A staircase guides you on how to treat others. Photo courtesy of Tarek Alghorani. https://www.facebook.com/MAD.GRAFFiTi.Week.SYRiaa?fref=ts

In a very poor city in Russia, where the buildings were crumbling, where middle-aged men were urinating on the bare skeletons of burnt-out cars, where children were playing with pebbles in the puddles of unpaved roads, there was once a peeling wall on which someone had scribbled, in coal, the words, “I can’t take this anymore.” I remember looking at this and thinking that it was actually strikingly artistic, the way the artist had chosen to use a medium that is an internationally recognized symbol for poverty, the way the canvas itself expressed its point, the way it drew attention to this forgotten structure, and the way that, simple and yet irremovable from its context, it could so succinctly express the emotions of its own community.

In my wanderings around Russia, I frequently came across more of these these cave-man carvings onto aging stone. Some of them, like the one above, were expressions of despair in inhumane conditions. Many of them included expletives and imaginative (if somewhat neolithic) illustrations. But most of them, unsurprisingly, were about love.

I remember one in particular that I discovered on the pavement outside my apartment in St. Petersburg in the fall, the words, “Kitten. I love you. Forgive me,” thickly drawn in what I believe to be yellow paint. I remember it because it was still there in the spring, only slightly faded. I wondered whether or not Kitten had forgiven him, and I wondered how it had survived hundreds of shuffles of shoes, sheets of ice, downpours of rain, and the endless coming and going of snow.

What’s more resilient, paint or love? Photo: Diana Bruk

When I proudly showed my friends these pavement love letters, some would nod appreciatively, but others would grimace. “That’s not art,” they would say, “It’s graffiti.” The words “vandalism” and “hooligans” would often creep in, but I couldn’t help but feel that, in a country where free speech is only a conceptual term, where punk prayers lead to prison sentences, and where you could be sent to a gulag for saying the wrong thing out loud, graffiti had a special meaning, as scratched words trying to find permanence in decaying buildings, desperately seeking an audience in a silent world.

“Freedom Graffiti,” a work by Syrian artist Tammam Azzam, who superimposed Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” on to an image of a Syrian bombsite. Tammam Azzam is represented by Ayyam Gallery, www.ayyamgallery.com

On February 2, 2013, a photograph went viral on Facebook, achieving 20,000 “likes” and 14,000 “shares” in less than five hours. It was a photo of a building in Syria devastated by war, on which the artist Tammam Azzam had digitally superimposed Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece, “The Kiss.” Azzam chose the iconic duo to highlight the dichotomy between the ruined building and its amorous apparition. He explains, “I chose Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ because it is an internationally accepted symbol of love between people. The message transmitted by this powerful symbol is violently juxtaposed with the destructive situation in Syria.”[1]

The title of “The Kiss” comes from a line in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “The kiss is for the whole world!” And, thanks to the magic of photography and Facebook, this kiss is truly for the whole world, shared with millions in a matter of minutes, incapable of being taken away. What also touches me about the work is the way that the holes are limited to the bodies of the lovers, their faces left untouched. Their bodies are destroyed. The kiss remains.

While hailed for its message on the enduring power of love, much of its emotional resonance comes from its message on the triumph of art in warfare. It reminds us of the transformative power of art, its ability to make something destructive appear constructive, to turn ruin back into creation, to manufacture its own private reality. Azzam fled to Dubai with his family seven months into the civil war. He told CNN that he hopes to return to his homeland someday and recreate the painting on that wall, although he has justifiable doubts over whether or not the wall will still be there[2]. In any case, I hope he doesn’t, because the fact that the piece is digital is precisely what makes it such a magical stand against tyranny. Because it does not exist in the physical world, it can never be taken away or destroyed.

When I first saw this awe-inspiring image, my attention lingered over what the artist chose to name it. “Freedom Graffiti” seemed unexpected, given that the image was not graffiti in the traditional sense of the word. But it invariably reminded me of the Freedom Graffiti Week that took place in Syria in April 2012[3], a movement that also used graffiti to focus attention not on the image itself but on the ruined surface on which it was made, to use visuals to say: Look at me. Look at what they’ve done to me.

Graffiti artists post a new image in the dead of night. If caught, Tarek says the “best case scenario” is being shot on the spot, the worst case is being detained and tortured. The man behind him takes a picture, to be uploaded and shared via Facebook. Photo courtesy of Tarek Alghorani.

The Syrian uprising began in 2011 as a reaction to fifteen students being tortured over political graffiti art. In order to commemorate and carry on their efforts, former tortured prisoner Tarek Algorhani started a Facebook page in April 2012 called Freedom Graffiti Week[4], a self-proclaimed “mix of civil disobedience and peaceful expression,” where people post photos of incredibly inventive graffiti art that they’ve seen around the war-torn country.

Speaking of the movement, Tarek said, “At the beginning of the revolution, whenever people assembled, there were only a few of them. The police and security forces could easily split them up with no trace left behind. That’s where the idea of drawings came in. Even if the police came in and dispersed people, anyone walking by later would know, ‘There was a protest here, revolutionaries were here.’ It’s a stamp, a mark. And it’s difficult for the police, because they get tired. Every time they would clean up a wall, something else would appear.”[5]  In Syria, as in Russia and other countries where voices of political protest are routinely silenced, graffiti art becomes a triumphant form of anonymous expression to a widespread audience, one its enemies are incapable of effectively oppressing.

An innovative use of a building’s protruding hook. Photo courtesy of Tarek Alghorani. https://www.facebook.com/MAD.GRAFFiTi.Week.SYRiaa?fref=ts

This Spongebob drawing may even be an homage to the underwater philosopher’s wise words of “Dumpster writing! The voice of the people!” Photo courtesy of Tarek Alghorani. https://www.facebook.com/MAD.GRAFFiTi.Week.SYRiaa?fref=ts

The images on Freedom Graffiti Week are not obscenities haphazardly sprayed over beautiful buildings; they are tiny, often amusing sketches, carefully drawn on rubble and wreckage, onto the corners of shops, around the cracks of stairs, incorporating the space they inhabit rather than vilifying it. These drawings breathe life back into wreckage, drawing attention to aging buildings that you’d otherwise look at with pity or pass by without a second glance. They give an aesthetic purpose to these structures, now that their functional purpose has been taken away. They bring ownership back to the people who’ve lost them. And that’s the difference between spray paint sprawled over brick walls and the secret messages emerging out of pavements or clinging bravely onto cement. One exposes the ugly side of human nature, the other triumphs over it. One seeks to ruin what the other struggles to legitimize. One destroys construction, and the other creates out of destruction. And this, perhaps, is the greatest achievement of art.

DIANA BRUK was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and grew up in New York City. She studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and received her Masters in Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. She writes for MTV Voices, Brooklyn Exposed, and Examiner.com. In her spare time, she enjoys mingling at cocktail parties and gazing contemplatively out of windows. dianabruk.com.

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Editor in Chief MEAGHAN KENT, Contributing Editor JANET KIM, Copy Editor BETH MAYCUMBER, Copy Editor JENNIFER SOOSAAR

Contributors: Loriel Beltran, Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, Domingo Castillo, Aramis Gutierrez, Sam Trioli, Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, Beth Maycumber, and Julie Dickover

Curated by Meaghan Kent

Journal designed by SITE, Logo designed by Fulano

Our second issue dedicated to contemporary practices in Florida

Exhibition view, Cut Outs – Jenny Brillhart and Carolyn Salas, January 26 – March 21, 2013, Courtesy of Emerson Dorsch

Jenny Brillhart’s two paintings bring a bit of her studio into the publicness of the exhibition space. Carolyn Salas’s two sculptures stand isolated from one another, and all the works almost float in a tall, fluorescent-lit white gallery. Despite this, the Dimensions Variable space feels cozy somehow. When I entered, I felt privileged to be inside an inner sanctum of delicate, subtle work. Brillhart’s “Vagabond” is made of five architectural detail paintings on drywall fragments, evenly spaced and propped on nails tacked onto a horizontal line drawn in pencil. Her other work houses small objects and paintings in neutral shades inside a door-shaped display box. The impression of intimacy was helped by Salas’ sculptures, which structured the space, from her mottled white “L” to her steely gray slightly misshapen circle, “O”, leaning against a wall. During the opening reception many viewers held their breath, yet children ran laps around the “L” and through the circle, before parents distracted them with other delights. In their exuberance the kids intuited that Jenny and Carolyn’s works were in harmony with the space and carried with them the amity of their making, a state of being protected and comforted, safe.

Tyler Emerson-Dorsch: Jenny, where did the title “Vagabond” come from? Why did you choose to display these particular architectural details in this format, on these supports?

Detail of Vagabond, oil on drywall and wood, 2012-13, Courtesy of Emerson Dorsch

Jenny Brillhart: It is named after the hotel where I found the details I painted about. The format can be thought of, as fragments which could separate, and become somewhat nomadic, like a vagabond, though this connection wasn’t made until I titled the piece. The hotel has a long history. At the time of making the piece it sat abandoned with plywood boarding up the windows and a large fence around it, so I had to stick my camera nose between the chain links.  Then it was painted white with all its boarded-up-ness already on there so many of the walls had this geometric layering, which I like. I thought to paint the scenes on random pieces of wood and drywall in my studio and garage, as a way to further instill the specific material with narrative and bring a function to under-used substance. Painting on leftover drywall and wood seems a bit parallel to painting about the building. I used odd shapes to refer to the abstraction and fragmentation of it. Finally, resting the pieces on a pencil and nail shelf underscores the relationship of the material to the wall, as well as the subject.

TED: You trained at the New York Academy for painting. This is a very academic background. One might expect someone with this training to studiously depict the figure, a whole building, or a whole landscape. Why the seeming fragmentation?

JB: Yes, my graduate training was very academic in a material sense and fairly void of today’s post-modern (is that where we are?) thinking. I chose this path because I wanted to understand paint and its technical specifics and to understand how to see. Basically I was, and still am, into form. At that time the process of making something out of the stuff that best suited the idea was too large to take on. My concern was medium, the materiality of paint and what it could do and still function as itself.

So, to answer “why the fragmentation of the piece”, my intuitive process has always let me see croppings or fragments of things and that probably originally led me to architecture. For this particular series it wouldn’t make sense to paint the entire hotel in its landscape. I view and record the hotel in little bits over time and I want that process to be present, and also show what I find interesting and relatable in the subject.

All of the pieces in the show revere the space’s support systems. My two pieces, with the wall, nails and line and secondarily the wall and floor. Carolyn’s also unite with the wall and floor as well as within the space itself  – the air, maybe? The structure and presentation are embedded within the environment and the contents within each individual piece contains a larger, outgoing dialog. This helps to elevate these objects beyond their categories of “painting”, “sculpture” etc.

Carolyn’s circle ["O"] contains the content it frames as well as the graphite that closes her armature. It is almost a sculpted drawing. My works more timidly step outward in hopes that there can be a balance between beauty and concept. Does one negate the other? Maybe it does. Beauty is really the poetic, usually intuited, it is more process-based, and it is what one can’t control.

TED: Carolyn, your sculptures seem to fit so organically with bodies in space. They are relatively large – the “L” sculpture was about 7 feet tall, and the circle about 5 feet in diameter. They also seem like just the right intervention into DV’s space and with more economy and less flourish than previous pieces. Can you talk a bit about how you modeled the pieces in space and to what circumstances were you responding?

O, 2013, fiberglass and plaster, 5ft in diameter x 4in, Courtesy of the artist

Carolyn Salas: Working on-site over the course of two weeks allowed me to let the expanse of the space determine the configuration of the sculptures. When initially working on this project I had several ideas in mind but when I arrived at DV and saw the high ceilings and “openness” of the gallery I knew exactly how I wanted to approach making the pieces. Lately I have been working with a certain scale that corresponds to human height. In this way I imagine the relationship to the body, how we maneuver through space, and our relationship to objects in space. When making the “O” and “L” structures I was thinking about symbolic shapes relating to code. The forms then develop a conversation or particular language with one another and the architecture by referencing particular bits of structural framework, or in using the walls as support. This builds a connection between what’s familiar and seemingly unfamiliar. I just started incorporating graphite powder into the works. This emphasis on line or gesture becomes heightened by its materiality. In order to find a balance between the two, I kept the works black and white in color, allowing the forms’ minimalist structures to be accentuated. The graphite applied to the “O” shape gives the object weight, while the cast plaster of the “L” makes the white almost disappear into the background, and they become sculptural drawings in space.

TED: Explain why the pieces, even scaled up, bear evidence of your hand?

CS: No matter what scale the works are they would show my hand.  That “quirkiness” is something I like to see, the evidence that it was touched and not slickly manufactured. My work is very physical; it demands use of my body, helping in a way, pushing and pulling, the material. I then develop this closeness with the material. It becomes about the struggle to figure out how it will work. With each project a new obstacle arises that has to be figured out. In a way I build up this system that then gets broken down. It seems to be an endless cycle; that closeness is what draws me in. The sketch or drawing of the objects is one aspect, while their physicality and size is another. I tend to focus more on the motion or direction, guiding me to a place of memory where touching and feeling is how I am seeing.

Tyler, when you brought up Geston Bachelard’s book Poetics of Space I thought it was such a perfect reference for the show. My copy has been on the bookshelf since my undergrad days, worn and rifled through. I picked it up again and skimmed over it. A phrase stands out to me that seems poignant at that time:

“But actually this grandeur does not come from the spectacle witnessed, but from the unfathomable depths of vast thoughts. Baudelaire writes, ‘In certain almost supernatural states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it.’”[1]

Exhibition view, Cut Outs – Jenny Brillhart and Carolyn Salas, January 26 – March 21, 2013, Courtesy of Emerson Dorsch

Looking back at Jenny’s work there is such an eerie quality to her paintings, which makes me think of places I have been whether in a dream or waking state. With her leaning wall piece ["Inner 10"] and the organized objects…this placement and order is also familiar but yet can’t quite be placed. How we work and move through our daily lives, observing and digesting to create a sense of them. It is something that I think is captured in this combination of works, even if just for a moment in time…. bringing the outside in or vice-versa.

TED: Bachelard writes about subconscious memories of the house – the cellar, the attic, or the nooks where one takes shelter (or perceives shelter) to be alone and read or daydream. These memories are shaped – bracketed if you will – by the imprint of the way a certain corner supported the body back then, the body of a daydreamer. In Bachelard, the attic houses the daydreams of rational thought, while the cellar, in its connection to the earth, is a mysterious space that tends to draw out animalistic nature and other parts of our nature we tend to fear. At DV, with the soaring ceilings and wash of cool white light, it seems that we are in an attic space. Bachelard focuses on the imprint of intimate space from childhood, or even mankind’s childhood. But the space of the studio has as much power to be an intimate space of memory and embodied observation.

Jenny, can you describe your studio and how its space and your place in it comes into your work?

JB: For me the studio is a place of filtering material and image, and allows for time and memory to come into the work. What might be intended as a straightforward composition will inevitably also contain the energy of it’s own life at the studio. Sometimes I think of the paintings as one might appreciate a found object, in that they might not mean anything at first, but simply by inviting them into the work space and letting them hang around, they acquire something, not quite tangible, much like the multiple fleeting and ordinary thoughts and visions Bachelard refers to in the above quote. The studio practice is one of repetition and making and it is through that cycle that I believe things happen.

TED: Carolyn, the graphite circle piece, “O”, leans against a wall for support, a gesture which recalls all the reasons a body might lean against a wall. Can you talk about how you think about weight and stability in your sculptures in DV, and in general?

CS: The leaning sculpture comes from thinking about support structures that are typically hidden from plain view. Whether you’re looking at the architecture of a building, the structure of a boat or a stretcher bar, the internal support is essential.  I like how the sculpture needs the wall, activating this otherwise white field with its round mass. I’m interested in the idea that the “O” sculpture gives an impression of resting, taking a break, and using the wall for support. There is something humorous in that the circle is less a like a circle and more like a wonky shape, and slightly battered. I can imagine seeing it having difficulty rolling. I think the circle might be humbled by its inaccuracy, hence needing a little help. Some of my more recent sculptures play off balancing weight, teetering on that moment where gravity must hold everything in place. Finding that tension within that space is something that interests me, like something on the verge of collapse.

TED: Jenny, your paintings all lean against the wall as well. Where Carolyn’s circle sags a little against the wall in a gesture that suggests rest, you support your small paintings on top of nails, which are tacked into a horizontally level graphite line, and lean them against the wall. Propped on scrap wood, “Inner 10″ also leans against the wall. Why did you choose this system of support?

JB: Like Carolyn, I am also interested in support structures and what is often overlooked. I think the components of “Vagabond”, the nails and pencil line, are a comment on the wall’s “potential.”  The wall not only covers the armature of the building, gives shelter, and privacy, it also holds up artwork that is about it’s own self!  What a handy thing that wall is. This leads into the function and purpose of a painting or wall work. Is the purpose of the painting simply to comment on the wall? Well, not exactly, but perhaps it shouldn’t ignore its support. I am acknowledging the idea of painting as object. And possibly bringing forward the tension between the painted object and the more common perception of painting as decor, aesthetic, or telling narrative. There, I believe, is something related to function, architecture and that space in between.

TED: After a month of not being in the exhibition space and looking at the installation shots again, I am struck by the way Carolyn’s circle and Jenny’s shelf push against the space in opposite directions. Jenny’s five paintings on the back wall seem to float, while Carolyn’s “L” acts like an extender in text, making it more legible, and connecting to the heights from the ground. Jenny and Carolyn, do you have some final impressions of the installation views?

CS: I’m particularly liking how minimal the works are, allowing plenty of breathing room in between. I am currently working on several projects in the studio now that came from this specific grouping of sculptural works.

JB: I like how you describe the pieces as pushing the walls in the opposite direction. I think our use of the walls does have a specific visceral effect on the space, enlarging it or allowing it to open. The paintings in the back sit even further back, with the large sculptures in front heightening the perspective distance. This visual suits me.

Jenny Brillhart graduated with a BA from Smith College and received an MFA in from the New York Academy of Art. She lives and works in Miami, Florida. Brillhart currently has a solo show up at Kuckei + Kuckei in Berlin. She recently showed at ARCO Spain and Pulse Miami. In 2012, she participated in exhibitions with Dorsch Gallery, Dimensions Variable in Miami, the Sammlung SØR Rusche Museum in Germany and ArtCenter South Florida. In 2010 she showed new work with Kuckei + Kuckei Gallery and she was chosen for New Work Miami at the Miami Art Museum, curated by Rene Morales. Brillhart has participated in group shows including The Naples Museum of Art (Naples, FL), David Castillo Gallery (Miami, FL), the Anhaltinischen Gemäldegalerie Museum in Dessau, Roemerapotheke Gallery in Zurich,  Morgan Lehman Gallery in NY, and ArtCenter/South Florida in Miami Beach. Her work has been published in Ocean Drive, The McKinsey Quarterly, New American Paintings and Miami Contemporary Artists.

Carolyn Salas was born in Hollywood, California. She received her MFA from CUNY Hunter College, NY in 2005. In 2011/2012 she was a Grant Nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award. Salas has exhibited at museums including The Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY and The Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA. Recent gallery exhibitions include Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara CA; Kate Werble Gallery, NY; BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Abrons Art Center, NY and Casey Kaplan, NY. Salas has recently completed the artist in residence program at the Fountainhead Residency, New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation, NY: Abrons Art Center Studio Program, New York, NY; and the Elizabeth Foundation For the Arts Studio Program. Salas had her first solo show at Dodge Gallery in January of 2013. Salas lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Portrait series, Installation image, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, March 2013

Beth Maycumber: Could you start by describing your process for creating the aura portraits?

Anna Von Mertens: Typically, I start a series by creating a system, fleshed out with research, and then build the work visually from there. This series came at me sideways: while working on a previous series, observing how the dye was running together, I thought, these really remind me of aura photographs, the way the colors come and go, and the boundaries between them. I got stuck on the idea of auras—I couldn’t shake it. I wanted to shake it. I was like, “Auras? Come on!” But they stuck with me.

The premise is to create auras of famous paintings. I would select a famous painting, the sort referred to in Art History 101, paintings that live larger than the actual object itself. I chose paintings with an intense relationship between painter and sitter, as well as portraits of strong personalities, and used that context to build my story of the painting’s aura.

When you get your aura photographed, you place your hands on an electromagnetic sensor and the computer translates those electrical frequencies into the color spectrum. A Polaroid photo of you is then placed over it, so it’s actually two superimposed layers.

Julie Dickover: The image that is translated to the computer then is the electromagnetic current?

AVM: Right, that’s your aura reading, and they superimpose a Polaroid on top to make it seem like it’s around you, but they are actually separate. So with my series, the two layers of dyeing and stitching make sense. You have the aura itself, and then I’m superimposing art history on top of that by using the original image. It mirrors the process of getting your aura photographed.

There is a “science” to aura interpretation. Each color has significant meanings, and the location of the various colors—whether manifesting above your head, or coming in on your left side, or exhibiting outward on your right—is important. So I would reverse engineer these auras by creating narratives about who was Philip IV or Mona Lisa, and try to represent that with these rules of color.

For the dyeing process, I stretched white cotton onto a frame and painted the dye on with a brush, building the color slowly because the dye is like a loose watercolor, but it immediately starts chemically bonding with the fabric. The colors bleed into one another, and while you want those edges to leak, you also want to be in control of them. You’re right on the edge, falling in and out of control with the color.

“Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” (Sunset, January 24, 1848, Sutter’s Mill, Coloma, California) during the dyeing process, courtesy of the artist.

Each piece has seven to ten layers of dye, and I would build up the layers until it had the intensity I wanted. I was working much more intuitively than normal, just responding to the color in front of me. But because I had this system of analyzing auras to follow, I tricked myself into working intuitively.

JD: Did you have failures? Pieces that just didn’t work?

AVM: I did—I had almost forgotten this. I started with the Mona Lisa—a logical starting point: the most famous painting. It took maybe four attempts, four failures. I didn’t know if technically I could pull off the effect I wanted to achieve. It’s challenging to keep the dye behaving the way you want while allowing it to do its own thing, but that was the fun part. So after those four passes, I almost gave up.  Once I learned that you can never go backwards with the dye, as long as I built the color up slowly enough, I felt like, okay, this is going to work.

Mona Lisa, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 2009, courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

BM: So you dye first, and then begin stitching?

AVM: Yes, you have to do the dyeing first because the fabric needs to be tight to get those even transitions. It’s funny to even say that because over the years, I’ve felt in competition with painting, and have tried to embrace textiles on its own terms. Here I’m taking painting head on, stretching out this canvas with a brush in hand—and the subject matter is obviously all about painting. It was interesting to inhabit the world I had been avoiding.

Back to your question, the dyeing comes first, and once I’m happy with the color, I project the original painting onto the fabric and chalk out the figure’s silhouette. My auras are the same proportions as the original painting, so the two fit to scale. Here you can kind of see Philip IV’s body, his front foot pointed out, and he’s got this high, strange collar on, that gives him this very unique silhouette. After chalking the silhouette onto the fabric, I then mark the figure’s chakra points, and from that create my own aura-like emanation. The original painting is recognizable while a suggestion of something else.

Philip IV’s aura, after Velázquez, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 2009, courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

JD: How do you dye the stitching?

AVM: I wanted the stitching to be an invisible layer, so I matched the color of the thread to the background aura. There’s enough range that I’m able to buy commercially available dyed thread. I’m glad you think the thread is hand-dyed because I wanted that to appear seamless. Sometimes I would have to change thread color every couple of stitches to pull it off.

To clarify, I am not a craft martyr; I don’t take the stance that it has to be done by hand. If you can only achieve an effect by hand, it needs to be done that way. The dyeing can obviously only be done by hand, and the quality of texture that you get from hand quilting is only achievable through the hand. Because of the two interlocking threads, machine quilting would just flatten it, versus the dotted line of the hand stitching. I hand stitch simply because it is the only means to reach the end that I want. If there is commercially dyed thread that is the color I want, I have no problem going out and buying that.

Detail of Philip IV’s aura, after Velázquez

JD: Your work makes me think about how a quilt is a domesticated, functional craft object, and yet, you’re treating it as an art object, a painting. There has been a lot of work over the past ten or so years that has brought craft to the forefront of contemporary art making. Have you always made work like this? Did you use to be a painter and then transitioned to textile work? How do you negotiate the line between craft and fine art?

AVM: I studied fine art; since first grade I knew I wanted to be an artist. Originally, I followed a more traditional path of drawing and printmaking. I made my first patchwork quilt on a whim senior year in college, and fell in love with the materials and the process. It took a while, but slowly the two roads of craft and fine arts converged. I wanted to use the subtext, the meaning inherent in the quilt, and have that be my foundation for building my ideas. The two worlds came together.

Frida Kahlo’s aura, with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 2009, collection of Ann Hatch, San Francisco, CA

I have thought these dyed auras are so beautiful on their own, could I just stretch them like canvases? Ultimately, there is some transformation that happens when they become objects; they have more of a presence in the form of the quilt. I see hand quilting as my own way of “framing.” There’s also an accessibility that’s different if they didn’t have that layer of hand stitching to them. Even though these pieces are very far removed from the bed and the original context of the quilt, they still carry those meanings that then transform the work.

BM: It’s interesting that you say that, because I know with at least some of your earlier work, you displayed pieces on flat platforms that resembled beds. I am curious about what made you change to showing the works on the wall.

AVM: In grad school, I practically signed my own personal manifesto: my quilts needed to be displayed in the form of the bed. I wanted my work to address the site of the bed as a way to stay true to the origins and meaning of quilts. For a long time, I only displayed them in that format. I loved using that constraint as a conceptual jumping off point. But after a while I didn’t want such a strong association with the bed. I kept looking at the wall, wanting to put my works there, but because I had sort of signed this manifesto, I couldn’t do it.  Finally, I realized the wall is not the enemy. The wall is about the act of looking, so if I make the works about the act of looking, they belong on the wall.

The Duke and Duchess of Urbino’s auras, after Piero della Francesca, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 2009, courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

That’s how I landed on the idea of stargazing as the ultimate form of looking, this existential looking as a way of locating ourselves in this world. Thinking how the act of looking allows you to be more conscious of where you stand, I launched into the whole star series. The work in this gallery [the Portraits series] obviously belongs on the wall because it specifically refers to the history of painting, but it’s not like I’ve ruled out the sculptural; maybe a new series will come up where it becomes again about the space of the every day, the space where we live and walk, and then I’ll return to sculpture.

JD: One thing that is interesting about your work is how you tow the line between craft and formal aspects, but also the conceptual ideas and the research that goes into each series. Do you regard those issues as being equally important, or do you place a greater importance on one or the other? Is it important for the people viewing your work to know everything that goes into it?

AVM: Not that one trumps the other, but I definitely start the work from a conceptual framework and the idea carries me through the process. Beauty and formal decisions are important to me, but I spend so much time and work with the piece itself, if I didn’t have an idea or narrative to carry me through, I wouldn’t get to the other side; I wouldn’t finish the piece. It’s not that one is more important than the other, but that I couldn’t have one without the other.

Aesthetically, I am a minimalist at heart, but it sometimes can leave you cold. Minimalism’s original goal was to be much more accessible—by distilling the essence it would gain that much more. But it turned out it can be quite the opposite. In some ways, I’m trying to bridge to that original goal, distilling my idea down to its purest aesthetic form, while still maintaining its accessibility.

Black Gold (Sunrise, January 10th, 1901, Spindletop, Texas), 2011, detail, from the series Endings, courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

In terms of what the audience knows and what’s revealed to them, I try to have the titles be an entry point, to launch the viewer with that piece of information. I also often have additional materials that accompany the work. I used to think of that as a weakness, that the work itself should contain everything. Then I thought of conceptual work from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and realized that stories were attached to these works, almost a mythos was created around them, that ended up augmenting the work. That became part of my process.

A tipping point for me was when I first showed the series “As the Stars Go By” at Jack Hanley Gallery. That work is so historically based—it shows violent moments in American history and the stars above them. I wrote up what occurred during those historical moments, and why they were such pivotal events. At the opening, word got out that this text was available, and the gallery said they had never printed so many handouts for any show before. I realized there is a hunger for that.

JD: Yet, not unlike wall text in huge museums, there is sometimes a backlash against it.

AVM: I think the backlash often for wall text is that it’s trying to describe what your experience should be of the piece—

JD: —Interpreting the piece for you.

AVM: Exactly. With my work, I provide information, either facts or circumstances, to accompany the work. Quilts have always had stories told about them; the story gets tied to the object. But quilts and stories are not sexy terms. Conceptual art, however, has its construct, or it has a long-winded title. These, too, are stories. Just because one is craft and the other art, there shouldn’t be a hierarchy. So I am trying to reclaim the idea of story.

BM: Can we talk about these pieces [“You and Me” series] here?

You and Me series, Installation image, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, March 2013

AVM: Right after my second child was born—I mean literally two days after—I needed to get back into the studio to restore my sanity. I had typical postpartum spikes of joy, and complete love for this child, along with a real sense of feeling overwhelmed. I had this image, on maybe day five of my son’s life, of how current circulates around two magnetic poles, how that was a metaphor for the push and pull of this intense relationship.

Using the same source image for each piece, I treat the poles differently: using the gray scale, I shift the color of the thread to highlight different areas of the piece. I named each piece after a rock song because I liked playing off the idea of romantic love, that melodramatic, intense love—like this piece named for a song by The Smiths [“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”]. But hidden underneath the melodrama of young love was for me this relationship between mother and child.

At the outset of this series I also knew, with the realities of having two young kids, I wouldn’t be able to get in to the dye lab for a while. I wanted to work on a small, intimate scale, work in black and white, and work really simply, to mirror my year of becoming a mother of two. The irony was, despite this simple concept, this series was insanely technically challenging to pull off. The transitions between thread had to be precise. In certain works, I had fifteen shades of thread within two inches. This simple, beautiful idea at times drove me crazy, but I came out the other side, just like I came out the other side of those newborn sleepless nights.

You and Me (Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now), detail, hand-stitched cotton, 2011, courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

The intensity of those threads so close together is like the point in a relationship where you lose your sense of self. With the hand quilting, at times I love it, and at times I hate it. I only make one piece at a time, which creates a nice cycle: the research phase, the dyeing process, the hand stitching. Taking it one step at a time makes it continually feel fresh.

The remaining three works in the show [“Jupiter Rising”, “Black Gold”, and “Gold Rush”] are from two different series, but share the same premise. They use star calculation software to map stars above historic events.

Endings series, Installation image from Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, March 2013. Left: Black Gold (Sunrise, January 10th, 1901, Spindletop, Texas), 2011, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR. Right: “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” (Sunset, January 24, 1848, Sutter’s Mill, Coloma, California), 2008, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, Private Collection

This diptych [“Black Gold” and “Gold Rush”] is about dawn and dusk, an obvious transition point between one thing ending and another beginning. I wanted to use that moment as a broader metaphor for those times when we close one chapter of our lives and look forward to the future. The piece on the right [“Gold Rush”] shows stars coming into view on the evening gold was first discovered in California, leading to the California Gold Rush. The piece on the left [“Black Gold”] shows the stars on the morning the Spindletop geyser blew in 1901, and the modern oil industry began. They represent the allure and pull of the future, as well as the events these discoveries set in motion. Reading like Hollywood film stills, one is a black-and-white Western, while the other conjures the idea of riding off into the sunset.

BM: Am I correct that you were commissioned to do a piece for Ballroom Marfa? Can you speak about that experience?

Yes, this diptych [“Black Gold” and “Gold Rush”] was that commission. I had never done a commission before, but was up for the challenge. Thinking about topics relevant to Texas, I started looking into the drought Texas is currently experiencing. That launched me into research about the history of drought cycles and I came across recent international studies linking climate change with the fall of empires. Thinking of the United States and the eventual fall of its oil empire, I was excited to make this connection. But I was dependent on scientists who were generously collaborating with me, so realized I wouldn’t make my Marfa deadline, but it was still an amazing process because it launched an entire series I am working on now, linking drought cycles to catastrophic events.

So with oil on my mind, and thinking of Marfa’s rich film history, I returned to the stars and made the Spindletop piece. The reference to film stills really clicked when the diptych was shown at Ballroom Marfa— the film Giant is shown continuously at a hotel in downtown Marfa and there is a film poster with an orange background that reads just like the “Gold Rush” piece.

It was also a thrill to get to travel to Marfa after hearing about it for so many years. It is one of those places where the legend looms large, and when you get there, it still lives up to all of your expectations.

Jupiter Rising, January 7, 1610, Padua, Italy, 2008, from the series, Look to the Heavens, hand dyed, hand-stitched cotton, courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

This piece [“Jupiter Rising”] is from a different series, “Look to the Heavens.” I had been depicting the stars, but not with any particular relation to astronomy. So for “Look to the Heavens,” I turned to actual astronomical events where what is seen above is clouded by our belief systems below. This piece is the evening Galileo first spotted Jupiter’s moons, which validated Copernicus’ theory that the earth was not the center of the universe. In his diary, Galileo wrote the exact time and date of his sighting so the software program is a way to time travel and see the stars Galileo saw. Galileo was put on house arrest for the rest of his life because of this discovery, so this series highlights how even observable facts can be controversial.

BM: In your historically based pieces, how do you choose which moments to focus on?

AVM: With the “As the Stars Go By” series, showing the stars above violent moments in American history, I chose these pivot points where what came before changed what followed. The Vietnam War changed our idea of war, but within that, I chose the Tet Offensive because, while strategically it was not a successful mission for the Viet Cong, it was a mental tipping point for the American public. Another example is the Wounded Knee Massacre, the last “battle” in the American Indian Wars.

Detail of “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” (Sunset, January 24, 1848, Sutter’s Mill, Coloma, California)

But sometimes the image comes first. Like with the “Gold Rush” piece I wanted to do the most over-the-top Hollywood sunset, and watched some old Westerns trying to find that quintessential moment of riding off into the sunset. Only later did I figure out the piece should be about the California Gold Rush. So the historic references come in different ways, but they’re all about the idea of one thing ending and another beginning.

BM: Do you feel like your work is going in a certain direction at the moment?

AVM: The series I’m working on now uses historic tree ring cross-sections pulled from studies that link climate change with periods of human instability: the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Aztec Conquest, the Black Plague. My work is increasingly political, perhaps just a sign of our times. But we’ll see. I never know where a new series will take me, which is scary and delightful at the same time.

“What Could Be” is on view at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum through April 12. Von Mertens’ work can also be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Arts; Salisbury University Art Galleries, Salisbury, Maryland, from March 4-April 6; Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, from April 19-June 30; and at the 2013 Rijswijk Textile Biennial at Museum Rijswijk, in the Netherlands, from June-November.

Beth Maycumber is currently working on a Master’s degree in Library and Information Studies at Florida State University; she also holds an M.A. in U.S. History from the University of North Florida, and a B.A. in History and Art History from Flagler College. Her recent projects include curating two special exhibits about Jean Ribault’s 1562 voyage to Florida at Fort Caroline National Monument, and participating in artist Harrell Fletcher’s “Before and After 1565″ project at the Crisp Ellert Art Museum. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, with her husband and son.

Julie Dickover is the director of the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College in Saint Augustine, Florida, where she has organized exhibitions by artists such as Montreal based video artist Julie Lequin and photographer Mark Ruwedel, as well as a collaborative interdisciplinary project and exhibition with Portland, Oregon based artist Harrell Fletcher. Dickover is also an advisory editor for At Length. Prior to living in northeast Florida, she lived in Los Angeles where she worked as a registrar at UCLA’s Hammer Museum.

GEAN MORENO is an artist based in Miami. His work has been exhibited at the North Miami MoCA, Kunsthaus Palais Thum and Taxis, Bregenz, Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee, Haifa Museum, Israel, Arndt & Partner, Zurich, and Invisible-Exports, New York. He has contributed texts to various catalogues and anthologies, including Uncertain States of America! (Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo), Round-Leather Worlds (Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin), Catastrophy? What Catastrophe!? (Quebec Biennial), 2009 e-flux Reader (Sternberg Press, New York), Eat the Frame! (DFI Publishers, Amsterdam), and Peter Friedl (Extra City, Antwerp). In 2008, he founded [NAME]Publications, a platform for book-based projects.

ERNESTO OROZA lives and works in Aventura. He earned a degree at the Havana Superior Institute of Design. Oroza is author of the book Objets Réinventés. La création populaire à Cuba (Paris, 2002). He was a visiting professor at Les Ateliers, École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI) in Paris (1998), and professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Design of Havana from 1995 to 2000. His work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and cultural spaces such as Haute Definition Gallery, Paris, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and Laboral Centro de Arte, in Spain.

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Editor in Chief MEAGHAN KENT, Contributing Editor JANET KIM, Copy Editor BETH MAYCUMBER, Copy Editor JENNIFER SOOSAAR

Guest Curator LAUREN VAN HAAFTEN-SCHICK

Journal designed by SITE, Logo designed by Fulano, All images credit: Lauren van Haaften-Schick

Marfa, TX

Texas is enormous. The land is mostly desert with its endless sky. The road stretches for miles, causing the optical illusion of infinity, akin to staring at the ocean. Even in winter, mirages appear on the sand and asphalt. Everything here is marked by a contradiction of unpredictability and control.

Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation, housed in the remains of the military base Fort D.A. Russell, is comprised of permanent installations by eleven artists, including Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt, and Roni Horn, which fill the base’s former meeting-houses, infirmaries, and sleeping quarters. School No. 6 by Ilya Kabakov is a fabricated Soviet elementary school classroom where the holes in the exterior walls are left unfilled, allowing sand to blow in, coating an already aged patina. John Wesley’s surreal figurations, dependent on their own odd sense of repetition, stand out as the sole moment of whimsy. Everything was selected and overseen by Judd. A massive installation of his signature aluminum boxes, each with facets in unique configurations, fills two hangars that once housed German prisoners of war. A hand-painted sign that translates: “Use your head or lose your head” looms above the works.

The Chinati Foundation is located in downtown Marfa and exhibits a behemoth permanent installation of works by John Chamberlain. It is home to the Judd Foundation offices, the late artist’s architecture and design workshops, studios, and house. A new generation of art businesses, visitors and investors have developed nearby. On Highland Street, going south from City Hall, one passes an art book store, at least five galleries, an Andy Warhol permanent work, as well as artists’ and crafters’ studios. Around the corner, on San Antonio Street, there is a line of newly refurbished Airstream trailers serving coffee and tacos. Across the street is Marfa Montessori. The town is an amusement. Everything is stylized to maintain the myth of authenticity. At the perimeter are crashed trailers, crumbling houses, broken fences, and then nothing but the desert.

Just further are Judd’s home and studio, swathed in a nine-foot high adobe wall. It is the original addition to the town, built in the time after Camp Marfa, when the town was seemingly abandoned. This barricade served to block all that could have distracted Judd from his work in the studio and library, ensuring privacy and refuge from a world deemed too loud, quick, opportunistic and prying. A preservation team is currently working to keep it that way.

Visitors en route to Marfa, TX must first pass through El Paso. Formerly overshadowed by Juárez, its sister city just south of the border, El Paso has in recent years absorbed the clubs and restaurants that once gave Juárez its fabled night-life. The highway and a paved river divide the two cities. Looking down at Juárez from the end of Scenic Drive, the view is surreal and other worldly. This is as much of the now infamously violent city that we dare see.

Eventually, everything changes.

There is a brief mountainous pass on Highway 10 just east of El Paso, right before Van Horn. This is the last  sign of civilization before one turns south to go towards Marfa, Big Bend National Park, and ghost town after ghost town.

Oil rigs dot the highway in West Texas, standing as kinetic monuments in an otherwise barren landscape. They each have their own tempo, and continue undisturbed by the harsh winds and sand storms that blow through. The air smells like gasoline.

The horizon is lined in purple mountains. Nothing looks as though it has any depth or dimension. It’s possible that not all of it is real.

About an hour east of El Paso, in Van Horn and Sierra Blanca, there are road signs warning against picking up hitchhikers.

For Judd and the artists he invited to Marfa, the potential for permanent siting of a work in this open land gave it new purpose.

In the early sculptures I used anything made of steel that had color on it. There were metal benches, metal signs, sand pails, lunch boxes, stuff like that. . . . Body shops would cut parts away and I would choose what I wanted from whatever was in their scrap pile. . . . I wasn’t interested in the car parts per se. I was interested in either the color or the shape or the amount. I didn’t want engine parts, I didn’t want wheels, upholstery, glass, oil, tires, rubber, lining . . . none of that. Just the sheet metal. It already had a coat of paint on it, and some of it was formed… I believe that common materials are the best materials. 

—John Chamberlain

It takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again. 

—Donald Judd

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.

—Donald Judd

Spanish curves, adobe and the horizontal utility of ranch-style buildings merge in the architecture of the southwest Texas desert. Structurally preserved yet cracked or faded by the sun, it is impossible to tell how old some things are. There is often nothing for miles on either side.

The art and architecture of the past that we know is that which remains. The best is that which remains where it was painted, placed or built. Most of the art of the past that could be moved was taken by conquerors. Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it’s made, since it’s first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort. This situation is primitive in relation to a few earlier and better times.

—Statement for the Chinati Foundation/La Fundacion Chinati, Donald Judd, excerpt.

Art and architecture — all the arts — do not have to exist in isolation, as they do now. This fault is very much a key to the present society. Architecture is nearly gone, but it, art, all of the arts, in fact all parts of the society, have to be rejoined, and joined more than they have ever been. This would be democratic in a good sense, unlike the present increasing fragmentation into separate but equal categories, equal within the arts, but inferior to the powerful bureaucracies.

—Statement for the Chinati Foundation/La Fundacion Chinati, Donald Judd, excerpt

On the edge of Valentine, Texas, on California Avenue just northeast of Marfa, Prada Marfa nearly blends in with the other shuttered shops along US 90. Though it houses the Prada fall 2005 collection of handbags and shoes, the doors are sealed shut and the shop has never been open for business. Sometimes, a pickup truck with tinted windows parks across the road, waiting for visitors to come and watching as they leave.

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005. Commissioned by the Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa.

The Stardust Hotel had crumbled before the slow start of Marfa’s transformation in 1972, when Judd moved to the former military town from New York. He wrote of passing through nearby Van Horn while enrolled in the Army in 1946–1948. Journal entries are filled with observations of the empty landscape and vast open sky. The military base that now houses his Chinati Foundation was defunct by the end of World War II, and its buildings were left to decay.

A relic of the late Deco-era boom of life in Marfa, the Stardust sign is one of the few remaining traces of the region’s past incarnation. Once Judd moved into the downtown he erected a wall around his home, built from the bricks of an abandoned hotel. Maybe it was the Stardust.

We first went to Marfa together in 1996. Judd was dead. The town was dead. Chinati was in mourning. Tumbleweeds the size of shopping carts blew down the wide streets — with no one even there to photograph them. There were a handful of Tex–Mex cafés with flyswatters on the tables and a drive-through window at the local bar. Nearly every storefront on Highland Avenue leading up to the courthouse was empty, save the ones installed with artwork by Judd. 

—Sean Wilsey and Daphne Beal

The old theaters downtown are relics of Marfa’s earlier status as a military hub and resort for local ranchers.

The Paisano Hotel, just next door to the Texas and Palace theaters, is now included in the National Register of Historic Places. Buffalo heads and painted tile adorn the walls, creating a kind of Spanish lodge, a look and feel familiar to past generations as a more authentic Americana.

The concierge of the Paisano, a late middle-aged Mexican-American woman, has lived in Marfa her entire life and began working at the hotel as a teenager. Having moved her way up from a position with the cleaning staff, she now checks in guests and takes reservations for dinner. First in line is a group of three college-aged blonde women wearing cocktail dresses and all carrying the same black handbag and mini rolling suitcase. After checking in, they ask three times whether the concierge is serious when she says there is no elevator to take them to the second floor. Next, a pair of young men ask where the bar is and if there is a happy hour. They are wearing vintage shirts, have casually long hair and beards and one of them has thick black-framed circular glasses. The concierge tries to find this unremarkable. 

Third in line is another couple, a white woman and a Mexican man. They give the man’s name, Alonso, for their dinner reservation. 

     “Oh, your name is Alonso,” the concierge says. “Maybe you’re my brother.”

     “Hm, I don’t think you’re my sister…”

     “I always wondered… My father died before I was born, and I always thought, maybe I have brothers and sisters I don’t know about, so maybe you’re my brother. I grew up here with my mother, we always lived in Marfa, sometimes in Alpine a half an hour away, but mostly here where I also have two aunts. You look like the pictures of my father.”

     “How did your father die?”

     “He was in a car accident, a crash right outside Van Horn, on the highway between here and El Paso. There is a mountain ridge at Allamoore, on the 10. They just found him there, maybe he fell asleep, don’t know what happened.

—conversation from the Paisano Hotel

Ry Rocklen, Second to None, 2011

The land in parts of southwest Texas is divided as an ordered grid, defining ranch and farmland properties. It is completely linear.

A personal fortress downtown, Judd’s home and studio are repurposed military storage facilities. One wonders how the rigidity, flatness, and dependence on the grid within his work was informed by the desert and plains of southern Texas.

Judd’s transitional piece from painting to sculpture, housed here, is a floor work comprised of a bright orange curved sheet of plywood held to an arc by three planks affixed to the ends. There is a section of black pipe running through and connecting both, like a portal.

Complementing the aesthetic and ethic of the late artist’s work, every experience of its exhibition is highly mediated. There is no photography allowed.

Judd’s comprehensive design and architecture studios in a former supermarket downtown are also completely concealed.

Dan Flavin, Untitled (Marfa Project), 1996

Completed after Judd’s death and when Flavin himself was ailing, a reviewer from The New York Times deemed the work, “The Last Great Art of the 20th Century.”

Donald Judd, 15 Untitled Works in Concrete, 1980

This series of two and a half by two and half by five meter concrete structures were the first additions to the Chinati complex. When the piece was introduced, ranchers joked that the hollow boxes were square drainage culverts, and a neighbor is said to have overly watered a tree outside their bedroom window until it blocked their view of the boxes altogether.

Judd’s pristinely kept, closely guarded home and its neighboring installations in Marfa represent the ultimate experiment in environmental control.

Upon entering the expansive permanent installation of Judd’s aluminum boxes at the Chinati Foundation, visitors are lectured on the staining effect of body oil on aluminum, and are watched at all times by one or more docents. Conservators do a sweep of the building after every tour. The buildings, which formerly housed two hundred German POWs during World War II, have been retrofitted with floor to ceiling exterior glass walls.

The space is a vitrine in the wild desert, utopian and oddly innocent.

Fences, doors, gates, and barriers are all engineered with the same precision as the sculptor’s infamous boxes. The proportions are always symmetrical. They are designed to last, and to keep out any intruding element.

A visitor to Marfa from Dallas mused on the influx of tourists and the burgeoning art economy over the past few years. Businesses seem to be doing well, and yet, like the native locals, this population keeps to its own.

To Donald Judd, 

… As we leave the Chinati Foundation, my grandfather’s house is on the left at the traffic circle. Completing the circle are the public housing complex and the US Border Patrol office. The Border Patrol tower shines its light down on the area. Behind Hipolito’s former home there is an altar housing a statue of the Virgin de Guadalupe. The main structure of the altar is a discarded bathtub turned on its end and partially buried in largest tree in the yard. I tell you how the altar is there to mark an apparition of Guadalupe in 1994, coincidentally, the year of your passing. The apparition appeared at night for two weeks as a white shadow in the tree trunk. There is film footage of this phenomenon on a single decaying VHS tape. She appeared to Hector Sanchez, whose family lives in the house now. He passed shortly after completing the altar in 1997. He is survived by his wife, Ester, who has no difficulty maintaining both her belief in the auspiciousness of the apparition as well as her hypothesis that it was “caused” by the light from the Border Patrol tower coming through the tree’s leaves… 

Perhaps you have never noticed the altar before. It has also drawn pilgrims for years, from Mexico, New Mexico and the local area, but these pilgrims are different from those who visit your works, and likely they have never taken notice of one another either.

We continue walking north and east. A few blocks and we are at the Blackwell School. Now a mostly inactive landmark, the school was historically where students of color in the area gained their education. Small and isolated as it is, Marfa experienced the same racial segregation in public education as did the rest of the country in the last century. Now it is a quasi-museum, and in large letters across the east facing exterior wall we see a quote in black florid script: “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.” Beneath that a name: Gloria E. Anzaldúa…

“In her book Borderlands/La Frontera, there is a subsection titled ‘Invoking Art.’ In it she distinguishes the dominant “Western aesthetic” by its operations of setting up rigorous systematicities, then demonstrating a virtuosic mastery of those systems. I understand this as aptly describing most work canonized in the discipline of art history, from geometrically driven Renaissance painting to your own impulse toward seriality, constructed ratio-systems and pristine materiality…

Against this, Anzaldúa poses the work of her “people, the shamans” for whom art is inseparable from everyday life. This work is immediately spiritual and political, in that spirituality is a source for political (read communal) action for them and for her. Here, an example we both now know might be the altar to Guadalupe’s apparition in Marfa. The motivations behind its construction are wholly different from your own. They come from a Mexican American Catholicism that carries traces of pre-Colombian figuration manifest in colonially imposed forms and mythologies. It was constructed to mark a site not by meticulously manipulating light and physical space but by alluding to the supernatural, the sacred that is invisible most of the time but markedly auspicious when present…

The binary Anzaldúa constructed is not satisfactory for me, and I understand border thinking as a method by which to address my dissatisfaction. Speaking solely from the example of your work, the first half of the binary allows no space for understanding the political, philosophical work moving through the manipulation of metal, concrete and plexiglass. It makes no space for investigating the large body of writing and activism you left behind. You have thought importantly and much about the conditions of the country where we live, and been critical even of its critics. As your own writing and the work of scholars like David Raskin have demonstrated, you rigorously investigated anarchism, the politics of space and the problems of centralized government, and investigation is inextricable from the ratios and systems that guided your pen and hand in designing the works and spaces you have left us in Marfa and elsewhere. The latter part of the binary leaves no room for investigating the form of an object like the altar. Giving primacy to its allusiveness to the supernatural beyond disallows, or makes difficult, a reading of the object as congealed labor. How are we to discuss the Mexican factory from which the statue was sourced and its complicity with racist capitalism? Or the local Marfa hands who painted it as imbricated in the discourse of scarcity, labor and resources in West Texas? 

I wonder what you might have thought of all of this…

—Josh T Franco, Letter to Donald Judd, September 2012

Thirty minutes east of the town is the viewing station for the Marfa Lights. The first recorded sighting of the phenomenon was in 1883 when a rancher camping near Paisano Pass spotted a series of mysterious flashes in the night sky. They were known among the Native Americans long before. In 1947 a local pilot attempted to fly to the lights at night and get close to them, but once he was in the sky they were nowhere to be found. After this first failed mission, the pilot tried again twenty years later with the aid of observers in cars and planes. Neither trip yielded any information.

The lights often appear in pairs aligned at ten-to-twenty degree angles. Some say they are ghosts of the Spanish Conquistadors, or spirits of the Native Americans’ ancestors. Sometimes they disappear as soon as they are noticed. There are accounts of people being pursued by them. Roswell is only about a five-hour drive away.

Their cause remains a mystery.

We drove up to the Marfa lights viewing station and everything looked abandoned. Then we saw a girl standing in the road, her head covered by a white piece of cloth, and slowly waving her arms. We pulled over and rolled down the window to ask her if it was closed, to which she replied in a sing-song voice “It’s always open…”

There was a rustling sound the whole time we were there.

When we left the viewing platform there was a white car parked right out front that we never heard pull up.

It’s not the lights from the cars. It’s not a traffic light.

One time I heard someone singing.

When we got back in our car I went to put my hand in this little box that we had kept open, storing souvenirs we’d collected along the way. But somehow, while we were out watching the lights, the box had been closed.

Owner: NBC News

Date: 7/5/85 

Title: APPEARANCE OF MODERN ART SURPRISES MARFA RESIDENTS 

Location: Marfa;Texas 

Era: 1980s 

Personalities: Judd, Donald 

CAR DRIVES DOWN HIGHWAY. HIGH SHOT OF MARFA SEEN. TRAIN MOVES DOWN TRACKS. TOWNEE SITS OUTSIDE. ABSTRACT ART IN THE FORM OF CONCRETE BLOCKS IN FIELD SEEN. AERIALS OF CONCRETE BLOCKS SEEN. MAN LOOKS AT BLOCKS. IN INTERVIEW MAN SAYS HE THOUGHT THE CONCRETE PIECES WERE MEANT FOR A NEW HIGHWAY. ANOTHER MAN CONTENDS THE BLOCKS WOULD MAKE NICE BACHELOR QUARTERS. MAN ASSERTS HE DOESNT KNOW MUCH ABOUT ART AND NOTES THE BLOCKS MAKE NICE HOMES FOR ANTELOPE. ANTELOPE ROAM NEAR CONCRETE BLOCKS. ART CREATOR DONALD JUDD (PH) SKETCHES. IN INTERVIEW JUDD SAYS HE IS USED TO PEOPLE LAUGHING AT HIS ARTWORK. JUDD WALKS THROUGH TOWN. EXTERIORS OF MARFA MUSEUM SEEN. DISPLAY OF CRASHED AUTOMOBILES AND ALUMINUM SCULPTURES SEEN IN SIDE MUSEUM. JUDD CONTENDS HE IS TRYING TO MAKE REALITY WITH HIS SCULPTURES. SUN SETS OVER CONCRETE BLOCKS.

For those committed to visual culture, cyan is a moniker that evokes an explicit set of color properties. Its proliferous use in subtractive printing processes and electronic display devices has cemented a color profile in our collective consciousness. Cyan arrives weekly on the cover of our favorite guilty pleasure magazines, and from its ubiquitous use in print materials, it has trickled down into a myriad of contemporary consumer products. Perhaps as a result of its pervasive presence, cyan has recently emerged as a popular hue in the catalog of many paint manufactures.

While its commercial home has provided cyan a persistent phenotype, as a Fine Art product, cyan paint lacks the color consistency found in its Design trade sister. In “Types-o-cyan,” tubes of cyan paint are hand rendered on paper, emulating the halftone print process. Each image is painted using the paint contained within the depicted tube. The variance of the proprietary pigments is elevated from product affectation to conceptual content. By articulating the subtle differences within a single color, I am gently tugging at the frayed edges of contemporary painting. This point is hopefully made more poignant as these colors are being viewed through the cyan of your electronic display device.

Ryan Peter Miller is the name for a human artist currently living in Chicago, IL. In 2008 he received notice of his status as a Master of Fine Arts upon graduation from Arizona State University. His work has been featured in New American Paintings, and he exhibits nationally and internationally, and if you follow string theory, interdimensionally. His upcoming exhibit, “Painthings,” opens at Purdue University, October 15, 2012. He currently teaches Drawing and Painting at Carthage College, in Kenosha, WI.

Artist website: ryanpetermiller.com

Top: Package, 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable
Bottom: Map Drawing 11, 2011, paper on canvas, 42 x 62in

Top: Reliquary (Street), 2012, 135 drawings, wood, plastic, 5.5 x 7in
Bottom: Wall (Hidalgo), 2012, Collage on panel, 5 x 8in

Top: Map Drawing 10, collage on canvas, 43 x 63in
Bottom: Reliquary (Church), 2012, 135 drawings, wood, plastic, 5 x 5in

Top: Souvenir, 2012
Bottom: Souvenir (tag), 2012, mixed media, 2.5 x 2in

Kitchen Painting, 2012, collage on wood, 6.5 x 9in

]]> http://www.site95.org/2012/09/01/artist-project-christina-mesiti/feed/ 0 http://www.site95.org/2012/09/01/artist-project-the-mexican-suitcase-enrique-santos/ http://www.site95.org/2012/09/01/artist-project-the-mexican-suitcase-enrique-santos/#comments Sat, 01 Sep 2012 22:22:19 +0000 site http://www.site95.org/?p=1770 To Catch a Thief / Para Atrapar a un Ladrón

The Mexican Suitcase is the result of more than three years of work by the Mexican-based Argentinian artist, Enrique Santos. This artist book could be, amongst other things, a ‘catalogue’ of an apocryphal exhibition that is not meant to be, one that from its very beginning proposes a reverse path to that already established —first the book, and then? Read More

Margaret Boko, Dead Heart, 2012, courtesy of Tangentyere artists, copyright of the artist

The diversity of Aboriginal art across Australia can no longer be contained, there is no simple way to present or engage with Aboriginal exhibitions. Different multiplicities are operating across the vast and intricate expanse of Australia. There is more opportunity for collaboration and discussion. It is impossible to capture this diversity in one exhibition, in one retrospective, in one institution. The only way to talk about these pluralities is to create multiple structures that not only recognizes this plurality, “but provide a means through which plurality can be ordered, characterized and evaluated” and perhaps communicated in some meaningful way. (II) The future of Aboriginal art may be facilitating new ways of capturing plurality through the mobilization of fluid networks and information sharing. This will take a keen ear and an open mind, it has started happening all ready from those whom treat all artists as artists.

There is a degree of tension looming between those who are keen to write Aboriginal arts obituary and the artists themselves, whom are still creating, very much alive. The only thing that is becoming extinct is homogeneity, the view that all art looks and is about the same thing. Stories are now more personal, more individual, more contemporary and in some ways, more confronting. Exhibitions have previously come to celebrate the abstract mysteries of ‘other worlds,’ but where are these other worlds and who is in them? As Hetti Perkins remarks, are we doomed to continually rearrange the seats on a sinking Titanic? (XIII) For some people it is still unthinkable that Aboriginal art can be on the one hand traditional and on the other contemporary. (IV) However, as Rex Butler explains, Aboriginal art is the one thing in Australia that involves us as it is “truly alive, has wider implications, that tells us something about the times in which we live.” (V) Stephanie Radock, almost 10 years later is saying a similar thing, “Aboriginal history, Australian history, world history of great significance.” (XIV) Any deviations or attempts at shaking things up, cross cultural collaborations and solo careers are usually met with harsh criticism, seemingly like some people have missed the point. Ian McLean explains that modernity’s apocalyptic effects on all traditional societies are undeniable and that Aboriginal art in Australia is laying bare these effects for collaborative interaction, so why aren’t we interacting? (XI) The silence surrounding colonialism and aboriginal experiences of it continues to silence voices in Aboriginal art. (IX) As Tim Acker explains, “The market’s focus on the consumption of art and the profitability of its players has smothered serious and confronting issues of artist and community livelihoods.” (I) Some of the best contemporary art has been created from issues of displacement, migration, marginalization; “great art happens in spite of its circumstances, rather than because of them.” (VIII) It seems that Aboriginal art is often theorised from the point of view that it is all ready ‘dead,’ that is has remained unchanged for thousands of years, that this complex culture has not had to constantly reinvent itself to remain in tact in some way. An important part of this reinvention and rejuvenation has come from the making of art, an art making that is “process oriented and not outcome oriented,” (IV) so why is everybody so obsessed with the outcome?

I believe there is reason to believe that artists want things to be done differently, that stories need to be shared so that they can be acknowledged. As Djon Mundine states, it is not about forgiveness, it’s about recognition and remembering. (XII) When looking at a selection of different artists across Australia, with a list that is constantly expanding, it becomes clear that the work itself demands something else, at the very least, a willingness to listen. Sally Mulda, Margaret Boko and Dulcie Sharpe all work in Alice Springs under the banner of Tangentyere Artists and Yarrenyty-Arltere. Their work talks of intervention, reinvention and collisions, experimental art works that are innovative microcosms of the world they live in. Lance Chad and Billy Kenda paint at the human rights organization, Bindi Inc., also in Alice Springs. Lance’s paintings of cowboys have a haunting, surrealist quality where Billy’s bold and vibrant tourist scenes come from deeply personal observations.

Sally M. Mulda, They are drinking beer at bush, 2012, courtesy of Tangentyere artists, copyright of the artist

I believe there is reason to believe that artists want things to be done differently, that stories need to be shared so that they can be acknowledged. As Djon Mundine states, it is not about forgiveness, it’s about recognition and remembering. (XII) When looking at a selection of different artists across Australia, with a list that is constantly expanding, it becomes clear that the work itself demands something else, at the very least, a willingness to listen. Sally Mulda, Margaret Boko and Dulcie Sharpe all work in Alice Springs under the banner of Tangentyere Artists and Yarrenyty-Arltere. Their work talks of intervention, reinvention and collisions, experimental art works that are innovative microcosms of the world they live in. Lance Chad and Billy Kenda paint at the human rights organization, Bindi Inc., also in Alice Springs. Lance’s paintings of cowboys have a haunting, surrealist quality where Billy’s bold and vibrant tourist scenes come from deeply personal observations.

Sophie Wallace, Art Centre manager at Yarrenyty Arltere explains that the degree to which people are often marginalized in Alice Springs cannot be overstated. The art produced comes directly from the heart, turning personal reflections political and social narratives. Often being written off as naive or worse, untraditional, there is always a persistence to categorize Aboriginal art, to name it one thing or another. Jorgensen explains that Aboriginal artists have always wanted to translate their paintings to a white audience so that we can understand the artist’s spiritual links to country. (IX) The spiritual power of country is still present in the grandiose of Margaret and Sally’s landscapes, but country has become more personal, a meditation on life in the town camps.

Dulcie Sharpe from Yarrenyty-Arltere is most recognized for making utterly unique soft sculpture from recycled woolen blankets. The fabric is dyed with local plants, tea and rusty bits of metal, creating rare organic patterns. Art Centre manager Sophie Wallace says the artists create work that is “humorous and beautiful, rough and sculptural, ridiculous, dramatic and inspiring… people find a voice that tells the wider community that they are worth listening to, that they are important, that they are healing themselves and their families.” (XVI)

Moving across to the Pilbara reside two sisters with a passion for innovation. Lily Long and Amy French are two Warnmun women whom paint at Martumili artists. A dynamic duo, these two began painting with the intention of modernizing their culture, sharing their ideas on canvas by always negotiating what should be included and what shouldn’t. Lily and Amy are strategists, intellectually deciphering their problems with what way best to paint. Their paintings are never one-dimensional, one thing is never one thing, having a collaborative approach and sharing the burden of the past by re-envisioning/ re-invigorating place.

Daniel Beeron and Leonard Andy from Girringun Arts in Far North Queensland universalize their personal stories. Creating small projects with big ideas, these two artists are challenging the way rainforest people have been visualized in the psyche of Aboriginal Australia and their own struggle for a unique identity. The artists only started working in 2009 and decided that the best way to create was to be radically different. Passionate and inventive, these two men from different areas are both initiating their own projects to educate both Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal audiences.

Amy French and Lily Long explaining the imagery and singing in their 5 x 3m canvas that will be featured in “We Don’t
Need a Map,”an exhibition in November, photo credit: Gabrielle Sullivan, courtesy of Martumili Artists.

Daniel Beeron has just completed the first phase of a research and visual art project about communication and connection. (VI) Daniel started with archival anthropological historical information about muwaga (message sticks) and mindil (woven) baskets from the region of tropical north Queensland. Written in early contact time, the historical information explains that without a written language, groups in that area of Australia use to communicate with message sticks. Some were carved or ornamented and were interpreted differently depending on spiritual knowledge and could also be used as a passport. Daniel explains that this project is revitalizing culture, reengaging with the past to re-articulate the future, reconnecting groups across the region and teaching younger generations. Each artist that participates creates two message sticks and two baskets, one for themselves and one for exhibition. Each is a very personal manifestation of the historical information and their own experiences. But grouped together, Daniel’s project speaks of universal truths, what can we learn from lost histories, about reconnection, about innovation and the power of personal stories in painting a much grander picture.

Leonard Andy is from Mission Beach and is one of the only few traditional elders of the land in that area. In the corner of the Cairns Regional Gallery last year, in an exhibition curated by Avril Quail, was a set of five eloquently executed and meticulously painted boomerangs. A dog with dollar signs painted on his body caught my attention, and as you delve deeper into the seemingly small, humble objects, a big story appears. Leonard explains that the story painted on the boomerangs is about cyclone money and the impact its had on the social structure of Mission Beach after the devastating cyclone Yasi tore through the region in 2010. Leonard also says that as a far north Queenslander, he is the minority of the minority, in a constant battle for a separate identity to desert Aboriginal art and culture. These artists are just at the beginning of their journey; their projects can only grow as people become more aware of the different contemporaneity’s within Australia.

Stan Brumby from Halls Creek Art Centre, Yarliyil and Mervyn Street from Mangkaja artists, Fitzroy Crossing paint about the pastoral industry and the seamless transitions made by many Aboriginal men from nomadic life to horsebacks and mustering. Described as Aboriginal cosmopolitans, young men became proficient cowboys, “fearless, full of initiative and very quick to adapt.” (X) These two artists combined a life of hard work, maintaining traditional ties and now, articulating their life on canvas in vibrant collisions. Elements of Catholicism haunt Stan’s work, his intricately executed “Noah’s Arc, 2011” is the perfect example of this consolidation. How elements of the colonizers culture was integrated, incorporated into the complex systems of Aboriginal spirituality.

Loreen Samson from Roebourne and Charmaine Green from Yamitji both are visually reacting to the reality of mining, the destruction it creates and working through their own grievances. Loreen’s figurative works envisage parts of Australia that are unseen in the cities, the industrial machinery that haunts the once pristine landscape. Charmaine’s work is full of emotion, as a way to experience the pain and facilitate a new form of activism.

After nearly 40 years the Aboriginal art movement continues to grow, artists are more committed and the art keeps evolving in unexpected ways. (X) The unreality of the ‘Australia’ presented through movies and documentaries on colonial times is very different to the Indigenous experience of Australia. If we are to be taken as seriously addressing the problems of the Aboriginal Australia divide, then we need to curate exhibitions that address this, and start a dialogue, not end one.

Aboriginal art continuously involves us because it is the site of unprecedented “cultural conflict and exchange.” (V) In the following years, it will be interesting to see how these artists develop, how disparate parts of Australia can be reconciled. This is not a uniquely Australian thing, Indigenous populations internationally are attempting to rewrite their own histories and receive acknowledgement. (XV) To use Djon Mundine’s words again, “in Aboriginal society all art is a social act,” you cannot remain neutral in the presence of these artists work. There are many artists whom are developing new ways of creating; this movement will continue to grow. This is just the beginning of the conversation that the artist’s have started, its time we all got involved.

I Acker, Tim, “Aboriginal art is a complicated thing’, Artlink 2:3, 2008, p. 64-69.

II Smith, Terry, “What is Contemporary art?” University Of Chicago Press, 2009.

III Biddle, Jennifer, “Art Under Intervention: The Radical Ordinary of June Walkutjukurr Richards,” Art Monthly, June 2010.

IV Biddle, Jennifer, via email correspondence, 2012.

V Butler, Rex, “An End of ‘Aboriginal’ art and the shock of the new” (2003) in How Aboriginies created the idea of contemporary art, ed. McLean, I., IMA Press: Australia, 2012.

VI Girrungen Arts Statement, 2012.

VII Jorgensen, Darren, “Aboriginality, hyper-visibility and wobbliness in paintings from Australia’s Western Desert,” World Art 1:2, 2011, p. 259-272.

VIII Jorgensen, Darren, “Bagging Aboriginal Art,” Arena 111, March-April, 2011, p. 38-42.

IX Jorgensen, Darren, “On Cross- Cultural Interpretations of Aboriginal Art’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 29:4, 2008, p. 413-426.

X McLean, Ian, “Aboriginal Cosmopolitans: A Prehistory of Western Desert Painting,” Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Harris, J. Wiley- Blackwell: UK, 2011.

XI McLean, Ian, “Aboriginal Modernisms in Central Australia,” Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers, ed. Mercer, K. MIT Press: USA, 2008.

XII Mundine, Djon, “The Ballard of Jimmy Governor,” Artlink 32:2, 2012.

XIII Perkins, Hetti, “A Place of our own: conversation with Daniel Browning,” Artlink 32:2, 2012.

XIV Radock, Stephanie, “Making Histories,” Artlink 32:2, 2012.

XV Thompsen, Christian, 2012.

XVI Wallace, Sophie, “Same But Different Speech,” unpublished manuscript, 2012.