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Tag: Art
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Book Review: Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II By Elizabeth Rodini
ABJECT OBJECTElizabeth Rodini’s Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II (2020) landed on my radar through meeting Rodini last year at the American Academy in Rome, where she is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director. Rodini’s recent object biography investigates a number of intriguing and complex issues. Gentile Bellini, brother of the better-known Giovanni, was a Venetian artist. In 1479, he was commissioned to travel to Istanbul to paint a portrait of the Sultan, Mehmed II. This Renaissance portrait of an Ottoman sultan has gained a broad mystique, its legend perhaps eclipsing the actual substance of the canvas itself.
We may follow Rodini into the subterranean vaults of London’s National Gallery, where she finally encounters the portrait she has been exhaustively researching for so long …in a state of neglect, an object so altered and eroded as to bear little resemblance to its original state. This abject object had been the focus of intense strife and controversy, fought over for centuries.
Lowering the Great Winged Bull, lithograph, frontispiece to Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, (London, 1849), The New Your Public Library, Digital Collections. Rodini brings this ostensibly dry and academic subject to life with the intensity of a gripping mystery novel…”Who done it?”
Cultural patrimony—the premise that artworks belong in the culture, often the country, where they were made—was a budding idea in 1912 when the owner of the painting, Enid, widow of collector and archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, passed away. The Layard collection, then housed in a palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, was willed to her nephew, and London’s National Gallery. Before those parties could resolve who might have rights of ownership, they needed to get the painting to England—no small feat with Italy clinging to its treasured art objects.
This question of individual’s rights of ownership is a challenging one: Is it better to support the claims of individuals’ (or institutions) to private ownership of artwork, or will the broader good be served by placing the artwork in a setting deemed more culturally appropriate?
The Elgin/Parthenon Marbles are the “litmus test” for this issue, according to Rodini. Lord Elgin brought them from Greece to the British Museum in the early 19th century, where they have now resided for over 200 years. Greece, reasonably arguing that they were looted from the Parthenon in Athens, demands their return. The dispute has raged for centuries; Byron was among the first to condemn the looting. Once this is eventually settled, it may tip the scales for similar repatriation cases across the globe.
After James Fergusson, color lithograph, The Palaces of Nimroud Restored, color lithograph in Austen Henry Layard, The Monuments of Ninevah, 2nd Series (London, 1853), pl. 1. The New York Public Library, Digital Collections. Rodini takes a measured stance overall, weighing the value of the universality of priceless antiquities against the need to redress past injustices. Her description of studying an image in 2015 of an Assyrian winged bull in the British Museum, concurrent with reading news stories of ISIS defacing with power tools a nearly identical ancient sculpture in Iraq as part of a purge of imagistic artwork, definitely provides food for thought. Still, no excuses can be made for the colonialist and Orientalist impulses of these early plunderers, and repatriation will no doubt be one of the key challenges facing museums as they research the provenance of objects in their collections.
Rodini’s thoughtful work offers us an eye-opening window into many enticing, interwoven and labyrinthine realms.
Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II:
Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic ImageBy Elizabeth Rodini
224 pages
I.B. Tauris
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ASK BABS
For Your Eyes OnlyDear Babs, My spouse stopped making art after getting her BFA in painting 10 years ago and hasn’t touched a brush to canvas in the five years we’ve been married, but the pandemic got her painting again, and I’ve never seen her happier. I know nothing about art, but I think hers is very cool. The problem is she refuses to show her work to anyone but me. How can I support her art and get it out into the world?
—Supportive in Scottsdale
Dear Supportive, If your spouse didn’t have an art-school background, I’d suggest you nudge her into the limelight as soon as possible. A little praise goes a long way when you’re new to calling yourself an “artist.” But your spouse is in a very different scenario. Even though she’s been on a long hiatus, she’s already an artist, and it’s going to take more than Etsy sales and kudos from the neighbors to get her to be comfortable showing her work again. You are not the person to tell her how to be an artist. She already is one.
The good news is she’s making art, you’re happy for her, AND you like her paintings. Consider yourself lucky that she trusts you enough to show you her work. Right now, your spouse needs the physical and mental space to grow and re-engage with the practice of making her art. Let her decide what that means. Only then will she be willing to show her work to other people. You have no idea how difficult it can be to emerge from creative hibernation.
Back in college, she had plenty of people to talk with about her art. For the time being, she has you, so get to know her work and her artistic inspirations. Ask her to make you a viewing/reading list so you can better understand the art that matters most to her. Get to know something about her materials, her techniques, why she paints what she paints. But remember, she doesn’t need a critic (and you’re not qualified to be one); she needs a comrade. Be her biggest fan. Trust that your informed enthusiasm will be infectious, and one day, your spouse will give you permission to spread the gospel about her work. Until then, be the support she needs and let her set the pace.
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GALLERY ROUNDS: Hana Ward
Ochi ProjectsOchi Projects’ current exhibition, “an exit from this room and others like it,” features the latest painting and ceramic work of artist Hana Ward. In this show (all works 2021) both objects and paintings reflect on themes of time and isolation; feelings we are all too familiar with this past year. However, Ward takes these somewhat somber sentiments, and through luscious colors, illustrative marks and whimsical compositions, depicts scenes of power and potential.
Hana Ward, that drinking-wine-kind-of-thinking, oil on canvas, 2021 The show is made up mainly of paintings of Black female figures existing alone in wistful, reflective states. Rather than seeming to abide existentially in limbo though, Ward’s figures appear purposeful, even hopeful. Most of the paintings the women are in domestic settings as in that drinking-wine-kind-of-thinking, where a woman sits alone with a glass of wine at a dining room table. The illuminated figure appears in contemplation and the window behind her reveals an ethereal moonlit landscape. Although she exists alone in the confines of the dining room, the glow of the moon hints at the beauty and mystical world just beyond the window. In an exit from this room and others like it, a woman stands in the foreground of a room with a red painted floor extending behind her. The focal point leads to an open door, emitting a warm yellow glow that she looks toward hopefully.
Hana Ward, ima koso (now is the time), ceramic, glaze, clock, 2021 Themes of domesticity and time are further explored through the handcrafted ceramic wall pieces that are also a strong component of Ward’s practice. Clocks and vessels of sculpted faces are inter-dispersed throughout the other paintings, directly referencing concepts of time and space with titles such as ima koso (now is the time) where hands of a clock extend from the forehead of the woman they rest on—portraying how time is on the forefront of the mind.
In a year seeming to have no measure, Ward encapsulates this concept in reflection and celebration and looks towards the future. An exit from this room and others like it, reminds us that this moment will hold its mark for each of us, yet progression is in constant forward motion.
Hana Ward: an exit from this room and others like it
at Ochi Projects
March 27 – May 8, 2021Images courtesy of Ochi Projects.
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OUTSIDE LA: Katya Grokhovsky
Smack Mellon, New YorkKatya Grokhovsky is an artist and curator who explores the expectations of the American dream and the lived experiences of immigration to the US. Originally from Ukraine, Grokhovsky founded The Immigrant Artist Biennial, which launched last year despite many pandemic-related setbacks. In her current show at the New York-based nonprofit and exhibition space Smack Mellon, Grokhovsky created a wild installation of colors, textures and shapes called FANTASYLAND. Playing off of the themes of happiness, high hopes and naïve joy associated with Disneyland, Grokhovsky confronts the slow deflation of dreams as the shiny façade of living in America starts to deteriorate.
Grokhovsky uses a variety of mediums to make large assemblages with colorful objects such as giant plush toys, inflatable beach balls, parachutes and neon signs. FANTASYLAND is a site-specific installation for Smack Mellon that resembles a playground that at first feels like an exciting, welcoming amusement park, but upon closer inspection reveals darkness and decay. The exhibition is at once inviting, yet off-putting, bewitching and grotesque. The artist subtly chips away at the cheer and joy and leaves you with a sense of having missed out on something that was once beautiful.
Katya Grokhovsky, FANTASYLAND, 2021. Addressing American society’s culture of excess and consumerism, the large, colorful assemblages are made of repurposed materials like shopping bags and pieces of textile, adding to this sense of arriving at something that has seen better days. The materials are worn, slightly decaying and sun-bleached, with evidence of their past lives buried in layers below. Much like immigrants themselves, the installation appears to have a history, one that is being constantly reworked and added to rather than cleansed or erased. The works bear stories that the viewer can never fully know. A nod to the journey of immigrating and the idea of past lives and past homes, there is a strong sense of impermanence. The materials themselves are not archival, and the arrangement of the objects would inevitably vary if it were ever replicated.
Expanding on this sense of impermanence are the giant beach balls scattered around the installation. The balls, all in different stages of deflation, seem symbolic of the American dream, as if the idea of America is slowly deflated as the experience is lived. Deflation in general is a common thread throughout the exhibition. Deflated, lifeless parachutes hang from the industrial beams of the building and are draped around the beach balls. The balls inherently continue to lose air as the exhibition progresses, mirroring the constant evolution of life.
Katya Grokhovsky, FANTASYLAND, 2021. Grokhovsky’s works say so much about the experience of immigration: the hopeful expectations, the disappointment, the arduous, endless work, and the feeling of being sold on a dream that exist as a shell of its past. Powerful and poignant, she delivers her message wrapped in a shiny, colorful package that is as welcoming and foreboding as the story of immigration.
Photos by Etienne Frossard, courtesy of Smack Mellon.
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GALLERY ROUNDS: Ishi Glinsky
Chris Sharp GalleryIshi Glinsky’s exhibition explores monuments of survival that honor the sacred practices of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, native to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Upon entering Chris Sharp Gallery I am instantly subsumed by Glinsky’s monolithically scaled leather jacket that levitates in the middle of the room. Coral vs. King Snake Jacket (2019) is colossally sublime, towering just over 10 feet tall. I feel an immediate desire to get close to the sculpture. I imagine crawling into the pocket of the worn-in jacket to discover an old receipt or a matchbox. The teeth of the zipper form interlocking arrowheads. Each crease in the leather recalls a story, a gesture, a history; each stud a piercing act of violence. As I look over each intricate detail, I notice that the jacket is adorned with an assortment of patches and pins, as leather jackets often are. Some are insignias for bands like Public Enemy and the Dead Kennedys, while others signify Native American activist groups, such as AIM (The American Indian Movement), and MMIW, stitched in black and red beads to represent missing and murdered Indigenous women. The sleeve of the jacket reads “YOSEMITE MEANS THOSE WHO KILL.” While the leather jacket’s hard exterior is a cultural symbol for rebellion, it also offers warmth and protection. Glinsky’s work embodies Indigenous history, resistance and survival.
Coral vs. King Snake Jacket, 2019 The radically oversized scale of Glinsky’s sculpture pays homage to Indigenous practices and native land that has historically been exploited and unrecognized. Western-hegemonic art history recalls monumental art by minimalist giants and land artists like Donald Judd and James Turrell, who have historically exploited stolen land, using it as a backdrop for their work. Art history works to reinforce violent colonialist narratives. We need new monuments and new storytellers. Glinsky’s sculpture acts as a counter monument that acknowledges and celebrates Indigenous people and their survival. While minimalism offers ahistorical universal ideals, Glinsky’s monument denounces dominance and claims resistance.
Coral vs. King Snake Jacket (detail), 2019 Indigenous scholar and activist Gerald Vizenor characterizes “survivance” as an active sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry. Survivance carries forward Indigenous stories through collective memories and embodied practices.[1] Glinsky’s monument announces and honors Indigenous survival, demanding space for remembrance and existence.
Installation view: Friend ore Foe, 2021; Blue Rider, 2019 Chris Sharp Gallery
runs thru April 24, 2021 -
OUTSIDE LA: Izzy Barber
James Fuentes, New YorkIzzy Barber’s exhibition, “Maspeth Moon,” at James Fuentes brings together new plein air paintings that capture daily life in New York. Petite in size (the smallest 4” x 4” and others around 10” x 9”) Barber’s paintings are snapshots of quiet scenes that are at once private and familiar. From Little Italy to Midtown to Maspeth in Brooklyn, Barber paints the shared spaces and collective experiences that connect New Yorkers on a personal level.
Juniper Valley, 2021 Some paintings are identified by location, while others are left unnamed, but feel no less familiar. Barber often paints places and feelings she has encountered on a walk. “It can be a group of people, a structure, or a combination of colors that makes me stop and look again,” she explained in an email exchange after I inquired with the gallery staff. “Half the time I make a small sketch before I return another day with a canvas. Other times it’s a certain city block or neighborhood that I know has a feeling that I want to paint.”
Ridgewood Roof, 2020 One such feeling is captured in Ridgewood Roof (2020), in which the roof became both the studio and the subject. Painted in rich brown hues, neighboring roofs with glowing windows and a distant, sparkling city skyline unfold before the viewer. With so little outdoor space, rooftops have become a huge part of New Yorkers’ lives, especially over the last year. Far from luxurious, the city’s roofs are typically unfinished and dirty. A true representation of the resiliency of New Yorkers, rooftops became symbolic of how any outdoor space can be turned into something useful and possibly even beautiful.
Barber’s use of color captures the changing light as the days and seasons evolve. In Mott Street Market (2020), vibrant blue umbrellas and quaint food stands recall the Amalfi Coast or the Island of Capri. This same rich, mesmerizing blue is seen throughout the exhibition. The artist spends at least a day in her studio mixing paint to prepare for her outdoor excursions.
Weekend Gamblers, 2020 Barber’s paintings are truly done en plein air, often in periods of a few hours. “There is no rule, but the majority of the works in this show were done in one session. They are all painted on location. I bring the paintings back to my studio to look at them and if they don’t feel right I return to the same spot and keep working. If [the subject] is a fleeting moment, it’s going to be a quick painting. In the winter, I’ll stop when my hands or feet get numb; I can lose track of time easily when painting.”
It’s hard not to imagine the artist sitting in the snow painting the colorful blurs of sledders in Juniper Valley (2021) or swiftly working to capture the movement of the figures playing games in Weekend Gamblers (2020). Barber transports the viewer to these special moments, leaving a renewed sense of curiosity for the places and feelings emblematic of New York.
Izzy Barber: “Maspeth Moon”
James Fuentes, New York
April 8–May 9, 2021
All images courtesy of James Fuentes.
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OUTSIDE LA: Artes Mundi 9
National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39For the 9th edition of the Artes Mundi Prize, an international panel of jurors —made up of Cosmin Costinas (Executive Director and Curator of Para Site, Hong Kong), Elvira Dyangani Ose (Director at The Showroom, London) and Rachel Kent (Chief Curator at MCA, Sydney) — shortlisted six established and mid-career artists whose works expose the relationship between the individual and the collective, unfolding across memory and history. Whilst the final winner will be announced on April 15, a digital version of the exhibition has recently opened with a rich public program. An overt quest for healing and reconciliation among human beings, and within a culturally and emotionally displaced self, are at the center of Dominican Republic-born artist Firelei Báez’s research. Historic maps and diagrams from colonial periods support the artist’s colorful and detailed drawings which often depict the majestic bodies of mythological creatures, the Ciguapas. The three large-scale paintings realized by the artist for Artes Mundi 9 are caught in the act of “traversing” the plain surface of the map grids, printed onto the canvas, in search of situating unprivileged histories and geographies differently.
Firelei Báez, the soft afternoon air as you hold us all in a single death (To breathe full and Free: a dec-laration, a re-visioning, a correction), 2021 (detail). Acryl-gouache and chine collé on archival printed paper. Installation view: Artes Mundi 9. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photography: Stuart Whipps.While interconnections among locations and individuals are present in Firelei Báez’s works in the form of an emotional attachment to a far-away place, the Ghanaian artist Dineo Seshee Bopape explores the influence of a global history over other, local ones by emphasizing the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of materiality in her immersive works. Across over 1000 drawings gathered together in unfinished grids as part of Master Harmoniser (2020), Bopape uses soil and clay from different locations across the U.S. and Africa that have been marked by the history of the Atlantic slave trade. The rest of the rooms dedicated to Bopape’s works have walls washed with soil from sacred Welsh sites. These spaces host the sound piece Gorree (song): Thobela: harmonic conversions (2020) and the remnants of (Nder brick) ___ in process (Harmonic Conversions) (2020), a spiritual ceremony she made in homage to Northern Senegalese women who sacrificed their lives in order to escape enslavement. The intimate personal belief systems that people to navigate history and, equally, to preserve memory from disappearing, are fundamentals to a deep understanding of the artist’s creative proposition.
On the contrary, this private and introspective dimension seems to be denied and turned away by official accounts of history and memory investigated by Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi investigates in Angels of Testimony (2019). The work consists of three, screen video pieces where the artist prompts confrontations with his own national guilt, alongside younger generations of fellow citizens. Whether they are filmed in the rehearsal space of the artist’s studio or in crowded Japanese streets, public testimonies from an elderly veteran of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), provoke a cascade of conflicting sentiments within the exhibition space. An emotional fatigue and exhaustion is thus perceived as a side effect of a never-ending tension between forms of reappropriation, omitted national histories, self-reconciliation and collective healing. In Koizumi’s work, history and memory appear as malleable and deformable entities that evolve within the ongoing relationship established between human beings and their broader surrounding.
Meiro Koizumi, The Angels of Testimony, 2019 (detail). Three-channel video installation, colour, sound, archival materials. Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam and MUJIN-To Production, Tokyo. Installation view: Artes Mundi 9 Photography: Stuart Whipps.Through her film installations, Puerto Rican artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz registers changes and deviances observed within the lives of local communities, by actively intervening on the viewers’ perceptions. The main sensorial faculty called into question is certainly sight. At the center of the room, a series of forms made from triangular pieces of mirrored glass titled Malascopios 1-5 (2020) —a Spanish neologism invented by the artist to indicate the act of “see wrong”— generate kaleidoscopic effects across the 16mm film projections. This is evident in Otros Usos (2014), a film shot on a former US naval base in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, where land, sea and sky collapse in an abstract succession of images.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Installation view: Artes Mundi 9. Courtesy the artist. Photography: Stuart Whipps.Explorations of the landscape as a sort of memory-catcher of the countless spoliations—realized by humans and non-humans alike—on post-colonial states are further carried out by Indian artist Prabhakar Pachpute. Pachpute perpetrates a subtle disambiguation between reality and imagination through the restoration of dystopian and archetypal imaginaries. Drawing from his family history of three generations as workers at Indian coal mines, and deep archival research into the Welsh mining community, Pachpute’s large paintings portray landscapes where vegetation, humans and animals are the great, felt absent. In such desolation, however, a window of opportunities of a better world, encompassing cooperation and solidarity among workers, as well as between human and non-human entities, is left open through the symbolic use of the clenched fist. A march against the lie (IA) (2020), shows a clenched fist rising from a topography of soil on a draped canvas and sets the tone for engaging with American artist Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic works.
Prabhakar Pachpute. The march against the lie (1A), 2020. Acrylic and charcoal pencil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata. Installation view: Artes Mundi 9 Photography: Stuart Whipps.Artes Mundi 9 seem to recognize that protests are, ultimately, the pivotal element which allows human and planetary history to take unexpected routes, often through processes of rupture and renovation. This strong affirmation should be contextualized in the way Weems’s multi-image works offer a commentary on hyper-contemporary transnational unions and cross-cultural collectivities. Presented when the larger global movement of Black Lives Matter began to take to the streets worldwide, The Push, The Call, The Scream, The Dream (2020) puts forward a clear gesture of solidarity toward those who fight for justice and equality for all. By highlighting the role that singular individuals play in the unfolding of history and in the fabrication of new memories, Weems’s work stresses also that these histories and memories cannot be fully understood alone. Instead, they require an analytic sight of the interconnections that characterize our humanity, capturing a broad span of experience, from moments of solitary mourning to the restoration of collective intimacies.
Carrie Mae Weems, Repeating the Obvious, 2019. 39 digital archival prints of various sizes. Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. Installation view: Artes Mundi 9 Photography: Stuart Whipps.Artes Mundi 9
National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39
March 15 – September 5, 2021Artists: Firelei Báez, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Meiro Koizumi, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Prabhakar Pachpute, Carrie Mae Weems
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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain
“Fly in League with The Night” at Tate BritainA man sits center frame, drowned within an interior sea of red hues, arms spread as he pensively gazes against our direction into the distance of the frame. A woman laughs cross-legged on a stool, mouth wide open as if paused mid-speech or laughter, as a grinning fox resting on the checkered floor between her legs mimics her expression. Nearby, two young girls explore a white-stricken landscape as they inquisitively play with what is left of the scattered land which surrounds them.
Mystic Edifice (2020) The unique allure of Ghanaian-British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings rests in her enigmatic ability to mold past, present, and future; creating timeless landscapes that explore the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environments. Such elements are not usually deemed extraordinary, but since—like Yiadom-Boakye herself—all of her subjects are black, it feels radical. Smiling, smoking, lounging on beaches, and dancing; these autonomous subjects compel you to look, allowing black figures to become the protagonists of their own stories at last.
“Fly in League with The Night” seamlessly transitions itself from large-scale to mid-size works, from singular portraits to group images. Some works are paired to operate in dialogue with an other, such as Wrist Action (2010) and Bound Over to Keep the Faith (2012) where two androgynous figures are presented side-by-side, mysteriously grinning in the direction of the viewer. One rests their head upon their fist, whilst the other flashes a peach glove as if teasing us with what we are able and unable to identify. Straddling the line of what it means to be hyper-visible, seen, and simultaneously unseen; their gesture only amplifies their expression. Walking away from the exhibition, your mind remains marked by the tiny details of the faces you have just seen, with each figure slipping and merging into the other, much like I imagine Yiadom-Boakye intended.
To Improvise a Mountain (2018) Yiadom-Boakye executes a masterful approach to painting. Every brush stroke appears thick and distinct, yet complimentary of every shaded hue which appears. It is as if one can hear moments from each mark. In every brushstroke there is a laugh, a giggle, or a sigh, and with each of the endless black and maroon marks, or little burst of carnival yellow or rose pink, there is a moment of life. Black skin tones are rendered before us to echo the sentiment that no matter where they are placed, these characters will always find the light, whether it be through an expression, a gaze, or a gesture. Yes, these subjects are black, but Yiadom-Boakye redirects our thought and forces the viewer to question: why does such a thing actually matter?
Condor the Mole (2011) Fly in League of The Night brings together over 80 works crafted over a 17-year period. A timely and provocative mid-career retrospective, these works will haunt you far and beyond your initial viewing. Perhaps there are some studies featured which have lesser impact against the monotonous default white walls of Tate Britain. However, this is nowhere near distracting enough to fault the show. Yiadom-Boakye truly does fly away with her imagination, forging a realm far beyond what we are taught the Western Canon of painted portraiture should look like, and allowing black figures to exist in a timeless space where they are able to simply be at rest and at play, with room to finally take a breath.
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Sherrie Levine: Sherrie Levine, Sherrie Levine
Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Self-portrait, Courtesy the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels Part I: Lana Del Rey
Some claimed that Lana Del Rey’s 2017 song “Get Free” was a rip-off of Radiohead’s iconic and self-masturbatory indie ballad “Creep,” which led to a rather unhinged and masculinist lawsuit. It seems that for women artists, homage or deconstruction or enjoyment or critique can all slide seamlessly and without conversation into fraudulence or a sort of frivolous game. This is to say nothing of still ongoing quests for (female, queer, POC) genius that are both necessary and regressive in their modernist preciousness. Of course, anything be similar and/or dissimilar to anything: bodies, one evocative wilderness or another, chord progressions, rainbows, discourses, bronze, women (largely) artists working at a certain place and in a certain time and in certain academically verified modes, photographs as such, lives, instances of falling in love. I will quote “Get Free” pretentiously “at length”:
There’s no more chasing rainbows
And hoping for an end to them
Their arches are illusions
Solid at first glance
But then you try to touch them (Touch, touch)
There’s nothing to hold on to (Hold, hold)
The colors used to lure you in (Shut up, shut up)
And put you in a trance (Ah, ah, ah, yeah)I don’t know the outcome of the man-child Radiohead outcry, but I do know that if they won the battle, they did not win the war, for Lana already exposed the trance and all of its iterations, thus rendering the archetypal idea of a copy archetypally unnecessary.
There is a freedom and pleasure in living inauthentically and without originality. In the chorus of “Get Free,” just after her appeal to rainbows, Lana pleads, moving from one archetype to another:
Sometimes it feels like I’ve got a war in my mind
I want to get off, but I keep ridin’ the ride
I never really noticed that I had to decide
To play someone’s game or live my own life
And now I do
I wanna move
Out of the black (Out of the black)
Into the blue (Into the blue)So, the movement toward optimism might be regimented, like the rainbow-turned-solid, or in the process of chalky decomposition. In any case, irrespective of the game she plays, she is still stuck within the colors of a bruise, and she and we love it.
Part II: Kermit the Frog
Kermit the Frog, like Lana Del Rey, knew that rainbows are the ultimate cliché, something that reproduces itself infinitely in ways that are life-giving and saccharine. They are a luxury (feminine, queer, hysterical, over-the-top, frilly, wasteful) but they are necessary. Despite their erotic curvature, rainbows are, in this way, akin to grids, bars, and the constraining heft of critique and deconstruction. On YouTube, you can find a “Rainbow Connection” duet sung by Kermit the Frog and Debbie Harry. Its wholesome and nostalgic spectacle is just that and nothing more and that has to be OK. In that moment, Debbie Harry was the Debbie Harry of Hairspray and not the Debbie Harry of the New Wave. But pretentiousness about genre is the worst kind. The fact that it is Debbie Harry of Hairspray with Kermit the Frog has to be OK in order for us to cope with the fact that the rainbow connection cannot be fulfilled
All of us under its spell
We know that it’s probably magic
And indeed, it must be magic, for it is being sung to us by a Muppet, whose only skull or trace is the puppeteer’s hand, and when the hand is retracted, there is nothing: only gauzy belief. But the magic lies in the fact that gauze cannot bruise, and that is solace enough. Debbie Harry has a skull though, but she does not offer it to Kermit or to us, and that is OK too.
Part III: Karen Carpenter
Gay men love Karen Carpenter, who did a beautiful cover of “Rainbow Connection” that was release posthumously in 1998, because all gay men (at least those, oftentimes, but not exclusively, of a certain age who were educated in the Judy Garland School) carry with them, inside, where the gauze is, a forced embrace of death, which is the ultimate form of unoriginality. And unoriginality is a form of wasting away, as is the evaporation of a rainbow in the indifferent sun or in the eyes of a cruel lover. And no one can be remarkable in wasting away, since we all do it—some more quickly and intentionally than others. But we hope nevertheless to waste away remarkably and create a legacy. Why are there so many songs about rainbows, and why are there so many narratives of death, which is another name for the master narrative of History? It is because the most reliable form of emotional nourishment is repetition, and it is the deepest form.
Allegedly, The Carpenters’ cover of “Rainbow Connection” was never meant to be released. Richard Carpenter joked, “If I ever released it, Karen would come down and get me!” This statement turns Karen Carpenter, feathered and wispy-to-death, into the Father and the Law, which seems flippant at best and cruel at worst. If Monet and Flaubert and Barthes were that thin, would we fear them? Would we disregard their wishes and listen blithely to and love their kitsch-adjacent recordings that they never wanted to see the light of day? It is irrelevant in some ways because no one regulates a man’s thinness, the space he takes up. Maybe if they were thinner like the immaterial bands of a rainbow, they and we might evade the pleasures and dangers of influence and history and death. Karen and Kermit and Lana and Sherrie know that in disappearing we can finally get free. They also know that a desire to reappear is not an indictment of our freedom.
Sherrie LevineSherrie Levine Sherrie Levine11 March—10 April 2021107 rue St-Georges | St-JorisstraatWilliam J. Simmons is a writer and curator based in LA and NYC. His first book Queer Formalism: The Return was published this month by Floating Opera Press. -
Pick of the Week: Doug Aitken
Regen ProjectsIn the 1950s-60s, Jasper Johns created two works – Flag (1954-55) and Target (1961) – which both carved his place in the art historical canon and established a new conceptual framework for art. These encaustic versions of instantly recognizable icons (an American Flag and a simple series of concentric circles) represent a dramatic shift in art theory. Simply put, before Johns, a flag wasn’t art. Neither was a target. And without Johns, we would not have the newest show from Doug Aitken, “Flags and Debris,” on now at Regen Projects until March 13th.
The show consists of large fabric tapestries and a video installation which uses those tapestries to garb dancers performing throughout Los Angeles. The first connection from Aitken to Johns is with Aitken’s own Target (2020), a tapestry composed of scavenged mixed fabrics. Not only is this piece visually inspired by Johns’ work, but its material and the way it flows off the wall inspires the feeling of a flag.
And from this initial connection to Johns, we can see the conceptual diversion from Johns that Aitken takes with the rest of the show. While Johns suggested that a flag could be art, Aitken suggests a work of art could be a flag. Other than Target, the rest of Aitken’s tapestries and banners contain some kind of textual element — mostly phrases or slogans. Some phrases are uniting (almost to the point of being banal, such as We The People (2020)), while others are simply referential of our era, like Digital Detox (2020). But a flag is more than a rallying commonality, and certainly more than an inert object which hangs on our walls.
Aitken’s video work, Flags and Debris (2020) uses choreography developed with LA Dance Company in order to explore the conceptual power of flags. Aitken uses dancers completely enshrouded in his flags to show how they may act like suits of armor. The flowing, expressive movements of the performers highlight the malleability of a flag’s material and essence, but their inability to escape the shrouds illustrates the danger of covering yourself in ideology. While it can protect you, it can just as easily trap you.
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd, LA, CA, 90038
Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Ludovica Gioscia
Baert GalleryThe artistic process is often private. Artists seldom actively show the steps taken to craft an end product, but to some, like Ludovica Gioscia, revealing all is vital to their work. In a large, multi-faceted installation at Baert Gallery entitled Arturo and The Vertical Sea, Gioscia displays every detail of her process.
The installation is principally composed of three large, wooden structures, upon which hang various works: dream robes, portals, double-sided wall papers, and papier-mâché. The first time walking through the space is disorienting, seemingly intentionally so. The wooden structures stick out at odd angles and carve the gallery into diagonal sections. The large, eye-catching works are so diverse in material and inspiration that it overwhelms even your sense of direction.
But slowly, the intricacies of the show appear. Detailed plans for the dream robes and the wallpaper and trial attempts for the brilliantly colored papier-mâché works are also on display, tacked to the wooden structures. They act as narrative markers for the show, a road map through which an understanding of the story can be explored.
This initial stage of the process is vital for grasping Gioscia’s vision. Using, for example, the list of ingredients for her papier-mâché, we gain an understanding of her inspirations. Gioscia details not only the kind of paper and color of dye, but also makes use of less traditional ingredients, like cat hair and joy.
And from those early drafts, we can snag the central thread of the installation: Gioscia’s cat, Arturo. The key inspiration for the works, according to Gioscia herself, stems from a dream in which there were “many Arturos floating in the sea, floating in an incredible mass of vertical water.” This description ties many of the seemingly disparate elements of the show together: the aquamarine robe which Gioscia used to harness her dreams, the wallpapers which flow like waterfalls, and the many Arturo effigies in ceramic, papier-mâché and watercolor.
Arturo and The Vertical Sea is a beautifully orchestrated installation exploring the dreamy and delightfully surprising mind of Ludovica Gioscia and her beloved Arturo.
Baert Gallery
1923 S SANTA FE AVENUE
LOS ANGELES, CA 90021
Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Jeffrey Gibson
Roberts ProjectsI am certainly not alone in feeling that their idea of the American identity has changed drastically in recent years. The “American Dream” has proved itself to be as fanciful as the name suggests. It simply never existed for the majority of Americans. Even the American flag, at one time unifying, has been so thoroughly tainted by the racist, fascist, far-right nationalists that it inspires more hatred than harmony. But, a hopeful, progressive American identity can still be found at “It Can Be Said of Them,” the newest solo exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson.
Throughout his career, Jeffrey Gibson uses his art to explore his identity as gay man of Choctaw and Cherokee heritages, particularly in relation to the broader American identity. Principally, Gibson utilizes bold geometric patterns, traditional Native American craft materials such as beads, precious stones, and fringe, and a Post-Modern use of language to challenge ideas of gender roles and heteronormativity.
The mixing of material and meaning shines with the pair of punching bags suspended in the main hall. With them, Gibson transforms traditionally masculine objects into brilliant, beaded works, labeled with declamatory statements like “CAN THEY SHE HE DO IT? YES WE CAN!” The fusing of stereotypically masculine and feminine activities (boxing and bead craft), adorned with the gender-inclusive rallying cry, presents a powerful, progressive perspective of identity and unity.
Alongside these inspiring rallies, Gibson also recognizes our current cultural crossroads in the hanging bead tapestry, ONE FOOT IN GLORY, ONE FOOT IN HELL. This work again uses Gibson’s customary bright colors and strong geometric patterns and is roughly the size and shape of a flag. It is a new banner to unify under in a time that feels on the edge of immense progress or imminent disaster.
Finally, we come to the paper works, which are some of the strongest and most historically conscious in the show. These collages mix abstract fields of color with advertising, propaganda, and other material surrounding Native American experience throughout the 19th and 20th century. They describe a history that is not at all distant from today and reflect that the histories we’ve been taught are seldom the whole truth.
Roberts Projects
5801 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA, 90232
Appointment Only -
Pick of the Week: Tiffanie Delune & Kaye Freeman
Band of VicesIt is no stretch to say that the COVID-19 pandemic – principal among several other tragedies, injustices, and horrors over the past year – has fundamentally altered the way we see our world. It has revealed inequities more sharply than any other time in recent memory, and has left in it’s wake unimaginable anger, fear, and death. In The Midst of All That Is, the newest show at the gallery Band of Vices from artists Kaye Freeman and Tiffanie Delune, portrays the only two perspectives that seem to exist in the world of pandemic: the broadly global and the intensely personal.
Freeman’s work catches the eye with her frenetic, expressive style. The paintings appear like snapshots, capturing a brief instant of chaotic energy and motion. They move quickly, and won’t wait for you to catch up. There are recognizable landmarks in her works, from cranes and skyscrapers to the Capitol building, boasting shadowy figures in front of the landmark in an example of artistic clairvoyance.
What shines through most in Freeman’s work are the elements of construction or reconstruction (perhaps even deconstruction.) It’s reflective of the transitory period in which we find our country. There has been an unimaginable amount of loss in this past year, and yet for those of us who remain there exists the incredibly important task of building ourselves up to what we’ve believed ourselves to be for so long.
Delune’s work is, by contrast, introspective to the degree of being auto-biographical as she draws on her Belgo-Congolese heritage. In her absolutely enchanting paintings, figures, such as the young black girl in Hot Pepper, are lost in a mystical land. Some are cautiously present, or else composed of something entirely different to their environment and thus set apart. This is the case for the figures made of embroidery floss, which unravel themselves for their own amusement.
As opposed to Freeman’s chaotic aesthetic, Delune’s works are remarkably structured. In its Kandinksy-esque freedom, elements appear to have settled on the canvas in the most natural of orders, and not a leaf or flower is out of place. This month in Los Angeles, there is hardly better painting to see than works from Tiffanie Delune.
Band of Vices
5376 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016
Appointments can be made by email -
Pick of the Week: Andy Moses
William Turner GalleryNature has been the font from which many artists have taken their inspirational sacrament. And it is a pleasure to see an artist who takes that inspiration and so masterfully manifests the power and majesty of our natural world into something entirely new, which is what you will find at Andy Moses’ solo show of recent works at the William Turner Gallery.
Andy Moses is not new on the scene. He has worked as part of the cadre of post-modern greats for most of his career, and has maintained his unique aesthetic sensibility and only ever refined it further. While previous works appear other-worldly, Moses’ collection on display now is far more grounded.
The first works of note are the collection of honeycombed smaller canvases that sit in the back left. They harmonize wonderfully with one another, and offer a natural starting point to the rest of the show. The paint churns and spins, rebounding off one another and appearing like brilliant geodes or St. Elmo’s Fire. These are the groundwork, so to speak, and from here the canvases get larger and take on lives of their own.
The large hexagonal and circular paintings really illustrate Moses’ desired swirling and spiraling effects, drawing the viewer into the whirlpool of brilliantly vibrant color. The gold in particular appears to leap off the canvas like a great whip of light. Here, the lines ebb into and around one another, colliding and crashing like lava flows and ocean waves.
But finally, the true gems of the show are the landscapes. The curved canvases create a panoramic effect, as if looking over a misty marsh or rainbows dancing lightly over rivers. The colors are hypnotic, and the lines which stack and flow one on top of another give the works both height and breadth.
Many words describe the paintings on display at William Turner Gallery: iridescent, geodetic, entrancing, to say just a few. But no words do Andy Moses’ works true justice, as just like in nature, to truly appreciate their beauty you must immerse yourself in them.
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Pick of the Week: Hosai Matsubayashi & Trevor Shimizu
Nonaka-HillThere is a natural tension drawn between old and new, conservative and progressive. Often times, it can feel that between those two positions there can be no resolution. Even in art, it can be difficult to fit the opposing ideals together; though when it happens, the results are mystifying. One such confluence of tradition and modernity is the group painting and ceramics show of Hosai Matsubayashi XVI and Trevor Shimizu, on view at Nonaka-Hill.
For those who haven’t seen a roman numeral that large since the French Revolution, our era’s Hosai Matsubayashi is the sixteenth in his family to run their kiln in Uji, Kyoto. Since the year 1600, the Matsubayashi family has produced some of the finest ceramics in all of Japan, most notable for their tea ceremony sets – and every ounce of the centuries of creative ability and technical mastery is on display in dozens of precious objects, from waved vases to earthen tea kettles.
Trevor Shimizu, by contrast, does not stand on a mountain of history but rather at the forefront of contemporary art. A painter and video artist based out of New York, Shimizu is known primarily for his sardonic and comedic works, like his exhibition of fart paintings in 2015. His work is deeply expressive, drawing on modernist influences to paint rapidly and with decisive brushstrokes.
Here in Nonaka-Hill, they have been brought together. Matsubayashi’s ceramics (which draw on a wide variety of traditional Japanese technique, most prominently wabi sabi and blue-washes) sit peacefully on low tables, as if they were set out for use in a tea ceremony. And while still in his abstract style, Shimizu’s large landscape paintings take on a new life when hanging alongside the historic ceramics. One begins to notice the influences of calligraphic styles in Shimizu’s work, and an allowance of negative space not unlike that of ink painting. Likewise, Shimizu’s expressive paintings lend their sense of freedom to the pottery, in turn lifting and re-contextualizing this tradition.
Together, Shimizu and Matsubayashi breathe new meaning into one another’s works, creating an entirely unique experience out of their individual brilliances.
Nonaka-Hill
720 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA, 90038
Appointment Only
Carrie Mae Weems, Repeating the Obvious, 2019. 39 digital archival prints of various sizes. Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. Installation view: Artes Mundi 9 Photography: Stuart Whipps.
