Archives for June 2009

According to the Telegraph, more than 13,000 people applied to be living statues on Anthony Gormley’s project for Trafalgar Square’s empty fourth plinth, one hour each, night and day, for 100 days. Titled One & Other, it opens July 1 with 613 participants.

The Telegraph was wrong about one thing. A fork-life truck will lift not just a “mixed bag to Britons” to temporary glory. Applications were accepted from around the world, including one from Seattle artist Ellen Ziegler. After her name came up, she raised funds for her trip via Facebook.

Ziegler:

I plan to expand my work with mirrors into a time-based interactive performance on the Fourth Plinth at 9:00 am UK time, July 24, 2009. Live webcams will broadcast in real time; there will be BBC and international media coverage.

From Extreme Craft:

In case you sit up nights worrying that the Chinese aren’t quite grasping the whole capitalist thing, let this photo reassure you. These are Terra-cotta warrior shaped packets of chili sauce.

Unregulated capitalism in a totalitarian state might be good for packaging. But deprived of the dream of the common good without gaining anything resembling human rights, the people are a bit adrift, don’t you think, Li Wei?

Li Wei:

I love Fail Blog, a visual record of society’s signs and symbols gone horribly wrong. Sometimes, however, its lust to find fault mirrors of its faults. Why is this kid’s slide a fail? Children come out of the body. They are not likely to be scandalized by an orifice mash-up that functions as playground equipment.

It’s not a scandal, but unless it’s by Niki de Saint Phalle, it’s a rip off.

Her Hon (through her sex), from Moderna Museet Stockholm, 1966:

Her idea, her colors.

It’s the art object you will never see, unless you are an initiated Australian Aboriginal male. Nor can it be photographed. The only thing can be noted is its location – no longer at the Seattle Art Museum.

Although SAM has owned the object since museum founder Richard Fuller purchased it in 1970, the museum says it has never been shown. (Fuller retired in 1973.) Not even Australian Aboriginal elders who are pressing the issue around the world knew of its existence.

SAM is not only returning the object, it volunteered to do so without being asked.

Why?  Thanks to Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan, who’ve been collecting in this field since the 1980s, SAM has a stake in the subject. It’s one of the only U.S. museums with a gallery devoted to Australian Aboriginal art. The real motivator, however, is SAM’s African art curator,  Pamela McClusky. When I met her in the early 1980s, she had mounted an exhibit of traditional Ibo stools. Noticing what struck me as a lax security presence and the small size of the stools, I asked if she were concerned that one or two might be taken.

Not at all, she replied. The stools are spiritually protected. If anyone were foolish enough to steal one, he’d suffer before he came to his senses and brought it back.

A student of Robert Farris Thompson‘s, McClusky is not your ordinary art curator. Like Thompson, she embraces the meaning first peoples give the objects that they create. She is far more likely to see the central Australian Aboriginal object in question as elders see it, rather than in purely aesthetic terms.

Once the object came to her attention, it was as good as gone.

The wording of the press release has her stamp on it:

Secret/sacred objects of the type being returned are typically used in religious ceremonies by
central Australian Aboriginal men. They are considered to be physical manifestations of sacred
ancestral beings and as such have great spiritual power.

Not thought to have great spiritual power. The assertion is that they do in fact possess such power.

The National Museum of Australia will store the object temporarily while consultations proceed regarding its final
repatriation.

Airing tonight on HBO, Liz Garbus’ documentary, Shouting Fire, has as its subtitle, Stories From the Edge of Free Speech. (Preview via NYT)

While I haven’t seen it, she didn’t need to explain the title. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ metaphor is so rooted in the American imagination that her two-word contraction carries the day.

Holmes:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

Makes sense. The elegant image, however, supported a bad judgment and helped Holmes ride into history lauded for good sense he did not, in this case, demonstrate.

The Supreme Court opinion in question upheld a prison sentence given the pacifist Charles T. Schenck for distributing leaflets to World War I draftees. He urged them to say, without violence, hell no, we won’t go. (Schenck v. United States, 1919). The fire of which he warned was not a delusion.

When writing Supreme Court decisions, art is good, but justice is better.

Carol Milne, opening July 2 at Gallery IMA:

Drawings from the hospital. Baker – comedian, performance artist and good cook – here via the Guardian.

Tutankhamun’s come-back is coming up empty. Following a nationwide consensus, he’s now racking up bad reviews in the Bay Area, including a key one from Kenneth Baker:

Among people with a professional interest in the arts, “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” which opens today at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, will merely deepen the tarnish on the reputation of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

More here. The first Tut wave in the U.S. in the 1970s reverberated in the art of the time. This time, the only response worthy of the high status of the subject comes from Brooklyn artist Ariana Page Russell, via Shaun Kardinal. Titled Pharaoh, it’s a self-portrait as boy king.

Just as Tut’s body is an essential part of the touring package, Russell’s patterns come not from paint but from welts. She explains:

I have dermatographia, a condition in which one’s
immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases
excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts
to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin’s surface is
lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words
on my skin, which I then photograph. Even though I can direct this
ephemeral response by drawing on it, the reaction is involuntary, much
like the uncontrollable nature of a blush.

From Lila Ghobady, Iranian artist-in-exile – why she didn’t vote in the latest elections and why Mousavi is not a real alternative to Ahmadinejad. No matter who is the president of
Iran, the state, she writes, would would stone her.

As a journalist and filmmaker, I am called upon by the Islamic Republic of Iran to respect the red lines. These “red lines” include belief and respect for the Supreme Leader and the savagely unjust rules of traditional Islamic law in my country. I am expected not to write or demand equal rights. I am not allowed to make any film without the permission and without censorship by Iran’s Minister of Culture. If I did openly do all these things in Iran, I would be disappeared, tortured and raped. I would be killed as have so many women journalists, filmmakers and activists in Iran. Among those killed include Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photo journalist who was tortured and murdered for attempting to photograph and publicize brutalities committed by the Iranian regime.

This
is Iran. This is what it means to live under Ayotollah Khameini and his
goons. No change is possible while Iran is controlled by autocratic,
fundamentalist religious despots who determine the laws of the land.
There has been no real election. Candidates are all hand-picked and
cleared by a central religious committee. It is a farcical imitation of
the free nomination/ election process that we have pictured in the free
world. There is no possibility that a secular, pluralistic,
freedom-loving democratic person who loves his or her country can
become a candidate to run for president (or any other office) in Iran.

More here. Meanwhile, inside Iran, artist/filmmaker Mania Akbari writes about the arrest of her 17-year-old son, grabbed for wearing a green armband. Badly beaten, he was released because she has serious pull.