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WINTER
18 Ressurection of Hilma Af Klint
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Studio Visit
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Editor’s Letter
2030 ISSUE 10
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DESIGN education Re-imagining the Design Classroom
Safi Mafundikwa Zimbabwe
Elizabeth white on teaching
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Collins Obijiaku
Design Italiano Castiglioni
By Parra Domestic life
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Rachel Portesi Fernando 1936 - 2020 Solanas
CONTENTS
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Gallery View Artist Featured
George Condo
Vicinity Stories Meghe Dhaka Tara Criterion
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Cao Fei’s Vintage China
39 Slumming It New york Disclaimer : This edition of the magazine is not official and merely only as a concept
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I’ve read a good deal of writing advice, and I’ve tried to share the best of it with readers of this magazine. But in my opinion, there’s one nugget of wisdom that gets dug up in far too many essays on the writing life: “No excuses.” It’s typically used to remind us how, when all is said and done, the writer must write, period. It’s a battle cry against procrastination, and I appreciate its efficacy. After all, I can come up with a year’s worth of things that need to be done before I sit down to finish my book. But this prohibition on excuses strikes me as a mere headline, appealing to those who think riches await if only they can commit to a rigorous writing schedule. It’s an example of the five-easy-steps approach to literature that I vehemently resist. Lately I’ve been turning this pointer on its ear, and it’s proven to be much more useful. My feelings on this matter began, I suppose, with last issue’s profile of novelist Ben Fountain who, as Roberta Werdinger points out in her recent letter to the editor (page 11), was quoted as having said, “It’s slightly ridiculous to be fifty-three years old and about to have your debut novel come out.” Turn to this issue’s twelfth annual roundup of debut fiction (41) and you’ll find Anna Keesey talking to Peter Ho Davies about why it took a decade to finish her debut novel: “Oh God! If something takes you that long to write, it had better be Middlemarch or Gravity’s Rainbow to justify the time. So it’s embarrassing to discuss. The short answer, maybe, is that for years I was tentative about the book, anxious and ridiculous, and for years after that I was adopting and then raising a child, mostly on my own, while working. ”To which I cry out, “No excuses!” The truth is, if we’re doing good work there is no need to justify
left : george condo display
Editor’s note 7
Re-imagining the Design Classroom from the Perspective of Othered Identities by the Editors
education
illustration by hayley wall
DESIGN A look at design education through the lens of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, queer, disabled, or immigrant bodies On August 4, five design educators came together for the SHIFT Virtual Summit, hosted by the AIGA Design Educators Community, for a panel discussion entitled “Reimagining the design classroom from the perspective of othered identities.” On a 90 minute video call, they discussed their respective experiences outside of the traditional design canon and looked at design education through the lens of Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer, disabled, or immigrant bodies. They questioned how to best represent their embodied identities in their classrooms, shared strategies and references (some of which you can access here), and spoke about going inward, into the 8
“I was influenced by the work of Rufino Tamayo as much as I was by the work of Anton Stankowski.”
body, as well as bringing students out of the canon and into the world. Josh Halstead, Julio Martinez, and Michele Washington were the panelists, alongside Jessica Arana and George Garrastegui, who moderated—they introduce themselves in their own words below. Then they delve into a discussion that, as the moderators put it, create a space “specifically as an opportunity to locate design educators in themselves and to center a discussion around who you are, what experiences have impacted why and what you teach, and how you might bring your Othered identity to that work…. and how representing any of those identities in the classroom may give
students the opportunity to imagine new worlds or design themselves new worlds.” Jessica Arana (she/her/hers) I’m a multiethnic Mexican woman. I was born in Mexico, but I was raised in the United States. I am a design educator and a design practitioner. My experience is with Borderlands and Chicana/o identity, and I use arts-based research to talk about how self-narratives can be strategies for identity development and surviving in this world. I’ve taught design at California State University, Northridge and also Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. George Garrastegui (he/him/his) I’m 100% a Latinx designer, Puerto Rican, born and raised in New York City. I’m a designer and educator and I teach as a full time professor at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech) in Brooklyn. I currently teach design research, typography, and design thesis. Josh Halstead (he/him/his) I identify as disabled. To date, I’ve taught graphic design foundations at UC Berkeley Extension and California College of the Arts Extension. In 2021, I’ll be teaching a new course titled Design and Identity Politics, the manifestation of a couple years of research and resource gathering. In addition to teaching, I’m a greenhorn design scholar working at the intersection of technology studies, critical disability studies, and somatics. My current project investigates an embodied approach to critical design research. Julio Martínez (he/him/his) I was born in Mexico City, and my family came out to San Francisco when I was 12. And I’ve been in San Francisco ever since, I’ve been teaching at San Jose State University, part of the California State University system, for about nine years. I have a branding studio in San Francisco that has been running for about 13 years called studio1500. I also do a lot of illustration and personal work on the side. Michele Washington (she/her/hers) I live in New York City, but I come from Atlantic City, New Jersey. I teach as an adjunct in graduate Exhibition and Experience Design at the
“Imagine what the design classroom would feel like if it were a vestibule toward self and collective discovery.”
“I think you almost have to create those changes in the classroom because the world is changing constantly.” City Tech. I primarily work as a designer, researcher, and strategist. I do a lot of work with cultural organizations, startups, and nonprofits, and I’ve also lectured widely on the History of Black Graphic Designers, nationally and internationally, and I’ve written heavily on that topic as well. Arana: Sometimes in both the academic and the design setting, the personal can be seen as too personal—not impartial enough, or not rigorous. But I’m guessing that our identities that we embody weren’t included in our own design curriculum when we were learning design. I’d like to specifically defy that right now. I’m curious, what are ways of knowing that come from aspects of your own identity, your body, or your lived experience? And do you bring your whole self into that approach, or in your learning material? Washington: In teaching the communication design theory class at City Tech, I don’t necessarily follow the full framework provided for the syllabus because I found it very Eurocentric. When I was asked to teach this class, I said that I would teach it from a cross-cultural perspective. One of the things that I do to jumpstart the class is have students write a short essay that’s about 500 words based on an episode from the Code Switch podcast, called “What’s in a Name?” Because a lot of times students that come from different countries have different sounding names and people either butcher them or they’re asked to shorten them. Other things that I do are questioning the Bauhaus not having women and not having a cross-cultural perspective; we look at branding globally, how it’s translated in other countries; and then we look at cultural imagery. I use an old AIGA Journal “Who Owns Cultural Imagery,” edited by Steve Heller and the late Sylvia Harris, and it covers everything about cultural imagery for just about every ethnic group, and it also gets into gender. Martinez: When I trained as a designer 20 years ago, I had this viewpoint that was shared by a lot of the design world that if you’re a good designer, you’re a good designer. The work is anonymous, so it shouldn’t matter where you come from. And for the most part, that’s how I approached teaching when I first started. Then I had a couple of students in the first couple of semesters just really dig in [and ask] “Yeah, but how did you do it?” That encouraged me to bring more of myself into the classroom… I started to really talk more about [my Mexicanness]. In some classes it’s more appropriate than others—in my typography class, I don’t really get into that as much, but in some of the advanced image-making classes I teach, I do tell them, “Hey, I was influenced by the work of Rufino Tamayo as much as I was by the work of Anton Stankowski, those were equally strong influences to me.” And I encourage students to define those influences wherever they are. 9
Halstead: I have an unavoidably political understanding of design. I often say that I’m better suited to be an accountant or a lawyer, but because I was born into a world that, more often than not, is not made for bodyminds like mine, I became a designer. From playgrounds to school campuses, workplaces, and housing, inaccessible architecture is rampant. For instance, it’s common for me to be invited to a friend’s house only to be met with a flight of stairs that my legs can’t scale—and no elevator or lift alternative. In this example, stairs function as both a material and rhetorical barrier to access. They police where my bodymind can and can’t be in a city, but they also tacitly state that bodyminds like mine are not welcome and worthy of rejection. What happens if we substitute my friend’s house for the office where an important job interview is held? How about a reality where stairs are the only way out of an apartment on fire with broken elevators? Design is always a political practice, because it imagines the people who will be interacting with its material and digital experiences in certain ways, excluding others. As such, design is one form of governance that mediates social, economic, and political exclusion. I mentioned my use of disability is a critical method earlier. What I mean by this is leveraging my embodiment to understand how power amasses and operates in certain places and spaces. When power becomes knowable, we can then subvert it. Take, for instance, a San Francisco design office only accessible via a rickety, clandestine flight of stairs. In short order, the exclusion I experience leads to a thread of questions regarding how the sedimentation of such architectural micro-aggressions came to be. Historically, what do these stairs tell us about how economic ideologies position some bodyminds as productive and others as burdens? Politically, what corporeal capacities are required (but unsaid) to become a designer? Pliable legs are only the beginning. Consider the creative software design praxis religiously deploys that is just now becoming more accessible to those of us who use our elbows, chins, or voices to navigate screen space instead of our hands and fingers. The list goes on. Centering my disabled embodiment generates questions that, if engaged in creative practice, have the potential to uproot several threads of historical, social, and political repression, among others. It’s a way to build theory, and I try to teach my students the value of centering their own identities and embodiments in their process to cultivate critical consciousness and emancipatory world building. Garrastegui: It seems like everybody on the panel has been able to shift the landscape 10
of the way they teach based on who they are and what they bring to the table, physically, culturally, etc. Did anybody notice any gatekeeping that you had to navigate through? Michele mentioned [telling City Tech] that she would take the course only if she was allowed to change the course; do you have experiences where you weren’t able to shift things in the way that you would prefer, or think would actually benefit the students? Washington: I find that with both undergraduate and graduate students, they really want world experience. They don’t necessarily want what’s in a textbook because textbooks get outdated very quickly. So how can you get them to look at what’s happening out in the world at large, and to bring that into their work? I know that if you’re teaching in college with a union-based environment, you do have leeway based on some of the guidelines of how you can shift around your curriculum. I bring in a lot of excess reading, videos, and other things that I want students to explore. With graduate students, we do projects that are out in the real world, in public spaces. So they have to take a lot into consideration, whether it’s designing for multiple languages, or designing for accessibility. Martinez: The gatekeeping I’ve experienced is really not outside of what you might expect. As an adjunct, there are certain buttons I just don’t have access to, but the way that it works at San Jose State is that you get a course and a set of goals, but what you do in the classroom is mostly up to you….even though I’m not writing
“It’s about sharing information, reading, and becoming aware of what’s existed in the world.” Halstead: Juicy question. One way to frame dignity is its being one of three essential nutrients for well-being. In her book, The Politics of Trauma, Staci Haines argues that many of the personal and collective traumas we experience can be understood as a violation of dignity, safety, and belonging. What many of us have been alluding to during this panel is that graphic design as a discipline and industry is in need of critical reflection. A place to start is by asking, “Am I teaching design history from a Eurocentric perspective?” This is precisely what a group of design historians sought to challenge when they created Decentering Whiteness in Design History Resources, a living document meant to decenter White people within American design history and North Americans and Europeans within global design history. A Google search for “graphic design legends” surfaces David Carson, Saul Bass, Stefan Sagmeister, Paula Scher, Massimo Vignelli, and Paul Rand—all formidable designers, and all uniformly White. Dignity applied to graphic design pedagogy and practice means teaching Jennifer White-Johnson when exploring color theory, introducing students .
Saki Mafundikwa on 20 Years Running the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts by Ksenya Samarskaya
education
Image by Beatrice Sala.
DESIGN Saki Mafundikwa is the founder and director of the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA), a graphic design and new media training college in Harare, Zimbabwe. In 1999 Mafundikwa left New York, where he was working at the time, to return to his homeland with a mission to create a school rooted in Afrikan history, one informed but not dictated by European design. In 2004, Mafundikwa wrote and published Afrikan Alphabets: the Story of Writing in Afrika, the first, and still the go-to, book on African typography. While the book is currently out of print, you can watch Mafundikwa speaking about it in his TED talk, or wait for a revised edition, expected to be published in 2021. I’ve been playing e-mail tag with Saki since last November. Our interview attempts were initially interrupted by Harare’s severe electricity cuts, then travel, and finally, COVID-19. When we finally did manage to get
Saki, hello. How are you? First off, let me just say this, I am tired. I’ve run a design school for twenty years without a single cent in funding in a country that just won’t get its politics right. We have weathered the storm of autocratic rule for all 40 years of our “independence.” My country had only known one ruler for 37 years—that’s 37 years of brutal dictatorship and dysfunctional economic policies that saw our country degenerate from “the bread basket of Afrika” to a basket case. Then three years ago, we exchanged one dictator for a worse one. We never saw that one coming and the current dictator is both clueless and cruel, hell bent on looting the country’s treasury and mineral resources. We seem to be cursed by the worst leadership imaginable. Zimbabwe has enjoyed the distinction of “pariah state” for most of its life as an independent state.
“Our future lies in our past, for there lie our greatest achievements and contributions to the development of humanity.” 11
Why is it important to talk about politics up front? Well 25 years ago when I was living and working in New York City and had the “brilliant” idea to return home and start a design school, I felt like nothing could stop me—I was invincible and my idea so brilliant that funding was just going to flow like the waters of the mighty Zambezi! It didn’t take long for me to realize that there was trouble in paradise. Every single application for funding was rejected on the grounds of where the school was: “Great idea but wrong country.” That became the mantra. It was frustrating because my school was a private entity and not associated with the government at any level. I realized then that politics play into many initiatives in many parts of the world. Most frustrating was the hypocrisy of the industrialized nations cherry-picking “rule of law” infractions in countries they deemed “unfriendly.” So, as the lean years rolled by, I realized that I was on my own. I am, however, working steadily to launch online .version of ZIVA
“ We have to
decolonize Decolonization
What, if any, advice would you give to others starting an independent design school today? COVID-19 has changed everything. I doubt that we’ll ever get back to the “way things were” and that holds true for design schools. Do I know what the future looks like? I wish I had a crystal ball and if I did, I would’ve foreseen the game changer that this nasty pandemic is. It looks like everything is moving online and looks like things are going to work—for some—albeit in a very different way. Initiatives like ZIVA are now part of history, I do not think that type of design school will ever happen again. Ain’t that sayin’ something, wow. What do you feel like are the important questions designers, and design, should be asking right now? Boy-oh-boy, if you’d asked me this question mere months ago, like the first two months of 2020, I would’ve had a lot to say, but now… it’s about survival, our survival as the human race. There’ve been conversations lately about authorship in type design: about who’s allowed to design typefaces for different scripts, who gets to critique their quality, what being native to a language, or a region, means. What’s your take on these issues? I missed any debate on authorship of typefaces—living in Zimbabwe for as long as I have, I got used to being “off the grid” as far as information was concerned. Poor, slow, and expensive internet makes sure that connectivity is a luxury only the affluent few can afford. That situation is worse now as our economy slips into free-fall again. I just raise my eyebrows at the arrogance of the North who now predict education going online! Zoom with all its imperfections is an unknown word to most in my part of the world (I was hacked by racist white extremists in August during a Zoom lecture with a U.S. based partner and organizers and the experience left me pretty shaken up). So, I missed that conversation and still belong to the “old school” thinking that anyone can design any typeface they feel like designing irrespective of their nationality. The only condition that I have always insisted upon is crediting the source, and if there is any profit derived from the design, it must be shared with the source. Who’s the type design police issuing “permission” to designers? What I do have greater issue with is the buzzword du jour: “Decolonization.” Here I declare myself the police (along with other Natives). Again, I raise my eyebrows at all this debate and interest by people who have no idea what it means to be “colonized.” Who feels it knows it—WE the colonized have to lead that debate. Nothing irks me more than “intellectuals” and self-appointed “experts” waxing philosophical about decolonizing design education. My very good friend and partner in crime, Sadie Red Wing and I ask the very crucial question, “What are they decolonizing to?” Only someone who has experienced the sting of colonization can decide that question. We are the ones with the indigenous knowledge systems that become the new curriculum. I’m fond of saying that our future lies in our past, for there lie our greatest achievements and contributions to the development of humanity. We have done the research and have the authority to author new textbooks and course material. We have to decolonize Decolonization. 12
Elizabeth White on Teaching for the “Whole Student” by Ksenya Samarskaya
Higher education is not a level playing field DESIGN
education
Design by Katharina
Elizabeth White is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her work explores “social, psychological, and political themes including maintenance and self-preservation; security and freedom; control and anxiety; and confrontation with the unknown.” Her projects—which was been exhibited globally, including at the Tate Modern in London—are usually site-specific and shaped by research. They often incorporate the images, objects, and words of others.
for the whole student.” What does that entail, and how does that end up looking in practice?
student, and blurring the traditional boundaries that have often existed in the classroom?
As an institution, Bennington i designed to support students’ exploration and reflection, and t help them identify and pursue their own questions and interests. A key component of this is the significant amount of time faculty members end up working with students outside of the classroom, as advisors, plan and review committee members .
Since 2011, White has taught at Bennington College as a member of the faculty of visual arts. She also directs the Museum Fellows Term, a five-month program in which students do a work-study semester at a major cultural institution in New York City. Over coffee, sporadic text messages, and shared documents, we discussed what she means by “teaching for the whole student,” a method of pedagogy she helps employ at Bennington.
Class sizes are small, and courses emphasize participation and incorporate individual meetings. Students also complete a “work-integrated learning” requirement every year. This structure encourages students to bring their education into new contexts, to test their ideas, explore possible careers, and ultimately to inform their future pursuits, bringing those experiences back to campus to enrich conversations with peers, faculty, and advisors.
Working so closely with students over time, and in multiple contexts, I’ve come to recognize that their “workloads” are much heavier than what is evidenced by a syllabus: that while meeting the demands of their courses, they are often simultaneously navigating significant personal challenges. Trying to complete assignments while worrying about your or your family’s health, immigration status, access to care, or ability to afford housing, is multitasking of a different order. Students across the country (and the world) are carrying these burdens and doing this work.
You mentioned that Bennington uniquely positions itself as “teaching
What’re some challenges you’ve had to face in taking in the whole
“As educators, we should do all we can to create spaces of care where students feel supported. 13
Pier Giacomo Castiglioni , nicknamed Popo , was a prominent Italian architect and a pioneer of Italian design. According to Dino Gavina, he was one of the ten best designers in the world.The son of Giannino Castiglioni, a renowned Milanese sculptor, he graduated in architecture in 1937 from the Politecnico University of Milan, for which he designed the official signet in 1944.In 1938 he established the famous Studio Castiglioni in Milan with his elder brother Livio (1911-1979) and also started working with Luigi Caccia Dominioni—another leading Italian architect and designer—with whom he collaborated until 1945.In 1944 his younger brother Achille joined him and Livio at Studio Castiglioni and they officially worked all together until 1953, when Livio left the trio. However, Pier Giacomo and Achille continued collaborating during his entire life.They also involved in their work many other prominent Italian designers including Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, Erberto Carboni, Fulvio Bianconi, Giancarlo Iliprandi, Grazia Varisco, Heinz Waibl, Italo Lupi—who was Pier Giacomo’s teaching assistant at the Politecnico University—, Max Huber, Michele Provinciali, Pino Tovaglia, and others. During his career, he worked on the whole field of design from architecture to exhibition design, on to furniture, product, and light design. He served many renowned Italian design companies including Alessi, Brionvega, Cassina, Flos, Gavina, and Zanotta as well as many major corporations such as ENI, Montecatini, Pirelli, and RAI.
PIER GIACOMO CASTIGLIONI Milan, Italy,
1913-1968
Many of the pieces he designed are now part of the collection of major museums such as the MoMA in New York and the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) in London. He also received numerous recognitions including five Compasso d’Oro awards (1955-1967), one Triennale Bronze Medal (1947), two Silver Medals (1957, 1960), two Gold Medals (1957, 1960), and two Triennale Grand Prix (1951, 1954).
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Achille Castiglioni—nicknamed Cici—was a pioneer of Italian design and one of its most influential protagonists.The son of a prominent Milanese sculptor, Giannino Castiglioni, he started dedicating himself to design in 1938 at 20 years old. He graduated in architecture from the Politecnico University of Milan in 1944 and joined his brothers Livio (1911-1979) and Pier Giacomo (1913-1968) at renowned Studio Castiglioni, which they established together in 1938.He focused on the whole field of design working from architecture to urban planning, from exhibition to furniture design, on to product and light design. He designed chairs and tables, lamps and bookcases, ashtrays and valet stands, dishes and flatwares, school desks and hospital beds, sinks and toilet bowls, handles and bottle openers, coffee machines and beer dispensers, and many more.Until 1968 he always worked in close collaboration with his brother Pier Giacomo, with whom he designed some of the best known icons in the history of industrial design including Sella and Mezzadro stools as well as Arco and Taccia lamps (now part of the MoMA’s permanent collection). In 1956 he acted as a founding member of ADI—Associazione Disegno Industriale (Industrial Design Association), the first and most important Italian design association. Honorary Royal Designer for Industry since 1986. He received a honorary degree in design from the Royal College of Art of London in 1987, and another one from the Politecnico University of Milan in 2001. During his career he received many recognitions including eight Compasso d’Oro (1955-1979)—the first and most recognized design prize in the world—, one Triennale
ACHILLE CASTIGLIONI Milan, Italy,
1918-2002
DESIGN
ITALIANO
Designculture 15
CASTIGLIONI BROTHERS
Tric Foldable Chair (Bernini, BBB) 1965
Splügen Bräu Babela S u s p e n d e d Armchair (Gavina, Tacchini) Lamp (Flos) 1958
Tric is a redesign of Thonet’s B-751 folding 9 chair, that was first produced in 1925 1 and discontinued around late 1930s. Designed with Achille Castiglioni. Designed The chair is today produced in Castiglioni beech wood and also Bräu beer transparent plastic.
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6 with for the house
This beautiful armchair was designed in 1958 for the Milan Chamber of Commerce to combine comfort, Achille lightness, and stackability. The Splügen original chair featured an iron in Milan frame, today replaced by ash wood. Designed with Achille.
1
Spinamatic Beer Dispenser (Poretti) 1964 Made from two die-cast aluminium shells. The project was awarded the Compasso d’Oro 1964. Designed with Achille Castiglioni.
Sanluca Lounge Chair (Gavina, Knoll, Bernini, Poltrona Frau) 1960 This armchair comes from the idea of emptying the padding of the chair in order to reduce it to the essential curves needed to ergonomic support. The chair is made up of three elements: seat, backrest, and headrest. They are built separately and then assembled together. Designed with Achille Castiglioni and thanks to the technical support of Dino Gavina.
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Seeing, And Seeing Through, Art History: The Resurrection Of Hilma Af Klint In ‘Beyond The Visible’ [Halina Dyrschka, 2019] By Esmé Hogeveen
hilm fk a a
lin
t
hi l m a af k lin t
Sometime last year, I tweeted: “are Hilma af Klint selfies the new [Yayoi Kusama] infinity mirror selfies?” Selfies taken in Kusama’s 1970s mirrored chambers blew up in the art world in 2018, with laypeople and art history buffs alike waking early to book exhibition tickets months in advance. In early 2019, a comparable buzz was building around the rediscovered abstract paintings of Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). After years of critical and popular neglect, af Klint was finally receiving her due. On the heels of several well-received European exhibitions ‘Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future’ opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in October 2018. Around the same time, my Instagram feed began to swoon with pastel spirals and vivid geometric motifs – images from af Klint’s dazzling large-scale works. Then in March 2019, Tavi Gevinson, perhaps the archetypal millennial tastemaker, posted a photo of herself grinning in front of “Adulthood,” a pale violet and orange painting from af Klint’s ‘The Ten Largest’ series. Clad in an eccentric ensemble by Belgian designer Dries van Noten, Gevinson captioned the pic, “Matching Hilma af Klint” with a DNA emoji. 12,786 people liked it. In Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (2019), German filmmaker Halina Dryschka explores the implications of af Klint’s historical and contemporary reception. In addition to providing an engrossing portrait of an artist responding to sexism and other ideological influences of her time, Beyond the Visible sheds much-needed light on the role major institutions have played – and continue to play – in the widespread omission of women from the canon of Western art. As contemporary New York-based artist Josiah McElheny observes in an interview clip, “In science, a citation can always be overturned, but in art history it seems like citations cannot be overturned […] so it makes it almost impossible to insert anyone into art history.” Dryschka addresses this challenge head-on, saying in a voice-over at the beginning of the film: “[L]et’s rewrite art history.” The following= with Dryschka investigating why af Klint’s contributions were overlooked in her day and well into the 21st century. 18
Within the first ten minutes of the film, several Swedish and international art historians, curators, and artists provide context for the significance of the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual contributions. Meanwhile, Dryschka shows details from paintings with what runs the gamut from non-representational illustrations of revolutions in natural science, radio waves, and X-rays to spiritualist mediations on nature and the afterlife to Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), a series of 193 paintings and paperworks created to adorn a never-built theosophical site. Next, a recurring historical reenactment scene, shot from above, is introduced: an actor playing af Klint prepares a large
canvas on the floor, then begins sketching in pencil and preparing and mixing pigment, before finally painting. These shots work surprisingly well as a unifying thread in the film and also remind viewers of the immense scope of af Klint’s vision and output. Early in Beyond the Visible, split-screen images show motifs and details from af Klint’s works alongside comparable details in paintings by Modernist and Postmodernists heavyweights such as Vassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. In all of these sideby-side examples, af Klint’s work precedes the male artist’s by several years. Next we learn that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) published
a book in 2012 titled Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, which included no mention of af Klint. In one of the more deliciously pointed voiceovers, Dryschka relays that: “In answer to my inquiry, the [MoMA], the so-called Vatican of art history, replied they weren’t so sure whether Hilma af Klint’s art actually worked like abstract art. After all, she hadn’t exhibited in her lifetime, so how could one tell?” This question is a bit of a red herring, as making an absolute argument about why or why not af Klint’s work should be classified as pioneering would risk repeating the kind of monolithic thinking that overlooked some of her contributions in the first place. Nevertheless, unpacking questions related to
artistic recognition – including nested queries about peer influence, homage, and accreditation – becomes a means for Dryschka to reveal the high stakes of challenging established narratives in art history. Yet she is also careful to incorporate nuance into her study of af Klint’s life and reception. We learn, for instance, that the painter was widely respected by many of her peers and worked out of a state-sponsored studio in downtown Stockholm for years. We also learn that it was af Klint’s own decision to refrain from showing the richly imaginative and complex works she created for a theosophical temple for at least twenty years. Instead, she left these works to a nephew, Eric af Klint.
“ The pictures were
Now, living in a time when information is often captured and transmitted without a physical site or transcript, there is something inspiring about af Klint’s efforts to make sense of that which exceeds physical sensation. Her attention to energetic forces – spiritual, scientific, and in the natural world – feels apropos at a moment when individuals are seeking meaning beyond dichotomies of religion and technology, or looking for ways to understand them in dialogue. As Iris Müller-Westermann, former senior curator at Moderna Museet Stockholm “Klint’s project was something much grander than. Larger context to understand who we really are in a cosmic perspective.”
painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke. “
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I’m Just Happy We Got a Cat: Parra Paints an Abstracted Domestic Life
Pieter ‘Parra’ Janssen Dutch artist Parra (1976) is best known for his surreal bird-like characters and distinctive use of saturated colours. His early work explored vibrant hand-drawn letters and humor, in recent years, his work has evolved into gorgeously layered abstract interpretations of his core figures. Celebrated by galleries and championed by a devout underground following, Parra has become a respected and multimedia artist, through solo exhibitions spanning Asia, the United States, and Europe. Working across large scale public sculpture, painting, drawing and textile work, Parra creates an enigmatic and instantly recognisable style that defies easy categorisation. His work is in the public collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Parra is co-founder of cult apparel label ByParra and a member of music group Le Le and MICH. Parra Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
bet on number three, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 100 cm (27.5 x 39.4 in) Constant (Los Angeles) 20
I’M JUST HAPPY WE GOT A CAT is a solo show, yes, a virtual one, but a self-produced solo show in a time when virtual and physical have a tendency to blur into one anyway. Originally planned for the US this year, Parra has really honed in on that “domestic” scenery into a lush and almost laid back existence. Female characters lounge,peer out with aplomb through windows, but trapped in their towers of monotony. In what was once highly pop-oriented work has evolved in day-in-day out life that becomes more abstracted when regarded closely.
talk to the hand, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 100 cm (27.5 x 39.4 in) Constant (Los Angeles) 21
the indoor pool, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, 85 x 120 cm (33.5 x 47.2 in) Constant (Los Angeles)
I’M JUST HAPPY WE GOT A CAT Parra’s stylized female subjects exploring themes of the mundane, domestic life in all its tediousness. We see them resting, in conversation, passing the time, always indoors. When there is daylight visible through windows, it’s not that they can’t reach it, but that it’s no longer of interest. Each day repeats itself in these scenes and his subjects become further abstracted in their monotony. A far cry from the pop influences of his early work, I’M JUST HAPPY WE GOT A CAT’ shows Parra carefully exploring early Cubism with six new, beautifully restrained scenes we - maybe now more than ever- can all relate to.
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the tired chair, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 100 cm (27.5 x 39.4 in) Constant (Los Angeles)
different needs, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, 85 x 120 cm (33.5x47.2in) Constant (Los Angeles)
overtrained, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 85 cm (33.5 x 47.2 in) Constant (Los Angeles)
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An Anguish at Arm’s Length: Supriya Choudhury in The Cloud-Capped Star Whenever I think of the iconic Bengali actor Supriya Choudhury, the first thing I recall is not her face— with its high cheekbones and large, kohl-rimmed eyes that often drew comparisons to Sophia Loren’s—but her voice, disembodied, tearing through the hills in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star (1960): “Brother, I wanted to live; I want to live; tell me that I will live!” A beloved star of her time, Choudhury had a decades-spanning oeuvre that included another Ghatak film, E-Flat (1961); a string of commercial successes with her real-life partner, the Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar; . 24
and even a notable late career cameo in Mira Nair’s The Namesake (2006). But when she passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty-five, she seemed forever embalmed —in obituaries, remembrances, and cultural memory—in that primal scream she lets loose in The Cloud-Capped Star as Neeta, the dutiful daughter of a penurious refugee family who is ruined by her own selflessness. It’s a cry that endures in part because it strains against an inexorable fate. In “The Cloud-Capped Star”, Ghatak draws from the myths of the Hindu deity Durga to deliver a furious critique of the bourgeois
values of post-Partition Bengal. Like the Mother Goddess whose deconsecration—ritualized through the yearly festival of Durga Puja— sustains the life force of the world, Neeta expends herself thanklessly for her family until tuberculosis seals her tragic destiny. She ends up at a hillside sanatorium (a twisted reference to the goddess’s mountainous abode), where, in the film’s final moments, she is visited by her brother Shankar (Anil Chatterjee). As he prattles nervously about their nephew, trying to keep her in good spirits, Neeta suddenly erupts, objecting desperately to the
inevitable. She isn’t dead yet, but but Ghatak all but confirms her annihilation with Eisensteinian montage: he cuts jaggedly between angles, destroying all sense of perspective, while Neeta’s voice seems to separate from her body and reverberate across the valleys, which are filmed in rapid pans that fade into each other. That Choudhury’s distinctive presence survives this scene of destruction, enduring and perhaps even engulfing Ghatak’s formal frenzy, is a testament to the actress’s astute melodramatic capacities—her ability to turn her character’s abject victimhood into an unsettling moral force. It was Ghatak’s inspired use of “lower” forms like melodrama that distinguished his work from the neorealism of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, his contemporaries in the Indian art cinema of the 1950s and 60s, also known as “parallel cinema.” “I think a truly national cinema will emerge from the much-abused form of melodrama when truly serious and considerate artists will bring the pressure of their entire intellect upon it,” Ghatak once wrote. This was precisely his project in works like The CloudCapped Star, Subarnarekha (1965), and A River Called Titas (1973). These transfixing, sometimes erratic films harness melodramatic excess in service of a radical indictment of liberal-capitalist society, deploying Indian mythology alongside Jungian archetypes and Brechtian alienation. Neeta in The Cloud-Capped Star represents a particularly ambitious effort at this synthesis: she invokes not just multiple avatars and symbols of the Goddess Durga, but also the Jungian mother-complex, the exploited proletariat, the soul of the partitioned nation, and, at the most immediate level, the figure of the refugee. This is particularly evident in an exchange between Neeta and her romantic interest, Sanat.
“You don’t deserve any of this,” he says - “this hardship, suffering, and responsibility!”
Like everyone else around her, he takes advantage of her generosity even while protesting feebly against her exploitation. When she suggests that after they marry she can support his academic ambitions with her earnings, he balks at her: “You don’t deserve any of this,” he says, “this hardship, suffering, and responsibility!” Ghatak closes in on Neeta’s face in profile as she responds. Continuing to smile, she turns slowly to face the camera, eyes gazing into the distance, and says coyly, “Then make a glass case and place me inside like a wax doll.” Then she turns back to him and suggests they walk back home. There’s a curious falseness to this moment. Neeta’s words suggest sarcasm, perhaps even resentment at Sanat’s empty pretense of chivalry. Yet Choudhury’s monotone delivery betrays no such sentiment, as if severed from the content of her speech. She seems to suggest that she’s already a wax doll in the invisible prison of the screen: fetishized and hallowed, yet, like an idol, deprived of real, fleshful life. It’s an obscene caricature of the trope of the selfsacrificial, divinely suffering woman, who in Indian melodrama routinely embodies an ideal, a focus of sympathy and identification. But Neeta’s lack of all comprehensible human emotion comes off as a disconcerting, unrealistic aberration (or perhaps a “sin,” as she later describes her own failure to protest the wrongs done to her). Choudhury commits so fully, so
Wordlessly, with a deep inhale, she arises from her seat, her gaze still vacant but no longer sweet, and walks out of the apartment. As she descends the stairs, the world of feeling that she has so far kept at bay seems to take hold of her like a spirit. The camera approaches her at a low angle; on the soundtrack, one can hear the lashes of a whip. With each step down, Choudhury’s wide-open eyes turn further upward, while her body convulses, as if experiencing a mild seizure. Finally, frozen in a close-up à la Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s Joan of Arc, she clutches her neck, her face the image of hysteria in arrest. To some, that sudden reversion might seem contrived; Ghatak wrote that he had heard it described as “horribly forced.” But the filmmaker’s genius lay in this calculated dissonance. He invoked the cultural narratives that organize our lives only to make them strange, exposing their fundamental illogic. And in The CloudCapped Star, this method finds its muse in Choudhury. Straining within and against archetype, her performance opens up the chasm between human life and the idols and ideals foisted upon it by society.
unreasonably, to the archetype that she undoes its spell. From one extreme, Choudhury goes to the other. The turning point in The Cloud-Capped Star, initiating Neeta’s devolution, arrives 25
Internal Riot: George Condo Captures a Transcendental Moment Hauser & Wirth // November 05, 2020 - January 23, 2021 featured artist
George Condo George Condo, himself rooted in the Old Masters, but so absolutely current, to convey our state in play. The Fall show season continues with some heavyweight presentations as Hauser & Wirth introduce Internal Riot, a series of new paintings and works on paper by George Condo, showing through January 23, 2021. Debuting with the gallery in this major presentation, this personal favorite also had the honor of inaugurating their new Chelsea space. George Condo is recognised as being one of America’s most influential living artists. In a career spanning more than three decades, Condo’s highly original and distinctive body of work has consistently drawn upon art historical traditions and genres, the portrait particularly, in order to hold a mirror up to contemporary social mores. His work daringly fused the sensibilities of European Old Master painting with references to popular American culture, including Playboy magazine, comics and cartoons. George Condo (b. 1957, Concord, NH) lives and works in New York. His works feature in important public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris. Condo coined the term ‘Artificial Realism’, to describe his approach or, in other words, ‘the realistic representation of that which is artificial’. 26
Following Drawings for Distanced Figures, presented online earlier this spring, the work in this show was entirely made during the quarantine period, “reflecting the unsettling experience of physical distance and the absence of human contact during this prolonged time of social isolation.” Bringing back his most iconic figures, the presentation is divided between large works on canvas and works on paper. The works on paper seem to serve as spontaneous internal rumblings that spring into the larger, elaborate paintings, reflecting work Condo made daily, even as he conveys a new world that operates without the familiar concept of time, without the comfort of that constraint. Noteworthy is that Condo’s figures are now almost exclusively solitary, disconnected from each other, while tangled up in an abstracted mass of expressive gestures and forms, all driven by the very intimate experience to which the artist alluded in a statement about the show: “‘These paintings and drawings explore my experience in isolation and reflect the inner isolation we have all experienced throughout our lives. Internal dialogues while in transit or asleep or in the form of dreams … The virus turned deadly, and its attack amplified the flaws in humanity, the ruthless denigration of people simply for what they look like and where they came from. The protests were justified. I protested with my paintings”
I unite every form and color and harmonize it to the point where it sings like a choir. I’d love to see the world do that.” — Sasha Bogojev 27
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As in previous works, Condo’s ‘Distanced Figures’ synthesize pictorial languages and motifs to create what he describes as ‘composites of various psychological states’. The themes in the drawings not only respond to our current situation and the absence of human contact, they are a continuation of the recurrent themes in the artist’s work. The figures in this new series of works often appear in pairs, linked by intersecting lines, yet their viewpoints do not connect. For Condo, the condition of isolation also carries positive connotations of seclusion in the studio space. Made during the last three weeks, in the artist’s home studio in New York state, these portrait drawings are evocative of the experience of isolation during this unsettling period of social distance. Depicted in crayon, pencil and ink, overlapping figures are layered, combining multiple viewpoints to reflect different emotions occurring simultaneously; fear, paranoia, claustrophobia, panic and distress are portrayed in this particular group of drawings but handled with such beauty, elegance and resolve as to provide an antidote. Not that he is keeping track of time. “The month of May soon turned into August, which then turned into November, ” Condo says to
the Guardian from his studio later that day. “2020 is just the framing of the time lapse.” It’s all a blur, much like his messy paintings, which are now on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York City. Internal Riot, opening this week, features 18 paintings and drawings, ranging from nightmarish splashes of insanity, to portraits of Virginia Woolf, Bugs Bunny and the rapper Travis Scott. How Times Square became an unlikely hub for resistance art Read more There are also a series of chaotic landscapes, depicting the artist’s own inner storm, which easily mirrors our own anxious moment. The show digs into self-isolation, madness and the divided disarray that America is today. “The ‘divisive inequality of America’ is how I would describe it,” Condo corrects me. “It was always there, but now change can’t just be an idea or a slogan – it has to get real and fulfill the ideals it supposedly stands for.” It ties into his trademark abstracted portraits, calling to mind Pablo Picasso’s cubism, but updated with an expressionistic, pop art flair, painted with a bold Disneyland palette, where outer conflict meets inner struggle. Condo calls this style of painting “artificial realism” or “psychological cubism”. He describes it as tracing the thoughts of each character, capturing their overlaying .
The artist, who worked with Warhol, befriended Basquiat and painted for Kanye, talks about making art during a tumultuous year and why he left New York City
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Cao Fei’s ‘Blueprints’ Finds Freedom In Fantasy Cao Fei’s ‘Blueprints’ begins in a room decorated to look like a mid-20th century foyer in China: the kind you can still only find in the increasingly few hotels and restaurants in this fast-changing country that have yet to feel the pressures of upscale modernisation. A receptionist greets you from behind a dark wooden standing desk, behind which hangs a poster with gold characters set against red velvet. Antiquated wooden chairs are dotted around the room and various Maoist memorabilia – a mini calendar from 1958 featuring Mao and Khrushchev celebrating the Sino-Soviet union; electronics manuals from the sixties – are arranged in glass cases. The room, the introductory brochure explains, is Cao’s tribute to Beijing’s Hongxia theatre, a former cinema designed for local factory workers that currently serves as her studio space, itself set to be demolished and replaced by a set of skyscrapers. The only incongruous element in the room is an installation that looks like a modern-day 30
ATM machine in the bottom-left corner, on the screen of which a documentary video about the lives of Hongxia’s former factory workers plays on a loop. Men and women describe their lives in the ‘50s and ‘60s during the height of friendly relations between China and the Soviet Union (which disintegrated by the latter end of the ‘60s) and the rigid orderliness of their days: one woman remembers a “collective breastfeeding hour” at the factory, while a man reflects on the sweeping ambition of the Soviet-style design ascendant at the time, which saw architects design factories and homes on criteria as particular as the ideal ratio of hairdressers to residents. He is sceptical: “men are not gods”. Cao was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, a southern city home to many of the first post-Mao liberal economic reforms that opened up China’s economy to the world. Since then, the dominant narrative of China has been one of aggressive, triumphant growth: after markets opened to globalisation, the
people got jobs and got rich, and now the country is shooting into the future. Cao’s work not only looks at the costs of such progress but questions its basic premise. If Cao’s recreation of the old Hongxia theatre grounds the viewer in a specific time and place – helped along by historical testimony from workers who lived through it – the rest of ‘Blueprints’ lifts you into a vortex, featuring futuristic films that explore themes often associated with the artist: the alienation of modern city life; the dehumanising effects of automation, and the teetering possibility of civilisational collapse. Walk into the room ahead and there’s Nova (2019), a hallucinatory timetravelling love story that takes place in the electronics factory that once adjoined the original theatre. The future is here and dead in La Town (2014), in which an unseen French couple in 2046 look back on the bloodstained remnants of a civilisation, much like our own, dotted with run-down McDonalds and gas stations; Asia One (2018) is set in an Amazon-like mail
by Rebecca Liu She is a staff writer at Juxtapoz.
Cao’s films have often been read as a critical commentary on the costs of modernisation within China, yet globalisation has meant that what is born in one country is never a single country’s problem. Whose Utopia (2006), a three-part film Cao made during a sixmonth residency at a south China light bulb factory, begins with montages of an assembly line at work: glass bulbs clinking on conveyor belts; rows of men and women painstakingly bending electronic wires together. The bulbs assembled in this factory will go far beyond the borders of the country. They might arrive in homes across America or be sold at higher prices in shops across Europe, and their tungsten metal filaments may well have been mined in Rwanda. The alienation Cao explores is nota phenomenon limited to China – she speaks to the particularities of her time and her region while tapping into a global mood of nervous energy. Past, present and future bleed together, leaving – for all the talk
The alienation Cao explores is not a phenomenon limited to China – she speaks to the particularities of her time and her region while tapping into a global mood of nervous energy. Past, present and future bleed together, leaving – for all the talk about alienation and depersonalisation that often attends her work – When watching Cao’s films it’s easy to evoke Fredric Jameson’s (in)famous statement that the contemporary subject is stuck “in a perpetual present”, incapable of willing themselves into a new future and condemned to revisit the past through shallow aesthetic iconography. In Asia One (2018) there’s a brief interlude in which a dance troupe runs amok around the warehouse, mimicking Maoist revolutionary ballet styles and using conveyor belts and mail sorting bags as props. In Nova (2019), a young man becomes lost in something like a cyberspace purgatory, shuttling between future, present and past. 20-something with DJ equipment. 31
“Gindin Mangoro: Under the Mango Tree”: Collins Obijiaku @ ADA Contemporary, Ghana Something to celebrate in 2020 would be the stunning spotlight on contemporary African artists opening shows around the world. Back in 2008, Juxtapoz traveled to South Africa to document the continent’s first contemporary art fair in Johannesburg, and what we found was a mixture of highly conceptual, sculptural work, but not a plethora of figurative paintings. Wow, what a difference a younger generation makes! The incredible talent in representational painters from contemporary Africa has captivated an audience, and as the body itself continues to be explored in the coming years, as both a subject and political statement, Africa is fast-becoming the influential pulse. One artist who continues to blow our minds with intimate intensity and stunning textural tones is Nigerianbased Collins Obijiaku. This month, Collins solo show, Gindin Mangoro: Under the Mango Tree, was the inaugural show at the new ADA/ Contemporary Art Gallery in Accra, Ghana, which focuses on the African diaspora and its artists. Collins himself was born in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria, described by the gallery as someone who” has spent the last twenty years living
in Suleja, a small town famous for its proximity to Abuja (the Nigerian Federal capital) and widely recognised as a town with a great pottery tradition.” After showing in various group shows and this
summer at well-curated auctions , it’s a breath of fresh air to see the widespanning portrait work of the young artist. ADA notes that Collins’s style honed his unique style without a formal art
but by nurturing his natural-born talents as a draughtsman. Gindin Mangoro: Under the Mango Tree demonstrates a beautiful use of color and figurative power. One of the characteristics that initially attracted me to Collins’ paintings, a quiet work redolent with a glorious use of browns, golds and earth tones is once again shown in this solo presentation. Collins is able to capture movement within skin tones, the strokes fluid, yet balanced with bright bursts of blues and greens, and in some instances, using pink like an artist capturing its essence. Perhaps that is what makes Collins Obijiaku’s emergence feel so exciting. Like Accra, Ghana-born Amoako Boafo, his deft use of special detail makes the next few years of contemporary art more global, beneath a sky that is the limit for the young Collins. “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive.To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist.I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive”— James Baldwin
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In Memory of Fernando Solanas Born in Buenos Aires in 1936, Fernando Solanas was an Argentinian film and theater director, musician, actor and politician. He co-founded the Cine Liberación group, and made his directorial debut with The Hour of the Furnaces, which was shot clandestinely between 1966 and 1968 and banned in Argentina until 1998. The film played in competition in Locarno in 1968 and returned in 1987 as part of the Festival’s 40th anniversary Retrospective. A year later, in 1988, Solanas’ filmmaking was once again part of the Locarno program thanks to Sur, the first (and so far only) Argentinian film to win the Best Director award in Cannes.Solanas passed away in Paris on November 6, 2020.
The Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro pays tribute to Argentinian filmmaker Fernando Solanas Fernando Solanas transformed modern cinema, and the way we perceive it. His project was a third cinema, far removed from Hollywood and so-called European auteur filmmaking (which he continued to view as “American”). With his films, Solanas was at the core of a time period when political polarization was equal only to the creative impetus that allowed cinema to explore previously undiscovered territories. As the years went by, his extraordinary contribution may have faded a little in the memories of cinephiles who preferred other emotions and cinematic languages. And yet, when faced with the latest loss in the film world, Solanas’ stature unveils itself yet again in all its singularity.A key player in decolonization filmmaking, he was one of the auteurs who most prominently birthed the idea of a “new cinema”. Today it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the urgency of the debates stemming from films that were made at a specific point in time, when Latin America was oppressed by ruthless dictatorships.
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TRIBUTE
“Making a film was crucial for “Pino”: the way one makes a film reflects their way of being in the world and, inevitably, the way one is in the world shows itself in the stitches of editing, the camera angles and the question of gaze
Films like The Hour of the Furnaces, with a running time exceeding four hours, were veritable manuals on how to decolonize one’s gaze, for the sake of a new, liberated filmmaking practice. If one’s memory goes back to some of his subsequent films, such as 1998’s The Cloud, we understand how Solanas preferred approach was always an excess of generosity rather than calculation. It would be easy to celebrate Pino today by reminiscing about his masterpieces. Instead, a poet’s voice is sometimes hidden in their most controversial creations, which are perhaps the most heartfelt and blunt ones. In those works the conflict between heart and mind is more visible, and thus more vital. It is undeniable that the Solanas of the 1960s and ‘70s is different from the filmmaker who achieved great success in the mid-80s with Tangos, the Exile of Gardel, igniting a newfound interest in the music of Astor Piazzolla. And yet it is still the same man who opposed corruption and violence, who was shot in the legs by the goons of power and who kept pursuing his own, unmistakable
vision. To get an idea of said vision, we can simply evoke the conversation with Jean-Luc Godard that appeared in Cine del tercer mundo in October 1969. Much like fellow cinematic poet Theo Angelopoulos, Solanas was an integral part of the world he recounted through images. He tried to make sense of it. Sometimes he was criticized for excessive use of symbolism and allegory. And yet it was a magnificent spectacle, when he went head to head with what he perceived as the flaws of his time. Solanas’ films were not “political” as a result of ideological or party allegiance. They were political through their ability of turning the debate and friction between history and the positioning of the camera into a linguistic fact. This was the fundamental lesson “Pino” taught us. And perhaps it is time, once again, to go back to those teachings.
— Giona A. Nazzaro
Rachel Portesi’s Beautiful Wet Plate Collodion Hair Portraits BY KITTY GRADY
Brattleboro Museum // October 24, 2020 February 14, 2021
Since the beginning of human history, hair has held cultural and symbolic meaning. It is a marker of ethnicity, social class, identity, gender, sexuality, age, sickness, and health. Women’s hair especially is woven into mythology, religion, politics, culture, and art. Rachel Portesi makes hair portraits utilizing the early photographic method of tintype. She works collaboratively with her models to create intricate—one might say baroque— hair styles. Pinned to walls or other scaffolding, the extravagant hair designs are often embellished with flowers, becoming living sculptures rooted in the human body. Hair is often referred to as a woman’s “crowning glory.” Portesi’s “crowns” befit Ceres/Demeter, goddess of growing plants and motherly relationships; and Diana/ Artemis, goddess of the hunt, wild animals, and the moon. In the throes of a personal crisis over the dawn of her fifties, with her kids fast growing up, the photographer Rachel Portesi started thinking about hair. While carrying out an artist residency in her home state of Vermont, where she was learning the early photographic technique of tintype photography, she was simultaneously working out how she could confront this transitional phase of her life in her work. “I felt older and fat,” she tells me over Zoom from her studio. “I was trying to figure out whether I was still a sexual being or a tstrong woman. But in some ways I still felt 36
After playing around capturing pieces of her hair on film, the project blossomed – or grew – into more elaborate experiments with hair, nature and photography. The result is Hair Portraits, an exhibition of 17 tintype photographs and two video works at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont. Each magically metallic, sepia-toned work features an elegantly poised model whose hair has been transformed into a kind of sculpture, seemingly defying gravity with invisible strings, some also enhanced and adorned with flowers and leafy branches gleaned from Portesi’s garden
“I wanted them to be about femininity, sexuality and beauty, but not for the male gaze,” Portesi says. Long hair has traditionally been a signifier of either sexuality or madness and hysteria (see Ophelia’s unkempt tresses, or Medusa’s snaky mane), while short buzzcuts function as a form of flapperish, feminist shorthand. In contrast, Portesi’s hair photographs-cum-sculptures explore the way big hair might provide its own freedom from patriarchal codes. She references the portrait “Daphne” in the series, where, in allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the model’s plaits seemingly grow out into branches: “I love the story – that she would rather be turned into a tree by her father than marry a man she didn’t love.” The portraits recall the recent work of Laetitia Ky, an Ivorian artist who creates sculptures – of lightbulbs, people, plants, teacups – with her dreadlocked hair and Ana Mendieta, the American-Cuban artist whose “facial hair transplant” series sees her playfully gluing moustaches and beards to her face. The artist Louise Bourgeois, who had hip-length hair as a young woman, is explicitly referenced by Portesi in the triptych “Homage to Louise Bourgeois”, which features spidery, Pippi Longstocking-style plaits inspired by the artist’s drawings. “She used all these feminine materials like sewing, thread and hair,” Portesi says of Bourgeois. “She thought a lot about the pain in life and how to take that and make art. I thought of her
as an artist-mother figure.”
“There is an expectation when you get older that you either cut off or dye your hair. I have a friend who says you never see so many grey ponytails as in Vermont,” says Portesi, who throughout our discussion unties and artfully plaits her own long brown (only slightly greying) hair several times. “I want to have a grey ponytail some day.” 37
Slumming It
In the 1970s, New York looked like a city in decline. The Mayor’s Office had been running a deficit since the 1960s, borrowing to balance the budget, but in the spring of 1975, the banks that had kept the city afloat declined to extend further credit, initiating a fiscal crisis. By October 16, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, which President Gerald Ford famously refused to alleviate. The Municipal Assistance Corporation, a committee formed several months earlier to manage the city’s finances, and composed almost exclusively of bankers, pivoted to enforcing austerity. The policy was buttressed in 1978 by the establishment of the Emergency Financial Control Board, which was also concerned with finding market-based solutions to the scarcity of funds.
In the 1970s, New York looked like a city in decline. The Mayor’s Office had been running a deficit since the 1960s, borrowing to balance the budget, but in the spring of 1975, the banks that had kept the city afloat declined to extend further credit, initiating a fiscal crisis. By October 16, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, which President Gerald Ford famously refused to alleviate. The Municipal Assistance Corporation, a committee formed several months earlier to manage the city’s finances, and composed almost exclusively of bankers, pivoted to enforcing austerity. The policy was buttressed in 1978 by the establishment of the Emergency Financial Control Board, which was also concerned with finding market-based solutions to the scarcity of funds.
by Andrew Marzoni
In the 1970s, New York looked like a city in decline. The Mayor’s Office had been running a deficit since the 1960s, borrowing to balance the budget, but in the spring of 1975, the banks that had kept the city afloat declined to extend further credit, initiating a fiscal crisis. By October 16, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, which President Gerald Ford famously refused to alleviate. The Municipal Assistance Corporation, a committee formed several months earlier to manage the city’s finances, and composed almost exclusively of bankers, pivoted to enforcing austerity. The policy was buttressed in 1978 by the establishment of the Emergency Financial Control Board, which was also concerned with finding market-based solutions to the scarcity of funds. 39
Thoughts from number of Paul Fusco’s fellow Magnum photographers
Paul Fusco worked as a photographer with the United States Army Signal Corps in Korea from 1951 to 1953, before studying photojournalism at Ohio University, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1957. He moved to New York City and started his career as a staff photographer with Look, where he remained until 1971. In this role he produced important reportages on social issues in the US, including the plight of destitute miners in Kentucky; Latino ghetto life in New York City; cultural experimentation in California; African-American life in the Mississippi Delta; religious proselytizing in the South; and migrant laborers. He also worked in England, Israel, Egypt, Japan, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, and made an extended study of the Iron Curtain countries, from northern Finland to Iran. In 1968 – on commission for Look – Fusco travelled across the United States on the funeral train of presidential candidate Robert F. 40
Kennedy – following his assassination. Of the assassination Fusco said, “The blow was monumental. Hopeon-the-rise had again been shattered and those in most need of hope crowded the tracks of Bobby’s last
a nation in mourning. Here we share a statement from the president of Magnum Photos, Olivia Arthur, and thoughts from Fusco’s fellow on the occasion of Paul’s death
Magnum Photographers from across the generations remember him for the inspiration his work gave them as well as his generosity within the community. His presence will be missed and his legacy will be remembered.”- Olivia last train stunned into disbelief, and watched that hope trapped in a coffin pass and disappear from their lives.” This work – a series of photos of track-side mourners – became his book RFK Funeral Train – a portrait of
1930 - 2020
Paul Fusco Robert Kennedy funeral train. USA. 1968. ©
SO-LONG PAUL
Paul Fusco Robert Kennedy funeral train. Harmans, MD. USA. 1968. © Paul
There’s no interest in painting an ordinary pretty woman or pretty-looking man. It’s all about the imagination. I look at women as being art. In my paintings, you never see them enacting against the male world, they’re only in communion with other females. George Condo
£ 8.50