Back in school -- cultural identity in art

This week in art history class we read about cultural identity and how artists in the third world may have a hard time deciding which elements to incorporate into art.  Should they use their traditional religious or tribal symbols or the more recent historical artifacts and political ideas that stem from colonial or post-colonial days?  In a world of global connections and universal communication, it's hard to separate out what the artist wants to say about his own culture from the influence of other cultures.

Coco Fusco, a Cuban-American artist and scholar, wrote, "In such a state of things, the very notion of cultural purity can seem like something of a nostalgic fantasy...  No longer bound to a sense of having to restrict one's focus, materials, or genre, many contemporary artists of color move back and forth between past and present, between history and fiction, between art and ritual, between high art and popular culture, and between Western and non-Western influence.  In doing so, they participate in multiple communities."

I am not a person of color, but it occurs to me that the same observations apply as I think about my own cultural heritage -- white flyover-state Protestant -- and how it affects my art.  And one of the things I wonder about is how rarely I see that cultural heritage expressed by contemporary artists in non-ironic terms.

Hundreds of artists have sneered or laughed at the white-bread American culture; almost the entire genre of Pop Art in the United States is based on simultaneous fascination with and disdain for the familiar stuff of our childhoods.

Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #35, 1963

But do any artists deal with this material in earnest?  In the 1930s Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and other Regionalist artists did, depicting small-town scenes and heartland values, but Regionalism went out of fashion after World War II.

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930














(When American Gothic was first exhibited, some big-city critics assumed it was meant as a satire of narrow-minded rustics, but Wood said it wasn't.)

Norman Rockwell, Teacher's Birthday, 1956













More recently, we can point to Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, but neither of them were totally embraced by the High Art establishment.  Rockwell was generally dismissed as an illustrator, and Wyeth because he seemed dangerously close to illustration.  And of course who can forget Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, who became fabulously rich and later went bankrupt producing sappy scenes of little cottages in the woods, sold through franchised galleries.  I'm not sure there's anybody more despised and reviled by the art establishment.

And yet, if High Art frowns on earnest depictions of heartland America, heartland America returns the favor.  Another of the scholars we read this week observed that the concept of art as a self-sufficient activity based on aesthetics is peculiar to Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.  In other cultures, the visual tradition is determined by religion, commemoration, representation and other factors.  I would argue that heartland America is more this way than it is like Europe in terms of art.

In heartland America there is some reverence for the pretty landscape painting, the picture of Jesus, the wedding photos and the family portraits, but a great deal of suspicion of Artists and Art.  Those artists aren't decent guys like us -- they smoke dope and have nude models!  Hey, my kid could paint that!  Heartland culture never did embrace abstraction, thus skipping the large part of 20th-century art, and is even less accepting of performance art, conceptual art and other recent genres.  Do you remember the hysteria 20 years ago over Karen Finley's nude performances or Robert Mapplethorpe's photos?

There are a gazillion artists who grew up in heartland America, couldn't wait to move to the big city and put that white-bread world behind them, and became famous and successful after their escape.  Many of them used their native culture as grounds for irony or condemnation.  But I wonder whether that culture will produce any artists who will become part of the global High Art world by using the heartland culture in earnest -- or even any who aspire to do so.

What do you think?  Opinions from those of heartland heritage especially welcome.

Back in school -- theory

Almost done with the semester, and I realize that throughout the course I have been wrestling with the question "what does this mean to me?"

First of all, who is me?  Although I am intrigued by the complexities and subtleties of theory, and enjoy reading art criticism, my primary self-identification is as a working artist, a maker.  And I have not yet seen much overlap between the theory and the practice of art.

In the history of high art, there have been plenty of theory-driven movements, many with their own manifestos, clubhouses and secret handshakes.  More recently, since the definition of art has broadened, there are identifiable groupings of certain practices and approaches -- conceptual art, performance art, earth art.  But I wonder how many of the artists whose work can be validly described by a certain theory actually woke up in the morning and said "I need to make something post-structural."   I suspect the inspiration came from some other thought process, and the theory was put on after the fact by outside obervers.

Even within the famously labeled movements such as Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism, many of the alleged participants have resisted the label.  And once you drop down the food chain, to the everyday artists whose work is not found in MOMA or written up in Artforum, I suspect that theory almost disappears.

I suppose there are everyday artists who choose their formats, mediums, subjects and viewpoints from a starting point of theory.  I could envision, for instance, that committed Marxists or feminists might choose to act out their political imperatives through art rather than through community organization, writing, academic scholarship or seeking elective office.  I know that in some repressive regimes, art (visual or literary) is one of the few vehicles available to express opposition and individuality.

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds -- 100 million hand-painted ceramic seeds, installation at Tate Modern, 2010













But I suspect these overtly political artists are vastly outnumbered by artists who determine their work from other starting points.  Some may be attracted to art because of an early-discovered facility in drawing, or the inspiration of a favorite teacher or mentor.  Some may come to it as a hobby and only later become more serious about it.  Some may come to it as a job, such as illustration, advertising or fashion design, and only later decide to practice it without benefit of clients.

As I think through the roster of working artists whom I know personally, which must number at least a hundred, I can't think of any who start with theory.  Many of them not only refuse to ground their work in theory but resist assigning any meaning to it.  If pressed, they might say "I make it because I want to," or "because I have to," or "because I can make whatever I want," or "because I like the way it looks."  Many artists who strive to sell their work will say "I want to make art that's beautiful" or "that people like" or "that people will buy."

And I won't say they're wrong.  In fact, I have a hard time thinking how a working knowledge of theory makes a better artist.  I have been asking myself as I read Barthes and Baudrillard and the other intellectuals whether anything I've learned has anything to do with people who make art, or whether theory is solely the province of people who talk about art.

So far I have come up with two possible trains of thought that might take me from the station of theory and let me off in my studio.

The first is that by learning about various theories I might come up with ideas that could influence my own art.

The second is that I need to carefully examine the messages that I am sending in my art.  Perhaps there aren't many people out there who want to receive them, or who are equipped to decode them, but on the off-chance there is somebody, I want to make sure that person will get the right idea.

I'm still skeptical about the role of theory in my life as a working artist, or the lives of my everyday artist friends.  But I'm thinking hard.


What do you think?  Does art theory enter into your work?

Back in school -- reflections on feminist art

Another paper written for my art history class:

OK, I’m going to show my age. I was there for the dawning of the Second Wave of feminism, raised in the postwar age of stay-at-home moms doing housework in high heels and pearls, hitting the workforce and marriage just about when women were starting to question their cultural expectations and limitations. I was just as mad as anybody at the dawning realization that the status quo just wasn’t fair.

But I never thought – and to this day, do not think – that the way to protest maltreatment at the hands of the chauvinist pig male establishment is to maltreat yourself.

In many cases, early feminist artists took this maltreatment quite literally. Valie Export walked down the street in different kinds of creative undress, inviting people to feel her up. Marina Abramovic invited spectators to savage her with knives, thorns and loaded guns while she sat motionless for six hours, and they took her up on it.  Yoko Ono allowed spectators to cut her clothing off while she too knelt motionless.

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0



















In other cases, feminist artists settled for simulated maltreatment. Ana Mendieta reenacted a brutal rape of a woman in her community, and made numerous photo images of herself, both clothed and nude, covered in blood (at least the blood was not her own). Carolee Schneemann allowed snakes to crawl over her naked body.

Ana Mendieta, Body Tracks



















And many feminist artists simply offered their own naked bodies in provocative contexts to challenge the traditional view of the passive female nude, laid out for the pleasure of the male viewer/consumer. Some upped the ante by featuring female genitalia in prominent roles, either their own or false, For instance, Hannah Wilke made little genitalia out of bubble gum and stuck them to artworks on paper or to her own face and body. Francesca Woodman stuck masks and photos between her naked, spread legs. Carolee Schneemann extracted a long scroll from her vagina during a performance.

Hannah Wilke, SOS Scarification Object Series

Francesca Woodman















While agreeing totally with the feminist perspective that the art world has historically given women the short end of the stick, and something should be done to challenge this practice, I have a hard time understanding the concept behind giving yourself the short end of the stick in protest.

By contrast, I feel a great deal of sympathy for feminist artists who try to put the show on the other foot, by giving men a frisson of what it might be like to be seen voyeuristically as a sex object. Artists such as Joan Semmel and Anita Steckel painted heterosexual sex from a female perspective, celebrating the activity but presenting it for the benefit and pleasure of the woman, not the man. Perhaps male viewers felt a bit uncomfortable at their depictions of erections and penises, and if so, that was exactly what the artists wanted to accomplish.

But I confess to bewilderment over how putting your body forth as a sexual display to shock, disturb and titillate viewers is a large qualitative improvement over allowing some male artist or pimp to do the same. (I had a hard time finding images to illustrate this post that were at least sort of fit for public consumption.  A half hour on google with the artists I have mentioned will probably be plenty to ruin your breakfast.)

Artists of both genders have always felt free to use shock value as a step toward acceptance (or at least recognition) by the art establishment, and the greater the public outrage, the greater the artist’s satisfaction, emotional if not financial.  I can also see the temptation on the part of young, good-looking women to capitalize on their looks; if over the centuries men have made money off the nubile bodies of women, it’s nice for women to bypass the exploiters and make the money themselves, especially if that also provides a ticket to the higher levels of the art world. But as a card-carrying feminist I wish these artists had chosen a mode of expression that could stick it to the man without treating themselves as meat for the man’s gaze.

Back in school -- liberated from history

This week in art history class we read about the dividing line between "modern" art and "contemporary" art.  It falls somewhere around 1970 and its distinguishing feature is that contemporary art, unlike modern art and all earlier movements and genres, is not part of a continuing narrative of art history, not part of a grand trajectory of styles that change over the centuries, each one emanating from the ones before.

Instead, contemporary art has been liberated from art history.  Contemporary artists can do any damn thing they please, borrowing from any source they wish and combining ideas and motifs from many different periods, styles and sources.  They have also been liberated from those pesky concepts of standards and criteria for judging value.  Where once it was legitimate and appropriate for critics to identify "good art" or "bad art," that's no longer true.

My paper this week reflects on what has been lost in the crossing from the old world of formal standards into the anything-goes world of contemporary art.  If there are no commonly accepted standards of what constitutes art, let alone what constitutes good or bad art, then the only mechanism that can fill the vacuum is the marketplace.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (detail) -- sold in October for $34 million, the most ever paid at auction for work by a living artist.  The painting had extra cachet because the seller was rock star Eric Clapton.

I find it ironic that the (usually French) philosophers who hold capitalism in such passionate contempt are complicit in this abdication of value to the crass philistines of the big-time art market. The philosophers apparently like to think of contemporary art as being untethered from daily life, gloriously liberated from the stultifying traditions and history of art, able to do whatever it wants without consequence.  Yet no human endeavor is truly separable from life.  If artists wish to be supermen soaring above petty rules and regulations, they will be disappointed when it's time to pay the rent.  Those who glory in the freedom to appropriate from all sources, to give new meaning to established images, may be rudely awakened when they are sued by the makers or corporate owners of those images.

In flushing the concept of standards down the drain, the philosopher-kings of contemporary art may face unintended consequences.  If the art world is to exist without standards, what will be taught in schools of art; and if schools of art wither away, what will become the feeder system for the pro leagues of the big-time gallery/market complex?  Perhaps Yale will offer a joint MFA/MBA to reflect the realities of art production.

With no standards and criteria to be learned, who will staff the galleries and museums?  Perhaps the ideal gallerist or curator will no longer be an art history major but a marketer fresh from an apprenticeship at Disneyland.  This is already happening in the museum world, with its emphasis on blockbuster shows, but at least so far the blockbuster is seen as the necessary cash cow to support the other elevated (and worthier) missions of the institution.  In the absence of standards and traditions of high art, perhaps the cash cow will take over and the other shows and objects will be divested as hamburger.

With no standards and criteria emanating from the art world, how will galleries, collectors and auctioneers decide what is valuable?  Instead of the educated taste of a community of artists and art connoisseurs, we will have only the trendy taste of rich people for luxury goods.  Perhaps Gagosian will be acquired by LVMH, with the Hirsts displayed and marketed alongside cognac, champagne and luggage.

In inventing and/or identifying a world freed from the burden of standards, the champions of contemporary art may find themselves regretting what they wished for.

Back in school -- originality

Here's the paper I wrote recently for my art history class:

After spending a day reading about originality, I reflect on Shakespeare's title/phrase: "Much Ado About Nothing."  The critics point out that art (or by extension, any aspect of thought or science) comes either from emulating existing knowledge or practice, or from some alteration or re-direction of existing knowledge or practice.  Or perhaps both.

Either the artist works from his own self-image, his own feelings, his own experience, or he channels the ancients, reworking communal themes and images.  Or perhaps both.

This is hard to argue with.  What are my other choices?

First I reflect on the possibility that anybody can work entirely from his own self.  Once you get to kindergarten, you have already internalized a body of knowledge that comes from others.  By age five you have learned a language, and a sub-language that marks your ethnic origins and your socioeconomic status.  You have learned a family history, perhaps complex: sisters, half-sisters, stepsisters; relatives by blood vs. those by marriage; which ones you like, which ones you stay far away from.

By age five you have learned a culture.  Within your family, you know that everybody comes to the table at dinnertime, or gathers around the TV, or fends for himself; that you go to church on Sunday or root for Michigan State; that you read books or have dogs or wash the car every weekend.  Within your community, you already know whether people in the neighborhood are friendly with one another and are welcome in each other's homes; whether they go to work faithfully, are unemployed, or play tennis every day; whether they demand that their children do homework and get good grades; whether they respect or fear the police.

If you were to drop out of kindergarten and move to a cave, you would still be marked with those early exposures to culture and history, and no matter how religiously you were to pursue artistic originality, you could never escape those memes.  And every year that you stick with the program, learning more facts about your history and becoming more nuanced in your culture, reduces the possibilities that you could be totally original as an artist.

If freedom from history and culture is the hallmark of the "modern" artist, then it seems that the only true "modern" artists are those who were raised by wolves or those who are profoundly retarded.  Perhaps the most well-known example is the late Judith Scott, who was deaf and mute and had Down syndrome, and made "art" by obsessively wrapping yarn and fabric strips into bundles.  She was embraced by the art world as an outsider artist and her work sold for as much as $15,000 and is found in the permanent collections of many prominent museums.

Judith Scott

The rest of us have no choice but to bring our culture and history to our artmaking.

If nobody comes to the studio without history and culture, then where can true originality come from?  Artists can copy others and/or, having come up with some idea that works, copy and repeat themselves.  This is no different than it was 500 years ago, but today, artists are made to feel inferior if they are not "original," whatever that means.

One of the nastiest remarks one can make about art is that it's "derivative."  The frequent response, it seems to me, is to say "I didn't want to be original, so there."  Call it appropriation, call it sampling, call it quotation -- it's a preemptive defense against accusations of lack of originality.

In the end, I believe artists must walk a fine line between being influenced by their surroundings, their culture, their history (otherwise they would be brain dead) and outright plagiarism.  Too far over the line and they may find themselves in court, but currently it's a lot more difficult to be found guilty in the public opinion of the art world.

Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1964 -- Patricia Caulfield, who made the original photo, sued and won a settlement

Richard Prince, Canal Zone (right) -- Patrick Cariou, who made the original photo (left), sued and won in federal court; all of Prince's images had to be destroyed

Shepard Fairey, Hope -- Mannie Garcia, who made the original photo, sued and won a settlement; Fairey pled guilty to contempt of court in the case and was fined

Back in school -- sex and death

I wrote last week about how I'm taking a graduate-level art history class, after an extended absence from the classroom.  We're writing every week, and I thought I might share some of my work with you.  Here's a slightly edited version of my first paper, based on an article that riffed on Titian's Venus.  

The author writes at length about images that are sexually arousing, and suggests that we of the 21st century can barely imagine how transgressive and shocking these subjects were in early modern times.  I am reflecting on a class of images that have taken the opposite trajectory: far more transgressive and shocking today than they were five centuries ago.

I’m talking about images of dead bodies.  Death has always been a subject for art; images of Christ on or just taken down from the cross, and of martyred saints were mainstays of churches, Bibles and devotional books.  Sarcophagi of nobles and high clergy were customarily crowned with sculptured corpses.   The Black Death brought a plague of artworks of horror and disruption following that vast series of epidemics.   The danse macabre, showing partying skeletons, was a common image. 

Michael Wohlgemut, Danse Macabre, 1493

Slightly more subtle, but still firmly focused on the inevitability of death, were the memento mori and other still life paintings that came later.  The dead bodies might be rabbits, pheasants and fish rather than people, but the message was the same – you’re next. 

People who saw art, whether as paintings, sculpture or book illustrations, had to be familiar with images of death.  They probably took the images seriously as come-to-Jesus reminders, but I suspect their emotional responses were more awestruck and solemn than shocked.

Even as the centuries passed, images of death stayed at the forefront of consciousness.  Early photographers frequently took pictures of the dead (a big plus in those days of long exposures: the dead could really hold still) and it was fashionable to wear lockets with little death photos, perhaps along with a lock of the deceased’s hair. 

I don’t know exactly how public attitudes (at least American attitudes) toward death images changed, or how quickly.  Perhaps it started with the advent of “real” death images instead of mere artist representations; if so, the extensive photographic documentation of the Civil War surely was an important first step.

The horrors of subsequent wars were even more closely covered.  And yet there was a consensus among photographers to withhold the most disturbing images of battlefield casualties in the World Wars, at least until years later.  The American public saw photos of the dead at Dachau but not on the Normandy beaches.  The very fact that television news of Vietnam showed same-day carnage is credited with changing the public view of that war.  

It’s not as though we haven’t seen plenty of images of death, primarily in wartime.  But in the last half-century those images seem to me to have become more shocking, more taboo, even as sexual images have become more commonplace and less shocking.

I’d like to know more about how contemporary artists  have depicted dead bodies, and how these images were received by the critics and by the public.  Warhol’s images of car crashes and suicides, and Serrano’s images of bodies from the morgue, would be high on the list.  A bit of googling reveals that critics and public alike found it easy to disapprove of these artworks, and I suspect these were not the only such cases.

Andres Serrano, Morgue Photos

Andy Warhol, Green Disaster Twice (sold for $15.2 million last year)

More recently the public was shocked by images of people falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Readers protested when newspapers published photos of falling victims.  Eric Fischl’s bronze statue, “Tumbling Woman,” inspired by the event, was installed at Rockefeller Center but within days it was covered up and subsequently removed after people were upset.

Eric Fischl, Tumbling Woman

Not high art, but certainly important in the public consciousness are many disturbing death images from the war in Iraq.  The Bush administration was so aware of the power of images to shock and galvanize the public that it banned any photography of flag-draped soldiers’ coffins returning to the US. 

Journalists have gone through immense self-flagellation over whether and how they should present notorious death images such as the video beheading of Daniel Pearl, and the US contractors ambushed by crowds in Fallujah, then killed, burned and hung from a bridge.  Almost always their readers and viewers rise up in protest when such images are published, accusing the editors of sensationalism, and perhaps political motives.

Perhaps sex and death have changed places in the public's visual universe in the last fifty years.  Where one used to be seen as shocking and pornographic, now the other one is.

Learning more about art

Got an email the other day from a quilter whose work I have known about for years, largely because we've been participants on the Quiltart list for a long time, reading each other's messages and blogs.  She wrote:  "For the last 15 years or so I have concentrated on ways to create portraits with fabric.  I am really wanting to grow and develop further as an artist.  I am finding that I don't really have a basis for understanding more abstract art -- for instance, why is one 'good' and another is not.  I was wondering if you could give me some recommendations of books or websites that might help me develop a more sensitive understanding."

Wow!  That's quite a question, and I had to think for a while.  I wandered around on Google for a bit looking for some background material, and the best I could find without spending all day was this discussion of abstract art.  But I think the real solution to your dilemma is broader than just reading matter, it's how to cultivate a way of looking at and evaluating art, other people's and your own.

I would suggest that instead of being intimidated by how different abstract art is from the representational work you already do, you think about the similarities.  Other than not trying to faithfully depict things from real life, abstract art follows almost all the same rules of composition: balance, rhythm, proportion, emphasis, unity.  Everything you know about color applies equally to representational and abstract work.

Maybe a good place to start is to look through a bunch of images that you know to be "good" -- for instance, work by the famous abstract expressionists, or the earlier 20th century painters.  Run through the list of qualities (balance, rhythm, etc.) and try to see how they appear in these pictures.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow, and Black

For instance, here the yellow and red areas balance the heavy black at the top.  There's clear unity in the lines and the grid, and emphasis on the very large white square.

Philip Guston, Bronze

Here there's a rhythm in the lighter pinks surrounding the darker focal center, with white in the four corners.  There's unity in the character of the brushstrokes and the quality of the paint (crude, messy, seemingly applied in haste).  And so on.

Robert Motherwell, Mural Fragment

There's rhythm in the size and weight of the five large black shapes, in the strong black verticals and the colored horizontals.  The small white and black  circles at the right echo the larger ovals.  The three columns of the composition have a pleasant proportion, not identical in width but in good balance.  The green stripe just below dead center complements the warm earth tones and neutrals everywhere else in the painting.

The more you do this exercise when you visit museums or look at art images online, you'll get better at seeing the principles of good design.  And you will be able to see them at play in your own quilts as you compose them on the design wall.

Speaking of design walls, I think that it's important as you become more abstract in your quilts to work with at least some improvisational flexibility.  Where making representational pictures in fabric, especially portraits, requires a lot of advance planning and design on paper, and not a lot of changing of plans in midstream, I think you have to give yourself more freedom in doing abstractions on the design wall.  Allow yourself  plenty of stepping back, looking, contemplating, and letting the fabric talk to you.  Colors that you thought would play well together when you made your preliminary sketches or pulled piles of fabric to work with may not be right when you see them in the flesh at actual size.

I don't know whether this answer will be enough to satisfy my friend.  Maybe if the rest of you have favorite books or websites or ideas you could suggest them as well.  But in the end, I think the solution is to spend as much time as possible looking at and thinking about art, no matter whether you're doing it with the help of books or conversations with others or the internet or some other method.  You can develop your biceps by doing curls or chin-ups or working on a nautilus machine -- it doesn't really matter which one you choose as long as you do it regularly.  Same with thinking about art.