Artist of the Day: Willem De Kooning

We've just been reading Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight in my WGS course. That, coupled with my research on Grey Gardens, helped me to discover a new artists--Willem de Kooning. I had heard the name and seen a couple of his paintings. I was really interested in how his paintings really went along with our topical discussion of body images. I wish I had found him just a week or two earlier. This image to the left is Woman III.









I don't know why he started painting women. I couldn't find a detailed enough of an answer in the amount of time I devoted to researching this blog. The little bit wiki had to say was the following: "De Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions were derived from objects found in the studio. But it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively. In the summer of that year he began Woman I (located at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City) [and to the right], which went through innumerable metamorphoses before it was finished in 1952."

Lee Krasner

Shattered
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I have been reading a lot of the Hamptons while conducting research on the Beales. They always refer to themselves as artists (Little Edie is the dancer, Big Edie is the singer). Well, I picked up a book called Hampton Bohemia to see about some of the artwork coming out of the time period and what not. I've always been a really big fan of Pollock, but for some reason, it had escaped my mind that his wife was also a painter. Lee Krasner's work is amazing! I have started finding some pictures of her. I wonder if there has been an academic study of the hidden women painters behind the famous men who have found their ways into museums and homes around the world.
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White Squares
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I was particularly fond of this image below, Noon. I think the color is so vibrant, which is so interesting to me when juxtaposed against many of Pollock's paintings that use a lot of black, dark colors. I think she really captured something in this painting. It's named after a time, but for me it really captured this emotion of squishy-ness that I feel after I eat a big meal. It makes me feel very satiated. Not sure where that just came from, but the truth will out, right?

In the introduction to Primate Visions, Donna Haraway states that she will use “potent verbal and visual images” to show how primates have been manipulated by human culture to explore relationships between numerous binaries such as nature/culture and sex/gender (2). For Haraway, the symbolic and the real figures of primates become a vehicle to explore these rigid binary distinctions because, as she claims, “Primates existing at the boundaries of so many hopes and interests are wonderful subjects with whom to explore the permeability of walls, the reconstitution of boundaries, the distaste for endless socially enforced dualisms” (3). Haraway’s inclusion of these (visual) representations of primates further elucidates the connections between visuality and the construction of knowledge, yet her inclusion and erasure of certain images leaves me wanting more. Juxtaposing Palmore’s Reclining Nude, a poster created by the Guerilla Girls, and the absent/false image of Carl Akeley’s triumph, I will demonstrate the ways in which Haraway’s argument can sustain itself and erase itself, and by creating a continuum—or rather a triangular relationship—of these images, I aim to show how Haraway’s visual element falls short of producing her desired attempt to make bitter these “enforced dualisms” by forefronting a discussion of absence/presence in these images and their contexts.



“Primatology is Simian Orientalism,” a major segment of Haraway’s introduction, is the only subsection that features a visual image—Tom Palmore’s Reclining Nude. Haraway writes, “Sex and the west are axiomatic in biology and anthropology. Under the guiding logic of these complex dualisms, western primatology is simian orientalism. [Figure 1.1]” (10). This is the only introduction or context for Palmore’s painting. Conceivably, this could be a stylistic move. If “sex and the west are axiomatic” in certain discourses, it is only logical that this statement is suggested in Palmore’s painting according to the text. Yet, the absence of context to this painting suggests pure presence; it just is nothing is needed to buttress its inclusion in this section. Turning to Marx’s phrase—“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (10)—allows for a connection between Orientalism and primatology and the insertion of Palmore’s Nude. The primates cannot represent themselves in art, and thus humanity must do it for them. As a result, Palmore’s painting is “axiomatic” and sheer presence marked only by the absence of context and description.

In contrast to this image of Palmore, I turn to Haraway’s chapter on “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” and more specifically on her discussion of Delia Akeley’s biography of her husband. The discussion and presentation of Delia’s Jungle Portraits is marked by an absence in a similar way that Palmore’s work is marked by presence. Of importance here is the absent photograph of Carl Akeley’s restored morale, a photo that is a lie or hoax perpetuated by Delia: “Delia produced a biographical effect at odds with the official histories; she showed the messiness behind the ‘unified truth’ of natural history museums” (50). Haraway’s investigation of this image seems to compliment her discussion of truth/fiction—another important binary she explores—and yet its “absence” from her text is marked by the complimentary contexts and analysis of its perpetuating lie concerning manhood and adventure. This photo remains a lie/hoax in Delia’s text, but Haraway shows the way in which it discloses a fact: “The accompanying photos in the archive suggest a version of reality, a biography of Africa, which the Museum and its official representatives did not want displayed in their Halls or educational publications” (50).

Palmore’s Reclning Nude and Delia’s absent photo are two instances in which Haraway’s text perpetuates this binary distinction between absence and presence. By including Palmore, Haraway engenders and creates a certain truth/lie—that of the axiomatic West—whereas with the Akeley she creates a lie/truth—that of Museum culture’s purposeful elision of reality to produce particular forms of masculinity. By introducing a third term into this binary distinction I have highlighted in Haraway’s text, I would like to show how the Guerrilla Girls’s poster, Get Naked, uses the binary of absence/presence to be “especially productive and especially problematic” and in so doing complicate Haraway’s binary (Haraway 12).

Get Naked first premiered in 1989 on NYC buses after being rejected as a billboard commissioned for the Public Art Fund. In ways that Haraway’s text and images cannot do, this poster manages to rupture distinctions between absence/presence and truth/lie. The inclusion of the gorilla image on the head of Ingres’s Odalisque creates a fiction. Likewise, the Guerilla Girls “assumed the names of dead women artists and wore gorilla masks in public, concealing their identities and focusing on the issues rather than their personalities.”5 Thus, the Guerilla Girls enact a fiction, and by seizing hold a slippage in language that occurs between the connections of gorilla and guerilla, they are able to “productively” use the image of the primate to further their cause and agenda. This can be contrasted with the factual, which is represented in the words of their poster. In this single, consolidated space, the Guerilla Girls are able to create an absence and presence that marks out the way in which the female body is ever-present—in the form of the nude subject—and absent—in the form of female artists.



By acknowledging how extremely “productive” the Get Naked poster is, I also acknowledge how “problematic” this poster and the position of the Guerilla Girls can be. In fact, this co-opting of the image of the gorilla resembles an Orientalist approach, in which the dominant position uses the subordinate position as a resource for/of power. Thus, the Guerilla Girls can easily adopt a gorilla/guerilla identity because of their position of power over primates and as academics or art critics. Also, the use of the mask and the creation of fictional identities shows how “mobile” the Guerilla Girls can be (Haraway 10); anyone could wear a mask. This position and poster, then, uses the primate in a way that is at once “popular, important, marvelously varied, and controversial” (3). While they are making an audience aware of a deficiency of female artists in museums, they do it at the expense of the gorilla.

Haraway’s inclusion of arresting images is important because it shows how our visual representation of primates has shaped the discourses of primatology and humanity. The silent distinction between absence/presence in Haraway’s text stands in contrast to the poster because of its use of image and text to correspond to one another, something that is lacking in the two Haraway “images.” By introducing a third term—the Guerilla Girl’s poster—into the continuum of Haraway’s images, we can see how Haraway’s exploration of binary opposition creates another one between absence/presence that is elided in her inclusion of the Palmore and Delia’s photo. Haraway’s text and images rely on binaries in order to be presented; thus, her work can be critiqued for the binaries that she overtly overlooks or manipulates in order to explore the primate’s liminal position.

"On a Sailing Ship"

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do, than by the things you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream."
-MARK TWAIN

Once again I have cracked open A Year in Art. Today's picture is "On a Sailing Ship" by Caspar David Friedrich, painted 1819.

It reminds me of this amazing quote by Foucault about ships: "the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development ..., but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the form of pirates." (from "Of Other Spaces")

And the Oscar Goes To

When people think about all of the work that goes into movies, they rarely think about all of the pre-production research. For the most part, I would hypothesize that everyone thinks it’s all about the writers, actors, producers, and directors. Of course nods are given to production and design at Oscar time. Well, Harry Potter has yet to win an Oscar, and I do wonder if they are going to hold out and do what they did for the LOTR series, which is give awards to the last film rather than the earlier ones because it is a series-franchise-thing. I’ve been thinking about this because I came across these awesome links/images/documents that I want to share today. I’m officially casting in my ballot for Nicholas Saunders and the design team behind Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes.










Thanks to the Creative Review, which I think is an online magazine of some kind, I was able to view the images created by Saunders and others concerning the joke shop. Here’s what Saunders says, "I worked in the graphic design department for the film under the watchful gaze of senior graphic artists Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima – and alongside fellow assistant graphic artist Lauren Wakefield," Saunders explains. "It was just the four of us who created packaging for this
particular set but this work here is just the stuff that I personally designed.” […] “I was briefed to work on the Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes originally," Saunders continues. "I was also asked to come up with a number of names for more products (such as Anti Gravity Hats) to adorn the shelves. Then after the product names were approved and cleared I used the names as a base to start the designs. When the boxes were ready they were printed on mass up to 400 then they were placed on boxes of all different shapes and sizes. Then after this stage the set dressers took them to fill three storeys of shop shelves in the shop on the Diagon Alley set.”

snippets from various artists

So, I have been extremely lazy lately and haven’t really been blogging at all. I really need to step up my game (something a friend told me the other day). So here is a short post.

Everyone (i.e., like two people) has been sending me information about these random new artists they have been discovering, so here is some information about some new artists. Yeah!

I went to the White Linen Festival in New Orleans last weekend, and I was surprised to see a couple new artists that I liked. We barely went into the galleries because we were busy drinking and walking around. This is who I discovered: Raine Bledsoe and Doyle Gertjejansen.

Bledsoe’s work was really interesting. He/She (ambiguously gendered name, right?) worked in mixed media. I snagged this picture from a Shreveport blog. It’s of a twig person surrounded by pages from an old book. I got to see this piece in one of the galleries. Another interesting piece of was of tree made out of lines of poetry that were cut up into a tree’s shape.



The other really neat artist that I discovered was Gertjejansen. His work was very colorful, and he painted on some really large canvases, which looked really nice. I couldn’t save any painting from his site, but here is the link to check out.

The third artist, who I did managed to get a picture of/from, is Julia Blackmon. I like how her work is about domestication, but also the revelry that kids feel when they sort of break the rules. Interesting stuff.

Class, Houses, Discussion

My students and I just spent about an hour talking and writing about this painting by Edward Hopper entitled “House by the Railroad.” I am teaching 1004 right now, and I am trying to integrate visual culture studies into writing. I choose this topic because I figured it would be something that all of my students (all three of them) would be familiar with. We look at the world around us all of the time. It is in fact one of the major senses through which we experience life.

Today’s class was just one of those days that was kind of rewarding. I met a fellow teacher in the stairwell just before getting to class, and I talked about how I feel so awkward teaching sometimes—that I talk to much, that I make a big deal out of nothing, that I am interested in the topic and my students are just little bobble heads nodding agreement. When I got to class and one of the students was not there, I was kind of shocked and thought it might be a bad day, but I was luckily rewarded with her reassuring presence.

We talked a lot about place and space because we started with the chapter, “Coming to Terms with Place.” We spent time talking about the difference between space and place, and my students were getting the really theoretical stuff that I wanted them to understand, which felt great. We ended talking about this poem by Edward Hirsch—an ekphrastic poem about Hopper’s painting. We then learned how to incorporate MLA into our writing and talked about introductions and rhetorical questions. Good discussion.

But what I was most happy about is that I started to realize how awesome Hopper is. Of course, I am very familiar with Nighthawks, his most famous painting. And this one time I downloaded some random podcasts from MOMA about him. I think there might be some research going on Hopper in the near future. What do you think about the painting?

"For Eighty Cents" by Alessandro Morbelli

How fitting that one of my last times in office hours this semester, I would come across a painting called "For Eighty Cents" in my A Year in Art book. Although this wasn't necessarily a pittance in 1895, I understand that the back-breaking work portrayed in the painting was not that easy. And while I know that I am very fortunate to have a job, funding, and a pretty awesome career, I can't help but relate to these women in the painting. Work is hard, and I feel like I always have to bend over backwards to get the job done. Some amazing feat always needs to be accomplished, and I now know that my sense of hyperbole is overtaking me right now. So please feel free to disregard my analogies above.

The painting is quite pretty. I guess you could or may have noticed that I haven't exactly done an entry for each day about the paintings in my book. So o course, I only pick out the ones I like, and one of the things that I love about this painting is the color and reflections that Alessandro Morbelli paints into the canvas.

More Happenings

Okay, so I totally noticed that one of my old college friends (Melody) posted this on her Facebook wall, but I had to post it here too just in case some of my friends that aren't hers who didn't get a chance to see it could see it for the first time. Like her, I am probably way to excited about this, but as you probably know, one of the things I am totally interested in is Happenings. This random occurrence of art and performance being made. I hope you enjoy!



I know that there are some elements to a Happening that are controlled and practiced. Certainly these actors/dancers had to learn their parts. But the sheer joy of some of spectators is just so amazing, and the fact is that many people in the station were probably shocked at this. This rather mild, amusing Happening is one to share.

Five Women on the Street by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

"On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock." - Thomas Jefferson

This quote accompanies a really odd painting that I just had to find out more about: Five Women on the Street by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. I was in the office today for some odd reason, well research related, and I went ahead and looked at the painting for today from A Year in Art. When I saw this painting, I could not for the life of me figure out what shouted out "March," but for some reason the editors thought to include this for the month.

Kirchner was a German expressionist painter from the earlier part of the last century, and he apparently did a number of painting of the Berlin streets and women, this painting being one of the more famous/important ones. This painting from 1913 was also labeled as one of the 100 Greatest Painting by a 1980 BBC series. According to online sources, his paintings contained "grotesque distortions [that] mock[ed] the mannered artificiality of Berlin society." And the short bio wrote that 600 of his painting were confiscated by Nazi officials before he committed suicide in 1938.

The women are supposed to represent Berlin street-walkers. For more information about the series, click here. According to artdaily, "With Five Women on the Street (1913), Kirchner has placed the prostitutes in a space that resembles a stage, relating them to dancers in a revue. Lined up rhythmically, these figures, in their proliferation, also reference the abundance of streetwalkers in Berlin at that time." In this way, his painting seems to relate to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in that both paintings are taking "prostitutes" and putting them in new settings to make us re-evaluate aesthetics of gender, body, and the "subject" of art. So, even though I never really heard about Kirchner, I am happy to know some info now.

The Crevasse

Although this crevasse is not in the Patagonian glacier, I have to admit it is pretty amazing, visually that is. [Sorry for that lame inside joke, but for those of you that know it, I hope you take some pleasure at others' expense.]

Check out this awesome 3-D street art I found in TSWL yesterday when I was "working." This particular piece is by Edward Muller and was a part of the "Festival of World Culture" in August of 2008.

Darwin and the Arts

I came across this article on the NYTimes about a new exhibition entitled, "Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and Art." Now, I really wish fly to Yale to see these paintings. The impact Darwin had/has on literature is one of those small pockets of literary study that fascinate me. I like this passage in the article, which sort of succinctly summarizes Darwin's impact:

"The show claims to be exploring, for the first time, the impact of Darwin’s theories on the visual arts. With a few deft selections and explanations, French Impressionism is shown to have been under the influence. (Degas was fascinated by Darwin’s study comparing facial expressions of animals and humans.) So, too, were the aesthetic movements of the late 19th century, with their visions of feminine beauty. (Sexual selection was one of the themes Darwin turned to in exploring the power of plumage.)"

One particular artist I like who I would also like to think was impact by Darwin is Max Ernst. Surely Darwin's theory of evolution and animal life influenced some of Ernst's painting, which feature animals prominently.

For instance, "The Robing of the Bride" featured below. It is hard to see in the painting where animal begins and where human begins. The creatures/bodies/entities in the painting seem to be part animal and part human, suggesting some confluence between how we understand the different species. Now, I am not an art scholar by any means, but just viewing this painting makes think that Ernst is trying to point out some uncanny connection to birds and humans and its mythic overtones, especially since this painting has some sort of magisterial quality with the courtly imagery and title.


This other painting I found some time ago, and I have always tried to look at it because of my initial reaction, which was a cross between, "What is that?", and, "Amazing!" Entitled "Men Shall Know Nothing of This," this painting below makes me think of the relationship between living and non-living. With the machine images on top of the elephant-like creature and then the statue in the foreground, it seems like Ernst is suggesting that these non-living objects can be a burden to us. They can lay on top of us and in our path obstructing our movements.

Regardless of whether Ernst was really influenced by Darwin, I thought it would be interesting to share these paintings. I hope you enjoyed them!

The Battle of Carnival and Lent by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

In honor of the Mardi Gras season that I am currently missing in New Orleans, I thought I would pick this really cool painting from my A Year in Art book to share. I know with this picture the detailing is not quite as exquisite as one would hope, but you can at least get a sense for the grandness of the canvas. The Battle of Carnival and Lent by Pieter Brueghel the Elder is in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Dated 1559, this canvas does sort of capture the amount of randomness of the carnival season in New Orleans. Things are going on all over the place, and who knows if there is really order going on. Surely, chaos is reigning in the picture, and it usually takes over at some point.

I was able to get this detail of the painting to share:

One a rather interesting note, when searching for images on the web, I found out that Zbigniew Preisner composed a short instrumental piece based off of this painting for one of my favorite films, Bleu. I can't wait to rewatch the film now and listen to the piece and see how it fits into the score/film.

Dancers at Rehearsal by Edgar Degas

I have this really cool A Year in Art book that has been sitting in my office all alone and untouched for almost a semester and a half. I had it propped up on the shelf for decor purposes, but today I felt inspired to take it down and see what painting was [emblematic] chosen for today. I feel the start of a new feature to compliment one of my favorites blogs, progress on the prairie's, Sunday Art Chat.

Edgar Degas's Dancers at Rehearsal, 1885-1890, is accompanied with a quote by the artist: "Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."Firstly, I think this painting is quite pretty. I know that Degas has a number of canvases that detail the life of the ballet girls, and before cracking this book, I had not seen this particular one before. According to the text, the painting is housed a the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, which may have something to do with it not being seen by me; nevertheless, I do think this is one of the more interesting entries in the ballet series. I like the angle of the gaze in this painting. With the little wooden feature that covers the upper-right hand corner, I feel that the view is obstructed slightly because it is almost a clandestine gaze going on. Do these girls know that they are being watched? Certainly, this is a question I had after pondering the image for a while. Another would be, what is the connection between the groups in the painting? The sort of begging, enchanting gesture of the group on the left seems at odds by the nonchalance perpetrated by the group in the far left, and yet, this perfectly captures the sense/schemes of rehearsal that go on.

As far as the quote that accompanies the painting, how true. I think I understand what Degas is saying. When one is a pedestrian in a certain field, it is easy to learn and master because as a newcomer, you know so little. And yet, as a master of a particular field, it is so much harder to learn how to improve because you have often commanded so many skills up until a certain point. In a way, for me at least, Degas's quote sort of explains a little bit of this anxiety I have been having about grad school. It is like you reach this point, and you know there is something beyond it, and reaching the next point becomes harder and more obscure. I'm reminded of a recent blog/note from a friend, "How much can my writing style change by this point?" (I'm paraphrasing/inventing just a bit.) And I have been feeling a little bit of the same. I have been in school for almost 20 years, I have done this whole college thing, and what now?