Narrative Style in the F#%king 21st Century

While it had the biggest audience among political junkies and other followers of the Chicago mayor's race, this account in the Atlantic makes a good case for the groundbreaking achievement of the epic fake Twitter account @MayorEmanuel. While there have already been a number of interesting works looking at Twitter as a communications medium, @MayorEmanuel is a work of literary art created from within the medium, taking advantage of its brevity, its real-time nature, and its serial distribution to a core audience of followers.

It didn't hurt that @MayorEmanuel was often riotously funny, taking great and inventive advantage of former Obama Chief-of-Staff/next mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel's reputation for baroque profanity.

David Hammons

A remarkable show of David Hammons at L&M Arts...

Chris T. posted this review of the show last night to my FB page--definitely worth a read.
I'm completely fascinated by Hammons' recent work work:
1. by the way they somehow elude the categorization of painting and yet are some of the most interesting painting I've seen in a long, long time.  In the first few moments of looking at them, I had this barrage of thoughts, wow, this completely changes my notions of what I thought painting could be--in fact, painting can be so much more!  My own notions have been so limited--the boundaries are wide open once again.  Hallejuah!  (or something akin to that exclamation of supreme delight...) 
2. by the way they are adamantly abstract, utterly, heart-wrenchingly poetic and deeply aesthetic--conjuring all kinds of affinities with what we assume poetic abstraction to be at first--and yet, they do not really reside where we think they should reside in the end.   They flirt with race and politics, attaching the complexities of race and politics to an appropriately complicated form.
3. by the way they teach me how to see painting, aesthetics, abstraction, and politics-as-dealt-with-by-art anew--

Privacy and Public Struggle

It may be a bit hard to follow, but this article by Ta Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic raises a point about visibility and identity that I think is directly related to last Thursday's discussion in class. The incident he's discussing was an assault on CBS correspondent Lara Logan during the demonstrations/celebration in Cairo following Mubarak's resignation. The story has since been politicized in some exceptionally ugly ways, but Coates is talking more generally about the trade-offs between personal privacy and the public struggle for equal treatment.

Coates is a very thoughtful young writer, and he maintains one of the internet's most informative and well-behaved comments sections. He's also written at great length on his blog about Civil War history, slavery and the antebellum South, for anyone interested in digging into those topics.

Something in the reading that Donovan provided for tomorrow's class made me think of the Yes Men. Their work often features outright deceit, along with plenty of embarrassment and awkwardness. They do, however, always "kick upwards" when it comes to the power relationships into which they insert themselves.

Art History in the Midst of History

This is unconfirmed news coming out of Cairo tonight, but it appears that both citizens and the Egyptian military have been reported as protecting the Egyptian Museum from looting and fire even as the neighboring headquarters of the ruling party is aflame.

I'll also mention that our own Mariam Stephan is still in Cairo, finishing out her Fulbright stay in the country. Nikki Blair told me today that she spoke to Mariam this week, and that she was safe and due home Sunday. With events in Cairo developing so rapidly, I just wanted to give folks the latest information that I have.

The NYT has continuing coverage of what more and more looks like a revolution.

Mark Lombardi's Drawn Worlds

Mark Lombardi, World Finance Corporation and Associates, ca. 1970-84: Miami, Ajman, and Bogota-Caracas (Brigada 2506: Cuban Anti-Castro Bay of Pigs Veteran) (7th Version), 1999. Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 69-1/8 x 84 inches.

I held off on discussing Mark Lombardi until now because I think he is the perfect artist to help us segue from our initial discussion of politically engaged artwork to our next conversation, which will focus squarely on drawing. Lombardi's work was intensely concerned with the political, and his enormous drawings were an attempt to see clearly the complex interrelations at the heart of the major financial and political scandals of the time (Iran-Contra, Keating Savings and Loan, BCCI, etc.) This article, written by his dealer, is a brief inside look at how central a role drawing itself played in Lombardi's approach to his work, and insists how necessary it is to see the works as drawings.

Personally, I think that the drawings that Lombardi completed in the 6 short years before his death in 2000 are the most perfect artworks of the 1990's.

The Strange Saga of Steve Kurtz

Although Critical Art Ensemble's work is decidedly political, and takes advantage of all sorts of performative and socially embedded strategies, founder Steve Kurtz is probably best known for waking up one tragic morning in 2004 and entering a Kafkaesque nightmare that ended only after a four year legal battle.

I've had the TLC order the documentary Strange Fruit for us, and we'll screen it once it comes in. Until then, learn more about the case here.

Contemporary Political Art in Zimbabwe

Today's New York Times has an article on the shuttered exhibit of Zimbabwe artist Owen Maseko, whose installation of paintings and sculptures depicts the mid-80's slaughter of thousands of minority Ndebele citizens at the hand of government-controlled paramilitary forces. Maseko faces up to 20 years in prison for insulting President-for-life Robert Mugabe.

Steve Lambert and the Anti-Advertising Agency

Light Criticism from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

Steve Lambert came to the Weatherspoon in the summer of 2009, in conjunction with the "Our Subject Is You" exhibition at WAM, curated by Lee Walton and Xandra Eden. He gave an amazing talk which featured some work from the Anti-Advertising Agency. The talk itself contained elements of the power dynamics inherent with artists and audiences, in which Steve asked us to remove our shoes at the beginning, only to reveal at the talk's conclusion that he did this merely to prove that he, as artist, could do so without being challenged. The exhibition and Steve's talk in particular completely changed my perspective on contemporary art. Props to Lee and the Weatherspoon for bringing this to Greensboro. We want more!

Wafaa Bilal

When trying to think of an artist with a Brechtian practice, I immediately thought of Wafaa Bilal. He visited ECU a few years back, and gave a talk about his project, "Domestic Tension," in which Bilal lived in a small gallery room for a month with a robotic paintball gun, which people online could use to shoot him. As a result of the project, he suffered mentally and physically, showing clear symptoms of PTSD and insomnia. One of the more memorable things he shared was that a group of people online chose to defend him from other shooters, by using the controls to divert the gun's shots. He discusses the project in a short video, and his website and a link to the project's daily video blog can be found by clicking here. A newer project, "... and Counting" (shown in the picture on the left) involved tattooing Iraqi cities onto his back in Arabic, along with a dot in red ink for every American soldier killed (5,000 total). Iraqi deaths were represented by dots in invisible ink. The project was meant to be a commentary on the lack of press or attention on Iraqi deaths, as well as a permanent memorial. The 24 hr tattooing process was filmed and could be seen live by viewers online. Make sure to watch the video on his site - the sound of the tattoo gun combined with the names of the victims being read is eerie and unsettling.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is someone who I think isn't recognized nearly enough for the revolutionary nature of her thinking and practice. Her Manifesto for Maintenance Art is a principled challenge to the traditional romantic (and traditionally male) notion of the artist as creator of something new. Her determination to assert the creative validity and necessity of the regular, repetitive acts of all those who keep things from falling apart, breaking down, or overflowing is an important contribution to the expansion of what an artist's role in the world can be. I think it's particularly compelling that she has found a way to extend the creative potential of her thinking, beyond the earlier activist performances, through a fruitful 40 year long collaboration with the NY Department of Sanitation as their first and continuing Artist in Residence. A recent interview from Art in America captures a bit of her formidable intelligence and sharp wit.

Voina art collective

Members of Voina art collective are currently being held in a Russian prison. The video piece I included is the one of a man running in traffic with a bucket on his head. I also included several links. BOMBLOG, ART THREAT , FREE VOINA

Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971

© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

This is the other early Haacke work that I was thinking of. It's similar to Moma Poll in its critique of specific powerful individuals, this time the Shapolsky family whose Manhattan real estate empire is characterized by Haacke as being largely composed of slums. The specificity of this critique is what led the Guggenheim to cancel the exhibition just six weeks prior to its scheduled opening, and to dismiss the curator, Edward Fry, who continued to support the piece.

The work was conceived as an unremittingly didactic work, with the ramp of the Guggenheim punctuated by 142 sets of photos and datasheets representing each of the buildings, with accompanying maps and charts demonstrating their place in Manhattan's geographic and financial context.

A good but brief recent article on Haacke by Manfred Hermes in Frieze.

Artists taking up Benjamin's challenge

Continuing forward from the discussion of "The Author as Producer" in the last Art 641 meeting, I wanted to flesh out the picture of Hans Haacke's work, specifically the works he did in the early 70s calling out the political and economic networks supporting major arts institutions. First up is 1970's MOMA Poll, featured in a Museum of Modern Art exhibition of systems-based work titled Information.

If you can't read the text pictured, it says:

Question:

Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November ?

Answer:

If 'yes'
please cast your ballot into the left box
if 'no'
into the right box.

The context is that Nelson Rockefeller was both a member of the Board of Trustees of the museum and considering a presidential run at the time.