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Mary Cassatt, "The Child's Bath," 1893

The images this week have come from CUNY's very useful women's history site Women's Leadership in American History. Check it out.

Historical Image of the Day

"Corn Harvest, Taos," painting by Theodore Wores, 1917

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Shirley Bolton, "Renovation (Tenement Series)" 1970

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Henry Tanner, "Kansas City, Kansas," 1897

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"Park Street, Boston," Karl Zerbe, 1942

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"The Great American Subway," Mahler B. Ryder, 1969

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This week's theme is Puritans, both images of Puritans and Puritans in memory.

"The Puritan," Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1899

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Home of E.F. Caldwell, Larchmont, New York, circa 1900. Caldwell was a leading designer of metalwork and electric light fixture during the late 19th and early 20th century, something reflected in this room.

I Hope Taft's Not On Top

The link is probably inappropriate for work, but artist Justine Lai is working on a series of paintings showing her having sex with the American presidents, in order of succession. She's as far as Grant I think. Here's her explanation:

In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated.

I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness. It would be easy to let the images slide into territory that's strictly pornographic—the lurid and hardcore, the predictably "controversial." One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its "Fuck the Man" symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do.

While I'm not really qualified to judge Lai's work from an artistic standpoint, I like the principle of it. Humanizing presidents is a valuable service, particularly the most mythologized. The painting of her and Lincoln is probably my favorite because of its shocking humanization of a man that seems so unlike us. It reminds me of the greatest bit in John Stewart's book, the pin the clothes on the naked Supreme Court justices. That was one of the most juvenile jokes, but also the most profound.

Via Tomasky.

My New Favorite Photographer Must Really Like to Count...

My friend just showed me this artist: Chris Jordan.  His collection called "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait" looks at contemporary US culture through statistics.  And the numbers are staggering (3.6 million SUV sales in one year and 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries every month), but they really don't mean anything until you can see them.  His giant photographs are composed of thousands or millions of smaller photographs to correspond with the statistics.  I would post some of the pictures, but you really have to go to the website so you can see the zoomed-in versions to really get an idea of what they are showing.  They are clearly not meant to be seen on the computer instead of in person, but sometimes you have to work with what you have...

Because a lot of his pieces have to do with consumption and over consumption, Jordan has been labeled an environmentalist - which I'm sure he is.  But it interesting to me that pictures of oil barrels and junk yards inspire more of an environmental ethic than landscapes.  Landscapes are mass-produced and sold in stores like Hobby Lobby so people can hang them above their couches, but they certainly do nothing to inspire an environmental consciousness.  And landscape painters have certainly never been called environmentalists.  Why is it that images of the thing we are supposed to be protecting (nature) do not affect us, but pictures of our trash can be so profound?

Also, here is a link to a video of Chris Jordan speaking.

A problem solved by art, then jacked up by government tools

I caught this story in the LA Times, which has also made it on the local news rotation here in Southern California.

A small family-owned grocery business in Highland Park (a north east Los Angeles neighborhood) was having a difficult time with graffiti—the owners told the LA Times that the store had been hit by “taggers” over 100 times. After some research, the Antonio family found that buildings in the area with murals were not being hit by graffiti. As it turns out, murals are highly respected in the world of street art and are generally untouched out of respect for the creators. The Antonio family spent $3,000 hiring some local artists to create a mural on the side of their grocery store. The plan worked—after mural was finished, the store went untouched for three months. Art solving real-world problems, very cool.

Enter The City. The LA Times article reports that after about three months, the city threatened the Antonio family with a $1,000 fine and/or imprisonment if it the mural wasn’t removed. City crews then came by and whitewashed the side of the building. Why? Usually the city doesn’t go after murals unless someone complains.

A Highland Park resident did complain. She said that the mural was “gang looking” and made her “nervous”. The kicker here is that she is with the Highland Park Neighborhood Council (bletch).

There are a several of things that bother me about this. First of all, the director of the city’s Office of Community Beautification had this to say about the mural—“There’s obviously some talent here, but that’s just graffiti”. How condescending—to demure enough to admit that there is some artistic talent behind the object, but then to negate completely its status as art. That we have city officials to decide what is and is not art is completely appalling; I find this (at the risk of hyperbole, I admit) rather terrifying as an artist. That the art in question was on private property is even more heinous. How is it that someone can use an “excessive advertising” ordinance to force a private citizen to remove something of artistic value (and commercial value—remember the $3,000 price tag) from his or her own property? I’m terribly sorry if it made some (probably white) neighbor “nervous”, but seriously.

If you want to live in a community where things like this are controlled very carefully, the United States has thousands of KB Home/DR Horton/etc. communities available with very stringent and proto-fascist Home Owners Associations. You can even run for HOA president, where being a complete asshole will garner you lots of praise. Outside of that, however, I would hope that the rights of private citizens to decide for themselves what constitutes art without prior consent of the government would prevail over the at best unaware, and at worst, racist “feelings” of a member of the Highland Park Neighborhood Council.

And just for the record: since the city painted over the Antonio family’s mural, the wall is getting tagged again. I hope that lady from the Neighborhood Council likes looking at that.
(photo of mural by Jacob Antonio Jr., of the Antonio family)

And Now, From the Art World....

When some thieves stole two paintings, including a Picasso, valuing millions of dollars, in December 2007, from Sao Paulo's Art Museum (MASP), it became patently clear that the museum desperately needed to beef up security. How they would pay for that - be it through donations, increased prices, government help, or whatever - didn't matter so much as the need to find some way to do it. Stilll, in spite of the fact that it only took the thieves 3 minutes and a car jack to pull off the heist, you couldn't help but feel that, while horrible, and while security was minimal, these things happen elsewhere, too.

But twice in 7 months? It's becoming patently clear that, if Sao Paulo, the richest state in Brazil, can't offer enough funds to help preserve their cultural repositories, something has to be done. I'm against closing museums of this type, but if you're going to be so susceptible to theft not once, but twice, in 7 months, well....I don't see many alternatives between either paying up for security or shutting at least part of your operations. The government's (especially the state government's) failure to aid here is as shameful as the idea that private collectors would pay people to steal public collections for their own private gains.

Historical Image of the Day

Jacob Lawrence, "The Shoemaker," 1945

I'm not a professional architecture scholar, but...

Imagine my surprise this morning to check nytimes.com and discover that Akron was at the top of the main page. Apparently, their story on the re-opening of the Akron Art museum with its daring new modern architecture was interesting enough to warrant space there.

I've seen the building coming together in chunks in my random visits back home over the few years, but have yet to see the interior (I hope to do so in September for my first quick trip back to the states in over a year). However, having seen the slideshow attached, I have to respectfully disagree with critic Nicolai Ourousoff. Absolutely, the modern design on the outside and the lobby look wonderful. And, as brutal as his portrayal of downtown Akron as part of "the dark side of the America recalled by Robert Venturi: a haunted Main Street U.S.A. of decrepit brick buildings, vacant windows and empty storefronts" is for the most part accurate. Akron was devastated in the 1970s and 1980s as the economy was in recession and the tire companies (save for Goodyear) all relocated their corporate headquarters and major production units (although, to be fair to Akron, if Ourousoff thinks its awful now, he should have seen it in the early- to mid-1990s, before the downtown revitalization projects.)

But having seen the slideshow attached, I'm not so sure the interior is as miserable as he makes it out to be. Is it daring and exciting? Certainly not. It's just a standard art gallery, meant to have blank walls and not-offensive spaces to display art, trying to put the emphasis on the art and not the room. Is this a bad thing? Maybe it is to an architectural scholar/critic/whatever, but to me, honestly, it looks not any different in terms of interior, display space than the galleries of MoMA in New York, the National Galleries in DC, or even the amazing (and underrated) Cleveland Art Museum (at least before it began its 6-year total renovation project in 2005). I am curious to go see the building, and I respect that Ourousoff knows a lot more about these kinds of things than I do, but if the general public likes it, I don't see the harm. I guess that's the difference between me and art critics, though - function over form.

Historical Image of the Day

Jackson Pollack