The unlikely creation of an international art movement
By Doug Harvey at LAWeekly…
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…
From T. J. Clark at The Threepenny Review…
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…
By Randy Kennedy from The New York Times…
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…
A new exhibition at City Gallery from Artur Klosinski - BUDAPEST / 13 minute video / from 20 December 2009
(still from ‘BUDAPEST’ by Artur Klosinski)
From Andrew Motion at The Guardian…
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…
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/.
Randy Kennedy at The New York Times writes:
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…
