I Call It Art

Coco Fusco

Fusco is a Cuban American performance artist whose work explores and challenges ideas on gender, race, and borders.  One of her performances was included in this year's Whitney Biennial.  You can read more about her work on her website, but I'd like to highlight two projects in particular that deal with death and gender:

Better Yet When Dead

I thought of Ana Mendieta; I thought of Frida Kahlo and the way in which she sort of dies on canvas--there was this form of performance... I started to think about these processes of idealization that are very much a part of Latin Catholic Culture, where women get shafted in reality and then deified at the moment of their death. I thought that one of the things that is kind of bizarre about this, in this particular moment in history, is that death becomes a kind of opportunity to really commodify to an incredible degree the images of these women. So I think about Evita Peron and the business that's been generated by her corpse traveling around the world for 40 years; the difference between Ana Mendieta in life and in death; what happened to Frida Kahlo who got one solo show in her entire life in Mexico and now is the best-selling artist from her country. (via MOMA)

The Incredible Disappearing Woman

So in the piece different possible scenarios emerge in the storytelling. The date rape drug, catalepsy was another version I did some research about, -- you know, people being buried alive because they looked dead and then they wake up. So one thing was to do the almost hardcore journalism, you know, asking, who could this have happened to , but another thing to think about was what would it be like to be alive when everyone thinks you are dead, to be just an object, not to be seen, not to be recognised, not to be present for people. In that sense, thinking about it in a more metaphorical way, gave me a way to tell the story. (via 3am)

Fusco's performances intentionally create a sense of complicity in the viewer.  So reading about these performances seems beside the point but, at the very least, the interviews and talks that I've linked to contextualize Fusco's works in interesting and provocative ways. 

Fusco's "Buried Pig with Moros" will be showing from April 3 to May 2 at The Project. 

Alex Colville

If you've seen Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat, you may recall a scene (scroll down for images) in which the character Neil McCauley, played by Robert de Niro, is standing at a window with his gun resting on a table behind him.  The entire scene is bathed in deep blue light.  I remember this moment from the movie and learned recently that this shot was inspired (most likely) by Alex Colville's 1967 painting "Pacific" (click here for a higher res image).

Colville was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1920 and studied fine arts in college.  During World War II, he served as a war painter for the Canadian army and was sent to Europe.  In 1945, he was among three Canadian artists who entered the newly liberated Bergen Belsen camp.  "Bodies in a Grave" was one of the works that came out of that experience.  The website for the Canadian War Museum contains a few more images from this period of Colville's work.  When I think of a "war painter," particularly a painter-soldier, I think of someone who is like a journalist but working in images (admittedly, though, I don't know a great deal about the subject).  Colville himself describes the work of this period as "reportorial."  But a painting like "Bodies in a Grave" doesn't really report, in a journalistic sense of the word, the scale of death and disease that Allied soldiers encountered in Bergen Belsen.  It feels very personal and very partial, like a remnant. 

For more on Colville, I recommend his page on Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's website.

Frank

In his article "Honk if you see high art," Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post argues that a mural for a auto service shop is "Picassoid":

Finding an accidental work of modern art in our own urban scene may be no stranger than spotting some Constable-like beauty in the untouched English countryside. The fact that the trees don't know they're artful doesn't make them seem any less artistically arranged. (my link)

"Trees Don't Know They're Artful" should have been the title of this post.

The actual title for this post comes from The Kills version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Chanson de Slogan."

Comments

[Tracie]

Coco Fusco's name keeps coming up in stuff I've been reading...her work is so interesting, and i love that she's also a writer. It's refreshing to read critical work written from an artist's perspective. she's got an essay in Talking Visions. I kinda wish that book came in little booklet form, it's this ridiculous tome that you can't really take anywhere.

oh yea and here's the two shows that we were talking about yesterday!
WACK!
Sackler Center for Feminist Art