I just saw Shirin Neshat’s first feature length film, Women without Men, 2009. It has won a lot of awards, at the Sundance Film Festival, at the Venice Biennale, and elsewhere.
I wonder how many of the people giving awards and writing reviews have read the novel by Shahrnush Parsipur of the same title. This is the second novel by Shahrnush Parsipur that Neshat has used as a point of departure, the first was Touba and the Meaning of Night.
Parsipur seems to be supportive of the film, she is appearing in the photographs of the Silver Lion ceremony in Venice and she even plays a part in the film as the brothel madam.
The film is visually dazzling, Neshat’s trademark, and her film is a logical direction from her early photographs, then the slow moving imagery of her installations, to now a feature- length film. Her husband Shoja Azari is also a filmmaker and collaborates with her. The film was shot in Morocco, with Casablanca as 1950s Tehran. This is a good review.
Women of Allah, her famous photography series in which she wrote the poetry of the famous modernist Iranian feminist poet, Forough Farokhzad, on the hands and face of (herself) wearing a chador, was a response to a visit to Iran after many years. She was shocked at the changes from what she remembered in the late 1970s as a small child ( she left in 1979 at the time of the Islamic Revolution). Paying homage to a great poet as a visual artist is common in art from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries in which poetry has been more important than visual art. (I would like to avoid the inaccurate term “Middle East”)
Her film Women without Men appeared almost at the same time as the Green Revolution, an amazingly fortuitous circumstance for its success. The cast and Neshat wore green and held up the peace symbol in Venice during the award ceremony in September 2009 for Best Director.
The film is pure Shirin Neshat. She has stunning images of women in black chadors (she has a love hate relationship with chadors, she loves their visual effects, but not the oppression of wearing them.) A lot of her films include an emphasis on the black shapes of the chador.
I have heard Shirin Neshat speak, and she is very compelling. I can still remember her saying on a panel in Istanbul, ” artists in Iran do not have the luxury to ignore politics.”
On that note, the film’s vortex is the politics surrounding the US coup of 1953 which overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran and reinstalled the Shah.
One of her characters, Munis, comes back from death and engages with the political activists who support Mohammed Mossadegh. They are represented as Communists, leafleting in the dark of night, resisting the supporters of the Shah in demonstrations in the streets.They are ultimately crushed both literally and metaphorically. That’s Munis in the photograph above, floating in a sea of people, both there and not there ( she is after all resurrected from the dead.)
None of this is in the novel.
The sole reference to the coup in the novel is the date of the novel mentioned in the book, August 1953. There is unexplained turmoil in the streets. Munis is not a political activist, she simply visits a bookstore and reads some books.
Parsipur is a feminist novelist, she has been writing books and short stories since the late 1960s. Women Without Men was first drafted in the late 1970s, although published in the late 1980s. She was censored for referring to virginity and has spent time in jail. Her life has been both as an acclaimed Iranian novelist and as an exile since 1994 whose works are banned in Iran, an incredible tension. All of her novels include elements of the magical, the incredible, magic trees, magic women, women as trees, ( if you saw Touba by Neshat, the woman became the magical tree, in her novel Women without Men, a woman plants herself and becomes a tree).
But the main theme of Women without Men, the novel, is women together in a special place. In that place, a house with an orchard, magical events occur. The novel is feminist, focusing on four women from different social classes, a prostitute, a sister of a repressive and religious brother, a religiously observant woman in love with that brother, and a wealthy woman who leaves her general husband and buys a garden and estate in the country in order to be free and do as she wishes, including writing poetry, which she does badly. ( In the film she is a singer).
The main theme of Women without Men the film, is the coup d’etat, the role of the United States, and people’s lives at that time. Neshat brings together the military, the Shah reinstatement, and the magical orchard where the women live by having the military who are searching for communists after the Coup come to a party at the house in the orchard.
The parties in the book are not connected to the military, they are a celebration of life and the aspirations of Fakhri to be famous. In the film, she is attached like a mother to the prostitute Zarin who hovers between life and death; in the book, Zarin marries the gardner and has a magical pregnancy ( becoming transparent), giving birth to a lily which is planted by the stream. Her mothers milk is given to the woman tree.
The place of music is crucial to the film. As the soldiers and officers sit at the table disrupting the party of the bourgeois guests who both support and do not support the coup, the tension is broken by the beautiful singing and playing of an elderly man. (earlier, before the soldiers arrived, the hostess Fakhri had performed herself).
So the question is what is the position of culture here? I found it provocative, on the one hand it was soothing the oppressive military men, on the other hand it was disrupting their oppression.
The other question is, why did Neshat keep the same title as the novel for her book. Her film is about the tension between life and politics, between freedom and oppression, the novel is about complex relationships between women, between reality and fantasy. They are entirely different. In the book all four women are in the same place. Munis does not go back to Tehran.
But one cannot argue with Neshat’s power to call attention to political issues in an aesthetic context. This is the most difficult achievement for art. I salute her for that. But for those who are looking for an Iranian film, they will have to look elsewhere. She has said she wants to convey the complexity of Islamic culture, but contemporary Iranian women say that she has been away too long ( she is also banned from Iran now). Iranian women that I know do not like her work. They find it annoyingly cliched and superficial with respect to Iranian society and Iranian women.They refer to her art as “chador” art, or “veil” art, holding the Western gaze to Eastern art.
I suggest Bidoun magazine, an outrageously amusing and clever contemporary publication on culture in the Middle East (they call it that) and Arteeast, an online journal that has indepth articles on a range of subjects.
Nonetheless, Neshat is the primary female Western-based artist who is so prominently addressing Iranian politics in art for the international art audience. At least she is opening the door. The fact that we think all those chadors are what is happening in Iran then or now just shows how much we all have to learn.
This entry was posted on July 14, 2010 and is filed under
Shahrnush Parsipur,
Shirin Neshat,
Woman without Men.
There were amazing contemporary artists working in ceramics also.
The Vence Chapel (Matisse), entrance, amazing stain glass inside
This was near the gorge of Verdon that we hiked in
and the exquisitely beautiful town of Moustiere Ste Marie recommended by my good friend Romson Bustillo. Here is my salute to the good life in a small restaurant there.
The Museum of Resistance in La Fontaine de Vaucluse, called Call to Liberty 1939 -45 told the story of Petain’s capitulation to the Nazis, his cult, his sending of French men to work in German industries, and then the amazing resistance movement with its multiple identities, courageous participants, and its successes (sabotage) and failures (killing and persecution). It had a whole section on the artists in the resistance, especially writers, like Paul Eluard.
One poet memorized 140 poems while in prison and then wrote them down when he got out.
Seeing the art of these famous artists in the locations where they lived and worked was enlightening. (We missed out on Leger, that will have to be on the next trip).
They moved to Southern France when it was dirt cheap, one after the other, Cezanne came from there and never left, and he painted in his own back garden as well as a quarry and his studio. Amazingly limited geography. He was forced to the sea during the Franco Prussian war and painted the Meditaerranean “l’Estaque” like a big blue wall. No crashing waves for him. Van Gogh of course moved for the sun and color.
Matisse in Nice were a perfect match of light and color, Picasso went there in 1946 (having spent the war years in Paris) and spent three months painting with makeshift materials at the Grimaldi Castle. It is now a Picasso Museum right on the water, in what was a grim old castle. Today it is filled with light and air and an extraordinary group of paintings, many of them in tones of grey and brown.There is also a stunning group of black and white photographs of Picasso painting in the Palace, with Francois Gilot, the only woman who every left Picasso, from those same months. And then there is Picasso’s amazing pottery. He painted on preexisting pots in Vallauris and restarted the entire pottery production there.
Apparently he didn’t like the fact that Matisse made a chapel for nuns at Vence. He was an atheist, but a very competitive one, so he did a chapel in Vallauris with War on one wall and Peace on the other wall. It has been closed down though. Here is War. Peace will come soon. Below is a photograph of the Chapel from the web. The murals are painted in a Romanesque chapel with a barrel vault and he painted it completely. Of course the formalists don’t like any of Picasso’s political work.
I’ve never even see these work reproduced before. Not part of the MOMA canon, that’s for sure.
I am on the emotional side with Picasso, but I can still enjoy Matisse. Cezanne I felt was so priviledged, how could he fail to be a success. All he had to do was paint!
There will be more pictures soon. Here we are reflected in the water from the famous Avignon Bridge
This shadowy photograph shows a sculpture by Henry Moore at the Tate Britain. It is in the permanent collection, not part of their new exhibition of Moore’s sculpture. It represents a sculpture based on one of the shelter drawings from World War II, with its flowing robe and awkward pose, it has been pulled from the many drawings he made in the London Underground and other shelters during the Blitz.
There was footage in the Tate show of Moore actually walking through the tube underground stations. He explained that he only drew people afterward and usually sleeping as he did not want to be too invasive. I didn’t realize that these famous drawings in the London Underground depicted sleepers on the platforms ( of course they did, if you think about it) and that the people there were in non sanctioned shelters. They just went there in droves. After the fact, the government sanctioned it as a shelter.
Moore commented (and this explains some of the drawings), “the only thing at all like those shelters that I could think of was the hold of a slave ship.” You see emaciated cadavers in facing rows and close up couples. Moore found that their gestures while asleep told him a lot about their state of mind. He also found the sight “pathetic, sordid and disheartening.” According to the museum though, he “transformed London’s poor into heroic figures and the uncertainty of their situation into stoic resignation. “
One of the most fascinating details in the exhibition were his sketches of preliminary ideas for drawings ( he was commissioned by the government to paint the war). In his tiny sketches he drew burning cows, and sheep with airplanes flying overhead. How rarely we see the impact of war on animals.
The heart of the exhibition was the war period. His drawings of miners in the same time frame, commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Board, are equally strong (his father was a miner), suggesting claustrophobia, as well as courage and perseverence under incredibly difficult conditions deep inside of mines.
The framing of Moore by the Tate aside from this section which cut through their efforts like a knife, was to focus on sexuality, surrealism, modernism and materials. The exhibition brochure was organized by medium, a particular stone, a specific wood, etc.
I went through the exhibition with my inlaws who had been to Moore’s studio with the artist. He felt that touching the sculpture was crucial to understanding it, but of course in the musuem, the materials were simply an aesthetic reference, not a tactile experience.
The gallery materials gave us no biography (such as his roots in working class England), and only cursory references to his exploration of other art forms such as Egyptian and Meso American (which the museum calls Ancient Mexico “dominated by sex and religion). It mentioned the importance of Roger Fry’s book Vision and Design, without saying when it was published (1920) and included some wonderful sketches.
Moore’s art and his own words trumped their efforts. For example he said ” Trunks of trees are very human. To me they have a connection with human life.” So from a material, wood became an active spiritual presence.
Steve McQueen’s “Queen and Country” at the National Portrait Gallery is a very different type of art about war, also commissioned by the government. He has been on a long campaign with Royal Mail to get these stamps used on letters. He has created 160 sheets of stamps, each stamp with a single face of someone who has died in Iraq in 168 stamps.
Steve McQueen is part of a long tradition in England, the official war artist. He went to Iraq in 2003 to try to make a piece but was barely able to leave his room. That’s when he thought of stamps. But Royal Mail and the Ministry of Defense have been very difficult to deal with in creating the project, he couldn’t get the addresses of soldiers who had died. And this article raises the question of how such a project would be received in the US where even photographs of flag draped coffins are censored.
Meanwhile at Blackall Studios, London, there is an important exhibition called “War and the Body.” I didn’t get to see it although an installation “The War Experience Project,” which was shown in Seattle by Rick Lawson was included. Lawson is a veteran who works with veterans on painting military jackets with their own war experience. He hands these jackets together and the result if deeply moving. Furthermore, the artist,
refuses to narrate his experience, saying it is far too traumatic to tell in a sound bite.
Another artist included was Sama Alshaibi, an important Iraqi/Palestinian artist.
The important premise of the exhibition was that war is “embodied”, that seems like a pretty straightforward idea. But when you think of the real physicality of all those young people on both sides, as well as children and babies, who are killed in war, it really hits on the essence of why war is insane.
The play is based on a book, (Michael Mopurgo, War Horse, 1982, a children’s novel written from the perspective of Joey, the main horse in the play). but the memories of the role of horses in World War I are taken from conversations with someone who was part of that War The other interesting fact is that it was similar to the multimedia approach of William Kentridge, with animations, puppets, music, and real actors, although here all the components were more literal and easily understood. The shadow plays and other techniques were abstracted, but not avant-garde.
Hana’ taught at the College of Fine Arts, Baghdad University. She also earned a Ph.D. in art theory there. Art students came from all over the Middle East and Europe, and could attend free of charge. Saddam Hussein abolished private universities. Now the University where she taught has lost its faculty to diaspora, it building was ravaged, its library destroyed and private universities are returning to Baghdad.
She told me of the deep contradictions of life under Saddam Hussein, there were no elections and if you joked you could die, but prior to sanctions she could travel freely. She had six works purchased by the government in the Modern Art Museum.
During the sanctions, Hana’ went to the archeological museum for inspiration.
She stated that she belongs to a group of artists who are pursing the theme of ruins, who all belong to what she called the “80s” generation in Iraq. They include Kareem Risan who left in 2004 for Syria and now lives in Canada, and Nazar Yahya who is in Jordan.
At the end of my trip I visited a second Iraqi artist, Dia Azzawi. He is older than Hana’. He has a degree in archaeology in 1962 from Baghdad University, then a degree in Fine Art in 1964. He worked at the archeology museum until the mid 1970s when he left Baghdad. He said it was “politically obvious that he could not stay. “
He is also a collector of contemporary art from Iraq.
He suggested to other artists the idea of book art, a new format for Iraqi artists that was easily transportable. Selections from his book art collection have been shown in the U.S. in several venues with the title Dafatir, curated by Nada Shabout.
Azzawi is also a curator. He has just created an exhibition called My Homeland of the work of seven Iraqi artists in Dubai and is also contemporary art advisor and curator for the Qatar Museum.
He explained to me that there is a big market in fake contemporary Arab art. As the market demand has grown for contemporary Arab art, particularly among the emirates, who have a lot of money, but don’t know much about contemporary art, the collecting of works of name artists has led to the production of fakes. Jawad Salim for example, a was a premier Iraqi modern artist who was commissioned in 1958 to create the Monument to Liberty in Baghdad, by the newly created Iraqi Republic (1958 – 1963, led by Abd al-Karim Qasim whose ties to Nasser led to his assasination by Baathists in collusion with the CIA) Jawad Salim died in 1961 before his sculpture was completed. His work is currently being forged from old photographs.
Finally, the work of Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour is in an exhibition in Paris. Above you see her Palestinauts. I have followed her video work for two years and I think she is one of the most talented video artists addressing Palestinian issues (and the competition is stiff)
This show featured “Intergalactic Palestine. “All of her videos are riffs on populist genres, from cooking shows to horror movies, with the deeper metaphor of the anguishing condition of Palestine. But her trademark is that we laugh as we cry.
This video is a riff on science fiction about space. She even uses a remastered sound bite from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 “A Space Odyssey.”
It starts with the artist, as a Palestinaut (cosmonaut plus astronaut), in her space ship, getting ready for take off. We hear “Jerusalem, we have a problem” , then “everything is back on track.” She lands on the moon and plants the Palestinian flag, walking carefully in her moon boots. She declares ” One small step for Palestinians, One giant leap for mankind” as she waves to the earth. Then she floats away into space and disappears.
The artist has explained ” The work reflects the fact that Palestinains are in limbo, without a state, as their homeland shrinks like a spot on the horizon . . . The moon landings reflect a widespread anxiety, that in leaving home, we might never be able to return home again.Yet because this anxiety is universal, the pain of the real forced exodus of the Palestinians is doomed to remain a private grief, forgotten by the rest of the world.”
This entry was posted on June 7, 2010 and is filed under
Dia Azzawi,
Hana Mallalah,
Larissa Sansour.
Two great minds, Picasso and T.J. Clark matched in a lecture. At first I was dubious, when the first statement Professor Clark made was “Space was the form truth took for him as a painter.” This seemed unduly formal, detached. But by the end I was fascinated, and only slightly unhappy, with his analysis. At the beginning Clark declared “The twentieth century appeared in his (Picasso’s) work as a way of life coming to an end. … It was the end of the “room” in art, the world view of being and having was shattered to the core.” ( these quotes are based on my notes they are not exact). He did not elaborate on this comment, about which much can be said.
What I will add is that the metaphor of the room as a secure domestic place filled with our objects as the focal point of life, based on capitalism, acquisition, and obvliviousness to the rest of the world, was destroyed in World War I ( of course that isn’t true, it was only the hegemony of the British Empire that was destroyed) – but the painters in that crucial early twentieth century era sensed the impending destruction and altered the domestic space in art into the layered, complexity of cubism. (Clark confusingly later refers to the destruction of Cubist “room-space” by Picasso, the Cubists were not actually concerned with room space, but with disrupting it, in my opinion. I think Clark overprivileges Picasso)
OK
Then point 2 , which was the most compelling insight for me, was that this was “the new face of war” of what has become the war on terror, our permanent war forever. We know that this is the first representation in art of deaths of civilians by bombing from the air ( the Germans were testing new planes in collaboration with Franco, just in case you need that fact filled in). Such a death is now so commonplace that we digest it with our breakfast.
Professor Clark stated that “”certain kinds of death break human contact” There is a “special obscenity” of this new death. “Privacy is torn apart, the room gives way to the street.” And this new reality led to Picasso’ s new way of imagining a public and political that is outside, rather than the interior sexual domesticities that had been his focus. ( Well there are the Three Musicans, from just after World War I, they are in an ambiguous space and they are scarey and scared).
Again, there is much elaboration possible. Clark showed us an odd sketch in outlining this movement outdoors, but he did not show the famous bone paintings of the early 1930s which are all on the beach and, to me presage, the nightmare of Guernica in thier frightening shapes. But of course one difference is that those giant “vagina dentata” heads are threatening, whereas in Guernica they are being attacked. He also failed to every mention the “dreams and lies of Franco,” that well known etching series. It presages Guernica in many ways, it is set outside, it has direct formal connections. When I asked about it in the questions, he first said it was not relevant, than brilliantly backtracked and rethought it as he talked about it.
A major point in the lecture was the enormous scale of the Guernica (mentioned again in the “dreams and lies” answer which he reminded us were tiny) the largest painting he ever did (of course determined by the scale of the site for which it was commissioned, not Picasso’s inclinations.) It was this scale as well as the subject AND the site itself, the pavilion of the Spanish Republican government as it fought for its life against unified fascist forces of church and state, that forced Picasso to change his way of working as well as out of his self referential narcissism. The result is a monumental homage to the doomed people of Guernica. It is not the first time that the female victims of war have been represented, (look at Kathe Kollwitz), but it is because it is by Picasso, the most famous.
One of the most intriguing parts of the lecture was Clark’s detailed analysis of how Picasso achieved this transformation of his inclinations to represent the interior, personal, and the sexual, to the exterior public death, by his removal of sexual references, of references to Greek, to males, his step by step ( based on those daily photographs by Dora Maar) changes in the relationships in the painting.
But then Professor Clark declared that in the painting we have “flatness finding its feet” ( it was a pun too, as he emphasized the feet in the painting) . WHAT, we are talking about re defining the idea of pictorial space in response to tragedy, and we have “flatness”. Flatness is of course that tiresome idea of Clement Greenberg’s. The flatness here is defined by Clark as “the collapse of modernity” . That’s not hard to disagree with as an idea, but actually there isn’t flatness in Guernica, it has all sorts of erratic spatial relations, and it is the erratic relationships that suggest the tragedy, as far as I am concerned. Some of the figures are flat, some of them are in the extreme surface of the painting, but others are not, particularly at the bottom of the painting, there is an indication of recession or at least volume. ( he talked a lot about the bottom of the painting as a complex problem) But the flatness here is, then, humanity run over by a war machine.
Clark’s final statement that these are “hieroglyphics of states of agony” was wonderful.
His lecture was about HOW an artist transforms his personal response to disaster into the elements of a painting, and for Picasso, according to Clark, it was in the transformation of space.
Of course, this almost eliminates the content completely. The bull, the light, all symbolism. The possiblity of resistance is nil, mankind is simply a victim and of course that is the case so often in war, the human is simply a pawn in a system of power, and this is the representation of that moment according to Clark. But emptying all content, except the moment of bombing, I think is unduly flattening the painting. Eliminating all reference to resistance (the woman flying into the center with that incredible light which for me suggests humanity and resistance) makes this image only one of despair.
Clark has become a formalist? Or is he re defining formalism in a social context. I think the latter. I hope so. I hope this is slight of hand, play the vocabulary of formalism into a new context. Clark is, of course, of that particular breed, academic marxists. They are all brilliant, but on some level, they all disturb me. They are so dry and removed from feeling the horrors. Their social concern for the state of the world is undoubtedly real, but their writing is so turned inward that it contradicts what Marx realized was necessary in the age of industrial capitalism, resisting oppression through collective action in public spaces. Clark and Picasso’s public space (or ambiguous public private space) actually is not a committed activist space. We know what happened next to Picasso, he joined with the Communists and the Resistance during the Occupation of Paris. Then he went back to his old domestic ways for the most part in his later years. We have to acknowledge that Dora Maar was the radical that really was a key to Guernica.
This entry was posted on April 30, 2010 and is filed under
T.J. Clark on Guernica.
Theaters can make statements about war, directors care, but sometimes it is a little ambiguous what the plays actually say. Two plays in Seattle, Henry V and An Iliad (a modern play performed by one actor, that refers back to the classic but also inserts contemporary references), each one is obviously responding to our permanent war culture.
The first Henry V by Shakespeare is really celebrating victory against long odds in war. It was used to rally the British morale during World War II, with a film version starring Laurence Olivier. Prince Hal was a pretty wild kid, but he became King Henry V.When the Church gives him a chunk of money (to avoid having their lands confiscated according to the play’s beginning), he’s off to war in France, based on some shakey premise that France is actually belonging to the English because of way back when family connection (that sounds like Israel in Palestine). Anyway off he goes and he beats the complacent French at Agincourt because (although this wasn’t emphasized but my knowledgable husband informed me) they use the older technology of the longbow while the French used a cross bow with a shorter range. The real story of the war not included in this play, is rather grim, with many women and children dying in a siege.
So is this an anti-war statement??? The Director said in the program that her best friend’s son was in Afghanistan. It seems to me the play was an homage to the courage of soldiers.
But then there is Shakespeare’s own perspective. It has been said that on the one hand he creates heartfelt speeches by King Henry, on the other hand suggests he is ruthless, and his men mock him.
This play was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth because the Irish troubles had already begun, so perhaps it was intended to give heart to the British. But, of course, underlying it, is the ordinary people and their ordinary thoughts, always a feature of Shakespeare. And of course they were wet, dirty and sometimes uninterested.
To further mitigate its anti war statement, in this production there was a mix of 1940s war costumes, seen here, and 1960s Pop around the Princess Catherine of France who at the end marries our Henry V, which did bring peace. So that makes the war worthwhile??? Or could he have married her anyway and no war. He was offered her at the beginning of the war. ( It is a little like the Vietnam War, Kissinger was offered a peace before it started and in the end had exactly what he was offered at the beginning, after so many years)
Odd Play. Here is another opinion.
An Iliad (this isn’t much of a picture but it is all they have on the website, obviously the character was posed before the production) , created by Denis O Hare and Lisa Peterson (who also directed it) was an entirely different matter. It was a tour de force performance by a single actor, Hans Alweis, and he played the entire range of characters ( Hector, Achilles, Ageammenon, Patroklus, Priam, Helen, Paris, Andromache, Astynax the baby son of Andromache and Hector , Zeus, Thetis, Athena) brilliantly, as well as himself (perhaps Homer) and himself again ( a contemporary who sees the meaninglessness of war).
The selections from the Iliad, the parts that were chosen, were perfect to convey the stupidity of war, the needless suffering, the insanity of killing, the arrogance, the egos, the hesitation, the thoughts of avoiding war that were not acted on, all of it was there. The recital of wars from ancient history to the present was staggering, presented in a soft voice that seemed to come out of the actor like a slow drip of blood. It was a similar intention to the slide show at the end of Henry V of art works about war, but had much more impact. The simple recital fit with the poetic homage of the play as a whole.
An Iliad gave us the full persepctive on what war is about and an extraordinary performance.
But then there is the Srebenica Quilt made by the widows, sisters, daughters of survivors of that terrible massacre. Each square is an homage to a lost loved one. Each one is actually woven, it is not a quilt, it is done in the flat weave kilim style, a heritage of the Ottoman Empire in this area. It is done by a group of brave, activist women who are extraodinary survivors, who are claiming a burial ground for their loved ones, who are reburying them, who are organizing to declare that they are going forward. This is the message of woman. I wish there were a play about that.
“Boycott Israeli Apartheid” the pro Palestinian protest at Westlake Plaza in downtown Seattle had a huge audience last weekend because it coincided with a “flash”, a coming together of young people. The Boycott, Divestment Sanctions campaign is a long project. It is just beginning. The people of Palestine and pro Palestinian Israelis and other people around the world are urging the world to support this campaign that compares the current situation in Palestine Israel to apartheid in South Africa. The Palestinians are trapped in their cities by endless checkpoints. They are living in open prisons, they cannot get to work, their fields are being stolen by the wall. The campaign is asking people not to buy Israeli products, like Naot shoes, and to advocate for divestment of investments in Israel such as Motorola and Caterpillar. Here is an image with some of the companies that do business in Israel.
Of course the largest factor in the situation is the enormous US support for the Israeli military budgets. We send untold billions there every year. End the Occupation is a project to help us educate the American public and lobby Congressmen on the issues.
Not far away from the pro Palestinian rally, there was an immigrant rights rally, hundreds of people protesting the deportations, proposed horrendous legislation, and advocating for their rights. They oppose further militarizing the border, and they support legalizing their status. They came here simply to make a living because many people are increasingly unable to do so where they live, often because of our Free Trade policies that are dumping cheap agricultural products in Mexico, putting farmers out of business.
The film festival was sponsored by Tasveer, which has been going for about nine years, an amazing and enterprising operation. It is partnering with Chaya, a group that advocates for and provides services to South Asian women who are victims of domestic violence. Yoni Ki Baat ( Vagina Monologues) was a series of courageous monologues by women who addressed dating, marriage, cultral traditions, sexuality, coming out, childbearing, and female circumcision.
And finally, there was an Indian PowWow, a celebration and example of an extraordinary resurgence of American Indian cultures, traditions, languages, and pride. Far from being obliterating, tribes are asserting their rights and recovering their languages and traditions.
So from oppression to liberation, from the beginning of a resistance, to the results of resistance, from people in the midst of struggle to people healing themselves to people celebrating their liberation.
Very inspiring. People organizing together really do make a difference, they really can change the world. And artists are an integral part of that. Doing nothing or just talking really does waste that potential. As Arundhati Roy says in one of her brilliant essays in Field Notes on Democracy ” “There is something pitiable about a people that constantly bemoan its leaders. If they’ve let us down, it is only because we’ve allowed them to.”
So I went back to the Henry Art Gallery’s Kiki Smith exhibition “I myself have seen it” for another look. It is a complex exhibition and deserves a lot of looks. First I watched the Art 21 video which was really helpful . She talks about death masks, her grandmother’s, her father’s, her sister’s. She herself is cast, that is terrifying. And she talked about Genevieve the savior of Paris.
So when I saw the series about Genevieve in the exhibition, it was clear what she was doing. The exhibition includes six photographs of parts of the sculpture, a profile face, lips, a hand, the legs of a wolf ( perhaps signifying the enemy that Genevieve’s prayers staved off from Paris), the wolf’s furry face, four animal feet. Together they create an imaginary narrative, much more than the sculpture in which G calmly steps over a supine animal, but this narrative is another story, a story of fragments of bodies that seem to be frozen, even as they create, collectively, a sense of anxiety. The stasis is perhaps related to Genevieve’s spiritual nature. But there didn’t seem to be any suggestion of the actions that she took to save the people by bringing grain.
Going through the rest of the show starting with a young girl trapped (floating?) in a branch, to odd photographs that seem to evoke fragments of organs, to Mary Magdalene ( we know her story, Christ’s “fallen” woman) , to Lot’s Wife (who turned to a pillar of salt, if you remember), to the Harpies (perched about on mouldings high above us) , to the witches, to the little girls, dead white animals, dead black crows, shredded puppet, worms, and a photograph of just Guanyin’s head on its side (the image is in previous post) which does not suggest her power as a goddess of love and mercy and childbearing. There is only one message for me – violence against women, and especially little girls. The show is presenting frighened girls and oddly powerless witches. Even fairy tales where little girls succeed, like Alice in Wonderland, seem to be oddly ambibuous – will she succeed in escaping her pursuers??
The question is why doesn’t Kiki Smith say what her real subject is, why is she so unwilling to be an advocate for all the victims she creates in her sculptures?? Why does she make victims from powerful goddesses and biblical women. Why can’t they fight back? Why doesn’t she fight back? My intelligent friend Deborah Lawrence talked me out of saying it is about personal trauma. What do I know, but why is Smith so obsessed with this single subject of death and threats of death and powerlessness.
The contrast to Cindy Sherman comes to mind who works from film, that, like fairy tales, are often about violence against women (in fact the new mythology), but we know they are re-staged with herself as the main actor, and she is opposing violence against women by calling attention to it.
Kiki adds to the victims in the world without doing anything for them. As far as I am concerned this is not feminism.
In an intriguing revelation, she mentioned that she had worked with Bread and Puppet theater for awhile. But she takes their confrontational approach and empties it of all resistance in making these prone or frozen or fragmented women and girls.
And what an amazing contrast to the adjacent gallery at the Henry with the photography of Milton Rogovin.
He has photographed the working class for fifty years. He went to Chile ( the image above is from Chile,) Appalachia, photographing. among others, the families of miners and the miners themselves (particularly resonant at the moment with the horrifying greed propelled, mine accidents in the non unionized mines )and repeatedly to the Lower West Side of New York City. His people are dignfiedand strong. He honors them with his photographs.
He wrote poetry about the subjects of his work.
Here are a few of his comments.
“They are regular people just like the rest of us. We must not abandon them.”
“Everybody should have an opportunity for a better education.”
” All around we saw people with great potential but we knew none of them would realize it under the conditions of our society.”
Here is a man who cares deeply about the human condition and has spent his life recording it and speaking up for what he believes.
The Kiki Smith exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, curated by Elizabeth Brown, in collaboration with the artist for many years and years, is a tour de force, not to be missed. Together they went through about 80,000 photographs to arrive at the show. Hats off for a great show and a great installation.
Brown wrote her dissertation on Brancusi’s photographs of his own work, those haunting black and white photographs that were first published in the Little Review in the early 1920s by the eccentric genius Jane Heap. (See
my website for more information on her). But what a difference. Compared to Brancusi’s actions which were relatively straightforward, although the results were beautiful, Kiki Smith, is like walking into a complex game in which we have no idea which way to go or what the rules are.
The title ” I myself have seen it: Photography and Kiki Smith ” refers to the fact that these are Kiki’s photographs of many different types, documentary, journalistic, casual, creative, serendipitous.
Those of us in the press conversed with the artist informally -a great opportunity to try to get a little more straightforward information from the artist ( her artists talk was aggravatingly indirect, and my bete noir, about her materials and where she got them, although she had some good one liners).
Naturally, I asked her if she was concerned about environmental issues, since we were standing in a room with a lot of simulations of dead white mammals, and also a crucified Christ photograph ( that’s my nod to Good Friday, today). She said she didn’t like to be polemical, she didn’t like to tell people what to think. Where have we heard that before? But in her case, it is true. She lays out the work, the death, the damage, the anguished adolescent girls, the mythic women, the fairy tale girls, the composite bird women, but they are all strangely passive. Oddly, she said the same thing as William Kentridge, that making art flows from her subconscious, she doesn’t know what she is going to do ahead of time. But with wildly different results. Kiki Smith does not engage social political issues, we must conclude that spontaneity is conditioned by who we are. In Kiki Smith’s case, I think this show gives us a whole new perspective on who she is and what her work is about.
When I asked her about AIDS, since that was the first work I saw that impressed me at the height of the epidemic (in the art world), she said, oh I just happened to be doing work about the body then (she also said when she took emergency medical training it was just to clinically analyze the bodies) .But her sister had jsut died of AIDS! So where is the anguish, the emotion, the passion? Anyone that can produce this much work has passion, but there is a strangely absent quality, a sense that somehow her consciousness is somewhere else.
Now I am going to make a big leap and a big guess. When I saw the movie Precious, one of the key devices was that when she was being raped, she would escape into fantasy, wonderful living color celebrity status fantasy. She was absent from the world in those times.
I see the same absence in Kiki Smith, her women lie wounded, or stand introverted, her crows are dead, her imagery of Little Red Riding Hood morphing into a wolf/girl doesn’t suggest she is empowered by this transformation. Lilith, another woman who has had a raw deal, is just Lilith, not all conquiering Lilith. So what about Kiki’s absent emotions. Is this a result of early traumas? I am not going to go further with this and get more explicit, but that was the message of the show for me. Going from Kiki Smith to William Kentridge, from the “feminist” introvert standing or lying passively, to the male activist declaring greed and capitalism wrong was quite a contrast. I still haven’t digested it. I respect Kiki Smith for what she has done, but I wish she would stand up and declare herself. We have to penetrate the obfuscating indirectness ( which is strangely, deeply allied with sixties modernism, as became clear in the lecture).
But the show is really wonderful, dozens of images, all of them beautiful in themselves, that together give us a whole new perspective on Kiki Smith. The Seattle Weekly had a nice analysis of the experience of looking at the show, up, down, and eye level.
Sharon Arnold did a wonderful analysis from a completely different perspective than mine.
This entry was posted on April 3, 2010 and is filed under
"I myself have seen it",
Henry Art Gallery,
Kiki Smith.
This is my springtime celebration.
I stood under our plum tree and photographed it.
I felt the sheer beauty of the tree, its blossoms, its unpredictable branches
and
I understood why
gnenerations of artists in Japan and China have painted this subject.
In the midst of our war filled planet, and my militarized country,
I was grateful that I could pause for a moment
to immerse myself in this tree.
This entry was posted on March 26, 2010 and is filed under
Plum Blossoms for a moment.
