Mel Bochner’s Burnt Tongue
Mel Bochner, "No," 2009. Oil on canvas, 60 x 45 inches. Courtesy Marc Selywn Fine Art.
Los Angeles galleries are brimming with minimal, kind-of-conceptual abstraction at the moment — Paul Davis’s successions of hinges and wood and Joe Fyfe’s felt and muslin Motherwell spin-offs at ACME; Matt Connors’s posed expressionism and empty frames at Cherry and Martin; Leonor Antunes’s hanging brass triangles at Marc Foxx; or Lisa Williamson’s controlled outlines and understated installations at the recently closed David Kordansky exhibition. But of all these, it’s veteran Mel Bochner who makes the keenest impression.
Mel Bochner is obscenely smart. He has the pedigree and, when he wants to, the vocabulary of an academic. He teaches at Yale, and has written about the “oddly circular history of perspective” and linguistics in Wittgenstein. But through forty-five years of making, he’s managed to keep his artwork visually crass, provocatively simplistic, and, as a result, wittily incisive. In his current exhibition at Marc Selywn Fine Art, a series of comfortably large, kinkily colored paintings run through sequences of synonyms. Visually staccato, the paintings look the way that the rough rhythm of Charles Bukowski soundbytes sound.
Bochner, who has called himself a “belated beatnik,” had his first exhibition back in 1966, at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Then, like now, he was questioning the grammar of what we look at when we look at art. In a particularly memorable piece, he used word portraits to engage work made by his contemporaries–in Portrait of Eva Hesse, a slew of tactile-sounding verbs circle around the word “wrap,” which anchors the drawing. It’s an abstraction of an abstraction that pulls Hesse’s ideas out of the context of her work and yet it’s surprisingly accessible. Pared down to “wrap,” “limit,” “ensconce,” and “tie-up,” among other words, Hesse (or at least the Hesse represented by these verbs) seems like a spatially-obsessed poet who’s fixated on everything bodily, which is actually fairly accurate.
Since then, Bochner has done a variety of public works, written about Donal Judd and serialization for Artforum and, among other ventures, begun a refreshingly whimsical series of drawing not too ingeniously derived from Roget’s Thesaurus.
Performance Art Realness with a Twist
Marina Abramovic, "The Artist Is Present," performance documentation, 2010. Courtesy the New York Times
It starts like this:
One snowy night last month, as New Yorkers rushed home in advance of a coming blizzard, more than a hundred artists, scholars and curators crowded into the boardroom of the Museum of Modern Art to talk about performance art and how it can be preserved and exhibited.
And somewhere close to the end we find this, in reference to Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005:
Ms. Abramovic saw that show, she said in a recent interview, as a way “to take charge of the history of performance.” In the 1990s, as younger artists became interested in work of the ’60s and ’70s, she said she noticed that some were restaging historical works themselves, often without consulting or even crediting the originator. “I realized this is happening because performance is nobody’s territory,” she said. “It’s never been mainstream art and there’s no rules.” Finding this unjust, she decided to set them herself, by recreating the works in consultation with the relevant artists and estates. Better she should do it now, she said, because “they will do it anyway when you’re dead behind your back.”
And so Carol Kino reports for the New York Times on March 10 in an article entitled “A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue” on the Museum of Modern Art’s private “Performance Workshops.” She brings attention to the issues raised by these “Workshops” in the field of the conservation and presentation of performance art and the involvement of museums in this project.
I decided to take those two bits of writing out of the piece to bring attention to a fact that has seemed self-evident to me from the moment I first saw Abramovic’s work, but has become completely evident after a flurry of articles and profiles on her have appeared in many publications lately: Marina Abramovic is a total stone-cold diva. Now don’t get me wrong, this is certainly not meant as a negative value judgment. It’s a fact that makes me love her more, and with the same part of my brain that loves incredible women like Kate Bush, or Tyra Banks. I could see it, from the first interlaced fields of her brushing her hair in 1975’s Art Must Be Beautiful to the time she got in people’s way in 1977’s Imponderabilia, to her most recent alpha female diva moment, The Artist Is Present, in which she stares you down in public.
In short, “doing” Marina Abramovic would be an amazing drag performance. In an alternative universe in my head, this is a very common occurrence. In my head, drag queens LOOOOOOVE “doing” La Marina with almost the same zeal they they usually reserve for “doing” Ana Mendieta or Maya Deren. Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning has a whole section on Guerrilla Girl Realness with a Twist and Chrissie Iles is a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race. But camp fantasies aside, what these extracts from Kino’s piece show is that Abramovic is tough as nails and — for better or for worse — has decided to grab the performance art bull by the horns and try to change its course in her favor. I’m ambivalent about this exertion of will on Abramovic’s part. On the one hand, who else is going to do it? She’s charismatic, people like to see her and listen to her, and she certainly has the street/ivory tower cred to do so. On the other hand, I question her intentions. Is Abramovic pulling a Rhonda Rulebook because she basically doesn’t want people touching her stuff?
Weekly Roundup
John Feodorov, "Fairy Tale", (detail), 2007. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 50 in. Courtesy Valise Gallery.
Sparkling Nepalese paper, race and civil rights, a northern island, circular botanics, fluorescent lights, a ton of vinyl records, and a few reviews in today’s roundup:
- Season 1 artist John Feodorov is included in the two-person exhibition De-Natured at Valise Gallery, an artist-run collective on the island of Vashon, Washington. Feodorov (based in Seattle) and Lauren Atkinson (of Whidbey Island) were students of Valise member Beverly Naidus over twenty years ago when they were undergraduate art students at California State University Long Beach. Their work in De-Natured addresses “our complex relationship with nature and the conflicting sensations many of us feel in its presence.” Feodorov explains his work: “Several years ago, I visited the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon, near my family’s land in New Mexico. This was during the much-hyped Harmonic Convergence when people were gathering at numerous traditional sacred sites around the world. Along the inside perimeter of one of the large kivas, a throng of tie-dyed spiritual enthusiasts formed a circle while sitting in lotus position. At the axis, they had erected a plastic totem pole, an object possessing no significance to the native peoples of the Southwest. Their act, while well intentioned, seemed more like an act of spiritual desperation than of re-connection. It is this kind of sincere yet misguided event that interests me as an artist.” De-Natured closes March 31.
- On March 16, The Getty Center will screen Legacy: Black and White in America, a documentary that premiered on PBS that explores the legacy of the civil rights movement and looks at the lives of African Americans today through conversations with figures in business, politics, academia, the media, and the arts. Following the screening, cultural commentator Lawrence Weschler will lead a discussion about the legacy of race and civil rights in contemporary art and museum practice. Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), who is featured in the video, will be part of that conversation. The event begins at 6pm. Click here for more information.
- La Saison the F[euml]tes (The Season of Celebrations) — a site-specific installation of flowers, plants and trees by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe — opens March 17 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reine Sofia in the Palacio de Cristal. For this project, Huyghe will place different plants associated with various holiday periods in a circle, each one of them characteristic of a specific time of year. The arrangement is to be read as a clock with the different seasons marked by the diversity of flora — roses, violets, chrysanthemums, palm trees, plum trees, jasmine, bamboo, and firs. La Saison the F[euml]tes closes May 31.
- On March 30, Kiki Smith (Season 2) will speak at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) along with the curators of Philagrafika 2010, an exhibition that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. Smith’s work is included in the core exhibition of Philagrafika, The Graphic Unconscious, simultaneously on view at PAFA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, the Temple Gallery at Tyler School of Art, and The Print Center. Using fragile sheets of Nepalese paper, Kiki Smith installed two walls of PAFA’s gallery with an array of small and large-scale works. Smith will discuss the major themes in this work and her ongoing interest in printmaking techniques and processes. The event begins at 6pm.
- Through May 16, works by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view in Vinyl at La Maison Rouge in Paris. The exhibition of close to 800 albums, tapes, CDs, specialist magazines, reference books, catalogues and artworks is drawn from the collection of British collector, publisher and curator Guy Schraenen. Vinyl shows LPs from “an acoustic and visual angle” to illustrate how artists from the 1920s through today have experimented with language and sound. Visitors can listen to every record in the collection at a specially-designed deck.
- Martin Puryear Prints, an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, surveys a decade of the Season 2 artist’s printmaking. Puryear’s prints are inspired by various interests that are also visible in his well-known sculptures — furniture, basketry and his international travels. Curator of Prints, Kristin Spangenberg, says, “Puryear has created a body of printed works that extract the essence of minimalist abstraction with an appreciation of natural forms and ordinary objects.” The exhibition continues through June 13.
- Colorforms, a long-term exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, explores color and abstract form in artworks from the Hirshhorn’s collection that date from 1949 to the present. Milk Run (1996), a fluorescent-light installation by Season 1 artist James Turrell, is on view alongside works by Paul Sharits, Fred Sandback, Mark Rothko, Anish Kapoor, and Wolfgang Laib through winter 2011.
- The traveling survey exhibition of works by Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has made its way to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in the UK. Read recent reviews of the show from Laura Cumming of The Observer; Adrian Searle of The Guardian; and Jonathan Brown of The Independent.
- Read what critics for Bloomberg and the New York Times are saying about The Nose, produced by William Kentridge (Season 5) for the Metropolitan Opera. The performance continues through March 25.
First Impression: Skin Fruit (Part 2)
Tim Noble and Sue Webster, "Masters of the Universe," 1998–2000. Translucent resin, fiberglass, plastic, and human hair.
(continued from Part 1)
Down the stairs, Nathalie Djurberg’s sexually violent claymations are followed by Cady Noland’s sculptural image of Lee Harvey Oswald at his death. She has him riddled with holes, one in the place of his mouth and gagged with an American flag textile.
In the corner of floor three is one of the most iconic works in the show, Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s Masters of the Universe (1998–2000). The pre-human couple have been installed on a extension rolling down from the museum’s white walls. It appears as if they’re stepping out of a time vacuum into a context vacuum to survey the room. From their vantagepoint, Pawel Althamer’s Schedule of the Crucifix (2005) is the work that demands the most attention, featuring a live performer posing on a cross ten feet up on the wall. He is stationary in a crown of thorns until his schedule dictates that he descend the ladder, change, and exit the room. Nearby, the figure in Andro Wekua’s Wait to Wait (2006) is seated in a motorized rocking chair upon a brick base and within colored glass. He wears clownish make-up and a dress shirt and, lacking pants, you see that this guy’s genitals have been effaced. Subtly in motion, he still seems disconcertingly real, particularly beside Althamer’s living sculpture.
There are odd consistencies between floors. Just about below the floor of Tauba Auerbach’s dimensionally expansive black and white dots are Nate Lowman’s silkscreen of the same ilk. Wrapped around the far side of the room, like Gober’s bed upstairs, is Maurizio Cattelan’s Now (2004), the wax body of JFK in an open casket—a more disquieting sense of sleep, to say the least.
Frederick Wiseman, Orphan Films, FIFA Montreal, & Other Documentary Screenings
“La Danse—The Paris Opera Ballet,” 2009. Directed by Frederick Wiseman.
Though it’s been a particularly busy past few weeks here at Art21 production HQ – creating new exclusive videos, shooting the preparation and rehearsals for William Kentridge’s Nose production at the Metropolitan Opera, and in general getting ready for our next season – this has also been quite a fertile time for documentary screenings. So I thought I’d extend my last post and talk about some more hard-to-resist documentary offerings in New York City and beyond.
But first, in my last post, I mentioned the passing of the acclaimed documentary editor Karen Schmeer. One of the very hopeful things to come out of this very, very sad event is the establishment of the Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship. Here’s the description in the words of the website:
“The Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship has been established to honor the memory and spirit of Karen. The yearlong experience encourages and champions the talent of an emerging editor. The fellowship provides opportunities to help cultivate an editor’s artistry and craft and to expand his or her professional and creative community.”
Now, on to the screenings. This programming can’t really be defined as art-related, though; the films are a little too important and interesting to pass up for editorial niceties. First, I really need to mention the yearlong screening series of the films of legendary and still active documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman at the Modern Museum of Art in New York. MoMA is showing all his films to date – a remarkable 39 works, including his latest project, Boxing Gym (2009) – through the end of the year. If you’re anywhere in the area, it behooves you to at least catch one. And if you’re interested in an almost encyclopedic depiction of the world on film, then take this probably once in a lifetime chance and see all of them (and if you do, I’d love to hear from you). Though I’m sad to report that classics like Titicut Follies (1967) – once banned by the Massachusetts Supreme Court – and High School (1968) have already shown, there’s still a lot of great screenings left. Next up is Juvenile Court (1973) on March 18. Go here for the schedule. And if you’re looking for a little help in navigating an admittedly intimidating body of work, check out filmmaker and avowed Wiseman fan Errol Morris’s amusingly alternative guide here.
Weekly Roundup
Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.
In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:
- The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.
- On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.
- Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.
- Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.
- Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.
- Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.
- Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.
- A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.
- Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.
- John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.
Letter from London: Ethic Minority
Matthew Broderick in "Election"
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“What’s the difference between morals and ethics anyway? Anyone?”
— Matthew Broderick, Election
If there’s a tipping point in the minds of those casually interested in contemporary art, it’s almost always on moral or ethical grounds. “He/she did what to a dog/sold what for a billion dollars/did what to a dead cow/did what to a crucifix??” your amazed friend asks, and suddenly all credibility is leached from the subject. You’re embarrassed; you get your coat. Later on, you blog resentfully at your friend’s apparent narrow-mindedness (and defriend him: take that!). Art’s leapfrogging of moral and ethical niceties is a Romantic hangover that once was noble and exciting – Courbet, Baudelaire, 2 Live Crew – and now reeks of ghettoized cliché. It’s the thing people don’t like about contemporary art. And the less contemporary art complies with “real world” ethical and moral structures, the less it is of the “real world.” And yet this is what we value in art (in its current late-Romantic state): its ability to discuss the things avoided in the mainstream imagination. To ask difficult questions. This is the double bind of contemporary art’s relationship with ethics. Its purported snubbing of conventional (Judeo-Christian) ethics both allows it to discuss the undiscussable and removes it from the discussion.
When Santiago Sierra created a gas chamber in Pulheim, Germany, in 2006 – filling a synagogue with exhaust fumes from six parked cars, accessible only for five minutes to visitors wearing gas masks – he whipped up a predictable furore. That most critics of the work (including me) never experienced the work doesn’t really matter: that it raised ethical questions does. This is the unfortunate situation contemporary art gets itself into when tackling sensitive ethical or moral issues: the media storm generated by the work is the work, and the original piece itself is drowned out by the buzz of voices. Art of this kind negates its own irrefutable trump card, its visual singularity. The problem is that visual art’s status as chief cultural question-raiser has been gradually usurped, not just by other more immediate cultural products, like cinema or TV (Inglourious Basterds treats the commercialization of the Holocaust in a far more successful – read, “widely seen” and “aesthetically enjoyable” – way), but by the multiplicity of dissenting voices made possible by the advent of the Internet. Why bother jetting in an internationally recognized artist at spectacular fiscal and environmental cost to raise ethical questions when you can do so yourself, sitting at home, with Doritos crumbs all down your shirt?
This Magic Moment: Diana Thater, Jeffrey Wells at the Santa Monica Museum of Art
Diana Thater, "Los Angeles Theatre Marquee," 35mm production still from "Between Science and Magic," 2010. Courtesy the artist.
The Oscars, aka prom night for Hollywood, are just around the corner! Who does The Academy love more: the noble savage, the noble soldier, or the noble soldier-turned-savage? Are you on the edge of your seat or what?
If you answered “or what” to that question, you might prefer to spend this Sunday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, whose current exhibitions offer an excellent antidote to “movie magic.” Disassembling that particular phrase is the crux of preeminent video/film/installation artist Diana Thater’s newest work, Between Science and Magic. Thater’s installation (also on view across the country at David Zwirner Gallery until March 13) features a film of a magician repeatedly performing the iconic rabbit-in-a-hat trick, while Jeffrey Wells’s concurrent exhibition, Seeing While Seeing, represents a clever manifestation of Wells’s own distinctive approach to deconstructing parallel themes of illusion, trickery, and suspension of disbelief.
Jeffrey Wells, "Seeing While Seeing," installation view, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art.
The low-tech trompe l’oeil animations in Wells’s installation are just as psychedelic and phantasmagoric as the high-end CGI phosphorescent forests in Avatar, and are far more lively and dimensional. As you enter the museum’s project room, the walls begin to dissolve before your eyes. With a series of subtle projections, Wells deftly liquifies two corners of the room into wiggly lines, while strange after-image-like rectangles appear and disappear around the two pictures that hang on adjacent walls. Even as you attempt to anchor yourself by reading the exhibition’s wall text, the letters begin to dance off the page, glowing and pulsating. The exit sign suspended at the top of the doorway echoes itself onto the nearby ceiling and opposite wall, as though reflecting itself onto a watery surface. The effect of the work is simultaneously disquieting and invigorating. Suddenly, the world around you feels malleable, porous, and oddly comical. The projectors are revealed, but it’s not entirely possible to determine exactly how Wells produces these strange effects – and you kind of don’t want to know. Wells, like a magician, has performed a trick that leaves his audience buoyant with pleasant bewilderment and inquisitiveness.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Wells’s mutating wall, Diana Thater addresses both the intersection and divergence of art and magic in her installation commissioned by the SMMoA. I must say that I find it a bit of a stretch to describe this particular work as an installation, although Thater herself would probably argue that projecting her film on the wall of the Santa Monica Museum constitutes it as such. I would disagree entirely with this classification were it not for the two speakers that amplify the mechanical whirring of her two film projectors. This effect ultimately allows the work to fill the vast space of SMMoA’s main gallery, rather than simply existing on a single plane. In addition, the piece is comprised of two separate films, though the projectors align to produce a symmetrically balanced split-screen effect.
You Are What You Read
Guillermo Vargas, "Exposición No.1," 2007. Galería Códice, Managua, Nicaragua.
What are the ethical implications of using live animals in art?
In 1974, Joseph Beuys caged himself with a live coyote for a performance piece called I Like America and America Likes Me. The artist spent a week living with the coyote, eventually learning how to co-exist with the animal. His intention was to highlight the strained relationship between the coyote and European settlers in America, and its representation of the damage done to the continent and native cultures.
Joseph Beuys, "I Like America and America Likes Me," 1974. Photo: Caroline Tisdall. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
In 1993, Damien Hirst presented In and Out of Love, filling a gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies hatching from white canvases, feeding on sugar syrup, mating, laying eggs and dying, to illustrate the brevity of life and the inevitability of death. Years later, the artist had a tiger shark killed to be used in his work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
In 2003, the graffiti artist Banksy painted live animals from head to hoof in an exhibit called Turf War, causing an animal activist to chain herself to railings surrounding a decorated cow, despite the animal’s conditions being approved by the RSPCA (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).
In 2007, artistic freedom and expression was challenged in an exhibition by artist Huang Yong Ping, entitled Theatre of the World at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Lizards, scorpions, tarantulas, and insects were exhibited in conditions deemed improper for the animals by the SPCA, an organization whose mission is to advance the well-being of animals. The artist decided to remove the animals from the exhibit in protest, in order to maintain the integrity of the artwork.
As much as these works outraged animal rights activists, perhaps no other exhibition has caused as much controversy over the ethical use of live animals in art as Exposición No.1. A show of work by Guillermo Vargas, a Costa Rican artist also known as “Habacuc,” took place on August 16, 2007 at Galería Códice in Managua, Nicaragua. Written in dog food on a gallery wall was the statement, “Eres lo que lees,” meaning, “You are what you read.” The center of attention was a sickly-looking street dog tied to a metal cable bolted to the wall with a short rope. The animal was supposedly captured in the alleys of Managua by some children who were paid by the artist. According to hundreds of blogs and news articles circulating on the Internet, the artist intended for the dog to starve to death during the course of the exhibition. Vargas intended to raise awareness of the public’s hypocrisy by comparing what happened to this dog to a burglar named Natividad Canda Mayrena, who was mauled to death by two rottweilers in Costa Rica while the police and onlookers watched.
The outrage that ensued over the Internet and via mass media outlets culminated in a petition that was signed by over four million people worldwide, calling for the artist to be boycotted from the Central American Biennial Honduras 2008 and for criminal charges to be filed against him. Filled with outrage, I signed the petition as well. Later I read that Vargas also signed the petition, claiming that an artist always signs his work. This seemed curious to me, so I decided to investigate the facts behind the exhibition and was surprised by what I learned.
Talking with Esopus Editor, Tod Lippy, Part Two
Image courtesy of Esopus magazine.
This is part two of my interview with Esopus editor, Tod Lippy (click here for part one). In addition to the interview, readers may also want to check out “The Assembled Picture Library of NYC”, a collaborative exhibition and workspace environment organized by artists Robin Cameron and Jason Polan. The exhibition will provide free and open access to hundreds of images from the collections of Cameron and Polan. Visitors are invited to come in during gallery hours (Mon/Tue/Thu from 12-5pm) and use these images—which include manuscripts, advertisements, prints, original drawings, and more—as raw material for their own artworks, which will be displayed on the walls of Esopus Space for the length of the exhibition. Polan and Cameron will also create a book featuring visitors’ artworks, The Assembled Picture Library of New York Book, that will be available at the closing reception on March 18th.
Joe Fusaro: Esopus is a tremendous resource on many levels. Can you talk about the magazine’s relationship with educators? Have you had experience with teachers using the magazine in their classrooms, and if so, how?
Tod Lippy: I know that Esopus has been used as an educational tool by a number of our subscribers who happen to be teachers. One issue in particular has been especially popular in that regard: Esopus 6: Process, which featured evidence of the working methods of a number of different creative people — work journals from the late Christopher Isherwood relating to the writing of A Single Man; a photographic documentation of the making of a dry-point etching by the artist Sylvia Plimack Mangold, the comic Demetri Martin’s joke diaries, and even a paper model (which our readers could build from pre-cut forms included in the magazine) of a dodecahedron offered by the mathematician John Conway, who always employs model-building when working on a new theorem. But every issue of the magazine features content — such as our “Modern Artifacts” series produced in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art Archives — that offers learning experiences for readers of all ages.
Since the editorial tone of the magazine is deliberately neutral — we try to avoid critical jargon that might be off-putting to more general readers — and since the artists’ projects in the magazine rarely have any introductions or explanations preceding them, I guess one could argue that the magazine is actually neglecting the opportunity to teach its readers about the meaning of contemporary art (much of which, of course, can feel oblique to people lacking art degrees). But to tell you the truth I think the experience readers have with the work in the magazine, which they are forced to approach on their — and its — own terms, may end up being a deeper one in many cases.
Incidentally, I think that perhaps one of the best things Esopus has to offer younger readers, particularly in this era of publishing, is an essentially commercial-free environment. I’ve spoken at a number of high schools and colleges about the magazine, and when I deliver lectures I bring along a Powerpoint presentation during which I ask for a show of hands from the audience as I project photos of spreads from current magazines. I ask them to raise their right hands when they recognize an ad, and their left hands when they see editorial content. I start with obvious choices — a Nike advertisement, a page from The Talk of the Town in The New Yorker — but it’s amazing how quickly confusion sets in when I show them an “advertorial,” or a paid-for “special supplement” that apes the look and feel of the particular magazine. Advertising is so pervasive in every nook and cranny of our culture that it really isn’t noticed anymore, and I think that’s problematic, especially for young people who should know when they are being sold something.
