Kiki Smith 2 and Milton Rogovin

So  I went back to the Henry Art Gallery's Kiki Smith exhibition "I myself have seen it" for another look. It is a complex exhibition and deserves a lot of looks. First I watched the Art 21 video which was really helpful . She talks about death masks, her grandmother's, her father's, her sister's. She herself is cast, that is terrifying. And she talked about Genevieve the savior of Paris.

So when I saw the series about Genevieve in the exhibition, it was clear what she was doing. The exhibition includes six photographs of parts of the sculpture, a profile face, lips, a hand,  the legs of a wolf ( perhaps signifying the enemy that Genevieve's prayers staved off from Paris), the wolf's furry face, four animal feet. Together they create an imaginary narrative, much more than the sculpture in which G calmly steps over a supine animal, but this narrative is another story, a story of fragments of bodies that seem to be frozen, even as they create, collectively, a sense of anxiety. The stasis is perhaps related to Genevieve's spiritual nature. But there didn't seem to be any suggestion of the actions that she took to save the people by bringing grain.

Going through the rest of the show starting with a young girl trapped (floating?) in a branch, to odd photographs that seem to evoke fragments of organs, to Mary Magdalene ( we know her story, Christ's "fallen" woman) , to Lot's Wife (who turned to a pillar of salt, if you remember), to the Harpies (perched about on mouldings high above us) , to the witches, to the little girls, dead white animals, dead black crows, shredded puppet, worms, and a photograph of just Guanyin's head on its side (the image is in previous post) which does not suggest her power as a goddess of love and mercy and childbearing. There is only one message for me - violence against women, and especially little girls. The show is presenting frighened girls  and oddly powerless witches. Even fairy tales where little girls succeed, like Alice in Wonderland, seem to be oddly ambibuous - will she succeed in escaping her pursuers??

The question is why doesn't Kiki Smith say what her real subject is, why is she so unwilling to be an advocate for all the victims she creates in her sculptures?? Why does she make victims from powerful goddesses and biblical women. Why can't they fight back? Why doesn't she fight back? My intelligent friend Deborah Lawrence talked me out of saying it is about personal trauma. What do I know, but why is Smith so obsessed with this single subject of death and threats of death and powerlessness.

The contrast to Cindy Sherman comes to mind who works from film, that, like fairy tales, are often about violence against women (in fact the new mythology), but we know they are re-staged with herself as the main actor, and she is opposing violence against women by calling attention to it. 

Kiki adds to the victims in the world without doing anything for them. As far as I am concerned this is not feminism.

In an intriguing revelation, she mentioned that she had worked with Bread and Puppet theater for awhile. But she takes their confrontational approach and empties it of all resistance in making these  prone or frozen or fragmented women and girls.

And what an amazing contrast to the adjacent gallery at the Henry with the photography of Milton Rogovin.

 He has photographed the working class for fifty years. He went to Chile ( the image above is from Chile,) Appalachia, photographing. among others, the families of miners and the miners themselves (particularly resonant at the moment with the horrifying greed propelled, mine accidents in the non unionized mines )and repeatedly to the Lower West Side of New York City. His people are dignfiedand strong. He honors them with his photographs.
He wrote poetry about the subjects of his work.
Here are a few of his comments.
"They are regular people just like the rest of us. We must not abandon them."
"Everybody should have an opportunity for a better education."
" All around we saw people with great potential but we knew none of them would realize it under the conditions of our society."

Here is a man who cares deeply about the human condition and has spent his life recording it and speaking up for what he believes.

Kiki Smith

The Kiki Smith exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, curated by Elizabeth Brown, in collaboration with the artist for many years and years, is a tour de force, not to be missed. Together they went through about 80,000 photographs to arrive at the show. Hats off for a great show and a great installation.

Brown wrote her dissertation on Brancusi's photographs of his own work, those haunting black and white photographs that were first published in the Little Review in the early 1920s by the eccentric genius Jane Heap. (See my website for more information on her). But what a difference. Compared to Brancusi's actions which were relatively straightforward, although the results were beautiful, Kiki Smith, is like walking into a complex game in which we have no idea which way to go or what the rules are.

The title " I myself have seen it: Photography and Kiki Smith " refers to the fact that these are Kiki's photographs of many different types, documentary, journalistic, casual, creative, serendipitous.

Those of us in the press conversed with the artist informally -a great opportunity to try to get a little more straightforward information from the artist ( her artists talk was aggravatingly indirect,  and my bete noir, about her materials and where she got them, although she had some good one liners).

Naturally, I asked her if she was concerned about environmental issues, since we were standing in a room with a lot of simulations of dead white mammals, and also a crucified Christ photograph ( that's my nod to Good Friday, today). She said she didn't like to be polemical, she didn't like to tell people what to think. Where have we heard that before? But in her case, it is true. She lays out the work, the death, the damage, the anguished adolescent girls, the mythic women, the fairy tale girls, the composite bird women, but they are all strangely passive. Oddly,  she said the same thing as William Kentridge, that making art flows from her subconscious, she doesn't know what she is going to do ahead of time. But with wildly different results. Kiki Smith does not engage social political issues, we must conclude that spontaneity is conditioned by who we are. In Kiki Smith's case, I think this show gives us a whole new perspective on who she is and what her work is about.

When I asked her about AIDS, since that was the first work I saw that impressed me at the height of the epidemic (in the art world), she said, oh I just happened to be doing work about the body then (she also said when she took emergency medical training it was just to clinically analyze the bodies) .But her sister had jsut died of AIDS! So where is the anguish, the emotion, the passion? Anyone that can produce this much work has passion, but there is a strangely absent quality, a sense that somehow her consciousness is somewhere else.

Now I am going to make a big leap and a big guess. When I saw the movie Precious, one of the key devices was that when she was being raped, she would escape into fantasy, wonderful living color celebrity status fantasy. She was absent from the world in those times.

I see the same absence in Kiki Smith, her women lie wounded, or stand introverted, her crows are dead, her imagery of Little Red Riding Hood morphing into a wolf/girl doesn't suggest she is empowered by this transformation. Lilith, another woman who has had a raw deal, is just Lilith, not all conquiering Lilith. So what about Kiki's absent emotions. Is this a result of early traumas? I am not going to go further with this and get more explicit,  but that was the message of the show for me. Going from Kiki Smith to William Kentridge, from the "feminist" introvert standing or lying passively, to the male activist declaring greed and capitalism wrong was quite a contrast. I still haven't digested it. I respect Kiki Smith for what she has done, but I wish she would stand up and declare herself. We have to penetrate the obfuscating indirectness ( which is strangely, deeply allied with sixties modernism, as became clear in the lecture).

But the show is really wonderful, dozens of images, all of them beautiful in themselves, that together give us a whole new perspective on Kiki Smith. The Seattle Weekly had a nice analysis of the experience of looking at the show, up, down, and eye level. Sharon Arnold did a wonderful analysis from a completely different perspective than mine.

William Kentridge revisited

I am writing again about South African artist William Kentridge because I have learned a lot more about him from the catalog for the amazing exhibition in San Francisico, which I won't be able to see. This image is from Stereoscope, eighth of nine animated hand drawn films that Kentridge made about Soho and Felix. Soho is a bureaucrat who is buried in the system. Felix is a creative sensual personality who has an affair with his wife. In this frame from the film, you see Soho in 1999, after the end of Apartheid, after the Truth and Reconciliation commission, with his suit crying a sea of blue. The blue water is flowing everywhere, he is dejected. The blue water is cleansing, but his world has disintegrated. He knows he is guilty, he cannot deal with it. His whole world was numbers, control, greed, money, paper pushing. In the final film of the group, Tide Table, Soho is on the beach reading a newspaper, as people go in and out of the water. It seems to be a type of remission.
The work by Kentridge is about the position of the privileged white artist in the midst of a political system the he rejects, but is also part of, with the white bureaucrat who is greedy and rich, and the creative artist as stand ins for aspects of Kentridge himself. Apartheid, a system of detestable oppression, formed him , supported him, and made him a famous artist . He refers to it as a rock that he carries within him.

In the exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, Stereoscope is on exhibit along with Memo, a shorter film that is also about a bureaucrat in the midst of a sea of black ink that eventually takes him over. Other works in the show are filled with classical references, the Three Graces, Melancholia. and of course his famous Procession that encompasses the procession of refugees, of political marches, of protestors, of disenfranchised, of mindless followers, all are part of it. Kentridge, since the end of Apartheid refers to South Africa as a post anti apartheid society.

His interest in Mozart's opera, the Magic Flute, with a dancing rhinocerus in the animated proscenium setting behind the singers, suggests the absurdity and the beauty of the world. Kentridge does not suggest solutions to political problems, he does not advocate, instead he offers simply his own personal confusion and misgivings. He owes a lot to the early Russian avant-garde of utopian art after the Russian Revolution as well as Duchamp and Dada. But he too is dejected, he recognizes that utopias have always failed, ideologies don't work. What is left for us. Perhaps only sitting on a beach reading a newspaper as the inevitable tide of water washes over us.

William Kentridge takes Seattle by storm

This week we were on the cultural map with a performance by William Kentridge on Monday and an opera by Kentridge on Wednesday.
At the Henry Art Gallery, the performance, "I am not me, the horse is not mine"had its North American Debut. Naturally, I wasn't allowed to take pictures. This is a picture of a related idea, as you will see. I did take a few notes
The stage set echoed his studio, with a simple scaffolding, a working wall, with pentimenti of work removed, and the artist running through sets of notes. Back projected on the studio wall appeared the artist himself, once, twice, three times, at various times. The real Kentridge sometimes seemed to chase off these other Kentridges, sometimes dictate to them while they took notes, sometimes bore them to tears, and sometimes collaborate with them, as when he threw his real notes away and his photographic double caught them.
He started out with Gogol's The Nose from 1837 which was made into an opera by Shostakovich in 1928 at a critical transitional moment in the early Soviet Union, when creative thinkers were still allowed to work, just before the Stalinist era began. (Kentridge is actually going to present this opera next year)
He told some of the story ( one can't help but notice that the artist has a prominent nose, and therefore perhaps is attracted to stories about disappearing and reappearing noses)
He went backwards to an earlier version a story in a story from the seventeenth century, then Don Quixote.
Meanwhile the wall also projected some of his "stone age animation" images, and such images as video footage of himself (already mentioned above) and him awake at four am with a busy mind. The title refers to cut out collage pieces that seemed to form a horse for us, and as it fell apart, we still saw horse forms.
Here are a few quotes, that I found provocative:
"how much of the outside world do we need inside us to make sense. And we cannot stop making a meaning from shape, even as it disappears we hang onto it. 

We hang onto a skeleton of utopia.
Constructing meaning in the world is half of who we are.
We are heads banging against our own limitations. "
Meanwhile, animated images of things falling down including "that ridiculous blank space"
The animation also included the familiar marches of burdened people, but here they seemed to be carrying slogans from revolutions, rather than their worldly possessions as in his works that focus on South Africa.

The idea for me is that this performance speaks to a time when things in the world are changing ( as they are now, the performance was presented at the Sydney Biennial in 2008) when we carry dreams and ideals around until they have no meaning, much as we carry things around. Since Kentridge was shaped by apartheid South Africa, the post Apartheid era has been just that. Where do we carry our ideals and principles now. How do we go forward with our old ideas of equality and liberation.

It speaks also to our current state in the United States: as Obamamania gives way to reality, that he is of course part of the same system as George Bush, and a pawn in a larger system than he can possibly really change, what do we do with our hopes and dreams? Do we keep on lugging them around. Of course we do, even as they come crashing down. We go on demonstrating and protesting. 

A long section at the end of the play was reading from the trial of Bukharin, one of the most pivotal of the early revolutionaries, as he was forced to explain himself, and yet taken off to prison. The crashing of his ideals is in every line. 

Black Panthers and the White Art World

Never have I felt more acutely the separations in Seattle between white art and the real world than this weekend in Seattle. On Thursday night we had a moment of intersection (of sorts) thanks to Aperture Foundation and their publication of the amazing photographs by Stephen Shames of the Black Panthers. Stephen Shames, who is white, was friends with Bobby Seale in Berkeley and Oakland in 1966 from the time of the founding of the Black Panthers. He created a series of intimate photographs of the Panthers all over the country which have never been published before. They are on display at Odegaard and the book was sold at the Henry Art GalleryAuditorium in conjunction with a program.

We heard from Aaron Dixon and Larry Gossett about the founding of the Black Student Union at the University of Washington with only 12 students. Soon after they also founded the Black Panther Party in Seattle (although one comment on my blog suggested they were different groups) and it was the first Panther Party outside of Oakland. The picture shows some of the Black Panthers on the steps of the State Capitol, You can see Elmer Dixon right out in front. We also heard from Janet Jones who is responsible for an excellent online project about the history of the Black Panthers in Seattle. We are currently celebrating the 40th Anniversary of that historic moment. Unfortunately, UW is still dominantly white. Although there is an ethnic studies program, apparently faculty have blocked a 5 credit ethnic studies requirement for graduation. Obviously integration varies from program to program, also. Jacob Lawrence was hired in 1970 as a result of the Black Student Union pressures, and the diplomatic skills of then President Odegaard. But when I taught a course there in art history in 1997, there was no complete set of slides of Jacob Lawrence's work !

Stephen Shames photographs are on display in Odegaard Undergraduate Library at the University of Washington. So here came the Black Panther discussion into the Henry. Good for the Henry Art Gallery for hosting the discussion.

But then Friday I decided I needed to at least open myself to see a white art show so I went to Western Bridge where there was a generous buffet and several current artists, including Alfredo Jaar ( who is Chilean). Jaar was the reason I went, and his small work did not disappoint, it was three captions about the Rwanda massacre, without the photographs, part of his larger Rwanda project. The unspeakable aftermath of the Rwanda massacre that he witnessed has been the subject of many works by the artist. But the entire rest of the white art exhibition was playful, a room full of balloons, air in the eye through a hole, a text message piece that sends little cartoon images of a bear and other games. The idea was to "activate the passive viewer".

I went to hear Andreas Zybach on Saturday talk about his work. Inspired by a 19th century machine that produced energy from water in a clandestine way, Zybach's work involved a large construction through which we walked that generated 6.5 horsepower energy, enough to send ink through tubes and out on the floor of the gallery. It was not, however, about environmental crisis, energy issues or anything real (except perhaps in a closet way) . It was about taking the idea of a machine that generates energy and making it playful. The entire exhibition was called "You Complete Me," a theme suggesting interactivity, but when the ink on the floor started being used to spell "iraq" the artist decided this didn't complete him and rubbed it out. There lies a long essay perhaps on "what is art". Western Bridge according to director Eric Fredericksen, is about post painterly abstraction, so therefore Iraq has no place there.

It was going from Western Bridge to the Black Panthers anniversary that led to my despair. The event included speakers like hip hop artist Laura Peace(Piece) Kelly and Bobby Seale himself . People talked about both the present world of violence ( the police who killed Sean Bell had just been let off) and the tactics and strategies that the Panthers used to get gangs to work together, feed children, provide health care, educate black people politically, etc. The tactics used to break them up, infiltration by the FBI and getting them back to the business of killing each other, are exactly the tactics being used in Iraq today.

The myth of Black Panthers as simply carrying guns and threatening whites is a long way from reality, which brings us back to the photographs of the Black Panthers by Shames as well as the art work by Emory Douglas, ( this is not a link to Amazon, although it took some effort), now available in a book. Emory Douglas is the Black Panther Minister of Culture and his section of the Black Panther website is an amazing resource on all sorts of histories and references to both Black Panthers and current injustice. His posters and drawings document the strength of political art when it is done by a really good artist for a deeply felt cause in which he is engaged. ( Example below)

So back to segregation. I was sick at the isolation and narcissism of the white art world. The irrelevant playfulness of the art ( except for Jaar), at this time in our nation's history is so sad.

I wish the intersection at the Henry Art Gallery had been deeper, longer, and more committed ( like having a partner show in the gallery). But at least it was a start. According to Jen Graves in the Stranger, the Henry has been sneaking in politics all year. I am ready for them to be less stealthy, but again, at least it is better than little bears on my cell phones. How about an exhibition of the work of Emory Douglas?