Posts by Miss Rosen

Judy Chicago: The Roots of “The Dinner Party”

Posted on October 20, 2017

Artwork: The Dinner Party, 1974‒79. Ceramic, porcelain, textile, 576 x 576 in. (1463 x 1463 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo © Donald Woodman)

Artwork: Sojourner Truth #2 Test Plate from The Dinner Party, circa 1978. Porcelain and China paint, diameter: 14 in. (35.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, gift of Judy Chicago, 82.165. © 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum)

When Judy Chicago unveiled “The Dinner Party” in San Francisco in 1979, she turned the art world upside down with the first epic work for the Feminist Art movement. Around an equilateral triangle table, she crafted elaborate place settings for 39 female figures from the history of western civilisation, beginning with the Primordial Goddess and ending with Georgia O’Keeffe. Along the way, viewers encounter Ishtar, Hatshepsut, Sappho, Theodora, Elizabeth I, Sacajawea, Soujourner Truth, Emily Dickinson, and Margaret Sanger, travelling from prehistoric times through the women’s revolution.

For each woman given a seat a the table, a place was set, her name embroidered on a table runner accompanied by symbols of her accomplishments. Then, for the piece de resistance, Chicago served up handmade plates of china, meticulously painted with the main dish: a vulva reminiscent of a flower or a butterfly. The table is situated on The Heritage Floor, composed of 2,000 white triangle-shaped tiles that bare then names of an additional 999 women who contributed to history.

When I first learned of the work in a “Women in Art History” class, the professor asked for reactions. Everyone was silent, agog or agape, lost in thought. But not me. My hand shot up and I blurted out, “The work is about going down – eating out – and I support that.”

The class tittered. My teacher blushed and quickly changed the subject, focusing on how “The Dinner Party” embraces the textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing) and china painting, all of which were traditionally relegated to the realm of crafts or, more plainly, women’s art. At the time of “The Dinner Party”, these modes of production had not been accorded parity with the male-dominated realm of drawing, painting, and sculpture, which were considered superior as forms of “fine art.”

In 2007, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened at the Brooklyn Museum with “The Dinner Party” as its foundation. Now, to mark its ten-year anniversary, the Museum introduces Roots of The Dinner Party: History in the Making (October 20-March 4, 2018). The exhibition provides insight into the making of this historic work, which took six years to complete, and involved the work of nearly 400 women and men.

Featuring more than 100 objects including rarely seen test plates, research documents, ephemera, notebooks, and preparatory drawings, we are lead inside the creation of this phenomenal project. Chicago speaks with us about “The Dinner Party”, which has become her most influential work and one that, decades on, continues to inspire and provoke a wide array of responses from people from all walks of life.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Christina of Sweden (Great Ladies Series), 1973. Sprayed acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm). Collection of Elizabeth A. Sackler
© 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo © Donald Woodman

Artwork: Study for Virginia Woolf from The Dinner Party, 1978. Ink, photo, and collage on paper, approx. 24 × 36 in. (61 × 91.4 cm). National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Mary Ross Taylor in honor of Elizabeth A. Sackler. © 2017 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo: Lee Stalsworth)

Categories: 1970s, Art, Brooklyn, Dazed, Women

I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish

Posted on October 19, 2017

Invariably a day will come where I put “How Soon Is Now” and get into my feelings. The highs, the lows, the fighting the air blows, I’m absolutely consumed with a maudlin mania that overcomes and nestles me in its clasp. One time is never enough. Play it again, Sam.

And – I’m not even a Smith’s fan. Coming up, I found them morose. But as time goes by, I can’t front. Where so many other bands faded away, The Smiths and Morrissey live on. In celebration, These Days, Los Angeles, presents, I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish: The Smiths & Morrissey Collection, now on view through October 22. The exhibition takes you back to the days when poster art was errythann.

The exhibition features a selection of vintage, 40 x 60 inch duotone posters made between 1985 and 1995 originally displayed in the UK and around Europe in train stations and record stores (Remember those? I’m sayinn). From the start, lead singer and co-songwriter Morrissey ran the show when it came to the band’s artwork, working alongside Rough Trade art coordinator Jo Slee.

At a time when everything was neon colors and punch pop graphics, Morrissey opted out and when vintage. Coming of age during the Pictures Generation, appropriation was de rigeur. Rather than take use of the band Morrissey chose images like Cecil Beaton’s famed photo of Truman Capote mid-jump, just as his career was taking off and the world was his oyster. It was evocative, if not provocative in part, a comment on popular culture and the spaces between high and low art. Stephen Zeigler of These Days shares his reflections on the power of the band here with us.

What was the inspiration for the show?

Stephen Zeigler: To be honest it was quite unplanned and came about very happenstance.

Do go on…

Stephen Zeigler: A good friend of ours is a huge fan of both The Smiths and Morrissey. He is a compulsive collector of all sorts of band merchandise (not just Smiths/Moz) and came to a point where he needed to downsize some of his collections. When he told us he would be selling off the Smiths and Morrissey posters, we thought it would be a great opportunity for the rabid Los Angeles Smiths/Moz community to be able to view the collection in it’s entirety before it was pieced out.

Everything is for sale and been selling quite well. We have had buyers from across the country purchase pieces. We even had an awesome couple drive over 400 miles from Oakland to see the exhibition and purchase a piece.

The Smiths are the perfect definition of a cult band. How would you describe their appeal?

Stephen Zeigler: Wow, that’s such a tough question and something I have been thinking about a lot during the shows run. I don’t think it can really be stated definitively but I think that Morrissey’s lyrics are intensely personal and yet the melancholy, anger, and emotions are universal and can mean something different to everyone.

I think for the average listener who grew up in the 1980s their music was always present and brings people back to certain points in their lives, and for the devoted super fans it’s deeply personal. I have spoken to visitors who tell me that Morrissey and The Smiths saved their lives, showed them another life besides gangbanging, or they were going through a rough time in their lives (even to the point of suicide) when they heard a song or lyric that showed them they weren’t alone in their emotions.

I love how music has the power to reach people who are on the brink. I’m very intrigued by the fact they continue to be so popular now, as so few groups from that era have such a prominent presence in the culture today. Why is it about their work that makes their appeal transcend time?

Stephen Zeigler: I think The Smiths are one of those unique bands, like The Clash, The Jam, The Specials, or Public Enemy who come from a specific era and time but are able to speak to an audience who may not have even been born yet when the band was together.

Specifically to The Smiths it was really a perfect storm of Morrissey’s voice and lyrics and Johnny Marr’s innovative guitar playing.

Morrissey said, the artwork needed to “take images that were the opposite of glamour and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power—or, possibly, glamour.” Could you expand on how these images do just this?

Stephen Zeigler: The Smiths have always been sort of down played in their appearance. Coming from working class Manchester where pretentiousness can get you an ass beating, the band embraced the common, hence the name “The Smiths.” With the artwork, they took images from many common looking British elements and personalities and the act of repurposing them as record covers or blowing them up as huge stage backdrops, in itself gives the images an importance never before imagined.

I’ve always loved the visuals they used for their campaigns. Could you speak of what the works have in common and how it defines their aesthetic?

Stephen Zeigler: Morrissey selected still images from little known or remembered mid-century films and photos of authors and artists that influenced him. The images were then stripped down and taken out of their original context to become a visual poetry of their own.

All photos courtesy of Stephen Zeigler, These Days.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions

Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting

Posted on October 19, 2017

Artwork: Eye Body, Transformative Actions For The Camera, 1963. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann

You may remember Lady Gaga’s meat dress as something of a scene – but it doesn’t hold a candle to Meat Joy, the Carolee Schneemann happening from 1964 that inspired it. Where Gaga took an existing idea and transformed it into a publicity stunt, Schneemann invented something that had never been seen or done – and it nearly cost her life.

Picture a group of young men and women clad in their undergarments experiencing the pleasures of the flesh: of the carcasses of fish and chicken, along with sausages, touching their bare skin. Imagine being in the same room as they gathered on the floor to engage in an experience of sensuality the likes of which had never been realised before. Envision a man in the audience becoming so enraged he leaped from his seat, dragging Schneemann off to the side, and beginning to strangle her.

This happened during the Paris edition and went on until two bourgeois women jumped from their seats and fought off the attacker until he stopped. Then Schneemann got back into the happening and continued on with the knowledge that her explorations could unleash a cataclysmic storm. But Schneemann is an unstoppable force – she is freedom incarnate. Uninhibited and unafraid, she has been challenging the patriarchy by virtue of being true to herself.

Born in 1939 to a country doctor and a farm wife, Schneemann grew up close to nature, embracing the life and death cycle of the earth. When her father refused to support her decision to go to college, she won a full scholarship to study painting at Bard College, in New York, which she attended until she was expelled on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” Where others might have given up, Schneemann persevered, creating a body of work so singular and so challenging that to this day she has no equal in the field.

Her pioneering investigations into the female body, sexuality, and gender have tapped into archaic visual traditions and wrestled with social taboos, transforming Schneemann into a vessel of transgression and subversion in search of truth. In celebration, MoMA P.S. 1, New York, presents Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting (October 22, 2017- March 11, 2018), the first comprehensive retrospective spanning her prolific six-decade career.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Prestel has released a catalogue of the same name, while the Artists Institute has published Carolee’s Issue 02, which illustrates the ways in which other artists, advertisers, and pop culture figures have drawn heavily from her work. Schneemann speaks with us about Meat Joy as well as her career as “both image and image maker.”

Read the Story at Dazed

Artwork: Meat Joy 1964, chromogenic color print. Photo by Al Giese. From performance at Judson Church, November 16-18, 1964 New York. Courtesy of C. Schneemann and P.P.O.W, New York

Artwork: Nude on Tracks,1962-1977. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Painting, Women

Samuel Fosso: Self-Portraits

Posted on October 18, 2017

Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.

Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.

At the tender age of 13, Samuel Fosso set up Studio Photo Nationale, and began his career as a photographer. The year was 1975, and Fosso was working in the city of Bangui, located just inside the border of Central African Republic.

“With Studio National, you will be beautiful, stylish, dainty and easy to recognize,” Fosso promised. Here he works taking passport, portrait, and wedding photographs for the community—but it was his self-portraits that brought the artist global acclaim.

“I started taking self-portraits simply to use up spare film; people wanted their photographs the next day, even if the roll wasn’t finished, and I didn’t like waste. The idea was to send some pictures to my mother in Nigeria, to show her I was all right.,” Fosso told The Guardian in 2011. “Then I saw the possibilities. I started trying different costumes, poses, backdrops. It began as a way of seeing myself grow up, and slowly it became a personal history – as well as art, I suppose.”

And from this seed of genius, a life’s work arose, one that is rooted in the complexity of layering, meaning, and identity inherent to the self, and just how plastic these things are when we skate along the surface of life, mistaking appearances for the thing they claim to represent.

Like a great actor, Fosso delves deep within himself and returns with an understanding of human nature and the way it manifests in the body, and on the face, through costume, gesture, and expression. For the past forty years, Fosso has honed his craft, creating a body of work that examines the experience of life as a West African man.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.

Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.

Categories: 1970s, Africa, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Robin F. Williams: Your Good Taste Is Showing

Posted on October 18, 2017

Robin Williams. Your Good Taste is Showing. Acrylic, airbrush, and oil on canvas 72 x 72 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W

We live at a time of extreme disconnects between the representations and reality, fueling a compulsive cycle of consumption in search of illusions and false ideals. Nowhere can this be seen better than in advertisements, which are designed to provoke a complex mixture of desire and dissatisfaction. What makes them eerily effective is the way they integrate into our lives, informing our attitudes, opinions, and aesthetics. As time passes they become something more: memories of the “good ol’ days,” which we can wax nostalgic upon while simultaneously rewriting our histories to flatter our self-images.

The subject of gender is infinitely complex, with its ideals and archetypes that are far more constructions of fantasies and fears than they are upon the mundane reality that makes them infinitely more messy, revealing the inherent nature of paradox at the root of existence when we live in a state of conflict rather than harmony with our lives.

Advertisements are false paradigms that are readily absorbed for their reductive thinking that enables people who like to avoid responsibility to readily allow someone else to dictate the terms. Naturally, they are far more seductive otherwise they wouldn’t work. By provoking us with pragmatic solutions (buy this! use that!) they cultivate dependency not only on their wares but also on the very medium itself. Perhaps there’s nothing so delicious as a reflection upon which we can project our ego’s demanding neediness. Invariably, short term gratification wears off, and we return to the well even thirstier than we were when we first took a sip.

Robin Williams. It is Not a Pipe. Acrylic and oil on panel 30 x 30 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W

The construction of the female gender is American society has long been a losing paradigm, dating back to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idealistic essay Woman (1885), which overwhelms with the weight of virtue and vulnerability. “They are victims of the finer temperament,” he writes, clearly enamored with the pedestal upon which he places them.

Fast forward nearly a century to the 1970s, as liberation movements began to free women from these tiresome constraints. The pendulum, being what it is, swung in the other direction, where wanton grace became the idea. Advertisers understood the power of aping the zeitgeist, corralling the chaotic displays of self-exploration into neatly packaged archetypes.

These aesthetics fascinated American artist Robin F. Williams and became an integral motif throughout her new body of work, which combined genre painting and portraiture to subversive effect in the new exhibition Your Good Taste Is Showing, now on view at P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, through November 11, 2017.

Williams’ work deftly mixes takes 1970s advertisements as its departure point, examining the ways in which they drew upon art historical tropes to sell everything from cigarettes to shampoo. Where the advertisements wanted to draw you in to their world, Williams’ forces you to back off, subverts expectations of propriety, giving her subjects the agency to figuratively flip the bird while still looking, soft, sensual, and glamorous. Here, sexy is a double-edged sword, for it both makes you look but places a clear boundary between the desire it stimulates and its ability to fulfill your dreams.

No, the works says, not this time. I’m not yours.

Robin Williams. Bather, 2017. Acrylic, airbrush, and oil on canvas, 38 x 23 inches. Copyright Robin Williams, Courtesy P.P.O.W.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions

Joe Mama-Nitzberg: Picture not Portrait

Posted on October 16, 2017

Our Grandmothers, 2017. Pigment print on canvas, 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.

“Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1964 essay Notes on “Camp.”

It is here that we begin—and return—in the work of Joe Mama-Nitzberg’s new exhibition, Picture, not Portrait, currently on view at Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland, ME, through November 11, 2017. The exhibition presents a selection of recent works that open questions and create space for dialogue about the interplay between technology, memory, identity, and the curious legacy of postmodernism.

Mama-Nitzberg is generous in his approach, simultaneously exploring and critiquing the complex ideas that most would prefer to put into reductive, didactic boxes of thought. Here, nothing is quite what it seems but all the better for us, as it opens up spaces for interrogation that are more often than not silenced.

The works in the exhibition peel back the layers of perception to expose the complications of reality, of the simultaneous spaces that are at one contradictory and complementary. Here, we are liberated from the authority of the absolute, free to experience the work in whatever way we wish. Mama-Nitzberg offers insight into his process, allowing us to see the ways in which are can be a vehicle for debate, discussion, and contemplation.

Could you speak about the legacy of postmodernism: what do you think this entails, both for better and for worse? How does your work speak to this legacy?

Joe Mama-Nitzberg: The strategies of postmodernism are still reverberating and utilized even when they are not identified as such, including questions of authorship, power relations, pastiche, appropriation, image/text, high/ low.

Postmodernism created an awareness and an embracing of an unfixed state. It is creating terror when employed by our president. The post-truth, post-facts playbook can have us scrambling towards the safety of essentialism. As comforting as this may seem, we cannot un-ring that bell.

Untitled (Elite Detachment Sontag), 2017. Pigment print on canvas. 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.

You use Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay Notes on “Camp” as a jumping off point for several pieces in the exhibition, with particular attention to “[d]etachment is the prerogative of an elite.” How do you address her academic detachment in her work?

Joe Mama-Nitzberg: The statement “detachment is the prerogative of an elite” jumped out at me. I was touched to think she was crowning “camp” queens as “the elite,” even if this might be taken as a critique. Although she was a part of the gay/queer community and did participate in “the life,” Sontag was an academic writing about a gay male subculture.

One could say that her academic status detached her from this bar/street culture. One could also say that her gender detached her from this group. Perhaps there is some truth to this but perhaps it is exactly this distance and detachment that made it possible for her to theorize in the manner that she did. She was inside and outside simultaneously.

When I began making these pieces, there was a Sontag moment happening in the culture. This was also the zenith of what has been popularly referred to as “Zombie Formalism” [a term coined by Walter Robinson referring to the resurrection of the aesthetics of Clement Greenberg]. I realized that many of the paintings that were qualifying as “Zombie Formalism”, for me also qualified as “Camp”.

I was very interested in playing with just who the “elite” might be to the viewer. Artists? The 1%? Traditional gay male culture? Academia? Me?

Untitled (Henri Matisse by Carl Van Vechten 1), 2017. Framed archival pigment print, 23.875 x 19.625 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.

How do your reconceptualizations of Carl Van Vechten’s portraits address power relations, cultural appropriation, and the limits of the digital?

Joe Mama-Nitzberg: A friend gave me a biography of Carl Van Vechten as a gift. I had a very visceral response to the book. Both his life story and his photography produced true ambivalence for me. I found his dedication to promoting other artists to be generous as well as exploitative and self-aggrandizing. As a well-connected wealthy white man, he had the ability to introduce artists and artworks to the literati and the glitterati. Many of those that Van Vechten promoted were African American. I felt that Van Vechten truly wanted to bring about racial understanding and harmony and that he had tremendous respect for Black people. That said, I also felt he was a controlling diva who did not have to navigate life in the same way as many of those that he championed.

And here it gets even more complicated. Van Vechten was a gay man during the many decades of the twentieth century when that was hardly a privileged distinction to hold. It was often a crime. Van Vechten was working to champion other marginalized peoples in a way to elevate his own status. Does that now make my use of his work righteous, as I identify as a gay/queer man, and hence it is also makes it my own marginalized culture to appropriate and represent?

I say this with the awareness that I am looking at all of this through a twenty-first century lens. I take these questions of cultural appropriation and power relations very seriously. I need to examine my own position in the work as one that is questioning rather than answering. I have tried to create an open arena rather than a place where to make absolute proclamations of ownership.

As for the limits of the digital, I utilize Adobe Photoshop to make these images. I am self-taught in Photoshop and let’s just say I would never brag about my skills. One of my interests is what I am calling “the digital hand.” These consumer-based programs and algorithms have empowered me to make work in a way that was never available to me before. I have a confidence to work on my own with a level of freedom that I lacked as a younger artist who relied on others and their technical expertise.

The Van Vechten pieces in the show all have similar formal qualities. These similarities are created by the source Van Vechten images, as well as by how I make marks in Photoshop and the limits of the program. Photoshop is designed to be consistent and to jump through the same hoops over and over. That’s what Adobe is selling.

Untitled (Henri Matisse by Carl Van Vechten 2), 2017. Framed archival pigment print, 22 x 18 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.

It’s always very telling when the work of rebellion becomes the very thing it set out against, in this case the work of the Pictures generation. Could you speak about the ideological failure of appropriation?

Joe Mama-Nitzberg: The exhibition is titled Picture not Portrait because I liked the many ways this could reverberate and how it might be read. The title came from a piece with a quote from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I caught myself making the mistake of calling it The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Somehow to me it just sounded grand and correct. But… It is incorrect and I wanted to make sure I was using the correct title.

To remember, I created the mantra “Picture not Portrait” and I loved the ring this had. As I use photographs of individuals and refer to their biographies, I was also thinking about both pictures and portraits. How do these terms operate for the viewer?

Lastly, I use “Picture” to refer to the Pictures Generation/Group. I don’t believe that this work or these artists necessarily failed or that if they did that their failure was truly different than any other artistic radical gesture’s failure: they all seem to fail in the same way. We like to think that we can be outside of capitalism, and that critique, even if is commodified, is still somehow rebellious.

This is nothing new. Wilde’s rebellion was always a cash cow. The subversion in his talks, books and plays made him a very wealthy man – that is, until his homosexuality sent him to prison.

We often choose to be naïve and self-serving. We are stuck in a system that does not allow us to escape this double bind. Making work that is purely formal and avoids these strategies doesn’t work. Not making objects/commodities but accepting monies from institutions and collectors doesn’t really work either. With all of this said, today I will not choose cynicism and defeat. I am still deeply optimistic about the power of art to be radical and to communicate and affect change.

Noble Sissy 1, 2017. Pigment print on fabric, 37 x 26 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions

Pieter Hugo: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Posted on October 15, 2017

Emeka, motorcyclist and Abdullahi Ahmadu Asaba, Nigeria, from the series “The Hyena & Other Men”, 2005-2007, 2007. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg

Imagine coming of age as a white man in South Africa during Apartheid. How does the truth of your people weigh on you: does it turn you into an accomplice or does it push you into the margins of resistance? It’s a question worthy of consideration outside the frame of SA – it speaks to the nature of existence: do you stand for or against oppression?

South African photographer Pieter Hugo took to the camera to address his questions and concerns, using the medium as a means to examine, document, and subvert, creating several bodies of work that are deeply layered and resonant, charged with strength, emotion, and defiance.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg/Prestel) beautifully presents Hugo’s most important series made over the past two decades. Here we see how Hugo inherently understood his position as a white man in South Africa and the legacy it entailed, neither shirking from, diminishing, or rationalizing the horrors of his people. Instead he took his inheritance as the opportunity to set the record straight, to stand as an outsider and from this vantage point, use the camera to speak truth to power.

Of the first series, Looking Aside, made in South African between 2003 and 2006, Hugo writes, “In this early body of work I explicitly took a confrontational stance, an attitude that is rehearsed in a lot of my subsequent work. It is an unflinching series. I wanted the intensity of my own gaze.”

That gaze was informed by two trajectories: the falsehoods of photojournalism as informed by American ideologies steeped in superficial humanism and the use of photography by the South African government as a means to control apartheid through a system of classification and separation. With these currents flowing through his mind, Hugo pointed his camera straight on, creating a series of portraits that defy romanticism, intended to discomfit and disconcert with their lack of heroicism, beauty, or pretense.

This direct approach makes use of the camera as a tool of aggression, for it forces us to look, to see, to recognize a picture of humanity that has been whitewashed, distorted, or completely denied. Whether photographing the vestiges of the Rwandan Genocide in 2004 or The Hyena & Other Men in Nigeria in 2005-2007, Hugo’s photographs are challenging and confrontational, yet courageous.

Hugo’s willingness to upend tradition was transformative. Where The Hyena & Other Men was shocking when it was first released, it has now become embedded into the fabric of fine art photography. And this is where things begin to shift, as Hugo’s work blurs the boundaries between documentary, portraiture, and fine art to create a new kind of environmental portraiture.

Obechukwu Nwoye, Enugu, Nigeria, from the series “Nollywood”, 2008-2009, 2008. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg

Green Point Common, Cape Town, from the series “Kin”, 2006-2013, 2007. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg

From the Wild Honey Collectors, shot in Ghana in 2005, to Nollywood, made in Nigeria in 2008-2009, we see the emergence of a new aspect to Hugo’s work. “In my development as an artist,” Hugo writes of Nollywood, “this project was the first time I really questioned the veracity of the portrait. I became aware of how one can play with portraiture, this it can be much more than just the superficial depiction of a subject.”

And so, by the time he was making Kin in South Africa between 2006-2013, and Permanent Error in Ghana in 2009-2010, everything had changed. Hugo’s portraits had entered into a new realm, one that was just as direct but less antagonistic. They were subtle and complex yet at times eerie and apocalyptic. Their humanism was neither sentimental nor idealistic; instead they captured the disturbing fact that reality is deeply unnerving.

Rooted in truth, we simply look and we observe, but it is how we react — and what we do with that reaction, that speaks of and for our character. Since seeing Hugo’s photographs made for Permanent Error, published by Prestel in 2011, I felt a shift: a purpose and a calling in my writing about photography and art.

His photographs are made inside a circle of hell. The Agbogbloshie dump, located on the outskirts of Ghana’s capital, Accra, is a wetland turned wasteland, a slum and a workplace populated by thousands of men and boys who refer to this area as Sodom and Gomorrah. This is a slum of the twenty-first century, a place that Western countries would never allow within their borders, a place that could only exist among disenfranchised—in the rice fields of Guiya, China; behind the electronics markets of Lagos, Nigeria; in the back alleys of Karachi, Delhi, and Hanoi. It is the place where pits are dug and fires burn, and in those fires, our Information Age truly leaves its mark.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that we now produce 50 million metric tons of e-waste per year, and 6,500 tons will arrive each month at the Port of Tema, where it then finds its way on to Agbogbloshie. The workers in these poisoned pits make their living first by hauling then smashing, gutting, and burning the televisions and computers to recover copper, steel, and aluminum. The only thing green in this equation is the money being made by electronics manufacturers, whose sales are booming—despite the recession—for computer games, printers, electronic toys, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS devices, camcorders, tablet readers, computers, and televisions.

In 2001, when the book was released, United States, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Japan, and South Korea refuse to honor the Basel Ban Agreement, which was created in 1995 to ban the export of all forms of hazardous wastes for any reason. Of these countries, only the US refused to ratify the original 1989 United Nations treaty known as the Basel Convention, which created a full an on the export of toxic wastes for any reason from developed to developing countries.

The result of this failure is the creation of places like Agbogbloshie, where the unrelenting waves of the Information Age crash upon the shores like tidal waves. Pieter Hugo’s photographs show us the price of progress, an unquantifiable desecration of the earth and its inhabitants. This kind of inhumanity reaches a level on unconscionable ignorance that Hugo’s photographs brutally address. Baring witness to a new kind of inferno that is in its nascent stage, Hugo’s photographs stand as a testament against our complacent assumptions. “Recycling” is the chipper chatter of marketers leading the masquerade.

Permanent Error stands in dark warning and reveal the reality of our brutally consumerist lifestyle. We share this responsibility, just as we share this earth. You and me, your friends and family, all of us are the reason Agbogbloshie exists. I’ve never gotten over this and it challenges me to come to terms with not only my work as a writer but as someone complicit in the destruction of the planet.

Hugo reminds me that reality exists beyond our experience of it, and at the same time it is our responsibility to come to terms with our inheritance. To avoid and ignore, to rationalize, to pretend or play dumb is nothing more than a lie. On the path to solutions, we must first speak the truth, to ask the disturbing questions, and come to terms with our guilt. Too many get caught up in shame and blame, in a disingenuous paradigm that asserts itself to avoid responsibility.

That we don’t have the answers is rational. How could we when we can barely speak or acknowledge the truth? Hugo reminds us, the first step towards salvation is owning up, baring the burden, and transforming it through the action of redemption and salvation in the name of humanity.

Thoba Calvin and Tshepo Cameron Sithole- Modisane, Pretoria, from the series “Kin”, 2006- 2013, 2013. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Photography

A Trip to Alcatraz

Posted on October 12, 2017

It wasn’t dark when we set out on water. It had been bright and clear light. June maybe? I’m not really sure. The middle of every decade blurs into this wave, a maze, like a web of memories intricate and imprecise though the vibe is magnified through the lens of time. So I’m on this boat, a motor boat, it has two tiers. I’m on the water, indoors and out. Dramamine I am sure, that’s the only drug besides Advil I’ve had in years.

Good thing too cause I’m real sensitive. To heights. Depths. Shifting balances. I’m not a natural. I’m the opposite. But at least I’m predictable (indeed). So here we are on the seas of Marin County and we are cruising into San Francisco Bay. It’s beautiful, everything is shades of blue, the water ripples fan out and flow into waves that coast under the skies that darken as the horizon looms. Out to ocean it’s the sunset but inland it’s electric lights dotting the landscape.

I love the way SF looks as you move towards it. The tall hills jutting out on that little mass of insistent land. Beautifully sculpted with old buildings of sorbet and marshmallow. Towards the water, tiny two stories cottages line up like Peeps at Duane Reade in April… and me not eating sugar so I see it everywhere.

I’m on the boat. Dancing with Jim. He’s playing DJ and I’m not sure what he’s spinning but it’s goood. Cause that Dram is working so the floor tilting isn’t a bad thing. I need this. Deeply. Inside me. Letting loose on the high seas, so to speak. Set me free ~

Then the captain calls me, so I step to the stern and there I am, by his side, looking out the front, moving with purpose across the top and it all feels different now, as though the power of the sea was beneath my feet and I relax into the energies that floated and swirled through the air.

We are coming upon Alcatraz. The sky was dark and stars sparkled in the canopy. I look at the island and from the fog of a dream a ferry emerged. I knew it wasn’t actually there, I could see it, through but not with my eyes. I looked it over and noticed two men in suits, hats, and trenchcoats. Very 1930s. Feds. I watched the boat dock and they were off, into the noir.

I snapped back. It was 2005. 2006. 2007. (ahem). Not sure. Those years are a blur. But I’m sure I am where I standing. Beside the captain. He might have been saying something. Didn’t matter, really…

Categories: Art

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco

Posted on October 12, 2017

Photo: Antonio Lopez, Pat Cleveland, Paris (Blue Water Series), 1975. Copyright, 2012, The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Photo: Antonio Lopez, Corey Tippin and Donna Jordan, Saint-Tropez, 1970. Photograph by Juan Ramos. © Copyright The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, 2012. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Deep in the mountains of Puerto Rico lies Utuado, built by Spanish imperialists nearly 300 years ago. It is here that Antonio Lopez (1943–1987) was born. The son of a father who crafted mannequins and a mother who made dresses, Lopez was a child prodigy who began to sketch at the age of two, revealing a gift that would revolutionise the fashion industry and prefigure the times in which we currently live.

At the age of seven, Lopez and his family moved to New York City, where he grew up living a double life, making mannequins with his father but playing with dolls out of sight. His burgeoning bisexuality would soon drive a wedge between Lopez and his family, inspiring him to create his own centered in his artist studio at Carnegie Hall.

As the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements made space for those who had been previously marginalized by the mainstream, Lopez and his creative partner Juan Ramos (1942–1995) introduced goddess-like visions of his muses to the world in the pages of Vogue, WWD, and The New York Times. His discoveries, known as “Antonio’s Girls” included Grace Jones, Pat Cleveland, Cathee Dahmen, Tina Chow, Jessica Lange, Jerry Hall and Warhol Superstars Donna Jordan, Jane Forth and Patti D’Arbanville – women who not merely beautiful but were extraordinary characters and artists in their own right.

In celebration of his glorious career, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump, will make its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 12. The documentary charts Lopez’s rise from the streets of the Bronx to the pinnacle of the Parisian demimonde. As the dominant fashion illustrator of the late 1960s and 70s, Lopez arrived on the scene just as ready-to-wear came into existence, bringing his distinctive Afro-Latinx sensibilities into the mix.

Antonio Lopez 1970 brings us back to a pivotal period in fashion history when the aristocratic hierarchy of the couture houses was falling away. In its place, Lopez emerged with a vision so modern that he was boldly ahead of his time – James Crump reflects on the ways in which Lopez’s Afro-Latinx roots transformed the fashion industry.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Eija Vehka Ajo, Juan Ramos, Jacques de Bascher, Karl Lagerfeld and Antonio Lopez, Paris, 1973. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Joshua Lutz: Hesitating Beauty

Posted on October 10, 2017

To speak openly of mental illness is one of the last great taboos. Not to speak of treatment, of therapies, of medication, doctors, hospitals—not to speak of the industry that has been in existence for but a century, but to speak of the people themselves. Of their inner and outer lives, and the way in which these boundaries melt, of the way in which their illness subverts our understanding of what both reality and relationship mean. It takes an unfathomable courage to wade into the murky waters of the mind, into places that have been wounded and have become maladapted over time, into places few dare to tread for fear of losing themselves in the quagmire that goes beyond the rational mode of interpretation.

What few may understand is that mental illness is a shared state, affecting not only the person it befalls but those who walk in its wake. To stand before this illness and experience it in the flesh is to know a side to the sublime that few can truly grasp, a kind of shadow being that has cast its hand upon the earth. Many who live with it, or live in its presence have become silenced by its reach, fearing not only external judgment but the implications of sharing in its path. So much is unknown, untold, misunderstood, misdiagnosed. So much is dehumanized by fear, by shame, and by the system itself. It is for this reason that we are blessed to have artists like Joshua Lutz who bring profound and painful truths to us in the form of art so that we as a people may both meditate on and mediate the space where few dare to share with the world.

Hesitating Beauty, which runs April 11–May 18 at ClampArt, NY, is a study of Lutz’s experiences living with a mother suffering from schizophrenia. The nature of schizophrenia itself is not fully understood, but it is a detachment for our commonly-held perceptions of reality that drive the sufferer into a kind of psychosis few can comprehend on its own terms.

Blending family archives, interviews, and letters with Lutz’s photographs, “Hesitating Beauty” mirrors the disassociative and distorted qualities of the illness itself. What we accept as “reality” has been defined by the group, and anyone with even the slightest twinge of mental illness is aware of how slippery the slope is once we step away from the shared perception of “truth.” It is to Lutz’s credit that he lyrically conveys this dance with reality as it he experienced it firsthand. It comes back to photography, as it was the camera that he used to cope with the situation in which he lived.

Lutz reveals, “Are you ready for some true contradictions? Here is the thing: my relationship to photography keeps on changing. How it functions in my life and the role it plays continues to evolve even with the same subjects. As far as ‘Hesitating Beauty’ goes and the work involved in making it, there were times when I would photograph to simply put myself on the other side of the camera. To look at my mom, the crazy behavior I was seeing and to document it in some fashion probably prove to myself that I was not crazy. As long as the crazy was on the other side of the camera surely I couldn’t be loosing my mind.

“For so many years I thought I would get this illness. That I would grow up to have schizophrenia and need the medication and shock therapies that my mom was having. The camera and all that comes with it was this tool that functioned as a way to separate myself from the experience. In some respect it also just simply creating a task for me to do. Often I would dread the monotony of having to be a primary care giver. So for me it was this thing that I could do to pass the time. That sounds so horrible. ‘Spend time with you mom, you don’t need a camera,’ the little voice says.

“Well, that eventually did happen and as my relationship to photography changed. I did end up using it to look more closely. At some point I started to think about photography as a means to look at the world with a heightened sense of awareness. With that shift I was able to photograph in such a way that it wasn’t about passing the time or separating myself from the moment. For me it became more about being present to the situation regardless of how bad the situation was. To feel comfort in the love I had for my mom without wanting or grasping for some alternative outcome.”

It is here that we enter into Lutz’s world, a world where things are not as they seem, but love is that which holds us together through the stormy days. It is this understanding, compassion, and kindness that makes “Hesitating Beauty” so powerful. For as much as we consider the photographs as works of art, we must also consider them a private history made public in a way that challenges our assumptions about mental illness. Here Lutz asks that do not require answers so much as they offer the possibility of a new understanding that liberates all those who sufferer from the stigma imposed by the outside world.

First published in L’Oeil de la Photographie
November 12, 2014

Categories: Art

Jonas Mekas: A Dance with Fred Astaire

Posted on October 4, 2017

Jonas MekasPhotography John Lennon. Photo courtesy of Anthology Editions

At 94-years-old, Jonas Mekas is undergoing a literary renaissance. The esteemed filmmaker, poet, and artist is publishing five books of work, most notably A Dance with Fred Astaire (Anthology Editions), a visual autobiography comprised of anecdotes and drawn from Mekas’ life after his arrival in New York in 1949.

Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas was a teen when the Russian Army invaded his homeland. As he and his brother, Adolfas, attempted to flee in 1944, they were captured and forced to spend eight months in Elmshorn, a Nazi labour camp. When the war ended, they became Displaced Persons living in refugee camps, until finally able to emigrate to America, settling in Brooklyn.

Once in town, Mekas planted new roots, from which the tree of life has grown firm, with many branches bearing countless fruits. At his deepest core, is a love for cinema, its revolutionary forms, and a profound respect for the avant-garde. Together with his brother, Mekas launched Film Culture magazine, which ran from 1954 to 1996. His commitment to community went far and wide, enabling him to serve a need and fill a void.

Mekas became the first film critic for the Village Voice, founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which has since evolved into Anthology Film Archives, located in the heart of the East Village. Along the way, he met and collaborated with some of the greatest figures of the times, from Andy Warhol to Salvador Dalí, John Lennon to Jacqueline Onassis.

As you weave your way through his work, the words of Plato reveal themselves time and again: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” His is a singular life unlike any other, one filled with passion, determination, and innovation. His stories inspire, enlighten, and entertain with equal parts charm, courage, and originality. Mekas takes us on a stroll down memory lane, sharing the knowledge and wisdom garnered from a lifetime dedicated to art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Courtesy of Anthology Editions

Photo: Courtesy of Anthology Editions

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan