In Terms Of

Tag: Venus

  • Get Off the Internet

    Begun in March 2015, this essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    I Will Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism
    Thursday, March 12, 2015
    Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, Brooklyn, NY

    Leah DeVun introduces the panel (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    From an aesthetic point of view, the term “punk”—whether referring to a music genre, a fashion style, or a nonconformist attitude—has generated an incredibly diverse creative output that ranges from cynical and nihilistic to self-empowered and ethically sound. Tonight’s panel, organized by A.I.R. Gallery and the Women and the Arts Collaborative at Rutgers University, addressed the passionate, potent combination of youth rebellion, women’s rights, and fast, furious music through the stories of five panelists who emerged from various punk scenes in the United States. The moderator of the panel, Leah DeVun, an artist and a professor of women’s and gender history, described the difficulty of summarizing each speaker’s impact on art, music, and culture into a one-paragraph introduction. One crucial thing, she contended, is that punk still has the power to fight the status quo.

    In a leather vest and boots, the singer, musician, author, actor, and spoken-word performer Lydia Lunch took the microphone and walked to the front of the stage, where she declared that she was No Wave, not punk. As opposed to the London variety, Lunch explained, “punk in New York was personal insanity, personified and thrown onto the stage.” Declaring affinities with the Surrealists and Situationists, she said, “I have always been fucking resisting.”

    Lydia Lunch in 1979 (photography by Ray Stevenson)

    Lunch grew up in Rochester, New York, and experienced the city’s race riots of 1967 as an eight-year-old. As a teenager she ran away from home, leaving behind her “asshole” father, a door-to-door Bible salesman, for a thriving underground scene. Finding Patti Smith inspirational but traditional, Lunch channeled her rage through abrasive music, angrier and artier than the punk of the Ramones. “I had a band that sounded like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,” she spat out, “at the same time I had a band that sounded like a slug crawling across a razor blade.”1 Other musical projects adopted other genres, such as big band.

    “Somebody had to come out with a woman’s voice and articulate aggression,” Lunch avowed, “and use some of the enemy’s language and put it right back in their fucking face. And that is basically what I’m still doing today, whether that’s through literature, art, photography, music, illustrated work, or writers’ workshops.” Her work over the past forty years can be characterized by a resistance to the patriarchal cycle of abuse. “Details are specific,” she said. “Trauma is universal.”

    Wearing her signature plastic mask, the artist and performer Narcissister read a short statement paper that outlines her project: to use intense eroticism, humor, and spectacle to address gender and racial identity and issues of representation. She presented images of Narc vs. Judy, a recent work made during a Yaddo residency, in which she placed vegetables and thrift-store bric-a-brac on the pages of a book on Judy Chicago’s canonical installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79). The older artist inspired Narcissister for several reasons—both changed their name as “a symbolic statement of self-determination” and both create vaginal imagery. Narcissister screened an eleven-minute draft of a video in progress, also made at Yaddo, that retells the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” with sexually explicit glee.

    Narcissister as Little Red Riding Hood (artwork © Narcissister)

    A champion of DIY, the curator Astria Suparak was a self-described Riot Grrrl as a teenager in Los Angeles. Working without formal curatorial-studies training or even a master’s degree, she surveyed her career in three parts: as a student, as an independent curator, and as an institutional employee. In the late 1990s, Suparak programmed a film series at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she was an undergraduate, that showed experimental work, hard-to-find work, and the work of women, queers, and other marginalized groups. Because Pratt sponsored the project—nearly one hundred events in all—through student-activities funds, admission was free.

    Suparak connected with the larger experimental film scene in New York, which helped her as an independent curator after the turn of the century. She organized projects merging film and video, audio and music, live performance, and one-night art exhibitions; she even used dance and dinner parties as a medium. With the “rock-band model” for her activities, she “did a lot of shows in bars during those years,” in addition to nontraditional spaces: an abandoned mall in Louisiana, a disco hall in Dublin, and a roller-skating rink in Philadelphia.

    Astria Suparak is meeting her childhood goals (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The third phase of Suparak’s career is unfolding in university galleries, where she seeks to expand an institution’s identity and audience, bringing in engineers, sociologists, and sports fans. “My curatorial work isn’t only meant for art-world consumption,” she stated. Since 2013 Suparak has been touring Alien She, an exhibition organized with Ceci Moss that originated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which fired her early last year). Named for a Bikini Kill song, Alien She is not a history show but instead foregrounds the nonmusical “creative output” spawned by the early 1990s cultural moment of Riot Grrrl.

    Osa Atoe, creator of the music fanzine Shotgun Seamstress, is a potter and art teacher based in New Orleans. Growing up in northern Virginia in the 1990s, she read record reviews for Smashing Pumpkins and Courtney Love in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone, Raygun and Venus. (Her friends listened to TLC and Boyz II Men, and her parents to Afropop and R&B.) A believer in self-education, Atoe played in and toured with bands and did volunteering and organizing in Washington, DC—she finished college at age 28. Later, as a black woman in Portland, Oregon, she was surrounded by white liberals whose attitudes toward race she found awkward.

    Issue 8 of Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress

    Looking for a means of expression all her own, Atoe found inspiration in the “educational and cathartic” zine Evolution of a Race Riot, which demonstrated to her that an audience for black punk culture existed. Yet when making a Maximum Rocknroll or Punk Planet for black kids, she said, “I didn’t want to come from a place of critique.” Not limited to music, she wrote about the photographer Alvin Baltrop and the video artist Kalup Linzy.

    “For better or worse, whether I like it or not,” said the writer and musician Johanna Fateman, “I’m associated with the historical movement of Riot Grrrl … which I’m happy about.” Though she said the movement was over by 1994, she channeled its energy into a set of strategies to make art for a wider audience—not just for a scene.2 One way to express her relationship to music and politics was through writing. Fateman read an early piece reflecting on a performance by the Bay Area lesbian punk band Tribe 8: “It was extreme” and “extremely interesting to us as sixteen year olds” to stumble aross “the stupid gratification of live performance of punk music.” She also read excerpts from articles on Sara Marcus’s book on Riot Grrrl for Bookforum; on her band Le Tigre for the Red Bull Music Academy; and on her experience writing a song and shooting a video for Pussy Riot’s appearance on the television show House of Cards for Art in America.

    During the audience Q&A, an attendee asked Suparak how she funded her projects. With several scales of economy, she responded. When she worked without a budget for events in living rooms and abandoned malls, the participants were aware of the situation (and were okay with it). At bars, Suparak split door revenue with the venue. “Universities have money,” she reminded us, saying she included a few tour stops at schools to keep a project afloat. For a while, Suparak sacrificed having an apartment to save money: “I was living out of a suitcase” and bartering. With punk, DeVun chimed in, you don’t need permission or even to know what you’re doing.

    Members of Pussy Riot and Le Tigre at Baltimore Penn Station on August 8, 2014. From left: Masha Alyokhina, J. D. Samson, Johanna Fateman, and Nadya Tolokonnikova (photograph by Petya Verzilov)

    An attendee asked the panelists to respond to Tumblr feminism, which apparently takes extreme positions and attracts online trolls. While advocacy certainly takes place on the internet, “you should be out in public doing it,” urged Lunch. That said, Atoe finds it important to have an online counterpart to real-world projects to reach those who can’t get a physical zine.

    Venues and institutions mattered to the audience. “I don’t expect to see feminist performance art in a gay bar full of shirtless men,” a male attendee told Narcissister. While that may be true, she broadens her reach by performing in alternative spaces, night clubs, galleries and museums, and performance-art festivals. The art world misunderstands the intellectual complexity of her work, Narcissister said, and gets confused by a more public approach—like when she wowed the nation on America’s Got Talent in 2011.

    Another audience member inevitably asked how punk survives in an institutional context—isn’t this selling out? While Lunch acknowledged that mind-blowing stuff is happening in small venues like Death by Audio in Brooklyn, museums are acceptable punk spaces. Sometimes at underground clubs, she joked, “it’s me and twenty fat guys with beards.” To go to a really underground punk show, DeVun said, you need to be the person “who knows to go under the fence, around the corner, and through the hole” to get there. Atoe maintained that tiny shows in intimate settings have great personal meaning. “I’m sick of squats myself,” Lunch fired off at the original questioner. “I was sick of squats before you were born.”

    Johanna Fateman (left) discusses her contribution to the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    You can’t get 350 to 400 people in a small club, Suparak remarked, referring to the size of tonight’s audience at the Brooklyn Museum, and institutions offer skilled technicians and designers—people to which artist may not have access. “The idea of museums as elite places is false,” Suparak stated. Atoe urged people to “create the kind of atmosphere that you want to be in,” especially in male-dominated music scenes, which is why she started booking shows in the first place. Lunch had the last word: “as long as you can communicate, I don’t really care where it’s at.”

    Does archiving change the nature of the medium of zines, someone asked the panel. Eschewing rarity and meeting demand, Atoe has made copies of the first two issues for people for eight years. Fateman said she could neither preserve her archive on her own nor handle every researcher’s request for material, so she donated it to the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, which comprises zines, letters, flyers, photographs, audio recordings, videotapes, and much more. While her early creative expression is embarrassing, Fateman admitted, people are interested. Now her work is contextualized with that of her peers. Archiving changes zines, Fateman conceded, but so does time. The intersection of punk and feminism has changed since the late 1970s, but the interest of tonight’s audience proved that it has persevered and remains as relevant as ever.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 This band was Beirut Slump.

    2 During the audience Q&A, Astria Suparak said the majority of people who associate with Riot Grrrl today are in Central and South America—especially Mexico City.

    Read

    Osa Atoe, “I Will Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism,” Shotgun Seamstress, March 24, 2015.

    Emily Colucci, “Big Sexy Noiseless: Lydia Lunch’s Silently Visceral So Real It Hurts,” Filthy Dreams, May 10, 2015.

    Nicole Disser, “Feminist Punk Panel Talks Zines, Radical Politics, and Race,” Bedford and Bowery, March 16, 2015.

    Samantha Spoto, “Punk Rock Needs Feminism,” Breakthru Radio, March 19, 2015.

    Watch

  • The Authorial Intent

    Public Art Fund Talk at the New School: Jeff Koons
    Wednesday, September 10, 2014
    New School, John L. Tishman Auditorium, University Center, New York

    Jeff Koons discusses his Inflatables from the late 1970s (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Is it possible to be indifferent to Jeff Koons? For many years my attitude toward the artist’s work has been impassive and disinterested. It exists whether I like it or not and has some visual interest, but I’ve never cared enough to form an opinion beyond that. Among the most successful living artists, Koons is comparable to Jay Z or U2: a talented mainstream artist whose early output is considered groundbreaking but whose later works are noteworthy more for their high production values and their exorbitant, multimillion-dollar price tags than their aesthetic worth. Over the years Koons has managed to stay relevant, with critics and journalists dutifully covering his exhibitions and appearances, just as they would report on Bono’s activism and Hova’s exploits.

    A retrospective covering Koons’s entire career, organized by Scott Rothkopf, sits in the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 19, the final exhibition at the museum’s Upper East Side location before a move to the Meatpacking District. The exhibition was among the reasons for tonight’s sold-out talk at the New School. Dressed in a navy suit, a pale-blue open-collared shirt, and black dress shoes, Koons delivered an hour-long, well rehearsed lecture in which he presented himself as an animated but never overbearing orator, using a variety of hand gestures, movements, and poses that enhanced his spoken words. At one point he even crouched down to greet an imaginary dog. Woof!

    After thanking the Public Art Fund, which sponsored the talk as well as the sculpture Split-Rocker (2000), a large outdoor floral arrangement on view at Rockefeller Center during summer 2014, Koons talked about his upbringing and his understanding of and approach to public sculpture, the subject of this lecture. He first became aware of the genre through a childhood encounter with the statue of William Penn that stands atop Philadelphia’s City Hall building. Created by Alexander Calder’s grandfather, the work embodies, Koons said, a history of society’s values on a mystical scale. Art deals with issues of interior and exterior, he continued, that elicit emotional responses. Further, experience and emotion form the vocabulary of art, and to interact with public art in physical space is a “communal activity.”

    William Penn stands on top of City Hall (photograph by G. Widman for the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation)

    Koons emphasized what he called the “unitative,” explained as something bigger than us but at the same time collectively shared. The York fairground in the artist’s Pennsylvanian hometown, founded ca. 1765, was the first fair in the United States, he said, and there he experienced games, visual stimulation, joy, pleasure, and terror—both as an individual and as a group with other fair goers. Fireworks, parade floats, and houses decorated with Christmas lights also inspire him, providing “excitement, awe, and wonder.” “Our governments,” Koons even said, “are a form of public sculpture.” If by this he means the socially engaged practice of argument and debate, with the elation of progress and success and the frustration of stagnation, then art is like not only politics but also science, business, religion, and myriad other things.

    Koons’s vacations were also formative experiences. As a kid he and his family visited Dolphin Land or Dolphin World in Florida (perhaps he meant the Miami Seaquarium), where he internalized the relationships between humans and animals. These relationships are evident—in some way or another—in his Antiquity 3 painting, which depicts a woman riding an inflatable dolphin. Recalling the aquatic-theme-park performances of jumping dolphins and such, Koons applied abstract ideas about the surface of the water versus going underneath to sculpture. Indeed, surface and depth are the core—if not the most important—qualities of Koons’s art.

    Jeff Koons, Antiquity 3, 2009–11, oil on canvas, 102 x 138 in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    At this point Koons switched to autopilot, pulling ideas from the usual spiel he gives when discussing his own work, trotting out stock phrases about generosity, transcendence, perfection, communication, and sharing, like he most recently did on Charlie Rose and The Colbert Report. “As soon as things become public, there’s a sense of generosity,” Koons said. People share the transcendence created by art collectively, the artist explained, and there is no private experience. Deflating the importance of his artistic production, the artist said, “There’s not any art in that object,” which instead acts as a “transponder” for the art experience. Transponders, he noted, both send and receive. Later Koons said, “We don’t care about objects—we care about people.” I have no obligation to the object, he continued, but rather to the people and their trust. I wonder if he gives the same populist rap to the elite collectors who spend millions on his work.

    Koons traced the beginnings of his involvement in outdoor, public sculpture. His first foray was the stainless-steel Kiepenkerl (1987), made for that year’s Skulptur Projekte Münster in West Germany. The hot metal accidentally bent during the casting process, damaging the work in several places. Since there wasn’t enough time to redo the piece, the artist faced a grave decision: either pull out of the exhibition or attempt a hurried fix. “I went with the radical plastic surgery,” Koons said cheerfully, giving the punch line to this story for the umpteenth time.

    Jeff Koons’s Rabbit in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007 (photograph by Librado Romero for the New York Times)

    Koons described several more public artworks from the past twenty years, expressing amazement that Macy’s included a gigantic version of his mirrored inflatable Rabbit for its Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007. He also revealed that he had been looking at Baroque and Rococo art when conceiving the monumental Puppy (1992), a large floral arrangement in the shape of a dog that appeared outside Rockefeller Center in summer 2000 (among other sites); he wanted to put those historical styles into a piece of his own. Issues that Koons grappled with for Puppy included biology, ephemerality, symmetry/asymmetry, and internal/external. Ultimately—and this was the highlight of the talk—Koons described Puppy as “a piece about control,” the kind of control a person exercises or relinquishes in his or her life. “It’s whether you want to serve or be served,” he said. This commentary evoked not only the “greed is good” mantra from the 1980s, but also the exercises and abuses of power in any political or economic dictatorship —all frightening stuff, even threatening. Here the menacing qualities of Koons’s seemingly happy, carefree art bare its fangs.

    Returning to formal and logistical issues, Koons professed that photographs of Split-Rocker typically show the piece in a pristine state, when it was first erected in early summer. Koons, however, intended the work to get “shaggy and chaotic” over time, which it had certainly done when I visited the work in mid-September. An unrealized outdoor work called Train, Koons explained, will feature a functioning, performing steam locomotive dangling from a crane. “It’s a metaphor for an individual” that huffs and puffs in a determined manner, he said, and the train experiences an “orgasmic moment” when it hits one hundred miles per hour. “To me, that’s William Penn,” he said, reiterating his themes of history, power, and the connection of an individual’s experience to something bigger.

    Koons also returned to his biography, recalling the showroom of his father, who was an interior designer. The elder Koons had sold paintings by his young son in the store window, integrating them into arrangements of furniture and other household objects. “He gave me great confidence,” the artist said of his dad. Koons also gave a shout out to W. Bowdoin Davis Jr., his art-history professor at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, who revealed the many operations in play in art, such as psychology, religion, sociology, and symbolism.

    Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules), 2013, plaster and glass, 128½ x 67 × 48⅝ in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Koons revealed his Balloon Venus sculpture (2008–12) as a hermaphroditic fertility object and announced that the Gazing Ball series (2013) is among his favorite bodies of work. Coincidentally it was at that moment when I noticed the artist’s intense blue eyes as he showed images of several Gazing Balls. With an image of his oversized sculpture Play-Doh (1994–2014) hovering onscreen, Koons told us “I’m trying to make works you can’t have any judgment about.” If you make judgments,” he decreed, “you’re limiting yourself.” He advised his critics to “Open yourself up and keep everything in play.”

    The event organizers had collected written questions for Koons earlier in the lecture, and Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, read a selected few to the artist. Did Koons ever fear there was a time when he felt that his career was over, and what did he do? In his early years the artist admitted to going broke a couple times, leaving New York to live with his parents. But he came back to the city because, in his own words, “people want to be involved in dialogue. People depend on you.” I cannot imagine anyone taking that statement at face value.

    When has technology not kept up with your artistic vision, asked another question. Koons claimed he prefers not to use new technology, which implied an apprehension of his work being tied to a particular method or process or—worse—appearing dated. Yet as the Friday symposium “The Koons Effect Part 2” determined and as Michelle Kuo noted in her catalogue essay, the artist uses complex software and highly intricate three-dimensional modeling to fabricate his recent work. Some even say that his level of technological perfection is higher than is needed by the aerospace industry and the military. Again, Koon’s modest words can be readily dismissed.

    Jeff Koons on Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Someone wanted to know how Koons can manage his studio workers and still be creative? Acknowledging his longtime studio manager Gary McCraw, who sat in the audience, the artist said he is always walking through the studio, watching and educating his loyal workers. How loyal are they? The average tenure of an assistant, he pointed out, is nine years. In the end, tight organization and long-term stability give the artist his creative freedom. Another Q&A dealt with the white skin color of the porcelain figures in Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). At the time, Koons replied, radical changes were happening to the performer’s body, and the Italian craftsman who fabricated the piece wanted to know “How am I supposed to make his nose?” when it was constantly changing in real life. Koons noted that porcelain was the “king’s material,” so he wanted Jackson to appear godlike, as in a pieta. Further, he said, the thick black outlines surrounding the singer and monkey’s eyes alluded to Egyptian art.

    How would aliens from the future interpret your work? “They’d see a lot of the world, from our day-to-day lives,” Koons responded, pointing to the archetypal, universal qualities from our present historical moment embedded into his art. To what do you owe your fame and commercial success? “My family,” he replied, as if giving an Academy Award acceptance speech. When he was child, Koons remembered becoming ecstatic when his parents told him he could draw better than his older sister, whose life, he perceived at the time, had until then been superlative to his in every way. I wondered what that sister is doing now. What don’t critics get about your work? Koons repeated the transponder argument and boasted that negative people aren’t “prepared” for his art and are “insecure.” While seemingly arrogant, this response isn’t so atypical for an artist, though many would probably not state it so baldly. Koons does receive a healthy amount of negative criticism, but it’s rare for an artist to be so untroubled by it. Koons’s attitude may serve as a model for other artists. Or not.

    Installation view of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, June 27–October 19, 2014 (artworks © Jeff Koons; photograph by Ronald Amstutz)

    I wish someone had asked about appropriation and copyright. Koons has been the subject of four lawsuits: he lost the first three on weak parody defenses but won the fourth with the transformation argument. The losing cases—Rogers v. Koons (1992), United Feature Syndicate v. Koons (1993), and Campbell v. Koons (1993)—each involved works from the Banality series: String of Puppies, Wild Boy and Puppy, and Ushering in Banality (all works 1988). The last, Blanch v. Koons (2006), focused on a photographer’s complaint that Koons used an image she took in a painting from his Easyfun-Ethereal series.

    Toward the end of the lecture Koons returned again and again to his aphorisms on affirmation, acceptance, participation, and mutual support. It was hard for him to go off script—I doubt that he can—and the audience questions picked for him were relatively tame. In many ways Koons speaks like a politician, like Barack Obama on the presidential campaign trail. And like a politician Koons doesn’t offer truth or salvation but favorable, enthusiastic rhetoric about those things. He proposes a welcoming, populist frame of interpretation for his art, not to foreclose other people’s ideas but rather to make sure his intentions are being discussed. You can take his words at face value, scrutinize them, or dismiss his sermon, but you can’t deny that Koons is smartly shaping the reception of his work. After this talk I still felt indifferent toward his art but appreciated hearing about it from the source.

    In Terms Of count: 0.