Sheep Art

It's an ad for an electronics company (kind of) but still neat.

h/t to Countdown on msnbc

Brooklyn Museum by the Brooklyn Masses

The Brooklyn Museum is doing its part to spread democracy by creating "Click!" a photography exhibit on display until August 10th. The exhibit began as an open call for photographs that capture the "Changing Faces of Brooklyn." Visitors to the exhibition's web site then voted on photographs and the crowd consensus selected the images that would become "Click!"

There's an interesting dissent from Slate about both the photos that were chosen as well as the broad and ineffectual nature of the theme of the exhibition itself. I don't think it makes you a fascist to agree that some of the photos selected were amateur in composition as well as trite and sentimental. But as far as an experiment in crowd mentality intersecting with art, well alright.

Luckily there is an image in the exhibit of one of my sentimentally favorite Brooklyn buildings, the Pippen building at 3rd Avenue and 3rd St. on the Gowanus Canal. Though it's not the image below, courtesy of another blog, you get the idea.

Feminist Art at the MoMA?

We all remember Jerry Saltz's astute criticism of MoMA for the pitiful number of women artists on display in their permanent collection. Printed after a summer of blowout women’s art exhibitions that prompted Nancy Princenthal in Art in America to call 2007 “a banner year for feminism in the visual arts,” such an exposé made MoMA look rather foolish and behind the times, at least in my mind. However, with full awareness of their cultural hegemony, the MoMA seemed to shrug off Saltz’s words with little effort (or at least get away with ignoring the critique completely)…or did it?

Let me take a step back for a moment. Having moved to the city recently, I’ve been making the standard museum and gallery rounds. So naturally I made my way uptown to see the Olafur Eliasson show before it closed (who doesn’t want to see some Smithson and James Turrell slickly rehashed?). However, what peaked my interest was not what I came to see, but instead a room tucked away in the contemporary galleries devoted to Sigalit Landau, a contemporary female Israeli artist. The exhibition is part of MoMA’s Projects Series, founded in 1971 as a forum for young emerging artists. This mini-exhibition consists of three remarkable video works and a number of salt-encrusted lamp-like sculptures. The most recognizable of the videos is Barbed Hula (2000) featured in Global Feminisms. However the most memorable is DeadSee (2005) in which a raft-like spiral of whole and half-eaten watermelons floats on the Dead Sea and slowly unfurls. The artist, locked in the center, is spun around and around until the watermelon coil is unraveled, leaving her body exposed. This incredible body of work can be seen here.

If MoMA’s “all boys club” reputation is valid, then what is work by an artist in Global Feminisms doing there?

It's worth noting that Landau isn’t the only feminist artist currently on display. In the contemporary galleries reside a powerful Nancy Spero, a visceral set of Lynda Benglis sculptures, and an incredible Louise Bourgeois along with a number of other works by female artists either explicitly or implicitly feminist.
Is MoMA finally jumping on the bandwagon? Is MoMA finally heeding the Guerrilla Girls’ warnings? Or is it temporarily paying lip service to the pressure to show artists from more diverse backgrounds?

While Eliasson still dominates, perhaps this is a step in the direction of positive change. Perhaps this is also a sign that for better or for worse feminist art is less of a radical movement and is gradually being integrated into major art historical institutions…but that’s an issue I’ll take up another day.

Art's Happening: Sara Rahbar

(Sara Rahbar, American Democracy Textile, 68x50, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.)

I found out about this artist, Sara Rahbar, while doing some research at the museum yesterday. Rahbar will be speaking in a panel with the South Asian Women's Creative Collective this Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum. She is also involved in an exhibition currently on view at the Queens Museum of Art called "This Case of Conscience”: Spiritual Flushing and the Remonstrance. I haven't seen the show yet, but can recommend checking out her myspace page which includes some of Rahbar's photography, painting, and images of her really unusual and interesting textiles.

(Sara Rahbar, Hosein and I, Oppression Series #2 photo shoot, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.)

Art's Happening: Yoko Ono

This is an excerpt from the "Picks of the Week," a blog series I've just started working on for the Brooklyn Museum Feminist Art Blog. Enjoy!

This is the last week to see Yoko Ono’s Touch Me, which closes May 31, 2008 at Galerie Lelong in Manhattan. This multi-dimensional fluxus artist focuses on the female experience in this exhibition through sculpture, painting, interactive installation and includes a film of her 1964 performance of Cut Piece.

(Yoko Ono, Touch me III, 2008. Cast silicone, wood, bowl, water. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong.)

Don’t miss the chance to see this legendary artist’s work at her first exhibition since 2003!

Brooklyn Museum: Feminist Art Blog

(Tracey Moffatt. Film stills from Lip, Artist, and Doomed (1999, 2000, 2007).)

It has recently come to my attention that the Brooklyn Museum runs a feminist art blog, in association with the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I checked it out this morning, and found it to be quite an extensive resource of international feminist exhibitions currently on view to the public. Included in each blog entry is a description of the exhibition and background information of the artists participating. The blog also goes into a bit more detail for the Sackler Center exhibitions, with entries that are both scholarly and informative. Rounding out the blog is a slide-show of the recent installation of Ghada Amer's artwork in the museum, and even a description of the center's facebook page. The blog's contributers range from interns at the museum, to the Sackler Center's curator, Maura Reilly, which keeps the blog's content delightfully varied. Check it out here.

Art and Anger

Plastic sent me this link to a New York Times article about a group of Swedish nationalists who vandalized the Kulturen gallery in Sweden on Friday. The group destroyed the work of photographer Andreas Serrano, a shock artist who is perhaps most remembered for his work, "Piss Christ," and the controversy that arose around it in 1989 due the fact that it was funded by a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts.

This most recent exhibit by Serrano, called "A History of Sex," is racy, but it is scary that it could provoke this kind of violence with such unrestrained bravado and conviction. Oh yeah, did I mentioned that the vandals video taped the act and posted it on YouTube? It is quite disturbing. I was particularly unsettled by the fact that the cameraman focuses on the destruction of a photo of an interracial gay couple for the majority of the video, despite the other "objectionable" photographs in the show, including a depiction of a woman fondling a stallion. That just smacks of hate to me.

Here is a link to the video, which has been removed from YouTube "due to terms of use violation," but can still be found on google video.