Transcript of the first release of the upcoming podcast called Spection:
Welcome to the first issue of the Spection Podcast, straight from us to your earbuds.
How do we make reflection relevant to a me-me-me culture? There are thousands of ways to satisfy our need for entertainment today, but why do we end up choosing A over B? We aren’t frequently asked to question our tastes, but that’s what Spection is here to do. Through articulating preferences, we can sort out more than just the good from the bad. Understanding the essence of attraction to art leads to a dialogue about what we value in our culture. We’re not only interested in why people haven’t been out to see the latest international docu-drama yet, we’re wondering why that synth-heavy rap song is on everyone’s ipod. Music, art, films, and books don’t have to be mindless entertainment, but there’s a lot of inane stuff out there that makes it to the top. We’re not afraid to tackle the bad in the name of understanding the good.
To flip on the television and watch whatever happens to be playing is like playing Russian Roulette with our intellect. It’s a crime to waste an hour on reality tv when something more stimulating is on the next channel. Too often we take the easy route when it comes to culture, favoring what’s popular over what’s enriching. Too often we write off something like opera as too high brow to be understood by anyone without a monocle. And too often do we miss out on the best of what the world has to offer, all because we refused to put forth a little effort. Such intense satisfaction awaits, if only we’re willing to work for it. And you’ve already taken the first step.
We’re starting a dialogue to put high art within everyone’s reach and to make questioning culture second nature. If you’ve already clicked subscribe, you’ll be receiving content weekly from our team of contributors. Essays, interviews, and dialogues are all on the table as we search for something more from our media.
This week, we’re featuring an essay by weekly contributor Marcy Capron called (pola)Roid Rage, Or, What Instant Satisfaction Did to Photography. She’s explored Polaroid photography from its invention up to the boom of the iconic square photos in so-called hipster culture.
Guest contributor John Hodgman interviews author Jefferey Eugenides next week. He’ll be asking about his new collection of essays on love, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead. Regular contributor Brian Hoffman also joins us next week to offer a review of Steppenwolf Theater’s production of The Tempest.
We’re here to sound off on cultural phenomena, but we want you to jump in too. Since culture is not a passive phenomenon, we’ll take your phone calls on your opinions, questions, and commentary in a monthly episode we’re calling FeedBack. But you won’t just be listening to our voicemail. Our contributors will offer their own two cents alongside yours for enhanced perspective.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for joining us. Don’t forget to call in, and don’t forget to Stop. Look. Listen.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Zuzana Stefkova's Curator Talk
Zuzana Stefkova is a curator at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Prague, Czech Republic. Her talk spanned many artists from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a region in Eastern Europe with recent history involving struggles with communism, democracy, and westernization. By the end of her discussion, it was clear that Czech political art has much in common with its Western counterparts. The recent change in leadership caused a rapid artistic evolution, but it still suffers from setbacks common to all political art.
She heavily discussed the works of David Cerny, the artist responsible for the Keith Haring-like babies climbing the television tower in Zizkov and the pinkness of the formerly oppressive Russian tank monument. His sculptural works have an air of mischief about them, somewhere between activism and vandalism, a balance with which many activist artists struggle. His work raises questions of boundaries of artwork in general, but also the efficiency of conveying political messages through artwork. A threat of offensive and illegal activity tends to inspire censorship, which has been a problem in Stefkova’s recent exhibits.
Politik-um explored sensitive issues in Central Europe, including propaganda and political acts. This exhibition in Prague castle (the seat of Czech government) included several controversial pieces, including Zimmer Frei!, a demonstration taking over abandoned housing, laced with anti-German sentiment. Because of proximity to the head of state, this exhibit was prematurely closed to avoid associating the nation with offensive anti-German attitudes.
The next exhibit entitled Czechpoint was denied access to the national galleries for fear of unfortunate consequences due to similar content. This second exhibit aimed to blur the definitions between art and politics, audience and activist. Where Politik-um emphasized the helplessness of art to affect change in its society, Czechpoint empowered the viewer and offered a forum for art to make political change. Of course, this was done in a set of small, obscure galleries and not the Prague Castle. Perhaps this is fitting though, that change made to the system cannot come from the system itself, it must originate in the outskirts. Limited accessibility is a small hurdle if the message conveyed can be more potent. Still, to limit the audience to essentially people who have already been convinced of the urgency of the political messages seems somewhat sad; those who need to be exposed to this new point of view may have ventured to a national gallery, but to wander into an exhibit like Czechpoint would be unlikely.
The majority of the rest of Stefkova’s discussion focused on specific individual pieces as examples of challenging the current political state in different ways. The ubiquity of “artist groups”, that is, artists producing work semi-anonymously in troupes, was surprising as she revealed piece after piece by groups Guma Guar, Pode Bal, Rafani, and Ztohoven. In Czech art, parallels to American political art are astounding, and similar hurdles must be overcome. Exploring art outside of our own society, especially in an emerging Western culture, reveals an understanding about how we process information about our own culture.
She heavily discussed the works of David Cerny, the artist responsible for the Keith Haring-like babies climbing the television tower in Zizkov and the pinkness of the formerly oppressive Russian tank monument. His sculptural works have an air of mischief about them, somewhere between activism and vandalism, a balance with which many activist artists struggle. His work raises questions of boundaries of artwork in general, but also the efficiency of conveying political messages through artwork. A threat of offensive and illegal activity tends to inspire censorship, which has been a problem in Stefkova’s recent exhibits.
Politik-um explored sensitive issues in Central Europe, including propaganda and political acts. This exhibition in Prague castle (the seat of Czech government) included several controversial pieces, including Zimmer Frei!, a demonstration taking over abandoned housing, laced with anti-German sentiment. Because of proximity to the head of state, this exhibit was prematurely closed to avoid associating the nation with offensive anti-German attitudes.
The next exhibit entitled Czechpoint was denied access to the national galleries for fear of unfortunate consequences due to similar content. This second exhibit aimed to blur the definitions between art and politics, audience and activist. Where Politik-um emphasized the helplessness of art to affect change in its society, Czechpoint empowered the viewer and offered a forum for art to make political change. Of course, this was done in a set of small, obscure galleries and not the Prague Castle. Perhaps this is fitting though, that change made to the system cannot come from the system itself, it must originate in the outskirts. Limited accessibility is a small hurdle if the message conveyed can be more potent. Still, to limit the audience to essentially people who have already been convinced of the urgency of the political messages seems somewhat sad; those who need to be exposed to this new point of view may have ventured to a national gallery, but to wander into an exhibit like Czechpoint would be unlikely.
The majority of the rest of Stefkova’s discussion focused on specific individual pieces as examples of challenging the current political state in different ways. The ubiquity of “artist groups”, that is, artists producing work semi-anonymously in troupes, was surprising as she revealed piece after piece by groups Guma Guar, Pode Bal, Rafani, and Ztohoven. In Czech art, parallels to American political art are astounding, and similar hurdles must be overcome. Exploring art outside of our own society, especially in an emerging Western culture, reveals an understanding about how we process information about our own culture.
Andrea Bowers's Artist Talk
Andrea Bowers fits nicely into the intersection of feminist and activist art. Her methodology seems to include multi-media interpretations of her research into a single topic. After a period of extensive research, she produced a series of works focusing on letters between Emma Goldman and her longtime lover, Ben. Bowers’s deep admiration for Emma Goldman is not surprising. Goldman, herself an early feminist activist and anarchist, was what Bowers described as a “party girl”: a sort of socialite with an attitude, and in her black leather boots and soft grey pants, it seemed that Bowers had found a connection with this woman that ran deeper than a research subject. Her research was conducted through a third party of sorts, Goldman’s biographer, Candace. This daisy-chain of women passing information adds a significant layer to her drawings and artwork produced on this topic. As she chronicled Goldman’s life through her artwork, it became clear that much of it was a tribute to the way she lived her carefree yet lonely life. The most intriguing pieces of the Emma Goldman works were the photorealist drawings of Goldman at rallies and protests, giving speeches and taking action in the name of her rights. By drawing something in exquisite detail, Bowers explained, she really understands it and absorbs it as part of herself.
Her next project spawned off of the same protest and activist themes. Selecting gift wrap as her paper medium, she spray painted feminist and anarchist slogans onto poster-sized pieces. These posters are unique, each with a different gift wrap background and message. She later commented that she saw the gift wrap as a symbol of femininity and domesticity, but impermanence and disposability was the first issue that came to light for this viewer. Perhaps a hybrid of these two ideas was at play; the flowery papers signifying an end to feminine struggles more than the mottos they display.
Though distinctly feminist at times, her body of activist artwork seems to explore general human rights issues. When Elvira Arellano, an undocumented Chicagoan who faced deportation although her son was an American citizen, took refuge in her church, Bowers became fascinated once again with new images of protest. Her three channel video piece, entitled An Act of Radical Hospitality (2008), explores the human side of the issue with a painstakingly long zoom on Elvira alone, with her son, and the son without her. Each features the subject staring directly at the viewer, questioning the traditional passive viewer format. Bowers explored the effect of art that looks back.
The most effective part of this collection of pieces for me was the display of the two yellow quilts inspired by a sign in Elvira’s church, Quilts of radical Hospitality (2008). Each quilt says “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” in either English or Spanish. The English phrase is written on a traditional Mexican style blanket, and the Spanish on an American Log Cabin quilt. Again she reverts to a feminine medium to embed in her work a whole other issue. She continued with a quilting theme in her most recent works concerning the AIDS quilt. These displays harken back to her photorealist drawings as she studies one panel of the massive quilt and copies it directly.
While I find much of Bowers’s work to be an effective representation of pressing issues such as immigration, AIDS awareness, or international relations, she tends to leave glaring fingerprints of herself where she doesn’t have enough content to round out a piece. She starts with effective, fairly potent ideas and dilutes them with choices that incorporate too many issues, leaving some pieces simple at best and unfocused at worst.
Her next project spawned off of the same protest and activist themes. Selecting gift wrap as her paper medium, she spray painted feminist and anarchist slogans onto poster-sized pieces. These posters are unique, each with a different gift wrap background and message. She later commented that she saw the gift wrap as a symbol of femininity and domesticity, but impermanence and disposability was the first issue that came to light for this viewer. Perhaps a hybrid of these two ideas was at play; the flowery papers signifying an end to feminine struggles more than the mottos they display.
Though distinctly feminist at times, her body of activist artwork seems to explore general human rights issues. When Elvira Arellano, an undocumented Chicagoan who faced deportation although her son was an American citizen, took refuge in her church, Bowers became fascinated once again with new images of protest. Her three channel video piece, entitled An Act of Radical Hospitality (2008), explores the human side of the issue with a painstakingly long zoom on Elvira alone, with her son, and the son without her. Each features the subject staring directly at the viewer, questioning the traditional passive viewer format. Bowers explored the effect of art that looks back.
The most effective part of this collection of pieces for me was the display of the two yellow quilts inspired by a sign in Elvira’s church, Quilts of radical Hospitality (2008). Each quilt says “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” in either English or Spanish. The English phrase is written on a traditional Mexican style blanket, and the Spanish on an American Log Cabin quilt. Again she reverts to a feminine medium to embed in her work a whole other issue. She continued with a quilting theme in her most recent works concerning the AIDS quilt. These displays harken back to her photorealist drawings as she studies one panel of the massive quilt and copies it directly.
While I find much of Bowers’s work to be an effective representation of pressing issues such as immigration, AIDS awareness, or international relations, she tends to leave glaring fingerprints of herself where she doesn’t have enough content to round out a piece. She starts with effective, fairly potent ideas and dilutes them with choices that incorporate too many issues, leaving some pieces simple at best and unfocused at worst.
Xiaoze Xie’s Artist Talk
Xiaoze Xie’s approach to historical art reflects his own personal history from his birth in China to his current life in the United States. He studied architecture in Beijing in 1988, witnessed the uprisings at Tiananmen Square, traveled to the mountains of China, and ended up an associate professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
His painting career began in libraries, with a fascination for the “rows of sleeping books”. They contained something abstract, something more than just a story for him. Painting the horizontal stacks of Chinese books was a way to paint a symbol of memories and history within the rigid structure of parallel lines—an aspect which appealed to the architect in him. He says he tends to work intensely on one theme, thoroughly exploring an idea. A systematic approach results in visual variety from his core inspiration. From Chinese books he moved on to other libraries, including the collection at MOMA, where he chose greenish tints to the largely black and white piece to reflect the different effect of the fluorescent lighting in the American library.
From these pieces which seemingly honor books in their native setting (“sleeping” in their libraries), he moved on to a more destructive topic: book burning. To tackle this part of history, he chose to integrate three dimensional components—railroad spikes—into the overall piece to emphasize the destruction and penetrative aspects of censorship. He depicted specific, labeled books flying through a bonfire, pages flapping like wings—a very different state from the unlabelled library series. Of course, the tension inherent in such an iconic act demands a different treatment of the elements of the scene, as Xiaoze Xie understood.
The study of books seemed to naturally lead to a study of newspapers, the reading material of daily life. In 1998, he began to paint stacks of newspapers, as they were stored in the library. Because the papers are folded, the newsprint along the edge appears as an abstraction, rendering it helpless in its mission to convey information. He progressed to editions of papers with color photos and thicker folds, giving more of a picture of what happened, but still a fragmented view of the original articles. If traditional history paintings are like reading a book on the war, Xiaoze Xie’s newspaper paintings deliver information about events like the evening news: a myriad of topics, and just the headlines. The painting creates a permanence of such a transient form of literature that seems somewhat undeserved, but nevertheless makes for an interesting discussion, especially in contrast to his earlier works about books on library shelves. This study in depiction of news became even more fascinating as he continued this series of American papers through the early 2000’s. The juxtaposition of a late 1990’s to a post-September 11 country emphasized the flashy nature of headlines warning about terror and international events.
Keeping with his thematic method, Xiaoze Xie moved on to explore politicians as a subject of drawings. Like the Spanish painter who dared to paint the king and queen as ugly as they were in real life, he depicted political figures in both the American and Chinese governments as realistically as possible. His newest work appears to be in this area, which needs to be developed further to generate the rich intellectual fodder that the “abstracted” newspaper series has produced.
His painting career began in libraries, with a fascination for the “rows of sleeping books”. They contained something abstract, something more than just a story for him. Painting the horizontal stacks of Chinese books was a way to paint a symbol of memories and history within the rigid structure of parallel lines—an aspect which appealed to the architect in him. He says he tends to work intensely on one theme, thoroughly exploring an idea. A systematic approach results in visual variety from his core inspiration. From Chinese books he moved on to other libraries, including the collection at MOMA, where he chose greenish tints to the largely black and white piece to reflect the different effect of the fluorescent lighting in the American library.
From these pieces which seemingly honor books in their native setting (“sleeping” in their libraries), he moved on to a more destructive topic: book burning. To tackle this part of history, he chose to integrate three dimensional components—railroad spikes—into the overall piece to emphasize the destruction and penetrative aspects of censorship. He depicted specific, labeled books flying through a bonfire, pages flapping like wings—a very different state from the unlabelled library series. Of course, the tension inherent in such an iconic act demands a different treatment of the elements of the scene, as Xiaoze Xie understood.
The study of books seemed to naturally lead to a study of newspapers, the reading material of daily life. In 1998, he began to paint stacks of newspapers, as they were stored in the library. Because the papers are folded, the newsprint along the edge appears as an abstraction, rendering it helpless in its mission to convey information. He progressed to editions of papers with color photos and thicker folds, giving more of a picture of what happened, but still a fragmented view of the original articles. If traditional history paintings are like reading a book on the war, Xiaoze Xie’s newspaper paintings deliver information about events like the evening news: a myriad of topics, and just the headlines. The painting creates a permanence of such a transient form of literature that seems somewhat undeserved, but nevertheless makes for an interesting discussion, especially in contrast to his earlier works about books on library shelves. This study in depiction of news became even more fascinating as he continued this series of American papers through the early 2000’s. The juxtaposition of a late 1990’s to a post-September 11 country emphasized the flashy nature of headlines warning about terror and international events.
Keeping with his thematic method, Xiaoze Xie moved on to explore politicians as a subject of drawings. Like the Spanish painter who dared to paint the king and queen as ugly as they were in real life, he depicted political figures in both the American and Chinese governments as realistically as possible. His newest work appears to be in this area, which needs to be developed further to generate the rich intellectual fodder that the “abstracted” newspaper series has produced.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Spencer Finch: Light, Time, Chemistry
It would be easy for me to write a review of Spencer Finch’s Light, Time, Chemistry by focusing on the chemistry. Easy, yes, to discuss Shadow, Sculpture of Centaur, Tuileries (after Atget) (2007) as the obvious representation of Sir Isaac Newton’s electromagnetic spectrum on a fluorescent lamp, or to mention the speculated chemical traces on the sheet of paper exposed to the molecules of Emily Dickinson’s garden air, or to talk about the simply titled collection of ten photographs, Ag (2008) as his own sort of elemental analysis of the precious metal using silver gelatin prints. But I didn’t come here for “easy”.
The gallery district in the West Loop of Chicago where the Rhona Hoffman Gallery sits doesn’t fit my stereotype of an artsy scene. I couldn’t immediately picture the socialites zipping about in their sporty BMWs, buzzing themselves into their lofts kitty-corner from a meat packing plant and a Mexican grocer’s warehouse, but I quickly warmed to the idea of pairing art, luxury, and factory. The first piece, Periscope (sky over Chicago, 3/26/09—3/27/09) (2009), an indoor/outdoor installation, blended right into the naked brick and metal of the streetscape. It wasn’t until I saw the indoor component that I noticed it connecting outside through the storefront of the gallery. A large ventilation duct, opening upwards towards the sky just above the entrance to the building snaked through the window and ended just in front of a white wall in the lower level. Peering outside from inside was now easier than walking all the way to the window; looking up into the cold metal tube showed a tiny frame of the cheery blue sky thanks to some well placed mirrors. The cyanotype exposure on the facing white wall interpreted the light which entered the gallery through the pipe as streaks of blue, not unlike the color seen through the ventilation duct, but very much unlike the texture. Somewhere in between the sky and the cyanotype an error had occurred: like that mischievous “purple monkey dishwasher” kid playing telephone at day camp, some part of the system had failed to render the perfect image of the Chicago sky! Was this a misinterpretation of the photo-sensitive paper on the wall, or an error on the part of the ventilation duct? It was here that my mind first turned back to chemistry.
Perception is a tricky little thing. Many of Finch’s works seemed to circle around this concept, most overtly of all Periscope. Where chemists build large metallic machines to look at sub-microscopic atoms, Finch builds a tube to see the sky. (Yes, I said it would be too easy to revert to chemistry, but it’s unavoidable…and perhaps inevitable.) Chemistry constantly struggles with how to perceive a world we know is around us but cannot detect with just the five senses. And so chemists invent microscopes and spectroscopes and gadgets to enhance our eyes and ears, but we are still not limitless. Finch points out our limitations on the macroscopic scale. Periscope offers not only the instrumentation; it also treats the viewer to the sun-stained cyanotype as the best effort of his bulky creation.
He further explores this concept with Thank You, Fog (2009), a photographic piece in 60 frames, each taken 60 seconds after the previous one and arranged in a line around the four walls of the upper gallery. The images overlooking a small patch of pine trees are only decipherable from a close distance; a thick fog provides a low resolution, variable from frame to frame. And thus we get a temporal picture of the problem of interpretation: clarity is not a constant. The press release states that this piece explores fog as it “both reveals and conceals, frustrating our desire to capture an accurate image”, hinting that the title of the piece may contain a hint of sarcasm. But were the viewer sitting next to Finch in Sonoma as he snapped those photographs, I suspect she would have seen much the same thing as the film shows: vague suggestions of trees underneath a blanket of soft gray. The frustration may exist, but it is not directed at a desire to capture an “accurate image”, it is a frustration at the inability to capture the non-existent image we desire. Thank You, Fog could not be exhibited in a more appropriate place; large wooden structural supports of the building interrupt the emptiness of the room, teasing viewers as they obstruct and reveal that idealized forest image so hungered for. The interference of the fog allows the viewer to project onto each image her own forest, complete with pinecones and that fresh, green scent. If Schroedinger’s cat is still in the box, it is simultaneously alive and dead. It is the act of observation which determines the outcome. And so the gratitude expressed in the title Thank You, Fog may actually be sincere.
Light, Time, Chemistry delivers what it promises, but not completely in the traditional form. He swerves around the kitsch of presenting the obvious graphs and charts, instead favoring the meaty idea at the heart of all science: perception. Finch lays out a nice collection, using his tools as best he can to explore perception in his spatial language. I could discuss a connection to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, wherein Heisenberg proves that a full knowledge of space and time cannot simultaneously exist, and the choice to understand one means knowing nothing of the other.
But that would be too easy.
Spencer Finch’s Light, Time, Chemistry is showing at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery (118 N. Peoria St, Chicago) from March 27 – May 2, 2009.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
