More Lippard Plus Artists

Gosh, that was a pretty long hiatus from the blog. It has been on my mind to sit and write. Life has taken over. With an upcoming exhibition and a million life things to do, my focus was everywhere but here. Writing this is centering. Reading has been confined to stints in the bathroom after the kids are asleep or after work is done. Subway reading is a luxury I treasure beyond words. All in all, I have been sloooooow.

As I promised in my last entry, I googled some artists in the book that I wanted to look up and see what they were doing now. There are some big names Lippard mentions. I stuck to the lesser known big shots.

David Chung: http://www.davidchung.com/
In the chapter called Mixing, Lippard covers some amazing artists whose work resonates loudly with current events in the US. It is almost a bit uncanny how much this chapter belongs to the here and now. Was Lippard on some sort of time machine when she wrote it and didn't realize it? I am sure that these artists are very well known by those much better versed when it comes to names. I must confess, that this was the first I heard of David Chung and I was impressed. It goes without saying that by the mere size of his canvases Chung is stationed in LA. Where else would he have the space to explore the pictorial plane with such dramatic line and gusto. His name attracted me. Having a history in Korea and returning there last year, the big boom of the Korean art world is dynamically impressive for me. There is so much ordered passion in the details of work by many Korean artists as well as in Chung's. His imagery is a symphony of graffiti and Korean motifs, northeast Asian symbols such as the crane, swooping above a tangle of monochromatic beams. His 1988 piece Seoul House” an electronic rap opera, was an early piece sited by Lippard. The video on his site is pretty good for showing the documentation of a live piece and left me wanting Chung to create more live pieces. He found a way to collaborate with ethnomusicologist Pooh Johnston and composer Charles Tobermann that mirrored the cross cultural identity the US carries within it. When so much media focus recently (albeit misinformed for the most part) on cross cultural relations, it is refreshing to see something smart, non-sensationalist, and dignified.

Larry Beck (Chnagmiut Yup'ik): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_James_Beck
I was disappointed to see this artist had passed away in 1994. The link above was the only more or less comprehensive link on him and his work I could find. He died in 1994, a few year after the publication on Mixed Blessings. He had a tremendous career working with Tom Robbins in performance collaborations with the Shazam Society (worth a good research paper if ever) and in his own rite with mighty sculpture. In his caption, he notes that he is an Eskimo but also a 20th Century American who lives in a modern city with junk yards, industrial waste, trash cans that float on the shores of ancient beaches where his ancestors found driftwood. His pieces involve using modern found objects to create masks influenced by traditional old Inuit art. They are as amusing as they are poignant. As I was reading his bio on wikipedia, I read a sentence that struck me: “He experimented with casting several small masks, based on traditional Inuit forms, in aluminum and bronze, but he was still uncomfortable with the fact that the masks represented a complete contradiction to his western art training. This and peer group pressure kept him doing abstract work.” Reading this sentience reminded me of an interview I heard on WBAI with Ellen Lupton on her new book about indie publishing companies. In her interview she mentioned that the business of publishing is based on keeping people out because there is so much money involved with publishing a new author that it is really an economic risk. Is art's aesthetic based on financial risk thus affecting our interests, judgments, and choices? Beck deserves a retrospective in a major way. But who will do it? With any luck a museum devoted to Native American Arts will do so, but what about the bigger institutions like the Guggenheim, LAMOCA, Gettysburg, etc.? Will they take the chance and re-program the aesthetic?

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/chaTheresa.php
A tragic end like that of Ana Mendieta, Cha died at a point in her career where she was hitting incredible momentum. Her book “Dictee” is already on my list of to buy after I finish this project. I want to devote more time researching her work. Her work is contemporary to Mendieta. Their work both transcends from the material to the another plane that is universal. Both begin from the female and from there invest their energies into transcending limits within materials. I had heard of Cha before this book, but to be honest had not seen any of her work and only heard of her fame and tragic death. Her work is simple but deceptive in leading us to think that it's core is not complex. She had a retrospective that traveled to Spain organized by UC Berkley according to La Fundacio Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. There is a foundation under her name with images and documentation on her work.

I think I am going to devote one more entry to Lippard. The bookcase has to move forward. I don't know if I am going to use a first strike for this book. I feel as if I'm committing heresy just thinking about doing this let alone it being a Lucy Lippard book, but the project must move forward and at this pace, I don't want my audience to forget about me. So here's a deadline I'm sticking with: August 17. The week before is going to be filled with opening exhibition jitters and work. New live art piece. Exciting!

Book 1, Shelf 1: Lucy Lippard Mixed Blessings

When I started reading Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, I had forgotten that I requested a book from the public library: Democracy, by Group Material and the Dia Art Foundation published in 1990 the same year Mixed Blessings was. Keeping to my rules, I haven't read it. I've browsed through the table of contents and noticed some incredible writers, among them Henry Louis Gates Jr., bell hooks, and Bill Moyers. These names have put my mind in the perspective of Lucy Lippard's world during the late 1980's when presumably she starting writing Mixed Blessings. Call them post-colonial, progressive, liberal, radical or realistic, the rhetoric of the writers I just mentioned are by no mean subtle. The late 1980's marked a continuation of thought that had its roots in the 60's movements and begged for a different world order to emerge. Mixed Blessings was written at a crucial time for art, a period filled with unfinished business and final battles for equal representation, artistic expression, and total inclusion. Reminisent of 1968, something was in the air. Countless people were dying of AIDS (and still are), Nelson Mandela was freed, East and West Germany reunited, the Cold War ended, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and some listened to Madonna's Vogue. The capitalistic game was a foot and the Guerrilla Girls could afford to put advertising on the side of buses in New York City. Old world structures were dismantling and artists were reflecting it (e.g. Group Material's Democracy).The Culture Wars were waged in full swing by conservative Americans such as Jesse Helms wanting to take back “their culture” so that it reflected the ideas and beliefs of “American” people.

As I've been reading Mixed Blessings, I am overwhelmed by the amount of information that is jammed in it. It almost seems like Lippard was writing a last will and testament on the day before Warsaw's Nazi seize. Lippard's voice can sometimes be so prophetic as well as have a scared-straight quality. There have been moments though when her writing seems aggressively romantic bordering cliché: “...is not imprisoned by her cultural sources, but freed by them”1. Considering that the book is devoted to the unearthing of, “a little-known explosion of art by women and men from many different ethnic backgrounds”2, it is pretty thin (total 270 pages with notes and bibliography). Was it little-known to the publisher? I get the feeling that Lippard was influenced by the momentum of the time. She just wasn't getting on the band wagon of collaborative groups when she wrote Mixed Blessings. She wanted to be a cultural bridge between two co-existing and separate art worlds, those in and those kept out.

I visited El Museo del Barrio the other day, and seeing it's revamped space I discovered new artists that were making dynamic art throughout the 20th century. Visitors around me were amazed to discover them and their history in a silenced existence. I kept Lippard's book in focus asking myself as I walked through the space, “Has her goal to inform the public of art made by people 'of different ethnic backgrounds' been successful?” As I sat on the train reading the second chapter "Telling", I noticed the name of an artist whose work impressed me and my friend at the museum. It was a video made in 1958 which consisted of reedited news reels from WWII and the Korean War. The footage was manipulated and rearranged in such a way to magnify the absurdity of war propaganda. The piece's formality was exceptional. It was by Rafael Montaňez Ortiz. On page 94 of Mixed Blessings, is a photograph documenting a performance piece, Communion with Trees, in Italy on the property of Fluxus artist Robert Watts in 1988. I found out that Ortiz was not only “pioneering the performance art field”3, but was also the first director of el Museo. My friend pointed out that our tour guide had failed to point out Montaňez Ortiz's piece.

Lippard, Lucy Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, New Press: New York, 1990

1. Lippard, Lucy Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America,p. 67
2. ibid, back cover
3. ibid, p. 93

The First Shelf

In order of appearance Title/Last Name:

Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America/Lippard
The Language of New Media/Manovich
Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey/Gernsheim
3rd World Film Making and the West/Armes
The Development of Segregationist Thought/Newtry
Assassins/Sondheim
The Book of Folly/Sexton
The Balcony/Genet
In the Zone/Murphy & White
Metamorphisis/Kafka
The Soul of the New Machine/Kidder
The Last Days of Socrates/Plato
Urban Renewal/Bellush & Hansknedt
Leviathian/Hobbes
Apocrypha/various
The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist/Breytenbach
The Executioners Song/Mailer
Warring Women of India/various
Seven Pillars of Wisdom/Lawrence
To Discover the True Self I Must Die/Master Dae Haeong
The Disuniting of America/Schlesinger
I and Thou/Buber
The Left Hand of Darkness/Le Guin
Foucault's Pendulum/Eco
A Prayer for Owen Meany/Irving
One Hundred Years of Solitude/Marquez
Alternatives to Violence/various
The Republic of Plato/Cornford
Popular Cultures and National Identity of the Dominican Republic I/Oritz
Popular Cultures and National Identity of the Dominican Republic II/Oritz
De Anima (on the Soul)/Aristole
The Colonial Heritage of Latin America/Stein
How to be an Alien/Mikes
Paula/Allende
The Vietnam War/Young
Tekstura: Writings on Russian New Media/Efimovais & Manovich
In the Time of Butterflies/Alvarez
Freedom from Fear/Suu Kyi
Oh Pray These Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well/Angelou