The symbolic charge of “the day after” marks itself as an interval structured by ambiguity as opposed to closure—a time of wake-up calls, hangovers, regrets, and comedowns. In science fiction, the phrase often suggests the apocalyptic nightmares of a world threatened by total disaster, while in revolutionary politics it articulates the call to reality after the collective euphoria from battle has worn away. It is this landscape of post-event fallout and failed achievement that undergirds The 5th of July, an exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center curated by Daniel Fuller. Fuller gathers a diverse group of artists from across the United States who work in an equally diverse range of media, united by their unique “explorations of failed promise.”[1] Invoking the day after America’s national celebration of independence, and the traditions of spectacular neighborhood firework displays, street parades, picnic banquets, and other forms of gluttonous consumption that define the holiday, Fuller asks us to be attentive to the ways in which celebration is often followed by its opposite.

The 5th of July, 2016; installation view, far left: Katherine Bernhardt. Cantaloupe, iPhones, Nikes, and Capri Suns, 2014; acrylic and spray paint on canvas; 96 x 120 in. Courtesy of Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

In many ways, the desire to cultivate an uneasy dialectic between celebration and despair is what animates the vast majority of contemporary art—a lesson learned from Pop Art, which seized upon the slick, disposable, literal image-culture of the postwar era in order to point to the anxious cultural desires at the core of capitalist consumption.[2] This tension between transcendence and travesty is at the core of modernism. And yet, despite the exhibition’s many rhetorical prompts that ask viewers to hold these works together under themes of regretful failure and empty promise, I was struck more by the ways in which certain works of art seemed to struggle under this narrative. If anything, there are moments within the show that resound with an optimism and euphoria that are difficult to ignore.

The inclusion of a constellation of garish name-brand logos and sweet consumables might point to the depressing core of disposable modern life, yet Katherine Bernhardt’s electric orange and pink cacophony of Capri-Suns, cantaloupes, and Nike sneakers, Cantaloupe, iPhones, Nikes, and Capri Suns (2015), rattles with a repetitive patterning that seems to celebrate brashness with humor and joy. Bernhardt’s jazzy color harmonies and playful rhythms of pattern speak less of conspicuous consumption and more of the formal history of modern painting through their cheeky merger of decoration and consumer kitsch.

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Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you the most recent edition of their popular “Locating Technology” column, a consideration of the Museum of Stolen Art (MOSA). Author Genevieve Quick notes that “MOSA capitalizes on the unknown: the whereabouts of the artworks, sometimes the conditions of their theft or looting. Rather than explaining the significance of given artworks as conventional museums do, MOSA poses questions about their absence.” This article was originally published on April 7, 2016.

Ziv Schneider. Art Detective: The Museum of Stolen Art, 2015; Android VR app. Courtesy of the Artist.

Ziv Schneider’s Museum of Stolen Art (MOSA) (2014–) employs virtual reality (VR) to rethink how museums and technology approach embodiment, audience, and collections. As a smartphone app, MOSA allows viewers to navigate virtual galleries, complete with audio tours that contextualize its exhibitions and pop-up didactic texts about the individual works. In harnessing VR’s imaginative possibilities, MOSA displays absent artworks—those that have been removed by criminal acts, war, or dubious historical agreements, domestically and abroad. As a virtual environment, MOSA’s fluid relation to place and audience challenges how museums attempt to represent and inscribe local cultural identities, as well as construct a global citizenry. With several rotating exhibitions spanning from ancient to contemporary civilizations—Stolen European Paintings, Stolen Photographs, The Looting of Afghanistan,The Looting of Iraq, and Recent Thefts are currently on view—MOSA addresses the individual and cross-cultural heritages of Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East. Indirectly, MOSA suggests that conflict and war have been instrumental in many art thefts around the world, historically and more recently. While operating didactically, MOSA also includes many voids that invite questions about museums’ strategies and missions.

As many museums expand, their architectural presence marks their escalating cultural and economic interests. In addition to being repositories of art, brick-and-mortar museums are cultural brands that cities use to elevate or maintain their status as culturally relevant and as tourist destinations. As a VR museum, MOSA sidesteps the battle for cultural capital among conventional museums by offering immateriality and simulation. Downloadable for free, MOSA is portable and easily accessible to anyone with a smartphone and a Cardboard viewer. Viewers make MOSA present where they are, rather than having to travel to a place, either within one’s city or beyond.

Read the full article here.

Today we look back at an intriguing curatorial question from last year: “Which comes first—the artist or the machine?” Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. This article was originally published on March 16, 2015

In the role of writer and curator, I find myself playing bureaucratic middle man between artists and the public, or artists and institutions. But, where it comes to performing the role well, which comes procedurally first—the artist or machine? When I get an idea for an exhibition or written feature, the appropriate order of things often gets confusing for me. I’m not sure if I should first approach the artist with the idea (to make sure they are willing and able to participate) or should first approach the institution/publication (to be sure the project gets green-lit). I’d hate to pitch something to my colleagues that I can’t ultimately deliver, just as I’d also hate to get an artist’s hopes up about something I can’t get the “production powers that be” interested in. An etiquette lesson would be great.

Rachel Reupke. Letter of Complaint, 2015 (video still); color video; 10:00.

A few years ago, a friend bounded up to me at an opening and announced, “Good news! My curatorial proposal to Institution X was accepted and you’re in the show!” Needless to say, I was pretty stoked, but I was also extremely surprised, since that was the first I’d heard of it. This curator was an old friend and a trusted professional, so the situation was a bit different, but it left me wondering: What if I didn’t want to be in the show, or work with that curator or space, or if the work wasn’t available? This would have left us all in a sticky position.

I must admit that I don’t really care how other arts professionals handle this situation. Your question provides me with the opportunity to stand near, if not actually climb onto, one of my favorite soapboxes—a rather large one that is labeled Put the Artist First. As a curator, your primary loyalty should be to the artists, and therefore you must pitch your plans to them at the outset. Don’t worry so much about not being able to deliver if your proposal is not accepted; the way around that is to tell the artists that your project is in the initial stages and you’ll keep them informed if things move forward. That way, you haven’t promised anything other than an interest in working with them.

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Although International Transgender Day of Visibility was over a week ago (March 31), the need to show support for the transgender community only increases in urgency with the recent passing of anti-LGBTQ laws in North Carolina and Mississippi. Today at Daily Serving we’re thinking about the importance of amplifying trans narratives, including visual stories of personal experiences. As Shauna Jean Doherty shares in this Shotgun Review of Wynne Neilly’s work, sometimes art can resiliently “offer clarity where ignorance predominates.” This article was originally published on August 17, 2014. 

Wynne Neilly. January 24th 2014-24th Shot, 2014; Fuji Instax Film; 4 ¼ x 3 ¼ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Ryerson Image Centre. Photo: Wynne Neilly.

Through a collection of archival documents, personal photos, and voice recordings in the exhibition Female to “Male” at the Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto-based artist Wynne Neilly presents a self-portrait of his personal journey transitioning from two relative subject positions, “female” and “male.” Quotations around the word “male” in the title ruminate on the mutability of the term, its constructed nature, and the spectrum on which all gender lies. Queer theorist Judith Butler would contend that “male” is an approximation of a gender identity that, as established, can never be fully realized.[1] While gender is indeed provisional, the physical, emotional, and economic impacts of transitioning are not.

Weekly Instant Photographs, 1–45 (2013–2014) depict Neilly injecting himself with 50–100mg of testosterone, and document his physical transformation over a period of months. Displayed in a horizontal line, the photographs feature an expressionless Neilly standing in front of the same gray-white backdrop in his apartment. During the exhibition’s opening, swarms of viewers hovered over these snapshots, voyeuristically attempting to observe traces of the hormone’s effects. Though concerns of spectacle and personal preservation may be misplaced in an exhibition replete with such intimate ephemera, it is indeed difficult not to be moved by the installation’s revealingly diaristic inflections.

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From our friends at REORIENT, today we bring you an interview with the Saudi photographer, gallery owner, journalist, and princess Reem Al Faisal. Author Joobin Bekhrad talks with Faisal about her most recent solo exhibition, Nass [People], color, and being a woman photographer in “a man’s world.” This piece was originally published on March 1, 2016.

Reem Al Faisal. Zaheera.

It’s early in the morning, and, amidst news of escalating tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, I find myself—an Iranian in “Tehranto”—dialing a princess in Jeddah. Scratching my wild locks long overdue for a trim, my thoughts are fluttering amongst black-and-white images of Bedouins, the fabled “Empty Quarter” of the Arabian Peninsula, and the adventures of Wilfred Thesiger. I don’t know what to think; I’m still trying to keep my eyes open and stop yawning, while being distracted by the coffee maker in the corner of my eye. I should have made a cup, at least, I think to myself, as someone picks up on the other end. In a few moments, Reem Al Faisal pops on the line, and I forget all about the coffee, Thesiger, and making a visit to the salon; I didn’t know princesses could be so interesting.

The granddaughter of the late King Faisal, Reem is perhaps best known for her criticism of Saudi society as well as her renowned gallery in Dubai dedicated to photography, The Empty Quarter. Unbeknownst to some, she is also an active photographer herself, and has recently opened a new branch of the gallery in her hometown of Jeddah. The launch of the Jeddah location last November also coincided with her first solo exhibition in the gallery, Nass [People], comprising photographs taken within the past twenty-odd years in Jeddah and the southern Arabian province of Jizan. For the first time, Reem has introduced elements of color and graphic design into her photographs, which show the seldom-highlighted human side of a country brimming with vibrancy and verve; but pop art it ain’t. Who, though, is this artist I’d been hearing so much about, and how did she get me to prick up my ears at an ungodly hour on a blue December’s morning?

Read the full article here.

Surrounded by the works in Father Figures Are Hard to Find, fifty or so attendees sat on the concrete floor of neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), awaiting the lecture–performance Da Da Daddy Hasselhof by Mysti, who appeared in drag, wearing a cascading blonde wig and bright halter and miniskirt combo. Her academic talk began with a slow-building critique of object-making and market-driven aesthetics, and came to a crescendo in a takedown of identity as an impervious shield against making bad or exploitative art. She challenged 02.02.1861 (2009–) by Danh Vo, a work that consists of a letter by J. Théophane Vénard, written just before his execution, to his father. Vo’s own father mails hand-copied versions of the French letter (which he cannot read because he doesn’t speak the language) to buyers in an unlimited edition until his death. A copy, rendered in flawless blue calligraphy, was prominently displayed in the next room.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience), 1987; C prints; 49 x 41 cm. Courtesy of the Artist, Autograph ABP, and nGbK, Berlin.

Mysti is an emerging, U.S.-born performance-based artist interested in “queering theory,” while art star Danh Vo was born in south Vietnam and became a political refugee when his family fled in a handmade boat and was later rescued at sea before settling in Denmark. But both have fathers who were disappointed when their sons decided to become artists. These kinds of divergent yet overlapping narratives are echoed again and again in the transgressive, queer-centric exhibition, where father figures of all kinds are revered and rejected through entirely individual gestures.

At the entrance to the exhibition, the patrilineal status quo of identity is confronted by two self-portraits by Juliana Huxtable, Sympathy for the Martyr (2015) and Lil’ Marvel (2015). Rather than clinging to identity, Huxtable molds it like putty in her hands, shapeshifting into a superheroine or trans-Christ. Her self-aware, Cindy Sherman-like transformations are otherworldly but human, and thus gloriously imperfect. Much like Sherman’s earliest works, the tension between self-determination and others’ projections is well crafted. At the far end of the gallery, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s performative images Under the Surplice (1987), Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience) (1987), and Bronze Head (1987), made nearly three decades earlier, critique the limitations of cultural inheritance through the lens of a queer, HIV-positive Nigerian expat.

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If you are currently attending or working in an academic arts institution, look around. What is the ratio of women to men in the student body? What proportion of the faculty is female? How many female faculty members are tenured? How many department chairs or deans are women? At many institutions, there is a visible disproportion between the number of women who are students versus the number who make it to ranked, tenured faculty or senior administration. This conspicuous lack of women in positions of power is the impetus for the groundbreaking 2015 study “Little Chance to Advance? An Inquiry into the Presence of Women at Art Academies in Poland,” published by the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation.

Karolina Melnica. Celujacy (Excellent), n.d.; performance documentation.

Though the data portion of the study concentrates on Poland, it would be easy to extrapolate the majority of the philosophical findings to art departments, colleges, and universities around the world. “Little Chance to Advance” illustrates the cultural, psychological, and environmental factors that operate on individual and systemic levels to disenfranchise women, both within and beyond the academy. Currently, across the nine Polish visual art academies, women constitute 77 percent of the student body, but only 34 percent of assistant professors, 25 percent of associate professors, and 17 percent of full professors. In essence, the higher the level in the visual arts academy, the more women disappear. Are they opting out? If not, at which points in their trajectory are they being pushed out of the system?

Using data obtained from the academies and the Central Statistical Office of Poland, anonymous questionnaires, and in-depth interviews, “Little Chance to Advance” found that the gaps can’t be explained by a single factor. Students of both genders self-report similar aspirations and priorities, including the willingness to forego a family for the sake of their career; in fact, women are less eager than men to take care of their families after completing their studies. Equally significant, though divergent, were the responses to questions regarding employment strategies: Women put their faith mainly in experience, credentials, and hard work, while men placed more emphasis on social influences such as networking, family background, and even “having a romantic affair with someone important.”[1] The Literature Review and Results sections of the study discuss social capital and the ways in which power is transferred along gendered networks. In 2016, this isn’t surprising information—examinations of male networks of power and the “old boys’ club” have been available for quite a while—but the study rightly asserts that “social capital might be of even greater importance in the art world due to its vague criteria of evaluation and close relations with protégés” and “The importance of networking increases in dysfunctional institutions which offer few transparent paths of promotion.”[2]

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