According to What?

Last week was so full that I never quite managed to write about all the art that filled my time. One of the moments that lifted my spirits was a walk through “According to What?” a retrospective look at the work of Ai Weiwei. Filling an entire floor of the Hirshhorn Museum, the show includes a selection of 98 black-and-white photographs from the Chinese artist’s life in New York from 1983 to 1993; sculptural works incorporating materials as diverse as bicycles, stools, storage chests, pearls, tea, and ancient clay vessels; videos; and many large, inkjet prints applied like wallpaper not only the gallery walls but also covering enough of the floor that visitors are forced to walk on them.

Nothing that I have read about Ai Weiwei gives me any indication of his religious beliefs, or even if he has any. What is clear is that there is no distinction in his mind between his art and his life, and that for him, both life and art have a profoundly moral dimension. As the Directors’ Foreword to the catalog of this exhibition states,

Despite being beaten and detained by Chinese officials in his hotel room in 2009, which resulted in a head injury that ultimately required emergency surgery, as well as his arrest and confinement for eighty-one days in 2011, the artist remains through his art and actions to be an advocate for open dialogue and human rights issues. In his artwork, he continues to raise crucial questions about the right to express and conduct oneself freely, about accountability, and about the value of individual lives.

Many of the artworks in this show are also stunningly, hauntingly beautiful while asking disturbing questions about the complex relationships between old and new, history and progress, creativity and authenticity. Two that reference the map of China are made from dark, sensuous ironwood, reclaimed from Qing Dynasty temples that have been dismantled to make way for the new construction documented in the large inkjet photographs. Another work consists of 16 Han Dynasty vases, dating from about 200 BCE to 220 CE, which the artist has altered by dipping them in ordinary industrial paint. A nearby wall text asks,

So-called creative behaviors always accompany the issue of “authentic” and “original.” It may be the most important core question, whether a work is original or authentic. And this issue may well be the main point for contemporary art. People are looking for something new. But what on earth is something new? And what is the method of making something new? Can it be fake and at the same time authentic?

Near the end of the exhibition, 40 tons of steel rebar are piled along the floor, carefully laid in a pattern that looks like an empty riverbed, or a fissure in the earth. Each of the carefully-straightened pieces was recovered from schoolhouses that collapsed in an earthquake in Sichuan in 2008. Not far away, near the escalators that carry visitors into and out of the exhibit, large sheets of paper that look like a ledger book notes the names, ages, class, and gender of over 5000 child victims of that earthquake as a disembodied voice reads the names aloud.

Ai Weiwei asks deep questions of both art and life. What is real? What is important? What is really worth doing? Whatever the artist may say about his religious inclinations, these are profoundly spiritual questions that all of us must ultimately answer. Lately, Ai Weiwei has been giving his life and his art to discovering the truth about his government's attempts to hide its own activities against its citizens. To what am I giving my life and art?

Any Art in a Storm

Since I live and work in Washington, DC, relatives and friends from non-hurricane parts of the world have been calling and emailing, asking how we weathered the Big Storm. Although the seminary where I work was closed for two days, I find myself a little embarrassed to say that not much happened in my neighborhood except a lot of rain and wind. In accounts of the devastation in New Jersey and New York, and extended power outages and fallen trees and crushed roofs in the DC suburbs, art is probably pretty low on the list of people’s priorities in the aftermath of the storm. The Red Cross is busy providing drinking water, sandwiches, and a warm, dry place to stay, not worrying about aesthetics.

BELEIF + DOUBT at the Hirshhorn

 

But art isn’t just about pretty things. Art is a way of thinking about the world. Last week, I stopped in at the Hirshhorn Museum to take a look at Barbara Kruger’s remarkable installation, BELIEF+DOUBT. It’s in the newly-redesigned basement level, where every inch of the walls, floor, ceiling, even the undersides of the escalators, is covered with printed vinyl. For many years, Kruger has been using the tools of advertising to ask hard questions about the relationships between wealth and poverty, power and oppression, need and desire. In 1989, she worked with commercial sign painters to create an untitled mural on the side of what was then known as the Temporary Contemporary (now the Geffen Contemporary) in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles. A review in the Los Angeles Times describes it like this:

Nearly three stories high and more than two-thirds the length of a football field, the commercially painted mural is hard to miss. So is its composition, which approximates the American flag. The upper left corner is a blue rectangle with white letters that announce: "MOCA at the Temporary Contemporary." The remainder is a red field whose white sentences divide the expanse into visual stripes.

The chosen composition obviously flags MOCA for the passer-by, but it also evokes something more subtle and provocative. Such public buildings as courthouses, post offices and city halls are typically the ones that fly the flag out front. Kruger's flag-mural insists that the art museum be counted as a place for important public business, too--the business of expressive thought, enacted in the social context of a public place.
 

Call it street democracy in action. In four lines of simple text, Kruger's mural poses nine direct questions: Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose? Who does time? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last? [http://articles.latimes.com/1990-07-04/entertainment/ca-271_1_barbara-kruger-s-artwork]

WHOSE BODY?

A photo by Gary Leonard of National Guard troops in front of the mural following the trial of Rodney Kind in 1992 in Los Angeles adds another layer of meaning to the artist’s questions. It can be seen on the Museum of Contemporary Art’s website at http://www.moca.org/audio/blog/?p=3159.

WHOSE BELIEFS?

At the Hirshhorn more than twenty years later, Kruger continues to question our values, our unspoken assumptions, our unreflective behaviors. On the floor under one escalator, she writes, IT'S A SMALL WORLD BUT NOT IF YOU HAVE TO CLEAN IT. Under the other, the words are THE WORLD SHRINKS FOR THOSE WHO OWN IT. Between large letters that insist BELIEVE ANYTHING FORGET EVERY THING, a smaller sign proclaims GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU’LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF! and another asks WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU LAUGHED?

WHOSE POWER?

As thought-provoking as each aphorism or question is on its own, the cumulative effect of all those huge letters is overwhelming.  As I walked through the space, craning my neck and peering around corners, trying to keep track of where I was and what I was seeing, it felt like the antidote to the ads that tell me what I should buy or think or do whenever I read a newspaper or magazine, watch a movie or television show, listen to the radio, or even walk down the street. In the relentless storm of commercial messages that increasingly fill our lives, this art asks questions that have less to do with aesthetics than with the underlying realities of life.

The Day of the Dead

2012 Day of the Dead Ofrenda outside Oxnam Chapel

This past week, it has seemed that I am surrounded by death. None of the dead are my own loved ones, but rather people close to people I know – my dearest friend’s father, a student’s husband, a colleague’s grandfather, another colleague’s dear friend. So much death, so much love, so much grief. And so it seemed fitting that yesterday Amy and I went to the narthex of Oxnam Chapel to build the ofrenda for this year’s observance of the Day of the Dead.

As we covered an ordinary folding table with black and purple vestments; stacked open-fronted boxes to serve as niches for photographs and mementos; arranged paper flowers, electric candles, feathers, and calaveras; and set out offerings of bread and salt, I remembered doing the same thing last year at this time. Most of the objects we had gathered were the same as the ones we used before, but some were missing and others were newly offered – a life-sized Halloween skull covered with glitter, two large vases of silk flowers, and I’m not sure what else.

Last year's ofrenda

Building the ofrenda is both art-making and ritual activity, responding to the changes in ourselves, in the materials, and in the community with decisions that are both aesthetic and charged with meaning. Does the purple cloth go over the black one, or the other way around? Does this element go here or there? This space looks a little empty, shall we move this object a few inches to the right or that one to the left? As artists, our eyes are trained to look for balance, harmony, that elusive rightness that says a work is finished. As people of faith, creating a space for communal ritual, our hearts are trained to leave open spaces that others will fill in, to trust that the changes that others will make to our own collaborative effort will make it fuller, richer, more meaningful.

This year’s ofrenda is different from last year’s, and from the one that might appear next year in the same space. It is a temporary, collaborative artwork that marks a particular moment in time; a ritual space for remembering those who have died in the last year or two; and an offering into the life of the ongoing yet always changing community that is Wesley Theological Seminary.

Art and Gender

This afternoon I spent an engaging hour with one of my colleagues, looking for artworks for her to use in her class on the construction of gender. As we thought together about what images have engraved themselves so deeply into our cultural consciousness that they serve as icons of femininity, alternately laughed and groaned at a lot of art, both good and bad.

Eventually, we settled on about a dozen sculptures and paintings that tell an abbreviated but nonetheless convincing story. Beginning with the little sculpture whose true name and function is lost, but which is known to every art student as the Venus of Willendorf; through ancient Greek depictions of the goddesses Athena and Hera, medieval and Renaissance madonnas, romantic and early modern odalisques; to Degas bathers, Duchamp's shattered Nude Descending a Staircase, Picasso's cubist Girl Before a Mirror, Tom Wessleman's Great American Nude, and Phillip Pearlstein's dispassionate, headless bodies, we reminded ourselves how much of women's self-image has been refracted through the eyes, imaginations, and needs of men.

Granted, this was a selective list, leaving out the shocking painting of Judith with the head of Holofernes by Artemesia Gentilischi, the gentle portraits of women and children by the Impressionist Mary Cassatt, and countless contemporary artworks that skilled and talented women produce daily in our time. Slowly, women are claiming the right to create our own images. But we do so in a world that already exists, against the background of thousands of years of images that defined us and told us how to look, what to wear, and how we were to function. That history is good to call to mind, so that the future does not merely repeat the past.

Lettering

This morning as I arrived at work, I saw Amy and Trudi sitting side by side on the floor, putting up the lettering for the new show. There was something about the way they were sitting that reminded me of two little girls, happily making some big surprise for the adults in their lives. And, even though we are adults, that is the way that a lot of artists feel they are treated a lot of the time—like children who are indulged and encouraged while we play, but brushed aside when it’s time to think about serious things.

The show that Trudi has been installing for the last couple of days invites us to think about serious things. Guest curated by printmaker and weaver Cecilia Rossey, it carries the weighty title

                                        

                                   BLACK.WHITE.REaD:

                                          Nothing’s Black

                                          Hardly White

                                          Nearly Read

                                          Journey Through the Maze.

Cis has guest curated two other shows in the Dadian Gallery. In 2009, she brought us An Artist’s Reaction to War, in which ten artists were invited to make artworks responding to the war in Iraq as well as the idea of war in the abstract. This show, which first was exhibited at a gallery in Salem, NC, addressed aspects of war including the collateral death of children, the role of money and power, and the eternal hope for peace. A panel for Rossey’s own powerful contribution, “War Memorial: Iraq and Afganistan”, hangs in my office, a daily reminder of the thousands of nameless dead who are remembered only by their grieving families.

In 2010, Rossey gathered prints, paintings, and sculptures under the rubric Food and Form, inviting us to think about the symbolic nature of food, eating, and the body. In her statement about the idea behind the show, she wrote:

Acknowledged as the foundation of physical and emotional nourishment, artists probe the impact of food in contemporary society. Through myriad images and various media, artists highlight the beauty of food as form as well as food creating form. 

Food and Form spans contemplation of nature’s tempting designs for human ingestion to the corporate deviation from those original compositions to fatten profits. To ward off a national obesity epidemic, food activists wish to provoke a debate concerning basic nutrition, fitness and health.

BLACK.WHITE.REaD is just as serious as Rossey’s other shows. Reminding us that nothing is black, hardly anything is white, and very little is actually read, the works in this exhibition explore love and hate, faith and unbelief, fate and chance, and the many ambiguities of life. As Rossey writes,

The concept for the B.W.R exhibit began as a simple appreciation of graphic design: the stark contrast of black and white, subtle grays achieved in skillful etchings, red striking a bold emphasis. Over the year, this concept became a metaphor for life’s experiences. . . Often we hear “It's black and white,” “You knew what you married,” “You signed the contract.” These comments isolate rather than protect delicate personalities.

 

As Trudi and Amy applied the stark, red letters to the window outside the gallery, carefully making sure that everything lined up and that no air bubbles marred the clean lines and simple forms, I thought about the seriousness with which artists take their work of making the invisible visible. Although what we do may look like child’s play, we know that what we are really doing is creating worlds of meaning for others to inhabit. And that is no trivial task.

Sacred Space

 Architects are often called upon to provide buildings for religious communities. At some point in every congregation’s life there is the opportunity to build a new building or to renovate an old one. Last Friday, I was privileged to participate in a jury that looked at student projects in the Sacred Space and Cultural Studies concentration of the Catholic UniversitySchool of Architecture, a place where students are encouraged to consider what makes a space seem sacred.

As the invited outside voice in a group that otherwise consisted of members of the School of Architecture faculty, I felt awkward at first, not knowing the rules and customs in this field that is part art, part engineering, part faith. Soon, however, I realized that, just as in any art school critique, the tools of the jury are careful observation, metaphorical thinking, and concern for the teachable moment. My own voice as an artist and a liturgical scholar added one more note to the already wide and deep conversation.

The students had spent the previous three weeks responding to a brief to design a small monastery for twelve monks. Under the direction of Associate Professor Julio Bermudez and master architect and guest lecturer AlbertoCampo Baeza, the students looked at the site, thought about voluntary simplicity, beauty, and monastic buildings from earlier times. Given a mere 5000 square feet to accommodate a chapel, a library, dining room, dormitory, and utility spaces, the students made preliminary sketches, concept models, plans, elevations, and presentation models of their visions of sacred space.

 
In the twenty minutes allotted to each group’s presentation, only some of the issues raised by cardboard models, site photographs, and a variety of plans and elevations could be addressed. Still, I was struck by the variety of questions. Where do people enter the building? What is the relationship between the building, the nearby river, and the surrounding trees? What does the building look like when it is lit at night? How does the arrangement of open and closed exterior surfaces speak about the space enclosed within? What is that door made of? What happens when the river rises? What is the story you want to tell?

In the end, it is the story, whether told in concrete and glass, wood and stone, or paint or words. These compositions in cardboard and glue tell stories of procession and pilgrimage, of contemplation and recreation, of eating and sleeping and studying in a place of where the natural world intersects the human-made. In a few months, some of these elegant explorations into light and form will be on exhibit in the Dadian Gallery, in an exhibition called “A Box of Miracles.”

Tea with Kali

 The Paper People are leaving the gallery today, making way for an invitational group show, BLACK.WHITE.REaD: Journey Through the Maze, guest curated by Cecilia Rossey.  But I couldn’t let all of Rosemary Markowski’s remarkable papier-mâché sculptures get away, so At the Table 2 - Tea with Kali is now installed on top of my filing cabinet, where I can see it out of the corner of my eye as I sit at my desk.

At a mere 12.5h x 12.5w x 5d, the piece occupies a psychic space that is much larger than its objective dimensions. A very proper-looking woman with cropped, brown hair and a sad yet quizzical expression on her face sits on a rickety chair, holding a red tea cup. At the other end of the table sits another woman, this one with blue skin, long unkempt hair, and four arms. Between them, the table, spread with a patterned cloth, holds a teapot, another cup, a plate of cookies, and a somewhat bewildered-looking male head. Kali’s tongue, which sticks out of her mouth nearly to her chin, is the same bright red as the tea cups, her eyes glare fiercely beneath glowering brows, and her necklace of skulls glitters against her bare, blue skin. One of her hands rests lightly on the head, two others brandish a sword, a spear, and the fourth makes a gesture which might be a fist but might also be a sign of blessing.

The fearsome Kali is a Hindu deity that is sometimes referred to as the Dark Mother. As she sits across the table from her bemused companion, she seems to me to be the embodiment of that part of myself that sometimes gets out of control with anger. It is said that Kali was trying to kill the forces of evil, but got so carried away that she almost didn’t notice that she was destroying everything around her. When her consort Shiva threw himself under her feet, she was so astonished that she stuck out her tongue and stopped her rampage.

I don’t really know Rosemary Markowski, having only met her once when she came to the gallery to give and artist’s talk, so I can’t really say if this sculpture is autobiographical. What I can say is that she knows a lot about human nature, and about the need we all have to make peace with the unpredictable wildness that dwells within even the most mild-mannered exterior. As I look at this small sculpture, it reminds me to welcome the passion that fuels my life, even though it sometimes feels dangerous. To have Tea with Kali is to welcome her to my table, to recognize that Kali’s upraised hand is not a threat, but rather a gesture that says, “Do not be afraid.”