Want to take part? Submit your studio — just check out the submission guidelines.

Steffen Martin, Odense, Denmark (link)

This is my studio at an old industrial building. I do not use an easel but place my canvas lying on the floor or with the canvas leaning on the wall. I like my paints to be close to me so I don’t have to look for them on a shelf, that’s why they’re all in the shot.

Rosalyn Richards, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (site)

I had this studio built as an addition to my house. I designed it so that I can take some work outside through sliding glass doors when I work on messier things and the weather is nice. That also makes it easier to move large furniture or boxes in and out of the space. I have been working mainly on prints and drawings in this studio and I have had to arrange it for both clean areas and also areas where I can use inks, paints, and other materials. I use the table spaces for drawing, collage ideas that I base my drawings on, and also for matting prints.

There is a small press shown in the background, and soon I will be moving in a more medium-sized table press into my studio space as well as a paper cart for storage.

Many furniture items such as the shelving and presses are on casters, which makes it easy to rearrange the workspace as my projects change. I have installed track lighting on three walls for viewing work, and there are ceiling lights over the drawing tables which can also be dimmed if necessary. I have natural light from several windows on the end wall, part of the side wall, and also from the sliding glass doors.

Chris Arabadjis, New York City (site)

What you don’t see in this picture is as important as what you do see. The floor, wall, and tables are my easel. Missing from view is the wall of books and music (right) and collections of shells, rocks, coral, cones, puzzles, mathematical models, etc. and supplies (left). Everything, floor to ceiling, has a place, except for the ephemera which is always shifting. A second window is out of view. Outside the windows is a courtyard.

To me this room is the most exciting place in the universe. It may be small, but in my mind it is huge. With the exception of drawings made on my commute, everything I create is made here.

Jill Lear, Ketchum, Idaho (site)

I have worked in a number of studios in a number of cities, from very small to very big. I think this is my favorite one so far. The great thing about it is it has enough space to have many paintings and drawings going on at once, as well as room for a lot of inspirational material on the wall like quotes and favorite works of art and books, and my large flat files for storage. I love having lots of clean white paper of different sizes ready to go.

Since my work always revolves around trees, I travel to a lot of different places looking for “trees of significance”. When I find a tree I like, I take its GPS coordinates, photograph it from all angles, then I put the photos on the wall of my studio and study them until I decide how I want to work with them. My goal is to document and record as many of these trees as I can through photography, drawing, and painting and even stories.

Having a space like this with all its natural light and all the white open space around me has allowed and inspired me to take risks I wouldn’t have before. Plus I can just step outside into the beautiful Idaho landscape when I need time to regenerate.

Loretta Owens, Harrison, Arkansas (link)

Over the last few years, I’ve been working my way up to increasingly larger workspaces — from having to unpack supplies onto the bedroom floor at home any time I wanted to work on a piece to now working in this four room walk-up downtown, where I can leave my mess out 24/7.

The building is from 1930, with all the requisite “old building” features — squeaky floors and high ceilings, heavy transom windows over the doors, and various pipes running exposed along the walls. Among other neighbors, the building is also home to a music teacher and a small church congregation, whose piano sounds drifting muffled through the walls and floors can create a really serene atmosphere on sunny afternoons. Of my four rooms, I work mostly in the room photographed here. I work on the floor when I need a great deal of space and I work on a table in the upper right when I’m painting smaller details.

I climb out the window and sit on the roof when I need to step away from my canvas and plan my next move.

Mural in Playland by Larry Millard (all images courtesy the Coney Island History Project)

When Larry Millard showed up in Coney Island in 1957, he was looking for work as a sign painter. His work was so impressive he was hired to do murals across the amusement area, particularly in the recently demolished Playland Arcade. Yet just as suddenly as he appeared, he vanished in 1960 and was never heard from again. What was left as a memory was his art, but the effort to preserve it has been complicated by vandalism, death, natural disasters, and the altering landscape of Coney Island. Now an exhibition focused on his work at the Coney Island History Project is aimed at remembering this mysterious artist and exploring the darkly playful work he left behind.

Detail of a mural by Larry Millard

The Curious Playland Arcade Art of Larry Millard includes photographs of his Playland murals, as well as actual chunks of the art that were rescued from Playland. ”It has this cartoony style, but with a beautiful serious side,” said Charles Denson, director and founder of the Coney Island History Project. “There’s something deeper there that’s representing his life.”

The murals show long-legged ladies and a hapless man who tries to love them, as well as scenes of gaming and gambling. Denson described Millard as “a tortured soul” who showed up to work early each morning, unshaven and unable to start painting until he’d had a few drinks. No one knew where he lived, although it was assumed somewhere in the area, and sometimes he arrived with a girlfriend named Eunice. The 45-year-old, fedora-wearing man with a mustache and dark hair said he was once a cartoonist at the New York Daily News, but Denson said they’d never been able to track down his previous work.

Playland Arcade Mural

Each inch of the Playland Arcade on Surf Avenue was covered with his pun-filled colorful murals, and he also did work at Stauch’s and B&B Carousell. Yet despite finding an audience in the amusement area for his Al Capp-like art with its unlucky in love humor, when he disappeared in 1960 no one really had a clue who Millard was.

Denson said that while “everything you have now [in Coney Island] has a corporate style and everything’s manufactured,” it was once an active place for original art for each individual ride. “It’s kind of a miracle that his art actually survived as well as it did,” he said, which is an incredible understatement.

Playland Arcade Mural

The Playland Arcade itself closed in 1981, and although it was planned to be demolished it was instead sealed up. Its longtime attentive caretaker was Andy Badalamenti, who lived in a house beneath the Thunderbolt roller coaster. The hope was that the arcade would one day be reopened and restored, although there was always an agreement that before its destruction the murals would be saved. Unfortunately, Badalamenti was stricken with cancer, and another blow came with a photographer who broke in and published photographs in the New York Times. The images drew other trespassers and the resulting vandalism and theft damaged many of the murals. Then the front gates blew in during a storm, and even with the roof collapsing and the place blocked off, there was even more trespassing. Badalamenti would pass away in 2011, and eventually the decision finally came to demolish it. Before doing so, the asbestos had to be removed, so the whole roof was stripped off. Just days later, Hurricane Sandy hit and totally flooded the place. Some of the murals had already been relocated to the Coney Island History Project, but this too was flooded.

“Everytime we thought we had it saved, something came up,” Denson said. “It was almost like it was following his life story with all these pitfalls waiting.”

Destruction in the Playland Arcade

After the waters receded, what was left was incredibly fragile and could just crumble to the touch. Yet some of the murals were carefully extracted. One final, large mural could only be safely accessed once part of the building was down, but the process ended up causing the whole front of the building to collapse, taking the mural with it. The whole building was ultimately destroyed this February.

Despite all this, some pieces of the murals were saved and are being restored, and each and every Playland mural was photographed. ”His artwork illustrates somebody’s perception of Coney Island, it’s not just for Coney Island,” Denson said, and the hope is that The Curious Playland Arcade Art exhibition will preserve not just his art, but his story as well, and perhaps even unravel some of the mystery around this artist. ”We hope that somebody who knows him will come forth and tell us what happened to him,” Denson said.

Hand of Aces

Playland Arcade Mural

The Curious Playland Arcade Art of Larry Millard is at the Coney Island History Project (3059 West 12th Street, Coney Island) from May 25 through July 7.

Jean Cocteau, “Orpheus’ Mirror” (1990), gilt bronze, 32 cm (© Comité Cocteau, © Collection I. Kontaxopoulos & Alexander Prokopchuk Collection of Modern Art, Brussels)

HONG KONG — I fell in love with Jean Cocteau when I was 19. I spent nights taking photographs of his epic 1930 film The Blood of a Poet frame by frame. The infatuation was similar to one I had with Picasso, whose paintings I copied obsessively, determined to learn the language of the man who made “Guernica.” In both cases, my heart was eventually broken. First, I learned Picasso used women like he used his paintbrushes. Then it transpired that Cocteau was a Nazi sympathizer. It was hard to know where I stood with both artists afterwards.

Jean Cocteau, “Adam and Eve” (c. 1959), markers on paper, 40 x 49 cm (click to enlarge) (© Comité Cocteau, © Collection I. Kontaxopoulos & Alexander Prokopchuk Collection of Modern Art, Brussels)

With Picasso, it was easier, of course — he was a man, after all. Cocteau was different, a more complex and nuanced spectre. I wondered: what would I have done if I were an artist living in Paris when Hitler’s tanks rolled in? Thankfully, he was no Heidegger, a full-fledged member of the Nazi party. And he was a firm supporter of Jean Genet, the notorious enfant terrible of the queer scene, even defending Genet in court in 1941. Cocteau’s Nazi shadow made no sense. I thought of this when gazing at the 230 pieces currently on view in a major exhibition of his work at the Hong Kong City Hall, alongside works created by and with friends and associates from Picasso to de Chirico.

The show begins with a series of pencil- and pen-on-paper self-portraits that form an artist book — Cocteau’s format of choice — produced in 1925, “The Mystery of Jean the Flower.” In the series, Cocteau explores his sense of self through the celestial, with his face made up of constellations, and the natural, with the spiral of his eye connected to the curve of his chin. Each image is executed simply, with clean lines, and annotated with scribbles of thoughts on life, death, and opium addiction. The self-exploration continues in a closed-off room titled “Erotica,” where there are more drawings, these ones as explicit as their titles:  “Anal Sex,” “Cruising,” “Struggle.” There’s a selection from “A White Paper” (1930), an artist book exploring the internal world of sexuality and identity, too: a drawing of man with two heads; a naked man on horseback blindfolded with a second, headless body draped over his back.

Reflection and duality are key themes in Cocteau’s work. A scene from his film Orpheus (1949) begins with the beautiful (and Cocteau lookalike) Jean Marais pressing his hands against a window, recalling another iconic image from the movie in which Marais’s face presses against his own reflection longingly. The reflective surface, the mirror, is a common prop in Cocteau’s films (also featured in the famous scene in The Blood of the Poet when “the poet” falls into a mirror that suddenly turns into a pool of water). In his early self-portraits, the reflective potential of a piece of paper works like the cinematic image, as a portal enacting a desire to know and transcend one’s self.

Raymond Voinquel, “Jean Cocteau drawing” (1942), photograph (vintage silver print), 13 x 18 cm

Perhaps it was this desire that propelled Cocteau to draw and study himself consistently. The search also seems to have continued through others, from his portraits of history’s greats — Einstein, Shakespeare, Chaplin, Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Friedrich Nietzsche, to those of his contemporaries — composer Erik Satie, poet Paul Éluard, and writer and painter Max Jacob. He immortalized Jean Marais and his clear infatuation with the actor in a stone bust titled “Jean Marais as a Faun” (1939).

This need to seek out one’s reflection could also explain those physical, bullish desires that drive men and women to befriend, love, and bed each other. This recalls another common motif in Cocteau’s work, the bull, which plays out in the influences of mythology, the idea of humans having the characteristics of animals, the animalism of flamenco, and bullfighting. The bull features in one scene of The Blood of the Poet as an invocation of the myth of Zeus turning himself into the animal so as to rape the Phoenician woman Europa. This legend forms the title of a series of coloured prints published in 1939, “[The Rape of Europa], We Believe in Europe,” which features multiple faces in each work. Some have profiles protruding from either side of the face and subtitles below, such as one that bears the phrase “L’Europe, notre patrie” (Europe, our homeland). This dream of European unity feels as cynical (and as hopeful) now as it must have in 1939.

Andy Warhol, “Jean Cocteau red portrait” (1983), silkscreen, 80 x 97 cm (click to enlarge) (© Comité Cocteau, © The Jean Cocteau House Collection, Milly-La-Forêt)

The Hong Kong exhibition, which also includes a remarkable suite of artist books by Matisse and Braque that situate Cocteau in a tradition of artists who drew as if they were writing and wrote as if they were thinking, is an homage to a man of many faces and guises. Of particular note are a series of joint artist books created with the likes of Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer, Bernard Buffet, Leonard Fujita, and Christian Bérard — a testament to Cocteau’s love of collaboration. Then there are the portraits of him by fellow artists Modigliani, Picasso, Buffet, Jacques-Émile Blanche, and Warhol, views of Cocteau by those who knew him. They are surprisingly bland in their elegance — Cocteau as a man whose anxieties were kept hidden from public view.

In the end, despite the volume of works on view and the efficacy with which they present a man enamored of the celestial laws of nature, the magic of word and image, and the myths of history, I remain at once in love and at a loss. As with all of Cocteau’s work, the exhibition presents the reflection of a man reflecting on himself, and I am left to make vain attempts at reflecting back on him.

Jean Cocteau: Spirit of the 20th century Parisian Scene is view until June 9 at Hong Kong City Hall (5 Edinburgh Place, Central, Hong Kong) as part of the annual Le French May Festival in Hong Kong.

A spread from the book “Barrel of Monkeys” featuring drawings that can be turned into animated phenakistoscopes (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

The phrase “barrel of monkeys” generally means a bit of crazy fun. In some cases, though, people may use it as an example of something that’s less fun, i.e. ”this party is way more entertaining than a barrel of monkeys.” This contradictory dual meaning makes Barrel of Monkeys a great title for a graphic novel by French cartoonists Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot — in my eyes, at least, because I still haven’t decided whether the book was a really awesome barrel of monkeys or the lesser variety.

The title’s also appropriate for the format of the book — a string of loosely related anecdotes, short stories, and vignettes brought together between the covers like a bunch of simian creatures thrown in a barrel — and for its themes, which start off (page two) with bestiality and move more broadly into sexuality and violence. And herein lies my quandary: like its title, Barrel of Monkeys as a whole is incredibly smart, as well as wonderfully innovative. But it’s also disturbing, and sometimes, when the humor fails, it’s just plain offensive. And those moments are strong enough to taint my feelings about the entire book.

The cover of “Barrel of Monkeys”

This is the first English translation of Ruppert and Mulot’s work, but the pair have been working on comics together since 2005. Barrel of Monkeys was published in France (Panier de Singe) in 2007 and won the Revelation prize at Angouleme, the biggest comics festival in Europe, the same year. Its English translation and publication in the US are thanks to comics critic, editor, and publisher Bill Kartalopoulos, who recently founded Rebus Books (and who’s a co-founder of the beloved but recently departed Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival). He deserves credit for bringing European comics to American readers, something we’ve been sorely needing; the medium is flourishing on both continents, but as with so much contemporary literature and writing, there’s a lack of translation and exchange across the ocean.

Translating a work, however, doesn’t give you the cultural context for it, and I’ve been wondering if that’s what I’m missing with Barrel of Monkeys. The stories in the book mostly follow a pair of videographers/portrait photographers on their strange exploits: to shoot the molestation of animals at the zoo, to take pictures at a masquerade ball for the maimed and disfigured, to stage and photograph a duel at a national gathering of sword swallowers. There are other stories thrown in that don’t feature the pair: a father who tries to create a phenakistoscope with his son but just ends up frustratedly cursing and smacking the boy twice upside the head (and making him cry); two horribly racist European tourists who visit the pyramids in Egypt and treat their local guides with vitriol and disdain; two deaf guys who shoot people for fun on a train. Fun! Seriously. They shoot people and then crack up at the thought of shooting themselves with the two bullets left.

The approach here is obviously that nothing is off limits — that we can talk about and mock everything. Ruppert and Mulot may even be attempting to mock standard bro fare by having their protagnoist pair get into stupid fights and spectate obnoxiously at the seeing-eye-dog Olympics. But the rub is that by placing the duo and their ethos at the center of the book, the authors do nothing to really discourage it. The whole tone is calculated cool, a nonchalance that becomes an acceptance and then a condoning of violence. In the last vignette, the photographers kill and maim two prostitutes so they can set up a surrealist-tableaux-come-to-life with the bodies. (I’m not even going into the details, which made me actually feel sick.) Those prostitutes are two of the only women in the book, and all of the women are minor characters alternately viewed as sexual objects, humiliated, or violently injured. Not one of them gets angry, fights back, or injures a man. I don’t need a book to feature women to like it, and I’m not saying that certain topics should be off limits for writers and cartoonists, but I also don’t accept a nihilistic approach to violence as a cover for condoning misogyny.

An encrypted drawing on left, and an overhead comic on the right

Where Ruppert and Mulot succeed is in the technical aspects of the book, with original, challenging layouts and all kinds of awesome experiments with viewing and form. The story about the ball for maimed and disfigured people contains a series of phenakistoscopes that are mesmerizingly animated on the artists’ website. Another piece includes panels drawn in 3-D cubes, and I’m still not sure how to properly view them. The recurring tale of the portraitists at the zoo is full of scenes encrypted into messes of lines and points that can be decoded by “ripping out the pages and tracing the lines joining the matching symbols with an awl … folding along the lines towards the reader for the capital letters, and away from the reader for the lowercase letters,” the authors write. (Good luck.) These are participatory, interactive comics — comics that come to life beyond the book and follow you home. It’s a delightful idea, but also one that makes the disturbing stories even more so.

Getting under readers’ skin takes talent, and Ruppert and Mulot undoubtedly have that. The question is: in service of what? At first glance, the only thing approaching a point seems to be, “Ha, look what complete and utter jerks these guys are.” But each of the vignettes about the portraitists ends with the image of a ridiculous final photo in a frame — a man’s head chopped off by the boomerang he had aimed to catch, the dying loser of the duel on the floor, the winner posing with a woman in S&M gear in submission. Maybe, just maybe, the authors are pushing us to think about the lengths we go to to justify our picture taking these days — and conversely, the way we justify our actions and scenes we witness through the capturing of images. Is it worth staging a duel for the shots you’ll get at the end? Is there a redeeming value to seeing death in the New York City subway on the cover of a local newspaper? Just how far will our image obsession take us?

Barrel of Monkeys is available from Rebus Books.

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when most of us didn’t carry cameras with us everywhere we went. When something interesting happened, we had to try to remember it, in all its detail, and then retell it to our friends and hope they believed us. The ubiquity of cameras has largely altered this practice, giving us visual reference material for our stories as we point and swipe on our phones to narrate events.

The Descriptive Camera (via mattrichardson.com/Descriptive-Camera)

Recently, I stumbled upon the Descriptive Camera, a project by artist Matt Richardson that harkens back to the days when we could simply describe an image without showing it. When you take a photo with his camera, you get a printout — not of the image per se, but a written description. The description is outsourced to folks at the Mechanical Turk and appears as a small, receipt-like slip at the back of the camera.

“Modern digital cameras capture gobs of ‘parsable’ metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo,” Richardson writes on his site. “The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.”

Of course, anyone could simply upload a photo to Mechanical Turk and get similar results, but there’s something charming about the object itself. The camera is deceptively simple, relying on a variety of API and open source tools to make it work. He posted a few results on his site, but they’re of quite boring subjects, like desks and chairs.

Some of the photographs with their corresponding descriptions. (via mattrichardson.com/Descriptive-Camera)

Here’s hoping Richardson gets a crowdfunding campaign together to prototype this camera. I’d love to see how it could be used for the images we’re more prone to snap today — selfies, party shots, food, and, of course cats.

Images from around social media from Hyperallergic’s inaugural #ArtTalk.

On Monday, May 20, a sold-out crowd turned out for our inaugural ArtTalk with Klaus Biesenbach. The event could not have been a more auspicious launch for the #ArtTalk series, with which we hope to host edifying speakers engaged with the world of art and visual culture in unique and provocative ways. Biesenbach’s presentation on Monday centered around EXPO 1, the project he has co-developed with Hans-Ulrich Obrist of London’s Serpentine Gallery in response to the devastation in the Rockaways caused by Hurricane Sandy.

An engaged audience thoughtfully participated in the discussion both IRL and online, using the hashtag #ArtTalk to make comments or live-tweeting the discussion. In one memorable moment, Biesenbach referred to the culturally-savvy volunteers he brought along with him as hipsters turned “helpsters,” a term he said he had heard recently — though in case you were wondering, it dates to a 2010 New York Press trend piece.

Along with the occasional mercurial aside, Biesenbach treated the audience to a narrative journey through the highlights of EXPO1, from esoteric avant-garde work to the large Adrián Villar Rojas amphitheater to the photography of Ansel Adams. The curator even shared some ancillary suggestions for minimizing waste in the name of decelerating climate change — along the vein of avoiding picking up extra disposable detritus like shopping bags, coffee trays, and so on.

The talk has inspired us at Hyperallergic to engage in some more indepth exploration of the ideas in and around EXPO 1, so please expect that in the weeks and months ahead.

We look forward to making the #ArtTalk a monthly Hyperallergic tradition, and thank all of you who showed up or followed online for taking part in the conversation.

Maria Alekhina (via Wikipedia)

A member of the punk feminist group Pussy Riot, Maria Alekhina, has declared a hunger strike after a Russian judge refused to allow her to personally attend a court hearing about her possible parole, according to the Associated Press.

Alekhina, who was watching the hearing remotely through a video link, ordered her defense team not to participate in the upcoming afterhearing that her request was denied.

According to Russia Today:

Following the announcement, the court ruled to postpone the parole hearing till May 23. “I’m declaring a hunger strike and order my defense lawyers not to take part in this court trial,” Alekhina stated.

Alekhina and fellow band members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were sentenced to two years in prison last August for ”hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” after they and other members of the Pussy Riot collective performed an anti-Putin song unauthorized in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Samutsevich was released after just six months, but Tolokonnikova was denied bail last month.

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that:

Pavel Chikov, head of human rights body Agora, said denying Alekhina the right to appear in person at a court so closer to where she is serving her sentence was an affront to her dignity.

And they added, in classic Hollywood Reporter style:

In January HBO picked up US TV rights to Pussy Riot — A Punk Prayer, a documentary about the group and its political activities by British filmmaker Mike Lerner and Russian Maxim Pozdorovkin that screened at Sundance.

Look, Ai Weiwei’s been through hell. But that doesn’t mean he needs to put the rest of us through it. And yet, here we are — “Dumbass” has arrived. In terms of metal, Ai Weiwei, in one song, has become the Billy Ray Cyrus of the genre. Billy Ray is about as country as Pat Boone was heavy metal. And as far as metal cred goes, Pat Boone was more believable than Ai.

In a track that stylistically recalls a Def Leppard B-side that wouldn’t have made it past Joe Elliott‘s coke dealer, Ai warbles and wails his way through five minutes of tepid, sugary metal — although the warbles and wails are the one thing about this mess that works. More punk than metal, “Dumbass” reminds me of one of the most punk moments in all of cinema: Michael Caine singing a dead little ditty in Little Voice. (You were expecting a Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle reference, weren’t you?)

Heavy metal is about power, be it sexual, personal, cultural, or political. Michael Cain’s Little Voice character, Ray Say, is a man who has given all his power away, while Ai has had his taken from him. In both situations, the power is gone and the art is about that. Ironically, in Little Voice, the man who has become a cartoon reveals honest tragedy through a rage about that transformation. In Ai’s case, he takes a real tragedy — his own — and turns it into a cartoon.

Using video clichés leftover from ’80s hair metal (prison guards and food, hot chicks, sex doll comedy, cinematic shaving, lipstick) to achieve his goal of depicting the terror of being in a Chinese prison, Ai ends up conveying the feelings of 16-year-old kids the world over: my parents don’t understand me, and now I’m grounded. This would have been perfect had it been a Skid Row video.

With all the accolades he’s garnered lately (deservedly!), Ai Weiwei, artistically, must feel slightly invincible at this point. This expands the scope of your options. But there’s a difference between having the freedom to try anything and believing that you have the skill set to succeed at it. Partnering with “China’s Leonard Cohen,” as singer Zuoxiao Zuzhou was referred to by Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins, seems to have been a mistake, at least in trying to make something “heavy metal.” A quick survey of Zuoxiao Zuzhou’s music on YouTube betrays a bad approximation of Western pop music usually reserved for places like France and Israel. Um, not very metal.

And the shame of all this is that Ai Weiwei, because of his current position on the world stage, could have had almost any collaborator he wanted. When Ai first spoke of his desire to do a heavy metal song, he talked about it being the only way he would be able to release all the rage in his heart. Well, the aforementioned vocals are there, but they’re backed up by “metal” that seems to have been written by Yanni. I dreamed of a collaboration with the still-kicking-against-the-pricks Napalm Death. (You can’t tell me that John Zorn couldn’t have arranged this with a few emails.) Hell, I would have settled for a toothless Metallica jam. If Ai Weiwei wanted to keep it closer to home, he should have cast aside his metal dreams and worked with the Beijing duo Li Qing and Li Weisi’s industrial outfit, Soviet Pop. They have the sound of oppression down; it’s raining piss while live wires snake across the floor with these nasty bats. Ai’s struggling and strangled vocals could have taken the shape of a fractured siren, floating above a primitive and desperate landscape.

But instead we get this. Ai Weiwei, go back to your room.

Ai Weiwei’s “Dumbass” is the first single from his album The Divine Comedy, coming out on June 22.

All images from the Sun Yuan and Peng Yung’s series “Hong Kong Intervention” (2009) (courtesy the artists and Osage Gallery)

HONG KONG — As part of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, Yuko Hasegawa, fresh from curating Sharjah Biennial 11, has curated a section of the fair dedicated to large-scale works titled “Encounters.” Seventeen galleries are presenting, with such names as Liam Gillick (Kerlin Gallery), Raqs Media Collective (Project 88), MadeIn Company (Long March Space), and Haegue Yang (Kukje Gallery). With the title of the section in mind, Hong Kong gallery Osage will feature a project by Chinese artist duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in 2009 titled “Hong Kong Intervention,” which focuses on Hong Kong’s domestic workers, a majority of whom come from the Philippines and Indonesia.

For the project, the artists gave a number of domestic workers a toy grenade, asked them to photograph it in the home of their “masters,” and take a portrait of themselves with their backs to the camera to protect their identities. The result was a series that explores the line between a so-called “master” and “slave,” and the underlying anxieties that exist in a society ordered along certain hierarchies.

The context of an art fair is a challenge for a project like this, given the issues surrounding inequities in wealth and power that arise from it, and the act of positioning these images as artworks for sale when the artists do not necessarily consider their project “art.” In this interview, the artists talk about the work and what it means to them.

*   *   *

Stephanie Bailey:  How did the idea for “Hong Kong Interventions” come about?

Peng Yu: You can see that many Filipino domestic helpers gather in Central Hong Kong during the weekend; they either sit quietly, participate in demonstrations, or play card games for leisure. Although they have accepted their employment contract, they still ask for more rights and benefits. Hong Kong society on one hand needs this type of low-cost labor, but at the same time it is felt that giving the Filipinos more benefits is not in the interest of local people. In a small place like Hong Kong, this contradiction is a common problem. Whether it is is seen as an act of art or war, the intention of this project was to bring about the potential for change.

SB: How did you come to define the parameters or rules of the project?

PY: One hundred Filipino domestic helpers were given cameras and asked to photograph their places of work—any place there that they felt was an interesting setting. But the photograph must contain the toy grenade we gave them.  After that, the photographers had a photograph taken of their back. The domestic helpers became the artists—they chose the setting, created a scene in which the grenade was placed, and documented it to produce a still life. Other than a copy of the photographic prints, no payment was given from the artists to the participants.

SB: How did the context of Hong Kong inform the project?

Sun Yuan: I had noticed the contrast in Statue Square between the surrounding business and commercial environment and that of the Filipino domestic workers. My thoughts were that there needs to be a way to solve this problem. Capitalist methods of donating through charitable means will not erase the guilt. One must have a more comprehensive resolution. This is only a suggestion, but could bring help about the necessary imminent change.

SB: I wanted to ask about the idea of ‘”intervention” and the idea of intervening into a transient workforce of migrant labor in an urban (and neoliberal) space such as Hong Kong, essentially, in your case, as outsiders.

PY: We always felt the translation “interventions” was not the most appropriate, but as our English is not very good, we have let the gallery do the translation. The term seems to refer to something that is too artistically conceptual. What we really meant is ‘strategy’, such as ‘progressive strategy’ or ‘attack strategy,’ with the meaning of a military operation plan. The English translation ‘intervention’ sounds as if the migrant laborers are intervening in city life.

When working on the project, we did not consider it a work of art. Rather than focusing on executing artistic techniques, I am more concerned about the role the project would play in society and the reality of the project, even though the project itself is artistic in its nature.

SB: Does the fact that you come from China inform and affect the way you respond to your work as artists and your perspectives on the world?

SY: It is completely unavoidable that one’s thoughts and experiences are influenced by their direct environment. Regardless of the political or cultural environment, all these reactions are a natural instinct, which one can only either adjust to or wholly reject.

SB: You have said in a joint statement that you are interested in the invasion and occupation of a community in covert and effective ways. How does this translate to your approach to “Hong Kong Intervention”?

PY: What we are concerned about is the effect it brings to art; what it brings to the reality of the situation apart from art, and if a miracle could happen outside of that reality.

I wanted to enter Hong Kong homes forcefully, allowing these mechanisms of art to become a platform of conspiracy for the Filipino domestic workers. There is a similar relationship between artists and institutions.

SB: How did the project develop and evolve over time?

SY: After this work entered the collection of the Singapore Art Museum, a large part of the proceeds were donated to Hong Kong aid agencies for foreign workers—in particular, the Mission for Migrant Workers, an organization committed to assisting migrant workers who are in distress, and the Bethune House, a temporary shelter for displaced and distressed domestic helpers of all nationalities. It was an ideal outcome.

This interview is part of a larger interview originally conducted as research for an essay by the author for a forthcoming issue of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

Leslie Thornton, still from “Luna” (2013) (All images courtesy of the artist)

Artist Leslie Thornton describes the digital as the “repository of everything.” In “Luna” (2013), her new and seductive three-channel video work on view at Winkleman Gallery in New York, her ambition is to construct a visual history that begins in 1900 and ends in the near future — say 2020. “Luna” foregrounds the use of digital effects to recreate the visual and aural sensation of various time periods, using the same set of three images as “actors” reappearing from scene to scene in different period costumes, to different musical scores.

Thornton, based between New York and Rhode Island, has chosen Coney Island as her setting. It’s a perfect choice given its carnivalesque history: a place of play, entertainment, amusement and marginal subcultures. Her camera is focused on its greatest icon: the Parachute Jump. Included in the National Registry of Historic Places, the 250-foot-tall amusement ride was originally installed for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and moved to its current location in 1941. It ceased operations coincidentally at around the time of the second New York World’s Fair in 1964. This fantasy icon lends itself graciously to digital manipulations of time.

Still from “Luna” (2013)

A digital triptych, “Luna” shows us three simultaneous views of the Parachute Jump. As the videos unfold we begin to see how historically freighted certain visual and aural cues are, and how they contribute to our recognition of a particular historical period. One moment we can see and feel the turn of the century and in another we perceive Weimar Germany. Thornton elegantly coaxes us along, focusing our attention on the subtle shifts that suggest a change from one period of time to another, and an attuned consciousness to how things looked and sounded. After all, do we really know how Enrico Caruso sounded or do we merely recognize what recordings of his voice made in 1920 sound like?

“Luna” is mounted on a wooden scaffold and we face its three screens as if looking upon an altar piece in a darkened cathedral. The footage on the right and left is the same as the footage in the central panel but it has been digitally manipulated in a different way. Still, we recognize its sameness because movement in the central panel is simultaneously echoed in the other two. A bird may rise off the ground and to the left a kaleidoscope of white and grey will flicker; it’s almost as if life is being reduced to its primary building blocks or to a set of fractals as we watch.

Still from “Luna” (2013)

Thornton, who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, has long had a precocious understanding of how technological means (or forms) integrate themselves into content, defining, limiting, and determining meaning. As such, “Luna” is a tour de force of that understanding.

Most of us are somewhat conscious of the way in which the technological tools both create and limit what is possible visually. For example, a tool like Photoshop created an entire genre of images, some of which depended on ideas that preceded the technology such as refining certain forms of collage, while others explored new attributes of the program. But images made in Photoshop are limited by what Photoshop can and can’t do, and these limits become a part of the content of those works even when we are not completely conscious of them. It is easier to recognize this phenomenon in hindsight — it’s what we mean when we say something looks “dated.” And by that we may not mean “no longer relevant” but rather, tied to a particular time or technology in the way that, for example, William Eggleston’s prints are so profoundly tied to the dye transfer process and the specific colors that this available technology rendered.

Still from “Luna” (2013)

On view alongside “Luna” is a work from Thornton’s Binocular Series. ”Sheep Machine” (2011) consists of two circular video images; one is fairly straightforward documentary footage and the other is a digitally manipulated and pulsing kaleidoscope. Filmed in the Swiss Alps, it shows a flock of sheep grazing next to the structural support of the cable cars going up the mountain. Notably, that structure is oddly reminiscent of the architectural scaffolding of the Parachute Jump; the former in black and the latter in red. And while these works function in different ways, they both ask us to pay close attention to how we see,  how vision constructs our reality, and how the representation of vision is a part of that construction.

Still of “Sheep Machine” (2011)

Thornton is perhaps best known for Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985-2010), a series that originated on film and eventually migrates, at least in part, to video. It presents the lives of two children who go about whatever it is that they do isolated from all others and seemingly raised by a television set.

We are familiar with the sensational stories, later often proven fraudulent, of feral children. The Roman twins Romulus and Remus were purportedly raised by wolves, and in keeping with the zeitgeist of late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s “return to nature” values, both François Truffaut’s L’enfant Sauvage (1970) and Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974) examine the phenomenon of the “wild child.” But what kind of a “wild child” emerges from the TV den instead of the wolf den? There is an arc of examinations ranging from popular culture, in films such as Videodrome (1983), intellectual writings such as those of Raymond Williams, novels such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and much in between.

Still of “Peggy and Fred in Hell”

We hear about children raised on television but what if this were literally so? What if that form of diffuse and artificial intelligence raised two small children? Peggy and Fred in Hell is a possible outcome. They’re two modern feral children whose world was constructed solely by the television set — a glowing cathode ray that focuses all of their attention and provides their entire understanding of the world. We aren’t watching Peggy and Fred watching television so much as we are watching them be television — acting out their world as if they were on screen. So they mirror their understanding of a TV world to us watching them on a TV screen; an endlessly receding recursive relay.

Because this earlier work considers the stupefaction of television, its relationship to visual pleasure is a conflicted one, whereas in Thornton’s more recent works, like her Binocular Series and “Luna,” uncontested beauty is given free reign. If we are seduced into watching for long stretches we won’t be taken over by evil miscreants (Videodrome) or unable to leave the set until we die of starvation (Infinite Jest). But if we are thoughtful, “Luna” will provide us with a glimpse at the power of digital tools to remake our known universe and point out signposts we’ve passed along the way that form our consciousness of time far more surely than a ticking clock.

Leslie Thornton: Luna is on view at Winkleman Gallery (621 West 27th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 22.

“Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt” at the New York Public Library (all photographs by the author)

Up in a hallway off the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library is a small exhibition of prints from one of Impressionism’s iconic artists. Created between 1878 and 1898 by Mary Cassatt, the quiet depictions of women in repose with family pets or viewing the opera might not immediately catch the eye of those who happen to pass by, but they represent not just the early experimentations of Cassatt, but one of New York’s greatest overlooked art collections.

Two prints in “Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt”

The reason it goes overlooked is that you usually have to make a special request to see any of the thousands of prints in the library’s Samuel Putnam Avery Print Collection, which includes work by hundreds of artists like Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, and Camille Pissarro. They were assembled by Samuel Putnam Avery, an art dealer who had started as an engraver in publishing. Avery traveled throughout Europe in the 19th century, importing art for his showroom at 88 Fifth Avenue at 14th Street — the best of what was happening abroad.

Print by Mary Cassatt with a personal letter addressed to Samuel Avery, noting that it’s one of her early attempts at lithography

The Cassatt prints in Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt have never been assembled together into one exhibition like this before. Arranged chronologically, her experimentations, both successful and less so, are shown through different printmaking methods, working up from scratching monochromes to those in startling color. Cassatt was close to Degas, who encouraged her to try etching, one of his favorite mediums. He even did some etchings himself of Cassatt from their visits to the Louvre, one of which is on display in Daring Methods. While Cassatt has definitely been heralded for being the only American artist among the French Impressionists — not to mention a successful woman artist in the 19th century — the prints demonstrate her progressive quiet confidence in embracing the ordinary as something refined. They also show her dedication to reworking ideas repeatedly until she perfected her grasp of lithography.

Trade card for the Samuel P. Avery Fine Art Room (1873)

Avery donated the prints to the New York Public Library in 1900, just before his death in 1904, making it the first public print collection in the city. While his influence as an art dealer isn’t readily apparent on the current landscape, his name and eye for art is still visible. As one of the founders and then a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he contributed heavily to its first selection of paintings. He also donated an extensive archive of architecture books to Columbia University, which are held in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library in Avery Hall. The library is actually named as a memorial for Henry Ogden Avery, Samuel’s son, who was a professor of architecture at Columbia and died suddenly just as his career was starting. In the Smithsonian Archives of American Art are Avery’s correspondences with everyone from Victor Hugo to John La Farge to Samuel Colman, and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries you can view a whole book of autographs and sketches from his artist friends that represent an extensive web of people that were the spirit and foundation of art in the late 19th century. While it’s a shame that these lovely prints are not in one of the better lit, more central galleries in the New York Public Library’s main building, they do offer a portal into the creative process of Cassatt and reveal the wealth of art held by Avery’s print collection.

Mary Cassatt, “Under the Lamp” (1883), softground and aquatint, showing her mother reading and her sister sewing

Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt is at the New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, Manhattan) through June 23.

The Whitney Museum is going back to basics, or at least that’s what you might think with their new brand identity redesign that was unveiled today. Created by Amsterdam-based Experimental Jetset, the new logo is an acute replacement to the rectilinear typeface rolled out 13 years ago and designed by Abbott Miller of New York-based Pentagram.

The 13-year-old logo by Abbott Miller is bye bye at the Whitney Museum. (via pentagram.com)

Is this better? Not really, but the thinking behind the zigzag, or what they call the “responsive W” is thoroughly considered and intriguing:

But even more than the letter W, we think the line also represents a pulse, a beat – the heartbeat of New York, of the USA. It shows the Whitney as an institute that is breathing (in and out), an institute that is open and closed at the same time. An institute that goes back and forth between the past and the future, moving from one opposite to the other (history and present, the ‘Old World’ and the ‘New World’, between the industrial and the sublime, etc.), while still moving forward.

The museum’s name is set in Neue Haas Grotesk, while accompanying text will also appear in the same typeface. The most unusual and nonsensical aspect of the logo essay is the studio’s strange emphasis on the Whitney’s special European relationship (emphasis mine):

There’s something about this typeface that reminds us of the Whitney. As we already wrote in some of our earlier presentations, we feel that an interesting theme within the history of the Whitney seems to be the relationship between America and Europe. While it is true that, initially, the Whitney focused exclusively on presenting American artists, it did so in sharp reaction to a specific pro-European context: a historical situation in which European art was valued above American art. It was this context that gave the Whitney its (emancipatory) right to exist. And despite (or maybe because of) its historical focus on American art, the Whitney continues to encapsulate this dialectic between the ‘Old World’ and the ‘New World’. The fact that the ‘old’ building and the ‘new’ building of the Whitney are both designed by European architects (Marcel Breuer was Hungarian, Renzo Piano is Italian) only emphasizes that.

As we already pointed out, it might be exactly this dialogue with the European ‘other’ that enables the Whitney to continuously define and re-define its American identity. We believe that, within the redrawn version of Neue Haas Grotesk, one can find a somewhat similar tension between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New World’: an European typeface, reinterpreted by a young American designer, originally commissioned by an English client.

In the 21st century, this special Euro-American relationship seems more past tense than future. I would venture to guess that if the designers weren’t European, no one would explore this relationship, which doesn’t even exist from my point of view since it is a vastly simplified telling of that history that excludes the real “others” in the history. And what are we supposed to think of the European “other”? Well, first, it is Eurocentric hogwash, considering that the heritage and identity of 21st century America is much broader and inclusive (Latin America, Asia, Africa, Native America … ) and the “other” has never been European in a very very very long time in this country.

A conceptual sketch by Experimental Jetset for the Whitney logo on a bus shelter poster, and their branding guidelines on various Whitney objects. (images via experimentaljetset.nl)

But back to the actual logo. The no-frills brand identity, like their new website, feels like a clean, concise solution but from years ago — there’s already a dated feel to the design, the Whitney bus shelter advertisement is underwhelming and strangely evokes American Apparel ads. The peaks and valleys read as a line on a stock chart, which in this art market obsessed world may suggest the values of this particular museum and its priorities.

Looking at the branding guidelines, I don’t see the visual pleasure of a Sol Lewitt wall drawing, or the perceptual fancy of Op Art, even the solidity of Abbott Miller’s logo, what is here is a bare decontextualized line, on a white field, with no soul, just a continuous wave, like the stock market, which gives us the illusion of progress and movement but doesn’t really go anywhere.

Most folks, most days, enjoy turning their internet dial to Hyperallergic for incisive news and commentary that elevates the discourse on art. And it is with the utmost respect for that sensibility that we bring to you this gem of a mid-critique artist breakdown, a true must-see for any cultured person/viral video meltdown enthusiast.

In brief: the artist, in black, presents her piece — she is plainly not enthused about painting as a medium nor is she a fan of this particular effort of hers. In fact, she “really, like, dislike[s] it a lot.” She continues, “I don’t really know what it means but I like the fact that there’s, like, it’s a figure with a line going across its eyes like it’s blinded, maybe someone could draw meaning from that …”

Her peers, noting that she’s a fashion student, offer some delightful pointers before finally dropping the ever-helpful suggestion that her work is self-obsessed. At the 2:20 mark, she exclaims, “This is such fucking bullshit,” and unleashes a pyrotechnic reckoning of stomps and flails upon her canvas.

Perhaps we’ve been had, and this is some high-concept work masquerading as viral fodder. Either way, don’t miss it.

h/t UBIK

One of the strangest finds on the internet when seaching for Glafira Rosales is this photo — available for purchase as a framed, canvas or other type of print — where she is sitting beneath of portrait of herself painted by Yelena Tylkina. (via fineartamerica.com)

Glafira Rosales, the Long Island art dealer who has long been under investigation for allegedly selling counterfeit artworks by major 20th century figures, was arrested today and charged with tax fraud connected with $12.5 million of income secreted in Spanish accounts. The announcement, which came from Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and agents from the IRS and the FBI, was accompanied by a comprehensive criminal complain which suggests that the scale of her alleged crimes was much higher than had previously been reported.

According to the criminal complaint in United States v. Glafira Rosales, approved by Assistant Attorneys General Daniel Levy and Jason Hernandez, Rosales sold a total of 63 works of art to two Manhattan galleries identified only as Gallery 1 and Gallery 2. Gallery 1, which contextual information in the complaint suggests is the since-shuttered Knoedler & Company, bought the lion’s share of the paintings, allegedly purchasing 40 works — twice the amount previously reported in Vanity Fair. Litigation provoked by Knoedler’s sales of Rosales’s paintings allegedly precipitated the storied gallery’s closing in 2011.

Gallery 2 is identified as having been founded “in or about 1997 by a person who had previously been associated with Gallery 1,” and had engaged in 23 additional sales of Rosales’s works. Her wide-ranging fraud, which the complaint alleges dates back to the 1990s, centered around “never before exhibited and previously unknown painters” that Rosales claimed to be selling either on behalf of various anonymous sellers or a Spanish collector. The works included pieces purportedly by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among many others.

Proving that there is never a situation too grave for a good art-crime pun, U.S. Attorney Bharara’s release adds that Ms. Rosales “gave new meaning to the phrase ‘artful dodger.’”

In each of the three false tax return charges, Rosales faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison and a maximum fine of $100,000. In each of the five charges surrounding her failure to disclose her Spanish accounts, she faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000.

Pratt students will be exhibiting at 56 Bogart during BOS 2013. (original photo via 56bogartstreet.com)

Thanks to further largess from the arts community, Pratt Institute’s Flameproof student exhibition will be coming to Bushwick Open Studios on June 1 and 2. Marianne and Ted Hovivian’s 56 Bogart Street will be the second venue, after Park Avenue’s Seagram building, to exhibit the work of students whose academic experience at Pratt was marred by February’s fire. The Hovivians were inspired by Larry Gagosian’s generosity in arranging for the Seagram building show, and they offered to make the space available to the students during Bushwick Open Studios, noting that “the synergy was a natural, Pratt is our neighbor and we know the BOS audience will be thrilled,” as Marianne Hovivian told Hyperallergic.

The sentiment was appreciated by curator and Pratt professor Greg Drasler, for whom “it’s going to be fun rather than impressive [like the Seagram show] — which isn’t to say work isn’t impressive, but the context is more fluid and much more understandable by these artists.” Drasler, who follows Brooklyn Museum’s Eugene Tsai’s curation of the previous iteration of Flameproof, highlights that this show, unlike the higher-profile event on Park Avenue, will be more intimate and focused on the students’ interaction with their artistic peers and mentors. “I think the idea of participation in the art community is much more in evidence in this context, it feels very real, participatory,” he said.

Flameproof (56 Bogart Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn) will run 11am–7pm on Saturday June 1 and Sunday June 2 during Bushwick Open Studios.

Lygia Pape’s 1968 performance “Divisor” restaged in Hong Kong. (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

HONG KONG — The staging of Lygia Pape’s 1968 performance “Divisor” on the streets of Hong Kong was a fantasy I never knew I had, but witnessing it was a dream nonetheless. Presented as part of the current exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, Ghosts, Rebels. Sars, Leslie and the Hong Kong Story (May 17–July 20 2013) at the nonprofit space Para Site, this current staging of “Divisor” channels the potency of the seminal work into another context, one defined by the effects of colonialism, plagues, politics, contagion, sterilization, and segregation.

The exhibition itself explores the murky depths of Hong Kong society and its anxiety, fear, and paranoia. It traces such conditions through the SARS epidemic of 2003, one of the gravest health crises to hit this densely-populated urban space, and against the social changes that have taken place in this city’s long and complex history as a colonial British outpost handed over to China in 1997. In this sense, the staging of “Divisor” as a work exploring the relationships between individual expression and collective will felt like a moment of healing in what has become an incredibly politicised yet highly divided society.

The procession travels down Chater Road. (click to enlarge)

Inti Guerrero, co-curator of the Para Site exhibition (along with Cosmin Costinas), explained the rationale behind re-staging “Divisor” to Hyperallergic:

The struggle for both the individuality and the collectivity one experiences in “Divisor” made us think of the boundaries we as humans construct amongst each other. During times of plague – physiological or cultural (social pests) – people become arrested in their own bodies. Contact, touch, being with others could result in contamination … Hong Kong is a megalopolis that needed a Lygia Pape, strolling in the heart of its downtown. “Divisor” temporally integrated the multi-layered and diverse society of this city.

I took part in the first staging of the performance on May 17, perhaps a dress rehearsal to the second staging of “Divisor” at Tamar Park in Admiralty on May 25 during Art Basel Hong Kong. At first, I was an observer — watching both from ground level and from the walkways that join the buildings on either side of Chater Road, where the happening took place. But as I walked alongside the modestly-sized group, Moe Satt, an artist whose work is included in the Para Site show, beckoned for me to join. Of course, I had wanted to but had not yet found the moment to do so. Something inexplicable held me back; as is often the case when you are confronted by a group of people you don’t know.

“Divisor” in Hong Kong’s central business district.

I wasn’t the only impromptu participant; a few others joined in. Together, we performed according to the directions of the exhibition’s co-curators along with other members of the Para Site team. We crouched low, performed “Mexican waves,” jumped up and down, flapped our arms, walked or ran and turned around, paused, and spread out as far as we could before rushing to form a tight huddle. We changed positions: heads plunged below the white sheet and bodies waded through a wonderful, intimate space. People rubbed sweaty shoulders with strangers and friends; finding a new order within a given frame of a white sheet — not unlike the white monochrome Pape’s “Divisor” invokes.

I think about intertextuality when I think about the monochrome. The idea that every text is formed from another, in what is essentially a vast and expansive textual blanket. When it comes to a monochrome canvas, a million things are going on — the paint strokes, the constitution of the paint. Then there is the canvas itself — a seemingly smooth surface characterised by cross-hatching threads, as textured as a pointillist painting.

Participants folded the canvas upon completion of the performance. (click to enlarge)

This recalls a perfect moment at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, in which an image of Pape’s original 1968 “Divisor” performance on the streets of Rio was presented next to Adriana Varejão’s witty appropriation of Lucio Fontana’s cut canvases, in which the slashes so characteristic of Fontana’s work were instead filled with shades of red oil paint oozing out of the slits like flesh. It was a statement on the canvas as an abstract body — like Pape’s white sheet with smiling heads poking out of it: a social body composed of individual, human elements.

There was a lot of laughter in the Hong Kong re-staging of “Divisor.” When the group managed to collectively fold the sheet neatly into a square at the end of the performance, there was a sense of achievement, too; simply due to the fact that a group of people had managed to turn a sheet into a symbol of that social fabric we all belong to, as abstract as such an idea might seem in a neoliberal city like Hong Kong, where market forces so often trump the needs of the community. This was a wake up call. A reminder that coming together as a society can also be a joyful thing, lest we forget: all it requires is a willingness to participate.

“Divisor” will be staged for a second time at Tamar Park, Admirality, Hong Kong on May 25.

A general view of Wiliam Powhida’s new exhibition at the Charlie James Gallery in LA. (via cjamesgallery.com)

LOS ANGELES — When Marcel Duchamp submitted his signed urinal to a group exhibition in 1917, he certainly couldn’t have predicted that his decontextualized toilet would represent the dawn of an era in which everything and anything could be “art.” Take some mundane object or action, add word salad — et voilà, you have art. Manipulated photographs aren’t simply manipulated photographs. They are “visual statements that are at once documentary and fictional.”

A painter’s brush strokes don’t come together to form a picture, are textures that “function as proof of past operations.” And a piece of taxidermy isn’t just a stuffed animal. It’s “a state of apparent life premised on actual death.” In the Bermuda Triangle of Art, an object is never an object. It’s a physical vessel with which to deliver heaps of impenetrable prose — prose intended to convince some aspiring patron that the mound of detritus before him is pregnant with meaning (in addition to looking great over the couch).

A taxidermied coyote is set in a wood crate with pink packing peanuts. Powhida’s text reveals that it was hit by a car in New Jersey: “Poor bastard.” (click to enlarge)

Navigating this universe of intellectual gymnastics and 200,000 square-foot art fairs requires a good deal of studiousness and an excellent bullshit detector — traits that New York artist William Powhida possesses in spades. Powhida has spent his short career (he is only 37) deconstructing the power and money mechanics of the art world in intensely-detailed drawings and paintings that are part political cartoon, part stream-of consciousness rant. In an infamous 2009 collaboration with artist Jade Townsend, he portrayed the habitués of Art Basel Miami Beach in a steamy, stinking Hooverville.

That same year, an illustration he did for the cover of the Brooklyn Rail displayed the uncomfortably chummy connections between some New York galleries and Manhattan’s New Museum (and helped stir up a media shit storm). In 2011, in a solo show at Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea, he diagrammed the social and professional links shared by the architects of the financial collapse. Now, in his latest solo show, on view at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, he pulls back the veil on the art-making process and its attendant verbiage.

The notes for “A (really bad, bad) Neo-Expressionist Painting,” a type of work that is a staple in all commercial art spaces. This piece best channels Powhida’s acid humor: “Friday at 3:30 it was blank. At 5:30 it was on the floor while we drank beers.”

For this exhibit, Powhida enlisted the assistance of other artists and fabricators to produce works that embody the worst art market tropes, such as the shiny object, the cool minimalist tower, and the incredibly bad painting of a skull. Alongside each piece he has added his signature touch: a trompe l’oeil painting of a hand-written note that details the process, budget and reasoning behind each work, with plenty of smart aleck-y remarks stuffed in between.

The following rumination accompanies a single strip of pink neon affixed to the gallery wall:

“Art might value an invention (singular) but the market demands product (plural) and will accept endless minor variations on a single idea. We can pretty much do anything over and over again. This may be why art history is long, but not terribly deep, and why there is SO MUCH FUCKING NEON.”

In “Some Asset Class (Digital) Paintings – Color Field,” Powhida plays with the thinking and methodology behind so much glossy digital work.

A trio of digitally-produced color-field, we learn, was crafted by running pieces of currency through some fancy filters on Photoshop — literally, money on the wall. A taxidermy of a coyote in a wooden crate draws comparisons to Damien Hirst and Joseph Beuys, and the observation that coyotes are like artists because “they are extremely territorial … and like to fight each other.” The tendency toward unpolished geometric abstraction — which Powhida refers to as “D.I.Y. Informalism” — is represented by three white, silver and pink canvases hammered together in bulky, asymmetrical shapes. The idea: “To play around with some studio junk and stuff from the hardware store to make a few awkward objects without thinking intuitively with feeling!”

Eviscerating content-less work: a detail of Powhida’s notes from “A Post Minimalism,” in which he proposes creating a pleasing sculpture out of bar graphs documenting inequity. (click to enlarge)

This may sound like the world’s most overwrought art gag. And, certainly, there is no small irony in critiquing the creative numbness of the art market with pieces that will be sold on that very same market. But Powhida’s artistic spoofs are so spot on, and his critiques so incisive, it’s hard not to get sucked in by the whole exercise. The anonymous minimalist sculpture might as well be the anonymous minimalist sculpture found in countless corporate lobbies. The expressionistic painting of a skull seems destined for a one-night warehouse art party with DJs and Red Bull. It’s like every commercial gallery/art fair/Bushwick basement I’ve ever been to — with the benefit that the accompanying texts couldn’t be more engrossing or hilarious: “You realize people are going to like these,” it reads in the notes for the skull painting. “Fuck.”

Certainly, this taxonomy of clichés overlooks the breakthroughs that artists can and do have. Powhida has chosen to train his laser vision on a part of the art world that is more preoccupied with product than it is with ideas. Yet he hits on an essential truth about a culture that treats art like a financial commodity. Spend an afternoon wandering around the gleaming white-box spaces in Culver City, and you’ll find all of these clichés being served up for five, six, and seven figures. In Powhida’s hands, art world platitudes are mordantly funny. In Culver City, not so much.

William Powhida, Bill by Bill, is on view at Charlie James Gallery (969 Chung King Rd, Chinatown, Los Angeles) through June 8. You can download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue online.

The West Garden at Dia:Beacon (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

Of the 25 artists whose work is currently on long-term view at Dia:Beacon, four of them are women. One of those women is half of a husband-and-wife team. The open, spacious museum just up the river from New York City is beautiful, staid, and a bit, well, male. Even a fantastic three-room installation of wry Louise Bourgeois sculptures can’t undercut the machismo you get from wandering through a hall full of John Chamberlain pieces made of crushed steel, while knowing that under your feet there’s another hall full of sculpted steel Richard Serras. The men’s pieces just loom so large — they take up an enormous amount of space, both physically and emotionally.

The hall of Chamberlains is, however, filled with windows, and from inside you can look out and see bright pink flowers. They’re attached to the trees in the museum’s west garden, which is a nice place to take a break from all the Very Serious Art — not just because it’s lovely, but because if you sit for a while, you’ll hear something: strange cries that may at first sound like real bird calls but are actually an installation by Louise Lawler, titled “Birdcalls.”

First created in 1972 and Lawler’s only sound piece, the work involves the artist turning the names of well-known and well-respected male artists into bird calls. Julian Schnabel’s last name becomes the warbly, guttural “Schnaaaaabel.” Joseph Kosuth’s last name takes on a light, airy tone, as if Lawler were launching the word like a balloon into the sky. “Aarrrt, aarrrt, A-a-aaartschwager!” she cries (for Richard), in a a throaty squawk reminiscent of a rooster.

The napkins at Dia:Beacon’s cafe are the key for Louise Lawler’s “Birdcalls.” Names in orange are the ones called.

“Birdcalls” is, in a word (or two), absolutely hilarious. Much of the artwork at Dia:Beacon is monumental and moving, and there’s no question of its importance, but the flip side of the museum’s in-depth solo presentations is that they seem to emphasize artistic greatness basically to the point of sanctification. After a few hours, it’s hard not to feel all those egos pressing down on you. And then you hear Lawler’s work, and you burst out laughing.

The names of these men are most often heard these days when they’re called out by another man, an auctioneer, minutes before a hammer comes down and one of their works sells for millions of dollars. (Often millions of dollars more than any work by a woman.) Lawler, in turn, transforms the men into a species (we might sit in the Dia garden and hope for a sighting!), skewering their egos with simple humor and spotlighting them in an infinitely more critical way. There are moments, too, when her voice seems to shift from bird calls to the caricatured crooning of an old lady, whereupon you can picture little Robert Barry being called into the living room to keep his overbearing grandmother company.

Hopefully, Dia:Beacon will address its gender gap more purposefully one day. In the meantime, thank goodness for Louise Lawler.

Louise Lawler’s “Birdcalls” is on long-term view at Dia:Beacon (3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY). You can also hear the original piece from 1972 on Paddle8’s blog.

Charles Ray’s “Family Romance” (1992–93) is included in the New Museum’s “NYC 1993,” which closes this weekend. (photo by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic)

Memorial Day is upon us, and with it comes a long weekend, picnics in the park, and the delicious first tastes of summer. To help you revel in your art going this week, the doctor prescribes some sure bets and encourages you to take some chances.

There’s little doubt that a discuss of gender politics in the arts should be a good place to spend Wednesday night. Meanwhile, video screenings at the Brooklyn Museum and a new exchange cafe at the Museum of Modern Art will have you seeing and doing new things at old institutions. If you’re looking for more video, visit the Video_Dumbo festival, counterintuitively happening in Chelsea this year; if digital art is more your thing, two gallery shows of net art are opening this week. Finally, for those who want to jump in blind, the doctor recommends a fantastical performance called the Museum of the Transition from the Unreal to the Real, and for those who want to know what they’re getting into, catch the New Museum’s NYC 1993 show before it closes on Sunday.

 The Cremaster Himself

When: Tuesday, May 21, 7 pm  ($25)
Where: New York Public Library (Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Ave & West 42nd Street, Midtown, Manhattan)

For its eclectic and ever-engaging discussion series Live from the NYPL, the New York Public Library will host artist Matthew Barney. The talk coincides with the Morgan Library’s recently opened exhibition of Barney drawings, and Barney will apparently discuss his “boundless imagination and wide-ranging career” with Paul Holdengräber, who, if you’ve never seen him, is quite the animated host. It sounds to us like a lot to handle. This one’s probably best for die-hard fans.

 Internet Art IRL, Part 1

When: Ongoing through Wednesday, May 22
Where: Jack Chiles Gallery (481 Broadway, fourth floor, Soho, Manhattan)

It’s officially Internet Week here in New York, and as you can see here, there are lots of events and talks and things going on all week. One of them is a show called The Feed at Jack Chiles Gallery, featuring net art curated by Angelina Dream and Valerie Veatch, avatars of some of the participating artists in the gallery, QR codes, live DJ streaming, and film screenings. So basically they’re trying to re-create the internet in real life, but, you know, more earnestly than Dave Chappelle.

Joanne Greenbaum’s Untitled (2013) is part of the exhibition dedicated to Lee Krasner at Robert Miller Gallery (image via Robert Miller)

Gender Politics in the Arts

When: Wednesday, May 22, 6–8 pm
Where: Robert Miller Gallery (523 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

The Robert Miller Gallery is currently showing a group exhibition that celebrates Lee Krasner’s impact on and legacy for female artists. In conjunction with that, the gallery will also host this panel discussion, 62 Years Later (it’s 62 years after Krasner’s first solo show), focusing on the last few decades of gender politics in the arts. Participants are soprano Lauren Flanigan, Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg, Creative Time president Anne Pasternak, artist Laurie Simmons, and ballet dancer Heather Watts, with economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett moderating. As you can see, no men are included, leading us to assume that in this case, “gender” means “the role of women” more than anything else.

 A Night of Super 8s

When: Thursday, May 23, 7 pm ($12)
Where: Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn)

Current Raw/Cooked artist and Williamsburg stalwart Michael Ballou used to have a monthly art screening event in his garage studio called the Four Walls Slide and Film Club. At the Brooklyn Museum on Thursday, he’ll hark back to those days by showing some of his Super 8 films on one of his artworks that resembles a semitruck, with live music by Brian Dewan.

 The Museum of the Transition from the Unreal to the Real

When: Thursday, May 23; Friday, May 24; Sunday, May 26, 7:30 pm ($15 suggested donation)
Where: The Hive (20 Cook Street, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

This multimedia theatrical performance is our wild card pick of the week. Here’s the description:

The audience is given a tour of an imaginary museum, in which various surreal exhibits are displayed and performed for their mind’s eye using storytelling, movement, dance, aerial silks, trapeze, live music on bizarre musical instruments, projections, real time light sculpture, masks, and shadows. Each of the exhibits presented to the audience explores new layers of interaction between layers of realities both internal and external, combining collaborative resources from artists in many fields to create images of otherworldly strangeness and beauty in a play of audiovisual mayhem.

Have fun!

 Exchange Café

When: Opens Friday, May 24
Where: Museum of Modern Art (Education and Research Building, 4 West 54th Street, Midtown, Manhattan)

Last winter, the Museum of Modern Art launched an initiative called Artists Experiment, for which the institution’s education department has invited contemporary artists to bring in conceptual and unusual projects. Now artist and activist Caroline Woolard is setting up an Exchange Café to prompt visitors to think about property and how we assign value. You’ll have to barter for your tea, and then you can browse a library of books and ephemera while you drink it.

Promo image for the Jogging at the Still House Group (via stillhouse.tumblr.com)

 Internet Art IRL, Part 2

When: Opens Friday, May 24, 6–9 pm
Where: The Still House Group (481 Van Brunt Street, #9D, Red Hook, Brooklyn)

Everyone’s favorite surreal-internet-art-meets-the-everyday-and-then-sell-em-on-Etsy tumblelog, The Jogging, is taking over the Still House Group’s space. The theme is environmental doom meets the digital age, and Red Hook couldn’t be a more fitting neighborhood for the show. Plus we quite like the colorful roped salmon on ice promo image for the show.

 Video_Dumbo

When: Ongoing through Saturday, May 25
Where: Eyebeam (540 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)

Video_Dumbo is happening in Chelsea this year … which is a little weird. But there’s lots of good stuff on offer, from eight permanent installations to daily screenings that include US premieres and brand new works, plus new Finnish video art. See the schedule and plan your visit here. (And read our review from last week here.)

 Last Chance: NYC 1993

When: Closes Sunday, May 26
Where: New Museum (235 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

This week is your last chance to see the New Museum’s love letter to the New York art world of two decades ago, NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. Reviews have been mixed but mostly positive, and anyway, it’s definitely the kind of show you want to see for yourself.

Culture Plate (all images courtesy Norm Barker/Hidden Beauty)

Beneath our sheath of skin is an internal world both vast and complex. While most of us rarely get to see it, these workings of our systems and organs are the daily viewing of pathologists, particularly when it comes to disease. A new book of photography takes us into our own interiors, and shows that even with their horrid ravaging of our bodies, there is some beauty in these afflictions.

Image of a smoker’s lung

“Let me be very clear, in no way do we mean to glorify disease, but it is part of the human condition,” co-author of Hidden Beauty: Exploring the Aesthetics of Medical Science Norman Barker explained. Yet he elaborated that we’ve all experienced diseases in some way, whether in our own lives or someone we know. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, kidney disease, heart attacks, and infections are not unfamiliar to us, but their structure in our bodies is often invisible.

Barker, who is Associate Professor of Pathology and Art as Applied to Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, collaborated on the book with Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue, a professor of pathology, oncology, and surgery also at Johns Hopkins. His job title might seem curious, but he noted that art and anatomy “have always had a close relationship” and that “during the Renaissance artists and anatomists were often the same person.” For example, he pointed out that one of the most famous drawings of the 16th century was the frontispiece of anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), showing the dissection by Vesalius of a woman’s corpse. Later, people would pay to enter Dutch anatomy theaters to see the interior of human bodies. This interest hasn’t left us, even if the cross between direct research on the human body and art is not as close as it once was, and science remains a very visual study.

Cirrhosis of the liver and Melanoma

Gallstones and Osteoporosis

Photographs from Hidden Beauty are currently being exhibited the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and will later travel to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. They include a variety of imaging techniques, such as a cancer cells revealed by Spectral Karyotyping or electron microscopy. While the original intention wasn’t that they be visual art, the diagnosis images have striking views of forms and a diversity of structures, so that it’s astounding that they all came from the human body. Nevertheless, the goal of the book is not just to show the entrancing dimensions of such things as a lung riddled by smoke inhalation or the worn lattices of osteoporosis, but to explain the diseases in an accessible context as well. It’s by really seeing these diseases and the inner-workings of ourselves that we can have a better understanding of what’s happening beneath our surfaces.

“The human body is a magnificently complicated machine,” Barker stated. “We feel privileged to have a behind the scene tour of the human body everyday. We also feel privileged to work with men and women who have devoted their lives to science and find a cure for many of these diseases.”

Paget’s disease of the bone

Hidden Beauty: Exploring the Aesthetics of Medical Science is available from Schiffer Publishing.

Joseph Beuys performing his piece “Felt TV” (photo by Lothar Wolleh, via Wikipedia)

Joseph Beuys is a canonical postwar artist, but was he really as progressive and enlightened as we’ve come to believe, and as he led us to think? A new biography of the artist, written by German-born Swiss author Hans Peter Riegel, kicks up the age-old debate about the separation of the artist and the art by contending that Beuys was actually a dedicated follower of some occultist and racist ideas propagated by philosopher Rudolf Steiner, and that he hung out with quite a few former Nazis. “In Riegel’s view, Beuys was neither a deranged artist nor an innocent genius, but rather a fairly reactionary and dangerous figure,” writes Ulrike Knöfel in Der Spiegel.

The article presents the book’s evidence in a fairly bombastic way, beginning with an introduction that’s bound to raise a skeptical eyebrow. The second paragraph leads off: “Beuys, born in 1921 in the western German town of Krefeld, is viewed by many as the only genuine avant-gardist of the postwar era … ” Well, that’s something of an extreme claim. Unfortunately, this also sets up the indictments that follow to be read as shocking revelations, when in fact they read as interesting, complicated pieces of history that merit a closer look.

To wit, the allegations are: Beuys was a “habitual liar,” twisting the truth on everything from his story about being rescued by Tartar tribesman during WWII to the extent of the Nazi enthusiasm of his hometown and his own role in the war; Beuys was “obsessed with Steiner’s occultism and his racial theories — and with the abstruse ideas of a Germanic soul, a German spirit and a special mission for the German people”; and Beuys had close ties to and worked with a good number of former Nazis, including his patron Karl Ströher, who donated substantially to the Nazi party, and politician Werner Georg Haverbeck, a former member of the SS and head of training for the Hitler Youth movement who continued a career in politics after the fall of the Third Reich.

Beuys’s “Homogenous Infiltration for Piano” (1966) (via Wikipedia)

Beuys isn’t the first artist or thinker with Nazi associations: people have been struggling for decades over what to make of Leni Riefenstahl and Martin Heidegger, whose connections to the party seem much stronger than Beuys’s, and let’s not forget Philip Johnson, who sympathized with Nazism early on, and Salvador Dalí, who faced criticism for embracing Franco’s Fascist regime. Beuys’s associations are just as troubling, and the fact that they’ve rarely, if ever, been explored until now reveals the success of the artist’s own myth making, as well as the art world’s selective political myopia. But what they really point to is the need for further research and exploration rather than any blanket indictment or decanonization of Beuys. It’s especially hard to know how to take some of Riegel’s more bewildering claims — e.g. “Beuys was one of the first members of Germany’s environmentalist Green Party, and he spoke a great deal about democracy. Ultimately, however, the artist strove for a totalitarian society …” — without reading the book itself.

Mostly clearly, Beuys’s Nazi ties seem to confirm the messiness of WWII and postwar Germany, a long period when the majority of the German population was implicated in the Third Reich in some way. After the war, many former Nazis found their way back into politics quite easily, and it’s not as though just because Hitler was defeated his ideology vanished into thin air. A nationwide political brainwashing takes generations to undo.

All of which isn’t to let Beuys off the hook. The trick is to explore how these more nefarious politics affected and informed — or didn’t — his art, and to reevaluate accordingly. One commenter on Twitter pointed to this Benjamin Buchloh essay about Beuys that begins this process and seems to align with Riegel’s findings. Buchloh writes:

The esthetic conservatism of Beuys is logically complemented by his politically retrograde, not to say reactionary, attitudes. Both are inscribed into a seemingly progressive and radical humanitarian program of esthetic and social evolution. The abstract universality of Beuys’ vision has its equivalent in the privatistic and deepy subjective nature of his actual work. Any attempt on his side to join the two aspects results in curious sectarianism. The roots of Beuys’ dilemma lie in the misconception that politics could become a matter of esthetics …

By Der Spiegel‘s account, Riegel sticks to the man rather than the artwork, which is a fine (and perhaps necessary) place to start. But ideally, after this, a more critical biography will come along to help us better connect the dots.

h/t @magdasawon

Some of the items we discovered in Amazon’s “painting” category. (screen shot via Amazon)

This day may have been inevitable, but now it’s finally here. In its attempt to take over the world — or at least everything that can be bought and sold in the world, Amazon is launching an art gallery.

There aren’t many available details yet about the endeavor, but an email announcement for an informational event was forwarded to Hyperallergic. It reads:

This summer Amazon is planning to launch a Fine Art Gallery where customers will be able to purchase original artwork offered by a select group of invited galleries via Amazon.com. You are cordially invited to a special event in New York where we will introduce the Amazon Art marketplace to New York galleries …. We have received overwhelming support from the galleries that have already joined the platform and we would love the opportunity to offer your gallery’s selection in the Amazon Art store.

We reached out to Amazon for more information but a public relations representative at the company replied, “We’re not able to comment at this time but stay tuned.”

It’s interesting, given the company’s track record with books, that Amazon is taking the high road and trying to join forces with galleries rather than beat them at their game. Then again, unlike books, art isn’t a mass market, and the higher-ups at Amazon are probably smart enough to know that without galleries, they’d have a tougher time figuring out where to begin, not to mention gaining credibility. (No one’s clamoring about Costco’s entry into the art market, for instance.) Still, it’s hard to not wonder whether they’ll transition to working directly with artists and become gallery competition somewhere down the line.

In the meantime, what do galleries gain from this kind of partnership? Exposure to a new and larger audience, I suppose, although the price differential between many works of art and your average Amazon-bought book or blender is noteworthy. It sounds a little dreamy-eyed, but maybe, just maybe, Amazon Art will be geared at smaller galleries, helping them expand their clientele and increase sales, and maybe the giant company will start to fill the online hole left by the disappearance of 20×200. Of course the profit-sharing arrangements would have to be favorable enough to make it worth signing on, and the gallery from which we received the announcement is mid-level, not a start-up. Who knows, maybe Amazon Art will help turn the broader public into an art-loving one, or maybe it’ll squeeze the middle of the market even tighter — or maybe no one in the art world will really care at all.

Benjamin Binstock opens the Vermeer’s Daughter symposium at NYU’s Cantor Film Center on May 18. (all images by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

Imagine for a moment that in the days after Johannes Vermeer’s death in 1675, that his widow Catharina and eldest daughter Maria, sitting in a darkened room of the Vermeer home, conspired to settle their numerous family debts in a secretive way. Owing their baker the largest sum of money, the widow and her daughter would give up two of the Master’s last paintings to settle their debt.

For instance, how would the value of a Vermeer change if, all of a sudden, it became a Maria Vermeer?

In a theory developed by Cooper Union art history professor Benjamin Binstock, the two debt-settling paintings were actually the work of the daughter, Maria Vermeer. According to Binstock’s 2008 book, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, Maria was trained behind closed doors as the Master’s apprentice and is the true creator of one-fifth of today’s known Vermeers.

Nearly untouched by book critics and completely ignored by top Vermeer scholars, Binstock’s text was the subject of a one-day symposium entitled “Vermeer’s Daughter?”, presented by the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU’s Cantor Film Center on Saturday, May 18. Three impressively appointed panels — of historians, artists, and generalists, respectively — dealt with the author’s elevation of Maria Vermeer as a new 17th-century wunderkind.

During the Vermeer’s Daughter symposium, a panel of artists including Chuck Close, April Gornik, Gerri Davis and Vincent Desiderio (left to right) spoke. (click to enlarge)

Jonathan Gilmore, a philosopher and art critic at the symposium explained, “Ben’s book is a victim of its advanced press — it was judged literally by its cover. But those of you that read the book know that after the introduction, it’s not until page 270 or so that he makes these explosive claims.” Conscious of his naysayers, Binstock seemed resigned to criticism from the start of the symposium, but stuck to his guns. “I now recognize that the way I presented my hypothesis — as an obvious fact — is less convincing,” he said in his opening statement. “I stand before you chastened and ask you to reconsider the subject. Can we give these figures their living names?”

Vermeer’s Family Secrets goes to work on numerous topics, not just a theory concerning the painter’s daughter. In his presentation, Binstock covered the erratic technical output seen during Vermeer’s career, examining the conflicting treatment of, for instance, cupids rendered in paintings that hang on the walls behind sitters or of red thread articulated with mastery in one work and then very flatly just one year later.

Binstock, who shuffled life-sized reproductions of the Dutch master’s work on stage, also presented a newly completed chronology of Johannes and Maria’s work, pasted onto a timeline. The author made special mention that the images can be peeled off and resituated — and made it an open proposition for panelists to do so.

Johannes Vermeer, “Girl with a Red Hat” (c. 1665–1666), oil on panel 9 1/8 x 7 1/8 in. (23.2 x 18.1 cm.), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Andrew W. Mellon Collection (via Wikipedia)

Binstock elucidates six or seven paintings that he believes Maria created herself, including two shadowy works that he dubs self-portraits, which currently hang in Washington, DC’s National Gallery. “Girl with the Red Hat” (1665–66) is the more celebrated of these two works, and it was the most discussed painting at the symposium.

Painter Gerri Davis made interesting use of “Girl with a Red Hat” by ruminating on self-portraiture and the penetrating stares that often appear when artists paint themselves from mirrors, as seen in her examples by Parmigianino, Rembrandt, and Frida Kahlo. As attention returned to “Girl with the Red Hat,” it was difficult to not feel a pang of hope for the case of Maria the painter. “Girl with a Red Hat” truly has those deep, self-portrait eyes.

Still, strong intuition brought about by any viewer’s inner sense of visual perception alone is not enough evidence to make important leaps when assessing attribution. At one point in his talk, Binstock placed a highly coded narrative onto the 1673 work “Girl Interrupted at her Music” where, as he claims, Maria is caught in a moment of conflict — interrupted by not only her father but also her impending marriage that would eventually disrupt her study of painting.

Johannes Vermeer, “Girl Interrupted at her Music” (c. 1660–61), oil on canvas 15 1/2 x 17 1/2 in. (39.4 x 44.5 cm) The Frick Collection, New York (via Wikipedia)

Bard Graduate Center professor Ivan Gaskell argued that Vermeer held a much greater distance between his art and family life than Binstock has conjured in his book. Gaskell showed Vermeer’s “View of Delft” (1660-61) and noted the liberty Vermeer wielded as he adjusted the heights of buildings along the Delft skyline to suit his own compositional tastes. In essence, Vermeer chose visual harmony over accurate record keeping — reinforcing the artist’s separation between painting and life.

Speaking alongside painters Vincent Desiderio and April Gornik, Chuck Close asserted that the true family secret of note was to hide Vermeer’s use of a camera obscura and not to conceal an unknown apprentice. Close spent time marveling at Vermeer’s notoriously maverick technical skill, proclaiming, “I know how every painting in the history of the world was made, except for Vermeer’s!” He went on to disregard Binstock’s daughter-theory. “Nothing would make me happier than to find a woman who painted these incredible paintings,” said Close, “I just don’t buy it. Not that she couldn’t, as woman or as a girl, but I just don’t buy it.”

Johannes Vermeer, “View of Delft” (1660–61), oil on canvas, 98,5 x 117,5 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague (via Wikipedia)

For those in the audience hoping to learn more about Maria Vermeer as a woman or an artist (or to find a place where those issues intersect) — little was illuminated. Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, originally billed to present at the symposium, was absent and replaced by poet and historian Martha Hollander. Still, a thorough reading of gender in Binstock’s theory, which seems desperately needed, was largely missing in the symposium.

April Gornik speaks about the painting “Girl with a Red Hat” at Vermeer’s Daughter on May 18. (click to enlarge)

Jonathan Gilmore chimed in, “It’s odd that feminist art history hasn’t embraced this thesis. It was easier, at least, with Artemisia Gentileschi who, at least in my view, was a better painter than her father. So, when a lot of these paintings were de-attributed from her father and then re-attributed to her, it made sense because her other works were of a similar quality.” Maria Vermeer, however, inherits a varied cluster of paintings from Binstock, unlinked by subject matter or iconography and widely diverging in technical accomplishment.

Although Maria’s life as an artist remains more-or-less unfounded, the notion is not entirely implausible. Binstock’s re-attribution, if correct, would be wonderfully romantic — full of enough 17th-century scandal and secrecy to inspire new scholarship, exhibitions of Maria’s work and may even be likely to inspire a re-make of the 2003 film, based on Tracey Chevalier’s novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, where Scarlet Johansen played opposite Colin Firth, not as Vermeer’s daughter but as a servant in the Vermeer family home. In such richly ambiguous territory, where do we paint a line between fact and fantasy?

Panelist and Art Institute of Chicago scholar James Elkins found bravery and personality in Binstock’s work as a piece of creative writing but less authority as a scholarly text. David Poeppel, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at NYU and Ulrich Baer, professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU, turned their attention to the other panelists, expressing dissatisfaction with the merits of presented arguments. Poeppel pointed out the methodological flimsiness he noticed in many statements made by art historians who had presented earlier. By day’s end, no presenter had really come out swinging toward the matter at hand. Many speakers seemed extremely careful or often reticent with their opinions.

During the Vermeer’s Daughter symposium, a panel of art historians, including Martha Hollander, Ivan Gaskell and James Elkins (left to right) spoke at NYU’s Cantor Film Center on May 18.

Why is Vermeer and the emergence of Binstock’s insurgent theory handled with kid gloves? If not for a lack of scholarly ingenuity by panelists that would contest Binstock’s ideas or for a reluctance to be in the minority with their point of view, the reason could rest in the balances of financial pressures. Innocuous or circular commentaries by historians don’t shift a work’s value at Christie’s the way that re-attributions tend to do. For instance, how would the value of a Vermeer change if, all of a sudden, it became a Maria Vermeer?

Claims like Binstock’s jiggle a carefully assembled house of cards. “Sometimes people don’t want to see an artist in that way,” remarked writer and panelist Rachel Cohen. “They don’t want to see the homely side of an artist — surrounded by family and children, the mutual dependencies of friendship and influence of teachers and students.” If re-attributed, Vermeer’s number of known paintings would dwindle and the Old Master’s legacy as we know it would shift, along with value of each work — perhaps prompting knee-jerk de-accessioning by museums or upsetting the allegiances between collectors and the historians who have previously made attributions one way or another.

Panelist and Princeton University history professor Anthony Grafton, who was especially poignant as a closing speaker, paused to consider what a glorious find Maria would be if she could in fact be brought into focus. He said of the theory, “If it’s right, it’s something to be pursued with passion, as Binstock has already done, but pursued deeper and in the light of a richer sense of fathers and daughters, women as artists and the larger social world of Dutch art, into which this also is a piece.”

Currently on exhibit in San Francisco’s de Young Museum, “Girl with a Pearl Earring” will arrive at The Frick Collection this fall, on loan from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. While it is re-united with the Frick ‘s Vermeers, New York audiences will be able to see what Binstock claims is both a loving portrait of a daughter but also a portrait of a master in her own right. Lawrence Weschler, an NYU scholar who moderated the symposium agreed with this, or at least with the notion that the young woman in “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is most definitely Vermeer’s child — “any father of a daughter can tell that.”

Vermeer’s Daughter, the all-day symposium, took place on Saturday, May 18 (11am–6pm) at NYU’s Cantor Film Center (36 East 8th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan).

The Stedelijk Museum’s new annex (photo by John Lewis Marshall, courtesy Stedelijk Museum)

Dissing the Stedelijk Museum’s new Mels Crouwel–designed wing, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman off-handedly compared the building to a “ridiculous” bathroom tub that suggested to him the sensation of “hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.” On the speed-rail ride back to Paris from a visit to the Amsterdam institution, it occurred to me that he completely got it wrong. Mels Crouwel did not give the museum a tub; he gave it a captivating sarcophagus, an often tub-shaped funeral receptacle designed to hold a corpse. And that is as it should be. After all, modernism is long dead. The Stedelijk Museum first opened its doors back in 1895 and is widely acknowledged to be among the world’s most important collections of modern art and design.

The Stedelijk Museum escalator entrance (photo by John Lewis Marshall, courtesy Stedelijk Museum)

Of course art does not really die, it just becomes funny — as Kimmelman’s Bach-playing clown might suggest. Mels Crouwel and the Stedelijk seem to have felt this, too, as they have discretely and intelligently installed an audio system in the slick long escalator that, when I visited, was delivering my favorite funny Dada work of all time. In the air were the intriguing and amusing sounds of the German painter Kurt Schwitters: his entertaining audio work “Ursonate” (1922–32) as performed by Arnulf Appel and Eric Erfurth (recorded in 1993).

As I glided up and/or down the escalator (which I did six times, just for the pleasure of it), the 53 minutes of “Ursonate” hovered in the air, while I beheld an optical shimmer produced by the merging line patterns in motion that make up the silver escalator. I know that it isn’t, but it had the feeling of permanent perfection, in that the glimmering tubular space matched the whimsical patterning of the Northern European utterances — sounds that float on your mind.

Gliding up and down that metallic tube, listening to the eccentric guttural rollings of “Ursonate,” I noted how that experience parallels arriving and departing Amsterdam itself by bullet train: the smooth, slightly elevated glide that one experiences while looking out the window. Actually, that sideways glide does have a bit of the feeling of sliding into and out of a tub (and one might suppose a sarcophagus). And perhaps, even, the swooshing glide of a bicycle rider taking leave from an Amsterdam coffee shop.

Cady Noland, “Strapped to a Narrative” (1988) (photo via trendbeheer.com)

This rising-falling silver ride was echoed in one of my favorite visual art installations at the Stedelijk, Cady Noland’s silvery sculpture “Strapped to a Narrative” (1988), as placed just next to the fabulous Andy Warhol disaster painting “Bellevue II” (1963).

Andy Warhol, “Bellevue II” (1963) (photo by Ed Jansen)

Other Stedelijk highlights for me were, of course, the collection of Kazimir Malevich’s mystic Suprematist paintings (1917–19), which float and dance up and down, left and right, on two adjacent walls; the Hanne Darbove room; and Barnett Newman’s deep blue “Cathedra” (1951).

Daan van Golden, “Composition with Liliac Squares” (1964) (courtesy Stedelijk Museum)

I also enjoyed Frank Stella’s silver painting “Newstead Abbey” (1960), Philip Guston’s “Painting, Smoking, Eating” (1973), and the painting “Composition with Lilac Squares” (1964) by Daan van Golden. Like the escalator, Daan van Golden’s beautifully noisy work — something between Op art and deadpan Jasper Johns–like Pop art — also radiated a forceful optical gleam. It achieved this by being nothing more than a painting of a beautiful lilac-colored, checkered handkerchief.

True to form, other Stedelijk masterworks that I greatly appreciated were Willem de Kooning’s “Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louise Point” (1963), “TV-Buddha” (1974) by Nam June Paik, and the less-known Simone Forti’s holographic print “Angel” (1975–77). In general, I treasured the fact that at the Stedelijk labels that identify the art are placed as far away as possible from the art — in the corners of the room — thereby not interrupting the contemplation of the work itself.

Nam June Paik, “TV-Buddha” (1974) (courtesy Paik Studios)

Bypassing the two-hour-long lines to see the Rembrandts at the newly renovated Rijksmuseum, I instead made my way to the Allard Pierson, the archaeological museum of the University of Amsterdam, where I passed a productive two hours. There I discovered two brilliant works, the first being the modest (in size, at least) “Hermaphroditos Statuette” (100–50 BCE).

“Dionysus Sarcophagus” (2 CE) (via Wikimedia)

The second (and greater) encounter was with the Roman marble “Dionysus Sarcophagus” (2 CE), also known as the Bacchus Sarcophagus, the Dionysos Sarcophagus, and the Bacchic Thiasos. It was purchased 30 years ago this year by the Rembrandt Society from an English lord and donated to the collection. Unlike my beloved, well-preserved, and highly polished sarcophagus “Triumph of Dionysos and the Seasons” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “Dionysus Sarcophagus” has degraded radically and its surface is extremely grainy and gritty. This makes a great deal of difference in terms of the art of noise masterpiece that I think it is. To somewhat clearly make out the complex floating image dance of the drunken Bacchus among a bevy of satyrs and maenads performing a goat sacrifice, I had to back up and away from it. The ideal clear viewing distance was at about 40 feet. This was not possible from all four sides, however.

Detail of “Dionysus Sarcophagus” (via Wikimedia)

As I approached the “Dionysus Sarcophagus” the woozy images tended to melt into a highly textural noise field, as grainy and gritty as it can get. This play of image-merged-into-noise-field, for me, suggested perfectly the drunken ecstatic Dionysian state of resurrection that the narrative suggests: that the stamping of grapes into wine signifies death transformed into new life.

The Stedelijk Museum (Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) is open daily from 10 am to 6 pm.

The Allard Pierson Museum (Oude Turfmarkt 127, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 am to 5 pm and 1 pm to 5pm on Saturday and Sunday.

The artists of “Fresh Faces from the 1970s”: (from left to right) Anton Perich, Marc H. Miller, Colette Lumiere, and Neke Carson. (Photo: Curt Hoppe)

Despite my longtime interest in New York art from the 1970s, I somehow never imagined delving into an artistic process called, quite literally, “rectal realism.”  However, over a week ago, I found myself in a small room at the Gershwin Hotel at “Fresh Faces from the 1970s,” a film screening and discussion, watching artist Neke Carson painting “I love you” with a paintbrush shoved in his butt.

Organized by artist and art historian Marc H. Miller, who has emerged with his website 98 Bowery and online gallery Gallery 98 as one of the main supporters of 1970s art, “Fresh Faces from the 1970s” gathered together three artists associated with 1970s downtown Manhattan. The screening featured performance artist, musician and street artist Colette, who is currently going by the name Colette Lumiere though she has inhabited various personaes throughout her career; photographer, digital painter and Public Access-provocateur Anton Perich; and witty artist, musician and rectal-realist painter Neke Carson.

While exhibitions and publications continually revisit art from the 1970s, these three artists, perhaps due to their refusal to be easily slotted into a particular style or movement, are less recognized than some of their peers. Experimental, sometimes filthy and often very fun, the films screened in “Fresh Faces from the 1970s” revealed an era of art-making undeterred by censorship, outrage, or lack of sales, which could and should inspire the artistic practices of today’s contemporary artists.

As Marc H. Miller explained in his introduction to the evening:

“We thought we were living in the shadow of the 1960s, but we seemed to have a lot more fun.”

Revealing this palpable sense of amusement, the evening began with “A Pirate In Venice” (2012), a film directed by Frederike Shaefer, that both follows Colette as she prepares for a performance at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and presents a loose history of her work. Watching Colette wander around Venice in her strikingly beautiful and slightly intimidating Victorian punk fashion, the film captured her edge and subversiveness, which has influenced pop stars from Lady Gaga to Madonna.

Colette, “A View of the Lips, Street Piece I” (circa 1973) and “The Ear, Street Piece I #8″ (1973), from Postcards From the Story of my Life (Gallery 98)

“A Pirate In Venice” traces the various incarnations of Colette’s artistic practice from her early anonymous street art, in which she painted on the heavily trafficked Manhattan streets, to sleeping in the Clocktower Gallery, to her window installation at Fiorucci.  As Colette plays with the appearance of the female body in art history, fashion and popular culture, the film suggests Colette should be placed in the canon of significant women performance artists.

Even the disembodied voice of MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch appears in the film, praising Colette’s installation “Real Dream” (1975) at the Clocktower Gallery where she slept nude, surrounded by pink satin. While Tilda Swinton’s nap in the MoMA Atrium is certainly the most publicized, Colette deserves credit as the woman who first slept in an art institution as performance forty years ago.

After Colette’s fabric-draped performances in “A Pirate In Venice,” Anton Perich screened a series of censored clips from his Public Access television show, Anton Perich Presents.  A precursor to the freedom of YouTube, Public Access television provided a venue for any artist, like Perich, who wanted to publicly air their material. With clips ranging from Colette sleeping in the nude to sketches with Perich’s friends, to interviews with the mesmerizingly cranky Lydia Lunch, the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, Andy Warhol, and Salvador Dali, Perich’s clips illustrated the democratic and accessible social scene and nightlife of the 1970s.

My favorite clip from Perich’s collection was undoubtedly a silly sketch featuring drag icon and Warhol beauty Candy Darling with Taylor Mead, poet and star of Andy Warhol’s film Taylor Mead’s Ass (1965), who sadly passed two weeks ago.  Raunchy, captivating and thoroughly campy, Mead plays Darling’s disgusted and disappointed father, depicting the pervasive sense of fun that Miller attributed to the art of the 1970s.

Neke Carson, “Rectal Realist Portrait of Fred Flintstone” (1973) and “Rectal Realist Portrait of Andy Warhol” (1973) (Gallery 98)

Last but certainly not the least memorable, Neke Carson, who currently runs the programming at the Gershwin Hotel, presented the film I had been both waiting for and dreading since I received the invitation for the event: Anton Perich’s short film from Anton Perich Presents (1973) documenting Carson’s “rectal realism.” Looking to define a new artistic technique separate from hand-eye coordination, Carlson developed “rectal realism,” completing hilariously realistic and admittedly quite good paintings of subjects like Fred Flintstone and Andy Warhol.

Luckily, Miller’s Gallery 98 made Perich’s film available online so I don’t have to explain in detail what Carson’s method actually entails. As Carson quipped, “You can look away if you want to look away.”

Even though I consider myself nearly impossible to shock (my tastes ranging from John Waters’s films to Dennis Cooper’s novels), Carson’s rectal-realist painting undoubtedly shocked me and for that, he should be praised. Transgressive and certainly pushing the limits of good taste, rectal-realist painting was a sleazy revelation. Art should be shocking, questioning the viewer’s limits, stomach and fortitude for trauma.

Documentation of Neke Carson’s rectal realist portrait of Andy Warhol (Photo: Anton Perich, Gallery 98)

Apparently, I wasn’t the only Waters fan struck by Carson’s rectal-realist painting. In a hysterical anecdote, Miller recalled that someone stole Carson’s “Portrait of Andy Warhol” (1973) at the Punk Art exhibition in Washington D.C. that he and Betty Ringma curated in 1978 during “Baltimore Night” when they hosted director John Waters and his toothless starlet Edith Massey. (Unsurprisingly, a Baltimore man later returned the painting.)

While events like ”Fresh Faces from the 1970s” certainly fuel the nostalgia that current New Yorkers feel for the more dangerous, derelict and permitting days of downtown New York and its art scene, I left “Fresh Faces From The 1970s” not wishing that I was a part of that scene, but that younger, contemporary artists today might follow the three artists’ lead. Colette, Perich and Carson all push viewers’ and institutions’ boundaries, creating a freewheeling approach to art without a predetermined, popular, or even accepted style or subject matter.

As Colette explains in “A Pirate in Venice”:

“We did these things not because we wanted to be famous but because we just wanted to and needed to.”

A Ghost Army soldier next to a rubber M4 Sherman tank, 93 pounds fully inflated (image courtesy the National Archives and PBS)

There are many reasons that the US and Allied troops won World War II. One of the more obscure ones may be the 1,100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, aka the Ghost Army.

The Ghost Army was basically what it sounds like — an invisible shadow army of the larger one. Its job was to stage elaborate deceptions to trick the Germans and lure them off track, doing so with three units: the 603rd Camouflage Engineers (visual); the 3132 Signal Service Company Special (sonic); and the Signal Company Special (radio). All together, the groups used dummy inflatable tanks and airplanes, sound effects of tanks rolling and troops marching, fake radio transmissions, and more to carry out 21 missions, each time attempting to convince the Germans of the false presence of tens of thousands of US troops. They didn’t always succeed, and they had casualties along the way (they were never armed beyond their fake weapons, which seems crazy), but their last mission, Operation Viersen in March 1945, was by all accounts their most successful. The Ghost Army managed to redirect German soldiers preparing for an American attack across the Rhine, allowing the actual American soldiers to advance with relative ease.

The deception of the Ghost Army came about through an impressive combination of skill and artistry, and in fact, many of the men in the visual unit were artists themselves, plucked directly from art schools. Ellsworth Kelly was among them, as were fashion designer Bill Blass and wildlife artist Arthur Singer.

The existence and history of the army are fascinating, and not a story that’s been widely told. (The project was classified until 1996.) Author and film producer Rick Beyer has spent seven years tracking down documents, interviewing veterans, and piecing together the tale of the Ghost Army; his documentary premieres tomorrow night on PBS. I emailed to ask him a few questions.

*   *   *

The official history of the Ghost Army, with the unit’s ghost emblem at the bottom (click to enlarge) (all images via ghostarmy.org unless otherwise noted)

Jillian Steinhauer: How did you first hear about the Ghost Army? What made you want to explore and tell this story?

Rick Beyer: I first learned about the Ghost Army eight years ago when a mutual friend introduced me to Martha Gavin, a woman in the Boston area whose uncle was in the unit. Martha was passionate in her belief that this little-known story needed to be told in a documentary. Her enthusiasm was the spark that started the whole project.

I have always loved quirky history stories, the strange, “can you believe it?” stuff. In fact, I’ve written an entire book series, The Greatest Stories Never Told, that focuses on exactly those types of stories. The idea that there were American soldiers in World War II going into battle with inflatable tanks and sound-effects records was so bizarre, so contrary to every image from every war movie I’ve ever seen, that it immediately attracted my attention.

On top of that was the fact that many of the soldiers in the unit were artists, who used their spare time to paint and sketch what they saw on the battlefield. The first time I met Martha Gavin, at a Starbucks in Lexington, she was carrying an armload of three-ring binders filled with her uncle’s wartime artworks. I was captivated with the way they presented such a unique and intimate perspective of the war. And that’s how I got hooked.

JS: How were the men recruited into the Ghost Army?

RB: The US Army decided to create this deception unit, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops (aka the Ghost Army) , in January 1944. Because they were in a hurry, they drew on existing units to put it together. To handle visual deception, they selected the 603rd Camouflage Engineers. This unit had originally been formed in 1942, and many of the people in it were established artists or art students. According to the official US Army history of the unit, “It was composed mainly of artists from New York and Philadelphia with an average IQ of 119.” Recruiting was done through art schools such as Pratt and Cooper Union, as well as by word of mouth. In some cases, it was the soldiers, looking for a way to put their art skills to work, who found the camouflage unit. Of course it wasn’t secret at that point — the secrecy didn’t come until later when the 603rd became part of the Ghost Army.

A page from Bill Blass’s sketchbook during the war

JS: The film touches on this briefly, but can you explain a bit more about the visual deceptions and stunts that the 603rd Camouflage Engineers pulled off in the US, before they were deployed to Europe?

RB: The camouflage unit was involved in a number of projects before it became part of the Ghost Army.  They camouflaged the plant in Baltimore where B-26 bombers were made, as well as large railroad guns near Amagansett, NY. In addition, in 1943, the 603rd took part in large scale maneuvers in Tennessee and Louisiana (along with hundreds of thousands of other soldiers.) They were camouflaging artillery, headquarters, etc.

Left: troops sketching in a bombed-out church in Trevieres; right: a painting by one of the men of the same church

JS: The film paints a very positive picture of the Ghost Army, but I’ve read that their results were somewhat mixed. Is there an accepted opinion on how successful they really were at deceiving the Germans?

RB: The Ghost Army carried out 21 different deception missions on the battlefields of Europe, and it is clear that some were more successful than others. In the case of Operation Bettembourg, where they filled a hole in Patton’s line for a week in September, 1944, and Operation Viersen, where they deceived the Germans about where two American divisions would cross the Rhine in March, 1945, there is good evidence of success. In other deceptions, the evidence is not as definitive. In a few cases its clear that they did not have the hoped-for impact. So I think describing their results as mixed is pretty accurate.

One interesting point is that there is absolutely no evidence that the Germans ever discovered that there was a deception unit operating against them.

A map of Ghost Army operations (click to enlarge)

JS: My first reaction while watching was that these missions were basically suicide. Luckily, it didn’t play out that way, and in the end the Ghost Army suffered only a small number of casualties. But did the men, when you interviewed them, talk about this aspect of the project? Were they terrified? (Did anyone defect?)

RB: I think it takes a special kind of braveness to operate on or at the front when your goal is to draw enemy fire and you don’t have any heavy weapons with which to defend yourself. Many admit that they were scared, and they count their blessings that they made it home alive. Of course not everyone did … a handful of people in the unit were killed, and a couple of dozen wounded, mostly by artillery. I don’t know of anybody who deserted.

JS: The Ghost Army project was classified until 1996. Do you have any thoughts on why it was kept quiet for so long, and/or do you know any of the circumstances behind the decision to declassify it?

RB: The experts I have talked to suggest that it was kept secret so that if the Cold War turned hot, we could use the deception techniques in fighting the Russians. Fred Fox, an officer in the unit who went on to work in the Eisenhower White House, tried in the ’50s and ’60s to get the official army history of the unit declassified, so he could write about it, but the Pentagon refused.

I’ve heard tantalizing hints that there may be parts of the story that are still considered secret, but of course it is hard to nail that down.

A Ghost Army half-track outfitted with playback equipment and a 500-pound speaker with a range of 15 miles (image courtesy the National Archives and PBS)

JS: Was WWII the first time the US used this type of military deception? Did we go on to use it in other conflicts, and do we still?

RB: Military deception has been around for a long time, at least since the Trojan Horse, and probably well before then. What made the Ghost Army unique is that it was specific unit dedicated only to deception, that it was mobile (like a traveling road show) and multimedia (visual, sonic, radio, and “special effects.”) Certainly some of those techniques have been used since then … for example, in the first Gulf War, I know the US used both sonic deception and inflatable tanks, and I am sure that radio deception is a very active field. But for some reason the US Army is not anxious to share with me the details of how it conducts deceptions in the present day!

The Ghost Army premieres on PBS tomorrow night, May 21, at 8 pm EST.

Working alone in a studio can do things to your head.

Visiondivision created this unusual proposal called “The Miami Sun” and hopes to build it as a landmark in Miami’s Bayfront Park. The designers explain the idea for this hotel, landmark, casino, and water park as follows: “The new monument is a thin, half sphere-shaped hotel with a casino on its lower floors and an observation deck on its upper floors, which gradually shifts its colors during the day, mimicking a dimmed sun at daytime and creating spectacular sunrises and blazing sunsets for the park at dusk and dawn. At night time it shifts to a moon. The sun and the tropical archipelago will be a relaxed and positive monument that many people also can enjoy physically and that symbolize both the laid back way of the Miami lifestyle as well as the flamboyant decadence.” (via designboom)

This week, photos in museums, why art critics matter, a street art site that “steals”, the East Village Eye goes online, political economy, a rapper’s run in with Marxism on Twitter, what American voters think of hipsters and more …

 Every wonder why you can’t take photographs in some museums? Here is a good discussion by Carolina Miranda of the issues around the issue over at Art News.

 From WNYC’s audio piece on why art critics matter starts with this sad piece of information:

The last full-time art critic in the city of Chicago was laid off by Time Out magazine last month. Now, there are fewer than ten full-time art critics employed by newspapers and magazines in the country.

Though, are critics “bossy” like the speaker says? I don’t think so, not good ones anyway. This whole segment is a little old fogy, and demonstrates IMO why “art critics” are dying, because they aren’t adapting to new realities and prefer to pontificate rather than engage.

 One website is taking street art off the street and selling it, and Berlin Art Parasites has something to say about it. Even though I mostly agree with the post, at the end of the day the act of street art is illegal, so taking it off the street isn’t exactly “stealing,” no? Though the background and motivation of this strange street art sale site is fascinating:

According to Street Art 4 Sale, who operates anonymously for his own “personal safety,” this ingenious little operation began after the proprietor saw the film Vigilante Vigilanteand felt compelled to,“Help out with the growing vandalism problem in the city.” But it was only after watching Exit Through the Gift Shop, the popular film by street artist Banksy, that our masked merchant, “Realized the potential value of the ‘art’ littering the streets” and, “Decided to sell what we clean up to help monetize the project as well as give back thru charity to the homeless of the city.”

And writer Hannah Nelson-Teutsch is completely on mark with this point:

Quite frankly, I find the notion that someone could perceive urban artwork as vandalism and yet profit from its clear and present value as a cultural product, suspect if not outright hypocritical.

 The Onion does it again: “Artists Announce They’ve Found All The Beauty They Can In Urban Decay.” The last line is the best:

The world’s artists later confirmed plans to spend at least another 50 years churning out heavy-handed depictions of the inherent soullessness of suburban sprawl.

 Anton Vidokle, who should write more IMO, has a good read over at e-flux about the political economy of art, including this insightful lede paragraph:

Since the early days of modernism, artists have faced a peculiar dilemma with regard to the economy surrounding their work. By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one hand this allowed for a certain rejection of normative bourgeois life, it also required that artists entrust their livelihoods to middlemen — to private agents or state organizations. One result was that some of the most influential modernist artists, from Paul Gauguin to Mondrian and Rodchenko, died in abject poverty, not because their work was unpopular but because the economy produced by the circulation and distribution of their work was entirely controlled by others, whether under capitalist or communist regimes. While a concern with labor and fair compensation in the arts, exemplified by such recent initiatives as W.A.G.E. or earlier efforts such as the Art Workers Coalition, has been an important part of artistic discourse, so far it has focused primarily on public critique as a means to shame and reform institutions into developing a more fair system of compensation for “content providers.” It seems to me that we need to move beyond the critique of art institutions if we want to improve the relationship between artists and the economy surrounding their work.

 Possibly related? Rapper Lupe Fiasco’s management takes control of his Twitter feed following Marxist theory debate.

Some of the classic covers of The East Village Eye (via east-village-eye.com)

 The East Village Eye (1979–87), which was one of the great punk media outlets of the 1980s, is now slowly digitizing the back issues so they can be searchable online. The Eye published a number of emerging writers and featured numerous artists on its cover, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Sue Coe, Richard Hambleton, and Mike Bidlo.

 A New York theater critic Kevin Williamson got peeved at a woman using her cell phone during a performance, and decided to take matters into his own hands and chuck the phone against a wall. While we can all relate to being bothered by another’s digital habits during a performance, the culprit and the vigilante both seem slightly disturbed.

 Meet Jeff Koons’ balloon animal consultant.

 Last Friday night, Kanye West premiered his new song, “New Slaves,” on the streets of Williamsburg through large-scale projections on the side of buildings. A brilliant marketing tactic, which was, of course, followed by an appearance on Saturday Night Live. It turns out the projection wasn’t exclusive to Brooklyn, it has or will take place on 66 different buildings in 10 cities around the globe (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Toronto, Paris, London, Berlin, and Sydney).

 The new Libyan government is searching for former dictator Qaddafi’s art collection:

Saif al-Islam, Qaddafi’s second son, who is in custody charged with crimes against humanity, was known to be a keen art collector and reportedly active on the Islamic art circuit. He was due to open a museum of Islamic art in Tripoli in September 2011, but its construction was halted by the uprising. Exhibits destined for the museum had already been bought from London auction houses.

 There’s some controversy about this year’s World Press Photo winner, as some people are saying it is a composite, though the photographer says it isn’t. World Press Photo is standing by the winner.

 And Public Policy Polling polled American voters’ attitudes towards hipsters and found some surprising (and bizarre) info:

• 10% of Americans consider themselves hipsters (15% Democrat, 10% Republican, 3% Independents)
• 50% of voters 18–29 consider themselves hipsters
• 27% of Americans think hipsters should be subject to a special tax
• 33% of Hispanics consider themselves hipsters, versus 6% of whites and 10% of African Americans
• 54% or Hispanics think hipsters make a positive contribution to society, versus 21% of white votes and 13% of African-American voters
• 17% of people in the Northeast identify as hipsters, versus 4% in the Midwest, 9% in the South, and 7% in the West (though there’s a high percentage of people in the South and West who aren’t sure how they identify)

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.

Barent Fabritius, “The Slaughtered Pig” (1656), oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm (click to enlarge) (Staatliche Museen, Berlin, image via Web Gallery of Art)

If we can now grow a hamburger in a test tube, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, we will still be able to get to the meat of the matter?

“I have heard people eat most heartily of another man’s meat, that is, what they do not pay for.”

—William Wycherley, The Country Wife

“The method must be purest meat
. and no symbolic dressing,
actual visions & actual prisons”
. as seen then and now.

—Allen Ginsberg, “On Burrough’s Work”

“Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.”

—William Hazlitt

OH EASE OH BODY STRAIN OH LOVE OH EASE ME NOT!
WOUND-BORE
be real, show organs, show blood, OH let me
be as a flower. Let ugliness arise without care
grow side by side with beauty. Oh twist
be real to me. Fly smoke! Meat-real, as nerves
TENDON
Ion, FLAME, Muscle, not banners but bulks as
we are all “deer”
and move as beasts. Stalking in our forest
as these are speech words!

—Michael McClure, from “Dark Brown”

“It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.”

—Albert Einstein, referring to clothing.

“Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself,
And so shall starve with feeding.”

—William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“I’m a meathead. I can’t help it, man. You’ve got smart people and you’ve got dumb people.”

—Keanu Reeves

“When the old men do the fighting
And the young men all look on
And the young girls eat their mothers meat
From tubes of plasticon

Be wary of these my gentle friends
Of all the skins you breed
They have a tasty habit
They eat the hands that bleed”

—Mick Jagger, from “Memo from Turner”

“The only meat I eat is from animals I’ve killed myself.”

—Mark Zuckerberg

She & Him: Volume 3

Merge, 2013 [BUY]

It’s funny to watch card-carrying members of the perceived Brooklyn counterculture sell their songs to Starbucks and Levi’s, but I’m worried about the quality of the product. Conventionally fetching femme fatale Zooey Deschanel and conventionally subtle singer-songwriter M. Ward have stumbled on an engaging synthesis of baroque country and retro-doo-wop, the kind of music that gets played in college coffee shops. Like most supposed counterculture merchandise, it manages to be both willfully insular and glazed entirely in sugar.

Why the contemplative Ward indulges Deschanel’s frisky antics and commercial ambition I don’t know, but they clearly have some chemistry going, even if they’ve only bonded over liking vintage French movies and pre-Beach Boys harmony groups. Their slippery wall-of-sound usages impress and surprise even when they sneak ukuleles and violins into the mix, with many of their tunes sounding impossibly familiar and completely fresh. But they’re also as square as Michael Bublé, who also released a Christmas album in 2011, and more calculating. Like, oh I don’t know, Alma Cogan, Deschanel affects the all-American drawl you never hear anymore outside of black-and-white movies, glossing over vowels and consonants alike in the pursuit of precious domesticity. It’s all too consciously cute, too disingenuously naive, too willfully insular and utterly imaginary, a nostalgic throwback to a previous stylistic era that only ever existed in the popular American imagination to begin with.

Despite all her passes at mall music, which will only increase as her audience gets more accustomed to her authority, Deschanel is basically a girl-next-door type. Only most girls next door don’t keep playing the ingénue at 33. Or slip into French on their cover of “Sunday Girl.” Really, French on “Sunday Girl.” She sounds totally natural doing it, too, as befits the kind of playfully trite cosmopolitan she probably is and has so much fun selling herself as.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Mosquito

Interscope, 2013 [BUY]

Unlike most 21st-century New York punk bands, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren’t purists, or ironists either. What attracts them to the genre is its brutal potency, its propensity for trashing all bona fides and just immersing itself in raw catharsis. Ten years after their debut, they’re thrilled that they still exist, and their style has just gotten cruder and nastier.

Frontwoman Karen O is rather intimidating, shrieking like she wants to lose her voice, and when she tries to sing normally she sounds hoarse indeed. Why anyone would take this hipster model for a sex symbol is beyond me; she acts like a dominatrix. But the violence translates to the music, which is downright exhilarating. Nick Zinner’s wildly loaded guitar tears up the album, calmly cruising forward for a while, then suddenly detonating with a killer riff veering in and out of nowhere before immediately regaining control, only it won’t be long before he loses it again, and somehow each song manages to follow this unbearably tense pattern. Soaked in hideous distortions and indiscriminate echo, the band rumbles with severe, vaguely gothic muscle you can’t help but admire. At any rate, O earns her proclamation: “Heed the call my slave,” “I wanna be an alien,” “I will suck your, suck your, suck your… blood!”

Even if you’re not invested in sadomasochism or extracting pleasure from pain, not to mention the alternative-rock pose, this band will thrill as long as you like having fun and don’t mind getting your hands dirty. There’s nothing to extract on this jarring album. All the pleasure is right on the surface.

Satinder Sartaaj: Afsaaney Sartaaj De

Firdaus, 2013 [BUY]

I thought this Sufi singer had invented a revolutionary new style of international crossover until I realized those weren’t synthesizers at all; this album is mostly if not entirely acoustic, which shocked and impressed me even more. How it’ll go over in India I have no idea, but from the warped perspective of Western pop, always my frame of reference, it’s remarkably unified and singular.

From what I’ve read about the lyrics, they seem pretty preachy, with one song allegedly an ode to all the dead trees in the world. This could be why it’s easy to put aside the language barrier and enjoy the record as sound. Saturated with the cheap waves of the harmonium pipe organ, its smashing sitar/lute/etc figures simply mesmerize, creeping along at their own majestic pace, and the popping hand drums seem ancillary to the motion of the music, as the constant riffs are plucked so relentlessly and rhythmically they churn out a woozy self-contained dynamic. It’s slow and weird; it’s warm and glowing; it tickles and gushes and soars. Every second is plotted out so as to maximize its aesthetic intrigue, and even on the most plodding songs Sartaaj’s calm lightness leads the glimmering backup to swelling, repetitive climaxes. His melodies are simple, circular, and theoretically capable of looping onward to eternity.

With Sartaaj’s calm chant radiating supreme, serene wisdom, this album is a painkiller, meant to help you relax and get stress off your back. Don’t be surprised if it excites you as well.

Lady Antebellum: Golden

Capitol Nashville/Universal, 2013 [BUY]

Ever since 2011, when I took a relatively large number of planes and heard Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” played gently in the background before takeoff on every single one of them (I counted! and on more than one airline!), I’ve thought of this band as the epitome of megacorporation Nashville blandout. Vanilla-smooth, with only regional color separating them from that big, undefined, squishy mass of adult-oriented rock, they truly are the modern Doobie Brothers.

Despite the brightly soulful guitar picking, the drippy pedal steel, the generic-Southern singers, the way power ballads start sounding restrained once you’ve heard eleven of them in a row all steamrollering their way on home, babe, the album isn’t as generalized or homogenized as it sounds at first. In fact, I count two lyrical details in “Better Off Now that You’re Gone” alone. Although they’re another chapter in the timeless tale of inoffensivity as commercial strategy, don’t ever think they’re not offensive. The way they professionally and skillfully appropriate countrified instrumental techniques, decorate them with clichés, scrub them clean with bright production overlay, and serve it all up in a delicious melting pot of banality insults the American public whether the American public knows it or not.

Band members Hilary Scott, Charles Kelley, and Dave Haywood remain faceless the whole way through, nothing wrong with that, might as well buy it, right? And hey, they’re refined, subtle, and tasteful by the standards of egregious overkill. Wouldn’t want to offend anybody, now.

Dan Voisine, “Peg” (2013), oil on wood panel, 26 x 22 inches (all images courtesy McKenzie Fine Art)

Don Voisine’s oil paintings on wood brim with all kinds of tensions: between flatness and spatiality; stasis and torque; containment and expansion; light and dark; tonal gradations and sharp contrasts; matte and glossy surfaces; transparency and solidity. Once you begin noticing the variety of stresses animating these paintings, more start to emerge — that’s how finely and tightly tuned they are.

Voisine seems to view painting as a contested object, a place where conflict and dialogue overlap out of necessity and urgency, with neither superseding the other. His works invite scrutiny, requiring the constant refocusing of attention. Despite their deployment of a central form comprised of two black shapes, one overlaying the other, the paintings defy the simplicity we associate with minimalism and Frank Stella’s oft-cited credo: what you see is what you see. They are paintings made to disassembled and reassembled in the mind’s eye.

In an interview with Brent Hallard about his exhibition at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA (November 4–December 23, 2009), Voisine made this observation about his use of black:

I became very interested in black paintings, early Stella, Kelly, McLaughlin, that magnificent gigantic black Clyfford Still at the Art Institute of Chicago, and of course Reinhardt. They seemed to be among the most difficult, challenging and least seductive paintings around. I had to give it a shot.

From 1992 to 1999, Voisine painted a centered black form surrounded by a border. Often the black form was notched, interrupted by white spaces. The figure (or black form) was either a flat plane or a thing in space. The fact that it could be read as one or the other introduced another level of sentient tension into the work. Since 1999, when he introduced the diagonal into his work, Voisine — who has absorbed aspects of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich — has been expanding an idiom that is all his own. In that sense, he has extended beyond what many theoreticians assert are culminations — or end points — in the history of painting, entering into a territory that exists outside language, particularly the narrative that concludes with the death of painting. Voisine’s quietly insolent stance points to one of painting’s particular strengths – it can resist being domesticated by language.

2.

Don Voisine, “Dub Step” (2013), oil and flasche on wood panel, 11.75 x 11.75 inches (click to enlarge)

In his third exhibition at McKenzie (May 3–June 19, 2013), Voisine pushes the tension to another level, underscoring the ongoing conflict between expansion and containment. In the small, square “Dub Step” (2013), the lower left and upper right arm of a black X extends past the wide black border running along the top and bottom of the painting. At the same time, the X is contained on each side by a pale, olive green band, which is joined by a dark green strip of a different width running along each edge.

In “Dub Step” and other paintings in the exhibition I kept putting the black planes together and taking them apart. The X is both a form and a gesture (X marks the spot). The diagonal thrust of its upper right and lower left arms conveys the deeply human desire to reach beyond the borders containing it.

In the formal tensions Voisine establishes in his painting — as the result of a process, his elements never appear forced or extraneous — all kinds of feelings and possible readings come into play. This is one of the deep, abiding strengths of the artist’s best paintings; they become analogical. In the late 1950s, Stella squeezed space and meaning out of painting. Fifty years later, Voisine has found ways to squeeze both space and meaning back in, to open up what has been pronounced closed. Voisine wasn’t the only one to recover painting, but, unlike many others who rejected the narrative of painting’s death, he did it with a reductive vocabulary of hard-edged geometric forms.

3.

Don Voisine, “Rickshaw” (2013), oil on wood panel, 16 x 12 inches (click to enlarge)

Voisine works on squares and rectangles, both vertical and horizontal formats, with some horizontal formats extended to become synonymous with panoramic views. He seems open to trying any proportion and color. In this exhibition, I found myself associating his palette with office storage units (yellow-beige and olive green), gothic literature (violet and scarlet), young girls’ birthday celebrations (red and pink) and nature (deep blue). His whites are never blank offsets for his blacks but colors in themselves, ranging from cool to warm.

When he overlays one black plane (usually glossy and semi-transparent) over a visceral black plane resembling a veil of charcoal, Voisine defines a form which viewers are provoked to undo. Such an overlay — in which each plane is distinct in its color, texture and relationship to light — seems to me one of the most imaginative reconfigurings of Reinhardt’s juxtapositions of different blacks to date. Our attention shifts between unity and separation without ever coming to a final conclusion, leaving the painting open to further speculation. Reinhardt may have done the “last painting,” but Voisine has done the one that comes after. In doing so, he is claiming some measure of equality with his predecessor — a heretical state that hierarchical thinkers can never accept, much less understand.

4.

Asymmetry and optical shifts play an increasingly larger role in the work Voisine has put up in his current exhibition at McKenzie Fine Art. In the diptych, “Tip” (2013), he abuts two squarish rectangles to make something nearly twice as long as it is tall. In the painting, which has wide red bands running along the top and bottom edges, two tilting rectangles are overlaid across black, abutted rectangles, whose edges parallel the painting’s physical dimensions.

Unlike Malevich’s diagonal rectangles and parallelograms, which soar up, Voisine’s rectangles tend to tilt down, as if sliding out of whatever secure position they might have once had. There is something funny and sad about the way these tilted rectangles, their corners pushed against the painting’s physical edges or a constraining band of paint, have come to rest.

Don Voisine, “Till” (2013), oil on wood panel, diptych, 44 x 46 inches each panel

An elegiac current runs through some of Voisine’s paintings, but that certainly is not all they are about. His black X — which he keeps changing, from work to work –brings to mind Ronald Bladen’s monumental “X” (1967) spanning the atrium of the Corcoran Museum. Voisine’s paintings may be relatively small in scale, certainly in comparison to their minimalist precedents, but the expansive forms feel monumental. It seems to me that the Corcoran would be the ideal place for his first museum survey. It is certainly about time that such attention is paid to this calm pioneer.

Don Voisine is be on view at McKenzie Fine Art (55 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through June 9.

John Walker, “Red Yellow Coastal Cross North Branch” (2011), oil on canvas, 84 x 66 inches (all images courtesy the artist)

I have long admired John Walker’s work for its unique combination of tough materialism and romantic lyricism. I recently met him in his studio at Boston University, where he is the head of the MFA program. My visit with Walker happened to take place on the Thursday after the Boston Marathon tragedy, and I spent Friday’s citywide lockdown with painters Gideon Bok and Meghan Brady.

In retrospect, my time with Walker feels like a complete experience, not exactly separate from the events, but certainly a place where painting can encapsulate and transmit the range of human drama and emotion. Walker’s painting is about this faith, in the mark, in the hand, and in abstract form.

Walker was born in 1939 in Birmingham, England, and studied at the Birmingham College of Art and La Grande Chaumière in Paris. He was awarded the Harkness Fellowship in 1969 and began dividing his time between the United States and England during the 1970s, exhibiting in New York and becoming associated with post-war abstraction. He then lived and taught for several years in Australia, where he became interested in Oceanic Art. He taught at Cooper Union and Yale University before assuming his current position at Boston University. He has exhibited widely internationally, including representing England at the 1972 Venice Biennale, three solo exhibitions at the Phillips Collection, in 1978, 1982, and 2002, and in Beijing in 2010.

His major bodies of work have included “canvas collages”: monumental collages that incorporate pieces of other paintings; the Alba paintings, which use an abstract, vertical form as an essential part of their painterly vocabulary; “text paintings” which juxtapose painted words with images; and small landscape-based paintings of Seal Point, Maine, where Walker has a residence.

*   *   *

Jennifer Samet: Can you tell me about your early exposure to art and how growing up in England affected your painting? What was your family’s relationship to art?

John Walker: I grew up in Birmingham, England, one of the most industrial cities anywhere. Through my brothers, I was introduced to the English countryside. They were recreational fisherman — perhaps in reaction to the Second World War. As a young boy, I followed them everywhere. Basically, though, I lived right in the middle of an industrial city.

John Walker, “Oceania 7″ (1982), oil on canvas, 84 x 66 inches (click to enlarge) (collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

I suppose my introduction to art was my mother, who was a fantastic woman. When she was twelve, her mother died in childbirth, and she had to leave school to look after her brothers, and a new baby. But somehow, she managed to educate herself. She was a supplier of knowledge; she took me to museums, showed me what a Constable looked like, read Shakespeare to us.

She was what you would call in those days a “street mother” — one of those women that society depended on, to function. If someone gave birth, she was there. If someone died, she’d wrap him up. And of course, I followed her everywhere, so I saw all that. She lived until she was 102. She was a life force.

My father had been very damaged in the First World War. And they met when she was an auxiliary nurse. They believed in that awful Victorian idea, fed by the ruling class, that work was a virtue, that it brought you close to godliness. My mother was a cleaning lady, and my father was a mailman. I always had a job. When I was eight, one of her jobs was cleaning the floors at the Woolworth’s. In those days, you cleaned floors on your hands and knees, with a scrub brush. She would do one aisle, and I’d do the other. At the end of it, when we got on the bus to go home, she had in her bag some ink that she’d “knocked off the table.” Drawing materials. She had a tough life, but there was always a way to get things done. When I said I wanted to be an artist, that was it; she never said no.

JS: You have lived in Australia and the United States. Why did you decide to leave England?

JW: I had become very conscious of the power of American art. It looked amazing, and I couldn’t find that kind of companionship in England. The English art world in the 1950s and 60s was very exclusive. It wasn’t easy to meet real artists outside of the art schools. When I looked at all those famous photographs of the Cedar Bar it looked more democratic. I never really wanted to go to London.

I won some art prizes; I’d done one or two things that people were interested in. I set up a studio in the countryside, and I was driving a truck, making deliveries to docks. I would get up at 4 AM, get back to my studio by noon, so I had the rest of the day to paint. I was living in a village called Blackwell, and one day this woman came up the stairs. She said she was visiting someone in the village, was told an artist lived here, and would I mind if she had a look around? I was painting these big paintings, at least 20-feet wide. There were thirty or forty paintings that size, and we went through them. She sat down, I gave her some tea, and she said, “Have you ever thought of showing in New York?” And I said, “No. Of course not.” She said, “Would you like to? We could show them in my gallery.” It was Betty Parsons. We became very good friends. So I had a show with her in 1967. I came to New York once in that period. And then Lawrence Gowing suggested I apply for the Harkness Fellowship, which brought foreigners to New York. I went there with my family and we lived down on Grand Street. There were about three galleries down in SoHo at that time, like Betty Cuningham, who I showed with. After that, I was invited to Australia on a fellowship.

JS: How did living in Australia, and specifically, your exposure to Aboriginal art, impact your painting?

JW: I became very interested in the Australian bark paintings, and bought a lot of them. I decided I wanted to go north, to the barrier reef. I was a kid from the slum in England, so I always wanted to go to the best places in the world. Then I found out that, in the interior, there are sites with these rock paintings. They are the real thing; it isn’t contemporary art!

I returned to England, but then, Fred Williams, a great painter in Australia, asked me to come back and run the painting department at a school there. I said I would stay three years, but I ended up staying six. It gave me an opportunity, to love Australia, to love the artists. I had to put an art school together, and there were a lot of problems. So I got a couple of Aborigines to be professors there. And I found a lot of women whose husbands were very prominent in the art world, but who had always been in the background, continuing to paint, with no one caring about them. I invited them to teach, and they brought a lot of wisdom into the school. I had six wonderful years.

JS: You also collect African art. Can you tell me about your interest in African art?

JW: It is about that kind of authenticity, which art is, at its best. It is digested over a long period of time, and that gives it real, human values. It is unapproachable for me, but I know it when I see it. It is consistent; it’s not like the Western tradition, where you have to change all the time.

Also, as in all painting: it’s not about how many ideas you have; it’s what you do with that idea. There was a moment when Philip Guston used to come to my studio. I said, “Why do you come here? I only have one idea.” And he said, “That’s why I come here.” It seems to me it isn’t about very much. It’s what you do with that little bit. If you think about Cézanne, he had a mountain, some apples.

John Walker, “Looking Out to Sea II” (2012), oil on canvas, 84 x 66 inches

JS: This makes me think of your paintings of Seal Point, Maine. You made hundreds of small paintings of this single site. What inspired you to paint this motif repetitively?

JW: Subconsciously, I may have wanted to own something. When you look at Cézanne, whether it’s the mountains, or a still life, you are looking at someone who is the world’s expert, who knows more about it than anyone else. That is what Seal Point is to me. I painted too many pictures about it. But when I go there, I get really excited. I feel alive, and it doesn’t matter how many people come there and look at it. They’re not going to sit where I sit, or see it the way I see it.

You realize when you look at a Cézanne, he’s seeing things that no one ever sees, nor ever will again. It is full of that moment of seeing. It’s almost not about what’s there; it’s about capturing something no one else has seen. The viewer gets excited by that moment, that piece of blue being in the right place.

There is a Cézanne portrait in the Phillips Collection. It is like he’s tapping away, building this solid form, this self-portrait. It is like building a church. You’re painting away, and it’s like bang, bang, bang. But it isn’t until he put that stroke on the forehead—which is probably the last moment of the painting — that he rings the bell, so the people will come. The people are not going to come to the church unless the bell is rung. It is that moment, of visual illumination.

JS: In many of your paintings you combine text with image. You have spoken about how painting words is like touching them. Can you elaborate on this?

JW: You have to touch them to write. You don’t see them until you touch them. I was writing someone else’s verse — from a Wilfred Owen poem — and it seemed to me I had to feel it through the brush for it to be meaningful. That’s when the word is illuminated, through the touch of it, the pressure of it. Even in very early paintings, touch was always important to me: the sound of the touch of the brush. That is why I never paint with music on.

I try to tell my students not to listen to music while they are painting. They might be making terribly expressive paintings, or quiet paintings, but they’ve got this music pounding in their ear. I ask them what they are listening to, and it has nothing to do with what they are working on. I tell them they should listen to the sound of the brush. I’m sure Rembrandt did. Imagining the noise of a Rembrandt is a total explanation of what it is. The noise is the explanation for the paintings. He didn’t have chamber music playing in the background. He had the noise of the painting, the noise of the brush. If you look at a Goya, you see these wonderful things. He knew how to kiss the surface, in the most sensuous way. And it’s all to do with sound.

JS: Goya comes up a lot when discussing your work. The form that recurs in many of your paintings is called an Alba. Is this a reference to Goya?

JW: The original painting that had that form, had nothing to do with Alba. It was given that name later. It was about me trying to find a form. As a young man, I had gone to Amsterdam to look at Van Gogh, actually. I saw the Rembrandts, including the painting that is still the most important painting to me — “The Jewish Bride.” It just touched me so. It is truly one of the great romantic paintings in the world.

John Walker, “Coastal Cross North Branch” (2011), oil on canvas, 84 x 66 inches (click to enlarge)

I came out from the Rembrandt painting, and then I went to the Stedelijk. I’d been trained at that point just in figurative art. For the four years previously, I’d been in a life room. And I saw this painting, a white square on a white square. I didn’t know what it was, but I got the same emotional take that I got from the Rembrandt. It blew me away, took me off balance. I turned away, came back. I had no way of dealing with it intellectually. I’d never been faced with avant-garde art. I didn’t do anything about it. But several years later, I read that Malevich, when asked what his ambition was for painting, said it was to imbue the square with feeling. Well, that’s what Rembrandt did. So the connection was immediate. Then I didn’t have this problem of why I liked Rembrandt and why I liked certain contemporary art, why I grew to like Jackson Pollock. That is what they were doing: they were imbuing the square with feeling. I’d never read that, never heard of that, but it seemed to be right on.

At some point, I was still a figurative painter, and I was trying to paint pictures of my father, who had been injured in the war. And I exhausted it. I mean, how many times can you paint someone in agony or pain before it becomes cliché? So I thought, there’s got to be another way to do this. I started to experiment; I did all kinds of things; I cut up paper to try to create three-dimensional forms. I never believed that abstract art should be merely frontal. Why can’t it have all the attributes that Titian has, or Rembrandt has? Why can’t it have volume; why can’t it have air? The major painting of the 1960s was all about flatness. Funnily enough, Clement Greenberg used to tell me that my paintings had too much stuff in them. Anyhow, I came up with this form. When I found it — this cut out piece, it was so simple, and it was like the whole world came alive. Everything was simplified. Of course … that feeling only lasted a moment, maybe a week.

This form could be male or female. Suddenly, my idol, the main player in my life — Goya — came back. I saw the references. I felt that if I could close this thing, I could give it an identity. So that’s how the Goya reference came about: not immediately, but later. It was John Russell, I believe, who wrote that he couldn’t understand whether it was an Alba form, or like looking through a keyhole in a door. He got it totally wrong both times, but the Alba name stuck.

Once I got this form, then I could look at Velázquez, Gainsborough. It was important, because my paintings had become about collage, and were very flat; they had no air. I wanted them to look like the side of an oil tanker. There are moments in your life, where you wonder, “What have I abandoned to get to this?” I felt like I had abandoned air. So once I had found a shape, then I could put air around it. I could have a conversation with Titian, with Cézanne, which I was losing.

This happens from time to time. I go somewhere too far, and think, “What I value is gone, and I have to bring it back.” I am not an admirer of artists who take themselves where they can’t see anymore. Sometimes painters become so extreme, that they can’t just paint a landscape picture, or paint a dog! They almost become inarticulate. But Picasso could do it, Matisse could do it, Braque could do it. And all that argument about late Pollock, that he was going back to figuration. That was about seeing again. It was about, “I could expand my vision. Of course I could go here and do that.” The artists who really achieve something do that.

JS: There is a very interesting conversation in your work between your studio practice and your landscape practice. Can you talk about that?

JW: I love to teach, and I find one of the biggest problems I have with my students, is convincing them that you can do anything. They already feel locked into something. I think it is art history’s fault. Art history makes it seem linear. It presents Picasso as going from this to that. But really, he was a mess, creatively. In 1922, in his studio, the late Cubist painting The Three Musicians was on one wall, and on the other wall was Three Women at the Spring. Creativity is a huge mess. It really is one of the big problems: how do you convince a student that it’s a mess, because that is the last thing they want to hear. They want some sense of it all, from you or me. And I walk in and say, “No, it’s not like that in the real world.”

Most of the time, when I work outdoors, it is this constant taking the paintings out, nailing them to the trees, basically. It is to authenticate the painting. It’s like, “You’re not right, until you’re as good as that.” Of course, you don’t get that, but that is the ambition.

JS: And for you is it about trying to get the feeling of that place?

JW: Well, no, I think it’s more than that. I’m trying to get what’s there. I’m not fudging it. It may not be there when you’re there, but it’s there when I’m there. I do paint in this place that we call “shitty cove,” which is where all the rubbish comes in. I can’t paint the scenic part. I’m anti-scenic. It took me about ten years before I could paint the place, even though I was living there. I found a place where it smells, and all the garbage comes in and that allowed me to paint, because it wasn’t scenic.

JS: It reminds me of how you refer to paint as “colored mud.” Your paintings seem so much about the elements — paint becoming a signifier of earth, rather than just representations of the landscape. Do you agree?

John Walker, “Red Yellow and Blue, Coastal Cross North Branch” (2011), oil on canvas, 84 x 66 inches

JW: I still paint with my hands. I think Rembrandt did, so I do also. I can’t see any way Rembrandt did the things he did unless he was touching the paintings all the time. The mud thing came out of my experience with Aboriginal art, understanding they were very involved with mud. The people make paint from the earth. Also, Guston referred to paint as shit, which Dore Ashton reminded me of. And, I had been painting a lot about my father, and every description of the First World War, every poem I read, was about mud, what they lived with.

It is this very ambitious idea. If you accept that paint is colored mud, and you put it on a canvas, you realize it is only a genius, like Turner or Rembrandt, who can turn it into air. It is the height of ambition, it seems to me, to be a painter. How do you do this: turn it into air, or a piece of silk, or a piece of flesh? How does Cézanne tap, tap, tap this thing, and turn it into this? It is a magical thing — it is alchemy. And it is your hands that do it.

Peter Acheson, “Dedicated to Sigmar Polke” (2012), acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 48 x 40 inches (all images courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects)

This is an essay about communication and exchange between painters. It has to do with developing a shared language, and with exploring the nature and extent of our theoretical basis in painting.

The origin of what’s written here is a continuing conversation I’ve been having with the painter Peter Acheson over the course of the last few years. Acheson is currently exhibiting a collection of his paintings, recent and past, at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Painting today is a backwater. Our reasons for appreciating it, if we do, are various and sometimes contradictory and contentious. When compared to the cinema, it has no firmly established place relative to society as a whole, which often leads to the sense among practitioners, particularly the young, that painting is really just about self-involvement, a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. Few people outside the art world could name five prominent contemporary painters, much less comment on the value of their work.

The only apparent alternative is the market, in which sales and exhibitions are what signify importance. Then the question is not how to talk about painting, but how to market it. It then becomes easy to forgo criticism altogether. In their press releases, galleries print their own analysis of what they exhibit. In response, critics and artists often shy away from value judgments in favor of descriptive writing. In a pluralistic culture nothing is more gauche than being strictly opinionated. This is what’s commonly referred to as “the crisis in criticism.”

The problem is located nowhere in particular but everywhere generally. Those who are high on the hog don’t wanna talk about it because why rock the boat, and those who are on bottom don’t wanna talk about it either because why be reactionary?

My contention is that the problem is the paradigm; and I want painting to heal its own wounds by redefining and expanding its context and by broadening its field of activity. This can happen both through practice ¾ painters working as painters in their studios ¾ and (emphasis here) by communicating. By talking about what we do. Talking anywhere ¾ the classroom, the studio, the street, the Internet. This is why talking’s important, uncomfortable as it may be. It’s education. So this is one painter’s ode to the possibility of a greater union between paint and language and a testimony to what’s gained by exploring it.

What follows is a hybrid form. A question is followed by a response from Acheson in italics then my comment. It is meant as a tribute to a specific exchange, and to the idea of exchange between artists as a means of generating change in the language surrounding painting.

Acheson’s work demonstrates a relationship between theory and practice that is an alternative to the contemporary paradigm. In his paintings, he concentrates on image and its reverberations as a means of undoing ingrained dichotomies in our language. A single painting is never strictly abstract or representational. Language itself is paired with collaged objects and paint, each meant as an equivalency for the others.

By eliminating thought barriers to painting activity, Acheson’s work creates a new inroad into painting. My conversations with him have helped clarify my own objectives and helped me recognize that still other paths may be blazed: that in fact, our history is not over. Or if it is, so much the better because we can now operate without the constant imposition of history’s twisted sibling: ideology.

Our new subject could be consciousness itself as it evolves and changes from hour to hour, day to day, and century to century. This passive, speculative attitude is not entirely new (Corot said: “It is not necessary to search, only to wait”). But its romantic, Watteau-like origins are the antidote to contemporary Apollonian methods and apathy alike.

In Acheson’s paintings, the movement of one brushstroke into the next is never a matter of finishing a painting, or of competing with an ideal, or of abjection in the absence of possibility. It is simply about seeing what will occur next, in the next moment.  His paintings and our evolving conversation have helped shape and reinforce my own sense of possibility. I believe in exchange of this nature as a catalyst for change even in the direst of circumstances.  Acheson is fond of quoting James Hillman’s question: “If we are on the Titanic and the ship is going down and everybody know it, is it worth it to rearrange the deck furniture?” Our answer:

1. Is there an operating theory of painting today?

No, not a universal theory. But there are theories from other disciplines that bear on painting. The big one for me is the idea from archetypal psychology of the anima mundi. As James Hillman points out, “The question in contemporary psychology is not what is the subject, but where is it? Does it stop inside my skin, or in my human relationships, or does it extend out to the rocks and trees?” Paintings become real for me not when they express my feelings only, but when the voice in them comes from out there. If the voice out there can come through a painting, then it can be heard in all sorts of other ‘inanimate things’. This would imply a dismantling of our human-centric point of view and suggest that we are but one of many players on the stage of consciousness. And the amazing thing is that paintings can arrive at this place. Here, as the intention-driven mind is downplayed, the external mind can flow in, either as unconscious (to us) coincidence or as a beautiful moving together of parts¾ like seeing a fox in the woods when one is quiet.

Peter Acheson, “Goddess” (2010), acrylic on foil on canvas, 11.25 x 8 inches

I am here liberated from the sense that I must do something in order to make my paintings meaningful. It concretizes the idea that one’s paintings are intrinsically already something, which is all the more important for their uniqueness. If you can get your mind around this, then your paintings can start to teach you about what you are. They become animated in the sense of animism. Individuated teaching forms: the opposite of merchandise.

2. In terms of your experience as a painter, where do paintings come from?

Paintings come from the unknown. Can we know exactly what the painting will look like before it confronts us? The proof is revealed by the fact that ‘finished’ paintings often fall off and require more work after we think of them as done. “We” cannot know. Successful paintings continue to mystify precisely because we can’t control the outcome, no matter how deliberate the method.

The teaching forms tell us that we are not in control. If this generates discomfort, good. That means there is no navel gazing going on at all. And if there is no final control in the production of paintings (any more than there is the course of life), then paintings can’t very well be considered as reliable products for consumption. No one is ever going to know what they’ve got.

Peter Acheson, “KB” (2010), oil with conch on canvas, 10 x 8 inches

3. Has the field of painting been professionalized? A professional artist. Is that an oxymoron?

Painters can be professional in the same way that shamans and psychotherapists are professional. Painting is an art, not a science. Science isn’t even a science as we usually understand the word. Painters are the worker-priests in the cult of man (Brice Marden). We roam the graveyards. We examine the old technologies and myths to see what still applies (Gary Snyder). This process doesn’t aim at meaning but participation. Painting as a profession which can be taught in art schools implies Apollo, skillful problem solving, the clear light of understanding. Rather than understand, painters choose to stand under. Painting is a performance art, more Dionysian than Apollonian. True to our professional obligations, we aim at dismantling ‘professional,’ turning it towards ‘professing’ joy, contrariness, and replacing ‘squirrel-in-cage’ thinking with consciousness in the fingertips.  

In terms of the ‘contemporary dialogue,’ or ‘being contemporary,’ this is a radical redefinition of professionalism. Comparing a painter to a shaman and equating the act of painting with performance simultaneously elevates the practice to a critical function vis-à-vis our fellow humans and frees us from the shackles of pure materiality. A shaman operates on the material world via a transcendent plain. So when we look at paintings or when we make paintings we are dealing with psychology and with health. And that leads to reconsidering why and how a painting gets made. Painting practice suddenly integrates itself into life on a par with everyday functions, and ‘participation’ in this becomes critical. And if it might serve a healing function then we are happy that it exists. Whether you made it or whether I did becomes unimportant.

Peter Acheson, “Reemerging Spiral” (2012), oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

4. In relationship to that, is studio practice separable from a painter’s life? Are the life and the painting different?

Different in that one reflects the other. Sometimes life leads, sometimes painting. But it is impossible and fruitless to separate the ochres and cadmiums from the entire mineral composition of the earth; pointless to distinguish the water in the watercolor from the streams, rivers, and rain — all part of the planetary water cycle. We say the painting is finished, but how can anything be finished in an unfinished universe? We have the fantasy that the art in museums is immune from the wear and tear of time, and this leads to the idea that painting is separate from life. But a look at the lives of Pollock, Rembrandt, and Guston, just to name three, refutes this fantasy. Complacency in life leads to complacency in painting. In times when money obligations curtail my studio time, I tell myself that it is PAINTING that walks into Dunkin Donuts for coffee, PAINTING that puts gas in the car, fills the farecard. It seems to be enough.

Peter Acheson, “Slow Rain” (2012), acrylic with foil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches

Peter Acheson: Paintings continues at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (208 Forsyth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 26.

Anselm Kiefer, “Morgenthau Plan” (2012), acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on photograph mounted on canvas, 113 x 149 5/8 inches (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photography by Charles Duprat)

Anselm Kiefer has scaled back, way back, from his preposterously overproduced previous solo at Gagosian, but with Kiefer we are always talking about relative degrees of gigantism.

In her review of that show, which was titled Next Year in Jerusalem (November 6–December 18, 2010), Roberta Smith of The New York Times set the scene this way:

The Gagosian space is crowded with 25 sculptures encased in large, often towering vitrines with floors of cracked (or scorched) earth. Each contains a sinister ruin: the fuselage or engine of a vintage airplane; a fleet of small suspended U-boats made of lead; a white plaster ball or wedding gown jagged with shards of glass; an immense and brittle thorn bush dotted with painted flames.

The scuttlebutt I heard at the time was that it cost a million dollars simply to install the exhibition — a figure that does not seem out of line given the quantity of plate glass that had to be factored into the handling.

In many ways, the new show is a retrenchment. Fifteen out of the eighteen works on display are paintings. There are no vitrines, just a few freestanding sculptures. Some of the paintings contain elements that project into the room, but most do not.

While the vitrines in Jerusalem felt simultaneously precious and over-the-top, they were also something different, an exploration of new territory even if the themes were recycled.

In contrast, the most successful paintings in Morgenthau Plan, as the new show is called, could have been made at any point in the artist’s career. I am thinking of two in particular, “Nigredo – Morgenthau” and “der Morgenthau-Plan” (both 2012), which present Kiefer’s familiar blasted landscapes with a powerful density of materials and a refined sense of touch.

Anselm Kiefer, “Nigredo – Morgenthau” (2012), acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on photograph mounted on canvas, 74 13/16 x 149 5/8 inches (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photography by Charles Duprat)

However, the rest of the works, with a few exceptions, range from the middling to the embarrassing. What is remarkable is that Kiefer himself supplies the reason why.

The exhibition’s title refers to a proposal drawn up in 1944 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, that would take the demilitarization imposed upon Germany after World War I many steps further, leading to a total deindustrialization of the country. Factories would be decommissioned and the economy would revert to a form of pre-modern agrarianism.

On a shelf in the Gagosian Gallery entrance, piled in a neat stack next to copies of the exhibition’s checklist and press release, there is a letter from Kiefer to Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Henry Moore Foundation, in which he describes the evolution of the series:

Unless a person wishes to practice l’art pour l’art, he needs a subject. But where does that subject come from? This past year I have painted a number of pictures of flowers. […] They’re beautiful. But beauty in art needs meaning. One can’t have just beauty on its own. True art does not portray beauty alone. Beauty needs a counterpart.

And these paintings are unusually colorful and beautiful, again, in relative terms, for Kiefer. Some of the color shifts, from icy blue or hot pink to the ashen gray we know so well, are stunning. But they are also unstructured and pictorial in the most illustrative sense. Their masterful wielding of surface and pigment knocked me out at first glance, but I eventually started to cringe.

Kiefer continues:

If he paints flowers for six months and they become more and more beautiful, closer to perfection, he begins to believe he is losing himself, his identity as a painter, as a good painter. He can even develop a bad conscience because the subject is so easy. […] In thinking about this flaw another flaw occurred to me: the Morgenthau Plan. For it too ignored the complexity of things.

And so I had hit upon the Morgenthau Plan, which would now be associated with the flower paintings. (Emphasis mine.)

He goes on to write that if the plan were implemented:

With the destruction of industrial sites more land would have been gained. The fields would have been opened up for plants of all kinds, for carpets of flowers everywhere.

And so the paintings map out an alternate history for Germany in which the Morgenthau Plan has been put in place and the country’s industrial zones have reverted to their natural state.

The only problem is that the concept has been retroactively ”associated with the flower paintings.” They did not spring from the idea, which bristles with paradoxes (Morgenthau’s radical proposition, presumably based on the belief that the Germans are an incorrigibly warlike race, played into the hands of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, and he used it to rally the population, an effort that possibly extended the length of the war).

Consequently, the repurposed paintings lack all urgency, devoid of historical focus as well as the formal rigor and abstract thinking that make something as florally sumptuous as Monet’s water lilies, to choose an obvious comparison, continually compelling to contemporary eyes.

In her review of Jerusalem, Smith starts out on a positive note (“The German artist Anselm Kiefer knows how to put on a show”), sidling up like a Renaissance assassin about to slip a shiv into the kidney:

Portentously titled “Next Year in Jerusalem,” the Gagosian exhibition is effective middlebrow art as catharsis, spectacle with a message.

That’s pretty damning, and while such an assessment doesn’t necessarily carry over to the work in this show as a whole, it’s hard to shake the “middlebrow” epithet while looking at a painting like “Große Eisenfaust Deutschland, kleine Panzerfaust Deutschland (Velimir Chlebnikow)” (2012), a field of flowers with rusting machine guns mounted at the top.

Kiefer’s interplay between two and three dimensions is a well-worn trope by now, but it may not seem so stale if his pairing of disused weaponry with an overgrown landscape weren’t so obvious and literal. The same holds true for the even more theatrical “O Halme, ihr Halme, o Halme der Nacht” (2012), in which the guns are replaced by an airplane wing.

There are two works, however, that stand apart from the others. One is “Von der Maas bis an die Memel, von der Etsch bis an den Belt” (2011-2012), a colossal Romantic seascape with Courbet-style waves rolling ahsore and heavy, lowering clouds along the horizon line.

The work’s distinctive painterly realism and blue-dominant coloration pull you in, but after a few moments the 19th-century look begins to feel uncomfortably retro, as if Kiefer is attempting to revive a long-dead style for no particular reason.

Anselm Kiefer, “Oh Halme, ihr Halme, oh Halme der Nacht” (2012), acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on photograph mounted on canvas, 149 5/8 x 220 1/2 inches (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photography by Charles Duprat)

What I found more intriguing was “Oh Halme, ihr Halme, o Halme der Nacht” (2012), which features a typically blackish Kiefer landscape — a furrowed field diminishing in raked single point perspective — with handwritten text taking up the entire upper half of the picture, from the horizon line to the top of the canvas.

Kiefer’s practice has always incorporated words or phrases that reflect the work’s titles or themes. Sometimes this is quite evocative, as in his series “Dein Goldenes Haar, Margarete,” but just as often the meaning of the painting can depend too much on what is written on the surface.

In “Oh Halme,” Kiefer appears to have allowed his literary bent to run wild. If the actual meaning of the text remains obscure to non-German speakers, its intrusion upon the landscape nevertheless creates a disruptive and refreshing visual element.

Compared to “Nigredo – Morgenthau” and “der Morgenthau-Plan,” the two paintings I mentioned earlier — which, though impressive works, do not escape the trap Smith defines in the same review as Kiefer becoming “better and better at making Anselm Kiefers” — it feels less assured, even confused and hesitant. But for a superstar painter, that seems like a good place to be.

Anselm Kiefer: Morgenthau Plan continues at Gagosian Gallery (522 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 8.

Lot 220: Charles & Ray Eames, Freestanding kiosk, Iron, walnut, plastic-laminated, and hand-painted surfaces, Only two known examples are thought to have survived after the fair was disassembled. Custom designed for the IBM Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, and fabricated by hand at DMI, Los Angeles, 1964, 192″ x 111″ x 122″, Literature: Neuhart, John & Marilyn. Eames Design: The Work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. (New York: Abrams, 1989, p.191). Estimate: $20,000–$30,000 (all photographs courtesy of Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA))

I think I’ve admitted this before on Hyperallergic, but I love auctions. Not the big ticket auctions that grab all the headlines but the ones where it is still possible to find startling treasures. Traditionally, art and design auctions were the realm of dealers, connoisseurs, passionate collectors, and even art historians who watched them carefully in an effort to find a deal, a missing art historical link, or round out a collection with an unusual or rare find.

Flipping through the Los Angeles Modern Auctions’s May 19 Modern Art and Design auction catalogue, I came across an astonishing selection of pieces by architects, designers, and sculptors that I felt were too good not to share.

Lot 292: Shiro Kuramata’s Feather stool, Designed 1990, Dyed feathers encased in acrylic, aluminum, From the edition of 40, Ishimaru Company Ltd., Tokyo, 21.25″ x 13″ x 16.25″, The model was conceived for Spiral, a gallery and shopping complex in Tokyo, Literature: Aikawa, Michiko. Shiro Kuramata. Exhibition Catalogue. (Tokyo: Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996. p 196), Estimate: $30,000–$50,000

From a exuberant Eames kiosk for IBM to a lamp designed by Philip Johnson that looks surprisingly like a similar item in his famed glass house, these are fascinating objects that ignite my imagination.

Sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s “Radio Nurse” (1937) is a beautifully designed baby monitor made of that brittle early plastic called bakelite. His first major industrial commission, “Radio Nurse” was accompanied by “a separate enameled metal receiver called the Guardian Ear.” If you thought the sleek industrial aesthetic was the invention of Dieter Rams, this object may make you think again.

And how often do we see a desk by artist Richard Artschwager? The attractive object with precise curves gives you a better understanding of his art that is often populated with furniture or built in three-dimensions with techniques that evoke the work of an artisan, which he obviously also was.

But my favorite in the lot is the kiosk by Charles and Ray Eames. This colorful canopy, complete with flags, was designed by the Modernist couple for the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It is an object of optimistic whimsy.

The charm of auctions for me is great, and not for the fact that they commodify art, but because they demonstrate that the vast majority of design and art is lived with and loved by people who were once enamored with things that they felt were worth saving, buying, and allocating a place for in their lives. I think anyone who enjoys art could understand that.

Lot 299
Philip C. Johnson, Floorlamp (Designed 1952, this example produced later), Painted steel, aluminum, Edison Price, Inc., 38.875″ x 26″ diameter at shade, Designed with Richard Kelly, Provenance: Collection Edison Price, Inc, New York; Rago Arts Auction, February 2011, New Jersey; Modern One, California.
Exhibited: “The structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture”, Yale University,
New Haven, August 23-October 2, 2010, Literature: Eidelberg, Martin. Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was. New York: Abrams, 1991. p 204. Estimate: $12,000 – $18,000

Lot 358 Isamu Noguchi, Radio Nurse, (1937), Bakelite, Zenith Radio Corporation, Molded manufacturer’s marks, 8″ x 6.5″ x 5.5″
Literature: von Vegesack, Alexander. Isamu Noguchi, Sculptural Design. Exhibition Catalogue. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum,2001. p 110. Estimate: $5,000 – $7,000

Lot 262
Philip H.Johnson, Plaques(2), (Designed and executed c. 1930), Patinated iron and bronze, Studio, 16.5″ x 9″ and 18″ x 9″
Provenance: Philadelphia Convention Hall, Pennsylvania (1930–2005);
Private Collection, California. Estimate: $1,500 – $2,000

Lot 286
Richard Artschwager, Desk (1957), American walnut, Studio, Signed and dated “R. Artschwager 1957,” 29″ x 66.25″ x 43″
Exhibited: “Furniture by Craftsman”, Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, 1957
Illustrated: Armstrong, Richard. Artschwager, Richard (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1988), p 15. Estimate: $7,000 – $10,000

Mike Houston, “Overheard in NYC II” woodcut (via cannonballpress.com)

We’re in Soho on Tuesdays, the Lower East Side on Wednesdays, Chelsea on Thursdays, Bushwick on Saturdays. We go to openings, art fairs, auctions, performances, lectures, galas, member events, after-parties. (Oh the afterparties!) WE are the New York Art World, though we do travel, so we’re really everywhere.

Every Friday (or so), we post things “Overheard in the Art World.” #OHAW Honestly, art world, don’t take yourself so seriously.

The art world spread its wings over Manhattan these past few weeks, taking over warehouses, piers, churches, and an island when the Frieze fair graced us with its presence and attracting those gossiping, traffic-inducing, ill-informed celebrity “collectors” when the Metropolitan Museum of Art rolled out its red carpet:

“Damn, she looks likes she’s getting married AND divorced.”
—overheard at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala Red Carpet (via @museumteens)

“They should make the celebs take the subway.” (regarding the traffic jam near the Met tonight).
—overheard on Twitter (@debrahampton)

“Let’s walk through and then go back through in reverse to take pictures so if we get kicked out, we’ve already seen it.”
—overheared at Punk: Chaos to Couture members’ preview at the Metropolitan Museum

Him: “I’d buy that piece in a heartbeat but I don’t know about the unfinished wood.’
Her: “But that’s the whole piece.”
—overheard at Janet KURNATOWSKI gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

“In my high school there was a group that were called the alternatives, but they all looked the same.”
—overheard being said by one of the performers in Tino Seghal “This Situation” (2007) at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal

“I don’t know how I feel about my selfie right now.”
—overheard at the Museum of Modern Art in the room with Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”

“Play that song about selling coke.”
—overheard at Creative Time gala at the Domino Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

“Why are there so many mirrors?”
—overheard at the 2013 Frieze New York art fair

“We need to find some love in here for Dan Colen even though he’s a self-centered spoiled skater punk.”
—overheard at the 2013 Frieze New York art fair

“It’s only Dan Colen.”
—overheard at artist William Powhida’s Williamsburg studio sale

“There’s sooooo nothing to watch. I’m watching Battlestar Galactica for the second time.”
—overheard at the 2013 Nada New York art fair

“I’m looking to see where everyone is getting their rainbow sparkle.”
—overheard at the 2013 Nada New York art fair

“I’ve been waiting around for paint to dry.”
—overheard at the 2013 Nada New York art fair

Man: “Are you reviewing this?”
Woman: “Yes. ”
Man: “Do you know who it’s by?”
Woman: “No. ”
—overheard at the 2013 Nada New York art fair

“I’m really glad they have a design fair in NYC now; but I’m still not sure what ‘design’ is exactly.”
—overheard at the 2013 Collective Design Fair

[Woman approaches] ”Hi!! How are you?! It’s sooo good to see you.”
[Brief exchange, woman leaves] ”That woman is such a bitch.”
—overheard at the 2013 Collective Design Fair

“It’s a strange time in the art world.”
—overheard at the Papier13 art fair in Montreal

“Well, the best part about *that* fair might have been waiting outside in the entry  line in the sun.”
—overheard at the 2013 Cutlog art fair in New York

“This section looks like a high school student art show, just sayin’.”
—overheard at the 2013 Cutlog art fair in New York

“Oh! I was gonna go to that fair, but I stayed home and got high instead.”
—overheard at the Wallpaper magazine Frieze New York party at Le Baron

—overheard on Facebook

“I just went to the art fairs on Instagram this year.”
—overheard at an art world dinner party

“Are you taking me somewhere to kill me?”
—overheard during the Greenpoint Gallery Night

Hou Hanru: ”I hate young artists.”
—Overheard at a dinner in Melbourne, Australia

Steve Cannon on the steps of his anti-establishment gallery, A Gathering of the Tribes, in 1998. (image by Dora Espinoza, all other photographs by the author for Hyperallergic, unless otherwise noted)

While the Metropolitan Museum of Art canonizes punk on the Upper East Side, A Gathering of the Tribes gallery is quietly celebrating its 20th anniversary on the Lower East Side. Across the street from the Nuyorican Poets Café and blocks from the former CBGB, Steve Cannon’s A Gathering of the Tribes brings together artists of all disciplines and backgrounds.

“I figured it had to be multi-cultural, multi-racial, and all that kinda stuff,” Cannon explains, “and then it had to include old folks like me, and young folks like you, crossing into multi-generational as well as multi-cultural, and since this neighborhood has always been diverse in terms of every ethnic group I could imagine — either living on the Lower East Side or breezin’ through here at one time or another — the door had to be open to everybody. The only qualification was that you had to be a lover of the art.”

Although Cannon, author of the infamous Groove, Bang and Jive Around and self-proclaimed hoo-doo doctor, started the organization in 1990-91 as a literary magazine, the gallery component opened in 1993, a project the former Tribes curator Dora Espinoza convinced him to undertake. “And life has never been the same since,” Steve says with a laugh.

Two works from Out of the Closet and into the Open, currently on display. (click to enlarge)

Cannon’s slight southern twang, inflected with years of cigarette smoke, his tendency to occasionally interject the word “yawn” in conversation, and his sunglasses-inside look give him the vibe of a jazz singer imported straight from New Orleans (where he is in fact from). But the shades aren’t just part of his fashion sense: Steve is blind.

Cannon explains that he can typically imagine what the art on the walls of his gallery looks like through descriptions. This process of describing art inspired Espinoza to create Exquisite Poop, which the website explains was an ambitious project enlisting writers and painters in a chain: The painters first painted one work and committed to a second. The writers were then assigned a painting and told to describe it in as much detail as possible. The paintings were then reassigned to another artist, who was only given the writer’s description and asked to re-create it as closely as possible. Cannon, meanwhile, says that while he can typically picture what the art looks like, he isn’t as able to picture what his visitors look like — “and you know I’m not going to ask you,” he says.

From the current show: Steve Cannon, as photographed by Gail Thacker.

Tribes’ current exhibit, titled Out of the Closet and into the Open, features left-behind works from the shows that have previously hung on Steve’s walls. Some of the artworks are labeled and framed, others not. The artists have been contacted, but as Steve says, “If the artists want it back, they can pay me rent for all these years of storage!”

The exterior of A Gathering of the Tribes.

Throughout our interview, many people wander into Steve’s apartment, all greeted with the same warmth, all offering to get Steve something from “the outside world” as they left. The first guest is Dora Espinoza, a Peruvian photographer and the space’s original curator, who scrambles about the apartment, making bids on photographs and telling stories from when she was curator.

“Once I had an exhibit here, it was two guys from Medellin, Colombia, with all the big cartels,” Espinoza says. ”The exhibit was fantastic, and all the cars outside were super, [including] Rolls Royces … There was so many rich people that night, when I looked out [that window] I was like, whoa! And they were coming and coming and coming — all the drug cartel was here buying art.”

Minutes after she leaves, a couple of other guests come in, looking for solace over the recent death of their cat. Steve permits them to hold an impromptu funeral service in his garden, and the girls solicit his advice as to what type of poem to read at their cat funeral. They leave minutes later to get the necessary supplies. Alyssa Devine, his current gallery attendant, comes into the room, on her way out to run errands. She offers to grab “cigarettes, ice cream, beans, Hershey bars, and… coffee: that’s the Steve special.”

Cannon, who, along with Devine, runs the gallery with the help of various interns and guest curators, is a local East Village legend, sometimes referred to as “the living book of the East Village” and has been the subject of many documentary films and articles, including a travel show aired in Japan.

Cannon is often mentioned in conjunction with Gil Scot-Heron, whose spoken word piece “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is frequently cited the inspiration behind much of the prolific New York hip-hop movement. Cannon taught Scot-Heron at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and recalls when Scot-Heron lived with his friend in a trailer next to the campus, “because they decided that they were too bright to live in the dormitories with the other students,” Cannon jokes. He recalls when Scot-Heron invited him to hear his poem, and Cannon said it needed a lot of work before it could be published. “Next thing I know, that god damn poem became one of the most popular things on this scene,” he laughs. Cannon will be publishing Scot-Heron for the first time in the upcoming issue of his literary magazine alongside a photo of the “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” mural painted on Avenue C and 12^th.

Gallery view of the current exhibition, Out of the Closet and into the Open

Faced with economic hardship in 2006, Steve sold the building and now rents his apartment. This means he often confronts the threat of eviction. “Where it stands right now is that me and this woman I sold [the building] to are at peace temporarily,” he says, “and temporarily is in a broad, neon sign in the middle of Time Square. It’s a temporal piece.”

Although the current exhibition is worth a visit, Cannon always imbues the space with a remarkable character, making it what Espinoza describes as “the last anarchist place in New York City.”

Out of the Closet and into the Open will continue at A Gathering of the Tribes (285 East Third Street, East Village, Manhattan) through Tuesday, May 21. There will also be a poetry reading on Saturday, May 18, beginning at 7 pm and featuring Ron Kolm’s newest collection of poems, titled Divine Comedy.

Opening night of video_dumbo (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

After a year’s absence, the annual video_dumbo festival has returned with a week of screenings and installations that have video art reflecting on itself.

Last night, the central exhibition, Re-Return to Sender, opened at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in Chelsea. While it’s now extracted from its former Brooklyn home, there is an ongoing installation running in parallel at the Front Street gallery space of Dumbo Arts Center, which is continuing its participation in the event as a co-presenter this year. As we reported last month, the Dumbo Arts Center is currently without a staff and is reevaluating its future, and their work with video_dumbo curators Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy was at that time their central focus before examining their next step.

“Re-Return to Sender” at video_dumbo

video_dumbo floor screening

The week ahead will carry a flurry of 14 different video programs involving over a hundred international artists, including such promising themes as “Camera Obscuras,” “The Idea of the North,” and “New Finnish Video Art.” If the art installed in Re-Return to Sender is an indication, this year’s video_dumbo should be full of eclectic spectacle. Be sure to grab some explaining text before exploring the exhibition, however, as what is happening is quite interesting, but needs a little context to be fully appreciated.

Daniel Canogar’s “Spin”

Christoph Meier’s installation

For example, there’s Chris Shen’s “Infra” with a towering grid of old TV remotes that work as a projection tool (when viewed through the proper “glasses”), and while Daniel Canogar’s “Spin” might look like just a bunch of old DVDs from afar, up close you can see videos screened individually on each one. These are actually rips of the videos on the DVDs played back over them like some sort of Möbius strip of media. I was also drawn to an installation by Christoph Meier (no relation to this author), where a Mondrian tribute of rectangles were carefully lined up on the wall with different projectors, exploring the individual aspect ratios and light temperatures of each. In Bram Snijders and Carolien Teunisse’s “RE:,” a lone projector is surrounded by a circle of mirrors that layer the video it sends out over itself.

Bram Snijders and Carolien Teunisse’s “RE:”

Where video_dumbo and the Dumbo Arts Center will go from here is something that remains to be seen, but the video art on display here and projected for the coming week holds engaging ideas for the evolving media to explore, even as it looks back onto itself with its electric gaze.

Central screen at video_dumbo

video_dumbo at Eyebeam

video_dumbo is at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (540 West 21st Street, Chelsea) through May 25.

Film still from Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” (image via filmlinc.com)

Film, like writing, is split categorically between “fiction” and “nonfiction.” This nomenclatural divide most likely stems from a perceived obligation to the audience on the part of nonfiction — the title conveys a promise of truth. Stories We Tell, the new documentary from Sarah Polley (Away from Her, Take This Waltz), successfully asserts that there is no objective reality to be found anywhere in “nonfiction.” Polley isn’t the first documentarian to upend audience expectations of fact, but Stories We Tell needs no novelty to succeed; it is a beautiful film.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion in “The White Album.” She describes the fairytales we create out of everyday events — stories are the way we make sense of the world swirling around us. In Polley’s film, her father, actor Michael Polley, offers this alternate take from Margaret Atwood:

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood … It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

The film contains much (interesting) meta-discussion about the nature of stories, but its emotional compass is Polley’s unabashed desire to understand both the life of her mother, Diane, who passed away when she was eleven, and the relationship between her parents. This basic wish — to comprehend who our parents are, who they were, how they lived their lives, and how we fit into that picture — is relevant to all audiences. Stories We Tell ultimately leads the viewer to a revelation that Polley already knew when making the film: Michael is not her biological father.

To try to understand the narrative of her own conception, Polley interviews members of her family and her parents’ friends, asking them to recount the story of Diane’s adult life as they saw it. The narrative oscillates between interview footage, old home videos, and re-creations shot to look like home videos. The possibility of linear storytelling immediately disappears; each subject has a different perspective, and the obviously staged re-creations further blur any semblance of objective truth.

Some of the stories told: Diane was a charismatic, beautiful woman whose passion was the stage. She may have loved her husband Michael deeply, but there was also likely quite a bit of marital discontent. Michael, a loner by nature, may have been unable to make his open-hearted wife feel desired. Diane lost her children from her first marriage on grounds of adultery during a bitter custody battle; the guilt from that loss may have destroyed her self-confidence. It’s possible that Diane found love during her affair with film producer Harry Gulkin, who certainly loved her passionately. Diane may have chosen to hide the fact that Harry was Sarah’s father to keep the family together, or because she loved Michael above all else. There are very few solid truths here, only stories about love, shortcomings, parenthood, depression, and discovery.

At first glance, there’s an essential self-absorption inherent in the form of the personal documentary. Polley recognizes this — she says that she finds her compulsion to reveal her family’s secrets “embarrassing.” However, it’s far too simplistic to write off the whole project as an expression of contemporary narcissism: to do so is to dismiss an entire genre, to assert that nonfiction is always narcissistic when it’s autobiographical.

More traditional documentaries, whose primary goal is to impart information, can be stunningly dull even as they’re remarkably educational. (Note the phrase “talking heads,” dismembered body parts so impersonal that the fact of their speech warrants a descriptive title.) Polley follows in the footsteps of the great documentarians — Marcel Ophüls comes to mind — who replace the goal of information with the goal of psychological exploration.

Film still from Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” (image via bonjourtristesse.net)

The customary cornerstone of the documentary, the interview, is undoubtedly a psychological situation. Two people sit down and decide that this will be an officially sanctioned exercise, one in which some semblance of the truth will be arrived at, information imparted. A filmed interview offers the viewer insight into this therapy-like interaction: a chance to watch the subjects contradict themselves, to notice the inherent biases in the ways they understand the world.

For this reason, interesting documentaries like Stories We Tell don’t constrain themselves to a linear, factual timeline of what happened and why. Good documentaries instead assert: there is no objective truth humanity is capable of recognizing. Much of real life consists in the telling of stories, which may or may not be true, depending on your vantage point — individual reality is a self-described fiction. The tension between the expectation of a fact-based story and the actuality of a nuanced tale gives documentaries, when done right, a special emotional potency.

In the film, Michael Polley quotes Neruda: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” He then observes, “We talk and talk without somehow conveying what we’re really like.” Stories We Tell exists in the space between those two sentiments: we unavoidably desire to understand our past and are simultaneously doomed to lack the words or perspective to explain even our own point of view, let alone understand the stories of others. We must learn to be content with the truths offered in ambiguity.

Stories We Tell is currently playing at select theaters nationwide.

Tunisian street artist eL Seed’s calligraphy-inspired work on Broome Street, across from White Box. (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

It has been sixty years since the last Tunisian artist, Abdelaziz Gorgi, was formally shown in New York, but that’s the first of two claims to history made by The After Revolution, a series of exhibitions showcasing Tunisian artists at White Box on the Lower East Side — the focus of this review — as well as 5Pointz in Long Island City and the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) Gallery on the Upper East Side. The exhibition’s second and more obvious claim to history is as a comprehensive engagement with the question of revolution as it stands in Tunisia, two years after Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself and brought down a tyrant.

“We never lived Tunisia, really,” curator Leila Souissi, a former journalist and diplomat who splits her time between Belgium and Tunisia, told me one recent afternoon. I was asking her about the purpose of The After Revolution, whether its intention was more archival or aspirational. It turns out that it’s a bit of both, though two years after the fall of Ben Ali, the focus is decidedly less journalistic and more contemplative, intentional.

Patricia Triki. (click to enlarge)

“We ask these questions, not just for ourselves, but for our children,” she said, alluding specifically to the work of Patricia Triki, a half-Tunisian artist whose exhibited series of photographs manifests a fragile return from exile, a young female subject carrying a plaid suitcase in varying states of uncertainty; at once action and repose and a washed out nostalgia for the future.

But beyond these abstract considerations, Souissi stresses that the fundamental object of her show is to demonstrate, amid the uncertainty surrounding the durability of the democratic movement in Tunisia and elsewhere, that there is a vibrant and conscientious civil society in Tunisia, one belonging to a universal and humanistic tradition that extends beyond the arena of national politics.

Photographer Rim Temimi, whose series of multi-ethnic Tunisian matriarchs dominates the entrance and culminates in the brilliantly-titled split image “Ni Qab Ni Soumise,” explained that she finds it difficult to be strictly journalistic, that for her it is important to show the “happy, peaceful” vignettes of the Tunisian condition. This theme bears itself out throughout her works in the show, though she is at her strongest in the entrance photographs, striking images of women from backgrounds not readily associated with the dominant Tunisian identity — an elderly Jewish lady, a middle-aged woman of Italian heritage, and so on. “It was a great loss,” she says of the departure of Tunisia’s Jewish population in 1967.

In the foreground, Rim Temimi’s “Ni Qab, Ni Soumise,” in the background, Antoine “Tony” Guerrero interviews Leila Souissi. Guerrero, a veteran of MoMA PS1 and FIAF, will be joining White Box in July.

The show alternated between quasi-archival images documenting the significant moments of Tunisia’s 2011 revolution alongside more quotidian moments and startlingly political mise-en-scène works. In contrast to the photographs were three large works of street art on Broome, opposite White Box, one a collaboration between eL Seed and Jaye, both Tunisian, and two solo works by eL Seed. In many ways, the vibrant immediacy of photography and street art, the raw character of both mediums, seems ideally suited to capturing the Tunisian political scene, though the more intimate FIAF Gallery show delivered some intriguing and melancholic works of painting.

Amine Landoulsi’s “Madonna” (2011) was a standout of the White Box show. (click to enlarge)

Back at White Box, Amine Landoulsi’s “Madonna” (2011) was easily the most compelling photograph in the show, a young woman’s steely indignation framed by the battered Plexiglas of riot shields. It’s the kind of moment that stands athwart the messiness of politics in pregnant austerity, a character curator Leila Souissi compellingly described as “arresting the acceleration of time.”

Another standout was Wassim Ghozlani’s Sens Interdit series, which dominated White Box’s back wall with a slapstick narrative of a woman in a crimson niqab, as cryptic as it was playfully subversive. The artist’s mercurial sensibility, though fundamentally serious, was a refreshing departure from what can at times be a superficial and cloying documentary sincerity in works engaging the Arab Spring writ large.

Wassim Ghozlani’s Sens Interdit series.

Though any single-nationality show, especially one with such a deeply political focus, is bound to produce some uneven results, Leila Soussi’s The After Revolution can roundly be considered a triumph, a thoughtful presentation of emerging talent in Tunisia that managed to deliver a heterodox vision of a high-profile but ill-understood political moment.

The After Revolution continues at White Box (329 Broome Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 18, at 5Pointz (45-46 Davis Street, Long Island City, Queens) through May 31, and at the French Institute Alliance Française Gallery (22 East 60th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through June 1.

The After Revolution was organized by the French Institute Alliance Française as part of its biennial World Nomads festival.

“The Negation of Time, Prologue” at Le Laboratoire, by William Kentridge with Peter Galison and Philip Miller (Photograph by Phase One Photography)

It’s possible that scientists and artists may have one side of their brain more dominant than the other, with the broadly opposite characteristics of logic and creativity, but the best innovations in both fields tend to come from using the whole mind. In an attempt to instigate such mental dialogues between science and art, a new exhibition and laboratory space called the Lab Cambridge is opening up in Kendall Square in in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next year.

“Every exhibition will have an artist and a scientist coming together,” said Carrie Fitzsimmons, executive director of ArtScience Labs and director of Lab Cambridge, over the phone. “Kendall Square is near such a big scientific community with MIT and Harvard and all the biotech firms, but mostly no one know what’s going on inside these laboratories, and what we’re trying to do is open up this space for an open dialogue.”

Shilpa Gupta and Mahzarin Banji’s “While I Sleep,” on the theme of fear, at Le Laboratoire. (photograph by Marc Domage)

The communal space for collaboration will be a stateside iteration of Le Laboratoire in Paris, both of which are the brainchilds of David Edwards, a Harvard professor and active entrepreneur, who will teach his Harvard class in the Lab Cambridge space. Both are also part of the ArtScience Labs ”experiments in culture,” and Lab Cambridge in particular evolved from the three year experiment Edwards did at Harvard called the Laboratory that embodied similar experimentation between art and science.

The Paris center “where artists and designers experiment at frontiers of science” has included such projects as “The Olfactive Project” where artists, scientists, and designers are working on the idea of “Virtual Coffee” to experiment with creating an “electronic coffee odor” that can be sent around the world, caffeinating the mind as it travels; “Figure Studies” where artist David Michalek used HD video to do Muybridge-like studies on movement; and Cira Najle’s “Cummulus” installation of clouds on the ideas of atmosphere and water in the air. ”With all the exhibitions in Paris, David’s been able to curate with the artist and the scientist a match where there’s interests from both,” Fitzsimmons said.

What will be in store with the Lab Cambridge, which will be located in Kendall Square, is yet to be seen, but the building’s plans from French designer Mathieu Lehanneuer and architectural firm Born Fenollosa Architects are curious and promising, including a space for exhibitions and an auditorium, as well as a store with innovative design items and a “WikiBar” cafe. Edwards will likely continue his indefatigable work with merging science and art, which he’s already done in things like the cross-disciplinary focus of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard and through the ArtScience Prize for, as you could guess, designs that mix art and science in an inventive way. By taking science out of its secluded lab and art out of its white wall gallery, hopefully this new venue will inspire new ideas on both. ”Everything we do is about making these creative lab spaces, and this goes on many levels, whether it is curating the exact space or trying to help the aritst or scientist figure out where they really want to play or explore,” Fitzsimmons said. “There are no preconceived notions of the outcomes.”

Turn and face the students, Mr. President of Cooper Union.

(All images copyright Yao Lu, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY)

SAN FRANCISCO — Pollution and health have been on the Chinese mind as of late. From dead pigs in Shanghai to tips for avoiding bad air in Beijing, a clean environment can be difficult to find. Smog and water pollution have become a feature of China’s urban landscape, creating a hazard not just for Chinese citizens but people all over the world.

Traditional Chinese ink paintings are often known as shanshui, or mountain and water. Unfortunately, much of China’s water is no longer drinkable, and its mountains are difficult to find behind the smog. It’s a topic ripe for creative exploration.

I recently stumbled upon the work of Yao Lu on PSFK. As I clicked past, I was surprised to see the design blog featuring such a traditional landscape. But as I looked closer, I noticed that what was supposed to be an ink painting was actually a photograph. Yao carefully adjusted the image on Photoshop to create the semblance of a shanshui painting, down to little details like a red chop for the artist’s signature.

In a statement online, Yao described his project, dubbed New Mountain and Water:

Today, China is developing dramatically and many things are under constant construction. Many things have disappeared and continue to disappear. The rubbish dumps covered with the ‘shield’, a green netting, are a ubiquitous phenomenon in China.

What’s most striking about the work is the way it twists China’s idyllic scenes into a comment on the contemporary landscape. There’s a haunting beauty to these mountains of trash, and if the world would rather forget its dumpsters, maybe art can compel us to look at them again.

Yao Lu, “Mountain Trek” (2009)

Yao Lu, “Mountain and Straw Houses in the Summer” (2008)

Yao Lu, “Autumn Mist in the Mountain with Winding Streams” (2007)

Yao Lu, “View of the Autumn Mountains in the Distance” (2008)

Yao Lu, “Early Spring on Lake Dong Ting” (2008)

Enrico Miguel Thomas in his Red Hook studio. (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

A few months ago, on a February evening in Grand Central, Brooklyn-based artist Enrico Miguel Thomas carried his drawing board a few paces away from where he had been set up, illustrating from a counter  — leaving behind a bag full of markers and a folded-up easel. After a brief moment of gathering the necessary detail on his subject, a process he characterizes as having taken no longer than five minutes, he turned to find a swarm of police officers gathering near his bags, which were less than ten feet away. After approaching the officers, claiming the bags, and identifying himself as an artist, the MTA police insisted on “clearing” his property with a K-9 bomb-sniffing dog.

Enrico Miguel Thomas, who has spent the better part of the last decade doing subway illustrations, was irked by the exchange, but his displeasure turned to shock when a single officer stayed behind and handed him a pink summons for “dis-con,” or Disorderly Conduct. The incident has since developed into a bizarre legal process, as reported by the New York Times on Monday, and yesterday Hyperallergic was able to catch up with the artist at his Red Hook studio to learn more about his practice and his relationship with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

A drawing of commuters in Grand Central.

This wasn’t Mr. Thomas’s first brush with MTA authorities — in 2010, he had been cited for obstructing passengers, a charge he successfully defeated in court after an eight month ordeal. More recently, in July 2012, he had been invited by the MTA’s Transit Museum to lead a workshop for kids about his work as one of the most recognizable artists working on New York’s iconic transportation infrastructure: the subway.

His works, which have previously earned him recognition in the New York Times, center around illustrations of New York and subway scenes — passengers, trains, landmarks — drawn with permanent markers on the subway maps distributed by the MTA. And so it was especially painful for Enrico Miguel Thomas to find himself again at odds with the very institution that inspires his work, and to find himself the target of what he considers to be a discriminatory attitude, both against his heritage — he’s Puerto Rican and African American — and his position as an artist.

The Fifth Avenue Apple Store, as envisioned by Enrico Miguel Thomas. (click to enlarge)

“He’s still there,” Mr. Thomas recounted overhearing the officers telling each other after they cleared his bags. Even though he repeatedly showed them clips of his press coverage to explain his presence at Grand Central, the officers allegedly were irritated by his unwillingness to take off and decision to continue drawing after the incident. After he received the summons, he told Hyperallergic, he was so upset that he left the terminal immediately, and the piece he was working on that evening remained unfinished.

There is a legitimate policing function to the MTAPD, but repeatedly harassing a quiet, unobtrusive artist who has dedicated his work to contemplative drawings inspired by New York infrastructure seems a bit excessive. The world’s subway systems are defined by the community of buskers and assorted artists who variously pander to, document, and gently disrupt the commuter tedium.

Regardless of how one might feel about New York’s increasingly tight security apparatus, the chilling effect on artistic expression is palpable, and Enrico Miguel Thomas’s double-edged experience — his previous experience getting an MTA citation overturned and his invited participation at the Transit Museum — suggest that there is a disconnect between how the MTA presents itself in public and how it enforces, to a draconian extent, rules and regulations meant to curtail criminal behavior rather than harmless expression.

After the incident, Mr. Thomas eventually found a lawyer, and, like his previous imbroglio with the MTA, planned to fight the charges. At a Midtown Community Court hearing on May 1, the judge, Felicia Mennin, offered up a shocking rationale for the Disorderly Conduct citation — in upholding the summons, she referred not to legal precedent but the Boston Marathon bombings and 9/11 in justifying the encroachment on Thomas’s rights. Her comments spurred the New York Times coverage mentioned above, and are demonstrative of the petty fascism of Manhattan’s minor courts. Despite the decidedly prosaic legal process ahead, Thomas remains inspired: though his previous work had taken him all over the city, he has found himself increasingly drawn to Grand Central since the incident. “I’m going back nearly every day, now my Grand Central collection is staggering.”

“Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant” (“Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salut you”) distributed by Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in Italy in 1942; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s quote “The world knows that the Nazis, the Fascists and the militarists of Japan have nothing to offer to youth, except death,” illustrated with Hitler removing a mask to show a and skull from the Office of War Information, United States (1942) (all images courtesy the British Library)

As a way to guide public opinion to a collective obedience, governments around the world have employed art. These visual modes of propaganda can be powerful and moving, and they haven’t disappeared, as proved by the playing cards showing members of Saddam Hussein’s regime distributed by the US during the 2003 Iraq invasion. The British Library in London is opening an exhibition that examines extensively this tradition of control.

1813 portrait of Napoleon by Jean-Baptiste Borely, aimed at inspiring loyalty at a point when his power was declining, showing him as the supreme, unrivaled leader. While the painting was in the Council Hall of Montpellier for a time, after less than a year Napoleon was defeated and the artist never paid.

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion has a global focus on state-run propaganda that stretches back to the ancient world all the way up to contemporary Twitter and our current bank notes. One of the co-curators at the British Library, Jude England, stated in the release:

We want visitors to consider the role of propaganda in their own lives today, as well as look at the state’s use of propaganda throughout history. That’s why, as well as displaying iconic pieces of propaganda from the Library’s collections, such as posters from both World Wars, the Cold War, and Vietnam, we’ll also be focusing on more surprising examples, such as the 2012 Olympics and even Twitter – things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with a word like ‘propaganda’.

With about 200 items, there’s plenty of examples of how war posters preyed on visceral reactions to death and destruction, and how the icons of a nation can be manipulated into calls to action or reaction. Yet while images like Hitler removing a mask to show a skull (illustrated by FDR’s proclamation that “the world knows that the Nazis, the Fascists, and the militarists of Japan have nothing to offer to youth, except death”) are expected fodder for any propaganda showing, there are also grand portraits of leaders like Napoleon, toweringly painted by Jean-Baptiste Borely and decked out from silky shoes to golden laurel crown. Despite its ostentatious opulence that shows him secure as emperor, it was painted as his power was declining to his ultimate defeat at Waterloo.

Painting by Irakli Toidze (1949), showing a young Stalin as a scholar; Painting from 1967 imagining a young Mao striding to single handedly win victory in the 1922 miners’ strike at Anyuan. Its thought to be the most reproduced painting anywhere in the world, with more than 900 million copies made.

Similar and subtle in using portraiture to influence a desired profile are the images of Mao and Stalin, both showing them in an idealized youth. While nothing on them blares COMMUNISM IS THE WAY, they suggest with simplicity the visions of perfection of the leaders.

All of this is just the beginning of a delve into propaganda, as it is an always present component of our visual culture. Some of the most significant events of our recent history have resulted in state-funded art meant to blare out from the noise of daily life and drive their messages straight into your heart. When the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, propaganda posters showing drowning women and children and a smoldering ship, demanded viewers to “take up the sword of justice.” When the space race consumed the US and Soviet Union in an epic, and expensive, battle for the stars, even the pioneering space dogs were honored as Soviet conquerors of the cosmic sphere. Art is, in a way, all about persuasion already, convincing a viewer of an artist’s world perception, even in the most passive of work. It’s a power that governments around the world have long appreciated for its influence on our emotional cores.

Here are some more views of propaganda, past and present, from Propaganda: Power and Persuasion:

Illustration from the Medical Officer journal to promote better public health. At the time, flies were held responsible for contaminating food and spreading diseases such as tuberculosis and anti-fly campaigns were held across Britain, Australia, and the United States. (1920)

Scarf honoring the endurance of London during the German Blitz, with both Churchill’s “We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches” and American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s “London can take it!” quotes bordering a map of the bomb sites. (1942)

A WWI poster from the Parliamentary War Savings Committee encouraging donations. The five shilling piece provides added a level of symbolism, as its marked with an image of St George slaying a dragon. (1915)

A Soviet poster showing the freedom symbol of the Statue of Liberty being used as a surveillance tower for the American police. (1971)

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion is at the British Library (96 Euston Road, London), May 17 to September 17.

Photograph of Hannah Arendt, NYC, 1944. (image courtesy of the Estate of Fred Stein)

The Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research is a $5,000 essay prize awarded in an annual competition for those interested in the juncture of art and creative research and in the principles at the heart of the arts and humanities, including sense-based intelligence; the reality of singular, nonrepeatable phenomena; ethical vision; and consilience between inner and outer, nature and reason, thought and experience, subject and object, self and world.

The award is presented by the MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Entry submission: essay of 1,500 words or less
Application deadline: Friday, May 31, 2013
Theme: On Art and Disobedience; Or, What Is an Intervention?
Cash award: 5,000 USD

The winner will be announced by Saturday, August 31, 2013.

Please note that essays over the limit will be disqualified.
Application for the prize is open to the general public.

Download the PDF application and email the completed application and the essay (in a .doc or .pdf format) to ctcrprize@pnca.edu.

Explication of theme:

“To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. The history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely. All that remains in such a case is an equivocal, diluted form of guilt. I would say that there is good reason to study the dynamics of disobedience, the spark behind all knowledge.”

—Gaston Bachelard, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

Intervention is an omnipresent if not ubiquitous word in contemporary discourse, but what forms does it take in the age of genetic engineering and real-time media?  Is the concept a decoy or distraction in the face of futility? A cover or compensation for hopeless battles and set-ups? Is it simply working to slow down the Inevitable, a notion that in and of itself works as a major obstacle to critical thought and action? Or is it something more serious, more durable, and more dangerous? What is the relation of critique and intervention, theory and practice? And what role does art play in what Bachelard called “creative disobedience,” acts of Prometheanism “so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely”? Might art now comprise one of the last forms of political stealth, working in increasingly sophisticated time-based ways? What kinds of thought and action are powerful and compelling interventions today, whether one-off spectacles, sabots, monkey wrenches, sleepers, gummy bears, or Trojan Horses?

Along with Anne-Marie Oliver and Barry Sanders, Founding Co-Chairs, MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research, Pacific Northwest College of Art, the judges for 2013 include:

• Claire Bishop, Professor of Contemporary Art, Theory and Exhibition History, Graduate Center, The City University of New York
• Judith Butler, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, The University of California, Berkeley, and Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy, Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien/EGS
• Barbara Duden, Professor Emerita, Leibniz Universität Hannover
• Julia Kristeva, Professor Emerita and Head of the École doctorale Langues, Littératures, Images, Université Paris Diderot, Paris 7, and recipient of the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought
• Heike Kühn, Film Critic
• Martha Rosler, Artist and contributor to the Hannah Arendt Denkraum (on the occasion of Hannah Arendt’s 100th birthday)

For more information visit pnca.edu.

Mikki the chimpanzee learning to use a camera with Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid (all images courtesy Sotheby’s)

While staggering auction record peaks were summited this week by some talented human artists, a more amateur representative of an underrepresented artist species is expected to gain some auction attention of his own. Photographs by Mikki the chimpanzee that show blurry views of Moscow are estimated to fetch between $75,000–100,000 at Sotheby’s.

Mikki posing in Red Square

The lot of 18 photographs is part of the June 5 “Changing Focus — A Collection of Russian and Eastern European Contemporary Photography” auction in London. They include both Mikki’s clarity-challenged captures of Moscow’s Red Square and other city sights, as well as documentation of Mikki learning to use a polaroid, analogue, and antique large-format camera with Russian-born American conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Called “Our Moscow Through the Eyes of Mikki,” the 1998 collaboration between human and simian was part of Komar and Melamid’s broader ongoing project of collaborating with animals. Back in 1987 they worked with a a dog named Tranda to “draw” with paw prints canine-friendly subjects like the outline of a bone, and in 1995 they painted busts of George Washington with an elephant named Rene at the Toledo Zoo in Ohio. They even tried out gnawed wood sculptures with with beavers in 1998.

Komar and Melamid reportedly first encountered the chimpanzee Mikki at the Moscow Circus, according to Metro. While chimpanzees have similar vision to humans, including bifocal sight, depth perception, and distinguishing the variations in colors, it’s hard to say whether Mikki could really conceive of the idea of capturing what was before him with these strange devices. However,  Suad Garayeva, the curator of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, told Metro that “Mikki got quite excited with the results.” These results, the fuzzy views of the spires and people of Russia, may not have much in the way of control, but there are plenty of surprising angles and a dislocation from the expected in their frames.

Below are a few of Mikki’s shots up for auction.

Mikki’s photograph of curious spectators

Red Square photographed by Mikki

A blurry Moscow view by Mikki

An interesting capture of light in one of Mikki’s photographs

A long exposure of the sky and Moscow architecture by Mikki

Photographs from Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s “Our Moscow Through the Eyes of Mikki” are up for auction in ”Changing Focus – A Collection of Russian and Eastern European Contemporary Photography” on June 5 at Sotheby’s in London.

Left, raw materials for the “Expo 1″ colony, and right, explanatory text and a rendering of what it will eventually look like. (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

The word “expo” conjures big visions: grand pavilions, ferris wheels, exotic exhibitions, a world’s fair. But last Sunday, a different kind of expo opened at MoMA PS1, in Long Island City, Queens — Expo 1: New York, the latest curatorial effort of the institution’s director, Klaus Biesenbach. It’s not quite a world’s fair, but Expo 1, which is the result of a ongoing partnership between MoMA and Volkswagen, riffs on the idea by comprising many pieces that fit loosely together as a whole. It might best be described as an exhibition of exhibitions, or an extremely multifaceted exhibition, or an exhibition that’s “not only an exhibition,” as Biesenbach said at a press preview last week. He also talked about it in terms of wrapping “an envelope around the building [MoMA PS1],” while curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a co-organizer of the show, called it “almost like a Russian babushka.” This was shortly after Obrist posed the essential question from which Expo 1 sprang: “What is a large-scale exhibition for the 21st century?”

Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist speaking at the press preview for “Expo 1″ (click to enlarge)

Obrist’s answer was that it should take its form from an archipelago rather than a continent, which is to say, a grouping of separate but related islands rather than a continuous landmass. The 21st century is a fragmented one, and for curators it demands a similar approach.

It was fitting (and no doubt intended) that Obrist used an ecological term to explain the concept, since the environment — both natural and built — is the overarching subject of Expo 1 (the envelope in which Biesenbach wrapped the building, if you will). “An imaginary contemporary art museum dedicated to ecology,” Biesenbach explained in a recent phone conversation. “I basically curated the whole building according to what would normally be there” — group shows, solo shows, installations — “but as an imaginary museum devoted to ecology.”

Biesenbach said that he and Obrist had been wanting to do a show on the subject for a while, “and then the hurricane [Sandy] happened. And then it was not a topic anymore — it was an urgency.” What’s more, after the superstorm, “it became clearer that our concept of social practice was much more important. It became very clear that this show cannot be symbolic. It has to be real.”

Adrián Villar Rojas, “La inocencia de los animales (The innocence of animals)” (2013)

That realness includes a garden on the roof of the building that staff and visitors will tend; the resulting fruits and vegetables will be incorporated into the menu at MoMA PS1’s cafe/restaurant, the M. Wells Dinette. It includes a school run by members of online art magazine Triple Canopy, which is set not only in a series of classrooms on the institution’s third floor, but also in an exhibition space that artist Adrián Villar Rojas has turned into an incredible amphitheater by way of a massive clay sculptural intervention. The installation is massive yet weathered, strong but cracked, looking simultaneously like a ruin and a dystopic set from the future.

An installation view of the “ProBio” show, with Dina Chang’s “Flesh Diamonds” (2013) in the foreground and Shanzhai Biennial’s “S.B. No 2″ (2013) in the background

There’s also a colony being built in MoMA PS1’s courtyard; the geodesic dome-cum-community center in the Rockaways; at MoMA proper, the Rain Room, a space filled with falling water than stops when it detects a human presence; and a cinema showing a wide range of programming (features, documentaries, shorts, video games) from 2004 on. And, of course, since this is an art museum after all, a series of more traditional exhibitions and installations, including a tech-focused group show called ProBio, curated by artist Josh Kline, and an Ansel Adams show organized by MoMA photography curator Roxana Marcoci. Biesenbach spoke of it all as “a kind of coexistence — a simultaneity of an aesthetic and social function.”

Meg Webster’s “Pool” was originally commissioned for this PS1 space in 1998 by then director Alanna Heiss. It’s on view once again in “Expo 1.” (click to enlarge)

When Biesenbach and Obrist began discussing the show, before Hurricane Sandy, they were thinking a lot about artist Joseph Beuys (a video of his “Sweeping Up,” in which the artist and two students swept Karl-Marx-Platz following the 1972 May Day parade, is on view) and the German concept of erweiterter kunstbegriff. What that means, Biesenbach explained, is that “art has to be responsible in society and activist. It’s a political necessity. The political dimension of art is always applied in contemporary art, so contemporary practice is always social practice.”

That interpretation is more easily applied to some elements of Expo 1 than others — at the press preview, Biesenbach referred to the Rockaway dome as the most successful example — but the overarching ecological activist theme comes through even in many of the more static art objects on view (Mark Dion’s tree of tarred and taxidermic animals, “Killers Killed” [2004–07], for instance). And while it’s sort of exasperating to think it’s taken us so long to get to this point of critical mass — Beuys was already sweeping up four decades ago! — the view, at least according to Biesenbach, isn’t totally hopeless. “Dark optimism” is the show’s theme. As he explained at the preview, it means “you have a future if you do something.”

Joseph Beuy, “Sweeping Up” (1972), installation view at MoMA PS1

Expo 1: New York is on view at MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens) through September 2, with other end dates for other venues.

Klaus Biesenbach will be speaking at our inaugural Hyperallergic ArtTalk on Monday, May 20, at 7 pm. Tickets are available online.

Tatyana Murray’s “In the Woods” exhibition at BOSI Contemporary (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

The shadows of memory and haunting of the afterlife are entwined through three shows currently open on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. While perhaps odd choices for the warming weather that generally restores life to the streets, these exhibitions dwell more on death, offering some intelligent contemplations of how art can function as a form of remembrance.

Art by Tatyana Murray at BOSI Contemporary (click to enlarge)

I started this perusal of haunting art at BOSI Contemporary, where Tatyana Murray’s In the Woods had spectral works of layered etched plexiglass lit by LEDs showing flourishing, yet ephemeral, trees, as well as some odd scenes involving unicorn skulls and disembodied deer heads. The British artist is heavily influenced by fairytales, but her stories are warped by remembrances where something of a nightmare has gotten in. The gallant unicorn is dead and inside a hanging wall clock the ghostly skull of a bird stares back. The exhibition is bit too broad, though, as her vellum work is not nearly as strong, and the sculptural clusters of deer antlers also don’t have quite the same darkness to them as the plexiglass work, which is captivating to examine from different angles, assessing the dimensions of these phantoms.

Photograph by Katherine Wolkoff at Sasha Wolf Gallery

And perhaps deer are having something of an LES art moment, although the tantalizing angles of antlers is definitely a longtime art favorite. They were the focus of Katherine Wolkoff’s Deer Beds at Sasha Wolf Gallery. Or rather, it was the absence of them. The photographs from Block Island, just off the coast of Rhode Island, show the traces of deer that slept on the grass. The Brooklyn-based photographer is probably best known for her elegant silhouettes, some which focus on Block Island birds in taxidermy, and these are sort of the reverse of those. Instead of taking away the details and leaving the form of a person or animal, she has captured the occupied space of the sleeping deer.

Photographs by Katherine Wolkoff at Sasha Wolf Gallery

While the photographs are fairly straightforward, and a solitary piece may not have the same impact as seeing all them all crowded quietly into the gallery, they still have a simple moving memory to them. Wolkoff finds each of the beds by traveling through the deer’s trails in the grass to where they slept the night before, and even with their living absence there is an impression of warm life in the soft forms pressed into the grass.

Examining art by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo at Muriel Guépin Gallery (click to enlarge)

My final stop in this memory crawl was recent Brooklyn transplant Muriel Guépin Gallery, with Gabriel Barcia-Colombo‘s mixed media sculpture. The New York-based artist has been working with using video art as a way to contain memory (he even gave a TED talk on the subject). Here a small installation of his work had flickering figures of people standing in jars, bottles, and other containers (even a blender, where you could press the button and make the poor soul spin in the churning cyclone of water).  After all those skulls and foliage apparitions of deer it was nice to have something a little more lighthearted.

Art by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo at Muriel Guépin Gallery

While he cites the collections of natural history museums as inspiration for his acts of memorialization, the art is more interesting as a comment on the digital archive of our selves. It sometimes feels like between social media and commerce and all our other little traces webbing through the online world that we are everywhere and nowhere at once. Yet here these personal moments can be contained as relics, selfhood made manifest.

All three of these exhibitions interpret how to preserve the imprint of the absent, and while this is all very moody stuff for a sunny afternoon, even these beautiful early days of the summer will someday be a memory that we will have to dig through our mind to recapture. Perhaps we could use a little art documentation to help.

Tatyana Murray: In the Woods is at BOSI Contemporary (48 Orchard Street, Lower East Side) through June 2.

Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds continues at Sasha Wolf Gallery (70 Orchard Street, Lower East Side) through June 30.

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo exhibits at Muriel Guépin Gallery (30 Orchard Street, Lower East Side) through June 2. 

Doug Aitken, “Listening” (2011) (image via 303 Gallery)

André Malraux, the prolific French critic and Minister of Culture under Charles de Gaulle, once wrote that art is an “anti-destin,” a revolt against destiny. And by that measure, the country’s recently-released report calling for a tax on internet-connected devices to fund cultural production qualifies simultaneously as artless and a work of art in itself. The generally well-intentioned document, authored by Pierre Lescure, a special advisor on France’s “exception culturelle” doctrine, was presented to President François Hollande on Monday, and Le Monde reported that it marks a departure from the aggressive copyright-protection tactics previously favored by Nicholas Sarkozy’s conservative government.

Pierre Lescure’s Twitter profile pic. (via @pierrelescure)

The case is laid out in grisly detail, in 80 individual arguments comprising 500 pages, but the gist of it is: France’s cultural patrimony, or at least its cultural bureaucracy, has been harmed by the diffusive powers of the web, and would very much benefit from a shot in the arm in the form of a tax on all internet-enabled devices. The Lescure report further suggests that the ideal rate is 1%, levied against all web-enabled hardware sold. This would generate revenues of €86 million (~$110m) from an overall market estimated at €8.6 billion (~$11b).

Of course, the report, which prompted one conservative politician to levy the familiar accusation that Mr. Lescure and the French left are “high on taxes,” should be commended for its thorough reaction to an obvious problem, but the resulting decision to tax electronic hardware is plainly unrealistic. Though a state subsidy of the arts has an important role to play in democratic societies, and is an area in which the United States can certainly stand to learn a thing or two from Western Europe, a provocative proposal such as this one is just that — a high-visibility attempt at troubleshooting an issue for which there is no clear solution.

It’s the kind of thinking that would probably permanently end a politician’s career in the United States, but in France comes across as a proposal to be debated and discussed, if not implemented. As many advocates for an increased awareness of the costs of cultural production would likely agree, there is a balance to be struck between top-down state intervention and the cultivation of a behavioral shift at the grassroots level.

The Lescure report can be read as a defeatist and ham-fisted reaction to what should be an attempt at wide-scale correction in the consumption patterns of web denizens, and for that reason alone should fail. Nevertheless, the French government already charges a tax on digital storage for the very same purpose, and it raises €200 million (~$257m) from that annually, so forget about encouraging small-scale artistic patronage and altruistic concert-going — it may very well be time for beleaguered copyright holders to consider Gallic relocations.