Michelle Kamhi
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Is Ai Weiwei an Artist?

February 11, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art / 2 Comments

This week the New School for Social Research will host a conference in New York City entitled “The Fear of Art.” The keynote address will be delivered (on video) by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident world renowned as a “contemporary artist” and “political activist.”

Ai’s reputation as a political dissident is undoubtedly well founded. It derives in large measure from his courageous activity in response to the horrific 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed thousands of his fellow Chinese, including countless schoolchildren. In support of parents who blamed the government’s shoddy construction methods for needless deaths in the province’s schools, Ai provided an online forum on his blog for the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project. Defying government stonewalling, it served to publicize the names of deceased students throughout Sichuan province whose identity had been uncovered by an unofficial group of researchers and volunteers. Ai’s high-profile activism is largely credited with pressuring the government to release accurate figures on the death toll, which it had attempted to downplay.

But is Ai Weiwei really an artist?

That question can best be answered by a clear-eyed consideration of the work he has described as the most emotionally meaningful to him—his Snake Bag installation.

Ai Weiwei - Snake Bag

Inspired by the Sichuan earthquake, it consists of 360 grey and black backpacks joined together to simulate a 15-meter-long snake. The piece vividly represents a snake. Yet it does not function as a traditional work of sculpture would—that is, by embodying its meaning in what is visually represented. It instead belongs to the spurious postmodernist genre of “conceptual art.”

As such, its meaning cannot be directly grasped or even guessed from the object itself. Who would think to connect a snake with the Sichuan (or any other) earthquake? When one looks closely, one can see that the snake is cleverly composed of backpacks. Yet even then, how would one guess that the backpacks were meant to refer to students killed in the earthquake? One wouldn’t. The piece’s meaning is conveyed by accompanying verbal accounts, not by the work itself.

Contrast that with undisputed political art of the past—works such as Francisco Goya’s Third of May  

Goya - Third of May

or Elizabeth Catlett’s And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones.

One might not recognize the specific historic event that inspired the Third of May, for example. Yet the image movingly conveys the brutal terror inflicted by a merciless firing squad. And like all true art, it therefore has significance far beyond one moment in history. So, too, Catlett’s stark image of a lynched black man, sprawled beneath the feet of his executioners, chillingly embodies the horror and inhumanity of such an event, regardless of the particular circumstances.

Why is the postmodernist genre of “conceptual art”—to which Ai Weiwei’s Snake Bag belongs—“spurious” in my view? Because it originated as one of many anti-art gestures in the 1960s, whose very inventor explicitly recognized it as something other than “art.” It is one of many ironies of today’s artworld that virtually the only “contemporary artists” who are taken seriously are those working in such anti-art genres!

 

Cy Twombly in Mr. Morgan’s House?

February 3, 2015 / Michelle Kamhi / Contemporary art / No Comments

Among other trends I deplore in Who Says That’s Art? is the postmodernist artworld’s growing incursion into institutions devoted to world-class private collections of the past. Such incursions—in clear violation of the founders’ tastes—are achieved by directors and curators bent at all costs on introducing “contemporary art” (a deceptive term encompassing only anti-traditional, “avant-garde” work). They could not do so without the complicity of trustees, however—some of whom collect such work. Still worse, financial support for exhibiting this work of dubious artistic value often comes from the dealers who trade in it.

Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil [more], which closed last week at the Morgan Library & Museum, is symptomatic of this lamentable trend. So much was wrong about it that I hardly know where to begin. I’m hard pressed to say which is worse, for example—the execrable work? or the inane curatorial glosses upon it?

The show’s featured work was Twombly’s “monumental” Treatise on the Veil—a 33-foot-wide expanse of gray house paint, relieved only by a strip of thin white lines. “Monumental” properly refers to more than mere size, however; it also connotes importance—significance. The significance of Cy Twombly (1928-2011) we’re told, is as “one of the most important artists to emerge in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.” What is his work noted for? Its “rich repertoire of marks, scrawls, scribbles, doodles, and scratches”—a contradiction in terms if ever there were one.

We gain a sense of that “rich repertoire” from the series of preparatory “drawings” that flanked Treatise on the Veil at the Morgan. These indeed offer “a fascinating window into the artist’s creative process.” One such “drawing” was glossed as follows:

[Twombly’s] folded strips, . . . smudges, and illegible scrawls create a rich and layered surface and reveal the artist’s pleasure in the process of making. Note, for instance, the use of different kinds of tape [used to fasten the folded strips].

I’m tempted to add: I’m not making this up—cliché though it may be.

The introductory wall text for the Twombly exhibition informed visitors that Treatise on the Veil was inspired by a “musical” piece entitled The Veil of Orpheus, by the French composer Pierre Henry. If you fail to discern the “increasingly lyrical feel” the Morgan curator imputed to Twombly’s work, never mind. You won’t hear it in Henry’s musique concrète either.

Finally, readers of Who Says That’s Art? should not be surprised to learn that partial funding for the Twombly exhibition was provided by none other than the Gagosian Gallery—Twombly’s dealer. Asked by the Gagosian’s director, Mark Francis, what prompted the exhibition, Morgan curator Isabelle Dervaux explained that it fits into the museum’s decade-long program of exhibiting the work of twentieth-century artists “for whom drawing was an important medium and who have made a particular contribution to its history.” (See the upcoming Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions.)

Twombly’s “marks, scrawls, scribbles, doodles, and scratches” may be Dervaux’s idea of drawing, but they were surely not Mr. Morgan’s. The trustees of the Morgan should hang their heads in shame at this latest travesty of his legacy.

– – – – –
Note: For an appreciative review that outdoes in inanity even the Morgan curator’s glosses, see “Cy Twombly’s Remarkable Treatise,” Hyperallergic, December 21, 2014.

In Memoriam: Lucylee Chiles (1941-2013)

December 23, 2014 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education / 4 Comments

Lucylee Chiles- headshotLast month I had the bittersweet experience of attending a small exhibition of botanical drawings and watercolors by my late friend Lucylee Chiles. The exhibition was held at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where Lucylee had earned her Ph.D.

Lucylee died exactly a year ago today, after a long and courageous battle against ovarian cancer. During the last two years of that battle, she had become happily immersed in the rigors of botanical art. It is a demanding discipline, combining scientifically accurate observation with artistic skill in depiction. She loved it. And her love of it showed in the meticulously rendered images I saw at T.C., some of which are reproduced below.

The eldest child of Major General John (Jack) Chiles—who served on Douglas MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo after World War II—Lucylee had developed a passion for art as a child in Japan. And in her adult years she taught art in exotic locales around the world, continuing the peripatetic life she’d become accustomed to as an army brat. She was among the last Americans evacuated from Iran after the Khomeini coup in 1979—one of several close calls she had in an adventurous life. In her final decade, she signed on with cruise ships to give watercolor lessons to novice passengers, traveling as far as Tasmania on one of her last voyages.

Botanical art was a late discovery for Lucylee. In a Christmas note she sent in 2011, she related that a small garden project she’d undertaken for her apartment building had led to her

working towards a certificate in botanical illustration at the NY Botanical Garden.  Having to go to the Garden regularly is a delight. Find I quite like drawing with a magnifying glass—the polar opposite of the fast and loose style I teach on the cruises.

What that note didn’t mention was that the treks from her apartment on Morningside Heights to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx were sandwiched in between bouts of chemotherapy, with their unpredictable toll on her energy and well-being.

But the art vitalized her. And she was eager to share her excitement over it. In the fall of 2012, she invited me to attend the 15th Annual International Exhibition of the American Society of Botanical Artists with her. When I responded enthusiastically to what we saw there, she was clearly pleased. And when I told her, on a visit to her in the hospital only a few days before she died, that a little exhibition of her own work might be planned at her alma mater, her face visibly brightened.

What better way to honor Lucylee, then, than to show to a wider public some of the lovely products of her forays into this very exacting art form. [CLICK ON THUMBNAILS TO ENLARGE]





[All the above works are Copyright © 2013 by The Estate of Lucylee Chiles and are published here with the permission of the estate. No other use is permitted without prior written authorization.]

“Art Education” Now

I must add a sadly ironic note here about what art education students at Teachers College are now learning. The contrast would surely not have been lost on Lucylee. She often deplored the lack of standards in today’s artworld. From time to time, she’d send me a news clipping that touted some dubious work—having annotated it with a few words of scathing critique.

TC - Hotel Chelsea - 1Evidence of the current drift in art education stood in the room just next to the one containing Lucylee’s botanicals. It was the arrangement of table and chairs pictured here.

Items on the cluttered tabletop included half-empty beer mugs, some playing cards, and ashtrays heaped with cigarette butts.
TC - Hotel Chelsea - 2

Moving closer, I thought “who on earth is smoking like that these days?” It then occurred to me that this was a student installation. As explained in the exhibition brochure, it was a “visual history project” commemorating the “celebrated artists” who once inhabited the Chelsea Hotel, and “their influence on art education history.”

Who were these celebrated “influences” in the eyes of aspiring K-12 art teachers? In particular, Andy Warhol (who once said he didn’t “love roses . . . or anything like that enough to want to sit down and paint them lovingly and patiently”), Jackson Pollock (of drip-painting fame), and the (occasionally pornographic) photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Such artists, the brochure claimed, “were concerned with critiquing the consumerist culture that they lived in.” Indeed? Some might say they were more concerned with drugs, sex, themselves, and (in the case of Warhol, at least) capitalizing on consumerist culture. In any case, I shudder to think that, to quote the brochure, “The study of their art provides contemporary students in art education with a broader horizon of possibilities.”

Saddest of all, it was clear from conversation at the show that neither the students nor their professor-mentor had any inkling that the “art” represented in and by that crude little installation (so typical of today’s “conceptual art”) is, in effect, a travesty of all that Lucylee had striven for as a teacher and in her own art.

Slings and Arrows (not the TV variety!)

December 11, 2014 / Michelle Kamhi / Book reviews / No Comments

As might be expected, my critics have begun to weigh in, the first being Professor Paul Duncum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his one-star “review” on the Amazon.com page for Who Says That’s Art? he dismisses my ideas as “grounded in Kantian aesthetics as reworked by right wing ideologue Ann Rand.”

Anyone who has bothered to read her writing on aesthetics (much less my work about it) knows that no one would be more stunned by the alleged Kantian connection than “Ann Rand” herself!

I don’t mind slings and arrows—I only wish that the level of scholarship were a bit higher, and that the names could at least be spelled right.

Professor Duncum is shocked that my definition of (fine) art excludes photography and “abstract” work—though he has never bothered to consider my reasons for doing so. In truth, as I note in Who Says That’s Art?, he is among the all-too-many these days who, while charged with the training future of art teachers, are more concerned with consumer goods, popular culture, and critiques of capitalism than with “art” of any kind.

Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts.

November 8, 2014 / Michelle Kamhi / News / 6 Comments

Greetings!

In this first blog post, I’m pleased to trumpet the release next week of the book I’ve been working on for more than a decade: Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts.

As emphasized in the press release announcing publication, the book throws down the gauntlet to the contemporary art establishment. I look forward to a lively debate regarding the challenge I’ve posed.

I will use this space to refine and expand upon the argument presented in Who Says That’s Art?, as well as to offer further observations on the world of art, past and present.

I invite readers to comment, pro or con, provided they do so civilly—under their real name, unless there’s a compelling reason not to do so.

I look forward to hearing from you!

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