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(via The Past and Present of a Syrian-American Artist)

The issues raised by this video and the controversy are very intricate. They bear on how we see this time period and how we view museums themselves—are they just a place for entertainment that should only present things that are lovely or morally agreeable, or does a show like “Theater of the World” also represent a historical examination of another culture and another time? If so, how do you judge that history? Even if aspects of it are deeply troubling or repugnant, should they be presented if they were important? What is certain is that instead of being an occasion to understand the intricacies of this period in China, the way this controversy has exploded has now projected an incendiary stereotype deep into the public mind. Just as a point of reference, a decade ago, the show’s curator, Alexandra Munroe, set an attendance record for the Guggenheim with her spectacular exhibition of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. It attracted 344,389 visitors. By comparison, almost 750,000 people signed the Change.org petition calling for the removal of the works in “Theater of the World.” In effect, the controversy represents the biggest audience that this show will ever have, the point of the public’s maximum need to understand. In that hour, the museum has been unable to educate or illuminate the public. And that fact does not bode well for museums in general in the present.

Why the Guggenheim’s Controversial Dog Video Is Even More Disturbing Than You Think | artnet News

Through blur, darkness and drift, the photographer Santu Mofokeng shows that black South Africans are more than their suffering.

#decarava #roy

"Merce Cunningham: Common Time" at the Walker Art Center shows how the choreographer shaped fields far beyond dance.

Having recently seen the MCA Chicago half of this exhibition, I found this review particularly helpful in thinking about Cunningham’s role in the arts and what this exhibition aims to do.

It’s not about making the world a drab and miserable place. It’s worse.

"But closer to home, it is imperative that we understand what Trump's attack on the arts is really about. It's not about making America a drab and miserable place, nor is it about a belief in austerity or denying resources to communities in need. Much like the disappearance of data from government website and the exclusion of critical reporters from White House briefings, this move signals something broader and more threatening than the inability of one group of people to do their work. It's about control. It's about creating a society where propaganda reigns and dissent is silenced.

We need the arts because they make us full human beings. But we also need the arts as a protective factor against authoritarianism. In saving the arts, we save ourselves from a society where creative production is permissible only insofar as it serves the instruments of power. When the canary in the coal mine goes silent, we should be very afraid -- not only because its song was so beautiful, but also because it was the only sign that we still had a chance to see daylight again."

#holocaust and the nazi era

Last month, I participated in Shaun Leonardo’s "I Can't Breathe," a public, participatory workshop and performance that takes the form of a self-defense class.

#the laundromat project #shaun leonardo #i can't breathe

“The system relies on its invisibility, so to do this kind of work only with those in the system would be an injustice,” says Leonardo. “It’s my responsibility to broaden awareness of the ways that black and brown bodies are branded as criminals. Until we counteract that, the system can’t be broken down.”

An Arts Program as an Alternative to Incarceration for Minors | artnet News

In San Francisco, artists in residence at the city dump are valorized for their work. In West Oakland, homeless people who rely on independent recycling centers are criminalized.

#san francisco

Despite the misogynistic horror of Donald Trump’s campaign and eventual election victory, 2016 was a great year for women in the art. There were compelling solo exhibitions by women artists in majo…

artpracticalsf

Edgar Arcenaux’s exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, Written in Fire and Smoke, is relatively modest in scale, occupying the List’s two main galleries. But while the exhibition is physically constrained, conceptually it is oversized—colossal, even. Written in Fire and Smoke is comprised of three bodies of work, all of which manifest through different material approaches. All, however, share the complexity that defines Arceneaux’s practice, a process that centers on research, layering, and remixing references and imagery from diverse parts of American culture and mashing them into sublime expressions.

Read review in full on DailyServing.com.

“Carrie Mae Weems’s two current exhibitions, on view at both Jack Shainman galleries, seem to offer an answer: art can act as a witness. In the dual shows, Weems shines a light on violence, institutional silence, judicial ignorance and black underrepresentation. This is seen most vividly her gut-wrenching take on the killings of unarmed black men and women by police in the 24th street space. Not all the pieces in Weems’s shows force viewers to witness these crimes, but those that do drag these issues into view for a Chelsea art audience, rendering a passive and apolitical viewing experience almost impossible .”

(via With Art As My Witness: Carrie Mae Weems at Jack Shainman Gallery)

#Carrie Mae Weems

(via He Died at 32, But a Young Artist Lives on in LA’s Underground Museum | NPR | KQED Arts)

“Art AIDS America” has prompted institutions and younger artists to rethink the ways in which AIDS is represented in art. But other artists, activists, and institutions have taken the exhibition as an opportunity to call attention to who is represented. We need to see the images of HIV-positive women of color in Meredith’s photographs. The supportive care work being carried out by What Would an HIV Doula Do is equally important. We need to know how to talk to a friend or relative who might have been recently diagnosed with HIV. But we can’t do that without a diverse and inclusive frame of reference.

Revisitation Phase: Looking at Art and AIDS - News - Art in America

Yet another serial project, Calendars (2020–2096), 2004–10, shown in a 2015 solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery in London, comprises 1,001 pages from a future wall calendar, roughly one for each month of the years named in the title. Each page contains a photograph of a different locale in Singapore, ranging from office interiors to parks, with the sole unifying factor being that they are all eerily devoid of people. Like the number five in the Everything (Baike) performance, the dates were chosen arbitrarily. The futuristic setting (Parts of Singapore today can look like something out of a science fiction movie) and the blunt seriality of the photos together form a bizarre new sensation, one of future nostalgia—memorialization in advance. Who knows if any of these places will still exist on the dates specified by the calendars. But whoever’s eyes are still around to rest upon these photos in the future might reflect back on a world that once was, a world we (or more precisely, the denizens of Singapore) currently occupy, one that may appear more precious now given its vulnerability to the myriad dangers created by mankind.

Writing and Non-Writing - Magazine - Art in America

Contesting/Contexting SPORT is ambitious, and for the most part, it fulfills its ambitions. The exhibition is a timely analysis and critique of the world of professional sports, which has consistently proven itself to be in need of an overhaul. It also celebrates the redeeming — communal, amateur, noncommercial — aspects of sports, as well as the relationship between the body and politics, something that in the cerebral world of art is often ignored. The show’s two sections are sides of the same coin, but Contesting/Contexting SPORT demonstrates how one of those sides has been allowed to grow out of all proportion — just like, one might say, a sports star’s ego.

Dismantling the Myths of Sports

There are many people that think that because I have proposed things like Arte Útil and what I call ‘political-timing-specific art’ I’m renouncing art; it is actually the contrary, it is claiming the right that art has to be redefined as an active part of other things, it is the rights artists have to be more than producers.

Tania Bruguera, interview by Mark Rappolt / Art Review

It had more to do with the needs of the moment, and the extent to which languor and beauty can lose track of the urgency of those needs. Instead of a song of mourning, I longed for a scream, like those conveyed by the phantasmagoric hellscapes of Kara Walker’s most grotesque visions of racism and slavery, which manage to contain all of the confusion, ugliness, and subterfuge involved in the work of smuggling one’s humanity out of a system of terror, mass-violence, and death. Meanwhile, Beyoncé and others continue to mine the legacy of black folks making lemonade from life’s lemons. (Even the controversial “Formation,” which ends her Lemonade, reminds us to “always stay gracious.”) As the murders continue, that’s hard to do, and as a response to tragedy, grace begins to feel anachronistic. Still more complicated: If the concept of divine grace that animates songs like “Amazing Grace” (written by a slaveholding white clergyman) stems from the doctrines of the colonizer’s church, to borrow from Frantz Fanon, then how do we repurpose it as a tool for decolonization?

Chase Quinn on grace and activism - artforum.com / slant

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