Eve Essex and Cornelius Cardew

Scratch Orchestra Reenactment at the Berwick

Continuing the tenuous thread I’ve begun to weave, today’s post concerns Eve Essex, an artist I’ve been interested in since she was a resident with the Berwick Research Institute in Boston, MA. One of her recent projects is a reenactment of British composer Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra. Cardew formed the Orchestra in the 1960s, bringing together professional musicians and amateurs to play non-traditional, group-created scores as a form of social activism. Eve’s reenactments of the original Scratch Orchestra rehearsals ask participants to operate in the present and past at the same time, realizing a forty-year-old utopian vision. Is this an antidote for political apathy or a caricature of earnestness? Eve calls it “theater” — does that make it more or less genuine (or neither)? I’m interested to know if anyone else sees a relationship between this project and Stuart Sherman’s inscrutable performances, detailed in my first post.

First Scratch Orchestra Reenactment

An Original Scratch Orchestra Score

Art & Compassion at “New York’s Cathedral”

New York's St. John the Divine Cathedral, photo by Mark Larrimore via Flickr

Rev. Tom Miller is the Canon for Liturgy and the Arts at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, affectionately known as “New York’s Cathedral,” even though it is affiliated with the Episcopal Church.

As the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, St. John the Divine is a unique structure with a a one-of-a-kind mission to embrace the whole city. It is a grand structure which fully reopened last November, after a fire damaged the building in 2001. It has a majestic presence in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan and since the early 1970s, it has fostered a strong and lasting relationship with the world’s performing and visual arts.

In the last few years alone, the Cathedral has hosted major exhibitions, including A Time For Hope, which showcased the arts of the autonomous region of Castille-Leon in northern Spain, and the Season South Africa show in 2004, which featured the work of 17 South African artists and was co-hosted by the Museum of African Art.

Rev. Miller is a thoughtful man whose urbane sensibility serves him well in New York. He explains that the Cathedral’s openness to contemporary art is multi-faceted, and he elucidates this point with some thoughts on Episcopalian theology and his personal views on the role of art in society.

When one work in the Season South Africa exhibit sparked controversy from school groups and Catholic organizations because of its contemporary take on the Pietà, he took it in stride and mentioned that it reminded him of a hymn which spoke about Christ making the unlovely, lovely. “No one is excluded,” he said. “Artists help us ask the difficult questions we shy away from.”

“In the Episcopal tradition, incarnation is an important part of the doctrine, but it’s not just in doctrine, devotion, or liturgy. So, it is part of tradition to think that everyone in the world, not just church people, are created with this creative impulse. Artists live to investigate and understand the world and sometimes advocate,” he says.

Rev. Miller works closely with Lisa Schubert, Vice President for Events, Marketing, and Communications at the Cathedral, and together they work to integrate visual arts into the Cathedral’s programming.

The following interview was conducted via email.

St. John the Divine's Peace Fountain with the Cathedral in the background. Photo by Alexander Kagan via Flickr.

Hrag Vartanian: Can you tell me about St John the Divine’s visual arts programming?

Rev. Tom Miller: Our visual arts programming invites both established as well as developing artists to install work that reflects on the human condition and those qualities of heart, mind, and soul that respond to a greater awareness of the sacred nature of human life (often in relationship to the divine, defined as broadly as possible).

HV: How does it fit into the mission of St. John?

TM: As New York’s Cathedral, we claim to be a House of Prayer (broadly defined) for All People, which means we have a profile beyond our denominational identity or doctrinal focus. Our mission is to serve the enlightenment of all people in ways of justice and peace, and in that regard, to encourage respect for the dignity of all human beings. Art helps us to do that, but we must necessarily move beyond “church art” and find other expressions of the many ways this divine purpose is perceived by many people. From a scriptural stand point, we claim the belief that God truly did and does come into the world so that we might have life and have it more abundantly. The late Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, among others, was fond of quoting Irenaeus: “The glory of God is a human life fully lived.” That’s my starting point.

A life fully lived necessarily has to do with art, since we are all disposed to it, and it serves us individually and collectively as an integrating agent that connects our hearts and minds and makes us more than we can know or be otherwise. This has something to do with the imagination, of course, and it has something to do with compassion.

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Conveying Compassion

Doris Salcedo, "Atrabiliarios," 1992-93. Photo: Robert Pettus. Courtesy the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

When I learned that Doris Salcedo was being featured in Art21’s episode on Compassion, I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate artist to represent this theme. However to me, Salcedo goes beyond feeling compassion for the victims she represents in her work to being completely enveloped in their reality. By doing so, she’s able to give a voice to those who were silenced. This is especially strong in her work, Atrabiliarios, which powerfully illustrates what is left behind from the “disappeared ones” — empty shoes and unhealed wounds. This work is one of the few owned by the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and was featured in our exhibition Portrait/Homage/Embodiment. The shoes, which are recessed in niches that are covered by roughly-sewn animal skins, are abstracted representations of individuals who have “disappeared” as the result of  political violence in Colombia. The power of the work comes from Salcedo’s strong and immediate connection with her subject’s world.

While contemplating what to write for this post, I remembered that Salcedo gave a talk in St. Louis back in 2002, when the work was purchased. Looking through the transcript, she describes how you cannot understand a situation by analyzing it from a comfortable distance—something I think we’re all guilty of every time we open a newspaper. To fully connect with a situation she asks you to go beyond analysis and be “in the world” — to delve into the history and the lives of those involved. She emphasized that she considers her art to be “impotent” in actually changing the circumstances behind these terrible stories.  However, the ability of her work to communicate is not only strong, but essential in continuing the memory of the victim. When a viewer contemplates Salcedo’s art, the pain of the victim being represented reaches out and connects with each viewer’s own memories of pain. This personal and private interaction with the work elicits compassion from the viewer and in that moment, connects him or her to the victim.

In a series of timely posts on Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green discusses the use of art as a means for understanding the difficult subject of torture. I feel that this sentence in particular can be applied to Salcedo’s approach to her work: “Perhaps because they embrace ambiguity rather than reject it, artists often excel at embracing emotionally and intellectually difficult subjects.”  Through the openness of her work, Salcedo is able to communicate a fuller reality of the individual she represents, beyond newsprint or a CNN ticker. The violence inflicted upon the victims, the materials left behind, the artist’s position and that of the viewer — all of these combine to create a powerful cross-section of experiences and emotions, resulting in a stronger sense of understanding and compassion with those represented in the work.

Understanding Pain

Doris Salcedo, "Shibboleth," 2007. Photo: Tate Modern.

A friend of mine told me how she first learned of rape: rape happens when someone forces all your clothes off, her brother explained. My friend was, of course, horrified.

I learned about rape at the Sauk County Fair. I picked up a graphic novel at a booth, and, while I don’t remember the novel at all, I remember one phrase from the author’s biography: “raped at knifepoint.” She had been a young black woman and the one with the knife had been a white man. I imagined it happening in a barn (in the filmy, strangely accurate way I understood white-on-black violence, farms were emblematic sites), though I didn’t really know what it was. I did vaguely understand that her subsequent pregnancy meant the legacy of what happened would probably outlive her.

It’s difficult to understand the pain of others. Even now, I still often think of rape as silently happening in rural places, leading to new lives that will be tacitly ignored by those of us who weren’t there.

Art is at its most incisive when it breaks into that chasm between our own misunderstandings and the pervasive pain we don’t know how to acknowledge. Though I saw Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, an austere fissure that split into the foundation of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, only in photographs, I felt it acknowledged the difficulty of compassion with penetrating accuracy.

Salcedo works in an aloof way. Yet she’s always gutturally grappling with the most emotive and threatening sides of life—piling wooden chairs in an alley in such a way that makes death absurd and daunting, filling furniture with concrete to commemorate people whose lives have been made irrationally inert, or breaking open the floor of the Tate Modern. She responds to explicit problems—political violence in her native Colombia or racism in the post-colonial world—but her work has wide ramifications.

At first glance, Shibboleth struck me as a cold Minimalist ploy, a Richard-Serra-like testament to the power of single physical gestures. And I suppose it is cold and minimal. But watching a video of visitors stepping over and around the fissure, becoming inadvertently separated from each other, unable to close the gulf and unsure of how to navigate it, emphasized the fragility of our understanding of ourselves. What is compassion? How close can we really get to someone else’s pain? What we do once we’ve witnessed trauma?

After immersing herself in the pain of others, Salcedo has emerged with inert, gapingly industrial gestures. Cold and mute like architectural ruins, they give compassion a pragmatic face.

An interview with Regina José Galindo by Francisco Goldman

Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a BOMB interview with a Season 5 artist—or one that corresponds to the theme of the artist’s work. Inspired by Doris Salcedo’s discussion of witnessing, victimization, and the brutality of power, we dove back into our Archive and unearthed an interview with another Third World artist, Regina José Galindo.

In this BOMB interview with novelist Francisco Goldman from Winter 2005, Galindo, winner of the 2005 Venice Biennale Golden Lion, discusses social action, inaction, karma, and her intensely personal performances that stem from her rage at the violence and corruption in Guatemala, then and now.

Suffering and Compassion: it’s not just within Buddhism that these ideas interpenetrate and inform each other. Salcedo and Galindo’s works share an inescapable truth: art is about experience.

¿Quien Peude Borrar Las Huellas? A walk from the Court Of Constitutionality to the National Palace of Guatemala, leaving a trail of footprints in memory of the victims of armed conflict in Guatemala, 2003. All images courtesy of the Artist.

Francisco Goldman: I imagine that we should begin with a few words about what is happening today in Guatemala. Hurricane Stan, the flooding, the terrible loss of lives, the general calamity that is going to sink people even deeper into lives of inescapable poverty. What did Guatemala do to deserve so much suffering?

Regina José Galindo: To me this question feels too deep, too heartrending. As you say, my country has suffered an eternity of calamities of all shapes and sizes: a mortal conquest, the maltreatment of indigenous villages and the negation of their rights throughout our entire history, the Gringo intervention, an infernal 36-year war, evil governments, spine-chilling levels of corruption, a murderous army, histories of violence that are a daily nightmare of inequality, hunger, misery—and now this, which unlike the aforementioned things is a natural disaster. How is such karma even possible?

But you ask what Guatemala did to deserve all this. Perhaps the proper questions would be: What haven’t we done? Why have we been so afraid, and tolerated so much fear? Why have we not woken up and taken action? When are we going to stop being so submissive?

I feel impotent, unable to change things, but this rage has sustained me, and I’ve watched it grow since I first became aware of what was happening. It’s like an engine—a conflict inside me that never yields, never stops turning, ever.

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Meet the Season 5 Artist: Doris Salcedo

The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Compassion, premiering on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Compassion features three artists — William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems — whose works explore conscience and the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others.

Who is Doris Salcedo and what does she have to say about compassion?

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, where she lives and works. Salcedo’s understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form and open to interpretation, her works are essential testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. Even when monumental in scale, her installations achieve a degree of imperceptibility—receding into a wall, burrowed into the ground, or lasting for only a short time. Salcedo’s work reflects a collective effort and close collaboration with a team of architects, engineers, and assistants and—as Salcedo says—with the victims of the senseless and brutal acts to which her work refers.

On the subject of compassion in art, Salcedo says about her 1997-98 work Unland (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

[In this work] what I tried to do was to transform materials to the point where they are no longer metaphors but metamorphose into something else quite human and quite delicate—to talk of the fragility of human life and also the brutality of power. In order to do that I wanted to make a surface that was incredibly delicate and fragile, that can literally be destroyed if you just pull a little bit of the fabric that covers it. It’s unbelievably fragile. And I think that would generate the idea of fear and compassion as the human response to a tragic event.

The poet Paul Celan, quoting Georg Büchner, uses a very beautiful image: he says that he wishes he could be a Medusa’s head to turn certain things into stone and gather people around that stone as though it were a great masterpiece. In a way that’s what we do. Celan also says that the artist steps outside the human into a different terrain, the terrain of the inhuman, but looking always towards the human. I think that defines what I do and how I try to connect what I research with my work.

Poetry is something that you cannot use in everyday life, but—like the only aspect of our world that is not practical, that we cannot use, that is outside capitalism and consumer society—it is there in its extraordinary uselessness, which is exactly why it is poetic. Without it we would no longer be human. We would just be producing.

What happens in Salcedo’s segment in Compassion this October?

“I am a Third World artist,” says Doris Salcedo, “from that perspective—from the perspective of the victim, from the perspective of the defeated people—it’s where I’m looking at the world.” Filmed in her Bogotá, Colombia studio while preparing a series of abstract Untitled (2008) sculptures based on antique household furniture, the artist devotes careful attention to the tormented wooden finishes and smooth concrete surfaces of her objects. “I don’t work based on imagination, on fiction,” she explains, characterizing her role as a “secondary witness” to the victims of violence whose testimonies she collects as research for her pieces, such as Atrabiliarios (1992-93) at SFMoMA.

“My work is based not on my experience but on somebody else’s experience,” she says, prompting her long-time assistants to narrate the development of major works such as her Unland (1997-98) series of tables, held together with strands of human hair sewn through millions of tiny holes; the ephemeral installation Noviembre 6 y 7 (2000) that spanned 53 hours to commemorate a bloody siege on Bogotá’s Palace of Justice; and the computer modeling and engineering behind Shibboleth (2007), a 160 meter crack in the foundation of Tate Modern in London, for which the artist enlists a Bible story as a parable for the plight of immigrants in Western societies. Reflecting on her position as an artist in a world beset with so much horror and grief, Salcedo surmises that “the word that defines my work is ‘impotence’…but then, as a person who lacks power, I face the ones who have power and who manipulate life.”

Doris Salcedo. Left: "Untitled," 1998. Wood, concrete and metal, 74 x 44 x 21 1/2 inches. Collection of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Photo: David Heald. Right: "Shibboleth," detail, 2007. Installation at Turbine Hall; Tate Modern, London Concrete and metal, 548 feet long. Photo: Tate Photography, London. Courtesy of the Artist and Alexander & Bonin, New York.

What else has Doris Salcedo done?

Salcedo earned a BFA at Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano (1980) and an MA from New York University (1984). Her awards include a commission from Tate Modern, London (2007); the Ordway Prize, from the Penny McCall Foundation (2005, 1993); and a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Grant (1995). Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (2007); Castello de Rivoli, Turin (2005); and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2002), among others. She has participated in the T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Turin (2005); Documenta (2002); and the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art (1999). Her work is included in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Where can I see more of her work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?

Doris Salcedo is represented by Alexander & Bonin Gallery, New York.

What’s your take on Doris Salcedo’s inclusion in Season 5?

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!

An interview with Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey: Your work has had a very grand sweep since we first met in 1976. I would say you began in a kind of documentary mode, turning your camera on aspects of your surrounding world that allowed you to visually talk about the things that you were seeing and the things that had value or meaning for you. Your Family Pictures and Stories brought those observations closer to home in an autobiographical way and also began to bring a shift through the introduction of a textual voice into your work. Since that work you have deployed a range of strategies in realizing your ideas. I’m wondering if you could go back for a minute and just talk briefly about where you were in 1976 when you had decided that the camera was going to be your voice. What influenced you and who were your models at that point?

Carrie Mae Weems: We were young. (laughter) It’s wonderful to have the benefit of hindsight. I think often about planning retrospectives—I’ve got one coming up this fall in Seville at the Contemporary and one at the Frist Center for Contemporary Art in Nashville in 2011. They give me the chance to look back over the work, over my history. The thing that surprises me most about the early work is that it’s not particularly different from the work I’m making now. Of course I was trying to find a unique voice, but beyond that, from the very beginning, I’ve been interested in the idea of power and the consequences of power; relationships are made and articulated through power. Another thing that’s interesting about the early work is that even though I’ve been engaged in the idea of autobiography, other ideas have been more important: the role of narrative, the social levels of humor, the deconstruction of documentary, the construction of history, the use of text, storytelling, performance, and the role of memory have all been more central to my thinking than autobiography. It’s assumed that autobiography is key, because I so often use myself, my own of experience—limited as it is at times—as the starting point. But I use myself simply as a vehicle for approaching the question of power, and following where that leads me to and through. It’s never about me; it’s always about something larger.

In Family Pictures and Stories, I was thinking not only of my family, but was trying to explore the movement of black families out of the South and into the North. My family becomes the representational vehicle that allows me to enter the larger discussion of race, class, and historical migration. So, the Family series operates in this way, as does the Kitchen Table series. I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women—underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves. In one way or another, my work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition. I’m determined to find new models to live by. Aren’t you?

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Meet the Season 5 Artist: Carrie Mae Weems

The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Compassion, premiering on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Compassion features three artists — William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems — whose works explore conscience and the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others.

Who is Carrie Mae Weems and what does she have to say about compassion?

Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953; she lives and works in Syracuse, New York. With the pitch and timbre of an accomplished storyteller, Carrie Mae Weems uses colloquial forms—jokes, songs, rebukes—in photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and expose pernicious stereotypes. Weems’s vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms—social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths. Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans for more than a century.

On the subject of compassion in art, Weems says about her own life and process (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

There are ideas about compassion—what you sacrifice for compassion, what you give up, what you choose not to live with so that you can express that. But we all sacrifice something for our compassion in some way. We’re giving up something so that something else larger can happen, so that something bigger than you can take place. Sometimes we sacrifice our families. Sometimes we sacrifice other levels of interpersonal communication so that we have that larger relationship with questions that move and shape the world.

And so (and I don’t think that I’m being naïve or sentimental or dramatic about it) I think that I’ve sacrificed an enormous amount of interpersonal comfort to pursue aspects of compassion, to pursue them, to look at them and to say, “Yes, I will step up to this. I want this too. And if I want this in this time, in this moment, then certain things have to be sacrificed (because I don’t know how to do it all).” Sometimes you sacrifice too much. You find yourself out on a limb and not knowing really quite how to get back down the tree. But it’s the space that you’re in because you have taken the risk. I’m not unaware of the sacrifices and, at times, whom your compassion hurts. It’s not all moving in one direction. It’s complicated, as the work is complicated.

What happens in Weems’s segment in Compassion this October?

“Narrative and storytelling is in the blood,” declares Carrie Mae Weems, “I really needed to understand something about the nature of my own being, and my own voice, and really where I come from.” Through a mixture of archival personal photos and the artist’s first major photo-documentary series, Family Pictures and Stories (1978-84), Weems takes the viewer on a personal journey through her childhood in 1950s Portland, Oregon, the outward discrimination towards her mixed-race family (Jewish, Native American, and African American), and her own radicalization in the 1960s when she moved to San Francisco at the age of sixteen to dance with choreographer Anna Halprin.

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Meet the Season 5 Artist: William Kentridge

The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Compassion, premiering on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Compassion features three artists — William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems — whose works explore conscience and the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others.

Who is William Kentridge and what does he have to say about compassion?

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1955, where he lives and works. Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a now-signature technique, he photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge uses stereoscopic viewers and creates optical illusions with anamorphic projection to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

On the subject of compassion in art, Kentridge says about his own drawing practice (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

In the activity of making work, there’s a sense that if you spend a day or two days drawing an object or an image there’s a sympathy towards that object embodied in the human labor of making the drawing. For me, there is something in the dedication to the image, whether it’s Géricault painting guillotined heads or another shocking image. There’s something about the hours of physically studying those heads and painting them that becomes a compassionate act even though you can tell that the artist is very cold-bloodedly and ghoulishly looking at disaster or using other people’s pain as raw material for the work.

That’s what every artist does—use other people’s pain as well as his own—as raw material. So there is—if not a vampirishness—certainly an appropriation of other people’s distress in the activity of being a writer or an artist. But there is also something in the activity of both—contemplating, depicting, and spending the time with it—which I hope as an artist redeems the activity from one of simple exploitation and abuse.

What happens in Kentridge’s segment in Compassion this October?

While filmed in 2008-09, the Compassion episode surveys works and themes that Kentridge has developed over the past twenty years, exemplified by the artist’s poetic narratives that draw upon the texture of current events and the sweep of history. “South Africa is very much part of the work,” says the Johannesburg-based artist, but asks “how does one find a way of not necessarily illustrating the society that one lives in, but allowing what happens there to be part of the work, part of the vocabulary, part of the raw material that is dealt with?” Shooting without a predetermined script when developing the charcoal drawings for his animated films—such as Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (1991)—Kentridge’s experimental method demonstrates “thinking with one’s hands” and proposes an “understanding of the world as process rather than as fact.”

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New Flash Points Topic: Compassion

Carrie Mae Weems. "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried," 1995. Selection from set of 30 C-prints with sandblasted text on glass, dimensions variable. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

In celebration of the fifth season of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, premiering this fall on PBS, we are accelerating the Flash Points format, tying the next round of topics to our upcoming four thematic episodes: Compassion, Fantasy, Transformation, and Systems.

We kick off the next few weeks with the question of compassion. In true Flash Points style, we boil the notion down to a simple, provocative, and open-ended question:

Do artists have a social responsibility? To whom? To what?

Additional questions on this topic might include:

Throughout this time, we’ll publish in-depth posts about the artists profiled in the forthcoming Compassion episode — William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems — as well as feature musings from our roster of guest writers, extending the theme beyond the series to real world correlations, questions, and perhaps even discomforts.

Help us start the conversation by leaving a comment below. Feel free to note other artists whose work addresses the theme of compassion — we’d love to collectively envision a broader landscape of how it is considered in contemporary art practice. And save the date for the Compassion episode which debuts nationwide October 7, 2009 on PBS!

(Please note, too, that our most recent topic of What is the value of art? comes to a close this Friday, so there are still a few posts we’ll be publishing in conjunction with this as well.)

Doris Salcedo, "Unland the orpan’s tunic," detail, 1997. Wood, cloth, hair and glue, 31½ x 96½ x 38½ inches. Collection of Fundación “la Caixa.“ Barcelona. Courtesy the artist Alexander & Bonin Gallery, New York.

William Kentridge, From “9 Drawings for Projection (1989–2003): Felix in Exile,” 1994. Production stills, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris.