Paris Letters by Janice MacLeod

“…likely to appeal to fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s EAT PRAY LOVE...”

After unwrapping Christmas gifts, I took a rare break from lecture preparations to kick back with one of my presents, Paris Letters (2014, Sourcebooks Inc.) by Janice MacLeod, in which the author gives up a job in Los Angeles as a copywriter to find the meaning of life in Europe during her mid-thirties. When someone who hails from the same rural county as you writes a bestseller, the overwhelming impulse is to want to like the book. At best, I can borrow MacLeod’s wording of “cute, but slow”—which she used to imagine the Parisians’ assessment of her Anglophone self because of the language barrier—as a description of her autobiography.

MacLeod relays the details of her job of writing text for junk mail, presumably so that the onerous task will ultimately stand in contrast to the pleasurable creation of painted letters for subscribers. The degree of detail draws out this portion, though. This is followed by an entire chapter about the epiphany she has while cleaning her underwear drawer in which she quotes four times the voice in her head that says, “Clean out your underwear drawer.” In the process, she says farewell to the lovers for whom the undergarments were purchased. From there, she moves on to her clothes closet, which keeps her away from the mall, contributing to her ability to skip town. At the end of the book, there is a list of 100 things that she did to save money. As comedian George Carlin said of the Ten Commandments, many could be combined rather than being stretched out into a significant-sounding number, like playing the stock market and--listed separately--taking the advice of rich men at the coffee shop about how to play the stock market.

MacLeod captures the local colour of Paris, from its delectable macarons to the hair salon in Robespierre’s former bedroom, where she has her bridal hair done. Throughout the book, “see[ing] Paris as a canvas,” she includes her illustrated letters, but unfortunately not in colour. In the negative space of a rosebush, or a less visually busy area like a winding sidewalk, she writes about her experiences and the city’s history. The complication is that she appropriated the concept from another artist, Percy Kelly (1918-1993) (1). In a passage where I almost gave up reading Paris Letters altogether, she reveals, “…I sat in a chair with Percy’s book. At moments, I felt Percy whispering to me from the pages” (p. 88). Fortunately she attributes her source, but she seems to have no qualms about using someone else’s concept, which is consistent with her lack of conviction in the canvases she makes of crows to sell on Etsy to help fund her trip. It wasn’t until she referred to the Mona Lisa as “my new friend Mona” (p. 79) that I lowered my expectations. Since I sound like the Grinch, I will concede that MacLeod can’t be faulted for lack of passion about being an artist. She makes a New Year’s resolution to become an artist; reads Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (1992, Penguin Group) and introduces Paris Letters with a quotation from it; and announces two-thirds of the way through, “It had only occurred to me in that moment that I was indeed an artist. In Paris!” (p. 175).

The author finds love in Paris, with a butcher named Christophe. She describes him as lovely and evidently he is: Christophe buys matching robes so they can always feel like they’re on vacation, and when she sulks, he calls her phone and sings Lionel Ritchie’s I Just Called to Say I Love You. Their relationship feels one-dimensional, because it moves forward seamlessly, aside from no common language and eventual bureaucratic obstacles related to MacLeod’s visa, both of which are described humorously. They declare their love after two weeks and when she's travelling afterwards, he calls several times a day. To use a postal analogy for their relationship, since that seems apropos for a book about letters sent by mail, Jacques Derrida’s concept of adestination (the “possibility of non-arrival”) (2) is absent. The happy ending is a fait accompli. There is a PG-rated sightseeing day in Rome with a man with whom she once flirted, which demonstrates her loyalty to Christophe but also her slight hesitation about settling down. Unsurprisingly, she trades in her take-out boxes for eating on plates with Christophe. She writes, “Everything was perfect.” Melodramatically, she begins the next paragraph with, “Until I changed things.” She then recalls how she updated the apartment flooring after he recommended against it; it causes the couple to walk in silence and then they make up immediately afterwards. It feels like tokenism to hint at tension but avoid causing irreparable damage to their relationship by disclosing something more substantial. If there are no skeletons in the closet, good for them...but give it time, eh?

Paris Letters is likely to appeal to fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s EAT PRAY LOVE (2006, Viking), as the protagonist gives up the majority of her possessions, lands in Europe with an insatiable appetite, ponders spirituality (though to a lesser degree here), and finds love. This comparison is invited by a photograph of the two authors on MacLeod’s website. Relatedly, fans of Julia Roberts may appreciate Macleod’s Runaway Bride-like realization that she changed herself to be like her various boyfriends, taking on their hobbies to be relatable and agreeable. Those who dislike the rom-com and chick lit genres may prefer to clean out their underwear drawers instead.

(1) Percy Kelly changed his name to Roberta Kelly in 1985 but eschewed a sex change operation.
(2) Tucker, Thomas D. Derridada: Duchamp As Readymade Deconstruction. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Print. Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://shop.sourcebooks.com/paris-letters.html

Suzy Lake: Playing with Time at the Art Gallery of Ontario

“…a ‘history of feminism as seen through her [Lake’s] work.’”

On November 21, the Art Gallery of Ontario was the venue for the debut screening of Suzy Lake: Playing with Time by independent filmmaker, Annette Mangaard.

The feature-length documentary opens with Toronto-based artist, Suzy Lake, developing film. In this immediate reference to the theme of time, she shakes a developing tank back and forth, back and forth, highlighting the mundane nature of this particular part of her otherwise captivating practice. It counteracts any presumptions of glamour, as do later scenes like a pigeon crossing Lake’s path while she adjusts a tripod. The arguable irony, of course, is that the act of making such a film is glamorous. It’s been a while since I watched films about grande dames like Marina Abramović or Vanessa Beecroft, but it strikes me that they stand in contrast to Mangaard’s almost four years of coverage of Lake, who comes across as a grounded artist.

Mangaard purposefully avoided pandering to the feminist adage, ‘the personal is political.’ The audience does learn that Lake was born and raised in Detroit, where she began making art as a child, and that she relocated to Montreal in 1968 at age 21 with her husband, a draft dodger. She recounts him being asked at the border if he was bringing in a car, a wife, or cattle, which underscored the perspective that “a wife was property.” The focus, however, is on Lake the artist. She states that she is more interested in the audience knowing what she is than who she is.

As to what Lake is, gender invariably informs the answer. Her Choreographed Puppet Series, which she began in 1976, communicates the concept of women as property without relying on personal anecdotes: she created a harness with straps that allowed her to be moved like a marionette by friends stationed on the top of a box, resulting in photographs of the jarring movements. Through such performative photographic self-portraits, she subverts the male gaze. Like her contemporary, Mary Beth Edelson, she takes the approach of, “I’m not trying to flirt with you” (Edelson). Lucy Lippard, who defended Lake’s early work when it was seen as radical, observes that Lake made “people see that a body was just a body.” She has continued in this vein, making works like large (read: imposing) portraits showing off her post-menopausal chin hair. “Ageing is just a different beauty,” she says matter-of-factly of the series.

In terms of appreciating the performative nature of her work, it’s terrific to see footage of images unfold rather than just seeing the finished products of still photographs. Personally, I was able to see Extended Breathing in Public Places (2008-2014), in which the artist attempts to stand motionless in loaded settings like the Detroit Institute of Art and the World Trade Centre construction site for an hour-long exposure, as evocative of an early daguerreotype in which the sole human activity in focus is at a shoe-shining station, with the rush of modernity reduced to a blur.

Interview clips with Sarah Angelucci, Barbara Astman, Connie Butler, Mary Beth Edelson, Lucy Lippard, Lisa Steele, Françoise Sullivan, Dot Tuer and Martha Wilson are included. Only one man, gallerist Donald Browne, speaks about Lake in the film (and ever so briefly), which has the effect of both celebrating women as authority figures and reinforcing the prominence of female voices in feminist art history. The multiplicity of voices is a strong contribution, but the occasional soundtrack of a voice without confirmation of the speaker’s identity is disorienting; I found myself trying to anticipate who the initial narrator was and once the interviewees had been shown on screen, trying to recall whose voice sounded like a match.

Numerous connections could be drawn between Lake’s work and the works of other feminist artists. Her Transformation (click Next for Gary William Smith) series, begun in 1973, comes to mind for its coincidence with Ana Mendieta’s gender-bending bearded self-portraits. Mangaard considers the complementary practices of Lake and Wilson, adding to the Canadian flavor of the film, since Wilson worked at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design during the period where she and Lake discovered one another’s work through personal recommendations and snail mail. "We're the same person!" Wilson exclaimed in the Q&A that followed, noting that they were born in the same year and they address similar subject matter.

Following the screening, a discussion ensued stemming from Lisa Steele’s question in the film about how far society has come. Wilson commented that she wants to punch someone in the nose when they say we’re in a post-feminist era. Mangaard noted that the film was intended to be a “history of feminism as seen through her [Lake’s] work.” Its archival footage and stories like Jared Sable telling Barbara Astman, “I’m taking on a new gal,” referring to Lake, indicate that we are by no stretch of the imagination in a post-feminist era.

Suzy Lake: Playing with Time is also featured in the AGO retrospective exhibition, Introducing Suzy Lake (November 5, 2014 – March 22, 2015) co-curated by Georgiana Uhlyarik, associate curator of Canadian art and Sophie Hackett, associate curator of photography.

Image, l. to r.: Martha Wilson, Suzy Lake and Annette Mangaard.

Reimagining Africanity at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum

“Mutu is not usually seen through the lenses of Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism.”



“There’s room for us all on the spaceship,”* was one of the comments on a panel at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) on November 1, underscoring its suitability as a follow-up to my interview with Sarah Beck about artists and outer space.

The panel, “Voyaging the Fantastic: Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism in Wangechi Mutu and Contemporary Black Art,” featured artists based in nearby Chicago: D. Denenge Akpem, Krista Franklin, and Ayanah Moor. Akpem is a self-described “space sculptor” who works in installation as well as interior design, focusing on its facilitation of empowerment; Franklin, a poet, is drawn to collage because it “can displace race;” and Moor, a recent Chicago transplant, uses black hair—which she describes as amazingly transformative—as her “original material” in art. All three artists have worked together before, reinforcing Franklin’s later description of Chicago as a “community of makers.” The windy city is also, I learned, home to many black female astronauts.

Franklin stressed the value in recovering works of “black spacey culture” that preceded the terms, ‘Afrosurrealism’ and ‘Afrofuturism.’ The first such example raised was Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek. Moor commended her for “positioning blackness beyond earth.”

Reflecting on the origins of terminology is also informative. Panel moderator, Alexander Weheliye, professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, recalled that the term ‘Afrofuturism’ emerged on a listserv whose members hailed from inside and outside academia. As a librarian, I was curious to see if this combination is still apparent in current use. Indeed, the first page of Google results for ‘Afrosurrealism’ links to academic databases, a newspaper article, a film festival website, a blog, Tumblr, and Instagram. For ‘Afrofuturism’? Amazon, a newspaper article, a magazine article, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Facebook, a website showcasing art, and a website highlighting Afrofuturism’s relevance to cultural production beyond visual art. Still, my standby resource for preliminary research, Oxford Reference Online, yields zero results for both terms. Clearly, there is work to be done.

The terms themselves warrant reflection. Franklin cautioned that ‘Afrosurrealism’ and ‘Afrofuturism’ could become like brands and restrict the discussion. And they’re already restrictive. Moor observed that there’s a tendency to use the “same five ways to define some brown person’s work.” Recently, Franklin was on the receiving end of a presumptive and isolating comment that her work was “the Afrofuturist piece” in an exhibition, and Akpem made an artwork during her MFA studies about her mother having breast cancer, which people fixated on as a racialized portrait, rather than a portrait of a woman who happened to be black. Akpem characterized this tendency as surface level treatment and Franklin referred to it as the “pigeon-holing…of black productivity.” Moor said we need to keep expanding the vocabulary beyond terms like ‘identity politics.’ She noted that we should welcome people with different approaches. “This is just one model for this conversation," she stressed. "Other formats are possible.” Franklin encourages constant reimagining, and Akpem recommends “moving out of linear ideas of space and time” because Afrofuturism is “about the here and now” as well as the future. The latter idea might sound nebulous out of context, but not when an earlier comment by Akpem about Mutu’s work is considered: “Take your creation myth and rework it in a future state.” Moor situated her work similarly, noting that Mutu conveys alternate realities and that her work contains a “beautiful fantasy element.”

Weheliye noted that Mutu is not usually seen through the lenses of Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism. Even so, “she [Mutu] adds complexity to the way that blackness and Africanity have been imagined.” Pointing to this complexity was the frequent identification of polarities in Mutu’s work. Moor identified a sense of ‘womanness’ in figures being submerged or rising up, with striking fluidity. Moor also commented on the pairing of vulnerability and violence, and of construction and deconstruction. Akpem alluded to the push and pull of Mutu’s work by describing it as fetishistic art talismans with a trickster aesthetic. She noted, for example, that Mutu’s figures can be both grotesque and sexy. Franklin likewise described the shape-shifting “formidable creatures” of women hybridized with elements of animals, plants, and machines as both protective and threatening.

After two hours of engaging discussion (I hadn’t even realized the panel had gone half an hour over and that my husband was waiting in the lobby), the audience filtered into the museum’s stellar mixed media exhibition, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (Sept. 19-Dec. 7, 2014; organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art, Duke University), which is the first US survey of her work. Walking through the show, I was reminded of Franklin’s enthusiasm for Mutu’s work. When encountering work, she said, “I should be like, ‘Oh, sh*#!’”

*D. Denenge Akpem

Image: Pretty Double-Headed; 2010; mixed media, ink, collage, and spray paint on mylar; courtesy of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum

Back to School with Sarah Beck

“There’s a beautiful balance between science and art that’s waiting to be tapped.”

I caught up with Sarah Beck by phone after her return from Montreal as the first artist-in-residence at the International Space University’s Space Studies Program (SSP14), which is in its 27th year.

HS: If I understand correctly, your starting point of the Pioneer Plaque (1972) was the first visual initiative to communicate to aliens. Can you tell me more about it?

SB: Carl Sagan was approached by NASA at the last minute. His wife actually drew it [the design that would become an etching]. It contained a pulsar map, which is like a time capsule; if someone found it, they could tell when it left our solar system. She compressed all body types and ethnicities for the nude figures, and she was heavily criticized because the man was waving and the woman wasn’t.

HS: What was at the heart of the controversy?

SB: He was waving. He was dominant. Also, she was relatively thin. As a pair, they were controversial because they were obviously Caucasian, even though she tried to make the figures cross-racial.

HS: I remember reading that in one of the Voyager missions, images of sex organs and a slightly pregnant woman didn’t make the cut. Do you think we’ve become more or less prudish with the images we’d use to communicate with aliens?

SB: Well, the seventies were pretty swinging! The unfortunate thing is that the Sagans were so obsessed with biology that they overlooked culture. In their defense, with anything that involves tax dollars there’s going to be controversy and it’s going to be seen as ‘space smut.’

HS: What other tactics were used in that time in anticipation of alien contact?

SB: Frank Drake was already sending radio signals into space, then paired up with the Sagans and others to create the ‘Murmurs from Earth’ project. They sent a gold record into space with a uranium spot on it; it’s a way to time stamp because it allows for dating. They wanted to capture sounds of the earth: dolphin sounds, babies crying, even Chuck Berry. There’s a Saturday Night Live skit with aliens asking for more Chuck Berry! They wanted to get people to say hello in every language on the record, so they went to the UN because that seemed the most expedient way. But some countries refused to participate if their enemies participated, or if their favorite songs from home were not included. Some went on to record long-winded speeches, and the whole exercise ended in a bit of a SNAFU. Notably, no ‘Rosetta Stone’ was included, so I suppose there would be no way to decode what was being said in so many languages anyhow. Ultimately this aspect of the recording is definitely a time capsule of earth, and our inability to communicate amongst ourselves...then or now!

The record also makes several cognitive assumptions, first assuming that aliens have ears, and the plaque and operational diagrams assume aliens have eyes. They also assume that if these devices make it through, space aliens even recognize the record as a message and not part of the space probe’s mechanics. Lord knows if I came across the diagram I likely couldn’t operate it myself. Although it has now left our solar system all these years later, the odds of it being intercepted are slim. So it’s more for humans.

HS: What was involved in your re-imagining of the Pioneer Plaque?

SB: The first thing I did was read. Scientists were fascinated to learn that art involves research. 40 years of research seemed manageable to digest at first. I wanted to understand the conversation and identify the key players. During the course of my research, two stories blew my mind: one pointed out that there are two forms of intelligent life on earth—humans and dolphins—yet we have no idea how to communicate with each other. The other story was about two groups of researchers who spent a year devising messages for aliens. When they sent them to each other, one group couldn’t decode the message because they were working with Macs and their counterparts were working with Windows!

The punchline of anything you read is that it’s [alien contact is] not possible. In fact, we may be alone in the universe, which I find as equally terrifying as being one of many intelligent life forms in the universe! Stephen Hawking doesn’t think we should try to contact aliens. He says it’s dangerous. What if alien races are hostile or want our resources? On the other hand, there’s an art critic named Hito Steyerl who says that our messages are already out there, and if aliens are going to get a message, it’s probably going to be one our spam emails about penis enlargements.

HS: Meaning that we need to be more strategic or conscientious about our messages?

SB: Maybe. Carl Sagan pointed out that if aliens are listening to our ‘babble bubble,’ assuming they exist, it’s too late and we might as well be friendly.

I knew I wouldn’t be drawing a new plaque, and wasn’t even sure there was a point to my project. Then I started thinking, what is the ultimate message in a bottle? Space is often compared to the ocean. The odds of a message being scooped out of the vastness of space had me picturing a bottle bobbing along sea waters, waiting for an audience. It’s such an optimistic act to send out a message in a bottle, like a needle in the biggest haystack you can imagine! Using the message in a bottle, the medium itself addresses the hopelessness of interception while it embraces the hopefulness of being found.

I also decided my message needed to be simple, and meant more for my audience on earth. For the alien who intercepts it, the message is ‘you are not alone!’ They may think the object is magic, and in fact, that seems just about right.

As humans, we often ascribe magic to what we do not understand. An important player in the conversation about alien communication is archeology, which is a good way to examine message deconstruction as it’s the only earth-bound example we have to study messages across time. We know that in ancient England, when people found arrowheads, they knew they weren’t from nature, but had no idea what they were. Maybe they were magic? Either way, these early archeologists could tell there was an intervention, and the shape was unlikely to be natural. The rock had evidence of intention. I knew that my message had to include this agency - but that didn’t need to be decoded for the simplicity of the message to be understood.

I was also thinking about math and all of the message composition attempts involving math that I had read about. Ultimately I decided to work with origami because it employs math, intervention, and sculptural poetic aspects. I ended up making origami ships in a bottle. The ship references our history of colonial enterprise, which is the same spirit, for good or bad, that is taking us off the planet and out into space. This aspect of the message is certainly for my fellow humans.

Before folding each ship I marked the small paper with a golden handprint so that if the finder ever unfolded the ship they would be confronted with our hand, the tool used to make the ship. Kind of like the Caves of Lascaux with their hand markings.

I ended up making an edition of 20 and put them into the hands of people who contributed to my thinking around the project, those contributing to space pioneering, and people I know are going into space.

HS: Nice! From the SSP website, I gather that there is an emphasis on team projects. Did you collaborate with professionals and can you describe the process?

SB: The participants don’t sleep. Ever! They spend their first few weeks writing exams. They work morning, noon, and night with boundless energy. I joined them in week 5. I got to do a lot of cool things, like use the Canadarm. I opened the catalogue like it was Christmas and chose the workshops that applied to me most, but I got involved with all of the departments. There are so many aspects to space, it even needs lawyers! And space architects! All these different facets and vantages contributed to my project, but also contributed to my understanding of interdisciplinarity. This is the real deal.

We talk about interdisciplinarity in art, but to see it at work on this scale was really something. People shared their knowledge so freely. When you think about it, each astronaut, cosmonaut, or tyconaut represents an army of people on the ground who made their voyage possible from so many angles. Even the smallest thing needs to be considered, and there is little to no room for ego.

HS: What kind of response did your work get?

SB: A lot of people were like, “OMG! You’re an artist,” which is funny in a room of rocket scientists! Injecting myself into this busy environment was daunting, and as this was a pilot project, we were all figuring it out as we went. People would stop me on their breaks to share their thoughts on the project, or to simply ask questions, but the participants are so busy, so absorbed! Because I had no exams or research keeping me tied up, I had the fortune of interacting with faculty, astronauts, and guests.

I quickly observed that scientists have the same problem as artists; they’re trying to make their discipline more accessible. They need the public to be excited so that funding continues, and future scientists are born! In my work, I’m always trying to expand my audience, and they are too. There’s a beautiful balance between science and art that’s waiting to be tapped. It’s very copascetic. Ultimately, there is a big future for this type of collaboration, and space needs artists to ask the tough questions - space artists need to be born!

Because this was a pilot project, we are already working toward future iterations that further engage participants and the community, maybe even to help them write their own message for aliens.

HS: Speaking of helping other people write messages, on some level, this work makes me think of your Nuit Blanche installation from 2012, Postcards from the End. With disaster tourism, people who aren’t from an area find themselves purposefully in unfamiliar territory, using visual documentation to mark that blending of worlds. Does the work you made at SSP relate to other projects or bodies of work of yours?

SB: While in residence I kept thinking back to the research I was doing for my MFA on Kurt Vonnegut. His brother was a scientist and Cat’s Cradle was written as a warning to scientists. We introduce new technologies like 3-d printed human skin, with no thought of the consequences. I attended a New Technology lecture, and the future seemed so startling, and because I was overwhelmed, I stepped out to the bathroom. I went to wash my hands and the sink wouldn’t work! The future is filled with broken things! It totally reminded me of Cat’s Cradle.

Now I find myself mentally planning an artwork for scientists that is a warning - ‘Just because you can make it doesn’t mean you should.’ In the spirit of Nobel or the Manhattan project. I would also like to write a space opera based on space garbage! Maybe a space artist has been born.

For once [with the origami ships in bottles], I made a project without humour, because there is no irony in space! It was a real change for me because I work with irony and humour a lot. At the SSP14, colonialism was discussed endlessly, and framed only as a positive concept. It was discussed with no derision, no irony. The ‘C word’! Just think! I heard it everywhere as people planned future colonization of Mars, the moon, and beyond. If you think about names like the Voyager, Pioneer, Mariner, Discovery and Endeavor, they’re so optimistic; they sound like colonial ships.

HS: If we look back to the history of exploration, artists’ emphasis was on representing exotic individuals in newly discovered or conquered lands and bringing them back home. The Pioneer Plaque, the Voyager disc images, Murmurs from Earth - they're all interesting because they represent the flipside. You’re right, they really are for the humans and not for the aliens.

SB: Message construction reveals so much about the sender! Like art, it is a mirror back on our society, and likely exposes so much more than we can even imagine.

Message construction is one thing, but at NASA Ames, Berkeley, and many other labs there is serious work being done searching for extraterrestrial communications sent our way. I found myself thinking about these researchers a lot, and wondering how they discuss what they do. It must be tricky going to a party and being asked what you do for a living. The listener probably assumes they are one of those crazy ‘Ancient Alien’ scientists!

HS: I’m curious, were you drawn to this subject matter because it was from the era in which you were born?

SB: A little bit, definitely. But mostly, there’s something about Carl Sagan and the hopefulness and making science accessible that reminds me of art.

HS: Mathematicians designed the Pioneer Plaque, with the rationale that math is the lingua franca, yet the outcome was art. Do you think that art is the common thread among the living?

SB: I know that Linda Sagan was an illustrator as well as a scientist, so art was definitely in the room. But to answer your question, I think the common thread is culture. Culture and smarts are different. We know that monkeys and elephants have made paintings that sold on the market, but would they have made what we think of as paintings without human intervention? Animals use tools. We just learned that bears use tools.

HS: We did?

SB: They use buckets! Otters use rocks! Nature is crazy. Good culture, crappy culture—that’s what makes us different, special. In terms of a lingua franca, it’s impossible to imagine anything outside what we know. We can’t even understanding meaning(s) from the past. We can’t even agree on what good art is or on what masterpieces would be suitable to send into space. To say art is the voice is kind of off. It’s like screaming at the sky. At the end of the day, there’s no Rosetta Stone.

Science is so optimistic that it makes me feel like a cynic. We [artists] are supposed to be the ones who are imaginative. In both fields, there’s a place for both even though artists and scientists can be very solitary. At space school, they’re all actually doing it, with no barriers. It was amazing!

Images courtesy of the artist

Too Smart for Her Own Good: The Blazing World

“...she would reveal the truth, so people would be forced to admit that female artists are overlooked.”

Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014, Simon & Schuster) is a fitting follow-up to the last book I reviewed, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). Like Solanas, the protagonist in The Blazing World, Harriet Burden—who goes by Harry—is a gender-bending provocateur, hell-bent on getting revenge in the New York art world for misattribution of intellectual property but plagued by judgments about her mental state (and, in turn, credibility).

Hustvedt’s novel is a faux-biography, presented as if edited by one I. V. Hess, Professor of Aesthetics, and published on the heels of a posthumous retrospective show of Burden’s art. A work of metafiction, it’s about society’s gullibility and specifically, its inability to see through fiction. It’s convincing as a scholarly biography, between its analysis of the idiosyncrasies of Burden’s journal entries; a postscript commenting on a vital journal of Burden’s that was recovered as the book was about to go to print; and lengthy footnotes revealing the rabbit holes into which academics leap to track obscure leads…so convincing, in fact, that I actually checked the call number to confirm it as a work of literature. Hilariously, Hustvedt writes herself into the text: in a pseudonymously written article outing Burden’s experiment of having three men exhibit her work as their own to expose gender bias, Hustvedt is dismissed as “an obscure novelist and essayist” (p. 255).

After years of being in the shadow of her gallerist husband, the widow Burden convinces Anton Tish (in 1998), Phineas Q. Eldridge (in 2002), and Rune (in 2003) to participate in the ruse, known collectively as Maskings. All three men had enjoyed varying degrees of success in the art world, so logically, their new, fabulous work made discreetly by multi-media artist Burden will not appear utterly out of the blue. Oddly, their success should be her success, but ultimately, it constitutes her failure. For instance, when one of the artists is fawned over by the press, critics neglect to identify Burden as an influence. She has enough of a reputation as an artist that it is an oversight, but not such an established reputation that it precludes her pursuit of the scam altogether. She can hardly wait for the moment when she will reveal the truth, so people will be forced to admit that female artists are overlooked. Alas, Rune goes rogue and refuses to take part in the exposé. He notes flippantly in an interview, “We live in a post-feminist age of gender freedom, transsexuality. Who cares which is which? There are lots of women in art now. Where is the battle?” Easier said from his position than Burden’s.

Burden’s welfare suffers substantially as a result of the botched experiment: she loses weight, temporarily loses the new love of her life, and instigates a physical altercation with her nemesis. Her motivation had been multifaceted, making the betrayal that much harder to take: in addition to wanting visibility, she had wanted validation—not just as a visual artist, but arguably as a writer and as a self-made philosopher. Her best friend, Rachel, describes her as having “an immense appetite for ingesting as much learning as she possibly could” (p. 48), while Eldridge says of Burden, “She knew too much, had read too much” (p. 216). Undeniably learned, Burden frequently quotes the greats from history in her journals, requiring the editor to act as an interpreter by way of inserting footnotes. The footnotes, being objective by their very nature, contrast Burden’s impassioned writing. Perhaps Hustvedt is conducting an experiment of her own, to gauge the reader’s self-importance: if you recognize an obscure art reference or a historical feminist reference within The Blazing World, how does it make you feel? Knowledgeable? Knowledgeable and therefore superior?

The highs and lows of Burden’s burdensome experiment unfold through chapters presented as contributions written in memoriam by characters interspersed with journal excerpts. In these seeming primary sources, the characters veer off topic to share loosely related details about their pets or people’s auras, emphasizing their lack of investment in the experiment. In contrast, Harry is obsessive, bringing to mind the female-associated term, hysteria. There are some obvious foils, like Rachel, the psychotherapist best friend who identifies Burden’s post-betrayal behavior as irrational; Bruno, Burden’s new male love interest, who is as unmotivated as she is prolific; and even her granddaughter’s friend, who is able to forget a spat the very next day.

There is poetic justice when the traitorous artist, Rune, dies during his own performance. As a result, there are posthumous accounts of his life and legacy and a surge of interest in his practice. Frustratingly, even in death, Rune and Burden compete for attention. On the upside, reading his sister’s remembrance humanizes him and creates empathy, leaving the reader conflicted about whether or not to detest him.

In addition to astutely capturing the complexity of the gender bias in the contemporary art world, Hustvedt characterizes it well overall, from graduate students’ overuse of theory to punchy descriptions like critic Clement Greenberg, right-hand man of Jackson Pollock as “a successful dictator” (p. 172). That Hustvedt holds a PhD in English and has lectured on art in academic and museum settings comes as no surprise. In the running for the Man Booker Prize, The Blazing World is deserving of a place on every academic and art lover’s bookshelf.

Cover reproduced with the permission of Simon & Schuster.

Prettying up Feminism: The Coven at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse

“…the ironic mimicry of girlhood…”

I stopped by La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse in Montreal on Friday night for the opening of the window installation, Girlhood, curated by Luna e los Santos. On the heels of SlutWalk and its strategy of reclaiming what is deemed negative, it aims to celebrate the state and/or attributes of being young and female in spite of girlhood’s bad rap. Girlhood features the work of 13 artists, more than half of them Montreal-based, from a 14-member feminist collective known as The Coven. A fabric hanging of digital reproductions of members’ work faces the street; a wooden bench is partly covered with repeated white text from Samantha Conlon that says, “I pledge allegiance to girlhood”; and on the windowpane, a variation of the white text proclaims multiple allegiances. The arrangement of images is a nod to the Pinterest generation (which seems appropriate, given that the artists who have provided their ages in their bios are in their early- to mid-twenties).

During the opening, a different selection of images than is shown in the vitrine rotated on a projector inside the exhibition space. As with the fabric hanging and also the press release, no titles were included for individual works even though titles can be found for some of the same images on the collective’s Tumblr site. It’s a shame because titles could have provided an entry point for viewers. Just as titles are not associated with individual works in the fabric hanging, press release or slideshow, artists’ names are disconnected in all three. On the one hand, this curatorial choice captures a communal sensibility and refutes the notion of artistic genius, which has historically been associated with men rather than women. On the other hand, attribution in the visual arts was hard won and since lack of recognition for female artists has been an ongoing challenge, it gave me pause.

There is definitely room for improvement in the presentation of the images in the vitrine. One of the images towards the top contains graphs which cannot be read from the sidewalk, nor can the graphs be deciphered in the corresponding thumbnail on the invitation posted in the lower right-hand corner of the window (which, oddly, is surrounded by what looks like white, soapy strokes). The window frame bisects a number of images, while valuable real estate is taken up by utilitarian pink borders between images. One piece says, “Things 2 make me better than u,” reminding me of an elementary school classmate’s brazen t-shirt that proclaimed, “Everything boys can do girls can do better” (awesomely foretelling her coming out as a lesbian years later). I digress. The work in question is fragmented vertically on the fabric hanging and horizontally on the invitation. The punchiness of some images is sacrificed to the structure of the window; for example, part of a sword is covered, making it seem less threatening. Also, in a clever and progressive gender-bending image of a girl wearing a Playboy shirt, the shock of fuchsia hair on a goth girl is obscured (shown here), preventing the appreciation of its contrast with the blonde hair of the magazine model.

The emergence of collectives like the Coven, and other groups I’ve blogged about such as the New York-based tART and the international Ardorous, is exciting. One collaboration in particular stands out as being parallel and that is the Toronto-based GalGalz. The duo of female gallerists writes, “…our Girlie feminism is an imperfect, personal response to our experiences, and it feels powerful to us. By seeking strength and community in girlieness, we feel that we’re reclaiming what’s relentlessly cast as weak, silly, dismissible and frivolous…” (1) Like the Coven, GalGalz employ pink branding. The colour palette and the frills that accompany it are non-threatening, but are they also inadvertently dismissive, like campaigns against breast cancer? They pretty up feminism, but there’s no escaping the fact that the issues tackled by feminism are ugly. To return to the window text about allegiances, the first one says, “I pledge allegiance to sexting”; personally, when I read that, my mind goes to the late Rehtaeh Parsons (a victim of rape and related bullying), and I feel the opposite of celebratory. Additionally, the risk (or thrill) of adopting a girlie aesthetic for feminist purposes is that it’s hard to tell the difference between the ironic mimicry of girlhood and the hearts and smiley faces that adorn the placards held by young women online to denounce feminism. Thus, having a clear agenda is helpful—albeit challenging for artists with different practices coming together. The press release reveals a bit about their agenda, but it is not as developed as the GalGalz’ online statement.

Although the press release states that the artists embrace the frills of girlhood, aside from a silkscreened image of a candy heart, a painting of a jeweled crown, and a photographic image of a My Little Pony toy presumably embedded in icing, the subject matter in the fabric hanging is adult. Images of little girls are not conjured by pins projecting out of underwear to mimic pubic hair; well-endowed female figures dancing in a circle; female figures with hairy appendages and droopy breasts (the latter by Charlene Bataille, shown here, are particularly strong); or representations of Playboy.

The press release notes that the collective exists for the members to find their voice(s), but these unresolved elements effectively convey the very criticism the Coven has identified as being associated with young girls—specifically, to translate from the French statement, that they aren’t sure of themselves. However, their exhibition record demonstrates momentum and it will be interesting to see what they accomplish as they move through the growing pains.

Girlhood closes August 29th.

Sources:

(1) http://www.galgalz.ca/about/

All photographs taken in situ by Heather Saunders

Recommended Reading: Valerie Solanas Biography

“Its [the SCUM Manifesto’s] premise was that...women should take over the world.”

Cover reproduced with permission of the City University of New York Feminist Press

Breanne Fahs’ biography of enigmatic, self-described superfeminist, Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) lives up to its gripping preface. The opening paragraph of the book published in April by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York reveals that one interviewee refused to speak about the woman who famously shot Andy Warhol until her death certificate was produced, for fear of retribution from the paranoid schizophrenic. Between reluctant interviewees and a loyal mother who burned Solanas’ archival material when she died, the very existence of Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (And Shot Andy Warhol) is remarkable.

Exhaustively researched, the book is chock full of quotations whose length prevents statements from being taken out of context. Although this risk is always mitigated by conscientious academics, it is also something of a tribute to Solanas, who became incensed whenever she felt her writing had been misrepresented. With extensive research comes detail, but it may not always add to the tale. For instance, it seems superfluous that the couch an arts editor crossed over to in the Factory right before the shooting was in the art deco style. Ditto for Warhol’s wardrobe selection that day, though it is interesting that he was wearing his trademark silver wig when he was taken to hospital. Fahs’ writing style is also descriptive grammatically; a sentence comes to mind that contains seven adjectives in a row (1). It’s fitting, though, because Solanas was such a complex person that one adjective would not suffice to describe her. Plus, it mimics Solanas’ style; for example, Solanas wrote that fatherhood made females “male-dependent, passive, domestic, animalistic, nice, insecure, approval and security seekers, cowardly, humble, ‘respectful’ of authorities and men, closed, not fully responsive, half dead, trivial, dull, conventional, flattened out and thoroughly contemptible” (2).

That Solanas’ shooting of Warhol appears in parentheses in the title underscores the author’s intention to not dwell on this aspect of her life. Indeed, the near-fatal shooting of 1968 appears just before the half-way point in the book. As a result, extensive consideration is given to her contributions—welcome or not—to radical feminism from behind bars and how she fractured NOW (its members couldn’t agree on whether to support her as a mistreated and justifiably angry woman or distance themselves from her violence). There is a sense of restoring dignity to Solanas, indicative in sensitive comments like Fahs qualifying the behavior of an acquaintance of Solanas as deliberately cruel. Additionally, while it would be handy to have a timeline of her extensive criminal record, it would be at the cost of empathy because the facts would be presented apart from the context that helps the reader understand her plight.

For Solanas, writing became an outlet for her contemplation of gender, although ‘contemplation’ seems too gentle a term. She had a complicated life to say the least: she was an apparent child victim of incest betrayed by her father, a twice pregnant teenager, an adult sex worker in seedy settings like the Chelsea Hotel rooftop, and a green card wife. She embodied the ‘whatever’ quality of queerness that Sarah Liss writes about in last month’s issue of FLARE magazine (3), referring to herself as a lesbian, but choosing occasional male partners, at one point for a few years. At times she projected asexuality, but she could also be overtly sexual—for example, in exposing herself. This ambivalence came through in her manifesto for SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men. Its premise was that men were emotionally flawed and overall screw-ups, so they should be exterminated and women should take over the world. Although the scope of the book is within Solanas’ lifetime, the ripple effect is apparent in contemporary society—for example, in Pussy Riot singing, “Kill the Sexist!” and a Carrier of the Cross for the Orthodox church in which they performed a different song retorting, “If they want to live in a world without men, they should move to an island or the Amazon or something” (4).

Because Solanas spent time in mental institutions (more so than in jail), it has been documented that she had a higher than average IQ. Her radical ideas were intertwined with incredible insight. For instance, she predicted such developments as test tube babies and Viagra. She was a master wordsmith and a perfectionist editor. She demanded respect, but was hardly respectful of her colleagues (for example, comparing Simone de Beauvoir’s writing to comic books and calling the works of Ti-Grace Atkinson, her ally when she was incarcerated, “total shit” (5)). In contrast, Solanas considered the SCUM Manifesto to be “history’s greatest bargain” (6). In part, this was in reference to the fact that its initial sale price was $2 for men and $1 for women. French philosopher, Jacques Derrida declared the text ‘necessary’ while Atkinson called it the “most important statement written to date in the English language” (7).

Broadly speaking, it’s possible that for Solanas, Warhol represented the gender disparity of the art world. Before she met him, she lamented in the manifesto that men “define Great Art” (8). She saw her shooting of Warhol as a moral act that was about artists’ rights (namely writers’ rights) rather than about feminism, which complicated matters for the radical feminist movement. Specifically, she was upset because she felt Warhol had led her on about producing her play, Up Your Ass, and that he had appropriated her comments for his films—which she had reason to believe, since he welcomed a spontaneous cameo of Solanas in one of his films. Both situations must have felt like a blow since she had believed Warhol to be on her side, to the extent that she considered him to be head of the ‘men’s auxiliary’ of SCUM. Even after the shooting, she maintained contact with him, almost always baiting him. For instance when the original publisher of the manifesto, Olympia Press, went bankrupt and the publishing rights reverted to her, she posted an ad looking for distributors; in it, she wrote, “Andy Warhol, peddle it at all those hot shit parties you go to (9).” The challenge for the reader is that Solanas restated her feelings about Warhol and her contact at Olympia Press ad nauseam and there is a point at which reading her harassing letters and verbal slurs loses appeal. This element notwithstanding, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (And Shot Andy Warhol) will be equally valuable as beach reading and as a scholarly source.

In a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum a week and a half ago, I was glad to see that this book was sold in the gift shop, since the timeline from his life posted on the gallery walls didn’t delve into Solanas’ motive.

Sources:

(1) p. 47

(2) p. 63

(3) Liss, Sarah. “Love is Love,” FLARE, June 2014: 104-109. Print.

(4) Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer. Dir. Mike Lerner, Roast Beef Productions Limited, 2014. Film.

(5) p. 307

(6) p. 307

(7) p. 177

(8) p. 63

(9) p. 297

In Defense of Yoko Ono

“…definitely not a SWUG.”

Leaving the North Midway Travel Plaza in Bedford, Pennsylvania on the week-end, I spotted this billboard featuring Yoko Ono. It paired a recent portrait of her with an outdated charge in the form of the question, “Would you take energy advice from the woman who broke up the Beatles?” It was produced by the Big Green Radicals, a watchdog group that critiques the likes of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. According to the BGR website, the campaign (which also includes similar billboards of Robert Redford and Lady Gaga) aims to emphasize the gap between the lifestyles of average Americans and celebrities.

My gut reaction was, “Yeah, probably” in response to the billboard’s question. Before I elaborate, I should say that I can't feign neutrality where Ono is involved, as I did a live drawing performance honouring her at her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, with Erin Finley two years ago, as shown on the left. (Double click to enlarge).

When I think of Ono and environmentalism, what comes to mind is Acorn Piece, a collaboration with John Lennon in 1969 that she repeated solo 40 years later. They planted acorns in easternly and westernly directions to symbolize the union of cultures, and mailed acorns to world leaders, asking them to plant them for world peace. At worst, this gesture would result in the absorption of carbon dioxide through the planting of trees; at best, people would come away inspired. Maybe, just maybe, if we had heeded her advice in Grapefruit (1964) to “Listen to the sound of the earth turning” (1) the earth wouldn’t be in such poor shape.

The billboard is a response to Ono’s anti-fracking efforts with a group she co-founded with her son, Sean Lennon, called Artists Against Fracking. Its placement in Pennsylvania is fitting, given that more natural gas is produced there than any other state on the prime Marcellus Shale stratum. Stephanie Malin interviewed small-scale farmers in Pennsylvania who were in a position to lease land for corporate fracking, and reported that they saw it as a force beyond their control. Additionally, she found that they either felt the environmental concerns were unfounded or that they were balanced by economic benefits. This type of media campaign could play a key role in normalizing fracking for a group that is vulnerable. (2)

Whether or not Ono had a hand in the demise of one of the greatest bands in history is a separate issue from her environmental politics. She is not Pete Seeger, nor is she Midnight Oil. The pairing is simply incongruous. Curiously, the BGR billboard says “broke up the Beatles,” which sounds definitive, yet in Ono’s activist profile on the BGR site (3) it says, “When she’s not helping to break up the Beatles…”. So, which one is it, BGR? If Ono said fracking causes earthquakes in one breath, and helps cause earthquakes in the next, undoubtedly she’d be attacked for being inconsistent.

Ono is no stranger to poor reception: for example, in her native Japan, her shows have been advertised using the script reserved for foreign names, while her grasp of English has been mocked in the US, where she is based. (4) The BGR profile of Ono dismisses her experimental music as screeching and as (note the surly quotation marks) ‘performance.’ It also describes her as being washed up. It’s unfortunate to see the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the high profile Venice Biennale so grossly misrepresented. On a more superficial note, when Vogue publishes a spread of a woman’s “amazing style history” as it did with Ono (5), it means she is definitely not a SWUG.

Fortunately, it would seem that Ono has the last laugh. In attacking Ono with billboards, the Big Green Radicals are actually reinforcing her media savvy. Ono used billboards most famously with John Lennon to protest the Vietnam War, the contemporary version of which is “Imagine there’s no fracking” billboards produced by Artists Against Fracking. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Ono should feel vindicated. Her “brilliant use of mass media” (6) is evident not just in her billboards but in her banners, bags, stickers, postcards, flyers, postcards, and badges, all carrying on the tradition of multiples that emerged with Fluxus and made art more accessible to the 99%.

SOURCES:

(1) Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions + Drawings, New York: Simon & Schuster, reprinted 2000, n.p.
(2) Edith Newhall, “A Long and Winding Road.” Art News, 99.9 (2000), 162.
(3) http://www.biggreenradicals.com/activist/yoko-ono/
(4) Jerry Hopkins, Yoko Ono. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986, 191-192 and 251.
(5) http://imaginepeace.com/archives/17833
(6) Stephanie Malin, “There’s no Real Choice but to Sign: Neoliberalization and Normalization of Hydraulic Fracturing on Pennsylvania Farmland.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (2014): 4:1, 17-27.

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: Paolo Pedercini @molleindustria, May 17, 2014. Credit within tweet to Ross Goldstein. https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/467616992287916032

Zanele Muholi at Ryerson University

“My beat is about visual politics”—Zanele Muholi

Since graduating from Ryerson University in 2009 with an MFA in Documentary Media, South African artist Zanele Muholi has exhibited in such high profiles venues as dOCUMENTA and the Venice Biennale. During a return visit from Johannesburg for the opening of her show, Faces and Phases (May 1-June 1 and June 18-Aug. 24, University Gallery), she gave an artist talk last night at Ryerson.

When Muholi clarified that she would be giving an artist talk rather than a lecture, she wasn’t kidding. With thank-yous to myriad individuals interspersed between reflective statements about her work at both the beginning and end of the night, a Q & A in the middle, and a seemingly spontaneous demo of website images toward the end, the audience got a sense of her creative process. Evidently, she makes constant, rapid-fire connections between elements in what unfolds as a constellation. Interestingly, although it would appear that she is not a linear thinker (she admitted to never having had things in order as a student either), her black and white portraiture series of black lesbian women is sequential. Consisting of over 240 images taken during the past eight years, it has far surpassed her original goal of 25. One of these works is a self-portrait, underscoring the fact that she speaks as an insider.

To return to the constellation metaphor, during her animated presentation, I found myself thinking back to an excerpt from a book I skimmed on the road trip from North Bay to Toronto. In Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Clark Institute in the Visual Arts, 2014), the Raqs Media Collective writes, “Detach yourself, momentarily, from the mothership of art history. Step out for a spacewalk” (p. 4). Muholi invites us to take a spacewalk with her extensive intervention in visual culture. Referring to queer people, she observed, “It’s always challenging to have people like us. You go to museums and galleries and ask yourself, ‘Where am I in all this commotion?’” Later she noted, “Maybe there’s an assumption that galleries and museums aren’t for black people.” Thus, she aims to bring about or enhance black queer visibility. It’s a pressing need: a few weeks ago, a show featuring her art in the Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal was shut down because of pressure from Islamic extremists. Consequently, “being here is like winning the Nobel Prize.” She notes that “these [institutional] spaces sidelined us and we decided to become visible.”

She has facilitated this visibility through portraiture. Muholi introduced herself as a proud black lesbian, and she photographs other proud black lesbians in Faces and Phases. She avoids photographing black lesbians under the age of majority or those who haven’t come out. “I don’t want to be responsible for your closet,” she says. She has formed an organization, Inkyaniso, for the subjects—or ‘participants’ as she calls them, acknowledging the collaborative element—to share their stories (see http://inkanyiso.org).

“My beat is about visual politics” she says and considers her work to be more about visual activism than aesthetics, and herself to be a visual activist more so than an artist. Indicative of this stance is her statement that she doesn’t want to die young without rewriting history.

Rather than fall back on jargon like ‘the scopophilic gaze,’ she states that the series forces the audience to ask why they are asked to look at these faces at this point in history. South Africa is at a turning point historically. In 2006, same-sex marriage was legalized, and it is the first (and so far only) African country to make the transition. Muholi has photographed gay weddings, making arrangements like not charging for her services in exchange for being able to use selected images professionally. “It’s part of our history. It’s now,” she says. She has also documented lesbian funerals as a political act to expose queercide. 2012 was a particularly brutal year in this regard, with Amnesty International citing at least seven LGBTI murder victims across South Africa*.

Photographing the participants in Faces and Phases has been painful for Muholi, though it may not be apparent from the confidence the participants project. When an audience member asked about her editing process, she revealed that it usually involves tears and a trans-Atlantic call to her therapist. Still, Muholi says, “I decided I would rather suffer for something I believe in than die in silence.” Her work is rooted in love as much as it is in pain. She says that she doesn’t want to limit the struggle to pain because it can’t be moved forward without love. “When we think about black lesbian histories,” she urges, “let’s think about love.”

Faces and Phases, curated by Dr. Gaëlle Morel, is part of WorldPride 2014. If you’re in Toronto, please join me at the opening of The Sex Offensive: Emancipating Gender tomorrow night at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, which is also part of the festival.

*Noted by Muholi and at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2013/04/two-years-on-no-justice-for-hate-crime-in-south-africa/ Image: Mpumi Moeti, Kwanele South, Katlehong, Johannesburg, 2012, gelatin silver print. Source: http://www.ryerson.ca/ric/exhibitions/ZaneleMuholi.html. Copyright: Zanele Muholi and Stevenson Cape Town/Johannesburg.

Woman, Revolt: Ghada Amer at Cheim & Reid

"...no bravado there."

A former gallery colleague once told me that meeting her husband (of several decades and counting) felt like stepping into a warm bath. For me, that characterizes the initial and continued experience of viewing the works of Cairo-born, New York-based Ghada Amer. Years from now, I imagine it will still feel just right.

Her current exhibition of recent work at Cheim &Read (Chelsea, NYC), Rainbow Girls, closes on Saturday. It's well-rounded, featuring three floor sculptures (a new enterprise for Amer) and eight two-dimensional mixed media pieces in which thread is dominant. Since 1997, she has combined paint, which she considers to be male, with thread, which she considers to be female. Two of the eight works were made with her partner and long-time collaborator, Reza Farkhondeh, as denoted by the initialism, RFGA, in the works' titles. The Big Black Bang -- RFGA, (2013) is the largest work in the show. At 102 by 132 inches, it is a seeming response to connections drawn between Amer and Jackson Pollock. The size for Abstract Expressionist artists like Pollock was all about capturing the action of the body, but sewing is different. Occasionally, it requires a full range of motion, but often, it's a matter of teeny stitches for nimble fingers--no bravado there. This piece pulses with colour on a dark background, a tamed tangle of sperm-like threads flowing in the same direction and visually overtaking images of stitched, sexualized women underneath, to the extent that initially it appears wholly abstract. At the risk of flogging the Pollock comparison, I will say this: just as attempts to mimic his fractal-filled paintings have been likened to a plate of spaghetti, when I run out of Ziploc bags, my embroidery bag is a mess but has none of the spectacular qualities of this work.

Amer is an interesting counterpoint to the last artist whose work I reviewed, Sarah Lucas, because she is understated in comparison. In fact, in the catalogue for Rainbow Girls, Anne Creissels comments on Amer's ability to hide as much as she shares. A case in point is the egg-shaped, stainless steel filigree sculpture, Blue Bra Girls (2012), in which a female figure's thumbs meet in the negative space understood to be her groin. It seemed fitting that I was distracted by a boy dragging his skateboard around this piece (seemingly indifferent to its connotations of masturbation) or that kids were playing hide and seek around another sculpture, because there is a constant element of distraction in Amer's work. With the sculptures, you can't take in the information on the surface immediately facing you without filtering the information (presented backwards) on the opposite side of the sculpture. Similarly, distraction is inevitable in her two-dimensional works, which are a combination of overlaid threads, sexualized images, and feminist messages in Arabic and Roman letters. You cannot rest your gaze on the nipple thrust upward of a reclining female without also processing the text that says repeatedly, "I see my body as an instrument rather than an ornament." Whether this is a mantra or an unheard plea is up for debate.

Sometimes the text is in block letters coloured in solidly in black or white paint, bold like Barbara Kruger's advertising-inspired photo montages. Sometimes they seem almost noncommittal, like sketches, traces, or perforations. Their repetition, however, shows absolute commitment. It's orderly, not frantic, so it harks back to a time of sewing samplers and a preference for rote learning over critical thinking. There's another association I can't shake, undoubtedly because of the title. In elementary school, I was one of three girls to fill lined notebooks with rainbow colour schemes, declaring our adoration through repeated text for TV stars, musicians, or the boy next door. Why the celebration of schoolgirl crushes necessitated this behaviour, I have no idea, but I remember it feeling most purposeful. Even though I can't help but see Amer's strands of thread in portraits as tear-smeared mascara, even though I'm cognizant that the least optimistic phrases she uses like, "No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body" resonate in Canada where I'm writing from, I choose to see these works--with their personalized, Jenny Holzer-like truisms and quotations of the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Amina Sboui--as celebratory.

Image: Sunset with Words -- RFGA, 2013. Acrylic, embroidery, and gel medium, 48 x 50 inches. Reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://issuu.com/cheimread/docs/031314_ghada_amer_trif?mode=window&pageNumber=1

Size Matters: Sarah Lucas at Gladstone Gallery

“…gruff but poetic.”

Nud Nob at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, New York is British artist Sarah Lucas’ first show in the US in almost ten years.

Featuring large sculpted phalluses and phallic-shaped vegetables as well as sexually suggestive photographs, the exhibition provoked extensive gawking through the gallery’s glass doors when I was there. Of the people who entered the gallery proper, the least flummoxed was a girl around age six. Her only concern was that she wanted clarification about what the woman in the six massive self-portraits wallpapering a room was eating (answer: a banana). Also overheard was a man repeating, “It’s beautiful” when looking at an oversized phallic sculpture. In spite of the well established concept of penis envy, personally, I found myself thinking of the entry tags at the 1993 Whitney Biennial that said, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” When contemplating why she chooses this subject matter, Lucas says, “because I don’t have one” but cites plenty of other reasons that invite diverse interpretations of her work: “appropriation…voodoo economics; totemism; they’re a convenient size for the lap; fetishism; compact power; Dad; why make the whole bloke?; gents; gnomey; because you don’t see them on display much; for religious reasons having to do with the spark” (Coles, p. 51).

Lucas’ work is blunt, in keeping with the way she speaks. It’s gruff but poetic. As J. J. Charlesworth writes of her work from the 1990s (which includes said banana works as well as Chicken Knickers, the photo in full view from West 24^th Street that superimposes a raw chicken on a woman’s panty-covered crotch), its sophistication lies in its vulgarity. Blush and turn away, though, and you might miss it.

One of the nuances is the evidence of the artist’s hand, and I don’t mean that in a Sarah Lucas-double entendre kind of way. Rather, the artist’s hand is revealed through asymmetrical forms and pockmarked surfaces that make for imperfect phalluses. Displayed on cubes of crushed metal cars, there’s a bit of a thumbing of the nose at machismo. Also, the evidence of labour differentiates Lucas’ sculpture from, say, minimalist sculpture (which was also very macho) and emphasizes the kind of labour that isn’t automatically associated with art made by a woman.

What you can’t miss, even if you stick to the street view, is the size of the works. It seems proportional to the cultural value assigned to sex and functions as a reference to the notion that bigger is better—an absurd ode to penis enlargers, breast augmentation, and big numbers notched on bedposts. There’s an element of playful pop mockery with the scale quoting Jeff Koons and Claes Oldenburg, but there’s a sinister quality too: if you’ve seen the movie, A Clockwork Orange, it’s unlikely you’ve forgotten a large white phallic sculpture used in a lethal rape scene of a woman.

There are smaller works as well that Lucas showed in the Venice Biennale last year. The Nuds series began as stuffed nylon stockings that stand in for human figures but look kind of like Gumby. Sometimes they appear with chairs, sometimes with toilets. Sometimes they are breasts, sometimes legs, sometimes intestines. The later versions in the show are bronze, like the large vegetables (which might be eggplant, zucchini, or butternut squash; whatever they are, they bring to mind urban myths of self-pleasure leading to hospital visits). The shift to bronze gives them a refined quality that announces, “I am Sculpture.”

As a Young British Artist who is not really so young anymore, being in her 50s, and somewhat androgynous in appearance, Lucas is well positioned to make audiences rethink the conventions of sexual desire by disrupting the privileged male gaze that has dominated art history. You might say she’s carrying the torch for the late Louise Bourgeois. Even so, the extent of the feminist dialogue she encourages has been debated. As a librarian, I have noticed that some of her articles are indexed only with ‘feminist art’ while many are indexed with practically everything but that. Her work has also been called ‘trash-feminism’. Although I have yet to encounter this term as a noun, I assume it to refer to artists like VALIE EXPORT, who entered a Munich movie theatre in 1968 wearing crotchless pants and taunting audience members. Lucas, in turn, has cut a hole in her shirt to expose her nipple in response to Marcel Duchamp’s

catalogue cover of 1941 and she has certainly used base materials to comment on sexuality in the past, like tabloid publications, cigarette buts, and old mattresses. Regardless of whether she’s a feminist, I feel an affinity with her because of her stance that we construct our reality and therefore, we should reflect on that process.

The exhibition closes tomorrow.

Sources:

Charlesworth, J. J. “Sarah Lucas Profile: From YBA to Classic Pervery—Making the Ordinary Extraordinary.” Art Review. Jan./Feb. 2013 http://artreview.com/features/sarah_lucas_profile/

Lucas, Sarah; Cook, Angus; and Fairhurst, Angus. Sarah Lucas: After 2005, Before 2012. Walther König, Köln.

Grayling, A. C. “An Uncooked Perspective on the Nature of Sex.” Tate Etc. Autumn 2005, issue 5.

Image: Installation view. Reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/8487/#&panel1-4

Shary Boyle at York University: Inspiring without re-traumatizing

“…an ‘urge to connect’”

Tuesday’s Goldfarb Lecture in Visual Arts at York University by Shary Boyle was standing room only, further to “tweets in the thousands,” as Professor Barbara McGill Balfour noted in her introduction.

Refreshingly down-to-earth, the featured Canadian artist in the most recent Venice Biennale closed the door herself when noise filtered in from the hallway, paused when latecomers arrived so they wouldn’t feel awkward, and—revealing what Murray Write called her “goofy repartee” in Canadian Art magazine (1)—asked at one point, “How ‘bout that cave art?”

Boyle’s presentation was structured around her multi-media installation at the Biennale, providing a stylistic roadmap of sorts of how she got there. She began by sharing a film from the installation called Silent Dedication, in which an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter signs a poetic tribute to “heroes of silence.” She cites Charlie Chaplin as an influence, calling his silent films “heartening and inspiring for keeping spirits up about humanity.” Characteristics of silent film and sign language dovetail with her art because she’s “always straining to tell a story…through gesture.” In fact, she revealed that if she weren’t an artist, she would like to be an interpreter (she has several years of training in ASL to boot).

She maximized the opportunity of exhibiting in Venice, using it as a platform to give voice to the silenced, from missing women to Pakistani activist, Malala Yousafzai. Author Sheila Heti, in describing an earlier work by Boyle, captured its essence: “…we are not merely looking at the woman here—we are the woman.” (2) Boyle explained, “I can’t speak on behalf of anybody but I can share.” 

Her approach in the Biennale installation, Music for Silence, can be traced to her tendency as a child of “finding solace in drawing” and recognizing loneliness as “exquisitely beautiful.” From a young age, she never wanted to be an artist for the sake of being an artist. She simply wants to make life more meaningful through communication. “Language is so fraught,” she observed. “Isn’t art a language?”

How does an artist transition from working out of her living room without assistants to being courted by Louis Vuitton and jet-setting to Venice to prepare an installation seen by 250,000 people? There are several answers. First, inertia. Boyle spoke of constantly pushing beyond her comfort zone and habits to “places that are mysterious.” As a primarily self-taught ceramicist, she finds enjoyment in “testing the limits of yourself and materials.” She collaborates in unconventional ways, like visiting the homes of grey-haired hobbyists to learn more about ceramics. “There’s no scene; it’s not cool,” she admits. Second, an openness to exploding the categories of art. She’s known for live drawing performances with projections of fantastical images and vivid colours complementing music of the likes of Feist and Peaches. These undertakings are driven by her admiration for the immediate impact music has on general audiences and from an “urge to connect” with practitioners of a form of expression sharing much in common with visual art. “There’s something about cross-disciplinary practice that is super-enlivening,” she says. Third, love your work, but not in an egotistical way. It would be fair to say that Boyle bonds with her work. When working with life-size sculpture, for example, she says, “You’re making a relationship,” akin to interacting with an actual person. She works from memory rather than photographs, with an appreciation for the “tenderness” that results from imperfections. She also aims to “belligerently ignore” the bias against craft because she “enjoys making things with my [her] hands.” Ultimately, in the face of trends and expectations, she says you have to think about how you want to spend your time as an artist.

As a feminist, she has made bold moves. For example, she has used unambiguous titles, like Intersex. She shared that gender has always been of interest to her. Rather than buy into the binary perspective of male-female, she asks, “Aren’t we all a combination?” Also, she “brought the taboo subject of rape into the museum” through a series of ceramics featuring mythological figures like Persephone, commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario.” Her work, while progressive and transgressive, is never too hard-hitting. “You don’t want to re-traumatize people,” she cautions.

This post is dedicated to Paul Kipps (1948-2014), an unforgettable professor. To borrow Boyle’s characterization of Chaplin, he was heartening and inspiring for keeping spirits up about humanity.

Sources:

(1) White, Murray. “The Mermaid’s Cave: Shary Boyle’s Path to the Venice Biennale.”  Canadian Art (2013 Aug. 2). http://www.canadianart.ca/features/2013/08/02/shary-boyle-mermaids-cave/

(2) Heti, Sheila. “No Walls.” In Boyle, Shary. Otherworld Uprising. Toronto: conundrum press, 2008, p. 68.

Image: Silent Dedication, 2013, stills, black and white 16 mm film, silent, 2:45 min. Written, directed and art directed by Shary Boyle; translated and performed by Beth Hutchison; film processed by John Price; photographed by John Jones. Reproduced in 2019 via fair use/fair dealing. Source: https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/more-real-than-reality-an-interview-with-shary-boyle (Border Crossings image provided by the National Gallery of Canada).

Affects of Site: Conference on Site-Specific Art

“Affect is undeniable.”—David LaRiviere, PAVED Arts

This past week-end, Affects of Site took place on Nipissing Territory in North Bay, Ontario. Although I was unable to attend Clarke Mackey’s key note address on Friday night, I caught the panel discussions on Saturday featuring Susan Cahill, Sarah Cook, Serena Kataoka, Lieann Koivukoski, David LaRiviere, Steve Loft, Gil McElroy, Gram Schmalz, Laura Smith, Danielle Tremblay, and Dermot Wilson. For profiles, see http://www.affectsofsiteconference.com/#!speakers/cfvg.

Coincidentally, I was reviewing notes from the conference in tandem with preparing a lecture on conceptual art for a class I’m teaching this semester. The parallels between contemporary site-specific work discussed in the symposium and conceptual art a half-century earlier leapt off the page: the secondary status of the object, the active role of the spectator, the interest in semiotics, and the subversive tendency that is sometimes playful and other times utopian—all leading to questions about the relevance of the gallery system and the art market.

Site-specific art retains an element of dematerialization, often in spite of itself. For example, Sarah Cook recounted a work by Edouardo Kac she curated into a festival in Mexico City, consisting of a transgenic plant whose growth in a greenhouse was jeopardized by an earthquake. In a recent installation co-curated by Susan Cahill and Laura Peturson in North Bay, Jamie Latham’s water-filled jars featuring self-portraits were confiscated by police for chemical testing before anyone else saw them. One of Gil McElroy’s memory tables—angled picnic tables partially charred and inscribed with poetry—was only installed for an afternoon before it was stolen. Perhaps providing karmic balance is a visitor’s note scrawled on an LCBO bag pleading with passersby to not destroy a Toronto fort built over and over again with materials like rebar by Gram Schmalz and Laura Smith, dubbed the “end of the world crew” by locals (and known officially as the Physical Futures Initiative). Of course, some installations, like Ice Follies, are designed to be temporary. One morning, Dermot Wilson awoke with the vision that Lake Nipissing was like a blank canvas. Nine years later, the biennial on the frozen lake remains in full swing. Lieann Koivukoski called it “North Bay’s best kept secret,” and visiting the installations between sessions made for the best conference break I’ve ever had, personally.

Image: Drowning and Drowned Out in situ, by Jaymie Lathem. Courtesy of Near North Arts

A question that resurfaced throughout the day was whom art is intended to affect. The democractic answer need not be stated, but it was interesting to see the nature of that democracy teased out. Site-specific art maximizes audience, connecting artists and curators to a public largely unexposed to art historical rhetoric, or as McElroy put it, people who haven’t lost their sense of adventure or been trained to avoid excitement. It’s a place to move beyond what performance artist Laurie Anderson calls ingrown situations, to stop preaching to the converted. Cahill envisions a shared communal space where spectators don’t feel like they have to know the answer, but they can have their perception change as they enter the site. The word ‘can’ is important: spectatorial agency means that individual response is unpredictable. Site-specific art tends to have unstructured moments, as Schmalz noted, and there’s a range of potential aesthetic-affective responses. There were many stories of children being delighted, but in an era where Pussy Riot members could be jailed for performing in a church, I, for one, appreciate that the conversation wasn’t restricted to affects of pleasure. Serena Kataoka, for example, recalled visiting a men’s shelter with musical performers called the Subatomic Monks and experiencing sexual harassment that morphed into a positive jamming experience. She also described a peaceful protest on Queen Street in Toronto called Free Parking Space, during which she wore a cardboard car while cycling; it lead to criminal charges, which were ultimately dropped. It’s no wonder she eschews documentation of collaborative interventions. Similarly, when the Near North Media Lab took its trailer to Huntsville during the G8 summit to make work, Koivukoski said the group was under constant surveillance and that she’d never been carded so much in her life. Wilson suggested that art’s purpose is to improve the health of society, but these examples demonstrate that there’s no way to know whether it will take or not.

An example of a site-specific festival that the community really took to is Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s all-night art extravaganza. Steve Loft commented that every city seems to want their own version, which reinforces Cook’s observation that there is a “privilege of play.” So what’s a small city to do? In Sudbury, La Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario hosts an alternative art fair every other year. Some 30,000 people have taken in their installations, many from the driver’s seat of a car. Danielle Tremblay recalled that when she co-founded GNO and became its general director, they didn’t have walls for work so they went out into the community and co-opted spaces like billboards. “We were like dogs marking our territory,” she said, laughing. David LaRiviere is also a proponent of billboards in his role as director at PAVED Arts, featuring such gems as Karen Elaine Spencer’s postcards to Stephen Harper in a collaborative project with AKA. He has also pushed against the “flat affect” of advertising by putting his own work in public in the form of movie posters installed at theatres. Smith pointed out that there is a place for intimate festivals even in a large city like Toronto. The Queen West Art Crawl and Art on the Danforth can be refreshing because they don’t tend to be congested or to be associated with partying. The trick with small festivals, Koivukoski said, is that they may have a huge impact on a small community but the figures can appear inconsequential to funders who are comparing the population to larger centres. Furthermore, Tremblay noted that it’s challenging to demonstrate quality over quantity in these situations. Fortunately, from the organizer’s perspective, as David LaRiviere said, “Affect is undeniable.”

On top of the seemingly endless cycle of applying for and reporting on project grants, curators must act as cultural ambassadors to convince governing bodies that it’s a good idea to put art where the masses can see it. Also on the topic of negotiations, audience member Duane Linklater stressed that there should be consideration of the use of Indigenous land for site-specific work. Thus, cultural producers would do well to follow Gil McElroy’s lead in remembering the Hippocratic Oath (first, do no harm, etc.) when approaching site-specific work. Sensitivity to the history of places is complicated by the fact that, as Cook noted, there are “cartels of curators” traveling the globe, without a connection to specific locations. They may not, in fact, be associated with a particular gallery at all, demonstrating a shift from the traditional definition of curator as custodian of a collection. This may be for the best, as Cahill suggested that galleries aren’t necessarily the most accessible space. Yet, as Tremblay said, they’re unlikely to disappear, so curators may as well be imaginative in their use of the white cube. Even the educational responsibilities of curators are shifting, evident in the comments of the Physical Futures Initiative: Schmalz enjoys having spectators teach each other and Smith says that she and Schmalz have “learned so much from the non-artists.” Perhaps, then, curators have become more facilitators of artistic exploration.