Claire Stephen's Exhibition: "Trace"

  

 Claire Stephens’ MFA Midway Exhibition at Sierra Arts Gallery was one of the most interesting contemporary exhibitions I have seen lately. Stephens draws inspiration from the landscape that surrounds her, but does it in a highly unique way in her usage of varying medium and display.

   Landscape inspired works are something that I have personally never been drawn to. In Northern Nevada we see a great deal of landscape and environmental work and I have yet to be intrigued by any of it, other than Stephen’s work.

   I also intentionally did not read into her intent or artist statement before writing this, as I wanted to give my own unpolluted interpretation of her work.

   I think that this has a lot to do with her usage of materials and installation techniques. I was particularly drawn to her fabric tree installation and feather glass paintings.

    I have a supreme interest in fairy tales and fairy tale imagery, so I personally related to her tree installation. I am not sure if she intended for her trees to relate to fairy tales, but to me they represented the scenery of the fairy tales I have been studying for my own thesis. I loved the sheerness and fragility of them as well as their movement as patrons walked through.

   I noticed a physical theme throughout her work as the majority of the materials had an almost feminine fragility about them. This is also an area I have been interested in as of late: works that are feminine in nature, but not overtly feminist. I think many young female artists are working within this style. I’ve noticed that works done within this type of style also seem to have this nostalgic yearning in them, but it is hard to place what the work or artist is nostalgic for exactly. I would include the work I make in this as well.

 Trees and feathers make up the bulk of her subject matter and are created with a very delicate hand. Much of the work seems like if you breath on it too hard it will come crumbling down around you. For Stephens’ work, the nostalgia seems to be for a beauty of the surrounding world/landscape that is almost either stuck in time, or a time she has created from her own view of the world. 

Reenchantment of Art (readings 1 & 2) & Waste Land

 

   The Reenchantment of Art had me struggling throughout the bulk of it. I think Suzi Gablik had a clear agenda in writing this, and while I do not think that in itself is a problem, as she is a writer, I found myself having issues in agreeing with her point of view in relation to what makes an artwork important.
   She speaks much about the negativity and cynicism that the modern art world has created and that in order to create a "reenchantment" of the art world artist must engage society and/or the "soul" or "spirit."
   I agree with this basic idea, but the way that she goes about it is what leaves me perplexed. Most specifically in her glorification of Fern Schaffer's nine year performance work. Now, I never seek to belittle an artists' work, but I do not see how this is truly engaging. I find it hypercritical the way that she portrays Western culture's views on ritual, spirit, etc. in comparison to "the shaman" of other cultures. I guess this is because I do not personally feel disconnected from the world nor I do feel like I'm missing something from not having these "ritualistic" expirences, so I find it hard to relate to both that work and her elevation of it. Perhaps this makes me part of the problem of modernism she is presenting. I am not sure.
   She cites David Bohm: "It is impossible to have true individuality except when not grounded in the whole. Anything which is not in the whole is not individuality but egocentrism."
   It's quotes like this that I really struggle with. I think one of the beauties of art is that it can represent and question a variety of different things, or even nothing at all.
    The work that I make seeks to engage an audience of course, I think this is one thing art really should do, but it is still very much focused on the self and I don't exactly find that egotistical in the way Gablik does. My artwork is focused on personal associations related to psychological and emotional trauma. I know it has personally impacted people beyond my personal circle as at an opening of work midway, a woman came up and spoke to me with tears in her eyes. I'm not seeking to solve all of the world's problems, but I think this example shows that work that is deeply rooted the self can be equally as important to work related to the masses/greater population.
   She writes of David Salle's paintings and her dislike of them because they have no real concept behind them; they're just pretty images painted on a canvas. While I try to look at a piece of work objectively and find the meaning in it, I've found that after years in art school and critical practice, after awhile this analysis can become overbearing and exhausting, so I guess I don't really find an offense in work like his. Sometimes a thing is just a thing and that is the end. It may not be helping the world, but I do not think it is hurting it anyway either.
   I would also like to discuss Dominique Mazeaud's work of cleaning up the river. Gablik writes, "In 1917, Duchamp exhibited a urinal and called it art, although at the time there wasn't any concept yet in place to explain such an act of transgression. Today Mazeaud's project is equally startling because it isn't based on a transgression of aesthetic codes at all. It comes from another integrating myth entirely: compassion."
   While I do not disagree with her comparison between the experimental nature of what defines "Art,"what i do disagree with, it yet again, Gablik's analysis of it: "Mazeaud isn't competing in the patriarchal system at all, but stands true to her own feminine nature. By returning to the river every month on the same date to resume her task once again, she makes the ritual process into a redemptive act of healing."
   Anytime Gablik brings up femininity, masculinity or the patriarchal  system, I immediately become disinterested because I think her terms are out of date as her definition of the feminine is, at least to me, is the definition of a normal person with emotions and feelings. I also struggle with an artwork not having a physicality to it; what makes her different from anyone on the side of the road picking up trash on a regular basis?
   This leads me to Vik Muniz's work as I wonder how Gablik would classify his work. The work within the documentary focuses both on the landscape and the people within it as they filter through the landfill.
   I think his work had both negative and positive outcomes. This is both in relation to Gablik and my own assessments. He focused on the landscape and the not-so-great conditions of those who work at the dump. While I think it is commendable as issues of the environment  are important, what I struggle with is the process of the film. I felt like at times he borderline exploited these people and his ego got in the way of their realities. By the end of the process, the workers do not want to back to working at the dump and while we assume a happy ending for them based on the film work, we really have no idea how their lives ended up. Once the film is over, we are no longer supposed to care as we did while they were on screen.

Inside the Studio

Petah Coyne

Petah Coyne is an American sculptor and photographer that has been working professionally for over 20 years. She received her Bachelors Degree from Kent State and her Masters as well as an honorary PhD from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Her work can be seen in various permanent collections all over the country, including the Whitney, Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

-Sculptures

   She is most known for her large-scale sculptural installations, which combine varying materials including hair, silk flowers, ribbons, dead fish, taxidermy animals and most famously a special wax among other materials. They are large in scale and often take on feminine shapes.
   The wax is specifically made for Coyne by a chemist and does not melt below 180 degrees. They are built from steel understructures, but Coyne intentionally makes them seem “incredibly delicate and to have that feminine sense of appearing soft and seductive. But as a number of women have shown, we have an internal strength and drive that is hard to fathom.”
   The Scottsdale Museum of Art has said of her work: "Coyne belongs to a generation of sculptors—many of them women—who came of age in the late 1980s and forever changed the muscular practice of sculpture with their new interest in nature and a penchant for painstaking craftsmanship, domestic references and psychological metaphor."
   Though Coyne’s work is highly feminine, it does not provoke or ask questions concerning social or media issues, but rather issues related to personal associations and childhood memories. This sculpture specifically, relates to her memories of what she thought it would be like to become a woman, stating she thought it beautiful and extravagantly festive like floating on air.

-Photographs

   Though she is most famed for her wax sculptural pieces, she was academically trained as a photographer and printmaker.
   Her most recent exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art features a career retrospective, including her photography, which largely consists of ghostly images of Buddhist monks and children, which seem to portray a sense of loss and melancholy.




Dan Graham

Dan Graham is an American artist and writer that began his career at 22 as the Director of the John Daniels Gallery in New York City exhibiting the work of Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson and Donald Judd. He actually curated LeWitts first solo show. After the gallery space closed he wanted to make work himself. The gallery was only open for about six months. He is self-educated, with no post-high school degrees or formal education. He finds importance not just in the physical artwork, but also from a critical point of view and contextualizes his own work within essay format. His work crosses various media and is heavily influenced by social changed from the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War and Women’s Liberation Movement. His work is highly conceptual.

-Photographs

   Much of Graham’s photo works are text-based images that found their venue space in magazines. His most famous body of work “Homes for America” consists of straight on images of New Jersey homes and neighborhoods accompanied by essay. The photographs are technically simple and portray the ordinariness of the subject matter, however with the added context of Graham’s essay, dwells on his eras depersonalized home, which no longer reflects personal tastes, but rather the beginning of the era of the housing development cookie cutter and criticism of mass production.  He never says if this is a positive or negative thing, but calls the homes beautiful.
   This reminded me of our talks on how our media consumption in today's era has depersonalized the way in which we communicate with one another.

-Film/Performance

   Graham also used film and performance to capture his interest in social environments. His most well known performance Performer/Audience/Mirror consists of an audience in a dance studio facing the mirror and Graham while watching as he verbally articulated his own movement and expressions as well as the audiences as they are scrutinized in the mirror.his is meant to encourage the audience to see themselves as individuals and as integral members of their community, the mirror representing a confusion of public and private boundaries.

-Pavilions

   Perhaps what he it known best for are his “pavilions,” which are made up of steel and glass based sculptural installations play with the viewers perception of space by way of glass/mirror that is both reflective and transparent as well as creating two-ways mirrors and fish-eye effects that play with the viewers optics as they walk around them. He has had them commissioned in institutions all over the world, including  Germany, Japan and Berlin. The pavilions are meant to operate as structures that investigate the encounters between people and how we perceive ourselves as depending on ones position or the light, you may see only yourself, or other people.

Kiki Smith

   The daughter of minimalist artist Tony Smith, Kiki Smith has become one of the most influential artists of today in her own right. Her work is highly feminist and socio political and explores the themes that address philosophical, legal, social and spiritual aspects of human nature as well as treatment of women and the body. She is in numerous collections worldwide and has been shown in various one-person shows at the Walker Museum, Smithsonian and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, among many others.



-Sculpture

   While Smith works in varied mediums, she is well known for her sculptures of varying degree of the human form, this was amplified in the early 1990s with the height of AIDs and the death of her sister from the disease. It brought up questions of how the human body functions and can so easily be mutilated.  She works primarily in bronze and beeswax but also used other materials such as paper mache and plaster. Her sculptures  explore varying subject matter from folklore, art history, science and primarily feminism. Her work challenges of female identity and stereotypes. In this piece, for example she portrays the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, however in Smith’s version she has Red emerging from the wolf, a symbol of over coming his power on her own, not needing a huntsman to save her.
   In contrast, she also creates wax sculptures that ask questions about physical abuse. The figures are meant to show the physical fragmentations caused by abuse as well as the psychological ones. In this controversial piece Tail she creates a woman crawling across the floor excreting either feces or intestines. This is meant to represent the pain of abuse that come from inside and eventually escapes.

-Prints

   Her other body of work she is highly known for her is her prints. She creates these on very thin papers with that look delicate and feminine. Her drawing style is intentionally sketchy and labored, creating a sense of girlishness. A theme found in much of her work is the relationship between Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. In these series of prints she explores this relationship as them becoming intertwined, and eventually becoming one entity.

Brett VanHoesen: Why German Art Matters Lecture

             I attended Dr. Brett VanHoesen's lecture, "Why German Art Matters" at CCAI the first week in November.

             I found this lecture/question and answer session interesting for numerous reasons. From varying art history/studio courses I have taken throughout my undergrad I have always found an interest in contemporary German art. I think that modern German art is an exemplification of the importance to both culture and history. I speak specifically of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition put on by the Nazi Party before WWII that was meant to defame both the artist and their work. It has always astounded me that this work was considered so dangerous and important that it terrified them into vilifying an entire movement of art.

            I think in the United States the idea of a piece of work has that much power is mind boggling to the majority of the population.

            During the question and answer portion, an audience member asked, since Berlin is/is becoming a huge art city, if it runs the same risk that Manhattan did in the 1980s. This question intrigued me.

            In the summer of 2011 I was fortunate to be able to study abroad in Prague, only four hours away from Berlin. Because of this close proximity I was capable visiting Berlin for about four days. While I was unable to actually visit any art museums in my short stay, I still managed to get a decent dose of the German culture that surrounded the city.

            In relation to modern art, I noticed first and foremost the huge amount of graffiti and street art. This is an area that has never held much interest to me much past watching Exit Through the Gift Shop a few years ago.

            I was intrigued with street art of Berlin because not only for the first time it went past dirty graffiti and cheesy murals, which is what I was primarily exposed to in the United States, but how people reacted to it. They didn’t seem to upset that it was there, but also did not seem too overjoyed either. It was just part of their everyday lives because it was something that is always there.

            Granted this is my impression based on a few days and the fact that I do not speak German, but still it was nice to see at least a general acceptance of public space artworks in a non-traditional sense.

            

Inside the Studio

1. Petah Conye

2. Kiki Smith

3. Sandy Skoglund

4. John Currin

5. Dan Graham

Technology and Media

 

   This weeks readings all strongly dealt with how technology is effecting our everyday lives. They all seem to have a fairly pessimistic outlook on the ever-blurring lines that everyday technology creates.
   In "The Watchdog and the Thief" a few quotes stood out to me:

          “Even people who are weary of the Net’s ever-expanding influence rarely allow their concerns to
            get in the way of their use and enjoyment of technology.”

          "When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the
            amplified part and its natural functions…today’s industrial farm worker, sitting in his air
            conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all- though in a
            single day he can till a field that would have taken a month by hand."

    To me, what the author is trying to get across is that these technological advancements that were originally designed to make our lives easier our ultimately numbing us. HE uses the example of the test subjects who either do or do not receive help on the puzzle test. He notes that those who did not receive help worked quicker and more logically by the end than those who did receive help; their brains are being challenged. 
   On a similar, yet different note, "Turning Points," discusses the modes of communication that modern technology has created for us. From landlines to FaceTime, our current communication methods are designed to keep us connected on a larger basis than ever before.
   But how has this virtual mode of communication AND technological ease effected our lives as physical people?
   In "The Machine Stops" people of the world are connected to each other and technology, yet disconnected at the same time. The pull to experience things and people in person is no longer there; they settle for a virtual connection over a face to face experience. 
   This is similar to the "The Turning Points" description of the man who is more happy in his relationship with his Second Life wife and life than his own. He has no intention of ever combining the facets of his real life and virtual life, which leads me to question; are we moving to an era in which we are humanizing our computers while at the same time, dehumanizing the individuals around us?

The Media is the Message

 

   I think the major thread behind this weeks readings was that each new generation of humanity comes up with its trademark tool for communication and what that means for us as a society.
   Much of the reading was rather pessimistic in its outlook of the way that humanity is headed or how we do things. The authors seem to believe that our world is quickly becoming that of science fiction in which we are slaves to our culture, telecommunication advances, etc.
   The authors also often bring up 1984 and Brave New World as being related to our current culture, specifically Brave New World and its warnings against becoming a culture based around our indifferences and eventual love of their oppression through our love of the comforts of technologies that undo the ability to think. In relation to the real world, this seems to signify that we are (or already are) to become enslaved to our telecommunication tools and that we are alright with that.
   In "Four Arguments" the author writes, "In one generation out of hundreds of thousands in human evolution America had become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experiences of the world." I think what started with the television has evolved into the internet and more specifically social networking and smart phones. We are so used to over stimulation that there if often an outright need to be connected to something. People constanly are seen texting, uploading photos to Instagram or Facebook, creating tweets, even while in the presence of another physical human being. I would say strongly that many of my generation would prefer to email or text someone over a phone call in most situations. But is this necesarily a bad thing? Do these communications actually dehumanize us/create indifference, or have we just become more efficient in the way in which we communicate?

   On a somewhat unrelated note, in "Amusing Ourselves, the author writes that Las Vegas should be the metaphorical city of our current world because it is almost entirely based around the world of entertainment much in the same way that our current population participates and praises entertainment/ers. Having grown up in Las Vegas I find this particularly interesting because the majority of the people I knew growing up have one of two opinions on the city that relate to the readings:

          1. They work within the entertainment industry and love it there or
          2. They work outside of the entertainment industry and want to leave

   Between reading that Las Vegas should be considered today's metaphorical city and the knowledge of those within my age bracket living in the city who enjoy it makes me wonder, is this reliance on entertainment as a way of life bad, or more specifically, is it a response to something else? 
   For example, Vietnam was the first nationally televised war, and it would be fair to say that because of that, much of that generation became disillusioned to what America, or even the world, meant to them. For my generation, the event that sparked much of what we are now as a society was the World Trade Center Attacks. Perhaps as the generation of children who saw this media saturation of this horrific event and the wars and emphasis on national security and terrorism has become disillusioned and has chosen to participate in society in ways that pose no threat to their happiness.
   Keep in mind this idea is not only related to Las Vegas in particular, but also contestants of reality shows or those working in other entertainment fields. Events like 9/11 push generations of people in different directions and sometimes its more comfortable to focus more on things that come easy and avoid complication.