Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Art: A Confrontation in Time
The artist of the day is Lynda Benglis (warning - photos in link not suitable imagery for children or the workplace...IMHO) and I like her because it seems like she just played with materials that she thought would be interesting and just did what she felt she wanted to do with them and see where she could take them. She played - and artists should play, I think.
Since I'm feeling so ...you know. I decided to find a good interview and put in photos of the works mentioned...where I could find them.
So. I hope you enjoy this and are having a very good Tuesday.
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Marina Cashdan: You moved to New York from Louisiana in 1964. I understand you considered yourself to be an abstract artist. Does that still hold?
Lynda Benglis: I realize increasingly that I’m not completely an abstract artist or a so-called post-Minimalist. My work has always been either connected to events in my life, process, subjects or strong associations. It was Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe who first mentioned that he thought of my work as being symbolic or associative.
Lynda Benglis: I realize increasingly that I’m not completely an abstract artist or a so-called post-Minimalist. My work has always been either connected to events in my life, process, subjects or strong associations. It was Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe who first mentioned that he thought of my work as being symbolic or associative.
MC Only a few years after you arrived in New York, you were turning heads with your wax ‘paintings’ and latex pours, for example Night Sherbet (1968),
Contraband (1969),
Embryo II (1967),
and the ‘Pinto Series’ (1969–70). What attracted you to these materials?
LB They’ve all been used as a surface for human skin. Latex and rubber masks, wax effigies and wax in ritual. I was also interested in the fact that most of these materials derive from nature.
LB They’ve all been used as a surface for human skin. Latex and rubber masks, wax effigies and wax in ritual. I was also interested in the fact that most of these materials derive from nature.
MC You often speak about having been part of a group of artists who were wondering what to do and what the future was. Was this a response to that same question? Were you inventing, or reinventing something?
LB When I came to New York I was part of a close circle of artists who were asking questions about where art was going and what art could be. For my part, I think I was reinventing a process within painting; I was making my own paints with pigmented rubber and then later with pigmented polyurethane. I had this feeling that I wanted to stretch the image, to have the image confront the viewer rather than have it lie on a surface (i.e. canvas) or a board.
MC You talk about your early works as ‘little bombs’. Did these reflect your life experiences then?
LB They were bursting with energy! New York was larger than life for me then, because I had grown up in rural Louisiana, and even New Orleans appeared rural compared to New York. I found myself focusing on splashes on the sidewalk or the power of huge trucks passing as I was on my bicycle. And I absorbed that kind of energy. I wanted to give it back in response to something that was going on in a linear way – ideas that had to do with the development of painting and sculpture.
MC Yes, you often speak about proprioception (‘the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself’) and I feel that exists also in your early works Pinto (1969–70) and Totem (1971)
as well as more recent bronze fountain works. I practice yoga and those works make me think of deep breathing, the idea of seeing the colours of breath moving up and down the inside of the body. This brings to mind another work, Phantom,
which will be shown at the New Museum for the first time since it debuted at the Union Art Gallery at Kansas State University in 1971. Why was one part of this five-part installation separated?
LB I did it in the context of a wall 15 metres long and there were five pieces. For some reason, one of the pieces was sold and the owner didn’t want to let it go. It could not be shown without the fifth piece. But it’s only a relic now because it’s not within the context of the space that I created it in and it looks less interesting – like digging up an urn. Recently I received an apologetic card from the offspring of the widow who didn’t want to part with the fifth element.
LB When I came to New York I was part of a close circle of artists who were asking questions about where art was going and what art could be. For my part, I think I was reinventing a process within painting; I was making my own paints with pigmented rubber and then later with pigmented polyurethane. I had this feeling that I wanted to stretch the image, to have the image confront the viewer rather than have it lie on a surface (i.e. canvas) or a board.
MC You talk about your early works as ‘little bombs’. Did these reflect your life experiences then?
LB They were bursting with energy! New York was larger than life for me then, because I had grown up in rural Louisiana, and even New Orleans appeared rural compared to New York. I found myself focusing on splashes on the sidewalk or the power of huge trucks passing as I was on my bicycle. And I absorbed that kind of energy. I wanted to give it back in response to something that was going on in a linear way – ideas that had to do with the development of painting and sculpture.
MC Is Robert Pincus-Witten’s term for your work, ‘the frozen gesture’, a misnomer, because your work feels more like it’s living, an act as opposed to a confined object?
LB Well ‘the frozen gesture’ was something that I think both Yves Klein and Franz Kline had done. Symbolically, Klein jumped out the window: he was involved with gesture, process (his ‘women brushes’ painting with their bodies) and the symbolic (sponges soaked with his paint on monochromatic blue canvases). Kline took the gesture and made it iconographic. Frank Stella said that Kline was one of his favourite artists, so I think Stella himself took the canvas, the stretcher bars, and turned them on their side to make them painted objects, as did other artists who were using materials and geometry. They were presenting something that was, in a way, rebellious and sometimes simplistic, and it was called Minimalism. I saw that and understood it in the context of where art could go, but for me it was a statement that seemed very rococo. It was way out on a limb. I felt that art had to have more content, a multiplicity of meaning and associations. And even many of those so-called Minimal artists broke out of their own self-created mould!
LB Well ‘the frozen gesture’ was something that I think both Yves Klein and Franz Kline had done. Symbolically, Klein jumped out the window: he was involved with gesture, process (his ‘women brushes’ painting with their bodies) and the symbolic (sponges soaked with his paint on monochromatic blue canvases). Kline took the gesture and made it iconographic. Frank Stella said that Kline was one of his favourite artists, so I think Stella himself took the canvas, the stretcher bars, and turned them on their side to make them painted objects, as did other artists who were using materials and geometry. They were presenting something that was, in a way, rebellious and sometimes simplistic, and it was called Minimalism. I saw that and understood it in the context of where art could go, but for me it was a statement that seemed very rococo. It was way out on a limb. I felt that art had to have more content, a multiplicity of meaning and associations. And even many of those so-called Minimal artists broke out of their own self-created mould!
MC In Dave Hickey’s recent essay ‘A House Built in a Body: Lynda Benglis’s Early Work’ (2010), he writes: ‘As a friend of mine remarked at the time, foreshadowing the dildo photograph: “If she’d only been a guy, it would have been less intimidating.” But she wasn’t a guy […] and male artists have always been welcoming to female artists – except for artists like Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke, Bridget Riley and Joan Mitchell whose sheer talent and erotic charisma scared the hell out of everybody, women included.’ Do you think there’s an alpha female quality to your work that at the time scared your peers, not only referring to the 1974 Artforum advert but in the ‘erotic charisma’ and, more so, ‘sheer talent’ that they saw in your practice?
LB It’s only a person’s interior and exterior that is different. I think we all have both male and female qualities. Even my dog Pi is an alpha female, so she expresses herself in a very positive energetic way and some people like to define it as male or female – aggression is male and passivity is female – but these are both human and animal traits, and the world is made up of that. That’s in our psyche and it’s a balance in the works and in nature that you can’t easily categorize.
LB It’s only a person’s interior and exterior that is different. I think we all have both male and female qualities. Even my dog Pi is an alpha female, so she expresses herself in a very positive energetic way and some people like to define it as male or female – aggression is male and passivity is female – but these are both human and animal traits, and the world is made up of that. That’s in our psyche and it’s a balance in the works and in nature that you can’t easily categorize.
MC For those who may not have considered such things, did this confrontation and playfulness challenge even your peers? And has your work moved from that challenging position to one that’s more spiritual and contemplative? If so, was this conscious or unconscious?
LB I think that one context in which to explore that particular work is my addressing and confronting feminism. I was asking myself: ‘What are the questions that I should ask of this movement and myself and what I feel about it?’ The ideas that I proceeded to develop are not so politically conscious and have to be experienced on a different level. I’m inventing new processes in the making of sculpture and painting; I’m redefining how we see and think about form, so it’s a formal pursuit and not a pursuit about feminism and political thinking. It’s about the development of ideas and feelings that have a progression in my personal context. One might see it one way or another according to your time or what you experience when you look at the work – no one can control that. I can’t control it. The museums can’t control it. If art were so pure that it might have a kind of ultimate control within the context of the artist then it would be just pure thought.
LB I think that one context in which to explore that particular work is my addressing and confronting feminism. I was asking myself: ‘What are the questions that I should ask of this movement and myself and what I feel about it?’ The ideas that I proceeded to develop are not so politically conscious and have to be experienced on a different level. I’m inventing new processes in the making of sculpture and painting; I’m redefining how we see and think about form, so it’s a formal pursuit and not a pursuit about feminism and political thinking. It’s about the development of ideas and feelings that have a progression in my personal context. One might see it one way or another according to your time or what you experience when you look at the work – no one can control that. I can’t control it. The museums can’t control it. If art were so pure that it might have a kind of ultimate control within the context of the artist then it would be just pure thought.
MC Since the 1970s, you’ve spent a lot of time in India and you have a house in Ahmadabad. Can we talk about your relationship to the country?
LB Robert Rauschenberg and Bob Morris recommended that I visit India. Rauschenberg was very close to Merce Cunningham, and the dancers from the 1964 Venice Biennale were going there, so he went to India after he won the Grand Prize at Venice. The family that he visited was very involved in the arts, dancing and science, and so I was very much taken with the place, because I had a context in which to experience it. Before this invitation I might have been afraid to go to India because I had no context. I wouldn’t have gone because it was the ‘thing to do’.
LB Robert Rauschenberg and Bob Morris recommended that I visit India. Rauschenberg was very close to Merce Cunningham, and the dancers from the 1964 Venice Biennale were going there, so he went to India after he won the Grand Prize at Venice. The family that he visited was very involved in the arts, dancing and science, and so I was very much taken with the place, because I had a context in which to experience it. Before this invitation I might have been afraid to go to India because I had no context. I wouldn’t have gone because it was the ‘thing to do’.
MC And the same for Sante Fe, New Mexico, where you also have a house and have spent a lot more time recently. Have these different environs grown into your work, as in your life?
LB They’ve allowed me to open up the field of thinking because thinking and art, as in science, is open-ended. It’s inductive and it allows me to consider other possibilities.
LB They’ve allowed me to open up the field of thinking because thinking and art, as in science, is open-ended. It’s inductive and it allows me to consider other possibilities.
MC Can you talk about your glass works from the 1980s and how they relate to your knots from the ’70s? There seems to be a relationship there.
LB I wanted to see if glass could be formed with my hands and tied into a knot. I could do it because of the space-age technology with gloves. Later I developed this idea of the concave/convex form in glass and cast it; it seemed like jelly on the wall. I found that because of this form – this hemisphere – the surface of the images seemed to float and almost disappear. I took this half-round idea and developed it in metal sculpture and in the pigmented polyurethane as well.
MC D’Arrest (2009),
shown in your Cheim & Read exhibition last year, was hypnotizing and, as you said, jelly-like. The brilliant orange colour seemed to really take to the material, almost jump out from it, and similarly for the other pigmented works.
LB Yes! These forms accepted the light in an interesting way. This light came kind of within the form; it got absorbed.
LB I wanted to see if glass could be formed with my hands and tied into a knot. I could do it because of the space-age technology with gloves. Later I developed this idea of the concave/convex form in glass and cast it; it seemed like jelly on the wall. I found that because of this form – this hemisphere – the surface of the images seemed to float and almost disappear. I took this half-round idea and developed it in metal sculpture and in the pigmented polyurethane as well.
MC D’Arrest (2009),
LB Yes! These forms accepted the light in an interesting way. This light came kind of within the form; it got absorbed.
MC It was the same with the phosphorescent works from the ’70s. The light is in the form, an entirely different quality to when the pigment is elevated.
LB Absolutely. And what was interesting about those forms in phosphorous was that when you looked at them, they were constantly moving. That’s the same with the present polyurethane textured forms. We experience something in our bodies that is proprioceptic; we experience it in our whole body – you feel what you see and you are ‘charged’. It’s an exchange of energy.
LB Absolutely. And what was interesting about those forms in phosphorous was that when you looked at them, they were constantly moving. That’s the same with the present polyurethane textured forms. We experience something in our bodies that is proprioceptic; we experience it in our whole body – you feel what you see and you are ‘charged’. It’s an exchange of energy.
MC Yes, you often speak about proprioception (‘the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself’) and I feel that exists also in your early works Pinto (1969–70) and Totem (1971)
LB I did it in the context of a wall 15 metres long and there were five pieces. For some reason, one of the pieces was sold and the owner didn’t want to let it go. It could not be shown without the fifth piece. But it’s only a relic now because it’s not within the context of the space that I created it in and it looks less interesting – like digging up an urn. Recently I received an apologetic card from the offspring of the widow who didn’t want to part with the fifth element.
MC Speaking of urns, ceramics were a big part of your work in the ’90s and 2000s, playing to your interest in how our perception of form changes through texture and surface, and overlaying or casting various materials or textures and surfaces.
LB Working with clay was a big part of my understanding about what I wanted to achieve with form – basically a more organic form. I was also playing with the idea that surface and texture can also describe form: we see the surface and the texture of things and we complete or feel the form. I thought that sculpture had begun to imitate life too much and sculptors had forgotten about the life of the surface and the life of the form itself. They weren’t asking questions anymore and often people were just working too logically: we do this, we do that, we react this way and we get a sculpture. And are we just imitating a form? And I did some of that, too, in question. But for Migrating Pedmarks
and Cloak-Wave [both 1998] I made a form underneath with plaster and burlap and then made these undulating clay forms over it, as if I was water or earth finding my sense of balance on another kind of surface. And that’s what I did with the polyurethane when I did the installation for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis [one of six monumental pours made for various institutions in 1971]. Those were largely made with plastic and an understructure made of chicken wire and wood covered with polyethylene.
LB Working with clay was a big part of my understanding about what I wanted to achieve with form – basically a more organic form. I was also playing with the idea that surface and texture can also describe form: we see the surface and the texture of things and we complete or feel the form. I thought that sculpture had begun to imitate life too much and sculptors had forgotten about the life of the surface and the life of the form itself. They weren’t asking questions anymore and often people were just working too logically: we do this, we do that, we react this way and we get a sculpture. And are we just imitating a form? And I did some of that, too, in question. But for Migrating Pedmarks
MC But isn’t there also an element of divine intervention, so to speak; allowing something other than what’s intended to intercede, especially in using some of the materials that are less rigid and so not as easy to control?
LB I think Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis were really playing with this idea of the accident. They were just more responsive, or maybe Pollock was. But actually it’s really a marriage between the conscious and the unconscious that occupies the creative mind. I find what the materials can do and within that context there is that decision-making. In the beginning I romanticized it; and you can say what you want, it is still confined by the format. I saw visions of clouds yesterday; you couldn’t imagine how complicated they were on all horizons. That’s one reason I love New Mexico! The kinds of images of the clouds are infinite. I think we deal with an infinite imagination! This is how the artists must get the God-complex! However, the artist is always dealing with the bounds of the material and the unbounded nature of the universe and of the imagination – and trying to mark the time. Whether you comprehend it or not, you don’t understand it all. It’s infinite.
LB I think Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis were really playing with this idea of the accident. They were just more responsive, or maybe Pollock was. But actually it’s really a marriage between the conscious and the unconscious that occupies the creative mind. I find what the materials can do and within that context there is that decision-making. In the beginning I romanticized it; and you can say what you want, it is still confined by the format. I saw visions of clouds yesterday; you couldn’t imagine how complicated they were on all horizons. That’s one reason I love New Mexico! The kinds of images of the clouds are infinite. I think we deal with an infinite imagination! This is how the artists must get the God-complex! However, the artist is always dealing with the bounds of the material and the unbounded nature of the universe and of the imagination – and trying to mark the time. Whether you comprehend it or not, you don’t understand it all. It’s infinite.
MC You’ve spent much of your career outside New York in the last three decades (even though you still have your apartment on the Bowery). I wondered if you feel that New York is insular?
LB I think ideas generate and regenerate when artists are with each other and I think these are very important moments of an artist’s life. I still feel that New York is a great city for seeing and hearing things. Those moments in time that I had as a growing artist I couldn’t have had anywhere else.
LB I think ideas generate and regenerate when artists are with each other and I think these are very important moments of an artist’s life. I still feel that New York is a great city for seeing and hearing things. Those moments in time that I had as a growing artist I couldn’t have had anywhere else.
MC So when Hickey talked about other female artists who challenged the art world in the 1970s, like Wilke, Riley and Mitchell, was he also talking about a particular type of work that marked a time? And is this time lost? Is this underground nature, so to speak, gone nowadays?
LB I think people are definitely drawn to nature, even until death. These works were not popular but people are always drawn to the questions that life offers. I think the Internet is a waste of time. The computer can be non-functional. And just the fact that you’re constantly battling something and you think you’re in communication but you’re really not …
LB I think people are definitely drawn to nature, even until death. These works were not popular but people are always drawn to the questions that life offers. I think the Internet is a waste of time. The computer can be non-functional. And just the fact that you’re constantly battling something and you think you’re in communication but you’re really not …
MC And how do we use all this information available to us?
LB Exactly. How do you use it? Hickey’s really asking how do you use it in a way that’s a personal gesture? How can it be recognized? Everybody has his or her own handwriting but how do you develop it in a way that’s communicating? It’s about focus and communication.
LB Exactly. How do you use it? Hickey’s really asking how do you use it in a way that’s a personal gesture? How can it be recognized? Everybody has his or her own handwriting but how do you develop it in a way that’s communicating? It’s about focus and communication.
MC What are you working on at the moment?
LB I’ve recently made some African masks in glass. The African mask has supposedly long been of interest to collectors and artists since Cubism, which was a proposition that New York’s Museum of Modern Art expounded in the 20th century. From the time I was doing the knots, I was making an organic Cubist statement; the planes were in a sense not planes. It was a linear organic statement, one of curved planes. These particular masks that I bought from the man who sells them from a truck in front of the Whitney Museum are classic images of what might be thought of as an African mask. They interested me not so much for their complexity but for their statement about the African mask: they were for the ritual and about the ritual, created by the tourist industry, and the seller was very cognizant of the Cubists referencing African art. I find that art is made about art and continues to develop certain ideas and what gave me pleasure about these forms was that they were both classic and simplistic at the same time. So I said: ‘I’ll take these classic, simplistic forms and make something else from them’. Why not? Why not regenerate the tribal, you know! [laughs] And so I did that with the glass blowers at The Museum of Glass at The Tacoma Museum.
LB I’ve recently made some African masks in glass. The African mask has supposedly long been of interest to collectors and artists since Cubism, which was a proposition that New York’s Museum of Modern Art expounded in the 20th century. From the time I was doing the knots, I was making an organic Cubist statement; the planes were in a sense not planes. It was a linear organic statement, one of curved planes. These particular masks that I bought from the man who sells them from a truck in front of the Whitney Museum are classic images of what might be thought of as an African mask. They interested me not so much for their complexity but for their statement about the African mask: they were for the ritual and about the ritual, created by the tourist industry, and the seller was very cognizant of the Cubists referencing African art. I find that art is made about art and continues to develop certain ideas and what gave me pleasure about these forms was that they were both classic and simplistic at the same time. So I said: ‘I’ll take these classic, simplistic forms and make something else from them’. Why not? Why not regenerate the tribal, you know! [laughs] And so I did that with the glass blowers at The Museum of Glass at The Tacoma Museum.
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| Lynda Benglis-Robeline (Detail) |
MC For visitors to the show at Museum of Contemporary Art or the New Museum, is there something you hope they will take with them?
LB I hope when someone looks at or feels the work they take with them a kind of physical moment that becomes a special kind of confrontation in time, that’s all. When art speaks to you it’s both a physical and mental exchange that the viewer has. It’s a pure moment, it’s a transition of time, it’s timeless, don’t you think? True art and the response is timeless.
LB I hope when someone looks at or feels the work they take with them a kind of physical moment that becomes a special kind of confrontation in time, that’s all. When art speaks to you it’s both a physical and mental exchange that the viewer has. It’s a pure moment, it’s a transition of time, it’s timeless, don’t you think? True art and the response is timeless.
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Looking forward to hopefully feeling better tomorrow. Next on the list is the Berwick Street Film Collective which I will not be talking about. But after that on the list is award-winning artist, filmmaker, and author/publisher Camille Billops and I'm looking forward to that.
'Til Tomorrow!
~Alex
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Inspiration Sunday
I have some quotes from all different kinds of artists for you today. Some you may not have heard of so I have some links attached to their names, so if you have any further interest.
I hope this will give you some inspiration for this coming week!
It takes a certain maturity of mind to accept that nature works as steadily in rust as in rose petals. ~Esther Warner Dendel
I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self. ~Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko Room - Tate Modern
I have discovered that the unasked-for accident can be the salvation of what you are doing. ~Stephen De Staebler
Stephen De Staebler - Winged Victory
The further I go, the sorrier I am about how little I know: it is this that bothers me the most. ~Claude Monet
I have never liked the middle ground - the most boring place in the world. ~Louise NevelsonOnly just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is still infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim. ~Wassily Kandinsky
Louise Nevelson - Shadows and Flags - NYC 1977
Wassily Kandinsky - Flood Improvisation
Something awful happens to a person who grows up as a creative kid and suddenly find no creative outlet as an adult. ~Judy Blume
Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I begin to feel an enormous need to become savage and to create a new world. ~Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin - Washerwomen at Roubine du Roi
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion. ~Emily CarrTomorrow I will continue along with my research of 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".
Emily Carr - Kitwancool
I hope you enjoy the last few hours of your weekend.
'Til tomorrow!
~Alex
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
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