Nature and History

EUX.TV reports that Ai Weiwei's tower of Chinese doors at documenta 12 has collapsed during flooding on site.

The tower, constructed of old doors salvaged from demolished Qing Dynasty buildings, seems like a logical extension to photographic memorials to the lunacy of development in today's China, wherein history is being bulldozed at an extraordinary rate.

It seems even more appropriate that nature should have put the kibosh on the effort to memorialize what has been lost. If the developers don't get us, the storms of global warming will.

Whether the tower collapsed because of shoddy construction or because the artist didn't understand engineering principles, the collapse parallels the collapse of new construction, in China and many other booming locations around the globe. Even new construction made from old demolition is not immune.

Einstürzende Neubauten.

crossposted (again) from joculum.livejournal.com

Kings of Interstitial Space

Sunday’s NY Times brings news from the Venice Biennale of two Swedish artists who, stung by the absurdity of living in a country that still had a king, declared themselves the kings of all of the world’s indefinite boundary zones: wherever there is territory in between the definite borders, wherever the boundaries are blurry, there is their kingdom. And there are many places on earth where it is agreed that it is a very bad thing to be caught on the wrong side of the border, but neither side can agree on the exact location of the boundary line. In that hazardous blur of turf, these artists rule.

Their kingdom also has a very large population, since anyone who is dead is automatically made a citizen, with the option of applying to be removed from the citizenship roster if they find it offensive.

They offer passports, but I don’t think I can be a triple citizen as well as a dual one. I already hold an NSK passport, offered to all who wish to be citizens of the first artists’ state in time (rather than in space). NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) made their reputations in Yugoslavia when they won a Yugoslav government competition for a youth organization poster by copying the design of a Nazi youth poster. They later declared that Slovene independence was their most successful artistic project to date. Their passports bear (or at least bore) a valid sequence of numbers on passport blanks lifted from the Slovene passport office by an NSK sympathizer, which enabled NSK members to cross between Slovenia and Italy on NSK passports in the innocent days of a dozen years ago.

The United States doesn’t recognize dual citizenship, and the upshot of this is that as long as the dual citizen doesn’t attempt to re-enter the United States on the wrong passport, U.S. citizens can also be citizens of whatever other country will have them. I have friends who hold valid Irish citizenship (by virtue of ancestry) and E.U. passports in consequence. I probably shouldn’t point this out, since these days everyone is racing to defend the borders, but.

Another artist, who declined to acquire an NSK passport during their residency at the 1996 Olympics, said we would all be happy as NSK citizens until NSK started collecting taxes and calling up artists for the army. (Of course an NSK army would have to defend art in all times but in no place in particular.)

It would, I suppose, be a lovely conceit if the two kings of the interstitial kingdom sent letters to the warring powers who have been the primary creators of their indefinnite territory, demanding a demilitarized exclusion zone of at least a hundred kilometers on either side of the kingdom.

crossposted from joculum.livejournal.com

Fatuous observations on Cecilia Beaux

In one of my frequent firm grasps of the obvious, a brief perusal of the catalogue of the High Museum’s “Cecelia Beaux: American Figure Painter” exhibition reveals that her portraits were perceived as every bit as disturbing in the world of 1893 as they seemed to me when I discovered them on the walls a few weeks ago in this scholarly survey of a painter who has always been overshadowed by her male counterparts. (William Merritt Chase called her the most important female painter of her generation. But.)

My enthusiasm, then, is a naiveté comparable to realizing with excitement that Moby Dick incorporates a good deal of actual information regarding the hunting of large cetaceans. Only in this case the whales are psychological states, and the perceivers didn’t know they were hunting for them, only that something big was out there.



Sita and Sarita was as bothersome to American viewers of the 1890s as Whistler’s The White Girl, which Beaux would have seen, had been some years earlier. And many of Beaux’ other 1890s portraits, Dorothea in the Woods, et cetera, seem to reflect not just perceptive glimpses of feminine psychology that were missed by Beaux’ male counterparts, but intense personal attachments. Beaux knew these subjects’ inner lives, and it shows, but she also brought her own strong feelings to the enterprise.

Portraits in Summer, which I can find on the web only in a vintage black and white photograph, is another arrestingly unusual accomplishment; I wonder about its stylistic predecessors, since it almost seems to foreshadow later decades in its particular idealization of Beaux’ nephew and his bride. They seem to be facing their radiant future rather more resolutely than I would expect in an American formal portrait of 1911. I can think of a whole host of earlier Central European strength-and-beauty allegories (this was the age of that brand of bodily romanticism) but that is not where this couple is coming from, or going, either. Everything about the gestures and postures puzzles me, though not necessarily productively.



To use the fashionable term, Beaux is using some visual codes I just don’t recognize. Yet she doesn’t seem like the type to have self-importantly invented her own. She seems to have invested these portraits with a good deal of psychological baggage just because she understood her subjects so well, and put so much of them and of their relationships with her into the resulting artwork. Her formal portraits of military men and Unitarian ministers are as well-done but blankly unrevelatory as I, with a sense of anticipatory depression, would expect. These folks didn’t want their inner selves revealed, and they got what they paid for.

I am so self-evidently not an art historian that it is pointless to add to Sylvia Yount’s excellent study. But I wanted to attempt to get at what so arrested my attention when, by and large, the portraiture of that period in American history leaves me slightly worse than unmoved.

news from the neighborhood

This exhibition is opening at a gallery in metro Atlanta; apologies to those of you who may still be checking for my long-delayed (typically) further remarks on the 2007 Southern Open Biennial in Lafayette, Louisiana.

more later re the Acadiana Center for the Arts et al.

I’ve just come from jurying the First Southern Open Biennial at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana. The experience reminded me of jurying annual or biennial exhibitions at the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke and the art museum in Alexandria, Louisiana. (I can never remember the name of the museum because then-director Mark Tullos, who is now at the art museum in Lafayette, succeeded in getting his institution the URL “the museum”: www.themuseum.org.)

These shows always turn up a few neglected treasures, and they’re often destined to stay neglected for one reason or another; usually idiosyncracy combined with unfashionability.

I always end up putting in about a dozen works without which it would have been a stronger but less diverse exhibition, plus as many as a dozen works that make it admirably and unequivocally on one level and barely squeak by on another. The artists of the five Gulf Coast states who submitted work to this inaugural biennial were, on the whole, less marginal in the technical department; a few visions were inadequately realized, but the pleasure there was discovering just how many obstacles the artists in questions had had to encounter en route to producing a body of work that, knowing the whole story, one would expect not to exist at all.

I ended up having to exclude a fair amount of well-rendered, not at all stale landscape for reasons of space as much as anything. It occurs to me, and this is not at all an unkind comment, that it often would be possible to curate an exhibition of upwards of a dozen artists that would look superficially like a solo show. One can say the same for seventeenth century Dutch flower painting. Many artists learned a language and learned it flawlessly.

So one ends up looking for the interesting mavericks, and the meticulous traditionalists pushing a little beyond their expected boundaries, and the practitioners whose vision is their own but whose technique is borrowed from other experimentalists. Plus variations on the foregoing.

Such shows are juried from digital images, these days, and from slides in the preceding century. The necessity of maintaining anonymity works against certain bodies of conceptually oriented art, which is the dominant form in contemporary international circles but not in the regions where it is not merely unmarketable, but uncomprehended. Sometimes the full body of documentation arrives on the juror’s desk along with the images, but in this case I had to ask for elucidation in the case of images that clearly had a story that the photographs of the work weren’t telling.

My favorite in this regard, because I was so baffled by the uncommunicative photo I almost overlooked it, is a collaborative artist’s book by Jackie Klempay and her brother that consists of 3-D photos of Texas and Michigan, their respective states of residence. Intended to represent the polarities of American experience (Texas and Michigan are as opposite as you can get in an enormous number of geographic, political, and cultural respects), the photographs only become viewable through the old-fashioned 3-D viewing glasses that contain one red and one blue lens.

This plays with the metaphor of the red states and blue states brilliantly. Taken singly, each piece of information is unintelligible; the only way to get at a fully dimensional picture is to combine the red and blue perspectives into something that is neither one but corrects for the relentlessly monocular vision of both.

This isn’t great art (a good piece, but not a great one) but as I say, the visual metaphor is superb. All the punditry about the American states being various shades of purple is true; Austin and Ann Arbor could co-exist in an imaginary third state once a few regional peculiarities were straightened out, and there are many Upper Peninsula hale-and-hearty types who could adjust to the ways of the ranchers of the Sagebrush Revolution whose basic opinions they share. (I know the Sagebrush Revolution moniker is decades old and no longer applicable, but bear with me, I’m looking for quick rhetorical shorthand.) But the only way to reduce the distortions of the individual perspective is to find a perspective from which red and blue do not merge uncomfortably into an unpleasant shade of purple, but provide their own take on what each side rightly regards as inconvenient truths. The resultant vision will not be a bland perspective somewhere in the middle, but genuinely binocular. (It’s worth noting that my eyes seldom focus together, so the challenges of attaining three-dimensionality are literally apparent to me.)

Anyway, this is also a brilliant metaphor for the kind of juried show I like to assemble, which was rightly described as “wildly eclectic.” It is also a metaphor for the kind of online publication I would like to see someone assemble (I’m frankly not sure I have the capacity to do it), one that would create a multiocular perspective (yes, I know, that’s the worldview of a fly, but even so). The global biennials and art fairs show us the diversity of an international art world that is, for all of that, not all that diverse; Tom McEvilley was right when he pointed out the error of, I think, a Pacific Islands artist who said in response to a question, “Contemporary art is whatever art is being produced this very moment.” It isn’t, and it isn’t even all art that consists of more complex stuff than the decorously decorative work that copies popular styles. (This latter remark itself lumps together famous popular painters with makers of conventional hotel art, and to do this is to oversimplify the methods of churning stuff out for the mass market. Nothing is ever as simple as it appears, except of course when it is.)

Given that it is now possible to cram a lot of images even on a CD, much less on a two-gig thumb drive such as has dropped in price precipitously, the near-infinitude of storage space on networked servers mean that it would be possible to produce a searchable database of world art of the moment that would be so definitive that it would resemble Borges’ library too vast to find anything, or his map that so replicates the territory that it also is useless for purposes of orientation.

So we need more things like the First Southern Open Biennial; ultimately still dependent on the strange personalities of the gatekeepers, but reflective of enough different personalities so as to reveal aspects of global art that will never show up in the spheres delimited by curatorial respectability. The magazine that employs me, Art Papers, is doing an unparalleled job of showing us what is distinctive and unexpected in the world's contemporary art, but daggum it, it’s still “contemporary.” And there is a lot of non-contemporary art that is also non-traditional, and it’s spread across the planet.

I still want to see a map of the world’s counterforces that is comprehensive but searchable; something more like Google Earth or its competitors, a database that lets you focus in on specific areas of interest, though which areas is a matter still limited by the economics of making the detailed overhead shots. (On the literal level, East Timor got its closeup only after it entered into regional headlines; suddenly it became possible to put names on the hotels, restaurants, and transient marketplaces of Dili.)

For now, the First Southern Open Biennial is a pretty good start; it’s up through July 28, and there’s a catalogue, spiffily and quickly produced via lulu.com on my recommendation.

Nature, Nostalgia, Nepotation, and other expressions of the new at Mason Murer

“is art the joke or the punchline?”

Thus does Jess Snyder complete his artist's journey round the room, making art under the names of three personae in the “Nature, Nostalgia, Nepotation: Deborah Landry, Alessandria Mucciaccio, Jess Snyder” exhibition at Mason Murer Fine Art through May 6. Snyder is the “Nepotation” part of the University of West Georgia’s Atlanta Gallery Project Award Exhibition.

Snyder offers faux naiveté done right; anyone who has tried knows that it is hard to make work look awkward and amateur and visually successful all the same time. It is hard enough to make genuinely naïve work that doesn’t look klutzy; much of the time, it is hard enough to make sophisticated work that doesn’t look klutzy. Snyder pulls it off. These drawings and poignant parodies of wall texts combine grace and representations of the success of failure as much as the falling tightrope walker who appears in the one of the pieces inspired by metaphors of the circus.

Deborah Landry’s engravings, especially “Vision to Behold,” are lovely, haunting evocations of the mystery and majesty of the forest when it is left to its own devices. Her wall of ceramic models of clear-cut tree stumps, “As Far As the Eye Can See,” reflects the devastation that follows when it isn’t.

Alessandria Mucciaccio deserves to be celebrated for sheer imaginative range carried in unanticipated directions. Her encaustic wall sculpture of a female nude, inlaid with Greek text and butterflies, may or may not succeed by conventional standards, but it pushes the boundaries between genres productively as much as it stretches customary symbolism in personal directions.

The adjacent “Fresh Blood” exhibition of emerging or under-recognized artists, organized by Mason Murer itself, should be seen by anyone within comfortable driving distance. I hope to deal with this one a bit more in a post in the near future, but Yana Dimitrova’s “Melancholy I” and the adjacent melancholy painting of a sofa covered in clear plastic would be worth the price of admission if admission were being charged, which it is not. (I used that joke in a previous post, but if a joke is worth making, it is worth running into the ground.) Alli Ferrara shows us how abstraction and representation ought to be combined in the twenty-first century, much as the late Genevieve Arnold’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia demonstrates one way in which it could be done in the now definitively terminated twentieth. There are so many other pleasures of painting and sculpture (but not, alas, video or other new media) to be had in this exhibition that it deserves an extended analytical review, whether or not it ever receives one.

With luck, I shall eventually refine these notes into something more formal, including discussion or at least description of a few more artists. Until then, I would like to point people in the direction of this show before a few random images on people’s websites become the only way to appreciate it.

If the link works, this should be Yana Dimitrova's "Melancholy I" as it appears on her website:

Michele Schuff

Lux in Tenebris: Paintings and Installation by Michele Schuff



Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt.
—Scotus Erigena as quoted by Ezra Pound

…add your light to the sum of light.
—Billy Kwan in Christopher J. Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously

If thee does not turn to the Inner Light, where will thee turn?
—George Fox as quoted by Kenneth Rexroth

There is light within a Man of Light, and it illuminates the whole world.
—the Gospel of Thomas


“All things that are, are lights.” We came from the Light, and to the Light we shall return. The fallen sparks trapped in earthen vessels is one of those models of gnostic philosophy that existed from one end of the Silk Road to the other, and has now spread throughout the earth. Perhaps it was always already spread throughout the earth. Perhaps the mysticism of light was spread already around the domesticated fires of the Paleolithic caves.

What we know for sure is that the mysticism of light took hold from Egypt to Central Asia and beyond. The major difference would be the source and destiny of the light; rationalists can say all they like that the metaphor is a natural diffusion of the multiple values perceived in fire and sunlight, and of course that is how all metaphors get started. (One might consult antique texts like Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction on the birth of all abstract concepts out of analogies drawn from direct physical experience.)

But the experience of the Inner Light seems to be a genuine psychological phenomenon, not necessarily universal. More often the Light is kept safely distanced from human beings, like fire itself or like an excess of sunlight. And yet one way or another, the light gets in. The disagreements regard the question of how and when.

“He was not that light, but came to bear witness to the light. The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.” “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” And the Light Verse in the Koran birthed whole schools of mystical wisdom.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The issue for European and Asian antiquity was whether the light was there in the first place as part of a cosmic rescue operation or through a cosmic accident that meant the light itself had to be rescued.

Americans, raised on Calvinism’s notions of total depravity and with ample personal experience of innate human perversity, generally voted for the necessity of enlightenment from without, by any means necessary. But a working minority always asked if the light of enlightenment might not be already embedded in the muck, like the lotus flower that springs from the muddy lake bottom in the Buddhist metaphor.

Buddhism came late to America, of course; but gnostic philosophy and gnostic psychology came to the North American continent courtesy of Central European transmissions of Silk Road metaphysical metaphors. (I refer you to Harold Bloom’s books, such as Omens of Millennium, for an argument that America always was a more gnostically optimistic culture than is generally believed.)

Michele Schuff’s paintings and installation at Whitespace give us the metaphors unmediated. The two galleries give us the successive moments of light-mysticism in reverse, rather as Carl Jung suggested that contemporary souls had to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead (which itself is a Silk Road account of the re-imprisonment of the light that is classically gnostic in its essence). We begin in ineffable brightness and descend into luminous darkness. (Or maybe ascend; the floor of the back gallery is a big step higher than the floor of the front one.)

In other words, the front gallery’s big encaustic paintings feature vivid bits of red, yellow and orange surrounded by and melding into a white background/foreground, or globular ovals of white floating in a midnight-blue surround. The tables in the front gallery combine individual containers of light into a suggestion of collective purpose (like Christianity’s lamps put upon lampstands to give light, albeit soft light, to the whole house). The back gallery contains multiple hanging translucent models of Coleman lanterns (electrically lit, on a single circuit, the technology itself providing a metaphor of Neo-Platonism’s vision of the single Source of the One energizing and illuminating the Many).

One wants to celebrate the sheer technical versatility of “Lux in Tenebris” (Latin for “light in the darkness,” an extract from the Gospel of John that became the motto of the Presbyterian Church). It is rare to find an artist who solves compositional problems through a revelatory dream who also figures out how to combine onto a single rheostat the circuitry of multiple lanterns suspended by piano wire. The combination of imaginative leap and practical cast of mind suggests an enlightenment that is half intuitively Buddhist and half old-fashioned eighteenth-century rationalist. (For the record, Schuff’s chief source of metaphoric inspiration was Buddhist, but she is not a practicing Buddhist, and she began researching the metaphors of light after some very real experiences of light in the darkness in the unlit stretches of north Georgia’s Hambidge Center. In the night of rural artists’ retreats as in pioneer America, there are times when one can find oneself in the middle of a dark wood where the clear path is altogether lost, quite literally.)

The paintings make fine meditational objects. The repeated image of lights that are either stars in a night sky or illuminated vessels floating in a richly luminous dark are particularly intriguing.

Schuff may or may not know the onetime Persian-garden custom of putting lights in glass globules behind curtains of falling water, in niches for lights that are themselves concreteizations of the metaphors of mysticism. Most of us have encountered some version of the metaphors of microcosm and macrocosm that link the stellar distances of the night sky with the invisible distances of the occulted Inner Light. But that the technical problem of representation of all this should have been resolved in a dream is one of God’s gifts to the surviving Jungians among us. (Actually, it is God’s gift to a whole raft of contending interpretations, but one seldom finds such a pristine example of archetypes at work in everyday life.)

Of course, it is Schuff’s sufficiently transcendent talents as a painter that makes the dream’s visual insight more than a treasure held in earthen vessels. The wax of the encaustic medium contributes its customary mediation of light superbly, and the particular mix of light and dark in the palette is exactly what a good painting ought to contain. Occasional flaws of surface texture and other inevitable reasons for quibbling come only after the first impact, which is delectably positive and likely to ameliorate later critical impulses.

The hanging lanterns alone would be worth the price of admission, if one were being charged to get in, which one is not. The paintings alone would be worth it. As it is, the twin galleries of light and dark are a free gift that should be savored while the show is still there, and remembered lovingly when it is not.

The show is there through the fifth day of May, and you may consult your Atlanta arts calendar for the boring details of how and when to find it. Or point your browser, as a favorite radio program so charmingly puts it, to www.whitespace814.com.