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BuzzFeed published a report claiming that Tumblr was utilized as a distribution channel for Russian agents to influence American voting habits during the 2016 presidential election in Feb 2018.
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Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen ARTH 385 / Fall 2017 Blog Entry # 10 / New Museum / ICP
Trigger Exhibition / New Museum
The New Museum’s current exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” focuses on how gender subversion and identity is explored beyond the binary of male and female definitions, and how this is manifested in contemporary art, in the current political and social conservative climate. The exhibition includes a large amount of artwork that is displayed on walls and sculptures as well as being viewable on videos. To me the exhibition was difficult to navigate with too many pieces of art crowded in exhibition spaces that were too small for the many different installations on walls, sculpture displays and ongoing video projections. Sounds from different videos blurred into each other that made it difficult and irritating to focus on, or understand what was spoken or sung or performed. There was one exception to this with the video of the poet Fred Moten, which was viewable by itself in a separate space that included seating. The overall feeling was confusing, irritating and annoying, but it was also very insightful. The exhibition’s focus is that of gender identity, how to access and accept it, and live with it in a political and social climate that has little tolerance for someone “different”, and /or “other” than main- stream perceptions. The Artist Justin Vivian Bond, intrigued with the persona of the famous cosmetic model and white person Karen Graham, explored gender identity with painted self-portraits emulating the model’s image. The paintings are installed around a small seating area that could recall a sophisticated female’s person space in the 1970s and 1980s. The transgender artist created a space that suits the favorable gender identity. Finding gender identity is only one part of the show. The artists A.K. Burns and A.L. Stiner display photographs of women in sexually explicit scenes, commenting on direct ‘overt sexuality’ as used in advertisement, as well as the heterosexual pornography industry that objectifies women. The photos also seem to explore eroticism as power, as well as reversal of the traditional power dynamic in sexual politics. Less gender identity but more exploration of queerness is visible when the work by the photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s depicts a collaged image of a body with several hands contending with a penis. But his photos of cameras that are pointed at the viewer for instance bring up the question of gender and identity. He seems to ask who takes the photograph and who consumes it? Sensual photos of only half captured bodies are perhaps internal portraits, or not recognizable ones, concealing gender identity. Perhaps the desire to see yourself, or to be seen different is at the pulse of these photos. The question of how does one represent oneself, and how one is seen or perceived by others comes to mind looking at Mr. Sepuya’s work. While it was confusion and irritation to orient myself in the exhibition, the exhibition was insightful to me and triggered new awareness and sensibilities. Walking away from the show, I was thinking that perhaps the feelings of confusion, irritation, and the annoyance were intentioned by the curators of the exhibition. It makes sense to me that these feelings are to be ‘triggered’ to help the viewer better understand the thoughts and feelings the exhibiting artists might perhaps experience them selves and is a common state of being. Because a person who is trying to find gender identity in a society that allows no room for the ‘Other’, must be confusing, irritation and frustrating. Trigger was a very good and thought provoking show, and hopefully a primer for future gender subversion and identity exploration.
Lauren Greenfield Exhibition “Generation Wealth” at International Center of Photography (ICP) The exhibition “Generation Wealth” by the artist Lauren Greenfield is a documentation of (our) society’s decline in humanistic values, and the disillusion of happiness through wealth. The show includes a massive amount of photographs, videos and interviews of people that are sporting, and talking about wealth symbols such as cars and houses, fashion, beauty and corrective surgeries, as well as real estate. With her photographs, films and videos, as well as interviews and essays, Lauren Greenfield is able to convey a landscape of ‘bling’ that on the surface seems to polish the imaginary tale that happiness comes from money. Her work exquisitely bares open how far people will go for wealth that supposedly brings happiness, and how some of the people who accumulated wealth have lost it and realized that it does not bring happiness. An example would be the German Hedge Fund Manager Florian Hamm who revealed in an interview with Lauren Greenfield that money does not bring happiness but heartache instead. Mr. Hamm lost more than $800 Million and is a wanted man in the USA. No happiness here now. The range of people in the spell is wide and does not exclude young children being part of beauty pageants, or teenagers and adult women who use their body to accumulate wealth. Older adults who will give anything to look younger, women who will be who they must be, to get the wealth, and it goes on and on. One of the most disturbing pieces is the interview with the woman who is referred to as ”Queen of Versailles”. It’s about a husband and wife team who wanted to build their own Versailles but ran out of money after the 2008 crash on Wall Street. I did watch the full movie at home and I must say I was disgusted with their blatant love for money. The money craze that appeared with the rise of the credit card is an insatiable monster. Lauren Greenfield has done tremendously important work accumulated over the last 25 years, showing what money and greed will to the mental health of a society (ies).
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Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen ARTH 385 / Fall 2017 Blog Entry # 9 / Brooklyn Museum
Proof Exhibition The exhibition ‘Proof” features the artists Fransico Goya, Sergei Eisenstein and Robert Longo. The name ‘Proof” beckons the question ‘proof of what”? The three artists who lived in three different time periods, have in common that they have all lived through times of wars and social and political unrest. Each artist is represented with work that narrates and interprets views of these events in their respected monochrome mediums. Fransico Goya’s drawings and etchings for instance commented on a Spain as it moved towards the Enlightenment period. He had become more liberal but was disillusioned and disappointed in the political process by the end of the French Revolution. He chronicled the times and produced work with scenes of power structures that demonstrate the political and social unrest and violence, as well as religious persecution. The film theorist and director Sergei Eisenstein who was a supporter of the Russian Revolution with his work chronicled the founding and the beginnings of the Soviet Government. Eisenstein developed the technique of ‘montage’, an editing tool that separated scenes with different angles and focal length. With these techniques, individual scenes could be put together to achieve specific emotional responses and thus became a tool for propaganda purposes and to play on the emotions of the viewer. The views shift several times in the last scene of the movie ‘Battleship Potemkin’ when the Tsarist sailors decide not to go against the revolutionaries by join their comrades and emotionally manifest solidarity that is to catch the viewer as well. In his work, the artist Robert Longo also recounts political, social and environmental events. His creates monumental sized drawings with charcoal and chalk that comments on our societies love for everything extra large. It seems that Robert Longo makes monumental work because in our current society the mass of the culture is overstuffed and overfed, things get lost and get overlooked. So it seems very appropriate to create monumental images of icebergs that are endangered by global warming for instance. Or a monumental eagle or portrait of Barack Obama will make us think of the country we live in and what it supposedly stands for. A raft of people lost in the ocean makes me think of refugees and immigrants and places that are old homes and new homes. This painting made think about Ai Weiwei’s current work and the film Karina Aguilera Skvirsky made about the travels of her grandmother. It’s interesting that I noticed several ships in exhibitions this season, such as the three sailboats by Chris Burden exhibited at Gagosian Gallery, Cecily Bowns’ shipwrecks, Goya’s drawings show some boats with distressed people, Battleship Potemkin by Eisenstein and then Robert Longo’s raft. I think “proof” is a very good exhibition that let’s one explore different ties and thread them together with the help of the three artists.
Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” The exhibition “The Dinner Party” by artist Judy Chicago is a permanent installation in a space created for it, the Elisabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, located in the Brooklyn Museum. Judy Chicago set out to create a feminist work of art. And it is a powerful sight; the large triangle holds 39 women made plates representing 39 mythological and female artist figures. The plate sets are made of porcelain and hand painted and the textile runners are hand embroidered. These activities refer to women’s art, which was limited to women’s activities such as creating textiles or decorative arts, such as porcelain painting as Judy Chicago described in her first experience with that medium. The imagery on the plates or their shapes is called ‘central core” imagery, referring to positive female identity as well as sexual freedom and empowerment. Interesting to me is the fairly large number of women who helped produce this whole piece of art over a time of several years. All contributed in solidarity as women to creating feminist art and with that contributed to female art history which had and still has very little presence in art history. The Dinner Party is a powerful work of art that inspires and encourages creating more feminist art.
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Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen ARTH 385 / Fall 2017 Blog Entry # 8 / Galleries and Cecily Brown
Gagosian Gallery The group exhibition “LA Invitational” consisting of artist from California, of whom most of them are alive, presents conceptual art that references a colorful, creative and innovative California. The large and colorful abstract painting by Mary Weatherford for example, that include colorful tubes of neon lights, seems to represent a wide landscape such as California. This painting, a large rectangle, feel like movie screens and reference Hollywood, an important creative hub of California. Other work reference nature and urbanism, such as the painting by Jonas Woods, representing a green leafy plant in a white pot that has on it painted in black and white, simulating an urban environment. Alex Israel portrays palm trees in his photographs that seem native to California. Thomas Houseage’s large abstract and ‘Untitled” sculpture is referencing the theme of the human body and architecture, natural and manmade. The sculpture, not made with traditional materials such as plaster, wood or bronze, but with hemp and rebar wire, referencing perhaps the change from old worlds to new worlds? The seemingly out of place ‘Three Ghost Ships’ by Chris Burden, life-size sailboats that operate with solar panels and satellite software to operate without human navigation, is innovative and makes one think of life in a world lost, where human touch is replaced by artificial intelligence. Some of the work in the show reminds of pop culture and seems non-political, while other work is conceptual and political in a very subtle way.
Joyce Kozloff at D.C. Moore Gallery In her exhibition ‘Girlhood’, the artist Joyce Kozloff, created mixed media art with her cartographic work of the last decades and her girlhood drawings, she recently discovered in her parent’s home. The newly created phantasmagorias are maps with added drawings of places and self-portrait photographs that seem to explore the understanding of female childhood knowledge and learning. It’s an exploration to what end female knowledge/learning was/is restricted. Some drawings scenes are idyllic such as “Dream of the American West”, displaying a harmonic scene of males, nature and animals but no females, but perhaps, male humans made history…not females? The work seems to have an ‘outside art flair’ because of it’s child-like imagery, and also seems to be a reference to feminist art work with the use of unconventional art materials such as chalk, crayons and craypas for instance. Furthermore, in one of the gallery spaces in which Kozloff’s work is shown, the floor is patterned, referencing her work of patterns and decoration, as well as textile work, styles and a medium traditionally used by women; and a frequently seen component this current season in Chelsea. This is a wonderful show with its colorful mixed media pieces and delicate drawings that lets the viewer take a glimpse inside a world of knowledge and imagination of a female child of the past. By pointing out the restricted knowledge base intended for females and the isolation it brings with it, the artist seems to invite to take a closer look at these restrictions that marginalize women and keeps control of their creativity, energy and wisdom. A must see show rooted in identity and feminist art.
Cecily Brown Gallery and Studio Visit Cecily Brown’s exhibition ‘A Day! Help! Help! Another Day” at Paula Cooper Gallery invites the viewer into a space that can easily accommodate the very large canvases that she is known for to paint. The paintings display recognizable and abstracted human bodies and parts, placed in a sea of loosely gestured shapes and forms. The imagery is painted in black, pink, orange, gray and blue colors expressed and intensively. The paintings ever expanding and multiplying shapes and forms burst with energy and urgency. Inspired by poetry and art history, this work is based on Théodore Géricault’s painting of a shipwreck, ‘The Raft of Medusa’ (and the political undercurrents of his painting, as well as the work by Eugène Delacroix that display a striking rawness of events or situations that can shock the viewer. The intenseness of wild renderings and the use of color remind loosely of Abstract Expressionism, painters such as DeKooning, and the displayed the urgency can be compared to Kara Walker’s forceful cutouts. Cecily Brown also commented that she is inspired by romantic poetry The visit to Cecily Brown’s studio was very enjoyable as the artist welcomed us into her favorite space. It was interesting to see the works in progress and the physical set up with a scaffold, the large amount of sorted tubes of oil paints and brushes, as well as the drawing station with renderings and small prints of historical paintings. My favorite discovery, were several shelves packed with jigsaw puzzles, featuring art and non-art images. As a jigsaw player myself, I can understand how this practice can aid in the process of dissecting imagery as it often seems done in Cecily Brown’s work. It makes total sense as it can give insights into the thought process of the artist. This has been one of my favorite visits to an artist studio. I truly enjoyed Cecily Brown’s friendly and unpretentious manner.
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Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen ARTH 385 / Fall 2017 Blog Entry # 7 / Smack Mellon / Karina Aguilera Skvirsky and Claudia Britan
Smack Mellon / Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
The artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky created a video about her grandmother’s travels from a place that was home to the grandmother, to a new place that and because she never returned home again, converted into a new home. The artist, performing in the video as her grandmother, travels the same route as her grandmother did more than a hundred years ago, and adjusts to changes to her identity such as a hairstyle for instance, to resemble her grandmother. She also tries to experience similar experiences her grandmother might have had, such as dancing with people she meets on the road. Ms. Aguilera Skvirsky re-created this trip to explore the undercurrents of self-identity, self -representation and national identity when physical dwelling places change. It grapples with very real current issues such as nationalism and immigration. The theme “identity, places and nationhood” are important current topics examined in art. The artist Ai Weiwei has been exploring the issue of immigration and refugees, people who had to leave their homelands behind; they either escaped wars or other hardships that peaceful lives, and were forced to find new places to live where they are most often not welcomed. Ai Weiwei’s current installation “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”, and in particular the large ‘birdcage’ at the south end of Central Park, is a cause for thought of who is an ‘insider’ and who is an ‘outsider’ and why. Mr. Ai Weiwei’s work, as well as Ms. Aguilera Skvirsky’s, film are critical investigations of people(s) displacement from their homeland, and the effect it has on their new and assimilated identity directed by their new place of home and it’s society.
Smack Mellon / Claudia Britan The artist Claudia Britan is a multi media artist who focuses with her work on pop culture, consumerism and mass production, the main ingredients of pop art. In one of her current projects, the remake of the film Titanic, Britan explores pop culture and consumerism. The Titanic, the ship that sank to the ocean floor after it hit an iceberg on its voyage from South Hampton, UK, to the United Stated, was a catastrophic event that was widely broadcast in the world. The news and entertainment medias such as newspapers and the movie industry for instance have the ability to sensationalize events. Claudia Britan, in her re-make production of the film Titanic, works her way through the idolizing modes of pop culture, when she herself a fan of the movie, performs as the main character Rose in a caricaturist way; or further when she performs as Brittney Spears on a Live TV show, that makes the critical viewer rethink stardom and fan-ship. Britan further comments on society’s’ state of large appetite for consumerism when she makes it a point to only work with used and recycled materials to produce the sets in her remake of the Titanic movie. Her work about stardom, fame and glorification of people, as well as her points on mass consumerism connect her work to pop art artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for instance, who made images of prominent people and items that were popular in society, commenting on celebrity and consumerism.
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Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen ARTH 385 / Fall 2017 Blog Entry # 6 / Raghubir Singh (Met Breuer), Ai Weiwei Central Park Cage, Museum of Art and Design (MAD)
Raghubir Singh (Met Breuer) A surprise visit to the Met Breuer Museum introduced me to the mesmerizing photographic world of the Indian Photographer Raghubir Sing. The artist, who was born in 1942 and passed away in 1999, was at home across the globe, but most of his photographs centered on people and streetscapes in India. Raghubir Singh produced color photographs at a time when it was common in the western world to shoot in black and white, as one of his influences the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson did, who also focused on street photography, portraying people and street scenes mostly in Paris for instance. But Singh also looked at work by the American photographer Helen Levitt, who photographed street life in poor neighborhoods of Manhattan, she used black and white film, as well as color. With his beautiful colorful photos of street life in Indian cities, Mr. Singh opened the East to the West, he explained that the colorful streetscapes of India could not be portrayed in black and white, and with that, actually connected to, and legitimized photography as art. For instance the photo “Ram Rahman” taken in 1982 portrays a painter whom Singh captured in front of his very colorful store/studio front. The painter is surrounded by his paintings that are the connection to the traditional art world. It makes sense to suggest that photography is the extension of painting, because before there was photography, there was painting, which was practiced for centuries to portray people and landscapes, and have a lasting image, the same agency a photograph has. Singh looked at traditional miniature painting when he portrayed his contemporaries. The photograph “Catching the breeze”, Hathod Village, Jaipur, Rajasthan”, taken in 1975, shows girls and young women playing of whom two young women are on a swing in a tree, which resembles and references a miniature painting from centuries ago. His ability to portray his people and his culture with techniques such as the use of a mirror for instance is fascinating and allows the viewer to become part of a scene. Singh’s capture of a precise moment of an action, such as the young women on the swing, up in the air, on one of two possible sides, or in another photo he is able to portray a diver in mid air while jumping into water. It truly is an enlightening gift to experience India through Singh’s very colorful and modernist lens. And it is a clear break from a western perspective with photographs by British artist John Murray for instance, whose photograph of the Taj Mahal channels a still and contemplative black and white view, portraying a view from the outside, unable to look inside and catch what Singh was able to catch, a colorful India.
Ai Weiwei, Central Park South, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” Installation.
The golden cage installation by the artist Ai Weiwei was an experience. At first look the golden cage resembles an oversized birdcage, but has much stronger connotations after the second look. It wrestles with the thought of unjust separations that for instance occur with matters of immigration and displacement of people (s). It reminds of Chris Ofilis’s installation at Gallery Zwirner, the large chain-linked area that is an entrapment to the ones caught inside, and a space not accessible from the outside. Both works left a very strong and urgent impression for me, to examine and re-examine spaces and places and the way people (s) respect and live with each other.
Museum of Art and Design (MAD)
The visit to the Museum of Art and Design was impressive and insightful. Different exhibitions present many mediums in site - specific spaces that for instance explore the visualization of sound through video synthesizers such as the exhibition “Subject to gesture” by artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe does. Most exhibitions are installations using space and sound in which the viewer is invited to participate in making sounds by touching components of an exhibition or walking and climbing on parts of an installation, with the result of making different sound. The museum is a place where art becomes public and interactive.
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Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen ARTH 385 / Fall 2017 Blog Entry # 5 / Paul Anthony Smith / Keltie Ferris
Camouflaged building structures, disguised figures and portraits, as well as symbols of screens and separation, such as chain links and beads, are main elements of Paul Anthony Smith’s artwork, the artist who recently welcomed us into his studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The studio was filled with work comprised of sculpture, ceramics, paintings, drawings and photographs that are no longer 2D works but have morphed into 3D work, considering some of these surfaces have been picked with a metal ceramics tool (the method is called “picotage”) in even strokes to create a screen on the image to disguise it, or other work, a large painting has a screen of hanging beads in front of it. At first glance some of the work such as the paintings and the beads look like an abstract piece of work, but only at first glance; the viewer needs a little time to decipher the disguised and abstracted representations of people and spaces. Paul Anthony Smith shared with us his story of being born in Jamaica, where he lived until he went with his family to Florida at age nine, as well about his studies at the Kansas Art Institute and his move to NYC. It seems to me that locality is an important factor of Smith’s work since he explains that the beads in the house in his native Jamaica are a not only there to serve as a space separator but also as an alarm system at night, the rustling beads will alert to an intruder; it is a device to keep someone in or out of a space or perhaps in his current work, the beads bring attention not only to disguise, but to isolation and separation of people and places. That thought reminds of other artists who are using separating elements into their work. Chris Ofili for instance in his latest exhibition at David Zwirner uses the chain link fence to grapple with the idea of wanting something that is not available, or is separated or isolated. Ofili created a space that is enclosed and not accessible from the outside and not escapable from the inside. Even the person on the outside of the fence is somehow caught by the shadow of the chain link that is behind her on the wall separating from desirable people and spaces. Disguise or separator elements in Smith’s work such as partial brick walls, obscuring people, or the “picotage” areas that mask people in his paintings and photographs, as well as the chain links running up and down in his photographs tell of social circumstances observed in his personal world. While the beads remind him of his native Jamaica, the brick wall and chain links are visible outside in his immediate neighborhood. Paul Anthony Smith speaks about seeing and taking everything in, and then expresses this in his art. Even his love for cooking and eating food with friends and family is important because this experience reminds him of the importance of community near and far; his use of chicken feet in his work makes this quite clear. To me, Smith is a very interesting artist because of his “eyes and ears wide open” mentality; he is interested in everything he sees and is able to express his experiences in his art, which brings us valuable insightfulness of our society and culture.
Filled with dancing fields of colorful painted areas displaying green, orange, red and blue colors in different hues that are separated by black swirling lines, 1970s Italian fashion textile prints came to mind when I first saw Keltie Ferris’ new paintings a couple of weeks ago at her studio in Bedford/Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. But also Abstract Expressionism comes to mind looking at the new paintings. And as her paintings before, they are also large and powerful. While her previous work was very thin layered…spray-painted at times, some thin layers are in the current paintings but they are accompanied by extreme heavy layers of paint, intentionally build up with marble dust, to give more depth to the painting. The other change is that the current color fields are less rigid geometric than in previous paintings. These new color fields have swirly bodies and are floating in each other. Influenced by summer light as she pointed out, some of the paintings have more of a white base in contrast to the most recent paintings worked on in early and middle Fall of this year. Still powerful and energetic, the new paintings seem softer than earlier work, they are more playful; perhaps this playfulness or the more human feel is influenced the Ferris’ body-prints she has been making for some time and that have brought her work closer to connect with human sensuality, a quality to express and investigate in her work as she pointed out to us at our visit with her in her studio. I find it interesting that Ferries is having some of her body-prints woven into rugs. Textile artwork seems more visible at the moment in Chelsea galleries this season, with women artists such as Polly Apfelbaum, who is currently showing textile work such as woven rugs at Alexander Gray Associates, and Lin Tianmaio who created rug pieces with words (sometimes not nice ones) displayed on them at Galerie Lelong. Textile work has always been connected to women, and it is now interesting to me that I thought of textile prints when I saw Keltie Ferries new work. Perhaps the next wave of feminism is on its way, reacting to a dark overreaching sexist patriarchy.
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