Austrian artist Kerstin Cmelka explores the way art's icons are alive to the present.
Kerstin Cmelka is a visual artist who works primarily with photography, film and oil paintings from photos. Her recent works source film stills, film-production stills and documentation of performances, such as those of VAIAE EXPORT. While many of her works show subjects that were originally intended to provoke emotional extremes, Cmelka avoids indulging in the emotionally charged portrayal of her selected subjects by deregulating their original readings. Her subtle reworking of found materials brings new relevance to her subject matter, or offers a new reading of its existing qualities. Cmelka's recent exhibitions include the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, (2007); Overtake, at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Ireland, (2007); and the last Busan Biennale (2006). She lives in Berlin.
SHANNON BOOL Maybe we could start by you telling me what your starting point is in the works that you've recently made, Multistability (2006) and the Re-actions on VALIE EXPORT (2006). Can you tell me what interests you in the original materials?
KERSTIN CMELKA Mostly it is an image that I see several times that keeps on preoccupying me in one way or another. The VALIE EXPORT photos, for instance, are images I've known since I was a child and that have always had an effect on me. If some images always reoccur in my head--sometimes there are years in between--and if I keep wanting to look them up again and again, then I will start to work with them in a more analytical way. The way I use them, or the new work that comes out of them, is decided afterwards.
SB How would you describe this relationship to using the images as being analytical?
KC I mean to use an artistic method to deal with material that is not your own. So I don't mean analytical in a scientific sense, but more at first being attracted to something in an emotional sense, and then trying to find the parameters that attract you, the parameters that affect other people--why do these images exist, or how they are regarded as a part of a collective knowledge?
KC Yeah, your starting point is your own attraction, and then you start to think about perception in general. In German, you call it "intersubjektiv"--you know, something that happens to you, but can also be shared with other people.
SB Intersubjectivity.
KC Yeah, intersubjectivity. And this is always to me the kind of parameter that makes something valuable enough to be an artwork, the question of it having enough intersubjectivity, or better: if it is able to create a new intersubjectival perception.
SB A lot of the materials you use are often very highly charged with emotion.
KC Yes.
SB So, for example, in the Multistability works, everything functions on very specific plains of affect. Can you talk a bit about the concept of multistability?
KC It's a term from cognitive psychology where the perception of an object can switch in an unstable manner from one thing to another. Pop back and forth from one thing to another. Different interpretations.
SB The old woman, the young woman.
KC Yes, that is the easiest example. Images where you have two images in one and most people see just one image in the first case. Once you know there should be another one, you really concentrate on the image; and then maybe after a while you see the second image.
I read that in this moment where your perception switches from one image to the other, what actually happens in that moment is not clear. It has been researched on people. While looking at a multistable image, their brain functions and their eye positions were measured. But every time a person said, "Ahhh, now I see it, now I see that other image," there was no change in the brain functions
SB Like they knew it already.
KC I don't know the explanation for that. But what is interesting is that you can't measure that switch, even though people experience it.
SB For example, in Multistability #2 (2006) you have this portrait of a woman, who has a rose balanced on her head, or did you balance it on her head?
KC No, it looks manipulated or Photoshopped, but it is the actual film still; it's "real."
SB It is an Antonioni film?
KC No, it's Fellini, I think it's called Juliet and the Ghosts (1965) in English.
SB Right right. So going through some film stills, you pick one that has a woman who is also in a very ambiguous pose, where on the one hand, her breasts are coming out of the picture and her tongue is coming out of her mouth, it's completely seductive, but then there is the rose balanced on the top of her head, which formally blocks her sexuality into the picture frame. Then you have the two-sided photograph, Multistability #1 (2006), which you informally refer to as the "psyche," in reference to the old Austrian term for furniture, such as a dressing table, that is inset with a full-length mirror. Your "psyche" has a portrait of Luchino Visconti's mother on each side that could, theoretically, be spun around.
It's interesting because many of your works seem to stem from you growing up in Austria. You haven't lived there for about eight years, have you?
KC Ten years now. I think with those Austrian topics it's similar to what I said earlier, it's maybe something that affected me in my childhood, or in my youth, and then later when I was in Germany and studying art, interests in art came into my head that somehow linked to old interests that I had as a child, or as a teenager, but at that time--that sounds a little bit romantic-I didn't have any form of expression for these things.
SB Yeah, that's what I mean. That's where that kind of ambiguity comes in. For example take another work that was in your artist book, Extra (2006), which you took from the biggest archival book about Viennese Actionism.
KC Yeah, the book that VALIE EXPORT and Peter Weibel published and which was banned.
SB It's not in print anymore?
KC No, it hasn't been for years.
SB So you went to a friend of yours who lives in Vienna, borrowed the book from him and took this photo of a woman's bottom, and there is a flower propped between her thighs.
KC Yes, a poppy between her upper legs. It's actually a close-up I made from a documentation photo of an Otto Muhl performance. In the actual photo you see more of the woman. You can see all of her legs, and you also see a man with a 16mm Bolex camera filming her.
SB So, in the original you see that it's part of a performance?
KC Yes. But you just see part of his head, and the Bolex, so it's a very cliched photo. You have this photo of the woman with the flower stuck between her upper legs, and then you have the 16 mm Bolex, which symbolizes a weapon, and half of the male face filming ... I thought it was too easy, too funny, so I did the close-up, I manipulated it. Do you say "adapt", to take something and ...?
SB Appropriate?
KC No, that's not the word I am looking for. Appropriating something, it's like, come on, the original is fucked up anyways, and the original is so cliched you can't believe it, so to just say appropriating is too thin, it's adapting it, in that case.
SB Also, in other Multistability photos, you took a still of a woman lying on a bed, and you tilted the still 90 degrees, so the woman was lying vertically, as opposed to horizontally. This can bring to mind Rosalind Krauss' idea about Dali's work, The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933), where the photos of the women were tilted ...
KC From a vertical to a horizontal position ...
SB And then they looked like illustrations of hysteria ...
KC Exactly.
SB So when you tilted the photo in the opposite direction--horizontally to vertically--it changed the viewer's perception of the woman from one of lying on a bed, suffering, to a position where maybe she is laughing or in a state of ecstasy.
KC With that photo, what was so thrilling for me was that it was the first photo that I found where the technique of a simple tilt worked--where I didn't have this feeling that it was just a photo turned upsidedown. A different expression became visible through the tilt that was as strong as the expression in the original photo.
SB Well you very carefully map out how large you make a work, how you cut the work, how you frame the particular expression you're showing--also if you're working with dancers that aren't professional or in the theatre, which is work that you also do. That also connects to what you did with VALIE EXPORT and her performances that she did in public in the 60s and 70s, which at the time were very revolutionary in a feminist sense. But then you made what you termed Re-actions.
KC Actually you called them Re-actions, and I then used the term because I liked it [laughs].
SB You really took the political value of her performances out of the photos.
KC In a way, yes. VALIE EXPORT--she will kill me if she hears this comparison now--she had something else to express as well, and somehow used and then later transformed the format of the Viennese Actionists that she'd been initiated into.
SB So, when you did your Re-actions, you chose a lot of the more obscure performances that she did, but you also used her most famous performances; you can't avoid Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Touch Cinema (1968), Portfolio of Doggedness (1968).
KC That's because my work was more about the iconic character of the documentary photos than about the actions or performances themselves. And that's why I wanted to make a book about it, because you learn these things through books, but sooner or later there will be nobody who was there when they happened. Today, those photos might have become more and more similar to photos from other contexts. If you didn't know anything about VALIE EXPORT today, you could also think these documentary photos were showing a film star from a strange 60s Austrian avant-garde movie. You may just get a feeling of attitude and style, things like that. Still, there is the iconic effect coming from them. This was interesting for me.
SB There is the iconic effect, but also the affect, and this is something that I thought was a great tension in that work, that when you look at the photos of VALIE EXPORT, she looks a lot like a film-noir star. We can't deny there is something very sexy about her representation, and when you learn more about her performances, like in Action Pants, where she was sitting in a cinema, got up and walked through a row of people with a machine gun and with the crotch cut out of her pants, that she was very aware of her power as a ...
KC Female performer?
SB As a female performer. And this is something you really unravelled or deconstructed in your portrayal of her.
KC I didn't play out these sexy parts too much. They have another value today. What she achieved was coming from Actionist art. You remember the poppy and the woman's ass filmed by a male cameraman? And the Viennese Actionists, I mean, all the wives of those artists didn't have any function other than maybe something similar to starring in an Yves Klein performance. Of course it's great what the Actionists did, but still you can't say that they were dealing with female artists at all. VALIE EXPORT brought herself into the pool of Viennese Actionism, using many parameters of that movement, but she brought a different reading to it. The first action, the Portfolio of Doggedness, was totally performed for the camera. The photos of the Viennese Actionists are all documentation photos, but the actions took place whether there was a camera or not. That was not what it was about with EXPORT, where the action is clearly made for the camera. She had other ideas and a different character, I would say, and because of that she used her sexiness and her aura as tools.
SB Well, she was very conscious of herself as a commodity.
KC Yeah, but she also had fun with that, I think.
SB Yeah, sure.
KC There was something unclear in a good way. Everybody could have said, "Wow, she's showing her tits." Of course she was more than aware that people would think about her that way. She also has star qualities and that is the great thing about her work. I'm sometimes angry about the reception, because at the time she gave titles like Touch Cinema and called it the first real feminist film, or called Action Pants: Genital Panic a film. She always liked to have really one-way readings and titles. I think that was necessary at the time, but then feminists in the 80s only talked about her as being the super feminist of that time; it's just not entirely true.
SB Why not?
KC It's only one line of interpretation, not dealing with anything else that is in the performance; for example, that it is maybe totally contradictory or ambiguous within the parameters of feminism, at least in the 80s. Sure, it's a feminist work, I would never deny that, but it's not only a feminist work, it's a female work.
SB Do you think in your Re-actions you are lending an experience that wasn't allowed in the original performance, or wasn't permitted in the 60s? You were talking about how Actionism was able to accept VALIE EXPORT and her method of making feminist films, largely due to the fact she was working on their terms. Do you think that elements present in your photos were missing before? Like how you hone in on fragile aspects of the performance?
KC No. I think I showed moments where you have to focus somehow. I would guess that EXPORT experienced this, too. I mean when she went out with that thing, the Touch Cinema box, I can't imagine she wasn't standing nervously in the staircase of her apartment waiting for the performance to start.
SB I know. Maybe my question is too much of a moral one. I mean it's more a question of whether you think these fragile details should have been let in before?
KC Okay, now I understand. No, they couldn't have been let in before--of course not. It wouldn't have worked. Because then she would have been a vulnerable woman trying to show her tits in public.
I thought the same thing about the Portfolio of Doggedness. Of course she must have been really tough to do that at that time, when artists in Vienna were arrested for actions that were far more harmless. But I think there must have been those moments of focusing and exact timing for what had to happen in the next moment, and also nervousness. That is the reason why I did those preparatory photos, too, or invented documentation photos, like the photo of me exiting the tram before the Portfolio of Doggedness actually started. You know? The one where you always talk about my "spaced-outness".
Shannon Bool is a Canadian artist who lives in Berlin. Her work has been most recently exhibited in the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, Herald St. in London, and Buchmann Gallery in Berlin. She is represented by Galerie Iris Kadel in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Rightfully yours
Rightfully Yours, was an intellectually thrilling and politically provocative exhibition mounted by young curator Tejpal Singh Ajji. Through a wide range of Canadian and international performance-based work--very broadly defined--Ajji created a laboratory to consider how artists insert themselves into a contemporary world wracked by conflicts over territory and identity, investigating what rights they or any of us have to take on and occupy the postion of the other. Artists here are productively framed as invaders, re-invigorating debates over cultural trespass and appropriation while never losing sight of the potent pleasures that cone with transgressions of symbolic and actual property, of insider and outsider knowledges. Ajji's exhibition offered a highly nuanced and multi-faceted perspective on artists venturing where they don't belong, frequently finding them to be mediators of conflicts between different publics.
The raw, beating heart of the show was Steven Cohen's video, Chandelier (2001-2002), projected large in a darkened nook and casting a figurative shadow over the entire exhibition. Cohen, a queer, Jewish South African, stumbles through a Johannesburg shantytown that is being torn down around its residents. In elaborate, bejeweled makeup, Cohen wears a large, jangling crystal chandelier as a dress: he is a spectacle of white privilege. Striking mannered poses in his precariously towering platform heels, he is as much in danger of collapse as the fragile shacks around him. A few locals are joyful and many are shocked. To some, he is an angel sent from God; to one, a whore to be fucked. Regardless, he continues his halting choreography through a ravaged landscape of poverty, disenfranchisement and despair decked out in the chi-chi symbols of a feminized, decadent elite (also flagged as Jewish through the Stars of David he wears on his body), haughtily refusing to communicate verbally. A catalyst amid chaos, Cohen is alternately threatened and protected, cursed and blessed. Cohen is not personally responsible for apartheid or the glaring economic injustice that remains in its aftermath, yet we fear that the artist's mere presence in the shantytown, wearing his ridiculous finery and frippery, further subjugates the squatters. But clearly, feelings of being mocked by this intervention do not approach the devastation they have experienced as a result of the social and economic conditions under which they live. Cohen becomes an easy target for our disapproval, but only because systemic injustice rarely clowns for its victims and makes a spectacle of itself like cosmopolitan artists do. Similarly, in another video, Andy Bichlbaum of media infiltrators "The Yes Men is castigated by a BBC newscaster for the "cruel trick" played by the organization on the people of Bhopal, getting their hopes up with the wish-fulfilling prank of devising a televised apology on behalf of Dow Chemical for the ruinous Union Carbide disaster. As if their brazen act of corporate humiliation and sabotage were more malicious than the company's far greater crime of destroying thousands of Indian lives.
Cohen's piece establishes drag as an important theme, one that offers a compelling model for identity in our current historical moment. Costumes are an important element of the show, as artists get tricked out as Miss Canadiana (Camille Turner), Lesbian Rangers (Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan), and a doctor willing to write excuse notes (Alison S.M. Kobayashi). Artists both dress up and dress down, performing figures of authority (and assuming their powers), taking on the guises of the abject, and also confusing such dichotomies. For example, Sislej Xhafa declared himself the unofficial 1997 Albanian representative at neighbouring Italy's Venice Biennale, where he roamed the grounds in the guise of a soccer player, thus embodying both prized sports hero and pavilion-deprived Balkan transient. Similarly, Alicia Framis' large gown made from the near-indestructible fabric Twaron was intended as protective armour for women, but was also emblazoned with abusive and derogatory phrases chosen by women and copyrighted to prevent their public use again. Through publicizing violent speech, the dress transposes the shame of abuse from victim to perpetrator.
Mattias Olofsson's drag is his ongoing performance as a real i9th-century Sami woman named Stor-Stina, here seen in a video learning to speak the slang Rinkeby-Swedish. As Stor-Stina, Olofsson mediates anxieties between the indigenous Sami, non-indigenous Swedes and their state, and young, suburban immigrants, whose patois Stor-Stina receives lessons in. It seems that Rinkeby-Swedish is not so much about words as about the correct physical performance of masculinity (the coach acts as if he does not notice that Olofsson's persona is a woman) and their linguistic exercises add a further layer of ethnocultural drag to Olofsson's work.
Other artists infringe on the art world, and Rightfully Yours, from the margins. Washington, DC-based Mingering Mike made covers for his own imaginary soul albums with paper, pencil and ink that reference the black community and its struggles in the late 60s and 70s. He is present here both for his self-insertion into the recording industry and as a sort of meta-commentary, the "outsider" artist as an interloper in a show otherwise populated by "professionals" His handmade albums about sickle-cell anemia, drug abuse, bad landlords, Bruce Lee and Vietnam are examples of history told from the ground up, broad issues filtered through the mind and hands of a fantasist into poignant cultural emblems.
With their status as entertainment rather than art, Sacha Baron Cohen's creations, Borat, Bruno and Ali G, are interlopers here as well, and we are invited to partake of their pleasures on YouTube on our own time. The corporate profit motive makes us immediately more suspicious of Cohen's intercultural exhibitionism than if he were a credentialed contemporary artist with an explicitly critical agenda. (Framing the show with two Cohens suggests homage to the diasporic wandering Jew as a model for all the artists' border-transgressing peregrinations.)
With a deep respect for ambiguity, uncertain emotions and the insights provided by irony, Ajji's exhibition was a preternaturally mature and satisfying effort. Just as the prominent comma in the exhibition title demands that we sign on to its project--and assert our own agency in the process--Ajji leaves for us to fill in many blanks in Rightfully Yours,.
The raw, beating heart of the show was Steven Cohen's video, Chandelier (2001-2002), projected large in a darkened nook and casting a figurative shadow over the entire exhibition. Cohen, a queer, Jewish South African, stumbles through a Johannesburg shantytown that is being torn down around its residents. In elaborate, bejeweled makeup, Cohen wears a large, jangling crystal chandelier as a dress: he is a spectacle of white privilege. Striking mannered poses in his precariously towering platform heels, he is as much in danger of collapse as the fragile shacks around him. A few locals are joyful and many are shocked. To some, he is an angel sent from God; to one, a whore to be fucked. Regardless, he continues his halting choreography through a ravaged landscape of poverty, disenfranchisement and despair decked out in the chi-chi symbols of a feminized, decadent elite (also flagged as Jewish through the Stars of David he wears on his body), haughtily refusing to communicate verbally. A catalyst amid chaos, Cohen is alternately threatened and protected, cursed and blessed. Cohen is not personally responsible for apartheid or the glaring economic injustice that remains in its aftermath, yet we fear that the artist's mere presence in the shantytown, wearing his ridiculous finery and frippery, further subjugates the squatters. But clearly, feelings of being mocked by this intervention do not approach the devastation they have experienced as a result of the social and economic conditions under which they live. Cohen becomes an easy target for our disapproval, but only because systemic injustice rarely clowns for its victims and makes a spectacle of itself like cosmopolitan artists do. Similarly, in another video, Andy Bichlbaum of media infiltrators "The Yes Men is castigated by a BBC newscaster for the "cruel trick" played by the organization on the people of Bhopal, getting their hopes up with the wish-fulfilling prank of devising a televised apology on behalf of Dow Chemical for the ruinous Union Carbide disaster. As if their brazen act of corporate humiliation and sabotage were more malicious than the company's far greater crime of destroying thousands of Indian lives.
Cohen's piece establishes drag as an important theme, one that offers a compelling model for identity in our current historical moment. Costumes are an important element of the show, as artists get tricked out as Miss Canadiana (Camille Turner), Lesbian Rangers (Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan), and a doctor willing to write excuse notes (Alison S.M. Kobayashi). Artists both dress up and dress down, performing figures of authority (and assuming their powers), taking on the guises of the abject, and also confusing such dichotomies. For example, Sislej Xhafa declared himself the unofficial 1997 Albanian representative at neighbouring Italy's Venice Biennale, where he roamed the grounds in the guise of a soccer player, thus embodying both prized sports hero and pavilion-deprived Balkan transient. Similarly, Alicia Framis' large gown made from the near-indestructible fabric Twaron was intended as protective armour for women, but was also emblazoned with abusive and derogatory phrases chosen by women and copyrighted to prevent their public use again. Through publicizing violent speech, the dress transposes the shame of abuse from victim to perpetrator.
Mattias Olofsson's drag is his ongoing performance as a real i9th-century Sami woman named Stor-Stina, here seen in a video learning to speak the slang Rinkeby-Swedish. As Stor-Stina, Olofsson mediates anxieties between the indigenous Sami, non-indigenous Swedes and their state, and young, suburban immigrants, whose patois Stor-Stina receives lessons in. It seems that Rinkeby-Swedish is not so much about words as about the correct physical performance of masculinity (the coach acts as if he does not notice that Olofsson's persona is a woman) and their linguistic exercises add a further layer of ethnocultural drag to Olofsson's work.
Other artists infringe on the art world, and Rightfully Yours, from the margins. Washington, DC-based Mingering Mike made covers for his own imaginary soul albums with paper, pencil and ink that reference the black community and its struggles in the late 60s and 70s. He is present here both for his self-insertion into the recording industry and as a sort of meta-commentary, the "outsider" artist as an interloper in a show otherwise populated by "professionals" His handmade albums about sickle-cell anemia, drug abuse, bad landlords, Bruce Lee and Vietnam are examples of history told from the ground up, broad issues filtered through the mind and hands of a fantasist into poignant cultural emblems.
With their status as entertainment rather than art, Sacha Baron Cohen's creations, Borat, Bruno and Ali G, are interlopers here as well, and we are invited to partake of their pleasures on YouTube on our own time. The corporate profit motive makes us immediately more suspicious of Cohen's intercultural exhibitionism than if he were a credentialed contemporary artist with an explicitly critical agenda. (Framing the show with two Cohens suggests homage to the diasporic wandering Jew as a model for all the artists' border-transgressing peregrinations.)
With a deep respect for ambiguity, uncertain emotions and the insights provided by irony, Ajji's exhibition was a preternaturally mature and satisfying effort. Just as the prominent comma in the exhibition title demands that we sign on to its project--and assert our own agency in the process--Ajji leaves for us to fill in many blanks in Rightfully Yours,.
Monday, April 27, 2015
Leah Sandals interviews New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz
The best lesson I ever had in art criticism-prior to encountering the writings of Jerry Saltz--just happened to be my first-ever lesson in art. It was in a small photo class at a general-ed. state university. The teacher's day-one assignment was "Go find a photo you like. It can be any kind of photo, but just find one. Then sit down and write a page's worth about what this photo makes you think and feel, what memories it reminds you of."
I admit, shamefully and 12 years on, that my mode of writing and talking about art, whether in undergrad crits or glossy art mags, has wavered little from that first, simple directive: look at the work; if you see something you respond to, sink into it, write what it makes you think about, what memories, feelings and associations it conjures. While I've studied art history a bit, I have, for fear of obscuring honest personal reactions, not used it much.
Reading Jerry Saltz's writing, however, is the first thing that has made me want to know, and show, my art history better. That's because Saltz, in his witty, direct and, unsurprisingly, twice-Pulitzer-nominated prose, does something most critics find disturbingly difficult: he shows it's possible to stay close to the core of one's emotional and intellectual reactions to art while recognizing its context.
Lately, Saltz has had as much Gawker-esque attention as any critic of our era can get. In April, he left the Village Voice, where he'd written since 1998, for New York magazine. Though the shift seemed amicable, it offers a handy entry point for interviewing Saltz about the life experiences squeezed between his spare Web bio lines, which note that, in addition to having been an advisor on a Whitney Biennial, he has been a truck driver and an artist.
The resulting discussion (personal prying weathered graciously by Saltz at my behest) gives some sense of where one of our era's best art critics has come from, where, to his mind, the New York art world is going and whether anyone would travel across water to see it.
Q: So, it's not immediately apparent how one gets from Figure Drawing II and lot lizard-type environs to, say, snagging a Pulitzer nom. How did you get started?
A: Well, I don't think anybody when they're a kid raises their hand in class and says, "Ooooh, I want to be an art critic." It's something you back into.
In high school, I looked around and noticed that the people who seemed to be having sex were either in theatre or art. I knew that I couldn't go into theatre because it just seemed a little demonstrative for me. So I thought, OK, art, art would be a good way to meet people. And that was just a thought in high school. Nothing else really happened except I pretended I liked art so I ended up liking all the standards--people like Dali, Modigliani, Michelangelo, your absolute popular heros.
Then I went to art school, the Art Institute of Chicago, and immediately dropped out. I thought, "Oh no, I know way more than these people" I thought I was just a smarty-pants and I left.
I did start making art around that period. Then I opened an artist-run gallery. This should've been the first warning sign that I was not an artist. The reason that should've been a clue is it meant I was happier outside the studio than inside the studio. But all through that period I was making and exhibiting art, and I got a National Endowment for the Arts grant, with the huge sum of $2,500, which was eventually the money I used to move to New York. And I sold my work and I was reviewed in Artforum, but all of this is just a pathetic way of telling you that I could've been a contender
A deeper truth was I had demons. And the demons were telling me the same things they tell every artist, any person who makes anything, they were telling me, "You can't do this, you don't really know how to do this, you don't have enough time to do this, you don't have enough money, you can't schmooze with people, blah blah blah." So I tuned in to those demons and said, "Oh yeah, you're right." When I moved to New York, I stopped making art.
Q: Is this where the truck driving comes in?
A: Yes. I became a long-distance truck driver, driving from New York to Florida or New York to Texas once a month. Mind you, I was not driving eighteen-wheelers, but rather a m-wheeled truck that was loaded not with steel but with art. I am Jewish, after all; I don't think my people are allowed to drive eighteen-wheelers hauling steel through the rust belt.
Q: So it was an art-crating company.
A: Yes, but ultimately it was a way to go into exile and have, I don't think a nervous breakdown, but have a walking semi-nervous breakdown in private. I spent huge amounts of time alone in the trucks, thinking, "Well, I looooove art" which I did by that time, "and I looooove the art world," which is terrible and embarrassing to admit. But I really did, and I thought, "I've got to find a way to stay in the art world" And somehow, some way, I thought, "Gee, I bet being a critic is easy. I could just teach myself to be an art critic" And that's where I began.
Q: How did you teach yourself?
A: I thought, OK, I will read art criticism. So I began to read the hip magazine of that period, which was Art-forum. And I would read it religiously, almost from cover to cover, and, of course, I barely understood a word that I read. It was a time when the art world was exciting, but criticism, with a couple of notable exceptions, was beginning its mind/body split. There was a lot happening upstairs, but not a lot happening downstairs for me. And it all got very jargon-filled, very theoretical.
This was also a time when the first translations of French theory were appearing in America. And everyone was reading the same 12 authors. Of course, the problem is they're still quoting the same 12 authors. Anyway, I started to quote the same people too. And I would write these reviews that I had no idea what I was talking about, but I was using the right words so that seemed to be pretty good. It was simulacra this, post-that. That's what I was writing, and it was fun. But I really wasn't writing about what I was seeing, and I think I secretly knew that.
Q: How did you start actually looking at the work?
A: I began this column in Arts Magazine where I wrote on a single work of art for the whole column. I did it about once a month for three or four years. That was really good training for trying to look harder at the object and then look also at my own reactions and try to record them. Mind you, all of that was all positive all the time. So even when I was going deeper, I was only going deeper into half my reactive, generative self; only into the happy.
Q: Which you now say critics shouldn't do.
A: Yes, I think that's dishonest if you're only writing from half of yourself. I don't believe anyone is happy all the time.
Q: And somewhere along the way you advised the 1995 Whitney Biennial.
A: Yes. And that's where I learned I had absolutely no interest in or gift for curating. Absolutely no interest. Speaking to the artist about what the artist said their art meant--what the artist said their work was, how the work should be exhibited--I thought, well, I don't want to care about that, I want to look at the art myself and say simply what I think and then you can disagree with it.
Q: Hmm. I was wondering if you wanted to do more curating, but ...
A: Do not call and do not ask.
Q: OK. How did the Voice thing happen?
A: Well, the biggest change for me was being invited to work for Time Out New York, which was a great opportunity. I only did it for about a year, but that's where I learned about weekly criticism and I saw what a great opportunity that can be, to have a review out while the show was up. You're in the conversation in the present. I love magazines, I get them all, I read them all, but they're usually published after a show. I'm interested in the during, in "a rhetoric of presence."
Q: So ... about that rhetoric. What's your weekly routine?
A: I see about 40 or 50 shows a week in New York City. The Voice didn't pay fares to go to Brooklyn and considered itself a very local paper. So my beat was New York City. New York magazine, I'm not sure yet. Maybe the same but that's OK with me; there's over 300 galleries in Chelsea. There's probably that many galleries spread around New York, too, so I've got my hands full and I'm happy about that. I see the shows every week and I'm just going through them thinking about my own reactions. And looking and thinking and thinking and looking and reacting, until something sort of gets my attention, positive or negative, and then I will start to sift through my reactions and say, "Maybe I have something to say about this."
Seeing the shows is really sort of thrilling. You're in public and it's like being in combat, you know, there's things flying left and right. Opinions, people yelling at you, people saying "This stinks!" and "This is great!", and you're in the middle going, "Wow," and it's all very exciting and then you go home and you're completely alone. And sort of cut off from everything except your own reactions and the echoes of voices in magazines and newspapers and books, and so on. And then I sit down and I try to write about what I'm thinking.
Remember, all of this has to happen in six days. So if I get a big catalogue on a show on Byzantium, I think, "Wow, yeah, Byzantium! Thrilling! I'm all about Byzantium!" and I open the catalogue and I read about a paragraph and I look at my watch and say, "Gosh darn, I've got to get to work." I can't read much to do it.
Q: You say that you're a "trench critic," grounded in personal reactions. Still, you're adept at balancing art-historical awareness with that.
A: I think it can be dangerous to be either all one or all the other. If I'm only making it up out of myself and not paying attention to other voices or other ideas, that's not right. That becomes ideology too. When people say, "I have no theory," this is the worst theory of all, because it is the most blinkered and self-righteous.
Q: You've noted--quite humourously--that "few are further from the epicentre of action than an art critic at an art fair." How much do you think critics are outside the art world?
A: Well, I think everyone is inside of it. No one is outside of it. If you're looking at the art world from your home and just in a magazine and not making any money at all and not having any shows at all, that is your relationship to the art world. But I'm not kidding myself. I'm on the inside. I know that I'm lucky enough to have this sort of pulpit where I'm spouting off every week.
Q: Well, it seemed accurate for an art fair, because you wouldn't be in the position of a buyer, and buyers are the ones catered to at fairs.
A: Yes, I don't buy art. I don't collect art.
Q: What do you have on your walls, then?
A: My wife [New York Times art critic Roberta Smith] and I buy a lot of stuff from thrift stores. We have a really nice collection of five-dollar ceramics and I've gone on Paint My Photos to make a copy of a painting that I like. So I'll pay twenty-five dollars and they'll make a copy.
Q: Are you serious?
A: Yes, I'm looking at one right now. I was pretty hard on Damien Hirst's last exhibition of photorealist paintings. And the most expensive painting there was of a green operating room. So I had an painter make a very small copy, two feet by one foot, of that painting. I figure Gagosian sold his for one million, and I got mine for twenty-five.
Q: That must bring some satisfaction.
A: Well, it made me appreciate Hirst a bit more. Mine isn't that good! I also went to a 99-cent store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles to retake the Gursky photograph. Because I thought, well, this is easy. I could really have my own 99 Cent. And I can't tell you how bad mine is. It really made me appreciate how difficult it is to make something up.
Q: We hear more and more about Berlin and London's art scenes. What do you think of the idea that these cities are usurping New York's role as an art centre?
A: New York was, in one time in the 1960s, the centre of the art world. But that centre lasted only briefly. As early as the 70s, New York seemed like the most provincial place in the art world. In the late 70s, there was a kind of painting that was only practised in New York--a kind of abstraction, painting about painting, painting about trying to save painting. So that's why in the 80s, when art started coming from everywhere, New York was really shook.
And the truth is now that New York is a centre, but it is the trading floor of the art world. And it is an expensive place to live. When I go to Berlin or elsewhere, I am just so jealous and amazed at how people live, because the key to any art centre is you must be able to be poor in style, and that is getting very difficult in New York. You can do it in other expensive cities, like London or Berlin or Los Angeles. So something's gotta give in New York. Something has to change and it's unclear what that is.
Q: Just checking: are you saying this because you're used to non-New Yorkers beating up New York?
A: Well, I love New York. But I know there's a death star on the horizon. The leases will come up in Chelsea in the next five to 10 years, and, I think, when rental spaces become too expensive for the dealers, where will they move? New York's great advantage has always been to have one or two very condensed neighbourhoods of galleries. And I wonder, since New York is an island culture, an island city, where will they go? New Yorkers have traditionally not crossed water for culture. They just won't do it. It's herd instinct.*
For more of Jerry Saltz's writings, look for his book Seeing Out Loud (The Figures Press, 2003) or check out his reviews ported weekly at nymag.com.
Leah Sandals is an art writer based in Toronto. Her writing has been published in Flash Art, Sculpture and Canadian Art. She has never been a truck driver.
Sandals, Leah
I admit, shamefully and 12 years on, that my mode of writing and talking about art, whether in undergrad crits or glossy art mags, has wavered little from that first, simple directive: look at the work; if you see something you respond to, sink into it, write what it makes you think about, what memories, feelings and associations it conjures. While I've studied art history a bit, I have, for fear of obscuring honest personal reactions, not used it much.
Reading Jerry Saltz's writing, however, is the first thing that has made me want to know, and show, my art history better. That's because Saltz, in his witty, direct and, unsurprisingly, twice-Pulitzer-nominated prose, does something most critics find disturbingly difficult: he shows it's possible to stay close to the core of one's emotional and intellectual reactions to art while recognizing its context.
Lately, Saltz has had as much Gawker-esque attention as any critic of our era can get. In April, he left the Village Voice, where he'd written since 1998, for New York magazine. Though the shift seemed amicable, it offers a handy entry point for interviewing Saltz about the life experiences squeezed between his spare Web bio lines, which note that, in addition to having been an advisor on a Whitney Biennial, he has been a truck driver and an artist.
The resulting discussion (personal prying weathered graciously by Saltz at my behest) gives some sense of where one of our era's best art critics has come from, where, to his mind, the New York art world is going and whether anyone would travel across water to see it.
Q: So, it's not immediately apparent how one gets from Figure Drawing II and lot lizard-type environs to, say, snagging a Pulitzer nom. How did you get started?
A: Well, I don't think anybody when they're a kid raises their hand in class and says, "Ooooh, I want to be an art critic." It's something you back into.
In high school, I looked around and noticed that the people who seemed to be having sex were either in theatre or art. I knew that I couldn't go into theatre because it just seemed a little demonstrative for me. So I thought, OK, art, art would be a good way to meet people. And that was just a thought in high school. Nothing else really happened except I pretended I liked art so I ended up liking all the standards--people like Dali, Modigliani, Michelangelo, your absolute popular heros.
Then I went to art school, the Art Institute of Chicago, and immediately dropped out. I thought, "Oh no, I know way more than these people" I thought I was just a smarty-pants and I left.
I did start making art around that period. Then I opened an artist-run gallery. This should've been the first warning sign that I was not an artist. The reason that should've been a clue is it meant I was happier outside the studio than inside the studio. But all through that period I was making and exhibiting art, and I got a National Endowment for the Arts grant, with the huge sum of $2,500, which was eventually the money I used to move to New York. And I sold my work and I was reviewed in Artforum, but all of this is just a pathetic way of telling you that I could've been a contender
A deeper truth was I had demons. And the demons were telling me the same things they tell every artist, any person who makes anything, they were telling me, "You can't do this, you don't really know how to do this, you don't have enough time to do this, you don't have enough money, you can't schmooze with people, blah blah blah." So I tuned in to those demons and said, "Oh yeah, you're right." When I moved to New York, I stopped making art.
Q: Is this where the truck driving comes in?
A: Yes. I became a long-distance truck driver, driving from New York to Florida or New York to Texas once a month. Mind you, I was not driving eighteen-wheelers, but rather a m-wheeled truck that was loaded not with steel but with art. I am Jewish, after all; I don't think my people are allowed to drive eighteen-wheelers hauling steel through the rust belt.
Q: So it was an art-crating company.
A: Yes, but ultimately it was a way to go into exile and have, I don't think a nervous breakdown, but have a walking semi-nervous breakdown in private. I spent huge amounts of time alone in the trucks, thinking, "Well, I looooove art" which I did by that time, "and I looooove the art world," which is terrible and embarrassing to admit. But I really did, and I thought, "I've got to find a way to stay in the art world" And somehow, some way, I thought, "Gee, I bet being a critic is easy. I could just teach myself to be an art critic" And that's where I began.
Q: How did you teach yourself?
A: I thought, OK, I will read art criticism. So I began to read the hip magazine of that period, which was Art-forum. And I would read it religiously, almost from cover to cover, and, of course, I barely understood a word that I read. It was a time when the art world was exciting, but criticism, with a couple of notable exceptions, was beginning its mind/body split. There was a lot happening upstairs, but not a lot happening downstairs for me. And it all got very jargon-filled, very theoretical.
This was also a time when the first translations of French theory were appearing in America. And everyone was reading the same 12 authors. Of course, the problem is they're still quoting the same 12 authors. Anyway, I started to quote the same people too. And I would write these reviews that I had no idea what I was talking about, but I was using the right words so that seemed to be pretty good. It was simulacra this, post-that. That's what I was writing, and it was fun. But I really wasn't writing about what I was seeing, and I think I secretly knew that.
Q: How did you start actually looking at the work?
A: I began this column in Arts Magazine where I wrote on a single work of art for the whole column. I did it about once a month for three or four years. That was really good training for trying to look harder at the object and then look also at my own reactions and try to record them. Mind you, all of that was all positive all the time. So even when I was going deeper, I was only going deeper into half my reactive, generative self; only into the happy.
Q: Which you now say critics shouldn't do.
A: Yes, I think that's dishonest if you're only writing from half of yourself. I don't believe anyone is happy all the time.
Q: And somewhere along the way you advised the 1995 Whitney Biennial.
A: Yes. And that's where I learned I had absolutely no interest in or gift for curating. Absolutely no interest. Speaking to the artist about what the artist said their art meant--what the artist said their work was, how the work should be exhibited--I thought, well, I don't want to care about that, I want to look at the art myself and say simply what I think and then you can disagree with it.
Q: Hmm. I was wondering if you wanted to do more curating, but ...
A: Do not call and do not ask.
Q: OK. How did the Voice thing happen?
A: Well, the biggest change for me was being invited to work for Time Out New York, which was a great opportunity. I only did it for about a year, but that's where I learned about weekly criticism and I saw what a great opportunity that can be, to have a review out while the show was up. You're in the conversation in the present. I love magazines, I get them all, I read them all, but they're usually published after a show. I'm interested in the during, in "a rhetoric of presence."
Q: So ... about that rhetoric. What's your weekly routine?
A: I see about 40 or 50 shows a week in New York City. The Voice didn't pay fares to go to Brooklyn and considered itself a very local paper. So my beat was New York City. New York magazine, I'm not sure yet. Maybe the same but that's OK with me; there's over 300 galleries in Chelsea. There's probably that many galleries spread around New York, too, so I've got my hands full and I'm happy about that. I see the shows every week and I'm just going through them thinking about my own reactions. And looking and thinking and thinking and looking and reacting, until something sort of gets my attention, positive or negative, and then I will start to sift through my reactions and say, "Maybe I have something to say about this."
Seeing the shows is really sort of thrilling. You're in public and it's like being in combat, you know, there's things flying left and right. Opinions, people yelling at you, people saying "This stinks!" and "This is great!", and you're in the middle going, "Wow," and it's all very exciting and then you go home and you're completely alone. And sort of cut off from everything except your own reactions and the echoes of voices in magazines and newspapers and books, and so on. And then I sit down and I try to write about what I'm thinking.
Remember, all of this has to happen in six days. So if I get a big catalogue on a show on Byzantium, I think, "Wow, yeah, Byzantium! Thrilling! I'm all about Byzantium!" and I open the catalogue and I read about a paragraph and I look at my watch and say, "Gosh darn, I've got to get to work." I can't read much to do it.
Q: You say that you're a "trench critic," grounded in personal reactions. Still, you're adept at balancing art-historical awareness with that.
A: I think it can be dangerous to be either all one or all the other. If I'm only making it up out of myself and not paying attention to other voices or other ideas, that's not right. That becomes ideology too. When people say, "I have no theory," this is the worst theory of all, because it is the most blinkered and self-righteous.
Q: You've noted--quite humourously--that "few are further from the epicentre of action than an art critic at an art fair." How much do you think critics are outside the art world?
A: Well, I think everyone is inside of it. No one is outside of it. If you're looking at the art world from your home and just in a magazine and not making any money at all and not having any shows at all, that is your relationship to the art world. But I'm not kidding myself. I'm on the inside. I know that I'm lucky enough to have this sort of pulpit where I'm spouting off every week.
Q: Well, it seemed accurate for an art fair, because you wouldn't be in the position of a buyer, and buyers are the ones catered to at fairs.
A: Yes, I don't buy art. I don't collect art.
Q: What do you have on your walls, then?
A: My wife [New York Times art critic Roberta Smith] and I buy a lot of stuff from thrift stores. We have a really nice collection of five-dollar ceramics and I've gone on Paint My Photos to make a copy of a painting that I like. So I'll pay twenty-five dollars and they'll make a copy.
Q: Are you serious?
A: Yes, I'm looking at one right now. I was pretty hard on Damien Hirst's last exhibition of photorealist paintings. And the most expensive painting there was of a green operating room. So I had an painter make a very small copy, two feet by one foot, of that painting. I figure Gagosian sold his for one million, and I got mine for twenty-five.
Q: That must bring some satisfaction.
A: Well, it made me appreciate Hirst a bit more. Mine isn't that good! I also went to a 99-cent store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles to retake the Gursky photograph. Because I thought, well, this is easy. I could really have my own 99 Cent. And I can't tell you how bad mine is. It really made me appreciate how difficult it is to make something up.
Q: We hear more and more about Berlin and London's art scenes. What do you think of the idea that these cities are usurping New York's role as an art centre?
A: New York was, in one time in the 1960s, the centre of the art world. But that centre lasted only briefly. As early as the 70s, New York seemed like the most provincial place in the art world. In the late 70s, there was a kind of painting that was only practised in New York--a kind of abstraction, painting about painting, painting about trying to save painting. So that's why in the 80s, when art started coming from everywhere, New York was really shook.
And the truth is now that New York is a centre, but it is the trading floor of the art world. And it is an expensive place to live. When I go to Berlin or elsewhere, I am just so jealous and amazed at how people live, because the key to any art centre is you must be able to be poor in style, and that is getting very difficult in New York. You can do it in other expensive cities, like London or Berlin or Los Angeles. So something's gotta give in New York. Something has to change and it's unclear what that is.
Q: Just checking: are you saying this because you're used to non-New Yorkers beating up New York?
A: Well, I love New York. But I know there's a death star on the horizon. The leases will come up in Chelsea in the next five to 10 years, and, I think, when rental spaces become too expensive for the dealers, where will they move? New York's great advantage has always been to have one or two very condensed neighbourhoods of galleries. And I wonder, since New York is an island culture, an island city, where will they go? New Yorkers have traditionally not crossed water for culture. They just won't do it. It's herd instinct.*
For more of Jerry Saltz's writings, look for his book Seeing Out Loud (The Figures Press, 2003) or check out his reviews ported weekly at nymag.com.
Leah Sandals is an art writer based in Toronto. Her writing has been published in Flash Art, Sculpture and Canadian Art. She has never been a truck driver.
Sandals, Leah
Canada's culture war
Almost twelve million dollars is quite a saving. Especially if you can convince the public that the programs you cut were profligate in the first place. This is the Tories' strategy. A federal government press release of October 25, 2006 characterizes monies previously allotted to cultural diplomacy as "wasteful." In the public response to this the tendency is to debate the numbers--defending the value of Canadian culture, Ross writes, "Canadian cultural exports ... total almost $5 billion annually"--and of course this is right.
It is important to counter the bizarre supposition that culture is somehow not a real industry. It is also important not to accept the terms of the debate as the Harper government has set them. The argument does not begin and end with the idea that culture traveling beyond our borders is not our concern. There is a wider issue at stake. Writing on the subject, also in the Globe (January 27, 2007), Margaret Atwood puts it succinctly: "If these things can be done in a minority government, lo, I say unto you, what things shall be done in a majority?" A government with only a tenuous mandate to rule that slashes the budget for cultural promotion so precipitously appears extremely narrow in its worldview, if not extremist. As Atwood further notes, we can only speculate what kind of ignorance and hatred motivates cuts like these.
A more measured and, indeed, humane view of the value of cultural diplomacy can be found in the pages of this issue of C. Candice Hopkins, director of the Vancouver artist-run centre Western Front, interviews Lida Abdul, an artist from Afghanistan. The two first met while both were participating in residencies at the Banff Centre, and a portfolio of Abdul's work was recently published in the Toronto glossy Prefix Photography. Canada's networks of cultural exchange are working well, in other words. And, significantly, Abdul's participation in the last Venice Biennale was financed in part by the Canadian consul in Kabul. Canadians should be proud that we could make this small contribution.
As Hopkins notes, Abdul was the first Afghan artist to represent her country at the Biennale. It takes incredible courage to make art when your country is a war zone. But as Abdul herself says, "You can't give up even in the face of massive destruction and tragedy. You have to affirm life. For me it is life-affirming to create work, to move on"
The Canadian diplomacy cuts are taking place in a cultural climate which has recently seen the suspension of publication of Parachute, the only Canadian magazine of any format that has a significant public profile abroad. That's no small achievement. The Canada Council spent 30 years investing in the development of this profile and in Parachute's impressive reach into international networks of magazine distribution. In recent years, however, they have been withdrawing their support. C and many other magazines are being subjected to the same series of cuts. Although unrelated to Harper's budget measures, the rationale is roughly the same: the Canadian magazine industry, like Canadian culture as a whole, should be able to fend for itself on the open market. It's a dubious argument and one that is contrary to global trends, as many people have pointed out. (Ross: "England, Germany, France and Italy all spend about $1 billion a year on cultural diplomacy") Other factors may have contributed to the decision to stop publishing Parachute, but the magazine's press release on the topic makes it clear that deteriorating levels of government subsidy were a determining factor.
Harper thinks Canadians don't care about culture. And maybe he's right about that. As of March 7, after circulating for over four weeks, a petition against these cuts had 6,134 signatures. Not a very impressive number. Multiply that number by 10 and you know a real cultural constituency is speaking. Taking an optimistic view, perhaps it's just a slow burner and not sputtering out.
Monday, April 13, 2015
WITHOUT HERMENEUTICS
Since standing before that picture, I have reconsidered the types of bodies that populate Shearer's work. For all the cultural anthropology embedded in his project, what often gets overlooked is the artist's interest in bodily presence. Dieter Roelstraete puts it aptly when he surmises, "Whereas the guitar and metal archives obviously purport to stage (and thus also reinforce) the clear-cut, anxiously patrolled gender lines that apparently come custom-made with American lumpen culture, [Shearer's] Cassidy & Garrett archival works paradoxically seem intent on breaking down those very same barriers, most notably by bringing into play the slippery, positively threatening notion of 'male beauty'--the great Unspoken of Western art history." The unspoken quality of the bodies Shearer presents, or their beauty, can be partly identified with the blank, stoic (or stoned) attitude of icons, though not in any conventional religious sense. The satanic overtones and cultish figures signal an upended devotion. But what is retained from the religious context is a yearning for a world where images play a more powerful role.
Shearer's art, I think, draws its greatest strength from its keen ability to intersect with the body. At times, his images seem to be all body. Faces are often at least partially obscured or look so relaxed in depiction that they provide no key to the subject, giving the rest of the body a greater role in the construct. If in this respect Shearer has left behind the enigmatic tradition of medieval icons marked by the face-forward stares of Jesus, Mary and the saints, the enigma of the icon remains--as the image that is a body as much as it depicts one. It is this notion of presence that allows a picture to come alive.
Having proposed that Shearer's work carves out a physical course for the encountering of images in our rapidly dematerializing culture, I'd like to leave this religiously tinged interpretation behind and, by way of conclusion, engage differently with the bodies that I continue to encounter throughout the artist's work. In other words, I have no intent here to follow the path of religious scholars and many an art historian in insisting on a hermetically sealed explanation for Shearer's "iconic imperatives:' In her seminal essay "Against Interpretation" Susan Sontag concludes, "In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art." No neat, well-rounded hermeneutic circle can reconcile girly boys like Leif Garrett with the all-male guitar aficionados and long-haired androgyny pictured in Larry in Germany (2004). To do so would be to leave behind the erotics of these bodies and of the images created for us to encounter them in.
VI. AFTER LIFE
As Shearer's project continues to take different forms, I tend to think that this is how the artist keeps us aware of the various embodiments of images available in our culture. If he is increasingly devoted to painting, it is perhaps because paint's variable consistency affords the most varied of all imaging techniques. The intensifying dialectic of the image and the body in african wall art and decor (in particular) reminds us that if images have a variety of embodiments available to them, so do people. If there is a god to invoke here, then it should be Eros (the god of life). The enumerable references to death and "the unholy" will dissuade only a literal viewer of Shearer's work. To propose an erotic encounter with his art in place of a hermeneutics is to engage in the life of his images, and it is also to consider how people can feel alive when they engage with them.
Shearer's art, I think, draws its greatest strength from its keen ability to intersect with the body. At times, his images seem to be all body. Faces are often at least partially obscured or look so relaxed in depiction that they provide no key to the subject, giving the rest of the body a greater role in the construct. If in this respect Shearer has left behind the enigmatic tradition of medieval icons marked by the face-forward stares of Jesus, Mary and the saints, the enigma of the icon remains--as the image that is a body as much as it depicts one. It is this notion of presence that allows a picture to come alive.
Having proposed that Shearer's work carves out a physical course for the encountering of images in our rapidly dematerializing culture, I'd like to leave this religiously tinged interpretation behind and, by way of conclusion, engage differently with the bodies that I continue to encounter throughout the artist's work. In other words, I have no intent here to follow the path of religious scholars and many an art historian in insisting on a hermetically sealed explanation for Shearer's "iconic imperatives:' In her seminal essay "Against Interpretation" Susan Sontag concludes, "In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art." No neat, well-rounded hermeneutic circle can reconcile girly boys like Leif Garrett with the all-male guitar aficionados and long-haired androgyny pictured in Larry in Germany (2004). To do so would be to leave behind the erotics of these bodies and of the images created for us to encounter them in.
VI. AFTER LIFE
As Shearer's project continues to take different forms, I tend to think that this is how the artist keeps us aware of the various embodiments of images available in our culture. If he is increasingly devoted to painting, it is perhaps because paint's variable consistency affords the most varied of all imaging techniques. The intensifying dialectic of the image and the body in african wall art and decor (in particular) reminds us that if images have a variety of embodiments available to them, so do people. If there is a god to invoke here, then it should be Eros (the god of life). The enumerable references to death and "the unholy" will dissuade only a literal viewer of Shearer's work. To propose an erotic encounter with his art in place of a hermeneutics is to engage in the life of his images, and it is also to consider how people can feel alive when they engage with them.
Excerpted from a speech on the Modellschau
Excerpted from a speech on the Modellschau, an event organized in 1915 to promote Viennese fashion, Vetter's comments make clear that the Werkstatte salon had not succeeded in its goal of bringing modernist fashion design to a broad public. Because of their originality, high quality, and exorbitant prices, these avant-garde clothes ultimately could not enter the everyday routines of the average metropolitan woman but remained exiled in the remote realm of high art.
It was not simply their status as art, however, that prevented most Viennese women from adopting the clothes of the Floge salon and the Wiener Werkstatte. The stylistically provocative designs proved to be too unusual for the average Viennese woman, who would not have been able to afford the garments had they conformed to her tastes, as well as for the women of the aristocracy, who would have had the financial resources to patronize these salons. Middle and upper class civil servants and members of the bureaucracy (professions which were barred to Jews) generally wore ready-to-wear clothing that conformed to the swiftly changing tastes of mass-produced fashion, while the women of the aristocracy followed the standards set by the Parisian designers of haute couture. Aside from isolated champions like Zuckerkandl, the clothing produced by the Wiener Werkstatte was still viewed with skepticism by much of the press, and most critics maintained that these dresses simply remained too bizarre for everyday use.
Part of the discomfort contemporary observers exhibited towards the new fashion may be traced to the vigilant message of the reform dress movement which had heavily influenced modernist clothing design in Vienna. The clothes created by the Schwestern Floge and the Werkstatte feature the basic characteristics of reform dress, eliminating the corset and utilizing loosely draped fabrics to allow freedom of movement. Reformist designers sought to gain the physical liberation of women by designing clothes which would not constrict the free, healthy movement of the body by subjecting it to the debilitating cage of a corset. German and Belgian attempts at clothing reform, such as those by Paul Schultze-Naumburg and Henry van de Velde, began to attract attention in Vienna as early as 1902, but its views were by no means conventional. Although Schultze-Naumburg declared in 1903 that "Corsets are out!", the "S-line" figure--a form produced by a corset which eliminated the stomach, pushed the bust forward and raised the buttocks--continued to dominate Viennese fashion. In 1908, women wore a hip belt over the corset and, in 1909, the long corset came into fashion, which laced away the hips to produce an extremely slim contour. his extravagantly slender silhouette reached its high point in 1911, when the skirt's narrow shape became so exaggerated that the woman could hardly move. Dress reformers' renunciation of the corset signified political as well as physical emancipation, and went hand in hand with the demand for women's rights. The Schwestern Floge and Wiener Werkstatte did away with the corset during a period in which it was still very much the standard in contemporary dress, and in which the liberationist agenda of the reform style coincided with an intensely threatening feminist movement. At a time in which Otto Weininger's startlingly popular book Sex and Character proposed the essential degeneracy and baseness of women, a style of dress associated with women's independence and intelligence was not going to find broad, unproblematic acceptance with the Viennese public.
It was not simply their status as art, however, that prevented most Viennese women from adopting the clothes of the Floge salon and the Wiener Werkstatte. The stylistically provocative designs proved to be too unusual for the average Viennese woman, who would not have been able to afford the garments had they conformed to her tastes, as well as for the women of the aristocracy, who would have had the financial resources to patronize these salons. Middle and upper class civil servants and members of the bureaucracy (professions which were barred to Jews) generally wore ready-to-wear clothing that conformed to the swiftly changing tastes of mass-produced fashion, while the women of the aristocracy followed the standards set by the Parisian designers of haute couture. Aside from isolated champions like Zuckerkandl, the clothing produced by the Wiener Werkstatte was still viewed with skepticism by much of the press, and most critics maintained that these dresses simply remained too bizarre for everyday use.
Part of the discomfort contemporary observers exhibited towards the new fashion may be traced to the vigilant message of the reform dress movement which had heavily influenced modernist clothing design in Vienna. The clothes created by the Schwestern Floge and the Werkstatte feature the basic characteristics of reform dress, eliminating the corset and utilizing loosely draped fabrics to allow freedom of movement. Reformist designers sought to gain the physical liberation of women by designing clothes which would not constrict the free, healthy movement of the body by subjecting it to the debilitating cage of a corset. German and Belgian attempts at clothing reform, such as those by Paul Schultze-Naumburg and Henry van de Velde, began to attract attention in Vienna as early as 1902, but its views were by no means conventional. Although Schultze-Naumburg declared in 1903 that "Corsets are out!", the "S-line" figure--a form produced by a corset which eliminated the stomach, pushed the bust forward and raised the buttocks--continued to dominate Viennese fashion. In 1908, women wore a hip belt over the corset and, in 1909, the long corset came into fashion, which laced away the hips to produce an extremely slim contour. his extravagantly slender silhouette reached its high point in 1911, when the skirt's narrow shape became so exaggerated that the woman could hardly move. Dress reformers' renunciation of the corset signified political as well as physical emancipation, and went hand in hand with the demand for women's rights. The Schwestern Floge and Wiener Werkstatte did away with the corset during a period in which it was still very much the standard in contemporary dress, and in which the liberationist agenda of the reform style coincided with an intensely threatening feminist movement. At a time in which Otto Weininger's startlingly popular book Sex and Character proposed the essential degeneracy and baseness of women, a style of dress associated with women's independence and intelligence was not going to find broad, unproblematic acceptance with the Viennese public.
Sunday, March 29, 2015
The display of early Italian panels
This discussion points to the central problem regarding the display of early Italian panels. As Kanter rightly states, the panels were "three-dimensional objects, more akin to sculpture", yet many museums display them as if they were independent paintings. Today, 3 piece wall decor set are quite popular in home decor. To complicate matters, the viewers standing before an early Italian panel bring with them anachronistic notions of the "picture" and "art," which are confirmed by a presentation that reinforces this false association. Such tendencies are compounded by the traditional demands of connoisseurship and aesthetics, which promote an installation of works that is organized in response to an exceedingly narrow range of questions. In light of the wide range of questions raised by art historians in publications like Italian Painted Panels, it is striking that such issues are rarely addressed in museum galleries, and if so, only cryptically, in the museum labels.
In her brief paper, "Effective Communication with the Museum Visitor," Jean Cadogan introduces the problems of balancing didactic information with the objects on display. While I agree with her point that each institution will need to identify which mixture of media will best serve their particular constituencies, there exists a powerful reservation to raise questions within the gallery walls. This reservation is rooted in the assumption that to raise questions (via didactic panels or wall text) will compromise the aesthetic purity of the installation, available space, and/or the "neutral" approach to content. These concerns are unfounded. Imaginative installation design, so often reserved for temporary exhibitions, can address the creative questions that are being raised in the scholarship without adversely affecting the space or appearance of the galleries. Regarding the issue of content, there is no such thing as a "neutral" installation. The mere selection and arrangement of objects in a gallery or series of galleries represents an argument of one sort or another. That said, it would be helpful if such arguments were articulated overtly, rather than assumed, so that the visitor can more fully consider the issues raised by the curator. Also, by compelling curators to publicly articulate their argument for one or a series of galleries, it would become more apparent how frequently the same questions are being posed within a museum. This is not to exclude questions of style, chronology, and aesthetics, but to make such matters one among others addressed in the galleries. Early Italian panels occupy a pivotal place at the end of what Hans Belting has labeled the "era before art." Resisting the temptation to treat them as "art" and to regard them as functional artifacts, much like items in a medieval treasury, will bring museum experience and scholarship closer in line with each other.
Of the issues not raised in this conference, but of importance to the broader issues of conservation, one must make note of the current forces that too often lead to potentially problematic treatment campaigns: temporary exhibitions, re-installations, and self-promoting sponsorship. While such forces can impact what, how, and when objects are treated, and have become a common problem at many institutions, they do not appear to have played a deciding factor in the problems associated with the Yale panels.
Approaches to Conservation sheds light on an important chapter in the history of modern conservation. Garland has assembled the papers skillfully and maintained the spark and liveliness of a panel discussion. In light of the exceedingly polemic debates that have erupted over the high-stakes, high-profile controversial conservation projects of the last two decades, the thoughtful analysis of the past and present treatment of the Yale panels represents a refreshing approach and much welcomed publication. This is not to say that there were not early and vocal critics to the conservation of the Yale panels, only that it is productive to examine the issues raised by these works free of intense public pressure. Although Approaches to Conservation stems from and deals at length with matters particular to the history and treatment of the early Italian panels at Yale, the issues raised in the volume bear on all art historians, conservators, and curators.
Phillip Earenfight is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Trout Gallery at Dickinson College. He publishes on duecento and trecento art, architecture, and urban planning. He is working on a monograph on the Misericordia Confraternity and its place on the Piazza San Giovanni in Florence.
In her brief paper, "Effective Communication with the Museum Visitor," Jean Cadogan introduces the problems of balancing didactic information with the objects on display. While I agree with her point that each institution will need to identify which mixture of media will best serve their particular constituencies, there exists a powerful reservation to raise questions within the gallery walls. This reservation is rooted in the assumption that to raise questions (via didactic panels or wall text) will compromise the aesthetic purity of the installation, available space, and/or the "neutral" approach to content. These concerns are unfounded. Imaginative installation design, so often reserved for temporary exhibitions, can address the creative questions that are being raised in the scholarship without adversely affecting the space or appearance of the galleries. Regarding the issue of content, there is no such thing as a "neutral" installation. The mere selection and arrangement of objects in a gallery or series of galleries represents an argument of one sort or another. That said, it would be helpful if such arguments were articulated overtly, rather than assumed, so that the visitor can more fully consider the issues raised by the curator. Also, by compelling curators to publicly articulate their argument for one or a series of galleries, it would become more apparent how frequently the same questions are being posed within a museum. This is not to exclude questions of style, chronology, and aesthetics, but to make such matters one among others addressed in the galleries. Early Italian panels occupy a pivotal place at the end of what Hans Belting has labeled the "era before art." Resisting the temptation to treat them as "art" and to regard them as functional artifacts, much like items in a medieval treasury, will bring museum experience and scholarship closer in line with each other.
Of the issues not raised in this conference, but of importance to the broader issues of conservation, one must make note of the current forces that too often lead to potentially problematic treatment campaigns: temporary exhibitions, re-installations, and self-promoting sponsorship. While such forces can impact what, how, and when objects are treated, and have become a common problem at many institutions, they do not appear to have played a deciding factor in the problems associated with the Yale panels.
Approaches to Conservation sheds light on an important chapter in the history of modern conservation. Garland has assembled the papers skillfully and maintained the spark and liveliness of a panel discussion. In light of the exceedingly polemic debates that have erupted over the high-stakes, high-profile controversial conservation projects of the last two decades, the thoughtful analysis of the past and present treatment of the Yale panels represents a refreshing approach and much welcomed publication. This is not to say that there were not early and vocal critics to the conservation of the Yale panels, only that it is productive to examine the issues raised by these works free of intense public pressure. Although Approaches to Conservation stems from and deals at length with matters particular to the history and treatment of the early Italian panels at Yale, the issues raised in the volume bear on all art historians, conservators, and curators.
Phillip Earenfight is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Trout Gallery at Dickinson College. He publishes on duecento and trecento art, architecture, and urban planning. He is working on a monograph on the Misericordia Confraternity and its place on the Piazza San Giovanni in Florence.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Abbema's work
In Abbema's work, the personified Paris rests against a coat of arms, probably of her city, though this detail is too indistinct for certain identification. This shield serves visually as the back of her makeshift throne. At the end of her extended right arm she holds a long, leafed branch, no doubt of laurel. Donning modern dress, as are the balance of the women in the vessel, her hourglass figure twists from a three-quarter view of her lower body to a nearly frontal torso to a profile head. She looks down on the group of women personifying the Arts, placed in the body of the vessel below her, and she honors them with the extended laurel branch.
Following the arc of Paris' arm and extended branch, the figure of Drama is indicated. She is seated at the bow, at a slightly lower level across from Paris, and is facing back into the vessel. Her chin rests on one hand while she contemplates the mask of tragedy which she holds with the other. This figure is more than an anonymous personification. Appropriately, it is a portrait of Abbema's long-time friend, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt's particular features, as Abbema renders them, are identifiable even in this loosely painted sketch.
The other passengers represent, reading counter-clockwise, Painting (note her paint brush and paint-covered palette), an unidentified allegory (with no readable attributes), Literature (note her pen in hand at rest on the table; identified, by visual comparison, as the comtesse de Martel de Janville, the writer known as Gyp), and an allegory of Oration (identified, by visual comparison, as Board of Lady Managers' president Bertha Palmer) as indicated by the figure s raised right arm. (13) Next to Oration is a shaded figure outlined against the sail. She stands beyond Drama's (Bernhardt's) knee and looks out directly at the viewer but has no associated attributes. Her proximity to Drama and Painting along with a comparison photograph of the artist (see Fig. 1) suggest that this figure is Abbema's self-portrait.
In America Receiving the Nations at the World's Exposition--E Pluribus Unum (Fig. 5), Abbema depicts four men and two women of various cultures, and a personification of America, all riding together in a sea vessel. This vessel is comparable to the replica of Columbus' flagship, the Santa Maria, sent by Spain for exhibition at the Columbian Exposition (Fig. 7), but in Abbema's representation the central mast is missing. As in this replica, escutcheons of various regions of Spain are displayed on the forward and aft railings. Unlike the replica, Abbema's escutcheons are merely blocked-in impressions of shield imagery and not the true renderings on the Santa Maria; it is probable that more accuracy would have been found in Abbema's finished work. The sail at the bow of Abbema's ship carries the insignia of the Royal Spanish Order of Santiago--a red cross often adorning ships on Christian crusade. A plain sail is placed at the stern with a small American flag furling at one end. In the center, another American flag is draped over the side of the vessel and drags in the water, a complement to the fleurs-de-lis covered cloth from The City of Paris sketch.
Abbema's vessel is sailing into the site of the World's Columbian Exposition. The exposition grounds were designed as an intricate system of interconnected waterways, including ponds, lagoons, and canals, around which were placed the more prominent World's Fair buildings. Images of the Columbian Exposition site accompanied many newspaper accounts of its building progress, making them readily available for inspiration. In the background, the low dome of the Agriculture Building or one of the small side domes of Machinery Hall is just visible on the left, while the Administration Building (Fig. 8), located at the west end of the Basin at the Columbian Exposition, is depicted on the right. Based on the location of the Administration Building and the direction in which the ship is heading, the building in the left background is probably Machinery Hall. By depicting the vessel traveling the Columbian Exposition waterways, Abbema presents a visual symbol of America receiving the nations at the World's Columbian Exposition.
At the elevated stern of the vessel, a standing figure of Columbia in classical dress holds a laurel wreath extended overhead. This figure is similar to the other Basin sculpture at the Columbian Exposition, Daniel Chester French's The Republic (Fig. 9). An American eagle, with a shield of the United States as a breastplate, stands to Columbia's right. The eagle and shield are images of the United States, but are also found on the state flag of Illinois, which hosted the Exposition. In the body of the ship are six figures; from left to right, they represent: a North American Indian, a fair-haired and light-complexioned woman in modern dress, a dark-haired and dark-complexioned woman (costume unclear), a South American vaquero, a light-complexioned gentleman, and a European seaman.
Source: http://www.outpost-art.org/abbema-louise-c-15_16_21.html
http://www.outpost-art.org/blog/?p=91
Following the arc of Paris' arm and extended branch, the figure of Drama is indicated. She is seated at the bow, at a slightly lower level across from Paris, and is facing back into the vessel. Her chin rests on one hand while she contemplates the mask of tragedy which she holds with the other. This figure is more than an anonymous personification. Appropriately, it is a portrait of Abbema's long-time friend, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt's particular features, as Abbema renders them, are identifiable even in this loosely painted sketch.
The other passengers represent, reading counter-clockwise, Painting (note her paint brush and paint-covered palette), an unidentified allegory (with no readable attributes), Literature (note her pen in hand at rest on the table; identified, by visual comparison, as the comtesse de Martel de Janville, the writer known as Gyp), and an allegory of Oration (identified, by visual comparison, as Board of Lady Managers' president Bertha Palmer) as indicated by the figure s raised right arm. (13) Next to Oration is a shaded figure outlined against the sail. She stands beyond Drama's (Bernhardt's) knee and looks out directly at the viewer but has no associated attributes. Her proximity to Drama and Painting along with a comparison photograph of the artist (see Fig. 1) suggest that this figure is Abbema's self-portrait.
In America Receiving the Nations at the World's Exposition--E Pluribus Unum (Fig. 5), Abbema depicts four men and two women of various cultures, and a personification of America, all riding together in a sea vessel. This vessel is comparable to the replica of Columbus' flagship, the Santa Maria, sent by Spain for exhibition at the Columbian Exposition (Fig. 7), but in Abbema's representation the central mast is missing. As in this replica, escutcheons of various regions of Spain are displayed on the forward and aft railings. Unlike the replica, Abbema's escutcheons are merely blocked-in impressions of shield imagery and not the true renderings on the Santa Maria; it is probable that more accuracy would have been found in Abbema's finished work. The sail at the bow of Abbema's ship carries the insignia of the Royal Spanish Order of Santiago--a red cross often adorning ships on Christian crusade. A plain sail is placed at the stern with a small American flag furling at one end. In the center, another American flag is draped over the side of the vessel and drags in the water, a complement to the fleurs-de-lis covered cloth from The City of Paris sketch.
Abbema's vessel is sailing into the site of the World's Columbian Exposition. The exposition grounds were designed as an intricate system of interconnected waterways, including ponds, lagoons, and canals, around which were placed the more prominent World's Fair buildings. Images of the Columbian Exposition site accompanied many newspaper accounts of its building progress, making them readily available for inspiration. In the background, the low dome of the Agriculture Building or one of the small side domes of Machinery Hall is just visible on the left, while the Administration Building (Fig. 8), located at the west end of the Basin at the Columbian Exposition, is depicted on the right. Based on the location of the Administration Building and the direction in which the ship is heading, the building in the left background is probably Machinery Hall. By depicting the vessel traveling the Columbian Exposition waterways, Abbema presents a visual symbol of America receiving the nations at the World's Columbian Exposition.
At the elevated stern of the vessel, a standing figure of Columbia in classical dress holds a laurel wreath extended overhead. This figure is similar to the other Basin sculpture at the Columbian Exposition, Daniel Chester French's The Republic (Fig. 9). An American eagle, with a shield of the United States as a breastplate, stands to Columbia's right. The eagle and shield are images of the United States, but are also found on the state flag of Illinois, which hosted the Exposition. In the body of the ship are six figures; from left to right, they represent: a North American Indian, a fair-haired and light-complexioned woman in modern dress, a dark-haired and dark-complexioned woman (costume unclear), a South American vaquero, a light-complexioned gentleman, and a European seaman.
Source: http://www.outpost-art.org/abbema-louise-c-15_16_21.html
http://www.outpost-art.org/blog/?p=91
Friday, January 9, 2015
Reservation about Devouring Frida
In many parts of the text Lindauer seems to be fervently looking for new truths about Frida. As a result, her conclusions are usually onedimensional. This clashes with Frida's oeuvre, which consists of many subtle nuances, conceptual shifts, and layers of political and personal meaning. Lindauer's analysis of Frida's Four Inhabitants of Mexico (The Square is Theirs) (1938, Private Collection), is an interesting example. The four figures depicted are typical of Mexican popular culture and were inspired by pieces in Rivera's arts and crafts collection. The young girl included in the work is Frida herself, as evidenced by her likeness to her self-representation as a child in her house at Coyoacan in the Family Tree (1936, New York, Museum of Modern Art). This opens up the possibility of an autobiographical decoding of the painting that ought to be incorporated within the political one. Frida's obsession with the idea of human origins, with her own procreative powers, and her conflicting relationship with her own mother (represented by the Nayarit figure in the painting) and with Diego (embodied by the Judas/traitor figure), symbolically reflect Frida's preoccupations with the future of her beloved country arrived at through personal references.
In Chapter VII, Lindauer's effort to glorify the artist as an avant la lettre feminist reaches its peak. She disputes Martha Zamora's statement that Frida typed speeches and letters for Rivera because it does not consider that she may have made contributions to the text. She also complains that even during the 1930s and 1940s, when Frida was starting to exhibit her work(check out paintings by Frida Kahlo) worldwide, the newspapers and journals noted her exotic ethnic look more than her art, a trend that continues to this day. She writes, "The Frida-look as a fashion commodity accentuating the seductiveness of her persona completely obliterates any suggestion that Kahlo was a producer of socially, politically meaningful paintings" . The fact remains that the Frida's narcissistic construction of Frida's ethnic look and identity, personality revealed in her recently published diary and in the numerous self-portraits she created, and the clear dichotomy that she established between the colorful and perfectly elaborated costumes and hairstyles and her suffering but restrained face, are evident in her work. Frida's paintings make obvious the objectification of woman in patriarchal society, and that is precisely one of her most valuable contributions to the interpretation of Mexican culture. To denounce the constrained position of women in twentieth century Mexico, through open and bold self-analysis, is a political statement that reflects admirable personal courage, and which is of profound historical significance.
My main reservation about Devouring Frida has to do with the fact that, in order to revert the psycho-biographic approach, which according to Lindauer is to blame for the mythologization and commodification of Frida, she takes on an exclusively socio-political perspective. Frida's mastery resides in the fact that, with her self-referential angle, she addresses some of the most controversial issues that Mexican society usually prefers to silence: the social constructs of gender roles, homosexuality, infidelity, motherhood, abortion, exploitation, and, above all, human suffering. Frida's work is, as Breton stated, "a ribbon around a bomb," not because her art is pejoratively debased as "feminine," but because of her remarkable capacity to unveil the most private feelings and events, make them public, and in doing so, she subtly exposes the suspicious social prescriptions that shaped them. Frida's works should not be devoured. Instead the subtle flavors they offer should be leisurely savored.
In Chapter VII, Lindauer's effort to glorify the artist as an avant la lettre feminist reaches its peak. She disputes Martha Zamora's statement that Frida typed speeches and letters for Rivera because it does not consider that she may have made contributions to the text. She also complains that even during the 1930s and 1940s, when Frida was starting to exhibit her work(check out paintings by Frida Kahlo) worldwide, the newspapers and journals noted her exotic ethnic look more than her art, a trend that continues to this day. She writes, "The Frida-look as a fashion commodity accentuating the seductiveness of her persona completely obliterates any suggestion that Kahlo was a producer of socially, politically meaningful paintings" . The fact remains that the Frida's narcissistic construction of Frida's ethnic look and identity, personality revealed in her recently published diary and in the numerous self-portraits she created, and the clear dichotomy that she established between the colorful and perfectly elaborated costumes and hairstyles and her suffering but restrained face, are evident in her work. Frida's paintings make obvious the objectification of woman in patriarchal society, and that is precisely one of her most valuable contributions to the interpretation of Mexican culture. To denounce the constrained position of women in twentieth century Mexico, through open and bold self-analysis, is a political statement that reflects admirable personal courage, and which is of profound historical significance.
My main reservation about Devouring Frida has to do with the fact that, in order to revert the psycho-biographic approach, which according to Lindauer is to blame for the mythologization and commodification of Frida, she takes on an exclusively socio-political perspective. Frida's mastery resides in the fact that, with her self-referential angle, she addresses some of the most controversial issues that Mexican society usually prefers to silence: the social constructs of gender roles, homosexuality, infidelity, motherhood, abortion, exploitation, and, above all, human suffering. Frida's work is, as Breton stated, "a ribbon around a bomb," not because her art is pejoratively debased as "feminine," but because of her remarkable capacity to unveil the most private feelings and events, make them public, and in doing so, she subtly exposes the suspicious social prescriptions that shaped them. Frida's works should not be devoured. Instead the subtle flavors they offer should be leisurely savored.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Speak with Ken Lum
I wanted to speak with Ken Lum for this inaugural Short Interview in C Magazine mainly because of a slide talk he did at NSCAD in fall 2002. I admired the works he presented, particularly his furniture pieces. The Q & A that followed was a different story. A couple of male teachers delivered long, aggressive statements towards Lum, barely bothering to pose them as questions. Lum responded in kind, scornfully taunting his audience: "You call this a Q & A? I thought NSCAD was tough! At Goldsmiths, where I just came from, they kept me on my toes for over an hour. This is pathetic. NSCAD. Ha!" And he left.
It was all very boys' club, very soap opera and very confusing. Despite the sensitive ambiguities of Lum's work, which I have reflected on seriously since, his is also an oeuvre of the impervious and sealed up, not unlike the gruff persona he presented that day.
I have long wondered what it would be like to ask Lum some personal questions. Not only would it be more "estrogenesque"; on some level, I think, I longed to make him cry. Unfortunately, that wasn't exactly what happened.
This interview took place nine days prior to the 2006 federal election in Canada--an election the Conservative party won.
Q. You travel a lot. What are some of your favourite Vancouver things to do after you've been away for a while and come back?
A. Coming back and just staying in my own place. I don't go out much, even here in my neighbourhood. And I rarely go downtown. Whenever I go downtown I'm always amazed how many people are there. I'm split between the [University of British Columbia] campus and my home, out on the west side of Vancouver. I go to the nearby supermarket and maybe a nearby diner. My gym is right across the street. That's all I miss, basically being home.
Q. When you're abroad, where do you tell people you are from?
A. First of ali I tell them I'm Canadian and then I tell them I'm from Vancouver. Particularly in Europe, and less so in recent years, people would ask, "But where is your family from?" and I would say China. That was a few years ago they used to say that, but now it's much less.
Q. Have you ever considered moving somewhere else?
A. I've moved lots of places. I've lived in Martinique. I've lived a year in Paris, a year in Munich. I lived in China. I lived in Winnipeg. I lived in Toronto for three-and-a-half years. I actually moved to these places. I'm not talking about going someplace for a week, but for at least a year or two, or three years. I think that's moving. Like even doing a residency where you're there half a year, you have to move. When I did all this, I put a lot of stuff in storage. I sublet my apartment one time and often I would give it up. Now I own the place so it's different. It makes you more tied to your place.
I have itchy feet all the time anyway; I'd like to move again. I don't know where, but I have some job offers and stuff. I'm still debating.
Q. Is it ever hard to make those choices?
A. It's not terribly hard. I don't wreck my head around it. If it's an interesting city, that's appealing ... but not always. Last year I received a great offer in San Francisco, but I just didn't want to go to the same time zone ... like why would I be moving [within] the same standard time? Hong Kong would be great. I also spent a lot of time in Dubai last year.
Q. Has racism as an issue gotten better or worse in Canada since you began your art practice? If not better or worse, how have the issues changed?
A. Well, I live in Vancouver so it's a little bit of a different question here because the city is so Asian anyways. It's much better now than when I was growing up or in early university. Yeah. Much more, I don't know, sympathetic and so on. The relations between people around 1986 had a lot of tension because of the influx of Hong Kong Chinese at that point. Now I think the non-Chinese have finally admitted defeat and admitted that these are the people who spur the engine of change and good restaurants and such.
I don't think, though, that it's improved at all in terms of aboriginal relations in Canada. And I think Canada's always got this degree of being a racialist country. Racialist, not racist. I'm not sure how to wrap my head around that. Racialist in that people are always very conscious of race but Canada always pretends we're not. I actually find America's much better that way. If you're in New York or Seattle or some other big city it's not an issue, you're just whoever you are. Well in Canada you're always Polish-Canadian, Korean-Canadian ... it's racialist. I don't know. I don't know if it's good or bad. I just sometimes wish we didn't have to mete attention onto those hyphens.
I mean look at the current election campaign. This hyphen community, that hyphen community, it's cynical: "How can we win this hyphen community vote?"
O. Your work seems to be a lot about perfection. Can you talk about that? Like, do you ever wish you could make something messy?
A. Perfection? You mean because of the finish? Well, why would I want an imperfect work? You try to develop the work to a certain standard and finish. When I say something looks finished, it doesn't mean shiny. Even good little scribble drawings always look finished. There has to be a finish that would represent actively the complexity of the artist's expression.
People have mentioned that about my work before. And I just think that's how my work is. Some say it's clinical, and some say it's rather cool and head-bound, and I don't dispute that either. That's just the way I am. And what I'm interested in are the fissures behind that. So as long as that's there on some level and is detectable in terms of inducing certain kinds of sentiments in the spectator, then I'm happy. And besides, often my work makes reference to advertising and publicity culture and so on, so in a way you'd have to match that; there's some degree of mimicry involved. I'm not trying to create advertising. But in order to have that considerable conceptual deviation from advertising you have to match it on a visual level
Also, my office is completely neat, so that's just who I am.
Q. If the Vancouver School were an actual building, what would it look like?
A. Well, first of all I guess there would be a lot of separate rooms with no common hallway. They would all open up in different directions. I could go to my office or studio and would never see the other residents until I die, basically. Once in a while I would hear music coming from Rodney's studio or Ian reading a book to some classical music or something, and I might sometimes feel like, "Hey, could you keep it down?" It would be something like that.
It was all very boys' club, very soap opera and very confusing. Despite the sensitive ambiguities of Lum's work, which I have reflected on seriously since, his is also an oeuvre of the impervious and sealed up, not unlike the gruff persona he presented that day.
I have long wondered what it would be like to ask Lum some personal questions. Not only would it be more "estrogenesque"; on some level, I think, I longed to make him cry. Unfortunately, that wasn't exactly what happened.
This interview took place nine days prior to the 2006 federal election in Canada--an election the Conservative party won.
Q. You travel a lot. What are some of your favourite Vancouver things to do after you've been away for a while and come back?
A. Coming back and just staying in my own place. I don't go out much, even here in my neighbourhood. And I rarely go downtown. Whenever I go downtown I'm always amazed how many people are there. I'm split between the [University of British Columbia] campus and my home, out on the west side of Vancouver. I go to the nearby supermarket and maybe a nearby diner. My gym is right across the street. That's all I miss, basically being home.
Q. When you're abroad, where do you tell people you are from?
A. First of ali I tell them I'm Canadian and then I tell them I'm from Vancouver. Particularly in Europe, and less so in recent years, people would ask, "But where is your family from?" and I would say China. That was a few years ago they used to say that, but now it's much less.
Q. Have you ever considered moving somewhere else?
A. I've moved lots of places. I've lived in Martinique. I've lived a year in Paris, a year in Munich. I lived in China. I lived in Winnipeg. I lived in Toronto for three-and-a-half years. I actually moved to these places. I'm not talking about going someplace for a week, but for at least a year or two, or three years. I think that's moving. Like even doing a residency where you're there half a year, you have to move. When I did all this, I put a lot of stuff in storage. I sublet my apartment one time and often I would give it up. Now I own the place so it's different. It makes you more tied to your place.
I have itchy feet all the time anyway; I'd like to move again. I don't know where, but I have some job offers and stuff. I'm still debating.
Q. Is it ever hard to make those choices?
A. It's not terribly hard. I don't wreck my head around it. If it's an interesting city, that's appealing ... but not always. Last year I received a great offer in San Francisco, but I just didn't want to go to the same time zone ... like why would I be moving [within] the same standard time? Hong Kong would be great. I also spent a lot of time in Dubai last year.
Q. Has racism as an issue gotten better or worse in Canada since you began your art practice? If not better or worse, how have the issues changed?
A. Well, I live in Vancouver so it's a little bit of a different question here because the city is so Asian anyways. It's much better now than when I was growing up or in early university. Yeah. Much more, I don't know, sympathetic and so on. The relations between people around 1986 had a lot of tension because of the influx of Hong Kong Chinese at that point. Now I think the non-Chinese have finally admitted defeat and admitted that these are the people who spur the engine of change and good restaurants and such.
I don't think, though, that it's improved at all in terms of aboriginal relations in Canada. And I think Canada's always got this degree of being a racialist country. Racialist, not racist. I'm not sure how to wrap my head around that. Racialist in that people are always very conscious of race but Canada always pretends we're not. I actually find America's much better that way. If you're in New York or Seattle or some other big city it's not an issue, you're just whoever you are. Well in Canada you're always Polish-Canadian, Korean-Canadian ... it's racialist. I don't know. I don't know if it's good or bad. I just sometimes wish we didn't have to mete attention onto those hyphens.
I mean look at the current election campaign. This hyphen community, that hyphen community, it's cynical: "How can we win this hyphen community vote?"
O. Your work seems to be a lot about perfection. Can you talk about that? Like, do you ever wish you could make something messy?
A. Perfection? You mean because of the finish? Well, why would I want an imperfect work? You try to develop the work to a certain standard and finish. When I say something looks finished, it doesn't mean shiny. Even good little scribble drawings always look finished. There has to be a finish that would represent actively the complexity of the artist's expression.
People have mentioned that about my work before. And I just think that's how my work is. Some say it's clinical, and some say it's rather cool and head-bound, and I don't dispute that either. That's just the way I am. And what I'm interested in are the fissures behind that. So as long as that's there on some level and is detectable in terms of inducing certain kinds of sentiments in the spectator, then I'm happy. And besides, often my work makes reference to advertising and publicity culture and so on, so in a way you'd have to match that; there's some degree of mimicry involved. I'm not trying to create advertising. But in order to have that considerable conceptual deviation from advertising you have to match it on a visual level
Also, my office is completely neat, so that's just who I am.
Q. If the Vancouver School were an actual building, what would it look like?
A. Well, first of all I guess there would be a lot of separate rooms with no common hallway. They would all open up in different directions. I could go to my office or studio and would never see the other residents until I die, basically. Once in a while I would hear music coming from Rodney's studio or Ian reading a book to some classical music or something, and I might sometimes feel like, "Hey, could you keep it down?" It would be something like that.
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