One-Way Street

Mr. Dob and the Wall-Eyed Monsters: Takashi Murakami's The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg

I got a chance to attend the preview of the Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. All I had known about him was that he collaborated with Kanye West and Louis Vuitton to create high-concept branding. It turns out that these branding projects were only a relatively brief phase in his career, albeit one in which his talents coalesced in perhaps their most perfect form. I was prepared to see him as a sort of Japanese version of Jeff Koons, but to my eye, Murakami's "And Then, And Then And Then And Then And Then (Red)," (1996–97, below), created during the peak of his branding phase, is his most perfectly realized work of art.

 

 

Murakami started his career painting gloomy meditations on ecological disaster. He was headed to a career as a minor artist, a Japanese version of Anselm Kiefer but without the grandeur. Then, in the story told in the MCA exhibit, one day Murakami decided he wanted to be an anime artist, so he created a character called Mr. Dob. To clear a space for the character Murakami swept away his landscapes of doom and painted a pure blue field onto which Mr. Dob appears in a off center, a tiny fraction of the frame, smiling timidly. There's a whole gallery in the MCA exhibit devoted to these transitional paintings. They're completely unlike anything that came before them. Compare an early painting at left with one of Mr. Dob's first appearances on the right. 

 

A lot of retrospectives in art museums try to document transitional moments in artists' careers. I don't recall ever seeing such direct evidence of a painter morphing into an entirely different artist. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's exciting to watch.

 

Once he discovered anime and Louis Vuitton, his paintings and sculptures became eye-catching without necessarily being accessible. We see Mr. Dob evolve from a tiny, fragile figure in a vast background into a landscape himself, a framework onto which Murakami maps out the imagery he had developed during his mid-career branding phase. In "Tan Tan Bo Puking--a.k.a. Gero Tan" (2002) branding reaches its logical end as grotesque myth-making. Nevertheless, the painting has a kind of beauty. Murakami's best work creates a tension between the beauty of its colors and the ugliness of its images.

 

 

That tension, however, dissipates in Murakami's twenty-first century work. His canvases have grown ever larger, some taking up an entire gallery wall. I found it hard to see these larger canvases as a sign of artistic growth. It's almost as if Murakami is looking for something new to paint and if he expands his canvases he may find it someplace. While there's a lot to look at in these late Murakami canvases, like smiling daisies sprouting from the bottom of the frame, the wall-eyed monsters command one's attention the most. We're told these figures represent spiritual enlightenment, but how? Without access to the texts Murakami is working with, it's hard to tell, and the MCA provides only cursory information. The viewer is left to contemplate a disconcerting aesthetic--part Hieronymus Bosch, part Hello Kitty, part mad doodler. 

 

 

Even the title of the exhibition, The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, suggests there's an artistic crisis just around the corner, if Murakami hasn't already fallen into one. The most recent work in the exhibit, some of it created especially for it, seems unfocused, although that's most likely because the earlier work was more selectively curated. But even the images in this gallery demand your attention. Some retrospectives allow you to gloss over some artworks to get to the next development. Not Takashi Murakami--every image is arresting. 

 

 

One can disapprove of Murakami's dalliance with corporate branding. The cover he designed for Kanye West's Graduation album is cool, but West is an ambiguous figure in popular culture. Lots of contemporary artists mix high and low cultures, East and West--in this sense Murakami isn't that special. Some of his daisy paintings look like they belong more on an iPhone case than a museum wall. Yet one comes away seeing Murakami's art as more than the sum of its parts. You should go to the MCA retrospective to see an artist evolve at a time when art has become a big business and not just simply the tool of it. 

Hanne Darboven and the Endless Archive

Cynthia Cruz sees a lot of Walter Benjamin in Hanne Darboven's Kulturegeschichte 1880–1983, currently on exhibit at Dia:Chelsia. The exhibit pamphlet says Darhoven "[weaves] together cultural, social, and historical references with autobiographical documents, it synthesizes personal history with collective memory"--a description that could apply to any number of artworks. Cruz is more insightful, noticing that Darboven creates an "endless archive" which "does not describe the world around her but rather reflects it, remaining inside and refusing to participate in the distancing and violence of objectification that are inherent in description." This was also Benjamin's technique for recreating history: gather objects around a single point of view, then allow historical objects to speak for themselves.

The Art of Wall Along the Mexican Border

Donald Trump is about to order the building of a wall along the US-Mexican border. As people who live in the borderlands already know, walls already exist on the border. They are mere artifacts among many others in the land where two cultures meet in conflict and reconciliation. The photographer Richard Misrach has been photographing the borderlands since 2004. Like a sort of desert flâneur, he's also been gathering artifacts of the contact zone, from discarded backpacks to shotgun shells, and turning them over to the composer Guillermo Galindo, who converted them into instruments. The story of this collaboration is told in Border Cantos, as well as an exhibition at the Crystal Bridges of American Art through April 27, 2017.

The Landscapes of John Berger

Late in his career John Berger retreated in the foggy mists of the French countryside, reappearing every so often with a novel or an essay. But in the 1970s Berger was perhaps the most famous art critic in the world. He brought Walter Benjamin into popular culture at a time when few people outside the Frankfort School tradition paid much attention to the German critic and philosopher. Ways of Seeing, Berger's most famous work, was an update of Benjamin's Artwork Essay. In the book and the accompanying television series Berger showed how advertising appropriated the aura of great works of art to sell products. Like Benjamin, Berger applied Marxist concepts to art criticism. Oil painting, Berger once wrote, "did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity."

Landscape painting was a particular area of interest for Berger. He didn't hate it all, but he was deeply skeptical of a lot of it.  The painting below by Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews (circa 1748), in Berger's eyes, was an image of socio-economic power.

Completed shortly after Mr. Andrews' marriage to the daughter of a neighboring gentry--a marriage that enhanced his estate--the image captures the unchanging power of property relations in pre-industrial England. "They are not a couple in Nature as Rousseau imagined nature," Berger comments. "They are landowners and their proprietary attitude to what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their expressions." There's even a blank space in Mrs. Andrews' lap for an as-yet unborn heir (or so the speculation goes) to help perpetuate control over the land.

Jonathan Jones compares the Gainsborough landscape to a contemporary image, speculating how Berger might have interpreted an image of a polar bear standing on an iceberg in 2014.

Jones recognizes something of Mr. Andrews' proprietary gaze in the polar bear, but unlike the 1748 image of permanent ownership over an unchanging landscape, the polar bear's world is literally falling apart. His realm gets smaller every day. What had once been eternal has become an object of historical change. Jones writes, "Berger taught us to see the landowner’s whip behind every painted haystack, and his critical attitude to images of landscape is the more telling today when human action is destroying nature even as we lovingly photograph and film it." 

There's one more point of comparison between the images. Still early in his career when he painted the Andrews landscape, Gainsborough was still developing naturalistic effect into his oil paintings. Note, for example, the tumultuous weather in the background. Photographs are conventionally held to be the most naturalistic of all image forms, yet this polar bear is shot with a wide-angle lens to dramatize the polar bear's environment in a non-naturalistic way. The power of the bear is diminished by the warp of the very limited horizon in the background.

The photograph is stock photo from the site Alamy.com. I haven't been able to verify the photographer, but I think it's Peter Barritt, who specializes in, among other things, photographs of great oil paintings. As Berger and Benjamin would have reminded us, the polar bear stock photo and the Gainsborough together are just images among others, but if we look at them properly, as Berger and Benjamin teach us, we can understand what they mean.

Drum-Taps

This sign was designed for Angelinos to see not a gambling resort in the desert, but a supplement to the existing Los Angeles, one that made up for its deficiencies.

 Its designer, Betty Willis, a Las Vegas native, died on Monday.

 

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I am crushed by the changes made in every new printing of Claudia Rankine's Citizen. (These pages used to be blank.) pic.twitter.com/Lc7sOh6P8o

— Kenny Coble (@kennycoble) January 6, 2015

 

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A Washington, D.C. hospital, December 1862

The New York Review Books has released a new edition of Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, a collection of Civil War poems originally published 150 years ago this month. 

The poet’s erotically charged relationships with the men “not only offered physical and spiritual gratification,” [Drum-Taps editor Lawrence] Kramer writes, “but also provided the libidinal underpinning of political and social order.” The affections and the sentiments that arose in the field and in the hospitals during the war — Whitman cared for Confederate soldiers no less eagerly than for Union troops — would serve as a blueprint for the national fellow-feeling necessary for reconciliation afterward. “For Whitman,” Kramer concludes, “personal union was the basis of the Union.”

Whitman originally intended The Drum-Taps poems to express the idea of reconcilaition and a new after the Civil War. But, for reasons unknown, Whitman later incorporated some of the poems into Leaves of Grass, a thematically more diffuse collection, and abandoned his attempt to re-imagine the union in poetic terms.

 

Sonia Delaunay and the Avant-Garde Shoes

After a visit to the Tate Modern's EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay, Adrian Searle argues Delaunay was a serious, and even more interesting, artist than her better-known husband,  the avant-garde painter Robert Delaunay. "Far from retreating into the applied arts and stereotypical 'women’s work,'" Searle writes, "Delaunay sought instead to extend art into the everyday and the broader material culture."

Although she painted on canvases, some of her most interesting work was done in fabric. She was a master of intriguing patterns. Among her clients were Gloria Swanson and the architect  (and model for the James Bond villain) Ernö Goldfinger. Delaunay bridged the gap between Modernist images and the body. In her clothes the human form, veiled for years in Victorian fashions, emerged as a representation. In Modernism, even the nude form is a representation. 

Photographic Negatives and the Unspeakable Event

There are two interesting quotes in Andrew Jacobs' story about Xu Yong's new book Negatives, a collection of photographs of Tienanmen Square in 1989. The first quote comes from Xu himself:

“This is an art book [. . . ] I have no interest in discussing what [the photographs] mean.

Yes, Xu has created a book of beautiful images, but his creative decisions don't fit into the conventions of fine art photography. The images in Negatives are drawn from raw 35-millimeter negatives. However, the negatives can be reversed with an iPhone using invert colors setting, a built-in function. From where do the instructions to reverse the negatives come? From Negatives? Jacobs doesn't say. The settings change seems to be a form of samizdat viewing in which the user is responsible for developing (potentially) censored images.  

The second quote comes from Perry Link, an expert on China at the University of California, Riverside.

“[Negatives] is a wonderful way of capturing that underside of insecurity that attends the Tiananmen issue and that, in a larger sense, haunts much of official China today,” he said. “The artist seems to be saying: ‘Here’s the reality that no one looks at squarely but that everyone knows is there.’ ”

Roland Barthes located the essence of a photograph in the event it records. "The photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially," he writes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. And in this repetition the photograph disappears. When we look at a photograph of ourselves, we say "that's me," not "that's a photograph of me." A photograph resists language because it is without signs or marks—it simply is.

Xu's photographs in Negatives are a veil over the mechanical reproduction of the events in Tienanmen Square in 1989. The photographs and the events are revealed simultaneously through the very modern act of looking at them through a camera. Xu claims negatives don't lie, but that doesn't mean they're not codes referring to the unspeakable.

Politics and Art in the Digital Age, Part 2: Reproducing Andy Warhol

Continuing our discussion on aesthetics and politics from yesterday . . .

Get ready for a Warhol wave in 2015, and not just at auction. About 40 exhibitions of that artist’s work — much of it previously unseen by the public — will be flooding university art museums and institutions.

This was the lede for a New York Times story about how the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has handed out 14,000 of the artist’s works, obliging curators to do something with them. Warhol is undergoing a Warholian transformation into a high art icon because his artwork are so easily reproducible. If he’s in 40 museums this year, he must be a major artist and we should never forget him.

Warhol is a key figure linking modernism and post-modernism in terms of reproducibility. He is modernist in that his work satisfies Theodor Adorno's demand that modern art must “prove itself equal to high industrialism.” In Warhol’s work both art and culture are commodified and processed as surfaces without any depth in order to demonstrate that, in a mass-mediated culture, shared memories are never entirely free of mass-produced images. 

 

 

Warhol’s Marilyn series demonstrates the reproducibility of any body, image or event as a commodity. Marilyn Monroe is a commodity in the sense that her image is a figure of desire well established in the American cultural imaginary. We know this because Warhol is one of the people who established her there. Monroe isn't an icon because of her movie performances, which were remarkable but not immortal. Monroe is who she is for us now because Warhol and others so freely and frequently made use of images of her. Monroe is an iconic figure because she has been reproduced so many times. 

 

Walter Benjamin was among the first and still among the most important observers of reproduction in the cultural realm. Among the claims he made about reproducibility was that it frees the artwork from its existence in particular place and time, allowing it to become a means of political and cultural critique. This has always been a controversial claim. In actual practice, defiant images are easily re-appropriated for commercial purposes. The alternative is to stop resisting and swim happily in the image stream. Then you end up with something like Lady Gaga’s theater of being, itself not that far removed from what Warhol did in his Marilyn series. 

 

How are we supposed to approach somebody like Lady Gaga? She’s no Baudelaire—no snark intended. There’s no inner self resisting the marketplace. She has no spleen to vent at her own commodification. Are there any political gestures in her work—beyond the usual post-feminist blandishments about a female performer assuming control over her own image? You can’t rule it out, I suppose. Generally, though, critics limit themselves to wondering if she’s playing with images more cleverly than Madonna did. 

 

There’s a huge divide between Charlie Hebdo and Lady Gaga. The former clings fiercely to the political realm at the cost of artistic value. The latter represents culture as an autonomous sphere outside the political. Are these the only possibilities for politically engaged art? Is it all or nothing?

 

More on that in my next post. 

Politics and Art in the Digital Age, Part 1: Je Suis Charles Baudelaire

The subtitle of this blog is “aesthetics and politics.” What does that mean, exactly? A set of recent events has made me reconsider how I understand that phrase. The relationship between art and politics, as it has been articulated in this blog, is idiosyncratic and inconsistent, partly because my own understanding of the relationship is idiosyncratic and inconsistent, and partly because art and politics don’t always related to each other in the way. Sometimes the relationship is straightforward. The Charlie Hebdo incident is one such example because its journalists and cartoonists place art in the service of political satire. Just as the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were so intense they became something else--politics--the intensity of the religious extremists who opposed them also exposed their true form: Religion was just a cover for politics.

 

One day someone drew a picture, and a short time later they were shot dead for drawing the picture. Art and politics doesn't get any clearer than that. Other times the relationship is harder to uncover, and that’s when things get really interesting.

 

Walter Benjamin is an obvious influence in these investigations. He looked for politics in the most least likely places they could appear. Starting with his early essay (1914), "Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin," Benjamin decided to approach lyric poetry as a political subject. What could be more apolitical than lyric poetry?  Benjamin flatly rejected Nietzsche’s description of lyric poetry as a means for the poet to play “the entire chromatic scale of his passions and desires.” Benjamin read Charles Baudelaire as a lyric poet who created verse that embodied the contradictions of high capitalism, meaning the early, more localized forms of capitalism before the mass industrialization and mass culture of monopoly capitalism in Benjamin’s own day. Baudelaire represented the artist free to pursue his or her own inclinations in an age of repeated failed social revolutions. In the mid-nineteenth century writers were exploring new ways to be free. At the same time, however, their readers struggled to find any means to create their own individuality in the midst of rapid industrialization and expanded state power. Baudelaire’s poems were produced by a new way of looking made possible by capitalism. Poems, and therefore poets, were commodities in the marketplace, but  they entered the market under protest. Baudelaire gave voice to new experiences in the developing cities of capitalism: getting jostled by the crowd, seeing the same disgusting old man appear over and over again in the streets, window shopping for commodities in poor taste, eyeing prostitutes—and recognizing the poet shares her position in the economic order. Baudelaire used the forms of lyric poetry but without the interiority. He replaced the chromatic scale of feeling with shock experience.

 

Benjamin studied Baudelaire during the rise of fascism, which threatened to take over all of European culture, high and low alike. Thus it was easy—and urgent—for Benjamin to see politics everywhere. Baudelaire wrote at the beginning of an historical process that seemed to be culminating in Benjamin's time. But it isn’t 1936 anymore. What’s the relationship between aesthetics and politics when digitization threatens to take over all Western culture and commerce? Does Walter Benjamin have anything to say about these conditions?

 

More on this subject tomorrow.

Je Suis Charlie

Perhaps it's no coincidence that the January 7 issue of Charlie Hebdo featured a satire based on Michel Houellebecq's new novel, Submission, about a Muslim president of France.

Interestingly, Charlie Hebdo was born through an act of censorship. The journal was founded in 1970 by journalists who worked for Hari-Kiri, a journal that was banned because of its satirical coverage of the death of Charles de Gaulle. The name Charlie Hebdo is a reference to Charlie Brown in Peanuts. In French the title means Charlie Weekly.

 

Spanish caricaturists: "And this is our gun" #CharlieHebdo pic.twitter.com/bwugTPh0Al

— Paris P. Tuzun (@paristuzun) January 7, 2015

 

Mashable details what's known about the victims so far. 

The Washington Post rounds up cartoonists' reactions to the shootings in Paris.

Salmon Rushdie issued a statement condemning the attack in predictable terms. 

In the ongoing coverage, some news outlets are obscuring the offending cartoons, in case some terrorists are waiting in the parking lot with loaded AK-47s.

French media outlets, meanwhile, are offering equipment for the financially-strapped satirical journal to keep publishing. 

 

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TT @jeromegodefroy: For 10 yrs I’ve lived at Place de République, I’ve never seen a spontaneous demo this large. pic.twitter.com/RsHw0FQwKN

— Andy Carvin (@acarvin) January 7, 2015

 

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The Muslim radical argues that the ban on blasphemy is morally right and should be followed; the Western liberal insists it is morally wrong but should be followed. Theoretical distinctions aside, both positions yield an identical outcome.

The right to blaspheme religion is one of the most elemental exercises of political liberalism. One cannot defend the right without defending the practice.

-Jonathan Chait on those who blame the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for provoking Muslim extremists. 

It should be pointed out that the gunmen not only killed cartoonists and their editors, but also two policemen, shooting one point blank in the head as he lay on the sidewalk. There are reports that the video of the policeman's killing has been repackaged as propaganda by supporters of the Islamic State militants. The policeman shot on the street was Ahmed Merabet. 

 

. 2/ Video with the #ISIS Nasheed & poster below with the new hashtag now running in Arabic #WeAvengedTheMessegner pic.twitter.com/HebRrqnnPM

— Hala Jaber (@HalaJaber) January 7, 2015