Pacific Standard Time organizers just released the third in their “celebrate” series of video advertisements for the event, this one shows Ice Cube talking about what there is to love in Los Angeles and specifically Charles and Ray Eames’ Case study House #8, “The Eames House.” Other videos in the series include Jason Schwartzman celebrates John Baldessari, and Anthony Kiedis celebrates Ed Ruscha. These videos are charming, funny, and bring art into a mainstream context… but… they all honor white male artists and allow men to do all the honoring. Although a bevy of diversity might seem too constructed or forced, this absence seems conspicuous, especially when utilized to advertise an event that intends to, and does reasonably well, present the LA art scene in its entirety.

To see the videos click here: //www.pacificstandardtime.org/videos

In response to the PST festival and its advertising, performance artist and filmmaker, Susan Mogul, created this ad as a spook of the “celebrate” posters:

In a recent lecture at the Orange County Museum, Mogul questioned the way PST fetishizes feminist work from the 1970s, forcing artists into frames of what they once were, forgetting any emergence or growth that may have happened in the ensuing years. While the initiative has brought focus to many artists who should have seen greater glory in the first place, for others, they feel as though they are going backwards rather than forwards, with galleries and museums solely interested in their early works or works that supported a constructed idea of LA art or 70’s art or feminist art, etc. Sometimes I wonder if the worst thing for an artist is to become famous – they end up stuck in an aesthetic, if they try to move forward they have everyone in their life, their dealers and supporters, forcing them back to what was successful, and their very creativity becomes a schtick.

But, you say, the most recent commercial celebrates Charles and RAY Eames… Ray was a woman! Well, try looking up “Ray Eames” almost every reference will include Charles. In fact, if you look up Ray, excluding Charles in the search, you only get about 400k hits, whereas if you look up Charles, excluding Ray, you still get almost 3 million. In this duo, Charles is often presented as the icon, with Ray the designer. Obviously, Ray is an important artist in her own right, in her position as collaborator with her husband, and through her own theory and design work, but is she really enough to represent the many women artists and viewer/enthusiasts who are a part of PST?

If you are interested in shows that include many women artists as part of PST, check these out:

Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983 (LACE) //www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions?id=los-angeles-goes-live-performance-art-in-southern-california-1970-1983

The Alchemy of June Schwarcz: Enamel Vessels from the Forrest L. Merrill Collection (Craft and Folk Art Museum) //www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions?id=the-alchemy-of-june-schwarcz-enamel-vessels-from-the-forrest-l-merrill-collection

Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Hart of American Modernist Architecture and Design (MAK Center) //www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions?id=sympathetic-seeing-esther-mccoy-and-the-heart-of-american-modernist-architecture-and-design

Maria Nordman Filmroom: Smoke 1967-Present (LACMA) //www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions?id=maria-nordman-filmroom-smoke-1967-present

Beatrice Wood: Career Woman-Drawings, Paintings, Vessels, and Objects (SMMOA) //www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions?id=beatrice-wood-career-woman-drawings-paintings-vessels-and-objects

Doin’ it in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building (Otis) //www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions?id=doin-it-in-public-feminism-and-art-at-the-woman-s-building

It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973, Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona (Pomona Museum) //www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions?id=it-happened-at-pomona-art-at-the-edge-of-los-angeles-1969-1973-part-2-helene-winer-at-pomona

She Accepts the Proposition: Women Gallerists and the Redefinition of Art in Los Angeles, 1967-1978 (Crossroads School) //www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions?id=she-accepts-the-proposition-six-women-gallerists-and-the-redefinition-of-art-in-los-angeles-1967-1977

There are many more shows also that illuminate underrepresented artists working in Los Angeles, to see more, check out www.pacificstandardtime.org/exhibitions

This article is from september, but includes interesting thoughts on how attempting to prove their worth and incorporate so much is giving the audience a sense of “trying too hard”…   //blogs.laweekly.com/stylecouncil/2011/09/is_pacific_standard_time_tryin.php

what PST shows have struck you as most successful?

This post has unfortunately been long delayed but I am eager to talk a little about Weegee’s work on Hollywood currently on display at MOCA grand avenue in LA. The shows provides a glimpse into the quintessential-New York photographer’s take on/over Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s through photographs, film clips, posters, articles, and, of course, his book, Naked Hollywood. As usual, MOCA takes on a big cohesive subject and does a wonderful job presenting it from several different angles. The curatorial effort by USC art historian Richard Meyer allows the viewer to focus not only on the works presented but also gives a glimpse into the historical and cultural context and contemporary milieu of Weegee’s experience in Hollywood. Yes, this is the goal of most museum exhibitions, but No, this is not usually accomplished. In this case, and I think it was specifically due to the collaboration between scholar and and contemporary art institution, this ideal was fully realized.

Briefly, because if you want to know more about the photographer’s history you should pick up Meyer’s book Weegee and Naked City, Weegee was a pseudonym for the photographer Arthur Fellig, born in Ukraine and who moved to the United States in about 1909. Best known as a newspaper photographer notoriously first on the scene to photograph the most gruesome of crimes in New York, Weegee’s known work also includes many photojournalistic prints documenting the city’s street life in the 1930s and 40s. The part of his life that has been lesser known, until now, was his role as filmmaker, muse, and interloper in 1940’s Hollywoodland. The MOCA exhibition focuses mostly on small (8×10) black and white prints, some grossly manipulated, some seemingly straight but through the lens of Weegee’s gritty realism never appearing to be fully realistic. We are also presented with posters for films such as Dr. Strangelove, for which Weegee acted as set photographer and inspiration for Seller’s Dr.’s heavily accented voice, and the film version of Naked City, inspired by his first book of photographs. Clips from Weegee’s own 16mm films accompany these better known works and incorporate a more surreal version of his photographed reality. We also find his book, Naked Hollywood, as an addendum to the show, with supporting documentations of its publication and reception as well as articles and reproductions of his prints in major magazines intended for varied audiences from the photographic hobbyist to the fashionista. This, in particular, emphasized the cultural and technological precedence for his manipulations.

Looking at black and white 8×10 manipulations of popular celebrities in today’s world of overwhelmingly large and heavily manipulated prints, it is difficult to understand how they would have been read by an audience expecting glamour and reverence, tradition and realism. Today we see these as quaint caricatures, and Weegee himself even called them “Caricatures,” but the innovation isn’t truly understood by the modern viewer. Because photography is taken for granted now as a manipulate-able media, we don’t see the attack on one’s viewing expectations and assumptions that a contemporary would have experienced.  Weegee focused on the viewers and consumers of popular culture as much as he did on the celebrity culture itself, and I wonder whether his point is to establish the unreality of this world because of his respect and understanding of the expectations of those consumers? His caricatures were not meant to be quaint depictions of stars’ known features, a manipulation of reality, but rather to point out the true reality of the “celebrity,” that the myth of their being is the “real” for consumers of hollywood culture. The real of marilyn monroe is her lips, the extremes of her body, the real of bette davis is the bulge of her eyes, the myth is their being real in any other way, he depicts in his manipulations a real so much more real because of its extremes. The use of photography in this way is ideal, because the real and the unreal become so blurred in the early years of photographic manipulation (before the ability to manipulate every image came standard on your desktop computer).

I haven’t read Meyer’s book on Weegee yet or the show’s catalogue, but I am eager to do so. A good exhibitions should make you want to know more and more about the subject matter, not necessarily leave you feeling completely sated. The show approaches Weegee as a photographer but also allows him to stand in for theoretical questions, and that is what makes it definitely worth seeing.

Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles
MOCA Los Angeles – Grand Avenue
Nov 13, 2011-Feb 27, 2012
//www.moca.org/

KCET article that talks about, among other things, the place for Weegee in the museum (something MOCA explores often with such exhibitions as WACK! and Art in the Streets) – //www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/arts-culture/naked-hollywood-weegee-in-hollywood-at-moca.html

Meyer & Lee book, Weegee and Naked City //www.amazon.com/Weegee-Defining-Moments-American-Photography/dp/0520255909

New York Crime Scene

Weegee image of Bette Davis

Weegee working out of the back of his car

Just got home from the members’ opening of Kenneth Anger “Icons” and Weegee “Naked Hollywood” at MOCA Los Angeles. I was really only very familiar with Weegee’s work on New York crime scenes before tonight and after seeing the amazing manipulations he was doing in the 50’s in Hollywood, I have many questions buzzing around my mind. Most importantly, how does a modern audience view pre-digital manipulations in photography in light of our associations with manipulative ease via photoshop and other digital platforms? Also, how do contemporary audiences consume delicate, small, black and white images after years being confronted by aggressive large-scale color photography?

More concrete thoughts tomorrow!

Kenneth Anger on theramin @moca tonight-
//yfrog.com/masukz

thoughts on Weegee in Hollywood-
//www.laobserved.com/intell/2011/11/weegees_hollywood.php

weegee, marilyn

Usually I like to do my own writing on this blog, but in lieu of my recent post on Cinderella Feminism, I want to share this. New York Times just posted an interesting article on an Egyptian feminist who realized her personal freedom by posting nude pictures of herself online causing an uproar in Egyptian politics. Check it out:

//www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/world/middleeast/aliaa-magda-elmahdy-egypts-nude-blogger-stirs-partisan-waters.html?_r=2

Photo on blog post by Aliaa Magda Elmahdy

What do you think of this form of feminism?

Monday evening I attending a lecture given by Cheri Gaulke and Denise Uyehara at Pomona College about their work as collaborative feminist performance artists (not collaborating together but both being a part of collective art groups at one point in their careers). The next morning I was so inspired by the idea of women working together to pursue an aesthetic approach to advancing the social and political equality of women, that I decided to talk to my daughter about being a feminist. She is two years old. It went something like this:

Me: “Gretchen, are you a feminist?”
Gretchen: “am I a feminist?”
Me: “Yes, are you a feminist?”
Gretchen: quiet contemplation… “No, i’m not a feminist”
Me: “Well, being a feminist really just means that you think boys and girls are equal to one another, do you think boys and girls can do the same things?”
Gretchen: “yes… Mommy, I’m a Cinderella Feminist!”

Cindy Sherman, "Untitled #276/ Cinderella"

I cracked up, but then I started thinking. The idea of a Cinderella feminist was pretty adorable, because really, to a 2 year old, these are just two of the roles one might play in the infinite storeroom of props and scenarios that constitute the world around them. In another way, it made me truly think of today’s young women who embrace the very same institutions that women once fought against, young marriage, family, staying home with children, and yes, dressing provocatively seemingly for the benefit of surrounding men. Really, though, there is a distinct difference in the way women today embrace these formerly stifling conventions, today they own it, and (theoretically) are pursuing their own paths which just so happen to entail these roles rather than having these roles foisted upon them without option or opinion.

At the same time, however, gender stereotypes are so intrinsic in our culture and mindset that perhaps it is only the presumption of choice that has changed, not really the ability to choose. Women dress provocatively claiming to be taking control of their own sexuality when really they are still playing to a male fantasy of female sexuality. But, really, how do we know? Gender and sexuality are so interwoven and so difficult to see objectively that it is difficult to know even what choice IS anymore. Can there really be free will when we are enveloped in a culture so early and so completely?

Sacred Naked Nature Girls, "Power Play" from Untitled Flesh, 1996

Denise Uyehara, a founding member of Sacred Naked Nature Girls talked about James Luna being criticized for appropriating Native American culture and the humour in that, given that he himself is Native American. This was an interesting thought — just because one is a member of a certain culture, is it given that they are “authentic” in their use and understanding of cultural elements, that they have authority and right to those images? Even if they are utilizing images that adhere to the same cultural stereotype other members of the culture might lobby against? Just because a woman is a woman, is she authorized to make herself into a sexual stereotype?

Gaulke talked about her early years as a feminist in the 70’s and mentioned her frustration that “women were ‘in the closet’ about being women, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that they are women.” This reminded me of something Jane Livingston said during a discussion panel at the Getty a couple weeks ago between 3 female curators. Livingston was asked about being a woman curator at an institution widely criticized for its predominant focus on male artists (she was the 20th century curator at LACMA in the 70’s), and she replied, “it just didn’t occur to us.” Claiming that they just weren’t conscious of the lack of women in their repertoire, the three proceeded to discuss exclusively male artists and to show a general lack of interest or knowledge of female artists working during this time period. To be a professional in the art world at that time, women had to deny their femininity, to see “objectively” by perpetuating the status quo of male dominance. I really wonder if much has changed. In order to be seen as unbiased, we have moved back toward a status quo that makes women perpetuate the very same cultural stereotypes they once fought against, in order to be claim equality women have reclaimed their own chains under the guise of choice and emancipation.

How do you see feminism today? Are feminism and professionalism mutually exclusive ideologies? Is there a role for feminism in art NOW? Are YOU a cinderella feminist?

Last Thursday marked Liz Glynn’s 2nd performance for Engagement Partyat MOCA Los Angeles, “Like a Patient Etherized on the Table.” The performance was part of a residency by Glynn titled “Loving you is like Fucking the Dead,” a tribute to the goth metal band Type O Negative, and follows “On the Destruction of the Crystal Palace,” the first performance in the series of three. Both pieces so far have used the museum as muse as well as setting, deconstructing the very nature of seeing, preserving, and idealizing the museum and analyze the museum as cultural construct.

"on the destruction of the crystal palace"

Glynn takes her title from a T.S. Eliot poem, “The Love Songs of J. Alfred Prufrock” from 1919, keeping us squarely in the time period she summoned for “Crystal Palace,” the turn of the 20th century. This period has obvious implications in terms of her use of museum history and art theory given the nascence of the museum as preserver of the world’s art and cultural artifacts and the emergence of new technologies that inspired oft-cited essays such as Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” But, I get ahead of myself, let’s first delve into the actual event of the evening, Glynn’s orchestrated blind-stroll through priceless works of art.

Blindfolded visitors

Upon entering the museum, visitors were given a note that explained the process for the evening, that they would follow the sound of jangling keys and stop when the sound stopped. Upon agreeing to the terms, the “viewers” were blindfolded and their stroll began in earnest. Guards and museum staff led the way, jangling their keys, conjuring the idea of authority figure and groundskeeper, the constructors of our communal experience in the institution. At each stop along the way the blindfolded were treated to time-period appropriate lines of poetry selected by Glynn as far as I can tell to emphasize the experience of darkness more than to elucidate the works on the walls or the specter of the surrounding museum. Visitors were given no clues as to where in the museum they were, or what images happened to be on the walls, in fact many were surprised to find out that in fact the lights had been on the whole time. They were then led either to an elevator or to stairs (depending on the timing of their tour–the elevator gave out about half way through the evening) and into the lower level auditorium of the museum. Once in the auditorium visitors were directed to sit and were instructed to take off their blind-fold whenever they wished and to stay as long as they liked. Upon opening their eyes, they were greeted by an illuminated blank white screen, no sound, no image, no instruction.

Duchamp's coal bags

Hearing about this performance, my mind went directly to something I was told long ago, that Duchamp at one of his art openings, instructed for the lights in the gallery to be turned off and, handing out flashlights to visitors, asserted that no one looks at art on the walls during the opening anyway. Thinking about this piece, I did a little research and learned I had heard this inaccurately, in fact, this was a reference to Duchamp’s curation of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he hung the ceiling with over one thousand coal bags, obscuring the normally well-lit room and forcing visitors to use flashlights to see the works on display. For another exhibition, First Papers of Surrealism, Duchamp entangled would-be viewers in one mile of twine, limiting greatly their ability to approach any art. About his flashlight experiment, Elena Filipovic points out in “A Museum That is Not” for e-flux, “the viewers got close to the art, leaning forward to focus their hand-held electric lights–an act in distinct contrast to the notion of ‘proper distance,’ disembodied viewing, and the ‘enlightening’ clarity of the traditional museum or gallery… One notes a concern with perception and a continuation of that assault on visual autonomy that so interested Duchamp… the interrogation of the

Duchamp's twine

autonomy of vision went hand-in-hand with a rethinking of that site so invested in maintaining it–the Cartesian exhibition space.” Clearly we see here a connection to the assault Glynn performs on visitor’s visual sense in her piece, “Like a Patient Etherized on the Table.” Glynn, to the same end, is analyzing and realizing the limitations of the museum and the structures of museum viewership as well as considering the essence of the museum itself as preserver of our cultural heritage and artistic legacy.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, also discussed the space between object and spectator and its implications. Just as Glynn looks at the destruction of the institution that was meant to preserve in her first piece and subverts the visual in a space tending toward extreme ocularcentrism in the relationship of viewer to artwork in her second piece, Benjamin also assesses what it means to preserve and the cultural need for historic validation as well as the function of physical closeness to, and originality in, works of art. Much is made of the idea here of the aura of the work of art, and Benjamin’s feeling that the aura is predicated on direct contact and originality. I see in Glynn’s piece, however, also a “talking back” to Benjamin, and an answer as to how to preserve the experience of the creative aura of works of art, by eliminating the very overused sense on which we normally rely, the ocular experience.

For Benjamin, “the contemporary decay of the aura… rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of hte masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.” Uniqueness is linked to permanence completely in this essay, and Glynn also seems to be playing with both of these ideas, a loss of permanence in the destruction of the museum as institution and the assertion of uniqueness as the temporality of experience rather than the “domain of tradition” inherent in the objecthood of the original work of art. In the first of his perceived two planes of art work reception, Benjamin points out that “artistic production begins with ceremonial objects… one may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view.” My question for visitors leaving MOCA upon experiencing Glynn’s piece was, “Did it matter that you were among works of art?” In other words, I wonder, was the knowledge of the “being there” of the work important to the experience for the visitor. Despite the common response of having been affected by the knowledge that they were in a museum, I do feel that their experience would have been different had they been told that the priceless works had been removed for this event than it was knowing that the works were just inches from their bodies. The knowing physical closeness had to have had an impression just as much as the institutional influence of the museum as place. Glynn, by orchestrating this experience of closeness and cult value of the work of art through blindness to the actual works, subverts Benjamin’s erosion of the aura caused by increased experience and exposure to reproduced work.

It is no surprise that Benjamin asserted the Dadaists, with their passion for reproduction even as a part of the act of original creation, and their ceaseless closing in and unending examination of the work and experience of art, were chiefly responsible for the destruction of the aura. Duchamp’s darkness led to greater closeness and focus, while Glynn’s darkness leads to a stepping back to the experience of the work’s cult properties, the building back up of the aura through the idea of the art’s physical legacy rather than the specific work’s manifestation as image. Susan Buck-Morss in “Mythic Nature: Wish Image,” points out that “Benjamin was reluctant to rest revolutionary hope directly on imagination’s capacity to anticipate the not-yet-existing. Even as wish image, utopian imagination needed to be interpreted through the material objects in which it found expression, for it was upon the transforming mediation of matter that the hope of utopia ultimately depended: technology’s capacity to create the not-yet-known.” Perhaps it is really through the aura an not the vision of art works that the next imagination is realized. Possibly, this is the blank screen for Glynn, the canvas for the imagination of the participant upon interaction with the aura of the work, the landing point and launching point from which to continue the utopian thought experiment itself.

In the end, I wonder whether the gaze of the viewer upon the work and the perceived being gazed upon of the viewer by the work of art can be achieved without sight itself. Is the gaze enough caught up in the aura of the object, the feeling of closeness and the perception of historical object-ness, that blinding the viewer can actually aid experience and connection to the work? In other words, perhaps the contemplation allowed through engagement in this way, rather than the distraction of seeing the actual works themselves, provides a more authentic experience and a greater aura to be present. The sense that the gaze is returned may be amplified without an actual ability to “look” upon the work. Glynn is clearly interested in other aspects of the museum experience as well, utilizing security officers to read poetry and guide experience is bold in itself, but I find fascinating the choice to place blindfolded viewers beside great works of art. I almost wish she had left the piece at that.

My background is as a fine art photographer and today I’d like to talk about photographic work and its propensity to the series. Sometimes the art in photography is the series as in an image book, sometimes the art consists of individual works that together become a series, sometimes the series is all taken together as one individual work as in a collage or installation. These categories clearly aren’t rigid and become even more complicated as we think about media and curatorship and publication, i.e. who in fact decides on the series. Perhaps it is in the artist’s imagination (as in the work of August Sander) or perhaps it is an impulse post-fact of a third party who upon viewing the work finds threads of meaning (as often happens in curated retrospectives). This topic comes up for me not only because I certainly struggle with it in my own photography, but I also have had the opportunity to explore the exhibition Under the Big Black Sun at MOCA Los Angeles in depth for the last few weeks, especially several series of photographs created during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Lets start by talking about the artistic process, although diversity among artists makes this by no means a simple trajectory. Personally, I begin often with an image or a thought, that thought transforms into an image or the image transforms into a thought. From there I explore the thought further with more images or explore the image further by expanding my sights. Sometimes this leads to a group of images that all look somewhat similar but truly were conceived individually, and sometimes this means that I come up with a group of images that only together fully realize the original intention. At other times I find myself exploring images that may be disparate and because of some level of chance perhaps, I find that they work together to express some other idea that I hadn’t even considered during exposure. These become an image in themselves, a collage made up of individual images that may or may not have been used in other projects previously but that now function as pieces of this new whole.

August Sander

It is common for artists of all media to work in series. Some painters have a general theme or utilize a unique process to create a series, but generally each of these works stand on their own. For photographers it is a little more difficult because often the end result of our work is realized in multiple forms (and multiplicity!). Photographic work may end up on an album cover, in a book, on a poster, it may be reproduced endlessly, it may be limited to a production run, or it may be completely unique. In this way, the series become far more important to the idea and function of photographic work than it is in other media. An artist like August Sander, who I mentioned earlier, conceived of his great project as a massive series documenting types of German people. This work was displayed as a series by Sander and printed into book form under his watch, but it was only through the utilization of his images as individual portraits and art pieces under the curation of Edward Steichen (in The Family of Man) and others that the idea and identity of Sander as auteur was born. The artistic acclaim of Sander as artist/image-maker was created through downplaying the staunchness of his own categorization of photographs within a series. Under the Big Black Sun offers us the possibility to directly compare different way of working with photographic art as/within the series.

Joe Deal

Separated in the museum space but conceptually quite similar, the works of Chauncey Hare, Joe Deal, and Lewis Baltz all utilize the series in a similar way. Hare photographed people as if they were office fixtures for his series “This Was Corporate America” from 1976-77. These black and white works each depict an office worker as a cog within the space wherein they work, surrounded by typical office paraphernalia from the ubiquitous file folders to the glaring lamps and cubical partitions, humanity sometimes confined to a portion of a head peeking up over the furniture as they become completely overwhelmed by the surrounding workspace. Deal’s series, “Diamond Bar: Recently Occupied Homes” from 1980 depicts the tell-tale signs of suburban occupation and development so prevalent during this period. Carefully manicured backyards fight to maintain their composure against the unoccupied chaos of neighboring grounds. Similarly but with a more clear political bent to his series, Baltz depicts the same expansion of humanity in “The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine” from 1974. These works more

Lewis Baltz

clearly juxtapose the stark walls of new development against the rambling weeds of the formerly natural grounds. All three of these photographers make a point by combining a grouping of similar photographs all shot with the same intention and always meant to be a part of the same series. Whereas these works on their own may hold some power and beauty, the political or ideological intention of the photographer is only really realized through their combination.

Another path may be seen through the works of Gronk, Hal Fischer, and Jim Goldberg, again separated spatially in this exhibition but similar in many ways from the way they use the series to, in the case of Fischer and Goldberg, their combination of text and image, and, in the case of Gronk and Fischer, their thematic

Hal Fischer

similarity. Gronk, who is better known for his large-scale mural work, created a series of black and white photographs from 1972 to 1978 that explored his life, world, and identity as a gay man. Fischer’s series, “Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding among Gay Men,” created in 1977, explored the modes of non-verbal communication in San Francisco’s sub-culture as a way to raise consciousness of the burgeoning gay rights movement in that city and elsewhere. These images combine text and imagery to underscore the photographer’s intentions. Goldberg, also using image

Gronk

and text but in this case asking the subjects themselves to create the latter, created his series “Rich & Poor” between the conspicuous years of 1979-1985. As anyone protesting today in the Occupy movement will probably be able to tell you, these years began a great disparity of wealth that continues and has expanded to this day. Goldberg’s images depict people as people within their own space and often give the feeling of the sitter having dictated the time, place, and posture of their posing. The handwriting makes it quite clear that it is the sitter’s own hand and the sitter’s own words that have been immortalized rather than the photographers although, clearly, through having orchestrated the making of the image, it is really the photographer’s intention that comes through especially through the juxtaposition of several of these compositions situated

Jim Goldberg

beside one another. In these three series, we see that the photographers have created works that stand alone yet say something more when they are positioned together. Gronk’s “Twins” makes it’s point without the other images in the series, but is so much stronger with their attachment. “Rich & Poor” just isn’t as telling without multiple stories, but even one image can introduce you to a world you wouldn’t have had access to without the photographer’s insight. And where each of the semiotic images give us a piece of the puzzle, the complete series gives us the whole picture.

We have seen now photographer’s who use the series to tell a story, and photographer’s who tell a story within each image but tell more through grouping the images together, now let’s talk about photographers who create images in a series that, in my opinion, could each stand alone and tell the full story. The two that come to mind who are shown in Under the Big Black Sunare Robert Heinecken and Peter Reiss. Heinecken’s series,

Robert Heinecken

“Inaugural Excerpt Videograms” were created in 1981 by pressing photographic paper up against a television monitor during the gala and inaugural address of Ronald Reagan. The color images are blurry and dark, only giving the viewer a hint of the familiar body and head that we all somehow still recognize. Heinecken’s often revealed political agenda is more murky in these images but nonetheless, the ominous way in which the incoming president is presented is in itself telling. Reiss’s images of children housed at Mt. Vernon State Hospital and Heinzerling Children’s Institute in Ohio for his series, “Severly and Profoundly Retarded Individuals,” is no more clear and certainly no less unsettling. These photographs show us children and young adults with very severe

Peter Reiss

disabilities and abnormalities in their own spaces and presumably with their consent given the intimacy of the relationship between photographer and viewer. In a world where most people have never come directly face to face with a person so different, the confrontational nature of being forced to look at these difficult images is tempered with the clear empathy the photographer is able to infuse through closeness and avoidance of rigid formality in favor of a more casual aesthetic. In each of these cases, the photographers create images that are each complete tales. Just one of Heinecken’s videograms allows us entry into the world of political murkiness he is immortalizing, and just one depiction of an individual imparts the confusion of feeling that Reiss so masterfully captures.

Finally, let’s briefly mention the artists who combine images together to create one piece of art work. For these photographers, and perhaps they aren’t even really photographers any more but installation artists, the individual photograph is raw material in service to the greater whole of the piece. Here the work of Ellen Brooks and John Baldessari comes to mind.  Brooks’ contribution to Under the Big Black Sunis her piece, “Adolescents” from

Ellen Brooks

1975, an image collage made up of “fourth generation” photographs of pre-pubescent children, first photographed on film, then printed on paper, then xeroxed and transferred onto wax paper and affixed to the wall as a grid. From a distance the wall is a formalists’ study in black, white and gray while closer up the images become more clear and the quiet discomfort of these culturally taboo and meaning infused images takes hold of the viewer. Baldessari also commandeers a wall with his piece, “Virtues & Vices (for Giotto)” from 1981. Depicting characters from popular films under titles such as Chastity or Greed, Baldessari re-conceives Giotto’s 14th century frescoes for the

John Baldessari

modern faith-ambiguous viewer. The authority of the church is questioned with humor and through his use of popular culture within the morality tale, Baldessari’s levity allows a window for the viewer to examine heavy ideas of faith and authority on their own terms. These photographers allow the images they use to become a part of the larger whole, each photograph could be a part of any other set but through their combination in this particular way, on this particular wall, they become a part, a piece of the greater whole, the art work.

Clearly, the series functions in many different ways. I remember as a young artist applying to schools we were told that admissions committees wanted to see that you had a strong vision, that your work was a cohesive body. With this in mind, it is difficult sometimes for artists to get out of the series, to explore images on their own and within their own context, not considering how they “fit” into a series or body of their work. In fact, the most masterful artists allow themselves the space to let images play, to make things on their own terms. On the other hand, unfortunately some artists who become well known for a certain body or series of works have trouble ever leaving that series. Once you receive critical and commercial success for a series it is quite difficult to move on to something that may be less popular and instead you end up replicating yourself, a shadow of your own former artistic impulse spread across multiple canvases rather than an authentic spark that might fizzle but also might develop into the brightest fire. The series is like so many paints or emulsions, a tool in the artistic toolbox, meant to be utilized but not to incarcerate authentic artistry.

Yesterday a performance artist, Marni Kotak, gave birth to her son in a special birthing room she constructed at Microscope, a New York gallery. The process and artistic impulse that brings a woman to give birth as a performance piece are under some scrutiny but I really want to talk about what having children is and means to artists, these personal, private acts of creation juxtaposed with the public act that is art-making, and the reasons why Kotak felt the birthing process should be installed as an art piece.

Kotak is quoted as saying “I am showing them, as in my previous performances, that real life is the best performance art, and that, if our eyes can be opened to it, all of the meaning that we seek is right there in our everyday lives.” This is truly astute and certainly an age-old wisdom espoused also in Hindu and Buddhist teachings on mindfulness and meditation. A friend recently posted on Facebook that she doesn’t understand why forward-thinking and planning is frowned upon in these traditions, that happiness can be found as much in expectation as in immediate experience. Some would say, however, that the obsessive anticipation which characterizes modern life stops us from truly having and exploring experiences as we encounter them. I think Kotak is tying to do just that, but in our modern world, the way we know how to experience events is through capture and documentation. Her birth was thoroughly photographed and videotaped and will be played on a loop throughout the run of the exhibition. In some ways, I wonder if the point ends up being missed. In her attempt to draw attention to real life in everyday activities and focus on the magic, beauty, and meaning of those experiences, she has ended up taking what should be momentary and fleeting and instead making it reproducible and sustaining thereby ignoring the true beauty that is life’s passing nature.

The impulse to document and draw from our everyday lives is undeniable and ubiquitous in the history of art, what is challenged is how close to documentation one gets in their application of experience to aesthetics. It is reasonable and advisable to be inspired by the life around you, but when you actually take that life to the page, canvas, photograph, or performance space, the value of the work is often determined differently. In one portfolio review, even before I opened my case, the reviewer asked me in a disparaging tone, “now, these aren’t going to be pictures of your kids, are they?” Well, yes, they were, but it’s not like that, really! As an artist/mom I do involve my children in my work, and even when they aren’t directly imaged, my experience and being as a mother is intrinsic now to my creative process. Many artists have aligned the act of artistic creation to the act of physical creation, either seeing them as mutually exclusive as in the case of Judy Chicago, or as deeply inspiring and specific, as in the case of Kotak. Artists from Julia Margaret Cameron, to Sally Mann, to Catherine Opie have depicted mother-hood and their own children photographically, all differently and all to great ends. The difficulty is that every single parent in the developed world has probably photographed their children and their experience as parent as well. This is the challenge as an artist working with an encompassing subject and especially in an accessible media such as photography.

Beyond the difficulty of taking on such a role as parenthood and how that affects one’s ability to have any professional life whatsoever, as artists is it possible to be inspired and creative when so much inspiration and creativity must be utilized in the simple process of raising little people? I am still trying to find balance here and for me that means channeling some of my child-rearing creative efforts into art-building creative efforts which becomes manifest at times by my children’s physical presence in my imagery.

These concepts move beyond parenting, of course, to any other creative endeavors that are a part of our lives and activities. Artists have to look at the world around them and truly try to experience life as art, I think, in order to make art that is tangible and accessible to an audience. Artists point out the patterns and beauty, the sublime and the ordinary, they teach us to focus our attention or to ignore focus and take in the greater moment at hand. If artists ignore or try to compartmentalize their own personal and private moments of creativity and passion, what does that do to the art they produce?

Check out this nice article on motherhood and art making by Sharon Butler: //www.brooklynrail.org/2008/12/artseen/neo-maternalism-contemporary-artists-approach-to-motherhood

For information on Kotak, check out this article from the Washington Post: //www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/live-birth-performance-artist-marni-kotak-delivers-healthy-baby-boy/2011/10/26/gIQAsUxoIM_blog.html

Julia Margaret Cameron, "I wait" 1860s

Sally Mann

Catherine Opie, "Self-Portrait/Nursing" 2004

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about looking at art and viewership, but today I want to talk about what looking at art does to/for artists in particular. I recently took a brief sojourn to Chicago for the Filter Photography Festival and had the opportunity to see the good, the bad, and everything in-between while visiting the city. If you haven’t had the chance to visit Chicago recently, it really is the most wonderful place to be an artist and to see art, it is a city that supports and physically embraces the arts. I had the pleasure of coming of age as an artist in this city attending the School of the Art Institute for my BFA and I think, as a place, it allowed me to develop an eye and a passion that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Back to the topic at hand, however, as I strolled through 2nd Friday opening offerings st small galleries for emerging artists in Pilsen I started to think about what looking at bad art does for the artist/viewer and this concept was further brought to my attention with a later visit to the Art Institute to see some of my favorites from my days as a student.

John Baldessari, in his conversation with Chris Knight at the Hammer a few weeks ago, mentioned his reason for living and working in Los Angeles, “I live here because L.A. is ugly… If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art? I always have to be slightly angry to do art and L.A. provides that.” Does the same hold true in terms of viewing and being exposed to bad art? First we have to think about what makes art bad. I’m not talking about art I don’t like when I say “bad art,” I’m talking about art that may be conceptually uninteresting, aesthetically unappealing without reason, contextually inappropriate, or just conceptually and physically mismatched, but to such a degree that it is unredeemed by any underlying respect for the artistic impulse that inspired its creation. In a discussion on the Museum of Bad Art located in Dedham and Somerville, MA, published in Architecture Boston, Louise Reilly Sacco, the Permanent Acting Interim Executive Director of MOBA, asserts that bringing high school students to MOBA and then to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston “frees kids to laugh and point, to have their own opinions and argue about things. Then they take the experience to the MFA, where they might otherwise feel intimidated… Maybe the ugly… frees us.” There may absolutely be a point to this in terms of novice viewership, but I wonder if this freeing reaction is different for artist/viewers. Artist/viewers tend to already be (or feel) expert enough to analyze art on their own terms, and, for them, does looking at bad art upset the “input” function to art progenesis, or, as Baldessari might feel, does looking at bad art in fact inspire through its excitation of anger, confusion, or distaste, an impulse toward art making so essential to that progenesis?

On the other hand, good art… Does looking at good art, beautiful art, inspired art, fascinating art, respected art, inspire creativity or stilt it in the recognition of the already-done-ness of almost every concept and form the mind can create? Some might say that looking to great art for inspiration, visiting museums holding works you love and respect during the process of creation, is in fact courting the disaster of mimicry in the artist’s own work. As artists, the things we see and learn go into our work whether consciously or subconsciously. In many ways, I feel that the predominant and excessive reading of internet-eze causes poor expressive fluency on the part of even educated speakers and writers. To the same end, I truly wonder whether prolonged exposure to bad visual input taints the aesthetic well from which creativity springs. In terms of reading and writing, a heavy dose of literate prose can counter-act the damage done by our text and twitter heavy cultural linguistics, so perhaps the same is true for the visual arts. There is so much visual stimulation in our modern environment, can we temper it through consistent exposure to historically important and aesthetically fluent works? For me, the space of the museum and the concentration on works of art that it permits, allows me to re-set my viewing eye that becomes lazy in our ocularcentric culture just as reading critical, historical, or poetic literary works resets the mental laziness inspired by our entertainment obsession.

In the end, looking at art and thinking about art is never truly harmful, whether good or bad. Some people are inspired by beauty, some by ugliness. The reasons for creation are as numerous as practitioners. For me though, I find that the greatest art comes from people who had an active visual life, who maintained positions among groups of artists or libraries of great works, who looked intentionally and allowed that to become a part of their own work.

I’ve been blogging a lot about shows around town but today I thought I’d take a little break to talk about art itself, and the nature of the materials we use to create.  As someone who has a background in the creative arts as well as museum studies, I often am conflicted in terms of how I look at the material nature of the craft.  On the one hand, art is creative, often messy, and very much physical in its creation (well, most–I’ll save the discussion of the artist’s “hand” in art for another blog…).  In art institutions, however, emphasis must be placed on preservation and therefore distance between viewer and viewed, whether that manifests in how many weeks of the year a piece may be shown (very short for works on paper including photography) or the physical distance at which a viewer must stand from the work.  In my mind this creates a conflict in terms of the relationship between the artist’s intentions and the viewer’s experience and we might even extrapolate that this creates a tension for any modern viewer of art between seeing and experiencing the work.

This past weekend I had a chance to visit MOCA grande with my 2 1/2 year old twins.  In some ways, kids are just completely honest when it comes to the viewing experience and I truly love introducing them to contemporary art because it leaves so much room for them to interject their own emotions and experiences.  I really enjoyed the Personal is Political show because it included many of my favorite artists such as Annette Messager but for them, the highlight was the Lynda Benglis exhibition.  Benglis created sculptural works that are extremely tactile and approachable.  The works create spaces around the actual material that embrace the viewer and intrigue the eye and my little ones immediately sensed and enjoyed the physicality of the works, especially the dripped paint piles in the middle of the floor, but they became slightly frustrated, asking again and again why they couldn’t touch or walk on the the pieces.  The answer is absolutely true, you can’t touch the work because if everyone touched it, it would no longer exist, the piece would be destroyed by the interaction.  At the same time as I say these things though, I am myself frustrated, because the work calls out to be touched, the materials are sensuous and intriguing and the works are most interesting in the imagined experience of physical contact.

Duchamp’s important work, “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even” is often cited in terms of the importance of material and acceptance of its nature as part of the work itself.  Duchamp spent years working on the piece which was painted and etched on glass.  When the work was broken during shipping, Duchamp repaired the piece but embraced the unintended change of the web of cracked glass as part of the nature of the material that was intrinsic to the art itself.  Today the piece is closely guarded and protected at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  The protection is essential given the historical importance of this work, but again, we must just think about how it changes the art to be so removed from its own material nature.

Earlier last week I mentioned in passing the work of Doug and Mike Starn, photographers who have built a huge market following for their often art historically inspired collaged photography.  I first became acquainted with their work in the early 1990s when they were first achieving prominence and major prices for their art.  At the time, I remember one of the big debates and issues being that they had used non-archival materials like scotch tape for their early collages and that these were starting to come apart and mark the photographs.  The materials used were tearing apart the works of art and, obviously, no one is going to spend that kind of money on something that won’t last!  The market drives our obsession with the archival nature of art and to be “museum quality” is the goal for all photo papers with non-color-fade lives of at least 100 years.  I suppose this was the point of photography in the first place, to create something that would freeze and preserve a moment in time (much like taxidermy, Annette Messager famously insisted).  On the other hand though, it is the time-sensitivity of the media that has always intrigued me, that we can preserve a moment but for only so long, that all life eventually fades and the age and time of a work as well as its material nature are all a part of what makes the art… well, Art.

As a photographer by training, I am accustomed to the white glove treatment in dealing with art prints and works on paper despite that fact that my own work has often been sewn, stitched, painted, manipulated, punched out and shredded.  This is in part why it was such a shock the first time we visited Cuba and met with very well known artists who stood with cigar in hand quickly flipping through their own paintings, prints, and drawings bare-handed and encouraged us to do the same.  What originally felt strange and awkward began to feel exciting and drew us further into the works we were viewing.  My experience became more aligned with the the artist’s, the act of creation that much closer to my act of viewing, my own physical presence that much closer to the artist’s.  It is still a shock to see the works of some of these artists preserved in museums and galleries today.

I still enjoy most the works that engage me as a viewer on that physical plane, the ones that incorporate some part of my physicality, whether through an auditory sensation, an immersive experience, or a tactile component to the work.  I think the more a viewer is touched and engaged on that level, the more likely they are to be moved by a work.  The closer we get to the tactile nature of art, the closer the viewer can come to understanding the materiality of the image or sculpture that they are viewing, the closer they are to feeling the artist as a part of that work, and to understanding the work, the art, itself.  Ah, but in the end, the part of me that is a historian and theorist just can’t let the art in our world be destroyed even in search of an authentic experience of the work.  Is knowing and preserving more important than feeling and understanding?

"The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)," Marcel Duchamp