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Old Damascus, Syria: Dating back to the third millennium BC, Damascus is one of the longest continually-inhabited cities in the world, but much of its ancient centre is threatened by development. (Reuters)
In 1991, Dubrovnik, a fairytale fortress of Titians, Renaissance palaces and lemon-scented cloisters, was shelled by Serb and Montenegrin forces. Appalled by the siege of a city described by Lord Byron as the “pearl of the Adriatic”, the international community sprung into action.
Unesco, the United Nations organisation responsible for education, science and culture, called meetings, co-ordinated fundraising, and mobilised armies of experts. Not long after the dust of war had settled on scores of razed buildings, Croatia began restoration work. In a matter of a few years, Dubrovnik, designated as a World Heritage Site in 1979, rose from the ashes.
That’s how the system is meant to work. Since its inception, 37 years ago, Unesco World Heritage has become a global brand whose seal is slapped on the planet’s most precious places. The Taj Mahal is on the list, alongside the Pyramids of Giza and the Grand Canyon. These are the man-made and natural wonders considered to be of such outstanding value to humanity that their importance transcends borders, politics – and even economics. They are deemed deserving of the ultimate layer of protection – to be placed beyond the reach of polluters, developers, looters, bombers, and the ravages of time. The World Heritage seal is a guarantee of preservation.
At least that’s the perception. But now many within the conservation community are convinced Unesco is failing. They say the moribund organisation is teetering on its once sound foundations as its principles and priorities crumble under the weight of bureaucracy and outside influence. The World Heritage emblem has come to represent a grandiose marketing tool – fodder for “things to see before you die” coffee-table books.
Just last week, a row erupted over St Kilda, a remote, Unesco-protected island in the Outer Hebrides. When plans were announced to open a visitor centre on nearby Harris, St Kilda’s local guardians, the National Trust for Scotland, feared an influx of World Heritage Site-bagging tourists could damage the site. Elsewhere in the world, less scrupulous custodians desperate for tourist dollars campaign to be included in Unesco’s sacred list without preparing for the inevitable hordes.
At its worst, its most vocal critics say, World Heritage is a lame duck in a straitjacket, incapable of protecting the world’s truly endangered places.
The Independent
Roger Hiorns’ installation Seizure. Photograph: Sarah Lee
Critics of the Turner prize are used to harrumphing crossly about the absence of painting or drawing from the award’s shortlist, and condemning a perceived preponderance of video or film work.
This year, by contrast, video artists are absent from the shortlist. Instead, it includes a painter who makes figurative work, an artist whose practice has recently stretched from drawing to sculpture, and another whom the judges called “a modern fresco painter”.
The four shortlisted artists – who create intriguing, involving, frankly beautiful work, according to the judges – are Enrico David, Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright.
According to curator Andrea Schlieker, one of the judges: “I think this is work that the public will be able to relate to very easily – this is strongly material, seductive art.”
Fellow juror Jonathan Jones, the Guardian art writer, said: “I think this will be a great Turner prize, and it will remind people why the Turner prize is important.”
Schlieker added: “There are many connections between the shortlisted artists this year – there is an element of surrealism common to a lot of them, an attention to the handmade and to craft; and a preoccupation with drawing.”
If these virtues seem to represent something of a departure for the Turner prize, this is, say the judges, coincidence. A lively but “friendly” six-hour debate whittled down a longlist of 19 artists, and, said Schlieker, “we certainly didn’t set out to create the sense of a movement or a group – in the end it came down to the quality of individual artists.”
The Italian-born David, 43, is, according to Jones, a “brilliant painter who is obsessed with the human body. But if this is figurative art then it is not as we know it, Jim.” His imagery – often borrowing from commedia dell’arte – is “strange and disturbing, definitely not safe or conventional,” said Jones. He added, “preoccupied by bodies in a disconcerting way; he comes back to distortions, mutations and a troubled sense of self. He seems to be taking on a psychoanalysis of self – or pretending to do so, or flirting with the idea. He is one of the most exciting, troubling artists of our time.”
Schlieker described Hiorns, 34, as a “modern alchemist” who uses “base and ordinary materials, such as liquid detergents, perfumes, copper sulphate, and turns them into something wondrous”. One work, Vauxhall (2003), involved his installing an ordinary looking drain – out of which flames leaped.
In another work, called IBM (15×20), towers of foam created by liquid detergent bubbled from ceramic vessels. And last year, in his work Seizure, he occupied a condemned flat in London, coating every surface in copper sulphate. After a time, intensely blue crystals encrusted the whole space, turning it into a darkly magical, glittering cave.
Skaer, 34, who lives and works in London and Glasgow, has mostly worked in drawing, but has recently expanded her practice to embrace sculpture. A recent installation, The Siege, combines sculpture and drawing, with subtle references to Brancusi and Leonardo. Another work, Solid Ground: Liquid to Solid in 85 Years (2006), created, in plaster, three-dimensional versions of the ink blots of Rorschach tests. Said Schlieker: “She is trying to unpick our understanding of recognition.”
The final artist, the oldest on the list, is the Glasgow-based Richard Wright, 49, whom Jones described as a “modern fresco painter”. A work he made for 2007′s Edinburgh international festival involved his picking out the ceiling and walls of a Georgian house in an intricate net of geometrically worked out dots.
Jones said: “He created a spiralling, seductive, fascinating thing for the eye. You were drawn into a mathematical flow, just as in the Alhambra you are entranced by the repetitions of the patterned tiles. He is interested in formal beauty; and he collides the architecture in his head with the messy, arbitrary architecture of real places.”
The other members of the Turner prize jury are Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup. It is chaired by the director of Tate Britain, Stephen Deuchar.
The Turner prize exhibition, showing work by the shortlisted artists, will open at Tate Britain, London, on 7 October; the prize will be announced in a ceremony at Tate Britain on 7 December.
Charlotte Higgins
Guardian
Rem Koolhaas (Associated Press)
Rem Koolhaas’s massive, doughnut-shaped CCTV building in Beijing survived unscathed in February when a fire engulfed a nearby tower belonging to the same complex. But the event signaled the ending of an architectural era.
“I don’t even know about the word ‘downturn,’ ” said Mr. Koolhaas in his office in Rotterdam recently, reflecting on the global economic slowdown that has stopped the architecture world dead in its tracks. “It’s seems simply the end to a period.”
All around the world, major architectural projects are under threat. In November, construction stopped on the Russia Tower, a 600-meter-high Moscow building designed by the London firm Norman Foster & Partners. Meanwhile, another Norman Foster Moscow project, called Crystal Island, featuring a 450-meter-high, funnel-shaped skyscraper, has also been put on hold.
A few weeks after the Beijing fire, Harvard University, which has seen the value of its endowment shrink dramatically over the past year, announced that it was slowing down construction of its new billion-dollar science campus, meant to be a showpiece of sustainable architecture.
Mr. Koolhaas’s firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is moving forward with its planned projects, including a theater complex in Taipei, a library in Qatar and new buildings in Mr. Koolhaas’s native Holland. But the firm, with offices in Rotterdam, Beijing and New York, has been forced to cut back its staff from a high point of 270 employees in summer 2008 to 220. While OMA has not seen any projects actually cancelled, Mr. Koolhaas said, “There are a number of things on hold.”
The CCTV skyscraper marked the climax to a world-wide boom in iconic architectural projects that commenced in 1997, with the opening of Frank Gehry’s shimmering Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. One of several innovative buildings designed by Western architects for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Mr. Koolhaas’s headquarters for China Central Television quickly became a signature of the Beijing skyline. Now, with a global recession threatening future architectural projects of all kinds, the building seems like a souvenir of days gone by, even though it has yet to be occupied.
“A reappraisal is going on in the architecture world,” said Cecil Balmond, the London-based engineer who has worked closely with Mr. Koolhaas for over two decades. “In a time of plenty, there is a bravado and a push to make more and more sensational [architectural] statements.” In the current climate, he noted, “a very spectacular iconic project might now get the pause button.”
On Feb. 9, the Beijing sky was lit up by a smaller adjacent tower in the CCTV complex, as its flames dwarfed everything around it. Mr. Koolhaas was in Milan that night when he got the news. “I took the plane right away and I was there the next day,” he said.
According to CCTV, the fire was caused by an unauthorized fireworks display, believed to have been organized on the site to celebrate the end of the Lunar New Year holiday. Images of the blaze were quickly distributed by Beijing citizens, who captured the fire on their cellphones and camcorders. Those initial images of the blaze suggested that the tower might be nearly destroyed. However, said Mr. Koolhaas, “they are simply rebuilding it as it was, because there was no structural damage.” As a result of the fire, one firefighter died and several others were reportedly injured.
OMA said the complex’s main building — Mr. Koolhaas’s gravity-defying, doughnut-shaped structure — wasn’t damaged. According to Bas Lagendijk, an OMA spokesman, the building, which was originally scheduled to open next month, may be occupied beginning in late 2009.
Mr. Koolhaas said that the “interconnectivity” of the building’s rounded form was meant to foster “an intimacy between all the parties” at CCTV. He also believes that the building, visible for miles, has had an impact on Chinese society. “It introduced a level of daring that had not been shown in China,” he said. I am very convinced that it had a positive effect on Chinese culture in general. It pushed the edge of possibility.”
Now 64, Mr. Koolhaas, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2000, was known during the first few decades of his working life for his writing and his unrealized projects as well as his finished buildings. Starting in late 2003, in what has proven to be a high point of his career, he finished three remarkable and very different buildings in three completely different urban settings, in 18 months: the Seattle Public Library; the Casa da Música concert hall in Porto, Portugal; and the Dutch Embassy in Berlin.
Mr. Koolhaas is sanguine about what the future holds for OMA. He has seen periods of tightening in the past: His firm shrunk down to a few dozen employees in the 1990s after a controversial commission for a public museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, was cancelled by the city parliament at the last minute.
For now, he said, upcoming projects such as the Taipei Performing Arts Center and buildings in Rome and Copenhagen — scheduled to start reaching completion in about two years — haven’t been affected by the recession.
“Architecture is in such a permanent state of flux and turmoil that we have no stability anyway,” he said. “That is why we are very good at improvisation.”
J.S. Marcus
Wall Street Journal
Other People’s Opinion Syndrome (OPOS for short) is a common complaint among arts lovers. OPOS is the problem of letting yourself be swayed or influenced by what people are saying about a particular work of art before you go and experience it for yourself. Inevitably, our impressions of a film or piece of theatre, music, dance or exhibition can’t help but be affected by the expectations that we’ve built up in our minds based on other people’s reactions to the work of art. If we hear an artwork is absolutely unmissable, we often end up feeling disappointed; if everyone tells us to avoid experiencing a piece like the plague and we end up going along anyway, we can sometimes be pleasantly surprised.
Critics don’t generally have to deal with OPOS because they tend to experience new work when it’s fresh out of the gate. In many respects, their words become the bedrock of OPOS.
But my position is slightly different. Because I work as a theatre critic for a weekly publication so don’t have to file a review overnight, and have a great aversion to opening night performances for a variety of reasons (which you can read about here if you’re interested) I tend to experience plays and other events later in their runs than my colleagues. Even if I make a point of ignoring all reviews until I go to see a show, sometimes it’s impossible not to find out what people are saying about it before I pitch up at the theatre.
I was away from the Bay Area in Europe for two weeks before going to see War Music at the American Conservatory Theater last week and was hence able to come at the production unblemished by OPOS. But this is rare. In the case of Lloyd Suh’s new play at the Magic Theatre, American Hwangap (a still from which is pictured above) this wasn’t the case. By the time I went to the theatre to check out the show last night, no less than three local critics had shared their opinions verbally with me in passing, and I had also read a short review of the play in my own paper which had been assigned to another critic in my absence.
I find myself having to deal with OPOS all the time, so I’ve tried to develop strategies to take in the opinions I hear and read while minimizing their influence. I actually love finding out what other people think of works of art, even if I haven’t experienced them already, which is why I occasionally sneak a peak at reviews prematurely and occasionally strike up conversations with regular theatregoers and critics about their thoughts on a particular show when I still haven’t made it out to see it for myself. I just try to remember that I often disagree with what my fellow critics (and others) think which helps me to approach the theatre-going experience with, I hope, fewer preconceptions. It’s taken me years to develop this skill, however, and I can’t claim to have mastered it fully yet.
Last night’s performance of American Hwangap was particularly interesting with regards to OPOS because the opinions were so divided on the subject of Suh’s domestic drama about a Korean man’s return to the U.S. to celebrate his 60th birthday party (or “Hwangap” in Korean parlance) with his estranged ex-wife and grown-up children.
Two critics, whom I ran into at another play last weekend and a downtown restaurant respectively, had told me they loved it. A third critic critic, whom I bumped into at an art exhibition yesterday, said she hated it. The review I read by critic number four was lukewarm. It was fascinating to hear such diverse viewpoints. I came to the conclusion that anything which sparked this amount of controversy was bound to be worthwhile. I also came to the conclusion that I couldn’t come to any conclusion about the play until I had seen it for myself.
Though I didn’t detest Suh’s drama as much as my art exhibition colleague did, I didn’t like it nearly as much as the two critics who gave it the thumbs up. I probably felt even a little less engaged by the production than the review I’d read of the show in SF Weekly. The characters repeated their positions incessantly, the play had no subtext to speak of, the humor was canned, the performances seemed as one-dimensional as the writing and I didn’t personally buy any of the reconciliation scenes. The play is only 80 minutes long, but I was bored after about 20.
OPOS is an insidious thing. It seeps into and informs our view of art almost unconsciously. But it isn’t all-powerful. With a bit of practice, I believe it’s possible to hear different viewpoints on a work of art and then go and experience it for yourself without letting OPOS spoil the experience.
Chloe Veltman
lies like truth
“Still Life with Apples 1893-94″ is carried by installers to the wall for hanging. It is part of the “Cezanne and Beyond” show. (Clem Murray)
Part of the fun of “Cezanne and Beyond” – the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition demonstrating how the 19th-century master Paul Cezanne directly inspired a century’s worth of artists – is that a visitor can see art history happen. The links between the generations of artists and their work are so clear that you don’t need an audio guide or wall text to get it. All you have to do is look from picture to picture to picture.
If I were a child, this show might get me hooked on art for life. And if I had children, I’d consider it a perfect way to show my kids how exciting art can be.
Except I wouldn’t be able to afford to, and neither will many other families. The museum is charging as much as $88 for a family of four to see the show, effectively pricing out all but the relatively wealthy. This is an enormous, embarrassing mistake, and the museum should be sure not to make it again.
By setting the entrance fees so high, the museum has effectively chosen to segregate itself into two museums. The area of the museum that features “Cezanne and Beyond” is available only to those affluent enough to afford the exhibition charge, while the rest of the museum is more accessible to the lower and middle classes.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a nonprofit housed in city-owned buildings. It gets about $2.4 million a year from the city and has received millions more in capital funding, with more on the way. So its willingness to effectively redline certain residents out of its programming is improper.
This kind of exhibition pricing is not the norm. The most analogous nearby museum is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a comparable relationship with New York City. The Met asks that visitors pay what they can, with a suggested donation of $20 ($10 for students; children under 12 are admitted free of charge). A visitor can pay $5 and see every exhibition.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s charge is part of an unfortunate trend that has museums seeing themselves as competing with for-profit entertainment businesses such as the local cineplex or professional baseball team. This is wrongheaded. The museum is a nonprofit that, according to its mission statement, exists to share its art, scholarship, and exhibitions with “an increasingly diverse audience as a source of delight, illumination, and lifelong learning.”
When the museum effectively blocks so many from its headline programming, it is overtly excluding an “increasingly diverse audience” from its halls. It’s OK if a business creates entertainment that is too expensive for some people. But it is not acceptable when a city-supported nonprofit limits access to its best offerings.
If the only way to accomplish an exhibition is to price out most of the audience, the museum should either raise more money from foundations and other sponsors, or it should not do the show. There is no imperative that a museum put on splashy, expensive shows. Nor must an exhibition be expensive to be great.
Tyler Green
Philadelphia Inquirer
There is very little that playwrights, film directors, fiction editors and journalists agree on. But on one subject there does seem to be an almost universal consensus, and that is that you – the reader, the listener – are bored, most of the time. Look at any contemporary guide to making art, or working in the media, and the assumption is that an audience’s natural state is one of restless ennui. Our job as writers is to provide a sort of espresso shot. Grab them quickly, grab them hard – otherwise they will change channels or walk away.
And so we throw spectacle at you, make sure there are three laughs on every page, grip you with the power of ‘what happens next?’, do what we can to shock you with graphic sex and violence. From the worthiest of new-writing theatres to the brashest of musicals, from the Booker shortlist to the BBC newsroom, the assumption is the same – that you out there are very easily distracted.
Maybe we should blame the invention of the TV remote control: people often do. At some point around 30 years ago, it became possible to hop aimlessly between channels. Programme-makers became convinced that they had to make a pitch for their show in its opening few seconds, and then keep on pitching just to keep the audience on side. But why has this requirement to grab, grip, deliver a punch (the language is nearly always that of physical violence) infected nearly every other medium? After all, you’ve already chosen to buy that novel, or theatre ticket; the chances are you’re going to stick at it even if the story moves slowly, if it rambles or pauses to digress. But more and more, it seems, we treat every audience as though they carry a phantom remote control. We are terrified of losing them.
Polish theatre director Krystian Lupa isn’t scared of his audience. He never seems to consider that we might all be suffering from some kind of attention deficit disorder. And the chances are you haven’t even heard of Lupa. His work isn’t much known in our rather inward-looking island, though he is big news in the rest of Europe. I knew nothing about him myself until recently, when I was invited to Wroclaw in Poland to see him receive the Europe Theatre prize, an influential award given to those considered to be major figures in contemporary theatre.
I arrived in Poland a day too late to see Factory 2, Lupa’s eight-hour homage to Andy Warhol. But, before the prize ceremony, I was fortunate enough to see his Marilyn, a three-hour work-in-progress that will eventually form part of a nine-hour exploration of ‘personality’. It wasn’t at all what I thought it would be: I suppose I was expecting some kind of spectacle – maybe abstract, maybe symbolic – but nevertheless, a burst of theatrical pyrotechnics. In fact, what is remarkable about Lupa’s work is its simplicity, its slowness, its longeurs.
On a realistic-looking reconstruction of a movie backlot, Lupa showed a series of long dialogues between Marilyn Monroe and her acting coach, a photographer and a studio doorman, as Monroe prepares (as she was reportedly doing shortly before her death) for a New York theatre adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. One thing struck me very soon into the show: this was the first time I had seen Monroe as a truly dignified person, entirely apart from the screen persona she created. Here was a woman whom you believed might seduce Arthur Miller with her mind, as well as her body.
Apart from an arresting final few minutes, featuring video and the sudden appearance of a crowd, the three-hour performance was slow and talky. At first, I found it hard to watch. Here were actors who didn’t seem to care whether I was engaged or not. But Lupa’s work is about the thought and the emotion taking place right at that moment, and his actors aren’t afraid to take their time; he is not interested in rushing us forward, or building suspense. So yes, I was initially frustrated. But then I suddenly became hugely excited: for almost the first time in my theatre-going experience, I was truly being treated as an adult, someone who didn’t need to be constantly diverted, who had chosen to be here and was being given space for my own responses. And it seemed OK to sometimes engage fully with the performance, and sometimes drift off into my own thoughts. Here was theatre that didn’t stop to worry that I might get bored. Sometimes it was boring: it was really, really boring. But it was never dull – and it was all the better for it.
Mark Ravenhill
Guardian
An opening-night event at the Arts Collinwood gallery in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood.
Last month, artists Michael Di Liberto and Sunia Boneham moved into a two-story, three-bedroom house in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood, where about 220 homes out of 5,000 sit vacant and boarded up. They lined their walls with Ms. Boneham’s large, neon-hued canvases, turned a spare bedroom into a graphic-design studio and made the attic a rehearsal space for their band, Arte Povera.
The couple used to live in New York, but they were drawn to Cleveland by cheap rent and the creative possibilities of a city in transition. “It seemed real alive and cool,” said Mr. Di Liberto.
Their new house is one of nine previously foreclosed properties that a local community development corporation bought, some for as little as a few thousand dollars. The group aims to create a 10-block “artists village” in Collinwood, with residences for artists like Mr. Di Liberto, 31 years old, and Ms. Boneham, 34.
Artists have long been leaders of an urban vanguard that colonizes blighted areas. Now, the current housing crisis has created a new class of urban pioneer. Nationwide, home foreclosure proceedings increased 81% in 2008 from the previous year, rising to 2.3 million, according to California-based foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac. Homes in hard-hit cities such as Detroit and Cleveland are selling for as little as $1.
Drawn by available spaces and cheap rents, artists are filling in some of the neighborhoods being emptied by foreclosures. City officials and community groups seeking ways to stop the rash of vacancies are offering them incentives to move in, from low rents and mortgages to creative control over renovation projects.
“Artists have become the occupiers of last resort,” said Robert McNulty, president of Partners for Livable Communities, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. “The worse things get, the more creative you have to become.”
Artists and architects are buying foreclosed homes in Detroit for as little as $100. In St. Louis, artists are moving into vacant retail spaces in a shopping mall, turning stores that stood empty for more than a year into studios and event spaces for rents of $100 a month. Artspace Projects Inc., a national nonprofit development corporation, plans to create 35 live/work spaces for artists on vacant property in Hamilton, Ohio, after converting an empty car factory and an adjacent lot in Buffalo, N.Y., into 60 artists’ lofts last year.
Cleveland is emerging as a testing ground for the strategy. With the collapse of the manufacturing industry, the city’s population has plummeted to around 430,000 residents today from nearly a million in 1950. A wave of home foreclosures has accelerated the slide. The Cuyahoga County treasurer estimates that 15,000 homes sit vacant — roughly one in 10. City officials tore down 1,000 homes last year, and more than 12,000 buildings await demolition.
In neighborhoods pocked by vacancies, artists have started filling the void. Last November, Katherine Chilcote, a local painter, bought a boarded-up, bank-owned house for $5,000 in Cleveland’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood, where one in four family homes has gone into foreclosure in the last three years. Thieves had stolen the doors, punched out windows and ripped out all the pipes, sinks and electrical wiring. Eight cats had moved in.
The 29-year-old artist and four friends spent months ripping up moldy carpet, laying down new tiles and hardwood floors, repairing walls and stripping peeling paint. She bought the empty, weed-filled lot next door for $500. She plans to build a sculpture garden there, with large, whimsical mobiles that twist in the breeze. She’s applying for grant money from the Cleveland Foundation to turn four more vacant houses in the neighborhood into artist residences and studios.
Through her nonprofit public art organization, Building Bridges, Ms. Chilcote is also working to turn vacant storefronts in Cleveland’s Westown neighborhood into artists’ exhibition spaces. Four storefronts are now filled with hand-painted pottery, landscapes of trees and fields, and large, spray-painted scenes of the city’s abandoned steel mills and factories.
Ms. Chilcote plans to expand to seven storefronts this summer, and is working with the Westown Community Development Corp. to create nine permanent artist residences and studios in an old theater that’s been vacant since the mid-1980s. In the meantime, Ms. Chilcote and other artists are hatching creative, temporary uses for buildings that are scheduled to be demolished. This summer, she plans to transform an empty ice cream parlor into a giant sculpture of a cake.
What began as a grass-roots movement, with artists gravitating to cheaper neighborhoods and making improvements, is now being embraced by city officials as a tool to revive neighborhoods reeling from vacancies and home foreclosures.
Alexandra Alter
Wall Street Journal
Judith Scott, who had Down syndrome and spent much of her life institutionalized, began creating yarn sculptures like this untitled one from the late 1980s at the Creative Growth Art Center in the Bay Area. Ricco/Maresca Gallery
Judith Scott couldn’t hear or speak, yet she found a language with which to describe her inner world. Hawkins Bolden couldn’t see, yet his statues stare at you with haunted eyes. And both Royal Robertson and Ike Morgan, isolated by mental illness, communicated through paintings what they couldn’t express any other way.
These four artists, whose lives and work are the subject of a new documentary, “Make,” which is screening on Saturday evenings at 6 through May 2 at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in Chelsea, belong to a category that some call outsider or self-taught artists, although these are terms that the film studiously avoids. Certainly all of them lived and made their art outside mainstream society, and Mr. Morgan, who is still living, continues to do so. But, as Frank Maresca, one of the owners of the gallery, which is also showing a group exhibition of the four artists, said, it is not their disabilities or their harrowing stories that make their work interesting.
“All of these people were born with a gift,” Mr. Maresca said, “and it was through their situations that the gift grew the way that it did.”
Their situations were extreme, to say the least. Ms. Scott — who is the most established of the four, having had museum shows and been the subject of a book, as well as another film — was born with severe Down syndrome in 1943. Her twin sister, Joyce, was developmentally normal, and as children they were inseparable. But when they were 7, their parents sent Judith to an institution, where she remained for 35 years, so isolated that for a long time her sister didn’t know if she was alive.
In the 1980s Joyce Scott located her sister, moved her to the Bay Area, where Joyce lived, and enrolled her in a workshop for artists with disabilities called the Creative Growth Art Center. There, after showing no interest in the paints that were offered her, Judith suddenly, with no prompting, began to create strange, cocoonlike sculptures by wrapping found objects in layers and layers of multicolored yarn. She continued making these, in many variations, until she died in 2005.
A psychologist interviewed in “Make” speculates that the sculptures, which sometimes take on anthropomorphic shapes, represent memories of her childhood bond to her sister. That no one knows for sure lends her work — as with all the exhibition — an air of mystery.
To Mr. Bolden, who was blind from the age of 7 or 8 as the result of an accident, the tribal-looking sculptures that he created out of old pots, discarded kitchen equipment, pieces of carpet and other detritus found around his Memphis neighborhood were scarecrows to keep birds away from his vegetable garden.
“I think it brought him a really intense joy to scare the birds,” one of the filmmakers, Scott Ogden, said of Mr. Bolden, who was over 90 when he died in 2005. But as for whether he considered these figures art, Mr. Ogden said, “I think he didn’t even understand the question.”
Mr. Robertson, who lived in extreme poverty in Baldwin, La., and died in 1997, didn’t consider his paintings, depicting alien landings and apocalyptic disasters, art either, but a form of prophecy.
Only Mr. Morgan, whose colorful, impressionistic paintings are based on pictures in books or album covers, thinks of his work as art. Yet he also sees it as a job, the only one he had in the 25 years he spent in the Austin State Hospital being treated for schizophrenia. (He was released several years ago.) “It’s given him a sense of purpose,” Mr. Ogden said. “He spends every waking minute making art.”
For Mr. Ogden, 35, an artist who lives in Brooklyn and shows his work at Ricco/Maresca while supporting himself primarily as an art handler, “Make” is the product of a more than decade-long obsession. He was a student at the University of Texas at Austin when he encountered the work of Mr. Bolden, Mr. Robertson and Mr. Morgan at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Tex. “I just got blown away,” said Mr. Ogden, who with his baby face and few days’ stubble looks as if he should be in an indie rock band. “This stuff looked so different from what I was seeing in art school.”
He became friends with the proprietors of the gallery, Bruce and Julie Webb, former Dallas punk rock kids, as he described them, who fell in love and discovered a shared passion for old signs, carnival banners, Masonic objects and other curiosities, as well as self-taught art. Even though Mr. Ogden had little money, he started collecting. Sometimes he would watch the gallery and take care of the Webbs’ dogs in exchange for art.
Because of his fascination with Mr. Morgan’s paintings, the Webbs encouraged him to visit Mr. Morgan at the hospital in Austin, which he did. (“I was nervous,” he said, but “Ike is such a sweet guy, I felt comfortable with Ike almost instantly.”) The Webbs also took him to see Mr. Bolden in Memphis and sent him to visit Mr. Robertson in Louisiana. When he arrived, Mr. Robinson was standing on his front porch, holding a Bible and giving a sermon to the thin air. He welcomed him into his house and talked “for about six hours straight — I don’t think I said a word,” Mr. Ogden recalled, adding that because of Mr. Robertson’s deep Cajun dialect he understood only about a third of the monologue.
A few years later, in 1999, when he was in graduate school at Queens College, Mr. Ogden made a short video about Mr. Morgan. Later he filmed Mr. Bolden, with whom he had developed a friendship, and Ms. Scott, whose work was already well known. Mr. Robertson had already died, but Mr. Ogden was able to borrow footage from others who had filmed him. Through a private detective he also tracked down Mr. Robertson’s estranged wife, Adell, though it took years and several visits before she agreed to be interviewed. In 2003 he teamed up with Malcolm Hearn, a freelance editor, who helped him shape his footage into a narrative.
Mr. Maresca, who with his business partner, Roger Ricco, has been involved in the world of self-taught art for decades, said that despite the examples of a few familiar self-taught artists like Henry Darger and Martín Ramírez, it can be hard to call the art world’s attention to work that doesn’t fit into any period or movement. Ricco/Maresca did a show of Mr. Bolden’s work 20 years ago, and it “fell on blind eyes and deaf ears,” Mr. Maresca recalled. Aside from Ms. Scott, whose work now sells for tens of thousands of dollars, the artists in the “Make” film and show still lack any substantial market.
Mr. Ogden, however, is passionate about promoting their work (there is a tattoo of Mr. Robertson on his left bicep), and he hopes the film and the show, which runs through May 16, will bring it to the attention of young audiences.
The title of the film reflects its main theme: “this urge to create that is unstoppable,” Mr. Ogden said. Despite their hard lives, he added, none of the artists in the film felt sorry for themselves. “Art made a way for them to communicate with the world, whether anyone was listening or not.”
Kate Taylor
New York Times
Pawel Wojtasik’s ”Below Sea Level” is a long multichannel video of New Orleans scenes displayed, cyclorama-style, on screens that completely encircle the viewer.
If you’ve grown accustomed, resentfully or otherwise, to the frivolity and antics of the contemporary art world, the recent shift in mood toward elegy and soulfulness can be discombobulating, and even rather hard to take. Are we really to take seriously the Weltschmerz and despair of brutally ambitious young turks just out of art school, prospering denizens of Chelsea, or millionaire friends of Elton John?
Sam Taylor-Wood, one of the six artists in “These Days: Elegies for Modern Times” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, fits that last description. That she has also survived cancer and a recent divorce from her dealer, Jay Jopling, and that her art peddles in the fundamental themes of love and loss, doesn’t, unfortunately, change the fact that it has always been trite.
In almost everything Taylor-Wood does, you can feel her sniffing the winds of popular appeal, art-world cachet, and tabloid sensation, and pitching her work at the point where all three meet.
If clowns in art are suddenly all the rage again, Taylor-Wood will take photos of clowns (see here her photos of dejected clowns in “After Dark (with Flower)” and “After Dark (Trapdoor)”). If David Beckham has been caught sleeping around, she will make a video of him sleeping innocently like a god. And she will never a miss an opportunity to borrow gloss and gossip value from her many other celebrity friends, from Robert Downey Jr. to Woody Harrelson.
Still, precisely because she has the knack of keeping things simple, Taylor-Wood occasionally hits the mark, and one of her works in “These Days,” a video filmed in time lapse called “A Little Death,” has rightly become a modest sort of classic. It shows a hare and a peach in a still life arrangement reminiscent of paintings by Chardin, the hare’s leg nailed to the wall, its head slumping on a table. Over the period of just a few minutes, we see the hare efficiently disassembled by maggots, while the peach remains absolutely the same.
The sight is at once incredible (how systematic these maggots are!), banal (you die, and this is what happens; get used to it), and mysterious (how to explain the immunity of that peach? Is it somehow a metaphor for the death-defying powers of eros, bolstered by the sexual reference in the work’s title, which in French refers to orgasm?). It’s as pithy an updating of the still life tradition of the “vanitas” as you could ask for.
In spirit, “These Days” relates most closely to the mood of late Romanticism. The artist is seen as a sort of mournful outside observer of various catastrophes, his or her capacity for poetic expression providing but a fragile bulwark against the great debacle at large.
It’s apt, then, that the Con necticut-based artist Robert Taplin has taken as his inspiration Dante’s “Inferno,” from “The Divine Comedy.” Taplin’s series of sculptures and dioramas made from wood, polychromed resin, lights, plaster, and Plexiglas take their cues from scenes in “Inferno,” updating them as allegories of contemporary strife.
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THESE DAYS: Elegies for Modern Times At: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, through Feb. 28. 413-664-4481, www.massmoca.org
The series begins with quiet scenes in familiar-looking interiors: Dante, a portly everyman figure based on Taplin himself, rising from bed, or sitting at a table, his head down, being summoned by two figures, Virgil, his guide, and Beatrice, his love.
Each subsequent work in the series takes us to another of the circles of hell: the smoky aftermath of a roadside bomb in what could be Baghdad; gathering crowds of refugees trying to cross the River Styx; a cave populated with refugees, many of whom meet our gaze; and so on.
The interpretations are sufficiently offbeat and unexpected to escape the dangers of kitschy illustration. The best one, I thought, was No. 5, “I Saw Shadows Carried on That Wind,” which has us looking through a window out over a courtyard in the gloaming. The ravishing sky is streaked with clouds and punctuated by two airplanes. The intimate courtyard below, its depth enhanced by Taplin’s stage-set-style tricks with perspective, seems forlornly abandoned, yet freighted with significance. The only evidence of life is a man disappearing behind a wall.
The show’s curator, Denise Markonish, has taken the first part of her title from a Jackson Browne song covered by Nico (these elegiac shows tend to have abstruse origins – see, for instance, the New Museum’s recent “After Nature,” which took its name from a poem by the late German writer W.G. Sebald and its inspiration from a diverse array of literary sources).
Markonish has been inspired by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and, wanting to temper the show’s overriding mournfulness with glimmers of hope, she adorns the small exhibition brochure with some lines from Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: “And all things/hushed. Yet even/in that silence/a new beginning,/beckoning,/change appeared.”
Is it change we can believe in? Up to a point yes. Like almost all such shows, “These Days” is hit and miss. But it has haunting moments, and, impressively, it complements several other displays currently at Mass MoCA, including a huge room devoted to somber but thrilling works by the German artists Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer and a group show offering a wistful take on the state of the environment called “Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape.”
The cumulative effect is not exactly uplifting, but it has a real emotional pull, like a complex chord that echoes in the chest and threatens to constrict the throat.
To go from Taplin’s haunting worlds within worlds to Micah Silver’s concocted environment inspired by Yves Saint Laurent’s Safari Jacket, or Chris Doyle’s lame video animation riffing on various artistic representations of the apocalypse, is inevitably to be disappointed. But the show has other high points, including a series of works by George Bolster, an artist in his mid-30s who was born in Ireland and lives in San Diego.
Bolster riffs on the morbid ecstasies of religious experience. His contribution comes in two forms: One is a dramatic installation featuring a narwhal suspended by red strings from a ceiling. The room is lined with mirrors. Its ceiling is decorated with scenes from the Day of Judgment. A song by Radiohead, “Reckoner,” plays from speakers. It’s a bizarre but very singular scenario.
Bolster’s second contribution, in a neighboring room, is a series of drawings in pencil, silver, and pen on Maplewood veneer, each of them very private and evocative versions of well-worn religious subjects, with contemporary detailing and flickering sexual undercurrents. “La Vierge Et L’enfant Et Son Dior,” for instance, shows a short-haired woman – the Virgin Mary – with a unicorn on her lap in a pose recalling the Pietá. Bizarrely, a Christian Dior handbag dangles from her arm.
The elegy here seems to be for the loss of religious belief – but it is all a little too cool and savvy for us to feel carried away by a sense of conviction.
The other strong piece, “Below Sea Level,” is a long multichannel video displayed, cyclorama-style, on screens that completely encircle the viewer. It’s by Pawel Wojtasik, a Polish artist living in Brooklyn, and it’s a kind of collage of scenes from New Orleans, adding up to both a tribute and a lament.
It has its longueurs, but that is in the nature of elegies, is it not? One can mourn only so long before life leaks back in.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
Artist Shepard Fairey cut his teeth on the mean streets of Los Angeles, so he’s definitely not going to let some pipsqueak organization called the Associated Press push him around.
This week, Fairey responded to a lawsuit filed by the AP in which the news organization claims that the artist broke copyright laws when he used its photograph of Barack Obama for his “Hope” poster.
Fairey’s lawyers said in papers filed at a New York court Wednesday that the artist’s use of the photograph is protected by the First Amendment as well as by fair-use laws.
But the real attention-grabber was Fairey’s assertion that the AP itself violated copyright laws when it used a photo of the artist’s “Hope” poster without getting permission. In other words, he’s arguing that the AP can’t reproduce an image by Fairey that the artist himself appropriated from the AP.
Did we just fall into a rabbit hole? Here’s what Fairey’s lawyers wrote:
“On January 7, 2009 The AP distributed a story entitled ‘Iconic Obama portrait headed to Smithsonian museum’ by Brett Zongker. The AP’s article included a photograph attributed to The AP, which depicted Fairey’s Obama Hope Stencil Collage that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution…. The AP did not obtain a license to use Fairey’s work in this photograph. As shown below, the photograph attributed to The AP consists of nothing more than a literal reproduction of Fairey’s work.”
They also accuse the AP of similarly infringing the copyright on works by Jeff Koons, Banksy Keith Haring and George Segal.
We at Culture Monster know that L.A. art-hipsters can be a pretty sarcastic and smart-alecky group of people. (Call it a permanent state of ironic detachment.) Whether Fairey is merely thumbing his nose at the venerated news institution or if these new claims have real merit — or both! — remains to be seen.
However you look at it, this saga is long from over. Check back often, folks.
David Ng
Los Angeles Times
