Prospect.3: Notes for Now

October 25, 2014 to January 25, 2015
Various sites in New Orleans

ExhibitBe
Saturdays, November 15 to January 25, 2015
3010 Sandra Drive, Algiers, New Orleans

“Prospect.3: Notes for Now,” the third New Orleans biennial, curated by Franklin Sirmans, presented 58 artists and collaborations at 18 locations within that city. The New Orleans Museum of Art showed Paul Gauguin’s Under the Pandanus (1891), on loan from the Dallas Museum of Art; paintings and drawings by Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral; and handsome modernist abstractions by Ed Clark, a veteran local artist. At the Ogden Museum of Southern art was a gallery of large paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was involved with music from New Orleans — and he visited the city briefly. Also at the Ogden were photographs of the prisons in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, in nearby Angola; and colorful bas-reliefs by Herbert Singleton, who was incarnated in that prison. And three floors of the Contemporary Arts Center included displays of Manal Aldowayan’s photographs of female workers in her native country, Saudi Arabia and the grid-grounded paintings of McArthur Binion, which allude both to the history of that medium and to black political history. There were landscape photographs of Louisiana and Mississippi by Thomas Joshua Cooper; Charles Gaines’s LED panels presenting texts by African, Asian and European radicals and socialists; photographs of the Nigerian film industry by Pieter Hugo; and Yun-Fei Ji’s scroll, which uses a traditional format to present scenes of conflict in contemporary China.

This show displayed some good local artists and, also, a full sampling of the sorts of installations, photography and videos that are fashionable in the present art world. It thus provides New Orleans residents and visitors an opportunity to learn about contemporary visual art. And the weighty, expensive catalogue provides a full visual record of the art on display, though the free newspaper map and guide published by The New Orleans Advocate is actually a more useful guide. The problem here was, quite simply, that while New Orleans has long been a literary and musical center, it hasn’t really been the home of very many well-known distinctive visual artists. When Sirmans justifies his inclusion of Gauguin on the grounds that he was a friend of Edgar Degas, who did visit the city, or of Amaral because of her interest in cultural diversity in her country, Brazil, one’s aware of this problem. The issues concerning class, gender and race faced by New Orleans, pressing concerns elsewhere, are dealt with in this Louisiana city in distinctive ways, which don’t get adequate critical analysis.

Stimulated, but a little frustrated by this ambitious exhibition, I drove South across the Mississippi River to ExhibitBe, an outdoor graffiti display in an unoccupied apartment complex just off of General De Gaulle Boulevard in Algiers. These five-story buildings, public low-cost housing (which is soon to be demolished to make way for a sports center) were the site for an outdoor display by 51 graffiti artists, curated by Brandan “B-mike” Odoms. On the first of these high walls was a pale green portrait of a woman by the Australian artist Rone. At the edge between the buildings Ana Hernandez and Rontherin Ratliff wove plastic window blinds into the perforations of decorative concrete sunscreens to produce a pair of outstretched, three-story high hands in the form of plastic tapestry. On the next building is MEEK’s image of a Ferguson protestor tossing back a police tear gas canister. And Odum’s portrait shows a 15-year-old George Carter, who was murdered in New Orleans, staring from the fifth floor. On the two story building facing these apartments, B-mike painted black history icons — Gil Scott-Heron, Biggie Smalls, Harriet Tubman, Radio Raheem, Maya Angelou, Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. And there was more graffiti inside some of the condemned apartments.

“This is temporary,” a sign warned: “take a picture. It will last longer.” On a sunny warm day, this open-air, free-admission show attracted crowds — including a DJ and dancers. As always, of course, the moral ambiguities of gentrification are not easy to resolve — the exhibition was possible only thanks to the allowance of a property developer, who is destroying public housing. Acknowledging that problem, I would argue that ExhibitBe, more so than Prospect.3, provides an authentic, accessible record of the visual culture of New Orleans. Recently Joachim Pissarro and I have made the distinction between art-world art and “wild art,” such as graffiti, that is found outside of museums, a distinction which is illustrated perfectly in the contrast between these two very different exhibitions.

I owe thanks to my daughter Liz, who is a New Orleans resident, for taking me to this marvelous show, which I would never have discovered on my own.

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September 5 to October 5, 2013
568 West 25th Street at 11th Avenue
New York City, 212-249-7695

In old master art and sometimes also in early modernism, words often are the sources for visual images. This, after all, is why there is an academic journal called Word & Image – and a book by Norman Bryson titled Word and Image. Once you have identified the key text, then you are prepared to interpret a painting. This exhibition demonstrates how in Islamic calligraphy, in New York graffiti, and in some American and European gestural painting the relationship between word and image is totally different. In Tunisian/French artist eL Seed’s acrylic painting, This is just a phrase in Arabic (2013), in the present exhibition, words form a magnificent black-on-red image.  Mehdi Qotbi’s lithographs, analogously, are playful decorations using words. And Rob Wynne’s Appear!  (2013) is poured paint spelling “Appear!” These artists transform Arabic or English-language words into visual compositions. Graffiti artists do something different—they invent languages. Keith Haring is represented here by large chalk on paper drawings; Rammellzee’s spray collage, Decision of Sigma War (1984) is a four-panel composition; and LA2 (Angel Ortiz)’s Fire 911 (2013) has oil markings on a fireman’s alarm. And the Abstract Expressionists and their French peers adopt yet another procedure—they make completely abstract calligraphic paintings.  Franz Kline’s Untitled (1953) is in exhibition along with Bill Jensen’s Raised Bristles III (2010-11) and Pat Steir’s Untitled (2004); so too are Pierre Soulages’s Untitled (1956) and Hans Hartung’s T1971-R24  (1971).

In 1984 Jeffrey Deitch argued that the calligraphic tradition is a crucial component of modernism. He proposed that Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly be set alongside New York graffiti artists and the Persian masters of calligraphy. The new graffiti, Deitch noted, “was everywhere except the art world itself.” Then two years later the title and cover image of Frank Stella’s manifesto Working Space were derived from graffiti. Stella built upon tradition—for a long time museum art has gained energy from street life. We find this happening already, I believe in Camille Pissarro’s paintings, the product of his anarchism, as Joachim Pissarro has written, “a radical aesthetic whereby art would be stripped of all its canons and literary ambitions.” And yet, even now the art world mostly maintains a distinction in kind between graffiti and gestural painting, between street art and art in the museum.

In his A. W. Mellon lectures of 1989 Oleg Grabar, the doyen of Islamic art historians, noted how in that culture: “Writing is a specific moment in a series of closed processes of interpreting the world, a set of formulas through which life or the surrounding worlds are expressed . . . Writing contains a potentially technical perfection that can only be explained by comparing it to horses, nature, or love.”

For Muslims, he notes, “God has sent His message through writing and yet no writing will ever express the plenitude of the divine message.” You don’t need to be a believer or take this claim literally to admire the calligraphic art, sacred and secular, assembled in this revelatory exhibition. Many Chelsea shows effectively present upscale contemporary art. This one does something more difficult and rare- it offers a visually convincing sketch of a revisionist art history.
Sources: Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro (New York, 1993), 161; Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, 1992), 85, 64.

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In May 2013 the app publishing company Art Intelligence released Art Intelligence: Keith Haring, a decidedly comprehensive and dynamic app designed exclusively for iPad 2.  The program’s introduction screen, in an essay entitled The Politics of Dancing, notes that Haring was a follower of the Warholian tenents of mass-production. This was first evidenced in the early 1980s in ephemeral chalk drawings in New York City subways in which he employed the black paper used to cover old advertisements as canvases for his iconic visual vocabulary.  Today the wide availability of Haring watches, coffee mugs, and even cleaning supplies speaks to this same interest—perhaps then to be able to download a piece of Keith Haring is the logical next step.  Haring opened his Pop Shop in 1986 making his iconography available to the denizens of downtown Manhattan, but now not even geography can preclude the digital consumer from getting a piece of Keith.

The app’s “curator” Bridget L. Goodbody describes Art Intelligence: Keith Haring as a “visual Wikipedia on steroids,” and she has a point: the energy of the 1980s art scene is reanimated through a virtual library of photography, video, and artwork that the user is invited to explore.  The app successful skirts the line between accessibility and political and art historical investment; clearly designed for adults, the descriptions are often wordy and sometimes academic, though younger users could appreciate the app equally for its incredibly comprehensive catalog of artworks and archival photos.  In this way, the app mimics the accessibility of the artist’s own work—Haring created a collaborative mural project with public schools in Chicago in 1989, and his famous 1986 “Crack is Wack” mural was designed for children, painted on a Harlem handball court.  His later focus on socio-political themes such as AIDS prevention and Apartheid in Africa birthed (sometimes pornographic) works obviously designed for adults, but his cartoonish visual vocabulary has always lent itself to young fans.

A virtual gallery of Keith Haring’s art is presented through detailed high-resolution reproductions.  Organized chronologically, the user is invited to browse a massive selection of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and murals.  These works are then searchable via the “Timeline” tab, which is divided into the broad categories of “life,” “art,” and “world” providing a social and historical context for the artist’s work. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of how Haring and his art were at the forefront of public consciousness, each artistic milestone can be clicked on for more information. For instance, in 1985 Brooke Shields posed nude for photographer Richard Avedon with a Haring-painted pink heart.  The caption for the image reads: “Nothing Comes Between Me and My Keith.”  Haring was at the forefront of a scene that dominated downtown Manhattan, and his ties to major players in fashion and music, in relation to his cartoonish subway drawings, created an instantly recognizable visual iconography.  Also in 1985, Haring produced his Free South Africa poster for the concert where Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and Hall and Oates sang “We Are the World;” a video of the performance is available via YouTube on the app.

The “Connections” tab is organized by themes such as “art,” “birth,” “Africa” or “AIDS.”  The user can maximize each image to see a short blurb: I stumbled upon a 1987 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show entitled “Lets Talk about AIDS.”  The “Resources” tab includes links to a selection of film, music, and literature that the creators feel is somehow relevant to Haring’s work.  Toni Morrison’s Beloved is listed for purchase alongside Paris is Burning, a 1990 documentary about ‘80s drag ball culture in New York City, and Duran Duran’s 1982 album Rio.  These choices are thoughtful, and while many address a historical relationship, a work such as Beloved (set 100 years before Haring’s birth at the end of the American Civil War) speaks instead to the artist’s commitment to visual representation of marginalized groups, a trope which is often schematized in Haring’s early work, which shows dogs, human figures and aliens in the same scene.  Perhaps the least useful portion of the program, at least currently, is the “Conversations” tab, which touts itself as “a forum to express your ideas to fellow art geeks.”  In this early iteration there are few conversations to be had, though in our era of digital anonymity and polemical web boards the prospect of sparking debates and sharing experiences is encouraging.  Fittingly, Art Intelligence: Keith Haring has a feeling of dynamism that recalls Haring’s own playfulness, as well as his simultaneous emphasis on stylistic consistency alongside innovation.

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