not all counterforces are little jokes: Hussein Chalayan at Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery is as mainstream as it gets in the world of art, but this is the kind of cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary enterprise I have always championed. The press release, verbatim:

"Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce further details of their collaboration with Hussein Chalayan whose new installation will be exhibited during a solo show, 8 September – 2 October 2010.

"Chalayan says 'My approach has always been interdisciplinary; the new work is an extension of this. There is a certain freedom to working in an art context that has allowed me to further explore the ideas that underpin my work.'

"The new installation explores music as a cultural form, creating a 'disembodied experience' of a performance of a traditional Turkish folk composition by Sertab Erener, one of Turkey’s most successful female singers, accompanied by an Ottoman orchestra. The installation is made up of a nuanced combination of audio, film, sculpture and musical notation. Here Hussein examines the experience of music as layered, exploring both the sounds created by different instruments, and the diverse cultural influences on the composition, which include Persian poetry and Greek orthodox chanting.

"Hussein Chalayan is one of Britain’s best known and most respected designers, and was the recipient of the Designer of the Year awards in 1999 and 2000. Chalayan represented Turkey in the Venice Biennale in 2005 and presented a critically acclaimed survey at London’s Design Museum in spring 2009, which later toured to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and is currently on view at Istanbul Modern.

"The project has emerged from a longstanding dialogue between the designer and Lisson Gallery’s Curatorial Director Greg Hilty who says: 'Hussein Chalayan is rightly celebrated not just for his fashion but as one of London's leading innovators in visual culture. His sensitive play with the history and poetic potential of wide-ranging cultural forms make him a natural fit for Lisson's programme of exhibitions.'"

George Steiner wrote My Unwritten Books a few years back; I am increasingly accepting the need to write “My Unwritten Essays.” This is a note about one of those essays.

C. G. Jung’s The Red Book, published at long last after decades lost in legend, is one of those confrontations with the unconscious that deserves to be contextualized in terms of literary and art history. Art history in particular, because The Red Book is such a sui generis work that at the same time is of its time, and comments upon it. Carl Jung’s unconscious when he began the book was the unconscious of a German-speaking citizen of Switzerland ca. 1915. When he ended the venture in 1930, in the middle of a sentence and the middle of a painting, he did so as a different person in history, and it was the historical fact that Richard Wilhelm and others had made the visual and literary materials of alchemy available to him that led him to abandon his personal researches in favor of inherited imagery.

However, it isn’t like no one else was plumbing the psychic depths with visual and verbal resources in those years. Symbolist art and its self-consciously decadent offshoot were florid explorations of the mind’s swamps and gardens, even as Gerard Manley Hopkins was writing that “the mind has mountains, / Cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.”

Jung’s visual resources included at least some of those paintings (Hodler in particular, but we don’t know, or I don’t, how far afield the work of Jan Toorop or any of the other artists of his generation got…there were widely distributed art magazines at the turn of the twentieth century, and as a different psychologically inflected modernism got underway a dozen years later with publications like Der Blaue Reiter, there were at least cultivated discussions going on about the strange doings of the new art. Jung knew what the Dadaists were up to in his own city of Zürich, and he didn’t like it. He almost certainly would have felt differently about the Symbolist generation, because the paintings in The Red Book are so often so Symbolist in their visual orientation. (They also owe much to medieval manuscript illumination, of course, since the book is self-consciously medievalizing, but most of all they look like the works of Hodler, or Munch, or Toorop or even Mossa and lesser lights whom Jung is unlikely to have seen. This similarity to painters Jung couldn’t have known as well as ones he could have isn’t an argument for the collective unconscious per se, because the styles seem to have been infectious; similar unconscious contents spawned similar paintings if the artists were inclined to paint in a certain manner already. It is the identity of consciously acquired style that reveals the structural identity of unconscious contents expressed in the individual artworks.)

Anyway, I don’t have time to sit down with recent books on international schools of Symbolist painting (and there have been several such books) or even with Robert Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition and do this right. Rosenblum’s general hypothesis is germane to Jung’s book; the long crisis of Protestant theology gave rise to a visual tradition of ecstatic relationships to the natural world in which the unpleasant as well as the delightsome facts of biology were subsumed into a profane mystical vision. At once anxious and celebratory, human beings were inserted through art into a new world of earthly and more than earthly delights that grew out of doubts about human destiny.

And Jung’s psychology is a historical response to that crisis, in the same way that Freud’s is albeit with different conclusions. The look of The Red Book, if not the details of its contents, certainly arises out of its moment(s) in time, and I suppose others are already investigating shifts in style and content over the course of the fifteen years Jung spent producing it. I certainly had meant to do so.

But since I seem not to be finding time to do it, be aware that William Willeford is speaking about the overall topic at Atlanta’s Jung Society meeting on Saturday, July 17. Those sufficiently interested in the subject should be able to locate information online here:
http://www.jungatlanta.com/schedule-willeford.html

Kandinsky's project revisited

Every so often someone comes along to have a go at a classic attempt, in this case Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee's statistical surveys at the Bauhaus trying to determine correlations between color and number and shape. The difference is that this artist in Ormond Beach, Florida has recognized that the correlations will change with culture and history; it isn't entirely biologically or spiritually fixed, even if very few cultures use red to symbolize passionlessness and tranquility or blue to symbolize restless agitation. (The dominant appearance of these colors in the environment may be enough to explain this without resorting to the electromagnetic spectrum. Kandinsky's own announced correlations of shape and color have always felt very odd and wrong to me, however—in sharp contrast to his usages in paintings—so it isn't just sky and blood and fire that shape our visual metaphors.)

Anyway, though I won't take the test myself, I feel inclined to pass this along for those who will:



Public Participation Wanted: Symbolism in Contemporary Western Culture Survey released on internet.



Like our individual signatures or fingerprints, we each see and interpret shape and color differently based on our experiences. Traditionally meanings have varied around the world. Has the diversity of America blended meanings? What are the characteristics that define your beliefs by color, line, shape? Can these elements be isolated? These are some of the underlining questions behind this project by Margaret Schnebly Hodge entitled “Glyph: Visual Interpretations of Contemporary Western Culture”.



Hodge is an artist fascinated by the blending features of contemporary western culture. “I believe that we are born with a primal belief system some refer to as an internal compass which is influenced over time by external forces, becoming a more complex cumulative belief system” says Hodge. “Participants are asked to provide meanings of basic shapes, objects and colors for Hodge to evaluate and discover the meanings in today’s western society. Is it different from our ancestors? Is there a transcendent core universal system?



In an effort to bring visual reality to the intangible values found in public belief systems, Hodge has developed a fun and simple 18 question survey and placed it on the internet. “I believe the survey phase may take up to 6 months in order to get the appropriate number of respondents” says Hodge. Asked why she chose the electronic system she explained “I want to let the project web out to a broad sampling of the public, individual to individual, and not be directed to any specific group of people.”



The survey is the first phase of and creates a foundation for Hodge’s upcoming multimedia project. Go to www.glyphproject.info to find more information on the project and complete the survey free online. Everyone, age 18 or older, who resides at least 6 months of the year within the United States, may participate in the survey. You do not have to subscribe to particular belief systems or be a citizen of the United States and no identifying personal information is required to participate.



Hodge is an award winning artist who resides in Ormond Beach, Florida. She has spent the past 5 years preparing for this project while remaining dedicated to her painting and completing other projects that included public participation. Her 2007 project, Art In the Sunshine, was proposed over the internet and through news media, then allowed to evolve on its own. Over 100 self enlisted artists generated more than 300 pieces of art from old signs that had been illegally placed on roadways. The art was legally installed along 20 miles of roadway for a three month period. This project brought together city, county, not for profit and private partners. For information on the artist go to www.mshodge-art.com .

everything is contextual. by definition.

That's to say, we perceive from a perspective, one determined by our prior experience, which includes upbringing, personal encounters, and theoretical apparatus that we buy into, whether that apparatus be Calvinist, libertarian, mystical or Marxist.

And that means that certain exhibitions are just plain troublesome to write about, just as they were troublesome to curate. But whether they in fact create trouble depends on the age and perhaps the nationality of the viewer.

Such is the case with "Incendiary Exposure," the exhibition of work by Daryl Harris and Michael Morgan that runs through June 27 at Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta.

Morgan combines an allegorical series about the pain of the oppressed (by racism, mostly, but also by economics and...other things) with a series of box assemblages about the pain of the boxed-in African-American homosexual. Even ten-year-olds get the picture, according to curator Kevin Sipp.

We must suppose they also get the picture in terms of Harris' paintings that deal with the pathology of continuing white racism and the different pathology of the violence-ridden culture that Harris encountered among his students and that he considers a particularly dysfunctional response to diminished economic circumstances. (I'm using this ludicrously highfalutin language for a reason, if only for Brecht's good old "Verfremdungseffekt," q.v. on Wikipedia.)

Sipp suggests that the pathological legacy of Jim Crow lingers in part because the United States has never squarely confronted the topic, but rather attempted to deal with this or that individual aspect of the problem. Distorted versions of self-awareness would be a side effect, from gangsta culture to homophobia, but for different reasons having to do with how prestige is established. In other present-day macho American subcultures, street cred was established until very recently by getting a high-powered trading position at Goldman Sachs.

While I am on the subject of subcultural self-awareness, I wish I could see the new show at the Art Pavilion Zagreb, a building that is apparently an inheritance from the Hungarian Millennium Exposition of 1898 in Budapest. The Hungarians wanted to spread the wonders of Magyar culture to their subject peoples, so the pavilion was exported to the Croatian capital (then the provincial Hungarian town) of Zagreb to use for art shows.

No, actually the canny Croatians told the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary that no way were they showing up in Budapest without getting some architecture in return. And since it would have been embarrassing to have had one of the nations of the great multi-ethnic, multicultural empire turn up missing, the Hungarian authorities assented.

And now we have, as an oblique commentary on this history, a show called "Neither From Nor Towards...Did You, Upon Awakening Today, See the Future from the Still Point of the Turning World?" This must be the actual title, in English rather than translated, because the keywords are all taken verbatim from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

The show is a commentary on the heritage of illusory optimism bequeathed to us by world expositions (and we should note that one is taking place at this very moment in Shanghai...I hope to acquire a catalogue as I have done for most of the world expositions—and also the colonial expositions—from 1924 onward). The text of the "Neither From Nor Towards" press release says it all:

"The histories of world exhibitions are scripts for reading the histories of the world, revealing the global economic, political, ideological and power relations of an era, beneath their usual optimistic glow highlighting utopian visions and glorious prospects for the 'future of mankind.'

"The exhibition recalls not the structure or 'intent' of the world fair exhibitions, but what is left of the ghosts of their proclaimed belief in mankind and its future. Situated in the historicist art pavilion, exchanged between Budapest and Zagreb at the turn of the last century, it reflects the relations of histories of architecture, photography and the ideology of exhibition with histories of power and subjugation, as well as the histories of past utopian and futurological visions, embodied in the promises of architecture and technology. It wonders if it is possible today, after an era of identity politics and fragmented narratives, to see the world 'as a whole' and simultaneously question the very idea of the wholeness as one belonging to the Western imagination related to the ideas surrounding modernity, progress and colonial equations."

So is it possible to view the world as a whole in an era when we can't even view the history of the United States as a whole, as witness the divergent responses of different generations (if not ethnicities) to "Incendiary Exposure"? Good question, and Croatia has its own much-disputed ethnic histories to worry about, or, rather, to try not to think too much about. For when people think too much about them in the wrong way, bullets start flying.

If anyone can elucidate the image from "Neither From Nor Towards" with which this essay begins, I'd appreciate it. I have the feeling that the images by Morgan and Harris will be similarly opaque to the Croatians, although they might get Harris' The Greatest Fear, a race-reversed antebellum plantation scene set on the front lawn of the White House. Gone With the Wind was popular in the war-torn Balkans to the point of being parodied by the Trio collective in a Clark-Gable-and-Vivien-Leigh postcard announcing "Everybody wants to see GONE WITH SARAJEVO—most famous movie of all time."

A Google search for that postcard, of which I own a copy, turned up nothing until I typed in different keywords (duh) after writing this essay—I have deliberately retained my not-quite-right recollection of the text, above—but it was good to discover en route that Bosnian design continues to produce hiply contemporary and ironic pieces of design in the ensuing decades of fragilely enforced peace. Trio's most famous design, incidentally, is "Enjoy Sarajevo," the 1992-1993 ripoff of the Coca-Cola logo that they joked would rescue them from besieged Sarajevo, because the Coca-Cola Company would want to put them on trial in Atlanta for copyright infringement, and that meant that the Americans would have to come arrest them and remove them from the war zone.

This has been a digressive post, but as always, digressive by design.

ends and odds

The promised reviews of Atlanta exhibitions are piling up unwritten, between one thing and another that I'll reveal later.

I was reminded today that it had been a long time since I last tried to contribute to +rosebud, the design magazine edited by Ralf Herms and others out of Vienna. (I had work in number 4, "Action," and 5, "Mystery.") I discover that not only have I missed number 6, "Ideal," but number 7, "Very Funny," came out last year, featuring the world's longest joke, set in 3 point type.

No joke at all is Dominic Stevens' design for a $33,000 (at current exchange rates) environment-friendly house. The Times says that "you and I could build it," but since they didn't list a URL for the plans that he is giving away for free on the Internet and there are too many Dominic Stevens stories for me to find the right one in my spare time, I am presuming that one of the architects who reads this blog will have the details. (It would be nice to have comments from someone besides Chinese spammers.) The April 8 story appears here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article7090211.ece

I think I shall have a go at an image-heavy post about one of the exhibitions I've promised to do something about.

September Songs access, Skies Over Atlanta ditto

My thanks to everyone who came to the CD launch reading for September Songs. The print version thereof, with extensive notes, is only available online via this URL:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/september-songs-twelve-poems-of-early-autumn/8435890

which can be accessed directly off my joculum.livejournal.com blog where the links seem to work, as they do not here.

Also, the "Skies Over Atlanta" installation in which I was involved along with Neil Fried, Evan Levy, and Priscilla Smith can be viewed, at least in part, in a five minute video here: http://www.rre.net

or more specifically, here: http://www.rre.net/SkysOverAtlanta.shtml

advancing slowly on all fronts

There will be time later to explain a few of the things going on in Atlanta at the moment, some of which have generated a certain amount of transient admiration and some of which may yet birth other things. For now, however, I want to pay homage to The Front, a New Orleans artists' collective profiled by Paul Chan on e-flux (in an essay linked to from Inside New Orleans, whose online link was forwarded to me by D. Eric Bookhardt).

Chan's essay, which essays much larger issues regarding community and communication than I have time to rephrase here in between my other commitments, describes the New Orleans tradition of artists' collectives which predates Katrina and continues to be carried on by those artists who were part of the scene before Katrina and continued to insist upon the survival of the N.O. art scene after it. The Front, whose website is www.nolafront.org, is one of the more intriguing of these, although you wouldn't know it from this extraordinarily lame post.

Trust me enough to navigate to http://e-flux.com/journal/view/144 for Chan's remarks. Bookhardt also has an appealing interview with Patti Smith in the current issue of Inside New Orleans at http://www.insidenola.org