A Cosmopolitan Synthesis of Form: Jack Whitten at the Met Breuer

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My review of the Jack Whitten exhibition at the Met Breuer is up on Burnaway Magazine:

As is recounted in the epic Homeric poem, it took the Greek hero Odysseus ten wandering years to return home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. The exhibition “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017,” on view at the Met Breuer in New York through December 2, similarly presents the artist’s life as a personal voyage and widely cosmopolitan journey. Born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama, (famously known as the home of self-taught artists including Thornton Dial, Ronald Lockett, and Lonnie Holley), Whitten became a civil rights activist as a young Black man growing up in the segregated South. Until his death at the beginning of this year, he lived in New York City and regularly spent time in Greece. “Odyssey” brings together forty of Whitten’s sculptures—which have never been assembled in such a large number and presented publicly—deftly merging associations with African American history, African sculpture, and Greek mythology. Whitten is known as New York-based artist who brought politics and history into conversation with abstract painting, but here it is his deeply personal wood carving practice that enriches how we can see his better-known paintings.

Keep reading here, and make sure you go see Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017 before it closes this Sunday, December 2.

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Phone Tag: Interview with Olivia Koh

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Olivia Koh, His heart was stuffed with dead wings (‘Suicide’, After Lorca, Jack Spicer), 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

I speak with Melbourne-based artist Olivia Koh in this Phone Tag interview. Olivia takes poetry and historical colonial texts as a jumping off point for a reconsideration of their context, biases, and contemporary relevance, often using video as a medium. We discuss her recent projects as well as the alternative exhibition space she organizes and the economy of living as an artist in Melbourne, Australia.

 

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

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Linnea West: How do you know [former Phone Tag participant] Athena Thebus?

Olivia Koh: I met Athena through a friend in Melbourne. I think she’s a very generous person. She lent me her drone… I saw one of her works at a festival here. Maybe we’ll get to this in a minute, but I host a video website, which is an online database to host videos online called recess. We asked Athena to contribute to that next year. I’m looking forward—I know she does texts and installations and performances, but she makes videos as well.

LW: When you say you host, is that like being a curator?

OK: I’m not sure about the title for myself. Organizer? Because I’m basically an artist, so I don’t have that curatorial training. I work with two other artists from Melbourne, Kate Meakin and Nina Gilbert, and we facilitate putting works online that are film works or video works. I don’t know if you’ve spoken to people in Melbourne, but there’s a particular economy here around exhibiting. It can be expensive and quite competitive.

LW: So, the site is an alternative exhibition space?

OK: Yes, exactly. More simply, it’s an alternative exhibition space that’s accessible through the internet. We get writers or artists to both collaborate with the artist and to produce a text that sits alongside the video. If artists want to, they can leave their work on the site and then people can still access it after the exhibition.

It has been going for two years, so it’s just starting. There’s a lot to navigate. We’re trying to get some money for it, because now it is reliant on artists working for free, on us working for free. We’d love to change that, but at the same time, I think it’s good to make something of what you have.

LW: Totally. Is the format because of a particular interest in video or because of the economy of it?

OK: A bit of both for myself. Nina, Kate and I, we studied photography at the same art school, the VCA in Melbourne, at different times. We do have an interest in photography, and we’re bringing works with an interest in that medium, or thinking about how to navigate that in the contemporary moment…

How do you navigate having a video in a gallery? There weren’t many diverse approaches to doing that in galleries in Melbourne. Also, people are working so much, and they have works but they don’t always show them as a final product, so it was making space to show those. It sounds altruistic, but it’s been really great to see them—that’s a privilege as well.

Olivia Koh, Episodes, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: To back up a little bit, why did you need to borrow a drone from Athena?

OK: [laughs] I saw one of Athena’s works, Deep Water Dream Girl, and there was this amazing footage that she took in the Philippines. It was a video following her family and a certain island where they live. I was watching the video, and I thought I really would love to capture certain shots by air. I also went to the Philippines, and I’ve made a sculpture that I’ve been putting in the sea. I’ve been trying to film it by drone. That’s what I’ve been using it for, not that effectively…but practicing. 

LW: If you have to describe your practice in a couple of sentences, what do you say you make?

OK: I rewrite texts, found texts, and I collage them or sort of…go through what is there, whether it’s using video, or making text pieces as images or as sculptures. For example, I’ve looked at anthropological texts from the 1900s that were written about people in the Philippines, and I’ve looked at some that are about people in Australia at that time. In the past, they have definitely been social, like describing burial practices and mourning practices. There was a focus on a dead body or a body that can’t move or speak for itself.

Olivia Koh, Episodes, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: What are you working on now?

OK: I’ve been looking at poetry and looking at translated poems in the works of a California poet, Jack Spicer. He translated [Frederico] García Lorca, the Spanish poet. I had the idea to get some of those lines translated by a Filipina artist, Dennese Victoria. I’m using this text in a video called Episodes. I did a residency in Manila in 2017 and I’m producing a work from my time there. I’m trying to relate my experience as a tourist to certain texts about colonial “hygiene bureaucrats” that came to Manila from America in the early 1900s. In a text about colonial pathologies, a doctor and academic named Warwick Anderson talks about tropical neurasthenia—medical conditions that are basically nervous breakdowns, from colonizing guilt and the change felt traveling in a foreign environment. When I was in the Philippines, I was complaining so much about the weather, and I was really overwhelmed. I was also trying to study this particular history and thinking: “Oh no, have I got this?”

[laughter]

I’m trying to make the correlation between footage I’ve shot there and to the different layers of history written about the country.

LW: Who has influenced your practice?

OK: Locally, I’ve been influenced by a few friends who are great artists. One’s Rosie Isaac, who writes and makes performances. Lauren Burrow, who is an artist—a sculptor. I’ve been influenced by them in a day-to-day way. Also, being exposed to the processes of their work has been a really practical way of learning.

I read a lot. I like poetry. Other texts influence my work more than art… art isn’t my primary go-to. I’ve also been reading this book by Patty Chang called The Wandering Lake. It accumulates parts of an exhibition and a research trip to a migrating body of water in China. It’s about her searching to make the work, but also about having her own body in that landscape. I really loved that.

LW: Her work is narrative, and you’re working with text, which are already narrative. Do you think about that in your work? Are you trying to deconstruct the narrative, or are you trying to create a new thread?

OK: Sometimes I’m trying to create a new narrative, and sometimes to sit the narrative on top of an existing work, re-addressing preexisting texts from another perspective. Inserting myself into the narrative is a way of making myself responsible for what I’m making, as well, which I feel uncomfortable with—but it’s good to put myself in there. I’m trying to put myself more in there, to become more visible in my work. At the moment I’m trying to make a slightly more narrative video, with me as a “germologist”—a kind of 1900s hygiene bureaucrat—having a delirious experience and then going into a dream state, with texts and images and memory converging.

Olivia Koh, Ginebra San Miguel, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: Is this one of your first forays into performance?

OK: Yeah. Usually, I’m quite removed from it. I use my body to film, and I use a lot of handheld shots. I think that’s what makes my work less objective or removed than traditional films, like the body—my body—is in the film. It’s not professional cinema; it’s more haphazard. But I haven’t really been in front of the camera. I’ve just been behind it.

LW: That’s a big shift.

OK: Yeah, I’ll probably go back behind it. I like the way that performance can be—this is probably the wrong word—but integrated into an artwork in different mediums, like a performative sculpture, that kind of thing.

LW: When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

OK: I find that hard, actually. After I finished studying and I graduated as an artist, I started calling myself an artist. I really think it’s not about study though. Ideally, it’s about identification. Like, if you want to call yourself an artist, you’re an artist. Here it’s difficult to have it as a career—as in other places, I’m sure. Because a lot of people aren’t going to make a living off being an artist, it’s about having that dedication if you want to make work instead of doing other things.

LW: Is it important for an artist to be in a big city? Whether that is in Melbourne or a city like New York, or wherever. Or, is it better to be in a small place where maybe life’s a little easier, rent’s a little cheaper, and there can be more of a focus on making?

OK: I’ve only been here practicing a few years, so I haven’t had a diverse experience… I’m really not sure what it’s like in New York. I think it depends on whereabouts you are, what your relationship is with a city, if a focus of yours is exhibiting, or whether it is to be present for shows and stuff that happen in the city, or what you community is. It’s all about how you talk with other artists.

LW: Do you have a good community in Melbourne?

OK: Yeah, there are lots of talented people that I can talk to.

I would also like to experience art communities elsewhere. When I went to Manila, I really enjoyed meeting different groups of artists and filmmakers. They really supported each other in the way that they worked on each other’s projects. I thought that was really cool. They really knew each other’s work through making it, producing it. Also, they were there for each other to talk about the work or to see the work.

Olivia Koh, The blue tongue of the coastline (Ode for Walt Whitman, After Lorca, Jack Spicer), 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: What does an ideal day look like in the studio?

OK: I don’t think I’m particularly productive as a studio artist, so I’m probably not the best person to answer that.

LW: If not in the studio, an ideal day working?

OK: It’s when thoughts accumulate over a period of time. When I have those days when things are starting to make sense. That’s ideal. There’s so much time spent that is so frustrating, when I feel like I’m working but nothing is happening and the choices I make aren’t developing.

LW: The nature of your projects seem like they would take a long time.

OK: Yeah, relatively. This video work has taken me a year, but it grew from work over the past three or four years. I’ve framed the video in different ways and then have been making different versions. I’m very piecemeal with making works. It’s hard to really finish a work.

LW: How do you know when it’s done?

OK: I’d say, “Never.” I like to think of works as iterations. That’s the best way for myself. With all the work, because they’re not really serial pieces, they really change with the context…where it’s shown, when it’s shown.

LW: Those were all my questions. Thank you so much.

OK: Thanks, it was really nice to talk with you.

Tableau of Human Existence: Marguerite Humeau at New Museum

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Installation view of “Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal” at New Museum, September 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Now on view at New Museum are ten amorphous sculptures that recall both the Venus of Willendorf and Brancusi, highlighted on ledges and shelves built into the irregularly shaped exhibition space. Raking light and the contorted space direct the viewer into the immersive environment of Birth Canal, the first museum presentation in the U.S. of work by French artist Marguerite Humeau. What is not seen but which carefully envelops the viewing experience is a custom scent called Birth Canal (Venus body odour), The scent of the birth of humankind (2018) and a ten-channel sound installation titled The Venuses envision the extinction of their offspring, humankind (2018). The titles themselves frame an epic story about birth and death rooted in both anthropology and fiction.

Installation view of “Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal” at New Museum, September 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

If the individual female body is the physical site of generation, here Humeau posits the female writ large as the primogeniture of mankind. There is no male presence. To be human, here, is to be female. The exhibition spins a tale about how humankind developed, an imaginative invocation of a scientific theory that early humans ate animal brains for their psychoactive effects. Humeau based her work on anthropological research from around the time that early humans were making venus figurines, like the famous Venus of Willendorf statue, whose function is debated. One possible function of ancient Venus figurines—or these more cerebellum-shaped, glossy sculptures by Humeau—is to guide the experience a person has in an altered state.

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The titles of the sculptures likewise guide the imagination of the viewer. Venus of Hohle Fels, A 70-year-old female human has ingested a sloth’s brain in brown alabaster, Two-Headed Venus, A 25-year-old pregnant female human and herself as a 90-year-old have ingested as tortoise’s brain in bronze, Venus of Kotenski, A 35-year-old female human has ingested a marmoset’s brain in pink alabaster (all 2018) specify individual narratives behind each form, although nothing as literal as a sloth or marmoset is represented. While we are told the statues are different female forms, they look only vaguely anthropomorphic: metaphors for the human rather than representations of the human. The descriptive titles of the venuses recall the displays of an ethnographic museum, as if these sculptures were actually ritual objects that had survived thousands of years. Yet the digitally rendered quality of the sculptures, with their gorgeous high-polish, machine-made curves, are strikingly of out sync with what was technically possible for early humans. The theatrical environment with its black walls and spotlights, and the sound and scent that work affectively on the viewer, also dispel the impression of a scientific history.

Installation view of “Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal” at New Museum, September 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Like a synthetic Greek chorus, the voices of the sound installation wail about the extinction of their offspring. While the voices speak of death, a scent like a new-born baby diffused throughout the space invokes birth. They help to elevate the tableau to a metaphor or parable: the voices foretell a possible extinction of humankind itself, even while the scent drives home viscerally the lived experience in all its first sweetness. And, I would argue, the way time works in Birth Canal forces us to see Humeau’s work as a metaphorical tableau that speaks beyond specific histories, real or imagined. The dark environment where the Venuses float as if in a void enables the metaphorical tale to creep over your sight, smell, and hearing as your body melts into the darkness. It creates space for a kind of disembodied consciousness, perhaps exactly what is needed  for the viewer to feel akin to early humans, who might have been in an altered state in a cave with similar figurines. Stepping outside time is essential. Humeau cites an ancient ancestor and the scope of humankind’s existence, conjuring up a huge sweep of geologic time in the mind of the viewer. Yet the vision itself is distinctly futuristic. The sculptures are too glossy. The haunting, almost screeching artificial wails approximate the human but do not bear the trace of actual human voices. Outside of the teleological existence of humankind (that, as a member of the species we exist within), the viewer smells the beginning and hears the end all at once, past and future combined.

The undifferentiated sweep of time and the disembodied environment creates a porous and evocative space for a set of ideas about the human and the animal, time and existence, magic and science. In that sense, Birth Canal invokes the kind of the totemic guidance that venus figurines may once have held.

“Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal” is on view at the New Museum through January 6, 2019.