NEWSgrist - where spin is art

NEWSgrist REblog: Three Qs for Yevgeniy Fiks

via LeMonde.fr:

Style avec M Le magazine du Monde

Trois questions à Yevgeniy Fiks 

24.01.2014 à 08h17 | Propos recueillis par Philippe Dagen

Cet artiste explore les relations entre Etats-Unis et Union soviétique à travers des peintures, des installations... Sa récente enquête sur les rapports entre anticommunisme et homophobie aux Etats-Unis durant la guerre froide est présentée à la galerie Sator, à Paris.

Comment vous définir ?

Comme un artiste post-soviétique, né à Moscou en 1972, venu à New York en 1994. Les débuts ont été durs. Je suis passé de la peinture réaliste socialiste apprise en URSS à l'art conceptuel, que j'ai découvert en arrivant aux Etats-Unis. Peu à peu, j'ai conçu mon « postsoviet project » et, depuis dix ans, je le développe.

Où puisez-vous vos informations ?

Dans les livres, les archives, les bibliothèques. En parlant aux témoins aussi. Mais je ne suis pas un historien : je me laisse attirer par ce qui est le plus conflictuel, le plus violent. Le communisme est encore un tabou aux Etats-Unis.

Comment passer de l'histoire aux œuvres ?

Selon les sujets. Quand je m'intéressais aux images de l'URSS à Hollywood, le film et la peinture s'imposaient. Aujourd'hui, ce sont la photo et le texte qui font le mieux écho à la part de propagande qui a marqué ces propos et cette période. C'est juste une question d'adéquation.

• Philippe Dagen
  Journaliste au Monde

A voir

« Homosexuality is Stalin's Atom Bomb to Destroy America », Galerie Sator, passage des Gravilliers, 10, rue Chapon, Paris 3^e. Tél. : 01-42-78-04-84. Du mardi au samedi de 14 heures à 19 heures. Jusqu'au 22 février. galeriesator.com

Interview in Arabic Lit: AZ Abushady: Revolutionary Egyptian Poet, Feminist, Beekeeper, and More

In Arabic Literature (in English): the excellent M. Lynx Qualey's interview with me about Abushady:

AZ Abushady: Revolutionary Egyptian Poet, Feminist, Beekeeper, and More

By mlynxqualey on August 26, 2013

Artist and writer Joy Garnett (@joygarnett) is working on a book about her grandfather, Ahmed Zaki Abushady, the Egyptian poet and bee scientist. She answered a few questions about AZ Abushady, his work, and her book project:

AZ Abushady as a young man. 1909.

 

ArabLit: When did you first become interested in your grandfather’s life and work (in a serious way)? What role did family stories play? Can you describe your current book-project and what it will encompass?

 

Joy Garnett: The book is a family memoir and an adventure story – a love story – that focuses on Abushady’s life, his work as a poet and bee scientist, and his premature death in relative obscurity in the US. It’s not a biography in the conventional sense. I have an inside story to offer, told through family members and Abushady’s own voice. My discovery of  an archive containing his letters and decades of correspondence was a pivotal moment. They reveal how his personal story is entangled with political and cultural conflicts played out from 1922 to 1946 in Egypt. Central to the story is the point of view of my aunt Safeya, the source of so much of this material. She is Abushady’s oldest daughter and the last living family link to that time. So, I am telling an idiosyncratic story partly through her, and in a way that I think anyone will relate to, whether or not they’re interested in Egypt. Specialists in Modern Arabic poetry and Egypt between the wars will, I hope, be interested as well.

I grew up hearing stories my mother told me about her childhood in Alexandria. Abushady loomed large, but his significance was related in broad strokes. It was all a bit vague and romantic. I was in college when I started to get a real sense of who my grandfather was. I started studying fusha at McGill’s Institute of Islamic studies and got into a conversation with an Egyptian classmate. She set me straight.

When I finally got to Egypt, it was on a student loan. I enrolled in the American University in Cairo’s summer language program. I was twenty. I made a point of looking for Abushady’s books and asking questions about him. I started to figure out who my family was. Once back at the Institute, I sought out critical articles about his poetry, but this was premature. The bulk of critical writing in English was still being written.

 

In my twenties, I stopped studying Arabic and Abushady altogether. I decided to pursue an art career instead. There was a point when I realized it was either him or me, and I had to make a choice. Many years passed where I barely thought about him, and then a few years ago I felt the pull. Even dead, Abushady is a force of Nature.

When my mother, aunt, and uncle started to grow old and sick, I was jolted back into thinking about this project. I taped interviews with them.  I had a day job in a museum library that gave me free access to things like JSTOR and interlibrary loans. And of course, this time around I have the Internet.

I’ve spent the past couple of years traveling to different archives and doing research independently to try to piece together the many parts of Abushady’s life, which is not easy. As a physician, bacteriologist, beekeeper, agricultural and social reformer, poet and publisher, he defies categorization. I want to bring together what I’ve discovered about his main achievements in a single narrative. I would like to show the extent of his influence on Modern Arabic poetry as well as his impact on bee husbandry in England and Egypt. For him, poetry and bees were deeply interconnected. But of course, no one in Arabic literature circles knows much about his bee science contributions and vice versa. The connections are interesting.

Read full interview......

 

 

Joy Garnett: Christmas Day Interview, Figure/Ground

 

Posted on Christmas Day: artist Julia Schwartz recently interviewed me for the artist series she edits at Figure/Ground, where I come clean about a number of things including the existence of artists on the Egyptian side of the family, my thoughts on Virilio and inefficiency, painting as a radical gesture, the importance of locale, and my walking fetish --->

________________________________________

Joy Garnett is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her paintings, based on news photographs, scientific imagery, and military documents she gathers from the Internet, locate instances of the apocalyptic sublime in mass media culture. Her social media projects examine the intersections of our digital and material worlds. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Her paintings have been reproduced on book covers and in numerous publications including Harper‘s, Perspecta: The Yale School of Architecture Journal and Cabinet magazine. Garnett serves as Arts Editor at Cultural Politics, a contemporary media theory journal published by Duke University Press. Her writing has appeared in the anthology Virilio Now (Polity 2011), and in the forthcoming Virilio & Visual Culture, The Virilio Dictionary (both with Edinburgh University Press 2013), and The Cultural Politics Reader (Duke University Press 2013).  She is currently working on a family memoir about politics and art set in Egypt’s Old Regime. She is represented by Winkleman Gallery, New York.

What attracted you to the arts? What were your earliest experiences of making art?

There is definitely an artistic tendency that runs in my family. There’s my mom, who was an artist and a freelance photographer. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, into a family of illustrious poets and painters. I’ve been researching the family history on and off for years: they were all eccentric artists! Radicals! Utopians! My grandfather, Ahmed Zaky Abushady, was an influential Romantic poet and editor who published several high profile journals in the 1930s and 40s. The most radical was Apollo, a platform for experimental Arabic poetry that really pushed the envelope. He organized a salon called ‘Apollo’s Society,’ whose members included notable and emerging poets from around the Arab world.

My mom grew up around a pair of eccentric older cousins, the Wanly brothers Seif and Adham. They were famous painters of the period. There’s now a museum wing dedicated to them in Alexandria. I think they are the reason why my mom initially wanted to become a painter. I found her childhood sketchbooks — she had aspirations early on. On top of that, her mother, my grandmother, an Englishwoman, was descended from the famous Lancashire poet and labor organizer Samuel Bamford, and styled herself after the 19th century adventurer and author of Letters from Egypt, Lady Duff Gordon. So, my mother and her two siblings grew up in an atmosphere of creative and political cross-cultural ferment, in a milieu of avant-garde and politically rambunctious artists, when Egypt was negotiating a volatile mix of European Modernist influences and elements of Arab nationalism. For literature and the arts it was an exciting if difficult time, full of conflict. Her father was in the thick of it.

I was born in the suburbs less than an hour’s drive from New York City, which was my immediate source for art when I was a teenager. My mom had me drawing and painting when I was one or two years old. She was then dabbling in oil paint — she was a truly awful painter! She didn’t inherit the Wanly genes, unfortunately. But happily, she was already quite a good photographer. We would paint together in a small room at home that she had tricked out as a studio. Soon she dropped painting altogether and committed herself to photography — good move. She used to tease me that there was room for only one painter in the family. She went on to become quite accomplished. She was obsessive, really. Our house was one large darkroom and studio with storage for her work. She was never not working on her photographs. I wonder if this, along with my fraught, competitive relationship with her, has something to do with my need to make and remake the connections between painting and photography in my own work.

My dad too was in the habit of producing large numbers of photographs of a more technical nature. He is a scientist, and I grew up hanging around his lab and helping him with experiments. He had an additional home lab in the basement, adjacent to my mom’s darkroom. It was like an artist’s studio. He would attach a camera to the oculus of his microscope in order to document experiments, sometimes with Polaroids, sometimes with 35mm film. I remember having fun manipulating the microscope mirror in order to emphasize different details before photographing them. Among other things, this gave me a sense of the artful, constructed and interpretive nature of photographs, even when they are functioning as scientific evidence. Something I was to circle back to later as a painter. [....]

READ full interview

READ more about Figure/Ground

smART Rights' Gina Glascock-Broze, Interviewed

One of the more interesting bloggers in the realm of artist copyrights is Gina Glascock-Broze, who blogs at smART Rights where she offers general insights, humor and savvy on the subject. It looks like Gina was recently interviewed by Marquand Books:

 

A Conversation with Gina Glascock-Broze

Posted on July 13, 2011

Gina Glascock-Broze has worked for more than five years in rights and reproductions with local, national, and international artists, studios, galleries, rights agencies, and museums as a project manager of artist copyright permissions and photographic material for various clients, including non-profit groups, museums, and publishing houses. She is interested in the many complexities of copyright law, gardening, and making pickles. She blogs here: http://smartrights.wordpress.com/

© Robert Wade Photography

 

Can you sum up for me what you do and how you got started?

I would like to be able to say that image sourcing and copyright permissions are pretty straightforward, but they aren’t, really. I help museums or publications secure photography and image/copyright permissions for the works they want to reproduce in a catalog or as part of an exhibition. This entails working with the catalog’s checklist, contacting the museums or owners of the works of art to ask for photography, and contacting artists or their estates for copyright permissions on works that are not in the public domain. It sounds easy, but when you think of it as part of a major catalog with 200–300 images, and add in all the decision changes to the design and the artworks that will appear, and then add in all the research it takes to find out who owns the copyright (not to mention the understanding of what copyright is), it can be quite daunting.

I started by working for the Seattle Art Museum. As exhibitions and publications coordinator, I had to research images and coordinate permissions for catalogs. I always liked the research, tracking artists down, and figuring out what we needed and how we were going to get permissions to do it. I still get a thrill when I get a letter from a famous studio or artist’s estate. It’s like, “Oh wow—Gilbert and George are writing to me!” It’s fun to get mail from famous artists. Later at SAM, I became the rights and reproductions administrator responsible for all non-commercial rights clearance for the museum and the management of image rights for external requests.

How did you begin working with Marquand Books?

I started working with Marquand Books when I worked at the Seattle Art Museum. Marquand Books was often the publisher of the catalogs I worked on as exhibitions and publications coordinator. Later, my former boss at SAM recommended me when MB needed freelance permissions work done.

Are there many freelancers doing the sort of work you do?

I don’t know exactly—there are some. I know some of the larger museums I do freelance work for have other freelancers working on other projects at the same time. It is a job for which you need a certain amount of experience to do, and at many larger museums there is an in-house rights and reproductions person, so there are a number of people with the right experience. How many freelance, I couldn’t say. In commercial publishing there are many freelancers, I believe.

How have image permissions changed in the last decade or so?

I can only speak to museums or educational/non-profit image permissions changing, since I really haven’t worked on the commercial side of permissions at all. The one thing that has changed dramatically in the past ten years is digital rights. In the early days of the web, museums and artists were very afraid to give rights to anything digital, thinking that they would lose all control as soon as an image was out there in cyberspace. But understanding of this has evolved, and now it is completely normal to request e-book rights or web rights for publishing copyright-protected images.

Also, just last year, the American Association of Museum Directors (AAMD) finally came out with a long-awaited statement on fair use—basically a statement of policy for member organizations—with regard to the use of thumbnail images of artworks in museum collection. It might seem silly that a museum couldn’t put small ID images on their website of works of art in their collection if they were under copyright, but as long as websites have existed, museums have been afraid of being sued if they put even the smallest of images of the work in their collection on their website. The AAMD policy means that finally museums can stand together with a common policy on using these thumbnail images. It seems small, but it is actually a big change.

How about e-books?

E-book permissions are pretty much the same as regular permissions these days. The only difference is that you have to be able to lock down access to the e-book—it is only available on one website, not downloadable, etc., and the term of the license is different: instead of printed copies, you have access for a period of years—stuff like that. But e-books are definitely on the rise. Many large museums have a policy that blanket-requests e-book rights for all catalog publications. This is really new to me this past year.

What’s the toughest part?

The toughest part is to be on the far end of all the changes that take place when work on a publication is underway. I’m not in the room where the decisions are being made, yet every change to an image has an effect on what I do. So there is a lot of back and forth, usually hundreds and hundreds of emails; you have to be very organized.

Where do you see image permissions headed? Any future challenges or changes?

I see a lot more of the permissions/image sourcing being shifted to freelancers like me. Museums are wildly understaffed, and if they can add to their exhibition/publication budgets the fees for copyrights, image fees, and a freelancer to do all the work for them, they can fundraise for the whole project and not spend their precious few internal resources trying to do a Herculean task.

However, I also sort of hope that one day I see an end to my profession. I would love to see a world in which museums and not-for-profit entities can use copyrighted images for educational purposes—like catalogs—under fair-use, without the threat of being sued; a world where all museums open up their digital libraries and make images easily available to other museums and not-for-profits for free without a lot of burdensome contracts and licenses. Unfortunately, given the current state of copyright law, I don’t think it is going to happen any day soon—but one can hope.

The Cariou Effect

© Sarah Morris
Parrot [Origami], 2009
Household gloss paint on canvas
214 x 214 cm. Image via Artnews.

A few days after Artnet posted my Op-Ed, The Copyright Bungle, excoriating the decision in Patrick Cariou's copyright infringement case against Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery, I received an email from none other than Cariou himself. Why was he reaching out to me? Here was a fellow who had just been awarded millions of dollars in damages, not to mention the option to destroy the offending works. Many people saw and still see Cariou as the underdog: a lone, risk-taking freelancer in a case where the "villains" are established, wealthy and famous. Indeed, whatever happens in the appeal, Cariou is the clear winner in the court of public opinion, a forum in which my own objections stand out as leaning strenuously in favor of Prince, as I argue for the validity of appropriation and the urgent need to limit the reach of copyright in favor of free expression. Surely my history as someone who has continuously rallied popular support against overreaching copyright would make me a potentially "dangerous" customer for Cariou to contact. Would his lawyers have approved? Well, as a lawyer friend of mine once said: you'd be surprised how frequently people do exactly what their lawyers tell them not to do.

Gingerly, I responded to Cariou. He wrote back and I responded again. Our correspondence continued for eight days. For a while I dropped everything else. The transcript of our discussion, pasted at 10 point type into a Word document, is 30 pages long. We ran the gamut from combatative to friendly, and I came to admire his willingness to engage someone on the other side of the debate. He had everything to lose in this discussion, and nothing to gain.

There were several themes and arguments that we came back to repeatedly. Mainly, we talked about limits to free speech, and what in Europe is referred to as moral rights in intellectual property law, which fortunately is not recognized as a part of copyright law in the United States. Before long, it became clear that for Patrick, this case was one of moral rights above and beyond everything else.

It was a stimulating, at times difficult exchange, but we parted friendly -  a real feat. As our conversation came to a close, I asked Patrick what he felt about my publishing the most interesting portions of our dialogue online. He asked that it be kept private - a wise choice! - and I have no wish to betray his confidence.

However, I reproduce here one short paragraph that I wrote at a heated point in our argument about the potential destruction of Prince's work awarded by the court. It resonates with the lawsuit recently brought against the painter Sarah Morris by a posse of origami artists:

 

Patrick,

The real destruction isn't about Richard Prince or his works. The real destruction is the chilling effect this decision has had on the free speech and free expression of a very broad array of artists -- not just those who experiment and play in the realm of collage and new media technologies, but also those of us who make one-offs: painters, sculptors, installation artists and anyone who comments on life and reality (whether that be inner or exterior 'life') through direct references -- including 'appropriated' references -- to the world around them, its art, its images, and its representations. All of us, really.

 

Indeed, regardless of what happens in the appeal, much of the damage to our capacity for free expression - our sense that we have a right to speak our minds, to experiment, play and to make art without looking over our shoulders - has already been done. I imagine that the origami artists feel empowered by Judge Batts' decision, not to mention their lawyers who now have a real basis by which to encourage their clients to sue, or at least to intimidate through cease & desist letters. How to undo this damage? How do you roll back a chilling effect of this magnitude?

I will end with a few thoughts from a recent post on Cablegram, the blog of the artist and writer Eric Zimmerman, (who earlier wrote an insightful piece about the Cariou v Prince decision on Glasstire):

In a broad sense Cariou v. Prince continues to be about allowing all artists the freedom to use existing images and materials within their work, and subsequently, the consistent, well-reasoned application of copyright law. Readymades and photomontage, pop artists’ engagement with mass media, collage, all represent tried and true strategies of appropriation in which their practitioners are granted exactly that. Does this mean all appropriative work is good and you have to like it? Certainly not, but taste is not the point. Any way you look at it Cariou v. Prince highlights the thorny issues still surrounding appropriation, the results of poor application of copyright law, and the narrowing scope of fair use. Let’s hope that in the future all of these issues move towards more intelligent, nuanced resolutions.