A clear and joyful light floods the inner gallery of Ink Studio in Beijing, where He Yunchang performed a series of three grueling new works in his exhibition Water Forming Stone. Light dances through candy-colored drinking glasses that are suspended in midair over a pedestal of simulated crystals and jade. It radiates off of the warm white walls cleverly composed of cardboard shipping boxes and onto a tree made of rubber tires, which sits on a polished black floor. In this enchanting environment, everyday objects evoke nature and beauty, stillness and movement, growth and peace.

He Yunchang. The Expanse of Tranquility, 2015; documentation of performance work. Courtesy of Ink Studio.

In contrast to his beautiful installation, He’s new performances are tedious, taxing his own endurance and the audience’s in equal measure. In The Expanse of Tranquility (2015), the first of the three pieces, He punctures a sack of ink that is suspended over a glass pane. For several hours, drops of ink fall onto the glass, and He uses sheets of calligraphy paper to wipe the drips off. In Cloud Shadows at the Heart of the Mirror (2015), He sets in motion a crystal cube that swings like a pendulum over a glass pane. After waiting over two hours for the swinging to stop, He cuts the rope, sending the crystal cube shattering onto the glass pane. In The Embrace of Wind and Dew (2015), He uses a calligraphy brush to dot water droplets onto a glass pane, only to wait for hours for the water to evaporate. In each of these performances, He is naked except for a thin white shroud, and is flanked by a row of similarly dressed women.

Water Forming Stone is part performance series, part career retrospective. The rest of the gallery is filled with documentation of the somber, body-breaking performances which He built his career on. These include Wrestling: One and One Hundred (2001), in which He consecutively wrestled 100 migrant workers; Keeping Promises (2003), in which He kept his hand in a block of hardening cement for twenty-four hours; and The Rock Tours Around Great Britain (2006–2007), in which He carried a rock around the perimeter of England on foot.

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#art #class #wealth #access #innovation #middleclass

Writing for Artnet in January, Ben Davis’s “Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?” raised an important question about the relationship between privilege and access to a life in the arts. Examining the upbringings of a number of artists currently or recently on view at museums in New York, Davis drew the conclusion that if not middle class, the majority of artists were more likely to come from wealth than from working/poor backgrounds. Can anyone without access to wealth afford to work the long and frequently unpaid hours demanded by the arts?

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Bal du Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

Art history suggests that the well-off have always had an inside line to the halls of culture, acting as artists or producers of major commissions. The middle-class artist is a more recent invention of the 19th century, occupying a social position that emerged with the Industrial Revolution and development in cities from Paris to New Delhi to Brasilia. In the Modernist cultural paradigm that emerges from this circumstance, the middle-class artist has an important role to play. His or her wealth is sufficient to ensure a liberal-arts education, but not so abundant as to be an insulator against the poetry of the street. The middle class ensures that vernacular subjects and art forms infiltrate the spaces of high art and culture. This is now something we take for granted, so much so that even the one-percenter artists that Davis lists work in common, everyday materials.

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Even if viewers know a little about the cultural and culinary history of Mexico, Gloria Carrasco’s exhibition at the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City might appear to be a show dedicated to the phallus. The gallery is filled with dozens of variations on the same object—a long, tapered shape made in a multitude of materials from textiles to ceramics and colors from earthy browns to bright pinks. The pieces are painted, gilded, bandaged, appliquéd, tied, chained, shackled, or skewered. Some hang from the ceiling while others are propped against the wall. It’s a delightful and funny first impression.

Gloria Carrasco. Entre Fusiles y Metlapiles, 2014; ceramic; 160 x 180 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Museo de Arte Popular, Mexico D.F. Photo: Jorge Gomez del Campo.

These phalli are actually metlapiles, cylindrical-shaped stones used to grind maize on a metate (grindstone). Also called mano del metate (metate’s hand), the metlapil figures prominently (along with the metate) in Mexican art and culture; they are a nostalgic image of pre-conquest Mexico, as well as a symbol of women’s work and domesticity. But Carrasco’s show, Prófugos del Metate (Fugitives from the Metate), breaks this cliché open. The artist clearly enjoys exploiting the humorous contradiction of an object that simultaneously suggests the masculine and the feminine. In one work in particular, Mine Is Bigger than Yours (2014), the metlapil is explicitly presented as both an erect phallus and a symbol of feminist empowerment.

In another work, various large-scale metlapiles on a bed of stones lean against a wall. The artist clearly wants to play with what they might signify; the title, Entre Fusiles y Metlapiles (Between Rifles and Metlapiles) (2014), situates the viewer within a hermeneutic field that engages many possible meanings simultaneously; the artist, having created something that looks suspiciously like a bunch of cigars in an ashtray, seems to be winking at the viewer, saying that sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar.

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We were delighted to see art-world activists the Guerrilla Girls on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote their exhibition at the Walker, which opened last week (on view until December 31, 2016). To round out the historical context of second-wave feminism from which the Guerrilla Girls emerged, today we bring you Lia Wilson’s review of Women’s Work: Feminist Art From the Collection at Smith College Museum of Art. This article was originally published on October 29, 2015.  

Carolee Schneeman. Eye Body #1, 1963–79; gelatin-silver print with hand coloring and scratching; 14 in x 11 1/2 in. Courtesy of Smith College Art Museum, purchased with the Judith Plesser Targan Class of 1953 Fund.

The exhibition Women’s Work is constructed within a historical frame. All of the included artists are introduced as individuals prominent in second-wave feminism, defined as a past era from the 1960s through the 1980s, a period with a beginning and an end. It cannot be denied that a great deal has changed in both feminist thought and social mores since then. Third-wave feminism called out the exclusions embedded in the second wave’s goals, and more nuanced and inclusive definitions of gender and sexual identity are now written into law and protected. In a 2015 interview, Gloria Steinem, a figurehead of the second wave, explained why she changed her mind about marriage. “I didn’t change, marriage changed. We spent thirty years in the United States changing the marriage laws. If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That’s not true anymore. It’s possible now to make an equal marriage.”[1] With this kind of concrete change, one might expect feminist art from forty or fifty years ago to feel somewhat dated, like throwbacks to an earlier moment in a righteous narrative of progress. The work in Women’s Work is anything but that.

The exhibition groups the artworks within five themes of second-wave feminism: “Challenging Institutions and Canonical Traditions in Art,” “The Body,” “‘Women’s Work,’” “Gender and Performativity,” and “Race and Ethnicity.” Much of the work doesn’t fit cleanly into just one theme, a testament to the many dimensions of the artists’ motives and an illustration that oppression occurs on multiple, concurrent fronts. Inequity can run rampant at home, at work, and in the art world simultaneously. Such is the nature of patriarchy.

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From our friends at Big Red & Shiny in Massachusetts, today we bring you a review of the exhibition Drawing Redefined at deCordova Museum. Author Shana Dumont Garr says of the exhibition, “The works by these five artists were arranged to consider an expanded definition of drawing engaging process, materials, and time. This premise arms viewers with a consistent framework to engage with the work, at times leading to more questions.” This article was originally published on January 11, 2016.

Drawing Redefined, installation view, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. Photo: Clements Photography and Design, Boston.

Drawing Redefined, on view at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum through March 20, 2016, is an entrancing show, with a presentation that is at once spare and sumptuous. All the works on view spring from a drawing practice, although they are also rooted in a sculptural tradition. Throughout the show, the audience is prompted to consider process as conceptual content—a prioritization that may lead one to think about the origins of the categories of art-making, and whether this categorization is in fact helpful. The five exhibiting artists, Roni Horn, Esther Kläs, Joelle Tuerlinckx, Richard Tuttle, and Jorinde Voigt, did not create the pieces chosen for the exhibition as preparation for other work, but rather as a means of understanding and progressing in their chosen (and wide-ranging) media. As a satisfying extension of this premise, each artist carries forth their drawing discipline in distinctive ways.

A host of multi-directional angles open the exhibition with works by Richard Tuttle, Roni Horn, and Joelle Turlinckx. They each occupy different zones of space within the gallery, with Tuttle’s mixed-media constructs occupying the lower quadrant of the wall and the adjacent patch of the floor, Horn’s large-scale framed collages dominating the walls, and Turlinckx’s pieces standing on the floor. Tuttle’s Flower meets viewers first and is initially jarring in its simplicity. The light-pink painted-wood relief rests on the floor like tiles positioned in a four-square. In an exhibition whose title asks us to consider the boundaries of drawing, Tuttle uses negative space as a form of mark-making; the absences between each piece of wood create borders that enable the four pieces to become a single object. Another of his works, Looking for the Map 11 (2013–14), leans against the wall, like a lopsided wooden pitchfork dressed in dashing swathes of fabric. From further away, across the gallery, an even more appealing view of Looking for the Map 11 comes from just beyond a floor arrangement, Volume d’Air, by Turlinckx.

Read the full article here.

Darren Reid’s journey into his current painting practice could be described as fortuitous. Four years ago, the self-taught artist found himself in a sad predicament. He needed to either put his dog to sleep or commit to giving her a shot of insulin every eight hours. In choosing the latter, Reid found his life transformed into a restrictive cycle of caretaking that meant he was at home often, so he took up painting. Now the artist’s work is collected by a number of galleries and private collectors.

Darren Reid. North Mill, 2012; acrylic on canvas; 23.6 x 23.6 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

North Mill (2012) is a rendition of the view outside his house at the time he began to paint. Prior to his artistic practice, works of old painting masters such as Caravaggio, Canaletto, and Holbein held an allure for Reid. “The skill required to render something so perfectly in paint always fascinated me,” Reid explains. Referencing Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) as an example of work that inspired a love for intricate craftsmanship, Reid is also drawn to the genre for its documentary value, especially in this post-photography age.

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I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on the 68th day of Marilyn Arsem’s 100-day-long performance exhibition, 100 Ways to Consider Time. The premise behind Arsem’s exhibition (which exists, it seems, as one piece or work) is that the artist will be on-site, situated in a gallery inside the museum, for each of the 100 days of the show. As the museum is open seven days a week, that means that Arsem will be there seven days a week as well. The gallery that she occupies is a small square inside of the contemporary wing, with works from the museum’s contemporary collection—objects and paintings by artists like Kehinde Wiley, Sheila Hicks, Andy Warhol, El Anatsui, and Josiah McElheny—paving the way to Arsem’s doorway. The interior of Arsem’s modest space is sparse. She is sitting at a small, squarish table more or less in the open center of the room. There are two chairs, and Arsem sits on one. A patient, speckled rock sits atop a folded black felt blanket on the other. One other piece of furniture—a modern-looking lamp—graces the minimalist room.

Marilyn Arsem: 100 Ways to Consider Time; performance still, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Courtesy of the Artist and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

On the day of my visit, Arsem was reading aloud to a dozen or so visitors—who shuffled and circulated as new onlookers joined and veteran audience members left—from Adrian Bardon’s A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time. The book is something of a summary of ideas about time and its measurement, from Heraclitus to Einstein. During the period that I shared Arsem’s space, she progressed from the discovery of the speed of light to Einstein’s theory of relativity. The book, perched upon her small table, was joined by a matte black metal water bottle, a black notebook, and black glasses case. Arsem herself was dressed from head to toe in black as well, reading haltingly about our “inertial frames” and the “relativity of simultaneity.”

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