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May 9, 2012 by admin

Lorraine O’Grady: Unnatural Attitudes


Lorraine O'Grady, The Fir-Palm (1991/2012), Silver gelatin print (photomontage). Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates.

Lorraine O’Grady is engaging audiences across the spectrum of Manhattan cultural institutions these days, sharing her insights as a conceptual artist and cultural critic. Last Monday she participated in a scripted conversation at MoMA with the visual and performance artist Adam Pendleton, who presented a live “portrait” of her. From there, she skipped down to the East Village, where she was the subject of Performa’s inaugural public event series examining the works and lives of seminal artists. Over the next week she will perform in concert with the Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran installation at the Whitney Biennial and converse with Linda Goode-Bryant at the Studio Museum in parallel to the exhibition Shift. Meanwhile, her recent video work Landscape (Western Hemisphere) (2011) is currently on view at Alexander Gray Associates, presented along with two reformatted photomontages from her iconic BodyGroundseries, 1991-2012, in an exhibition entitled New Worlds.

It is hardly the first time O’Grady’s presence can be felt simultaneously at “establishment” and “alternative” New York art venues. Indeed, she carried out her debut guerrilla performances at the New Museum and Just About Midtown, making sure to shake up the art world from all sides with her insistence that maintaining parallel, racially segregated cultural circles was bullshit.

Today, O’Grady’s ideas about race and feminism no longer seem radical, yet they still contribute powerfully to the public discourse in a society that has yet to fully come to terms with its messy past. This spring has been marred by right-wing attacks on women’s rights and the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American whose white killer has been released from prison on bail. Perhaps these events produced a yearning for a sophisticated, nuanced discussion about oppression and cultural subjectivity, the very issues that have been central to O’Grady’s work throughout her career? Is that why she is so hot right now?

Alexander Gray isn’t so sure. “I don’t think [discussions of feminism and racism] ever went away, but maybe they became less visible in the art market,” he tells me. Rather, he believes a curatorial interest in O’Grady’s work drives the attention she is now enjoying. It might also have to do with the current trend of looking to the past to search for clues that might help us better understand the contemporary moment; when younger artists rediscover the work of early explorers like O’Grady, the effects can be mutually reinforcing.

O’Grady was born in Boston, in 1934, the daughter of two affluent West Indian immigrants. Though her parents raised Lorraine in a quintessentially upper-crust New England context—she attended first the prestigious Girls’ Latin School, then Wellesley College— they themselves spoke with a heavy accent.  “It was just too much to take it all in,” O’Grady says of her dichotomized world.

Yet, it led to a lifelong exploration of identity that contributed greatly to the cultural discourse. At last week’s Performa Institute event, O’Grady revealed that she owes her artistic career to her fascination with her mother’s passage from Jamaica to Boston as a young woman in the early 20th century. At the age of 45, O’Grady began pursuing performance art to tell her mother’s story, but it came about rather by happenstance:

In 1979 she began attending weekly performances at Franklin Furnace, a ritual she now calls her “MFA program.” Yet she never imagined performing herself until she saw Eleanor Antin debut the character Eleanor Antinova— a black ballerina dancing for a Russian expat choreographer in post-WWI Paris—on stage in San Francisco. “Somehow, Eleanor reminded me of my mother and it inspired me to tell my mother’s story,” O’Grady explains. That desire has driven her work ever since.

Lorraine O’Grady broke out onto the art scene in the early 1980s as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a glamorous debutant who crashed art openings in defiance of the reigning convention keeping the black and white art worlds segregated. She staged her first guerrilla performances at Just Above Midtown, an avant-garde gallery showcasing black artists, and at the New Museum.

“That whole segregated art worlds business was such an unnatural thing and we had to take such unnatural attitudes in order to oppose it,” O’Grady recounts. Donning a gown made from 180 pairs of white gloves, she would disrupt gallery openings, lashing herself with a cat-o-nine-tails-cum-bouquet of chrysanthemums while shouting out poems that railed against the complacency of “black art.”

The gloves bring the entire history of black oppression to the visible surface, signifying what O’Grady describes as “middle class internalization of oppression.” She implicated her spectators in that oppression by handing them chrysanthemums she extracted from her bouquet to reveal the whip. As such, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire is the essence of O’Grady’s entire body of work.

Over time, however, O’Grady lost confidence in the ability of performance to fully express the sophistication of her ideas. She worried that live action made it too onerous for viewers to zero-in on particular aspects of the work, which led them to miss fundamental concepts. Consequently, in the 1990s O’Grady moved away from performance and began making photomontages. “I had to go into a two-dimensional format so my images could sit still,” she explained, meaning that she wanted viewers to linger longer over the details. However, this medium, too, proved insufficient to communicate “what mattered most,” her thoughts about the complexity of the African diaspora. So, she moved to video “in order slow down the response to the two-dimensional work.”

For anyone inclined to study O’Grady’s two-dimensional work, two of her early photomontages from the BodyGround series, The Fir-Palm and The Clearing (both 1991/2012), are on view at Alexander Gray. Recently reformatted on a larger scale and refined through improved technology, the photomontages are visually striking and evince the themes of sexuality, identity, and social norms. They are presented along with the video Landscape (Western Hemisphere), 2011, a close-up of O’Grady’s hair fluttering in a breeze set to a soundtrack of chirping birds and cicadas and made to resemble a natural landscape. Together, the pieces invite reflection on the nature of cultural hybridity.

O’Grady’s reflections on the African diaspora also punctuate her celebrated 1992 cultural critique on the black female body, Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity. In it, O’Grady posits that for centuries the Western cultural canon has incorporated the African female only as the embodiment of “otherness.” It relegates her, “by virtue of color and feature and the extreme metaphor of enslavement” to serving as a foil to the white female body. This understanding informs O’Grady’s famous analysis of the black maid’s presence in Edouard Manet’s iconic painting Olympia:  “She is Jezebel and mammy, prostitute and female eunuch, the two-in-one.”

O’Grady’s penchant for deep thinking and literary background (she used to write rock criticism for Rolling Stone), was also on display at the Performa event, where she delved into her admiration of two cultural icons, seemingly worlds apart: Charles Baudelaire, who “embodied the 19th century moment from Romanticism to Modernism” and Michael Jackson. Amazingly to those of us in the audience who initially failed to grasp the correlation between them, she built a convincing case likening Baudelaire to Jackson as “the first and the last of the Modernists.” (She also presented a photomontage juxtaposing images of the two, titled The First and the Last Modernist, presented at the 2010 Whitney Biennial.)

In the wake of Jackson’s death, O’Grady “descended into fandom” and began to revere the completeness of his vision; in her telling, the same vision that led Jackson to unite the world through universal music—there is a track on Thriller, she explains, for every audience—led also to his meticulously crafted appearance as a mixed-race “universal physical figure.” Consequently, O’Grady came to the conclusion that “there is no one with a more God-like vision of art than Michael Jackson.” He reminds her of Baudelaire, the “father of Modernism,” who paved the way for the Modernists to become the first artists to make art without God. “They had to become God to make art,” O’Grady explains.

In her own way, O’Grady, too, took destiny into her own hands in order to realize a vision: she had to start making art in order to become herself.

Published by Art Fag City on May 8, 2012.

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March 30, 2012 by admin

“Don’t use the internet as a f***ing condiment”: Net Art at Art Dubai

Alexander Provan (left) and Constant Dullaart (right), Art Dubai. (Photo courtesy Art Dubai)

Acquisitions of net art by the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and other institutions have given institutional validation to the genre, but complicated curatorial debates rage over what exactly it includes: Can it be shown on a computer in a gallery? Can it only be viewed online? Can art not based on code count as net art?

At (It’s Not) Net Art 2: Emancipate the Medium!, one panel at Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum, heated debates began over nearly every aspect of the medium, from its formal qualities to its politicization and the notion that it is inherently radical. This argumentativeness is perhaps unsurprising given that the medium lacks a strict definition.

“We say that net art is art that uses the internet as its medium, but the internet is not really a medium,” claims speaker Josephine Bosma, by way of opening the discussion. (Panelists and audience members would later challenge her on this point). Ms. Bosma understands net art to be the product of artists working within a certain space that is at once technical and creative. She recalls Robert Adrian X’s wonderment, articulated at the first online conference in 1979 at San Francisco MoMA, at “the space behind the computer” that allows one to “enter a new world.” To her, it serves as an “an ideal space for art to evolve in because art is also conceptual.”

“Why has it attracted so much counter-culture?” asks an audience member who professes an interest in the politics of net art. Another audience member replies that there is nothing inherently radical about the genre, but suggests it is often used subversively, or to inspire political activism.

The internet’s widespread accessibility facilitates this today, according to writer and editor Victoria Camblin. Yet, Ms. Bosma, who must be approximately two decades older than Ms. Camblin, refutes her claim that the younger generations are so at ease with the internet that it becomes a natural extension of themselves. “They are only at ease with the simplest of interfaces,” she insists, adding that most people’s daily internet activity only touches the tip of the iceberg.

Triple Canopy co-editor Alexander Provan steered the conversation back the art, dwelling on the discrepancy between art on the net and internet-inspired art shown in a gallery: “A lot of people don’t make use of the specificity of the medium, which is diluting the performance potential.”

Artist Constant Dullaart put it more bluntly: “Don’t use the internet as a fucking condiment.” He was not so much addressing anyone in the tent as venting about some artists’ tendency to embellish their work with a redundant internet component simply because they think it makes their art cooler.

Mr. Dullaart edits online forms of representation, and user’s access to it, to create on-and-offline installations and performances. As he warns about the colonization of the internet—corporations and states “divvying up the web and making decisions that influence us”—we watch the Google home page on his computer rotate 360 degrees. “I manipulate Google to show how they manipulate information they display,” he explains.

Ms. Camblin accepts Dullaart’s assertion that politics and economic incentives have undermined internet freedom. However, she refutes the implication that this is necessarily problematic, so long as everyone recognizes the mechanisms of control. “People are aware of [corporate and government control],” she exclaims, adding, “We make these structures apparent; it is conspicuously clear.”

Another audience member interjects (customary forum protocol having been abandoned during the first five minutes of discussion) to raise questions about how to preserve net art and what happens once it is taken offline. In response, Mr. Dullaart equates net art to performance art, referring to his own Facebook performances: “You can’t download Facebook in its entirety [in order preserve the performance he conducts by manipulating the code], just like you can’t freeze Marina Abramovic in the middle of a performance and unfreeze her in 50 years so she can reenact it”.

According to Ms. Camblin, once a net artwork is taken offline it becomes something else. What that something else is, however, eludes her: A book? A sculpture? She isn’t exactly sure. To account for this ambiguity, an audience member calls on museums and publishing platforms to open up their respective fields and embrace the genre, even as they struggle to understand it. “After all,” says Mr. Provan, “we have to assume that all new media will eventually become old media.

Published online by Art Fag City on March 30, 2012

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March 29, 2012 by admin

Art and Media, Guernica and Tahrir Square: Observations from Art Dubai

It isn’t exactly a surprise that this year’s Global Art Forum, an annual discourse on contemporary art under the aegis of Art Dubai, should explore the theme “the Medium of the Media”. The event takes place on the rough anniversary of uprisings that spread across the Middle East, making it inevitable that panelists focused on where art fits into a landscape marked by tweets from Tahrir Square and the real-time dissemination of images of Qaddafi’s corpse.
 
This proved fruitful. Media, by virtue of its dual contexts within the worlds of reportage and publishing on the one hand, and as the agent of artistic expression on the other, has enough ambiguity to spawn rich discussions on the nebulous boundaries between information, art, and activism. This week, we’ll be covering a few of the most interesting of those discussions.

Cairo-based historian and artist, Huda Lufti, delivers the second reflection on media’s powerful role in recent and current political upheavals. (Photo courtesy Art Dubai)

Concern over the brutal crackdown on Syrian revolutionaries and Egypt’s unpredictable political climate tempered the usual unabashed glamour at Art Dubai. At this stage of the game, many of the participants at Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum—the panel discussion contingent of the fair—preferred to pose questions rather than draw conclusions about the state of contemporary art in the Middle East.

“Is contemporary art up to the task of addressing complex social and political realities in the world around us? And should we demand this of art in the first place?” asks Negar Azimi, a journalist and Bidoun magazine editor, in a session entitled “Power less: Art vs Media.”

Underlying the discussion was the premise that media, particularly 24-hour news, has become the ultimate source of information on political change. In other words, has media eclipsed contemporary art as the zeitgeist? In the early part of the 20th Century, Ms. Azimi pointed out, art’s potential to inspire political agency was alive and well, the origin of both the anti-nationalist jeers of Dada and the propaganda of Guernica (a work commissioned by the Republican Spanish government). Has this now given way to official media coverage and citizen journalism?

And what of those innumerable images documenting every detail of the Arab street protests, captured and disseminated via personal devices from Manama to Tunis? Susan Sontag’s warning about the alienation and disengagement caused by the constant flux of horrifying photojournalistic images resonates with William Wells, director of Townhouse gallery in Cairo. He worries about the “volume of raw Youtube footage bombarding us every day.” But do any of these images rise to the level of art? Does labeling them as art alter their impact?

Yes, according to the Cairene artist and historian Huda Lutfi. She makes the case that the definition of what we consider art may be expanding so that some of what has been produced on the street does indeed constitute art, regardless of its formal qualities or the ‘artist’s’ background. In response to Ms. Azimi’s suggestion that these campaigns represent a new form of culture, Ms. Lutfi asks, “Why separate what these activists are doing from contemporary art?” Moreover, Ms. Lutfi believes art still has a potent role to play in spreading revolutionary messages and inspiring political activism. Fighting back tears at times, she credits the graffiti that popped up on police barricades throughout Cairo as instrumental in countering the government news agency’s anti-revolutionary propaganda.

Street art may be the most well-suited art form to communicate the spirit of the Egyptian revolution because, much like the nascent democratic movement, it faces the constant threat of being erased by the authorities. Moreover, street art is subject to taking on forms wildly different from what the artist intends, thanks to an added brush stroke here and there by an invisible hand in the middle of the night. Yet the very qualities that enable street art to embody the aspirations and challenges of the revolution also make it difficult to preserve. Ms. Azimi, for example, admits to losing interest in street art once it is brought within the walls of a gallery, though she acknowledges there are few other ways to document it. “It’s too early,” she says, “to make a coffee table book about the graffiti of the Egyptian revolution.”

As the discussion continues, the question of monetization comes into play. The notion that artists, gallerists, and even collectors might profit off the blood and tears of the Arab Spring is an uncomfortable thought. Nevertheless, the setting made it impossible to overlook: a mere stone’s throw away, at Art Dubai, a few enterprising galleries were already selling pieces marketed as “art of the revolution”. With moderate success, Ms. Lutfi tries to convince us that, as an artist herself, she does not consider it “problematic to produce works that express what I lived through the last year, as long as they are not monetized.” From her subsequent remarks, though, one surmises that she is still grappling with this idea: “But then, what do you do with the art if you can’t sell it?” she asks herself aloud. At issue, the panelists concur, is how to differentiate between artists who are opportunistic and those who are sincere.

Mr. Wells interjects, inferring it might not yet be time to worry about that. In face of “economic, political, and humanitarian crises across the globe,” he wonders: “What is art for? Does it matter? Is a painting more powerful than a photograph of a murder victim? Is it more truth-telling?” Neither the other panelists nor any audience member could offer a satisfying response.

Published by Art Fag City on March 29, 2012