viz. - art

State-Craft or The Art of Leadership in George W. Bush's Paintings

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:17:13 +0000

Image Credit: Kim Leeson / George W. Bush Presidential Center

Last year, an adventurous hacker found and leaked pictures of paintings made by former President George W. Bush, including two revealing self-portraits from the shower. Now, the private hobby has been made public by President Bush himself. The George W. Bush Presidential Library, up the road in Dallas, has just opened an exhibit, The Art of Leadership: A President's Personal Diplomacy, which features portraits Bush painted of the world leaders he once encountered as President, paired alongside mementos from his travels and his musings about statecraft. However, what makes these paintings remarkable for viewers?

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

It’s not their particular styling, for one. Look at the portrait of Tony Blair above: the pose (facing forward, including head and shoulders) is fairly standard. His formal outfit—blue jacket, blue shirt, red tie—belongs in a professional headshot. If his artistic intention was, as he told his daughter in a Today interview, to capture “the unique personalities with whom he served,” his art perhaps fails to rise to this level. The art itself is fairly generic. These portraits are something like outsider art, as painted by the ultimate insider.

Rather, here, the interest comes not from the art, but the artist. If, as hinted in the exhibit’s copy, “this exhibit tells the story of his relationships with these leaders,” it comes from Bush’s presentation of his work. The exhibit frames the art as the result of personal diplomacy in practice; displayed above various gifts he received from these officials, the portraits become another kind of tribute. His interview with his daughter Jenna Bush Hager focuses significantly on his intentionality—what he felt as he painted the works and what he feels about the individuals.

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

For example, Bush and his daughter discuss at length his portrait of Vladimir Putin. Bush recounts a story about when Putin “dissed” the Bush family dog Barney, and explains that “Vladimir is a person who views the US as an enemy. I felt that he viewed the world as US benefits and Russia loses, or vice versa.” This binaristic attitude might well be reflected in what Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post described as Putin’s “creepy scabs of eyebrows” and “the murky mud-mask of the rest of the face.” But any personality the viewer might find in the portrait might come more from the viewer than the art. Because we know about President Bush, because this art might reflect his own insight, we can read into the art some meaning. Even if the craft is not high, the art is there, in the viewer’s mind.

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

These portraits, like outsider art more generally, raise interesting questions about interpretation. What can we read into such work? What attention should we pay to the artist’s intentions? If this gallery seeks to instruct its viewers in the art of leadership, that art is one that is difficult to visualize. But these self-expressions on Bush’s part might in fact suggest legitimate insights about statecraft: the tenuousness of personal connections, the struggle to engage, to produce real intimacy, to turn it to public good. Portraiture is often judged based on the likeness—does this portrait of President G.H.W. Bush, done by his son, capture him? What it does preserve, however unskilled, is the son’s engagement with his own father’s legacy, and presents it for the public view. At least there’s some interesting vulnerability there to enjoy. I for one can’t wait for Barack Obama’s post-presidential poetry chapbook.

Convicting Capital Punishment in Art

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Tiny Subversions

When you live in Texas, you get used to people asking you to verify certain popular stereotypes: cowboy boots, country music, ten-gallon hats, and conservative politics. And—a belief in the capital punishment. The facts are bleak: Texas leads the nation in executions, with 510 since the death penalty was reinstated in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. To compare, the next closest state, Virginia, has only executed 110 people. While the number of death penalty sentences have declined since 1999, organizations like The StandDown Texas Project and The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty have advocated to either suspend or completely end the death penalty in the state. Numerous problems have been cited, from the shortage of drugs for lethal injections to protests about foreign nationals not being given their proper consular rights. While such logos-based arguments commonly circulate, another kind of ethos-based argument works through various art projects which seek to remind viewers of the humanity of the convicted.

Image Credit: Amy Elkins

H/T: Huffington Post

These online art projects work to reconstruct the ethos of these violent offenders. For example, Amy Elkins’s series Parting Words uses the final statements of the executed to construct their mug shots. For an example, see Elliot Johnson’s. The face is relatively obscured, but the grayscale type conveying the message—“I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me. Try not to worry too much about me. Remember one thing, Mother, I love you.”—becomes the man’s face. These tender words serve as a stark contrast to the dehumanized headshot, providing a new view of the violent criminal.

Image Credit: Huffington Post

Another man, Robert Black Junior, quotes from John Gillespie Magee’s poem “High Flight,” but his recitation trails off at the suggestive lines “— and done a hundred things / You have not dreamed of.” A poem written about flight during World War II becomes a man’s death-cry, an autobiographical narrative. Matched with the illegible portrait, the effect is eerie.

Image Credit: Amy Elkins

Samuel Hawkins’s portrait manages to touch the viewer through a different strategy. The absence of a final statement—here represented as “None”—reminders its audience of how depersonalized the industrial prison complex is. That there is probably more than Hawkins said in life, or could have said in the moment is put into relief by the fact that nothing was said here.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Tiny Subversions

Last Words, an art project by programmer Darius Kazemi, flashes lines from these last statements which include the word “love” in them, presented in white sans serif typeface against a black background. While Elkins’s portraits are in part powerful because they highlight the individuality of each inmate, these try to communicate the shared humanity between the prisoners and their audience through this shared emotion. The bleakness of the screen underlines the point also that these are last words, that while these people killed others, their lives are now over, available for mourning as well. If you sit and watch the page for several minutes, you’re likely to see certain repetitions: different spellings of “I love y’all,” gratitude for love and support, empathy with the victims’ families. Because these statements are all online, the viewer can choose to try and find out who said what, but the work relies on removing the statements from their specific individual context.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Tiny Subversions

The gradual appearance and disappearance of the text as shown here runs similar to a movie credit sequence, giving you a minute to consider an individual sentence before it gradually fades, to be replaced by another. The effect is somewhat mournful, and gives a completely different context and feeling to the language than something like this Wordle, which highlights in a different way how prominent the word “love” is in these final statements.

What strikes me as interesting about these different pieces is that all rely on the visual impact of the physical word to perform their plea for empathy or understanding. While the final statement is clearly an important rhetorical act for these individuals, the presentation and recontextualization of their words in visual forms turns these moments into an implicit critique of a dehumanizing process, even if only rarely do the inmates themselves protest the processes entrapping them.

Children, Monsters and the Anticipation of Mayhem: Analyzing the Horror Photography of Joshua Hoffine (NSFW)

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:09:58 +0000

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

With Halloween on the horizon, I thought I'd take a break from the horror show of the campaign to consider some more visceral scares, and photographer Joshua Hoffine provides viscera aplenty in his works. The image above is one of Hoffine's tamer outings, though it is still disturbing. A small child stands outside before a clothes line hung with drying laundry. The sun shines behind a large white sheet, casting the shadow of a clown holding a bunch of balloons in one hand and displaying a set of menacing claws on the other. Hoffine uses children in many of his photos, contrasting the innocence and helplessness of childhood with the savage agency of monsters human and supernatural. Before we look at other photos, I suggest readers consider the images below the fold not safe for work or for those who prefer to avoid depictions of bodily violence and mutilation, death and decomposition, children in life threatening scenes, or children posed near their dead, violently murdered, parent's corpses.

Unlike many horror books and films where tension is built over time by hinting at or showing fleeting glimpses of the monster, the still photograph lacks a diachronic dimension. The image must choose one of three options: it can hint at some undepicted horror, depict some partial glimpse, or show it straight on. Hoffine's latest work, a dyptych of Jack The Ripper just before and after he kills and disembowels a woman, gestures toward a sense of elapsed time, but I don't find this work as affective as some of his other images. Readers can click through the links to see the pair, but I'm not including them here because I see such Ripper imagery as more exploitative than imaginative. I find the violence of the real world tragic and depressing and prefer the thrills and chills of zombies and ghouls. There is something about the bluntness of the evisceration that makes me read the image differently than other Hoffine works, akin to my distaste for the torture horror films of recent years contrasted with the still-horrific yet more pscyhologically-engaging-if-disturbing body horror in the style of Cronenberg, though this line of argument goes beyond the still images I want to consider in this post.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

The first time you see Hoffine's more explicit images, the shock may be greater than his non-explicit works, but I find that they are not the works that stay most prominently in my memory. Sure, seeing a humanoid murderer wearing the stretched out skinned face of a mother, while her corpse lays on a table with her daughter coming around a corner in the background is shocking, but it lacks the anticipation offered in other works. And that anticipation, the waiting for the monster to act, helps embed the image in my mind, as if I'm continually expecting the action to complete itself, such as with the clown monster or the basement monster photo below.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

The monster itself is quite explicit, lurking under the basement stairs, but it awaits the unsuspecting, pig-tailed little girl making her way toward its grasp, not yet confronting the terror that awaits her.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

Hoffine also builds tension in some images of killers, though again, for me, with less effect. Above, we stand beyond a doorway looking into a kitchen. A young babysitter carries an infant, investigating a strange noise she heard just beyond the corner where we can see a maniacal killer waits with knife poised to strike. Below, we look through the keyhole of a door to discover the beheaded corpse of an ax murder victim, as the killer turns, ax in hand, to look back at us. For all three photos, the viewer's mind fills in what events next occur (or resists doing so), supplying a sense of impending doom that an explicit depiction of the moment of physical trauma alone (monster attack, knife attack, ax attack) would lack.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

Un-imaged (and perhaps unimaginable) horror plays a central role in Hoffine's Pickman's Masterpice sequence. Hoffine explains the sequence in his behind-the-scenes blog (where he details the considerable work he, his crew and models go through). The sequence depicts a story by H.P. Lovecraft about an artist that paints realistic horrific images. In the sequence, we see the protagonist react to Pickman's masterpiece, but we do not see the painting itself, and again the viewer is left to fill in the blank.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

Fusterlandia

Jay Voss — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

(Image credit: David Schroeder)

Last night I was online looking for photos of Cuba’s baseball league, and I stumbled across the work of Cuban pop-artist José Fuster. Specifically, I stumbled across Fusterlandia, a ceramic wonderland that’s grown to include Fuster’s home, studio, and neighborhood. This world is a cartoon that’s come to life. In addition to ceramics, Fuster also works with canvas, graphite, and engraving, and his studio work is often shown in France and Britain. And since we don’t hear a lot about individual Cubans down here in Texas, save their aging leader, I thought I might take a moment in this week’s blog post to highlight the work of José Fuster. Fusterlandia is visually stunning, to say the least.

(Image credit: David Schroeder)

Fusterlandia started roughly 10 years ago in Jaimanitas, a small fishing village outside Havana. Since then, Fuster has covered the homes of over 80 neighbors with ceramics and paint, decorating each house according to the character of its owner. The site is amazing to look at. The sky’s blue is mimicked on the tops of buildings, and surprising yellows and greens often make odd arcs in the air. Vibrant hearts pop up on the side of buildings, their red patriotically beating the same red that’s on Cuba’s flag. Ceramic hands and the shapes of vegetables are perched on top of buildings, reminding me of all the hideous marquees that I see when stopping for coffee at American highway-side gas stations. Except here in Fusterlandia the shapes are not hideous because they satirize the rather careless way that all cultures have decided to obfuscate our horizons.

(Image credits: David Schroeder)

What attracts me most to Fusterlandia is the way in which José Fuster has created a new world, and instead of simply projecting this world onto another medium (the way that one might do with canvas or film or any other form), he’s laid it on top of the world he inhabits. And so this isn’t some bustling corner of Havana, but rather the honest streets of a dusty and humble fishing village. The way in which Fuster works within these constraints reminds me of David Lynch or Picasso. Fuster’s not working in one of the most affluent parts of the world, and yet he refuses to be hemmed in by the circumstances. He’s creating something completely original that resonates with modern post-industrial life. There are bounds within which he must work, and he optimistically does so. This is not an art about breaking rules. It’s an art about optimistically playing with restraint. Check him out.

Objectifying the Office - Michelle Obama and the Spanish Magazine Controversy

Cate Blouke — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:36:38 +0000

Image Credit: cropped version of Karine Percheron-Daniels magazine cover image

Even the First Lady can't escape the objectification of black women's bodies (at home and abroad).

The Internet has had a lot to say about the Spanish magazine cover unveiled last week depicting Michelle Obama bare-breasted, swathed in an American flag. Most reactions have been vehement condemnations, accusing the artist (Karine Percheron-Daniels) of racism at worst, and poor taste at best. The image involved certainly raises a lot of questions (about race, art, censorship, and objectification), and I'll get into more detail when you see the (theoretically) Not Safe For Work images after the jump.

The image is based on a painting by Marie-Guillemine Benoist titled Portrait d'une négresse, completed in 1800 and currently hanging in the Louvre. While the painting is a depiction of a slave, according to at least one art historian the portrait “may be seen as a voice of protest, however small, in the discourse over human bondage.”

Karine Percheron-Daniels, the artist responsible for the cover image, has responded to the various attacks and accusations of racism with a statement explaining her thought-process and expressing a (seemingly) sincere admiration for Mrs. Obama. And, to be fair, this image is one in a series of nude political figures including the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Princess Diana, Eva Peron, and Obama himself (among others).

It interests me that most coverage of the "story" has chosen to censor the image of Mrs. Obama while leaving the breast in the original portrait bare. This explicitly condemns Percheron-Daniels' work (as not-art) while retaining the artistic value of the original.

While much to do is being made of the artist’s choice of source painting, I’m particularly interested in the significance of the choices Percheron-Daniels made in her adaptation – particularly the shifting of the subject’s gaze.

In the original work, the woman depicted confronts the viewer directly – a much more active role than the demure, side-long glance of the Percheron-Daniels’ portrait. As such, the new image removes any agency from its subject, turning her body (and face) into an object to be gazed upon. This ties in with the Spanish magazine’s rather odd caption – that Michelle Obama’s face will be key in the upcoming election – as well as the continued American obsession with Mrs. Obama’s arms.

It also seems significant that Percheron-Daniels chose to incorporate the American flag, tying the image into nationalism. On the international stage, then, the cover portrays America as being inescapably tied to its roots in slavery, and the first lady is presented as an aesthetic object. And given the kind ofappalling headlines some coverage has indulged in, the incident is certainly disheartening – particularly if you heard NPR’s recent interview of GOP-leaning veterans in which Bobbie Lucier (of Indianapolis) complains that “It's about time we get a first lady in there that acts like a first lady and looks like a first lady.” And one can’t help but chalk that kind of comment up to race.

Hat tip to this year's viz. editor Rachel Schneider for helping me talk through these ideas.

The Artist's Speech

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:11:13 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Emily Friedman

The audience hears violins sawing tensely as they watch a man scream on screen; only, he is mute. He moves his mouth, but we only learn his words through intertitles: “I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!!!” So opens the 2011 Academy Award-winning film The Artist.

Medium and message here easily coordinate as The Artist uses the techniques of silent film to tell the story of protagonist George Valentin, who refuses to speak.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

But why won’t he talk? David Haglund speculates that Valentin cannot act in talkies because his heavy French accent obscures his speech for American audiences; Marika Rose suggests that the film’s silence comments on changing gender roles. Both of these answers point towards interesting concerns that The Artist pursues. However, I’d like to think more about how The Artist privileges alternative forms of speech and how the film’s visual rhetorics comment on reality and representation.

Image Credit: The Northwest Trail

One obvious place where this comes into contention is the film’s return to portraits and images of George Valentin. We see his face reflected back to us—and to him—on magazine covers, front pages, film screens, and even full-length portraits. These images not only demonstrate Valentin’s popularity but show us a successful, charming, and talented artist. But his fall becomes visible as his angry wife repeatedly defaces his pictures and movie patrons step on them as they lay discarded on a wet street.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The image stands in so completely for Valentin that speech is unnecessary. As he later drunkenly stares at his shadow and castigates himself for being a “loser,” the shadow walks off, leaving George to destroy all of his films. Saved by the young ingénue Peppy Miller, Valentin himself runs away when he discovers that Peppy has purchased and saved his dapper portrait. When he walks up to a store window and stands in front of a tuxedo, seeing his face reflected above it, we see George alienated from himself. He can confront his image and almost recognizes himself as he used to look, but is pulled out of the moment by a chatty cop. His inability to recognize himself leads to the final climax where he attempts suicide, his burnt-out apartment mirroring his own despair, but the intertitle “BANG!” followed by the image of Peppy’s crashed car punctures the high drama. It is this visualized noise that then opens up his other possibilities for speech.

In fact, The Artist relies not only on the expressive power of the silent image, but also the moving picture. The Artist acts as a pastiche of silent film (specifically referencing its greatest star Rudolph Valentino) and the backstage musicals that comment on them. Certain scenes and plots—like Peppy and George’s scene in A German Affair and Peppy’s rise to leading lady—mirror movies like A Star is Born and Singin' in the Rain. Valentin’s slicked-back hair and overall physique resemble Gene Kelly’s, and The Artist underlines the similarity by making George Valentin a talented dancer whose comeback comes through a final showstopping number. Dance is the language through which Valentin may fluently express himself—he uses it to entertain his audiences, to express his growing affections for Peppy, and to sell himself to Hollywood mogul Al Zimmer. The language of dance, though, is clearly a heightened one, taking us outside of realism. Along with George’s images, the lingering shots of dancing celebrate non-mimetic rhetorics. Sound is too real in George’s nightmare; it threatens humiliation, alienation, and can deafen. Art and artistic expression happen through the visual medium, and can move us beyond speech. Peppy models the ideal viewer experience of Valentin’s film Tears of Love as she weeps over his slow sinking in quicksand.

Image Credit: The Fine Art Diner

While Peppy initially mocks “old actors mugging at the camera to be understood,” she here recognizes the power of melodrama. The scene where Peppy goes into George's dressing room and pretends that he is his coat actually shows characters thinking in the movie clichés that The Artist itself adapts. In fact, as Overthinking It further argues, the film does as well by embracing Jean Dujardin’s overexaggerated physical performance. The website traces through Dujardin’s career as a parodist to show how he uses his “proportionally large face, with big, expressive features” and his “nimble physical energy” to be larger than life, to “perform in a style,” to “imitate other actors who have performed in that style, and “to comment, though his imitation, on what that style means.”

Image Credit: Theiapolis

In The Artist’s case, Dujardin comments on the very silent acting style he embraces and so well embodies. By looking like Valentino and Kelly, he “look[s] backward, making a precursor of the present and commenting on what present movie stars are like by comparing them to a remanifestation of the past.” I might here suggest that his comment is to point out how our present in fact shares similar anxieties with the 1920s and 1930s about realism and representation. Websites like Pinterest and technologies like Photoshop allow for heightened self-representation, just as Peppy's film celebrity starts with a fake mole. While our culture may we recognize that they’re not perfectly mimetic, it’s easy to accept the reality of these unreal representations. In other words, when you live within media, it’s easy to forget the medium. The Artist and Dujardin’s performance ask us to confront this. By refusing traditional filmic speech and reverting to older styles, The Artist asks us to pay attention to these styles, these other forms of speech. By embracing the obviously unreal, we can—like Valentin—learn to speak again, and even find pleasure within it.

Becoming Animal: Feeling Horsey

Steven J LeMieux — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

While in Star Wars, Lonesome Dove and True Grit we saw particular examples of the relationships humans have with horses —relationships that always seem to oscillate between recognizing horses as companions and treating them as bare property. And while with Jasha Lottin (NSFW) we saw in her slaughter and photo shoot the extent to which these animals are splayed out as props for both viewers and those actually interacting with actual horses. With a piece titled Que le cheval vive en moi, May the Horse Live in me in English, and created and performed by Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin (together they compose Art Orienté Objet) we can begin to see the emergence of a differently possible relationship between humans and horses.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via plastik

What is especially interesting about Laval-Jeantet’s transformation is that it is largely hidden from view. As spectators we can see her prosthetic hooves and her interactions with the horse. We can partially see the process she has undergone; she presents that process as a documented and material aspect of the performance, but if we consider the actual performance the intimate relationship she is building with this animal, then we must admit that not only is her transformation private but that the core of her art is too. May the Horse Live in me, then, is ultimately an unseen piece of performance art that can only be gestured toward. The action of it, her feelings, her blood, the relationship (material and immaterial both) formed between her and the horse can only be speculated at. Unlike every other piece that I’ve considered over the past several blog posts looked at where and how the horse is deliberately captured as a spectacle upon which humans act. Laval-Jeantet does not seem to capture or use the horse; instead, she only hints at her relationship with it.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

About the performance they note that “As a radical experiment whose long-term effects cannot be calculated, Que le cheval vive en moi questions the anthropocentric attitude inherent to our technological understanding. Instead of trying to attain ‘homeostasis,’ a state of physiological balance, with this performance, the artists sought to initiate a process of ‘synthetic transi-stasis,’ in which the only constant is continual transformation and adaptation. The performance represents a continuation of the centaur myth, that human-horse hybrid which, as ‘animal in human,’ symbolizes the antithesis of the rider, who as human dominates the animal.”( Art Orienté Objet via BuzzFeed)

By slowly taking a horse’s plasma into her body Laval-Jeantet began to engage a very particular sort of becoming. Toward forming this new sort of relationship with a horse she had to acculturate her body to the particulars of the horse’s. And even while something like 95% of the cells (by count, not weight) in a human body are nonhuman and while our DNA can hardly be called our own—so much of it matches other organisms’, and it is streaked through with the remains of viruses—the process of welcoming more cohesive aspects of another’s body—the plasma and immunoglobins in this case--is still a violent act. It’s tricky enough just transferring blood from human to human, but interspecies transfers add another layer of difficulty.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

So that when Laval-Jeantet began welcoming in the horse’s plasma and immunoglobins she performed a peculiar kind of autoimmunity. Looking toward autoimmunity broadly we can see an event where a body turns on its own protection and ultimately allows others entry. This occurs in cultures and institutions and bodies of all sorts. And in this case, where Laval-Jeantet underwent a months long process of slowly introducing horse immuniglobulins to her own bloodstream, rather than deliberately destroying her immune system she pulled the wool over its eyes—or, more generously, convinced it to play (nice) with the horse.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via plastik

About the entire process she notes. "I had the feeling of being extra-human… I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive, hyper-nervous and very diffident. The emotionalism of an herbivore. I could not sleep. I probably felt a bit like a horse.' (we make money not art via Centre Presse)

While Laval-Jeantet worked at an intertwined horsey becoming HumanimalAlex, a youtube user and member of the ongoing art group HumanimaL, performs a different kind of transformation. If Laval-Jeantet’s relationship with the horse seems bound in blood Alex’s is skin deep. Through a blend of exquisite full body makeup, a mask and tail, and deliberate movements Alex, rather than appearing horselike, appears to appear horselike. So that even with the tail and hooves and mask his humanness shines through (with the explicit dominance of the human being, I’m sure, purposeful). Rather than moving toward a relationship with the horse this sort of transformation invokes the horse as an inspiration for particularly human behaviors. It’s noted on HumanimaL’s website that these performances are for hire and that “this undeniably unique act is guaranteed to turn heads, no matter what the occasion so use your Humanimal to show the wild side of your event, conference, opening or launch.” Here the specter of the animal is mobilized for the distinctly human designs. Like in Lottin’s photos the horse, here blended into human forms, is reproduced as a prop. Unlike Marion Laval-Jeantet’s private relationship with the horse Alex’s is formed entirely in the public eye. And while his work turns heads Laval-Jeantet’s gives us the opportunity to imagine what a differently organized relationship might look like.

Marc Chagall's Exodus: Another Visit to the Harry Ransom Center's King James Bible Exhibition

Marjorie Foley — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:11:07 +0000

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

It's a bit surprising to walk into the Harry Ransom Center's current exhibition on the King James Bible and see Marc Chagall's Exodus series on display, but, considering his origins in a Hasidic family, the Jewish artist's works are a surprising addition to any gallery. Chagall's work was an uncomfortable subject for his parents and, later, his in-laws--telling your Hasidic parents that you're going to grow up to be a painter is a bit like telling religious Christian parents that you're going to be a stripper. Despite shocking his parents by painting nudes, Chagall would continue his work to become the foremost Jewish artist of the 20th century, earning respect from his contemporaries for his understanding of color and his ability to use a limited palette with eye-popping results.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

The first image in this post is the frontispiece for 24-print collection entitled The Story of the Exodus, published in 1966. The image above shows Exodus 2:11, in which Moses witnesses the sufferings of the Jewish people enslaved and forced into hard labor by the Egyptians. In the story, Moses kills an Egyptian when he sees the man beating one of his people, the beating here represented by the violent red and hands with whips in the top right corner. The violence and suffering here is dreamlike, as all of Chagall's work is--the people's suffering in this image is represented by a dreamy thought bubble emanating from Moses's righthand horn.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

Working during the Second World War and afterwards coming to terms with what happened, Chagall's works, like the works of many artists in the first half of the 20th century, reflect the bafflement and impotence of watching the Holocaust happen from afar. Chagall was lucky to get on the list of European artists that some United States officials were trying to save, and, unlike Picasso and Matisse, he did leave Vichy France in 1941.

Interestingly, Chagall colors (literally) these prints with bright optimism for an ancient future, even after the Holocaust. The above image, another beautifully colored one, shows Moses at the burning bush, where God, after becoming concerned about the sufferings of the people, appointed Moses to lead the Israelites out of oppression and to the land of milk and honey.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Spaightwood Galleries

After Moses asks how he is to prove that God sent him to the Israelites, God turns Moses's staff into a snake, as in the image above. Each image shows the influence of Chagall's works in gouache, used not in these prints but in his other works. Gouache is much like watercolor, but contains an opaque base in order to create a brighter, opaque color. The limits on painting in gouache (as well as the benefits) are reflected in the spots of color in this image even though it's a lithograph.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall via Art Institute of Chicago

The Exodus prints are part of a larger trend in Chagall's religious works. From 1931 until 1956, he worked to illustrate the Bible; later, he would turn to crucifixions in order to best express tragedy. This last image, The White Crucifixion, is not from the series at the Harry Ransom Center, but understanding this crucifixion is important to understanding the importance of Exodus series and the rest of Chagall's work.

Chagall believed no artistic subject expressed suffering as well as a crucifixion. (For a fictionalized account of a Jewish artist painting a crucifixion, Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev is worth a read. It gets at the depths of pain that would cause a Jewish artist to paint a Christian form.) Though it's generally used by Christian artists, Chagall uses this crucifixion to express the persecution of the Jewish Jesus specifically and of the Jewish people in the 20th century generally. In the top left corner, one can see communist soldiers coming to terrorize Jews, in the top right, a soldier burns a synagogue in Lithuania (the soldier originally wore a swastika on his armband).

An Art Deco King James in the Orientalist Vein: François-Louis Schmied’s Engravings of the Creation and Ruth Stories

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:08:36 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Just before viz. took a break for spring, we visited the Harry Ransom Center’s newest exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. Instead of finding only illuminated manuscripts, we were surprised to find contemporary art, literary manuscripts, film posters, and even a sculpture of a golden calf. The exhibition is not just a collection of well-preserved historic Bibles—it’s a unique collection of visual artifacts tangentially related to the King James Bible. As the viz. team walked around the exhibition, one grouping of images caught my eye. Art Deco engraver François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of both Genesis and The Book of Ruth from the King James Bible is absolutely stunning. The artwork is most interesting for its fusion of the geometric lines of Art Deco with the Orientalism of its creator and the lyricism of the Biblical stories it illustrates.

Art Deco was a remarkably successful and widespread architectural and artistic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. The movement was one focused on decoration—the geometric, symmetrical forms of the buildings and drawings of the movement were influenced by ancient Egyptian flourishes. As Edward Said reminds us, since Napoleon’s foray into Egypt in the 18^th century, “Egypt was to become a department of French learning.” Along with Napoleon’s soldiers, “chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians” were tasked with “put[ting] Egypt into modern French.” Started around the heyday of archaeological work in Egypt (King Tut’s tomb was discovered in 1922), Art Deco internalized the general Egyptomania of the times. “Art Deco,” says British historian John M. MacKenzie in his book Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, “though not oriental in any obvious overall way, owed much to oriental influences: the geometrical patterns, often brightly coloured, the strongly projecting corbels, the sunbursts, winged elements, (like clocks rendered as solar discs), and other features.” Most of us are familiar with the architectural epitomes of this style, NYC’s Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. Both of these buildings make use of Egypt-inspired tropes, such as the lotus decorations on the elevators in the lobby of the Chrysler Building.

Image Credit: Archaeology.org

François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of the books of Genesis is no different when it comes to using Egypt-inspired visual elements. His depiction of the Creation is composed of brightly colored animals bursting (like sunrays) off the page. The whales spew water in symmetrical arcs, while a tidy group of partridges march along the bottom of the engraving.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Schmied was an Orientalist in the clearest sense. Working in the 1920s and 1930s, Schmied internalized the Egyptomania of his times. He even painted himself in “Oriental dress” at the beginning of his career in 1927. His willingness to take on the dress of the Other might be a sign of Schmied’s identification with the Orient of the past.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Shmied’s clear investment in the Orientalist project is critical to reading his illustration of the Book of Ruth. In his engraving for the marriage of Ruth and Boaz, Schmied chose to depict Boaz with darker skin than the outsider from Moab, Ruth. Moabites were excluded from the Jewish community as stipulated by God in Deuteronomy 23:3–6.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Ruth, as a Moabite, was allowed to congregate with Israelites because she was a woman (and Moabite women were begrudgingly accepted by Israelites). The story of Ruth and Boaz’s marriage is one of acceptance and compassion—Boaz marries the widowed and impoverished Ruth and fathers a son with her in the direct line of David and Jesus. Their story is not one of passionate love—nowhere does the Bible describe Ruth’s and Boaz’s physical attributes. So, it’s especially interesting that Schmied made Ruth into an olive-skinned beauty and Boaz into a dark-skinned savior. Schmied’s artistic choices might reflect his internalization of another culture, that of “the Orient.” In any case, his engraving is a unique one of an oft-depicted Biblical scene that merits much critical analysis.

See the engravings yourself at the Ransom Center’s exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The exhibition is up until the 29^th of July.

Unmarking Death

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:47:35 +0000

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

H/T: Lauren Gantz

Death is often in the news, whether it involves major singers, local Austin celebrities, or Twitter death hoaxes. Yet when we visualize death, it’s typically in memorials, not actual pictures of dead bodies. We’ve come some ways from the Victorian memento mori photographs which attempted to render the corpse vital and to serve, as Jamie Fraser notes, “as a keepsake to remember the deceased.” While traditional burial practices, which use embalming fluids to delay putrefaction and decomposition, likewise make the corpse appear as lifelike as possible, most people don’t make hair rings or take pictures of the dead to remember them. In this way, we remember the dead as not dead—as lively. In his photography series Unmarked, Stephen Chalmers presents an alternative way to represent death.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In a recent NPR article, Chalmers discusses Unmarked’s origins in a hiking trip that went past one of Ted Bundy’s dumpsites. As he says, “[J]ust that little kernel of information really changed how I felt about what was otherwise a really fantastic early date. I was struck by how my experience of this place was so changed by knowing the history of the location.” Thus, the series features the locations in which serial killers disposed of their victims’ bodies. Each photograph is named for the victim left in the place.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In photographs like the one above, Jennifer Joseph, Chalmers uses focus to direct the viewer’s attention to the specific place where the body once lay. The placid pastoral scene contrasts dramatically with the idea of violence that murder contains, but there is no dramatic visual tension in the photograph. As Chalmers tells NPR, “I kind of like the absence of spectacle. I’m a quiet person. I like for the images I make to be quiet.” The images are quiet in their lack of subjects and their rural backgrounds. The tetherball in Debra Estes hints at a more suburban setting, but the photo’s only dynamism occurs in the contrast of the yellow tetherball set against the browns and greens. However, Chalmers also explicitly states on his website that the images are meant not only to refuse “clichés of prefabricated sentimentality,” but also to “convey the original sense of shock at arriving at these sites of trauma and also that the self-conscious refusal of information and emptiness of the images and conveys our distance from this sense of shock to demonstrate the essential inaccessibility of these traumatic events and degrading deaths.” If the Victorian image is a “prefabricated sentimentality,” Unmarked works differently.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

Unmarked represents death in this “absence of spectacle,” the still scenes set against the media circus surrounding serial killers and their victims. Because we cannot hope to either represent or fully comprehend the victims’ traumatic deaths, the only way to do so is through its visual opposite. However, while such a series seems deeply respectful of the victims, it only displays death in its lack of display. Chalmers’ visual logic suggests that the only true way to represent murder victims is by refusing to represent them—a treatment that is provocative and beautiful, but may only reinforce the victims’ absence. Where is the space in which mourners can represent the dead, between too much and too little presence? Is the only way our culture can show death is by unmarking it?

Art + Architecture: Fact and Fiction in The Buell Hypothesis

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

A few days ago, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) unveiled its newest exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. A collection of five architectural plans that reimagine how five different suburbs in America could have benefitted significantly from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, Foreclosed is an amazing exhibition that melds art and architecture, politics and place. Today, I’m going to discuss the impetus of this exhibition—The Buell Hypothesis. The Hypothesis is an amazing hybrid publication created by Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. According to the publication’s graphic designers, The Buell Hypothesis is “part socratic dialogue, part contemporary screenplay, part media scape and part power point slide presentation.” This hybrid production, with its emphasis on collaboration and reinterpretation, is an appropriate point of genesis for Foreclosed.

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

As its creators—Buell Center colleagues Reinhold Martin, Leah Meisterlin, and Anna Kenoff—proudly proclaim in their preface to The Buell Hypothesis, the document is “both documentary and imaginary. It describes a world in which fiction informs fact just as much as fact informs fiction.” The structure of the Hypothesis reflects this collaborative process between the real and the fictional, as the document (interestingly described as “a screenplay” for “a film” by Martin et al. in their preface) is interspersed with such disparate elements as: descriptions of montaged images (of empty living rooms, of suburban houses) if the screenplay were to be made into a film; imagined dialogues between Socrates and Glaucon about the status of suburbs as they’re stuck in traffic on Interstate Highway 95 en route to a symposium organized by Diotima; clippings from real-world newspaper articles about public housing development and building policy since the New Deal Era; and case studies of a number of suburbs presented by Diotima in an imaginary PowerPoint presentation at an imaginary symposium.

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

The ultimate goal of this hybrid between the real and the imaginary is to get readers of the Hypothesis—likely urban planners, architects, and even art curators—to rethink our preconceived notions and preconceptualized images of suburban development. Again Martin et al. use their preface to explain the goals of their project—“The Buell Hypothesis, at its most basic, is as follows: change the dream and you change the city. The single-family house, and the city or suburb in which it is situated, share a common destiny. Hence, change the narratives guiding suburban housing and the priorities they imply, including spatial arrangements, ownership patterns, the balance between public and private interests, and the mixtures of activities and services that any town or city entails, and you begin the process of redirecting suburban sprawl.”

Image Credit: Metropolis Mag

It’s interesting that the very form of the Hypothesis—with its genre-crossing use of various tropes from screenwriting, classic dialogue, PowerPoint presentations, and scrapbooking—informs the ultimate goal of the project. Martin et al.’s text asks us to rethink our beliefs about what scientific or architectural reports look like (we’re used to seeing drab reports, of the “Title/Abstract/ Introduction/Materials and Methods/Results/Discussion/Literature Cited” variety) with a baby-blue covered publication (one reviewer hilariously said that the Hypothesis “looks like it was retroactively leaked from the RAND Corporation in the 1960s”) full of both fact and fiction. In reimagining the report form to include dialogues and diversions, The Buell Hypothesis opens avenues for hybrid, user-centered projects to profoundly affect the future of urban planning and design.

The Hypothesis has already affected the real world with MoMA’s Foreclosed exhibition, an art/architecture exhibition which takes Diotima’s PowerPoint case studies of a few suburbs around the United States and imagines alternate futures for five of them. Read Foreclosed's inspiration, The Buell Hypothesis, in its entirety at the Buell Center’s site.

Angst and Paralysis: Visualizing Melancholia from Albrecht Durer to Lars Von Trier

Ty Alyea — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Lucas Cranach's Melancholia Image Credit: Art Tattler

Last week, I examined how painters of the nineteenth century revised the image of Phillipe Pinel, the famous mental health physician, to contribute to an evolving national mythology and edify the physician's archetypal (as well as vocational) role in fostering mental health. While the representation (as well as the specific job description) of the mental health practitioner has changed drastically over the past five centuries, one cannot help but notice that there are striking continuities to be found in representations of people said to be afflicted with maladies of the mind. Today, we will take a look at some remarkable consistencies to be found linking 16th and 21st century visual representations of one of Western society's most frequently visualized maladies: melancholia.

Virgilius Solis the Elder's Melancholia .4VS Image Credit: NIH - Images From the History of Medicine

Though a predecessor in some ways to depressive disorders and depression, the concept of melancholia carries with it a number of spiritual and behavioral connotations that cannot be mapped onto contemporary (American) diagnostic categories without losing a number of significant and complex meanings; the complete edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), for example, devotes 1400 pages to the topic. Thankfully, a multitude of paintings and woodcuttings can help us demonstrate dimensions of melancholia that depart from contemporary mores of classifying and understanding such diseases.

Though melancholia proper was frequently associated with men as well as women, a significant contingent of artists chose to visualize the malady in the representation of dejected women. One can notice a number of significant similarities in the works of Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), pictured at the top of this post, and Virgilius Solis the Elder's Melancolicus .4 VS (1514-1562), directly above this image.

Cranach's painting depicts the melancholy figure as an angelic figure who is sitting in the corner of a room, looking blankly ahead. Since antiquity, Melancholia was understood in humoreal terms as an overproduction of black bile--in fact,the word "melancholia" simply means "black bile" in ancient Greek. And we can see this blackness in the top-right corner of the image. In the darkness we can barely make out the images of what appear to be witches on broomsticks--perhaps haunting the mind of this angelic figure whose countenance and posture seems to be in stark contrast to the disposition of the swinging cherubs. One almost gets a sense of a kind of swirling of the mind contrasted with the body's immobility. Likewise, we see a little dog sleeping at her feet. Solis's image includes some distinct similarites: the woman in this image sits with her face buried into her hands amidst a grouping of animals. As a counterpart to the stick held by the subject of Cranach's painting, we see that Solis's toga-wearing figure seems to be holding a sort of measuring compass. Does anyone have an idea of the significance of these items?

Albrecht Durer's Melancholia I Image Credit: Wikipedia

These images, in turn reflect some of the elements found in Albrecht Durer's depiction of melancholia. Durer (1471-1528) was an instructor of Cranach's, and we can see some similarities in their stylistic choices. Once again, we see the reclining dog at the feet of an angelic woman, and a sphere image as well. To take a guess at an answer to the question I offered in my previous paragraph, I will venture to guess that the compas in Solis's image, like the spheres in Durer and Cranach's pieces, may have something to do with rational/scientific creation--perhaps to an extent that it has an effect on spiritual existence. We may also note that Durer's image is replete with images of bells and (what appear to be) time pieces. And in the background of this otherworldly image, we see light (or perhaps the rays of "melancholia" itself) radiating from the distance.

Which brings us to our final images from Lars Von Trier's film, Melancholia (2011). As we see halfway through this trailer for the film, we notice a nude Kirsten Dunst laying on rocks, taking in the glow of a rogue planet, aptly named "Melancholia," which is on a collision course with the earth. Given this contemporary setting, Von Trier's choice to depict depression as a personal and cosmic apocalypse seems to be a throwback to the way in which the malady has been depicted for the bulk of its history. An analysis of the film yields further comparisons, as Dunst's character rejects scientific explanations (or in this film, wishes) that attempt to mitigate the danger. However, somewhat subversively, we see that the main character relishes in her melancholy, and fully accepts the doom it brings. Viewers might also note that one of the first images in the film is a horse that sits on the ground just as we first see Dunst's character--a strange image that nonetheless fits perfectly with five centuries of melancholia's representation.

Art + Architecture: Diana Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:01:16 +0000

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

For those of us interested in architectural sculpture, the last few months in Austin (especially on the UT campus) have felt like gifts from the art gods. I’ve already written about one exhibition (the recently-closed El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa show at the Blanton Museum of Art). This month ushered in a second sculptural exhibition. New York sculptor Diana Al-Hadid’s Suspended After Image, a site-specific installation at UT’s Visual Arts Center’s Vaulted Gallery, is a feat of texture and height. As a fantastic example of architectural art, Al-Hadid’s most recent work for the VAC asks viewers to circumambulate the sculpture and ponder the relationship between memory, built objects, and humanity.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson (cropped)

Memory inspired the entire installation. Al-Hadid was stirred to create her sculpture “Suspended After Image” after seeing a Gothic painting of the Visitation which featured an intricate cloak. Working with twelve UT art assistants, Al-Hadid turned her memory of a two-dimensional painting into a three-dimensional structure. “Suspended After Image” has a certain sinuousness to it—a river of faux-fabric permanently flows over more than half of the sculpture. I’m tempted to think that the sumptuous river of cardboard, wood, plaster, and metal evokes the way that memory works. Much as fabric folds and rivers flow, we remember in spurts and starts. In a recent article on Al-Hadid’s installation at the VAC, Austin blogger Michael Graupmann reviews the artist’s creation process: “images she sees often get stuck in her mind, (‘made sacred’) and stay with her until she transforms them through her work.” The curvy form of Al-Hadid’s piece seems to mimic its creation process.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

And yet there is also a sharp jaggedness to the whole thing—paint globs create skyscraper-like structures that rise out of the ground. It’s safe to say that “Suspended After Image” is a work that mimics our built environment, as Al-Hadid’s creations often involve architectural tools and methods. For this particular piece, Al-Hadid used a 3D modeling program and CNC router to plan its structure. Intricate lattices and elaborate stairs need to be modeled, whether they are used for art or architecture.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson (cropped)

And behind every architectural design is a person. Al-Hadid’s sculpture doesn’t allow its viewers to forget the human element in architecture and art. While walking around the sculpture (which urges us to do so from multiple viewpoints, even from above in the VAC’s Mezzanine), we’re surprised that the artist planned for every angle to be seen by an ambulatory audience. The most surprising part of Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image” is the supple plaster body that is either disappearing into or emerging from the stairs at the bottom of the sculpture. Is the built environment oppressing this body into oblivion? Is it growing human loins? I’m unsure myself. But at least the human (in the sculpture and outside of it) isn’t forgotten.

See Diana Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image” yourself at the Visual Arts Center until March 10^th, when another Artist-in-Residence piece will take its place.

Drawing on Pigs: Wim Delvoye's Art Farm

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:48:02 +0000

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

It's pretty easy to understand (and probably join in) the outrage surrounding Wim Delvoye's work with pigs. Tattoos aren't exactly taboo in any real fashion anymore, but even as commonplace as they've become they still seem to provoke discussions about the use of bodies as writing platforms. In casual conversation clothes don't have nearly the same effect; though, it could be argued that they write on the body just as much as any tattoo. Clothes, though, seem to be commonly taken up as transient while tattoos are (mostly) permanent. I doubt there would be nearly as strong a reaction to these pigs if they were just dressed up on a daily basis.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Of course, dressing a pig everyday would surely, almost undeniably, have a more noticeable impact on a pig's life. Clothes, no matter the degree to which a body has been naturalized to their presence, always remain external; through a thousand tiny hitches they make their presence known--they bind, sag, ride up, get caught, twist, shift, shuffle, flap in the wind. We put them on, we take them off; they are a forceful presence in our lives, but we do change them (What does this say, then, about, the 1% of America that isn’t allowed to change their prison uniforms?). And while there's lots of fun poked at animals wearing clothes (and at the people that dressed them) I don't believe there is anything near the response these tattooed pigs elicit. It's worth interrogating this difference.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

"To tattoo a pig, we sedate it, shave it and apply Vaseline to its skin" (Delvoye in a 2007 interview in ArtAsiaPacific found at Sperone Westwater). And then the pig and tattoo grow together. Grow, as Delvoyne imagines, in both size and value together. Pigs, posits Delvoye in the same interview, are largely thought of as having very little value. And even though these pigs may be spoiled they aren't co-authors in this project. Delvoyne states that "Yes, we name them; the name is often tattooed on the pig. It’s part of the personalization of the industrial product" (Delvoye). The pigs are breathing canvases. They shift and alter the tattoos they carry, but they are always still, fundamentally, written on. The pigs are eventually slaughtered for their skins. In the end they are either stuffed and mounted, or the skins are displayed.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Wim Delvoye worked his way up to live pigs. In the 1990s he began tattooing dead pigs, just working with pig skins he acquired from slaughter houses. It wasn't until 1997 that he worked with a live animal. In the late 90s he worked with and on a number of different pigs in different places. In 2004 he moved his practice to China and subsequently established Art Farm, a pig farm where raises and tattoos his pigs. It's worth noting that the other project Delvoye is known for is “Cloaca” a 39 foot long machine he built that eats, digests and shits.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Delvoye is a vegetarian, but he both consumes and offers these pigs up for consumption as art. He's particularly apt in describing that "I prefer to show the pigs alive. In a perfect world, I would just show the Cloaca shit machines and live pigs—eating and excreting together" (Delvoye). The constructed shitting machine and the thoroughly marked pigs are rendered equivalent, both flattened out as spectacle. The tattooed pigs are conceived as part of an industrial machine, a machine made up by human, animal, machine, and conceptual bodies. Taken together the pigs and machine reposition the viewer as also taking part, "eating and excreting" pigs and machines both.

Next week I’ll be writing on an already thoroughly inscribed upon birthday-present-pig that’s part of The Harry Ransom Center’s exhibit The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925.

Don't Miss Your Chance--"El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:39:14 +0000

Image credit: The Blanton Musuem of Art

El Anatsui’s art is haunting. The shimmering bottle tops of his most recent pieces, meticulously netted and woven with the help of his young crew, speak of previous uses, prior intents, and pasts that pummel and prod. A retrospective exhibition of the Ghanaian artist’s 30-year career is currently on view at UT’s own Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibition, “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa,” is a wonderful investigation of the tangible ways that the past weaves itself into our present.

A few weekends ago, I roamed through the exhibition, utterly amazed and dazzled by Anatsui’s use of reclaimed and repurposed materials to make art that spoke of the history of the artist, his materials, and West Africa. One of the many standout pieces from the exhibition was Akua’s Surviving Children from 1996, which was constructed during Anatsui’s residency in Denmark.

Image credit: The October Gallery

Although Anatsui was invited to Denmark to commemorate the 200-year anniversary of Denmark’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, his Akua does more than just jubilantly praise the end of centuries of horror. His materials hint at a history of violence and oppression, as he uses driftwood from a Danish shore and nails from a foundry that used to manufacture the very guns that were used by Danes to round up slaves on the Gold Coast. The driftwood, slowly worn down by the waves, is reimagined as a group of marching people with fire-blackened faces; the nails, made at the very site that used to manufacture weapons that caused the subjugation of millions of Africans, have been reimagined as the glue that holds together the marchers. A shared past of subjugation and violence haunts the marchers who stand, defiant against all odds.

Instead of driftwood and nails, another standout piece from the exhibition, 2008’s Oasis, uses Anatsui’s signature technique of woven bottle tops from liquor bottles. The juxtaposition of the aesthetic value of a piece like Oasis (which really does feel like a drink of cool water) with the moral message (just how many liquor bottles were consumed for Anatsui to make his art?)—is staggering. As tangible representations of a community’s consumption, the liquor bottle tops—with names like “Liquor Headmaster”—are woven into a traditional art form from West Africa, cloth. The past is revisited (and possibly mourned?) through traditional weaving techniques using unconventional materials.

Image Credit: Jane Katcher / Peter Harholdt

But, as discussed in a recent talk between El Anatsui, curator Lisa Binder, and art historian Moyosore Okediji, Anatsui’s work isn’t just about mourning the past—it’s also about chance and movement. Anatsui’s bottle top weavings aren’t just social and political statements. They’re beautiful and freeform, too. The display of Anatsui’s art is left to the whims of museum curators, who choose to show us glimpses of the backs of the pieces, which often are as beautiful as the fronts. Anatsui’s work makes us gaze just a little longer; it makes us take a second look. His pieces are remade with our every glance. There is hope that the past, too, can be remade and reshaped just as the curators shape Anatsui’s art, which itself reclaims, by chance, materials that others had left for dead.

Don’t miss your chance to see “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa” in Austin. The exhibition is at the Blanton Museum of Art until 22 January 2012.

Critical Cartography: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Google Maps is a godsend—in our daily lives, we use the site to find a new place to live, track the settings of a public controversy, catch lawbreakers in the act, and claim land that’s been long-contested. Border scuffles and all, Google Maps is helping us reimagine the terrains, cities, and spaces of the real world. It was only a matter of time before we witnessed the melding of Google Maps virtual and Real World spatial. That time is now: Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has spent the last five years working on a project that brings Google Maps’ digital location markers into real city spaces. His installations in different cities in Europe and Asia—all entitled “Map”—ask us to question the lines between real and virtual, center and periphery.

Known for his work with “Dead Drops,” the USB sticks that were installed in bricks of urban buildings to encourage free and anonymous sharing, Bartholl has long been toying with the false dichotomy between digitized and lived experience. His art is a reminder that digital environments have their own spatial representations, and that these spaces have ramifications in our lived lives.

With “Map,” Bartholl makes us question real and digital, center and periphery, through an installation involving a massive 600x350x35 cm wood sculpture of the iconic red location markers in Google Maps. With the help of a tow truck and a crane, the location marker was placed in the center of the city (two example locations for the installation were Taipei and Berlin).

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

From the pictures on Bartholl’s website, the markers are hard to distinguish from their digital counterparts. Both the digital markers and the “real” markers cast shadows. Both are perky punctuations in urban environments. Which of the markers is more real? Bartholl seems to nudge us in the direction of wondering whether this question matters anymore.

To further drive home how much effect Google Maps has on our ideas about places, Bartholl’s city center is the one that Google Maps provides when you search for the city. That center could be in an intersection, in a verdant wooded area, or in a dilapidated housing complex. Whatever the case, Bartholl’s installation asks us to question our ideas of center and periphery. What if your idea of the center of Berlin is different than the center of Berlin in Google Maps? What does the “center” of the city even mean in a digitized world?

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Bartholl’s work with the icons of Google Maps reminds us that maps are political productions. With maps, borders are drawn, districts are re-zoned, centers are marked. As geographers Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier argue in their “Introduction to Critical Cartography,” geographic knowledge is power, and hence, is political. With his cartographic installations, Aram Bartholl’s message is a political one; his work makes us rethink the boundaries that we have created when mapping digital and real, center and periphery, Google Maps or mental maps.

The (Future) Image of Los Angeles: Chris Burden's "Metropolis II"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

Los Angeles, the city we all (excluding Randy Newman) love to hate, is the inspiration for Chris Burden’s new kinetic sculpture, "Metropolis II," using 1,080 toy cars, many steep ramps, and a few powerful motors. The sculpture is expected to debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) this fall. Despite the sculpture’s not-yet-finished state, it’s already causing quite a buzz in the blogosphere, with coverage in the New York Times’ Wheels blog, LACMA’s Unframed blog, and GOOD Magazine’s Culture blog.

As a former Angeleno, the city and the ways that it’s depicted in art, film, and literary productions fascinate me. This fascination is well-documented by filmmaker Thom Andersen in his three-part video essay released in 2003, Los Angeles Play Itself.

Image credit: Bright Lights Film Journal

In Andersen’s movie, scenes from hundreds of movies traipse across the screen while a narrator laments the fact that Los Angeles has been maligned by the movies that are filmed and set in the city. According to Andersen, the city has been blown up and knocked down in film, if not completely evacuated of all the things that make it great—its pockets of diversity, its scruffy beauty, its simultaneously chaotic and laid-back lifestyle. By the end of Andersen’s epic on Los Angeles, we wholeheartedly agree with his musings about “Who knows the city?” For Andersen, and for fans of Los Angeles Plays Itself, the answer to this question is “Only those who walk, only those who ride the bus. Forget the mystical blatherings of Joan Didion and company about the automobile and the freeways. They say, nobody walks; they mean no rich white people like us walk. They claimed nobody takes the bus, until one day we all discovered that Los Angeles has the most crowded buses in the United States.” Being on the ground, in the streets, is what matters.

Chris Burden brings us the streets of a future Los Angeles with his “Metropolis II” kinetic sculpture. Burden’s metropolis has no discernable landmarks, no “A-ha! That’s Los Angeles!” buildings.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

But, there are a lot of freeways—in lanes sometimes 10 or more across, multicolored cars fly past. In a movie about the second Metropolis installation posted on the Gagosian Gallery’s YouTube page, Burden explains his reasoning for why he decided to make an installation where the toy cars never have to stop. As images of cars dart across the screen, Burden jokes that “I love hearing that the cars are going 230 miles an hour. That makes me really hopeful for the future. That’s about the speed they should be running. Not 23.4 miles an hour, which is what my BMW says I average driving around LA. It’s about to be over. The idea that a car runs free—those days are about to close. So, it’s a little bit like making a model of New York City at the turn of the last century and your model had horse buggies everywhere while automobiles are about to arrive. So, something else is about to arrive.” Burden’s “something else” are cars that don’t need people to guide them through the city, since there are no people that could get in the way of the self-sufficient cars.

The most striking feature for me while watching the movie about this installation is that there are no future people in this installation, no future pedestrians who can truly “know the city.” In “Metropolis II,” what we get is a people-less, car-overrun metropolis. The one image that stands out most for me is one of Burden (I presume) standing amidst the installation as it’s running, wearing headphones to dampen the incessant noise.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

I’m not exactly sure what to make of this image, but it seems to me to represent a conflict of interests with the Andersen/pedestrian camp and the Burden/car camp. This image has gotten me thinking about how Los Angeles is often depicted as a car-centric, post-modern configuration of sprawling neighborhoods. Isn’t it time that the city breaks out of this constricting stereotype?

Isn’t Thom Andersen trying to change our preconceived notions of Los Angeles with his movie? Isn’t that what the city’s recent strides to improve public transportation in the spread out metropolis is all about? Filmmaker Roman Polanski once famously said that “Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world...provided it’s seen by night and from a distance”; it seems that, with Burden, Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world…provided it’s devoid of people to impede the city’s cars from going as fast as they can. The important question to ask is: Does Burden’s image of Los Angeles do anything to change our minds about the city people love to hate?

World Erotic Art Museum

hoag — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:29:16 +0000

“Do not cede your desire" – Jacques Lacan

"Desire is a gift in life” – Chris Corner (IAMX)

The World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, is a brilliant study in desire as well as an implicit deconstruction of the opposition between pornography and art. My recent visit there thus not only provided me with much food for thought and aesethetic enjoyment, but certainly tickled my loins. The WEAM (yes, even the acronym for the joint sounds suspiciously erotic) has captured the hearts not only of Floridians, but art-lovers from all around the world as well, so I'd love to have the pleasure of sharing my experience of the museum with you.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

The first thing one notices about the WEAM is its location. Hidden away on the second floor of its respective building, the WEAM can be easy to miss, but I think this stands as key to its role as part of Miami Beach’s cultural unconscious—i.e., as images of 1,000 “competing” desires tucked away from apparent view. One ascends to the WEAM in a rickety elevator and finds oneself in the gift shop suddenly surrounded by erotic books, t-shirts, postcards, and piggy banks made to look like sperm cells. After sheepishly paying the $15 to enter, the thought occurs: “Just how trashy is this place going to be?” But within seconds after entering the exhibits, any notion that the WEAM is less than a collection of artistic genius is thoroughly dashed.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

Nothing overcomes the idea that the WEAM is reducible to a pornographic peep show more than its septuagenarian collector and curator, Naomi Wilzig, whom I had the pleasure of meeting during my visit. Wilzig, who has been putting together the WEAM’s collection for the past twenty years, is a grandmother whose professional accomplishments have spanned a lifetime. She quietly moves through the museum thinking and observing, seemingly quiet and demure. However, discussing Wilzig’s collection or its purpose with her quickly reveals a fierce, uncompromising intellect and a vision to match it. In Wilzig's words, “[the WEAM is] an education and it’s an awakening that we all are sexual beings, in case you didn’t notice it, or didn’t remember it, or didn’t know it. And that the human body and sexual acts shouldn’t be forbidden but brought out into the open in their honesty and in their purity and in the fact that it expresses the love that people have for each other.”

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

The range of Wilzig’s collection itself is massive, so it's not surprising that my own journey through the WEAM took nearly three hours. Rather than dryly recounting everything that one can find there, let me share my impressions instead. I remember the mythologies of Adam and Eve as well as Leda and the Swan depicted in dozens of stunning ways. I remember works both praising and condemning Lady Godiva and Katherine the Great. I remember Zeus and his many loves surrounded by, appropriately enough, ancient Roman sex toys and figurines. And as I reached the museum’s “center,” I remember the impressive cultural range of the collection with its pieces from Africa and Indonesia, China, Japan, Mexico, France, and more, including contemporary pieces from “masters” such as Picasso and Klimt. There is also a large collection of wooden carvings, furniture, and body casts; photos of pin-up girls, Josephine Baker, and Marilyn Monroe; a bevy of erotic images hidden in almost every household object imaginable; fetish art; lesbian, gay, and bisexual photographs, and much more . Near the exit one can even find the infamous phallic murder weapon from the film A Clockwork Orange.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

It is a serious understatement to say that the WEAM provides a lot for a theorist of desire to ponder. For example, that the museum is called the World “Erotic” Art Museum rather than the “Sexual” Art Museum aligns its aims with the Foucauldian view that “sexuality” and the categories of sexual identity are fairly recent inventions, whereas the erotic exchanges between bodies and pleasures are much "older." Moreover, with a keen eye one can discern histories of desire and histories of sexuality being produced as one builds narratives while traversing through the museum. These histories of desire and sexuality not only teach one something about history (that it is indeed produced), but also provide a philosophical hammer with which one can smash seemingly intractable notions about what constitute “proper” or “moral” or “correct” desires today. However, while traversing the museum one may also feel the Foucauldian worry concerning the monitoring of desire, that is, by “liberating” our desire and making it visible and public that we simultaneously open it to normative surveillance and control.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

There is also a fascinating rhetoric operating throughout the WEAM’s collection, making it difficult to tell whether the vocabularies employed are being used euphemistically, for the purposes of academic legitimization (e.g., the word “tumescent” is used innumerable times), or something else altogether. One also gets the wonderfully dizzying impression that the collection is amassed independently of a morally-judgmental eye, that is, one finds images of erotic encounters of all kinds and between all types of beings (i.e., not only hetero-normative and anthropo-normative images). One thus feels as though the WEAM is a space where flows of desire can operate in a more unfettered fashion, where desiring-machines are increasingly capable of “hooking up” and sharing affects as well as bodily fluids (N.B., the museum contains particularly large restrooms hidden away in the rear of the exhibits).

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

Perhaps what I’m suggesting, then, is that the WEAM operates in accordance with an Lacanian/Deleuzian ethics of desire, an ethics where desire is allowed to breathe, rather than attempting to eliminate or yolk it. The museum challenges us to ask whether we have acted in conformity with our desire as part of an ethical life, and challenges us to consider what explosive effects follow when desire (and/as the unconscious-nonconscious) is problematically and systematically bridled. The WEAM also asks us to consider what it is possible for us to do with our bodies, and to consider the range of experience and experiments that a body is capable of (that is, the museum asks us to confront not only the organs of our bodies, but also our bodies without organs). In sum, the museum relentlessly demands that we come to see ourselves as desiring beings, ones that produce desire in response to the call of living. Indeed the WEAM calls us to see immanent life itself as the unfolding and striving of desire.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

So if you’re ever in Miami Beach, check out the WEAM. Let it call you into the problem-questions of art and desire. And while you’re at it, don’t be afraid of that stirring in the loins. It’s all part of the experience. We swear that it won’t affect your vision or the hairiness of your palms…

“Like it’s your little toy”: Masters and Disasters of War

Justin Tremel — Sun, 29 May 2011 15:24:15 +0000

I never imagined my childhood play would be a harbinger of real-life disaster. Before I discovered Nintendo, I amused myself with various toys, and countless hours were devoted to “playing war” with what I referred to as my “army guys”those small, forest green, plastic soldiers forever frozen in distinct battle poses. Others may have had more elaborate sets, but my collection of army men (there were no female plastic soldiers), consisted of only a handful of poses. As I remember I had: radioman, grenadier, crawler, crouching machine gunner, standing shooter, and lookout, similar to the first group pictured below:

Image by I remember JFK

I would intricately arrange opposing armies on battlefield carefully peering at my men, delicately positioning each figure, pointing weapons, and constructing groupings, before finally opening fire. Perhaps because each army guy had dozens and dozens of identical types, I never thought of my casualties as individuals. This held true both in my monologues in the heat of the battle, “that grenade-thrower just took out my last machine gunner” and after all the soldiers had fallen.

After happening upon images of a new series of army men, my eyes have been opened to a dark side of this game and my position as indifferent war master, casually killing of and tossing about my soldiers, typecasts, not individual warriors (unlike my GI Joe collection). I can’t help but find myself haunted by Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” with its biting accusations

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

After destroying my opposing armies, post-war I’d briefly examine the aftermath of the battle, a disarray of fallen soldiers that I’d quickly pile together, throw in my toy bucket, and forget about until some future battle. A creative reworking of these familiar army men by UK-based Dorothy collective prohibits any such forgetting, and it forces us to linger post-battle—what happens to our veterans after “the fast bullets fly.” This collection was inspired a report published in July of 2009 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, a two-part exposé “Casualties of War” (part1, part 2), that details soldiers from single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs who, after returning from Iraq, spin out of control, engaging in rampant domestic abuse, rape, suicide, shootings, drug abuse, drunk driving, and assault at alarming rates.

Dorothy repositions the tiny army men in new poses, in so doing, repositions the “toys” as, arguably, masterworks of visual art, and certainly as poignant and massively effective productions of social commentary.

Perhaps the most striking new figure is of a veteran amputee:

Though he still remains clad in his helmet and combat uniform, his machine gun has been recast as a wheel chair, and a stump of upper thigh is all that remains of his once sturdy crouching right leg. The medium of the minute plastic toys works in multiple ways, playing off of a sense of familiarity and childhood nostalgia. The tiny scale forces us to closely examine the changed details, the soldier’s accoutrements, and the implications of these changes. The wounded vet remains all the more tragic because of the permanence of his pose, forever confined to his well chair, never able to cast off the vesture of battle—his bulky boots, bulky combat fatigues, and the leaden mental fatigue felt in the tilt of his helmeted head, in the blankness of his frozen, plastic stare.

I find most tragic touch in the subtle positioning of his hands. When viewed from above they seem to be engaged in propelling the wheels of his wheelchair, but when seen at eye level, from an acute angle, one discovers that his hands are placed outside the wheels, and noticeably clutched, seemingly gripping a phantom machine gun.

The hands continually grasp for his machine gun, but remain forever empty, leaving him with only the machine: a legless chair, wheeled but inert—immobile, sad.

In “Master’s of War,” Dylan castigates the warmongers of the world, describing them “like Judas of old” full of lies and subterfuge, deceptions which he can see through, snarling, “But I see through your eyes / And I see through your brain / Like I see through the water / That runs down my drain.” Might we not recast Dylan’s song in relation to these new works of art, reframing his haunting lyrics not so much in terms of accusation, but in terms of revelation, describing a new vision we can take on vis-à-vis these toy soldiers. These plastic objects are so compelling because they allow us to see through eyes that aren’t there, imagine painful thoughts of tortured brains, and immerse ourselves in a painful reality which otherwise so often miss. Like a child with his toys have we not lumped the individual tragedies of our nation’s heroes into an anonymous mass of “war veterans”? How odd that a “little toy” a tiny piece of plastic can help us see with such clarity and run rampant through our thoughts pouring forth emotion.

I’ve here examined just one of the figures in the series, yet, I would argue, that each of the other silent different figurines evokes unique, though similarly profound emotions and social commentary. When subjected to dual modes s of “seeing” close inspection, and introspection, these lifeless figures alter our vision, to showing a harsh reality; standing in for heartrending lived experiences cannot be hidden:

Images by Dorothy Collective

Like these tragically posed plastic army men, many real-life veterans, both male and female can’t walk, can’t speak, and remain trapped, suffering enduring post-war wounds both visible and hidden. Veterans like these plastic representatives, often can’t change position, can’t, can’t cast off their combat fatigue(s), can’t turn their heads to view a brighter future, and everybody knows that plastic army men certainly can’t weep; can we not do at least this much on their behalf? As a nation we celebrated Memorial Day last Monday, remembering those brave soldiers who paid the ultimate price. These figures remind us that every day is memorial day, to not just remember, but also to pay tribute to our heores and our lost loved ones—the dead, the dying, the living...

Sol Lewitt, #StankyLegg, and the Publics for Conceptual Art

noelradley — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:47:43 +0000

Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt Via UIC

Can the Stanky Legg bring new publics to conceptual art? Perhaps this is arguable. But why don't you make up your own mind about it while Chaz Evans shakes a leg in his Vimeo video. Shots of Evans dancing the Dougie, the Robot, and the Hustle after the break.

The shots of dancing are from the interactive exhibit EDBSL-Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt, and the dancer and creator is a MFA at University of Illinois Chicago, who is working with the 1972 recorded performance of artist, John Baldessari.

As Evans writes on his Vimeo page: "I feel that this is a tribute to [Baldessari] in that I think his vocal stylings have been hidden too long in the walls of art institutions and video art websites. Perhaps by my dancing them to popular moves it will bring his songs to a much larger public." Baldessari's songs range from the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy to arhymthic compositions with no tune at all in the style of 1970s performance art.

With his get-down-boogie dancing, Evans is mirroring the intention of Baldessari himself who was in 1972 trying to reach out to the public by translating another strange artifact. Baldessari's singing was a delivery of the premises of conceptual art written by Sol Lewitt.

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
Formal art is essentially rational.
Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may only be ego.

The sentences(there are 35 of them in all) don't seem to be written for a popular audience. But that didn't stop Baldessari and now Evans from bringing them to those who wouldn't engage or understand. Evans not only translates each sentence into a dance move from American popular culture. His exhibit also allows the viewer to use a controller to scroll through and choose which dances/sentences to experience. Evans writes, "It may be the case that after selecting the dances you will experience additional enjoyment brought on through a principle of choice-supportive bias."

It seems to me the exhibit does interesting work. It assumes the value of connecting new people with the historical work of conceptual artists. But this connection is made with a good dose of humor, more familiar parts of American culture, and also through gesture and the body. The disarming, enlivening dancing by Evans mediates a problematic relationship between the American public and the cultural heritages they either ignore or cannot access.

The user-oriented interface of the exhibit is another layer on top of that.

Sol DeWitt, Circle With Towers Via Artnet

Landmarks, our public art program on UT-Austin campus, recently helped to buy a major work of art by Sol LeWitt, "Circle with Towers." But the comments on the Landmarks press release indicate that conceptual art and the public still, at times, remain at an impasse. Those who posted comments against "Circle with Towers" argue that in a tight economy, the money used to purchase art would be better used on salaries, university technology, or anything else. The anti-art comments also question the aesthetic value and meaning of the Landmarks collection, which are mostly contemporary works of abstraction. On the other hand, the comments from art professionals and staff indicate the assumption that contemporary art has enduring value for the public. The whole purpose of the Landmarks program is to give people access (the art pieces are installed across UT campus). In their replies, the Landmarks staff post web links to multi-media support materials such as podcasts, written context, and images.

I believe the mini-controversy at UT shows that there is a bit of work to do in regards to engagement, but I believe personally that this presents a vital opportunity for us to reimagine our relationship to art in America in the new economy. I think Evans with his Stanky Legg is on to something. We need to engage art with our bodies. Also, I think we need to consider that we're not going to survive in a time of scarcity without digging into creative ways of thinking. It isn't going to work anymore to continue the status quo, and who better to show us that than artists like Lewitt who lived to upset it.

Dead Malls, Dead Stores - Toward a New American Gothic

ebfrye — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:32:36 +0000

Screenshot, "Pep Boys, 2009," Dark Stores, Brian Ulrich

Brian Ulrich's work focuses on the range of our experience with scenes of consumer culture. In one series, aptly titled Retail, Ulrich documents the familiar settings of bustling grocery stores, well-lit mega-chains including Target, and crowded malls. That series is populated with all types of American consumers. However, in a study in contrast, Ulrich has put together a series of photographs of deserted malls, vacant storefronts, and boarded-up restaurants entitled Dark Stores.

Screenshot, "Rolling Acres Mall, 2008," Dark Stores, Brian Ulrich

Recently, I was introduced to the term "ruin porn." To fill you guys in, in case you aren't familiar, I'll draw on a succinct assessment from from Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog for the Atlantic. He cites two helpful definitions, one from John Patrick Leary, who has a lot to say about the visual culture surrounding Detroit: "So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city."

Screenshot, "Toys R Us 2009," Dark Stores, Brian Ulrich

Sullivan adds to that Rob Horning's comments: "Ruin photos speak to our desperate desire to have our world re-enchanted. We want the banal structures and scenes of our everyday life dignified by the patina of decay, so that we can imagine ourselves as noble, mythic Greeks and Romans to a later age and, more important, so that we can better tolerate the frequently shoddy and trite material culture that consumerism foists on us, see it once again as capable of mystery. [...]We become larger than this life, than these dentist’s offices and deserted boardrooms [...] We will survive it all, we will outlast the mediocrity that made us."

Screenshot, "Klingman's Furniture, 2008" Dark Stores, Brian Ulrich

With those definition of "ruin photos" in mind, I wonder if we can apply the concept to these vacant mall-scapes. Although they aren't arguably "ruined," to use the word traditionally, they are still stripped of their original purpose. Because they are no longer shiny and contemporary, as shopping centers are often expected to be, there is the sense that in their failure to attract and contain consumers, they are indeed "ruined." How do we then, as Horning says, see these storefronts and empty escalators as "capable of mystery"? Yes, it's difficult to classify the romance here, though there is a romance and especially sense of the gothic. The eeriness is different, more evocative of Dawn of the Dead than anything else, though there are no zombies knocking out the windows and, for the most part, no bodies here. What's haunting is the absence of bodies and, oddly, the absence of extreme decay.

The Impermanent Art of Graffiti

Michael Widner — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Graffiti by Banksy, Image via Holy Taco

As many of Banksy's works show, graffiti can convey social commentary. For example, the painting above, which shows a city worker sandblasting the famous Lascaux cave paintings just as he would modern day graffiti, wittily laments the blindness of local governments to public art.

The antagonism between government and graffiti artists is understandable; we cannot expect government officials to determine what is art and what is vandalism. At the same time, graffiti is public art to be encouraged, not suppressed. The longstanding criminality of the form makes it ideal for subsersive and counter-cultural messages. Even so, alongside simple, unappealing tags or wall-sized, astoundingly intricate paintings of pseudonyms, graffiti that bears an explicit message stands out. While Banksy's skillful works transmit these messages with a vigorous and unique style that accounts for much of his popularity, this type of work is seen elsewhere.

I discover such didactic art throughout Austin. The guiding philosophy rejects consumerism and conformity. I came across two particularly nice examples yesterday, while walking along the Pfluger pedestrian bridge over Town Lake:

"Breathe" is a call for mindfulness and focus within a series of images seemingly unconnected by anything other than style and color. "Robots" playfully suggests that we already act like robots without realizing it.

As Nate Kreuter notes in his post on graffiti, a key element is the audacity of the artist. Painting this train bridge surely counts as daring. A KXAN news report about the water rescue required for a tagger who jumped from it after being caught in broad daylight exemplifies the dangers. The reporter calls the artist a "graffiti vandal" and notes his bongos were also found; she thus makes it clear that this individual and, by extension, the art form in which he was engaged, is deviant and deserving of mockery.

But note the height of the bridge from which he jumped:

Why would someone take such a risk to create public art that many consider mere vandalism, art that the city will surely blast away within weeks if not days? The transitory nature of this form has led websites like Art Crimes to try and preserve via photographs the various pieces, including some in Austin. Here are two paintings by the same artist (Gomer) in the same place:

"Gomer" images via Art Crimes

The impermanence of the medium is, itself, part of the meaning. Not only must we reflect on the formal characteristics and the explicit or implicit messages, but also the effort put forth by an artist who knows the work will disappear. The result is an anonymous, altruistic art that momentarily beautifies and provokes before its inevitable destruction.

"She lived happily on this earth for seven years": Ai Weiwei's Subversive Homages

ebfrye — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:00:46 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.

Ai has come under intense scrutiny for speaking out against the Chinese government in recent years, and a studio that took him two years to build was torn down in January. The Frontline documentary by filmmaker Alison Klayman highlights many of his subversive actions and the ways in which he uses new media, particularly Twitter, to reach a broader audience and challenge the boundaries of censorship. Ai has advocated democracy in China and supported 2010 Nobel Prize recepient Liu Xiaobo (New York Times). Liu appears in the piece.

Image credit: Screenshot, pbs.org

Weiwei was particularly critical of the government refusal to take responsibility for what many viewed as flimsy construction of government housing and school buildings in the Sichuan province. After visiting the area and documenting its appearance, Ai was quite stunned by an image of children's backpacks (below):

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

In addition to surveying local survivors to document the number of deceased children and releasing those figures online, Ai a piece that functions as both an homage to the deceased children. The enormous installation covers a significant part of the exterior of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The backpacks spell out a statement made to Ai by a mother of one of the victims--"She lived happily on this earth for seven years."

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

I don't have an extended analysis to offer for any of these images, but I am struck by the potential of documentary image (and Ai's extensive record-keeping) both as a communicator of pathos and as essential to artistic process. Also worth noting is the ability of the everyday object, particularly in our commodity-driven cultures, to communicate when multiplied and poised in a certain context. Ai is often called the Chinese Andy Warhol, but his multiplication of a mass-produced item, here a backpack, still insists on a human attachment to the mechanically made. Rather than stop at criticizing mass production or inscribing it glamorous irony, Ai Weiwei insists on its dual ability to invoke destruction on a grand scale and evoke, without fully representing, the particular.

Meat America - a photographic celebration by Dominic Episcopo

Cate Blouke — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:30:16 +0000

WTF, by Dominic Episcopo, from Meat America

Dominic Episcopo wants to explain to you "the indefinable adjective that is 'American'." And as far as he's concerned, the best way to do that is with meat. The images are funny, deeply ironic, and often ambiguous given Episcopo's purported mission.

Above, packaged ground beef shaped into the letters "WTF" is surrounded by a variety of fresh vegetables - one of these things is not like the other. The meat seems to be asking questions about processed foods and meat consumption.

Last semester Megan wrote a post about viewer expectation and food art, touching on how food as a medium can move audiences through both desire and disgust. Since Mike's comment on my post about Lady Gaga's meat dress earlier this semester, I've also been thinking about the relationship between images and appetite.

Texas, by Dominic Episcopo, from Meat America

Episcopo's adventures in meat manipulation are ostensibly intended as a celebration of America. As he explains, his project "celebrates our [American's] appetite for insurmountable odds, limitless aspiration, and immeasurable success." Given that Texas holds by far the largest number of cattle (more than 13 million head of the nation's roughly 92 million total in 2011), the Texas-shaped steak makes a lot of sense. It's symbolic of a huge portion of Texas' industry and the immense pride of this state (we're a prime cut, not just ground beef). But, I can't entirely tell if Episcopo's project is meant to be read as ironic. And if meat is American, and America is meat, I'm wondering what exactly that means...

Love, by Dominic Episcopo, from Meat America

Perhaps the clues can be found in the details. In the image above, the ground beef "love" is paired with pretzels, coffee, some sort of packaged dessert bar, and placed next to a newspaper strategically folded to include only "& Death." The sticker's read "U.S.D.A. Choice Beef," and "Family Pak Buy More." Here, as in the image below, the meat industry is linked with mortality - perhaps a nod to the 400,000+ deaths each year from coronary heart disease.

Brian Dettmer - Carving New Meanings into/out of Old Books

Megan Eatman — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:34:22 +0000

Libraries of Health and Complete Antique, Brian Dettmer.

H/T to Brian Gatten, Lauren Gantz and NPR

In honor of World Book Day (March 3--but it's not too late to celebrate!) NPR's visual culture blog, The Picture Show, featured work by Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer. Dettmer takes vintage books and carves them into sculptures that, as Mito Habe-Evans explains, "[deconstruct] the linear narrative determined by the structure of the book" and open the door for new interpretations. In giving new life to a supposedly dying medium, Dettmer's sculptures make an argument about the cultural space of physical books, now and in the future.

No title provided on website; Brian Dettmer

While Dettmer himself seems more or less optimistic about the future of books, his art suggests multiple readings. The pieces seem to suggest the incredible possibility of paper as a medium by showing that more can be done with it than we might at first think; however, whether this possibility would translate to continued use of books is unclear. It seems that rendering the human/book relationship as an aesthetic object gives credence to the argument that continuing said relationship is just nostalgia; while the human/book relationship is beautiful, this art suggests that it isn't necessarily practical. Of course, depending on audience, the argument that the human/book relationship is beautiful is in itself enough to justify the continued production of print texts. The relationship would be at least a little different from that you might have with a text you read on your Kindle, but not worse.

Screen capture from Dettmer's website; no title provided

These works also suggest that the physicality of a human/book relationship is part of what individualizes the experience of reading. It is because the books are paper that Dettmer can engage with them in this particular way, producing individualized pieces of art that represent a human/book relationship. Kindles have the mark of mass production; the fact that Dettmer uses vintage books with limited availability gives the appearance of a distinct and special origin. Even if a Kindle can be modified, physically or through programming, to make a piece of art, Dettmer's use of vintage books, which invoke images of the artist searching stores and calling suppliers, suggests that the history behind the pieces, and therefore their messages, will always be fundamentally different.

(Re)Constructing Bodies - Zackary Canepari's Art and the Real Girl

Cate Blouke — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:00:25 +0000

An image series of Real Dolls from photographer Zackary Canepari's blog

No, this isn't a photo-essay about the box of human heads found on a Southwest Airlines flight last June. But it's still a bit creepy. The ominous and evocative image above is from series of photos by Zackary Canepari, documenting the construction of Real Dolls - anatomically correct mannequins that run about $6,000 for those in the market. Not safe for work content after the jump.

An image series of Real Dolls from photographer Zackary Canepari's blog

You may remember the 2007 independent film, Lars and the Real Girl, which brought these otherwise obscure pieces of paraphernalia into the public eye. The quirky romantic comedy (with its PG-13 rating) rather skimmed over the sexual associations/use of the dolls in favor of a banal and sweet story about a lonely and socially maladjusted guy who just needed some company. But in this series of eerie photographs and short "documentary" video (bottom), photographer Zackary Canepari unearths a fragmentary and artistic approach to the life-size sex toys.

The images are uncanny and reminiscent of forensic labs or anatomy lessons. The rows of feet and teeth, framed by soft-focus, negative space, serve to disassociate the objects from the bodies they will be attached to, recalling notions of mechanization and assembly line production.

Despite how realistic the body parts may seem, the metal studs and exposed plastic remind us that these are manufactured, constructed objects. And, as a woman, it's somewhat unsettling to consider that creator Matt McMullen is literally building female bodies at the behest of male consumers.

However, Canepari's images, and especially the film, focus on the artistry involved in the creation of these "women." Regardless of any dubious or unresolved feelings I might have about the dolls' use, each one is unique, and their life-like quality isn't achieved without a certain craftsmanship.

I think that the images do evoke a kind of horror in objectifying the body. The photo above is especially serial killer-esque with its faceless plastic skulls and bodies suspended from the ceiling. And yet, I find it strangely compelling and beautiful at the same time.

In the video (below) Canepari interviews Matt McMullen, casting the creator as a skilled artist deeply invested in his creations. McMullen explains that he began with an interest in making a mannequin that was somehow more real than display models - something with curves, not super-model skinny.

"Honey Pie" from Zackary Canepari's video website

The African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists

noelradley — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:16:27 +0000

"Revolutionary" By Wadsworth Jarrell Via Howard University

What does 1960s black nationalist art say to us today? TVLand's recent documentary on the Chicago-based Afri-COBRA movement suggests a few major takeaways. One is that images created for a community--by a community--inspire revolution. But I'd like to draw out a second theme voiced by former Afri-COBRA members who argue in a variety of ways that change starts with mind, and not the body.

"Wall of Respect" 1967 Via University of Chicago

The mural Wall of Respect was the beginning of Afri-COBRA activitism. The collaboration was meant to promote African-American heroes and artists while avoiding the physical clash that characterized racial rioting in 1960s Chicago. This begins the film's organization of artistic form (mind) apart from public protest (body). Artists created the positive imagery to change minds and insisted they were transforming their own minds. "We were confrontational in the sense that we were confronting ourselves and our people. We weren't confronting anybody else," said Afri-COBRA artist Napolean Jones Henderson. "We were challenging ourselves to see ourselves as we are."

The film continues a visual divide between politics and aesthetics. Historical marches, speeches, and sit-ins from 1950s America (in grainy black-and-white) appear less vibrant, if only in a visual sense. Against footage from the civil rights movement, Afri-COBRA paintings glow with rich "cool aid" colors and celebratory imagery. Afri-COBRA was a continuation and not a critique of civil rights, but the sets of images do register distinctly: domestic American civic imagery versus Africanist imagery, 1950s versus 1960s, documentary film versus imaginative new iconographies, African-Americans struggling to be seen at all versus African-Americans proactively setting out how they will be seen, often with non-Western forms or motifs.

Screenshot of JET Cover Via Googlebooks

Afri-COBRA art often plays up its own rejection of literal revolution, such as the bullet motif. The 1971 JET cover features one of Jet Jarrell's fashion pieces, a bullet belt. (The mixed media painting "Revolutionary" incorporates real bullets.) In the Jet cover, the model wears the bullets and uses a butcher knife, menancing signals that she has the means defend herself physically. But that's only the first step in the representation here. The idealized 1960s domestic setting, the assured posture of the female figure and her knowing stare communicate that force won't be necessary. Change is inevitable, it says to JET readers, and is happening from within. You don't have to believe in the mind/body split to buy Afri-COBRA project, for the art movement was never truly disembodied. The rhetoric of mind, rather, was about Afri-COBRA members creating life on their terms, avoiding socially proscribed behaviors and ways-of-seeing.

Staging the Past: Irina Werning's "Back to the Future"

Megan Eatman — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Nico in 1990 and 2010, France; Irina Werning

This week, I want to draw attention to Irene Werning's Back to the Future project (website probably not safe for work; there is a small amount of nudity), in which the artist meticulously reconstructs images from her subjects' pasts. The results are always impressive, often funny, and sometimes touching in their illustration of how much and how little changes with the passage of time.

Lali in 1978 and 2010, Buenos Aires

In most cases, the images are recreated more or less exactly. Subjects wear identical clothing and mimic their earlier facial expressions. The small differences in the images then become especialy interesting. In the image above, Lali's outfit is noticeably different (a solid dress, heeled shoes) and the building she poses in has been updated. While the building's changes were outside of the photographer's control, I wonder about the wardrobe differences. While the shoes show the shift to adulthood, I am not sure what to make of the brown dress. There are smaller wardrobe differences in other images; perhaps they draw attention to the image as performance, creating a deliberate gap in the illusion that reminds viewers of the gap between the past and present.

Marita and Coty in 1977 and 2010, Buenos Aires

The images are often hilarious. The playfulness of performing your childhood self shows in the images, particularly those like the image above in which the subject has to replicate his/her expression as a baby. The incongruity of an adult with a baby-faced wonder seems silly, even though it seems like it would be depressing because the loss of innocence is at the core of what makes the disjuncture amusing. While these images can be poignant for a variety of reasons, they also seem to deal in a light-hearted manner with the departure of the past. The replication of the past (and the often uncanny resemblance between child and adult subjects) indicates that it isn't really gone, but things are different, and sometimes in an amusing way.

Damian in 1989 and 2010, London

If you go to Werning's website to see more of these images, I would also recommend her other projects. Her website shows interesting variety, including a series of photos featuring a Chinese crested dog named Chini in different costumes and a collection of photos called "After Army" that features images from a beach frequented by young people who have just completed their tour of duty with the Israeli army.

Communal Remembering - The Johnny Cash Project

Cate Blouke — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:17:23 +0000

Screen Shot of the video opening in The Johnny Cash Project

Cyber memorials are interesting beasts. A new, more publicly available way to mourn, they are often sites of controversy - raising questions about representation, curation and the appropriation of tragedy. But what happens when a multimedia memorial invites visitors to actively participate in the creation and curation of the content? A hyper-mediated explosion of awesome (among other things).

Screen shot of frame contribution from Bobby Latham, McKinney, Texas

The Johnny Cash Project is a virtual space better explored than explained, but I'll do my best to give you an idea. Visitors are invited to contribute drawings of Cash to be included in a sort of hybrid rotoscope music video, the frames of which flash by in a psychedelic flurry of grayscale images. You can pause the video at any point to explore the frames individually, and you can even watch the"drawing session" in which the image was created.

Screen shot of the filtered viewing options

Visitors are also encouraged to rate the drawings, and the video can then be viewed from a variety of perspectives - the highest rated frames, the director curated frames, the most recent frames, and more. The project is incredibly malleable and interactive. It gives visitors an extreme sense of agency in both controlling their own experience and contributing to the experience of the memorial as a whole.

Screen shot of rame contribution from Marc Verhaegen, Merksem, Belgium

The project bills itself as a "living," "communal" work, and the language is interesting in terms of its push towards vitality, especially given the song selection - "Ain't No Grave." The idea is that the project will continue to grow, creating "a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the man in black." It encourages a sense of assimilation and immortality. People can become a part of Cash himself (or at least the remembrance of him) by contributing an image to the collection, and the "portrait" will continue to live on.

All in all, the project raises interesting questions about mourning, memorial, agency and ownership. Aside from being a pretty amazing piece of hyper-mediated content, it's certainly a very democratic approach to memorial.

Bringing the Streets Inside - Google Art Project

Cate Blouke — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:06:03 +0000

While the google “street view” feature has certainly revolutionized the way we look at maps, they’re now taking that technology a step further – over the threshold and into buildings. The “Art Project,” powered by Google, has partnered with museums all over the world to bring not just the art, but the museums themselves to your computer.

Screen shot of The Art Project home page

The street view technology enables viewers to explore the museums’ galleries in virtual space. Moving from gallery to gallery, they can zoom in on the works of art. While not all of the works are available for viewing (some of the pieces have been blurred for copyright reasons), the project enables people to explore museums they would never otherwise be able to see – since the museums involved are scattered across the globe (from New York to Madrid, Prague to Berlin).

Screen shot of street view tour of Gemalgalerie; Berlin, Germany

Although at times I find myself a bit dubious about the fact that Google seems to be taking over the (virtual) world, I’m all for increased accessibility and availability of artistic and cultural commodities. In addition to the museum tours, the project includes high-resolution images of some of the museums’ prized possessions. Selected and curated
by the museums themselves, the images include varying amounts of background information including “Viewing Notes, Artwork History, Artist Information,” and
“Tags.”

Screen shot of Art Project's high-resolution image of Boticelli's The Birth of Venus

Over the past year or so, the viz. team has been working with The Blanton Museum here at UT on the Steve in Action Project – a collaboration between a variety of institutions who are exploring the value of social tagging to increase access and engagement with museum collections. While The Art Project doesn’t seem to allow tagging by visitors, and the tags currently seem rather limited, it will be interesting to see how this aspect evolves.

A third feature of the site enable viewers with google accounts to “create an artwork collection” from the available images. This is certainly a much more interactive experience than flipping through the pages of a book, and it opens up untold possibilities for art history classes, let alone the everyday art enthusiast. It’s also pretty cool in terms of preservation and proliferation of works of art.