Fiber Art: The Queer Kid on the Bus
Harmony Hammond, "Bag XI," 1971, mixed media. Courtesy the Brooklyn Museum of Art
Contemporary fiber artists have a lot of baggage to handle. They have so much baggage in fact that they had to knit a bigger bag to fit everything in. Fiber artists are rarely seen as the cool art kids who sit in the back of the bus and write “SLAYER” on the seat. Instead they are painted as the queer crafty kids who sit in front the bus, are friends with the driver, make friendship bracelets, and knit scarves. I’m sure performance or new media artists could argue for a similar unpopular position on the bus but their baggage would look less homespun.
Many contemporary fiber artists have made their fair share of friendship bracelets and knitted a few misshapen scarves but contemporary fiber practices are becoming more complex and draw from a history of labor, queer identity, craft, and feminism. This history includes rebel artists like Harmony Hammond, whose work is now considered important but in its time was too domestic for art critics and too gay for some feminists. In an article for the Journal of Modern Craft, Julia Bryan-Wilson points to some of Harmony Hammond’s conflicts with early feminist artist groups. She was an outsider among outsiders. Her work never shied away from crew-cut levels of lesbianism and was often viewed by some as threat to the goals of the Woman-made art movement of the early 70’s.
Josh Faught “Triage,” 2009. Hemp, nail polish, spray paint, indigo, logwood, toilet paper, greeting cards, pins, books, plaster, yarn, hand made wooden sign, denim, and gloves. Courtesy Lisa Cooley Fine Art
Some of Hammond’s work from that period used found textiles, rug braiding techniques, and acrylic paint to create often suggestive or blatantly queer objects. In her art, the domestic and low implications of fiber-based work created a space between painting and sculpture. The space she helped forge has grown and is now being utilized by contemporary fiber artists. This includes artists like Josh Faught, who approaches the impediments of feminism, hobby craft, and queer history with a sense of reverence and anxiety. In his piece Triage, Faught layers found objects like gay pride buttons and self-help books with hand woven and dyed textiles. His work reflects the present struggle for both fiber artists and queer people to assimilate yet maintain outsider status.
Cultivating Curiosity
Mark Dion, Drawing for "Aviary (Library for the Birds of Massachusetts)" 2005 Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Revving up for the new school year I have had the chance to read quite a bit over the past two weeks, and in addition to the recommendations from June 30th I reached into some of my favorite faded paperbacks and read The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. The story, if you haven’t already read it multiple times in your teens or twenties, follows Larry Darrell through his quest for a spiritual existence as his entire life seems to orbit around friends and family that cling to all things material and elite. But Larry hammers away. He travels. He seeks. He asks lots of questions. He sacrifices certain things to learn others.
The dog days of August are the time to ask lots of questions of ourselves as educators. This is the time to perhaps plan differently and seek even better ways of achieving the overarching goals that define our curriculum. What are the big questions students will investigate in our classes? What are the themes that guide our curriculum? What will our classrooms look and sound like? What will our courses, and the work, be about? What are the big things students will know and be able to do once they finish our courses?
One of the improvements I’d like to initiate this year in my own classes, picking up on an interview I read featuring season 4 artist Mark Dion, is to get more students to consider their relationship to museums and how they engage with objects in museums. Dion states in Phaidon’s Press Play (2005) that museums are continually pressured to entertain and educate what they perceive as younger audiences, and this has forced them to dumb down exhibitions for visitors. Rather than provoke questions, museums more often provide scripted answers. One of the difficult tasks I face this year is making students realize that museums are places to challenge ourselves and ask questions that can lead to understanding more than just the work on display. Good questions, as well as meaningful “front end” work prior to a museum visit, can make a huge difference in how students experience art in person.
In next week’s column, I’d like to talk a little bit about what good museum visits have in common with teaching using film and video in the classroom. See you then. Stay cool. And remember… Teaching with Contemporary Art hits the blog every Wednesday afternoon for your shopping convenience.
Contemporary Knowledge: Interview with João Ribas
What defines “the contemporary” as an area of study? How does it relate to the writing of history or other fields of inquiry? In this edition of Open Enrollment, Oliver Wunsch, a graduate student in history of art at Williams College, speaks about these questions and more with João Ribas, Curator at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. Ribas was previously Curator at The Drawing Center in New York, and has organized over thirty exhibitions in the US and abroad. He is the winner of two consecutive International Association of Art Critics Awards, and his writing appears in numerous publications.
João Ribas | Photo: Mario Heuschober, © Secession 2008
Oliver Wunsch: This Open Enrollment column deals with the questions and concerns of graduate students in the arts. In part, I was interested in speaking with you because you’re 31 years old and have a long professional record. During the years when many people pursuing a career in the arts would be in grad school, you were working as a writer and curator. To begin with beginnings, how did you start down this path?
João Ribas: I started through the practice of writing criticism — what I thought I’d be doing was focusing on post-war thought and contemporary art through academic work, though I became increasingly involved in the “contemporary art” part of the pairing, and so [became] an art critic and editor instead. Only later did I become involved with curatorial practice. That came with an interest in the discursive, narrative, and dramaturgical space of an exhibition, rather than the more analytical or reflective aspect of writing. What interested me at first was the production of a critical, judgment-based discourse, the kind of writing that exists before more sclerotic methodologies take over — maybe because of the aversion academic orthodoxy still maintains towards such belle-lettrist tendencies, like [Charles] Baudelaire writing on [Constantin] Guys.
OW: Do you see your time as a critic as part of your education?
Clement Greenberg
JR: Clement Greenberg, for all the polemics he entrains, called it “learning in public” — this sense of writing as a heuristic to discover what you think, as well as the gnawing fear of having to repudiate one’s previous judgments. What interested me was the reflective judgment enacted in the act of writing, itself part of the process of constantly seeing art. In the process of writing, you are forced to come to terms with something — like [Paul] Valery turning the seashell in his hands — and the object of your criticism is either less or more favored than when you first started, sometimes for altogether different reasons.
Bruce Nauman’s Cyborg Eyes
Bruce Nauman, "Mapping the studio II with color shift, flip, flop, & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage)," 2001
Not all events are recorded equally. Despite YouTube’s diarrheic explosion of what constitutes a potential video, clips where almost nothing happens are still difficult for a lot of people to get behind. Sometimes video is difficult when it’s not entertaining, but entertainment is not something most disciplines in art are ever expected to be. Nobody expects Robert Ryman to be funny, or captivating.
The first generation of artists working in video seemed to understand the revolutionary potential of the medium. Such pioneers as Peter Campus, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, VALIE EXPORT, or Bruce Nauman (among a multitude of others…) explored how video recording technologies changed the audience’s perception of time, space and the body by making them confront how their video image manipulated these concepts to make them their time, their space, their body. Despite the physical separation between the machine and the human, video does indeed control our “nerve endings.”
To me, the idea of the cyborg is more interesting as a way to mark a certain symbiosis with technological systems that we have created to enhance the abilities of our organic bodies. A few months ago, I wrote about the concept of the Kino-Eye as a proto-cyborg, explaining how video technologies have extended what is humanly possible for us to see with the “hardware” we are born with. As we move into a future that is quickly becoming hyper-mediated by video (you can get a smart phone with AVATAR pre-loaded on it!), it becomes difficult to ignore the fact that all these moving images are changing the way our brains work, and how we respond to recorded events.
The Paradoxical Art of “Inception”
M.C. Escher, "Relativity," 1953
What is so compelling about riddles, mysteries, and puzzles? Most people are fascinated by images and objects that are paradoxical or impossible in real life but look oddly convincing and perplexing in 2D. Art:21 Season Four featured contemporary artists Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford, Robert Ryman, and Catherine Sullivan who investigate the boundaries between “abstraction and representation, fact and fiction, order and chaos.” Throughout history, artists have been compelled to explore paradox as contradiction, ambiguity, and truth.
Ann Hamilton, "kaph," detail 1997.
The paradoxical structure of my work is often to engage that place of in-betweenness; to engage it, not to make a picture of it, not to make it its subject, but actually to try to work at that place in a way that demonstrates it, that’s demonstrative, that occupies it. You know it’s very abstract, but concrete.
It would seem that paradox inspires artists to expand their imaginations, derive abstract concepts, and dream bigger.
Art is paradoxical by nature. It both reflects the past and creates the future. It both orders and dis-integrates, and somehow, through the course of both, defies entropy.
Maybe that’s what humans do, too: reflect and create.
Maybe that’s why we need art so badly.
The Penrose stairs is a 2D depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop, so that a person could climb them forever and never get any higher. This is clearly impossible in 3D but the 2D version achieves this paradox by distorting perspective. The best known examples of Penrose stairs appears in a couple of famous lithographs by M.C. Escher (see top image) and this brings us to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film that is billed as a story about dreams but also delves deeper into our fascination with paradox.
Note that this entry is not a review of the film, nor are there any major plot spoilers for those who have yet to see the film. I have seen this film three times on the big screen because if you want to truly understand the mechanics of Inception rather than simply going along for the ride, you need to see the film more than once and spend some time solving its puzzles and untangling its mysteries. I had a different purpose for each viewing and spent some serious time analyzing the art (and design) in the film.
New guest blogger: Steven Frost
Thanks to Lincoln Hancock for this extensive chronicling of the NC Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) art scene. Stay tuned for another post or two from him in the coming weeks.
Up next is Steven Frost. Steven lives in Chicago, where he is completing his MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before moving to Chicago, Frost lived in Washington, DC, where he worked for the Corcoran College of Art & Design. Native to rural Vermont, Frost has exhibited his fiber-based objects, drawings, videos and installations across the U.S. His work addresses the cultural and material histories of queer identities. Steven is currently working on a large-scale installation concerning the debris of male aggression with fellow SAIC grad student Jesse Butcher. The installation takes over an unused Chicago storefront and is called Don’t Quit. Suffer Now. Frost is also designing costumes for a film project by George Washington University professor James Huckenpahler. The piece, entitled Exit Strategy, is loosely based on Jack Smith’s unfinished piece, Dracula VS Batman. Frost writes about the Chicago Art Scene and his colleagues at SAIC on his blog, Anyone Can Learn to Paint.
Weekly Roundup
Co Lab: Jenny Holzer with Miguel Gutierrez at ICA Boston, 2010. Photo Credit: Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe
Soon after last week’s roundup went live, I discovered a Jenny Holzer event happening in my backyard. In this week’s roundup, CNN shows William Kentridge drawing apartheid, Scotland shows William Wegman’s beloved Weimaraners, Julie Mehretu is about to show her new Manhattan studio work, and much more.
- For three nights last week the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) projected poetry onto it’s northwest-facing facade. The text is by Wislawa Szymborska and it was conceived and arranged by Jenny Holzer. The event was a collaboration between Holzer and performance artist Miguel Gutierrez as part of the Co-Lab series at the ICA.
- 20th Century Abstract Art from the Ringling Collection is currently on view featuring pieces by Richard Serra, among others. The show is composed entirely of the museum’s permanent collection and provides a “glimpse at this watershed moment in the history of Western art. Visitors will experience in two galleries work by many of the pioneers of this artistic revolution, and its various manifestations, which has become a hallmark of high modernism.”
- CNN’s African Voices showcased William Kentridge whose art has “chronicled South Africa’s shift from an apartheid to a post-apartheid society, evokes the tensions and memories of the former regime and reflects the inequalities of modern life.” Kentridge told CNN, “This is where I’ve lived for 55 years,” he said, explaining how the city inspires him. [It] is a city that deconstructs itself the whole time, it’s busy erasing itself the way you erase a drawing.”
- The City Art Centre in Scotland reopened on 31 July 2010 and is exhibiting William Wegman: Family Combinations that explores the “extraordinary photographic relationship with his beloved family of Weimaraners. This is the first comprehensive show of Wegman’s work in Scotland and the only UK opportunity to catch this exceptional photographic display.” The show highlights 25 years of Wegman‘s photography celebrating Weimaraners and are from the artist’s personal collection. Many have rarely been exhibited in public.
Why Here? Part 2
Outside Lump Gallery in Raleigh at a 2008 Benefit. Photo courtesy Goodnight Raleigh (http://goodnightraleigh.com).
Low on the southeast side of downtown Raleigh stands a nondescript grey building with a facade marked by four orange letters: LUMP. This cinderblock outpost houses the Lump gallery and project space — an artist-run enterprise in its fifteenth season. Lump does not represent artists and is explicitly committed to exhibiting work without commercial compromise. The vision of Bill Thelen, Lump’s founder and director, and the collaborative efforts of the swirling cast of artists who comprise Team Lump make the gallery home to some the most consistently rewarding and exhilarating exhibitions in the area. Thelen (an artist himself, with a new show opening in October at Vox Populi in Philadelphia) sees his role as more a facilitator of exchange than a traditional gallery owner: “I view the gallery space as an importer of artists, curators, exhibitions, ideas, and Team Lump as exporter of NC artists. We focus on getting exhibitions outside of North Carolina.”
Indeed, the Team — a variable, curated assortment of practitioners — gets around. In 2009, they traveled to London to install DIY Rapture at Cell Projects. Currently, their show Skins and Skeletons is at AVA in Chattanooga, TN. The team’s ready ability to serve as NC envoy — in addition to Lump’s sterling reputation as a gallery — means that Lump, more than almost any other independent arts-based enterprise in town, is pushing the Triangle’s rapport with a broader contemporary discourse.
Team Lump, "Next Level/Heaven Can't Wait." Installation view. 2009. Cardboard, wood, paint, felt. 18' x 20' x 5'. Courtesy Team Lump.
As a locus and center of gravity for this kind of energy and conversation, Lump’s presence reverberates in strong ways through the terrain of contemporary practice here. The project’s reliability, consistency and rigor have inspired a generation of forward-thinking artists in Raleigh and beyond. I spoke with Harrison Haynes and David Colagiovanni — two artists based in other corners of the Triangle — about Lump and its impact on their practices, as well as about the broader issue of working in the South.
