René Magritte. La Clairvoyance (Clairvoyance), 1936; oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 25 9/16 in. © Charly Herscovici.

Magritte’s paintings, while traditional in technique (often oil on canvas), are innovative and witty in concept. Doubling, fragmentation, displacement, and irrational juxtapositions are his favored strategies. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Magritte used his background training in commercial sign painting to execute his works. And as with Duchamp, language games are a preeminent concern. “This is not a pipe,” proclaims Magritte’s painting of a pipe. The paradoxical proclamation is correct: It is a painting of a pipe. Near this work is a small painting of a piece of cheese resting inside an actual glass cheese tray. Title? This Is a Piece of Cheese. Gotcha! Through the combination of text and image, Magritte questions not only reality, but representation itself. This is art about art. Given the continued post-conceptual trend in contemporary art and the continued questioning of the politics of language, the popular appeal of Magritte comes as no surprise.

René Magritte. La Trahison des Images (Ceci N’est Pas une Pipe) (The Treachery of Images [This Is Not a Pipe]), 1929; oil on canvas; 23 3/4 x 31 15/16 x 1 in. © Charly Herscovici. Photo: Digital Image © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA, Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

Latent sexuality, anxiety, menace, and violence interlace the works thematically. L’Assine Menace [The Menaced Assassin] sums up both Surrealist painting’s fascination with the irrational and the movement’s obsessive and sexist attitude toward women. Multiple well-dressed male “assassins” hover around the victim of a crime: a murdered naked woman, bleeding from the mouth. One male assassin holds a prehistoric-looking club, another a voluminous fishing net, and an incongruent third man listens to a gramophone, perhaps on the verge of being ensnared further in the mystery. The assassins’ black bowler hats are a nod to the pre-WWI serial-fiction character Fantômas, favored by the post-WWI Surrealists. Magritte took up wearing the same type of hat as his signature piece.

René Magritte. L’assassin Menacé (The Menaced Assassin), 1927; oil on canvas, 59 1/4″ x 6′ 4 7/8 in. © Charly Herscovici.

MoMA’s tone deafness about Surrealism’s obsession with decapitated or fragmented naked women is evident when a nearby shaped canvas of a naked female torso, centering on the genitals, is praised by the wall label for its “technical virtuosity and debt to Old Master tradition.” The painting’s title is a giveaway to its ambitions: La Representation (Representation). The achievement here is the blending together of representation with the object represented: The painting is curved exactly around the depicted woman’s curves, with a curving gilt frame. The subject and its representation (the painting) strive to be one and the same: an icon, in the religious sense. It is also as artful and problematic a crotch shot as Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866).

René Magritte. La Clef des Songes (The Interpretation of Dreams), 1935; oil on canvas, 16 1/8 x 10 5/8 in. © Charly Herscovici. Photo: Jerry Thompson.

Revelations in this show are the works from private collections, rarely seen by the public. For example, the exhibition brings together a whimsical series of untitled cut-and-pasted paper collages from 1926-27 from private collections and different museums. In these collages, Magritte cleverly utilizes sheet music (with lyrics in English and German), cut into his trademark grelot shape resembling a chess piece and meant to stand in for the human form. In one collage, the chess-piece-shaped sheet music is tilted on its side to float like a cloud in the sky. From the same years, we are treated to Magritte’s graphic-design work for avant-garde Belgian journals such as Le Centaure (the centaur, cousin to the Surrealists’ favorite Greek mythological monster, the minotaur). His commercial advertisements—for a jewelry store or a restaurant in Brussels—feature weird juxtapositions of elements unrelated to jewelry or restaurants per se, echoing the same concern to unfix realistic representation as his paintings of the same period.

In Magritte’s La Lumiere des Coincidences [The Light of Coincidences], painted in Brussels in 1933, a realistic candle set on a table casts a shadow into a painting of a sculpture of a torso, illuminating the body inside the painted frame. A painting of a painting of a sculpture of a body—Magritte peels back the onion of representation in a way that keeps today’s viewers looking and wondering: What is real?

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through January 12, 2014. The exhibition will travel to The Menil Collection, Houston (February 14–June 1, 2014), and The Art Institute of Chicago (June 29–October 12, 2014).

The upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics and Paraolympics in Sochi, Russia, have shined a light on a host of environmental, migrant, labor, and civil rights concerns in Russia. International observers and Russian organizations indicate that the situation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Russia has recently deteriorated. An emergent “traditional values” ideology propagated by the state and church—that falsely posits homosexuality as being anti-Russian, a Western import, and dangerous to children—is leading to increased violence against LGBT people, penalty and fines for “homosexual propaganda,” hate speech in the media, and intimidation of LGBT activists by extremist organizations, soccer hooligans, and neo-Nazis.

Claude Cahun. Self Portrait, c. 1928. Gelatin silver print. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Against the backdrop of increasing, institutionalized homophobia in Russia, I looked for positive and realistic images of LGBT Russians. As a photography historian and film curator, I am aware of the potency of visual representation—the affirming power of self-representation in particular. My PhD dissertation on queer surrealist photographer and activist Claude Cahun argued for the power of photographic self-representation in both affirming and crafting identity in the face of rising fascism. The images I was seeing of LGBT Russians were either of frontline activists fighting for their right to public assembly or misrepresentations, painted in words, by the virulently homophobic invective of politicians, neo-Nazis, and Russian Orthodox Church leaders. American and British LGBT civil rights movements have been represented, documented, and dramatized in film (Milk), photographs (Catherine Opie), Conceptual art (Gilbert & George), political art and design (Gran Fury), and public assembly and protest (as documented in the exhibition AIDS in New York: The First Five Years). As LGBT Russians are fighting for the basic right to declare their very existence, as well as for the rights to assemble as a community and to raise children, this battle is playing out on the turf of visual imagery.

Anastasia Korosteleva. Girls, 2013. 18 x 13 cm. Courtesy the artist

Russian photographer Anastasia Korosteleva protects the identity of her subjects in the series Girls (2013) by literally burning their faces in the photographs. The burned-out faces of women embracing literally and metaphorically show the scars of homophobia.

Film festivals are being organized to bring the experience of LGBT people and filmmakers to new audiences in Russia. The LGBT Film Festival “Bok O Bok” (“Side By Side”) was the first international LGBT film festival in Russia. After experiencing censorship in its first year (2008), it has operated for the past five years at various sites in Russia. The festival was most recently found guilty and fined for violating the new “foreign agents” law.

Annica Karlsson Rixon and Anna Viola Hallberg. State of Mind (Installation view), 2008.
Gallery K1, Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden. Projection hd, 7 monitors sd, sound. Courtesy the artists

The Swedish photographer duo Annica Karlsson Rixon and Anna Viola Hallberg’s “State of Mind” (2006–8) consists of personal stories and group video portraits of Russian lesbian and bisexual women and their friends and family discussing issues of LGBT identity and East/West dynamics. The subjects, casually posed in places of significance to them in the city, such as along the banks of the Neva River in St. Petersburg, project a mix of emotions—joy, exuberance, hope, pride, comfort. The video portion presents filmed conversations with the subjects, viewed simultaneously to create an approximation of the community as a congregation of voices. The installation has been shown in St. Petersburg, as well as in Ukraine, Sweden, and the United States at UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery [1].

A June 2013 Russian federal law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” broad in its implications, is now being used to censor film. Russia’s federal oversight organization recently issued a warning to a popular movie channel for airing a French musical, Les Chansons d’Amour (2007), for its alleged “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” Local and federal laws banning “homosexual propaganda” have been enacted from 2006 to 2013, sparking fears that they could be used against visiting Olympic athletes and tourists. For foreign citizens found guilty of “homosexual propaganda,” there is a penalty of fifteen days in prison followed by an entry ban. Transgender Russians and LGBT teens are particularly vulnerable. For example, one Russian neo-Nazi group hunts for gay teens to abuse and humiliate, disseminating video of the attacks through social networks on the Internet.

President Obama’s meeting with LGBT activists during his trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, for the G20 summit this month, was a step toward acknowledging the problem of discrimination and furthering international debate (although Russian President Putin denies that discrimination against LGBT people exists). Obama said he is “very proud” of the activists’ work, pointing to Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the United States as precedents. The controversy over free speech in Russia has already gained attention via the internationally publicized plight of the all-female punk band Pussy Riot, two of whose members remain in prison after a brutal crackdown. Significantly, activists point out that the rise of discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, as well as feminists and atheists, is tied to xenophobia and violence against ethnic minorities. In all cases, “others” are set up as foils to advance the state’s ideology of purity.

[1] Disclosure: “State of Mind” was included in In Mind and Memory, an exhibition curated by #Hashtags editor Anuradha Vikram.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier makes her New York solo debut with A Haunted Capital, a tightly crafted, personal-is-political installation at the Brooklyn Museum. The artist’s hometown of Braddock, a forgotten steel mill town in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is marked by a geography of postindustrial degradation. An outsider might take a social documentary approach to Braddock’s history and current woes. As an insider, Frazier documents that history’s tangible impact on her own and her family’s lives―an impact characterized by environmental illness, institutionalized racism, and disparity in access to health care―and her community’s pride and tenacity.  Documentary-style photographs of the demolition of Braddock Hospital, the only hospital in the area, are juxtaposed with intimate portraits of Frazier’s mother and grandmother, both of whom learned they had cancer in 2008. (A link is implied between Braddock’s environment and these illnesses, as well as Frazier’s lupus.) Framed gelatin silver prints of Frazier, her mother, grandmother, grandfather, and family friends, taken in Braddock at various points between 2002 and 2011, line the two white walls of the installation space along with carefully selected cityscapes. The end walls are wallpapered with dozens of images, a visual archive Frazier has gathered of Braddock’s history, one that is inclusive of African Americans. This was done in response to her realization that African Americans were excluded from a 2008 history of the town, Braddock, Allegheny County. “In the face of this and other exclusions, I have a strong sense of duty to visually write my family and community into the history of Braddock,” she says. [1]

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Momme Portrait Series (Shadow), 2008. Gelatin silver photograph, 15 1/2 x 19 1/2 in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund; © LaToya Ruby Frazier

Frazier’s portraits hover between staged and intimate. In Shadow (2008), the artist’s profile overlaps with her mother’s body; together they cast an ominous shadow that acts as a third persona that, the artist reveals, “foreshadows the loss of Grandma Ruby.” Grandma Ruby, Mom, and Me (2009) was taken at Frazier’s grandmother’s open casket. Frazier’s photographs, including some that are part of this show, are arrayed around the casket, while the artist looks out at the camera with a mixture of loss, self-assurance, and defiance. The snapshot Mr. Jim Kidd (2011), which shows a man protesting the hospital’s destruction, is overshadowed by the finality of a photograph of the destroyed hospital and its empty parking lot dusted with snow. The man’s handwritten sign reads: “UPMC is race-based, class-based health care.”

Frazier’s influences range from Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and Farm Security Administration photographers to self-portraitists Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun, as well as cultural theorists bell hooks and Michele Wallace and urban geographer David Harvey, all of whom she cites as part of her “artistic family lineage.” Indeed, her show reads at times like a self-representation of a social self rather than a psychic one. “Grandma Ruby, Mom, and I have all been shaped by external forces,” the artist reflects. “On the micro level, we are three women from an abandoned community, but on the macro level, I see us as symbolic of state oppression and neglect,” she is quoted as saying in the exhibition brochure. Frazier credits the Community Art Practice class she took with Carrie Mae Weems at Syracuse University as having propelled her to investigate class, race, and capitalism. Her distinction is in how she demonstrates the imprint of these forces on herself and her close family members, allowing observer and observed to merge. In this melding of oppression and self-investigation―particularly in her attention to environmental illness–Frazier’s work recalls that of British photographer Jo Spence, who charted her own position within a rigid class system and, later, her status as a cancer patient. Spence’s self-representation emerged from Marxist class analysis into a technique she called “photo therapy,” which she developed with collaborators, thereby demystifying her auteur status as photographer.

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005. Gelatin silver photograph, 15 1/2 x 18 1/2 in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund © LaToya Ruby Frazier

Collaboration is key to Frazier’s practice, as well. In a self-portrait with her mother, Huxtables, Mom and Me (2009), Frazier wears an old Cosby Show T-shirt. She describes how her mother set up the camera “in the bedroom doorway, facing a mirror reflecting part of her image. Both the mirror and T-shirt are scratched, dusty, and fading.” The promise of the idealized African American TV family pales in comparison to the reality of Frazier’s family life.  In a lecture she performed at the museum, with her images projected in the background, she said, “Between my background and my foreground, I am not sure where I stand.” This hovering between real and imagined, background and foreground, in both the spatial and the social senses, marks Frazier’s work.

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Huxtables, Mom and Me, 2009. Gelatin silver photograph, 15 x 19 1/4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2011.63.3.© LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs function as evidence of her refusal to remain invisible. Avoiding digital manipulation or technical flourishes, she marshals photography’s innate ability to create visibility–an indelible visual record–for the marginalized and oppressed, in the service of critiquing social welfare institutions.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art through Aug. 11, 2013.

[1] LaToya Ruby Frazier, interview with Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art, Brooklyn Museum, from exhibition brochure.

Liena Vayzman is an art historian, critic, and curator based in New York. She earned her PhD in the History of Art at Yale University, completing a dissertation on French Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun. Recent publications include “I’d Rather Be Here and Now:  The Performative Verb of Painting – An Interview with Anoka Faroqee” in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and “Farm Fresh Art: Food, Art, Politics, and the Blossoming of Social Practice” in Art Practical.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.