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…

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…

Tino SehGal, Untitled Installation–The Guggenheim Museum, through March 10th

From n+1 magazine:

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…

Recently published papers in The International Journal of the Arts in Society include:

• Chicano Art as Alternative Media: Its Influence on US Popular Culture (And Beyond) by Regina Marchi.
• Locus Solus by Sozita Goudouna.
• Pleasure Versus Pressure in the Piano Lesson: Music Education and Examinations in Malaysia by Jason Kong-Chiang Tye.
• The Postcolonial Sentimental: Imagining Cornelio by René J. Marquez.
• Process and (As) Community in Public Art: Audience Participation in Creating Art, Place and Meaning by Kevin Todd.
• The Conundrum of Medium Specificity: How can the Engagement with a Postmodern Juxtaposition of Media also Promote Medium Specificity? by Andrea Thoma.

• The Venetian Heritage of Dalmatia (Or the “Balkan” Heritage of Venice?) by Thomas E. Schweigert.
• Symphony Audience Development: Analysis of Organizational Culture in the Performing Arts by Erin E. Carey.
• The Influence of European Arts on Bagh-e-Golestan: The Qajarid Garden by Sedigheh Golshan.
• Fifty Years On the Road: Images of the Car in Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ by Jonathan Peter Day.
• Post-pastoral Ceramics: A Distinctive Ecological Language by Julia Jones.
• South African Cinema in a Global Marketplace by Damon Jon Heatlie.

The latest issue of The International Journal of the Arts in Society includes:

• Second Life: Performing the Real in Digital Arts by Leman Giresunlu.
• The Japanese Garden, Humanism, and the Contemporary American Landscape by Min Lum Mossman.
• On the Threshold-looking In: Bakhtin’s Concept of Dialogue in Visual Art Education by Gabriele Esser-Hall.
• The New Triple A Art, Archive and Artefact – At the Military Museums Lessons and Implications from a Converged Environment by Colleen Sharpe and John Wright.
• Space and Pedagogy: Explorations of Space through Poetry and Contemporary Art Practices in India by Dipalle Parmar - Haworth.
• Engaging Objects: The Talking Objects Programme at the British Museum by Emma Poulter.

• The Violence of the Unsaid in Van Sant’s Elephant and Paranoid Park: The Active Role of the Viewer in Creating Narrative Meanings by Ana Paula Barroso.
• Japanese Fireworks (Hanabi): The Ephemeral Nature and Symbolism by Damien Liu-Brennan and Mio Bryce.
• Writing ‘whiteness’: Representing the Afrikaner in post-apartheid South Africa – a comparative study of Athol Fugard’s “Sorrows and Rejoicings” (2002) and Jason Xenopolous’ “Promised Land” (2002) by Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt.
• The Cult of the New and the Work of Critique by Angeliki Spiropoulou.
• Water Over Skin: A Post-colonial Analysis of Cultural Identity - Overcoming a Sense of Shame by Daphne Cazalet.
• Transforming Hamilton, Creatively: Changing a City from a Cowtown to a Wowtown by Cheryl Reynolds.

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…