Sanford Biggers, Seen, 2009, Video still, Digital C-print, 30 x 40 in. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York

Currently on view at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum is a solo presentation of new work by internationally renowned, New York-based artist, Sanford Biggers. The work on view in the exhibition, entitled Moon Medicine, encompasses the breadth of Biggers’ practice. As he tells the SBCAF, “It is a thematic, multi-disciplinary exploration of past themes and new themes meant to broaden and complicate our read on American history.” In a recent video-recorded conversation between Biggers and CAF executive director, Miki Garcia, Biggers discusses his avoidance of artistic labels, such as “post black.” These labels are not rejected by the artist for the sake of radicalism but, rather, because he says that no matter how you mean it to sound, a label is always “predicated on there being an other.” Biggers further explains that he rejects labels even in his discussion of artistic medium, saying he’s “not interested in being a sculptor [or] a performance artist…I just make things.” Of his process, he says, “The more confused I am while making a piece now, the more successful it is to me regardless of what it ends up looking like.”

The recurring imagery of mandalas in Biggers’ work reflects a strong interest in Buddhism, the exploration of which is found in his past and current work. Biggers gained interest in the Buddhist tradition while living in Japan and traveling all over Asia years ago. Of the work he made upon returning to the US from Asia, Biggers says it became autobiographical in part—in the sense that he “fused some of what [he] had been studying and researching in terms of Buddhism, but also bringing in some things from my childhood, growing up in Los Angeles, and being a B-boy.”

Sanford Biggers, Constellation, 2009, Steel, Plexiglas, LED’s, Zoopoxy, cotton quilt, original printed cotton tile. Dimensions variable, Installation at Harvard University. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York, NY.

Biggers is a master of alluding labels, as we’ve learned, and the “elliptical” nature of his work (as Garcia refers to it), creates an open-ended dialog that spans a range of subjects from religious practices, to themes of racial tensions in the American South, to pop culture iconography. Moon Medicine will be on view through May 2, 2010.

Sanford Biggers lives and works in new York. He earned his BA at Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA and his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including at Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Okinawa Museum, Okinawa, Japan; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In it’s last week on view at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids is a solo exhibition of work by Chad Curtis entitled: DIGITAL IN NATURE.  The work included in the exhibition investigates the relationship of organic, living beings to the complex, nuanced environment and digital landscape. Each piece utilizes, to some degree, a crude, home brewed fabrication-and-drawing machine that relies on digital design tools, and computer numeric control.

Curtis often deals with simulation and refinement, utilizing highly processed materials removed from the context of their origin, to create a synthetic experience.  While the sculpture aims to potentially simulate an environment, the drawings serve as illustrations, of a lost world that happens to look a lot like the world we live in.

In a broader context, the work explores the line between the biological and mechanical, using popular, iconographic references. The idea of a distinction between the biological and the industrial, or the human and the digital, and the blurring of that distinction, is explored both as subject matter in the work and also in the production.

Chad Curtis currently serves as an Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. Trained in Ceramics and Printmaking, Curtis earned his BFA from Minnesota State University and his MFA from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

Edouard Duval-Carrié, Le monde actuel, ou Erzulie interceptée (The World at Present, or Ezili Intercepted), 1996, Bass Museum of Art

With the recent events developing in Haiti, the complicated history between the country and the United States has quickly surfaced. A group of American Baptists attempted to transport Haitian children out off the country without proper documentation causing an international media storm and a recent article from UK Guardian journalist Seumas Milne’s which questioned the U.S. Military’s motivation in “[commandeering] Port-au-Prince’s airport…[turning] away flights bringing medical equipment and emergency supplies from organizations…in order to give priority to landing troops.” This latent disregard seems to also be seeping into the discussion of the country’s history of art as well. In the earthquake’s aftermath, it is difficult to argue the importance of salvaging this artistic history while the reality of the devastation and number of lives lost continues to reveal itself. Yet, the recent foray of two U.S. media publications into this realm, and the aforementioned events, has led me to believe that the need for this discussion has come to us sooner rather than later.  It is the apparent unfamiliarity with Haitian culture, in this case, its art, that is most problematic and results in its artists and history to undergo further marginalization. By using its artistic history as a window into its national identity, hopefully, Haiti can be defined as more than one of the world’s poorest countries.

On January 24^th, the Los Angeles Times reported the destruction of the Centre d’Art, a historical art center founded in Port-au-Prince in 1944, which helped to launch Haitian artists onto the international art scene. There are two major problems with the article that need to be discussed further. The first is the usage of the term “primitive.” This label was used to define Haitian artists by the founders of the Centre d’Art (two Americans and a Frenchman) as a way to market said artists within the international scene. The trend in the art world during this time was to find the next great “primitive” artist, an influence of Dada and Surrealist artistic movements that sought to reclaim an innocence felt to have been lost with the industrialization of Europe. Haitian artists who were willing to be perceived through this European/American hegemonic gaze could find a place within the international art market.

Centre d'Art damage (Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times / January 23, 2009)

However, there is a long tradition of Haiti’s creolized academic tradition of which a formal, figurative style in Haitian painting can be traced back to. Philomé Obin (1892 – 1986) had been painting thirty years before the center opened and is still considered one of the most influential artists on Haitian art today. His work stands as an example of the school of memorializing well-known events within Haiti’s revolutionary history, frequently referencing Haitian heroes such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Charlemagne Péralte. Obin championed the school of nationalist art in Haiti and his influence can still be seen today in works by internationally known artists such as Edouard Duval-Carrié. To continue to refer to these artists and their works as “primitive” in this day and age without any context, as did the Los Angeles Times journalist Tracy Wilkinson, is, well, just plain lazy.

The second problematic area of the Los Angeles Times article, and in which we can also refer to the New Yorker’s January 25^th cover, is the continued use of the world “voodoo” when referring to the Haitian religion of vodou (also known as vaudou). The cover featured the painting The Resurrection of the Dead from contemporary Haitian artist Frantz Zephirin (a grand-nephew of Obin). The painting depicts imagery of vodou guide (“gods”), as they guard the passage between life and death. Both publications use the term “voodoo”, a Western construct laden with racial prejudice, with no further explanation of its immense role within Haitian art history or the formation of its national identity. Vodou is a combination of West African and Roman Catholic religions, comprised of deities, or lwas, which through worship, help practitioners get closer to the supreme god, Bondeyé. In her article Vodou, Nationalism, and Performance: The Staging of Folklore in Mid-Twentieth Century Haiti, Kate Ramsey discusses the role of the religion in the formation of the indigènisme movement, a conceptual rallying point for revolution against the U.S. occupation of 1915, rooted in ethnic and cultural identity. The religion was criminalized and those who observed its ceremonies were persecuted, forcing vodou to go underground and evolve into a locale of resistance for Haitians. During this time, vodou would become exoticized by American/European artists searching to connect to the “other”, such as choreographer Katherine Dunham and avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, best known for Divine Horseman: the Living Gods of Haiti, a film documenting vodou ceremonial rituals and practitioners.

Frantz Zephirin, The Resurrection of the Dead (2007), On the cover of the January 25, 2010 of "New Yorker" magazine

Once vodou became legal in 1946, the Centre d’Art encouraged its artists to incorporate religious imagery within their artwork, as it was perceived as purely authentic (read “primitive”). Haitian artists who made the conscientious decision to allow themselves to be labeled as “other,” were able to achieve success within the international market. A prime example is the artist Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), who through acceptance of the role projected onto him, exhibited in Paris and New York frequently and could claim patrons such as André Breton (father of the Surrealist movement) and American author Truman Capote. In his 2000 lecture, Voodoo Terror: (mis)representations of voodoo and western cultural anxieties, presented at the October Gallery in London, John Cussans discusses the “voodoo construct” and its four different distinctions: the voodoo doll; the zombie; the voodoo witch doctor; and voodoo possession. Through these continued representations, Cussans argues, vodou has been continually objectified and suppressed by U.S./European culture and its continued need to ethnographically “authenticate,” (or define through a Western gaze), what they don’t understand. Cussans concluded, “It is this tendency to return voodoo to vodou that must be reversed if we are to resist the compassionate continuation of vodou’s suppression effected by the misguided will to authenticity.” In other words, any concept of voodoo must be abandoned when approaching the Haitian religion; otherwise, we are doing nothing more than participating in the continued misrepresentation. This is the problem with the U.S. media publications. So ingrained in the American psyche has this misrepresentation become, these journalists didn’t even think to research the religion.

Hector Hypplite (1894-1948), La dauration l'amour (The Adoration of Love), 1946-48, in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Centre d’Art and local galleries have reported the loss of many artworks contained in their collective walls, not to mention a number of represented artists. The recent tragedy has made Haiti the world’s disaster darling and it has been tremendous how people from all over the world have responded to the country’s need for help. Yet, we need to take a collective breath and become aware that we are treading on complicated ground.  The lack of reference to any real historical, artistic or political context from both publications highlights the challenging areas that arise whenever a Western power has offered aid to Haiti. We cannot sustain meaning as a global community if we keep repeating the historic mistakes of colonization. As we go forward, we need to raise our awareness to include the entire story, not fixing Haitians and their history in a marginalized space, putting aside our preconceived notions in order to truly help Haiti. If not, I guarantee, we will have another revolution on our hands.

Originally Published on February 27, 2009

Artist Profile: Robbie Conal from By Osmosis TV on Vimeo.

Los Angeles-based artist Robbie Conal has made a name for himself over the past several decades for his poignantly irreverent and ultra-humorous political posters featuring unforgettable one-liner jokes. The artist wittingly simplifies issues that surround political figures and delivers the work to a mass audience by creating reproductions of his painting, pasting the posters in cities throughout the country. His clever insight can be seen over countless paintings such as a rendering of Dick Cheney with bunny ears bearing the simple phrase ‘Enronergizer Bunny’ over a hot pink ground.

In his current series of work, the artist has begun to move away from his well-known political poster portraits and has been investigating other, equally clever, connections between popular culture and politics.

The artist recently exhibited a new painting in the retrospective exhibition Beautiful/Decay: A to Z, which opened at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles last weekend. In addition, Conal recently teamed up with By Osmosis TV and Beautiful/Decay magazine to produce a short interview video that features the artist at work in his studio.

"We Live in Public," Film Still, 2008.

Josh Harris welcomed the new millennium from the basement of a New York bunker. He was surrounded by a posse of jumpsuit-clad creatives, and, at one point, all of them watched as a naked man whipped a barely dressed woman around underneath a running shower head. The scene made about as much physical sense as Bernini’s The Rape of Prosperina—the bodies twisted perpetually but never quite met in the way you’d expect them to. Harris and his companions watched the crude assault as though it were on television.

One of the first entrepreneurs to channel the potential of internet TV, Harris used a significant portion of his dot-com  fortune to build the bunker, which he called Capsule Hotel and filled with over 100 mini living pods, a shooting gallery, interrogation room, banquet hall, bar, and obscene number of cameras and video monitors. By the time New Years’ Eve arrived, 150 people had lived in the Hotel for nearly a month.

Residents (including Alanna Heiss, P.S.1’s haughtily fearless matron) submitted to constant surveillance and interrogation in exchange for admittance. Not only were members of the panoptical community watched, but they could watch one another by tuning in to any channel on any of the readily-available monitors.

"We Live in Public," Film Still, 2008.

“Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That, we own,” says Harris in We Live in Public, an unpretentiously efficient documentary released on DVD this week. It’s a telling quote because it suggests that the opposite of free is not costliness but being owned, and it pushes Harris’ experiment out of the realm of asset-swapping and into soul-selling.

Directed by Ondi Timoner, We Live in Public follows Harris through the birth of his dot-com fortune and his subsequent series of ahead-of-their-time media experiments. Harris plays villain and hero, acting as a self-appointed artist-prophet who exploits people’s penchant for attention and thus exposes a future in which “we’re going to increasingly have our lives exposed in very personal and intimate ways and we’ll want it to happen.” Chuck Klosterman would almost certainly call Harris “advanced.”

Not long after Quiet, the 24/7 bunker surveillance venture, was shut down by the NYPD  in early January, 2000, Harris invited his girlfriend Tanya to move in with him. Together, they went public. They installed nearly thirty web cameras in their home, including one in the toilet, and streamed their whole life onto the web. When they fought, they would run immediately to their computers, to see which of them had the allegiance of chat room regulars.

It ended badly, of course. After the dot-com crash, in which Harris’ fortune all but disappeared, Harris ended his relationship with Tanya (later he would call her a “pseudo-girlfriend,” though she claims they loved each other) and pulled the plug on public living.

As the rest of the world caught on to online chatting and video streams, Harris pulled away, initially living on a rural apple farm and later disappearing to Ethiopia to evade creditors.

Gustavo Artigas, "Vote for Demolition," 2009. Courtesy LAX Art.

Exposure doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Now the well-trafficked terrain of mainstream websites and reality TV, it often seems contrived and redundant when it appears in art. Many of the best artist-driven social experiments I’ve encountered this year refuse to invaded peoples’ privacy and, as a result, they seem perfunctory, even impersonal.

In Vote for Demolition, artist Gustavo Artigas invited people to vote for which over-priced, over-sized Los Angeles’ building most deserved the wrecking ball. The voting booths at LAX Art were perfectly spaced, giving voters plenty of room to deliberate, and Artigas asked for no personal information. The “surveillance” in John Baldessari’s recent exhibition is carefully unobtrusive–a camera watches you watching art, and, while art-viewing may be a genuinely intimate experience, it’s one that tends to play out in public anyway. Baldessari’s experiment feels more like documentation than invasion. Its aloofness makes the loneliness of experience painfully evident; no live streams or chat rooms can combat the fact that, most of the time, we navigate the world alone with our bodies. But maybe that’s okay.

When Harris moved to his apple farm, an interviewer asked him, “Are you a lonely man?”

He responded, “The implication when you say ‘am I a lonely man,’ is that it’s worse than being together. It’s just a different state of being, and one I’m quite comfortable with.”

The self-proclaimed “most important survey of contemporary art in the world ever” opened this week in at 350 West Broadway in SoHo, New York.  The Brucennial 2010 edition, titled “Miseducation,” is presented in a 5,000 square foot space temporarily donated by the real-estate mogul and art collector Aby Rosen and supposedly “brings together 420 artists from 911 countries working in 666 discrete disciplines.”  But who’s counting?  The creative art collective behind what is seen as a parody version of the Whitney Biennial is made up of five mysterious guys known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation.  Although the Foundation participated in the recent “1969″ exhibit at P.S.1, Brucennial remains the collective’s signature celebrated program since the founding of the event in 2008.

Focused on reshaping the art world via a more democratic and DIY approach, the Foundation places some of its more visible functions, like PR and the organization of exhibtions, into the artists hands.  Perhaps the result can best be described as a visual cacaphony.  The Brucennial’s rather lax entry standards (an email asked prospective participants to “either dredge something up or create something new…As fast and as loose as you like”) is a refreshing juxtaposition to the supposed stringent selection criteria of the Whiteny’s Biennial.  With a “sharing is caring” attitude and limited wall space artists move their pieces around in order to make room for new arrivals.  Neither first-come basis nor celebrity secures an artist a better spot, and emerging artists as well as blue chip artists (like Julian Schnabel) display their pieces side by side.  The title “Miseducation” and its press release offer insight into the Foundation’s desire to question the politics and institutional protectionism that seem to run the art world. However, one has to wonder how “lax”  and rebellious the event can remain with heavy-hitter curators Francesco Bonami and Vito Schnabel involved with curating the event.

The Brucenial 2010: Miseducation runs through April 4 at 350 West Broadway, SoHo, with projects also on view at Recess at 41 Grand Street.  The event also includes performances and a literary supplement.

Marilyn Minter, Crystal Swallow (2006), Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein to The Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin

Now showing through April 25^th at The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is the group exhibition Desire. Curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Blanton curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs, Desire features fifty works from an international grouping of contemporary artists working in a variety of media. The concept of the exhibition is to present the many ways artists have explored the notion of desire and its many facets within their work. The thought of this concept being visually displayed is tantalizing, yet, it is only with the multiple video works that the exhibition’s guard comes down. Isaac Julien’s Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), a video collaboration with the choreographer Javier de Frutos, is a stunning visualization of the yearning of two cowboys “dancing” around their mutual attraction and the stigma that often comes along with it.  Cauleen Smith’s Elsewhere, is a sensual film of a woman standing absolutely still while another person slowly unravels her sweater by a single thread.

Amy Globus, Electric Sheep (2001 - 2002), Blanton Museum of Art, Purchase through the generosity of the 2004 Blanton Contemporary Circle

However, it is Amy Globus’s video installation Electric Sheep (2001-2002) that will make the viewer blush. Set to Emmy Lou Harris’ rendition of Neil Young’s, Wrecking Ball, a large octopus is filmed in slow motion as it makes its way from one confined space to another. While watching the piece the viewer is likely to feel all the accoutrements of desire simultaneously: longing, lust, sensuality, fantasy, rejection, sexual identity, passion, intimacy etc. Also not to be missed is Mads Lynnerup’s Untying a Shoe with an Erection (2003), a tongue-in-cheek performance of presumably a man untying his shoe with his penis. The exhibition is able to transcend being merely an exercise of artists implementing the theme of desire, perhaps a bit unwittingly, with the dominance of these video works. The question that lingers long after leaving the museum is exactly how much of a continued role visual media plays in defining our collective idea of desire.

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, housed in a recently completed two building complex, is one of the foremost university art museums in the country. The museum’s collection is the largest and most comprehensive in Central Texas and comprises more than 18,000 works. It is recognized for its European paintings, modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, and an encyclopedic collection of prints and drawings.

With the title “Size Does Matter”  for his debut show as a curator, one has to wonder if Shaquille O’Neal is talking about the size of one’s wallet, connections, ego, or one’s preference to bra size.   With the opening of the show at Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation the famous basketball player, actor, and rapper can now add “art curator” to his ever-expanding resume of accomplishments.   The exhibition includes work by 39 different artists, or “artstars” to be more accurate, whose works explore the myriad ways that scale affects the perception of contemporary art.  The scale theme is extremely fitting: weighing 320 pounds and standing 7′1 atop his size 22 shoes, Shaquille O’Neal has described his own size as “monumental” and he has the ability to dwarf just about everyone in his presence.

O’Neal made sixty-six selections for the show, which features works ranging from the ginormous billboard-sized Andreas Gursky’s photograph Madonna I to the microscopic work of Willard Wigan.  It is rumored that the works were chosen from over 200 images that FLAG founder Glenn Fuhrman and director Stephanie Roach showed him over dinner after a game.  O’Neal has also admitted that he is a great friend of Donald Trump who has four or five Picassos on his plane that O’Neal likes to look at when flying with him.  And with that, viola, a curator is born.  Describing the process of picking the works to include in the show, O’Neal explains, “Art is a process of delivering or arranging elements that appeal to the emotions of a person looking at it.  It’s what you feel.  I picked those things because they were beautiful.”  With this criteria in mind it is not surprising that another theme of the show could be “half-naked women,” or “ginormous breasts,”  as pieces by Richard Patterson, Dr. Lakra, and Lisa Yuskavage graphically illustrate.  O’Neil also plays the role of the muse for the show inspiring works like Willard Wigan’s  Micro Shaq,  Mark Wagner’s Shaq by Marq and Peter Max’s Portrait of Shaquille O’ Neal. These pieces embrace the famous basketball player’s happy-go lucky attitude, goofy grin, and larger than life attitude.

“Size Does Matter” is on display from February 19, 2010-May 27, 2010 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea. Shaquille O’Neil is best known as a center for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Cleveland’s controversial best-selling author James Fray, who has written extensively on art, has an accompanying book for O’Neal’s art show that features installation images and an essay.

Still image from Erik Levine's Grip, 2005

As we witnessed over the past two weeks at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, athletes are under perpetually extreme pressure. During practice and performance—be it game, match, run or race—athletes in all sports carry the weight of victory on their shoulders, which of course is why the best of them are so uniquely admired.

Currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is a presentation of Erik Levine’s 2005 large-scale video projection, Grip, which the museum has recently acquired. Grip, a two-channel DVD in an edition of six, deals with the complexities of athleticism, as it features teenage boys playing tennis. The kaleidoscopic images in the two-channel video bend inward and out in a hypnotizing way as well as showing silent side by side shots of the young players in various states of sportsmanship on and off the court.

At first the quick-cuts of boys at play make up a montage that looks almost like a Gatorade commercial, but the clips quickly segue from displays of athleticism to the torture of self-punishment as boys slap their foreheads, kick their rackets, and fall to the green court on their knees in defeat. One boy shouts, “I quit tennis, man,” as he throws the racket to the ground, with not so much rage as a sense of what seems to be complete despair.

Many of us would argue that, within reason, the pressures of competition help to build character in adolescents, even if the athletes never go on to compete professionally, but that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking to watch a teenager bury his face in a towel to hide his tears after losing a match. However, too much of this mounted pressure can be dangerous for athletes of this age. As Erik Levine asserts in his discussion of the piece, “This despair can lead to extreme expressions of anger and frustration at a time in their lives when perspective can often be elusive, and alludes to the startling and revealing analogous microcosm for life outside the demarcations and boundaries of the playing field.”

Grip will be on view at MCASD’s La Jolla location through March 21, 2010. If you can’t make it to San Diego by then, you can view the video online here.

Erik Levine was born in Los Angeles and lives and works in both New York and Boston. He is an Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a recipient of multiple Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant awards, National Endowment for the Arts grant awards, New York Foundation for the Arts awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally.

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.”

Originally published on September 29, 2008.

Whitechapel Gallery in London is currently showing Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street).   This project addresses concepts of individual and community identity by revisiting the tradition of public street parties and festivals popular in 20th century London.  Drawing inspiration from these past events captured in newsreels and photographs, Manchot creates and documents her own 21st century street party.

Manchot realized Celebration by working closely with Cyprus Street inhabitants and organizing a party in this Bethnal Green, East London neighborhood.  The artist captured gathered residents as they posed for a group portrait using 35mm film – a medium with historic connection to old newsreels.  Blending photography and film, Manchot used a single tracking shot that pivoted to create a comprehensive, durational group portrait.

Melanie Manchot:  Celebration (Cyprus Street) also includes  photographic portraits of individual Cyprus Street residents.  Manchot’s new film and photographic work is juxtaposed with archival footage selected by the artist of historic street celebrations such as peace parties that took place in 1919 and 1945.  This arrangement allows the gallery visitor to view the changing faces of communities that have coalesced around London’s streets over time.  Most importantly, Manchot’s work reveals the diversifying effects of global migrations on a particular contemporary community.

Celebration (Cyprus Street) is exhibited as a part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s Education Programme.  It was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and was funded by Film London (Digital Archive Film Fund) and Arts Council, England.

Melanie Manchot lives and works in London.  She is represented by Goff + Rosenthal in New York.  Manchot earned an MFA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London and works in photography, film and video.

Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street) will remain at Whitechapel through 14 March 2010.

Leslie Hewitt, "Make it Plain (2 of 5)", 2006.

The Pew Research Center caused a stir this week when it released a study portraying The Millennials, those who came of age during the first decade of the 21^st Century, as the most even-tempered generation in recent history. Unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, The Millennials have sidestepped almost all reactionary impulses. “They look at themselves and they say, our generation is quite different than our parents’ generation. But they don’t say it with any rancor,” Pew president Andrew Kohut told NPR’s Robert Siegel. “The only thing they criticize the older generation for is their lack of tolerance.”

This sounds suspiciously rosy, even toothless, as though, by some accident of history, a whole generation of non-judgmental diplomats emerged at the exact moment the U.S. entered Iraq. But the Pew study has more bite to it than Kohut suggests. Refusing the spectacle of rebellion that your parent’s generation reveled in is another way of breaking history’s patterns.

After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, on view at the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park, revisits 1968 through the work of African-American artists who grew up in its wake. None of the included artists–most of them belong to last leg of Generation X even though their art-making careers coincided with the rise of the millennium–were cognizant when Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK were shot down or when the Black Panther Party peaked. And none of them pretend to have any precocious insight into  history they didn’t experience. What they do quite well, however, is acknowledge the still-opaque role the past plays in the present.

Hank Willis Thomas, "The Liberation of T.O. I'm not goin back ta' work for massa in dat' darn field," 2003/2005, Lightjet Print.

Hank Willis Thomas‘ stunningly sleek photographs, culled from advertisements and digitally stripped of all text, dominate the  gallery space’s center. All part of Thomas’ Unbranded, the ads originally appeared between 1968 and the present; Willis has been painstakingly moving  through the history of branding, selecting images that portray blackness or target black audiences. The images create a strange visual paradox. They retain the staged melodrama of the initial advertisements yet their deliberate serialization makes them feel like specimens in a study, each something to get close to and pick apart. In Willis’ 2006 rephrasing of a 2004 Peace Corps ad, unambiguously title Don’t Let Them Catch You!, young black children, who might have been from Harlem as easily as Brazil or Niger, leap  into a muddy pool of water as if on the run. A blurry haze covers the whole image, romanticizing the picture’s narrative and recalling too-close-for-comfort episodes in US history in which African-Americans have fled authority. The most disturbing aspect of  Thomas’ images is their ability to cleverly manipulate history’s visual tropes while still living in the realm of glizty glossies that suggest history doesn’t matter.

Leslie Hewitt, "Make it Plain", 2006

Leslie Hewitt’s large-scale photographs and sculpture also reconsider images of the past, but her considerations are more intimate. In the Make it Plain series, Hewitt combines loosely connected historical objects in an attempt to piece together a history different than that of sit-ins, protests and riots. In the second of the five photographs in the series, Hewitt has placed two worn books, representing two divergent perspectives, on a shelf: Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses, 1619 to the Present and the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. An empty frame leans above that and a photo of a ’60s era gathering, flipped on its side, hang above the frame. Another photo of two men hangs on the wall to the right. It’s like an impossible game of connect the dots–the relationship between the objects is buried in a palimpsest of history that only those who have read the books and were there when the photos were taken could decode, and even they might struggle.

In his recent book Timothy, essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg mentions how easy it is to ” walk through the holes” in human perception. It’s hard to overlook the big events, the ones that cause fires, change laws, and are embedded into history books. It’s harder to look between the spectacles and find the threads of truth that have slipped through. Hewitt and Thomas are looking through the holes.

After 1968 continues through March 7th. The exhibition also features work by Deborah Grant, Adam Pendleton, Jefferson Pinder, Nadine Robinson, and Otabenga Jones and Associates.