The last trip I made to the Art Institute here in Chicago (who can resist when it's free all month) was a strange sort of de-contextualized one. Maybe I've been spending too much time thinking about context lately, but nothing seemed like what it was. Or what it was intended to seem like.
The European Decorative Arts section looks like this at the moment:
It's a strange sight made even stranger by the bizarre Yayoi Kusama-esque display of paperweights attached in a smaller room.
Maybe this is a consequence of contemporary people with contemporary thoughts designing displays. There was something funny about looking at such objects on display as purely decorative. It's almost as though, in truth just balls of glass, they masqueraded for a while as paperweights, somehow a different thing entirely, and have now been rendered (by their new found uselessness) balls of glass once more. Purely decorative at last, as perhaps they always have been.
Also fascinating was the Maya pottery from the Late Classic period decorated by Ah Maxam. At least, so says the sign. There is a strange kind of hubris is claiming that knowledge. Apparently the 'artist's ' name comes from a glyph on the side, although various groups have attributed it to the owner of the vessel or a professional title or perhaps the name of the artist. But doesn't it sound important if we know the artist's name? Doesn't it seem as if the museum is doing an especially good job?
The graphic qualities of this work are astonishingly striking and startlingly beautiful. It requires a much better look than I can offer you.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Consciousness (mostly) regained after a few days of sleeping off a cold of mysterious origin, I would like to edit this most recent post about the proposed blocking of funding for the arts included in the President's proposed stimulus package. It's deserving of a coherent thought or two. _______________________________________
Art or Idiocy?, one of the blogs I follow, brought this to my attention. (I listen to NPR for at least a few hours a day, but I still seem to always be the last to know.) To quote from the Americans for the Arts website:
During their consideration of the Economic Recovery bill, the Senate approved an amendment offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) that prohibits funding for "...museums, theaters and arts centers..." This amendment, approved by a vote of 73-24, if included in the final version of this legislation would prevent the economic recovery funding from supporting these areas of the non-profit arts community.
On this website there is also a link to a form letter you can send to your senators. By entering your zipcode, your state's senators come up with a letter either thanking and encouraging them for voting against the amendment and for funding for the arts, or expressing disappointment at their decision that the arts are not worth funding.
I have to admit, I'm a skeptic about these mass e-mails of approval/disapproval, but if you click your heels three times and say, "Obama" maybe it will work. In any case, I'm sick of the arts being deemed excessive. We give money to schools, aren't museums and arts institutions an equal source of education? And continuing education for those no longer in the government mandated school system is just as important as teaching children. The Americans for the Arts website claims that without this funding 260,000 jobs will be lost; aren't those people as American as auto factory workers? It's a strange kind of reverse elitism to deny funding to those who aim to educate and advance cultural causes in favor of those who advance economic causes purely. A job is a job, and with an economic forecast as bleak as ours, is it really the time to bring up the old debate about government funding the arts?
Here's an excerpt from the 1992 ruling in the case of Karen Finley (performance artist) v. the National Endowment for the Arts:
The NEA was created by Congress in 1965 as part of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities (the "Foundation"). In establishing the Foundation, Congress found that "it is necessary and appropriate for the federal government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of . . . creative talent." 20 U.S.C. 952(5) It was the intent of congress to encourage "free inquiry and expression," and to insure that "conformity for its own sake is not to be encouraged" and that "no undue preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression." 111 Cong. Rec. 13, 108 (1965).
I aim to steal more thoughts from Walter Benjamin. ___________________________________
I have recently begun reading The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris. After a few attempts trying to jump into the deep end of critical philosophy, I have decided to start at a reasonably historic point of beginning. By this, I mean that I am not interested, or realistically able, to conduct an entire survey of Western thought by myself, so I am starting at a place that most other (failed) efforts have led me to see as something of a beginning.
Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation is a book I have read twice and understood fully neither of those times. Slavoj Zizek's The Parallax View stumped me about half-way through. (Plus I had to return it to the library) Benjamin it is. And so far, reading this book is akin to someone is explaining to me the things that I already think, but in a much more coherent and comprehensive way. The introduction to the book is more or less a guide to Benjamin's approach to writing and how we as the reader must consider not only his intended meanings but the way in which his 'sober' method of writing not only adds to but is part of the meaning itself. There are plays on the words representing thought (the 'old' fashion of writing) and presenting thought (Benjamin's inteded goal). Writing is broken up into sentances, forcing the reader to pause and reflect, the same way pauses in spoken word can affect a listener.
A favorite quote from the introduction:
"Our knowledge of a subject is the means by which we relate to that which we do not possess."
Monday, January 26, 2009
Every now and then I think of this Edward Keating photograph of the dust settling on objects after the towers fell on September 11th. I remember seeing it in the New York Times on my parent's kitchen table, and thinking it was so much more striking than the photos of the crashes themselves or the people jumping (which, luckily, I have never seen).
I mean to say nothing more than that I think about it. It's a beautiful photo, I wish I could find a better image of it.
The first of a collection of found pieces representing nature, painted in grays and whites to isolate them from their intended decorative properties and reveal their actual essence (or lack thereof).
One one of the last days of 2008, happily on vacation in Barcelona, I stopped in at the Museu D'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). In addition to the permanent collection there was an exhibit up entitled Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia. Traveling with four others who all saw the exhibit at different times, we all felt at least one thing about it: it was in need of a good editor.
The first problem that presents itself is the layout of the show. The museum lacks a flow from room to room, which doesn't disrupt the diverse permanent collection but makes for an interrupted thought process when viewing one exhibit. The entrances to rooms were often blocked off with wall text, causing a distracting traffic jam at the start of each room. Funneling into one of the rooms, visitors are greeted by an astounding amount of photography. In the introductory essay in the companion book all visitors are given when entering, Jorge Ribalta writes that, "[t]he exhibition provides a historiographic prototype, not a visualization of a single linear account of the history of photography, but a constellation of accounts of the genealogy and trajectory of certain discourses. To this end, the different parts are articulated as specific, temporal, interconnected points of reference, making clear continuities as well as discontinuities."
This "constellation of accounts" is organized as divisively as possible; individual rooms are filled with "Politics of the Victim", "Public Photographic Spaces", "Comparative Photography", "Topographics", "The Photographic Construction of Barcelona in the 20th Century" and "2007 - Metropolitan Images of the New Barcelona". Indeed, the last two themes alone fill the second floor of the exhibit. The entire history of photography for the rest of the world has it's own (equally sized) floor, which visitors pass through first. The first few rooms are devoted to the "Politics of the Victim" and feature documentation of worker's struggles, child labor, Weimar-era Germany and America around the start of World War II. There is an interesting newsreel from America entitled, "The Plow that broke the Plains" which could just have easily been included in the propaganda section. The "Victim" rooms were my favorites, but I suspect this is at least in part because the sheer amount of energy required to sort through all the photographs in this show was a drain on my enthusiasm. By the time I reached the Barcelona floor, which is much less broad in scope, narrative in style, and (in a word) relavent, I was honestly worn out.
The problem that arises in Universal Archives is not the works themselves, but the "show" itself. The Propaganda section is an interesting exception, displaying fascist propaganda in the way it was shown in it's day, all black and red backdrops and powerful displays. There is also an interesting moving picture (forgive the pun) showing footage of Steichen's Family of Man exhibit at the time of it's world tour. Even the Barcelona section, startlingly narrow in it's worldview as compared to the first floor, has interesting pieces, although not as many. The problem is that there is just too much of everything. The "constellation" of photography starts to feel more like a galaxy as you walk past hundreds and hundreds of documents. And the organization of these photographs into specific places in both time and space (often interpreted as 'nation') does more to highlight the disconnections between cultures than the connections of photography. A bit of shaking up and a bit of paring down would have done Universal Archive a world of good.
Nothing needs to be said here about the architecture of the museum, of which much as already been written. The permanent collection is quite unique, casting an eye not only to Europe but other Spanish-speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere. A few personal favorites include David Goldblatt's prints of South African Apartheid-era advertisements, (an example can be seen here), Öyvind Falhström's Second Feast on Edlund drawing, an strange composition in reds and blacks, and Vito Acconci's "Open Book" video, in which the artist reads from a text about openness without closing his mouth, which takes up most of the frame. Oddly enough, I found that video on YouTube:
Also an exciting (and long overdue) discovery on my part was the work of Marcel Broodthaers, whose thought process and meands and methods of expression could not be a more timely discovery for me.
