LECTURE INTRODUCTION

Artist Pablo Helguera provides an introduction to his work while discussing emerging art practices that involve social interaction, research, and pedagogy.

ABOUT PABLO HELGUERA

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based visual and performance artist originally from Mexico City who has exhibited widely internationally. He is the author of five books including The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style, The Boy Inside the Letter, and Endingness. He is a Creative Capital grant recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow and currently is the Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art. He recently presented an exhibition entitled Committed Explanations in Geography in the Houghton Gallery of Cooper Union.

This lecture took place on April 27th, 2009 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Despite that the law had infuriated many journalists and cultural practitioners (especially in the period 2007-08, when it was used in the most aggressive way), and affected the internet as an important zone of freedom in Ukraine, the protests against the National Expert Committee were scarce and didn’t get enough coverage by national media. At this point, Volodarsky made a decision to organize a performance involving local youth and members of artists’ communities – an action, which he thought would bring more attention to this issue from national press and Ukrainian lawmakers. Thinking of the most possibly radical way of expression, Volodarsky came up with the scenario when he and a female member of the local theater, naked, imitated sexual intercourse in front of the Verkhovnaya Rada (Ukrainian Parliament), while simultaneously, another artist and friend from Poland, pretending to be a foreign filmmaker, was publicly addressing his frustration over not being able to show the film his crew brought in Ukraine because of the censorship. He stressed that while the film is extremely popular everywhere abroad, local bureaucracy doesn’t allow showing this film to Ukrainian people, and that’s the reason why they were doing this action in cold weather in November in front of the Parliament.

Exactly at this moment the members of local religious groups, who lived nearby in the park, intervened, trying to attack – with the steel sticks in their hands – the performers and journalists, who came to cover the action, and this apparently had attracted police attention (a usual scenario in Russia and Ukraine when religious fanatics first attack the artists, then file law suits against them, or initiate the “witch-hunting” campaigns leading to the shameful trials.) Police immediately arrested Volodarsky’s female partner, and later, the artist himself. While the girl, who didn’t identify herself, managed to escape during the ruckus, Volodarsky, whose passport was ceased by police, remained in their hands.

The further development was dreadful. In police precinct, the artist received his portion of humiliation and threats when police promised to incriminate him in rape and drug possession, prevented him from contacting his own attorney, forcing him instead to accept a former police as his attorney. Contrary to the expectations that he would get away with paying fine, Volodarsky ended up in custody for 1,5 months on charges of malicious hooliganism. He was released from there only due to the massive media campaign (http://free.shiitman.net/lang/eng/actions/ ), organized by local artists and journalists; protesters even broke through police security of President Yuschenko to deliver him a petition. In hearings on January 4th, 2010, the judge admitted police violations and denial of legal defense in the artist’s case. Nevertheless, Volodarsky still faces the trial with the possibility of jail sentence up to 5 years.

Criminal law suits against artists became frequent in post-Soviet countries (smac already reported about similar case in Russia: http://www.smac.us/2009/05/21/artem-loskutov/ ), which have gone dangerously far away from establishing democratic institutions protecting freedom of speech and human rights. While Ukraine, thanks to Orange Revolution, has been considered as the most vibrant civil society among the former Soviet republics[2], the censorship still exists there. Yuschenko’s government and the cabinet of prime-minister Timoshenko, when plunging the country in deep financial and political crisis, didn’t do much about bringing the malicious Law of Protection of the Public Morals down and protect artists and journalists against prosecution in criminal courts. The freedom in Ukraine may essentially decline after the new elections, which have brought more conservative and corrupt administration that will likely implement harsh pro-Russian style of governing. International solidarity and support are needed in Ukraine as never before.

Olga Kopenkina,
New York

More details:

http://free.shiitman.net/trial/

This lecture concerns a different position within Modernist practice, neither vanguard nor resistant, which proceeds by way of a mimetic exacerbation of the worst conditions in contemporary society.

ABOUT HAL FOSTER

Hal Foster joined the faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton in 1997, and is currently its chair. He teaches lecture and seminar courses in modernist and contemporary art and criticism as well as regularly teaching in the programs of Media and Modernity and European Cultural Studies. His most recent books areDesign and Crime (and Other Diatribes)from Verso (2002); Prosthetic Gods(Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2004), and he is presently at work on a collection of essays on Pop art. He continues to write regularly for the October, Artforum, and the London Review of Books.

This talk is a part of the Interdisciplinary Seminar at the Cooper Union School of Art. The lectures and seminar are organized and led by Doug Ashford and Walid Raad.

This talk took place on April 6th, 2009.

Strong Back (2008) by Mishek Masamvu

In the Western world, the free world we are proud of our freedoms, eponymously so. As creative professionals, as artists, we claim freedom of expression as a cornerstone of civilisation and our very lifeblood. But is this necessarily so? Do we really understand, exercise and take responsibility for the G-d given right we say we cannot live without? How often do we look beneath this intoxicatingly shiny surface with the awareness of what lies beneath and feeds the furnace of our expression, what creates or possibly disfigures the words that appear to come freely from our mouths. What worth is our freedom to speak unfortified by integrity and freedom of thought?

In late 2009, I was invited to come to Zimbabwe. I went despite apprehensions underscored by consistently dire news headlines, despite government travel advisory website advice to refrain from travelling to the country as they would not be able to provide me with consular protection in case of any calamity. Neither was I comforted when my Zimbabwe-based journalist friend asked me to refrain from sending any SMS messages referring to Mugabe, because you just never know…

Now, with a childhood spent in Brezhnev era Soviet Union, I am an old hand with bureaucratic and corrupt dictatorially inclined regimes. There is a method for understanding their censorship: once you know what they like and what they don’t like, you can generally rest assured that they will be too lazy to delve beneath the surface into metaphor, sub-text, context or allegory to discover the thinly disguised critique of the political status quo. So in Zimbabwe, it came as no surprise to find out that while structures of censorship and political repression are alive, equally so are ways around them and opportunities to express opposition. For example, I am told, many literary and dramatic works in English are approved for performance with only a cursory review of the content as opposed to works in the native majority Shona language. Although English is universally spoken, it is Shona that is considered the dangerous language of dissent.

I was also told that the government view the visual arts as colonial and elitist and therefore treat art as generally unthreatening.

The biggest threat to the creative freedom of visual artists in Zimbabwe it turns out is not the government, but poverty. There is no street art and almost no graffiti, not because of repressions, but because artists cannot afford to waste expensive art materials on work that cannot be sold.

Fear exists, repressions exist, corruption exists, political manipulation exists, but equally so does the ability to communicate your message if you want to be heard. This is the artist statement of a young Zimbabwean artist who was happy to have me reprint it verbatim, using his name, although I dare not:

“I paint.  Art has become a means to come face to face with my fears. Like a baby, I construct and deconstruct. Mr President, next time you visit my studio, I will paint a portrait of you, a bleeding torso with dogs eating your limbs in the background. Hanged next to your painting will be portraits of victims suffering your misrule. On your way out, just behind the door you will find my unfinished portrait of a corpse. I died in this painting hoping my death meant something to you.”

Kill One, Create Room For Others (2005) by Mishek Masamvu

What he is saying and painting is risky, but his need to be heard and the urgency of his message outweigh the risk.

In Zimbabwe artists of all disciplines from music to visual arts to theatre and poetry, can and do make a living from their art. How? Well because they have no other choice. In a country with 85% official unemployment, the frictional jobs in sales and hospitality on which artists in the developed world commonly fall back on to subsidise their art practice, are not frictional jobs and they are not their for the taking. Moreover there is no government arts funding and no arts policy. To my surprise, attending an exhibition at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, I found that all the works were for sale! Artists are not uniquely disadvantaged in this regard. The whole country is in a state of having to fend for itself.

Unlike their counterparts in the developed world, artists are not seen as eccentric and suspicious fringe-dwellers. Their role as the voice of the people is deeply felt, respected and understood. So, believe it or not, an art opening or any launch event – book, project, CD etc, frequently features a performance poet who will be paid for the effort of composing a poem on the event.  Despite economic collapse and the closure of many venues, the live music scene is still extremely active. The cooperation between artists at the grass-roots level, as well as support from the general population, is a widespread quotidian reality.

This made me think about the shallow waters in which many artists in the free world swim and made me wonder whether a degree of repression and poverty, are necessary catalysts for artists to create work of genuine artistic depth. I think not. Not in my wildest dreams would I advocate the living conditions that I experienced in Zimbabwe. However what it did do is re-awaken my consciousness as to the responsibilities that freedom of speech carries and the true role of artists in society. Having obvious political targets and repression, just makes this easier – but bring back the days of Bulgakov’s Master and Marguerita or Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago or Arthur Koestlers Darkness at Noon.

12 Days After Harmonised Elections by Mishek Masamvu

Shortly after my arrival back in Australia from Zimbabwe I spoke to a few colleagues about organising a regular event to bring together art critics to discuss art exhibitions on the merits in front of audiences. The initiative was supported widely, but almost invariably subject to a rider. It could be a challenge I was told to get art writers and experts to go on the record with their opinions. The phrase used was “it could be dangerous” to critique major institutions or artists with the ability to influence project funding, grant applications or career prospects.

This is symptomatic of the self-censorship that is widespread throughout the art communities of the free world. We know how to vocalise vociferously, but so as not to alienate our key clients: the State, the big dollar patrons and let us not forget the sponsors.

What becomes of freedom of expression with generations of artists who learn to express themselves and align their thoughts with those of their bureaucratic and plutocratic paymasters? Moreover, what right has that artist community to the support of a public it has turned its back on?

The structures and strictures of political correctness, which underpin contemporary art funding and philanthropy as well as the art market, have become oppressively commonplace and predictable.  We will not be beaten up or thrown in jail if we say “fuck the system”, nor do we risk hunger or homelessness. The golden cage of big pocket funding is a boring illusion, which keeps feeding and fighting over scraps masquerading as cake and forgetting where the real battles are.

So if there is a lesson to be learnt in Zimbabwe it is this: freedom is first and foremost a responsibility. As artists, we have a responsibility to our art, to our societies and to our public. It is a responsibility to choose integrity over personal comfort, moral courage over self-censorship. Great art is not born from convenience or slick career moves. Great art is born from looking outward at the world rather than the acrobatic contortions of the next grant application. If we are not doing it for the people in our society, then we are not doing it right. If our speech is coloured by fear of biting the hand that feeds, then we lose the right to speak.

We must take responsibility for the freedom that we hold dear and are proud of by disengaging from the chains that really do bind. To do so meaningfully is to face our genuine grassroots by developing bridges with our real audiences rather than the keepers of deep pockets we have permitted to usurp our freedom.

Have we bought into the illusory promises of glittering cocktail parties and cutting the elegant figure of a tortured enigmatic artist in black for wealthy clients? As artists we know that art is not a luxury but a necessity. The best of creative achievements of humanity are the patrimony of humanity in a universal and not elitist way. If we believe it, then we should have the courage of our convictions. If we want art to be free, important and relevant, we cannot dismiss the general public as undereducated and uninformed. We need to take responsibility for rebuilding our road back to them and their road back to us, because that is the umbilical cord, which nourishes our art and enables our art to nourish our societies. If we need to be shamed into it by the example of artists who cannot take freedom for granted, so be it.

Last Month, the New York Guggenheim Museum unveiled Anish Kapoor’s large scale sculptural installation, Memory. A 24 tons steel structure, Memory (2008) is a site specific work designed to engage the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling museum. Speaking at the press conference, Kapoor commented on the relationship between work and site.

Deviating from his earlier works, Kapoor did not stop short at the state of spatial suspension. Entering the gallery, visitors perceive a gaping, fathomless black hole carved into white wall, a negative form of indeterminate depth or shape. On the other side, Memory’s corporal form awaits them with an intimidating mass of rusty metal. It’s heavy bulk, as if infected by a case of giantism, dominates the surrounding architecture. Contrasting presence with absence, material with visual, and production with effect, Kapoor challenges the minimalist tradition of sculpture, with its insistence on materiality and fervent anti-illusionism.

Sometimes perceived as an indulgent sensualist, Kapoor can be surprisingly articulate on conceptual points.  He delivers here some well measured remarks concerting the subject of sculpture.

]]> http://www.smac.us/2009/11/07/anish-kapoor/feed/ 0 http://www.smac.us/2009/10/29/two-albums-of-america/ http://www.smac.us/2009/10/29/two-albums-of-america/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:30:13 +0000 Cassandra Guan http://www.smac.us/?p=1294

"Untitled" (1990) by Robert Bergman

In an unusual choice, New York’s PS1 Museum is exhibiting a solo show called “Selected Portraits” by the American photographer Robert Bergman. A virtually unknown figure to the art world, Bergman launched his début this fall in two major museums. Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986-95 is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., an institution as known for its conservative prestige as PS1 for its offbeat experimentalism.

Recognition has been long in coming for Bergman, now 65. His biography reads like the ultimate eleventh hour success story, extolling that hoary fable of patience and reward. With an art world that increasingly caters to ideals of the young and trendy, Bergman’s breakthrough attracted a wave of media attention. In its promotion of emerging creative practices, P.S.1 has rarely endorsed so ancient a mariner. Seasoned is now fresh.

The man who inspired Bergman to pick up his camera did not have to wait as long. Robert Frank, who has became a household name, obtained recognition with comparative ease after publishing “the Americans” in 1958. Though initially controversial, it quickly took hold as a seminal work. Within two years, Frank received a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago and a second one at the Museum of Modern Art. The Americans is now on a celebratory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and will be there until January.

"Trolley - New Orleans" (1955) from "The Americans" by Robert Frank

Startlingly, Bergman’s practice shares many points in common with that of Frank when he made “the Americans”. The younger photographer unmistakably emulated the spirit of his mentor in that project, consequently producing the colored human portraits he has so far exhibited. “Selected Portraits ” distinctly resembles “the Americans” both in ambition and subject. Bergman claims he learned from Robert Frank that “the artist had to have a personal vision through feeling and intuition.”

"Untitled" (1993) by Robert Bergman

With striking parallels Bergman set out in the mid eighties to photograph the people of America. He toured the States on extensive road trips (a la Frank). He carried around a portable 35mm (a la Frank). He worked with natural lighting (a la Frank). His photographed subjects were randomly encountered with no class or racial bias (a la Frank). He took thousands of pictures and printed mere dozens (a la Frank). He aspired to capture the spiritual essence of a nation (also a la Frank)… What is truly surprising is the totally distinct vision he actually produced.
One gets the sense, looking at Bergman’s two-dozen large-scale colorful C-prints, that his is a sensibility as diametrically opposed to that of “the Americans” as you can get. While both photographers ostensibly worked in “portraiture”, they interpreted the idea very differently.

Frank has the montage intelligence of a latent filmmaker. Not only did “the Americans” function as a sequence of interrelated images, drawing on such cinematic devices as visual analogy, juxtaposition, synecdoche etc., he packed each individual photograph with intricate visual relationships. As indebted to Sergi Eisenstein as Walker Evans, Robert Frank’s great subject is not the American people, but the space between them and around them. His pictures even begin to address the activity of photography and its politics. “The Americans” contains a cunningly composed visual critique of America’s self-representation. The word “portrait” can be applied here only in a loose sense.

from "The Americans" by Robert Frank

Bergman’s photography on the other hand, references portraiture in the painterly tradition. It ought to surprise no one that these found their greatest advocate in the late Meyer Shapiro, eminent art historian of post impressionist paintings. The language of painting reigns supreme in these faces. Some bear strong likeness to period portraitures, from the facial types to painterly palette. Bergman has a very studied style, employing vibrant colors, delicate textures, and dramatic lighting. Though roadside pickups, his models look like studio sitters, decontextualized completely from their environments before solid backdrops.

Faces predominate in these tightly cropped compositions; they tends to be large, abject, and filling the frame. Jalal Toufic writes in “One or Two Things I’m Dying to Tell You” that the image of a face always inspires pity in its viewer, and any face unprotected by perfect beauty is at once vulnerable and piteous. He thus attributed to the “saving face” impulse a wider application. Affirming this insight, Bergman’s faces inspire instinctive sympathy from their viewers. The immediacy of certain faces in this show exudes pathos, naked and askew, unshielded by either pigment or symbols.

The difference in artistic expression between Frank and Bergman is a reflection of their difference in politics and personal backgrounds. At the time of his Guggenheim fellowship, Robert Frank was a European Jew harboring socialist sympathies. His identity as a non-American outsider enabled him to launch a scathing critique of American social injustices and economical inequalities. Bergman, however, channeled the 1980s apolitical attitude into his own art making, at times coming close to escapism.

Bergman unfolded a vision of America every bit as downtrodden as that of Robert Frank, but passive and silent. These “eloquent” faces have little to say. Rejecting language, Bergman wants the viewer to lose himself instead in an unspoiled encounter with the pure image. One suspects that painting is summoned precisely in order to suppress photography’s peculiar specificity. Even titles are pared down to eliminate information: just the year. No names, no places.

“I don’t want you to have any escape from simply reacting to the art,” says Bergman, “Telling the location sets up false assumptions.” Often, his ideas on art seem dated to a pre-postmodern era.

Considering the cultural backlash against essentialism and universalities, it is hardly astonishing that Bergman’s practice has been so often passed over. As he observed himself, “my art is not fashionable.” More accurately, his art is not in keeping with the times. The overwhelming feeling of “Selected Portraits” is isolation. Its message is a pathetic plea of the image.

Now simultaneously on view in New York City, “Selected Portraits” and “the Americans” present another opportunity to evaluate deserts and recognitions. Robert Frank made the right kind of work at the right time, down to predicting a civil rights movement ten years beforehand. The better question for Robert Bergman is not why he has been obscure but rather why discover him today?

The festival showcases features length films by such prominent directors as Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman and Frank Capra, together with experimental projects unearthed from archives worldwide. Some highlights of the program include: Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954), Michelangelo Antonioni’s  Le Amiche (1955),  Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922),  Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s Le joli mai (1963), Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), and Loin de Vietnam (1967), a collaborative work by Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, etc.

Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed). 1926. Germany. Directed by Lotte Reiniger.

One of the exhibitions during the 3rd Moscow Bienniale was No Echo, No Shadow, Anton Ginzburg’s solo show at Galerie Iragui. After the show opened I sat down with Anton to talk about the exhibition and his impressions of this year’s Biennale.

Taking the recent hi-profile cultural activities surrounding Al Gore’s climate change campaign as the point of entry, this talk will address how the increasingly prominent trope of sustainability — defined by the UN in 1983 as “development that meets their own”– provides a fertile, through highly contested terrain for politicizing artistic and design activities that might go beyond the rhetoric of neo-situationist militancy so popular in the artworld today. The talk was designed to have a site-specific resonance, insofar as Cooper Union is an institution that brings together artists, architects and industrial designers, all fields that have been called upon in various ways to contribute to the so-called “Neo-Green Revolution.”

This talk is a part of the Interdisciplinary Seminar at the Cooper Union School of Art. The lectures and seminar are organized and led by Doug Ashford and Walid Raad.

This talk took place on October 30th, 2007.

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