Maverick
Arts
Boston’s
Visual Artsletter
By Charles
Giuliano
82 Webster Street
East Boston, 02128
Charles.Giuliano@GTE.net
October 25,
2000
Issue No. 5
Charles
Giuliano is an artist. curator
and critic. This is the third
edition of Maverick Arts, an on
line artsletter. Frank Conte, a journalist
and comrade in arms, has agreed
to carry this newletter on his
web site, www.eastboston.com. He will also
be archiving back
issues if you are
joining us for the first time.
Also, if other arts related web
sites wish to carry this
artsletter, please reach me by e
mail. Charles.Giuliano@GTE.net
Sight
Unseen
Rafael Mahdavi
New England School of Art and
Design at Suffolk University
French Library and Cultural
Center
Nesting
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
&
Contact Sheet Self Portraits
Karl Baden,
Howard Yezerski Gallery
Lori
Hamermesh
Gallery Naga
Feedback
Sight
Unseen
Recent
Paintings by Rafael Mahdavi
On
view concurrently at the
New
England School of Art and Design
at Suffolk University
and
the
French
Library and Cultural Center
October
25 through November 22, 2000
The
French Library and Cultural
Center has published another
version of this essay in its
magazine, AD LIB. This essay
appeared in the exhibition
catalogue that also contains a
critical essay by New York
University Professor, Todd
Gitlin.
The
large scale, reductive, gray
paintings of Rafael Mahdavi,
combining abstraction, text,
Braille, and symbolism, represent
a confluence between two lifelong
concerns, the mastery of painting
technique, and language. These
paintings speak in Pentecostal
tongues.
Since
1975, Mahdavi, who is 54, has
worked in France. He has also
lived and traveled extensively in
the United States, Austria,
Spain, Italy, England,
Switzerland and Mexico. This has
resulted in a facility with
languages and induced a global
outlook.
This
nomadic lifestyle has penetrated
all aspects of his work. It has
resulted in an intimacy with
diverse cultural resources. He
has routinely extracted the
essence of multinational
influences and impulses.
It has
also created a disinclination for
jingoism, xenophobia, joining
cliques, or following trends.
And, through a complex,
contrarian thought process he has
rejected much of the orthodox
dogma of Modernism.
This
personal vision has led him, away
from the pervasive, avant-garde,
cul de sac, traditions of Duchamp
and Malevich. He has, instead,
intensely studied a range of
masters from Velasquez, Goya, and
Caravaggio, to such
contemporaries as Bacon, Johns,
Lopez-Garcia, and Rauschenberg.
What these inspirational artists,
past and present, share, for
Mahdavi, is poetry, richness of
content, substance, and technical
mastery.
Like
Giacometti, in his mid 30s,
Mahdavi, at the age of 48,
decided to start over. He
returned to some of his earliest
and most profound impulses to
make work that had personal
meaning and poetry.
"First
of all (my) paintings have to be
looked at," the artist said
during a recent studio visit in
the 11th
arrondissement of Paris,
"And not just looked at
formally and retinally. I edit my
paintings like a good writer
edits an essay. For me, color,
texture, scale, and composition
are part of a grammar of visual
elements. But they do not make up
the eventual poetry, which must
sustain over the next 1500 years.
The glory of Shakespeare’s
sonnets is not the commas and the
subjunctives. He uses his grammar
to build and structure his
sonnet. But there’s
something else involved."
The
current work involves patterns of
raised bumps spelling out words
and text in the Braille system
used by the blind. These are
punched into the back of the
canvas and leave a system of
coded dots. In other works he has
scored words such as, Paysage,
(Landscape) which also has a
double entendre, Age Pays.
The canvas has also been crushed
and folded. The resultant
wrinkled patterns have been
augmented with trompe
l’oeil rendering. In
addition to works involving
Braille, Mahdavi has rendered the
Spanish word for water, Agua,
and a poem by Garcia Lorca.
"The
idea of Braille," he
explained, "Is that
it’s a language. That’s
the main model of what I think
painting is. Language is only
public. The chance of getting
anything personal across is
highly unlikely."
Struck
by the casual manner in which
most visitors experience works in
a museum he was motivated to
learn and incorporate Braille as
a way of experiencing art for a
non sighted person. Or, to quote
American blues singer, Sonnyboy
Williamson, "I gave eyesight
to the blind." The Braille
text is first punched into the
canvas describing the content and
appearance of the final work.
"Most
people going to museums
don’t see," he said.
"They categorize. They give
it (a work of art) a five second
glance. ‘Oh, that’s a
Delacroix.’ When I go to the
Louvre, I usually look at ten or
fifteen paintings over a two hour
period. I go to see my buddies.
When you stand in front of a
painting for a long time you
discover new things about
it."
This
intensive process of studying the
Masters led to questioning
Modernism. "The sacred
cows," he said. "That
nobody dares wonder about. I ask
myself about the meaning of
painting." He discussed the
formal aspects of art as,
"Its public meaning. The
stuff you are taught in books.
The received knowledge. Great art
keeps accruing meaning that is
often unspoken. If art only has
public meaning, like a lot of
contemporary stuff, and no
private, or secret meaning, then
you have an academic piece."
Yes, but
why paint today when cutting edge
international art has explored
everything from performance,
video, installation, social,
sexual, and political content.
So, by continuing in the realm of
what Duchamp dismissed as,
"retinal," may Mahdavi
be viewed as reactionary and
counter revolutionary?
To this
challenge he replied, "
First of all, painting is hard to
do. There are many techniques
involved in painting. It’s
complex, difficult and not fast.
There’s no such thing as
fast art. It has to take a chunk
out of your life. That’s the
painting that I like. Secondly,
painting that has as its subject
matter its own technique,
history, and its own problematic
is, to me, totally unimportant,
Like writing about writing
doesn’t interest me.
"The
painting I believe in has meaning
for people. I believe in working
for the average educated person.
I want my paintings to generate
meaning for people for a long
time. I’m not painting only
for critics and art historians,
the insiders. (My paintings)
encourage people to ask questions
about themselves."
And just
how did he develop the technique
and iconography of the recent
work. In some respects it
involved the elimination of
earlier experimentation.
"When
I came to Paris, in 1975, I lot
of my concerns were best
expressed through
photography," he recalled.
"I worked on large photo
sensitized canvases. I exposed
photographs in black and white
and some were then tinted with
turpentine washes. I even doused
myself in developer and lay on
the exposed canvas. I did
Rayographs and put lace on the
canvases. And applied the
developer a la Pollock. But I got
bored with this. I was
technically a whiz, but, after
you got past the wowness of the
technique, I was repeating
myself."
Despite
the recognition and sales that
this innovative work eventually
received, the artist returned to
painting. "I went back to
painting things that were
important to me. I wanted to make
paintings that had meaning. The
techniques I was most proficient
at involved painting. I had
employed photography, and photo
transfer, in addition to working
on scenery and set design. So, I
had a good arsenal. But I
didn’t want to paint about
the arsenal. I went back to using
images, that I had started with
years ago, in New York, that were
still meaningful to me."
These
elements have been developed and
refined, in the past five years.
In addition to incorporating
single words, text, and Braille
there is a lexicon of signs and
symbols including: The body as
landscape, mountains, dogs,
hands, butterflies, fingerprints,
skulls and mushrooms.
The
butterfly, for example, is a
metaphor for delicacy and
migration. While the hand has
multiple interpretations as
varied as sign language. And, the
mushroom?
"This
is the Amanita mushroom," he
explained, "Totally
poisonous. If you even touch it
that’s harmful. It
represents the sense of touch.
The senses are important to
me."
These
works demand patience and time to
create and decipher. They evoke
galvanic mysteries for the
sighted, as well as, the blind,
now, and forever.
Gallery
Hopping: Boston
Maria
Magdalena Campos-Pons,
"Nesting."
Karl
Baden, "Contact Sheet Self
Portraits."
Both at
Howard Yezerski Gallery, through
October 31
14
Newbury Street
This
pair of exhibitions both involved
self portraits, an ongoing
concern of these artists, in the
medium of photography.
Campos-Pons,
a native of Cuba, has lived and
worked in Boston for many years
following an initial period of a
couple of years in Montreal, as I
was surprised to learn recently.
Her work is best known for
ambitious, self referential,
installations that have explored
identity and her rich Cuban
cultural heritage. She usually
appears in one way or another as
a character in her work. In the
past couple of years she has had
critically acclaimed
installations as a project for
the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, and in the List Visual Arts
Center at MIT as well as
participating in the Liverpool
Biennial. These multi media works
have been both visually stunning
as well as humanistically
haunting.
The
works on view here, a
continuation of an ongoing series
over the past few years, involve
working with a large format
Polaroid camera. The camera is
large, fixed in a studio and
expensive to work with. So
artists who use this process must
stand or place something in front
of the lens. This has resulted in
a lot of work, by different
artists, that have a sense of
sameness, often still life and
aspects of self portraits or
posing models. While the
resultant images, offering
immediate results, large scale
and rich color, are obviously
attractive the process also sets
severe limits.
These
images by Campos-Pons, because of
their consistent frontality and
centrality, don’t seem to be
pushing the medium and its
potential with the same level of
intensity in her installations.
She often uses makeup and props.
In this show, she has created a
triptych in which she has used
her hands inventively to form a
mask over her face and we see
traces of makeup around her eyes,
like "feathers." These,
"owl eyes," are then
bracketed by still life images of
artifact owls. There are many
visually seductive aspects of
this work but I hope that she
pushes it further.
One
ongoing project of Karl Baden, an
artist with anger, wit and irony,
was to take a daily self
portrait, mug shot. When they
were displayed en masse, in a
grid form, one was challenged to
see any daily subtle increment of
change. Hair a bit longer, maybe,
or expression slightly different.
More often like watching paint
dry or grass grow. But I found
the idea and obsession of it
intriguing. Like, self absorbed
to the max. He experimented with
different forms of presenting the
work, as book, and video but you
wondered when the project would
kind of dead end. Like how many
more years of that were possible.
Would he someday end up like the
character in Beckett’s,
"Krapps Last Tape,"
eating a banana and setting up
that daily shot. Just what were
the limits of the artist’s
fixation and the tolerance and
indulgence of the viewer. Enough
already.
That’s
why this new work was a shocker.
He is still taking those mug
shots, but with a twist. Or
twisted is more like it. The
contact sheet grids of details of
a grimacing face, a bit of a
mouth and teeth, a little chin
job, or a finger here and there,
when seen as a whole, is some
grotesque, psychedelic, Plastic
Man right out of a vintage Mad
Magazine. This series seems to
vent the artist’s rage and
the fire in the belly. Not easy
stuff to look at. But, hey man,
go for it.
Lori
Hamermesh
Gallery
Naga, through November 11
67
Newbury Street
This a
breakthrough show for Hamermesh.
She has long shown a facility for
a colorful form of expressionist
painting in the long Boston
tradition. But this exhibition,
which was several years in
gestation, has made a bold
departure.
The
paintings, literally, involve
layering. There is an under
image, some still life and
figurative themes, and then a
scrim is placed over that with an
interval of space in between.
That scrim, or veil, has painted
elements as well as embroidery
and decorative fabric appliqués.
Because of the manner employed
one can’t help but note a
feminine sensibility to the work
but while it evokes sentiment it
is certainly not sentimental.
Nostalgic, perhaps. For a wedding
couple. Or an occasional stray
dog. Probably a family pet. But
one theme that shows up several
times is an appropriation of the
Salon painter, Cabanel’s
kitsch Venus floating on the
waves with putti hovering
overhead. It was the hit of its
19th century salon and
was purchased by the Emperor,
Napoleon 111. Today it hangs in
the Beauborg. It’s the kind
of work that Robert Rosenblum
would wax rhapsodic over, he of
the quirky revisionist taste. But
how did it show up here in these
rather experimental works by
Hamermesh. What do these nudes,
brides and dogs add up to. Well,
maybe, a stitch in time.
Feedback
Claude
Gosselin, the Directeur general
et artistique of the Centre
international d’art
contemporain de Montreal,
e-mailed to express thanks for
the review but pointed out errors
in my poor use of French. It
seems that the correct spelling
is, La Biennale de Montreal 2000.
Mea Culpa (that’s Latin). My
apologies but I assure Gosselin
that I abuse a number of
languages, including English, and
not just French. But, French
speaking people, like, I mean,
they get so, like uptight.
Everyone else, sortah, like, you
know what I mean, here in the
like USA, and stuff, just kindah
get the drift and stuff.
When I
pointed out to me friend, Harry
Bartnick, for example, that I had
misspelled a lot of French stuff
in the Montreal piece, he said
that, "I wouldn’t have
noticed anyway." He got
through the piece, but complained
that it was too long. And kept
waiting for the jokes.
Rene
Blouin, reported that he enjoyed
the piece, complained that I gave
him too much credit and
attention, but found the piece
convoluted and wondered if I was
reverting back to banging the
gong around with a bit of the old
muggles and putting on the in and
out on the rot me brothers. Hey,
I ain’t sayin.
-30-
Y’All
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