Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Ok, here is a chestnut. What is wrong with me you might be asking. And there is that cliche in the title of the blog. Well believe it or not, the Yale Art Gallery is loaning some of their stellar works to the Seattle Art Museum and that is the title of the show. These are the original paintings of American art history and its partner, the myth making foundations of the Republic. This painting for example is pure myth as we were told. These people were never in the same room together. John Trumbull traveled all over to get portraits and then assembled them in the painting. Of of course, all white men with property and Jefferson biggest in the center, although he owned slaves, as did George Washington.
The whole show is a stunning group of works in every sense of the word. It includes the movement west, manifest destiny ( we even have the Golden Spike photograph of the connecting of the East and West railroad in Utah, of course the Yale people don’t know about our own Seattle based Zhi Lin, and his brilliant work commenting on the marginalization of the Chinese workers in the photograph.) And great political cartoons
The Yale American Art Collection contains almost primal benchmarks of the history of American art perhaps even the history of America on some level. It includes all the major artists, Homer, Bierstadt, Eakins, even Henry Ossawa Tanner, one of the outstanding African American artists.

But it is all propaganda, by privileged artists on the East Coast, painting for a privileged audiences.

And of course artists of color are represented only lightly, one African American walking stick, one chair made by a slave, a chest maybe by Mexicans, the painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner (who had to live abroad because of racism). There are also pencil drawings of the Amistad mutineers that are worth seeing in themselves. Amistad is the name of a ship on which the slaves rose up and killed the white crew. They were tried in New Haven in 1839 during the abolition movement and then sent back to Africa. The decorative arts are more “multicultural” in a way, intriguing sources in various places in the world.
And then there is the miniature with the interwoven hair of George Washington and Martha Washington. That was kind of astonishing, and you would miss it on the back of the painted miniatures unless you know what to look for.

It is intriguing to line this show up with Cosmos and Garden at the Asian Art Museum. That is also a mythmaking show, of maharajas in India. I will get to that next entry, but not tonight.

William Kentridge in Seattle

Take a look at this image. It is pretty extraordinary. This is the work of William Kentridge in collaboration with Hand Spring Puppets and Monteverdi. We went to a press preview with an excerpt on Friday. In the center is Ulysses as a hand carved wooden puppet lying in a hospital bed dying in Johannesburg, reliving his life. He appears a second time on the right. He is remembering his return to Penelope after all those years. Penelope is on the left and in the middle are three of her courtiers. Opera singers sing the parts of the Monteverdi Opera Death of Ulysses, but the puppets are the center of attention. The opera singers are subsumed behind the puppets, the puppets move as they “sing” The micromovements of the puppets is the really subtle aspect of the performance according to the puppeteers.

The background has a video by Kentridge. All of these elements are pretty hard to take in at once. Then there is the Baroque instruments, period harps and other instruments. Pacific OperaWorks is bringing this complex performance to Seattle. It is really something not to miss.

At the same time, the Henry Art Gallery is having a show of Kentridge’s work (as is the Greg Kucera Gallery, which I haven’t yet seen). It is an intriguing little collection of works that I really enjoyed. Several of his “stone age videos”, animated are always fascianting. You have to take time with them as in the bureaucrat eaten alive by his profession, and and line taking over the artist. The idea that the medium somehow has a life of its own has always been one of my favorite Kentridge ideas. His videos often seem to consume themselves, swallow themselves alive, in a type of Jonah and the whale feeling. Life is sucked out of the screen.

In addition, there are drawings, paintings, prints, sculpture. The little bronze collectibles set me back. They seemed so commercial. But the sugar lift aquatints really give you a sense of his graphic talent. In the show as a whole, you also have a sense of his classical roots as an artist, Durer in particular. Also his sense of humor.

Kentridge is a theater person. The opera is his idea, but of course he is using Monteverdi. The staging it with puppets and adding an animated backdrop is his idea. This is a work from 1993. It is not new, but Pacific Operaworks is new.

So where are the politics in all of this ? I asked the puppeteers and they said it wasn’t political. But I disagree. There is a lot to think about here. Fragmentation of relationships, death, life, seduction, deception, all wrapped in a multimedia complexity that requires a lot of thought. The trick is not to be seduced by any one element, but to see the big picture of where Kentridge is coming from. Life and death caught up in forces beyond their control leading to tragedy.

Olive Ayhens new painting

Olive Ayhens is a wonderful painter and a great artist. This is a new painting called Amphibian Emergency. If you look closely you can see that inside the glass condominiums are frogs, an endangered species. They are disappearing everywhere. They are an essential part of our ecosystem. The condos are popping up everywhere in her neighborhood of Williamsburg making communities extinct also. Condos don’t really create the same sense of comaraderie of street life celebrated by Jane Jacobson, The Death and Life of American Cities. Of course I am generalizing, but on my street in Seattle, I never see anyone from the condos.

Outside the window is the wasteland of urban living. Olive creates interfaces of humans and nature that call attention to our treatment of the natural environment. She also is a seductive and sensuous painter who knows how to use color and the texture of paint itself so skillfully that her content and her technique are wedded inextricably. Her love of beauty in the art work is a part of her distress about the ruin of the natural environment. Since she is currently based in NYC, she is painting that distress with an urban focus. She has also painted western streams rushing down Manhattan streets with cars floating in them, and a lumber mill and power plant set right on the Columbia River . She depicts vanishing species, birds, animals, and also vanishing trees, lost in our contemporary world.

Break the Silence Mural Project

Image Wars and Zones of Conflict

Other than Hirshhorn who is addressing the artist’s own position, the works expand our understanding of what is going on inside of an environment in which military attacks are destroying if not your own building, then the one next door, or in another part of the country (Lamia Joreige). Do you go and look, do you stay home and drink tea. Lamia drove nearby.

Other artists are also telling us what happens with the people who are on the ground, but not actually shooting, what happens to memory, what happens to you? Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an Iraqi photographer and journalist who was next to a US shoot out of civilians in Iraq. His image of a screaming child in his fathers arms, which I have on my desk, is haunting beyond any image I have seen. It interrupts us entirely. We cannot avoid it. These artists are telling us that conflict is a long, wide and deep place. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was also part of an exhibition and book called Unembedded. The photographers did work for mainstream media, but they are free lance, and the book includes a lot of work that they couldn’t get published.

Given the crisis in Gaza, I have been focusing on that in my own writing. In the New York exhibition, Demos included Emily Jacir and Ahlam Shibli, both of whom fall into the category of reinventing documentary photography. But I also found this statement by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun a pair of artists in one of the London symposia. They comment on the difficulty of representing Palestine, when it is non existent. How can it be made visible they ask? How has it been made visible? They use as the example the Jenin Refugee Camp, a place where the residents have been repeatedly asked to represent themselves, the artists ask if the refugees could be represented as other than victims? or other than witnesses?

Gloria Bornstein Some New Art

Gloria Bornstein had a small showing of her new work recently. This is what she said about it

“The title of the grouping of Rorschach tests and queens is: “you’ve been confirmed as queen”. I heard a voice saying this in a dream.

The artworks are part of a series exploring the perceptual gap between the eye as optical instrument – and the gaze of the unconscious.

Like Rorschach tests and dreams, the artworks play with objectivity, subjectivity, and the illusionary space in-between.

The artworks developed from one of many dreams I document daily, a continuing practice begun 1974″.

After reading Frank Rich in the NY Times yesterday I realized how apropos the mirrors are to the current financial hall of mirrors capitalism is mired in. The queens represent anything you project on them but Madoff (& sub-prime mortgages) are a perfect example of elation/deflation we find in dreams – awake and not). “

These evocative works are eerie, as seen in this suggestive photograph where they are reflected in a window at dusk. They come out of Gloria’s Bornstein’s subconscious. We love Gloria’s subconscious. When I need a jolt in my head I talk to Gloria, who is a private person who rarely shows personal work. But talking to her is always a treat. That is why we were so lucky to have this momentary showing ( or was it a sighting?)

The pieces were in two parts, the Rorschach drawings and the metal “crowns” based on those drawings are set on wooden heads from dummies. This is a great metaphor, a crown coming from the subconscious is placed on a dummy head. It suggests the inversion of the order of things, an accidental person becomes queen.

Since Gloria is so deep, the pieces also connect to Lacan, mirror stages, and dreams. Queens seem like a subject that doesn’t come easily in a dream. But a tiara on a wooden dummy head, this is pure comedy, pure outrageous defiance of expectations. I wish more people dared to be this ridiculous and beautiful. Life in the contemporary art world of Seattle would be a lot more interesting!.

Gloria also has a public side: She has done a lot of incredible public art. Here I will mention only the Sentinels at the Fire station in the International District. This is what she told me about them:

“Inspired by forms found in Asian Art, architecture, folk craft, and public safety, the multi-sculptural environment represents the guardians of the city. Just as the staff of Fire Station 10 Center in the Chinatown-International District is responsible for the public safety of the city, the surrounding Asian community has been standing watch over the interests of their neighborhood. I wrote the art plan “Different Voices, One Community” after interviewing the folks that make up the tapestry of Seattle‘s Asian community. Basically, the firefighters of Seattle‘s oldest station in Pioneer square-have a historic relationship with the community that goes back 100 years. At that time, the city had laws prohibiting firefighters from putting out fires in “Chinatown“. The firefighters helped change the laws. When large buildings were condemned, they arranged for neighborhood residents to work round the clock to bring them to code & meet city deadlines.”

Is this not wonderful information. These sentinels bring together art history, political, cultural connections, and Seattle‘s history of racism. Looking at these red sentinels we see iconic forms, a little like pieces on a game board, they interrupt the dreary area of Seattle where the fire station is. They declare themselves, they say stop, here are people who are going to suddenly rush out to help us in an emergency. Here are sentinels!

What is amazing about Gloria’s public art is that every piece is different. See her website to know what I mean.

Gaza, MLK and Obama

Last Saturday hundreds of people turned out to protest the massacre in Gaza. It was really a heavy and sad demonstration, but it was important to be there. We walked around a big double block in downtown Seattle, chanting.
The desperate situation of the Palestinians in general is what made it so sad. If you look below the completely biased US news coverage, the actual situation is that every major city is an outdoor prison, the wall is strangling the Palestinians movement and psyches, the military occupation is pervasive, and probably the other cities like Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Nazareth are thinking, we are next. The brief hiatus in the killing is just that.

Then the next day we had the MLK march, the best march of the entire year because it brings together everybody in a spirit of unity.Here I am with my grandson. We were also singing with the raging grannies. This is Max’s second MLK march. Last year he was only two months old. This year he went the whole way in his stroller, walking, and in my arms. It is the march above all others that I feel gives us hope.

Of course this year it was overlapped with the inauguration of Barack Obama the very next day, a supremely exhilarating day. It is hard to believe that we are actually rid of those crooks. Let us hope for the best. So far so good. But if Obama doesn’t really redefine the discourse in Israel/Palestine, which is almost impossible to do given the bias and ignorance in the US, the situation will be that we continue to fund Israel’s obliteration of Palestine. But many groups are working to try to help Obama to understand that a “better world is possible.” He has told us we all need to be activists. He cannot change the world alone. WOW, what a relief!! I want to feel this way for awhile.

clowns and laughter

The all day celebration of the Feast of the Kings meant there were non stop clowns performing in the town square. These are just two groups. Here the man with the red hat.asked people to volunteer to get up on stage and do as he asked them to do. They volunteered to be various animals, monkey, giraffe, lion.
Everyone had a good laugh. It was really great. If only the US sponsored culture that allowed people to laugh instead of so much military hardware, the whole world would be a better place. It was a big weight lifted off to be outside the US and its pressure to have arms, security, and war.

Mexico Part III The Yucatan

I thought it would be a let down to go to the Yucatan after being in the jungle in Chiapas at Palenque and Yaxchilan, but it was also thrilling. Merida, the Spanish capitol, was full of art. It had multiple celebrations going – its 466th birthday, the Feast of the Kings, and its weekly celebration of the heart of Merida. I went crazy in the zocolo buying gifts of embroidered clothes for everyone I could think of. There were so many kinds of music performed in the streets that we couldn’t keep track, groups of beautiful male singers in harmony performing with only a few instruments, female singers, popular Yucatan singers- Sergio Esquivel and Maria Medina, and of course Mayans with a horn and a drum trying to pick up a few pennies. The heritage of the city as a segregated place under the Spaniards was evident in the impoverished wandering Maya women selling textiles. I watched one eleven year old girl packing up her goods for twenty minutes, then she reappeared in front of our hotel. I had to buy a scarf from her. In this picture is Gabriela who had one of the stands that appeared overnight and disappeared the next morning.
Here is one of four groups who were playing in a small stage set up in the street on a single night, each one distinctive.
We also saw an amazing dance performance by a group called the Compania Kaambal that goes all over Mexico learning contemporary indigenous/folk performances. These performances combine rapid dance steps with extraordinary costumes and often spectacular headdresses.

They were also celebrating the feast of the Kings, when the children get presents in Mexico. It is my favorite holiday in Mexico. Lots of young people dress up as Kings and everyone eats a special cake that has prizes in it. You can see the big cake on the table here.

We visited late classic Uxmal with its huge structures, and Chichen Itza with its huge crowds and overwhelming tourist souvenirs that almost eclipse the structures. But the pyramids and the other buildings are still impressive. These are late examples of Maya culture, as is Tulum. Tulum has the added advantage of the story of Guerrero, a Spaniard who went native when he was shipwrecked on the coast of the Yucatan and then taught the Maya how to defeat the Spaniards, apparently this is the source of the word “guerrilla” We also learned in Tulum that this coast of Mexico was very close to Cuba, so the lolling masses in their bathing suits are right across a short stretch of Caribbean from Guantanamo. It reminded us again of the mindlessness of the masses as untold suffering occurs outside their consciousness. Of course we were also briefly sitting on the same beach, but we are not beach culture people. It only lasted an hour.

In the Government Palace in Merida is a series of over twenty large scale murals by Fernando Castro Pacheco that show the history of the Maya in the Yucatan pre and post Conquest. The Maya resisted colonization for decades, and then in the 19th century there was a Caste War that again fought the Spanish. They were tough fighters. It includes Guerrero as one of the subjects.This image is the Eagle and the Serpent.

Mexico Part II Jungle Walks and Yaxchilan

Near Palenque in the jungle is the forgotten temple. We went there with our guide Edgar (here is in the green shirt). It was covered with lichen and crumbling into the jungle. As we sat on the front steps we saw a family of howler monkeys. But what is really evident is that the jungle is heavily impacted by humans. It was nothing like what I expected. Jungle means to me inpenetrable forest, so lushly overgrown that you can’t pass through. This jungle had small trees and lots of light. That suggests that it isn’t that old.

We went through the jungle easily, but it was still beautiful. Edgar said that the area around Palenque has lost its designation as a bioreserve because a very high percentage of the jungle is lost to development, particularly cattle. That means all of us eating meat, all the Mexicans eating meat are affecting the jungle. We have always heard about Burger King and Brazil, this jungle is closer to home. We saw an exhibit about the jaguar hiding deep in the forest, but its shrinking habitat is threatening it with near extinction. But the connection wasn’t made to eating meat.

When we went to Yaxchilan we went on a motor boat on the Usumacinta River, the border with Guatemala. It was quite easy and accessible, but Yaxchilan is deeper into the jungle, the setting is even more lush and beautiful than Palenque. We went through a dark dark labyrinth when we arrived: that was a place for the king to get in touch with the cosmic gods. He stayed in the ninth level down for nine days, then re emerged with new powers.

Yaxchilan (it means green place) was a commercial trading center, but it had rituals and ceremony also. Carolyn Tate has analyzed it as a ceremonial city. It traded jade from Guatemala to Palenque. It has many steles and lintels showing such subjects as penis piercing, and the blood dropping into a bowl. This was another way of gaining power and of nourishing both the king and the earth. It had a feminist site, representation of a queen doing tongue piercings (stingray needle and rope passed through her tongue leading to hallucination, the best stele of this is in the British Museum, stolen by an early explorer) that also represent gaining power. The ball court was also prominent, and reliefs of ball players. This game was real, symbolic, political, impossible to play, and metaphorical of life and death. The ball game figures prominently in the Popol Vuh the early post colonial record of the Mayan creation story. Once there were 12,000 people living here. The main leaders are Bird Jaguar and Shield Jaguar.

After Yaxchilan we stayed in a Lacandan village. The Lacandan are the smallest Mayan ethnic group ( there are 13 different ethnicities today).When the Spaniards came there were 68 different cultures and 24 million people. After the Conquest they were reduced to 4 million. The Lacandan were traditionally living deep in the jungle until roads invaded it in rather recent years, the mid 1990s. Now their life style is also threatened. But they have a village where they put up tourists and take them on a walk through the jungle. We walked for five hours across rivers on logs and rocks, helped by our Lacandan guide who reached out for us, told us about medicinal plants and was generally charming. When I asked him about Bush and Obama, he said the Mexicans booed Bush when he came to Mexico and he likes Obama. There deep in the jungle we had this conversation. He also led us to a Mayan temple in the jungle, a small structure crumbling in the woods. There are hundreds of unexcavated temples.
Bonampak is in the Lacandan area of the jungle. It is a site with murals that are disappearing as people stand in line to look at them and breath on them.