Eyes in the Sky
A bust of George Ellery Hale in Mount Wilson's Solar Tower.
For the past couple of months I’ve been watching as my life partner, Christina Ondrus, embarks on a massive artistic, spiritual, and logistical undertaking. Christina is the Founder/Director and co-curator of KNOWLEDGES, a non-profit arts organization that she runs with Associate Director and co-curator Elleni Sclavenitis. I wanted to wrap up my Guest Blogging stint with some thoughts regarding their upcoming event KNOWLEDGES at the Mount Wilson Observatory, which will be held June 23rd and 24th. The event is free and open to the public. For more information and to donate or volunteer, visit theknowledges.org.
Space exploration was once a reliable source of national pride. Enormous resources were poured into the study of the heavens. Today, our country is mired in massive debt and draining colonial wars, with little moral support for government spending on the development of anything but outright weapons, military subcontractors and invasive body scanners. The U.S. government is gradually extricating itself from the business of exploring the heavens, just as it has washed its hands of developing the country’s art. I don’t mean to infer our government will not continue to explore and exploit the entire known universe in order to figure out creative ways to kill people, retain supremacy, and maybe control the weather, but the whole thing doesn’t really grab people’s imaginations like it used to.
Today’s frontier is cyberspace, a human-generated thought cloud of neurotic dark matter that permeates all interpersonal communication. The seeming infinitudes of outer space are too vast and impractical for us to think about. Better to colonize the digital wilds of personal information and cultivate them to yield money.
Mt. Wilson Observatory as photographed by the Observatory's live towercam.
In this smartphone-hampered context, The Mount Wilson Observatory stands as a temple of a bygone era of scientific advancement. It’s a pre-digital site of immense scientific significance. The 100-inch telescope built on the site in 1911 held the title of largest telescope on Earth for a solid 30 years. Edwin Hubble used this telescope when discovering the general expansion of the universe. The telescope’s mirror was the largest in the world and was crafted over the course of six years by a team of French artisanal glassmakers. The looming domes of the telescopes evoke cathedrals. On Mount Wilson you may hear contemporary, digital-based telescopes dismissed as “light collecting buckets.”
Ian Svenonius: A God Among Undergrads
Ian Svenonius with Chain and the Gang, photographed by Adela Loconte.
Every college student worth their salt has some figure of the subculture that just blows their goddamn minds when they’re of that perfect, impressionable, apple bong age. Most of them forget these figures ever existed years later as they tend to their busy adulthood. The weird thing is, that mind-blowing experience is most likely still working its magic on them and they don’t even know it. I can only wonder at how many former art students of the nineties are operating under the subliminal influence of the 1998 Make Up show where Ian Svenonius preached his liberation theology right in their face. We will simply never know.
Ian Svenonius is a national treasure. He’s got a book coming out in the winter called Supernatural Strategies for Starting a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band. You should probably pre-order it and see him speak if he does a reading. Or go see his band Chain and the Gang if they play in your city, or buy their record In Cool Blood when it comes out in June. Better yet, right now, watch this video of his former band Weird War doing an airtight performance for a bunch of kids in a gymnasium:
If there is any justice, Svenonius should be invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial on and off for the next two decades, and he should refuse every year. But there isn’t and he won’t. Still, the hypothetical ascendant visiting artist faculty members of the hypothetical art colleges in my hypothetical Svenonius Biennial Universe would be privileged to share air with the man, as generations of musicians and artists have been cribbing, quoting, and outright stealing his ideas for years. Which I suppose is only fair, since, as the host of the excellent Internet talk show Soft Focus, and a creator of numerous high-concept cultural-quotation-laden rock bands, he is an expert at recombining the raw materials of others’ artistic offerings to his own ends.
Yelling Fire in the Hall of Presidents
"United States: Most Wanted Painting" by Komar and Melamid.
An alarming number of Americans are taken by the notion that all past and present leaders of their Executive Branch converge and coexist in a state of simultaneity on a mysterious plane of existence decorated in the neo-classical style. I kind of believe it too. I call it The Hall of Presidents Syndrome.
The Hall of Presidents is a feature of Disneyworld wherein animatronic approximations of all 44 American Presidents are presented to an audience in a kind of civic religious ceremony. Within the Hall of Presidents, matters of grave importance are perpetually being discussed, historic speeches both eloquent and pithy are continually paraphrased, and the Union is forever validated and supported. The physical presence of these Presidential avatars tricks the minds of Americans into thinking that these men would be able to get along reasonably, and that the Americas they inhabited in their various lifetimes are all reconcilable, according to the linear march of Progress and each man’s unstinting devotion to The American Dream.
"The Forgotten Man" by Jon McNaughton, 2010. Limited edition print. Via http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/.
It is this fantasy that is reinforced, then threatened, in The Forgotten Man, a painting by Utah artist Jon McNaughton, which has become an internet sensation due to its guileless, ham-fisted, yet somehow opaque use of history painting conventions in the service of a doctrinaire Christian conservative value system. In The Forgotten Man, current President Barack Obama, who gets along with everyone just fine in the actual Hall of Presidents, is carelessly stepping on the Constitution as he looks glumly to his left. James Madison looks on in horror and makes a very George-Costanza-like show of his dismay. Behind Obama stand a bunch of Democrats (like Clinton and FDR) who applaud for some vague reason (’cause they’re all looking at a future of big government socialism or something?). Either way, what McNaughton employs his own 2-D Obamavatar to do in his next painting would surely get the 44th President kicked out of the club for good.
Just Us Boyz
"Just 3 Boyz" from "Funny or Die Presents." From left to right: Tim Heidecker, Zach Galifiniakis, Eric Wareheim.
I was recently asked by my friend Audrey Chan to guest lecture in a class she’s teaching about gender roles in art. She was planning on showing the students my own creepy, grief-and-pathos-laden grad school video piece Give Thanks as well as Mike Builds A Shelter by Michael Smith, and asked if I could suggest any other videos. Audrey had also thought of Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup, the collaboration between Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley (featured in Season 5 and Season 3, respectively, of Art in the Twenty-First Century) in which the (loosely interpreted) act of making soup in a cooking show format is made analogous to the abuse of one’s son. It’s probably telling that my contribution was the comedy duo Tim and Eric’s internet short Just 3 Boyz, a sitcom parody which represents the cancellation, if not annihilation, of middle class American manhood in popular culture.
Still from "Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup," 1987 by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.
Like Pop Rocks and Coke, the combination of watching Family Tyranny followed immediately by Just 3 Boyz is, if not lethal, at least nauseating and generally ill-advised. In their own way, both works explore the mental space that results when mass entertainment commingles with interpersonal abuse and dysfunction; the cooking show and the sitcom revisited as sites of trauma.
In Just 3 Boyz, Tim and Eric assume parental roles. Shades is a lampshade puppet voiced by Richard Lewis, and Zach Galifiniakis plays the prodigal son, a roommate who is returning from college. Much is left unexplained: Why are these “boys” living together, especially when one of them actually went away to college, and is now returning? Why are Tim and Eric acting simultaneously like the Three Stooges and an old married couple? It is inferred that this is one of many episodes, and the awkward situation of three presumably platonic male friends sharing a suburban house echo the elaborate and unlikely means by which sitcoms keep their casts on one set.
When Zach returns home from college, the air is thick with tension. He is dressed in a Juicy couture tracksuit (actually, “Saucy” couture in this instance) and pigtails. Zach is extremely impatient and verbally abusive. Given Galifiniakis’ “That’s so Raven” jokes in his standup routine, we can safely assume Zach is playing the role of the uncompromising teenage diva; but this attitude, when assumed by a surly, overweight bearded middle aged man, is intimidating and scary. Decidedly not Raven.
Pervasive Desperation and Precious Rubbish
A cartoon from "Don't Get Taught Art This Way! As So Many People Do" by Theodore L. Shaw, Stuart Publications, 1967.
Not so long ago, the L.A. art world seemed split in a rift of Beatles vs. Stones proportions. This time around, it was Rainer vs. Abramovic. People who read art blogs are probably familiar with the conflict: In her letter to MOCA president Jeffrey Deitch, Yvonne Rainer called Marina Abramovic onto the carpet for requiring performers to lie nude beneath skeletons for hours at a time for the benefit of “frolicking donors.” According to Rainer, with the performers paid at “sub-minimal wages,” the fundraiser “verges on economic exploitation and criminality.” After attending a rehearsal at the invitation of Jeffrey Deitch, Rainer released a revised letter to reflect her own observations and to address some of the criticism sent her way from the event’s pro-Abramovic performers: “Their cheerful voluntarism says something about the pervasive desperation and cynicism of the art world such that young people must become abject table ornaments and clichéd living symbols of mortality in order to assume a novitiate role in the temple of art.”
It seems both ironic and fitting that Los Angeles, with its history of Aimee Semple McPherson, Charles Manson, and L. Ron Hubbard, would be the site where Abramovic got bullshit called on her for using a shamanic priestess persona to exploit the labor of idealistic young people. Maybe if the guests consisted solely of obscure continental millionaires and not, say, Pamela Anderson, the line between confrontational critique and the exploitation of lithe bodies would seem more clearly delineated?
At the time, I was squarely pro-Rainer, but unfortunately I felt the initial labor dispute angle was muddied by an insistence on involving questions of artistic merit, so that it became a question not of Exploitation vs. Compensation, but Entertainment vs. Authenticity. More Beatles vs. Stones …to which I must respond “I don’t know, does anyone want to listen to Led Zeppelin?”
AND YET, the questions the debate bring up are important: Could it be that some of the sacrifices we artists and performers make in order to be part of the contemporary art world are not actually worth it? Could it be that some of our heroes, some of the living legends, some of the pillars of the contemporary art world, are capable of missteps and doing stuff that’s dumb or even wrong??
What would Theodore L. Shaw say about all this?
Spewey and Me
John P. Hogan performing with Ponce de Leon at Machine Project.
Greetings. My name is John P. Hogan. Right now you might be asking “Who the Hell is John P. Hogan?” I will attempt to answer in clear and direct plain-speak.
I’m an artist. But that’s pretty vague. I “do music” (I am the singer of a band called Ponce de Leon) and I make these epically long projects that are often variations on musical theater. But they’re like arty community theater about friars lost on an island, and Ponce de Leon’s son who was raised by dolphins. I really love to draw, but people seem to mainly care about the performances. So what I’ve done is slipped the drawing into the performances. Performers wear masks that are cartoon faces that I’ve drawn, and it’s a reference to ancient classical theater traditions and to cheap cartoons. In this way, I kind of become my own illustrator, which also takes the pressure off of coming up with a profound synthesis of form and content on the page, which always caused me a lot of anxiety while I was an undergrad. In general, I’m interested in storytelling and experimenting with the ways we tell stories.
Some autobiographical information: I grew up in suburban New Jersey, so I had proximity to The Big City, but without constant exposure to its sophisticating energies. I had relatives that were hip to the art world, but my immediate family was more into theater and literature. I had a pretty thorough obsession with cartoons that led me to pore over an enormous volume of Disney concept sketches in my elementary school library as if it was The Book of Kells (they even kept it open, like a dictionary or Bible, on its own pedestal). Meanwhile, my parents helped throw a wrench into my Disney-worship by developing the darkness of my sense of humor at a young age. My family considered it a point of pride that we didn’t know anyone else who considered Get A Life family viewing.
Revolution 2.12: The Revolution Will Not Be Veiled
Wall at Central Square, Cambridge, 2008. Photo credit: Wayne Marshall.
The veil is an item of clothing dramatically overburdened with competing symbolism… For women who wear it and artists who represent it, the veil is a garment whose meaning cannot be contained. It is a garment fought over by adherents and opponents, many of whom claim that their understanding of the veil’s significance is the one and true meaning.
- Reina Lewis, Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art
A former professor asked me one time, “Do you think the veil is one of today’s last uncolonized territories?” What kind of absurd question is that? – at least that’s what I thought. Yet my instructor did have a point. You can’t even begin to address gender and female identity in Middle Eastern art without looking at the one object that encapsulates and defines the average Muslim woman to naked, unknowing Western eyes: the veil. Like the hat in English, it’s a piece of clothing that has no singular name in Arabic and no solitary motivation: job, class, ethnicity, law, religion, fashion–these are just a handful of reasons why a Middle Eastern woman may choose to wear a veil.
Hardly an Islamic innovation, it’s a head covering rooted in the historical context of Arab culture, yet its depiction is entirely in relation to its wearer and its viewer, in how we adopt or reject certain connotations we carry with our own individual perceptions of this piece of fabric. For Westerners, it’s a single-sided image of everything that’s wrong with Middle Eastern culture, a symbol of anything Arab that contradicts so-called “Western values.”
Shadi Ghadirian (Iran), "05"- Qajar Series," 2001. Photo credit: imdtja.
Veiling is legitimized by the element of choice, and it is the presence or lack of choice that creates the context of whether the hejab frees a woman or objectifies her. Yet history, in all its intersections between the Old and New World, shows that patriarchy repeatedly finds a way to sneak in and impose itself on women’s dress, all in the name of “liberation.”
Revolution 2.12, Part II: Gender in the Middle East Cause
Photo by Reza Hakimi; www.facebook.com/ahmadrezahakimi.
History has a way of finding itself in the voice of the heroes. Not so much for the heroines. Women, often the backbone of revolution, almost always find themselves relegated to the backdrop before the honeymoon of victory wears off. Equals during protest, but second-class citizens under new governments and bandaid-approach “reforms.” Empowerment does not necessarily mean equality.
That’s not to say that we’re not making progress, but it’s often uneven and stalled, and in the case of the Middle East, many times marred by either Orientalist ideas of powerless women dominated by men or self-induced inferiority amongst women in the region who suffer from internalized oppression. Both sides play into the stigmatized and negative identity that is best encapsulated by the worn out, overmedicated and clichéd image of the veiled Muslim woman, often dominated by the trifecta of male power: the state, religious institutions and husbands. Rarely is the average revolutionary woman portrayed by her standard strengths: educated, socially aware, politically active. Instead, we latch on to her modest, “traditional” appearance, assuming that if she’s veiled that means she has no voice. As if she were a passive force of internal and untapped strength, what these images really do is reduce women to the one image the West has of her, making her cheap ammunition in an already simplified debate over the complex issues that make up gender inequality in the Middle East.
Feminist debate over the status of women within democratic reforms fueled by the Arab Spring is an ongoing discourse, reinvigorated this week with the publication of Egyptian-American Mona El Tahawy’s controversial article “Why Do They Hate Us?” published in Foreign Policy. Many (including myself) looked at the title and assumed the article to be one about the state of gender rights within the totalitarian regimes that dominate the Arab world. “They,” as it turns out, refers to Arab men in general, portrayed as inherently hateful towards women, as evidenced by all the sexual violations women experience on a daily basis in the Arab world.
"Cairo: Tank Versus Bread Biker and Sad Panda," by Egyptian graffiti artist Ganzeer. Photo credit: Maya Gowally.
Amidst all the other messages spray-painted around Tahrir Square, calls to action and demands for ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation last year, one military tank stuck out. “The revolution is in Tahrir,” it read, “no sleeping in bed.”
It was a common consensus amongst protesters, who rallied, and continue to rally, to replace government corruption with reform, and despite sugar-coated concessions that underestimated a country’s intelligence by treating amendments like bandaids, one thing was clear: the energy of the people has still not yet waned. Instead, it continues to ceaselessly evolve as revolutionaries and reformers persistently provoke themselves and each other as creativity splinters through the cracks of worn-out censorship. In this sense, art, music and performance fueled revolution by giving the disenfranchised – the outsiders, the rebels, the refugees, the critics – a second draft to rewrite their country’s cultural memory.
Art and politics rarely have a clean relationship. When the two ebb away from each other, you have dissonance; when they gel, propaganda. There’s a fine line as to where aesthetics lie in collective framings of events and their impacts, simply because art itself is inherently based on the individual: somebody creates it, usually in isolation, and then the rest of us evaluate the work based on our own personal tastes and interpretations.
Most artists don’t set out to create pieces that speak for an entire population, but rather attempt to bring their own awareness into imagery. The pressure on them to reflect, analyze, even re-record events that have altered their nation must be laden. To use your art for the patriotic search of national identity is limiting, because it aligns you with a particular message and gives you very little leeway to deviate and explore other possibilities or permutations. Art, essentially, becomes a society’s public psychiatrist. If a particular piece comes out “speaking for a community,” it’s because a majority of a certain demographic who saw it identified with its message.
New Guest Blogger: Safa Samiezade’-Yazd
Our grateful thanks goes to independent curator Jamilee Polson Lacy for her extraordinary series of posts exploring the relationship between language and image, literature and the visual arts. Next up, we’re very pleased to have Safa Samiezade’-Yazd as our new blogger-in-residence. Samiezade’-Yazd is an Iranian writer and editor whose expertise falls into two categories: contemporary art/performance and the Middle East. Together, the two give her a unique perspective on the depth of a region that is usually overshadowed by its politics. Her three one-woman shows explore Iranian identity in America–one through the veil, the second through Khomeini, and the third through the Islamic practice of temporary marriage. All three have been performed in Colorado, Vermont, and New York City, and one was presented at the Women Playwrights International Conference at the University of Mumbai. Most recently, she co-curated the first festival of Iranian theater to be presented in the United States, which earned recognition in Backstage Magazine, The New York Times Arts Section, NPR’s All Things Considered, WNYC, BBC Radio, Frontline’s Tehran Bureau, and Voice of America’s Persian News Network, which re-aired her interview as a “Best of VOA” segment. Safa holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Denver and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College. She currently edits the arts, film and music sections for Aslan Media Initiatives, an online non-profit news source on the Middle East and its diasporic communities. Welcome, Safa!
