Saturday, October 18, 2014
The Change Has To Come From Deep Within Us
In Europe I was a strict nonfigurative artist. We, the postwar generation, did not trust anything our forefathers represented anymore. We started from scratch: bombed cities, everything we were made to believe in had been proved to be an illusion. Our grandfathers, fathers, cousins and older brothers did not return from the war, or if they did, they were broken. Broken limbs, broken hearts, broken ideals—for the rest of their lives they were verstummt, silenced, in a traumatic, paralyzed sense.
Now, that was not because they had “lost the war.” There is always a loser and a winner in battle. It was the awakening, the realization [of] what they had given their lives [for] and taken the lives of others. The soldiers were not aware of the Hitler regime’s human crimes. Only after the war had they seen the photos of the concentration camps.
So we grew up in these desperate, hungry times, and to paint figures, landscapes, still lifes, at least to me and my closest artist friends, seemed ridiculous.
Also, as a child I saw around every living being a colorful moving aura (even around so-called dead things like stones), so when I saw Art, paintings of reality, I missed the color field.
Later, when my visionary childhood vanished away through schooling and teaching, when I had to learn the reduced interpretation of the world, I refused.
Before I knew what-for, I resisted the normative dogmas of what one does, thinks, feels, or what one does not. An ambiguity, a multi-dimensional, integral understanding: things are not either/or. They are 1+1=3. Non-dualistic.
That’s why, later in my artistic life, I was so happy to have found the optical glasses, which, when put over my written statements in my lens-boxes would distort and change and make relative my statements. They were not meant as absolute truth, they were “in-between” results of a thinking and feeling process.
So, back to my early art life. Whatever I had started as an artist was not considered art when I did it. My early cloth material “sheet-lightsheets” were regarded as female "knitting” crafts;
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| Mary Bauermeister-GroBes Lichttuch |
my stone pieces as pure nature.
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| Mary Bauermeister-Untitled
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| Mary Bauermeister-Quadrupel Four Stone Pictures on Magnetic Plate 256 variations possible-34x34cm
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Then in 1962 I had my first one-man show in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The director, Jan Willem Sandberg, had seen a “concept composition” which I did as a student in [composer Karlheinz] Stockhausen’s composition class, Score for Visual Artists.
What the interpreters of music do, play the notes of the composer, I brought into the field of art. The plan was part of a multimedia gesamtkunstwerk, so many artists from all fields could interpret the score. This strange piece of concept interested Sandberg and I had my first show.
At the same time in the museum there was a little show of American art—[Jasper] Johns, [Richard] Stankiewicz, [Alfred] Leslie and [Robert] Rauschenberg’s goat. I was so flabbergasted by this piece, and I knew, where this is called Art, I will and want to be!
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| Robert Rauschenberg-Monogram (a symbol of lust)? |
I went to Sandberg’s office [and] asked him to buy one of my show’s pieces, so I could afford a ticket to America. He did, and I ended up in USA October 1962. Six months on Long Island, [then] 1963, New York, National Arts Club, to which I transported all kinds of natural material, stones, sand, pebbles, tree trunks and many “ready-trouvier”—that’s what I called my found objects, which I hung on the wall of my first New York show, Galleria Bonino, 1963-64, as an homage to Marcel Duchamp (who I consider my teacher, and who liked my work very much.)
I stayed in New York and did many shows, was bought by many museums, and interrelated with the Art Scene, the artists and the critics. In the United States I gave up my resistance to figurative elements.
I stayed in New York and did many shows, was bought by many museums, and interrelated with the Art Scene, the artists and the critics. In the United States I gave up my resistance to figurative elements.
You cannot illustrate something absurd or abnormal without reference to something else. So surrealism needs realism to play with and against (like atheism needs theism)—to make a drawing of a piano where the keys are “out of order” and the pianist has six fingers on one hand, four on the other: multi-meaning, ambiguity, indeterminism.
So I gave into figurativeness, and I also could not resist becoming politically involved—Bob Dylan’s songs, Joan Baez, the Vietnam War, money, greed, inhuman exploitation, together with a clean, anesthetic morality. The Cold War, the “fellow traveler,” the “yellow danger,” the Chinese, were the evil ones—an enemy was always needed to distract from one’s own shallowness. Pop Art as a warning, making banalities the subject of art.
From 1968 to 1971 I did several pieces with figurative elements, drawings with political themes and titles, which show my intentions: (1) Don’t defend your freedom with poisoned mushrooms,1964, hinting at the atom bomb mushroom cloud, dedicated to John Cage, a pacifist and enthusiastic mushroom hunter, whose work I had performed in 1960 with Cage, [Merce] Cunningham, [David] Tudor performing.
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| Mary Bauermeister-Don't defend your freedom with poisoned Mushrooms - original drawing maybe?(source in German-no translation) |
(2) I’m a pacifist, but war photographs are too beautiful, 1966, hinting at the beauty of colors of liquid bombing, dropping colorful phosphors from attacking airplanes and setting fires in the cities a [conventional] bomb could have never achieved.
As most of the German old cities had wooden roofs, a whole street would burn in seconds and no [escape] was possible. We lived in the forest near Cologne and watched these bombs at night. How can something so beautiful like these colors be so destructive? The piece is in New York with Mrs. Bonino [. . . ].
No fighting on Christmas,1967-68, subtitled, “Kill for freedom, fight for peace.” [. . .] (4)China Tinte “Import Forbidden”,1967-68, a sculpture which is now on consignment with Achim Moeller Gallery, New York. (5)Yellow Flowers, 1968, an assemblage of many elements, a standing box, a collage of yellow shapes which look like flowers from a distance, but up close turn out to Chinese people hurting each other.(Moeller has one of these flowers with the China Tinte piece.)
(6) US Asian hero, 1968, and (7)The Great Fallout Society, about 10 pieces, lens-boxes, which I did in 1969 and do not have any or only a few documents. The Great Fallout Society, “fallout” = atomic waste, and the other meaning of our whole Western decadence.
The intriguing details of Bauermeister’s lens box encourage viewers to look closely and puzzle at it from multiple angles. The arrangement of conical and spherical forms and stones is inhabited by a grotesque population of sketchy, monstrous heads, clusters of inked eyeballs, and caricatures of American political figures from the Vietnam War era, including conservative Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, and President Richard Nixon, who took office in 1969. The work’s title refers to the social reform programs instigated during Lyndon B. Johnson’s Presidency that were never fully implemented — a circumstance that critics ascribed to the escalating costs of the Vietnam War. The multilingual patches of “yes” and “no,” mathematical equations, and strings of phrases describing the “germ-free…drugged society” that appear throughout #175 convey Bauermeister’s view that the government’s interest in Vietnam had tainted American society. Together, the text and images suggest that the state distorts reality such that nothing can be taken for granted or at face value.
-Written by Katherine Eisen, Class of 2012
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| #175 The Great Society - Detail 1 |
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| #175 The Great Society - Detail 2 |
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| #175 The Great Society - Detail 3 |
Are we as humans, the way we behave, not ourselves the fallout, the poison, the “mistake” of evolution? Are we at the verge of collective suicide? and if yes, why? Is the human experiment still valid, meaning does it lead to a peaceful, harmonious integration of spirit and matter—“the sons of God saw the daughters of the earth . . . ” [Gen. 6:2] and we the result of this marriage.
Can we tame our reptile brain and stop fighting—can we bring this experiment to a fruitful end, or do we end ourselves in atomic, ecological, economic disasters?
All these influences were urgent in the late Sixties. The Hippie Movement. The Student Revolt. The anti-dogma, [. . .] anti-establishment protests. And above all, “Mr. Clean, Mr. Proper,” keep it antiseptic, as long as it’s germ-free: a symbol of moral cleanliness, self-importance, arrogance, hubris.
Oswald Spengler, in “Can we be saved?”
Yes we can, but not from outside. The change has to come from deep within us.
These were the thoughts I had when creating "The Great Society".
The title meant, of course, in an ironic or sarcastic way (although my sarcasm is never nihilistic—the beauty of sunshine, the serenity of love, the innocence of children, the desire to contact the absolute—the depths to which humans can reach in their search always for one hope.
The bottle is half-full, not half-empty).
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I hope you have enjoyed this and are having a wonderful Saturday. For more on Mary you can see a lovely article written about where she is living here.
Inspiration Sunday is tomorrow of course.
'Til then!
~Alex
Friday, October 17, 2014
"Oh sure...how could that be?"
If you have just come across this blog and want to start in the A's, then just click here and you will go right to that entry.
Magdalena Abakanowicz is the first artist I talked about. She was born in Poland in 1930.
The artist we are speaking about today is Mary Bauermeister who was born in Germany in 1934 and lived in Frankfurt. Her mother was a singer and her father a professor.
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| Mary Bauermeister |
What was it maybe like if you weren't Jewish?...growing up there and then?
Hitler came into power in Germany in 1933, one year before Mary was born. So her childhood - until the war ended anyway - had the Nazi propaganda machine buzzing away in the background.
If you want a better picture in your mind what that could have been like, here is a good overview from the History Learning Site.
I wanted to mention the propaganda machine because says in the interview (portion) that I will have for us tomorrow: "The soldiers were not aware of the Hitler regime's human crimes. Only after the war had they seen the photos of the concentration camps."
In my head I'm thinking "Oh sure...how could that be?"
But after reading about the propaganda the Germans were subjected to and understanding that it was far easier to be cut off from the rest of the world - back then - than it is today, I can see how that could have been the perception of someone who was a child during that time...
I think the adults (as the majority of them wouldn't have voted Hitler into office had they the choice) living in Frankfurt then were not so fooled...but.
You know. I wasn't there.
So I have tried to set the stage somewhat for Mary Bauermeister who turned 80 years just last month.
I want to share with you a portion of that transcript (where I read that quote). It's from an interview between Timothy Cahill, editor of Art Conservator magazine and Mary Bauermeister...but it will have to wait for tomorrow's post - as today I have droned on long enough.
But - tomorrow you will see why I found this portion fascinating. I think it gives such a wonderful picture of what she was thinking and feeling through years of the creation of much of her work. And. I will search for and insert photographs of the works she mentions in the transcript because I wanted us to have a visual too.
Doesn't that sound like great fun?
Okay!
'Til tomorrow then! Hope you are enjoying your FRIDAY!
~Alex
Thursday, October 16, 2014
A Future Without Fear
But what if we human animals didn't create other things to be afraid of? By "other things" I mean, additional things besides what we would just be afraid of because we're in a biological body that has it's fair share of idiosyncrasies, health-wise.
Just look how scared we are about the ebola virus right now. On top of the things that create fear because of "just being" - why add to that? But humans DO...all the time.
War, for instance. Do we really need to add that to what we would just normally be worried about?
Just curious. If you've been reading this blog for very long you probably have been able to tell a thing or two about me. ONE. I'm not an intellectual. TWO. Not a philosopher. Not a deep thinker really and fairly naïve and somewhat simple and quite literal and probably over serious.
Curious too. One of the reasons I'm writing this blog. I'm curious about the artists who have come before me and about the artists who are here making art now...curious about why they make the art they make.
So. I've been researching each artist listed as having been in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007 and I am now to the artists on the list who's last names begin with the letter "B".
Judy Baca is the first artist in the B's.
Baca was born in Los Angeles in 1946 to Mexican-American parents and was raised by her mother, two aunts and her grandmother (who was a shaman, or what would in Mexico be called a curaderisma). You have probably seen her work out in public somewhere because she's predominantly a muralist...and a very prolific one.
In the 70's she brought L.A. street gangs together to paint The Great Wall of LA.
Closer to home, there is a Judy Baca mural in Denver International Airport in the Jeppesen Terminal, Level 5, (Southeast).
This project is an amazing undertaking that started several years ago. On Judy Baca's website is this quote from Frances Pohl describing the project's intent:
"[The World Wall - A Vision of the Future Without Fear] Explores the material and spiritual transformation of an international society seeking peace. During the early stages of the production of this mural Baca read Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth, which argues that we must imagine the eventuality of nuclear war before we can change our destiny. She realized however, that in addition to being able to imagine nuclear destruction, we must also be able to imagine peace, particularly as an active rather than passive concept. The eight 10’ by 30’ panels arranged in a circle that make up The World Wall attempt such imagining."I love that Baca so stridently emphases that what we can imagine, we can make real.
For this project though, she has had her work cut out for her. Take the panel for this project that was to be conceived and painted by a team of artists for the Israeli/Palestinian collaboration panel. This from the 1998 New York Times International article written by Ethan Bronner:
"It was a noble plan: Three peace-loving artists from conflicting groups -- an Israeli Jew, an Israeli Arab and a Palestinian -- would produce a mural depicting a future without fear, a symbolic guide to trying to live together in this disputed land. But the process proved far more tortured than any of them imagined, a microcosm of mistrust and betrayal that mirrored the hostilities they had set out to overcome."
Inheritance Compromise", by artists Ahmed Bweerat, Suliman Monsour and Adi Yekutieli were added in the spring of 1998. You can see some of it in the above photo.
Judy Baca is works with children too, helping them shape their own identities. Check out the video below about her 2013 Emancipation Project:
Hope you have enjoyed learning a bit about this amazing activist/artist, Judy Baca today. She has a fantastic website where you could spend hours learning more about her past and ongoing projects and more about her, of course.
Wishing you a day of making real the best of what you have imagined.
'Til tomorrow!
~Alex
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Who Are You?
Who are you and how are you defined and who defines who you are and why?
You decide (maybe you decide and maybe someone else decides) and then you can be that. Buy the clothes, listen to the music, drive that type of car and live...there.
If you were standing there in those boots with the others in those other boots, who would you be?
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| Eleanor Antin - Carving-A Traditional Sculpture (1972) |
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| Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova from "The Ballerina and the Poet" |
These are the questions Eleanor Antin's art works make me think of.
Here is a video of an interview with her (brief) and also her documentary fiction of Eleanora Antinova from the Archives of Modern Art-West Coast Video Art-MOCAtv
Published on Oct 15, 2012. Eleanor Antin uses fictional characters, autobiography, and narrative to invent histories and explore what she calls "the slippery nature of the self." In her video works, Antin uses role-playing and artifice as conceptual devices, adopting archetypal personae—a ballerina, a king, a nurse—in her theatrical dramatizations of identity and representation. In this work of documentary fiction, an archivist attempts to put together the "lost years" of Eleanor Antinova, the once-celebrated black ballerina of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, when she returned to her native America to eke out a meager living in vaudeville and early cinema. Interview directed and edited by Peter Kirby. Music: "Lieder ohne Worte, Op. 62, MWV U161: No. 6, Allegretto grazioso" by Saulis Dirvanauskas
Hope you have enjoyed your mid-week blog today. :)
'Til tomorrow!
~Alex
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Hydragrammas in Malta
It's interesting that while I have been educating myself art and art history and artists how much I've been learning. It is fun to share it too and since over three thousand page views have occurred on this blog since I have started it, I figure I'm sharing all this with at least a few people.
If you have read anything this past week you know I've been researching each artist listed as having been in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007.
I wonder how many people are turned off by the word "feminist" these days? I wonder how is it defined...
Feminism: (Wikipedia definition) Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, cultural, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. A feminist advocates or supports the rights and equality of women.
Okay. I wonder how many people (worldwide) can claim to be a feminist? There is an interesting feminist e-zine online...I found it taking a peek to see if there was any good stories about Islamic feminism and found this written by Caryle Murphy.
That was fun. But. Why have I travelled (in my imagination) to Malta and the National Museum of Fine Arts this morning?
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| National Museum of Fine Arts-Malta photo by |
Sonia Andrade is a Brazilian artist and finding information about her is a bit tricky (because I am in the U.S. trying to find out information about her and she is Brazilian and so much written about her is in Spanish...). She is considered a "video artist" but she does other types of art too so I have been trying to find out what I can.
Her art is categorized as "Conceptual Art" and she is a pioneer of video art and was in a "groundbreaking exhibition" - the first for video art in Brazil - so I can see why she was included in the WACK! show as an important artist to have there.
From the CLARA Database for Women Artists (yes, this is a fabulous site!) it says:
The work of Brazilian installation artist Sonia Andrade explores the relationship between the spectator and the object through the medium of single-channel video. While her installation pieces also include drawings, photography, objects, and postcards, the use of video allows Andrade to exploit the standardized visual system perpetuated by mass media images. The humor and political commentary which Andrade incorporates into her video work provides a powerful critique of modern media culture.In a more recent article in the Rio (de Janeiro) Times - 2011 - Andrade is described as "one of Brazil’s most important and internationally recognized artists" in this story (by Saira Ansari) which was written to cover a retrospective show of her works given at the Municipal Art Center Hélio Oiticica.
In this story, Saira Ansari mentions that Andrade's Hydragrammas were "presented originally in 1993 at the National Museum of Fine Arts. Where is that? ...I wonder
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| Parte da série “Hydragrammas”: inventário arquetípico da arte - photo from Daniela Name's wordpress blog I wish I could translate it... |
Tomorrow I will be learning about Eleanor Antin. I hope you will too. :)
'Til then!
~Alex
Monday, October 13, 2014
Hear Me - the art of Helena Almeida
Well, hello there.
Chantal Akerman was next on the list of artists represented in the show WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution in 2007.
Was?
I know. I said I'd be talking about all the artists that were represented at the show. However, she is a filmmaker and, while I do think film making is (or can be) art, it is not the type of artist that I wish to discuss in my blog because it is a whole huge wonderful topic in and of itself...and it is, in many ways, a bit of a different business type in the art world.
If you want to read more about Chantal Akerman you might read this microsite webpage published by the Vancouver Art Gallery.
So, after Chantal Akerman, next on the list of artists is Helena Almeida, who is Portuguese and uses the images of herself, or parts of herself, in photographs to create her art.
She started painting in art school and had this issue with the 2 dimensionality of canvas. It was too limited for her and she responded to that limitation by using photographic images in very imaginative ways. She is in all of her artworks but not as "herself" but rather as part of the composition itself.
The simplicity of most of the imagery is a fantasy approaching inkblots sometimes. There is color sometimes, but mostly her work is black and white. The format of these is very large.
My favorite written words about this artist were found on the Helga de Alvear Gallery website:
The importance of Helena Almeida's oeuvre lies in the fact that it is impossible to confine the formal traits of her personal language within the fixed bounds of artistic disciplines and classifying labels. While it is true that the Portuguese artist expresses herself chiefly through photography—usually in a large-scale format and a sober black and white, and a sophisticated economy of compositional elements, the truth is that the photographic shot—taken by her husband Artur Rosa, is the last act in a long and rigorous work process involving a large number of preparatory drawings, diagrams and video recordings.
In point of fact her approach to the work of art is characterized by a complex plastic conception born out of an intimate desire to express herself in a “spatial” order—i.e., a need to transcend the limits of the picture. Photography, painting, drawing and performance come together in the unified field of self-representation, where Almeida's body becomes the instrument used to intervene, communicate and create space—both pictorial and architectural—in phenomenological terms.
Phenome.... ?? ..menological ?? What?
Well...
I hope you are enjoying the beginning of the week as much as I am on this sunny fall day.
'Til tomorrow!
~Alex
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Inspiration Sunday
I hope you are having a fabulous end of the week Sunday today. Enjoy!
"There is a kind of anxiety that arises about a separate culture, a separate group. How can we do that to art history? How can we take one half of the population and make it totally separate and different? Well, the point is, at the time in history when these things are subject to finger-pointing, one has to make an educational analysis. But certainly none of us ever wants to live separately. I mean, we just wanted to bring ourselves to the attention of the other gender. And of course, coming back to the discussion of power, we do live in a patriarchy, and the rules are set for us women, and we need to move, to integrate ourselves into the totality of society, and we need to bring our own point of view with us as we do that." ~Miriam Schapiro 1923- (Oral history interview with Miriam Schapiro, 1989 September 10, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)
Miriam Shapiro / The Twinning of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden / 1989 / 80″ x 116″, (triptych) / Acrylic on Canvas / Flomenhaft Gallery
“It is easy to follow, but it is uninteresting to do easy things. We find out about ourselves only when we take risks, when we challenge and question.”
~Magdalena Abakanowicz 1930-
Magdalena Abakanowicz-Coexistence 2002, burlap, resin
group of 14 pieces 175-215 x 58-65 x 60-90 cm
"So women are at the beginning of building a language, and not all women are conscious of it." ~Judy Chicago 1939-
Judy Chicago-Through the Flower 2-1973
Sprayed acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 in.
Collection of Diane Gelon
"Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity." ~Marina Abramović 1946-
Marina Abramović
"I see art-making, especially that which comes from the margins of the mainstream, as a site of resistance, a way of interrupting and intervening in those historical and cultural fields that continually exclude me, a sort of gathering of forces on the borders. For the dominant hegemonic stance that has worked to silence and subdue gender and ethnic difference has also silenced difference based on sexual preference." ~Harmony Hammond 1944- (From Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) by Whitney Chadwick)
Harmony Hammond-Affection 1984
"I think the neat thing about my life was that it all started from my experience, and we both know that even if I talk about my intellectual experience or my experience with people—anything outside of my studio—we know that the artist can provide nothing for society unless it comes from within. We really don’t admire artists who ape other artists; we don’t take them seriously. We say, “Ah, yes, we’ve seen this before.” So I think what’s been neat about my life is that I am totally aware that all my experiences come together in the studio, and afterwards I could branch out and share whatever it was that developed from the work in the studio. I could share it with others, and I did that in many, many ways." ~Miriam Schapiro 1923- (Oral history interview with Miriam Schapiro, 1989 September 10, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)
“I wanted to tell you that art is the most harmless activity of mankind. But I suddenly recalled that art was often used for propaganda purposes by totalitarian systems. I wanted to tell you about the extraordinary sensitivity of an artist, but I recalled that Hitler was a painter and Stalin used to write sonnets...“Each scientific discovery opens doors behind which we are confronted with new closed doors. Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence...” ~Magdalena Abakanowicz 1930-
"I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism." ~Judy Chicago 1939-
"Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind, born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality, in our mind." ~Magdalena Abakanowicz 1930-
"The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind." ~Marina Abramović 1946-
That is Inspiration Sunday for this week. Hope you have plans for an extra creative and astonishing week; elevate our minds and ask the right questions :)
'Til tomorrow!
~Alex
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