Installation shot: Untitled (I Can See Russia From My House), 2017, 15′ x 10′ x 6′, dye sublimation printed carpet, bolts, washers, lumber.
I’m psyched to announce the public installation of a new work, Untitled (I Can See Russia From My House), in Warrenton, Virginia. It is a dye sublimation print on carpet, mounted on a wood support.
I suppose it could also be installed indoors, but it would lose a lot of the impact; it really is a piece that is best come upon in the course of daily life.
Untitled (I Can See Russia From My House), 2017, washer and bolt installation detail
The carpet is affixed to the support using bolts and washers [above]. Longtime Kremlin watchers will note that the image, of the south facade of St. Basil’s Cathedral, is here reversed.
Although an installation shot from December 2016 shows unrelated works installed nearby. It is the artist’s intention that this piece be viewed and appreciated on its own. Despite what you might assume, it is currently not for sale.
Category: dc
Better Read #013: Modern Art Shackled To Communism, by Congressman George Dondero
The Mellow Pad, 1945-51, by Stuart Davis, co-founder of the American Artists Congress in 1936, image: whitney.org
This edition of Better Read features a speech delivered by Michigan Republican congressman George Donderos on the House floor on Tuesday August 16, 1949 titled, “Modern Art Shackled To Communism.” I came across quotes and excerpts from this speech while researching the American Artists Congress, the group that brought Picasso’s Guernica to the United States for a fundraising tour in 1938.
Dondero made several fiery speeches against modern art during this, the McCarthy era, repeatedly accusing modernism and all its subsidiary “isms” of being a vile foreign-led Communist plot to destroy American art and values.
Near as I can tell, this is the first time Dondero’s complete speech has been available outside the Congressional Record, which turns out to be a lot harder to get ahold of than I expected. I am currently preparing a compilation of all Dondero’s art-related speeches, and the responses they engendered from the accused, the threatened, and even, surprisingly, the nominally allied. Because even I have a hard time listening to a robot for 26 minutes, the complete text of Dondero’s speech is included after the jump.
Download Better_Read_013_Dondero_Communist_Shackles_20170417.mp3 [26:49, 39mb, mp3 via dropbox greg.org]
Continue reading “Better Read #013: Modern Art Shackled To Communism, by Congressman George Dondero”
Remember, Remember, The Grift Of November
The first draft of history. History written by the victors What even is it? The barrage of nonsense comes so fast and thick and is so full of bullshit that the very notion of history feels out of date. Which is probably someone’s point. Or at the very least, in someone’s immediate interest.
Do you even remember the outrage when the Japanese Prime Minister’s Press Office released publicity photos of Shinzo Abe meeting Donald Trump at Trump Tower on November 17th, which revealed that Ivanka and Jared were sitting in on the meeting?
And then like two weeks later, the Times kind of buried the lede that at that very moment, Ivanka’s fashion label was negotiating a licensing deal with a Japanese apparel conglomerate whose majority shareholder is a development bank owned by the Japanese government.
Oh, hands were wrung, potential conflicts of interest were ruminated upon, denials and assurances were floated. And it all turned out to be bullshit, and that was also the same time Jared and Ivanka were in fact preparing to take up offices and jobs in the White House.
So maybe that’s a power of a painting: the ability to slow things down, even just long enough to have an impact, to make something stick, to give some context. It rewards the exercise of looking, looking longer, and looking back.
Campaign Ends April 26th: Our Guernica, After Our Picasso: A Kickstarter
Our Guernica, After Our Picasso: A Kickstarter
I’m not saying we should commission GWB to paint this, but I’m not saying we shouldn’t [deleted twitter url to a pic of angela merkel giving side-eye to ivanka trump at a white house mtg]
— gregorg (@gregorg) March 17, 2017
I swear, I tried not to do it, but the image was too strong. In the days since I started drafting this Kickstarter campaign, I quit several times. And then history kept catching up to this image. In fact, history started lapping it.
So yes, we need to mark this moment, this look on Chancellor Merkel’s face, on all our faces, when it was still possible to not believe what was happening before our eyes. And there’s only one painter who can do this moment justice. Unfortunately, he and justice are not really in a great spot right now, so we’re gonna use #chinesepaintmill and the Thomas Kinkade Editions Pyramid.
Our Guernica, After Our Picasso: collaged details from Michael Kappe/dpa photo, George W. Bush painting, and Picasso’s Guernica
In my darker moods, I imagine a series of paintings of such moments will come- Angelus Novus looking back and piling JPG upon JPG at his feet as the storm irresistibly propels us into the future. Can our brush-wielding Chinese allies capture the essence of Trumpian corruption with authentic Bushian flourish? Can we spread the resulting image(s) to the four corners of the warming, flooding earth to bear adequate witness? Let’s start with one and see.
Back “Our Guernica, After Our Picasso on Kickstarter now
UPDATE #1 After just a couple of days the project has gotten over halfway to its funding goal, thanks!
It has also been the subject of reportage by Will Fenstermaker at Artspace [who is also a backer, write what you know!] and AFC [“that’s a lot of layers to unpack for what’s essentially a meme” I do not disagree!]
On the more depressing news front, today, Day 3, might pass without a single new backer. Perhaps everyone’s too stunned at the floating of #Ivanka2024 by The Daily Caller [not linkin’, look it up], and worrying how a painting can somehow head off this meta-disaster. It probably can’t, but there’s a lot to be done in the mean time.
I’ve also noticed that backers are a savvy bunch. Folks seem to prefer the lower-priced, smaller prints at this stage. Possibly, I thought, because you’re reluctant to put up larger amounts of money for an artwork that you’ve 1) not seen because 2) it doesn’t exist yet.
It might be useful to reframe the entire project as a single conceptual piece, in which case, the physical manifestations are secondary to its core expression. But it’s still natural to wonder how it’ll look, especially if you’re contemplating getting a big one. I’m trying to think up a solution for this. Any advice or thoughts are welcome. And thanks again for spreading the word!
UPDATE #2 WHOA IT IS HAPPENING, THANKS! THE BALL IS ROLLING, THE CAMPAIGN IS CONTINUING. LET’S BUILD THAT PYRAMID AND LAUNCH A WHOLE BUSHMASTER CYCLE OF PAINTINGS TO DOCUMENT THIS THING!
1971: The Year In Andirons
The Vermeil Room in the White House as redecorated by Pat Nixon’s plumbers, photo c.1992, LOC via Phillips-Schrock
The White House needed renovation and redecoration, and the Nixons were determined to put their mark on the place. By 1969, the French interiors commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy were worn from use. Also they were detested by politicals as reminders of a martyred rival. H.R. Haldeman and new White House curator Clement Conger set out on an aggressive fundraising effort to remake the White House and its collections, a campaign publicly led by the First Lady Pat Nixon. The period room-style appearance of the White House to this day largely reflects Mrs Nixon & co’s work.
Based on my Google Books previews of it, this story of “the Dismantling of Camelot” is meticulously told by Patrick Phillips-Schrock in his 2016 book, The Nixon White House Redecoration and Acquisition Program: An Illustrated History.
Vermeil Room a la Boudin, c. 1964, image: whitehousemuseum.org
Phillips-Schrock’s account of the 1971 redecoration of the Vermeil Room on the ground floor of the White House is representative. From a caption of a photo of Boudin’s Kennedy-era design: “The room was expensively finished in painted surfaces in blue and white with vitrines lined in white silk. Conger found it offensively French…” [p.74]
From an interview with Conger: “What we have done in ‘face-lifting’ the Vermeil Room is to change the room from a very dark blue–which is rather depressing–to a light green-gray, the appropriate color as the background for vermeil, which is gold. You use blue with silver, but never such a dark blue!” [p.76]
The room was reconceived as an early 19th century sitting room, with a table at the center “attributed to the workshop of Duncan Phyfe, it was on loan until a donor could be found to purchase it.”
An 18th century lighting fixture in crystal with 10 lights replaced the Kennedy chandelier of bronze and blue tole. Further lighting was supplied by four matching sconces and by two candlesticks given by Mrs. Marjorie Meriwether [sic] Post, which were placed on the mantel. The fine Louis XVI marble fireplace was acquired and installed in 1962. [not too offensively French, I guess. -g.o] Within the firebox were a pair of valuable brass andirons, obtained from Israel Sack of New York. When the room was opened to the public, Conger related, “These are American andirons, so called ‘in the Paul Revere Manner’ with the flame and diamond lozenge–except they are a little more petite and narrow than the heavier ones of this same design one generally sees.” [p. 77]
The andirons abide.
American Andirons in the Vermeil Room, c.2008, image: CSPAN via whitehousemuseum.org
I mention this because I just googled across it. And because 1971 was a busy year for well-provenanced, Paul Revere-ish andirons. It was the same year Mrs. Giles Whiting bequeathed her Paul Revere (Attributed) andirons to the Metropolitan Museum. Interestingly, Mrs. Whiting’s Revere-ian andirons did not have a diamond and flame, but an urn and flame finial. Actually, I don’t know if that’s really interesting at all. Maybe what’s interesting about andirons is not the things themselves, but the complicated narratives into which they are enlisted.
Previously, related: Untitled (Andiron Attributed To Paul Revere Jr.), 2014 [greg.org]
Sforzian Resistance
I confess, when I heard parts of downtown DC were blocked off yesterday morning, my first thought was how this might affect my driving to the National Gallery.
But the composition and placement of this RESIST banner by Greenpeace makes this the most masterful work of art of our new era. Better even than the styrofoam copy cake. Scott Sforza could not have done it better himself.
Better Read #11 – Forrest Bess: The Asteroids (1946)
Forrest Bess, The Asteroids #3, 1946, oil on canvas board, via Phillips Collection
In 2014 the Phillips Collection received eight works by Forrest Bess from Miriam Shapiro Grosof, including a set of four paintings titled, The Asteroids (1946). They depict a dream Bess had, and the ceramist Arlene Shechet has put them on view for the first time as part of her museum-wide project, From Here On Now. [The other Bess paintings can be seen in the (Part 2) video here.] Shechet has made work in response to particular works and spaces at the Phillips, and has reinstalled at least five spaces, to absolutely riveting effect.
Shechet’s ceramic and cast paper sculptures are variously abstract and referential, and are accomplished on their own, but as catalysts for and participants in dialogue with works from the collection, they appear essential. Shechet has chosen and placed extraordinary works, which should be familiar, but which all feel like revelations, in a way that makes the Phillips spring to life. I’d say she should curate the entire museum, but many of the galleries Shechet did not curate also vibrate with unexpected and fascinating paintings of all eras, from Bonnard, to Ryder, to Robert Natkin? Somehow, yes. With a tribute show of the late William Christenberry’s work and Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture prints, I’d say the Phillips is the most unexpectedly awesome show in town right now.
Now on to Bess.
Download Better_Read_011_Forrest_Bess_The_Asteroids_1946.mp3 [dropbox greg.org, 3:10, 4.5mb]
From Here On Now, by Arlene Shechet, runs through March 7, 2017 [phillipscollection.org]
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Untitled (Republican Years), 2017
Untitled (Republican Years), 2017, nine empty jumbo frames, installation photo: @davidnakamura
Pleased is not the right word, but I will announce the installation of a site-specific work, Untitled (Republican Years), in the West Wing of the White House this afternoon.
The title is a reference to a 1992 stack piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Republican Years) (below), to which it bears a resemblance.
Felix’s is, of course, an endless number of prints.
This work consists of nine empty frames for the large, official photos known as “jumbos”, lining a staircase north of the Oval Office. The wall normally contains ten jumbo frames, but one has been removed. Personally, nine still feels like too many. One feels like too many. In any case, tomorrow the work will no longer be on view.
Monday Update: Indeed, the work is gone. [via @davidnakamura]
We The People
Public Art Fund installation, 2014, image: James Ewing via PAF
I have been thinking a lot about [among other things, obviously] context. How much the time, place, history, experience, and state of mind influence our experience with an artwork.
I think of my encounters with Vermeer’s View of Delft, and of reading about Lawrence Wechsler’s crucial visits to Vermeers in The Hague while covering Bosnian war crimes tribunals at the International Criminal Court. Art provides solace, sanity, respite, and sometimes, it makes difficult truths known, quietly and powerfully, to those who seek, sometimes through what Berger calls, “a felt absence.”
A lot of people I see are turning to art for some of these same things right now, trying to grapple with the devastating results of the US presidential election. Which might be nice. But I can’t help thinking of a work I liked immensely, but which now feels all but unbearable.
Fridericianum install shot by Nils Klinger via CAD
The Public Art Fund brought some to New York in 2014, but Danh Vo began showing pieces of We The People, his full-scale replication of the Statue of Liberty, at the Fredericianum in Kassel in 2011. That show’s title, JULY, IV, MDCCLXXVI, came from the tablet in the Statue’s hand.
Oddly, I didn’t remember the press release for the show being this explicit:
the sculpture is dissected into its individual parts and thus abstracted. In his recreation, Vo concentrates on reproducing the thin copper skin (the iron scaffolding supporting the figure is missing), which gives WE THE PEOPLE a special fragility. The broken icon, the destroyed allegorical figure of Libertas, forms a strong counterpoint to the massive materiality.
Maybe it’s the difference between abstraction and reality. Or their collapse into each other. A felt absence.
Untitled (George Washington’s Coffin), 2016 –
I cannot explain how I didn’t catch this when I saw it many months ago, but re-reading Steve Roden’s blog post about his return to painting after a year-long hiatus, this completely floors me:
Recently, I have also been obsessed with a photograph of two seemingly insignificant pieces of wood about the size of the inner part of a closed fist. The photograph appeared in an auction catalog, and I was fascinated to discover that these seemingly ordinary, or pathetic objects were pieces of George Washington’s coffin, and as such, their presence transcends their objectness.
Probably! But right now it is their objectness that I’m obsessed with.
Continue reading “Untitled (George Washington’s Coffin), 2016 –”More Aaron Kuriloff, Please
Aaron Kuriloff, Two Pillows, 1963, image and caption from Walter Hopps’ Boxes catalogue, Dwan Gallery, 1964, image: aaa.si.edu
In his Dwan Gallery catalogue essay, James Meyer calls him “a now-forgotten trader in readymades,” but I recognized Aaron Kuriloff’s name from Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975. Judd reviewed Kuriloff’s April 1964 show at Fischbach Gallery for Arts Magazine. He did not like it, dismissing the artist’s lightly assisted readymades as domestic misfires done better by George Brecht.
Now that I’ve seen some pictures, though, I’m kind of intrigued. For Boxes, the February 1964 group show organized by Dwan Gallery director John Weber, Andy Warhol sent three Brillos and a Heinz Ketchup, scooping the Stable Gallery by a month. And Kuriloff sent Two Pillows, 1963 [above], in which blue ticking-covered pillows were inserted in a blue-painted wood shelf.
No wonder Judd didn’t like it. I bet Haim Steinbach would, though. And Mark Stahl, who had a similarly promising-but-brief career with similarly found objects in the 1980s.
No less than Brian O’Doherty liked Kuriloff’s work, too. He reviewed the Fischbach show for the Times:
Both these shows, one [George Ortman] turning symbols into objects, the other [Kuriloff] objects into symbols, make a new cross‐roads where the traffic is getting heavier –a cross‐roads at which Jasper Johns originally planted his painted flags, breaking our reflex responses to the most loaded of symbols.
I’ll add some more images of Kuriloff’s works from 1963-67, the only period I’ve been able to find so far, and let’s just have a fresh look.
Aaron Kuriloff, Three Switches, 1963, Thibaut Gallery, image via nyt
The Times has at least two other reviews of Kuriloff’s work, both illustrated. In December 1963, he was in “Hard Center,” a group show at Thibaut Gallery organized by Elena and Nicolas Calas. From Brian O’Doherty’s review it sounds like it focused on the recontextualization as art of mass or consumer objects, an early example of Pop getting in formation. And the artist list shows just how far Pop has shifted since: Robert Breer, Nicolas Calas, Kuriloff, Walter de Maria, and Robert Morris. There’s a catalogue out there somewhere.
Aaron Kuriloff, A Laundry Bag, installed in 1965 at The Four Seasons, image: nyt
In 1965 Kuriloff is mentioned in a benefit sale/exhibition held at the Four Seasons. It seems kind of a mess, frankly, and the Times report doesn’t do it much justice, just sneering at now-acclimated art audiences not rioting over Pop Art. Kuriloff’s A Laundry Bag was just that, mounted against a green background, with a label, Erased de Kooning Drawing-style. Priced at $500 for mental health charity, it’s not clear if it sold.
Regarding Camille Henrot’s Elephant Child, A Book
It is not clear how the Oracle at Delphi worked. One day a month, except in winter, the priestess, known as Pythia, entered a sacred chamber, perched on a gilded tripod, peered into a bowl of water from an enchanted spring and, imbued by mystical vapors with the *enthusiasmos*, or divine spirit, of Apollo, she answered the urgent questions of the faithful. The Oracle was the most powerful public figure in the Ancient Greek world. No military or public policy decision was made without consulting her, and she was always right; any unwanted outcomes were attributed to mortals’ failure to properly interpret or follow the Oracle’s predictions. Centuries of Pythian pronouncements are recorded. For a long time they were in iambic pentameter. Then they switched to prose. Some accounts had a lucid, forceful Pythia dropping these pure rhymes herself. In others, the possessed priestess’ utterings seemed incomprehensible to all but her handlers, a coterie of priests known as the *hosioi* who, one would say, translated the prophecies.
*Elephant Child* is a book about Camille Henrot’s 2014-15 exhibition “The Pale Fox”. Very much like *Grosse Fatigue*, Henrot’s extraordinary video from the 2013 Venice Biennale, it explores humans’ attempts to understand the universe, and it marvels at the structures this inevitably impossible effort yields. It here can refer to either the book, or the exhibition. Henrot suggested thinking of *Grosse Fatigue* as a history and “The Pale Fox” as a geography, which I guess makes *Elephant Child* a map. They are three incarnations of Henrot’s universal narrative, all in one, one in all, a trinity.
Literally. Many screenshots from *Grosse Fatigue* are woven throughout the book, as is the video’s lyrical poem, performed by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh and created in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg. Ideas and references from *Grosse Fatigue* also abound, particularly Henrot’s foundational experience as an artist fellow at the Smithsonian, where she captured traces of the museum’s conflicted histories through taxonomy, evolution, colonialism, anthropology, and religion.
*Elephant Child* begins by holding up a compelling example of what we should be more cautious of calling an origin myth. The Dogon people of Western Africa tell of Amma, who created the universe, his twin, by drawing. The chaotic eighth of their four pairs of twin offspring rebelled, bringing disorder to the universe, but also creativity. He was Ogo, The Pale Fox. Henrot eagerly mined this cosmology for motifs that recur across origin myths-eggs, twins, recursion, primordial drawings-even as she acknowledges its credulous source: a blind Dogon hunter named Ogotemmeli, who reportedly wound out the tale during a long conversation with two white French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who published it as a book in 1965. The book was called *The Pale Fox*.
In its function as an exhibition map, *Elephant Child* traces Henrot’s process of identifying structures, and then translating them into schema. The intersection, or collision, of various schema produce the conditions under which the exhibition takes shape. As Henrot said in an interview, that is mentioned in, but does not appear in, *Elephant Child*,
I found it interesting to liken the elements related to the different phylogenies of living beings to the organizational systems of James Joyce’s *Ulysses*. When Joyce wrote *Ulysses*, he had organized systems in which a literary style corresponded to a color corresponded to a theme corresponded to a bodily organ. This over-systematization creates freedom, as categories can be understood together as a group or structure that permits arbitrariness. I wanted my exhibition to have this same freedom.
And so Henrot lays four chronological stages intuited from Leibniz onto the cardinal points of a compass in a rectangular gallery-a shape representing man, for God is a circle. The walls and floor are painted chromakey blue and encircled by an undulating, sculptural shelf, suggesting a timeline, of polished aluminum, which is piled with metaphorically resonant objects and images:
There are photos of my family and photos I bought on ebay…and there are different kinds of magazines, advertisements, leaflets, things I picked up in the street, things I bought. The images and the objects have very different statuses…I chose lots of embarrassing objects, because I wanted to focus on clutter-all the objects that you don’t know what to do with, but you don’t dare throw out.
What did not occur to me until I got to the very end of the book, and only then because I’d just seen one appear at auction, is that among these hundreds of objects are Henrot’s own works of art. This category is mentioned once in Scepanski’s intro, and nowhere else, until you get to a checklist of works, which turn out to be the only objects mapped onto the show’s schema. Rather than a *gesamtkunstwerk*, then, Henrot’s show, and its elaborate conceptual confabulations, are a context, a framing, for the production and presentation of her own art. Which here includes dozens of Zen-ish ink drawings that approximate Amma’s generative marks, and bronzes that echo either exoticized artifacts or postwar desktop abstraction. None of which is ever discussed.
Or maybe it is.
Maybe this book not only maps the arbitrary folly of inevitably subjective systematization that gave the show its premise; it instantiates it. It’s its own recursive cautionary tale, a *Gödel, Escher, Bach* of Henrotian Systems Theory, and turtles all the way down as practice. And the art is the result.
Henrot is trying to be the fun, free, arbitrary elegance she wants to see in the chaotic world she consciously over-systematized to the point of collapse.
The only place I’ve seen Henrot discussing her art per se is an interview with Rachael Vance last winter during the fifth and final installation of “The Pale Fox”.
[CH] I spend a lot of time looking at the objects on my desk. Also, when I go to the doctor I am fascinated by what they have in their waiting rooms, on their desks, and the way these things are placed. The objects are supposed to represent power but they are also ridiculous. More often than not, the doctor will have one of those huge tape dispensers, which just look so silly. Every time I see them, I always think:
“Why would you have a tape holder that takes up all this room? Wouldn’t it be more elegant to have a small tape in your drawer? And wouldn’t it be even more elegant to just do everything on your iPad?” One day perhaps things like that won’t exist anymore, who knows. Most of the bronzes in “The Pale Fox” were conceived out of this process in which we try to introduce rationality to something that is fundamentally irrational.
…
[RV] Compared to the rest of your material in “The Pale Fox”, your sculptures stand alone as very substantial yet quiet pieces. Do they represent some sort of therapy for you?
[CH] It’s true that they have a very different energy from the rest of my work. When I think about the exhibition, I think that energy came from a sense of anxiety. However, the sculptures came from a more playful and distant part of myself. When I start making a sculpture and stop having fun, I stop making the sculpture and move onto another one. In a way, there is this part of my work that is very disciplined and almost masochistic. The whole process of buying five hundred items on eBay and doing these charts and maps and studying them is a little mad. Just making the list for the exhibition was a headache. It was the same with *Grosse Fatigue*, writing the voice-over was such a long process. Editing the images was a nightmare and my assistant and I became really sick. There was a super-long list of different footage lines because there were more than 25 images running simultaneously. It was really crazy, but I guess I’m driven by this idea of going mad by trying to produce the impossible project.
The actual genesis of “The Pale Fox” is not clear, but it appears to follow (from) *Grosse Fatigue* and its success. The screenshots in the book show most of the ebay photos shipping in November 2013. Most of the sculptures date from 2014. So this kind of object making seems relatively new for Henrot, who previously favored film and had been skeptical of the artist label.
It is probably speciously late of me to note Michael Connor’s explanation from the preface that the main text of *Elephant Child* was “initially narrated by Camille to curator Clara Meister over a period of several days.” It is an “intellectual framework,” a “set of ideas as carefully crafted as any of her works,” that also comprised, on Connors’ part, “a certain amount of panic” and “scissors and tape.” In her introduction Westphälischer Kunstverein curator Kristina Scepanski credits Meister and Connor as co-authors of Henrot’s text. All three, along with Bromberg, are also the book’s co-editors.
I did not see any installations of “The Pale Fox” in person, but like so many others, I was utterly transfixed by *Grosse Fatigue* and remain so. It remains a remarkable, ambitious, challenging, and beautiful work, and I continue to marvel at its making. *Elephant Child* communicates that essence-and much of the content-in book form. But it also captures the multitude of overlapping systems and the many talented people assembling in the wake of Henrot’s triumphant Venice debut. It documents at least a part of the structure that grows around an artist to sustain a career, or a practice, that might, one hopes, survive the chaos that yields such works again. And if a crowd of *hosioi* decrypting Henrot’s pronouncements and wan ink drawings and elegant bronze pleasure objects are what it takes, then so be it.
Buy *Elephant Child* from Inventory Press, or on Amazon [inventorypress.com]
Order from Chaos: Interview with Camille Henrot [sleek-mag]
Tantas Sombras
Teresa Margolles’ La Sombra, installed at Echo Park Lake, photo: Carolina Miranda/LAT
Teresa Margolles has contributed a memorial to Current: LA Water, the “public art biennial,” which started last week. La Sombra (The Shade) is near Echo Park Lake and looks to be the most significant and prominent work in the program, which runs, incredibly, for less than a month.
La Sombra is a six meter-high…pavilion? Awning? Structure? In her onsite report for the LA Times, Carolina Miranda calls it an installation, a memorial, and a monument. It looks like it’s made of concrete, but if it’s going to disappear in a couple of weeks, I suspect it’s gunnite or stucco sprayed on a plywood box.
Which hurts. Margolles created La Sombra as a memorial to 100 Los Angelenos murdered with guns in the last 18 months. The sites of these killings were visited, washed, and the water re-collected for use in mixing the concrete. This circulatory element echoes Margolles’ previous works which incorporate the water used to wash corpses in the morgue in her home city of Juarez.
La Sombra is a stark, powerful form that draws people to it, especially on a hot, sunny day. In this way, perhaps, the deaths of these hundred people might yield some comfort to the living. Maybe family and friends can come sit under it. Maybe people will be motivated to act against gun-related violence.
“I wanted [La Sombra] to be on the scale of what has happened,” says Margolles in the Times. “I wanted it to have presence.”
Donald Judd, One of 15 Untitled Works in Concrete, 1980-84, 2.5m x 2.5m x 5m, Chinati Foundation, image via wiki
The scale and presence of La Sombra are indeed notable. It seems quite large. It looks like it could be concrete-Judd-in-Marfa-fields-size, but it is actually 4x that. It has an architectural presence and is not slight. It feels like about the right scale for 100 people. Maybe it is even the size of 100 people standing within it, I don’t know.
Memorials use scale to convey their meaning. Some memorials, like for the people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing and the AA77 crash at the Pentagon, use a cemetery-like field of individual-scale objects-chairs and benches, respectively-to represent the dead. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the World Trade Center Memorial, meanwhile, incorporate individual names into a larger, holistic experience of loss. nodding to a larger, shared sense of mourning, of a community, a nation. It really depends on the scale of death, whether it is thousands (58,195 or 2,977), hundreds (168 or 184), or one.
By remembering 100 otherwise unrelated deaths with one La Sombra, Margolles appears to have found a new scale for memorialization: a memorial unit that modulates between societal tragedy and individual loss. [I just remembered that the Pentagon Memorial actually called the benches “memorial units”.]
There were not just 100 people killed in LA with guns in the 18 months Margolles bracketed; there were 975. Even if it was just because of the prohibitive the logistics of washing down all those murder sites, the artist knew her temporary memorial alone could not account for that “scale of what has happened.” She’d need nine more La Sombras, just in LA. With an average of 55 people being killed each month, that’s another La Sombras every two months.
Imagine these 3-meter tall Judd concrete sculptures at Chinati are actually 6-meter tall Margolles La Sombras, each commemorating 100 people killed with guns. image: chinati.org
And now scale them up. There are 30,000 gun deaths in the US-half a Vietnam War or ten September 11ths-each year. Margolles’ La Sombra could be the optimal form and size for memorializing the people killed by gun violence across the country. But some details would need to be worked out. How far back in time do we go? We could need thousands of La Sombras right from the start. Seems impractical, at least at first.
Where should they be placed? Do we combine them all into one sprawling site, like an AIDS Quilt of concrete, an ever-growing Holocaust Memorial for a slaughter we refuse to stop? I think a La Sombra site could take into account the hundred people it memorializes within a city or perhaps a state, without getting too granular with your data; you wouldn’t want them to pile up and stigmatize a neighborhood, though having a few together could totally work.
Spread them out at least a bit. Though maybe a city or state could decide to stack them up in a public space, magnify their presence, so the absence of the dead can’t be ignored. Of course, you’d also want to avoid gamifying them, having them treated as kills to be racked up by violent forces in society, or even just a run-of-the-mill gun-toting psychokiller. They need to stay present in the landscape, but also just ominous and uncomfortable enough to prick the consciences of we who remain.
An artist’s imposing new monument at Echo Park Lake honors Angelenos killed in violent crimes [latimes]
Current: LA Water, LA’s Public Art Biennial, runs through August 14. [currentla.org]
“Untitled” (Republican Years)
“Untitled” (Republican Years), 1992
“Untitled” (NRA), 1991, collection: Astrup Fearnley Museet
25 years of this.
Charles Green Shaw’s Wrigley’s
Wrigley’s, 1937, Charles Green Shaw, Art Institute of Chicago, image: poulwebb
The banner on J.S. Marcus’s WSJ story about American painting in the 1930s is Charles Green Shaw’s Wrigley’s, which is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. Also, it is awesome.
With its unafraid abstraction mixed with proto-Pop, it reminds me of Gerald Murphy’s paintings from the 1920s. Shaw and Murphy both enjoyed privileged, Manhattan-based, continental lifestyles that involved painting, and according to Adam Weinberg’s 1997 exhibition brochure, they were friends in Europe.
But his AAA history doesn’t mention Murphy at all. Shaw didn’t get into abstraction until he came back to New York, well after Murphy stopped painting. And Shaw doesn’t seem to have been very involved in the artist community of New York in the 30s, despite having a couple of gallery shows, and being on some committees at The Modern. He was more a writer.
Which makes it tricky to gauge the quality/influence/familiarity of his work. It’s nice, some of it, like Wrigley’s, even looks great, but it doesn’t seem to have been important or impactful. The historical upside is limited, is how it feels. This, even though he was apparently friends with Ad Reinhardt. I guess it’s complicated?
Still, it’s good to see this photo of a pack of gum sitting on a postcard, which looks like source material for the painting. It’s among the digitized collection of Shaw’s papers at the Archives of American Art. As the larger version of the image so ably informs us:
Maybe it’s hard to put an emphasis on Shaw’s painting because he had so much else going on. He wrote for the New Yorker, did slim books of verse, cranked out some children’s books, took photographs.
Charles Green Shaw, photo of NYC harness store, c.1940s?, collection aaa.si.edu
We might call Shaw an artist fluent in multiple mediums today, but his is the kind of peripatetic practice that we’re conditioned to look askance at when we see it in the past. Or maybe it feels like he did not take much of anything seriously, except for mixing drinks. Maybe it’s because he was rich and a “bachelor” in a time and art world where that didn’t help?
I don’t really know, but I like the work.
Oh here we go. In 2007 Roberta Smith also called him peripatetic and wondered, more clearly than I, about his legacy. His group of well-heeled colleagues, the American Abstract Artists, who were abstract when abstraction was un-American, “were often called — and not always benignly — the Park Avenue Cubists.”
When he died in 1974, Shaw left his art to a surprised friend, the collector Charles H. Carpenter, who became its posthumous shepherd. A bunch of paintings went to the Whitney, and the Art Institute bought Wrigley’s. And apparently, he’s been an overlooked American minor master ever since.
Charles Green Shaw papers [aaa.si.edu]
Charles G. Shaw’s artist page at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery [michaelrosenfeldart]
[nyt]