by Jean Marie Carey | 20 Oct 2017 | Art History, Re-Enactments© and MashUps
During 2013 when I lived in München Gillian Wearing had a mid-career retrospective at Museum Brandhorst and a poster of the image you see here, “Self Portrait at Seventeen Years Old” (2003) was on placards all over the city as well as a huge replica on the side of the museum.
Gillian Wearing, “Self Portrait at Seventeen Years Old,” 2003; Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, 1928.
The capstone nature of the show at least intimated that Wearing was moving on to subjects other than herself and I remember thinking that perhaps at last we had reached “peak self portrait.” This proved not to be the case specifically or generally.
I decided to review the catalogue of this exhibition in the hopes of re-examining Wearing and also setting the record correct about one of my favorite photographers, Claude Cahun. I feared when Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask was announced at the National Portrait Gallery in London that is would offer yet another opportunity for female erasure, which is what happened in reviews such as this one from Aindrea Emelife of the BBC shrieking: “Claude Cahun: The Trans Artists Years Ahead of Her Time.”
In fact Cahun was a woman, a lesbian woman, who was perfectly comfortable with her biological sex. She was sentenced to death during her time on Nazi-occupied Jersey for refusing to renounce her lifetime lover, Marcel Moore, so it seems especially egregious to suggest Cahun wavered in her “identity.”
One of the most distinctive aspects of Cahun’s auto-portraits is that her strong features are never obscured, she is always recognisably herself, no matter what the costume or haircut. This is something Wearing, in her response to Cahun’s oeuvre, seems also to diminish, as the series made for this exhibition find Wearing immersed in full disguises as Cahun, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dian Arbus, and others.
Claude Cahun, “Untitled (I Am in Training, Don’t Kiss Me,” 1929; Gillian Wearing, “Self Portrait as Claude Cahun,” 2015.
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by Jean Marie Carey | 8 Jun 2017 | Art History
For the first installment of documenta diaries…here is George Baker’s “The Globalization of the False: A Response to Okwui Enwezor” (2004). Much of the work seen thus far at the German quinquennial, having liberated itself from theory and history, is therefore very literal, in a Thelma-Golden’s-1993-Whitney-Biennal way. There is more going on at documenta, of course, than granular personal narrative…but the emphasis is definitely on identity and by extension individuality. (more…)
by Jean Marie Carey | 2 Dec 2013 | Art History
Lorna Simpson @ Haus der Kunst
One of the aspects of Lorna Simpson’s work I have always admired is the technical quality of her photographs. At her recent press conference at Haus der Kunst she confirmed what you’d expect from examining the gelatin prints in particular but really, upon close in-person inspection, her oeuvre: that Simpson develops, prints, mounts and even frames most of her photos by herself in a darkroom/studio in New York City.
This sort of mid-career retrospective represents more than 30 years of of photography, film, video, and drawing. Known (as in these photos have entered the canon) for her mid-1980s for her language driven large-scale works combining photographs and text, Simpson’s effective enigmas are clearly coded but spacious enough to still wonder about. One of the most interesting works on view in München are a series from the 1990s of large multi-panel photographs printed on felt, accompanied by text panels describing their locations and the intimate encounters that are described but only hinted at visually. At the edge of the Englischer Garten where something exactly as described is probably happening right now only not as well concealed, the effect was actually humane and tender as opposed to amusing. The exhibit, which unfortunately overlaps with some other very strong show and with Haus der Kunst’s interactive festival also showcases Simpson’s film and video works, a group of watercolors, and an archive of found photographs from the 1950s, which Simpson has embellished by creating replicas of, posing herself to mimic the originals.
by Jean Marie Carey | 24 Apr 2013 | Art History, Music, Re-Enactments© and MashUps
The opening for Rebecca Warren’s installation at Kunstverein München on 19 April 2013 was dramatically heightened by a rain so steady and soft it enveloped more like fog. To be clear it’s just me who is describing Warren’s experiment in biomorphic austerity as an installation; you can read more about the British artist’s commission for the Kunstverein here if you do not mind the maddening floating text. One of the good things about the script for this exhibit is actually that it does not try to overexplain the sculptor’s intentions, a la the surfeit of “instructions” that seem to come with other conceptual sculptural works such as those by Teresita Fernández.
The main space is occupied by a columnar arrangement of tall cast bronze totems, embellished with female-ish parts, regularly spaced but not wholly viewable at a take. To me this suggested a course of weave poles like those on agility courses for dogs, so that was my “phenomenological” approach. The objects above were set above and in an alcove; overall, especially at night, an effective use of the placement of the Kunstverein building’s windows.
All vastly oversimplified, of course.
An “afterparty” in the foyer featured a fantastic set by Berlin-based turntable-techno-transformative-sounds collective M.E.S.H. that almost enticed some reactive dancing.
