New York Noise : Anarchy in the USA

Anonymous review of New York Noise (Soul Jazz Records), at Telegraph (22.12.2007) :

The 400 black-and-white images in New York Noise follow a timeline, from 1978 to 1988, that mirrors the span of Simon Reynolds's well-argued eulogy of post-punk musical creativity in Britain, Rip It Up and Start Again. Together these books reveal the very different transatlantic scenes of the time, and highlight the fact that the '80s were a period of thrilling artistic upheaval, so much more vital than the floppy-fringed pop-gloss wasteland that the decade is often dismissed as.

From Laurie Anderson and Cindy Sherman, via Jean-Michel Basquiat, Madonna and William Burroughs to visitors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa, many famous names peer out from the images (by photographer Paula Court) that fill these pages. But perhaps more valuable is the record of the many pivotal people that posterity has been less kind to - the girl groups, graffiti artists, DJs and performance artists who shaped the scene without ever transcending it.

Barry Schwabsky : The Imperfectionist

Review of George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail : Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, October Books/MIT, November 2007, and Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster : Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, trans. by Marc Lowenthal, MIT, September 2007, at The Nation (05.11.2007) :

For Lowenthal--as for art historian George Baker, an editor at October who has written The Artwork Caught by the Tail, an ambitious new study of Picabia's work "from the end of the First World War to the beginnings of Surrealism in 1924"--all this is just background. After all, Picabia's first publications date from 1917. Moreover, Lowenthal dates Picabia's Dada years from 1919, and it is the artist's relation to this movement, "one of the finest expressions of nihilism in the twentieth century," that really counts for him. He divides Picabia's production into pre-Dada, Dada and post-Dada phases. Yet consider that Picabia, born in Paris in 1879, was 32 when he met Duchamp, 37 when Dada first emerged at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1917, 38 when his first book of poems was published. Picabia was a generation older than many of his fellow Dadaists, such as Tristan Tzara (born in 1896), Marcel Janco (1895), Richard Huelsenbeck (1892) and Hannah Höch (1889). So while the prevailing image of Dada as a movement of angry young men (and a few women) in revolt against the collective madness of the Great War is not wrong, it hardly describes Picabia, who was already middle-aged when the war began and who escaped it, like Duchamp, by decamping to New York. Whatever brought about the massive change from his earlier conservatism, the motivations must have been very different from those of a 20-year-old like Tzara.

In any case, a reading of Picabia's remarkable poetry suggests that using Dada as a key to unlock it would be misleading at best. It may be more than just a reluctance to cross the boundary between academic disciplines that kept Baker, whose study comprises knotty but original and often illuminating chapters on Dada drawing, Dada painting, Dada photography, Dada abstraction, Dada cinema and Dada montage, from attempting an analysis of Dada poetry as well, despite the fact that his book covers the years when Picabia produced far more poetry than art. It's as though Picabia's poetry was never quite Dada. And even as far as art goes, Baker eventually has to entertain the possibility that "Dada for Picabia had been one great detour."

Siri Hustvedt : The places that scare you

On Louise Bourgeois at The Guardian (06.10.2007) :

Before I had read a word about or by Louise Bourgeois, I was fascinated by the emotional power of her work, how it stirred up old pains and fears, summoned complex and often contradictory associations, or echoed my own obsessions with rooms, dolls, missing limbs, mirrors, violence, nameless threats, the comfort of order, and the distress of ambiguity. Bourgeois can take you to strange and hidden places in yourself. This is her gift. What may be deeply personal for her finds its translation in art that is far too mysterious to be confessional. Throughout her long career, however, there have been repetitive themes and forms that appear in multifarious guises and mutations. From the paintings first shown in 1947 under the collective title Femme Maison to the mesmerising Cells of the 90s, the artist has vigorously reinvented versions of the body/house - as refuge, trap, or a bit of both - and she has done it with an eye and mind that interrogate the history of art as well as the human psyche.

The mind and its memories as a metaphorical place, topos, is an ancient idea. Freud, too, was fond of a spatial trope - archeology. Dig and you shall find. Repressed memories. Screen memories. Fantasies. For Aristotle, every memory has two parts: simulacrum, a likeness or image, and intentio, an emotional colour that is an associative link to a person's inner chain of experiences. Word association as a clue to unconscious processes would become an essential part of psychiatry in the 19th century, and today brain scientists know that emotion consolidates memory. What we don't feel, we forget. I have come to think of Bourgeois as an artist who roams the antechambers of a charged past, looting it for material that she reconfigures as external places and beings or being-places.

Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond : Gustave Moreau

"Gustave Moreau et Œdipe : Une image de l’artiste face à son destin" à La Tribune de l'Art (16.09.2007) :

Lorsque Marcel Proust, dans ses pages pénétrantes consacrées à Gustave Moreau, dépeint les tableaux du peintre comme des fragments d’un « pays », selon l’expression qui lui est chère, dont ils ne seraient que des « apparitions fragmentaires », c’est bien de l’âme de l’artiste et de sa vie qu’il est question : les toiles de Moreau seraient alors, dans une sorte d’avatar psychologique de la vue albertienne, comme des fenêtres ouvertes sur le lieu secret de la méditation et du sens, une intrusion en pointillé dans ce pays que l’auteur de La Recherche qualifie de « patrie profonde ». Comment, à la lumière de cette conception de son œuvre, ne pas considérer chez Moreau la récurrence de certains sujets comme le lieu privilégié d’exploration dudit pays ? Si l’on sait que l’artiste s’est plu à reprendre certains thèmes tout au long de sa carrière et même à retravailler ses tableaux sur une longue période, il semble que cette relation au long cours soit particulièrement significative dans le cas de la figure d’Œdipe. Depuis l’œuvre phare du Salon de 1864 Œdipe et le Sphinx (ill. 1) jusqu’à l’Œdipe voyageur de 1888 (ill. 3), en passant par Le Sphinx deviné (ill. 2) et quelques études éparses, le corpus œdipien n’est certes pas le plus conséquent de l’œuvre de Moreau : en y regardant de plus près, cette parcimonie ne vient que renforcer la densité du sens et ériger ces toiles en des jalons d’autant plus significatifs qu’ils s’échelonnent sur environ vingt-cinq ans de création. Que l’aventure d’Œdipe dans sa confrontation au Sphinx puisse être considérée comme une image forte de l’aventure du peintre lui-même semble presque évident ; cet aspect du thème n’a pourtant jamais été évoqué.

Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution

Introduction to Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution : Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. by Aileen Derieg (Semiotexte, 2007), at Artfurum (September 2007) :

Examining the neighboring zones of revolutionary machines and art machines can thus not be undertaken without reference to the recurring figures of more or less tragic failure and unequivocal disaster. Nor can it overlook the constantly immanent possibility of the “revolutionary schizoid flows” tipping into “fascist paranoid formations.” Richard Wagner’s ambivalence as a revolutionary and anti-Semitic propagandist may be an example here, another is the turn of a considerable number of German radical leftists after 1968 to various right-wing and radical right-wing niches. In their appendix to Anti-Oedipe Deleuze and Guattari particularly stress the two extreme poles of the desiring-machine between revolution and fascism and the difficulty of disentangling these extremes. Regarding the forms of exchange and connections between revolutionary machines and art machines, Deleuze/Guattari examine this problem on the basis of the most important avant-garde currents of the 1910s, specifically by proposing a distinction between four attitudes to machines exemplifying possible concatenations of art and revolution and their various types of failure in marginalization or political perversion.

According to this approach, Italian Futurism focuses on the machine to increase national productive forces and create the national new human being. Whereas what is new about this “new human being” is primarily determined by a radically affirmative relationship to the machine as a mechanism, the machine as a social assemblage is largely ignored (or determined by sexism, chauvinism, nationalism, bellicism). Indifference to all content seemed to make Italian Futurism open for every possible ideology; nevertheless, due to a certain omission, namely the non-problematization of production conditions, which remained just as external to the technical machines as to the fantasized “a-human,” “mechanized man,” Futurist practices created organizational conditions for a fascist desiring-machine, as well as for nationalist and militarist lines of argumentation among the (pseudo-) left-wing.

According to Deleuze/Guattari, humanist anti-machinism includes Surrealism (counter to Dadaism) and Charlie Chaplin (counter to Buster Keaton); in the present investigation this current is covered by Kurt Hiller’s post-expressionist “Activism/Spiritism.” Humanist anti-machinism seeks to salvage desire in the midst of a mesh of alienation felt to be total, and to turn this against the machine. In the process, however, it largely remains caught in the pathos of the spectacular representation of revolutionary ideas and revolutionary tendencies without taking technology and its own position in the production conditions into consideration. Roughly speaking, it thus opposes the a-human formalist ambitions of Italian Futurism with a fixation on content or with psychologism, but as its mirror image. At the same time, it supplies the capitalist production apparatus with desire, but without changing its form.

In relation with Deleuze/Guattari and Walter Benjamin.

Japanese Illustrated Books from the 17th-20th Century at the Van Gogh Museum

From ArtDaily.com (30.08.2007) :

AMSTERDAM.- The Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum are jointly organising a presentation entitled Japanese illustrated books from the 17th - 20th century to be held in the print room of the Van Gogh Museum from 12 October. Around 60 different illustrated books and several related prints demonstrate the Japanese artists’ view of illustration as a worthwhile artistic challenge. In addition to landscapes and famous locations, the presentation also shows depictions of flowers, plants, animals, customs, ceremonial events and erotica. Spectacular books showing – often remarkably modern – designs for kimono fabric and ceramics will also be on display.

Japanese books and their covers, arranged thematically and chronologically in this presentation from the 17th through to the 20th century, highlight the originality of the Japanese art of illustration. The images are surprising and imaginative, both in terms of colour and composition and are deeply rooted in Japanese culture, yet recognisable to Western eyes.

This impressive collection of publications consists largely of sample drawings intended to inspire artists and amateurs alike. During the 19th century, these sampler and pattern books – with their spectacular designs for the motifs for kimonos, ceramics and fans – enjoyed immense popularity.

Yoko Hani : Homegrown art

A great report on "tambo art" in Aomori, at The Japan Times (26.08.2007). Worth a read :

Inakadate Village started to create rice-paddy art in 1993 as a local revitalization project. No one will take credit for the idea, which seems to have just grown out of meetings of the village committee.

In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki in Aomori Prefecture every year, accompanied by the words "Inakadate, a village of rice culture." Then, by planting rice varieties with different colors of foliage on about 2,500 sq. meters of rice paddies, they quite literally brought their designs to life.

But as time went by, the locals' horizons widened and the pictures they tried to transform into fields of art became more and more complicated. Not surprisingly, over the years more and more people also began to pay attention to their extraordinary endeavors.

Then, in 2005, after agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous, 15,000-sq.-meter rice paddies, the villagers painstakingly plotted their planting on paper plans and created huge-scale reproductions of Edo Period ukiyo-e works by Sharaku and Utamaro. That year, around 130,000 visitors sought out this beautiful backwater to marvel at the arable artwork.

Hokusai tambo art at Pya!

Blythe in Kimono

LUVSIS. — I came across this blog when I googled my friend's artistic activities. Wow !! The shop Fu Ring-doh will open soon, fucco-san announces.

Peter Schjeldahl : Gustave Courbet and the making of a master

On Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton; $45), at The New Yorker (30.07.2007 Issue) :

“The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture” (Princeton; $45), by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, a Dutch-born American scholar of nineteenth-century European art, details the rise, the fall, and the tireless machinations of art’s first recognizably modern careerist. (The title is Courbet’s contented characterization of himself.) The book advances a present tendency among art historians to reconsider the Old Masters with reference to the art worlds that allocated wealth and prestige in their times. This emphasis is a sign of our own times, when money and celebrity—proliferating fairs and biennials, roaring auctions, around-the-clock Web journals and blogs—exalt the grandstand plays of a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Matthew Barney. Chu’s treatment of Courbet isn’t cynical, exactly; it acknowledges his artistic talent. But, by highlighting every possible instance of manipulation, Chu gives a puppetlike cast to the behavior of the artist and his contemporaries. That’s timely, too; some days in Chelsea galleries it’s hard not to feel like a laboratory animal, grubbing for cheese in a scientifically engineered maze. A reassuring figure in Chu’s book is Charles Baudelaire, who was befriended by Courbet but remained stubbornly cool to his work, which, in a review of the Universal Exposition of 1855, he called a form of “fanaticism” that waged “war on the imagination” in service to “a sectarian spirit.” (His attack did Courbet the honor of bracketing him with Ingres, whom Baudelaire charged with a variant of the same offense.) Not that the elephant-skinned Courbet minded. In the vast and stupefying “Studio of the Painter (Real Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life)” (1855), a work that still foments competing interpretations, he had taken sardonic note of Baudelaire’s anxious integrity by caricaturing the poet off to one side, reading a book with weirdly intense concentration.

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer : Une photo le long d’un chemin

Sur Danièle Méaux (textes réunis et présentés par), Photographie et romanesque, Études romanesques 10, Caen, Lettres Modernes Minard, 2006, 348 p., à Fabula Acta (05.07.2007) :

Écho non nécessairement revendiqué des « visual studies » d’outre-Atlantique, les approches universitaires des liens entre image et texte sont très à la mode en France depuis le début du millénaire. Les vingt-deux études de cet ouvrage, fruit d’un air du temps ut pictura poesis, se concentrent plus particulièrement sur l’interaction de la photographie et du romanesque. Et la retranscription d’un entretien entre l’éditrice du recueil Danièle Méaux et la romancière Anne-Marie Garat constitue une forme de conclusion à l’ensemble, un passage également de la théorie à la pratique. Photographie et romanesque. La conjonction inscrite dès le titre pourrait faire craindre une possible alternative, une de ces formules que l’on qualifierait de « fourre-tout » mais il s’agit au contraire d’un ensemble dense et réfléchi, d’études tout autant variées que travaillées, organisées chronologiquement par Danièle Méaux et présentant donc une sorte de panorama transhistorique et transgénérique de la relation entre le romanesque et la photographie. La photographie le long du chemin, cette photographie qui prendrait la place du fameux miroir stendhalien transforme d’emblée le paradigme romanesque. Le reflet supposé objectif – soit des plus véridiques – de la surface du miroir laisse place à l’opacité d’une image tantôt vraie tantôt vraisemblable voire tantôt truquée. Le phénomène photographique est en effet susceptible d’être compris comme une dialectique constante du voilement au dévoilement. Car si l’image que l’on nomme « photo » révèle, rappelle le réel, elle est aussi l’inscription spectrale d’une sorte d’unheimlichkeit dans la conscience de celui qui la contemple. C’est sur cette amphibologie de la photographie que revient Danièle Méaux dans son article initial, lequel s’apparente à une sorte de présentation et d’introduction de l’ensemble de l’ouvrage, mettant en parallèle romanesque et photographie génériquement autant qu’historiquement (du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui). Simultanément site d’une réalité qui fut, et projection fantasmatique voire délirante, la photographie peut tout autant générer le romanesque qu’incarner une des modalités de ce dernier (p. 22). Romanesque qu’il convient alors d’entendre dans cet ouvrage collectif — que nous choisissons de recenser le long du chemin et de manière linéaire —, non pas comme un genre mais comme une thématique.

Lénia Marques : Entre fables et tableaux : du pictural au scriptural au XXe siècle

Sur Florence Godeau (dir.), Et in fabula pictor. Peintres-écrivains au XX^e siècle : des fables en marge des tableaux, Paris, Éditions Kimé, 2006, 336 p., à Fabula Acta (02.07.2007) :

Fruit d’un colloque international à l’Université Jean Moulin (Lyon-III) en décembre 2005, cet ouvrage présente un vaste ensemble d’articles dont découlent différentes perspectives, attitudes et mises en dialogue à travers les œuvres d’un grand nombre de peintres-écrivains qui ont, chacun à sa façon, marqué le xx^e siècle. Ce livre se présente comme étant « consacré à des récits écrits en marge de l’œuvre plastique (ou en regard de celle-ci) et inscrits dans le champ européen contemporain » (p. 8). Mais cette remarque et le titre peuvent en eux-mêmes soulever des questions qui sont amplement débattues à plusieurs reprises.