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.