Category Archives: contemporary art

do it: Taking the Global Local

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Let s Do It UGA doit_productshot

I’m excited to get the ball rolling on a few projects for Fall, one of which is an exhibition that art history PhD student Brooke Leeton and I will be curating at the Lamar Dodd School of Art entitled Let’s do it UGA. We recently created a website for the project at www.letsdoituga.wordpress.com.

do it is a curatorial project begun by Hans Ulrich Obrist based on a simple proposition: “Create an instruction that someone else can use to make an artwork.” (More about that on e-flux’s project website.) In “Let’s do it UGA,” graduate students select different sets of do it instructions that form the basis of works of art. Instruction-based art privileges themes of variation, copy and authenticity, and play and experimentation, resulting in a work of art unconcerned with ownership or style. Instead, what drives the exhibition is the act of interpretation.

Brooke and I have enjoyed preparing the framework for the exhibition, but most of all we are excited to see what it will look like when it opens October 17. Because the artists are working from different sets of instructions that changes how they normally work, rather than us selecting objects or artist’s who work we are familiar with, the end result is a surprise. The only performance we can predict is one we will do ourselves, on the opening night of the reception. Following Amalia Pica’s instructions Throw A Party (2012), Brooke and I will end our night sweeping confetti evenly against one wall.

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Guest Post, Taking Flight: A Conversation with Chantal Bruchez-Hall

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Mary McGrail, a writer based in New York City, contributed today’s post on painter Chantal Bruchez-Hall. Mary’s writing has appeared in Melic Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Portland Review, and Community College Moment, and she is co-editor of the anthology Too Darn Hot: Writing About Sex Since Kinsey (Persea). She works in communications at a nonprofit in New York City. Find her on Twitter at @therealmfm.

Chantal Bruchez Hall

Chantal Bruchez-Hall in her studio

Chantal Bruchez-Hall is an emerging Swiss-American artist whose work has been shown in alternatives spaces around New York City. Influenced by her years of practice as a psychologist, Chantal’s paintings explore “the internal pathways and emotional maps that lead us to the heart of darkness and back.” I spoke with her about how she came to identify as an artist, and her recent decision to give up psychotherapy in order to paint full-time. Talking with Chantal reminded me of a quote by Ray Bradbury: “You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

Early experiences For years I convinced myself that I was not an artist. I remember in elementary school, a teacher telling me I had absolutely no artistic talent whatsoever, after I drew a pot of flowers all in purple. As an adult, I was practical; when I had a child I went back to do my PhD. I felt unable to do art, so looked at it from the other side, with awe. It was my son who first told me, ‘Why don’t you take a drawing class?’ I said, ‘Oh Matthew you know I can’t draw.’ He wouldn’t let go and we took a class together at Cooper Union, for beginners. This was about fifteen years ago. I learned that I could draw, and that freed me. It was as if the sky had opened, and I wasn’t on the other side looking in anymore.

Process I wake up sometimes, thinking of paintings. It could be a shape, or a color. I go inside my head for a while, then back to sleep, and it comes back, dreamlike. I don’t turn the light on.

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Chantal Bruchez-Hall, Poles Melting, 2014

I often use mixed media: a broken corkscrew, a discarded piece of metal, a torn fabric. Giving trash a new life is my way of refusing to let the refuse swallow us. I loved oil, it’s so sensual, but now I like acrylic and it allows me to do a lot of work with different textures, and to build surfaces. It can be so messy and big, disgustingly thick, or light and transparent. There’s often a phase in the process where a painting becomes “pretty.” When that happens I know I have to destroy it. You want something powerful, it can be ugly, beautiful maybe, but not pretty. The paintings start having their own personality, and I can yell at them: get out of my sight! I stack them in a corner, face against the wall.

Taking risks There’s a wonderful work by Goya, of two old women looking at themselves in the mirror. Old, bejeweled witches. It’s very harsh, but Goya perceived something about women’s terror of aging, of not being visible anymore. Nothing has changed! [she laughs]

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Francisco de Goya, Les Vieilles, or Time and the Old Women, 1810-12

The culture in which we live wants to keep us scared, because when you are scared you can be controlled. But it’s never too late to say no to fear. What’s difficult is getting over the fear of not being good enough, and fear of change. When I am scared, I tell my son, ‘You take care of that.’ My son died more than ten years ago, and it’s not that I believe he is there like a ghost, or an angel or something like that. But I do think he is part of that vast energy field that some people call god, black holes, whatever. I don’t know what to call it. I think the creative process links us to that energy. It’s hard to create. But it’s pleasure too. It’s joy.

Chantal, Exit, 2013

Chantal Bruchez-Hall, Exit, 2013

 

Revisiting Imran Qureshi’s Roof Garden Commission: Miniature as Medium

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US-PAKISTAN-ART-MET-IMRAN QURESHI

If you are like me, you might not have realized how closely Imran Qureshi’s installation on this roof of the Met this summer is connected to the tradition of miniature painting in South Asia. Certainly the red splatters remind one more immediately of Jackson Pollock, as well as of bloodstains, even if the suggestion of violence felt somehow unreal when seen over the trees of Central Park. When I saw the Pakistani artist’s more traditionally realized miniature painting below, it clicked into place for me.

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Qureshi’s 2011 miniature on traditional wasli paper, Blessings on the Land of My Love, uses the same splattered motif as the roof garden, only organized around the drainage grate on an interior courtyard. Blessings Upon the Land of My Love was also a 2011 site-specific installation at the Sharjah Biennial 10 that used this red vegetal patterning to take on the architectural structure.  The miniature on paper suggests that Qureshi sees the same vision whether writ small or large, and that moving the miniature off the page and putting it in dialogue with architecture still retains some essence of the miniature. In fact, considering the installation in closer relation to miniature painting allows one to see both how Qureshi employed formal elements of his traditional miniature training, in the Pahari style foliage, and even to connect it with the Mughal practice of employing pictorial artists to decorate their palaces with large wall paintings in addition to illustrating books. In a sense, miniature painting is a medium that the artist works through, rather than resides in.

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