Yesterday I wrote about how certain kinds of clothing signal political beliefs or status. I was particularly grateful to the many of you who emailed in with their own experience of the kinds I described. Lifts the isolation.
Today I want to share a wonderfully mischievous artist’s work, using clothing and other props to skewer political beliefs and/or stereotypes.
Sarah Maple is a young British artist of mixed Islamic descent who has been a rising star.
She had her first solo exhibit in NYC this February, and has received numerous awards and commissions for specific purposes. Her art is daring (she receives regular threats and people throw bricks through her gallery windows etc.) and insightful.
Sara Maple – Disney Princess Series
I especially like how she is not fixed on a particular topic, say skewering gender stereotypes, or racism, or nationalism, or – well, you get the idea. She processes what is happening all around her with her art, in paintings, photography, mixed media installations and films. The fun she seems to be having with putting her ideas into image simply oozes out of every picture.
Sara Maple – Disney Princess Series
I am posting images of an early (2011) series that looked at the contrast between the dreams little girls (are encouraged to) pursue, dreams about the existence as a princess, preferably a Disney one, and the kind of professions that regularly exclude women. Hanker over that mermaid dress, and never mind that a little bit more self confidence could have you excel in the sciences…. I applaud the playfulness mixed with an understanding of the seriousness of the topic.
Note, no complicated articles to read today! I’m too tired to find them as you probably are to read them.
I will, however, add to Maple’s clever work some photographs about abandoned props found by the wayside. And speaking of which: I am signing off to go on a little road trip. Communications will be intermittent, but will give you a chance to travel vicariously!
Appropriate music today, since I have no clue how people always get these insanely clever ideas, are some Enigma Variations….. composer Elgar being, of course, Maple’s Landsmann.
I do get a kick out of visiting art exhibits with my octogenarian painter friend – sometimes grumpy, often funny, never boring and always, always good for some revelations about art. Yesterday we did have a blast again, wandering through the halls of the Portland Art Museum, exploring its newest exhibit: the map is not the territory.
The exhibit, celebrating, in the widest sense, regional art, was put on by the new (2017) PAM curator of Northwest art, Grace Kook-Anderson. Despite some occasional misgivings, I was sold on her vision after finishing the rounds of exhibition halls. There was enough substance that it was easy to put aside what my friend sometimes calls “the exploitation of human tragedy for the production of trendy conceptual art.” The curatorial display decisions were strong, some individual art works truly stood out, and the whole of it radiated cohesion. It taught, and it moved.
Charlene Vickers Turtle Clan, part of the installation Ominjimendaan/to remember
It is a mystery to me how a curator can make limited choices when there is an abundance of good work to choose from. I’ve talked about that previously here:
Mistaken cramming is often the result – none of that at this show. The works had space to breathe and the range of mediums used did not interfere with each other. I found the juxtaposition of natural materials (fish skins, wood, etc.)
Annette Bellamy Out of Water Fish skin and artificial sinew (Background installation)
and/or concrete natural forms with man-made or even machine-made abstractions thought-provoking. Weight was given to artistic expressions of native American peoples’ losses, strengths, collective memory and contemporary struggle – a fitting decision given centuries of willful ignorance or suppression.
Charlene Vickers Sleep Walking Moccasins, beer case cardboard, thread, synthetic twine, glass bead, letter beads, faux fur, denim. cotton fabric, 1920s bedroom chairs, wool blankets, acrylic knit blankets, assorted mixed media and found photo works.
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The first of my favorite two pieces was Annette Bellamy’s Moving Mountains. The work is luminous and suggests that defying gravity is possible, after all. The contrast of seemingly heavy stones and boulders (stoneware, presumably hollow) and a sense of ascending lightness proved nothing but up-lifting. The lines from which the individual objects are suspended become part of the installation, suggesting falling rain at the same time that optically there is a sense of upward motion. The shadows seem to shift as something existing independently. The installation moved me, deeply, although I suspect that was not the “moving” referenced in the title.
The second work, slipstream (by the light of the moon) was a gouache/ink drawing on black clayboard by Mary Ann Peters. It, too, had a mesmerizing quality, inviting thoughts about watery surfaces. Funnily enough, it reminded me of one of those Rohrschach inkblot tests used by clinicians of yore as a psychodiagnostic tool – long debunked. Peters’ projective plane seemed to contain the mirror images displayed in those test stimuli, but of course, on closer inspection, defied that expectation. Smartly done, thought provoking.
Mary Ann Peters Slipstream (by the light of the moon) Gouache/Ink on black clayboard.
This was also the artist who apparently suggested the title of the exhibition, derived from Alfred Korzybski’s major publication: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1948.)The actual quote is longer: “The map is not the landscape, but if the map is similar to the structure of the landscape, it is useful“ which suggests a bit more than the general assumption that he referred only to the essential distinction between an object and its representation—or, more broadly, between our beliefs and the underlying reality.
Korzybski was trained as an engineer in Poland; he later developed a theory called General Semantics (GS) that he taught and wrote about here in the US. He had quite a bit of a following, many science fiction writers among them, and reached something akin to cult status mid-century. Most notably, he is considered linked to Scientology and in fact long passages of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard borrow from GS and the conceptual road-map laid out in Science and Sanity. Among early GS critics in the field of psychology and linguistics was Martin Gardner, who wrote a flaming rebuke in Fads and Fallacies In the Name of Science (1952.) More recent criticism has come from both Noam Chomsky and later Steven Pinker. In fact the latter’s book The Language Instinct (1994) has a whole chapter debunking Korzybski and his predecessors Sapir and Whorf.
Rob Rhee Marginalia Alginate plaster, acrylic, construction adhesive, gourd sherds.
Ok, enough of a detour – I’ll take off my cognitive-psychologist-hat and put back on the one devoted to art. If the map is not the territory then the quote is not a mirror of an underlying dead-end theory. It is instead a suitable guide for what this thoughtful exhibit references: regional issues, across time, tackled by inquisitive artists and a curator with vision, making borders apparent and inviting us to examine the history of the land.
That phrase originated with Star Trek, right? Space, where no man had gone before? Today it’s two women’s turn: two artists who have done some incredible work with space and constellations.
The first is Scottish artist Katie Paterson who has an enviable knack for combining scientific research with creative genius: In 2017 she built Totality, an installation that culled images of every stage of a solar eclipse from the body of 10,000 which have been created since a drawing in 1778. The images span drawings dating from hundreds of years ago through nineteenth-century photography and up to the most advanced telescopic technologies. Over 10,000 images reflect the progression of a solar eclipse across the room – from partial to total – mirroring the sequence of the Sun eclipsed by the Moon.She printed each individual image onto a mirrored panel, and then inserted it into a disco ball spanning 32.5 inches. Each row was arranged in the order that the sun eclipses, so began with quarter eclipses and finished with totality. You can see the whole thing for yourself in the clip below.
This year she will show her newest work, The Cosmic Spectrum, which encompasses the color of the universe from its very beginning to its eventual end. Working with scientists who have pioneered research on the cosmic spectrum, Paterson created a spinning wheel which charts the color of the universe through each era of its existence.
Here is her own description: The Cosmic Spectrum encompasses the colour of the universe throughout its existence, spinning in one continuous cycle. It charts a history of starlight, from the primordial era, through the Dark Ages and the appearance of the first stars, to the current Stelliferous Era and into the Far Future. It uses the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and speculative data from leading scientists to establish the average colour of each era. The 2dF Redshift Survey measures the light from a large volume of the universe, more than 200,000 galaxies. Scientists Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry analysis this data in order to determine the average colour of the universe today as it would be perceived by the human eye – a colour they coined ‘Cosmic Latte’.
Cosmic Latte – I like that!
While Paterson utilizes science, and conceives of her shows as exhibitions of ideas, Vija Celmins tackles the constellations as a subject for her passion:the illusionistic process of image making itself. The Latvian-American artist, now in her eighties, uses satellite photographs to depict the night sky. Over decades she painstakingly drew layers and layers of charcoal, often sanded down, and then used erasers to add the stars. A current retrospective runs at San Francisco’s MoMa, with at least 40 paintings and drawings of the night sky. https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/vija-celmins/
Nothing but horizonless sky, dotted with stars and planets. As a reviewer noted:One of the primary philosophical questions of art has to do with its dual function as an illusory window, through which we view a subject beyond, and as an object to be valued for itself. Celmins has dedicated her career to consideration of that great dilemma. Ultimately, as this exhibition reveals, the subject is the picture.
“It’s an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing ‘art’ to defend their collapsing culture.” George Grosz
Down the street from where I went to law school used to be a rare-book store, some steps down into a daylight basement. They sold prints as well and it was there where I first encountered George Grosz. I had no clue who he was, or how his work was anchored in yet another period of horrid German history. I was 18 and just starting to wake up to political reality. I also had no money to buy a print, which is probably why I remember this whole episode in the first place, since I was overwhelmed by what I saw, coveted it and couldn’t have it. It was different from anything I had been exposed to before.
You can see the original Faith Healers at MOMA. The KV stands for KriegsVerwendungsfähig which is usually translated as fit for active service; the literal translation is: usable for war.
Grosz’ experience with the horrors of war as a soldier in WW I made him a committed pacifist. He became intensely involved in subversive art and social critique, became a political activist and documented the upheaval of the 1920s in Germany. Hannah Arendt called his drawings “reportage.” He was dragged into court multiple times over accusations of agitation against the state, or blasphemy, and eventually escaped the rise of Hitler and his minions by moving to the States.
The man who had been a principal member of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, co-founder of DADA, who collaborated with John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann in the invention of photomontage (!), did not fare too well as an emigrant. The revolutionary spirit was subdued – “You come from another country you don’t start right away criticizing – they took you in.”
His art which had so brilliantly subverted the bourgeois style and content, turned into landscape painting and still life, with the occasional apocalyptic sheen. I almost spilled my coffee when I read in the Brittanica that his art became “less misanthropic…” He lived and taught on Long Island, still enamored with the country that took him in, but also clearly suffering the consequences of displacement.
In 1958 he returned to Germany, and died a short time later in an inexplicable fall down a staircase.
Until mid-July you can see some of his works at the Tate Modern in their Magic Realism – Art in Weimar Germany 1919-1933 exhibition. In case you, like I, didn’t know either: the term Magic Realism, for me always linked to South American literature, was actually invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subjects. Hah, not a day without learning something new. Lusting for a London trip…..
For music today go to this website and click on the arrow in the black box offering different titles. It is a compilation of music from the Weimar Republic.
Photographs today are street art from Berlin, his hometown.
PS: In the title photograph of today’s blog you can see half a bedbug and a sign below that reads: Vor der Mauer, nach der Mauer , schickt der Staat die Wanzen. – This is a wordplay on an old nursery rhyme: Auf der Mauer, auf der Lauer, liegt ‘ne kleine Wanze, roughly translated: On the wall lies a bedbug in wait to bug you. The wordplay: Before the wall, after the wall, the state sends bugs to bug you.
One of my favorite contemporary baritones, Sanford Sylvan, suddenly died last month, a year younger than I.
“We are going to a very deep place within ourselves. And what comes up and what comes out is our Self.” This was part of his philosophy of singing (and teaching singing) and related to deep breathing but I think it encapsulates what is essential about any true artist. I had earmarked that sentence at some earlier time when trying to remind myself what, among other things, art is about. It tells you about yourself in addition to what you are trying to tell the world in hopes of reaction.
The obituary gives you a fair summary of how singular Sylvan was as a singer. The link below let’s you hear for yourself – it is a remarkable performance of John Adam’s The Wound-Dresser. (And 3 cheers for the Oregon Symphony under Kalmar’s direction…) The album is called Music for a Time of War – but this is an anti-war piece if there ever was one.
Here is the Walt Whitman poem the music is based on:
The Wound-Dresser
An old man bending I come among new faces, Years looking backward resuming in answer to children, Come tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me, (Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war, But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself, To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;) Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances, Of unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;) Now be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth, Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us? What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?
2
O maidens and young men I love and that love me, What you ask of my days those the strangest and sudden your talking recalls, Soldier alert I arrive after a long march cover’d with sweat and dust, In the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the rush of successful charge, Enter the captur’d works—yet lo, like a swift running river they fade, Pass and are gone they fade—I dwell not on soldiers’ perils or soldiers’ joys, (Both I remember well—many of the hardships, few the joys, yet I was content.)
But in silence, in dreams’ projections, While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on, So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand, With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there, Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, Straight and swift to my wounded I go, Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground, Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital, To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return, To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss, An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.
I onward go, I stop, With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable, One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.
3
On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!) The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,) The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine, Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard, (Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.)
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood, Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side falling head, His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump, And has not yet look’d on it.
I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep, But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking, And the yellow-blue countenance see.
I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound, Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive, While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.
I am faithful, I do not give out, The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)
4
Thus in silence in dreams’ projections, Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals, The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad, (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)
Agnes Dei
Photomontages today from another source for anti-war sentiment – my commissioned work for Karl Jenkin’s Armed Man – A Mass for Peace.
We have this thing in our household about language. Well, someone has a thing in our house about my language – more specifically, my usage of the verb to love as applied to something other than a human being. Don’t devalue such a strong emotion, I am told, by wasting it on things, not persons! (That from the same Beloved who still despises split infinitives…)
Jay Senetchko – Sleepwatcher at the End – Oil on Wallpaper, Detail
I can’t help it, here I go again: I love this state. I love finding out new, beautiful things about it, even after 33 years since our arrival from New York City. You turn around and face surprises, in the natural as often as in the cultural landscape. Case in point was a recent visit to Astoria. I have written here before about this small former fishing and cannery town at the mouth of the Columbia river. I’ve described the increasingly vibrant art community, the diversity of what is on offer, from music to photography, from the perspective of a visitor as well as from that of an exhibiting artist.
I had, however, never visited the Royal Nebeker Art Gallery on the campus of Clatsop Community College. And I had certainly not seen any of the 12 previous annual exhibits dedicated to the Nude. My loss. Both with regard to not knowing about the small jewel of a space nestled among trees on the top of a hill overlooking the river as it flows into the ocean; or with regard to tightly curated, thought-provoking exhibitions, if past shows in any way resembled the one currently on offer.
My visit was prompted by an invitation to have a conversation with Carol Newman on the local radio station, KMUN, about a joint project with artist Henk Pander. He had last year painted me and my scarred body, the portrait juried into the current exhibition. While he painted I documented the process with my camera – a double portrait of artistically driven friends coming to terms with age, illness and a passion for observing. (Here is the long version: http://www.orartswatch.org/eye-to-eye/)
Before we sat down to talk about the experience we visited the CCC premises to look at the show. The place was bustling with activity to set up for that evening’s performance of the Vagina Monologues. Kristin Shauck, fine arts professor who has initiated and run the series since its inception, welcomed us. A woman whose passion about art boils under a veneer of quiet reserve, she deserves the 2019 Astoria Juggling Award: so many balls in the air without dropping a single one, all a few days before a major show opening.
I don’t envy anyone the job of having to choose a limited number, some 50 or so, of artworks from over 400 submitted by an international pool of artists. A job potentially made harder by the fact that both paintings and drawings are under consideration. And I wondered what it meant to say curatorial choices would be influenced by “the principles of highlighting contemporary bodies and the value in depicting them with radical clarity.”
Juror Ashley Stull Meyers’ vision certainly produced a set that was clear and contemporary. It was also sufficiently dissonant to keep you interested long after the first round of looking at the whole – something I could have anticipated, given her role as director of the now closed Marylhurst Art Gym – so deeply missed. http://www.astullmeyers.com
There were a number of juxtapositions that you’d expect, full nudes vs. partials, general sweeps vs. detail-orientation, seriousness (serious seriousness!) vs. charming teases. But there were also curatorial choices that I found noteworthy: giving preference, at times, to expressed ideas rather than level of technical skill, and groupings that allowed strange inclusions among the more quotidian pieces.
I just regret the curious lack of color. Maybe that had to do with the nature of the submissions, maybe the artists prefer the pinks, the ivories, the mostly earthy tones, the browns, the umbers, the fawns, the fallows. Those backgrounds gave the art along the walls a sameness that could have used some serious disruption.
The occasional outlier provided a welcome respite. My favorite in that regard was Beth Kehoe’s Shore, a painting that reminded me of some of Egon Schiele’s nudes that I grew up with. Perhaps coincidental likeness, not that I mind appropriation.
Other visitors were drawn around Drea Frost’s female figure submerged in ocean waves. The lovely, thoughtful young artist had painted her in response to recent loss, creating ambiguity: blissful floating or dangerous unmooring?
My own contemporary body, exposed in public, felt doubly jarring among all these voluptuous females.
Henk Pander and the portrait
My current mind, however, had a blast – a few funky reflections beckoned to be photographed. As I said, surprises around every corner. How I love them! There, I used that word again…
You can catch the show here:
Au Naturel: The Nude in the 21st Century will be on display from January 24 through March 14 at Clatsop Community College’s Royal Nebeker Art Gallery located at 1799 Lexington Avenue, Astoria, OR. A community reception will be held on Thursday, February 7t at 6:00 p.m., and this year’s juror will be present to give a brief gallery talk. This reception is free and open to the public.
Maybe in my next life I’ll be an art detective. Mystery! Adventure! Travel! Righting Wrongs! Call me Indiana Heuer, anytime….
This was brought to mind by reports that a Dutch art detective, Arthur Brand, tracked down two priceless Spanish reliefs stolen from a Visigoth church near Burgos in northern Spain to a garden in the United Kingdom.
The church itself is a mystery, effectively lost for centuries before being rediscovered in 1921 by a local priest and declared a national monument in 1929. An academic debate rages about its actual age, for which these reliefs, found in the garden of British aristocracy who unwittingly acquired them as garden ornaments, are crucial evidence.
This is the latest in a long line of discoveries by art historian Brand, who has made a name for himself as being a terrific sleuth of all things looted and/or forged, driven by passionate love for art ( the real thing.) “Devotion to pursuing art that “belongs in a museum” is the only way to function in a corrupt art world, Brand insists. While Interpol stresses that illegal art trade is difficult to measure, Brand estimates that a full third of the billion-dollar art market is forged, and at least 30% of antiques in galleries and museums were excavated from illegal dig sites. As it turns out, only black market drugs and guns generate more money than the black market for art. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bmybyd/arthur-brand-ukraine-feature
to modern museum heists, the art historian turned detective has delivered the goods, quite literally, back to their rightful owners. One of his scoops was recent: the return to Cyprus of a mosaic of St. Mark that was looted from the Panayia Kanakaria church in Lythragomi in the aftermath of the Turkish invasion in1974.
Which brings me to the Metropolitan Museum’s strange silence on its own collection of Cyprian art, the Cesnola collection, acquired from a robber of antiquities of large proportions. I am linking to the full, fascinating story below – it might as well be a script for a thriller movie about treasures stolen, who stole them, who fenced them and who now makes money off their display. Of course, unless we are talking museum break -in’s, it’s always more complicated than “that’s mine! Give it back!”
As the article states: “Theft may indeed be theft, but the topic of restitution is complex, global, emotional and legalistic. Governments and museums usually declare that their precious exhibits came to them in line with laws in place at the time of their removal. This was often done with the consent of regimes eager to profit from their local heritage. It’s an argument that can be self-serving because even when the theft was taking place, there often were voices that condemned it.”
Two years ago the Getty Center in LA showed a collection of illuminated manuscripts with a focus on what they could tell us about the lives of women in the Middle Ages. The richly illustrated prayer books and religious texts provide a window into the themes that dominated in those early years – childbirth, obedience, self-sacrifice.
Women themselves, mostly connected to nunneries but not always, were involved in creating these books. According to scientists about 4,000 books produced between 1200 and 1500 CE can be attributed to 400 specific female scribes in Germany alone, involved in both transcription and painting the illustrations.
For anything before 1100 CE not much is known, only about 1% of the few surviving manuscript can be linked to women artists. Fast forward to a skeleton find in North-Rhine Westphalia: the woman turns out to have a blue tooth, when examined. She lived sometime between 997 and 1162 CE, according to radiocarbon dating of her teeth, at a small women’s monastery called Dalheim.
The blue flecks of lazurite came with microscopic bits of a clear mineral called phlogopite, another ingredient in lapis lazuli. It’s rich in iron and magnesium, and it’s possible to trace the ratio of those two elements to specific mining spots in northeast Afghanistan. Using this, Warinner and her colleagues could eventually be able to tell exactly where Dalheim’s scribes and painters got their pigment.The team found lazurite particles embedded in the calculus on several of the unnamed woman’s teeth, which suggests that licking the tip of her brush was a habit she practiced over a long period of time.
The mineral was used for the intense blues, often associated with the Virgin Mary’s cloak, found in the manuscripts. It was a rare and expensive substance available only to the most highly skilled illustrators. Anthropologists had originally investigated the plaque of this woman to determine medieval diet. The finding of lapis flecks led to the illustrator hypothesis, somewhat confirmed by the status of the artist’s bones: no hard physical labor or disease for her, living to the then ripe age of 60ish. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/medieval-illuminated-manuscripts-were-also-womens-work/
Lesson #1: Scrupulously floss if you don’t want anthropologists to get to your life’s history.
Lesson#2: Our views of gendered (or racial) history might change if we are able to accrue and publish sufficient data. This is not just a question of having the scientific tools. Look at this fascinating discussion of the political issues inherent to the publication of anthropological findings: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-paleogenomics.html
Photographs today are from Heinsberg, North-Rhine Westphalia (a staunchly catholic state,) a small market town close to the village of my childhood. It had barely changed when I visited some 40 years later.
Music, since we drew the arc from female spiders, to female war photographers to female illustrators this week: a medieval woman composer, Hildegard von Bingen:
Too late. The exhibit closes in 4 days. Well, not really too late, since I wouldn’t travel to Hungary in any case, on account of my politics. Or Victor Orbán’s and his administration’s, more precisely.
András Böröcz, “Barrels on Eggs” (1993-94), cardboard, cork, chicken eggs, duck eggs (photo by Dorka Hübner)
That said, ohh, would I have loved to see this exposition of ingeniously fabricated objects. (And, if anyone ever described my own work as “….represent(s) both the consciousness of homo faber and the ease of homo ludens,” as Agnes Berecz, a Pratt Institute prof of History of Art and Design did of András Böröcz’ sculptures, I’d die a happy woman.)
So what am I talking about? Non-Objective Objects, András Böröcz’s Art, curated by Márta Kovalovszky, is currently on show at Budapest’s Kunsthalle, a museum that has become a focal point of the tensions between progressive views and the reactionary Hungary administration.
András Böröcz, “The Head Accountant” (2013), carved pencil, oak, toilet plunger, straight pins, cork, tape measure (photo by Dorka Hübner)
From what I discerned from the reviews, the exhibition excels in both what is displayed and how it is displayed, the latter referenced as a cabinet-of-curiosities, Wunderkammer, perfectly suited to its contents.
The artist left Hungary in 1985 and is living in NYC. You can catch glimpses of his work here https://www.andrasborocz.com and early reviews of the artist as a wizard and his work as magical here:
Basically Böröcz takes everyday objects, both found in nature or manufactured and creates sculptures or tableaux from them that reference in all directions: politics, quotidian life, art history with a focus on surrealism, and again and again Jewish rituals that in themselves refer to political action. Yad, the Jewish pointer use in reading Torah,
András Böröcz Yad, 2010
noise makers for the Purim Megillah, Matzoh and more all appear in – sometimes satirical – disguises. Think of him as a Hungarian Max Ernst, landed in the 21st century, balancing learnedness with a fondness for craftsmanship, performance art and an unerring eye for historical parallels. As for the politics: read the Hyperallergic review linked to above, since I am keeping with my promise to be mum on them this week….
Let’s hope there will be a US- based retrospective soon!
Music today: a terrific version of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, arranged for violin and piano, that perfectly matches the spirit of Böröcz’ work.
Photographs are select items found in different Wunderkammer settings in Lower Saxony, Germany…..
Help me out here. When you look at art, how do you judge if it’s good or not? Or, more importantly, whether it is truly art or not? I mean, I know when I like something, or dislike it. But I am often at a loss when I have to decide if something meets the criteria for being counted as good art. And sometimes I can’t figure out for the life of me if it’s art at all.
Of course I can do the relevant research, consulting those in the know, the experts, the books, the treatises, the critics. But that feels like cheating when I ask myself the simple question: is this or that painting, photograph, piece of music a work of art or not.
Jung Lee
My response
What should the criteria be? Beauty can’t be it – there are beautiful things that are not art, and art that is by no means beautiful. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines art as “something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings. Important ideas? That’s just kicking the can down the road by adding another concept that for the most part defies definition.
Should I be content with this? From the Stanford Encyclopedia: The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated. Maybe that’s the solution: not useful to define it, so why bother – go back to the like or dislike, as a purely subjective phenomenon?
My response
It all went through my head when I came across the work of South-Korean artist Jung Lee. She puts neon signs that spell single words, or phrases or whole stanzas into the landscape and then photographs them.
There is certainly imagination, to come up with the concept. There is likely skill, if she crafts the signs themselves, or in the way she photographs them. They can, I guess, look beautiful if you like surprises in your natural environment, but we had already agreed anyhow that beauty is not a necessary condition.
Jung Lee
My response
What ideas are expressed? Is there some essential meaning conveyed in the combination of message of choice and placement in the landscape? Am I too dense to get it? I honestly find it obscure. What is the difference to graffiti words, put across the urban landscape? I actually went back to my own archives, selected somewhat similar landscapes that I had photographed across the years, and painted in the opposite messages, hoping to find some answers. No luck. To me, The End did not convey anything significantly different from The Start. Except that it came first, as a concept, a call, compared to my response. (And on a side note – the landscapes are called desolate in the description of her works, increasing the sense of enigma, perhaps. Note that all my “matching” landscapes were photographed during simple walks in the forests and the beach, and just made to look this way via manipulating of lighting.)
Jung Lee
My response
The Why question, why is something to be considered art, in the end met the Why Not…. I’m sure that will rile the serious folks among us, or reveal my ignorance, or both. Why not!
