ReadLookListenJan24

Lisa Rawlinson

Read, Listen, Look

January 24, 2019

Featuring

1,000-year-old teeth Challenge Gender assumptions ,

Laura Owens on Modern Art Notes,

and Kusama: Infinity

a mini list of articles, podcasts, and artists that are worth your time

Read

If you haven't heard yet about the skull of a German nun that revealed she was very likely painting illuminated manuscripts using the rare (at the time) and highly valuable resource lapis lazuli back in the Middle Ages, well, clearly you spend less time perusing viral social media articles than I do. Apart from the fact that identifying the mineral via dental DNA (there were bits of the blue flecks in the plaque of the teeth) opened up a whole new avenue for research, the big take-away from this was that way back in the Middle Ages—a time we consider to be completely backwards compared to our own—a woman was using this precious resource and creating art with it. It wasn't the female scientists who balked at the very notion that GASP!, a woman would be skilled enough to be entrusted with such a commodity, it was the "art experts" they consulted, one of whom thought the idea that she was a cleaning woman with a taste for blue power was more plausible. Let's unpack this a bit. We can look around us at what's going on in the world and see that we are not living in a far off future where human beings have released petty bigotries and we all live in harmony. And yet, we still like to think of ourselves that way, especially on the left, especially in the art world. The reaction of the "art experts" says more about our time than the time the highly-skilled German nun and painter lived. It's not the idea that such opportunities for women were impossible way back when. It's that in our own time we still live a similar reality, no matter how much the patriarchal art world pats itself on the back for its self-perceived progressive values. This skull is a mirror, if we will look into it and really see ourselves.

Read the article here.

Listen

One of my favorite exhibits I saw in 2018 was the touring Laura Owens retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art (it's currently at the MOCA in Los Angeles). Anytime you can see an artist's work pulled together I think it enriches it, deepening the experience and offering the chance to see common threads, deviations, and the overall evolution of one person's creative vision. Tyler Green interviewed Owens on his Modern Arts Notes podcast—a great art-focused podcast you should follow, despite it's somewhat off-putting acronym, The MAN podcast (see above, though I see Tyler making a real effort in this area)—and with his tendency to dig in and look at the details and connections to art history combined with her tendency to focus on formal elements, it made for complimentary conversation. I dig Owens for her unapologetic display of a feminine hand and perspective in her work, and because there are little kid-style sailors and animals and mythology, and it just looks like she is having fun with a visual vocabulary that derives from an inner child and really doesn't care what you think. And maybe I'm projecting a bit, but there's that mirror that art holds up for all of us. Those are things I gravitate to. And as a painter hearing her talk in such depth about how the works unfold was as delightful as those guys off having an adventure on a boat with a giraffe and a parrot for company.

Listen to the podcast here.

Look

I've never stood in line for hours so I could immerse myself into a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room for 30 seconds. Maybe I will some day, but it's not on my to-do list at the moment. To me it seems like the absolute worst way to experience her art, worse than peering over heads and shoulder and elbowing your way to the front just to look at Starry Night for a few seconds before you are elbowed out of the way yourself. And it's a shame, because I feel like standing inside or in front of those works in particular are potentially powerful meditative and reflective experiences. I don't have a solution for how crowd-control could be handled in a way that allows for a more meaningful experience when there are just that many people who want to gaze upon it. But I do have a solution for the people who have approached those experiences almost as if they had a checklist or as a less reflective means to an awesome selfie, and that's to Netflix and chill (as they say, even though it's not actually on Netflix) with the documentary Kusama: Infinity. If we aren't able to spend reasonable time with her immersive spaces, spend time getting to know the woman who created them via this well-put together documentary (I've watched a lot of art-related documentaries lately, and I'm not throwing that praise around lightly). God knows after some of the BS she's had to put up with (see patriarchy above, also racism, also other stuff), she deserves not only the attention she is receiving today but a wide-spread effort to actually understand where she's coming from. Despite having not experienced an Infinity Room, I have stood in front of her paintings feeling the energy within them, and like with Owens, I found the thing I identify with, capturing energy through the documentation of movement in paint. Maybe it's something else for you. But if for no other reason, watch it and understand her contributions to contemporary art and how men repeatedly stole her ideas while neither promoting her or even acknowledging her (Donald Judd, excluded). And we come full circle.

Watch it on Hulu or a streaming option of your choice.