Daisies

From Daisies, a Czech film directed by Vera Chytilova. On most days, my very favorite movie.

Watch some here. Read an interview with Chytilova, "the Margaret Thatcher of Czech cinema," here. Read an essay on gender representations in the film here.

I'm starting to feel old-fashioned

I attended a lecture this evening, "In Praise of Impurity: Universalism vs. Geo-Aesthetics in Contemporary Art," given by David Elliott, a world-renowned curator of contemporary art, former president of the International Committee for Museums of Modern and Contemporary Art, formerly of the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and now Artistic Director of the 17th Sydney Biennale in 2010.

Elliot strove to unpack "universalism," rightfully dismissing it as Eurocentrism that has violently carried the torch of enlightenment across (its) foreign lands, conquering and colonizing along the way. So, Elliott asks, if universalism isn't really universal, if there cannot be a universal, then what is the alternative? "Geo-aesthetics," he considers, which posits that art and culture (and I assume this would extend into any other realm postmodern identity touches) exist entirely uniquely and particularly in relation to their place and people of origin, and thus cannot properly, or rather genuinely, be appreciated, understood, or engaged with by those outside of or non-native to that particular culture, people, region, language, or tradition.

But Elliott doesn't believe this, either. Instead, he makes a great case, mostly through an incredibly encyclopedic presentation and discussion of historical and contemporary images of both ancient and modern art, for the fact that art and culture were meant to be "global" from the start, that globalism is not a new, foreign concept to art and culture, but rather that it has been occuring for centuries (we can imagine just one example, the Chinoiserie styles and trends of aristocratic Europe in 18th century), and that it is suddenly evident because the pace and rate of transferrance of global culture is now so rapid. And particularly in contemporary art, it is one huge international exhibition after another, and artists can no longer create for a small, local, familial circle and think their work can't or won't be shared with the world one way or another via a myriad of technologies.

I imagined an artist working in a studio with just an inkling of a feeling that she is producing for millions of people the world over and competing for recognition among hundreds of thousands of other artists continents away. An incredible contest, if you think about it (in that way). And what must she be thinking when attempting to translate it for the world's language (English), everything and everyone she's never seen across vast oceans? Does it stay particular and we pretend to understand? Does it translate quaintly, quietly, ferociously, eloquently, seamlessly, fluidly, erotically, exotically, neurotically, novelty? I mean that, novelty . . . All of it? Who draws these lines, expounds upon these meanings? Surely not the masses, must be the monarchs.

You see, something else happened recently. I watched Who Gets to Call It Art?, a documentary about Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's very first curator of "contemporary art" in the early 1960s, when the Met wanted nothing with to do with contemporary, or any artist alive. As one artist interviewed for the film put it, everything you saw in there was "dead."

So there is foreign and there is dead. Distant and ancient. I studied contemporary art for four years, and I must tell you, dead is refreshing. I long for history, it is not greater, but it is a journey to a destination we'll never reach, and they always say it's all about the journey, so can't it all be about the history sometimes, too? To be consumed, surrounded by, the deadness of the Metropolitan, I feel truly alive, or at the very least overwhelmingly intrigued. Maybe this is what happens to us when we are sparked and stimulated by something eerie and distant and not local, one overwhelmingly difficult to conceptualize but oh so beautiful and un- (or only?) imaginable.

To what extent are we limited? Elliott says we are not, that we can only impose those limits ourselves. I like that, to think I can at least find pleasure in the experience of viewing or imagining or interacting with something from long ago or far away. Can I claim to understand it in the way someone else, anyone else, would? Of course not. Does that deligitimize a sense of appreciation for it? I don't think so. Understanding of it? Most definitely, it alters it. I fail to understand a great number of things, as do all of us, an always-already condition of the bounds of understanding and comprehensibility. But will something I understand in a culturally-specific way benefit from sharing it with others who cannot understand it that way, but only (and thankfully) perceive and conceive of it from their own cultural position? Yes. That would be part of the beauty of globalism, no doubt, and the best way to learn.

You Winter, let's get divorced

5. Journey, from the series "You Winter, let's get divorced".

4. Masmos 1! from the series "Salt".

3. Harvest Time from the series "Salt".

2. Domestic Marble from the series "Salt".

1. Sweating Sweethearts 2 from the series "Salt."


All photos copyright artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland and galleries Vous Etes Ici and Michael Hoppen Contemporary

Bumpersticker Brilliance

"Resist Despair"

Nurse

I recently framed this work by Kelley Heider as well, which was also included in the Presence and Performance exhibition I curated. Part of a six-piece series representing the archetypal objectified American female, I unfortunately could only afford to buy one. Here, I've placed the ever-doting, care-taking nurse Kelley beside the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. Kelley is an accomplished multimedia visual artist and writer, currently without a website to which I can link you. Together, the framing of Kelley's and Corkey's works (see below) made for a weekend full of productive activity and provocative nostalgia.

"I Never Said That"

My dear, quirky friend Corkey Sinks is a genius. So is her artwork. "I Never Said That" is one in a series of tattered fabric pieces she first created for Presence and Performance: Queer-Feminist Bodies, an exhibit I curated in San Francisco in June of 2007.

In this series, Corkey has carefully, meticulously, yet hastily, and literally, crafted and constructed visual text as we manipulatively craft and construct everyday speech. The identity of her speaker, or speakers, is/are invisible, and the phrases float freely, delicate comic-strip speech-bubbles coasting across imaginary tongues.

In a sense, images of this series could accompany, and counter, the very first entry of Pity from the Stars (see September 2008). It softly and succintly shows us a banality of language, the meaningless phrases we regurgitate everyday, void of emotion or personality. We rid ourselves of scraps of conversation, empty our minds of meaningless words and strings of thoughts piling up in immediate, vapid responses, filling formulas and completing patterns. Everyday we perform exchanges of both heartfelt and vague intimacy through recitation and dictation.

Setting aside the mechanics of semantics, we are left with the inherent limits of language, not to mention automatic misunderstandings and mis-communications resulting from the misalignment of feelings with the actual expressions of them. What does what we say say about us? What takes place when we refuse to pay attention, to take responsibility for, or to infuse or recognize meaning in our words?

The absence of quotation marks in these works speaks volumes, as we become hyper-aware of the accountability we must take for our speech and conversation and language; quotations, marking our words in time and space, contextualizing them for an audience (including ourselves), cannot save us from the impact they have the moment they are uttered, nor the dead, silent stillness when we fail to take care, when we find--or lose--ourselves mumbling in our most mundane moments of ineptitude, of ambivalence, of avoidance. They are somewhere forever, and yet dissolve in our reality when we decide we don't give a fuck.

Why did I choose this particular phrase? It was the most ingenuine. "I never said that." Can we ever really control the effect our words have on the world, on those brief moments that shift our lives forever? What do we really mean when we desperately defend or deny? If we've said something that inevitably becomes open to interpretation because, essentially, it exists once it's been spoken, how do we manage it? Did we ever really not say something because it's been understood or interpreted uniquely, if undesirably? What is there in language, in the words we use, that can be owned as our own, precisely molded to fit "our" meaning? Shall we return to authorship, to Michel Foucault? I also happen to have said this many, many times myself.

I finally framed this piece; it will soon be hanging above my bed, though I wouldn't mind falling asleep right next to it. It's incredibly warm. Check out Corkey's brilliantly inventive Austin, Texas gallery Okay Mountain, fairly recently featured in the equally amazing Art Papers.

Fantasy Wallpaper

Terry Castle posted this on her blog, Fevered Brain Productions. I wish it were the wallpaper in my living room. Or bedroom. Or bathroom. Click on the link to her blog for more of this fabulousness.

Riot on an Empty Street: Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun (b. Lucy Schwob, 1894, Nantes, France) has long been one of my favorite figures in art and its contentious history. A member of the original Breton-led French Surrealists, Cahun went unrecognized as a groundbreaking artist in her day, as did most of the women associated with Surrealism and other contemporaneous collectives dominated by men. Yet I find her work far more transgressive, more teasing, and more tense than both the men and women she worked alongside for a short while, the ones desperately attempting to transgress our norms, to tease our hair, to tighten our gaze. She maintained the chilly, dreamy distance of the others, but her ability to play with selves was unprecedented for her time. As many critics and art historians have said, Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin owe much to Claude Cahun.

Cahun was rediscovered by academia in the 1990s, when queer theory and performativity and the latter days of postmodern identity were in vogue. She was perfectly ahead of her time; everyone around us, alive and well and making and creating and reading and performing, was now doing what Cahun had done as early as the '20s, without ever knowing her name, let alone her work. Sherman and Goldin did it earlier than these folks, but surely no one knew her--no one knows her--well.

Cahun's sexuality certainly didn't hurt the attention her work received in the '90s (she spent the majority of her life with Marcel Moore, her lover and half-sister)--it was a la mode, to say the least. Unfortunately, it has never seemed that her revolutionary politics, or the intersection of her Jewish heritage with the Resistance activity she and Moore covertly conducted for years during World War II for which they were sentenced to execution, ever made its deserved impression on the art world.

In a nutshell, Claude Cahun used her own image--a costumed, makeuped, androgynous masquerade--in early photographic mediums and methods to play with the concept of "self" itself, the construction of individual identity, the ways in which we piece together our living self-portraits with these scraps of lavish, elaborate elements, the ones we wear and speak and sing and sweat everyday. She froze those elements in cold, still images of any number of persons she imagined, or the ones we did. But it is only in retrospect, in light of the theories we have developed and destroyed and the disciplines we have created and derided, that we find ourselves able to intellectually interpret them in the way we do.

So what did Cahun mean to do in her own moments? There is a private quality that permeates her work in a way the above-mentioned artists are only able to keep personal. Cindy Sherman's Film Stills come close, but the layers of raw emotion visible in Sherman's work are unlike the distant, quiet, closed gaze of Cahun's Autoportraits. When Cahun looks directly at the camera, she doesn't look at us. Rather, her gaze is recursive. There was never an "us" to be had. No doubt, these autoportraits were also autoerotic, to such a degree that viewers now try to grasp a bit of it for themselves, the eerie, circus-freak sexiness. We want to be privy to her performances, to buy them, to own them; but quickly we realize these images have an unwavering personality, a relentless control, that belongs only to Cahun, far away and long dead. And still.

But don't leave it to me to tell you about Cahun. The brilliant Terry Castle does a far better job, in the London Review of Books no less. Find out about Cahun's reclusive decades on the isle of Jersey off the coast of Normandy, where she and her sister and life-partner Marcel Moore spent their lives collaging and photographing on the beach and in their home , conducting top-secret activity for the Resistance during the war, and spending months imprisoned, waiting to be executed.

I give you my Claude, though she can never be had.

*The majority of Claude Cahun's work belongs to the Jersey Heritage Trust, Jersey, Channel Islands.