Contemporary Art and Archeology in the Middle East: Crying Caryatids, Flooded Histories, Graffiti, and Puppet Shows

 

Contemporary art and even the study of archaeology in the Middle East are deeply embedded in the dramatic economic pressures and political stress in that part of the world.

 

To start with the most surprising topic, contemporary study of archaeology as a practice,  “Indigenous Archaelogies of Ottoman Anatolia: Decolonizing Spolia” presented at the College Art Association Conference by Benjamin Anderson of Cornell University was a clearly argued lecture calling for consideration of the indigenous point of view on archaeological objects and sites, not just the interests of economic and intellectual elites.

 

A current example is the battle to save Hasankeyf (above) on the Tigris River, about to be flooded by a new dam along with 600 other sites on the Tigris. In 2009 there was a big effort to make it a World Heritage site, but the Turkish government refused to support it. The village has been an active settlement for 12,000 years.  Below we see the villagers protesting the plans to flood it.  The dam is built though and the floodgates will open any day. It is part of the GAP project, the massive Eastern Anatolian development that is meant to make Turkey energy independent ( while it destroys history, cultures, massive tourist destinations and natural habitats for rare animals.)

 

 

Spolia is the re-use of archaeological remnants in later architecture, but its roots are in the word “spoils” based in the Italian word, “spogliare” to strip.  Archaeological spolia enter a second history when they are part of a new fabric; in some cases they have a spiritual or even mythic meaning to local people entirely different from the original significance of the work.

 

According to Ben Anderson’s recounting, it is told that people heard the caryatid maidens from the Parthenon cry as one of their sisters was removed by Lord Elgin!

 

In the removal of ancient sculptures from sites there is frequently (even today) collusion between elites, archaeologists and the government, and a complete disregard of the feelings of the people in a local community where the object is embedded.

 

The removal of pieces to European museums was rampant in the 19^th century. Apparently the first law to prevent this was passed in 1869. We are all familiar with the ongoing repatriation campaign particularly for the return of the Elgin Marbles to the Acropolis Museum. Now we have another reason for them to return: the crying maidens and maybe the grieving gods of the tympana as well. But no amount of crying is going to survive the drowning about to happen at Hasankeyf.

 

 

 

“Submerged Stories on the Sidelines of Science” a presentation by Laurent Dissard at the University of California, Berkeley, also talked about the “others” of archaeology, in this case people living at the site of what became the Keban Dam on the Euphrates River, built between the 1964 and 1977 in Eastern Anatolia.  As teams of archaeologists came to rescue sites about to be submerged, they paid scant attention to the local people who lived and worked the land in the villages near the dam (162 villages and 50 hamlets were flooded). These people did not own their land so they received no compensation. They lost everything, but they are barely mentioned in reports and barely visible in the photographs.  These are the “marginalized others” such as Kurds, Armenians, and Alevis that Dissard attempts to bring back to life from their erasure.

 

And of course his thesis relates directly to the situation at Hasenkeyf where dozens of marginalized histories are being destroyed in order to deliver power to the center (both literally and metaphorically)

 

 

 

“A Revolution in Art? The Arab Uprisings and Artistic Production” presented by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) at the College Art Association was also full of dramatic revelations, particularly about revolution graffiti in Libya and Egypt.

 

In her talk “’King of Kings of Africa’: Racializing Gaddafi in the Visual Output of the 2011 Libyan Revolution” Professor Christiane Gruber of the University of Michigan, a specialist in Islamic culture,

spoke of a particular type of street graffiti. the street imagery specifically in Benghazi,  where African mercenaries (Tuareg from Mali who have been revolutionaries for decades in their own country) killed many Benghazis as part of Gaddafi’s mercenary forces.

 

Gaddafi was a big financial supporter of various countries in Africa and was elected President of the African Union of 53 states  in 2009. He had been proposing a United States of Africa as a way to stability (one wonders if this is why we were so eager to do him in).  In 2008, 200 African Kings endowed him with the title of “King of Kings” of Africa in Benghazi. He declared “We want an African military to defend Africa, we want a single African currency, we want one African passport to travel within Africa.”  Kings all dressed in traditional royal clothing and gold crowns came from all over the continent, including  Mozambique, South Africa, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

 

 

During the Revolution, Benghazi cartoonists, particularly the artist Qays al-Hilali, poured out their anger at the oppressive society in Libya. Qays transformed Gaddafi from the King of Kings to  the “Monkey of all Monkeys.” (I did not find those images available online)

 

 

The monkey in local culture, according to Gruber, is a sycophant, hypocrite and trickster, as well as representing cunning. She pointed out that the language of the cartoons’ epithets was a street Arabic specific to Benghazi.

 

 

 

The caricatures emphasize his afro hair and “ape-like” feature. Qays al Hilali was killed during the uprising, intentionally it would seem, because of his explicit cartoons.

 

 

Although there has been a flowering of murals in many places in Libya, only in Benghazi is are the references so explicitly targetting Gaddafi as “King of Kings.”

 

 

 

Professor Gruber concluded her presentation by providing analytic tools for thinking about what she called “conflict aesthetics”. The concepts she listed were incongruity, metaphor, stereotypes, and turning the morally objectionable into a joke. These works she said violated predictable conceptual patterns. These are definately concepts to think over. Very few people ( including myself) take a step back from street art to try to analyze it aesthetically.

 

 

Jennifer Pruitt  speaking on “Painted Discontent: The Role of Street Art in the Egyptian Revolution” discussed the changing dynamic of street art over the course of the uprising in 2011 as murals were created, altered, painted, over, effectively switching sides day by day. Martyr paintings were vandalized by pro Mubarek forces, then repainted.

 

Ganzeer is by far the best known of those artists. He has even been featured in Art in America as part of “The New Realism.” He painted 18 martyr portraits, some of them viewable online with a map to locate them at cairostreetart.com

He plastered this ironic and frightening image around Cairo at the height of the uprising.

 

 

Ganzeer here is painting one of his most famous murals. Below is the full mural, the encounter of the tank and the bicycle with the person carrying bread. It was later painted with streams of blood under the wheels, as well as being painted out. But much graffiti survives online. This virtual catalog is invaluable as a record of the specific images and sometimes their changing conditions.

 

 

 

 

Last night, at the University of Washington,  I heard a third talk on culture in the midst of uprising: “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times Notes from Syria, Memos to the President,” by Professor Lisa Wedeen sponsored by the Jackson School at the University of Washington. Her main theme was that a neoliberal autocracy and consumer culture had created an affluent culture in Damascus and Aleppo that had little interest in the uprising initially. Neoliberalism created sites and images that constructed and served a wealthy society of privilege. And, the people killing the revolutionaries, the “regime thugs”  were frequently hired by Assad from low income areas. The privileged said, according to Professor Wedeen, “It will resolve itself.”

 

As the situation worsened, the youth of the privileged joined the uprisings, and of course, today, nobody can ignore it any longer. The battle has been taken directly to Aleppo and Damascus. We heard about certain popular culture soap operas like “A Forgotten Village” actually supported by the regime even as it was making jokes about the surveillance society. These consumer oriented products of entertainment were examples of pressure valves organized by the regime. So they stood in a complicit relationship to the Assad government.

 

 

Such a situation of co-opting a critical voice has a long tradition in Syria as pointed out by miriam cooke (She writes her name in a lower case) in Dissident Syria, making oppositional arts official,  Cooke discusses performance art, visual art, films, and “prison literature” as a negotiation between the State’s controls (this is under Assad’s father Hafiz), and their desire to be in opposition to its policies, while not ending up in jail.  Even more complicated to think about is the idea that “the state that controlled and sometimes silenced them also needed them.” (4)

 

 

In the last two years, there are also contemporary dissident voices in Syria who are not at all part of the consumer or official culture. The puppet show “Top Goon Diaries of a Little Dictator” by the collective Massasit Matti has produced two Seasons and 17 episodes of comedic critique of the government. I would love to read an analysis of it in the context of the history of puppetry in the Middle East. Season 2, No 17 and the last episode, is chillingly pertinent, it ends with the Assad puppet placed in a coffin and the cover closed on him. This puppet show is easily viewable on You Tube. It was partially funded by money from abroad giving it a very different relationship to the regime that commercial soap operas.

 

Ali Ferzhat is a famous cartoonist who was formerly supported by the regime, but now criticizes it. He was attacked by the regime, some of his fingers were cut off. He now works from outside the country. There are others as well like the poster collective that made this poster.

 

Culture is always embedded in politics. It can be sacred objects shipped abroad from archaeology sites by colonial elites or villages drowned under water by economic development;  it can be street graffiti finally free to lampoon a hated leader in Libya or militarism in Egypt, it can be carefully crafted online videos that document protests in New York or DC, it can be theater that protests injustice in historical contexts that are still resonant, it can be writers and poets who say one thing and mean another (I remember meeting a filmmaker from Croatia who spoke of how everyone could read between the lines under socialism), it can be producers of soap operas in Syria who are protesting the government oppression with the government’s support.

It can be a blog that tries to explore all the possible ways of thinking about art and politics.

“Idle No More” and other Protests

 

The massive Climate Change protest in DC  brought together Indigenous leaders from Canada and the US as well as African Americans with the usually dominantly white movement. In Seattle, sadly, we had two separate demonstrations, one on Saturday  and one on Sunday, the first organized by Idle No More the Canadian based Indigenous protest of violation of treaty rights-such as removal of environmental protections from hundreds of tribal lakes and lands- they have been holding huge actions all over Canada. Here in Seattle there was a demo based  at Gasworks Park.

 

The second by the Sierra Club at Golden Gardens, a rally, photo, and short march. As far as I could see  there were lots of white people (probably because of the location.) Mayor McGinn gave a speech. This is Backbone’s Snowflake nuzzling a bullet train carrying people as an alternative to coal train.

The Sierra Club rally focused heavily on the coal trains, I wish it had also officially embraced the issue of tankers with tar sands oil negotiating through Puget Sound,  as well. as fracking. The tankers are already in Puget Sound, but there is a planned escalation from 5 a month to over 30 a month.  The Grim Reapers got it right ( a protest in Olympia on inauguration day that I joined)They included all of the disasters.

According to Carlo Voli, climate activist, all the refineries in Washington State are already processing tar sands oil, we are already using it in our cars. I drove to the rally with much guilt ( far away from downtown core),  how many fossil fuels are we using as we protest. Harpers Magazine author Richard Manning, writing on the devastation in Bakken, North Dakota from fracking for oil told us at the end of his article exactly how much fossil fuel he used to write his article. We should all be thinking that way.

 

 

A show at the Burke Museum Plastics Unwrapped  manages to tell it all in a compressed space : 1500 disposable plastic water bottles used every second in the U.S., 3,000 plastic bags every quarter of a second,

 

 

170 pounds of e waste discarded every second in the U.S., 9 million pounds of marine debris removed from beaches last year.

 

Only 7 percent of plastics are recycled each year, ghost nets left in the ocean kill thousands of marine mammals, seabirds, fish and other creatures. On the plus side the show talked about recycling!

 

Of course, not using plastic in the first place is a better idea. It is impossible though. Trader Joe’s is hopeless on packaging. When buying any product think about re-use vs waste, like all cellophane (petroleum based) bags go right into the landfill, but a nice glass jar can be re used over and over. Our local Madison Market Co-Op has fantastic bulk items. I keep discovering new ones, most recently, bulk frozen peas (which unfortunately are delivered by the truckers whose strike is being smashed by Whole Foods). If you bring your own container or bag you are on a plus side with the trash problem.

 

So when I travel on an airplane (one trip equals driving an SUV for a whole year and I make a lot of trips), I make my tiny effort by bringing my own water bottle and tea so I don’t generate trash on the plane

(ridiculous small difference compared to giving up flying).  I carry a big purse into which almost anything can go without a plastic bag, and try not to create hopeless trash ( it is impossible, on my last trip to NYC I had a Styrofoam encased street dinner, plastic encased sandwiches, aluminum wrapped gyros etc. Of course if I had eaten in any real restaurants no trash, but I was eating on the cheap).

 

In Seattle we have lots of recycling, but the rest of the country is awash in landfill, plastic, and no options. Depressing. And of course those plastics are petroleum based, and there we are protesting oil production. Here is the diagram from the Burke show

The show also told us what we did before plastics and how we got here. Of course we had wood, cotton, fibers, leather.

Then after World War II many war factories making plastic for war were transformed into plastic production for throw away objects and we were encouraged to consume, consume, consume.

 

 

It would be perfectly possible to generate an army of new green jobs if we could just get the oil industry on board with a new way of thinking. Who will take the lead? As I watched the devastation going on in East Texas for the XL Pipeline as shown on Democracy Now, I really started crying. Somehow watching a specific tree shoved over was more affecting than all the statistics in the world. (For many people trees have their own spiritual life. I always feel that way in the forest.)  I wondered what would happen if the men operating the back hoes got off and refused to continue destroying the planet. If the men laying the pipe said no. But reading Harper’s Magazine (see link above)explains what is going on. Jobs. Profits. “Energy Independence” ( Good news: Carlo said someone had photographed defects in the pipeline welds in the Texas Keystone and are going to sue )

 

Destruction of our planet is intimately connected with violence against the people on it, particularly indigenous men and women, and women in general, as well as the killing of plants, animals, and the sea and air.

In DC Jacqueline Thomas Chief of the Saik’u Nation listed the destructions and ended with plants as the most important.

 

One Billion Women around the world protested violence against women on Valentine’s Day, a project catalyzed by Eve Ensler. Take a look at some of the amazing videos on the website linked to One Billion Rising. Especially Hyderabad India.

 

I took part in a demonstration organized by We Will Not Be Silent on Times Square. I did not get to dance, which was the main idea (dancing instead of violence) , but it was a really powerful and amusing experience to stand in the middle of Times Square protesting  violence against women on Valentine’s Day. Other people were getting a romantic picture taken and it was projected onto a giant screen above us. There was a massive billboard of Oprah, and of a tough woman in some sport.  The contrast of the darkness of violence against women and the brilliance of Time Square seemed like a perfect dialectic. We even had some Valentine love song being piped in. Then we had to move because there was a wedding planned for our location.

 

 

But wandering around us were various cartoon characters, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, as well as Elmo and the Cookie Monster who joined us. Altogether it was a thrilling experience.

Lynn Hershmann Leeson !Women Art Revolution The Movie

 

The Film “!Women Art Revolution” by Lynn Hershmann Leeson is an impressive work.  (the image above by Spain Rodriguez is from a graphic novel based on the film). We all know the story of course, of the feminist art movement, but Leeson has collaged earlier and later interviews with benchmark artists, dramatic timelines graphically represented and vintage footage. It has a good pace and we are caught up in the drama of the story of women who turned the art world upside down from the 1970s to the 1990s.

 

Of course, this is an artist’s perspective. There was no reference to Linda Nochlin’s famous essay that started feminism in art history “why have there been no great women artists” and the affiliated exhibitions.

 

Leeson included two critics substantively, Arlene Raven (although not as a critic’s voice, but her personal story), and Ruby Rich, film critic. Moira Roth appeared briefly, and Lucy Lippard even more briefly, a critic whom I consider the most important of the era.

 

Curators were better represented with Marcia Tucker humorously telling her own very important story. The main story though is the usual history of US feminism, Starting with Judy Chicago in 1971 with a workshop in Fresno going through the Cal Arts Program, Woman House, Woman’s Building 1975, and from 1985 the Guerrilla Girls, who  are a separate and crucial story.

 

This is the enshrined history of feminist art in the US. All the interviews are available online. 

 

So, what about all the other stories?

 

There was a brief interview with the ever fabulous Faith Ringgold, but bell hooks was absent. bell hooks articulately explained why feminism in general and feminism in the art world, in particular, excluded women of color or to be more succinct, was racist. Other artists of color included were Howardena Pindell and Adrian PIper, and briefly Lowery Stokes Sims. All very articulate, as well as prestigious.

 

Judy Baca managed to mention the important fact of the vast gulf between feminism and her community based work with youth at risk.

 

Martha Wilson, founder of Franklin Furnace, provided a refreshing dissent from the narrative line, and of course Martha Rosler is always about more than meets the eye.

 

 

A friend of mine said to me. “Why weren’t you included?” It tells us a lot about how history is constructed for me to answer that question, which is only my own particular place in these decades. But so many people have related reasons for not being part of history.

 

First, I was from NYC and my mother did not do housewife stuff. So I didn’t have a model, or a suburban life style to rebel against which was a reference point not only for some of the artists, but also the content of their work.

 

Second, at the time of the eruption of feminism in the early 70s, the famous California stories, I was first in Boston, then Houston Texas, then Austin Texas.  I had no catalytic community of feminists.

 

Third, I admit it, I was a conservative then. I did get involved with anti war protests in Boston, but feminism and especially feminism in the art world was not a compelling concern of mine.

 

Fourth, I became excited about feminism ( in general, not art world concerns)  when I saw the Dinner Party in, of all place, Clear Lake City Texas, ( where NASA is located) in 1979. I was at that time critic for Artforum for the state of Texas, so I drove the four hours there from Austin to see it ( of course Artforum wasn’t interested in 1977)

 

Fifth, I was raising a child alone and working full time.

 

Sixth, when I held a teaching job at Mills College I was immersed in feminism,  but my best friends were philosophers, not artists.

 

Seventh, by the early 80s I was even more geographically challenged, teaching at remotely located Washington State University in Eastern Washington.

 

Eighth, in the 1990s I moved back to Texas and did get involved with the Women’s Caucus for Art (not mentioned in the film!). At that time the board was dominated by artists of color, so my real introduction to feminist art was among women artists of color who were addressing intensely social issues.

 

That is still my interest today. Not simply women getting shown and sold, which was what mostly concerned the feminist artists in the film, but with women artists and all artists who represent social issues.

 

So I am not part of this enshrined history of feminist art, and neither are any of the powerful women I met in the WCA, all of whom are well known aritsts: Flo Wong, Imna Arroyo, Gail Tremblay, Clarissa Sligh, Yong Soon Min and many more.

 

And then there is the global component, and feminism outside the US! I went global in 1995 when I went to the NGO women’s conference in Hairou China with the WCA. We met amazing women changing the world from the ground up. It was overwhelming. I was also the lone representative of the International Association of Art Critics to the conference, but art criticism wasn’t ready for global feminism. I only did a short article in thier newsletter.

 

So the movie is described as exploring “the relationship between feminist art and the 1960s antiwar and civil rights movements and shows how historical events sparked feminist actions against major cultural institutions.”

 

This is a little misleading. What was the relationship of these privileged art students to Civil Rights – they were almost all white!  The real relationship was the idea of activism itself, the changing of the climate in the world to the idea of collective activism. And since these women were in the “art  world” that is where their activism played out.

 

We need another history of feminism and art in the US that begins with real world community activism and women of color who bravely spoke out about poverty, jails, drugs, domestic violence. It is out there.

 

Rape is a part of many of these artists stories, (emphasized only in  Suzanne Lacy’s amazing work which she continues to this day) .

 

Perhaps that needs to be brought onto center stage.The History of Feminist Art About Rape (see my previous blog).

 

 

Tatiana Garmendia Takes on Topic of Violence Against Women in “Veils of Ignorance”

 

As we were standing in the opening of the exhibition “Veils of Ignorance”, just days after a young woman had died as the victim of gang rape in India, and that country was experiencing a nationwide protest, Tatiana Garmendia stated “this exhibition could have opened any day, and there would have been an example of rape, domestic violence, or abuse of women.”

 

Garmendia spent many months researching  domestic violence. She collected statistics from all over the world as well as narratives and poetry. The cumulative effect is overwhelming, but it is essential that we all experience this show. It is so easy to be in denial about the reality of the conditions of women today. So many artists avoid these realities in their work.   Garmendia has faced them.

 

Her motivation is based on a childhood experience she had in Cuba

“When my nuclear family was punished by Castro’s government and sent to La Trampa, a camp for political dissidents, I witnessed acts of unspeakable violence. Most of my memories of that time are blocked, but one memory has always remained. At the age of six I was forced to watch as Marilyn, an eight year old girl, was gang raped, had her mouth and panties stuffed with cockroaches and threatened with death if she ever told. Marilyn never spoke again. Not one word.”

 

Bravely, Tatiana Garmendia has both shared this traumatic experience and created a deeply affecting exhibition that calls our attention to the situation of abuse for women and girls locally and globally.

 

Towering figures wrapped in black (they are actually about 16 feet tall, but are shortened because of the gallery ceiling height.) Their coverings which intentionally evoke the intense coverings of the most conservative Muslim women only even more so, as there is no face showing at all, are pierced by words that have been burned into the  paper. Her reasoning behind referring to these “Unryu burqas “ is that it becomes a surrogate for battered women everywhere. As the artist states “I came across a state­ment by an Islamic femi­nist,  ‘All women every­where wear the burqa.’ I under­stood this to mean that the veil is but an outward symbol of a much more perva­sive real­ity of oppres­sion, one that is global and not just regional.”

 

Some covered women might disagree with that idea as they might have covered themselves out of piety or modesty, but the general idea of covering women comes out of a conservative rural interpretation of the threat that women pose to men (actually, it was  a Byzantine tradition before it was taken up by Muslims later, in Mohammed’s time women were not covered in this way). In fact, as this exhibition makes absolutely clear, the threat is much more of men toward women.

The words the artist has burned into the paper veils and the ” flags” at the end of the gallery as well, are testimonials by women who are victims of domestic violence. The artist told me that she burned them into the paper in response to her horror that women actually burned themselves to death in order to get out of impossible domestic situations. The burned words are personal stories.

 

The second component of the exhibition is an audio tape which recites  first hand stories and poems, alternating with worldwide statistics on the huge rates of violent attacks on women and girls. These attacks include  domestic violence, trafficking, prostitution, dowry deaths, women in the military, rape and sex selected abortions and more.

 

The cumulative effect is overwhelming. It is enraging. The numbers are unbelievable from around the world.  For example

3 women a day are murdered by husbands and boyfriends

Every 15 seconds a woman is beaten

Around the world, 1 in 3 women is beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused by a member of her own family

Every 9 seconds a woman is raped

In 2012 in India a dowry death occurred every 90 minutes

50,000 women are trafficked each year

2 million children forced into prostitution every year

 

But the installation also includes resistance:

Beware

out of the ash I rise with my red hair

and I eat men like air

 

And it ends on a note of hope

“We embody the power of courage, endurance of strength

the beauty of survival”

I could not help but think of the SHARE/WHEEL women who wrote the poetry in the anthology Beloved Community The Sisterhood of Homeless Women in Community. Their stories and poetry are often of a life that begins in domestic violence, but these women have survived, they are living examples of the strength of women to overcome the nightmare of personal intimate violence.

Another Seattle production was the Yoni Ki Baat monologues by South Asian Women many of which spoke of early violence in their lives.

API Chaya is an organization that helps specifically South Asian Women. It “seeks to end systematic violence in our community.”

And of course there are many more connections that could be made locally.

 

By the way apparently the men who raped the woman who died in India blamed the victim. See the link at start of post.

 

 

Exhibition Info: M. Rosetta Hunter Gallery ( Seattle Central Community College) until January 31. Hours 9:30 – 3:30 Mon to Fri 5-7PM Wed and Thurs evenings Phone 206 934 4379

 

 

 

My imaginary interview with Amy Goodman on Culture and Resistance

 

 

Amy Goodman featured “Culture and Resistance” today.

I love Democracy Now and I love Amy Goodman, but this show was notable for what was not included: visual artists!

In my opinion it also reflected an East Coast bias, in omitting the voices of Latinos, Asians Americans, Indigenous artists in any media.

Now Amy is great on covering issues across the whole spectrum of the US, so it is odd that for this show she omitted so many possible perspectives on “Culture and Resistance.”

 

I started to imagine Amy Goodman interviewing me. My fantasy interview

AG Tell us why visual artists are so important in resistance.

SNP Visual artists make visible the invisible. All of the artists that I write about give us insights that they have gained through their lives, their experiences and their obsessions about injustice in the world. They bring a highly attuned aesthetic sense to shape their images  in such a way as to make that injustice penetrate into our souls

 

AG How did you decide which artists to include in your book “Art and Politics Now, Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis”?

 

SNP I followed the issues and grouped artists according to those concerns, such as Resisting Police States, Women, War and Imperialism, Exposing Racism,  Crossing Borders, Ecology. I often had a few artists in mind whose work I had followed for many years, then I would add other artists as they emerged during the years I was writing the book . I began the book just after 9/11 and continued to work on it until 2010, It was going to press during the BP Gulf Oil Spill. I include artists of many different perspectives, but I tried not to ghettoize ethnicity, but focus on the issues addressed, which are frequenly shared by everyone.

 

AG You dedicated your book to Selma Waldman. Tell us about her.

SNP Selma Waldman died in 2008 as I was finishing the book. She was absolutely committed in her art to making injustice visual as well as to honoring those who helped to do that.

Selma grew up in Kingsville, Texas, as the daughter of the only Jewish family in that city, and going to school with many farmworkers children. She learned early about injustice. In 1960 she went to Berlin on a Fulbright Fellowship and saw the movie “Mein Kampf” as well as the front page stories about the massacres in Sharpesville, South Africa that year.

She decided to dedicate her art to addressing injustice, beginning with the “falling man” based on photographs of holocaust victims.  For many years her work addressed apartheid in South Africa and other Civil Rights issues around the world. She always had a global perspective on injustice. In her last months she completed 180 chalk drawings on black notebook paper of specific examples of torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.  She called the series, “Black Book of Aggressors” Right before she died she planned another series based on Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Children,” in which she referred to war devouring people in conflicts all over the globe.  Her work is in the grand tradition of Goya and Kathe Kollwitz, two artists who unflinchingly represented the horrors of war.

AG In your book, “Art and Politics Now”  you include other artists who represented Abu Ghraib torture.

SNP Yes. There are several, and of course they only represent a sample. I chose two others Fernando Botero and Daniel Heyman. The revelations via the internet, 60 minutes, and Stuart Hirsch’s article in the New Yorker came out in 2004. Colombian artist Fernando Botero made a series of paintings and drawings  that translated the raw photographsas well as other sources into paintings in his characteristic inflated bodies. He declared he wanted to give the prisoners  moral weight that made them heroic. Botero is best known for painting happy bourgeois small town people, but he has frequently addressed injustice such as the military junta in Columbia, and the drug cartels. That aspect of his career is not as well known.

 

Another artist in the book representing Abu Ghraib, Daniel Heyman,

is not as well known internationally.

He accompanied a team of lawyers who were preparing a class action lawsuit against two corporate contractors who provided Abu Ghraib with interrogators and translators.  Heyman’s  portraits give us men who had been released from Abu Ghraib, often disabled. He sat in on interviews in Istanbul, Turkey, and not only drew portraits but also recorded the words of the released prisoners, none of whom had ever been accused of a crime. Only this week that lawsuit was successful! The 71 released prisoners won over 5 million dollars from military contractors who organized the abuse. There is also a second suit pending.

AG We are just about out of time. What would you like to leave us with?

SNP Artists who make visual the pressing concerns of the world have a deep commitment to justice. They work in many different styles and media of art. Usually, these artists have chosen to represent injustice in spite of their art school training, which usually encourages artists to create aesthetic objects with technical sophistication, objects that represent only the artist’s personal identity and can be sold on a capitalist art market. Many of the artists I write about are also successful in selling their work (some choose not to sell it), but that is not as important to them as the fact of raising their voices against injustice.

 

Last, I would like to say that this is not new in American art. During the 1930s artists were also deeply committed to representing injustice, a story that I tell in my previous book, Art and Politics in the 1930s.  These contemporary artists work in a tradition that is powerful, but that is generally suppressed in the media and in art history and art criticism.  I write about these artists ( also on my blog of the same name) in order to increase understanding of the issues they represent and how these extraordinary artists have contributed to that understanding.

 

AG Thank you Susan Noyes Platt. We will continue this conversation soon!

Constructing Black History: The Present and the Absent

 

Dr. Deborah Willis, Chair and Professor of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, spoke to a packed and enthusiastic audience at the Seattle Art Museum on December 14 on the roles of “race, representation and gender” within works of art. Dr. Willis spoke about a few of the works featured in “Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, Paris” but she also integrated the show, with an emphasis on representations of and by African American women.

The general theme was that the display of the female body reflects how we interpret the world.

 

 

She deftly began with a reference to Germaine Krull’s amazing 1925 Self Portrait holding a camera and smoking a cigarette, reflected in a mirror. This portrait tells us so much about the new women who were subjects rather than objects in the early 20th century.

 

 

 

Next, she went back to the mid 19^th century images of the “Hottentat Venus,” about which she has edited a book Black Venus 2010: They Called her Hottentat .

 

Moving forward from there, she showed an amazing runaway slave advertisement with a carte de visite (!!) image of a slave, cut in half.  Certainly a carte de visite of a slave suggests a concubine relationship with a master who would have the money to commission this “visiting card” an irony for a slave, to say the least.  Cutting it suggests the attack of the master on the woman who refused to submit her life to him. I got many insights into that slave/concubine relationship in Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea in which the main character is enslaved to a man who forces sex on her from the time of her adolescence.

 

 

 

From the early 20th century, we saw Florestine Collins as a black photographer from New Orleans who had a flourishing career for decades. Carl Van Vechten’s famous portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, the famous anthropologist, is an intimate  image of an incredibly important woman.

 

Willis then moved on to the theme of “women who love their bodies” like movie stars, and women photographers such as Dora Maar, liberated by new mores and new equipment. Of course Germaine Krull is one of those.

 

She concluded with various recent women photographers represented in the show and Carrie Mae Weems, who should have been included!

 

The only African Americans on exhibit in SAM’s current shows are Adrian Piper and Lorna Simpson.

Marita Dingus is on permanent display in the African galleries with her amazing 400 men and 200 women of African descent. ( this is a detail of one figure).

 

 

 

 

For another perspective go to the Northwest African African American Museum to see the beautiful exhibition by Carletta Carrington Wilson “book of the bound.”

 

The museum has opened a new gallery with a wonderful intimate scale for this special exhibition which continues until March 10. Carrington Wilson is a poet and spoken word performer as well as a visual artist. In this exhibition she has given us 22 books, many of them bound shut, with ornate covers of many materials, bone, lace, newspaper, fabrics, string, jewels and much more.

 

The theme of the exhibition is that slaves were silenced, their narratives lost.

 

 

Carrington Wilson uses fabric as the means of suggesting the connection of trade, money and the “thread-bare body”:  the wealth of the traders was based on the bodies of the slaves.  As the artist explains in the brochure of the exhibition:

 

“Three vessels, the body, the book, and the ship form an intimate connection in the works of “book of the bound.” My work attempts to enter into mysteries binding bodies of flesh to the bodies of land, water, and text that forged and formed the social fabric of our hunger-haunted history”

 

Her collaged covers become a song to those who could not fill these books with their stories. In some cases the books are opened in a series of pages, accordion pleated, standing, or other formats. We see references to those who would have been in those pages. Each book has a poetic title, and often also a poem.

 

But the significance of the use of fabrics is profound. The wall label explains the relationship of cloth and slave further:

 

“The essence of the ship, the book and the body is held in the cloth of the collages. Merchants could not have sailed these ships to Africa without canvas sails. Because European slavers often traded fine fabrics like silk and velvet in exchange for bodies, Wilson believes the stories of their bodies remain in the cloth.”

 

 

Carrington Wilson also includes stacks of books whose titles create found poetry. We are invited to do the same thing. This seemingly serendipitous project is revealing. The opportunity for us to create found poetry that points toward issues of the slave trade is empowering.

 

 

To view Carletta Carrington Wilson’s artwork see her website

 

 

Don’t miss Carletta Carrington Wilson speaking about the exhibition on January 10, 2012 7-9PM at the Northwest African American Museum

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia+the World” A Symposium in Seattle

“New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia+the World: A Symposium” at the University of Washington gave us an opportunity to think about feminism today and how it can be redefined by new realities. The feminist movement in the US re-emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as a part of the many resistance movements of those years that built on the Civil Rights legislations of the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the primary campaigns were on equal pay and equal access to health care and birth control (issues that are still with us). In the art world, misogyny, racism, and elitism, became a focus. Looking back at that art (as we could do this fall in Seattle in the “Elles” exhibition), we see women asserting themselves mainly with their bodies: Hanne Wilke amusingly undresses in front of Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare By her Bachelors Even.” But elite and beautiful female artists undressing seems dated and pointless today. ( Wilke’s later work as she was dying of breast cancer is more resonant today)

 

Issues for women’s bodies, such as-again with reference to the Elles exhibition-Tania Brughuera’s painful manipulation of her mouth as a metaphor of the difficulties of speaking out–point more directly to present concerns.

 

Today women artists are reaching out beyond “art world” issues, and “body” issues, to address what is actually happening in terms of our planet and its people. Feminism in art today is embedded in cultural and geographical differences.

 

That is the premise of the conference “New Geographies of Feminist Art: China Asia+the World” organized collaboratively by Art Historian Sonal Khullar and Sasha Welland, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Professor. The symposium offered an impressive array of brilliant, predominately young, Asian, female scholars and curators, as well as three well-known artists, Navjot (who came from Mumbai), Wu Mali based in Taiwan, and Hung Liu, formerly of China, now in California, and a professor at Mills College.

 

The keynote address was given by Shu-mei Shih, Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature and Asian American Studies, at UCLA. Her main theme was “interconnectiveness” – “minor” sites are as important as “major” sites. She declared that feminism was an “ethical position” rather than simply a depiction of victim hood.

As examples she talked about several performance artists who address feminism as an action, and a method, but not as content. In other words, art about the female body is being replaced by metaphors that have a broader significance.

 

The clearest example was the work of Wu Mali. While her earlier work is specifically about women’s stories and aesthetics, of which a wonderful example, Secret Garden, was featured on the symposium website,( see above) and  her current work is a community-based practice addressing environmental issues ( second image above). she declares that

 

“Despite the various subjects, I am really dealing with only one core issue in my works: how does a person exist comfortably in an environment? Although a straight-forward question, this has never been a simple affair. For example, coming from a gender perspective one faces gender issues, in urban development one encounters class issues and the relationships between a nation’s power and its citizens. These matters are entangled with many complicated issues, but all derive from the question of how does one go about settling in his or her environment? How does a person live happily in despite of one’s identity, gender, background, or social class?  If you look at things from these perspectives you’ll find many problems; when a person faces their surrounding, it is a land issue as well as an institutional issue.”

 

 

 

Another artist who was featured at the symposium, Navjot, moves easily between the realms of abstract theory and concrete collaborations with indigenous people and street children.   Her position is that “the artist does not solve problems, only raises questions.” One question she raised was “why do people migrate,” as she observed how impoverished life was in the shanty towns of the city compared to village life. Navjot, like Wu Mali, has many strategies and themes in her work, and she collaborates with artists and the general public.

 

She is deeply concerned about ecological issues such as water pollution and the privatization of water. Her concern is to encourage creative thinking rather than to follow a preordained idea. She believes that something as simple as providing children with a place to play is a step toward a future society that is not wracked by violence. She also works with the public in urban areas, a much more unusual practice in India than in the United States.

 

 

Sonal Khullar, one of the symposium organizers, in her all-to-brief introductory remarks, spoke of migration and incarceration in relationship to historical violence (giving the example of Mona Hatoum’s potent work Traffic two suitcases connected with hair). This is a theme that I am really interested in and I wished she had spoken more about it.

 

But she rapidly moved onto another question. How does contemporary art disrupt predictable connections- with the example of Rina Banarjee who irreverently placed her large sculptures based on an outrageous contemporary kitsch aesthetic into the somber Musée Guimet in Paris.

 

A third theme was historical figures who embody transnational feminism, with the example of Amitra Sher-Gil, an early modernist and transnational elite, who studied art in Paris, then returned to India.

 

 

Sasha Welland, the other organizer, explained that the symposium was one response to the feminist shows “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” and “Global Feminisms, New Directions in Contemporary Art” The second show actually had two catalog essays on Asian feminism, but only about ten out of the eighty artists came from Asia. Welland emphasized relations across difference, transnational gender, race, class and nationality as a basis for feminism, not politics specifically about women. Examples she gave were Lei Yan, “What if the Long March Had Been a Women’s Rights March?”

 

She also sited Chen Quilin, whose home and village were in the path of the 3 Gorges Dam. This young artist creates theatrical short films in urban settings that suggest the disjunctions of the great loss caused by the dam.

 

One crucial group of speakers established that feminism has deep roots in China and India, and that it allies with the nationalist discourse of the mid twentieth century. This is not at all surprising, given that modernism throughout the world allies with secularism and women’s rights among elites. In fact, it is that alliance that has been progressively undermined in the last twenty years by the rise of reactionary Islamist male political leaders.  China, of course, is a special case, with the victory of Communist ideology.  Communism promoted women’s equality in some ways, as well as equal opportunity deprivation and oppression.

 

The artist Hung Liu, the final speaker, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China,told the mythical story of “Nuwa and Her Descendents” (also a television series in China). According to the myth, Nuwa is the Creation deity and she made humans with clay.  There are several other dramatic chapters to the story such as “Ancient ancestors offended the deities and the God of the Heaven punished them by creating disastrous floods” (hmm perhaps that is what is happening today)   Hung Liu’s retelling of the tale of this powerful deity followed by a specific discussion of some of the personal experiences underlying her own work, was a dramatic conclusion to the symposium.

 

It is impossible to do justice to all the topics and artists addressed in this brief analysis.The symposium as a whole was provocative and exciting, but I left with many questions.

 

First, the title “China, Asia +the World” made no sense to me. Is not China in Asia, and where is India in the title and what about naming other parts of Asia? I need to ask the organizers about this, as it was obviously carefully thought out.

 

Second, exactly in what ways is ecological art the new feminism? That was the theme, based on the “geographies” of the title, and established in the keynote speech,  but not sufficiently pursued  Simryn Gill, Geographer, for example, (her work is at the top of the post)was thet title of one talk, but it was difficult to see how her work is feminist.

 

Wu Mali was the most specific example, with her transition from women’s issues to community based art, but as the overarching thesis of the entire symposium, it needed more development. Also, there is some risk in this idea of vague generalities., rather than pointed content that exposes injustice. I am not advocating a focus on  “victimhood” as Shu-Mei Shih termed it, but many women artists  today have strong voices concerning specific issues.

 

Nalini Malini’s is one of them- there was a presentation on her which I missed. There are many more.

 

Third,  there were a lot of presentations on China. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of other parts of Asia, more geographies.

 

For example, it is an urgent  feminist issue and a new geography that young girls are trafficked from Nepal across the Indian border every day.  Or in India and elsewhere, the abuse of young brides by their in-laws continues and their only way out is often self-immolation.  Nilima Sheikh addressed the second topic some years ago in her Champa series from the 1980s.

 

Sheikh also addressed women caught up in the Partition based on the book by Urvashi Butalia,  The Other Side of Silence, voices from the partition of India.   She was mentioned all too briefly in the symposium.

 

 

There is a certainly a strong relationship between women, place, and aesthetic in contemporary feminist art.  There are infinite possibilities for 21^st century feminist artists to address issues on the ground.  Many are already doing that.  I hope that these brilliant scholars keep their eyes on those artists as they further develop their work on the new geographies of contemporary feminist art.

Women Artists in Seattle Part II

This fall in Seattle exhibitions by women artists, along with events, such as lectures and even a symposium, have proliferated so rapidly, it was difficult to keep up with them. Some inspired by “Elles” at the Seattle Art Museum, the first exhibition discussed here. Some coincided accidentally as in the second exhibition. Taken collectively, all of these exhibitions and events allow us to think about women, art, and feminism in 2012. How is it different from the 1960s and later twentieth century art?

 

 

Part I Social Order: Women Artists from Iran, India and Afghanistan,

This ambitious photography exhibition at the PhotoCenter NW included well known Iranian photographer Shadi Ghadirian, as well as Priya Kambli, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Manjari Sharma (all South Asian either in origin or currently) and Gazelle Samizay (born in Afghanistan). Each of these artists is exploring a personal journey, obsession, cultural contradiction, or transcultural ambiguity.

Priya Kambli conveys the sense of divided identity that results from immigration. This is a topic that several contemporary South Asian novelists have addressed so effectively, most famously in The Namesake, by Jumpha Lahiri which was made into a film. Her first short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, also  about difficult India-US transitions, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000, suggesting how potent this topic can be.

 

Priya Kambli’s format on display here juxtaposes three photographs in a narrow strip, already implying constriction. She presents disjunctions of her childhood and her present realities, her separation from her roots, and her efforts to come to terms with her current life. The cultural references are intentionally elusive and even opaque to a person unversed in Indian culture (like myself). “Muma Baba and Me,” ( from the “Color Falls Down” series) has a loving (wedding?) photograph of her parents in the center, and two partial photographs of herself, one showing her back and her arm, the other her neck and the back of her head. Her parents are facing each other, seated in chairs, fully represented, while she faces away, clearly far away from them both emotionally and physically. The partial view of her body suggests how much she has left behind.

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew currently lives in the US; she uses historical photography of nineteenth century Native Americans as a point of departure in these works; in this series she is amusingly but pointedly commenting on the confusion that dates from Columbus of Indians from India and Native people in the Americas.  She pairs an original 19^th c image with a contemporary image of herself with the same topic (and  antique photographic medium) , underscoring both the racism of the original posed image, the parallel history of colonialisms, and the contemporary confusions with which she lives.

The third South Asian artist Manjari Sharma, who lives in India, shows “Darshan” (sight, vision), one of a series of nine photographic reconstructions of Hindu Gods and Goddesses (only four have been completed) . The artist employs 35 craftsmen to construct the image.  The photograph shown in this exhibition is a small version: her intent is to display all nine reconstructions as six foot tall photographs, complete with incense, lighting, and prayers, an immersive environment that will certainly convey the power of “darshan” more profoundly. Even in the reduced scale shown the impact is dazzling.

 

Shadi Ghadirian lives in Tehran. She showed two different sets of work, the first, her well known self- portraits based on Qajar Dynasty photographic motifs, substituting herself for the elites of the historical images posed against ornate backgrounds, but updated with something contemporary, such as a vacuum cleaner or a boom box. These are the works that made her famous.

 

A second set of photographs are still lifes such as a bowl of fruit or a cigarette case, into which the artist has inserted a hand grenade or a bullet. Ghadirian gives us the intrusion of war, terror, and even implied killing, into the bourgeois middle class life.

 

Finally, Gazelle Samizay showed two videos, “Upon my Daughter,” and “This Will Be the Last-,” on the theme of women’s claustrophobia and helplessness in a marriage ritual, and in the marriage itself, an overwhelmingly important theme in Afghanistan, where women even set themselves on fire to escape an abusive environment.

Her third video “9409 miles” is poignant: as her mother prepares tea, her father intensely draws the house he designed and left behind in Afghanistan, but in the end tea spills on the fragile ink drawings (we only see the hands and the table). 

 

 Part II Territorial Trappings

Native American artist Tanis S’eiltin’s exhibition at Seattle Central Community College  brought together her Tlingit heritage and contemporary issues relating to intersections of white and Native culture. When Europeans introduced exploitative technology and resource extraction, they were able to subdue and exploit local populations. Indigenous cultures were embedded in capitalist society. They were no longer able to be self-sufficient.

In this new installation, 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  benefitted 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.

 

Tanis’s father was a good trapper, and he was even said to have wiped out the lynx in Skagway, Alaska. She remembered the furs as part of her subsistence life in her early years (she is now a Professor of Art at Fairhaven College, Bellingham).

In the installation we see memories of skins, re-created on transparent paper that have elusive images of native emblems and tools, hanging from the ceiling.

A real lynx fur and a real trap were part of the installation, their physical reality a stark and crucial contrast to the abstraction of the paper skins.

 

At the end of the gallery whale baleen sieves hung from the ceiling.  In a whale’s mouth, baleens are up to thirty feet long; they have little hairs that collect plankton and food particles. The baleen was used as stays in garments like corsets, another resource extracted from whales.

The main theme of “Territorial Trappings” is that Indigenous peoples participate in practices that plunder resources.  There is no absolute dichotomy of holistic native culture and marauding European culture. For over 100 years, native peoples have depended on the income from harvesting and trapping.

 

At the same time, as the artist told me, in Alaska, life is still based less on consumerism and more in a belief in making do with what you have. Skagway, home to the cruise industry, about which S’eiltin has done another installation, writes that contradiction large. It has a small, fairly impoverished permanent population, but 8000 people invade the city during the cruise season. Certainly the income from those cruises helps people to survive, at the same time that the industry itself represents massive waste of resources and pollution.

“Elles” and Beyond: Women Artists Take on the World

 

In Paris “Elles” made a big splash and awakened a conversation debate and discussion about feminism. In Seattle we have had a city wide extravaganza of exhibitions of women’s art, symposia, concerts, lectures, performances and special events. It is impossible to assess, though if this really penetrated already held perspectives, changed any minds or even expanded thinking.  We have some great creative people here, and some brilliant curators, but the critical discourse and analysis is flaccid. People did get worked up about the marketing of the show that used a photograph of a bikini clad bimbo, and  with protesting a ridiculous work by a male artist in which he looked up all the local women artists names he could find and represented them by name with a rows of small outlined breasts. This is an inane response.  But it reminds us why we need to give more thought to what these women are saying in their art. The issues they present are still with us.

 

Less than 20 percent of the Pompidou Center’s  “Elles” exhibition crossed the sea, but because the show comes from France, we first of all have a great opportunity to see some extraordinary modern and contemporary art by women working in France and the rest of Europe. For me, it was extremely refreshing to have that emphasis. Finally, an exhibition of women’s art that isn’t based on our “canonical” history ie the  Power of Feminist Art coming out of Lost Angeles in the 1970s.

 

It is not a systematic history, more of a series of unpredictable snapshots. I offer here a look at those snapshots, emphasizing the works that surprised or excited me.

 

In the very first room a stunning early painting by  Sonia Terk-Delaunay jumps off the wall with highly saturated reds, along with examples of her  pioneering  abstract color painting. Nearby are two woks by the dynamic Russian futurist, Natalia Goncharova,  a stage set from  the Russian constructivist designer, Alexandra Exter, and a subtle Cubist painting by the less known Marie Blanchard.

 

While these women often had male partners and collaborators, Suzanne Valadon’s “The Blue Room ”  launches defiance. Reclining on a bed with a luscious blue patterned spread  (an accomplished homage to Matisse)  a tough, real life woman poses in the way of traditional male paintings of nudes, but  she is a subject  not an object of male desire. With her cigarette in the center of her mouth, she assertively supports herself on one elbow. She wears loose fitting striped pants and her pendulous  breasts are covered in a pink top. Valadon’s work speaks of defiance and disgust with male traditions (she herself had been a model and lover of such people as Renoir).

 

 

Paris in the 1920s, that hotbed of cross-dressing and sexual freedom by  later to be outstandingly famous women and men, comes to us in the photographs of Gisele Freund, Dora Maar, and Berenice Abbott of such celebrities as Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville West, Sylvia Beach, Nusch Eluard (above), and James Joyce, Jean Cocteau.

 

Another  segment of photographs includes two photographers from that bastion of male domination, the Bauhaus- Lucia Moholy and Florence Henri . Here she is in a self portrait that confronts us with her intelligence and sense of her own strength.

 

Also not to be missed are paintings by the Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, Czech born Marie Toyen, and, especially,  a 1927 experimental film by Germaine Dulac “La Coquille et le Clergyman.”

 

Jumping forward in time, was another surprise,  Marie-Ange Guilleminot’s “Mes Poupees,” a 1993 video of the artist caressing  a “doll” made of  nylon stockings filled with seeds and covered with talc, a sensuous suggestive sculpture.

 

Familiar and still formidable work by sculptors like Lee Bontecou, Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois, are followed by a room of abstract paintings, and then what Seattle Art Museum calls “Genital Panic” after a work by Valie Export, in the most provocative room in the exhibition. Export was another surprises for me, a formidable Austrian feminist performance artist. In one famous work called “Action Pants Genital Panic” made in 1969, she walked around movie theaters with the crotch of her pants cut out, thus directly confronting people with a counter narrative to the passivity of women in film.  She is way out there.

Also in this room was Hannah Wilke, another bold feminist innovator, who invited people to chew gum which became like vulva which she then stuck on her body and posed in various pin up postures in “Starification Object Series.” Hanging high over our heads on one wall is the wonderful sculpture  by Niki de St-Phalle a defiantly enormous woman of junk materials such as hundreds of pieces of dolls and old underwear . In this same room is Sonya Andrade’s “tv” format video of 1975 which is a hilarious and original send up of food shows, as the polite eater starts to throw the food at us ( it is stopped by a glass partition. Sanja Ivekovic, a Croatian artist, continues the theme of cutting the body ( I wondered why Yoko One wasn’t included here) as well as Orlan’s painful surgeries commenting on the cult of beauty.

 

The second half of the show has fewer surprises, although Atsuko Tanaka’s electric dress jumped out. But it is a reconstruction and should have had at least a photograph of the artist in the 1950s  wearing this incredible garment constructed of hundreds of colored light bulbs that followed her nervous and circulatory system.

 

Particularly timely to see again are Mona Hatoum and Sigalet Landau’s videos, both metaphors of the Palestine Israeli conflict . They both address the body, one on the inside, as endoscopic surgery penetrates orifices, and one on the outside, Sigalet with a barbed wire hula hoop.

 

This show demands a lot of time ( I barely touched on the videos), and even more time if you immerse yourselves in the third floor, where the permanent collection has been rehung with only women artists, particularly Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler and up to the present with Jenny Holzer and even the very current Ghada Amer.

 

 

There is also a stellar collection of early modern artists including Northwest pioneer artists  Ella McBride, Maude Kerns, and Imogen Cunningham, as well as two works by Georgia O’Keeffe and  Charmion von Wiegand  and three of the so called American Abstract Artists of the 1930s.I wrote about both Charmion and the AAA in my book Art and Politics in the 1930s in case you want some context on this period.

The inimitable Sandra Jackson-Dumont brought us Christa Bell performing “1001 Holy Names ” for guess what and she has installed an Adrian Piper work in the Jacob Lawrence Gallery called “Cornered.” It confronts us with our own racism in a particularly effective way. Watch and be cornered. Needless to say, both “Elles”, and SAM have a skimpy representation of women of color.

 

So it is a delight that , without any question, Yayoi Kusama steals the show on the third floor, (all works on loan from the Gagosian Gallery). Her wriggling erotic forms crawl everywhere on shoes, hats, furniture, walls, floors. She takes the sterility of minimal grids and crosses it with organic shapes that seem to crowd together like an underwater coral. The boat in the show constructed of stuffed work gloves, as well as the snake like yellow and black eruptions on the floor, take over. Her painstaking, obsessive compulsive patterns cover acres of canvas, but the three dimensional forms are much more evocative for me in their physical presence. Kusama lives in a mental hospital in Japan by choice. We should all be so self aware.

 

From the perspective of global feminism other exhibitions in Seattle took it further. At the Asian Art Museum, women’s paintings from the land of Sita is a dazzling exhibition by artists who formerly decorated houses, and now make paintings on canvas.

That museum is also showing “Touba”, by Iranian Shirin Neshat, the two screen video that takes its title and its “sacred” tree from Tooba and the Meaning of Night by Shahmush Parsipur.

 

Finally, at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, there are two Chinese artists, Chung Ho Fraenkel, an extraordinary calligrapher, and Lu Wu Ju, an expressionist ink painter.

So where are we so far? Seattle is a city that can be really cosmopolitan. We are fortunate in our curators and their innovative approaches. As far as women artists are concerned to immerse ourselves in these art works is to provoke us to think about women’s place in yesterday’s and today’s world. They are still primarily working within the intellectual confines of the world of culture as artists, but they have more freedom of action. On the other hand, the risk is that with that freedom they are not as compellingly confrontational. Looking at Pipilotti Rist’s videos, I was left completely flat, compared to the work of say Martha Rosler, Eleanor Antin, or Ana Mendieta. Her work seems cliched and decorative. Today’s world has a myriad of really important women’s issues that could be addressed by artists if they chose.

 

More to come.

 

Sonic Time: Speech Sound Silence at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens

While the protests were raging in the streets in Athens, the National Museum of Contemporary Art was holding a retrospective from its permanent collection of cerebral conceptual art since the late 1960s. It was beautifully curated by Ana Kafetsi.( you can see all the images on the website, as well as detailed explanations. Ypu can see more of my Cycladic pictures on Art and Politics Now Flikr site)

 

Since I arrived in Athens after the protests ended (all I saw was a Susan Komen race for the cure), and I had just spent 10 days on a remote Greek Island, I decided it was time for an injection of contemporary art.

 

At first I thought oh dear how can I possibly be interested in this, but then I surrendered to the John Cage work, lay on the floor for 30 minutes of blissful emptiness listening to his extraordinary composition and watching light and dark patterns changing in the room, and I left with a new feeling of receptiveness to conceptual art. The 1992 Cage piece is very long, a total of 94 minutes, I heard just a part. Opus One 11 is a “Film without subject.” Of 103, Cage writes: “103 is an orchestral work. It is divided into seventeen parts. The lengths of the seventeen parts are the same for all the strings and the percussion. The woodwinds and the brass follow another plan… Following chance operations, the number of wind instruments changes for each of the seventeen parts.” At any rate it was beautiful in its randomness with an underlying sense of classicism.

 

After observing sunrises and sunsets, experiencing the burning midday sun and the rapid descent of darkness in Greece, I was really tuned into light and random experiences. Light is really what Greece is about in an aesthetic sense and random is what life is like if we give it a chance.

 

So then I went back to three early works, Sol Le Witt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art( 1969), John Baldessari singing Le Witt’s sentences to popular tunes ( 1972), and Lawrence Weiner’s Declaration of Intent from 1969. Le Witt’s sentences are still resonant today and many artists would benefit from thinking about them. So here are these three “old masters” of conceptual art in the Greek National Museum, as protests against austerity rage in the country.

 

Let us think about that. For example, these artists were fed up with capitalism, they were looking for the underlying structure and purpose of art outside the physical aesthetic object. The protesters are also fed up with capitalism and its dictates. They want the underlying significance of the state to survive, that is the obvious idea that the government is meant to provide certain basic supports for its citizens ( of course in the US that idea has been entirely thrown out- the government here is intended to be privatized). What the conceptual artists and the Greek protesters share is disgust with the corruption of capitalism and its corrosive effect on the spirit.

 

In his 1969 work. Weiner is really young, bearded, lanky. He is wading into a storm tossed sea to get random pieces of driftwood ( drift logs I should say) that can or cannot be made into a sculpture if desired. It is a lovely open ended statement – “I don’t care about the thing, I care about the act and the act is determined by wind, sea, rain, water, and my own strength or ingenuity in lifting these logs.” ( that is a pseudo quote)

 

Gary Hill was well represented in the exhibition with many many pieces, a virtual mini retrospective of Gary Hill. One of the most intriguing was a piece called Thomas the Obsucre  based on a book of that name from 1987, in which Hill is telling a story ( sort of). Looking at this piece, it was easy to see why he gave up on that direction and turned to the components of video, light, movement, space, sound, and psychological experiences.

 

The exhibition included many major Greek contemporary artists, for example, there was Bia Davou, with tiny drawings with Greek letters on graph paper called Serial Structures:Odyssey,

 

and Chryssa with an amazing Cycladic book from 1957.

 

Having just come from the Cyclades, it was easy to connect to this all white piece. There were other less well known Greek artists, that I enjoyed seeing, particularly  the 2012 sound and video installation with a surprise ending by Makis Faros that suggests a collapse of expectations.

 

The intersections  of Greek art and historical conceptual art was revealing,- sound and light are both basic components of the Greek environment. and naturally of Greek art.

 

The high point of the show for me was the accidental overlap and juxtaposition of two pieces. The first was by Bruce Nauman, Playing a Note on a Violin While I walk Around the Studio, from 1967 – 68.

 

Right next to his piece (so close that his violin could be heard) was another  piece by  Danae Statou called Ice Songs 2. These were the sounds of icebergs in the Antarctic forming, colliding, squeezing together, going into the open sea.  The source of the sounds was a result of scientists monitoring the break up of Antarctica with water microphones on the sea bed of a defunct US naval base They were formerly part of a massive monitoring effect to track Soviet submarines.  She collaborated with Vassilis Koutouris on imagery to accompany the sounds. Changing waves of blue and white projected on the floor of a large gallery floor provided accents to the changing sounds of the ice bergs.   So here was juxtaposed  a violin note ( actually two close together)  by an artist rejecting aesthetics and consumption, and an accidental  sound “concert” by ice bergs cracking up (of course related to our warming planet).

 

But in contrast to the 1960s artists who offered an escape from the clutter and corruption of the world, this piece is calling attention to the disintegration of the world. The piece intentionally has meaning beyond the sound itself. It is telling us of the invisibile and powerful forces at work all the time.

 

If we don’t actually pay attention to these particular random sounds and what they signify, we are looking at an end of the world, a forecast of which we had this week with the Super Storm Sandy, itself a coming together of various powerful forces and fronts. Global climate change is with us. The extraordinary power of nature is going to win the day in the end. That is getting more evident every day. The conceptualist artists definitely had the right idea about rejecting capitalism and the “art” world and embracing nature on its own terms.