In Australia in 1971, a 30-year-old white Sydney schoolteacher named Geoff Bardon took a posting in the Aboriginal-relocation community of Papunya in the outback west of Alice Springs, teaching art to the children of the patchwork indigenous community. When he began to encourage them to paint the traditional patterns they habitually traced in the sand — instead of the westernized cowboy-and-Indian scenarios that were expected of them — he inadvertently triggered one of the most remarkable artistic events of the 20th century. The Western Desert Art Movement began as a sudden outpouring of traditional visual material by dirt-poor male Aboriginal elders in this unlikely remote location, and has basically continued unabated, while expanding into a successful multibillion-dollar niche of the international art market and a major source of economic support, cultural pride and political empowerment for the indigenous Australian people.
Less than two years after arriving in Papunya, having broken under the pressure of racist individuals and institutions that wanted to stick to helping the natives with the tried-and-true strategies of incremental genocide, a.k.a. assimilation (and Johnny-on-the-spot carpetbaggers eager to cheat the artists out of even the relative pittances their canvases fetched in those early days), Bardon fled the settlement in the middle of the night, and unwittingly committed himself into the hands of notorious psychiatrist Dr. Harry Bailey, whose MK-ULTRA-style “treatments” consisted of lengthy induced barbiturate comas spiked with massive electroshocks — sometimes on a daily basis and often unauthorized. Twenty-six people died while under his care, and many others — Bardon included — were left permanently disabled. Continual pressure from dissatisfied customers, activists (including Scientology!) and journalists finally got Bailey’s “deep-sleep therapy” clinic shut down, and Bailey killed himself in 1985 in the face of a government investigation. More…
How deep is Bruegel’s pessimism? I guess the question is inseparable from that of his relation to Christianity. (He was no fool: the question is insoluble.) And from the issue of comedy. How much was horror played for laughs? Does laughter take the edge off things?
Consider the Triumph of Death in Madrid. How common a subject was it in Bruegel’s time? And where does the title come from? Of course the basic idea stems from the world of late-medieval prints and wall painting—the last time I saw it, the painting resonated immediately with a Dance of Death I had seen a fortnight before in the parish church at La Ferté-Loupière. But was not Bruegel aware that in turning a Dance of Death into a panorama of Death’s final solution—a disciplined army carrying out a scorched earth policy—he was steering into a different, more dangerous world? This is Hell, certainly, but also Last Judg-ment—with now the dead coming out of their graves not to accept reward or punishment but simply to take revenge on the living. In a way that seems typical, Bruegel insists on the closeness of the story he is telling to that of Christian resurrection of the body. Twice he shows members of the skeleton crew busily digging up the coffins of their comrades, and right at the center of the painting, in the mid-background, is a skeleton stepping from his grave (next to a horrible, blood-red filigree cross: signs of Christian burial are swallowed in the general tide of malignancy). More…
Photography’s surprising impact on the Surrealists
From The Smart Set at Drexel University…
Surrealism isn’t surreal anymore. It doesn’t shock or jolt. It isn’t confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners. The great theorist of Surrealism, André Breton, thought of himself as a revolutionary. He once wrote, “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.” Like most big talkers, he was wrong. Surrealism didn’t ruin anything or solve anything either.
Surrealism did its best, though, to shake things up. Looking out at the madness of modern life in the early 20th century, Surrealism said, “Bring it on.” The show currently on display at the International Center of Photography, “Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris,” makes that patently clear. Paris inspired the Surrealists. There was so much going on. The chaos of traffic and lights and humanity was constantly producing jarring images. Reality seemed to blur into a dream state and then back again. More…
When we walk into the denuded Guggenheim, finally wiggling past Lloyd Wright’s low-ceilinged, dark and deliberately claustrophobia-inducing entrance foyer, it takes us a few seconds to adjust to all the open space spiraling upwards and outwards around us. There’s a couple, good-looking college kids or twenty-somethings, hetero, going at it on the floor of the atrium, near the fountain. The crowd gives them wide berth. They writhe sinuously, mouth to mouth, kissing or pretending to kiss, rising onto their knees, palms flat on the other’s backs. Their hands slide down with exaggerated slowness until the palms rest flat on the floor, the first sign that there’s something artificial at work here, either in the lovers’ determined tantric exhibitionism, or the non-lovers, non-erotic erotics. Yet, as they slide once more into each other, until the black-haired girl is lying across the red-haired kid’s lap, and he doesn’t so much grab as guide her ass, with the palm again, deliberately flattened against the curve of thigh and cheek, until her legs curl into him, and her shirt rides up to reveal a naked back he will never touch, although it is the touch we are all waiting for, as, instead, she reaches up to cup his face in both hands and pull him down into a kiss, soundless this whole time, it is difficult to know how much of this is, in fact, performance, staging, whatever you want to call it, and what feelings or other unintentional stirrings we’re also witness to. More…
After a museumgoer’s trip and fall opened a rip in a century-old Picasso painting last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, officials there assured the public that — nightmarish as accidents are at a place entrusted with protecting priceless art — conservators would be able to fix the work quickly, in time for a major Picasso show in April.
But two other rare mishaps at the Met in recent years have provided hard lessons about the difficulty of making broken masterpieces whole again and of predicting when they will go back on view.
In 2002 a 15th-century marble statue by the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo — one of the most important High Renaissance statues in the museum’s collection — crashed to the floor and broke into hundreds of pieces when part of its dense plywood base buckled. Nearly six years later an Andrea della Robbia terra-cotta relief from the same period shattered after falling from a shelf above a doorway. Neither piece is back on view. More…
This thread over at Unfogged reminds me of something that’s puzzled me for years, ever since reading this: why didn’t prints displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices? Why didn’t it become the expected thing that visual artists, like writers, would primarily produce works for reproduction? (No doubt, in that branch of the wave-function*, obsessive fans still want to get the original drawings, but obsessive fans also collect writer’s manuscripts, or even theirtypewriters, as well as their mass-produced books.) 16th century engraving technology was strong enough that it could implement powerful works of art (vide), so that can’t be it. And by the 18th century at least writers could make a living (however precarious) from writing for the mass public, so why were visual artists (for the most part) weren’t artists? (Again, it’s manifestly not as though technology has regressed.) Why is it still the case that a real, high-class visual artist is someone who makes one-offs? I know that reproductions have been important since at least the late 1800s, but for works and artists who first made their reputation with unique, hand-made objects, which is as though the only books which got sent to the printing press were ones which had first circulated to acclaim in manuscript. More…
Michelangelo wrote some wonderful sonnets; Constable’s correspondence has a fascinating tough-tenderness; most visualisers have, with varying degrees of success, tried to match words to their images. But Van Gogh’s letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs (”Starry Night”), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.
Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest. More…
It is without any sense of surprise, but with the greatest of pleasure that I inform you that our very own Morgan Meis has been awarded an extremely well-deserved $30,000 by the Warhol Foundation in recognition of the excellence of his writing on art.
About eighteen months ago, the former fashion designer turned TV host turned bookmaker Todd Oldham moved his office from Soho, which he finally admitted had become “too like a shopping mall,” to an erstwhile law office in a building across from St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan. The main rooms have fantastic windows: They stretch nearly from floor to ceiling, providing spectacular views of both the chapel’s cemetery and the hive of cranes and activity that’s begun to fill up ground zero.
Oldham was there on a recent afternoon, dressed like an 8-year-old boy in blue jeans and a slim piqué polo shirt covered in a pattern of grizzly bears. The only visibly adult touch is a bushy and graying beard, the sort sometimes seen on religious zealots who gather in Union Square. He is unfazed by the morbidity of his new view. “Calatrava’s designing the PATH station!” exclaims Oldham, who is prone to exclamations. “It’s going to be so beautiful.” And, indeed, suddenly the whole scene does look almost jolly, like something from a Richard Scarry picture book.
The longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, at Sotheby’s in London on September 15th 2008 (see picture). All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last hurrah. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy.
The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising vertiginously since 2003. At its peak in 2007 it was worth some $65 billion, reckons Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, a research firm—double the figure five years earlier. Since then it may have come down to $50 billion. But the market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries.
In the weeks and months that followed Mr Hirst’s sale, spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable, especially in New York, where the bail-out of the banks coincided with the loss of thousands of jobs and the financial demise of many art-buying investors. In the art world that meant collectors stayed away from galleries and salerooms. Sales of contemporary art fell by two-thirds, and in the most overheated sector—for Chinese contemporary art—they were down by nearly 90% in the year to November 2008. Within weeks the world’s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, had to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to clients who had placed works for sale with them.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times “Fela!,” with Sahr Ngaujah sharing the title role as the revolutionary singer....
From Ben Brantly in the New York Times.
There should be dancing in the streets. When you leave the Eugene O’Neill Theater after a performance of “Fela!,” it comes as a shock that the people on the sidewalks are merely walking. Why aren’t they gyrating, swaying, vibrating, in thrall to the force field that you have been living in so ecstatically for the past couple of hours?
The hot (and seriously cool) energy that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of “Fela!,” which opened on Monday night, feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. Anyone who worried that Bill T. Jones’s singular, sensational show might lose its mojo in transferring to Broadway can relax.
True, this kinetic portrait of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, a Nigerian revolutionary of song, has taken on some starry producers — including Shawn Carter (Jay-Z) and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith — and shed 15 or 20 minutes since it was staged Off Broadway last year. But it has also acquired greater focus, clarity and intensity. In a season dominated by musical retreads and revivals, “Fela!,” which stars the excellent Sahr Ngaujah and Kevin Mambo (alternating in the title role), throbs with a stirring newness that is not to be confused with novelty.
Editor’s Note: Today we welcome a new writer to 3QD. Sue Hubbard is a freelance art writer based in London writing for a variety of publications from The Independent to the New Statesman. An award-winning poet, she has published two collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon) and Ghost Station (Salt), as well as a novel, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and a recent collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt).
Many factors have lead to London’s pre-eminence in the contemporary art world: the importance of Goldsmith’s College to the Hirst generation of YBAs, Saatchi’s ubiquitous influence as a collector, Jay Joplin’s White Cube gallery, the founding of the annual Frieze art fair, and of course, the Turner Prize, that annual award set up in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art presented each year to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition in the preceding twelve months. It has always been a controversial affair. There was, of course, that bed (it didn’t win) and Martin Creed’s minimal light bulbs that simply went on and off. Last year, the shortlist was universally derided as opaque and pretentious. But looking back over its history, love it or hate it, The Turner Prize has become a barometer of the British art scene. Those nominated, often previously unknown outside the art world, usually end up as household names.
Lens Culture, an online magazine celebrating international contemporary photography, art, media, and world culture, has a piece on the 2009 Photoquai Festival in Paris…
Photoquai, the biennial festival of photography based in Paris, was founded in 2007. Dedicated to non-western photography, the festival aims to to raise the international profile of artists previously unexhibited or little-known in Europe. It also aims to foster cultural exchange — and the vibrant interchange of different world views.
This year, the Guest of Honor at Photoquai is Iran. The festival has been directed by Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, an Iranian gallerist and founder of the Silk Road Gallery in Tehran, a space specifically dedicated to photography. More…
City Gallery is a modern art virtual gallery, presenting contemporary video art, photographic art, and performances and scripts on the internet. Since 2005, City Gallery has organized approximately 30 modern art exhibits that make use of the language of media. The current exhibit is available at http://www.citygallery.pl/.
As a crew of riggers finished hoisting a big taxidermied water buffalo onto its surreal perch the other day at the Asia Society Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there was a certain logistical satisfaction for those who looked on. “Watch the tail, guys, the tail!” one rigger yelled as the beast was pivoted into place atop a tall Ionic column, where it seemed to have climbed in its confusion.
But the sense of symbolic accomplishment in the feat was much greater. The water buffalo is a ubiquitous presence in many areas of Pakistan, where its tail is often painted red with henna. And the ascension of one onto a pedestal — to create a comically eerie sculpture by the artist Huma Mulji — was an apt metaphor for the larger exhibition being installed around it that morning in several of the museum’s galleries. More…
Below is a series of appropriated posters that I painted over and reinstalled into bus stops. These are the first posters to hit the streets in an ongoing experimental campaign to raise cognitive awareness and more importantly to inspire benevolent action that we often forget, oversee, or might be in opposition to our often hedonistic culture. These first batch of posters can be found in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. More to come. Many more. More…
A typical room at the Thompson LES, a hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that opened last summer, has the look of an industrial-chic loft, with exposed concrete columns, a floor-to-ceiling window and a platform bed. But it’s the room’s art that is most startling: a giant lightbox that floats above the bed. Inside is a photo of a tree from the photographer Lee Friedlander’s “Apples & Olives” series. Seen one way, the art adds a much-needed organic element to the room; seen another, the black-and-white image seems to meld perfectly with the bleak streetscape below.
The forward-thinking placement of art doesn’t stop there. Down in the restaurant, an installation by Peter Halley sets glitzy metallic rectangles against a smoky background. And on the third-floor terrace, three consecutive film stills of Andy Warhol, taken from “Andy Warhol: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man,” by Gerard Malanga, lie submerged at the bottom of a swimming pool. More…
Mario Minichiello is the Head of Department and Chair of Visual Communications programmes at Birmingham City University BIAD, faculty of Art and Design, Britain. He is also a visiting research Fellow at the University of Sydney, School of art. An award winning artist and designer producing both inspirational and often controversial reportage artwork for broadcast media including television, broadsheet newspapers and magazines. Professor Minichiello has recently been a guest on a number of broadcast debates on the role of art in society and has most recently taken part in an interview with Press TV, this was broadcast on a number of international channels including al-Jazeera. More…
Colin Rhodes, Professor, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney, Rozelle, NSW, Australia,
Leoni Schmidt, Academic Director: Research & Postgraduate Studies, School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
Tomasz Wendland, Dr. Wendland is a practicing artist who works in various media: Video, installation, drawing, sculpture, photography, object and performance, Poland
Judy Chicago, Artist, Author, Feminist, Educator, and Intellectual, New Mexico, USA
Barbara Fischer, Barbara Fischer, Director/Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, University of Toronto; as well as Senior Lecturer in Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art at University of Toronto, Canada
Aaron Levy, Teacher, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nancy Mithlo, Assistant Professor, Art History and American Indian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Common Ground has launched its own YouTube page devoted to the Arts in Society Conference. You can now upload your PowerPoint presentations, videos and see plenary presentations to the site. For more information please visit the website at: http://artsinsociety.com/conference-2009/online-presentations/
Recently uploaded videos include the plenary presentation of Andrew Selby from TRACEY: The Online Journal of Contemporary Drawing Research at the 2008 Arts Conference, Birmingham, UK.
To view other recent downloads and to join the Common Ground Arts Conference YouTube Group please click here.
Paper abstract: Drawing in relational mode emphasises process and tends to be propadeutic, incomplete and provisional. It opens boundaries for interdisciplinary visual arts practices and entails the mapping of points in space deployed through locational mapping strategies involving bodies-in-action. The translation from ideas to open-ended materialisation is crucial to relational drawing. ??Three case studies are presented and analysed. The projects involved play out in particular contexts in Aotearoa New Zealand where they have geopolitical and pedagogical implications. On the periphery of centres of visual arts production, the projects make their own respective impacts and undermine claims to universality within the larger arena of contemporary visual arts production in the world. Through the provisional register of their relational drawing registers the projects enable ongoing negotation through collaborative action and communal learning.
On Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th March, the Universities of Bolton and Huddersfield are collaborating to host the first Northern Student Scriptwriters’ Conference across two locations.
This two day conference is an opportunity for undergraduates, postgraduates and new and emerging writers to learn about the mechanics of the scriptwriting industry and to participate in workshops and garner advice from successfully established writers. The first day of the conference at the University of Bolton deals specifically with Film and Television writing, whilst the second day at the University of Huddersfield concentrates on Theatre and Radio writing.
Enquiries can be made via jks1@bolton.ac.uk / 01204 903331.
Call for Papers - submissions required by 24 April 2009. Send all submissions and inquires to sflock@ulb.ac.be.
1989 was a great turn in the history of East Central Europe. Twenty years after the fall of Berlin’s wall, the Centre for Czech Studies of Brussels Free University has chosen to investigate on the post-1989 period and to focus its reflection on performing arts. The conference will be held on the symbolic date of 27th and 28th November to commemorate the success of the Velvet Revolution. During those two days, we will propose to question historically and artistically the post-1989 period and the perspectives of the new stage in East Central Europe. Speakers will not only be historians and theatrologs, but also artists. The aims of this gathering are to examine 1989 insisting on differences and similarities in East Central European theatre, encompassing all generations, as well as to define its very new characteristics.
The most recent issue, 
