Untitled (Navigating errantly among liberatory forms and wander freely through Floridian groves; a gestural ode to JH)
“I am guided by what burns …
Playing materially with images
Category: art
Betye Saar at ICA Miami
The Trickster, 1994 Mixed media tableau
All courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
The Trickster features an anthropomorphic metal sculpture adorned with daggers and chains at its center. Set against a backdrop of camouflage netting and a neon lightning bolt, hands appear to be reaching out of the ground, surrounding the sculpture. The installation is flanked by a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “hoodoo is a blade dat cuts both ways.” In Haitian Vodou as well as the Yoruba and Dahomeyan diaspora, the trickster represents an intermediary, standing at the (spiritual) crossroads between humans and gods. Usually male, Saar’s trickster appears to have female attributes. The figure guards the crossroads for the many hands reaching up from the ground.
Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight, ICA Miami.
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Interview -Beatriz Cortez and Candice Lin
CORTEZ: In your work there’s a certain irreverence towards the Western humanist concept of the human as sacred. It is one of the things about your work that blows my mind. It makes me think not in terms of hyper objects but micro-objects: about all the worlds that already live inside our bodies and about how our bodies will disperse, not only to become cosmic dust but also to become lots of microbes and nutrients for other bodies, and not only when we become compost but also as we move around, each of us a porous body secreting its liquids throughout the world.
LIN: That is really fascinating that you are thinking about “what is not meant for us” as a way to shift scale, to think of justice beyond the political human sphere. I usually associate such scalar arguments, such as the idea that the Earth will survive us but we will not survive what we’ve done to the Earth, as arguments for nonaction—apolitical inertia. But you seem to be activating this reframing as a way to care more, to be more invested, while aware that we are neither master nor subject of the narratives unfolding. This reminds me of something that seems like a contradiction but perhaps is not, that I have been thinking about in both of our work. I think we share a desire or openness to learn from the materials—how they resist us, what their will asserts, and how we might embrace things that rust, mold, or change as part of the work.
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[…] an indispensable, neat, and useful […] still point of the turning world
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miséricorde (larousse.fr) misericord (wordsense.eu) or mercy
nom féminin
(latin misericordia, de misereri, avoir pitié, et cor, cordis, cœur)
- 1. Pitié qui pousse à pardonner à un coupable, à un vaincu ; pardon accordé par pure bonté : Implorer miséricorde.
- 2. Sorte de console placée sous le siège relevable d’une stalle d’église et servant, quand ce siège est relevé, à s’appuyer tout en ayant l’air d’être debout. (Les menuisiers des xve et xvie s. les ont sculptées de mascarons ou de petites scènes d’une grande fantaisie.) Synonyme : patience
- 3. Disposition à venir en aide à celui qui est dans le besoin.
via wordnik – [Middle English, pity, from Old French, from Latin misericordia, from misericors, misericord-, merciful : miser?r?, to feel pity; see miserere + cor, cord-, heart; see kerd- in Indo-European roots.]
grace –
- That element or quality of form, manner, movement, carriage, deportment, language, etc., which renders it pleasing or agreeable; elegance or beauty of form, outline, manner, motion, or act; pleasing harmony or appropriateness; that quality in a thing or an act which charms or delights: as, to move with easy grace.
- Favor; good will; friendship; favorable disposition to another; favorable regard: as, to be in one? s good graces; to reign by the grace of God.
Carmen Herrera
Martin Kippenberger
Medium
Catalogue, lithograph printed
Dimensions
page (each): 9 7/16 × 6 9/16″ (24 × 16.7 cm); overall
(closed): 9 5/8 × 6 13/16 × 1/4″ (24.5 × 17.3 × 0.7 cm)
Publisher
Galerie Max Hetzler, Cologne
Medium
Catalogue, lithograph printed
Dimensions
page (each): 9 7/16 × 6 9/16″ (24 × 16.6 cm); overall
(closed): 9 7/16 × 6 7/8 × 3/16″ (24 × 17.4 × 0.4 cm)
Publisher
Galerie Peter Pakesch, Vienna
https://moma-prints.tumblr.com/tagged/martinkippenberger
Kippenberger’s key works, for me, are a series of assembled sculptures called “Peters,” which he produced in the late nineteen-eighties. In German, Peter means “guy,” and, when used as a suffix, may denote a role or an attribute (as we say “cable guy”). Kippenberger adopted it as shorthand for any stylistic tic by which artists identify or brand—and, thereby, caricature—themselves. (“Peter-ness” might be interpreted as “ness-ness.”) A dizzying mishmash of techniques and vaguely familiar styles—in wood and steel, furniture and mirrors, photographs and printed signs—the Peters express a spirit of swing-barrelled derision, hinting that every conceivable artistic attitude is inescapably vain and selfdefeating. For the most notorious of the pieces, Kippenberger built a coffee table, using an abstract painting by Richter, which he had bought, for the top. (The piece sold at what amounted to a steep discount.) Other Peters immortalize banana peels in cast resin, present an Aldo Rossi chair with holes drilled in it, and entitle a gawkily carpentered wooden enclosure “Playpen for Brochures.” Most of the subjects are unclear, but you may still feel their pain, as the artist gores them.
Taking a Toll, A Martin Kippenberger retrospective by Peter Schjeldahl, March 1, 2009, NewYorker.
Tate.
