Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Body Builder on Venice Beach, California 1964 Gelatin silver print 8 1/4 x 12 1/4 in. Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
An exhibition that questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body and invites a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves. According to author and historian Barbara Summers: “Beauty is power. And the struggle to have the entire range of Black beauty recognised and respected is a serious one.”
If beauty is only skin deep, and colour deep, why the need to differentiate? Surely it doesn’t matter what colour your skin, beauty just is. You know it when you see it, regardless of colour. Not everything is about power; not everything is a site of contestation… to me, recognising true beauty is an acknowledgement of the light that shines from within, not something that is imposed from without. When you see true beauty, you know it instinctively. Intuitively. Enough of this posing – are you image or essence?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“That there are so few images of African-American women circulating in popular culture or in fine art is disturbing; the pathology behind it is dangerous … We got a sistah in the White House, and yet mediated culture excludes us, denies us, erases us. But in the face of refusal, I insist on making work that includes us as part of the greater whole,” said Carrie Mae Weems in a 2009 interview conducted by Dawoud Bey for ‘BOMB Magazine’.
Edward Curtis (American, 1868-1952) A Desert Queen 1898 (printed 2009) Modern digital print 20 x 16 inches Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries
Theodore Fonville Winans (American, 1911-1992) Dixie Belles, Central Louisiana 1938 Courtesy of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Bob Winans
Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) Harlem Fashion Show, Harlem 1963 Gelatin silver print 17 x 21 1/4 inches Magnum Photos
Anthony Barboza (African-American, b. 1944) Pat Evans c. 1970s Digital print 24 1/2 x 24 inches Courtesy of the photographer
Anthony Barboza (African-American, b. 1944) ‘Marvelous’ Marvin Hagler, boxer 1981 Gelatin silver print
Exploring contemporary understandings of beauty, Posing Beauty in African American Culture frames the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. The exhibition – and its companion, Identity Shifts – will be on view April 26 – July 27, 2014.
Posing Beauty in African American Culture examines the contested ways in which African and African American beauty has been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the Internet. The exhibition explores contemporary understandings of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. The exhibition is organised by the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, traveled by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, and curated by Dr. Deborah Willis. The touring exhibition is made possible in part by the JP Morgan Chase Foundation. Additional support has been provided by grants from the Tisch School of the Arts Office of the Dean’s Faculty Development Fund, Visual Arts Initiative Award from the NYU Coordinating Council for Visual Arts, and NYU’s Advanced Media Studio. Drawn from public and private collections, Posing Beauty features approximately 85 works by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Eve Arnold, Gary Winogrand, Sheila Pree Bright, Leonard Freed, Renee Cox, Anthony Barboza, Bruce Davidson, Mickalene Thomas, and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe.
Posing Beauty is divided into three thematic sections. The first theme, Constructing a Pose, considers the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. The second theme, Body and Image, questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The last section, Modeling Beauty and Beauty Contests, invites a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves.
According to author and historian Barbara Summers: “Beauty is power. And the struggle to have the entire range of Black beauty recognised and respected is a serious one.”
Press release from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website
John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969) Atlantic City, Four Women c. 1960s Gelatin silver print 20 x 16 inches Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University
Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Newton had a long series of confrontations with law enforcement, including several convictions, while he participated in political activism. He continued to pursue an education, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Social Science. Newton spent time in prison for manslaughter and was involved in a shooting that killed a police officer, for which he was later acquitted. In 1989 he was shot and killed in Oakland, California by Tyrone “Double R” Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.
Like the my earlier posting on the exhibition ‘Caravaggio – Bacon’ at Gallery Borghese, Rome, what an inspired curatorial decision this is. I would have never have thought to have brought Bacon and Moore together, but the synergy between the two artists work is undeniable.
Personally, I don’t think that Moore is as immobile and measurable as Radoslaw Kudlinski states in the quotation below: while rooted in anthropological concerns his anthropomorphic “nightmares” have a heft and gravitas that move you, not physically, but in the pit of your stomach. Look at the open mouth of Reclining Figure (1951, below) and tell me you are not drawn down into the bowls of the soul through the pointed tit of mother earth. Tactile, yes. Immobile and measurable, NO!
Moore moves you from within. His roots are from an ancient and emotional landscape, one of decay, time and change. His works are like embryonic sacs, pushing out at you from different points. The holes in his work are like looking into a black hole. The spaces he creates with his sculptures DENY a perfect formal economy, for they are really awkward images that impinge on a space. Never stationary, his sculptures move you from within in the most powerful way. A perfect counterbalance to the external, cinematic rambunctiousness of Bacon.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Art Gallery of Ontario for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“While Moore’s figures are sustaining themselves entirely from within, Bacon’s are disengaged fugitives from history. Bacon is already “after” when Moore is still “before.”
And while Moore’s nightmares are still rooted in anthropological concerns – corporeal and measurable – Bacon’s subject is a phantom without a name, without a past, because a collectivised subject is only and always an abstract fragment of a person.
But we need Moore’s confrontation with Bacon. Moore is a guardian of our sanity. His forms are stationary – despite the refined movement of all their structural lines, and their impeccable pronunciation of architectural tempo, as well as their perfect formal economy, they are going nowhere.
And because of Moore’s immobility, tactility and measurability, I welcome his presence with relief. He defends us from Bacon’s radical, cinematic mobility, forever escaping our grasp.
Bacon’s state of convulsive stasis is an illusion, because looking at his canvas you have an impression that between the two or three takes, there are more frames, as in a movie, trapped in the same space. There is also a sense that this trapping of multiplicity is not a conscious choice, but the consequence of there being nowhere else to go.
Bacon is the scandal of the flesh, the existential strip-tease – even a post-flesh, post-body concept of a person. He is a fugitive, and his natural state is motion, appearance and disappearance. He belongs to non-materiality, to cyberspace – and this is his paradox, because together with the sensuality of his pictorial matter, the materiality of subject is gone. That’s why Bacon is so relevant today.”
Radoslaw Kudlinski. “Serious Scary: Francis Bacon and Henry Moore in Toronto,” on the Canadian Art website, May 7, 2014 [Online] Cited 05/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
The tortured British painter Francis Bacon, whose triptych recently set a new record for the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, makes his Canadian debut this spring at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) alongside rarely-seen works by the British sculptor Henry Moore in the exhibition Francis Bacon & Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty. Featuring more than 130 artworks, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and archival materials, the exhibition explores the two artists’ shared fascination with the human form in relation to the violence of the Second World War and other key events of the 20th century.
Although they were neither friends nor collaborators, Bacon (b. 1909) and Moore (b. 1898) were contemporaries who shared an obsession with expressing themes of violence, trauma and conflict, both social and personal. Drawing on the artists’ personal experiences during the London Blitz and other conflicts, the exhibition examines how confinement and angst fostered their extraordinary creativity and unique visions. Bacon, whose dark depictions of human torment have inspired several characters in popular culture, including the appearance of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, was a sado-masochist who sought to process the trials of humanity through his canvases. Moore, a British war artist, was one of the most renowned sculptors of his time. His works evoke endurance and stability, but when considered in light of his wartime experience, they read as an effort to rebuild and redeem the fragile human psyche and body.
Curated for the AGO by Dan Adler, associate professor of art history at York University, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty is the first Canadian exhibition of Bacon’s work and includes rarely seen Moore pieces, from both the AGO collection and elsewhere. Moore’s works are a cornerstone of the AGO collection, and pairing them with those by Francis Bacon sets them in a new light. The exhibition also presents more than 30 archival photographs by acclaimed German-born British photographer Bill Brandt. Loans for the exhibition have also been secured from several institutions, including MoMA, Tate Britain and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Exhibition dates: Tuesday 22nd July – Saturday 26th, July, 2014
Opening: Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm
Nite Art: Wednesday 23rd July until 11pm Artists represented:Â Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes, Rennie Ellis Curators: Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson Catalogue essays: Professor Dennis Altman (below) and Dr Marcus Bunyan (Being (t)here)
Five days, that’s all you’ve got! Just five days to see this fabulous exhibition. COME ALONG TO THE OPENING (Tuesday 22nd July 6-8pm) or NITE ART, the following night!
The exhibition Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73 pictures the very beginning of the gay liberation movement in Australia through the work of Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes and Rennie Ellis. The exhibition examines for the first time images from the period as works of art as much as social documents. The title of the exhibition is a slogan from the period.
As gay people found their voice in the early 1970s artists, often at the very beginning of their careers, were there to capture meetings in lounge rooms, consciousness raising groups and street protests. The liberation movement meant ‘being there’, putting your body on the line. “It was a key feature of the new left that this embodied politics couldn’t stop in the streets: that is, the public arena as conventionally understood. ‘Being there’ politically also applied to households, classrooms, sexual relations, workplaces and the natural environment.”1
Curated by Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson and with catalogue essays by Professor Dennis Altman (below) and Dr Marcus Bunyan (Being (t)here: Gay Liberation Photography in Australia 1971-73), the show is a stimulating experience for those who want to be inspired by the history and art of the early gay liberation movement in Australia.
The exhibition coincides with AIDS 2014: 20th International AIDS Conference (20-25 July 2014) and Nite Art which occurs on the Wednesday night (23rd July 2014). The exhibition will travel to Sydney to coincide with the 14th Australia’s Homosexual Histories Conference in November at a venue yet to be confirmed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Connell, Raewyn. “Ours is in colour: the new left of the 1960s,” in Carolyn D’Cruz and Mark Pendleton (eds.,). After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2013, p. 43.
Many thankx to all the artists for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This exhibition chronicles a very specific time in several Australian cities, the period when lesbians and gay men first started demonstrating publicly in a demand to be accorded the basic rights of recognition and citizenship. Forty years ago to be homosexual was almost invariably to lead a double life; the great achievement of gay liberation was that a generation – although only a tiny proportion of us were ever Gay Liberationists – discovered that was no longer necessary.
The Archives have collected an extraordinary range of materials illustrating the richness of earlier lesbian and gay life in Australia, but this does not deny the reality that most people regarded homosexuality as an illness, a perversion, or a sin, and one for which people should be either punished or cured. It is revealing to read the first avowedly gay Australian novel, Neville Jackson’s No End to the Way [published in 1965 – in Britain – and under a pseudonym] to be reminded of how much has changed in the past half century.
Gay Liberation had both local and imported roots; the Stonewall riots in New York City, which sparked off a new phase of radical gay politics – when ‘gay’ was a term understood to embrace women, men and possibly transgender – took place in June 1969. They were barely noticed at the time in Australia, where a few people in the civil liberties world, most of them not homosexual, had started discussing the need to repeal anti-sodomy laws.
Small law reform and lesbian groups had already existed, but the real foundation of an Australian gay movement came in September 1970 when Christabel Pol and John Ware announced publicly the formation of CAMP, an acronym that stood for the Campaign Against Moral Persecution but also picked up on the most used Australian term for ‘homosexual’. Within two years there were both CAMP branches in most Australian capital cities, as well as small gay liberation groups that organised most of the demonstrations illustrated in this exhibition.
The differences between gay liberation and CAMP were in practice small, but those of us in Gay Liberation prided ourselves on our radical critique, and our commitment to radical social change. CAMP, with its rather daggy social events and its stress on law reform – at a time in history when homosexual conduct between men was illegal across the country – seemed to us too bourgeois, though ironically it was CAMP which organised the first open gay political protest in Australia [immediately identified by the balloons in the Exhibition photos].
The decision of the Menzies government in 1965 to commit Australian troops to the long, and ultimately futile war in Vietnam, led to the emergence of a large anti-war movement, capable of mobilising several hundred thousand people to demonstrate by the end of the decade. Already under the last few years of Liberal government the traditional White Australia Policy was beginning to crumble, as it became increasingly indefensible, and awareness of the brutal realities of dispossession and discrimination against indigenous Australians was developing. Perhaps most significant for a movement based on sexuality, the second wave feminist movement, already active in the United States and Britain, began challenging the deeply entrenched sexist structures of society.
To quote myself, this at least reduces charges of plagiarism: “Anyone over fifty in Australia has lived through extraordinary changes in how we imagine the basic rules of sex and gender. We remember the first time we saw women bank tellers, heard a woman’s voice announce that she was our pilot for a flight, watched the first woman read the news on television. Women are now a majority of the paid workforce; in 1966 they made up twenty-nine per cent. When I was growing up in Hobart it was vaguely shocking to hear of an unmarried heterosexual couple living together and women in hats and gloves rode in the back of the trams (now long since disappeared). As I look back, it seems to me that some of the unmarried female teachers at my school were almost certainly lesbians, although even they would have been shocked had the word been uttered.”
In Australia Germaine Greer’s book The Female Eunuch became a major best seller, and Germaine appeared [together with Liz Fell, Gillian Leahy and myself] at the initial Gay Liberation forum at Sydney University in early 1972; looking back it is ironic that a woman who has been somewhat ambivalent in her attitudes to homosexuality was part of the public establishment of the gay movement.
But the early demonstrations illustrated in this exhibition did often include sympathetic “straights” – a term that seems to have disappeared from the language – for whom gay liberation was part of a wider set of cultural issues. It is essential to recognise that while political demonstrations may seem to assert certain claims they play widely different roles for those who participate. For some of us a public protest is a form of “coming out”; indeed many people had never been public about their sexuality before they attended their first demonstration. For others a demonstration is primarily a place to find solidarity, friendship, and, if lucky, sex.
For the gay movement more than any other just to declare oneself as gay was to take an enormous step, a step that some found remarkably easy while others had to wait until late in life to discover that actually almost everyone knew anyway. I remember the now dead Sydney playwright, Nick Enright, who was one of the first people to be open about his homosexuality, and was so without any sense of difficulty; at the same time there are still people who go to great lengths to hide their sexuality even while acknowledging they would face little risk of discrimination were they not to do so
Maybe there is a parallel for people who now declare their lost Aboriginal heritage, unsure how they will be regarded but aware that this is crucial to their sense of self. Every generation has its own version of coming out stories, this exhibition hones in on that time in our national history when everything seemed in flux, and gay liberation seemed a small part of creating a brave new world in which old hierarchies and restraints would disappear.
Looking back at the photos creates a certain nostalgia – we all look so young, so sure that we were changing the world, though in reality most of us were putting on a brave front. The oddest thing is that in some ways we did change the world. Forty years ago we looked at the police as threatening, symbolised in the photograph from Melbourne Gay Pride 1973 where the policeman is clearly telling people to move on. Today openly lesbian and gay cops march with us in the streets, and the very idea that homosexuality could be criminalised, as it still is in many parts of the world, has largely disappeared from historical memory. Indeed to many people attending this exhibition that may be the first time they confront the reality that being gay in Australia in the early 1970s was to live in a world of silence, evasion and fear.
Artists include: Sean Barrett, Danica Chappell, Kim Demuth, Jackson Eaton, Mike Gray, Megan Jenkinson, Benjamin Lichtenstein, Phuong Ngo, Izabela Pluta, Kate Robertson, Jo Scicluna, Vivian Cooper Smith, Melanie Jayne Taylor and Justine Varga
Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014 showing at right the work of Justine Varga including Morning and Evening from the series Sounding Silence (both 2014, below)
Photography can be anything your heart desires (or so they say)…
Another stimulating exhibition at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne.
My personal favourites are the works of Jo Scicluna and the two large “sculptural” photographs by Kim Demuth, but every artist in the exhibition had something interesting to offer.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984) Morning from the series Sounding Silence 2014 Type C print 77 x 61cm Edition of 6 + 1AP Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984) Evening from the series Sounding Silence 2014 Type C print 47 x 38.5cm Edition of 6 + 1AP Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979) Left:Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 (installation view) Right:Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 (installation view) Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney
Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979) Left: Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 Right: Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney
Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958) Promise – Morrell’s Islands 2009 Type lenticular 22.6 x 38cm Edition of 5 Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958) Solace – Morrell’s Islands 2009 Type lenticular 21.7 x 38cm Edition of 5 Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney
View from the Window presents current thinking around photography (if we can even talk of something called photography any more).
With the ubiquity of the modern photographic image View from the Window attempts to highlight the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of current photographic practices. The artists respond to this by considering what ‘photography’ is, and in doing so re-shape, re-imagine, expand and break it down. They explore new thinking with traditional techniques and invent new methods of image making. The work is digital and analogue, flat and sculptural, conceptual and experiential, whole and fragmented. Despite all this, the photographic ‘idea’ remains – reshaping the way we see the world.
Press release from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014 showing in the background works by Jo Scicluna
Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969) Where A Circle Meets A Line (#4) (installation view) 2014 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, victorian ash timber, tinted acrylic 37.5 x 37.5cm Edition of 5 Image courtesy of the artist
Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969) Where I Have Always Been (An Island) (detail) 2014 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, Victorian Ash timber, acrylic 45 x 45cm Edition of 5 Image courtesy of the artist
Extracts from the catalogue essay View from the Window
As these artists’ works demonstrate, the field of contemporary photography is fundamentally multifarious, constantly eluding attempts to delimit and define it. Despite the diversity of these practices, they share a sense of critical inquiry. Whether working with analogue photographs in darkrooms or digital images in post-production, building physical objects or emphasising the immaterial, these artists all foreground the capacity for photography to interrogate our understanding of the world. Consequently these practices recall art historian Bernd Stiegler’s vision of photography as a ‘reflective medium’.5 By this term Stiegler refers to the inextricable link between photography and realism, but importantly not a form of realism understood as naïve mimesis. Rather, for Stiegler, photography reflects upon the structures and assumptions through which we perceive the world, it ‘plumbs the conditions and limits of our understanding of reality’.6 More than a veridical document or hollow simulacrum, photography thus exists as image, object and process, potentially all simultaneously.
The complexity of these works signals a second common element: the investment of time. All these artists expend considerable time and effort in producing their work, as do any dedicated artists. However, the relevance of this observation is that this temporal investment differentiates such work from the overwhelming glut of photographic images that circulate through the electronic networks of globalised society. Although it would be disingenuous and insensitive to claim that tourist snaps of well-travelled monuments are only meaningless ephemera or signs of globalised homogeneity,7 the near ubiquity of photographic images highlights the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of photographic practices. Committed to extended periods of observation and experimentation, these artists display the patience and persistence to interrogate the problems and possibilities of photography. At their gentle request we repay this dedication through our own extended viewing, for without the time to look we might lose the time to think.
Christopher Williams-Wynn 2014
Christopher Williams-Wynn is an art history honours graduate of The University of Melbourne, and co-founder and co-editor of Dissect Journal.
5/ Bernd Stiegler, “Photography as the Medium of Reflection,” in Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008, pp. 194-197 6/ Ibid., p. 197 7/ John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: SAGE Publications, 2011, pp. 155-187
Kim Demuth (Australian born England) 12.16am 18.02.2009 2012 Sculptural photography 110 x 92 x 6.5cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Kim Demuth (Australian born England) 9.55am 11.06.2008 2012 Sculptural photography 110 x 88 x 6.5cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Sean Barrett Cool Aether 2014 Duratrans on blackwood lightbox 80 x 60cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Sean Barrett Bright Swarm 2014 Duratrans on blackwood lightbox 80 x 60cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
Sean Barrett Dual Aurora 2014 Duratrans on blackwood lightbox 80 x 60cm Edition of 3 Image courtesy of the artist
In honour of the World Cup final and a wonderful tournament, here is a glorious posting to celebrate The Beautiful Game!
PS. So much of this work is conceptual graphic design, doesn’t anybody make art anymore?
Marcus
Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
On the eve of the World Cup – which, like the Olympics, takes place every four years – this exhibition celebrates football, the world’s game, and its richness as a field for metaphorical inquiry. Just as the World Cup brings together athletes and fans from around the globe, Fútbol: The Beautiful Game explores some of the ties that bind us as humans. Focusing on a simple game allows for a direct conversation about the communication and (more often) miscommunication that characterise our collective life, while celebrating one thing that most of the planet holds its breath for: the quadrennial event held to crown a nation as world champion of football. The sport has often been cited as a metaphor for nations, for cultures, and even for life, as is suggested by a statement attributed to the writer Albert Camus: “After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” Camus believed that the simple rules governing the game often had more to teach us about life than did politicians and philosophers.
Fútbol: The Beautiful Game presents the work of more than 30 artists who address the game through its imagery, signs, symbols, and sounds while also touching on larger issues well apart from the field of play. These themes include masculinity and the construction of heroes; ritual and worship; marketing and power; and current political, social, and cultural phenomena.
In the background: Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) Amsterdam, EM Arena I (installation view) 2000 Chromogenic print 108 1/4 × 80 11/16 × 2 7/16 in. (275 × 205 × 6.2cm) Gagosian Gallery Andreas Gursky, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Nelson Leirner (Brazil, 1932-2020) Maracana (installation view details) 2003 Plaster, plastic, ceramic, wood 120 x 130 3/4 x 9.5 in. Brooklyn Museum
In case: Satch Hoyt (Anglo-Afro-Jamaican, b. 1957) Kick That (installation view) 2006 Mixed media with sound Satch Hoyt Courtesy of the artist
In the background: George Afedzi Hughes (Ghanaian-born American, b. 1962) Parallel (installation view) 2009-2011 Acrylic, oil, enamel on canvas 72 x 120 in. (182.88 x 304.8cm) Skoto Gallery Collection of the artist, Courtesy Skoto Gallery
George Afedzi Hughes (Ghanaian-born American, b. 1962) Parallel 2009-2011 Acrylic, oil, enamel on canvas 72 x 120 in. (182.88 x 304.8cm) Skoto Gallery Collection of the artist, Courtesy Skoto Gallery
Stephen Dean (French-American, b. 1968) Volta (installation view) 2002-2003 Single-channel color DVD installation (9′) with audio and fabric enclosure Collection of Ruth and William True
Right on floor: Mary Ellen Carroll (American, b. 1961) FREE THROW (installation view) 1984 Mannequin bottom and basketball with rubberised paint 4 x 3 x 1 ft. (121.91 x 91.44 x 30.48cm) Mary Ellen Carroll Courtesy of the artist, 3rd Streaming-NYC, Galerie Hubert Winter-Vienna, Austria
Centre: Wendy White (American, b. 1971) Clavado (installation view) 2013 Acrylic on canvas, wood, enamel 74 1/2 × 74 1/2 in. (189.23 × 189.23cm) Andrew Rafacz Gallery Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Rafacz
Right: Dewey Tafoya (American) Olmeca 1370 BCE (installation view) 2013 Serigraph 36 × 50 in. (91.44 × 127cm) Self-Help Graphics Self Help Graphics & Art, Professional Printmaking Program, 2013. On loan from the Self Help Graphics & Art Collection
Installation view of the exhibition Fútbol: The Beautiful Game at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Fútbol: The Beautiful Game, an exhibition examining the sport of fútbol, or soccer, as it is known in the United States. Featuring approximately 50 works by nearly 30 artists on the subject of Fútbol – often referred to as “the beautiful game” – the exhibition looks at issues of nationalism, identity, globalism, and mass spectacle as well as the shared human experience between spectators from a multitude of cultures. In anticipation of the 2014 World Cup that takes place in Brazil this summer, LACMA’s exhibition considers the sport through video, photography, painting, sculpture, and large-scale installation.
“A globally beloved sport celebrated in the context of a museum: what a great opportunity to explore the international scope of soccer through the lens of art,” said Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA. “Fútbol should excite all, especially as it coincides with the World Cup in Brazil in summer 2014.”
“When people watch a game, they feel inspired by the spirit of the team, the fans, and the sense of community,” remarked Franklin Sirmans, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and department head of contemporary art at LACMA, “We, the fans, create the spirit of the team via our rituals. Witnessing a game is one of the few occasions during which a collective sense of enthusiasm is still possible. This exhibition explores that energy.”
Exhibition overview
Two room-sized video installations anchor Fútbol: The Beautiful Game. The first, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait by the artists Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, provides an intimate portrait of Zinedine Zidane – one of the greatest soccer players in the history of the sport – during the course of a single match. Meanwhile, Stephen Dean’s Volta, set to samba music, directs its gaze at stadium crowds and draws attention to both the pandemonium and organised ritual of mass audiences.
Other works by artists including Robin Rhode, Kehinde Wiley, Petra Cortright, Andy Warhol, Mark Bradford, Mary Ellen Carroll, Hassan Hajjaj, and Andreas Gursky, among others, provide a sense of the possibilities of the sport as a universal conversation piece. With artists hailing from as far afield as Morocco, Germany, Mexico, and South Africa – in addition to several Los Angeles–based artists – the geographic range represented in Fútbol: The Beautiful Game reflects the global reach of the sport.
Gustavo Artigas’s The Rules of the Game examines the ways in which communities that play different sports (basketball, soccer, and football) perceive one another, while Miguel Calderón’s video Mexico vs. Brasil dramatically unfolds during an unlikely victory for Mexico. Chris Beas harkens back to classical modes of presentation in his paintings: his athletic figures are depicted in a celebratory, almost mythic light. Meanwhile, the athletes featured in Generic Art Solutions’ works are almost caricatures caught in moments of extreme dramatisation.
In collaboration with LACMA, a new edition of prints has been commissioned by Self Help Graphics under the direction of executive director, Evonne Gallardo. The new prints by Carolyn Castano, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Ana Serrano, Dewey Tafoya, Ami Motevelli and Mario Ybarra, Jr. address varied aspects of the game – from a commemoration for the Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar who was shot and killed shortly after the 1994 World Cup, seemingly for his mistaken own goal, to references to the Olmec culture of the first major civilisation in Mexico.
As a nod to the imminent World Cup, the exhibition’s design alludes to the Brazilian flag with graphic symbolism as it evokes the environs of the sport – sun, sky, and grass – through a vibrant yellow, blue, and green.
Ana Serrano (American, b. 1983) Narco Soccer 2013 Serigraph 50 × 36 in. (127 × 91.44cm) Self-Help Graphics Self Help Graphics & Art, Professional Printmaking Program, 2013. On loan from the Self Help Graphics & Art Collection
As Minor White’s artist bookThe Temptation of St. Anthony is Mirrors (1948) is a visual love poem to Tom Murphy, so my artist book The Songs of Eternity (1994) is a visual love poem to my then long-time partner Paul. Both are exceedingly rare books: there are two copies of White’s book and there is one copy of mine.
The prints are even more beautiful in the flesh (so to speak).
Marcus
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
The Songs of Eternity
Images and poetry by M. Bunyan 1994
I stood at the edge of the precipice / and peered in as William Blake would say
The timepiece of eternity / swung hands through all the hours
so how naive I’ve been / not to see its powers
Did I deceive / or was I led
What a rude awakening / throughout my head
Many fabulous things were said /
many a doubt was in silence bled …
Nothing is certainty but the change – I was must be strong to attain
Depth, spirit, integrity and the rest
This affirmation I will confirm – not in conformity but in my own special way
Not this way nor that but my own path / that one day will whisper gently in my ear
Be strong, for we have much to say / when the sea becomes the sky.
Strong in your arms I become your scent
Lying in my bed the sheets of flowers enfold me
Trusting in my heart I know
Today Yesterday Tomorrow
The Songs of Eternity
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Shroud 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
I stood at the edge of the precipice / and peered in as William Blake would say
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Paul, shadows 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
The timepiece of eternity / swung hands through all the hours
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Eternal timepiece 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
so how naive I’ve been / not to see its powers
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Paul, head covered 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
Did I deceive / or was I led
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Pendent #1 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
What a rude awakening / throughout my head
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
Many fabulous things were said /
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
many a doubt was in silence bled …
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Suspension #1 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
Nothing is certainty but the change – I was must be strong to attain
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Chrysalis 1994 From the series The Songs of Eternity Silver gelatin photograph
Artists include: Marcus Bunyan, Juan Davila, Andrew Foster, Brent Harris, Mathew Jones, Peter Lyssiotis, Lex Middleton, Andi Nellsün, Marcus O’Donnell, Scott Redford, and Ross T Smith.
Opening: Wednesday 16 July 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm
Unknown photographer ACT UP D-Day on the steps of Flinders St. Station, 6 June 1991
1991
Image courtesy of the Australian Queer Archives
Another important exhibition to coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference to be held in Melbourne this July. The exhibition – which focuses on the seminal exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS, curated by Ted Gott at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 1994 – is supported by an extensive program of public events (see below) some of which I hope to get to. The community lost so many good people.
I just want to say ‘good on ya, Andi’, hope your smiling up there somewhere!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Michael Graf and The George Paton Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. The exhibition will be open until 9pm on Wednesday 23 July as part of the Nite Art Walk.
Andi Nellsün (Australian) Matr’x 1993
To coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference to be held in Melbourne in July, TRANSMISSIONS | Archiving HIV/AIDS | Melbourne 1979-2014 is an exhibition of artworks, manuscripts, and other material from private collections and public archives. It will focus on the partnership between government, health professionals, and Melbourne’s gay community, and on relations between activism, art and design.
Australia is recognised for having implemented one the world’s most successful HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns. The exhibition and conference, however, coincide with a twenty-year high in infection rates. To be able to reach a younger generation,current health promotion campaigns have become increasingly sophisticated. TRANSMISSIONS will investigate several of these campaigns in relation to others from the past thirty years.
TRANSMISSIONS will feature artworks by Marcus Bunyan, Juan Davila, Andrew Foster, Brent Harris, Mathew Jones, Peter Lyssiotis, Lex Middleton, Andi Nellsün, Marcus O’Donnell, Scott Redford, and Ross T Smith.
A publication and a comprehensive public program will accompany this two-week exhibition.
Exhibition curated by Michael Graf and Russell Walsh.
~ Thursday 17 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Introduction to the archives
Nick Henderson (Australian Queer Archives) and Katie Wood (University of Melbourne Archives) in conversation with Russell Walsh.
~ Friday 18 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Activism, archives and history
Graham Willett (Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives) in conversation with Russell Walsh.
~ Saturday 19 July, 3 pm – 4 pm – Curator floor-talk with Michael Graf and Russell Walsh
~ Wednesday 23 July – exhibition open till 9pm for Nite Art Walk
~ Wednesday 23 July 7.00 pm – 8.00 pm – Hares and Hyenas Word is Out presents: Charles Roberts, Infected Queer – 20 years on
Melbourne writer Javant Biarujia will read from the polemical AIDS diary that he helped edit and publish in 1994.
~ Thursday 24 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS: 20 years on
Ted Gott, Curator of the seminal exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994, in conversation with Michael Graf, with several of the exhibition’s artists present for comment.
~ Friday 25 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – The Face of HIV/AIDS: Photographic Portraiture and HIV/AIDS 1984-1994
Susannah Seaholm-Rolan reflecting on why many of the artists featured in Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS worked in the medium of photographic portraiture and self-portraiture (includes exhibition closing drinks).
Please note: all events will commence sharply at advertised times owing to the early closure of the Student Union Building
The central theme of the exhibition is the response from Melbourne’s LGBT community to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It will contain artworks from this period as well as activist, government and other cultural responses – some of the works have never been exhibited before.
Michael Graf is co-curator of Transmissions, along with Russell Walsh. Both Graf and Walsh have spent the past seven months trawling through the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA) and the University of Melbourne Archives, where they have discovered some of the most moving and unique stories in Melbourne’s LGBT history.
“We wanted to focus on some of the cultural responses to the crisis,” Graf says. “The main part of that has been Ted Gott’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994: Don’t leave me this way: art in the age of AIDS. That exhibition became an incredibly important event for a lot of people. The NGA actually thought they would get 10,000 people through the space in four or five months – they got 140,000 people.
“It became a kind of pilgrimage for people from Melbourne and Sydney and other places around Australia. They went to Canberra specifically to see that exhibition. It was the first time a national gallery anywhere in the world put on an exhibition about HIV/AIDS.”
Transmissions includes copies of the visitors books from Don’t leave me this way: art in the age of AIDS. As the exhibition became a place where people remembered those they had lost, they poured their emotions and their experiences of the exhibition into the visitors books.
“There are some extraordinary accounts,” Graf says. “They had this experience in a national gallery to actually grieve.”
Graf and Walsh also tracked down artists from this exhibition. While many concede that Don’t leave me this way has been long forgotten, the milieu surrounding Transmissions is that it is time for this work to be considered again.
“They [the artists] have also said this is the perfect time to remember it,” Graf says. “Sometimes these things have to wait until they have receded enough back into history before they can be looked at again.” …
Graf hopes people visiting Transmissions will take away the richness of these collections. He also hopes they attract a younger audience as well as those who will remember what life was like in the gay community at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
“We’re hoping people might be inspired to access places such as the Australia Lesbian and Gay Archives and for a younger generation of people in Melbourne to be exposed to this incredible important history.”
Rachel Cook. “Transmissions: Archiving HIV/AIDS – Melbourne 1979 – 2014,” on the Gay News Network website, 2nd July 2014 [Online] Cited 06/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) How will it be when you have changed 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Tell me your face before you were born 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
George Paton Gallery Level 1 Arts and Cultural Building Monash Road, the University of Melbourne
Many thankx to the Grand Palais for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I have boundless admiration for the naked body. I worship it.”
“I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It’s always little altars.”
“I am looking for perfection in form. I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.”
The exhibition will present over 250 works making it one of the largest retrospective shows for this artist ever held in a museum. It will cover Mapplethorpe’s entire career as a photographer, from the Polaroids of the early 1970s to the portraits from the late 1980s, touching on his sculptural nudes and still lifes, and sadomasochism.
The focus on his two muses Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon explores the theme of women and femininity and reveals a less known aspect of the photographer’s work. The challenge of this exhibition is to show that Mapplethorpe is a great classical artist, who addressed issues in art using photography as he might have used sculpture. It also puts Mapplethorpe’s art into the context of the New York art scene in the 1970-1980s.
In his interview with Janet Kardon in 1987, Mapplethorpe explained that photography in the 1970s was the perfect medium for a fast-paced time. He did not really choose photography; in a way it was photography that chose him. Later in the same interview, he said “If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make a sculpture. Lisa Lyon reminded me of Michelangelo’s subjects, because he did muscular women.”
Mapplethorpe positioned himself from the outset as an Artist, with a capital A. Unlike Helmut Newton, who as a teenager already wanted to be a fashion photographer, and imposed his vision of the world and photography, making it an art in its own right, Robert Mapplethorpe is a sculptor at heart, a plastic artist driven by the question of the body and its sexuality and obsessed by the search for perfect form.
Like Man Ray, Mapplethorpe wanted to be “a creator of images” rather than a photographer, “a poet” rather than a documentarist. In the catalogue for the Milan exhibition which compared the two artists, Bruno Cora recalls the parallels in their lives and works: “Before becoming masterly photographers, Man Ray and Mapplethorpe had both been painters and sculptors, creators of objects; they both lived in Brooklyn in New York; they both made portraits of the intellectuals of their time; and they were both incisive explorers of the nude form, its sculptural qualities and the energy emanating from it.”
Mapplethorpe was an artist before being a photographer. His images come from a pictorial culture in which we find Titian (The Flaying of Marsyas / Dominick and Elliot), David, Dali, and even the great artists of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, Bernini …
As in Huysmans’s novel, the exhibition is a countdown for this other dandy from the end of another world, Robert Mapplethorpe. It starts with his self-portrait with a skull-headed cane, the image of a young man already old, the tragedy of a life cut down in full flight by AIDS. But his almost royal final posture, as if beyond death, still (just) alive but already in the posterity of his oeuvre, seems to beckon us with a gesture of his pastoral cane to follow him into the world that he constructed in twenty years of photography. The exhibition continues with statuary, a dominant theme in Mapplethorpe’s last years, photos of statues of the gods in his personal pantheon: Eros, of course, and Hermes … The artist always said he used photography to make sculptures, and he ended his oeuvre with photographs of sculptures. His nudes were already photographic sculptures.
Works are not created just anywhere. To be fully appreciated, Mapplethorpe’s art must be put into the socio-cultural context of arty New York in the 1970s and 80s, and the underground gay culture there at that time. Two permeable and equally radical worlds. To take the measure of the libertarian explosion of the time, we need to watch Flesh, Warhol’s film with Joe Dalessandro, which narrates 24 hours in the life of a young New York male prostitute. To understand the violence and passion of gay sexuality for young New Yorkers fighting for freedom in a repressive period, we must read Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty, the story of a young gay in the years of riots and demonstrations and extreme emancipation; and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), to plunge into the sexual experiments of Fire Island in the 1970s.
Mapplethorpe is hailed as one of the world’s greatest photographers and the exhibition aims to give a broad view of his work.
Robert Mapplethorpe was an artist with an obsessive quest for aesthetic perfection.
A sculptor at heart, and in his imagination, he wanted “people to see [his] works first as art and second as photography.”1 An admirer of Michelangelo, Mapplethorpe championed the classical ideal – revised and reworked for the libertarian New York of the 1970s – and explored sophisticated printing techniques to create unique works and mixed compositions, which he framed in unusual ways.
Like the novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, this exhibition has been organised “À rebours” [against the nap] and examines the work of another dandy, living at the end of another world. It opens with Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with the skull-head cane: the image of a young man, already old, tragically cut down in the prime of life by AIDS, it also reveals how the master of the realm of shadows – photography – gave free rein to his imagination. Like a modern day Orpheus, beyond death, he seems alive – although only just – yet already in the afterlife of his work, beckoning us with his satanic cane to follow him into the underworld of his life, in search of his desire.
“Photography and sexuality have a lot in common,” explains Mapplethorpe. “Both are question marks, and that’s precisely what excites me most in life.”2 Exploring the photography of the body, he pushed it to the limits of pornography, perhaps like no other artist before him. The desire we see in these images – often the photographer’s own desire – also reflects life in New York, as lived by some, in the 1970s and 80s, at the height of the sexual liberation movement. “I’m trying to record the moment I’m living in and where I’m living, which happens to be in New York. I am trying to pick up on the madness and give it some order.”3
This retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s work – the first in France since he passed away – features some two hundred and fifty images exploring a range of themes. They cover every aspect of Mapplethorpe’s art – bronze bodies and flesh sculptures, geometric and choreographic, still lives and anatomical details, bodies as flowers and flowers as bodies, court portraiture, night photography, and eroticism, soft and hard – interspersed with self-portraiture in all its forms. The works from the photographer’s early career, which close the exhibition, reveal how the path taken by his art was already mapped out in his first Polaroids. The sign of a great artist.
1/ Inge Biondi, “The Yin and the Yang of Robert Mapplethorpe,” in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, New York, January 1979, p. 11 2/ Mark Thompson, “Mapplethorpe,” in The Advocate, Atlanta, 24 July 1980 3/ Sarah Kent, “Mapplethorpe,” in Time Out, London, 3-9 November 1983
Curators: Stephanie Rosenthal (Chief Curator of the Hayward Gallery, London) and Sabine Breitwieser (Director, Museum der Moderne Salzburg), with Tina Teufel (Curator, Museum der Moderne Salzburg)
PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS PHOTOGRAPHS WHICH MAY BE DISTRESSING TO SOME PEOPLE
If I had half of this artists courage, I might not even have a quarter of her talent.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Art is a material act of culture, but its greatest value is its spiritual role, and that influences society, because it’s the greatest contribution to the intellectual and moral development of humanity that can be made”
“My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through everything; from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”
“To me, the work has existed on different levels. It existed on the level of being in nature and eventually being eroded away. But obviously when it’s shown to someone as a photograph, that’s what it is.”
Ana Mendieta
The few women working with the body at that time were in instant affinity with each other… The struggle for all of us was to keep the sensuousness of the body and to de-eroticize it in terms of cultural expectations. It was gratifying and exciting to discover her work. Those of us who had already been situating the body as central to our visual aesthetic could also anticipate the resistance that would be around her.
I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory. More than Ana dies, when she dies.”
Carolee Schneeman quoted in Camhi, Leslie. “ART; Her Body, Herself,” on the New York Times website published June 20, 2004 [Online] Cited 20/06/2014. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“You do feel the sadness that she’s not with us and you wonder where she would have gone with her work.”
Raquelin Mendieta
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) (detail) 1972 Suite of eight colour photographs (estate prints, 1997) Each 50.8 x 406cm The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Rape 1973 Colour photograph (lifetime print) 20.4 x 25.4cm The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Rape Scene 1973 Colour photograph (lifetime print) 39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed) Tate Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010
Rape Scene (1973) was part of series of works devised in response to the rape and murder of a fellow student on the Iowa University campus, where Mendieta completed her BA, MA (painting) and an MFA (inter-media). She invited friends and fellow students to her apartment. The viewer entered through a slightly ajar door into a dark apartment into a room where the artist appeared under a single source of light revealing Mendieta stripped from the waist down. The artist stood slouched and bound over a table, nude from the waist down with her body smeared in blood. Around her was an assemblage of broken plates and blood on the floor. Her direct identification with a specific victim meant that she could not be seen as an anonymous object in a theatrical tableau.
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood)(detail) 1973 Suite of six colour photographs (estate prints 1997) Each 50.8 x 40.6cm Private collection, London; Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Ana Mendieta: Traces is the first comprehensive survey of this influential artist’s work to be presented in Great Britain or the German-speaking world. It persuasively demonstrates that her art, while very much rooted in the concerns of her day, maintains a powerful connection to our present moment. Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta was forced to immigrate to the United States as a child due to her father’s political situation, and much of her work is obliquely haunted by the exile’s sense of displacement, while also reflecting her position as a double minority in North America’s largely white, male art world of the 1970s and 1980s. From the beginning, motifs of transience, absence, violence, belonging, and an identity in flux animated her multidisciplinary art, which ranged nomadically across practices associated with body art, land art, performance, sculpture, photography and film. At its core lay her recurring use of her own body – its physical and photographic traces – and her interest in marginal outdoor sites and elemental materials.
Spanning her brief, yet remarkably productive, career, this exhibition explores the many distinct facets of her practice. It captures her powerfully visceral evocation of ritual and sacrifice, as well as cycles of life and decay, while also highlighting her pioneering role as a conceptual border-crosser. Including photographs, drawings, sculptures, Super-8 films and a substantial selection of photographic slides, most of which have not been exhibited until now, Ana Mendieta: Traces reveals an artist whose underlying concerns led her to bravely re-work and re-combine genres, to draw on different cultures, both archaic and contemporary, while challenging the limits of the art discourse of her time. Her work continues to profoundly challenge, disturb, influence and inspire.
The Museum der Moderne Salzburg will open an extensive retrospective of the work of Ana Mendieta, one of our era’s most important and influential artists. Mendieta was born to a politically active family in Havana, Cuba in 1948. In the wake of the Cuban revolution, when she was only twelve years old, her parents sent her together with her sister to the United States. In 1985, at just thirty-six years old, she died under tragic circumstance in New York. During her short yet prolific career, she developed a unique visual language that is mesmerising in its intimacy, and equally challenging. Her pioneering work has been acknowledged by large retrospectives in the United States and Europe, and is represented in the collections of major museums.
According to Sabine Breitwieser, director at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, who has arranged the exhibition, “a comprehensive exhibition in the German-speaking area, especially in Austria, and the German monograph on Ana Mendieta are long overdue. The artist’s distinctive work, in which she stages her body within the landscape, seems to be ideally exhibited at this site, where nature and the theatrical take on such a major role. Due to the fragility of the work, this could possibly be one of the last extensive Mendieta exhibitions.”
Among the central themes in Mendieta’s artistic work are exile and cultural displacement. In her search for identity and finding her place in the world, she attempted to create a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Her work reveals numerous points of contingency with the emerging art movements of the 1960s and 1970s – Conceptual art, land art, and performance art. Nonetheless, it refuses any kind of categorisation and instead addresses missing links or gaps between different media and art forms. “Through my art I want to express the immediacy of life and the eternity of nature,” wrote Mendieta in 1981. Using her own body and elementary materials, such as blood, fire, earth, and water, she created transitory pieces that combine rituals with metaphors for life, death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. Her disembodied “earth body” sculptures were private, meditative ceremonies in nature documented in the form of slides and films. From them, Mendieta developed the so-called Siluetas (silhouettes), which form the core of her work. In the 1980s, Mendieta’s body disappeared from her artworks and she started to generate indoor works for galleries. Her engagement with nature continued in her sculptures and drawings, which she created as lasting works.
The exhibition presents roughly 150 works, which are organised throughout twelve spaces; two of these spaces are reconstructions of the original exhibitions by the artist. The works shown are in a multitude of media ranging from photography, film, and sculpture through to drawing. A further section will present the artist’s archive. Slides and photographs, notebooks and postcards offer insight into Mendieta’s working methods. The concern of Stephanie Rosenthal, chief curator of the Hayward Gallery London, is “to show Ana Mendieta’s outstanding work in all of its facets, and to place her artistic process at the center.”
While the artistic media that Mendieta utilises in her works could not be any more diverse, the pictures that she produces are characterised by an unmistakable, overwhelming and mystical poetry. This exhibition makes clear that almost thirty years after the artist’s premature death, her work has lost none of its singularity and uniqueness.
Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Silueta Series) 1978 Gelatin silver print 20.3 x 25.4cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Alma, Silueta en Fuego (Soul, Silhouette on Fire) (still) 1975 Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD 3:07 minutes The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) (still) 1976 (Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks) Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD 2:22 minutes The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled (Cuilapán Niche) 1973 Black and white photograph (lifetime print) 25.4 x 20.4cm Private collection, London; Courtesy Gallery Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery London
Ana Mendieta died at just 36 years old, but the imprint of her life digs deeper than most. Mendieta’s work occupies the indeterminate space between land, body and performance art, refusing to be confined to any one genre while working to expand the horizons of them all. With the immediacy of a fresh wound and the weightlessness of a half-remembered song, Mendieta’s artwork remains as haunting and relevant today as ever.
Her haunting imagery explores the relationship between earth and spirit while tackling the eternally plaguing questions of love, death and rebirth. Like an ancient cave drawing, Mendieta’s art gets as close as possible to her subject matter allowing no excess, using primal and visceral means to navigate her themes. Decades after her death, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg will show a retrospective of the late feminist artist’s work, simply titled “Ana Mendieta: Traces.”
Mendieta, who was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, moved to the U.S. at 12 years old to escape Castro’s regime. There she hopped between refugee camps and foster homes, planting inside her an obsession with ideas of loss, belonging and the impermanence of place. As an artist in the 1970s, Mendieta embarked upon her iconic series “Silhouettes,” in which she merged body and earthly material, making nature both canvas and medium. In her initial “Silhouette,” Mendieta lay shrouded in an ancient Zapotec grave, letting natural forms eat up her diminutive form.
Her “earth-body” sculptures, as they came to be known, feature blood, feathers, flowers and dirt smothered and stuck on Mendieta’s flesh in various combinations. In “Imagen de Yagul,” speckled feverishly in tiny white flowers, she appears as ethereal and disembodied as Ophelia, while in “Untitled Blood and Feathers” Mendieta looks simultaneously the helpless victim and the guilty culprit. “She always had a direction – that feeling that everything is connected,” Ana’s sister Raquelin said of her work.
An uncertain mythology runs throughout Mendieta’s oeuvre, a feeling at once primal, pagan and feminine. Admirers have cited the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria as an influence, as well as the ancient rituals of Mexico, where Mendieta made much of her work. Yet many of Mendieta’s pieces removed themselves from the spiritual realm to address present day events, for example “Rape Scene,” a 1973 performance based off the rape and murder of a close friend. For the piece Mendieta remained tied to a table for two hours, motionless, her naked body smeared with cow’s blood. In another work, Mendieta smushes her face and body against glass panes, like a child eager to peek into an off-limits locale, or a bug that’s crashed into a windshield. Against the glass, her scrambled facial features almost resemble a Cubist artwork.
Mendieta died tragically young in 1985, falling from her New York City apartment window onto a delicatessen below. She was living with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre at the time. Andre was convicted of murder following the horrific incident and later acquitted. Though the art world remains captivated by the mysterious nature of Mendieta’s passing, her sister emphasised the importance of removing Ana’s work from her life story. “I don’t want it to get in the way of the work,” she said. “Her death has really nothing to do with her work. Her work was about life and power and energy and not about death.”
Fellow feminist performance artist Carolee Schneeman disagrees, however, telling The New York Times in 2004: “I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory.”
Since many of Mendieta’s artworks were bodily performances, the ephemera that remain are but traces of her original endeavours. For an artist whose career was built on imprints, ghosts and impressions, this seems aptly fitting. Visceral yet distant, bodily yet spiritual, Mendieta’s images speak a language very distant from the insular artistic themes that so often populate gallery and museum walls. Mendieta’s works present the female body turned out, at once vulnerable and all-powerful, frail and supernatural. As her retrospective makes obvious, her artistic traces are still oozing lifeblood.
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled 1976 “Silueta Series, Mexico” Colour photograph (lifetime print) 39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed) Tate Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010
Mendieta formed a silueta on the beach at La Ventosa, Mexico, filling it with red tempera that was ultimately washed away by the ocean waves. The artist documented the obliteration of the figure by the tide in a sequence of 35 mm slides.
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled 1978 “Silueta Series, Iowa” Colour photograph (lifetime print) 25.4 x 20.3cm The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris
FINALLY… two postings on consecutive days by conceptual artists who use photography to document their staging, performance, sculpture, body, earth-body, action art, found art, land art – WORK THAT I REALLY LIKE AND CAN REALLY CARE ABOUT.
I care about both artists work not so much because of the quality of the photography but because of their passion, insight, ideas and general human nous, their need to understand humans and the worlds we inhabit: that INTELLIGENCE necessary for understanding what is true or real, using their intuition to root out, to dig down into the human psyche.
In this posting Divola eloquently investigates the mysterious process of creation through imagination (only for the original “model” then to be destroyed); the notion of photographic authenticity and an interrogation of the human impulse to master the natural world; photography at its most deceptively naturalistic revealing hidden, dead animals; and the landscape altered by human presence and staged to serve as a theatre for creative activity through the “captured” act of running away.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In Divola’s words, the Polaroids feature “The photograph as an object has an relationship to that which it represents, something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it. The relationship of something dead to something living.” The Polapan prints especially lend themselves to this associate with skin. Their plasticity and their alchemical marks bear witness to a mysterious process of creation; their subject matter conjured up, and then discarded. Divola’s “studio constructions,” as he called them, were temporary structures made solely for the purpose of photographic depiction, including funnels, human and animal figures, and expressively painted backdrops. Divola’s photographs are themselves echo chambers: they replicate and reverberate light from objects that have long since vanished.
Divola’s process has important photo-conceptual precedents: Richard Long’s photographic records of lines made by walking, Jan Dibbets’ play with optical illusion through the camera’s lens, or Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements. Divola’s work, though, is equally in conversation with the work of Jasper Johns. Johns, known for his paintings of numbers, flags, maps, and targets, focused on flat subjects as a means to conjoining the surface of subject matter with a painting’s flat picture plane. Divola has transmuted the achievements and medium-specificity of high modern painting into images that explore photography’s mimetic qualities and its sheer surface. These are images are about a recognisable reality we cannot access, dim echoes of a familiar world, yet one that has vanished.
Anonymous. “JOHN DIVOLA – Echo Chamber” on the Gallery Luisotti website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Across the gallery is a series of found photographs, “Artificial Nature” (2002), made up of continuity stills (the photographs taken on film sets to make ensure uniformity from scene to scene) from mid-century films. The photographs show fabricated landscapes created in studio backlots. The images zero in on the notion of photographic truth – the idea that when you look at a photograph, what you’re seeing is an accurate representation of the world – by presenting a false natural landscape. Without outside knowledge, upon first glance, the photographs look like ordinary landscapes.
Maxwell Williams. “John Divola’s SoCal Moment,” on the Art in America website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“Artificial Nature” (2002) stands out, and as with many of Divola’s series, the bluntness of the title belies the delicacy and actual locus of interest. Composed of thirty-six “continuity stills”, these black and white prints have been repurposed from movie studio archives, framed and hung in a tight grid. Ranging in provenance from the 1930s to the 1960s, each picture documents a movie set dressed as a lush, natural landscape. A clapperboard sign planted in the foreground might identify the scene as “wooded hillside” or “the beach.” At once romantic and businesslike, the series opens a delicious gap between intention and effect. To view these pictures only through the lens of nature vs. artifice would be reductive and superficial at best. Treat them instead as a peek into the cabinetry of early pop mechanics, or evidence of a peculiar temporality where worlds should be fixed with a sign because they so routinely congeal and vanish.
Kristin Posehn. “John Divola: As Far As I Could Get,” on The Miami Rail website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
With a career compromising four decades, John Divola is as distinctive for his commitment to the photographic community as for his thought-provoking work, Divola’s influence within the field of photography is widely recognised by curators, critics, scholars and photographers throughout the country; yet, his work has remained largely uncelebrated. Many of his former students have achieved illustrious careers and far more recognition, even as Divola continues to mentor and inspire both undergraduate and graduate students in contemporary practice.
As Far As I Could Get is the first over-arching presentation of Divola’s work and is a collaborative project led by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), shown simultaneously at SBMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA) in the fall of 2013. Though Divola’s photographic series are diverse in subject matter, this approach as one exhibition among three Southern California venues emphasises the consistent conceptual and performative threads that run through Divola’s entire body of work.
Divola was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After graduating with a BA from California State University, Northridge, he entered the MFA program at the University of California Los Angeles. There, under the tutelage of Robert Heineken, the artist began to develop his own unique photographic practice, one that merges photography, painting, and conceptual art. In addition to his own studio practice, he teaches contemporary art in the underserved California inland empire and writes on current photographic practice for a national audience.
John Divola’s photos of photographs range widely but the intellectual rigour from which they spring is unvarying. Whether testing the visual limits of photography by vandalising abandoned houses, interrogating the iconography of the divine through paint, flour, and film, or emphasising the distance between image and reality through the blurred figure of a running dog, Divola’s work is simultaneously fun and philosophical, visually appealing as well as intellectually stimulating.
LACMA On view: Four series of John Divola’s work in the Ahmanson Building, 2nd Floor
The series 20 x 24 Polaroids is Divola’s earliest work exhibited at LACMA, shot between 1987 and 1989. Hastily fabricated sculptures created out of impermanent materials attempt, on one level, to approximate actual physical objects in the world – branches, a rabbit, the moon, etc. At the same time, the roughly-hewn surfaces and ticky-tacky backdrops insist on the artificiality of what is depicted. These works express Divola’s ambivalence to the idea of photography as a descriptive medium with a one-to-one relationship to the real. Photography, in this case, is not employed in the service of documentary truth, but instead is held up as a crucial interlocutor in a creative exercise.
Artificial Nature (2002) offers a clear example of Divola’s interrogation of the human impulse to master the natural world. The work is a collection of 36 continuity stills from films made between the 1930s and the 1960s. These photographs, taken on film sets to establish consistency across multiple cuts (to ensure that the placement of objects remains constant from take to take), document fabricated landscapes contained within the artificial space of the film studio. Representing the diversity of natural topographies add weather patterns, the images also include accessories such as signage and clapperboards, highlighting the distance between ourselves and the natural world – a distance that is only accentuated by cinematic representation.
Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit (1995) is a series of details from the Keystone Mast collection of stereographic negatives housed at the California Museum of Photography, University of California Riverside. Stereoscopy, a three-dimensional imaging technology popular from the mid 19th to the early 20th century, exemplifies photography at its most deceptively naturalistic. When Divola began to examine the original glass-plate negatives in the Keystone collection, he found a wealth of detail, such as the birds and rabbit nestled amidst the foliage that gave the series its title.
The series As Far As I Could Get(1996-2010), five works of which are included in the LACMA exhibition, has Divola once again engaging with the natural environment, but this time in a more performative vein. Divola positioned his camera on a tripod, set the timer for ten seconds, and then ran straight into the established frame. At one level, this was a completely dispassionate endeavour. On another level, because the resulting pictures depict a man in a landscape, not in a controlled experimental setting, the viewer cannot suppress a frisson of physical and emotional tension. The works engage the viewer with the natural landscape – a landscape altered by human presence and staged to serve as a theatre for creative activity.
“Divola is a photographer who works in distinct conceptual series that span and stretch the reaches of photography as art. For instance, at LACMA, the works include a series called “As Far As I Could Get” (1996-2010), where Divola sets a 10-second timer and sprints as far from the camera as he can. It’s performative, simple, amusing and alienating – a tiny body in full physical exertion, far off in the landscape.”
Maxwell Williams. “John Divola’s SoCal Moment,” on the Art in America website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online.
![Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Itiba Cahubaba (Esculturas Rupestres)' [Old Mother Blood (Rupestrian Sculptures)] 1982](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ana-mendieta_itiba-cuhababa-web.jpg "Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) 'Itiba Cahubaba (Esculturas Rupestres)' [Old Mother Blood (Rupestrian Sculptures)] 1982")
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