33 posts tagged “art”
I scooted over to Milwaukee yesterday, to meet up at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Ethan Lasser, a curator from Chipstone, and, in yet another capacity of working together, good ol' Rebecca Zorach. Ethan walked us through the galleries that house the combined Chipstone + Milwaukee Art Museum displays of American decorative arts. Ethan and his team are doing some really innovative curatorial work, truly bringing rare, masterfully crafted objects into contemporary relevance, and doing it without sacrificing the preciousness. Hard to describe their exhibition strategies fully. Some of the strategies are really simple, but very effective. For example, simply elevating chairs, such that eye-level apprehension of the chairs brings fresh shapes, detail, and negative space to the viewer's eye:
The video brings in issues of historical memory, antebellum realities and myths, spoken word performance, early American economics, spectres of chattel slavery, dreams of miscegenation, and layers of beauty that expands on the aesthetics of the object itself.
Ethan, Rebecca, and I gathered to talk over Theaster's upcoming project at MAM, which will be much bigger than this installation, and think about producing texts to accompany it.
After the meeting I took advantage of the complimentary museum entry to see the Warhol Last Decade show. For anybody with any interest in Warhol (and that really should be just about anybody), the show is recommended.
But the real surprises for me were 1) the War Bonds posters in the halls of the offices (where Ethan took us for a few minutes), and 2) the temporary show of art by veterans.
I am a total sucker for old posters, of course, so the War Bonds propaganda got me and my camera going, quick.
As one would expect, the art work by veterans was intense, bringing home the war experience in ways we just don't see in the news. I was happy to see a contribution by our anti-war comrade and Iraq War vet Aaron Hughes. It was a painting titled "Checkpoint."
Of course, this being the Milwaukee Art Museum, just getting to spend some time in the sparsely visited space on a weekday was a treat. Especially since this time we got to see the insides of the Saarinen War Memorial part of the complex, as well as enjoy the grand entry lobby (which I think is called the Windhover Gallery).
Enjoy this short profile of friend and Smart Museum curator Stephanie Smith, from Chicago magazine. The occasion is the Heartland show, which opens on October 1.
I like having academics and intellectuals make easy, immediate art. Their discomfort can be palpable. Monika Mokre and Elisabeth Mayerhofer, social scientists and theorists of so-called creative industries, joined me for an evening yesterday. We started off in the Zobl/Schneider SOHO space, just down the street from my space, discussing the various aspects of work in Austria, Europe, and the US that remain de- or under-politicized. The discussion was had while surrounded by fotos and material artifacts that came out of the Zobl/Schneider Berndorf project, which was a multi-year investigation into the culture and milieu of a single manufacturing company in Berndorf, Austria.
Then we moved over to my space to continue talking but also do a little hands on work. To draw or write while conversing. It took a bit for the Monika and Elisabeth to get in the comfort zone, but once there, we made a few text fragment flyers more than suitable for photocopying.
Here is a pic of Elisabeth wielding a broad-tipped sharpie. Notice the skillfully handled cigarette.
Until May 31 I will be working in this space at Neulerchenfelder Strasse 8, first floor, in the 16th District of Vienna. Amos Kennedy will be there with me, and there are some interesting art projects on the second and third floors, too.
My cellphone in Austria is 43.650.9504732.
I wrote a text for artist Fang Ling-an's new project at the Hyde Park Art Center, The Whole World Celebrates Together. It is a meditation on adoption and diaspora. The show is up until July 12, 2009.
Notes on Fang Ling-An's Obsession
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The past is written on and in our bodies, individual and social. Americans have been brought together, in peer groups, labor relations, and, most of all, in families, by genetic histories crossed with complicated social histories. The bonds of affection sometimes work against the forces of economics, resisting the social patterns established and encouraged by neocolonial legacies, and sometimes in concert, masking or reinforcing them. Like the woman in permanent recovery, Fang Ling-An reaches for the wisdom to know the difference.
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Historian Eric Hobsbawm notes in the opening to his book The Age of Revolution that at the end of the eighteenth century the vast majority of the world's peoples lived and died very near to where they had been born. In the same passage Hobsbawm also points out that various terms indispensable to us now, including ‘working class,' ‘capitalism,' ‘statistics,' ‘factory,' and ‘engineer,' first came into meaningful use with what he calls ‘the dual revolution,' that is, the contemporaneous French Revolution (political) and English Industrial Revolution (economic). By the end of that book's period of study, the year 1848, those and many more terms had entered the common lexicon. Since they are part of a single historical process, as words representing the conditions and ideas of modern society grew in importance, the movements and migrations of traditionally agrarian peoples increased in scope and frequency. If this pattern originated with Europe's dual revolution, it takes its most intense manifestation in the narratives of modernization outside of Europe. Over the next two centuries in many places in the rest of the world, the process gained in scale and intensity. In China, the increased migrations of peoples following the upheavels beginning in the nineteenth-century have continued in episodes throughout the Republican, the revolutionary, and the reform periods, right up to the present. Today, China's internal movement of surplus laborers from rural areas to the fast-developing cities nearly matches the numbers of cross-border migrant workers on the move in the entire rest of the globe.
*
Modernization, under its new name of globalization, has rendered displacements common. In the United States, the largest and most complex of settler nations, immigrant narratives abound in particularity. When including the relocations of persons within the borders of the US, diaspora emerges as a near-universal condition. Many of us who are reading this, maybe even most, live and will die far from where we once were raised, and likely even more distant from where our parents and grandparents grew up. While set in motion by the broad and impersonal tides of economics and history, migration and displacement are experienced subjectively, in the languages, emotions, aspirations, and regrets of individual persons. And in memories and the absence of memories. Uprooting is rarely less than traumatic, even for those living according to plan, as the what-might-have-beens never fully evaporate. Belonging to a place, whether consciously or not, always demands a kind of commitment to the possibility of permanence. When circumstances interrupt that permanence, the resultant loss becomes another factor that shapes a person's future, as much as does the presence of a new home.
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Sculptor and installation artist Fang Ling-An dreams this loss, and lives it. Two generations removed from her mainland China roots, she swims in the ocean of passing memory, portable traditions, phantasmatic recall, and quiet grief common to all immigrants. Her family's ancestral home is Shandong Province, birthplace of the Boxer Rebellion, home to Confucius, long renowned as a seat of traditional Chinese culture. Taipei—the resting place of so many faded Beijing opera stars and Kuomintang generals, branded over the decades as a self-styled capital of traditional Mandarin language and values-cum-postmodern megacity—is the place of her birth and upbringing. Currently stationed in Chicago, America's crossroads of migratory currents and the sudden if temporary center of American political life, Fang Ling-An, sensitized through her own search for what eludes those who leave one home and adopt another, trains her sights on a specific and contemporary migration narrative, one not yet analyzed to any great degree, much less historicized: the global movement of Chinese children through the motor of international adoption.
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While not unique to American society, adoption does seem to be a particularly American practice. Americans adopt places. Towns and states become our adopted homes. Americans adopt pets by the tens of thousands annually. We ‘adopt' highways, reserving its roadside litter for our clean-up labor, so we can have the privilege of advertising our good deeds. In Sunnyvale, California, a Silicon Valley suburb populated by many East and South Asian immigrants who have taken to the U.S. as their adopted country, one can even ‘adopt a bus shelter.' Such is the degree to which Americans believe we are afforded the opportunity to choose the relationships (to places and people) that populate our lives. Americans live within the constraints of an elemental contradiction: we invent ourselves and our fellow Americans ever anew, and yet at the same time our individual trajectories—and often our destinies—are lashed to the realities of our historical bonds, perhaps more tightly than for any other people, precisely for the luxury of reinvention (best case scenario) and forgetting (worst) we are allowed as Americans.
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By the year 2007 the annual number of adoptions by American families from China had peaked, and in the past year the numbers have plummeted. The factors are multiple and complicated, ranging from stricter guidelines on the requirements made of prospective American parents to a reported rise in domestic adoption in China to the shorter waiting times for children from other countries (such as Guatemala). As with earlier waves of Chinese immigrants, the migrations of (mostly) girl adoptees from China have been shaped according to a shifting juridical regime of fuzzy laws, customs, and economic incentive. The ugly spectre of trafficking also lurks—an almost inevitable element given the combination of poverty, corruption, deception, poor regulation, and cross-cultural divides in play. The particularities of this moment now seemingly coming to an end—ten years of rising adoptions, the decline of which coincides with the arrival of China as a global power—can no more be ignored than the Cold War imperatives that drove the United States to reform its immigration laws in the mid-Sixties, allowing for entry of thousands of Taiwan-educated technical professionals. How this latest and youngest group of Chinese-Americans, loved by their adopted families and learning to live with big question marks about their past, find their way to an understanding of their collective history is not for us to determine. And yet, as Fang Ling-An asserts through her art, the challenging questions are not the property of theirs alone. Our stake is shared.
Please join me next Thursday at Columbia College for this event I helped to organize. I've been interested in Karen's work for a long time. Indigo is an old friend and comrade.
Indigo Som is a Berkeley-based artist who has explored the far reaches of the Chinese restaurant phenomenon in a number of projects. In one ongoing series of investigations, she visits local establishments in those parts of the US otherwise nearly devoid of Asian American population. With camera and blog, she has toured the mountain West, the rural upper Midwest, and a belt of small towns across the deep South. Her work has been exhibited in shows at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, and the Asia Society in New York.
Karen Tam is an installation artist who has explored the aesthetics of Chinese restaurants in her ongoing Gold Mountain Restaurants work. Often drawing on the memories and experiences of the older generation of restaurant owners and employees, she recreates the classic interiors we have come to associate with potstickers and mooshu. Her work has been shown at Collyer Bristow Gallery in London, YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto, and Centre A in Vancouver. She is currently a Ph.D candidate in cultural studies at Goldsmiths College in London.
This will be the first time Indigo Som and Karen Tam appear at the same event. On Thursday evening they will deliver presentations on their work, take questions, and riff endlessly on the place of Chinese and other Asian restaurants in the American landscape, their role in the Western experience of Asian culture, and the many twists and turns in how diasporic Asians use restaurants to find economic and social niches in the US, Canada, the UK, and other places outside of Asia.
On Monday I will host my final Talking Point event. It has been for eighteen consecutive months that I've convinced a presenter that a hit-or-miss Monday night audience at the Hyde Park Art Center would be worth their time, would be appreciative of their shared experience and information, and would look forward to engaging in a discussion for an evening. And that they would get something out of the opportunity besides the measly honorarium. In the process, I've learned something about curating. What, you say? Come to Monday's event and I'll tell you.
My collaborators from Mess Hall's early years Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks will be the featured visitors for this last go 'round. A perfect way to bring it full circle.
Here is the full roster of featured visitors from my tenure as the series curator. Yes, they are ALL women!
Laurie Jo Reynolds and Tamms Year Ten
Anti Gravity Surprise: Kathleen Duffy & Jennifer Karmin
Naomi Davis & Martha Boyd for C/CURE
Phyllis Bramson & Judith Geichman
Rachel Caidor
Sze Lin Pang
Jennifer Montgomery
Elvia Rodriguez-Ochoa
JAM & Noon Solar: Jane Palmer & Marianne Fairbanks
Caroline from Green Lantern sent the notice below. Kevin Haywood, Myriel Milicevic, and I made this print-string-thingy several years ago, called Learning Tree. This will be the first time it will be on display and in action indoors, complete with its own tree trunk (or working representation thereof). Come join for the opening on Friday, 6 PM - 12 AM, with music after 9. All info about this show follows the pic of Learning Tree installed outside.
In Conjunction with the Southern Graphics Council conference , The Green Lantern Gallery & Press is pleased to announce a group show:
03.27.09 - 04.25.09
"Without You I am Nothing,"
curated by Anne Elizabeth Moore and featuring work by Andrew Oesch, Angee Lennard, Agata Michalowska, Dan S. Wang, Myriel Milicivic, and Kevin Haywood, Delia Kovac, DeWayne Slightweight, Karin Patzke, Heather Ault, Jason Tranchida, Jean Cozzens, Laura Szumowski, Matthew Lawrence, Meg Turner, Rob Ray, Sonnenzimmer, Xander Marro.
The opening will be held on Friday, the 27th of March from 6-9; during the opening will be serving a cocktail of the speakeasy variety with live musical performances provided by Helen Money, John Bellows, and DeWayne Slightweight from 9-12 am. A donation of five dollars is suggested to watch the music; BYOB suggested, although there will be some beer available.
In late capitalist America, we've become a bit too used to dealing with our visial culture in a certain way: by viewing it, memorizing it, consuming it. But intrinsically, we know that there are other, more fair ways to respond to the images that mediate our world. Without You I Am Nothing explores two distinct and vibrant worlds of mass-produced, artist-created prompts for cultural democracy, in Providence, Rhode Island and Chicago, Illinois.
These cities, which contain two of the most vibrant screenprinting scenes in the nation, have developed distinct languages for interactive poster-making. Artists in both locales mass-produce (or, sometimes, produce on only a small-scale) images and information that can be manipulated, or shifted, or changed. They are intended not to speak to an audience, but to be susceptible to audience response as well. Without You I am Nothing: Cultural Democracy from Providence and Chicago contains only posters that have one or more of the following elements: stuff that falls off (on purpose), windows, parts that move, space for new information, dials, buttons, removable elements, or other user-controlled, four-dimensional aspects of awesomeness. Simply put, these posters cannot exist without viewers' input.
By linking the poster-making scenes of two different cities, Without You I am Nothing underscores the distinct visual languages developed for each community: Providence's tight-knit group of experimental music-influenced, art-educated poster fans, and Chicago's internationally renowned rock fans used to pristine lines and funny animals.
The print medium is neither site specific nor intrinsically democratic: freedom of the press, after all--the earliest form of mass communication--belongs only to those who own presses. Still, the print medium is the one on which democracy in the US was founded; print-makers have pushed the limits of their medium with innovative design and contents since ink was first put to paper in a desire to communicate with "the masses".
Without You I am Nothing displays a wide collection of new, recent, and downright old works on paper that require more from the viewer than merely reading about, memorizing information on, and attending the event described in the poster. These may be malleable, 3-dimensional, tactile, transient, or somehow otherwise inclusive of elements that can move, deteriorate, or be removed; or bits that must be rubbed, poked, ripped, pressed, wettened, prodded, or yanked to achieve full poster satisfaction. Full poster satisfaction need not be guaranteed each viewer.
--
Caroline Picard
Director of The Green Lantern
1511 N Milwaukee Ave., 2nd Floor
Chicago IL 60622773.266.4234 http://thegreenlantern.org
A few days ago writer, teacher, and curator Bert Stabler posted to the gochgo list a link to a video document of the remarkable Piñata Factory project, which he, his public school students, and many others helped make happen. Mike Bancroft initiated the project. You especially gotta love the broad daylight stealth 'Streets & San' truck deliveries. Equal parts service work, social activism, anti-authoritarian provocation, and classroom student art project, Piñata Factory inspires. Check it out on Current.
Back in the run up to the Iraq War in late 2002, and then after Bush ordered the attack in March of 2003, I worked with a grassroots neighborhood antiwar group called the Hyde Park Committee Against War & Racism. This group had been working at a local level since the week following September 11, 2001. I and about a dozen or more others started attending meetings regularly beginning in late 2002, driven to action and togetherness by the dismay and outrage over the impending war. Together with others in the group who were somehow art-identified, one of the ways I contributed was to help make signs and posters. It seemed entirely reasonable to expect that the artists take on this responsibility. In grassroots activist groups, all competencies are made available to the needs of the group. But what we, the art people in the group, didn't do then was seriously critique and evaluate of our creations, or, for that matter anybody else's, apart from the casual gripes or plaudits when seeing a political graphic that somehow catches attention.
HPCAWR is for all practical purposes history. There is a Yahoo Groups mailing list but not much else. Nonetheless, some of us who first met and worked together then continue to find ways to occasionally share work and ideas. One of my comrades from that time is Amy Partridge, and it was with her that Laurie Jo Reynolds and I kicked off the evening's discussion last Saturday night at Mess Hall. For Amy and I, it was what we didn't do earlier: make time to focus on the operations of political graphics. In the sense of this event capping a process of creation we had begun back then, and that we always were aware of as an exercise in modeling a form of activism, it was a nice way to close a circle.
Of course, it is six years later, and the political situation is very different. The issues in our minds and hearts are more dispersed, and range across many specific causes. Our starting point for the evening was the Just Seeds Ten Years of Critical Resistance portfolio, a suite of prints all addressing prison-related issues. From there we turned attentions to graphics created for the Tamms Year Ten campaign, also on display. The twenty or so people who joined us contributed many useful and sometimes brilliant insights. We went for a solid two hours, with a nice break for pizza and socializing in between two sessions of focused conversation.
When Aaron Hughes and a crew of vets from IVAW dropped in for the second half the circle was completed in another way. The question of political graphics in relation to the Iraq War resurfaced.
