MotherPie

Performance Art (Stillness with Another)...

My life is my own performance art, as yours is yours, and that I can understand, but I just can't quite get a staged performance I saw in NYC.

Art makes you think, though.  The piece above, by Performance Artist Marina Abramovic, is from an artist I'd never seen before. She performed in NYC at the Museum of Modern Art and now, a week later, I am still thinking about it.  The photo above (credit and more here) is not what I saw. What I saw was this -- the artist sitting still all day in a chair looking at someone else sitting across from her and everyone around in the main two-story gallery at MoMA standing and watching her watch another.

Yet it has stayed with me. I was glad to see on MoMA's facebook page that 99 people had, at MoMA's request, put forth questions to ask her. Others, too, wondered how you explain this. I think that perhaps the appeal of this one act, where she sits from museum opening until museum closing for the duration of the exhibit of her works (Marina Abromovic:The Artist is Present, on through May 31) is because we rarely sit and focus on just one person for long. now. anymore. And for sure not. in. stillness. 

That is my take on it.  Art is, after all, what you make of it - the meaning it holds for you. But then, maybe I don't get it at all.

Indian Pop Art...

Ryan Singer's Mutton Stew, right, references the pop art of Andy Warhol (Warhol did his first Cambell Soup art in 1962). Singer's Navajo soup image on an apron, purchased from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, hangs in our kitchen cupboard.

Native American continues the trend of blending American omnipresent cultural images in the context of Indian traditional art. Andy Warhol took pop art forms and remixed them and created iconic art. Indian art remixes speak of cultural remixing, too, but in a way that speaks to our future where we may be headed where image trumps text and meaning is only found in the referencing.

Cochiti artist Diego Rivera spoke about his work at the Museum of Indian Art and Culture two years ago and I've written about his work before.

Culturally, the Indians understand this text-free image referencing because, unlike artists like Warhol who came from a textually literate context, their ideas were shared orally and graphically. I've gone into this idea more deeply elsewhere.

Santa Clara Pueblo artist Jason  Garcia, who, as the Heard Museum writes, "paints popular cultural themes derived both from mainstream art and from Native art...At times, he speaks to the cultural conflicts of traditional societal events functioning within a larger contemporary world. At other times, his work references culture clash." Garcia's Spiderman pot is pictured at left.

The Pop Art exhibit opened in April at The Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ and will feature both Romero and Garcia. It has been a long time since I've visited Phoenix and this museum. Perhaps this is the year I get there. This exhibit might be the beckoning moment.

An Eye on Art...

My hands and eyes have shifted to more art, less words.  And that is a lot to crow about. In my private world. With my chickies all grown. 

African American History in Art and Photographs...

Strength to Love.  That is the book he authored (a collection of his sermons) that was in Martin Luther King's briefcase, right, open as he packed it, in his hotel the day he was shot.  These never before released photos from the day he died by Henry Groskinsky for Life magazine.

Earlier this month I saw Dan Budnik's photographs of, Marching the Dream: American Civil Rights Photography which included many photos of Martin Luther King in an exhibit at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe. 

I'm headed to my hometown, Oklahoma City, and will just miss the Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the Oklahoma Museum of Art. Darn.  But oh well.  It is the week of the Arts Festival, which is a great event in that town.

African American Art is a hot genre, as I covered earlier.

The Semiotics of Cultural Ownership and Treasures...

Obama images are everywhere, the most popular icon of the 21st century. Obama's image is out of control, everywhere. Can copyrights of his image be enforced when they are remixed?  Like Warhol's use of pop icons (images of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Mao), references to existing art and icons is our method of digital literacy, signs of meaning, ideas that everyone wants to own and refer to. These Shepard Fairey Commemorative Plates can be purchased individually for $89, or as a set of two (one of each color) for $178, from The Future Perfect. 

The desire to personally possess, to interact, the make meaning, to create is innate.  I think we are born with a need to create, to find meaning and to interact with others in artistic ways. Who can own the idea of a thing?  This is continuing from my earlier post Stolen Art and Copyright.

Stolen Art: Ownership and Copyright

Shepard Fairey pre-emptively filed a lawsuit last week asking a federal judge to rule that he is protected from copyright infringement claims when he appropriated the AP's image of Obama as a base for his reiteration in the Obama Poster.  I wrote about the controversy over Fairey's Obama Poster art appropriation and the AP photo issue earlier.

When an image is appropriated, transformed and altered and a different artwork is created, this is a remix which is a murky area now that digital images can so easily be captured and worked with.  The lawsuit scuffle over ownership of art and copyright and appropriation and re-use is a murky one and with the popularity of the Obama Poster image, the issue has attracted more national attention than with other artwork remix examples.  What will probably help Fairey win, at least in this case, is that the AP photographer that took the case, (Manny?) Garcia, claims that his contract with AP gives him the copyright ownership.

Stolen Tangible Art
You can take the idea of art, ideas and ownership back to the idea of stolen artworks (think of the Elgin Marbles, taken from Greece by Lord Elgin and now in the British Museum), which is in the hot area of the ownership of artworks and repatriation.  For example, it struck me that the same week Fairey fought the issue of ownership of artwork, a court ruled in favor of ownership of art stolen in the Holocaust.

Digital Art and Remixes
Artworks can be copied and reworked so easily, digitally.   Fairey's poster has generated dozens of knock-offs and spoofs, such as those above.  These are just more examples of iconic images, art, appropriation, remixes and digital copyright enforcement difficulties.  Shepard Fairey and another appropriation artist Rick Klotz are remix entrepreneurs, building off of the ideas of others. A Dark Knight fan mashed Heath Ledger's Joker into Fairey's Obama Poster and called the new image "The Audacity of Joke", which is the top left in the series of Obama Poster imitations above.

Charis Tsevis, a visual designer living and working at Athens, Greece, has used copyrighted photos from Norwegian photo agencies to create his own mosaic of Britney Spears (click here for the large version and note how he has established his creative commons copyright on top of the work of others, allowing people to use his new remix for non commercial purposes). He has also  taken various photos of Obama supporters and turned them into his own art mosaic, but in that case he is not using copyrighted photos.

Tangible Art Versus Intangible Art...

The Elgin marbles, like Greek vases and other antiquities, can be physically returned to owners or countries that can prove provenance.  But the copying of artworks has been going on forever, whether they are copied or forged, or the ideas incorporated in altered versions.  But unless you can prove ownership of the original negative, proving ownership of work in the area of digital remixes is a murky, murky area.

To be continued: I have more to say on this on the 19th in a post called The Semiotics of Cultural Ownership and Treasures.

The Art: Time's Obama Cover is More Important than the Story

When Time magazine this week named Obama Person of the Year, I think it says all about image over text.  More important than Time's story on Obama, really, is the graphic art of it all: Obama's street art step to Icon Leadership, the second major visual coup after his famous logo design. Shepard Fairey designed a new Obama iteration for the Time cover. In Feb. 2008 Fairey's populist Obama Poster created  the Iconic Obama and from that point on image superseded text.

Time extended the graphics for the Person of the Year package and the visuals culled from over 100,000 digital Obama images on Flickr created by people the world over say more than the written words. 

New favorite Obma digital iterations? ..... (having trouble, I am, with MoSoPo)

Hot Art: African-American Genre...

One area of art that is gaining traction, really taking off in the last five years, is African-American art.  This self-portrait by Frederick C. Flemister (1917-1976),  is one of many examples by black artists highlighted by a Forbes feature on the genre.  Born in Atlanta, Flemister trained at Morehouse College, at Atlanta University under Hale Woodruff and later at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis where he won a scholarship. Though little known by the mainstream art world, in 1940, Flemister took first prize for oil painting at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, Ill. 

Major collectors of this genre include Bill and Camille Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Henry Bellafonte, Grant Hill, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Richard Parsons and Kenneth Chenault, but white collectors have discovered this market.  Now white collectors and institutions are discovering these long overlooked works. Swann Auction Galleries in NY created a department of African-American art -- the first auction house to do so.

Stars: Jean-Michel Basquiat (2007 auction record of $14.6 million) and Kara Walker, 39.  Walker had an exhibition that I missed at the Guggenheim over Thanksgiving '07 and most recently was at the Fort Worth Modern (I caught it there this fall and yes, much of it is disturbing), and commands prices over $400,000. 

When I lived in NYC I never knew about The Studio Museum in Harlem (1,600 works by artists of African descent) and am sorry I didn't get there.  The current exhibition there is of works by Barkley L. Hendricks called Birth of the Cool. He is best known for his life-size portraits of people of color living in urban areas in the 1960s and 70s.  At right is Hendrick's Sweet Thang (Lynn Jenkins), 1975.  Birth of Cool was organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and when it leaves the Studio Museum it will travel to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. 

When I lived in Atlanta I didn't get to Clark's University Art Galleries, one of the places to go to see art by  African-Americans (other places with good collections include: the Smithsonian with (most by William H. Johnson with 1,000 pieces); DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago; Fisk University Galleries, Nashville; Hampton University Museum -- a historically black college; and Howard University Gallery, WDC.

I'm glad to see this art and these artists receive attention.  Some institutions, like Fisk, are struggling to hang on to their collections. 

painting credits above, left: "Self-Portrait,"  in the Barnett Aden Collection, WDC; right, Hendrick's Sweet Thang

Art on the Edge, Art Intangible...

We're standing on a precipice.  Art makes you think, good art does.  Would you think that this nine foot hole in the Gavin Brown Gallery in NYC is art?  Urs Fischer's Eye-Opening Moment, according to NYMagazine's Best in Culture issue looking over the year in art, wrote:  Transforming art? What does this say?  NYMagazine writes:

But presciently, it was just as much a precipice for us and for the art world, since this was going to be the state of the world for the year to come: We’d all be poised on the edge—politically, psychically, financially, and aesthetically. The stark gesture was simultaneously surreal, loving, violent, and audacious. Fischer shattered perceptual space, destabilized our relationship to art and art galleries, overturned ideas about the market, and made us understand that all that is solid melts into air, that something momentous was coming.

Having moved from NYC to Santa Fe after intensively studying the changes in media and journalism, digital life is taking us to new places. While NYC is so forward, especially in the arts, Santa Fe is one of the world's top art markets, as well. But the art that we find here that intrigues me most is that of the Indians who were culturally based in an oral culture with symbols and signs, stories and dance while so much of the world for centuries has been dependent on text for cultural transmission.  I see this, too, as I work with the objects in the International Folk Art Museum.  Our ideas of art are having to be redefined.  "Wall Power" was the term used by one person in discussing the lower sales figures for this year's Art Basel Miami Beach. Fisher's deep hole certainly took the power of art off the wall.

So as we move into digital literacy, the visual is transformed and art becomes malleable, mixable, less fixed and intangible.  So Fischer's artistic statement puts us on the precipice, the ledge, of looking at our idea of art in a completely different way - the idea that everything solid melts into air.  Digital art could be like that, couldn't it?   Like the pots of the pueblo indians, decorated with symbols and signs that they read as we read latin letters textually, the used up vessels are shattered and returned to the earth or recycled into new pots when their use ends.  The Indians have always considered everything to contain life and to be changeable.  

Popular Art & Comfort Food...

When facing difficulties as we are with this market and economy, comfort food seems to be just the thing to serve up. Meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, soups, stews and chilis. Main comfort food at our house? Chicken Spaghetti and chicken soup.

This painting at left, The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, is the most popular painting in the world now. When times are tough, people hunker down and think of what is really important. Love. 

Klimt is so au moment.  One of his paintings back in 2006 set a sales record -- when times were flush.

MarketWatch has the story on the most popular art/oil painting as judged by OverstockArt.com.  The popularity of Klimt's The Kiss caused Van Gogh's Starry Night to fall to #2 but Van Gogh is still the most popular artist in the world with his Cafe Terrace ranking #3.  Other artists who made the list: Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Peirre August Renoir.  Da Vinci's Mona Lisa ranks #7.