Alex Alvis Art

I can See the Sea

Artist Iola de Freitas is our artist to talk about today, one of the artists included in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007.  She is Brazilian and has travelled quite a long way, artistically, from where she started back in the 70's with photography. 

Today, she is considered a site specific installation artist and a sculptor working primarily with stainless steel and pliable materials such as sheets of plastic.

Since she is Brazilian and not even the English version of Wikipedia has information on her, I have had some extra researching to do.  There is a very cool video of her work with her narration on You Tube.  But it is in Spanish with no subtitling.  It's a visually amazing video all the same.  If Spanish is one of the languages you know (or even if it isn't) you might want to check that out.  There is also an interview about her on Artslant and the Gallery Raquel Arnaud site has an English version of it's page about Freitas and great photos of her works.

Rather than write about her I thought it would be fun to let her work speak for itself - arranged from the 70's to today.  I love the forms and color and rhythm and organic shapes in her work today and the way it interacts with the light and flow of the environment and space the works occupy.

© Iole de Freitas-Untitled fabric & metal 1992

© Iole de Freitas- Untitled Cloth Object Sheet Metal, Copper wires - 1992

© Iole de Freitas - Untitled 2009

© Iole de Freitas - artist with reinstallation of work outside Açude Museum in the Tijuda Forest, a mountainous hand-planted rainforest in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - claimed to be the world's largest urban forest.

© Iole de Freitas-Documenta 12 Installation 2007 second floor gallery of the Museum Fridericianum

© Iole de Freitas - Caho

Untitled, ©Iole de Freitas, 2013 polycarbonate printing Green and aluminum, 100m² x 4 m in height, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro

Hope you are enjoying this first day of November and your weekend and this little retrospective of the works of Iola de Freitas.

Tomorrow is Inspiration Sunday of course.

'Til then!

~Alex

Moving Towards Equality

"I believe that gender is a cultural fiction, not a biological given. But while there have been many achievements in the last 20 years, racism and sexism are still rife. . . . Those things have to become detached. But until we are able to detach gender from the ways we are in the world, it’s important for us to move towards equality. Moving towards equality is what the word feminism means. Until we’ve achieved that, we can’t give up the word. Feminist design is an effort to bring the values of the domestic sphere into the public sphere; feminist design is about letting diverse voices be heard through caring, relational strategies of working and designing. Until social and economic inequalities are changed, I am going to call good design feminist design."  ~Sheila Levrant de Bretteville (in an interview with Ellen Lupton, Eye Magazine, Issue 8, 1992)

I agree with Sheila Levrant de Bretteville that gender is a cultural fiction.  A short way of saying that treating someone differently because of their gender has been invented by culture.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Pink, 1973, installation photo by Brian Forrest the at WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution Geffen Contemporary MOCA March 4-July 16, 2007

Just as treating anyone differently because of any perceived deviation from the "norm" is an invention of culture.  There is no normal, there's just us.  Why all the fuss?

©Sheila Levrant de Bretteville-Biddy Mason Wall in LA

Here is another quote from that interview:

"I will never, never, never forget to include people of colour, people of different points of view, people of both genders, people of different sexual preferences. It’s just not possible any more to move without remembering. That is something that Modernism didn’t account for; it didn’t want to recognise regional and personal differences.  People who have given their whole lives of supporting the classicising aesthetic of Modernism feel invalidated when we talk about the necessary inclusiveness, but diversity and inclusiveness are our only hope. It is not possible any more to plaster over everything with clean elegance. Dirty architecture, fuzzy theory and dirty design must be there."

©Sheila Levrant de Bretteville-NY Subway

Here is another quote I really liked from the interview with Ellen Lupton:

"There is a prevalent notion in the professional world that only if you have eight or more uninterrupted hours per day can you do significant work. But if you respond to other human beings – if you are a relational person – you never really have eight uninterrupted hours in a row.   Relational existence is not only attached to gender by history – not by genes, not be biology, not by some essential ‘femaleness’. A relational person thinks about other human beings and their needs during the day. A relational person allows notions about other people to interrupt the trajectory of thinking or designing . . . . The kinds of work habits that are part of this public sphere – that deny relational experience – are precisely the ones I want to challenge. Feminism has allowed me to challenge them; thinking about myself as a woman has allowed me to challenge them. When women are in the workplace, women do as the workplace demands it. Part of feminism is about bringing public, professional values closer to private, domestic values, to break the boundaries of this binary system."

There is a lot to know about Sheila Levrant de Bretteville - much more than I have time to write about here.  I had fun researching her art and philosophy and life today.

Here is another transcribed interview in a Yale magazine that is really good too.


Hope you are enjoying this last Thursday before daylight savings goes to winter on Sunday.

'Til Tomorrow!

~Alex

Tee Corinne

Tee Corinne is next on the list of artists featured in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007.

I think of Corinne as more of a writer type artist than a visual type artist.  Much of her visual artist work was photography and photographs manipulated in Photoshop.

©Tee Corinne- Self Portrait at 46

I think a lot of her work was done in the spirit of making more people accustomed to the visual imagery of women who loved one another both emotionally and sexually being together both with and without clothes.
 
She used color in her Photoshop manipulated work to convey emotion and mirroring in her earlier photos for visual interest...as I think she was making erotic art but wanted it to be esthetically pleasing - as opposed to pornographic.  She also wanted to protect the identities of her models.

©Tee Corinne

To me, Corinne's most important contribution is her use of art and photographs to celebrate the beauty of all parts and all types of the female form.  Her models were of all shapes, ages, ethnicities and physical abilities. 

I don't know if this was her intent but perhaps she was trying to make society face the physicality of all woman, not just what is considered most appropriately beautiful by some or "the media." 

It could be that if we can look more easily at every body than perhaps we can see more easily that we are not that exterior - but are - instead, what resides inside.

If you are interested in more information about Tee Corinne, here is a link to the transcript of an interview she did with Barbara Kyne. 

Hope you are having a good Wednesday. 

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex

The Artist is a Lonely Person

At lease, according to Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark.  She is next on the list of artists featured in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007.  I like her work because it (at least her later works) encouraged those viewing her work to also interact with it and I believe she a very important artist because of that.

From the DAN Galeria exhibition: ©Lygia Clark, 1960

This is nothing new to art these days, but back in the 60's and 70's interactive art, especially anyone coming to an art show being encouraged to manipulate a work on display (thereby being, in a sense, a collaborator to the work) was new concept.

©Lygia Clark-bisos

I have drawings of sculptures I will make that have participatory elements to them and I'm excited about the future creation of those.  I encourage people to touch my sculpture at shows.  This is one of the most amazing aspects of sculpture - I believe - sculpture allows us to not only have a visual experience but  a tactile experience of a work of art.

Lygia Clark took the idea of touching artwork to a whole new level and even believed that her art could improve the human condition.

©Lygia Clark - Canibalismo

She may have understated the simple and complex fact that art - most any art - improves the human condition (if only for the artist who creates it) and overstated what her art accomplished - but I haven't experienced her work first hand, either.  If I had gone to Moma's major retrospective of Clark's work earlier this year, I might have felt differently.

©Lygia Clark-The I and The You

This article written on Artnet News is a wonderful perspective about Lygia Clark herself and her work written by Ben Davis.  And also in BBC Culture written by Jason Farago.  So if you want to know more about the contributions of Clark and her work, these are a good read with more written references cited.

©Lygia Clark-Sensorial Mask

Tomorrow I will talk about the next artist on the list.  She once referred to herself as "one of the most obscure famous artists," Tee Corinne.

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex

Inspiration Sunday

Happy Sunday to you.  For Inspiration Sunday today I have quotes from the artists featured in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show that I talked about last week.  Hope you enjoy the quotes and hope you enjoy your end of the week and that this will help inspire you to start your week off on the best path it can be on.

And, I thought I'd put in a joke today...just because.  :)

It's an old joke.

"Be industrious: the more one works, the better one succeeds. The harder the task, the more honorable the labor. The more a man praises himself, the less inclined are others to praise him."  ~Theresa Hak Kyung Cha-Dictee Opening pg 8

"I don't know if I am that conscious of it, but some people say that our films have a tendency toward dirty laundry. The films say it like it is, rather than how people want it to be. Maybe it is my character that tends to want to do that, because I think the visual arts [artist?] in me wants to say the same kind of thing. So I don't know if I consciously did it; I think it is just my own spirit." ~Camille Billops

The Stone House, a Blues Legend A merger of art, prose and poetry illustrator Camille Billops

"It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void." ~Theresa Hak Kyung Cha-Dictee Opening pg 3

"Everybody has a form of tribalism. My sister got the look from Black men because she had a Puerto Rican boyfriend. If she were on the street with two little nasty children needing a daddy, they wouldn’t pay attention. It’s male tribalism that sees women as property." ~Camille Billops

"I would like to be cast as a humanist, someone who made a statement that was relevant to art history and the way we perceive ourselves and things."   ~Lynda Benglis

©Lynda Benglis

"When I was in Berkeley everybody was carrying a little red book—Mao's red book—and when Warhol produced his portrait series of Mao in a very aestheticized way, it was a shock—a good shock."  ~Dara Birnbaum

"Things happen in this country because you’re dark. Not necessarily because your hair’s nappy, but because you’re dark. That’s the first thing they see. . . .It will be hard to say, “I’m just a person.” No, you don’t get to be “just a person” here, you have to have a camp. And if it’s going to be with white people, you have to really be white. Nothing funny here. See, with Black America, there’s a legal definition. 1/32 Black blood, that means a great, great-grandmother Black—you are Black. That is only in this country, because of slavery. . . . From what I’ve seen in other cultures of color, very similar systems are at work. It’s racism within the group and that’s very powerful. So white people are not the only players on the stage. If you don’t admit to your own racism, how do you expect to keep telling white people about theirs?"  ~Camille Billops

"From the "Woodstock Nation" on, there was a brief moment when you actually felt that a large alternative group existed—that there were millions of "us" out there. But this was incredibly idealized. . . . I can remember Tom Wolfe lecturing . . . .It was a turnoff to see the author of Radical Chic in a totally white suit that looked so elitist to us, especially because he then represented the total opposite of a blue-collar worker. And he said, "You think that you are so different. Look at you. You are all so alike—what you are reading, how you are dressing." The coding within that "alternative" society was as defined and strict as in the society we were rejecting." ~Dara Birnbaum

"All work is some form of sensitizing oneself to the environment. It causes us to recognize ourselves and become self-conscious. We perceive in many different levels all at the same time. You can’t divide the intellectual and the sensual."  ~Lynda Benglis

©Lynda Benglis-North South East West Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin

"She says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live.  She says to herself if she would write without ceasing.  To herself if by writing she could abolish real time.  She would live.  If she could display it before her and become its voyeur."  ~Theresa Hak Kyung Cha-Dictee pg. 141

Tomorrow is Monday and I am finding that Monday is a very busy day normally.  If I have time I will post - if I don't (like last week) I won't.  But I will post for sure on Tuesday.

'Til then!

~Alex

 

The Dream of the Audience

"There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth." ~Chris Carter from The Blessing Way X-Files transcript 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in the capital city of South Korea in the 1950's and immigrated to the United States when she was 11 years old.


Giant history buff that I am (not) ...I learned today that Korea was occupied by the Japanese from 1910 to 1945 and the Koreans were not permitted to speak their own language during this period of time.  Korea has a long history of fighting within it's own country and multiple occupations from other countries.  The Koreans say they are the people of (a Korean word that translates into something that means grief and suffering and despair).

Cha used words and language with art to make her own messages.  Aware that words and language are used to control people, I believe she used words as art as a way to make people think about allowing themselves to be controlled in this way.

Her most famous work is titled "Dictée" which translates from French as "dictation" or "dictate".

“The main body of my work is with language,” Cha wrote,” before it is born on the tip of the tongue.” 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha-Earth (1973)

Here is a quote from Cha's book, Dictée:

You return and you are not one of them, they treat you with indifference. All the time you understand what they are saying. But the papers give you away. Every ten feet. They ask you identity. They comment upon your inability or ability to speak. Whether you are telling the truth or not about your nationality. They say you look other than you say. As if you didn’t know who you were. You say who you are but you begin to doubt. They search you. They, the anonymous variety of uniforms, each division, strata, classification, any set of miscellaneous properly uni formed.

A documentary of her life and work is in post-production right now.  Why not make a contribution to it's funding?  Just click on the orange Make a Contribution button below to do that and you can learn more about Cha, her life and work (and the film) by going to this site.

A Wonder Woman Blast from the Past

So.  As you may or may not know, 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".

Today the artist I am learning more about is a video artist, Dara Birnbaum.  It isn't really my thing to talk about video artists, as I have said before.  But for all you video artists who might be interested I decided to stick with it this time.

I found some good resources about Birnbaum and I will share those with you.

From The Feminist Art Project website, which - I very much hope you will explore further:


Next on the list of artists on the WACK website is Louise Bourgeois but I have already devoted a post to talking about Louise and if you haven't read it yet just click here. 

I wrote that post back when I was attempting to devote a certain day of the week to a certain subject.  Alas, that much self- imposed structure never seems to work well for me :}.

So - tomorrow we are progressing in our list past the artists who's last names begin with the letter "B" to the artists who's last names begin with the letter "C".

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is who we will talk about tomorrow.

Wishing you a fantastic Thursday!

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex