Tag Archives: art history

The Radical Legacy of Hannah Höch

The Radical Legacy of Hannah Höch, One of the Only Female Dadaists
by Alina Cohen, artsy.net

Photomontages were the original remix. In the early 20th century, a group of European artists spliced together images they’d found in popular media, creating singular artworks via a strategy of sampling. The results show both individual statements by their makers and cross-sections of visual culture from a particular historical moment. While these creators called their movement by the nonsense word “Dada” (“DADA, as for it, it smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing,” said artist Francis Picabia), their strange new artworks offered significant polemical ideas about gender, politics, and creativity during a particularly tumultuous era in Western history. 
….

Hannah Höch, one of the few female members recognized by the movement, offered a refreshing antithesis to such macho constructions. Her own photomontages offer kaleidoscopic visions of German culture during the interwar era, often from a distinctly queer, feminist perspective.
READ entire article.

How to Be an Artist, According to Louise Bourgeois

“Art is not about art,” Louise Bourgeois once declared. “Art is about life, and that sums it up.”

4 Art Lessons from Louise Bourgeois

  • Lesson #1: Make art about your life
  • Lesson #2: Find inspiration in all of nature, including spiders and maggots
  • Lesson #3: Revisit the same themes over and over again (but also keep experimenting)
  • Lesson #4: Never stop making art

read entire article

Cindy Sherman: ‘Why am I in these photos?’

Cindy Sherman: ‘Why am I in these photos?’| The Guardian

Photographer Cindy Sherman talks about a difficult childhood, her compulsion to dress up, growing older – and why she now prefers to live alone.

…”A flick through the photographs in her current retrospective exhibition in LA reveals her transformed into 20 kinds of matinee starlet, Hitchcock lead, pneumatic Monroe, terrified centrefold, crime-scene corpse, old master muse, cut-up sex doll, Republican wife, clown; both as determinedly absent and iconically present in her work as Andy Warhol once was in his.” [read entire article]

Cindy Sherman in front of her work at the Broad museum, Los Angeles, where a major retrospective of her work is taking place. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Observer

Flipping (Virtually) Through a Book of Cubo-Futurist Poetry

From Hyperallergic:

Life is shorter than the squeal of a sparrow.
Like a dog, regardless, sailing
on an ice floe down the river in spring?

Vasily Kamensky, with illustrations by David and Vladimir Burliuk, ‘Tango s korovami : zhelezobetonnyi︠a︡ poėmy’ (Tango with Cows, 1914), showing “Telephone” (all images courtesy the Getty Research Institute)

So opens the title poem of Tango with Cows, a 1914 book by Vasily Kamensky, with accompanying drawings by David and Vladimir Burliuk. All three artists were members of the group Hylaea, whose 1912 manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” is often cited as formally starting the Russian Futurist movement. Unlike the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” which proposed not only a new relationship to art but to all of life as well, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” was more specifically concerned with upending the literary status quo. [read more]

…The book, in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty — which has made its version available digitally

 

Dorothea Lange Documentary

Dorothea Lange ~ Watch Full Film: Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning
American Masters | PBS.

Dorothea Lange by Paul S. Taylor, 1934American Masters — Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning  explores the life, passions and uncompromising vision of the influential photographer, whose enduring images document five turbulent decades of American history, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II Japanese internment camps. Peabody- and five-time Emmy award-winning cinematographer Dyanna Taylor — the granddaughter of Lange and writer/social scientist Paul Schuster Taylor — directs and narrates this intimate American Masters documentary.

more info and links to Dorothea Lange resouces

MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Michael Schmidt

On May 24, 3 days after he received the Prix Pictet, Michael Shmdit died.. The award this year  focused on consumption. [see NY TIMES article]. The Prix Pichetet site has a great post  about him.  A quote:
Michael Schmidt once called himself a ‘blind alley’ photographer, “… that means that I stroll straight into a cul-de-sac and can’t find a way out. Then I come to terms with this as a sort of condition and at some point later on, I’m back on the outside again. (…) That is to say, failure or making mistakes is an integral part of my way of working.”

MICHAEL SCHMIDT | AMERICAN SUBURB X. has several of his series posted. [bookmark American Suburb blog – excellent resource.]

obituary from the BBC

Document, Protest, Memorial: AIDS in the Art World

Document, Protest, Memorial: AIDS in the Art World
by Barbara Pollock, ARTnews

It’s been three decades since AIDS first made an impact on the New York art world, annihilating a community and activating one of the most highly effective artist-driven political movements of the 20th century. At that time, for every Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres lost to the disease, there were scores of lesser-known artists, such as Ray Navarro, Hugh Steers, and Robert Blanchon, who also left their mark with art that documented, protested, memorialized, and reinterpreted the devastation of the era. [read rest of article]

Eva Respini (MoMA) and Mark Durant (St. Lucy) talking about Robert Heinecken

Great interview on the Saint Lucy blog with Eva Respini, curator of the MOMA exhibition on  Robert Heinecken

Launched in 2011 by Mark Alice Durant, Saint Lucy is devoted to writing about photography and contemporary art. He co-wrote  Robert Heinecken: A Material History in 2003.

They talk about much more than Robert Heinecken, but here is a taste of their thoughts on Heinecken:

MAD: Heinecken’s opposition to narrow definitions of what it meant to be a photographic artist manifested itself in many ways. One of them is this iterative process you talk about which I assume came from his training as a printmaker.  Looking at the show downstairs, one of the things that really strikes me, just how many layers we look through to the work.  There are frames within frames, there are palimpsest pieces, incisions, and interruptions in the supposed transparency of photography, which was embraced and canonized at MoMA and much of east coast photographers, critics and academics.

ER:  When I go through the show it still amazes me how unafraid he was in terms of using new technology, new materials, new processes and as you say, layering them on top of one another.  Anytime something came out, some new material or camera, Heinecken was experimenting with it immediately in such an uninhibited way. [ read entire interview ]

.

PAD/D Archive of Political Art

 Highlights From the PAD/D Archive.

The PAD/D archive is comprised of over 2,700 items, split into two sections: Regular files made up of documents, flyers, photographs and slides, and large flat files for posters, prints, and stencils.

Highlights From the PAD/D Archive

Aside from material related directly to PAD/D, countless files are dedicated to socially conscious arts organizations active between 1979–1990. Alongside familiar names such as the Guerrilla Girls, Group Material, Gran Fury, and the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), one will discover a myriad of lesser known collectives such as Angry Arts and Carnival Knowledge. Were it not for the efforts of PAD/D, the histories of many of these groups would have gone undocumented. The archive was formally donated to MoMA in 1994 by PAD/D members Barbara Moore and Mimi Smith. The photographs below represent a tiny portion of the archive. [see photo essay on highlights from the collection]

Read the second article about PAD/D on Hyperallergic

Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Songs Left Out of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Aperture Foundation NY

Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency started as a slide show with music.  To mark the third printing of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency Aperture has put online a piece by Greil Marcus on the soundtrack to Goldin’s original slideshow presentation of the work. Originally printed in Aperture #197 Winter 2009.

They have also assembled a YouTube playlist based on the soundtrack for Goldin’s slideshow, listen here.

Also, see interview and article @ Top Photography FIlms

Nan Goldin – Matthew Marks Gallery