How Cindy Sherman Made Shapeshifting an Art All of Its Own

American photographer Cindy Sherman remains a bit of an enigma to even the most devout followers of her work. Some might say she prefers it that way; as she told The Guardian in 2011, “I’m not about revealing myself”. The surest way to get to know Sherman, it seems, is by following the steady trail of breadcrumbs she’s left behind over the decades she’s spent both behind and in front of the camera. In turning the lens on herself – or rather, on constructions of various selves – the social mores, adolescent fears, and mixed media messages that have shaped Sherman’s psyche reveal themselves in sometimes dazzling, sometimes disturbing fashion to the viewer.

Perhaps Sherman’s greatest strength as a photographer lies in the way her images challenge people out of complacent viewership. From her first striking series of faux-film stills in the early 1980s, to her most recent anti-self-portrait series shown in New York’s Metro Pictures gallery in May 2016, centered on the aging starlets of cinema’s yesteryear, Sherman’s work has wrestled with and raised critical questions, including what it means to be female; how the media’s saturation of imagery deeply impacts the way women and girls see and present themselves to the world; and the effects of the double standards placed upon women who choose to explicitly insert themselves – or their gender – into their artistic practice. Today we examine the life of a woman whose power lies just as much in what she chooses to reveal as in what she keeps hidden from view.

Defining FeaturesIt’s no easy feat to pinpoint Sherman’s ‘defining features’ – her ever-changing appearance ties into her distinct talent for image-making. Using carefully chosen make-up, costumes, and prosthetics, Sherman has undergone countless transformations throughout her career to showcase and play with societal stereotypes of femininity. At any given time, she has appeared as a silverscreen bombshell, a platinum blonde in a dark noir, a fanciful figure from a 15th-century painting come to life, and a tragic victim of self-tanner. Sherman, who often works solo in her studio, acts as director, make-up artist, stylist, and model in equal parts. Through her imaginative and multi-faceted process, she depicts so many of the preconceived roles into which women have fit themselves for centuries. Yet by disappearing into her own pictures, and leaving in her absence easily recognisable female tropes, Sherman exposes their societally constructed nature. 

Untitled #183-A, 1988© Cindy Sherman, Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York

Despite Sherman’s deliberate provocation of the visuals featuring and marketed toward women that typically appear in high-end fashion magazines, the fashion world has sought out her eccentric brand of glamour and intellect on numerous occasions. In 1984, French fashion house Dorothée Bis collaborated with Sherman on a series of photographs published by Vogue Paris. Said Sherman of the series, “I’ve really got to do something to rip open the French fashion world. So I wanted to make really ugly pictures. The first couple of pictures I shot and sent to Dorothée Bis they didn't like at all... That inspired even more depressing, bloody, ugly characters.” She’s also partnered with the likes of Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake and Jean-Paul Gaultier. In 2006, American designer Marc Jacobs called on Sherman to develop a series of irreverent advertisements for his line, photographed by Juergen Teller, which found the photographer donning wigs and clownish make-up. Far from striking an aspirational chord, these images toed the line between commerce and art — an in-between space that Sherman’s aesthetic has long inhabited. 

Seminal MomentsBorn in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Sherman came of age as a photographer during the early 1980s, after pursuing an art degree at Buffalo State College in the early 1970s. While she began her artistic journey with paintbrush in hand, she soon found that world to be overtly male-dominated and decided to carve out her own niche. Sherman realised that photography spoke with greater urgency and directness to her lingering questions about life as a woman in America in the wake of feminism’s first wave. Once she had turned the camera on herself to produce her first series, there was no turning back.

Upon moving to New York in 1977, Sherman began to take her longtime love of dress-up more seriously as a potential part of her practice. She first caught the attention of the New York art world with her pioneering series of 69 monochrome photographs known as the Untitled Film Stills, in which she morphed into various female characters from imaginary, yet oddly familiar, 50s and 60s films. Yet rather than base these characters on identifiable actresses, she sought to capture more amorphous personality types that tapped into a viewer’s unconscious consumption of pop culture. Whether channeling a forlorn young woman stranded at the roadside, as in Untitled Film Still 48 (1979), or an obedient yet sexually available stay-at-home wife to an unseen husband, each image conjures strong associations to historical depictions of objectified women on screen.

Untitled, 2016© Cindy Sherman, Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York

In 1995, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) purchased a set of the stills for a reported $1 million – a particularly hefty price tag at the time. The museum became one of her staunchest supporters: the stills went on display in 1997 in a show sponsored by none other than Madonna and, in 2012, the museum organized a comprehensive retrospective of Sherman’s work.

Sherman’s subsequent series have left fans of her work constantly wondering into what territory she’ll next venture. Shortly after her success with the stills, she expanded on her interest in female representation, transformation, and voyeurism in her series of 35 photographs known as her History Portraits. Created between 1989 and 1990 while living abroad in Rome, many of the images corresponded directly to well-known images produced in the age of classical European painting, and were eventually hung in fittingly grand gold frames upon their arrival at New York’s Metro Pictures Gallery. She’s even managed to turn the public’s strange fascination with (and fear of) clowns into a highly memorable series of grotesque portraits created in the early 00s.

Now, at 62 years old, Sherman’s practice has taken a more personal turn: she has turned her keen gaze on the prospect of ageing as a woman. Her latest series of cinematic images featuring former starlets in their prime proves that her thoughtful approach to art has only deepened and evolved as she’s worked with eyes and mind wide open.

She’s AnOther Woman Because…Sherman’s unwillingness to be pigeonholed as an artist has made her one of the most dynamic to follow. Since her very first series, her work has fearlessly explored the fluidity of identity and gender representation – long before designers were embracing such fluidity on the runway or in magazine editorials. Captured in her images are the wide range of emotions one experiences – not to mention roles one is expected to embody – as a female-identifying person: anger, melancholy, desperation, lust, and joy are all accounted for. Sherman occupies a trailblazing spot in the history of American art and photography, and has never compromised her vision to secure it. For this reason, and countless more, Sherman is an AnOther woman to be reckoned with.

Untitled Film Still #6, 1977© Cindy Sherman, Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York

 TextOlivia Aylmer

 source anothermag.com

Whats in a Name, David E. Brown, Cabinet Magazine

Issue 5 Evil Winter 2001/02

What's in a Name

David E. Brown

 

A few years ago, an odd machine whirred in a back room at New York's Ace Gallery. A feeble motor turned a wood platter studded with hammered nails. A cam was moved back and forth by the nails; a homemade pantograph (a kind of tracing device) transferred that movement to a ballpoint pen poised above a seemingly endless roll of paper cash-register tape. Slowly, the pen scrawled out the signature of the artist, Tim Hawkinson; when it was complete, a guillotine cut off calling-card-size pieces of signed tape, the original creations of Hawkinson's original creation. The paper spilled down to the floor for days and weeks, piling up into a four-foot stack, from which a few gallery-goers snatched a souvenir.

A signature machine used in Christoph Büchel's Blank, 1999. Courtesy Swiss Institute. Photo Patterson Beckwith.

Signature Piece, as the machine was called, was a deft bit of engineering, but even more clever was its premise. That unruly stack of paper represented what should have been the artist's most valuable possession: the proof of his authorship, his signature. But the pile of scraps undercut more than the monetary value of a signature. By giving a machine the power to sign his name, Hawkinson destroyed the usual deference we give to the signature, our most common means to legally identify ourselves. And in doing so, he pointed at a long-running confusion over how identity is presented and assured, and how a signature works in that kind of transaction.

For centuries, identity was a fairly simple process, closer to God's Burning Bush tautology—"I am that I am." You were so and so, who had this seal and this family and these church birth records. Signatures helped—they've been around since Roman times, presumably as substitutions for seals—as did hereditary last names, which were a French and English invention around 1000 A.D. As the Renaissance brought economic and cultural progress to Europe, and people—especially merchants—started to move around more, rulers became more interested in keeping track of their subjects. New forms of ID arose.

Until the end of the 19th century, notes Alain Corbin, "a clever person could change identities at will."¹ A new town, a dead person's birth certificate, and maybe a strong resemblance to someone, and poof, you were him. Modern bureaucracies, new technologies, and the application of scientific methods to social problems put an end to this free-for-all. Bertillon's system of cranial measurements started the move to definite ID; that was superseded by Scotland Yard's fingerprinting system, which in turn is being replaced by ever-more-specific ID technologies such as iris scanning. Through all of these changes, though, the signature has remained the accepted proof of who you are.

The search for verifiable identity intersected another of the 19th century's revolutions—electricity. Soon after the domestication of this natural force, people began thinking about how the phenomenon could be used to transmit information. By the late 1830s, British inventors and the American painter Samuel Morse had created the telegraph, and within 20 years thousands of miles of wire connected all major cities. But some were not satisfied with telegraphy. For one thing, telegrams could be faked. And dots and dashes seemed as cold and impersonal as ones and zeroes do now—they bore no trace of their creator, and thus had nothing of the real essence of their creator. So began the endless quest for more personal electric (or electronic) communications. Dots and dashes begat typed letters, and then the telegraph begat the telephone; today, ASCII-text e-mail has been largely replaced by HTML- and graphics-equipped systems such as Microsoft Outlook.

A 1905 article on the teleautograph machine.

Enter the teleautograph, the 1888 creation of Elisha Gray, who had famously lost the race to patent the telephone by a few hours. It's not clear exactly why Gray thought transmitted writing would be better than transmitted words. But it didn't take much for a 19th-century inventor to start inventing. Once he got it working, his teleautograph wowed the crowds at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition. Here's how it worked: The transmitting person moved a writing stylus across a metal plate; its movement was measured by potentiometers. The varying levels of electricity put out by those components were transmitted by wire, just like a telegraph; the receiving instrument translated those levels into the motion of a pen-holding armature. Handwriting and signatures were finally moving through the wires. 

The teleautograph never worked well over long distances, and within a couple of decades the telephone and speedy mail system had a firm hold on personal communication. But the dream of a machine that could "prove" a writer's identity reappeared after World War II with the Autopen, made for people whose signatures were in great demand. 

An Autopen looks like a cross between a school desk and a pantograph—an arm jutting out of a 1960s-looking enclosure grips a felt-tip pen. Inside the machine is a model of a signature; the penned arm extends out onto the desk and accurately re-creates the signature "matrix" inside, hundreds or thousands of times a day. Early users were presidents and CEOs, who could have spent weeks signing their names, barely making a dent in the demands of the important identity. (A more recent application is direct-mail marketing, which benefits from a "personal" touch.)

The Autopen was a lifesaver for important men. But the Autopen undid some of the progress that had been made in identification. Your signature, with its practiced flourish, is as close to you that writing can get. "I am that I am," your signature wants to say. And that closeness-to-you is what convinces governments and banks and landlords that you are who you claim to be. But how can that certainty exist along with a machine that can sign and sign and sign, with no care as to who has told the machine to sign? (It can't, as evidenced by a series of unauthorized, autopenned Donald Rumsfeld signatures that appeared on official documents in early 2001.²)

To say nothing of value. After the Autopen was adopted by US presidents (LBJ was a big user, as was Nixon and everyone since) it found new markets among celebrities. It really is hard to sign your name for hours and hours, but maybe not so hard as disappointing one's fans. So by the late 1960s many famous people had their own Autopens churning out signatures for the people. And while Autopen signatures from presidents and business leaders had been accepted at more or less face value, they did not have to deal with the invisible hand of the collectibles market. An Autopenned document may be good enough for the Department of Defense, but don't try to convince a collector that a machine carries the emotional—and thus, in the irrational economics of nostalgia, financial—weight of a real autograph. 

A selection of Ronald Reagan's autopen signatures.

A recent eBay search turned up just two Autopenned items among the 60,000-plus autographed 8x10s, books, and other baubles up for sale. And of that multitude of signatures up for bid, hundreds of their sellers went out of their way to point out that they weren't Autopenned. If we accept the opinion of the collectibles market—and as odd as that market is, there seems to be no reason not to—then eBay has become the ultimate measure of desire, value, and authenticity. And that measure says that more than a century of effort to create a mechanical stand-in for the human hand, for the written personality, has come to naught.

1. Alain Corbin, "Backstage," in Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life, Vol. IV (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1990), p. 469.
2. "Clinton-Cohen Holdovers Push Liberal Agenda at DoD," CMR Notes (May-June 2001), at http://www.cmrlink.org/CMRNOTESMayJune2001.htm (link defunct —Eds.).

David E. Brown is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, New York. His first book, Inventing Modern America, was published by the MIT Press in November 2001.

source is cabinetmagazine.org

Yuni Kim Lang, Artist

This is 'Comfort Hair,' A Live Sculpture That Beautifully 
Explores Women's Cultural Identities

Katherine Brooks, Senior Arts and Culture Editor, Huffington Post

Yuni Kim Lang doesn’t just make sculpture, she makes live sculpture. 

The Korean-American artist’s signature artwork, “Comfort Hair,” doesn’t
come with a tiny beating heart, if that’s what you’re thinking. The “live”
modifier refers to the fact that the sculpture is more performance that
stationary object. The piece requires a person — a wearer — to make
the work whole. And when wearer meets sculpture, meaning pours forth.
The massive pile of dark, woven hair becomes a totem of cultural identity,
and a visual reminder of history’s obsession with long flowing locks.

“Comfort Hair” was inspired by the Korean practice of wearing a cache,
a large, heavy wig typically found on the heads of wealthy, high society
women. Like these raven-hued fixtures that epitomized the “bigger is better”
mantra, Lang’s sculpture appears like a massive pile of hair made from
polypropylene rope that sits atop a model’s head for one hour at a time. 

The gache is just one historical example that illuminates humanity’s greater
obsession with manes, mops, curls and tresses. Over the centuries, “hair
has symbolized so many different things,” Lang told The Huffington Post,
despite the fact that the only “living” portion of hair remains hidden inside
the follicle. “The obsession we have with our dead hair that we imagine
to be full of life is fascinating. It is the part of the body that has no nerves
or muscles but has movements and rhythm that feel alive. When you cut
it off there is no pain and it does not bleed. Yet, we perceive it as a
sacred entity.”

While history at large has undoubtedly obsessed over hair — from
yesterday’s Victorian wigs to today’s Instagrammable cuts — hair is,
of course, as much a personal experience as it is a shared one.

“‘Comfort Hair’ was conceived because of the way I was brought up,
as a third culture kid,” Lang explained. Third culture kid (TCK), she
elaborated, is a term used to refer to people who have spent a significant
amount of their developmental years in cultures other than the ones they
were born into. “Being a Korean growing up in China, going to an
American International school, I was sorting through three different
cultures to makes sense out of my own. The amalgamation of these
three cultures has become my personal cultural identity.”

According to Lang, the thing that makes the TCK experience so unique
is that it involves tough questions regarding personal cultural identity
 — even confusion — at a very early stage in your life. For Lang, this
first happened when she was three years old. “It is truly unique in the
sense that these individuals are moving between cultures before they
even have the opportunity to fully develop their personal and
cultural identity,” she said.

After each “Comfort Hair” performance, Lang tells us, the wearer
ceremoniously sheds the gache-esque work. “The action of shedding
the hair piece is like shedding a layer of skin,” she added. It’s the same
idea behind a reptile shedding its skin regularly to allow room for growth.
“The main reason for shedding is that their older skin does not grow
with them, so in order to grow they need to shed the old, allowing the
new skin to form below the old one. This is the idea behind the
performance. Our identities are ever evolving and growing and it is
a crucial part of the growth that we also shed a layer of us behind.”

“I fantasize about my hair,” Lang concluded. “It stands in for my
cultural identity which is becoming an organism that continues to
grow and prosper. Hair is always personal and my work is definitely
very personal.”

Photographs of “Comfort Hair” will be on view at 
John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 
as part of the “Towards Textiles” exhibition, until Oct. 11, 2015.

source huggingtonpost.com

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TATE Modern, Artists Rooms: Theme: Cultural Identity

Artists often explore the characteristics that determine our personal and social identity. They construct a sense of who we are as individuals, as a society, or as a nation. They question stereotypes and conventions while exploring attributes such as gender, sexuality, race, nationality and heritage. Our culture is informed by various forms of artistic and social endeavour such as technology, politics, style, music, performance and the arts. ‘Cultural studies’ emerged in the late 1950s and has been informed by radical approaches such as Marxism, feminism and semiotics.

The period of the Weimar Republic 1919–33 was a time of immense cultural revival in Germany. Berlin was the nerve centre of this activity and art forms such as cinema, dance, literature, theatre and visual arts all thrived. The mood of the time was famously captured by Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye Berlin, its decadence and political upheaval were depicted in the paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists such as Otto Dix and Geog Grosz. Dix, like many artists of the time, was a subject of the Weimar photographer August Sander, who photographed individuals and groups of people that he then classified according to their occupations and position in society. Amongst these categories were The Skilled Tradesman, which included iconic portraits such as Bricklayer 1928 and Pastry Cook 1928.

This lifelong attempt to document the German people resulted in Sander’s exhaustive portfolio People of the 20th Century which presented a diverse and democratic society. This vision was at odds with the emerging totalitarian regime which marked the end of the Weimar Republic and Sander’s publication Face of Our Time 1929 was subsequently confiscated and destroyed by the Nazi government in 1934. Sander is recognised as a major force in the history of photography. His work was an enormous influence on a later generation of photographers such as Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Walker Evans.

While Sander was known for his range of subjects, Diane Arbus was known for photographing those on the margins of society. New York born Arbus came to prominence in the New Documents exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967, along with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. The exhibition heralded a new generation of photographers. The exhibition’s curator noted that they “directed the documentary approach towards more personal end…Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it.” New York in the 1960s, like the Weimar Republic of 1920s, was a richly diverse society and attracted artists and political dissidents. During this period cultural politics were at the fore; minority groups such as the Black Panthers challenged authority through protest while the repression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities culminated in the Stonewall riots of 1969.

Arbus’ interest and celebration of gender and identity is evident in images such as Two Friends at Home, N.Y.C. 1965 1965 where a couple are photographed in their domestic setting, creating an intimate portrait suggestive of the nature of their relationship. Arbus’ direct images convey a sense of trust between the sitter and the artist where strikingly and often brutal portraits convey inner emotions.

“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth. Individuals, all different, all wanting different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from every other thing. That is what I love: the differences, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life… I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”

Another New York-based photographer was the artist Robert Mapplethorpe whose images, like Arbus, convey a sense of trust and honesty. Mapplethorpe, who primarily worked in the studio, came to prominence in the mid-1970s with portraits of his inner circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. Unlike Arbus, Mapplethorpe used himself as a subject, returning to the self portrait throughout his career. 

Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre included photographic portraits, still lives and nudes. He was also known for his sexually explicit images, which depicted the underground gay S&M scene of the mid-1970s. In these controversial works, sexuality takes precedence over social class or distinction of the sitter: examples of this include unknown young men such as Smutty 1980 and Tattoo Artist’s Son 1984. The British artists Gilbert & George began to photograph casts of young men from London’s East End in the early 1980s. Although works such as Existers 1984 are somewhat ambiguous the young men are elevated to the status of icon through their embodied potency, strength and beauty, the use of photographic panels resembling stained glass windows. Such depictions of young men aroused considerable hostility among critics, who accused Gilbert & George of being exploitative, and wrongly described the youths as rent boys or East End thugs.

Gilbert & George explored their own identity working as a pair and presenting themselves as ‘living sculpture’, incorporating themselves and their lives into their art, they set out to provoke their viewers, to make them think and question conventions and social taboos. Bruce Nauman, like Gilbert & George, was associated with conceptual and performance art in the 1970s. Nauman is renowned for his investigation into the human condition through language and the human body. “My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people.”

Nauman blurred the boundaries between performance and installation art in the 1970s with works that encouraged the spectator to become participant. His work often incorporates tools of mass media e.g. televisions and neon lettering, while challenging their conventions. Nauman’s video works, which are at times both ambiguous and menacing, are metaphors for the rituals, gestures and struggles of daily human existence. In works such as Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor) 1999, Nauman documents his everyday life, where his identity as an individual is informed by ‘place’ and occupation.  The menacing nature of the works concern questions of anxiety and alienation.  Whilst not ‘overtly’ a political artist Nauman’s work often references the political cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century.

In the late 1970s, Jenny Holzer devised slogans known as Truisms 1977-9, which play on commonly held truths and clichés. A truism is a statement which is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting: A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CANGO A LONG WAY. Initially, the Truisms were infiltrated into the public arena via stickers, T-shirts and posters. Later, Holzer started using electronic displays. In 1982 she emblazoned these messages across a giant advertising hoarding in Times Square, New York. The Truisms are deliberately challenging, presenting a spectrum of often-contradictory opinions. Holzer hoped they would sharpen people’s awareness of the ‘usual baloney they are fed’ in daily life.

Protect Protect 2007 forms part of a series of screenprints that reveal sensitive government transcripts relating to America’s intervention in the Middle East. Here Holzer uses a document from the National Security Archive, enlarging a military map and setting it upon a bright background. Holzer’s technique forces us to acknowledge the interpretative power of language, where the words “protect”, “suppress” and “isolate” emanate strongly against the image of a deeply divided and segregated Iraq.

Like Holzer, the work of Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez can be read as a political comment on contemporary culture while asking questions. Grimonprez came to prominence when this film-essay, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y + Inflight 1997-2001, was shown in 1997 at Documenta X. The work sees the protagonists perform a series of rituals at airports where identity is to some extent removed, taking off items of clothing while being security cleared and saying goodbye to loved ones. The work traces the history of airplane hijackings, eerily foreshadowing the events of 9/11, through archival images discovered during thorough research, televised images and quirky home movies.

As Grimonprez uses pre-existing film to collage an artwork, Gerhard Richter used photographs of eminent scientists, writers, musicians and philosophers found in encyclopaedia and dictionaries for his 1972 work 48 Portraits. The figures, such as the writer Franz Kafka, the composer Igor Stravinsky and the scientist Isidor Issac Rabi, are all European and North American men. Although they broadly represent a humanistic view of Western civilisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century they do prompt the question of which cultural figures are used to compose history. There are no women, religious figures or prominent persons from out with Western society. One of four photographic editions of 48 Portraits 1971-98 is held in the ARTIST ROOMS collection.

Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits and films often incorporated those from his social scene, including his associates from his studio, The Factory. The celebrities and factory stars of these artworks such as Liz 1965 are not just a celebration of celebrity but are tinged with tragedy, especially the images of women such as Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy. The stars themselves were often associated with misfortune and the works both pre-empt the obsessive nature of celebrity and reflect on the negative connotations of life in the public eye. His society portraits, like those of Mapplethorpe, represent not just the society that he himself inhabited but also wider popular culture and many subcultures.

The polaroid, A Self-Portrait with Fright Wig 1986, is one of several that Warhol took in preparation for a series of large-scale paintings commissioned by Anthony d’Offay for an exhibition at his London gallery in 1986. In the photographs, and subsequently transferred into the paintings, Warhol’s skull-like head is isolated from his body, floating against a dark background. This composition bears striking similarities to a Robert Mapplethorpe photographic portrait of Warhol from the same year. In both, Warhol wears his famous silver wig, but, in this Polaroid, the hair stands on end in an almost manic fashion. His eyes seem to be fixated on something to the left, behind the viewer, creating a distinct feeling of uneasiness. This series of self-portraits was the last Warhol completed before his death in 1987.

Richter and Grimonprez appropriate objects and images into their artwork to construct identities as does Ellen Gallagher, much of whose work is informed by her Irish and African-American heritage. Gallagher’s paintings and mixed media collages often question racial stereotypes and appropriate references to the physical divisions in race.

Paper Cup 1996 is part of Gallagher’s first mature body of work which explored layered and contradictory themes. Gallagher has created a loosely structured grid by lining up small pieces of writing paper in multiple rows, recalling the history of handwriting exercises. Closer inspection reveals each line to be carefully constructed from rows of bulbous shapes resembling the vowels a child must repeat when learning to write, though they are in fact a reference to the stereotypical lips of American blackface minstrels. From a distance this large work’s subtle geometry resembles an American minimalist painting, but closer inspection reveals not only a darker side of American history but references Gallagher’s own mixed-race origins.

source tate.org

Ana Mendieta, Artist, 1948 - 1985, Born Cuba

Ana Mendieta was interested in blood. In part, her fascination with the stuff stemmed from the violence against women she witnessed in her lifetime, beginning when a student was raped and murdered on her college campus. But the obsession also stemmed from her knowledge of rituals practiced in the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, in which chicken’s blood is offered as sacrifice. And, of course, the fact that the viscous fluid pulses through all of our veins, threading us together. 

When women write, their words are often assumed to be confessional. When Ana made images, she was interpreted through a similar lens. When the radical, dynamic and irrepressible artist died under tragic and mysterious circumstances at 36 years old, her haunting work was read like an omen. But to view her work in light of her death is to miss its essence. “Her death has really nothing to do with her work,” Ana’s sister Raquelin Mendieta told The Guardian. “Her work was about life and power and energy and not about death.”

Ana was a Cuban-born multidisciplinary artist whose work floated weightlessly between performance, sculpture, earth art, photography and film. Born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba, she fled to the United States with her sister at a young age, eventually settling in the Midwest. Ana’s work is uncanny in its ability to feel at once radically progressive and ancient, vibrating with a feminine power that stretches back to the earliest human rites. 

In one of her most well known pieces, “Imagen de Yagul,” Ana documented her unclothed body in a pre-Hispanic tomb at the Mesoamerican site of Yagul, covered in a spray of white flowers. The foliage consumed her silhouette, obscuring her body and rendering her an otherworldly hybrid. In her 1974 piece, “Body Tracks,“ Ana created a wall drawing on camera, drenching her forearms in blood and slowly dragging them down a white wall. The resulting imprint resembles the marks left by a corpse that’s been dragged off screen. 

Lesser known are Ana’s experimental films — on view now in “Ana Mendieta: Experimental and Interactive Films” at Galerie Lelong in New York — despite the fact that she made over 100 throughout her lifetime. Like her more recognized performances and photographs, Ana’s films are characterized by a haunting combination of presence and absence, manifested in scratches on the emulsion of celluloid film or filmed reactions to blood poured onto an unassuming sidewalk.

The exhibition at Galerie Lelong came into being thanks, in part, to the tireless work of Ana’s older sister Raquelin. Since Ana’s death, Raquelin has taken it upon herself to ensure her sister’s name and legacy live on. While Ana’s works are so often framed in the context of her death, Raquelin describes her sister in life, not only as one of the most influential feminist makers and overlooked artists of our time, but as a perky, fearless, confrontational young woman who let nothing and no one get in her way.

Their story begins when Ana and Raquelin were sent by their father to the United States in 1961 to flee Castro’s regime. The sisters were two of 14,000 children to immigrate to America unaccompanied by adults. Ana was 12, Raquelin had just turned 15. On the plane that brought them to Florida, all passengers were under 18 years old.

“I didn’t want to leave,” Raquelin explained in an interview with The Huffington Post. “I was very upset. I remember in the airport crying the whole time.” Ana, however, was more excited. “She had this image in her mind from all the teenage movies that were in fashion. The parties, the teenagers going around in convertible sports cars, going to the beach and having fun.” 

The plan was to send the children away for six months or so until political tensions in Cuba died down. The Mendieta girls and their parents expected the family to reunite in Cuba within the year; however, they did not. Through a collaborative program run by the U.S. government and Catholic charities, the sisters stayed in a refugee camp before relocating to Iowa, where they passed through various foster homes and institutions. During their first two years in the United States, the sisters moved eight times. With every move, they let go of the friendships they’d forget, knowing they would not be back. For the most part, the sisters had only each other. 

The Mendieta parents had signed a power of attorney declaring that the sisters not be separated. They told Raquelin to look after her younger sister, which is what she’d always done.

In our interview, Raquelin described her sister as forward, sociable, energetic and active. “She was a prankster, joking around a lot, playing tricks on people. She wouldn’t sit still for a second ... I, on the other hand, especially when I was around people I didn’t know very well, was very shy and timid. It was hard for me to deal with new people.” When they moved to Iowa, however, Ana took it harder, at least on the outside. “I had to be the spokesperson for us,” Raquelin said. “Once we got here she was very upset and crying all the time. I had to hold it in to be a role model for her.”

School was, according to Raquelin, “not a good place.” Back home, the Mendieta sisters lived sheltered, middle class lives and attended an all-girls private Catholic school. In Iowa, they were put in a reform school, where most of the other students had been sent by the court to avoid a state institution. Cursing, fighting, and violence were rampant. 

The sisters didn’t speak much English. They’d studied it in school, but their vocabulary was limited. “We could say ‘this is a boy, this is a girl, this is a pencil,’” Raquelin said. “To have a conversation was very difficult, to understand someone speaking was even worse.”

Both sisters found solace in art. Ana became interested when she was a junior in high school; Raquelin, at this point, had graduated from high school and was studying art in college herself. Teachers told Ana she didn’t have any talent, but she wasn’t dissuaded. “I don’t care! I like it!” Raquelin recalled her saying. 

Ana began college as a French major and art minor but soon switched them around. She worked mostly in drawing and some sculpture. After two years, she transferred to the University of Iowa, where she earned a bachelor’s and master’s in painting and an M.F.A. in intermedia. Just before graduation, Ana became particularly interested in performance art, “happenings,” as Raquelin referred to them with amusement. 

During college, much of Ana’s work focused on blood and violence toward women, resulting from a rape and murder of a university student on her campus. “People were scared,” Raquelin said. “We didn’t know who this person was, if he was around the corner, if we could be next. It was a small university town where hardly stuff like this ever happens.” In her apartment, Ana tied herself to a table for two hours and remained motionless, her naked body smeared with cow’s blood. She invited students and faculty to drop by the apartment, thereby becoming witnesses to a “murder.”

At the same time, Ana explored other matters, matters less of this earth. In 1973 and 1974, her art revolved around the idea of a single thread connecting everything. In her words: “My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”

“She was interested in spiritual things, religious things, primitive rituals, from Mesoamerica, the Mayas and the Aztecs, Afro-Cuban traditions. What connected her with nature and basic humanity. Things that are true for almost all cultures,” Raquelin explained. “She wasn’t afraid of using any kind of medium — drawing, painting, sculpture, gunpowder, film. She didn’t feel any limitations to what she could do.”

Beginning in 1973, Ana began a sculptural performance series called “Siluetas,” in which she hid her naked body in surrounding natural landscapes — sand, earth, snow, trees, grass, ice, and rocks — blurring the boundaries between woman and Mother Nature. In another iconic series, known as “earth-body” sculptures, Ana stuck and spread blood, feathers, flowers and dirt across her flesh in varied combinations.

“My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid,” Ana said. “Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world.”

In the sites and materials she selected, Ana was always very particular to incorporate the spaces and places she held close to her. Because of her uprooting at a young age, she grappled with feelings of belonging, impermanence and place. For her initial silhouette, Ana went to an ancient Zapotec grave. “She would collect earth from certain places she held dear — Cuba, The Nile. She called it a charge. An object would have a charge, it would have the vibration of that place,” Raquelin added.

“She wanted to leave her mark on everything,” curator Howard Oransky explained, “and she used her body to merge with the history of a place. The land and earth became a metaphor for family and love and culture. You can sense a yearning for what she lost as a child, and that is powerful.”

In college, both Ana and Raquelin studied art, but there was never a sense of competition between them. “We were exchanging ideas a lot but our work was very different,” Raquelin said. “We had the kind of relationship where I felt like I was watching over her, and she was looking up to me ... There was never really a competition.”

Besides, they had to watch each other’s backs. Even in art school, Raquelin remembers the discrimination they faced as women. Raquelin, who married before her senior year, had a drawing teacher tell her to “go home and wash your dishes.” Professors paid nearly all their attention to their male students. Ana, however, was able to tune out the debasement.

“She felt she was free to speak her mind,” Raquelin said. Ana managed to ignore the whispers of Cuban tradition, the voice advising you to respect your professors. She felt equal to them and thus able to contradict them. “She was not afraid of telling people what she thought of them. She fought for herself and what she believed in. She didn’t feel constricted by the expectations they had of what a woman should do.”

After graduate school, Ana moved to New York and her work gained more and more recognition. In 1978, she joined Artists In Residence, Inc. (A.I.R. Gallery), the first gallery dedicated specifically to women artists in the U.S. At the gallery, Ana met the man who would become her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. He was serving on a panel titled “How has women’s art practices affected male artist social attitudes?”

Before long the name Ana Mendieta meant something. “I was not surprised,” Raquelin said. “Her work was very powerful to me, very special. I could see she had that spark. She was never afraid of anything. Nothing Ana ever did surprised me.”

For those who knew her, Ana’s mainstream success was only a matter of time. “I never had any doubts about it that it would happen,” Raquelin said. “Her career was cut short by her death. She had all this encouragement; the art world was saying to her: you are accepted. Your work means something. It’s important.”

Sadly, Ana died on September 8, 1985, after the artist fell from the window of her 34th floor apartment in Greenwich Village. Her husband was in the apartment with her just before. Neighbors heard fighting. A doorman heard a woman screaming “No, no, no, no,” before hearing the artist’s body thud onto the roof of the deli 33 floors down. Andre had scratches on his nose and forearm.

Andre was tried and acquitted for Ana’s murder, found not guilty on grounds of reasonable doubt. The defense argued Ana’s death was suicide, and utilized her haunting artwork to back up the claim. Ana’s circle believed she was incapable of killing herself when her work was finally receiving the recognition she’d sought. Also, she was scared of heights. 

Ana’s death split the art world in half, with many prominent artists leaping to shelter Andre from the so-called “feminist cabal.” While they deemed Ana’s death a tragedy, many felt the incident wasn’t worth putting a damper on “Andre’s brilliant career.” From this dark perspective, the loss of a Hispanic woman’s life was not worth tarnishing a white male artist’s name. 

On the other side, artists like Carolee Schneemann and activist group the Guerrilla Girls were horrified both by the event and the subsequent handling of it. “We were all stunned by her violent death,” the Guerrilla Girls told The Observer. “We witnessed how the art world closed around Andre to shield him.” Outside of Andre’s Dia:Beacon retrospective in 2014, protestors donning sheer track suits reading “I Wish Ana Mendieta Was Still Alive,“ trickling chicken blood along the pavement. 

“When she was taken from us it was very traumatic,” Raquelin said. “She was my best friend and my sister.” their mother couldn’t deal with the pain, and asked Raquelin to take charge of gathering all Ana’s work and belongings — from Iowa, New York, Rome, and wherever else. “I had to read all the letters and notebooks and sketchbooks. It was a very healing experience. It continues to be. I feel like I’m still in touch with her. I still have her in my life. Her physical form is gone but her essence is still here, it’s still with me.”

Raquelin knew there was nothing more important to her sister than her work. “I felt like if her work was not looked after and promoted, she could not rest in peace.” She joined forces with a group of Ana’s friends to form the Ana Mendieta Committee, devoted to finding a venue to host a solo show of Ana’s work. This wish came true in 1987, when Ana received a solo retrospective at the New Museum in New York. 

After the exhibition, the committee disbanded, and Raquelin took it upon herself to send out the bios and market the work, the banal tasks the artist normally would have done. Raquelin formed a partnership with Galerie Lelong, which now represents Ana’s work. “Going there, helping install, seeing that everything is set the way she would like it to be. That has been my life’s work since she passed away.”

More recently, due to health issues, Raquelin has had less time to devote to Ana’s oeuvre. Her daughter and Ana’s niece, filmmaker Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, played a large role in preparing Galerie Lelong’s ongoing exhibition “Ana Mendieta: Experimental and Interactive Films,” which features 15 film works from the artist, nine of which had never before been seen. 

After asking Raquelin if it feels strange to watch Ana rise to such legendary heights today, she replied: “I don’t feel there is too much of a difference between now and then,” she said. “I think it would have happened eventually whether she was alive or dead.”

Over the years, Raquelin has carried on Ana’s artistic legacy, a legacy that fittingly balances presence and absence, love and healing, life, death and rebirth. “I have continued my relationship with my sister through the work,” Raquelin said. “My purpose was to let her know that it was okay, that I was taking care of her still. Through that, she was taking care of me.”

Source is huffingtonpost.com

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Slave Mask

"Caption "Esclave Marron a Rio de Janeiro" (Fugitive/Runaway Slave in Rio de Janeiro), based on a drawing by a Mister Bellel. The engraving illustrates a brief article on fugitive slaves in Brazil, and is apparently derived from first-hand information. "Captured fugitives," the article notes, "are forced to do the hardest and roughest work. They are ordinarily placed in chains and are led in groups through the city's neighborhoods where they carry loads or sweep refuse in the streets. This type of slave is so frightful that, while they have lost all hope of fleeing again, they think of nothing but suicide. They poison themselves by drinking at one swallow a large quantity of strong liquor, or choke/suffocate themselves by eating dirt/earth. In order to deprive them of this way of causing their own deaths, they put a tin mask on their faces; the mask has only a very narrow slit in front of the mouth and a few little holes under the nose so they can breathe" (p. 229; our translation)."

Image and text found on US Slave Blog.  Link here.

What is that thing in 12 Years a Slave?

From the scene on the boat in "12 Years a Slave"

September 14, 2015

By Toussaint Heywood

In the movie 12 Years a Slave, a man is shown with a tin mask chained over his mouth, on the ship taking Solomon Northup and others from Richmond to New Orleans to be sold.

Northup does not mention anything similar in the book. The mask is presumably based on a famous lithograph published in 1839.

The problem is that this form of punishment was rarely, if ever, used in the U.S. The man in the lithograph below is a Brazilian drawn by Jacques Arago early in the 19th Century, though the drawing has been widely copied and sometimes adapted to portray a woman.

Iron mask and collar for punishing slaves, Brazil, 1817-1818 Source.

Even in Brazil, this particular device, a small mouth-covering held on with metal straps, seems to have been rare. The text referring to the punishment in Arago's book does not match the drawing. He says the face is entirely covered by the mask, and other illustrations of Brazilians show full-face masks. So the illustration isn't even of the most common Brazilian gag.

Even the supposed purpose of the mask doesn't fit with North American slavery. It was to prevent the wearer from committing suicide by eating dirt or, less often, by drinking alcohol.

This was a complaint not typical in Virginia where the slaves in 12 Years embarked, and certainly not on shipboard. Clay-eating was recognized in the deep south among both blacks and whites as an odd but not lethal habit.

Sir Charles Lyell wrote on a visit to the U.S. deep south, "We observed several negroes there, whose health had been impaired by dirt-eating, or the practice of devouring aluminous earth,—a diseased appetite, which, as I afterwards found, prevails in several parts of Alabama, where they eat clay." He doubted it was due to lack of food because he "was told of a young lady in good circumstances, who had never been stinted of her food, yet who could not be broken of eating clay."

That does not mean a gag was never used to punish slaves here. The U.S. gag or bit or muzzle was meant to punish slaves by preventing them from talking or eating anything without it being removed, though it did not cover the face.

A journeyman cabinet-maker from the north reported: "In September, 1837, at 'Milligan's Bend,' in the Mississippi river, I saw a negro with an iron band around his head, locked behind with a pad lock. In the front, where it passed the mouth, there was a projection inward of an inch and a half, which entered the mouth. The overseer told me, he was so addicted to running away, it did not do any good to whip him for it. He said he kept this gag constantly on him, and intended to do so as long as he was on the plantation: so that, if he ran away, he could not eat, and would starve to death. The slave asked for drink in my presence; and the overseer made him lie down on his back, and turned water on his face two or three feet high, in order to torment him, as he could not swallow a drop.--The slave then asked permission to go to the river; which being granted, he thrust his face and head entirely under the water, that being the only way he could drink with his gag on. The gag was taken off when he took his food, and then replaced afterwards."

Decades later, Milliken's (Milligan's) Bend would become the site of a June 7, 1863 battle, one of the first where soldiers of "African descent" fought. Charles A. Dana later recalled, "The bravery of the blacks in the battle at Milliken's Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops."

Other U.S. witnesses described similar items. C. G. Parsonswrote in 1855: "The Gag is a piece of iron, about three inches in length, one inch in width at one end, half an inch at the other, and about one eighth of an inch in thickness. This instrument is put into the mouth, over the tongue, with the narrow end inside, while the wide end is left projecting through the lips. The outer end is inserted into a small strap of iron that passes over the mouth, the ends of which extend around to the back of the neck, where they are fastened together by a rivet, or a padlock. With this long, wide piece of iron thus confined on the tongue, the slave is truly gagged, — as he is unable to utter a syllable."

A Civil War officer observed near New Orleans: "Another article is a heavy iron collar, with a mouth-piece, or 'gag' attached. This gag comes up from beneath the chin, and is immovably fixed in the mouth. In order to speak, eat or drink, it must be removed."

While the producers of 12 Years a Slave may have wanted to show the torture inflicted on enslaved people by metal instruments, they chose an uncommon Brazilian devise that was actually milder than what could have been used in the U.S. 

One of the best analyses of the lithograph showing the Brazilian slave is by J. Handler and A. Steiner, "Identifying Pictorial Images of Atlantic Slavery: Three Case Studies," Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006), 56-62. The original image appeared in Jacques Etienne Victor Arago, Souvenirs d'un aveugle, Voyage autour du monde par M. J. Arago, (Paris, 1839-40), vol. 1, facing p. 119.

Source link here.