Art imitates Art imitates Art

The Han Dynasty was a very stable dynasty, lasting in two periods for about 400 years.  It was a time of expansion, established Confucianism, poetry, literature and diplomacy.  China also controlled the trade routes through the Taklamakan Desert (the Silk Road), thus bringing in tremendous prosperity.  In part as a result of both Confucianism (and its connection to ancestor worship) and tremendous trade, very hard stoneware ceramics flourished in the Han Dynasty.
 

Artist Ai Weiwei, one of the most important artists of the last few decades (not just because he's coming from the context of China and its repressive regime), has taken Han Dynasty vases and reimagined them.  As brightly colored dipped works.  My favorite, stamped with the Coca-Cola logo, parallels for me the take-over by modern American consumerism of everything. 

As the Hirshhorn puts it: "In this and other works in which the artist destroys the old to create the new, such as “Coca-Cola Vase” (2007) and his ongoing series of “Colored Vases,” Ai raises questions about the definition and endurance of cultural value."

Ai Weiwei then created a photographic triptych of an event in which he drops a Han Dynasty urn.  Ai draws our attention to what makes value--we value these vases precisely because of their age; they are of dubious quality and they are ubiquitous (precisely because of the circumstances of their creation). 

 

On Sunday, February 16, artist Maximo Caminero walked in to the Perez Art Museum in Miami, took one of the vase works from Ai's According to What? installation and smashed it.  He has been charged with criminal mischief for breaking the vase, valued at $1 million.  Caminero told the police/press: "I did it for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here," he says. "They have spent so many millions now on international artists. It's the same political situation over and over again. I've been here for 30 years and it's always the same."

Caminero says that it was spontaneous (the museum says premeditated), that he didn't really think about the value of Ai's work.  The value question is again raised--is it $1,000,000 because of the Han vase's value, the value that it has as a work by Ai, the value it has as one part of a multiple work installation, and/or the value the insurance company insists it have when exhibited?  Ai's response was that he should have found another means of protest, because of the trouble it will bring Caminero, but that the vase is gone and he expresses calm with that.  Other artists, many upset with Perez Art Museum's policy of passing over local artists, seem to support Caminero's act, feeling it was in connection with Ai's own work. 

Caminero's own work will receive more attention because of his act of vandalism.  But what he has done is the equivalent of a child kicking someone because he is thwarted--it brings the wrong attention in greater measure than the correct attention.  Will the Perez Art Museum look at its exhibition policies? (They are currently hosting the work of Edouard Duval-Carrie, a Haitian born but Miami based artist; I can't delve their history enough to know whether Caminero's protest is valid.)  Sometimes we feel just like children who can't get parents' attention.  Desecration and destruction are one way to draw that kind of attention.

Monuments Men: The Salvation and Conservation of American Image

This is a response essay to the 2014 film, Monuments Men.  It is NOT a review of the movie.  It does however, broadly discuss ideas related to the film and as such does mention scenes.  I tried hard not to write spoilers but your definition may vary.

Also--I will point out--the ideas and errors are my own.

I recently watched Monuments Men, directed by and starring George Clooney.  Based on a true story (Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Center Street, 2010) an international team of art historians and architects and “regular” soldiers form the backbone of the search for Nazi looted art at the end of World War II.  The movie has many problems—not just Clooney’s direction that makes a movie that cannot decide if it is a war picture, a heist movie, a buddy flick, and several other genres—but most glaring is the lack of historical accuracy, served with a dazzle of American patriotism.

The premise of the team is a “big idea”—that art is what makes us stand apart as civilizations.  Art is what makes us “truly” human, what allows us to transcend our pedestrian lives and petty quarrels.  The line is repeated over and over: this is an important mission because of the value of Art.  I’m an art historian; on some level, I believe this.  Art is what we make to tell our cultural story, values, concerns, and fears.  (And as such, it includes ephemera and pop culture and music and films. Not just the Michelangelos.)  But it is certainly an arguable position—are paintings more or less valuable than the lives of soldiers and civilians?  Who gets to decide?

Hollywood’s Monuments Men exist in an idealized space.  They exist in a war without individual looting.  Soldiers (of all armies) have always carried off small objects—flags, pins, uniforms, ephemera; they are part of a memorializing process that links the objects to events and places and people and indeed, are part of how we come to terms with the acts and demands of war.  Our magpie eye is also attracted to shiny and beautiful things, as evidenced by stories like Fred Butts who served in 1945 with the battalion which looted Hitler’s chalet, the Eagle’s Nest (Charlotte Sun newspaper, Port Charlotte, Fla. on Monday, September 27, 2010). But Allied soldiers looted works of art as part of this process of repatriation.  The Quedlinburg treasure is one of the most glaring examples; eight works from the lot hidden to protect it were probably stolen by First Lt. Joe T. Meador who was on guard during their rediscovery in 1945.  Meador likely knew well the value of what he had taken; he graduated with a BA in art from North Texas State University.  The case was dropped in 1949 when Quedlinburg became part of East Germany.  Works began to resurface in the 1980s in Texas after Meador’s death and became the focus of legal attention to return the stolen property (William H. Honan, “A Trove of Medieval Art Turns Up in Texas”, NYT 6/14/90).  Hollywood ignored the question of looting on any level.

Hollywood largely ignored the complicated questions of repatriation of stolen art.  At one point, Matt Damon’s character, James Granger, simply picks up a work from a storehouse of Jewish possessions and returns it to the apartment on the label on the back; the apartment is, of course, horrifyingly empty with Juden graffiti on the wall but of course, he can see where the work used to hang and he puts it back on the wall.  This whole scene is supposed to show us how sincere he is when he says he intends the return to rightful owners.  The road to Hell is still paved with good intentions.  The scene indeed implies that it will be an easy job—just look at the back and take the painting there. Cate Blanchett’s character, Jeu de Paume staff member Claire Simone, admonishes him by emphasizing the empty apartment but Clooney’s filmmaking buries this in the characters’ relationship and the over-arching motif of earnest intentions.  600,000 works of art, in a sea of furniture, dishes, clothing, shoes, hair, teeth.  At a hearing in 2006, some 100,000 are still listed as missing (https://plone.unige.ch/art-adr/cases-affaires/liberation-of-saint-peter-from-prison-2013-feldmann-heirs-and-private-person/review-of-the-repatriation-of-holocaust-art-assets-in-the-united-states/view). Almost 70 years later, there are works still in dispute.  How do you return a work when the owner, the owner’s immediate and extended families are wiped out?  How do you prove ownership when all your papers and photographs were destroyed after your family was forced to flee or sent to the camps?

Hollywood isolated the Soviets as the systematic “bad guys” of the world, looking to make a quick profit in their sweep of found Nazi art into their own collections.  Matt Damon’s character, Garner, makes an offhand reference to the Soviets as having lost 20,000,000 people, as an excuse for their behavior, which Clooney’s character dismisses; the film makes the Soviets villains second only to the Nazis who not only stole art but also destroyed it rather than lose it to the Allies.  Systematic military intention to take works of art and move them into the Soviet museums is well documented. However, there is no denying that in the post-war period art entered the international markets when owners could not be easily found, and for those with ready cash, these works entered both private and museum collections.  Various museums have listed works of questionable provenance linked to the Nazi era (Metropolitan Museum: 393 works, Art Institute of Chicago: over 500 works, National Gallery of Art: 400 European paintings). Beginning in 1998 there has been a concerted effort towards acknowledging these works, tracing these works, and returning when possible. The Nazi Era Provenance Project (http://www.nepip.org) is a searchable database of works created before 1946 that changed hands to American museums between 1932 and 1945.  It currently has 28943 objects and 175 museum participants.  It is a step in the right direction but as has been frequently noted, it does not include dealer records or international museum records; other countries keep separate records, keeping searching limited.  Major museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, devote staff and resources to provenance research, an area growing alongside a global art market, global art trafficking, and continued wars.  As late as 2012, with the find in the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, however, new caches of Nazi-looted pieces are still being discovered.  Did dealers, collectors, and curators know that these works were likely looted? The market of the post-war years clearly suggests that they knew but were deterred by the difficulties (and impossibilities) of returning works and dazzled by the allure of acquiring these artistic masterworks.

Why does any of this matter?  Could you just dismiss this whole essay as the ramblings of another cranky historian? Certainly.  But it matters because the Taliban attacked the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan in 2001, destroying a cultural heritage because they considered the works idols, contrary to their religious teaching.  It matters because during times of civil war, archaeological sites go unprotected and unguarded, and works of precious value slip away from towns like Balkh in Northern Afghanistan (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/whos-stealing-afghanistan-cultural-treasures/).  It matters because at times of political unrest, works are raided, damaged, and stolen as in Mallawi Egypt, perhaps never to be seen again (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/pictures/130823-museum-mallawi-egypt-looting-artifacts-archaeology-science-antiquities/); the Egyptian Antiquities Museum on Tahrir Square struggles in the instability of the climate, with reports varying about looting, thefts, and security.  If art matters, and I hold this as the tenet of the movie with which I do agree, then how we tell the story of the Nazis and their looted art matters.

What Clooney could have done with a few text slides at the end of the film was set the historical record straight from the inspirational story.  He could have acknowledged the magnitude in numbers of works stolen, the difficulties of restoring works to owners, and the efforts underway to do so.  He chose not to.  He chose to let his story stand.  So his story is simple in a world where we actually need the complex.  His story is one of unalloyed heroism and virtue, with America as the driving force of cultural right. If his story is the one we tell ourselves, then we underestimate the rapaciousness of power to sweep through culture as well as people; we miss the desperation that forces people to sell or abandon their cultural heritage; we miss the lessons that we could have learned about guarding and restoring patrimony. We are instead condemned to repeat these lessons. We are strong enough to be told the whole story.

Reviving a dead blog

What better image than Jean Antoine Houdon's 1787 image Winter?

Because...What the heck?
This was the random artwork of the day generated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art that arrived in my mailbox this morning.
I know that aesthetics have changed.  Even Houdon was breaking tradition with his shivering girl (an alternate title):
The boldness and severity of this image is almost as shocking now as when an earlier, marble version was first shown in the sculptor's studio during the Salon of 1783. As a contemporary observed when it was rejected for the 1785 Salon, "an entirely nude figure is not as indecent as one draped with false modesty."
I don't find a lot of things offensive but I was angry about this one.  Houdon's deliberate prurience, his desire for this body despite its helplessness, his taking away her face to make her anonymous (almost ashamed).  Not sure what the contemporary sees as "false modesty".  This is indecent to me because she's so obviously a fetish, an object for the gaze.

Stick to portraits of Voltaire, Monsieur Houdon.  There we can agree.

Teaching Race

Teaching race in any classroom is hard.  It's a fraught subject, based on how we see ourselves and how others see us, and how we use that knowledge of ourselves and others.  I consistently walk into this section aware that I am a white woman and that most of my students are visibly other ethnicities and races.  Race suddenly looms larger than it should in the dynamic of the classroom because I am not just the teacher but the Caucasian teacher, asking questions and demanding answers of my students, my Black and Latino students.  We begin with the lights on, a rarity in an art history classroom.  But I want them to be able to see me as we discuss the power differences in self-identifying vs. being labeled, in prejudice vs. racism, the idea of stereotypes and their cultural resonances.  

Often, I've been teaching a chronological survey so they see Henry Ossawa Tanner with American Realist/Impressionists like Eakins and Homer; we talk about Jacob Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance.  I started there today (at least briefly as this is a contemporary art topics class).  What strikes me though about Tanner is that his awareness of self is well within the artistic mainstream of Impressionism--gentle bonding genre scene of an old man teaching banjo to a boy in the idiom of light and shadow and loose brushstrokes.  I think it's important to see Tanner as trying very hard to be the man his White colleagues think he can't be, the man who feels compelled to leave the US for the greener-grass of France.  I moved on to Lawrence, who in the 1940s Migration Series, sees somewhat more openly the utopian longing of the move North, the racism both within the established Northern Black communities and the race riots sparked with Whites in cities like St. Louis.  Lawrence has a self awareness that was new and is important.

But part of me wanted to shock them into talking so I started with Carrie Mae Weems and the series, "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried," 1995.  Appropriation is a theme we've been discussing so this was important. Made for Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1850 to "prove" the racial inferiority of Blacks, they are "scientific" daguerreotypes that denied the personhood of these slaves.  Weems frames them within another image--an African woman--at the beginning and end to suggest heritage lost and mourned.  

My students looked at this image from the series:

They acknowledged the visual of the ropy scars from beatings but had no context at all for the words.  They did not know who Duke Ellington was; a few had heard of Billie Holiday.  None of them knew what the "strange fruit" was.  So I played the song and spoke the lyrics.  (Hurrah for YouTube).

We moved from there to David Hammons, an artist I almost never have time to teach but this is a special topics class.  Plus, he's rarely (if ever?) represented in survey books because of the largely political nature of his work.  We started with the seminal work, "Spade with Chains" from 1973.

They eventually got around to working on farms and chains of slavery.  They had seen no African masks so the connections there were ones I needed to make for them.  But they also had never heard the word "spade" in its derogatory meaning.  (So I made the computer users look it up in the Urban Dictionary.)  Age matters--when I was a kid, "spade" was still recognized; anecdotally, I suspect these kids are far more inured to variations on nigger, which was so pejorative when I was a kid that I never heard it, much less from my father in his own prejudices and jokes.

Finally, we ended today's class with Hammons' piece "In the Hood", from the Fresh Hell exhibit in 2010 (a piece which I have since learned dates back to the 1990s).

 For them, they jumped quickly to the Grim Reaper--faceless, deathly.  I asked them if it reminded them of the news and Trayvon Martin, seeing it now.  It seemed so fresh in my mind, and so much an evocation of the complications of race in America, with an African-American victim, an Hispanic-American perpetrator, concealed carry/stand your ground laws (and the economic class issues that drive them).

And about half the class looked at me blankly.  A few knew who I was speaking of and filled the rest in and we went on (actually, we stopped with this image but will come back to race on Friday).

Are they forced to reinvent their racial identities anew because they cannot see where they have grown from?  If my students don't know the history of race besides "the Civil War ended slavery" and "Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for desegregation", are they condemned to repeat the pain and sting of racism?  How can they not know the history happening around them, at this moment?  This is their lived context.  These events will be for them the Rodney King of the 1990s, the Willie Horton of the 1980s and 1970s, Eldridge Cleaver of the 1950s/60s.  When do they move from living in the moment to looking back at the moment to understanding the chain of moments?  When does living the history make it something other than just "OLD" and "A LONG TIME AGO"?

And this is why, every year, despite my own discomfort, despite my own frustration with what they don't know, I teach this material again.  Because we need--as Americans--to see how our countrymen see history, the country, the world.  (By the way, on Friday, we'll also talk about Asian-Americans and Native Americans and contemporary imagery.)

The Business of Art Museums

I don't know doodly-squat about business and running a museum but two stories recently came to my attention about museum buildings that really highlight the difficulties of preserving cultural patrimony in this age of tough economics.

In Cologne, Germany, there was a thriving and quite large Jewish community.  The community even weathered Crusader massacres in 1096 and Plague retaliation in 1349, and limped along until the advent of the Nazis.  A rich trove of many different artifacts has been uncovered and lies unacknowledged and unused in storage.  There's a dig in the city, where a new museum was proposed in 2007, but the general feeling is that Cologne is too broke to build a museum and that there's a sufficiently big Jewish museum in Berlin (250 miles away).  The museum is proposed at $64 million ($50+million euros); building a modern facility is undoubtedly expensive.  No denying that there are other places to spend that money.  Are there better causes?  Depends on your values, doesn't it?  It's a tough question as the AP story highlights--there's a solid number of people signing a petition against it.  But it seems to me that the placing of a fake bomb/suitcase and the carving of swastikas are also an indication that those who do not know the past are condemned to making ignorant and hateful statements until history smacks them upside the head.  If it were me on the committee, I'd seriously look into scaling back plans, seeing if we could find a locale to overhaul or build smaller/differently to get some of the collection into public exposure.  There might be a balance that could be achieved in this difficult economic climate that doesn't mean all or nothing for both history and services.

Here in the US, MoMA has bought the locale next door, the former American Folk Art Museum at 45 W. 53rd St. (link to NY Times article, pay wall may apply).  The museum building was a big deal--designed by talented and ambitious architects (Tod Williams and Billie Tsien) and opened after the 9/11 attacks.  But it was doomed--the museum borrowed $32 million for the expansion to this site.  I've not been to the new site, though know folks who have and have said lovely things about the American Folk Museum.  We can look back now to the bubbles that burst in construction, NYC, non-profits, tourist trade; we can be pleased that MoMA has the ability/resources to make use of the site.  We can also wonder why MoMA will raze the building and rebuild in its own signature metal and glass; is branding so important that the satellite extension needs to look like the rest of the buildingS?  Would there be a better use of the money?  Again, depends on your values.  I have to feel like there could be museum uses that respected the architecture of the building (especially since it meets museum needs; this doesn't need to be a major new use renovation).  I have to feel that there could be ways to spend less money but the pockets of MoMA are very deep.  Director Glenn Lowry suggests that they could put in another restaurant and shop on the ground floor--because maybe that is our cultural patrimony: look at the art and then buy a cheap reproduction on a coffee mug to take home.

Added 4/11, after the initial post: Hrag Vartanian over at Hyperallergic  also reflects on the MoMA purchase, with less flattering things to say about the Folk Art building in general but raising the question of buildings themselves as part of our cultural heritage.

March 14: It is Enough, Gun Violence and Art

As I wrote last month, on the 14th of every month, this group is turning its attention to the issues of gun violence.  I'm doing my part by writing what I know--art.

Today's work is

Roy Lichtenstein, Pistol, 1964 (print on banner, dimensions: 82 x 49")(in the collection of MOMA)

I have always been a fan of Roy Lichtenstein and the Pop Art Movement.  But I want to argue the complexity of this work in detail.

It is clearly referencing comics and the art that appeared in the newspaper.  The use of dark outlines, Ben Day dots (print process reproduced here by stencil), and the simplified abstraction of anatomy and objects all point to the comics.  Lichtenstein was clearly influenced by the issues of perception--hence the draw of Pop Art where comic art was taken from its pulp original and turned into "high art".   This work of art is all about our perceptions.

Comics carry with them connotations and the weight of our day-to-day and mass culture perceptions of ourselves.  The stories in the comics are the stories we tell ourselves about needing superheroes, seeing children who are loved and loveable despite their hijinks, recognizing the personalities of our pets.  Even comics that aren't topical can reflect our concerns about our job security and global situation.  They come with a recognizable vocabulary, often relying on humor to set us at ease with a story that may be uncomfortable otherwise.

I don't know what comic this came from.  Lichtenstein used a lot of the pulp comics, especially war, westerns, and superhero comics.  But here's why Lichtenstein's image is supposed to frighten us:

There is no setting.  Just a red wall.  Red like blood.  Red like anger.  Unrelenting.  There is nowhere else to turn, nowhere to imagine a scene and a story to diffuse this gun.

The gun points right at us.  There is no getting away from the black center of the barrel.

The hand--its finger clearly on the trigger--is disembodied.  There is no brain telling the shooter to not harm you.  There is no reluctance.

The size is huge.  There is no getting away from this threatening hand and the poised violence of the gun.

There's a lot of discussion in the gun control debate about what role culture plays in the psychology of guns.  Many gun owners argue that they put the gun in its "correct" context--teaching safety, using locks, limiting access--and that it is only when the gun is taken from that "correct" context--used by the criminal or the insane or the suicidal--that it should be limited.  Many folks argue that the context of guns in video games particularly accustoms children to guns as part of toys (part of comic mobs and criminals) and that it desensitizes them to the actuality of violence.  I suspect that the reality is some combination of all of these. 

Ernest Busche in the Lichtenstein bio linked here writes: "The theme basic to all of Lichtenstein’s work ...explicitly questioned the assumption that the function of representational art was to reflect reality. Throughout his work in all media, he continued to affirm that the arrangement of forms and colours obeyed pictorial rules independent of the subject portrayed. The succession of styles alluded to in his art, rather than being taken for granted as a self-perpetuating system, thus becomes an instrument for understanding art as the expression of an ideal state."  Lichtenstein is explicitly taking the gun from the removed state of the comics and returning it to the one where it is a tool of violence.

IT IS ENOUGH.  Now is the time not just to limit the horrific violence of the Sandy Hook shootings but to consider the casual access that allows over 80 deaths daily in the US by gun violence.  Our legislators are talking; make them act.  I wrote to CT. Senator Richard Blumenthal this morning.  What will you do?

What Art History Should Be

Mostly this is an entry to post you to a fascinating blog post from the British Museum: The Spirit of Sierra Leone in London, written by Paul Basu.

Sowei Mask, Collection of the British Museum, Af1886,1126.1