Vesna Pavlović. Elements of the Choreography, 2013; two fabric flags; 27 x 156 in. each; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville.

Oscillating between archival research, anthropological studies, conceptual photography, and documentary film, Lost Art—Zeitgeist Gallery’s current exhibition of the work of Vesna Pavlović—examines the artist’s deep engagement with institutional resources, specifically slides and photographic ephemera culled from university libraries and the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, Serbia. Founded in 1996, the museum is the result of the integration of two other institutions: the Museum of the Revolutions of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minorities, and the vast Josep Broz Tito Memorial Center, a repository of historical, photographic, and personal materials that document the life and career of President Tito. Despite Tito’s successful resistance to European Fascism during World War II, his strict policies of anti-alignment with Stalinist Moscow, and the mandates of Western capitalism during and after the Cold War, Tito’s reign is blackened by some of the darkest human-rights violations of the post-Soviet era—an issue that animates his historical legacy with tremendous ambiguity, unresolved conflict, and controversy.

The unsettled nature of her country’s past can be felt in Pavlović’s images of warped canisters and dusty reels located in the depths of these institutions. Years of War, Decades of Piece (2013) frames the act of remembering through the aged ephemera and the slippery slope of Tito’s rule that remains broken and uncohesive for former Yugoslavians. Known as a great socialist revolutionary as well as a “benevolent” dictator, Tito does not rest easy in the hearts and minds of those who thrived and suffered under his rule. Pavlović had firsthand experience in the late trajectory of the Tito administration—which shifted from pomp and circumstance, love and adoration, to the horrors of the civil wars in the 1990s—and she seizes on the complicated emotional and political contexts of the Yugoslavian socialist era by mapping the individual within a realm of “lost” images and ideologies.

Vesna Pavlović. Fototeks Suite, 2015; archival pigment print; 20 x 30 in.; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville.

The collection of images presented in Lost Art asks the viewer to examine the difference between photography as a documentary device and a re-presentation of history. While the black-and-white scale of the photographs speaks of the distance of the past, the images resist romantic nostalgia or sentimentality through a decentering of the forms, symbols, and materials of Tito’s rule. This is captured most compellingly in the fabric-based works, which borrow from the iconographic and textile materials of state propaganda (the thin gleaming fabrics of national flags, banners, and boutonnieres) to speak of the former Yugoslavia’s political past. Elements of the Choreography (2013), a deflated composite of the national flags of Yugoslavia gently affixed to the white surface of the gallery wall, grips the viewer with its dark irony and clever theatrical employment of socialist signs. Drained of color, the flag shimmers with the breezes circulating within the room as if it were a stage curtain—an “Iron Curtain,” perhaps. And yet the flag also registers bodily, drooping and spreading across the floor of the gallery like so much dead weight—the deflated, drooping weight of a lost national identity and political purpose. This theme is expressed again in Pavlović’s installation of four archival prints across a pleated gray curtain. Flickering and twinkling, the specter of Tito and the spectacle of his regime flutter against the fabric—an effect re-presented within Pavlović’s images themselves as a way to embody within the image-matter the instability, fragmentation, and brokenness that marked (and continues to mark) this period in Balkan history.

Vesna Pavlović. Video Still, May 25, 1979, Television, Belgrade, 2015; Endura metallic print; 20.5 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville.

Just as the collective history of the 20th century in the former Yugoslavia cannot be pressed firmly into the neutralizing vice of history, Pavlović’s own personal history and individual participation in Tito’s socialist project cannot be affixed firmly into the artist’s own understanding and reflection of the final years of his reign. After searching though televised footage and radio commentary of the 1979 “Youth Day” celebration in the Tito archives in the Museum of Yugoslav History, Pavlović was able to rescue her own image out of the infinite landscape of recordings and documents, thereby piercing the opaque and abstracting veil of history with the tender image of schoolchildren overwhelmed by the exciting theatricality of the event. An archival print of the certificate of participation sent to Pavlović’s mother by the Yugoslavian government complements the stoic, detached, drained images that surround it, another powerful gesture of the loss of pride and tenuous relationship to Tito’s ideologies and legacy that continue to inform the landscape of Serbian memory today.

Vesna Pavlović: Lost Art was on view at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, through October 31, 2015.

London Stereoscopic Company. Peter Jackson Aka the ‘Black Prince'; December 2, 1889; 42.5 x 31.5 in. Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Born on the Danish island colony of Saint Croix with two generations of slaves behind him, the champion heavyweight boxer Peter Jackson cuts a lean and noble figure in his 1889 photographic portrait, his top hat perched level upon his head, his elegant Victorian garments pressed, his stylish accoutrements placed as evidence of his social persona as a gentleman–dandy. The portrait was taken just a year after his defeat of George “Old Chocolate” Godfrey, which gained him the “World Colored Heavyweight Championship” title, and the commanding confidence of his gaze and body language tells us that this is not a man easily bested. However, Jackson’s popularity in Great Britain (his nickname in the British press was “The Prince”) and powerful self-presentation in the photograph do not wipe away the historical context of the image, namely an era of tremendous institutional racism and oppression of Black subjects in 19th-century Britain, and the nation’s merciless colonial expansions on the continent of Africa and in the Middle East. As empowering as it is ambiguous, Jackson’s portrait belies the complicated admixture of cultural codes and fantasies imposed upon the Black subject in visual representation, and points to the unsettled struggle between the subject’s own agency, their mediation through the eye of the camera, and the conditions of Black cultural politics.

Jackson’s image is just one of the many striking photographic portraits included in Black Chronicles II at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia, that activate an important dialogue about the history and record of Black faces and bodies within Western culture. Organized in its original formation by the British photographic institute Autograph ABP in 2014, and curated by two of its most prominent staff members, Renée Massai and Mark Sealy, Black Chronicles II embodies Autograph’s commitment to mining public and private archives of images for the absent Black subject—a mission that “renders visible” the gaps, omissions, and absences within historical annals. In its move to Atlanta, the exhibition opens up a new strand of conversation around the history of the Black subject in the United States and asks viewers to make connections between the British and American formations of empire, racism, and colonialism.

Photographer/Studio: Alex Ayton Junior. Unidentified Sitter, Edinburgh; c. 1900. Carte-de-visite; 64 x 100 mm. Courtesy of Val Wilmer Collection.

Following the logic of the chronicle as a temporal record that orders (and often visualizes) historical events, this exhibition also enables viewers to discover new ways of seeing Black subjects within traditional histories of photography, and demands an awareness of the ways in which the historiography of the still image remains un-diverse and exclusionary. The photographs on display capture an array of stories and figures, from Jackson and Queen Victoria’s West African goddaughter Sarah Forbes Bonetta to unidentified sitters whose portraits function as sacred testimony to the collective formation and development of 19th-century British history and representational politics. Wearing fashionable dress and posed within the artificial theater of the photographic studio, these faces describe the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the Black subject and emphasize the ways in which Black subjectivity has been cast out or left unidentified within (visual) culture. The galleries at Spelman reverberate with Frantz Fanon’s description of “the passionate research” that is necessary to make space for these lost voices.[1]

London Stereoscopic Company. Member of the African Choir, 1891; framed & unglazed; 42.5 x 31.5 in. Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The dedication of this exhibition to the British cultural theorist and activist Stuart Hall (who died in 2014) links the legacies of Hall’s intellectual project to Autograph’s institutional mission, and forms the academic and political foundations of this body of photographs.[2] As the spokesperson for the British cultural-studies movement of the 1980s, Hall was an integral part of a generation that brought Black and ethnic minority artists into visibility in a time of Thatcherism, Reaganomics, the New Left, Jesse Helms, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Hall’s contribution to the field of cultural and minority studies is vast; it remains vital today, as new struggles for civil and race rights continue to challenge and mine the unequal fields of representation within American political life. It is clear to me that the curatorial premise of this exhibition is inextricably linked to the call of #BlackLivesMatter, which places the lives and bodies of African Americans at the forefront of an ongoing national dialogue on racial violence and oppression. In our current climate of protests, demonstrations, and riots, funneled through the channels of mainstream and social media, the representation of the Black subject “continues to become and transform within culture, history, and power.”[3][4]

Black Chronicles II was on view at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta through May 16, 2016.

[1] See Frantz Fanon’s text Black Skin/White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, NY: Grove Press, 2008, pg. 22.

[2] Audio excerpts from Hall’s 2008 keynote address, “The Missing Chapter: Cultural Identity and the Photographic Archive,” given at Rivington Place in London, echo throughout the galleries.

[3] See Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation” in Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, pg. 57–58.

[4] The exhibition was organized by Autograph ABP, London; curated by Renée Massai and Mark Sealy; and produced in collaboration with the Hulton Archive, London, a division of Getty Images.

Amer Kobaslija. Sputnik Sweetheart of New Orleans and the End of the World, 2007; oil on two panels; 85 x 124 ¼ in.

In his 1971 essay “The Function of the Studio,” conceptual artist Daniel Buren defined the artist’s studio as a metadiscourse of “frames, envelopes, and limits” imposed upon the working artist in the age of advanced capitalism.[1] Claiming that this privileged space had become nothing more than an “ossified custom”—a “commercial depot” for curators and dealers to ship works out into the world (and thus detach the artwork from the conditions of production and site of creation)—Buren stated that artists could only resist the domestication of their work by preserving it within their studios forever (like Constantin Brancusi) or abandoning the four walls of the studio altogether for a life of art making away from institutional repression and commodification.

Buren’s provocation turns on the idealized notion of the modern atelier, described famously by Honoré de Balzac in his 1831 Romantic tale of artistic failure, “The Unknown Masterpiece.”[2] Setting the story in a cramped, skylit room cluttered with the detritus of an artist’s struggles—the idealized working environment for the solitary male genius of 19th-century literature and art—Balzac dramatized the central dilemma of the studio as both a mental and physical space that encloses the corporeal and psychic “energy essential to art’s existence.”[3] Thus, Buren’s desire to reconnect the studio with social life seems to fall in line with our current era of “post-internet artistry,” where nomadic career paths, collaborative practices, work-from-home jobs, and overnight internet art stars are the norm, and notions of passive aesthetic contemplation and private retreat are interpreted as oppressive and old-fashioned.

A quick trip to any café exposes the ominous cloud that hangs over Buren’s call for a “post-studio” age, as Starbucks and pay-as-you-go office space evolves into the new office for artists, students, and creative professionals clicking away on their laptops. Yet the mythology of the sacred atelier persists in our contemporary culture, as Amer Kobaslija’s current series of paintings at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans indicates. Taking up the weighty legacy of the artist’s studio, Kobaslija’s work explores the studio as a concept, a locus of artistic identity, a space of sociability or private retreat, an alchemical universe of transformation, as well as a psychological construct.

Pablo Picasso. Frenhofer at work on his “Unknown Masterpiece,” 1927-1931; engraving for Ambrose Vollard’s commission of illustrations for Balzac’s Le chef-d’inconnu; 7 7/8 x 11 in.

For Kobaslija, the studio is a unique and personal world built of interchangeable stuff: floors, walls, shelves, canvases, paint, paper, chairs, tables, brushes, easels, and lighting fixtures repeat themselves across the series, their positions made mysterious by the absent bodies of the artists working (and sometimes living) inside. The invisible movements and patterned routines of the artists order the placement of these unique assemblages, turning each picture into a leftover document of the “work” of the work of art. Following the Romantic tradition (I am thinking of Gustave Courbet’s epic painting The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up the Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life from 1854-55), Kobaslija seems to suggest that “the studio activity of the painter has never been seen as essentially private, but always somewhat performative.”[4] Yet despite the artist’s ambition to underscore the generative side of the creative process, for Kobaslija, art always takes place in a closed room.

Amer Kobaslija. Studio with Chair and Ladder (J. Pollock, E. Hamptons), 2015; oil on Plexiglas; 12 x 14 ¼ in.

Using his own studio as well as the studios of his close friends, colleagues, and artistic idols such as Jackson Pollock and Balthus as subjects, Kobaslija seems to equate painting the studio with a unique form of access into the artistic process and the inner psyche—but it is an access tinged with uncomfortable voyeurism, claustrophobia, and at times emptiness. This is confirmed by the troublingly high vantage point that Kobaslija uses in each picture—an uncomfortable position that demands that the viewer take on the viewpoint of security cameras or surveillance equipment. The uneasy feeling that these painted worlds are on the cusp of breaking down or in the process of some violent, unfixable transformation adds to the ominous charge of the series. If the studio has traditionally been a place of solace from reality’s complications, this exhibition seems to respond with urgent ambiguity by asking important and unresolved questions about the place of artistic practice within today’s society, and the traditions of Western art making that have not (and will not) go away.

Amer Kobaslija was on view at Arthur Roger Gallery through May 30, 2015.

[1] See Daniel Buren’s essay “The Function of the Studio” (1971), reprinted in The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, eds. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 156-165.

[2] See Honoré de Balzac’s Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, first published as “Maître Frenhofer” in L’Artiste (Paris, July 21 and August 7, 1831), revised and republished in 1837, trans. by Richard Howard as The Unknown Masterpiece (New York: New York Review of Books, 2010).

[3] Ibid., p. 43.

[4] See Barry Schwabsky’s 2009 article “The Symbolic Studio,” in The Studio Reader, p. 90, for a more in-depth discussion of Courbet’s studio scene.

Christopher Saucedo. World Trade Center as a Cloud (No. 5), 2011; linen pulp on cotton paper; 60 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

In the aftermath of a catastrophe, memorialization and remembrance are inevitably tied to forms of forgetting. These often take the shape of reactionary modes that proclaim an urgent desire to smooth over the eruptive, unresolved conflicts that shape our collective past and place them into digestible modes of representation.[1] However, for the communities that bear witness to the impact of a disastrous event, forgetting is impossible, as the harsh realities of the event continue to manifest themselves economically, socially, geographically, and spiritually.

The New Orleans Museum of Art’s current exhibition Ten Years Gone—timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—draws attention to the phenomenological fabric of disaster by making powerful connections between the messy temporal structures that animate traumatic events, cycles of life, and art itself. Despite strong aesthetic and contextual differences between the six artists chosen for the exhibition, curator Russell Lord has woven together a polyphonic conversation that explores disaster as a way to understand tragedy as something forever in the process of becoming. Here, time oscillates between the roles of organizing principle, conceptual conceit, and metaphor for the untidy “unfinished-ness” that often marks complex events, as the potency and infallibility of art to fully re-present the past is explored with vigor.

Willie Birch. Crawfish Dwelling, 2009; bronze; 6 x 5.5 x 4 in. Courtesy of Willie Birch and Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA.

In an effort to avoid imposing a sweeping narrative of Katrina based on progress ten years from the event, or upon unreflective or sentimental modes of interpretation, many of the works chosen for the exhibit respond to an expansive field of issues, namely, the costs of catastrophe and the fragile equilibriums that sustain life on Earth. The thin net between the losses that continue to injure the citizens of New Orleans—who lost family members, neighbors, homes, personal belongings, and pets to the floodwaters—and the environmental losses brought on by the storm are felt most intensely in the works of New Orleans native Willie Birch. While Birch’s casting in bronze of the natural byproducts of Louisiana’s infamous crawfish population in Crawfish Dwelling (2009) speaks to the ecological losses suffered in the aftermath of the storm, it is also a meditation on the profound interdependency between human culture and the natural environment, casting new light on what is precious in today’s society. Also reflecting on disasters that captured the attention of the international media, Christopher Saucedo’s delicate work World Trade Center as a Cloud, No. 5 (2011) opens up crucial links between the devastations in New Orleans and the catastrophe of 9/11, and invites the viewer to consider the disturbing relationship between the events, namely their mutual grounding in human error, failed standards of government accountability and transparency, and the human costs of long-standing environmental, energy, and shipping policies.

Nicolas Nixon. The Brown Sisters, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1975. © Nicolas Nixon. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

The final galleries dissolve the specificity of the exhibition’s tone into a poignant meditation on the cyclical patterns of renewal and transformation that structure human life through the time-dependent media of video and photography. Canadian artist Spring Hurlbut’s 2008 video work Airborne manipulates the material components of death—cremated ashes—into a balletic contemplation of the dynamic impulses animating life, and of the inexplicable abstraction that loss and death involve. However, it is Nicolas Nixon’s long-term photographic project documenting his wife and her three sisters over the span of forty years that proves to be the most irresistible to viewers in its direct and disquieting engagement with the mortality of its sitters. Simple, visually crisp, and equally intimate and coolly combative, Nixon’s finale to the exhibition foregrounds the power of photography to conjure materialist modes of remembrance and duration by documenting the passing of time through the faces and figures of aging individuals. Closing the exhibition with a family portrait—a genre of photography that embodies the act of “coming together”—Ten Years Gone shapes a utopian vision for the future of New Orleans as a city marked deeply by its traumatic past, moving forward nevertheless into the future with hope and love.[2]

Ten Years Gone was on view at New Orleans Museum of Art through September 7, 2015.

[1] For more on the art of commemoration and catastrophe, see: The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, eds. TG Ashplant and Graham Dawson (New York: Routledge Press, 2013); Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993); and Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin’s Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[2] My deepest thanks must go to New Orleans Museum of Art’s Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Russell Lord. During a telephone interview on June 29, 2015, Lord referred to the exhibition as an opportunity to “gather these artists together in order to ask questions about what was intended by the commemoration of the ten-year anniversary, and what has and has not been achieved.”