“Ai Wei Wei Fault Line” at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art

 

What a surprise to discover a beautiful new venue for contemporary art in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.  The San Juan Islands Museum of Art has existed in temporary venues for several years, but it moved into its current re purposed building a year ago, and hired a dynamic young director, Ian Boyden, 8 months ago.

 

Not only is this a wonderfully intimate museum space, but Boyden just created a provocative  three part installation that included Ai Wei Wei, and Goya both addressing the devastating cruelty of bureaucracy, governments, and soldiers.  The third part of the installation by Dana Lynn Louis suggests moving the dark feelings from the other two exhibitions out into air and space.

 

Ai Wei Wei’s installation “Fault Line” is what brought me to Friday Harbor.

 

Following his dazzling and moving installation on Alcatraz Island last year calling attention to the identity of dozens of political prisoners detained all over the world, Ai Wei Wei has continued to have exhibitions which he has organized from China while he was under house arrest and unable to travel outside the country from 2011 to July 2015.

 

His strategies for making the invisible visible continues in this exhibition on a theme that he has addressed frequently: the death of over 5000 children in the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008.

 

 

In this presentation, the list of names fills two walls of the museum, here you see the director in front of the list and, below, a detail of the last part of the list which ends with no 5196, Zhu Guiying a girl born in 1990. Each year on the child’s birthdays Ai Wei Wei posts on his twitter feed to honor that child.

Behind a partition, the video “Little Girl’s Cheek” 2008 interviewed the parents of the children who died in the collapsed schools. Ai Wei Wei hired researchers to gather the information.The parents, relatives and friends tried digging out the rubble covering the still living children with their bare hands when no help arrived. It is unimaginably painful to hear them describe the cries of the children.

 

The soldiers stood by doing nothing. When the parents protested they were barred from the site. When they went to officials they did nothing, explained nothing. The government harrassed the investigators that Ai WeiWei had hired. The parents were mostly peasants who had sacrificed everything for their children’s education and now had only a tragedy.

 

The officials blamed the earthquake for the collapse of the dozens of schools, but the shabby construction was clearly to blame.

 

In other installations by Ai Wei Wei on the subject of the children lost in the earthquake we have seen hundreds of backpacks, or piles of the rebar that collapsed. Ai Wei Wei bought tons of it and straightened it.

 

Here, we have shapes evoking coffins.

There  are 8 coffin like forms made of rosewood, that seem like enlarged jewelry cases with black foam holding pieces of rebar carved in marble that seem to rise up from their containers like ghosts coming back to haunt us. “Rebar and Case” (2014) has not been shown in a museum before.

The juxtaposition of these three ways of representing the disaster overwhelmed me with the tragedy in a way that I had not been affected by previous installations. Part of the reason was the intimacy of the space in this small museum, where we walked between the coffin forms and looked down on the ghost rebars, thinking of the children buried still under rubble, most of them never properly recovered and given a funeral. Here was a graveyard of lost children, with unmarked graves.

 

In partnership with this installation was the gallery of Goya prints with the title print on a poster “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

What could be a more appropriate partner to “Fault Line” than Goya’s Caprichos, that sarcastic representation of the inhumanity of the bourgeoisie aristocracy and the clergy toward the poor.

 

No 79 Nada Nos ha visto (No One has Seen us)   Pobrecitas ( Poor Little Girls)

 

“Yo es Hora” Capricios no. 80 ( It is Time).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

\

 

Relieving us from this immersion in the wicked ways of the power elite, we enter into the installation of Dana Lynn Louis “As Above, So Below,” It is a site specific installation for the  atrium of the museum, a space that resembles a greenhouse with its glassed in walls. Louis’s installation glass and mixed media sculptures change constantly according to light and weather conditions, time of day, or our own moods. It follow on her “clearing project,” which asked people all over thew world to “clear” themselves either spiritually or physically, but writing down these wishes and intentions on a piece of paper that was then burned.

 

 

Here we sense a different type of clearing, a more immediate clearing of the darkness of the other two parts of the installation with the lightness, both literally and metaphorically, of the suspended glass sculpture.

 

 

 

Ian Boyden is a great addition to our Northwest contemporary art scene. He is engaged and thoughtful, dynamic and motivated. Keep your eye on this museum for future exciting installations. UPcomin April 23 is Fragile Waters: Ansel Adams, Ernest H. Brooks II and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly,” until September 5. It will open on Earth Day.

Clearly this museum is going to be on our itinerary! You can combine your art visit with renting a bike and Island Bicycles.

Ritual Cleansing on Site of Murders of homeless people sponsored by SHARE/WHEEL

 

 

 

 

 

“I have made mistakes but I am so lucky with all the help, love and support I have been given since I moved here.” Young resident of the homeless encampment under I 5 and continuing up the side of Beacon Hill East of I 5 known with the derogatory term “The Jungle”

 

Climbing up the steep, muddy hill to arrive under the freeway at “The Jungle” where the murders had taken place of James Quoc Tran and Jeannie L. Zapata, as well as injuring of nine others, I was surprised to hear the regular sound of drumming. Perhaps they had already started the ceremony. At the top, I found no jungle, only a bare expanse of dirt under the 1-5 freeway. And the sound of drumming turned out to be the sound of cars on I-5 passing over an expansion joint directly overhead. The camp was small, many people had left since the murders, only six people remained.

 

One of them, a twelve year veteran named Michelle explained to me how she had started with a ministry to the homeless with her husband, but when he died twelve years ago, she became homeless herself.

Another quite young woman ( far left in photo above) claimed that she had made mistakes and her problems were her own fault, but that she felt incredibly lucky that people were giving her so much help and caring.

 

Of course, her problems are not simply her fault,  they are the fault of a society that provides so little support and treatment options for drug addicted people. Apparently Tran was urgently seeking an out of state treatment program when he was killed. Three teenagers accused of the crime also lived in a homeless encampment, children of a drug dealing father and a mother who had lost custody.  This is the bottom of our society, the result of our hopeless waste of money on war, and military, and free access to guns, in the hands of people struggling with addictions.

 

In spite of efforts to create a living room area with some cast off furniture and a community fire pit, the desolation of the encampment under the freeway overwhelmed me with sadness. The constant sound of cars overhead never stopped. See the expansion joint in this photograph.

The cleansing ceremony started at 12:30. Two native Americans offered blessings and real drumming in each direction, we read some passages about love and caring from Leviticus, and we spoke a two part chant of love and caring. Each of us was sprinkled with water from a cedar bough.

Two medical officials from King County attended. King County keeps denying funding to SHARE/WHEEL saying their outcomes are not good enough. In other words in our data driven world, you have to have statistically quantifiable results. SHARE/WHEEL encourages dignity, self respect and personal responsibility, not quantifiable results.

 

SHARE/WHEEL is a caring, creative organization that provides services to homeless people in well organized tent encampments that are run by the occupants, drug free and alcohol free. I joined the grant writing committee there for a while and was impressed with the intelligence and organization of the other committee members, all of them living in the tent camps or in the bunkhouse, another type of shelter also sponsored by SHARE/WHEEL. “The Jungle” is not one of their encampments but they offer support to all homeless people, honoring each time someone dies outside with a one hour silent vigil outside city hall.

 

Every winter solstice they honor all the homeless people who have died outside. The numbers keep escalating.

 

 

They also create rituals like the one I attended today, and

sponsored the Tree of Live in Victor Steinbruck Park, near Pike Place market. That sculpture has negative shapes referring to the fallen leaves of the homeless. All over Seattle you can see bronze leaves embedded in the sidewalk honoring homeless people who have died outside.

 

SHARE/WHEEL,  an organization that for twenty five years has been providing a creative, caring, support to homeless people on their difficult path through life.  We cannot allow them to go under with debt because of lack of financial support from our government or ourselves.

 

A Plea from their Website:

“We must demand that King County follow their own emergency plan, and fund SHARE.   King County says they follow the “All Home” Plan (to end Homelessness) but they don’t.  That Plan is clear – existing shelters like SHARE’s should be preserved, not bankrupted.   Please immediately reach out to King County Executive Dow Constantine (kcexec@kingcounty.gov, 206-263-9600) and King County Community/Human Services Division Director Adrienne Quinn (Adrienne.quinn@kingcounty.gov, 206-263-1491) and ask them to fund SHARE!   Please also call your County Councilperson today and insist on action.

 

At the same time please consider making an emergency donation to help keep us going while together we persuade the City, County, and Federal Government that SHARE is needed, and cannot be allowed to fail. The shelter system here is already full and simply would not be able to handle over 450 extra folks a night.”

Walid Raad Scratching on Things I Could Disavow

 

 

Walid Raad “Translator’s Introduction:Pension Arts in Dubai” 2012 paper cutouts, two channel video

 

Walid Raad experienced much of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-91) at long distance after he left Lebanon as a teenager in 1983 to attend high school and college in the United States. That distance forms the foundation of his work, his understanding that the construction of history is serendipitous, fragmentary, and heavily mediated. Research into archives is also questionable, because what survives in an archive is also accidental. Adding to this the distortions of trauma that are embedded in war and its experience, we have nothing but our imaginations and scraps of information to count on. Hence, Raad’s contention that distinguishing fact and fiction is beside the point. He claims that everything he says is factual, but there are different types of facts: emotional, aesthetic, historical, psychological.

 

The installation and performance  titled “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow” consists  of several parts at the Museum of Modern Art, a computer projection or tableau as the artist calls it, which forms the backdrop of his performance, (see top of post)

a wall of large apparently blank colored squares of varying sizes,

 

 

a wall claiming to examine art history in Lebanon with archival documents

 

 

a small scale museum with miniature images of Raad’s work,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the entrance to an empty museum “Views from inner to outer compartments”

 

Each of these components form a part of the narrative in Raad’s performance, which he claims refers to the construction of the history of art in the Arab world, as he puts it.

 

 

The largest and most complex component,  is the wall projection “Translator’s Introduction: Pension arts in Dubai” It is this projection and performance that I will focus on here with briefer reference to the rest of the second floor installation at the Museum. (There is also a retrospective of his earlier work on the third floor component of this major retrospective.)

 

 

Raad’s narrative of the large tableau began with an account of the Artists Pension Trust, a real organization that signs contracts with artists who donate works to a privileged investment plan. (Prominent art historians are listed on its Advisory Board online).

 

But Raad’s real point is not this huge contemporary art collection, but the basis for the determination of value in contemporary art for such a fund. Who will buy the work and why? Financial investors need to have a basis for their decisions.  He digs into its background and discovers that the tech workers of the parent company are former Israeli military intelligence officers. That company is owned by another company that combines risk management and algorithms: it analyzes data such as auctions, art language, and even color, in order to determine what affects the value of art.

 

The chilling result of Raad’s research is that the value of art is being determined by the use of a group of hedge fund experts in risk management. The sudden emergence of support for contemporary Arab art in the last ten years is embedded in this project. In addition to art work, the APT collects curators and art historians as advisors, who are well paid for their time. They create exhibitions and reassure investors of the value of the art.

 

In the tableau, these analysis are outlined in detail, with cut out biographies for about a dozen tech workers and their connections to the Israeli military.

 

This arc is part of a larger arc that connects this intersection of art and money to the cultural explosion on Saadiyat Island in Dubai, where five institutions are being built to house gigantic collections of contemporary culture by five super famous architects.  Dubai is investing in culture on a monumental scale. The cultural institutions include the Louvre, the Guggenheim, New York University, and, in collaboration with the British Museum, the Zayed Museum about the cultural history of the United Arab Emirates. Saadiyat, ironically, is very close to sea level, so it will certainly be flooded early in the rising sea levels that await our abuse of our planet, of which this mega “cultural” project presents itself as a dazzling example.

 

One has only to look at Gehry’s absurd design for the Guggenheim to see the inflated character of the project. The ludicrous design almost seems to be Gehry’s own joke as his response to this inflated, overwrought and contrived cultural endeavor.

 

The project on Saadiyat Island combines with high end hotels and other “amenities”  (New York University! A golf course!)  to present a complete “cultural” history and experience. The description of, for example, of what will be in the Louvre Dubai, is so vague as to be a parody of museum language and curatorial approaches.

 

In fact the whole project is a parody, and Raad’s performance is a parody of it as well. The crazy moving tableau suggests, as curator Eva Respini  has amusingly suggested, a wild distortion and aberration of a flow chart, harking back to that early effort to order art history by Barr. But it is also, on some level, a frightening story.

 

Raad’s larger purpose is to call our attention to the ways in which contemporary art history and culture can be fabricated out of nothing, out of an empty sandy island. Another part of his installation speaks of how the colors (being analyzed for value, see above), are now hiding. We see a wall of seemingly empty squares, which are in fact, enlarged segments from publications, in which the colors are choosing to hide in the margins, to avoid their algorithmic fate.

 

Another segment presents a miniaturization of Raad’s entire career in a model of a contemporary art space in Lebanon, a huge space, unimaginably larger than previous spaces for contemporary art in Beirut.

His work, though, is shrunk to tiny proportions. Again, this is a psychological experience, based on anxiety about what is happening to Arab art. Finally, a wall appears with Arabic names one of which is splattered with red paint, a name of an historic artist which has been misspelled. Raad excavates his career from scraps of old articles, perhaps in an effort to begin a “real” history of Arab art. The last part of this segment of the exhibition includes an “entrance” to a museum, an empty museum, which we cannot enter, and Raad details how it prevents an Arab artist from entering.

 

But there is even more to this contemporary meditation on the history of Arab art in the Middle East.

 

Up on the third floor, a corridor and a single small gallery includes 3d prints of Islamic art from the Louvre, some of which is metamorphosing into Byzantine art before our eyes. These images are based on Raad’s actual research in the Louvre of the Islamic collection and his fantasy of what happens to this art when it is shipped to Dubai. It metamorphoses, it becomes something else.His installation includes 3d jet prints of objects from the Louvre. Part of the Louvre collection is destined to be exhibited in Dubai.

 

Raad’s fantastic installation, in the end, is a terrifying exposure of the interconnections of art, power, money, pretension, art investment, culture as a cloak for political aspirations, and of course, the invention of contemporary art history in the Arab world.

 

At the same time, if we look at it all in another way, we can believe that the Arabs are simply trying to counter their image as “terrorists” to suggest that they are cultured intelligent people with a history hidden in the middle of the oil soaked desert.

 

The Gulf Labor Coalition  is exposing the slave conditions in which the workers who are building all of this culture are living.

 

Raad is part of the Gulf Labor Coalition, but has been banned from returning to the UAE. These activists expose in New York and elsewhere the abysmal gap between the treatment of workers and the pretentious arrogance of the cultural institutions and their elite brands.

 

Raad’s installation moves into the heart of Middle East politics, its inequalities, its wars, its culture, all in the form of a parody of museum installations.

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art and the Art of Disruption

 

 

 

I never dreamed that during my one month in NYC I would find myself repeatedly returning to the Museum of Modern Art for one show after another that provoked my ongoing analysis of art and politics as well as my long time interest in the way that the history of modern art is constructed particularly at MOMA. But that is the case.

 

Glenn Lowry Director of the Museum, spoke in a recent interview in the Brooklyn Rail of the role of the Modern Art Museum as disruptor, as having a history of disruption. Although that seems to be the trendy word in the last few years among the in crowd of “social process art”., Lowry actually cites Alfred Barr, the first director in his foresighted collection of film, architecture and design as well as his reaching out to art of Latin America, Asia, and Native Americans (certainly the latter is still a weak suit at the museum) as examples of disrupting the status quo. (Of course at the time the Museum of Modern Art was barely surviving on the largesse of Abby Rockefeller, so collecting in those areas was probably also a financial move, they were cheap  and also easier during World War II).

 

Given that commitment to disruption, it is therefore not surprising that I have found in several exhibitions, as well as in odd corners of the museum, various disrupting displays. For now, I will put aside Walid Raad, the most obvious and complex example. I am planning to return to him in a separate post.

 

The first surprise was outside the café/restaurant on the second floor where we could see a Richard Serra video from 1973, Surprise Attack, (you can view the video at the link) in which he tosses a lead brick from one hand to the other. We might say, OK, we know his art from so many years, without paying attention. But someone discovered this early work and installed it. The reason: it is absolutely resonant with our political environment today.

 

Serra is reading from a text as he tosses his lead brick back and forth back and forth. The text is Thomas C Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict ( 1960). Schelling, a game theorist, writes about the “amplified threat of violence” that comes from failure to communicate with others and to understand them; for example, each of two armed people suspects the other will act first. While Serra doesn’t take it to the next step, he just keeps tossing his lead brick, it is obvious that we are there today, both in our homes (Serra/Schelling’s  example is an armed homeowner and armed robber) and in international politics on every level. Of course, the US is always willing to play the bully these days, and skip the veneer of diplomacy.

 

 

Down in the depths of the education wing another surprise, archival materials from the well known radical group from Venezuela ” El Techo de la Ballena (Roof of the Whale).” Drawn from a donation to the Museum of Modern Art Library, the small exhibition of archival catalogs and photographs, with a video enhancement, lays out the radical left program of the more than sixty artists, poets and writers from Venezuela from 1961-69. It emerged during a period of democracy after a decade of dictatorship rule. They were energetically rejecting the dominant tradition of geometric abstraction in Latin America, (manifested in the universal constructivism aesthetic epitomized by Uruguayan Joaquin Torres Garcia, whose major retrospective appears on another floor of the museum.)

 

Here we have the intentionally messy, rude artists, aligned with Communists, protesting the status quo with ‘l’art brut” and surrealist approaches. The roof of the whale as a title refers to enormous power rising from the depths where it has been held submerged. They saw it as almost a volcanic power. Unfortunately, the show is a far cry from the volcanic energy the group proposed, set out in boring glass cases. A screen above highlights some quotes and images, but the real energy of the movement would be well served by a performance event with poetry readings in Spanish and English.

 

 

 

More prominently exploring a political theme, as well as the figure, “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: the Figure and the Second World War” opened with a strikingly original sculpture by Maria Martins, The Impossible III 1946, a bronze in which two figures spar; aggressive organic appendages replace their facial features. The larger body seems to suck at the other, while the slimmer figure holds back, not surrendering, an image of conflict and unresolved aggression.

 

Nearby, in a small etching by David Smith, Women in War, 1941,  a woman “reclines”in the foreground of a battle scene in which women are pursued, killed, raped. The image was printed in an edition of 16 and it follows his better known Medals for Dishonor series of 1937-40, but it is actually more unblinking in depicting atrocities of war.

Still at the entrance, Edward Burra’s painting Dance of the Hanged Man 1937 ( the work here is in the Tate of Dancing Skeletons 1934 to give tstretching the chronology of the exhibition backward into the 1930s. Burra’s awareness of pain through his own life long disability, led to original and complex paintings about anguished suffering. The Dance of the Hanged Man shifts scales dramatically between the giant oppressors and the victims.

 

 

The main body of the exhibition includes a galaxy of sculptures by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Jean Fautrier, Alberto Giacometti, and Joan Miro ( see top of post for Miro).

 

 

 

But Germain Richier’s savage and aggressive The Devil with Claws 1953 dominates the room.

 

Two intense groups of work are by Japanese artists. Shomei Tomatsu  photographed people in the aftermath of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki, a place he revisited repeatedly during the American occupation : “What I saw in Nagasaki were not only the scars of war, but a never-ending postwar. I, who had thought of ruins only as the transmutation of the cityscape, learned that ruins lie within people as well.

Small etchings by Chimei Hamda, include Elegy for a new Conscript: Landscape 1953 (above) hard to look at in its immediacy. They reverberate with the artist’s memories of the horror of a soldier’s death in the desolate landscape of Northern China during the Sino Japanese war 1937-45 in which the photographer served as a conscript when he was a young man.

 

An intensely precise drawing  by Mexican Francisco Dosamantes honors a dead soldier in the Spanish Civil War.

 

The show falls apart for me in the Shaman section, when it settles for East Coast based artists who are pulling from Native American spirituality. There are no native artists included, only one African American (Romare Beardon). Another artist who definitely did not belong was Henry Darger, one of my least favorite artists who seems to be so exciting to so many people. He creates private fantasies that have little to do with the heavy realities that the best work in this exhibition address. He is, not surprisingly, in the shaman section as well.

 

The strange inconsistencies of the selection are echoed in  the subtitle of the exhibition, with its reference to the Second World War, in spite of the fact that several of the works predate it or refer to other wars. Why not the Figure and War, making the same point more emphatically, and skip the later shamans. The first two rooms of the exhibition are stunningly installed, selected and create a strong statement. I don’t understand why the exhibition didn’t stay focused on artists’ responses to the nightmare of the human body violated by war in the mid twentieth century.

 

Still, the number of expressive works that convey the horrors of war confirms that the museum no longer settles only for aesthetics. It wants to be responsive to our contemporary nightmares and demonstrate that artists have a role to play in revealing it, very much in the tradition of Alfred Barr. Rather than disrupting a tradition, the museum is actually reclaiming one.  Barr favored the “Neue Sachlichkeit” artists and the grotesque until he became the director of the museum at the tender age of 27. In the 1920s Barr had already moved beyond Picasso’s cubism (and so had Picasso of course).

In 1936 under the duress of Hitler’s attacks on modern art, Barr invented the history of modern art with his “Cubism and Abstract Art Exhibition” and his famous chart, omitting all of his early digressions into grotesquerie.

 

The current impulse to disrupt returns to Barr’s young inclinations, before he was shaped by patrons, his own institution and politics. These shows, drawn entirely from the permanent collection, document a new willingness to disrupt genealogy as well as to embrace contradictory impulses.

 

The Pollock exhibition, all from the MOMA collection (and not all of what they have by any means), included many benchmark works, but again we see new perspectives. The Curator chose to give more in depth treatment to the forties ( this one untitled 1945), the transitions as they are called, allowing us to see the bizarre hesitations, rather than simply settling for a grand progression to the final drip paintings. Also the ongoing of Thomas Hart Benton’s principles of organization are obvious if you know what to look for. Pollock always said he rejected Benton, but it isn’t true.

 

 

Likewise In “Scenes from a New Heritage” the reinstallation of the contemporary collection, some surprising work pops up, particularly  “Mapping Justice. ” by a team of artists based at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture that documents the 17 million dollar cost of imprisoning 19 people from 17 blocks in Brooklyn, so called “Million Dollar Blocks.”

 

 

Nalini Malani’s Gamepieces layers mythology with contemporary violence, in her trademark circling acetate spheres, painted with figures that move like an early movie across the wall.  Camille Hernot’s film Grosse Fatigue tells the story of the creation of the world juxtaposing contemporary technology and historical archives, playfully, provocatively, tragically. Huseyin Alptekin’s  photographs of cheap Istanbul hotel signs made sense to me because I have known his work for many years, but I doubt anyone else got his larger point of class and power issues.

I can’t leave out the Joaquin Torres-Garcia retrospective, since it is the first showing of this great modernist’s work since I assisted with a retrospective in 1970 in my first job as curatorial assistant to the late great curator/director Daniel Robbins. A lot of Torres Garcia’s work burned in a fire in Brazil in 1976, not long after our exhibition, but thankfully the Museum of Modern Art curator, Luis Pérez-Oramas has been able to put together another stunning show of this pioneering artist, teacher and philosopher. This Uruguayan artist influenced artists all over Latin America. The fact that he is not mainstreamed in art history is ongoing eurocentrism. This exhibition is a glorious retrospective including his earliest street art and peculiar murals in Barcelona, his books, his toys, his constructive sculpture.  His brilliant inverted map of South America proclaimed Latin America as a center of culture. 

 

 

Finally, that crazy Katerina Fritsch sculpture in the garden  parodies Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, but not just to be funny. Take a close look and you see some scary ideas. MOMA this January was really a disruptive place and I loved it.

 

 

 

Photo Credits:

Edward Burra, Dancing Skeletons, 1934, gouache and ink on paper, 78.7 x 55.9 cm, Tate Collection.

Shomei Tomatsu (Japanese, 1930-2012). Hibakusha Tomitarō Shimotani, Nagasaki. 1961. Gelatin silver print, 13 × 18 3/4″ (33 × 47.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist © 2015 Shomei Tomatsu

Laura Kurgan, Eric Cadora, David Reinfurt, Sarah Williams, and Spatial Information Design Lab, GSAPP, Columbia University. Architecture and Justice from the project Million Dollar Blocks (detail). 2006. Digital prints and Powerpoint file with images generated from Esri ArcGIS (Geographic Information System) software. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designers, 2008. © Laura Kurgan, Spatial Information Design Lab, GSAPP, Columbia University

Nalini Malani (Indian, born 1946). Gamepieces. 2003/2009. Four-channel video/shadow play (color, sound: 12 min) and synthetic polymer paint on six Lexan cylinders. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Richard J. Massey Foundation for Arts and Sciences, 2007. Photo by Thomas Griesel. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguayan. 1874–1949). América invertida (Inverted America). 1943. Ink on paper. 8 11/16 × 6 5/16″ (22 × 16 cm). Museo Torres García, Montevideo. © Sucesión Joaquín Torres-García, Montevideo 2015.

Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguayan. 1874–1949). Forma abstracta en espiral modelada en blanco y negro (Spiral abstract form modeled in white and black). 1938. Tempera on cardboard, 31 7⁄8 x 18 1⁄2” (81 x 47 cm). Private collection. © Sucesión Joaquín Torres-García, Montevideo 2015. Photo ©2015 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Christian Roy

All other photos by Susan Platt or Henry Matthews

 

Abounaddara and Syria Freedom Forever: Making visible the ongoing tragedy of Syria:

 

 

 

I am reporting here on two online sites that are actually speaking from the ground in Syria, the receivers of this tragic onslaught. The statement just above is an excerpt from Abounaddara‘s manifesto.

 

To begin with, here is just one post from Syria Freedom Forever detailing a recent attack that makes what is happening in Syria specific and real:

 

“On Sunday the 13th of December, 2015, Douma and surrounding towns were subject to 59 indiscriminate aerial attacks, as well as a large number of cluster bombs. The preliminary death toll is 38 civilians, including 9 children and 5 women, according to figures provided by the Syrian Network for Human Rights. This number is likely to increase as crews continue to search for victims under the rubble. Schools in Douma and Zamalka, as well as a medical centre were targeted in the attack. This, in an area which has become almost devoid of medical care due to constant shelling.”

 

Syrian videographers and grassroots activists communicate to the world how they are living and working in the midst of the relentless Civil War that has them surrounded by violence on all sides.

 

The news media here repeat over and over that “we” are “fighting” this “terrorist threat” and that “everyone” is “terrified”. The reality is that most of us are not terrified, we are going on with our comfortable, well fed lives. The people who are terrified are the people on the receiving end of the hundreds of bombs we are dropping. That is terror.

 

When Paris and San Bernardino experience a terrorist attack, that is truly frightening, but the people in Syria, in particular, experience that constantly from our bombs, from the Syrian government, from Isis, from other gangs of thugs in Syria, now also

from Russia and Great Britain.

 

At the same time they are continuing to resist oppression, sending us information, holding marches, speaking out. This resistance is not reported in the media and not supported by any outside assistance.

 

 

Abounaddara is a collective of anonymous videographers who post 4 minute clips every Friday. Each clip interviews an individual revealing their personal perspective, or follows someone in their home, or reports on a concert or some other act of creative resistance. In speaking with individuals they reveal the complexities of the situation.

 

For example in “No Exit” a young filmmaker speaks first of the participants in the revolution bringing together very disparate people, and particularly in prison real criminals are thrown together with children, truck drivers and political criminals. Then he speaks of the contradictions of both Isis and Assad tolerating people who oppose them, until they decide one day not to and kidnap or kill them. There is no clear line of right and wrong, of good and bad, of winning and losing anywhere in Syria.

 

Abounaddara has recently been praised by the art world, and included in the Venice Biennale.

 

This Fall, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York gave Abounaddara an award, an exhibition and a symposium.

They are a sophisticated group of artists, theoretically literate who are tired of what they call “televampirism” of the news, the representation of victims and its perpetrators.

 

The grizzly images of dead bodies become what they refer to as “the banalization of evil.” (Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase) They feel that “television can inform while respecting human dignity.” They resent anonymous social media with “low informational value” gobbled up by the international press. Abounaddara believes that those taking these images are motivated by “revenge” and provide  a “voyeuristic” view of violence.

They claim “The Right to the Image” they seek to “Stop the Spectacle’. They believe that “The persons whose humanity is suppressed in images from wars, mass violations of human rights and other similar situations are not allowed to speak. Their humanity stops at the rights of bystanders to freedom of expression . . . Your wounds can speak, but you cannot.”

 

I was fortunate to see the last segment of their exhibition in New York. While all of the videos are online to view, the curated selection in New York juxtaposed three videos at once on different walls of the gallery. Surrounded by the large projections in a public space magnified the experience.

 

The videos sometimes had little or no dialogue, only actions, frequently it was a single person speaking. The political positions of the speakers varied, Alevi, resistance fighter, ordinary person, government prisoner, ISIS detainee, sniper, musician. In each case, as the person spoke, or moved about their home, or described their experience, or stated their opinion, they spoke with dignity.  It was deeply moving.

 

Somewhat similar in intent, although less embedded in theory,  are the tactics of the resistance blog

Syria Freedom Forever

 

We see individuals on the ground holding signs and drawings about their situation. They are communicating directly with us. As more and more countries decide to bomb Syria, and more and more people leave, these are the people, men, women, children, elderly, who are still there, on the ground.  They are surviving, but they want our support. The support I am giving today is to write about their condition.

 

Schools are bombed, bakeries are bombed, civilian homes are bombed. Markets are bombed.

 

These two projects enable people in the midst of the Civil War to speak for themselves.

 

And then we have the issue of refugees and our hostility in the US to giving shelter to those who are trying to escape. As of November 17 there were 4.3 million Syrian refugees. Turkey as over half of them. Lebanon another million, Europe 680,000. Canada is welcoming them. Obama has suggested 10,000, as ignorant politicians encourage people to refuse them.

 

As the media, across the political spectrum, (with the exception of the non commercial Democracy Now and a few other alternative sites), repeat over and over, that we are afraid, we are concerned about terrorism, it fans the flames of the fear of all Muslims, all others. Racism toward all nonwhite people is escalating.

 

Lack of gun control is obviously the single most lethal source of danger in the US.

 

But, in reality, if we were to allow people here to speak for themselves, as individuals, as Abounaddara does in Syria, we would discover many more complex feelings than simply “fear”.

 

If the images from Syria Freedom Forever were posted every day on the front page of newspapers, or blogs, everyone would agree that more aggression toward the Middle East is useless, cruel, and obscene.

 

 

“¡Presente!: The Young Lords in New York”

 

 

 

 

Juan Sánchez

“Once we were warriors ” 1999

The Collection of Julio and Isabel Nazario

 

“¡Presente!: The Young Lords in New York,” at El Museo del Barrio presents an eye opening history of the Young Lords, crucial as both political and art history. The exhibition is particularly relevant today as Puerto Rico, still a “self governing commonwealth” of the US, faces financial bankruptcy and is still at the will of the US Congress to resolve the crisis.  Because the US successfully subverted the independence movements and imprisoned its leaders throughout the 20th century, Puerto Rico cannot act on its own.

 

This exhibition reminds us of the strong demands for independence in the early 1970s, and its earlier stages all the way back to 1868 and El Grito de Lares when the first nationalist party was founded. The exhibition had two other venues in New York City, both locations of Young Lord activism, the Bronx Museum of Art and Loisiada, Inc on the Lower East Side where the group was founded in Tompkins Square.

 

At El Museo del Barrio, the exhibition has special resonance, as that museum began during these same years, its history as a cultural center serving the community embedded in the same issues that concerned the Young Lords.

Film, photography and archival material from the El Museo collection documented the activities of the Young Lords in East Harlem particularly in the period from 1969-71.

Stunning posters, paintings and sculpture filled one gallery, while other galleries included many archival documents in a dramatic installation.

Juan Sánchez’s striking mixed media artwork “Once we were warriors” honors the Young Lords’activism. Sanchez as part of El Taller Boriuca

( “Puerto Rican workshop” established across from the Young Lords headquarters in East Harlem)  began to explore his African and Indigenous roots as well as the brilliant graphic arts traditions of the island.  Symbols in the print refer to those traditions.

 

 

The founding members of the Taller,  Armando Soto, Marcos Dimas, Carlos Osorio, Adrián García, Martin Rubío, Neco Otero organized sit ins to advocate for community-based programs within museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and joined boycotts with the Art Workers Coalition who sought to close all the museums in  New York City after the Kent State Massacre. Taller held a sit in in Thomas Hoving’s office.

They founded the workshop, as Marcos Dimas has written, because they felt that there was a “cultural void” within the Puerto Rican community. As they organized exhibitions in the streets and donating art to the community, the print workshop cross fertilized with Puerto Rican based artists and created vivid prints of both historical figures and contemporary struggles and issues.

For example, they honored  Ramón Emeterio Betances y Alacán (1827–1898) ( upper left), a social hygienist and surgeon who organized the 1868 El Grito de Lares that inspired the nationalist movement in Puerto Rico. He is considered the father of the independence movement.

 

Another crucial inspirational leader honored here in a print was Pedro Alibizu Campos  (1890 – 1965) ( above middle left).

 

 

 

And there is Lolita Lebron (1919 – 2010) here in a 1971 print by Manuel García asking for freedom for Puerto Rican political prisoners. Lolita, with four other nationalists fired guns at Congressmen in 1954 to advocate for Puerto Rican independence. She was put in jail for 25 years, then reemerged still activist and Puerto Rico’s most famous freedom fighter.

 

A pair of well known prints ( this is only one) by Carlos Irizarry address the march on Washington to ask for a moratorium on the Vietnam War in 1969. The poem in the center is by Eugene McCarthy, the Moratorium painting is by Jasper Johns.

 

Antonio Martell’s lushly colored print calls on the USA military to leave the Island of Culebra, off the coast of Puerto Rico (as a result of protests, the military left in 1975, but remained on Vieques).

A second culture center with an emphasis on experimentation was founded by Eddy Figueroa on the Lower East Side with the name “New Rican Village Cultural Arts Center in the East Village.”

 

The same pairing of an urgent need to tell Puerto Rican history and address immediate issues characterized the Young Lords movement in general. Indeed, their writings today provide a striking example of the thorough historical research and economic and political analysis that these young activists provided in their newspaper Palante. A thirteen point platform developed in 1970, had one point revised at the behest of the powerful women ( below we see Denise Oliver Velez, then and now) in The Young Lords to state “down with machismo.”

 

 

With these historical perspectives in mind, the activism of the group deeply reflects the Young Lords desire to rise above the racist abuses of their childhood, abuses that permeated every aspect of their daily lives. The accounts of their childhood experiences, collected in their 1971 book Palante Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971, just reissued, lay bare the character of their ghetto life.

 

Many of these young activists saw only the opportunity for young death in drug dealing and gangs. The thrill of discovering another way forward through the activism of the Young Lords comes across clearly in the essays they wrote at the time. Strikingly, several of the early Young Lords had escaped that life and gone to college, during the early days of affirmative action, but they returned to their hood to organize and give back to their own community.

Outside the exhibition, a large map showed some of the most famous interventions by the Young Lords, focusing on basic community rights, housing, health care, education, nutrition. These four painted wooden rifles by Miguel Luciano commissioned in 2015 for the exhibition state those goals.

More specifically, the Young Lords as a protest against poor or non existent collection, they and community members piled garbage in the street and set it on fire to block the road, causing a major disruption in traffic; they co opted TB vans to deliver innoculations to the Barrio; they protested working conditions in hospitals, they occupied a church in order to open a day care center and provide breakfast.

 

Inspired by the example of the Black Panthers, and initially affiliated with a group in Chicago of the same name, The Young Lords evolved in distinct phases, the early community based activism, the organizing phase 1970 – 72 and the ideological, international phase, 1972 – 76.

 

Extraordinary photographers Hiram Maristany, Frank Espada, Geno Rodriguez, and Máximo Colón, among others, documented their actions providing us with a vivid and inspiring record of commitment.

As with the history of so many activist groups, there were efforts to reach out to all strata of society, deep motivation to make life better for their community, along with internal power struggles, efforts to develop ideologies, and ultimately, a decline based on alienation.

 

Ironically, the final decline for the Young Lords was the result, according to the documents presented here, of leaving behind their immediate community and extending their activism to Puerto Rico itself by closely affiliating with the on-going nationalist struggle for an independent country. At the same time, the ideology hardened and the leadership became more dictatorial. That proved a lethal combination.

But the amazing accomplishments of the Young Lords in just a few short years, as well as the rich body of art that the Taller Boriuca produced, lives on in these new exhibitions and publications.

They are a model for what a committed and diverse group of young people (the Young Lords included African Americans, feminists and a famous transgender performer, Sylvia Rivera) can accomplish with direct action, love of their community, and willingness to defy oppression. We can draw a direct line from them to the Black Lives Matter movement.   

Art AIDS America at the Tacoma Art Museum on World AIDS Day

Note: Since posting this blog, there has been heavy criticism of the exhibition for its lack of African American artists and inclusion of their voices in the discussion, a fact that I mention in this article. (See images of Die In below).

I know that the museum has no Black staff people, ( as is true of most museums in the Northwest , the Seattle Art Museum for example).

 

I still feel that the show is significant as I write here. It is ironic, but not surprising, that an exhibition that is analyzing exclusion in art history ( that of the AIDS epidemic), is itself guilty of exclusion.   I am glad to hear that it will be more inclusive of African American voices as it moves forward.

 

 

 

Deeply thoughtful and provocative, Art AIDS America, currently on view at the Tacoma Art Museum (until January 10), includes 127 works in multiple media. It includes the creative works of those who lived and died during the height of the epidemic in the 1980s as well as recent work by young artists. Curators Jonathan D. Katz and Rock Hushka intend to expose the radicality of the art as well as to remind us of the historic controversies of the 1980s that are still with us today.

 

At the center of the exhibition is a recreation of the famous “Let the Record Show” installation at the New Museum in 1987.

 

I vividly remember that work as a turning point for the art world, at the height of the Reagan silence on the AIDS holocaust ravaging the US gay community, especially its creative workers: the large pink triangle came from the Nazi identification code for homosexuals, “Silence = Death” a poster from a group of the same name, an LED board documenting government silence as deaths mount and other facts. In the photographs at the bottom are Jesse Helms, William F. Buckley, Jr, and Jerry Falwell, among others, with quotes from their infamous comments on AIDS and homosexuals.  Behind them is a photograph from the Nuremberg Trials, drawing a parallel between the the Nazis and the early 1980s.

 

AIDS was first labelled in 1981. In my personal experience, AIDS activism first vividly appeared in public at a Gay Pride march in San Francisco in 1983 when a contingent of very ill men marched to call attention to the still silent plague that was spreading so rapidly. San Francisco pioneered in treatment for AIDS, but it was many more years before it held widespread attention in the public, partly because of the absolute silence of President Reagan.

 

Wider awareness of AIDS was directly related to the creative activism by artists, writers, playwrights, poets, who began to write books (Randy Shilts 1987 And the Band Played On), write plays ( (Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which educated a huge audience), and visual art in many media.

 

One of the earliest examples of confrontational creative activism was “Let the Record Show” at the New Museum. According to Avram Finkelstein, with whom I spoke at the press preview, there was a direct connection between AIDS activism and 1930s activism. He described himself as a “red diaper baby” meaning that his parents were communists, and he grew up with the idea of activism, street posters, and creative advocacy. At a weekly meeting of artists he suggested a poster, inspired by the Art Workers Coalition “And Babies” poster about the Vietnam War. As he put it, “Reagan’s silence was equivalent to a war crime.”

 

The exhibition in Tacoma is divided into several themes, “ Grassroots Activism,” “Poetic Postmodernism” “Memento Mori” “Spiritual Forces” “Portraiture”, and “The Legacy of the AIDS crisis.”

 

Grassroots Activism features panels and a digital display about “The Names Project,” the huge AIDS Memorial Quilt that began in 1987, with a square available to anyone who wished to memorialize a person who had died of AIDS related illnesses.

It travelled all over the country continually expanding until it filled the mall in Washington DC. with 2000 squares. Today it has 48,000 squares with a new square added every day; it is the largest piece of folk art in the world.

The NAMES Quilt of course belongs in  the “Memento Mori” category of the museum as well as Grassroots Activism.

Tino Rodriguez’s Eternal Lovers, with its kissing calaveras, formatted in the spirit of a Mexican ofrenda tradition,  introduces another well- known folk tradition of commemoration.

 

Memento Mori range from photographs of funerals to abstract imagery. One of the most touching is by Peter Hujar who himself died of AIDS two years after he took the photograph Ruined Bed, Newark in 1985. Because so many artists knew they were going to die, memento mori frequently are painful self portraits, such as those by Mark Chester and  Mark Morrisoe documenting the progression of their own illness.

 

An exhibition about AIDS inevitably confronts the viewer with themes we prefer to keep hidden or buried in metaphor such as sexuality, illness, death, and homophobia. Of course, we are accustomed to these themes in the context of historical art, Catholic Renaissance art is filled with torture, sexuality and death, but when faced by the contemporary reality of these themes, we often look away in discomfort. But the compelling work here draws us into its painful subject. We are reminded of the deep commitment on the part of so many artists at that time. Included here are now well-known artists such as Jenny Holzer, Andres Serrano, Masami Teraoka, Duane Michels, Catherine Opie, Sue Coe, and Annie Leibowitz.

 

 

The challenge to engage us with subjects we would prefer to avoid, paired with, as Jonathan Katz so cogently analyzes in an outstanding catalog essay, the contemporary atmosphere of postmodern detachment and irony that prevailed in the art world in the 1980s, as well as the pervasive censureship of gay art, led artists who wished to represent AIDS to turn to what Katz calls “poetic postmodernism.” His prime example is Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose work in this exhibition includes one of his trademark newsprint documents to take home, as well as a blue bead curtain that we gently part by Felix Gonzalez-Torres called Untitled (Water),

 

Other well- known artists pursuing abstract metaphors are Ross Bleckner and Scott Burton. Jim Hodges’ luscious curtain made of silk and cotton flowers  When We Stay cascades down from the ceiling as open ended poetry, an homage of flowers to those who die, or a celebration.

 

“Poetic Postmodernism,” as defined by Katz subverted the abstraction that pervaded the art world. He even characterizes it as a “virus” that urgently entered the public face of art museums, as Barthes’ concept of the “death of the author” became horrifyingly literal. Katz contrasts poetic postmodernism to activist art which as he puts it “takes us somewhere”, “challenges our self- sufficiency.” Instead, poetic postmodernism “invites us to participate on our own terms.”
I found these distinctions convincing and helpful.

 

A crucial artist both in the 1980s and today Keith Haring came out of a graffiti background that doesn’t quite fit any of the categories, although the bronze with white gold leaf patina Altar Piece, completed posthumously in 1990, at the heart of “Art AIDS America” belongs to the spiritual category. His prints based on William Burroughs Apocalypse, 1988 ( above) exemplify Haring’s enormous, catalyzing energy, and spirit which many of us remember so vividly.

 

Women of course are a major aspect of the AIDS crisis, and an essay in the catalog focuses on them, although the exhibition has many more compelling works than the few discussed. One of the most striking is Ann Meredith’s Until that Last Breath! San Francisco California, photographs of women with AIDS, who asked to have their faces blurred for fear of retribution at their jobs or in their lives. Nan Goldin’s poignant series, The Plague, 1986 – 2001, a series of photographs of her friends who were living and dying during those painful years, as well as Kiki Smith’s Red Spill, 1996 still affect us viscerally. Smith’s work might be “Poetic postmodernism,” for its elegance and subtlety, but by creating an installation of large red glass puddles on the floor, we immediately recognize a literal reference to blood and to AIDS. Likewise Andres Serrano’s subtle red paintings at once read as blood, through some filter in our brains and eyes.

 

The exhibition brings the conversation up to the present, by including younger artists such as Kia Lebeija, whose startling self portraits evoke the lighting of a Nan Goldin.

 

Unfortunately absent from the exhibition are African American women, a major community in which AIDS-HIV continues to expand.  Glenn Ligon’s, Untitled, (I am an Invisible Man), 1993 quoting from Ralph Ellison’s well known book, is not specifically about AIDS. ***Absence of black artists has been heavily protested with a die in and major confrontations  

 

 

 

One Native American artist, Thomas Haukaas, contributed More Time Expected,2002. Consciously quoting one of the well- known ledger drawings created by Native people imprisoned in camps in the 19th century. Historically a riderless horse represented a fallen hero; here it refers to native people who have died of AIDS related illnesses.

Latino AIDS activist Joey Terrell irreverently redefines and subverts the shallow materialism of pop art with queer references as well as Truvada, an HIV medication.

 

 

The exhibition intends to extend a conversation into the community, and to connect to activist groups that continue today to confront homophobia, prejudice against people living with AIDS and HIV diagnoses.“Negotiating HIV is a conversation essential for everyone” Curator Rock Hushka stated.

 

This exhibition consciously contests the omission of AIDS art from the main trajectory of American art history. As this 1980s generation of creative thinkers began to confront ways in which to infiltrate and alter the basically apolitical, detachment of American contemporary art, their strategies and tactics permanently altered the very character of contemporary art production. Katz characterizes  “camouflage, ” and “infiltration”  and  “spying”  as strategies these artists adopted to position their work in museums whose tolerance for the topics of illness, homosexuality, and contemporary death, was zero. As a result, the art world has been permanently altered.

 

Rock Hushka’s catalog essay “Undetectable Presence of HIV in Contemporary American Art” speaks to abolishing the “silence” about HIV. Today is World AIDS Day, and around the world, people are commemorating it. Here is an image from Nepal.HIV is a global problem now and continuing to expand.

In the US, it has traditionally also been a “Day Without Art” since 1989.

 

As reiterated by both curators, the artists who insisted on breaking the silence of both the political world and the art world, permanently expanded the strategies and content available to artists.  They opened doors for activist artists committed to exposing injustice. The purpose of Art AIDS America is to demonstrate that a new genre of political art emerging from art about AIDS belongs in the mainstream of American art history, rather than as a brief footnote.  They convincingly persuade us of that in this major exhibition.

 

captions and credits:

ACT UP NY/Gran Fury (active New York, New York, 1987–1995), Let the Record Show…, 1987/recreated 2015. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Gran Fury and the New Museum, New York. Photo courtesy of the artists.

 

Tino Rodriguez (born 1965), Eternal Lovers, 2010. Oil on wood, 18 × 24 inches. Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

Keith Haring (born 1958, died 1990)

From the Series Apocalypse, 1988

silkscreen, edition of 90 38 x 38 in

Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation

 

Thomas Haukaas (born 1950),

Tribal Affiliation: Sicangu Lakota, More Time Expected, 2002. Handmade ink and pencil on antique ledger paper, 16½ × 27½ inches. Tacoma Art Museum, Gift of Greg Kucera and Larry Yocom in honor of Rock Hushka, 2008.10. Photo by Richard Nicol, © TAM.

 

Kia Labeija (born 1990), 24, 2014. Inkjet print, 13 × 19 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

Joey Terrill (born 1955), Still Life with Forget-Me-Nots and One Week’s Dose of Truvada, 2012. Mixed media on canvas, 36 × 48 inches. Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Foundation purchase. Photo courtesy of Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.

 

“Not Vanishing: Contemporary Expressions in Indigenous Art, 1977 – 2015”

Note: this post is dedicated to the Colvillle Indians who have just had a devastating loss of timber from this summer’s forest fires

 

The title “Not Vanishing: Contemporary Native American Art 1977-2015, curated by Gail Tremblay and Miles Miller at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington, obviously turns on its head the cliché of “vanishing races”  applied to native groups from the turn of the 20th century. Edward Curtis embarked on his well-known photographic project of preserving them through photography at the time when assimilation and extermination were the ongoing policies of the US government.

 

This ambitious exhibition (lasting only until January 3) includes 78 works of art by 49 artists from 23 tribes in the Northwest, extending North into Canada and Eastward to Idaho and Montana. We are invited to look closely and think carefully at the many trajectories of the art work that point to layers of meaning and interpretation.

 

Featuring both well-known and emerging artists, the exhibition fills the Museum on both floors and embraces us with many voices. I can only touch on a few artists and ideas here.

 

At the top of the post, and here, is the work of Rick Bartow, an intense expressionist multimedia artist. This painting, called Going as Coyote,  is carefully described by curator Tremblay in her essay:

“one immediately notices the way the artist divides the picture almost in half, the right side, dark, and the left filled with color and light. To the left of the center, the artist’s body leans forward toward the light and seems almost illuminated against the dark half of the drawing.   . . .. He draws his own face with mouth open and teeth revealed. The top of his head transforms into a dark coyote face, also with teeth bared. The coyote’s ears are light and brightly colored.

 

“The artist portrays himself as a dancer, and carries the two dance sticks that define the front legs of an animal when one performs the role of that animal in a ceremony. In this drawing, he portrays the tension of existing in two different realities.

 

“In front of the artist is the dark shadow of an arm reaching into the light. It does not carry a dance stick but reaches like a third appendage into a space filled with hand and finger prints that as they rise transform into coyote tracks so the human marks of the dancer visibly merges with coyote, as dance and coyote face a space illuminated by all the colors of day …”

 

 

 

Tanis S’eiltin’s installation, Territorial Trappings, 2012 epitomizes the theme of the exhibition, the mixture of indigenous perspectives and contemporary art, native values and pressing environmental issues that affect us all. S’eiltin’s theme is Native ties to the fur trade that continued right into her childhood.

 

 

 

Fashions such as fur hats made from sea otters, or fur jackets from lynx hides directly benefited the livelihoods of indigenous peoples, but also impacted their traditional relationships to the natural world. The ambiguity of this economic trade-off is suggested in the gallery with a neon sign reading “Trade” backwards.

 

 

 

John Feodorov has always been fascinated by the role of white “spiritual” practices that co opt native spirituality, as well as recognizing contradictions within native culture itself. He describes his installation Domi-Nature:

“Domi-Nature is comprised of 12 white-washed Teddy Bears kneeling and praying silently before a projection of the three smoke-stacks from the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant located on the Navajo reservation. The bears genuflect as if before a vision from heaven. This is an updated version to an earlier installation I created in 2001, just before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Since then, this piece has taken on a more serious and tragic association for me, particularly with recent environmental tragedies such as the BP Oil Spill and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Japan.”

 

 

These two installations address environmental concerns from sharply contrasting perspectives, but both refer to the artist’s sense of urgency as well as the complexity of the relationships of native artists and the environment. While Indigenous artists and activists are taking a lead in protesting environmental destruction and climate change, others are working for those companies or encouraging and inviting power companies onto their land for desperately needed jobs.

 

 

Another artist who is acutely aware of these contradictions is Joe Feddersen. As a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, in Eastern Washington and Southern Canada, Feddersen brings together stunning technique with subtle, but strong statements ( this image does not do justice to his exquisite work, the black verticals are a reflection of the photographer!). He worked for power companies earlier in his life, and you see on some of his work the geometric abstract form referring to those giant electrical transmitting towers.  At the same time, those same towers carry energy from the Grand Coulee Dam, which destroyed many fishing grounds of the traditional Colville during its construction and subsequent flooding.

 

That tale is narrated from the perspective of his own family in Lawney Reyes’ book B Street.   How the building of Grand Coulee Dam Changed Forever the Lives of One Indian Family and Devastated an entire tribe.” (University of Washington Press, 2008) A “Dreamcatcher” by Reyes is included in “Not Vanishing”, and an outstanding example appears in Seattle on Yesler and 32^st as an homage to his sister and brother (the famous activist Bernie Whitebear).

 

The exhibition purposefully includes a range of media that range from weaving, beadwork, and carved cedar boards  (here in John Hoover’s beautiful Loon Dance) to non native traditions of printmaking, acrylics, glass and bronze. These standing guardian figures by Joe David and Preston Singultary are made from blown and sand carved glass.

Often the works mix traditions and aesthetics, as in the entire room of extraordinary glass work by well known artists Joe Feddersen, Lillian Pitt, Preston Singletary, Caroline Orr, Susan Point, and others. That room epitomizes the cross cultural sophistication of these artists, as they work in a non traditional material but imbue it with both indigenous references and forms, as well as contemporary issues.

 

 

For example Lillian Pitt’s extraordinary Shadow Spirit in the Grass, draws on both indigenous meaning and contemporary ideas with cast New Zealand lead crystal and metal. Part of a series called “Shadow Spirits,” it is, as Tremblay writes, “cast by making a mold around a clay sculpture she created for the purpose.” Embedded in the clay are natural materials; here the imprint suggests a navel that “marks the connection between humans and the generations that precede them and make their lives possible.”

 

 

 

 

 

One of my favorite younger native artists included in “Not Vanishing” is Wendy Redstar. Her work humorously plays with the clichés about Indians, even while she makes a deeper point. At the time of the Seattle Art Fair this summer, Redstar installed numerous life size hunting decoy animals in Volunteer Park, a witty comment on one aspect of our contemporary interaction with nature.  In this exhibition, her small car with the long title in two languages, iilaalée = car (goes by itself) + ii = by means of which + dánniiluua = we parade plays with contemporary perspectives on ceremony and indigenous identity.

 

Gail Tremblay and Miles Miller, the curators of the exhibition, fortunately included their own work as well.

 

Gail’s Exploding Star created by the painful technique of weaving with metal thread, refers to environmental issues as well as mythic traditions. In fact, in her introductory talk to the exhibition, Gail explained the work in terms of historic myths, but in her wall statement she spoke of “ materials we have ripped from the Earth who sustains our lives.” In other words, she connects the ancient and the contemporary in both the imagery and its significance.

 

 

 

Miles Miller, best known for his beadwork, here contributes two large prints “The Traditionalists” that speak of the Lewis and Clark expedition and its absurd misunderstanding of the native tribes that it met on its way West. He enumerates both their invented place names, as well as the anguish of the natives perspective.

 

 

“Not Vanishing” can also be analyzed from the perspective of mainstream art history styles: expressionism in drawings and paintings by Rick Bartow, James Lavadour, Jaune Quick to See Smith, and Sara Siestreem’s John Day Narrows here,

affiliations with Robert Rauschenberg in

the provocative imagery by Corky Clairmont, here, in his Split War Shield made from cast handmade paper that looks like tire tracks.

 

 

 

or the references to “pop art” in the amazing tribal masks from automobile parts by Larry Beck, to minimalism by Joe Fedderson in his reductive geometry,  to realism in Larry McNeil’s poignant homage to his father

 

as well as the photographic realism of Matika Wilbur’s project redoing Edward Curtis (see my previous blog post about her work). And then, of course, there is the fact that Native artists practiced abstract art for centuries before it was “discovered” in Europe and the “American Abstract Expressionists.”

 

 

 

Erin Genia’s  Blood Quantum Countdown affiliates with conceptual art as it poignantly points to why these artists so urgently sustain their cultural heritage in the midst of their immersion in the contemporary world. She explains: “Blood quantum originated during a historical period of the U.S. when Native Americans were viewed as a vanishing race. Today, it enjoys widespread use by tribal and federal governments as a legitimate method of determining whether a person can be considered an American Indian. This piece warns that continuing its use inevitably leads to a countdown to our extinction. . . Our survival as a people is based upon a whole spectrum of qualifying factors, from lineal descent to connection to our tribal communities, to protecting, preserving and revitalizing our tribal cultures. It’s time to reassess the viability of the blood quantum system.”

 

Indeed, the theme of “Not Vanishing” is exactly that, these artists in many ways are demonstrating the complexity of contemporary Indigenous art. The exhibition provides us with a window into what might be possible if the history of American art could be more truly inclusive. Like the exhibition “Our America” that focused on contemporary Latino/a art, this exhibition exposes a rich history of contemporary art that does not surface in the mainstream of art history except for token examples.

 

Living in the West, in the midst of dozens of contemporary tribes, all of them producing contemporary culture, I am acutely aware of this omission. When I go to DC a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian, right on the mall, is often at the top of my list. But when I speak of that museum to other art historians living there, they have never been there except perhaps to eat. This tells us a lot about marginalization.

 

Unfortunately, there is no printed catalog of this exhibition. There is a lot of written material which I understand will be posted on the website of the Museum of Northwest Art.  Gail Tremblay’s powerful essay provides an historical trajectory for both traditional attitudes to indigenous art  (heavily ethnographic), the stimulus of the 1930s Indian Arts and Crafts Act, as well as the Institute of American Indian Art, and one source for contemporary art history in the Northwest at the Sacred Circle Art Gallery in Discovery Park in the 1990s. At that venue, curators Steve Charles and Merlee Markstrum created a series of strong exhibitions by contemporary native artists. As a critic, these shows introduced me  to several of the artists included in “Not Vanishing”.

 

The exhibition in La Conner, unfortunately rather distant from Seattle, ought to be at the Seattle Art Museum, or travelling to a major city. The fact that it is in a hard to reach museum, and has no published catalog, demonstrates that the struggle to integrate contemporary American art has a long way to go.

Nato Thompson Seeing Power, Art and Activism in the 21st Century

 

“My hope is that this book will help readers take stock of the capacities and resources of everyone involved in order to construct worlds collectively. Building new worlds requires patience, compromise and conviviality. It is a process of working in the world and with people.” Nato Thompson in Seeing Power, Art and Activism in the 21st Century, Melville House, 2015, 165 pp.

 

In this brief book, almost a manifesto, Thompson leads us to concepts that enable artists to intervene in the capitalist system without being co-opted. He starts with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (the conservative elitists of the Frankfurt School) who warned against mass culture (Thompson does not mention that their impetus was their horror with Hitler’s success in using mass media.) Adorno’s ideas were familiar to Clement Greenberg’s in New York City in 1939, as he was formulating his “avant-garde and kitsch” essay that obliterated the socially engaged, politicized and revolutionary culture of the 1930s. Thompson’s reference to Adorno sets the stage for his concern that capitalism co- opts culture. Of course, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht also from the Frankfurt School, were offering the opposite argument, that mobilizing the masses to revolution could be realized through mass culture. We have certainly see that today with social media!

 

Thompson touches on the historical background of 19^th century materialism and industrialization as the foundation of the culture industry, the production of products to be consumed, and its implications for the production of art,  then turns to his crucial theme:  the long running critical debate on art and politics. Thompson comes up with two terms “ambiguity” and “didacticism” as a way of delving into the issue. One can translate these terms into aesthetics and politics, of course, but ambiguity and didacticism suggest the problem more obviously, that artists who rely on aesthetics avoid direct statements, and artists who rely on direct politics alienate us with preaching.

 

Of course the whole argument is a red herring, in my opinion, if you take the position, as I do, that all art is political. The question is what is the engagement of the artist with the issue, is it superficial, self-aware, or profound? For example, Thompson went on the road with Jeremy Deller  for his “Conversations about the Iraq war.” (Although not acknowledged, the piece was sponsored by Thompson’s Creative Time organization). Deller is a white British artist. He knew a lot, he engaged Iraqis and US veterans in the project.  He became known in the first place for a film that recorded a recreation of a miner’s strike. But his primary interest is spectacle itself as clearly revealed in his pavilion at the 2013 Venice Pavillion.
Thompson provides a breakneck overview of the second half of the twentieth century, including Guy Debord and the Situationists, as well as the Beat generation. He omits at this point the radical revolution in art produced by artists affected by AIDS as a primary moment when the shift to political art began (he does mention it finally near the end of the book as an example of political art that “gained momentum by the sheer political imperative: friends and lovers were dying.”  A newly opened exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum, “Art AIDS America” examines in depth the ways in which art about AIDS shifted the trajectory of formalist American art. I will be reviewing it shortly on this blog.

 

Thompson identifies two types of production that connect art and politics successfully “social aesthetics,”  based on personal relationships and “tactical media” which recognizes “power in every aspect of life” and “disturb[s] political structures.”  He groups Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy and Meirle Laderman Ukeles together as second wave feminist examples of “social aesthetics,” the only reference to feminism in the book.  The example for “tactical media” is the Critical Art Ensemble, who moved outside the art world to larger systems of power. The Yes Men are, of course, another great example. Paul Chan’s project in New Orleans “Waiting for Godot,” (also sponsored by Creative Time) is discussed at length by Thompson, as an example of successful “social aesthetics.”  That is the only time that African Americans are given a voice in the book.

 

While many chapters recount all the ways in which capitalism and the culture industry make it difficult for artists to act outside that system, his conclusion focuses on the idea of creating space for actions, such as occupations that address the issues that concern us, “ rent control, housing, minimum wage, child care…” His citation of Trevor Paglen as a model of this emphasis resonates with me. Paglen as a geographer who also holds an art degree has long been a radical pioneer in intervening in public spaces, both conceptually and through photography.

 

Nato Thompson’s book documents the capitalist morass that confronted him as an elite young white curator of the 1990s. At some point, he woke up to the possibilities for art to intervene in systems of power.  But, he carefully avoids specific political ideologies entirely or even their terminology, such as revolution, class, dialectics, or even Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Anarchism.  Perhaps he was afraid of being “didactic.”  He also fails to explore the work of artists of color, which is intensely political. Instead he quotes well-known theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Antonio Gramsci, and Slavoj Žižek. His call to action, cited at the beginning of this review, calls for “patience, compromise and conviviality,” terms that are pretty weak as a means to realize the power of art to change the way people think. His more productive idea is in the preceding sentence, the idea to “construct worlds collectively.”

 

When Thompson states on p 23 that the activism of the WTO ‘”ended” during the Bush years, I was surprised. I have written an entire book on the subject of Art and Politics from 1999 – 2009, and barely scratched the surface. It was, in fact, an era of passionate oppositional art that specifically addressed political issues. It actually died when Obama was elected, but happily, it is now returning to the fore, and might even be said to dominate the art world. Creative Time itself has also evolved into a dynamic and exciting place to consider art and politics. What could have been more confrontational than inviting Amy Goodman to be keynote speaker at their recent conference in Venice.

 

What we really need, and we are getting closer to it all the time, is to stop even discussing “problems” with politics in art and support artists, who, creatively frame condemnations of capitalism, globalism and war. With climate change a reality, we can’t afford to be “patient” or “convivial” anymore. I am not as concerned about capitalism corrupting art, as I am concerned about capitalism ending the world as we know it.

 

Artists are already contributing to making that reality visible. Our critical responsibility is to make sure their actions are acknowledged and supported that they are encouraged to be understandable as well as aesthetic.  Art and politics joined together offers a vast range of possibilities to confront the system.

A visit to the home of contemporary Turkish Artist Tomur Atagök

 

 

 

During my recent trip to Turkey, I was fortunate to spend several days in the home of the contemporary Turkish artist Tomur Atagök. By immersing myself in her environment, and living with her art, I gained new insights.

 

She had recently reinstalled the art in her home, following her major retrospective exhibition this spring.

 

While I was there, we heard in detail about the intense migration from Turkey to Greece, as well as nationalists burning several offices of the HDP ( Halkların Demokratik Partisi -People’s Democratic Party), and much more from the perspective of both Turkish newscasters and others in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East. We interspersed intense news with popular culture,  classical culture,  and nature programs, in a parallel to her own art, which combines intense concern for current issues engulfing Turkey with commentary on popular culture, particularly as it affects women, and agony over the destruction of the environment.

 

Tomur lives in an idyllic compound in what used to be far out in the country, but which today is increasingly threatened by development, both government sponsored and local high end condominiums sprouting up in her small village.

 

While the compound where she lives still maintains an immersion in nature, we sometimes heard the not so distant boom of dynamite blasting away hills.
Since moving to Kumsuyu in the 1990s, her work has included references to the fragility of nature. She deplores our lack of respect for the natural environment, and sadly, that is only becoming more obvious each day, as the megalomaniac plans for the new airport, its highways, its storage facilities, and the third bridge destroy many acres of formerly protected forests along the Bosphorus, the only remaining forests near Istanbul, “the lungs of the city.”

 

What struck me, living with her art on every wall, and waking up inches from these two paintings, was her extraordinary sense of traditional lush brushwork, color and paint  that she has chosen to imbue with strong contemporary references to political issues, literature, feminism and nature. I can only touch on some of her work here. Gray Nature here combined painting with sticks to suggest a fragile, disintegrating balance.

 

 

 

 

Her references to women range from Neolithic goddesses to  the wives of military dictators to contemporary pop singers, sometimes all in one painting. One theme is ‘ordinary women” . In this series in her staircase, called ” Open the curtain slowly,”fabric covers the subtle reference to a woman

 

 

 

 

Born in Istanbul, she grew up in a family that was part of the secular military, but she also has ties to what she calls the matriarchal traditions of the Caucasus. She attended art schools in the United States during the late 1960s where she intensely responded to Professor Dale McKinney at Oklahoma State University and quickly grasped the principles of abstraction through the lens of Hans Hofmann’s well known theory of push-pull. She initially painted in dark tones as in this work, Shadows on the Wall of 1960.

 

She went on to study art at the University of California, Berkeley in the midst of the free speech movement and flower children, where her palette began to brighten, then on to the University of Washington, finally returning to Turkey in 1973 where she began moving beyond abstraction to become a pioneering feminist artist (as well as an historian of women artists in Turkey.)  In 1985 she created this work, Followers,  commenting on the situation for women after the military coup of 1980. This painting was on the staircase  also as a prelude to “Open the Curtain Slowly.”

 

 

Since the 1980s she has  filled her paintings with references to  pop stars  and contemporary women, as well as to the corruption of nature with plastic and other trash.

And perhaps her best known theme, the ancient Anatolian goddesses,

as an historical counterpoint reference point for women today.

 

All over her house were simple gestural art works that incorporated nature as well as the trash we leave behind. This series was called Framed Nature. Her training in abstract gestures is now materialized as gestures created by sticks, wire, and other natural materials. These works hung in her living room.

 

In the hallway were “art boxes,” large boxes with an assortment of trash that she has picked up.

 

She often combines collage, textiles, sticks, bugs, spent bullets, in small free standing sculptures and boxes. I found a huge dead fly that she added to her collection for another artwork.

 

 

 

This impulse to make collage  extends into thousands of “diary pages” made from the wrappers and tickets of her own life,

 

as well as textile collages created from fabrics that are personal to her life.  She generously gave me two. Here is a detail of those textile collages, note the antique collar at the top of the right hand collage. The piece below that is actually gold fabric, and below that a hand embroidered antique fabric.

 

Here it is installed in my living room in Seattle (with the antique collar visible on the top left).

 

 

Tomur has created hundreds of art works in her prolific career, works protesting war, honoring important writers, celebrating popular culture. But the dominant theme of the works installed in her home today is nature, as it is outside her window, and as we are acting on it with all of our carelessness.