Who are some of the role models in NYC? One giant on the art scene is Kara Walker, Professor at the School of the Arts, Columbia University. Using silhouette images, she depicts tribal warfare in the Antebellum South in United States History. Other example of places with tribal warfare were or are Ireland, Kosovo, Darfur, Kenia.
HORROR! Tribal warfare
Another giant is Jacob Collins, founder of the Grand Central Academy of Art: ‘Combining a technique reminiscent of the nineteenth-century American realists with a freshness of vision scarcely encountered among today’s traditional painters, Collins’ works form that rarest of unions where classic beauty and striking originality meet as harmonious equals’.
BACK TO BEAUTY? – Classical Anatomy
Two examples of art, one expressing the dynamic, the other one, the static. There are questions that come to mind.
Depicting tribal warfare in the context of the Antebellum South has been a successful venture for more than a decade. Will the terrific dynamic energy still be expressed as paper silhouettes portraying tribal warfare in decades to come, perhaps involving other ethnic groups?
Isn’t a hunched over thinking person a cliche? Will the human anatomy further be expressed as static form or will it evolve to express what anatomists and trainers are now thinking about – functional movement, mindful movement?
Birgit,
Who’s the cover girl and who’s the artist? I can’t possibly respond until I have this vital question answered –snort–
June,
It is a picture that Nina, my daughter, painted many years ago in an art class at college. I don’t know whom it represents.
The painting faces me when I wake up in the morning, wondering where I will go.
The painting also reminds me of you because of your love of symmetry.
Birgit,
I was wondering if the child was a self-portrait done by yourself.
As to your ruminations — I am thinking that Kara Walker’s distancing, in that horrifying way, of the warfare between whites and blacks is of a piece with the possible candidacy of a black American male for the president of the U.S. Both refuse typologies; both are startling; both, I’m thinking, could be liberating.
However, “tribal” warfare seems to carry a kind of rough equality between the warring tribes. I’m not sure that was the case for African Americans in the US. Is the phrase yours or Kara Walker’s?
I am going to have to check out the Grand Central Academy of Art — I’m not familiar with it. I wonder, given our familiarity and delight in the rough and erratic in visual arts, if it’s possible to revel in the sheer static stability that such classical work depicts.
I recently read about John Currin’s latest painting project. Currin is the figurative painter who seemed (seems?) to be following the classic processes and traditions of oils. But his latest images are of pornography. They aren’t satiric or commentaries on it; they are simply and wholly copied from porn magazines. Currin refers to them, almost ruefully, as porn, and in fact, he tells the interviewer that he isn’t sure what draws him to it nor why he keeps with it. (This too makes me think of current US events…..)
Perhaps that’s the direction (“functional,” “mindful movement”), that “classical” art processes will have to go?
I am teasing a bit; I do enjoy the fully established, totally silent restful forms that you have shown us, the forms that I can read without thought. But I’m not sure how long I would actually “look” at them.
Collins is amazingly skilled, but somehow after the first gasp I start to see them as slightly creepy. I want to pore over them to admire the technique, but then I’m not sure I’d want to go back. It seems an odd reaction, I wonder how I’d feel in front of the original art.
Steve,
I share you reaction. My first reaction was Dignity, Wisdom, Beauty, but then I had second thoughts. I, too, wonder how I’d feel in front of the original.
June,
To my mind, tribal warfare is like a see-saw: Yesterday, the Kikuyu dominated a village, today, the Luo are killing them. Having carried as a burden a different ethnic injustice, the holocaust, committed by my ancestors because of my accidental birth in Germany, and having processed it, and looking at the pain all across the world, I feel less inclined not to demand the taking of responsibility for one’s life without taking atrocities in the past or even present as excuses not to do so.
Yesterday, the Detroit Mayor who was asked to resign because he lied under oath about his relationship with his staffer blamed racial media for his problems by proclaiming “this unethical, illegal lynch mob mentality has to stop.” Is Kwame Kilpatrick less accountable than Spitzer because of history? Should I think that there is a difference between the Caucasian and African American Scientists who provided me with fake data because of history?
Jay,
I appreciate your comment of a post. What came to mind is:
As the lama, the Holy One says to his chela, Friend of all the World:
‘Having found the Way that shall free me from the Wheel, need I trouble to find a way about the mere fields of the earth-which are Illusion?’
Birgit,
The Holocaust and the US white enslavement of blacks — both haunt my nightmares. In the “mere fields of earth” the least they accomplish is keep me from being flip and easy about my own virtue.
Flip-flop, indeed — I have always wondered who I would have been had I been an adult female German of “Aryan” descent in 1941. Some of my friends know for certain what they would have done but I feel within me the capability for willed blindness that is wholly frightening.Nothing anyone can say convinces me of my innate virtue — I hope I never have to test myself, but that’s the only way I’ll find out if I have the strength to overcome timidity, convention, willed blindness, and so forth.
It’s comforting to think of the “way about” as a way through the “mere fields of our illusions.” But alas, I seem to be tied to them, regardless. It’s a little like “never to scale.” Regardless of how I try, I’m a creature of the Holocene and am jingoistically willing to fight off impending climate change. Even though that fight may be a foolish illusion of control, I have a responsibility to keep trying. So it is with considering the horrors humans inflict on one another — I have to keep challenging myself about whether I would be up to the task to fight for good not succumb to evil.
What I really fear is Yeats (again): “The best lack all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
I’m not sure what all this has to do with your presentation of conundrums. Kara Walker’s work is very complex in its entirety (she shows black on white violation as well as white on black in many of her pieces); I don’t sense the same complexity in the Collins work.
June,
If I had been an adult German female in 1941, I would hope to have emigrated rather than made a generous gift of my own life to an oppressive system. It would have been more difficult for a Russian peasant to escape French soldiers wiping out Russian villages if it is true that Napoleon invented genocide.
As a public persona, Kara Walker has some responsibility to make sure that her message is not misunderstood as it seems I did. The least she could do is edit Wikipedia that now merely says:
I am all behind you fighting for our Mother Earth.
“The best lack all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity.” is an interesting statement when applying to current US politics.
I am fatigued from working too hard and I need to learn to pace myself. Perhaps that would help me to acquire some of Jay’s sense of humor. Either buying into the Holy One’s philosophy of Kipling or a sense of humor should help toning down my ‘passionate intensity’.
Hi Birgit,
You _are_ sounding fatigued.
I read in Friday’s NY Times about an exhibit at the Metropolitan of Chinese paintings that I yearned to see. Perhaps that would also lift your spirits. If you can get there physically, absorb for me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/arts/design/14asia.html?_r=1&scp=6&sq=FRiday+March+14+2008+chinese&st=nyt&oref=slogin
In the meantime I’m off to a meeting of our UTNE discussion group to run an experiment and see if it’s possible to conduct a conversation about the two Democratic candidates with civility and kindness.
Birgit:
I just caught your comment about my purported “sense of humor”. Seems the right moment as I was just musing about a personal weakness: when upset I will often transpose words. It can ruin whatever effect I had in mind, and I have learned to avoid voicing heated words as they can easily become weated hords – that kind of thing. But better to be accused of having one than not, as I soften ay. Beats crying.
June,
Thanks. I now will be at the Metropolitan on May 1st.
Kindness and Democratic candidates! Only in a heavenly place like Portland could one think that way.
Jay,
Fascinating! Your linguistic ability is a strength with a calm brain and a weakness with an upset brain.
It reminds me of my brief stint at the limbic system, Papez’ circuit of emotion, Nieuwenhuys’ paracrine core of the brain, the soup of peptides motivating us.