Robert-Goldwater-Library

Robert Farris Thompson on Soundcheck

via NPR.org:

Robert Farris Thompson
The Yale art historian discusses his new book, Tango: The Art History of Love on Soundcheck:

Forever Tango    

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Author Robert Farris Thompson joins us to discuss his new book Tango: The Art History of Love, which explores the cultural roots of the Argentinean dance form. Thompson is a renowned Yale art historian, and Publishers Weekly calls his new book "an antidote to those trite coffee-table books that treat the tango with purple prose." We then turn our attention to the Oral History of American Music archive (OHAM), which is housed at Yale and is the place to go for an insiders' look at the history of American music. We're joined by OHAM founding director Vivian Perlis and associate director Libby Van Cleve. Their new book,

Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, is culled from taped interviews with more than 300 composers, musicians, and others ranging from Ellington and Ives to Copland and Cowell.

                                   

Listen Online Now
		Windows 20k
		MP3 32k

 

 

Brian Jungen's Prototypes for New Understanding

Brian Jungen, Installation Shot of Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2003). Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery

THE NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
presents:

Brian Jungen
September 29 - December 31, 2005
Air Jordans and plastic garden chairs morph into Aboriginal masks and skeletons in the work of Canadian artist Brian Jungen. Jungen's work explores the current tensions between indigenous and global cultures by transforming ordinary consumer goods into emblematic sculptures. This exhibition marks the first comprehensive survey of Jungen's work from the past ten years.

from the press release:

The New Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to present the first North American survey of the work of Brian Jungen (b.1970). Based in Vancouver, Jungen has received significant international acclaim for his imaginative and critical transformation of consumer goods into anthropomorphic forms that evoke a range of contexts from Aboriginal sculpture to natural history museums and retail display. His installations integrate the complex circuitry of desire, mimicry, and fetishization that shape global cultural and economic exchange. This exhibition includes several bodies of work, produced over the last ten years, some of which are being seen for the first time in their entirety. This exhibition also introduces a new series of works, Talking Stick (2005), produced by carving socially charged words and phrases into baseball bats.

As you enter the gallery, you are confronted by what appear to be large whale skeletons. From twenty-one to forty feet in length these skeletons float in space, reminiscent of a museum of natural history display as much they are of a museum of contemporary art. Yet, in this display the pod, or family of three whales, appears to be playfully swimming in and out of the grid of columns. Upon closer inspection, it is possible to discern that the skeletons - the ribs, backbones, flippers, and skulls - are in fact produced by disassembling and reconfiguring the same variety of common white plastic backyard chair. The irony of Jungen's construction of the natural world through petroleum byproducts should not be overlooked as it speaks to his sense of our place in the same ecosystem and larger life cycles such as the whales themselves. [read on...]

Brian Jungen, Talking Sticks (2005). Produced with support from the Province of British Columbia Spirit of BC Arts Fund.


Brian Jungen Exhibition Tours
Through December 31, 2005

Visitors can join any New Museum docent-led tours on a drop-in basis. Join us for tours of the exhibition Brian Jungen on Thursdays at 6:30PM and Saturdays at 2PM. Exhibition tours are free with museum admission.

The Goldwater Library has materials  in its vertical files regarding Brian Jungen: search Watsonline under "Keyword":

Jungen, Brian : [miscellaneous ephemeral material]

LOCATION  CALL NUMBER  STATUS
ARTIST FILE              

Descript     1 folder
Scope        The folder may include clippings, announcements, small                         exhibition catalogs, and other ephemeral items
Local note  Additional Materials in V.F. Cabinets in Stacks
Subject      Jungen, Brian 

Mat type    Vertical files. 

A Tale of Two Cultures: Yinka Shonibare

image source


via NYTimes, Art Review:
'Yinka Shonibare Selects'
A Sculptor from 2 Cultures Takes a Tour of Colonialism
Ken Johnson, Oct 14, 2005

[...] Born in London in 1962 to Nigerian parents, Mr. Shonibare grew up in Nigeria and at 17 returned to England to study art. In the 1990's he became known for wry postcolonialist commentary in the form of sculptural tableaus featuring headless mannequins in 19th-century-style English clothes made of brightly colored and boldly patterned African fabrics. These earned him inclusion in big shows like the Venice Biennale and the controversial "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum.

On view at the  is Mr. Shonibare's response to an invitation to do something with the museum's permanent collections. He has created a display of artifacts, mostly in glass-topped cases, associated with travel, and added two of his own sculptures. At the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is Mr. Shonibare's response to an invitation to do something with the museum's permanent collections. He has created a display of artifacts, mostly in glass-topped cases, associated with travel, and added two of his own sculptures. At the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea he has produced two sculptural tableaus, also about travel.
[...]

Mr. Shonibare's own sculptures cast the whole in a unifying light. Two headless female mannequins in Victorian dresses made of African fabrics rise above the display on six-foot walking stilts attached to their feet. These figures are meant to represent Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, who, along with a third sister, Amelia, founded the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Daughters of a wealthy industrialist, Sarah and Eleanor were avid travelers, and the things they gathered on their travels became the basis of the museum's permanent collection.

Elevated as they are and metaphorically equipped to traverse great distances, the figures of Miss Sally and Miss Nelly, as the sisters were known, become personifications of a seemingly benign cultural imperialism. And it is a measure of Mr. Shonibare's lightness of touch that he leaves the darker shadows of colonialism and its legacy - to which the Hewitt sisters were presumably oblivious - to the intelligent viewer's imagination.

The fabric patterns, by the way, have a complicated history of their own. They were initially produced by English manufacturers in the late 19th century for Indonesian markets, where they failed. In Africa, however, they became so popular that today we can easily take them for products of indigenous design. [read on...]

"Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works From the Permanent Collection" is at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan, (212) 849-8300, through May 6. Mr. Shonibare's exhibition "Mobility" is at the James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212) 714-9500, through Oct. 29.

Fiji's Treasured Culture

image source

The online resource "Fiji's Treasured Culture" is the result of a collaboration between the Museum Victoria and the Fiji Museum.  Selected images from the Museum Victoria's collection are cross-referenced with historical photographs from the Fiji Museum that contextualize their use and meaning.

Auction Calendar

image source
Dorotheum
lot nos. 69-71
textile dolls (Chancay?)
160-200 euros

Asiatische Kunst, Altamerikanische Kunst
October 13, 2005
Palais Dorotheum - Vienna
Lot nos. 1-88

Histoire Naturelle et Art Amerindien
November 9, 2005
Me Marc-Arthur Kohn (Hotel Drouot) - Paris
Lot nos. 297-317

African, Oceanic, and American Indian Art
November 11, 2005
Sotheby's - New York
Sale N08132

image source
Greg Martin Auctions
lot no. 1405
Contemporary Iroqouis corn husk mask
$250-350

Estate Arms Collections (inc. Native American and Ethnographic pieces, some from the Adam Fortunate Eagle Nordwall Collection of Fine Indian Art)
November 14-16, 2005
Greg Martin Auctions - San Francisco
Lot nos. 1339-1416

image source
Dayak. (Bornéo)
Rare coiffe circulaire

Art premiers; arts d'Asie
November 23, 2005
Millon & Associes (Drouot Richelieu) - Paris
Lot nos. 210-381

African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art
December 6, 2005
Christie's - Paris
Sales 5329 & 5416

African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art
December 7, 2005
Sotheby's - Paris
Sale PF5015

Tribal art
December 10, 2005
Vente Koller-Walu - Zurich

Rock Art At Risk

Jack Obonyo, on Mfangano Island in Kenya, tries to protect ancestral Abasuba rock art. "If this goes, it means our culture is gone," he said.

image source

via NYTimes:
The Ancient Art of Africa, at Risk
By MARC LACEY
Published: October 8, 2005

KAKAPEL, Kenya - There are two markedly different manmade etchings on a rock face here, and it is hard to decide which is the more jaw-dropping.

One, dating back thousands of years and featuring the outline of an elephant, is a sign that this hilltop in western Kenya was a special gathering place for early Africans. The other, no more than a few years old, featuring the names "DENNIS" and "PATRICK," is a sign that Africa's rock art is under threat.

Whoever carved those names seems to have disregarded the site's status as a cultural treasure. Authorities responded to the defacement by erecting warning signs and metal fencing around the rock face and declaring it a monument. But that has not stopped numerous copycats from slipping under the bars and scrawling their names into posterity.

Rock art has been discovered - and defaced - the world over. In the United States, a man was arrested in Utah last year for writing "I love you, Wendy" on a sandstone wall bearing ancient American Indian drawings. In another case, three stolen pieces of Indian rock art were recovered in 2003 from the front yard of a Nevada home, after being taken there in violation of the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act.

But in Africa, there is a lack of oversight at many of the rock art sites, leading experts to offer a grim prognosis for their future. "It's very endangered," said David Coulson, the founder and chairman of the Trust for African Rock Art, a preservation group that sponsored a conference on the problem in Nairobi last fall. "Populations are rising so fast, and sites that were in wild, uninhabited areas have development growing around them. So you have graffiti, the single biggest threat." [read on...]

Recent Maya 'Discovery' Qualified

The recent announcement of the discovery of a link between a Maya archaeological site and previously unsourced Mayan antiquities is now being cast more in the light of a confirmation of an earlier-held hypothesis -- this from an Oct. 4 follow-up article in the New York Times. Objects from the Guatemalan site of La Corona were previously ascribed to a "Site Q", whose Spanish-language name is a play on the interrogative "¿Qué?" or "What?" The 'discoverers' now acknowledge that others, including Ian Graham, had previously speculated on a correspondence between the looted artifacts and sites in the Petén region of Guatemala:

Dr. Graham, who was not involved in the new research, called it an exciting discovery and "gratifying confirmation" of their earlier findings, though he conceded that at the time he had some reservations because of the site's modest size ...

Dr. [David] Stuart, now an archaeology professor at the University of Texas, noted that at an international conference in 2001 he presented evidence that he said already established the Site Q-La Corona connection. [read more]