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To read the Carrington article, click here. a PDF will open. To read the vernacular photography article on the website of Art & Antiques magazine, click here. To read it as it appeared in print, click here. (A PDF will take a few seconds to download.) 1 January 2012 A new year’s wish...
NEW YORK - I saw this rainbow shimmering over a small bay on the north coast of Jamaica when I was visiting that sunny island a few weeks ago. See a rainbow, make a wish, right? Looking at this photo now, I wish that a big, global epidemic of PEACE, LOVE and UNDERSTANDING might break out everywhere in 2012. You never know. The unexpected does sometimes occur on this weary, ailing planet. Happy New Year to everyone! Posted by E.M.G. 8 December 2011 Welcome to the world of vernacular photography...
10 November 2011 Artist/arts activist Martha Wilson in the Brooklyn Rail NEW YORK - My article about Martha Wilson, the New York-based artist, arts activist, educator and founding director of the Franklin Furnace Archive, has been published in the November 2011 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. In it, several well-known feminist artists, including Suzanne Lacy and Lynn Hershman Leeson (whose docu-film about the feminist art movement, !Women, Art, Revolution, came out earlier this year), and the art historian/critic Lucy R. Lippard share their observations about the lasting place Wilson’s work as an artist and institution-builder has earned in the history of feminist art and, more generally, in the history of conceptual art. Wilson’s most recent solo exhibition was presented at P.P.O.W. in New York from Septemer 9 through October 8; please scroll down on this page to read my item about it, dated September 10. Meanwhile, the New York-based organization Independent Curators International has published The Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces. The book is a compendium of essays, book excerpts, and magazine and newspaper articles chosen by Wilson herself, an assortment of texts that played a big role in the past in shaping her thinking about art, politics, and the status of women and the role of the artist in society. It also includes some of Wilson’s own writings. The book is available from ICI, through its website. To read my article in the Brooklyn Rail, please click here. (Photo at right, courtesy of P.P.O.W.: Martha Wilson, Invisible, 2011, color photograph, text; 26.5 inches x 37 inches.) Posted by E.M.G.
2 November 2011 Kusama looks back at her formative heyday: New York in the 1960s TOKYO, JAPAN - With her colorful wigs, wide-eyed gaze and paintings, sculptures and clothes covered with all-over swarms of her signature polka dots or “infinity net” patterns or thick, phallic, sausage-like stuffed protrusions, Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) has become one of the most visible figures on today’s international art scene. Her look, as much as her art’s distinctive motifs, which have been reproduced in a multitude of what the Japanese call “goods”—postcards, tote bags, key chains, coffee mugs—have become indelible emblems of the globally recognizable Kusama brand.
It’s Kusama’s world. Grab some polka-dot stickers, plaster them all over your body and dare to enter it. There was a time when the inquisitive and the adventurous who did cross over into that trippy-playful headspace to join Kusama in her inhibitions-smashing performance-art events (many of which had to do with shedding all their clothes) would eagerly strip down and allow the artist to paint or plaster the blank canvases of their bodies with polka dots or polka dot stickers. In interviews, Kusama used to say that she took an obsessive approach to making her art. “Kusama’s Body Festival in ’60s,” an exhibition that is now on view (through November 27) at Watari-um, a small museum in Tokyo, looks back at the formative heyday of Kusama’s art-making in the 1960s, when she lived in New York and developed many of the themes and techniques that would become the hallmarks of her multifaceted oeuvre. Among them: her Infinity Net paintings, her soft sculptures and her painting-meets-sculpture-meets-performance art events (like her “Body Festival” in New York’s Washington Square Park, 1967) and all of those endless torrents of dots. In the press release the artist prepared for her 1968 “Alice in Wonderland” happening, which took place in Central Park, she wrote: “Featuring me, KUSAMA, mad as a hatter, and my troupe of nude dancers.” In Japan, a new book by Kusama, たたかう (“Tatakau,” which means “to fight,” “to battle” or “to struggle against”), has just been published. It complements the Watari-um exhibition and covers the same thematic territory. The book is full of photos and reproductions of posters and announcement cards for Kusama’s New York-era exhibitions and events. It includes photos of many of her performance-oriented works and such gems as a reproduction of a December 1955 letter Kusama received from Georgia O’Keeffe after the young Japanese artist had boldly contacted the legendary American modernist to ask her for advice and assistance regarding the art world. For photos of Kusama and news about her activtities, see the artist’s own website. Posted by E.M.G. 24 October 2011 In stunning, never-before-seen landscapes, a totally rad Ramírez TOKYO, JAPAN - Currently I’m working in this fast-paced, sprawling city that is home to a national government in paralysis that is wrestling with some very serious economic challenges (sound familiar?), along with some of the world’s most dazzling-wacky architecture and an endless supply of all things cute: stuffed-animal toys, pastries, mobile phones, bicycles—and people, like the androgynous youth in hot pants, a blue-sequin tank top and a bowler hat who handed me a flyer advertising a restaurant at which cute foods—a pork cutlet on a bed of rice shaped like a teddy bear, sundaes with balls of ice cream shaped like bunnies’ heads—are served by young women dressed as “fantasy maids.”
Just before I left New York, I had an opportunity to see the remarkable group of never-before-shown, mixed-media drawings by the Mexican-born, self-taught artist Martín Ramírez that are now on view at Ricco/Maresca, a gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea district (529 West 29th Street; telephone: 212-627-4819). Ramírez (1895-1963), whose work first came to the art world’s attention in the early 1970s, and who spent the latter part of his life in a psychiatric hospital in northern California, has earned a place as a genre-defining giant in the canon of outsider art’s still-evolving history. The works on display in the current gallery show, “Martín Ramírez: Landscapes,” which is on view through November 12, are revelatory. They will certainly change the way viewers who are familiar with Ramírez’s work and life story think about and comprehend the breadth and depth of his artistic vision. Both within the context of Ramírez’s own body of work, with its distinctive draftsmanship and signature, sensuous forms, and also, more broadly speaking, within the field of 20th-century drawing, these works expand and deepen the meaning of what landscape images can be. My article about this exhibition has just been published in the New York Observer. I invite you to read it here. Posted by E.M.G.
23 September 2011 La Wilson: Thinking outside the box (inside the box, that is)
A selection of Wilson’s newest mixed-media works from the past several years is now on view at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, the mid-Hudson Valley, riverside town that lies about two hours by automobile or train north of Manhattan. (See above item about Gillian Jagger’s exhibition, which is also now on view at this same gallery.) Dealer John Davis first showed the artist’s work in 1983, in an earlier incarnation of his gallery in Akron, Ohio. In her assemblage pieces, which exude an air of mystery and of playfulness at the same time, Wilson takes such humble items as wooden spools, pencils, dominoes, flat-head nails, colored embroidery thread, dice, hair clips, typewriter keys, small hand tools and light-switch plates, and through simple gestures like slicing them in half or placing them in unusual positions, completely transforms their character and meaning. In Wilson’s hands, a clothespin can become as elegant as a diamond brooch or as sinister as a dagger. She uses antique metal type or letter-press type forms, too, often stuffing sections of a box’s space full of texture-yielding objects, such as bullet casings, beads or carpenters’ folding yardsticks. The old wooden boxes she uses to hold her assemblages become integral elements of each one and often set the overall tone of a work, from funky to eloquent. Étude (2010), one of the most ephemeral-feeling creations in her current exhibition, consists of a group of felt hammer tips from the innards of a piano placed inside a small, shallow box like the delicate, color-streaked shoots of an exotic tropical plant.
For many years, Wilson has studied and followed the tenets of Buddhist thought. She used to keep a beloved pet rabbit, too, but it achieved satori and died several years ago; it had been one of her favorite companions here in this material world. In the Midwest, Wilson has enjoyed an enthusiastic cult following. Nationally, she is admired by fellow artists who work in and appreciate collage and assemblage modes of art-making. In the essay for the catalog of a retrospective exhibition of Wilson’s work that was presented at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, in Pennsylvania, in 2004 (“La Wilson: Altered Objects”), I wrote: “Wilson does not make art about art, per se, as much as she makes art about the making of art.” (So check your winking, postmodernist sense of irony about the appropriated and recontextualized at the door; Wilson’s creations are surreal, abstract or pomo by accident or by unintentional affinity, not by design.) About the odds and ends that are the raw material of her art, the artist once told me: “I just try to find a home for them....The thing is to go in and find relationships [between them] that I never imagined or heard of or thought about. I just love that feeling of them coming together.” La Wilson’s works are on view at John Davis Gallery (362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson NY 12534; telephone: 518-828-5907) through October 9. Posted by E.M.G. 16 September 2011 In mysterious, dreamy images, photographer Emi Anrakuji uncannily captures Japan’s current, anxious mood NEW YORK - Works of art that feel or appear mysterious because that’s the kind of effect their makers aim for and hope they will have can certainly attract attention. Even more compelling are those works of art in whatever form—pictures, objects, songs or instrumental music, films, dances, stories or poems—that, somehow, unwittingly and with a sense of timeliness and relevance that seems uncanny, capture the mood of the moment right now with an air of mystery and an uncertain but just-right emotional pitch. In this way, the images the young, Tokyo-based photographer Emi Anrakuji is showing in her just-opened solo exhibition, “A Decent Life,” at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery (at 547 West 27th Street, in Chelsea), seem to perfectly reflect the mood in Japan today.
As her homeland wrestles with an ongoing economic recession, a sclerotic national government, the challenges of a fast-aging population, the daunting task of rebuilding the north-central region of the country that was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, and the fear and panic that have followed leaked-radiation reports associated with a nuclear-power plant that was damaged in those disasters, among many Japanese, the mood today is one of high-anxiety uncertainty. “Actually, I started making the images in this series several months before the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan earlier this year,” Anrakuji told me at her exhibition’s opening reception yesterday evening. “But I do recognize that their eerie quality catches today’s mood.” In her photos, the photographer appears as a kind of untethered, roaming Everyman in a plain, light-colored frock, who floats through the streets of Tokyo like a spirit in a dream. In almost all of her photos, Arankuji’s face is not clearly visible. In them, she turns up in pedestrian tunnels, concrete passageways, in the back seat of a bus or in the urban underbrush, sometimes exposing part of her body and sometimes sipping at a little bottle of an energy drink, one of many bottles of that kind of popular potion that she can be seen lugging around in a clear-plastic bag. (If ever many Japanese people felt they needed a shot of stamina, mixed with confidence and optimism, that moment might be right now.)
(Emi Anrakuji’s exhibition, “A Decent Life,” is on view through October 8, 2011.) Posted by E.M.G. 10 September 2011 Artist Martha Wilson at P.P.O.W., New York: Aging gracefully, with political consciousness, “beauty” and sass NEW YORK - The artist, cultural activist, freedom-of-expression advocate and educator Martha Wilson is well-known as the founder of an important contemporary-art institution. In 1976, in New York, Wilson established the Franklin Furnace Archive, an alternative-space museum, whose purpose, its mission statement explained, was “to champion ephemeral forms neglected by mainstream arts institutions” and, in particular, with regard to the still-new genre of artists’ books that was emerging at the time, “to serve artists who [chose] publishing as a democratic artistic medium and who were not being supported by existing artistic organizations.”
By the time it closed its doors at 112 Franklin Street, in downtown Manhattan’s TriBeCa district, in late 1996, Franklin Furnace had presented many memorable exhibitions and a wide-ranging program of performance art events. It also had built up a renowned and definitive collection of artists’ books and ephemeral material that was often related to performance art, including photographs, videotapes, posters, pamphlets, collage works and limited-edition printed material of all kinds. In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired that collection. In 1997, after closing its physical space, Franklin Furnace launched its website, which has served as a platform for webcasts of performance and other Internet-based works of art. Under Wilson’s direction, the organization has continued its grant-making program in support of artists from around the world and has won major grants in support of its ambitious, ongoing project, the Franklin Furnace Database, which contains information about every performance art work, temporary installation, exhibition or benefit presented by the institution; it also offers images of events presented during Franklin Furnace’s first ten years. Now, in a solo gallery exhibition (“I Have Become My Own Worst Fear,” on view through October 8) that opened yesterday at P.P.O.W., in Chelsea, Wilson’s own new, performance-and-photography-based works are being showcased; with their interweaving of candor, humor, psychological analysis and subtle, social-political critique, they revisit themes she first began examining in the early 1970s as a younger, unabashedly feminist artist. Among them: the ways in which clothes and make-up shape a woman’s perceived identity in the world (and of herself); how our Western, developed societies “allow” or perhaps expect women to age; and how, in contexts that are sometimes beyond her control, given a society’s definition of what feminine “beauty” can or should be, a woman’s body may serve as a powerful platform for self-expression—or a battleground for a contest between a woman’s courageous sense of herself and the forces of Mother Nature (whose own feminist credentials sometimes seem dubious at best; what’s with all the macho-aggressive earthquake- and hurricane-making lately?). “I’ve always mixed humor with politics and the analysis or critique of social norms, values and trends,” Wilson told me at the opening of her P.P.O.W. exhibition yesterday evening. Standing next to a photo of herself dressed as an elegant, older matron (with great gams) in a red skirt suit, on which was printed the title “The Legs Are the Last to Go,” the artist added: “A sense of humor is especially worthwhile when self-identity and aging—your own inevitable process of getting older, that is—are your subjects.”
As much as I admire and respect Wilson for her accomplishments as an institution-builder and, most significantly, as a champion of free expression for artists and all supporters of democratic values in these chilling, paranoia-loving times, I also regard her as a remarkable locus of many of the intellectual, cultural and aesthetic currents that have evolved around her over the years and, in one way or another, have crossed the paths of the places, events or creative, collaborative efforts with which she has been associated. Examples: Wilson’s presence as a teacher at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in the early 1970s, when numerous, prototypical conceptualist artists were passing through to lecture and create event-based works, and her in-the-eye-of-the-storm advocacy for free speech, a civil right protected by the U.S. Constitution (remember that old thing?), during the “culture wars” of the 1990s. In 1998, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding the so-called decency test for awarding federal arts grants, which the conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms had demanded, Wilson wrote: “I believe the net effect of this law will be that artists will continue to take sexuality as their subject (as they have been doing for 30,000 years), but many presenting organizations will become frightened off by controversial content. Sigh.” Alas, maybe Martha Wilson is something of a venerable institution herself. Posted by E.M.G. 1 September 2011 With the passing of Leonora Carrington in Mexico, a revived interest in female surrealist artists NEW YORK - Born into an affluent family in northern England in 1917—her father was a texile magnate, her mother a devout Catholic from Ireland—Leonora Carrington was known from an early age as strong-minded, inquisitive and rebellious. As a young woman, she made her debut in high society at an elegant ball and was even presented at court to King George V. (Years later, she would mock that encounter in a story she would pen about a hyena who meets the monarch.) In her twenties, after studying painting with Amédée Ozenfant and discovering surrealist art in London in 1936, she met the German surrealist artist Max Ernst. With him (he was married, had a son and was more than twice her age), Carrington began a romantic affair that become a mentor-student relationship, too. They headed to Paris, where they hobnobbed with such modern artists as André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró. Once, in Paris, Miró handed Carrington some coins and told her to go fetch him some cigarettes. In 2006, recalling that moment in an interview with a British journalist, she said that she gave the artist his money back and advised him that, “if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself.”
Carrington and Ernst separated after the Germans invaded France, and conditions in Europe worsened. Carrington experienced—or endured—a traumatic-dramatic adventure that led to her escape from Europe after a nervous breakdown and a stint in a mental asylum in Spain. She also fled from the clutches of her father’s pals, who would have packed her off to a psychiatric hospital in South Africa. From Portugal, she headed to the U.S., then to Mexico, where she settled and spent the next seven decades of her life. She died in Mexico City on May 25 of this year. In Mexico, Carrington married a Hungarian-immigrant photographer and befriended other artists and intellectuals from Europe who had sought refuge there from the war. She became a close friend of the Hungarian-born photographer Kati Horna (1912-2000) and the Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963). Varo, who also painted in a surrealist mode, became one of Carrington’s closest friends and artistic peers. The two artists shared deep interests in alchemy, the occult, shamanism, the superstitious and magical aspects of Mexican culture, and the imagery of dreams. I was one of the last journalists to interview Carrington at her home in Mexico City. Toward the end of her life, she became very reclusive. She adamantly refused to speak about her personal life or the themes and content of her art. She declined to interpret or analyze her work. Admired for her vivid imagination and the fine craftsmanship that was always evident in her paintings, prints and sculptures, Carrington earned a lasting place in Mexico’s own modern-art history. A naturalized Mexican citizen, her coffin was draped with a small Mexican flag during a private burial service that took place at Mexico City’s British Cemetery soon after she died. My feature article about Carrington’s life, work and legacy has just been published in the September 2011 issue of Art & Antiques. (Click here to open a PDF.) A big exhibition focusing on the art and ideas of female surrealist artists who lived and worked in North America and South America will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art late next January. With the passing of Carrington, a giant in this sub-category of the larger, diverse surrealism field, expect art historians, curators and collectors who specialize in both modern Latin-American art and modern art in general to start poking around for available works by this most individualistic maker of strange, magical, indelible images. Posted by E.M.G.
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To read this article online, click 
HUDSON, NEW YORK—
Now available: My essay, "Nostalgia for the Future," about the American painter Stephanie Brody-Lederman, in a limited-edition chapbook published by Ballena Studio. To order a copy, send a check or money order for U.S.A.$6.00 (U.S.A.$7.00 for orders outside the United States) to: Edward M. Gómez, P.O. Box 7339, J.A.F. Station, New York NY 10116-7339 U.S.A.
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My article about an interesting discussion that is now going on in the field of outsider/self-taught artists' art has been published in the February 2011 issue of Art & Antiques. The debate focuses on this question: Should there even be a distinction of categories between art made by academically trained, "professional" artists and art that is created by self-taught art-makers? Here is the complete Art & Antiques article in PDF form. |
My article about the Japanese modern artist Takesada Matsutani, pegged to his recent museum exhibition in Kamakura, Japan, has been published in the May 2010 issue of Art in America. (See my 7 February 2010 "Journal" item, below, for information about this artist and his recent exhibitions in Japan.) Matsutani, who has been based in Paris since the late 1960s, was a member of the so-called second generation of the post-World War II Gutai group of prototypical performance and abstract-expressionist artists in Japan. Here is the complete Art in America article in PDF form. |
My interview with the artist Aurora Robson was published in the October 2009 issue of Art in America. In it, the Brooklyn-based, Canadian creator of paintings and mixed-media collages, and of sculptures made from cast-off plastic bottles, talks about her philosophy of art-making and the techniques she employs. Of special interest: Robson's environmentalist outlook and how she puts her save-the-planet values into practice as an artist and teacher. Read the article here. It's a large PDF. |
