Bad Art: elizabeth murray

Ok ok ok it is not that I think all her work is terrible . . . but come on? You cannot tell me that this doesn't look like something that should be in a Jewish Deli's bathroom . . . and that was not meant to be mean, its just those colors, and shapes . . . oy! But her earlier work is quiet interesting in its examination of abstraction . . so perhaps this should be retitled: "Bad Art: late elizabeth murray."

Great Jews in Art: leonard baskin

There was Leonard Baskin the writer, with his searing comments on important and often overlooked artists, and Baskin the maker of books, whose Gehenna Press set the standard against which all fine press books are measured. There was Baskin the Caldecott-honored children's book illustrator, and Baskin the watercolorist whose explosion of color burst so unexpectedly, in mid career, like fireworks over his previously black sky. There was Baskin the printmaker, who reinvented the monumental woodcut, and at the core was Baskin the sculptor ("I am foremost and fundamentally a sculptor."), who in the estimation of many, was the preeminent sculptor of our time ("Not because I am so great, though I am, but because all the others are so dreadful.")


Information kindly provided by http://www.rmichelson.com/Leonard-Baskin.html

Great Jews in Art: ida applebroog

Ida Applebroog was born in the Bronx, New York in 1929, and lives and works in New York. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an honorary doctorate from New School University/Parsons School of Design. Applebroog has been making pointed social commentary in the form of beguiling comic-like images for nearly half a century. She has developed an instantly recognizable style of simplified human forms with bold outlines. Anonymous ‘everyman’ figures, anthropomorphized animals, and half human-half creature characters are featured players in the uncanny theater of her work. Applebroog propels her paintings and drawings into the realm of installation by arranging and stacking canvases in space, exploding the frame-by-frame logic of comic-book and film narrative into three-dimensional environments. In her most characteristic work, she combines popular imagery from everyday urban and domestic scenes, sometimes paired with curt texts, to skew otherwise banal images into anxious scenarios infused with a sense of irony and black humor. Strong themes in her work include gender and sexual identity, power struggles both political and personal, and the pernicious role of mass media in desensitizing the public to violence. In addition to paintings, Applebroog has also created sculptures; artist’s books; several films (including a collaboration with her daughter, the artist Beth B); and animated shorts that appeared on the side of a moving truck and on a giant screen in Times Square.

Biographical information is courtesy of ART:21's website. You can also visit Ronald Feldman Gallery's website for further biographical and bibliographical information!

Ohh Feminists!

check this out:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-and-architecture/features/theres-never-been-a-great-woman-artist-860865.html

This article got me really thinking. It is really tough to take a side. It is obvious (and completely common knowledge) that women artists do face discrimination in the art market. The number of women exhibited in major museums in NYC is minimal when compared to their male counterparts. This is especially relevant when considering art pre 1900. However, are we to rewrite history according to a feminist agenda? That is the sticky issue. I cannot (and choose not to) come up with a definitive answer. This is a small article, but I think it lays out the ground work pretty well - I especially appreciate the use of facts and numbers.

The article ends with: "Mr Wirth, however, believes things could change. 'The problem has been that female artists have been historically excluded from museums,' he told The Art Newspaper. 'Now there are more female curators and a new generation of male curators rewriting art history.'" But what are the consequences of such rewriting? To what extent can art history be morally rewritten? Lots to think about . . . .

Bad Art: olafur eliasson

I would like to introduce a segment to this blog called: "Bad Art." I would like to extend my congratulations to Olafur Eliasson for being the first artist featured in this segment. His "blockbuster" exhibition at the MoMA has just closed but his "Waterfalls" will be on view for the rest of the summer.
The Public Art Fund must feel great having spent millions on the project, while MoMA is counting every penny of its over-priced entrance fee. In my humble opinion neither the exhibition nor the public art project is worth a spit in the bucket. Eliasson is a poor excuse for a conceptual art. The hype surrounding his work merely confirms that hotshot contemporary artists are spectacles - its sleek and stylish so it must be good! Yet, this is not the Andy Warhol type - that is sophisticated and educated in its social commentary - rather, what we witness with Eliasson is "institutional avant-gardism" (meaning that the conceptual element of his work is supplied by the institution that seeks to make financial gain off him). I mean, really for Christ sake - a room with orange colored light bulbs? Really? that is art? Come on! MoMA you one of the best collections of Modern and Contemporary Art in the world and who do you decide to showcase? Eliasson! His work is only good to take Facebook photos in . . . really! Come on MoMA, for shame! Thank God the Gay Pride Parade was going on at the time I saw this exhibition. . . drag queens dressed as sea nymphs always take away my Bad Art blues.

Kara Walker and Blogging

This is the appendix to an essay I wrote on Black Feminist Video Art. It is a rant against the racism (in Walker's art) that is all too warmly accepted by the general public, art historians and art critics. Enjoy!

The Whitney Museum provided a blog site whereby visitors to the Kara Walker exhibition have uncensored venue to react to the art works. The site explains: “Kara Walker intends for her artwork to inspire reaction and dialogue. This blog provides a place to share both.”¹ The blog provided a series of questions which responders could react to in order to generate conversation including: What personal associations do you bring to the exhibition? Do you ever find yourself using stereotypes despite your best intentions? If so, how? Do you think art can be a form of resistance? Like many of the reviews of the exhibition, commentators on the website praised the exhibition for directly addressing our views of racism. Helen, who identified as coming from the rural South wrote: “I hope it makes all who visit the exhibit have just a bit more sensitivity and a bit more strength to contribute to stopping the wrongs across our world that are ever so present right now.” There is a very interesting concern here for semantics as our is never clearly defined. Holland Cotter and Jerry Saltz, amongst others, expand upon this essentialist construction in the manner which they praise this exhibition. Cotter wrote: “Ms. Walker draws an important one: The source and blame for racism lies with everyone, including herself. It seems we are addicted to it. We claim to hate living with it, but we cannot live without it.” Yet, Cotter never addresses who constitutes this we. Is we those who read and have access to the New York Times? Is we those who are able to afford the costs of admission and the luxury of time to see the exhibition at the Whitney? The semantic conundrum is that we and our are not clearly defined and the perceptions that these proponents discuss are merely abstract assumptions on visibility and experience.

Viewers of Walker’s work enter into a subconscious and psychosexual contract with a video such as Calling. However, as opponents of Walker have asserted, what viewers do experience is a moralistically flawed construction of racially identity - of the past and the present. There were several persons on the Whitney blog who equate the immoral acts of her character with Walker’s own conscious. A blogger identified as mutope wrote: “There’s no need to gain the world and lose your soul.” Even more directed is Lore who empathized with Walker’s purported anxieties: “I hope all her anger and frustrations cease one day, because it has to be a very sad life to see the world through those eyes.” It is quite possible, as Lore suggests, that there is a more personal dynamic that Walker has with the exhibition then catches the eye. But, if there is any bit of the artist to be found in this video it is best seen as a record of her personal hang-ups with her self-hating racist psychosis. Howard Halle, and likeminded critics, argued that these historically fictionalized tableaus are incapable of capturing the human condition. There seems to be an anger boiling just underneath the surface of Walker’s work, but it never manages to convey the personality of the artist. The unfortunate result is that her works are, “far less free than she imagines.”²

The generational gap is another contentious issue concerning the criticism of Walker’s work. Critics Holland Cotter and Jerry Saltz dismissed any negative criticism as attributed to overzealous geriatrics. Cotter writes: “several African-American artists of an older generation, with careers dating to the 1960s, publicly condemned her use of racial stereotypes as insulting and opportunistic, a way to ingratiate herself into a racist white art industry.” However the most poignant and directed criticism on the blog was from Christopher, a self-identified 26 year old African American, who felt accosted by the onslaught of grotesque and perverse representations of Blacks:

Walker’s work does not subvert the white supremacist imagination of blackness but rather re-presents it in the tangible hear-and-now, bows to its hegemonic force and makes offerings of eagerly copulating slave women, debased pickaninnies and confused buckcoons [. . .] Walker’s work disturbs me because while it does present a horrifying, grotesque, epic vision of this country’s foundation it simultaneously hints that it is all ok, that blacks are just as complicit as whites and that these horrors were somehow, in part, self-extracted. She presents this racialized psychosexual fantasy as an obscured reality /shadows on the wall/, as the (subhuman) raw material blacks are truly made of.

This construction of select generational angst is countered by Christopher’s eliciting the criticality of Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell. The elder established Black feminist artists react out of anger as Walker has visually overturned the struggles of the Civil Rights movement. Christopher’s reaction is rooted in his distrust of a highly marketable and commercially successful artist.

It is not to say for certain that commercially successful artists cannot maintain a critical outlook, however the context of her work is compromised by the exhibiting institution – the Whitney. The conversation regarding this body of work has only added to the work’s mystique –a shallow self-sustaining hype. While the success of Walker is undeniable, the conversation regarding monetary compensation for moralistic obligations is a dish best served cold.