REVIEW
ANNA VON MERTENS:
COLOR: A LOVE STORY
UNIVERSITY GALLERY AT UMASS LOWELL
MAHONEY HALL
870 BROADWAY STREET
LOWELL, MASSACHUSETTS
JANUARY 22 THROUGH MARCH 3
by Greg Morell
There are two divergent roads of aesthetic departure for New Hampshire artist Anna Von Mertens. In one direction, we discover works of popular whimsy — a lighthearted exploration of the emoji. Fanciful, playful, vibrantly colorful and deliciously cute, it’s art candy you just want to eat.
However, the other path that Von Mertens explores is far different.
Both will on view in “Color: A Love Story,” an exhibition running from January 22 through March 3 in the University Gallery at UMass Lowell.
In the main gallery, Von Mertens will present two beds, side by side, in the open expanse of the gallery floor. It is not the beds themselves, but what is on the beds that is the point of the piece. Two hand-dyed, hand-sewn cotton quilts cover the beds, in what the artist perceives as conversation. It is basically a conversation of color, but how those colors got to where they are is the mystery in the stew.
This is hip-deep, highly intellectualized conceptual art. Each of these quilts is an exacting marathon of execution that includes hand-dyeing small squares of white cotton to the desired shade and the actual precise, mathematical construction of the quilt, in addition to the convoluted process of coming up with the motivation for the color, which boggles the limits of credibility.
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CORNERED: OLIVIA BERNARD
INTERVIEW
WHAT LIES BETWEEN, RECENT WORKS BY OLIVIA BERNARD
ORESMAN GALLERY BROWN FINE ARTS CENTER
SMITH COLLEGE
22 ELM STREET NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS
by Elizabeth Michelman
Olivia Bernard’s sculpture has always spoken through the fingertips to the whole body. No matter how flat a piece becomes, there’s always another side — and always a sense of inside and outside. It’s tempting to read her small glass panels and attenuated sheets of handmade paper as following within the traditions of abstract or color field painting. But Bernard is neither a painter nor a follower and has no interest in carrying forward the ideological, political or art-historical agenda of abstract painting today. Her 3-D sculpture and installation is grounded in minimalism, feminism and process art. Drawing has always been an extension of her 3-D exploration; she approaches the surface not as a field of visual experimentation but as an exploration of her personal boundaries.
In October, at Smith College’s Brown Fine Arts Center, Bernard will be showing two groups of smaller, relatively flat, wall-mounted work. These employ simple, low-tech materials, as usual, to explore the sensation of translucency. As in her larger sculptures and installations, which have shifted from poured Hydrocal carapaces to handmade paper over wire mesh, the materials in the current works are vitalized in an alchemical transformation from liquid to solid. The “Glass/Wax” series involves a process of dipping glass panes in hot wax, while the “Embedded” series fixes linear structures into stable forms in wet paper pulp.
The materiality of Bernard’s works forces us to reconsider our notions of both “flatness” and “drawing.” Her avoidance of traditional frames forces us to see these forms, in spite of their thinness and rectilinearity, as objects. In the “Glass/Wax” series, the work is not hidden behind glass; the glass pane, which serves as both surface and structure, is itself the work. Leaning against the wall and supported only by a narrow steel flange, each naked pane is at risk from vibration and mishandling. Likewise, Bernard refuses to confine the handmade paper sheets of the “Embedded” series. She floats them over an invisible Plexiglas substrate projecting a few inches off the wall, where they are subject to air currents, gravity, and electrostatic attraction.
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Together We Stand, Divided We Fall Venice Biennale 2017 Arte Viva Arte
By Nancy Nesvet
Venice, Italy – Bringing awareness to political and environmental crises and uniting the world’s artists in proposals for humanity’s and the earth’s survival, the Venice Biennale 2017 might be the most important art exhibition ever. Harold Rosenberg famously said that art is about events. This Biennale addresses current events while posing fundamental questions regarding the role of art and art-making. Is it a journalistic report and analysis of events, or an illusory view of what might be, could be, has been or is? This Biennale includes all of this: including beautiful and threatening nature, environmental disasters and the danger for refugees traveling upon the open seas, while optimistically providing solutions to potentially disastrous situations.
Christine Macel, curator of the Venice Biennale 2017, implores that this Biennale is for and by artists. Its participatory nature makes it clear that we are all artists, and the remaking and restitution of our world is the greatest art project ever. The most remarkable aspect of this Biennale is the many ways artists treat the subject of migration, be it forced, economically or politically necessary, and the necessity to confront threats to our environment, together formulating ways to save our world and our human race on this planet. Whatever the politics of each nation, artist or group, this Biennale brings the message that art creates awareness and comforts, that artists propose solutions, and we must come together as a world community to solve the world’s problems.
I still love Jesse Jones’ “Tremble, Tremble,” at the Ireland Pavilion, a frightening film of a performance announcing “The witches have returned” and in the process, proclaiming a new body of law, in “Utero Gigante,” ruled by a multitude of formerly suppressed women. Mark Bradshaw’s installation, “Tomorrow Is Another Day,” at the USA Pavilion, where Bradshaw makes a pile of discarded possessions of the disenfranchised around the perimeter of the room, accentuates the marginal status of some members of American and world society.
At Palazzo Mora, the Pavilion of Humanity’s “Objection,” two plaster figures, self-portraits of artists Ekin Onat (a Turkish Muslim) and Michal Cole (a Jewish Israeli), inhabit the same territorial bed but face away from each other. At the same pavilion, in a claustrophobic room made of 2400 men’s ties, the uniform of bureaucrats, chokes the Arabic-inspired room décor. The optimistic stop on this journey is “The Absence of Paths” at the Tunisia National Pavilion, where I obtained my new passport, issued by the state of Freesa, with the stamp of Pangea, declaring my nationality ‘Only Human,’ with origin and destination unknown, and status, migrant.
Refugees’ reasons for fleeing their native lands is treated in Jana Zelibsa’s “Swan Song” at the Czech and Slovak Republic’s pavilion, where Zelibsa’s video backdrop of Venice’s Adriatic Sea is foregrounded by lighted white swans moving in orderly rows. Mechanical swans, against rising waters relate our continuing obsession with digital imagery and virtual reality, while we ignore the real, threatened natural world. Perhaps most frightening is Samson Young’s “Songs for Disaster Relief,” at the Hong Kong in Venice pavilion. Using sound and video, Young re-appropriates “charity singles” “We are the World” and Bob Geldof and Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” to explore the ideologies and empathy that instigated these performances. Dirk Braeckman’s black and white photographs in the Belgian Pavilion are stripped of specific nationality. His shadowy figures, devoid of dress or skin color, could be anyone, a code and year the only identifying marks.
Actualizing the philosophies, sponsored by the Venice Biennale, Artist Olafur Eliasson and his foundation set up “Green light-An artistic workshop,” inviting the public to help make Green Lights, the sales of which enable a program to house, support and train political and economic refugees to gain employment skills in Italy.
This art exhibition’s anagramic motto, “Viva Arte Viva,” announces that art must live, and it does, spanning genres, history and culture, and that we must live art, together creating ways to live in and maintain our world. The most remarkable achievement of the Venice Biennale 2017 is its inclusion of so many nations’ artists and communities, enabling them to live and talk together, considering each others’ problems and viewpoints, and realizing that, as the world’s people, we can and must come together to solve problems if we are to survive on our mutual planet. This is the power of artists that Christine Macel and Biennale President Paolo Baratta attributes to artists.
Thank you to Artscope for this amazing journey, and especially to you, the readers for following on facebook and Artscope’s zine, coming along for the ride. Viva Arte Viva!
Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable at the Venice Biennial 2017
By Nancy Nesvet
Venice, Italy – Damien Hirst’s “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” installation, on view at Palazzo Grassi and Villa Doghana, Venice’s Customs House, is one of the Venice Biennial 2017’s most wildly popular exhibits. Following 10 years of work and thousands of euros of investors’ money, Hirst presents a fictional rescue of artifacts from the ship, Apistos (Kona Greek for Unbelievable).
Hirst’s storyline: a freed slave, Cif Amoton II, the letters of whose name rearrange to read “I am fiction” lived during the late first and early second centuries A.D., amassed a fortune, then bought and loaded statues and reproductions of ancient art and crafts pieces onto a ship bound for the Temple of the Sun, which he built. Hirst’s story continues with the fictional sinking of the ship in the Indian Ocean 5,000 meters under the seabed off East Africa, and its videoed recovery, in 2008, of the ship containing the artifacts, covered with coral, barnacles and other vestiges of 2,000 years under the sea.
One hundred artifacts, created by 250 craftsmen in five countries under Hirst’s direction, include a verdigris-tinted statue of a woman, supposedly an aspect of Katie Ishtar Yo Landi; resembling the South African singer Yo Landi. Born in Port Alfred, on the east coast of South Africa, she is known for her history of violence and from being a member of the South African singing group whose Afrikaans name, “Di Antwoord,” translates as “the answer.” Adding to her fiery background, her group’s producer calls himself God. Other works includes a forbidding, and frankly ugly statue of Hydra and Kali entwined, patinaed statues of Mickey Mouse holding Walt Disney’s hand; a gold and silver Quetzalcoatl, the great white God revered by the Aztecs; a Bronze Calendar Stone; a classic female form, Arachne, who Athena turned into a spider for weaving transgressions of the Gods; several copies of Medusa’s severed head encircled by the requisite snakes; Atlas topping a huge globe as the centerpiece at Villa Doghana and golden-headed copies of the heads of Atlantis survivors found off the Nigerian coast!; vessels and amphorae and more, all for sale.
From viewing this work, we might think Hirst condemns ancient civilizations, is making fun of ancient religions and plays the savior of ancient artifacts to no purpose but their sale to enrich himself, or that his “recovery” of art from ancient civilizations that produced ugly, horrific and violence-inducing heroes does nothing but enable Hirst and his admirers to feel superior. But wait. First, let’s remember that Kali is the destroyer and Ishtar the Mesopotamian the goddess of love, sex, war, combat and political power, who disappeared about 1 AD, when this ship allegedly sailed and Medusa was beheaded by Perseus, whose tears became coral, encrusting everything here. There are swords of various eras including one labeled “Sea World”; Mickey Mouse holding the hand of Walt Disney; an 18-meter tall jade Buddha; Andromeda with a sea monster and Hirst’s own torso reproduced in bronze covered with coral, all showing power structures, religious or cultural. Hirst has worked on this for 10 years, initiating the project in Summer, 2007, after the London bombings. This exhibition is about violence as the answer to terrorism. Hirst has shown, with humor and ingenuity, the dangers of power structures and figures and chronicled their ultimate demise, under the sea.
In a stage set of action figures once revered by almost every civilization around in 1-2 A.D., Hirst is non-discriminatory in his condemnation of power. He might believe that we must use hard-hitting violence against named and unnamed enemies, but the public’s reaction has been repulsion to these “heroes.”, Curator of the Venice Biennale 2017 Christine Macel’s diplomatic approach to nations coming together might better fight terrorism than Hirst’s employment of superheroes and heroines, cultural, religious or mythic. In the battle of hard-hitting power vs. diplomacy, who then wins? On Venice’s stage, my bet is on the side that preserves rather than destroys the world. Let’s remember that Hirst’s superheroes, Gods and frightening creatures went down with the ship.
Wanderlust: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden
By Nancy Nesvet
Washington, D.C. – Crashing websites to obtain tickets to the show, standing for hours in multiple lines to view the work, never-before seen crowds in America are going crazy for Yayoi Kusama. Because the work relates to universal concerns, this trip to infinity has us all trailing along, and when done with our 30 seconds in an installation, just wanting to go back again for more.
Alone, standing in a cosmos of pointed light, or surrounded by rows of golden pumpkins, my loneliness is alleviated by the unaccountable vastness and brilliant colors of these shimmering objects. As Yayoi Kusama fears loneliness most, she has conquered her fear with a self-imposed treatment program of desensitization. Her constant making of repetitive round forms, be they lights, pumpkins or seeds, leads to organized patterns that allow her and us to organize the overwhelming chaos in our lives and surroundings and visions to a pattern of beauty and life. She wants “to show that I am one of the elements-one of the dots among the millions of dots in the universe.”
No longer lonely, I am immersed in the beauty, in the light, for that fleeting moment allowed in each installation. Emerging from this installation, a dark-lit room resembling the cosmos, and entering another, I am surrounded by heavy, gravity-bound pumpkins sticking to the dark earth cemetery ground I stand on in the dark night. Death in the cemetery of pumpkins becomes life with the addition of golden light, just as floating stars in space become linear patterns of light leading to infinity. We don’t die, but merely become part of the infinitesimal points of light, one dot among millions, or one in a field of round, living golden pumpkins, bound to the earth, but infinite. Like dying, I am propelled into space, returning, to ground covered with pumpkins. We can’t long for that celestial world we have just experienced, because life here on earth, with those golden pumpkins is just as spectacular. If this is our infinite future, what a preview Kusama has given us.
The retrospective, “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., until May 14, includes paintings, three room-size installations (“All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins,” “Chandelier of Grief” and “Where the Lights in My Heart Go”) and sculptures. They provide a complete lexicon of her motifs, color, layering, light, reflection and exploration of the body and the celestial universe. The exhibition covers the three main periods of her career, from her 1958 arrival in New York City when she climbed the Empire State Building stairs to survey the city’s lights, then staging happenings, painting everything and everyone with dots; her work in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in Japan and her rediscovery and frenetic making of work from the 1990s to the present.
The river of white stones behind her house in Japan inspired an early work, black polka dots on white canvas, “Infinity” (1952), establishing her repetitive patterning of dots to fill the vacuum. Hereafter, her visual field is obscured by nets or dots that cover everything as in “Infinity Nets” (1960) where white nets, painted over black or grey grounds limit the view of what lies behind or underneath them separating Kusama from her traumatic surroundings. Those nets that obscure and the dots they delineate persist, in various forms, throughout her work as she explains in the catalogue for her second exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair; “the universe-would be obliterated by white nets of nothingness connecting astronomical accumulations of dots.” Everything is covered with dots, from the circular forms of “Infinity Nets,” to the round acrylic pumpkins of “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins” (2016), to the points of light in “Infinity Mirrored Room-Brilliance of the Souls” (2014) to paper dots with which we are encouraged to cover the white room (reminiscent of the mental institution Kusama lives in?), in “Obliteration Room” (2002), created again here, to the clothes she herself sometimes wears. Formally, “Nets and dots extinguish the contours of the objects”. Considering content, Kusama continued, “When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment. I become part of the eternal and we obliterate ourselves in love. (Manhattan Suicide Addict, 1978)
On the wall are photographs of her 1960s happenings, when she painted nude bodies with dots, because “painting bodies in the patterns of Kusama’s hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.” (Interview in BOMB magazine with Grady Turner, winter 1999.)
Kusama’s 1960s peep-show mirror boxes, included in this exhibit, allow us views of that infinite universe. (“Mirrored Room-Love Forever No. 3,” 1965). Undoubtedly influenced by New York’s pornographic peep shows during the ‘50s and ‘60s, they afford us a limited, solitary view, portending the room-size installations that allow us physical entrance into the celestial Kusama-created world.
Cloth-covered, handmade, painted phallus shapes repeat ad infinitum in the multi-genre work, “Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field” (1965/1998) and again in “A Snake” (1974). She has to touch the phalli as she makes them, constructing them, understanding how they operate, stuffing them with foam until they stand stiff. But they are not connected to anyone. They function as objects. She deconstructs her fear as she constructs these objects and orders them in martial patterns, marching across the landscape she inhabits. The resulting desensitization releases her from fear of sex and phalli, she claims.
“Polka dots symbolize disease…Nets symbolize horror toward the infinity of the universe – We cannot live without air.” (BOMB magazine interview with Grady Turner, Winter 1999.) Whether phalli, or city lights, or specks of radiation falling from atomic bombs, Kusama has created the modern sublime, with her installations showing fear of death, but the beauty of the universe surrounding us, perhaps after death. Whether the twinkling lights of Tokyo or New York, from her perch in space, her body no longer tied to the earth, or concrete, or penetrable, this work overcomes fear, of sex, of death, of loneliness.
Only an old artist, and Kusama is 87, who has thought about death, experienced hallucinations full of colored lights, flown above dark cities filled with twinkling lights and also witnessed rows of the dead, buried, tombstones above them in fields, can produce this work. Thank you, Ms. Kusama for alleviating the fear of death and replacing it with a curiosity for what is to come. Kusama has said (Yoyoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrors). “After I die, I hope that people see that my paintings are about love and peace and spirituality.” Yes, Ms. Kusama, I see that.
Go see it for yourself.
(“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” continues through May 14 at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue at 7th Street, SW, Washington, D.C. For more information, call (202) 633-1000.)
The Isles Arts Initiative
By James Foritano
Boston, MA – I enjoy sun, but as we ferried from Boston to George’s Island on a sunny Saturday afternoon, on July 11, even with a broad-brimmed hat, I felt like I had over-stayed my welcome on the top deck despite stunning views of Boston’s cityscape. I was onboard for this nautical adventure to take in the Isles Arts Initiative intended to call attention to the Boston Harbor Islands through its summer long public art series on George’s and Spectacle islands.
(A counterpart exhibition at the Boston Sculptors Gallery from July 22 through August 14 will capture the intrinsic beauty of the 34 harbor islands.)
In a mere 45 minutes, I was back on land to look at art outside on green parade grounds of George’s Island and inside a fort that was state-of-the-art when it was completed in 1863. The insides of Fort Warren are, in peace-time, blessedly dark and deep. One of my favorite exhibits was in the powder house. Instead of exploding, as they are wont to do, this massively walled building sparked only with dulcet sounds.
The Middle Kingdom Collective engineered a wood and steel instrument that came alive when the wind wafted over the roof and moved what looked like a toothed wheel inside. I was told that when the wind blows more strongly, these plucked notes form a melody. But even, intermittent, they were my speed.
My imagination filled this dark and somewhat sinister space with all the powder that never exploded by accident. And, thankfully, powder never exploded even outside the powder house, since, as far as my reading of history takes me, this fort never had to fire in defense of our city from the Civil War through the Spanish-American War and on through the Second World War.
More art installations deeper into the dark innards of Fort Warren are similarly provocative. The vaulted spaces inside are womb-like and harboring, but sinister also, since this womb was built to spew death at death-dealing interlopers.
How right and hopeful that these ominous spaces expand with lively video installations that percolate with sound and sights — and expand further with stable sculptures mobile with imagination. The audience lingers, casting glances at each other either to give or extract information of what lies just around the next corner, through the next tunnel.
It’s a treasure hunt for the mind and senses that goes on in spaces, here on George’s Island, in Fort Warren, purposed for darker times. That awareness made the art even more poignant, and sent us rambling onto the parapets of this mostly subterranean structure to look outside onto a sparkling ocean filled with sails and inside towards the once night-mare architecture of war and, now, of art with edge and depth.
(The Isles Arts Initiative is a summer-long public arts series on both Georges and Spectacle Island and in venues across Boston that celebrate the intrinsic beauty of the 34 Boston Harbor islands. Learn more at iai2015.greenovateboston.org.)