Review: Hide/Seek, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

I should preface this by saying that a close friend of mine, Ted Kerr, had just studied with artist AA Bronson, who since December 16 has put out an ongoing request to have his work, "Felix, June 5, 1994" removed from the exhibition, Hide/Seek: Desire and Difference in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C.  I first heard about the censorship through Ted, and I may not have gone to this exhibition otherwise, or paid much attention to the dialogue around the show, as unfortunately, censorship in art has become a white noise in media. 

Untitled still from the film "Silence = Death" (1990)

 
History repeats itself through yet another questionable censorship from the moral right, and being curious to see how David Wojnarowciz's now prolific "A Fire In My Belly" would have fit in and/or stood out from an exhibition on desire and difference in 20th century America, Ted, his boyfriend Zach, and I went to Washington D.C. to see Hide/Seek.

A few days have passed since I viewed the exhibition, and while my feelings and thoughts of confusion, anger, disappointment, and sadness have fluctuated quite vastly, I return to this first point of Wojnarowciz's work within the context of the exhibition, and I remain perplexed as to how "A Fire In My Belly" was included in this show in the first place.

For anyone who has seen the video, "A Fire In My Belly" is a tormented visceral visual hell that screams from a human core about love and loss. The work was created shortly after the death of Peter Hujar, Wojnarowciz's mentor and lover, who died from AIDS-related complications in an era where entire communities of men were decimated from AIDS while the government and media refused to address the disease. To describe the work as poignant would be too simple, as the collage video complicated feelings of anger and lost with desire and spirit that touches beyond any strands of affect. The work is also not a portrait of any one person or any one thing, and in a twisted outcome, the work only makes sense on the outside of Hide/Seek.

The show as a whole has its moments of strength, and curators David C. Ward and Jonathan Katz do an impresario job in tying the works together through the unsaid theme of queer desire. The show calls itself an exploration on the fluidity of sexuality, and how art reflects society's changing attitudes towards desire and romantic attachments. Not once do the words "gay" or "queer" appear, and so it is difficult to fault the show for something they never mentioned. That said, it is quite arguable that the show begins by way of self-censorship, staying proverbially in the exhibition closet, and choosing to present a normal, safe, and regulated perspective on celebrity gays and queers in and around the art world.

One only needs to look at the inclusion of which Robert Mapplethorpe works were selected and the answer is clear: this show is celebrating star status first and foremost.  The artists included are important figures to the art world, and to the cultural milieu of American literature, but the show is quite reductive in how these lives intersect and spawned some of the most prolific works of the 20th century. The repetitive inclusion of New York School Poet Frank O'Hara was palpably heart warming, and often about longing, but his poems were rarely, if ever, about sexual desire. Obvious exclusions included William Burroughs who wrote more about sex and drugs and orifices then anyone, and who as a figure in the world Katz and Ward explore, is far more central than O'Hara as someone who links many of the ex-pats and carries forward themes of sex and death.

There are also glaring issues with the skewered perspective on the show towards a gay male gaze from a past era, who marginalizes female desire into masculine poses and literally corners individuals like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein into portraits that simplify the complexities of narrative and language through an imposed lens of sexual difference. Walking through the show, the portraits came off more as a tabloid dishing on "who's gay and who's not", including some speculative guessing on Georgia O'Keefe and a conservative glossing over of cultural critic Susan Sontag's longtime relationship with famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, who took endless photographs of her lover, by displaying a Sontag portrait by Peter Hujar next to a less than desirable fashion portrait of lesbian-icon Ellen DeGeneres by Leibovitz.

David Wojnarowicz, Portrait by Peter Hujar, 1981

The greatest surprise in the exhibition is the prominence of David Wojnarowicz who somehow still looms large in the exhibition. Excluded is his video, but Wojnarowicz still appears three times in the show through two works as well as Hujar's portrait subject. Within Hide/Seek, Wojnarowicz is clearly reinforced as somebody important to gay identity and art during the AIDS crisis, and yet, he can be censored within the same exhibition.

The great tragedy of Hide/Seek is that the show has reduced and categorized a spectrum of individuals with limitless hearts and minds into the polite rigidity of "sexual difference". Over and over again, works within the show howled with such pangs of alienation and loneliness that went unaddressed under the rubric of unrequited desire.

Interview with Brian Jungen, Art Gallery of Alberta*

Known for his deconstruction and reassemblage of mass produced consumer goods such as Nike Air Jordans and plastic lawn chairs into critiques on museum-ready artifacts, Vancouver-based Brian Jungen has been internationally heralded for his work, and was the first living artist to receive an exhibition at The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.
Taking a short break during an intensive three-week installation at the AGA for three of his past major works, Carapace (2009), Shapeshifter (2000) and Cetology (2002), Jungen sat down for a chat about his old works, new works, the weather, and some insights about contemporary Canadian art.

Image credit: Brian Jungen's plastic-chair Cetology /  Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery

AMY FUNG: It's a pretty big year for you. First, congrats on the Gershon Iskowitz prize.

BRIAN JUNGEN: Thank you.

AF: I was curious about how you feel about having a retrospective in the same year you have this commission to do new works?

BJ: Well, I don't really like the term retrospective because it seems that's what happens after someone dies. I tend to think of it as a survey of older work, or a showing of older works in a new context.

AF: Will the new works be a continuation of this style?

BJ: No, the show at the AGO will be a whole new direction and a whole new body of work that I recently just started and showed in Vancouver last month at Catriona Jeffries. A lot of the new work is using found or unconventional materials, but very different from this kind of store-bought, mass-produced material. They are materials I think you would be familiar with through the landscape of rural Canada, like car body parts, animal skins, and things like that.

AF: Does your sense of place and home seep into your work?

BJ: It's becoming more important in my new work, this sense that I'm from Northern Canada. I've lived in Vancouver for about 15 years now, and though I really like the arts community in Vancouver, I find myself returning to Northern BC a lot, especially in the last few years. Maybe it's because I'm approaching middle age, and want to make connections to the place I grew up. I don't know if it's that, I just like the environment and the folks up there. I generally like the climate, believe it or not. There's hot summers, cold winters, probably just like Edmonton, but it's sunny and it's a proper winter. In Vancouver you don't really get a winter, you get a cold monsoon, and it's a different type of cold. I really miss winters like this. I've been here for the last two weeks, and folks in Edmonton have been saying how unusually cold and how much snow it's been this year, but I totally like it!

AF: Well I'm glad somebody likes it.

BJ: I guess I get to leave, but place is becoming more important in my work, I'm doing less site-specific work and building everything on-site, which I've been doing for the last several years.

AF: You're also showing in Close Encounters, the largest exhibition ever organized in the world on contemporary Indigenous art, happening in Winnipeg right now. Can you speak about that?

BJ: Sure, what I really like in Canada is that there is no division. You can be a contemporary artist and making work on Aboriginal issues and identity, but you're still a contemporary artist, whereas in the States, there's a huge division. That became really apparent to me when I did this project at The Smithsonian last year, Strange Comforts. It made me realize how much more wide open the Canadian contemporary art field is. Like with Close Encounters, I think it's amazing. If that show was curated in another country, it would be generally ignored by the contemporary art press, but not in Canada, which is great. It's very inclusive that way.

AF: Let's talk about the works in this show.

BJ: We have two of the whale skeletons, Shapeshifter and Cetology, both on loan, and Carapace, which I initially made in France two years ago. I was working in this old chateau that was converted into a contemporary art space and it had been surrounded by idyllic farm land, except the last few years it was all being converted into suburbs, just like what you would see in Calgary, Edmonton, Fort St John. In these suburbs I kept seeing these new garbage bins that just became a symbol for the sign of the times and a symbol of unbridled housing excess that I decided to use the bins as source material. I also thought it would be a nice pairing of this idea of this waste of garbage bins with the structure of a tortoise, which is a symbol of the Earth in many cultures, and is a house and home.

AF: Can you tell me about the construction of these works?

BJ: I keep working with material until I feel some sort of resolution with it, that a way of working with the materials has been realized. So with Carapace, instead of making a new one three different times, I decided to use the same materials three different ways over three different times. After the first time in France, I saw a completely different way of constructing it that would be a lot more dynamic, so I made it a second time last year at the Smithsonian, and when Catherine [Crowston] invited me here I proposed making it a third and final time. This will be the final configuration of the materials.

AF: What do you think viewers can expect from this, who generally will not have seen the first two configurations?

BJ: Because the piece is quite large, there's usually an immediate response. People want to go inside it, and they have this very strong physical reaction to it. People want to touch it and climb it—which you can't do—but the last two times, people sometimes saw it just as the materials and so they don't see it as art works. They think they can be interactive with it, which they can't, so now I'm actually cutting up the materials enough that you can't really recognize at first what it's made out of it.

AF: How many bins are you actually using?

BJ: I don't know. We usually deal directly with the manufacturers, but we basically take what we can get. Same with the chairs. When I was making those, I was just driving around to all the Canadian Tires, buying them up and clearing them out. If I need more, it's something so plentiful that you can just go out and get more. I bought some new bins here in Edmonton. There are certain things that are global products that you can basically get anywhere.

AF: And that really is the impetus of your work, how everything has been globalized, including art.

BJ: Yeah, there's a discourse about that. Art has taken on a much stronger profile in the last 10-plus years with museums wanting a much bigger presence in cities, to become a tourist attraction, like this place, the AGO, the Bilbao Guggenheim, that's how it's changed a lot, I think. Not sure if it makes art more accessible to the general public, but it has made a certain type of style or international strategy around art institutions.

*First published in Vue Weekly

Winnipeg Round Up, Sculptural Vocabularies and Close Encounters, January 19 - 22, 2010

More will be said on both Sculptural Vocabularies and Close Encounters: The Next 500 years, but I wanted to acknowledge the span of the past few days.

First, Sculptural Vocabularies was a collaborative symposium organized by The Winnipeg Art Gallery along with Mentoring Art for Women Artists and coordinated by the WAG's Adult Education Coordinator, Anna Wiebe. As a first of its kind initiative in Canada to focus specifically on women in sculpture on an international scale, it brought out over 100 delegates from across the country, despite so much going on with shows opening at Platform, Urban Shaman, Maison Des Artistes, and Gallery 1C03, much of which was parallel programming for Close Encounters, and of course, the bone crushing conditions of minus forty Celsius conditions that some would call invigorating, while others would not.

Image credit: Aganetha Dyck, Checkers and Bees, from exhibition The MMasked Ball, 2009

The programming for the conference was mostly even, with a questionable opening keynote by Catherine Widgery, who did not show much of her public art works. Widgery received one of Winnipeg's largest public art commissions ($365,000) in 1999 for her "River Arch", which I have never noticed though have passed on more than one occasion, and suffice to say when pointed out directly, fails to engage me as a work of art or design. Widgery's personal artistic practice was far more interesting, and that was one reoccurring theme: the divide of a personal artistic practice and the compromising profession of working in public art. Other themes included a focus on process and temporality, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to the field of sculpture.
The last day of Sculptural Vocabularies overlapped with the opening day of Close Encounters: The Next 500 years, a city wide international exhibition on Indigenous art that again, is a first of its kind. The panelists on Saturday were the strongest lineup including the morning panel featuring Mary Anne Barkhouse, Faye Heavyshield, and Nadia Myre moderated by Candice Hopkins, and the afternoon one on one conversation between Lee-Ann Martin and Rebecca Belmore. I describe this line up as the strongest as the work is inherently more political. While I was dismayed by the lack of men present for the first two and a half days of the conference, the greatest disparity was still not through gender, but through race relations, as a question, or rather, a rude request from the a woman in the attendance calling on Heavyshield to speak aloud the Blackfoot language was embarrassing and infuriating all at once.

The conference ended on a high note, with a candid and personal conversation between Martin and Belmore, who in a t-shirt, jeans, and fluorescent sneakers, who couldn't remember a single date, still stole the show by simply being  an artist wholly immersed in a process that can only be described as electrifying.

Image credit: Marja Helander, Mount Annivaara Utsjoki, 2002 , c-print,  117x93cm

The rest of the afternoon was spent revisiting main sites for Close Encounters which included Plug In, The Hydro Building, and 109 Pacific Avenue, formerly the Costume Museum of Canada. As the first exhibition in the world to bring together contemporary Indigenous artists from around the world including Canada, U.S., New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, and Finland, Close Encounters is certainly being described as important. Featuring over 30 works, with about 10% of that being newly commissioned works, the exhibition's curatorial strategy is to radically shift the encounter narrative of Indigenous art that often looks to the past and instead, consider future possibilities that will address new themes and issues. If opening night was any indication, certainly dialogues were provoked from those whose excitement and fervor over the contemporary boundaries bubbled and brewed, to those who questioned why so much of the work has already been seen, accusations of nepotism, and the classically provocative contention of being Indigenous enough.

Curated by the powerhouse team of Lee-Ann Martin, Steve Loft, Hopkins, and Jenny Western, the exhibition seems quite aware of all of these issues, though I am sure this will be argued, and really, it is that passion in the discussions to come that is the most exciting element of this star-studded exhibition.