October 27th, 2022. Art art art.

At the Carnegie Museum of Art, next door to the Natural History Museum, I found that most of the galleries we wandered through were very, very heavy-handed. Their 58th “Carnegie International” ” unfolds along two conceptual overlapping currents: historical works from the collections of international institutions, estates, and artists, alongside new commissions and recent works by contemporary artists” which, though in the overall statement doesn’t actually mention works of protest or a focus on previously marginalized artists, definitely has that focus, sort of disallowing the whimsy that sometimes lightens the WEIGHT of a museum’s collection. But above is a strange moment… hidden amongst classical marble figures and overlooking unexplained columns of balloons, Nicole Eisenman’s “Prince of Swords”.

I wrapped up the last of my Black Doll Maker interviews today… well… I mean – I wrapped EDITING the interviews. I wish I could claim actually conducting the interviews. The woman who’s actually asking the questions and drawing the artists out (not that they really need any drawing out, most are pretty loquacious) is a marvel unto herself, and at some point I’m hoping I’ll be able to see all of this from the macro level and know more about HER as well.

But that, especially in combination with our recent wanderings, has me thinking a LOT about art.

In any case – this last artist grew up none too far from where I did – though in the 60s and 70s rather than the 80s and 90s, and it’s interesting to hear her talk about the segregation in the area that leads directly into my own stories of growing up, since my own schooling was SO influenced by Maryland’s aggressive DEsegregation. The attempted reversals of White Flight and the concept that, just like me, she grew up in neighbourhoods that were primarily black and didn’t get the whole “black = minority” thing until she’d moved away… For her that was Boston, first encountering racism at school there, much as I feel like anti-Black sentiment was pretty much an outlier (ironically) till I went to school in Baltimore, where most of the school’s population was white in the midst of a Black city.

Other thoughts and notes … it’s interesting to hear the artists talk about one another. There’s a lot of Love and friendly respect. Joy. But some good teasing as well. And this last woman also was the first of them to send me a’Googlin’. A couple of things that I feel like I should’ve been aware of (Clark’s Doll Test!) (The Annual Black Doll Show in Baltimore) that were dropped from her lips… usually the interviewer would stop the interviewee and say “tell them about” so-and-so… but these were things I guess I really should’ve known.

The intersection of art and technical craft was a BIG deal in art school, and there were many specious arguments about art VS craft rather than the rather more important conversations of craft assisting or even servicing art. The visual aesthetics of the displays in the neighbouring Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh showed no less attention to beauty and grace than the marbles and paintings and structures created by the Artists, but these unnamed technicians are hidden behind service to history. And yet “hidden” in these vignettes and dioramas there’s plenty of climate activism as well as deeper and sharper statements about humanity as a whole….

Art? No. A stencil. Where does THAT fit into all of this. No skill required, probably 15 seconds out of someone’s day and instantly demolished by our desirous coffee-Lovin’ lips (actually, really, really good coffee at this little coffeehouse just a short walk from Brad Yoder’s house) – and yet this little coffeehouse DOES care enough to purchase said stencil and apply it to this short-Lived canvas heightening the aesthetic of our breakfast with a moment’s worth of visual delight…

I’m not sure if this artist was the youngest of them (I think she’s about 65) but she’s the only one to talk about 9/11 and it’s effect on art, racism and she has quite some stories about how she’d been putting together “Art Bombs” and “Peace Wars” and other such seemingly harmless terms that suddenly took on vastly new meanings in the newly-paranoid America that woke up on September 12^th.

Things to look up. Things to visit. Watching the progress bar progress, my google fingers a’googlin as my graphics card goes a’renderin’. Heh. Everyone should be subjected to a good, hour-long interview about their CALLING.

I bet more people are called than ever let on.

And I wonder about those who are called. I WAS called. Now I just Live it. I don’t know if I still feel it as a CALLING. At least not all the time. I go and play and come home. There’s not the IMPERATIVE that there once was. Maybe because I’ve Lived almost 50 years of my art NOT solving the problem. I’m no longer self-centered enough that merely coping serves enough of a purpose.

But I still relate strongly to the need to DO. Pulling at a thread or pulling at strings. Less about figure and form, or chord structure and the “correct” structure of a song, than about the physical act of DOING. And the audience is almost an accident.

Probably the most viscerally uncomfortable piece we ran across at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Organic shapes that should’ve been peaceful wooden forms creaked with slowly pumping movements and hydraulic clicks and shudders like some dying organism. It’s strange to get the paranoid feeling of being INSIDE something as it collapses around you even as you’re in a brightly-lit gallery space. The piece is by Trudng Cong Tung and I KNOW I’m missing some accent marks in there. It “concerns the mythologies of the land and their relationship to living practices that have been interrupted by the processes of modernization, war, and rampant industrialization…” the explanation goes on for quite some time and strangely leaves me with no greater feelings about the art. Media listed : “lacquer on wood, time, and temperature”.

Gallery art is such this different thing. High-minded at times. Paragraphs of explanation, often unable to stand entirely on their own terms. Strangely antiseptic environments. Vacuums. White walls and pinpoint lights. Placards of explanation that gives … not enough context.

And sometimes it seems as if the designers of museums DO have a weird little sense of humour. In the description for Phyllida Barlow’s “untitled: upturnedhouse” it is stated “If an empty room may be understood as a blank canvas, Pyllida Barlow fills her canvas emphatically with layers of painted plaster and cement”. And so does the gallery give her an empty room? Almost.

There is very, very little white space in this gallery. And so I sort of find it hilarious that the curators have given this sculpture an almost-empty room with naught but a TINY painting by Lois Dodd. A straight-forward study of a “Tree with Three Trunks”.

The comparison of this gallery work to these Living, breathing interviews is not flattering, and I wonder if half of the artists who’ve been chosen for these hallowed halls could communicate half so thoroughly. So many borrowed stories and borrowed metaphors, meaning so much less than a Lifetime of pulled threads tying oneself to a long culture of sculptures that see USE.

And it’s entirely possible that I’m seeing this through my own lens. In school I was guilty of appropriating things, but I don’t know that delving into Catholicism was any more or less dishonest than exploring dreamcatchers and Native American tarots and Wicca. I was exploring and hunting and wandering and wondering. There was romance for the Yanamamo who, through my Western eyes seemed to be a pretty violent, rape-oriented culture – but through art school Noble Savage obsession became just another sample of untouched human innocence. (yes, I know that years later the work of Napoleon Chagnon was largely discredited as sensationalized, playing up the above violence, but I’m talking about the college art school response to these depictions, not the veracity of the depictions themselves)

Ironically, this piece by Edgar Calel is actually CALLED “The Calling”. It’s a piece comprised of clay pots filled with water, rose petals and tree branches as well as paintings and drawings of ceramic pottery shards that were found buried in the earth on the artist’s family’s land. Though the description of “Oyonik (The Calling)” starts out with a description that “Oyonik” is a “healing ritual… and a communications technology… for people who are lost, both physically or spiritually adrift”, it goes on to say that “Calel has come to believe the shards were intentionally broken and buried by their ancestors, as an act of cultural preservation to prevent colonizers from seizing objects and the cultural knowledge manifest in them” and that his work is “counter-ethnographic”. I definitely find this interesting as a cross-section of both historical documentation and art responding to that documentation… but want to know if THESE pots are here to communicate with anyone, and want to know about the narrative of whether pots were broken not merely to deny “colonizers from seizing objects” and cultural knowledge – but if these were believed to communications devices were they not actually denying intelligence to the enemy in a very real, strategic way?

And I absolutely can NOT understand the context of many of these artists – responding to environments and nations and upbringings FAR more removed from me than “being Black in 1960’s Washington DC”… but we’re still human together, and I worry that the work is still more focused on romanticizing the difference, or capitalizing on the exoticism of the environment, and that the display capitalizes on the romance of the struggle rather than the communication thereof…

Edgar Calel is creating the kinds of clay pots that his ancestors believed could be used to communicate with one another … and from what *I* know of human religion, superstition and hope I doubt that’s a metaphor. Placing them in a gallery, where no-one’s using them for ANYTHING bothers me on some level that I can’t quite describe. Should it bother me more or less than the fact that some of the Black Doll Makers have their dolls hanging in museum spaces?

Knowing the Journey of the Calling makes a HUGE difference. Knowing the handwork that went into the dolls, knowing that many of them sprung from a need to create something where a needed thing simply did not exist. It’s different, more accessible. Less haughty.

Ha. I guess that’s what makes me a “folk” artist, right? I want to be accessible.

Below are a number of items reprinted from the photodump from Pittsburgh, just in the context of them being art rather than… you know… just a bunch of photos of my trip! I often took photos of the placards next to them, lest you think my memory for these things are infallible. These photos ARE my memories, but fortunately they take me back to the moment. Like with this first piece : “Untitled (My Pittsburgh Sculpture” by Mire Lee who employs “more robust sculptural materials such as metal, plaster, and concrete alongside glycerin, silicone and various types of resin” animated by pumps to “recall the internal systems of the human body – its organ functions, convulsions, failures, fluids, and excretions as a [thoroughly unpleasant but kinda cool] way of probing the depths and out limits of human behavior and psyche”.