Links

This has been a newsworthy week for the arts.

• Ai Weiwei on his captivity. Highlight: "Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare."
• Check out the Qadaffi family photo album.
• LA law enforcement has been in the headlines for the last few months for targeting artists and photographers. The latest.

Ken Lum

Jen Graves reviews a Ken Lum show for Art in America. She sounds impressed, as was I by the survey of his work at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In many ways, Lum's ouevre represents the most thematically consistent portfolio of any of the Vancouver photographers, and the show's impressive collection of his works illustrated how rigorously he has developed his ideas about language, culture, and methods of experience.

Representing race in Mac Miller

Mac Miller is an upcoming rapper with a little talent and a respectable knowledge of hip-hop history. In the video for his song Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza, however, he does little to allay concerns about white appropriation of hip-hop, which one academic recently called "an unambiguously African-American form." The Awl points out that:

He shows that he has black friends in his videos (let's dap each other up on camera!), sports a bunch of awful tattoos, constantly refers to getting high, and displays a nice collection of sneakers.

Most troubling, the video features Mac Miller wandering around an urban environment while a shirtless black teen with a boom-box follows him around. The implication may be that Miller channels authenticity as he pays homage to hip-hop's genesis in the Bronx, but it comes off as yet another instance of a white creator "speaking for" black artists. Michele Wallace writes persuasively in Invisibility Blues of how Stephen Spielberg's big-screen translation of The Color Purple neutered its relevance to the black community. There was the white writer William Dufty ghostwriting Billie Holiday's autobiography, which extended a long lineage of white writers telling the stories of black women.

While these examples don't quite parallel Mac Miller's music video, they do help illustrate his lack of self-awareness about the kinds of discourses (visual and otherwise) that his video engages with.

Links

• Texas prisons have banned the magazine Art+Auction for being "too damn sexy," according to Artinfo.
• Frieze has a great obit for Beuys student, avant-garde sound pioneer, and general artistic badass, Conrad Schnitzler.
• Paul Connerton's interview with Cabinet on historical amensias is well worth a read. I'll be doing a post on it soon.

Race and nostalgia

Political bloggers have been buzzing about the rhetoric of conservative politicians like John Boehner, who are worried that Obama and his Democrats are "snuffing out the America that I grew up in." Matthew Yglesias and The Economist agree that "conservative nostalgics like Boehner are primarily driven by regret at the loss of social privilege by white men," noting that pretty much everything else about American society in the fifties and sixties is antithetical to the Tea Party program (powerful unions, foreign interventionism, high taxes, to name a few). Some of the differences between the present-day and Boehner's childhood America? No more immigration quotas, plenty of civil rights, and a far more diverse population.

Taking a look at African American art from the days of Boehner's childhood is a fascinating (if totally unscientific) way of reminding ourselves that not everyone shared his America. For instance, in 1975 Robert Colescott painted his seminal piece George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (top). A parody of Emmanuel Leutze's famous painting, it lampoons the way African Americans were marginalized in seventies America. When Colescott looked around him, and then back at history, he saw hypocrisy and the absurd gap between reality and the rhetorical promises to African Americans by politicians and leaders of all stripes.

Of course, Colescott was a fantastically intelligent artist whose narrative-bending paintings are too complicated (and slyly witty) to reduce to talking points. Unlike Boehner, he's aware of the way contradictions settle into any conversation about the past, and he embraces them to his advantage. In 2009, Huey Copeland wrote in Artforum about Colescott's attitude toward "the blackness of comedy and the comedy of blackness," quoting the artist:

If you decide to laugh, don't forget the 'humor is the bait,' and once you've bitten, you may have to do some serious chewing. The tears may come later.

The way forward will not come from a yearning look back. While Boehner played with his toys in Reading, Ohio, powerful voices like Colescott were rattling cages and letting the world know that all, in fact, was not well.

More Blade Runner in Hip-Hop

I'm noticing more and more Blade Runner references cropping up in hip-hop songs and videos (I noted a few previous references here). The film even crops up on the new Beastie Boys record. In the video for J. Dilla's 2006 song Won't Do, a blimp floats overhead (above), quoting the film (below).

While the Blade Runner blimp promises a utopian off-world life, the Won't Do blimp memorializes J. Dilla's death from lupus.

Mad Men

In Season 4, Episode 12 of Mad Men, the show's mercurial lead Don Draper sits, mesmerized by an abstract painting. Recently purchased from a Greenwich Village artist (a heroin addict caught in the upheaval of the sixties), the painting is standard abstract fare. The artist's husband-of-convenience describes it as motivated by her interest in 'afterimages', giving form to the blurred line between dreams and reality.

Ink has been spilled about the art in, and of, Mad Men before. Era-appropriate art adorns the walls of Draper's ad agency, and the characters are alternately beguiled and intrigued by the emergence of trends like Abstract-Expressionism. I'm more interested in the way the show sometimes gives currency to the art's power.

In the scene above, for instance, something in the painting catches Don's eye. He pulls up a chair and gazes into it as the camera swirls around him, before the shot dissolves into a picture of inspiration as he works up a desperate gambit to save his ad company from sure destruction. The painting functions as a catalyst for thought, pushing him in a new direction as he maps out new ways of working with his world. I wonder what strategies a Gorky, an Eakins, or a Giacometti might have prompted.

News

• Artforum reports that the Catholic Church is leading all manner of activities in response to the exhibition of Mideo Cruz's "blasphemous" Christ figure.
• Janine Gordon's copyright infringement suit against Ryan McGinley has been dismissed (one of McGinley's photographs graces the top of this post).
• Christopher Thomas on a soon-to-be-iconic image of the London Riots.

Art catalogues

Louis Marchesano, the Getty's curator of prints and drawings, gives a highly readable account of the origins of the art catalogue. In the eighteenth-century, the collection of the Düsseldorf prince Johann Wilhelm II von der Pfalz found its way into independent galleries, where its director began to hang the paintings thematically. After a series of failed attempts (bankruptcy seemed to be a recurring eighteenth-century problem), the court architect of Prince Johann's nephew printed up a "systematic overview" of the art collection.

Significantly, this catalogue was intended to do two things: publicize an art collection in order to raise the prestige of its owner, and to serve as an educational tool for artists and other members of the educated aristocracy. Each painting got an analysis and a printed reproduction. These days, catalogues of private collections are something of a rarity. Even large public collections rarely provide complete overviews in printed volumes, instead diverting their resources to chronicling their thematic or historical exhibitions and reserving their collections for websites (some well-designed, some not).

As for those exhibition catalogues, they vary tremendously in shape and size. We have coffee table tomes with rarely-read academic essays and lavish reproductions. We sometimes have splashy layouts with banal quotes, and we sometimes have multimedia extravaganzas. How, I wonder, will exhibitions and catalogues be presented in the future (near and distant) as tools like iPads gain currency?

291

 This is too good to not share: Ubuweb has posted pdfs of Alfred Stieglitz's journal 291. This is a golden opportunity to check out the journal, published between 1915 and 1916, in all it's glory. Above is Francis Picabia's illustration for the July-August issue of 1915.

The iconography of "Otis"

For those plugged into pop-culture (even just a little bit), the release of Kanye West and Jay-Z's album Watch the Throne has been impossible to ignore. With the release of a video for the album's single "Otis," the album's mess of contradictions between the rappers' luxurious lifestyles and the street sensibility they've tried to maintain becomes glaringly apparent.

Let's start with the video's placement of Jay-Z and Kanye in front of a giant American flag, in an industrial wasteland. Reminiscent of Budweiser's shameless appropriation of the flag to hawk beer, and Ford's caricature of blue-collar life in endless truck commercials, the video tries to place two mightily successful rappers in a narrative best described as "struggle begets success."

Taking the theme one step further, the camera follows the rappers as they advance on a luxury car (a Maybach, hip-hop's new ride of choice) with power tools they've probably never had to use. This is the mythologizing of their commitment to manual labor, with its connotations of hard work and authentic hustle.

Of course, the lyrics of the song pay unashamed homage to the power of capital. Kanye and Jay-Z rap over a very recognizable (and thus, very expensive) sample and exult in their multiple Rolexes, their fleet of luxury cars, and their appearance as "photo shoot fresh, looking like wealth." Compare and contrast to another buzzed-about rapper of the moment, Mississippi's Big K.R.I.T. Paying homage to his working class roots, Big K.R.I.T.'s song "Dreamin'" relates the story of a hard-working rapper who makes good. In the song's video, Big K.R.I.T. dons a janitor costume and raps on the same empty stage he has to wipe clean (above).

Big K.R.I.T.'s video smartly picks up on a visual tradition of labor that alludes to racial and socio-economic oppression. While "Otis" merely taps a hyperbolic vein of American exceptionalism, "Dreamin'"references works like Gordon Parks' seminal American Gothic (below) or Io Palmer's Janitorial Supplies (above). This, I think, is a better way to tackle questions of heritage and authenticity in hip-hop.

Links

The photographers of the so-called Vancouver school have done an excellent job of branding their public identity, aided and abetted by one of the most engaged art institutions I've come across, the Vancouver Art Gallery. Every time I'm in Vancouver B.C., somewhere in the city is celebrating the achievements (still continuing) of Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, and their compatriots. Roy Arden is one of my personal favorites of the group, and his work Supernatural seems oddly appropriate (still above, watch the video on his website), given the recent events in London.

While I enjoy my time in Vancouver, some links:

• Peter Richmond bemoans the lack of ambition and vision in American stadium architecture.
• The New York Times describes the conditions of Ai Weiwei's imprisonment.

Beauty in the Philippines

Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines, is back in the headlines. Artist Mideo Cruz was included in a controversial show at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) that featured a sculpture of Jesus, complete with dildo (above). The outraged Marcos, who reportedly considers herself a patron of the arts, led the charge to shut the show down. How did she resolve the apparent contradiction between her sponsorship of the arts (including her support by the CCP's founding) and her call for censorship? Well, The Manila Bulletin quotes her as saying "you can express yourself but express yourself in a beautiful way."

Although volumes could probably written about that statement, I'll just limit myself to the observation that Marcos pays lip service to the worst kind of censorship, one that denies art the possibility to be anything more than a soothing, insipid purveyor of pleasure.

McQueen at the Met

Reaction to the Met's Alexander McQueen has been decidedly mixed. It was a popular smash, with thousands lining up to get into the exhibition's last weekend, and garnered the title of eighth most visited exhibition in the Met's history. The New York Times reports that attendees frequently dressed to the nines, sometimes in McQueen imitations, and the Met spokesperson told Artinfo that he'd seen nothing like it.

On the other hand, Holland Cotter took the Met to task for failing to ask "critical questions" about McQueen's possibly-racist stereotyping, producing a scholarship-lite catalog, and effectively renting museum space to the Alexander McQueen fashion house. Tyler Green picked up the last thread, a pet hate of his, and did the math. The Met's pay-to-play approach, while not unheard of in the art-museum world, isn't exactly the norm, and is anathema to many museums and curatorial departments nationwide.

It's easy, therefore, to cast the McQueen show as a testing ground for a number of oppositions plaguing the art world. It's even easier to see the show as a limit case for the art-museum's role these days. The relentless pace of admission hikes means that most museums are effectively off-limits for anyone lacking a student card or deep pockets. That holds true for some of the country's best-known institutions in the country's strongest arts communities; MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are all now prohibitively expensive. And, unlike the Met, they don't charge "suggested" admission prices. So, if museums are suggesting through their ticket fees that they're exclusive strongholds of culture, strictly upper-middle-class and up, why hold shows pandering to popular appeal?

Make no mistake, populist shows aren't inherently bad. They do good things for the local economy, they prompt large swathes of the local population to get involved in the art scene, and (as the McQueen show has obviously done) inspire visitors to greater creative heights. These are all tangible benefits. So, just because the Met has stressed some parts of a museum mission over others (sacrificing scholarship and ethical integrity), is that a reason to castigate the show? I tend to say yes, but McQueen's not really my cup of tea anyway, and it's a conversation that needs more voices than frustrated scholars in the blogosphere.

Identity politics

In 1993, art historian Ann Gibson wrote in the journal American Art about her embrace of identity politics. For her, borrowing the insights from African-American studies, gay and lesbian studies, and feminism (to name but a few of the disciplines that lent their weight to identity politics) was a handy way to navigate the "extras" left over from her dissertation on Abstract-Expressionism: namely, the social contexts that helped explain why some (white, male) artists found success while others fell by the wayside. Of course, this approach didn't come without its drawbacks. The legacy of deconstructionism means that identity politics has increasingly focused on everything except the work itself.

I had a professor who bemoaned the fact that practitioners of identity politics rarely let the artwork speak, caught up as they were in fitting artists and their works into grander social narratives. They simply exchanged the idea of a canonical history for a variety of competing histories, never really acknowledging that artworks can themselves be multi-faceted objects. I've always remembered Martha Sandweiss' description of photographs as stable objects with unstable meanings.

Of course the value of any theory (or discipline) lies in the use-value of the insights it can glean. Leonardo Drew is one artist who seems to demand good writing from the practitioners of identity politics. Critics tend to interpret his work in light of his African-American heritage, and usually note that his large installations use materials like cotton that explicitly reference African-American history. But as works like Number 54 (above) testify, his art has to be understood through its formal properties, its qualities of touch and smell, the way it looms in the space of a gallery. A sculpture made from rust, fabric, plastic, and wood affects viewers on a visceral level as well as an intellectual one. His work, in fact, seems tailor-made to push the practice of identity politics to the next level.

Borders

Back in June, Andrew Berardini chided Doug Aitken for his "theatrical posturing" about the porous nature of geo-political boundaries. Aitken, the darling of bienales and billionaires alike, used a large-budget commission to stage a film-driven "happening" aboard Dakis Jannou's yacht. Berardini's description of Aitken's theatrical installation has to be read to be believed, but, most notably, the artist seems to have missed the irony of his own work. Riding the the flow of art-collecting capital as it sloshes around the globe, Aitken can easily sing the praises of "international permeability." But, as Berardini points out, this is a permeability made possible mostly for the bored rich.

I'm consider myself a fan of Aitken's work, and I'm sure he produced a visually compelling piece of work. His films are generally aesthetically flawless, and often unsettling in their depiction of slightly surreal places. But there are more interesting, relevant, and (perhaps) truthful things to be said about borders and the conditions of bordering, and other people are saying them.

There was the project that erected a temporary crossing point between the U.S.A. and Mexico. There was Emily Jacir's work Where We Come From, where she repeatedly crossed the Palestinian border to fulfill the requests of Palestinian exiles. There is Clemens von Wdemeyer's short film Otjezd [Leaving], which creates an imaginary consulate scene, eerily mimicking the disorienting experiences of navigating different cultures and their bureaucracies (still above). These works go a long way towards confronting conditions of bordering that shape the lives of the not-so-wealthy billions, and I'm betting that they make for more engaging art as well.

Jean Epstein

The director Jean Epstein (above), fascinated with cinema's power, wrote:

To discover unexpectedly, as if for the first time, everything from a divine perspective, with it symbolic profile and vaster sense of analogy, suffused with an aura of personal identity, that is the great joy of cinema.

I'd say that's a pretty good summation of why film fascinates me too.

Spending cuts

Just how much damage did the recent budget deal do to the arts in the United States?

Michael M. Kaiser notes in the New York Times that in government funding cuts "the organizations that tend to get hit the most are rural, organizations of color, avant-garde institutions — those that have a harder time raising individual and corporate money." States already spend a fraction of their budget on the arts (the governor of Kansas recently vetoed an arts budget of just $689,000), and that amount looks to diminish in the near future as many NEA grants require matching state funds. While slashed funding at the federal level won't hurt big, donor-rich museums like the Met, it will winnow out smaller institutions that lack the support of wealthy communities.

South Carolina just successfully resisted a zero-funding attempt, with the New York Times reporting that creative industries pay the state a handsome return in both jobs and economic growth. Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts, already running on a shoestring budget, argues that the arts generated $287 billion in 2009. That's considerably more than the $275 million appropriated for the arts nationwide this year (granted, the arts will probably generate less money anyway in a slower economy), but it's a disservice to view the arts in economic terms. After all, in Washington State the governor proposed eliminating the Washington State Arts Commission and handing its duties off to the Department of Commerce. Simply handing the arts off to a commerce department and scrutinizing them for payoff has obvious, negative, ramifications. And some apologists just weaken the position by holding up projects that the general public (let alone hardline deficit hawks) will scoff at.