Artschmart

artschmart: olympia + iris

janeharr — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 03:52:16 +0000

It occurred to me that this image/still of Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, 1976, did for the 20th century what Manet’s Olympia, 1863, did for the 19th: confront society with its ultimate sham-muse; the idealized whore. Or courtesan no-more. Manet did it by attacking art history’s tradition of the reclining nude, and showing what a sham all that allegorical pretense really was.
Édouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863

Paul Schrader’s construction of Iris, a 12-year junkie old prostitute too young to be jaded – so aptly called the Shirley Temple of the 1970s – does much the same, shorning her of her innocence (one must be an adult to consent, right?) in order to skewer sexual mores. Both managed to titillate and shock through resolutely abject visions, and yet both succeeded in their bids for fame . Manet has become part of the canon, and Taxi Driver is undoubtably a classic as well. Both also came from repressed families. Here’s some excerpts from an interview with Schrader who talks about this, along with the film:

“I had no intention of being involved in the motion-picture business; I backed into it. It began when I was at Calvin College, a seminary in Michigan. I became interested in movies because they were not allowed. This was the era of The Seventh Seal and La Strada, and I saw that movies could fit into the religious structure of the school and provide a bridge between my religious training and the forbidden world. Movies were forbidden in our church by a synodical decree of 1928 which defined them as a “worldly amusement,” along with card-playing, dancing, smoking, drinking, and so on. I snuck off to see my first movie, The Absent-Minded Professor, which I’d been blackmailed into seeing by watching The Mickey Mouse Club.

When I was in New York, I was feeling particularly blue in a bar at around three A.M. I noticed a girl and ended up picking her up. I should have been forewarned when she was so easy to pick up; I’m very bad at it. The only reason I tried it that night is that I was so drunk. I was shocked by my success until we got back to my hotel and I realized that she was: (1) a hooker; (2) under age; and (3) a junkie. Well, at the end of the night I sent Marty a note saying: “Iris is in my room. We’re having breakfast at nine. Will you please join us?” So we came down, Marty came down, and a lot of the character of Iris was rewritten from this girl who had a concentration span of about twenty seconds. Her name was Garth.”

Manet’s Olympia (a common name for prostitutes at the time, btw) was modeled by Victorine Meurent, an artist who modeled for many of Paris’s demimonde. Meurent though, was much younger, and poorer than her aristocratic male “peers”. The story of Schrader with Garth/Iris is much the same in terms of the exploitive older male exercising his prerogative. Which is exactly what both call attention to, if unwittingly,as they do implicate themselves I think, consciously or otherwise. Though as the Guardian piece linked above makes clear, the abjection still resides in the woman:

“But while Meurent’s contribution was recognised by Manet’s friends, her willingness to pose naked made her a notorious figure to the general public, undermining her hopes of being taken seriously.”

Posing nude made her a prostitute for all intents and purposes then, anyway. Interestingly, it didn’t seem to deter her from wanting to continue her pursuit of painting anymore than it did Foster with acting. The later even talks about how proud she is to have been part of Taxi Driver.

In 1932 Paul Valéry wrote of Olympia, “She bears dreams of all the primitive barbarism and animal ritual hidden and preserved in the customs and practices of urban prostitution”, which applies just as well to Iris.

In the end, Manet and Schrader send-ups to the notion of the ideal “whore” underscore all this projected fantasy. That, and the fact that what is particularly abject exists because there is such demand. Something to mull over more, I think…

from the vaults: david armstrong, RIP

janeharr — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 01:56:59 +0000

Here’s one from the vaults. A Huffpo interview I did a few years back with David Armstrong, who I’m very sad to say died today. I remember him getting cranky through the process and sending strange missives all in caps, but mostly I remember being so impressed by his grace and wit. And of course his brilliant photographs, which I hope will come to be regarded with the same significance as the work of his peers/friends, Jack Pierson and Nan Goldin. Maybe sharing this will help in some small way, reminding people of how gifted he really was. RIP David, I’ll treasure our intense conversations, few as they were, always.

Nan Goldin: David at Grove Street, Boston, 1972, 1972;

black-and-white photograph; 18 3/4 x 12 5/8 in.; gift of the artist.

Home-Work: Photographer David Armstrong Talks About His Latest Monograph, 615 Jefferson Avenue

Posted: 12/19/2011 5:36 pm EST Updated: 02/18/2012 5:12 am EST

I have this vision of David during one of our visits in his Bed-Stuy home, sitting in a high-backed chair, smoking a Newport, gazing into the late day sun. It was July 11th, one of the hottest days on record, a heat wave with temperatures in the high 90s, the heat index in the 100s. He’d tried to cancel because of it, but I’d already gotten a cab before the email reached me. And there we sat on the second-floor of his 5-story brownstone where he shot many of the images in the book we were to talk about, filling the light-saturated room with our cigarette trails, talking of cats, sex, and poor health. And of course about the boys who inhabit his work, house, heart and mind.

A photographer long associated with “The Boston School,” a group of artist friends (Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and Jack Pierson, among them) who in the late 1970s developed a kind of snapshot aesthetic loosely defined by saturated color and raw intimate portraits, Armstrong has spent the last decade creating highly prized commercial work for fashion editorials, bringing to the glossies and the masses a doleful eye for beauty. The elegiac, often transcendent tone of his photographs, particularly the portraits of young male models captured in his latest monograph, 615 Jefferson Avenue (Damiani, 2011), taken before and after officially commissioned shoots, conveys more than mere beauty, however. Suffused with longing and an acute sense of the ephemeral, there is among the gorgeous young faces and carefully arranged tableaux, a feeling that time and memory are paradoxical twins, never in synch, but always connected.

Similarly, there is in the artist’s old-world manners and unironic love of glamour, a timeless appeal to the fugitive. Nevertheless, David is nothing if not candid, his words like his images steeped in an eloquence as forthright as it is often sad. A self-declared shut in, who prefers to spend most of his time at home, he is refreshingly unapologetic about behaviors others might find socially unacceptable. In a recent New York Timesinterview, for example, he openly concedes to drug use: “Jokingly, I [used to] say that if I reached 50, I would start doing everything again,” he said. “But it turned out I did. I started using again in 2002. Am I a functioning addict? I’m functioning enough.” It’s that candor and the tender love for a youth forever spent yet obsessively sought in the very rooms where we talked that led me to discuss with David the making of 615 Jefferson Avenue.

JH: The title of your book is the place where all the portraits in it were taken, but 615 Jefferson Avenue is clearly more than a number on a street. For anyone who’s had the pleasure to visit, or look carefully at the atmospheric lair that enshrines the pretty boys in your melancholic pics, your 5-story house smack in the middle of do-or-die Bed-Stuy, is a theatrical wonder of sprawling rooms and shifting light — as much a character in these works as the models themselves. Perhaps even a surrogate for yourself? How do you think your relationship to “home” has informed the images in the book?

DA: Faithful Jefferson Ave expresses more of me than I have the balls to in situ, and I thoroughly believe it stands as a faithful lieutenant to any with even a cunt hair of visual perception or emotional sensitivity. It’s more “me” than I am, mortgaging me rather than the reverse. I shall never escape the charms it holds, the resonance of all that’s happened here. Its fragile beauty and that of the light inhabiting its rooms and halls. I will never leave this place until the dark parade escorts me out. But yes, this house is definitely a prominent participant in any picture made here, and often in a manner beyond my control. This place is me, I’m in its possession.

JH: One of my favorite things about the house is the large, eccentric collection of stuff that you’ve amassed there. Moving through the maze-like corridors of its endless rooms, one sees all these groupings of objects where the Belle Epoque meets deshabille chic, arranged ephemerally on tables and under bell jars. I too obsessively collect shit, from cat whiskers and subway posters I steal to space age tchotchkes and vernacular pics, but there’s rarely any order. You manage to imbue these tableaux with a narrative and aesthetic potency such that many become sculpture/art. Does the process of arranging the different elements that comprise these more finished “works” mirror that of the boys you portray, arrange, and collect in your book?

DA: In fact, these processes mirror one another very little. Both bodies of work function as self-portraits but in such different ways. The piles of junk that take form over hours, days, months, and years furnish the one place where I still can work in an organic way, let something develop, contemplate it, then change it, add or subtract from it, move it or dismantle it. And more recently to sometimes say “that’s it, it’s done, there it is.” Very Mrs Dalloway.

JH: How then do the photos take form? And why are all the subjects young beautiful boys?

DA: The choice of subject, the time, the place, and then whatever evolves; mutations have occurred over the years but those fundamentals remain. I’m always scared before a portrait shoot the way you might be before an assassination. So much has to do with putting the person at ease, enough so they might open themselves to you in some small way. Jumping into the water is how I think about commencing any shoot. I honestly have no idea what i’m doing or where we’ll end up. As the only other participant, the sun can have as much to do with it all as either the model, the house, or myself. There’s an arc, it can be as short as an hour or as long as a day. In some cases, like the serial versions, it can go on for years with a single muse. Usually a point comes where I’m totally lost, the pictures are dictating themselves, I love that. There’s a climax and then you shoot a bit longer, wanting to cover yourself, though you know the moment’s passed. And all my subjects are not young beautiful boys. Glancing back I’d say for every four boys I’ve shot, I’ve shot a girl, in many cases much more interesting photographs. Also, I spent nearly five years primarily photographing places. Scalo published a monograph of these land and cityscapes, “All Day, Every Day” in 2002. And I’ve continued to make them until now.

I spent nearly four years working on a series of portraits of hustlers at Stella’s and the hotel Sherman directly preceding and overlapping the earliest of images in 615, none of them beautiful in the conventional sense, or all young for that matter. In my own estimation the best of my most recent work are interiors, images of this house, and my house in the country. Reshooting what are nearly two dimensional piles of other images, many of the tableaux of objects you spoke of earlier, and many just of rooms, windows doors, mirrors that change with the times of day and the seasons of the year. A lot of these were shown at Arles two summers ago when I’d just begun them. They continue to interest me more than anything else I’m currently doing. The selection of images in this book is obviously very specific and as I feared the idea behind it required a lot more clarification, but then you can never underestimate the stupidity of people. So what’s the diff?

JH: Lol. Well, in Ryan McGinley’s interview with you, he foregrounds your long-term friendship and relationship with Nan Goldin, a pivotal association others seem to systematically invoke as well. Does that ever get on your nerves — to have writers/curators/critics continuously fasten your work and its influence to Nan’s?

DA: No it doesn’t. I never would have picked up a camera had it not been for Nan. Beyond that nan and I brought each other up from the time we were 14, this isn’t folklore, it’s fact. We have a bond that for better or worse cannot be broken. We taught each other how to see in the confines of Harvard Square and Beacon Hill. Years later in Berlin her largesse allowed me the privilege of a post-graduate holiday that lasted for three years, affording me the freedom to do nothing other than relearn how to make images. And further still, had it not been for Nan no one would ever have seen the pictures I made. I remain in awe of her raw and staggering genius as a creator of images. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Nan. We share a love, the dynamic of which is strange to say the least, baroque even, but so are most friendships worth having. So yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

JH: Still, while the work shares a similar sensibility, there’s often a painterly, somber quality to your portraits (the boys never smile, for example) that recalls old masters, and distinguishes itself from Nan’s technicolor paeans to abject glamour through emotional restraint and sexual sublimation, wouldn’t you agree? What personal experiences and art historical references most account for this difference in tone, in your estimation?

DA: I think Nan’s photographs are primarily linked with painting in so far as her use of color running in perfect tandem to the content of the work, something not easy to pull off, and I don’t think intentional though undeniably true. As expressive as any other formal element to a painter is the use of color, the same is true of Nan. I’m not a good colorist and still pretty new to it. It took several years for me even to understand an image was working precisely because of the color. I think my pics also allude to painting, but more in terms of the use of line, compositional elements, and the handling of light. I generally find looking at paintings to be a far more transcendent experience… in the hierarchy of art forms, photography actually registers very low on my list, if at all. Henry Geldzahler once said we’d all be a lot better off if we realized photography was a hobby and not an art form. Had I not been the hapless fellow of 19 I was and had any courage, I’d have continued my pursuit of painting which is the reason I went to art school in the first place. But when all’s said and done, any good work of art needs to be judged on the amount of felt life it contains, painting or photo, mine or Nan’s, restrained or in your face, emotion is what it’s about. Of course that’s the world according to me, and judging from the mountains of crap being turned out these days, I’d say this notion of “art” was co-opted several decades ago. Sic transit gloria mundi..

shanzhai biennial: faux-ism in art

janeharr — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 02:42:03 +0000

Duchamp through the eyes of Koons, or just what happens when irony falls down the rabbit hole? I’m not quite sure, but Cyril Duval’s work has often piqued my curiosity. Years back I wrote a profile on himfor Clear magazine when he was launching Item Idem, and he happens to have a show up now at Johannes Vogt.

item idem Portrait of Mussolini as Prometheus, 2014
Planter, bubblegum, latex, foam, silk flowers, cereal boxes, acrylic, glass container, popcorn
10 x 22 x 55in (25 x 56 x 140cm)

Duval’s very smart in a resourceful, wily sort of way, as it seems is his partner-in-crime these days, Babak Radboy, who explains their current project, “Shanzai”, a faux art fair, in Art in America as such:

“The phenomenon of shanzhai is deterritorialized at its core—in the same way that a global art market is so obsessed by and so based on territorial expansion, but at the same time has very little to say about the places that it’s in. Whether it’s the Gulf or Istanbul or Baku or China, it’s all Ubers and hotels. The idea of trying to turn something like shanzhai into a place makes a lot of sense.

The way we operate is really based on invitation and opportunity. All of us in some way or another are annoyed at a kind of traditional studio practice and the idea of warehousing art products and labor and waiting for someone to happily discover you, like you’re a mineral resource or something. We really work around the opportunities that present themselves to us. Everything we do is made up for that specific venue, including press—when we have a large article or review coming up we’ll invent the documentation for a piece that maybe didn’t happen.”

I’m not sure what to make of it – the inevitable post-internet conflation of satire with admiration, the knowing consumer’s predicament? – but for those in London this week, check it out and let me know (especially if it “didn’t happen” ). Here’s the press release, and if you want more, check out this feature in V magazine:

SHANZHAI BIENNIAL N°3: 100 HAMILTON TERRACE
Monday Oct. 13th, Project Native Informant, London
Tuesday Oct. 14th, Frieze Projects (Live), booth L1, London

ART PRESS RELEASE:
For it’s third Biennial in as many years, SHANZHAI BIENNIAL will attempt to sell a £32,000,000 estate at Frieze Art Fair, London — for which they stand to make a healthy commission.

Entitled SHANZHAI BIENNIAL N°3: 100 HAMILTON TERRACE, the work consists of twin retail installations running concurrently at Frieze and the gallery Project Native Informant. Featuring a high-gloss advertising campaign in stills and video dispersed in a half dozen prominent press outlets but in the end culminating less in these traces than in the potential commercial transaction they seek to perform.

Transforming both their gallery and their prominently placed booth at Frieze into fully functioning real estate boutiques, SB has partnered with high-end brokerage Aston Chase in the crafting of a advertising strategy which unlocks the potential of Frieze as a lifestyle brand with a rarified demographic penetration uncannily suited to the London property market.

Taking the iconography and phenomenon of Frieze itself as their starting point, SB responds to an environment of intensely subdivided space, in which a labyrinth of booths recreates in miniature a global landscape of private galleries in an almost platonic representation of the dynamics of culture and commerce.

The fair has coincided with an epoch for the popularity and usefulness of contemporary art — which has itself become indispensable to the industries of property development, place-branding and ‘reurbaniziation’. The magazine from which it sprang also operates as a rentier of cultural space: producing a publication defined as a space for critical discourse; practically supported through the sale of advertisements. Advertisers effectively pay for space for its proximity to critique.

With it’s crypto-corporate identity evoking limited ethical liability SHANZHAI BIENNIAL decants the space afforded critique as a mediator of culture and commerce by directly profiting not only from the sale but also the production of its work.

With 100 HAMILTON TERRACE, SHANZHAI BIENNIAL squarely leaves the round of artists working within the framework of corporate aesthetics and positions itself as a commercial entity exploiting the art world in a mutually beneficial exchange of services. In the end the biggest winner is the public.

selections from the vernacular pic collection aka my orphans

janeharr — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 01:25:41 +0000

I started collecting old snapshots after spending hours sifting through an immense warehouse of junk that we regulars affectionately called “Sid’s on Driggs”, a space now occupied by a yipster grocery store and luxury apartments. I learned when they were asked to pick up the remains of loved one’s estate (ie. the unwanted contents of an apartment or house), it typically meant everything. Sid chose to leave the boxes of family albums and generations of photos out for people to buy along with furniture, clothes, knick-knacks, linens, housewares, etc. I loved it. Loved the surprises and discoveries of so much ephemera.

The photos were instantly compelling. I’d spend hours obsessively going through them, getting very drawn into the narratives they suggested, selecting those I liked based on various criteria, subjective, aesthetic, social, etc. They were so cheap, I couldn’t help myself, and sometimes I wanted to preserve the integrity of what could be 3 generations of family snapshots, so I got a lot. Over the years I found other junk shops with photos, but some were priced as precious. Luckily I found another place with a similar penchant (more like a willingness, I’d suspect) for taking in entire estates, The Thing, which opened in my neighborhood right about the time Sid’s closed. At first, I began collecting old stationary and greeting cards from the later, until I realized they had flat files in the back stuffed with old pics. The Thing then became my haunt, and I’d sit in a corner of the dirty store on the floor, slavishly going through drawer after drawer, flipping through thousands of images. I got many gems from both places, photos dating back to the early 20th century, polaroids of every format, pics printed on scalloped paper or in stereo formats, taken on all kinds of cameras: the variety was endless and enthralling!

Obvious categories emerged – birthdays, vacations, holidays, pets and kids, etc. – but I learned things too like it was weirdly common for guys in the 1920s-1940s to form pyramids or other formal shapes for group portraits (mimicking sports, I guess?). And people love posing with their cars. I’ve got photos from the 1950s of an old pet cemetery, images of WWII soldiers (including Nazis), amateur porn, representations across class and race as well as subjects and formats.

Anyway, a while back an intern of mine scanned some of the pics from my collection, a mere fraction of what I have, and I just came across the file, so thought I’d share here. The resolution is low, but they’re still great to look at. Of course, “vernacular photography” has now become a mega market with serious collectors (including famous photographers and museums) such that I don’t even bother to look anymore. I have so many as it is, and really need to spend time archiving rather than adding to the collection. Last summer a dealer rather greedily offered to buy them off me when he realized what I had, and I visibly recoiled at the suggestion. I’ve always felt rather protective of these images, which I think of as my orphans. I’ve shared them with very few people, so this is a big deal. Remember these photographs represent real people’s lives, and represent a time when personal photos were just that, PERSONAL. Yes, they also represent a history of technology, shifts in cultural and social mores, and a relationship to photos that you couldn’t entirely control. There are many “mistakes” and unintentionally interesting images in my collection, for example, that in today’s digital world would’ve been deleted, gone. Anyway, ENJOY respectfully, and please don’t disseminate without permission of acknowledgement, thank you!

from the archives: my artforum interview with monica bonvicini

janeharr — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 05:00:26 +0000

I never think to re-circulate my old writing, previously published stuff, but wtf, I watch artists promote the same work in different contexts all the time, which I like when its random, or the result of an unexpected encounter with an old work they forgot about, or find – in the long glance of retrospection – strange or interesting or nostalgic.

I came across this 2001 interview I did with Monica Bonvicini in just that way, by accident, and it took me down memory lane. It was for Artforum online, and I came across it googling artists engaged with architecture and gender. Kind of a sweet surprise, as I’d completely forgotten about it (big surprise, ha)! It reminded me of my trip to LA that year, where I saw the show we discussed, though sadly I can’t remember where:(

Here it is as a link, the cut-and-paste below is easier to read, and includes better images, only one of which, sadly, represents the installation I saw. There weren’t anymore online. Its a great work, though, one that made me think again about Bonvicini’s intrepid use of gay S & M imagery at a time when it was still outre or at least before harnesses became a catwalk staple.

Consider it my version of throw back Thursday, and if you want to know more about her work, Phaidon did a great book on the artist, and I threw in a few more pics of other, later work. HAPPY FALL!

Monica Bonvicini talks to Jane Harris about architecture and the iconology of construction workers.

For several years now, Monica Bonvicini has been something of a heckler, taking aim at the granddaddy of all aesthetic boys clubs: architecture. In her 1999 Venice Biennale work, I Believe in the Skin of Things as in That of Women, the Italian-born artist turned Le Corbusier’s well-known comment on its head, vandalizing the facades of a boxlike room she had built and covering the broken walls with graffiti.

Quotations from other famous male architects, such as Auguste Perret and Adolf Loos, were juxtaposed with obscene words and caricatures of naked men holding square sets, masturbating, or gazing at bejeweled women. Eternmale, 2000, installed at the Kunsthaus Glarus, featured slick white chairs and tables designed by Willy Guhl (from bent panels of Eternit, a mixture of cement and cellulose), an electric-blue carpet, ambient music from porno films, a video monitor displaying a burning log, and Picasso’s Tête de Femme (Head of a woman), 1963. A parody of a playboy pad from the 1960s, the room offered the ultimate guy space for chilling out, seducing chicks, and refueling the testosterone.

Bonvicini’s sense of humor is incisive and often chilly, sort of like Bruce Nauman on dry ice. Her themes—the libidinous charge of architectural space and the often sexist presumptions that underlie its theory—are considered with critical distance but are tweaked empirically by her lifestyle. She has spent over a decade dividing her time between Los Angeles and Berlin, two cities very active in the promotion of new architecture, especially the latter, where the buzz about building a new Berlin has been as loud as the cement mixers and drills, not to mention the hoots and hollers of construction workers whom women cross the street to avoid.

These Days Only a Few Men Know What Work Really Means, 1999

For Bonvicini, construction workers are, on the one hand, laborers who toil with no glory; on the other, purveyors of aggressive masculinity. But it is precisely the complex class and gender issues they embody that make them interesting to her. In Fuckeduptimes, 1999, Bonvicini interviewed bricklayers, asking them questions like “What does your wife/girlfriend think of your rough and dry hands?” and hired them to build minimalist structures in limestone.

This past May and June, Bonvicini presented a number of works at the inaugural exhibition of The Project in Los Angeles. One of these, These days only a few men know what work really means, 1999, delved into the contradictory symbolism of construction workers. The piece explores the psychosocial dynamics of advertising billboards, which the artist has overlaid with images of gay sex and quotations taken from the simultaneously public and private world of Internet chat rooms.

Both Ends, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010

Jane Harris: Tell me about your piece These days only a few men know what work really means.

Monica Bonvicini: I find it interesting that construction workers are so popular in gay erotica, but, at the same time, are well known for their extreme heterosexual behavior. There are other connotations in the piece as well. When I first showed it at the the Art Basel fair in 1999, I used portable aluminum walls that belonged to the fair, and kind of mocked the idea of an art-fair “statement.” The metaphor of a bunch of construction guys fucking each other (images I found in a gay porno magazine), and the misspelled quotations I took from the Internet, were hard to digest for quite a number of viewers. And then there are the two black-and-white pictures of Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, both of whom are literally wearing their own architecture in the form of models. But as you say, I had been working with construction materials, on construction sites, and with construction workers for a while.

JH: You did a piece at the MIT List Center for which you made an impenetrable structure from chain link, cinder block, and Home Depot wood trellises. Aren’t you working with Home Depot fences for another work, Turning Walls, 2001?

MB: The piece at the MIT group show was Turning Walls—the same piece I am showing in Grenoble.

Monica Bonvicini, Built for Crime, 2006, SculptureCenter, New York, Broken safety glass, bulbs, 5 dimmer packs, lan box, 4′ x 40-1/2

JH: I really like BEDTIMESQUARE, 1999. It’s a realization of a drawing you did some time ago, isn’t it?

MB: Yes. BEDTIMESQUARE was based on a drawing from the series “Smart Quotations,” 1996. The work relates to a piece of Carl Andre’s. Because of the industrial materials and the inflatable mattress in the middle, it is, metaphorically speaking, like sleeping in a Minimal sculpture. The bed, along with the window and the wall, are classical representations of feminine space. You know, the history of the bed is very interesting.
JH: Especially in performance art. Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and Vito Acconci all used beds or bedlike structures to draw connections between the body and the institutional frameworks in which it operates. So did Valie Export. What are you working on now?

MB: I just opened the show at Le Magasin in Grenoble. I’m also preparing a public art project for the Aussendienst in Hamburg, which deals again with the language of commercialism and its relation to art. I’m going to produce billboards developed by Scholtz & Friends, one of the biggest advertising companies in Europe, for buses and subway stations in Hamburg.
JH: Will you use construction-worker imagery again?

MB: Maybe. Why not?

Both Ends, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010

wiggin’ out: a virtual exhibition of wigs in contemporary art

janeharr — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 19:36:07 +0000

Culturally and historically, hair has been a marker of everything from social identity to sexuality, and wigs especially conjure associations with masquerade. As objects that signify the body, they can be alluring, comical, or abject. No wonder so many artists have used it for its material and allegorical associations.

I’ve mentioned here before my fascination with wigs since I was a girl, coveting the platinum versions worn by my German aunt and Dolly Parton, among other women from TV, the supermarket, and magazines. Other than this book, I’ve not seen any attempt to collect examples by artists, perhaps because it seems frivolous? Clearly, I don’t think so as I spent many obsessive hours hunting down the examples gathered below. No doubt I’ve unintentionally omitted some, but I chose not to include artists who wear wigs in performances as that would be too many. Anyway, ENJOY! And for those wanting to further whet their wig appetites, this tumblr dedicated to wigs is pretty fun.

(and fyi, this virtual exhibition is © janestown.net, please don’t steal and not give credit)

Lorna Simpson. Wigs (Portfolio) Waterless lithograph and felt, 1996-2006

Rachel Harrison, Glamour Wig, 2005, mixed media

Meschac Gaba, Tresses, fiber and mixed media, 2005

Jim-Shaw, Hollywood Wig Octopus, 2012; Lois Lane Wig Edition, 2011; Hollywood Wig Beehive. 2012

Aglaé Bassens Ink Wigs 2012 Ink and white pencil on paper

Petros Chrisostomou, Bigwig, 2006, mixed media

Lil Picard, 9 Wigs, c. 1970

Meyer Vaisman, Untitled Turkey XVII (Marie Antoinette). 1992

Ellen Gallagher, Pomp Bang, Advertisements and Plasticine, 1994

We Are The Painters, “Sans titre (Tiphanie),” 2012. Painted objects and synthetic hair on canvas mounted on wood panel

Martin Kippenberger, Disco Bomb, 1989

Ron Athey, Foot Washing Set w/Blonde Hair Towel, 1996

Millie Wilson, White Girl, 1995, synthetic hair, steel, wood and mixed media

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait in a Platinum Wig and Self-Portrait in a Platinum Pageboy Wig, two unique Polaroid prints, 1981

David Altmejd, mixed media, 2004

Haegue Yang. Medicine Men, mixed media, 2010

Michael Richards, The Great Black Airmen, 1996

conquering the artist statement: a 4 week workshop/sign up now!

janeharr — Thu, 08 May 2014 02:36:20 +0000

Hey there! This year I’m offering two sessions for my annual workshop, open to all NYC-based artists and designers, young and old, emerging and established, etc. I’ve had BFA students take it, MFAs, recent grads, those who’ve been at it a while, older artists, architects and designers who want to jumpstart their visual art practice, those looking to write about a specific body of work, etc. The age range has been from 20s to 60s, and I can happily say I’ve had satisfied customers four years in a row! Maybe because as a critic /writer and professor, I know how to crack the whip (there is homework!), but in a safe, encouraging way. I guarantee you’ll come out the better for it, or your Statement will at least, lol!

While in the past, I’ve had guest speakers (curators, artists, gallerists), the writing and editing process has always engaged participants the most, so this year its all about the STATEMENT. My intern created this Tumblr blog, which will be updated with more testimonials over time, so you can go there for more info, or read below. SIGN UP NOW while there’s room, and there’s a 10% discount if you mention janestown.net in your email!

CONQUERING THE ARTIST STATEMENT (AND OTHER INSIDER TIPS): A 4-WEEK
WORKSHOP FOR VISUAL ARTISTS/DESIGNERS

Do you know what constitutes an effective Artist Statement – what tone to take, how much detail is needed, what work to focus on – or just struggle with actually writing one?

Conquering The Artist Statement will teach you how to write and edit a strong, concise Artist Statement through in-class exercises, group critiques, and individual edits geared toward concrete results.
OPEN TO ALL!

TAUGHT BY MOI, JANE HARRIS, PUBLISHED ART CRITIC, INDEPENDENT CURATOR, SVA FACULTY MEMBER, AND FORMER GALLERY DIRECTOR (see ** below for more bio info.)

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF ARTIST STATEMENTS:
“Artist Statements are the foundation for press releases, grant proposals, cover letters, and catalogues. They are essential to your career. Just as your work, life, ideas, etc. change over time, so too should your Statement. An Artist Statement should be updated as often as a resume.” Jane Harris

“A poorly written statement has turned me off an artist’s work. Being a literary person, I am influenced by the way people speak and write. A badly written or poorly conceived statement pushes me in the wrong direction.” Edward Sozanski, art critic, Philadelphia Inquirer

TWO EVENING SESSIONS AVAILABLE: $275. per session.
MAY 20 – JUNE 12, THURSDAYS, 7-9PM/JUNE 4 – JUNE 25, WEDNESDAYS 7-9PM
(LOCATION: PARTICIPANT INC., 235 E. HOUSTON ST. NEW YORK, NY)

TO SIGN UP, OR RECEIVE MORE INFORMATION, EMAIL
janeharr@bway.net (subject heading: ARTIST WORKSHOP).

Testimonials:

“The workshop taught by Jane Harris was very informative and helpful on many levels, particularly, our focus on the often dreaded “artist statement.” As a group we dissected and discussed each statement as a stand alone entity, only later to see it in tandem with the actual artwork of each participant. I recognized how an obvious function of the statement can easily fail. Does the artwork actually connect in vision and theme to the writing. Creating continuity and focus between the work and statement continues to be a vital process guiding me whenever I revisit my statement and/or assist a peer/ colleague.” Jessica Stoller, MFA Cranbrook Art Academy, PPOW Gallery, reviewed in Hyperallergic and Artforum

“I recently took Jane Harris’ workshop and got so much out of it on so many levels. First of all it helped me organize my ideas about my art work in a personal manner with engaging language. I already had a statement but in the class I rewrote it with the help of Jane and with the feedback of the students. The end result was much more authentic, current, punchy, visual and effective.

Shortly after Harris’ workshop, I curated a group exhibition in Chelsea featuring my work and that of others, and my perfected Artist Statement from Harris’ workshop was very instrumental in the planning of this show, its press release, etc. I also made great contacts and friends in this course, which attracted high caliber artists with whom I was pleased to engage.”
Rebecca Haskins, MFA St. Martins, London

“At this point in my painting career I have been feeling an ever growing need to communicate with others and your workshop hits the spot. I genuinely appreciate what you are doing and this has been a very refreshing experience for me. Believe or not, it took a quite a lot of courage for me to come out of my studio and talk about my paintings. I am glad I did, and it means a lot to me. Thank you.” Suhee Wooh, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant recipient, Pierogi 2000 gallery

**Jane Harris is a Brooklyn-based writer whose writings have appeared in publications from Art in America and Artforum to Time Out New York, and the Village Voice. She is a regular Huffington Post columnist, and has also contributed essays to various catalogues and monographs such as Hatje Cantz’s Examples to Follow: Expeditions in Aesthetics and Sustainability (2010); Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art Carla Gannis (2008); Phaidon’s Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (2004) and Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (2005), Universe-Rizzoli’s Curve: The Female Nude Now (2004), and Twin Palms’ Anthony Goicolea (2003). Ms. Harris is a member of the art history faculty at School of Visual Arts, and has curated exhibitions reviewed in Art Forum, New York Magazine, the Village Voice and Time Out, New York. She is the founder of the blog(zine), janestown.net, and has been the director of two long-term NYC non-profit art spaces.

(private consultations also available)

vignettes of the nite XLVI: genet and lee

janeharr — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 05:10:30 +0000

“Thereafter, he ennobled shame. He bore it in my presence like a burden, like a tiger clinging to his shoulders, the threat of which imparted to his shoulders a most insolent submissiveness.”

― Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, 1948

The Thief’s Journal is one of my favorite books. The kind you can deeply commune with, and reread for the poetry and wisdom and offering of art and pain. Its been on my nightstand for years. Among the ever-shifting pile of books that have bored me, and wait for me to resurrect interest.

My friend Lee Gordon, who died 5 years ago this coming Memorial Day, once told me he thought Genet was too hung up on Catholic guilt. As a gay Jew and PLHIV, who had a truly sadistic father, his perspective halted me. His opinion about things was always well informed. I reasoned that for its time it was revolutionary, and he conceded it was. We were both right.

I miss Lee, and was sad to see there’s no work of his online. Somewhere in an old computer are a few jpegs, but I want everyone to see them. It renewed my desire to organize a memorial show here in NYC for him (preferably not on Memorial Day, I can hear him say, lol).

“Also worth a look are paintings by Lee Gordon. For several years Mr. Gordon has been producing exquisite, strange watercolor self-portraits in which he sometimes appears wearing women’s lingerie. In the new work in watercolor and oils, he assumes an infant’s body, which gives the several paternal encounters depicted a distinctly erotic cast…his watercolors are so good that he should be awarded a full-scale show soon.” HOLLAND COTTER, NYT, 1995

Lee never got that full-scale show. He kept on making art though, even while working a very demanding job. I’d like to at least give him some version of it, posthumously. So I contacted his best buddy, another great artist, Tony Feher, whose exquisitely gorgeous retrospective at the Bronx Museum of Arts, was so deserved, btw (I can at least post a couple of those), and will try to set that in motion. This post is in memory of Lee. RIP.

abstract expressionism, the “renaissance prince” of cold war politics

janeharr — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 06:44:27 +0000

Teaching Abstract Expressionism is never easy but its essential to the traditional modernist narrative, which I dismantle and question (I almost wrote “unpack”, phew) as a matter of course, and Ab-Ex provides ample opportunity:) Mostly its Pollock who bothers me, the shaman alcoholic (or is it the wounded cowboy?) whose vulnerability both tempered and underscored his ubermasculinity, reflecting the machismo of postwar American culture. Of course, I love many of the usual suspects, De Kooning, and Still, but overall I’m much more interested in what the Rauschenberg/Johns/Twombly/Cage/Cunningham coterie were up to in New York. Fellow arrivistes locked out of the cabbalistic Jungian dick fest. Where else will my students learn that on the heels of the red decade and the rise of photojournalism, Rauschenberg struggled with whether or not to be a photographer or a painter, explaining so much of his post combine work. If you’ve never seen the former, here’s a must have book of photos he took between 1949-62.

Billed as the first art movement to steal the avant garde spotlight from Paris, and train it on New York, where it has – or so the myth goes – stayed ever since, I so enjoy introducing proof of the CIA’s use of Ab Ex as a a Cold War weapon, a Renaissance Prince, if you will as this great article brilliantly details via the declassified information. It certainly raises the possibility that some of AB-Ex’s historical significance may be linked to that peculiar form of propaganda. That in order to make the Soviet’s use of Social Realism look fascist, which it mostly was, the government hired ivy leaguers to promote the Ab-Exers internationally. In heavily funded exhibitions that became key to the movement’s rise.

Of course, at home, it was still a very hard sell. Americans wary of all art abstract, or too provincial to get it (again, so the story goes). Pretty damn interesting wrench to throw in there, esp. since my aim is to get students to question dominant cultural narratives, in this case the eurocentric diachronic model of art history. It’s a weird thing to actually explain though (that a bunch of lefties would be employed by a bunch of isolationists to foster an international reputation for cultural tolerance).

Another thing I really like to introduce is the related interest in American primitivism, our very own “others” to project and steal from, ala Jazz and Native American cultures, at that time. Some of it sincere, I’d imagine. Still, this photo of Eleanor Roosevelt, who deserves a lot more credit for advocating for federally funding the arts, says it all, and this wonderful essay reveals a very interesting convergence of interests as well. Regardless, the influence of this larger interest in Native American art is another overlooked aspect akin to the role of African art on cubism.

1943: First lady Eleanor Roosevelt greets Miss Spokane Catherine Betts, in Native American dress, at a War Bond Rally in Seattle.

Franz Kline’s series of magnified details rendered iconic through a chance experiment with a projector at de Koonings also wonderfully undermines the whole authentic spontaneous gesture thing. MoMA owns this one from 1950, and describes it on its website in carefully guarded terms:

“True to an alternate name for Abstract Expressionism, ‘action painting,’ Kline’s pictures often suggest broad, confident, quickly executed gestures reflecting the artist’s spontaneous impulses. Yet Kline seldom worked that way. In the late 1940s, chancing to project some of his many drawings on the wall, he found that their lines, when magnified, gained abstraction and sweeping force. This discovery inspired all of his subsequent painting; in fact many canvases reproduce a drawing on a much larger scale, fusing the improvised and the deliberate, the miniature and the monumental.

‘Chief’ was the name of a locomotive Kline remembered from his childhood, when he had loved the railway. Many viewers see machinery in Kline’s images, and there are lines in Chief that imply speed and power as they rush off the edge of the canvas, swelling tautly as they go. But Kline claimed to paint “not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking,” and Chief is abstract, an uneven framework of horizontals and verticals broken by loops and curves. The cipherlike quality of Kline’s configurations, and his use of black and white, have provoked comparisons with Japanese calligraphy, but Kline did not see himself as painting black signs on a white ground; ‘I paint the white as well as the black,’ he said, ‘and the white is just as important.'”

vignettes of the nite XLII: random desktop pics

janeharr — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 05:19:38 +0000

(Art fair mania in NYC this weekend. The Armory, The Brucennial (all women, yea!), Volta, The Independent, Moving Image, Spring Break, ETC. ETC. not to mention the Whitney Biennnial opening. My usual resistance against the pull of so much social hysteria means there’ll be no recaps here, except to say I had fun at the Moving Image fair and afterparty, seeing lots of old friends, and was happy for the friends who got press mention here).

In some cosmic way reflecting all the hullabaloo, I’m sure, here are the random pics on my desktop at the moment. I’ve been in clean-up mode tonite, long overdue (all it takes is a few days of running around and feeling one has to dress for the public to create a hot mess). Next time I will photograph the tsumani of “getting ready” in all its grime and glory. And if you want to know anything about any of the images, as always let me know, I tried to provide what I could!

(Rene Ricard)

(Joyce Baronio)

(my apartment door)

(Grunewald’s Isenheim altar)

(group show organized by Duchamp in 1937)