Dear Friends of VISA,
No newsletter last week as I was in Seattle. I went to Seattle to shop for clothing it is hard to find interesting and attractive clothing for regular-sized women in Victoria. A case in point, the first store I went to in Seattle (Macy's) I found beautiful silver gray suit separates and I was able to choose different sizes for jacket, dress, pants and skirt as opposed to buying a whole ensemble in one size. And everything fit perfectly. I rarely ever do 'shopping' as an activity in itself so I thought I would give it a try. However after a day and half of spending time in stores, trying on items and purchasing the odd item here and there, I felt exhausted. Not just exhausted, but spiritually bereft. Sure it was fun to go back to the hotel room with my newly purchased items and imagine all my new outfits and what would go with what, but at the end of the day shopping left little for my imagination to work with. I decided to devote my third day in Seattle to the exhibition "Elles" that is currently on at the
Seattle Art Museum. I spent from 10am-5pm in the gallery and I could have gone back for another day. The show is so FULL. Camille Morineau, curator of the
ELLES: Women from the Centre Pompidou wrote about her show, "the goal is neither to show that female artists exist or to produce a feminist event... The goal is to show that representation of women vs. men is, ultimately, no longer important." And that really came across in the exhibition which covered women artists from the beginning of the century (early surrealists) to contemporary times. We have come a long from Lucy Lippard's book on feminist art in the 1970's called 'From the Center' which was based on the hypothesis that women's art has a different look than men's art, with the defining factor being that women's art revolved around a central compositional motif. In this exhibition you were much more aware of the art; the gender seemed to play a secondary role. In this two part exhibition, more than thinking you were looking at an exhibition of women's art, you felt as if you were given the opportunity to see an overview of 20th century art in several rooms in a museum. Here is a review of the Elles: Pompidou from the
LA Times. However here is a review by Germaine Greer who saw the exhibition in quite a different light than I did:
The Guardian. Perhaps I don't get out enough but I was just delighted to see so much interesting art in the Seattle Art Museum.
The first floor of the museum is
ELLES: SAM contained work by women from the museum's own collection their and has some great Joan Mitchells, Agnes Martins, a whole room of Helen Frankenthaler. An unexpected treat was a couple of rooms devoted to Yayoi Kusama whose retrospective I just missed at the Whitney this summer. SAM had some small works on paper by Kusama from 1953-1958 which were really delightful. The third floor,
ELLES: Pompidou was work from the Pompidou collection (which did incidently include quite a few American works). There were a lot of classic videos by artists such as Martha Rosler, Eleanor Antin and Andrea Fraser, a sound piece by Louise Lawler that I only had read about before and a provocative slide show by Nan Goldin with a soundtrack commissioned by Bjork and the Brodsky Quartet. And while Germaine Greer criticized the fact that the exhibition contained lesser known work by major artists, I enjoyed seeing some of these 'lesser works' as I hadn't seen them before such as a fairly large acrylic painting 'Untitled 1964' by Eva Hesse (who is more known for her sculptural work).
My state of mind was so completely different after spending a day in the gallery. A day spent shopping left me feeling somewhat depressed and verging on a strange kind of existential angst: I can't help wondering why are there so MANY items in the world to buy and who are the people making these items and where are the resources to make these items coming from and do we need all this stuff really? Whereas a day looking at art left my mind racing with all kinds of ideas and possibilities. I felt a sense of hope for the human race that so many people chose to spend their day, or part thereof, looking at art. While shopping I was amazed at how that world has no place for art. In my daily life I am privileged to be surrounded by art or thoughts of art everyday so to go out into the world of stores and see no art anywhere seems like being in a foreign land. I found myself after day one shopping starting to think that there is no reason or purpose for art in the world. And then the museum day made me realize, yes! People want and need art. There might less venues or money for contemporary art that there was ten or twenty years ago, however we need art more than ever. We need art to keep our imaginations alive!
Wendy
Video below is a sample of work from Elles: Pompidou
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| Semiotics of the Kitchen |
Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen - 1975From A to Z, Rosler "shows and tells" the ingredients of the housewife's day, giving us a tour that names and mimics the ordinary with movements more samurai than suburban. Rosler's slashing gesture as she forms the letters of the alphabet in the air with a knife and fork, is a rebel gesture, punching through the "system of harnessed subjectivity" from the inside out.
