NEWSgrist - where spin is art

In Memoriam: Jackie Brookner (1945-2015)

 

Jackie Brookner, a pioneering ecological artist and educator, died of cancer on May 15, 2015. She was 69.

Born in l945 in Providence, Rhode Island she received a BA in art history from Wellesley College in l967 and completed all work for a Ph.D. in art history at Harvard except for a dissertation before shifting her focus to sculpture in l971.

Her early career as an artist working in cast bronze was informed, in part, by the welded abstract sculpture of Isaac Witkin and by the Abstract Expressionist sensibility prevalent at The New York Studio School where she studied with Nicholas Carrone. Brookner had a brief stint as a co-dean there in the l970s before beginning a long career at Parsons The New School for Design in l980 where she taught until her death. She also taught at Harvard in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) Harvard in 2002.

Brookner was one of the few remaining artists to have originally lived in Soho when it was the international center for new art. Today the sculptures in her loft—dating from four decades—co-habit with hundreds of succulents and cacti, many of which she grew from seed or cuttings. Some plants have their roots embedded into the sculptures thus designed to encourage plant life on their surface. These are similar to her "biosculptures," what she called living sculpture, innovative ecological projects that bridged the gap between biology, social science, art and urban architecture in major site-specific works that have been an intrinsic part of her practice for the past twenty years.

Brookner's work was always distinguished by an engagement with natural materials. Early on she made numerous graphite drawings, small and large scale cast bronze sculpture, always informed by bodily touch and the human hand. Throughout her career there has been a metonymy between material and concept: in her later work more specifically she drew analogies between morphological patterns and systems in nature and the human body, her work crystalizing the moment when these became philosophical points about the connection between the body and the world. Local resources became the focal point for community collaboration, what Brookner called "neighborhood driven solutions" moving beyond the goal of creating permanent works of art. Likewise her writing in the l990s also anticipated by several decades recent philosophical trends in materiality and theoretical efforts to decenter and re-define the boundaries of the human in relationship to nature, ecology, and technology.

Notable among Brookner's projects is "Of Earth and Cotton," a series of museum installations that traveled for four years (1994-8), evolving at it crossed the southern United States. Artist Jackie Brookner followed the westward migration of the cotton belt, speaking with people who farmed and picked cotton by hand in the 1930's and 40's.

As people spoke about their memories, Brookner sat on the ground sculpting portraits of their feet out of soil from nearby cotton fields. The "portraits" became the focal points of the installations where they rested on 60 tons of soil or 2500 pounds of ginned cotton. Made of many different colors and textures of soil, the portraits were a metaphor for all the soils that were worked and the diversity of peoples who worked them.

The installations were accompanied by forty FSA photographs, commissioned by the US Government in the 1930's, depicting living and working conditions of cotton farmers during the Depression

Brookner created sculptural environments throughout the United States and in Europe, at the Joan Miro Center in Barcelona, in Grossenhaim Germany, Salo Finland, and other locations. Since the late 1990s all of her work focused on plant-based water remediation. Her work "Prima Lingua (First Language/First Tongue)" from 2001, an iconic touchstone work for artists working with environmental issues, is a monstrously large tongue that licks the polluted water in which it stands. The mosses, liverworts and other plants that live on the surface are a fascinating microcosm that help clean air as well as filter the water. Among her recent major projects were "Veden Taika (The Magic of Water)," consisting of three man-made floating islands in Salo, Finland: Veden Taika was a collaboration with local volunteers, regional science experts, the students and faculty of the Salo Polytechnic Institute, the Salo Parks Department and Office of Environmental Protection, Biomatrix Water and the coordination of Finnish artist Tuula Nikulainen. Emblematic of her work, the islands provide nesting habitat for birds and plant based filtration for improving water quality in the Salo Bird Pools, lagoons that were formerly used in the sewage treatment processes of the Salo Municipal Sewage Treatment Facility. Because an abundance of migrating and nesting birds now use the lagoons, the pools have been established as a EU-directive conservation site.

At the time of her death Brookner was working on a pilot project with The City of Fargo, ND to transform a neighborhood drainage basin into a community commons that will reflect the cultural vibrancy of the Fargo community. Meanwhile, the basin will maintain its function as a storm water collection site. "The Fargo Project" was made possible thanks to a partnership with Brookner and by a $100,000 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town Grant followed by a $450,000 grant. Brookner recently wrote to a friend, "After 5 years we are just breaking ground and there are years to go--but it is the most amazing and rewarding work I have ever done. Your wonderful questions will prod our thinking …. My own health is unfortunately quite fragile right now. I am not sure I will get to see this through, but none of us will get to do more than start the turning of the Great Wheel."

Brookner gave a TEDx lecture on The Fargo Project in 2012.

Brookner was the recipient of numerous commissions, awards, and grants including from the Nancy Gray Foundation for Art in the Environment and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writings were published in The College Art Association’s Art Journal, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, WEAD Magazine, and Paper Monument’s recent book Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment. Urban Rain: Stormwater as Resource, a book about Brookner’s water reclamation projects was published in 2009. Art and Ecology, her 1992 guest edited issue of Art Journal is still today considered a milestone in ecological thinking.

Brookner was an inspiring and much beloved teacher and administrator. At Parsons, she had taught in the Fine Arts MFA Program since its inception and served as the Interdepartmental Program Coordinator: Design for Social Change in 2000-2001. She was the recipient of The New School University, Pedagogical Innovation Grant in 2011.

In a statement about her practice Brookner wrote: "Hidden in the roots of our words we find what we seem to want to forget--that we are literally the same stuff as earth. My work explores this identity while undermining the assumptions and values that keep us from acknowledging it."

She is survived by her wife Terry Iacuzzo and by her brother Philip Weinstein and nephews Noah and Benjamin. Plans for a memorial service to be held in New York in the fall will be announced at a later date.

Brookner’s last site-specific installation was her own body; wrapped in a shroud, placed on a rustic plank of wood and lowered directly into the earth that she loved so much.

by Lenore Malen and Mira Schor, May 18, 2015

***

Thomas McEvilley, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief"

Image via.

The sacrifice of the wholeness of things to the cult of pure form is a dangerous habit of our culture. It amounts to a rejection of the wholeness of life. After fifty years of living with the dynamic relationship between primitive and Modern objects, are we not ready yet to begin to undersand the real intentions of the native traditions, to let those silenced cultures speak to us at least? An investigation that really did so would show us immensely more about the possibilities of life that Picasso and others vaguely sensed and were attracted to than does this endless discussion if spiritual propinquity in usages of parallel lines. It would show us more about the “world-historical” importance of the relationship between primitive and Modern and their ability to relate to one another without autistic self-absorption.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: “Primitivism” in Twentieth-Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art - Thomas McEvilley, 1992 (via clareleetaylor). See also.

Via NYTimes:

Thomas McEvilley, Critic and Defender of Non-Western Art, Dies at 73

By HOLLAND COTTER  Published: March 30, 2013

In 1984, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its exhibition “ ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” the reception was generally favorable. Then came Thomas McEvilley’s shattering review in Artforum magazine.

Appearing a month after the exhibition opened, the review meticulously, logically and thoroughly demolished its basic, unstated assumption: that the indigenous arts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Oceania and the Americas were of value primarily as source materials for Western modernism.

But Mr. McEvilley, who died on March 2 at 73, wasn’t done yet. In powerfully accessible language, he extended the charge of reductive thinking to the museum itself, and to Western art scholarship and criticism as a whole.

The show’s curators, William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, tried to rebut his attack in letters to Artforum. Mr. McEvilley came back with even more persuasively damning arguments.

They were the opening salvos in an argument about multiculturalism that would define American art for the rest of the 1980s and ‘90s. When the dust had settled, it was clear who the winner was, and it was also clear that a new era in thinking about art had begun.

Mr. McEvilley, who lived in Manhattan and the Catskills, died of complications of cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, said his wife, Joyce Burstein.

Like much of his writing on contemporary art, Mr. McEvilley’s review of the Modern show had wide repercussions. It inspired the curator Jean-Hubert Martin to present artists from five continents in the 1989 Paris exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre.” That show set the paradigm for countless others over the next three decades, including virtually every biennial and triennial anywhere, whether in Venice, São Paulo, Dakar or Shanghai.

Mr. McEvilley was well suited to be a spokesman for expansive ways of looking at world art. He studied Greek, Latin and Sanskrit at the University of Cincinnati. In his 36 years on the faculty of Rice University in Houston, from 1969 to 2005, he taught courses in both Greek and South Asian culture, as well as in the history of religion and philosophy.

In the lingering wake of 1960s formalist thinking dominated by Clement Greenberg and Minimalism, Mr. McEvilley was a crucial alternative voice. He demonstrated that abstraction was not a European invention, pointing to non-Western abstract art from Hindu Tantric painting to African masks to Islamic tile work. He was among the first widely read critics of his generation to write about contemporary non-Western art at a time when it was all but unknown to the Western market.

Mr. McEvilley was born on July 13, 1939, in Cincinnati. He received a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in classical philology from the University of Cincinnati, and a master’s from the University of Washington in Seattle. He was regarded as an adventurously cosmopolitan teacher at Rice as well as at Yale and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was a visiting professor. In 2005 he founded the M.F.A. criticism and art writing program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Among his books, the ones that have had the widest impact are two collections of essays, “Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity“ (1992) and “Art and Discontent: Theory at the Millennium” (1991), as well as “The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism“ (2005).

He published a monumental philological study, “The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies,” in 2001, and a second one, “Sappho,” in 2008. He also wrote extensively on Western contemporary artists. At his death, he was working on a book about Greek poetry.

He received the 1993 Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism from the College Art Association.

In addition to Ms. Burstein, Mr. McEvilley is survived by two sons, Thomas and Monte; a sister, Ellen M. Griffin; and two grandchildren. His son Alexander died before him. Two previous marriages ended in divorce.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 31, 2013, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Thomas McEvilley, 73; Altered Views on Non-Western Art.

 

See also:

Jerry Salz, New York Magazine
Roger Denson, Huffington Post
David Carrier, Art Critical
George Quasha

Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein: a talk in memoriam
Raphael Rubinstein, Silo

Saturday, December 11, 2004
Slought Foundation Art and Cognition : Thomas McEvilley
Listen to a 47 minute recording, or download the file

14 Poems read by their author, Thomas McEvilley.
Video by Michael Kasino
https://vimeo.com/17983139

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_McEvilley

---

RIP Mike Kelley, 1954-2012

UPDATE 2-8-12:

John Miller: A Personal Remembrance; Culture Monster; NYTimes Obit; The Art Newspaper.

For news check here, here, here, here, here and here.

 

One of my favorite things, from  the vaults:

NEWSgrist, December 01, 2008:

Mike Kelley Interviewed by Glenn O'Brien

Brilliant, brilliant interview with Mike Kelley by Glenn O'Brien, touching on everything from repressed memory syndrome, the art market, open source culture and the yuck factor of current copyright law and lawyers...

via Interview magazine (the "Art" issue) [excerpt]:

Mike Kelley

By Glenn O'Brien
Photography Craig Mcdean

 

[...]

Glenn O'Brien: How did you get onto the subject of repressed memory syndrome?

Mike Kelley: From the response I was getting to my works with stuffed animals and craft materials-people went on about how the work was about child abuse. What was my problem? Why was I playing with these toys? Had I been abused? Was I a pedophile? I didn't understand what they were talking about. But when I did a bit of research, I discovered how culturally omnipresent this infatuation with child abuse was. Since everybody seemed to be so interested in my personal biography, I thought I should make some overtly biographical work-pseudo-biographical work. That's when I decided to build the Educational Complex-the model of every school I had ever attended. I was thinking of it specifically in relation to the McMartin Preschool child-abuse scandal. I would leave out all of the parts of the schools that I could not remember and then these areas would be filled in with recovered "repressed" memories-which would simply be personal fantasies.

GO: As the work progressed, did you remember more and more?

MK: No, because the project wasn't about that. It was fiction to begin with; I wasn't interested in remembering anything. There's not much to remember anyway-my biography is fairly dull. It's much better to fill in these empty spaces with fiction than the boring truth. I filled in the blanks with pastiches of things that had affected me when I was a child: cartoons, films, and the kinds of stories one finds in the literature of repressed memory syndrome-horrible stories of sexual abuse. I just mixed all that up.

GO: I've remembered an event and thought I'd said something when actually it was somebody else who said it or vice versa. I think, especially in writing, so much of plagiarism is completely unconscious.

MK: I have experienced that often. I've stolen ideas, and people have stolen from me. I'm all for it. That's the way things get created. That's how culture grows. When there's an amazing idea, you take it and run with it. I mean, you're going to take it someplace else than the source anyway. There are a lot of artists who've worked at that specifically. One of my favorite writers is the Comte de Lautréamont, and much of his writing is constructed from plagiarized texts. Who would claim that his work is no different than what he plagiarized?

GO: One thing that the Internet seems to be doing is eroding the idea of copyright and originality. People are just taking bits of things and using them in a very free way.

MK: That's great. And the corporate entertainment industry is trying to stop it from happening. Think about it: Andy Warhol could not have a career now. He would be sued every two seconds.

GO: It's given a lot of work to the lawyers.

MK: Copyright laws are terrible for culture. It's illegal to respond to the imagery that surrounds you; you're bombarded every minute of the day with mass-media sludge. It should be the opposite: Everybody should have to respond to it. This is what should be taught in the public school system.
William S. Burroughs should be a major role model: All students should be given tape recorders and cameras to constantly record the gray veil that surrounds them, so that they can recognize that it's even there-and manipulate it. Most people are not aware of the white noise they exist in. Tape recording and photography allowed people to become aware of what was invisible to them for the first time. We're surrounded by invisibility. That's what I think art can do-make things visible.

GO: You put together a book of interviews a few years ago which I think has a lot of interesting things in it. There's an interview with Kim Gordon [of Sonic Youth], and she says, essentially, "One can never have a crush on art."

MK: She said you can have a crush on art, but it cannot be of the intensity of the infatuation one has for a pop song. I really disliked that when she said it, though I understood what she meant.

GO: But I have had somebody say to me within the last year that kids today don't want to be rock stars anymore. They want to be artists.

MK: Well, that's so they can make more money. It used to be the other way around.

GO: It wasn't about money. It was about getting laid, I think.

MK: Rock stars do get laid more than artists-at least they used to. Right now, because there's a boom in the art market, there are a lot of people in the art world who would not have been there before. Young people who would have previously gone into careers in indie rock-which is one of the few arenas where a young person with no particular talent can make some money-can now accomplish the same thing in the art world. And perhaps it's easier to be an artist because fine art is not as defined, in terms of quality, as pop music is. But, with the economy collapsing, maybe this will change now.

GO: After Robert Rauschenberg died last May, we republished an interview that he did for us, and he was talking about a conversation he had with Brice Marden. Marden told Rauschenberg that his students had changed so much that when they'd come to class, the first thing they'd say is, "Tell me how to get a gallery." Or, "Tell me how to get a loft."

MK: Now, if a student doesn't have a show by the time they graduate they think they're a failure. And they fully expect to make a living from being an artist. I chose to become an artist because I wanted to be a failure. When I was young, if you wanted to really ostracize yourself from society, you became an artist.

GO: What I didn't like about the rock scene was what happened to punk: It became a cliché of itself, this glorification of immaturity, whereas, in the beginning you had James Chance being influenced by Ornette Coleman and James Brown simultaneously-a lot of really sophisticated stuff going on.

MK: I feel very lucky to have grown up during that period, where you were surrounded by a lot of people doing very innovative things. And because of a strange fluke in the culture industry, a lot of this stuff made it onto records, and you could hear it because you had to kind of ride the youth culture. And so, with the success of the Beatles-which nobody expected-all of these record companies went out and put basically anybody who had a band onto vinyl and into every Kmart in the country. That was a fluke of history. And those people weren't trying to make a living. They were artists working in some folkish way-some of them very, very intelligent people who were trying to do interesting things. It's interesting that it became a kind of very professionalized youth culture. And then there was this whole shift in class with the rise of heavy metal-rock became sort of right-wing instead of left-wing. And punk was a reaction against that, trying to go back to this earlier model, but more nihilistic. Punk also happened in the '70s when there was a big economic crash. I know that I was very bitter that I had missed the hippie thing and all of that fun. All I was surrounded with were empty factories and horrible, shitty country-rock. And I wanted to make something really, really ugly. That was my plan.

GO: Do you think this crazy art market boom that's happening now is temporary?

MK: I can't see how it cannot be. An inflated market like this cannot last forever. Though, I do believe that class distinctions have changed to such a great degree that we might now be in a permanent situation of having a super-rich upper class, like royalty, who are not affected by economic shifts. Such people can continue to buy art even if the market is bad. So, potentially, this boom could continue-although I think most of these people are only buying art for investment purposes and they will stop buying it when other means of investment become lucrative again.

GO: What leads me to think that it might continue is the fact that the art market is a sort of perfect market. It's kind of impossible to regulate because it's inscrutable. I mean, the government could never figure out how it works.

MK: You can't control it.

GO: But you can influence it if you're smart enough. It's sort of like magic.

MK: But, then, art objects don't necessarily hold their value.

GO: No, they don't, so it becomes about buying and selling.

MK: And doing that at the right time. Though there is the attempt to position certain artists, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, as modern "masters" whose work is supposedly unaffected by market shifts. But, you know as well as I that masters don't last forever. Anyway, the boom is not going to last forever. There are too many artists making too much work right now, so any notion of quality is lost. Collectors are just buying everything-hoping something will pan out.

GO: Do you think that the boom has expanded the idea of art as something that requires explication?

MK: I see it as the opposite. I don't think that art needs explication now. In fact, there is very little serious writing about the most successful artists of the moment. This new art is very anti-intellectual-it doesn't need explication-the market is its explication. It's interesting, there are very young artists whose works are selling at auction for tremendous amounts of money and I've never heard their names before. There is some kind of internal machination of the market going on that has nothing to do with critical acceptance. These artists are coming out of left field. I used to understand why artists were successful-critically or economically. Even if I disagreed with these success stories, I understood them. Now, I'm clueless.

GO: It used to be that rock stars had to be young and sexy, and artists could still be kind of old and overweight-and it was okay because they had achieved this mastery. But now that same kind of star system seems to be infiltrating art.

MK: The art scene now is almost a mirror of the entertainment industry. The YBAs [Young British Artists] set the model for this trend. But England is a very different culture where art has a different social position than it does in America, and so such a thing is possible there. In America, artists, traditionally, are peripheral, unimportant, un-glamorous figures. But if things continue the way they are going, I can see that changing.

GO: There was a cover of New York magazine in 2007 with the headline: "Warhol's Children." It was all about that idea of artists as rock stars.

MK: I think that's why the Juxtapoz magazine art world is so popular now. This "low-brow" art style has overtly cut any ties to the traditional avant-garde. The posture is: "We're just plain old working-class folks making sexy art for the people." And young people really glom onto this stance. Mark Ryden is probably one of the most popular artists in the country at the moment, and many Manhattanites probably don't even know who he is. That's something that could not have happened before now.

[...read full article...]

Hoda Garnett, 1927-2011

Photo: Hoda Garnett

Hoda Garnett, née Abushady, age 84, of East Islip, passed away on October 13, 2011.

Born on October 2, 1927, in Alexandria, Egypt, Hoda was the youngest of three children born to Anna (née Bamford) and Dr. Ahmed Zaki Abushady, renowned poet, publisher, scientist and professor of medicine at the University of Alexandria. In 1946, the Abushady's emigrated from Egypt to the United States, arriving by ship in New York Harbor in April of that year.

Hoda was a photographer by vocation. She became a news photographer while serving in the U.S. Navy (1952-56), the first native-born Egyptian to become a WAVE. A long-time member of the Professional Photographers of America, Hoda's work garnered many awards and was widely published, appearing in LIFE magazine and elsewhere.

Hoda was a world traveler and a prolific artist. Living and raising a family for many years on Long Island's South Shore, she was drawn to documenting the landscapes of her locale: shore lines, light houses, bridges, night skies, snow-covered ponds, birches in bloom, children at the beach. Hoda had a keen eye for detail, a documentarian's compulsion to record, and a great appreciation for the beauty found in the everyday.

Surviving her is her husband of 55 years, Dr. Merrill Garnett; a daughter and a son: Joy of Brooklyn, NY, and Wade of East Islip, NY. She also leaves her sister, Safeya Abushady of Alexandria, VA, two grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews.

Memorial services and interment will be at the convenience of the family. Arrangements were made through Chapey Funeral Home, Main Street, East Islip, NY 11730

Artist Flores McGarrell Dies in Haitian Earthquake

Flo McGarrell cooking, Jacmel, Haiti, 2009

via M|I|C/A:

Flores McGarrell '97 '98 Dies in Haitian Earthquake

1/15/10

Flores McGarrell '97 '98, an artist and director of a community arts center in Haiti, was killed in the earthquake that devastated the nation on Tuesday. McGarrell, 35, received a B.F.A. in fibers and an M.A. in digital arts at MICA and was a faculty member at the College in 2001 and 2002. He died when the Peace of Mind Hotel in Jacmel, his hometown in Haiti, crumbled during the earthquake.

According to reports, McGarrell had stopped briefly at the hotel in Jacmel on his way home from the airport in Port-au-Prince, having dropped off his godfather for a departing flight, when the earthquake struck.

McGarrell was director of FOSAJ (Foundation Sant D'A Jakmel), a nonprofit art center in Jacmel, a beach town about 20 miles south of Port-Au-Prince and the cultural center of Haiti. FOSAJ, where he had worked since 2008, is "dedicated to empowering the Haitian people through art and culture and not only works in conjunction with the European Union to support the 150 artisans of ADASE, but maintains outreach projects addressing issues including street children, literacy and the environment."

In an interview in August 2009 with Art21, McGarrell said that "Jacmel is a place where the senses awake--it is visually rich and energetic." (Here is an article McGarrell wrote talking about living in Jacmel.) He was living out his lifetime dream of working in Haiti (see first-person essay below).

[read on...]

See also:

McGarrell in an interview with Art21 ("Inside the Artist's Studio: Flo McGarrell" by Georgia Kotresos, Aug. 28, 2009).

Obituary in The Baltimore Sun