George Grosz: Politics and His Influence at David Nolan
September 8- October 22, 2016, 527 West 29th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, info@davidnolangallery.com

Sometimes merely to depict the world is to make a political statement. When Sue Coe draws Homeless Woman Dressed in Garbage Bags (1992) and Louis Lozowick’s lithograph depicts Hooverville (1932), both at St. Etienne, those images in themselves reveal injustice, and so should inspire responsive action. And, at David Nolan, the implication of the visual rhetoric of Nancy Spero’s F111- Victims in River of Blood (1967) is transparently clear. But sometimes the relationship between visual art and political ideals is more elusive, as with A. R. Penck’s Ubergang (1968/70), an ink drawing, and Marina Abramovic’s The Hero II (2001/2008), a silver print, both also at Nolan. Penck’s German title describes a ‘transition’, presumably towards a more just society—and Abramovic ironically shows herself as a hero with a white flag on a white horse. And Gerhard Richter’s print 14 Feb 45 (2001), so you can discover by Googling that date, is an aerial view of Dresden made right after the World War Two firebombing.

Galerie St. Etienne presents sixty-five drawings, lithographs, paintings and posters made by American artists associated with (or supportive of) the American communist party. Coe has an illustration NY Soup Kitchen—a Week Before Xmas (1992), George Grosz two works on paper, and Alice Neel a painting Longshoremen Returning from Work (1936). These figurative artists depicted poverty, racism and unemployment. One room at David Nolan shows a group of George Grosz’s iconic works from the 1920s through the 1940s. The rest of this exhibition, in three galleries on two floors, shows a marvelous variety of political artists. You see Leon Golub’s Mercenaries II (1975), Ian Hamilton Finlay’s installation The Revolution is Frozen—All Principles are Weakened. There Remain only Red Bonnets Worn by Intrigue (1991), and Martha Rosler’s photomontage Empty Boys (1967-72). And also Faith Ringgold’s narrative composition, Hate is a Sin Flag (2007); Jorg Immendorff’s painting Only when the rocks are flying we will be appeased (1978), and Robert Rauschenberg’s remarkable collage Untitled (Huey P. Newton, Arts Magazine, Nov. 1970) (1970).

These two exhibitions present a most instructive history of twentieth century political art. In a lengthy essay, which is on-line, St. Etienne traces the career of Grosz, who immigrated to this country when Hitler came to power in his native Germany, and the response of various American 1930s leftists to the Great Depression. And, after noting that the rise of Abstract Expressionism led to the marginalization of political art, it plausibly argues that now we have as much need for socially engaged art as in the 1930s. “Although the American establishment rejected political art in the latter part of the twentieth century,” it claims, “some collectors and dealers remained devoted to the genre.” In fact, for two generations the very influential critics associated with October, have argued that contemporary art should critique our social institutions. And a number of artists extolled in their pages are in the Nolan exhibition. What has changed, and this is an important development, is that the dominant style of political art has been radically transformed. The activist commentary of Jenny Holzer’s cold water (2013) and Glenn Ligon’s Introduction (5) (2004) needs to be being teased out. As also is true of Ciprian Muresan’s Communism Never Happened (2006), a vinyl label reproducing those words. The claims of Coe’s images are as direct as those of the drawings by Grosz, the one artist who appears in both exhibitions. But nowadays the statements made by fashionable political art are mostly elliptical.

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The Review Panel, in its last meeting in 2014, took place at the National Academy Museum on November 21. The line up of critics joining moderator David Cohen included veteran Lance Esplund and two newcomers to the program, Sarah Douglas and Edward M. Epstein (in his New York debut; Epstein is a regular of The Review Panel Philadelphia). The exhibitions discussed were “Ragnar Kjartansson and The National: A Lot of Sorrow” at Luhring Augustine Bushwick, “Marina Abramovic: The Generator” at Sean Kelly, “Tommy Hartung: The Bible” at On Stellar Rays, and “Ursula von Rydingsvard: Permeated Shield” at Galerie Lelong. The next panel takes place at the National Academy Friday, February 13, 2015.

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Rainer has penned a letter to LA MOCA’s already-beleaguered dealer-turned-director Jeffrey Deitch demanding that he  justify what she sees as bizarre, sadistic antics, to be visited Saturday night (November 12) upon a cadre of young LA performers by veteran performance artist Abramovic.

Abramovic forged her reputation for emotionally and politically charged happenings via masochistic feats of physical and mental endurance.  Audiences would be challenged to do anything they liked to her with an array of potentially menacing objects.  Or daggers would be thrust at excruciating speed in proximity to her fingers. The daughter of a Yugoslav general, she courted martyrdom for the twin causes of existential satire and avant garde provocation.

But these days the celebrated performer, getting on in years, delegates the degradation to younger, fitter and presumably desperate (whether financially or for fame) dancers and actors.  At her MoMA retrospective last year, surrogates were enlisted to reenact her classic performances.  Implication: the masochist has turned sadist in her dotage.

The MOCA fundraiser adds a further twist to this dynamic as pointedly humiliating performances are laid on for the specific delectation of big ticket paying party goers in what Rainer compares to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lurid 1975 masterpiece, Salò. The movie is a reworking of the Marquis de Sade’s classic, “120 of Sodom” which the Italian cineaste sets in the last days of Fascist Italy.

At MOCA, performers are to be stationed on a rotating lazy susan under each table for a full three hours (with no pee break) forcing eye contact with each diner—uncomfortable eye contact has become a major theme of Abramovic’s work in a number of recent performances.  As Rainer writers in her letter to Deitch:

Subjecting her performers to public humiliation at the hands of a bunch of frolicking donors is yet another example of the Museum’s callousness and greed and Ms Abramovic’s obliviousness to differences in context and some of the implications of transposing her own powerful performances to the bodies of others. An exhibition is one thing …but titillation for wealthy donor/diners as a means of raising money is another.

Another vignette to be reenacted for the amusement of gala attendees entails performers lying naked, and still, underneath skeletons.  Rainer ascribes the willingness of young actors and dancers to subject themselves to such degradations, “to become decorative table ornaments installed by a celebrity artist” as symptomatic of a desperate need “of somehow breaking into the show biz themselves” as well as working for “sub-minimal wages.“

A volunteer performer, who has chosen to remain anonymous but whose testimony has been circulated with Rainer’s letter, reports that “diners may try to feed us, give us drinks, fondle us under the table, etc but … whatever happens, we are to remain in performance mode and unaffected.”  All this, over a fifteen-hour contract, for $150 “(plus a MOCA one year membership!!!)”

What Rainer does not spell out explicitly, but must nonetheless occur to many readers, is the extraordinary poignancy of making use of young performers in this way against the backdrop of protests by the “99%”.  The Los Angeles art/philanthropy circuit upon which LA MOCA draws its support represents in extremis the kind of concentration of personal wealth resented by the excluded and marginalized in the current economy.   Jeffrey Deitch has already proven himself seriously accident prone in gauging the mood of his adoptive city since assuming MOCA’s directorship, as the case of his ordered destruction of Blu’s anti-war mural illustrated.  This might be an instance of similar tone deafness to the changing social climate.

If, meanwhile, Abramovic’s aim is to represent the divide between haves and have nots in a pointed theater of the absurd, the likes of Eli Broad and David Geffen and other well-heeled diners might not appreciate being cast as the very caricature of the 1%.  The loss of donors would prove more catastrophic to Jeffrey Deitch than that of mere street artists or doyennes of avant garde dance.

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elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne

May 27, 2010 to February 21, 2011
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris, +33 (0)1 44 78 12 33

France has a long history of women artists and of organizations supporting their work.  Partly as a result of that tradition, the National Museum of Modern Art owns works by more than 800 mostly European women artists.  Approximately twenty-five percent of these are represented in elles@centrepompidou, an exhibition that runs through February of next year with occasional substitutions of additional works.  Occupying the extensive fourth floor of the Pompidou Center, elles is divided into nine categories: “Pioneering Women,” “Fire at Will,” “The Body Slogan,” “Eccentric Abstraction,” “A Room of One’s Own,” “Words at Work,” “Immaterials,” “elles@design,” and “Architecture and Feminism?”  This thematic approach enabled curator Camille Moreau to organize some 500 works in provocative groupings.  Her purpose was “to present the public with a hanging that appears to offer a good history of twentieth-century art.  The goal is to show that representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  But she goes on to say, “Proving it is another matter.”

“Pioneering Women” encompasses the late 19th to the mid-20th century period.  Often described as pre-feminist, these women nevertheless engaged the male-dominated art world with wit and determination.  Lack of representation of these artists in galleries and museum collections was one of the issues prompting demonstrations and other actions by feminists during the 1960s and 1970s.  Because of their longevity, several pioneering women were still working during those decades, notably Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Joan Mitchell, Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva, and Dorothea Tanning.  In general, however, they did not identity themselves as feminists or participate in exhibitions open only to women artists.

Confrontational and deconstructionist approaches produced the dynamic pieces in “Fire at Will,” which includes print and video documentation of performance art by Valerie Export (exposed crotch and machine gun), Sigalit Landau (barded-wire hula hoop), and Charlotte Moorman (cello and camouflage uniform), along with Wendy Jacob’s eerie installation of inflated, animated blankets.  In materials as well as subject matter, artists in this section attacked assumptions pertaining to art production. The violence of war, viewed as a male domain, prompted this theme. From Zineb Sedira’s nostalgic photograph of an Algerian ruin to Annette Messager’s skewered protest, these artists dealt with war-scarred landscapes and psyches.  The female body as both canvas and subject in “The Body Slogan” addresses concepts of gender and identity, creating the most unified section of the exhibition. Jana Sterbak’s flesh dress of thinly sliced raw beef (completely dried by the time I saw it in June of 2010) resonates with the bloody visions of a nude Ana Mendieta holding a flapping, decapitated chicken.  Marina Abramovic, Sonia Khurana, and Carolee Schneemann dance to their different drummers, while Tania Brugera, Louise Bourgeois, and Cindy Sherman consider the self-portrait as an exploratory genre.

“Eccentric Abstraction,” with its unmistakable reference to the 1966 New York gallery exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard using the same title, functions as the lynchpin of elles.  If we consider that the final two sections of the show focus more on design than art per se, then “Eccentric Abstraction” can be seen as positioned near the center of the exhibition.  Our opinion of everything that we see before these pieces and after them becomes enhanced or reduced by the “craft” materials and offbeat treatment of shape and space in this section.  Besides the classically deviant sculpture of Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse, works here emphasize the power of repetition, both inside and outside the grid.  The rhythm of marking, stacking, and stitching is claimed and perpetuated as essentially female within the context of this exhibition.

In “Immaterials,” eccentric abstraction morphs into post-minimalist dialectics, with light and white as recurring motifs. “A Room of One’s Own” strays from the rigorous curatorial focus in the rest of the show, with several works seemingly shoehorned into this category.  While Louise Nevelson’s sculptural installation, for example, may look like a wall unit for storage and display, its title Reflections of a Waterfall I suggests that the artist’s thoughts were elsewhere.  Although Mona Hatoum’s circular structure resembles a tiny room, the video seen on the floor invades and exposes the universal physicality of the human body.  The most ironic “room” is experienced in the 1975 video of Martha Rosler’s kitchen. “Words at Work,” while conflating text and visual narrative, nevertheless emphasizes the crucial component of language and storytelling within feminist art.  From the literal messages of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger to Eleanor Antin’s liberated black boots, we are reminded not only that women have stories to tell, but also that women tell them best.

On seeing an exhibition of this magnitude focusing exclusively on women’s art, it is very hard to imagine how its curator could suggest that the “representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  Moreau’s show underscores the fact that museums have only just begun to demonstrate the advances in post-1960 women’s art, let alone to explore work  by early women modernists that explores their differences from male pioneers.

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