Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism

September 12, 2010 – January 30, 2011

Venus Pareve, 1982-84, painted plaster of Paris, each: 9 7/8 x 5 3/16 x 3 5/16 in. (25.1 x 13.2 x 8.4 cm), The Jewish Museum, New York. Copyright © Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt

Over the past fifty years, feminists have defied an art world dominated by men, deploying direct action and theory while making fundamental changes in their everyday lives. Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism explores the widespread influence of feminist practice on the styles and methods of painting from the 1960s to the present. The provocative paintings on view here embody the tension between individual expression and collective politics, between a traditional medium and radical action.

While not a survey of Jewish feminist art, Shifting the Gaze is drawn primarily from the collection of The Jewish Museum, and features seven new acquisitions from the past three years. Some art historians have argued that Jewish
feminists are particularly attuned to sexuality, radical politics, and injustice because of Jewish involvement in modernism and leftist politics. Indeed, Jewish painters have played decisive roles in founding and sustaining major feminist theories and art collectives. This exhibition explores how social revolutions take place not only in the realm of ideas and politics, but in style and form.

Shifting the Gaze is organized into six sections: self-expression, the body, decoration, politics, writing, and satire. These topics reflect the variety of styles and forms that individual painters, often working within activist groups, created to challenge viewers to rethink memory, home, art history, and ritual, and to confront
anti-Semitism. Some of the paintings address issues specific to women artists, such as the representation of the body or the legitimacy of craft and decorative arts, while others address social issues that galvanized radical protest. As seen in these works, feminist painting generated new ideas and challenged old ones, shifting the gaze to encompass women’s history, experience, and material culture.

Since the 1980s, The Jewish Museum has supported the work of feminist artists through acquisitions and exhibitions in all media. To offer a historical framework for Shifting the Gaze, the curatorial staff is creating a list of over 550 women artists, from Renaissance Italian weavers to contemporary video artists, who have been represented in special exhibitions at the museum since 1947.

August 28 – October 3, 2010

Installation view. Collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Hammer Projects: Tom Marioni
By Corrina Peipon

In 1970 Tom Marioni was invited to make an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California. He asked sixteen friends to come to the museum on a Monday evening, when it was closed. The curator brought enough beer to go around, and everyone “drank and had a good time.”  The empty beer bottles, tables, and chairs were left in situ for the run of the exhibition. Rather than a performance, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art (1970) consisted of an action and its evidence. “Since I didn’t want to subject my friends to being performers, the public was not invited. . . . It was an important work for me, because it defined Action rather than Object as art. And drinking beer was one of the things I learned in art school.”  At the start of the same year, Marioni had founded the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco, where he presented work by artists—including himself, under the pseudonym Allan Fish—experimenting with new art forms, such as conceptual art, sound art, performance and action art, installation, and video. Open to the public as a nonprofit, membership-driven museum, MOCA presented pioneering exhibitions and projects until 1984. In 1976 Marioni started Café Society, a Wednesday afternoon social club that met at Breen’s Bar, down the street from MOCA, where invited guests assembled to drink beer and talk about art. Evolving out of The Act of Drinking Beer, Café Society was a social artwork that brought people together under contrived circumstances to interact freely. Café Society has continued over the years in various iterations, including video screenings with free beer at MOCA and Marioni’s ongoing weekly Wednesday salons at his studio.

Tom Marioni drawing the circle in the Guggenheim

Organized by Anne Ellegood, Hammer senior curator.

The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today

August 1 – November 1, 2010

The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor

Hannah Wilke
S.O.S.- Starification Object Series
1974 – 82

Ten black and white photographs with fifteen chewing gum sculptures in plastic boxes mounted on board, 41 x 58 inches. Copyright © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt – Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles

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The advent of photography in 1839, when aesthetic experience was firmly rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality, brought into focus the critical role that the copy plays in the perception of art. But if the photograph’s reproducibility challenged the aura attributed to the original, it also reflected a very personal form of perception and offered a model for dissemination that would transform the entire nature of art. The distinctive expression of the photograph, the archival value of a document bearing the trace of history, and the combinatory capacity of the image, open to be edited into sequences in which it mixes with others—all these contribute to the status of photography as both an art form and a medium of communication.

In his 1947 book Le Musée imaginaire (Museum without Walls), French novelist and politician André Malraux postulated that art history, and the history of sculpture in particular, had become “the history of that which can be photographed.” Sculpture was among the first subjects to be treated in photography. There were many reasons for this, including the immobility of sculpture, which suited the long exposure times needed with the early photographic processes, and the desire to document, collect, publicize, and circulate objects that were not always portable. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as techniques of darkroom manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers have not only interpreted sculpture but created stunning reinventions of it.

The Original Copy presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has been implicated in the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. Bringing together three hundred pictures, magazines, and journals by more than one hundred artists from the dawn of modernism to the present, the exhibition looks at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges our understanding of what sculpture is.

The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.

The exhibition is made possible by The William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund.

Additional support is provided by David Teiger and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/originalcopy/

Contemporary Art from the Collection

June 30, 2010–September 12, 2011

MoMA

The works selected for this installation highlight the debates around economics, politics, gender, and ethnicity that have permeated artistic practices since the late 1960s. Including approximately 130 works drawn from all of the Museum’s curatorial departments, the installation features a variety of approaches to art-making and follows a chronological path. The exhibition begins with works such as a haunting “body print” by David Hammons (1969), which depicts the artist in an act of prayer, and Pino Pascali’s Machine Gun (1966), a sculpture he made out of parts from a Fiat 500 during a period of intense social unrest in Italy. Concluding the show are two projects that explore larger themes of humanity and loss through current events: Huma Bhabha’s expansive print series Reconstructions (2007), in which the artist memorializes lost civilizations in her native Pakistan, and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot (2007), a project based on the artist’s restaging of Samuel Beckett’s play in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

also…new publications, go get ‘em

Hannah Wilke @ Neuberger Museum of Art (August 30, 2010)

Hannah Wilke / Prestel / Nancy Princenthal

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Heian Shrine Stroll Garden/Azure Vista, 1999, Cut photo mural with mobile, Panel 76 x 48 inches, Mobile dimension varies

White Flag Projects

Newtonland: Orbits, Ellipses and other Planes of Activity

With artwork by Greg Bogin, Elizabeth Bryant, Anne Eastman, Ib Geertsen, Grabner/Killam, Jean Painleve, Jan Van Der Ploeg and Jonas Wood.

Curated by Michelle Grabner

February 22-April 3, 2010

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by Mary Anna Pomonis

ARTLURKER

Saturday, December 12, 2009

The Bale Creek Allen sculptures at SolwayJones remind this Jet-Setter of why Texans are just so much bigger than life. Allen’s remarkable show has just enough grace and hee-haw to position his work in the same class as Rosson Crowe’s paintings. The sculptures that dominate the show are bronze tumbleweeds – yes, actual tumbleweeds folks! – each branch delicately welded and coated in nickel, 18 karat-gold or sterling silver. These elegant sculptures sit casually cocksure in their off-kilter glory; their forms so deliberately realistic that they hover just above the surface of normalcy like moissanite or fool’s gold. The only real giveaway that these are sculptures – opposed to the real thing – is the temperature of the metal. Touching one of his pieces is as exciting as petting in the back of a classic car on a deserted highway deep in the heart of Texas (without the requisite shotgun and beer, of course) and not just because one typically shouldn’t get physical with work. Just as alluring are Allen’s cast tire treads and sculptures of gold-dipped link chains with tire treads attached. These are the Texas version of ghetto fabulosity, their links the size of one’s palm.

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Q: At what moment did you first feel like an artist?
A: I led a red nude by a day bed under a deli

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William Anastasi (b. 1933)
Sink
rusted steel
20 x 20 in. / 50.8 x 50.8 cm.
1970
Christie’s New York: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 [Lot 182]
Post-War & Contemporary Day Session
Estimate     5,000 – 7,000 US$
Sold For     170,500 US$ PREMIUM  Currency Converter

Provenance     Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

artnet

Drawings as Thoughts, 2009

In the SCI-Arc Library Gallery, Jean-Pierre Hébert presents recent computational line drawings. Unlike conceptual art created from instructions given to a draftsperson, the drawings in this show are created from instructions given to a computer and printing device. The concept is precisely set not in English, but in original computer code, using scripting language such as Python, Scheme, or Mathematica.

10.23.09 – 12.13.09 | SCI-Arc Gallery

The entrance to SCI-Arc’s parking lot is at 350 Merrick Street, between Traction Avenue and 4th St in downtown Los Angeles.

Art Review

Landscape of Eros, Through the Peephole

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 27, 2009

Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass, 1976

    And there is a film by a contemporary female artist, Hannah Wilke (1940-93), who went to art school in Philadelphia, saw “Étant Donnés ” soon after its installation and remembered finding it “repulsive.” She later did a performance about it in which she assumed the place of the prone figure. And in a 1976 film made in the museum’s Duchamp gallery, she engaged with “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” his other grand erotic masterwork.

Dressed in a high-fashion white tailored suit and fedora, she does a slow striptease in front of the piece, or rather behind it, as the camera shoots her performance through the glass and through Duchamp’s painted phallic and vaginal forms frozen in unconsummated union.

Wilke, who was a great beauty, preens, shifts, undoes a button, tips her hat, shifts, stares, slowly pulls at a zipper. The Bride and the Bachelors can never complete their erotic task, but she can. In her performance she was the cool but active counterpart to the woman in “Étant Donnés,” just as exposed but in control of the exposure.

Duchamp, the transcendent pornographer, would have understood all these contradictions. I suspect he saw himself both as the distanced creator of his final work and as the passively light-bearing figure lying within it. And surely he would have agreed with Wilke’s tough-love words: “To honor Duchamp is to oppose him.” Because he opposed himself — or the mythical self he invented — by slaving away at material forms of art that he had declared beneath contempt. His dispassionate passion is what continues to make him magnetic. Tough self-love, perverse and seductive, is what “Étant Donnés” is about.

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