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The Thousandth Word
Five highlights from 2008.
The death of Senator Jesse Helms.
Since this piece you're reading now began as a sort of best-of/top-10/year-in-review kind of a piece - it has since become something more modest in scope - I had initially thought it would be fitting to devote some space to Robert Rauschenberg, who died this year at 82. Good year-end roundups usually incorporate remembrances that one might have neglected to write about during the year (and you can read some excellent, thought-provoking pieces about Rauschenberg from the past year here, here and here). But thinking back on the year, I wonder if the most notable arts-related passing may not have been Rauschenberg, but rather Jesse Helms, the Republican Senator from North Carolina from 1973 to 2003.
Helms is best known for his crusades against the NEA and government funding to individual artists in the late-1980s. In a perverse (ha!) way, it's not unreasonable to think that Helms had a greater impact on the way contemporary art is viewed in this country than any working artist of that era.
Perhaps more than any actual artist ever could have, Helms used his position in public life to make contemporary art into a simple, stupid game of us vs. them, an eternal loop of self-righteous D.W. Griffith film clips, casting the silent majority of good, God-fearing heartlanders against a host of sinister "others," an elite cabal of weirdoes, junkies, faggots and perverts. Their goal: using your tax dollars to undermine two-hundred years of American culture! Reading arts coverage from the late 1980s, it's amazing how often his name comes up, as if he was single-handedly responsible for this assault on the art world. He becomes almost a cartoon character, a villainous one-man stand-in for all the bigotry, backwardness and reactionary fervor in America. There was obviously a lot of truth to that, too, because Helms succeeded wildly in his crusade - funding for the NEA was gutted during this period, and since then, one could argue the default posture for artists in mainstream culture has been a defensive one.
I would love to think that this era has finally passed, and there are more broad-minded, reasonable ways of discussing art, mass culture, federal funding and freedom of expression in America. But even twenty years later, Piss Christ is still invoked by demagogues trying to score cheap political points by decrying the inherent sleaze of contemporary art. Anytime Serrano or Mapplethorpe is invoked by these people, even after all this time, Jesse Helms grins that desiccated, bug-eyed grin of his and takes another shot of bourbon down in Confederate Hell. It's a formidable legacy.
This should have been a landmark year for "political art" - the RNC and its attendant miseries completely dominated the Cities' psychic landscape all summer and a large portion of the fall. Somehow, though, it wasn't the watershed creative year for that we were hoping for. Perhaps passions were running too high for anyone to concentrate on subtlety or nuance. For example, one of the worst pieces of writing I've ever penned was created in August (no, I won't link to it). It was a purported "preview" of a show that coincided with the RNC, and I spent half the piece blathering about the unfocused blunderbuss blast of politically-themed art shows during that time, and not even in a particularly articulate or clever way. That's right; reduced to a sputtering, incoherent loon by the wicked forces of the GOP.
Me and everyone else, apparently. In all the brouhaha, in all of the shows and events and coordinated efforts during that entire cycle, I saw very little art related to the RNC that was particularly memorable. Hell, the seed art at the State Fair that Rich Barlow wrote about in this space was probably about as effective as anything in conveying creative-minded populist discontent. Most of it was just too easy, or too pat, or too didactic to really take hold. Nothing wrong with didactic, of course, but it doesn't always make for a compelling aesthetic experience.
Seeing a lot of this suffocatingly didactic work, I thought back to some drawings I'd seen by Megan Vossler in 2006 and 2007 that dealt with the specifics of warfare directly. These large-scale works depicted brutal, neutrally-toned, carefully-rendered scenes of fighting and destruction against vast, white backdrops of paper. Vossler had a very productive year this year - she showed in three exhibitions I liked quite a lot, the MCAD/McKnight Artists 2007-08 showcase, The Soap Factory's Pay Attention: GM08 and Draw Too: A Drawing Show in Four Acts at SooVAC. Before seeing her new work in these shows, I had expected she'd continue to work in this direction, with these literal depictions of war, particularly given the ever-worsening situation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Surprisingly, though, her new work seemed to touch on many of the same feelings so effectively conveyed in the earlier pieces without making explicit reference to the formal trappings of warfare. In pieces like All of our moments are stolen and When daylight moves, we rely on distance, the figures - when you can make them out against the landscapes - seem part of that violence-saturated world, but the immediacy of violence is replaced by a less urgent, more deeply troubled sense of pervasive dread. The white, unmarked swaths of space are so large and so all-consuming, they seem as if they could close up on the huddled figures that populate them at any moment and swallow them whole, leaving only a blank slate for new horrors to be acted out upon.
Unless it's printed in a broadside or wheat-pasted to a wall, political art can never merely be about purely doctrinaire details. Life isn't comprised of doctrinaire details. That unease in Vossler's work speaks volumes about the unease of our current situation, more than any more literal-minded agit-prop could.
I once got into a somewhat fatuous discussion with a girl I was dating about whether or not Minneapolis was the most Canadian of American cities. Maybe, maybe not, but watching Guy Maddin's film My Winnipeg this past year at the Lagoon, I was struck by how easily Maddin's "snowy, sleepwalking" Winnipeg could act as a stand-in for our own frozen metropolis. So many of the thematic concerns and emotions of the film - yearning, escape, chilly perfectionism, confused civic identity, the problems of place - I see played out in much of the art that bears the Minneapolis imprinteur.
Minneapolis, like Winnipeg, is not a cultural hub; it's an outpost. A very fine, livable and progressive outpost, but an outpost nonetheless. When you are an artist that has chosen to stay in an outpost, it's because you're either somehow trapped by circumstances, or (more likely) you've made a conscious decision to do so. It's not because you want to get rich or successful or famous, but because you have something here, some profound understanding of the place, or some attachment or obligation to it. Maddin's film deals with a fictionalized version of himself, a native of Winnipeg, drifting in a liminal space between sleep and waking life, conspiring to leave the city for good. This journey is really just a pretext, though, for Maddin to move between elaborate, semi-autobiographical set pieces about his mother and his family, his personal history in the city, the history of the city itself, and the hold that it continues to have on his imagination. So much of it is so bizarrely imaginative -- Secret societies! Séances! Rival cab companies operating on a secret grid of back alleys! -- that one begins to understand just how deeply rooted Maddin's own personal vision is rooted in the strangeness and idiosyncrasies of the city he comes from, and how difficult it is to see where one begins and the other ends. It's a funny, beautiful, moving piece of art that anyone who has chosen to create away from the cultural centers will recognize themselves in.
(Parenthetically, in keeping with the Canada/Minneapolis thing, there's also a serious subplot about, yep, hockey. My friend Harry once said this about the North Stars: their leaving Minnesota was "was a betrayal on the level of the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. If it seems like Minnesotans don't talk about it the way old Dodger fans talked about their loss, it's because Minnesotans are morose and the bitterness is kept inside where it can fester." The lyrical segment on the sale of the Winnipeg Jets to Arizona in 1996 and the pointless demolition of the historic Winnipeg Arena feels so perfectly Minnesotan in so many ways that I had to remind myself I was watching a film about another city.)
Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley's Street with a View.
Some of the year-end roundups I've been reading have made special note of the ongoing collapse of capitalism, and the role it will play in how art is made, sold and experienced. I find that street art, in particular, is singled out as a sort of new working model, free from the supposed stuffiness and elitism of the gallery system, existing as a perfect meritocracy where innovation and dynamism eventually floats to the top. I'm only partially sold on the idea myself; I find a lot of work by the likes of Banksy skews a shade too obvious to really satisfy me. However, I am certainly interested in thinking about new working models for art, and I think some of what we most have to look forward to in contemporary art is seeing these new models develop outside traditional galleries and museums. This won't just be "street art," as such, but broader. These new models with include any other sort of guerilla approach to art-making that is cheap, self-sustaining, flexible and accessible.
A wonderful example of this sensibility is Hewlett and Kinsley's Street with a View, an intervention that utilizes technology, performance, high concept and a bravura sense of corporate-piggybacking to create a piece of "street art" in the most literal sense. Working in Pittsburgh (again, away from those cultural centers!), Hewlett and Kinsley wrangled a whole team of performers, artists and neighborhood folks to stage a series of whimsical tableaus along a back-alley in the city's working class northside - swashbucklers, firemen, a garage band, a giant chicken, a full parade. This was all staged for the benefit of the Google Street View film crew that was passing through that day to document the area for its comprehensive Street View project. These scenes are now lodged forever in within that widely-used service, available for viewing by whoever stumbles across them.
Google has become the sole arbiter for so much of what we experience online. Street View itself has been criticized in certain quarters as proto-Orwellian, a fact that actually led one St. Paul suburb to demand the removal of its streets from the service this year. It's a monolithic force, and the fact that Hewlett and Kinsley were able to unilaterally intervene with such a joyous, ramshackle IRL scene, even with Google's tacit permission, makes it something special. The piece does an odd little dance around co-opting Google's "don't be evil" easy-goin' just-folks good-time corporate reputation, and outright flouting it by reminding Google that, though the Street View images may be their intellectual property, the streets they depict really do belong to the community and all the synthesizer-playing, sword-fighting weirdoes that live there. What we do with these streets, and how we interact with them, is an increasingly important question that artists will be asking in the coming years.
Hardland/Heartland's Millions of Innocent Accidents at the MAEP, Minneapolis Institute of Art.
My favorite critical dust-up of the year, if that's the right word for it. This show, of course, was covered in these pages by my colleague Michael Fallon, who pronounced it, in no uncertain terms, a failure ("poorly conceived, dolefully hopeless," he writes, and there are plenty more equally troubled adjectives throughout). I actually enjoyed the show myself, finding a lot to admire in the doleful hopelessness, but I didn't write about it, as anything I might have produced would have been significantly less questioning, irritated and (it has to be said) amusing than Fallon's piece. It was a searching piece of criticism that didn't play particularly nice, but raised points that were absolutely fair game.
Which is why I was delighted to see local gallerist David Petersen chime in for the defense a few weeks later on his own blog, in a piece that was equally full-throated, irritated and questioning in tone (despite the, uh, gratuitous bird-flipping imagery). The basic points that Fallon laid out and Petersen addressed are important ones, the critical questions that make for a good dialogue between artist and viewer - basically, the big questions regarding the former's intent and the latter's response. Fallon went into the HL/HL show, and saw a mostly irredeemable mess of well-meaning incompetence. Petersen went into it and saw the exact opposite, the work of a high-functioning group of artists that didn't in fact mean well at all and weren't shy about showing it. So if indeed the show was a failure, is it due to the good intentions of the artists and their inability to match the quality of the product with the concepts? Or does the show succeed in spite of that, because it manages to generate its own individual set of criteria, with no intention - good or otherwise - of meeting the viewer halfway?
Regardless, it was by no means an easy show, and I'm still half-surprised there was a place for it in the MAEP. Half-surprised, but very happy. In this year where the future of the program as we know it was thrown suddenly into doubt following Stewart Turnquist's resignation, it's good to see work and accompanying criticism that inspires such thoughtful, provocative and (yeah) viciously funny commentary.
Header photo of Unconvention yard signs courtesy zbartrout.
Art is Weeds
This is a drawing of a root pulled from the ground. Unsigned but every bit the signature of its creator, it was done in oil crayon by an artist who was once my closest friend. A reckless vitality courses all along its length. The energy tensed in it reminds me of these lines by Dylan Thomas:
"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer."
The drawing is taped to the wall above my desk. Sitting here writing, when I'm at a loss for words and growing desperate, my eyes seek it out, as though a transfusion of its sap might save me from the fear creeping up on me that I've got nothing to say.
I find it beautiful, but the drawing is just an offhand piece of work, tossed off by an artist who like most of us will go unremembered in order to make room for the next wave of the forgetful, the universe apparently needing things to be this way so as not to get bogged down. The drawing is beautiful but so in its own way is Nothing.
What makes the drawing not Nothing but Something to me, however, is the unsettling resemblance it has to the left side of the outline, from a certain angle, of a great work of sculpture from Greek antiquity--the powerful Nike of Samothrace, or Winged Victory, which now stands in the Louvre. I scissored out this image from one of those Franconia bumper stickers that say, "Start Seeing Sculpture."
How is it, I wonder, that in infinity's vast inventory of random, freely meandering lines the contour of this smudged drawing of a root with dirt clinging to it should so closely (but not exactly) coincide to the outline of a picture of a goddess carved in marble more than two thousand years ago? Given to seeing faces in the wallpaper and the stains on the ceiling, maybe all I'm seeing here is the Virgin in a burnt tortilla but everywhere you turn the world seems to reverberate with the idea that what goes around, comes around.
What's come around to the art world this past year, as chronicled in recent posts to this blog by Michael Fallon, is desolation. The collapse of the Minnesota Center for Photography and the imminent shutdown of the Minnesota Museum of American Art are just two of a growing number of casualties. But while institutions falter, crumble, and struggle to reinvent themselves, photographers are still making photographs, painters continue to paint, and musicians-- for no shortage of reasons--are still playing the blues. They have to--their compulsions demand it, so if we can leave off the handwringing for a moment, let's consider the possibility, shocking though it is to artists suddenly denied the nipple, that the creation of art might not be entirely contingent on the condition of the art world's infrastructure. It would be nice if that infrastructure were healthier, but art is weeds; it finds ways to push up through concrete.
One artist whose work pushes through is the irascible Scott Murphy, a painter from up near Duluth. Murphy planted his flag in the Twin Cities last spring with a mural on the corner of Fairview and University in St. Paul.
Done under the auspices of Forecast Public Art, the mural depicts the trolley (peopled with an interesting cast of characters. . . check it out up close) that used to run along University and it anticipates the trains that will once the Light Rail is in. Murphy is one of the last of the artists who, like James Rosenquist, has painted billboards for a living. If Obama institutes a new WPA, Murphy and other artists who actually know how to paint ought to be unleashed on post offices all over the country, restoring the art of fresco to its former glory while pulling down a steady check.
Committed but untenured artists have known something about uncertainty and the chronic lack of a steady check for years--the fear spreading through everybody's stomachs is not news to them. One of my favorite paintings of Murphy's is his Funding for the Arts.
Were the painting not the dead-accurate account that it is of things as they've been all along, you'd be tempted to call it prophetic. . . the ship aflame, she sent out an S.O.S. but things are not looking good for the SS Steinway. What gets my respect is that Murphy says screw going down with the ship--he paints the damned thing instead.
Fire creates as much as it destroys. At iron-pours around the region, artists stoke crucibles to cast molten iron into the shapes of their obsessions. The iron is smelted from old steam radiators busted up with sledge hammers. When it reaches the temperature of hell it's poured almost white hot into molds that may or may not explode.
An iron-pour is an offering to the gods of uncertainty and risk. The gods shrug their shoulders at most of what comes out of the molds, but sometimes a piece emerges that seems fully to embody the elemental violence of the physics that gave it form. Below is Matris Fe V, one of a series of works cast the last several years by the sculptor Felicia Glidden. Powerfully expressive of the process, it is a thing at once molten and frozen, solidified into a sort of three-dimensional photograph of a moment.
On a cooler note, sweeping the snow off his driveway recently, Willis Bowman, a Minneapolis artist and engineer, fell into a sort of dance with his broom. From the picture, it looks like it was a tango, the way those long, slinking glides, abrupt turns and dips are grooved into the snow.
Bowman lived in Japan for a few years as a child and remembers his parents taking him to Kyoto’s Ryoan-ji Temple with its Zen garden of rocks set in carefully raked white sand. Never one to think small, he’s now thinking about what you could do in a big parking lot with fifty people waltzing with as many brooms.
Tales of Grizzled Warriors
But there from the wise Empress’s lips,
Like a sun’s ray, a smile has broken:
Before her stands a golden-curled youth.
Frolicking midst the throng of warriors,
First he lifts up the heavy sword,
Then takes from them the battle helmet,
Then, trembling in rapture, he attends
To the tales of grizzled warriors.
–lines from “A Vision” by Kondratyj Ryleev (1795-1826)
IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD BY NOW, here’s an open secret about art: As with war, art is a brutal business.
Even in the best of times—when the stock market ticker isn’t bouncing around like so many Seismic monitors on the San Andreas Fault, and vast amounts of our country’s paper wealth aren’t getting flushed down the rabbit-hole—many in the arts community struggle mightily to survive. As a result, each year more artists than can be counted simply give up the practice. And likely this number only accelerates when the Darwinian realities of an unraveling national financial system kick in. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but in the past I’ve read estimates of upwards of 80 percent of MFA grads eventually stop making art before their time. And my own unofficial survey reveals that well over 90 percent of idealistic young gallery-owners eventually throw in the towel early.
Despite these realities, in art as in war, there is ever a constant flow of “golden-curled youth” who flock to both fields of battle, full of themselves and the idea that they alone, among all their competitors and nemeses, are destined for glory. What’s different between art and war, however—besides the whole blood and bullets thing—is artists are strangely more self-absorbed than their militarized counterparts. Artists in general, unlike real warriors, pay much less—indeed, almost no—homage to the heroic deeds of those who came before them. Their main intent primarily seems to be to overthrow their predecessors, to kill them off as quickly as possible—if only to make their own looming (artistic) battles that much easier and their own careers that much more glorious. In the end, unlike what happens with old warriors, no songs get written about the battle-hardened artists and grizzled-warrior gallery owners who’ve survived through the years in the arena of art.
And make no bones, the range of committed and long-suffering arts denizens in this hardscrabble metro area of ours—without whom there’d be scant art worth celebrating today—while not terribly broad, is very deep. Just sit down and make a list, and you will see. My own list of local artistic heroes, whose grizzled tales I have often found myself drawn to, is split in two. It starts with dozens of artists who, while I don’t always love every work they make, are to be admired for surviving through thick and thin and continuing the battle. Then it moves on to those few purveyors and supporters of art—gallerians mostly—who’ve survived the wars from their front-line positions, under constant assault (mostly from needy artists) and with terribly unreliable supply lines to sustain them.
The Grizzled Artists
Thinking about how the many artists I know who have been scuffling to keep mind and body together over the years - now share their situation with the thousands of people per day who have been laid off or have lost their jobs entirely. I retired at the beginning of this year… These days - I look around my studio and wonder how long I'll be able to support my work. As an artist - I started out completely broke. It's ironic to think that this might be the case - again - as I approach the end of my career.
–James Michael Lawrence, 11/28/08
BELIEVE IT OR NOT THERE ARE A NUMBER OF LOCAL ARTISTS still working who’ve carried the banner from the last big art-economic bust (in the early 80s) to the present one (today). Indeed, I’ve written often about such aging and occasionally forgotten artists—for instance, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. There are several dozen other local artist-warriors and survivors who merit the same sort of interest and respect, if only I had the time and the market for such arts writing hadn’t shriveled up like everything else. To save time and space, however, I won’t list any more of the grizzled artists worth admiring in this town; instead, I’ll just focus on a recent story about one of them that provides some insight about why we may want to consider paying closer mind to our aging art warriors.
The above comment by James Michael Lawrence appeared on the forums at mnartists.org at the end of November, a horrifically bloody month of cultural battle in which the national art market finally went into free fall, a local art museum shut down, local art institutions hacked staff, and a gallery or two went belly-up. A number of art-world friends and acquaintances—curators, writers, other arts professional who have served the arts world faithfully for years—had lost their job in the months leading up to November, but it was during this month that they began, more and more desperately, to voice their frustration over their struggles to find new jobs and somehow provide for their families. With that backdrop, I wondered immediately if Lawrence’s story had any paradigmatic implications for what was happening on the ground with artists, at this time and in this economic reality.
“I'm writing to answer your question about my pondering the future of my being able to support my artistic practice,” Lawrence replied in explanation. He and his partner had recently, within the last year, retired from their day jobs, and they now lived on fixed incomes, provided by Social Security and individual pensions, that amounted to about half of their work incomes. “We're fortunate,” he continued, “in that we addressed our priorities very early on - while planning for our retirement years - and did so with a clear understanding that some things had to be jettisoned. My art-making is number one on our list of concerns and considerations.”
Lawrence works with digital imagery, and he acknowledged that keeping up on technology is very costly. “Right now, we're able to shoulder those costs relatively easily. However, this will change when I turn 65 in two years.” A big part of the problem is, when Lawrence took early retirement, he ensured that in two years the work-coverage for continued life insurance, medical insurance, dental insurance would evaporate. “At that point, our ability to continue funding my art (if I want to continue using my media of choice) will weaken. That's the primary challenge [we] are facing.”
Ensuring continuity—both for individual artists and among the arts community—is what concerns me the most when I think about how the art community treats its aging artists, forgetting them at the twilight of their career. I can only imagine what it might feel like to work creatively for an adult lifetime, to survive while holding down multiple jobs, perhaps a mortgage, and all the attendant worries involved with being a modern American—only to meet up with a immoveable brick wall just when you finally have time to take on all the creative projects (during retirement) that you someday wanted to get to. Is it possible that any of the golden-curled young artists emerging now, so stuck in their own internal battles to make it big on the scene, have any ability at all to learn the lessons from the grizzled artists who came before them? Is it possible they even care?
The Grizzled Gallerians
Artists and art community members, meanwhile, should not forget there’s another entire class of art warriors who struggle day-in day-out for little thanks or reward, who often suffer much more than most of us in these times of economic implosion. The fact that we take for granted these grizzled warriors—people like Martin Weinstein, Thomas Barry, and Doug Flanders who share, between them, nearly a century-worth of support of local art—is indicative of the problems we in the arts community make for ourselves (how much we’re our own worst enemies). Without support from sympathetic individuals—from art lovers and collectors and artists and anyone at all interested in art—these galleries cease to exist. And without these galleries, well, there is no place for art to be seen. It's a, pardon the expression, vicious circle.
Indeed, the oldest of these three grizzled warriors’ artistic enterprises, the Flanders Gallery, currently doesn’t exist, having in the past few months closed its space on Lyndale Avenue to search for another (likely less expensive) space. And while it’d be easy to shrug, as many young art folk do, and say “nothing lasts forever,” and “well, they never were interested in my work anyway,” keep this in mind: This gallery, which was founded back in 1972, has shown hundreds upon hundreds of artist in its 38-year history, and has provided opportunity for numerous local artists to establish their careers here. It could have been just such a place for your own work in a few short years; it could have been, except it might well be no longer.
The same is also true of Thomas Barry Fine Arts, which has been existence, with occasional breaks, since 1984. Barry is known for his willingness to take a chance on and support local and regional artists—to give them real gallery representation and put them into excellent and elegant group and solo shows. When word came to me recently through the grizzled scenester grapevine (of which I am a recent inductee) that Barry was struggling now, and he was wondering aloud how much longer he’d be able to continue running a gallery after nearly 25 years of surviving at it—that’s when I knew we were perhaps becoming witness to the end of an era, perhaps seing the final battle in a long campaign.
I haven’t heard how Martin Weinstein, the youngest of the three grizzled gallerians—at least in terms of gallery operations is concerned—is doing at present. His gallery was founded in 1997, though before that time Weinstein for years was involved with growing the photography collection at the MIA while he kept a lucrative practice of law. And while Weinstein’s taste is not on the cuttingest edge (he became a dealer for Alec Soth, for instance, well after the young Minneapolis artist made a splash at the 2004 Whitney Biennial), Weinstein’s show are the real deal. The gallery—glorious lights, bright pristine walls, impeccably hung shows—could be at home in Chelsea. My guess, though, is that Weinstein too, despite the excellence of what he does, is likely suffering too in this current economy.
Coda
WHAT COMES TO MIND after surveying the battle scene that is our arts community is all the poetry, verse, and song that has been written through the years in honor of grizzled warriors. Certainly, warriors are deserving of our remembrance, but so, too, is anyone who survives in this cutthroat culture of ours. It wouldn't take too great an imaginative leap to see that poems such as McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” and A.E. Housman’s “Grenadier,” while memorializing the victims of battle, could have been written as much any grizzled veteran of any sort of battle. And Wilfred Owens, in his "Dulce et Decorum Est," could well have been imagining the struggles of grizzled artists instead of soldiers during the First World War when he wrote:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
In the end, to paraphrase Owens’ conclusion about the grizzled warriors who fought for country and honor in that great and horrific war, we might well say of those artists and others who are slowly (or not so slowly) falling away from our own art scene: “Dulce et Decorum est pro arte mori” (It is sweet and right to die for art).
“A Day Without Art” in Minnesota, two decades later.
On December 1, 1989, about six hundred galleries, museums and arts organizations across America, concentrated primarily in New York but including some here in the Twin Cities, observed the first "A Day Without Art." Coordinated by a New York-based group called Visual AIDS, the idea was for these institutions to mark the impact that the AIDS epidemic had made in the art world by shutting down exhibitions for a day, temporarily removing artwork from gallery walls, and sponsoring workshops, performances, lectures, rallies and memorial services (you can read The New York Times' contemporary coverage of the day's events here). Looking back on the coverage of that day two decades later, one can learn a lot about how the perception of AIDS has changed over time, and how much, in certain respects, it remains the same.
In his visual arts blog Leaping Into the Void last week, artist Michael Buitron pointed out that today, December 1, marks the 19th anniversary of that first A Day Without Art, and encouraged visual art bloggers to take the day to post remembrances of artists and arts workers they had known over the years who had died of AIDS-related causes. He asks in particular that writers focus on those who had died in the pre-Internet era and whose names and contributions are absent from cyberspace.
One can think of it this way: AIDS predates mass use of the Internet by at least ten or fifteen years. Consequently, the work of artists whose careers were cut short by the epidemic is not documented online as thoroughly as the work of their post-Internet peers, if it's documented at all. That doesn't even consider the potential that was present in these artists, many of whom certainly would have gone on to have long and rewarding careers in their fields. Most AIDS victims through the pre-Internet era died quite young, and many would today just be entering middle age and what is generally termed "mid-career," enjoying all of the successes and struggles that accompany that distinction. I don't mean to strike a mawkish tone here, but the fact is the AIDS epidemic disproportionately affected the arts world. There is a significant part of a whole generation's worth of voices that are needlessly missing from the far-reaching, all-remembering, back-and-forth conversation that is the Internet, that force that shapes, defines and arbitrates so much of our experience.
Buitron's post made me wonder how exactly A Day Without Art was observed here in Minneapolis in 1989. Not having any firsthand knowledge myself, I took a trip to the Central Library to consult the Minneapolis art world's periodical of record, Artpaper. If you've never spent any time with Artpaper, I encourage you to take a few hours some weekend to do so (they keep them, unbound, up in the magazine stacks on the 3rd floor). Published just beyond the reach of the Internet's institutional memory between 1982 and 1993, it's a fascinating and indispensable look at how the art scene in this town operated through that era. I don't believe any of it is available online, but the next time I win a few thousand dollars worth of grant money, I'll gladly initiate a digitization project.
Sure enough, in the December 1989 issue, there was an excellent, comprehensive piece written by journalist David Anger, detailing the various observations and reactions around town from the art and activism communities on A Day Without Art (infinitely better than the contemporary coverage I found in City Pages, the Reader or the Star-Tribune, I should add - what media outlet today, print or online, serves the art community as well as Artpaper did in its day? That's a good question for another time). Surprisingly (or not!), the very idea of A Day Without Art was met with mixed opinions, right from the outset. Anger quotes the late AIDS activist and journal editor Keith Gann as noting, "Art is what sustains us. Why close it down?" Others voiced a similarly mixed or muted response. Catherine Jordan of Arts Over AIDS worried that A Day Without Art "trivialized the issue because we're losing artists and their art for a lifetime, not a day." Others were concerned that the disproportionate loss of life in the New York compared to Minnesota made observing such a day here in this way seem frivolous. No doubt that the Minnesota arts community was unified in their passion and commitment to fighting AIDS, but I think there is a tendency to sometimes retroactively slap a bright red ribbon on AIDS activism and assume that everyone has always been on the same page, about everything, all the time. It's worth remembering that intelligent, committed people can have serious disagreements about how best to address serious issues. This article expresses that sentiment well. Minneapolis is not New York, after all, and even within the microcosm of our own arts community, there are always going to be conflicts and disagreements.
A Day Without Art poster from 1991. All images courtesy of Visual AIDS.
That said, on December 1, 1989, there were a number of major observations around town. The Walker made mention of the day in their promotional literature, but did not directly participate (they had already scheduled a similar day of AIDS-related programming for the following January). Neither the MIA nor the Weisman, so far as I am able to tell, held any sort of observance. The Minnesota Museum of American Art, however, closed down various galleries in their space throughout the course of the day in commemoration. The now-defunct First Bank, who boasted a first-rate collection of local art and whose influence in the art community in the 1980s now seems hard to fathom, marked the event all week long, with programming related to AIDS education on display in their exhibition spaces. In fact, a few pages from Anger's piece, there is a full-page advertisement from First Bank commemorating the day and listing contact information for ACT UP Minnesota, the AIDS Emergency Fund and other activist groups and agencies. A few arts nonprofits spent the day volunteering for AIDS-related organizations, and Arts Over AIDS held a vigil on Nicollet Island on the morning of December 1, commemorating the lives of the 324 Minnesotans who had died of AIDS to that point.
Coming across a number like 324 is very strange. It's a significant number, of course, but it's sad to consider that the epidemic had not yet reached its early- to mid-1990s peak, and it seems like a very small number indeed when compared to the figures from the years that followed. By 2007, at least 2,213 more Minnesotans would die of AIDS. At least 2,633 are presently living with the disease, compared to 617 in 1989. Of course, it's also worth considering that between 1982 and 1994, cumulative AIDS fatality rates were 84%. By 2007, the cumulative total since 1982 had dropped significantly to 52%. That's still 52% too many, of course, but it is a marked improvement. Still, reading this account from 1989, particularly when Anger writes bitterly that public interest in the subject seems to be dropping off, and he worries that people are gradually becoming "bored with AIDS," one is faced with the troubling knowledge that the crisis will continue to get much, much worse before it starts to get better.
Anger writes, in reference to popular coverage of AIDS in the 1980s, that television is "the principal cultural medium of contemporary life." This is no longer the case - today it's almost certainly the Internet that fulfills this function. The difference is that unlike television, the Internet is essentially an interactive medium, one that invites contributions from those who experiences it. So take a look at what other art blogs such are Leaping Into the Void are posting today. Then consider leaving your own remembrances of artists and art workers here in the Twin Cities that have died in the comments section below. Highlighting these artists and their work was one of the principal aims of the Day Without Art nineteen years ago, so take advantage of the opportunity to do that today. I will give David Anger, writing from the pages of Artpaper, the last word: "If art cannot validate our need to mourn as well as our need for action, then, I ask, what good is it?"
Sigmund, Unraveled
According to Sigmund Freud, one of the great sexist thinkers of the 20th century, the only contribution women have ever made to civilization in general and the arts in particular is--weaving. What may sound absurd today was influential in its day and age; in fact, Freud's theory of psychoanalysis continues to be influential long after his demise: would contemporary therapy culture be imaginable without his insistence that we look inward and dig deep? Would the pharmacological industry be able to pinpoint disorder after disorder, diagnosing deviations from normative behavior and reinforcing an imperative of well-adjusted propriety?
What's proper is so often in the eye of the beholder. Women rebelling against insane limitations imposed on their lives by the propriety-obsessed bourgeoisie in Freud's Vienna were conveniently thought to be afflicted with hysteria, a disease etymologically linked to Greek hystera, the womb. (When Dr. Rinner, my Latin teacher, sanctimoniously explained the connection between female anatomy and emotional instability to a class of 15-year olds at the Gymnasium I attended in Austria, echoing another one of Freud's famous dicta--"anatomy is destiny," all I could do was clumsily argue that he must be wrong, that surely, men were capable of hysterical behavior as well. An ill-fated attempt, since Dr. Rinner lost no time in turning my attempt at resistance into an exemplary hysterical outburst almost worthy of the clinical name.)
Ah, memories of growing up in a conservative town. Leaving the Twin Cities on one of the first appropriately (for the season) cold weekends this November, I visited Hudson, another, even smaller town, to take in the current exhibition at the Phipps, where six women--a sculptor, a photographer, a printmaker, a textile artist, a weaver, and a painter--delve into the complex meanings of home, place, memory, and transitions. Besides, they beautifully manage to prove dear Doctor Freud wrong by demonstrating that they are capable of doing more than "just" weaving--even though a few of them weave exceedingly well.
Upstairs, five established artists share the galleries, while downstairs, in gallery one, the youngest artist in the show, Melanie Van Houten, presents Threshold: fabric and rocks join cast iron sculptures of lace and crochet fabrics, displayed either hanging--on precariously fraying cotton ropes--or sitting on pedestals made from rock and iron, in a collection that asks us to suspend all idealized notions of feminine domesticity and delicacy. Doilies have never looked so potent before.
Melanie Van Houten, An Other Home (detail)
Van Houten is an interesting artist: after earning her M.F.A. at the University of Minnesota, completing a residency at Franconia Sculpture Park in the summer of 2007, and teaching full-time at St. Kate's in the sculpture program, she has recently relocated to Kentucky, where she is planning to build a sculpture park--the Josephine Sculpture Park--on the land that used to be her grandparents' tobacco farm. This return is relevant for Van Houten's work, since conceptually her artistic practice revolves around the concept of home: the longing, nostalgic and otherwise, to return, the push and pull between the desires for independence and the familiar sense of belonging to a place without question. But Van Houten's work also addresses the equally fascinating process of making a home, consciously, intentionally--as we are forced to do, sooner or later, with more or less distance to cover between our geographic origins and wherever life takes us.
Let's picture Freud and his famous couch here for a moment: the home and the womb, domesticity and the doily--it all seems to fall into place. A wise nod, a puff on the pipe.
But not so fast:
Van Houten's sculpture, Reclamation, at Franconia Sculpture Park consists of a tall, iron skeleton of a house--a rusty frame of a home that has eroded away to its barest structural components. It's a vestige of home, really, no dwelling place that could ever offer any real shelter. Cast in iron, it offers a compelling commentary on how hard it is to let go of a home; long after we have physically left, that elemental idea--perhaps the illusion--of belonging keeps haunting us. An old cabin, its boards bleached and stained from long-time exposure to the elements, hangs suspended from the iron bars: another old, traditional image of home, a frontier dwelling even, sways on cotton ropes. The cabin is hollow, its insides filled with a web of cotton rope: a spider web, woven to catch prey, and to entangle us in memories and dreams of place, home, and belonging?
Installation of Reclamation at Franconia Sculpture Park in the summer of 2007
The materials Van Houten relies on are deceptively simple--iron, wood, rope; the effect is striking. There is no sentimental nostalgia for domestic bliss here but a powerful reckoning with the ruins of home, the suspension of belonging, and precarious insistence that even amongst the eroded remains of an old idea, a new home can be found or built or made--reclaimed, even.
Melanie Van Houten, An Other Home.
In An Other Home, Van Houten uses a mundane object, a chair, and casts it in iron. The idea of home as a place to be sedentary manifests itself quite literally. But this simple chair as token of home is "other:" no longer self evident and unquestioned, but both rigid and reliable, it is snagged and snared by cotton ropes that, once more, form a spider-web-like contraption, showing, in no uncertain terms, the ways we are caught up, as if inevitably, in the twisted strands connecting us to the place we called home first. (In one installation, the shape of cotton rope web forms a house-like shape... a freakish, disintegrating fray of a house, reaching out to the chair, clinging to it, not letting go). In Who Says What We Call Home, on view at the Phipps (but shown below in an earlier version at Franconia), the rusted façade of a house is similarly entangled in a web of cotton rope: propped up, tent-like, and unable to break free of all the strings attached, quite literally, to the idea of home.
Melanie Van Houten, Who Says What We Call Home?
Van Houten's materials in Threshold, the collective title of the body of work on view at the Phipps until January 4 have expanded: in addition to the cotton rope, cast iron, and wood (reclaimed doors, this time), rocks, fabrics, wallpaper, and copper conspire to return, once more, to the compelling idea of home.
In Mine, three slabs of rock lean on top of a narrow, wall-mounted shelf. The rocks are identified by place: Faribault, MN, Coalbrookdale, UK (home of the Ironbridge Museum of Steel Sculpture), and St. Cloud, MN. Making a home, here, means connecting with the land at its most foundational: its very bedrock. Claiming ownership of these small pieces of the land is a proprietorial gesture, and yet, seems oddly futile: our ephemeral desire for home--having one, making one--pales in comparison to the sheer age, compression, erosion, these rocks have been through. These rocks may well survive us all.
Rocks, too, play a role, albeit a supporting one, in Thrown Stones I-IX: slabs of slate sit on three-legged iron stools and support small cast iron sculptures of house-like shapes. Van Houten made the molds for these casts from reclaimed crochet and lace fabrics, teasing them into rudimentary house-like structures. Yet these structures seem to flow and bleed over the rock, in a state of decomposition, caught and immortalized in iron. They are partial, fragmentary, incomplete--and utterly compelling in the way they remind of fragile, ethereal lace yet are made of iron and sit on rock. Once again, the desire for feeling grounded in a home collides with the transitory, the domestically delicate with the rawness of the materials.
In the middle of gallery one, on the floor, more houses promise the specter of home: made from quilted and felted fabric, and wallpaper, respectively, these pseudo-dollhouses have no windows or doors. Thus the cozy if impermanent comfort they suggest takes on the sinister edge of a padded cell that, thankfully, we get to see from the outside.
Does the home pose a threat or tempt with the promise of a happy-ever-after?
This question has haunted literature about artists for centuries. Can great art coexist with the pleasures of an ordinary domestic life, or do we need tortured and half-starved geniuses to produce work that catapults audiences out of complacent equanimity? But while cliché insists that all artists have to grapple with this question, artists who happen to be women have met with considerably more resistance to make these choices. (Well, maybe not while they were pleasantly weaving away in clean and proper bourgeois salons.)
In Before the Dawn, Van Houten's cast iron house sculptures play both parts, threat and promise: while some lead-colored house-shaped sculptures anchor cotton ropes to the floor, promising stability and grounding, the suspended houses, made of cast iron molded from crochet and lace, threaten to fall, the cotton ropes that hold them in place visibly unraveling. As in the Thrown series, these houses/homes seem on verge of disintegrating, caught at the very moment just prior to a sublime unraveling--but solidifying this moment with metallic certainty.
The title of the piece situates Before the Dawn at a liminal moment--the break of day, Jan Fabre's blue hour, the brief time span between night and day. Similarly, a "threshold" is located in between the domestic sphere and the outside world; it is a space of transition, where boundaries meet, and possibilities are born. Things are poised to happen--but we don't know yet what they are. What we do know is that here we see the moment right before this unraveling. That is the threshold this body of work seems to inhabit.
Leaving Van Houten's work for the upstairs galleries, I take a step back in time, it seems: here are women who weave, at last--or, as Dr. Freud and Dr. Rinner might agree, still!
One of Marie Westerman's TEXTiles
in TEXTiles, Marie Westerman presents double and triple woven fabrics that thrive in the space between textile and text, a kind of visual storytelling that draws on symbols from the natural world. Particularly noteworthy: the narrow, tall panels of "Two Birches" flank "Incantation," a larger tapestry where speckled tree trunks grow into a cross-arched ceiling of sorts, topped by the phases of the moon and what looks like Celtic runes. Imagery and triptych display capture the convergence between nature and religiously inspired architecture. The work is very proper, well crafted, well intentioned, and entirely conventional.
Tressa Sularz similarly relies on a traditional craft: basket weaving. Unlike her widely featured baskets (look for them online in Home and Garden, Wickerwoman, Round Hearth, and, in Minneapolis, at the Textile Center), the objects on display at the Phipps refute the plain demands of utility in order to become fine art: Tulipe and Closures, woven from ratan with shell buttons attached, serves no purpose but, according to the artist, "reflects movement and transition" and "emulates... the emotional terrain I continue to navigate." Lofty sentiments aside, the divide between art and craft--in terms of prestige and purpose--has been bridged more effectively elsewhere. (May I remind of the amazing "Functional Sculpture" show Glenn Gordon co-curated at Carlton College last winter?)
Tressa Sularz, Tulipe and Closures
Apart from such literally woven materials, photographer Karen Klein and painter/collagist Teita Amberg both invoke the figurative threads woven together in their respective bodies of work: Amberg's identifies "the thread that ties this collection together" as her "having a great deal of fun" (I quote from the artist's statement)-an approach that, despite the entertainment it doubtlessly grants the artist, falls flat conceptually. Klein, on the other hand, articulates the "connective thread" of "In Focus, Out of Memory," with more nuance, weaving together the memory of pivotal events in what she calls "a visual diary of sorts." Yet the digital photo-collages are no solipsistic exercise in self-absorption. Most of them invite reflection and allow viewers the freedom to connect to the imagery on their own terms, relying on their own memories and associations rather than getting caught up in deciphering the artist's.
Karen Klein, a digital collage included in "In Focus, Out of Memory"
In contrast, Mary Barrett's wood cut prints turned collages look outward and eschew the digital altogether: In her Canyon series, prints are cut and carved into, the paper ruffled or layered into three-dimensional textures. The landscapes Barrett thus creates look alive with movement. The sheer verticality of the canyon walls cuts into distant pockets of visible sky, while the horizontal breadth of Bryce canyon sprawls over the paper in so many ochre patterns. The broad-shouldered peaks of Glacier National Park reverberate with the slow grinding of glacial ice, its movement echoed in the white traces left by Barrett's expert cuts. Rather than weaving or adding elements together in order to make meaning, Barrett cuts to make meaning. (The action of cutting itself cannot but signify, especially in a Freudian universe. Interestingly, the root of "castration" leads back to the cutting up of land, severing parcels for military uses and turning them into forts, Latin castrum).
From the great outdoors, cut, printed, and collaged in Barrett's "Canyon Series and other 'Scapes," I am transported back to the here and now abruptly, when an older woman asks me, without prelude: "Do you know how fortunate you are to be born"--she hesitates, politely and so adorably Midwestern--"well, when and where you were born?"
Needless to say, I invite further explanation: It was in a small town in rural Michigan in the late 1960s, she tells me, when she and her girlfriend who had just returned from a trip to London sported brand new tattoo hose. Barely skirting expulsion, they were told to go home, change, and never ever wear those terrible tights again. Apparently, girls' legs were scary enough without an added thin layer of patterned nylon. Propriety was enforced and adolescent women's bodies policed. But here, years later, my hummingbird-flower-paisley tights briefly allowed us to bridge cultures and generations, and share this story, far from home. And suddenly, the present does not look so bleak. Occasionally, it is a good thing that what we thought we knew and took for granted unravels in front of our very eyes.
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