tina mion the elk <2007>
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A Space That Breathes: Inside the Atelier Of Leiko Ikemura
Leiko Ikemura creates worlds where the visible and the invisible intertwine. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, she shapes environments inhabited by mythical beings that blend human and animal features. These hybrid creatures manifest themselves in her studio across mediums—ceramics, glass sculptures, drawings, and text. On her canvas, they dissolve into images of landscapes and natural sceneries. During the first days of spring, Ignant had the pleasure of visiting Ikemura in the place where she brings her creations to life.
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ONE ENCHANTED SURFACE
I had understood that a drawing lived on the surface while a painting conjured greater depths. The Jack Whitten retrospective The Messenger at MoMA calls this into question. The canvases here are elaborate, elegant, exquisitely-crafted surfaces that hold all meanings within the depth of the paint. This substance is scraped, clotted, spotted, sprayed, smeared, disrupted, healed. And the paintings refuse pictorialism; they don’t refer to anything outside of themselves. The paint is all there is.
The museum carefully positions Whitten as an Afro-American artist. Wall texts note his southern heritage, involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, love of jazz, and use of an “Afro-comb” to make marks. It also asserts his place within Abstract Expressionism, predictably under-recognized. His paintings from the 1960’s, large canvases in which he laid strata of acrylic paint across the canvas with a rake-like instrument called a “developer,” have a haunted barely-there quality that prefigures Gerhard Richter’s Abstracts from the 1990’s. But while Gerhard’s paintings feel conceptual, like the residue of a process, Whitten’s feel originary, making a new geography.
They remind me of Robert Ryman’s canvases, which take the application of paint on canvas as their subject, only executed at a monumental scale. What figures that emerge are forms of paint. The developer’s tines squeeze acrylic into narrow streams. Ridges form, millimeters high, around staples, threads, coat hangers, and other objects fastened on and below the canvas. Criss-crossing motions leave a fine grid. Spills, smears, or marks across them complicate rhythms.
There are, in the large galleries on MoMA’s sixth floor, some of Whitten’s sculptures also. Inspired by summers in Crete, they combine rustic materials and found objects in stately, almost classical, compositions. But the paintings command the space. Each makes an enchanted, engrossing surface. Tissue-like, they tremble with life.
Photo courtesy of the Estate of Jack Whitten and MoMA.
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Four paintings by Albert York
1. Flying Figure in Landscape, c. 1968
2. Cow, c. 1972
3. Landscape with Two Pink Carnations in a Glass Goblet, c. 1983
4. Landscape with Two Indians, c. 1978
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Serpent enroulé autour d'une branche avec un motif complexe
Reptiles #serpent #branche #motif #SimenJohan #art #nature #photographie #figuration #infini #beauté
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Néron accroc des médias
Macron c'est le télévangéliste qui joue l'illusionniste pour se maintenir au pouvoir quoi qu'il en coûte !
Temps de lecture = 1 minute
La France est devenue un grand cirque à ciel ouvert où le citoyen est relégué à faire de la figuration.
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Things I’ve seen called the figure of figuration:
- language
- clothing
- the Sun
- anthimeria or personification or prosopopoeia
- the (cinematic?) face (Michael Taussig)
- the spectre
- ellipsis (Werner Hamacher)
- the chora
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FIGURING IT OUT
To be different in America is to be both conspicuous and invisible. One calls attention to oneself while remaining unapparent. This season’s exhibit at the Guggenheim, Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility, explores this space, focusing on depictions of Black Americans. Walking through is unnerving. The artworks question the legitimacy of the observer. And the sloping ground of the building undoes the physical stability of the viewer.
Depicting absence, erasures, removals, hidings and camouflages, these artworks also show the body resisting observation and, in resistance, becoming more present. In Rebecca Belmore’s sculpture Mixed Blessing (2008) a hooded and gloved adult figure, draped in black feathers, without hips or legs, leans forward, armed outstretched, at the viewer’s feet. Their charisma is arresting; one can’t look away. Is this person performing a ceremonial obeisance or begging for their life to be spared?
The exhibit also gets at the reluctance towards figuration in much of contemporary art, which is something altogether different from abstraction. Why are there no more portraits, no more characterful faces? It’s as if, in an age after photography, the face carries no meaning. This show highlights a generation of artists who grew up with Photoshop. At least three works incorporate the graphic conventions of that software, employing checkered transparency screens and acid blue or green backdrops, exposing artifice.
The Guggenheim’s ramp, especially after dark, is a great Manhattan promenade. The walk up or down, inside a crowd, is sophisticated and assured. But each time I turned away from one of the artworks I lurched. Looking back to the rotunda and its sloping lines of ramp, rail, ceiling and floor undid me a bit, caused physical unease.
On the rainy evening I visited the difficult subject matter didn’t seem to bother the mostly-tourist crowd, who took selfies with works without considering, or perhaps even knowing, the history of reconstruction, lynching, the Black Panthers or Tayvon Martin, all icons explored here. The gift shop, similarly guileless, was selling branded black hoodies. I wanted to turn to the crowd and ask, Did you see the same show I saw? And are you too thinking about what freedoms the body – that is, your body – enjoys to dress, walk, rest, to be safe in a place? Anyone who comes and looks carefully will find this exhibit hard to shake off. It shows that looking is not innocent, and casts doubt on whether we can ever see others for who they really are.
Rebecca Belmore, Mixed Blessing, 2011. Cotton jacket, synthetic hair, beads, Hyrdocal. Collection Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. Copyright Rebecca Belmore.
