“Between Bodies”

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Oct 27, 2018 – Apr 28, 2019

The eight artists in “Between Bodies” take us from the air, to the minerals deep in the earth, the untamed rivers, the smoking forest, and finally to the sounds and microorganisms of the deep sea. They explore metaphors of sexual transformation, intraspecies and trans species communication, future avatars and present voices. We witness the fragility and destructibility of nature, as we experience its power and invisible miracles. All of these artists care deeply about the dire condition of the planet and seek ways to halt or reverse the violent assaults perpetrated by those in power. They give us imaginary futures based on present catastrophes.

Curated by Nina Bozicnik “Between Bodies” features eight artists who work with the interface of technology and nature, what she calls “humans and more than humans” and the “legacies of violence” on the planet. The artists work in multiple media:  archive, text, sculpture, video, virtual reality as well as across disciplines, science, art, history, science fiction, poetry, storytelling.

At the entrance we pass through Hormonal Fog by Candice Lin and Patrick Staff. Herbal tinctures (licorice root, hops, black cohosh root, and dong quai root,) dispersed by a fog machine fill the air with anti testosterone herbs that gentle our aggressive tendencies, one way forward for the planet.   

Caitlin Berrigan’s challenging multi-part Treatise on Imaginary Explosions, Vol. II. 2016–2018 requires us to give up real time and surrender to its narratives, fragments, and multipart structure. In the main theme transgender scientists prematurely trigger simultaneous volcanic eruptions all over the planet. Berrigan links patriarchal extractions of the earth and the rape of the individual body, identifying these eruptions as an opportunity for radical transformation.

In two facing spaces the Treatise includes a “digital elevation topographical rendering” of Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano in Iceland juxtaposed to physical objects including a physical chunk of mineral on a brass chain, journals, a necklace/talisman suggesting interstellar travel and several videos. There is also an acoustic environment that we are invited to activate. The seismic vibrations echo inside our bodies.

Scrolling over a video of a rotating mineral, a poem suggests:

“Alliances of friendship outlast and overcome

any force of social or environmental trauma.

First we must find each other.

We must cohere.

In alliance, we move together.

We mineralize.”

In the main gallery Water Portraits, Carolina Caycedo’s huge prints on canvas, hang from ceiling to floor surrounding us with giant kaledeiscope-like images of rushing river waters. Some evoke giant vaginal labia.

Caycedo has worked for twelve years on “Be Dammed,” a project that looks at the impact of dams in Colombia, specifically on the Yuma River, also known as the Magdalena River, where no fewer than nineteen corporate dams are planned.  The artist spent months speaking with local indigenous peoples (she has her own roots in the area) about their lives before and after the dams.  

Her film A Gente Rio/We River underscores both the large scale corporate destruction of lives on the river and intimate details of survival such as a hand holding tiny crumbs of gold sieved from the river.

Sin Sol, Forest Memory by micha cárdenas and Abraham Avnisan immerses us in a forest landscape on three walls 

Hanging in the center of the gallery ipads offer a conversation between Aura, a virtual reality ancestor from the future and a present person who recites poems about the impact of living in a smoke filled landscape: “No trees, no horizons all gray. People like me need to stay inside. It’s been weeks.;” “I fear the future of a world on fire, not just smoke but fire might mean more hate.” I found these poems almost desperately sad especially now that we have had the season of wild fires in Australia, it is all the more believable.

Susanne Winterling’s Glistening Troubles animates resin replicas of bioluminescent single cell organisms on individual monitors. We feel we are underwater with them in a fragile environment that periodically vanishes as the screens go blank.  An interview with a fisherman/guide suggests that historically these glowing creatures were seen as magical because they made the water glow, today they are valued for healing properties. Dependent on salt water, they respond to movement both human and natural. Too much fresh water stimulates them to retreat into the depths.  Winterling emphasizes communication among these organisms and the natural environment, as well as our ability to disrupt or poison them with toxins.

Finally, Acoustic Ocean by the internationally renowned ecological artist, Ursula Biemann, connects us to deep sea sounds. Ironically first heard as a result of a military project, the sonar communications again refer to interspecies communication, particularly whales. Sofia Jannok, singer, environmental activist, and indigenous Sami speaks of the impact of changing climates on her community. She then insets listening devices into the sea of a desolate arctic landscape and listens to the sounds of the deep Arctic sea.

“Between Bodies” demanded time to embrace these alternative ways of experiencing the natural world, but it also offered possibilities for a future beyond confrontation and aggression. Taking another deep breath of Hormonal Fog on the way out reinforced that. ( written for Sculpture magazine, but never published so here it is free for nothing)

Added March 2020: We especially need that hormonal fog with our current global crises, hugely aggravated in the US by incompetence at the top ( some people say a deliberate strategy to wipe out the low income wage earners and replace them with robots and digital technology) . Viruses are not directly addressed in these works, but the interconnections of technology, human and nature is profoundly important to us at this moment. These artists are offering a new way to think about that.

John Akomfrah!

John Akomfrah’s “Future History” (until May 3, 2020) majestically fills three major galleries on the fourth floor of the Seattle Art Museum with video works projected on huge walls in separate darkened rooms.

Brilliantly curated by Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art, the three works span 500 years of history from the beginning of the slave trade in Elizabethan England to the present moment. Each work is immersive and mesmerizing. You will not be able to stop watching them. As McClusky pointed out, the experience is the opposite of racing through a gallery and giving 30 seconds to each work. Here we watch for up to 45 minutes.

We first encounter Vertigo Sea of 2015.  In this photograph we see Olaudah Equiano. Thanks to Pamela, we have what are known as “footnotes” for the exhibition, individual sheets we can take home. I had never heard of Olaudah Equiano, but he is monumentally important in the history of slavery. Here we see a man dressed in the typical garb of the eighteenth century gentleman. Looking closely you can see he is dark skinned. He appears to be brooding in a desolate Arctic landscape.

Equiano wrote an autobiography published in 1789 that describes his personal experience from being captured by slavers when he was eight, taken to Virginia, London and West Indies, but finally buying his freedom in 1766. He then began collecting and recording whale and polar bear killings. He overturned the cliché of Africa as a place of barbarism, and describes instead his home as “idyllic. with strong leaders, varied foods and festivals, and defined sense of order. This memory is contrasted with vivid descriptions of slave traders as cruel and barbaric; of suffocating sweat, smells and traumas on ships crossing the Atlantic and the humiliations he endured and and witnessed in the slave trade around the world. ” Equiano led the abolition movement in England and his autobiography is said to have contributed to the success in abolishing slavery in England and the British Colonies ( although not the huge financial benefits of the trade).

Projected as three large adjacent images, Vertigo Sea overwhelms us. Sometimes the images flow from one to another, other times they sharply clash. If you have ever seen one of David Attenborough’s BBC nature films, you will recognize some of his incredible footage: the artist gained permission to use it after befriending Attenborough for a full year. But Akomfrah goes the extra step that Attenborough only touches on in his most recent film: climate crises caused by our own actions.

He juxtaposes stunning nature sequences with the murder of humans in the slave trade and the hunting of whales. We watch horrified as the spears enter the animal and the helpless whale bleeds into the sea and dies, even as another screen celebrates their beauty. We gasp in disbelief at the reenactment of slaves forced overboard alive. Akomfrah gives us the unrelenting brutalities of genocide by hunters of animals and people who shared a single minded goal – to make money. Interspersed in the film are many quotes including Moby Dick and Heathcote Williams 1988 poem Whale Nation:

“From space, the planet is blue/ From space the planet is the territory/Not of humans/ but of the whale.”

Occasionally the sequences take a breath with three blank blue screens. But you will not be able to stop watching.

Akomfrah spoke of the flux and fluidity of water as suggesting the past, present and future. Our bodies are 90 percent water. But rather than acknowledge our connection to the sea, the planet, and its occupants, he stated, our hyper consumerism is destroying it.

I heard Akomfrah speak in a conversation with D.J. Spooky at the museum (right before all programming shut down because of the THE VIRUS). He met DJ Spooky while he was making The Angel of History in 1995.

Angel gives us Afro- Futurism:  musicians, writers, poets, actors, journalists, philosophers and techies. Afro-Futuriam, is described by the brilliant writer and musician Greg Tate “It’s like a beautiful compendium of the cats who were obsessed with what I call the “imagineering” of ideas—putting Black folks in a science fiction setting, in the future, or in the retro-future, listening back to ancient African kingdoms as a kind of science fiction fodder.” (Capitol Bop , interview 2015).

Note carefully that reference to African kingdoms, which also connects to cosmology and African mysticism. The musician Sun Ra is a major figure in these connections. He claimed to actually be an alien himself.

Seventeen creative thinkers, ranging from the cosmic musician Sun Ra to Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek actress, spin off Tate’s idea that “all those things that you read about- alien abduction and genetic transformation- they already happened. How much more alien do you think it gets than slavery, than entire mass populations moved and genetically altered, forcibly dematerialized?” (quoted by Kodwo Eshun).  Tate died last fall at the young age of 60.  

One of the compelling speakers was Octavia Butler, the only time she was recorded before her premature death in 2006. She wrote the Parable of the Sower in 1993 which predicts pretty much where we are today.

Another revealing person is Dr. Bernard A. Harris, Jr, the first African American astronaut to walk in space.

The third piece Tropikos 2016 silently and chillingly presents the historical roots of the slave trade in Plymouth, England, the major slave trading port during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.  Here Akomfrah quotes from Paradise Lost, and The Tempest. He segues from images of the royal family and its pirates, decked out in the riches from the slave trade, to a silent raft moving up the river Tamar.

The raft holds one slave with his back to us as well as potatoes, pineapples, bananas, an 18th century metal helmet, and a sculpture of Akuaba associated with childbirth in Ghana.  At the entrance of the exhibition is another Akuaba, from the Dogon people of Mali who holds her hands up in supplication for water.

According to curator Pamela McClusky ” She holds her hands up to implore the blessings of nommo, the master of water, who provides rain when it is needed.  The Dogon have a saying, “people can’t stand and pray all day, but the sculpture can”.  

Right now that seems like a place where we all are, imploring the blessings of the gods, in our case to help us work together to survive this crazy situation that our government brought on us because of their incompetence and stupidity in refusing test kits from the WHO in early February and closing down the CDC area responsible for planning for pandemics.

Hiawatha D, Christopher Shaw at the Northwest African American Museum, King Street again and the Henry Art Gallery

For the winter season here is Betty Shabazz X (Malcolm X’s wife): “We can say ‘Peace on Earth’ We can sing about it, preach about it, or pray about it, but if we have not internalized the mythology to make it happen inside us, then it will not be.”

Betty Shabazz X is included in a dual portrait with Coretta Scott King as one work in the riveting exhibition by Hiawatha D. at the Northwest African American Museum. Iconic Black Women: Ain’t I A Woman? (until March 15) features famous Black women in sports, politics and culture. The exhibition begins with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and ends with Simone Bile, Olympic Gold Medalist. Paired with each portrait is a powerful quotation by each woman. Uniting all of the women is the idea that they succeeded against incredible odds and if you want to enough you can too.

For example, Simone Bile writes “I would say to always follow your dream. And dream big because my whole career, including any of the things that I’ve accomplished, I never thought in a million years that I would be here. So, it just proves that once you believe in yourself, and you put your mind to something, you can do it.”

The poets, performers politicians, and sports stars are all familiar names: Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, Oprah, Toni Morrison, Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz X, Angela Davis, Serena Williams, Lupita, Maxine Waters, Shirley Chisolm, Michelle Obama and her daughters.

Across one wall are the young victims from the Birmingham Church bombings, and across another long wall, the Ain’t I A Woman series of six works on Black women in general as survivors and providers, and truth tellers. Almost all of the paintings focus on posture, gesture and clothes to identify these famous women; only a few of them include feet, hands and facial features.

At first that is disconcerting, but Hiawatha D’s simplified spatial relationships and abstract blocks of color set off the figures so effectively that we see the personality and power of each woman. We know them immediately. The absence of those details strengthens their presence and makes them more universal. The addition of potent quotations enriches our experience.

A second exhibition at the Northwest African American Museum by Christopher Shaw called Algorithm: Archetype is harder to explain, but easy to appreciate.

Here is a quote from the artist “…at the root of the concept for Algorithm: Archetype is an understanding that the way which we participate and propagate culture is based on systems of energy exchange… Archetypes exist in narrative and myth. Often these forms define the parameters of the space where knowledge exists. We have it within our power to shape, reject or recreate or own archetypes. In so doing, we can claim sovereignty over our own lives and cultures. We can rewrite the sequences that code our futures.” You probably need to read that again.

As you can see Christopher is an advanced thinker! He is a mathematician, engineer and clay artist. But when you see his work, you don’t feel overwhelmed by those abstract ideas, but by the beauty of his works. The installation of the minimalist clay and mixed media works is subtle, with several groupings of repeated shapes. Their unexpected relationships lead to meditation.

 

The Arts at King Street Station is once again offering an extravaganza in their beautiful big space. Brighter Future…to be heard, to be seen, to be free, organized through the City Hall collective Ethnic Heritage Art Gallery (until January 11), includes over fifty artists in all media. The show is an opportunity to experience a wide range of artists of color and discover new people. I was familiar with about five of them!! (Naomi is now an excellent Seattle Times columnist and an old friend.) But I was repeatedly excited by the work of a painter or sculptor or ceramist I had never seen before.

Shamim M. Momin, Senior Curator at the Henry Art Gallery filled the entire museum with In Plain Sight, (until April 26). Fourteen rising stars expose often invisible topics, communities, and stories.

I loved Ebony Patterson’s ornamented coffins and stunning large-scale collages created in mourning and celebration of black youth who have been killed.

Exciting in an entirely different way is Oscar Tuazon’s Water School, examining water issues from the perspective of the past, present and future with an emphasis on indigenous rights. Tom Burr’s installations, quietly written in corners, list the names of locations for gay men to meet up that he cut out of Spartacus, an International Gay Guide.

Finally, Nigerian-American artist Jite Agbro’s exhibition Deserving, (until February 26) at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art features a stunning mixed media print installation. She draws on patterns and indigo colors from Nigerian traditions that are hundreds of years old, and like so much else on the planet under threat in our current world. On January 19 at 3pm Agbro had a conversation about her work at the museum: she spoke of coming to art serendipitously as an immigrant mostly trying to survive. But a young instructor ( now the well known Romson Bustillo) at the Pratt School in the Central District reached out to her as a child and encouraged her. Her path was not easy with no money or privilege to support her, but now she is a big success and receiving commissions.

Paula Stokes 1845 Memento Mori

Paula Stokes’s 1845 Memento Mori at Method Gallery featured a stunning “cairn” of one thousand eight hundred and forty-five hand blown glass potatoes. Each potato was sandblasted making it opaque, and each one was different.

Paula Stokes is a native of Ireland who came here in 1993, but she still feels the draw of her home country.

She created this cairn to honor the millions of people who died in the potato famine in Ireland which began in 1845 and continued for four years. A potato blight, a fungus like organism first appeared in August of 1845, perhaps brought into the country on ships from the US (!). It took out one half of the crop immediately, and continued to infest crops for the next seven years, killing three quarters of the potatoes. As it wiped out crops, people became starved. Millions died.

All of the Irish farmers were tenant farmers on land owned by British gentry. Those landowners had introduced the potato only one hundred years earlier as a monocrop. But shockingly, even at the height of the famine, landowners ordered food exported to the United Kingdom.

In Ireland the failure of the crops led to immense numbers of deaths. Survivors, unable to have a crop to sell, were evicted from their homes, sent to orphanages and workhouses, and massive public food kitchens. Workhouses provided a temporary solution, but funds ran out quickly. The response from the British government was entirely inadequate, leading to more suffering.

Widespread death and desperation led to huge migration to the United States, as well as other parts of the world. Orphaned girls were shipped to Australia. In the first four years one million people emigrated. By 1901 six million had emigrated.

The immigrants to the United States faced prejudice and racism, just as immigrants do today. Nativists attacked them. But in the long run they, like all immigrants here, have become part of our country and made many invaluable contributions.

Paula Stokes’ installation both honors the nightmare of the famine in Ireland, and creates an homage to the idea of community and caring. The creation of the piece required a team of assistants. The act of blowing into the glass suggests a life giving force. The installation becomes, as one writer in the catalog suggests, an echo of the landscape filled with ancient ruins from which the artist has come.

The installation is both beautiful and fragile. As we touched a glass potato and immersed ourselves in the installation, it is possible to think about both the deaths of those who relied on agriculture, and the lives of those who survived.

The ownership of the land by the ruling classes in England led directly to destitution for the farmers who were their tenants, when the crops failed. Today migration has similar underlying causes in the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. Now the wealthy are corporations destroying indigenous lands to build dams and extract oil in Central America. In Africa, droughts, war, greed and poverty lead to migration.

As people today are driven from their homes by famine and violence, both caused or aggravated by the climate crises, it is crucial to remember the underlying economic forces of the disastrous famine that drove Irish migration of the late nineteenth century.

But unlike the nineteenth century, when the millions of Irish could enter the US or Europe easily, the immigrants today who do not die or drown are almost entirely delayed, detained, and locked up. Traditional procedures for entry are rapidly being dismantled by racist governments.

Thank you Paula Stokes for your meaningful work. We need more “Memento Mori” for our current world wide crisis.

Donald Byrd Choreographer

“Dance as Provocation”

Part I “Donald Byrd: The America That Is To Be” at the Frye Art Museum, October 12 – January 26.
Susan Noyes Platt www.artandpolitics.com

Donald Byrd transforms movement into resonant art. The world-renowned choreographer Donald Bryd has been based here in Seattle since 2002. In March 2016, I wrote here about his humble base in the Madrona Bath house.

A groundbreaking retrospective of Donald Byrd’s career, curated by Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor of Dance, Duke University, successfully overcomes the challenge of exhibiting dance in a venue designed for visual art. Videos from the 1970s to the present (from tiny to huge), as well as photographs from throughout Bryd’s astonishing career,  mesmerize us as we witness his extraordinary creativity. In addition, on a low stage inside the gallery we can enjoy intimate performances by the Spectrum Dancers on Tuesday and Wednesday at noon and Saturday and Sunday at 3PM.

Donald Byrd has been radical from his first performances in Los Angeles as early as 1978, when he challenged racism, gender, and bourgeois sensibilities with a classical pas de deux that paired a “disaffected” black man and “blasé cigarette smoking” white woman.  His choreography has deep classical roots, but he has consistently expanded the ways that he can confront us with deep social issues through music, movement, gesture, and settings. He deeply believes that dance can trigger social transformation.

His main inspirations are the giants of twentieth century dance George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and Alvin Ailey, but he also explores popular traditions ranging from punk and funk to Irish jigs. His encyclopedic vocabulary of movement (as well as music) becomes his own as he embodies challenging social issues.

Earlier in his career he aimed to shock: we see him in beauty pageant drag, singing an exaggerated “God Bless America” in American Dream, 1995 in a performance that includes “a phantasmagoric patchwork of terror and display.” You will have to see it to know what this means!

In addition to confronting bourgeois race and gender clichés, Bryd rewrote classics. In his Harlem Nutcracker, 1997, Clara now an African American matriarch, welcomes her well-to-do family for Kwanzaa and Christmas in Harlem. The choreography parodies traditional ballet while it also celebrates African American dance traditions.  Another even bolder retelling is The Minstrel Show, Revisited, 2016: it confronts us with the ongoing existence of the racist blackface.

At the center of the exhibition at the Frye is a gallery with four large walls filled with A CRUEL NEW WORLD/the new normal, 2013. Performed in the orange jump suits worn by prisoners and detainees, and inside a hurricane fence, with an American Flag falling on the ground, it explores, through extreme movements, the anguish of being trapped with no way out.

Also included are excerpts from the WOKENESS festival last fall that featured intense performances by his extraordinary dancers on lynching and the killing of African American men.

Finally don’t miss Donald Byrd performing Sweltering Son only two years ago!

Preston Singletary and Raven Skyriver

Preston Singletary (Tlingit, American) had a dazzling exhibition in Tacoma that recently closed called “Raven and the Box of Daylight.” The sculptures told the famous Raven story step by step with some full on installations, and special effects added in. We were mesmerized by the flow of the story and Preston’s presentation.

“Before here was here, Raven was only named Yeil

 

“He was a white bird and the world was in Darkness. Raven decides he will try and do something about the darkness, for himself and for the world. As he follows the Nass River, he encounters the Fishermen of the Night. . . . They tell Yeil Naas Shaak Aankaawu (the Nobleman at the Head of the Nass River), has many treasures in his Naa Kanidi (Clan House) including beautifully carved boxes that house the light.”

“Yeil(Raven) knows he will not be welcome in his raven form and devises a plan to transform himself to a tiny speck of dirt. His plan is to float down the river into the drinking ladle of the young woman, Naas Shaak Aankaawu du Seek’ ( Daughter of the Nobleman at the Head of the Nass River). That is how he will sneak into the Naa Kanidi( Clan House)

“Yeil turns himself into a piece of dirt and falls into the water. He floats into the young woman’s ladle as she dips it into the river for a drink. …

“Yeil is ingested by Naas Shaak Aankaawu du Seek’ and she becomes pregnant with Yeil.”

“Yeil grows into a precocious and precious human boy. “

The center of the exhibition was the clan house with its prized possessions, the stars, the moon and the daylight. Through pleading with his grandfather, who adores him, Raven is able to liberate the box of the stars, moon and daylight.

“As the stars fill the sky and as the moon takes its place. light begins to fill the earth. When the sun takes its place in the sky, bringing daylight to the world, it is frightening to all those who have been in darkness. The people are able to see the world around them for the first time and are startled. Those wearing animal regalia run to the woods and become animal people, Those wearing bird regalia jump in the sky and become The Winged People. Those wearing water animal regalia become the Water People. Those who remained strong (and stubborn) became the Human People.”

“Yeil decides it is time to leave and transforms back into bird form. Naas Shaak Aankaawu ( Nobleman at the Head of the Nass River) is devastated that his treasures have been released into the sky. He is so angry that he gathers all the pitch in the Naa Kahidi ( Clan House) in a bentwood box and throws it into the fire. He catches Yeil as he tries to escape out of the smoke hole and holds onto his feel Yeil is covered in the soot and smoke of the fire. He is transformed from a spiritual being tin the black bird we know today. His color marks his sacrifice. His physical form is forever changed for bringing light into the world”

At the same time as this exhibition, we enjoyed musical performance by both traditional Alaskan Tlingit Kuteeyaa and Preston Singeltary’s band Khu eex’. I can’t seem to us load the video here.

If you missed this special exhibition at the Museum of Glass you can still see Preston’s work as well as that of Raven Skyriver at the Stonington Gallery this month. Also on exhibit is his mentor Joe David. Raven Skyriver and Preston spoke at a panel this summer at the Museum of Glass where they spoke about the importance of the hot shop there for expanding the possiblities of their work in glass. Raven Skyriver who is from Lopez Island compared fluid glass to the marine environment. He sees himself as “perpetuating culture in glass.” Historically house leaders commissioned art. It has to be commercial now. His work presents endangered sea creatures. threatened by acidification, overfishing, and pollution.

Preston spoke of beginning his glass work only ten years ago. In the press release it emphasizes that he spent years studying form line design in order to create glass in the Tlingit tradition. He has studied with some of the great artists of contemporary Native Art. We all know how stunning his work has been in that medium. His glass work has transformed my point of view on glass sculpture. Last summer, he and Raven Skyriver collaborated on work for the first time. And this exhibition is in honor of that collaboration. Carefully note in the captions all the different techniques for working with glass: hot sculpted, glass cast, blown, sandblasted, sand carved.

Natalie Ball Betty Bowen Award Winner at the Seattle Art Museum

The Betty Bowen award winner Natalie Ball (Modoc, Klamath) has installed a provocative pair of works in the Seattle Art Museum . Ball is descended from the famous leader of the late nineteenth century Modoc resistance, Captain Jack. That heritage of warrior defiance is obvious here.

You Mist, again (Rattle) and Re Run make up the installation “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Snake.” The title interrupts the familiar nursery rhyme about the stars with a snake that can be both threatening and magical. Ball explores the collision of indigenous and white cultures as well as African American, also part of her heritage

One of the unintended juxtapositions of the installation is the view of the Marsden Hartley in the next gallery. Hartley’s work suggests his affinity with Native American patterns, although he did not move to New Mexico until later. Scholars traditionally focus on the references to Berlin in his symbolism, but seeing his work next to Ball’s the connection is unmistakable.

You Mist, again (Rattle) is full of mysterious references and startling juxtapositions. Ball’s work frequently suggests collage with extremely disparate elements. She purposefully mixes pop, elite, folk, mystical, and humor, along with her sophisticated command of color and composition, to keep us guessing. Looking closely we see crazy pink hair at the top, what she describes as braiding hair, as well as deer and porcupine hair. In that detail alone, the cross referencing of the natural world and the cultural world suggests her willingness to defy any accepted parameters. Even the over all idea of the rattle, here on a huge scale, is in our face, and somewhat frightening.

Note also the bullet shells embedded in a stick supporting the giant rattle. And what about that crazy unlaced shoe and the beaded blue rose hanging from the end of the snake skin. Trickster humor is juxtaposed here with celebrating indigenous vitality and perhaps some crazy sarcasm.

Rattlesnake skin appears as part of both works (although significantly identified simply as rattlesnake), a skin that a snake has shed, after it regrows another, a clear reference to the survival abilities of indigenous peoples, in spite of white man’s best efforts to obliterate them.

The second work Re-Run, is a tilted construction created from a diamond patterned quilt. That pattern is joyful, but the words “Run” and “Ran” formed from overlapped sports letters and mascot imagery suggest a different mood entirely and violently interrupt any easy reading. But the larger figure at the center of Re-Run suggests a tricky, but successful balancing act, that can refer to life in general. There are so many possibilities here for metaphors, that I suggest that you take a good long look and think about it. (Until November 17).

Just for fun I will end with Natalie Ball’s work in YƏHAW̓! the fabulous contemporary indigenous show this summer that I wrote about in early May. She showed another amusing, defiant work which is untitled. But juxtaposing a red tutu and hair weaves with a woven basket is outrageous enough without a title.

South African superstar photographer Zanele Muholi at the Seattle Art Museum

 

 

Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness

South African superstar artist Zanele Muholi bursts out of the Jacob Lawrence and Gwen Knight corner gallery at the Seattle Art Museum: “I’m reclaiming my blackness.” Their exhibition “Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness,” spills into four adjoining spaces.

 

First, we see the huge signature self-portrait visible from several galleries away, invading our experience of the work of mild white men in adjacent galleries. The artist wears a headdress of sheepskin that takes a lion’s mane to the next level of luxuriance. Keeping in mind that it is the male lion that has a mane, this lioness identifies as they. They look to the side, focusing beyond us.

 

Turning around, we see the artist posing in a mural scaled photograph in what evokes a classical reclining nude posture, until we realize that it contradicts that tradition of exploitation. Lying on their side and holding tightly to multiple plastic pillows that cover all specifically sexual body parts, they displace and occupy the reclining nude tradition constructed for male eyes throughout art history.

 

Moving into the next space, another 4-foot self-portrait evokes the statue of liberty, with the crown replaced by large coils of black foam and the gaze directed skyward. Again, the icon is redefined, reoccupied, remythologized. As “liberty” has become an empty word, this upward gaze expresses that impatience and absurdity.

 

The oblique gazes accent the whites of the eyes in every image in the show. As we enter the main gallery, painted entirely in black on two walls, we experience these intense looks over and over, trapped as though by pincers on four walls of self-portraits. In each work the artist transforms into a goddess, a miner, a queen, a king, and even a rocky cliff or forest. The artist collects found materials from various places: buying from stores, clothing from friends, items found in hotels or friends houses. The props enable layers of metaphors and political references that range from historical to contemporary, from personal to public

.

For example, in a self-portrait with South African money pinned to their head, a cow’s skin pinned on their shoulders, the references can be to the “bride price,” the selling of woman like cattle, but defiance and resistance embodies the posture and the gaze, even as it seems to suggest surrender.

 

In another work, an homage to her sister, a gentle and proud Muholi wears a crown and necklace of rubber inner tubes that confer majesty, and a defiant inversion of the violent history of rubber in Africa, where the Belgian King Leopold ruthlessly killed thousands to satisfy his thirst for that “natural” product. We can draw a straight line to the exploitation in the Congo today to obtain the minerals for our electronic gadget

 

 

Every single image can be approached with layers of meanings, as brought out by the intense and indispensable series of essays in the catalog. About the portrait “Kwanele, Parktown 2016 it is enough,” a face surrounded by plastic detritus, Ama Josephine Budge writes:

 

“Enough a plastic wrapper for a headdress. Enough chemical spilled oceans. Enough burning of carrier bags. Enough the animal carcass choked with used needles and candy wrappers. Enough electronic waste that will never decompose. Enough acid poisoning that never washes off. Enough villages under sand. Enough sand stolen for cement. Enough salinized cropland. Enough desertification. Enough brown bodies on the shoreline. Enough plastic wrappers forced migration. Enough polyethylene saran-wrapped suitcases—everything I could grab in a moment—abandoned at the immigration centre. Enough tear gas in the eyes of protestors. Enough extinct species. Enough plastic-strewn beaches. Enough. Enough. Enough. Enough. Enough. How many times must I say, ‘kwanele’ it’s enough, before what you hear is not more but too much.”

 

The directness of the artist’s bold head shots controls us as we look back seeing the steely gaze, the power, the anger, the courage. Muholi speaks of occupying public space, the spaces given to white people. As a South African, Muholi is particularly aware of the segregation of public space and its history in apartheid, but the entire planet is rapidly becoming an apartheid state with migrants imprisoned at militarized borders or drowned at sea.

 

Prior to this series, Muholi in an ongoing series photographs the LGBTQIA people of South Africa in a series with the title Face and Phases . They are honoring those murdered and those living amid murders and crimes against their community. Their own studio was ransacked, and unprinted work deliberately destroyed.

 

Turning the camera back on their own face in these portraits, Muholi allows no objectification of the other, deliberately negating a long tradition of the black body in ethnography, anthropology, tourist and so called “documentary” photography. The body is Muholi’s, the narrative is Muholi’s.

 

The statement is both local and global: the artist has constructed the images all over the world and identified each image by city, and in isiZulu, their native tongue. Working in black and white (albeit with color film) is another political reference to photography as created by white eyes and cameras calibrated in F stops for white skins. Here the subtle tones of black emphasize the many nuances of dark skin colors.

 

We are caught in the web of these layered metaphors that defy the state of our present world with brilliant defiance. “Hail the Dark Lioness”! (until November 8).

Don’t miss the videos behind the “Lioness” and read the articulate catalog!

 

A visit to the home of Alfredo Arreguín and Susan Lytle June 2019

Appropriately, a tangle of ivy hid the doorbell, but I knew I was in the right place because of the small pale red ceramic pig on the porch. As soon I entered the simple brick home of Alfredo Arreguín and Susan Lytle in North Seattle, I was immersed in a wonderland that echoed the jungles in Arreguín’s paintings. I immediately sensed the many layers of his life with Susan Lytle. Their connection flows through every surface in the house, filled with carved wooden sculpture and ceramics, rabbits, elephants, dogs, turtles, and composite beasts (those wonderful carvings from Oaxaca) arranged in careful ensembles throughout the living room and dining room.

The unity among many cultures and the universality of the creative impulse is a theme of the house and of the art created there.

First, Susan introduced me to the delicate “Queen of the Night” flower, a type of cactus that blooms for only one night with an exotic blossom. They are one subject of her paintings.  (I of course immediately thought of Mozart’s Queen of the Night and her extraordinary aria, like a one night exotic blossoming itself). Nearby on a table was a Jewel Orchid, a lush jungle plant with delicate flowers.

Figure 2 Anonymous painting of a kitchen

Arreguín pointed out a long brick stove in an anonymous painting in his dining room, remarking that he fed sticks of wood into a stove like that while living with his maternal grandparents who raised him in Michoacán Mexico. His grandfather first bought Alfredo paint supplies and encouraged his art. He also took Arreguín along as a small child on a trip to Las Canoas deep in the jungle. It made a deep impression.

After his grandparents died in 1948, Arreguín moved from one family member to another, initially living with his mother, then an aunt, then his father, a boarding house, and finally another aunt. While still a teenager, as an assistant to engineers, he had a more immersive exposure in the intricacies of life in the jungle, this time in Guerrero. He would never forget that experience.

But by extraordinary serendipity he was invited to live in Seattle by a family he met when they were lost as tourists in Chapultepec park. As a result, he came to the US in January 1956. Then he was drafted into the army, and sent to Korea. Fortuitously, while serving in Asia, he was able to visit Japan. The rhythms and patterns of Japanese art as in the waves of Hokusai, for example, permeate his art to this day.

On his return, Arreguín earned two degrees at the University of Washington.

Figure 3 Alfredo Arreguín Tehuanas 1982, 64 x 43” Courtesy of the Artist

As we spoke in the dining room I was facing an early painting Tehuanas from 1982 in which two female dancers face one another, their white dresses forming two separated sides of a circle, the space between them charged with energy. The dancers, static and stately, seamlessly occupy a single flat space with a dense pattern of green, blue, red, orange, pink and lilac. These patterns and colors invoke the spirit of indigenous art in Mexico, a life long reference point for the artist.

Arreguín explained that this was an early example of his use of pattern when it took him hours to create the repeated geometric shapes.

Now, he says, it just flows from his fingers.

I was amazed when I went to the simple basement studio and saw that Arreguín and Lytle shared a single long room. There was a slight demarcation created by a pile of Alfredo’s paint tubes and Susan’s easel. Such a permeable barrier between two working artists suggests intense focus, as well secure interconnections. They met in 1974 at the Blue Moon Tavern, a longtime hangout for beat poets most famously, Jack Kerouac.

Figure 4 Alfredo Arreguín Twilight 2019 60 x 96”

On Alfredo’s easel was a large painting of leaping orcas called Twilight. As we looked at the painting he now and then added a white dot to the surface.  Arreguín’s many paintings of wildlife in jungles and the sea speak to his great sense of the loss of our rich biodiversity. As he stated, “We are the most dangerous animals on the planet.” The mighty orca whale in our Southern Resident pod  about which Lynda Mapes has written so eloquently in the last two years in the Seattle Times, numbers only about 73 today, and they are starving for lack of the chinook salmon they need to survive. The salmon, like the orca, are dying out, both threatened by environmental challenges from pollution to noise.

I felt deep sorrow permeating the painting, reinforced by its gentle lighting between day and night. The leaping orcas were celebrating the birth of a new baby, but I felt the threat hanging over the joy. Only last summer a baby orca born to our Southern Resident Pod died in less than an hour, and then was carried for 17 days by its mother in a tragic epic journey. This summer we have heard that the Pod has left our region in desperate search for food, and three more orcas have probably died.

In the other end of the studio several of Susan Lytle’s completed paintings of the “Queen of the Night” hung on the wall, and a work in progress on her easel. Seeing these paintings at the end of my tour, fit perfectly with my introduction to the one night bloom and death of the Queen of the Night flower as I entered. Lytle carefully explores the rapid transformations and intricacies of these briefly surviving blooms in sequences of small paintings. 

Figure 5 Susan Lytle Queen of the Night 2016, 30 x 24”Courtesy of the Artist

Figure 6 Susan Lytle Night Bloom 2016, 18 x 14” Courtesy of the Artist

Figure 7Alfredo Arreguín Birds of Paradise 2012 42 x 50” Courtesy of the Artist

As I left, I looked at Birds of Paradise, hung directly opposite the front door. The multicolored birds fly and perch on branches against a background suggesting a sea and sky. The composition subtly suggests the Asian influence in his works. These birds fly joyfully in counterpoint to the leaping of the huge orcas who seem weighted with sadness. Arreguín said this painting has just been purchased by 4 Culture for the Children and Family Justice Center. He wanted to bring a feeling of freedom into a dark place. Here is his narrative:

“Birds have flown the skies since time immemorial.  These beautiful creatures have inspired artists for centuries, not only with their graceful flight, but also with their song and plumage. As an artist, I am no exception.  I have been fascinated with these flying miracles most of my life, and they appear in my paintings as memories of my childhood, of my travels and my daily walks and communion with Nature.  This painting, Birds of Paradise, is an attempt to describe my amazement and delight upon discovering these flying jewels from Indonesia and Australia.  As an artist, I would never try to compete with Nature’s creations.  So, in Picasso’s words, I paint the lie that makes us see the truth.”

So on this visit, I experienced Arreguín, the man, who sorrows for the loss of the connected intersecting web of life on our planet, and Arreguín, the painter, who celebrates life in all its forms.

His partner of many years, Susan Lytle introduced me to the exotic habits and intricate beauty of the “Queen of the Night.”

Together they sing a song that goes straight into the heart.

Thank you Ludovic Morlot

Last night we heard Ludovic Morlot our brilliant music director of the Seattle Symphony conduct his final concert as director at Benaroya Hall, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy and Leos Janacek. It was on the theme of love. It was a stunning concert that seem to be caressing us with one beautiful complex work after another. The music reached into every corner of the orchestra, we heard outstanding brass, woodwind, strings, drums and voices coming together in his final gift of his conducting to us and to Seattle. We could also sense the orchestra playing better than ever as a gift to Ludovic himself. He chose a choral piece as part of the concert in order to include the Seattle Symphony Chorale and the Northwest Boys Choir.

I was bathed in the music.

At the same time I was holding the memory of Pieter Vance Wykoff, in my mind. He died last week in his mid forties from brain cancer. He was a bass trombone player with the Hong Kong Symphony, a delightful young man whose life was cut short. Every time the bass trombones played last night I thought of him.

To give a sense of Morlot’s work in Seattle here is an article I wrote about just one week in March, 2019|

“In the last few weeks, our Grammy award-winning Seattle Symphony has outdone itself performing difficult contemporary music and presenting FOUR world premieres!

 The Chamber Music concert featured Tessa Lark in a preconcert (they always have a free recital before the main concert.) Lark is a violinist, but she played fiddle inspired violin music. Her humorous dialog explained the intersections of the blue grass music of Appalachia with classical music. She also played pieces of her own and an impossibly difficult contemporary work by John Corigiano. Then in the main concert the highlight was Leoš Janáček String Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata” led by Grammy award nominated violin player (and artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music Festivals) James Ehnes. This intense piece of music featured crashing conflicts played by the two violins, cello and viola, inspired by a Tolstoy novella about infidelity sparked by a violinist falling in love with a pianist while performing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Violin Sonata. That was thrilling!

We were so fortunate to go to “Celebrate Asia,” friends gave us their fabulous center of the orchestra tickets. It included a stunning succession of Asia related and/or composed pieces including a world premiere by Chia-Ying Lin, a 28 year old Chinese composer who won a competition for young composers sponsored by the Seattle Symphony. The highly experimental work Ascolsia, featured instruments and musical tones inspired by folk music of Taiwan. Shiyeon Sung, a South Korean born conductor, dynamically led the orchestra. A brilliant piano player, Seong-Jin Cho, also originally from Korea, played Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. It was stupendous. Katherine Kim then sang a wildly contemporary song cycle by Unsuk Chin, also Korean, based on Alice in Wonderland. Then the undauntable Symphony gave us Pubbanimitta for Orchestra by Thailand’s most famous composer, Narong Prangcharoen. Wow!

But there is even more. Later that week we heard another amazing pianist, Jonathan Biss, who had commissioned contemporary composers to create works inspired by Beethoven concertos. First he played Beethoven’s third concerto and then a SECOND concerto, the World Premiere by Caroline Shaw, inspired by the Beethoven, but totally avant-garde of course.

And last, and maybe the most thrilling of all, was the Silkroad Ensemble with Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian clarinetist, originally from Damascus. It was a truly international concert, inspired by “Beyond Borders,” a Seattle Symphony concert two years ago reacting to that original dreadful travel ban (Azmeh performed then also, barely able to get back in the country). Sandeep Das, from South Asia, gave us staggering drumming, and the world-renowned Chinese composer Wu Man performed several solos on the Pipa, a stringed instrument like a lute. Expanding our geography further, we heard the dynamic Venezuelan Christina Pato on Galician bagpipes, playing a fast moving “Latina 6/8 Suite” that included brilliant musicians from the symphony performing solos on the bass, viola, cello, and violin.

Again, the Seattle Symphony had commissioned premieres, one by the award winning Chinese composer Chen Yi (she had been composer in residence at Seattle Symphony in 2002–03). Then Kinan Azmeh transported us as he played his own new work, a clarinet concerto with the Symphony. As he played, I felt the deep tragedy of Syria in his music, in his life.

We are incredibly fortunate to have this amazing Symphony and its commitment to contemporary music. They are even launching a new venue Octave Nine, at Second and Union, which will feature an acoustic system that uses 42 speakers and 30 microphones, modular surround screens and movable panels that will immerse the audience.”

I couldn’t help thinking as I listened to the concert last night that classical performers are still dominantly white, we have quite a few Asians in the strings, one African American cello player, and of of course the incredible Demarre McGill, the African American flute player. The Boys choir was a sea of white faces, except I think one Asian. Knowing the schedules of my own daughter and her family, each of those boys came from the privilege of having a parent who could support them extensively, both logisiticaly and financially. My grandchildren fortunately have a very good music program in their public school in Nutley New Jersey, but carrying and delivering for an intense commitment like a choir is not on their horizon.

In 2006 we heard from the Young Eight, an entirely African American ensemble of classical musicians put together by Quinton Morris, our world famous violinist who teaches at Seattle University, originally came from Renton and is committed to reaching out to low income neighborhoods with music education in his Keys of Change. I wondered why there was no sign of him at the Symphony since that performance.

But the strength of Ludovic Morlot’s tenure was reaching out to many communities in Seattle, collaborating with groups such as Path with Art, offering free concert attendance to youth and teens accompanied by their parents, artists in residence, new commissions, encouraging young composers. Who knows how much of this will continue.

Thank you Ludovic Morlot for your generous 8 years in Seattle.