Artists Unite Issue

posting 2: decima bienal habana

The Havana Biennial runs from March 27 to April 39, 2009 with 16 major installation national sites and numerous galleries and studios exhibiting works: there’s a lot of art to be seen even considering that the Morro Cabana, one of the major exhibition sites, closed early for reasons unexplained.

Luckily the works some of Cuba’s greatest artists: Wilfredo Lam, Raul Martinez and Jose Bedia, are still on view in an exhibit called “Resistancia y Libertad’ at the Museo Nacionale des Belles Artes.

On the wall text (and in the excellent exhibition catalogue) curator Corina Matamoros tells us why these three: because they “are united by the same method, a similar way to produce their poetics. Surrealism meant to Wilfredo Lam what Pop meant to Raul Martinez and the trends derived from Post-Conceptualism to Jose Bedia; a model as starting point to tell of something else and in a different way.” Surely that is exactly what we’re all hoping for.

And why not consider also the wellspring culture as vehicle equal in its own way to method, style, or school. We know that Lam’s Afro-Cuban experience runs hand in hand with his surrealists’ view. All three are certainly products of their time and “region” or their culture, yet the work moves far far beyond regional concerns. Yes I’m still thinking, talking, writing about regionalism and I’m not the only one. Matamoros continues with “a model to be enriched until even its own original context could not develop it further,… an alternative form of inserting in history for the benefit of all narrative.”

Wilfredo Lam’s beautiful paintings can be read as manifestos for social change but they’re much more. The compositions are surprisingly light and warm and inviting even at their darkest. His surrealist and cubist connections to Picasso and that bunch are evident though for the first time I saw his work as the bridge straight to the heart of the next generation of Abstract Expressionists, in particular to where Jackson Pollack went.

I was prepared to dismiss Raul Martinez’ work as derivative pop repetitive graphics in no way transcending their time or purpose of heralding and furthering the cause of the revolution, but giving them second and then third moments I saw beyond that to their intimate and personal nature - though there is no escaping seeing them, at lleast in some part, as art propaganda.

Jose Bedia’s paintings take us on an exquisite journey, along a ritual procession of line, toward some certain future, with extraordinary grace and sureness of a visionary but without the slightest bit of the usual heavy-handedness of sci-fi to accompany it.

Photography was not allowed but here is one image from the catalogue.When I’m back in New York I’ll come back in and link some sites to this post.

TOO BE CONTINUED

Next stop: less formal settings / more contemporary pickings

Pamela Popeson

I’m in Cuba catching the tail end of the decima Bienal Habana, the tenth biennial, on the 25^th anniversary of the Havana Biennial. “Integration and Resistance in the Global Era” is the theme of the biennial but clearly it’s just as much about poetics.

This is definitely an international art event, several 100 artists from 44 countries, including the installation “Chelsea Visits Havana,” however the works have a regional feel or sensibility - at least the better works do.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of regional art a lot lately though to be perfectly honest what I mean by regional art is anything being done or shown, or more accurately anything I’m seeing, out side of New York City.  Mostly I’m wondering what I think regional art is and why we (I) bother to make such a distinction.

One of the installations at the Wilfredo Lam Center, the prime organzer of the 10^th Havana Biennial, is a series of paintings by Herve Fischer, a French-Canadian Philosopher, writer, and artist. In a dialogue with the Art History students of the University of Havana prior to the opening of the biennial, Fischer suggests, “The crisis of contemporary art becomes evident in biennials or large exhibitions. Artists from the North find themselves in an adequate context to give free rein to their personal narratives without any interest in dialoguing with the spectators, in a space that considers as a good artist the man who enjoys extreme liberty but without meaning, without communicating with the public, without an idea of social responsibility.”

I don’t necessarily agree that giving rein to personal narratives precludes communicating with the public or creating works of social responsibility, however I think he’ observed a, if not the, fundamental difference between the work one generally sees in galleries and museums in Central and South America, and what ones sees in the North, particularly New York City.

 He goes on to say, “here (in Cuba) there is a sense of commitment, a research on social and political matters that have to do with society.” I think that must be true, but I think it may also be true of the work created elsewhere including in the North. Perhaps the differences lie instead in what matters reflect the respective societies’ concerns. Perhaps the main social and political concerns of the North are the exploration of the personal narrative.

 TO BE CONTINUED…

Pamela Popeson

Just saw Tacita Dean’s work at Marian Goodman up through April 29. Half the show is overpainted photographs. The larger ones are interesting: the ancient burial rocks silhouetted using black paint are striking; but the photo texture and paint didn’t work for me (I became more interested in the brush strokes than the subject matter). On the other hand, the small paintings, using white gouache to silhouette and other marks on photos of trees, are gorgeous.

Her 16mm film Michael Hamburg, about the British poet, documents him in his home in Suffolk. The film is lush with soft images of trees and cropped compositions inside the house. While stacks of books and journals fill the house, most of the film — and one assumes most of his life — finds this man who escaped Nazism as a child talking about his apple orchard and the numerous unusual varieties he grows. The film, which is poignant and sweet like an apple, emerged from a commission about author W.G. Sebald who has his narrator meet Hamburg in the book The Rings of Saturn.

Those of you who receive northern Manhattan’s local newspaper, the Manhattan Times, in the mail, know they have done an amazing thing in the publishing field: they feature a full front page on an artist’s work, with accompanying article inside. This was a bold move and adds to the general positioning of northern Manhattan as an arts community. 

This week (April 9) features Artists Unite regular, Stephen Beveridge, for the work that he has on display as part of Artists Unite’s show That!, which was scheduled as a winter show, but due to scheduling quirks with AU and our venue host, NoMAA, has continued to grace the NoMAA gallery walls. I hope this feature in the Manhattan Times will encourage some additional art fans to stop by to see Stephen’s terrific paintings, as well as the works by Amir Parsa, Rosa Naparstek, Karen Greene, Anthony Gonzalez, Keesje Fischer, and Peter Ferko. At NoMAA, 178 Bennett Ave, by appointment 212-568-4396.

See more about Stephen’s work at artgrows.com.

As a board member of an arts organization, it’s been a long challenge to be without a space of our own to call home. Claudia La Rocco in the New York Times reported this week on the flip side: what organizations with too much home are doing in New York. The story touches on Dance New Amsterdam, where my friend and Artist Unite fan Kate Peila has been slashing costs and building innovative solutions. Here’s an excerpt. Read the full story here.

Dance Theater Workshop is one of many organizations that have invested in buildings in recent years, hoping for homes in which to safeguard their artistic mission. But these spaces have become burdens, contributing to escalating deficits and distracting the institutions from their core purpose.

“You get a building, and then you buy it, and then you get an endowment, and then the heavens open and the angels sing,” said Clara Miller, president and chief executive of the national Nonprofit Finance Fund. “And at each one of those steps up that ladder to heaven you’re actually becoming less flexible. You’re building more of a kind of organizational shell around yourself — which you may need, which may be the right kind of cradle for your mission. But you may be really undermining your flexibility to change with the times.”