Da Vinci was born on this day, April 15th, in 1452. Detail from Andy Warhol, Colored Mona Lisa (1963), celebrating the cult of celebrity around Leonardo da Vinci when the Mona Lisa famously toured the US in 1963. — Da Vinci was born on this day, April 15th, in 1452. Detail from Andy Warhol, *Colored Mona Lisa* (1963), celebrating the cult of celebrity around Leonardo da Vinci when the *Mona Lisa* famously toured the US in 1963.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

April 15, 2018

Fighting jet lag (still!) and trying to get back into a home routine, I spent the past week catching up with life at home and glued to late night cable news trying to make sense of the escalating craziness in the US and the evolving situation in Syria. It is times like these when the happenings of the art world seem to fade from significance, but I was cheered up Friday night when attending the graduating show of the BFA Fine Arts students from my department (at Kwantlen Polytechnic University). Exhibiting projects making up the culmination of a year's hard work, the artists touched upon many themes that brought conversation and critical reflection to the tumultuous moment we are living through. Whether it be the experience of immigration and living between different traditions and cultural expectations, attention to the body and the kinetics of experience, challenging ideas about gender norms and representation, or bringing attention to the destructive nature of abstracted knowledge and "fake news," the individuals in this show, as in many similar graduating shows around North America, are continuing the role of contemporary artists globally to bring visibility to the marginalized and speak truth to power. I urge you to support local art schools and attend the graduating shows that you will see begin to pop up at local colleges and universities over the next several weeks. I can promise it will not only renew your belief in the potential of young creative talent, but also in the power of art to bridge the social, political, and cultural divide that appears all too often to keep us isolated from one another. Enjoy this week's links!

"An Indigenous Artist’s Futuristic Vision of Traditional Transformation Masks"

hyperallergic.com

"The Internet Apologizes …"

nymag.com

"Do You Think Mona Lisa Is Happy? Then You Probably Are Too, New Research Says"

artnet.com

"After Zaha's "vagina" stadium, here are six more examples of yonic architecture"

dezeen.com

"A Collector Follows His Nose Through the Maze of Modern Art"

vulture.com

"Cy Twombly and the Transporting, Transforming Power of Art That Barely Uses the Tools of Art"

vulture.com

"7 Tips for Applying to Art School"

arsty.net

"Podcast episode 27: the enduring appeal of enigmatic Beuys. Plus, lost masterpieces reborn (PODCAST)"

artnewspaper.com

"‘Drawing Is Always a Struggle’: An Interview with Art Spiegelman"

nybooks.com

"A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain"

theatlantic.com

Lady AIKO, The Tale of Mr. Skull and Mermaids (2015), a street art mural first shown at Cony Art Walls, Cony Island, is heavily influenced by the Edo era Ukiyo-e prints that form an important part of Japanese visual culture. — Lady AIKO, *The Tale of Mr. Skull and Mermaids* (2015), a street art mural first shown at Cony Art Walls, Cony Island, is heavily influenced by the Edo era Ukiyo-e prints that form an important part of Japanese visual culture.

Location | Japan: Ukiyo-E and the Visual Culture of Everyday Life

April 12, 2018

To visit Japan in person is to be immersed in a non-stop aesthetic experience—an experience shaped by visual storytelling, fantasy, space-making, and attention at every level to artful detail, ranging from the luxurious to the most everyday and banal. This was perhaps my biggest takeaway impression of a place that has been at the very top of my travel bucket list for as long as I can remember. Not surprisingly, the country that has popularized manga and anime into universally recognized forms of mass contemporary visual culture also has a deeply entangled and shared history with Western forms of art. Enter Ukiyo-e print culture, and my own deep fascination with how representations of Japanese urban life came to influence the art of the fleeting and the everyday pioneered in Europe by the Impressionists and modern avant-garde art movements .

Translated, Ukiyo-e literally means “pictures of the floating world” and helps categorize a style of Japanese woodblock painting and printmaking from the early 17th to late 19th century Edo period. Innovating techniques of production and wide distribution that would allow for popular consumption of these images throughout Japan and then around the world by the late nineteenth century, talented Japanese artists turned to printmaking as a way to connect with and share art to the widest possible audience. Importantly, the subject of Ukiyo-e prints references the fleeting nature and everyday instances of urban life, emphasizing pleasure, beauty, landscapes, and the fashions of the time. This, and overt references to the transformative nature of city life, would come to influence and align with French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire’s challenge to artists of his time—to represent and draw inspiration from the everyday and ephemeral urban world around them, and not slavishly adhere to the traditions and forms of the ancient past. Critically, for Baudelaire, and the new generation of modern and avant-garde artists he would come to influence, this was more than just a change in the subject or content for art, it was also equally a revolution in the form of art.

Edouard Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola (1868). Note the presence of Ukiyo-e prints on the far left and upper right register of Manet's painting-- a nod to the fashionable Japanese print culture that was part of the Paris urban scene from the mid… — Edouard Manet, *Portrait of Emile Zola* (1868). Note the presence of Ukiyo-e prints on the far left and upper right register of Manet's painting-- a nod to the fashionable Japanese print culture that was part of the Paris urban scene from the mid to late 19th century.

The critical discussion of Ukiyo-e prints forms a key section of any course where I discuss the turn towards modernism in art. Representing the contemporary world was considered a revolutionary move away from the guiding purpose of high art, since at least the time of the Renaissance, to value images of the biblical past, historical record, and images of universal values and truths via metaphor. Turning instead to the banalities and fleeting moments of everyday life, in all of its messiness, incompleteness, and contingency, the role of artists as it emerged under the modern and avant-garde movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was less about being the purveyor of some kind of “truth” via their representations, and more about complicating and even calling into question the possibility of ever seeing or representing the complete world one sees with their eyes.

The flatness, stark colour contrasts, and often incomplete visions of Ukiyo-e prints provided one of the important influences to modern artists of the late 19th century who attempted to work out a new way to make the images Baudelaire was calling for. Turning, for example, to artists such as Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (see image comparisons below), we can see the influence of Ukiyo-e prints in the way content and form shifts in these artists works away from more traditional, figurative, and mimetic representations, towards the flat, divided, and unmodulated colour palettes of the Japanese. As I tell my students, new ways of making art cannot come out of a vacuum, and we now know that these artists were very much studying the work of Japanese printmakers when formulating new directions for their art practice.

It was with this rich context in place that I planned a visit to one of the most important museums and workshops of Ukiyo-e printmaking in Japan, the Hiroshige Museum of Art in Shizuoka City not far from the famed Mount Fuji, on the south coast of Japan. At the museum, which houses one of the largest collections of Utagawa Hiroshige’s prints, I was able to finally view a wide range of Ukiyo-e prints in both painted and printed form, and learn much more about the printmaking process that effectively placed affordable artworks in the homes of Japanese people for several centuries. At the time of my visit, there was a special exhibition of Ukiyo-e prints from the early 19th century depicting samurai and geisha entertainment culture that would further influence later artists of the era the Impressionists would be looking at (see my photographs below). We were also able to see side by side comparisons of Japanese prints and Van Gogh works where the undeniable influences and even borrowing were apparent. Finally, the museum also encouraged visitors to dress up and perform as subjects in their own virtual Ukiyo-e print, complete with kimonos and a well lit space suitable for photographing and sharing. As one of the guides told me, it was the intention of the museum to encourage active participation in a visual culture that gave visibility to everyday people and their lives.

Another fascinating section of the museum was the exhibition of contemporary art works influenced by Ukiyo-e print culture. Notable among them were the work of two UK artists. The first artist, Emily Allchurch, uses photographic collage to rework one of Hiroshige’s famous prints of Mount Fuji in Tokaido Road (2013), while the second artist, Carl Randall, and his work titled Mihni no Matsubara (2016), depicts crowds of selfie-taking young people and tourists, a contemporary subject matter, explored through the formal conventions of oil painting. I enjoyed examining these works up close and seeing how the museum made space for contemporary art works such as these to continue the conversation linking Ukiyo-e print culture to a global modern world with its fascination for the ephemeral, the urban, and the everyday.

Before leaving the museum, we learned that in the coming week a new exhibition featuring world famous Japanese-street artist Lady AIKO was set to open, featuring collaboration with onsite craftsmen to produce an original woodcut. I cannot express how sad I was to miss this amazing show. Later, the museum was kind enough to send me the press package for the exhibition titled LADY GO! AIKO x EDO Girls Collection that included the following description:

“Hiroshige Museum of Art meets globally active street artist, AIKO, for the first collaboration
ever! A collection of works representing the unique world of contemporary Eshi, AIKO, and
Ukiyo-e that feature women depicted by Utagawa-style Eshi including Hiroshige, Toyokuni
III, and Kuniyoshi will be featured at this exhibition. Highlighted works we may feel casually
familiar with include a giant wall art by AIKO exhibited for the first time in Japan, “America
no Yume”, which is created with techniques of Ukiyo-e Hanga, and Edo girls fashion that
appear in Ukiyo-e of the Tōkaidō and Kabuki. We hope you enjoy the world of “Girls” loved
by many generations of the Edo period to today."

The vivid poster for the Lady AIKO collaborative exhibition on this spring at the Hirsohige Museum of Art.

The show features two large rooms including one featuring prints from the collection displaying the life of girls depicted in Ukiyo-e prints, and the second room with the large scale mural The Tale of Mr. Skull and Mermaids (at the top of this page)—a work that AIKO first showed in Brooklyn, inspired by the intersection of “pop culture” of the Edo period and that of contemporary New York—and the original woodcut AIKO created with the museum titled American Dreams (featured in the above poster). I hope one day to see this work in person as well (Japan, I will be back!) but it is clear that the legacy of Ukiyo-e lives on in the way that the medium was clearly intended.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

April 08, 2018

We are finally back from our whirlwind travels through China and Japan, a trip that exceeded all expectations! In the coming weeks, I will be dedicating some posts on some specific art and architecture related topics related to my visit, but I wanted to bookend this week's round-up with a look at Art Basel Hong Kong, an event that I sadly missed by only a few days but shaped much of the art world conversation at precisely the moment I was on this trip. In fact, it is notable if you look at the Instagram feeds of many of the art world types I recommended in a recent post how many of them are touring major Asian cities since late March to survey the evolving art scene. I highlight @thingsizzyloves account in particular, as she has been posting spectacular art images this past week from Japan-- a place that I also sought to feature on my own feed as much as possible.

The other benefit of the long journey to Asia was that I was finally able to catch up on many movies and television shows that I had held in reserve for the air travel. At the top of my list was Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird, two beautiful films I had missed at VIFF, and All The Money in the World, a movie I have been wanting to see for some time since it follows the story of art collector J. Paul Getty and the kidnapping of his grandson in the 1970s. This is a story I had only heard about in passing, and being a huge fan of the Getty Institute and collection in LA, the story ended up blowing me away for lifting the veil on the corruption and ugly reality of the senior Getty. Without spoiling the movie and new television series Trust (debuting tonight on FX) and also based on the Getty story, suffice it to say that anyone interested in Getty's museums, art collections, and overall legacy will learn a great deal about the real story behind the man and the family. Eye-opening on every level, and an important part of the larger conversation regarding the intersection of art and the ultra wealthy. Enjoy this week's links and I will be back soon with some posts related to my Asia trip!

"Spotlight on… Art Central in Hong Kong"

theartnewspaper.com

"How Corporations Harness — and Hijack — the Idea of the Museum"

hyperallergic.com

"What’s Your Favorite Color? With Art Palette, Google Hopes to Repeat the Success of Its Viral Face-Matching App"

artnet.com

"What About the Breakfast Club? Revisiting the Movies Of My Youth In the Age Of #MeToo"

newyorker.com

"Unknown or Unreal? The Shadow on Some Russian Avant-Garde Art"

nytimes.com

"Judge Throws Out Closely Watched Lawsuit Against the Agnes Martin Authentication Committee"

artnet.com

"Why the Artist Who Created Erica Haskard’s Artwork Loves The Americans’ Fictional Painter"

slate.com

"Impressions of Art Basel in Hong Kong (VIDEO)"

ArtBasel

"Forgotten Feminisms: An Appeal Against ‘Domestic Despotism’"

nybooks.com

"Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 | MoMA LIVE (VIDEO)"

moma

Detail from Banksy's new mural that appeared in New York this past week depicting the imprisonment of Turkish journalist Zehra Doğan.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

March 18, 2018

As I post my weekly round-up, we are boarding a plane to embark on a whirlwind Asia trip with stops in Hong Kong, Xiamen, Shanghai, Beijing, Hakata, Kyoto, Shimizu and Tokyo-- a trip that has been in the works for almost a year, and one that I have been looking forward to and eagerly anticipating from the moment it was finalized. As it will be our first visit to China and Japan, I have been diligently researching the urban scene in each of our stops and enjoying the opportunity to learn more about the contemporary art scene we hope to glimpse while on the ground. Japan, in particular, has been at the very top of my travel bucket list for years and was the catalyst for this trip. Japan is a place that I have long wanted to visit for a million reasons related to the modern design, visual and urban culture, architecture, fashion, and the strong emphasis on everyday aesthetics the Japanese are famous for. I have also spent time studying the influence of Japanese art on developments in European modernism, so I am particularly excited for this leg of our journey.

China was a later addition to this trip, and it is a place that I am admittedly fascinated by but also deeply ambivalent about. As a teenager in 1989, watching the Tiananmen Square protests and aftermath on TV in the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall was both a life altering and critical turning point in my life. Looking back, I can mark this time as especially pivotal in how I eventually came to understand my own activism, research interests in the avant-garde, and the strong beliefs I formed in upholding liberalism, human rights, freedom of speech, and the role of artists, activists, and journalists in civil society. Over the years, I have been fortunate to have many students from China in my classroom, all urging me to see the country for myself, and to separate out the current politics from the long-standing culture and history that shapes the nation. At the same time, I have had students and friends from Hong Kong openly sharing how the city has been impacted since the handover to China in 1997 and describing how distinct and special the people of Hong Kong are. I have much to see and I am beyond excited to start this journey with an open mind and an open heart, and look forward to sharing what I see in the weeks to come. Enjoy the links, and happy Spring Break!

"Why Fewer Galleries Are Opening Today Than 10 Years Ago"

artsy.net

"Can Inclusion Riders Change Hollywood?"

theatlantic.com

"Activists Pressure Louvre to Drop Oil Company Sponsorship with Die-in"

hyperallergic.com

"Zaha Hadid’s Desert Think Tank: Environmental Beauty and Efficiency"

nytimes.com

"Banksy protests Turkish artist's incarceration in new mural"

cnn.com

"No. 72: The Delectable, Daring World of Cake Art (PODCAST)"

artsy.com

"Hustle & Ho, Sex Workers Festival of Resistance "

artforum.com

"The mirage of riches in museums’ vaults"

theartnewspaper.com

"Firing of MOCA's chief curator triggers worry over the future of an artist-centric museum"

latimes.com

"Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts / Retrospective at Schaulager Basel (VIDEO)"

vernissage

Jasper Johns Target paintings (1961) on exhibition at an artist retrospective of Johns' career at The Broad in Los Angeles (image: D Barenscott Instagram) — Jasper Johns *Target* paintings (1961) on exhibition at an artist retrospective of Johns' career at The Broad in Los Angeles (image: D Barenscott Instagram)

Jasper Johns and Some Thoughts on Artist Retrospectives

March 14, 2018

Last month when I visited the Takashi Murakami exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I mentioned how retrospective exhibitions were among my favourite type of art show. Perhaps it is the historian in me, or the interest I have had since I was a young kid in reading biographies of famous people, but I find something deeply resonant in seeing the lifework of an artist curated in a dedicated space. Not to be mistaken, retrospectives are admittedly among the most romanticized and least critical of all art exhibition types. They are seductive in their visual storytelling, positioning the artist as hero-genius in the isolated white cube, and shamelessly appealing to that part of us that wants the short-cut version of an artist’s career.

Retrospectives follow a long tradition in the history of art that sought to distinguish and elevate particular individuals into the canon of art history. Originally exclusive affairs with limited audience, retrospectives were made more commercial and mainstream in the late nineteenth century as part of the rise of World’s Exhibitions. Importantly, the move grew out of an interest by the state in nationalizing and even laying claim to particular artist movements and traditions, yet by the early twentieth century, sprawling retrospective exhibitions also existed to attract larger audiences, and potential buyers, to the new “modern art” of the era. Important retrospectives (what we would call “blockbuster” shows) held across Europe at this time, of artists such as Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Matisse, helped to inspire new generations of artists and educate the public through a survey of carefully selected works meant to represent the individual artist’s oeuvre.

As art historian Robert Jensen argues in his study Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton University Press, 1996): “after 1900 the retrospective was widely and self-consciously employed as a weapon to redress the exclusions of the past, to rewrite history, to construct a canonical history of modernist artists as a sequence of great individuals in the evolution of modern art.” Ironically, the era of retrospectives, which began as a way to recognize artists on the margins of the art world, and in post-WWII would act as important cultural exports in the name of liberal democracy linking modern art with open societies, continues today with many problematic dimensions, exclusions, and the aura of privilege. For these reasons, it is always important to approach the retrospective with both healthy scepticism and an understanding of the larger contexts at play.

Case in point-- while in Los Angeles, I visited the Jasper Johns exhibition “Something Resembling Truth” at The Broad (click on selected image gallery below to view individual works and titles). This was a retrospective that was co-organized with the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts in London, where it was first on display through the fall of last year. Jasper Johns, an American painter, sculptor, and artist (associated with the Neo-Dada and pop art movements of the 1960’s), who is today 87 years old and regarded by many as among the most important living artists in North America, was chosen for a retrospective by a curator and art historian duo in London who had been working on publishing and releasing a five-volume academic catalogue on Johns. The Los Angeles contingent organizing the show was headed by The Broad’s founding director, and the Jasper Johns show would be part of the private museum’s programming, helping to raise the profile of the brand new art institution in the eyes of the art world. In short, the Jasper Johns retrospective does one kind of job in England, and an entirely different kind of job in the U.S.

In London, the venue for the retrospective, in one of the cities oldest and most venerated art spaces, was presumably staged to showcase the research of the curator and art historian organizers. Still, the show was met with much less enthusiasm as one might expect. Seeing all of John’s famous American flag works was likely unsettling to a British public coming to terms with the Trump era, and was once again a reminder of the art historical narrative and mythology surrounding what Jason Farago in the New York Review of Books termed “the primacy of American art as the postwar successor to European modernism.” In sharp contrast, as I noted when I was in L.A. after seeing the tremendous marketing machine promoting the Johns show all over the city, there was a very different way that the Johns show was being used to attract a new kind of crowd to the local art scene. In L.A., Johns was positioned as both retro and sexy—a recycled version of an American art legend in a city that venerates heroes and everything shiny and “new.” As Catherine Wagley aptly described in an artnet review:

“The exhibition may indeed be particularly illuminating for younger Angelenos, who, even if they visit museums regularly would rarely see Johns paintings (LACMA and MOCA mostly own prints). It’s seductively installed, lit to make colors pop. The aspiring painter can, and should, geek out over Johns’s surface texture, trompe l’oeil, and material competence. But the Broad, with its ahistorical hanging, does to Johns what it usually does to art: privileges objects over context. Hopefully viewers will be beguiled enough to learn on their own how deftly Johns’s work spoke and responded to his political and aesthetic milieu.”

In the case of the artist himself, Jasper Johns had very little to no input in the staging of the retrospective. Reading a longer New York Times article on Johns by Deborah Solomon ahead of my trip, it was interesting to learn how little the interpretation of his legacy mattered to the artist: “Mr. Johns himself is loath to offer biographical interpretations of his work — or any interpretations, for that matter. He is famously elusive and his humor tends toward the sardonic. He once joked that, of the dozens of books that have been written about his art, his favorite one was written in Japanese. What he liked is that he could not understand it.” In fact, the important lesson in understanding the wider context of this and many other retrospectives, is how little the artist’s actual lived experience or interpretations figure into what one sees. Retrospectives, like many other kinds of storytelling devices, say more about the culture that produces them than the subject under examination.

Further Reading: