The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. –James Baldwin The Creative Process (1962) (from The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985.)

ONE OF THOSE WEEKS. Unrelenting, miserable downpours, not the drizzle Portland usually knows. Unrelenting, horrid news, death calling with helicopter crashes, earthquakes, viral lung disease. And then three art encounters that stretched the brain and filled the soul with smatterings of joy. Softened the week around the edges.

The thread that ran through these encounters was literally that: a thread. Or, more precisely, multitudes of them, fabrics, textiles, hair and other palpable materials fashioned into something different and new. To stay within the textile metaphor, the warp running the lengths of the works were clever, clever ideas about our place in the world, crossed by the weft of invitations for multiple interpretations.

Wool, cotton, fabrics of all sorts used to have a purely functional existence in my universe. One of my earliest memories is that of large groups of German women workers walking to and from work at the factory on the outskirts of the village, chatting and simultaneously knitting, wool skeins held in the front pockets of their aprons. Socks, hats and mittens mostly, easy to transport, the larger sweaters waiting at home. (The factory was aptly called Glanzstoff, shiny fabric, a regional employer for over a thousand workers spinning artificial fibers and Viscose.)

One class up, the ladies met for tea and crochet sessions, producing intricate lace doilies, scoffed at as kitschy by my generation, shamefully ignorant of the enormous skill and creativity displayed. The melodic humming of the Singer sowing machine, pedal-powered by my mother’s feet, was a constant childhood background noise. I can still feel the yearning for store-bought clothes, a half century later…..

That art could be involved did only dawn on me much later. Visits to Bayeux put tapestries on the mental map, and later, post-war exhibitions of the Bauhaus weavings put an end to my stupidly snobbish attitudes towards “crafts.” In the U.S. you still have a chance to see a stellar Bauhaus-weaving – related exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute until middle of February.

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CLOSER TO HOME a visit to the Portland Art Museum proved the first eye-opener of last week. Diane Jacobs‘ work Global Inversions (2008) literally makes us, in keeping with James Baldwin’s admonition, “conscious of the things we don’t see.” A large panel shows an inverted map of the world, with felted wool indicating oceans and hair defining land masses. It looks amorphous, vaguely familiar when you approach it before knowing what it is. Recognition is achieved by means of a small, transparent, acrylic globe suspended in front of the panel: it reverses the directions of the map into the ones familiar to us.

Substances from the world that is – animal and human hair – depict a world imagined upside down, containing allegoric truth within a geographic lie. Our world, of course, IS upside down, out of balance, careening into places unknown. The many suffer, the few make the decisions, and economic motivation often supersedes morality. We do not have to see that truth as long as we embrace our looking glass (that little ball) which mirrors the status quo, a comforting illusion for us on top of the world. Or maybe if we see it as a crystal ball we glimpse a future that is rightsize up, a world where justice guarantees more even distributions.

As I said, open to multiple interpretations; the artist’s goals, to have “the viewer investigate her or his own relationship to the given topic,” was, in my case, met. Wool on the panel sabotaging efforts of the ones in power to pull wool over our eyes. Art making us conscious of things we didn’t see, fighting our ignorance.

To quote Baldwin again, a different essay:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —from The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010)

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Auch das erotische Kunstwerk hat Heiligkeit. – Egon Schiele, Sketchbook entries (1911)

Erotic works of art as well contain some sanctity.

WHEN I FIRST MET Amanda Triplett at an art auction and opening which displayed one of her pieces, I knew nothing about her other than that she makes sculptural fiber works and installations from salvaged textiles.

There was something distinctly puckish about her, a delicate elf, a teasing sprite, right out of the cast of a Midsummer Night’s Dream (that is if she had stuck with her passion for theatrical performance before she switched to visual art.) Enough to trigger my curiosity, in any event, and so last week I visited her studio.

Little did I know. This young mother of two has a laser-sharp eye on our preoccupation with our bodies, society’s ways of manipulating female (and increasingly male) confidence through issues of body image and function. A devotee of the erotic expressionism of Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918), her sculptures lack any of the shyness associated with the elfin folks.

Nor their diminutive size, which Shakespeare hints at:

“they do square, that all their elves, for fear,
Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there.”

The works do have a puckish wit about them, though. How else would you describe a series of imaginary female organs, including Hysteria and Plasma, the former appropriately shaped like a giant vibrator?

Or the tactile, sculptural nest (maybe an acorn after all, if not the womb) that invites visitation? A hint of veneration of the sanctity of female function right next to pointers to the harm inflicted by misogyny.

The striking ambiguity in surface and form allows for multiple interpretations. If you didn’t know the intent behind some of these works, you might just look at them as intricately sewn sculptures, with frequent reddish color combinations, the occasional shocking pink aside. They invoke some vaguely biological forms, patterns that can be equally associated with tide pools, oceanic life forms, or even cellular biology.

Which takes us back to our own bodies. Recent larger works represent imaginary layers of skin, their lace-like perforations raising questions about directionality of flow.

Do they allow the poisonous pressure of body image-standards to be absorbed, or do they allow parts of the self to flow out towards connection with the other? No blood-brain barriers here, but rather contemplations about our relative place in the world.

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TRIPLETT HOLDS A B.A. IN Art and Art History from Sarah Lawrence College in NY. Starting out as a performance major, she soon switched to visual art, mostly focussed on drawing and other works on paper.

She credits the fact that she was raised in fabric-rich societies like Egypt and Taiwan, with parents later living in India, with her eventual settling on fiber sculptures. Her intention to work with discarded materials found the perfect source: Shortly after she moved to Portland from California in 2016 she was awarded one of the artist-in-resident spots at Glean, “a juried art program that taps into the creativity of artists to inspire people to think about their consumption habits, the waste they generate and the resources they throw away.” They work in partnership with Recology Portland, Metro, the regional government that manages the Portland area’s garbage and recycling system and crackedpots, a nonprofit environmental arts organization.

The two strands of environmental consciousness and gender issues run in parallel, just as the sculptress’ work is alternating between small and large, universal and/or site specific.

Lately she has begun to incorporate some performance aspects into her shows, sewing herself in into a sculpture in front of audiences, and then cutting herself out again, adding rings and layers of fabric per performance.

An element of chanting, coming out of her meditative praxis, is explored as well, guided, as she frequently repeats in our conversation, by the heart. It might be a big and busy heart, but it is matched by an incisive brain.

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“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951)

OF COURSE NOT, all we have to do is re-invent it. Just ask Triple Candie. Their current exhibition at the Portland Art Museum, Being Present – Revisiting, somewhat unfaithfully, Portland’s most experimental art experiment, the Portland Center for the Visual Arts (1972-1987) does just that.

The duo of Shelley Bancroft and Peter Nesbett (collaborating for this exhibit with Sara Krajewski, the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art) creates exhibitions about art without art, their statement reads. I beg to differ. There is a lot of artistic creativity involved in the way they problem-solve around issues of representation. How do you, after all, depict what went down across two decades at an art hub founded by three artists/academics, Michele Russo, Mel Katz and Jay Backstrand who had the vision to bring avant-garde, contemporary art to Portland? In particular, how do you represent the performance history ushered in by Donna Milraney in the 1980s, which superseded the focus on painting and sculpture in the 1970s under Mary Beebe’s leadership?

One of the ways that people solve problems includes the use of analogies. As it turns out, that only works if people do not cling to superficial features, but focus on the structural aspects of a problem, the underlying dynamic that needs to be captured in an appropriate analogy. Triple Candie did just that when using carefully crafted, individualized tapestries that are analogies of the PDX appearances of post minimalist dancers, jazz and electronic music musicians and performance artists. (In the context of today’s focus on textiles, this is the part of their exhibition that I’ll describe.) Small accompanying plaques inform the viewers about the name of each performer, the date of their performance, their artistic approach and a bit on their life story.

Mounted on walls and suspended from up high across a large space in PAM’s Contemporary Art wing above an orange stage, these fluttering, somewhat insubstantial fabric rectangles hint at the impermanence of single performances. Each one was carefully designed to bring out dominant characteristics of the performing artist they represented. What would I have given to be a little mouse in the room where the curators brainstormed for ideas of typicality, and then set out to transform them into surrogates with wit at times bordering on sarcasm, at times on idolatry! Lovingly detailed, patterned textile portraiture. You should go and give that exhibition a look. Some of it might have you in stitches.

Was glänzt, ist für den Augenblick geboren, 
Das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.

That which glitters is born for the moment;
The genuine remains intact for future days.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust eine Tragödie, Kapitel 2: Vorspiel auf dem Theater (1808)

I was so cold when I left Dorothy Goode‘s studio after a visit last week that I could barely get the key into the car ignition. During our first ever encounter we had huddled, both in down jackets and hats, in front of a little electric stove in her unheated ware-house abode. The space had beautiful views, brilliant light and a damp iciness that crept into my arthritic bones. I could not help but think of Frans Hals, that radical observer of humanity, who was so impoverished at the end of his life that in the Dutch winter of 1664 he accepted three loads of peat on public charity, otherwise he would have frozen to death. (Of course he then had to portray the administrators of said charity, the Governesses of an Alms House in 17th century Haarlem – those faces all-telling.)

Not that Goode would accept alms. Ever. Fiercely independent, proud, accomplished and not at all risk-averse, she’ll probably persuade you rheumatism is the price you pay for pursuing your art. Or so I wager. After all, I have to run on the impressions of 2 hours of conversation with an artist intensely protective of her inner life.

Wager I shall. Our conversation led my thoughts back to the cautioning words of one of Hals’ landsmen, Vincent van Gogh. In a letter to his brother Theo, he was acutely aware of the temptation to exchange security for creative independence, mediocrity for daring. “How does one become mediocre? By going along with this today and conforming to that tomorrow, as the world wants, and by not speaking out against the world and by only following public opinion!” He compared himself and his brother “so the one, “a certain position or affluence and a businessman,” the other “poverty and exclusion, painter.”… “I feel that the future will probably make me uglier and rougher, and I see “a certain poverty” as my lot — but — but — I will be a painter … in short a being with feeling.” (Letter by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo on or about Sunday, 16 December 1883)

Plus ça change plus c’est la meme chose – if you follow your own path, defy convention, are immune to Zeitgeist and pursue what you – and not the world- want, and if there’s no trust fund carefully hidden in the wings, you do lack security to a degree that can veer into the frightening.

Forget talent. Forget vision. Forget skilled craft. I think John Berger put it best in Ways of Seeing (1972): “Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their interests as narrowly as possible.This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and is not desirable.”

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The pressure to conform to “desirable standard” – dripping paint today, identity politics tomorrow, or was that yesterday? – is intense. Opting for shimmering instead of genuine is only increased by structural factors beyond your personal recognition as an artist. The number of failing galleries, often due to higher real-estate cost, means fewer options for representation, and the surviving ones will understandably select with an eye on their own bottom-line. This includes factoring in the taste of potential patrons and the artists’ ability to draw collectors in with personal connections and the like. Add to that the fact that new generations of buyers, who should replace the older ones now downsizing to their retirement homes, are exceptionally burdened with educational debt, have little homeownership that opens up space for collections and, importantly, tend to spend on experience rather than objects. The perfect storm, if you were not one of the rare break-out artists during the last few decades.

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Conforming she ain’t. Mediocrity is the last term that would come to mind when perusing the body of art in her studio or assessing the richness of the conversation. True to a vision, the first.

I had seen and liked Goode’s work across the last decade at Butter’s when the gallery was still a brick & mortar enterprise. A recent show, Transfixed, at Augen, rekindled my interest and led to my request for an interview. What drew me in was what I perceived to be exuberance in these paintings, and the sense of something moving. In fact they recalled one of Piet Mondrian’s claims (I seem to be stuck on the Dutch today!) he made about his work in response to the suggestion by Calder that some of their parts should be made to move: “Well, I think my paintings are fast enough already.”

The perceived speed of Goode’s recent paintings seemed to me in equal part giddy and compulsively driven, a perfect tension between lifting your soul up and weighing your heart down with the emotional valence behind those expressions. One part that helps evoke a sense of lightness is the medium: egg tempera painting (mixing egg yolks with paint pigments and a liquid agent) feels inherently less heavy and foreboding compared to oils, tempera don’t darken over time and they often resemble pastels, in their thin layers and matte finish. Brushstrokes have to be fast and precise with the quick-drying tempera, and crosshatching carefully thought through. It is not a forgiving medium compared to oil, requiring years of practice for the skill levels seen in the exhibits at Augen.

The part that alludes to heaviness lies in the medium as well: heavy wood panels are the base substrate, covered with an absorbent ground, often Italian gesso, that requires tons of physical labor in cooking it up and applying it to the board. Overall, of course, it is the expansiveness of the gesture, and then the unexpected, strange stopping short in those abstracts that is the catalyst for the psychological impact.

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“Mir liegt das Gefühl des sich Ineinander-und Übereinanderschiebens der Dinge. ”

(I cherish the sense of things merging and overlapping.)

Paula Becker Modersohn, in a letter to her friend Clara Westhoff Rilke, 1903.

As German art critic Adolf Behne pointed out in 1923, Paula Modersohn was not yet familiar with the concept of abstractionism since she died much too early, in 1907, with her pathbreaking work left unfinished. But the concept of constructivism that was so central to her art already contained the idea of abstraction in embryonic form. (Paula Modersohn und der Uebergang zur Bildkonstruktion. In: sozialistische Monatshefte 60 (1923). S. 294-299)

Things merging and overlapping have blossomed into full form in Goode’s abstractions, who also frequently experiments with flat fields of colors and strong contours, as did Modersohn Becker. It is not where she started out, though. Raised in rural locations in California, a life often defined by scarcity of cultural stimulation and uprooting, she graduated college from Northern Arizona University, strongly attached to representational drawing and illustration. The pursuit of a higher degree in art hit numerous obstacles, some unpreventable, health related, and never came to fruition.

Not that that stopped her. She has been painting ever since, the love for representational human form soon succeeded by increasing abstraction, freeing her perfectionist self from too many constraints imposed by reality that wanted a mirror image.

Like her painter sister, 130 or so years ago, she chose art to dominate her existence, with relationships at times subservient, and rules of social commerce or politeness disbanded. Like with her forbear, the life events of psychological importance willed themselves into the paintings, in Goode’s case often in diaristic fashion, with language serving as the underpainting for 144 panels, for example, documenting the dissolution of a relationship. The women painters also both seemed to have a hunger for experience, and openness towards it, while at the same time retreating into intensely needed private isolation and withdrawal. They would have gotten along fine. (A decent biography in English of Paula Modersohn by Diane Radycki can be found here.)

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Of all the work I saw that morning while shivering away, I was most drawn to paintings that had an added element to the fine and precise layers of tempera. The artist uses a tool that adds three-dimensionality to the flat color gesture, scratching finely grained patterns into the surface of the painting.

It struck me as joyful, in the Nabi tradition of embracing something decorative as having the right to exist, belonging in “high” art. Playful beauty.

And it was that playfulness, that geometric lightness in 3D that brought me back to Alexander Calder now talking about his own art, not Mondrian’s. In what is as close to an artist statement as you ever got out of him, he wrote to the abstraction-creation folks in 1932:

Merging. Overlapping. Nothing at all of this is fixed – certainly not how art relates to the rest of life, how varying events – or brushstrokes – bond to ever shifting constellations, how an artist’s growth becomes manifest in her choice of direction. The only thing I see as unmovable is that Goode’s art will out. If she doesn’t freeze to death in the meantime.

Jugaad: Originally from Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, and Urdu

Definition in the Oxford English Dictionary: “a flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way”

One of the side effects of being German is that everybody always comments on the weird words your language generates, and in particular their length. Yes, it’s strange to have (real!) words like Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (loosely translated as the law for the task assignment of monitoring beef labeling,) but then again their length is proportional to the length of German sentences that extend across half a page. There are other languages, less often mentioned, that engage in similar stretching exercises, Turkish, Greenlandic and Finnish among them. How is this for a lingual marathon? Ymmärtämättömyyksissäni suuntautumisvaihtoehtoni opintotukihakemuskaavakkeeseen kuulakärkikynällä kirjoitin is a Finnish statement, I am told, that translates into “In a state of not fully comprehending, I wrote my major thesis on the form for financial aid provided by the state using a ballpoint pen.” Just saying….

In reactive fashion, I have become very fond of truly short words that convey incredibly complex meanings. Jugaad is one of them. Fully aware that I might engage in inappropriate cultural (mis)interpretation, the word implies making do with very little, salvaging what can be salvaged, miraculously coming out ahead. Or, as the Harvard Business Review defines it: “the gutsy art of overcoming harsh constraints by improvising an effective solution using limited resources.”

The word came to mind when visiting the Museum of the Oregon Territories (MOOT) in Oregon City last Saturday, to meet with executive director Jenna Barganski and Tammy Jo Wilson, president and co-founder together with Owen Premore, director, of Art in Oregon.

Gutsy?✓ Harsh constraints?✓ Limited resources?✓ Improvising? ✓ Effective solution? YOU BET.

Art organizations, particular those only arriving recently on the scene, are struggling. Small museums are fighting for survival. Historical societies are not exactly showered with financial support. The need to improvise is paramount and dependent on the creativity of approaches, skill in networking and envisioning of possible resources – all clearly evident in the two young women who are embarking on a shared fundraiser for their organizations, an art auction and exhibition, Art Makes History.

This coming Friday, January 17th, there will be a preview party of art work donated by numerous and diverse local artists, exhibited in the Tumwater Ballroom, the museum’s event space overlooking the Willamette Falls, displayed and lit on a hanging system also provided by a generous donor. Art Makes History will then be open for silent auction bidding (online here) and the winners will be revealed at the closing event, an auction dinner party on February 29th (reservations here.)

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The Museum of the Oregon Territories is one of those cultural institutions that run under the radar, even though it can be reached in less than half an hour’s drive from Portland. Part of the Clackamas County Historical Society, established in 1952, its collection has steadily grown, and is now housing some 30.000 artifacts, including more than 10.000 digitized photographs, a treasure cove. Its mission includes but is not just restricted to preserving and interpreting the County’s history, including the native peoples’ communities, life in the territories with the advent of the pioneers, or industry’s role in the development of the dam and power generation, a family history archive.

With the leadership of executive director Jenna Barganski, who received her B.A. in Art History from Northern Arizona University and M.A. in History/Public History from Portland State University (and also curates he occasional art exhibit) MOOT will open its newest exhibit: Lines on the Land: Mapping Clackamas County at the end of January. Also on offer is a monthly lecture series, the Murdock Talks, that range from local historical topics to cowboy poetry to a history of Oregon’s women murderers, to cite just a few. A new book club aimed at people interested in history meets monthly at the other cultural site of the CCHS, the Stevens-Crawford Heritage House. And now there will be art on view, reflecting a broad cross- section of artists in the community.

It will have to compete with the extraordinary view from the museum’s windows…..

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Just as historical societies are rooted in community, Art in Oregon (AiO) is focused on building bridges between artists and communities. The non-profit wants to link artists, businesses, educational spaces and community spaces to promote art patronage and, importantly, access to art for people who do not necessarily visit museums and established art galleries on a regular basis.

I met Tammy Jo Wilson this summer as one of the participating artists in the Exquisite Gorge project (I wrote about her here) and was impressed by her vision. A gifted artist herself, I think she and her co-founder, sculptor Owen Premore, have put their fingers on the pulse of the current art scene and found it to be, shall we say, erratic. It beats too rapidly when in the presence of the big and shiny, the arrived or the cool, however you want to put it, parts of the established elite. It slows down to a faint murmur, when it comes to local artistic expression, which marches to different standards, perhaps in skill, perhaps in focus of expression, but still pumps the necessary blood to the heart that is community.

AiO wants to change that and offers an on-line database of Oregon artists with their Art Shine Project. Artists can apply on-line to be added to the roster; they can also respond to calls for curated exhibitions. Public venues can easily peruse the offerings and pick what’s appropriate for their needs.

“The Art Shine Project is a grassroots venture which builds relationships between Clackamas County artists and local establishments (i.e. businesses libraries, schools, museums, etc.) and facilitate placement of artwork by regional artists in highly visible, public spaces through a micro-grant program. This project increases investment in local artists and expansion of cultural assets throughout the county.”

Jugaad. Instead of brick and mortar galleries, of art dealers and agents of exclusivity, you have an effective solution based on local talent and local interest matched at an electronic site that makes art (and artists) visible, with little cost involved.

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The artists who donated work for the Art Makes History auction and exhibition are a representative sample of what you can find in the data base, from emerging artists to those who’ve already made their mark in the art world.

There are some lovely pieces hanging on the walls of the museum, some traditional, some funky, some abstract, multi-media creations, photographs, collages. Bidding prices start at comparatively low levels, given the sums some of these pieces fetch at galleries around town.

There was fabric art by Amanda Triplett, a piece that should be snatched up in a second, reminding me of Oregon Coast tide pools with their otherworldly creatures, all from recycled materials to not add more burdens to the environment. A watercolor by Bethany Hayes caught my eye for its unsentimental elegance, and a mix of pastel, graphite, charcoal, acrylic paint, colored pencil, silkscreen and conte’ crayon on paper in three works by Kathryn Cellerini Moore was exquisite. And I, full disclosure, splurged on a whimsical oil-on-panel piece with the buy now option which allows you instant gratification. Hey, there have to be perks if you trudge out on a weekend morning to gather materials for a review. Early bird and so on…

Here is the full list of artists on display: Ronald Bunch, Douglas Burns, Kathryn Cellerini Moore, Tamara English, Dotty Hawthorne, Bethany Hays, Sue Jensen, Kendra Larson, Katherine McDowell, Veronica Reeves, Amanda Triplett, Elo Wobig, Natalie Wood, Beth Yazhari – you see what I meant by variety!

Many of us bemoan the reduction in arts funding, the decreasing role art is afforded in educational settings with tight resources, the lack of inexpensive real estate that would provide gallery space for emerging artists. Here is an opportunity to act on those concerns and support one old and one new organization that try to remedy these failings. Make it a night (or two) out in Oregon City, check out the art, or bid from the comfort of your computer desk chair, just get engaged with your art community – otherwise it might soon be history.

ART MAKES HISTORY

Art Exhibition & Silent Auction

January 17, 2020 6:30 – 8:30 pm Preview Party

February 29, 2020 6:00 – 10:00 pm Dinner Auction

Museum of the Oregon Territory

Tumwater Ballroom – 211 Tumwater Drive, Oregon City, Oregon

You have a number of options interpreting today’s photographs.

A) This is what my brain looks like when trying to write not one but two really long and involved reviews during a single week. And now darkness descends and all that’s left are the photographs.

B) This is what my cerebrum looks like (the part of the brain that handles some aspect of language) when desperately trying to find words that can be printed in a family friendly blog in reaction to the outcome of Great Britain’s election. Darkness descends there, too.

C) This is what an infinity mirror room looks like when created by a nonagenarian artist obsessed with polka dots, fully insisting that we all are same, connected souls in the world.

If you picked: Yayoi Kusama, you won. If you guessed Brexit, you sort of won. If you said braindead, you are my friend.

C, in other words, rules the objective world. A, B and C, however, are not mutually exclusive…..

The Souls of a Million Light Years Away is currently on exhibit at The Broad and each visitor braving the lines to get in is accorded exactly 45 seconds to explore the experience. Guard with stop watch on hand standing outside and calling you out.

And here are Polkadots and Moonbeams…..

There could not have been a better introduction to Iranian-born, US artist Shirin Neshat than watching one of her videos, Rapture (1999) early on in the extensive retrospective of 30 years of her work, currently on exhibition at The Broad in L.A.

Everything, but everything was binary in that experience. You sit between split screens, having to turn your head to the left to see one part of the video installation, to the right to see the other and never the twain shall meet. The left side depicts hundreds of women, the right the equivalent number of men. The females, cloaked in black hijab or chador watch, often passively, pray, are mostly silent except for an occasion of ondulation, disperse and eventually send a few of their own on a rickety boat into the depths of the Atlantic ocean (filmed in Morocco.) The men, in identical black pants and white shirts, run the length of a citadel, canons and all, climb to the roof, sing, feast, display some hierarchical order and are generally active, eventually waving en masse to the departing women from afar.

Think of it as Buñuel meets Herzog, and I mean that as a compliment. Sort of. It was visually dramatic, exquisitely staged and choreographed. The binary themes of female/male, activity/passivity, departure/arrival, even a dreamlike state vs reality that are central to all of her work, were right upfront. The video brought the issues of gender differences and religious intolerance to the fore with a sledge hammer, black and white for all to see, and yet leaving enough room for ambiguity that even the most fervent feminist could leave the screening room with an inkling of hope. Maybe.

There was that nagging thought – and one that repeatedly crept into my brain while taking in this comprehensive exhibition – as to whether we have made any progress away from the orientalist lens applied throughout history to members of non-western cultures, those exotic figures from a different world. The forced head movements between screens had me wonder about disconnection, the separation of them vs us, but also about how our gaze is steered, often away from taking in the whole picture; the staged costuming and movement of the people evoked a sense of directorial control that was reminiscent of its colonialist counterpart, chador replacing the nude bodies of those Seraglio paintings of yore as a mirror image of exotic otherness.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Neshat is superb in the way she creates visual scenarios, employs melodrama to make a point, ingeniously cashing in on our fascinations. She is powerful in her story telling and quite sensitive to contemporary concerns with exile, gendered existence, the interplay between political power and religious fervor. And she has whatever it takes to become a successful female artist in a male dominated world, never mind her exceedingly dainty, feminine appearance, dangling designer jewelry, heavy make-up and all. More power to her!

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She also has a story that is carefully tailored to underpin her art. Raised in Iran in a middle-class family in the 1950s, sent to catholic boarding school in Tehran to get a westernized education, she came to the US at age 17 in 1975 to go to college and later grad school to get her MfA. Discontent with her attempts at making her own art, she moved to New York city and worked at the side of her partner for over 10 years, tending to a cultural meeting point The Storefront for Art and Architecture. Those years were not exactly exile – that only began with the political changes in Iran prohibiting her return, and she has certainly refrained from visiting there for the last decades, now openly declaring that she never wants to go home, even if it were politically possible, and intends to leave nostalgia for the place behind.

Her first large project in the 1990s after a visit back home after years that included the revolution, the hostage crisis, and the Iraq war, propelled her like a rocket into the successful realms of the art world. The photographic series Women of Allah depicted veiled women with guns in various positioning, often looking directly at you in regal and defiant ways, overlaid in carefully applied calligraphy citing Farsi poetry, often by women poets. No longer object of stares but agents of their own gaze, these women, photographed between 1993 and 1997, projected strength, particularly in the juxtaposition of tenderness, when coupled with children, with rawness, when harnessing the weaponry, another one of those binary plots.

The writing across the bodies of the subjects felt like a membrane to me, a distancing device in the sense that the language cannot be deciphered by this Western viewer, but also as a protective barrier against too much exposure of the body parts it covered. If we could read Farsi, we would learn that two very contrasting poets are projected onto the different subjects:

“Farrokhzad’s imagery from the pre-revolutionary Iran, controversially sexual, Western, a modern rebel thirsty for life—and Taherzadeh, the new regime’s idol, utterly alien to the artist, Muslim, traditional, Eastern, revolutionary, daydreaming about martyrdom. In Untitled (1996), the woman is the object of desire, her face covered with Farrokhzad’s text. In Speechless (1996) and others employing Taherzadeh’s text, the woman willingly becomes the revolutionary sacrifice: motherly, subjugated, utterly secondary.”

While I looked at these determined faces I wondered about how the historical development in the 30 years since these photos were taken would change our reaction: if I knew these women were involved with ISIS, would I see a triumph in their courage to join the fight? If I was a Kurdish female fighter, now raped and killed for participation in a singular social experiment of gender equality, would my Iranian sisters, fighting for the right to veiled themselves again, feel like enemies or allies? Does a change in contemporary context alter the poignancy of contemporary art?

Does a change in politics alter the way we describe a country? I was reminded of one of my favorite travel books of all times, Terence O’Donnell’s Garden of the Brave in War, that describes life in pre-revolutionary Iran in the countryside, introducing world views quite different from our Western perspective and yet assuring a sense of shared humanity. How would he have depicted the contemporary state of affairs?

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Neshat has won countless awards for her work, among them the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale (1999), the Grand Prix at the Kwangju Biennale (2000), the Visual Art Award from the Edinburgh International Film Festival (2000), the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York (2002), the ZeroOne Award from the Universität der Künste Berlin (2003), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize from the Hiroshima City Museum of Art (2005), and the Lillian Gish Prize in New York (2006). Her contributions to important collections can be found here.

The early photographic explorations were soon joined by videos and feature films, media that I find frankly much more interesting and a better match for her strength of creating visual drama, and also requiring deeper thinking than her portrait work. The exquisitely mounted exhibition at The Broad meanders from room to room, large spaces that provide breathing room for the XL portraiture. There is something about the size (and the repetitious use of calligraphy obscuring faces across 30 years of work) that eventually strikes as dangerously close to gimmicky.

The strong emotional impact of the first series, in other words, was not matched for me in later work, now staging subjects from other countries, often by major commissions, in Egypt and Azerbaijan. People propped up in studio arrangements with photographers present (Larry Barns being a frequent and outstanding collaborator), lighting assistants bustling, and Neshat directing pose, are asked how they feel about poverty or what home means to them (the little things like mother’s food, it turns out to little surprise.) Capturing their tears in front of the recording group feels invasive to me, if not exploitative, and the size of the portraits prevents any sense of intimacy with the subjects.

Much more impressive is work that contrasts the smallness of humans, almost always women, with the largeness of landscapes or architectural molochs. The stills anticipate what the video installations confer: a striking sense of visual exploration of psychological states.

The Broad excels in placing the small auditoriums where the videos are shown in-between the spaces for photographic work – it is almost like breathing room provided, except that your breath is sucked in and held from the tension elicited by these films. It is as director that Neshat succeeds most, on both the emotional and intellectual level. (Unclear, why that did no transfer to her first major directing role in an operatic setting – she was called to direct Aida at the Salzburger Festspiele in 2017, an opera with a love triangle and political and religious oppression, right up her alley, one would think. The showcase production with Muti conducting and Netrebko in the main role was lauded, but Neshat’s directing ruthlessly panned by the critics.)

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Neshat does not consider herself a political activist. Politics affect her, though, and she talks freely about being exposed to racial profiling immediately after 9/11 and then again since the 2016 election that confronted her with more explicit racism in her own private experience. Her recent work (Roja and Land of Dreams) turns to explorations of living as an exile in the US, providing astute social commentary on trauma and war as experienced by all sides, but also linking to her feeling that she is not welcome in either culture or place.

When asked if she considers herself a feminist she answers indirectly: “If someone asks me that and they often do, I give the question back to the audience. Do they think I am? Yes they do, so I take that, it’s ok with me.” Her recurrent emphasis on the dichotomy of women being extremely fragile and vulnerable vs extremely strong and defiant might need a closer look in the context of feminist theory. The implications of gendered realities in her work, however, are fascinating and if you have a chance to see this exhibition, make sure you do!

Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again

Oct 19 – Feb 16, 2020 The Broad, Los Angeles, CA

I Will Greet the Sun Again

I will greet the sun again
and the little river that once ran in me
and the clouds that were my ruminations
and the aching blooms of poplar trees,
my companions in those seasons of drought.

I will greet the crowd of crows again,
who brought me their rich perfumes,
gifts from gardens of the night,
and my mother who lived in the mirror
and whose shape was the shape of my own old age.

I will greet the earth again,
who in her lust to create me again,
fills her fiery belly with seeds of green.

I am coming, I am coming, I will come again,
with my long hair dripping the scent of dirt,
with my eyes inflicting the density of darkness,
with brambles I’ve picked from the far side of the wall.

I am coming, I am coming, I will come again,
and the doorway once more will be filled with love
and I’ll greet the lovers standing in the doorway,
and the little girl there
still standing in love.

Forough Farrokhzad

Translated from Persian by Paul Weinfield, © 2014