The Existential Easel

Just an art blog for an art class. Note: There are 2 pages to this blog

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Exegesis: Isabelle Graw and The Triumphant Progress of Market Success

Week 6 | August 12th, 2021

In 2009 Isabelle Graw, an art critic, theorist, and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst published a short book entitled The Triumphant Progress of Market Success. The book came in the midst of the global financial crisis of 2008 and early 2009, when the art world was still in panic mode. For Graw, this allowed her to evaluate how the art market has changed since the 20th century.

Graw argues that “the market and its players [have] […] an increasing say in establishing artistic value.” She thinks that this is because the art market has become more globalized and now obeys celebrity culture. Therefore, instead of relying on critics to create symbolic value, the Market can now rely on social media and marketing to create cultural relevance. For example, Daniel Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007), a skull covered in diamonds, had no inherent symbolic value whatsoever. Still, because of its ridiculous price, it gained cultural significance. Moreover, because the Hirst brand was already established and marketed on social media, the symbolic value didn’t matter much anymore because people were already willing to buy it regardless of what a critic would have said. However, Graw nuances this claim, citing that we now live in a knowledge society (cognitive capitalism), meaning that critics are still relevant because they are the knowledge makers in our knowledge-based economy. In other words, even if the art market can generate cultural relevance, cultural relevance also depends on the symbolic meaning that art history provides.

Although no one can deny the importance of symbolic value that critics still provide, the Market has gained a lot more power thanks to the rise of social media. An interesting case study is the debate surrounding the selling of NFT art. NFT (non-fungible tokens) allow you to buy and sell digital art as you would in a gallery or auction by keeping track of who owns the art. However, it is controversial because, unlike physical art, anybody can copy/paste it anywhere they want. Thus, it would be the same as the original.

Beeple, “ Everyday: The Last 5000,″ 2021

On March 11th, an artist known as Beeple, who had previously never sold an artwork for more than $100, sold a digital collage entitled Everyday: The Last 5000 Days for $69 million at Christie’s, instantly making him among the top three most valuable artists in the world. The collage consists of art he has completed every day for the past 5000 days in a grid format. However, it has been slammed by art critics berating it for its lack of artistic value. In other words, it has no symbolic value. So why was it sold for so much? It’s because of the Market. First, there might have been market manipulation as both the buyer and the underbidder have large stakes in the success of NFTs. By buying the art at such a high price, they might have knowingly inflated the overall value of NFTs to their own advantage. Second, social media also played a role in creating hype around NFT which has not only given Beeple a large fanbase but has planted a seed in the minds of many that NFTs are the way going forward. Christie's auctioning one-off legitimizes that claim. Therefore, in this day and age, when it comes to art that has been introduced into popular culture, such as NFT art, art critics can do little to change the valuation because even though we live in a knowledge society, public opinion is also the bread and butter of this day and age.

 Sources:

Chayka, Kayla.“How Beeple Crashed the Art World.” The New Yorker, March 22, 2021.  https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-beeple-crashed-the-art-world

Graw, Isabelle. “Isabelle Graw.” Interview by Alex Gartenfeld, Purple Magazine. Spring 2011. https://purple.fr/magazine/ss-2011-issue-15/isabelle-graw/

Graw, Isabelle. “The Triumphant Progress of Market Success.” In High Price:

Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. pp. 19-79.

Kastrenakes, Jacob. “Beeple Sold an NFT for $69 million.” The Verge, March 11, 2021. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million

Smee, Sebastian. “Beeple’s digital ‘artwork’ sold for more than any painting by Titian or Raphael. But as art it is a great big zero.” The Washington Post, March 16, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/beeple-digital-artwork-sale-perspective/2021/03/15/6afc1540-8369-11eb-81db-b02f0398f49a_story.html

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Andy Warhol at the AGO

Week 6 | August 10th, 2021

We’ve all heard stories about the great Andy Warhol, the famous Pop Art artist of the latter half of the 20th century. His prints are everywhere, and he is often one of the first artists we get introduced to in elementary and high school art classes. What was unique about Warhol is that he was truly a contemporary of his time and, in some ways, is still relevant today. He showcased an exceptional understanding of American culture and engaged in topics that hadn’t been manifested in art yet, such as consumerism and celebrity culture. This led him to produce a new type of art image that was controversial for his time, what Hito Steyerl would later call the “poor” image, but which would also give him his stardom. Now, we can all get a chance to see his infamous works in person at the Art Gallery of Ontario until October 24th.

In chronological fashion, the exhibition recounts his career along with the social, political, and personal moments that inspired his art. Perhaps the most striking particularity of this exhibition is the focus on Warhol’s sexuality. Although everybody knows Warhol was an openly out gay artist, no one ever seems to talk about the extent of his homo-erotic works within his career. Most of the time, the focus is always on the Marilyn Monroes and the Campbells’ Tomato Soups, probably because of the ‘taboo’ nature of the subject. Warhol’s fascination with the male nude started at an early point in his career with sketches of his friends and colleagues in explicit poses in the 1950s. Followed by an erotic film of his lover, the poet John Giorno’s behind in 1963 and a screen-print of a Bobby Houston’s Torso. Towards the end of his life, in 1987, Warhol took more photographs of male nudes and had his assistants stitch them together in groups of four. These series of photographs are all entitled Male Nude and have the models pose in explicit positions. At first glance, you might dismiss this series of photographs as simple pornography; however, these images are particularly revealing of Warhol’s inner thoughts. They connect with the overwhelming theme of repetition in his work, his interest in photography and perhaps inform us as to why he was so interested in depicting explicit male nudes throughout his career.

Andy Warhol, Tongue in Ear, 1980 (I would post the photo I am talking about but I am afraid it will get taken down. If you want to see it, it is on the Milanote.)

In his work, one of the ways Warhol used repetition was to neutralize his subjects. This can be seen in Electric Chair (1971) and in his Disaster Series (1963), whereby repeating a gruesome picture over and over again, the fear and discomfort associated with that image eventually disappear. When we consider the historical context Warhol was living in, when being gay was a crime, and the AIDS epidemic was in full force affecting a considerable amount of the gay community, we can suddenly understand how significant these explicit photographs genuinely are. Perhaps, like in the Disaster Series, he wanted to desensitize himself to the fear of being a gay man in an intolerant and dangerous society at the time. Looking at these photos as a gay man in the 1980s, one would see death. Oddly enough, he died the same year these photograph series were produced.

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Exegesis: Garneau on ‘Writing about Indigenous Art with Critical Care’

Week 5 | August 5th, 2021

David Garneau was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta and is a prominent Metis artist, curator, and art writer in the contemporary art world. His work mainly focuses on ideas of nature, culture, masculinity, and his Metis heritage. More recently, he has also become the head of the Visual Arts Department at the University of Regina. One of Garneau's most popular writing pieces is entitled Writing about Indigenous Art with Critical Care and was published in the 2020 Spring Issue of C-Magazine. In it, he brings attention to the treatment of indigenous artists in Canada's art world.

Garneau argues that today art critics and curators avoid critically engaging with Indigenous artwork and instead "try to avoid the rocks as they go with the flow. So occupied that they lack the firm footing required to wonder, publicly, what the desired outcomes of reconciliation, Indigenization, and decolonization might even be, and how their product is measured." In other words, they know that if they don't talk about Indigenous art, they would be on the wrong side of history, so they fill up text boxes with "woke" words but fail to engage with it in a way that matters. "It is as if critical thinkers must display uncritical, or at least silent, agreement with these processes to participate in cultural discourse."

Frustrated by what he has observed, Garneau gives two possible answers as to why this is happening. The first is that some critics lack the knowledge to engage with indigenous art and therefore only rely on pure intuition to inform their assessment. While intuition can be a good starting point, some critics rely too much on intuition and can't support their claims with concrete examples. They forget that intuition is often based on systemic biases and "conform and confirm the settled opinion." (Garneau, 2020) The second reason writers fail to critically engage with indigenous art is that even when they possess enough theoretical knowledge about Indigenous practices, they cannot go beyond the Indigeneity of the work and point out what is unique about it. Having highlighted the problem, Garneau proposes a definition of proper Indigenous criticism to use as a guideline. Indigenous criticism, Garneau states, should be about "[d]iscovering how a specific work of art functions among, between or in resistance to these forces […]. (Garneau, 2020) "Forces" being the game of tug of war between Aboriginal and Settler culture that Indigeneity (a third sovereign space) must wrestle between. Garneau goes on to analyze Kent Monkman's "Scream" by precisely doing the latter--highlighting the tension between Aboriginal and Settler practices in the piece.

This essay is no doubt poignant and hits hard. Interestingly, the criticism that people are shying away from critically engaging with Indigenous conversation can also be applied outside the art world, where discussions about race, gender, and equality are also being dodged for simple agreement. An example that comes to mind is the Land Acknowledgment speech given every time we go to a meeting, class, or theatre. While acknowledging history is definitely a step in the right direction, it simultaneously feels like a gimmick used by wealthy companies to brush off the issues and avoid truly critically engaging with the systemic problems they are themselves still perpetuating. After the acknowledgement, I always find myself asking: how much have they really done to help Indigenous people within their company; what Indigenous organizations are they supporting or donating to? Frequently, the answer is none.  

Sources:

Garneau, David. "Writing about Indigenous Art with Critical Care." C Magazine, Spring 2020. https://cmagazine.com/issues/145/writing-about-indigenous-art-with-critical-care

"David Garneau." The University of Regina. Accessed on August 5th, 2021. https://www.uregina.ca/mediaartperformance/faculty-staff/faculty/f-garneau-david.html

Image: Monkman, Kent. “Scream.” Acrylic on Canvas. 84” x 126.” 2017. https://www.kentmonkman.com/painting/2017/1/20/the-scream  

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Michael Belmore at the AGO

Week 5 | August 3rd, 2021

On the second level of the Art Gallery of Ontario is a collection of works by various artists reflecting on land and territory. Together, their works explore different meanings of what it is to occupy land, from spiritual connections to resistance and tension between two sovereignties. One particular body of work that is highly recognizable for its use of organic material and engagement with nature is Michael Belmore’s self-titled exhibition. Belmore is a Canadian Anishinaabe artist and has been a full-time artist since graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1994. Since then, he has become a household name in the Contemporary Art World and known for his sculptural work exploring land, water and his Anishinaabe identity.

One of the pieces in the exhibit in the exhibit entitled Edifice (2019) is a sculpture made of a collection of sandstone carved and fitted together as if it used to be a single piece that has now been broken. The surface is cut, giving it height in some places and depth in others. It looks worn and used. A single vein is painted with copper leaf and breathes life into the work. It is as if the fissures within the earth were radiating heat or if we were cutting into some organic living matter.

Michael Belmore, “Edifice,” 2019

The sculpture engages in a discussion about indigenous and settler relations. Specifically, between the clash in culture between indigenous people who have a deep connection with the land inbuilt in their culture and settler colonials whose culture is built on capitalistic values of exploiting the land for private wealth.  This meaning isn’t apparent at first sight, but it becomes clear with a deep dive into the materials. Specifically, the sculpture was made out of Kingston Red Sandstone, the same material that was used to build the Parliament building in Ottawa. By doing this, Belmore is engaging with the politics of resource extractions, where things are “pulled up, broken, repiled, [and] situated somewhere else.”  Therefore, the stones read as a link to the experiences of first nations peoples, who, like the material itself, have been extracted, pulled up, and broken apart by the imposition of Western Colonial ideals and values. We can think of examples such as the implementation of residential schools or the Doctrine of Discovery which outlined that aboriginal people weren’t civilized enough to get property rights and led to their extraction from their ancestral lands. In this sense, the single copper vain of warmth radiating from the piece signifies the life still present in the earth after the process of material extraction has taken place. It also represents resistance not only of nature faced with industrialism but of the First Nations peoples who, after centuries of persecution and extraction of their land and values, are reviving their culture and thriving in a country that sought to eliminate them.  

In the end, the genius of the piece is truly in the (copper leaf) details. By blowing life back into inanimate objects, Belmore forces us to consider what impact we might have on living things and the people the territory belongs to.

Sources:

Belmore, Michael. “Bio.” Michael Belmore. Accessed July 3rd, 2021. https://michaelbelmore.com/bio/

Belmore, Michael. “Michael Belmore: Breath deep dive.” YouTube, accessed July 3rd, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpkcegIr-4

Belmore, Michael. “Michael Belmore: Edifice deep dive.” YouTube, accessed July 3rd, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNJzpQtS1fI

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Exegesis: Agamben, What is the Contemporary?

Week 4 | July 30th, 2021 (Written for the Midterm)

Philosophers have long debated how to define ‘the Contemporary.’ Often, the term is used as an overarching concept to mean the present. Still, it can also be used to describe two things that are of the same time. Therefore, Contemporariness has no fixed definition. One Italian philosopher, who has attempted to bring some sense to the concept is Giorgio Agamben in his essay entitled What is the Contemporary? published in 2009 as a part of What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. In it, he argues that “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it.” (Agamben, 41)

If we are to deconstruct Agamben’s argument, we must ask ourselves what it is to keep a distance from our time. To explain this, our author refers to the 1923 poem by Osip Mandelstam entitled The Century, in which the century beast described as having the flexible cartilage of a child simultaneously breaks his back trying to turn around. The poem goes on to say that the Contemporary is the person who will simultaneously break this beasts’ spine and “weld together with his own blood the vertebrae of two centuries.” (Agamben, 41) In other words, someone who is contemporary is someone who has a critical perspective of their own time—someone who can rectify the light (flexibility) and the dark (fracturing) of his own time. This is when Agamben introduces a second definition; “The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.” (Agamben, 44) Therefore, we must ask again, what it is to see the darkness of our own time. Here, Agamben refers to a neurophysiological metaphor to find an answer. He compares darkness to when we close our eyes; it is not the absence of light but rather a particular kind of vision; it is an action. In other words, to see darkness is actually simply a complicated way of saying that the Contemporary is able to see what has previously been hidden like a problem or a concept.

Overall, both definitions articulate something important about the state of Contemporariness, but perhaps the second definition is better to grasp the concept than the first. The first definition is right about needing to have distance to gaze at the century beast. Agamben understands the act of being Contemporary as an act of looking or gazing, and like vision, seeing requires distance as we cannot see something if we are too close to it. An excellent example of what was once considered contemporary is the Dada movement from the first half of the 20th century. The artists were responsive to their own time, reacting to the chaos, wars, violence, and death caused by the new war technologies. Their ‘distance’ came from not understanding the absurdity of their time, so they studied it and reproduced the sounds and the esthetic into collages and performances. This gave them a critical perspective on their own time, which allowed them to engage with it and understand what it meant to be living in the first half of the 20th century.  

Camille Turner, “Wanted,” 2017

The second definition, however, contains an important generalization. As opposed to the first one, it does not enforce a specific time frame, i.e., “a singular relationship with one’s own time.” (Agamben, 41) Agamben hints at in his comparison with Fashion and the Archaic. He states that the Contemporary can only see the darkness “in the form of a ‘too soon,’ that is also a ‘too late,’ of an ‘already’ that is also a ‘not yet.” (Agamben, 47) Therefore, Contemporariness is an ahistorical concept, and chronology, whether you’re engaging with the past or the present, doesn’t matter--it is untimely. What matters most is that two people engage in the same discussion, whether or not they are centuries apart. An example is Camille Turner who in her work Wanted (2017) engages with the dark history of runaway slave ads and updates them as fashion magazine ads. Real descriptions of slave ads from the 19th century are juxtaposed with contemporary fashion models that match their description. Wanted in the sense of trying to capture a person and wanted in the sense of fashion and commodity. By doing this, she confronts the erasure of slavery in Canada making the contemporary spin fit an earlier context and in the same breath make the 19th century context contemporary. She is “[tying] together that which [is] inexorably divided” and “recall[s], re-evoke[s], and revitalize[s] that which [was] declared dead.” (Agamben, 50)

In the end, a combination of both definitions is the best way to explain the Contemporary. The Contemporary is then not only the one who perceives darkness but also one who can “divide and interpolate time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation to other times.” (Agamben, 53)

Sources:

Agamben, Giorgio. "What is the Contemporary?" In What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA, 2009.

Turner, Camille. “Wanted.” Camille Turner, accessed on July 30th, 2021. http://camilleturner.com/project/wanted/

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Elias Sime: Tightrope

Week 4 | July 26th, 2020

As the Royal Ontario Museum opens up again to the general public, it is doing so in full force with plenty of new thought-provoking exhibitions. On the fourth level of the museum is the Roloff Beny Gallery currently displaying Elias Sime’s exhibition entitled Tightrope which will be available until the 6th of September. Sime was born in 1968 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where he currently works and resides. He graduated with a degree in Graphic Design in 1990 from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University. After graduation he started working with mixed-media collages using repurposed materials and recently expanded his work to include sculpture. Since then, Sime has become a prominent figure in the contemporary art world as his work has been internationally recognized and featured in both group and solos exhibitions.

Tightrope features Sime’s work from 2013 to 2019 which includes a dozen large canvases layered with a variety of found materials ranging from repurposed electronic components, threads, and buttons to create complex imagery. The name of the exhibition, Tightrope, references the “delicate balance and constant tension between technology, and the environment” (wall text from exhibition). One particularly thought-provoking piece is the one first presented upon entering the gallery entitled On the Edge (2015) which is a huge piece composed of eight large canvases and made of reclaimed electronic components such as motherboards, circuits, and wires chosen for their colour. The imagery resembles an arial photograph. The use of the electronic components are oddly well suited to create this illusion as their materiality which is made of different geometrical shapes can give the illusion of land parcels, buildings and landscape at varying densities. The green mother-bords illude to the country, the brown CPU’s (processors) look like low-density city areas or suburbs, while a variety of other electronic components which are more three dimensional and colorful represent a metropolitan fabric with high-rise buildings.

Interestingly, there are many levels of interpretation to this work, some detailed by the artist, some left to the viewer to decode. On a first level, this piece engages with the dynamics of urbanization. Because of the use of the three different types of textures the changes between each level of density are drastic which is not unlike some arial maps you can find online. These types of changes can happen as cities grow rapidly and become more and more globalized, a factor which technology has itself played a huge role in. The ‘map’ itself also isn’t a reproduction of a specific arial, it can be any place in the world. Therefore, a second reading of the map is about the connection between globalization and technology in which almost every city in the world can be connected into this one unifying map because of the interconnecting factors of technology. A third reading of the work is also about material extraction. The continent of Africa is one of the richest continents in term of material extraction for minerals used in phones and computers. Consequently, in the work every parcel of land is literally represented by the product its soil helps produce. By doing this, Sim brings attention to the delicate balance between this extraction and the socio-political and environmental repercussions of these practices. However, Sim doesn’t have any negative intention towards extraction, or the technological materials used in his work. “'My work reclaims these machines in a tender way, as I am not in opposition to technology,” Sims explains, “[i]t’s about how to balance it with “real” life. We’ve become off-balance. My title for my series of collages, “Tightrope,” 2013, has a double meaning. It’s about this equilibrium, but I also wanted it to evoke a string: If you pull it too tight, it will break.” (Chrisholm, 2020)

Source:

Chrisholm, Nan. “Review: ‘Elias Sime: Tightrope,’ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.” August 12, 2020. https://www.kemperart.org/news/2020/aug/review-%E2%80%9Celias-sime-tightrope%E2%80%9D-kemper-museum-contemporary-art

Images: 

Sime, Elias. “On the Edge.” Reclaimed electronic components on panel. 2015. Photographed by Sarah Janelle

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The Neighbor's Window, a review during Covid

Week 3 | July 23rd, 2020

The Neighbor's Window was directed and produced in 2019 by Marshall Curry, who based the short film on an episode entitled The Living Room of the podcast Love and Radio, where Diane Weipert recalled a similar story. The film tells the story of Ali and Jacob, a middle-aged couple with kids living in New York City. Their relationship is strained from the trials and tribulations of life. One day, they notice that their apartment window directly faces that of their neighbors, a young couple who just moved in. Unable to resist the temptation, Ali and Jacob spy on their neighbors, and compare their circumstances to their neighbors. We watch from their perspective as their neighbor's lives unfold. Eventually, after a turning of favors, it is revealed that the neighbors were also watching Ali and Jacob's lives and a strange kind of bond is formed between the pair who found comfort in watching each other's lives from afar.

The film had great success and even won an Academy Award in 2020 for Best Live Action Short Film. However, I think no one knew just how much the film would truly resonate with people during the Covid-19 pandemic we are still unfortunately in the midst of. When at the height of it, with people stuck at home, working from home and everything in between taking place at home, I think we could all relate to Ali and Jacob, envious of what they could see through the window: people having parties and close social interaction. Similarly, the short film also illustrates this new modern condition we have seemingly entered in where we form relationships with people from far away. Through these series of openings and closing of the curtains for those living in metropolitan cities but also of the Zoom screens, which, similar to the former, offer a window into someone else's life and home. We relate to each other this way, finding connection in the fact that we are both confined to our voyeuristic instincts, standing in front of our windows and cameras, peering into other people's personal lives.

Curry, Marshall, director. "The Neighbor's Window." Marshall Curry Productions, 2019.

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Exegesis - Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space

Week 3 | July 21st, 2021

In his three-part essay entitled Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, published in 1976 in Artforum Magazine, Brian O'Doherty takes us on an overview of the history of the gallery space. We start from the 18th and 19th-century salon-style hangings to the present-day white cube, where the author reserves a stark criticism. The term 'white cube' is used to reference the mode of display of white walls with artificial light sources that have long since been the established default in galleries and museums.

There are two arguments in O'Doherty's text. The first is that the white cube came about because of our changing notion about the edge. Previously the frame was used to contain an illusion into a 3D space, similar to a window frame. As art became flatter, such as in Monet's work which is the example given in the text, it eroded the edge. Thus, the frame became obsolete and was replaced by white walls to objectify the work and provide a type of palette cleanser between artworks to avoid the pictures becoming a single perceptual field. His second argument is that the white cube alienates everything that is 'other.' It not only alienates the presence of the body, but it exploits the art by making it expensive and excluding. It puts the art on a pedestal. O'Doherty writes: "In this context, a standing ashtray becomes almost like a sacred object […]" In this context, the fact that it is art cannot be questioned anymore.

Consequently, an even bigger problem arises; the art gallery becomes a secular system with a closed system of values conforming with the social order. Therefore, it has never truly been as neutral as its white walls might otherwise suggest. "This, of course," O'Doherty writes, "is one of modernism's fatal diseases." The essay was so popular that it was republished in a book and deeply discussed. It was a turning point in contemporary art theory as O'Doherty's criticism tapped into what many people were thinking but had not yet put into words.

While I agree with the essay's main arguments, there is no doubt a generalization in his second argument. Specifically, it comes from this last quote where he calls the white cube "one of modernism's fatal diseases." The fault is that this supposes that this problem caused by the white cube is uniquely a modernist one. As mentioned before, O'Doherty main issue with the white cube is that its neutrality is an illusion. Therefore, if the artist accepts the gallery space he is showing in, he conforms to the ideological state apparatus. But hasn't this always been the case?

The white cube indeed excludes everything that is 'other;' poor people, people of colour, uneducated people, queer people, etc. However, this was also the case for the gallery space even back in the 18th and 19th century salon-style hangings. During this time in Western society, not everybody was allowed to produce so-called "art." It had to be one of the 'classical' arts, and it had to be taught at an institution; this meant that it wasn't accessible to people who didn't have the means to pay for an education, people of colour, and women. There was no illusion that the art world and, therefore, the space in the gallery was an inclusive one. The system that controlled what was considered art and who could produce art back then is still very much the same today. In the case of the white cube, I would argue that it is actually more obvious that the gallery space and the apparatus behind it aren't 'neutral' or inclusive. Now, instead of simply knowing at the back of your mind that your body is an intrusion onto the space, you feel it instantly when you walk into the hermetically sealed white cube. Therefore, as the art world stands today, even if you strip today's art gallery of its white hermetic walls, the institution that transforms ashtrays into sacred objects is still there; it will still be biased, the art object will still be deified by its mere inclusion into a gallery space, and the 'other' will never feel as if they belong.  

That being said, the art world isn't hopeless. There are ways to counter the problem of the white cube. Many artists have chosen to simply not exhibit in formal gallery spaces and instead utilize public space or other unconventional spaces to display their art. For example, David Hammons refused to exhibit any work in art galleries, museums, and very acclaimed art exhibitions but instead opted for Church basements and street corners. Additionally, some artists have found ways to critique the institution behind the white cube (also called institutional critiques, which falls under conceptual art) while operating within the system. Perhaps one of the best-known art stunts was Hans Haacke's MoMA Poll in 1970 (pictured above), where (without letting the Museum know what he was up to) asked visitors to vote on socio-political issues. For example, one poll asked: "Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting for him in November?"  By doing this, Haacke was directly commenting on the involvement of MoMa's major donors and board members. Haacke thought that the artist's job was to expose the institutional framework of the gallery as a kind of inside job to disillusion the general public as to the so-called neutrality of the white cube. Since then, many other artists have taken up the flame, such as Matthieu Laurette, Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson.

In the end, like O'Doherty hints to in his writing, the form of the art gallery will change again once art itself goes through another metamorphosis. I cannot help but wonder what this new phase will look like.

 Sources:

Filipovic, Elena. David Hammons : Bliz-aard Ball Sale. London, (England: Afterall Books) 2017.

"Moma Poll, Hans Haacke." WikiArt, October 5th, 2012. https://www.wikiart.org/en/hans-haacke/moma-poll-1970

O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube : the Ideology of the Gallery Space. Expanded ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Image 1: "Christine Ay Tjoe Spinning in the Desert." The White Cube. https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/christine_ay_tjoe_hong_kong_2021 

Image 2: Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, New York, 1970. https://www.wikiart.org/en/hans-haacke/moma-poll-1970 

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The Cut, The Tear, and The Remix: Re-imagining Spaces for Art in a Covid Struck World

Week 2 | July 14th, 2021

In an exhibition entitled the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures presented by the McMaster Museum of Art and the Nia Center for the Arts's virtual exhibition the white cube is dematerialized to create a space for Black artists of the diaspora envisioning an Afrofuture.

The exhibition, curated by Stylo Starr during her curatorial internship with the McMaster Museum of Art, features eight Canadian artists of the African and Caribbean diaspora. Their works, each grounded in a different form of a collage, centers around their experience as immigrants. In this sense, collage is quite a fitting medium as it works with themes of construction and deconstruction, contextualization and decontextualization. The platform itself was created by the artist SPATIAL-ESK and is set in outer space with colourful planes carving out colour-coded rooms for each artist. The exhibition is removed from any familiarity and is without any floors or ceilings, instead exposed to the galaxy surrounding it. Once entered you can click and drag your mouse through the exhibition. Different icons lead you to a secondary webpages to get more information on the artist and their work or in certain cases to watch the artwork.

For example, after entering Sonya Mwamba's room in pastel blue, you can click on an icon to be redirected to the McMaster Museum's website where you can watch her short films. They reference the Kodak test photos and Hollywood movies where the white cultural canon reigned supreme. Mwamba thereby challenges the white default by superimposing the black bodies to recalibrate these films, thus taking back Black narratives and ways of being. Another artist whose work we are redirected to see is Kofi Oduro's hypertext code as an alternative to the performance of poetry. His works speak volumes about the creative potential of basic technology and hints at how the black and immigrant experience is often moved beyond physical space. Digital art can be understood to embody this state of being as it is at once a physical and imaginary space.  

Yung Yemi, “Nothing Real Can Be Threatened”, 2020

In another room, Yung Yemi's (also known as Adeyemi Adegbesan) black and white collages  refer to what he calls "the duality of blackness"; that is to be both infinitely diverse and singularly monolithic. Thinking about a future where blackness is freed of oppressive colonial rule, each collage is stripped of context and hung in white space. They are also simultaneously draped in detailed and decadent armour, expressing the need for protection even in an Afrofuture. In a yellow room, FEZA focuses on what she calls the 'middle space;' where reconciliation between the past and the present becomes possible. Her collages deconstruct and reconstruct her memories by tiling segments of photographic images together like pieces of a broken mirror that create an alternate reality.

Next, originally presented as an immersive exhibition, Anna Binta Diallo's work resembles portals using images of landscapes, space, or maps within the silhouettes of bodies that merge with the background of the exhibition. Themes of displacement emerge through the juxtaposition of different landscapes within the singular vessel. In a red-coloured room, Emkay's Adjei-Manu similarly collages into silhouettes focusing on hands and eyes signifying the search for one's own identity and history, and how they might speak to one's own future. Finally, in a brown room, Ghislan Timm's plays with GIFs and Marcel Camus' 1959 film Black Orpheus to bridge the past and the future by juxtaposing and assembling the fate of the two lovers with imagery of the joyful festivities of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thus inserting black and brown bodies into Greek mythologies. Her space is more furnished than most, with brown columns blending into the rooms' background.

Overall, the cut, the tear, and the remix: contemporary collage and black futures is successful in its two goals. Its first, presenting a diverse selection of collage artists that engage in the discussion about the Afrofuture. For example, although all the artists addressed feelings of non-belonging through their common language of collage, some like Sonya Mwamba or Anna Binta Diallo addressed their displacement and search for identity by creating a sort of an alternate reality where they would belong, while others like Kofi Oduro or FEZA offered more contemplative experiments of what it means to be a migrant.

As for its second goal; offering an alternative to the white cube, both Stylo Starr the curator, and SPATIAL-ESK the designer of the platform, were able to capture the experience of going to an art gallery within the comfort of our own home away from the 'snobby' art world. They were able to do this by taking what was important; scale, accessibility, and order, and discarding the rest leaving us in this space between the physical, and the immaterial. This makes the space itself its own kind of artwork which blend in really well with the theme of the exhibition. For example, one aspect that often gets lost in virtual spaces is the sense of scale, as we can be left to zoom in and out infinitely. However, because the viewer can't actually walk around the platform and is constrained to a clicking on a single marker, the collages never lose their sense of scale as seen in Anna Binta Diallo's series of collages where we can stilll grasp how big the works would have been in their original installation setting.

Having said this, there were two things that could have been improved. First, is the creation of a space where you could do everything, like see Sonya Mwamba's short films or Kofi Oduro poetry without being redirected to another webpage. Second, the work of interpreting the pieces somewhat on our own has been done for us. In every artist's individual page is a statement giving us a reading of the work on top of the artist's statement which isn't necessary as it almost robs the viewer of their imagination when looking at the art. In the end, the cut, the tear, and the remix bridges the gap that the pandemic has left us with this past year and a half by bringing together an interesting departure from the white cube to possibly offer a more inclusive space that isn't limited by the audience's distance or time.

Link to the exhibit: https://museum.mcmaster.ca/the-remix-virtual-exhibition/

[theexistentialeasel]

Exegesis: David Hammons and the Question of Art

Week 2 | July 12th, 2021

On a cold New York Sunday in February 1983, a man stood on the sidewalk on the southeast corner of Cooper Square and Aster place, in his coat and scarf. Laid before him, on a stripped North African rug was a series of perfectly round snowballs, in three different sizes, arranged neatly in graduated rows. He was selling snowballs….or so the tale goes. This was, in fact, the legendary work of David Hammons, a well-accomplished artist still active today who has been working since the late 20th century and who is best known for his ephemeral institutional critiques.

In her book entitled David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale (2017), Elena Filipovic studies and reconstructs the events of this mythical snowball sale as part of Afterall's Books' One Work Series. This was no doubt a difficult feat as Hammons is known for being purposely elusive. For example, the only record we have of Bliz-aard Ball Sale are two rolls of film produced by Hammons' friend, the photographer Dawoud Bey. Most of which have never been seen or published at all. Even the author had to go to great lengths to document Hammons' career through close readings, archival research and personal interviews. From this Filipovic asks an interesting question: What is art? Or rather, at what point does a gesture become a piece of art?

One answer Filipovic proposes is that it is the documentation process; the residual trace it leaves for history to analyze as proof that a critical thinking process happened at some point in time. In Bliz-aard Ball Sale, Bey's photographs played an important role by documenting the event as there are no other records of this sale happening. If Bey hadn't been there, the art world wouldn't have known of the sale and thus wouldn't have been able to record it into history as an iconic artwork. However, another answer might simply be that it is the artist's intention that makes the gesture art. For example, a street seller not making art would merely say, "I am selling snowballs." In Hammons' case, his thought process was a lot more complicated. As we learn in the book, Hammons went to great lengths to make the Bliz-aard Ball Sale; from moulding each snowball using a plastic mould, watching the street sellers for countless nights to learn how to infiltrate the scene so he wouldn't stand out, to getting his friend Bey to take pictures of him at work. Finally, there was also an intention behind his work; Hammons thought the artist was somewhat always a scam artist. So selling snowballs in the middle of winter is the perfect demonstration. Therefore, in this sense, documentation matters less than the intention. The gesture becomes art as soon as it is conceived, whether it actually happened or not, because that is the intention.

In the end, whether there is a debate about if the work actually happened or whether there was an intent behind the gesture is somewhat actually irrelevant. Perhaps, the only truly important thing is that someone recognizes the gesture as a work of art, whether that be the artist or even a passer-by.

Filipovic, Elena. David Hammons : Bliz-Aard Ball Sale. London, (England: Afterall Books) 2017.