Robert Goldwater Library blog

NYTimes Review: African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, "Lesson and Feast"

Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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via NYTimes Art Review | 'African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva':

Putting ‘Primitive’ to Rest

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 4, 2009

In the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum you’ll find a tiny African copper relief that probably predates, and would surely have awed, the great Lorenzo Ghiberti. You’ll encounter a bust of a Nigerian beauty to rival Nefertiti; an Oceanic Apollo with the physique of an Olympian; and a Micronesian statuette that is, with its stacks of faceted planes, Brancusi before Brancusi.

These objects, along with 32 others, make up the exhibition called “African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting.” The show, an unabashed masterpiece display, is not only a gold mine of historical data and a connoisseur’s delight, but also a reminder of how perceptions evolve — a mere few decades ago everything here was referred to as “primitive art.”

This was a capacious category. It covered African, Oceanic and North American Indian material, as well as Pre-Columbian art from Central and South America and all things “tribal” from everywhere else. Only fairly recently have the political dimensions of “primitive” begun to be fully sorted out and reckoned with.

Meanwhile, long-established museum collections built on that catch-all concept are still with us, changed now in their thinking if not necessarily in their form.

The Barbier-Mueller Museum represents one such collection; the Rockefeller Wing, with origins in Nelson A. Rockefeller’s 1957 Museum of Primitive Art, another. At the Met the two converge, complementing and extending each other. In one sense the result is an old-fashioned sampler display of one-tribe-one-style sculptural types: a classic reliquary figure from Gabon; a textbook New Ireland mask; and so on.

At the same time, by bringing certain comparable pieces from two different collections together, the show is an invitation to alter our habits of looking. We are encouraged to retain a sense of the context and history of objects, but to pay more than usual attention to interpretive inventiveness and formal finesse: in short, to get a sense of the many things that “great” in art based on non-Western models can mean.

In the Barbier-Mueller exhibition that spectrum is wide and deep. The collection was started in the early 20th century by Josef Mueller (1887-1977), the son of a Swiss industrialist. A young man with a hankering for the vie de bohème, he moved to Paris in 1907. Not being an artist himself, he became a collector, buying Picassos hot from the studio, and in due course buying what Picasso was buying: African and Oceanic art.

[read on...]

African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting

Forehead Ornament (Kapkap)
Western Solomon Islands, 19th century
Tridacna shell, turtle shell, fiber; Diam: 4 3/4 in. (12 cm)
Provenance: H. Gibson, England, before 1893; Royal United Services Institute Museum, London, 1893; James Hooper, England, before 1979; [Christie's, London 1980], Barbier-Mueller collection, sin

ce 1980

African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting
June 2, 2009–September 27, 2009
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 1st floor

	View images from this exhibition.

The collections of African and Oceanic art in the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva, begun in the 1920s by Josef Mueller and continued by Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, represent the culmination of more than eight decades of wide-ranging collecting of works from both regions. Presenting more than thirty highlights from the Barbier-Mueller’s holdings of African and Oceanic sculpture, most never before displayed in the United States, this exhibition explores a rich legacy of connoisseurship. The African works in the exhibition—sculpture and masks from western, eastern, and central Africa, from miniature to monumental in scale, made of wood, ivory, metal, and terracotta—illustrate both the creativity of the continent’s artists and the discerning eye of the collectors. The Oceanic works, an array of rare and spectacular objects that exemplify the breadth of achievement by artists from across the Pacific, include a striking group of figures, masks, and decorative art from Polynesia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, and other areas.
Accompanied by a catalogue. 

The exhibition is made possible by Vacheron Constantin.
It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva. 

The Passing of Cecil Skotnes

Cecil Skotnes at home

via ArtThrob, 4-22-09:

The Passing of Cecil Skotnes

It was with sadness, that ArtThrob learned last Saturday morning that Cecil Skotnes had died during the night. The celebrated South African artist died in a Cape Town hospital after suffering a fall and contracting pneumonia. He was 82 years old.

Of Norwegian-Canadian descent, Cecil Skotnes was born in 1926 in a poor neighbourhood of East London. He fought in World War II against Italy with South African troops, after which he stayed on to study painting in Florence. On returning to South Africa, Skotnes studied art at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1947 to 1950. He lived in Johannesburg from 1946, relocating to Cape Town in 1978.

A champion of modernism in Africa, Skotnes started his career as a painter. But, influenced by German Expressionism, he turned to printmaking in 1954 when he met Egon Guenther, a goldsmith, art collector and collaborative printmaker who persuaded him to abandon painting and develop a new artistic language through printmaking.

From 1954, when he took up this new medium, many of Skotnes's woodcuts were printed by Guenther. Skotnes has since been recognised as a pioneer of printmaking in South Africa, as very few artists were working in this medium in the 1950s. He is also acknowledged for popularising printmaking in South Africa while teaching at the Polly Street Art Centre from 1952 to 1965.

Icon for my dead Uncle II 1998. painted wood. 122 x 122 cm

In 1952 Cecil Skotnes was appointed Cultural Recreation Officer at the Johannesburg City Council's Polly Street premises, where adult education for black people was offered. Skotnes began teaching informal art classes there, and a group of students quickly established themselves at the Centre as dedicated career artists.

By the mid-1950s, as many as eighty students attended the Polly Street Art Centre, as the school became known. It was here that Durant Sihlali (1935-2004) and other strong painters established a 'township art' genre. Sculptures were produced by talents such as Sydney Kumalo (1935-88), who was Skotnes's assistant from 1958. In the early 1960's the locus of this training moved to Eloff Street and the centre became known as the Jubilee Social Centre.

With increasing restrictions on the freedom of black artists under apartheid, Skotnes moved the studio equipment to Soweto, then resigned in 1966, following Kumalo's resignation about a year earlier.

In 1963 Skotnes helped to establish the Amadlozi group. This group, which included Guiseppe Cattaneo, Cecily Sash, Sydney Kumalo and Edoardo Villa, sought to work at the intersection of African and European art. Skotnes exhibited his prints on his first solo show at the Pretoria Art Centre in 1957, and some were chosen to represent South Africa at the São Paolo and Venice Biennales of 1957 and 1958.

In 2006 Skotnes said of his own work, 'My work is grounded in the African idiom. There are two elements here: understanding the art of Southern Africa before the white man put his foot in the country, and my experience of teaching township people." A former President of the now defunct South African Council of Artists, Skotnes was the recipient of many awards in recognition of his contribution to cultural development in South Africa: the Chamber of Mines Gold Medal in 1965, and the South African Breweries Gold Medal in 1968. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Rhodes and Witwatersrand, and the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold (2003), for 'exceptional achievement in, and the deracialisation of, the arts, and for outstanding contribution to the development of black artists.' 

Powerhouse Museum goes Creative Commons!

reblogged via Powerhouse Museum (Sydney) blog:

Powerhouse collection documentation goes Creative Commons
By Seb Chan , Apr 2, 2009

We’re happy to announce that as of today all our online collection documentation is available under a mix of Creative Commons licenses. We’ve been considering this for a long time but the most recent driver was the Wikipedia Backstage tour.

Collection records are now split into two main blocks of text.

The first section is the relatively museum-specific provenance which is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license.

The second section is primarily factual object data and is licensed under a less restrictive Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike license.

Just to be very clear, images, except where we have released them to the Commons on Flickr, remain under license. There’s a lot more work to be done there.

So what does this really mean?

Teachers and educators can now do what they want or need to with our collection records and encourage their students to do the same without fear. Some probably did in any case but we know that a fair number asked permissions, others wrongly assumed the worst (that we’d make them fill out forms or pay up), and it is highly likely that schools were charged blanket license fees by collecting agencies at times.

Secondly it means that anyone, commercial or non-commercial can now copy, scrape or harvest our descriptive, temporal and geospatial data, and object dimensions for a wide range of new uses. This could be building a timeline, a map, or a visualisation of our collection mixed with other data. It could be an online publication, a printed text book, or it could be just to improve Wikipedia articles. It can also now be added to Freebase and other online datastores, and incorporated into data services for mobile devices and so much more.

Obviously, we’ll be working to improve programmatic access to this data along the lines of the Brooklyn Museum API, as well as through OAI and other means, but right now we’re permitting you to use your own nouse to get the data, legitimately and with our blessing - as long as you attribute us as the source, and share alike. We figure that a clear license is probably the ground level work that needs to preceded a future API in any case.

Thirdly, we’ve applied an attribution, non-commercial license to object provenance largely to allow broad educational and non-commercial repurposing but not to sanction commercial exploitation of what is usually quite specific material to our Museum (why we collected it etc).

You might be wondering why we didn’t go with a CC-Plus license?

A CC-Plus license was considered but given the specific nature of the content (text) we felt that this added a layer of unnecessary complexity. We may still, in the future, apply a CC- Plus license to images where it will make more sense given we have a commercial unit actively selling photographic reproductions and handling rights and permissions.

From the Deep: Mami Wata @ The National Museum of African Art

via NYTimes, Art Review | 'Mami Wata': 

From the Deep, a Diva With Many Faces

The Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles. 

"Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas," at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, celebrates a goddess and her ripples.More Photos >

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: April 2, 2009 

WASHINGTON — Here’s the plan. We drop whatever humdrum thing we’re doing and leave for Washington. Right away is not too soon. Once there, we head straight to the National Museum of African Art and begin our descent into the galleries, down being the only direction for this subterranean branch of the Smithsonian.

 As it turns out, we aren’t going underground. We’re going underwater: down, down, into African water, mid-Atlantic water, Caribbean water, with light, colors and temperatures changing all the way. No need for snorkels or goggles. Art is our oxygen. Nothing should stand between us and it.

As we go, we pass the museum’s permanent collection: masks from Liberia glistening with palm oil, royal figures from the Grassfields of Cameroon, Ghanaian gold, Benin ivories and, from Tanzania, a portrait of President Obama printed on ceremonial cloth.

Finally we reach the museum’s lower galleries and settle there, light as bubbles, as if on the ocean floor, with the sound of tides rolling and shushing above.

What we’ve come for is “Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas.” If the title sounds a bit formal, the exhibition is not. It’s as rousing as a drum roll, as piquant as a samba, as sexy as Césaria Évora’s voice. It’s about glitter and tears, bawdy jokes and baskets of flowers, miracles and mysteries, money in hand and affairs of the heart. It’s about standing at the edge of the sea at dawn and watching a world re-born. In that world no one walks; everyone dances and swims; everyone, that is, who has taken the plunge into Mami Wata’s realm.

Who is Mami Wata? She is Mother Water, Mother of Fishes, goddess of oceans, rivers and pools, with sources in West and Central Africa and tributaries throughout the African Americas, from Bahia to Brooklyn. Usually shown as a half-woman, half-fish, she slips with ease between incompatible elements: water and air, tradition and modernity, this life and the next.

Provider of riches, she is described as the “capitalist deity par excellence” by the show’s curator, John Henry Drewal, a professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and as such, she’s a natural bailout savior for our time. But when assailed by qualms over ethics, she can cause trouble, sending Madoffian fortunes onto the rocks with the flick of a fin.

Her beginnings are murky. Sub-Saharan rock paintings of great antiquity depict fish, snakes and human figures swimming together, suggesting that water was long considered a magical, difference-dissolving medium. Beings that combine human and animal features are a fixture of African art.

The image of the mermaid, though, seems to have come from Europe in the 15th century, possibly on prints, playing cards or tattoos. The specific image now identified as Mami Wata crystallized in the late 19th century, after a German print portraying a non-European circus snake charmer had a wide African distribution.

The picture of the woman, with her light-but-not-white skin, cascade of dark hair and long skirt covering what was presumed to be a fish tail, caused a sensation. Her overseas allure was further amplified by an overlay of Hindu influences introduced by South Asian immigrants to Africa, many of them rich merchants.

This ecumenical mix, as intensely exotic in Africa as African art is in the West, still has currency. A Mami Wata dance mask carved by the contemporary artist John Goba of Sierra Leone is a mini-Himalaya of Hindu motifs, with rearing cobras and snarling dragons perched atop a triple-headed goddess. Carved figures of Roman Catholic saints and a crucifixion, with Mami Wata in doleful attendance, turn another mask, this one from Nigeria, into a kind of chapel-chapeau.

But religious emblems are no guarantee of sanctity. To some eyes, particularly those of fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, Mami Wata is plain bad news. Abdal 22, a painter from Congo, depicts her as a henna-haired, Western-style femme fatale with a mirror, a comb and a faraway look. The Pentecostal Christian artist Kwame Akoto, who goes by the professional name Almighty God, presents her even more enticingly, but X-ed out with blood-red lines.

Fluid in form, volatile in temperament, foreign in origin, Mami Wata is feared and reviled as a spiritual loose cannon. Inevitably, she’s been snagged in a net of sexual politics. As women take increasingly active and independent roles in contemporary life, they are perceived as a threat to social stability. Africa is no different in this way from anyplace else. Mami Wata has come to personify feminine power that must be brought into line and tamped down.

[read full article] 

“Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas” continues through July 26 at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, 950 Independence Avenue SW, Washington; (202) 633-4600, africa.si.edu

The Truth about the Lost Amazon Tribe "Hoax"

[Image source: AFP]

reblogged via Huff Post:

The Truth about the Lost Amazon Tribe "Hoax"

By David Grann, Author, staff writer at The New Yorker

Posted March 8, 2009 | 08:44 PM (EST)

Last year José Carlos Meirelles, who works for the Brazilian government agency set up to protect the country's indigenous populations, released photographs that captivated the public imagination. Taken from an airplane swooping over the Amazon jungle, the pictures showed a group of Indians--their faces streaked with war paint, their bows drawn with arrows--that were said to remain uncontacted by the outside world.

Meirelles said that he had released the photographs to protect the tribe's territory from the onslaught of prospectors and loggers and farmers. In pursuit of such bountiful land, settlers had denied there were any remaining uncontacted Indians, and had mounted a campaign to open these territories for commercial use.
A few days after the photographs were made public, reports in the media surfaced that seemed to confirm the settlers' contention: the images were labeled "fakes," and widely dismissed as part of a "hoax," a "fraud," and a "PR joke."

Yet this perception was deeply misleading, and has had severe repercussions for the Indians in the region. As I document in my new book "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon," even today parts of the Amazon--a wilderness area virtually the size of the continental United States--remain unknown. The Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty tribes that are secluded in the jungle. John Hemming, the distinguished historian of Brazilian Indians, has said that these forests are almost "the only place on earth where indigenous people can survive in isolation from the rest of mankind."

The dispute over the photographs stemmed from confusion over the meaning of "uncontacted," as these groups are commonly designated. Though Meirelles had never said the tribe was unknown, many in the press had initially portrayed the group as such. In fact, like many of these tribes, the group's existence had had long been known about--its presence detected either by frontiersmen or by satellite imagery. Indeed, it is likely that many of these tribes have had some form of fleeting "contact" with outsiders over the years.

But that did not make the photographs "fakes" or a "hoax." The reason these tribes are classified as "uncontacted" is because they have retreated into the jungle and consciously avoided any interaction with settlers--an interaction that has frequently led to the extinction of Amazonian tribes.

In 2005, I visited the Kalapalo Indians in the southern basin of the Amazon. The tribe lived in the Xingu, which is part of Brazil's first Indian reservation. (It was created in 1961.) While the tribe had been contacted by the Brazilian government several decades earlier, its fate gives some sense of the threat to these indigenous communities.

While I was there, I spoke with a member of the tribe named Vanite, whose job was to guard one of the posts on the reservation. He told me that the other day an Indian had come to him and said, "Listen, Vanite. You must come with me down the river. The white people are building something in Afasukugu." The word "Afasukugu" meant "the place of the big cats"; at this site, the Kalapalos believe, the first humans were created. Vanite picked up a stick and drew a map on the mud floor. "Here is Afasukugu," he said. "It is by a waterfall."

Vanite paused for a moment, then continued with his story. "So I said, 'I will go with you to Afasukugu, but you are crazy. Nobody would build anything at the place of the jaguars.' But when I get there the waterfall is destroyed. They blew it up with thirty kilos of dynamite. The place was so beautiful, and now it is gone. And I ask a man working there, 'What are you doing?' He says, 'We are building a hydroelectric dam.' "

The dam was being built in the middle of a major river that ran through the Kalapalos' territory. Vanite, who was becoming more agitated, said, "A man from the [Brazilian] government comes to the Xingu and tells us, 'Do not worry. This dam will not hurt you.' And he offers each us of money. One of the chiefs from another tribe took the money, and the tribes are now fighting with each other. For me, the money means nothing. The river has been here for thousands of years. We don't live forever, but the river does. The god Taugi created the river. It gives us our food, our medicines. You see, we don't have a well. We drink water right from the river. How will we live without it?"

After Vanite finished his account, the chief of the Kalapalos, who was standing beside him, concluded, "If they succeed, the river will disappear and, with it, all our people."

Related News On Huffington Post:

HOAX: The Lost Amazonian Tribe That Wasn't They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an 'undiscovered tribe' in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian...

smARThistory: Read/Write Art History!

via newsgrist:

smARThistory: Read/Write Art History!

(thanks to Tyler Green / TylerGreenDC [@Twitter])

via smARThistory.org:

About smARThistory

Why We Made smARThistory
For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging. In addition, we had found the web resources developed by publishers to be woefully uncreative. We had developed quite a bit of content for our online Western art history courses and we had also created many podcasts, and a few screencasts for our smARThistory blog. So, it finally occurred to us, why not use the personal voice that we use when we teach online, along with the multimedia we had already created for our blog and for our courses, to create a more engaging "web-book" that could be used in conjunction with art history survey courses. We are also committed to joining the growing number of teachers who make their content freely available on the web.

A Short History of smARThistory
smARThistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.
We are interested in delivering the narratives of art history using the read-write web's interactivity and capacity for authoring and remixing. Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of closed and protected content, eliminating Web 2.0 possibilities for the open collaboration and open communities that our students now use and expect.
In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them. We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies.

[read on...]

East African commemorative banner

via Artnet magazine:

An East African banner commemorating Barack Obama’s election, with a text in Swahili reading "God has blessed us with peace and love.

Social Networking the Museum (part 2)

[For part 1 see: Up Close + Personal: Socially Networking the Museum, via newsgrist]

re-blogged via koven j. smith:

Twitter, Museums, and the “Institutional Voice”

December 30th, 2008 by Koven

Image via CrunchBase

Maria Gilbert of the Getty Museum started an interesting (and, I’m sure, evolving) conversation this morning about institutional “brands” on Twitter. The discussion was sparked, in part, by a recent post from Ari Herzog assessing the Museum of Modern Art’s own online presence. Twitter, and specifically how to use it in an institutional capacity, has of late been a hot topic at the Met as well, and the time seems right to lay out some of my own thoughts on the subject. Welcome to my New Year’s resolution to write more here at kovenjsmith dot com. Woot.

I think that the process of trying to figure out how to use so-called “social media” platforms like Twitter and Facebook has essentially accelerated the disintegration of what we used to call “the institutional voice”; that single, monolithic, thoroughly-vetted voice that spoke to you, the visitor, from a given museum’s publications, press releases, and Web site. As more and more low- or no-cost publishing platforms have become available over the last decade, we’ve seen an erosion of this single voice, as individuals from institutions are able to publish more quickly without going through a traditional vetting process. The question for museums is then: when that voice is gone, what replaces it?

I find, on Twitter, that institutional or company feeds are always less interesting than personal feeds. They’re informative, to be sure, and often highlight things about a given institution (a work of art, an upcoming program) that I might not have otherwise known, but they lack that certain personal angle that makes for a really good feed.

The problem is that a feed that speaks for an entire museum must, by its very nature, often remove the personal and/or provocative from its tweets in order to appeal to the broadest possible constituency. Therefore, the problem is less “what should we write about?” and more “from what perspective should we write?”

I agree with Tyler Green that the primary focus of a museum feed should be Art, but an institution can’t be as free with its opinions as an individual can be. If an art museum were to say something like “this portrait looks like Billy Dee Williams” in its Twitter feed (and let’s hope that happens), I’d have to wonder, as a follower, whose perspective that is. Does someone in the marketing department think that? Does the curator? An educator? The Web site director? As an institution, then, we’re reduced to posting somewhat bland tweets–daily highlights of works from the collection (something better suited to an “Artwork of the Day” desktop widget), or advertisements about half-price admission days (which probably belong in a marketing newsletter).

However, this problem of perspective goes away if you replace that single feed with a diversity of feeds from your staff.

Think about it. Friendships in the virtual space are not much different from friendships in real space. I’ll never be “friends” with MoMA, no matter how much I may love it as a museum, but I could easily imagine being friends with MoMA’s technology people, its curators, its educators, or its conservators. MoMA The Institution might not feel free to say that a particular work in its collection is sub-par, but a curator on MoMA’s staff might be willing to tweet at length about why that work is sub-par. I may not agree with that perspective, but it’s still an interesting one to read (and potentially joust with as well, via @ replies). As a follower, I’m not engaging with the institution per se, I’m engaging with one of many possible viewpoints from within that institution. This would have the end result of actually connecting me to the institution in a much more powerful (and one would hope, lasting) way.

This doesn’t mean that a single institutional feed has no value. In fact, as Tim O’Reilly points out in a recent post, he finds that his own Twitter feed often works as a kind of switchboard, connecting his followers to individual feeds within O’Reilly Media. One could certainly imagine an institutional feed taking this role, functioning almost as a party host introducing various guests to one another.

Although it seems likely that Twitter is about to break into the mainstream, we’re all still really trying to figure out how best to use it. It’s not a blog, it’s not e-mail, it’s not a Web site–it’s something entirely different that, I believe, has the potential to fundamentally change the way museums interact with their public. In “Remix,” Lawrence Lessig states that “…despite the rhetoric of the content industry, the most valuable contribution to our economy comes from connectivity, not content. Content is the ginger in gingerbread–important, no doubt, but nothing like the most valuable component in the mix…” It will be interesting to see if this will become true for museums as a result of engagement with platforms like Twitter.

h/t to Joy Garnett (from the Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) for the Lessig quote.

Koven J. Smith is the Musical Director of cornfield dance, as well as a producer of interactive technologies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an adjunct professor of Information Technology for the Visual Arts at New York University. With a background in electroacoustic music, formal composition, and new media design, Koven's work explores the intersection of multiple art forms and technology.

Africa, the Americas and Even Outer Space @ 80 Washington Square East

 

“Miss D’vine I” by Zanele Muholi.

The South African photographer and queer activist Zanele Muholi updates the classic ethnological tableau of an exotic, all but nude “native maiden” by having a model of ambiguous sex play the part, while a portrait painting by a popular artist from Ghana, Kwame Akoto, who goes by the professional name of Almighty God, declares through an inscription that cross-dressing is an unholy act.

Photo: Jean Vong

via NYTimes:

Last Chance

A Multicultural Swirl of Africa, the Americas and Even Outer Space

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: December 2, 2008

It is said that multiculturalism won the 2008 presidential election. So why does contemporary art in New York feel so unicultural these days? A decade ago exhibitions linking Africa and the Americas were not uncommon. They are now, though, which may be one reason that “S&M: Shrines and Masquerades in Cosmopolitan Times” at the 80 Washington Square East Galleries looks so fresh.

 

"In this show to pose is to perform, and performance is a ritual. The Senegalese artist Soly Cisse has the glowering glamour of a hip-hop deity in Kehinde Wiley’s painting of him. "

 

Photo: Jean Vong

 

 

 

Technically it’s an adjunct to two shows of African textiles, one at the Grey Art Gallery a few doors away on the New York Universitycampus at Washington Square, the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But one glance is enough to establish that “S&M” is not just part of a larger picture. It occupies a planet all its own.

You know you’ve landed when you see “The Mothership Tranceformer,” a rainbow-hued patchwork tent by Xenobia Bailey. Part shrine, part home, part workshop, with a sewing machine outside its door, it is a component of a project called “Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk” that Ms. Bailey has been working on for years. An Afro-futuristic vision, it owes as much to Sun Ra as to the quilters of the American South and tribal crafts.

But even before reaching Ms. Bailey’s house of many colors, you encounter other hybrid things. An abstract sculpture by Senga Nengudi made of pantyhose and wire looks like a many-breasted goddess sprouting from a wall. A rangy assemblage by Thomas McDonell and Richie Gergel, two young New York artists who worked together in Ghana, suggests an African power figure with a video screen for a face.

In drawings by Robert Pruitt, life-size figures wear what looks like homemade space gear. And in photographic self-portraits from the 1970s, the Cameroonian artist Samuel Fosso offers a personal version of internationalist couture that verges on intergalactic.

In this show to pose is to perform, and performance is a ritual. The Senegalese artist Soly Cisse has the glowering glamour of a hip-hop deity in Kehinde Wiley’s painting of him. Joni Mitchell, or rather her doleful face as seen on the cover of her “Blue” album, weeps big blown-glass tears in an altarlike sculpture by Chris Bogia.

The South African photographer and queer activist Zanele Muholi updates the classic ethnological tableau of an exotic, all but nude “native maiden” by having a model of ambiguous sex play the part, while a portrait painting by a popular artist from Ghana, Kwame Akoto, who goes by the professional name of Almighty God, declares through an inscription that cross-dressing is an unholy act.

Clothes take on personalities of their own in the sculptures of Nancy Barton and Onyedika Chuke, and performance turns surreal in a confessional text piece by Leyden Ynobe Lewis, with its tone of rapture and psychological possession, and in a video by Tracey Rose that has the artist manically racing through a sendup of some anthropological vision of Africa as the original Eden, the font of primitive human life.

Ms. Rose has a way of going for laughs that are never really laughs. But the show’s most disquieting piece is another video, Lyle Ashton Harris’s “Performing MJ,” taped in a Yale classroom. Wearing diapers, pumps and whiteface, Mr. Ashton Harris alternates between infantile helplessness and explosions of rage, finally flailing his way out of the room like a trapped animal.

The video is named for Michael Jackson, whose face appears, painted on Ghanaian funerary cloth, in a piece titled “White Ebony” elsewhere in the gallery. Mr. Ashton Harris’s take on his subject is as oblique as it is intense: you end up feeling as baffled and quietly freaked-out as some of the viewers at this performance probably did. No American artist in the past two decades has more insistently yanked at the tensions that hold ideas of blackness and whiteness in place.

Mr. Ashton Harris is the subject of a traveling retrospective, which goes to New Orleans next spring. Why it hasn’t come to New York, his home city, is anybody’s guess. At least we’re getting something of him here, not just in the video but also in the exhibition as a whole, which he organized with Ms. Barton and Mr. Bogia. The result, bearing all the marks of his tuned-in, far-out sensibility, is one of the best group shows of the season so far.

“S&M: Shrines and Masquerades in Cosmopolitan Times” is at the 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York University, through Saturday; (212) 998-5747.