Gustav Klimt – Mada Primavesi and Bikini Kill

Generally Klimt’s work is more busy and stylized, but here he keeps it light for a portrait of  9 year old Mada Primavesi. The picture is in The Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC, room 829. It hangs just at the entrance to the thin room devoted to 4 huge paintings. Klimt’s is at least 7 feet tall and the colors shine out of the canvas due to the white of the museum wall that blends almost exactly with some shades of the girl’s dress.

The work probably done to hang in the massive house of Otto Primavesi, her father and successful capitalist. Her defiant pose, legs braced against anything and a fist on her side, could have been on the cover of  Girls to the Front. Mada Primavesi was painted in 1912. There is no background, just colors that we can take to be a purple wall and a white and green floor, or a white river that Primavesi stands astride; either way the focus is clearly on the girl in a statement of power. The portrait is of the daughter of a wealthy banker and industrialist, so her confidence probably comes from her assurance that she won’t ever have to deal with any problems, but given a push in the right direction she could have grown up to wage war against the patriarchy.  She looks like she wouldn’t take any shit from anyone, that could be seen as rich entitlement, but the picture is far more enjoyable if her pose of control is thought of as a conscious push against the society that was oppressing her both as a woman and a child.

Reject all American is Bikini Kill’s second LP and Statement of Vindication is the first track. The subject of the painting, the colors used,  the pose and the size of the piece immediately called Kathleen Hannah to mind. This girl gets what she wants, and she knows that she is not allowed it and it won’t come without a fight.  Reject All American was less abrasive and rawly punk as Pussy Whipped, and wasn’t as refined as Le Tigre. Primavesi is certainly not punk, but she isn’t entirely polished pop either.  She needs the youthful energy and simple songwriting, especially multiple slightly off key vocals, that comes with punk, but needs the edges filled down a bit – she is refined. So the 2nd album by  Bikini Kill makes sense: still young enough to start a bar fight, not old enough to sit down and write an album for a year.

It would be remiss not to include I Busted In Your Chevy Window as an option, as it works equally well, but for different reasons.

Although the argument could be made for Le Tigre’s track Deceptacon which is defiant, bright and has a Devoesque rejection of authority to it.

An Alternative Audio Guide to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Explanation

For information about a painting, look at it. Failing that, read a book about the artist and the time in which they were painting, nothing happens in a vacuum. Audio guides either jump in with biographical information, or explain the brushwork in detail and attempt to translate a picture into prose. Alternatives are needed; not “european masters for dummies”, but an alternative to the spoken word’s attempt to translate the picture. There are ways in which prose can accentuate pictures, and vice versa – there is also music.

“Writing about art is like dancing about architecture” so by extension speaking about art is equally as useless.

A couple things about the above quote – it would be brilliant if people danced about architecture, to do so, however, assumes a level of knowledge between the dancer and the audience. If both are well versed in architecture then a dance should be absolutely acceptable. Imagine some sort of impregnable interpretive dance, where the dancers are all wearing black and the music is Phillip Glass and the audience is forced to stand uncomfortably as the dancers wrythe around them. That would be the Scottish Parliament Building  another image here.  Now imagine a ferocious ultra sexual tango where the partners are grappling and leaning over tables and the woman’s hair brushes the ground sometimes, but her leg wraps around his back and she pulls herself back up.  This would be an Oscar Niemeyer, some brazilian paradise for billionaires.

Secondly, the origins of the quote are interesting and explored here.

The obvious aim is to pair works of visual art with music.

An Excessive Weekend

For most an excessive weekend would be drinking too much and not doing anything. That is called a weekend of excess, I don’t do those anymore, at least not much. I wrote a pamphlet for my brother’s 20th birthday and that is personal and shall not be shared here. That is where I have been and what I have been writing all week.

No this excessive weekend I bought and read books. The books purchased were the following:

The Rise Of Theodore Roosevelt – Edmund Morris

Theodore Rex – Edmund Morris

Colonel Roosevelt.  – Edmund Morris

Why 3 volumes on Roosevelt? I want to visit the Natural History Museum, where his statue stands resplendent with a freed slave and native american chieftain flanking him. A fresco announcing a “Statesman, Ranchman, Explorer etc etc surround the back of the statue and he shot 90% of the animals in the museum. Also I am fascinated by the hubris it takes to put ones face on a mountain next to your countries heroes.

Literary Outlaw: The life and Times of William S Burroughs – Ted Morgan

Despair – Nabokov

Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage – Against Equality

Don’t ask to Fight Their Wars – Against Equality

The Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg

Parasite – Stephen Boyer

Prick Queasy – Ronald Palmer

London Fields – Martin Amis

Sexus – Henry Miller

Future Perfect – Edited by Andrew Durbin (a collection of shorts from Bureau of General Services: Queer Division)

 

Anyway, not that  anyone will really care but that is what I have been doing for these last days.

 

The Mire of Museum Funding

The recent controversy surrounding the funding, by an evil mining corporation, of Sebastian Selgado’s exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum has brought up an issue that is in some ways the most basic issue about art. Authenticity and value.

The problem with the art world is money. Money and subjectivity. Subjectivity attached to perceived authenticity. Should a museum or artist ever say “no” to a grant?

The role of a museum is to hold, care for and display art. This is distinct from a gallery where a gallery’s objective is to display and sell art. A gallery is often self funding, a museum never is.

In more civilized parts of the world, admission to most museums are free and the museums are paid for with public money, while in other places museums are run as businesses, and there is always a problem with funding.

Unfortunately we do not live in a Star Trek utopia, instead we must deal with capitalism.

The tenants of capitalism basically say that something must make money or it’s not worth doing. In order to make money an object must have a purpose. Art has a purpose to some, and to others it’s purpose is to be purposeless.

There is no agreed upon currency that makes sense in the art world. So museums must require membership fees, entry fees or rely on meagre state grants. Grants that are hard to come by because the bureaucracy of capitalism is completely at odds with everything culturally worthwhile. The two worlds rarely collide on an even footing.

Sometimes art wins out, Dali sells four paintings before breakfast, Duchamp fools a museum into buying a urinal, and so on. Other times art loses, paintings are sold to private collections, or artists starve and commit suicide.

Recently capitalists have become interested in art as a tradeable commodity. Art is seen as more stable investment in this economic crisis entirely brought upon by unregulated capitalists ascribing arbitrary value to things they don’t fully understand. So, as art is now a ‘safe’ investment, the capitalists rush to do something they love to do – put arbitrary prices on things they don’t fully understand and sell them amongst themselves.

Some artists are doing well in this new system, for now, the value of a painting could jump 500% in a day, then drop 900% the next, but it allows artists to get money and continue making art. For what ultimate purpose? We are still yet to figure out, but capitalism now argues art for the purpose of investment and trading.

Then what of museums? Collections of ancient works that are literally priceless. Priceless is a word we use when we mean something is hugely expensive, but here it is used in its original sense of being unable to have any monetary value ascribed to it. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Museums also house ancient art from around the world.

The Metropolitan Museum here in New York has a great exhibition on the first great capitalist foray into ancient artistic traditions. The last ten or so ounces of beautiful gold and silver ornamentations that still exist after the Spanish drove out the natives, melted all their exquisite gold art and used it to fund a war against other capitalists (thankfully the Armada sunk and we can only hope they died slowly).

In the more modern world, museums get money from corporations who make more money than governments, and no money is achieved through fully ethical means. So when a museum gets a grant they have to go ahead with the show, they are forced into it by the broken system we are all forced to operate under. The ends justify the means, Museums can’t afford to be unbending in their principals.

We can’t blame Selgado for taking the money and putting on a show, a show that could raise awareness of the problems inherent in exploiting natural resources and displacing indigenous peoples.

Don’t hate the player hate the game. We can’t fault anyone for taking money from anyone, all money is tainted.

originally published in Musee Magazine. 

Aperture talk: Contemporary Swedish Female Photographers.

On Tuesday the 11th of February, Aperture hosted an artist discussion in conjunction with it’s ongoing exhibition Different Distances: Fashion Photography Goes Art. The talk, is entitled The Idea of Reality: Views on Fashion Photography. Writer Johanna Lenander was the MC, questioning Denise Grünstein and Sophie Mörner in turn and then together.

While the title was a bit misleading, the conversation turned to fashion only once, the artists were open and expressive about their work, their past and their intentions. Sophie Mörner shared her experiences starting a magazine for emerging photographers, and showed one of her best series – a love affair where they would frolic in the forest, but never exist in the real world.

Her photographic work is sensual, sexual and beautiful, but it has a gaurded nature, as if we are looking into a community we are not a part of. A fantasy that we cannot be a part of. Sophie Mörner said that her images started out as fantasy but now, enviably, she lives in that reality. Her publishing work is prolific, publishing not only Capricious Magazine, which started it all, but a magazine for lesbians called Girls Like Us. She is embedded in queer culture and is near the center of an exciting new time in Brooklyn photography.

Denise Grünstein spoke about her work, turning more to fashion, but stressing she tries to keep her art separate from her commercial work. Grünstein is well known; a Swedish photographer who is rightly credited as igniting art photography as a movement in Sweden. Her work is expansive and feminine.

Ending the discussion there was a Q&A, and a question was asked about fashion. The question was dismissed at first by Mörne, “I don’t do fashion.” And Grünstein defended her art as art, not commercial work.

While both photographers praised fashion they played down their part in that world. However, the conclusion was reached that, while commercial, fashion photography was one of the few places a photographer could be creative.

It is nearly impossible to become successful as a photographer. I’m sorry. The work new photographers get is the worst work available. How can one be creative taking pictures of food? This is not why you picked up a camera. The few who get to take fashion photographs, count yourself lucky, and put your print on every shot and never work a job you can’t get fired from. Both women approached success in different ways.

Grünstein started her career working commercially, with movie stills and fashion photography. Both gave her license to explore her creativity, and she made her art on the side. Now she shoots her art and occasionally does commercial work on the side.