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Why the Whitney is “Nervous” About Upcoming Laura Poitras Show

BY Noelle Bodick | January 29, 2016

           

                                       

Laura Poitras's "ANARCHIST: Power Spectrum Display of Doppler Tracks from a Satellite (Intercepted May 27, 2009)" 2016.

( Courtesy of the artist)

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Laura Poitras. Courtesy Praxis Films

Classified images leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden will figure as artworks at the Whitney Museum of American Art in its Laura Poitras solo exhibition, “Astro Noise,” opening next week. In an unprecedented sprint from headline to gallery wall, news of the covert intelligence program to which the works pertain will have scarcely broken — last night, in two stories on The Intercept — before the large-scale prints go on view to the public on February 5.

Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, artist, and journalist who became a household name in 2013 for her reporting with journalist Glenn Greenwald on the warrantless spying programs exposed by Snowden, is including newly revealed visuals from the Snowden archive in her show, as well as in an accompanying catalogue. The images are products of a program in which, according The Intercept, “American and British intelligence secretly tapped into live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets, monitoring military operations in Gaza, watching for a potential strike against Iran, and keeping tabs on the drone technology Israel exports around the world.” The story continues:

“Under a classified program code-named ‘Anarchist,’ the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, working with the National Security Agency, systematically targeted Israeli drones from a mountaintop on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. GCHQ files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden include a series of ‘Anarchist snapshots’ — thumbnail images from videos recorded by drone cameras. The files also show location data mapping the flight paths of the aircraft. In essence, U.S. and British agencies stole a bird’s-eye view from the drones.”

Declassified government materials are nothing new to the art world — take Jenny Holzer or Mariam Ghani, for example. And even classified materials have found their way into art, as when Simon Denny used graphics from documents in the Snowden archive that had been made public the year before (by Poitras), in work that mimicked the NSA’s cluttered and cheesy PowerPoint aesthetic for the Venice Biennale. (He also commissioned an ex-NSA graphic designer.) But this is probably the first time that an artist showing highly classified documents has been so closely involved with their initial exposure — and the first time that a museum has displayed such works so soon after that exposure, and on American soil. 
In an interview, Poitras described the institution as “nervous,” but, almost in the same breath, also “incredible” in their support of this work. “My experience working with institutions frequently revolves around the question ‘What is the worst-case scenario?’ And their job is to imagine those, because it’s completely new territory,” Poitras said in New York in November, speaking of the potential risks the museum might be taking on.
Upon entering the gallery, visitors will meet six enlarged archival pigment prints on aluminum, among them brightly colored visual depictions of decrypted and descrambled signal analysis captured by GCHQ, which as of 2012 hacked into foreign drone feeds (there are no indications that the operation has been shut down since, according to Poitras). At least one print depicts an intercepted Israeli drone signal. After that, viewers will proceed through four separate installation works driving home the realities of the surveillance state. Other materials from the Snowden archive will appear throughout the show and in the catalogue.
“With anything that’s dealing with the [Snowden] archive, we’re taking it through a separate journalistic process,” Poitras said, which includes “confronting the government” — seeking comment from government representatives — and “making sure it’s in the public interest.” Ahead of the release of her Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour,” Poitras grounded the revelation of classified materials in news stories. This time, Poitras’s fellow reporters at The Intercept, Cora Currier and Henrik Moltke, timed the release of today’s Intercept stories to precede the opening of her exhibition at the Whitney.
“First we found the images, then we found the story behind them,” Poitras wrote in a follow-up email to ARTINFO about the prints, a couple of which are vaguely reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s abstract squeegee paintings, but with pixelated gradients, almost a net-art fever dream. “When we started research for [the] Whitney [exhibition], we approached the archive differently and began by looking at it from a visual perspective, which led us to the Anarchist story,” Poitras explained.
Co-reporter Moltke, an independent journalist who has previously collaborated with Poitras on a number of NSA stories (including the agency’s partnership with AT&T, the alliance with “third-party” nations codenamed “Rampart A,” and GCHQ’s spying on climate change summits), helped Poitras comb the archive for compelling visuals and later acted as a go-between for the artist’s reporting team and the museum.
One reason for the Whitney’s concerns might be the World War I-era Espionage Act, the vehicle for prosecuting disclosures of information “relating to the national defense.” Called “singularly opaque” in the dissenting opinion of the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, the statutes neither draw distinctions between various security clearance levels — it was written well before our sophisticated state secrets apparatus today — nor does it carve out a safe haven for journalists or third parties receiving the leaked information.
But even under the Obama Administration’s severe crackdown on leakers and intrusive investigations into reporters, no journalist or publisher has ever been prosecuted under the Act.
In this case, the Whitney will be serving as a third party — the equivalent of a newspaper — in providing a public venue for this classified information, and would arguably be protected even if the news had not been broken elsewhere. “Prosecuting any kind of third-party publisher would raise alarm bells,” said Heidi Kitrosser, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School whose scholarship specializes in free speech law and legal issues relating to national security, adding that prosecution would be an “extraordinary step.”
“Given that it is Laura Poitras in connection with journalistic endeavors, my guess is that it would be perceived as too closely linked to journalism to really create a distinction worthy of the different type of prosecutorial decision,” Kitrosser said.
Still, Kitrosser added, she would “not be surprised and fully expect[s] a lot of angry talk and denouncements from the government and talk of threats to prosecute.”
And the legal issues are certainly not minor. “If [the Poitras work] is that sort of material [with a high security clearance], then there’s all the more legal risk,” said Floyd Abrams, an attorney who defended The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case (as well as the Brooklyn Museum of Art in its 1999 legal battles with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani over a Chris Ofili painting). He later added that “before showing an exhibition of this sort, I’m confident that the Whitney is taking serious steps to ensure itself that any legal risk is minimized.”
In performing legal due diligence, the museum worked with outside legal counsel David Schulz, an expert in media law and national security journalism. Schulz did not view Poitras’s act as raising different liabilities at the Whitney, an art museum, than it would at a news organization. “The legal questions that are presented by the exhibition are really no different than the legal questions presented by Laura’s journalism,” Schulz said in a phone interview. “So my role as outside counsel to the Whitney was really to counsel them the same way a media lawyer would counsel a newspaper about the role of the First Amendment in protecting their rights of expression and how that plays out in material that may be classified by the government.”
“We looked at the same issues and followed the same procedures that a responsible news organization would undertake,” Schulz added, pointing out that a museum, like a newspaper, is protected under the First Amendment.
The Whitney might seem a surprising venue for a show like this, given its cozy relationship with the White House of late. Last spring, First Lady Michelle Obama spoke at the museum’s downtown dedication, before President Obama visited the museum with daughters in tow last summer. In 2014, the museum lent two Hopper paintings to the Oval Office.
The museum did not respond directly to the question of how it anticipates this exhibition will impact that relationship, but instead offered that it was “extremely pleased” to be organizing Poitras’s show. “Throughout its history the Whitney has presented the work of artists who engage in charged artistic and political issues, particularly from an interpretive documentary perspective, and we continue to serve as a platform for artists to express their ideas,” the spokesman wrote.
As a private institution, the Whitney still receives some federal funding regularly from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). For this exhibition, the museum did not apply for or receive any federal funding.
Poitras spoke admiringly of the museum’s decision to mount her show. “When [the Whitney] reached out to me [in 2013], I was in Berlin, unsure of when I would come back to
the United States,” she recalled of the days after publishing the Snowden revelations. “There was a question as to whether the government would try to bring charges against Glenn Greenwald or me.”
“So it was bold of them — there’s a lot of risks in reporting on material that the government doesn’t want public,” she said. “That’s just the way it is.”

                                       

          

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Art World || Brazil's Galeria Nara Roesler Comes to New York's Flower District

Art World

Brazil's Galeria Nara Roesler Comes to New York's Flower District

Brian Boucher, Friday, February 5, 2016

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Nara Roesler gallery's artistic director Alexandra Garcia Waldman.
Photo: Courtesy Galeria Nara Roesler.

Veteran Brazil gallery Nara Roesler is expanding into the crowded New York art market, with a new viewing space now open in the Flower District.

Sitting in the 950-square-foot room in an 1870 building on West 28th Street, artistic director Alexandra Garcia Waldman described the gallery's plans for the new venue, which is open by appointment and has been receiving visitors since December. She talked to artnet News among works by gallery artists such as Bruno Dunley, Lucia Koch, Artur Lescher, and Marco Maggi.

The New York space is the latest expansion by a gallery that's been in business for twenty-six years in São Paulo and opened a new venue in Rio de Janeiro in 2014. But now it was time to branch out further, Waldman said.

“Brazil is like the US in one way," she said, pointing out that it's practically “a continent unto itself, with its own market, its own criticism, its own institutions." Its protectionist economy, too, has discouraged collecting artists from outside the country. So the gallery hadn't seen a need to look outward, she conceded, and indeed about seventy percent of its buyers are Brazilian.

“But I'm now obsessed with taking the Brazilians outside of Brazil," she said. She sat under a large Antonio Dias work based on the covers of various newspapers printed on canvas, sections overpainted with geometric red patches.

The viewing room, with works by Lucia Koch, Antonio Dias, Melanie Smith, and Paulo Bruscky.

The gallery's staff of thirty keeps up a brisk pace of eight art fairs a year, from Art Basel Hong Kong and the Armory Show to Frieze Masters and, on its home turf, Art Rio. Waldman, who grew up in New York and spent ten years in Mexico City before joining the gallery, had just touched down from visiting several European countries and would take off for art fairs in Mexico City the next day.

The new viewing room is not far from a few other dealers, namely former Chelsea resident Casey Kaplan's new venue; Planthouse Gallery, which opened in 2013; and a space shared by dealers Leon Tovar and Cristina Grajales. Other dealers have been scouting the neighborhood as well, driven partly by rising rents in Chelsea. For now, Nara Roesler's other near neighbors include retailers hawking costume jewelry, lingerie, sunglasses, and hair extensions.

Nara Roesler shows more than forty artists, many of them Latin American practitioners of various generations, including those born in the 1920s and ‘30s, like Hélio Oiticica and Julio Le Parc; Paulo Bruscky and Antonio Dias, born in the ‘40s; and children of the ‘60s and ‘70s, such as Vik Muniz, Virginia de Medeiros, and Cao Guimarães. Nara Roesler also works with artists hailing from other parts of the globe, representing Daniel Buren and Isaac Julien in Brazil.

Among the upcoming exhibitions at the Flower District venue are shows by Guimarães (opening March 31), Abraham Palatnik (in May 2016, coinciding with a presentation of his work at Frieze New York), and Marcos Chaves (opening September 3).

The viewing room, with works by Bruno Dunley, Tomie Ohtake, Lucia Koch, and Antonio Dias.
Photo: courtesy Galeria Nara Roesler.

Waldman made no secret of the fact that the Brazilian art market, like the art market globally, is experiencing swift, and erratic, changes. The larger economic and political situation is turbulent, too, she pointed out, with the country undergoing corruption scandals and corporate bankruptcies to rival those of the US in 2007–08.

Goldman Sachs chief Latin American economist Alberto Ramos has an even harsher assessment. “Brazil is a mess," he said, according to Bloomberg. “Number 10 used to mean Pele. Now it's inflation rate, unemployment rate, and the popularity rate of the president."

So the gallery's turn from inward-looking to outward-facing is partly a move born of necessity, and, Waldman said, the still-bustling New York art market is essential to that plan. Describing the way the gallery manages its various artists, she noted that cultivating different artists requires various strategies.

“Everyone is their own case, and everyone needs what they need," she said. “But everyone needs New York."

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Brian Boucher

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Fashion Forward: When What We Wear Becomes Art to See

Posted on January 10, 2016 by admin

— By Beth Dunlop

Iris Van Herpen

COLLECTORS AND CONNOISSEURS OF DESIGN look for inspiration in many places, from the hardware store to the runway. This winter, fashion design comes into sharp focus with exhibitions that look at yesterday, today, and tomorrow. “Fashion is one of the most accessible of design disciplines, since we all use it, or we choose to reject it. Although it’s accessible, it’s not necessarily simplistic,” says Cathy Leff, the founder of the small jewel-like gallery installation called the Fashion Project at Miami’s Bal Harbour Shops. “Clothes carry many messages and narratives—about the maker, the wearer, lives lived, cultural attitudes, norms, and values. Examined in the broader context of an exhibition, dress speaks about the people who created and wore it, how they lived, what they did, the materials they used or worshipped,” Leff says.
The Fashion Project is arguably on the smallest scale of any of this winter’s fashion exhibitions, but it comes with a high pedigree. Leff, the former director of the Wolfsonian – Florida International University, was offered gallery space at the tony Bal Harbour Shops and then enlisted the help of the widely respected British curator and fashion design scholar Judith Clark. It’s a small space but perfect for a close look at the history of fashion, told in a series of exhibitions that are part curation and part conceptual art installation. In the fourth of the series, entitled The Anniversary, Clark looks at the last fifty years of fashion history with a special emphasis on nature as a design motif. The Anniversary runs through January 20 and will culminate with a four-day film festival, Fashion in Film/Time: Returns, Recalls, Renewals. fashionprojectbhs.com

Angelo Seminara and Millie Schwier making the wigs and floral headpieces for “FP04: The Anniversary.” Photo: Thom Atkinson.

In Atlanta, the High Museum’s Iris van Herpen, on view through May 15, 2016, showcases the experimental work of the thirty-one-year-old Dutch designer, who is influenced by art, science, music, and philosophy. Her oeuvre is at once based on traditional craftsmanship and new technology, including some of the world’s first 3-D printing in fashion and computer modeling and engraving, and at times it incorporates such unexpected materials as magnets and umbrella ribbing. Coorganized with the Netherlands’ Groninger Museum, the exhibition opened in November. Sarah Schleuning, the High’s curator of decorative arts and design who co-curated the exhibition, terms the work “an incredible fusion of artistic expression, craftsmanship, and creativity. The marriage of traditional, handcrafted designs and twenty-first-century technology makes her work innovative, dynamic, a bold, new future for fashion design.” highmuseum.org
The new SCAD FASH, opened in October by the Savannah College of Art and Design, adds a ten thousand-square-foot museum to the school’s Atlanta campus, joining with the art museum, which opened in 2011. The mission, according to SCAD president Paula Walker, is to focus “on the past, present, and future of fashion design, connecting conceptual to historical principles of dress, whether ceremonial, celebratory, or casual.” SCAD FASH opened with a retrospective exhibition of the work of Oscar de la Renta, looking at the designer’s career from the mid-1960s until his death in 2014 with additional garments from the fashion house’s current creative director Peter Copping. On view to December 31, the show includes gowns worn by Laura Bush, Taylor Swift, and Oprah Winfrey. The museum’s permanent collection also includes work from such designers as Yves St. Laurent and Givenchy. scad.edu

Oscar de la Renta, courtesty of SCAD.

Jacqueline de Ribes: The Art of Style, on view through February 21, 2016 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Anna Wintour Costume Center, looks at the fashion persona of the Countess Jacqueline de Ribes, both muse and designer, and in many ways, a living work of art (as curator Harold Koda puts it, her approach to dress was “a kind of performance art”). The exhibition features some sixty works taken from de Ribes’s archives and dating from 1962 to the present, including examples of her personal fancy dress ball ensembles. Though she put together her ball gowns and other attire herself, sometimes with the help of a seamstress, de Ribes was the celebrated client of many of the last century’s most important fashion houses (the Met’s list includes Giorgio Armani, Pierre Balmain, Bill Blass, Marc Bohan for House of Dior, Roberto Cavalli, John Galliano, Madame Grès [Alix Barton], Valentino Garavani, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Norma Kamali, Guy Laroche, Ralph Lauren, Ralph Rucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Fernando Sanchez for Révillon Frères, and Emanuel Ungaro). She had her own fashion house from 1982 to 1995. metmuseum.org

Jacqueline de Ribes, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Clothes speak about the individual and about society—class, gender, economics, politics, power,” says the Fashion Project’s Leff. “After all, we dress ourselves each day, and, in doing so, we construct and convey a bit of our identity—that is, who we are or who we want to be.” 

... Detained for Meme-ing Chinese President

News

Artist Detained for Meme-ing Chinese President

• by Laura C. Mallonee on June 1, 2015

by Laura C. Mallonee on June 1, 2015

A Photoshopped picture by Chinese artist Dai Jianyong of President Xi (All images via Instagram/Coca96)

If you’re an artist living in China, take some advice from the example of Dai Jianyong: don’t make potty jokes about the president.

Meme-ing by the Buddha (via)

According to AP, Jianyong posted Photoshopped pictures online showing President Xi Jinping with an exaggeratedly constipated expression. The artist dubbed it the “chrysanthemum face” in a hashtag — “chrysanthemum” being slang in China for anus.

Though Jianyong is a relatively obscure artist, the authorities took note. On May 26, while he was walking with his wife near their Shanghai home, 12 police officers arrested him for “creating a disturbance” online. If convicted, he could spend five years in prison.

Jianyong had posted similar photos of other people before, so at a glance, the Xi images don’t really seem that subversive — maybe just a little disrespectful. “It was just a playful thing he did,” said Judy Zhu, the artist’s wife. “I don’t think there was that much political intent behind it.”

Never enough memes (via)

But some online commentators saw in Xi’s doctored mustache an allusion to Adolf Hitler, even though it’s not exactly identical. That would align Jianyong with political activists who have taken to calling the president Xitele, a word that combines the two leaders’ names.

Whatever it was about Jianyong’s image that infuriated the Chinese officials censoring it, his story shows how difficult it is for contemporary Chinese artists to know what will or won’t send them to jail. That’s been especially the case under Xi, a hardliner who came to power in 2012.

A Photoshopped picture by Chinese artist Dai Jianyong of President Xi (Image via Instagram)

“In general, the space for civil society to make their opinion public has become much harder under Xi Jinping, and that’s also true of artists,” Frances Eve, a researcher with  Chinese Human Rights Defenders, told the AP. “The government’s always made it a little unclear, but people who used to work as artists felt like they hadn’t crossed the lines. Now, people have been detained and have crossed that line they didn’t know was there.”

Countless artists have been antagonized under Xi’s presidency, including Ai Wei Wei, Guo Jian, Chen Guang, the Gao Brothers and many more who supported last year’s Umbrella Revolution. In December, the government announced it would begin sending artists to live and work in rural areas, a policy that uncomfortably echoed Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

It seems that as long as the president is in power, artists who don’t want to end up in a dark prison cell should stick to the kind of fuzzy, feel-good art he likes best, as explained in a chilling speech last year:

“Fine art works should be like sunshine from blue sky and breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste and clean up undesirable work styles.”

In a 2011 article for Hyperallergic, An Xiao explained that memes in China can often have a subversive intent, like a “street art of the internet,” as they are harder to search and censure by the authorities. During the 2011 Beijing-Shanghai high speed railway train accident in Wenzhou, Chinese netizens made memes to respond to the incident. During the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last year, many Chinese in China and abroad commemorated the event with various memes.

ChinaDai JianyongPresident XiPresident Xi Jinping

Articles

Jenny Holzer’s Cat, Ugly Renaissance Babies and Other Art World Meme Trends

• by An Xiao on January 24, 2012

by An Xiao on January 24, 2012

The Casually Pepper Spraying Everything Cop takes a walk through Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte”

In a recent essay for the AFC art blog, Will Brand lambasted the recent dot work of Damien Hirst with a memorable line:

These spots reflect nothing about how we live, see, or think, they’re just some weird meme for the impossibly rich that nobody knows how to stop.

The idea of an art meme feels counterintuitive: art is supposed to reflect deep issues about society and self, or at least be technically complex, while memes are quick hacks about cats, shit people say and dancing Obamas.
But this past year, the internet has been seeing a ton of new memes that involve the arts.
Most recently, after the now famous Lt. Pike pepper sprayed a line of students at UC Davis, his image began appearing in the annals of art history, from Seurat to Banksy. The absurdity of the “casually pepper spraying everything cop” meandering through classical paintings reflected the absurdity of the pepper spraying itself, and it launched a meme that played a major role in launching a reported five investigations at the northern California school.
The pepper spraying cop meme is largely political, with a bizarrely artistic twist.  But what about other memes that are just about art?   Consider the following:

Ugly Renaissance Babies

Andrea Mantegna’s “Presentation at the Temple” (ca. 1460) comes with the caption: “Oh fuck oh fuck, thank god you’re here, Angry Santa! I don’t want to be a mummy!”

When I wandered the halls of the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery of Art, I always marveled at how, well, awkward the babies were. They were often inhumanly large, or at least adult-like.  It must have been hard in those days to get a baby to pose for you for very long.
Why it took so long, I don’t know, but a meme has finally arisen. Ugly Renaissance Babies, a popular group Tumblr, follows in the great tradition of Awkward Family Photos, with user-submitted images of babies in classical paintings that don’t quite inspire our love of cute.
Consider the memetic response to Domenichino’s The Assumption  of Mary Magdalene into Heaven: “Oh my god, birds looked really weird during the Renaissance.”
But lest we think LOLBabies are a product of the 21st century, we need simply look back to this 1950s Lovers Lane collection of baby photos.

Shepard Fairy’s Obey and Hope

Google search results showing different variations on Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obey and Hope posters.

Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obey graphic was plastered across Los Angeles and soon the rest of the United States.  The simple, ubiquitous image may not be the first street art meme, but it was certainly the most prominent.  Fairey himself riffed off the theme with Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara variants, while artists have created Sloth, Oy Vey and Ballet versions.  Similarly, his famous Hope poster has spawned a host of memes and even a web site that lets you easily create an “Obamicon.”
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but Fairey, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to agree.  When Austin artist Baxter Orr remixed the image with a SARS mask, Fairey and his legal team sued.

Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramović

The Artist Is Present Video Game, an 8-bit adventure by artist Pippin Barr.

Ai and Abramovic, the two most recognizable names in the contemporary art world at the moment, have naturally become memes themselves. Witness the continuing response to Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present, with a recent video game by Pippin Barr, and a (now defunct) Twitter feed in the voice of her chair.  The Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry Tumblr may even be considered art in itself, for directly showing the unique power of her piece in a way that an official press release or video feed from MoMA never could.
On Sina Weibo and the Chinese-speaking Twittersphere, Ai Weiwei has of course become a meme. The sunflower seeds he sends regularly to fans pop up on Sina Weibo, whether as images or as part of a largely commentary, while his now-iconic face has been placed on a grass mud horse and in biting satirical comics.  Most recently, his fans stripped naked to show their support after he was investigated for distributing pornography.

Jenny Holzer’s Aphorisms

And where would we be without Jenny Holzer, whose pithy aphorisms are perfectly suited for Twitter?
It started with the 37,000-follower strong Jenny Holzer Twitter feed, which, in the early days before verified accounts, felt like they were coming directly from the artist until everyone figured out it was fake.  The feed meme soon evolved into Jenny Holzer Mom (“YOU SHOULD KEEP NEAR THE THINGS YOU LOVE BUT SITTING THAT CLOSE TO THE TV WILL RUIN YOUR EYES”) and, my favorite, Jenny Holzer Cat (“LISTEN WHEN YOUR BODY TALKS BUT DON’T MOVE AS I NAP ON YOUR CHEST FOR THE NEXT 6 HOURS”). This latter only shows that cats, art and memes are natural allies.

Ai Weiwei’s head on the body of a Grass Mud Horse, a symbol of defiance against Internet censorship.

So what does it all mean when even the sacred world of art is transformed and meme-ified for the broader internet? To me, the art world meme reflects the inevitable collision of the high art world with, well, everybody else. In a world in which the average art appreciator can feel empowered to create, remix and revamp, the art world meme is the internet generation’s version of sketching at the museum.
In the future, Warhol predicted, we’ll all have our 15 minutes of fame. But now that everyone can become famous, we need new metrics for lasting fame and success. For the art world, becoming a meme might just be one of those metrics. After all, living on in people’s Photoshop queues and social media ensures that an artist’s name echoes throughout eternity… or at least the Twittersphere.

Ai WeiweiJenny HolzerMarina AbramovicmemesShepard Fairey

Reactor || Angst and Comics: Daniel Clowes in Chicago

Reactor

Angst and Comics: Daniel Clowes in Chicago

• by An Xiao on October 18, 2013

by An Xiao on October 18, 2013

Ghost World on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. (All photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted).

CHICAGO — There’s a meme floating around of Scarlett Johansson falling down in New York, seconds before she hits the pavement; users began remixing the image, in a now well-trodden meme tradition, into out of context photos. Recently named Esquire‘s Sexiest Woman Alive for the second time, she epitomizes grace, sexuality and poise. That’s part of what made the meme so potent: even this otherworldly beauty can trip and fall flat on her face.

Image via Mashable

Had ScarJo taken a fall in 2001, and had there been any paparazzi then to photograph her, the meme might not have struck a chord. Over a decade ago, she had more of a cult following, starring alongside Christina Ricci as part of an awkward teen duo in Ghost World. Based off the graphic novel series of the same name by Daniel Clowes, the film captured post high school angst, American adolescence and the emptiness of suburban life in magnificent scope.

Daniel Clowes’s cover for “Eightball 18” (1997), gouache on white board (Collection of Daniel Clowes Image courtesy of the artist and Oakland Museum of California)

Clowes’s work is the subject of Modern Cartoonist, a show originally designed for the Oakland Museum of California but recently traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and will be showing at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio next year. It’s the first museum exhibition devoted to someone the show explains “defined the indie aesthetic for his generation and garnered respect from both critics and audiences.” The Chicago location is quite apropos, given that the cartoonist hails from the Windy City, which has also nurtured canonical works like Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy.

The installation features comics for readers to flip through. At the far end, there’s even a bed.

A peek at Wilson, Clowes’s first book project, takes us into the angsty world of a white middle aged man living in Oakland. These one-page vignettes cover moments like Wilson cussing out a passerby who doesn’t compliment his dog and another of an inmate watching an icicle drip slowly into water, concluding that there’s “Still nothing.” Other parts of the exhibition reveal Clowes’s sketches and drawings, with a glimpse into Ghost World coming to life and other classics like Chicago, Lloyd Llewellyn, and Dan Pussey.
The exhibition pays homage to comic book culture, offering readers a chance to sit or lie down in makeshift beds which have some of Clowes’s works on them. And collections of artifacts appear behind glass cases and wrapped in comic book sleeves. A collection of original panel drawings flips open like poster displays, with the final panel featuring a self portrait of the artist, his face a mixture of angst, anger and confusion, but maybe there’s a smirk lying just beneath the surface.

Daniel Clowes, “The New Yorker (cover)” (2009), black ink on white board (Collection of Daniel Clowes Image courtesy of the artist and Oakland Museum of California)

Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes was at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago from June 29–October 13, 2013, and it will be traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, where it will be copresentation by the Wex and Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum next year (May 17, 2014–August 3, 2014).

comic booksComicsDaniel Clowes

Galleries || #withoutwords: The Existential and Profound in Syria’s Emerging Art Scene

Galleries

#withoutwords: The Existential and Profound in Syria’s Emerging Art Scene

• by Mark Sheerin on July 12, 2013

by Mark Sheerin on July 12, 2013

A work by Lens Young (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

LONDON — News from Syria suggests the pen, the paintbrush, the camera, and even needle and thread may be mightier than the sword after all. For what other reason would the government have broken the hands of a political cartoonist. But the fully recovered cartoonist, Ali Ferzat, is back at his desk, ridiculing the follies of man, and his nemesis President Assad may soon be looking for ways to avoid trial as a war criminal.
Ferzat’s cartoons are existential and profound, but hardly feature the vicious personal attacks which characterise UK satire. His most scurrilous work appears to be a sketch of Assad grooming himself before a giant mirror, which sure enough, makes the dictator look giant sized. Other neat illustrated tricks include a floral sapling which upends a tank and a man who throws the blueprint for a ladder to a supplicant trapped in a ditch.

A drawing by Hamid Sulaiman

Laughter is otherwise thin on the ground in a new exhibition of Syrian art, much of which has been smuggled out at no small risk. Titled #withoutwords, the London show offers testimony rather than political direction; its dozen artists are broadly oppositional to the regime, but it is war they oppose above all. And in a country where the West, the East, and a myriad of faiths all have a political stake, we should remember that war is no solution at all.
Along with the satire, the conflict sees developing forms of reportage. Anonymous artist collectives have come into their own. Citizen journalism has never been healthier. And Lens Young, a network of photographers based all around the war-torn region, feels like a positive new thing. Seven black and white photos represent them here. With lack of artifice, and occasional lack of technique, shots include smoke billowing from an apartment block, a semi abstract study of tank tracks and a MiG Fighter plane at close range. Well, they put your latest Instagram down at the pub into perspective.
#withoutwords also features community art without any cosiness, as Hazar Bakbachi-Henriot came to hold textile workshops in a refugee camp in nearby Turkey. Displaced Syrian women, aged from 15 to 50, depicted themselves in mourning among an array of tombstones bearing Arabic words for martyr or quotations form the Qu’ran. This is outsider art to the nth degree since the women cannot get back into their own country, never mind the art world.

Works by Tarke Tuma

Ramez Bakir, on the other hand, has made a sophisticated film installation with an intertext familiar to many Syrians. His installation “Dam(n),” takes up where late filmmaker Omar Amiralay leaves off, their shared topic a 1970s dam in the river Euphrates which led to the flooding of many villages. It may have been a Utopian project. But the flooded valley was once the cradle of civilization, having settlements dating back to the stone age. So much for modernization.

Sound is well deployed in this show. It is the ambient rumble of a three-year-old conflict which has become part of everyday life. Take the stairs at a given moment and you may be rocked by a mortar hit. The source is video piece “Tuj,” a ‘Syrian short story’ in which an unseen child bounces a ball in a stairwell. But filmmaker Khaled Abdulwahed lets the sound of the bounce give way to the sound of shelling. The building suffers a direct hit and debris falls from the ceiling. The most heartbreaking aspect of war must be that children keep on playing. So this is one of the most accomplished pieces in the show, the friendliest to conceptual Western eyes.

Momtaz Shouaib

Tuj is available on YouTube (and posted above) along with Abdulwahed’s other piece in the show “Bullet.” If any aspect of a bloody civil war can be described as exciting, it would be the way in which brave artists on the wrong side of the regime have been able to disseminate their work on the web. The conflict in Syria has become known as a YouTube war, with all those pros and cons. Artwork, at least, is much more likely to calm the situation than, say, the footage of rebel commander Abu Sakkar taking a bite from a human heart. If new media is the front line we should be gratified to have embedded artists.
With this in mind, painting seem a slow way to respond to horror. But in fact the many canvases have cost some £30,000 to bring to London. The Assad regime are presumably no more happy with us seeing such cris de coeur as those by Hamid Sulaiman, Amjad Wardeh, or Tarek Tuma. Tuma’s glowering painting of Nietzche reminds us just what the human race has done to God. But even the delicate abstract work by Bakbachi-Henriot is given a political spin with the title Gunshots. There is no painting for the sake of it here. The damaged dolls of Fadi Al Jabour are also quite unambiguous.

A cartoon by Ali Ferzat

They bring us back to the youngest victims of the conflict. In 2011 a group of schoolchildren was arrested and allegedly tortured for writing on a wall. If a government would do this to its children, what might it do to artists? The most disturbing photos here carry an 18 certificate in a closed off room. We see corpses of all sizes. We see a child holding a shell. We see a pallbearer, tears silvering his face. The oppositional artist must be all these things, mournful, playful and prepared to sacrifice everything. This is a tragic, urgent show.
#withoutwords: Emerging Syrian Artists continues at P21 Gallery (21 Chalton Street, London) through September 1.

Ali FerzatAmjad WardehHamid SulaimanHazar Bakbachi-HenriotKhaled AbdulwahedLens YoungRamez BakirSyriaTarke Tuma