« Shelley and David at the Meat Market » by Carlos de Jesus, September 2012. Courtesy and Copyright Carlos de Jesus 2012.

Summer is over, and the weather in New York is getting colder…Even David is wearing long underwear (designed by Missoni!) as he hangs out among the crowds in the Meat Packing District of Greenwich Village.

So it is time for my Blog to come to an end.

For me, this assignment has been a terrific opportunity and a great privilege. Many thanks to Marta Gili, Adrien, Marta P. and Maurice at the Jeu de Paume, the wonderful friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to the success of the series, and to all of you who’ve been reading and commenting on what I’ve been writing for the past six months. May we meet again!

An Homage to Classic Sculpture by dEmo and Missoni was on view in New York, at the intersection of 9^th Avenue and 14^th Street, throughout the summer of 2012. The artists’ 24-foot tall rendition of Michelangelo’s David was previously exhibited in Madrid, Barcelona and Milan.

L’article « Farewell from the Big Apple! » by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Unidentified Photographer, [Part of the crowd near the Drill Hall on the opening day of the Treason Trial], December 19, 1956. Times Media Collection, Museum Africa, Johannesburg.

We must return to the point from which we started: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement…

                                                          Edouard Glissant, “The Known, the Uncertain”

This Glissant quote makes an appearance in Sarah Nuttall’s superb book Entanglements, an examination of contemporary art and literature in South Africa. The blurb on the book jacket fittingly describes Nuttall’s text as an “exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds.” Committed to illuminating the complex strands of difference and sameness, violence, victimhood and resistance entangling all of her fellow citizens in their web, the author explores a rocky terrain of communication, misunderstanding and mutuality that reveals itself even to transient visitors of this intensely creative nation. My own 2009 visit to South Africa – thanks to an invitation from the Roger Ballen Foundation – was, I must admit, one of the high points of my intellectual life. While participating in a two-day seminar at Wits University with artists, curators, critics and intellectuals from Jo’burg and Cape Town, I was privileged to enter into a profound exchange about the nature and responsibilities of culture. Engaging in an open-ended, dynamic and rich dialogue committed to “returning to the point of entanglement,” the participants were intent on forging an artistic and political future not framed by what Nuttall calls a “persistent apartheid optic.”

This was, and is, a tall order, and a continuing quest. I’m happy to report that another stage in the ongoing discussion is taking place right now in New York City, in the form of two major exhibitions at the Walther Collection and the International Center of Photography. As I mentioned, when visiting Johannesburg I was grateful to participate in a workshop with people who, while living in a social and political environment that continues to be impossibly difficult, try every day to confront and express their problems directly, head on, instead of relying on “persistent optics” or tired ideologies. The complexity of approach that arises from such an intense commitment is evident in both exhibits, albeit in different ways. Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, curated by Tamar Garb for the Walther Collection, will ultimately be a three part show. On view now, in Part One, are works by Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin. Garb sees the African archive as “a contested compilation and collection of artifacts and representations that have accrued over time, and that are open to scrutiny and examination by a new generation of artists and viewers for whom the colonial orthodoxies and truisms that led to its creation are no longer operative or true.” The “contested” part of this assertion becomes clear in the juxtaposition of these two projects, as well as these two exhibitions. A.M. Duggan-Cronin’s Bantu Tribes of South Africa, an 11-volume study published between 1928 and 1954, visualizes an ethnographic vision of indigenous tribes, frozen in an “immutable state of Being” in traditional costumes and ennobled poses in barren and empty landscapes. Hovering somewhere between proud African types and demeaning stereotypes of aboriginal people (depending on your point of view), these Bantu tribes were presented by Duggan-Cronin as representative of an authentic and timeless Africa even as the political struggle for and against apartheid wracked the urban centers of the nation – a struggle extensively described in The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, curated by Okwui Enwezor with Rory Bester, on display concurrently at ICP.

A. M. Duggan-Cronin (1874-1954), Ovambo (Ogandjera) Woman, 1936. Courtesy of The Walther Collection

In other words, two distinct South African temporalities are on view in New York: the one, the stasis of the noble black savage who exists in an eternally retrospective state and the other, the quick tempo of enraged and embattled denizens trapped in a modern bureaucratic state that systematically dismantled their human rights after 1948. But even within the Walther exhibition alone, the definition and depiction of what it means to be an African is “at stake,” as Marta Gili would say. Sharing the space with Duggan-Cronin’s project is Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album: Look at Me, created as a slide show in 1997 (and shown recently at the Jeu de Paume as part of his retrospective exhibition). The pictures (shown in 3 versions: as slides, as the silver gelatin exhibition prints Mofokeng produced from the deteriorating originals, a few of which are also in the gallery) are part of the artist’s personal collection, salvaged from the albums and drawing rooms of neighbors and acquaintances and researched to identify sitters who posed for studio photographers between 1890 and 1950. Co-extensive with Duggan-Cronin’s project (as well as the early days of apartheid), these pictures represent the original studio portraits commissioned, paid for and preserved by Africans who envisioned their ideal selves in modern European-style dress and fancy hats.

Santu Mofokeng, “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950,” 1997 (Unidentified photographer, South Africa, early twentieth century) © Santu Mofokeng / Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg

My colleague Dr. Jennifer Bajorek, who has contributed to this blog and who lectured in conjunction with the exhibition, told her audience that when Mofokeng showed his personal works (black and white documentary pictures describing township life, religion  and land, some of which are simultaneously on view at ICP), his subjects did not like them at all. He began collecting The Black Photo Album pictures in order to discover what types of images his neighbors in fact preferred, and thereafter only exhibited his own photographs interspersed with ones that had been commissioned by people in his community. The differences in the depictions are obvious, of course, but so are the time warps built into the project. Multiple temporalities converge when the records of the original sittings (represented by the faded original prints) jostle with the contemporary vision of an artist interrogating the meaning of his forebears’ photographic experience. Unmoored from personal albums and sequenced within the narrative of Mofokeng’s slide show, the portraits are interspersed with his queries and contestations:  “Are these images evidence of mental colonization or did they serve to challenge prevailing images of “The African” in the western world?” is one of them. Of course there is no answer to this question, the pictures represent neither and both and the question floats into an existential void. This is the complexity – and irresolution – of entanglement. When the viewer understands that the photographs describe distinct, sometimes contradictory “life worlds” co-existing within the same historical time and space, he or she begins to comprehend the hall of mirrors that is South Africa today.

The same dense interactions are evident in The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, although that exhibition gives them a completely different spin. Whereas Distance and Desire is spare and focused on two extended projects, Enwezor and Bester have organized an enormous exhibition with a cast of thousands. Though no one agreed on the precise number of pictures on the walls at the Press Preview, there are at least 500 photographs, which are accompanied by magazines, videos and “overtime” information available on computers in the galleries. At the Preview, Enwezor explained his interest, and excess, by explaining: “We’ve all looked at enough images of D-Day, I wanted people to see something else that was going on around the same time.” Central to the organization of the show is the theme of bureaucracy: the ways in which this horrific system of government was “normalized” within the society through laws, paper trails, housing, transportation and entitlements. Photographic evidence describes how populations forced to live in this increasingly oppressive nightmare internalized (or not) their roles — and developed methods for either maintaining the status quo or fighting back.

Gille de Vlieg, Coffins at the mass funeral held in KwaThema, Gauteng, July 23, 1985. © Gille de Vlieg.

The show is divided into two parts. On the upper level of the museum, the viewer can follow the history of apartheid from 1948 (with the victory of the Afrikaner National Party) until 1994 (the rise of Nelson Mandela). Here we see many, mostly black-and-white documentary photos, accompanied by texts and time lines as well as videos and magazines. The vast majority of the pictures were taken by South African photographers like Peter Magubane, Jurgen Schadeberg and Ernest Cole, but there are also some by outsiders like Margaret Bourke-White and Dan Wiener. The downstairs space focuses mainly on artistic expression, on the responses of creative image-makers to this system of injustice. On display are works by South Africans like Sue Williamson, Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, William Kentridge, David Goldblatt and the collective Afrapix, as well as contributions by foreign supporters like Adrian Piper and Hans Haacke. One of the major premises of the exhibition is that during this historical period, photography was deliberately transformed by its practitioners into an active social instrument. So the duality of the exhibition, its highlighting of both documentary description and artistic interpretation (with lots of links and overlaps between them), is designed to emphasize the multifaceted usage of visual media during an intense period of political struggle.

Eli Weinberg, Nelson Mandela portrait wearing traditional beads and a bed spread. Hiding out from the police during his period as the “black pimpernel,” 1961. Courtesy of IDAFSA.

Another level of intricacy, however, is evident in the choice of subjects covered in the show. Enwezor has made no secret over the years of his disdain for the “persistent optic” of Afro-pessimism: the media’s insistence on seeing the continent and its inhabitants as unmitigated disasters, mired only in violence, poverty and corruption. This exhibition gives a much more nuanced picture of daily life under apartheid, and both blacks and whites are visualized in multiple ways that are not exclusively political. Along with documentary records of government meetings and political figures, protests, violent encounters and hardship, there are pictures of everyday life in both the African and the Afrikaner communities: living conditions, education, religion, parties, music (Miriam Makeba!) and magazines like Drum. Though separate within the context of the show (and the apartheid system), these social manifestations have an equivalent weight here. Their presence does not allow any South African, black or white, to become “stuck” in the political stereotype of victim or aggressor. From Nelson Mandela and the thrill of victory in the 1990s, to the disappointment of the current social malaises and divides expressed by young photographers, we are left not with a fairy tale but with a complicated evolution of many intertwined histories: their triumphs and failures, their possibilities and disappointments as well as their aftershocks and legacies.

Life Worlds will be the last article in my series for the Jeu de Paume. As I said during the video interview posted in the museum’s online magazine, I accepted Marta Gili’s challenge in order to revitalize the language of my contemporary responses to global art. During my travels, I’ve met no people more committed to the complexities of this language than South Africans. As I say goodbye to the Blog and its readers, I am pleased that these artists and writers are front and center. My hat is off to them for all they’ve taught me – and all they continue to teach me in exhibitions like these, enriched with insight about every “entangled” contemporary society wrestling with difficult questions that have few, if any, easy answers.

© Shelley Rice 2012

By the way, after publishing this Post I received at least five phone calls and letters suggesting that I see the movie “Searching for Sugarman.” My friends and students were right: don’t miss it. The story — about a Mexican-American singer unknown in my country and a rock star in South Africa for decades — is incredible.

L’article « Life Worlds » by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Wafaa Bilal, « Domestic Tension (Shoot an Iraqi) », FlatFile Galleries, Chicago, 2007. Courtesy and copyright the artist.

The Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal is one of my colleagues in the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University. Though his studies were originally in photography, Wafaa has an open and flexible attitude toward media, and it is not only the politically charged content but also the form of his works – which are becoming increasingly well known internationally – that will interest readers of this blog. This interview took place over lunch in Greenwich Village on September 19, 2012.

Shelley: Given the fact that your life has been so eventful, I think the best way for readers to understand your art would be for you to begin discussing your background.

Wafaa: I was born in Iraq in 1966, that’s about two years before the Ba’ath regime took over. As a child, I grew up idolizing the regime, we were kids and we were swept away, of course, but slowly as I grew up I noticed, everyone noticed, that the regime became more and more oppressive. At the age of 18, I had a strong ambition to go to art school, but for political reasons this was not allowed and I was sent to study geography at the University of Baghdad.

S. What kind of political reasons?

W. Physical education and art were considered to be highly effective fields, and the regime made sure that every candidate for these fields was carefully screened. Considering my family’s background in politics, I was rejected, so then I was sent to study geography. Even though you can see that is not at all my passion and I resisted, I had to do it, because if I failed college I would be forced into the military, placed on the front lines, and this was during the war with Iran. So of course I stayed in the program. But it wasn’t so bad, I had access to a studio at the university and I could paint on a daily basis. I used that as a platform, I put up shows, and every show I organized had problems. Some works were political in nature and they were confiscated by campus security; sometimes I was dragged to the office for interrogation. But in 1990, right after the invasion of Kuwait, I was one of the students who stood up publicly and refused to volunteer for the Kuwait war and at that moment I knew I was blacklisted and needed to run. In 1991 there was the bombing for 40 days, and I used that opportunity to escape from Baghdad. I waited on the edge of my hometown of Kufa until March, when there was the uprising, one of the first Arab Spring uprisings when people took over. But the regime unfortunately crushed the entire uprising and we were on the run. I stayed in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia for two years. After that I was able to come to the United States, to New Mexico, and that’s when I said: no more geography and geology, I will study art.

S. How did you get to New Mexico? That’s not a self-evident choice…

W. I had a friend who was a translator for the U.S. military.  He left the camp before me and his sponsor was one of the American officers who lived in New Mexico. I needed an address and that was the only one I had. But it ended up being good, the university was a great school for me, with great photo teachers. Five years later I got my undergraduate degree and then I went on to Art Institute of Chicago and studied Art and Technology for my Masters Degree.

In 2007 I started one of my major projects, called Shoot an Iraqi. Shoot an Iraqi came from my personal devastation after the loss of my brother, who was killed by a drone in Iraq in our hometown. I think at that moment my work shifted. From being about human rights in general it began engaging larger, more personal issues. It became intensely focused on my deeply felt responses to the war in Iraq and, and the same time, on the idea of engaging people beyond the confines of art spaces. This is when I started linking gallery spaces with the Internet.

I received the news about my brother’s death in 2004, and for the next few years I honestly did not know how to deal with my losses, or how to communicate that through art to the public. Only when I watched an interview with an American soldier who was sitting in Colorado, directing these drone planes and dropping bombs on people in Iraq, did I realize that she was completely disconnected psychologically and physically from his targets. That’s when it hit me, that’s when I knew the combination of media I needed to communicate my ideas. I wanted to create something that gave control to the viewers, but also detached them psychologically and physically from the target. Then I thought: The target needed to be real, needed to be live, and its interaction with the viewers needed to last long enough so that people had time to connect to it. For this project, which was originally called Domestic Tension because the gallery thought that Shoot an Iraqi was too provocative, I lived for a month in a 32 x 15 foot space in the back of the gallery with a bed, a desk, a computer, a lamp, a coffee table and an exercise bike. Several Plexiglas screens separated my “bedroom” from the rest of the gallery, where a paintball gun, outfitted with a robotic mechanism that fired in response to the commands of online viewers and gallery visitors, was stationed at the threshold. People could go on site, direct the gun and shoot a paintball at me at any time for 30 days.  By the end of the live event, more than 65,000 shots had been fired at me by viewers from 136 countries.

S. So where was this? Which gallery and when?

W. It was in Chicago, in the FlatFile Galleries, for 30 days from May 7-June 5, 2007.

At the beginning, I disconnected myself from the viewers: there was no sound, the picture was grainy etc.  But every day I uploaded a 10-minute video clip so people could see the emotional roller coaster I was going through on a daily basis. Because of that more and more people started coming, to see the site and to interact with me. Then the media picked up the story. The public got attached to the project first and then the media came around, which is the reverse of what usually happens.  But it got much bigger when the Chicago Tribune wrote an article about it on the front page, about targeted shooting. It was such an important project for me, because after that Shoot an Iraqi I started thinking about making projects that are dynamic, rather than didactic. I started involving the live body as a medium because of its immediacy, connecting people inside and outside of the gallery through the Internet and giving viewers some kind of control over the work. These ideas about dynamic encounter have a lot to do with earlier works like Happenings, by artists such as Allan Kaprow, of course. Like them, I want to make art that is open ended: nothing is pre-determined by me, but evolves with the participation of the viewers themselves. Without the participants, nothing will happen and the project will be idle.

S. After the performance, I know that you published a book about your experience. Why did you decide to do that?

W. When Shoot an Iraqi was over, I ended up with massive amounts of documentary materials –videotapes, daily journals etc. — and I decided I wanted these records to be archived so that everyone could have access to them. I wanted the project to continue beyond the 30 days. One of the writers, Kari Lydersen, who at the time reported on the project for the Washington Post, did an excellent job. I was so amazed by how she dealt with it that I approached her later, asking her to co-write the book with me. We had a few offers from publishers, but chose City Lights because we knew the quality of their work; the book continues even now to be well received by many people, including academics. We structured it by describing how I survived the 30 days without breaking down – but also by showing what things, which events, inspired the project in the first place. So there was a parallel structure: after a day in the gallery, the focus of the book would shift to Iraq. Going back and forth between art and life gave the reader a sense of what happened in the gallery space and also an open window onto Iraqi life, how my family lived and the devastation we suffered losing both my father and my brother within two months.

S. I know that all of these things continue to be major parts of your work: expanding media, interfaces with the public, and your engagement with political issues of the day. How do you see the development of your art as moving on a parallel track with the development with your media?

W. That’s a really good question. I always see the project as determining the medium, and not the other way around. Right now, new media work best for what I want to say — because most of time I’m dealing with global issues so it doesn’t make sense to stay local in my art. As I said before, I’m building not objects but events, encounters – and encounters are very dynamic. I need a physical space, a gallery space, as a platform, but after that the medium becomes the story: the encounter between the platform I set up and the viewers of the event, wherever they are. Digital connectivity is not just a tool, it becomes the medium itself.

S. Would you like to update this interview by discussing some of your recent work, like the event you created in Tehran at the end of 2011? This project is a very good example of the interactivity you’ve been describing, and the interface of film and performance too.

W. One of most recent projects was entitled A Call (which translates into Farsi as Neda the name of the young Iranian woman killed on the street during the recent protests against the election in that country). I was invited by the Aaran Art Gallery gallery in Tehran to commemorate the 30^th anniversary of the Iraq/Iran War. I didn’t know how this was going to happen, so I started talking to people, looking at the space…. One thing that triggered the entire project was the empty swimming pool sitting at the back of the gallery, which used to be a home….

Video streaming by Ustream

S. Had you seen the gallery?

W. No, one of my students from Iran alerted me about the empty swimming pool. It hadn’t been used for 30 years, so it had become allegorical. Since we were talking about the losses of this war, which continued for over 8 years, I wanted to divide these losses into the ones who were lost and ones who were left behind. The pool, of course, is underground. So I separated the performers into two groups: the ones standing in the swimming pool and ones above, the ones that left and ones that are left behind. I used all local performers, 80 performers dressed in black and white. They descended from the second floor of the space, moving through the viewers to arrive at the swimming pool. Some stood in the pool, some were placed around it, and then they all stood and stared at the audience for 30 minutes. Standing motionless, looking at the viewers surrounding them, at a certain point they began to symbolize the status quo in Iran at that time. So the piece moved beyond being a commemoration of the 30^th anniversary of the war.

Wafaa Bilal, « A Call », Aaran Art Gallery, Tehran, 2011. Courtesy and copyright Aaran Art Gallery and the artist.

One complication to all of this: I didn’t get a visa to go to Iran. We tried everything, but nothing worked. So I directed the entire piece through Skype from my living room in New York, with the gallerist Nazlia Noebgshari in Tehran holding a laptop, walking around and showing me where everyone was walking and standing! On the day of the performance there were so many people who couldn’t go — even the curators (Ava Ansari and Molly Kleiman from The Back Room) weren’t able to be there — that we decided to do a live stream of the performance from Iran to the White Box Gallery in Manhattan. At that moment, everybody was connected: Iranians who were not able to witness this event could come to the gallery to see it performed, while the people in Tehran could look at us in New York commemorating this event. So the distance was erased through technology.

Wafaa Bilal, « A Call », Nazlia Noebashari and friend in the Aaran Art Gallery in Tehran communicating by computer with Bilal in New York, 2011. Courtesy and copyright Aaran Art Gallery and the artist.

S. How did the Iranian government react to this event?

W. I don’t think the gallery had many problems. No, as far as I know the only complaints were that the event involved too many people. The piece was very vague, so there was nothing to complain about, and that was deliberate. Political art does not have to be so direct; sometimes, it is much more powerful if it suggests multiple interpretations rather meanings assigned by the artist. That’s the good thing about creating an encounter: you trigger something and let it unfold, and you don’t control the outcome. The gallerist said that everyone involved felt a lot of responsibility to do the best they could since I could not be there. The performance had two runs, and there was so much demand that the gallery decided to do a third show one week later.

© Shelley Rice / Wafaa Bilal 2012

Wafaa Bilal’s work will be screened during ARTE Video Night 2012 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris on Saturday, October 20 from 7:30 p.m., with the participation of Véronique Cayla, president of ARTE and Jean de Loisy, president of the Palais de Tokyo. 

L’article Domestic Tension: An Interview with Wafaa Bilal by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Frank Moore « Hospital », 1992. Oil and silkscreen on wood, in artist’s frame (painted wood and resin). Private collection, Houston. Image: Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.

I knew, for sure, that I was home again a few days after my plane landed in New York. Riding the crowded, sweaty subway, beleaguered passengers were suddenly confronted with yet another beggar, a young, strung out white guy in jeans who moaned about the indignity of his situation and then proceeded to tell us (in way too much detail, and way too loudly) why he and his young family were in such dire straits and what we could do to help them. This is, of course, a familiar occurrence in the Big Apple; none of us thought much about it until another passenger, a black woman who obviously rides this particular subway line regularly, began disputing the facts of the beggar’s story by pointing how much he’d embellished or altered it since she heard it the week before. Calmly, the two of them negotiated the details and authenticity of his public “performances,” while the rest of us howled with laughter (and of course, offered him some cash). Only in New York…

The other way I know I’m home, of course, is the overwhelming, daunting task facing me and everyone else interested in keeping up with the sheer quantity and diversity of cultural offerings in this town. When the rentrée begins here, the floodgates open; even though this blog will end in a few weeks, life never stops in the big city. There are some fine gallery shows by well-established artists like Robert Adams (Matthew Marks), Sally Mann (Edwynn Houk), James Welling (David Zwirner), Douglas Gordon (Gagosian), Cedric Nunn (David Krut), Lise Safarti (Yossi Milo) and Richard Misrach (Robert Mann Gallery); retrospective glances at the influences of Warhol (at the Metropolitan Museum) and Conceptual Art (coming to the Brooklyn Museum); group shows like that surveying the Gutai Art Association in Japan (at Hauser and Wirth) and the thought-provoking mélange of objects from diverse cultures called Collectors of Skies (curated by Valérie Rousseau and Barbara Safarova) at the Andrew Edlin Gallery. There was a wonderful reading from, and discussion of, My Poets, the new and surprising book about her personal creative process by writer and scholar Maureen McLane. For this blog post, however, I will single out a few of the things I’ve seen this month that I’ve especially enjoyed.

Frank Moore « Freedom to Share », 1994 Oil and glass beads on canvas mounted on wood. Collection of Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum, New York. Image: Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

First on my list is the Frank Moore exhibition of paintings, videos, drawings, writings and stage designs, entitled Toxic Beauty, at the Grey Art Gallery and the Fales Library of New York University. An active participant in the Downtown art scene until his early death from AIDS in 2002, Moore’s eccentricity and utter originality shine through in this retrospective of his work about illness, toxicity and the environment. Large scale, almost magic realist paintings, colorful and bizarre, remind viewers immediately of artists like Frida Kahlo, whose image-world was both personal and extremely political in its pain and its naivety. Sometimes based on photographs of models, Moore’s works morph immediately into surreal alternative universes, where hospitals become broken ice floes with patients and doctors stranded in isolation. Thanksgiving dinner is a blood (and not a turkey) fest shared by all races, colors and creeds, and buffalo roam not on the range but on white bed sheets. Hieronymus Bosch-like characters make their way through landscapes littered with medical vials, mice and pills, illuminated by piles of gold coins. In Moore’s reality, every frame is a work in itself: pharmaceuticals, plumbers’ pipes and maps echo and encircle the iconography, breaching the boundaries between art and life so that bizarre and horrific images spill over to implicate those of us seemingly safe in the surrounding space.

Focus, 2001. Digital C-Type print on canvas, hair, silk threads, and cotton threads. Collection of the artist © Lin Tianmiao

I was also enthralled by the retrospective of Lin Tinmiao, one of China’s foremost women artists, at The Asia Society Museum. Surveying her work since 1995, Bound/Unbound is comprised of installations, sculptures and two-dimensional works, many of which have never been seen outside of China. Thread and hair, usually white, link the works in this show, and it is often hard to distinguish between them. Wrapped around objects, obliterating or enhancing photographed faces, morphing into bodies, body decorations or covers, these tangled skeins are sometimes accompanied by video or sound. This is an uneven exhibition; works like The Proliferation of Thread, Bound and Unbound and Focus are very strong statements, while others seem less powerful and more decorative in impact. Most extraordinary, from my point of view, is Here?Or There?, originally produced with her husband Wang GongXin for the 4^th Shanghai Biennale of 2002. A room filled with mannequins, dressed in bizarre and beautiful costumes made by the artist that hover between the traditional and the space-age, opens outward toward video views that flash between old landscapes of China and the new, dissonant cityscapes into which the country is transforming. Watching this extraordinary spectacle, familiar yet foreign, fascinated by a vision of people, of society, of female experience I could perceive but never fully grasp, I was grateful once again for the window onto the world that contemporary art provides.

Ether, 2008-2011 pigment print on handmade Innova Smooth Cotton Natural White paper mounted to board image © Fazal Sheikh

Speaking of which, there is also the debut show of Fazal Sheikh’s latest work now on view at Pace/MacGill Gallery in midtown Manhattan. Entitled Ether, comprised of over 40 small pigment prints of images taken in the sacred city of Varanasi (Banaras or Banares on the banks of the River Ganges in Northern India), the images focus on sleep, dream, death and birth in the place Hindus consider the auspicious site of the soul’s emancipation from the eternal cycle of reincarnation. Often seen in groupings that juxtapose various bodily states or the five elements, the photographs document – but can never penetrate — the mysteries of the physical body as it enters the world, travels in dreams or is transformed through death into earth, fire, water, air and ether. With these quiet and beautiful images, Sheikh is paradoxically using photography’s descriptive capabilities to highlight the spiritual side of our nature, the ineffable metamorphoses between states of being that can be neither perceived nor described. Like Zoe Leonard, who has created another in a series of site-specific and room-sized camera obscuras in Murray Guy’s Chelsea gallery, Sheikh has decided to look beyond the purely political and ask different, less tangible, questions about sight, subjectivity, culture and interconnectedness.

Ether, 2008-2011 pigment print on handmade Innova Smooth Cotton Natural White paper mounted to board image © Fazal Sheikh

And then, last but not least, there was the revival of Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This is the third time I’ve seen this magnum opus by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass with choreography by Lucinda Childs (all of whom were in the house for opening night) – and the first time was the original performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976. Einstein, for me, is therefore a homecoming of a different sort, a reminder of a Downtown New York legacy that sometimes seems quaint (there’s a whole scene where a toy space ship traverses the closed grey curtain) but that nevertheless has lost none of its original power. The train and the courtroom, the clocks and the night bus, the sounds and words and gestures endlessly repeated but always new: they were there, they are here, they are luminous. They are icons whose strength lies precisely in coalescing the fugitive visions glimpsed in passing within Leonard’s camera obscura, and making manifest whatever is monumental about our passage through space and time.

Robert Wilson / Philip Glass : « Einstein on the Beach ». Photo : Stephanie Berger

© Shelley Rice, 2012

L’article « Home Again » by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Paul Robeson Rutgers Football Team c. 1917. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

« The View From Left Field »
on view in the Department of Photography & Imaging
New York University
721 Broadway, 8th floor
New York, USA
September 4 – November 17, 2012
Opening Reception – September 14, 5 – 7 PM

This Blog Post is an adaptation of the wall text and a sampling of photographs from an exhibition on view in the New York University Department of Photography and Imaging Galleries from September 4 through November 17. All photographs are from the Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, part of the archives of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) at New York University’s Tamiment Library. These photos may not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

The View from Left Field was the name of a sports page of the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the American Communist Party. New York University’s Tamiment Library, under the direction of Mike Nash, acquired the archives of the Party in 2006. Included in this acquisition, among the records, documents and publications that date from the 1910s to the end of the 20^th century, was the photo morgue of both the Daily Worker and its successor, The People’s Daily World. The estimated 500,000 images in the morgue, filed away in boxes with written documents and currently being digitized for use by the public, include approximately 25,000 prints, 85,000 negatives and 165,000 wire service images, as well as 25 boxes of large format photographs produced for display purposes. The Worker and World photograph morgue and the larger Communist Party archive are widely recognized as a nationally important collection, certainly the most important that the Tamiment Library has acquired in the past 25 years.

Far Eastern Whaler Alexei Glagoley Rests in a Finback Whale’s Mandible by Yu. Muravin/Fotokhronika, TASS 1960. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

One of the most significant special collections in the United States documenting the history of the American Left and the labor movement, the Tamiment Library substantially enhanced its visual holdings with the addition of this repository of images documenting Communist Party history, the Cold War and all of the 20^th century movements for progressive social change that shaped American society. The original photography in the archive represents the work of staff and freelance photographers associated with the newspapers. Documentary images, they depict people at work, social conditions, factories, strikes, parades, farms, fields, struggles for civil rights and liberties, wars and revolutions. The fight for racial equality, whether by Paul Robeson, soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, or baseball players in America, runs throughout the visual narrative. Images of Soviet society and conditions in Eastern Europe during the 20^thcentury, rarely seen by Western audiences, are also an important component of the archive.

Czech Miners Receiving UV Treatment during the Winter Months, n.d.. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

Throughout the Fall 2011 semester, students in my Toward a Critical Vocabulary seminar systematically examined a selection of 12-14 boxes randomly pulled for this purpose by Michael Nash. Each box has one or more themes, whether that is the Vietnam War, agriculture in Czechoslovakia, May Day Parades, student protests, sports heroes or the Civil Rights Movement, and that theme is developed in folders filled with both photographs and printed, handwritten or typed documents. The students’ goal was to select images of exceptional interest – in form and/or content — that could be scanned, printed and exhibited in the 719 Broadway Gallery of the Photography and Imaging Department of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. After choosing the pictures, the students worked on related research papers with Professor Nash, who filled them in not only on 20^thcentury history but also on the ideology of the party, thus helping them to understand the complex social history behind the images taken, collected and ultimately selected for publication in the Party’s newspapers.

Anti-Vietnam War Paris Protests May 1972. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

This is, in other words, a project designed as a learning experience. It is not the definitive research exhibit on this material. It is a student sampling of available resources, an assemblage of amazingly interesting and relevant pictures, and not a comprehensive survey of the Tamiment’s archive. There are notable subjects missing from this show that are, of course, part of the library’s collection: pictures of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, records of major union strikes, demonstrations and negotiations of the 20^th century and documents of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought against Franco during the Spanish Civil War, among them. Students worked with and studied the material Nash chose for them, and often made decisions based on visual rather than strictly chronological or historical criteria. They were impressed with the quality of the images, and disturbed by something else that was missing: the lack of attribution. These pictures might have been taken by members of the Photo League who worked free-lance for the Daily Worker, or unknown talents, or perhaps by known artists and photojournalists living in New York at the time — but until we study this further we will never know. Much more research needs to be done to establish authorship, and this exhibition is designed to both celebrate wonderful material and to stimulate continued engagement.

Iranian Basiji Woman Shoulders a Russian-made Rocket Launcher during Woman’s Day in Shiroudi Stadium, Tehran, Nov. 1987. Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University. May not be republished without the consent of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

Since The View from Left Field is being shown in a Photography Department Gallery, my colleagues wanted the exhibited images to look their best. All of the original pictures were, therefore, beautifully scanned and reprinted by Jonno Rattman, a student in the class, and then matted and framed by Karl Peterson and the rest of the gallery staff. Needless to say, this is not how the “working” photographs look in the Daily Worker archive. There they are of diverse sizes and materials; technically, they run the gamut and are in wildly variable conditions. Some are original black and white prints, some are post cards, some are wire service transmissions or clippings from other newspapers and many are torn or faded or covered with publishing marks. As a historian, I personally prefer to see the pictures in their “real” rather than their “ideal” state, so we have compromised, and composed an archival e-book of the original images, front and back, with their captions and marks, to accompany the show. This makes it possible for historical researchers to get a better sense of the actual state of images now stored in folders and boxes.

We are hoping that this sampling of what I call “the world in a box” will help to inform photographers, the NYU community, historians and the general public about the archival treasures stashed away in the university’s library, a major resource soon to be made available online. The study of this collection will add a lot to our understanding of photographic history, American history, the history of journalism, and international relations (among other things), and it is a visual feast chock full of information about the daily lives of humans on earth during both the quiet and the tumultuous moments of the 20^thcentury.

Shelley Rice’s Students in the Tamiment Library CPA Archive, Fall 2011, photo by Shelley Rice

The View From Left Field is dedicated to the memory of Michael Nash, who left us in July 2012. He didn’t make it to the opening he was so anticipating, but we know he is with us in spirit.

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© Chris Killip, Le mur du grand amour, centre-ville de Gateshead, Tyneside, 1975

The British photographer Chris Killip made the decision to begin both his exhibition What Happened: Great Britain 1970-1990 at Le Bal in Paris (organized with the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany by curator Ute Eskildsen) and his book Arbeit/Work (Steidl, 2012) with the following statement:

One night in 1994 my friend John Clifford, who owned the best bar in Cambridge, took me into the middle of Boston to where the civic center and other administrative buildings now stand. These buildings were built in the 1960s on top of the tough working class district of Scully Square, where John and his brothers were born and raised. John pointed out to me streets that no longer existed, telling me who had lived where and in which house. Who had died in Vietnam, who had worked for the mob, who had gone to prison or ended up in politics. When I interrupted his narrative to tell him how great it was that he was telling me the history of this place, he spun round, gripped me by the throat and pushed me against the wall. With his raised fist clenched he said, “I don’t know nothing about no fucking history, I’m just telling you what happened.”

After seeing the exhibition, and watching the accompanying 12 minute film from 1976, A Girl Chewing Gum by John Smith, the viewer begins to understand the relevance of this powerful anecdote. Personally, I had the sense that the entire show was a kind of personal struggle with meaning – in both art and life. Killip’s documentary photographs, about inhabitants, workers and others in Britain on the Isle of Man, Bury St. Edmunds, Huddersfield, Lynemouth and areas of the Northwest of England, portray, as David Campany wrote, people “exiled within themselves, incapable of finding their moorings, merging into a collective drift” as they are increasingly disenfranchised by the changing economic circumstances of a rapidly de-industrializing nation. The meaning of these peoples’ lives within the national economy takes a hit right in front of our eyes, but so does the concept of photography that allows an artist to interpret the conditions and destinies of others. This show and book are as much about Killip’s attempts to define his relationship with his subjects as it is about the subjects themselves.

Filatures, 1974, Courtesy of the Artist © Chris Killip

It is useful to understand that Killip’s influences include Paul Strand and August Sander, as well as Bill Brandt, Robert Frank and (especially, from my perspective) Walker Evans. Like Killip, Evans walked a thin and often tense line between the socially prescribed meanings of things and those in which he believed. Campany makes a case that Killip’s work has never been “of its time,” and in a sense this connects him deeply to his forbear. Working in America in the 1930s, where everyone “knew” how to define and pity a victim of poverty, Evans struggled to transcend the popularly accepted, simplistic and ultimately degrading definitions of those struck hard by the Depression. Committed to treating all humans, rich or poor, as complex beings and emotional equals, adamant that he would never allow political ideologies or economic hierarchies to stand between him and his subjects, he entered into continual conflict in his job at the Farm Security Administration because his superiors felt his work was “not political enough.”

Looking at the muscular black and white images in What Happened, it is easy to see Killip fighting the same fight, but this time his invisible adversaries were (are) the proponents of “Concerned Photography” in (and after) the 1970s. Those were the years when the International Center of Photography opened its doors, and the years when the liberal print media (and it was liberal sometimes in those days!) expected photographers to understand and to fight for the poor or for those disenfranchised by race, creed or religion. Nowadays, when every writer can be considered profound by adding “atrocity,” “violence” or “trauma” to the title of some academic text, and every photographer can become a politically correct activist by (once again) defining and visualizing victims, Chris Killip is trying to look clearly, respectfully and without prejudice at the lives of those who are struggling to survive a shifting and often merciless economy. “To the people in these photographs I am superfluous,” he wrote in 1988 in In Flagrante. He refuses to see himself as anyone’s savior, or anyone’s judge; the only activism he admits is his own aspiration to understand and record the life around him. Given the trendiness of political correctness in the theory and practice of photography in the USA (where Killip teaches at Harvard), it is easy to see that he too is shadow boxing the adversary of popular stereotypes and preconceptions, both human and photographic. It took a long time (around 30 years) for anyone to acknowledge that Walker Evans had anything important to say, about the Depression, America and the impact of money and machines on people’s lives.

Mr Johnny Moore, Ballaona, Michael, 1971, Courtesy of the Artist © Chris Killip

One of the first things to notice is that Killip, like Sander and Evans before him, has made the decision to shift the focus of his photographs away from the individual and toward a more socially contextual approach to human subjectivity. His early work, on the Isle of Man, consists mainly of portraits, with a strong Strand influence, of people who in the 1970s worked in traditional ways in occupations and on territories long considered to be their birthright. The instability of the economic context, the massive shifts in ways of working and economic possibilities and liabilities, begins to impact on the solidity of this long established situation, and the pictures continually emphasize the malaise of sitters trying to position themselves within a strange new environment. A man, standing to the left with his back to the camera, seems flimsy enough to blow away in the wind as he faces a brick wall; although his stance is firm, his white hair flies like the garbage surrounding him on the street, and his body has no more weight than his dark shadow mirroring him on the opposite side of the picture plane. This is an image of a tense detente, literally a stand off as this man tries to remain the still point in a turning world.

In other series, a shipyard that supports a community closes, forcing people to disperse; housing complexes filled with families and children are demolished from one photo to the next. Traditional occupations like fishing, lovingly described, suddenly become anachronisms. Demonstrators, punks and revolutionary slogans make their appearance. Killip’s insistence that people flourish or fail within a social world, that their sense of self is based on moorings that include work, place and community, makes him sensitive to the conditions that create, and degrade, human behaviors. Never perceived as arbitrary or extreme, his subjects are reactive to the times in which their lives are embedded. Their responses are neither programmed, programmatic or predictable. They just are what they are: “what happened.”

The Girl Chewing Gum, 1976, 12’ © John Smith

Which leads me to John Smith’s film, The Girl Chewing Gum, a hilarious and smart counterpart to Killip’s searching work. An extended look at an urban corner dominated by a store named Steele’s, this animated black and white street photograph is narrated in such a way that the questions of meaning discussed above become central to the activities of the most banal English passersby. Alternately acting like a Gregory Crewdson style directorial photographer, a choreographer, a traffic cop, a scholar analyzing the random actions or attributes of anonymous pedestrians or an increasingly bizarre interpreter of the visible (or invisible) evidence (which at the end includes descriptions of a black bird with a nine foot wing span and a man with a helicopter in his pocket), the narrator is constantly intervening in what we see and hear, embellishing documentary records in ways that sometimes establish and more often stretch credibility. The girl chewing gum is elevated to significant iconography in this context; English words when read backward transform into Greek ones, and disembodied pronouncements fly (through electrical lines, of course) between the city and a field with cows 20 kilometers away. This film is the best antidote I’ve ever seen to the pretentious certitude of aesthetic interpretation and academic analysis. Susan Sontag, eat your heart out: I want every student I teach to see John Smith’s master work at least twice before picking up a camera or an art history textbook.

SR
© Shelley Rice, 2012

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Strip, 2011 © Gerhard Richter

Up front, I want to say that I decided to write about Gerhard Richter because I am in love with Motifs, the artist’s book he conceived to accompany the retrospective “Panorama”, now on view in Paris. Organized by the Tate Modern (London), the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen (Berlin) and the Centre Pompidou, the show is intended to celebrate the 80th birthday of this German master by exploring the complexity of his oeuvre both chronologically and thematically. While I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve, I should also confess that I love the exhibition – and not because I am a die-hard fan of Richter’s, a “groupie” like some people I know.

It was, in fact, a challenge to bring me into the Gerhard Richter fold. I’ve never been convinced by the strident — and too narrow, from my point of view — arguments of my peers on his behalf. First there are the conceptual, indexical, archival types, who surround me in Manhattan of course, and who pontificate endlessly about Richter’s Atlas as if it was the Holy Grail of contemporary visual representation. Then there are those who swoon over Richter “L’Artiste,” the painter in the old, male tradition who provides the world with a constant supply of abstract works embellished by squeegees and splashes galore. It’s not that I don’t appreciate these pictures (and these positions), but they’ve never succeeded in explaining to me (as a famous French intellectual friend of mine recently said) “why I need to see the works of someone who continually reproduces the whole history of art.” The exhibition currently on view at the Centre Pompidou does, in fact, explain just that, by brilliantly linking the various aspects of Richter’s oeuvre — abstract paintings, photorealist works, glass sculptures and everything in between — in ways that emphasize and communicate this prolific artist’s overarching aims.

“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no concern. I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like continual uncertainty.” This citation, used often throughout the show and its accompanying literature, becomes a rallying cry that allows the viewer to relax when confronted with such a diverse range of work. The decision to organize the oeuvre chronologically and thematically rather than into discrete formal units (sculptures, works based on photos, abstract paintings) allows meaning to circulate around and between objects, making it very clear that Richter’s ultimate aim is in fact to emphasize (continually, incessantly) that we humans always see the world through a glass darkly, a glass that can and will shift and change size, shape, perspective at any moment. The townscapes of Dresden – painted when the city had been rebuilt after the devastation of World War 2 – are described in such fluid strokes that the destruction seems to manifest itself again through the renovation. Picturesque landscapes of barns and forests and meadows in Italy or France — painted realistically, impressionistically, or with abstract strokes layered on top of representational depictions — are all described by the artist as dreams (“a type of yearning, a yearning for a whole a simple life, a little nostalgic”), while his layered abstractions are perceived as “more real… my presence, my reality, my problems.” Painted references to traditional religious symbols — skulls and candles and angels — take their place next to works mediated by public or private pictures of family, politics and war. Objects, places, people and paint strokes, photographed and projected, change scale; blown up, mirrored, juxtaposed, they morph into something else entirely. This is, in other words, a body of work bound together by Richter’s inability to believe what he sees, to believe in the ultimate and unchanging truth of the visual information he creates or receives through his eyes: whether those eyes are seeing a magazine, a political or iconographic sign, a loved one or the landscape around him. The blurs, the break-ups, the pictorial transformations are ways of visualizing this “continual uncertainty.” The mental images mediating our experience of the world and obsessively engaged by Richter are nothing more than the screens through which we perceive — and ascribe meaning to — the continually shifting shadows on the walls of Plato’s Cave.

Tante Marianne, 1965 © Gerhard Richter

One of my favorite such transformations, which involves some very contemporary working methods and media, resulted in the creation of Strip in 2011. In the process of making this work, paint moved through photographic reproduction into digitization – a movement in the opposite direction from many of Richter’s well-known canvases, like Betty or Aunt Marianne, where a photographic image is reproduced in oils. To produce Strip, Richter began with a photo of Abstract Painting (724-4) of 1990. This original image was then divided (using computer software) vertically in 2, then 4, then 8, 16 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048 and 4,096 bands. The process (comprised of 12 stages of division) produced 8,190 strips, each with the same height as the original image. At each new division, the bands became thinner and thinner, more and more minimal in detail. Eventually, these bands were used to create Strip, the huge, abstract laser print on paper that is one of the latest works on view in the exhibition.

Which brings me to the discussion of Motifs: Division, Mirror, Repetition, the bookwork Richter conceived as an accompaniment to the show. It is clear from the central importance of Atlas, and the existence of other volumes discussed in the catalog, that Richter enjoys working through ideas by making books, and these are often composed of photographs that are repeated, reversed or transformed. As the subtitle makes clear, Motifs is such a project, based on the transformation of Abstract Painting (724-4) into Strips. In the bookwork, the entire process of division is documented, and the bands produced by the 12 stages are mirrored and repeated in ways that give rise to the abstract motifs that are the central surprise of the book.

They are surprising for several reasons. First of all, as one flips through the 238 color images that comprise the volume, one watches subjective, expressionistic splashes and drips of paint, with all their physicality, transmute into cool, clean digital color bands. Expressionism and minimalism, handwork and computerized reproduction, no longer opposites, become part of a continuum that, once again, allows Richter to undermine the categories that define our ways of seeing. But the most beautiful surprises in the book are precisely the abstract motifs that emerge as the strips are mirrored, repeated and juxtaposed. In the center of the book, between expressionism and minimalism, these motifs propose another universe of forms. They echo the patterns of Tibetan painting, Islamic decoration, South American weaving and Indian metalwork; like jewels, like lace, like flowers they emerge from the fractured images of the painted surface, and echo the colors and forms of global culture. They are, in a word, wondrous — and from my point of view, they move Gerhard Richter’s work forward in more ways than one. The last room in the Pompidou exhibition is entitled “Continuing to Paint,” and the wall label discusses the paradox of painting in the digital age. Evidently, Richter has figured out a way to keep his medium relevant, and expansive. This master might be 80 years old, but it seems he is still standing in the vortex of contemporary expression — peering, as usual, through a glass darkly at the diverse shadows animating our visual environment.

© Shelley Rice 2012

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All rights reserved: Grasset

This is a Post-Card from Paris. I’m sitting in an apartment rented from a friend on the Left Bank and reading yet another book purchased at La Hune. (The French publishing industry anticipates an economic upturn the minute I arrive in town.) This time the book is Anne Sinclair’s 21, rue La Boétie (Bernard Grasset, Paris, 2012), a memoir chronicling her research into the history of her family and especially her grandfather, the famous art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Interweaving family stories with political atrocities and deceptions, Sinclair describes the lives and relationships of gallery artists and the fate of their works under (and after) the Nazi occupation. Rosenberg’s fight to preserve his family, his collection and his business interests under impossible circumstances is set against personal stories of war, exile, disappointment and love. Sinclair is a clear, impassioned writer and an experienced journalist, so her cautionary tales of prejudice, cruelty and deceit keep wiggling out of the past tense and surfacing into the murky political waters of the present.

A historian of modern art first and foremost, I am of course interested in the subject of Sinclair’s book, especially since Rosenberg’s influence as an art dealer — of Picasso, Braque and Matisse, among others — spanned two continents and substantially impacted taste, the market and collections in the United States. A champion of the continuity between the past and the present, historical masters and the avant-garde, he fought to establish contemporary art in the highest precincts of American culture. His presence in New York after 1940, of course, was not simply a life style choice, but an imperative dictated by the murderous anti-Semitism of the era. This same imperative dictated that Sinclair would be born of French parents not in Paris but in the Big Apple, a few years after the end of the war and a few years before me.

My family arrived at Ellis Island from Europe — Eastern Europe, mainly Romania it seems — a long time ago (in American terms, which means the 19th century). All four of my grandparents were born in the United States, making me the Jewish equivalent of a Native American, or a Daughter of the American Revolution. By the time I was born in the Bronx, the family history beyond the Port of New York was fuzzy indeed — though ironically it was a famous Jewish art dealer who provided me with much additional information when I was in my late 20s. While I was studying art history, Leonard Hutton was revered for his collection of German Expressionist and Russian Revolutionary paintings. I spent a lot of time in his gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan during my student days, not yet aware of his personal history or our family ties. Hutton was born Leonard Hutschnecker in Germany. Like Paul Rosenberg, he too fled Hitler, and arrived in New York Harbor in the 1940s with a minimum of money, no friends and nowhere to stay. Thinking fast, he grabbed a phone book, and found only one Hutschnecker listed in the whole city. He called that number, explained his problem, and asked if perhaps the New York Hutschneckers might be willing to help him get started since the odds were that they were his relatives. The family in question agreed, and helped him get settled in America. He, in turn, swore he would construct a geneology, a family tree to honor everyone from the bloodline that had saved his life.

Which is, oddly, where I come in to this story. I was reading an article in the New York Times one day during the late 1970s; it was about Arnold Hutschnecker, a famous psychiatrist who treated, among others, Richard Nixon. My maiden name was Shelley Hutch, but my father was born Harold Hutschnecker. He changed his name to Hutch before his marriage, around the same time (and for the same reason) that Anne Sinclair’s father changed his name from Schwartz to Sinclair. Seeing the article about Richard Hutschnecker, I had exactly the same impulse as Leonard had years before. I called the psychiatrist’s office, and announced that I certainly must be his relative. To my shock, the nurse called the famous doctor to the phone and he arrived breathless, saying he had in fact been waiting to hear from me. He and his brother knew my grandfather, and knew about my father. They had been hoping that they would be able to learn more about — and meet — the latest generation of the Hutch family. But, Richard said, he wasn’t the one who kept the records of the family — I really needed to call his brother, the art dealer Leonard Hutton! He told me that Leonard would be thrilled to hear from me. My visit would allow him to fill in the gaps left in the family archive.

So in the late 1970s my family expanded to include the amazing (and now deceased) Leonard Hutton Hutschnecker (along with his wife Ingrid), who around that time had decided to re-adopt the family name shed during and after World War II. Indeed, it was true, Leonard had kept his promise: he had constructed a huge family tree, tracing Hutschneckers all over the world, as far as Russia, Switzerland and even South Africa. He was thrilled but not surprised to have found an art critic in the family. At the time I was writing columns for newspapers like the Village Voice and magazines like Artforum under the married name I still use. Considering that everyone else in my immediate family was an accountant, I seemed like a black sheep. But in the family as a whole, the global family, creative people (especially theatre people and interior designers) have predominated. What a relief!

I am recounting this story not only because it is a good one but also to make clear — yet again, and in a personal way — the tremendous impact the Nazis and the Second World War had on the circulation and the future of art, artists and intellectuals. This is precisely the general theme of Sinclair’s enlightening book, the tight lines between the personal, the cultural and the political, and the ways in which these various threads continue to surface (for better or worse) in contemporary life. She is strongest on her family history, and in describing (and sometimes questioning) her grandfather’s efforts on behalf of art, artists and social justice; she is weakest when discussing New York and its cultural history, which Rosenberg entered in mid-stream, hardly a pioneer. Picasso was shown in the city by Alfred Stieglitz before the Armory Show of 1913 and World War I; he didn’t need to wait for Paul Rosenberg to give him his first exhibition in the Big Apple around the middle of the 20th century, even though Sinclair’s grandfather certainly helped to solidify the European modernists’ acceptance and placement in major institutions and collections. This is one of the curious anomalies of the new book. As she admits, Anne Sinclair initially saw New York through the eyes of a child. In 21, rue La Boétie, she has attempted to retain her youthful enchantment with the city while telling a very grown-up story — a balancing act that doesn’t always ring true, especially since she herself mentions the ordeal of 2011, when her husband DSK had no choice but to remain in NYC while officials decided whether to pursue (eventually abandoned) criminal charges against him for the sexual assault of a hotel maid.

It must be said that much of my knowledge of Anne Sinclair, ironically, dates from this period, when television newscasts showed nightly images of the couple bombarded by reporters on the street when they dared to venture outside of their Tribeca townhouse. That image of her — as stoic and supportive wife — needed some fleshing out, with information about her professional accomplishments and her distinguished lineage, which is why I bought this book in the first place. But I must confess that my initial motivation for writing a Blog post was more concrete and more immediate than these intellectual concerns. I became obsessed by the black and white photograph of the young Sinclair and her grandfather printed on the cover of this memoir. In the picture, Anne is perhaps four years old. Facing the camera in what seems to be a park, she is holding the kind of bucket used in a sandbox and grasping her grandpa’s hand. And, most important for me: she is the spitting image of me in a number of family photographs retrieved from my parents’ haphazard archives and scrapbooks. A cute, chubby cheeked and dark haired girl, she is wearing the same coat and the same beret I wore as a child.

Shelley Rice, 1950s, photo by Harold Hutch

For some reason, this fashion coincidence freaked me out. It was as if I was suddenly faced with a mirror image. The repetitiveness of family snapshots, their conventional structure and style, hit home even across the Atlantic. The shock of recognition, in fact, was almost Barthesian: the photo confronted me head on with what Roland Barthes called the madness of history. There’s a section in Camera Lucida where the author talks about “history” being the time when his mother lived before he was born, without him. Whereas this “historical” time was a void for Barthes, I had the opposite reaction to Sinclair’s image. A plenitude of historical details flooded into my head when I realized the implications of this family snapshot. I don’t know this person, she is French and living a very different life from mine. So how is it that she is wearing my coat, and why do we look so much alike?

It took me a while to realize that while we inhabit different worlds today, by accidents of history Anne Sinclair and I were two well-dressed Jewish girls about the same age during the same historical moment (the early 1950s) in New York City. We surely played in the same parks, perhaps even in the same sandboxes, and obviously both of our families bought into the vogue for safeguarding family memories in snapshots made simple by new technologies. And yes, I probably am not imagining it, our mothers could easily have purchased nearly identical coats for their young (and pampered) daughters. My coat, as I recall, was slightly fuller at the bottom, but the wool tweed and the collar were absolutely the same, and I can never forget that great hat (which I must admit looks as cute on her as it did on me). In the years after this picture was taken, Sinclair would, of course, go back to Paris and make a name and a life for herself in France, while I would do the same in the Big Apple, and there this story might have ended. But the photograph grabbed my attention, and made clear connecting links buried in time, space and family archives — as well as in the annals of commerce. For my mother only bought coats at Russeks, the now defunct Fifth Avenue store owned by the Nemerovs, the family of Diane Arbus. If we did, in fact, wear similar coats, perhaps the Sinclairs shopped there too. It is, indeed, a very small world.

© Shelley Rice 2012

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Image courtesy of The Glass House, photo by Eirik Johnson

Since this blog began, I have been harassing my friend and New York University colleague Pepe Karmel, well known art historian, curator and critic of contemporary art, to make a contribution to the ongoing discussion. Happily, The Philip Johnson Glass House staff decided to enlist him too, so we have all joined forces. The Glass House, completed in 1949, was Johnson’s private residence, and it is considered to be one of his greatest architectural achievements. Inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, the building has exterior walls of glass and no interior walls. It sits on 47 acres of land in New Canaan, Connecticut (which are home to supplementary buildings and works created by the artist over a period of 50 years), and the entire campus has been named a National Trust Historic Site by the U.S. Government.

Before practicing architecture, Johnson was the founding Director of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and curator of the famous 1932 exhibition, “The International Style.” As a trustee and patron of MOMA for many years, he donated more than 2,000 works, by artists as esteemed as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, to the institution. Johnson’s close ties to the art world, and to its most important movers and shakers, inspired him and his partner, David Whitney, to use the Glass House as a meeting place for the great cultural players of his time. Conversations with people like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Robert A.M. Stern became legendary, and Vincent Scully called these gatherings “the most sustained cultural salon that the United States has ever seen.”

After the deaths of both Johnson and Whitney in 2005, The Glass House continued to host these conversations. In 2010, partnering with graduate students from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, the staff created an expanded digital forum. Accessible at www.glasshouseconversations.org, the site proposes provocative questions or debate topics, and by now 20,000 people from 150 countries have participated in the ensuing exchanges. The question posed to Pepe Karmel by Glass House Conversations recently is indeed a hot button, and often controversial, issue:

Is the United States still the leader in innovative new art as it was in the latter half of the 20^th century?

Here is Karmel’s reply, as it was posted on the Glass House Conversation web site. Readers are encouraged to continue the discussion, of course, by publishing comments here or contributing responses to glasshouseconversations.org.
SR

Pepe Karmel, 2012, courtesy Pepe Karmel

If there is an avant-garde today, its very nature contradicts the assumptions implicit in the question. Why should we assume that the most important new art of a given era will be associated with a single nation? Is it actually the case that the United States was the “leader” in new art during the second half of the 20th century? Is “new art” necessarily innovative? The idea that, at any given moment, one nation is going to be the home of the avant-garde is a translation into artistic terms of Hegel’s idea of the world-historical figure. In canonical art history, Italy carries the baton from the Renaissance until the 18th century, France is the leader from 1775 until 1945, and the United States has the historically important avant-garde from 1945 until recently. This is demonstrably wrong. What about Netherlandish art in the 17th century? German and English art in the late 18th and 19th centuries. South American, non-Western, and, yes, French art after 1945?

Specifically, I would argue that the dominance of U.S. art after 1945 is in large part a chauvinist illusion. After the triumph of Pop and Minimalism in the 1960s, U.S. art historians rewrote art history (in the 1970s) to eliminate pretty much all important art made elsewhere. Arguably, much of the most innovative art produced between 1945 and 1970 was made in and around New York. But that doesn’t entitle us to ignore the rest. Nor does it entitle us to pretend that the dominance  of New York lasted beyond this 25-year period. Certainly, in the 42  years since 1970, as much or more important art has been made elsewhere as has been made in New York.

Finally, we need to question the concepts “innovative” and “avant-garde.” They are rooted in the same Hegelian model, which assumes that the “essential” events in art history are formal innovations (Cubism, geometric abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism) that supposedly follow a coherent logic of development, and that everything else is a sideshow. In an era when Marcel Duchamp is a much more important influence than Pablo Picasso, is there any credibility left to this position? There have been few–or no–significant formal innovations since 1970. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Some critics and scholars take this to mean that the history of art came to an end in 1970, and that everything since then is an epiphenomenon. That seems absurd. Much terrific art has  been made since 1970. It is distinguished, not by formal innovation, but by the way it crystallizes and expresses important experiences of life in our contemporary world. From this perspective, much of the important art of our time is being made in the former “Third World,” and addresses the experience of post-colonialism, triumphant in China, catastrophic in much of Africa, and different in different countries. If this means that the avant-garde has departed U.S. shores, so be it.

— Pepe Karmel, New York, 2012

L’article People in Glass Houses… By Shelley Rice and Pepe Karmel est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

SR

Emmanuel: So, Shelley, what would you like me to talk about?

Shelley:  First, can you give me an overview of this project, since this is the second book you have written about Alan Ingram Cope and we need to inform our readers about its history.

E: Alan and I met in 1994 on a tiny island off the coast of France called the Ile de Ré. I asked him for directions on the street and after that we became friends. We stayed friends for five years, from the moment we met until the moment he died. In the meantime, I taped hours and hours of conversation between the two of us to gather this patrimony, which would allow me to turn this man’s experience into biography.


S: But why him?

E: Complete chance, just because we had some sort of crush on each other. I felt he was a very interesting person and I wanted to spend time with him. It just started like this. He was retired. He invited me to his home, he introduced me to his wife, his dog, and then his life. He showed me some pictures, then some books, and very soon I found myself meeting with him in the little garden he had near his house on the Ile de Ré to talk and tape conversations. The conversations became stronger after a while as he opened his memory and his philosophy of life to me more and more. I was thirty at the time, and it is always interesting for an inexperienced man to speak with someone who can see his life in perspective — a view of life that can be both an overview and a close up, something only possible for an older person. It was fascinating for me. The main thing I can say is that he was one of the people in my life with whom I’ve spent the most memorable moments.

So I started very soon to turn his testimony into drawings, because I thought it would be interesting for him to see his memories coming back as drawings done by someone else, to see if that worked and if he would allow me to interpret his memories. They couldn’t fit exactly because I hadn’t lived what he had lived, but I listened carefully to him to catch all the words and the images linked to the words. I knew that we could go quite far together if he would accept my interpretations, and I was relieved because the first time I came with my drawings he was very enthusiastic. We both felt that this was a way for our friendship to go on. We worked together for five years, from the time he was 69 years old until his death at 74. I worked hard to make sure he could see the first book but unfortunately he died six months before it was released.

S: Can you talk about the first book and why you chose that aspect of his life – his experience as an American soldier in the Second World War — for the initial volume?

E: We had the opportunity to be pre-published in a magazine (Lapin), every three months, with no limit to the number of pages…

S: Wow, that’s like Balzac…

E: So I started to create episodes about this childhood, but after a while he said: “We have this regular appointment with readers.  Maybe we should tell them something that can be like one story, like a feuilleton…”

S: Like Balzac!

E: He said the best thing to do might be to tell the story of “his war,” because it has a beginning and then it is a voyage: you are in a vehicle, you are sent abroad, you cross Europe and end up at the border of Czechoslovakia…. This is really a story to tell in a magazine. So I stopped working on his childhood and started working on the war. While he was alive of course I always had the gold mine of his memory, and the opportunity to call him up and ask him questions: “What was the weather like on this day and what kind of jacket were you wearing back then?”

S: And he remembered?!!?

E: Yes, because he was an elephant! He was incredible. Maybe, at the origin of this project, there is the decision to pay a tribute to his incredible memory, because most people are not able to answer questions about the days of their lives.  After his death, I decided that was the moment for me to travel to find his traces, to follow in his footsteps and meet some people who had known him. So I went to America and to Germany, which he had occupied with Patton’s army. It turned into an inquiry. I sent shot-in-the-dark letters to people wherever and got answers or not. In 2009 I was in Ohio with an old flame of his, his girlfriend when he was 20 and she was 16. Almost every week, even now, I receive photographs from a historian in the Czech Republic, who read the book when it was translated into the Czech language. (Alan’s War has by now been translated into ten languages.) The mission that took Alan from Germany to Czechoslovakia during the war is not well documented, but it is the specialty of this historian. I went to visit him and he opened his archives to me. He wanted to help me (even though of course the war is over for me now!) to find Alan, and the fact is that we didn’t when I was with him. We found pictures of people in the book: I recognized the top sergeant, and others. But it was only a few months later, after I came home, that I received from him a picture of Alan himself.

I meet people here and there who are often moved and interested by the fact that a young person is dedicating an important part of his life to an older one. That always attracts attention because we carry within us an urge to listen to those who have more experience. A lot of doors opened to help, to provide clues and images and memories, so the fact is that this project becomes more and more interesting as time passes.


S: Since you brought up photographs: Alan talked to you for a long time but he also gave you pictures from his past. What’s the relationship between images and words in this project? How do these photos function as memory tools within the context of the books?

E: Some of them are published in the books, or interpreted, re-drawn to be presented in the books…

S: And how do you make those decisions?

E: I wanted the reader to see his face, his actual face in a photograph, at least once in the book. In the American edition, I included a photo album at the end of the book since I know Americans have all seen and owned pictures like these. But in the rest of the book there are no actual photos because the drawings refuse to be associated with them. I tried, but it doesn’t work. You have to have a graphic style that is very particular to allow a drawing to be near a photographic image: most of the time they don’t want to be side by side and they fight against each other until one of the two is dead.

S: But you know that Barthes called photographs “counter-memories.” He insisted that they stop the process of memory. As an artist, you are trying to delve into the process of memory, so these two types of images are fighting against each other not only visually but also philosophically.

E: Exactly, but the fact is that these photographs are not part of my memory. They are part of his. If you accept the fact that now I’ve been living with them for almost twenty years, you realize that they have now become part of my life too. This also is something very interesting, and it is something that I will have to explore in later years. The time has not yet come, since I am still the process of treating his testimony. I have told the story of his war and his childhood, but his teenage years are still to come. Until that is done, I’m not thinking too much about everything that is happening to ME by working so long on such a subject. After I have finished telling his story, that will be the moment to ask myself “what have I done, and why?” And when that happens I will be probably be about the age he was when I met him!

S: Yo!

E: But about the pictures: I have a few anecdotes to tell. For instance, I would go to California with Alan’s photo album in hand. In this album, there is a picture of a house on a certain street. I knew he lived in this house, I knew more or less when, but I didn’t have the number of the street address  – and you know streets in California can go on from San Francisco to San Diego! So I would spend days going up and down a street looking for this house. I knew that I might not find it. There was always the risk that the building would be gone, or changed, or that trees might have grown. But I do this only for the emotion I have when (if!) I do find it. If I do find the house, that’s fabulous, and I just sit in front of it staring in amazement…


S: Have you ever gone in to meet the people who live there now?

E: No, I haven’t done that yet, because I haven’t yet drawn these houses in the books. When I do, the books are going to come back to these places in California. They will be in libraries and bookstores, there will be blogs and people in the neighborhoods will know.

S: And then the people living in the houses now will invite you to tea!

E: Yes, maybe, and then that invitation will become part of the story too. It’s like the chance meeting I had with Alan on the streets of the Ile de Ré. I prefer to wait and let things happen. Sometimes when I do find people and see places, it is precious for me because I can draw exactly what is there, and often people have closets full of documentation that they generously offer to share with me. And the story grows.

The book I have just finished, of course, is about Alan’s early years. The war book was about the experiences of a soldier who never really faced fire, who traveled through Europe seeing countries and meeting people. Alan’s Childhood, on the other hand, is about everyday, simple anecdotes, his family and the people in his young life: his uncles, grandparents, friends, his drawings etc.


S: I have the sense that this new book is very much a look at la vie quotidienne of a young person living in California at that time.

E: Yes, but Alan’s childhood coincided with the Great Depression since he born in 1925. His father lost his job, his grandparents moved in with them because they couldn’t afford a home, there were earthquakes…

S: So there were natural disasters and human made disasters…

E: Yes, all mixed up with the simplest things of childhood. One thing I have learned from listening to older people, is that even though a person may have lived very dramatic moments in his adult life, the things that stay closest to the bones are the facts of childhood. What remains in a lifetime are the first memories from which all the others grow, early memories that Alan sometimes told me with a trembling voice – a voice never present when he talked about the war or other aspects of his later life, some of them very dramatic. I try to capture that intensity in the new book. I tell my readers simple stories, many of which they have already lived themselves. But when your work is very simple it is also very risky, because the frontier between art and the banal is very, very thin. But that is where I like to be: some place we have all experienced.

Alan had a particular gift for telling those stories, which is part of my admiration for him. When I was with him, sometimes I would have this hallucination that he was shining with the capacity to resurrect episodes so one could SEE what he was saying. But when you see what someone says, you build the picture only from your patrimony. The images you are able to put together to illustrate what someone is telling you are not theirs; they are those that you have created yourself by connecting deeply with another. That is the miracle,  that is what I call friendship. I make books to prove that it is possible for one person to listen so carefully to another that there will be coincidences in their visions, because there is in fact a certain logic to life. All of these human experiences, we have them in us, which is the reason why stories can pass from one person to another. They all play on the same keyboard.

© Shelley Rice and Emmanuel Guibert, 2012
Many thanks to Edgar Castillo, for his technical help and support
For all images: © Emmanuel Guibert & L’Association, 2012

L’article Stories Played on the Same Keyboard: An Interview with Emmanuel Guibert by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.