From Memory of Trees project, Kathryn Cook, 2014
Monday morning art reads:
1. Friday was the 100th anniversary of the Turkish murder of 1.5 millions Armenians in 1915. Once again, the United States betrayed its moral obligation in favor of its own interests on a big occasion, having President Obama abstain from calling the mass murder of 1.5 million people what it is, which is a genocide. The link is to a interesting photographic project, documenting what little remains of those infamous 1915 events.
http://framework.latimes.com/2015/04/21/reframed-in-conversation-with-kathryn-cook/#/15
2. Jonathan Jones thinks very little of Vik Muniz's new project for the Venice biennial, placing what amounts to a very large paper boat in the middle of sea of yachts to call attention an increasing world-wide racism and hatred towards migrants seeking a better life under the most gruesome and dangerous conditions. Jones is right. The project is weak, couched in kumbaya language and more intent on its own status as biennial art than the message that it is trying to carry. Jones quotes Muniz:
“The project is a metaphor for a vessel, something that
saves you, takes you from one place to another. It’s not a criticism; it’s a
platform. Once you’ve seen it and you’ve thought about it, you might have the
need to discuss it … ”
So, when people die unnecessarily, it is okay to just "might have the need to discuss it?"
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/apr/21/lampedusa-migration-deaths-sea-venice-biennale
3. On a lighter note, an exhibition of "non-art" or "art that used to be art but due to some sort of accident is no longer art" is on display at the University of Chicago's Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, an interdisciplinary research center. I find this terrain to be fascinating, the rhetorical and material distinctions that render something valuable or valueless. We spend most of our time trying to justify the valuable, so, naturally, an exhibition of stuff now considered (in the almighty world of insurance) valueless would make for an opportunity for reflection.
http://www.chicagomag.com/arts-culture/April-2015/A-Museum-of-No-Longer-Art-Opens-in-Hyde-Park/?utm_campaign=Chimag+No+Longer+Art+042315&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=FB
Video of the week:
4. Set to a sort of guttural groan against a beat, MOCA TV shows us the world of Sterling Ruby's urethane works. It is a beautiful video, showing not only how the pieces are made but also lending a decent understanding of how lush and complex these pieces are in person. Ruby is a child of both David Foster Wallace and Mike Kelley, a person who is able to see the underbelly of society and the wages of its addictions. The urethane works are monuments to this study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjNj5N2iF44
Poem for the week:
5. Some painters talk about having a certain control in their work that they know if one brushstroke or even a singular moment is out of place. If that moment is wrong, the entire proceeding is wrong. I have no intuitive way of understanding this, I've always had to take a painters word for it. To be honest, I do not entirely trust when painters talk in this way. However, I know (for certain and without any doubt) that this control is possible in poetry. I was reminded of this when reading Abundance by Louise Gluck from 2007. If Gluck does not brilliantly employ the word "roar" in the last line, the entire poem would fall. That one word flavors everything. The fresh memory of what you just read is altered in an instant.
http://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/5821/five-poems-louise-gluck
One Click Deeper
6. Ruby, it has been my experience, is one of the best people with whom to talk about David Foster Wallace in the entire artworld. Anytime I see his work, I find myself revisiting Wallace's texts, especially Infinite Jest and his great essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. As I was lulled into a wide-eyed trance by MOCA's music and buffet-like close ups of Ruby's work, thinking of Wallace made me consider that the moment was less beautiful than unsettling, that the MOCA video may take too much of the anxiety and ferocity out of Ruby's work to replace it with passivity.
I should just post E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction rather than go into it too deeply on a Monday morning list:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram%3A+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319