The best thing for me about living in Southern California is visiting the off-beat monuments and quirky establishments scattered around the region, the products of idiosyncratic individualists and the markers of frequently bizarre twists of history that seem only possible here, in a landscape marked by extremes and by great mediocrity. Some of these strange landmarks deservedly garner MacArthur grants; others of great significance struggle to stay standing and stay open. I’m going to talk about two places I have visited recently.

Objects have their own kind of histories and it is a real and rare pleasure to visit artworks in situ. In the case of these monuments, the object is actually merged with the place — and the place is continually in process (of expansion, or of decay), and the process is so idiosyncratic that it is merged with the person(a) creating it.

It is worth thinking once in a while about the factors inherent in objects — besides their “goodness” or quality — that contributed to their being appropriated or adopted as art at certain historical moments. Size and portability, permanence, similarities to established fine art categories like painting and sculpture, investment with spiritual or important cultural meaning… all these things carry value judgments in addition to determining whether an object can fit (literally and figuratively) in a museum or other fine-art setting. To become art (in a conventional sense) an object must be displayed, and to be displayed it must be in a suitable size and format for the art-viewing mechanisms we have, and preferably be salable. (Even installation art, which is praised for being un-monetizeable and un-migrateable, can still be billed by art instutitions as an exclusive experience.)

There may be many reasons why the two sites that I visited have not been embraced as art, despite their evident status as their creators’ masterworks.

Salvation Mountain

[Description: Left, a round, tall structure made out of hay bales, with multi-colored paint and Bible verse designations written on it. Right, a hillside, topped by a cross, covered in bright, glossy colors, shapes, and messages, including "God Is Love."]

Out in the remote, flat, very hot desert near the Salton Sea, Leonard Knight lives alone (but not wanting for visitors) in a converted truck parked at the base of his hand-sculpted, paint-straw-and-adobe Earthwork.

Nearby towns are composed of mobile homes in small fenced-in squares of dirt; there is no real economy that I can see. A woman with two teacup dogs is selling a self-published history of the area from her yard in Niland. It is ponderously, excessively hot.

[Description: 3 detail views of painted and sculpted surfaces of Salvation Mountain, with flowers, Biblical messages, and graphic blue stripes representing a waterfall down the slope of the hillside.]

It feels important to have a kind of purposeful narrative when you’re faced with such a massive and unending project. Knight has a message of love, an aptitude for living simply, and a serious kind of tenacity. A lifelong loner and army veteran who got religion at the age of 36, He has been working on Salvation Mountain for thirty years. Knight’s only creative experience previous to the mountain was painting some cars and the creation of a giant handsewn hot air balloon (aquired by the Folk Art Museum). The simplicity of his mission (and seemingly of the man himself) is a major part of the appeal, because the product is so remote and bizarre and outsized compared to the retold, simplified story of the man. The naive, lumpy and joyful qualities of the work are intensified by their monochrome, impoverished, desert surroundings.

Nit Wit Ridge

[Description: Left, the front facade of Nit Wit Ridge, with three levels and verandahs, each level made of different materials, including arches of stone, wood siding painted green, and corrugated plastic. Right, decoration inside the kitchen includes formal pink wallpaper, a print of peaches, and old advertisement posters, including one for 7-up.]

Begun in 1928, construction on Art Beal’s residence continued until he was removed from it into a nursing home. As the garbage collector for Cambria, CA and as the owner of a small sloping lot, Beal had access to a range of scavenged building materials, conventional and un-, that he put to use on a multi-story residence filled with beauty (walls and arches lined with dozens of abalone shells from the local canning operation) and sad humor (his and hers facing toilets, though Beal lived alone, left by his wife). The house’s proximity to Hearst Castle is the source of puns and comparisons throughout the guided tour. The house is considered an eyesore by many in the area.

[Description: Left, a multi-colored tile and abalone shell backsplash over the outdoor stovetop. Right, uneven concrete steps leading up to the entrance of the house are faced with abalone shells.]
 

The “why” of creative work has been a topic of ongoing discussion in my household for a while now: whom are we trying to answer when we talk about why we make? How “far down” do we have to go with that question: why make this line blue, or why make anything at all? A lot of these processes are a little bit mysterious, which I think is good. Another thing I appreciate about these projects — which really transcend the categories of “folk art” and “site-specific” or any of that — is that the “why” of them is acknowledged in an honest, unaffected way.

I’m not really sure.
I have this message I think is important.
I wanted to make something big so I did.
 

This is not really the focus of my response to these sites, but since I’ve mentioned a number of projects by men, let’s look at visionary art practice through the lens of gender for a second. Most materials I have found on women and folk art center on women’s traditional domestic production: needlework, quilting, and among upper-class women, appropriate lady accomplishments like watercolor painting. It’s less art than it is “women’s work.” Don’t get me wrong, the products of all this labor are demonstrably awesome. And in terms of collecting and establishing the legacies of women artists, folk art-focused outfits have a notable advantage over high-art establishments — the normal issues of access (to education, art materials, art community, etc) and institutional biases don’t apply in the same ways.

[Description: A virtuoso crazy quilt, with mostly red, blue, neutral, and black patches, some with symbols, flowers, flags, and even little portraits in them, and a central larger applique with a chicken (?). It's roughly square and has a fan pattern made of thin radiating strips in each corner.]

Social or economic conditions that contribute to folk artists’ outsider status are too often glossed over or romanticized (or both at once).  Choices of hobbies and pastimes are results of social strictures and economic forces, and this is one of the ways that objects are carriers of our cultural histories. For women historically, artistic expression (and most activities) followed conventions of propriety and developed skills needed for wife- and motherhood; in other words, it was (unpaid) work done for the family unit. Nevertheless, although women’s work was devalued and the subjects and media of that work rather severly limited, well-executed pieces, whether functional or decorative, added prestige to a household and demonstrate that women used these art forms as a means of creative expression throughout their lives.

Relatedly, it’s less common for women to be solitary, unenmeshed, un-responsible-to-others like these masculine counterparts I’ve mentioned who have no demand for utility for their handiwork. Quilts and things are fundamentally different from large-scale, sited, functionless works like Salvation Mountain (which are perhaps fundamentally different from the large-scale, sited, functionless artworks I showed at the top).

On the other hand, creativity is creativity, folks!
 

(Perhaps the people who are lucky enough to collect or curate art assume that men and women in all times have had as much control over their lives and free time as they do. Sort of conversely, perhaps one reason we so much admire those artists who struck out on their own is that we feel that we don’t have that ability to direct our own lives.)

Further reading:

Salvation Mountain website
New York’s Folk Art Museum exhibition of women artists
Watts Towers website
Raw Vision Magazine (note: I think “outsider art,” which is used prominently here, is kind of an insidious term and not preferred)
Salton Sea and desert books: Greetings from the Salton Sea, photographs by Kim Stringfellow; Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low Down California, by William DeBuys and Joan Myers; Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

What I want to suggest is that there is no such thing as a natural signifier, that the signifier is always constructed… Yinka Shonibare, Bomb Magazine, Fall 2005

I recently saw a Yinka Shonibare piece, The Age of Enlightenment – Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Bretruil (2008), at 21C Museum in Louisville. Like his other well-known works, it’s a life-size fiberglass mannequin, outfitted in elaborate 17th-Century costume, but rather than brocade and velvet, the costume is made of the cacophonous colors of Dutch wax printed cotton. The technique of wax batik cloth dying originates in Indonesia; Dutch colonizers brought it to Europe, where it was scaled up to industrial production in order to be exported to the African colonies. Today wax prints, many still manufactured in Europe, are synonymous with African dress. A colonial invention, Dutch wax fabric is nevertheless a sign of “authentic” African identity, and Shonibare’s use of it revisits colonial history and points out that the identity and authenticity are not fixed but “fabricated” (heh). Shonibare has discussed these figures in terms of carnival and masquerade traditions, in which the poor can pretend to be rich and the rich poor for a day or two.

Here are some terrible photos I took of the artwork with my phone (it’s placed in front of two Shonibare photographs that reconstruct/revise Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters):

So, here is the picture on which the figure is based, by Maurice Quentin de la Tour:

You can see the bows and sleeves and weird necklace-ruff thing are modeled closely after the painting (incidentally, this lady is wearing a similar neck-thing in nearly every image made of her!). The things set out on her desk (presumably her scientific treatises) are also reproduced faithfully, along with the dividers in her hand. (The arm which in the painting is under her chin rests on the table, and is made of wood, on the mannequin.)
I normally wouldn’t have bothered to look up the antecedent artwork for Shonibare’s piece; it seemed like a fairly standard, if sciencey, aristocrat portrait, and the sciencey, mappy aspects were perfect accessories to the overall narrative of colonialism, mapping, possession, and trade that the artist’s work embodies and scrambles. And in fact, I did not look it up: it came to me! In a book that I happened to be reading on the plane ride back from Kentucky, that very same day! (Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick, 4th edition)

What I began to read about made me see Shonibare’s work generally, and this figure particularly, a bit differently — thinking about this particular woman (a controversial and brillant thinker), sewing and dressmaking as women’s work and socially acceptable amateur “accomplishments,” and relationships between Enlightenment-era conceptions of class, gender, and family and the colonial project as a whole…

I actually stumbled upon a different portrait of this lady (below), which interestingly was painted by a lady artist, Marianne Loir. The Marquise Du Châtelet (1706-1749), the prodigy and salonière depicted, was a physicist, mathematician, and public intellectual who participated actively in debates on Newton, Descartes, and Liebniz, and was also the lover and intellectual partner of Voltaire. Despite her reknown while she lived, she and her contributions were relegated to the shadows of Enlightenment thought and history after her death. She was extraordinarily privileged, both in terms of the wealth she was born into, and in having an eccentric father who encouraged her in education. (She was also a serious card shark and sometimes cross-dressed in order to be admitted to men-only clubs…!) Here is a choice quote about education for women, in which de Châtelet foreshadows Linda Nochlin’s famous question of 1971:

Why is it that for so many centuries not a single good tragedy, fine poem, valued story, beautiful painting, or good book on physics has been produced by the hand of a woman? Why do these creatures – whose understanding appears to be similar in every way to that of men – seem to be held back by an insurmountable force? Let someone give me a reason for it, if they can. I leave it to the naturalists to find a physical reason for it, but until they have found one, women have a right to speak out for their education.

Here is the portrait in my book, by Marie (Marianne) Loir (painted 1745-49), evidence of a tradition in which women artists often depicted women. Excluded from the Academy in Paris, Loir was a member of the Academy of Marseilles. Though the composition of this portrait is straightforward, the iconography and mannerisms of the painting reflect the style of the official aristocratic art of the period. During the Enlightenment, this style, tied to the excessive decadence of the mistrusted aristocracy, was reformulated as a feminine counterpart to a new masculine ideal of virtue, and likewise spheres of female activity were contested in light of the “natural” separation and opposition of masculine and feminine as posited by Rousseau, who was virulently opposed to salonières like du Chaletet. In an age of changing class structure, Rousseau couched his unease with women’s usurping of the “natural” authority and citizenship of men in terms of the female body and the home, remarking that when the mistress of the house goes wandering about in public, “her home is like a lifeless body which is soon corrupted.” As this metaphor illustrates, the body, and especially the female body, is a primary site of class conflict played out in its dress, customs, and manners. One’s appearance can convey and reinforce a moral code.

Among Rousseau’s other thoughts on what’s “natural” and not, his particular projection of simplicity and naievete to onto colonized peoples (though he was not the originator of the trope of the “noble savage”) is important. Rousseau rejected the use of civilization or any other ideal as rationale for colonization, and pointed out that colonists failed to convert the colonized to their way of life anyway. However, while he suggested that “savage” people were better off as they were than “civilized,” he still believed them to be more or less sub-human, lacking reason and awareness of their agency. It’s like anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism.

These proscriptions on gender and projections on culture are interrelated and fit into much vaster and long-running oppositions of feminine/masculine, nature/culture, and emotion/reason-intellect. Increasingly during the Enlightenment and afterwards, colonized peoples were essentialized, feminized, and used as a foil to the progress and civilization of Europe.

Of Shonibare’s other figures that represent specific Enlightenment figures, like Adam Smith, Time critic Richard Lacayo has said,

“When I see them dressed in those outfits it says to me that reason, which was the faith those men lived by, wasn’t enough by itself to understand the complexities of the world that Western civilization, which liked to think of reason as its foundation, was creating. It had a dark side that reason didn’t want to know about.”

(Above: Three Graces, 2001)
The headless Enlightenment figures with their frilly symbolic attributes are parodies, not just of individuals but of a whole class and long history. In reading about du Chatelet (and the contested space women occupied in that period) I realized forcefully how constructed and even frail the ideals of the era were, not inevitable, not “natural,” not truth, but thought up by somebody. (The elaborate construction and spectacular, fastidious appearance of Shonibare’s garments support this I think.) Then, as now, people were attempting not only to map, understand, and control the whole world –- they were also trying to get a grip on their families, their households, and themselves.

I think it’s no coincidence either that Shonibare’s work about colonialism and its lecagies is visually expressed through the domestic/feminine labors of clothing and appearance. Even things that are supposed to be emblematic of certain ideals — authenticity, femininity, reason, civilization — are heterogeneous and muddled, and can never quite fulfill the fantasies of those Utopian models.

Further reading:
du Chatelet in Cabinet
Yinka Shonibare in Bomb Magazine

Mary Kelly, Flashing Nipple Remix

Art 21 Blog: Must Art Be Ethical?

Edward Winkleman: You can’t take it with you, so it’s about what you leave.

Rebecca Solnit: When the Media is the Disaster (this is a bit older, but I heard her speak at a panel recently at the LA Times Festival of Books, where she discussed some of the same points of imagery, media, semantics, and ethics.)

Amanda Hess: But if you’re wearing a veil, how will I know you’re smiling, baby?

Michael Kimmelman: Who Draws the Borders of Culture?

In the interest of not writing a huge long book report, I will try to stick to just the main thesis. But Drucker also talks about a lot, A LOT of artists, which is great. She summarizes Benjamin and Adorno, opticality and visuality, and the politics of visual pleasure and whether it’s allowed, in ways that were really accessible and useful to me. (She also writes some things about “slacker aesthetics” that I found very gratifying, but that still convinced me it’s a legit movement, as well as some very gratifying things about Lisa Yuskavage, who should maybe be the subject of a whole other post).

The book is kind of inflammatory. Sweet Dreams‘ basic premise is that while artists and theorists generally pretend, at least in their intellectual formulations, to be separated from and indifferent to commercial mass culture – even in exercises of appropriation and irony – most contemporary artists actually are working in a way that recognizes their relations to power and culture, relations that are complicated and contradictory. Fine art is, in Drucker’s view, complicit with mass culture and free market economies both in its content (theories and subject matter) and in its very existence, the way it is able to function as objects of culture that generate symbolic value. When we experience a piece of artwork, we don’t respond to the thing only in itself, in a vacuum, as if it simply offered up unequivocal meaning that we have only to receive (one more reason for writing off Modernism). Rather, art images are part of the vast context of other images, fine art to vernacular, past to present; aesthetic values, production values, and high consumability communicate in the languages of our shared cultural reference library.

Symbolic discourses in fine art are not just about form and practice, but are also part of broader cultural discourses, like identity, history, and place. The values sustained in specialized art practices – individual thought and autonomy, fetishized labor – are the same values that undergird the consumption-based, display-driven free-market mass culture. In many cases, fine art is only distinguishable from mass culture by the conditions of its consumption (location in a gallery, cost, presentation, etc.), the cues and codes that establish it as having some symbolic value.

A Duchamp "Boite-en-valise," a travel-size compendium of his most famous works

Drucker writes that the models of thought that often succeed in the art world, those which are self-characterized as radical, are in fact fairly old hat and are used to minimize or hide careerism of artists (said more neutrally, the desire to make money from what you do). Rather than being a neutral third party who can comment on our culture from outside it, as this negatively-positioned language would suggest, the art world is “embedded in the very value systems that the avant garde was traditionally supposed to oppose.” (20) (It’s important to say “supposed to,” since even the engineers of this oppositional avant-garde sensibility were a bit compromised, e.g. Duchamp supposedly tearing down aura and auratic original works while at the same time conscientiously building the Duchamp brand.) Ergo, “My work is a critique of…” and the overuse of “transgressive” and “subversive,” etc. And the inability or unwillingness among art world types to acknowledge this situation and to address it honestly and critically represents, according to Drucker, a failure of imagination and widespread cowardice.

VB60, a 2007 Vanessa Beecroft performance in Seoul

Drucker writes that the avant-garde oppositionality also lets us maintain a disdainful distance between mercenary work-for-hire and the noble, unpaid labor of the genius, and to stake a corresponding moral high ground. I sometimes find it hard to explain exactly why what I term “controversy for the sake of controversy, not ideas” bothers me, but when I see works in museums and collections that, in supposedly risky “juxtapositions,” highlight the oppositionalities of high/low culture, PC/non-PC statements, skilled/deskilled labor, etc. I remember that these false binaries are maintained because to do so benefits some party. The work of Vanessa Beecroft is an example of this kind of seeking controversy that is entirely non-controversial and sells well because it actually shows us what we’re used to seeing in popular culture (i.e. women as bodies as objects for consumption). She exploits in order to talk about exploitation. I have read a number of attempts to formulate a way for her art to somehow be negatively positioned towards fashion, sexism, and spectacle, to be “co-opting” these things so as to criticize them. Better to stop pretending and simply acknowledge that the work is compromised by its alliance with these aspects of consumerism, and go from there.

Projects of institutional critique of any sort are necessarily compromised, because with art, they nearly always take place in the institutions in question. Drucker writes that the art world is peopled with artists who “simultaneously desire to dismantle and to be taken up by these [art] institutions.” (8) Andrea Fraser is but the most obvious example. While this is sort of scary, artists are in a unique position here: by participating in the corrupt world, they then show us how corrupt it is. If it’s honestly acknowledged, the impurity of fine art makes it wonderful; it’s both a commodity and an alternative space of expression, and somehow aesthetic, symbolic expression still works in that situation. So that’s Sweet Dreams in a (very limited, very brief) nutshell.

…..

Aside, Sort of: I think we should all stop using the word “juxtaposition.” (It’s annoying, anyway). Instead, the reality is that connectivity, contingency, and relationships make up our perceptions and influence our ideas. The smashing together of the high and the low, or the pure and the capitalistic, or the creator and the consumer, or the expert with the untutored – these things are not clashing, mutually exclusive conditions. They are merely points along the cultural continuum. The next step, I think, is to own up to and address fine art’s being a luxury item, an elite, exclusive, limited, unshared, gated, (indulgent?) phenomenon. And if it is really that, is it a problem? Intuitively I feel that it is; on the other hand, money is one of the ways that we show that we value things; but, like any bubble, the art bubble was founded on validation through selling only, rather than through the many other things that are good about art; still, I don’t think commerce itself is inherently bad for art, because while there are certain values like creativity that may be beyond price, I don’t know that anything we actually make is ever not commercialized, i.e. able to be exchanged for something. It’s just that in the present case, commerce serves to keep art exclusive and secluded among a small elite group, rather than to move art around and foster relationships through exchange.

Indexed by Jessica Hagy

…..

The above book review here serves as a long introduction to some short and incomplete thoughts on #class, an art-think-tank-conference event occuring as we speak at Winkleman Gallery, and its co-creator, the artist William Powhida. In his text-heavy, painstaking drawings Powhida alternately uses the voice of an ambitious, naive art world innocent and a jaded, cynical insider. At left is his editorial cartoon/magazine cover depicting the major players, bystanders, and condoners of the scandalous conflict-of-interest goings-on at the New Museum last fall. While it vehemently criticises a major, once-promising alternative museum in the midst of an ethics crisis, the drawing reads a bit like a friendly roast. (Here it is larger.)

William Powhida, "How the New Museum Committed Suicide," cover for November 2009 issue of the Brooklyn Rail

I found it helpful in illuminating those connections and characters which are out of reach to the non-rich and art powerful, but somehow I have some doubts that anyone pictured in it now plans to amend their ways. On the other hand, Jerry Saltz said that this cartoon alone changed his mind.

Moreover, I don’t think the (in)effectiveness of his campaign of sorts in terms of changing the New Museum situation is really a factor for judging the work. (After all, we haven’t achieved world peace yet but they’re still giving out the Nobel for good effort.) What is most interesting about Powhida’s work is the way the knowing-cynical-insider and outsider-idealist-watchdog roles are balanced and mixed. His credibility as a critic of art world players and practices is founded on his status as a (relative) outsider, yet his subject matter and information are only available to him as a (relative) insider in the art club. Powhida is also an occasional critic and keeps a blog.

And he’s a level-headed participant-critic. Of #class occuring at the same time as major art fairs in New York, he writes:

I’m sure it was part of the reason that Ed [Winkleman] offered Jen and I this slot during Armory to address and hopefully problematize the fair mentality.  It really is a perfect time for the show.  Ed will be participating in two fairs, PULSE and another new ‘alternative to the alternative’ fair.  This is a spectacular set of conditions for #class to exploit and be exploited by.  Ed hopes to potentially take part of our show and enter it in to the real market, while Jen and I hope to invade the polished, hushed art fair atmosphere in return.  What I love about this project is, even as I’m writing this, I will also potentially be participating in two fairs… If anyone still believes for a second that I am not a ‘pig’ as Jen Dalton describes those of us who participate in the market (the other choice being ‘loser’ and the attendant poverty and integrity that comes with it) then you should really go back and take a look at my art.  I have been trying to sell out for years, and have found that it takes an incredible amount of work to make any headway at all.

In the proposals for #class, Powhida and Dalton acknowledge the mushy, mixed-up relations between theory, making, and commerce. These three factors, while treated separately as Think Space, Work Space, and Market Space nevertheless overlap in terms of the physical space dedicated to them and in the activities and lectures set for the gallery. The setup of the space may reflect the everyday reality for most artists, or else an aspirational ratio for art activities; the bulk of the space and time is devoted to panels and group discussions in Think Space, followed by Dalton and Powhida responding in Work Space, and the works they make being offered for sale in the deliberately marginalized Market Space.

Our transparent complicity in the market and the proximity of the think/market spaces to the work space will help steer the discussion back to the emotional conflict between ideals and reality.

There are tons of panel discussion topics and activities scheduled for #class, including at least one that I’d be really interested in: “Background, Identity and the Straight White Male Discussion.” I find it a little painful sometimes to be reminded of how art is just a pile of luxury objects whose ownership and understanding is completely restricted to high-income-earning people. (Other times I am more cynical, or complacent? and it’s not as bad.) In the inverted gallery space – an in-progress working and talking area, rather than a space for the display of finished, consumable objects – maybe the #class participants will be able to regrasp some of the intangible, non-monetary goodnesses of art.

Excerpt from Sweet Dreams

www.vanessabeecroft.com

www.williampowhida.com

williampowhida.blogspot.com

hashtagclass.blogspot.com

www.winkleman.com

edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com

The announcement and call for entries express a desire to expand the exhibitions’ audience. (I am happy to report that the curators are both women, Tunisian and Italian, respectively, and about a third of the artists are women.) But at least one Malian artist thinks that the presence of the art event alone is not enough to stimulate the Malian climate for photography. In my experience, Malians participation is low not merely because of disinterest — although that is significant in a region largely lacking a cultural framework in which making pictures makes sense — but because Malians unassociated with foreign/Mali government sponsors are deliberately excluded from events, even by Malian hosts.  This happened to friends right in front of me in 2007. It was a strong signal about who this art is for.

Installation view of S. Dicko's "World Mosaic"

Like many cultural initiatives in Mali, this one’s sponsorship is part Malian government, part European government(s), part NGO, and part corporate (Puma).  In some ways, exhibitions like this are of a piece with the  historic and ongoing discovery (and/or pillage) narrative, in which curators (explorers) journey to Bamako to find new artists (natives) to take back and show off. Comment threads on articles announcing the biennial are populated by European curators, photo editors, non-profit directors, and so on looking to “meet interesting photographers” during their trip to Bamako. I’ve written many words about patronage in other settings; suffice to say the undertones are evidently problematic.

But shouldn’t it be celebrated that people and institutions are interested in meeting those interesting African photographers? Given the very, very limited exhibition, information-sharing, and market structures for artists of all stripes in many African cities, outside involvement is necessary and positive.

Then again, shouldn’t some fraction of the money and energy going into this international event for the viewing pleasure of an international audience be committed to inculcating a local audience for this art bizness?! I’m not saying this biennial shouldn’t exist just because it isn’t perfectly egalitarian and saving the whole world right now. I am very much in favor of any event that promotes African artists in an international conversation. I’m just saying that the contrast between its crowd and its setting should be more straightforwardly addressed by everyone involved and that the situation could open up good discussion and lead to some productive changes. (And not about modernizing anything or anyone so that they can appreciate art. How about making some art that people, as they are, like?)

Baudouin Mouanda, "Série S.A.P.E., Congo-Brazzaville"

The theme of this year’s event is a culturally and politically freighted one. Notably, but not unusually for African artists, many of the participants live abroad, or between two countries. ”Borders” is also a timely theme; many cultural events of the past two years have focused on related subjects like historic migration and contemporary (often illegal) immigration, which run up against the arbitrariness of national geographies, and the vast economic disparities between even neighboring regions. It seemed that photography was almost the natural medium for considering these intertwined issues; because for so many people they have personal, current, and widespread ramifications, it made sense to straightforwardly document their effects. (I remember one really wonderful show in particular, of photographs following a young Malian man legally laboring in France along with the changes occurring in his home village as a result of his income: wells, tools, a large concrete house and TV for his family. No paintings I saw approached the level of complexity of this photo story.)

I’m looking forward to reading more reviews of the exhibitions after the close of the show December 7. Antawan Byrd, a Fulbright fellow serving as a curator in Lagos, has a write-up on Art Info in which finds that the exhibitions lean too heavily on documentary  photography, which “leaves the impression that contemporary African photography is overtly literal, journalistic, and observation-based” and may reflect a lack of deeper engagement on the curators’ part with the many-faceted subject.

Nandipha Mntambo, "Série Ukungenisa, Praça de Touros I

One thread of this (legitimate) criticism circles back to the question of Malian participation in the event, and in art dialogues in general. The biennial owes its existence (or its location in Bamako, anyway) to the global art hits Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé, both studio portraitists. Now, I think those photographs are great, as fascinating sociological documents and as art, but they were hardly the product of a thriving art photography scene. The gulf between the perception of Malick Sidibé’s studio photographs in Bamako and their enthusiastic reception abroad, in their oversize, high-contrast fine art versions, is huge.

Generalization: Maybe it is a strength of African photography, in an African context, that it is “literal, journalistic, and observation-based.” Maybe African photographers are aware that (a) here they are able to tell their own stories to the world, which is certainly not the norm; and (b) creating work that other Africans can identify with has its own value.

See also:
Blog associated with a collaborative project, Invisible Borders, created for the Biennale
A Picture of Africa? ArtInfo (whence I pulled all these images)
Bamako Biennale in 2006 ArtForum
The power of culture
Creative Africa Network

I read the recent piece in the NYT about how no one stops and actually looks at things in museums. Pausing instead just long enough to snap a photo (increasingly with unnecessarily professional-grade cameras), the crowds breeze through the hallowed halls. Edward Winkleman touched on it, encouraging a museum-sketching flashmob sort of event. Some of the original piece struck me as a little “kids these days” in tone, but the gist of it was right on, and the fact that Michael Kimmelman, the author, began a project of sketching monuments and such struck a chord (I am not a good sketcher). He ends the piece with a charming anecdote of girls in the Louvre enjoying a lingering, non-label-reading, playful engagement with the artworks.

Also last week, I read a really lovely quotation of Diderot in an essay by Arthur Danto on Chardin: “One stops in front of a Chardin as if by instinct, just as a traveller exhausted by his trip tends to sit down, almost without knowing it, in a place that is green, quiet, well-watered, shady, and cool.” * One can imagine just how it would feel, after wandering through halls of large  melodramatic history paintings in a Salon, to arrive at a picture that, almost magically, returns you to something that you know to be important, something both familiar and transformed, immediate, and treasured.

from wikimedia. Un Canard col-vert attaché à la muraille, et une bigarade. ca. 1730

So I began to think about why people go to museums and how we behave in them, and I reflected a little on some experiences I’ve had doing some slow looking and engaging with artworks. The question of why go to museums, and its over-question, “Why do we even have them,” is a (many) book-length problem, involving ideas of curiosities, conquest, world exploration, Eurocentrism, and many different philosophies about humankind’s achievements. Museums house our national and “world cultural” treasures (those that can be removed to museums, anyway), and receive support from governments and many prestigious institutions and people in order to preserve and sometimes display these things. Limiting the question to art museums, today’s visitors, and the actual visiting, what’s the point? To get cultured? To kill time? To show evidence of our taste, class, and intelligence? To actually learn? to appreciate the past, or other places/peoples, or the present?

And to the issue of the photos. I’ve seen similar behavior many times at sites of great natural beauty (or any site. This train of thought coincided with a visit to the Palace of Fine Arts in SF, where lots of tour buses went by, and lots of people took pictures without even getting off the bus). People walk to a ledge or whatever, snap a photo, and keep walking, having looked at the scenery on the three-inch LCD longer than just with their own eyes. What is the purpose of this picture –  it can’t be a memento the great experience you had at that outlook over the Grand Canyon, because you hardly had an experience. In a way the action of photo-taking has a generous impulse, the idea that you could share this experience (or a facsimile) with someone else. And photo-takers must take that to heart, sort of; it’s rare for flickr, for example, to have fewer than 5,000 uploads per minute. Taking a picture is also way more convenient than, say, sketching the sculpture at hand, or composing a few lines about it. A photograph is also a way of adding something to one’s collection, as Susan Sontag wrote. I think this is especially true of self-in-front-of-something pictures (not that I don’t take those myself), that it’s an action of staking a claim by saying “I was there.” Thinking back to the Grand Canyon, though, you were there doing –  what, exactly?

from flickr user Beppie K

Returning to imaginary Diderot sighing before imaginary Chardins: some artworks really do reward you for looking long and closely. You change and they change, yielding up their better treasures. Some, though, despite their evident virtuosity and probable historical significance, just don’t get that deep. For many, the experience of obligatory tourist museum visits must be like Diderot’s wandering through the halls filled with those dry, gilt-framed, nonsensical academic canvases, but without any Chardins to rest upon: nothing grabs them, even if they try they don’t recognize themselves in what they see; nothing is relevant. One may attempt, by reading a label, to get something more out of what is one the wall – and I believe labels are really valuable – but the artwork itself expresses thoughts, information, narratives, messages, as well. And these are right before you.

Some artworks pull you in towards their surfaces with detail. Like the intensely frotted surface of a Soutine still life, a surface that you feel with your eyes. Or a venerable old masterpiece like the Isenheim altarpiece, which I’ve been lucky to see, a work that has both an immense totality and a whole bunch of devastating, beautiful, and minute details. These hold you with a great deal of visual stimulation, and you respond emotionally, thinking maybe of mortality, or divinity, or whatever. Other works get you very differently, in their bigness, wholeness, and mysteriousness. I’m thinking here of Rothko canvases (many have written about their experiences viewing these, including James Elkins in a sweet book called Pictures and Tears) and such. They affect you and you’re almost not sure how. I’ve seen a couple of Jenny Saville paintings in person, and as I looked I kept walking right up to the canvas, and then away to see the whole, and then back to grasp some particular passage, and so on, for half an hour, hardly noticing that I was moving. And then I went home and looked at them in books, which was not the same at all.

Cornelia Parker's Anti-Mass 2005. from flickr user marshall astor

Recently I had a wonderfully intense few moments of slow looking with a piece in SF’s deYoung Museum. Anti-Mass, by UK conceptual artist Cornelia Parker, is made from bits of charred wood from a Southern church destroyed by arson. I was a little familiar with the artist’s work from back when I subscribed to art magazines, and it wasn’t even the first time I’d seen this piece in particular. It and some of other well-known works are made of the blown-apart bits of some structure, suspended in the air in the dimensions of a cube, as if the explosion were somehow paused and made orderly. This time I was drawn to it, both because it is so evocative – of violence, of the fear of terrorism, of death, of rebirth from death – and because the form itself, the unsolid cube of irregular, beautifully black bits of wood, is so beautiful and mysterious. As with the Saville paintings, I wanted to get close and then far, first touch it with my eyes and then see its whole (its location in the gallery sucks for this, sadly). It didn’t last long, but it was sort of sublime.

I didn’t take a picture; I remember it, though, really well. I do think that long looking is wonderful, but I’m not inclined to think that speed-appreciation by the masses is a sign of crisis. I speed-appreciate a lot of things, and dedicate myself to a few, the ones that matter most to me. I don’t think the blame belongs on the masses of philistines tromping through the Louvre; perhaps they are getting out of it what they wanted, really, and they go on to devote their attention to things that matter more to them. Perhaps the things that will really move them have not been made yet, or at least put into museums.

* Arthur C. Danto, “Chardin,” in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life. Columbia University Press (2005), 39.

Scene from The Magic Flute with design and projection by Kentridge. Image from nytimes.com

I’ve had my second visit to William Kentridge’s somewhat giant retrospective “Five Themes” at SFMOMA. Both grandiose and unassuming, comic and sublime, it’s all opera and processions and grand theater that always come back to drawing, slow and messy charcoal drawing. I’ll cover two of the five themes here.

Stills from the studio films. Image from artnet.com

I loved the way he went about visualizing himself in the studio (a series of short films dedicated to early filmmaker George Méliès), in the act of creation, with a mixture of gravitas, nostalgia, and silliness, using the visual jokes of early animation and silent film. The tape runs in reverse, and the artist plucks pages out of the air, catches books floating up from the ground, even repairs (and becomes) a torn charcoal self-portrait. In another, a coffee cup “jumps” out of the artist’s reach as he tries to pour into it. The coffee pot becomes a spaceship, landing the artist on a hostile planet. He asks us to play along with his grainy, gently slapstick humor, these unsophisticated, humble attempts to represent the creative process. It’s as if he says, “Look, I really don’t know how else to do this, so I’m just going to try, ok?” This is how we are: ambitious, imaginative, but always fumbling. 

After my first visit, when I tried to describe to a friend the mini-puppet-theater-animation pieces (Black Box; Preparing the Flute) that grew from Kentridge’s involvement in a restaging of The Magic Flute, he was confused by my calling them “operas.” I struggled to find another, better word, because that’s what they’re based on, and that’s what they really are: highly keyed and mannered dramas told with music and stagecraft. The pieces are elaborate miniature stages, with wings, lights, and double projections. Characters, built from discarded tools and studio detritus, move on tracks in motorized choreography. We see the brutal colonization of Namibia, a rhinocerous, a lamp, birds, the cosmos, the Enlightenment, drawings and historical images folded into the condensed little stage. It’s big. 

It’s so rare that sincere concern for others, and clear moral urgency, and personal history, and self-deprecating comedy come together. He is political, but obliquely so. He’s a philosopher, but an unashamedly physical one; he’s a moralist, but a playful one.

The work is deliberately crude and simple, but it insists on the sensation of touch, and of effort—of touching again and again with charcoal and eraser. It’s unusal in that it has no bling, no twist, no tagline. It’s sort of just human: moral, subtle, dark, hopeful, and compelling, and always being redrawn. It is so refreshingly earnest it makes one ache. And feel very happy. And sense that despite the smallness and awkwardness of things we might do, we have some good reasons for doing them. 

In other words I love and admire WK (and I didn’t even talk about the prints! and the animations! and The Nose!). So here are some links to reviews of the show: from the newspaper of record by Jori Finkel, from KQED by Kristen Farr, and from the SF Chronicle by Kenneth Baker; and a great profile in New York Magazine.

As much as Sontag exhausted me, I realized again in viewing these beautifully framed pieces how much her books changed the way I experience photographs (and thus, the world?), not to mention influenced many of the things I think about, in general and related to my artwork, about suffering, ethics, news, and responsibility. Mainly I thought about this fuzziness that arises in a few areas when we see photographs in museums, and Susan and all her judgmental temper and élan was fresh on my mind.

from sfmoma.org

The featured photographers, Yto Barrada (b. 1971), Guy Tillim (b. 1962), Judith Joy Ross (b. 1946), and Leo Rubinfien (b. 1954), are “aligned” (according to the museum’s website) “for their shared interest in making pictures about the current condition of our world.” Okay, I think we can agree that all photographs are of current conditions; what the writer seems to be getting at is a kind of political bent in the works. In two out of four cases, this is a stretch. The website blurb, and the blurbs in the exhibition galleries, are trumping up the critical, political content of the works. (They also commit an easily avoidable sin, which is to refer to the “changing Africa“ that the South African Tillim is exposing—when in fact the photographs were taken in two countries, the DR Congo and Malawi.)

 

Guy Tillim. Rayina Henock and Masiye Henock. Petros Village, Malawi, 2006. from michaelstevens.com. (c) Guy Tillim.

Briefly, working backwards through the exhibition rooms, I found the Rubinfien pictures to be straight-up bad, grainy, frequently out-of-focus. Ross’s works, low-contrast, low depth of field, old-fashioned contact prints were beautiful, and while using antique cameras seems kind of gimmicky, it enhanced these photos by connecting them, in my mind at least, with portraits of political figures past, like Lincoln, whose images we see over and over. Tillim is an interesting inclusion because he is a photojournalist who has worked for major agencies and had major arty exhibitions (there are probably more of this species than I realize), and the work, 2 series, seemed to be a mixture of images I could see on a front page and those I’d imagine in a nice big book. I’m looking forward to learning more about him. I liked Barrada’s photos pretty well, and I think the blurbs did them and her a disservice by insisting that they depict a local culture being “disrupted” by tourists who are never pictured. Although there is undeniable political tension in the Strait Project, of which these photos are a part, I don’t think the politics are the defensive salvage ones the blurb hints at.

As I walked through the galleries, I found myself thinking a lot about permission and ethics related to authenticity related to what I’d call staginess, or the quality of being set up for the camera. Rubinfien’s photos clearly demonstrate disregard for permission to be photographed, and I was much more perturbed by that than by their supposed depiction of a new kind of fear we all live with (see how I’m interested in them as photos, not as reality. Thanks, Susan!). The photos are random “street shots” taken in cities around the world that have been targets of terrorist attacks in recent years. Some reviewers have called these photographs “portraits”; I think that is a gross overstatement, implying a level of consent and collaboration that Rubinfien is NOT engaged in. Only two of the photographs feature a subject looking at the camera, and many of the others are blurry or out-of-focus, with the signs of far zooming-in (things like nearer people’s heads and shoulders, some blocking most of the in-focus subject. I get that this is part of the aesthetic, but when that happens to one of my snapshots, I consider it a dud). Some of them are kind of creepy.

Leo Rubinfien, "At the Empire State Building, New York, from the series Wounded Cities. from sfmoma.org (c) Leo Rubinfien.

None of the titles give a name; rather, they are titled after the place where they were taken, as if these individuals and their particular concerns are subsumed by their location and its past. I don’t necessarily think this is native to photography as a medium, but this is what Sontag is talking about when she decries the importance wantonly bestowed on anything photographed and framed. Which is not to say that the anonymous people in these pictures aren’t important, but rather that mediocre snapshots are not made more worthwhile by being made large and glossy.

In the adjacent gallery were Ross’s dim, golden prints of Iraq war protesters in rural Pennsylvania, Ross’s home region. In great contrast to Rubinfien’s works, these prints are small (about 7 x 9″), posed, in a consistent format, and give most of the image to untrendy middle gray values. Their smallness and tone are some of their strengths; they ask to be looked at closely and long. They are unironic, emotional, tender, and thus really unusual these days. Some of the images really are dramatic and moving, and they have a realness in the way they come up slowly that blazing, fleeting snapshots like Rubinfien’s can’t begin to give. One wonders about these people in the Rust Belt, people whom we think of as the benighted yellow-ribbon-magneting supporters of the war, who are holding placards, and still holding them in 2006, when the photos were taken. Some of them, however, border on the goofily self-aware, and I imagine the photographer coaching, “okay, look into the distance, squint a little, good…” They are titled with the sitter’s name, “Iraq War Protester,” and town.

 

Judith Joy Ross. Susan Ravitz, Protesting the War in Iraq, Easton, Pennsylvania, 2006. from pacemacgill.com. (c) Judith Joy Ross.

So on one hand we have these portraits, respectfully taken, beautifully produced. But they stagnate, too staged, they become a little showy, and each one begins to blend into the next. On the other hand we have these street photos, which have a totally different energy, this spontaneity, but they’re almost not staged enough, in their quality and in their conscience. Which is unfortunate because Rubinfien is clearly motivated by conscience and empathy (not to mention anxiety), but I really find his practice as it appears unacceptable, and the  more I think about it the more incensed I become that the work is received in galleries and museums. Not surprised, but bummed. I am convinced that this matters, and that Rubinfien is stepping on people as he blurs the lines between art and, well, not, and while this could be spun as bold and exciting, I find it a little troubling, grouch that I am. And I think: but what if his pictures were staged? Would we be disappointed? (Perhaps some of us would.) Would they be less real? (I don’t know, they’re still real people, posing for a photo about a real phenomenon.) Would they be more like art? (I think so.)

link to a particularly awesome edition of BibliOdyssey, a really nerdy and interesting blog:

The Miyako Nenju Gyoji Gajo (Picture Album of Annual Festivals in the Miyako) 

Photos of 1928 paintings on silk.