ART and POLITICS NOW

Wael Shawky Cabaret Crusades The Horror Show File 201o

This is the beginning of my analysis of the Istanbul Biennial which has the title “untitled” based on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who titled his work “Untitled” then added a parenthesis with a particular reference. In the Istanbul Biennial 2011, the curators made five group shows with the following references untitled(abstraction), untitled(Ross), untitled (history) untitled (passport), untitled (guns). The overall theme was the possibility of undermining the distance of modernism with political contexts. The range of political content went from extremely literal to absolutely abstract. Indeed the exhibition is a veritable encylopedia of different ways of examing the possible relationships of art and politics. I will write more about the specific art work in the next entry.

For now, the overall effect was that of a lot of historical art that was modernist, paired with contemporary artists recontextualizing historical modernism, or reinventing it. There were very few artists from the U.S., and none of the usual familiar names except Martha Rosler ( but the curators chose to show her earlier Vietnam series, rather than her recent series on the Iraq war.

For now, I will comment on the image above as indicative of the “new world order” ( how antiquated that idea is, and yet, there is indeed a new world order, and the US is not at the center of it). This Egyptian artist is using 200 year old marionettes to tell the story of the Crusades from the Arab perspective in a video of a marionette show. The video was in Arabic with Turkish subtitles. No English. That was exciting in itself. The narrative centered around the brutality of the Crusaders.It was riveting.

More to come on specific works.

Elizabeth Colborne Lumber Mills of Puget Sound

Seattle art historian David Martin’s exhibition at the Whatcom  Museum is a perfect partner to the late summer days we are experiencing. We can empathize both with Colborne’s early delight in the forests of the Northwest, her close up drawings, paintings, and prints, as well as her later work which suggests the devastation that those great forests invited. As in the image above, she always maintains a distance, and does not incorporate any critical comment. She only presents the fact of the lumber mill in Bellingham with amazing technical desterity. The wood blocks with multiplesubtle colors demonstrate her command of thmedium. But more than that, she has suggested both the beauty and the tragedy of the Northwest forests. Another work of 1933 Cedar Blocks

as well as this one

 

Cedar Logs for Shingles

show us the consumption of the resource in which the Northwest was so richly endowed.

Colborne’s early work is an example of late nineteenth centurychildren’s book illustrationsa genre full of detail, delicate color and a sweetness that has disappeared from children’s books almost entirely. I have recently been reading an early illustrated version of Raggedy Ann to my grandchildren and the illustrations are a wonder to behold, compared to later editions of the same work which are highly simplified.

Colborne also did paintings that suggest her deep immersion in the woods, she seems to be standing in the very midst of the forest as she painted these works. We enjoy standing there with her.

Finally, as an end of summer image, I give you this clam digger, an image of people in an activity which I saw out of the train window on the way to the museum.

Elizabeth Colborne Clam Diggers 1900

The Sister Peaks of the Cascades 1925

That gave me a satisfying sense of continuity with the past.

Of course it also reminded me that this was the era of those depressing images of the native peoples of the Northwest that are on many of ourferry boats, the dispossessed native peoples on the shore harvesting the bounty of the Northwest in the midst of their new poverty.

Natives in the early 1900s