Wednesday 5 August 2009

Tuesday 4 August 2009


old Greek cypriot poster found at following website http://www.wineloverspage.com/reports/nicoscyprus05.phtml

greek propaganda poster



found at website http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/pics/Greek-propaganda-poster.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/cyprus.htm&usg=__X-c65EtKIrasFbdjet1fZkavXvk=&h=432&w=286&sz=14&hl=en&start=7&sig2=LyI9-vtV5MkUDRrh-TBOlg&um=1&tbnid=8en8ZRnr3onL7M:&tbnh=126&tbnw=83&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcypriot%2Bnationalist%2Bposters%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=FLN4SompLIywjAfyuJWwBg

turkish propaganda poster



found at following website http://images.onesite.com/my.telegraph.co.uk/user/john_akritas/20080403201824.jpg


My comments: interesting image indicating the historical relationship of the two nationalisms from the Greek perspective. Image found at theWood Engraving & Woodcut section of the HAMBIS PRINTMAKING SCHOOL - MUSEUM website online collection at http://www.hambisprintmakingcenter.org.cy/wood_engraving.htm

Rinos Stefani



image from the HAMBIS PRINTMAKING SCHOOL - MUSEUM at http://www.hambisprintmakingcenter.org.cy/linoleum.htm

the artist website at http://www.hambisprintmakingcenter.org.cy/linoleum.htm

Toyshefki (Toygun Shefki)



Photography
Toyshefki (Toygun Shefki)
"QIBRIS: Aspects of a people and culture" (1995), photography

QIBRIS is more than just a book, it is cultural album of 42 photographs taken by the famous Turkish-Cypriot photography artist Toygun Shefki (also known as Toyshefki), from 15 years of documentary photographic studies of Turkish Cypriot life style and traditions.
From shepherd to cafes, all are contained within 72 high quality pages which you will treasure and share with family and friends for years to come.

(text from the "turkish-cypriot online museum of fine art", artist link

The Bath by Sümer Erek




The Bath
Multi disciplinary project
Installation - Liverpool Biennial - Independent 2002
St. John's Market, Ranleigh Street, Liverpool
Mixed Media - bathtub, 1000 red roses, canvas, tiles, water
Dimensions - (240cmx360cmx380cm)

Text by MEGAKLES ROGAKOS - September 2002
At first glance the work of Sumer appears to be wonderfully diverse. On second thought however, and taking into account his 'Upside Down House' installation of 2001, Erek's art shares a common denominator; a consistent concern with the human condition. Sumer creates multi-disciplinary installations to explore issues around selfhood and the self's relationship to its environment.
'The Bath' is a case of transformation, the metaphysical space where the dream meets its death or - as Sumer describes it - a 'death-bath of a dream'. 'The Bath' then becomes a vehicle for the so-called 'memento mori'; a reminder that everything with life must die. Taking off from autobiography, Sumer offers 'The Bath' as a cosmological expression. Being a place where one can find peace, relax, dream, and fantasize, 'The Bath' inspires the romantic vision of hovering red roses suspended over the bathtub. Nonetheless, death is lurking; death not literally, as suicide, murder or passing away of a person, but metaphorically, through the withering of the roses. Sumer dramatizes the dream's drive to death by inviting the public to experience his installation by using the bath. The occasional bathers loose themselves by entering a total dimension of vision and sound.

THE BATH by SUMER EREK
CREDITS: CO-ORDINATOR & CURATOR MIKE HURST / FUNDING A-FOUNDATION, InAF / SUPPORT KAREN JANODY, URUN KILIC, CHRISTOPHER SCHAPER, GORDON WEBBER, NICK BIRCH, SAM ABDULLA / RESEARCH MEGAKLES ROGAKOS / PERFORMANCES CONCEPT & DIRECTION SUMER EREK / MUSIC & SOUND DESIGN VERGIL SHARKYA / OBOE CAIT WALKER / PERFORMERS JO BLOWERS, GAYNOR EVELYN SWEENEY, ANDY GARCIA, MONICA BELLO, BEN YOUDAN, ANGELINE FOULKES, TONY KNOX, AMINA BIHI, BETH KYRIAKIDES & OTHERS

http://www.sumererek.com/

Tracey Emin: My Life In A Column


Tracey Emin: My Life In A Column
'All the love and forgiveness in the world never stops me asking the same five words: Why did you leave us?'

Friday, 9 May 2008SHARE PRINTEMAILTEXT SIZE NORMALLARGEEXTRA LARGE
I am lying on my bed. It's rock hard and slightly bumpy and the pillows are very flat and combobulated.

I don't know if that's the right word to describe the pillows, but when you lay your head on them they give the sensation of being made up of lots of individual bobbles, which are very hard. The whole experience is somehow very basic, yet strangely satisfying. I can hear the sea roaring, and if I sit up straight I can see the blue of the Mediterranean touch the blue of the Mediterranean sky.

I'm in Cyprus, an island that for years has been divided in two, and I would say, extremely unhappily. The first time I came here was 1984. The civil war was still fresh in people's memories, and everywhere had a very heavy military presence. But now, nearly a quarter of a century later, Northern Cyprus has been left in a confused, driftwood state of no man's land.

Northern Cyprus, once untouched and unspoilt simply because nobody had the courage or the permission to invest, is now fast becoming a hideous world of cheap and tacky villas. An overrun and overbuilt sprawling mass of fake mediterraneana. So much in this part of the world is not real. Breezeblocks are clad with fibreglass rocks, wooden doors are made of plastic and brass is painted aluminium.

There is a certain amount of Cypriot culture in terms of taste, which has always been able to win me over, enchant me. The chintzy plastic tablecloths, plastic soup bowls with cherries on them, fountains in the shape of dolphins, ad-hoc gardens, which border on either the insane or genius. Grapevines stand next to bougainvillea, strawberries grow in the shadows of tomatoes, all these kind of things are in general a Mediterranean way of being. But sadly, in the last 15 years, Northern Cyprus has lost its way.

Tiny hotels double their room-size overnight. They make more space on land by claiming the sea. They build, casting giant shadows where the sun should shine. Almost nothing is thought through. For miles and miles, signs say "Turtle Bay Villas", "Turtle Beach Villas", "Mediterranean Heights". Turtle this and Turtle that where once turtles used to live.

I want to feel the magic of Cyprus. I want to imagine Cleopatra bathing in her pool. I want to think of her and Mark Antony making love as they watch the sun set behind the copper mines; the mines which once incarcerated Pontius Pilate; the copper mines which now lie derelict and disused.

I have only ever been to the Greek side of Cyprus once and that was to visit the graves of my family – graves which were all well kept and neatly looked-after in a tiny little cemetery.

My ancestral connection with Cyprus goes back a long, long way, but my now only real connection at the moment is my dad. He is 87 and he infuriates me. I can never see him without feeling angry. All the love in the world and all the forgiveness never stops me from asking him the same five words: "Why did you leave us?" This conversation always comes up. I always feel that we are two extras in a play.

The sun is an almighty spotlight and the Troodos Mountains are our stage. I feel like every word we are saying to each other is being recorded. My dad tells me that he is unlucky. I hear myself say back: "No Daddy, you are not unlucky. How did you ever think you would get away with it?

"You treated your wife cruelly, my mum badly, and one by one you let your children down." And the last line of the play is always the same: "Dad, why should I look after you when you have never looked after me?" Then the curtain falls and I walk away, always wondering if these are the last words I will ever say to him.

Sometimes, when my dad makes me angry, I just won't see him for six months and then I hope that when I see him I would have missed him so much that the anger would have gone, but in reality nothing gets resolved this way. Like the island of Cyprus being divided in two (just for the record my dad speaks better Greek then he does Turkish) for years and years, the separation has only cost the people of Cyprus dear.

Yesterday I drove through the Green Line – the line which divides southern Cyprus from Northern Cyprus, the Greeks from the Turks. A no man's land of barbed wire, corrugated iron and hundreds upon thousands of shelled out derelict buildings. Miles and miles of something which looked like a strange set from an apocalyptic film. A void of terror and emptiness, the evidence of the futility of war.

Every time I think of Cyprus I always think of it as the perfect example of a disagreement unresolved. So much sad bitterness from the past that has only become magnified towards the reconstruction of the future.

As my dad becomes older, I feel Cyprus slipping away from me. When I was younger, my ability to always look for the positive, to rejoice in its idiosyncrasies becomes increasingly more difficult, as I see its natural beauty being eaten up by greed.

Every time I leave Cyprus, I have the same fear. When I board the plane I imagine that one day I will be boarding the plane with the body of my father and at the same time the door will close behind me.

A door to a Mediterranean island that will then always remain closed.

More from Tracey Emin

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/tracey-emin/tracey-emin-my-life-in-a-column-824251.html

Hasan Öztürk


"Hala Sultan Tekke",
watercolor and drawing mix (49 x 64 cm)



Born in Larnaca, Cyprus in 1909. A self-taught painter, the artist did not have a formal education, and taught himself to read and write. The theme of his earlier paintings were the sea and life at port, reflecting the environment he was working then at the docks.
In 1964 he joined the Fine Arts Association and participated in many of the group's nature-visit paintings. His later paintings focused on observations of the nature and paintings of portraits.
The artist died in 1981. Maras Emek Cultural Asssociation of Famagusta organised a tribute exhibition of his paintings in memory of the artist after his death. Öztürk's paintings are mostly in private collections.
(text from the Turkish-Cypriot online museum of fine arts)

Sunday 2 August 2009




http://www.pbs.org/art21/education/abstraction/lesson2.html
Lesson 2—Cartoon Commentary

Cartoons are often conceived as both humorous and deeply serious. Combining both fictional and non-fictional elements, cartoons have been used as a subversive or radical medium to comment on and critique the mainstream. Often providing a forum for visual protest, political cartoons present diverse perspectives on the pertinent issues of the day. Whether in form or content, many contemporary artists have a strong connection to the comic aesthetic and the comic critique. Drawing from their work, this lesson explores how cartoons use both representational and abstract visual language and messages to narrate social and political concerns.

Walton Ford creates large-scale watercolors of animals and humans interacting in Audubon-like landscapes with biting social and historical commentary. Kerry James Marshall has created the comic strip RYTHM MASTR, which presents a contemporary super hero based on a traditional Yoruba god and myth. Raymond Pettibon’s paintings and drawings suggest political or satirical statements about everything from baseball to American presidents. Kara Walker's notecards and silhouette images tell provocative stories about race, sexuality, and power through the visual landscape of the Civil War South.

objectives

• Students will research the history of political cartoons.

• Students will compare and contrast the work of political cartoons found in mass media like newspapers and magazines, with political cartoons and political commentary found in contemporary art.

• Students will create their own political cartoons commenting on a pertinent social or political issue of the time.

materials & resources

Art:21 Web Site
• ("Liberty Bros. Permanent Daily Circus")...– Michael Ray Charles art work
• "RYTHM MASTR" —Kerry James Marshall interview
• Political Humor & Colonial Critique—Walton Ford interview
• Political Cartoons, Patty Hearst...—Raymond Pettibon interview
• Projection Fictions—Insurrection!... —Kara Walker interview

Additional Web Sites
• http://cagle.slate.msn.com/politicalcartoons/
Current political cartoons and cartoonists from around the world
• http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/
A brief history of political cartoons
• http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/side/cartoon.html
History of political cartoons and bibliography
• http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/hogarth/main.html
William Hogarth
• http://www.umt.edu/partv/famus/print/daumier/daumier.htm
Honore Daumier Prints
• http://www.wesleyan.edu/dac/coll/grps/goya/goya_intro.html
Francisco Goya Prints
• http://www.icaboston.org/exhibits/splat.cfm
Rhytm Mastr

Classroom Materials
• Additional Sunday comic section of local newspapers and magazines, current of past editions

critical questions
• What are the differences between cartoons and other visual media that critique or comment?

• How do cartoons address political or social causes?

• What is the history of political cartoons and how have they reflected the pertinent issues of the day?

• What are the most significant genres of political cartoons and how did they become the most significant?

• How is humor related to cartoons, political or otherwise? Are there limits to humor?


activities

The Sunday Comics
Look at a current Sunday paper with a comics section and ask students to categorize each of the comics presented into types or themes. Collect a variety of Sunday papers from around the country and repeat the exercise with other newspapers from urban or rural areas, West coast, Midwest, or East coast papers. Consider how the categories or themes are similar or different in different areas.
(Time: One 45 minute session)


Are Political Cartoons Funny?
Humor plays different roles in political cartoons from different eras and addressing different subject areas. Discuss the element of humor embedded in political cartoons. Ask students to discuss if there are limits to humor and what they are. What are the implications of using irony, satire, or sarcasm when addressing issues of diversity, poverty or homelessness? Are there subjects or issues that are not appropriate for use with humor? How does this relate to the 1st Amendment’s right to freedom of speech? Vote on the funniest comic in the Sunday paper and discuss why it was funny. Repeat the exercise for the least funny.
(Time: Half a 45 minute session)


A History of Visual Commentary
Discuss the history of political cartoons from religious and political editorials during the Protestant reformation in Germany to the impressionistic caricatures being made during the early Renaissance in Italy. Using examples of political prints made by Francisco Goya, William Hogarth, and Honore Daumier, discuss the combination of parody, protest, caricature, symbolism, allusion, metaphor and humor that exist within these early political cartoons. Discuss how these three artists used political cartoons to comment on the political events of their time. Based on the images, have students describe the political issues they are portraying. Ask students to describe what the artists’ personal stance on the issue is and how it is similar to or different from the stance of a history textbook takes.
(Time: One 45 minute session)


Pettibon and Americana
Introduce students to the work of Raymond Pettibon through the Season Two video segment and Web transcripts. Have students compare and contrast the images and text he is using with the images and text they saw in the work of Goya, Hogarth, and Daumier. Ask students to identify the subjects Pettibon is dealing with in his images and how they reflect the place and time of the artist. Ask students what are other ways they would describe Pettibon’s images. How is Pettibon’s use of image and text different from the earlier examples of political cartoons? Pettibon does not consider himself a political artist. Ask students if they agree or disagree after looking at his work. Define the meaning(s) of the word 'political' and discuss whether cartoons are always political even if they do not have overt political messages or meanings.
(Time: One 45 minute session)


Ford and Walker on Social Commentary
Through his paintings, Walton Ford directly confronts the history of colonialism as well as a very personal family legacy of slave-owners from the American South. His images address this particular history in satirical and often provocative ways. Have students look at a series of Ford’s paintings and prints and discuss how his images are similar to or different from the images of Kara Walker’s in terms of tone, subject matter, and imagery. Because Ford is commenting on a very particular history, ask students to identify what his images convey in terms of historical fact and personal fiction. Kara Walker also creates imagery based on the contentious history of the American South. Her silhouette images suggest the painful past of slavery and violence that still haunt the American psyche. How are Ford’s images of historic events and places different from Kara Walker’s. Ask students to describe the fact and fiction presented in both of their work. Ask students to describe the way each artist presents a visual commentary on the history of the South.
(Time: One 45 minute session)


Marshall and New Translations
Another contemporary artist who incorporates the language and the aesthetic of cartoons and comics in his work is Kerry James Marshall. His comic book, RYTHM MASTR, creates a contemporary protagonist from a traditional Yoruba deity and combines African history, mythology and a love of fantasy with a contemporary medium and story. RYTHM MASTR is not a political story but has obvious political implications about representing history and culture. Discuss how RYTHM MASTR is different from contemporary comic books and contemporary political cartoons. Discuss the political issues being addressed in the work and how they reflect the current issues and ideas that Kerry James Marshall is interested in. Although less explicit, how do other comic books such as Marvel Comics or DC Comics, deal with political concerns and issues?
(Time: One 45 minute session)


Cartoon Commentary
Have students choose a current issue or political figure and create their own political cartoon. Ask students to consider which elements they will draw from to create their commentary - parody, protest, caricature, symbolism, allusion, metaphor or humor. Compile all of the cartoons and organize the different images into categories by subject or theme. Create a book of all of the cartoons with chapter introductions written by the students describing the particular theme or topic being addressed. Duplicate for all members of the class.
(Time: Five 45 minute sessions to long-term project)

reflection & evaluation

• Have students identified the various aspects of political cartoons and incorporated them into a cartoon of their own creation?

• Have students learned about the history of political cartoons?

• Have students created their own cartoons addressing a current issue, idea or event?

Find out how this lesson plan correlates to your state's education standards! On PBS TeacherSource do a search for "Art in the 21st Century" and click on the Standards Match icon.

going further

Using this lesson as a starting point, political cartoons from any era or artist can be used to explore the historical events, issues, concerns and figures from that time. In addition, the following lessons could be combined with this lesson to form a longer unit of study:

Characters and Caricatures
Honoring Heroes and History
War on Film

Did you use this lesson or generate your own activities based on ideas inspired by the lesson? Submit student art work, new lesson plans, and your comments to Art:21 and have them posted on the site. Help the Online Lesson Library grow!

additional lesson plans on featured artists

Walton Ford
Cartoon Commentary
Confronting Conflict
Landscape & Place
Describing the Real

Kerry James Marshall
Cartoon Commentary
Looking at Likeness
Understanding Home

Raymond Pettibon
Cartoon Commentary
Dictators, Collaborators, Managers & Soloists
Describing the Real
The Alter-Ego Saves the Day

Kara Walker
Cartoon Commentary
Characters & Caricatures
Confronting Conflict
Describing the Real
Looking at Likeness
Migrating Viewpoints

interview of art21 with Walton Ford



Political Humor & Colonial Critique
ART:21: Can you talk about the series of paintings you've been working on that deal with Sir Richard Burton?

FORD: I have this ongoing project that has to do with this African explorer, Sir Richard Burton, who I actually have pictures up on the wall in my studio. He was one of these 19th Century explorer guys that I’m particularly interested in. And he was a complete lunatic. He was a linguist and knew something like thirty or forty languages by the time he kicked. He translated the "Kama Sutra" into English. He translated "The Perfume Garden." He spoke Arabic and Hindustani. He spoke many languages very well, to the point of being mistaken for a native. He was stationed in India in the 1840's, during the Raj, as an English officer. And he was able to penetrate Mecca in disguise as some sort of Persian trader or something. And he had all these aliases. He was a spy. He was part of the great game—the whole kind of thing that Kipling talks about in "Kim."

The painting I’m working on now is a monkey banquet. It has something like nine or ten monkeys so far. I’m going to put more in. And it’s part of a series that has to do with Burton. He’s an endlessly fascinating character for me to study. But one of the stories that I was reading about him that stuck with me was this one about these monkeys that he kept in his quarters when he was a young British officer. And I’m going to read a quote that explains the painting:

“His language studies continued unabated and his interest in the science of the spoken word led him to conduct an interesting experiment with some pet monkeys. Curious as to whether primates used some form of speech to communicate, he gathered together forty monkeys of various ages and species and installed them in his house in an attempt to compile a vocabulary of monkey language. He learned to imitate their sounds, repeating them over and over. And he believed they understood some of them. Each monkey had a name, Isabel, his wife, explained. He had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and one tiny one, very pretty, small and silky looking monkey he used to call his wife and put pearls in her ears. His great amusement was to keep a kind of refectory for them where they all sat down on chairs at mealtimes and the servants waited on them and each had its bowl and plate with the food and drink proper for them. He sat at the head of the table and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a baby’s high chair.”—That’s just too good!—“He had a list of about sixty words before the experiment was concluded, but unfortunately the results were lost in a fire in 1860 in which almost all his early papers perished.”

And to me, this is just what I’m looking for when I’m doing all this reading. I do a lot of research and this thing has almost everything in it. It’s like a mini-history of colonialism right there, of the imperialist venture. He’s learning all the languages he can. He’s possessing as much of the culture as he can. There’s an erotic kind of fascination to it, like he’s got his wife. The whole thing is so wild. And yet there’s something sort of futile and hopeless about it. And then the whole thing goes up in flames. I mean it’s almost the history of the British in India. It’s too good!

So the painting I’m working on now is Burton's refectory, his amusement. And I’ve got the wife in the painting. The doctor, the aide-de-camp, the chaplain—they’re all in there. And I’ve assigned them all little personalities of their own. And as I was working on it, a little subtext crept in and I went with it—which is the painting is also an allegory of the senses. I have sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound in there as well, mixed in with the things. It seemed like the senses come to play in this sort of colonial experiment too. You know he’s just trying to experience.... Burton was one of the, great British minds and was endlessly curious. He wasn’t one of these people that talked about “bloody wogs.” It was more like he really wanted to understand the cultures he was immersed in. Not in an enlightened or politically correct way, but in a way to better serve his country and his cause, to serve this sort of empire. But head and shoulders he's more interesting than most of those guys. They looked down their nose at him and called him “Dirty Dick Burton.” They found him sort of filthy because he was so interested in the erotic and was interested in researching brothels and things like that. A little more than what made his mates comfortable over there.

ART:21: Is there something about colonialism that's inherently humorous to you? I don't think most people would find colonialism very funny.

FORD: That’s a good question because I feel like on some level I’m personally acquainted with some of this material because my family was from the South and I’m descended from slave-owners. I was interested in confronting that aspect of my background and making pictures about it. So for a while I did try to do that. This is a more indirect way, you know, not directly making pictures about my people so to speak. But I'm interested in finding a way into this material.

I think that there’s almost no subject that you can’t treat with some humor, no matter how brutal it can seem. And that’s just something that I see in Goya or Brueghel or people like that, or even R. Crumb, or somebody where the subject matter is pretty intense. With Goya, he’s talking about a Spanish inquisition, but to do it he’s got a parrot or some sort of weird animal allegory functioning that has to do with bulls falling from the sky or something like this. Brueghel is the same way. Like if he’s dealing with some dreadful sin or cruelty, there’s room for a sort of droll approach in his mind anyway. And when I was thinking about my ancestors there was something kind of pathetic about them. Like one series of paintings I did—and it’s not that I necessarily want to call attention to earlier work, but it all leads to the approach that I have now—was painting ancestors of mine on horseback but losing control of their horses. And I know enough about riding to know what you’re supposed to do. Not that I’m a good rider, but I’ve ridden horses. So the idea being that these guys were losing their stirrups and they’re sort of slipping from the saddle. But the whole equestrian tradition has to do with mastery of a spirited animal and with control, and I wanted to subvert that.

So my humor is a bit at the expense of the Empire. And I feel like I can be the brunt of my own joke. And I don’t see any reason not to do that, to poke fun at my own culture, to poke fun at my own foibles. And kind of feel like I’ve earned that at the very least, you know. There is another book, the "The Autobiography of Emily Donaldson Walton," and she is someone who remembers the plantation. I’ve always had this book and this is what she wrote when she was in her nineties. And this is in the 1930’s. So she’s someone who remembers Sherman’s march on Atlanta. What’s amazing about my family is that, for example, my brother who’s six years older than me, there’s a picture of him sitting on my great grandmother’s lap. Now my great grandmother remembers when Sherman marched on Atlanta when she was about six. My brother was twelve when the Beatles played at Shea Stadium. So the overlap there is just insane, how compressed the history is.

I’m very interested in addressing this stuff. I think we had some very grim political art in the ’90s that was photo or text based and absolutely humorless. And I don’t think people benefit from that tone of voice. I think the best antiwar film ever made is "Dr. Strangelove," period. And so much better than something like "Schindler's List," which will just make you feel so sanctimonious and it’s just—who needs it? That’s my take on it.

ART:21: What's particularly humorous about British colonialism?

FORD: The thing about this monkey picture is Richard Burton is keeping forty monkeys in his quarters when he’s a young officer to learn their language. There’s something just right away that strikes me as humorous in the quintessentially super-eccentric British way and their mode of building an empire which was carried out by these kinds of eccentrics.

There is just some sort of sad humor in this idea. When I painted the monkey wife, I painted her individually and I named it "The Forsaken." And my idea is that what Richard Burton did as part of his colonial enterprise was to actually learn languages. When he would go to a new place he would have a woman set up house for him and become his mistress. And he said he would learn the language that way.

So this thing with the monkey wife seemed to be perverse once you know that about him. I set up a fantasy that she was devoted to him, that she really loved him. And when he left she was a bit heartbroken to no longer to be his wife. In the colonial experience as it happened in India, it was almost as if India was caught in an abusive relationship with some sort of male. That’s how it always was portrayed. What England held was feminine and what England was was masculine. Then when they get out of the relationship, there’s some sort of bereft quality to the place once you leave. So it mocks that idea, as if this monkey could care less. So she sits in a tree and she’s got Indian miniatures that are erotic and she’s got a fan, a pink fan, and she looks all heartbroken and bereft because she’s been abandoned by her lover—which is how England would like to think the rest of the world felt about them, the sun setting on the Empire.

ART:21: Is there a word for that kind of humor that you apply to your work?

FORD: I guess it’s satire or parody or any of that. And then there’s this idea of sending up the whole form of discovery. In other words, the mode of representation that I use looks like 19th Century manuscript painting. It looks like the kinds of notebooks that these colonial guys kept where they did sketches of the local fauna and flora, and named it after, you know, themselves and their own friends and colleagues back in England or whoever first described it. It wouldn’t matter that it might be known for thousands of years in the culture that was already there. These guys got the opportunity to call it "Johnson’s this" or "So and So’s that" and give it a Latin name and file it.

So I use those modes of representation to paint these things as well. That turns that tradition a little bit on its head. Rather than in the service of these great collections or empires, it tells an alternative narrative. All of this makes it sound like I have this great intellectual reason for making these things, but ultimately I want to paint a sexy monkey, and I want to paint a big, huge elephant with an erection. And there’s this other sort of silly kind of underground comic aspect to me that just wants to paint this stuff.

And it also comes from some personal inner reason that has nothing to do with this sort of other thing. I often question the intersect between the message as perceived (as a political kind of “blah, blah, blah”) and my urge to just make these pictures. Why do I feel the need to make these things? Why is it that you want to make them as disturbing as you can? Or as violent and out of control as you can? That just comes from some place that doesn’t bear up under theoretical discussion. And all artists are like that. They get going and then they figure out—as they go—why and what it all means in a weird way, and how it all ties in.

I think I’m explaining it to myself with these slave-owning ancestors. What exactly was it about, going down South when I was boy? Was it seeing the end of that kind of thing? I was born in 1960, so when I was a tiny boy in the South it was a very different place. And we used to go down all the time to see my grandmother in Georgia or my relatives in Virginia. So I think maybe that had something to do with it. And in Virginia there’d be this duck hunting and turkey hunting kind of milieu. There was the great kind of southern gentleman, naturalist sportsman tradition in my family that was still being kind of held onto in spite of the fact that most of family's wealth was, of course, gone with the wind...thank god.

ART:21: There's always that mixture of glee and revulsion in your work. Can you talk about that some more?

FORD: The big, big thing I’m always looking for in my work is a sort of attraction-repulsion thing, where the stuff is beautiful to begin with until you notice that some sort of horrible violence is about to happen or is in the middle of happening. Or that it’s some sort of interior monologue.

Take a figure like Audubon, who was kind of a madman. He was violent. If he didn’t like you he might challenge you to a duel or something. I mean the guy was completely out of control and shooting birds off the deck of ships and watching them drop in the ocean. On a riverboat trip down the Missouri he’d shoot a coyote and wound it and it would run off into the hills and he’d never see it again. He wasn’t the enlightened sportsman that we’re used to thinking about. Often when I paint something in his style, I try to think that it’s almost like his dream state or something. It’s like the way he really thought somehow betraying itself and leaking into the work, infecting it somehow, giving it a computer virus and making it do what it oughtn’t do. Or what it shouldn’t reveal.

When you look at the Audubon painting of the passenger pigeons, he just paints two little romantically involved passenger pigeons. And there’s no implication that there were billions of these birds that were getting reduced by the largest single slaughter ever above the water vertebrates. You have no idea that everyone was engaged in this wholesale slaughter of this bird. There was a whole economy built on destroying these birds and within fifty years they were all gone. That was something that these guys didn’t allow into the work somehow. And that’s what I put in the work. I want to tell that story.

ART:21: Is subverting the norm something that you adopted from experience or did it come from looking at art? Were you a subversive child?

FORD: I was impossible, man... I came out of that generation that turned into the punk movement. It was partly that. There was this sort of moment in time when you weren’t a hippie anymore. And you certainly weren’t going to be a Reaganite—this is the generation that has SUV’s and made up the idea of a five-dollar cup of coffee and voted all these Republicans into office. And I’m supposed embrace this bunch of clowns? I felt that when I was a little kid. There was nothing cool about it.

I was way too late for any kind of feeling of cohesiveness with the ’60s. And by the time I was old enough to notice these guys that I thought were cool when I was young, they were all burnt out or dead. So I had no interest in being one of those guys. And then I couldn’t do the punk thing because that seemed too much like joining. That felt so militaristic and lockstep. So there was this sort of ironic distance you adopted in your twenties that had to do with a sort of arty, snotty distance that you see in like the Talking Heads back in those days. And I could kind of relate to that, but you just didn’t know where to stand. And so yeah, there was some idea of taking respected modes and screwing them up.

One of the things I think that confused people about my work when they first saw it in New York was how close it is to duck stamp art. Or the thing that you would put above your living room couch. A very accepted mode and conservative mode of representation. And that’s deliberate, but that was misunderstood and it’s still misunderstood. I still have trouble breaking down that last barrier to understanding my work. There's an innate suspicion that some people have of craft, of being able to paint or caring or giving a damn. Not forging ahead in that modernist tradition of breaking new ground and using new media. The fact that I would much rather paint in ways that have been tried and true for hundreds and hundreds of years. There’s so much bad art that’s made that way and it’s hard to make people understand what I’m up to.




The Sensorium, 2003, Watercolor, gouache, pencil and ink on paper, 60 x 119 inches. Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

Shahzia Sikander









"Fleshy Weapons," 1997. Acrylic, dry pigment watercolor, tea wash on linen; 96 x 70 inches. Collection of the artist.

“Fleshy Weapons”


"Fleshy Weapons" depicts a red, floating female form whose feet are replaced with gestural loops that connect her legs, replacing the traditional weight of the human figure with a buoyant feeling of self-containment. Multi-armed and veiled, the provocative figure references both the Hindu multi-armed goddess and the veiled Muslim woman, mixing traditional iconography from India and Pakistan. The multiple arms grasp exquisitely painted weapons, some raised as if to strike, others pointing to the ground, creating a circle of weaponry that is neither strictly an offense nor a defense. Though the white veil covers the arms to their wrists, it is raised over the chest showing a vaguely abstract female form in purples and yellows and reds. One reaching arm does not hold a weapon, instead it grasps a white circle within which is a girl, more finely made than the goddess, her pointed feet connected by a spare line that loops around the hoop that encircles her. Unlike the speckled goddess, the girl is not veiled, instead a pink band in her hair holds white and purple ribbons that splash down over her shoulders to her waist, her featureless face clearly visible behind them. Traditionally, the veil is used to cover and desexualize women, protecting Islamic men from the seductiveness of the female form. The veil becomes eroticized by the hinting at what it covers and by the little it reveals. Here the veil covers only the arms, which nonetheless are well-equipped for battle, and where the eyes should appear there are only flat, colored dots. What we as the viewer expect from the image of a veiled woman - something negative, hinting at oppression and faintly exotic - is denied us, literally disarming our preconceptions. "Fleshy Weapons" depicts the female form both historically - the traditional Islamic woman, the Hindu goddess - and ahistorically, in the combination of meshed cultural imagery and in its abstract, transfigured, and highly personal rendering.



http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/sikander/card1.html



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http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/sikander/card2.html


"Venus' Wonderland," 1995-97. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, tea on hand-prepared 'wasli' paper. Collection of Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehman, New York.


“Venus's Wonderland”



Almost all the figures in "Venus's Wonderland" are veiled: the woman who is in the center of the miniature painting, the smaller female figures who populate its borders, and the monkey hanging from a tree. Arranged off-center with a large decorated border and depicting a scene reminiscent of a children's morality tale - there is an apple tree and the fruit is found in the hands of both the monkey and central female figure - the painting began with Sikander thinking of a story about a monkey and a crocodile and their mutual deception of each other. The colored hoops with which the animals play, flat circles that border the scene, and gossamer-like veils that resemble a shower of white ribbon, all found here, are common elements in Sikander's work, personal symbols that layer her paintings. Juxtaposed against the Eastern elements of the scene is the appearance of Venus (hence the title of the work), unveiled, painted in very lightly amid the animals, and the shell from which she traditionally emerges, though which here she is dislocated from. Instead, a crocodile lies in the shell, glancing mischievously at the viewer. The mesh of Eastern and Western mythology carries no negative overtones, nor do those veiled in the scene seem any less free or revealing. The monkey and crocodile in the children's tale that helped conceive this painting, could be thought of as symbols for the larger mutual (though here, playful) manipulation that Eastern and Western cultures have engaged in, each positioning the other's cultural symbols as abstract, unpromising, other. Here, that deceit is shown as playful conceit.




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Biography « previous artist | next artist »
Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan. Educated as an undergraduate at the National College of Arts in Lahore, she received her MFA in 1995 from the Rhode Island School of Design. Sikander specializes in Indian and Persian miniature painting, a traditional style that is both highly stylized and disciplined. While becoming an expert in this technique-driven, often impersonal art form, she imbued it with a personal context and history, blending the Eastern focus on precision and methodology with a Western emphasis on creative, subjective expression. In doing so, Sikander transported miniature painting into the realm of contemporary art. Reared as a Muslim, Sikander is also interested in exploring both sides of the Hindu and Muslim “border,” often combining imagery from both—such as the Muslim veil and the Hindu multi-armed goddess—in a single painting. Sikander has written: “Such juxtaposing and mixing of Hindu and Muslim iconography is a parallel to the entanglement of histories of India and Pakistan.” Expanding the miniature to the wall, Sikander also creates murals and installations, using tissue paperlike materials that allow for a more free-flowing style. In what she labeled performances, Sikander experimented with wearing a veil in public, something she never did before moving to the United States. Utilizing performance and various media and formats to investigate issues of border crossing, she seeks to subvert stereotypes of the East and, in particular, the Eastern Pakistani woman. Sikander has received many awards and honors for her work, including the honorary artist award from the Pakistan Ministry of Culture and National Council of the Arts. Sikander resides in New York and Texas.

For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Shahzia Sikander on the Art21 blog
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“Chaman”
ART:21: I'm noticing the way in which images are revealed and concealed by the layers of tissue paper in your installation work. What does the layering refer to, and what is your intention in using it?

SIKANDER: At some level, the idea of layering here through painting on the wall and covering it up with tissue, with paper, and then putting more drawings in front of it - that kind of space, or that experience of space through those layers, suggests a certain sense of meaning being either manipulated or meaning being constructed, or that there is more to understand than a simplistic reading of something. So it does allude to a lot of meaning which becomes significant culturally. And I think experience, or the idea of veiling and revealing here, becomes important because a lot of my work is deeply personal. And it also takes a lot of liberty through personal experiences. It kind of takes a jump-start from there; whether at a humorous level or at a level where one intends to subvert something, it takes on and challenges how people read work, or how people read different cultures, or one's own sort of reaction to those experiences. And sort in the quest of developing a vocabulary, I'm very interested in personal space and the cultural space. And since I'm dealing with such an image-oriented genre of work, a lot of the vocabulary in the miniature painting basically deals with mythology and refers to a particular period of painting: the court paintings during Mogul patronage. It refers to a lot of the aspects of that time. And then through Hindu mythology it refers to a lot of the Hindu religion.

And so the imageries that those paintings occupy is like looking at them from a very objective space, and then taking elements from the Hindu experience and putting them in the experience of the Mogul, which is Muslim patronage, but it's not necessarily a Muslim school of painting. So the idea since there is not a very solid discourse, definitely not a very critical one that exists on the history of miniature painting, it's open for interpretation. And it's also defined in a very descriptive chronological way, so the importance of looking at it critically has been reduced. So one just looks at it and reads it in a simplistic fashion. All of those elements I think are so ripe to then play with. And when I came to the U.S. I was so aware of having this neutral space where I could look into and understand more of the Hindu schools of painting.

Growing up in Pakistan, I didn't have much access to miniature painting to begin with because of a lack of books and resources and libraries and all of that. And also because of this separation of India, Pakistan and every day's identity related to it, one grew up kind of fascinated with the other. And I was very into Hindu mythology, but when I used the goddess it's not a particular goddess that I'm using or referring to. It's the idea of the goddess, the goddess being just the opposite of the Muslim belief, where idol worshipping is something which is blasphemous. So this idea of the god and goddesses is a foreign aspect. And within a visual vocabulary, when one is looking at things and dealing with this idea of the image, then, as an artist, how do you separate the many layers? How are the Pakistanis trying to define that this art is ours and this art isn't? And so whatever came under Muslim patronage suddenly became Pakistani heritage. All of these aspects are so intertwined with the social-political identities being defined.

And the relation to Urdu literature plays a very significant part here, because of the whole Muslim identity during British occupancy. When the idea of a separate homeland for Muslims was being defined, Urdu literature became the main form of expression where these political ideas were played out. As a result of it, the poetry became revolutionary and was accessible to the masses. That aspect is also related to this way of work, where it's something with no ownership, something experienced. When people come in, the viewer can experience it, but doesn't necessarily have to know where it's coming from. And in the same sense, the goddess becomes not important, whether it's Kali or Durga; it's the idea of it, the allusion to the opposition of the veil. So I'm stripping the identity of the goddess and putting the veil on its head. One is dealing with very two extremes of image. The goddess image is something which is very familiar to media. It's this image with several hands, and yet it's not a particular goddess, because I was not interested in that; I was interested in coming up with a definition that could occupy the entirety of that experience as such, and the dilemmas of it. Again it's about raising issues about stereotypes with the veil and the goddess and the interplay of both. And yet the goddess as such becomes a problematic issue, and the veil also, because it's not like the oppression, or the subversion. So in that sense, the veiling and revealing becomes the cause and effect for me, because I'm also investigating these things as I grow as an artist.

But these are very loaded issues to take on because the minute you bring the word 'veil' into the equation, it connects you to a Muslim identity, or a woman's identity. And that was the last thing on my mind, because it's not my experience. I never wore one. I have a very hard time relating to that notion, and I cannot speak on behalf of women who either wear a veil or choose to wear one. Culturally, it's not my experience of having grown up in Pakistan, but the minute you leave that country and you come here, it became such a significant topic of discussion that at one level I let it come into my work, and at another level I was having a hard time getting rid of it. And that aspect is what interests me. For me, I want to take on that challenge. And so it's like veiling and revealing. There's always two sides to a story.

ART:21: If the goddess isn't a specific Hindu figure, then what does she represent to you? What role does she serve in the work?

SIKANDER: The reference to the goddess, I think, for me, I am interested in the multidimensions of the female identity. The goddess could be a figure of power. It refers to empowerment definitely. And yet there is a certain sort of dark side to it too, where there is reference to destruction. And whether it's destruction of evil or good is left in the background. But here again, if the figure of the goddess is about this idea - a figure of power, the veil, when it comes on its head, does that mean that the veil is disempowering the figure? The idea of the veil is something that isn't revealing, so do not underestimate what's behind the veil either. So the minute I started mixing up these different traditions and meanings, it only led to a marriage of more meanings.

At the same time, the sort of intimacy of the difference too. I became more and more interested in (that) again; the dialogue was not about East and West, it was more about East and East. For me, I was interested in understanding Hindu-Muslim aesthetics, but at the same time a vocabulary which is very hybrid in its origins. Also, looking at Akbar's period, one of the Mogul emperors in the 16th century, the art and the painting and the political discourse of his experience was so hybrid, and he recognized all of it, that notion of a plural India, when you look at the brilliance with which he has generated art forms and language and literature. Now, one is involved with coming to America and dealing with this post-colonial dialogue, and this plurality of experience, and this multicultural dimension to things and globalization - and it is not a very foreign phenomenon. It happened in history. So in that sense, it's how cycles come to an end. It's sort of the idea of spirituality right there, one kind of recognizes it. And so, for me, there's no separation; you can't separate the many layers of Hindu-Muslim experience, to say this is Pakistani or this is Indian or this is Muslim or this is Hindu. All of those aspects played a part, and they're like layers of meaning over layers of time. And there's no separation there. So part of it was actually paying homage to that notion, but in the process, almost subverting it, too.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/sikander/clip2.html

interview between art21 and Kara Walker





Kara Walker
"Darkytown Rebellion"
2001
Installation view at Brent Sikkema, New York
Projection, cut paper and adhesive on wall, 14 x 37 1/2 feet
Collection of Foundation Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Only “fair use,” for personal and/or educational purposes, of artwork is permitted: Art21 Copyright Notice
copyright



Projecting Fictions: “Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On”
ART:21: What are your first thoughts about this piece here at the Guggenheim?

WALKER: Well, this piece is called "Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On." I always wind up going back to the very beginning of everything with my pieces, so it seems like it’s a continuation of a series of work that I’ve been doing with large, narrative silhouette scenes, building around this idea of the cyclorama or a kind of historical exhibit. In this case it’s somewhat hysterical. The idea at the outset was an image of a slave revolt at some point prior to me. And it was a slave revolt in the antebellum south where the house slaves got after their master with their instruments, their utensils of every day life. And really it started with a sketch of a series of slaves disemboweling a master with a soup ladle. My reference in my mind was the surgical theater paintings of Thomas Eakins and others.
ART:21: And the overhead projectors came about how?

WALKER: I knew for a while that I wanted to make a piece that tried to engage the space a little bit more directly then the pieces that are just cut paper on the wall. And I had been using the overhead projectors as a kind of a shadow play tool. Not really as a tool for making the work—they’re usually hand drawn. But I wanted to activate the space in a way and have these overhead projectors serve as a kind of stand-in for the viewer, as observers. And my thinking about the overhead projectors connected with my thinking about painting as far as creating an illusion of depth, but in a very mundane, flat, almost didactic way.

But back to surgical theater...before I even started working with a narrative that circled around representations of blackness, representations of race, racial history, minstrelsy, and everything that I wanted to investigate, I was making work that was painterly and about the body and the metaphorical qualities of the body. So I always think about this work and think about history in terms of the body. And this act of excavating that’s been such a current and recurring theme (particularly in the histories of feminist artists, feminist writers, African-Americans, people of color) is about investigating and eviscerating this body of a collective experience, a history, sometimes to the point—at least in my reckoning—to the point of leaving nothing intact. There’s just this pile of parts and goo. And I entered into this project, this idea of being a black woman artist, from the perspective of a person who has been presented with a pre-dissected body to work from. A pre-dissected body of information. These gall bladders and hearts and stomachs are all the things that would make me complete should I choose to use them correctly and put them back together. So in a way it’s Frankenstein-like.

ART:21: Do your pieces, like "Insurrection!" always have a particular narrative that you want viewers to follow?

WALKER: Actually, talking through my work has been one of those problems. There’s a way in which I’m more interested in what viewers bring to this iconography that I’m constantly dredging out of my own subconscious. And as I dredge, I’m often surprised about what comes up and what seems an up-holding of my own invention—what seems connected to a series of representations of the vulgar as paired with the blackness that have already existed and have been regurgitated over several hundred years, or over a history of African-Americana. So I couldn’t really name these characters or caricatures in the way that the wall texts at the museum or reviewers who’ve looked at my work have sought to, or have elected to. I think these figures are phantom-like. They’re fantasies. They don’t represent anything real. It’s just the end result of so many fabrications of a fabricated identity.

ART:21: And yet your own name often appears in the title of your works as well? Are you treating yourself as a fictional character?

WALKER: I think part of that is a game that I’ve played with. The naming of the pieces and the way that I’ve sort of represented myself as the maker of these images, always with this jab at the notion of privilege or entitlement as it’s been doled out occasionally to young women in my position: African-American, female, young. I was interested in slaves narratives and the romantic novel of now one hundred and fifty years ago. When Phillis Wheatley’s book of poems had to be verified by upstanding white men in the community and they put their stamp of approval on the authenticity of these words as though it were an impossibility that a black woman could think of anything on her own. Now it’s debatable, you know, how artistically worthy what she thought of on her own was, but that’s really not the point. I like the idea of suddenly finding myself in the desirable echelons of the art world and presenting myself in this manner. So I am incredibly grateful for the approval of white society who understands that I am an anomaly. It should raise questions I think, maybe more than it does.

ART:21: It seems like you keep a lot of information in your mind simultaneously, numerous perspectives.

WALKER: There’s a lot of information, but it’s not nearly as researched as I want it to be. It depends really from piece to piece and from moment to moment in my life. Things have sped up so much with the career aspect of being an artist that I always have my suspicions that that’s to keep me out of the books. But no, it’s twofold you know. There’s a way that this work is two parts research and one part paranoid hysteria. And I’ve always kind of liked that, that impulse. I’ve always possessed that impulse of concocting half-baked theories based on the reading of a selective tome. I mean, I don’t trust it. I don’t want to put it out there without some self-consciousness, without being reflective about it. But it’s a fascinating slippery slope when you start.

When I started investigating my relationship to my identity and what my identity means, it was in the context of artists doing identity-based art. I envy and have a love for people who research in great detail history or some moment in history, say feminist history, and then present it in a way that’s somewhat didactic and matter-of-fact. And really with an effort, a sincere effort to throw meaning out to an audience that maybe isn’t conscious of this aspect of history. But I’m incredibly suspicious of that impulse too. I think that it’s all going to be filtered through one’s subjectivity and my subjectivity, as a young person, as a person at the end of the 20th Century, my subjectivity is of a sexual woman, as a person who makes sometimes really bad decisions.... There was no nobility in trying to do research like that and in trying to filter my sense of self through the lens of a larger history. It was going to get complicated and I liked the complications that I was finding.

ART:21: Where does "Insurrection!" fit in the more recent projection works?

WALKER: This is the first piece I did. I used the projection and overhead projectors as a feature. And I exhibited it in Geneva, at the Center for Contemporary Art there. I built the piece in a very painterly way. It’s actually the antithesis of the way that I think that I should work: starting with the backgrounds and moving to the foreground and then reworking the backgrounds, and basically cutting and pasting these colored gels, and drawing on the top and slapping them on top of the overhead projectors in a very slapdash way. The images, they grew around this central piece with the surgical theater or whatever you want to call it—evisceration, insurrection—and I decided to build it into a triptych based on the space that I had at the time. All of the pieces that I worked on have transformed depending on the space where they’re exhibited. But this one was built as a triptych with the indoor scene in the center. The windows came on top of that. And then I thought I’d have what’s going on on the outside and try to reduce the mayhem that I was envisioning to a few set incidences where there is some turbulence, there’s some give and take: castration and self-castration, offerings and stealing.

ART:21: What do the projections mean to you?

WALKER: Projections came about as one of a series of steps. It’s an easy answer to the idea of projecting. Projecting one’s desires, fears, and conditions onto other bodies, which all of my work has tried to engage with using the silhouette. And it also created a space where the viewer’s shadow would also be projected into the scene so that maybe they would, you know, become captured and implicated in a way that is very didactic. Overhead projectors are a didactic tool, they’re a schoolroom tool. So they’re about conveying facts. The work that I do is about projecting fictions into those facts.

ART:21: And the fact that they're beautiful. How does that play out?

WALKER: Beauty is just an accident. Beauty is just a happenstance. Beauty is the remainders of being a painter. The work become pretty because I wouldn’t be able to look at a work about something as grotesque as what I’m thinking about and as grotesque as projecting one’s ugly soul onto another’s pretty body, and representing that in an ugly way. I have always been attracted to the lure. Work which draws a viewer in through a kind of seductive offering. Here’s something to look at, stay a while.

ART:21: Did you discover something for yourself when creating this piece?

WALKER: Have I discovered something for myself? Well, this way of working was new with the projections. It was actually a lot of formal discoveries. Spatial relationships, things like that.

I think one of the things that’s happened here and there with the work that I’ve done is, because it mimics narrative—and narrative is kind of a given when it comes to work that’s produced by black women in this country—is there’s almost an expectation. I feel an expectation for something cohesive. There’s an understanding within America about where that resolution is, you know, what that means to have a "Color Purple" scenario where things resolve in a way and a female heroine actualizes through a process of self-discovery and historical discovery and comes out from under her oppressors and maybe doesn’t become a hero, but is a hero for herself. And nothing ever comes of that in the pieces that I’m making. And I’m increasingly aware of wanting to make that clear, that to some extent there’s a failure for that kind of resolution and she doesn’t become a.... You know she’s not evil, she’s not a hero either, but then she sort of engages these oppositions constantly and keeps it open, always knowing that the next question is "Who is she?"

And she is...I just say she is "dot, dot, dot..." That’s where I have this problem with language and naming right now, the Negress of earlier titles, the "Negress of noteworthy talent," who is me, who is not me, who is that entity of somewhat powerful sisterhood negritude, that is an idealization that stems partially out the black power movement and partially out of a mainstream desire for the juicy strange other, the Josephine Baker banana skirt kind of desire. Otherness embodied and otherness that embodies herself and otherness that plays at otherness. But who is she? Is she one or all of the characters in the work? I think of the work in the way that you have dream images and the door and the hippopotamus actually represent the same thing. They’re all stemming from the same impulse somehow, which is something like a will toward chaos or a will toward attempting resolution with the certainty that chaos reigns.

This is so hard... Yes, she’s an idealization, disembodied. And also a re-embodied presence, with a will and a desire towards chaos. There is a will towards resolving that chaos with a certainty that it will never quite end. It will never quite reach a clear conclusion. It will progress.


from
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/walker/clip1.html#

online art lesson on conflict

http://www.pbs.org/art21/education/war/lesson3.html







Kara Walker: Projecting Fictions... interview & clip (picture above)
Walton Ford: Printmaking & Natural History interview & clip (picture below)



Lesson 3—Confronting Conflict

overview

LESSON TITLE:
Confronting Conflict

ARTISTS:
Ford, Sikander, Walker

LEVEL:
Grades 9-12

SUBJECT AREA:
Visual & Performing Arts

NATIONAL STANDARDS:
#1 Media & processes
#3 Symbols & ideas
#4 Visual arts, history, & cultures
#5 Assessing the merits of work
#6 Connections between visual arts & other disciplines

THEMES:
Loss & Desire, Identity

LESSON CONTRIBUTOR:
Jessica Hamlin, Art21; Dipti Desai, Director of the Program in Art Education, New York University


Representing conflict, be it in the form of histories of war, national strife or personal struggles, has preoccupied artists across the centuries. By recalling conflicts of the past, how can we better understand present conflicts? War and strife are typically depicted in terms of black and white, suggesting two sides engaged in oppositional struggle. This apparent opposition is the focus of this lesson.

The work of artists Kara Walker, Walton Ford, Shahzia Sikander will be used as the starting point to discuss how imagery informs our understanding the past, specifically controversial, provocative, or factional issues and events. Kara Walker's cut-outs and silhouettes reference the events of the antebellum South, while Walton Ford’s paintings and prints recall 18th and 19th century naturalist images but subvert their traditional beauty with references to colonialism and eco-terrorism. Shahzia Sikander’s intimate and detailed miniature paintings reflect the ongoing conflict between Muslim and Hindu cultures. This lesson will explore how formal artistic elements such as contrast and symbolism can graphically portray how conflict is often seen as a relationship of opposites: right versus wrong, good versus evil, light versus dark, etc.

objectives

• Students will consider the representation of conflict in visual art and the notion of presenting opposition through symbolic and conceptual ideas.

• Students will consider how history is constructed by voices that typically represent only one side of conflict.

• Students will explore Kara Walker’s work as it relates to the idea of conflict and opposition, the hero/heroine and the anti-hero/anti-heroine.

• Students will create their own representations of opposition and conflict.

• Students will explore the medium of the silhouette to describe and represent ideas including its history as an art form, the formal element of contrast, and the conceptual notion of symbolism.


materials & resources

Art:21 Web Site
• Projecting Fictions: Insurrection!... – Kara Walker interview & clip
• The Melodrama of Gone with the Wind – Kara Walker interview & clip
• Islam & Miniature Painting – Shahzia Sikander interview & clip
• Fleshy Weapons – Shahzia Sikander art work
• Printmaking & Natural History Artists – Walton Ford interview & clip
• Political Humor & Colonial Critique – Walton Ford interview & clip


Additional Web Sites
• http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/s/silhouette.html
Silhouette Art
• http://pages.prodigy.com/kate/silhist.htm
Silhouette Art
• http://ngeorgia.com/site/cyclorama.html
Atlanta Cyclorama depicting the Civil War Battle of Atlanta
• http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med-db/webdocs/webart/
Commentary about Thomas Eakins’ painting, the Gross Clinic
• http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/ampaintings.gross.htm
Commentary about Thomas Eakins’ painting, the Gross Clinic


Classroom Materials
• Magazines
• Glue
• Slide projector or overhead projector
• Roll of white paper
• Roll of black paper
• Pencils
• Chalk or white pencils
• Scissors
• Masking tape


critical questions

• How is conflict different from and/or similar to war?

• What is the difference between conflict in relation to our personal lives as compared to conflict on a national or international scale? What are examples of personal conflicts we have? What are the national or international conflicts we are aware of or perhaps involved in?

• How do the stories about conflicts or wars change with the storyteller? Consider the statement, “History is told by the winners.”

• How does the art of Kara Walker, Walton Ford, and Shahzia Sikander reflect ideas of conflict and opposition? What conflicts do their images describe and how does their work change the discourse concerning these conflicts?

• What is the history of silhouette art?

• How does the form and technique of the silhouette relate to ideas of conflict and opposition?


activities

Looking at Conflict
Have each student brainstorm a list of personal, local, national and international conflicts they are aware of. Ask them to consider their sources: newspapers, television, Internet, radio, etc. Compile a group list. Ask students to identify who is taking part in these conflicts. How are the opposing sides described or named? Who are the heroes or heroines in these events? Who are the villains or the anti-heroes and anti-heroines?
(Time: Half a 45 minute session)


Walton Ford and Colonial Legacies
View several of Walton Ford’s watercolors and prints and discuss how they represent particular attitudes or events in American history. Describe the conflicts he is commenting on as well as the conflicts he is creating. Using images from magazines, create a collage of humans and animals. Individually or as a group, brainstorm a list of possible grievances that animals might have against humans and how might they communicate these grievances? Choose a particular idea or issue that your collage addresses.
(Time: Two 45 minute sessions)


Contemporary Miniatures
Shahzia Sikander specializes in Indian and Persian miniature painting. Raised as a Muslim, Sikander explores both Hindu and Muslim imagery, often combining them in a single painting. Sikander views the juxtaposition and mixing of Hindu and Muslim iconography as “parallel to the entanglement of histories of India and Pakistan.” Sikander is also conscious of the oppression for women in some Muslim cultures although she herself has not felt oppressed as a woman because of her background or her religion. Have students view the video segment on Sikander, view the image Fleshy Weapons and read portions of her interview discussing Islam and Miniature Painting. Have students describe the imagery and iconography they see and how it relates to the theme of conflict of opposition. How does Sikander’s work call into question the treatment of women? How are the different sides of the entanglement Sikander mentions represented visually? Are sides being taken in Sikander’s images? Have your students create a visual statement about an issue or concern that they see in the newspaper or are currently addressing in their own lives. Ask students to incorporate the use of symbolic imagery and text to describe the issue or concern they are addressing.
(Time: Two 45 minute sessions)


Kara Walker and the Antebellum South
View the video segment on Kara Walker and show students additional images from the Art:21 Web site. Have students discuss the particular method and content with which Walker represents the idea of conflict. What is she representing? How do you know? Are there sides being taken? Which ones?

Walker states, “The silhouette lends itself to avoidance of the subject, you know, not being able to look at it directly, yet there it is, all the time, staring you in the face.” How do Walker’s images both provoke and avoid the subjects they address? When Walton Ford calls himself a ‘maximalist,’ rather than a minimalist, how does this relate to Kara Walker’s avoidance of the subject?

Consider the stories that Walker’s images are portraying. Ask students to discuss how specific stories about conflicts or wars change with the storyteller. Consider the statement, “History is told by the winners.” How does this relate to history told in textbooks and the events and the narratives of those who did not have the opportunity to represent themselves, like slaves?
(Time: One 45 minute session)


Early Silhouettes
Show students images of early silhouettes and describe the process and history of making silhouette images. Compare and contrast the historical examples of silhouette images to the images that Kara Walker is producing. Compare and contrast the imagery of the silhouette to the imagery of Walton Ford and Shahzia Sikander.
• http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/s/silhouette.html
Silhouette Art
• http://pages.prodigy.com/kate/silhist.htm
Silhouette Art
(Time: Half a 45 minute session)


Beginning the Silhouette
Using a slide projector lamp or overhead project, have students create their own silhouettes in pairs on large white paper. As a class and depending on spatial limitations, decide whether to create full-body or traditional bust silhouettes. Ask students to decide on a particular pose or stance for their silhouette.

As an alternative to using projected light, have students draw profiles for each other or to trace student’s bodies while they are lying on top of the paper. The size of the original silhouette should depend on the final format that you would like to have students present their images.
(Time: One to Two 45 minute sessions, depending on size of class)


Brainstorming the Character
Have students brainstorm ideas for a real or fictional character they will create: a hero/heroine or anti-hero/anti-heroine or combination of both. Have students brainstorm the ways in which they can graphically and symbolically represent the characteristics of this character. What are the visual clues they can use to describe the particular time and place this person might live in? How do Walker, Ford and Sikander represent particular characteristics of the protagonists in their images? What are the graphic clues they provide so that the audience can identify who these characters are? To solicit ideas, have students write a story or make a list describing their character. Turn these characteristics into visual elements they can include in their real or fictional character.
(Time: One to Two 45 minute sessions)


Completing the Silhouette
Have students alter their original silhouette image to reflect the real or fictional character they have created by incorporating the new visual elements. Ask students to consider a possible time or place these characters will or once did exist. Have them consider additional costume and accessories that might reflect this time period. Once they have sketched the final silhouette outline for their character on the white paper, have students cut out their character and trace the shape onto black paper using chalk or a white pencil. Cut out the final silhouette from the black paper.
(Time: Two 45 minute sessions)


Making the Narrative
Create a narrative or story that includes each of the characters and create the necessary additional silhouette imagery that will tell the story. Install the silhouettes around a room, perhaps incorporating existing structural elements of the room. Have the class create a title for the installation and ask each student to write their own version of the story from the perspective of the character they have created. Invite other classes in to view the installation and describe their own version of the story being told. Photograph the characters individually as well as the complete installation and create a book that includes each student’s writings with the image of their character.
(Time: Three 45 minute sessions)


reflection & evaluation

• Have students articulated their ideas about conflict and opposition in relation to visual symbols and imagery?

• Have students reflected on the notion of conflict and its diverse meanings in personal, local, national and international contexts?

• Do student’s written narratives and visual images reflect the idea of the diverse narratives involved in representing conflict both historical and contemporary?

• Have students reflected on the featured artists work and their relationships to the idea of conflict and opposition, the hero/heroine and the anti-hero/anti-heroine?

• Have students created silhouettes that use symbolic elements to describe their ideas?

Find out if this lesson plan correlates to your state's education standards! On PBS TeacherSource do a search for "Art in the 21st Century" and click on the Standards Match icon.


going further

While this lesson uses the artists Do-Ho Suh, Eleanor Antin, and Collier Schorr and their relationships to wartime events as its starting point, this lesson could be modified for different artists and wars, forming a unit with other lessons such as:

War on Film
Wartime Voices
Looking at Likeness
Characters & Caricatures

Did you use this lesson or generate your own activities based on ideas inspired by the lesson? Submit student art work, new lesson plans, and your comments to Art:21 and have them posted on the site. Help the Online Lesson Library grow!

additional lesson plans on featured artists

Walton Ford
Cartoon Commentary
Landscape & Place

Shahzia Sikander
Migrating Viewpoints
Remaking Myths
Traditional Crafts, Contemporary Ideas

Kara Walker
Cartoon Commentary
Characters & Caricatures
Fact or Fiction: Describing the Real
Looking at Likeness
Migrating Viewpoints

Art and Conflict Exhibition


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3834863/Art-and-Conflict-Exhibition.html
For the first time armed forces veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have allowed work from their Art Therapy sessions to be exhibited to the public.

By Alastair Good
Published: 7:00PM GMT 18 Dec 2008

The work is a unique insight into the mind and emotions of those who have served our country and come home with mental health problems.
The exhibition is at the Together gallery, an artspace in the east of London which was set up in 2006 to showcase artwork made by artists working in the mental health area. The drawings, paintings, sculptures and poems produced by the veterans to express their emotions show a shockingly honest account of how they have felt trapped and betrayed by their own emotions and thoughts upon returning home from war.



The works express feelings of inadequacy and dependency, feelings that are particularly hard to manage for men and women who have been used to looking after themselves in the most demanding situations. Untitled by Nick White, depicts a slashed wrist along with the statement "Why does it always come down to money?" The accompanying artists note says "Frustration. Having to ask for assistance in order to manage makes you feel useless with no control over your own future."
All the artworks have these notes, some long and some short but all very expressive and moving. Veteran Eddie Gray writes: "At times I felt as if I would be doing everyone a favour by going somewhere quiet and dropping dead (at the time of writing I am still alive, I think)" These sorts of statements and the artwork they accompany reveal a sense of frustration and despair at the situation these veterans find themselves in when they return home from war unable to process the experiences they have had.
One of the most striking works is a charcoal sketch of a man sitting on a bed in a darkened room with what looks like broken bottles littering the floor in front of him. Titled Ghosts of the past it has been made by Peter Ormes who spent eight years in the army between 1990-98. You can also see a note by the open door, perhaps an apology or explanation to a wife and family for the confusing and frightening emotions and behavior that Ormes has exhibited since his return.
Viewing this exhibition can be a challenging and sometimes upsetting experience but there can be no doubt that those who do make the effort to go and see it will come away with a much better understanding of the effect that taking a country to war can have on those we send to fight it.
Art and Conflict: An exhibition of work created by Veterans is showing at Together Gallery, 12 Old Street, London until 16 January 2009.

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