Author: xerkss

Art Censorship

The censorship of art is nothing new. While we allow ourselves freedom of expression in most places, art censorship is still prevalent. Modern technology grants us access to upload, share and reshare images that we consider art. There are even exhibits whose primary goals are us uploading and sharing our take on art. However, this wasn’t always the case. Throughout history – art censorship has claimed the creative freedoms of many artists and their work.

Silencing and erasing art due to unacceptable content is the rallying cry of the ultra-moral. In some cases the motivations for censorship were religious. However, in others, they were social or political. Artists push boundaries through their imagery and content. The art world is a place for overstepping the bounds of “polite” society, and delving into controversial and taboo characteristics. Art regularly “butts” against standards of good taste in the fight for freedom of expression.

However, art censorship is spreading beyond traditional medians of media. Instagram and Facebook have taken to censorship on their platforms. The latter censoring artist Rupi Kaur’s “period photo,” claiming that it violated community guidelines. However, the same platform allows for a plethora of images found under the simple hashtag #girls. While Facebook did not appreciate a teacher attempting to share a photo of Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde,”. Claiming in statements that “photos of paintings, sculptures and other art that depicts nude figures are [fine].” 

Censored Throughout History

Initially deeming it unholy and immoral by many followers of the Catholic faith, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel was “unsightly” to many including Pope Daniele de Volterra. The scene depicts unclothed human souls who rise or fall to their otherworldly fates. So much so critics could hardly concentrate on the religious message through all the naked parts.

Integrating themselves with the progression of time, classical nudes are now apart of the language of art. Painted bodies like Michelangelo’s are not only accepted but revered. Lounging nudes are on display without complication in works by Titian and Giorgione. However, Manet’s red-headed nude was seen as “vulgar“. Her unwavering gaze and realistic representation, adding heat to a raging fire.

Manet chose to capture nudity not as otherworldly or heavenly. He paints the body in its reality. Bringing in policemen to protect the canvas from furious patrons – the piece was received happily during the 1865 Paris exhibition.

One year later, Courbet’s depiction of the world’s origin, increases the stakes. Commissioned by Turkish diplomat and collector Khalil-Bey, the work rose to almost mythical status. Consequently, the piece showed mainly behind closed curtains.

The piece didn’t show publicly until 1995. Its whereabouts between 1866 and the late 20th century remain shrouded in mystery. The piece is still too salacious for Facebook. The site censoring the work in 2011.

Dipping a crucifix into a cup of his own urine in 1987, photographer Serrano, sealed his infamy with his piece aptly titled “Piss Christ.” Initially showing in New York to a positive reaction. However, two years later at its North Carolina showing, things took a turn. Local Senator Jesse Helms publicly expressed his outrage. Stating that the work “dishonor[ed] the Lord.” Consequently, Serrano lost his grants. “Piss Christ,” to this day, remains as controversial.

Censorship today

As Edgar Allen Poe says “There is no beauty without some strangeness”. We could argue there is no beauty without some vulgarity. The world around us is 24/7 mania each part of it being broadcast into our homes. Why shouldn’t art reflect that – and if that is not censored in our nightly news, then why censor it in our museums – or in the media?

Adda Þóreyjardóttir Smáradóttir must have asked the same question when she started the #freethenipple hashtag. Going viral on social networks everywhere the then 17-year-old student chair of the Feminist society at the Commercial College of Iceland, declared Thursday “Free The Nipple Day” at school. A classmate noting – she’d be letting herself in for trouble, as she posted a topless selfie of herself.

Inequality of human bodies aside – the censorship of art is reckless. Art is the great unifier able to connect us even if the subject is taboo. Taboo subjects make their way to the general public regardless of their oppressors. They are seen in all their scandalous, salacious glory. Allowing us the opportunity to see the world beyond the scope of our own sometimes narrow view.

Frida Kahlo: Arte Popular

The first-ever Kahlo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular highlights the artist’s respect for Mexican folk art. Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art aptly named arte popular. She like many of her compatriots at the time saw it as a celebration of Mexican national culture. Deriving inspiration from objects, and seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution. Continuously incorporating their visual and material qualities into her artwork.

Kahlo’s work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s. However, the rediscovery of her work was carried out by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, she became a recognized figure in art history. Chicanos, the feminist movement and the LGBTQ movement saw Kahlo as an icon. While her renown has been on the rise for decades, she is an internationally celebrated artist. Her work is an emblem of Mexican and indigenous traditions. As a result, popularizing the polarizing subject.

Mexicanidad

Debuting in 1921, the term arte popular links art and politics. It constructs patriotic histories and images uniting Mexico’s divided peoples. Following a devastating civil war, government officials and artists played overlapping roles. However, Kahlo herself was not a folk artist. However, she includes ceramics, carvings and other handmade objects made in rural communities in her work. She like other artist and intellectuals alike lionized the works of arte popular.  While synonymous with the mexicanidad, or Mexican national culture. The arte popular movement, therefore, promoted the celebration of Mexico’s indigenous and working-class people. Exploring some of the social and political ideas of the post-Revolutionary period. The exhibition contextualizes both Kahlo’s paintings and arte popular. While focusing on the dialogues between the two. Highlighting the issues of the day, using art as its voice.

MFA Exhibit

This is the MFA’s first exhibition on Frida Kahlo. It focuses exclusively, on Kahlo’s lasting engagements with arte popular. Focusing on her passion for embroidered textiles and devotional retablo paintings. Shining new light onto Kahlo as a clever and ambitious, painter. The exhibition creates the opportunity to discuss the influences of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters.

Bringing together the exhibition is eight Kahlo paintings some on loan from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, there are approximately 40 representative examples of arte popular, on loan from the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA). As well as photographs and important illustrated publications from the period.

A representative of Layla Bermeo, Assistant Curator of American Paintings, says “While many exhibitions focus on the artist’s biography and interpret her paintings as direct illustrations of life events, our exhibition brings fresh attention to Kahlo as an ever-evolving and ambitious painter, who actively responded to arte popular.”

“Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular” is on view through June 2019, at the MFA’s Art of the Americas Wing.

The Age of Art For Instagram

The age of made-for-Instagram exhibits says something about our culture, however, it didn’t start in places like Happy Place. It more likely started in nature and in restaurants and spilled its way over in modern culture. Artist like Yayoi Kusama created installations prime for the age of art for Instagram long before cellphone towers and hashtags dominated the airwaves.

An example of Instagram gold was the 2015 experience called Wonder. Placed in the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian the art experience featured nine contemporary artists. One room featured a prismatic rainbow made from 60 miles of thread. Another room was wallpapered with dead insects. In another, 10 towers of index cards stacked and glued together loomed over visitors like volcanic rock formations.

Becoming a sensation on social media, Wonder was able to bring more visitors to the Renwick. The museum encouraged this. Curator Nicholas Bell told the Washington Post at the time: “We’re all flabbergasted, to be frank. I wonder, what are they even trying to say? ‘I am here Instagramming?’ It’s like this new first-person narrative of the museum experience. I’m fascinated.”

Ready Made Installations

Three years earlier, the Rain Room opened at London’s Barbican Center. The installation would travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and all over the world. However long its tenure in those museums, it remained the longest on Instagram. Where there are thousands of photos of it.

While the Rain Room initial intent was not social media, its unparalleled success online demonstrated a need for these types of exhibits. In some cities, people waited in line for as long as eight hours for their chance to get a photo inside. Proving there is a market waiting to be served.

According to Jia Jia Fei, Director of Digital at the Jewish Museum of New York, “The world has seen an increase in these spectacle exhibitions that have really taken on a new dimension online”. Delivering a TED Talk last year on Art in the Age of Instagram. “When you think of the very Instagrammable exhibitions of the last five years—the course in which Instagram has existed—you think of Yayoi Kusama and her Infinity Mirrored Room. These are artists who really have very critical bodies of work, but [created installations] that have taken on new meaning because of social media.”

Smoke and Filters – Art for Instagram?

Is there though a line between Instagram filler and art? What differentiates the psychedelic paintings of the abstract movement, like Mohammed Melehi from a room designed to delight the senses like in Jared Paul’s Happy Place?

“Artists like Sol LeWitt also have, in their practice, very intricate colorful walls,” says Fei. “Without that context, one might consider that to be as created for Instagram. There is a nuance in an artist’s practice. It’s about minimalism and a period in time in which that work was created. If it’s just an orange wall that exists as a backdrop, there’s no meaning or value added to having that space there.”

Some critics draw a harder line in the sand. “These manufactured entertainments aren’t significant art exhibitions any more than a Chuck E. Cheese arcade or the Block of Fame at Legoland,” says Christopher Knight. He is an art critic for the Los Angeles Times. “They’re just snobbier.”

Pop Commercialism

Each of the goals of these spaces is as different as the artist behind them. The museums that host their work are there to ask questions, provoke thought, explore space, and add a sense of amazement. However, the aims of these recent installations like the ones at the Museum of Ice Cream are further complicated by commercialism. Many of the rooms are sponsored by brands. However, the limit to which these brands impact the experience differs by location.

Ferney the creator – claims that experiencing a place through selfies goes far beyond the spaces she and others have created. “I go to SF MoMA and everyone’s just trying to get Instagrams,”. “Is that what art is becoming—what you’re experiencing and sending out into the world?”

Visiting a museum in the 21st century is not a place of quiet contemplation. Where one can simply see art, today we document and replicate it. Fei says in her TED Talk, “In the pre-digital photography era, the message was: This is what I’m seeing. I have seen. Today, the message was: I was there. I came, I saw, and I selfied.”

Perhaps we should reflect on the experience that we get out of these spaces; rather than if they’re artistic or not. Do they make us think? Is the mind’s eye expanded somehow by these shared experiences? Or simply does experience that you take from these creamed colored daydreams add value to our lives, instagrammable or not.

Contemporary African Art: Breaking Records

If our art market forecasters are clever, they should pay attention to the recent auction of modern and contemporary African art at a London based auction house. While the most recent sale of contemporary African art may not be the highest in the category. The auction is a significant increase from its sale last year. Marking an advantageous nod to the future.

Setting a new auction record for 11 artists, most of whom are unfamiliar to the Western art world. However, they will not be unfamiliar for long. Before her work began tearing up records in the evening auctions in New York and London, Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby posted a sharp increase in auction prices at modern and contemporary African art sales.

New Talent

Artists whose work gained substantial high notes at the sale include Senegalese artist Omar Ba. Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, a 35-year-old Brooklyn-based, Côte d’Ivoire-born painter. Also notably, the late Moroccan artist Hassan El Glaoui; and the late pioneering Nigerian photographer J.D. Okhai Ojeikere. Whose records broke twice.

Perhaps the most notably at the auction is rising of Congolese talent Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga. His vibrant painting of two figures whose bodies resemble the inside of a cell phone, Congolese Palm. The painting exhausted its presale estimate of $32,000–45,000 to sell for over $100,000. Consequently, beating his previous record of $92,124 set last year.

The significant share of the total, however, was driven by El Anatsui‘s work. He has an established international collector base and a reputation. As the representative for Ghana in the Venice Biennale this year, El Anatsui has long been a blue-chip powerhouse. Also remarkably, he is the subject of a retrospective in Munich organized by the late Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu.

His glittering bottle-cap tapestry Zebra Crossing 2 (2007) sold for $1.4 million, decidedly above the presale estimate of $700,000 – 960,000. The work previously sold at a Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale in London in 2013, where it made $771,788.

Owing the majority of their style to the aesthetic of Bauhaus in Germany, a group of Moroccan artist known as the Casablanca School traveled to Marrakech. In 1969 the staged an exhibition in the street. Tapping into the history of abstraction in Arabic art, and heavily influenced by the “hard-edge” paintings in New York by Frank Stella or Elsworth Kelly. The paintings hung on the city’s dusty walls, were a riot of color and pattern. Taking place near the city medina the Exposition-Manifeste intended to snub the official showroom of Moroccan art.

Radical Art In Morocco

Now 82, Mohamed Melehi, recalls, “We took a position against the government,”. He continues “Our works were in Jemaa el-Fnaa square for a week, exposed to the sun and wind. It was an ideological message about what art could be.”

Melehi’s work had been somber until the 1969 exhibition. Developing his style and after spending time in America, his work became characteristically full of color. His patterns a visual representation of the psychedelic freedom of the time. The wavy parallel lines he would use throughout his career took root during this time.

Wishing to spread the modern American values to the developing world Melehi started a scholarship. The terms of which dictate that international students returned to their home country after their studies. Hoping “to unite, to maintain and enlarge the friendly solidarity which united or should unite all civilized beings”.

Eight years after its independence, Melehi found that art played a vital role in Morocco politics. The country, in a crossroads as King Hassan II, hung on to power. “The political atmosphere was very tense. People were trying to claim their freedom and their right to live in democracy.” His art, a safe way of protest. At the time “The authorities did not see the link between art and politics.”

Meheli Today:

Aspiring to develop modernism that did not mimic the western aesthetic Melehi ingratiates his art into Moroccan daily life. With fellow innovators, Farid Belkahia and Mohammed Chabâa they install their art with the local culture. Melehi was included in the 1963 exhibition Hard Ege and Geometric Painting and Sculpture in America. Melehi reflects, “Hard-edge painting made me rediscover the abstraction inherent in Islamic art,”. Now teaching at the art school in Casablanca, Melehi encourages his students to explore their surroundings. Asking of them “ what could we find in Morocco that was an expression of modernism?”

Seeking an audience away from the constraints of the museum Meheli continues to work outside. He paints on wood and takes on several collaborations with architects. Seeking to create “postcolonial architecture”. While his paintings entertain a small group of scholars. However, his joyful palette and patterns show Melehi is still looking to influence and reach a wide audience.

On display until June 22: New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School is at the Mosaic Rooms