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This old blog shall remain as an archive of posts ca. 2005-2007.

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A Century of Makonde @ The Wallach Gallery, reviewed in The NYTimes

Wallach Gallery. Figures of Makonde men, around 1970-80, one carrying a boy and a suitcase, the other a water pipe and a spear.

via NYTimes, Art In Review [additional linkage provided by RGL]:

REVOLUTIONS
A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: November 2, 2007

Wallach Art Gallery
Columbia University
1190 Amsterdam Avenue, near 116th Street, Morningside Heights

Through Dec. 8

Goodbye to timeless Africa, darkest Africa, out-of-Africa and the "primitive" Africa that made Western Modernism sexy — to all the blinding stereotypes that shape the way Africa continues to be viewed internationally. Such farewells form the very basis of African art history as a progressive discipline today. And they clearly underlie exhibitions like this one, organized by Alexander Ives Bortolot, a lecturer in African art history at Dartmouth College and a Columbia University doctoral candidate.

Art from Mozambique, and East Africa in general, is scantily represented in public collections, and the art of the Makonde people has been little studied in recent years. So Mr. Bortolot is filling a scholarly need. And he approaches his subject in an interesting way, not through objects per se, but through the masked performance tradition called mapiko in which they play an integral role.

The show begins with 19th- and early-20th-century sculptures that suggest the roots of the masquerades performed by masked and costumed Makonde men — participation by women was forbidden — who assumed the personas of ancestral spirits who protected and preserved order in the community. Beginning in the 1920s, its spiritual utility diminished, but its role as inventive social commentary increased. When a socialist government came to power after independence in 1964, the masquerade became a vehicle for a new ethic of self-reliance and social equality. Women began participating and created masquerades of their own.

Now, after a protracted civil war and the establishment of multiparty democracy, the mapiko tradition is thriving in freestyle mode. Some performers present it as pure entertainment, others as social critique, still others as a way to restore old spiritual meanings. In every case this is a transformative art at the center of society, not a luxury item at its fringes. It encompasses ideas of repetition and change, and Western art can learn from it.

Mr. Bortolot captures all of this thrillingly. And Wallach, in presenting the show, does exactly what a university gallery should so. It showcases fresh research; fleshes out that research with marvelous and unfamiliar objects; and distills it in a catalog of nuanced clarity, written by the curator. Congratulations all around.

Adventures in gallery going: the Dark Continent

This month (Nov. 8-17) Galerie Walu presents Schwarz Afrika, an installation with an intriguing twist for the visitor:

Galerie Walu invites you to a fascinating exhibition. For two weeks, cloth, tightly draped, will conceal the display windows of the art gallery. The visitor who enters the dark and shaded room is handed out an electric torch [flashlight on this side of the Pond -- Ed.]. Thus equipped, the visitor embarks on a suspenseful journey of exploration and discovery ...

By directing the torch, details, structures and colours are highlighted which otherwise pass unnoticed. Depending on the colour torch light temperature -- –warm or cold –-- and depending on the light's incidence and the movement of the torch colours and shapes will change until eventually the exhibits are seemingly instilled with live [sic] and start dancing in their own shadows. And suddenly one realizes that African art is a culture that is lived and experienced.

Remix @ The Heard Museum

via e-flux :

REMIX: NEW MODERNITIES IN A POST-INDIAN WORLD

Heard Museum
2301 N. Central Ave.
Phoenix, AZ 85004

http://www.heard.org

In Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World, 15 contemporary Native artists have much to say about the modern world. The exhibition presents mixed media work on canvas and in video, photography, sculpture, collage and performance. The artists explore broad themes of class, gender and globalization as well as engage in the more personal territory of family and community. Remix opened October 6, 2007, at the Heard Museum.

In one of several essays in the exhibition catalogue, Heard Museum curator Joe Baker, Delaware poses these questions: "Why are indigenous artists not allowed to celebrate the present as other artists do? Why do we require of Native artists a myth or fantasy, an iconography? What became of the celebrated ideal of multiculturalism, a world composed of ever-changing blends and mixtures?"

In response, Baker and co-curator Gerald McMaster, Cree turn the microphone over to the Remix artists who defy expectations and debunk biased mythology with their smart, complex and often satirical art. Much of the exhibit explores what it means to be of mixed heritage with strong ties -- and sometimes absent ties -- to Native communities.

Dustinn Craig, White Mountain Apache/Navajo, sees an analogy between skateboarding culture and complex traditions of tribal life. His video, 4 Wheel War Pony, tells the story of young Apache skateboarders. His artist statement explains, "Apache kids with skateboards live with dreams so large they will never dare to tell anyone. Yet those dreams get a little smaller each year, with the death of another friend, or the impossible success of another."

Franco Mondini-Ruiz, who is a Tejano of Mexican-American and Italian stock, negates stereotypes by humorously embracing them. For Remix, his participation becomes performance as the artist creates and sells 100 paintings in a live marketplace. His paintings and sculptures are created from tchotchkies found in thrift and souvenir shops, and the performance is a statement on the "business" of collecting art.

Cree artist Kent Monkman appropriates 19th century romantic landscapes to bring out an erotic perversity that underscores pop cultural representations of early relationships between Native Americans and European settlers. In Remix, the artist appears as the "half breed" drag queen, Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle. This alter ego is also the purported creator of the work, which includes a suggestive video installation called "Shooting Geronimo," shown inside a 20-plus-foot tipi created in crystal.

Video games are the territory of Zuni artist Alan Natachu. In his ongoing project, he satirizes stereotyped American Indians myths that dominate the current video gaming industry with images like the blood thirsty Indian Warrior.

Artist Anna Tsouhlarakis, of Navajo and Greek heritage, challenges stereotypes through role reversal. In her video "Let's Dance," she struggles to learn diverse steps of other ethnic dances including an Irish jig, line dancing and a Haitian voodoo dance. As student rather than teacher, Tsouhlarakis steps into a new role; no longer is she the "outsider" performing Native traditions for curious strangers.

This exhibition was organized by the Heard Museum, Phoenix, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and co-curated by Joe Baker and Gerald McMaster. Remix will be on view at the Heard through April 27, 2008, and travels to the Smithsonian's George Gustav Heye Center in New York in May 2008.

The road to Infotopia? On digitizing the world's books

Anthony Grafton in this week's New Yorker provides a lucid and level-headed analysis of the many fervid efforts to digitize the universe of the printed word, such as the Google Library Project and Microsoft's Live Search Books Publishers Program, as well as more focused (and frequently non-profit) ventures such as the Open Content Alliance and more subject-focused efforts such as Aluka (about which you've previously read in this space).

In fact, writes Grafton, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing ...

Google and Microsoft pursue their own interests, in ways that they think will generate income, and this has prompted a number of major libraries to work with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit book-digitizing venture. Many important books will remain untouched: Google, for example, has no immediate plans to scan books from the first couple of centuries of printing ... Other sectors of the world’s book production are not even catalogued and accessible on site, much less available for digitization. The materials from the poorest societies may not attract companies that rely on subscriptions or on advertising for cash flow.

Closer to home Grafton also provides a concise and complimentary history of libraries from third millennium B.C. Mesopotamia to the present. The conclusion includes an encomium to libraries that might remind readers of the retardaire Nicholson Baker. But unlike Baker Grafton makes a case for libraries being an enduring participant in the research process, not the sole player:

For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come.

Apart from the article, "Future reading: digitization and its discontents," there is a complementary online-only article with links to many of the web resources cited in the article.

ILLUSTRATION: TOM GAULD

American Indian Heritage Month @ MMA

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art Education Newsletter, November/December 2007:

 Celebrate the opening of the New Gallery for the Art of Native North America on November 14 with these programs.

Gallery Talks
Details

Friday, November 16, 10:00 a.m.
Tuesday, November 27, 10:00 a.m.
Wednesday, December 12, 10:00 a.m.
New Gallery for the Art of Native North America
Edith Watts

Films
Details

Tuesday, November 20, 2:00 p.m.
The Crooked Beak of Heaven (1976), produced by David Attenborough (52 min.)
Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall, Uris Center for Education

Thursday, November 29, 2:00 p.m.
In the Land of the Totem Poles (1999), directed by Michel Viotte (51 min.)
Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall, Uris Center for Education

If you enjoyed receiving news about The Metropolitan Museum of Art, we invite you to sign up for our free email newsletters. See My Met Museum.

Critic's Notebook: Into Africa

ILLUSTRATION: SILJA GÖTZ

via The New Yorker, November 5, 2007:

Critic's Notebook
Into Africa
by Peter Schjeldahl

One recent Sunday at the Met, when "The Age of Rembrandt" was as jammed as a clown car, a few viewers had the run of an astonishing sculpture show, "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary." Smartly chosen objects, most from the nineteenth century, enable instant connoisseurship of traditions whose famous impact on modern art, via Picasso et al., is incidental to their quality: better than modern art, by and large. No Western master improves on the formal genius of the best Fang reliquary figures (made to guard vessels full of ancestral remains) and Kwele masks. Focus on details of the black, glisteningly oiled Fang pieces: rhythmic elongation and compression of body parts, heads domed like cosmic eggs, sublimely abstracted hair plaits, and backs whose subtle planes flabbergast. Some of the unknown artists were powerful and crude, others elegant and a mite bland. But the maker of the statue that, when shown in London in 1933, was dubbed "the Black Venus" beggars Brancusi.

The Inaugural Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Reblogged from Material World (with props to Haidy):

                                                                                   

National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, the Netherlands, 8-11 June 2008
http://www.Museum-Conference.com

At this time of fundamental social change, what is the role of the museum, both as a creature of that change, and perhaps also as an agent of change? The International Conference on the Inclusive Museum is a place where museum practitioners, researchers, thinkers and teachers can engage in discussion on the historic character and future shape of the museum. The key question of the Conference is 'How can the institution of the museum become more inclusive?'

As well as impressive line-up of international main speakers, the Conference will also include numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations by practitioners, teachers and researchers. We would particularly like to invite you to respond to the Conference Call-for-Papers. Presenters may choose to submit written papers for publication in the fully refereed International Journal of the Inclusive Museum. If you are unable to attend the Conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in this fully refereed academic Journal, as well as access to the electronic version of the Conference proceedings.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 8 November 2007. Proposals are reviewed within four weeks of submission. Full details of the Conference, including an online proposal submission form, are to be found at the Conference website.

Apart from the web site, there will also be a conference journal, The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, and an electronic Newsletter (sign up here),

Eternal Ancestors: Alisa LaGamma on the Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC

[click above to listen]

via WNYC.org, The Leonard Lopate Show (October 15, 2007):

Reliquary Sculpture: Seated Male Figure (Muzidi) Kongo peoples, Bembe group; Democratic Republic of the Congo - 19th–first half of 20th century
Etnografiska Museet, Stockholm 1954.1.2332

Art from Africa's Equatorial Rainforests
Curator Alisa LaGamma joins Leonard to speak about "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary," a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It features sculptures from Africa's equatorial rainforests and explores how they've influenced early 20th century artists.

Download MP3

Kamau Amu Patton's Cable Cosmologies

via Rhizome.org, 10-12-07 :

Storytelling, on a universe-shaping scale and in a spastic, homespun-costume style, has underpinned most of Bay Area-artist Kamau Amu Patton's work, from advertising posters mounted on the sides of bus shelters to animistic works on paper. Having trained in sociology and physics before completing an MFA at Stanford University, the artist's background in both social critique and the ordering principals of the cosmos both come into play in his video-focused installation work, which borrows from the vernacular of African American cable-access cult leaders. Spinning eccentric cosmologies of divine kingship that cross invented hybrids of African and Christian religious ritual with the low-budget aesthetics of local programming, the artist uses this sub genre of American television to create sometimes ridiculously overblown rites and iconographies surrounding apocalyptic prophesies. Rather than a parody of TV mystics, however, the work traces the media conditions under which these kinds of millenarian narratives are told and their visionary creators find a pulpit. Promising to investigate "the media produced of African American cult activity in America, including the 5 Percent Nation, Nuwaubian Nation, and the Black Hebrew Israelites," an exhibition of his recent work is currently on view at Machine Project, in Los Angeles. Here video work is accompanied by sculptural objects related to occult practices in an installation that speaks volumes about American folk narratives playing out on television as it takes up the conventions of the cable cult genre.

[Link]

This entry was posted by William Hanley on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 8:03 am.