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

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.

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.