A Little Bit of History Repeating

The National Portrait Gallery has been one of my favorite museums to visit during my time living in Washington. The hours are convenient (it’s open til 7 most days), and it has that amazing painting of Walt Whitman (maybe it’s more a portrait of Walt Whitman’s beard….in any case, I love it). I’ve also felt like, of all the national/public museums here, the NPG has one of the better contemporary programs going (the Portraiture Now series, Self-portraiture in the 20th Century, the Outwin Boochever competition, Ding Ren’s recent performances, etc. etc.).

So, of course, I feel sad about the Smithsonian administration’s caving in to right-wing attacks on its display of David Wojnarowicz’s video work A Fire in My Belly. If you read or listen to the Catholic League’s remarks on the subject, it seems pretty obvious that the leader of that group is grasping at straws, making outrageous statements in order to garner recognition for himself and his group as much as anything else. Honestly, the whole furor seems like it might have been cooked up to sell newspapers, since the Catholic League’s leader wasn’t aware of the artwork until asked to comment on it by the New York Post. Yet it seems that, with the hopping-on-the-bandwagon of Reps. Boehner and Cantor, we are all set to re-wage the culture wars of the 80s and 90s anyway. So much for contemporary programming.

Oh well. Nothing like being a punching bag for the advancement of an unrelated and hostile political agenda. I’m sure this outrage will garner The Right lots of votes in the art-hating segments of our citizenry.

I read in the Washington Post this morning that the NPG is going to replace this artwork in their video kiosk with a selection from Pink Narcissus, a 1971 film about the fantasies of a young male prostitute, directed by James Bidgood. So that’s okay then. Goes along with the Pope’s recent okay of prostitutes’ condom usage. I hope we can all be happy about that.

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Bravo Transformer!

What I've Been Thinking About: Formalism vs. Conceptualism

I’ve been reading some discussions on the art blogs recently about formalism vs. conceptualism and the artist's intent, ginned up by Roberta Smith writing about Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum. (Scroll down to see Edward Winkleman's posts from November 10 & 11, and the review mentioned here.)

I used to want to draw a bright line between these two camps also. I believe my thinking was encouraged by grad school and the kind of art I saw in the Midwest and in the East. Those examples showed me that art was either beautiful, or heady, but hardly ever both at the same time.

My time in LA revealed that the distinction between the two kinds of art might be geographical, and is certainly a lot more blurry than I had once believed. I think schools in LA must convey the attitude that all art made now will be inherently conceptual, because it is made in a Post-Conceptualism world. We’ve all learned the lesson that art must mean something besides or beyond the way it looks, so we apply that lesson to all future creations and viewing experiences. Conceptualism can be fun, casual, and hell, even enjoyable to look at.

I was confronted head on by this problem when I was trying to wrap my head around MOCA’s Index show of California Conceptualism last fall. As a museum educator, I was grappling with how to introduce this work to elementary school students without having to give them a fat stack of books to read first. The problem as I saw it was: how are we going to deal with the art of ideas based just on what we see before us, since that is all we are gonna have time to go on in a one-hour tour? What I discovered was that kids approach Conceptualism the same way they approach any other kind of art. If they like to look at it, they’ll talk about why; if they think it’s boring, well, they like to talk about that too. For young viewers, form contains content.

Last night I went to an artist panel at Hamiltonian Gallery with Anne Chan and Michael Iacovone. They both seemed to be struggling with the Formalism vs. Conceptualism problem a bit too, though he more than she. Iacovone’s project was in part an effort to remove the artist’s hand, eye, and choice from image making via a series of arbitrary rules and random dice rolls. He seemed very concerned that the resulting photographs should not be aestheticized objects to be appreciated for their formal beauty (which they had in loads), but invitations for viewers to engage the city in a similar ruled based method (in order, with luck, to experience their everyday space in a new way).

I kind of wanted to shake him a little bit. Why are we still thinking that physical attractiveness is suspect, or that beauty and concept cannot work together to form a more perfect artwork? If Michael Asher can create a seductive pink plastic square and call it high minimalism, then dammit, I can enjoy looking at a well-made rule based photograph. In fact, that little bit of beauty is what gets me to look in the first place. So yeah, the artwork might be showing a little leg….but so what, as long as it follows through with complex ideas once it’s got my attention? Because as a viewer, what I see before me is all I really have to go on in the end.

(image is Michael Asher's no title, 1966, from MOCA.org)

Neighborhood News

Last weekend there was a shooting in my neighborhood of LA, Echo Park. In total, two men were killed, one wounded, and one suspect apprehended. Police say the shootings were the result of an internal dispute among leaders and members of the EXP gang.

I was especially disturbed when I first learned about the shooting because of its location: in the middle of one of the neighborhood’s main avenues which is always covered up with pedestrians, bicycles, and cars, across the street from an elementary school and a coffee shop. Granted, it was Sunday afternoon, so school was not in session, but I’m sure there were still plenty of kids and other locals out and about. So what gives, gang bangers? Don’t shoot up the place, and keep your violence to yourselves.

However, I also know that these gang members and their gang are long-time fixtures of the neighborhood, just like the elementary school and the little markets that dot the avenue. I know too that they view the neighborhood as theirs, and a white-skinned, light-haired person like me is just one of those newbies who doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to be educated about the neighborhood’s real culture, and never will really belong here.

At least, that’s the message I’ve gotten from reading the postings on several neighborhood blogs and listservs in the past few days. Incidents like this one bring up to the surface our divisions, differences, and beefs, perceived or otherwise. Discussions about this event seem to have instantly generated comments about the increase of white residents in the neighborhood over the past 10 years, the lack of respect given the old residents by the new ones, and the ignorance of the new residents when confronted with the realities and mores of the previous generations.

I’m not entirely sure what the two things have to do with each other, or why these subjects are so quickly related. I didn’t realize any one race or ethnicity had corned the market on hopes for bullet-free walks down the street, or that the wish for such could be understood as disrespect. Isn’t it natural for us all to want a safe place to coffee-sip, porch-sit, shoot the breeze (not each other!) and watch kids play?

The recent conflict over these questions makes me feel bad. I'm pretty sure that we do indeed all want the same basic things in life, but our outside differences are just too much for us to overcome in order to find that common ground.

Art Pork

I have heard on the radio and read in print several commentators, talking heads, and members of the general public lambasting the economic stimulus bill now grinding its way through congress as being full of pork. Item Number One on everyone’s menu of critiques seems to be the 50 million dollars of funding being proposed for the National Endowment for the Arts. I heard a radio talk show guest say something along the lines of: “Building sculptures and putting on operas does not stimulate the economy, does not create jobs.” (I heard this approximate quote on the Patt Morrison Show—1-3 pm on 89.3 KPCC—sometime in the last two weeks.)

Well, sir, I beg to differ. No, building a single sculpture does not create hundreds of jobs instantaneously. However, the money used to bring such a thing about does touch many hands and businesses, spreading out in a community like the tiny little hair roots of a poke salet weed in search of sustenance. For instance: the foundry and its skilled workers who fabricate the sculpture are paid, so that they can pay bills and buy groceries and maybe some new blue jeans at the national retailer who pays rent to the mall; the steel mill gets a boost from the purchase of the few tons of raw material needed to create the artwork, and therefore continues to pay for health insurance and matching retirement funds for its employees; the freight company that transports the material and the finished artwork gets to put its equipment and workers in motion, and in so doing buys fuel, antifreeze, and paper forms in triplicate; the artist and her freelance assistants (who she pays!) work in a town or a city for a few days, buying coffee, sandwiches, and the odd Danish from the locally-owned bakery down the street from their worksite. The arts stimulate our economy underground, lubricating those wheels and gears in small ways, like bacon grease left in the skillet used to cook up some eggs. It’s small, but it keeps us grinding forward like that bill.

I work part time in the education department of an art museum, and I just survived a round of layoffs there. $50 million is small change in the grand scheme of things; but it can buy an awful lot of coffee, pizzas, construction paper, masking tape, and photo paper (the kinds of things we are constantly buying more of for projects and workshops). So if we stay employed, we keep making those kinds of purchases, and they help keep both Office Depot and Joe’s Giant Slice in business.

(image is Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago, from Wikipedia)

Basin Street Blues

The calendar has rolled around again to the end of August, and like a lot of other folks I’m thinking about New Orleans. I remember going to bed on the night of August 28, 2005, (or maybe it was early early in the morning on August 29…I was still in grad school then) believing everything was okay. The storm had passed, and the cities I know on the Gulf (Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola) seemed to have escaped. But when I woke up the next morning, that picture of safety had been traded for about the most awful thing imaginable.

I never lived in New Orleans, but I visited it often during college (just five hours east on I-10, cruising along the coast and through the bayou). And growing up where I did, New Orleans was always in the architecture of my imagination this magical, far-away place of glamour and big-city life, a distant shiny thing on the horizon down the river (New York City being too far away to be possible). Like Memphis, only more so.

So when I did finally visit for the first time, over Labor Day weekend of my first year of college (it was 1997, and we learned that weekend of Princess Diana’s death), I fell in love. (I’m sure this feeling was helped along by the presence of the boyfriend I was visiting, who was matriculating at Tulane.) New Orleans was a beautiful, many petaled flower unfolding before me, wrapping me in its ornate perfumes. It was like I had imagined when I was little, only more so. Since then, I have harbored a secret, romantic wish to live there, but I know that’s not likely now; the river of my life has taken a different course.

I felt far away then, in 2005, (an eight-hour drive from Home, so 16 hours from the Crescent City), but now, sitting here at the other end of I-10, I could be in a different country. The sun shines and the traffic rolls on here as if nothing ever happened “back East,” as if “back East” might just be a figment of our collective imaginations. Late in 2005, I was visiting Los Angeles in advance of my move out here, and a long-time Angeleno remarked to me that he didn’t believe money should be spent rebuilding New Orleans. His attitude was “It’ll just happen again, and it’s not worth that much to our national economy, so why bother?” I wanted to retort “Why should the rest of us want to help rebuild Los Angeles after your next big earthquake?”, but I held my tongue. His comments hurt, because I knew that his attitude reflected this disconnect from the rest of the country that I would feel out here.

But a few things that make me feel closer: I’ve noticed that newscasters (at least on the radio) have gradually reformed their pronunciation of the city’s name over the last two years. Instead of “Noo OR-LEE-enz,” we now hear “NuWOrlans,” much closer to the native language. And at this time of year, I can hear those familiar voices on the radio: the Cajun almost-Northeastern accents, the African American accents, the old-time accents from small towns in Mississippi; these almost sound like Home to me. And Home is why things, cities, get rebuilt -- we all need one, even if only to imagine it.