HÖCH, Hannah, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-20.
Höch was a pioneer of the artform that became known as photomontage. Many of her pieces sardonically critique the mass culture beauty industry, at the time gaining significant momentum in mass media through the rise of fashion and advertising photography. Her works from 1926 to 1935 often depicted same sex couples, and women were once again a central theme in her work from 1963 to 1973. Höch also made strong statementson racial discrimination. Her most famous piece is Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (“Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany”), a critique of Weimar Germany in 1919. This piece combines images from newspapers of the time re-created to make a new statement about life and art in the Dada movement. The complex imagery of her montage work explores her fragmented life as a woman within a male dominated art movement and pre-war and post-war society in Germany. This was during the time in Europe that women were given suffrage, magazines were being published for women, and Höch was using this epochal time as material for her art.The rigid gender roles are toyed with in a destructive manner, often placing a woman’s head or legs on a male body, and vice versa. In the post-war era, she infuses African art in her Ethnographic Museum series. Women are justaposed with primitive imagery, relating women’s slow progress in contemporary German culture.
Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze (still), 2010. (Henry Prince, Mary Boone Gallery / Nicole Klags)
Stored in a secure facility in the Cayman Islands, Mika Rottenberg’s new sculpture will be sold in shares to collectors who have never seen it in person. The only public image of the work features a smiling New York art dealer, Mary Boone, holding the precious object: a raggedy cube made of raw latex, rotting lettuce and tins of blush.
Whether you think this arrangement is brilliant or ridiculous probably depends on how you feel about the contemporary art market. Rottenberg, named one of the 10 most promising New York artists by New York magazine in 2007, is interested in the mysterious mechanisms by which art’s value is created. “Something that could look like nothing could be worth millions of dollars,” she says. “I think that’s fascinating.”
Her video installation “Squeeze,” currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, imagines the production of the ungainly art object as a somewhat magical process. Combining footage of real workers in the lettuce and rubber industries with staged shots of claustrophobic spaces in which women perform repetitive but seemingly unrelated tasks — mashing, scraping, massaging — the piece engages serious issues of labor, gender and globalization. It is also surprisingly funny.
In one sequence, field laborers insert their arms into holes in the ground; miraculously, the arms emerge in a room where they are massaged by another set of women. Nearby, the naked rear ends of other workers protrude through openings in a wall, cooled by sprays of mist.
The show is one of several current exhibitions that use humor to raise questions about the relationship — whether estranged or entangled — between art and everyday life. John Baldessari’s wry twists on artistic convention are a recurring theme in his retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hugh Brown’s imitations of works by famous artists are on view at Robert Berman Gallery and video artist Ryan Trecartin’s latest media-addled vignettes recently arrived at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Pacific Design Center gallery.
Of course, humor is subjective, and not all of these artists are trying to be funny. In fact, artworks that go for easy laughs are often dismissed as superficial entertainment — or worse, simple mockery.
Rottenberg, 34, insists she is not trying to make fun of Boone or any of the workers and performers who participate in her videos. “Humor is just a way to help digest things,” says Rottenberg, who uses it to deal with what she sees as harsh realities beyond her control. “It’s like either I’m going to cry or I’m going to laugh.”
No stranger himself to the thoughtful side of funny, Baldessari, 79, has been gently turning artistic and popular culture on its head since the 1960s. “The humor found in Baldessari’s work stems from the way in which he calls attention to absurdities that already exist,” writes LACMA curator Leslie Jones in an e-mail. One example is the painting “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell” from 1966-68, in which Baldessari simply transposed a found text onto a canvas. The text offers advice on which colors and subjects artists should use to maximize sales of their work. “Baldessari highlights the illogical notion that paintings of bulls or roosters will sell better than paintings of cows,” writes Jones. “That’s funny to us, but the person who wrote it was probably dead serious.”
The humor in such works depends on a bit of inside knowledge — the fact that the text was appropriated, not written by Baldessari. While the painting exposes the ridiculousness of the original text, it also marks a boundary between those who know and those who don’t.
Brown, another Los Angeles artist, takes this idea of the inside joke to elaborate extremes. His detailed works riff on the recognizable styles of famous artists such as Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse and, yes, John Baldessari, with a single, signature difference: each piece includes a reference to a chain saw.
An avid collector of anything having to do with chain saws — he owns more than 150 chain saw toys — the 56-year-old artist sees the works less as a love letter to power tools than as an hommage to the art he loves. To that end, he does extensive research into the artists he mimics: He studied footage of Pollock making his drip paintings before he attempted his own version and employed the same neon fabricator as Bruce Nauman. “If one of those artists had actually done them, it would look just like that,” he says of his creations — except of course, for the chain saw.
Brown sees the ubiquitous power tool as a non sequitur that might prompt people to question the authenticity of the works. “I almost want them to be a little bit confusing, like you weren’t sure what you just saw,” he says.
But one gets the sense that for Brown, it’s even better if people don’t catch on. He gleefully recounts stories of those he has fooled, including an Orange County critic who saw the works at Cal State Fullerton last year and assumed they belonged to a rich collector with a penchant for chain saws. Still, most of the artists Brown copies are so recognizable that most people get the joke. “The museum told me that they never had a show where there were so many people who left smiling,” he says.
Of course, using humor to deflate the pretensions of the art world is nothing new. Since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp showed a urinal and signed it with a pseudonym, artists have been poking fun at the definition and conventions of art. But despite a lineage that runs from Dada and Surrealism through Fluxus, Pop art and much contemporary performance and video, the discussion of humor in art is still something of a neglected subject.
“Humor is still regarded as associated with entertainment value, so to talk about art as entertaining kind of simplifies things,” says Sheri Klein, professor of art education at the University of Wisconsin-Stout and author of the book “Art and Laughter.” She thinks artists, curators and art historians might be reluctant to talk about an artwork’s humorous aspects because they’re afraid it won’t be taken seriously.
This concern has to do with class distinctions that date back to Western art’s aristocratic heritage. “Long ago, when all the rich people wanted to make paintings of themselves, smiling was not something you did in a painting,” says Klein. “It was something that the lower class did when they got drunk and had their carnivals.”
Yet art seems to get more carnivalesque every day. In a kind of concentric three-ring circus, the Museum of Contemporary Art recently hosted a taping of the soap opera “General Hospital” in which actor James Franco played an artist. Franco also declared the taping a performance art piece, which he documented in a film that also will be shown at the museum.
Another show at MOCA, “Any Ever,” is a suite of new works by Trecartin, whose manic, ultra-contemporary videos have been described by Times writer Jori Finkel as “demonically funny.”
Trecartin, 29, who lives itinerantly in cities from Philadelphia to Miami and now Los Angeles, is part of a generation of artists for whom humor no longer carries a stigma, says Jon Davies, who co-curated “Any Ever” at the Power Plant in Toronto this spring. Instead, hilarity is just one of many emotions that flit across the screen. “He is very interested in these very complicated states of not knowing how to feel, or feeling lots of different things at the same time,” says Davies.
He adds that much of the works’ humor springs from the juxtaposition of disparate voices, objects and ideas. Sprinkled with cheap digital effects, even cheaper furniture and ever-morphing personalities who speak a patois of clichés, acronyms and buzzwords, the videos are fast-paced, resolutely physical condensations of our sprawling media landscape. “His work is very much just trying to reckon with this overload and represent how all that information has an effect on human bodies,” Davies says.
Trecartin, unlike many video artists, has posted several of his works in their entirety on YouTube, and it’s tempting to suggest that his work in some way bridges the gap between art and pop culture. But Davies maintains that it does more than simply add to the media glut. “He is really playing a role in shaping how we view this material,” he says, adding that the work, which has become faster and faster over the years, “almost forces your brain and body to adapt to it.”
Klein agrees that while contemporary artists increasingly blur the line between art and entertainment, humor still functions differently in the two realms. “The aim in humor for entertainment is to help us forget our troubles,” she says. “The role of humor in terms of art is awareness and liberation and change. So I think the outcomes or the aims are different, but the techniques might be the same.”
Drawn to the energy of punk rock, Marclay began creating songs, singing to music on pre-recorded backing tapes. Unable to recruit a drummer for his 1979 performances with guitarist Kurt Henry, Marclay used the regular rhythms of a skipping LP record as a percussion instrument. These duos with Henry might be the first time a musician used records and turntables as interactive, improvising musical instruments. Marclay sometimes manipulates or damages records to produce continuous loops and skips, and has said he generally prefers inexpensive used records purchased at thrift shops, as of 1998, never having paid more than US$1 for a record, as opposed to other turntablists who often seek out specific recordings. Marclay has occasionally cut and re-joined different LP records; when played on a turntable, these re-assembled records will combine snippets of different music in quick succession along with clicks or pops from the seams – typical of noise music – and when the original LPs were made of differently-colored vinyl, the reassembled LPs can themselves be objects d’art. Some of Marclay’s musical pieces are carefully recorded and edited plunderphonics-style; he is also active in free improvisation.
He was filmed performing a duo with Erikm for the documentary Scratch. His scene didn’t make the final cut, but is included on the DVD extras. Thom Jurek writes “many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art — and it is art, make no mistake — writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up of vinyl records and pasting them together with parts from other vinyl records, they never seem to mention that these sound collages of his are charming, very human, and quite often intentionally hilarious.”Marclay has performed and recorded both solo and in collaboration with many musicians, including John Zorn, William Hooker, Elliott Sharp, Otomo Yoshihide, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Flo Kaufmann; he has also performed with the group Sonic Youth, and in other projects with Sonic Youth’s members.
Notably interested in Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Over the past 30 years, Christian Marclay has explored the fusion of fine art and audio cultures, transforming sounds and music into a visible, physical form through performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video.
In 1996, the artist Christian Marclay plastered more than five thousand blank musical notation sheets in public spaces throughout Berlin during a month-long sound festival. Members of the public filled them in with standard musical notations as well as scribbles, drawings, and random marks. Marclay photographed many of the graffitied sheets and compiled them into a book, creating a musical score from them. He called this selection of prints Graffiti Composition (2002), which can be seen in MoMA’s Online Collection.
For the Biennale de Paris in 1975, he made the piece titled Conical Intersect by cutting a large cone-shaped hole through two townhouses dating from the 17th century in the market district known as Les Halles which were to be knocked down in order to construct the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou.
Both of Gordon Matta-Clark’s parents were artists: the American Anne Clark and the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, artist of Basque, French and Spanish descent.[1] His twin brother Sebastian was also an artist, who committed suicide in 1976.
He studied architecture at Cornell University, but did not practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as “Anarchitecture.” At the time of Matta-Clark’s tenure there, Cornell’s architecture program was guided in part by Colin Rowe, a preeminent architectural theorist of modernism. His vision of modernism later influenced much of Matta-Clark’s own work in its relation to modernist practice and theory. He also spent a year studying French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and was in Paris during the student strikes of May 1968. It was in Paris that he became aware of the French deconstructionist philosophers and Guy Debord and the Situationists. These cultural and political radicals developed the concept of détournement, or “the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble.” Such concepts would later inform his work. He is most famous for works that radically altered existing structures. His “building cuts” (in which, for example, a house is cut in half vertically) alter the perception of the building and its surrounding environment.
Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his “building cuts.” Matta-Clark also used puns and other word games as a way to re-conceptualize preconditioned roles and relationships (of everything, from people to architecture). He demonstrates that the theory of entropy applies to language as well as to the physical world, and that language is not a neutral tool but a carrier for society’s values and a vehicle for ideology.
In the early 1970s as part of the Anarchitecture group, Matta-Clark was interested in the idea of entropy, metamorphic gaps, and leftover/ambiguous space. Fake Estates was a project engaged with the issue of land ownership and the myth of the American dream – that everyone could become “landed gentry” by owning property. Matta-Clark “buys” into this dream by purchasing 15 leftover and unwanted properties in Manhattan for $25–$75 a plot. Ironically, these “estates” were unusable or unaccessible for development, and so his ability to capitalize on the land, and thus his ownership of them, existed virtually only on paper.
In 1971 Matta-Clark cofounded Food, in SoHo, New York, with Carol Goodden, a restaurant managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. The activities at Food helped delineate how the art community defined itself in downtown Manhattan.[3] The first of its kind in SoHo, Food became well known among artists and was a central meeting-place for groups such as the Philip Glass Ensemble, Mabou Mines, and the dancers of Grand Union. He ran Food til 1973.
In 1974, he performed a literal deconstruction, by removing the facade of a condemned house along the Love Canal, and moving the resulting walls to Artpark, in his work Bingo.
He started his training at the École des Métiers d´Art, followed by a brief sojourn at the École National Supérieure de Beaux Arts. He has explored all disciplines, from painting to cinema. Among his chief concerns is the ‘scene of production’ as a way of presenting art and highlighting facture (the process of ‘making’ rather than for example, mimesis or representation of anything but the work itself). The work is site specific installation, having a relation to its setting in contrast to prevailing ideas of a work of art standing alone.
In the late 1960s Buren hit on the mark that connected him with ideas of space and presentation arising through deconstructionist philosophies backgrounding the May 1968 student demonstrations in France.
Working in situ (on site), he strives to contextualise his artistic practice using the stripe – a popular French fabric motif – a means of visually relating art to its situation, a form of language in space rather than a space in itself. He began producing unsolicited public art works using striped awning canvas common in France. The stripe is a standard 8.7 cm wide. Denoting the trademark stripes as a visual instrument or ‘seeing tool’ he invites us to take up his critical standpoint challenging traditional ideas about art.
He started by setting up hundreds of striped posters around Paris and later in more than 100 metro stations, drawing public attention through these unauthorised bandit style acts. In another controversial gesture he blocked the entrance of the gallery with stripes at his first solo exhibition.
As a conceptual artist, he was regarded as visually and spatially audacious, objecting to traditional ways of presenting art through the museum/gallery system while at the same time growing in hot demand to show via the system.Since 1970 he has applied this obsessive language to the production of installations. He has no qualms about working in public spaces whether or not he has authorization. This has brought him problems with the police on more than one occasion. Buren is certainly one of the most solid representatives of Street Art.
In 1975 he entered a new stage in which he would create his works in the same place where they were to be exhibited. This means installations closely tied to the architecture and the scenic setting, and he calls them “cabane eclatée.” Some of these works have been the basis of virulent disputes among the general public and in the media, as happened regarding the one he created in 1986 called ‘Deux Plateaux,” a 3000 square-meter installation with which he virtually took over one of the courtyards of the Palais-Royal in Paris. The venerable seventeenth century building whose construction was commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu found itself invaded by numerous columns of varying sizes that Daniel Buren covered with his typical black and white stripes. This work, which was on the verge of toppling the whole Ministry of Culture, now holds a certification as a National Monument.
Most importantly for me however he wrote the articles about‘ the function of the studio’and ‘the function of the museum’. However outdated you might find them, they outline the histories that artists have grown from.
PHILIPPE APELOIG & RONAN ERWAN BOUROULLEC
GARY BUTCHER & KAMO (photo by KATZUNARI TAJIMA)
JAMES WOCJIK & JAMES BIBER + CARIN GOLDBERG
KEN HAEDRICH & DAN TOBIN SMITH
T MAGAZINE is a supplement to THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE exclusively dedicated to style. T MAGAZINE is published fourteen times a year and each cover features creative interpretations of the infamous fraktur T by various artists and designers. In celebration of the fifth year of publication, T MAGAZINE has created a retrospective online gallery highlighting some of the best covers. Interesting to see so many fresh takes on the same theme.
Ikebana and Bonsai are your two main forms of traditional spiritual Japanese gardening. Though the word ‘Ikebana’ literally means ‘living flowers’, it is actually the visual presentation of cut stems, flowers and other features to represent an aspect of nature in miniature. Bonsai, on the other hand, means ‘pot plant’ and the art form involves raising living trees, often over a period of several years. While they are small, bonsai are not actually different from the trees we see around us, they are not miniature species. Rather they are small branches of a tree, carefully chosen, pruned and cultivated so that they look like smaller versions of their own species. They are also displayed in a way that shows off their best features, usually in a simple, shallow pot. Bonsai is about the combination of the plant and the pot. There are many different styles of bonsai such as:
broom style – a tapered trunk topped by a symmetrical area of foliage
cascading style – the pot is kept on a platform and the branches ‘cascade’ down below it
windswept style – resembles a tree that has grown up in an area exposed to strong winds.
Saikei is similar to and often confused with bonsai, but is actually closer to ikebana. Different species of small trees as well as other plants, rocks and sand are used to create miniature landscapes.
Araki was born in Tokyo, studied photography during his college years and then went to work at the advertising agency Dentsu, where he met his future wife, the essayist Y?ko Araki. After they were married, Araki published a book of pictures of his wife taken during their honeymoon titled Sentimental Journey. She later died in 1990. Pictures taken during her last days were published in a book titled Winter Journey.
Having published over 350 books (and still more every year) Araki is considered one of the most prolific artists alive or dead in Japan and around the world. Many of his photographs are erotic; some have been called pornographic.
After he was diagnosed with cancer, the main theme of his work changed to portraying the ability to give life (for example photos of naked woman with their newborn children) and he said he began to take photographs of flowers, which shall be presented at his funeral insted of real flowers.
Usually reviews of Araki’s work start by pointing out the contradictions “monster,” “genius,” “pornographer,” “artist,” etc. The greatest negative routinely cited is his attitude toward women, photographed smeared with paint or bound in bondage ropes, images that reflect attitudes rooted in Edo’s ancient past or Tokyo’s modern sexual underworld.
But this kind of moralistic approach doesn’t quite fit a subject like Araki, who is more a force of nature, existing, in some Nietzschean space beyond good and evil. In the show “Nobuyoshi Araki: Self, Life, Death,” at London’s Barbican, Araki’s depictions of women placed him beyond the pale of some liberal leftwing acceptability, before trying to find some level on which he could be “redeemed.”
Araki’s present book and show, “Tokyo Jinsei,” covers much of the same ground as the Barbican show with a similar 40-year-plus range, although, typically, the “pornographic” element has been watered down for a Japanese audience.
While moral concerns are always going to surface among those keen to damn his work, they are less helpful for those wishing to develop a true understanding of his frantic photographic framing and capturing of Tokyo’s unique energy. With such a variety of subject matter, formal concepts are also useless. This leaves just one device that is the key to all Araki’s art — Araki himself. Looking at the people in the photographs — and even the scenery — we see the chemistry of their reaction to the cheerful, relentless, comical ball of energy that is Araki.
View from a cemetery of the construction on Roppongi Hills (2000; above); High school students returning home in the afternoon (1997; below)
Origami came from the Japanese words “Oru” meaning “to fold” and “kami” meaning “paper”
Origami started in the early 700’s when paper first came to Japan. Origami is when a single square of paper is folded into beautiful designs. Origami was originally used for religious purposes, but then people started using it as something to do for fun. Origami creators fold square pieces of paper to make animals, dolls, boats, and other figures without using scissors or glue. During the Heian period (794-1185), origami was used as a gift for family or friends. In the Edo period (1603-1868), people were making more beautiful origami designs by using more than one sheet of paper. Origami’s last change was in the Meiji period (1868-1912); origami was taught in elementary schools as a lesson in geometry.
I also found this handy guide to making an Origami fish…
HÖCH, Hannah, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-20.
