As a painter of political ideas—and, often, the grotesque and cruel—Luc Tuymans is a historian of images that appear banal but reveal sinister workings: colored blobs are actually disembodied eyeballs; a bare room with flattened perspective is the site of uncountable murders; a limp cloth turns out to be the emblem of a growing nationalist movement. His first U.S. retrospective, a mid-career survey now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is installed in chronological order, rewarding the viewer with a sense of how his ideas developed for each series. To mark this notable event, Mr. Tuymans conducted a personal tour of the galleries, illuminating his process and the themes behind each work. He concluded the tour with the remark, “I am not interested in having power. I am interested in looking at power.”

La correspondance (Correspondence), 1985. 31.5 x 47.5 inches (80 x 120 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“I stopped painting from 1981 to 1985 because it became too suffocating and too existential. And somebody by accident shoved a Super-8 camera in my hands and I started to film. And then I came back. Making images is important in the sense that you need distance.”

“This was the first painting made after the film adventure [above]. And it’s actually one of my most conceptual works, and it’s based upon an anecdote. The anecdote is from a Dutch writer who was stationed in the Dutch Embassy from 1905 to 1910. And he didn’t have enough money to bring his wife over to Berlin. And in those days you had the grand cafes with very bourgeois interiors, and also postcards taken of them. So every time he went to eat in such places he bought a postcard, and with a red pencil he crossed out the table at which he had eaten, and he sent it to his wife during the duration of five years. So that’s why it’s called correspondence. It’s also the idea of persistence, and homesickness without an end.”

Die Wiedergutmachung (Reparations), 1989. 17.75 x 21.625, 15 x 17.75 inches (45 x 55, 38 x 45 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“This is something I saw on television. It’s called the Weidergutmachung, and it’s about the woman who made the documentary, it was made in ‘89, which is when I saw the documentary on the West German television. It was quite an interesting documentary because Weidergutmachung means the pay-back system towards the people who suffered in the concentration camps…this time not the Jewish people, but Gypsy twins on which the German doctors in the concentration camps had experimented. These people were never paid back because the guy who was actually responsible for the whole situation of the repayment was also a doctor who himself experimented on them during the times he was working in the concentration camp. When he dies off in ‘83 in his bureau drawer, the woman who was making the documentary found contact prints of disengaged eyeballs and hands. So this is what I saw on the television screen. It was such a poignant element that I turned it into a more organic imagery.”

Gaskamer (Gas Chamber), 1986; oil on canvas; 24 x 32 1/2 in. (61 x 82.5 cm); The Over Holland Collection. In honor of Caryl Chessman; © Luc Tuymans; photo: Peter Cox, courtesy The Over Holland Collection

“The most problematic painting that I ever painted—that I ever will paint as long as I live, probably—is the Gas Chamber. The Gas Chamber was derived from a visit to in Dachau where you have a real gas chamber and not a replica. And I stood in it, and I made a watercolor when I visited it, and for years this watercolor was on the floor of my studio, which made the color of the paper yellow. And I also made it on a frame that is deliberately not straight. It’s a metonymous image, because without the words of the title it would be completely without effect, it would be just a painting. Nevertheless, it shows the triviality of that type of horror. At the time of its use, it was masked as a place where you could get a shower. All the elements of perspective are taken out, in order to get to this feeling of claustrophobic existence. I mean, a lot of times the Germans say, ‘We can’t deal with that type of history as the Holocaust,’ but I’m not agreeing with that, it is part of the culture… This remains a very difficult and ambiguous painting.”

The Flag, 1995. 54.375 x 30.75 inches (138.1 x 78.1 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“This was from a show about Flemish nationalism in my hometown, where at that point (luckily not anymore) there was the biggest concentration of the right-wing political party called the Flemish Bloc. So I thought I would start with their icons. This is the Belgian lion. The Belgian lion normally is a lion on a yellow backdrop with red claws. To enlighten you about the history of Flanders is going to take us very long, because it’s a long story to begin with, but anyway, to give you an idea…During the first world war, all the officers were French speaking. This meant that during the First World War a lot of Belgian people died in that war, millions of them. The people who were the soldiers, the foot guys, they were all Flemish; there were huge massacres, because when the officers would say a gauche [French: left], they would go right, into the machine fire. In between the two world wars there was a closeness in terms of culture to the German culture, more than to the French culture. And that ended up in a collaboration with the Germans. So a very difficult situation. That’s why you have a lot of marriage trouble, which I also witnessed. My mother was Dutch, they were in the resistance. My father was the Flemish side, they had collaborated. At dinner, when I was five years old, this explodes by the accidental showing up of a photograph of the guy I was named after doing the Hitler salute. You can imagine the whole situation. So what you can see here is the Flemish lion, and I just made a watercolor of it, and then I crumbled it together, and then pinned it on the wall. And then I did something I had never done before, I took a Polaroid of it, and it was such bad quality that it totally deleted the imagery, which is actually beautiful I think. And this was the first time I used Polaroid as a device to derive imagery.”

Ballroom Dancing, 2005; oil on canvas; 62 1/4 x 40 3/4 (158 x 103.5); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional and promised gift of Shawn and Brook Byers; © Luc Tuymans

“This was painted out of my disgust with the Bush legislation. The first idea I had was this: I was thinking of this element of regression in American society in those days, going back to an open form of conservatism, and therefore Fred Astaire, Ginger Rodgers. Ballroom dancing. So then I was on the web browsing, trying to find more contemporary imagery, and in 2005 there was the Texas Governor’s ball, this is the Texas seal, the woman swings her head out, this guy is the epitome of well-behaved and whatever. And on the other hand, this is an image that’s really classical, I really loved doing it…”

The Secretary of State, 2005; oil on canvas; 18 x 24 1/4 in. (45.7 x 61.5 cm); Collection the Museum of Modern Art, New York, promised gift of David and Monica Zwirner; courtesy David Zwirner, New York; © Luc Tuymans

“…Then, one of my best friends who used to be the Minster of Foreign Affairs, made a remark of Condoleeza Rice—I was in a bar, reading this in a newspaper—there was a day Condoleeza Rice came and visited our country, and he said something like, “She is very intelligent, and she is not unpretty.” And this sexist remark led to my idea of Condoleeza Rice. The interesting point is that she is depicted not to be judged, she is depicted with great determination. At that point no one knew what the woman was going to achieve.”

Installation view of ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993. Photo: Katya Kallsen © President and Fellows of Harvard College

When I was an undergraduate painting major, my drawing instructor, a cool-headed minimalist who approached teaching with as much restraint as he did art-making, warned me not to preach to the choir. I had made a series of over-stimulating, muddy drawings in which decadent magazine imagery swam in bleeding pools of ink. The drawings criticized consumer culture (loudly), but they didn’t do much else. “Everyone who sees these will already agree with you,” my instructor said. If I was going to make art that would hang on walls and be viewed by largely liberal audiences, what would I gain by reiterating progressive ideas? A pat on the back?

Over the past year, I’ve seen a spattering of activist art that made me bristle—all-but-haloed images of our new president, liberated grocery carts that have been turned into mobile compost bins, or wall texts that proclaim vague imperatives like “Now” or “Act.” Seeing work like this in a gallery feels like encountering a self-contained anti-war protest in the quad of a left-leaning campus. It makes you wonder, for a moment, if you do live in a vacuum.

Art and politics belong together, but not in the way the way global warming belongs to Al Gore, or the FDA belongs to Phillip Morris—there shouldn’t be any self-congratulation, lobbying, or under-the-table favors. When I think of the potential of political art, I often think of David Wojnarowicz’s videos from the early ‘90s—portraits of disintegration, they attacked Aids-era government with a vengeance so guttural and naked that they turned politics into gut-spilling and made viewers who voted red squirm just as badly as viewers who voted blue.

Art + Positive, AIDS Is Killing Artists, Now Homophobia Is Killing Art, 1990. Sticker, 4 x 6 in. Courtesy of Avram Finkelstein. Photo: Jessica Ficken.

Act Up New York: Activism, Art, and the Aids Crisis, 1987-1993, currently on view at Harvard’s Carpenter Art Center, may not rival the intensity of Wojnarowicz’s ITSOFOMO or Fire in My Belly. But it takes on the relation between art and activism in a way that is gripping, urgent and also pragmatic. Curated by Helen Molesworth, Harvard’s Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, and Claire Grace, curatorial intern and doctoral candidate, the exhibition chronicles six peak years of The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (Act UP), a group that took to the streets to advocate for gay rights and health care in the late 1980s, as the Aids death toll rose steeply. The work archived Act Up doesn’t pose as art, per se. It does, however, seem at home in an art space.

On the first floor of the Carpenter Center, video monitors play interviews from The Act UP Oral History Project, an effort, spearheaded by Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, to record the stories of living Act Up alumni (Schulman knew she had to begin the project after she heard a commentator on the radio say “At first, America had trouble with people with AIDS, but then they came around”—“I could not continue my life without making sure that no one would ever say something like that again,” Schulman told the National Institute of Health). There are more than enough monitors to overwhelm; no one can possibly watch the hours of footage that loop through that room. Yet the talking faces on each screen compel attention, many of them speak carefully, considering their history with the hesitation of people old enough to feel the weight of time but young enough to see their personal futures as more promising than their pasts. Says on interviewee, “Becoming an Aids activist was like a religious conversion, in many ways, in terms of the passion and self-discovery and creating a new identity.”

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Photograph by Rick Rhodes. Courtesy of the artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (HICA) in Charleston, South Carolina has a long history of celebrating works by artists who exist on the fringe of the mainstream contemporary art world. For the inaugural exhibition of their new gallery space, Director and Senior Curator Mark Sloan is presenting a collection of collage and assemblage works, titled work v. / work n., from a rather unknown artist standing at the edge of her first major museum exhibition, at the ripe age of 74.

The artist, known only as Aldwyth, has long abandoned her first name not in the hopes of being seen in the fashionable lineage of Madonna and Cher, but to conceal her identity as a woman and to neutralize her position as an artist in a male dominated world.  As an artist evaluating the mainstream art world from the sidelines, much of her work confronts the patriarchal genealogy of art from the margins. Similarly described in the bell hooks essay marginality as site of resistance, Aldwyth carefully moves away from marginalization as a site of deprivation and positions herself in a space of resistance, remaining part of the whole but outside the main body of the art world.

Gallery Installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

For decades, Aldwyth has remained rather anonymous, creating work in seclusion in a small coastal island of South Carolina. Many of her works confront issues related to exclusion within recorded art history, like Document, where she attempts to amend the history of art as listed in the 1950’s edition of Canaday and Janson with ongoing personal updates. By endlessly expanding the 1950’s edition, Aldwyth rewrites art history as she sees fit and leaves the end blank for history to continue to write itself.

Aldwyth’s collage works explore the massive through the minute, creating large indexes of images and ideas. In works such as The World According to Zell and Casablanca the artist has created entire worlds that catalog and reveal new meaning through the manipulation of context. The World According to Zell recontextualizes an encyclopedia from 1871 whereas the artist has removed all images in the two volume set to create her own visual history.

Gallery Installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

She has also created an impressive collection of assemblage works with found objects embedded with their own cultural history. Many of the objects tell an abstract story of the artists life, including personal rejection, success, wonder and melancholy. The objects found within her assemblage works offer a direct nod to artists such as Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp and much of the Dadaist movement.

While it may seem unfit for an artist who often creates work about being on the outside of an institutional framework to finally be the subject of a major museum exhibition, it is precisely this fact that makes Aldwyth’s work so appealing. Creating work for decades with little to no regard of ever exhibiting her creations has embedded the work with a unique sincerity that comes as a privilege for viewing. To experience the artist’s work is to confront a new history, one that has been rewritten from the outside looking in.

Photograph by Rick Rhodes. Courtesy of the artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

Work v. / Work n. will be on view at HICA through January 9th, 2010. The exhibition will travel to the Telfair Museum’s Jepson Center for the Arts from February 10th through May 17th, 2010. Work v. / Work n. is accompanied by a full color-catalog.

Walead Beshty

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently presenting New Photography 2009, this year’s installment of a series that began in 1985 with the aim of exhibiting the most compelling recent work in the field of contemporary photography.  Organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, the exhibition brings together six young artists, Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek, in a visually diverse body of work.  Most of these artists actively produce work in other media, such as drawing, video, and installation, and each one has an innovative and distinct method of constructing a photograph.  Collectively, these artists investigate the making of a photographic image in the twenty-first century, often utilizing processes of collecting, assembling, or manipulating other images or items.

With the advent of contemporary aesthetics and technologies, photography, long characterized by its ability to capture and represent reality, is again the subject of critical debate. The historical definition of the medium is challenged by the rise of digital capabilities and software programs, which allow photographers to combine their own images with others that are digitally uploaded or scanned.  The abundance of imagery now available at the click of a mouse has led artists towards a deeper analysis of the role of an image within society.  The six artists included in the exhibition create their pictures in a studio or darkroom, investigating the expanded vocabulary of digital processes and its technical and theoretical implications for photography.   The exhibition highlights an epochal moment of transformation for the medium, showcasing the work of artists who critically confront our media saturated world, and open a new era of possibility for photography.  Some works reference traditional techniques of the medium while others are constructed from online images; the works included range from abstract to representational. (more…)

Second Nature, currently on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum, provides a freshly intelligent glimpse into Los Angeles’ past decade, depicting a world in which art can insouciantly assert itself without resorting to contrivance.

1. “‘There’s going to be a seismic change,” said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter after 9/11. “I think it’s the end of the age of irony. Things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear.” But, of course, Carter kept right on publishing his sleek, ad-filled nucleus of frivolity and irony kept thriving.

Ruby Neri. Untitled (Lioness), 1998-1999. 102 x 63 x 44 1/2 inches. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Gift of Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson. Image courtesy of the artist, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

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Loren Schwerd’s Mourning Portraits provide humanized descriptions of the blight that persists in the years after Hurricane Katrina. Working from her photographs taken in efforts to digest these remnants of life, she rebuilds crumbling artifacts as scrupulous and loving memorials to her community. Out of human hair extensions, discarded near St. Claude Beauty Supply in New Orleans, she depicts her encounter with absent victims. Inspired by the tradition of 18th and 19th century memento mori hair jewelry, she participates in a sentimental activity to honor the deceased. These expressive and elegant constructions allow the viewer an extended gaze into this dark topic, beyond its sheer mass that obscures individual identities.

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Currently on view at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles is a solo exhibition of new work by LA artist Jason Houchen, entitled Fallen Trees Spread No Seeds. Houchen’s past life in Missouri solicits his Americana aesthetic, to which he adds a healthy dose of Los Angeles irony and tongue-in-cheek imagery. The painstakingly delicate woodburnings – manifested on either sculpted and carved moose or ram heads, lampshades with polished silver antler bases, belt buckles or flat wooden panels – depict a folksy batch of collective portraits and landscapes. But through Houchen’s witty presentation and thorough craft, one is sure to not confuse the work with folk art goods being sold roadside to tourists on the way to the Grand Canyon.

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