CAA News Today
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — July 14, 2011
In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, museum directors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts.
- Karen Aqua, a filmmaker and teacher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose works in animation can be found in her eleven films and in the twenty-two segments she had created for Sesame Street since 1990, died on May 30, 2011. She was 57 years old
- José Argüelles, an eccentric artist and scholar who, after earning a doctorate in art history, taught aesthetics at universities nationally and wrote about the Mayan calendar in his book The Mayan Factor: Path beyond Technology, passed away on March 23, 2011, at age 72. He is known for organizing the Harmonic Convergence event of 1987
- Thomas N. Armstrong III, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from 1974 to 1990 and who later led the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, died on June 20, 2011, at the age of 78. Armstrong facilitated the museum’s purchase of Frank Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch!, Jasper John’s Three Flags, and Alexander Calder’s Circus; he is also known for his firing of the curator Marcia Tucker, which prompted her to found the New Museum of Contemporary Art
- Ariege Arseguel, an independent art consultant and a former executive director of the Sonoma County Museum in California, died on June 5, 2011, at the age of 49. She had also worked for the San Francisco Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Terry Ball, an artist who drew architectural reconstructions, including historic depictions of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle, among other locations, died on February 23, 2011. He was 79 years old
- Luciano Bellosi, an art historian specializing in Italian artists from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries—notably Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, and Masaccio—died on April 26, 2011, at age 74. He taught medieval art history at the University of Siena from 1979 to 2006
- Ron Bone, a British painter known for his quiet interior scenes that critics compared to Andrew Wyeth and to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, died on February 26, 2011. He was 60 years old
- Claudio Bravo, a Chilean-born, largely self-taught artist who established his reputation in the 1960s by painting portraits of elite society in Spain and the Philippines, passed away on June 4, 2011, at age 74. Influenced by Mark Rothko and Antoni Tàpies, Bravo transitioned into trompe l’oeil paintings of drapery and crumpled paper in his later years
- Thalia Noras Carlos, a philanthropist who contributed millions of dollars worth of Greek and Roman antiquities to the Michael C. Carlos Museum, which bears the name of her late husband, at Emory University in Atlanta, passed away on May 22, 2011. She was 83 years old
- Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist artist and writer and a muse to Max Ernst, died on May 25, 2011, at the age of 94. Though she traveled and exhibited her work internationally, she settled in Mexico City, where she spent time with her female artistic colleagues, Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo, and developed her unique, highly praised painting style
- Ira Cohen, a filmmaker, photographer, poet, publisher, and musician whose greatest work was life itself, died on April 25, 2011, at the age of 76. The New York–based Cohen traveled internationally and had collaborated with William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Paul Bowles
- Stephen De Staebler, a Bay Area–based creator of figurative sculpture in clay and bronze that depicted hauntingly fractured body parts, died on May 13, 2011, at the age of 78. The de Young Museum in San Francisco will host a retrospective of his work, Matter and Spirit, that opens in January 2012
- Bernhard Heisig, a celebrated and criticized East German painter who addressed themes of suffering in war and under fascism, died on June 10, 2011, at the age of 86. After reunification, Heisig’s work was exhibited across the country and presented in a solo show at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau in 2005
- M. F. Husain, a painter often described as the Picasso of India, died on June 9, 2011, at the age of 95. After starting his career as a Bollywood poster and billboard artist, Husain shifted into a style of painting inspired by Hindu temple art and Cubism, and his controversial depictions of deities and politically charged nude women sent him into self-exile
- Denis Mahon, a historian and collector of art who contributed his significant collection of Italian Baroque paintings to several British institutions, died on April 24, 2011, at age 100. His book Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, published in 1947, is a leading text on the subject; he also wrote extensively about Caravaggio and Nicolas Poussin
- Adolfas Mekas, a filmmaker associated with New American Cinema and the founder, with his brother Jonas, of Film Culture, a journal that advanced avant-garde film, died on May 31, 2011, at age 85. Mekas was also a founding member of the film department at Bard College, directing the program from 1971 to 1994 and teaching there until 2004
- Robert Miller, an art dealer whose eponymous New York gallery represents many blue-chip artists and their estates, including Ai Weiwei, Diane Arbus, Lee Krasner, and Alice Neel, died on June 22, 2011. He was 72 years old
- Andrew Morgan, an artist and a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami from 1970 to 1987, died on March 18, 2011, at age 88. He was known for paintings and drawings of the Florida landscape and the Everglades
- Mordechai Omer, director and chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum for the last seventeen years, passed away in June 2011 at the age of 70. He was also a professor at Tel Aviv University and worked to cultivate the Israeli art scene by supporting both young and established artists
- David E. Rust, a curator who worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, for many years until his retirement in 1984, died on April 8, 2011, at the age of 81. A specialist in French painting, Rust also studied Spanish and Italian art
- John S. Slorp, president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1990 to 2002 and an accreditor for the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, passed away on May 21, 2011, at the age of 74. Previous to his stint in Minnesota, Slorp was president of the Memphis College of Art for eight years
- Jack Smith, one of four artists known as the Beaux Arts quartet—or the Kitchen Sink artists, after an article by the critic David Sylvester—who came to prominence in England in the 1950s with abstract paintings that channeled Social Realism, died on June 11, 2011. He was 82
- Cy Twombly, an influential and revered postwar abstract painter whom the critic Robert Hughes elevated to an artistic pantheon that included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, died on July 5, 2011. He was 83 years old
- Osamu Ueda, an Osaka-born curator at the Art Institute of Chicago who catalogued the museum’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints in the Claire E. Buckingham Collection, died on January 30, 2011, at age 83. Ueda was the coeditor of an important museum book, The Actor’s Image: Print Makers of the Katsukawa School, published in 1994
- Polly Ullrich, a Chicago-based journalist who wrote for United Press International, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Chicago Sun Times, and the New York Times before she turned to ceramics, which she created and exhibited across the United States, passed away on July 6, 2011, at age 60. Ullrich also lectured across the Midwest and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned an MA in art history, theory, and criticism in 1994
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the August listing.
New Appointments to CAA’s Journals
posted by Christopher Howard — July 05, 2011
Earlier this spring, the president of the CAA Board of Directors, Barbara Nesin, has confirmed new appointments to the editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals, in consultation with then–vice president for publications, Anne Collins Goodyear. The appointments took effect on July 1, 2011.
Art Journal
Art Journal has announced its next editor-in-chief: Lane Relyea, an art critic and associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Since the 1990s Relyea has contributed to Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, and Afterall, among other publications. His book D.I.Y. Culture Industry: Signifying Practices, Social Networks, and Other Instrumentalizations of Everyday Art is forthcoming from MIT Press. Relyea will succeed Katy Siegel of Hunter College, City University of New York, and begin his three-year term on July 1, 2012, with the preceding year as editor designate.
Joining the Art Journal Editorial Board for four-year terms are Doryun Chong, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Saloni Mathur, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chong is a contributing editor at Art Asia Pacific and worked as associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 2003 to 2009. His recent exhibitions include Bruce Nauman: Days (2010) and Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider (2009–10). Mathur, a specialist in the art of South Asia, wrote India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Her recently compiled volume, The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
The Art Bulletin
Rachael DeLue, assistant professor at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been named the next reviews editor of The Art Bulletin, succeeding Michael Cole of Columbia University in New York. A specialist in American art, DeLue focuses on visual language in culture as it pertains to race, stereotypes, and beauty, and her most recent publication, Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008), coedited with James Elkins, considers its titular subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. DeLue will serve one year as reviews editor designate before beginning her three-year term on July 1, 2012.
In addition, two CAA members have joined the the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for four-year terms: Dana Leibsohn, Priscilla Paine Van der Poel Professor of Art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; and Steven Ostrow, professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and chair of its Department of Art History. Leibsohn concentrates on visual culture in colonial Latin America, highlighting the relevance of maps and modes of literacy in particular. A recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting her collaborative multimedia project, “Vistas: Colonial Latin American Visual Culture 1520–1820.” Ostrow has extensive knowledge of early Italian visual culture and has published on a variety of subjects, including sculpture and illuminated manuscripts, with an emphasis on patronage, iconography, and artistic practice. Most recently he contributed an essay to Rome Italy Renaissance: Essays in Art History Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday (New York: Italica, 2009).
The Art Bulletin Editorial Board also has a new chair, appointed from within its ranks: Thelma Thomas, associate professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will serve for two years. Thomas specializes in Byzantine and Eastern Christian art and architecture, leading seminars such as “Material Culture in Late Antiquity: Textiles,” and “Byzantine Art and Architecture: 9th–15th Century.”
caa.reviews
The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes a new member, Tomoko Sakomura, assistant professor at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, who will serve for four years. Currently the journal’s field editor for books on Japanese art, she is working on a book project called Poetry as Image: The Visual Culture of Waka Poetry in Late Medieval Japan.
Five new field editors for books and exhibitions have recently been chosen by the editorial board to serve three-year terms. Joseph Alchermes of Connecticut College in New London will commission reviews of exhibitions of pre-1800 art in New York and the Northeast, and Kirsten Swenson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is field editor for exhibitions in the Southwest. Aida Wong of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, will assign reviews of books on Chinese and Korean art; Pamela Jones of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, will do the same for books on early modern and southern European art; and Juliet Bellow of American University in Washington, DC, will cover books on nineteenth-century art.
Sheryl Reiss, lecturer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, began her three-year term as editor-in-chief of caa.reviews on July 1, 2011, succeeding Lucy Oakley, head of education and programs at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. CAA will publish an interview with Reiss, who served on the journal’s editorial board from 2001 to 2005, later this summer.
CAA Files Amicus Brief for the Supreme Court Case of Golan v. Holder
posted by Christopher Howard — June 24, 2011
This week CAA filed an amicus brief in the case of Golan v. Holder, which the United States Supreme Court will likely hear later this year. The issue raised in Golan v. Holder is if Congress could, consistent with the First Amendment, remove certain foreign works from the public domain and bring them back into copyright when it enacted the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994. A lower court, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, held that the URAA was constitutional. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Jeffrey P. Cunard, CAA’s counsel, was asked if CAA would join several like-minded organizations and individuals in signing onto a brief that would support the importance of the public domain. The Executive Committee of the CAA Board of Directors considered the importance of the public domain (works no longer in copyright) as a wellspring of resources for artists, scholars, and other creators while discussing the detrimental effect of removing works from the public domain. The committee also noted that a filing by CAA in Golan v. Holder would be consistent with the organization’s filing of an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case of Eldred v. Ashcroft. In that 2003 decision, the court determined that Congress did not violate the First Amendment when it extended the term of copyright through the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. After reviewing drafts of the current brief, the Executive Committee authorized the filing of the Golan v. Holder brief on June 20, 2011. To learn more about Golan v. Holder and the issues at stake, please review the following articles, published online in March and April 2011:
- Lyle Denniston, “A Major Test of Copyright Power,” SCOTUSblog, March 7, 2011
- Edward Lee, “Golan v. Holder: Supreme Court to Review Copyrighting Works in Public Domain,” Huffington Post, March 9, 2011
- Shannon Mo, “Cert. Granted in Golan v. Holder,” Re:Marks, April 1, 2011
The principal author of the brief, Jennifer Urban of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California’s School of Law in Berkeley, received assistance from Cunard and his firm, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. Others signing onto the brief include individual writers, musicians, and scholars as well as other organizations. Cunard extends his thanks to Anne Collins Goodyear, curator at the National Portrait Gallery and CAA vice president for Annual Conference, for providing the excellent example of a visual artist, Marcel Duchamp, using a public-domain work, the Mona Lisa, to create a new one (pp. 14–15). The brief also cites other artists, from Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns to Banksy and Shepard Fairey. In addition, Cunard has noted the extensive reference to CAA’s involvement in the orphan-works proceeding (pp. 33–35), which helps the brief support the proposition that the URAA’s copyright restoration of many foreign works had exacerbated the orphan-works problem. CAA’s involvement in Golan v. Holder is the latest event in its long history of advocacy efforts regarding freedom of speech and copyright issues. On behalf of all CAA members, the board is grateful to Cunard, one of the nation’s leading experts in copyright law, for the work he has put into the brief and for his continued support of the organization.
June Issue of The Art Bulletin Publishes Essays on Bruegel, Guston, Degas, and Fragonard
posted by Christopher Howard — June 20, 2011
Essays in the June 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, examine a range of topics that include works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Philip Guston, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. A fifth essay on aesthetics and a collection of important book reviews round out the issue, which has been mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members. The issue is dedicated to the memory of the late Anne L. Schroder, an expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art; one of her final essays appears in it.
Leading off the issue is Margaret A. Sullivan’s article that uncovers the beginnings of genre in Bruegel’s debt to stoicism, ancient satire, and the art of Pieter Aertsen. Next, Schroder explores Fragonard’s later career through two revived projects, his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles (1788–1809) and his unfinished painting series, the Progress of Love. For “Hegel’s Contested Legacy,” Jason Gaiger reexamines the Hegelian inheritance in art history in light of newly published transcripts of the lectures on aesthetics and, in doing so, raises broader questions about the concourse between art history and philosophy.
Looking at French art in the nineteenth century, André Dombrowski reveals layered political and historical significations embedded in Degas’s Place de la Concorde (ca. 1875), an urban genre portrait of Viscount Lepic and his daughters. For his contribution, Robert Slifkin finds that Guston’s unsettling return to figuration in the 1960s, which partook in a larger “1930s renaissance,” used the disjunction between two moments to comment on the present.
The June 2011 issue includes reviews of two books on humor in Greek vase painting and Roman visual culture, two on Chinese painting, one on medieval Buddhist sculpture, and one on forgery in premodern German art, as well as an exhibition review of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which appeared in Los Angeles, Nuremberg, and Berlin in 2009–10.
Please see the full table of contents for June for more details. The next issue, to be published in September 2011, will feature essays on Roman mosaic floors, an emblematic Michelangelo cartoon for a fresco, portraiture in France after 1789, and the American painter John Sloan.
June Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — June 16, 2011
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.
The CWA Picks for June 2011 include a nationwide list of screenings for !Women Art Revolution, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary film on the feminist art movement, and a retrospective of the work of the mask-clad Guerrilla Girls, opening at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. In addition, two events—a three-day conference in Lisbon and a survey of the infamous Young British Artist, Tracey Emin, in London—give an international flavor to the picks.
Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
A Tribute to Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010)
posted by Christopher Howard — June 16, 2011
Amy Ingrid Schlegel is director of galleries and collections for the Aidekman Arts Center at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. She served on the CAA Board of Directors from 2007 to 2011 and was liaison to the Committee on Women in the Arts from 2008 to 2011.
Sylvia Sleigh (photograph by Judy Schiller)
When I first met Sylvia Sleigh at her Chelsea brownstone in 1993 during the course of my dissertation research, I realized what a treasure trove her home/studio was and how enchanting her amiable, anecdotal manner of recalling the past also was. Until recently, within the last decade, most people knew little about Sleigh’s seventy-year oeuvre other than her best-known painting, The Turkish Bath (1973), often reproduced as one of the very few works by a woman artist in art-history textbooks. Despite the tokenistic way in which many students might know Sleigh’s work, it has long been clear how the women’s movement in New York during the 1970s helped boost her from relative obscurity since arriving in the United States from England in 1961, where she had just one solo exhibition. Now, in 2011, she posthumously received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, after earning the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association in 2008.
It seems disingenuous not to acknowledge and assess how Sleigh’s remarkable and, in many ways, paradoxical career as a feminist artist was fostered, even born of, her long-term monogamous relationship with the art critic, curator, and writer Lawrence Alloway, whom she married in 1956 (and remained happily married to until his premature death in 1990). Sleigh and Alloway managed a long-term romance and marriage while their roles as “traditional” realist painter and “avant-garde” critic and theorist diverged during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Yet each participated in the other’s private, creative fantasies, and those fantasies were projected in the creative work of both, produced on different floors in that Chelsea brownstone.
Sylvia Sleigh, The Turkish Bath, 1973, oil on canvas, 76 x 100 in. Collection of the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago (artwork © Estate of Sylvia Sleigh)
Indeed, their relationship was the subtext of a 2001 retrospective exhibition I curated in Philadelphia, “An Unnerving Romanticism”: The Art of Sylvia Sleigh and Lawrence Alloway. Sleigh painted more portraits of Alloway than of anyone else; he also appeared several times in her group ensembles, including The Turkish Bath. Naturally, Alloway’s visage could be identified throughout the exhibition, and drawings he penned in ink within longer letters written to Sleigh during his travels were also part of the display.
The exhibition’s title was lifted from an undated letter Eleanor Antin wrote to Sleigh after seeing Sleigh’s 1971 painting Philip Golub Reclining: “It romanticism is unnerving,” Antin gushed. “The contrast between your fierceness and his lush languourous [sic] beauty is violent.…. Sylvia, dear, you are a magnificent romantic and not a lady.” In the work Golub, then about sixteen years old, gazes dreamily into a large, wall-mounted mirror, while Sleigh’s reflection—she is seated in front of her easel—scrutinizes the sitter’s naked, teenaged body and effeminate face partly obscured by his long, wavy hair. In Golub’s case, as the son of Sleigh and Alloway’s close friends Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, the desire was purely visual—Philip is essentially eye candy—but this certainly was not always the case.
One of Sleigh’s gifts as a painter was her ability to establish an intensely personal and professional dynamic between herself as creative subject and, in the case of her many straight or gay male sitters, the object of her desiring gaze. This intense dynamic also characterized her relationship with Alloway. Already wed and ten years his senior, she married him after a five-year affair. Unlike some creative couples, romantic love and intellectual partnership were not incompatible for Sleigh and Alloway. They were each other’s muses and sounding boards. They were, in many ways, separate but equal partners, autonomous agents yet fondly attached. Despite their career imbalance, particularly during the 1960s, when Alloway was in his heyday, they nurtured one another’s aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities, including their penchant for iconoclasm in their separate challenges to the art world’s prevailing notions of aesthetic quality judged in exclusively formal terms.
Sylvia Sleigh, Max Warsh Seated Nude, 2006, oil on canvas, 52 x 56 in. (artwork © Estate of Sylvia Sleigh)
During the 1970s some reviewers questioned the quality of Sleigh’s paintings depicting nude men. Ironically, it is those portraits for which Sleigh is now canonized in art history today. Linda Nochlin argued in her 1974 article “Some Women Realists: Painters of the Figure” that quality in Sleigh’s work was a red herring, writing that Sleigh “most pointedly raises the issues involved in the female artist’s representation of the male nude. While not overtly political in intention, [her works representing nude men] are certainly political in effect, if we accept sexuality as one of the major political arenas of our day.”1 While Sleigh did not deliberately distort her figures, she tended to idealize the bodies of her models and to render their faces as highly individualized portraits. This propensity creates a frisson that some critics may have misread as incompetence. Or, as Nochlin asserted, “Similar accusations of formal weakness, technical insufficiency, or even willful distortion were, of course, leveled at Courbet, Manet and even at the young Ingres, at least in part because the underlying politics of their art affronted ‘normal,’ i.e., unconscious of ideological expectations.”2 We recognize in hindsight that sex discrimination hindered Sleigh’s reputation as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century for decades. While Alloway chose not to publish a single review of Sleigh’s solo exhibitions, he certainly understood the forceful challenge her paintings of nude men posed to assumptions about spectatorship as a male domain of pleasure. After all, the same art gallery that he critiqued as a reviewer for the Nation and for many art magazines during the 1970s exhibited her nude and seminude portraits of him.
Sleigh’s paintings are, fundamentally, intimate testaments to the relationships that she maintained and nurtured over her lengthy, prodigious career. As an index of the people she knew at the time, her oeuvre collectively reads like a perpetual, unnerving romance with that rare professional intimacy expected from a realist painter who works from life, a romance that is unnerving for its unexpected capacity to simultaneously charm and alarm.
Endnotes
1. Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists: Painters of the Figure” Arts 48, no. 8 (May 1974), 32.
2. Ibid.
Spring Art Journal Features Artist’s Project by Paul Sietsema and Centennial Essay by Richard Shiff
posted by Christopher Howard — June 15, 2011
CAA recently published the Spring 2011 issue of Art Journal, which includes a Centennial essay by the noted scholar Richard Shiff and, on the front and back covers, a project by the Los Angeles–based artist Paul Sietsema.
The issue acknowledges CAA’s Centennial year with Shiff’s text, “Every Shiny Object Wants an Infant Who Will Love It,” a state-of-the-field essay on contemporary art. Beginning with the unfigured sensory experience of a Donald Judd installation in Marfa, Texas, the text examines the human impulse to organize and categorize the elements of aesthetic experience.
Paul Sietsema created two news works for the issue: Untitled Composition for the front cover and Painter’s Mussel for the back. Both are based on found photographs and slyly pun on the interplay between language and the working life of artists today.
The Spring issue also publishes an essay by Saloni Mathur that details the postcolonial context in which the American designers Charles and Ray Eames explored the traditional arts of India—and helped configure the industrial-design program of the newly emergent nation. Next, Christopher Bedford, chief curator of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, invited seven artists and curators to join him in pondering the peculiarities the art-speak word “project” (as used in the first paragraph of this news item). While some see it as a useful term, others find darker implications in its widespread use.
An essay by Karen Kurczynski called “Drawing Is the New Painting” suggests that the pressures of the contemporary marketplace can jeopardize drawing’s characteristics of expression and immediacy. In a monographic study titled “City of Degenerate Angels,” Ken D. Allan traces the art and publishing efforts of Wallace Berman in the context of the 1950s Los Angeles jazz scene in which the artist came of age. Additional audio evidence for Allan’s argument appears on the Art Journal website.
The Reviews section of the issue, edited by Howard Singerman, contains Michael Corris’s analysis of Julia Bryan-Wilson’s book, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, and Alzo David-West’s assessment of two publications about art and visual culture in North Korea.
National Coalition Against Censorship Posts Video of “Policing the Sacred”
posted by Christopher Howard — June 09, 2011
The National Coalition Against Censorship has edited video of “Policing the Sacred: Art, Censorship, and the Politics of Faith,” a session held during the 2011 CAA Annual Conference in New York, and posted it on YouTube in two parts. Links to the videos appear below.
In recent decades, the volatile relationships among art, politics, and religion have only intensified, as evident in the Culture Wars of the 1990s in the United States, the Danish cartoon uproar, and ongoing battles over artistic depictions of religious figures, including the recent removal of a David Wojnarowicz video from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. This panel, moderated by Eleanor Heartney, an art critic and the author of Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, brought together five artists and advocates who discussed the above issues and more.
Participating were Richard Kamler, an artist and educator whose installation of intertwined pages from the Koran and the Torah incited controversy in New Haven in 2010; the Bulgarian video artist Boryana Rossa, who spoke on behalf of her husband, Oleg Mavromatti, currently wanted by Russian authorities for “inciting religious hatred” through a performance in which he had himself crucified; Iranian artists and filmmakers Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, who recently completed Women without Men, a film that evokes the religious, social, and political tensions surrounding the 1953 coup that brought the Shah to power; and Svetlana Mintcheva, NCAC director of programs, who recently wrote “Hide/Seek: Museums, Ethics, and the Press: A Symposium Report” for CAA.
In addition, the artist Joy Garnett reviewed “Policing the Sacred” for CAA’s 2011 Annual Conference Blog.
Watch the Video
Documenta Website Posts Audio of CAA Centennial Session on “Feminism”
posted by Christopher Howard — June 02, 2011
Audio of the 2011 CAA Centennial Session on “Feminism,” chaired by Norma Broude of American University and Griselda Pollock of the University of Leeds, has been uploaded to the website of Documenta, the major international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. The next one, Documenta 13, is scheduled for June 9–September 16, 2012, and its website has become a repository for news on preliminary events and happenings as well as a forum for discussing timely issues in the art world. Its artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a panelist in the “Feminism” session, arranged to have the 2½-hour audio recording posted to the Documenta website, where it will be permanently archived and available to promote discussion among a worldwide array of visitors to that site.
The CAA session was organized as two panels: the first on “Attaining Full Equality: Women, Artists, Museums, and Markets,” moderated by Broude, and the second on “New Directions and International Perspectives in Feminist Art History,” led by Pollock. After four decades of feminist scholarship and political activism in the art world, and on the occasion of CAA’s centenary, the session brought together a cross-generational and international group of museum-affiliated curators, international art-fair and exhibition organizers, art-market experts, and art historians to share their perspectives on present accomplishments, institutional impediments, productive strategies, and future frontiers for feminism’s creative enterprise.
Spring Grant Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — June 01, 2011
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of five books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, the grants are given to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The five grantees for spring 2011 are:
- Elizabeth Childs, Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti, 1800–1901, University of California Press
- Shih-shan Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Medieval China, Harvard University Asia Center
- Patricia Leighten, A Politics of Form: Art, Anarchism, and Audience in Avant-Guerre Paris, University of Chicago Press
- Pamela Patton, Art of Estrangement: Redefining the Jews in Reconquest Spain, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Visual Culture in Revolutionary France, Pennsylvania State University Press
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. The deadline for the fall 2011 grant cycle is October 1, 2011.