#museum critique

[qtubbo]

It’s kinda frustrating how everyone will say oh we want more egg drama, we want character conflict, we want more infighting, but when it makes their fav cubito look bad suddenly we’re taking everything too seriously and ruining the fun. It’s not just a block game to the characters, because they live there, so making critiques on behavior that is bad or toxic isn’t an attack it’s what happens when there is character conflict. Correcting, or discussing is perfectly normal, but you can’t say you want conflict and then turn it into something lighthearted because that means you didn’t actually want any conflict. You wanted conflict now here’s your conflict and sadly when there is conflict it will make characters look bad, it makes Tallulah, Leo, Foolish, Phil, and Tubbo all look bad it’s what happens.

You can’t tell people to stop making analysis or critiquing behavior because you’re viewing differently, or choosing to change the story to make it more lighthearted. Like I understand saying don’t cross in to reality people often do with ccs, but is anyone actually doing that with the admins?

[thoughtportal]

the garden of time and the met gala

[coyoteprince]

do you still do taxidermy? :]

Nah, though I still heavily respect, cherish, and seek it out via educational channels and natural history museums. I had a big nerd-out about the La Brea Tar Pits yesterday, in fact, especially finding out they have coyotes.

Anyway, had to stop a long time ago because my cool new disability started showing up. Taxidermy and tanning are intensely labor intensive, I just couldn't do it anymore. Being autistic also means I'm hyper sensitive to pain and cold (your hands tend to get extremely cold due to needing to keep specimens cold) which was another nail in the coffin.

I still keep osteological specimens and clean them, though. Still have the iron stomach to handle decomp smell and touch, too. Haven't taken in a new soul in a while, but I still hope a camel I can name Igore lands in my hands one day.

[ani-antiquities]

The Melancholic Woman: Eva Hesse, Ennead (1965), and Trauma, De-strung

(source: ICA Boston)

I will open this essay with a line from art historian, Anne M. Wagner’s essay, Another Hesse, on her journal October, vol. 69 – wherein she writes of our subject, American sculptor Eva Hesse:

Hesse’s self-scrutiny, we learn once again, is a means of coping with “environment” – with the inheritance of the past. But it is also the measure – even the proud badge – of her “difference”, the difference, we remember, of being an artist. (p. 131)

Anne M. Wagner’s essay on Eva Hesse will be one of the main sources of this paper.

Here, we will be able to trace Eva Hesse’s art and its asymbolia to the artist’s melancholia and her journey of sublimation and working through. We will also thereby arrive at more questions to ponder Hesse’s life, and inquire about the connections among art, melancholia, and the semiotic – and possibly ponder a perspective that ties the end-goal of these Kristevan concepts together.

(Before I go on, I just wanna say that this essay may draw on similarities EVA HESSE: POST-MINIMALISM INTO SUBLIME, by Robert Pincus-Witten. I wrote this specific essay more than a year ago for my Cultural, Literary, and Critical Theory class, and I only found this essay just today, as I am writing and doing more research for this piece. LOL. However, I would like to justify that the content of my essay is to draw connections between Hesse’s art and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory. I did enjoy Witten’s essay, though!)

(Source: pbs.org)

Eva Hesse

At the height of Nazi Germany, Hesse’s family fled to America for protection from religious persecution, but it was not long until sanctuary proved to be fickle as well, in the land of the free. Due to trauma implicated by the Second World War that vehemently caused the deaths of Hesse’s extended family, the serious circumstances of (Eva Hesse’s mother) Ruth Marcus House’s bipolar disorder worsened. These events dominoed to Wilhelm Hesse’s divorce from Ruth Marcus, and Ruth’s suicide. Adding salt to the wound, Wilhelm would marry a woman named Eva. Upon the new marriage, the young girl and her step-mother would share the same name.

Identity crisis aggravated young Eva’s trauma – from the persecution of family whose faces she had never known, to losing her to suicidal mother at ten. It seemed like grief was her very being.

Graduating from Yale, she exhibited works whose style displayed that of Abstract Expressionism and paved the way for Minimalism.

Art historians speculate how these traumas were sublimated into her art. Her self-portraits showcase distorted images of faces and figures. They are almost like a child’s attempt at creating a figure painting, except that their tone is so somber that only an adult can express such a feeling.

(Untitled, 1965, oil on canvas: From: mutualart.com)

However, the most intriguing work of Hesse does not come from two-dimensions – but three. This includes Hesse’s sculpture, Ennead (1965).

(Ennead, 1965, oil on canvas. From: icaboston.org)

Eva Hesse’s Ennead (1965)

All that there is to the piece: acrylic, paper mache, some resin-coated strings, plywood, some plastic, and a title possibly referencing the Egyptian pantheon.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, describes the artwork as such:

The orderly, formulaic application of the threads devolves into an increasingly chaotic composition as they accumulate and tangle toward the floor. A few strands are affixed to the adjacent wall, cordoning off a wedge of space that becomes part of the sculpture itself. This gesture also draws the viewer’s attention to the corner of the gallery, activating this normally overlooked area. Additional material hangs to touch the floor, thus uniting three planes. “Ennead” means a group of nine, in this case referring to the nine points from which the strings extend.

How can we interpret art whose surface presence is devoid of any points from its meaning? Baroque art can be so interpreted by its gargantuan number of details that fit on a four-cornered canvas. Poetry can be dissected among its metaphors, language, and enjambments. How can we possibly describe a sculpture so bare of material and overly abstract in its form? Was it meant to be this way – stripped down and bare?

Asymbolia and Melancholia

Many of Hesse’s works portray a distinct use of asymbolia, and the stimulation of asymbolia to its audience.

It is impossible to speak of Ennead without speaking about Hesse – primarily because Hesse and her art are one. Hesse even says: “My life and art have not been separated. They have been together.”

Ennead is no exception – however, with absolutely little to no “initial and final'' interpretation of meaning when you see the sculpture. What can we then say about Eva Hesse through the piece? Even art historians themselves, up to this day, consider Ennead to be an enigma on its own – its minimalism minimizes itself, to the point of devoiding any meaning, making us doubt if there is any at all.

First, we must discuss the asymbolia in Ennead – the art itself. Though by instinct and intuition, the substance of Ennead is uninhabited on its own, I would like to shed a few pointers on the piece and its asymbolia through its deliberate absurdity.

The strings were meant to be orderly at first, until its tail-end, wherein Hesse describes them as a jungle. Hesse even took in the effort to dye the strings to possibly add more aesthetic depth to them. Hesse describes the process of this piece in one of her journals.

The further it went toward the ground, the more chaotic it got; the further you got from the structure, the more it varied. I've always opposed content to form or just form to form. (Quoted in L. R. Lippard, op. cit., p. 62)

However, even when Hesse describes her decision to irrationalize the hinds of the strings, the art still talks gravel to the path towards the most inane question: What does it mean?

So, we shall secondly address the audience’s confusion, that stems from the asymbolia of the audience themselves – the very inability to attach any familiarity or meaning to the symbols the art presents, because of the very fact that it lacks anything.

The only thing that makes sense of Hesse’s art is nonsense – the asymbolia found in Hesse’s art, that stems from dissecting, stripping down, and representing her trauma. Hesse states in one of her interviews: “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something… A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and vision.”

Must her own “something” be from her depression – from the trauma of losing her mother, identity, and other factors throughout?

We take the theory behind this inquiry from Julia Kristeva’s illustration of asymbolia and melancholia in her book, Black Sun – “The negation of that fundamental loss opens up the realm of signs for us, but the mourning is often incomplete. Melancholia then ends up in asymbolia, in loss of meaning…” (p.42).

Hence, to study the bare Ennead is to study Hesse’s bare melancholia.

We may never have the opportunity to bear witness to Hesse’s trauma, as only she and herself can live it, so we turn to her journals,

Throughout her life, Hesse seems to be on good terms with working through with her depression, as she sublimates it with her art – if it means going against the conventions imposed on her by four-cornered dimensions of papers and canvases, and the one-platform norm of past sculptures (Ennead takes up two adjacent walls, and thereby two dimensions).

Asymbolia and the neglect of the pre-conceived semiotic can be seen in her journals – which instead of letters and intelligible words, consist of drawings that penetrate any dividers and lines.

Kristeva furthermore explains this psychoanalytic mechanism as she illustrates the control of the preverbal in aesthetic creation: “When the struggle between imaginary creation (art, literature) and depression is carried out precisely on that frontier of the symbolic and the biological we see indeed that the narrative or the argument is ruled by primary processes” (p.65) – explaining the subnormality of Hesse’s art and entries, and how the manifestations of obscurity stem from the mere struggle of Hesse’s melancholia.

(Figure 3: Hesse’s journal. From: sugarcandymtn.com)

Other than these, her excerpts write of her own feelings of depression and anxiety: “I must write, my sanity is involved. I cry and cry, the pages are wet. I have no one, to go to and the edge of hysteria and insanity is not far apart” (October 19, 1964).

Anne M. Wagner writes: “Anyone who wants to make a serious contribution to remembering Hesse will likewise have to speak about a wound. For what is striking about Hesse’s art is its utter inwardness, with artistic languages of the day: her imagery and effects are not learned by rote, only to be parroted back more or less unchanged” (p. 159)

With this: Must her melancholia still be the root of her asymbolic art? Or was this art a testament to her ability to self-scrutinize all along? Furthermore, will there be anything to self-scrutinize when there is no trauma?

Conclusion: The Futile Point of Interpretation

Hesse intended her work to be autobiographical, but never understood – and thus reflecting the paradox of identity: to know, but never understand. Even her journals were not meant for the purpose of understanding: “Hesse’s journals and their users have meant that it is no longer possible for viewers “not to know the artist” – or at least, not to feel they know her, and to prepare themselves accordingly when looking at her art.”

Yet, even when we have read Hesse’s journals, watched documentaries, and studied countless journals from art historians – the impossibility to fully understand still looms over her audience. So then we ask the question: What should we feel to know of Hesse? The illness caused by both personal and socio-economic circumstances of her time? Must her works be cursed with the fallacy of perpetually being tied to her trauma.

On Dostoevsky, Kristeva writes: “Works of art thus lead us to establish relations with ourselves and others that are less destructive, more soothing.” Hesse’s artifacts are therefore not records of her mania, but documentations of her survival from it. Her illness, therefore, is not what should be reflected of her life – but her sisyphean triumph over it.

Maybe it is for the better – as the point of art itself is to sublimate the traumatic aggression of the artist, and (like a monster) to never let it out of the cage of the canvas. Kristeva can even attest to this, saying: “Art seems to point to a few devices that bypass complacency and, without simply turning mourning into mania, secure for the artist the connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing” (p. 97)

Hesse did this concealment well, so much so that it is said the artist herself might not have realized this. As Wagner would write: “If Hesse’s life did enter her art, it did so by a process that Hesse herself was in a position to describe. We would be looking for ways (Hesse’s unconscious) repeatedly configured. I think such imagery exists in Hesse’s art, and I take it to concern the artist’s feelings toward her mother above all” (p. 165) So much so, that even daring to question the trauma behind Hesse’s art, we do not only turn a blind eye to the artist herself, but arrive at a futile destination when we do: “Yet, in asking them [questions on Hesse’s art] we risk losing sight of the workings of Hesse’s unconscious – a notion that, after all, was the motivating impulse of this discussion. But the artist and her unconscious are not far away.” (p. 173)

Conclusion

I will close with another one of Wagner’s concluding lines:

“To claim that Hesse’s art aims to remember and express a common human quality or experience is not the same as attributing to it some universal force or purpose. It gives its own account of that experience.” (p. 186)

This aim of art is reminiscent to how beauty sublimates melancholia in the form of art, much like giving its own account of an experience. Kristeva writes:

“Beauty emerges as the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live. Melancholia to the point of becoming interested in the life of signs, beauty may also grab hold of us to bear witness for someone who grandly discovered the royal way through which humanity transcends the grief of being apart.”

(p. 100)

Hesse’s journey as an artist is proof that asymbolia – another result of melancholia – paves the way into sublimation. Art is therefore not rooted in the melancholic, its her way of forging a path deeper underneath it. Art is agency from the trial of inner-disagency. Art is therefore the artist’s most individual and subjective struggle, not of her depression, but one of working through. Precisely through this art, we unlock the beauty sculpted from the marble of melancholia. Hesse and Ennead are just among the myriad of melancholic beauty in the realm of art.

SOURCES

Kristeva Julia. Black Sun : Depression and Melancholia. Columbia University Press 1989. https://archive.org/details/blacksun00juli. Accessed 27 Feb. 2023.

Artincontext. “Eva Hesse - The Brief Life and Incredible Works of Eva Hesse the Artist.” Artincontext.org, 4 Apr. 2022, https://artincontext.org/eva-hesse/.

Branaman, Bianca. “Love - Eva Hesse.” Sugar Candy Mountain, Sugar Candy Mountain, 4 Sept. 2018, https://sugarcandymtn.com/blogs/the-brand/love-eva-hesse.

“Ennead.” EVA HESSE, https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-315751.

“Ennead.” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, https://www.icaboston.org/art/eva-hesse/ennead.

Evemy, Benjamin Blake, et al. “Auctions, Exhibitions & Analysis for +500K Artists.” MutualArt, MutualArt, 17 Feb. 2023, https://www.mutualart.com/.

“The Sickness of Being Disallowed: Premonition and Insight in the 'Artist's Sketchbook'.” O A R, https://www.oarplatform.com/sickness-disallowed-premonition-insight-artists-sketchbook/.

[blue-bec]

Excuse me while I get all pedantic on this, but the ending of The Van Gogh Job (Leverage S4:4) really annoys me. Background, I have a Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies (which I studied because I was bored) and so I have spent time looking at repatriation of objects and artworks.

See my essay here for starters:

https://blogs.bluebec.com/essay-it-belong-to-them-lets-give-it-back/

Plot synopsis is:

On the trail of a lost Van Gogh, the team learns the painting was the center of a World War II love story between a black soldier and the white heiress he was forced to leave behind.

So the painting is found and Nate suggests to Charlie Lawson that he consider donating it to the Boston Museum (we won't delve into that one too much)... and just fucking no.

The art was looted by a Nazi (sure he saved it from a fire in a gallery/museum/safe-location for the collection of the (now) Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg). The art has an owner. Charlie Lawson is not the owner of the artwork and it should be returned to the Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg.

Sure it sucks, but the US Government has been instrumental in leading conventions and practices to ensure that looted art is returned, even when they suffer economic loss from it. The Boston Museum, or any other US Museum/Gallery who this artwork might be donated to would ask how it came into Charlie Lawson's possession and then would flatly refuse to accept the donation unless it was to return it to Germany.

The only way it would make sense for Charlie would be to sell it to a private bidder, and so the team have effectively left him in the same dangerous position. He has his art, and he can either have it stolen from him by someone with more power, return it to Germany, or illegally sell it.

So yeah, I loved the episode, but hated the ending because just no. Nate would know all this too. He's an insurance investigator, which as we know includes a lot of art knowledge by him. He would never have recommended donating it. The rest of the team would have offered to fence it for Charlie Lawson.

Return the art to the rightful owner or sell it on the black market.

[mariathechosen1]

Do y’all remember when there were tons of 25 minute long ‘art critique’ videos on youtube entirely dedicated to telling unwilling tumblr users that their art was objectively bad because they gave their characters body hair?

…what the fuck was that all about?

[keirametzbrassknuckles]

"Art hung in bare white rooms with nothing to explain it and only an interpretation corner for children" good lord what art museums are you guys going to anyway? Is this the 90s? Are we stuck in the white cube ? Hello? Can anyone hear me?

[thepixiediaries]

thinking about maybe writing a piece for my student magazine about how it feels to watch Oppenheimer sweep at the Oscars as a Japanese American person...

[vfdinthewild]

“They didn’t go very far. Daniel led the way, navigating the Beijing streets with an easy familiarity, until they were at one of the many hutongs in the heard of the city, the narrow street crowded with vendors and the sounds of summertime.”

-from Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li, pg. 39

[little-cereal-draws]

Overall, I think natm 4 was a pretty good movie! I do have a few critiques tho. Jed and Octi did seem a bit one dimensional and they did forget about them for long periods of time and Attila's character was really only used when they were fighting (he's my baby boy and I'm crushed that there's almost no content of him both in canon and in the fandom). And ofc Ahk wasn't there at all! I knew that already bc I checked IMDB a few months ago but they showed his sarcophagus and everything! They could've at least mentioned him! idk

But the movie was cute, funny (I laughed at several points), and gorgeously made. I'm considering it canon. It's not my favorite out of the series but it wasn't bad; it was a good movie! 7/10

[brandycranby]

if you likespam, you might as well get blocked bc its not like you're contributing anything to my posts, now are you?

[sourkitsch]

When I was a boy, newly interested in art, my mother took me to the Metropolitan Museum. We looked around the lobby, and when we discovered that there were no art classes being offered, my mother lost interest. I begged her, I wanted to see something, so she let me go upstairs alone. The Met then wasn't like it was now: it was like a big warehouse for scholars. When I got to one dark room filled with paintings I heard a tapping sound, like a cane on the floor. I was fearful, somebody was coming towards me. This guy came up to me -- he had polished shoes -- he put his walking stick on my sternum and pushed me down. He told me 'Dirty little boys like you should not be in museums like this.' Years later I realized who that man was: James Rorimer the director of the museum.

from Jerome Witkin: Painting History, Memory and Fantasy

The Met now has a number of Witkins in its collection.

[fairyzar]

the older i get the more confused i become in regards to my identity.

[itsmeyvetta]

Step Into the 'Otherworld': A New Exhibition Now Open at SculptureCenter

Upon entering the sculpture center and seeing the setting of the show, Alvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT, for the first glance , there was no clear direction on where to look. However, this also allows the audience to explore on their own. It's a strange yet very inviting space, with marble seating areas arranged in semi-circles, there are trees, lamps and elements all over the place on the floor or on the wall or in the ceiling . Whether it’s the japanese magnolia tree branch sticking out of the wall or the flickering orange and yellow light installation doubling as the “ceiling”. when looking up, the light overshadows what's within it (imagine swimming underwater and looking up at the surface, only seeing shapes). I stared for a long time and noticed a butterfly fluttering in a precise circular path and the route itself became a noticeable trace. The rest looked like fallen leaves. While staring at the ceiling and moving slightly, my feet kicked something accidently that clinked. It was a hyper-realistic leaf sculpture made of metal. Numerous metal leaves lay scattered on the ground, inviting viewers to step on them or kick them around, making the audience part of the artwork. Bitten apples were everywhere, and a book lay on one of the marble chairs. Alvaro Urbano creates an independent time and space like the Garden of Eden that functions as an “otherworld” and beyond traditional temporality.

The way Urbano arranges these objects and designs the whole scene creates a place of timelessness, an alternative reality. This alternate space operates on its own set of rules. Trees that will never die, flowers that never wither, and even apples with bites will not decay over time The butterflies on the ceiling will keep fluttering until everything shuts down. The lights flash with drum rolls, gradually dimming to darkness as the drum rolls fade, then turning on one by one as the sounds re-appear. Everything appears strikingly real on the surface level, closely resembling the actual objects , yet undeniably unreal as they are sculptures. It is seemingly a space of perfection as it disrupts the natural cycles and pauses time. In spite of it being deliberately constructed, the whole space can still easily be subject to destruction and deterioration, through tearing down or water damage.

The presence of numerous bitten apples on the ground in Álvaro Urbano's exhibition could also reference the Garden of Eden myth, where the bitten apple symbolizes the temptation and the fall from innocence. With the inclusion of a book, Urbano also creates a tension between innocence and knowledge, temptation and consequence. The apples could represent the fall from grace, while the book suggests the pursuit of forbidden wisdom. It’s so tempting for any viewer to approach and try flipping through the one single book in the show, but upon realizing it’s an unreal metal object, the viewer, despite the disappointment,  remains their innocence, protected from forbidden knowledge and its consequences. In reality, however, every action has a consequence, whether you realize it or not.

Alvaro Urbano’s re-interpretation and of Scott Burton’s Atrium Furnishment invite the viewers to rethink time, space, reality in a romanticized way. While we cannot pause time in reality, the exhibition does create a space where our perception of time is momentarily suspended through the artworks.

[dmdunamancer]

From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson

"Artist Ayana V. Jackson creates an undersea realm honoring those who jumped or were thrown overboard during the trans-Atlantic slave trade." (Smithsonian Magazine, 8 June 2023)

Where There Is No Origin But Memory I

The Self-Forgetfulness of Belonging Will Never Be Mine I

Consider the Sky and the Sea

Some People Have Spiritual Eyes II (featuring the dress which also appears as "Use the Stars to Fix a Celestial Navigation Point," with materials including Ghanaian currency, paste, cotton, raffia reed fans)

When the Spirit of Kalunda Comes So Does Kianda

Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I

Reliquary: The Sea Has Nothing to Offer but a Well-Executed Grave

It is Only When You Lose Your Mother That She Becomes Myth

I Summon the Voice from the Deep I

[images from the official exhibition website]

Also -- for those interested, many of these garments and models appear in video-works in collaboration with other artists! Very cool.

[criticcritiquing]