Moksha

the wide-eyed tourist

2006-07-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

Continuing on my eager tourist route, I checked out the MOMA a couple of days ago - that temple to which all western modern art history classes is dedicated [broken obelisk above is a suitable homage]. And yes, it is always a thrill to see the stuff of canonical texts - to know that yes, without a doubt, what you are seeing has been stamped and approved (for now!) as "the good stuff". (no - I didn't see the Dada show - I am not a fan.)

It has been so long since the new building opened (long - in my memory span anyway), that I forget some of the initial criticisms of the Yoshio Taniguchi structure. (above facade photo doesn't really cut it) I loved it because it not only humbled itself in the presence of the art by refusing to compete - but at rest intervals between galleries, there always seemed to be an available view of the outside fountains, gardens, and sculptures. In other words, in contrast to the Met for instance (or most other historical museums for that matter) one doesn't feel hermetically sealed within the building nor within some kind of suspended timewarp. The building, and thus the art inside, is constantly referencing the world outside - its inspiration, after all, for what is inside and how it narratives are constructed. I guess that's kind of an obvious attribute for a postmodern building - but I liked it!

I discovered that I really liked the work of Philip Guston - a large collection of his paintings from the 60s was featured within one of the ongoing exhibitions. Picture bold pinks and reds - giant organic forms that morph into actual banal objects (like a cigarette dangling out the mouth of an artist as he lays in bed) when you take a step back. I was also so intrigued by the Herzon and de Meuron display (two Swiss architects that are hot hot hot - they did the new Walker in Minneapolis as well as the de Young in San Fran and so much more...) - which included videos set into the ceiling and then reconfigurations of the museum's collections behind small windows, so that you had to WANT to see them in order to peek through. The whole thing made you physically aware of the process of seeing and in turn, forced viewers to see things more carefully and more delibrately than they normally would.[photo below]

One interesting little art historical detour carried me through "Transforming Chronologies" (TC) - an exhibition of drawings exhibiting modernism at its best but in a provocative unchronological way. For instance - aligning work by Matisse, Kara Walker, Vito Acconci, Juan Miro[photo right] (not all together) - so playing with time frames but setting up work that appears to have used similar artistic solutions to make different (or the same) points. The substance of their work cuts across time.

But it should also cut across space. Which brings me to that niggling critique that you knew was coming.

I should say that TC included work from Latin and South America - which was interesting. But while modernism's historical perspective has perhaps broadened slightly to include non-North American or W. European art, the East is still a sticking point. And the proof that it IS a sticking point can be found in the photography galleries - again designed to show the "universal" language of modernism through the camera lens. In here, one African artist - Seydou Keita from Mali is represented with a studio portrait from the 50s; and there are three Asian artists (two from Japan with whom I was not familiar, and Ragubhir Singh from India represented with a shot of women in the monsoon from the mid 60s). They are fascinating interventions upon an otherwise western landscape of modernity.
And you wonder how they got there.

It isn't that you can't find non-western work in the MOMA - you can, if you look for it. But it was in the context of these exhibitions that aimed to display the artistic trajectory of "modernism" in new and exciting ways - that the silences are particularly palpable. Are we still asking "when was modernism" in China, India, African countries, etc...? I guess so.

And so it has to be remembered that MoMa's narrative of modernism - even in this brand new cutting-edge version - only goes so far. If you look between the cracks for other voices, you can find some of them (faintly) - but you have to find the cracks first. And they don't make it easy.

Assez!

Revisiting "Retake"

2006-06-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

About four years ago, I came across the catalogue published by Tulika books on Vivan Sundaram's Retake of Amrita exhibition. At the time, I wrote a little review of the work based on the catalogue (probably a review that I would NOT want to revisit at this late date!), and have since curiously watched as the show seems to have been travelling extensively since at least 2002....through Europe, Canada - I think maybe Singapore?? - and to the US.

All this preface is to say that I finally got to see the work in the flesh at the Sepia Gallery and wow - I have seen this work reproduced so often that I did not expect to be blown away by the real thing. Guess what? I was completely and utterly blown away.

Of course scale is always the first thing that jumps out after spending years looking at photos or slides, but it was the composition of the whole thing itself that produced, well, very intimate and raw emotive space. And that, I think, is not so much the impact of the individual photos which were taken between circas 1911 and 1950 by Vivan 's grandfather, Umrao Singh - but rather it came from Vivan's own manipulation of the photos to reveal relationships, tensions, and uncertainties between his family of "actors". You become invested in the trajectory of their lives and, like a theatrical event, you want to know how it all turns out in the end for every one of them.

I was also surprised and delighted to see parts of the actual Amrita Sher-Gil archive on display - photos that Umrao took of himself and his family that Vivan later manipulated for the Retake show. Just the disclosure of the archival photos was a glimpse into an important - yet surreal - moment in Indian history, underscoring Amrita's canonic place in Indian modern art while at the same time questioning her real ties and sense of identity linked to India.

I say the last because although much of her work drew on Indian subjects, she did so with the pov of a European modernist, and with the eyes of the European elite of which she and the whole family were very much a part. Her physical and psychological distance from - rather than her connection to - India is so striking in these images. The fact that Amrita (as a figure) and her paintings were so aggressively swept up by the nationalist movement is thus a more fascinating comment on the tensions and contradictions of early postcolonial nationalisms than I had previously recognized.

There was also a 10 min set of videos in the show that employ photographic stills, video and music - facing each other and tracing in not-so-subtle ways, the narratives of Amrita's mother and sister (Vivan's mother). Although I was mesmorized by the flickering photos and their "movements", I still found it the least compelling aspect of the show as the music was a little too monumental and over the top; and one had to wonder about the real messages, obviously the artist's mother's history is a personal narrative, but it is difficult to tell as the mother (Indira) does not give nearly as much away in the images at Amrita. And as for Vivan's grandmother, Marie Antoinette, her death by suicide is a little too sensationalized here with the jerky and somewhat odd video manipulation of the images, it comes off as somewhat forced or obvious.

I guess here stands my love/hate relationship with the archive-as-art or even as a parallel to art: Marie Antoin's story - I suppose like Amrita's - is best presented in the context of art as a l little obscured and mysterious - at least ambiguous. And there is a line here between the "real" archive and the "surreal" art. At what point can I as the viewer interpret the work - and when am I forced to yield to the historical "truths"? I know the story of the family - or at least how it is told in the public realm - but can one view "Retake" without feeling as though their interpretations need historical narrative "corrections"?

LIVE from New York!

2006-06-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

I'm baaAck!
After a couple of months on the lam from blogging, moksha has resurfaced in the big apple and really, what could be a bigger impetus for getting back her much-needed groove?

Day One - while it probably would have been more practical if I had spent the day buying amenities like, I don't know....toilet paper and soap? - instead I spent most of the day at that bastion of art and art pilfering (did I say that?), the Met.

In four hours, I barely got through the Egyptian galleries (that is a whole other story - I used to think that mummies were rare...), but my comments here are reserved for Anglo Mania, a wacky and deliciously irreverent costume/diorama show which transcended the confines of curatorial "creativity" - a feat that was made all the more incredible to recognize while standing in such a traditionally austere institution.

Basically - the show mused upon the construction of "Englishness" through the "traditions" and "transgressions" of its clothing history. "Tradition" in this case stood for clothing that ranged from the 18th to end of 19th century, and "transgressions" (which took their cues from "traditions" but overturned them in the process) that were played out mainly in the past twenty years and were predominantly represented by designers Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. I should note here that this tradition/transgression thing ultimately seemed a little forced - who's to say that the "tradition" specimans were not transgressions in their own time? Or maybe there was on a comment here on the shifting meaning of these era-centric 'uniforms' - in 100 years, the trangression examples will be "tradition"...

Anyway - the real transgression, in my opinion, was in the layout of the show. These period rooms that normally house the Brit. classical art section of the museum were so wonderfully rearranged and acted upon by wild-haired mannequins, the effect was a deconstruction of the traditional museum space and a forging of something new. Picture a grand non-working fireplace arranged in a museum to display, among other things, period type fireplace implements and untouchable gilded mantle decorations - now picture that same mantle with a translucent-skinned mannequin with blue hair and Galliano newspaper print and tartan long underware sprawled over it in the place of gilt decor. It upended the whole concept of the "period room" and the diorama which are so often formulaic when it comes to costume display.

In this juxtapositon of old and new, tradition and transgression, it was equally fascinating to hear the comments of visitors. Some outright poo pooed the whole thing, unwilling to suspend belief for a moment that Burberry waders, mohawk head dresses made from tampons, and Elizabethean-inspired jewelry containing semen deserved a place in the Met's hallowed sanctum. Others were constantly trying to identify the contemporary pieces from the old ones in efforts to determine, as one woman said, the "original" from the derivative, I suppose. There were a lot of sniffs and some bored expressions - if the clothing codes were too familiar, it seems, they lost some respect among those who go to the museum to be reminded of how much they don't know, rather than to rethink what they do.

But still others were, like me, blown away by the spectacle and sheer theatricality of the "scenes", overarching in melodrama and yet so right for the opulent interiors that surrounded them. I particularly liked the way the class system in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries were constructed, featuring interplays and conversations across time and space among "gentlemen/prep school types" and amongst "coachmen/punks". [photo above]

Enough for now - but suffice to say the way this exhibition tore down conventions of chronology, and diorama display, forcing us to pay attention to the cinematic elements of the galleries which we usually take to be natural and normal constructions, will stay with me for a long time. Hopefully other curators will follow.

Guess what? I'm in NYC and it's awesome.

Opening sucess!

2006-05-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

Over at www.genderingdetail.blogspot.com are images from the opening of Gendering Detail in Toronto this past Friday - a labor of love for four artists, a curator and two gallery directors!

This means I no longer have an excuse for not keeping up with Moksha - so once the juices start flowing again - i will resume!

Distractions...

2006-04-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the hiatus - I have been spending all my time over at:

www.genderingdetail.blogspot.com

But I promise to return in about a week!

Washing Machines and Wunderkammers

2006-04-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

The History of Chinese Painting and The History of Modern Western Art, Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (on your left), by Huang Yong Ping, is always a crowd pleaser in the classroom.

While it brings out some points for discussion from students, it also helps to articulate Huang Yong Ping's (HYP) own status, straddling both China (which he left in 1989) and Europe/US (where he is much loved in the art world).

In the latest Art in America, Eleanor Heartney has written a clear essay, I think, about his retrospective at the Walker in Minneapolis, now at MASS MoCa.

And I am struck by a couple of things:
-the first is that I - and many other designated 'non-western' art historians - often lament the fact that we are expected to have a knowledge of western art as an a priori given, despite the fact that it is not our focus of study. "Western" art historians, on the other hand, are not assumed to have knowledge of India, China. etc....
And yet here is an artist who uses his extensive knowledge of western art history (find overt references to John Cage, Duchamp, da Vinci, the Euro "avant-garde") AND Chinese art histories in Taoism, Buddhism, Zen - as well as Chinese arts collectives like Xiamen Dada) - and uses it all to tremendous effect without placing these two intellectual locations at odds with, or in resistance to, each other.

In fact, he made me want to learn more about Western European art so that I could better decipher his references - and that is no mean feat for a Chinese contemporary artist.

In any case, I can't help but wondering if us non-westernists can make better use of our world-straddling positions and force more dialogue across the proverbial art historical chasm. Finding probably - more similarity than difference.
I was at a dissertation writing seminar a couple of years ago and came away totally frustrated because I was the only non-western person, and thus to my mind, my work had a hard time being understood and connecting with the others in the seminar. There was a real dissonance there that, instead of trying to get to the bottom of it, we all just swept it under the carpet - including moi. But I wonder if there is some sign there - that I'm not doing enough to see beyond my little frame....??

-The other point I had about this exhibition was what Heartney describes as its Wunderkammer qualities. There are taxidermied animals a la Museum of Nat. Hist; divination tools; live reptiles; part of a reconstructed airplane, etc....in short, all the mismatched displaying of a cabinet of curiousities. And I realize (where have I been, you might ask??) that artists are moving away from the in-your-face critique of the museum space (Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson), and HYP brilliantly seems to use the critique as a legitimate frame for his show, without being guilty or underminded for actually holding the show in a museum space!

If all that seems a bit mishmashed at the moment, it's because I am currently running late and waiting for a shuttle to take me to the airport. More later.....

Florida: the promised land

2006-04-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

What is it about the state of Florida that makes everyone absolutely throw up pastel colors?

Don't say it's the warm climate - I'm not buying that. there are plenty of hot places in the world where women outright refuse to wear pale canary yellow "slacks" with a soft minty green shirt and think, "of course they match, they're both pastels". The only thing missing with that combo is a pacifier - the state is inhabited by big, old babies.

This phenomenon does not stop at clothing, but even there you have a case for a seriously challenged visual culture.
Oh no - it extends to houses, to interior design, to cars, to restaurants, to grocery stores - everything is swathed in blossomy shades that those of us in the rest of the country (not to sound superior or anything..:) would not let our children wear after the age of two. Call it my San Francisco cynicism - it isn't normal, or healthy, to consume and wallow in so much pastel. You start to believe that Disney is real life and that the sun really does have a happy face. Or something like that.

It's as if everything has this determined mission to look happy, innocent, and peppered with childlike wonder. It's the "we're on vacation and damn it we're carefree" suspended color-time. Or the "we live here and are under the delusion that everywhere looks like this" color resignation.

I cannot give you a visual on this because I really don't want to spend the time hunting one down on the web. You will just have to trust. And ponder the horror.

you can never go back

2006-03-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

Sympatico / MSN News : Entertainment : British Museum returns aboriginal ashes to Tasmania

Here is something interesting. I mean the actual process of repatriation, rather than the specific details of this case.

As the past few months have seen the repatriation of objects from such hallowed institutions as the Met and the Getty by Italian and Greek authorities, (see my earlier post: A Change in the Tide of Repatriation) the issue of repatriation is beginning to emerge in my mind as a fascinating track to pursue in the future.

How is the provenance and acquisition of these objects characterized before and after repatriation? How do their meanings change in the process of repatriation - moving for instance, from the status of foreign "treasure" to symbol of national heritage? What does the political act of standing up to a major American or British museum do to the reception of the objects in their "home" countries? Or to their significance as "art" or "artifact"? And finally, this idea that objects inherently belong in a geographically bounded region or city is also interesting. Are they actually going back to their immediate place of fabrication, or (more often the case, I'm sure) are they going back to adorn National Museums? Is a repatriated object in this capacity more 'valuable' than one that is not because of the political implications behind its acquisition?

Too many questions - precious few answers. Although I will suggest that particularly as Asian countries come increasingly into their own on the economic stage, there will be more aggressive calls for repatriation.

And as a branch of museum studies and art history, the results of tracing some of the political claims on these objects, and their subsequent journeys back "home" could be fascinating.

Raqs in SF

2006-03-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

Writing a blog is kind of like working out regularly - while you are engaged in the routine, it comes naturally, but once you stop - the pain of getting back to it can be a real deterrent.

In any case, I am now back after some more recent entertaining. My hostess skills are now dried up for the next few months....

Other than hospitality management chez moi, however, I did have the opportunity to hear part (alas, had to leave!) of a lecture by Raqs Media Collective, the members of which are doing a short residency program at the San Francisco Art Institute. The collective is comprised of: Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

The image at top is 8 Pieces of Evidence, done for the 2003 Venice Biennale which I had the pleasure of seeing - might I add, the only South Asian artists represented at that event. This, of course, was remedied this year with a whole section devoted to S.Asian artists, which seems to indicate a sudden spike in interest from the international art market. At the 2005 VB, the work was A Measure of Anacoustic Reason:

All of this is virtually impossible to show in these still images - because so much of it is in multi-channel video format, with sound and large-scale compositions for the projections. Both VB pieces, tackle, among other things, considerations of mapping urban and geographic spaces and raise provocative questions about the unmapped spaces in between constructed borders, in between monuments and underneath city scapes. They are about inscribed identities and their uncounted or desacralized counterparts - and about the processes of this making and unmaking in the city, and in the "world" (or many "worlds" for that matter).

In any case, I won't do the layers justice here - but the sumptuousness of their focused/unfocused video images, the slow-moving capturing of spaces that are specific or nebulous (Pieces of Evidence is about Delhi) is seductive and always makes me want to uncover more.

What I particularly appreciated at the talk was that although its primary purpose was to explain the missions and realizations behind their work, they refused to assign a bottom line of literal meaning to the work, nor did they resign it all to the domain of unguided public interpretation. They tried to explain their motivations, but clearly stated that their struggles and avenues of interrogation were designed not to yield answers or truth-claims, but to point them in new directions. They admitted that this shadowboxing could be frustrating - and yet kept them going - as it keeps those of us who admire their work continuously going back and reevaluating its meanings and encrypted messages.

They articulated this with a fascinating parallel to K.C Bhattacharya as seen through Ashis Nandy, whose own hybridity of pre-modern, modern and industrialist attitudes in Nehruvian India was akin to their own unstable, or fluxuating positions and attitudes in their art (modern/postmod/postcol/). - Or at least, that is how I understood the presentation!

Well - that's the end of this story for now. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend their next public event - but I do think that they are producing some of the most compelling contemporary art in India right now. Is it "postcolonial" - is it "post-postcolonial"? - It never ceases to make me think.

Deconstructing the construct

2006-03-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

Southeast Asia, Too, Is on Map of Islamic Art - New York Times

Great article to start the day!
I like it because it demonstrates how museums are currently grappling with the boundaries of "Islamic art" definitions - which themselves are largely products of a western museology tradition.

It can only result in more nuanced understandings of Islamic visual culture - and do great things for the mainstreaming of the discipline.

so rah rah!

footnote hell and other stuff

2006-03-15T15:52:00.000-08:00

help! If I write another convoluted footnote today I will literally weep. My hands are cramping from the tedium and my eyes will no longer focus on 12pt font sizes. kill. me. now.

on a happier note (in protest of my excrutiating day, I am now forgoing with any and all pretenses of format, including caps), or at least a more interesting one, I have been pondering a couple of things of late...

the first is Sotheby's upcoming auction of contemporary Chinese, Japanese and Korean art - find it here and register because it's fast and free. Apparently, this is the first auction of its kind - although I haven't verified that. For those that teach a contemporary Asian art survey (comme moi), many names are recognizable and I must say I was happy to see Sui Jianguo's work in the line-up as he is the artist behind our afore-mentioned red dinosaur. But everyone featured is safe, known, and has achieved notoriety outside of their respective countries. So the rubber stamp of the western art market is alive and well.

still, I went from happily wondering about how contemporary Asian art will possibly change tastes and collecting patterns in the west, to reading about
the current over-the-top performances of connoisseurship and opulent wealth at the European Fine Arts Fair in Maastricht. $90 million dollars for a painting?!

maybe I should not be so thrilled that contemporary Asian art is being churned up in the grand commoditizing art markets of the west because one result, as witnessed in this article, is the construction and fetishizing of "masters"- like Rembrandt, who BTW, could not be more loved at this event. Of course, this is done at the great expense of so much art, shifting the focus onto dollar value from art historical significance.

the outcome of events like this, of course, end up in museum narratives that reinforce the grand canons of art history through exorbitant "masterpieces" that showcase their most expensive - not necessarily their best - parts of the collection. So it does as much violence to the work of artists whose work gets left behind, as it does to the elevation of those that do not.

i know this is not exactly a revelation - but when I saw the prices on those Euro paintings, I couldn't help but wonder where it ended and what it meant for the "mainstreaming" of asian art. I was, sadly, far more taken with the $$$ involved in the Maastricht than with the work itself. Are the other possible trajectories that art can make in our capitalist world?

I'm puzzling this as I now return to agonized footnoting.....

the veil: it's the 'new black'!

2006-03-12T20:40:00.000-08:00

After a slight hiatus (I have been entertaining!), I am back with a vengeance.

One of my secret indulgences is to cruise articles on the web about the lastest fashion crazes - there are glitzy hooplas called "fashion week" in Paris and New York - and there are always catwalk images with incredible clothes that I look forward to seeing in knock-off form in the months ahead.... but this latest round of catwalk days in New York (and maybe London??) is extremely disconcerting. Witness two examples of how designers have been swathing their models lately, in hoods (some with eyeholes and some without), quilted and linen veils, bondage masks and low slung hats. There were examples of this in the NYT from about five difference fashion houses.

The response has been somewhat predictable, I suppose. Some say the additions are misogynistic, while others dismiss the trend as frivolity that should not be taken seriously.
I am in the first camp. I do think that it is serious and comes directly out of our current relationship with the Middle East. I know the argument can be made that women's fashions in the west have historically toyed with head coverings and the like, but why is this the specific moment of the fashionable catwalk version of the burqa? How often do images of veiled Muslim women flash across your television screen nowadays without context?

Of course the veiled woman has, in recent years, provided the ideal grounds for which to propagate western conceptions of homogeneous oppressive cultures in the east. It is almost impossible to convince college students that most women who veil do not do so under duress from family or government. The juxtaposition between the "free" bared-faced white American woman and the "oppressed" veiled Muslim woman is so embedded in the general psyche.

And today, I would hazard, the veiled Muslim woman also stands (in the west) for the real lack of knowledge that we have about Islamic cultures, and how this ignorance is finally becoming glaringly obvious in so many tragic ways. She is a sign, in other words, of what we don't know and cannot access. A source of frustration, even as so many western politicians portend to want to "release" her. whatever. the rhetoric makes me queasy.

Parallels with the conception of the exotic, mystical harem as a metaphor for the inaccessible East by colonialists in the 18th and 19th centuries are, of course, purely uncoincidental. :)

And so it is not such a mystery that the veil makes a return on a neo-orientalist stage as a sign of the mysterious woman, the exotic and unknowable enigma, but thankfully sexy to men - and therefore, ultimately conquerable.

And it is no coincidence that the veil is now making a turn on the catwalks of the States and Europe. Designers like other artists, absorb what is around them and interpret it within their own visual filters. Doesn't the Vivienne Westwood hood above look like the one used in the Abu Ghraib torture images??Thus the "don't take it seriously" defense does not hold water.

This claiming and recasting of the veil is a sign of our times, and a sign of how the bodies of women once again in the history of the world provide the battlefield on which men live out their fantasies of war, of violence, and of conquest.

the mini-est rant

2006-03-06T22:41:00.000-08:00

did anyone get a good look at that humungous Oscar's stage last night?

enough with the Art Deco-on-steroids look - Man, I am so sick of that!

of artists, modesty, and self-analysis

2006-03-06T22:13:00.000-08:00

Incharacter.org

Thanks to www.galleryhopper.org for the link to In Character - the articles are so well written (or least the two I have read), they make me weep. Would that my dissertation sounded so smart (~sob~). The In Character article is a historical perspective on the place of modesty in the life of an artist, to which GH responded:

"I hate artist's statements. It's ridiculous that an artist should be expected to explicitly explain what's behind a piece of work. Isn't that a job for the viewer to figure out on their own? Joerg has pointed out that they are frequently more than a little contrived if not disingenuous."

I, however, want to ponder this a bit more. I have no problem with artists talking about their work or being asked to submit statements about their work to exhibitions - only they know if this feels contrived and should therefore bow out of the statement if it does. So much of the current wave of contemporary art is so intensely personal that it seems silly to balk at providing a few contextual details for the piece - for interest's sake in the artist, if nothing else.

I do have a major problem, however, with the notion that an artist's perspective on their work is somehow more "truthful" or "authentic" than anyone else's interpretation. Once it is in the public realm, all of those interpretations are equally valid, it seems to me. In fact, I would argue that most work is only truly complete once it elicits the reactions of people other than its creator. I know many artists who benefit immensely from the dialogue surrounding their work, to the point where their own original ideas about it change.

But try as I might, it is excruciatingly difficult to ask a university class of art history students to interpret contemporary art and NOT ask me if they "got it right." "Getting it right," BTW is always translated as the opinion of the artist her/himself because - only they know the "answer". There is some strongly held belief in the supra authority of the artist's word, and I can't make them shake it. Arghhh [insert: me wanting to kill myself]

At what point in the education system are students taught the "bottom line" of knowledge production? Whoever told them that boiling all information down to a little nub of stuff that is 'right' is what education is about? We must teach this approach (or is it an innate way of making sense of things?) - although the obvious demons of standardized testing come to mind, I know that students think like this in Canada too - and they don't have plethora of standardized tests that we have here. Maybe it's the system of testing itself, or the structure of tests, or the fact that teachers find it easier to teach all of the memorizable tidbits than to instruct students on how to interpret, on how to question, and on how to be critical. Those three things should not be so painfully foreign for a 23-year-old. Yet, for the most part, they really really are.

For the art historian, critic, collector, lover, whatever - artist's statements can be interpretative tools at best, interesting side notes at worst. But the danger really is in attaching too much importance to this as some grand word of authority. Maybe the parallel between writers and artists is not a feasible one (read said In Character article), but nonetheless, I know that once my tome of ill-worded dissertation ideas are put to rest, I will effectively set them free into the public domain. I know that I have not said the last word on anything - and that I will probably hate this as soon as it is finished. I also know that its interpretation in the minds of others is what will keep me working and producing, as a writer and an academic. Perhaps many artists would feel the same.

Collectives: radical rehash?

2006-03-05T10:41:00.000-08:00

Interesting article by Holland Cotter (like him or lump him, he tends to raise good questions - except around Islamic art; at CAA, I sat in a panel that lambasted him for his perpetuation of stereotypes, but I digress....)
The Collective Conscious - New York Times

Still - I think he dropped the ball on this one.

I like the idea of these artist's collectives operating under fictional names of artists and dealers; creating false media projects to comment on the infiltration of propaganda into the realm of popular culture (like a trailer and movie publicity posters for a fictional film starring Penelope Cruz and Ewan McGregor); or using biotechnology experiments to raise awareness about genetic engineering and organic food production. Call it "activist art" or as one group (titled: 0100101110101101.ORG) call it, "media actionism" - the result is I think a fascinating rethinking of 1970s performance and action art with a 21st -century twist. But the concern with breaking away from the commodification of art, and the artist-as-celebrity which were major issues for artists in the 70s, still remain and this history should be acknowledged.

Now when I discuss performance art in a classroom, I always talk about the way in which the fantastic Japanese Gutai movement has been so marginalized in the art history annals. We revisit their work and ultimately determine that our *now wiser* and enlightened global view helps to situate these artists in a more elevated position vis a vis western performance art.

But this last statement is obviously naive - because this whole article is about American artists - as if this phenomenon a. does not have a history in global performance art and b. emerges only from the US.

I can't believe, for instance, that he didn't even mention the Raqs Media Collective based in Delhi whose work has received "international" recognition at two Venice Biennials and is now included on the Peace Tower at the current Whitney Biennial. At Venice in 2003, they were the sole representation of India. Not too mention numerous other shows around the world combining installation, video, textual analysis, photography, and fiction, mapping urban physical and psychological spaces. [see one video still above from Building Sight: Curatorial Project for On Difference #2]

If we truly have moved away from dismissively marginalizing non-western artists, then why comment on a "new" artistic phenomenon without at least acknowledging that the work of artists in our own backyard is in constant dialogue with the work of artists elsewhere in the world?

The idea of the artistic collective is neither new nor "American" - until western critics learn to break out this centric approach to contemporary art (beyond tokenism), we're doomed to repeat the art historical mistakes of the past.

making art: not quite the same as writing it

2006-03-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

One of the best things I ever did was take an art class. Now that the art school brochures are crowding the mailbox once again, I am reminded of this fact.

Now it may seem strange that a person struggling to become an art historian for the past 7 (8?) years had NEVER taken an art class prior to about a year ago - but there it is, not even in high school.

And yet I was foolishly confident when I stepped up for a San Francisco Art Institute course in collage. Confident that since I spent such an inordinate about of time writing, thinking and dreaming about art, that surely that would manifest itself into something sublime that actually was art. Oh naive one.

It is not surprising that I spent the first two weeks of the course literally writing words on canvas. I tried to do this in some ambiguous interesting way of course - through newspapers, crosswords, etc....the results were horrific, to say the least.

I had spent so much time forcing the visual qualities of art into words on paper that I could not conceive of an artwork without words. And as anyone who has ever read a review, then seen the exhibition and wondered if the reviewer was on crack - words and art are very often at polar opposites. Maybe some of the best work, for me anyway, is where meanings are so slippery and sly that framing them with words on a page is inevitably unsatisfying.

So I had to break free. Kill the historian and unleash the artistic being that I was pretty sure (although by this time, not 100% sure) was inside me. Coming up with ideas was the easy part - executing them was far more painful than writing them, naturally. By the time my tremendously subversive idea had worked itself out on canvas, it appeared trite, forced, silly and just really really bad. I was great at the "critique" part of the course - I could cut up or admire everyone else's work as well as my own - yet I was embarrassed to hang up my crapola work. Most of it immediately went into the garbage.

The upside to all of this was that I now teach art history a little differently - particularly to a class of studio students for whom I have unending admiration! We talk more about process, about technique, and more about artist interpretation than before I tried to be an artist.

I am more inclined to admit that the historian of art offers a limited perspective, and even that it is perhaps not the RIGHT one for thinking about and understanding the artistic process. Horror or horrors - but that's not my revelation, its Donald Preziosi's (see Brain of the Earth's Body)...it's one that makes you think though.

Ok - I know I've gone too far on the blog when I start to cite. Blogging, in a very real way, parallels the experience of letting loose that was so crucial to even begin to "make" art. Thank goodness it still allows me to use words though, or else I'd really be depressed.

The not-so-great fruits of my artistic labor are above and below (and I do mean LABOR):

Scalped from the Art History Newsletter

2006-02-28T22:09:00.000-08:00

I read this in the morning and then promptly blocked it out of my mind as too insane to deal with. I thank Art History Newsletter for summing up the inanity so succinctly:

From today’s New York Times, Philippe de Montebello on the Euphronios Krater: “How much more would you learn from knowing which particular hole in — supposedly Cerveteri — it came out of? … Everything is on the vase.” On illicit antiquities: “The truth is — unattractive as it may be — the black market, to a certain extent, is responsible for the preservation of a great many objects.”

I hereby take back what I said before about the somewhat benevolent gesture of the Met. It seems that I fell into the same trap as just about everyone in the museum world who has been heaping praise upon de Montebello and calling this one of the great marks of his legacy. Sigh. His arrogant second quote clearly epitomizes the attitude of so-called "great" western museums.

Because at the end of the day, de Montebello truly feels that the Met has a "right" (maybe a "duty") to "rescue" objects from the rest of the world. In fact, he believes that institutions like his own (and there are few) draw on such dizzying heights of intellect to parse the meanings of art objects that they are certainly above the law.

And if that does not scarily hurl you "Back-to-the-Future-style" into the imperial 19th century, I don't know what will. Ugh.

Ode to my dinosaur

2006-02-28T21:05:00.000-08:00

I live in a small apartment featuring an ad hoc arrangement of Ikea furniture interspersed with mismatched antique pieces and random India references (like the Ravi Varma print over my dining table), but it's also got the coolest red dinosaur that you have ever seen.

This dinosaur means a lot - he marks our first foray into buying art that is over $500 - in other words, art that you want to plan a room around; art that you tell people not to put their drinks on; and art that makes us feel as though we have tapped into something so clever that if others don't get it, then it's clearly their loss; OK, art that gives us an excuse to sound pretentious. Oh yeah, he does all that.

Not to mention that we love the thought of having a red dinosaur from China in our humble abode, completely upending any allusions to banal domestic normalcy. He makes us cool. Like the quintessential travel souvenir, we often depend on him saying more about us, than about himself.

Not that there isn't a lot for him to say. And before you are impressed, let me admit that we bought him at a museum gift store following an outstanding solo exhibition of his artist, Sui Jianguo. Sui's dealer from Paris had happened to send over a few images to the gift shop for general sale, and we were two of the lucky recipients.

I often wonder, however, if this textured glossy red T-rex, standing about 2 ft high with MADE IN CHINA embossed on his belly, is speaking to a specific moment that so defines *our* immediate anxieties about China right now, perhaps he will appear naively dated in just a few years.

Obviously his meanings are layered: although resembling a toy, his size and weight (of polyurethane) shows there is more significance to him than what meets the eye, and the lure of his bright, nobbly surface is seductive. Our own "addiction" to China in multiple industries hits home. But it's a dinosaur, and it's red (heralding the 'extinction' of 'red' China?) - it all seems incredibly current, vital and slyly humorous. Sui Jianguo's own relationship and history with both strongly Communist and emerging capitalist China is complex and, in his own mind, without a definitive conclusion.

But maybe my kids will be learning Mandarin and won't have to go to a special school to do it. And maybe once China begins to call in its debts to the U.S., our relationship will change from one of cautious anxiety to begrudging resignation. And maybe our fabulously exciting, and foreboding, dinosaur will one day lose its potency in the face of these rapid global changes.

But I hope not. As an art historian, I need to depend on its meaning changing with time, but not diluting its impact in the process. Because, well, he rocks.

Speechless and sad

2006-02-27T23:13:00.000-08:00

Before and after images of the Abbasid al-Askariyya Shrine in Baghdad that suffered serious damage last week. I cannot quite figure out if these images depict the same entrance - in the after image, the iwan arch-way is gone. The minarets look the same, but the clock tower is gone. In any case, it is clear that the devastation is complete at this shrine to two imams which ironically attracted both Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Where does it end?

CAA brief de-brief

2006-02-24T12:17:00.000-08:00

Uh oh - I returned from Boston yesterday with the shameful realization that I had yet to add a single blogging entry from CAA despite my previous grandiose claims. Ok, it is official, I am not a hardcore blogger. And I am fine with that. [note that the date on this blog should read Monday the 27th]

I have been sharing a hotel room with three other women over the past week - needless to say, there were very few moments at CAA when my mouth was not flapping (sorry - I mean, engaged in intellectual conversation). So my blogging responsibilities fell by the wayside. Besides, how could I look suave in my carefully chosen art historical ensembles while lugging around this 7-pnd laptop? It wasn't happening.

But it was a fabulous conference for Asianists - there were more papers and panels relevant to this field than at any other CAA that I have attended over the last six or seven years. So that's saying something!

Another positive sign were the number of interviews that South Asianists were racking up - dare to dream that universities are increasingly transforming the tokenist adjunct non-western positions into full-time appointments... Thank goodness that the media continues to fuel American fears of capitalist ventures in China, innovation and out-sourcing in India. All of it helps little ole me to present a much more persuasive picture about the relevance of what I teach to the everyday lives of American students. To say nothing about the obvious super-charged interest in Islamic art.

Speaking of which, before the whole thing slips my mind, I wanted to comment on some of the more thought-provoking panels I attended. One included a discussion about the presentation of Islamic art in museums which raised a number of deeply problematic issues for me, while also highlighting the perspective of curators towards their collections.
Linda Komaroff from LACMA gave an outstanding paper, I thought, because she was not afraid to be self-reflective about the role of display in the "Islamic art" gallery, nor to alter her own strategies in the gallery periodically to reveal new historic/formalist/social narratives in the museum space. This whole panel, however, ended in a strangely defensive way when the audience started to question the category of "Islamic art" in museums and the historical/academic/museological roots of its construction. I couldn't help but think of the constructions that surround any group of objects in the museum context; in the 1930s, I am sure that the Islamic galleries would have been called "Persian" to reflect the contemporary predispositions towards everything Persian. But the self-reflective nature of the panel seemed to stop here and I realized that curators of Islamic art may have different, and very specific, ideas about the parameters of its definition than those of academe. The questions of category seem to have been the subject of museum battles in the past, and thus are considered relatively "fixed" today. I still have a hard time with this, but the responses from the panel made me recognize these distinctions in approach. They also came up again in a fascinating introduction to the field by Nasser Rabbat, who chaired a panel the next day.

Questions around categories also came up in other panel contexts: what is "asian art"? What is modern/contemporary asian art? What does that mean and how else can we define it. If it means everything (ie. we are all "Asian bodies" as one person remarked), then it means nothing.

The contemporary art panel led by Rebecca Brown and Sarita Heer was particularly provocative in this area. My favorite was by Murtaza Vali about Pushpamala N's video performance, The Phantom Lady or Kismet (image above). There is too much to go into here: her use of the tableau format; the nostalgia for the era of self-consciously "modern" India; the androgynous, and hybrid masked character she assumes to comment on the fantasy of "Indianness" and the constructed narratives of citizenship. All the more intriguing for me as I grapple with similar themes in my own work.

Well - I actually have to start working now and catching up on work...To all of my legions of readers who anxiously awaited the promised "live blog" - I hope I didn't waste too much of your time! If you do want any other specific details about CAA - the whole interview infrastructure, for instance, let me know. [on the interview point: picture hundreds of people in dark-colored power suits nervously eyeing each other in competition... And picture a room with rows upon rows of spindly tables featuring committee members from the country's most prestigious schools arranged like firing squads around lonely-looking candidates on the other side of the table. You could actually walk through and around these little configurations and hear the interviews which must have been nerve-wracking for the candidates!]

So that wraps CAA '06
Until next year in NYC!!

crazy or just devout?

2006-02-19T21:49:00.000-08:00

One more word for the day - but it's short and without insight because I have not actually seen this show, and the articles I have read do not raise any interesting controversies.

Howeveah - I wanted to highlight this show at the Rubin Museum of Art by Rob Linrothe called Holy Madness: Portraits of Tantric Siddhas, featuring painting and sculpture from South Asia and the Himalayas that depicts gurus so close to the otherworldiness of God, that they occupied much of their time in another dimension altogether - madness.
http://www.rmanyc.org/Exhibitions/inaugural.cfm#6

The title is of course a bit difficult to digest. "Portraits" implies that these holy teachers actually existed which is debatable, following this is the implication of specific patronage. As if these "portraits" were commissioned by the godly men and women themselves in their lifetimes (if they indeed existed and had 'lifetimes'....!). I think most of these works are from the 19th-century, but at least some of the gurus were noted in the 12th, or in earlier eras! Problematic and strange - it makes me wonder who chose it and why.

I have always been interested in this notion of the wild eccentric holy figure that can be seen in so much Asian art, not just from S. Asia or the Himalayas. People who live outside of the mainstream of society and who project themselves as so completely attuned to nature and the ephemeral that little things like washing are completely out of the realm of daily life. And yet the narratives of extraordinary other-worldly abilities capture the imagination and exist as some evidence of a higher state of being.

As Holland Cotter pointed out in his review from the NYT, while poor members of society were just deemed crazies, religious and wealthy madman were more often considered eccentrics. Which, when you think of it, is probably not that much different from today. Madness is often indulged when money - or religious karma - is involved. And madness per se has a long history in Europe, I believe, of being associated with an altered spiritual dimension.

I suppose the contemporary manifestations are seen in movies today where inevitably, the rambling homeless guy is the one who has the most profound insight - or even works as a metaphor for God... .
Well, now I'm the one rambling -enough for now.

LIVE from Boston!

2006-02-19T21:13:00.000-08:00

It's been years since I have donned my journalist hat and set out to find "scoops" and "angles" on stories that the general populace could potentially find interesting.

So forgive the next week's postings, which will be an account of the College Art Associations yearly hoop-lah in Boston - I'm rusty and the "ledes" may not be very catchy.

CAA is, of course, that celebration of art that attracts hundreds (more??) of art historians (more black clothing and heavy plastic-rimmed eyeglasses than you have ever seen in one place) into one or two convention centers for four fun-filled days of art, art history, art criticism and frantic book buying.

The chaos is rife: it comes from the sheer magnitude of people (most of them awkward academics); the jostling of programs/notes/cards/Foucault, Lacan, Bakhtin (just because); the hyper anxiety of meeting the "right" people and having the "right" intriguing spin to put on my dissertation when someone (everyone) asks, "so what do you work on?" The number of times I have asked, and been asked, that question and then instantly zoned out is amazing.

In addition to all of this delicious esteem-bursting interaction is a job center where some will boldly go to try and forage for a career. I may be one of them but that remains to be seen.

As of Wednesday, I'll make some attempts to add levity to the affair, as well as to report on the 'Top Paper of the Day'. (Which could not possibly be of interest to anyone by myself, but I really don't care.) I am hoping to be inspired, overwhelmed, and revived somewhat in my own work.

And so - let the games begin. I'm ready to report.

Blake. bottomfeeders, and lots of $$$

2006-02-16T22:13:00.000-08:00

I always feel a little duped to hear about doctors who got into the profession only for the money and line up to sell their souls to pharma companies. But then again, I suppose, why shouldn't they?

This is what I was pondering while reading the above blog post on "L'Affaire de Blake"- which I will not rehash here because the link is just below!
Edward_ Winkleman

Suffice to say - it is the tale of greedy dealers, auction houses, and underhanded deals. All of it signifying in the end that a recently rediscovered, hitherto unpublished, set of 19 William Blake paintings from 1805 are going to be broken up for the sole purpose of getting a higher price.

They will be sold off individually and thus out of the public (and scholarly) eye and completely disconnected from the rest of the images with which they form a series. That's the thing that really irks me - they find these 200-year-old paintings actually together as they were originally (except for one errant one that's at Yale for some weird reason...), and the first decision made is to tear them apart.

I am reminded of that brilliant 14th century illustrated manuscript from Tabriz, the "Demotte" Shahname, whose pages were literally sliced in the middle by an art dealer (actually, "Demotte") so that illustrations on both sides of the page could be sold separately. So much for ever tracing what that complete mss. ever looked like.

But greed is everywhere. And like the doctors on the take, we can't assume that everyone in the arts profession is there because of some ethereal pure "love" of art and art history. As long as the $$ is good, there will always be dealers and auctioneers who can't see the art for the greenbacks.

Toronto vs. Frank Gehry

2006-02-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

CBC Arts: Gehry says Toronto missed its chance with architecture

Ok, so maybe he sounds a little bit bitter.

Bitter at having to gain respect for his architecture outside of the country before Toronto would even look at him....

Bitter at the fact that - had he been given some important breaks in Toronto, he might have been able to really revitalize its design over the last two decades, rather than just swooping in now with an AGO project.

Bitter because a. Toronto's architecture has been historically conservative, stodgy and decidedly anti-avant-garde. and b. it is SO typically Canadian to not take chances with art and architecture until the artists/architects in question are thoroughly entrenched in the industry elsewhere. And that's frustrating.

In other words, by all rights, Toronto should have been "so over" Gehry by now. They should have had their Gehry moment at least a decade ago and today, Herzon and de Meuron should be wearing hard hats around the construction sites of that fair city.

And if I had anything to say about it - Toronto would have had an awesome Anish Kapoor "bean" far before Chicago even dreamed up a millenium park:
but that's just my little preference because I love it.

Essentially Gehry says in this article what Torontonians need to hear AGAIN. This whole city needs to be reoriented to take advantage of its crowning glory (it's the lake, stupid). This topographic feature may come as a surprise to those who thought that the southern parts of the city were reserved for highways, byways, and ugly cookiecutter condos transplanted from Seoul and Hong Kong, designed to permanently cut the rest of the city off from its waterfront. Here it is:

This is not to say that I am not thrilled with the Opera House project, the AGO, the new OCAD bldg, and the amazing ROM. Those are all fantastic initiatives. But they are initiatives that exist within a bubble - they will be finished and city adminstrators may subsequently wash their hands of the whole "city design" affair.

They should instead be looked at as the beginning of a movement away from perceiving the city in terms of pockets, and instead instituting a vision - finally thinking about how it all works and looks together.

Until that happens, I might be inclined to agree with Gehry - the city of missed chances. Toronto take a chance?? Surely I jest.

Everyone's worst nightmare

2006-02-13T20:49:00.000-08:00

This story is too hilarious.

These 17th century Qing-dynasty vases have been minding their own business in the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge for apparently, decades.

Along came a slightly clumsy tourist who tripped on his shoelaces while going up the stairwell of the museum. Unfortunately for him, there were no handrails and the walls were smooth marble, as they tend to be in museums.

Uh hun - you get the message. ~$250,000 later, three vases have been smashed into "thousands of razor sharp shards" - according to the 6ft. guy that did it, "it was a miracle" that he didn't get hurt. Thank goodness for the soft cushiony landing supplied by 400-year-old vases. Although he maintains that he really only hit one....it just happened to tumble domino-like onto two others....(!!) damn those Chinese ceramics and their slippery bottoms.

Right - it seems the guy is banned from further visits to the museum, and they are now starting to rethink their objects-outside-of-plexiglass-case policy.

This can happen to YOU!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,,1703206,00.html

so what about those dumb cartoons?

2006-02-12T22:01:00.000-08:00

In keeping with the general theme of belatedness on this blog, I thought that I would indirectly weigh-in on the cartoon war discussion with this little excerpt from Michael Kimmelman's excellent commentary last week in the NYT:

Incredulity about the violence:
"Over art? These are made-up pictures. The photographs from Abu Ghraib were documents of real events, but they didn't provoke such widespread violence. What's going on?"

The power of this image:
"What may be overlooked this time is a deep, abiding fact about visual art, its totemic power: the power of representation. This power transcends logic or aesthetics. Like words, it can cause genuine pain."

Historical context:
"Ancient Greeks used to chain statues to prevent them from fleeing. Buddhists in Ceylon once believed that a painting could be brought to life once its eyes were painted. In the Netherlands in the 1560's, pictures were smashed in nearly every town and village simply for being graven images. And in the Philippines, enraged citizens destroyed billboards of Ferdinand Marcos.To many people, pictures will always, mysteriously, embody the things they depict."

Why we can't dismiss this and really have to consider what it means and what are truly the conditions of its provocation:
"The current bloodshed, fueled by political extremists and religious fanatics, turns the culture war once again into real war. People forget that Salman Rushdie's Japanese and Italian translators were stabbed (the Japanese fatally) and his Norwegian publisher shot."

"Among the issues to be hashed out in this affair, there's a lesson to be gleaned about art: Even a dumb cartoon may not be so dumb if it calls out to someone."

No easy answers.

Belated goodbye

2006-02-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

I know that this is old news by now (but hey, if you want a scoop, go read the newspaper!) - but I wanted to add my two cents to say goodbye to Nam June Paik, who died on Jan. 31st.

Now that I have been reading up a little more on his work, I realize the tremendous impact he has really had on contemporary art today. In the 1960s he was incorporating video imagery into his artwork - my family didn't know what a VCR was until circa' 85!

Of course to look now at his earlier work, the thick screens and tangled cords look clunky - as in his famous collaboration with the cellest Charlotte Moorman below:

But this was 1971 - and he was already interrogating our relationship with media-generated realities by combining physical performance, electronic sound and video and forcing them to speak to each other in both disturbing and humorous ways. The experimental and temporal quality of much of this work spawned a whole genre of technology and media art.

Although I never went looking for his work, I had the opportunity of seeing it in some memorable places. At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, my husband and I still imitate his video depicting a woman “singing” a typical car alarm - it’s actually a little bit addictive! I think of it every time one of those stupid things goes off in my neighborhood (which is actually quite often – notice I didn’t say they made me think about calling the police? aside to viewers: car alarms don’t work).

At the Guggenheim in 2000, his installations not only filled the ramps with static-screened tv sets (forming bras and other low-tech gadgets), but he also used laser beams to attack the only pristine wall in the building – the glass rotunda. Rather than cloaking the awkwardness of that architecture, he chose to celebrate it with technology, at once rendering the old FLWright new and dynamic again as the beams continually echoed the organic curves and geometric symmetry of the museum. It seemed the perfect comment on the “public-ness” of all of his work and the broad implications for media-driven expression.

Not to mention that the site of swirling neon lasers in the locus of the Guggeheim rotunda was really just way cool.

Still a great site for info:
http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions
/paik/paik_top.html

a fond farewell....

Good times in Baghdad?

2006-02-07T17:59:00.000-08:00

Another spectacular collection of photography passed across my cyber desk today - www.mideastimage.com - mostly consisting of blk and white images of Ottoman Turkey and Syria from the end of the 19th century to the early 20th.

Most interesting for me though - outside of the teacher perspective - were these fairly unremarkable images from Baghdad c. 1920. Top left depicts an outdoor cinema and on the right is an image of a port customs office on the banks of the Tigris.

I spent some time looking in detail at each one because the image I have of Baghdad today is so remote - so utterly removed!! - from the normalcy of these images, I guess I expected something in their details to hint at the inevitability of their present-day condition.

But they persist in looking like photos that could have been taken almost anywhere in the world in 1920. Actually, that outdoor theatre looks like one I went to in Greece just two years ago.

Just like "9/11" has become a term that supposedly sums up an event plus its devastating emotional and political fallout, "Baghdad" is also starting to compute in my brain as a psychological weight that signifies so much more than just a city - with common theatres and ports. When I saw that name on these images, I immediately thought about them differently.

I suppose that "Beruit" held similar weighty connotations for my parents in the 70s, and we all know that saying "Vietnam" in the U.S. means a hell of a lot more than a geographic region in Asia.

These are the kinds of definitions that don't make their way into dictionaries, yet become a necessary part of our lexicon - necessary because there is too much about them we simply cannot speak about or even grasp, so the name (or date) needs to acquire a meaning that is larger than itself, and speak it implicitly for us.

I suppose we (and media?) construct them because we have to. I think in j-school we called it the "pseudo environment" that entails, if I remember, the streamlining of complex ideas so that they are digestible and somewhat forced into making sense. I might be just babbling now!!

The palm trees, the water, the cool-looking theatre - Baghdad looks like a peaceful and somewhat quaint (well, it is 1920!) vacation spot. Too bad that I will never think of it as one.

the beauty of anonymity

2006-02-06T16:55:00.000-08:00

Why are anonymous portraits so intriguing? Why is it that I can spend hours in antique stores pouring over black and white photos of people I have never met (usually babies in starched lacy clothes and hand-tinted rosy cheeks for some crazy reason), yet I have incredibly little interest in most of the strangers who physically walk by or sit in front of me everyday?

Why do we care who the girl in the Pearl Earring was?

These are the questions that haunt me as I peruse this fascinating site about our somewhat shameful love affair with the anonymous portrait sitter (www.unknownsitter.com) . I relegate this to the "somewhat shameful" pile because I can't be the only one who stands in the store with a creepy smile on my face, looking at a photo and dreaming up outlandish, or sad narratives to accompany it. More often than not, I am jarred back to reality and realize that the antique store clerk is staring to give me suspicious looks.

No - I'm not going to try and put this photo into my purse when you aren't looking, I am just trying to complete the story of this unknown person! Their narrative seems so open-ended just lying there in an unmarked photo. Like an unmarked grave. But again, why do I care? What is the need to complete this story that has nothing to do with me?

And don't you even feel just a little bit satisfied when you have managed to configure some fictitious story that explains the image? As if you now know it's secret. It now has a history - thank goodness for that.

Maybe it's because we envision photos of ourselves at the bottom of an antique store pile someday. Unmarked and clearly unloved at five bucks apiece (more if there's a frame, of course). And that idea of being let loose like that - suspended in time and pawed through by bargain hunters - without the context of a photo album, or a familial connection, is disconcerting. What would these antique-store-patrons-of-the-future think of my outfit? And how exactly would a random picture of me end up there anyway?

Is there a basic human need to want to give a context, and a history, to things? Or is it a western thing (obviously now I'm thinking of colonial project of history writing that helped to epitomize the so-called benevolent aspirations of the British in India)? The Buddhist tenet of impermanence, as one example, seems to negate the need to preserve history on some level, while at the same time drawing on historical traditions and texts within that practice.

Or maybe that need just arises to counteract the way in which the anon. image is usually found. To pull an old photo out of a stack of other random images and to give it a meaning with an imagined history suddenly recalls the physical presence of that person, and in some strange way, that anonymity is gone. After all, that person wasn't always anonymous; it's the slipping away of identity that is difficult to come to terms with - we try to keep it intact and hope that some day, someone will do the same for us.

what do medievalists have that we don't have?

2006-02-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

In an effort to start making this blog appear more blog-like, and to start rebuilding the little lists of links that this template has unfortunately decimated, I am wondering what the heck is up with all of these medievalists?

Where are the legions of S. Asianists, one wonders?

Just go to www.crankyprofessor.com (which is quite entertaining BTW and includes some Islamic art references and comments) and look at all of his blog links on the right side of the site. What is with that?? I am seriously starting to think that medievalists have more fun than S. Asianists - and that's just depressing. If only I had known before applying to grad school.

I thought that academics who actually had jobs would not have the time to create intricately long and interesting posts. Who knew?

So to anyone (and I do mean anyone) who comes across an art history blog that is remotely not medievalist, do send it my way.

Surely I am not a lone voice.

makeover!

2006-02-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how I feel about this new look. True, it has none of the clunkiness of the last template, but that photo of a bronze monument (some guy on horseback) is a bit odd - does anyone know what that is, anyway? I like the little bit of map though - it looks like part of a London tube map and reminds me of terrific painted/collaged work by Talha Rathore:

(look closely at the cypress trees) that use maps to reference the confusions and multiple directions of life in a foreign land.

And frankly, a blog can be one pretty good way of "mapping" one's life.

A Change in the Tide of Repatriation?

2006-02-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

Wow - what's happening to the balance of power in the museum world? With Peru putting up a fuss for a bunch of bones at Yale:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/arts/design/01mach.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

and Italy taking on Marion True, the former curator at the Getty Museum, for hustling stolen goods out of the country,
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-brand27jan27,0,6705615.sto

and the Met actually giving BACK to Italy a 2, 500-year-old krater after 30 years of dispute (below), along with some other significant works of art,

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/arts/02cnd-museum.html

one would think that some western museums are finally being forced to take an ugly look at their place and role in the history of western "exploration", colonialism, and plain theivery.

I know this sounds like a gloat - but it isn't. There is every reason to believe that many of the objects in these museums, at Yale for example, have been there for almost one hundred years and are the product of excavations that occurred before antiquities laws were stringent, before widespread movements of preservation, and before the countries of their origin had any voice in the global arena. I also know that dealers are unscrupulous and many museums purchase objects in good faith only to find themselves lied to later once the check is cashed.

But there are too many museums in Europe and in the U.S. that have dark secrets in their collections - objects smuggled under the coats and in the luggage of curators; objects purchased at auction without an in-depth knowledge of how they were acquired; and objects donated with the same shady histories. For this second point about auctions - Peter Watson's, Sotheby's: The Inside Story is an enlightening read. http://www.salon.com/books/sneaks/1998/02/26review.html

So it is nice to know that the noose is finally tightening a bit and museums are finally being forced to come to terms with their pasts. Not because there is something particularly noble in returning some of these artifacts - the above article seems to suggest that the Peruvian articles have become very sought after in Peru for propagandistic purposes (but they should have the right to raise the culture flag as well as anyone else).

But the primary reason I think this is a good thing is because power breeds arrogance, and if Marion True was only one of dozens of curators who, for years, turned her head the other way when a deal was being made or made a point of not asking all the right questions, then maybe she is the example that needs to be made.
This little True event, of course, is what must have spurred the Met to finally let the krater go home, admitting that it was indeed stolen from a tomb.
But if you noticed, the Met also wants to start a partnership of long-term loans - tit for tat - with the museum authorities in Rome. Now Rome is not hurting for incredible museums, that is certain, but the idea behind that overture is a good one.

Major museums in Europe and N. America regularly exchanging objects of the same historical value (key!) with lesser-known museums in other parts of the world - THAT could be the start of a beautiful friendship and an important beginning to the purge of stolen items in the west that simply must take place.

The Diaspora, undone

2006-01-28T18:37:00.000-08:00

It was with tremendous interest that I ventured today into the new Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), just around the corner from that comparatively staid, Euro-celebrating SF Museum of Modern Art - now made moreso in juxtaposition with this new museum.

A museum dedicated to a diaspora is an interesting thing - and a vast subject to even get your head around, much less try to define visual space with it.

The museum begins with a statement of (or plea for) inclusion - thus: we are all part of the African diaspora because, after all, all life begins in on the African continent. Fair enough, although the black African diaspora is certainly what I expected to learn about here, and it is clearly the focus of the institution. This is further enforced later on with a little display of the world's first stone axes and tools, unearthed in east Africa but with technology that made its way throughout Asia and Europe.

The other focus is, interestingly, on the experience of becoming part of a diaspora. Displacement as a whole, in other words, supersedes the individual cultural distinctions that make up the African diaspora.

I suppose the creators decided that they could go one of two ways on this - they could distinguish specific African cultures and trace their movement in the world all the while separating, or "othering" one from the other by "original" language, religion, etc.. Of course, this strategy is hugely problematic (as my scare quotes indicate), and would inevitably draw criticism from those excluded by the project, or those essentialized by it.

But the other alternative - the one chosen here - is to generalize culture, speak of humanity in homogeneous terms and emphasize unity, over diversity. I think this probably speaks to current questioning of decades long lip service paid to the politically-charged terms of "multicultural" or "diverse" which serve to identify and thus compartmentalize certain "communities" of "difference" - and let the repercussions occur where they may in the form of stereotype and prejudice.

So in the museum's "Celebration Circle" there is a video narrated by blacks, whites, Asians and they speak together - their sentences literally overlapping - about the dynamics of family or community celebrations, while celebratory images from around the world play behind them.

Next is an interactive corner where we are asked to think about different body adornments in different parts of the world (all of which are displayed with a mirror in the center - hence the "unity in diversity" theme). This swings around to a display about food and demonstrates how food originally produced in Africa made its way across the world. - So displacement of material objects and cultural traditions in agriculture and eating.

Then there were theatres - one of which was showing a history on the Haitian revolutions, while the other was dedicated to the oral histories of former American slaves. - The experiences seemed again to focus on transition - the period in which the black African becomes something else - by throwing off the colonial oppressors, or by being forced into slavery.

Once I came to terms with the transition narrative - I could see how generalities worked, and how it would not have been appropriate to talk about specific African cultures, or languages, or religions. In any case, the contemporary art section at the top of the museum was the best simply because art is such a personal endeavor - it reminded me that each individual experience of displacement - or of memories (inherited or lived) of displacement, is unique. So it would be disingenuous of the museum to try and define specifics - except, you could argue, in the case of American slavery, which our society has already reimagined as a homogenized project.

I couldn't help but wonder if an "Asian" diaspora museum could function in a similar way? In the West, we tend to falsely see Asia as comprised of more diversity than Africa - so perhaps the same types of unifying messages would not work. Also, slavery as a phenomenon in the modern era provides a kind of frame on which to construct this sense of commonality, or shared histories, like the Holocaust is a point of imagined unity for Jewish people around the world. What similar shared tragedy or rupture can be traced within Asia - Mongol invasions? Colonialism? And why is a point of rupture or violence so crucial to defining modern identities?

Indian Art on Tap, not on Top

2006-01-24T21:32:00.000-08:00

Indian Artist Enjoys His World Audience - New York Times

Why do I always seem to read about Indian contemporary art in the mainstream media within the context of sales figures?

With so many incredible exhibitions of S. Asian contemporary art in N. America these days, I am amazed by the lack of coverage these shows get in lieu of the above type of story - a "gosh gee, Indian art can sell for 1.5mill. Christie's/Sotheby's! Well, what do you know?!"

The *success* story (and I mean that entre guimee because success in this case means recognition within the western art market) of contemporary art from India, or by artists in the diaspora, is simply not new.

For at least two decades, S. Asian artists have been acquiring stronger profiles internationally at biennales and in other major group exhibitions that are innovative and worldly in their outlook. Significantly, both of these types of venues usually do not attempt to frame this work as specifically "South Asian" or "Indian" - instead, it is just provocative contemporary art that happens to be made in India.

So these types of poor Indian artist-made-good stories like this one in the NYT irk me because it seems they endeavor to keep artists from South Asia "in their place," so to speak.

But maybe this is a phenomenon that speaks directly to/comes from market forces in the U.S.:
The "sales figures" aspect of this article naturally refers to the current state of the market for South Asian work (usually paintings) in N. America. From what I can tell, that appears to be generated predominantly from S. Asian communities and from collectors who are more interested in art as a commodity, than as a visual statement.

In fact, I am always amazed that the only place in town that offers seminars in "Art Buying as an Investment" seem to be galleries that specialize in S. Asian art. So the NYT article, I suppose, speaks to these collectors - for whom art is only the equivalent of another stock or bond, with potentially higher returns.

And that also is another potentially frustrating fact, because this is also a market that is mainly interested in buying and selling big names like Tyeb Mehta and M.F. Husain, and has little time for emerging artists. So the "gosh darn it" aura around Mehta's works simply perpetuates the market demand for work from established artists, rather than actually raises awareness about contemporary art from S. Asia, as it portends. Hmmm.

Questions time! Why is artwork by S. Asian artists so often presented in the context of investment?
Is it really all about making money? Or is there some sense that Indian art - like many S. Asians themselves who emigrate to N. America - needs to generate money in order to be recognized as having real "value" in the world?

Is this artwork then a surrogate - or metaphor - for the dreams of the diaspora?

Remember Breakfast at Tiffany's?

2006-01-22T21:50:00.000-08:00

I don't know why this just popped into my head - but here it is.

I will be the first to acknowledge that we have miles to go before the "Othering" of non-western cultures is laid to rest (if indeed, it ever can be).
But sister, if you want to know how far we have come, just watch Breakfast at Tiffany's and take another look at Mickey Rooney. Why is it that I saw that movie years ago and NOTHING seemed amiss? That is the thing that is disturbing - my only memory of that movie was how fabulous Audrey Hepburn looked and how great her hats were.

The Party with Peter Sellers is another "classic" worth revisiting.

Wait a second - did I just imply that there has been some kind of enlightened progression in the portrayal of broadly Asian characters? Scratch that third sentence.

I know we think that we are all older and *wiser* about such things now, but I doubt it. There must be contemporary equivalents that make similar cultural assumptions. Come to think of it, how many old, long-bearded sages (or smart moody children) in movies are NOT Chinese or Japanese? Isn't Star Wars a hotbed of wild Asian stereotypes? And why does every East Asian character in action films have to be versed in martial arts? And really good at nerdy computer things? I'm speaking broadly, of course.

Oh yeah, Mickey Rooney's "Asian" pastiche lives on but in different guises than it did in the 1960s. And like Breakfast at Tiffany's, it is so embedded within our popular culture, that one sometimes has to look twice to realize what we're actually seeing.

The City Rises

2006-01-18T22:50:00.000-08:00

New Delhi is a place where crossing the street is an adventure. Where goats and kids, rickshaws and aggressive cattle, mangy dogs and sharply beeping little cars all claim their right to the roads and refuse - refuse - to give way.

Jitish Kallat and Vivan Sundaram - two outstanding contemporary artists working in India and presenting their work everywhere - recently decided to tackle the above as artistic fodder. With surprisingly diverse, and intriguing, results.

"Rickshawpolis" (great name!) At Nature Morte in Neeti Bagh (a massive house that took me ages to find in a colony where every house seems to be part of A-block) there were paintings and photography by Kallat. www.naturemorte.com
Some of his work paid homage to the ubiquitous fender bender (see above).

The photos zeroed in on bruises and deep scrapes on cars that speak to their courageous feats of driving in Delhi and evoke special narratives for each mundane dent or scratch. (I couldn't help but wonder, "is that the impression of a person?") Their magnified and somewhat abstract quality even lent a certain pathos to each crunched auto body, scars that are earned and worn as evidence of their urbanity.

The best paintings were large-scale cacophonous clashes of vehicles, people, animals and shaky buildings, all emulating from a central point on the canvas in shades of red and blue, as if they were simultaneously squeezed out of the pic plane. And from a distance, they all meld together into this wonderful rhythmic mess.

I especially liked the little gargoyles that anchored the paintings at the bottom which were a humorous reminder of the ornaments on euro-pastiche buildings that are resigned to perpetually watch the movement of the city from their static facades. Now placed at the bottoms of these paintings, they evoke a historical foundation to the above chaos, rather than an aloof superiority.

At the Lalit Kala Academi, Vivan Sundaram took a much less romantic and far more messy approach to the urban environment, though I know that he personally did not get too involved with the messy bits. These "bits" are essentially garbage and his focus is on rag pickers and waste collectors whose living depends on the rebirth of garbage (recycling is a better way to say it) as something "useful". One man's garbage.....

There were a lot of different elements to this show - in fact it was laid out like a museum with intersecting rooms each conveying different messages or feelings. One of my favorite works was the cardboard obelisk - homage to Delhi's massive grass roots recycling (low tech meets 'high tech') - but also just a reminder of how much waste a city generates and how we depend on these unsung invisible workers to cart it away and out of sight.

One gallery was a work in progress - small portraits of local waste workers, some of them in their city department clothing. Consumption, disposal, consumption - does that ever end?? The relentlessness of that was overall more provocative than Kallat's urban celebration - the two shows in juxtaposition seemed to convey the differences between actually living within and without the city's textures. The whole elitist art scene is one way, I suppose, to live outside of this fabric.

Some of the other photos that depicted scenes in Delhi that had been recreated in garbage had the feel of topographic maps . But they actually made some kind of poetic sense - a city building and rebuilding itself in waste - regenerating garbage into the fabric of an urban environment.
The image of cities consuming themselves is a good one - as living, breathing entities that keep us alive - right under our noses.

ROM (G)Rumblings

2006-01-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

There is something quite fascinating about walking into a museum that has had the opportunity to almost completely remake itself from scratch.

Curators are presumably given carte blanche (OK, carte gris) to reinvent their space in the most up-to-date way possible. The results can and should be innovative, or else underwhelmingly disappointing.

This opportunity doesn't happen often - I have only truly seen this in its entirety at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, but the Royal Ontario Museum (gotta love that grandiose colonial name!) in Toronto has recently unveiled some new and not-so-new galleries in the effort to revitalization its interior as it revamps its architectural footprint in the city.

And the results (drum roll here), are somewhat strange.

I say this because I have never before seen a museum where each gallery was so disjointed and detached from the next. Each ROM gallery I visited presented itself as an absolute thumbprint of its curator's interests rather than expressing any overall coherence in the institution. What is also fascinating is the way in which each gallery seemed to reflect the current state of scholarship surrounding each group of objects - and how varied they were!!!

To clarify: the First Nations Gallery (voila - on your right) was organised according to the actual amassment of the collections. That is, the names of British collectors were used as frames for the displays - so one had a reflexive look at how and why these objects were collected, and subsequently how the ended up in the museum.

This was all done with the backdrop of 19th-century ethnographic studies, etc, etc. .....Needless to say, I loved this gallery because it completely paralleled my own interests.

There were gaps, however - for instance the glaring lack of aboriginal names juxtaposed with the names of colonial collectors that I noted above. And a conspicuous absence of 19th-century violence done to aboriginal communities.

In other words, the gallery was all about self-reflexive collections and 19th-century anthropology. Completely in line with current scholarship (particularly coming out of Canada from Carleton U.) .

Cut to the Asian Galleries. (as you can see from the pic, the light was spectacular)

In comparison with the above reflection upon the creation of collections, the Chinese and Japanese collections just seemed to materialize out of thin air ....??

The reflection vanished and we were left to wonder if perhaps these objects were dug right out of the ground in Toronto....I think not. The narratives woven around objects here related only to their original use in China, Japan or Korea, and stopped somewhere around the 18th century. It was sad to see the commentary on collections as entities themselves stop so abruptly here.

Note to would-be curators: when creating a display of jade or Chinese metal objects (mirrors, incense holders, etc), two or three examples will suffice. Unfortunately, the ROM wanted to show each of its fifty odd small broken jade pieces (jade crumbs really), and they wanted to display them from smallest to largest, er, just so you get the point. (Which is?)

But the gallery that oddly stuck with me the most was the "Bronze Age Aegean" gallery - because as I walked through its corridors, I envisioned its curator as a soul with the very soundest of traditional art historical education.
Only such a scholar would write labels that instructs viewers to note the "stylized horses" for no particular reason and provide intricate sylistic diagrams without the slightest guidelines as to what it all means, or what the heck "stylized" means anyway.

The objects are stunning, and I'm sure the scholarship was thorough. But their presentation unfortunately smacked of the art historical elitism that keeps people like my parents far away from museums. Who is this supposed to be for anyway?

I can go on - the Islamic galleries are another interesting journey - but I've gone on for long enough. A more positive person would look at these galleries and say, "hey, there's something for everyone". It's true; there is. But the First Nations Gallery was such a good start to an otherwise disappointing visit - a little synchronicity would have helped.

But go see it anyway - the architecture is way cool.

Self examination in 2006

2006-01-01T12:05:00.000-08:00

My sister-in-law has just produced a litany of precise and progressive New Year's resolutions that, if accomplished (and there are few doubts about this!), threaten to put the rest of us to shame this time next year and scratching our heads about the previous months' successes and failures.

Don't worry - I'm not about to use this site to therapeutically post my personal resolutions. But I thought I would try to advocate for some professional ones.

In a recent H-Asia post, Yeow-Tong Chia from U of T quoted the following from Wang Gungwu, Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005):
"It is widely acknowledged that the work of professional historians is not getting any easier. On the one hand, historians have to face the challenge mounted by those social scientists who try to ask different questions of similar data. Trying to turn history into a social science in its own right is not the answer. History has a distinguished lineage and historians have a different job to do. On the other hand, such historians are also challenged by the work of those outside academia who write well. And many of these historians do so with a literary flair, verge and imagination. The academic historian today is often discouraged from venturing into such writing by some universities that are narrowly focused on work published in highly specialized journals and read only by other professionals. By the time young scholars have passed through that barrier, many are no longer able to write for a wider audience to read"(p. 5)

Two points here - both I have heard elsewhere but feel they need repeating because to actually adhere to or attempt to write to them could evoke vital changes on the staid art historical front and particularly help those of us in the non-western branches of the discipline.

The first is to address the questions of social scientists which I take to mean the critical value of self-reflexive (and reflective?) research; to place ourselves within the context of our research and scholarship and ask ourselves why we are drawn to certain issues and how our personal and intellectual environments impact our approaches. The myth of objectivity in art production, interpretation and artistic analysis should be better exposed for what it is and, following this, we should be able use our acknowledged (and celebrated!) subjective approaches to open new avenues of questioning. All art historians' eyes have filters - I think it is fascinating to try and figure out what they are and how they inform the work.

The second resolution is perhaps not as readily applicable for me as the first -which I can immediately turn to my dissertation - but it still warrants thought. Chiefly, I think that the more well-written popular books that are produced about non-western art history, the more students will be able to walk into my class with at least a clue about the subject.

I went through high school with about five big colorful tomes on Matisse, and a few on Picasso, lining my bookshelf next to Lord of the Flies. And in my 16-year-old mind, this clearly meant that these two artists were foremost in the realm of art history. Why didn't I have an equivalent on Amrita Sher-Gill or the Gu-Tai (which I would have loved, by the way)? Answer: non-existant. It is reasonable to assume that the more popular books that are produced and consumed about non-western artists, the more academic publishers will realize that the world perhaps does not need yet another book on Matisse and will rise to the demand for non-Euro art history.

And then we can all get our dissertations published.

And all will be right with the world. Points to ponder in '06.

Watch this space

2005-12-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

Regardless of what this seems like, I have not abandoned all hope and deserted this blog. I am merely taking a break from it on the other side of the world.

But I will return - soon.

Airport angst

2005-12-06T13:10:00.000-08:00

I saw Vito Acconci at the airport.

I may not have actually seen him in the flesh, but everytime I go to the San Francisco Airport and take note of the exit corridor, I see "Light Beams for the Sky of a Transfer Corridor". Here it is with the artist himself placing a pay call for the photo:

Ok, that's fine. The real question is, what in fact is Vito Acconci DOING at the airport? And what is his work DOING at the Philadelphia airport? As one of the founders of great performance art in America, I want to think of him in his 1970s guise: masturbating under a floor with gallery visitors listening in; biting himself all over while naked and then inking the bite marks, etc.. I realize that these days are over and he has moved on to other more architectural projects, but airports?

What, for that matter are hundreds of other established, even pioneering, artists attempting to create with their airport art? It's everywhere. From every hangar-like airport reservation desk space, there is a mobile hanging from the exposed industrial trusses. There are also inevitably murals that overlook escalators [if you happen to go through Newark airport, by the way, there are some by Arshile Gorky (!)], ceramic-y things or photos on small walls, large oil paintings lining long corridors - usually reminding me about (yawn) aviation, the sky, or "exotic" travel destinations.

Of course I see the purpose of public art, but the airport to me is the most banal of locales. It seems to be the space where artists of once great tenure - like Acconci - go to perhaps not die, but certainly to fade away. It is the musak that every great musician dreads to hear her music in. Even if it isn't bad, it pathetically vies for your attention away from the task at hand (traveling) and almost never, never wins. It's also calming, it's always pleasant, it's almost always tailored for the banal environment in which it is placed.

Larry Kirkland and Nance O'Banion just blend right in:

So - let's ask the questions. What do the environments of airports do for this art - how do they affect our experience of it, our dismissal of it, our respect for it? How much are artists asked to conform to certain parameters about the work they are producing in this space? Why does it irritate me so, when I portend to love art? Because I can't stop and take it in "properly", because it becomes just another obstacle to maneuver my suitcase and my occupied mind around?

If public art is going to make sense to me in an airport, it will be art that makes you want to stop and look. It would be art that is interactive, and asks you to think a little bit as you wait at the gate, rather than stare mindlessly at the t.v. or a magazine. What about video installations with multiple headsets? It would be art that makes you feel as though you were going somewhere important, or that you have arrived somewhere exciting. It would do more than fill a space - it would say something. One would think there would be a lot to say about these liminal spaces of transition, these limbo areas between cities, states, countries, filled with people from all over the world. In an airport - time and geographic spaces are suspended. I want to see something that make me more aware of this phenomenon.

There is more to say on this - but thankfully, I won't be the one to do it. A heroic grad student at Rutgers is presently compiling all of this into a dissertation. Once I read that, maybe I'll be a little clearer on Vito's role at SFO. For now, it just seems like kind of a waste.

I'm always the last to find out....

2005-12-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

So I was in the middle of reading the article below about the recent Turner Prize recipient in the UK, blah blah, artist makes shed into boat - sails boat down river - stops and makes boat back into shed and wins prize. Tra la la. Anyway, the artist, Simon Sterling seemed to have a sense of humor about the whole thing: he called himself a "lucky" artist because just by chance the shed had a paddle inside which apparently made the whole boat transformation even easier.

Ah-um.

http://sympatico.msn.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/
2005/12/05/Arts/turner_051205.html

But what really struck me (or I should say "stuck" me) was the fact that there were protesting artists outside the Turner award who apparently represented the "Stuckist" art movement. They have been around since 1999 and whilst I have been studying Asian art history, this whole intriguing(??) group has passed me by. But now I'm up to speed.

The Stuckists (according to their very amaterish website) agitate against conceptual, installation, sculpture and basically any art that is not painting (but it seems photography and collage have passed some kind of secret test and are considered OK). They also advocate a return (to the Renaissance, I ask??) to spirituality as the basis of art. There are UK Stuckists and there are "international" Stuckists who seem to reside mainly in the US. Examples are as follows:
From Kent, Philip Absolon

And from Long Beach, CA, David Dannov:

So judge for yourself if there is anything "conceptual" about either of these paintings. I would say that there was. Presumably, technical proficiencies differ between the artists who have signed onto this manifesto. And I don't see the religion element here, but maybe there are exceptions to this rule.

Yes - I'm making fun of this.
I guess what I find semi-interesting about this kind of bizarre fringe-y group is that they even exist. Their very name derives from their artistic stasis (they are literally "stuck" in one mode of thinking about art) and I can't help but think that this is simply a "movement" for bad artists who, rather than admit their failings, produced a legitimizing manifesto and have confined themselves by its parameters rather than face the challenges of producing and saying something new.

A lot of artists are stuck - in artistic voices, gimmicky techniques or just work that worked so excellently to begin with, they seem to have trouble saying something else. For some reason Kara Walker comes to mind with this last point - although I adore her work, I have to admit that I have not seen any changes to the way its themes are presented. The silhouette is somewhat confining and the only thing that seems to change is their scale. (or maybe I am not familiar enough with her work).

In any case, being stuck happens to a lot of creative people - some outstanding and some bad. But it is only the bad, in my opinion, who try to hang a name on their "stuckness" and call it art.

The gigantic contribution of the miniature revisited..

2005-12-02T17:11:00.000-08:00

Re my earlier post of the same name.

Holland Cotter of NYT looks at the Karkhana show in nice juxtaposition to the current exhibition at the Met, Pearls of the Parrot in India.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/arts/design/02mini.html

It is interesting to note that John Seyller has written essays for both exhibition catalogues.

It is also interesting to note that Cotter says that Shahzia Sikander was a "pioneer" in creating a contemporary vernacular for miniature paintings. Whoa - I think he means to say that - as far as collectors know in New York City - Sikander was the pioneer. However, Zahoor ul-Akhlaq of the National College of Arts in Lahore was the first to make the traditional techniques of miniature paintings relevant to Sikander's generation (his work is above).

This generation, by the way, also included Ambreen Butt, Imran Qureshi and others in the Karkhana show. Sikander's work is incredible - but just because it sells well in NYC and Europe, and an art critic is well acquainted with her work, does not make a pioneer. That is how the narratives of art history become distorted, and artists whose work needs to be remembered, get dismissed.

Note to self: stop reading the NYT and expecting to get a balanced view of the world. Fair enough.

Biennial mania

2005-11-30T21:28:00.000-08:00

(Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2005 "The Experience of Art" exterior by Barbara Kruger)

Visiting a Biennale, Biennial, Triennale, etc. is actually really fun.
What can be more exciting than joining the throngs of buzzing and inevitably well-dressed people in vast airplane-hangar-like spaces and seeing a mind-boggling array of contemporary art that is trying desperately to be 'cutting-edge'?

Given the prestige of the event, all of the work you see has some kind of authority attached to it - it should presumably be some of the better work, not something dashed together for a sale - and since such events are so laden with reviews and so heavy with the anticipation of discovering "emerging" hot artists, the biennial turns everyone into a critic.

Rather than the dispassionate environment of the museum, the biennial is hot-blooded and opinions are thrown around like confetti at a cheap wedding.

So it's fun - but is it worthwhile? I know that John Clark has recently written on the merits of the Biennial system - particularly with regards to Chinese contemporary art (see summer issue of Yishu: Jrnl of Contemporary Chinese Art). I heard him speak on this last summer and from what I remember, he posited a very persuasive argument that politics and the 'star factor' associated with some key artists means that one really does not get the 'cutting edge' at the Biennials, but rather (for the most part) the same artists again and again that seem to have great PR but may not be very 'emerging' at all.

I wonder if the Biennial phenomenon isn't the 20th and 21th centuries' art version of the 19th century's Euro World's Fair Expositions? These Expos sought to "sum up" the world by displaying pavilions to represent the "best" of culture and arts production as it was viewed by Europe in that era. Basically- they were particularly effective at displaying the colonies and the "mystic East" in a way that was perceived to be even better than the real thing.

Each Biennial aims to sum up contemporary art in some parallel ways - country pavilions at Venice - elsewhere, you can find more regional themes. But they all portend to represent a cross section of the best. What they don't tell you is how much the art market, national politics, and individual curatorial tastes and relationships have to do with determining the "best". What are the criteria anyway? Biennials always make for good press - and a tremendous social buzz (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/arts/design/30whit.html; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/arts/design/30whit.html) - but it is important to be critical about what they actually offer to the art world.

Some to check out:
SITE Santa Fe5th International BiennialSanta Fe, New Mexico, USA; Taipei BiennialTaiwan;Triennial Poli/GrÃ¡ficaSan Juan, Puerto Rico;1st Moscow BiennaleRussia; 7th Sharjah BiennialUnited Arab Emirates;Prague Biennale 2Czech Republic;51th Venice BiennialInternational art exhibitionItaly;3rd GÃteburg BiennialSweden;3rd Fukuoka Asian Art TriennaleJapan; 2nd Beijing International Art BiennaleChina;Yokohama Triennale 2005Japan

The list goes on and on...

final question: These things are all over the world - why doesn't India have one?

Kiki Smith for President

2005-11-28T22:25:00.000-08:00

Following a fantastic show at the San Francisco Museum of Art, I have to say that I have seen various works by Kiki Smith before (mainly etchings of animals on that ephemeral, decaying, crinkled Nepalese paper she likes to use), but seeing them all together - particularly the 3-d work - I finally have a sense of how tremendously powerful her work really is.

It was also juxtaposed with a Chuck Close show which, although technically fascinating, in comparison to the provocative and sometimes gut-wrenching work of Smith, seemed wholly narcissistic and dry. Smith's only masculine representation (seen at left) is by contrast, based in a frozen pre-historical man discovered (I think) in S. America. It floats up the wall weightless, distorted, and vulnerable.

One thing that makes me a complete devotee of Smith's work is her use of materials - papier mache, translucent resins, thread and the aforementioned ephemeral paper - all of which connote a certain delicacy or fragility, traditionally associated with the feminine. So her juxtaposition with and manipulation of these materials to produce jarring, sometimes disturbing and confrontational statements about gender, birth and fertility, and the pain and violence done to each, is so unsettling and unexpected, one can only marvel and want to learn more.

Look, for instance at how she literally turns the female body inside out in Blood Pool (below - see exposed vertebrae image) as she lies curled in the fetal position, covered in blood.

Well - I can go on, but I won't because I have work to do... but I did want to show Ribs - the delicate "bones" strung with threads that threaten to break at any moment and send them all clattering to the floor. And "Tale" where the woman, in papier mache, is doubly vulnerable by her position - is she trying to crawl away from something? - and the feces smeared across her backside. Actually it was kind of interesting watching to reaction of people to this work - you can imagine!

Kiki Smith for Pres - we need such sensitivity in the White House!

Is Le Corbu to blame?

2005-11-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/magazine/27wwln_essay.html?hp

What does Le Corbusier have to do with the recent chaos from the banlieues in France?

I like this article because we have already heard how racism has become politically and socially institutionalized in France (and frankly, through much of Europe I think), but the writer asks how urban planning, and particularly the design of subsidized housing contributes to the sense of isolation and disconnect between the Parisian urban and suburban cores.

Exhibit A is above. It is clear that the Corbu model for self-contained living, sprung from a modernist's love for order, clean lines and universal conformity, did not anticipate the possibility that diverse communities might call for diverse housing solutions. I won't restate the author's whole point here, but he draws attention to the fact that those with the ability to move up in society quickly outgrow these spaces and thus move away, while those who are restricted by poverty and racism are increasingly confined by these neat little boxes for "habitation".

And so I consider Chandigarh - where interestingly, it is the Secretariat and other government bldgs that resemble the French housing, while the Indian housing is actually low rise; the individual homes appear larger than the French versions and they are interspersed with green spaces.

This is the Secretariat on the left.

Et voila -some housing on the right. Not by any stretch unconformist, but certainly less oppressive than the grandiose structures of self-contained communities in France.

My questions are - why did he do this in India when the former housing design was so popular in France (Unite d'Habitation in Marseille is contemporary with most of the Corbusier buildings in Chandigarh ['52])? Was it a question of climate or available materials? Although I have been to Chandigarh, and written about it briefly, I cannot recall the proximity of housing to the downtown core. But most criticisms I have read condemn his isolation of the government buildings from the rest of the city, rather than the housing.

Despite the unending critique of Corbu architecture and planning in Chandigarh, is it possible that he was ultimately more successful (albeit unwittingly so) in India, than in France? Or has the general community in India done more to alter the original intentions of the city so that it ultimately better conformed to the needs of a local community? Points to ponder.

What's a coffee shop to do?

2005-11-23T19:41:00.000-08:00

I am usually in favor of any move by the general community to integrate art into public spaces.

Take the latest craze of adorning the oft-icky-sticky walls of hair salons, coffee/sandwich shops, and bookstores with the work of local artists. On the surface, it's a good thing that art is taken down from its gallery or museum high horse and given some room to breathe in daily, otherwise mundane, establishments.

Some of the galleries-within-another-venue schemes actually can surpass the appeal and notoriety of the original space (see The Backroom Gallery at www.abobebooks.org if you don't believe me) - which is even more of a good thing! Obviously the better the work and the better the promotion, the more they sell too.

But I am irked by the fact that soo much of this new "public art" is total rubbish. Too much bad art can be difficult to digest. Just because it's called "art" does not make it worthy of a public space. Case in point is my local coffee shop that is covered in garish, splashy horrid stuff (think 1980s dripped paint collages that you made in highschool). They make the whole environment look cheap, crass and loud (but have absolutely nothing to say). It isn't just me - I see other customers cringe when they look up from their lattes. The stuff does not even stimulate debate, it's that painful.

So why doesn't some clever person take it upon themselves to be an independent curator for the city's more adventurous salons/stores, whatever? What these places need is a middleman to connect them with emerging artists whose work doesn't get shown in regular galleries, but would actually look great if shown well and in the proper place. Some of the better established places have separate curators, but many don't.

This person could hold openings around the city once a month, or every other month, depending on the wishes of the venue. The artists and the curator split the money from sales, and the stores get regular buzz with the openings, plus look fabulous.

This seems like an obvious idea - maybe this person does exist.
But if they do - they sure aren't doing much business in my neighborhood.

How to teach "Hello Kitty"

2005-11-21T21:08:00.000-08:00

(Takashi Murakami, Time Bokan-Pink, 2001)

Ever wonder how exactly to show Japanese popular culture in a classroom and talk about more than gender distortions, androgeny, sexism and repressed sexuality?

You might want to pick up the October issue of Art in America which has a neat little review article by Eleanor Heartney called "A Marriage of Trauma and Kitsch" in which she looks at a recent exhibition at the Japan Society in New York. I like it, because it is the first time that I have actually heard someone admit that the Japanese popular melding of art, entertainment, sexual fantasy, violence and childish cuter-than-cute can be really, really disturbing.

I heroically try to use images in the classroom that demonstrate a subversion of stereotypes around women and Japanese culture in general. But after a while, it gets a little thin and I wonder if I am looking at ironic commentary or the fruits of a psychological breakdown. Heartney looks honestly at otaku (subculture of the obsessive fan or collector of anime that many of the works of art on display grew out of) and asks, "Is otaku political, critical and subversive? Or does it simply reinforce reactionary, regressive and conformist tendencies in contemporary Japanese culture?"

She raises issues surrounding the aftermath of the nuclear bombs and an unwillingness to come to grips with this past (inherent in the show's title, "Little Boy"), and the lingering economic crisis as the ingredients of a contemporary society that popularizes prostitution for schoolgirls and violent, sexual manga (comics) for adults. All - she says - contributing to these strange trends of infantile (bring up "Hello Kitty" slide) horrific fantasies and saccharine sentimentality.

I have read similar comments before, but Heartney's very smart and direct approach makes this an excellent resource for the non-specialist - especially if you have to teach it.

Math meets music meets art

2005-11-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

Fari Shams

Unfortunately, I cannot post images of Fari Shams' art because everything on her website is in Flashmedia. You will just have to take my word for it that it is fascinating, and then go directly to the above website.

Why is this work so worthy of your recognition? For one that has struggled with the concepts of mathematics all her life (me), yet has always somehow had some understanding of the visual languages of art, I am astounded and intrigued by the fact that Fari Shams brings together both vernaculars to produce startlingly cohesive and lyrical work.

This Iranian woman draws on chaos and quantum theories (!) and the properties of prime numbers to create an integrated visual system in her paintings and sculpture. She also alligns the constructs with systems of musical notation - thus the above painting is called Cantata. Her etchings are particularly evocative of a musical phrase, rising and falling in exact synchronicity yet seemingly random formation. If you happen to be at the Iran Heritage Foundation in London - go see this! The exhibition is called Linescapes of Thought - Secret Vision.

I have little knowledge of Fari Shams' background, except that she was born in Iran - I don't know when she moved to the UK. Still, it seems that there is no little reference to the Tehran-based (?) artist Parviz Tanavoli in her work. Particularly in the sleek wooden creations that articulate Persian script. Tanavoli also employs an underlying structure or system his work, akin to Persian poetic stanzas, and also reminiscent of early Islamic design penchants for geometry and interlocking forms. In fact, the concerns of Fari Shams' work for space, time, and underlying mathematical mapping seem to be fundamentally related to early Islamic traditions that equated the essence of God with an endless mathematical grid that encompassed everything, yet took no specific form. Not religious - but based on theological ideology - like the composition of these secular Safavid tiles below from 17th century Persia:

Anyway - above all, I love the rhythm in this woman's artwork and the way in which you can very easily lose yourself while contemplating the relationship between its delicate details and sweeping expansive strokes.

Similar to becoming engrossed in the contours, rhythms and emotion of a symphony.

to Mao or not to Mao

2005-11-17T19:46:00.000-08:00

When is art just art?
As far as I am concerned, the answer is never - if art could be detached from its social, political, economic and/or religious contexts, I would be out of a job, and my classes would be a little short (and boring).

But what happens when I start to consider the artwork that I hang on the disgustingly stuccoed walls of my apartment? The present case to which I am referring involves two Chinese propaganda posters that my husband picked up at a market in Hong Kong a number of months ago. I have just bought frames for them and cleared a spot on the wall - all ready to hang - but wait! Just what am I doing?

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about either image. The first one you see here is probably authentic and most likely dates to the end of the 1960s or the beginning of the 70s, from the heart of the Cultural Revolution. I say it is authentic because of the amount of repair work that has been done on it, as well as the quality of the paper and the style of the cherub-like peasant faces whose smiles speak to the glories of Communist living and the collective power of the countryside. You can see for yourself:

The other is definitely a contemporary knockoff of another circa end-1960s, 70s image - the paper is stiff and has a bit of a glossy film on top, therefore it was not made for disposable and facile posting on walls like the first. Technically, it is also poor - which by itself does not necessarily make it a "fake" since amateur artists were quite encouraged during the CR to create propaganda posters, but there is just something not right about it that I can't quite put my finger on. I am clearly not a connoisseur of CR visual culture:

I immediately want them on my wall because the cherry red of Communism is a brilliant, striking color (although these pics do not demonstrate that), and the dynamism of the scenes - particularly the former - compositionally makes them interesting to look at. Moreover, the images - real or not - are grounded in this dramatic history that happened on the other side of the world and only comes to me now in the form of analytical histories. But what did happen exactly and am I glorifying Maoist China by hanging this on my wall?

Chinese artists were - and continue to be to a lesser extent - oppressed, censored and punished under Maoist China. Maoist policies from 1958 (the Great Leap Forward) and between 1966-76 (the Great proletariat Cultural Revolution) led to the deaths of somewhere between 16-27 million people. And I am old enough to remember Tiananmen Square in 1989 which was a glaring remembrance that Maoist China survives. In fact, everyday, we hear about the remnants of these policies in the news, but for the most part, we choose to ignore them. Would I hang an image of Nazi propaganda on the wall?

I once heard a well-respected Chinese contemporary artist and scholar say that the duplication and fetishization of Mao's image was an act of reclaiming his power, of effectively voiding its destructive meaning and rendering it frivolous, empty, decorative. One can make the argument for the current commodification of posters like mine, or I am also reminded of the store that stands outside of Mao's tomb in Beijing that sells all sorts of strange plastic trinkets adorned with his visage (complete with large chin mole). Does that glorify his memory, or recast it within a capitalist system that therefore undermines and deconstructs the very grounds of his ideologies?

And at the end of the day - do I hang these up, or what? It is an uncomfortable decision to make. Art is never just art - by now, you'd think I'd know that.

The gigantic contribution of the miniature

2005-11-15T13:25:00.000-08:00

http://www.aldrichart.org/current.html#karkhana

They are technically not miniatures.
They are, however, executed in the Persian and S. Asian techniques of manuscript illustration, otherwise known today as "miniature" painting. And they are incredibly rich, layered and exciting to look at.

I am talking about a current exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum called Karkhana, an Urdu reference to the Mughal painting workshops of Pakistan and India that reached a fervor in the 16th and 17th centuries. Although I do not have the pleasure of living in a state that is anywhere close to this museum, I am familiar with the artists and have fallen in love with the online images.

Like this one:

I don't think you can see the detail of the sewing that actually sutures together the fine wasli, that is, handmade paper derived from cotton and silk on which all miniatures of the Persian and Mughal traditions are painted. All of the five artists in the exhibition are former students from the National College in Lahore - ok, are there any other schools in Pakistan that teach the traditional techniques of miniature?? I don't know any artists who specialize in this style who are not graduates of that school, just wondering. By the way, the artists are: Aisha Khalid, Hasnat Mehmood, Muhammad Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Talha Rathore, and Saira Wasim.

What makes this show particularly unique - and the work so complex - is that many of the paintings were done collaboratively. Taking a cue, of course, from the karkhanas of old, the collaborative atelier was brought up to date as artists each started two works, and then sent them to each other to add their own interpretations and variations to the image. The contemporary partnering of work is the brainstorm of Muhammad Imran Qureshi, who I believe orchestrated a similar show of collaborative work two years ago.

The partnered works are not the only images on display, but they are certainly a draw - and the results are fantastic. I pointed to the sewing before because I am sure that is the work of Talha Rathore, which I adore. Other pieces such as:

highlights the technical ability of Saira Wasim and her grasp of portraiture. There is a certain haunting aspect to this image, and the allusions to sewing and suturing I find again very evocative.

The sewing in Talha's work particularly intrigues me as miniature painting in S. Asia is traditionally the domain of men, yet fine artistic detail in the west is so often associated with women, frivolous decoration, and feminine domestic spaces. Sewing is the epitome of domesticated women's work. So in many ways, I think I am always looking for gendered issues in these paintings - watching how detail is used to subvert these traditional prejudices against delicate detail and fine drawing.

Shazia Sikander has definitely done a lot to bring miniature techniques into the mainstream of N. American art, but the Aldrich show demonstrates that there is room for many more masters of the "miniature"!! Hint, hint - the South Asian Gallery of Art in Oakville will be showing an exhibition of contemporary paintings by artists also schooled in the miniature technique (Talha is among them!) in the spring.

By the way - can we find a better term to describe these paintings than "miniature"? The term always forces me to revisit the colonial interpretation of manuscript illustrations in S. Asia - they are NOT miniatures! *sigh* for lack of a better descriptor, the term carries on - but I don't have to like it.

Art History and its Evil Twin

2005-11-14T18:40:00.000-08:00

What is visual culture and am I doing it?

This is a question that I have managed to artfully avoid in the context of my dissertation. And yet - with an eye on the post-dissertation phase of my life - I am feeling the need to finally figure this out once and for all.

How, for instance, will I be able to use the term "visual culture" in the context of a job interview if I don't really know how it differs from art history? Why (you might ask) use it at all, except for the fact that right now, "visual culture" has a cutting-edge aura that implicitly speaks to a certain intimacy with current theoretical tracts. Not to mention the fact that every job description that has interested me in the past six months has asked for someone who works in a visual culture framework. Hence my dilemma.

I am not the only non-western art historian pondering this question. A recent panel at a conference at U. of Wisconsin Madison basically asked the same; and I see the topic will come up again at the Association for Asian Studies conference in San Francisco this spring. In Madison, interdisciplinary approaches were stressed and are apparently a hallmark of visual culture. But interdisciplinarity is also integral to so many current applications of art history that I see it as a natural evolution of the discipline, rather than the fabrication of a new one.

I turn to my Visual Culture Reader (Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., 1998) for answers which, although they may be dated, they might at least provide a point of reference for what he calls this "new visuality of culture". He aligns the discipline with the postmodern and says that "visual culture is not just a part of your everyday life, it is your everyday life." Thus the Coke ad at the top of this post.

Hmm, so vc is current and draws on all aspects of quotidian visuality. Doesn't this definition conversely impose a certain definition on art history? So - AH cannot be about current visual production, and cannot look beyond the canons of "high art"? Still confusing.

To make matters worse, I am immediately struck by the few writers in the book with whom I am very familiar: Carol Duncan, James Clifford, Timothy Mitchell, and Malek Alloula - all writing about collections, spectacle, exhibitions and Duncan and Mitchell even directly about museums. Isn't the museum the very foundation of canonical art historical thought? At least, I am persuaded by Preziosi's theory on this when he says that the museum process of reading traces of culture in objects mark the beginnings of the discipline. It seems strange then that the very roots of AH - and they are 19th century roots - are part of the focus of visual culture. Looking at museum institutions necessitates an interdisciplinary framework, to be sure, but art history must always be a key factor in the discussion because it is born from within and is generated by the institution. Or not??

Nope. It still isn't clear. But considering I work on museums, and call myself an art historian, I may have some 'splaining to do come interview time. rats.

I found religion in Vegas

2005-11-13T21:54:00.000-08:00

The above is untrue - the absurdity of that line just made me want to use it as a title. But if I extend the parameters of "religion" slightly and consider the visual environment of Las Vegas briefly, it actually works better than one would think.

This is because the urban and architectural planning of the Vegas strip is framed by the social narratives of pilgrimage, ritual and control. I recognize that this is far from insightful; the city's simulacra vibe is not exactly a secret, but I'll rehash a few thoughts as I unwind from a tightly wound weekend in sin city.

Scale is instrumental in creating dual environments of awe and concentration that seem to be key to any major hotel construction. Grandiose entrances, towering ceilings and giant-sized accessories like huge swaths of curtains, or unnaturally large flowers play the role of cathedral or temple, leaving the viewer to feel miniature in comparison, yet impressed and filled with some desire to attain, or somehow view these massive commercial spaces in a digestible manner.

In this space, everyone immediately looks up to the ceilings and feels overwhelmed by the vastness of the spatial features. In a religious context, this same experience humbles the pilgrim and recalls the expansive power of a higher force; you make sense of it and find access into this realm through prayer - in a Vegas hotel, one is also humbled, yet offered an apparent route to attain and own this opulence through money.

Cue the casino areas which, by contrast to the expansive and intimidating entrances or extra luring attractions, are dark with low ceilings and rows and rows of machines that disorient the viewer. But the scale is comforting - even safe. Concentration on one machine or table comes easily in these often cramped spaces, filled with people playing a role in the same performance as you.

These throngs are led down the same pathways between hotels, watch the same shows and eat the same food and admire the same attractions. All are funneled over bridges that function like aqueduct systems feeding streams of pilgrims into the expansive entrances of still more hotels where they follow specific routes designed in the carpet or floor designs and delineated with color or iconic motifs.

There is safety in numbers and safety in ritual - Vegas is an ideal vacation spot because the rituals are already defined for the tourist, and the examples of multitudes of other pilgrims ensure that you negotiate the spaces "properly" and enjoy a sense of belonging in the process. Vegas works best for those that confirm its ritual by peforming them over and over.

What is so fascinating is that this is all offered to the tourist as choice. In reality, the options of choice (what to drink, eat, see, where to move, what to wear, what to photograph, etc....) are as simulated as the cultural pastiches that comprise the "themed" hotels. The fantasy becomes the reference for the real thing, rather than the other way around.

In the "Star Trek experience" attraction, visitors become part of the fantasy of the television show and, in a mock performance, are threatened by villains who insist that "resistance is futile". In Vegas, the layers of that statement hit you over the head like a hammer as there is actually no line between the role playing of the Star Trek actor and the role playing of the Vegas tourist.

This suspension of time, place and reality that meticulously define the "strip" (no newspaper boxes on this road to remind you of the outside world!) are what make it simultaneously fun and more than a little dangerous.

Art among the stacks

2005-11-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

A trip to the library can't be all that bad if a breathtaking installation is also part of the bargain.

One of my favorite public installations is this one seen on your left and right by Ignacio Rabago called Babel Library IX that skewers books on heaving fishing line and suspends them in mid air, covers flailed open, pages hanging out as if in mid ravage. It is located in the domed atrium of Doe library at UC Berkeley and it is 100 times more dramatic than these photos allow.

What is so ingenious about setting this installation in the context of a library is that it undercuts the quiet authority that one inevitably senses when wandering through the oppressive and overwhelming space of the university library. Apparently Rabago has set up similar pieces in eight other libraries around Europe - so the affect is universal. There is something a little blasphemous and irresponsible about seeing books lolling around in the air, bindings stretched out in wanton abandon. We are taught to revere and consecrate the knowledge in books (only use pencil if you want to write in the margins!) - even be intimidated by their authority. But here the book becomes something different. Here the biblical, and perhaps mythical, tower of Babel seems to be released from its historical fixity and set free - escaping out the windowed dome and into the sky above.

Before you lament the "loss" of these books - since they have all been irreparably damaged by the installation - you might be consoled to know that there is a disclaimer at the library's entrance which states that all of the books used in the piece were slotted for destruction anyway. In other words, books were harmed in the making of this art, but we were going to throw them away anyway. Double blasphemy from a library!! And all the more deliciously naughty.

But the knowledge in the books is sacrificed for the dialogue of the installation. And to be fair, I have no idea what knowledge has exactly been sacrificed because all of the books I can discern from the library stairwell seem to be written in German, Italian and other languages I cannot distinguish. So they are doubly cryptic to me. Most of covers appear dated, so perhaps they haven't moved off the shelves in years.

What I do know is that Babel Library IX brings new meaning and a fresh life to these tomes through their very deconstruction - and reminds me that some of the most influential books may be those I never get to read at all.

A 14th-century Islamic palace on my block

2005-11-08T22:29:00.000-08:00

This post is about my gym, so excuse the banality, but I just have to write somewhere about this marvelous place and unfortunately, it does not fit into my dissertation.

Voila - exterior and interior to your right. The gym is actually a situated within a c. 1920s theatre called the Alhambra. And the name is no coincidence - yes, it is actually modeled (loosely) on that 14th century Islamic palace in Granada, Spain and speaks to the appeal of Islamic pastiche in western design motifs throughout the 20s and 30s.

One of several interesting points about this is you can see that this interpretation of the palace (likely produced by an architect who had never seen the real thing) has fashioned the exterior of the theatre somewhat like a mosque, complete with two minarets, which I'm sure suited contemporary conceptions of the "Moorish" aesthetic at the time without anyone really noting that in the 14th century, they were associated with religious, not secular spaces.

I can go on and on about the design of this theatre. Three times a week , I jog away 30 minutes at a time on the elliptical machine and visually drink in the nooks and crannies of the place. Some of which are in the top right pic which shows the horseshoe-shaped arches with large niches in the walls containing equally large vessels in gilt and pastel greens and blues. These are just two elements always celebrated in the Alhambra palace and would certainly have been read about by the architect, but again clearly not experienced first hand.

In the Granada version, the arches are much shorter with lighter piers, defining spaces of luxurious relaxation and princely proceedings that were open onto large gardens and running fountains of water. Those vessels, by the way, would have been a little further down the wall and probably filled with water so that they were accessible to hot and thirsty palace dwellers and travellers. You can also see that the lighting over the reception counter was modeled after hanging glass mosque lamps.

Of course all of this has adopted new meanings in the context of the seemingly "exotic" theatre at the time of its creation - offering patrons a little orientalist adventure with the price of their popcorn. But the final cherry on this intriguing little theatre is the ceiling- unfortunately not pictured here. Spiraling around its periphery is a wide three foot swath of gilt and minty green in what appears to be an abstracted vine motif. If, however, you have ever seen what "Allah" looks like in Arabic, you would very quickly see that the architect has (knowingly or unknowingly?) used this script form and stylized it almost beyond all resemblance. Almost, but not quite.

And so three times a week, I look down from the elliptical machine onto the sweaty aerobic classes and muscle-bound weightlifters below, heaving and running and plugged into ipods. And it seems silly, anachronistic, and just a little bit sneaky to know that a 14th century palace in the hills of southern Spain has helped to create our work-out space - and that a long ribbon repeating "Allah" looks down at us from above.

It's a reminder of a time when our ignorance about Islamic cultures only led to kitschy pastel architecture and imagined exotic tales. I know that is simplistic - but that is what it feels like.

The original:

Reclaiming the Canadian Canon

2005-11-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

It's a wonderful thing to be able to take a break from dissertation writing - where I am constantly looking and relooking at the canons of South Asian art history and museums, trying to find avenues by which to turn perspectives around and perceive visual culture from yet another angle - and the above image appears that beautifully and simply accomplishes in one photo what I have yet to accomplish in hundreds of written pages.

Seven members of the South Asian Visual Arts Collective in Toronto have cleverly turned tails on that most staid (and annoyingly persistent) of Canadian art historical canons - the Group of Seven. This image is a contemporary reproduction of the c. 1920 Arthur Goss photo below, and what volumes does it speak?!

Not only does the South Asian female insert herself forcefully onto the stage historically reserved for the white male, but for me, what makes this delightfully simple gesture so refreshing is that the Group of Seven is so obviously and desparately in need of being decentred in Canada. The fact that this artistic space is being claimed by non-Europeans who produce incredibly thought-provoking and timely work, is a statement that needs to be inserted more and more forcefully onto the landscape of Canadian contemporary art.

Self-Mutilation at the Guggenheim

2005-11-06T17:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/arts/design/06kenn.html?oref=login

My first instinctive response after reading this article is to immediately agree with the critics - what is the value in reproducing, (re)performing performance art from the 1960s that was made powerful originally by the fact that it was by its nature irreproducible and resisted commodification?

Spontaneity was also key - not from the part of the artist - whose performance was usually always planned carefully - but from the perspective of viewers (witnesses really) who did not know what to expect and therefore did not know how they were "supposed" to response physically, intellectually and viscerally. This has always been my big problem with the reproduction of Yoko Ono's "CutPiece". Even the second time this was performed (I think it was London first, New York second - or the other way around!), the audience was already programmed and prepared to cut off her clothes, in effect deflating the performance of its anxiety and its provoking questions about our collective potential (?and latent desire?) to do violence.

However, after reading Abramovic's comments, I am forced to reflect on the fact that as an art historian I take for granted - depend on - the fact that art has meanings and lives that extend far beyond its origins. In that case, the above paragraph looks only at the meaning of 1960s performance art at its origin and neglects what it has meant to artists since, or what it can say to society today.

But I am still torn and unsettled by the whole thing - mainly because of the point I made about CutPiece - that, like the performance we all expect, the audience too will have an orchestrated and performative role to play that has already been mapped in history.

Perhaps I am wrong about this. I hope that the reviews following these Abramovic performances take this into account and recognize that the reaction of the witness is critical to the power and completeness of any performance. Also - the fact that she is (re)performing all of these pieces in the staid, legitimized context of a major established art museum seems to subvert the radical nature and potential that gave these performances such power to begin with. Maybe their reenactment within this space will serve to historicize, or somehow "fix" the position of performance within the art historical canon. But hasn't this already been done??

Finally, there is also Abramovic's comment about copyright and the suggestion of stealing, or misappropriating 60s performances. Who owns any performance? The artists who perform or the spectators who bear witness to its happening?