NEWSgrist - where spin is art

How Islamic? "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking" @ MoMA

Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

"Pleasure Pillars" (2001) by Pakistani-born Shahzia Sikander.



via NYTimes:
What Does Islam Look Like?
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: February 26, 2006

THE West and Islam are on a cultural collision course. That's the best-selling fiction that many people — politicians, religious leaders and the media on both sides of the equation — are working overtime to turn into fact. Actually, it's a very old story, and art is routinely pulled into it.

Always, we hear Islamic art talked about in the way something called the "Islamic world" is talked about, as if it were unitary, unchanging, inscrutable and over there. We hear that Islamic art is, by definition, religious art, and we hear about its hostile relationship to the human image.

We got an earful of this with the furor over Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. The fact is, images of the Prophet abound in Islamic art and culture; the Metropolitan Museum has several examples in its Islamic collection. But unlike the cartoons, such images are not caricatures.

The cartoon issue isn't primarily an art story, any more than the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in India was an architecture story, or the censure of "The Satanic Verses" was a story about contemporary fiction. It's a political story, an ancient and universal one, about how an image, and almost any image will do, once it is fused to cultural identity — Islam, in this case — can end up being used as a weapon.

As it happens, at the same time that intense partisan heat is being generated around the topic of popular images and Islam, we are getting a number of exhibitions of contemporary work to which the name "Islamic" is attached. Some shows approach the Islamic connection hesitantly; others embrace it. Together they tell us very different things about the reception of a cultural category called "Islam" in the West.

By far the most prominent exhibition of contemporary art on the subject yet seen in New York opens today at the Museum of Modern Art. You would never guess that subject, though, from its title — "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking" — in which the word Islam does not appear.

All but three of the featured artists were born in some part of the so-called Islamic world: Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine and Turkey. But they all live and work in the West and have made their careers in the mainstream international art scene, which means in Europe and the United States. Despite their Western positioning, they are routinely tagged as Islamic artists by an art world addicted to marketable categories. The question posed by the show's curator, Fereshteh Daftari, an assistant curator at the Modern who was herself born in Iran, is "How 'Islamic' is their art?"

Most of these artists are tagged Islamic because of their backgrounds. Yet much of their work is far less about Islam itself, as a religion or culture, than about their relationship to Islam — in some cases it is close and positive; in other cases, distant and critical. But in most instances, it is ambivalent — the opposite of how Islam is treated these days in the larger world.

In these works, images and forms associated with Islam, far from being sacrosanct, are invitations to individualistic and unorthodox experimentation, to examine and play with Islamic identity without being confined to it. [read on...]

Carnival of Souls

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Branden Pearson, 10, with beads he collected last week at the Krewe of Excalibur parade for the Mardi Gras celebration in Metairie, La.

via NYTimes: Mardi Gras Diary
Amid Revelry, Evidence of City's Cruel Transformation
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: February 25, 2006

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 24 — For a long time I hated Mardi Gras, and tried to flee the city in those weeks.

It was the opposite of what made New Orleans beguiling, or so it seemed to me: loud and raucous, the city's ritual self-abasement enforced mass jollity. The workaday New Orleans, underpopulated, green and quiet, was best in its absolute regard for individual states of joy or gloom.

For years I failed to see the point, a distaste reinforced when visiting hordes from the mainland let their hair down and turned the French Quarter into a "Disneyland for drunks," as a dyspeptic bookseller friend put it. The history of Kings of Rex going back decades was commemorated in some of the city's grandest homes, while the city's crumbling social compact failed to receive similar attention. I knew too that some Jewish families in the Uptown neighborhood left town during Carnival because they would not be invited to the fancier balls.

Yet over the years a different aspect gradually began to sink in. Streaming through the streets of my neighborhood in the Garden District, after the parades, were the city's poor — black families, on the way back to their homes a few blocks away, children skipping with their loot next to strollers festooned with beads.

These were the days of the year when the neighborhoods were joined, however tenuously. The local grandees in their columned mansions had to suffer it. Orders of precedence were reversed. Difficult lives had this release, at least. Outsiders amazed at the lack of internal clamor for change in New Orleans fail to account for these ephemeral satisfactions.

In recent years, going to the parades with my young children opened my eyes again — bead-catching turned out to be serious business — and I made my peace with Carnival.

This year has been a shock. Black people are largely absent in the trek back from St. Charles Avenue, the parade route. There were some black families at the Krewe of Muses parade Thursday night, but where were the children and mothers streaming back to the tattered houses close to the Mississippi River? The crowd was thinned out, boisterous only in patches. It was mostly white, and mostly local.

The Muses parade carried some telltale signs. Instead of bands from each of three traditionally black Catholic prep schools in New Orleans — St. Augustine, Xavier Prep and St. Mary's — there was a small single band uniting the three, a so-called Max Band. Another group styled itself the Ninth Ward Marching Band, but it was almost all-white — clearly commemorative, rather than representative, of what had been a black neighborhood, now gone. The band members wore military-style helmets with "9" on them. The once-obscure Ninth Ward is now a world-famous war zone.

Nothing has brought home Hurricane Katrina's cruel demographic shift like this. A friend — a native, unlike me — said after Sunday's parades that it reminded her of the Mardi Gras of her childhood, four decades or so earlier: smaller, more homogeneous, peopled more largely by locals. The city was still majority-white in those days. It may be so again at this moment. Every "expert" has a different set of numbers and projections.

Two years ago there was a shooting at the Muses parade — rival teenage gangs from the Mid-City neighborhood shot at each other, and a young woman, a paradegoer, was fatally wounded in the crossfire. The shooting terrified the city's tourism mavens and led to a beefing-up of security. This year, two New Orleans police officers, posted close to the spot, looked bored and sleepy as they surveyed the thin, peaceful crowd.

Carnival is still a sort of release this year, even if it proves to be a tourism bust. The giant dummy refrigerators and the floats lampooning local politicos squeeze humor from a grim time. (William J. Jefferson, a New Orleans congressman, was skewered for having commandeered a National Guard truck to check out his house during the flood: "Uh, General, may I borrow a Black Hawk? I think I left the oven on," was painted on one float.) In Louisiana, elected leaders can always provide a laugh when nothing else can.

But one thing the Mardi Gras season may not constitute this year is that amazing, temporary social upending, the same as in popular festivals going back to the Middle Ages — a kind of escape valve for social tensions. The poor, no longer hidden away, used to come out.

In the terrible days after the storm, they came out, too. Before the rescuers arrived, along with the troops and the hordes of reporters, New Orleans was, briefly, a city almost entirely of impoverished African-Americans. The ruined neighborhoods belonged to them. I was struck by the sight of people, hanging out in the street, in a dry zone by the river on one of those days. Then the people were gone, and the city was empty.

The Studio Visit (or make art, not video)

A scene from a video by the artist Joyce Pensato at Exit Art.

via NYTimes:

ART IN REVIEW - ROBERTA SMITH
February 24, 2006

The Studio Visit
Exit Art
475 10th Avenue, at 36th Street,
Manhattan, Through March 25

Make art, not video. That is but one nutshell response to the sometimes amusing, occasionally impressive but also enervating slog that is "The Studio Visit," the latest marathon effort from Exit Art. As usual, much of its appeal stems from the fact that the concept has been put into practice at all.

This time, 160 artists were invited to make short video variations on the time-tested ritual of artists inviting friends, art dealers, critics or collectors to their studios to look at their art. It is often a form of audition for all concerned, as well as a way to make contact, gather data and get your work on the information highway that still matters the most: word of mouth.

With videos projected continuously on five large walls and on monitors in 10 small, scrim-enclosed rooms, the look is part art fair, part reality show, especially since seven of the participants have also set up studios of one kind or another in Exit Art's big windows (for an effect that is a little too zoolike). There are too many close-ups of hands wielding pencils and views of gritty stairwells and hallways. At times it all feels dismayingly in step with present-day trends in narcissism, voyeurism and attention-deficiency.

The videos are usually four to six minutes in length, but even the good ones seem too long, with the possible exception of one by Anne Spurgeon, who takes two and a half minutes to transform herself into someone resembling Barry Manilow and leaves you hanging. Music always helps, as does high speed, stop action or high-speed stop action, combinations of which are used to good effect by Joyce Pensato, Cynthia von Buhler, Ida Applebroog, Bruce Pearson and Lance Wakeling, who briskly inventories the contents of his studio.

Taylor McKimens musters some rare self-deprecation, while Paul Wirhun, talking about his devotion to painted eggs, is actually moving. So, less directly, is Elisabeth Kley, whose ink drawings and ceramic fountains seem related to the work of Jack Smith. Also noteworthy are the contributions of Seth Weiner, JP Forrest, Eduardo Gil Galue, Christy Gast, Kim Jones, Ronnie Yarisal and Katja Kublitz, and the collective called the 62, which made a run-on stop-action panorama from mostly still images.

This show would have been more memorable if limited to its best efforts, which by my estimate was about 25. But its massing of individual works has its own impact. It randomly samples the range of talent, delusion and ambition harbored by people who are drawn to art, like moths to a flame.

3/1 TALK: Spieglman, Melamid, Wallach

via apexart:

 

Wed March 1, 6:30 pm:

ART SPIEGELMAN
and ALEX MELAMID
in conversation with
Amei Wallach

Seating is limited.
Please arrive on time.
Reservations will not be taken.

apexart
291 Church Street, NYC, 10013
t. 212 431 5270
www.apexart.org

Directions: A, C, E, N, R, Q, 6 to Canal and 1, 9 to Franklin.
Presented in conjunction with:

Neo Sincerity: The Difference Between the Comic
and the Cosmic is a Single Letter
curated by Amei Wallach

Download EXHIBITION BROCHURE

For further information, please see www.apexart.org/exhibitions/wallach.htm.
Gallery hours are Tues - Sat, 11-6.

From the Peloponnesian Wars to the Black Death and the War in Iraq, in dire times aughter has always been the best revenge. There have always been subjects that were simply too stunning to manage in any other way; situations sublime in their overwhelming terror, as Kant would have it. Laughter dislodges pieties, sabotages power and short-circuits rote response. Comedy trips up expectations. It has always been so: Think of the god Dionysus in Aristophanes' The Frogs, fretting because he has to row a boat and his ass is sore, when he crosses the infernal Acherusian lake on his way to the underworld; think of any "man walks into a bar" joke you’ve ever heard; consider Freud's response when the Nazis promised him safe passage out of Austria in return for a statement swearing he hadn't been mistreated. "To Whom It May Concern," he wrote, "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone. Sigmund Freud."

For more than half a century, most art was inadequate to the task of responding to the Holocaust. Then in 1986 Art Spiegelman reinvented the comics. His two volume graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale was sufficiently twisted, disjunctive, multifarious and immediate to tell the tale not only of the horror itself, but of its generational fallout. Maus was accessible to all ages and idiomatic to a generation raised on MAD Magazine, which taught a naive and self-congratulatory postwar nation the uses of irony. Irony dismantles taboos about what you can say and how you can say it. It exposes the fictions that prop up power, and it does so by stating the opposite of what it means. "What? Me Worry?" the motto of MAD's vacuous, all-American cover boy, Alfred E. Newman, stood for all the lies sustaining the suburban dream in the age of segregation, the Atomic Bomb, and what Dwight D. Eisenhower named the "military-industrial complex."

In the visual arts, irony has routinely been a means by which to dismantle distinctions between high and low, art and life. This was particularly true in the Soviet Bloc, where irony in its many manifestations was the only way for an artist to achieve an authentic voice impervious to the babble of bureaucracy. There were some Soviet-born artists, such as Ilya Kabakov, who did not permit their ironic strategies to altogether mask their yearning for deeper, more humanistic significance. There were American artists, like Ida Applebroog, who braided irony with intimacy. But, in general, irony as it has been practiced in art and popular culture in the last half-century has been a distancing device. Unless you want to be taken   for a born-again or a talk show host, forget about wearing your heart, let alone your principles, anywhere visible.

In the fallout from the twin attacks on the World Trade Center towers, irony has become so ubiquitous in this country that it is the language of choice from the boardroom to The Daily Show. It has become America's version of a chador. To be ironic is to wear the contemporary reality of doubt meant to warn off any possibility of emotion or conviction.

So about five years ago, Spiegelman began integrating into his lectures around the country a sly proposal for a neo-sincerity movement. "Neo-sincerity," as he defines it, is "sincerity built on a thorough grounding in irony, but that allows one to actually make a statement about what one believes in." This may not be altogether serious (Spiegelman confesses that he can't tell the difference between serious and funny), and this exhibition doesn't make any claims to an actual movement in art. But at this moment of emergency in the world, there certainly appears to be a hunger for the comic relief of personal conviction. Freud defined a "tendentious" (as opposed to "innocent") humor that could overcome prohibitions against life (sex) and death (aggression). In an age in which sentiment is an embarrassment and sex and aggression are at once lionized and feared, comedy has the ability to deal smartly with all three by cutting through conventions to expose the core of actual feeling and belief. It tames the terror of confrontation with what is most primitive, pleasurable and real. [read on...]

Lessig makes plea for Read/Write Internet

via Darknet, 2/16/06:

Lessig makes plea for Read/Write Internet 

InternetNews.com: Lessig Makes Plea For Read/Write Internet. Excerpt:

Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig warned that today's fast-growing, free-wheeling Internet is threatened by network providers who want to control innovation and commerce on the Internet much the way AT&T once controlled the phone networks.

Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference here, Lessig said society has to decide if it wants to continue down the current path of a "read-only" Internet or embrace what he called a "read/write Internet" with broad access to content and the ability to legally build on the creative works of others.

Lessig did say he wasn't in favor of content being entirely proprietary or entirely free, but he fears the repercussions of the former being the dominant business model.

He cited Apple's  popular iTunes music store as a perfect example of the read-only Internet.

"It's a massively efficient way to get content to consumers they can buy easily," said Lessig.

And the Internet is enabling other new streams of commerce for content providers. Lessig noted for example that Amazon is experimenting with a pay-per-page model for books.

"This read-only Internet is supported by copyright law to perfectly control how people get access," he added.

reBlogged via Lessig blog:

The Read-Write Internet  

I wrote this piece for the FT about the next war in copyright. If you’ve not seen AMVs, you should. Look here.

This will be the next big copyright war — whether this form of noncommercial creativity will be allowed. But there will be a big difference with this war and the last (over p2p filesharing). In the p2p wars, the side that defended innovation free of judicial supervision was right. But when ordinary people heard both sides of the argument, 90% were against us. In this war, the side that will defend these new creators is right. And when ordinary people hear both sides, and more importantly, see the creativity their kids are capable of, 90% will be with us.

I saw this first hand in the eyes of a father. From the FT piece:

But to those building the Read-Write internet, economics is not what matters. Nor is it what matters to their parents. After a talk in which I presented some AMV work, a father said to me: “I don't think you really realise just how important this is. My kid couldn't get into college till we sent them his AMVs. Now he's a freshman at a university he never dreamed he could attend.

These are creators, too. Their creativity harms no one. It is the heart of a whole new genre of creativity — not just with anime, but will all sorts of culture. If, that is, it is allowed.

Update: A relevant City of Heroes video on in-game IP.

 

posted by [ Lessig ] on [ Jan 17 06 at  7:20 AM ] to [ bad law ]  [ 33 comments ]  [ post diffusion: 1 trackback + technorati ]