Labor Craft above the Clouds

Labor Craft above the Clouds (The Intermediaries of a Time that Governs People to Raise a Barrier to the Comfortable Urban Condition)
2010
263 x 30 x 13 cm
wood, acrylic, varnish, felt

Ανακύκλωση-Επανάχρηση-Οικειοποίηση

Eπιμελεια : Θανάσης Μουτσόπουλος
Καλλιτέχνες: Όπυ Ζούνη, Βλάσης Κανιάρης , Χρύσα Ρωμανού, Βασίλης Σκυλάκος , Άγγελος Αντωνόπουλος , Λάζαρος Ζήκος, Νίκος Τρανός , Κωστής Τριανταφύλλου, Γιώργος Τσακίρης, Πάνος Χαραλάμπους , Γιώργος Χαρβαλιάς, Νίκος Κρυωνίδης, Αντώνης Μιχαηλίδης, Κωστής Βελώνης, Κalos & Κlio, Κατερίνα Παπαζήση

Δημοτική Πινακοθήκη Καλαμάτας
Δεκ.2010 - 31 Μαρτίου 2011

Passe-Montagne

Thierry de Cordier
Passe-Montagne,1983

Writers Cottage

Architects: Jarmund / Vigsn?s AS Architects MNAL
Location: Asker, Norway
Client: Cecilie Enger
Project year: 2007 – 2008
Photographs: Nils Petter Dale
Source :www.archdaily.com

Unbounded Enthusiasms

Bojan Šarčević, World Corner, 1999, bricks, plaster, wallpaper, wood. Installation view, Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin.

“TO WHAT EXTENT SHOULD AN ARTIST understand the implications of his or her findings?” This is the cryptic question that Bojan Šarčević posed to a panel of artists, critics, and curators he’d convened on the occasion of his 2006 two-venue exhibition in Ireland, at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo. The show debuted a group of works—miniature geometries of brass threads dangling almost imperceptibly against an expanse of elegantly distressed wallpaper—that appeared far from the kind of research-based production his query would seem to address. Yet the seminar, held at the Dublin venue, was no mere discursive supplement. If Šarčević broached the broader topic of meaning in art—as was borne out by the ensuing expansive and open-ended discussion, which took the outcome out of the artist’s hands and offered no easily summarized “findings”—he also answered its own question. And this response was articulated via the creation of a defined structure (in this case, the colloquium form) that serves as an engine of relatively unbounded knowledge production. It’s precisely this kind of generative and multiplicitous rubric that has unified Šarčević’s stylistic shape-shifts, over the past decade or so, through roughhousing architectural interventions, films and videos, delicately filigreed sculptures, and a diversity of photo-based work.

The problem was that, thanks to the presiding doxa of reception, readings of Šarčević’s work had tended to overlook this central strategy. There are understandable reasons for this. Consider, for example, one of Šarčević’s earliest pieces, World Corner, 1999, for which he physically extracted the corner of a room in a condemned apartment building in Amsterdam, cut an equivalent-size corner from a room in Berlin’s Carlier|Gebauer gallery, and fitted the Dutch corner into the German gap. While the new addition sat more or less flush with the venue’s walls and floor, a suture of splattered plasterwork around it made plain that a transplanting process had occurred. And in this sense, World Corner would seem to map onto Šarčević’s peripatetic background: Born in Belgrade, he lived with his family in North Africa for some years, then moved to Sarajevo as a teenager. At the age of seventeen, at the outset of the Bosnian war, he left that city and has since sojourned in Montreal, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin (where he now lives). So far, so tidy: World Corner’s suggestions of migration and adaptation chime with Šarčević’s Eastern European name and far-flung, war-torn background, offering, in a highly respectable post-Minimal idiom, an allegory of geopolitical instability, nomadic drift, and contingent identity. But while Šarčević is not unconcerned with these issues, this isn’t how his art communicates, where it originates, or how it is internally organized.

Šarčević’s interest, in the case of World Corner (which was shown on two further occasions, in Watou, Belgium and Paris), lay in upending and refocusing the experience of a given space, in creating something at once incongruous and assimilated, in making a collage in three dimensions. He was, he says, inspired by a memory of Jean Eustache’s film Une Sale Histoire (A Dirty Story, 1977), in which a man describes discovering a peephole in a Paris café’s bathroom and fantasizing that this aperture predates the whole city, which grew up around it. When World Corner was plugged into a gallery space, it too seemed paradoxically both a foundation and an empty center. It was evidently older than what surrounded it; figuratively speaking, it might have been the cornerstone on which each structure was built.

Glimmering here is the idea that the conceptual ambit of Šarčević’s art might be disproportionate to its apparent physical restraint. Though his work always seems to be shifting gears in terms of medium and appearance, it consistently demonstrates what multitudes a particle of reality can contain when it is unmoored from its context, and how that untethering might modulate experience on the visual—as opposed to critical or conceptual—plane. We can see this dynamic in other early works—for example, Favorite Clothes Worn While S/He Worked, 2000, for which Šarčević persuaded members of various uniformed professions (including maids and car mechanics) to spend two weeks working in their “best” clothes and then exhibited the stained results in a pseudo-museological display. Here, carried over from World Corner, is an impulse to simultaneously emphasize and normalize incongruities. Favorite Clothes . . . engages other issues as well, e.g., labor’s indignities and its insidious colonizing of the self. But at the same time, these works are rooted in a notion of the material trace as suggestive origin; both prompt viewers to build outward—into a hemisphere of delimited signification—from what is effectively abstract mark-making, as invested in texture and facture as Dieter Roth’s grease stains or Lee Bontecou’s soiled, cut-up conveyor belts.



Bojan Šarčević, Favorite Clothes Worn While S/He Worked, 2000, twenty-seven wardrobe items, MDF tables. Installation view, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, Germany, 2000

Rather than viewing them as determinative, a stable platform on which interpretation can be built, one might see the external references that Šarčević offers in such works as something like the fragments of an old, decaying scroll: They at once serve as points of orientation and imply, materially, the vast expanse of everything that isn’t there to be read. They thus take an audience accustomed to reading works of art, unlocking predetermined content, and treating reception as a form of mastery and set them afloat in endlessly bifurcating realms of signification, inviting them to fill in the blanks themselves. This is especially clear in two works whose references are loaded indeed: Spirit of Versatility and Spirit of Inclusiveness, both 2002, are corner-hugging mimicries of decorative detailing from holy places. The former is a painted-wood, silvery-gray, sci-fi-looking spread of interlocking geometric forms based on muqarnas, the richly niched corbels found in mosques; the latter is a life-size replica, in glowing plates of steel, zinc, brass, and copper, of one of the curved, vaulted corners of Cologne Cathedral. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, this overt counterposing of Christianity and Islam might conjure a nimbus of sociopolitical import and rhetorical intent. But in fact, via its mismatching of aesthetic regimes, the work undoes the kind of neat conceptual symmetry (e.g., Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [1996]) that would enable such a reading. What both works offer is undeniable and estranged material presence: Here, Šarčević makes Islamic architecture feel startlingly futuristic and allies Christianity with the textures of Minimalism. To the extent that Spirit of Versatility and Spirit of Inclusiveness do contain a political or topical argument, it may consist in the notion that failure of imagination—the kind that posits two religions as a simple binary—is itself an ethical transgression.

In later works, the referential quality becomes ever more oblique, while the work itself seems to move toward formal transparency—as if to delineate a kind of ether in which viewers’ projections of meaning could remain suspended. Keep Illusion for the End, 2005, for instance, is a large, freestanding geometric framework of overlapping and crisscrossing three-dimensional outlines—zigzagging lengths of brass, copper, wood, and concrete recede like afterimages behind an irregular polygon made of slender wooden strips—which, seen from one angle, snap into focus to suggest the flattened silhouette of a house. The airy, diagrammatic whole, an elegant study in form and line and (absence of) volume, has a refined neomodernist feel. But the overly elaborated zigzags, reminiscent of Art Moderne moldings, also suggest decor details such as coving. Like the Spirit of . . . sculptures, this work puts ornament center stage. In a doubly wry inversion, modernism is remade out of what it repressed, and abstraction is made to do the bidding of its former nemesis, figuration.

Yet while all of this usefully lends itself to talking about the work, these projects could perhaps also be recouped as simply the sediment of the artist’s daily life, rather than as Šarčević’s attempt to insert his art into a history of ideas. His creative method, he says, frequently finds him trying to reconstruct and amplify some splinter of the real. While World Corner sprang from his walking the streets of Amsterdam, Šarčević was living in Berlin, surrounded and fascinated by early-modern architecture, when he made Keep Illusion for the End and related pieces, such as the sleek copper stack of inwardly curving, loosely enclosing banister-like forms Wanting Without Needing, Loving Without Leaning, 2005, or “1954,” his 2004 series of black-and-white collages that upend the regimented spatial logic of modernist interiors. And describing these latter works’ ostensible thematics doesn’t, in any case, fully account for their physical or material fundamentality, which is elegant and anorexic, old and new, and suggests that the work doesn’t primarily require interpretation (although it can take it). If we tend to apprehend and remember the world in glancing, indelible details, Šarčević’s approach suggests, then an art that harvests and compounds such fragments ought to be a model of, and a cue for, an upgraded state of awareness, of being in the world—a model that invites surrender to the comparative aphasia of an underinscribed encounter, one that doesn’t come with a predetermined meaning.

An untitled 2006 series—of which Šarčević’s inconspicuous sculptures for Dublin were an outrider—found him bending and welding slender lengths of brass and stringing them with threads, like alien harps or sextants, before fixing them to walls that had been partly painted or wallpapered and partly stripped. The linear elements form a set of emphatic, specific, yet opaque formal decisions for the viewer to navigate, mitigated by what has increasingly become a hallmark of Šarčević’s art: a rare, abstract beauty. Once again implying a kind of three-dimensional collage, this procedure morphed across parallel groups of works created the same year. The brass geometries were strung with patterned silk scarves from a Berlin market, in a sensuous conversation between textures. They then found themselves standing like forlorn miniature pylons on complexly planed white cardboard plinths. And this tableau form was adapted (with the brass threads going with it) for Šarčević’s 16-mm film series “Only After Dark,” 2007, and “The Breath Taker Is the Breath Giver,” 2009.




View of Bojan Šarčević, “Only After Dark,” 2007, Centre d’Art Contemporain d'Ivry—le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France. Photo: André Morin.

The five films that compose the former series are all less than three minutes long, screened within specially made chambers that underline their quality of rapt hermeticism, and accompanied by downbeat and dilatory improvisations for piano, percussion, guitar, and kora. In each, the camera racks up static views of precise arrangements of shardlike Perspex uprights (L-shaped, like corners); groupings of ragged wood, brass, and curved paper; and origami-like card constructions, miniature stone obelisks, and a hunk of red meat that, at the end of the final film, appears to pulse like a beating heart. The accumulation of different angles on coordinate-free scenarios—expanded, in the four-part “The Breath Taker Is the Breath Giver,” to include miniature wooden architectures festooned with strings and nestling in sand; alien-looking, hair-covered objects resembling Chinese scholars’ rocks; and ravishingly lit alignments of crumpled colored tissue, cardboard, and a hank of blond hair—turns Šarčević’s camera into a proxy for the perplexed but entranced viewer, able neither to fully understand nor to look away.

The editing style, which involves restless cutting among the tableaux, meanwhile imparts to Šarčević’s subjects a quality bordering on animism. (The artist has said that he wanted the sculptural elements to be almost like protagonists, desiring to communicate with one another.) They hover, poised between sentience and dumb objecthood. The film’s liminal objects are echoed in a series of sculptures of surpassing delicacy (“Involuntary Twitch,” 2010), in which horizontal brass plates are held precariously within a system of notched, willowy steel poles. Though they’re composed of hard metals, these assemblies are inestimably fragile—a paradox that conveys itself unnervingly as viewers realize that these scaffolds are literally quivering in the gallery’s air currents. And though they resemble modular shelving systems, they’re resolutely nonfunctional (unless one has, say, a selection of feathers to display). These are near-abstract works haloed by panoplies of cloudy reference—their modernist aspect, for example, is at once present and hard to pin down.

This isn’t mystification for its own sake. For an artist to assign specific meaning to his or her own work—to seek to control “the implications of his or her findings”—is, by Šarčević’s lights, a kind of legislation or moralizing. It’s also deeply limiting, foreclosing the possibility of art’s accessing its profounder registers: where the viewer, rather than decrypting a piety, has a journeying encounter. On that voyage, Šarčević is still a guide but not an autocrat. It is here, one would say, that the tactical élan of Šarčević’s programmatic use of fragments and details might be seen. A sliver of the real, particularly when coaxed into the kind of exquisite obliqueness that he specializes in, is a starting point, asking to be followed through—refusing openness but allowing the viewer to do the completing. The rich specificity of Šarčević’s fragments, their near-Romantic keying to particular places and historical moments, creates spheres of interpretative potentialities, from the aesthetic to the sociopolitical. The artist refutes “meaninglessness,” the perilous obverse of opening up signification—but doesn’t turn the artwork into a cipher.

In 2007, Šarčević produced an artist’s book that juxtaposed images from the whole of his career with texts extracted from a 2004 paper on the transitioning Western Balkans, commissioned by the European Union Institute for Security Studies; he titled the volume Kissing the Back of Your Hand Makes a Sound like a Wounded Bird, densely alloying specific political realities and expansive poetic polysemy. One might consider this a distillation of what Šarčević is asking for: not an outright rejection of the content-driven approach that has dominated the art of recent decades or a wholehearted return to the modernist formalism that preceded it, but a realization that the two models were artificially cleaved all along. Vouchsafed here is a synthetic practice that does not displace experience—looking, feeling—in favor of decoding and that still acknowledges the existence of the outside world. This is an old modernist problem, but one that stalks us still. What we need is neither an erotics nor a hermeneutics of art, Šarčević wordlessly affirms. We need an art that calls for both at once.

Text by Martin Herbert
Source:Artforum , Nov.2010

Passe-Partout

Claire-Fontaine, "Passe-Partout" (Paris 10eme)

"Consumption", Helena Papadopoulos Gallery, Athens
11 November 2010-15 January 2011

Bearing the Light

Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appearrs, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds -- the indivisible shared out in endless abundance.

Denise Levertov

Rotterdam Dialogues: Morality

Witte de With presents a two-day symposium structured around lectures, dialogues and a masterclass by Wendelien van Oldenborgh.


Since the Fall of 2009, the team at Witte de With has been developing a series of exhibitions and events that make visible the gray zones of contemporary morality. This was motivated by our perception that an exponential number of moral attitudes are emerging in the public sphere that reinforce rigid, binary frameworks for thought and action. With this in mind, our aim has been to shed some light on the workings of morality from a range of different perspectives, focusing on the areas where its application is elusive and unstable, culturally specific and politically ambivalent. Our sense is that the question of morality must remain in play but open and undefined.
The purpose of Rotterdam Dialogues: Morality is to forge a constructive discussion around this increasingly ubiquitous but elusive term, transferring the explorations and speculations developed throughout this past year’s exhibitions and events to the discursive field.

With this symposium we wish to shed some light on the fraught encounter between the values that characterize the idea of an open, egalitarian society, and the intolerances articulated in the name of morality. As with previous Acts of the program, the symposium guests have not been asked to specify the meaning of morality, but rather to introduce case studies through which to think constructively about spaces and instances where binary distinctions – good and evil; right and wrong – fall apart. Each guest will share her or his intellectual experience to form a base for concrete discussion.

The participants represent a wide range of disciplines: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, curating, criticism, art, anthropology and architecture.

Lars Bang Larsen (critic, Barcelona/Copenhagen), Clémentine Deliss (director, Museum de Weltkulturen, Frankfurt), Dessislava Dimova (art historian and freelance curator, Brussels), Felix Ensslin (Professor for Aesthetics and Art Mediation, State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart), Joseph Grima (director, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York), Nikolaus Hirsch (director, Städelschule, Frankfurt), Candice Hopkins (curator, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), Koyo Kouoh (administrator, curator and critic, Dakar), Mian Mian (author, Shanghai), Matthias Mühling (Head of Department Collections /Exhibitions/ Research, Städtische Galerie im Lembachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich), Wendelien van Oldenborgh (artist, Rotterdam), Adriano Pedrosa (independent curator, editor and writer, Saõ Paulo), Tariq Ramadan (Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University), Aaron Schuster (philosopher, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin), Tirdad Zolghadr (independent critic and curator, New York, teacher at Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College).
And with New-York-based artist, Rainar Ganahl, as a special respondent from the audience.

Witte de With symposium
19-20 November
Wendelien van Oldenborgh masterclass
21 November

Marx in Arcadia

Kostis Velonis, Memorial to Collective Utopia, 2010, wood, acrylic, watercolour, 141 x 80 x 54 cm

"Marx in Arcadia",AD Gallery, Athens
Opening: Monday 15 November 2010, 8:00 p.m.
Exhibition duration: 15 November – 15 January 2011

Athens Dialogues : Democracy & Politeia

Democracy & Politeia

Athens, where the conference will take place, more than any other city-state of ancient Greece made an acknowledged contribution to the notions of democratic governance. This was both idealistic and realistic, emphasizing the importance of the individual but also the collectivity. The notion of human dignity was repeatedly stressed as was that of equality even though the latter was also severely circumscribed by the different social attitudes of the ancient world towards slavery, women and the rights of semi-citizens or immigrants. The understanding of justice and what purpose it should serve also received nuanced and sophisticated treatment that still informs legal thinking. Similarly pioneering was the realization that in a democracy citizens have duties as well as rights, towards the state but also towards ëeternalí laws, touching the sensitive issue of the permissible limits of civil disobedience.

These ideas evolved in the forum and in the gymnasium, during private social gatherings, and through the medium of essays or theatrical dramas and even comedies. The different media used to give them birth themselves became sources of inspiration and imitation as other panels will examine. The ideas of good and bad government were thus to figure prominently in the arts of the Renaissance among others. In short, the notions of the ancient world spread and touched not only lawyers and politicians but also thinkers and creators from all disciplines.

To these eternal topics the ancient Greeks did not always provide the final answers. Indeed, most would agree that these “big questions” are incapable of single or conclusive responses. But the ancient Greek world invariably handled them in insightful but also in a contradictory way which makes the richness of the ancient legacy greater and the need to explore its relevance to today’s unstable and highly materialistic times even more urgent.

Chair: Professor Konstantinos Svolopoulos, Professor of Modern Greek history, President of the Academy of Athens and Professor Anastasios-Ioannis Metaxas (co-chair), Professor Emeritus of Political Science of the University of Athens and Director of the Political Communication Workshop

Main Speakers: Ryan Balot, Angelos Chaniotis, John Dunn, Pierre Delvolvé, John Dunn, Jean-Louis Ferrary, Ljubomir Maksimovic, Anastasios-Ioannis Metaxas (co-chair), Sarah Monoson, Josiah Ober, Claudia Rapp

Onasssis Cultural Centre, 26 Nov.
www.athensdialogues.org

The Contemporary Artist as a Role Model in a Crisis of Competence

In a universe of increasing incompetence, in which amateurism flourishes, the contemporary artist offers an interesting role model. Society can learn much from the ways in which the contemporary artist makes his ignorance effective.

As a profession, contemporary art occupies a special position. Lacking a clear standard of craftsmanship, it is not a real métier: neither technical nor aesthetic criteria exist that can help identify a ‘competent work of art’. In this respect contemporary visual art differs from other art forms, such as music or dance, that still have solid minimum criteria for technique and skill.

Should artists be able to hold a hammer? In contemporary art even insiders rarely agree about criteria of artistic quality. A particular artist’s work may be judged as pathetic wreckage by some and at the same time as a revolutionary new aesthetic by others. This lack of consensus about quality and artistic merit will continue to provide material for Gerrit Komrij to write cynical newspaper columns. It is, however, actually a fascinating characteristic that makes the contemporary artist an unexpected role model in today’s society.

At the moment, we see around us a real, overall crisis of competence. The most distressing examples of this have shown up in the financial sector, with banks, investors and insurance companies (‘The incompetence is baffling,’ according to financial markets supervisor Hans Hoogervorst, last April). Major infrastructural projects that have stranded or failed completely also indicate a fundamental lack of expertise, in this case on the part of government authorities and project developers. ‘When the government stopped building bridges and roads, knowledge and expertise shifted to market players,’ according to the city of Almere's alderman, Adri Duivesteijn (NRC Handelsblad, 12 December 2009). But those market players themselves also seem to be failing. Contractors and subcontractors building the sheet piling for Amsterdam’s new metro line have made tremendous blunders, with well-publicized, disastrous consequences. From other sectors of society, including elementary education and forensic psychiatry, painful cases of incompetence are being reported as well.

Universities, colleges, government bodies and other organizations are meanwhile obsessed by the phantom of ‘excellence’. But the more they repeat this mantra, beating the drum of the knowledge economy, the clearer it becomes that society as a whole finds itself in a crisis of competence.

Incompetence is certainly a thing of every age. The current crisis may be due to the fact that technical, managerial and economic systems have become so complex and intertwined that minor incidents are more likely to have far-reaching consequences. Automation has in any case proven to be no remedy for the unreliable human factor. In fact, it only multiplies the consequences of human failure.

There is also a clear ideological component. Within the neoliberal network economy, knowledge tends to dissolve in a quick succession of temporary projects, causing a loss of focus and concentration. The durable institutional logic of the state, the school or the museum evaporates in an ever more rapid sequence of reorganizations and management trends. To control and innovate the organization itself has become an obsession that is making managers lose sight of more substantial tasks.

In this context, the contemporary artist is an interesting role model. In a universe of increasing incompetence, only artists know how to make their lack of expertise productive. Contemporary artists are professionals without a profession, craftspeople without a craft, dilettantes with infinite potential. Only artists routinely subject the professional content of their discipline to debate, as part of their everyday practice. With each new work they make, artists embrace the crisis of competence instead of shifting it to others, as is the case in most other domains. They accept complete responsibility, in defiance of the neoliberal tendency to delegate and outsource. By definition, the creation of a work of art entails a critical test of the criteria of creative competence and artistic skill. Thus visual art can be considered as a form of societal meta-production: any contemporary work of art is like a condensed re-enactment of the crisis of competence in a public context.

What are the implications for art schools? The ideal visual art curriculum neither denies nor conceals the lack of substance at the heart of the artistic profession, nor does it anxiously try to renew or reconstruct some lost craft. Instead it makes this fundamental condition the focal point of a permanently reflective practice. However paradoxically, the true competence of the artist is the ability to work with his or her own incompetence. Art students have to learn to face the indeterminate nature of their profession, without recourse to generally valid methods and techniques.

In the mundane reality of both politics and business, such critical capacity has been lost. Due to pressure from voters, shareholders, consumers and the media, the fear of making mistakes has overtaken all other concerns. Even if the contemporary artist is not able to come up with a general solution to this dilemma, the artistic attitude in dealing with (in)competence is well worth a closer look. Art education may be the only place where this particular type of ‘competency training’ exists.

Pascal Gielen teaches art sociology and cultural policy at the University of Groningen and is Professor of Arts in Society at the Fontys University of Fine and Performing Arts in Tilburg. Camiel van Winkel is Professor of Visual Art at AKV|St.Joost, Avans University in Den Bosch. They are currently doing a joint research project on the hybridization of contemporary artistic practice.

Translated from the Dutch by Mari Shields.

Source:Metropolis M, 2010 No5 October / November.

Folk Indian Cats

The Book "I Like Cats" emerges from the brushstrokes of the best-known tribal and folk artists of India. Silk screen-printed by hand, this book features an impressive gallery of irresistible felines across a variety of Indian tribal art traditions, and comes with a framable screenprint. Carrying on in the comic verse tradition, the witty and jubilant poetry-tales of Indian writer Anushka Ravishankar are internationally acclaimed, widely translated, and honoured with innumerable awards. Art by various artists from the finest tribal and folk traditions from across India.
Tara Books

Where Are the Great Women Pop Artists?

It's clear that female artists of the '60s were pushed to the margins of art history. But a series of exhibitions showcasing their work reveals how un-Pop many of them were

Western art history has nearly always been constructed as a narrative in which women are viewed through male eyes—as subjects and as objects. From the Venus of Willendorf to Raphael's Madonnas, Rubens's raped Sabines, Picasso's jilted lovers, and de Kooning's man-eating females, the standard gaze was that of the male, and what it gazed upon was the objectified female body.

Suddenly art history (once again) finds itself being turned on its head as another aspect of the past gets unearthed and revised. This time the subject is the supposedly secondary—that is, the unacknowledged, neglected, subservient, auxiliary—role of the women Pop artists who were at work in the pre-Linda Nochlin days, when the textbook-writing ­Jansons and nearly everyone else thought that only men could create masterpieces.

Since the 1960s, when women artists started defining themselves and re-narrating the history, we have slowly become aware of their contributions. Lately museums have gotten into the act. It may be sheer coincidence, but exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Kunsthalle Vienna this autumn both focus on the women artists who were identified with Pop art, while an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York tackles a related subject: painting and feminism (with a bit of Jewishness thrown into the mix). These shows complicate the categories of what's Pop and what's not, opening up a slew of new questions.

Curator Angela Stief, in her catalogue introduction to "Power Up: Female Pop Art," at the Kunsthalle Vienna (through February 20), points out that while female Pop artists resemble their male colleagues, oscillating between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, commodity cult and capitalist critique, they remain "militant, critical, and outstanding in their positions as feminist pioneers."


Martha Rosler's photomontage Vacuuming Pop Art, 1967–72, addresses politics and the male gaze.

If Pop art by women artists was hardly ever simply Pop, what was it? The female artists of those years were, willingly or unwittingly, involved in a major change in content, context, and medium. They were concerned with shifting both the objectifying male gaze and the objectified female gaze. As these exhibitions point out, the women whose art skirted around Pop—and can be somewhat misleadingly called Pop—complicate matters, which isn't a bad thing.

Pop art in the hands and minds of women artists is intricately linked to the rise of feminist art, political and sociological art, art that involves decoration and craft and female sexuality—and thus the subsequent future of 20th-century art. These artists weren't tangential: they were crucial. And what is most interesting about their work can be found in its disparities and divergences from Pop. What women were doing was another kind of art, and to call their work Pop does a disservice to it.

Pop art in the hands of male artists was cartoony, exaggerated, sometimes cynical. Involved with male sexuality, it had to violate something, blowing a cliché so far out of proportion that it could be reconstituted as an aspect of formalism. Pop art was about fast foods, fast babes, fast mechanically reproductive processes such as the silkscreen and the Benday dot, and blatant commercial images and ads. It was about all-American banality. And it was an almost exclusively male movement. Back in the days when Mel Ramos could paint Chiquita Banana pinups, Tom Wesselmann could sex up his still lifes by putting sunburned nudes with pubic hair into them, and Allen Jones could obnoxiously use a lifelike playmate on her knees as a coffee table, Marjorie Strider was making shaped canvases featuring 3-D breasts that were smartly violating the picture plane as if to one-up the men, who never noticed. And Elaine Sturtevant, a few months after Warhol created his first flower paintings in 1964, borrowed Warhol's silkscreens to replicate those paintings and inserted her renditions into group shows—along with her George Segal and Frank Stella look-alikes—to make Pop into something more conceptual, a decade or more before the word "appropriation" would emerge.

Unlike the previous macho AbEx generation, which also counted female artists like Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elaine de Kooning, the Pop movement, strictly speaking, did not have high-profile female participation. Marisol, Strider, and Sturtevant were sometimes included in Pop group shows in New York, but they never wholly fit. Pop art was about banality, disaffection, and detachment, and the ideas of the women artists diametrically opposed these themes. Philosophically liberated, they thought for themselves, radicalized their art, and imploded the meaning of Pop.

If Chryssa was Pop because she used neon, does that mean Dan Flavin was too? If Vija Celmins was Pop, wasn't she at the same time a budding photorealist? If Yayoi Kusama was Pop, what do we make of her phallic obsessions and cosmic polka dots? If Niki de Saint Phalle was Pop, where do her big folk-art mamas fit? And if Lee Lozano's pre-conceptual work and Faith Ringgold's pre-quilt paintings can be dragged into the orbit of Pop, we can only throw up our hands and conclude that we desperately need a more descriptive term.

Women's Pop-related art had its own intentions. It could be about obsession, cosmic design, or, in the case of Marisol, folk arts and crafts. Usually it opposed or dissected the male gaze. The male artists may have been content to flirt with post-industrial Minimalism, but back in the days when femininity equaled domesticity, Martha Rosler mailed out a series of narrative recipes. They involved, for example, the dislocations of a Mexican maid who didn't have a clue as to what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was, and pieced together images of suburban kitchens invaded by the horrors of the Vietnam war. On the other hand, Warhol, whose latent political content went unremarked for years, didn't do decorative camouflage painting until the 1980s.

Now "Power Up: Female Pop Art" makes it quite clear that an idea can be about politics as well as about female sexuality. It ­narrows its scope to nine artists, some of whom—such as the Belgian Evelyne Axell—have remained seriously under-known in New York. The star of this exhibition is Sister Corita Kent, the nun who used signs, slogans, and packaging as a form of political protest.

Twenty-five female artists, including Axell and some other unfamiliar Europeans, are in the Brooklyn Museum's "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" (on view through January 9), and it's hard to resist an impertinent question: Would anyone ever dream of titling a show of male Pop artists "Subversive Seducers"? And in an exhibition that includes a number of arguably un-Pop artists, where is Yoko Ono, Lee Bontecou, Carolee Schneemann—or even Colette, who knowingly transformed herself into the objectified object of the male gaze?

The impact of feminist thought permeates works by 27 artists in the Jewish Museum's "Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism" (through January 30). Contributors range from Louise Nevelson, Rosalyn Drexler, and Eva Hesse to Nancy Spero, Hannah Wilke, and Nicole Eisenman. Rosler is oddly absent, but then, conceptual photomontage probably doesn't count as painting per se. But kudos to this exhibition for anointing three token males as honorary feminists: Leon Golub, who was always attuned to power, persecution, and victimhood; Robert Kushner, who made the most of feminized pattern and decoration; and Cary Leibowitz, with his self-deprecating gay Jewish humor.

Unacknowledged or under-­acknowledged at the time, relegated to the margins or forgotten by history, the profound female artists of their time inverted the male gaze and anticipated the future while male Pop artists were getting stuck in their own styles. The tenuous thread that ties them all together is linked to feminism and the contemporary art that was still to come. And now, in these exhibitions in which nearly everyone spills out of the arbitrary category of Pop, what at first may seem curatorial weakness becomes great strength. History is again being distorted, manipulated, and revised, for better and worse, but such are its innate fictions. And we have to conclude that the work by these woman artists doesn't seem nearly as dated as that of their male counterparts. Shifting the gaze, indeed.

Text by Kim Levin
Source: ARTnews, November 2010

Power Up

Dorothy Iannone. The Story of Bern, or Showing Colors, 1970.

"The next great moment in history is ours!" Dorothy Iannone

Rediscovering outstanding women Pop artists, POWER UP fulfills Dorothy Iannone’s combative promise after fifty years. The show aims at the reinterpretation of an art movement that until today has primarily been associated with male protagonists. Plastic, loud colors, reduced forms, and graphic contours – the nine women artists’ works on display resemble those of their male colleagues in many respects. Whereas their works appeal to the taste of the masses, these artists, as pioneers of Feminism, have remained belligerent and critical. They reveal the consumer culture’s superficiality, exposing the commodity myth as an empty shell like Christa Dichgans, ironically transforming everyday objects to oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth, or exploring mass media clichés and superstar constructions like Rosalyn Drexler. Like Sister Corita, a committed peace activist, they took a clear stand on the sixties’ social and political events such as the Vietnam
War.

The exhibition pursues its political perspective in those instances where the era’s current notions of what a woman is are revised by different views: Kiki Kogelnik and Marisol describe the corset in which the representation of women by themselves and by others is caught, while Evelyne Axell or Dorothy Iannone provocatively display the nude body, love, and sexuality, and, like Niki de Saint Phalle, attract the viewer’s attention with sophisticated modes of self-presentation.

Evelyne Axell, Sister Corita, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, Niki de Saint Phalle

Curator: Angela Stief

POWER UP - Female Pop Art
KUNSTHALLE wien,
November 05th, 2010 - February 20th, 2011

Zeroing In

"I am a landscape," he said,
"a landscape and a person walking in that landscape.
There are daunting cliffs there,
and plains glad in their way
of brown monotony. But especially
there are sinkholes, places
of sudden terror, of small circumference
and malevolent depths."
"I know," she said. "When I set forth
to walk in myself, as it might be
on a fine afternoon, forgetting,
sooner or later I come to where sedge
and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps,
mark the bogland, and I know
there are quagmires there that can pull you
down, and sink you in bubbling mud."
"We had an old dog," he told her, "when I was a boy,
a good dog, friendly. But there was an injured spot
on his head, if you happened
just to touch it he'd jump up yelping
and bite you. He bit a young child,
they had to take him to the vet's and destroy him."
"No one knows where it is," she said,
"and even by accident no one touches it:
It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my way
preoccupied through my life, crossing my hills,
sleeping on green moss of my own woods,
I myself without warning touch it,
and leap up at myself--"
"--or flinch back
just in time"

"Yes, we learn that
It's not terror, it's pain we're talking about:
those places in us, like your dog's bruised head,
that are bruised forever, that time
never assuages, never."


Denise Levertov

Can ecosystem engineering prevent ecological catastrophe?

For over a decade, University of Arizona ecologist Michael Rosenzweig has preached a gospel of what he calls reconciliation ecology: designing everyday landscapes to support as many plants and animals as possible.

He says it’s the only way of averting ecological catastrophe, which standard approaches to preserving nature will only slow. Some conservationists have embraced the idea. Others think it’s rose-tinted dreaming. With a computer program directing the design, reconciliation ecology will get its test in Tucson, Arizona.

“We decided to turn Tucson into a lab of a million people,” said Rosenzweig, who spoke on reconciliation ecology Aug. 3 at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh. “We’re not trying to restore old habitats. We’re trying to invent new ones.”

The project’s roots extend back to 1995, when Rosenzweig wrote a textbook on island biogeography, a field of research describing ecological dynamics on ocean islands. Over the last several decades, the research had been applied to terrestrial islands formed by human development. The findings were discouraging. Ecologists predicted the loss of 40 to 50 percent of all species. After reviewing the literature, Rosenzweig thought they were optimistic. He put the figure at 90 percent.

More island-like preserves and parks wouldn’t fix this, he reasoned. It required a “reconciliation” with nature inside human-dominated biomes that were largely ignored by conservationists, and cover almost every piece of non-tundra, non-desert land.

Rosenzweig pointed to piecemeal examples of this approach, like ecosystems flourishing amidst shade-grown coffee canopies, or the wetlands of southern Czechoslovakia’s fish farms. The strategy took shape in his 2003 Win-Win Ecology: How The Earth’s Species Can Survive In The Midst of Human Enterprise.

Reviews were mixed. There wasn’t much doubt about Rosenzeig’s diagnosis, but his solution was questioned. Wrote then-Conservation International ecologist Thomas Brooks in a review, “I genuinely fear that Michael Rosenzweig’s theories and examples are less broadly applicable than he argues. And yet I want to believe that he is right.”

In the intervening years, Rosenzweig hasn’t backed down. “The attitude we’ve had for 100 years is, let’s save habitats. We’ll have remnant patches and call them national parks and wildlife refuges. That slows extinction down, but it doesn’t change the endpoint,” he said. Mass extinctions won’t be avoided “unless we turn our attention to the habitats we haven’t paid attention to, that we haven’t even called habitats.”

In Tucson, those ignored habitats are backyards, schoolyards and the mosaic of neighbourhoods and businesses typical of America’s suburban sprawl. Rosenzweig wants to arrange their habitats with a program built on a database of life-history characteristics on 300 local plant species, plus natural history records gathered from a century of research on Tumamoc Hill, an 870-acre island of relatively undisturbed desert west of downtown.

People can decide what species they want to have. The algorithms tell them what other species they’ll need. “It calculates what the relationships are, and which need to be maintained in order for species of interest to live,” said Rosenzweig. Calculations are modified according to local soil type and topography.

Rosenzweig plans to do an “alpha test” at sites on Tumamoc Hill. Another is now taking place in the Barrio Kroeger Lane, a poor neighbourhood set in the Santa Cruz River floodplain. Native, rainwater-harvesting Sonoran Desert vegetation is being planted to lessen summer floods. It should also bring back four local hummingbird species.

If that works, other Tucson neighbourhoods could follow suit.

“There is so much potential to harmonise people and nature” in this approach, wrote ecologist Gretchen Daily in an email. As head of Stanford University’s conservation biology centre, she studies how to predict ecological changes in human-directed landscapes, a research branch known as “countryside biogeography.”

“There is a fair amount of scepticism about reconciliation being a viable model, which is why this is an important experiment,” said Madhu Khatti, an urban ecologist at California State University, Fresno.

Rosenzweig envisions the tested program becoming a tool for developers, neighborhood associations, businesses, anybody with a backyard -- first in Tucson, then elsewhere, as other ecologists localise the code.

“I can’t put out a general rule to fit every toon, but I can put out a general method, and program it,” he said. “That’s what we’ve done. This has to be done for every area.”

Of course, computer-aided ecosystem design is far from what John Muir or Edward Abbey had in mind, and old-fashioned preserves are needed for true wilderness. But as Khatti noted, “there’s very few places in the world where humans can be completely removed.”

“If you produce an ecological theatre that meets the animals halfway, they’ll do the rest,” said Rosenzweig.

Text by Brandon Keim, 16 August 2010.
Source: Wired.com

Peasant and Stockbroker

Peasant and Stockbroker, 2010
rock, wood, acrylic