Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
With museum jobs as scarce as truth and justice from the Bush administration, my advice is, do not go into debt getting a credential for a job that isn’t there.
More general life advice is also welcome. All entries will comprise an exhibit at the University of Washington. Details here.
(Men around us #1 here.)
Zhang Huan: To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997, performance, Beijing
I invited about forty participants, recent migrants to the city who had come to work in Beijing from other parts of China. They were construction workers, fishermen and labourers, all from the bottom of society. They stood around in the pond and then I walked in it. At first, they stood in a line in the middle to separate the pond into two parts. Then they all walked freely, until the point of the performance arrived, which was to raise the water level. Then they stood still. In the Chinese tradition, fish is the symbol of sex while water is the source of life. This work expresses, in fact, one kind of understanding and explanation of water. That the water in the pond was raised one metre higher is an action of no avail.
In old communist China, there was little freedom but there was work guaranteed, along with a rough version of a safety net for the compliant. In post-communist China, freedom is given or taken away on the whim of the state. Thanks to capitalist inroads, there is no safety net. It’s a new world of totalitarian capitalism: all risk and few freedoms.
To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond features the victims of the new economy. They are workers for whom there is no work. They raised not just the water level but the profile of all the left-over and displaced workers around the world.
As John Perreault wrote in another context, capitalism is global, but so is tuberculosis.
The Boy Scouts are not a problem for J Zack Bent, who created his 4Culture exhibit – Buffalo Trace – to honor his family’s life in scouting. From the press release:
Zack Bent’s father was a Boy Scout within the Buffalo Trace Council in southern Indiana. “The tradition of scouting was handed down to me by him. And like the true Buffalo Trace, which was a migratory buffalo path through Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois that acted as road west for early Americans, scouting bears its trace in my life.”
Bent’s photos and relic-like objects document the wry and absurdly tender process of himself, his pregnant wife (the artist Gala Bent) and two young sons diving into the scouting life.
There are, however, children involved. What do they learn from scouting?
1. Homophobia. The organization is on the wrong side of history. If this were the only problem, I’d want its governing board to rot in hell, but there’s more.
2. Anti-eco greed. Just before my newspaper folded last March, PI reporter Lewis Kamb documented that Boy Scouts higher ups across the country for decades have conducted high-impact logging on tens of thousands of acres of forestland, often for the love of a different kind of green: cash. (Three-part series here.)
3. War mongering. See yesterday’s New York Times’ story, Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More. After reading it, art blogger James Wagner had the following, silver-lining thought:
Should we be grateful for one small favor? I mean, as homos we are fundamentally excluded from BSA membership, which normally means no participation in any of their fun and games or lovely overnights, so at least the Boy Scouts of America and their affiliate, the coeducational Explorers program, aren’t teaching violence, militarism, xenophobia, racism and fascism to our own young people (or at least not to those boys and girls who dare to be out while teenagers). (More here.)
Back to Bent. He won me over. I think he’s seriously wrong on this issue, but it isn’t his job to be right. The Boy Scouts are at the heart of his experience, which was in his case positive. Not only is he entitled to his memories, he’s able to turn them into doors that invite even the most alienated to walk through.
On the other hand, the uniforms chill me.
Santiago Sierra failed make a dent on the politics of economic power when he paid a pittance to unemployed young men to allow tattooed line to be permanently inscribed across their backs, like a scar from the lash of a whip.
From ARTnews:
Often working with refugee organizations, Sierra created pieces that involved workers from the local underclass being paid to do meaningless tasks: support a piece of Sheetrock at a 65-degree angle for an entire day; sit inside a cardboard box; or push around two-ton blocks of concrete. By designing such deliberately pointless “jobs,” he highlighted the disjunction between such workers and their work, showing labor as an imposed condition rather than a choice one makes. “The remunerated worker doesn’t care if you tell him to clean the room or make it dirtier,” Sierra remarks. “As long as you pay him, it’s exactly the same. The relationship to work is based only upon money.”
Degrading work is based only on money. By offering only degrading work, Sierra epitomized the problem. His reputation soared, but it’s doubtful his collaborators look back on their participation with pride.
What is exploitation? In the 1980s, many critics claimed that to photograph the homeless at all is to exploit them. Saner voices now prevail, but it’s hard in such work to avoid the didactic or sentimental.
Jesse Burke scores a poignant success in Low at Platform Gallery. Burke paid a group of homeless men to come to his studio, take off their shirts and be photographed. (Click to enlarge.)
In the early 1980s, visiting a friend who’d moved to the lower East Side prior to its upgrade, I noticed watery blood stains in snow drifts. I asked if they documented fights from the previous night. No, said my friend. They mark places that the homeless relieve themselves.
I thought of that exchange when looking at Burke’s photos. The men in them aren’t pathetic or heart-warming or instructive. They do not go forth and teach all nations. Instead, they are simply and clearly a genuine measure of themselves. To June 20.
Doing the dog paddle, some people think they’re Esther Williams. Noah Grussgott lives in the gap between fact and optimistic fantasy. His chairs that are figures are made from material signs of distress (barricade tape, band aides, crumbling bits of brick wall and discarded foam core), but they occupy space with a jaunty elan. They are the best news they’ve ever heard.
Gathered together in Bleacher, they project a comic air of expectancy: Whatever is going to happen is going to be good.They are not troubled by their lack of forward momentum. Why travel when you’re already there?
Band aide chair:
Barricade tape chair:
Although it’s an insufficient image, I love the cheap charm of his baby blue/girly pink foam core Frank Stella, on the wall below.
Robert Yoder’s battered geometries from the 1990s….
look positively regal next to Grussgott’s.
Although Yoder is almost always purely abstract, he has the weight to sound a serious depth. I’m not sure the same can be said of Grussgott.
I used the swastika as a literal symbol, immediately recognizable as a
representation of hate. It’s both in a vulnerable/boxed in position as
well as at the center of the image. The intention was to simultaneously
discuss the ways in which symbols are sensitized and how overtime, even
a swastika can become a cliche.
But swastikas are not cliches. John Updike once wrote that what interests Saul Bellow does not appear to interest his characters. There’s a similar disconnect between what Grussgott wants to convey in his work and the work itself. As long as he stays away from ultimate evil, which swamps him, there are worse problems. In the end, who cares what the artist was thinking?
Grussgott continues at Grey Gallery through June 6. In the Seattle Times, Rachel Shimp sees the show as the artist wants it to be seen.
Carl Andre doesn’t think of his floor pieces from the late ’60s as flat. They claim the space above them to the ceiling.
In 1987, Charles Ray found a more literal way to connect within the spacial void. Ink Line flows from the ceiling to a hole in the floor, refabricated for his current exhibit at Matthew Marks. (Ken Johnson review here.)
Alex Schweder connects through directions, which are, in the photo below, painted at the room’s top and bottom.
At On The Boards Saturday and Sunday.
What a waste. Jan Fabre’s splendid company saves him from the didactic tedium of his text, but just barely.
I think he was going for something like this, Jean Lowe’s Overstock! from 2009,
(Enamel on panel, 95 ½ x 84″)
The fatal virus of consumerist capitalism kills its host.
Instead, frantic overkill subverts his indictment of high fashion, Christianity, the id of appetite, the KKK, Abu Ghraib, racism and the wealthy. Fabre is a leftist blowhard who charms radiant performers into working for him.
There are moments, however, when the text scores. Men with guns lounge on leather sofas and summon women with a snap of the fingers, who rush over to masturbate them.
“My museum is getting too small for all my Hindu Indians,” says one man. “I need only two more Jews to complete my collection,” says another.
Faber also succeeds in taking the erotic out of the sexual and the fun out of a joke. Orgy of Tolerance opens with four writhing under the pressure of their own hands, coached by four in paramilitary garb. The first 10 seconds were pretty funny, but Farbre skillfully turned the humor inside out to mock those in the audience foolish enough to laugh.
I love this company. They can do anything. Too bad they’re doing this for one hour and 45 minutes. Anytime there was music (Dag Taelderman) and dance, the bad time I was having became a distant memory. The ballet with shopping carts was wonderful, and performer Goran Navojec sold every scene in which he appeared. He’s the only hefty body on the lithe team, and the only one whose sex appeal could not be disguised. Even when he wandered in wearing nothing but diapers and smoking a cigar only to disappear again, he was the star.
I heard a woman behind me whisper to her companion, “Bring back the big guy.” Amen.
An inspiring way to start the day can be found at FAIL Blog. It tracks those who fail big, fail fast and fail often.
an ArtsJournal blog
