Ms. Poiesis

Feminist art moves into the spotlight this year, with two major exhibitions and a housewarming for “The Dinner Party”

by Michele Kort

“Be careful what you wish 40 years for,” says Judy Chicago.

The famed feminist artist isn’t complaining, just noting all the hard work that’s gone into a remarkable occasion: This spring, her iconic 1979 art piece “The Dinner Party” will be permanently enshrined at the Brooklyn Museum.

And that’s not all. “The Dinner Party” will serve as centerpiece for the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Yes, an elite American art institution—Greek-pillared portico and all—has recognized an art genre that, over the past several decades, has been too often disparaged and too rarely feted. Moreover, the Sackler Center will also showcase the exhibition “Global Feminisms,” opening March 23—a survey of 86 women artists from nearly 50 countries who carry feminist concerns into their work.

As if that were still not enough, the exhibition “Wack! Art of the Feminist Revolution” will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles on March 4, unearthing the roots and shoots of international feminist art from 1965 to 1980.

Read the rest here.

For more on Judy Chicago, click here.

Saint Claire 37
2003, Earthenware
84 x 55 x 55 cm

Cuddly Toys Caught on Barbed Wire
2001, Earthenware
55 x 38 x 38 cm

Barbaric Splendour
2003, Glazed ceramic
67 x 35 cm
See more here.

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Mantegna, Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue 1499

MÉNAGEOT, François-Guillaume
Envy Plucking the Wings of Fame
1806

These never go out of fashion …

These illustrations are by Giotto – frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy 1306

Wrath

Injustice

Infidelity

Inconstancy

Foolishness

Envy

Desperation

Bronzino, Venus, Cupid and Time (Allegory of Lust) 1540

This work was probably created at the Tuscan court of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici for presentation to the King of France. It was designed as a puzzle, and incorporates symbols and devices from the worlds of mythology and emblematic imagery. It would have made the perfect present for the French king, known for his lusty appetites, yearning after Italian culture and magnificence, and with a liking for heraldry and obscure emblems.

The goddess of love and beauty, identified by the golden apple given to her by Paris and by her doves, has drawn Cupid’s arrow. At her feet, masks, perhaps the symbols of sensual nymph and satyr, seem to gaze up at the lovers. Foolish Pleasure, the laughing child, throws rose petals at them, heedless of the thorn piercing his right foot. Behind him Deceit, fair of face, but foul of body, proffers a sweet honeycomb in one hand, concealing the sting in her tail with the other. On the other side of the lovers is a dark figure, formerly called Jealousy but recently plausibly identified as the personification of Syphilis, a disease probably introduced to Europe from the New World and reaching epidemic proportions by 1500.

The symbolic meaning of the central scene is thus revealed to be unchaste love, presided over by Pleasure and abetted by Deceit, and its painful consequences. Oblivion, the figure on the upper left who is shown without physical capacity for remembering, attempts to draw a veil over all, but is prevented by Father Time – possibly alluding to the delayed effects of syphilis. Cold as marble or enamel, the nudes are deployed against the costliest ultramarine blue, and the whole composition, flattened against the picture plane, recalls Bronzino’s contemporaneous designs for the duke’s new tapestry factories.

Source: Web Gallery of Art

Photographs of flowers by Katinka Matson

Three Parrott Tulips

Water Lily and Leaf

See more of Katinka’s work here.

Her work alludes to Dutch still life painting of the 17th and 18th centuries. Here are a couple of examples:

BOLLONGIER, Hans
Still Life with Flowers
1639

BOSSCHAERT, Ambrosius the Younger
Still-Life
1627

See my still life etchings here and photographs here.

Is the American Empire on the Brink of Collapse?

By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash. Posted March 24, 2007.

U.S. military expert Chalmers Johnson argues the catastrophe in Iraq and the staggering cost of running a military that stretches across 130 countries on 737 bases may finally cost America its empire.

“I believe that we’re close to a tipping point right now. What happened to the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 could easily be happening to us for essentially the same reasons. Imperial overreach, inability to reform, rigid economic ideology. … The world’s balance of power didn’t change one iota on September 11, 2001. The only way we could lose the power and influence we had at that time was through our own actions, and that’s what we did”. — Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

Has our “leadership” traded democracy for empire? Have their over-bloated egos convinced them that they are the world’s newly crowned colonial kings? Author Chalmers Johnson is certainly not given to wearing rose-colored glasses. As he concludes in his newest book, Nemesis: “… my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences.”

Johnson’s well-argued, persuasive argument draws on the economic, military, and political lessons of the past, which may be just what’s needed to wake up Americans in time to change course. In this interview, he explained his hopes and fears for contemporary America.

Read more here.

The Emperor tarot

The Emperor symbolizes the desire to rule over one’s surroundings, and its appearance in a reading often suggests that the subject needs to accept that some things may not be controllable, and others may not benefit from being controlled.

The Emperor is Key Four of the Major Arcana. Fours are stable numbers; four walls, four seasons, four corners. It takes a massive amount of energy, comparatively, to move them. The strength of The Emperor is the stability he brings. The weakness is the risk of stagnation.

The Emperor is connected to Key 13, Death, through its cross sum (the sum of the digits). Emperors maintain their power through death and through their relationship with the other 13 of the tarot; The Queens (who legitimate their rule and bear their heirs). He is also strongly associated with Life; his scepter is an ankh, the symbol of life. But he is in the mountains, separated from the pulse of life. The sign of the Emperor is associated with the sun sign of Aries. Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and is the leader. The Emperor, like Aries, is fiery, powerful, authoritative and very egotistical.

King Minos is another aspect of this archetypal image. He was, mostly, a good king, (considered so wise he is, according to some, one of the judges of the dead), who increased and protected Crete for many years. But he took his kingdom by means of a trick. He and his brothers disputed who should rule, and he prayed to Poseidon to send a sign from the sea that he was the chosen of the gods, which he promised to immediately sacrifice to the god. Poseidon sent a magnificent bull, and Minos was proclaimed king. But he balked at fulfilling his promise to slay the animal, and substituted a bull from his own herds. In so doing, as Joseph Campbell put it he “converted a public event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investiture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person. The return of the bull should have symbolized his absolutely selfless submission to the functions of his role.” (Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces 15 (2nd ed. 1968)). And the consequences were catastrophic; Poseidon afflicted the Cretan queen, Pasiphae, with an unquenchable desire for the bull. Their coupling produced the Minotaur, who was fed on human flesh.

Slaying the Minotaur

The Emperor’s power and apparent stability bring great comfort, self worth, power. But the danger, as Minos discovered, is that we may gain a sense of personal entitlement beyond our actual rights. That way leads corruption, material or spiritual. It also, to quote an old television show, makes the people “cr[y] out for a hero.”

Generally, when the Emperor appears in a spread, he is something to be overcome. Some rigidity of thinking, some inflexibility of approach, some external force keeping us from our destiny. A comforting myth the Querant has outgrown. Sometimes, he represents the exterior forces we must accommodate. Sometimes, he is the superego. The two rams on each sides of his throne represent Aries presenting him as a powerful dictator for his time and showing his potent thirst for conquering in war. (Source: Wikipedia)

By Martha Kearney

“The Chapman Brothers first hit the British art scene with Disasters of War in 1993, their sculptural re-working of the 19th century Spanish artist Francicso de Goya’s epic series of etchings Desastres de la Guerra. Ever since, Goya has remained a steady influence on their work. In Bad Art for Bad People, the first big show to examine their work, there is a large Goyaesque tree called Sex hung with the skeletons of soldiers from the earlier Disasters of War in an advanced state of decay. The other major sculpture in the room – an inflatable lilo featuring a couple having sex is made of bronze, and is entitled intriguingly, Death.

Chapman brothers, detail from Explaining Christians to Dinosaurs 2003

The Tate Liverpool exhibition traces the artistic journey of the Chapman Brothers. It’s centrepiece is perhaps the notoriously controversial Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic de-sublimated libidinal model, one of a collection of child mannequins where sexual organs are put in place of more familiar facial features, which hit the headlines in 1997 after its unveiling at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition. Later works include the exotic sculptures of The Chapman Family Collection with their parody of McDonalds and globalisation. For those seeking their inner child, Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC is the best room to explore. This is where the dinosaurs who got left behind live. Mostly made from cardboard, one even from an old Mitsubishi VHS box, there are a few made from bronze for the detectives amongst us to hunt down.”

Chapman brothers, installation Bad Art for Bad People

“Wrestling with earlier artists and with history, trying to get beyond cliche and to say something if not original then at least fresh, they keep our perversities alive – which is pretty much the best an artist, or even a pair of artists, can attempt to do”. (Anthony Searle)

· Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Bad Art For Bad People is at Tate Liverpool until March 4.

Read more here and here.
See a slide show of work from the Tate Gallery exhibition here.

Surrealism’s women thought they were celebrating sexual emancipation. But were they just fulfilling men’s erotic fantasies?

By Germaine Greer

Monday March 5, 2007
The Guardian

Delvaux, The Birth of the Day 20th c

Among the “surreal things” to be celebrated at the V&A’s exhibition this month is the human body. The body when separated from its identity – or soul, if you prefer – becomes just another thing. In her book The Surreal Body, written to accompany the exhibition, Ghislaine Wood struggles mightily to present the body that “the surrealists endlessly manipulated and fetishised” as unisex or ambisex, but it is actually feminine. Not female. Feminine. Even in the deliberately dis-gendered figure of Claude Cahun, the operation of narcissism is purely feminine. Herbert Bayer mugging at his naked and mutilated self in the mirror is feminine. Hans Bellmer’s dolls are all, horribly, feminine.

Fini, The Ends of the Earth 20th c

In our polarised culture, in which real men may not be treated as mere body, and women must consider themselves primarily body, the portrayed body becomes the feminised body, regardless of its sex.

May Ray, Veiled Erotic (portrait of Meret Oppenheim) 20th c

At the same time that the women of surrealism were endlessly arraying and portraying themselves, as often in carefully posed photographs as in any other medium, the men of surrealism were disappearing into short back and sides, and suits and ties. Femininity was all image; masculinity had no image at all. Real men don’t look in mirrors. …

Oppenheim, Object 20th c

Read the rest of the article here.

For more on Surrealism, click here.