Author: jessylarson

Like many people, I usually approach performance art with, at best, apathy. Similar to contemporary painting, which is often caricatured as simply canvases painting in a solid color or just a dot in the center, the art world has done a good job at distancing itself from anything tangible or easily relatable to a general audience. Three years of art history classes have somewhat numbed me to this argument; I rarely look at art anymore for the purpose of evoking in myself ‘feeling’ or ‘emotion.’ I typically approach any era or genre of art as a lens through which to contextualize or reflect the historical period surrounding it. To this extent, I can understand the backlash to minimalist and performance art considering so much of its importance is its reaction to image theory and art history. Similarly, my reaction to performance art has more often than not been “ok it’s interesting that people are exploring artistic barriers but none of this will stand the test of time.” However, recently I have come across a few pieces that have caught my attention and further pushed by conception of what “art” is. I think the two most exciting pieces I’ve heard of are by Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic and both explore the importance of audience participation and compliance, to the point where they blur the line between sociology experiment and artwork. Chris Burden’s piece “Samson” is part instillation, part performance. Burden, who made a name for himself in the 70s when he had a friend shoot him in the arm for a piece and in the 80s when he had himself crucified to a car, created “Samson” to further understand how far the audience is willing to participate when being directed. “Samson” is a set of beams constructed to fit between the walls of a gallery, connected to a turnstile. Each time a patron of the museum enters the gallery they pass through the turnstile, and every time it is turned the beams are rigged to push outward. Theoretically, if enough people passed through the turnstile, the walls would be pushed to collapse. Considering the museum did not, in fact, collapse, either there were not enough patrons or Burden’s audience made the conscience effort to prevent the demolition. I’m inclined to think that there just were not enough people visiting the museum (surprise surprise). Marina Abramovic did something similar with her performance “Rhythm 0,” in which she placed 72 items on a table, some harmless and others not, and allowed audience members to do whatever they wanted with those items to her while she remained motionless. She said afterward about it:

“I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”

For the most part, it seems as though the vast majority of novels and non-fiction books we read growing up in the United States were from either American or European authors.  However, the Middle East has a rich literary tradition to rival the West’s with famous poets like Hafez, Rumi, and Khalil Gibran and novelists like Elias Khoury, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Kahled Hosseini, famous for writing The Kite Runner.  The Middle East is often stereotyped as having heavy restrictions on intellectual pursuits and freedom of speech, which in some cases is true, there are many writers who are internationally renowned.  There is even a high school in Brooklyn named after Khalil Gibran and English translations of Rumi have sold over half a million copies worldwide, him being one of the highest selling poets in the U.S.

“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.”

-Rumi

Middle Eastern nations have embraced many Western authors as well.  Though a good deal of the books have to be pirated, some of the best selling writers in Iran are John Grisham, Danielle Steel, and Harry Potter is a favorite of young people, just as it is here, same with “Pinocchio” for young children.  There has also been a longstanding divide between Israeli books and those from other Middle Eastern nations which, in recent years, has seen some progress.  In 2009, Israel overturned a law from World War II which banned books from or translated in “hostile countries” like Syria and Lebanon.  This means that Israeli citizens will now be able to access a much larger selection of Arabic writings, which will hopefully add to some form of open dialogue in the region.

Americans often have a very one dimensional way of viewing daily life in the Middle East, and usually focus on aspects related to violence, insurrection, Islam, terrorism, and sexism.  The region is viewed as a place of constant turmoil, where daily life is shattered by suicide bombings and oppressive military presence.  These generalizations overshadow the culture that continues to grow out of a historically literary, but diverse, place.  There have been many writers who encourage the de-stigmatization of the Middle East, like Reza Aslan, Edward Said, and Tariq Ali.  Literature is important in spreading this awareness because it allows for a personal aspect of Middle Eastern life to be shared globally in an enjoyable manner.

From around the age of 14 on, I have been fascinated by scientific illustrations.  As a teenager, my room was filled with anatomical drawings; when my grandma was diagnosed with lung cancer I sent her a detailed charcoal drawing of a set of lungs.  I still believe they are ridiculously underappreciated as an art form, though I also think their quality has declined with the advent of digital technology that can just produce a model on a computer.  Meticulously  drawn diagrams of plants and animal bone structures always captured my attention in biology class far more than the lessons being taught, but I have no doubt that these illustrations helped me to understand the beautiful intricacies of science better.  Not only do they serve an aesthetic purpose but they are instructional, and I for one have no problem with art being used as a tool to

get people interested in or excited about academics.  Prior to photography, they served as a means of relaying information all over the world; for example, zoologists in England could see what a rhino looked like without ever having seen one in person.  It used to be in Europe that only executed prisoners were allowed to be dissected (and occasionally in public).  Due to Christian convictions at the time, it was believed that dissection prevented any possibility of entering heaven and the forgiveness of the deceased’s sins.  Many anatomical illustrations are, in fact, of executed criminals.

As far back as art historians seem to be able to go, art has always existed as a means of resistance, a catalyst to revolution, and a construct for exposing societal and political flaws.  With the continual privatization of the art market all over the world, guiding it out of the hands of restricting state and religious direction and patronage, artists are freer than ever to combine their own dissatisfactions with the existing power structure, stereotypes, preconceptions, etc. with forms of art that are more experimental and avant-garde.   Increasingly, the once European and U.S. dominated art market has shifted considerably.  Though cities like London and New York are still the major sellers of art, and Paris may always be the prime location for exhibition, some of the highest selling and most talked about art is coming out of places like Beijing and Dubai.   Themes that are common are usually similar to the same values coming out of Western contemporary art like feminism, war, and consumerism.  Aesthetically, the two hemispheres have been producing vey similar looking art as well.  Some point to this as an achievement in the universality and pervasiveness of art, though the point has also been made by some scholars that European art has had its own form of ‘colonialism,’ and Middle Eastern art (and for that matter, African and Asian) has been overly influenced by Eurocentrism, to the point where the unique Middle Eastern artistic tradition has been overshadowed and replaced with art that is a product of European art history.  If this is the case, the Middle East seems to be beating the West at their own game.  In 2008, Farhad Moshiri became the first Middle Eastern artist to sell an artwork at auction for over $1 million (specifically $1.05 million), and the numbers have only been growing since, with the Dubai Art Faire attracting some of the most elite in the art world, to the point where they have been the ones donating to the Louvre.

In a post-9/11 world, it seems as though anything related to the Middle East is translated through the lens of terrorism, whether it is pro or anti war.  It is not uncommon for news stories or interviews with Middle Easterners to solely focus on how the war has affected them, their opinions on it, the racism that has been engendered by the event, etc.   Though these things can’t be undermined, it is important to realize that there are other issues at stake in the Middle East, and there is a lot of art that reflects this.  They also have their genres of landscape painting, illustration, political cartoons, splatter painting, and so forth.

Though European and American connoisseurs of art seem to be receptive to contemporary art coming out of the Middle East, for many this is still fairly new territory.  U.S. museums usually have much less Middle Eastern art in comparison to their European collections, and after the controversy over the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad there was a considerable backlash in some prominent museums (most notably the Met), where many ancient works of Middle Eastern art were put into storage out of fear of reprisal.  Even U of M, as progressive as it may be, added for this Fall its first course on Middle Eastern art in years.  However, it does seem as though there has been a significant integration in the recent past of the Middle East into the global art market, and it only shows signs of increasing popularity.

Considering we are so close to Halloween, I decided that the most fitting subject for my first post should be something creepy:

Death and beauty have always had a tense but entangled relationship.  In ancient Egypt, if a particularly beautiful woman died her body would be left out in the desert heat for 3-4 days before being given to the embalmers to stay any temptation for necrophilia, Georges Bataille wrote that thanatos and eros could never truly be separated, and of course it’s been the subject of countless cult horror films.  This strange attraction to the visual side of mortality has been, possibly most poignantly, encapsulated in the tradition of death masks.  The tradition of the death mask began in ancient Egypt and continued through the Roman Empire, wherein a prominent person’s face would be duplicated in a stone carving shortly after death and the resulting mask would be placed over the deceased’s own face during funerary proceedings.  In Middle Ages Europe the technique was switched over to a casting process, where immediately after death the mask would be made of a plaster type material.  These masks were usually used in effigies and not kept with the dead person after burial.  The Medieval French had a somewhat unsettling tradition of using the death mask of a recently dead king to create a puppet-like figure with movable limbs.  Death masks were almost exclusively used for identification and scientific purposes starting in the 19^th Century, but the new subversive Bohemian artists emerging mid-century saw merit in the unique realism and individuality of the death mask.  One particular mask, titled L’Inconnue de la Seine, was adopted above all others by the Parisian avant-garde as the ideal of tragic beauty.  The legend goes that in the late 1880’s the body of a drowned woman was pulled out of the Seine and the pathologist at the Paris Morgue was so enchanted by her loveliness and soft smile that he had a mask made of her face which fell into the hands of a manufacturing company who reproduced large numbers of L’Inconnue.  Her image became the paradigm for misunderstood beauty and the spectacle surrounding death, with sophisticated Europeans hanging copies of it in their houses and writers like Albert Camus and Rilke hailing L’Inconnue’s smile to be as alluring as the Mona Lisa’s.

The art of the death mask lies in the shocking reality that it isn’t simply a sculpture but an impression of the moment almost directly after the subject passes from life to death.  The fame and public interest that it found in the late 19^th Century coincides with the beginnings of modernism’s move toward capturing the everyday and the objective, which death masks like L’Inconnue are reflective of.