Courage: "An Open Letter from an Artist to a Mexican Crime Cartel Boss"

"Do you ever feel sorry and secretly cry? Do you sometimes look at yourself in the mirror and feel embarrassed or angry? Do you really believe that Jesus Malverde, St. Judas Tadeo and the Holy Death are protecting you? Are you willing to pay the huge price of putting your relatives and friends at risk for a relatively short life of power, sex and glamour? Do the movies and soap operas that you inspire make the daily risks worthwhile? Don’t you ever wonder if creating a truce with other cartels might actually be beneficial to you and to the whole country? Am I naïve for asking these questions?"

Photograph © Michael Macor / The Chronicle.

At In These Times this week you can find this courageous open letter by performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. In his letter Gómez-Peña addresses the performative dimensions of the violence and mayhem that the drug cartels generate. The passage I've lifted above contains a series of hardly naive questions. Unfortunately, the answer to each is very likely not those Gómez-Peña would like. And I fear that he has placed his well-being in jeopardy by speaking out.

Passings: Jack Levine (1915-2010)

American painter Jack Levine has died. You can find an obituary here in The New York Times. Levine, according to the Times, was adept at 'skewering plutocrats.' His work on the painting I've lifted here - entitled the "Feast of Pure Reason" (1937) - was funded by the WPA. Imagine the government today funding artists to depict the 'patriotic' intimacies that exist between police, politicians and capitalists! In discussions of the economic stimulus spending program there was lots of talk about 'shovel ready' construction projects. No one thought to mention the plethora of 'satire- ready' subjects among the prominent, wealthy and powerful.

The Guardian Anoints Top Ten ...

We are Making a New World (1918)
by Paul Nash - © Imperial War Museum.

. . . British Art Works About War. You can find the story, with links to most of the works, here. Their list includes the Nash painting.

Slow Down and Smell the Theory ~ Alfredo Jaar

Artist’s Statement: In his own words. … Alfredo Jaar talks about his installation The Marx Lounge, a neon lit reading room devoted to left wing theory. His piece is a public realm commission for Liverpool Biennial 2010: Touched, the International Exhibition. (here)

Well, I've been a great reader of this kind of literature for many years and I really think there has been a kind of revolution going on in the last 20, 30 years in the intellectual world.

If you read some of these texts by Stuart Hall, by Terry Eagleton, by Alain Badiou, by Jacques Rancière, Frederic Jameson, etc, etc. They are extraordinary texts and essays. They are very challenging. They are models of thinking the world and that's what I do as an artist. I create models of thinking the world.

So I wanted to share this knowledge with the public because people tend to go very quickly in a biennial. They move from work to work. They are stressed. They are rushed. They want to see everything, and so this is in a way a work that asks you to ‘stop, please stop, stay here, relax, take your time, why don't we think for a while?, let’s go in depth into these subjects.’

I'm an architect making art so basically when I was given the space I wanted to create a comfortable space where people could sit down, enjoy themselves, and have good light to read, be comfortable, to offer them a break in this rush around works. And basically we created the longest possible table to accommodate some 1,500 books.

So the centrepiece is this huge table and of course we made a funny allusion to Marxism and communism with the red walls and the neon sign that says Marx Lounge, and we have the red carpet and we decided on black sofas. So it’s a very striking colour decision. We took red and black. But it's really a comfortable place. It's a place that invites you to sit down and relax and read. It's a reading room.

I wanted people to stop in their tracks, because you can access the internet in your home and on your phones. There is so much technology today, but I think the book has this value of stopping you in your tracks of asking you to go deeper inside. I have the impression that technology keeps us on the surface.

It's very difficult to sit in front of a computer and go deep inside because your eyes get tired very quickly. You have to operate software. You have to operate the mouse, etc, etc. And you are distracted by mail, by different windows opening up and flash movies and things like that. So here it’s really about you and a world construction that is being made in front of your eyes by this author in the book. I wanted to slow down and technology goes too fast. I really wanted to slow down.

Liverpool has a long tradition of progressive politics and historically it's a place where workers have fought for so many rights and so I thought it was the right place to create a work like this.

As a political theorist I find Jaar's work wonderfully provocative and his taste in "theory" unfortunate. Many (not all) of the writers he mentions are virtually impenetrable [1]. Among the problems with progressive or leftist "theory" is that verbiage takes the place of analysis; not only is there a tendency to be Luddite with respect to the often very useful tools of standard social science, but there is a preoccupation with abstraction and a turning away from genuine political and economic problems.

By contrast, among the things I like about Jaar's art is the way he keeps his eye on the ball - that is, on the problems of people in the world. For a start, here as in past projects, aiming to get people to stop and see and think. So, while Jaar sees the parody being the red neon sign 'The Marx Lounge,' I take the "theory" being peddled in this garish decor redolent of a bordello.

"Promiscuously Putting Things Together" ~ A Conversation with William Kentridge

I stumbled across this interview with William Kentridge at The Financial Times and thought I would point out a couple of the interesting bits. The first is about seeing as an activity.

“A lot of my recent work is to do with seeing as an activity, rather than a passive reception of the world . . . What clues do you need to make sense of something? Things come together and there is an instant when you recognise, oh yes, a rider on a horse. It’s about acknowledging and celebrating that double nature of seeing, the impurity of seeing: I know that it’s pieces of wire and black paper but I can’t stop myself seeing a face.

An abstract painter might insist their work is just paint but I am saying that’s a complete distortion of what it is to be human. It’s not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud. That’s what it is to be alive with your eyes open: to be constantly, promiscuously putting things together, getting shapes to have a coherence. It’s a kind of act of aggression against the self to try to stop that. A sort of Zen purity. I am so against that!”

From a philosophical point of view this claim deflates criticisms of what has been called the spectator theory of knowledge not by rehabilitating a naive view of disengaged viewing but by insisting that spectatorship itself necessarily is an activity.

Then, speaking of the artistic avant-garde in Russia of the 1920s and 1930s, Kentridge draws an analogy to himself and other post-apartheid South African artists.

“For me, the question was: what was the relationship between that energy and inventiveness and the belief in politics by the artist? There was something about the belief in the possibilities of revolution that was part of the energy inside their work.”

“How do you keep a sense of utopian optimism, but at the same time understand the disastrous history of utopias? I don’t pretend to have an answer, but that is the space in which you work.”

A well-stated question and the pretty much the only right answer.

Ansel Adams or Uncle Earl? Why Should we care who made the Photographs?

Well, silly, . . . because photographs are property and all sorts of people have large financial stakes in controlling the number of Adams snaps in circulation. The law suit reported in this story shows the pretentious art world in all its essential venality. You can find background on the fracas here. In any case, much of my effort on this blog is aimed at shifting attention from worrying about photographs and their characteristics to talking about photography and how it is used. Perhaps the basic difficulty in effecting that shift is that photographs are simply worth so damned much?

Abramović redux

Not long ago I wrote a couple of posts prompted by a review by Arthur Danto of a piece that was a central part of a recent MOMA show re: performance artist Marina Abramović. As I mentioned in the earlier posts, I usually find Danto insightful and interesting. In this case, though, I was more than a little flummoxed. Danto now has published a brief follow up to his initial essay; you can find it here. What follows are some of the interesting bits:

"In 1964, Andy Warhol exhibited wooden facsimiles of shipping cartons. A work of art and a mere shipping carton can look exactly alike. What explains the difference? What is the difference between sitting down with someone in a performance and merely sitting down with someone? The work of art has meaning; it is about something. And it embodies that meaning.

Many people thought that Marina Abramovic’s act of sitting across from them was a case of the emperor’s new clothes. But for most who sat with her, the act was fraught with meaning. It was in a sense a sacrifice on the artist’s part, an ordeal, an immense favor conferred on those who sat with her.

[. . .]

Think of the title of Marina’s show, “The Artist is Present.” And what presence means. The sitters are honored to be in the presence of the artist. It is a ritual moment, and understood as such by their own ordeal of waiting. The woman who sat for the entire period (seven hours) tried to make the presence hers. The next day Marina was present but the woman who sought her presence was gone. Marina’s presence was a treasure that could only be conferred. These are some of the hermeneutical aspects that the artist understood, and sitters mainly acknowledged. Think of all the photographs that shows tears in their eyes! People will discuss this event for years. It was a moment of spiritual exchange. How many of those do we have in a life?

[. . .]

The spiritual wiring of the human soul remains to be diagrammed. That is what art is for."

So here is what I think the crux of the matter is for me. As Danto makes clear in these passages, and what I complained about earlier, this "sitting" was passive for the viewers - an "act" of homage, an experience of being orchestrated or choreographed for the artist's purposes. Abramović, on Danto's own view, is bestowing on viewers some sort of gift; she is doing them a "favor." I therefore don't quite get his claim that "The Artist is Present" exemplifies performance art insofar as that category or genre "has ignited in the public imagination the idea that one can do more than passively experience works of art." It seems to me to convey the reality that, for viewers, their "participation" is wholly ancillary. Moreover, insofar as Abramović entered into some sort of trance-like state during the performance she offered no recognition of viewers as agents. Would she even have noticed had the chair across from her were vacant? Conversely, how might sitting across from someone who is oblivious to your presence differ from viewing an inanimate object (painting, sculpture, photograph)? Perhaps that is the message Abramović sought to convey - that all art (at least in the industrial-gallery-museum complex) ultimately takes the form of such supplication on the part of viewers. I doubt it.

Perhaps I am way too jaundiced, but I simply don't buy Danto's claims (with respect to Abramović specifically, not art in general) about "spiritual" connections and so forth. Indeed, the real relevance of Warhol to all this - especially for the various repeat "performers" I pictured in the second of my earlier posts - lies in his overused remark about the fleeting and shallow nature of celebrity.
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P.S.: The image I've lifted here shows the woman (seated to the left) to whom Danto refers in the passage I quote - she showed up, dressed like the artist, and sat for the bulk of an entire day of the show.

People Who Need a Hobby or, On Second Thought, Perhaps They've Found One

Here are a half-dozen repeat walk-on performers in Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present. I surely missed some others. Each portrait of the respective person is from a different day. All these folks turned up between day 25 (top) and day 59 of the exhibition. They came day after day, stood in line waiting and then sat there playing their assigned role. (Did they bring a book to read while waiting on line? Or did they watch the action?) In several instances they are cataloged on the MOMA Flickr page as having been adjacent in line, so must've become familiar with one another. Denizens of the MOMA page have identified a couple of the culprits - one is herself a "performance artist" (does this constitute plagiarism or poaching?), another just a fellow attracted to the performance as if by magnetism! Good grief.






























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All images from Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present Photographs by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović.
P.S.: Glancing at the newly uploaded images of attendees for days 60-65, it appears that several of these people just cannot stay away.

Here's Looking at You Kid ~ Marina Abramović

The other day The New York Times ran this report on this exhibition at MOMA written by philosopher and critic Arthur Danto. The show is actually a "performance" entitled The Artist is Present by Marina Abramović; the piece, which is part of a retrospective of Abramović's work consists in the artist sitting in a chair (generally clad in red white or blue) across from an empty chair. Visitors line up for the opportunity to sit across from Abramović for as long as they like. (One morning a woman apparently showed up dressed like Abramović and sat virtually all day.) The sitters are being photographed and their "portraits" are being posted on this Flickr page; my rough guess is that somewhere just shy of 1200 sittings have taken place so far. From what I can tell the entire ordeal is being filmed for posterity as well.

I actually have learned a lot from Danto's writings over the years. But my colleague and friend Rachel, who teaches in the Rochester VCS program recently referred to him as a "dork." Given that he seems to really, really like this whole exercise, I have begun to wonder myself. Of the current performance Danto writes that the "performance has brought MOMA itself to the cutting edge of contemporary artistic experiment" and that "It has captured the imagination of everyone interested in contemporary art." I guess I am just not all that interested.

I will come back to some "interesting" aspects of The Artist is Present in a companion post. Here I just want to pose some questions that Danto tacitly raises. Here he is:

"Performance art, as currently practiced, emerged as an avant garde movement in the 1960s and ’70s, and some of its features made it difficult to visualize how it might make the transition from galleries and public spaces to the more institutional environment of the museum.

For one thing, the medium of the artist is his or her own body, sometimes nude or engaged in highly dangerous circumstances. Pictures of nude bodies doing dangerous things raise no such obstacles in a museum space, but performance art itself is real in all dimensions. Before it can be translated and presented in a museum, a number of problems, both practical and philosophical, must be worked out.

One method would be to allow the pieces to be re-performed, which purists naturally disallow. For them, a performance is a one-time event, unlike a play, which is made to be re-performed; in theater, the distinction between character and actor is widely accepted. In the purist’s conception of performance art, there can be no such distinction; the artist and the performer are one, and must use his or her own body in the work. No one else, they argue, can do this, for reasons both moral and metaphysical.

Marina Abramovic is one of the early performance artists whose works have the deep originality that justifies their inclusion in great museums.

[. . .]

What is clear is that the possibility of sitting with Marina has ignited in the public imagination the idea that one can do more than passively experience works of art, that one can be part of a work of art for as long as one is willing or able."

I am sure that there are theorists of art who will think my puzzlement is naive, but do we define art by what can make it into a museum? And isn't the shift into "the more institutional environment of the museum" pretty much an invitation to passivity? In the current instance Abramović seeks to control the terms of the entire "experience"; that she is not quite able to do so does nothing to mitigate the fact that any creative participation by the folks who line up to sit with her is at the margins of her plan. I wonder if anyone has walked up to the sitters and spoken to them or offered to purchase the place of the person sitting with Abramović - a novel way to cut line. I'll bet not. (Maybe said purchaser would then insist that the chair remain vacant while she perused the other parts of the retrospective. Imagine the ire of the MOMA security, to say nothing of the artist, in such a circumstance.) Everyone surely is polite and well-behaved. Passive. Compliant. Proper. They all know how to comport themselves in a museum. They are indeed a "part" of the work, playing a role that has been engineered for them.

Looting, Politics and 'Art'

"Most European museums are, among other things, memorials to the rise of nationalism and imperialism. Every capital must have its own museum of painting, sculpture, etc., devoted in part to exhibiting the greatness of its artistic past, and, in other part, to exhibiting loot gathered by its monarchs in conquest of other nations. . . . They testify to the connection between the modern segregation of art and nationalism and militarism." ~ John Dewey (1934)

In The New York Times today is this story confirming both Dewey's observation and the general failure of art critics to get it. The critic - in this instance Michael Kimmelman - sides with the imperialists in the case of the Elgin marbles, possessed by the British but claimed by the Greeks. In part, he adopts a post-modern view of "culture" as freely circulating and so devoid of any "authentic" locus. But, ultimately, that is simply scaffolding for his claim that the British were able to take the marbles and so should keep them. The Greeks, he thinks are simply playing symbolic politics: "The Greeks argue for proximity, not authenticity. Their case has always been more abstract, not strictly about restoration but about historical reparations, pride and justice. It is more nationalistic and symbolic."

I think that claims of authenticity are moot - not for post-modern reasons, but because there never was any authentic possession to which one or another group might lay claim. In other words it is not that authenticity has been superseded but that it has always been specious, a rationalization for power and deception (including self-deception). Yet there is a good amount of rationalizing self-deception going on in Kimmelman's essay. I leave to one side his presumption that culture generally and art specifically constitute clearly bounded, discrete domains and, therefore, afford a terrain on which disengaged critics can ply their trade. I am more concerned here with the broader political implications of Kimmelman's position. Here is another juicy bit:

"Over the centuries, meanwhile, bits and pieces of the Parthenon have ended up in six different countries, in the way that countless altars and other works of art have been split up and dispersed among private collectors and museums here and there. To the Greeks the Parthenon marbles may be a singular cause, but they’re like plenty of other works that have been broken up and disseminated. The effect of this vandalism on the education and enlightenment of people in all the various places where the dismembered works have landed has been in many ways democratizing.

That’s not an excuse for looting. It’s simply to recognize that art, differently presented, abridged, whatever, can speak in myriad contexts. It’s resilient and spreads knowledge and sympathy across borders. Ripped from its origins, it loses one set of meanings, to gain others.

Laws today fortunately prevent pillaging sites like the Acropolis. But they stop short of demanding that every chopped-up altar by Rubens, Fra Angelico or whomever now be pieced together and returned to the churches and families and institutions for which they were first intended. For better and worse, history moves on"

Here the incoherence of Kimmelman's position is clear. He rightly speaks of the sorts of "vandalism" and "looting" that have been central to colonial enterprises, excusing them even as he protests that he does not. And he celebrates the fact that such actions now are legally proscribed. In the end he adopts a sort of let by-gones be by-gones stance. History after all does move on!

Yet, Kimmelman also hints at a sort of consequentialist approach to the whole matter when he suggests that the display of pillaged art works has been "democratizing" and that it has "spreads knowledge and sympathy across borders." If we want to consider consequences - and I think that is precisely what we ought to consider - then we ought to ask what precisely is the message being sent if the British are allowed to retain the marbles (or if other countries in possession of looted works are allowed to retain them in the face of legitimate claims). The answer, it seems to me, is this: the powerful and the rich can do what they please; the claims of justice are irrelevant or, at best, such claims trade upon the good graces of the rich and powerful. I presume, of course, that it is possible to sort out how to do justice in various cases and that it is possible to differentiate legitimate claims from those that are not. Those are difficult matters. But the underlying claim remains sound - we should look at consequences and when we do we should look at how the consequences impact common understandings of justice. The latter surely do not sanction simply allowing the rich and powerful to get way with whatever they have managed to get way with thus far.