Browsing Tag

Converge 45

Endless Pigeons.

· Malia Jensen at The Reser ·

“To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.”

~ Jean (Hans) Arp “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs.” (1966.)

***

Full of joy about captures my emotional reaction to Malia Jensen‘s newly installed sculpture at the Arts Plaza of The Reser, her contribution to the many works of art displayed across town during the next weeks in the context of Converge 45‘s Biennial. Endless Pigeons is such a clever sculpture, subversive and learned alike in the way it combines subject, form and a slightly altered utilitarian object for its pedestal.

Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023)

Her commissioned sculpture riffs off one of Constantin Brâncuși‘s most famous works, the Endless Column from 1937. The 98-foot-high column of zinc, brass-clad, cast-iron modules threaded onto a steel spine is part of an installation of three sculptures commemorating Romanian soldiers fighting in WW I. Recently restored after years of neglect, vandalism and governmental condemnation as “degenerate art,” Brâncuși’s sculpture can be visited in Târgu Jiu, Romania. (Actually, this one is the last in a series of endless columns dating back as early as 1918, made of wood, with several others following, two of them around 1928 that are 10 ft and 13 ft tall respectively, and for the first time placed on square pedestals. Both can be seen at the Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris.)

Constantin Brâncuși Endless Column (1937) – Photo Credit: Mike Masters Romania (CC BY-SA 3.0 RO)

Jensen’s column is not quite on that scale, and the elements consist of eight humongous representational pigeons rather than abstract geometric modules, but I take joy over awe any day.

There is a bit of tongue-in-cheek rebellion towards the giant of art history (or perhaps the fan boys of “famous” art in general) in choosing the lowly bird as a replacement, although “lowly” depends on the eye of the beholder and the context. Watching flights of band-tailed pigeons is inspiring, if only for the noise their bodies make. Wading through throngs of tourists in European cities taking pictures among the flocks is quite the adventure, particularly when enthusiastic photographers enamored with individual birds become a tripping hazard.

The perennial pigeon man at the Louvre, Paris; tourists on St. Mark’s Place, Venice

XL Pigeons elevated to art, with the real thing blithely ignoring the gilded additions to its perch. Town hall roof in Alkmaar, Netherlands.

In Portland, a city that has made the meme “put a bird on it” its own – often accompanied by condescending smirks – putting one bird on top of another shows welcome contempt for what is considered worthy art – or not. Jensen’s sculpture evoked in me such a strong sense of the artist’s love of nature, her desire to show the beauty in the ignored or overlooked, her playfulness in the arrangement of the birds, and her skepticism as to who gets to define “art,” that it simply lifted my spirits.

The size contributes; previous works that offered visions of piled-up birds were smaller and somehow more tender. The current large birds almost beckon you to touch them, feel their ridges and explore their patterns with your fingers, a haptic experience made possible by the sculpture’s accessibility. Their bronze plumage shows plenty of detail with a patina that might soon be altered by chance contributions dropped by avian neighbors from the small urban wetland nearby.

Malia Jensen Small Pile, (2010) Bronze 10 1/4 x 6 x 5 inches

Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (1923) Details

Birds have, of course, played a major role in art, and significantly so with multiple contemporaries of Brâncuși within the surrealist movement. Leonora Carrrington used them as a frequent motif in her paintings and lithographs, and I found one of my favorite bird paintings ever in the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico: Remedios Varo‘s Creation of the Birds.

Left: Leonora Carrington Steel Bird (1974) Lithograph on Paper. Photo credit Sotheby’s.

Right: Remedios Varo Creation des las Aves (1954) Oil, Masonite.

They were a central topic for Max Ernst, who relates his obsession with them to the childhood trauma of losing his beloved pet bird at the time of his sister’s birth. For Ernst, birds became symbols of both victimhood and freedom, used in his art as an alter ego, often representing a rising phoenix from the ashes. (I picked an example that mostly resembled a pigeon, photographed at a Hamburger Kunsthalle exhibition, I believe of the Collection de Menile in the early 2000s, I lost my notes. The other images are from a 1975 book of edgings, Birds in peril.)

Max Ernst Oiseaux en péril (1975) Color etchings – Oiseaux spectraux (1932) Oil on cardboard.

Brâncuși, whose work is frequently referenced by Jensen, was preoccupied with birds as well. He was interested in their movement, however, not the way they looked. His series of Bird in Space representations, seven of them in marble and 9 cast in bronze, takes off the wings altogether, streamlines the bodies and adds just an oval plane for a head. The creatures soar, more akin to rockets, really – here is an example from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, CA.

Constantin Brâncuși Bird in Space (1931)

The artist was also questioning the traditional way sculptures were displayed, on top of a pedestal that signals the artistic value of a piece, aiming at ennobling it, elevating it out of reach in ways that confer the preciousness of the object (or the memories it represents.) His contemporary, sculptor and poet Hans Arp who I quoted at the beginning, was even more opposed to traditional pedestals. (Details can be found here.) He felt they enhanced an aura that separated the experience of art from other experiences we have in our lives, distancing us from the work in ways that had to be overcome. In fact, he loathed the way art, put on a pedestal, glorified people – often the very people who brought disaster upon us, just think of all those sculptural memorials to generals and colonialists.

“Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome.”

Hans Arp “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs.” (1966.)

Abandoning aloofness in favor of enhancing participatory interaction with the art work was the goal. That included ways of encouraging the viewer to circumnavigate a given sculpture, looking at it from different viewing angles, and not being ruled by a fixed position in space. Employing something more akin to utilitarian objects was also believed to help overcome the distance between viewer and object, given that it was less of a demarcation and more of an invitation given the established familiarity.

Jensen’s Endless Pigeons makes great use of these markers that encourage participatory engagement. Her “pedestal” turns out to be one of those traffic barriers, albeit foreshortened, that tell you to stay in your lane, but here, in welcome reversal, functions as an invitation to cross over line that separates art from everyday life.

Stacked Jersey Barriers

Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023)

The way she arranges the pigeons also invite the viewer to walk around the sculpture, wondering about the balancing act exhibited in that column. I ended up speculating about the single, straight backward looking pigeon: an avian representative of Klee’s Angelus Novus, the angel of history always looking backwards towards the past, although he has his wings straight up, if I remember correctly?

Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023) Detail

Circling the sculpture – although these tracks were made by the machinery that installed it, not the author.

Viewing the sculpture from above somehow enhances the sense that the column is slightly teetering and the birds flapping their wings to attempt balance. There is humor here, some distinct signal that we can’t take everything too seriously, (ARRRRRT, as the inimitable Molly Ivins used to say,) and should not cling solely to depictions of the problems of our times.

But there is also the reminder that not only do we, whether scientists or artists, stand on the shoulder of giants, but that the balance needed to achieve the heights we want is inevitably coupled with trust and cooperation, the whole in need of reliable parts.

Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023) Detail

A column of animals perching on each other is a familiar symbol of the power of solidarity for any child raised in Germany. The Brother Grimm fairy tale The Town Musicians of Bremen relates a story of abused and condemned, aging animals banding together and running away from their farms. With combined forces and a bit of slapstick luck worthy of the Dadaists theory of chance, they get rid of a band of robbers that terrorized the town. The donkey, the dog, the cat and the rooster live happily ever after, wouldn’t you know it. Immortalized by sculptor and Bauhaus Master Gerhard Marcks, the sculpture of their heightened power achieved through mutual aid was placed on the Bremen town square in 1953. (The city, by the way, also houses a museum in his honor that has become noted for exhibitions of modern and contemporary sculpture.)

Gerhard Marcks Bremer Stadtmusikanten (1953) Bronze.

Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023) Detail

***

Many of the European artists in the 1930s, when fascists started to move things towards inescapable horror and destruction, showed a renewed interest in nature and its essential value. Hans Arp certainly stressed the importance of unity between man and nature, and many of his sculptures of that era were artistic expressions of those beliefs. One of them, To be Exposed in the Woods, brings me to Malia Jensen’s recent work that is challenging to grasp, in more ways than one. I want to explore it here, because I see a direct link to the work displayed at The Reser. Just give me a minute to set the stage.

To be exposed in the Woods (looking indeed like a partially consumed salt lick out in the woods) came to mind when I thought back over Jensen’s oeuvre Worth your Salt. If you think the pigeons at The Reser are humongous, wait until you grasp what went into the video that Jensen produced starting in 2016. Driven by a sense of a nation mired in divisiveness, a latent disquiet about where we as a country were heading, she turned to nature, hoping for a sense of harmony as well as an embrace of uncertainty and discovery. The artist carved 6 body parts out of large salt licks, with a head that was once again a nod in the direction of Brâncuși or maybe Giacometti, a hand offering a plum, a foot, a breast and a stomach represented by a stack of donuts. (You might have seen that piece at a 2022 show at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, reviewed in ArtsWatch here.)

Malia Jensen Worth your Salt (Nearer Nature project, 2018 – 2022) (All project photos and screenshots credited to Jensen’s Website or lecture videos.)

She then needed to find locations across Oregon that would provide access to animals interested in the salt licks, prevent hunters or vigilantes from easily accessing vulnerable pray (private or land trust land desirable), allow her to place multiple video cameras (18!) with motion sensors that would record the wild life, in positions with maximum light effectiveness, and then be able to come and go frequently to exchange the SD cards of the recordings for months on end.

All that required interaction with previously unfamiliar people, traversing stretches of land with populations not necessarily used to environmental artists, and eventually cataloging, cutting and editing the 10s of thousand of videoclips with a team of multiple assistants to braid into a final video of some 6 hour duration. This video was then displayed in carefully selected locations that included rural grocery stores and bars, elementary schools, the research facilities at OHSU, chocolate stores, mental health clinics and son on, in hopes of instilling a sense of harmony in viewers, or at least curiosity about the unfolding displays of nature, and maybe fill some of the emptiness left from exposure to a world that has us reeling and insecure, if not frightened.

Here are some of the images captured by the cameras. Overall the fauna was diverse, turkeys, bobcats, coyotes, deer, squirrels, a brown bear and, yes, band-tailed pigeons! on the coast, all making an appearance.

Malia Jensen Worth your Salt (Nearer Nature project, 2018 – 2022)

The assumption was that it was a fair deal – the animals, gifted with the needed minerals from the salt licks would in turn provide the artist with footage that would allow people to be alert to the wonders of nature, in an age where species are disappearing at an unprecedented clip. In turn, increased engagement for the preservation of nature might be triggered by the awe instilled by observation. At least that is my understanding of the core idea of the project.

Why am I then, despite my admiration for the conceptual richness and the insane amount of work going into all this and the wit instantiated in the donuts, for example, feeling unease about what went on? I think it has to do with the nature of surveillance.

If you yourself go out into nature, photographing nature, or wildlife in particular, there is a shared space, a shared risk, a one-on-one encounter that somehow shapes the relationship between you and the animal. This is particularly true when there is eye contact.

May 2023 Oak Island Loop, Sauvies Island, OR

That precludes, pragmatically, the acquisition of the amount of footage and the diversity of wildlife on display in Jensen’s work, of course. So if we grant license to work with automated surveillance instead, and use salt as a lure to maximize the encounters, then we could argue, ok, they got something in turn. But here is where things shift: when the salt licks had taken on a particularly pleasing aesthetic, they were removed to be cast in glass, themselves becoming objects of art of a more permanent and transactional kind. (This was originally not in the plan.) Will those exhibits still confer the ideas that motivated the Closer to Nature project to begin with? Where the critters cheated out of the rest of their supplementary diet?

The hand and what was left of the head top right.

It is certainly obvious when you hear Jensen talk about the work, that it imprinted on her soul, moving her, sustaining her through the years of pandemic isolation, so I am not suggesting mercenary intentions. And in any case, artists have to make a living and should sell their art. It also likely brought meaning to many of the people who were able to see the video or the casts. It just feels like animals have not been able to escape the impact of human “progress” and expansion, threatened or dislodged from their habitats, burnt, starved or suffocated by the environmental destruction we have unleashed. Now we spy on them in their remaining spots, lured there by promises of years, not months, of NaCl. Not that they care, they wouldn’t know, of course. It is more about introspection into our own ethical parameters that might or might not be violated when we, too, engage the tools of surveillance that many of us so rage about within the power structures where we humans live and move.

Which brings me back, in case you were worried, to the pigeons. I cannot tell if the expressed deep love for nature was always there or was enhanced by Jensen working on the Nearer Nature project. It is clearly on display in her choice of sculpting the Endless Pigeons, no matter how humorous or ironically it is to be received. I also feel that the decision (and, yes, courage in today’s art world) to create something joyful, vibrant, somehow optimistic (as this column came across to me) is potentially the result of having been given the gift of watching harmonious interaction during her video recording. Not all is doom and gloom. Watching deer and coyote peacefully cross paths at night reminds you of that.

I remember photographing this window display in a small shop in France, that added the “lowly” pigeon to the exterminator’s list among the cockroaches and rats, and thinking, “Hah, they’ll outlast the last of us. No matter how we try to prevent them from nesting, feeding or defecating by hammering nails into windowsills or providing netting for the vulnerable buildings, they’ll reproduce!

Pigeons roosting on a French cathedral

Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023) Details

I can only speculate why this sculpture was placed at The Reser. A practical location? A relation to the environment? A counterbalance to Jorge Tacla’s work inside which confronts us with the dark side of humanity? (I had written about his remarkable paintings previously here.) A result of the fact that both artists are represented by Christin Tierney Gallery in NYC? Who knows. The choice was perfect. We need some straightening to navigate the art world and we need resilience to make it through these times. If anything speaks of resilience, it is pigeons! And they bring joy. Not a small thing.

My daily visitors, band-tailed pigeons.

Converge 45: Public Opening Weekend Celebration at The Reser: Saturday, August 26 @ 10:30 am

Malia Jensen: Artist Talk :September 21, 2023 6:30pm at The Reser

SOCIAL FORMS: ART AS GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP

  • Where: The Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, 12625 S.W. Crescent St., Beaverton

CONVERGE 45

  • What: A Biennial exhibition of work by 50 artists in 15 venues across greater Portland, curated by Christian Viveros Fauné
  • When: Opening Aug. 24-27 and continuing with various closing dates through the end of 2023

SOCIAL FORMS: Art as Global Citizenship

· In partnership with CONVERGE 45 The Reser presents Jorge Tacla, Karl LeClair, Malia Jensen and Miroslav Lovric. ·

We are 5,000, here in this little corner of the city.
How many are we in all the cities of the world?
All of us, our eyes fixed on death.
How terrifying is the face of Fascism
For them, blood is a medal,
carnage is a heroic gesture.

Song, I cannot sing you well 
When I must sing out of fear.
When I am dying of fright.
When I find myself in these endless moments.
Where silence and cries are the echoes of my song.

Lines written by Chilean artist and political activist Victor Jara before being tortured, his hands chopped with an axe, and murdered by Pinochet’s military henchmen in September 1973 at a stadium holding thousands of people rounded up by the Junta, his body thrown out into the streets of Santiago.

***

I spent several weeks in Chile some 18 months after that fateful date, traveling from Bolivia through the breathtaking, stark beauty of the Atacama desert of the North with its abandoned nitrate – and open-pit copper mines monopolized by British and later American capital. I stayed in Santiago for a while, where bullet holes remained in plain, demonstrative view, riddling the presidential palace, La Moneda, where the democratically elected, socialist President Salvador Allende had been killed during Pinochet’s Coup d’Etat. I knew of the violence of the new regime, fully supported by American industrial giant I.T.T. and the CIA (U.S. banks also extended more than $150‐million in short‐term credits to Chile and the Pentagon sold it 52 jet fighter and combat support planes in those 18 months,) but had no clue to its extent. Today’s officially recognized number of victims of the Junta, people killed, tortured or imprisoned for political reasons, is 40,018. That might not even account for the many “disappeared,” thrown out of helicopters into the sea. Military officers responsible for Jara’s murder were finally sentenced to 15 years in prison, in 2018, almost half a century later. Slow moving wheels of justice and all that. Barely anyone talked to me in 1975, much less about politics, the country seemed frozen in shock or fear and a nightly curfew was still in place.

Jorge Tacla Injury Report/ Informe de lesions, HD film 4:25 (2016 – 2023) Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

Although the days of the Junta are over, Chile is currently under duress in other ways, equally threatening to its population, particular the working class and the indigenous folks exposed to the consequences of mining. A United Nations report from two months ago states that Chile faces a daunting series of inter-connected environmental crises that violate human rights, including the fundamental right to live in a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The country is particularly exposed to the effects of the climate crisis, among the 20 nations with the highest level of water stress in the world. Droughts and water pollution around lithium mining are intense, the latter a major export and subject to fierce struggles over ownership, bringing an unprecedented 1.5 million people out into the streets to protest for environmental justice 4 years ago.

All this as an introduction to Chilean artist Jorge Tacla and his work (his list of many achievements found in the link), currently presented at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, in partnership with Converge 45. The local arts organization, comprised of art professionals and business leaders, starts its Biennial officially on August 24, 2023. Planned are 15 exhibitions by international and American artists across multiple venues, tackling, as the organizers put it, “how art interacts with global power shifts in contemporary society, including how art is at the vanguard of societal redefinition and shifts towards more participatory culture.” (Watch for more reviews by various writers on ArtsWatch in weeks to come, covering the full spectrum of the shows.) The list of artist names – I have obviously not yet seen much of the work itself for the upcoming Biennial – suggests a surprising and challenging curation by art critic and author Christian Viveros-Fauné.

I. Jorge Tacla: Stagings/Escenarios.

At a time when the wagons are circled, and exclusionary nationalism (and worse ideological forces) once again raise their ugly head in so many of the countries we thought were steadfast democracies, a transnational approach to art is certainly important. Knowledge of an artist’s background, temporally, geographically and culturally, might help us to gain a greater understanding if not appreciation of his work, surely affected by specific experiential pressures. Tacla came of age in Chile during the time of the military coup and left the country for the United States in 1981, these days sharing his time between New York City and Santiago, Chile. Add to that Syrian and Palestinian ancestry, peoples exposed to inordinate amounts of suffering and oppression across their histories, a heightened sensibility for abuses of power and the consequences of displacement are to be expected. That sensibility indeed influenced the contents of his work that I encountered at The Reser, an exhibition titled Stagings/Escenarios.

There are three exhibits on view, a video, Injury Report/ Informe de lesions, that relates to the book burnings by the Chilean Junta, a timely reminder for us in our own country that the step from banning to burning is but a short one, once autocratic power is fully unleashed, and two paintings. One is extraordinary large, displayed on wooden structures that makes it look like a billboard, the other is traditionally hung. Staging, rather than scenarios, feels like an aptly chosen title for the show, given the way the paintings dramatize catastrophe.

Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 60, (Detail) (20121) Oil and cold wax on canvas. Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 60 (offered with an instruction: interpretation left to the viewer) depicts an interior view of a room that could be a tiled kitchen transformed into a provisional field hospital, or a torture chamber, constructed with hastily thrown together cinderblocks. Central is a kind of operating table, with a side shelf of medical-looking instruments and tinctures, surrounded by amorphous forms that could be shackles or handcuffs, under a hovering cloud of markings that resemble musical notes, the echoes of resounding screams, or, alternatively, buzzing insects attracted by the remnants of bodily fluids. The one unambiguous representation in this monochromatic web of hints and suggestions is the visual anchor of a patch of blood, with a few tiny splashes detectable here or there. It steers our attention to the subjective suffering of a human being, whether harmed in situ or patched back together on a make-shift bed, creating empathy, but also narrowing our focus to victimhood. It forces a gruesome vision of physical harm, drawing us into the literal as well as metaphorical darkness of that chamber. Not much room for interpretation, frankly, if a puddle of blood gets visual place of honor.

Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 60, (Details) (20121) Oil and cold wax on canvas. Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

The larger painting, Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, displays a panoramic view of collective suffering, rather than honing in on a singular imagined body under duress. A frontal view of city blocks bombed to shreds evokes the real-life catastrophe of the siege of the Syrian city of Homs, where a three-year-long battle between the military and oppositional forces a decade ago led to indescribable acts of barbarism by Assad’s henchmen, until the rebels withdrew, and the government took hold.

Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, (2018) Oil and cold wax on canvas Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

It is a truly interesting painting, despite flirting, at times, with clichéd ambiguity: are the pinks and coral hints at the horizon a hopeful sign of dawn, or are they the glow of still smoldering fires? Are the wispy clouds testimony to an indifferent nature, or plumes of smoke?

Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, (2018) (Detail) Oil and cold wax on canvas Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

What made it fascinating to me is the subversive use of columnar arrangements, spatial divisions by means of subtle changes in coloration, vertical lines and actual, distinct columns that overlap on some of the four panels that comprise the entirety of the painting, The columns are enclosed in an unending repetition of violently destroyed human habitat. Columns and repetition were a device of what art historian Meyer Schapiro called “despotic art,” or arts of power, starting with baroque displays of endless columns in churches and cloisters, or colonial architecture in Egypt and India, government buildings with porticos, down to the mass media presentation of his time, then the 1930s, in the new medium of photography capturing hangars filled with rows of airplanes, or military divisions marching en bloc.

Tacla is turning the table, using those elements from the perspective of the displaced, rather than that of the abusive forces, the repetition of block after block of unmitigated destruction inducing horror, rather than awe. In its cityscape expansiveness it called to mind a 19th century painting of another hell, by John Martin – note the columnar repetition of the government buildings or an imaginary reconstruction of cities of antiquity.

Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, (2018) (Detail) Oil and cold wax on canvas Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

John Martin Pandemonium (1841), Oil on canvas, 123 x 185 cm. Louvre, Paris. Based on John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, where Pandemonium is the capital of Hell.

The billboard-like staging reminded me of the billboards seen on many commuter roads, displaying advertisement for (sub)urban neighborhoods: You’d be home now, if you lived here! Well, you’d be dead now, if you lived here, in Homs.

The association includes something of a dialectic, of course. Being reminded of the price of violent political conflict might make you aware of the gathering darkness around us or create empathy for refugees facing a watery Mediterranean grave during their flight. But the reassurance of not living “there” after all, allows us a distancing from those far-away places where genocide happens, enacted by “foreign barbarians,” promoting a false sense of security on our own shores.

The use of cold wax mixed with the oil paints adds to the unnerving feeling caused by the staging. It allows a manipulation of transparency, and so some of what I saw resembled the haze when you look through tears, if not through the dust that gets whipped up when buildings crumble. It also adds body and allows layering; on close inspection, the painting shows scars or buckled skin, as if skin is ripped off or has burnt to the point of melting. The association to skin really was the only direct – and shattering – link to the representation of human beings, rather than architectural ruins.

Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, (2018) (Details) Oil and cold wax on canvas Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery

I cannot help but wonder how thick-skinned the artist himself must be to make it as a wanderer between worlds, like any displaced person never quite belonging to either the old or the new. Early NYT review doubted his ability to reach high ground as a painter. That didn’t age well. Psychoanalytically absorbed reviewers attest him a profound death anxiety – I guess I’m with Maslow here, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” including the aesthetics of destruction as a symbol for one’s psyche to acolytes of psychoanalysis. Critics attacked his monumental work at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, a series of plates that memorialized the place of Jara’s murder and is inscribed with his name – Al mismo tiempo, en el mismo lugar (At The Same Time, in The Same Place), 2010, – as too focused on the individual, particularly when the individual in question devoted his life to collective power.

The paintings on view at The Reser suggested to me something quite different, independent of my admiration of the technical prowess to create these monumental constructions and the artist’s resilience when reenacting suffering in the process of painting. In some ways they bear witness, questioning the relationship between the aesthetic and the social, particularly the violence so ubiquitous in our world. They want us to consider, like all good political art, how we bear or enable or resist social imperatives that are associated with power and its requisite tools.

Does art manage to shape our historical thinking, and does its form help us reconfigure our assumptions about the present? Can works of political art ultimately achieve change of a kind, beyond providing a contemporary label that soothes buyers’ conscience by making them feel “progressive”, sort of an art-washing for the soul of the (neo)liberal collector? I will turn to that question in a bit. Before we get there, let me introduce the other two artists on display at The Reser.

***

“A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and un-compromised, in its innermost structure.” 
― Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music

The quote by Adorno, though focussed on modern music, could equally well be applied to curation. Curation is hard and often does not get the attention and appreciation it deserves, particularly when un-compromising. If you are a renowned curator charged with constructing large assemblies of artists, you have to balance your ideas and concepts with the interests of the organizing institutions, who have partially mercantilistic aspirations. Biennials, art fairs and the like do infuse a place with economic activity, after all. You might also face an embarrassment of riches – die Qual der Wahl is the German phrase, the torture of choice – with regard to the number of artists at your disposal, amongst whom you have to pick and choose, avoiding the dreaded commodification, pushing an important concept and protecting the state of your reputation simultaneously.

If you are a local curator, no matter how talented, your choices, on the other hand, are often somewhat restricted. If you have to combine the available work with that of heavy hitters (and I consider Tacla in that category) how do you protect the other artists from being overshadowed (no matter how good they might be, they are still less known), unless you believe in clichés like “A rising tide lifts all ships?” I don’t know the answer, but there are two comforting thoughts: for one, these lesser known artists will get exposure, that potentially opens up a larger circle of viewers eventually, if the quality of the art holds its own. More importantly, in my view, is the fact that a public confronted with art that is not yet labeled as awe-inspiring or famous, will find it much more approachable, opening interest in art in general. It might be an inspiration to listen to one’s own creative impulses, or an encouragement that early or mid-career work deserves representation. That said, the work of both artists that Karen de Benedetti picked, again showing her sensitivity for pairings as in previous shows that I reviewed, will reward viewers’ scrutiny. (Malia Jensen‘s sculpture was not yet present when I visited.)

II. Karl LeClair Perceptive Omissions // Miroslav Lovric Subconscious Conversations

What unites the work on display by two very different artist, Karl LeClair and Miroslav Lovric, is how it’s grounded in personal memory. For LeClair, intensely attuned to natural environments, drawing is a way to process the changes brought about by frequent relocations, from the East Coast to Idaho and now to the Pacific Northwest. His mixed media, printmaking techniques include intaglio, relief, and monotype (all of which were generously explained to me in my ignorance, including the preparation of the various papers, if using color, with background washes of layers of thinned acrylic, like watercolor).

Perceptive Omissions is presented almost like an installation, allowing direct, unmitigated access to the paper, reinforcing a tactile quality of the prints, the geometric rigidity softened by the occasional colorwash.

Karl LeClair Perceptive Omissions (2023) All works numbered, not labeled.

His drawings and monoprints capture the shifting characteristics of various geographical environments with a surprising tenderness. I sensed a cautious approach to new objects of his affections, trying to learn about a place, as well as a a hint of nostalgia about what had to be left behind.

The pairing of representational scenes and geometric drawings somehow reminded me of Western Esotericism, like the medieval engravings of Paul Yvan. Not sure why I picked up a hint of mysticism, but there you have it. Interpretation left to the viewer…

***

Lovric’s work, Subconscious Conversations, was the most accessible to me, growing up in post-war Europe surrounded by prints of Klee, Kandinsky, Matisse, Calder or Joan Miró. The latter’s simple shapes, strong lines and colors came to mind when I looked at the present paintings and their faint surrealist connotations. Lovric, a refugee from Bosnia, another country with a recent bloody history and unresolved political conflict, works through his displacement with remembering that seems at times indistinguishable from longing. I get it. The acknowledgement that you will never be able to recover what is gone for good, once you have made a life in a different country, does not preclude a yearning for that you left behind, even if it no longer exists.

Miroslav Lovric Soul Catcher #2 (Woman) (2011) Mixed Media on Paper

He stated somewhere that his work is about hope and resilience, and I can certainly pick up a desire for optimism in the saturated, bright colors on display. It will speak to viewers, since we can all use a dose of positivity, even if woes are not grounded in political strife or experiences similar to those of the artists.

From left to right: Miroslav Lovric Autumn Tree (2020) Oil on Canvas; Red Nest (2020) Mixed Media on Paper; Questioning Bird (2015) Mixed Media on Paper.

Miroslav Lovric Garden (2021) Mixed Media on Paper

Yet I thought the strongest of the images on display was one that captured the immediacy of contemporary (pandemic) isolation, not related to the past at all. The monochromatic construction attends to traditional elements of windows and chairs, and adds a body, albeit to my eyes one that’s missing head and heart. There is corporality to the legs, but in the absence of social embrace, of human interaction, the core of a person vanishes. Or is not clearly delineated enough to be easily detected. Tell me about it.

Miroslav Lovric Solitude (2021) Charcoal on Paper

***

III. Some considerations about political art.

Citizenship is the right to have rights. – Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Ch.9.)

What does it mean to consider “art as global citizenship,” part of the Biennial’s title? Certainly not to have rights, or the corresponding obligations, as expressed in Arendt’s view of what it meant to be a citizen, during an era with many people deprived of any rights as refugees from fascistic regimes. I come back to her, for one, because I’m fussy about terms: citizenship is connected to people, not “art,” with a defined set of political criteria, and secondly, because Arendt’s philosophy is increasingly relevant today in the face of immigration politics, soon to be intensified by climate refugees. Well worth re-reading.

More likely, the intended meaning of “art as global citizenship” runs along the lines of what Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the renowned Swiss curator, uttered here (or everywhere, he utters a lot):

“Art can widen horizons, dissolve borders, is obliged to bring people, ideas, concepts together. A successful piece of art has the power to change expectations and perspectives….(art) is asked to facilitate supranational dialogue.” (My translation.)

Siegfried Kracauer’s phrase from his Weimar Essays, “They were everywhere, and belonged nowhere,” a referral to the masses as a cultural phenomenon during the1920s, could, in my opinion, also be applied to these ubiquitous tropes we hear today when discussing art. One of them, “Entgrenzung,” the act of removing borders and promoting class permeability and global interconnectedness, is among the most frequently used. Can art transcend borders and change perspectives? How would we empirically assess the actual impact of political art, and has anyone done so, beyond simply qualitative reporting that people are moved, or claim to have gained new insights, or flocked to see a particular work of art?

Art as Social Practice: Tania Bruguera and her art movement ‘Arte Útil’ engages in long-term, participatory projects that include a community center, political party for immigrants, and an institution working towards civic literacy and policy change in Cuba.

We have long held that political art, through forms of social commentary, can raise awareness and inspire dialogue. Art, we believe, can provide representation for those who otherwise remain invisible or marginalized, helping to de-stigmatize on occasion. Art can be a form of memorialization of significant events, either transmitting knowledge about them to present generations who are exposed to selective versions of history guarded by those in power, or future generations who can stitch together a picture of past times and events. (I have written about the politics of memory recently here and here.)

Art as instigator: William Blake was one of the first political artists trying to dissolve borders – in this case the church- imposed rigid division between good and evil.

Certainly an early socialist perspective on art suggested artists should serve society by assuming an ethical stance to reveal the workings of ideology by describing the truth. Do we have evidence that it works? Do people still think about new perspectives an hour after they left the museum? How do we find out if people who report being moved or challenged by a piece of art translate that into behavioral changes, voting patterns, a measurable decrease in racist, xenophobic or misogynistic attitudes or some such? If there are data, enlighten me! Me, the social scientist wants to know. Me, the art lover couldn’t care less. (I am excluding visual propaganda here, which has been empirically shown to manipulate people’s values successfully. It differs from single pieces of art by the frequency with which it showers the viewer, being mass produced and co-temporally broadcast across media.)

Art as memorialization: depicting historic events as they unfolded..

Micha Ulman Empty Library (1995) (My photographs)

This is another piece of art to commemorate book burnings, in this case in Germany during the prelude to the Holocaust. The monument at Berlin’s Bebelplatz is an underground library with enough room to fit 20 000 books, totally empty. Unobtrusive, easily missed, it consists of a 5 by 5 by 5 underground space that can be viewed through a glass cover – theoretically. The weather and temperature differential often fogs the glass over, so you only get a glimpse, a vanishing view, just like memory of the era that is slowly disappeared or disappearing.

Maybe the question for evidence of effectiveness is the wrong question. Maybe we should forget about the claimed or actual function of political art, when it is so obvious that artists across history could not help but serve as mirrors for the political and/or philosophical environments and conflicts of their day. Maybe artists are driven to description in face of the uncertainty of their existence within a political system, and really good art goes beyond that by pinpointing what the political functions are of the structures and events their describe: the function of violence, for example, during an authoritarian period, or the function of propaganda to prepare for catastrophe, or the function of assigning value to keep traditional hierarchies intact. It is about expression of the artist’s views on the injustices of the world, or their delineation of possible utopias, not their intended impact on public opinion or belief systems. They have a particular talent or even genius for describing the world as they see it, contemplating possibilities as they weigh them. Whether we, the viewers, actually pick up on that or transform it into action would not affect their production, even if it is desirable that we would.

Max Ernst Europa nach dem Regen (1933) (Europe after the Rain)

Art as premonition: depicted is a post-apocalyptic, new world order with Europe and Asia melting together.

Then again, maybe we can use the fact that art has threatened existing power structures to the point where it was forbidden, persecuted, criminalized or otherwise impeded, as indirect evidence of its effectiveness. The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfDK, or Fighting League for German Culture), for example, was founded in 1929 by Alfred Rosenberg, with the aim of promoting “German culture” while fighting the cultural threat of liberalism, leading to prohibition of “non-Aryan,” degenerate or progressive political art and the persecution of many artists. Similarly draconian measures can be seen in contemporary Russia or Iran.

Art as warning: Bauhaus artist Mariann Brandt weary of renewed militarization. “They are marching again.”

Art as activism: Photomontage by Hannah Höch Mutter, (1930) shown in the 1931 Berlin exhibition, Women in Distress, which she organized to fight for decriminalization of abortion; the show opened by Käthe Kollwitz.

One thing is empirically established: in times of social rupture, structural change of political systems and power struggles, societies become quite flooded with the depiction of catastrophes. If you look at the Weimar Republic, for example, there was a preoccupation with the visualization and dissection of catastrophes that seemingly emerged from the atrocities experienced during World War I, but seamlessly prepared, in insidious ways, the public for the horrors of its immediate future. The visual politics of people enamored with war and violence as an engine for society, like philosopher Ernst Jünger, filled the zone with imagery that celebrated the moment of danger, the unfolding of catastrophe. The new medium of photography lent itself to such manipulation – its mass distribution was in many cases intended to “produce docile subjects for the dawning spectacle of oppression and war.” (Isabel Gil, The Visuality of Catastrophe in Ernst Jünger’s Der gefährliche Augenblick, KulturPoetik, 2010, Bd. 10,p.87)

The Moment of Danger (Frontal Cover)

Preparing the masses: collective mourning after Lenin’s death, in New York

If we look at the ubiquity of depictions of catastrophes in all their gory details in our own time, with many other parallels to the 1930s looming, one wonders if we are in the process of being desensitized as well. Paintings of destructive consequences of war or torture like Tacla’s might rightfully warn us or make us think about the historical conflicts in parts of the world not our own (though surely underwritten by U.S. hegemonial interests,) or even be premonitions of things to come to our own backyard – I believe his art applies to anyone of those categories. But if they are integrated into a deluge of visual imagery of horror, from art, media and propaganda outlets alike, there might be unintended consequences, including the normalization of catastrophe.

Art as (scientific) witness: Forensic Architecture  uses architectural evidence in cases of war crimes or other human rights abuses, often focused on how the narrative justification differs between state and victims. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018.

Georg Simmel, another German sociologist and Neo-Kantian philosopher who died in 1918, anticipated something he called the the Tragedy of Culture. He believed that there was a dialectical relationship between “objective culture” – the art out there, or religion, rituals, etc. – and “subjective culture,” our own development as individuals with creative or intellectual abilities. He was convinced that the onslaught of objective cultural products, massive saturation with cultural information, would stunt our psychological growth, with us shutting down in the face of overwhelming stimulation. The idea reverberates with me, and I often find myself in a balancing act when deciding what should be processed and what should be ignored. In the case of the current exhibition at The Reser, I come fully down on the “Give it a shot” side. The work deserves our contemplation.

And here is another Latin American political artist, Facundo Cabral, assassinated some years back, with a song that describes some of the ways of being an artist in the world. “I did not come to explain to the world, I just came to play.”