identityresearch

[identityresearch]

At midnight on April 29, 1963, the movie screen at New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema lit up with visions of men and women in makeup and dresses; draped white fabric and a tall vase filled with feathery blooms; and disjointed shots of lips, eyes, tangled limbs, and genitalia. These images were a part of Flaming Creatures, an experimental film by Jack Smith, which premiered that night. The police were called, and they seized the film. Soon after, it was banned in 22 U.S. states and four countries. Eventually, it came to the attention of Congress and the Supreme Court, as a part of a censorshipbattle then being fought in America. Detractors and champions took their sides. And Smith, the pioneering performance artist, actor, filmmaker, and photographer who was largely unknown outside of New York’s underground art scene, suddenly became famous.

Smith’s unconventional approach to his films was inspired by the melodrama and excessive glamour of Hollywood and B-movies, and by such flamboyant forms of performance as burlesque. In Flaming Creatures, as in all of his works, there is no fixed narrative, the sets and special effects are low-tech and homemade, and non-professional actors populate the cast. Shot from above or from odd angles at close range, Flaming Creatures is composed of loosely connected vignettes full of humor, eroticism, and violence. We see men applying lipstick to their puckering mouths, the set appear to crumble in an earthquake, and a vampire in a blond wig suck the blood of an unconscious victim. Shots of bared body parts and fluttering eyes punctuate these scenes, set to a soundtrack of vintage music. Because of such scenes, and Smith’s DIY, freeform approach to making Flaming Creatures, the film went against the norms of both society and filmmaking—ultimately setting a radical new example that inspired other artists and filmmakers. Adding to its significance is the fact that it foregrounded the fluidity of gender, sexuality, and identity and celebrated their free expression, at a time when they were seen in more rigid terms.

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/jack-smith-flaming-creatures-1962-1963

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Lorna Simpson is an American artist, born in 1960, who lives and works in New York.

She uses photography, video and collage to explore identity – which means what makes us who we are – using her own experiences as a black woman to inspire her work.

She is most well known for her powerful artworks that combine photographs with words. In these works she questions and challenges narrow and conventional ideas about women, culture and race.

Because she uses photography to explore ideas rather than just taking photos of things she sees around her, she is sometimes described as a conceptual photographer.

Lorna Simpson was one of a group of artists who became well known in the 1980s for exploring themes and ideas relating to identity politics in their work. Identity politics focuses on the lives and experience of those who are often marginalised in society such as black people, women and gay people. (Marginalised means pushed to the side, forgotten about, or not treated as important). Identity politics aims to make others aware of the issues and unfairness that these marginalised people have to face.

She started off taking photographs of things she saw around her – but soon realised that she wanted more directly to explore the ideas and issues that she felt strongly about. So she began to take carefully posed photographs in her studio. By putting words alongside the photographs she could express even more powerfully what she felt.

http://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/who-is/who-lorna-simpson

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Not an artist to shy away from controversy; Laurie Simmons probes into the darker aspects of Internet culture and the control it exerts over modern society. Holding a mirror to our obsession with self-perception and identity, Simmons asks: is our desire for perfection worth the sacrifice?

In the artist’s recent body of work "How We See", Simmons draws upon the online “Doll Girl” culture, a community of people who alter themselves to look like Barbie, baby dolls, and Japanese anime characters through make-up, dress, and even cosmetic surgery.

Photographed against acidic bubble-gum backdrops; a succession of lacklustre, doll faced models pose awkwardly, as if being snapped for their annual college yearbook. But the image has a disturbing element – the model’s faces are drained of human emotion and eerily painted eyes complete with false lashes are overlaid upon their delicate eyelids. Simmons is a surrealist at heart, and this provocative series is no exception.

By photographing these young models and trans-women together, Simmon highlights the problems of self-worth and identity that govern our fragile society. In a world over-saturated by imagery and peppered with unrealistic expectations, we continually edit every facet of our own image. “How We See” is a troubling reminder of our self-delusion and painful awareness of self, as facilitated by social media. Simmons reflects on society’s quest for perfection, asking what happens when filters and cropping aren’t enough. What sacrifice will be made in order to acquire that next unobtainable standard?

https://www.kidsofdada.com/blogs/magazine/18205253-laurie-simmons-how-we-see

[identityresearch]

Shahzia Sikander is an American-Pakistani artist whose eclectic work merges contemporary issues of Middle Eastern identity with art-historical references. Fusing traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting with Minimalist abstraction, her work establishes an aesthetic bridge between two cultures. “The purpose is to point out, and not necessarily define,” the artist said of her work. “I find this attitude a useful way to navigate the complex and often deeply rooted cultural and sociopolitical stances that envelop us 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, she studied at the National College of Arts Lahore before receiving her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Working in the media of performance art, sculpture, video projection, and digital animation, the artist has received significant critical acclaim and international attention for her work. Sikander currently lives and works in New York, NY. Her works can be found in The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

http://www.artnet.com/artists/shahzia-sikander/

[identityresearch]

Richard Prince’s New Portraits have proven to be nothing short of sensational. The artist’s controversial series has seen him take other people’s Instagram posts, print them on six-foot canvases and sell them for up to $90,000. The only changes made to these images of everyone from Pamela Anderson to total unknowns are the bewildering or lewd remarks Prince adds to the comments thread. As of last Friday, ten of these new works are on show at Gagosian London. “The iPhone became my studio,” Prince says somewhere in the seven-page stream of consciousness that makes up the press release.

For the last 40 years the New York artist has inspired everything from acclaim to outrage for the unapologetic appropriation that has defined much of his work. As the man who reprinted copies of JD Salinger’s classic teenage anthem Catcher in the Rye with his own name in place of the author’s, Prince has found himself on the wrong side of copyright lawsuits multiple times. Resulting opinions of him tend to violently swing between genius and good-for-nothing. In the case of the New Portraits series, Peter Schjeldahl writing for the New Yorker’s response to the screenshot-cum-paintings was “something like a wish to be dead,” whilst sex writer Karley Sciortino has said she felt honoured to be included in the series.

In an unexpected but fitting turn, people seemed to feel slightly vindicated when some of Prince’s unauthorised Instagram reproductions were recently reproduced and resold by some of their original subjects, namely the LA-based group of alternative pin-up girls and burlesque dancers operating under the moniker SuicideGirls. “Payback!” headlines screamed, but this ceaseless loop of feedback and mirroring perfectly plays to Prince’s raison d’être. Even this is not the artist’s own, and in his ideas about enshrining banality and popular culture he is most definitely walking in Warhol’s slightly worn-out silver shoes.

Mining the internet for source material is not new either, but as abhorrent as they may be, Prince’s portraits eloquently teach a powerful lesson in the trappings of social networking. They test public and private limits and have started an important and much-needed conversation about copyright and art in the digital age. They have also been sharp reminders that our self-exposure and digital exhibitionism doesn’t exist in the vacuums of our various feeds, but very much enters into public territory.

The most absurd part in all of this postmodernist pageantry however, happened during my exchange with Gagosian’s PR when I asked for press images and was told, “I’m afraid that we don’t have permission to use any images of any individual works.” Irony is a beautiful, twisted thing.

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/richard-prince-new-portraits

[identityresearch]

William Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries. Referring to himself as the ‘Friendliest Black Artist in America’, Pope.L has belly-crawled the streets of New York, consumed pages of the Wall Street Journal, and chained himself to the doors of a Chase Manhattan bank using link sausage and dressed only in a skirt made of dollar bills. Pope.L’s work, over the last 30 years, spans a variety of mediums from performances such as these, to installation, video, mixed media and drawing, all constantly confront the viewer- forcing us to think critically and offering a comment on culture, poverty, race and consumption.

On view at Kenny Schachter / ROVE is a wide range of work including drawing, mixed-media, video and performance documentation from the late 1990’s to present. In a series of hand-drawn, text-based works called ‘skin-set drawings’ Pope.L confronts identity politics in a striking and humorous way: “Red people are bonnets,” “Black people are beside the point,” and “Green people are inferior”. These works, full of tension, metaphor, and contradiction, confront our innermost racist fears and prejudices.

http://www.roveprojects.com/wp3-index.html

[identityresearch]

Piper explores identity through her artwork by investigating race and gender. People often include traits like race and gender when describing their identity. These traits play a role in who we are as people and in society. Piper questions the viewer about how she, as a black and white woman in America, is treated in society. People often confuse her for just a white woman, and do not realize she is also black. Piper is both white and black, however she is neither white or black alone because she cannot identify as one over the other. She has multiple identities which ultimately leads to her investigation of identity through her artwork. Piper makes a stand against racism and sexism, attempting to help the general public become less biased by engaging with her works (Berger, 1998).

Why does she explore Identity?

Piper explores identity because it has personal meaning to her.  Throughout her life she has noticed that people have treated her very differently depending upon what they perceived her race and sex to be.  An example of this can be seen in her performance pieces “My Calling Card.” Piper was often mistaken as only a white woman and people do not recognize she is also black. She observed people making racist comments because they did not perceive her as black. These issues directly and indirectly influence her and how she fits into society, what “groups” she is put in. She wants to make a statement about her identity in hopes to change how people view different groups of people. If people change how they view others, this world would be a much more positive place to live (Bowles, 2011).

https://adrianpiper.weebly.com/piper-and-identity.html

[identityresearch]

In 1979, after working in The Museum of Modern Art’s curatorial ranks for 12 years, artist Howardena Pindell was in a car accident that left her with partial memory loss. Eight months later, during what she describes as “one of the hottest summers in New York,”1 she set up a video camera in her apartment, focused it on herself, and made Free, White and 21, a deadpan account of the racism she experienced coming of age as a black woman in America. She developed the work out of her need to heal and to vent: “My work in the studio after the accident helped me to reconstruct missing fragments from the past….In the tape I was bristling at the women’s movement as well as the art world and some of the usual offensive encounters that were heaped on top of the racism of my profession.”2

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Pindell grew up when the South was still lawfully segregated and racism was rampant nationwide. She was 21 when the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. In Free, White and 21, she illustrates the stark divide between black and white Americans by appearing as both herself and as a white woman. The video opens with a glancing shot of the artist in whiteface and wearing a blond wig, in the guise of a white woman from the 1950s or 60s. This character is the free, white, 21-year-old to which its title refers, who appears throughout the video, discounting Pindell’s searing experiences with statements like, “you really must be paranoid,” and “you won’t exist until we validate you.”3

When she comes onscreen as herself, Pindell first recounts the abusive racism that her mother endured, and then talks viewers through the milestones of her own life—including elementary and high school, college, and young adulthood—via the discrimination that made her advancement such a struggle. At one point, she peels a translucent film off of her face, as if to reference the facial masks and other cosmetic products marketed to women to beautify and transform their looks. But this film has not changed the artist’s looks, and especially not the color of her skin. Instead, it serves to re-emphasize the fact that they were transformed by a white-dominated American society—into a liability.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/119105

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Ono's fundamental contribution to the formation of Conceptual Art was involving the audience into the completion of the work. It is designed so that anyone can make it - a crucial dimension of its meaning.Ono was one of the strongest feminist voices to emerge from the art world in the 60s. Her Cut Piece (1964), a first for feminist art performance, invited audience members to take turns cutting off her clothes using a pair of scissors. It also brought the audience into close contact with the artist, which was a new concept and crossed traditional boundaries.A path-breaking force in eliminating boundaries among the arts, in the early 1960s, Ono opened her home to dancers, composers, and artists and encouraged them to work together. The building of interdisciplinary community is another great area of achievement in her career, and a fundamental aspect of her practice.A pioneer in music as well as art, Ono was trained as a classical pianist. She was also steeped in Japanese Imperial music (Gagaku). Her familiarity with both traditions captivated experimental Western musicians La Monte Young and John Cage (Cage's 4'33''is essentially a translation of the famous Zen koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"). She in turn was influenced by them.Experiences, events, and performances form the backbone of her artistic practice. In this respect she is the quintessential conceptual artist. Her work is designed to redirect our attention to ideas, instead of appearances.Though her name has been unfairly associated with a woman who negatively affects a man's professional performance (Beatles fans often blame her for their breakup), Ono helped John become much more conceptual. She assisted him in moving away from the mainstream that the Beatles had previously inhabited, and encouraged him to develop an independent voice as a composer and musician.

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-ono-yoko.htm

[identityresearch]

The MCA featured the black and brown pantyhose of her long-running R.S.V.P. series, which was stretched, contorted, and knotted into abstract echoes of everything from hair and genitalia to masks and musical notation. At the Redline Gallery, there were videos, artifacts and photo documentations of performance works dating from the 1970s, with her improvised ritual dances under Los Angeles freeways,to her more recent conceptual investigations into the visual, musical and dance patterns of everyday labor. And these two surveys didn’t even touch the photography, poetry and painting she does under the pseudonyms Lily B. Moor, Harriet Chin, and Propecia Lee to investigate the boundaries of race and identity.

Soon after her son was born in 1974, Nengudi began to work with panty hose as a material. For her, it reflected the elasticity of the human body. She stretched the pantyhose in various lines across walls and to the floors, and then invited a collaborator — usually Maren Hassinger — to “activate”, or dance with the pieces. The results are spectacular:  conjuring bondage, weaving, lynching, sex, birth, and jazz, the works point to — yet always resist — direct reference, while clearly defining their sculptural relationships to the female body. Even as standing pieces, the R.S.V.P. installations seem to bear the traces of movement both sensual and constrained. The clear awareness of Eva Hesse, who died in 1970, only adds to the sense that Nengudi takes great pleasure in visual conversation.

https://hyperallergic.com/146981/the-improvised-body-the-reemergence-of-senga-nengudi/

[identityresearch]

The great challenge for artists is to find images that go beyond their personal circumstances to express something humanity can identify with. That something is usually one of five essential experiences: birth, death, love, sex, and beauty. When you encounter Mariko Mori’s otherworldly being (especially her penetratingly beautiful reflective eyes) in Link of the Moon (1996), you see all these aspects at once. The video installation utilizes DVD on five screens and shows a kata, (a form, meditative movement, or pattern — especially used in study of martial arts), performed by Mori’s sci-fi persona inside an airport. She handles a small capsule resembling a crystal ball, and her movements resemble those seen in butoh or mime. The capsule is like a seed, symbolizing transformation and transport. Curious travelers notice Mori, but have no time to stop. They pass her by, and are reflected in the capsule as minute, colorful distortions. Her kata is meditative, seductive, and haunting, like a strange dream that holds you spellbound, one you wish to never wake up from because it’s more beautiful than anything you’ve experienced in your waking state.

Mariko Mori broke into the international art scene with her large-scale self-portrait photography in the mid-1990s. Not limiting herself within this medium she adopted multi-media techniques and has since created a mélange of installations, video, and performance that incorporate high-fashion, sci-fi pop, traditional Japanese rituals, Shinto Onmyodo spirituality, and music. Her themes are eclectic, embracing the fantasies of post-everything Japan and its extreme experimentation while recontextualizing traditional customs, mannerisms, and trends. You can’t point to a single style in Mori’s work, but you can find one common quality, the key to understanding her art and belief system, which is not Buddhist or Shinto, but rather based on technology. Here are five key statements by Mori:

1) “Technology insists on defining what is absent, the unknown center hidden within us.” 2) “Art and technology seek the new or the imminent future; they share the same anxieties and conditions, and aspire to resolve the essential problems of humanity.” 3) “The development of technology seems linked with the desire to make human utopias possible.” “Technology is the unending search for both an eternal loss and an eternal present.”4) 5) “Visualization by means of technology—as in computer graphics and virtual reality systems—helps me to concretize a space in which it might become possible, through a visual and auditory experience, to look inside oneself: deeper consciousness.”

Technology is Mori’s art, subject matter, and in a sense, her religion. Inspired by the concept that all things in the universe are interconnected, Mori effortlessly fuses technology with artistic expression. In Nirvana (1996-97), for example, when Mori transforms into a flying divinity she draws inspiration from Buddhist iconography, but she is not recreating the classic symbol — rather she is presenting a divinity of the future.

A former model and fashion designer before her art career, Mori also attended art school in London, where she asked instructors why there were no sewing machines in the sculpture department. She began designing costumes and incorporated advertising and media techniques in her art. After she graduated, Mori’s kitsch-like photos instantly caught the eye of the art world, through her fabrication of a series of outrageous and provocative personas. “The clothes represent the skin, the shell of an individual,” she says of her costumes. “They are an expression of my identity and ideas.”

Mori has transformed herself into a chic cyborg, artificial mermaid, and salient goddess, among other creations, and has placed herself in archetypical Tokyo settings such as the red-light district in Kabukicho, an Akihabara software store, Shibuya station, a love hotel, and subway train. These settings reflect a future in the present now, and what better place to emphasize this than Tokyo, the sant, or metropolis, of cutting edge technology and design, Earth’s most futuristic city to date?

Mori’s portraits are engaging not because of their slick, pseudo-contemporary presentation, or her experiments in persona transformations, but rather because of her ability to illuminate the illusory character of cultural perspectives and perverse desires. Japan is not her audience, rather Japan is her subject; she meditates on Japan in the context of a global audience, exposing foreigners’ perceptions of Japan, as well as Japan’s perceptions of itself.

One of Mori’s early self-portraits, Birth of a Star (1995), depicts a teen rocker with spiky violet hair, dressed in pop music fashion. It’s a silly, colorful work that surprises with sexual undertones. The power of Birth of a Star is the way the viewer is both put off and seduced by Mori’s ambiguousness. Moreover, it is a self-proclaimed prediction of her own success, as if somehow Mori knew she would be an art star. It resembles, in its simplicity, portraits throughout history: Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1489) and Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Jug (c. 1655). Like those classic portraits, Birth of a Star encapsulates a specific time and place, and 200 years from now will exemplify what it was like to be in 1995 Tokyo.

Also sexually covert and ambiguous is my favorite Mori portrait, Play with Me (1994). Mori presents herself as a manga heroine with blue-velvet hair, wearing a dominatrix space suit. She waits outside a konbini (convenience store), next to a manga video game. Prices are tagged on every object from store goods to sale items and one feels there is a price tag on her, too. Three Japanese men, caught photographically as a blur, enter the konbini and pay no attention to her. Waiting for a man to approach her, Mori’s heroine is momentarily distracted and looks to the sky as if gazing at a star. There is hope and innocence in her eyes and a mystical tension in her expression. The title of this self-portrait does not refer to the video game. When the cuteness of the photo wears off and the title wears on, one realizes that Mori’s manga persona is a commodity, a cute and seductive soapland prostitute recontextualized into a sci-fi sex fantasy. The power of this portrait is similar to Birth of a Star as it shifts from cute innocence to perverse sexuality.

There has been a long-term identity crisis concerning Japanese women’s role in contemporary society. Should they behave in traditional manner, or be modern Issey Miyake women, or both? Mori’s Tea Ceremony (1994) explores this theme, casting herself as a Japanese office worker serving tea on the street to a male office worker. There are two unusual qualities about this portrait. Firstly, she serves tea outside on the street, not inside an office. Secondly, she wears a typical office uniform, but with the addition of a silver head-piece with pointy ears, giving her the appearance of an alien.

The incongruity of the contemporary office worker’s alien uniform and her behaving traditionally is subtle, but successfully expresses the dilemma she faces. Two salarymen walk by, one frowning, one smiling, but neither looking at her. Mori pays no attention to them either, but rather offers tea to someone approaching her, still outside the photograph. This is significant. The office girl (the contemporary Japanese woman) is a kind of alien and Mori, in situating the office event on the street, is commenting on the dislocation of tradition.

Mori’s later works have moved away from sant, from all earthly places, and fuse collage with computer generated graphics to create otherworldly, myth-like spaces. A recurring motif in these later works is the capsule, an updated technological symbol of metamorphosis. It is presented in various media: video, photographs, and installation. Mori’s physical relationship to the capsule keeps changing; either she is placed inside it, holds it in her palm as if it is a futuristic crystal ball, or the capsule exists on its own terms. The capsule was first used in one of Mori’s portraits, In the Beginning of the End (1994), where her persona was transformed into a hybrid alien-human living in a capsule at Shibuya Station in Tokyo. Mori uses the capsule to comment on Japan’s culture of hyper-hygienic aesthetics, but also its role of being fully present and partly responsible for the transformations in world space and world culture. The capsule is an alternate space to exist in and serves as protection, but also a way to breathe, dream, live, and in the end perhaps to hatch and transform.

The only work where Mori is separated from the capsule is Enlightenment Capsule (1998), an installation work consisting of a glass capsule made from fiber-optic cables. It is a prime example of how technology is a metaphysical, if not religious, medium for Mori. The capsule inside the gallery or museum is connected to a sensor placed on the roof and utilizes chromatic deviations that separate ultraviolet and infrared rays from sunlight, generating a synthetic lotus blossom. Mori is interested in light’s physical, spiritual, and metaphysical properties, and here she achieves a combination of the spiritual and scientific, uniting both visible and invisible forces.

Mori’s capsule is a preservation vehicle against time’s natural decay. It contains and prolongs, like a transformative seed. It is Mori’s refutation of the jisei, the farewell poem to life, which expresses the beauty and mystery of death. Her capsule does not celebrate death, it aids in distancing death. But for Mori, like the Buddhist. This doesn’t mean death is absent from Mori’s thoughts, rather, her concept of death, like Buddhist philosophy, is not of an end to life; the illusions of life and death are created by the ego. Mori muses:

Death is already present at the time of birth and even if one does not think about it, one is always more or less conscious of one’s own death in the future. I feel strongly that, both in the Orient and the Occident, the origin and the terminus of expression is death. What is very interesting to me is the idea that everything has its own consciousness. I have my consciousness and can recognize it, and I can also recognize the consciousness of others. If all the creatures in the existing world have consciousness, then the Earth should have it, and the solar system and all the planets, galaxies, the whole universe, and every single atom should have it. All of these things that seem to lack order are in fact ordered; and all things are united in some way.

Like the brush-drawn Buddhist enso circle symbolizing eternal recurrence, death continues the transformation of being. Mori replaces the enso figure with the capsule, a new symbol that updates death, time, and the aesthetic sensibilities of our technological age.

In her early twenties Mori had a life-changing experience; she couldn’t wake from a deep sleep and thought she was dead. The experience lasted six hours:

It was as if my consciousness had begun the program leading to death. I lost my sight and my hearing, I had a strange sensation of streams, and then I began to recall, in a short time, my entire life backward until the moment of my birth, or even before my birth. Then, suddenly I found myself in complete darkness. It took me a long time to regain consciousness. I passed through this stage and experienced the whole process of coming back. This process starts from a state of nothingness, a state without memory. The first thing I remembered was that I was a living thing, a life. A long time passed before I finally remembered I was a human being. Then I remembered I was on Earth. I recalled a mother and a child; and in the same way that I had returned to my origin, I came back to the present and remembered what had happened to me. In my consciousness I felt as if I were reincarnated, as if I had become a different being. Ever since, I have wondered and asked myself what that experience was, and now I look at death from the other side.

An experience like that makes a deeper impression then any artwork. Mori never forgot it. She recently stated, “I am always wondering why I am here and thinking that I will die because I am living.” The experience occurred before Mori’s art success, so one can assume that it influenced her work. Mori’s art, technological visions of immortality, death, and utopia, reflects this experience and indulges in these realms as a natural human impulse. Mori’s art is a reflection of human desire for utopia achieved by technology.

Dream Temple (1998) is Mori’s cynosure, her utopian manifestation as art object and most sophisticated work to date. Dream Temple was inspired by the Horyuji Yomedono (translated as “Dream Temple”) in the ancient prefecture of Nara located south of Kyoto. The Yumedono dates from around 739 AD and is one of the earliest meditation spaces in Japan. Prince Shotoku used the shrine to meditate and study Buddhist scriptures and had extraordinary Onmyodo-like dream visions resulting in the creation of the spiritually-charged statue Guze Kannon, which was placed inside the temple’s core and is the principal object of worship. It is the same height as Prince Shotoku and symbolizes his body and soul. The word “guze” comes from the Saddharmapundarika sutra and means “saving people from suffering.” Legend has it that Prince Shotoku was visited in his dreams by a boddhisattva who taught him difficult sutras. “I felt a strong link between the Horyuji Yomedono and what I wanted to do artistically,” Mori explains. “When I saw the temple in person I was struck by its incredible beauty and by the statue of the Guze Kannon, which has a spiritual strength beyond its physical form. After this experience I was driven to create my Dream Temple project.”

Visiting the Dream Temple is a unique experience. I had this opportunity when I attended Mori’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT) in Kiba, Tokyo. Anyone can see the Dream Temple from the outside, but to enter it you have to make a reservation when you pay at the museum entrance. The Dream Temple was sensibly placed near the end of the exhibition, followed only by Miracle (2001), a series of abstract digital paintings on glass. Prior to arriving at the Dream Temple I walked through the Garden of Purification, a large installation with crystal Zen gardens, footpaths, and a large-scale still taken from the video Kumano(1998). Conceptually purified, I was ready to enter the temple. Before I did so, however, I had to confirm my reservation. I was asked to take off my shoes and put on a clean pair of white stockings four sizes too small for my feet. They seemed like something an alien might wear, with a grid-like pattern on the soles to prevent slipping — cool, even if they were too small. I then waited on a bench with five other people.

I had no idea what I was supposed to do, or what I was going to experience. I had seen photos of the Dream Temple, but never realized you could actually enter it, or more significantly, enter it alone. Finally, when it was my turn, the attendant helped me up the steps to the core of the temple. She opened its central doors. Inside was a pure white space like the inside of a shell, a place of peacefulness and purity. I was told to enter, sit on the white mattress, and put on a pair of headphones that lay on the floor. She said she would return in five minutes, and closed the doors. Soothing ambient music began and I watched a series of abstract images flicker across a wide screen.

Dream Temple expresses themes of energy, meditation, and technology, but is limited in the ways that most art is, being less like an actual temple and more like a synthetic art object. We witness Dream Temple, step inside it, meditate in it, experience it, but then forget it, because the experience doesn’t feel as much like a spiritual activity as it does like going to see a movie. One reason for this is that we don’t go there daily to meditate in it. We pay 2,000 yen, and experience it as a spectator. Unfortunately, this limitation hinders most of Mori’s art. Her remarkable visions of technology don’t change our existence in the same way that a spiritual experience can. Oddly though, I must confess that I desire to experience a temple like Mori’s because, although verging on kitsch, it cultivates technology, beauty, good design, and a pleasing aesthetic…

In both traditional and contemporary terms, Japanese art seems mostly flat and two-dimensional; it has always lacked fundamental linear perspective. This notion reflects the most profound difference between Western and Eastern thought, culture, and religion. Mori ponders:

What is the difference between the vanishing point in European perspective and the Oriental concept of the void or emptiness? The unpainted space in Japanese traditional art is not meant as a void, but sometimes represents the infinite symbolic or mental sphere. The difference is an approach to death too, in a vision of life and death, that has resulted in extremely different expressions.

Japanese artistic expression attempts to find passage from real space to virtual space. An example of this is the difference between Buddha images depicted in paintings and as sculptures. The Buddha statue primarily represents “becoming,” whereas the Buddha painting captures “what is” while remaining considerably stagnant and confined. The Buddha statue is more alive, but still has limitations. “This state of becoming cannot be completely expressed in a form,” muses Shinichi Nakazawa, author of Thirty Thousand Years of Teaching on Death. “The attempt to grasp this state when it appears, like bubbles from the void, is at the core of Japanese art as well as Japanese thought.” Mori’s art in this context strives for passages and searches to “become.”

Mariko Mori’s portraits, videos, performances and installations form a unique expression by a contemporary Japanese woman successfully uniting art, fashion, technology, and spirituality. Mori questions the conditions of her homeland and the way the world attempts to understand it. Her art transcends common notions, and, like the various perspectives of a prism lens, reveals different views of the identity of contemporary Japanese women, the cultural landscape of Japan’s place in the world, and Japan’s role as a technological culture. She offers a new aesthetic of beauty and peace, capturing the beautiful, positive possibilities of technology and depicting our dreams and desires as possibilities to come.

What is problematic with Mori’s art, specifically her self-portraits, is that it comes across as the indulgence of a pretentious, hip, 21st century wannabe shaman. Mori’s spiritual sensibilities are visible in most of her work. She succeeds to some degree, but I leave her work feeling the same way one does after watching a nifty music video — momentarily engaged, visually inspired, but somehow spiritually depleted. Mori’s art offers us visual brilliance without significant, life-changing wisdom. Her gift is on the surface, the beauty of images. Mori is dreaming, and her dreams are beautiful, but I long to see her art go beyond this — to capture something more profound and humanly real.

https://kyotojournal.org/the-journal/culture-arts/synthetic-dreams-the-art-of-mariko-mori/

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Mendieta was a key figure in the Body art movement that emerged from the Performance art movement. Her sustained use of the body's simplified and often nude form to depict both presence and its opposite, absence is an essential component to her work whether denoting the human or the ethereal.Mendieta is recognized as an important contributor to Land art, a movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked, taking the possibilities of art outside gallery confines. She used the natural environment as a perpetual setting throughout her career, most memorably in her earth-works such as Siluetas, which were created in various natural locations with particular meaning to the artist and adorned with elements indigenous to the areas.Merging with the earth not only became a mark-making process for Mendieta, but also a metaphorical return to mother and ritualistic homage to a universally generic, feminine earth goddess. In the end, the land was perhaps her greatest collaborator, helping her express the body's place within the world and its relationship to nature.Mendieta is also oftentimes connected with the Feminist art movement for her work on the fluidity of gender and the manipulation of her own body parts to blur the line between male/female identification. But also, she often embraced her own feminine spirit and feminine mysticism in her work, unapologetically and with copious amounts of joy.The consistent use of blood and other organic material such as feathers, rocks, flowers, fire, and the earth reflect Mendieta's passion for religious ritual. She was especially inspired by the strain of Cuban Catholicism known as Santeria. Much of her artwork materialized as a sort of rite, orchestrated to articulate the perpetual cycles of life, death, womanhood, rebirth, and renewal.Because of her early displacement from family and home and the trauma that produced in her early life, Mendieta became a lifelong champion of the marginalized or minoritized whether by racism, sexism, or geography. Much of the passion that went into making her work was stoked by a desire to have everybody recognize those considered "other bodies" and to accept humanity as one throbbing whole rather than a world of disjointed individuals.Violence remains a mysterious ingredient in Mendieta's legacy. Themes of domestic violence, of turning a blind eye to violence, and forced participation in witnessing violence can all be found as a parallel strain to her more earth, feminine, nature-inspired pieces. Although never really answered, this preoccupation beats below the surface and has raised many questions over the years within fans, critics, and her own personal friends about whether or not Mendieta had personal experience of abuse especially, most poignantly, in regards to the way her life tragically ended.

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-mendieta-ana.htm

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The Runaways is a series of ten lithographs based on nineteenth-century advertisements published by slave owners to locate runaway slaves. Ligon asked friends to write descriptions of him as if they were reporting a missing person to the police. He then rendered the text in typography that mimicked the original ads and paired them with drawings from newspapers and anti-slavery pamphlets of the time. Ligon explained, “‘Runaways is broadly about how an individual’s identity is inextricable from the way one is positioned in the culture, from the ways people see you, from historical and political contexts.”1

Ligon was surprised to find that the descriptions his friends wrote were similar to those from the slave ads. Critics have also commented on how the texts read like accounts of criminal suspects, perhaps a critique of racial profiling by law enforcement. The texts from these two lithographs read:

RAN AWAY, Glenn, a black male, 5’8”, very short hair cut, nearly completely shaved, stocky build, 155–165 lbs., medium complexion (not “light skinned,” not “dark skinned,” slightly orange). Wearing faded blue jeans, short sleeve button-down 50’s style shirt, nice glasses (small, oval shaped), no socks. Very articulate, seemingly well educated, does not look at you straight in the eye when talking to you. He’s socially very adept, yet, paradoxically, he’s somewhat of a loner.

RAN AWAY, a man named Glenn, five feet eight inches high, medium-brown skin, black-framed semi-cat-eyed glasses, close-cropped hair. Grey shirt, watch on left hand. Black shorts, black socks and black shoes. Distinguished-looking.

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/glenn-ligon-untitled-from-the-runaways-1993

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At the end of his life, the celebrated painter, draftsman, and sculptor Wifredo Lam (Cuban, 1902–1982) was asked to reflect upon why he painted. “It’s a way—my way of communicating between human beings,” he stated. “Just one of the ways one can try to explain with full liberty. Some will do it with music, others with literature, I with painting.”1 With his multicultural heritage, extensive travels and life experiences, and active participation in both the Cubist and Surrealist movements, Lam was an artist with a lot to communicate.

In 1943, Wifredo Lam was in the midst of re-acquainting himself with his native Cuba, especially its population of African descent. “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the black spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks,” he once said. “I knew I was running the risk of not being understood. … But a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work even if it takes time.”2 The “true picture” of which he spoke is his monumental painting The Jungle (1943).

The figures seem to simultaneously emerge from and merge with a dense wall of vegetation composed of thick, banded stalks suggestive of the sugarcane that grew in the fields the slaves worked. The rightmost figure holds a pair of shears, a possible reference to harvesting, while the leftmost figure, with its horse-like features, could be seen to hint at one of the spirits in Afro-Cuban mysticism. Since Lam chose a color palette of blues and greens, with touches of yellow and white, this could be read as a moonlit night scene, or as taking place during the day, under the cover of the deep shade of the jungle.

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/wifredo-lam-the-jungle-1943

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Oozing avant-garde, post-industrial gravitas, Hauser & Wirth’s ultra-trendy Los Angeles Arts District location is currently housing Mike Kelley: Kandors 1999 – 2011, an exhaustive survey of internationally-renowned late sculpture and performance artist Mike Kelley’s rarely-seen Kandors. These miniature cityscapes encased in variously-colored glass bell jars offer a truly unique and poignant emotional viewing experience, revealing how it would feel to be a superhuman, omnipotent being gazing upon a civilization below. Exploring themes of memory, loneliness and desperation, Kelley’s titular Kandors are inspired by legendary comic book hero Superman’s home city of Kandor on the planet Krypton. 

https://www.riotmaterial.com/distortion-memory-identity-isolation/

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An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas' elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity is a unique and intriguing inquiry.

Jonas' investigation of subjectivity and objectivity is articulated through an idiosyncratic, personal vocabulary of ritualized gesture and self-examination. Often performing in masks, veils, or costumes, Jonas uses disguise and masquerade to study the personal and cultural semiotics of female gesture and symbols. The layering of mirrors and mirrored images is one of her most powerful metaphorical devices. Among Jonas' signature formal strategies are the manipulation of theatrical and video space, the use of drawing to add a rich density of texture and content, and objects that convey meaning as cultural icons, archetypes and symbols.

https://www.eai.org/artists/joan-jonas/biography

“In the late 50s and early 60s, there was no such thing as video or performance art. I went to art school in New York and I was dissatisfied with my work as a sculptor, but I was very lucky to know people who were using performance as art, like Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and the dancers who worked with them – Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs – as well as composers like Phil Glass. We were all friends at the time; it was a very small world, very different from the art world today. So I went to many of these happenings; I saw as much as possible. So the minute I saw this work, I thought this would be interesting for me because I wasn’t satisfied with object-making. I was drawn to this alternative form of artistic expression, although generally, I don’t call myself a performance artist. I think of myself as a visual artist who works between media. Performance is one of my basic structures, but it’s also very important to know its relationship to technology, video, and to ideas of perception.”

http://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/39388/1/enter-the-surreal-world-of-avant-garde-filmmaker-joan-jonas

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Gober's sculptures seem like ordinary objects at first glance, but they reveal their artifice upon closer scrutiny. Rather than hiding their handmade quality, these objects highlight the materials involved in the construction process. For some works, Gober identifies them only by their materials, showcasing media like wood, plaster, wax, hair, wire, clay, paint, and more. Surprisingly, Gober exposes both the means and the making of the art work, giving the viewer access to the unseen history of the work and the inevitable presence of the artist behind it, affirming a more complex process existing underneath a finished exterior.By choosing objects found in modern-day life as the subjects of his sculptures, Gober's works directly confront the influence of the "readymade" throughout recent art history. First made famous by Marcel Duchamp in the early-20th century, readymades extracted items from daily life and gave them new identities as art objects. This process made artists and viewers reconsider their own relationships with these items, as well as their understandings of what art was required to be. Gober's works, however, are not readymades in the truest sense, but recall the impact of the readymade on artistic freedom. Gober preserves a hand-crafted quality in his objects obscuring and negating their use as commodities while still maintaining their basic, original visual features. Gober's simultaneous recognition and rejection of the readymade's most prominent features pushed the limitations of Contemporary art, eliciting surprise and provocative thought.The presence and the absence of the human body is constant in many of Gober's works. From dollhouses to kitchen sinks, his objects often imply use by humans, even when people are not visually present. Gober inserts the viewers into the spaces created, leaving them empty and waiting to be filled by a real or imagined human presence. This experience is comfortable and familiar, and yet, it is also disconcerting, especially when the sculptures and installations invoke privacy and intimacy associated with the human body. As viewers intrude on these intensely and physically close moments, they are aware of their own complicity. This tension between comfort and discomfort is one of Gober's hallmark traits, forcing viewers to experience sensations and ideas in an art environment that carry impact beyond the gallery walls.Though Gober's sculptures present seemingly mundane and universally experienced objects, many of them hold personal, even autobiographical, meanings. Gober investigates such intimate topics as sexual identity, religion, and social taboos over many years and in many visual manners, finding surprising methods to include the individual, and here the artist, in the final products.

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-gober-robert.htm