The Official Blog of the Allen Memorial Art Museum

Information on the programs and collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

[amamblog]

Jean Kondo Weigl, Untitled, 1974, Gouache collage, Art Rental Collection Fund RC 1974.3.

Elka Lee-Shapiro ‘18, former curatorial assistant in Asian art, conducted this interview with artist Jean Kondo Weigl in July of 2018 as part of her exhibition, Centripetal/Centrifugal: Calibrating an Asian American Art.

On March 12th at 3:00 p.m., Lee-Shapiro will return to Oberlin to give a Tuesday Tea lecture on the exhibition. For more information, visit the event page on the Allen’s Facebook.

EL: I was thinking that we could start by talking about the work we have of yours in the AMAM's collection. It was created in 1974 and you mentioned that you were working with hard-edge abstraction at the time.

JKW: Right, after completing the MA program in Studio Art at Oberlin I was working as Assistant to the curators at the Allen Art Museum.  At the time, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop art were primary avenues in the New York art scene.  I had studied those movements as an undergraduate in a contemporary art seminar at Scripps College while also taking classes in figure drawing and painting, and wanted to explore acrylics and non-figurative or formal compositions, probably influenced by artists such as Frank Stella. I’m not sure if I was aware of Sol LeWitt at that point, but there were a lot of artists, painters, and printmakers working with the grid format.

I chose to use the format of the grid in this work because of the regularity and the rationality of the grid, which could be juxtaposed with something else—something freer, looser, more subjective, more organic -- while still retaining the organized structure of the grid. I experimented with some loosely conceptualist formats where I might, for instance, devise a sequential order for what was going to go in each unit of the grid, and so on.

EL: The work we have in the Allen’s collection has a repeated pattern like that… is that where that idea comes from?

JKW: Yes, I began with an abstract design painted in gouache on paper that I cut up into sixty equal squares. Next, I cut the squares, four at a time, into curved strips, which I then recombined to form new squares that I then arranged in the final composition.  I couldn’t have foreseen or visualized the end product of my process the first time I tried it, and was surprised to find the resulting sense of rhythmic movement, advancing and receding space and lively qualities of color and light to be so effective. You never know what's going to happen when you try out an idea.

EL: What was it like doing this type of work in Oberlin, because a lot of the discourse surrounding formalist painting was rooted in New York City? How was it being in Oberlin engaging with these types of investigations surrounding painting?

JKW: Becoming interested in a more formalist approach to painting was a natural response to the influences I encountered at Oberlin as a graduate student and as a member of the staff at the AMAM.  Ellen Johnson, Professor of Modern Art, and Athena Tacha, Curator of Art since 1800, were powerful forces in promoting current trends in art from New York in Oberlin through their scholarship and involvement with regard to the museum’s acquisitions, exhibitions and visiting artists program.

Also, as a Graduate Assistant, I worked under Forbes Whiteside, Professor of Painting, assisting in his painting and color theory classes. In Mr. Whiteside’s color theory class, I learned a lot about color relationships and color interaction, and wanted to explore some of the ideas that I was learning in my own work. I think that's what pushed me towards nonobjective imagery, so that I could focus on color schemes and variations on the different characteristics of color. I probably know one hundredth of one thousandth of what there is to know about color theory, but I can get deeply engaged with what little I know, experimenting with all the different possibilities and variations.

EL: You mentioned the idea of objective and subjective painting in relation to the grid. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, especially because your recent work does incorporate more narrative or figural elements.

JKW: I'm really equally interested in formalism and narrative or figurative art, and equally emotionally moved by both. Even with narrative art, the story is definitely part of what I respond to, but a large part of what I respond to are the formal elements of the work—the paint, color, and surface—and the power and skill of the artists. I remember before I ever cried to a painting, the only kind of art that I would respond to emotionally would be film or music—I can easily cry when I see a sentimental commercial on television—but I was never moved to tears by a painting until I saw a Pierre Bonnard painting. It was a small landscape of a spring day and I was overwhelmed.  I don't know how you identify the core idea of a single work of art or a body of works of art when there are multiple elements that are constant throughout. The meaning of a work has a little bit to do with the imagery and a whole lot to do with the composition and the treatment of form—but you can't have the imagery without that. So, you can't separate them.

EL: We touched on this a little bit but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how your personal background influences your work, and whether biographical or politicized identity comes into your work?

JKW: Well, how can we separate one’s background and identity from one’s work, either? That's another thing, right? You are what you are. I am what I am because of my background. So, it’s impossible to ignore it, but I don't think you have to worry about making it clear, because it is clear. It just comes out anyway. Everything that’s influenced me as an artist is because of my background.

I'm probably drawn to Asian art and the history of Asian art for that reason. I might not have taken courses in the history of Japanese art at the University of Utah, but in a way I felt obligated to know more about it. I might have been interested in Asian art as an undergraduate but it’s my memory that, at that time, we didn't have a lot of exposure to Asian or other non-Western art history; it wasn't automatically built in to your art education. For example, I knew that I liked ukiyo-e, but the topic of 19th century Japanese art was mainly touched upon in the context of its influence on 19th century French art.  Today, if I get stuck in the process of sketching or painting, one source that I may turn to for direction is 19th century Japanese art.  I really relate to that period as did many 19th century artists in Europe who were being exposed for the first time to a lot of Japanese and Chinese art.

EL: Do you think of the Asian influences in your work as relating to your personal identity?

JKW: Sure, not consciously, just automatically.

EL: Thinking about your identity, would you identify as say, an Asian American artist, or a woman artist, and does that play into your work at all?

JKW: Asian American over woman artist?

EL: Or Asian American woman artist... I guess in terms of these labels.

JKW: That's an appropriate question because the women’s movement was in full bloom in the seventies which is when I was at Oberlin working on as master’s degree and coming of age as an artist. Oberlin’s master’s program required a written thesis and an exhibition, and I wrote my thesis on the women's movement in art.  I was reading Linda Nochlin, Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Judy Chicago, and anyone I could find who wrote about the role of women as artists or the image of women in art.  I joined the women's caucus of the College Art Association and participated in a couple of their collaborative projects. They organized a book project and a box project, and my work was included in their traveling shows. But I don't put gender at the front of how I identify myself as an artist. And the Japanese part, well, both the Japanese and the female parts were given to me, but I don't necessarily feel that I put myself in either category, as much as lot of other people need to or choose to.

I'm aware of my race and gender on a certain level.  My race and gender are important aspects of my identity, but my identity and how it plays into my work is more just individual—having to do with my personal experience and relationships.  One key to how I identify as an Asian American woman artist may be how I identify with other Asian American women artists; if it’s difficult for me to relate to another Asian American woman artist on some level of aesthetics or politics, I think it would be difficult for me to put myself under the same label as her.  On the other hand, I would probably relate more completely to an Asian American woman artist, compared to a non-Asian, non-American, male artist, if her art and politics were aligned with mine.

EL: We probably have time for maybe one more question. I'd love to hear more about your approach to teaching and what teaching is like for you.

JKW: I don't think of myself as being really articulate or able to explain some more complex issues or concepts in a particularly clear or elegant way, but sometimes in the classroom I find myself getting really excited and at no loss for words.  Especially when I’m talking about the process and how it’s important to let go and not be afraid—I’m trying to encourage students to let go, loosen up, and not worry about whether their assignments are going to be successful. I work very hard to be the best teacher, but some students stand out as being so talented, perceptive and intuitive that I can only step back and admire them, deserving little credit for their achievement.  

[amamblog]

Shu-Ju Wang (Poem by Emily Pittman Newberry), Water, 2014, (cover and interior), Clarence Ward Art Library.

Elka Lee-Shapiro ‘18, former curatorial assistant in Asian art, conducted this interview with artist Shu-Ju Wang in July of 2018 as part of her exhibition, Centripetal/Centrifugal: Calibrating an Asian American Art.

On March 12th at 3:00 p.m., Lee-Shapiro will return to Oberlin to give a Tuesday Tea lecture on the exhibition. For more information, visit the event page on the Allen’s Facebook. 

EL: I was thinking that we could start with some general introductory information, if you could talk about your work and interests more broadly, and any projects you’re currently working on.

SW: My background is actually in high tech. My degree is in computer science, although I wanted to go to art school, but my parents directed me into engineering—which was fine—but once I finished school and started working, I started taking classes at a local art school. Back then it was the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, which was very close to my place of work. I started taking classes there and I started to exhibit my work in 1996.

As for my interests, I would say that it took me a few years to find my footing and figure out the areas that really interested me. For the past decade I've been really interested in the type of catastrophic or really profound transformations in our lives. We go through transformations all the time, but it's very slow, very… not noticeable, but I've been interested in those really huge, catastrophic transformations—so immigration, health, the environment—I've been working on those three specific variants. These last several projects I've worked on have really all been about the environment, but also about personal transformations.

I worked with a transgender poet between 2012 and 2014 to produce an artist's book. She's an activist and she gave me a poem titled “Water,” and it moved between solid and liquid—ice and water—and she wanted it to read in the round. You would typically think of a book as having a beginning and an end, and she wanted to have something that was different – she wanted the book to not have an end. That took me a couple of years to work on and it was a really challenging project. Because the way the poem read, it made me think of her as a transgender person, and how we tend to think of things as being this or that—ice and rain, snow and rain—we think of these things as distinct, but they're really not. It's a spectrum, right? I've been playing around with this idea a lot, both in the environment and our relationship with the environment. That's really what I've been doing for the last several projects.

EL: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about Nigrum, the artist’s book that we’re including in the exhibition.

SW: That book was inspired by this chili-eating contest, which was really this fun thing. I'm not sure what initially made me decide to make a book about pepper, but I saw the ad for the contest. I started looking into the history of spice and I was vaguely familiar about the spice trade, but pretty much everybody knows it was spice that set forth Columbus going around the globe. I started looking into that, and I was born and raised in Taiwan, and Taiwan was colonized by the same people—the Dutch and the Portuguese—who were also in the spice trade. I found that black pepper used to be such a precious thing—whereas nowadays, you go to any cheapo diner and there’s going to be pepper on the table—but it used to be such a precious thing. There was this story about, I think it was the Goths that were invading Rome, and one of the demands that was made was for peppercorn, so people went to war for it. For pepper to go from that kind of a status to just on a tabletop anywhere, I found that really interesting, so I started to research the history of the spice trade. There's this whole colonization and that of course involves mass migration, but in this case, the people that migrated were the overlords, and the indigenous population suffered.

In terms of the structure, I was pretty set from the beginning that I was going to use the palm leaf structure because that was a structure that was native to that region. The research for this book was completely on historical events—the transformation of the pepper from this valuable commodity to a very inexpensive commodity, and the mass migration of people through the globe.

Shu-Ju Wang, Nigrum, 2008, Clarence Ward Art Library, Oberlin College.

EL: Was the chili-eating contest in the US? SW: Oh, yeah. That was just at a restaurant in a strip mall.

EL: How did you create the map on the back?

SW: It's a historic map that I found and then I manipulated it so that it's a little bit distorted. It's an altered drawing of the historic map.

I like the idea of having the map on the back be broken up, because as you’re travelling, you only get to see a little bit of what's ahead of you. With a map, you get to see this whole picture, but when you are travelling, you only get to see a little slice of the world of where you are. I liked the idea of having the map broken up and then you only get to see a little bit of it at a time.

EL: Do you think of your art as political?

SW: I don't think about my work as political, but I think it’s not possible for my work not to go there. Somebody pointed out to me the other day that so much of what I do is about food and water, and obviously those are the two things that we need to sustain us. I'm interested in those two issues but not just as something that we drink and something that we eat. As soon as you leave those immediate needs—that we need to drink, that we need to eat—you go into agricultural practices, the food that we experienced as different classes of people, your social economic background, the politics… I think it's just not possible to not go there, but I'm sure somebody else will find it entirely possible to just talk about food and water literally, but I guess this is just not how I think. I just find it so easy to go from A to B, to B to C, D to D and pretty much, I’m at Z. One thing leads to another, I guess.

EL: Do you think of your art as, if not political, do you think you serve also a role as an activist through your art?

SW: I don't think of myself as so much of an activist in that I'm just saying, “This is what I know. This is what I think I know from what I've learned, and I’m just presenting it to you.” I'm not going to try to convince you; I'm just saying this is my point of view and this is what I have learned. Of course, everything that I'm presenting to you, I know I'm filtering it for my audience. I'm not just throwing everything in and saying, “Oh, here it is, you deal with it.” I’m filtering it, and so it is not unbiased and I know that, but that's what I get to do as an artist, and not just present one point. I think of an activist as someone who is much more actively trying to get their point of view heard, trying to get their point of view seen. I don't think I'm trying to get my point of view heard, trying to get my point of view seen—I’m just saying this is my point of view. If you want to hear it, see it, great; if you don't want to, that's fine too. Of course I think my point of view is correct, which may or may not be true, but obviously I think it's the right one or I wouldn't hold it.

EL: You mentioned earlier that you were born and raised in Taiwan. How does your personal background inform your work?

SW: I was born and raised in Taiwan and came here as a 15-year-old by myself without my family. I lived with an American family, Anglo-American family, so I had this immersive Anglo-American experience, which is very unusual for immigrants. I had this very discrete line of immigration—one day I was living with my family, and then the next day I was with an Anglo-American family. That's very unusual for an immigrant, because they come usually with their family, or if not, they're within a community that they're somewhat familiar with; whereas, I arrived and didn't know any Chinese people.

I did this big painting project in 2012 using food as a metaphor. I did these diptychs, and on one side was the food I ate before I immigrated, and on the other side, was food that I started to eat after I arrived.

I have been here since 1975, and pretty much living within the Anglo community. My husband and I went to China for the first time in 1997, and in 1997, China was very much like what Taiwan was like in 1975. When I arrived in China, I had this sense of “Wow, this is like home.” I felt so comfortable there, even though I couldn't really read simplified Chinese, but just the built environment was very similar to what I remember being the built environment in Taiwan. The public transportation was very similar to what I remember in Taiwan. Even down to the propaganda that they would paint on the concrete walls, “love your country” or whatever, ‘don’t spit,” things like that. I was like, wow, “I'm home” and there's just such a comfort level. I think people congregate not for political reasons, not necessarily for nefarious reasons, but just for comfort. There's a lot of comfort in being surrounded by people who look kind of like you. What's interesting is that when I go to Taiwan now, I don't feel that way, because Taiwan is so different from what it used to be like when I was living there. When I go there now, it's like a foreign country.

[amamblog]

Finding Ellen Johnson

Wouldn’t you like to meet the interesting woman who sought good red wine wherever she went and hobnobbed with artists (and at least one princess) whenever she could get away from restoring her mid-century Frank Lloyd Wright home?  Everyone has a chance to sample the late Ellen Johnson’s tasteful life simply by visiting the Weltzheimer/Johnson House in Oberlin, OH, some first-Sunday-of-the-month afternoon between April and November.

 The docents at the W/J House are newly prepared to talk about Ms. Johnson the person as a result of the recent visit to the house by her beloved niece and husband, Kris and Greg Moylan.   Conversation with the couple was packed with their memories of Ellen’s visits to her family home in Warren, PA for holidays, their previous times as guests in her Oberlin home, and annual summer stays at a lakeshore cottage Ellen rented.

 Who knew that Ellen had installed a two-person sauna in her home (now the room where visitors remove their shoes)?  The Moylans knew.  And they knew that the same room also served as Ellen’s wine “cellar.” Ellen would travel far and wide in her roomy Chrysler to obtain interesting wines back in the days when liquor was not sold in Oberlin.  

 Kris remembers that Ellen usually counted on others to supply the food while she supplied the wine and venue.  “Once she had a large roast and she asked me – a 10-year-old – how she should cook it,” Kris recalled.  

 Ellen had three sisters and a brother, but only two nieces and one nephew.  She was a generous and attentive aunt, providing gifts and amusements that seemed to be tailored exactly to the recipient.  And maybe it was even Ellen’s penchant for ice cream that tipped the Moylan’s decision to run a Dairy Queen franchise for years?  

 The Moylans displayed excellent recall of the original art pieces that Ellen had displayed in her Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home (many of which now belong to the Allen Memorial Art Museum) as well as stories about the artists who produced the eclectic items.  And in one more surprising personal story, Greg said that Ellen also enjoyed reading palms – she read his before his marriage to Kris. Ellen’s palm-reading talent had been revealed to the world in 1972 in a New York Times story when she attended a party hosted by artist Robert Rauschenberg and studied the hand of a famous guest, Princess Christina of Sweden.  

 Hope we will see you soon at 534 Morgan St., Oberlin. For detail, see: http://www2.oberlin.edu/amam/flwright.html

 Post by Janice Patterson (Weltzheimer/Johnson house docent)

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Postures of Engagement

As the Allen this week begins to de-install the two Fred Wilson shows that have occupied and transformed the museum over the past year, Curatorial Assistant Mir Finkelman pauses to document and reflect on her experience of teaching Oberlin students with Wilson’s work. 

Visitors to the Allen during the 2016-17 academic year encountered a space which appeared to deliberately obfuscate its own legibility. Oberlin College students often had the benefit of a staff member to walk them through the avenues of meaning-making presented by artist/curator Fred Wilson in his site-specific “museum intervention,” christened Wildfire Test Pit. Discussions with college classes centered on students’ observations of the show. Noting aspects of the installation that appeared familiar, and then unfamiliar, they interrogated what a visitor might expect in the space of the museum, and how Wilson’s intervention challenges and subverts those expectations. Every discussion with students illuminated new ways in which the familiar is made strange through Wilson’s inversion of standard curatorial practice, which engenders an entirely different approach to seeing objects and navigating an exhibition.

The casual museum visitor encountered Wildfire Test Pit without this structured, guided experience, and had to pick up on cues from the physical arrangement of the space in order to know how to delve in. After entering through the front doors of the Allen directly into the King Sculpture Court, a visitor was confronted with a marble portrait bust of a man named James Peck Thomas, encircled with a ring of salt. Flanking the bust were two telescopes, fixed upon objects high above the viewer’s sightline from the Sculpture Court floor. Both the telescopes and the salt, seemingly out of place in an art museum, provided keys to understanding how Wilson might have envisioned visitor engagement with the space. Wildfire Test Pit relied on perspective, viewership, and active bodily engagement to build meaning and promote discussion, and most importantly to preserve a multitude of possible approaches to the objects and the installation as a whole.

Wilson gained international acclaim following his 1992 commission Mining the Museum, staged at the Baltimore Historical Society. Objects from the bowels of the Society’s permanent collection, including cigar store Indians, fine silverware, and iron shackles, were evocatively juxtaposed, raising haunting questions about the nature of collecting and recorded history, particularly vis-a-vis the experience of non-whites in America. Wilson has since staged a number of similar interventions at museums across the country, unearthing untold stories through his selection and placement of objects, and through his rigorously researched wall texts, which function as subversive footnotes to the established narratives of the institution. His installation at the Allen was equally rich and changed the way I viewed our collection, which I had gotten to know over four years as a student at Oberlin. While there were many threads of the installation that made for great conversation and discovery, three themes, outlined below, consistently arose in my discussions with current students and casual visitors, and helped us together to begin unpacking the installation’s nuanced layers.

Sightlines

There were two telescopes in the installation: the north telescope focused on a golden Baule female figure, looking down onto the sculpture court, while the south telescope was trained on a facsimile of a drawing of Urania, the muse of astronomy. The reference to Urania seemed to many the key to understanding the purpose of the telescopes: their connection to astronomy. This was, however, only one part of their function. While the telescopes seemed to facilitate the viewing of these objects, positioned high above the ground, they also obscured them, as one had to shift their eye around the eyepiece to view each work clearly. The telescopes revealed themselves not as instruments of clear sight but rather as mechanisms of translation, as the objects did not neatly fit the mechanical strictures of the telescopes, and thus remained elusive.

The viewer was integral to this act of apprehension. The installation prioritized the viewpoint of the visitor, implicating them in Oberlin’s history and in the role museums, including the Allen, have played as inheritors and translators of cultural legacy. The viewer was made vulnerable by bending over or bowing before the telescopes and the objects upon which they gaze, exposing the backs of their necks, and losing sight of their immediate surroundings. Here, the secondary and tertiary functions of the telescopes came into focus. They acted as foils to heighten the visitor’s perceptions, also making them fully aware of how their bodies moved in the space. Within the context of the installation, which was thematically focused on the life and legacy of the first documented female African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, the telescopes also functioned as a metaphor for our relationship with history: we rely on extant or available documentation to understand the past, and sometimes there simply isn’t enough reliable information to reconstruct what we ourselves did not experience. Lewis’s story, in particular, was forgotten for almost a century and has been told and retold by more recent historians, leaving us with only a partial knowledge of her history. The telescopes point not only to the limitations of recorded history, but in the partial views they construct of objects in the exhibition, they also point to a more museum-specific problem, namely that museums must choose what to include or exclude from their versions of history-telling. The telescopes, combined with the historical references within the installation, thereby prompt visitors to reflect on the limitations of understanding history through any museum’s collection or presentation of objects.    

Salt

With the telescopes signaling from the start the need for close-looking within the installation, visitors were presented countless opportunities for small moments in which the familiar was made strange. For the attentive viewer, these moments marked continuities throughout the exhibition and offered clues to a path one could take through the installation. Though the bust of James Peck Thomas looked outward from the installation, confronting visitors as they entered the museum, the ring of salt Wilson placed around its columnar base and just below its shoulders invited visitors to circumambulate the entirety of the work, putting the visitor’s body in full motion right from the start of the show. The salt was also echoed nearby, where it spilled out, brilliantly white, from an overturned trashcan. Visitors had to bend or crouch down to read the label beside the metal bin, a posture of lowering similarly demanded by the Three Graces, a plaster cast with an open cavity in the back that harbored four African figures surrounded by a mound of salt. Whereas the trashcan positioned the salt as a familiar commodity, its presence at the feet of these African figures or placed like an emblem around the bust of Thomas brought out other functional and symbolic allusions: purification, preservation, corrosion, protection, which together nodded to various histories that involve salt, including trade, mining, colonization, snow, and the ocean.

Even if a visitor did not initially realize how prolifically salt was used throughout the space, the overturned bin made its presence very apparent and helped draw attention to other, less obvious places in which salt appeared. The recurrence of a non-traditional material in the space invited visitors to double-back and move around, taking a path through the Sculpture Court that was neither circumscribed nor linear. This looping path, combined with the postures that the placement of salt, like the telescopes, required of visitors, showed them how to engage with the show: fully, even bodily, and with a questioning or curious attitude.

Surveying

The final clear indication Wilson gave the viewer on how to navigate the installation came from its invocation of abnormal height. Most visitors to a museum expect the majority of the artwork to be centered at eye-level. As the telescopes at the front of Wildfire Test Pit signaled from the start, the visitor was encouraged not just to look straight ahead (or down, as the salt demanded), but to look up. Vinyl texts of varying sizes and lusters were installed high up on the walls of the Sculpture Court, sampling quotations, providing timelines, and presenting lists, all mingling together in a nonlinear fashion. Visitors were left to interpret how these snippets of text were connected to each other and to the objects below, and to do so, visitors had to actively move about the space in order to see the texts above at all, as their matte or glossy finishes of caught the light differently depending on where one was standing. Understanding the role of the text thereby required both physical and mental acrobatics--visitors really had to work to produce meaning from all of the stimuli filling the space.

For visitors to the Allen over the past year, Wilson’s installation was almost inescapable, no matter where one went in the museum. As one moved through the ambulatory galleries that surround the Sculpture Court, each of which displays art and artifacts from around the globe, Wildfire Test Pit presented itself anew through the arches, and lent different texture to other works on view. When visiting the upstairs Ripin Gallery, which also hosted objects from across cultures, it was almost impossible not to look down upon the Sculpture Court, and out across at the text that was now mostly eye-level. When seen from above, the ruddy earth-toned paint of the Sculpture Court walls (a color Wilson specifically chose, which museum staff dubbed “Fred Red”), along with the fragmentary components of the installation, evoked the archaeological “test pit” of the title, bringing the allegory of excavation to bear upon the museum’s material history. When observed from this height, other visitors became a part of the installation as well, enforcing the notion that histories and objects inhabit a liminal, and ever-evolving space in which we actively participate, often unknowingly. The varying vantage points available to the viewer acted in conjunction with the telescopes, salt, and selection of objects to make the visitor aware of the integral necessity of their perspective and presence in meaning-making, both inside the museum and out.

Though both the space of Wildfire Test Pit and its narratives were complex (and undoubtedly sometimes frustrating for visitors), Wilson’s skillful arrangement of the objects demonstrated the availability of a multitude of modes with which to engage the space—there was no single correct way understand the show or the stories it aimed to tell. In my experience working with the show over the past year, Wildfire Test Pit opened an arena for Oberlin’s community at large to pose questions about whose history is chronicled institutionally, by whom, for whom, and how—and indicated at every turn that such questions do not have answers that can be resolved by one exhibition.

—Mir Finkelman, Curatorial Assistant for Academic Programs, 2016-17

If you’re hungry for more information about Wildfire Test Pit, the Allen has also published a catalogue documenting the show, now available at our Front Desk. If you’re interested in purchasing a copy from afar, please contact the museum at 440-775- 8665 or email administrative assistant Sally Moffitt at [email protected]

[amamblog]

Happy Birthday Frank!

Happy Birthday, Frank!

Thursday, June 8, 2017 is being observed in many places across America as the 150th birthday of the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and the date kicks off a year-long celebration of the man from Wisconsin who shaped the way people live across the globe.

When Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, in 1867, his Welsh-born mother Anna Lloyd Jones was 25 and his father William Carey Wright was 42. Wright’s sisters Mary Jane and Maginel were born in 1870 and 1881 respectively. The Wright family moved frequently due to Rev. Wright’s itinerant ministry. Wright’s teacher mother introduced young Frank to a unique set of toys:  the Froebel “Gifts,” numbered sets of wooden blocks that were the basic tools for a pre-school education program developed in Germany in the 1830’s by Friedrich Froebel, credited as the founder of the Kindergarten movement.

These smooth maple blocks that could be stacked in infinite combinations were the Lego blocks of the day, and more. Froebel had devised a graded curriculum to be used with the blocks to spark children’s awareness of and exploration of the forms of the natural world. In “An Autobiography” (1932), Wright commented that the “primary forms and figures” of the blocks “never left his fingertips.”

Results of his formative experience are evident in the Weltzheimer-Johnson House, as in all his 500+ other built works. The Oberlin house has round balls on its roof line, rectangles on its floor grid, triangular elements in the Wright-designed occasional chair, and dresser drawers that resemble the original boxes for Froebel “Gifts.”

Readers and architecture buffs who are thinking about traveling around the U.S. in 2017-18 to see Wright-built homes and other buildings are advised to check websites for the properties of interest to learn about the special events that may be available. For example, the entrance fee for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City will be only $1.50 per person on June 8 and the Museum of Modern Art in New York   has mounted a special exhibit of Wright models, drawings, and photographs that is viewable until October 1. There are dozens of other opportunities to marvel at Wright’s genius, including the Usonian-style Weltzheimer-Johnson house in Oberlin every first Sunday April to November. – Janice Patterson, W-J House Docent

[amamblog]

Fred Wilson Teaches Us How to Pay Attention

In the artist’s intervention at Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Art Museum, white and black bodies suggest a deeper, racialized meaning.

Check Hyperallergic’s article about Fred Wilson’s exhibition, Wildfire Test Pit, currently on display at the Allen. 

[amamblog]

Every year students become trained AMAM docents by taking the Practicum in Museum Education winter term intensive. Pictured here is Kate Fittinghoff (OC ‘19) giving a tour this past winter. 

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An Interview with Wang Guangyi (in English and Chinese)

In the current AMAM exhibition Conversations: Past and Present in Asia and America, a painting titled Chanel (below) by Chinese contemporary artist Wang Guangyi is on view. To demonstrate Wang’s “conversations” with art and artists from the past, Chanel is paired with an anonymous propaganda poster from the Cultural Revolution, Thoroughly Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius!, and a lithograph titled Crak! by Roy Lichtenstein, one of the leading figures in the Pop Art movement in the US.

Wang Guangyi first gained wide critical acclaim with his Great Criticism series, which included Chanel. The works juxtaposed propaganda imagery from the Cultural Revolution with brand names and motifs from Western advertising, which were flooding into China during the Reform Era of the 80s and 90s. Like Pop Art, Wang appropriated elements of mass-produced commercial advertising; however, by adding exaggerated, heroic figures from political posters he slyly suggests that advertising and propaganda are equally manipulative. Recently, Zimeng Xiang, the AMAM Student Curatorial Assistant in Asian Art, interviewed the artist.

* Below, you can find a transcription of the interview in Chinese. 

Wáng Guǎngyì 王广义 (Chinese, b. 1956), Chanel, from the Great Criticism series, 1994, oil on canvas, 149.2 x 119.7 cm. Oberlin Friends of Art Fund, 2001.20. Allen Memorial Art Museum

Q: The shift from your early works in Northern Art Group to the Great Criticism series was extraordinary. What was the change in your opinions on art that caused such a huge shift? What triggered such a change in your mind?

Wang Guangyi 王廣義, Post-Classical: Gospel of Matthew, 1986, Oil on canvas, 100cm x 100cm. (Fig. 1)

A: My works created before the shift of my focus had almost nothing to do with my life experience. They were just my imaginary issues: the Post-Classical series (1986) was my own correction to the classical culture and the Frozen North Pole series (1985) was about an imaginary “northern culture”. Not until I started painting Mao (1988,1989) did my artistic practice begin to mature; not until then did I realize what was really connected to my life experience and my educational background.

Wang Guangyi 王廣義, Waving Mao Zedong, 1989, Oil on canvas, 150cm x 120cm. (Fig. 2)

Apart from that, the formation of the Great Criticism series was somehow accidental as well. Despite the poor artistic qualities of propaganda images made by amateur painters during the cultural revolution, I used to find in them a unique kind of power which I wished to exploit in my works. I enlarged and copied one of those images of workers, peasants and soldiers onto a canvas, setting it in the corner, and had no idea how to deal with it. Several days later, I happened to have a chance to drink a can of Coke. This was in those days when lots of Western consumer products (such as Coca-Cola and Marlboro cigarettes) had just entered China, but coke was still a “luxurious” drink. Incidentally, I set the Coke can on the ground, suddenly coming up with some interesting ideas.

Since the Great Criticism series, my attention shifted from the form to the imagery itself. The form is entangled with art historical contexts and elements of individualization, which I was trying to get rid of. I tried to free art from the hands of artists, to make it possess more power—the power that came from people as well as the leader. In the Post-Classical series, with the aid of old masters I told a myth about art history; in Mao’s portraits, with the aid of photography and printing presses I told a myth about the leader; in the Great Criticism, with the aid of people I told a myth about people.

Q: The Bold outlines and exaggerated figures of the Great Criticism series bring to mind a series of Cultural Revolution-era posters, such as “Thoroughly Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius!” (ca. 1970), that are themselves reminiscent of the work of the Modern Woodcut Movement of the 1920s-1940s. Were you referencing either of these in your series, or Cultural Revolution imagery more broadly?

A: Yes, I was referencing the Cultural Revolution-era posters. Basically the prototypes of the Great Criticism series are such imagery created by the “people”. I was juxtaposing these two kinds of imagery coming from different eras—figures of workers, peasants and soldiers, and images from imported advertisements that had permeated contemporary life.

Wang Guangyi 王廣義, Great Criticism: Coca-Cola, 1990-93, Oil on canvas, 200cm x 200cm. (Fig. 3)

Q: How did you feel about the widespread propaganda posters during the 60s and the 70s when you were young? What was the impact that the swelling consumer culture brought to your life in the 90s? How did you come up with the combination of propaganda images and Western commercial advertisements?

A: The cultural revolution lasted only for ten years, during which Chinese people subverted politics, as well as history and art. We lived in a political metaphysics. Elimination was regarded as creation. Chaos was believed to be order. The Cultural Revolution is usually understood as a mythmaking movement, but I consider it more like a kind of Dadaism. This is Mao’s political metaphysics—a unity of mythmaking and Dada. Under the influence of such metaphysics, we embraced the negative, with an unprecedented audacity, as if they are actually the positive. A particular image system was built when the practice of “Great Criticism” was invented. As the Cultural Revolution ended and Mao’s utopia vanished, commodity fetishism became popular in China where true religious belief was submerged. Chinese speedily switched to another image system—a system about signs of consumerism. Everything but my cognitive system was changing dramatically. I was trying to look for a meaning behind the conflicts between my haunting memories and this burgeoning new imagery.

Q: The whole series of Great Criticism includes both prints and oil paintings. Is there any difference in ideas between works made in these two kinds of media?

A: They express the same idea, just different in the ways they could be spread.

Q: Could you tell us about how you created those strings of numbers on the painting Chanel and other special techniques you applied?

A: I stamped those numbers. I also used an altered traditional glazing technique.

Q: Besides the Great Criticism series, many of your other works, such as the sculpture series Materialist made in around 2002 and the painting series Methodology of People’s War made in 2004, also make reference to images from woodblock prints made in the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution period. Why are you interested in employing images and visual effects originally generated for reproducible media in your works that were made in non-reproducible media?

Wang Guangyi 王廣義, Materialists, 2001-2002, Sculpture (Fiberglass and Millet), Approximately 180cm x 120cm x 60cm. (Fig.4)

A: There was a transformation happening there when I modulated and recreated the existing prints. Through such a process of transformation, artists would amplify or even distort the original meanings of the material. My Great Criticism series tended to flatten and simplify (the source material) by removing those medium tones in colors and shadings. It might relate back to the original image style of “Great Criticism”, which was redolent of woodblock prints, but I indeed intentionally pursued that kind of effect in my later works. Plenty of Cultural Revolution imagery, including some of those propaganda images, retained more or less some sense of space; those were created by professional artists, in a Soviet art style. However, they simplified the forms to make images speak to people. I call that a thorough conceptualization. Interestingly, it is exactly those conceptualized images that possessed a unique power.

Q: Because of your Great Criticism series, many critics and art historians consider you as the founder of Chinese Political Pop art. What do you think of such an identity (or rather, label)? Did it have any unexpected effect on your later artistic practice? Do you think that it might restrict the ways viewers read your works?

A: Of course, my Great Criticism series should belong to the category of Pop art, whereas my Pop art has probably included some issues related to politics and ideologies. Pop art is defined as a popular art concerning mass culture, but to a country like China, the most “popular” would be politics.

It certainly had some impact (on my later artistic practice), both positive and negative, but this was not something that could be determined according to my individual will. My works and my words became productions of the world of pop as soon as they left me. Maybe that is the reason why contemporary art approaches everyone’s life so closely. Contemporary art seems to be a reconstruction of the synchronic experience of the public. It involves everyone and forces them to participate, like a huge “game”. At first glance, they are unsure about what exactly this game is, in the same way as they are about the evening news on television. But one thing is clear: contemporary art always reminds the public of a most basic matter—both news and games lead us to real life.

Q: In a previous interview, you mentioned that “the core of art is something spiritual”. Could you choose one word to describe the “spirit” of contemporary Chinese art? What do you think is the biggest difference between the “spirit” of contemporary Chinese art and that of ’85 New Wave?

A: The only way I could talk about ’85 New Wave is from my own experience of it. History is just a random product. When we were actively participating in ’85 New Wave, we had no idea that it would be eventually remembered this way after thirty years. What’s more valuable and substantial is the process of re-thinking the spirits and thoughts of those individuals involved in this piece of history. As far as I’m concerned, it was still a great period of time back in the 1980s, when my numerous dreams and imaginings about art were constructed during those salad days of mine. ’85 New Wave offered me a starting point—a point that related to my feelings about Shamanism in the northern area where I grew up—of my artist’s career. All those major themes of Shamanism—pantheism, mysteries, agnosticism and indeterminacy—still mean a lot to me. Today I still believe that we are agnostic about art, and what artists express are no doubt some kinds of thoughts—but such thoughts are indeterminate.

Q: Most Western audiences nowadays as well as Chinese students of my generation would probably not respond to your “Great Criticism” series as you expected since they did not have the same experience that people of your generation had during the Cultural Revolution, either as participants or foreign spectators. What kind of role would you like your work to play at AMAM, a Western academic art museum? What kind of impact would you like it to have on students of my generation?

A: Essentially, China is a somewhat utopian country. In its long history, the shifts in state power influenced people profoundly. Nowadays such influences are gradually fading away from the memories of younger generations, but something remains the same—something that has never changed except that the way it happens may be different now. Since the early years during which I was born, I’ve had strong feelings that the state was trying to brainwash people with its utopian ideas through propaganda imagery. Meanwhile, when I finally grew up and became an artist, I found that in some Western, developed countries, the state power was used to stimulate people’s ardor for commodity fetishism. As an artist having these two mechanisms superposed, I stood in the intermediate realm, presenting the result to audiences of different ages from different places. As for the role I would like my work to play at a Western academic art museum, I wish that it could guide audiences to learn about issues I’ve been interested in, issues that essentially transcend the concept of nation and time.

Wang Guangyi 王廣義, The Last Supper, 2011, Oil on canvas, 1600cm × 400cm. (Fig. 5)

Q: Images of Western political or religious leaders, as well as Christian icons, started to emerge in your works after 2010. What are your major ideas behind these recent works? Earlier you said that you are more interested in expressing collective notions rather than personal feelings in your works, and that your works are usually created by “the public’s hands”. What are the collective notions that you would like to convey in these recent works?

A: Those works are from the New Religion series. About this series, earlier I said, “The presence or absence of various rituals, icons, relics and commandments, etc., are not something we are able to control. We can only obtain a sense of history’s existence through the figurative reproduction of memories. We looked at everything, but from the backside. We observed the existing human civilization, but with a veil covering on it. Since our childhood, we’ve been exposed to all kinds of things by accident. Those things are like negative films that will re-emerge once they are activated, again, by accident, at some point. Today everyone’s life is affected by such “negative films” carrying a certain density of time and memories which would influence the way we see the world.” What I mean by “collective notion” is that my works rarely involve issues that only I, an individual, have been faced with; instead, they concern issues that most of us have been faced with.

Q: Could you tell us about what you are working on currently (or where you are among different stages of the art making process)?

A: Currently, I’m preparing for a show that will take place in Wuhan this November (2016), and the other one in Prague next year (2017). Both of them will present my works from different time periods as well as those made most recently.

Regarding my recent thoughts on art making, I’m trying to find the source of all my artistic practice. Last year (2015), I made a new installation The Origin of the Gods through which I connected other works of mine, including those made in the early period. This work could be related back to my childhood experience in the northern area. When northern kids are sick, they would probably be sent to a shaman instead of a doctor. I thought this was nothing more than superstition when I was young, but as I grew up, I found that behind such a phenomenon there is a particular significance of those original religions, which interested me a lot.

Such habits came from the legacy of Northern Shamanism which originated from Northern China, Northern Russia and some European areas, but mainly Northern China. To some extent, what we are faced with are so-called “religious” matters—Buddhism and Christianity undoubtedly came from foreign areas; only Shamanism is indigenous. Curious about it, I wanted to find its root, the most basic thing about our spiritual life.

What that is in my works, in which I tried to find that “root”, is exactly an attitude of Pantheism—an emphasis on accidental encounters rather than assigning everything their unique values. As I’ve mentioned before, if someone was tripped up by a rock when walking at night and the next morning he found that the rock had actually saved his life by keeping him from falling down the cliff, this rock would be his savior—from a Pantheist’s perspective. This sounds very interesting to me. Pantheism regards everything around you, such as rocks, ropes, crows and other things we could encounter in our daily life, as potential saviors; accompanying inadvertent circumstances, it determines whether this particular thing would show such a value and meaning. If we look at Western civilization from a Pantheist’s perspective, we would find that this rock, in absolute terms, is the same as what Nietzsche has said in Ecce Homo.

Interview transcription in Chinese:

王广义专访

向子濛 Zimeng Xiang

从您“北方艺术群体”时期的作品到“大批判”系列是一个非常大的转变，在这个过程中您对艺术的看法发生了怎样的转变？是怎样的契机促使了您的艺术观念发生如此大的转变？

在这之前我的东西应该说和我的生活经验都是没关系的，是我想象出的一个问题。“后古典”是我对古典文化的修正，“北方极地”是我想象出的一个北方文化，实际上和我的经验和我的生活，和我整个的教育背景都没有关系，实际上我真正成熟是从画毛泽东这件事开始的，我接下去就更明确了，和我经验相关，和我艺术整个教育背景相关，大概是这种产物。《大批判》的产生，除了这个之外，也具有偶然性，那个年代，大量的西方商品刚刚进入中国，像可口可乐、万宝路烟，而文革期间大量非专业的人画的一些很幼稚的报头来表达他们的态度，从绘画语言上非常拙，形也不准，但确实有一种力量，我也想找到怎么来使用它，我先是把其中一个工农兵的《大批判》报头打格放大成一米乘一米，画到画布上原样临摹下来，放到墙角儿，好几天也不知道怎么处理。很偶然，在那个喝可乐挺奢侈的年代，我偶然喝了一罐可乐，把可乐罐放到地上，突然觉得很有意思。

从大批判开始，我的注意力从图式转到了图像。图式有太多艺术史和个性化成分。我想努力地摆脱它，我想把艺术从艺术家的手中解放出来，让它更具有力量。力量来自人民，来自领袖。我创作了毛泽东和大批判。在后古典那里，我借古代大师说话，讲了一个艺术史的神话。在毛泽东那里，我借照相术和印刷机说话，讲了一个领袖的神话。在大批判那里，我借人民说话，我讲了一个人民的神话。

“大批判”系列中夸张的粗线条人物形象让我们不禁联想到文革时期的宣传海报，例如（AMAM收藏中的）“彻底批判林彪孔老二”。而这些宣传海报本身又令人回忆起20年代至40年代的新木刻运动。在“大批判”系列作品中，您是否有暗示这两者中的其一，或是广义上的文革图像？

和前者（宣传海报）是有关系的，或者说我的《大批判》作品的原始图像，就来源于前者这些“人民”创造的图像， 我将这些工农兵的形象与今天我们生活中的那些引进的、渗透到大众生活中去的商品广告图像相结合，将这两种来源于不同时代的图像因素并置。

六、七十年代时随处可见的带有宣传性质的图像曾带给当时的您怎样一种感受？九十年代至今的消费主义文化对您的生活又产生了怎样的冲击？为什么会想到把这两者联系在一起呢？

文革只有短短的十年的时间。十年中，中国人颠覆了政治，颠覆了历史和艺术。中国人生活在玄学政治中，破坏就是创造，天下大乱达到天下大治。人们常说文革是一种造神运动，依我看来，文革更像是一种达达运动。造神和达达的统一，就是毛泽东的政治玄学。在这种玄学的影响下，中国人以一种空前的魄力，相信负面的东西更具有积极性，他们发明了大批判，建立了一套特殊的图像系统。随着文革的结束，随着毛泽东乌托邦的破灭，拜物教在信仰空缺的中国盛行。在图像上，中国人迅速地接受了另一套系统，一套关于消费的标识和数字系统。社会的一切都在剧烈地转换，我的认知系统却未能适应。残留的记忆和新兴的图像发生了冲突。我试图在我的艺术中却寻找这种冲突背后的意义。

整个“大批判”系列中既包含版画作品，也包含油画作品，使用这两类不同的媒介所创作的作品背后的意义有什么不同吗？

意义是一样的，只是这两种媒介的传播方式不一样。

请问Chanel这幅作品上一串串的数字是怎样弄上去的？您在创作这幅作品时还使用了其他什么特别的方法/技巧吗？

上面的数字是我用印章印上去的，同时我还使用了改变了的传统罩染方式。

“大批判”系列之后，您的许多其他作品似乎也借用了大跃进或文革时期版画中的人物形象，例如02年左右的雕塑作品“唯物主义者”系列，以及04年的作品“人民战争方法论”系列。为什么会对使用不可复制的媒介（油画/雕塑）来再现原本由可复制媒介（版画）所产生的图像这种创作方式产生兴趣？

我对已有的印刷品进行再加工、创作， 是一个转换的关系。艺术家通过转换，把原来那个东西的意义放大了，甚至也可能是扭曲了。我的《大批判》倾向于平面化，逐渐去掉了中间调子，不论是素描关系还是色彩关系，越来越倾向简单。这虽然与那些大批判的原始风格有关，那些东西有木刻的感觉，但我在后来的画面上一直有意追求这种效果。文革中的不少画面还是有一种立体感和空间感，基本上是苏联艺术的风格样式，还是出于专业艺术家之手，即便是一些大批判的报头画，也是他们画的，但当他们在向人民述说的时候，他们在形式上就做了简化了的处理，我把这种简化称之为“彻底的概念化”。有趣是，恰恰是这种概念化的图像，有一种特别的力量。

您因为“大批判”系列而被许多评论家及艺术史学者公认为中国政治波普艺术的创始人，请问您怎么看待这样一种身份（或说是一种标签）？这种标签是否对您之后整体的艺术创作产生了影响？您是否认为这从某种意义上来说束缚了观众对您的作品的解读？

当然，我的“大批判”毫无疑问应当属于波普艺术的范畴，只是我的波普艺术可能包含了政治和意识形态的一些问题。波普的定义是一种流行的通俗艺术，但是对中国这样一个国家而言，最流行的应当是政治。

影响肯定是有的，有正面的也有负面的。但有些事情是不能以个人意志来决定的，我的作品和我所说的话一经离开我，就成为一个波普产物了，也许，正因为这样才使得当代艺术逼近了每一个人的生活。其实就当代艺术来讲，它似乎应当是一种公众共时性经验的一种重组的实现，它涉及到所有人，它是一场大型的“游戏”，它迫使公众参加进去。从表面上看，公众似乎弄不清楚这个游戏的真面目，这有点像公众在晚间观看电视新闻节目一样。有一点是清楚的，那就是当代艺术总是在提醒公众注意一个最基本的问题：新闻和游戏引导我们走向真实的生活。

您曾经在一次采访中说过，“艺术的核心是精神性的东西”，那么您认为当下的中国当代艺术的“精神”，与85新潮时期的“精神”相比，最大的不同是什么？如果请您用一个词来形容中国当代艺术的“精神”，那将会是什么？

我只能从自己经历的85去真实的谈论这段历史，任何一件事情成为历史其实是非常偶然的，就像我们当时参与到其中，不知道这会成为历史，如今三十年过去了，我知道这是历史了。在这个过程中，回到参与历史具体的个人精神思想的历程可能更具有价值、更真实。以我个人而言，我仍然觉得80年代是一个美好的年代，我的青春年华是在那个年代度过的，我的无数梦想、无数对艺术的想象是在那个年代建立的。 85为我的艺术道路提供了一个起点，那个起点和我小时候生活在北方对萨满教的感觉有关，萨满教的泛神论、神秘感、不可知、不确定这些词语对于今天的我来说依然有巨大影响，我今天仍然认为艺术是不可知的，艺术家所表达的毫无疑问是一种思想，但是这个思想是不确定的。

大多数西方观众以及正在海外留学的这一代中国学生由于并没有您那一代人年轻时的经历 （不论是作为参与者还是西方旁观者），对您作品中的政治元素都无法产生感同身受的体验，很可能会对您的作品产生一些您预料之外的回应。您希望自己的作品在AMAM这样的西方学术性美术馆中扮演一个什么样的角色？  您希望您的作品对我们这一代的学生产生什么样的影响？

本质上讲，中国是一个乌托邦国家，在它漫长的历史进程中，国家权力的变化对人构成了很深的影响。虽然在今天，这些影响也在慢慢改变、淡出了更为年轻的一代的记忆。但有些东西是恒定的，其实从未改变，只是方式不一样了而已。从我出生的年代开始，我深深感受到国家权力将“乌托邦”的想法通过宣传画的方式对人进行“洗脑”。当我漫长的成长为一个成年人，成为一个艺术家之后，我发现，在西方一些发达国家的国家权力在利用商品的商标设计去刺激人的“拜物”的热情。我作为艺术家，我把两种东西重合在一起，我站在中间地带，把它呈现给不同地域不同时代的观众。要说我希望我的作品在西方学术性美术馆扮演什么样的角色，那我希望通过我的艺术所呈现的问题，能够引导观众去了解我所感兴趣的问题，这些问题在本质上又应该超越于国家和时间的概念。

2010年之后，您的画面中开始出现许多现实中的西方政治、宗教领导人以及基督教圣像，可以谈谈这些作品背后的想法吗？早些时候您曾说过“我不太适合表达自己的很私密的感受，这不是我的强项，我更适合表达公共的概念……我的艺术常常是借人民之手来完成的”那么在这些作品中，您想传达的是怎样的公共概念呢？

你说的这些作品，是《新宗教》的系列，关于这些作品，我曾经说过：“各种仪式、偶像、遗物、戒律等是否在场，是我们所不能掌控的。我们只能靠‘记忆的表象复制’来获取一种历史的存在感。我们看到的所有东西，都是在背后。我们观看人类已有的文明，都是隔了一层的。从小时候开始，我们接触到的一切东西都是偶然的。这些东西像“底片”一样在我们心中存在，在某一时刻它们又被“偶然性”激活，就会浮现出来。我们今天人的生活，都受到“底片”的影响。而“底片”所承载的时间和记忆的厚度，又会影响我们观看世界的方式。”我所说的公共，是我的创作极少指涉我作为一个个体所面对的问题，而更关心更为普遍的“我们”所面对的问题。

愿意透露一下近期在准备什么样的作品，或是正处于一个什么样的创作阶段吗？

目前我正在准备我今年（2016）11月份在武汉的美术馆的展览，还有就是明年（2017）在布拉格的美术馆的展览，这些两个展览都将呈现我各个阶段包括最新的创作。

另外，我近期在创作上的思考，就是我试图要找到我所有的创作的一个根源。去年（2015），我创作了新的装置作品《众神的起源》，通过它将我其他的作品，包括早期的作品串起来。这件作品和我童年小时候生活在北方的经历有关。北方小孩生病了，不一定找医生，可能用一种巫术的方式弄好，小的时候知道这是迷信行为，不知道这里很复杂的含义。随着年龄的增长，我发觉这里面有一种比较朴素的原始宗教的意味，这个是我特别有兴趣的。

事实上这些行为来源于北方萨满教，萨满教主要的发源地是中国的北部和俄罗斯的北部，以及欧洲的某些地方，但是以中国北部为主。所以从某种意义上讲，我们所面临的和遭遇的是所谓“宗教”这些事情，像佛教、基督教毫无疑问都是外来的，惟有萨满教是非常本土的东西。我觉得这个事挺有意思的，我想找到它的根源，找到属于我们精神生活中最基本的一个东西。

我做这个作品找到那个东西，就是一种泛神论的态度，对所有的事物不赋予唯一性的价值，而是去强调这种偶然的遭遇。就像原来我谈过一个人在夜晚的时候走路，被石头绊倒了，早上起来发现如果不被石头绊倒就会掉下悬崖摔死。对他而言，这个石块就是他的拯救者，这是经典的泛神论说法，我发现这是非常有意思。泛神论把你周边所有的物都赋予了一种拯救者的身份，像石块、绳索，包括乌鸦等等这些我们日常常见的物体，伴随着偶然发生的境遇，决定这个物体是否会凸显这个价值和含义。如果我们也以泛神论的立场来看待西方文明，我们会发现，这个石块和尼采所说的“瞧！那个人”在绝对意义上是一样的。

Image Sources:

Fig. 1. Wáng Guǎngyì, Chanel, from the Great Criticism series, 1994, Oil on canvas, 149.2 x 119.7 cm. Oberlin Friends of Art Fund, 2001.20. Allen Memorial Art Museum, http://allenartcollection.oberlin.edu/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/id/11046 (accessed February 7, 2017).

Fig. 2. Wang Guangyi, Post-Classical: Gospel of Matthew. 1986, Oil on canvas, 100 cm x 100 cm. Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. From: Asia Art Archive, http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/Details/29792 (accessed February 6, 2017).

Fig. 3. Wang Guangyi, Waving Mao Zedong. 1989, Oil on canvas, 150 cm x 120 cm. Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. From: Asia Art Archive, http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/12153 (accessed February 6, 2017).

Fig. 4. Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism: Coca-Cola. 1990-93, Oil on canvas, 200 cm x 200 cm. Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. From: Asia Art Archive, http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/Details/29830 (accessed February 6, 2017).

Fig. 5. Wang Guangyi, Materialists. 2001-2002, Sculpture (Fiberglass and Millet), Approximately 180 cm x 120 cm x 60 cm. Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. From: Asia Art Archive, http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/Details/29864 (accessed February 6, 2017).

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Installation views of our exhibition Conversations: Past and Present in Asia and America on view through May 21, 2017. Inspired  by the AMAM’s 2016–17 theme of “Time,” this exhibition bridges wide temporal  and cultural distances, linking the works of artists from China, Japan, Korea,  the United States, and Canada, both well-known and anonymous, living and long  gone. In the fall of 2016, the exhibition will feature paintings and  calligraphy that reflect the lasting legacy of the Chinese literati tradition. For  the spring 2017 semester, a fresh rotation of works highlights adaptations by  contemporary East Asian and Asian-American artists of the graphic sensibilities  of Pop Art and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, along with the creative  reworking of imagery from historical photographs. On view throughout the year  will be contemporary ceramics that respond to various East Asian ceramic styles. These  “conversations” do not simply mimic the past, but engage it in a dialogue that  references earlier subjects, styles, mediums, and techniques and infuses them  with the artist’s contemporary reality. They may take the form of respectful imitation,  creative reinterpretation, bitter critique, ironic send-up, and sometimes all of these at once.   The exhibition is organized by Kevin R.E. Greenwood, Joan L. Danforth   Curator of Asian Art.

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This week our Sunday Object Talk will be given by education and public programs assistant Hannah Tishkoff (OC ‘18). She will speak about Fred Wilson’s “LIBERATION” from 2012, a recent acquisition to the AMAM collection. This work combines Wilson's ongoing engagement with flag imagery with his signature blown glass forms. This work is currently on view in the exhibition Black to the Powers of Ten. Talk begins at 2pm. Offered most Sundays during the academic year, these talks are orientated specifically towards the casual visitor to the AMAM. Each talk focuses on one work in the collection or on view in a current exhibition, and lasts approximately fifteen minutes plus questions. Conducted by an Oberlin College student docent, these talks are a fantastic opportunity to learn about new objects or revisit old ‘friends’ from the collection. Each student-led talk focuses on a work in one of the galleries, including some of the most famous in the AMAM collection. Fall semester talks begin on September 11 and run through December 4 (except for October 16 and 23, and November 27). Image: Fred Wilson (American, b. 1954) LIBERATION, 2012 Acrylic on canvas, blown glass Gift of the artist and Pace Gallery, Douglas Baxter (OC '72), President, and Ruth C. Roush Contemporary Art Fund

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We’re always happy to see Oberlin College students diligently researching, writing, drawing, and studying the galleries! #academicmuseums

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Josef Albers emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States and was hugely influential in bringing Bauhaus-informed minimalism to American art students. Color, Albers thought, was “the most relative medium in art.” Interested in philosophies of optics, neuroscience, and perception, Albers radically simplified his compositions, often using a square format, to experiment with the saturation of color. This lithograph aims to capture the velvety, rich black of a night sky, meditating on the variety of shades perceptible within this hue. On view through December 23, 2016 in the exhibition Time Well Spent: Art and Temporality. Image: Joseph Albers (American, 1888–1976) Midnight & Moon II, 1964 Color lithograph Gift of Kenneth and Barbara Watson, 2009.25.48

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Mào Xiāng ranks among the most colorful characters in 17th-century China. Perhaps best known today as a poet and romantic, Mào also enjoyed considerable fame as a calligrapher during his own lifetime. He was a disciple of one of the most important calligraphers and painters of his age, Dǒng Qíchāng 董其昌(1555–1636).

The text of the calligraphy, recounting a visit to West Lake near the city of Hangzhou, is a well-known vignette from a travelogue by poet and essayist Yuán Hóngdào 袁宏道 (1568–1610). Yuán was a central figure in a group of late Ming writers and poets who believed that good writing originated from genuine feeling and authentic experience, rather than from strict imitation of traditional literary models. Throughout his short life, Yuán sought to balance tradition and innovation and to keep his perception of the world fresh. Although he died a year before Mào was born, the younger man undoubtedly became familiar with Yuán's philosophy of life through their mutual friend, Dǒng Qíchāng. Mào's choice of this text is an interchange both with Yuán (in part because he was also a bon vivant) and with his teacher, Dǒng, whose style of calligraphy Mào strongly alludes to in this scroll. Now on view in the exhibition Conversations: Past and Present in Asia and America. Image: Mào Xiāng 冒襄(Chinese, 1611–1693) Waiting for the Moon at Six Bridges, 17th century Handscroll, ink on satin Overall: 14 3/16 x 218 1/2 in. (36 x 555 cm) General Acquisitions Fund, 1970.39

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On the occasion of a new exhibition Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy of Art (London), which opens today, we wanted to feature these two works from the AMAM collection whose display led to the first conceptualization of abstract expressionism. Both paintings were exhibited in 1943 at the Third Annual Exhibition of Modern Painters and Sculptors at Wildenstein Gallery in New York City, where they attracted the attention of Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times. Jewell singled them out as incomprehensible in a review in that paper, writing, "You will have to make of Marcus Rothko's 'The Syrian Bull' what you can; nor is this department prepared to shed the slightest enlightenment when it comes to Adolph Gottlieb's 'Rape of Persephone.' " Gottlieb and Rothko asked their friend Barnett Newman to assist them in responding to Jewell's review; their letter was published on June 13, 1943. It is a compendium of the principles under which the artists would work for much of the decade, and effectively laid out a first manifesto relating to the painting of the nascent New York School, which developed into Abstract Expressionism. They declared that abstract forms are the "simple expression of the complex thought," their commitment to "subject matter which is tragic and timeless," their "spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art," and that the meaning of a painting must come about through a "consummated experience between picture and onlooker." For his assistance in crafting the response, Gottlieb and Rothko gave their paintings to Newman, whose wife Annalee Newman subsequently donated them to the AMAM in honor of Professor Ellen Johnson.

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Fred Wilson subverts art history-as-usual at Oberlin's Allen Memorial Art Museum (photos)

New York artist Fred Wilson's displays at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College have reshuffled the art historical deck to reveal startling new ways to see its collection.

We were pleased to see this very positive review of Fred Wilson’s exhibitions Wildfire Test Pit and Black to the Powers of Ten in the Cleveland Plain Dealer earlier this week. Both of these important shows will be on view at the AMAM throughout the 2016-17 academic year.

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AMAM Collection Spotlight: This sculpture, notable for its drama and energy, takes up a theme frequently found in ancient art: that of a lion attacking and killing a bull. Face furrowed in concentration, the lion sinks its teeth into the fleshy neck of the bull, which rears up in agony, attempting to throw off his attacker. The lion's tail rests on the bull's rear upper thigh, as it sits on the bull's back and its claws grip the underbelly of its victim. The group has tentatively been identified as belonging to a pediment, as it was made to be seen from only one side, despite being carved (summarily in back) in the round. Sculptures such as this, popular in ancient Greece, ultimately emanate from the ancient Near East; the scene has been found on Mesopotamian cylinder seals from around 3000 BC, and although its meanings are obscure, may relate to the changing of the seasons, or to wild nature overtaking the domesticated. Image: Greek Lion Attacking a Bull, ca. 200 BC Pentelic marble R. T. Miller Jr. Fund, 1948.28

[archimaps]

Construction details of the Allen Memorial Art Building, Oberlin

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Yoo-hoo, @amamblog!

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A timely reblog, as the AMAM starts planning next year’s centennial celebrations...

The archives of Oberlin College hold a great deal of material related to Gilbert’s several buildings on campus.