Wednesday, May 27, 2009
History in the making
A few amazing photos I found on nytimes.com celebrating Nikola Tesla's history.
Tom Marioni, 5/18/09, "Beer, Art, and Philosophy"
Considering himself to be one of the co-founders of Conceptual Art as well as the founder of the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), Marioni certainly isn’t someone to take lightly, despite what one might think in the titles of his works. Many in the audience seemed to be drawn to his talk specifically for his work, entitled “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the ‘Highest form of Art’,” Marioni performs a musical piece that he carefully orchestrates in both the beginning and end, allowing the audience to watch the interactions of the beer drinkers as well as listen to the differing tones and sounds made by the slowly emptying beer bottles. Marioni was very specific in his description that his performance was a musical piece rather than sound-art because of the work he had put into composing the piece.
Marioni discussed briefly how he grew up in a Catholic family, and how the ideas involving “relics, residues, and records” inspired him in his future work as well as his spiritual journeys within the studies of Zen and calligraphy. He was especially interested in the idea of calligraphy’s symbols looking like as well as the act of creating them being similar to the object that the symbol represents, and how in English we don’t have that kind of luxury.
Marioni hit upon intent several times within his lecture, especially when audience members asked him about how genuine his titles were and how some of his pieces came about. One performance in particular seemed to stand out to prove his point. He had a working janitor, an actor, a dancer, and an artist (specifically a sculptor, himself) sweep the floor in his gallery. While these four people performed the same action and completed the same task, they completed it in completely different manners with completely different intentions because of their occupations. It is this reason exactly why Marioni wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times stating why he didn’t agree with the Guggenheim trying to recreate old performances from artists both dead and alive; by trying to recreate the experience in the first place, even though the artist who is recreating the piece is trying their best to keep the original artists intent in mind, they’re still doing a recreation of the original event, and will therefore not be able to give a pure performance of what originally occurred and rather will be “acting” the part of the original artist.
Marioni also spoke about his experience of living in San Francisco, and how it has shaped his future works. Marioni considers himself a sculptor who creates “artifacts” after the fact of his performances, including pieces such as “Tree, Drawing a Line as Far as I Can Reach,” (1972) in which he sits down on the floor of the museum and repeats the action of stretching up as far as he can reach for a specific amount of times, which he calls “out of body action drawings.” Specific physical actions, when armed with a pencil, lend a certain shape or overall image after the physical event is over. The idea of capturing the overall effect of a collection of repeated small temporal events in one piece was very interesting to me, almost a collective photograph of a single action.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Xiaoze Xie, 4/23/09
Xiaoze Xie, currently a professor at Bucknell Univeristy, first began his studies in a background of architecture and then moved into the fine arts. Upon graduation, he traveled a lot and sketched within the mountainous regions of China. This structural, sparse, and mathematical quality of work is reflected within his earlier series, entitled “The Libraries” (1993), “Digging into old papers” (1994-1999), “The Silent Flow of Daily Life” (1998-), and “Fragmentary Views” (2001).
Within “The Libraries” series, Xiaoze Xie captures rows of “sleeping” books that appeared to form walls around him as he visited these various libraries. The paintings realistic qualities lend themselves to his method: he painted from black and white photographs that he took for this series, and would continue to paint from photographs in his future works. Xie explained that in this series, he was more interested in the history of the book itself rather than the information that it was meant to convey; books as symbols of time, memory, and loss as opposed to methods of reference.
He then moves into more of a political realm with his series “Digging into Old Papers.” Through the use of acrylic underneath the oil image, Xie portrays the vulnerability of the young Chinese students protesting that he portrays. Xie discussed that he was “questioning the idea of revolution always as a form of progress.”
Xie continued to shape his political works within the series “Fragmentary Views,” in which bits and pieces of paper combine to make a “micro-history” as well as a commentary on media, mass consumption, availability of information, and the distribution of information to the masses. At this point in his life, he was able to combine his interest in books, the act of organizing information, politics, and history collectively into one series, which he entitled “The Theatre of Power” (2005-). In this, he expresses his interest in what he calls the “theatre of politics,” in which politicians always wear a mask and play specific characters within specific settings. He moves away from the realism of photography that he relied on so much before in his earlier works, and instead focuses on the texture of the paint and the tactile elements of the brushstrokes.
He also talked about his interest in the depiction of crowds, and how “history only records the great deeds of a few people.” This is reflected in his latest work, “October-December 2001,” and his current focus on a post-9/11 world. In his video piece, he records various headless and nameless figures riding the subway amidst the almost violent ambient noise and headlines announcing the violent acts of various dates.
While in answering his questions from faculty he didn’t seem to be 100% positive on why he made some of the choices that he did within his work (such as his use of large scale and how that relates to the viewers physical engagement with the piece), however his overall drive in a specific field of thought has taken his work in a specific and effective direction.
Guerrilla Girls, 4/17/09, UChicago
One of the many anonymous members of the Guerrilla Girls spoke at the University of Chicago concerning the lack of female involvement in both museums as well as current media. Known for their provocative methods of getting out their message including mixed media posters, billboard ads, and slogans (including the one found on their website: “Re-inventing the “f” word – feminism”), when in public the group always wear gorilla masks to conceal their identity. As the speaker noted, “It’s the work that we do, it doesn’t really matter who the people are.”
Established in New York City in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls first became known for their flashy posters that decorated the streets of the city. First focusing on statistics of museums in the area (usually specifically percentages of artists who were male and/or white), they eventually moved on to analyze problems of underrepresentation of women and other ethnicities within the film industry and gender stereotyping. Stylistically common in all of their work is a flashy commercialized front meant to draw the viewer in, so that they’ll pay attention to the statistics listed on their work. Considering the establishments that they target, I was quite surprised. For example, the National Gallery of Art has artists that are 98% male and 99.9% white. Although when one thinks about the older collections, considering social norms and constraints at the time, it would make sense that the best-preserved paintings would be those of white males.
The speaker started her talk discussing what the group was doing to move forward now that they were well known and considered to be “main stream” in some eyes. Other audience members expressed concern that they had “sold out,” as if the Guerrilla Girls were a small indie band that had signed onto a large record label and were being used in commercials. Despite their notoriety and their current popularity, isn’t it their purpose to get their word out to as many people as possible, and doesn’t this popularity help their message rather than hurt it?
Throughout the discussion, the speaker went through the evolution of their movement, ending on their interests in forwarding feminist ideals. The speaker noted “everyone wants to believe that Feminism is over, that we’ve somehow won,” and how they strive as a group to continue to bring feminist ideals to the public without the negative stigma that being a “feminist” usually has. An audience member aptly noted that the Guerrilla Girls only had female or transgender members, but no male members, and that a large part of the most recent wave of feminism was to include men as well. The speaker accepted this, but also said that this was just because it was the way things “had always been.” It seems strange that the Guerrilla Girls would push the boundaries in so many ways, yet not be able to push the boundaries within their own organization.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Sandra Bermudez at The Kasia Kay Gallery
Sandra Bermudez: “The Happy Pussy and Other Endings”
When one enters the Kasia Kay gallery greeted by the centerpiece of Sandra Bermudez’ work, a pink neon sign with the word “PUSSY” in all capital letters, one is almost not impressed. In our current culture prevalent with Bratz dolls and “graphic ” or “logo” t-shirts, slang terms for any and all kinds of genitalia and drugs have become wildly common in the English lexicon. However, Bermudez’ work brings forward a new interpretation to this slang by choosing only the words that she believes to be the most positive. “Conceived as a counter-balance to the negative driven lexicon for female genitalia… the artist selected positive, cheerful words and symbols creating 19 new sculptures.”[1] What’s interesting is that instead of questioning the use and symbolism of the slang in the first place, Bermudez chooses to stay within the form and language that these negative symbols were created in in the first place and put a positive spin on them. The sculptures are hung in various positions along a long white wall, the majority of them larger than a person’s head, some even larger than head and torso combined. While the sculptures in their use of language as well as colors (light pinks, fuchsia, silver and gold all coated with a high gloss) seem stereotypically girly and not that far out of the ordinary decor in a teenager girl’s bedroom, the sheer size, placement and arrangement of the sculptures is somewhat aggressive and confrontational, asking the viewer to question the use of these kinds of symbols and language. Bermudez doesn’t limit her sculpture to just words, using the imagery of peaches and a pink kitten to also question of such symbolism of the vagina in the first place.
The quality of the sculptures within Happy Pussy also question the production of the images used. The hyper-stylized text seems to be taken directly out of Microsoft WordArt, or possibly a graphic t-shirt available in the lower echelon of the mall[2] (This is also reflected in her “Charms” series, such as Wife, #1 Lover, and Beautiful Cunt). The images of text and especially the cat are pixilated and up close don’t have the same quality as they do from viewing at a distance. This along with the slightly jagged edge of the sculpture from where it was cut is a reminder of the mass production as well as the consumption of these images; how filtered and digested they already are when we finally get to them.
While Happy Pussy deals with the constant consumption, creation, and spreading of these symbols and slang, Jona’s Daughter is less of a positive attempt by the artist to spin the stereotypes and symbols behind women in today’s society. Instead of encouraging her audience to question stereotypes and symbols (and even come up with better ones), Jona’s Daughter encourages the viewer to be put in the place of the cut out woman, going even further than empathy and embodying that precise moment. The same tactic is used by designers of female-marketed “quick reads” who always conveniently leave out the face of whatever character they’re portraying, so that the reader can imagine themselves in that character’s place.[3] Instead of being able to identify the female victim in the image, distance yourself from the victim and empathise with her (and then quickly move on), one must personally embody the empty space within the image and question why one got there and why one made those choices in the first place, or if it even was a choice. The fact that his image is hung at eye level also aids in this process. Along with this personal embodiment of the female figure, one is also left to analyze the figures still pictured within the piece. The scopophilic male gaze captured within the image seems almost ridiculous to the point of photoshopping. However, in the gallery’s statement the image is implied to be real.[4] Both men and women stare, shoved into clustered rows at a hot sweaty day at the beach. The amount of media being used to capture this moment also seems insane: cameras on cell phones, actual camera equipment, and digital cameras can all be seen. This duel commentary on both the debasing role of the woman in this image and its constant duplication and spreading through various mediums also tie directly into Happy Pussy. Furthermore, the title itself lends an allegorical aspect to the piece, encouraging the viewer to take one step further from imagining himself or herself within the cutout of the image, and also include the judgment of this invisible father figure hinted at within the text.
Her final pieces in the gallery, Be and Mine aren’t as sexual as her other two pieces, but still bring into question the idea of rituals behind female identity and how engrained certain stereotypes are within our culture and society. A common request on candy hearts given out on Valentines Day, one often forgets the true significance of the words. As Hong-An Truong notes in her review, “the words [perform] both subject and object. One can never “be” except in one’s undoing in the face of another.”[5] These words seem to ring true for the entirety of the exhibit, as women in our society struggle to form their own identity outside of stereotypes and sexually submissive roles, there is always a struggle between one end or the other, with no place to settle into.
Note: When I went to see the Sandra Bermudez show on Saurday, May 2nd, not all of the works featured on the Kasia Kay Gallery’s website were hung.
[1] http://www.kasiakaygallery.com/
[2] http://www.shopjustice.com/detail/7460997, http://shop.pacsun.com/girls/tees/Starry-Night-Tee/index.pro
[4] “…a blown up internet photograph from a college porn website, where the topless female has been cut-out and all that remains are voyeurs photographing an empty silhouette of a female.”
[5] http://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/4226
Image courtesy of ArtNet: http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Artwork_Detail.asp?G=&gid=424444055&cid=159472&which=&aid=424630223&wid=425960616&source=exhibitions&rta=http://www.artnet.com
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