Panel: Performance, Act, and Ritual

Here is a quick write-up of an event I attended a few weeks back:

http://adrienneskyeroberts.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/performance-act-ritual-art-and-mourning-panel-discussion-at-performance-art-institute/

On April 6^th San Francisco’s Performance Art Institute presented a panel titled “Performance, Act, and Ritual: Art and Mourning. Panelists Cooley Windsor, Adrienne Skye Roberts, and Julia Goodman gave unique interpretations of the subject matter. The presentations were primarily just that, three separate interpretations without major crossover content beyond the general ideas (art and mourning.)

Maria Porges, who moderated, opened the event with a reading of Jack Spicer’s “Love and Death”. Porges teaches at CCA, and is an artist and writer. The poem, which concentrates geological metaphor to locate, or ground, reflections on meanings in mourning, in love and loss, reminds us that there are ways to remember and grow in times of loss. Setting the tone for the following presentations, “Love and Death” warmed the listeners to hear the panelist’s situated perspectives on art and mourning.

Cooley Windsor read his short story “50 Blue”. Lines such as “You already know everything you need to know to perform” and “Buy a light bulb”, sweetly portrayed the poetic inconsistencies of being-in-mourning. Windsor went on to elaborate “a series of gestures” which combined to construe fragmented memories of a poet and past lover who had died from AIDS before Windsor could personally confess his feelings. He interprets that love and loss under the banner “Don’t give me a funeral, give me a demonstration”. Drop all the bodies fallen by AIDS off on the White House lawn. More introspectively, Windsor reflects that this loss cannot be approached directly but at a slant.

Julia Goodman discussed recent artwork as a calendared response to her fathers death, and relates that experience to work she’d previously done in Chile, working with muralists who had been repressed during the brutal Pinochet regime. She inquires: How do we make room for death in secular society? She mourned her father through Jewish custom, making and impressing into paper every day for the eleven months proceeding from his death. She discusses the need to refer to mourning by “moving” across time vertically and horizontally, simultaneously. She also discusses the conditions in which muralists in Chile experienced literally unspeakable grief as inhabitants of their community continued to ‘disappear’ under Pinochet. Necessarily ephemeral, murals make temporary use of public space. Throughout the dictatorship muralists were unable to work outdoors and only secretly indoors, as their work was of mortal consequence. Goodman: “Pressure builds when one’s interior world does not have external expression.” That pressure leads to real pain. Collective gathering is a crucial part of coping with grief. Public mourning provides the space to expose one’s heart.

Adrienne Skye Roberts presented on Linda Montano’s 1977 video piece “Mitchell’s Death”. Like other feminist artists of the era, Montano used autobiography to make art in the spirit of a performative life-art. She made this piece after hearing of her ex-husband’s sudden death. The video is shot in black and white, high contrast, and the content is Montano’s face in close-up. She caked gray makeup onto her face, which functions as a mask and a veil though none of her feeling seems to be veiled, and 12 acupuncture needles protrude, further texturing the filmic impression. The audio is Montano narrating her emotional reaction to the news, the details of which appeal to the listener’s emotions in extreme. She speaks in monotone – the grain of her voice and constant tempo force the narration to sound like chanting, imbuing the work with a ritualistic tone resembling Buddhist chants and also the ritualistic time of Greek tragedy, which sink into the skin of the listener. Roberts showed a portion of the piece and then added her insights. This document functioned as both a site of private mourning, and as a publically displayed art piece illiciting a collective experience though intensively mediated – but still able to touch. She recalls a Lucy Lippord piece of criticism on the work: “Ritual is about repetition, death is not.” Roberts inquires, “How do we stay present with death and what is the witness?” She also brings the audience’s attention to the site of this discussion, a gallery; carving a space to discuss mourning at a gallery as taking an active role in considering the importance of appropriating time and place for mourning in secular culture.

-Rachel

Egypt's King: The Conservation of Art in Political Crises

As Egypt carries into its seventh straight day of protests against the marathon reign of President Hosni Mubarak, as the last Internet provider in the country goes dark, and as a rash of new counter-protesters inject a violent immediacy to this surging revolution, the question of the nation's other power - its vast and incomparable collections of art - becomes a prime concern for the country's future.

     The New York Times included in its stream of online coverage of street battles between protesters and police the reassuring image of Cairo's vast Egyptian Museum lobby being paced by gun-gripping military officers. In that same thread of images was a shot of the Cairo airport, where foreigners packed into lines, all in search of flights out of Egypt - airlines are scrambling to staff planes following this mass exodus of travelers from the country.

     The guards were stationed after looters attacked the Egyptian Museum, home to nearly 120,000 historical objects including the famed gold funerary mask of Tutankhamen. Luckily, though one room away from the Tutankhamen treasures, they only managed to damage the objects they intended to steal, ripping the heads off two mummies, toppling a statue of King Tut and trying to break off gilded wood they apparently mistook for gold. Still, the restoration of these objects will be difficult work.

     Sunday 35 men tried to break into the museum, and finally on Monday a group of 50 men made a third go. This time, however, snipers had been stationed on the roof, and dozens of armed guards were patrolling its halls. The officers had been ordered not to shoot, and the group was arrested in the museum's lobby.

Flanked by special forces, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass 

speaks at Cairo's Egyptian Museum Monday.

  In Memphis, south of Cairo, an open-air museum was ransacked and emptied of its art. Other museums across Egypt have suffered looting, including the Royal Jewelry Museum and the National Museum in Alexandria.

  Zahi Hawass, who has long been the outspoken antiquities chief in Egypt, was recently appointed as Minister of State Antiquities in Mubarak's new government. "If the museum is safe, Egypt is safe," he said. While the military is beginning to protect these important sites, the exigency of preserving Egypt's cultural history escalates.

  The danger of mixing arts and political crisis has been witnessed before in our young century. By the close of the Taliban's reign in 2001, the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul had suffered the worst aspects of that regime. All human depictions had been slashed, shattered, looted, set aflame or bombed. The Taliban was seeking to erase the multicultural, long-historied and complex narrative of Afghanistan. It is a testimony to the museum staff's courage that only two-thirds of its contents were destroyed; in 1988 the staff hid crates of the most precious artifacts in the presidential palace, which were retrieved in 2004. That art had miraculously survived.

  In 2003, the Taliban aimed their energies at another precious national treasure. The sixth century rock sculptures of Bamiyan were detonated. The Taliban strung locals from ropes to plant the bombs into the bodies of these ancient living rock sculptures. One local described the terror at the possibility of being released into free fall by his Taliban captor after he'd stuck the explosives into the 1,500-year-old Buddha.
     That same year, Iraqi looters broke into and ransacked the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. American forces intervened three days later, when the worst damage had already been done.

     It seems that Egypt is aware of these precedents as it stations troops to protect its national treasures. Afghanistan and Iraq are both haunting examples of the unrestrained destruction of art as a result of political fragmentation. In Afghanistan, art was understood as a serious encroachment on a central, exclusive religious and political narrative; in Iraq, desperation and conflict fused to destroy the Baghdad Museum's holdings. In Egypt, art is an esteemed and essential component of personal and national history, yet economic despair and political turbulence combine to make ancient artifacts an easy target. The comparison should not link Egypt's protests to Iraq and Afghanistan's very separate histories, but should rather illustrate what incredible losses have occurred when art vanishes in the upheavals of the nation-state. 

  Protesters have done much to curb the chaos of Egypt while asserting their authority. In Alexandria, a group of young Egyptians barricaded the Library of Alexandria from would-be looters, an act addressed in an official's letter of gratitude to young Alexandrians. Since then, Hawass has claimed that all twenty-four of the country's museums are now being guarded by the army and should even open to the public later this week - a dubious suggestion given the escalating violence in Tahrir Square.

  The world is watching what may be a great shift in power or a mere adjustment to the political regime. Among what is key is that the Egyptians continue to protect what is one of their country's greatest economic and cultural assets: its art. If the Egyptian protesters are successful in achieving the reform and restructuring of power that they seek, they must know that their art and their heritage will play an essential role in ensuring the progress and stability of any future state. This, I suspect, is why, following Friday's initial attack against the Cairo National Museum, a group of young Egyptians armed themselves and formed a human barricade at the museum's doors. The havoc that has so far transpired there through the will of some of the country's careless opportunists has also expressed the forceful wisdom of Egypt's new generation.

LÆRKE LAUTA: FLOATING FEMALE

Floating Female is a new five-channel project that explores internal and external states of consciousness. Lauta’s video installations draw from a northern European tradition that ascribes mysterious, romantic, and spiritual qualities to the natural landscape. Her works are characterized by an undertone of unresolved suspense, the latent fear of a fatal event that is not directly revealed to the viewer. The artist’s camera does not present a decisive moment but functions instead as an instrument of premonition and doubt. Austere light, a lush palette, and evocative sound combine in Lauta’s work to create liminal spaces that linger in memory.

On View at the Mills College Art Museum, January 19th - March 13th, 2011

Opening Reception, January 19th, 6 - 8pm

Lecture by Laerke Lauta, February 22nd, 7pm, Danforth Lecture Hall

One Fine Broad

Eli Broad, to the informed, is the SunAmerica (AIG) billionaire art collector. To most Los Angelinos, he can be monikered "rich guy who funds weird LA buildings," like Gehry's Disney Hall. Today he released the plans for the new Broad Art Foundation, a three-storied museum in downtown LA. The Broad collection is, well, broad. The collections and exhibitions should be exciting, and that $130 million architecture might be worth a brief look-see, photo op, bus ride by, etc.

Anyway, the perforated exterior allows for a nearly excessive number of skylights. Perhaps distracting for art viewing, no?

My opinion, honestly, is a bit divided about it all.

Here is a slideshow of what the interior will look like.

Free Art Opening in San Francisco, TONIGHT!

Hello Fellow Art-Enthusiasts,

If anyone in the Bay Area is at all interested, the photography gallery, SF Camerawork, is having an opening tonight, Thursday January 6th, from 5-8pm.
I encourage anyone and everyone to go, because the show is going to be really interesting, comprising works of some very young photographers. Yes... Students! And not just any students, students of SFC's First Exposures class, and 826 Valencia's program for students.
So check out this great opening if you're in town because it's free and awesome!

Details

-Alyssa

Fixing Art

Today I was at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty foundation is known world-wide for it's excellent art collections and exhibits. I often visit the Getty when I'm in LA, because I feel like I'll never see the same exhibit twice, It's always changing.
One part of the museum that I personally like to visit is the photography wing. They usually have one to three shows there, that are either all related, or all extremely diverse. Currently they have works from "New China" which are really very interesting photographic pieces by contemporary, and somewhat well-known Chinese artists like Zhang Huan and Rong Rong. The other major photography exhibit is the works of Felice Beato, a name I thought I recognized, but wasn't sure until I started surveying his work. Beato was born in Italy, but grew up in Great Britain, and eventually moved to Asia and photographed the worlds and cultures of China, Japan, Korea, India and Burma. As far as documentation of culture goes, he does a relatively good job capturing daily life in these "foreign" lands, but I have ethical issues with his art.
This work for example:

At first it didn't bother me as a piece, I thought to myself, "Wow, what a dramatic and almost morbidly wonderful thing to capture." But then I looked to the side to read about the piece, and it noted especially that he had gone around the site and found bits of skulls and skeletons laying around, and so he placed them as props in his piece to add a "dramatic" element and sort of stir up emotions about the massacre.
Seriously? He needed to stir up emotions with skeletons? There are photographs of empty gas chambers used in the holocaust that are more haunting and dramatic than this photograph. All you need is a damn good title, and a frighteningly accurate historical event. If there were no skeletons in this piece, just the land, the structure, and the group of people in the frame, and the exact title that it currently has, I think it would have had a more realistic dramatic affect on me than it did. And that's the truth.

-Alyssa

The Manifested

Note: This is the manifesto I wrote for my senior seminar course, the final assignment of the semester. I decided to post it after being demanded to by fellow Art History Society member and close friend, Adrienne Suzio. Instead of a manifesto, I aimed to contribute a piece of art while questioning the form of art and its creation, the artist, though I should mention it wrote itself in about an hour. I was exhausted, frustrated, existential -- and absolutely did not want to write a traditional manifesto as I had no trace of discipline that day. I did not enjoy reading it in class. Reactions encouraged.

Ellen

MANIFESTO

This is a manifesto, she says. She shifts the laptop over, tilting the screen inward, blocking the silver daylight, increasing the screen's illumination. I only had a few minutes … She trails off.

My tooth, it has been hurting. 

Way back, on the left, I feel metal pulsing. I wish it would simply jump from my mouth, and leave me be!

Read it as an individual and as an everyone, she instructs.

This is a manifesto.

It is striking, the lighting of the day. The silver halos around the black trees shielding Mills Hall. The cold of December, a season without memory, because no one remembers winter. We hurriedly purchase our coats, our boots, our hats. We Californians had forgotten.

It is simple to create, she said. It is the act that perplexes us, not the outcome. The things we have cherished for so long as staggering monuments that have so far warded off the rising tides of history that will, surely, envelop everything someday, these things were made once, by real human hands. Just like yours and mine, you see them? 

The bell tolls, it is 1:45 p.m. and I know that time is reeling. I can feel it beneath my boots. I can feel it building.

That poet you loved, remember the one? The Christian Bohemian-Austrian man, shrouded in dark coats, the heavy gaze, the flat face and the weak brow. But Ellen, you never read his poetry! Well, yeah. Just his letters. His letters reached to me, only there did the print levitate. His letters, addressed not to names and places, but to that inexorable human behavior. He knew about the meaning of history, time, image. He knew how to conjure power and truth, he knew the ingredients of meaning so well - he understood that creation is impossible when we don't think about a place we would rather be, even if it's just this one, but lain out on the fabric of time altogether, seen in perspective, seen as an action that is meaningfully for having occurred when nothing could have occurred at all, when something is when there could be something that is not… The golden cupolas of Russian towers, the hazy image of a pasture outside a train window, a walk in the garden with the eternal Tolstoy, the act of finding power in your memory of a home you will never return to, a home created, manifested solely in the mind, a place of reality as dreams, where even a blade of grass is as if painted into the air… 

That manifesto, what were you getting at?

I was just trying to tell this computer about how easy it is to make things. All we have to do is recognize our power and implement it formally in a way that we can share. We can use ideas that matter to us, that have shaped us irrevocably, experiences that have hurt us and made us cold, we can warm them for the canvas, the camera, the screen, the paper, we can use them to express ourselves and our deepest truths and secrets, we can use it to correct the omission, to assert our observation. We can be heard, you know, it's not difficult.

I noticed on my walk down from my house this morning, that there were green shoots covering the entire hillside, where eucalyptus trees were steadily looming, because those trees pretend there isn't any cold. Against the shrill sunlight, these green shoots seemed taller than they were, neon blazes emitted from the earth. 

I know that sward, because last week it was a dearth. 

This is true of everything. When we go further, that is when art happens: when we have discipline and deliberation, when we recognize the metaphors inherent in the act of being, when we act on the connections that occur in a single day, when we bring them to the public's attention and insist that our view is important, that is art. When we engage discourse and we strive for the recognition of the art we feel the most toward, that is history.

I felt sad, this coming winter, this moment of solitude and writing, this pent-up sentiment, I was not ready for it, before I knew what had happened --

Winter was shot through by these green shoots…

It was unexpected, this manifestation, this turn against the forces of winter, this thing that seemed to defy the white burn of the distant sun, that seemed to make winter warmer, to make winter not a winter.

Their permanent collection, she mentioned, is wonderfully lit. Oh, but after! I was on my way downtown to buy a new jacket. A true reward for the art devotee - but instantly upon leaving the museum was caught in a terrible thunderstorm. Yes, I walked two whole miles that way. Those smooth sidewalks were entirely shrouded in water. It even felt romantic at moments -- I was so cold I felt nothing. But by the time I got to where I was going, I didn't want a jacket at all -- I just wanted to go underneath that horribly flat pavement to the train, and return to the surface in a little while, warmed again…