Category: Women Artists

America stalled, the dollar and Native American Women


stalled-bonita-oil-on-photographfig. 2: Stalled, Oil paint on photograph
© Peña Bonita,1988

Joan M. Jensen, Professor Emerita, at New Mexico State University has written a fine essay on Native American Women Photographers As Storytellers. It combines about a dozen of my interests but has wider resonance, not least in her choice of the above photograph by Bonita.

She says;

As Native women have added cameras to fiber and clay, they have explored ways to combine a search for personal and public identity. Their work has formed a critique, a different story, that explicitly and implicitly critiques the “vanishing race” genre of romantic photography so popular at the turn of the century and since the 1970s revival of Edward Curtis and other photographers of American Indians. These photographers portray their cultures not as vanishing, but as part of a lively, assertive group of people confident about the importance of their cultures in the past, their importance to the present, and their influence on the future. They sometimes use images identified with Indian cultures, but these images are not used as emblems of a generic unified past. Instead the images carry specific messages or stories about how individual artists interpret family and tribal histories, how they experience the present, or what they project for the future. As women, they may employ signifiers identified with female cultures and tell stories that relate to women’s history, but their photographs may also have messages about gender relations, differences among Indian cultures, or commentary about Indian-Euro-American history. Sometimes there are no Indian signifiers at all except in written messages on the photographs or in captions. These photographers portray Native people with a wide range of physical and attitudinal characteristics. Some works are ironic or humorous, others angry, sophisticated, or reflective.

To read the essay go HERE

Two artists Weathering Art: Roni Horn and Jari Silomaki

roni-horn-large

Roni Horn has a book about her ongoing project in Iceland

Weather Reports You

 

by Roni Horn

Pub: Steidl & Partners.  Available on Amazon

“Everyone has a story about the weather. This may be the single thing each of us holds in common. And though the weather varies greatly from here to there, it is, ultimately, one weather that we share. Small talk everywhere has occasioned the popular distribution of the weather. Some say talking about the weather is talking about oneself. And with each passing day, the weather increasingly becomes ours, if not us. Weather Reports You is one beginning of a collective self-portrait.” Roni Horn

Over the past two years Roni Horn has been working with a small team in the southwest of Iceland gathering personal testimonies from people talking about the weather. These “weather reports” include descriptions, reflections, memories and stories based on experiences of the weather that range from the matter-of-fact to the marvellous. The different nuances and usages of language suggest that the weather is not just a matter of meteorological conditions but is, in Roni Horn’s words, “a metaphor for the physical, metaphysical, political, social and moral energy of a person and a place”.
A wonderful article HERE

Brilliant set of resources including videos HERE

Jari Silomaki

You might be interested to link Roni Horn’s idea with this Finnish photographer Jari Silomaki

 

Some time ago, when I first saw an exhibition of Silomaki’s work I wrote the following;

Powerful resonance in yoking the subjective eye with the global event

An appreciation of the art of Finnish photographer Jari Silomaki

 The Finnish photographer Jari Silomaki writes on the photographs he shows – in the exhibition I saw he wrote in white ink. He writes about the photograph he took and its context in his life and the fact that it was coincidental with some major event. Several of his arresting photographs can be seen HERE: 

jari-silomaki-finlandia-hallSOURCE

 ‘Since 2001 I have taken a landscape photograph every day. I connect these photographs to important personal and world political events…. The starting point of this work was that world events, personal events and weather will repeat themselves and merge into one continuum……. On the other hand, linking landscape and news concretises how we are in contact with world events through the media. Everything is brought up close, which also means that events that are truly nearby are no longer close.’ 

Jari Silomaki, photographer (Finland)

 For me Silomaki, and this idea, is one of the most exciting finds in many years. The linking of the public events and the choice of a landscape brings powerfully together the subjective and the public.   It’s not only about the cataclysmic such as Kennedy’s assassination or the Twin Towers attack but also anything significant on global news.

Concerning the cataclysmic I remember the Twin Towers collapse because my wife and I were in Ikea having taken an American friend. In the case of Kennedy’s assassination I was in a weight-training club above a green-grocer’s shop where the smell of the potatoes and greens from downstairs was (thankfully) just more powerful than the smell of sweat. I didn’t take those two ‘memory-photographs’, but the Ikea one I could still take, because we all remember where we stood as the sense of horror began to fill in the store.  The green-grocer shop I’m sure is no more.

 One of the interesting elements in Silomaki’s great idea is the sense that you get when you realize that he chose ‘this perspective’h, ‘this angle’, ‘this composition’ as the personal – with the global news circulating in that day’s consciousness. The images become impregnated with the facts both personal and public. They create, for me, an oceanic resonances drawn from time and timelessness and place and placelessness, the subjectively personal and the binding knowledge that comes from global news.  Why because we see what the photographer held to be significant in the ravaging consciounes of the event.  We are seeing his world with his eyes.

In seeing the world with his eyes the question is raised as to the relationship between what he frames in the photograph and the frame created by the writing.   Is that a limiting aesthetic?  Is it limiting because we don’t know more about the web of significances in the photographer’s environment.

Women artists: Eva Zeisel – and aesthetics as the playful search for beauty

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Eva Zeisel – a 100-year  life-time’s design rooted in a ‘nature and human relationships’ aesthetic.

“I’m not interested in innovation.” (Eva)

“They are so beautiful – like a symbol of eternity!” (Blog commentator)

Zeisel’s Rockland BowlZeisel’s Rockland Bowl

Her TED presentation;

The ceramics designer Eva Zeisel looks back on a 75-year career. What keeps her work as fresh today (her latest line debuted in 2008) as in 1926? Her sense of play and beauty, and her drive for adventure. Listen for stories from a rich, colorful life.

Eva’s  story is indeed as interesting as her work – for more see HERE

There is a documentary about her (2002) HERE

Amazon have several books about Eva, and vases etc designed by her,  HERE

Courtesy of TED

Photo and comments source Metropolismag Mason Currey

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Some questions to include in a school, college or university project on 

Women artists: Eva Zeisel – and aesthetics as the playful search for beauty

Is Eva a designer, an artist or both.

She seems to a) have created beauty and b) been commercially successful against great odds AND impervious to the ‘art-mafia’ that run the fine art world.’  Discuss.

Google Robert Hughes and ‘The Mona Lisa Curse’ – what relevance do you see between the Hughes analysis and the achievement of Eva Zeisel?

Should schools, colleges and universities make a greater effort to find people like Eva who seem to connect to that which is eternal, beyond fashions?

 

Thoughts on art No. 1: The Turner Prize, The Stuckists and what do we want from artists.

“Art is worth the consciousness that it raises.”

The Turner prize stinks say the Stuckists.  

The Turner prize is great say others.

What do they, and we, want from our artists and their art?

‘Thoughts on art No. 1’ – in a nutshell:  

Just what do we expect from an artist?  What do we have the right to expect?  Are we asking too much?  

In a world of increasing billions of communications isn’t an artist that informs you just a little bit more about

a) being human,

b) his/her being human

c)  or being human in the world with others worth his/her salt?

This is another way of saying that art is worth the consciousness that it raises.

For example two artists help me experience space differently and think about it differently are  Rachel Whiteread and Antony Gormley

 

'Ghost by Rachel Whiteread. The presence of a room without the room, a memory that fills a space such a room occupied.
'Ghost by Rachel Whiteread. The presence of a room without the room, a memory that fills a space such a room occupied. WikiPedia

 

 

Space, (ghosts of) people in space and the inner space of people.
Antony Gormley's 'Domain Field' Space, (ghosts of) people in space and the inner space of people - and memory.

 SOURCE

 

Of course the two artists I chose are somewhere between very good and great.  But even if they were students showing just single pieces of their work it wouldn’t make any difference.

The gain was in and  around –  ‘space – being human – memory’ – i.e. a deepening and widening of consciousness. 

Whiteread and Gormley –  are both important to me for reasons other than  ‘space – being human – memory‘ but just for extending, deeping, enjoying the resonances of that area, “Thanks – many, many thanks –  I’m so glad I came across you.”


“From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die,” a great site on art and spirituality

A great site – I recommend this very rich essay by Susan Ressler – ‘It’s all about the apple – or is it ? HERE

My own reading of the Adam and Eve creation myth is that it is an allegory concerning a developmental stage in human development – the stage at which consciousness as we now understand it came about.

The linking of women with inferiority, uncleanness and the guilt for human corruptibility is the crime against women for which men have paid and are paying – as well as the terrible cost borne by women and children. My belief is that human maturity, and therefore justice and development, will come about proportionate to the balanced development of feminine and masculine spirits in men and women together. Equality for women is part of this and a step on the way.

I have written more about my reading of Adam and Eve HERE

In her introduction Ressler says;

“Spirituality” and “religion” are not synonymous terms, yet for many of us, our spirituality derives from what we call “organized religion”: a set of institutionalized beliefs and practices based on sacred texts such as the Bible or Koran, and imbued in the teachings of spiritual leaders such as Christ, Mohammed or Confucius. Moreover, one could say that Western culture (meaning that of Europe and the Americas) has inherited its cultural ethos from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, which still has a pervasive influence on all aspects of Western society. Therefore, this essay begins with the “Apple” or, more precisely, how women artists of the American west have chosen to re-present the central creation myth of Western culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition: the story of Adam and Eve.

Notwithstanding the problematics of women artists and their gendered relationship to the position of Eve in this story, “From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die,” (Ecclesiasticus 25:24), there is no single viewpoint expressed by the women who reconfigure this iconography today. In Maxine Olson’s It’s All About the Apple (figure 1), Eve and a somewhat disgruntled-looking Virgin Mary appear to be mesmerized by a seductive Venus, flanked by gaping orchids and an Egyptian figure who appears as contented as a cat. Meanwhile, a young putti-like child has momentarily shifted his attention to Eve from the can of S&W apple-sauce he holds in his hand, reminding us that Eve is the central player in this modern parable.

Kathleen Campbell’s Eve, in Ominous Prophecy III (figure 3), depicts a different narrative. Campbell intends the gesture of this dark-skinned Eve, who holds the apple in her left hand while extending her right hand, to echo that of the snake from Michelangelo’s The Fall of Man. Campbell says, “Here I use the traditional spiritual iconography of Western Civilization as a metaphor for the bleak prospects which await humankind if we continue in a course seemingly headed for destruction.”

In “It’s All About the Apple, Or is it?,” Eve’s story becomes a departure point for exploring multiple perspectives on contemporary spirituality which include, but are not limited to, the Judeo-Christian tradition. The essay is wrapped around the artworks of nearly two-dozen women who come from a variety of traditions: Christian, Jewish, Native-American, Asian, Earth-based and Eco-Feminist, to name a few. As if to counter Kathleen Campbell’s dire prophecy, the essay concludes with artists who ply their spirituality with political activism. And the final artist in this essay, Karen Carson, whose Sandwich (figure 2) bespeaks yet another “take” on “Birth” and “Death,” shows us that, in a profound sense, we become what we consume, as we participate in these processes.

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A great site HERE connected to another great site (go to bottom of page) connected to another great site ‘The Women in Photography Archive’ – and a whole lot more (but finding your way around is a bit of a problem)

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE