“Komm, Frau”

In following the news surrounding the art world, I find myself quite often surprised by the amount of backlash that artists and museums receive when the art they create or support stirs controversy or discomfort. And even more surprising, to read about artists facing criminal charges and prison time for speaking to issues that should and need to be addressed. Is freedom of speech not in play these days?

The brief appearance of a concrete sculpture in Gdansk, Poland on October 12, 2013 depicting a Red Army soldier raping a pregnant woman has sparked heated controversy and a very upset Polish and Russian government. Erected without permission next to a Soviet tank, a communist-era memorial to Red Army soldiers who liberated the city from the Nazi’s in 1945, a sculpture finds its way into the public arena as a Red Army soldier kneeling between the legs of a fully pregnant woman lying on the ground, his left hand pulling at her hair and his right hand holding a gun in her mouth. The artist, Jerzy Bohdan Szumczyk, who created the sculpture to address the tragedy and suffering of rape victims by Soviet soldiers during the last months of the war, is now facing 2 years in prison for “inciting racial or national hatred,” according to an article in Speigel Online.

The title of the piece, “Komm, Frau,” a German phrase meaning “Come, Woman,” draws mass attention to what has been a largely hushed subject of the crimes committed by the Red Army during World War II when German women, as well as Russians and Poles who had been Nazi prisoners, were raped during the last months of the war. This speaks not only to the horrors of Russian history, but further, to the victims of rape across the world. From the Nanking Massacre to the rape of Japanese women during the U.S. Occupation following the end of World War II, there has been little to no discussion or acknowledgement of these largely taboo topics in our history. Would an exhibition addressing these rather hushed subjects be successful? Accepted? Or received with opposition?

Although there is a growing attention given to controversial issues surrounding gender, sex, racial discrimination, etc., some of the most acclaimed museums who have attempted to educate the public and rid the “taboo” out of our less than proud histories in an acknowledgement of the wrong and the importance of this understanding as critical to the betterment of our society and cultures around the world have been met, at times, with opposition. This begs the question…Would an exhibition that displayed “Komm, Frau,” for example, and other art that speaks to issues like this have a place in a museum? In a gallery space?

Although museum’s like the Brooklyn Museum of Art and its controversial exhibition Sensation, as Lowry states, which was received with much attack, particularly from the mayor of New York, leaving the museum to “fight” to keep its doors open, “the museum’s protection under the First Amendment was never in doubt, as was clear from extensive pre-existing case law, and like every other major paper the New York Times defended Brooklyn’s right to present the exhibition.” Despite public protection under the First Amendment, the U.S. has had its fair share of challenges with respect to controversial art and exhibitions.

Museums and artists alike have met with equally forceful opposition from the public at times, as in the case of the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum and its representation of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. Although we would like to think that we have moved passed the failures, horrors, and dark moments of our history, and have accepted and acknowledged what has transpired and how evolved we have become, the U.S., as with the rest of the world, refuses to accept and acknowledge wrongdoing on their own part. The Enola Gay, which spoke to the reality of the B-29’s involvement in the horror of the atom bomb and its mass obliteration of men, women and children in Japan, was met with continued opposition and criticism by the American legion, members of Congress and World War II veterans who were unsatisfied with the museum’s representation of what transpired during the war. And though they were not “forced” to shut down, the backlash and public opposition left little room for the museum to continue, resulting in the closure of the exhibit.

Will we ever be truly ready for truth?

“’Pseudo-Art’: Russian Ambassador Slams Wartime Rape Sculpture.” http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/russia-slams-sculpture-of-soviet-soldier-raping-woman-in-gdansk-a-928492.html

Lowry, Glenn. “A Deontological Approach.”   

Gallagher, Edward. “The Enola Gay Controversy.” http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/enola/r2/

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

I have always been intrigued by the process in creating a work of art. It is this that drew me to an article on an exhibition currently held at the Whitney Museum, “Hopper Drawing,” which shows an expansive collection of drawings Hopper made for his large oil paintings. His well-known canvases including Soir Bleu (1914), Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928), From Williamsburg Bridge (1928), Early Sunday Morning (1930), and Nighthawks (1942) among others are shown alongside the many drawings and sketches that evolved into what we know today of his canvas works.

In the article, “How Edward Hopper Storyboarded Nighthawks,” as it appears in ArtNEWS, Cemblast pays close attention to the development of the characters and setting for what would become his most renowned painting, Nighthawks, bringing to mind, the writings of James Cuno. For Hopper, a show focusing on his drawings would have been quite perplexing. As Cemblast states, “Hopper didn’t consider his drawings as art objects that should be exhibited or sold. To him, they were simply studio materials – documents of the process he used to conceive and to plot, in minute detail, the stories he told on canvas.” Although Hopper did not consider his drawings as art objects, his studies for the Nighthawk and others are finally given the attention needed for the public to fully appreciate and understand the artist and his creative process. Compositional studies of the diner and the surrounding streetscapes, of the four figures, and the effect of lighting and contrast reveal the artists thought process, the development of his composition and style, and the idea that paintings are much more than what the artist had intended for public display.

The beauty of a fragment, states Cuno, “is that it is at once part of something else, something larger, and is complete in itself, even in its partial form.” The sketches of Hopper’s Nighthawk, the fragments of a Brygos drinking cup, or the literary fragment of the German Romantics, for example, is an intensely intimate look into a “condensed, intensified pattern, whose intensity is necessarily accompanied by the pleasure of release from the condensed to the expansive.” By providing the audience an experience of the condensed, fragmented parts of drawings and studies, to the expansive image of the final work on canvas, it comes as no surprise that the exhibit was received with much acclaim and popularity.

And as Cuno continues further, in an examination of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien, the compositional and figurative studies not only provides pleasure in witnessing the condensed as an evolutionary process in achieving its ultimate expansive state, but is an accumulation of these very fragments, a collection of parts of painted or drawn studies of individual figures or groups of figures, put together as if to make of each canvas a finished painting in and of itself. The evolutionary process to painting, therefore, of compositional studies and preliminary sketches, are equally important in understanding, appreciating, and connecting to a work of art. And even better, a glimpse into the inner workings of a great artist and his work.

“Paintings ARE made of PARTS…They ARE visual contraptions…And ALWAYS MORE.” 

~ Cuno 

http://www.artnews.com/2013/07/25/how-edward-hopper-storyboarded-nighthawks/

Cuno, James. Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust.

3-D Printing of the Old and New

What comes to mind when you think comfort? Space age technology? Your skin forming jagged waves of the “brain”? In the ArtNEWS article “Brancusi & Brain Waves: 3-D Printing goes to the Museum” and written by Stephanie Strasnick, Lucas Maassen and Dries Verbruggen from the Belgian design team Unfold created their collaborative 2010 creation Brain Wave Sofa which will make its debut at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, curated by Ron Labaco. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor his brain waves while he closed his eyes and thought of the word “comfort,” Maassen’s brain wave data was then translated into a three-dimensional image programmed to a computerized milling machine called the CNC mill to carve out a foam replica of that image and is one of more than 100 pieces featured in “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital.” 

Maassen and Verbruggen, Brain Wave Sofa, 2010

The exhibition, which will open on October 16 at MAD will showcase works of art, fashion, furniture, etc. that has been constructed using the technological devices of EEG, etc.What many might find even more fascinating is the encouragement of public engagement with how these technologies work. Francois Brument’s Vase #44 (2009), for example, allows visitors to speak into a microphone that uses a special algorithm to translate a voice into an image of a vase, determined by the speaker’s volume and duration of speech.

The elitist individuals that lead the museum of today and of the past have long prevented the museum from taking the course it needs to take. The implementation of education, therefore, is the progressive element that we have sought as part of the museum experience to allow for a greater connection and engagement with the general public. Popular education, as Theodore Lowe states, embraces all aspects of human activity, of increasing the knowledge, happiness and experience of the individual. But unlike formal education, Lowe seeks an education that is a voluntary act of the individual. It is commendable, therefore, to see a prominent institution like MAD reaching beyond the conformist approach to the museum experience for an experience engaging, and voluntarily promoting thought, action and experience. This exhibit incorporated a wide variety of engaging works of art that teach visitors that technology and visitor engagement is critical to the development and exploration of further innovative and provocative modes of art.

Hornby's I never wanted to weight more heavily on a man than a bird (Coco Chanel), 2010

And in an age of technological advancement, in which the visitor and public might generally associate technology as contemporary, what is striking about this exhibit is its incorporation of high-tech artworks that derive from 19^th and 20^th century art history. In Nick Hornby’s 2010 I never wanted to weight more heavily on a man than a bird (Coco Chanel), the visitor is introduced to computer-controlled hotwire that combines Brancusi’s Bird in Space and Rodin’s The Walking Man  into one sculptural piece.

http://www.artnews.com/2013/10/07/3-d-printing-at-mad/

Theodore Lowe's "What is a Museum"

Art Lending to the Public

Can I Check Out That Taryn Simon Painting?

Ever wanted to peruse the aisles of a library filled with art? And to be able to check a work of art out? Did you ever think such notions would become a reality? In an article from The Art Newspaper, Julia Halperin introduces readers to a new trend in the art world, that of borrowing art. A Pennsylvania art collective called Transformazium has created a programme to lend art to locals through a library in the suburban town of Braddock. The donated works of contemporary artists including Taryn Simon, Vincent Fecteau and Wade Guyton have provided the Braddock Carnegie Library with over 100 prints, paintings, photographs and sculptures that members of the library can check out on loan for up to six weeks at a time. 

Surprisingly, this is not the first to take on such a project. There have been several institutions in the past decade that have established art-lending collections to provide the public with access to art that would have otherwise been reserved for the wealthy. Interestingly, in the past, such institutions have nevertheless established such programs of art-lending in affluent areas, a stark contrast to Braddock’s program, the library of which serves the some 3,000 residents of Braddock, 40% of whom live below the poverty line. This new endeavor would surely put a smile on John Dana Cotton’s face. Dana had long called for a change to the museum world, for greater attention towards the art that connects the audience to the everyday and ordinary, to their lives, and one that called for greater access of art to the public.

In “The Gloom of the Museum,” Dana yearned for a time when museums would more actively participate and encourage the loaning of objects to other institutions, to libraries and museums, and to universities and colleges. Why not take the museum to the public, to the young and old, to the rich and poor, to those who are not able to access the collections, who find themselves in the far off reaches of a suburb or less access friendly/finance friendly museum. Public branches, Dana argues, can serve all. “The collections, groups, single objects, and photographs and other pictures can easily be placed in school houses, and surely soon will be.” He would be delighted in knowing then that not only has this become normative, but has reached far beyond the imagined. Art has become, though in the very early stages, attainable in every sense of the word. It is only in branching this out to communities across the country will this truly find its affect and impression on the public at large.  

With all that said, there are many questions and concerns to be addressed. Issues of care, management, loss and damage prevention, etc. Will there be informative sessions on the proper care and handling of the works on loan? How will the library address concerns surrounding the damage or even loss of a work on loan? Will the borrower be charged the full price? If so, who determines the cost? Will there be a conservator on hand to process condition reports and review the works of art upon check out and return to document the condition of the work on loan? What precautions will be made to ensure the longevity of the collection? The questions go on and on and yet looking past all this, one finds justification almost in the goal of the program. Art is supposed to be placed in people’s homes, to be enjoyed.  Most anything can not be fully appreciated without use and access. In areas, especially those with little access or exposure to the art scene, and particularly those of our contemporaries, it is commendable to learn that there exists institutions like the Braddock Carnegie Library that have identified these issues and have found a way of bridging the divide. Will our local library one day do the same?

Sources:

The Art Newspaper

Dana, John Cotton. “The Gloom of the Museum.”