Global Anonymity

 

 

JR has a show at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, part of an overarching project called "Inside Out."  JR is a famous street artist from Paris, and simply typing in that bio feels kind of icky to me.  Not sure why, except that his whole gig seems to be about a sort of utopian populism in which getting your picture taken and plastered somewhere in the city constitutes -- well, I'm not sure what.  The whole endeavor is predicated on the fact that fame, no matter how it is instituted, is worth it.  The kind of fame JR deals in, sweet and esoteric and empowering, is actually the same kind of fame that is dealt out via the internet, TV, radio, and any other platform.  Your image becomes your identity.  So what is the difference between getting your photo taken by JR and his project-workers and getting it taken by paparazzi or even doing a little selfy on Instagram?  In the case of JR's project, it must be that his presence as a "famous street artist from Paris" is what makes it different.  Plus he's not making a shitload of money from the image.  Plus the image is not of someone who is already famous.  Plus it takes the concept of "selfy" and rarifies it, turns it into a status beyond self-promotion. 

 

In the case above, JR and his project workers pasted the portraits they took on the concrete around the fountain at Fountain Square.  So, I guess, people could walk on them while enjoying them.

 

Which brings me to Inside Out, the overarching project.  This is from the Inside Out website, from its "about" page:

 

"On March 2, 2011, JR won the TED prize at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and called for the creation of a global participatory art project with the potential to change the world. This project is called INSIDE OUT. Inspired by JR’s large‐format street "pastings," INSIDE OUT gives everyone the opportunity to share their portrait and make a statement for what they stand for. It is a global platform for people to share their untold stories and transform messages of personal identity into works of public art.  Each INSIDE OUT group action around the world is documented, archived and exhibited online. Over 120,000 people from more than 108 countries have participated.  The INSIDE OUT project has traveled from Ecuador to Nepal, from Mexico to Palestine, inspiring group actions on varied themes such as hope, diversity, gender-based violence, climate change..."

A project that is built around being "a global platform for people to share their untold stories and transform messages of personal identity into works of public art" looks kind of odd when executed like the picture above.  The portraits become plastered litter on the ground, peeling away from the weather and from people actually walking on the faces.  No messages are delivered this way, I don't think.  When I was looking at all the faces I just thought about the faces of missing children on milk cartons or on bulletin boards in Wal-Mart:  an anonymity intervenes.  You can't help that.  When people's images are grouped and plastered on the ground there's a sort of unintended irony, a message about the uselessness of portraiture. How does having your picture taken and then pasted on the ground with other pictures of people inspire group actions around "hope, diversity, gender-based violence, climate change"?   

Or maybe the art happens when the project happens?  When people are having their photos taken, and everyone is having a good time?  Is that the art?  Maybe the end result is just a weak echo of what actually occurred? 

Still trying to figure it out. 

I saw the Ai Weiwei retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art earlier this year, and I was a lot more impressed with the way he blended art and activism.  In one elegant, epic piece he and his project-workers pounded out miles of rebar to form ocean-waves of meaning.  The rebar came from the shoddily-constructed schoolhouses in Chinese villages where kids died during an earthquake in 2008.  And in the ether inside the museum was a recorded voice reading off the names of the dead.   There's an intended irony here of course, and a seriousness about how anonymity creates throw-away lives, but then also hearing those names and seeing that repurposed rebar becomes a celestial experience:  both aesthetic and political, without indulging in fame or even rhetoric.

I don't know.  I guess you shouldn't compare the two.  But I am. 

Careless Whispers

At the Contemporary Art Center, downtown Cincinnati, Patti Smith's "The Choral Sea" seems both cozy and distant, kind of like she is shellacking her memories into deep meaning, but also losing something in the process.  Just Kids is an incredible book, and in it Smith's voice is lyrical and inventive, but also friendly and chatty, celebratory, simple.  I guess I thought her visual art would be the same.  But the exhibit, based on a book of poems she wrote about Robert Mapplethorpse, is almost the opposite to me, overly poeticized and fussy, a little too shabby-chic.  Upstairs on a couple floors is a hot mess called "ON!  Handcrafted Digital Playgrounds."  Billed as "an interactive exhibition celebrating our innate attraction to play," it's basically what's left after the innate celebration and play are over:  a sort of art-school apocalypse with chalk and smeary pastel scribbles all over the walls and a feeling of abandonment in the aftermath of a really good pillow-fight that is no longer in session.  It's like wandering around a closed-down amusement park.  The thrill I guess is of witnessing the poetry of closed-down amusement parks, but I don't think that was the intention.

The intention of "The Living Room" (right across the way from "The Choral Sea") is about deconstructing living space and then getting all kinky with it.  The "Living Room" itself, pieced together by several artists (Paul Coors, Guy Michael Davis, Terence Hammonds, Katie Parker, and design collective Such + Such), reads like a setting in a Ke$ha music video, maybe if she did slow-jams -- romantic and kitschy and luxe, with solid gold bears in chains and an old-school fireplace doctored up with artistic intent.  Such + Such contribute a really excellent hard-wood bear-rug.  All of it is fun and odd in the best way possible.  But the highlight of "The Living Room" and of what's up at the CAC right now, is a video installation.  To the right of the actual living room are video images covering two walls and meeting in the corner.  There's a giant Barbra Kruger horizontal word crawl featuring non-sequiturs you want to hang onto and put into practice, and genuinely sweet and endearing visuals of people hanging out self-consciously while songs like "Careless Whisper" are put through a sort of ear-worm redux that makes them sound like the poetry of the gods.  Paul Coors is the artist credited for this.  And at the start of the video the camera follows his back out of the CAC and down the street toward places he seems to call home.  The whole thing blurs into a sort of revery, a cable-access stream-of-consciousness riff.  The technique is sumptuous and home-made, a mix of glamor and yearning for its opposite.  The big ring on Alicia Keys' finger (in an interstitial moment that stretches out almost into infinity) is the sun the whole world orbits.  An adjunct renegade spotlight creeps outside the video through the gallery space like the gestapo or the light Emmet Kelly tries to sweep up during a clown/hobo performance.  One of the most perfect moments for me was watching that video and seeing a Jenny Hulzer quote in big red letters:  "Private property creates crime," and then looking down and seeing the spotlight shining on the "U S Bank Gallery" emblazoned on the gallery floor.

Coors' video is where your mind goes when it wants to find meaning, but your mind often can't find meaning in the world even inside your head.  It can only make what your feeling crawl closer to meaning.  Slowing down pop songs to match your mood, walking on sidewalks to places you've been a thousand times, friends and family posing like they are characters on a sitcom during the beginning credits -- all of this is about someone finding a way to be happy, I think.  The title of the video, if I remember correctly, is something like "How I stopped worrying and started loving y'all."  There's bliss in this thing, pure and clever.  As I watched, I kept thinking of everything I'd done that day before seeing the show (buying a washing machine at Home Depot, driving on 1-75, trying to find a parking space because of Taste of Cincinnati patrons taking up the Fountain Square parking garage), and I felt completely vindicated somehow, as if all the shit you do and have to go through really is just a secret path to at least partial wisdom, maybe even happiness for real.

Wrecking Ball Afternoons

Guy Tillim's "Avenue Patrice Lumumba" just left the Contemporary Art Center here in Cincinnati.  I went to the CAC Monday and got to see it, not even knowing it was there and it was the last night.  I am so glad I got to see the work.  The walls of photographs were an amazing experience.  Tillim's pictures have a poetry deeply embedded inside them, as if not only light, shadow and shapes got in through the lens, but an exhausted universe making its last claim on consciousness.  Ghosts of bureaucracy, ghosts of statues that have lost their meanings and their heads, ghosts of grand hotels resembling ship-wrecks far below the ocean...  Tillim's worldview reflects a need to make meaning out of what is left behind, and to find a moment in the lonely stillness of it all that allows you to recognize what has been lost and won't ever come back. 

This is from the CAC's website:

In his project Avenue Patrice Lumumba (2007–08), South African artist Guy Tillim (b. 1962) records the architecture and infrastructure of colonial and postcolonial Africa. Patrice Lumumba (1925–61) was one of the first elected African leaders in modern times. In 1960 he became the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo after his country won independence from Belgium. Only ten weeks after his speech at the independence celebrations, in which he listed various injustices and human rights violations implemented by the Belgians, Lumumba’s government was deposed in a coup. He was imprisoned, beaten, and murdered in circumstances suggesting the complicity of the governments of Belgium and the United States. Lumumba became revered as a liberator of independent Africa and his legacy has made a lasting impression in many cities throughout Africa. The streets and plazas that bear his name in western and southern Africa have come to represent both the idealism and decay of an African dream for unity.

That decay becomes a way of life, and in all the photographs you can see that evolution slowly losing its reason to evolve and yet there it all is, brick, concrete, steel and shade, vast boulevards and balconies haunted by emptiness.  You can't erase the world.  You can only watch it slowly try to erase itself.

And of course I thought about Raymond Thunder-Sky.  How his drawings depict that same sort of alienation, that same sense that everything goes away and stays at the same time.  Especially in his drawings of interiors, Raymond seems intent on finding that exact moment when you feel both lonely and yet also past loneliness:  the room becomes what you are feeling, and you lose a sense of yourself. 

Then you disappear.

Shared Interests

For “Disappearances,” Shinji Turner-Yamamoto’s exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center here in Cincinnati, the artist uses elements such as plaster and paint chips to create sculptural works meant to comment on fragility and transience in the human world.  On the walls of the gallery are gilded fractures and found pieces of demolition, destruction and detritus, evidence of buildings and lives no longer there, but lingering both in the mind and in the material world.  The show is an amazing and sparse poem about what is left behind, and as I toured it my thoughts turned to Raymond Thunder-Sky.  The connection is obvious:  Raymond was interested in deconstruction and demolition, and his drawings, like Turner-Yamamoto’s sculptural wall-hangings, are evidence of buildings torn to pieces by a large wrecking ball usually, and in that destruction Raymond finds pattern, order and an almost Mondrian-esque symmetry.  The same eye and ambition and interest is in Turner-Yamamoto’s works.  Shinji Turner-Yamamoto was born in 1965 in Osaka, Japan and studied fresco painting in Kyoto.  He has exhibited around the world, from India to Ireland, and is committed to using historic and natural elements in his work as meditations on the environment. Raymond Thunder-Sky was born in Hollywood, California in 1950, and lived most of his adult life in Cincinnati, Ohio, only exhibiting his drawings toward the end of his life.  Their biographies could not be more disparate; their aesthetics and sensibilities intermingle like musical notes.

Below:  Top three photos:  works at the Contemporary Arts Center by Shinjo Turner-Yamamoto.  The bottom four photos:  three "close-ups" of Raymond Thunder-Sky's works, and a full-scale drawing.