A Purpose For The Miami Art Museum

Miami Art Museum Should Rethink its Identity


Miami Art Museum ground breaking.

As the Miami Art Museum (MAM) breaks ground for its new Herzog and de Meuron-designed building in Museum Park, its leaders should rethink the scope of the institution’s program.

The institition began a quarter century ago as a kunsthalle, and in 1995 the board decided to begin a permanent collection. They opted to focus the institution on postwar and contemporary art with an emphasis on the Americas, particularly Latin America to reflect the strong presence of Hispanics in Miami.

The board has yet to build a significant collection. The collection numbers only around 600 objects, mainly contemporary works and photographs. There are a handful of significant pieces, but not enough to merit a vast building.

The board’s financial commitment has not been very impressive, either. They have $31 million in pledges and cash for construction of the $131 million building, with the $100-million balance public money from a 2004 County bond issue. They have raised only $15 million for an endowment to operate the future institution, suggesting that financial stability is unlikely if the facility opens as scheduled in 2013. Should scarce public money be used to construct a building when the board of trustees – who will be responsible for raising operating funds and for building a collection – have not demonstrated a serious commitment to the project?

The project is proceeding based on a “Field of Dreams” model: “If you build it they will donate, fund and come.” This is the shakiest of armatures on which to build an institution.

Miami Art Museum by Herzog & de Meuron, South elevation view. © Herzog & de Meuron

Moreover, the contemporary-art focus is too limited to serve the needs of the citizens of Miami who are bankrolling the lion’s share of the future museum.

The thinking was that it would be impossible to create an encyclopedic museum, or even a museum of Modern art. Great classic works – whether by Old Masters or Picasso — are exceedingly rare and the cost of acquiring them is prohibitive even for the wealthiest art organization in the country. But, Miami is already rich in postwar international and Latin American art. The city has renowned private collectors devoted to these areas, and nearly all of them have established public museums in which to show their holdings.

Martin Margulies presents rotations from his modern and contemporary collection, a trove far superior to MAM’s permanent collection. Don and Mera Rubell and Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz also have private museums devoted to their collections. Ella Cisneros created CIFO foundation which operates a museum that hosts contemporary art exhibitions, many based on her superb collection of Latin American modern and contemporary art.

There is no shortage of contemporary art available to Miamians. What’s missing is older art, anything from before 1970, and particularly from before the Second World War.

There is almost nothing from antiquity and the Middle Ages on public view in Miami, few objects from the Renaissance to early Modern periods, and almost nothing from all of Asia and Africa. The Bass Museum in South Beach offers around 200 European paintings and a smattering of material in other media. The best Old Masters in the region are hours away at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, not easily accessible to Miami residents and students. And the nearest major encyclopedic collections are in Atlanta.

What Miami needs is an institution that can host traveling exhibitions of all kinds, from antiquities to Asian art, and loan shows of Old Masters and modern and contemporary art from around the world. The publicly funded MAM should create a place to see the likes of King Tut, China’s Terracotta Warriors, and less commercial shows of masterpieces from the Metropolitan, the Louvre, and  the world’s other great museums that could introduce Miami audiences to work not otherwise available to them.

When the museum was established it mounted shows covering the whole of art history. The decision to build  a collection with the focus on 20th- and 21st-century international art and the Americas makes sense, but the museum should revert to its more encyclopedic scope for its exhibition program.

A broad range of shows could attract a larger audience for the museum’s in-house exhibitions and programs. They would produce income to operate the museum. What’s more, they would help put Miami on the international museum exhibition circuit, benefiting the citizens of Dade County. Miami Art Museum should mount such exhibitions, either in its future building or in a separate pavilion that could be built in Museum Park. The publicly funded museum should aim to provide the greatest public benefit. Opening the exhibition program to traveling shows of all kinds would serve that public purpose.

Jason Edward Kaufman

This article is from: http://blogs.artinfo.com/inview/2010/12/07/miami-art-museum-should-rethink-its-identity/

Smithsonian Repercussions After Removal Of Wojnarowicz Video "

Smithsonian deals with fallout over David Wojnarowicz video controversy






















Senior Smithsonian officials are meeting with concerned museum staff over fears that removing a video from the National Portrait Gallery sets an unwelcome precedent. The action has generated protests, thousands of e-mails and an advisory board member's resignation.



The staff at the National Museum of American History met Monday with Richard Kurin, the undersecretary for art, history and culture, and a member of the senior staff who decided that the excerpt from David Wojnarowicz's video was what the Smithsonian called a "distraction" to an overall groundbreaking show.

One participant at the meeting said Kurin explained that Smithsonian officials moved fast because criticism from Capitol Hill and other critics was coming so quickly. "The secretary had to move quickly because the news cycle moves so fast now," said the longtime employee. "He also said the video wasn't an essential part of the show and had been added late."

Because the objections on Capitol Hill came initially from two powerful Republicans, Reps. John Boehner (Ohio) and Eric Cantor (Va.), and Congress controls 70 percent of the Smithsonian's budget, employees said they feared to go public with their viewpoints.

"Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" opened Oct. 30 and is the first major museum show to explore same-sex intimacy. The Smithsonian has said repeatedly the institution stands behind the show, which continues through Feb. 13.

Since removing the video, which contained an 11- second segment that showed ants crawling over a crucifix, the Smithsonian has taken steps to control the damage. The action has also been criticized by artists, who staged a protest outside the Portrait Gallery last week, and by the Association of Art Museum Directors, an influential group.

Last week, James T. Bartlett resigned from the gallery's advisory panel in protest. "I believe it is a fundamental right of museums and their curatorial staffs to make such decisions [about exhibition content], even if some art is deemed objectionable by external critics," Bartlett said in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post. "I choose firmly and resolutely not to be part of an institution that is and can be put ad infinitum in this position."

Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough and Kurin attended meetings of the Portrait Gallery commission on Sunday and Monday.

Before a staff meeting at the Portrait Gallery on Wednesday, the museum's director, Martin Sullivan, released an e-mail with the details of a reply he is sending to "the thousands of e-mails and phone calls" that have come to the museum.




Noting the spectrum of opinions the museum had received, "I want to assure you that your message has come through.

"As you know, more than 100 artworks are on view in the overall exhibition. More than a dozen works specifically address the tragic impact of AIDS. The exhibition continues to include two important works by David Wojnarowicz as well as a portrait of him by Peter Hujar. The art was assembled from the Portrait Gallery's permanent collection and from many other sources. It is presented together for the first time ever, thanks to generous lenders and private financial supporters.''

The controversy has gained national attention, even meriting a commentary on Stephen Colbert's show. The New York Public Library had invited the curators to a forum next week before the exhibition became Topic A in the art blogosphere. The panel is still scheduled. David C. Ward, the historian at the Portrait Gallery and co-curator of "Hide/Seek," Jonathan D. Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the show's co-curator, are expected to speak, along with Sullivan, at Wednesday's forum.

 

This article is from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/AR2010120905885.html


Architecture's Godfather of Postmodernism, James Frazer Stirling

Postmodernism's Pivotal Figure


By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE


James Frazer Stirling (1924-1992) was a magnificently talented architect, a large man with a large vision, known to all as "Big Jim." For those of us who admired him then (and still do), he was the most gifted architect of the generation that followed the founders and form givers of modernism in the early 20th century. Born in Glasgow and based in London, he was a pivotal figure in that transitional period that we have given the catchall name of postmodernism, beginning in the 1950s, when modernism began to be seriously questioned for its perceived failure to engage with the real world.

stirling

Because he practiced before the phenomenon of the celebrity starchitect, his name is virtually unknown to the public or to architecture students today. He died at the age of 68, shortly after winning the Pritzker Prize and being knighted; his death was unexpected and premature. His buildings were complex and controversial; his deeply thoughtful, experimental explorations of uncharted possibilities were meant to move architecture on, to turn modernism into something more humane, contextual and familiar that users could relate to and understand; his philosophy was constantly evolving, along with a highly personal, eclectic style.



Stirling never relinquished his belief in the rationalism, practicality and necessity of the new forms and technologies; they had changed the built world forever. But the limited vocabulary of the International Style had become, in his words, "exhausted," its buildings "boring, banal, and barren"; their aloofness from their surroundings made them "disruptive and inharmonious when placed in older cities." He was, in a sense, the anti-LeCorbusier, or the anti-Mies, looking for ways to recapture some of the things swept away by the modernists' messianic zeal—connections to history, place and the environment. What we build, he believed, "should not be disassociated from the cultural past."

The search took him through a seemingly odd succession of unrelated styles that his contemporaries found inconsistent and disturbing. The tradition-bound British resisted his competition-winning designs—he built mostly in continental Europe and the U.S.—but no body of work makes it clearer how much more there was to postmodernism than the faux history, funky colors and insider jokes of so many who claimed the movement as their own. With hindsight, it is obvious that his influence has been profound; his transformative impact on the art of architecture is increasingly clear.

An important exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven explores these issues through sketches, drawings, photographs and models selected from the Stirling archives owned by the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. "Notes From the Archive: James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher" is the first major attempt to explore the development of his ideas based on this documentary evidence. The show has been organized in collaboration with the Canadian Center for Architecture, under the curatorship of Anthony Vidler, dean and professor of architecture of the School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York, who has written a scholarly and insightful book on Stirling based on his study of the archives that also serves as the exhibition catalog.

Prof. Vidler has selected about 400 items for display after reviewing 5,000 of the more than 40,000 documents that span Stirling's career from 1949 to 1992, from his student days through his early work with James Gowan, and final partnership with Michael Wilford, to the year of his death. Displayed against a running background of the unmistakable, aggressive green that was Stirling's trademark color—among other heresies, he defied orthodox modernism's primary hues with a wild celebration of purples, golds and greens (his purple socks, worn with a certain gravitas and insouciance, enlivened his otherwise conservative and unremarkable attire). The show is a must-see for any architectural professional or student of architecture, but the studies, notes and axonometric diagrams that record his thoughts and design process may be a little hard going for a general public more accustomed to dramatic sequences of photographic images and drop-dead models of buildings in proper chronological order.

Stirling's architecture contains enough complex material to offer an infinite variety of lessons to each new generation according to its particular interests and needs. Today's revisionist scholars often prefer their own theories to historical facts, but Prof. Vidler has the advantage of knowing this turbulent period well; he was an astute and accurate observer at the time. What his analysis of this archival material gives us is a rewarding and long-overdue reappraisal of an extraordinary architect, humanist and artist who did much to redefine the art of building for the 21st century.

It has been largely forgotten that the immediate postwar period was the time of the New Towns movement, when entire new communities were being constructed across Europe, from Cumbernauld in Scotland to Vällingby in Sweden, to relieve a desperate need for housing and to accommodate the overflow population from older cities. Architects everywhere, including Stirling, were involved in the pursuit of this Utopian dream. Prefabrication and standardized, industrially produced housing were the accepted solution for these social problems. Mistakes were made, as the saying goes, and lessons were learned (and not learned); the most unsuccessful and unpopular housing has been demolished, and those communities that survived have succumbed to the accommodations of taste and time.



Stirling soon saw the unreality of these schemes, perhaps because he grew up in Liverpool where a lot of reality was on view and he was never a member of the architectural elite for whom prefabrication was one of modernism's most cherished illusions. He understood (as many do not to this day) that there was an irreconcilable conflict between the production methods and imposed styles of prefabrication and the "uncertain and sometimes irrational preferences of the consumer and the class he represents."

He also saw the functional and commercial vernacular of Liverpool as a source for a more familiar and time-tested kind of design, and he began to use local materials, like red brick, to modify the structural glass and steel of the university buildings at Cambridge and Leicester done in the late '50s and early '60s, without sacrificing the radical rethinking of program and space that modernism encouraged. By the '70s he was combining the practical technology and functional rationalism of modernist practice with a more conscious relationship of a building to its culture and community.

As architects began to look back at the history modernists had discarded, his interest grew in the neoclassicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This was undoubtedly encouraged when the Luxembourg architect Leon Krier, an avowed classicist and superb delineator, joined Stirling's office in 1968. Mr. Krier's elegant and evocative drawings, with their classical allusions and the odd pieces of Biedermeier furniture, have become associated with much of the firm's output. Stirling's "modern neo-classicism" followed in the '70s, further confounding observers, and some of the more substantial and idiosyncratic Biedermeier furniture was incorporated into his home and studio, where it suited his large frame and eclectic tastes perfectly.

All of these interests and influences were so thoroughly absorbed in his mature work of the '70s and '80s that if you look at buildings like his Clore Gallery (1978-86) for the Tate Museum in London, or the even more striking Staatsgalerie Museum in Stuttgart (1977-84), the impression is never of something derivative or cobbled up out of a collection of ideas; what you are struck by is their total originality and an unparalled personal vision.

But the quality that ties all of Stirling's work together is something that only the greatest architects possess: the unique ability to think volumetrically, to conceptualize and visualize all of a building's components and relationships simultaneously in all three dimensions, reorganizing and reinventing those relationships to create brilliant spatial progressions and shifts in perception and experience that elude more ordinary talents. Pleasure and surprise are some of architecture's most important gifts, and they come only from the most subtle and complex creative acts. Once we have gotten the glitz and bling of recent years out of our eyes, we will see Stirling as the innovator he really was, a man towering over his contemporaries, far ahead of his time.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.

This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703921204576005900819004790.html

Paris Man Sues Met Museum Over Cezanne



[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]Madame Cezanne in the Greenhouse, 1891-1892, M...[/caption]


Man sues Met to recover Cézanne


A Paris engineer is suing New York's Metropolitan Museum over a Paul Cézanne painting he says was stolen from his great-grandfather in Russia.



Pierre Konowaloff says the art collection owned by his great-grandfather, Ivan Morozov, was seized on Lenin's orders in 1918 during the Russian Revolution.

The Met received the painting Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory in 1960 in a bequest of American collector Stephen C. Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune.

French artist Cézanne painted the Impressionist image of his wife in 1891.

Konowaloff filed a statement of claim in U.S. District court on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg news agency.

He is claiming the painting, bought by Morozov, a textile merchant, in 1911, was seized illegally by the Russian government and it was resold illegally in 1933 to a New York art dealer, at a time when the U.S. did not recognize Soviet Russia.

The Met museum has issued a statement saying it believes it has good title to the painting and the lawsuit is without merit.

Konowaloff is also involved in a dispute with Yale University over a Vincent van Gogh bequeathed by Clark to a university gallery.

Yale has filed a pre-emptive suit, trying to establish its ownership of The Night Café.

The university argues in its suit that it is unreasonable for U.S. courts to overturn the redistribution of property undertaken by Russian during the Russian Revolution.

This article is from: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2010/12/09/cezanne-revolution.html#ixzz17jNYOSzU

Hungary Auctions Off Communist Kitsch

By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH And VERONIKA GULYAS


BUDAPEST—Competition was fierce for Lot No. 38, a fine ceramic sculpture of Vladimir Lenin.

The winning bidder was 22-year-old Timea Szabo, who offered nearly $1,000 for the small likeness of the communist hero. Ms. Szabo, too young to remember Hungary's socialist past, is firmly engaged with its capitalist present.

"We're not into Lenin, really," says Ms. Szabo, who works at a real-estate company that caters to Budapest's newly rich.

[SB10001424052748703296604576005812165749354]

But sizing up her new acquisition—which portrays the first Soviet leader grasping the lapel of his overcoat, a stern expression on his bearded face—she declares: "It will look pretty in the office."

More than 20 years after the collapse of communism here, Hungary's government is holding a vast rummage sale, auctioning off socialist-era paintings, sculptures and photographs that have been gathering dust in storage.

The proceeds will be used to help clean up after another reminder of central planning: an industrial accident that in October left villages in western Hungary flooded with caustic red sludge—waste from a once state-owned aluminum factory.

On Monday night, hundreds of people joined the bidding at an art gallery that formerly served as a warehouse for Hungary's secret police.

Hungary's current political leadership views the purge in part as a symbolic exorcism of the ghosts of socialism—and a reminder of past suffering.

To advertise the auction, the government created a logo showing the hammer of the communists' old hammer-and-sickle emblem striking Lenin's head and causing him to see red stars. Below it is inscribed the motto, "Never Again."

"It's an important gesture. Almost every Hungarian family was somehow a victim in the communist period," says Gergely Boszormenyi Nagy, an official of the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice, which organized the auction. "This is the end of the line. We won't keep this stuff anymore."

But the event also comes at a time of rising nostalgia for the socialist years —at least in some quarters of Hungarian society.

The country's economy has been upended by the global financial crisis. Unemployment soared as the country sank into its worst recession since the transition to capitalism in 1989.

Many older people thrown out of work now say that at least under the communist regime everyone had a job and something to eat.

Gyorgy Torok, 45, who bought a vintage Lenin lithograph for about $50 on Monday night, says that the art works on sale reminded him of his youth and of his father, a mining engineer and avid collector of communist-era memorabilia who died earlier this year.

"When I was young, I didn't really look deeply into the faults of the system," says Mr. Torok, a real-estate entrepreneur who says that his business is struggling amid the economic downturn. "I lived a calm, secure life where bread cost 3.5 forints and everyone had a job."

Today, a loaf of bread costs about 200 Hungarian forints, or $1.

rt played an important propaganda role throughout the Soviet sphere. When communism collapsed in 1989, politicians across Central and Eastern Europe had to decide what to do with decades' worth of statues, paintings and other works of public art.

In most countries, the hulking images of Lenin, Stalin and other communist VIPs were pulled from their pedestals in parks and corralled in museums.

Many of Hungary's are now in a sculpture garden outside Budapest.

Some pieces were snapped up by collectors of communist kitsch in the West and put on display—like the Lenin statue perched on the roof of Red Square, an apartment building on New York City's Lower East Side.

The art works for sale this week in Hungary are a mixed bag. They offer a glimpse of the iconography of socialism as well as the dissonant results when artists' varying styles were applied to what the communist party deemed appropriate subjects.

On offer was an impressionist-style painting of women working on a television factory assembly line, as well as lush oil paintings of shipyards, railroads and steel mills.

A painting entitled "Soviet-Hungarian Friendship" from 1950, six years before Hungary's unsuccessful revolt against Russian domination in 1956, shows Hungarian peasants relaxing with Soviet soldiers, one of whom holds a submachine gun. Two Soviet tanks idle in the background.

A few of the pieces are by well-known Hungarian artists who, willingly or unwillingly, joined the communist government's propaganda efforts.

The Lenin statue bought by Ms. Szabo was the work of Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl. He was famous in Hungary and the U.K. for his depictions of figures as disparate as George Bernard Shaw and the future Queen Elizabeth.

"We need to take into consideration the experiences of the old times and learn from them, to confront the past and use it cleverly," says Gergely Mikola, 33, the chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in Hungary. He had his eye on several lots, but was outbid.

At Monday's auction, the Wende Museum of Culver City, Calif., purchased 25 pieces that it termed "significant works" of communist-era Hungarian art.

The museum specializes in visual arts of Cold War Eastern Europe.

"The works are representative of an extinct era in world history," says Justinian Jampol, the museum's executive director.

Sales reached $63,000 on Monday, the first day of the auction. Wednesday's session, which also included non-socialist pieces, raised roughly $96,000, organizers say. The auction concludes Thursday.

Peter Pinter, the owner of the gallery that is handling the auctions for the Hungarian government, believes that many of the items on the block are those that apparatchiks didn't deem good enough to pilfer when the communist system fell apart.

"Since the auction was announced, a lot of people have been calling, saying, 'We have a Lenin, we have a Stalin at home. Will you sell it for us?'" Mr. Pinter says. "Parents most likely kept these pieces due either to nostalgia or because they held a certain value to them.... But children feel that these are just a burden."

This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704250704576005442795543116.html

Jerry Saltz's Top Ten NY 2010 Art Shows

The Year in Art


By Jerry Saltz



1. “Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936”
At the Guggenheim Museum through January 9, 2011
It’s not often that a show pulls back the curtain on conventional wisdom or revises art history outright. But guest curator Kenneth Silver has done that with panache. Thanks to his show, we have a clearer, less formalist idea of what was going on across Europe between the wars. As we’ve long suspected, art didn’t simply march forward from Cubism in the teens through Dada and Surrealism in the twenties and thirties; it made some strange pit stops along the way, into an often disturbing realism. At the grand, terrifying end to this show—just yards from Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s ode to Teutonic superiority—is the work of one of Hitler’s favorite painters, Adolf Ziegler. That his triptych of four sinewy female nudes looks uncannily like the work of John Currin left me gasping about the present.

2. Tino Sehgal’s ‘This Progress’
Guggenheim Museum
You began the walk up the Guggenheim’s ramp—the walls stripped of art—accompanied by a child actor. At different stages, you were handed off to an older actor. As you progressed to the top, the talk was of progress; with each guide, the conversation would deepen or die, become more or less personal. What I loved? That Sehgal’s creation—as real as the Mona Lisa—offered such an expansive and moving (emotionally and physically) definition of art.

3. Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield”
Whitney Museum of American Art; curated by Robert Gober
It was a tremendous treat to rediscover the near-forgotten American visionary Burchfield, who turned ordinary things into eerie (ectoplasmic hills!), utterly original, even magical art. I much prefer the haunting, unknowable Burchfield to the Whitney’s main man of constant solitude, Edward Hopper.



4. Sarah Sze
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Sze went all out in this two-story-high gallery show, inhabiting the area with a madly replicating architecture of multiple parts (fans, lights, pieces of bicycles). Space was explored, expanded, slowed down, woven back together, and transformed into the abstract machine it may be.

5. Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Derek Eller Gallery and Laurel Gitlen
Hutchins is leading art into some fantastically promising places. With these two shows—“Kitchen Table Allegory” and “Over Come Over”—she turned abstraction and sculpture into imaginary fictions that are at once archaic, architectonic, filled with longing, and enchantingly awkward.



6. Joanna Malinowska, “Time of Guerrilla Metaphysics”
Canada
Her show opened at the end of 2009, but the physical presence, imaginative audacity, and sheer psychic power of Malinowska’s massive Boli figure—placed at the center of her excellent show—haunted me all year. The traditional tribal sculpture is made partially of excrement; the artist fabricated hers with wood, plaster, clay, and scraps of Spinoza’s Ethics.

7. Huma Bhabha, “Sculptures”
Salon 94 Bowery, through December 19
Bhabha’s formally inventive and rough sculptures of faces, bodies, fetishistic figures, and war machines conjure Roman antiquity and urban renewal, proving that serious high-mindedness doesn’t have to be freighted with bombast or bathos.



8. Mike and Doug Starn, “Big Bambú”
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The brothers took the roof of the Met and spun it into a gigantic, evolving nest crawling with viewers. Thrillingly participatory and experientially awesome, it never stopped growing—much like the museum itself.

9. Arlene Shechet, “The Sound of It”
Jack Shainman Gallery
It’s exciting to see artists using materials that, until recently, were ridiculed by the art world for being decorative or crafty. And somehow Shechet turned a variety of gnarly, curling, enigmatic (and oddly sexy!) objects into a convincing language of sculptural form.

10. “#class”
Winkleman Gallery
Just when we needed it, the spirit of activism, anarchy, and making it up as you go surfaced in this exhibition—a kind of think tank meets tribal gathering. Organized by artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, “#class” was open to anyone who wanted to see performances, or talk about the market, careerism, and bad critics. Consciousness and hackles were raised; energy was generated.

 

This article is from: http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2010/69899/

Climate Change Threatens Archaeological Sites


Climate Change Threatens Archaeological Treasures


Melting ice can help unlock ancient secrets, but warming temperatures could imperil many more historic sites.


Oetzi the Iceman

Mummies decaying in Siberia, pyramids vanishing under the sand in Sudan, Maya temples collapsing: Climate change risks destroying countless treasures from our shared past, archaeologists warn.

Melting ice can unlock ancient secrets from the ground, as with the discovery in 1991 of "Oetzi", a 5,300-year-old warrior whose body had been preserved through the millennia inside an Alpine glacier.

But as ice caps melt, deserts spread, ocean levels rise and hurricanes intensify -- all forecast effects of man-made global warming -- Henri-Paul Francfort of the CNRS research institute fears a heavy toll on world heritage.

Francfort is head of a French archaeological team in Central Asia that played an important part in excavating the Kurgans, or frozen tombs, of nomadic Scythian tribes in Siberia's Altai mountains.

He fears they now risk being lost.

"The permafrost, the constantly frozen layer of earth that protected them up until now, is melting," he said. "There are mummified, tattooed bodies, buried with sacrificed horses, furs, wooden objects and clothes."

"With my Russian colleagues, we are watching the part of the soil that melts each season, and which is getting deeper and deeper," he added. "Unless we take preventative action, it will soon be too late."

According to Francfort, Oetzi's remains were most certainly uncovered due to a receding high-altitude glacier in the Italian Tyrol region.

"Melting glaciers, especially in Norway, now regularly reveal other treasures," he said.

Like a modern-day Atlantis, experts warn that rising ocean levels -- which some forecast could jump a meter (three feet) by 2100 -- stand to wipe out dozens of coastal archaeological sites, with Pacific islands on the frontline.

In Tanzania, maritime erosion has already destroyed a wall of the Kilwa fort, built by Portuguese colonialists on an island just off the coast in 1505, Francfort said.

And in Bangladesh, the ruined city of Panam in Sonargaon, the heart of the kingdom of Bengal from the 15th to 19th centuries, is regularly hit by flooding.

Today, Panam is one of 100 sites listed by the UN culture agency UNESCO as threatened by climate change.

A forecast spike in unpredictable weather events -- hurricanes chief among them -- is another major source of concern, says Dominique Michelet, a specialist of American archaeology at the CNRS.

He cites the case of Chan Chan in Peru, former capital of the Chimu civilisation and the largest pre-Colombian city in Latin America, which is already severely exposed to flooding linked to the El Nino weather pattern.

Likewise, the Maya temple of Tabasqueno in Mexico had to be largely rebuilt after it was badly damaged by two tornadoes -- Opalo and Roxana -- in 1995.

"Archaeologists had managed to stabilize the main temple, but the buildings became saturated with water and collapsed inward," Michelet said.

Sand is one of the worst enemies of archaeological sites, like in Sudan where dunes are encroaching on the burial pyramids of Meroe, the capital of a flourishing kingdom from the third century B.C. to the fourth A.D.

"In Oman, two cyclones -- Gonu un 2007 and Phet last year -- totally buried in sand sites that date back to the fifth and sixth millennia B.C.," said Vincent Charpentier, of the INRAP archaeological research center.

Michelet warns that UNESCO's efforts so far to identify at-risk sites do not go far enough, calling for the world to "sound the alert" over the threat.

"Archaeology is part of human memory," said Francfort, who suggests radical solutions may be needed to protect past treasures from climate change, citing the case of the Abu Simbel rock temples in Egypt.

Following a concerted international effort, the entire complex was relocated in the 1960s to prevent them being submerged by the building of a dam on the River Nile.

This article is from: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/climate-change-historic-treasures.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1

WikiLeaks and Culture, Part 2: US-Spain Quid Pro Quo - Undersea Treasure for Art Looted by Nazis


WikiLeaks cables: Art looted by Nazis, Spanish gold and an embassy offer


Spain rejected attempt to tie together claim on coins found by US firm and row over painting in Madrid museum, cables show


Odyssey Black Swan treasure

US officials offered to help Spain claim an undersea treasure haul of gold and silver coins discovered by a controversial American exploration company in return for Spanish assistance in the recovery of valuable art looted by Nazi Germany, according to embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.

In a conversation with the Spanish culture minister, César Antonio Molina, the US ambassador in Madrid, Eduardo Aguirre, sought to tie the treasure found off the Iberian peninsula by Odyssey together with attempts by an American citizen, Claude Cassirer, to recover a painting by Camille Pisarro that hangs in a Madrid museum.

"The ambassador noted also that while the Odyssey and Cassirer claim were on separate legal tracks, it was in both governments' interest to avail themselves of whatever margin for manouevre they had, consistent with their legal obligations, to resolve both matters in a way that favoured the bilateral relationship," the embassy reported in a cable on 2 July 2008.

The offer was made after the Spanish government claimed ownership of half a million gold and silver coins found on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean by Odyssey's underwater robots. The company had provoked Spanish fury by landing the treasure at Gibraltar and flying it straight to the US.

The so-called Black Swan treasure, which Odyssey said came from an unidentified shipwreck, had been valued at about $500m.

Molina refused to tie the Odyssey case to the Pisarro painting, according to the embassy. "The minister listened carefully to the ambassador's message, but he put the accent on the separateness of the issues," the cable reported.

He promised, nevertheless, to meet Cassirer to discuss what could be done about the painting, Pisarro's Rue St Honoré. Après-midi. Effet de Pluie, which currently hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid.

In another cable the embassy explained the background to Cassirer's claim. "The Nazis forced Mr Cassirer's grandmother to sell the painting in 1939. Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza acquired it in 1976. In the early 1990s, the Spanish government purchased the collection and built the current museum. In 1958, Mrs Cassirer received a DM120,000 restitution payment for the disappearance and provisional dispossession of the painting, but retained full right to the painting."

The museum has refused to hand over the artwork, claiming that it was bought in good faith. Baron Thyssen had not known the story of Lilly Cassirer, a wealthy German Jew who said she was forced to sell the picture for 900 marks (about $360). She said it was the only way she could obtain an exit visa from Germany as Nazi oppression of the Jews escalated. The painting of a rain-soaked Paris boulevard had hung on the walls of the family's Berlin and Munich homes since the impressionist painted it in 1897.

Molina pointed out that as the collection technically belonged to a foundation, there was little the Spanish government could do about it.

"The painting was acquired legitimately by the foundation in 1993, along with the rest of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection," the museum said in a recent statement. "The foundation has been the peaceful owner of the picture ever since its purchase and has exhibited it permanently, so there can be no question of its ownership."

With Spanish courts unlikely to force the museum to give up the painting, embassy officials at one stage asked Spain's cultural policies director, Guillermo Corral, whether there might be some "creative solution".

"Spain is sensitive to the family's claim, Corral said, but does not believe it can legally negotiate compensation," the embassy reported. "It might, however, be able to make gestures to the family and to the Los Angeles Jewish community. The government could, for example, organise and fund travel to Spain and cultural exchanges to promote mutual understanding and appreciation while giving due recognition to the Cassirer family."

The family continues to pursue its claim, although Claude Cassirer died in September. Earlier this year a court in Los Angeles allowed the family to bring a case against Spain demanding that the picture be given back to them.

Spain claims that the Black Swan treasure find comes from a Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which sank off Portugal's Algarve coast in 1804. The vessel had just returned from Montevideo when it was attacked by four Royal Navy ships, and was carrying half a million coins that had been minted in Peru.

Descendants of the 249 Spanish sailors who went down with the ship joined the Spanish government's case against Odyssey in a court in Altanta, Georgia. The court ruled that the cargo belonged to Spain; Odyssey has appealed.

The company claims that up to 70% of the treasure the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes was carrying did not belong to the Spanish state at the time, and so the vessel was effectively on a commercial mission. That means the cargo cannot belong to the Spanish government today, it argues.

The leaked cables reveal that the US embassy had the previous year handed over to Spanish authorities the customs documents filed by Odyssey when it flew its hoard of coins into the US in mid-2007.

This article is from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-us-spain-treasure-art

Art You Can Swim In, at LA MOCA

Click here to find out more!

MOCA visitors can plunge into Latin American light and space--and Oiticica/D'Almeida swimming pool


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The swimming pool is a common sight in contemporary art, thanks in large part to the dazzling blue depths--or surfaces--of David Hockney. But a swimming pool as art?

During the run of "Suprasensorial," MOCA's new show on Latin American light and space art that opens Sunday at its Geffen Contemporary location, a lifeguard will be in attendance. Towels will be handed out. And disposable bathing suits will be sold at the bookstore. All so that visitors can see and experience for themselves what looks like a psychedelic swimming pool.

The highly immersive artwork was conceived by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and filmmaker Neville D'Almeida in 1973, as part of a larger series they called Cosmococas. (It was not realized until after Oiticica's death in 1980.) Coca, as in cocaine, helped fuel the artists' visions and also figured into some of their installations directly. In the case of the swimming pool, a projection on the wall of the pool room features images from John Cage's book "Notations," on which  D'Almeida traced lines of cocaine for a minimal, white-on-white composition.

Splashier are the blue rope lights lining the edge of the pool, and a green light projected onto the surface of the pool. MOCA curator Alma Ruiz says the idea behind this piece, which the museum re-created based on original drawings with input from D'Almeida, was "to bridge the language of art and cinema." The work also reveals a difference between Latin American artists using light as a medium and their California counterparts, like James Turrell and Robert Irwin.

Turrell and Irwin focused more on an individual's experience -- "whether physical, intellectual, or spiritual," Ruiz says. "For the Latin American artists there was much more of an attempt to create a social experience.

"There was also a political undertone," she says, "in the sense that these artists were trying to make art more democratic and less elitist. Oiticica talked a lot about pushing the viewer to become an active participant, with the hope that that transformation would happen not just in the arts but in everyday life."

--Jori Finkel

This article is from: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/12/moca-plunges-into-latin-american-light-and-space-art-with-oiticicadalmeida-swimming-pool-visitors-we.html

Review: The Turner Prize Ceremony (Oddest Year Yet?)



Susan Philipsz: Sonic boom


Susan Philipsz has won the Turner prize – using just her own voice. So was her night marred by the student protests? How did she get into sound art? And what's this about a run-in with Stephen Fry?


Susan Philipsz



Monday's Turner prize ceremony was the oddest – and in some ways the most moving – that most regular guests of the annual event can remember. Students and lecturers from London art colleges staged a "teach-in" protest during the day in Tate Britain, where the award was due to be announced in the evening. At closing time, many refused to leave, remaining in the entrance hall.

Later, at the event itself, only a makeshift barrier separated the student protesters from the party-goers in the central gallery of the museum. The students – demonstrating against cuts in public funding to higher education for arts, humanities and social sciences – were invisible but audible, and the talk inside the party, where guests included culture minister Ed Vaizey, was of little else. Many at the party had attended art schools or taught in them, and, despite a certain discomfort induced by their sipping champagne while the young protesters continued with their demonstration just metres away, approved of the protest.

Anjalika Sagar – half of the Otolith Group collective, which was shortlisted for the prize – went outside to give a speech of solidarity to the students and returned clutching a crumpled banner. Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, also spoke to them sympathetically. And the winner of the £25,000 prize – Glaswegian Susan Philipsz, whose piece consisted of a recording of her soft and sonorous voice singing a traditional Scottish lament over the River Clyde – remembered it the morning after just as an artist who works in sound ought: "It was a surreal experience. The particular acoustics in the gallery made it seem like it was a dream – the way the cheering and the chanting carried."

Some artists might have felt a little irritated by their moment of glory being so noisily hijacked, but Philipsz is a veteran of the barricades. In her acceptance speech, she expressed her sympathies – even if, in the heat of the moment, she blurted out that "education is a privilege not a right", which might well be taken as a prophecy. When we meet at Tate Britain the following morning, she corrects herself. "Education is a right not a privilege – as I used to say myself on demos."

In fact, before Philipsz went to art school at the age of 23, she devoted herself to political activism in her hometown. She had always wanted to be an artist, but reckoned her time could be more usefully channelled into promoting political causes. This was in the mid-1980s; she is 45 now. "We campaigned against the poll tax. And the miners' strike. We used to collect money outside shopping centres – 'Dig deep for the miners'; 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out.' I thought of doing politics more seriously. I passionately believed we could change the world – that there could be socialism in our time. Those were heady, idealistic days."

So what happened? Where did the idealism go? "I know my works aren't overtly political, but . . . " She hesitates. "But I did use the Internationale in a work." Remarkably, given the fact that she has had three hours' sleep, she starts to sing, in that sweet voice . . .

Arise, ye workers from your slumber,

Arise, ye prisoners of want.

For reason in revolt now thunders,

And at last ends the age of cant!

She made the work in 1999: a recording of her voice, singing this anthem of international socialism, was installed in an underpass in Ljubljana, Slovenia. "When I hear a big group singing that song," says Philipsz, "it makes me want to cry. But with my solo voice it was ambiguous. It was unclear whether it was a clarion call to action, or a lament for the past." She says she remembers an old lady, tears streaming down her face, singing along in what may have been Slovenian or Russian.

In the end, what got her to art school was her sister Barbara, one of five siblings. (Four of them made it to the event to celebrate. Mum and dad stayed at home: "Mum was dancing in front of the telly.") Back then, Barbara was attending Bellarmine Arts Centre in Glasgow, building up a portfolio to get her into art college. So Philipsz joined the class, too. Barbara then got in to Glasgow School of Art, and Philipsz didn't. Instead, she was offered a place at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, part of Dundee University.

There, Philipsz took part in student protests against cuts to grants, and reminisces about an occupation of the university. "We had all slept in the library and, at the crack of dawn, we were put into pairs and designated our own room." She and a fellow student were put into "what looked like the nerve centre of the university" – a cupboard-size room humming with giant computers.

After an altercation in which "someone tried to shoulder the door", there came a polite knock. Could the university's rector have a word? They said yes. "And in walks Stephen Fry. He looked like a giant. He had a really deep tan as if he'd been helicoptered in from his holiday. He said, 'Look here, I am sympathetic to your cause, but do you really think this is the right way of addressing it?'" Fry was sent off with a flea in his ear by Philipsz's fellow protester.

Later, she studied as a postgraduate in Belfast. So, though she  is Glaswegian, her background is different from that of so many artists who, graduates of the city's art school, have ended up as nominees for or winners of the Turner prize, including Richard Wright (last year), Simon Starling (2005), and Douglas Gordon (1996). "I think it was a good thing I left," she says. "Though it's so hard to tell. It's been a different route from a lot of my peers."

The work that clinched the prize was the installation Lowlands Away, under three bridges of the Clyde in Glasgow, made for the art festival Glasgow International. In fact, she has had relatively little work shown in her hometown, and mourns the fact that Lowlands Away ran for just two weeks – and, during that time, aircraft were grounded by the Icelandic ash cloud, so many potential visitors were prevented from coming to the festival from overseas.

Soft voice on a brutalist walkway

It was the period in Belfast, she says, that really formed her as an artist and saw her gravitating, as a sculpture student, towards sound, in particular recordings of her own voice. "I had always liked singing, and I started thinking about the physicality of singing – becoming aware of the space created by the voice in the body, and how it projects into the space around you." The fact that her voice is untrained is part of the power of her work – there is a fragility, a humanity and a sheer ordinariness to her voice that draws the listener in, adding an emotional depth to the otherwise formal intent of her work, which is about the way that sound can fill, explain and animate a space.

A six-part piece, Surround Me, commissioned by Artangel, can currently be experienced in various locations around the City of London: walkers happen upon the melancholy sounds of 16th- and 17th-century English madrigals and rounds as they wander past London Bridge, the Bank of England and the strange brutalist walkways of the financial district.

Philipsz has, for the last nine years, lived in Berlin with her partner Eoghan McTigue; it's a city that's home to so many British artists, including Gordon, Ceal Floyer, and former Turner prize nominees Tacita Dean and Phil Collins. She plans to host a Burns night this year, with homemade haggis (she honed her technique last year by stuffing enough offal into a pig's stomach to feed 30 people, brave woman).

She has no plans to come home, though she can sound wistful about Scotland and London. But then a hint of wistfulness seems to flow through both Philipsz and her work. "I sometimes miss – Eoghan would laugh at me, he doesn't think I can change a lightbulb – I sometimes miss the physicality of making things," she says.

But, as Serota said at the prize ceremony, with an ironic nod in the direction of the chants of the demonstrators, now seems to be all about sound.

 

This article is from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/07/susan-philipsz-turner-prize

Film house, center receive $35,000 for their programs



[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee.[/caption]


Belcourt Theatre, Frist get art grants


By Stephanie Toone

The National Endowment for the Arts recently approved $35,000 in grants for a Hillsboro Village film house and downtown's renowned visual arts center.



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The NEA awarded a $20,000 grant to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts for its upcoming Vishnu: Hinduism's Blue-Skinned Savior exhibit, which will open on Feb. 20, said Susan Edwards, executive director for the center.

The agency also presented a $15,000 grant to Belcourt Theatre for its Repertory Film and Visiting Artists program.

"I think it says we're one of the most creative communities in the United States," Edwards said. "This is so exciting for us. This will help us show the culture and complexities of Hinduism."

The two Nashville arts organizations were among 1,057 nonprofits to receive the first round of 2011 grants from NEA, said Liz Stark, NEA spokeswoman. The first round of grants will distribute more than $26 million to arts agencies. The second round of recipients will be announced in spring 2011. Since Congress established the agency in 1965, it's awarded more than $4 billion in grants to agencies for innovation, artistic excellence and creativity that benefit the community.

Stephanie Silverman, managing director at Belcourt, said receiving the $15,000 NEA grant will ensure that cinematographers, producers and filmmakers will continue to lecture at Belcourt as a part of its visiting artists program. The funds will supplement the expense of shipping film roles from places such as France, Tokyo and Argentina, she said.

"We had about 20 visiting artists come in and speak this year, and we show hundreds of films each year. Half of those are our repertory films," Silverman said. "It can be unbelievably expensive to ship these prints, so this funding will allow us not to rule that out."

The Frist Center will utilize its artistic excellence grant to support its upcoming exhibition focusing on one of Hinduism's deities, Vishnu. The works will give insight to he meanings and culture of Hinduism's Vaishnava tradition. At the end of the Nashville run, the artwork will be placed at Brooklyn Museum of Art.

"There are three major deities, and there have been major exhibitions on the others, but this is the first to deal with this God and his many incarnations," she said. "We've been working with the Hindu community in Middle Tennessee because we want to present all cultures and help people see the world in a new way."

The installation of the exhibition will begin next month after the Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from Musee d'Orsay ends its run at the Frist.

The Frist Center and Belcourt Theatre offer the local community different forms of visual arts, but both organizations serve the same purpose, Silverman said.

"We're venues that contribute to Nashville's deep and rich artistic community," she said. "The NEA is a national nod to what we're doing locally. That's a real compliment."

Charles Fazzino, Pop Artist: Official FTL Centennial Artist and Unofficial Visual Historian

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By Leslie Minora,

The city of Fort Lauderdale and 3-D pop artist Charles Fazzino have a mutual love for each other that began with his post-college art-peddling and partying days in the '80s and has ballooned into his role as the city's Official Centennial Artist and Official Artist of the Winterfest Boat Parade. But Fazzino, whose work is well-known globally, is significant to the city in more than name alone. He was commissioned to create Fort Lauderdale's official centennial poster in his signature bold, playful, 3-D style. It serves as a visual documentation of the city's culture with a nod and wink at its past and present (think: Indians and Elbo Room). Fazzino also created the official 3-D poster for Winterfest 2010 (think: glittery Santa with a blonde, bikini-clad "Miss Clause" around his arm).
Fazzino's work is fun. There's really no better way to describe it. In addition to his posters for Winterfest and Fort Lauderdale's 100th, he will open his exhibit, "Faces of Fort Lauderdale," showcasing invented characters representative of historical SoFla types in his largest exhibit ever at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. His 100th anniversary poster and museum exhibit will both be unveiled on Thursday. The Juice caught up with Fazzino, who is known for his collage-style commemorative pop-art works, to learn more about his vibrant Fort Lauderdale art extravaganza.

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Click here for more information on his museum exhibit.
...and here to see more of Fazzino's work



Your work is consistent and very distinctive. How did you find this niche within the art world?
On Broward Boulevard, there used to be an arts and crafts store. I don't know if it's still around, this was in the '80s. I was doing the same artwork, but flat. I went into this arts and crafts store, and there was this large table set up, and it said "Class in Paper Toiling Today," and you had all of these little old ladies, and they were cutting with scissors, and they were taking wrapping paper of Raggedy Ann and Andy, Mickey Mouse. They were stacking them in 3D with glue, and they were layering each one. I said, "This is so interesting, this 3-D thing."

So, I took the class for $10, bought one of their little kits, and I made it. I took one of my paintings and I took it to a local printer -- color copies. I cut them out. I made them 3D and had an outdoor art show in New York...I had sold all 20 of them. You think back that you'd be doing this 30 years later, and what it did for my career because I was the first one to do something different.


How do you make the 3-D posters?
First it starts as an original painting, and from the original painting, we make handmade prints. I have a staff of artists that work with me in my studio in New York. We cut them out with an Exacto knife, layer them with gobs of silicone glue and hot glue, and then build it up into layers.


The big ones I do -- they're one of a kind and they're also done the same way but they have a different sculptural look. Some are on canvas, some are on paper, and then part of the museum exhibit are vision-o-graphs.

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These are actually plexiglass boxes, each one is lit up with either special lighting or other embellishments like fiberoptics. If you notice, all of the eyes are gone, and so you look through the eyes, and inside are layers of plexiglass and on each layer tells a story of the person who lived in that decade in Florida.
Each one is a portrait that you can look through their eyes to their soul...This one [Shane McDonald] is really cool. This one has a disco ball inside moving with strobe lights hitting it, so when you look into it, you see a hot party going on and it shows you layers of plexi glass inside and all the research I did on the club scene here in the '80s, which I knew some about because I used to come down here in the '80s. Fort Lauderdale has been about partying. 1980s was a big time.


How did you choose characters for this exhibit?

Each one is made up. They're based on historical events that happened in one of those decades, but they're made up stories for each person.


Where does your work fall in the spectrum between commercial art and fine art?

I think for anybody who does anything commercial like I do, there's always a fine line that you're walking. But I think I've managed to do it well. I try to keep everything that I do -- the three-dimensional ones -- limited edition and make them really beautiful looking and hand made. I don't use anything that is stamped or commercially done.




How is Fort Lauderdale different than other places you've been commissioned to depict in your work?

Fort Lauderdale was perfect that I was commissioned to do it because I used to come down here. I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York, and I drove down here [right after college] in my van, filled with my art work, and I used to display my work at the Las Olas Art Show, the Coconut Grove art show in the early 1980s.  So it's kind of nice that I've spent all this time here...I actually watched them building the [museum]. I remember saying to myself, "God I wish I'd have a show there someday." That's what's so nice about it -- 25 years came full circle.





Gilliam reveals the surreal world of Monty Python art



[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]John Cleese (right) and Michael Palin (left) o...[/caption]


By Laura Allsop for CNN

London, England (CNN) -- Few are in doubt that the legendary Monty Python troupe elevated comedy to an art form. But visual art was as much a part of their identity as silly walks and great songs.

Original Python and film director Terry Gilliam was responsible for the iconic animations that acted as buffers between sketches, as well as the opening credits of the TV series "Monty Python's Flying Circus" that ran from 1969 to 1974, as well as the Python films that would follow.

Instantly recognizable, they were anarchic sequences that often took famous works of art such as Botticelli's "Venus" and sculptures by Auguste Rodin, and forced them into unlikely situations for comic effect.

Gilliam, an American whose film directing credits include "Twelve Monkeys," "Brazil," "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," began his career as an animator and strip cartoonist.

After meeting John Cleese in New York, Gilliam went on to form Monty Python with Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Cleese. Gilliam was initially brought in to do animations, though he later had some notable comic roles in the sketches.

Describing his aesthetic for the Monty Python animations, Gilliam said: "Mine was just anything I could lay my hands on, that was free and cheap and that I could cut up and move around."

"I used to always go down to the National Gallery (in London) when I was running out of ideas and I just wandered through and in fifteen minutes, I had a million ideas," he said.

"Basically, I communicated with paintings, had a little dialogue with a painting, either taking the piss out of it or treating it with respect. Those things just intrigued me," he continued.

In London to promote "The Ministry of Silly Games," a Facebook game using imagery and sketches from the show, both Gilliam and Python Terry Jones explained that art not only influenced the animations but also the content of many of their acts.

"Both of us are huge Bruegel and Bosch fans," Gilliam said. "(It's a) kind of a medievalist view of the world which seems to me to be a lot more alive and interesting than most of the iconography of our modern world."

Indeed, medieval hags and dim-witted knights cropped up regularly in their sketches and in the 1975 film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," a comedy mash-up of Arthurian legends.

But if the vibrant worlds of 16th century Dutch painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel provided inspiration for the Pythons' imagery and set pieces, other art movements were less helpful to their vision.

"The Renaissance was a disaster," Jones said. "Art suddenly got po-faced. You know, it was all being paid for by these fascistic dictators in Italy."

Gilliam's animations could be described as filmic collages for their use of cut-outs and found material, and for the way that their narratives are spliced together seemingly randomly.

Figures are grafted onto the bodies of animals; a couch potato has his eyes sucked out by the TV set; and an enormous foot descends from the sky periodically to squash the figures below.

Though surreal, Gilliam maintains that their aesthetic was not violent and that he finds current video games overly so.

"I mean, we created interesting worlds full of odd, bizarre, surprising elements and I think that's what gamers seem to want," he said.

"I don't know, most games I look at it seem to be incredibly violent. Our violence was much funnier -- bloodier -- but funnier," he continued.

Gilliam's distinct visual style is evidenced in his films, which are often fantastical and colorful forays into strange worlds, as with "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", "Tideland" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

The animations he developed with Monty Python, he said, influenced his later film style.

"Those were cartoons which were distorted, grotesque, the world is twisted, and it's kind of the same thing," he said.

Though it is just over 40 years since "Monty Python's Flying Circus" was first aired on British television, neither Jones nor Gilliam is slowing down. Gilliam is working to get his famously beleaguered film "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" off the ground and both he and Jones will be directing separate operas in the UK in the coming year.

"I'm trying to do something new in my dotage," said Gilliam of the process of directing "The Damnation of Faust" for the English National Opera in 2011.

"I'm terrified frankly, but we march on."

 

This article is from: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/12/08/monty.python.art/

Philadelphia History Museum Selling Thousands of Items From Collection

Museum Sells Pieces of Its Past, Reviving a Debate


By ROBIN POGREBIN

PHILADELPHIA — A galloping horse weather vane sold for about $20,000, and the cigar store Indians brought in more than $1 million. A Thomas Sully oil painting of Andrew Jackson netted $80,500, and a still life by Raphaelle Peale, part of the family that put portraiture in this city on the map, was auctioned at Christie’s for $842,500.



These were just a few of more than 2,000 items quietly sold by the Philadelphia History Museum over the last several years, all part of an effort to cull its collection of 100,000 artifacts and raise money for a $5.8 million renovation of its 1826 building.

In doing so the museum stepped into the quicksand of murky rules, guidelines and ethical strictures meant to discourage museums everywhere from selling collections to pay bills. It is one of the hottest issues in the museum world today. With budgets shrinking in a bad economy, the pressure to generate revenue is growing along with fears that museums are squandering public trusts meant to preserve the artifacts of the past for future generations.

The National Academy Museum in New York, Fisk University and Brandeis have all recently drawn fire — and even sanctions — for selling or planning to sell artworks, and none of them sold as many works as the museum here.

In general art and objects are supposed to be sold only to finance acquisitions, though different museums are governed by different standards. Art museums, regulated by a formal code of the Association of Art Museum Directors, may not sell work for any other reason.

As a history museum, though, this institution — formally called the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent — is subject to separate, less stringent guidelines put forward by other associations. So museum officials say the installation of new carpet, paint and lighting were all legitimate expenses to be paid from the proceeds under the guidelines of the American Association of Museums, which say that sales can be used for the “direct care” of a collection. Adding to the confusion, there is a third set of standards maintained by the American Association for State and Local History permitting proceeds to go toward the “preservation” of a collection, a similarly broad term.

The New York State legislature, confronting this maze of precepts, recently considered passing a law that would make selling collections — the art world term is deaccessioning — to pay operating expenses illegal. It never made it to the Assembly floor because museums opposed it.

Some museum professionals say that having differing guidelines for art and history museums only fosters confusion at a time when finding any means of raising money is especially appealing.

“This rapidly becomes a slippery slope,” said Derick Dreher, the director of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. “What museum director wouldn’t be tempted to say that air-conditioning is absolutely crucial for care of collections? Heating, humidification and dehumidification, similarly. But if we go down this road, we end up paying our gas, electric and water bills — classic operations costs — with deaccessioning proceeds.”

But, some argue, museums sometimes have to pare down their collections to remain viable. “Museums really cannot continue to accumulate and accumulate and accumulate ad infinitum,” said Janet C. Marstine, founding director of the Insitute of Musuem Ethics at Seton Hall University and now a lecturer and program director at the University of Leicester. “What does one do with former acquisitions policies that did not make sense, or not having an acquisitions policy, or having so many objects they can’t care for or don’t really fit within their purpose?”

The Philadelphia History Museum, which has been closed for nearly two years for renovations, hopes to finance the completion of the project — about $1.5 million — from the sale of “an artifact” it would not identify. It views its sales as falling within the history museum guidelines.

“We view the entire reconstruction project as preserving and caring for our largest artifact, the building,” said Gregory J. Kleiber, the museum’s treasurer, “and making possible the display and conservation under museum-appropriate conditions of the other pieces of our collection.”

The state and local history association — which serves nearly 4,000 institutions — said that history museums resist easy definition and therefore make rigid regulation difficult. “History artifacts include everything from locomotives to artwork — it’s a very broad type of collection — so it’s really hard to set one ethics statement that covers the kaleidoscopic nature of the history collections,” said Terry Davis, the association’s president. “We intentionally leave our policies — our ethics statement — rather loose. Our belief is a board should take the ethics statement and make thoughtful decisions about what’s best for the care of their collections.”

Ford W. Bell, the president of the American Association of Museums, acknowledged that his group’s policy was “less clear” than the one governing art museums, and that whether or not a history museum’s sales fit within the guidelines “is somewhat subjective.”

“In general, we hope that museums will not use the collections as an asset to support the operations of the museum or things that are not directed to collections’ care or buying new objects,” Mr. Bell said.



In selling items, the Philadelphia History Museum’s officials say they are trying to maintain their collections responsibly within limited storage capacity and to keep the institution focused on its core purpose. In addition to large-ticket items, the museum has sold relatively minor pieces, like two wooden 19th-century rocking chairs (one in need of caning), which together brought $35, and assorted lithographs of New York City from the mid-19th century, which went for $12.50. Some objects have been given to other institutions.

“We’ve collected a lot of things over the years, many of which have very little to do with our mission as a history museum,” said Mr. Kleiber, the treasurer, who was president of the museum from September 2007 to September 2010.

“We want to continue the process, to continue looking at what doesn’t fit our needs and move forward,” he added. “We were very conscious when we started the process that this sort of thing raises eyebrows. We feel we’ve been very careful and very thoughtful about the entire thing.”

The history museum initially said it had no record of how many items it had sold, how much the sales had brought in or where the proceeds had been directed. “I’m sure there are records around,” Mr. Kleiber said. “I’m not sure I’ve seen them.”

The museum later acknowledged that between 2003 and 2009 it sold 2,595 items at Philadelphia-area auction houses, earning a total of about $115,000. Another 64 items — some of which were transferred to the museum in 2001 by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which shared in the proceeds — were auctioned at Christie’s, bringing in $3.4 million. The museum has sold “mountains of stuff,” Mr. Kleiber said, but much of it is only “little bits of paper, odd bits of this and little bits of that.”

Some museum professionals say the institution should have been more transparent about its sales, explaining what it was selling and why.

“I wish some of these things were staying here and wish there had been a greater opportunity for local museums to purchase them,” said Page Talbott, a trustee of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. “There wasn’t time built into it, to have a conversation about it. The sale had already been planned and catalogs printed.”

Others say the scope of the sales is troubling. “The motivation appears to be liquidation, rather than preserving the embedded knowledge and experience that these artifacts bring,” said Kenneth Finkel, lecturer in American studies at Temple University who briefly served as deputy director of the museum. “Decisions made by donors and curators and libraries become the legacy. And the decision to deaccession stupidly is also a legacy.”

Many of the more prominent works sold were paintings done by members of the Peale family, whose most famous member, Charles Willson Peale, is viewed as the founder of America’s first major museum, which operated in Philadelphia in the 1800s. “There is nothing that’s more centrally Philadelphian than the Peale family,” said Mr. Dreher of the Rosenbach museum. “Though I respect the museum’s right to act as it did, it’s taking away the opportunity for the public in and around Philadelphia to be enlightened by these works, and now one of the best stories can’t be told because it’s gone.”

Mr. Kleiber said that making sales more public is “something we’ll consider.”

Regarding the Raphaelle Peale still life, one of the more valuable items sold at Christie’s, Mr. Kleiber said: “The Peale we felt was very much outside the mission. We’re a history museum, not an art museum. It’s a picture of a fish.”

 

This Article is from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/arts/design/06sales.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

The Art Center's Executive Director's Books Don't Add Up

Woman Accused of Stealing From Carnegie Visual Arts Ctr.


Laura Phillips

Decatur, AL - A two month long investigation has led to the arrest of the former Executive Director of the Carnegie Visual Arts Center.

According to Decatur Police, the Center reported several discrepancies in their financial records on October 13th. Police found that the money was being moved into other accounts not associated with the Center. The accounts allegedly belonged to Laura Harris Phillips, the former Executive Director. She had resigned from the post after the money was moved, but before police got involved in the investigation.

Further investigation showed that items has been purchased with the missing funds that were not authorized by the Center. In all, police say the funds transferred to Phillips' prsonal accounts and the unauthorized transactions totaled more than $50,000.

Phillips was arrested at her home and charged with theft on Tuesday.

She's being held in the Morgan County Jail.

This article is from: http://www.waaytv.com/news/local/story/Woman-Accused-of-Stealing-From-Carnegie-Visual/akM14VRpP0OwB8GGKUVsBA.cspx

Hockney in Pixels

In Paris, A Display From Hockney's Pixelated Period




by Susan Stamberg

Purple flowers in a green-and-rose vase on a blue background

David Hockney thinks his current exhibition may be the first one that's ever been 100 percent e-mailed to a gallery. The 73-year-old artist is standing in the space in question — the Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation in Paris — trying to talk about the works, when his iPhone rings.

"I'm right in the middle of an interview," he says, laughing. "I'm sorry — wait a minute — I am, actually." Then, to the reporter: "I'll turn it off."

And he does, though it might have been more fun if he hadn't: He might have made us a new artwork right on the phone — a little vase of flowers, or a face, or a landscape.

When Hockney first got the device about two years ago, he immediately realized it was a new medium for creativity.

"Incredible little thing, really, because it was like a sketchbook and a paintbox all in one," the artist says. Better, even: "No cleaning up. No mess."

That's because he's painting with an app called Brushes — a small virtual paintbox on the phone's screen, into which Hockney dips a finger — or 10 — and makes pictures.

"He started out sending out these images — little images that he would make on his iPhone — to his friends," says installation designer Ali Tayar. "You wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning, and you're trying to go back to sleep, but on your computer is one of his images," Tayar says. "That is a treat — a 'Hi,' a little flower."

Capturing The Morning, With Light Instead Of Inks

Hockney started making these vibrant digital "paintings" early in the morning at his home in Yorkshire, England.

A dusk-pink rose in a crystal jug on a dark-blue background

"From about late April to July, the sunrise would hit me in bed," he explains. But "if I'd [only] had a pencil and paper by the bed, I wouldn't have drawn a sunrise."

Black lead, white paper; not that much to get up for, really. But Hockney had his iPhone by the bed, so he could draw the sunrise on the phone, in color.

Then the sun hit a vase of flowers near the bed. Hockney painted that, too. More mornings, more paintings, until he'd made hundreds and hundreds.

"Some were drawn quite quickly," he says, "Some were drawn over two or three mornings, meaning I'd go back to them. And I sent them out — lovely thing was, I could send them out to my friends. ... Often they were getting the sunrise that they'd missed."

As you might guess, the people on his list — a couple of dozen or so — said they loved receiving those early-morning e-mails.

For A Few Weeks, 'Fresh Flowers,' And Then A Sudden Fade

Then Hockney heard about the larger iPad. The artist has always carried a small sketchbook with him. Now he carries the electronic equivalent. The creative experience is different on the bigger device, he says.

"On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb," he says. "Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger."

And he really gets into it, reports curator Charlie Scheips.

"He says he sometimes gets so obsessed that when he's going, he rubs his finger on his clothes to, like, clean his finger — as if he was using real paint."

Scheips coordinated the Paris show, a riot of non-paint paintings on luminous digital screens. One wall at the gallery is hung with 20 iPhones; a second wall carries 20 iPads. (The Berge-St. Laurent Foundation paid for all the devices — it's not an Apple-backed effort, it says.)

All the gadgets are turned on 24 hours a day, and from time to time Hockney e-mails a new work to one of them — a kind of artistic status update.

The show, called "Fresh Flowers," closes at the end of January. And then, installation designer Ali Tayar says, all the art will disappear.

"It's not the traditional painting," he muses. "It really doesn't exist. It's just light on a screen."

Pink flowers in a crystal jug on a blue background

You could print a Hockney e-mail, if you were lucky enough to get one, but it would lose something in translation without that brilliant backlighting. The work only lives on these gadgets.

There's another hurdle, of course.

"We haven't figured out how to get paid," Hockney says. "At the moment it doesn't matter, but I will have to figure it out like everybody else."

Meantime, he's having fun making art with this newfangled but basically old-fashioned instrument. So are loads of other artists who are bringing back drawing this way, making works on digital devices.

Curator Scheips says Hockney has always been forward-looking — years ago he made collages with Polaroid pictures, and used home copying machines for other works. This new phase, Scheips thinks, is just the logical next step.

But it's a big step, artistically.

"These things are all about surfaces," Scheips says. "It's all about mark-making. ... These drawings — they may be small physically, but they're big and important in terms of his total oeuvre. And he thinks that this medium is gonna change the world."

 

This article is from: http://www.npr.org/2010/12/07/131854461/in-paris-a-display-from-hockney-s-pixelated-period