Taryn Simon. Would not let me use her pictures.

Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon studies and works in one of the most human fields of research; semiotics. She ascribes meaning to things. She is interested in the space between words and pictures. In her own words, “the image is transformed by the text and the text anchors the image“.

From May 2^nd 2014 to June 5^th 2014 we engaged in a critical study of Simon’s series Contraband in preparation for this piece. Our process is to first begin with a theme, in this case Temptation, and find photographers who have done work that tantalizes us. A month isn’t long enough time to digest Simon’s entire oeuvre and, as Simon’s section is part of a larger whole magazine, the subject had to have a relationship to the other pieces. Contraband addresses all aspects of temptation, from religion and drugs to sex and food.

Simon put vast amount of research into Contraband, specifically at JFK airport. As an international hub, JFK and New York are central to the second creation myth of the the united states: the immigration wave. People come into the US with trappings of their old life, only to have them confiscated.

The result is a 6 X 4 grid with self-contained sentences designed to make sense only in relation to Simon’s Contrabandseries. In this way the images are anchoring the text, inverting, but adding to, Simon’s process.

Semiotics; ascribing meaning to things. This is the essence of everything Simon does.

First, as a polyphony. Aesthetics of syncopation and harmony.

As an essay. Research methodology must be explained and held in account.

Pulchritude.

 

 

Cow Dung Toothpaste.We are taught that art fits into a place and time and can only be understood in relation to other art.To hide the khat the smuggler used a giant cigarette box. The irony is, a giant box of cigarettes is also illegal.The objects are suspended in sterile non movement like the back room for immigrants. Same white walls, same gloved hands.20 GALLONS OF A DATE RAPE DRUG.The research has to draw on a common but unthought reality that, once seen, is unsettling.It is prohibited to bring in fat, but how can you be sure there will be decent sala where I’m going?This is two days contraband at JFK.

 

Then there is Canal Street.The white is clinical.Renaissance still life. While there is a lack of a lobster, the lobster is implied. A decaying head. A hand resting on stainless steel.With art references like the still life, Simon expects a certain syntax. At other times she steers us towards the connection she wants us to make.Contraband as a series highlights our cultural differences and our global similarities.The best picture in Contraband: Unidentified Mammal (Indonesia). Western Tarsir. It looks like an infant because of the large eyes. Largest eyes of any mammal (relative to it’s size) New York has romantic connotations as a historic port of entry. Immigration is the second founding myth of the USA.Large format highlights the exact details of the objects and removes them from context. This is exactly what they are; items removed from their home and their culture.When you immigrate you still mean to go back. You are pulled back and forth and your children are spinning. We can’t escape our history any more than you can escape your shadowText anchors and gives a place, but sometimes a description is not enough.Don’t tell the audience how to interact. Allow the audience to explore on their own.Taxes, Tariffs, Federalism. The Small Stick?A terrifying K-hole with dead birds, heroin, and Lost season four playing constantly.

Fuck Selfies

Sometime in the first half of the ’10s people found a name for a phenomenon that had been around for a long time, nagging for a descriptor ever since the internet was able to hold photos.

The word, coined online and then added to the OED (as language cannot be controlled, only recorded) is selfie. The selfie has gone by many names over the years, The MySpace Picture (me, in a bathroom mirror), The Interior Elbow Shot (no mirror, just my face, from above, but mostly my arm outstretched holding the camera), The Profile Picture(me, doing something that I need you to know about, taken via the arm method), Me and My Goons (many looming faces, one arm) Pay Attention! (bathroom or arm method; look at my sexy body). A selfie is as to be done with a level of ironic self-detachment and the earnest desire to share and be seen. A nood pix for your lover is not a selfie, but you can take a naked selfie. The difference is the audience.

The selfie takes all these previous forms and combines them into one large, egotistical mass of first person pronouns. The definition is being stretched to contain all forms of self – portrait, and that is logical as the phenomenon is a result of social networks and readily available, pretty high quality, cameras combined with teenage self-absorption.

There is a trend to describe every self-portrait as a ‘selfie’. This is, for now, wrong. A selfie is meant to be fumbled around the back of a broken iPhone, taken via an outstretched arm or in a mirror. We pretend that these are casual pictures, snapped for our friends, but there is effort and time involved in pretending not to expend any effort or take any time. The high quality camera phones and readily available filters allow anyone to mess around with a picture and make something that looks nice. Like many of the best artists, the closest and easiest subject is oneself. The ease of access has opened up the world of photography for thousands of people, giving them the tools they need to make new and exciting art. But a selfie is not, by definition, art.

In an attempt to connect with that most fickle of markets: the oft copied youth with money, pop culture has become obsessed, but not every picture of yourself is a selfie. For example:

Miley Cyrus snaps a picture of herself rolling a blunt – selfie.

Ellen DeGeneres at the oscars – advertisement.

Tony Wiener’s wiener – noodz.

Rembrandt – self portrait.

Just me chillin’ (detail; up nostrils) – selfie.

Trends are over as soon as the wider populace discovers them, and with this rational, the selfie is over. When the advertisers swung their lazy gaze upon selfies and attempted to sell us things; bombarding us with our own narcissism, we laughed. There is something pathetic about a company attempting to socially engage on twitter or facebook. Like the Toyota? Really? In 2 years social networking is going to be 90% robots advertising to one another, latching onto buzzwords (like buzzword), and spewing them back out as some warped reality of what was honestly just a bit of fun.

Pierre Molliner

Pierre Molinier

When he was 18, Pierre Molinier’s younger sister died. Pierre was left alone with his deceased sister to photograph her, which he did. He also fucked her corpse and came on her dead stomach. He created his own dildos, using them to become his dream of top and bottom, giver and taker. When he found that his asshole stopped giving him pleasure he stared at himself in the mirror and shot himself while masturbating.

He was a man with no morals, he was proud of it and gloried in it. No need to pray for him.

The reason we are reading about Molinier now is André Breton. Breton discovered Molinier’s pictures and saw them rightly, as explorations of hermpahrodism, transvestism, sexuality, gender reversal, gender shattering, and weird perversity. Bréton, being the leader of the distinctly French surrealists, saw Molinier’s imagery as anti-bourgeois, anti-religious, and a challenge to a broken world’s morality. This was fine until Molinier created an image of himself as a half man / half woman, sucking the cock of a crucified Christ. The war was over, and the surrealists were declining in relevance, reality had just proved morality and sense dead. Molinier’s cock sucking of Christ crossed some line with Breton. Who, while declaring the end of morals, traditional human relationships and the destruction of society, turned out to be a homophobic conservative.

Molinier fits into a larger idea of hermaphroditic surrealism; that branch of surrealist art focusing on the deconstruction and reconstruction of gender. Creatures with 15 stilettoed legs, three ripe buttocks and one smiling dolls face. Like most other surrealist art it is a reaction. This time a reaction to the existing gender identities and sexual conformities present, not just in postwar Paris, but in memories of the occupation. Molinier was different. His art was less a reaction and more of a gleeful exploration. Molinier was a mixture of an adolescent boy, naively groping himself while peeping through a hole in his aunt’s wall, and that Burroughsian queer with a lifetime’s refined taste and experience in all manner of proclivities.

Even when Breton was backing him it was next to impossible to get any of Molinier’s work shown at any major galleries. No one in Paris wanted to see shoes adorned with dildos (for easy access to the anus, with a simple bend of the leg), or collages of asses (Molinaire’s) plastered around a unidentifiable body. Even less did they care for his mysticism. Some of his most striking work was in full leather outfits, with glowing eyes, backlit; a silhouette of his ultimate being. A woman of power and and a creature of lust.

Molinier sometimes worked with models, but for the most part the transformation of himself into his version of a glamor model was as important to him as the final picture, then modification of the picture.

He would slide stockings up his shaved legs. When he was 16 his sisters would dress him up as a woman and take him out dancing. He would clip garter belts to silk panties that strained against his hardon. There is nothing inherently wrong with this behavior, but men in the 50s who partook in transvestism or homosexuality were going against what society deemed correct. The important thing about Molinaire was that he didn’t care.

One hesitates to call Molinier’s work self portraiture in the same way we have difficulty classifying Cindy Sherman as such. Molinier transformed himself for each picture, then spent a large time in post production creating the object he desired. The work was not a portrait of himself, rather a work that used his body t convey a character. He would create props, mostly phallic objects, that he would use in his pictures. He would attach these phalluses onto shoes. It seems unfairly sanitary to call his lovingly crafted and well used dildos ‘phallic objects’. Molinier would want us to say cocks, dicks, pricks, biroute, chinois, or polpol. So dicks it is. Molinier would make dicks and attach them to things. His shoes, his elbows, most often he would shove them into his asshole. Molinier made suits with absurdly large breasts and hourglass figures. Posing to photograph himself in his shamanistic glory, with an aching erection and firm tits.

Molinier wouldn’t be considered that unusual today. Except perhaps that early bout with necrophilia, but who doesn’t experiment at that age. No one is considered that unusual today. He is viewed as an early, less talented, less famous, less inhibited Robert Mapplethorpe. He would be at home on the internet, sharing pictures of his cock with strangers and buying dildo shoes online. He was before his time, and he was totally of his time. Molinier celebrated his sexuality, he lived and died for it. To fuck to be fucked, to look fuckable, to encourage sweat on brows or tightness in pants was his goal. Breton was turned off because Breton was a square. Molinier continued on, remorselessly, proudly exhibiting what others pretend never to have thought about. But he knew, he knew we all had those ideas in the backs of our minds. He knew when we said “his use of the phallus was important in post-war Parisian surrealism as it explored the absurdity of gender and the surrealism of hermaphrodites” we really thought in base words only; short and sharp:”pricks, dicks, assholes, heels, cocks, cum, grins, queer, legs, sex, death, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking’.

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.

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. 

Entropy In Art.

Artistic Energy, Loss and Empowerment.

Shoutout to Buckminster Fuller.

Each work is created in a time answerable only to the artist

they exist relatively to the other works of the age, school, or style.

Immediate art has just been made and there is doubt of its existence

a non-validated image is an irrelevant image.

The first showing for a work is the piece at its weakest;

there is nothing in a caterpillar that suggests it will become a butterfly.

Art must be a fundamentally observable phenomenon.

Untactionable art means nothing.

As a work is viewed it gains energy.

Reaching a vertex is inevitable.

When the work has influenced other artists or

rooted a school,

when the work has gained a sanctioned fame; hanging on the austere wall of a national gallery

the entropic loss of relevance has made the work sterile

an example of a time, removed from it’s context.

If DuChamp taught us anything it is that art is art only because of context.

Placing art in easy scholarly categories allows an automatic critique,

a line is drawn between painters who never saw each others work

a line is missed when things move ahead.

Evolutionarily, art moves in jerks.

Fast and unpredictable.

Long periods of ossified ideas,

and then an injection of unfamiliar into the art-sphere

changes the environment and provokes evolution.

We speak of artists from years ago with cold detachment

then another vertex is reached.

The work is old enough to be completely detached from any modern sensibility

a bygone example of what things looked like, with no context

and the emotional resonance is different

but happens just the same.

A parabola is part of a sine wave.

Ozymandias reconsidered in the light of the Met.

Ozymandias reconsidered.

The poem is familiar; Shelly pened it in 1818 and the final lines are well known.

The jist of it is: A traveler in a strange land, a desert full of ruins, sees the bottom of what was once, judging by it’s foot, a giant statue and a head of a sneering, over-proud God-King. The inscription beneath reads:

“I am Ozymandias king of kings, look upon my works ye mighty and despair.”

The common interpretation of this is that, though the statue’s commissioner intended it to be a monument of their vast power and wealth, it has  become a monument to the ultimate futility of power, laughable as it is against the flow of time. Therefore, ye mighty, look upon the wastes and ruins and despair, because this is what happens to the King of Kings and this is what will happen to you.

However, there is a different interpretation that one could take. A 21^st century impression.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains statues of Kings of Kings from 3000 years ago, busts of rulers who were revered as gods and demanded to live forever. If in a glass case there was a giant foot standing on a base, and a stone head that through which hubris, command and authority still shone, then the words “Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair.” Take on the opposite of the accepted meaning. 3000 years later the work is being viewed by tens of thousands of people each year, who marvel at it’s construction, at the craftsman’s skill and {imagine} what the King of Kings must have been.

The mighty now would do well to tremble at that kind of legacy, Ozymandias has achieved immortality, as have Hatsheput, Darius, Alexander and the others who Shelley originally was faulting for their pride in creating vain statues.

In 3000 years we can imagine, Mount Rushmore and the Washington Needle sitting in a gallery with people wondering why Teddy Roosevelt was up there in the first place.
Monuments to the ancient world survive, and in them survive the leaders and the cultures.

The Natural History Museum is compromised by violent capitalists and Sebastian Selgado is a hypocrite.

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The Natural History Museum is compromised by violent capitalists and Sebastian Selgado is a hypocrite.

     The world of patronage and artistic credibility is mired in black and white allegiances to lost causes.

As artists are held up to a higher standard than the causal craftsperson, they are assumed to be serious, unrelenting and above all authentic in whatever cause they champion.

The paragon artist spits at dirty money even if it means dying poor and unknown; as long as their principals are intact then they are be true to their art, and may die uncompromisable.

This may be a naïve position, but almost certainly the correct one. What is art if not naive?

So, when photographer Sebastian Selgado’s recent exhibition of his work Genesis, beautiful photographs capturing disappearing flora and fauna as well as indigenous people in the Amazon Rainforest, was sponsored by the company Vale hackles were raised.

Vale is a mining company that counts among it’s many accolades the coveted title for having “the most contempt for environmental and human rights in the world” awarded by industry watchdog Public Eye.

The indigenous people of the Amazon were directly displaced and their land destroyed by Vale, who created the Belo Monte dam to “ensure energy security” for Brazil.

The Natural History Museum toes they line they were told to tread by the company, spewing laughably prearranged lines that lauded Vale’s commitment to sustainability and renewable energy. Perhaps the Natural History Museum was seeking to create more extinct plants and animals to pad it’s collection?

The more likely scenario is that those running the museum care only about money, and to a company like Vale sponsoring an exhibit is a way to say “look, we know we destroyed thousands of lives, but here is some money and you can look at pictures of those lives we destroyed, we are giving back to the community.”

Museums and their funding is difficult, we must have museums, but no one wants to pay, and they must be paid for. Beyond evolving and living in a socialist utopia, there seems, to these capitalist money hungry hypocrites, no way to make this a reality.

What, then, of the artist? Mr. Selgado has made his career and his money by documenting the disappearing (because of Vale, remember?) Amazonian natives, as well as nature photography in general. The assumption being that Mr. Selgado may perhaps give two fucks about what happens to said natives. This assumption is, sadly, wrong. By taking the money from Vale and not boycotting the show, the museum, and anything connected to the kind of work that destroys the rainforest, Mr. Selgado has proved himself an enemy of the people and the world he propots to care about.

We could take a portrait of Mr. Selgado, looking pensively out of his large house, then reroute a sewer line to flow directly through his living room, destroying everything he owns and everything he knows. Then we could exhibit the photograph at a show paid for by the sewage company that rerouted the line.

His hypocrisy does not make him any less of a photographer, but they do make him a less worthy human being.

The Three Minds of Dialectic Behaviour Therapy

 http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/mind_states.html

In the highest state of mindfulness, is suicide an option?

       There are, so I am told, a reasonable mind, a wise mind, and an emotional mind. The emotional mind’s territory is rough, volcanic and sporadic. Anger, fear, hate, terror are a constant and burning essence there, but so are: agápē, érōs, philía, and storgē. It’s not as easy as simply suppressing the emotional mind until it simply disappears,because what is living without the possibility of at least one of the 4 loves.

      The reasonable mind is a staunch logician, thinking things through and offering helpful advice like, “that will be on sale in a week, how about waiting?” The logic, the mathematical, the less immediate and less intense mind; but no less important. The reasonable mind provides explanations and strategies for the world around us.

      The wise mind is the area of confluence of the reasonable mind and the emotional mind. The wise mind groks. It is more than just an affirmation of emotions mixed with the consideration of what the logical result would be. It is a feeling, something just feels right. And we are taught to search for that wise mind and we will be at peace with ourselves.

     So what then, if nothing feels right? If things feel correct then the wise mind is doing it’s job; curtailing the fire of emotion and filing the accounting book of the reasonable.

    Why is it not possible to have a wise mind that comes to a negative conclusion? The possibility of both emotion and reason coming together and realizing that things do not feel right is because something is wrong. Obviously, the world is wrong, but it’s always wrong so the natural order is maintained. The logical assumption then, is that I am wrong.

    That is an emotional response, and therefore irrational. It is also reasonable, based on the facts and therefore true. Can a wise mind commit suicide?

    The reasonable mind, weighing the logical futility of life comes to the existentialist conclusion that life is meaningless. The reasonable mind reads the old Hagel, Hobbes, and (in a moment of irony) Freud; but continues to settle with Camus (not to be confused with coming to a Sarterian conclusion Camus abhors death, Sartre welcomes it). So if life is meaningless then why live it?

    The reasonable mind then defers to the emotional mind to justify existence with love, passion and happiness. But of course emotion can never be trusted; falling flat with happiness and instead coming back with depression, lethargy, anger and loneliness. The emotional mind then jumps to the conclusion that life is painful and awful.

     If life is painful and awful, if life is ultimately meaningless then the wise mind would come to the conclusion that life is entirely a waste of time and it would be better for all concerned if it simply stopped existing. The wise mind is empathetic to the idea that there are others whose existence is valued, just not itself. The feeling of ‘correctness’ comes in like a boat slipping through the fog; everything is not alright, everything is shit; but it’s the calm reassurance of having come to the conclusion both logically and emotionally that make such an act of self destruction correct.

     That kind of calm reassurance opens up a realm of possibilities. A slow death, a quick death, make a mark, make another human to think about separate minds.

There are no such things as separate minds.