Seduced at the Barbican?

The Barbican’s new show ‘Seduced’, takes us through the history of sex in art beginning with a range of classical and ancient Chinese and Japanese art, and ending with today’s practising artists from around the globe. Not once does the content seem to hesitate or hide under the pretence of innocence and naivety of what it is dealing with, thus giving it a very matter-of-fact feel even when it comes to the more extreme images such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of anal fisting.

The educational stance the exhibition takes (despite being filled with oversized phalluses and raw images of vaginas), which is by no means accidental, gives the subject matter a mature and intellectual view of what it really is. It is precisely this that leaves us taken aback – the non-allowance of giggles or disgust. This is because the curators Marina Wallace, Joanne Berstein and Martin Kemp chose works from some of history’s most respected artists who undermine the fantastical side of sex by showing it either as humorous, purely physical and obscene or beautiful and emotional.

Being uncensored is exactly the point - it begs to differentiate art from pornography. One is forced to wonder that what might have once been considered porn is now re-evaluated (largely due to the existence of photography and film) and looked upon as art - the idea of which is precisely delineated by artist Jeff Koons in his enlarged, surreal photographs of his ex-wife and porn star Ilona Staller.

It seems ironic though, how the curators appear to be stressing the point that these works are in fact art, not pornography, and should be viewed as such - yet they have made it an over 18’s exhibit only. Though the age restriction might add to its appeal, in an age in which pornography is widely available to the under-aged, it only serves to contradict the concept on which the exhibition is founded. Or perhaps this was a deliberate move to inspire further debate on what the fine line between art and pornography is, and where it is drawn.

However the works do not fail to fascinate in that they offer such a broad scope of sexual fantasies and realities and often touch on the animalistic and natural aspect of sex, explored in works such as Nobuyoshi Araki’s photographs of cut up fruit and snails on unfathomable body parts.

In taking us through the history of sex in art, we are forced to recognize how utterly undividable sex is from our nature and moreover, our day to day lives. The choice of artists to prove this point was an excellent one, and their recognition as professionals serve to aid us in our understanding that though throughout the ages sexual art has been censored or available only to the select few, it has always been a prominent theme for artists, both well-known and unknown – and continues to be so.

Louise Bourgeois' Trauma'?

It is probably more appropriate to say that the ninety-five year old female artist’s work is currently on display at the Tate Modern, rather than to say that her life is on display, but I am unsure as to which is most accurate. Of course her work is intended to be autobiographical, once inside the exhibition you cannot escape that fact. I felt as though I’d just walked into some strange nightmare in which memories take on the form of darkly psychedelic objects.

Her obsession with her past is undeniable, and for a brief moment she is able to draw you into it. I was curious to find out what had made her so angry, and why exactly the word ‘trauma’ was written in every corner possible inside the exhibition, but I have to say I was sorely disappointed to understand that it was merely that her father had invited his mistress to live with them and be tutor to Louise and her siblings. Ah yes, the Oedipal complex all over again. I was immediately bored, how many times have we heard a story about a man having an affair with the live in maid/governess/whatever and the child’s confusion at the situation? Surely there was a more disturbing trauma behind all these tits and willies. One gets the feeling therefore, that she has realized the power behind the ‘oedipal’ qualities of her work, and has since sucked as much out of it as she could.

She is also inconsistent. She says that it is not the penis she dislikes, but the bearer of the penis. This is all fine and dandy, but then why is there a bodiless penis hung from a hook in the ceiling? It seems she doesn’t really know in which direction to point her anger, towards only her father or towards all men in general? Her work speaks contrarily to what she says.

On the other hand, one interesting thing about her work is that she recognizes that both men and women share feminine and masculine qualities, and she quite openly if not unconsciously expresses a degree of penis envy, which in today’s modern society is something most ambitious women can relate to.

Another issue that irritated me about her exhibition was why should we be so concerned with this woman’s history? Especially when it does so little to enlighten us on issues surrounding trauma. The theory of the Oedipal complex has already been offered to us by Freud, and we all seem to accept it as a truth, so there really is nothing that distinguishes Bourgeois from the rest of us other than her obsession with it, and there is nothing new we can learn from her work. It serves simply as a confirmation of Freud’s theories, so why all the fuss over it?

In my opinion, Bourgeois shows nothing else of herself but a woman from a wealthy background who has nothing else to complain about other than daddy’s sex drive and his supposed tyrannical personality. But in all honesty, how many of us have not had a fallible, overbearing parent?

One would have thought that by now she would have dealt with her past ‘traumas’ and moved on to something different… she is ninety five years old, after all. It saddened me to be confronted with a woman who cannot seem to look past herself.

Seeing through blinding light

She cast her sceptical eye over the hands with no bodies as they traced the glass walls of the large box. ‘Is this art?’ she asked herself. In a world where art has no definition, where life itself appears not to, she was at once confused and lost. Could she decide whether or not it was a worthy work of art before she’d been through the experience awaiting her in the box, as she tended to before every art exhibit? She desperately longed to disengage herself from it all and throw into the wind all of her own desire to be an artist. ‘There was no point’, she thought, ‘it’s all nonsense’. Terrified of herself and her ambition, but most of all, the prospect of failing, she wanted to reject everything that might open her mind and make her better than she was. It was a never ending conflict between what she was and what she frantically didn’t want to be.

Finally the queue in front her disappeared inside the box and she was allowed in. She approached the mist cautiously, and saw her limbs slowly dissipate into the white cloud. A sudden chill shuddered through her body, as though to remind her that it was still connected with her. She could see nothing in front of herself. Everything was white, and it felt for a moment that she was entering the gates of heaven.

Bodiless voices called each other and giggled nervously all around her, and suddenly she felt utterly alone. In this claustrophobic box everything material ceased to exist, everything that had guided her through life was irrelevant. All that was left was the desire to get out, to retrieve control of the one sense she so heavily depended upon – her sight. But something urged her to stay. It was as though there was something within the mist that urgently needed discovering.

It came to her in a silent bang. ‘There is no point in trying to get out, the haze is everything you are and everything life is'. To find the exit so quickly would be a reflection of the solution to every problem she had ever faced. It struck her at that moment as entirely repulsive and cowardly. 'I will stay here and face it', she told herself. Sometimes one needs to be suffocated from the vision of reality in order to truly gain perspective of it. This is what the mist seemed to be whispering. ‘All our paranoia, all our fears are hysterical. Our society is hysterical. We are all hysterical beings thrown into a haze of confusion, and it is this essential buzzing fear that unites us but at the same time ultimately divides us’. She knew at that second that the only way she would ever manage is by embracing her fear and in a way use it to gain perspective of the positive in the world.

At last she decided it was time for her to leave. At the exit she was confronted by her friend who asked her how she found it. She replied that it was ‘alright’. She offered no explanation as to why she considered it merely so but it seemed unfair that one was allowed a few minutes of clarity and relief from the real world when you had only to return to it a moment later. You see, when her vision was returned to her and she was faced with the ugliness that surrounded, it was impossible to put to use anything that she had just learnt. Perspective, it seemed, was momentary, and though those moments came to be sacrosanct to her, they offered no solution to true existence. She was left with many questions, and few answers. Such was life, she thought, and headed home filled with the comfort of knowing that sometimes answers to life and ambition are in a practical sense, useless.

Artists catch head lice for show

Seven German artists are living with lice in their hair in an Israeli museum for three weeks in the name of art.

The Berliners aim to stretch boundaries of what is art, saying they are toying with ideas about hosts and guests in line with a theme set by the museum.

"The idea is that we live in the museum as their guests, and at the same time we are hosting lice on our heads," said artist Vincent Grunwald, 23.

The artists are wearing shower caps to prevent the lice from spreading.

Milana Gitzin-Adiram, chief curator of the Museum of Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, said: "Art is no longer just a painting on the wall.

"Art is life, life is art."

'Open up wounds'

She said she spent weeks exploring the gallery's theme of "hosting", turning to philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and the Bible for inspiration.

But after receiving proposals from around the world, she decided to choose the head lice.

But artists also stressed the show was not meant to be a reference to the Holocaust.

"We were aware that, as Germans in Israel, there was a risk we may be misunderstood, that we would open up wounds," said Stefan Reuter, 27.

The exhibition has the potential to cause controversy in Germany, where the mention of lice could prompt memories of Nazi propaganda that described Jews as "parasites."

Not a 'gimmick'

"People ask about it - we had one woman who came and thanked us for making such a great statement against the fascist rhetoric of German history," Reuter said.

He and his fellow artists said the exhibition offered the chance to explore the concept of the parasite and to ask whether the word could be "reclaimed" in Israel.

The group acknowledged that living with lice was uncomfortable, but said it was worth it for the sake of art, and insisted it was not a gimmick.

"We are serious," said Akim One Machine-Tu Nyuyen. "The lice are part of the art."

Other controversial artworks have included last year's Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger, who also made a film called Sleeper in which he dressed as a bear and wandered around Berlin's National Gallery.

And an Australian performer, Stelios Arcadiou, also garnered attention when he had an ear grafted onto his forearm in the name of art in 2007. He said his extra ear, made of human cartilage, was an augmentation of the body's form.

(taken from BBC)

Words and Concept

Art used to be (and in some cases still is) all about the image. Francis Bacon's work was all about the sensation. He said that he wanted the images he painted to create a feeling before they created a story. In this way the person is forced to spend time engaging with the art and figuring out for himself the story within only after he has emotionally reacted to it. Not at any point did words play part in explaining it - one has adjectives to describe the work, but not explain it.
It seems these days that art is no longer a language in itself, devoid of words. Conceptual art has inevitably formed a relationship with spoken and written language required and used by the artist in order to ensure his work is understood, so the verbal explanation and the visual piece come together as a single, complete package.
Why? Because the artist has become a lazy creature. What happened to years of training oneself to speak with images? What happened to a lifetime's dedication and devotion to the better understanding of the language of the picture? Cézanne, Van Gogh, Paula Rego, Lucien Freud, Rodin etc. etc. didn't waste their time talking endlessly about what they were trying to achieve without actually attempting to achieve it.

I remember when I was still in school an artist was commissioned to make a sculpture/installation to put in the main hall. It was an awkward piece: wooden boards jutting out at weird angles with paintings of miniature people and scenes all over it. The artist came in to talk about it, and he spoke for the better part of an hour about how it was autobiographical, and then went on to explain all the little stories he'd depicted. It was really tedious, a complete waste of our time. But it turned out he'd been doing this all over the country, his work and his live talks about them were part of the same package. My history of art teacher mumbled something about what a scam it was and left half way through. Touché.

Somewhere along the way verbal explanations have come to be required, and no longer by the art critic, but by the artist himself. Surely if the work requires this, it's not achieved its goal? It's like an architect standing outside his building explaining all the interior spacial arrangements to people before they're allowed inside.

Artist vs. The Maker

Artist vs Maker, Part 2

January 9, 2008 in Aesthetics, Art Making, Art/Life, Current viewing, Museums, Seeing, The "Art World", What Art Can Do | 1 comment

In one way or another, contemporary artists have been handing off the actual making-of part for years. Who would expect Richard Serra to hand-install one of his thousand-ton steel sculptures, or for Christo and Jeanne-Claude to be out in Central Park hanging the 23 miles of nylon panels that made up “The Gates”?

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gates in Central Park

But when viewing more intimate works, especially sculpture and painting, part of the appeal has always been standing in the presence of the unique hand of the artist. Vincent van Gogh spent years developing the swirling technique that would define his dramatic wheatfield oil works in Saint-Rémy. Jackson Pollock took pride in his “action painting,” sometimes poking holes in paint cans to create a delicious stream, sometimes picking up a turkey baster to put on the finishing touches.

The intensely personal feel in a van Gogh, Pollock, or Picasso may be part of why works of the artists can fetch millions on the auction market, and reliably draw millions of visitors to museums to see the paintings in person.

Though that understanding of art may still drive individual viewers, it’s not so current in the art world. As far back as 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed “R. Mutt” to “Fountain,” a urinal meant to signal his move away from painting into Dada-inspired provocations. In the 1960s, the movement called “conceptualism” came into its own: An artwork could be a barricade of oil barrels blocking a Parisian street, or pages of a book chewed up, dissolved in acid, and then “poured” into bottles to be sent back to a library. What did it matter who did the chewing? Suddenly, the idea was more important than the creation of it.

Duchamp, Fountain

John Baldessari, a pioneer of conceptual art, trained as a painter and earned a degree in art, but in 1968 held a cremation in which he burned all his paintings as a way of holding himself to his new plan: to stop using technique and commit to the maxim that the idea is everything. These days, he has a handful of assistants to help create his collages, videos, and other conceptual works. In addition, some pieces - prints more than 60 inches wide, all framing - are “jobbed out” completely and done elsewhere.
“It’s delegation,” says Baldessari, 76. “An architect is a classic example. He doesn’t have to build a house. A composer doesn’t always have to conduct his work so why should an artist?”

Some artists have built entire careers on this concept. Sol LeWitt, though trained as a conventional artist, began to recruit teams of installers to create “his” pencil drawings, obsessively detailed works done on gallery walls, and then removed. The team approach became part of what viewers appreciated in a LeWitt work - and makes possible the curious exhibit being mounted later this year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. LeWitt died at age 78 last year, but the show goes on: close to 40 trained installers will spend six months creating nearly a half-mile of his penciled and painted wall drawings. It will be the largest-ever LeWitt show featuring these works - and will be created entirely posthumously.

LeWitt, wall installation

“I think he was very interested in the notion that the idea itself could carry great power,” explains Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, which is collaborating with Mass MoCA on the $9 million project. “If he showed the idea to others, people would enthusiastically enjoy participating in that experience.”

But artists such as LeWitt and Baldessari make the gap between “artist” and “maker” part of the fun of the work. That’s not the case with Donovan, Sherman, or Finch. Creating “Untitled (Pins)” is not some kind of social gathering. It is business carried out by an installer who pours the pins into a mold, and then removes that mold to leave the cube.

For Donovan, having another person create her pin sculpture is not a statement. It’s practical.

“If I installed everything, I would never be in my studio,” says Donovan in a recent phone interview. “I’d be following everything around all the time.”

Donovan created the first cubes by her own hands a decade ago while experimenting in her studio. But now, whether you’re a collector buying one through one of her galleries or a museum - the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego has a pin cube - you’re expected to assemble it on your own. Donovan does send instructions.

She believes that her work is done before a sculpture is seen by the public.

“I’m the one in the studio making these discoveries,” says Donovan, who will be the subject of a one-person show at the ICA next year. “But because of the nature of my work, I can pass off some of the labor to others. I’m more interested in developing the phenomenological aspects of the material. Once that’s done, my part is done.”

There is disagreement about this premise.

Maine-based John Bisbee makes sculptures using nails and spikes. He knows Donovan’s work, and long admired her - until he had heard she stopped making her own art.

Bisbee, whose 20-year retrospective opens in January at the Portland Museum of Art, says he knows that curators and gallery owners don’t mind when artists delegate.

“It’s more production, more shows, more money,” he says. “I’ve got to be honest. I fantasize about it. I’ve got more ideas than my hand can do. But for me, art is about what one person can do, from conception to completion.”

On a recent Sunday morning at the ICA, a woman circled Donovan’s cube of pins. Charlotte Sullivan, a 23-year-old artist in Athol, crouched at one point to examine it more closely.

“I wonder about how it came to be here,” Sullivan said when asked what she was thinking. “I think a lot about the process. Is it solid pins all the way through? Is it important for her to make it herself or did it come with instructions?”
Told the answer, Sullivan admitted she was disappointed.

“I’m not really sure it’s a successful piece of work,” she said. “I would feel closer to feeling it was if I knew she had built it. I would know her hand and time were connected to this because I don’t think you know unless you do it.”

In a sense, this approach to art simply takes us back to Rubens’s time, when a workshop of assistants and apprentices did much of the painting for distinguished artists, with the master guiding the work at the top level. Only now, the “assistants” are museum workers and gallery workers.

Then, as now, art was not just a calling but also a business. If anything has changed, it’s that today you don’t need to be a Rubens or LeWitt to offload the work. You can be Tara Donovan, just 38 and on the cusp, but certainly not a household name.
But this also means that Donovan, an artist praised by serious art-world types, has something in common with Thomas Kinkade, the QVC-selling “painter of light” who has never been taken seriously by art collectors, but has built huge success on an empire of “official” reproductions.

Donovan says she’s sold about three dozen cubes of different sizes and materials. (”Toothpicks” sold for $45,600 last year.) She notes that it doesn’t matter who you are, a museum or a collector: The piece comes with a set of instructions.

So what, she was asked, would stand in the way of somebody who wanted to save money by creating a pin cube without paying the artist?

“They could, but they won’t own a Tara Donovan,” she says. “Unless you own a certificate along with that work, you don’t own my work.”

Geoff Edgers
The Boston Globe

Art Critic Crisis (article from the guardian)

Art Critic Crisis

Damien Hirst’s diamond skull

You can whack them with a shovel. You can shoot them, poison, stab or throttle them. You can threaten their families and you can hound them in the press; you can put them down any way you like, but some artists refuse to stay down. What does this tell us? That artists are the undead? Or, worse, that criticism is in crisis?

At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. Wherever critics are paid to gather (you wouldn’t catch us in the same room otherwise), they go on about the crisis. These debates have become an occupational hazard - but they also pay well. If I had known there was money in it, I would have invented a crisis myself.

At Art Basel in Miami Beach last December, just as we were about to go out and perform on the imminent death of criticism and to answer such questions as “What is art criticism today and why is it relevant?” and “Is money the new art criticism?”, the Las Vegas-based critic Dave Hickey said he felt like Donald Duck at the Last Supper. Being Donald Duck is at least livelier than being a dinosaur, drowning in a dismal swamp. There is indeed something faintly ludicrous in sitting around at an art fair talking about criticism. Never has the art market been stronger. Never has money been so powerful. Never have so many artists got so rich, and never has there been such alarming stuff on sale. Never have critics felt so out of the loop.

People blame all the money sluicing round the art world. They blame the internet and the rise of the blogger. They blame the dumbing-down of newspapers and the replacement of criticism with the sparkling, if vapid, preview featurette, and the artist-as-celebrity photo opportunity profile. Who cares about the art or the concepts?…

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine, has complained: “At no time in the last 50 years has what an art critic writes had less effect on the market than now.” Whatever he writes, Saltz believes, has no effect. Might as well shrug and walk away. I just wonder why a critic even cares that their writing has such a negligible influence on the market. Although there has been a certain pleasure, on one or two occasions, in making Charles Saatchi stupendously angry, I couldn’t care less if collectors pay any attention to me or not.

Some critics think that the fact that there’s so much bad art around means that it is a great time to be writing about art, which is like saying that because of the plague, what a great time the 14th century was to be an undertaker. Critics aren’t doctors. We can’t fix things. We are not here to tell artists what to do. They wouldn’t listen anyway. Maybe the word criticism has become part of the problem. Or the problem is that we are asking the wrong thing of the critic: critics are not the painting police nor the sculpture Swat team, not market regulators nor upholders of eternal values (there aren’t any). Those who think they have a role to play in this regard are as jumped up as they are unreadable. Criticism might blow the whistle on overhyped art, flabby curating, moribund institutions or the odd fly-blown administrator, but that is because you cannot divorce art from its context.

Being iconoclastic, slagging off artists and institutions, gets a critic noticed. Anger, undeniably, is also a good motive for writing in the first place. Controversy, the smell of blood, the whiff of scandal - this makes careers. It also sells newspapers and magazines. Of course it is the duty of the critic to be iconoclastic, and to be reckless; but critical terrorism is no good as a long-term strategy. It becomes predictable, and the adrenaline buzz soon wears off. It is also disingenuous, and ultimately a false position. There is such a thing as bad faith, and lousy opinions.

Getting things wholly wrong is also a critical prerogative. But, again, it is no good just turning up with a lot of fixed opinions and then complaining that the art doesn’t measure up to your impossible requirements and unassailable prejudices. Some critics make you wish you didn’t like art at all.

The Guardiann