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Friday, April 02, 2004

The McEneaney defense

 

We want to question Tyler Green's gulaging of Sarah McEneaney as a regional painter in Modern Art Notes, the other day. We don't know David Bates' work (Green compares Bates to McEneaney), but judging from the image MAN ran, we have to question placing the two of them in the same sentence, let alone in the same post. (top image McEneaney's "My myomectomy")


McEneaney is not really about Philadelphia. Her work is about her life as a paradigm of the artist in the world. The specificity of her images to Philadelphia and her own private life and daily life transcend themselves. We'd compare her to Florinne Stettheimer and Persian miniatures.

As for regionalism, we don't get what's wrong with it or why it's being damned. We have particular fondness for a number of "regional" painters whose work talks to us from afar--like Grant Wood, some Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, oh that's enough for starters. (bottom image is random Persian miniature from Google images)
permanent link  libby and roberta 1:44 PM
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Another view on Barnes

 


The press has not gotten the right idea about Dr. Albert C. Barnes and his thinking, said Kimberly Camp, Barnes Foundation executive director and CEO, this evening at the Slought Foundation. "His ideas were not idiosyncratic," she said. (Shown, Camp on left with Jeremy Braddock from Cornell, center, and Slought's Jean-Michel Rabate, moderator.)

This other view of Barnes was not just dreamed up. She got it from Barnes' papers now in the process of being archived and therefore still unavailable to the public, she said, addressing a crowd of about 40 willing to come out on this weekday night for some intellectual grappling.

Furthermore, Camp said, Barnes' much discussed arrangements of the art on the walls at his estate were ever-changing. "The ensembles were fluid up until the day of Barnes' death," she said (shown, Barnes with dog.)

As for the education program, the classes at the Barnes changed "180 degrees" in the time following his death from the way they were originally conceived. During his life, artists and scholars were welcome to contribute to the discussions, and discussions is what the classes were. Lectures were a post-mortem wrinkle. "It was a think tank for the love of aesthetics," Camp said.

Camp's comments followed a paper, "Neurotic Cities: Barnes in Philadelphia," delivered by Jeremy Braddock from Cornell University in which he argued that Barnes and his support of modernism was contested hotly by several academically entrenched psychologists, including University of Pennsylvania psychologists Francis X. Dercum (shown left) and Charles W. Burr (shown below right). Dercum and Burr ridiculed the modernists exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art for degeneracy and lunacy.

The group were defending their academic turf--somatic causes of mental illness--against Freud, who was already winning his place in psychiatric circles elsewhere.

In a talk at the Art Alliance, the group of psychologists charged that the paintings were "symptomatic evidence of the insanity of artists," Braddock said. Dircum said the works showed disease of the color sense and of a great many other mental faculties--direct evidence of neurological deformities--and he called for the institutionalization of the artists.

Barnes, on the other hand, was more in favor of Freud, and in a letter to the Brooklyn Eagle, said the psychologists were "'old hat'" and called them "'ignoramuses with a penchant for limelighting."

The moment was a struggle for cultural power, and Barnes ultimately won that battle, receiving a state charter a year later, in 1922, to create a gallery founded under the principals of modern psychology.

Today's struggle over whether or not to move the Barnes is also a struggle for cultural power, and sure enough, the charge that Barnes was an unreasonable is part of the let's-call-the-collector-crazy tradition. Braddock (shown left) made a number of points about how collecting has historically been interpreted as a sign of insanity, so this is just business as usual when all articles about Barnes point up his irrascible side and not his reasonable, intelligent side. (Hey, don't we all have irrascible moments?)

Not long after all of this fuss, the Museum of Modern Art was founded. Its method of displaying art has become the norm. But that doesn't make Barnes crazy either.

As Camp said at the end of her response to this tale from history, "There's another way to interface with art than [today's idea of an] art museum"--a white box, with "people shuffling silently as voyeurs." Her closing sally was, "There has to be more than one contextual framework in which we experience art."


Barnes expressed concern that after he died, his thinking and ideas for the foundation would be set in stone by followers, Camp said (citing the unpublic as yet archives). But he himself was constantly challenging and reassessing his own notions and assumptions(shown, Gauguin's "Loulou" from the Barnes collection).

I buy it. Barnes was open to Freud and he was a champion of modern art, both fairly daring positions in conservative Philadelphia.

I honestly don't know what he'd think about moving the Barnes collection. But neither do those other people know what he'd think. I say, let's just move the thing. It's so inaccessible, I haven't been there for a gazillion years. Let it stay the Barnes, with its wall arrangements and educational programs, but let's bring it to the people.

Philadelphians, like the good doctors who said modern artists were certifiable, are so retrograde, they fight every change tooth and nail. If Camp's and Braddock's reports are true, Barnes was not like that. He was open to new thinking and new art. Furthermore, the penchant of painting collectors as crazy, one of the points Braddock was making, has certainly applied to Barnes, apparently unfairly. So, let the Barnes change.
permanent link  libby 7:12 AM
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Thursday, April 01, 2004

Kara Walker FWM pix up

 
Here are four installation shots of Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. I folded them in to what I wrote the other day.

permanent link  roberta 2:03 PM
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Laurie Anderson touches down

 

Art-rock legend Laurie Anderson touched down in Philadelphia last week to give a talk as part of the ICA's 40th Anniversary celebration.

The talk was the third in the ICA celebration series, number two being Richard Artschwager (see posts, 2/15/03 and 2/15/03 ) and number one having been wild-and-crazy first full-time ICA Director Sam Green (which I missed but heard later via recording). More outstanding artists who have shown at the ICA will be giving talks in the fall.

In accordance with Anderson's amost pop-culture, multimedia status as a musician, performance artist, poet, and installation artist, specializing in ambitious pieces built around deep thoughts, an enormous crowd (by art standards) of about 400 showed up. Like me, they seemed to be charmed by her 10-foot-deep dimples, her good nature and her gift for spinning a yarn. The audience even filled the aisles and pressed in across the back in front of the doors at the auditorium at Penn.

Afterwards, she even had a fan ask for her autograph of his laser disc (I forget what was on the disc and I'm not clear if the fan was Canadian filmmaker Mark Achbar or not, but I've got his name scribbled in my notes along with the name of Achbar's film, "The Corporation," to screen in Philly in April).

NASA calls
Anderson mostly talked about what she's up to vis-a-vis making art (or what she's wondering about) these days, and it's, as usual, out of this world. Literally. Turns out she's NASA's artist in residence.

How this came about seems a little mysterious to her. The phone call to her studio from NASA struck her with disbelief. "You're not from NASA," was her first response, she said. Her second response, unspoken, was still skeptical: "Some fan knows what my ultimate fantasy would be." That line earned her a laugh. Eventually she asked her caller, "What does an artist in residence for NASA do?"

That one she's still trying to figure out. (Shown here in an early, groundbreaking performance, fiddling while the ice melts. Her skate blades are embedded in the ice.)

Time and the garden
While figuring out her artist-in-residence role, she's trying to integrate all her newfound NASA experience--visits to all the NASA facilities, watching the Mars rovers being built, etc.-- into a piece she's doing for EXPO 2005 in Japan. It's a Japanese garden (she's working with a Japanese gardener and a committee--a first for her, she said) and she's thinking of ways to incorporate music, video, and Mars rocks and other images from the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

What she's mulling over is the concept of time in a Japanese garden: The plum tree, she said, represents the shortest time possible. It drops its petals on a rock, representing a different amount of time. (Image from performance "Moby Dick.")

"I'm putting images from Mars in that context," she said.

Another issue in Japanese rock gardens is "also how much of nature is really alive and in what sense it is alive." Like Japanese haiku poet Dogan, Anderson said she wonders, are mountains aware? rivers, trees, rocks? "And we're searching for life on another planet."

"...As you can see, I'm desperate to pull these things together."

Walk on the free side
Time is also a part of her other major thread of undertakings (shown with her partner, singer Lou Reed). She's trying to get out of cyberspace ("I'm a supergeek," she cheerfully opines). So she is taking walks and keeping records--photos taken by a credit-card-size camera, diaristic 1- or 2-minute radio spots. She wonders about how walks, which are unprogrammed and come at you like life, in time, can be integrated as art work, with a beginning, middle and an end. She's been taking walks in France, in Greece along the "Sacred Way" (passing through the crossroads where Oedipus killed his father) and Milan.

"I don't walk very far. If I can't make the daily quota, I take a cab," she said with typical good humor, earning herself more laughter. Then she tempered the modesty of the enterprise with another admission: "I have a walk producer." She makes sure Anderson has the essentials, like a toothbrush, for the route.

Anderson also squeezed a little bit of politics in (I can't resist including this, but I must admit she had so many other great things to say that I left out and I'm feeling a wee bit guilty): "Last fall I got really irritated. There were a lot of theories about how our Founding Fathers were God-and-Country guys. But they were reading Voltaire and Diderot. [It was the time of]... the Enlightenment. OK, the French Revolution had some bad patches, but they did think of this idea of Liberty."

Anderson's walks, she said, are the opposite of religious pilgrimages. They are not an obligation but rather a form of freedom, she said, still thinking about the concept of liberty.

After talking a bit about working for the Greek government in its planning of the Olympics opening ceremony, a job now on hiatus for lack of funds, she answered former ICA Director Janet Kardon's question of whether she ever makes drawings.

Anderson said she does--for example her plans and proposals for the Japanese garden. "I guess I don't use paper and pencil. A computer pad gives me just about the same satisfaction." (Shown, "Wow Mom" etching)

Large and small
Afterwards, gallerist Shelley Spector wanted to know if Anderson ever does small projects. Anderson said she has a month each year dedicated to accepting calls for small project (the month changes each year). "If you call me in that month, whoever calls, whatever it is, I'll do it. So it's my festival month."

Very John Cage, don't you think?

I just want to add here that Anderson still looks pretty much like she always has, physically petite and self-contained, her hair still spiky. Self-contained, however, does not describe her manner, otherwise. Her smile and delivery are warm and amused by life and its contradictions.

She was born in 1947, by the way, and looks about 40! A guess on how she does it: She has dwelled so long in cyberspace, land without time.




permanent link  libby 4:59 PM
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Help your favorite Mongolian artist

 

[Note: I got an email this week from Joe Hohenstein, Mongolian artist Batsaihan Purveegiin's immigration lawyer. Purveegiin, you may recall, has been detained by Homeland Security since last September in spite of the fact that a Judge's order staying his imprisonment was in effect. (read my Weekly story about the case). Hohenstein says he may now be able to get Purveegiin a bail hearing or -- better yet -- a release. He is requesting letters of support from the community to back up his argument that Purveegiin poses no risks. (image is a the cover of a book made by Purveegiin. He turned over proceeds from sales of the book to support homeless children in Mongolia.)

If you can write a letter of support, follow Hohenstein's directions below. Even if you have never met Purveegiin in person, you may feel you know him through his folk art, which has been exhibited widely. He is definitely a member of the Philadelphia art community and if you feel you could support his release, please consider writing. Thanks! I edited Hohenstein's letter for length.]

Letter from Joe Hohenstein
Dear Roberta,
I am writing you because we are now in a position where we can help Purveegiin possibly get released [from INS detention]...I would like to file a Motion for Bond before the end of the week and I would like to include as many examples of community activity and support as possible. Can you see what you can do in terms of writing letters of support and getting the word out to others?

The letters should indicate the name and contact information of the person writing them. They should indicate how you know Batsaihan and what your experiences with him have been. We are requesting for Batsaihan Purveegiin to be released from immigration custody or at least given a fair bond amount. I will be trying to file by the end of the week if I have enough letters. Address the letters to The Honorable Walter Durling, Immigration Judge. Please don't send letters to the judge directly. Send them or fax them to me at the address below. Thanks for getting the word out.

Joseph Hohenstein
Nationalities Service Center
1300 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
fax- 215-735-9718



permanent link  roberta 1:49 PM
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Walker takes a walk in her piece

 

The biggest surprise Friday night at Kara Walker’s “entertainment” at the FWM was seeing Walker, dressed like a barefoot, pipe-smoking, 3-D approximation of one of her cut-paper silhouettes. When Libby, our friend Bay and I got entry to Walker’s installation (people were allowed in ten at a time and asked not to linger too long), she was sitting on the floor like an element in the piece, just another prop. She was not the first thing we noticed. (see Libby's post for more.)

The room was dark and the lighting came from several small video projections and from the many small and one large cyclorama that cast flickering light and color onto walls, ceiling, floor and the props. A little pup tent reminded me of childhood and acting out plays in the backyard. In fact, the whole thing kind of reminded me of a stage set for children to act out stories. (Top image is Walker and below is one of Walker's large non-linear narrative works, "Gone: a history of romance of a Civil War as it occurred between the dusky thighs of one young Negress and her heart.")

The moving lights gave it all a summery, firefly-lit affect.

The star in the dark space, the Venus in cosmos Fibbergibbet, was the video projection on the screen of a woman dancing the Charleston. It was among the smallest elements but it was the most compelling.

As with most everything else in Walker’s world, the dancer was back-lit and her body became a flat silhouette. She danced the jerky steps, her legs and arms a constant flow of up-down, spin around motion. Because the video had been speeded up, the jerky motion was accentuated and the dancer seemed a marionette doing a kind of St. Vitus’ dance. At the end, she’s so tired she has to pick up each leg to move it, but she keeps on moving.

It was mesmerizing. It was almost all I wanted to look at.

(next four images: Kara Walker In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Phila, "Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo: Kara E. Walker in Two Acts" (details), 2004, Image courtesy of the artist and the FWM. Photo: Aaron Igler)

Bay whispered to me “There’s somebody in the tent.” Indeed there was. Bay thought it was a man but he was dressed as a woman.

Just then, Walker stands up and begins reading from a sheet of paper. In the tent, banging and clanging of pots ensues. Walker reacts and continues reading in a flat voice, uninflected with any kind of emotion. At some point a large man, dressed in a bonnet and burlap sack with the letters “K.W.” stitched on it emerges from the tent. The two have a stare-down.

The spoken words are garbled and I catch a few. “Sure is dark in here....stop laughing and reload...you going to the barbecue? they are roasting the bones of our ancestors...it’s a live feed ... there isn’t much to be seen of a negress in the dark...you haven’t seen her have you...what’s orange and black and beautiful to behold? a nigger on fire....overhead the crow flies..war is near its end..they spoke with soft, sweet...allow me to step outside a conversation I have so carefully allowed to elaborate.”

With those last words -- pretty much mumbo jumbo if you ask me -- Walker steps outside the room, the man gets back in the tent and not knowing whether it's over or not, we stand around for a minute or two before leaving.

Bottom line, the live action was as circular as what was on the cycloramas.

Walker is not a linear storyteller.

The live action felt like childs' play enacted by a child for a parent. It also felt like a kind of experiment of the artist in her space attempting to relate to it in a new way.

If there’s genius in the piece it’s in the two small video works -- the Charleston dancer and the piece projected on the tent which shows Walker dressed in bonnet playing out the “Negro aphorisms” that were projected on a small arrow pointing at the tent. Both seem to carry on Walker's obsession with the role of African American women in the south and elsewhere. Both video components, I think, could stand alone and yet they worked well as elements in the theatrical set-piece.

I revisited the work yesterday and was alone with the installation long enough to write down many and some of the aphorisms which began “Many black women"... or "Some black women"...

The aphorisms covered every stereotype and cliche, from good girl to bad. And I’m thinking the Charleston dancer and the girl in the bonnet projected on the tent are both “some” and “many” black women, as is Walker herself.

While I think the live action didn't do much for the piece, I did find it most compelling to see the artist -- dressed as one of her stock characters -- in her work. It made it all the more clear her identification with her material.

It's great the Fabric Workshop provides a space and support for artists to experiment and take risks. You can scratch your head at the results, as we're all doing here, but in the end, I'd rather have a new Kara Walker piece to mull over than a lot of other things.

Finally, because we all love this kind of detail, here are some behind-the-scenes tidbits from Blake Bradford and other staff at the FWM.

The man in the tent? Walker’s cousin, James Hannahan, a writer studying for an MFA in writing at the University of Texas, Austin.

The four-piece band at the opening? “The Ebony Hillbillies,” out of New York, a Black string band playing traditional music. Walker picked the band to play at the opening. (You can hear the band live at the Grand Central Shuttle Terminal on April 28 as part of the Music in the Subway celebration.)

References in the piece come from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second book “Dred, A tale of a Great, Dismal swamp” (1856). Read a conversation with Walker and MOMA curators from 1999.


permanent link  roberta 10:14 AM
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Shaggy dog video story and Huelsbeck's shades of Becerra

 

I ran in to Rodger Lapelle's gallery last week to return an art video I had borrowed. (The video was one from a series done in the early 1990s where critics like Jerry Saltz and Arthur Danto stand in a gallery and explain the art or go behind the scenes and talk to the artist. There are several tapes in the series and just in case you're wondering, the least tortured performance by a talking head was given by Arthur Danto who enthusiastically chased after Red Grooms in a gallery as the artist was installing a show.

I enjoyed the video a lot. It wasn't at all like PBS's art 21 with its high production values -- it was more like an informed sales pitch for the work you were seeing. I thought it was interesting. And I wondered what art cartel put the series together. Maybe Rodger can explain a little for us...But I digress)


Meanwhile, in the gallery, the walls were full of work. This time by Simon Huelsbeck, small oils collectively called "Philadelphia Narratives." The work was monotone -- everything awash in sepia -- which gave it a kind of old-fashioned photo-documentary feel. (images of car, tank, kiss and Philadelphia City Hall are by Huelsbeck)


The paintings, full of surreal juxtapositions, coded story-telling, apocalyptic skies and weird, camera-influenced, fish-eye point of view, were intriguing. Apart from the color, with their narrative qualities and the seriality of imagery -- a man and woman kiss in close up, mid-distance and from afar -- they reminded me a bit of works by another Lapelle painter -- Roland Becerra.



I'm quite partial to Becerra so I slowed down enough to take a closer look and a few pictures.

Then Rodger tells me Huelsbeck went to high school with Becerra in Miami. Is it me or is that strange? The two went to art school in different places -- Becerra, Yale and Huelsbeck, Minnesota. But here they are in a Philadelphia gallery. I suppose, given Friendster, that is not really shocking.


But that the work shows affinities is a surprise. Now Becerra, it must be noted, is doing suburban gothic of a sort (people in graveyards at night) and Huelsbeck seems to be doing Philadelphia by way of Los Angeles (B movies come to mind). So the work is not lock-step, but it is kindred in spirit somehow -- those skies, those funny fish-eye angles, the storytelling. (bottom image is a Becerra)

Anyway, Huelsbeck's show comes down tomorrow (sorry to be so late) but I recommend it.
permanent link  roberta 3:26 PM
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Sunday, March 28, 2004

Kara Walker's mumbo jumbo

 


Roberta and I both went to the Fabric Workshop and Museum Friday to see Kara Walker's performance, "Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo: Kara E. Walker in Two Acts."

Roberta had an inside view, while I looked via the live feed in the next room, so we had two different looks at what was going on. I can't speak for how the inner-sanctum experience played, but maybe Roberta will weigh in.

Before the performance, I had been inside and gotten a good look at the installation--a mix of Walker's silhouette wizardry, magic lanterns, video projections, electronic billboard with racial statements and aphorisms, a coffee-colored tent and coffee-colored landscape painting on a mud-colored backdrop for a stage.

The swampy feeling worked. Indeed, the installation was the strongest part of the event, but I couldn't quite integrate its multiple elements into a unified piece of art.

The performance problems as they came through to me via the live feed, however, were major. The script was incomprehensible (not from a sound point of view but from a content point of view). Walker, dressed as a slave child, suddenly, without explanation, morphed into a pipe-smoking commentator. And who was that other actor supposed to be?

The words were plucked from slave narratives and filled with embarrassing (to me) stereotypes, but I couldn't find where Walker was going with it or what the story was. The lines sounded like they were being read from a script, and by gum they were.

I found myself waiting for the justification of using such loaded material, waiting for Walker to skewer it the way her visual work until now has consistently skewered the stereotypes of the past. It never happened.

Part of the way through, Walker lost her audience altogether, and then the sound was lost beneath the chattering and people getting up to leave. I never saw the second act.

This is the first time that Walker's work has not totally impressed me. I find it hard to believe that the second act would have been good enough to overcome the failings of the first and pull everything together.

I'm sorry to report, this ambitious venture seemed to be a lot of mumbo jumbo.

permanent link  libby 12:39 PM
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