NY Art Semester 2017

Henry Giddings

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The Studio Museum

It’s fitting that as I entered Harlem I started noticing signs of black culture. The first was the people; all around me once I got off the subway, our majority white group was in the minority. The second was the stsnds by the side of the road, selling clothing emblazoned with the Rastafarian flag and Bob Marley and perfumed oils in jars labeled with things like “Fast Ca$h” and “Michelle Obama.” Third was the shops: a mouth-type grill store, a furniture store selling plush seating and a rhinestone-studded statue of a jaguar, a Burger King without a singe white person. Then we entered the Studio Museum.

I have to say, I absolutely loved the exhibition. The topic of “Fiction” was open enough to allow a broad range of art & artists into the exhibition, and all of them had something different to say about race, as well as all the intersections that go along with it. I wish I had had more time to browse the exhibition, as I got to see about two rooms of the at-least-4-room exhibition in the short time I was there.

As I wandered the exhibit, I also found myself craving a show like this on transgender artists. Trans people are generally some of the hardest hit when it comes to prejudice, so creating a safe space that would also support them economically just as the Studio Museum does would do a lot of good for many of them. The representation of our experiences, and the diversity of those, would be fantastic. I was inspired by the Studio Museum in multiple ways, and I can’t wait to go back.

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New Museum & ICP

It feels very strange to address both "Generation Wealth" and "Trigger" as someone caught in the crossroads, and in some ways, the crosshairs. I’m transgender and upper middle class, so “Trigger” speaks to my non-normative gender and “Generation Wealth” speaks to my class, especially the idea of upward mobility turned into a lust for opulence. Each one speaks to an aspect of me, but each one fails to explain my particular experience in different ways.

“Trigger” speaks little to the idea of trauma and what it means to live with that. According to the curator’s press release, the target is gender in all its forms, normative and non-normative, and attempts to question whether normativity is really challenged by non-normative gender, or whether another norm is simply being created. Unfortunately, this exhibition undermines this idea through the sheer diversity of the works presented. It reads less like an attack on anyone or anything and more like somebody dredged a trans person’s brain for symbolic images and made a show out of it. I can’t say I see the destruction of gender in it; I see an unraveling, as if the threads of it wore too thin and the combined weight burst the lining and now it’s all fallen through, all over the floor. The constant sound of flesh hitting flesh playing in the background of a lether-dungeon sort of room where knit sores, blood, and labia dange from the walls, the butt of a black woman turned into a vase, a woman with visible chest hair in a blond wig smoking and adjusting lights while her assistant tosses glitter, a collage of BDSM-images, the photographs of the outside of gay people’s homes in a trailer park, a disco ball onto which is projected the image of a man’s torso that bursts into a million copies of itself on the walls, and a bearded man wearing dangling crystals and a soft shawl singing and dancing in his back yard are the result.

In contrast, the more I look at “Generation Wealth” the more I see the gaps. Greenfield says this work is not about the 1%, and to a certain extent that’s true. The very rich are present, but also the very poor who spend everything they have just for a night of fun. In a sense, this is about the 1% invading all our lives without even being physically present. I feel this is an important thing to examine, especially as this is apparently a pattern sociologists have been noting for a while, but it also misses the perspective of people who never took their wealth for granted, no matter how big or small it was. This is a perspective made up primarily of the systematically deprived: POC, seen here in the flash & show of hip-hop and no other part; queer people, suspiciously absent; disabled people, who often spend a large amount of their money on medical care essential to their survival. This isn’t necessarily a critique. In order to craft a coherant narative from her show Greenfield purpously chose to show the greatest excess, that which takes the normative vein of luxury to an almost disgusting extreme. Still, this absence of any counter-narrative to the lust for wealth makes it all too easy to percieve the problems she points out as much bigger than they actually are. There are ways of life that do not revolve around money, either the presence or absence of it. None of them are represented in the show. Even the cigar smoker, sitting in the lap of luxury, crying about being asked not for a boat but to turn off his phone by his wife, reinforces the idea that money is only ever a corrupting influence.

There is also something to be said about an uncritical promotion of Puritan ideals as the moral backbone of the United States with no mention of the misogyny and racism embedded in that culture. Class struggle is only one aspect of our history as a nation, and the collision of that with the many other threads of our national identity & consciousness has gone a long way to produce the effects that Greenfield documents. Hip hop, for exmaple, is equally about giving power to the widely economically-deprived African American population as it is about showing off, both in terms of machismo and wealth. This has created a ripple that’s been heard around the world, and continues to influence American culture in profound ways. Fashion has picked up on this trend and spun, sometimes quite literally, hip-hop fashions, which are derived from a largely poor population, into a guilded version for consumption not just by white America but the entire world. I find Greenfield’s work interesting, but essentially incomplete.

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Sackler Center For Feminist Art

To start out, I would like to make it clear I chose to attend this exhibition. My raction to The Dinner Party is charged, but that does not mean I by any means regret going. I chose to go to this exhibition because I want somewhat desperately to explore gender in art, and understanding The Dinner Party is a necessary part of that.

I’m not sure reading Chicago’s own reflection on the Dinner Party as “A Symbol Of Our Heritage” really prepared me for visiting The Dinner Party. In that piece Cicago describes her central imagry as a butterfly only, no mention of the intentional evocation of labia. Still, it’s not as though I was unaware of the vaginal imagry; that was fairly clear from Amelia Jones’s summary of reactions to The Dinner Party. I can’t say I appreciate the vaginal imagry all that much. I would never go so far as to call it pornographic; my discomfort lies not with the overt reference to genitals but rather the place those genitals take in the piece. Even as I was entranced by the skill presented all over the piece, in the runners and the china sculpture and the tiled floor, I was almost sickened by the vaginal symbolism. The plates themselves are beautiful, and the forms are beautiful, but the idea that the vagina is the center of womanhood actually turns my stomach. I am a transgender man with female genitals; if my genitals were really the center of myself, I would be a woman. I find myself at complete odds with Hilton Kramer’s statement that “for anyone more intersted in art than ideology...the esthetic pleasure to be derived from “The Dinner Party” may prove more elusive [than for fans of the feminist art movement].” To me it is the aesthetics that appeal, not the ideology, which rests, for me, like a constant rebuke across my shoulders.

Yet I think also to simply say “We know better now” and move on also misses the point. All of the non-fictional women Chicago chose probably had female genitals. There is nothing inherently wrong with pointing that out. There is nothing inherently wrong with female genitals, period. What bothers me the most is the conflation of genitals with achievement. These women were great, neither despite nor because of their genitals. The Dinner Party places these genitals as the center of their being, representing to Chicago their “core,” whereas they were almost irrelevant to their success, just as a phallic symbol is to a man’s success. The Dinner Party doesn’t just point out that its invisible participants had labia, it places them as the center of their very being. This feeds misogyny than challenges it. The patriarchy points to binary sex as the natural origin of all gender roles, both male and female. Attributing the achievements of these woman to their vaginas simply creates another gender role; it does not challenge the idea of gende roles, or say that there is no such thing as something you cannot do because of your gender or sex. By placing female genitals at the center of their being, Chicago ties the exquisite craftsmanship of the piece together with the female sex. This has a place in the history of feminism, in the reclimation of all things deemed female as no less important than all things deemed male, but in the end plays into a strict binary separation of female and male in all aspects of life far more than it challenges them.

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Jen Davis

I volunteered to be one of the people to interview Jen Davis, not because I was initially terribly familiar with her work but because when I browsed her work I was instantly drawn to it because it immediately spoke to me about body image. Over the course of this semester, I have rarely run across work that addresses the body in any way. In some ways I think this is cultural; the rise of abstraction marked a decreased interest in the human figure, which seems to have be delegated to the realm of realism, and today the body is something of a political topic no matter how it is approached. Issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, sex, objectification, and autonomy are all raised by the simple subject of a human figure. That is quite a lot to tackle all at once, and quite difficult to do well. Davis’s work, especially in Eleven Years, does this elegantly and almost pristinely. Her subject is clearly parceled out, all the more clear through the beauty of her shots, which turn what could have been simple self portraits into an exercise in fantasy, sculpting the myth of the beautiful fat woman out of a fat woman. I wanted to know how someone hits on a subject like this, and how she managed to place so much of the personal into her work without backing down from criticism.

Looking back on the questions I came up with to get to these answers, I realized that I reached for questions that were unnecessarily harsh. In the interview I smoothed over the questions I had written, adding explanations and subtracting laden language to communicate as respectfully as I could manage in the moment. Yet I still got all the information I wanted. Her subject matter came about as a question she felt she had to answer about why her sense of identity seemed to be tied to being an outcast. She stopped photographing not when her weight loss was “complete” but when that question was answered. She was able to separate her work and herself, and that allowed her to place something intensely personal in the category of “work.” She continues to work with themes of body image in her new series of works, the first being about her first relationship and the second being about body builders. These images incorporate issues of gender and sexuality, objectification and autonomy. Her work, although it certainly has a sort of political impact and following, was never political in intent.

I think there's an instinct that we have, especially in Western society, when somebody reveals something intimate, to pick apart their reasons for doing so, and make it somehow not about them but about us. It's part and parcel with the spirit of capitalism, the idea that competition makes you stronger, and strength is the most important quality in a person. This is a theme seen over and over again when I was researching Davis and “Eleven Years.” The reception of her work was both positive and at the same time seem to want more than was already revealed, to pick Davis herself apart through the window presented by her very personal photos. The breakout coverage in O Magazine was gentle by comparison to article like The Daily Mail’s, whose headline reads "Woman who spent 11 years photographing her overweight body to try to love herself but in the end resorted to gastric band surgery.” Still, peppered through the article in O Magazine are numbers: 269-pound, I’m 34, lost 95 pounds. When I brought this up with her she described this as a result of not knowing how to handle press well, implying that these numbers were mistakes, a way that the public was mislead by her words. There’s a truth to this, but it’s a truth driven by an obsession with outward appearance in the public she speaks to. Even when presented with a narrative entirely personal, that is intentionally focused on one person’s relationship to weight, we extrapolate it to us. In the case of The Daily Mail, that extrapolation produces a sense of shame and superiority lying side by side. In O Magazine, that extrapolation invites us to imagine Davis is photographing herself for our benefit, not hers. I also fell into this trap, and extrapolated her personal medical decision to get a gastric band surgery into a decision that she was not and never could be beautiful as a fat woman. I looked at her with a mix of pity and chiding, as if I knew better than her what she should be doing with her own body. I think it's important when looking at work such as Davis's to take a step back from our own perspectives and our own stakes in the issues the work addresses and consider the impact we have on our culture by critiquing any and all signs of vulnerability in other people.

The last thing I want to talk about is my own relation to Davis’s work. As my own work as an artist has become focused on the issues brought about by the body in modern times, especially the transgender experience, I have come across what seems to be a dearth of work to draw from. This can be exciting in some ways, but honestly mostly intimidating. There’s no guidance for me here other than what I construct. Davis’s work speaks to me not just on the level of body image but also that of transformation. This transformation marks a change in autonomy, from passive acceptance of one’s body to the active attempt to change it. This mirrors my psychological state during my gender transition pretty well, and the issues she ran into photographing the series are a lot of the same that I’m facing. Jen Davis has provided me with a blueprint my own work can follow, instead of leaving me groping around in the dark for something good.

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Fyfe & Hall

It was interesting for my first studio visits to be to two abstractionists.  Abstraction in general is not something I enjoy, but in this case it doesn't seem to be about abstraction itself. Puzzlingly, I had a negative reaction to Fyfe's work and a positive to Hall's. I’ve spent a while trying to figure this out, but I'm still not sure I can put my finger on the difference, so I’ll just start by describing both of their works as I perceive them.

Joe Fyfe’s work reads to me as an attempt to escape the effects a context and the viewer have on a piece of art, to make something that is purely about the art itself and nothing else. Fyfe has created a process where he becomes, or attempts to become, a vessel for vision that is not even his, removing himself from the equation entirely. He collects his materials from an indifferent world and arranges them in order to show that indifference, to demonstrate that art does not care about you. His art exists to let you know that it simply exists, whether or not you care about its existence. To me, this idea of unselfish art, an insular piece where nothing is referenced outside of itself and yet nothing is outside of it, all-encompassing and meaningless in that omnipresence, almost belittles the use of art as communication. By attempting to remove his work from the context and the viewer, Fyfe unwittingly communicates what it is that he himself values: abstraction, selflessness, and a sort of meditative acceptance of one's own insignificance. It doesn't surprise me, then, that so many of the young people on our trip did not find his work very appealing. I wonder how much of my own youth is present in my perception of him and his work. 

My aversion not just to Fyfe's work but to abstraction in general probably stems from the philosophy that I take with my own work. It is mostly, but not always, about a personal experience I'm trying to express. I believe this largely comes from being a sexual and gender minority.  I try to telegraph through my work what it means to be those things, and in doing so I face down a great void of representation.  Transgender representation in particular is rarely accurate, much less positive. This affects me and people I love every day, damaging us in ways that are hard to describe.  I put so much of myself and my experience into my art not because of any kind of narcissism but because there is so little else for me to draw from.  I see so little of people like myself around me, everywhere from banal pop culture to the most esteemed of the literary and art world. It is hard for me to let go of the idea what I experience is important because I am so often told that it is not, or worse, not real.

With that in mind, my reaction to Alison Hall's work is doubly interesting. Her work as well as her work ethic speaks to me in a way that I find hard to describe. The connection I feel goes beyond sharing a background with this artist, namely that of a working-class white person with roots in southwest Virginia. In fact, I think my background is almost irrelevant, given that Hall has chosen to focus her work on a member of the Italian Renaissance, Giotto. The idea of meditation and self-betterment through repetitive but complex work is not even something that I read in her pieces. What appeals to me is more the sense of meticulously organized simplicity, chopped and diced and rearranged. To me, Hall's work hides the labor involved in its creation and invites the viewer to enjoy this spectacle, despite the spectacle being something ordinary. Her pieces are quiet and contemplative, requiring your attention and yet at the same time inviting you to let go of trying to figure out any specific meaning. Standing in front of Fyfe's work I feel diminished; standing in front of Hall's work I feel as though I'm a part of it.

These very different works come from two artists with fairly similar backgrounds: white and lower-class. It is interesting to me that these seemingly ungendered works present two very different faces, given the difference between the two artist's backgrounds reside only in gender and location. I think there's also an element of gender that is layered on top of their work by the viewer. Case and point: Of the reviews given to us to read, only the review of Hall's work in Hyperallergic makes a gendered connection to quilting.  Fyfe's work is literally taking pieces of cloth and layering them on top of each other, while Hall's work is painting and graphite. It makes me aware yet again of how gendered perceptions are in many ways a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Woodblock carvings by Fredrick Remington

I was impressed by how shallow these were, having worked on woodblock myself.

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The Angel of Death and the Sculptor-Daniel Chester French, 1889-93

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The Vine-Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, 1921

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Tres Memoria-Lynda Benglis, 1969-70

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Range-Donald Moffett & Robert Beck, 1997

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Julain Lethbridge, 1947

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Lucas I-Chuck Close, 1986-87

Along with a lovely model, a fellow Art Semester student.

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Naked Man, Back View-Lucian Freud, 1991-92

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Brooklyn

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Kara Walker

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Chelsea Galleries

Visiting the Chelsea galleries as someone looking to be an art professional gave me a taste of what it's like to be a commercial artist, or rather what's important as one.  Of all the shows we saw, the one that came across the best was one of the simplest in execution, but one of the most complex in conception.  At Kara Walker's show the medium was simply ink drawings, sometimes collaged onto a paper sheet but just as often not.  Compared to Al-Hadid's dripping, sculptural wall paintings and candle clocks, Espirito Santo's illusory take on household objects, Trevor Paglen's AI-driven compilations, Sanford Bigger's glitteringly "repaired" sculptures and quilts, or even Amanda Ross-Ho's playful perspective shift of human clutter, Walker's medium is simple and unassuming.  It is the content, the ideas presented, that set her work apart.  It's encouraging to learn that the depth of thought put into a work of art makes a greater commercial success than any one gimmick or medium.