10 Searing Political Artworks You Should Know

The Phaidon Folio

The Art of Sticking It to the Man: 10 Searing Political Artworks You Should Know

By Artspace Editors

July 22, 2016

Banksy's Untitled (LA, 2011), 2011

Artists have long used their work as a site to express their politics. Though their historical, social, and geographic contexts differ widely, such political works can, at their best, challenge long-held beliefs and spark meaningful dialog amongst peers and viewers alike. In the current climate, this consciousness-raising effort seems as vital as ever, and artists are taking notice. In this excerpt from Phaidon’s The 21^st Century Art Book, we look back at some of the most interesting and important examples of political art from the past decade and a half. For more information about making effective political art, check out our new guide here.

I THOUGHT THEY WERE CONVICTSHarun Farocki2000 

Grainy surveillance footage from a maximum-security prison captures the dramatic moment when an inmate is shot dead by guards. The shooting of William Martinez in 1989 was one of many similar incidents at California State Prison, which became notorious for its brutal conditions. Farocki’s film focuses on the investigation into the shootings, revealing that guards intentionally set up fights between prisoners, allowing them to escalate before interceding with live ammunition. The prison footage is juxtaposed with computer-generated graphics based on the movements of supermarket shoppers. In this way Farocki explores the power relationship between the observer and the observed, drawing parallels between the role of surveillance in the lives of prisoners and those of everyday citizens. The power of images has been a central concern for the German filmmaker since the late 1960s. His film essays and documentaries examine systems of control and manipulation, and the influence of technology on human behavior.

ENDLESS CONUNDRUM, AN AFRICAN ANONYMOUS ADVENTURESSKara Walker2001

A group of black silhouetted figures are shown leaping and cavorting, and engaging in lewd sexual acts. Walker has used black paper cut-outs, which are usually fixed directly onto the gallery walls, since the early 1990s. Silhouette art peaked in popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Walker has reappropriated the style to create imagery that is often shocking and uncomfortable, addressing issues of race and gender, power and sexuality. This piece was originally commissioned by the Swiss museum Fondation Beyeler, and was created in response to its collection of African art. In it, Walker examines the influence of African tribal art on Modern artists, as well as looking at the wider appropriation of black creativity in Western art and culture. The piece includes Walker’s recreations of works from the museum’s collection, including Augustin Rodin’s Iris (1895), while the title references the Constantin Brancusi sculpture Endless Column (1918).

WHERE WE COME FROM (HANA)Emily Jacir2001–3

Jacir asked Palestinians who were prohibited from entering their homeland, or who experienced restricted movement within it, the question “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” In 2002 using her US passport, which at the time entitled her greater mobility through Israeli borders and checkpoints, the artist carried out these request (due to increased restrictions in the region the piece would be impossible to make today). The installation Where We Come From is a photographic, text, and video documentation of these actions. The requests were mostly simple, often poignantly so. Many were related to family: a kiss for a mother, an up-to-date photograph of a brother’s children. Others were almost banal, with one person just asking that Jacir do something “normal” in Haifa. The installation explores questions of displacement and how conflict affects individuals on a personal and everyday level. Silenced historical narratives, resistance, and movement are recurring concerns in Jacir’s works.

MAY MY SITUATION BE BETTER IF I AM IN CHINA?Bandi Zhao2003

The artist clutches a toy panda as he sits in a London street talking with a homeless man who asks: “May my situation be better if I am in China?” The question, printed on the photograph in English and Chinese, is left unanswered, though Bandi’s expression suggests an unfavorable response. The sardonic tone here is typical of the artist’s photographs, which depict him and his panda in everyday scenarios. In some works comic book speech bubbles give voice to the toy, who discusses topical issues such as war, terrorism, pollution, and public health. Drawing from the visual language of advertising and public information campaigns, Bandi’s witty and subversive works critique the absurd and often irrational aspects of government propaganda in his native China. While Bandi has exhibited in galleries internationally since the early 1990s, many of his works appear as public posters, allowing his political commentaries to reach a mass audience.

HATE AND POWER CAN BE A TERRIBLE THINGTracey Emin2004

A textile wall hanging, this work uses an old pink woolen blanket cut and extended, with cotton as backing, onto which a series of statements are stitched. Emin has used quilting and appliqué in her work since her career-launching solo exhibition in 1993, and is one of a number of women artists to use traditionally feminine crafts to express complex emotions and sexuality. A central player in the loose group of artists commonly referred to as the Young British Artists (YBA), Emin’s work is often based on self-exposure, yet this piece is overtly political. Amongst the statements in block capitals, a small section of white fabric features a handwritten text: “1982, A year so many conscripts did not got home – Because you, you killed them all”. This, combined with the use of the British Royal Navy’s White Ensign flag, suggests a reference to the Falklands War and the ever-divisive then-Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

IN THE NEAR FUTURE, NEW YORKSharon Hayes2005

Five simultaneous slide projections document a performance-based artwork in which Hayes held up banners carrying anachronistic slogans relating to protest actions from previous eras. The original, collaborative performance took place in various public locations, the sites of historical actions, in New York in 2005. It was then adapted for similarly significant locations in Brussels, London, Warsaw, and Vienna. The intention was not to re-enact the protests but to commemorate those events and to assert the possibilities for future dissention. The artist was also exploring the idea of the protester as an agent of change, the protest sign as a method of communication and the political construction of public space and public speech. Hayes’s work combines performance art with direct engagement with the public and her principal concern is the way in which we participate, as both speakers and listeners, in the political discourse of our own time.

WORLD MAPAi Weiwei2006

Thousands of sheets of fine cotton cloth have been cut into the shape of a world map and layered precisely to create a three-dimensional sculpture. Actual geographical borders between countries are ignored in favor of the straight edges of the fabric, which divide the map. Using a familiar image, Ai has constructed a complex work that is by design very labor-intensive to install, thus evoking China’s status as a source of cheap workers for the garment industry. The difficulty of placing the elements accurately also introduces issues of international relations and global trade. The historical, socio-political, and economic conditions of contemporary China frequently serve as starting points for Ai’s art and he has become internationally known for his critical stance. He uses a diverse range of techniques and materials, often drawing on Chinese traditions, and although politically motivated,  he uses humor and metaphor, producing work that is poetic and subtle in its content, with formal aesthetic qualities.

THE CAPITAL OF ACCUMULATIONRaqs Media Collective2010

This double-screen video projection weaves together filmed images of Berlin, Mumbai, and Warsaw to imagine a shared economic, social and urban history of the twentieth century. Its title is a reversal of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913), which described the rapacious nature of capitalism: its tendency to commandeer resources and its intolerance of other economic models. The film reflects on Luxemburg’s theories and includes a parallel narrative exploring her violent death and the disappearance of her body. The double screen sets up a dialogue between images, narrative, and text, making a work that is hauntingly poetic and polemical. Raqs Media Collective, a group of three media practitioners, operates at the intersections of contemporary art, historical and philosophical enquiry, and activism. In 2000 they co-founded the Sarai Programme at Delhi’s Center for the Study of Developing Societies, which encourages creative collaboration between the visual arts and other disciplines concerned with urban spaces and cultures in South Asia.

UNTITLED (LA, 2011)Banksy2011

A young girl, pencil in hand, watches in annoyance as her simple drawing of a house is boarded up. Applied directly to a Los Angeles wall, this mural is one of several outdoor works by Banksy that appeared across the city in early 2011. While the figures have been rendered using the artist’s familiar stencil technique, the child’s house has been drawn freehand with colourful crayon. With characteristically acerbic wit, the work addresses the issue of foreclosure that plagued the U.S. housing market during the early 2010s, speaking bluntly of the callousness of those involved in repossessing people’s homes. Appearing on city streets throughout the world, Banksy’s satirical art combines subversive humor with social and political commentary. Starting out as part of the British graffiti subculture in Bristol in the early 1990s, he has since become one of the world’s most famous street artists. Preferring to remain anonymous, speculation is rife regarding his true identity.

CIVIL TAPESTRY (DIRTY YELLOW)Theaster Gates2012

A decommissioned fire hose is the unusual material used to make this work. The formal arrangement, made from long strips of the flattened hose, recalls American abstract art of the early 1960s, especially the famous stripe paintings by Frank Stella. Yet it is to another event from this period that Gates’s work points: the violent hosing of civil-rights demonstrators by police in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The enduring challenge of race and class inequality in American cities is a driving force for Gates, whose sculptures, installations, and performances are part of a larger vision that aims to effect genuine social change. Originally trained as an urban planner, the Chicago-based artist uses funds raised from the sale of his works to assist in the regeneration of deprived neighborhoods. Collaborating with architects, craftspeople, and unemployed laborers, Gates buys and renovates derelict properties. Salvaged materials from the buildings are then used to create new artworks, and so the cycle continues.

7 New Art Documentaries

Lists!

7 New Art Documentaries to Watch in 2014

By Artspace Editors

May 19, 2014

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 1136

If you've ever caught yourself wishing you could enjoy the magic and drama of the art world from the comfort of your own home, look no further. New Yorkers have recently been treated to a crop of new documentary films showing across town that feature close looks at contemporary artists. Some of these movies follow artist outsiders as they attempt to infiltrate the art world while, at the same time, revolting against its conventions, pretentions, and exclusive tendencies. Others examine major well-known figures, from stock characters of 1960s Modernism including Minimalist Sol LeWitt and ardent feminist Carolee Schneemann to the international figure Ai Weiwei and his fiercely restrained living conditions under house arrest in Beijing (whose work is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum). Here’s our quick roundup of these new-and-recently-released documentary films, all of which open backstage views onto artists’ lives and work.

“TELOS: The Fantastic World of Eugene Tssui” (2014)

SYNOPSIS: Kooky architect struggles to be recognized for his environmental architectural plans.
QUOTE: “We don’t want to have buildings that are strange and look out of place… Why?”
THINK: “An Inconvenient Truth” meets “Space Jam”
ABOUT: Director Kyung Lee met the futurist architect Eugene Tssui at a conference on the environment, where he was presenting his work… while wearing a flowing cape. Lee knew she had found a subject—and true character—for a film. Like a comic book superhero, Tssui speaks about how his organic architectural vision can save the world, countering the destructive tendencies of our species. The film goes on to document the exotic plans of this modern-day Buckminster Fuller—or else total quack (the film keeps us guessing)—as he gains a small following in an American mountain town.

“Llyn Foulkes One Man Band” (2013)

SYNOPSIS: Irreverent septuagenarian painter and musician Llyn Foulkes is having a comeback, which will culminate in a New York exhibition (Foulkes's New Museum survey of 2013)—if only he can make himself stop revising his work.
QUOTE: “I can’t just finish it. The only way it’s finished is when they take it away from me.”
THINK: “About Schmidt” meets “Amadeus”
ABOUT: Perhaps a comfort for the perseverating editor, artist, or writer amongst us, this documentary covers seven years in the life of the artist who can’t stop amending and editing his artwork. Foulkes is in his 70s and came to fame with 1950s and ’60s West coast Pop, playing a Seussian one-man-band instrument of his own invention. As he prepares for a new show in New York, we are treated to his cantankerous antics and amusing scuffles with the art world.

“Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case” (2013)

SYNOPSIS: The unflinching camera follows the Chinese dissident through the Kafkaesque maze of modern-day Chinese politics during the period of his house arrest in 2011.
QUOTE: “It’s a fake case. It’s a fake case about a Fake Company. But the Fake Company is a real company. The fake case is a real case but it’s fake, it’s fabricated.”
THINK: “The Trial” meets “The Fugitive”
ABOUT: “The Fake Case” picks up where Alison Klayman’s film “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” left off. The Chinese government has become increasingly antagonistic towards the artists and accuses his company of tax violations. As a result, Ai is housebound and robbed of his passport. The camera records trailing police, phone tapping, and prying reporters, and displays just how deeply the state has insinuated itself into the life of the artist.

“Breaking the Frame” (2014)

SYNOPSIS: Carolee Schneemann is a bad ass.
QUOTE: “The taboos about contact and touching were very basic and pervasive when I started.”
THINK: “Girls” meets “Nymphomaniac”
ABOUT: Carolee Schneemann, the pioneering artist who charted the course for the likes of Marina Abramovic, Cindy Sherman, and Tracey Emin, is paid her due by filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawska in this documentary. Elliptical in its account—and sometimes narrated in a literal whisper—the documentary rhymes with the sensual quality of Schneeman's own body of work, which is framed as revelatory. Nitoslawska occassionally splices excerpts of Schneemann’s films into her own, creating a delightful mingling between the old and new, an homage of one female filmmaker to another.

“Sol LeWitt” (2014)

SYNOPSIS: A look at the process of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
QUOTE: “I don’t want to be an art personality.”
THINK: “A Beautiful Mind” meets academic criticism
ABOUT: Hostile to celebrity, Sol LeWitt avoided cultivating any kind of cult of personality around his art throughout his life, which ended in 2007. Director Chris Teerinks respects this wish in the new documentary about the Minimalist artist. At the film’s center is LeWitt’s installation of “Wall Drawing 801: Spiral” in the Netherlands' Bonnefantemuseum, opening a lucid window onto the artist's meticulous process and thinking that undercuts customary experiences of visual consumption and commodification.

“Fritz” (2014)

SYNOPSIS: Filmmakers cast a light on a painter who's gone on working for four decades, though remains unacknowledged by the art community.
QUOTE: “I struggled and I felt invisible.”
THINK: “How to Make it in America” and “Forrest Gump”
ABOUT: Fritz came to New York in 1977 to become a painter. Almost 40 years later, he paints, but has never gained any traction in the art world. Hearing-impaired, with an injured back, and short on luck, Fritz is a failed artist incapable of navigating the lowercase ‘p’ politics of the art world. But now with his personal story of loss at the center of this new documentary series, made by Benjamin Gonyo and Michael Martinez, about the exclusionary nature of the art world, maybe he can climb his way up.

“Sign Painters” (2014)

SYNOPSIS: The lost craft of sign painting is memorialized.
QUOTE: “You could make that brush do anything you wanted to.”
THINK: “The Commitments” meets “Her”
ABOUT: Filmmakers Faythe Levine and Sam Macon introduce us to a generation of sign painters as they reflect upon the loss of their craft in an increasingly technological society. In doing so, they trace the growing breach between art and information. Former sign painter Ed Ruscha says the movie’s “engaging telling of this important American story should have good legs.”

Lists!

The Dishiest Art-World Tell-Alls to Read This Summer

By Noelle Bodick

May 31, 2014

It’s summer, the season to take in a healthy dose of Vitamin D—and another essential nutrient, Vitamin G, also known as art-world gossip. While chiefly procured from whispers exchanged at gallery openings and galas, it can sometimes be extracted from the pages of guilty-pleasure reading, too.
Here, we survey some illuminating insider accounts from the art industry, from a museum director describing how he (inadvertently) pillaged antiquities from across the world to scabrous reports of hustlers and art-world powerbrokers. These are stories, told from the innermost rings of the trade, about who did what to whom, where, when, and why.


TITLE: Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of ArtAUTHOR: Thomas Hoving
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1993
SYNOPSIS: As the seventh director, Hoving treated the Metropolitan Museum of Art as his personal treasure trove, hoovering up antiquities from tombs and sacred sites across the world. In these more freewheeling days, he worked in illicit ways. “My collecting style was pure piracy, and I got a reputation as a shark,” he recalls. This is an account, told with no small dose of infectious audacity, about his decade breathing life back into “stiff, gray and slightly moribund” museum.
STYLE: His swashbuckling attitude charges the prose with a chummy and boastful energy.
JUICY TIDBIT: Experts discovered that the crowning gem of Hoving’s collection, a 2,500-year-old Greek vase by the fabled artist Euphronios that was bought in 1972, was in fact smuggled out of Italy. At the time, Hoving avoided asking any questions: such was his turn-a-blind-eye approach to collecting. In 2006, the “hot pot,” as he calls it, was repatriated to its native soil.
N.B.: Read this memoir in conjunction with Rogue’s Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum by Michael Gross, which revels in the backroom dealings and power-plays that served to make the Met great ever since the 1870s.


TITLE: What Did I Do?AUTHOR: Larry Rivers
YEAR: 1993
SYNOPSIS: This rollicking memoir by the artist who notoriously filmed his young daughters topless spans almost seven decades of his life. A Jew who grew up wishing he were instead a black jazz musician, Rivers became a figurative painter in the late '50s when Abstract Expressionism ran rampant. The story flows down a stream of alcohol and onslaught of bisexual lovers, one of whom includes the poet and MoMA curator Frank O’Hara.
STYLE: Though clearly an exhibitionist, Rivers is a little bit cagey and doesn't show any real inner feelings about his art, or his bedroom antics.
JUICY TIDBIT: The poet and doctor William Carlos Williams, author of "The Red Wheelbarrow," once performed an abortion for one of Rivers’ girlfriends.
N.B.: If you like artist memoirs, also try the photographer John Gruen's book, The Party's Over.

TITLE: True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World
AUTHOR: Anthony Haden-Guest
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1996
SYNOPSIS: When you read art history, everything seems to speed along a track towards a happy land of big art movements and –isms, populated by Great Artists. Beginning at the 1973 auction of the extraordinary cutting-edge collection amassed by taxi magnates Robert and Ethel Scull, the ur-flipping event that launched the contemporary art market, Haden-Guest derails the traditional story, touring us instead through the dark backrooms of galleries and auction houses of 1980s and ’90s New York. We overhear hard-hitting deals between saboteurs, gallerist skullduggery, and glasses clinking: the small-time politics determining the rise and fall of artists’ careers.
STYLE: Haden-Guest entrances the reader by relaying delightful intimacies: scuffles between blue-chip artists, a rumored nose job.
JUICY TIDBIT: How did dealer Mary Boone get slow-moving artists to produce more work to feed the inflated art market of the 1980s? “Get them into debt," she says in the book. "What you always want to do as an art dealer is to get the artist to have expensive tastes. Get them to buy lots of houses, get them to have expensive habits and girlfriends, and expensive wives.”


TITLE: Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close UpAUTHOR: Bob Colacello
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1990
SYNOPSIS: The editor of Interview (which Warhol founded in 1969) for over a decade, Colacedo was the artist’s confidant in the years after his attempted assassination in 1968 and subsequent retreat to the upper-crust in-crowd. Colacello's portrait lifts the veil of simplicity Warhol wore to reveal a “closet control freak” who played Factory workers off one another and manipulated the celebrities in the pages of his magazine.
STYLE: The prose is “close up” and in focus, with plenty of tawdry details to go around.
JUICY TIDBIT: Warhol had no patience for editorial integrity. He instructed Colacello, for instance, to always include the kind of perfume an interview subject was wearing: “Perfume advertises the most. And cigarettes and liquor. Can't we have everybody smoking and drinking in every photograph, Bob?”
N.B.: Read it in conjunction with Warhol’s own catty Philosophy of Andy Warhol.

TITLE: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in ArtAUTHOR: Phoebe Hoban
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1998
SYNOPSIS: This unauthorized biography follows Basquiat's career from his teenage days graffiting “SAMO” across New York and hanging out with artists like Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf to his breakout 1981 show to meeting art-world royalty like Larry Gagosian and partnering with Andy Warhol, who eventually faded out the friendship because of Basquiat’s excessive drug use. In the end, this is the tale of a man addicted to drugs, and a greedy art-world addicted to celebrity and glitz.
STYLE: A magazine writer, Hoban is a killer reporter whose enviable sources include ex-lovers like Madonna, drug dealers, and Basquiat’s many collectors. She writes with precision and poetry: “His eyes could eat your face.” He made paintings with “a rough energy and nasty edge.”
JUICY TIDBIT: Early in life, Basquiat’s father stabbed his son in the buttock after catching him copulating with a male cousin.

TITLE: Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art AddictAUTHOR: Peggy Guggenheim
YEAR: 1946
SYNOPSIS: Born in 1989, Peggy Guggenheim was reared and educated in privilege in New York, where she studied the Italian Renaissance. She would go on to meet—and often sleep with—the haute bohemians of the century. The wife of Surrealist artist Max Ernst in Paris, a champion of Jackson Pollock in New York, and gallerist in London, advised by Duchamp, Guggenheim recounts her journey as a patron of modern art.
STYLE: You know a memoir is going to be quixotic that begins: “I have no memory.” The tone is honest, confessional, and not without delicious details.
JUICY TIDBIT: "I had a collection of photographs of frescos I had seen at Pompeii. They depicted people making love in various positions, and of course I was very curious and wanted to try them all out myself," writes Guggenheim.

TITLE: Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974AUTHOR: Amy Newman
YEAR PUBLISHED: 2000
SYNOPSIS: If Artforum is the art-world’s 10.5-inch square-shaped Bible, Newman’s oral history full of incredible anecdotes and fierce altercations is the exegesis of the plot. It begins in the early days of unpaid staff burning the midnight oil in make-shift headquarters, when a plucky editor penned “Letters to the Editor” and placed fake ads for work by his three-year-old daughter. It ends with Lynda Benglis’s notorious advertisement of herself, naked and greased, holding a huge phallus in the November 1974 issue.
STYLE: Divided into -Isms and Schisms, the book balances buttoned-up theory with loosey-goosey asides in the form of post-game analysis by the art-world players.
JUICY TIDBIT: The central figures in the magazine's history make no bones about how confusing and impenetrable its articles can be. Here's Artforum editor Philip Leider on contributing art historian Annette Michelson: "I never understood what she wrote." And Barbara Rose on the writing of contributor Max Kozloff: "Opacity was maybe unintentionally part of his style. Later it had nothing to do with a reserve about communication, it made it all look very deep and profound and it confused people and it was a way to keep people out."

TITLE: Breakfast With LucianAUTHOR: Geordie Greig
YEAR PUBLISHED: 2013
SYNOPSIS: Greig is Lucian Freud's Boswell. “Lucian’s conversation ranged,” Greig recalls, “from dating Greta Garbo to the best way to land a punch without breaking your thumb, to how he had popped into 10 Downing Street to see Gordon Brown, or had been to a nightclub with Kate Moss.” In Greig’s hands, here is a story of a wildly priapic and destructive man, who, incidentally, is also an artist.
STYLE: Greig knew Freud for the last 10 years of the artist’s life. His account is unsparing in detail. Even on Freud’s deathbed, Greig can’t help from sprinkling in bits of gossip and trivia.
JUCIY TIDBIT: Freud had 14 acknowledged children—he considered birth control “terribly squalid”—and tended to bed up with teenage girls.

Lists!

The 10 Absolute Worst Ways to Die in a Hieronymous Bosch Painting

By Alexandra Peers

June 3, 2016

A Bosch self-portrait, in Hell

If you believe in Hell, the image you have of it is probably from a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
The deeply religious 16^th-century Netherlandish master painted many easy-on-the-eye artworks—biblical scenes the Wedding at Cana and The Adoration of the Magi among them—but is best known for the stunningly detailed and imaginative nightmares he created to illustrate the consequences of sin.
With a style that influenced and presaged Salvador Dalí, M.C. Escher, Edvard Munch, René Magritte, and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica centuries later, he painted scenes that depicted fantastical horrors: naked humans surrounded by monstrous carnivorous birds, disembodied heads, grinning razor-teeth ghouls, all inflicting a variety of horrific punishments with macabre delight.
Who was Bosch and why did he have such dark thoughts?
A contemporary of Henry VII, for the Shakespeareans among you, Hieronymus Bosch was born Jheronimus (or Jeroen) van Aken outside of in an area that is now the Netherlands, circa 1450. His grandfather, father, and brothers were painters, so, perhaps to set himself apart, he took his last name from his home town of Hertogenbosch. The artist signed some works but dated very few, making historical research somewhat difficult.
What little is known about him is that he taught Pieter Breughel the Elder, was reasonably successful and reknown in his lifetime and was active in a sect of the Catholic faith. That said, he tended to be very skeptical of authority figures, from kings to clerics to the medical profession.
Only about 25 paintings and eight drawings are confidently attributed to Bosch. (Another dozen or so paintings are in dispute, and could be by his workshop or disciples.) But that small body of work is memorable.
This summer, the 500^th anniversary of his death, Spain’s Prado salutes the groundbreaking genius with a retrospective "Bosch: The Centenary Exhibition," running through September 11. It proves that, long before Quentin Tarantino coined the phrase in Pulp Fiction, Bosch was “getting medieval on your ass.”
With a little art history thrown in, here, counting down to the (arguably) most unpleasant, are the top 10 ways to die, or wish you would already, in a Hieronymous Bosch painting.

10.  Unanesthethzed Brain Surgery

 Detail from The Extraction of the Stone of Madness or The Cure of Folly  

In this painting, a surgeon is removing the “stupid stone” from inside a man’s head. Removal of a cranial rock, according to Dutch folklore, was supposed to improve reasoning. Called The Extraction of the Stone of Madness or The Cure of Folly, text above the image reads partly, and disturbingly, in Flemish: “Master, cut the stone out quickly.”
While there's no proof such a surgery was performed in the era—and the painting is widely seen as making fun of blind faith in medicine—brain surgery was not unheard of in the period, and the surgeon is using the type of instrument that would have been used.
Interesting footnote: The painting was immortalized in Foucault's The History of Madness.

9. Water-Boarded With Liquor

Cautionary detail from The Last Judgment

It's ironic that Bosch disdained Earthly pleasures—or at least painted as if he did—because he married quite wealthy. His wife's fortune gave him of level of descretion in what to paint and for whom, and he favored the topic of divine retribution.

No surprise, then, the Bosch triptych titled The Last Judgment, painted circa-1500, is rich in a sickening array of ways to perish. Among them is drinking to death, and in this detail from the painting giant demons restrain a glutton as they pour liquor (along with some more foul liquid, the painting implies) never-endingly down his throat.
For some people this is torture. For others, Saturday night.

8. Being Sneezed on Throughout Infinity

Detail from Tondal's Vision

This painting is based on a 12th-century book by an Irish monk, very widely re-published at the time (it was something of a European bestseller), that tells the tale of a knight who falls asleep and tours the afterlife. As a result of what Tondal, also called Tnugdali, has seen, he resolves to live a more spiritual life.
Bosch's Tondal's Vision features a soup of naked people; they sit in some primordial cesspool while a man with a giant nose sneezes on them.  Highly unpleasant to be sure, but it's a picnic compared to what the painter has in store for others.

7. Serving as the Travel Luggage of the Damned

Platypus-billed creatures haunt the afterlife in Bosch's art

Here, in the bottom third of Judgment's frame, is an instance in which the subject probably wished he was dead. Carted about by a goblin and pierced with arrows, this fellow also gets to enjoy (everlasting?) upside-down eye contact with a mutated peasant.
In Bosch's symbology, arrows are considered by some scholars to be evidence of succumbing to incorrect religious teachings. Although religious himself, Bosch sometimes depicted nuns and priests as liars—or livestock.
Interestingly, this Bosch painting became so well-known and popular that Lucas Cranach the Elder painted a version of it later in the 16th century.

 6. Flayed to Ribbons by Harp Strings

Bosch's bizarre take on popular music of his time 

Bosch's undisputed masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which may have taken over a decade to finish, is neary 13 feet across. Each corner is packed with details. A small section of the right panel crams in several unfortunate souls, plus a hurdy-gurdy.
Bosch was highly critical of leisure pursuits, gambling in particular, and in one notable image, a man is doomed to spend eternity rolling dice out of his mouth while being attacked by giant insects. But the artist also looked down on more prosaic pastimes, the playing and enjoyment of non-liturgical music among them.
Here, in a tiny tableau featuring musical instruments, a man is trapped, and sliced, by a giant harp while another has his flesh branded with a musical score by arguably the weirdest creature in any of Bosch's paintings. And that's saying a lot.

5. Hooray. You're Dragon Food

Having it both ways: By claiming his interest was Heaven, Bosch was able to paint horror, as Hell 

Bosch's paintings are full of mythological creatures, both ones of his own invention and standards of fiction—dragons, harpies, arachnae. Such beings would not usually have a place in religious art, but Bosch got around that problem neatly by making his horror paintings cautionary moral tales. (Think Stephen King as a fire-and-brimstone minister.) He also presented some of the images in triptychs, a painting form associated with churches.

4. Boiled and Roasted

Detail from The Seven Deadly Sins and Four Issues, in the collection of the Prado

One of the earliest major works believed by some to be by Bosch, this wooden table (with its tableau arranged in the shape of an eye that stares accusingly at the viewer) depicts the seven deadly sins—wrath, envy, avarice, lust, gluttony, pride, and sloth. A corner image then depicts the resulting punishment in hell. Though each is awful in its own—the proud woman has her abdomen munched on by a lizard as she watches herself in a mirror—perhaps the worst fate is reserved for the greedy. They are boiled in a golden cauldron and roasted on spits.
Interestingly, the Bosch Conservation and Research Project questions the authenticity of this piece, but the Prado, which owns it, stands by its authorship. Let's hope there's no eternal punishment for misattribution.

3. Perforated and (Cough) Penetrated

Bosch painted unusually cheerful demons 

Here, a sinner is bent over a spiked metal wheel and pushed into the blades by horrific but efficient creatures who seem to be enjoying themselves immensely. The black-winged ghoul may be even be indulging in non-consensual sex. Nearby, a decapitated head "looks" on sightlessly
Daniel McDermon, writing in the New York Times, noted of Bosch paintings that, "hell's concierge service seems excellent, with an enviable demon-to-damned ratio."

2. Beaten on a Razor's Edge

Household objects become images of torture in Bosch images

His apocalyptic visions earned the artist the nickname of "The Devil's Painter," but blood is surprisingly rare in Bosch paintings. In this gruesome image, however the fate of one sinner is to be beaten and slice on the edge of a giant knife, encircled by a buffet of severed body parts.
Household and everyday objects are common in the artist's work, from wheels to bells to funnels to mirrors. Card tables and backgammon boards also appear frequently, especially in hell, but prosaic objects are usually perverted to evil means.

1. The Worst?

In an image seen as critical of the institution of the monarchy, a murderous royal bird is crowned by a pot 

The Garden of Earthly Delights is also in the collection of the Prado. (It, and other Bosches, were brought to the museum by King Philip II of Spain, who was a fan.) The first two panels depict Eden and Earth, but the third is a seething vision of hell.
It is one of Bosch's more creative pieces in terms of the various manners of death, but this painful and scatalogical one is perhaps the worst way to go: chomped on by a giant bird and expelled into a Hellmouth, awake, as waste, while birds fly out of body cavities and others void themselves in the crowded cloaca of the damned below.
Coda: As a result of researching this story, we have resolved to lead a more spiritual life.

Know Your Critics

How to Understand Hal Foster, Godfather of Postmodern Art Theory

By Maya Harakawa

March 10, 2016

The art historian and critic Hal Foster. Image courtesy Interviewmagazine.com

Describing Hal Foster as a critic is something of a misnomer. A distinguished professor and academic, he is one of the most important art historians living today. That being said, Foster’s commitment to writing that’s both critical and historical has defined his career. His writings on the history of the avant-garde and contemporary art are equally influential: Foster is a rare type of art historian whose impact in circles outside of academia has not diminished his esteem within it. With an ability to opine on Adolf Loos and Martha Stewart in a single text, Foster devotes himself to the past and the present, high and low, with equal fervor. What follows is an overview of Foster’s major works and ideas.

Image courtesy wikipedia.org 

KEEPING MODERNISM RADICAL IN THE POSTMODERN ERA

After receiving his bachelors degree in Art History and English Literature from Princeton (where he now teaches), and earning a masters degree from Columbia, Foster studied art history under Rosalind Krauss—the highly influential post-structuralist critic and theorist, best known as the author of "Sculpture in the Expanded Field"—at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where he wrote his dissertation on Surrealism. This early focus on modernism and the historical avant-garde has been an important touchstone for the rest of Foster’s work, even as his focus has shifted to other historical periods.
Foster’s first notable book was an edited volume of essays titled The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983). Featuring the work of Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Crimp, Kenneth Frampton, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Edward W. Said, and Gregory L. Ulmer, The Anti-Aesthetic is still an indispensible text, one that is all the more impressive given the fact that the intellectual movement it chronicles was very much still in formation when the book was first released.
In the early 1980s, artists, theorists, and historians grappled with a new intellectual paradigm, one that questioned modernism’s core assumptions. Postmodernism replaced the autonomous, pure work of art with the concept of “text,” meaning something that is highly contingent upon external forces and interpretations. Foster was one of the earliest people to see these ideas at play in the work of his contemporaries, namely artists of the Pictures Generation such as Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman, and to characterize them as postmodern.
True to form, Foster’s own theorization of these newly forming ideas is very much grounded in history. Writing in the book’s introduction, Foster argues that the rise of postmodernism is not indicative of modernism’s failure. Instead he sees postmodernism as refreshing modernism's oppositional spirit. This continued investment in modernism is a hallmark of Foster’s art history and criticism. Even as Mondrian appears on Yves Saint Laurent dresses or anti-art works are collected and rarified by museums, Foster maintains a belief in modernism’s radical potential, seeing these appropriations as co-options rather than evidence of failure.
This larger preoccupation with and defense of modernism is central to Return of the Real, Foster’s book on art in the second half of the 20^th century. With its focus on “return,” the book is both a new reading of postwar practices and an argument for the “radical integrity” of their pre-war predecessors.
Here, Foster does not see the late-20th-century reappearance of artistic strategies such as the readymade or the monochrome as a case of imitation or repetition, but rather as a productive reworking of the original avant-garde. For example, artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Daniel Buren, according to Foster, use institutional critique—the tactic of turning the focus away from the artwork itself to the museum, organization, or context housing it—to creatively analyze the limitations of their predecessors.

TAKING ON DESIGN CULTURE

Foster's focus shifted in the early 2000s towards architecture, design, and culture at large. In the title essay to his 2002 collection Design and Crime, Foster recasts Adolf Loos’s seminal 1909 essay “Ornament and Crime” as a critique of 21st century “design,” a category which, Foster argues, encompasses everything from “Martha Stewart to Microsoft.” The term’s ubiquity, to him, is not a good thing. Rather, it expresses an increasingly inextricable relationship between design and consumerism, one that has resulted in a “near-perfect circuit of production and consumption” that defines contemporary culture. Foster’s insistence on the relationship between culture and commerce is an important part of his later work: he is always aware of art and culture’s role within capitalism.
In The Art Architecture Complex Foster continued to probe the relationship between design and culture, exploring what he saw as the fusion of art and architecture in the work of starchitects like Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. As architecture’s engagement with art supplanted its prior reliance on theory, Foster saw the discipline playing an increasingly pivotal role across all the arts. He argued that architecture was starting to affect the character of painting, sculpture, and film, as architectural statements claimed the visual attention that was previously reserved for art.

POST-9/11 AND THE POST-CRITICAL  

The Art Architecture Complex is only obliquely about the museum, but the art institution has taken center stage in Foster’s most recent criticism. In two 2015 essays in the London Review of Books, Foster questioned two of the fundamental components of the contemporary art museum: its architecture and its curators. He argued that a preoccupation with entertainment has eclipsed the museum’s role as a space for presenting art. While contemporary museums face a host of new architectural challenges (including unprecedented expansion), they are also becoming iconic architectural images and spaces in their own right. As a result, the institution has become a beacon for quick, superficial consumption.
Foster has argued that curation is undergoing a similar shift as well. Decrying what he sees as flashy exhibition-makers who emphasize instant gratification over intellectual rigor, Foster pointed to the rise of the spectacular at the expense of engagement. Showmanship trumps academicism, as an insatiable appetite for everything new leaves art vulnerable to capitalist exploitation.
This past fall, Foster released Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency. Continuing his investment in contemporary art and criticism, Foster’s book covers art of the past 25 years. Taking a wide historical angle, it suggests that we are currently witnessing a shift away from the postmodernist period that interested Foster 30 years prior. In essays on the rise of “archival art,” performance, the “post-critical” condition, and the purpose of museums, Foster diagnoses a new set of artistic preoccupations defined by a new sense of emergency that now haunts our post-9/11 world. This attempt to come to terms with some of the most urgent political, cultural, and artistic issues of our time is evidence of Foster’s continued skill as a critic.

Image courtesy akimbo.ca

BONUS FACTS

—Foster is an editor at October, the journal of art history and criticism that was co-founded by his dissertation advisor, Rosalind Krauss.
—Foster attended the Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington, where one of his classmates was Bill Gates.

—The Bay Press, the same publisher that released Foster's seminal The Anti-Aesthetic, was founded in 1982 to publish The Mink's Cry, a children's book written by Foster. The book's protagonists are a young wolf, an orphaned seal, an outcast raven, and a sailor. Sadly, The Mink's Cry is currently out of print.

—As Foster told Interview magazine, his favorite heist film is the 1955 classic To Catch a Thief, staring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

MAJOR WORKS

• The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 1983. Bay Press.
• Compulsive Beauty, 1995. MIT Press.
• The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 1996. MIT Press.
• Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes), 2002. Verso Books.
• The Art-Architecture Complex, 2011. Verso Books.
• Bad New Days, 2015. Verso Books. 

Know Your Critics

How to Understand Rosalind Krauss, the Art Critic Who Made Theory Cool (and Inescapable)

By Dylan Kerr

July 9, 2016

The critic Rosalind Krauss. Photo by Judy Olausen, c.1978

The reputation of the art critic Rosalind E. Krauss is the kind of paradox one only finds in the art world. Though the theory-heavy art journal she’s famous for founding—October—only has a circulation of about 2,000 people, and her myriad books and articles remain little-read outside of academic circles, she is considered one of the most influential critics of Modern and contemporary art of the past half-century. Most specifically, she’s credited with helping introduce the American art scene to French post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jaques Derrida in the 1970s and ‘80s, whose ideas have since become almost de rigueur for talking about and teaching art history in the 21st century (for better or worse).

The ideas in her work, however, and her influence on today's art community are intensely important to understand even if you're not about to wade into the Columbia University professor's scholarly oeuvre. For the time-impaired, here’s a quick primer on Krauss to get you started.

Beginnings

In her own recounting, Krauss has been both interrogating and defending Modern art from her earliest aesthetic experiences. After noticing that his daughter, who enjoyed painting as a child, had a predilection for art, Krauss’s father encouraged her creative side with regular trips to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (conveniently located near his offices at the Department of Justice, where he worked as an attorney). There, as Krauss recounts, the budding critic began honing both her eye and her tongue. “In the modern galleries,” Krauss writes, “my father would make objections to the works and I would defend them. I adopted a certain militancy, for I had to try to convince my father that these modern works of art were not phony, that they were really important. This sharpened my desire to explain.” Works by Paul Klee, Georges Braque, and Mark Rothko proved especially influential on the young aesthete, and helped form her thinking.

By the time she arrived at Wellesley College as an art history undergrad, this early appreciation for Modernist masters had blossomed into a full-blown love affair. It was in the context of her senior thesis on Willem de Kooning that Krauss found herself seriously engaging with the work of Clement Greenberg, the ultra-influential New York art critic best known for his strict formalist analysis, insistence on medium specificity, and championing of the Abstract Expressionists during their early days. This intellectual relationship shifted into a personal one following Krauss’s enrollment in Harvard’s department of fine arts as a PhD student, where she met and befriended Greenberg as she prepared her dissertation on the recently deceased AbEx sculptor David Smith, whose estate the elder critic helped to manage.

Breakages 

The friendly dealings between these intergenerational critics proved short-lived. Krauss, who had been writing for such respected publications as Artforum since 1966 (only four years after graduating from Wellesley and three years before she received her Harvard degree), found herself increasingly interested in the work of Minimalists like Richard Serra and Donald Judd—artists Greenberg dismissed as not adhering to the strictures he laid out for Modern art.  

For Greenberg, truly avant-garde art strove for an ever-increasing purity and adherence to the history its medium, a view Krauss eventually came to regard as overly simplistic. As she says, “[Greenberg’s] whole relationship to art was incredibly teleological. His idea was that art had to end up in a certain place, and if it didn’t contribute to that trajectory then he dismissed it.” 

In the context of this opposition, Krauss began exploring novel avenues for evaluating works of art that seemed more true to her experience as a viewer. She eventually landed on the writings of French post-structuralists like Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, incorporating their ideas on meaning and value as a subjective, historically contingent, and mutable phenomenon into her own writings on contemporary art. Freudian thinkers like Jaques Lacan also proved useful insofar as they theorized the repressed, often violent and sexual impulses that Krauss was coming to believe were vital to the Modern art she loved.

Far more than academic navel-gazing, Krauss and her contemporaries saw these ideas as intensely political and even revolutionary; as she wrote in 1972, “We can no longer fail to notice that if we make up schemas of meaning based on history, we are playing into systems of control and censure. We are no longer innocent.” Increasingly, the artwork’s medium became less relevant than the socio-political history surrounding and informing the work itself, a history that could be reframed by a sensitive and informed critic.

It’s precisely this spirit of revolution that lead Krauss to the next big break of her career: leaving the respected editorial board of Artforum in 1976 (she’d been promoted to editor in 1971) to start her own publication called October. The departure resulted from one of the great art-world controversies: when the artist Lynda Benglis took out a two-page advertisement in Artforum featuring herself naked but for sunglasses and a provocatively co-opted dildo—a response to what Benglis saw as the machismo of the male Minimalists encapsulated in a notorious photo Krauss herself took of the artist Robert Morris—Krauss condemned the magazine for allowing what she deemed pornography to "brutalize" its staff and readers, and left.

Co-founded with her Harvard classmate and fellow Artforum apostate Annette Michelson, the new journal took its name from Sergei Eisenstein’s classic 1927 film October: Ten Days That Shook the World, an avant-garde recounting of the Russia’s famed October revolution. Their goals for the new magazine were clear: provide an outlook for the then-nascent critical writings of the post-structuralist school in the American context. 

As anyone whose taken an art-history class in the past two decades can attest, these thorny ideas (and the interpretive mode of looking at and talking about art they call for) have proven highly influential in the academy, where Krauss has spent most of her adult life—she’s been on the faculties of M.I.T., Princeton, Hunter, and finally Columbia, where she’s worked since 1992.

Both October and Krauss have earned reputations as highly progressive and eminently obscurantist, a reflection of their shared reliance on dense theory as a means of unlocking the art object. If you’ve ever scratched your head over a Derrida or Lacan quote in a press release or catalog entry, chances are good you have Krauss and her revolutionary little publication to thank. By the time contemporaries like Hal Foster began contributing to October, this decidedly postmodern turn had taken a firm hold on the artistic mainstream, setting the stage for the vibrant interpretive art culture we have today.

Books

While Krauss first achieved prominence for her articles in Artforum and October (many of which, such as her legendary "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," included her infamously inscrutable diagrams) her books have proven especially significant in establishing her place in contemporary art criticism.

Her 1985 collection of essays The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, for instance, takes the mythos of the historical avant-garde to task. Krauss claims that the developments of postmodern art theory call for a thorough reevaluation of Modernist masters like Rodin and Giacometti, as well as an overall overhaul of the ways in which we evaluate art to include (perhaps unsurprisingly) the analysis of the philosophers she admires. In contrast to claims about these artist’s boundary-breaking originality and continual inventiveness, Krauss finds repetition and reproducibility to be at the heart of their work, and positions it as a challenge to their late-20^th-century celebrants, who are now tasked with proving the artistic value of their achievements through appeals to framing (both physical and metaphorical) or what she calls “the authorial mark of emotion,” better known as feeling.

Her 1993 book The Optical Unconscious expands upon the ideas of this earlier effort, turning to figures like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst as embodying a counter-narrative to the Greenbergian formulation of modern art. In short, Krauss argues that Modernism was in fact less concerned with purity and autonomy than previously thought, looking to movements like Surrealism and Dada as concurrent developments that take the subjective states of the unconscious as their inspiration and rationale, and drawing heavily upon the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and especially Lacan. The book is also notable for Krauss’s unusual, almost diaristic writing style, which underscores the intensely personal (not simply “pure”) motivations underlying the work. 

Movingly, Krauss’s 2011 book Under Blue Cup also attempts to write theory through personal narrative, this time through the very specific lens of her 1999 brain aneurysm that left the intellectual temporarily bereft of her short-term memory. A central insight from her subsequent cognitive therapy—“If you can remember who you are, you can teach yourself to remember anything”—provides the occasion for a reappraisal of the artist’s medium as a form of memory. She looks to the work of artists like Ed Ruscha and Sophie Calle as exemplifying a way out of the so-called “post-medium condition” by turning to a new medium (cars for Ruscha, photojournalism for Calle, etc.) to act as structure and support for their ideas.

For younger artists still casting about for a new way to make their mark on art history, Krauss’s ideas should provide a welcome jumping-off point, as they have for an entire generation of art writers.

The Phaidon Folio

What Was Fluxus? A Brief Guide to the Irreverent, Groundbreaking Art Movement

By Artspace Editors

July 22, 2016

George Maciunas, the founder and nominal leader of Fluxus

What, exactly, was Fluxus? The mid-20^th-century art movement has proven highly influential to generations of artists looking to bleed the lines between art and life, but its amorphous nature and sheer strangeness mean that it remains something of a mystery to younger artists and art lovers. For those still left scratching their heads, this essay excerpted from Phaidon’s Art in Time: A World History of Styles and Movements provides a quick primer on this radical group’s major players and events.

Fluxus was a loose confederation of international artists in the 1960s working in performance, painting, sculpture, poetry, experimental music, and even correspondence art (art sent through the postal service). It was often, though not exclusively, political in tone. Fluxus works shared similarities with the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow, particularly in the way they blurred distinctions between art and life. In doing so, Fluxus transformed art from an object of aesthetic contemplation to a gesture of political action. The actions of these artists laid the groundwork for Conceptual art and performance art in the decades to come, and Fluxus shared members with other movements, such as Neo-Dada and video art.

Fluxus leader George Maciunas (1931–78) summarized the themes found in much Fluxus work in his Fluxus Manifesto (above). Cut-out dictionary definitions of “flux,” which emphasize its bodily character—a flow of fluids and discharge—were interrupted by his handwritten political statements calling for a fusion between art and reality.

Fluxus performances often had a pithy character, especially in contrast to Kaprow’s “Happenings,” though both sought to blur the line between artist and audience. At a 1963 Fluxus event in Düsseldorf, for example, Maciunas threw copies of his manifesto at his audience, and Dick Higgins staged a similar performance (see above) in Wiesbaden the following year. The single stack of paper transformed into a flurry of multiple pages embodying the idea of “flux” as continual change, and recalled the early Dada movement in both its irreverent content and disregard of aesthetic norms.

Another Fluxus artist, Yoko Ono (b. 1933), created Cut Piece in 1964 (see above), in which she kneeled on a stage and invited audience members to cut off pieces of her clothing with scissors. Ono remained motionless, and the realization of the work was dependent on its audience. The performance created a psychological tension for the viewer, who was asked to participate in an otherwise taboo act.

Fluxus actions implicitly and explicitly critiqued traditional art practices, as when Shigeko Kubota (b. 1937) attached a brush to her underwear and then squatted and moved to mark paper on the floor with red paint (see above). The piece challenged the male-dominated world of Abstract Expressionism—the paintbrush became phallic, and the horizontal orientation recalled Pollock’s drip paintings. But more than satire, the work signified a concentrated intellectual and physical effort.

Joseph Beuys (1921–86) used Fluxus performance to emphasize art’s responsibility in the political sphere. A former World War II Luftwaffe airman, Beuys used art as an attempt to atone for German guilt and responsibility and to provide a space for spiritual, transnational healing. In a shamanistic ritual Eurasia Siberian Symphony (above), he propped up a dead hare on thin poles and gently carried it on his shoulder. The fat and felt between the front poles are part of Beuys’ personal symbolism representing warmth, nourishment, and healing. The word “EURASIA” written on the chalkboard suggests a desire for political and ethnic harmony. The organic materials often used by Beuys are in a state of flux and subject to processes of decay. In the artist’s words: “… the nature of my sculpture is not fixed or finished … Everything is in a state of change.”