Monday, March 18, 2024

He is merciful...Mohammed Ehsai (Iran - 2007)... seen at The Islamic Arts Museum in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia


{{{click on the image to enlarge it - I apologize for the less than professional image - I took it with my phone}}}
 

The piece is called "He is merciful." Yes, God forgives, but can we ever forgive ourselves?

If we look back on experiences we had and the harmful things we did to others which are truly painful for us to remember, and perhaps if we view this as a stage we left and cannot go back to, we can join God in forgiving ourselves. Then there would be nothing left for us but joy. 

So I think the key to forgiving ourselves is to look at a painful memory and to say, basically, "Thank God I moved away from acting like that. Thank God I can't do that anymore." This can lead to a sense of calmness and can help to remove the sense of lingering regret we might feel. 

What about forgiving others who have hurt us? This seems to be one of the most difficult of goals. Lots of folks talk about the importance of forgiveness, and they claim to have forgiven, but I am not so sure I can believe them.

Maybe we should think about what "forgiveness" would be. It would not involve reclassifying what happened to us as having been a good thing. Like all of us, I have experienced real malice and cruelty in my life - that has to remain acknowledged as malice and cruelty.

So forgiveness would seem to be a two-step process. First it would be the realization that something cruel or malicious was done, but we would be able to avoid feeling the normal responses to that. We would rise above the need for retribution. We would be able to say, "Yes, that person was cruel. That person wanted to hurt me. That person went out of his/her way to hurt me. But I control my emotional states and I do not have to return feelings of malice for feelings of malice. I can let these negatives emotions go. I have to let these feelings go - they are wrong."

I guess the same would apply to the person who hurt us. We have to remember the lousy things we have done and realize how flawed all of us are or can be. Again, it is simply a matter of recognizing the negative emotion we feel and letting it go. We don't have to replace it with anything, we just have to realize that we have the capacity to rise above retributive emotions.

If you look at Ehsai's amazing painting above, we see that some of his text seems to be reaching higher and some seems to be probing lower. The text looks like a congestion with branches growing above and roots growing below. This image can represent the process of God reaching down for us and us reaching up to meet God. Or it can represent the growth process of putting down roots into the earth, into our ancient, biological lives and raising to meet a higher principle.


Thursday, March 14, 2024

Public Sculpture in Kuala Lumpur - A Flower Launching a Flower Bomb?

 

click on photos to enlarge them

I am in Kuala Lumpur right now, and right outside of KL's City Hall is this public sculpture.

Of course, it shows one flower which has already bloomed and another bud about to open above it.

But it also kind of looks like a flower launching a bomb, doesn't it?

So I am hoping an artist sees this photo of this public sculpture and is inspired to tweak it a bit to have a flower guiding a literal sculpture of a bomb over itself.


Why? There's real political symbolism here. A flower guiding a bomb toward a destination could mean, for example, that the most violent countries tend to portray themselves as the guardians of peace.

I mean, the USA had a president who won the Nobel Peace Prize but then bombed 7 different foreign countries. 

I hope someone can tweak this work of art soon - it will be iconic.


Feel free to read my essays at The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

 

Friday, March 1, 2024

Moon Beom - Human Touch as the Basis of Creating Art

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After watching Native American medicine men demonstrate sand painting at MoMA, Jackson Pollock felt that his movement over a canvas, while dripping paint, could help to express complicated aspects of his inner reality much more effectively than the semi-abstract symbolism he had been playing with. Action art became a more direct form of mark-making on canvas than searching for visual images and setting them in relation to each other to approximate some inner process or conflict.

Action art is all about immediate and universally recognized mark-making from the inner to outer worlds, and the extent to which we can go back to the marks, later, and recognize them. It is also about how the residue of our lives and actions might influence others as they encounter it. What the limits are in recording expressions, and what the limits are in communicating them, become the big issues in action art. The ultimate goal of this type of art, then, would seem to be to find “perfect” action art that allows one to come back to it later and understand fully what was experienced (for self-reflection and analysis) and to use the markings to affect and transform other lives as the meaning will be clear to viewers.


Moon Beom is the most creative, accessible and humane process or action artist whose work I have seen. He eschews any mediating tool between himself and the canvas, choosing to use his bare hands. He will first cover the canvas with one hue of acrylic paint in either a “hot” or “cold” color, then smear an oil stick onto the canvas. He uses his hands, like a masseuse, to rub into the smears left by the oil sticks, creating tenebrous, leafy or tissue-like designs. Kim Foster once referred to the designs as “lettuce-like” and they are clearly vegetative but also with pillar-like or smoke-like elements. Sometimes the “stems” seem to be like rays of light penetrating through clouds. Sometimes the “leaves” seem parched and hanging in space.


These leafy structures are what we engage after Moon’s action or process and Moon seems to be playing with the concept of touch as in touching or reaching or affecting the viewer. It is as if, as a conscientious artist, wishing to use his art to reach and heal and elevate others, he decided to just literally use touch in his art. After all, Michelangelo once said: “To touch can be to give light.” Giving or getting a hug literally reduces your blood pressure. Even a handshake helps reduce stress. Touch eases pain, assists in sleep, reduces irritability, fights depression, lowers stress and heals illnesses, among many other beneficial effects. So Moon is using one of the most humane tools possible in his art – his own capacity to touch.


The choice of colors and relationships between colors in Moon’s work seems deliberate as well. Chromotherapy was a form of healing in ancient Chinese culture. Red, a hot color, was believed to increase blood circulation, while blue and green were seen as soothing anodynes. I think Moon is privy to this and deliberately is using these colors as healing agents, kind of the way Kusama believes her polka dots can heal. So the big question becomes, what are we to make of the leafy structures? Moon uses human touch on his canvas, produces these leafy structures and this is what we engage at the gallery. What does this mean for us? How can we be affected by this?

The best answer would be for you to go plant yourself (ha, ha, pun intended) in front of some of these works at Kim Foster Gallery and get what he gives you. Or, take a look at the images here and see how they make you feel. What is unusual in Moon’s process art is that his “residue” is not abstract like Pollock’s, it is semi-representational but it does not represent anything that truly exists. It is like a Platonic form of leafiness. It evokes a belief in us that we are seeing leafy structures that came about through the compassion and humanity inherent in human touch. We see and feel leafiness, growth, abundance, fullness.


My belief is that most abstraction actually engenders a type of anxiety whether it wants to or not, even if the piece is completed in reassuring and soothing colors. Most people seem to dislike abstract art and will admit that they cannot understand it. I have had educated friends tell me that they do not want to go to MoMA because they do not even want to look at abstract paintings, because those works make them feel as if they cannot get something important. In these works Moon shows his kindness and humanity as well, for he does not leave us with squiggles or indecipherable markings. His process art leaves us with something we can visually grasp, something, perhaps, like a medicinal herb or something mysteriously nourishing.





Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Andrea Lilienthal - Small Disturbances (Dorian Gray Dresses)

{{{click on images to enlarge them}}}

Entering Andrea Lilienthal’s Small Disturbances at Carter Burden, the viewer is immediately engaged in a stunning manner due to the extreme conflict between the message being conveyed and the means being used to convey it. 

Lilienthal, with the help of dressmaker Nina Klimov, takes New York Times photos of people and nature under duress and, using a 1947 Singer sewing machine, creates children’s dresses out of them. Except for a spray meant to gently fortify the paper and stabilize the images, the dresses are completely newspaper and thread.

The means of expression becomes a cute, endearing, innocent evocation of childhood forced to carry the message of a world dominated by discord, deceit and destruction. This flawed relationship between means and message creates a powerful visual statement. By presenting this extreme contrast we become more fully aware of the message the dress imparts as well as the message imparted by the photos. 


The discord between them adds a further dimension. The dresses are based on designs from the 1950s, a time many Americans feel were the halcyon days of the American empire. People tend to remember the Eisenhower era nostalgically, as we seemingly went through eight years of peace, economic prosperity and moved toward greater civil rights for all races. Environmental disasters, terror attacks, endless wars and a hopelessly disunited country could not have been imagined at the time.

We are not just affected by the juxtaposition of innocence and grief, making both more piquant to us, but we arrive in a better situation to assess the level of manipulation to which we can be subjected by both means and message. 


For example, do these visual images engage us toward meaningful action or do they merely lead to a type of learned helplessness, where we feel that the world is spinning out of control and there is little we can do within our own spheres? Newspapers are in the business of soliciting emotions from us ranging from outrage to empathy and this is done for profit or an ulterior political agenda.

Herein lies the strange beauty of the dresses, as we are drawn toward both the innocence of childhood in a perceived golden age and the feeling of false potency engendered by an awareness of the world’s strife. There is a strange beauty to the dresses which is hard to fathom. 


The images do create amazingly colorful patterns but one realizes that the never-ending social and international conflicts and natural disasters are producing this never-ending series of patterns for the dresses. The visual images of extreme distress, in all their blazing glory, become an endless source of attractive patterns.

The dresses are, of course, frozen in a period of time and thus possess a sense of permanence. We have the permanence of the dresses mixed with the transience of the images, which are normally consumed on one day and forgotten by the next. By combining the image and the dress we get an attempt to both make the dresses seem more fleeting and the images more permanent. 


We get layers of impermanence becoming the permanent as, ironically, the only thing really permanent is our memories, however flawed they might be. This mirrors how news events become a part of our own personal timelines and our personal timelines have become darker as history seems to be moving in a negative direction, closer and closer to social and environmental collapse.

Yet, we might be forced to ask whether these dresses, or the children who might have worn these dresses, bore the seeds of the tumult we now experience. After all, the last four presidents were members of the baby-boomer generation, as the world has dovetailed into greater and greater chaos. Three of the four grew up in the 50s (Obama was a sonic-boomer, born in the early 60s), when these dresses were popular. Was it the children of these halcyon days who bear responsibility for the current mess of the world? 


Also, what about the fact that this artist only creates dresses? The girls of the 1950s became the activists of the 1970s. They rebelled against the passivity and purity represented by the dresses created for them. Yet, the images may be testament to the fact that they were not able to execute a complete influence over the course of history and must now look on what was wrought despite their best efforts and intentions. The dresses were an attempt to mold an entire gender and this failed, but the world also now seems to be failing.

One of the board members of Carter Burden told me that Lilienthal got this idea by thinking of the lovely dresses she wore as a child while realizing, in retrospect, that there were horrors occurring around the world that she, as a child, could not possibly have imagined or understood. This led to combining the horrors of today with the dresses of her now lost innocence. 


Perhaps the dresses are an invitation to view children differently and how they are educated or introduced to the more problematic aspects of the world. Are we shielding our children too much? The images compel interest, sympathy and disgust at the same time that the wearer would be unable to grasp, perhaps, what is really happening.

It is as if the dresses had been left in a museum and instead of becoming moldy they became filled with these images. These are Dorian Gray dresses. They have ostensibly maintained their youth and innocence but bear the markings of the sins of the world.


Do you like thoughtful writing? Please check out Daniel Gauss' essays on The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

Text and Design for Humane Change - Chicago Design Museum: Great Ideas of Humanity

This is an old review that I discovered I had never posted anywhere because I did not like the image selections and edits by the platform that was going to post this, and I retracted the article. This was supposed to be published in 2018. ---> I no longer have the images for the show, only 4 images remain. Sorry about that, this was a great show.


The advertising industry helped to completely overhaul American values in the 1950s. Following the lead of Dr. Ernest Dicker, founder of the Institute for Motivational Research, ad guys worked hard to dismantle the traditional American values of restraint and thrift

As David Halberstam pointed out in his amazing book The Fifties, Dicker advised that Americans would buy luxury goods if they felt they truly deserved to indulge themselves after sacrifice and hard work, and/or if the ad guys could tap into the irrational and subconscious sexual needs mentioned in Freudian psychology. 

This strategy of cajoling and seducing Americans into buying things provided the Scylla and Charybdis that crushed frugality, allowing rabid self-absorption and consumerism to thrive to this day. 

Chad Kouri design for a Cornel West quote (close-up)

At the same time that this was happening, however, the Container Corporation of America was pursuing its own advertising revolution. Walter Paepcke, CEO of the CCA, and his wife Elizabeth Nitze Paepcke, a designer, had begun experimenting in the 1930s with ads using the talents of contemporary artists. 

These ads avoided direct references to their product (cardboard boxes) and highlighted meaningful, pro-social and often patriotic ideas instead. Mention of the company was peripherally made in the ad, but the CCA appeared mainly as a sponsor of the concept portrayed. 

Bart Crosby design of a quote by Augustine

This evolved in 1950 into one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever: The Great Ideas of Western Man. Mortimer Adler, of the Great Books of Western Civilization series, originally supplied the ideas and Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus-trained designer, commissioned artists and created designs himself to visually supplement the quotes. The name of the Container Corporation of America was discreetly presented with each image and message. For 25 years these ads ran in America's foremost magazines approximately once a month, generating museum shows and requests from schools for portfolios. The CCA became one of the most famous companies in the country. 

Max Temkin design of Brecht quote

Bauhaus, of course, was a design movement that dovetailed nicely with the principles of western liberalism. It glorified technology ignoring the Marxist concern for issues of alienation and exploitation. Rummaging through some of the CCA ads, the overarching principles of liberalism jump out at one – individualism, economic freedom, democracy, the belief in progress etc. Often the artists incorporated images of the great "men" (e.g. Hamilton, Franklin, Lincoln, Einstein), from whom the quotes were taken, into the design. The ads were clearly meant to instill a sense of pride and universalism in regard to the American system by collecting as many famous quotes from as many famous white men as possible and making them look visually attractive. 

Pouya Ahmadi's design for Rumi

The implication was that the greatest ideas of western "man" all seemed to point to the USA as the greatest and most sparkling achievement in human history, just as the USA started to reveal the extent of its institutionalized racism while barreling into a meaningless and criminal war against Buddhist farmers in Asia (which it would lose badly).  

The lesson learned was that the best ad is often an ad that does not look like an ad because it purports to serve a public good. This has been picked up and carried through various socially committed ad campaigns since. It has been a lucrative method of self-promotion. 

The Chicago Design Museum critically revisits the CCA campaign by inviting contemporary Chicago artists and designers to illustrate a new batch of quotes. We, thus, get an idea of what a great ideas collaboration of text and visual art can look like when artists are freed from the relationship with a corporate sponsor predisposed to spread ideological hegemony far and wide. 

So we see more racial, ethnic and gender diversity here in the quotes and designs in this show. Indeed, the quotes chosen often reference the theme of struggle against oppression, the need for humane and pacifistic methods in this struggle, as well as a desire for real and sincere justice and equality - instead of touting the values of one gender, one race and one economic class.
  
When an old white guy is used, he turns out to be a cool old white guy, like Augustine, who wrote "Love all men (and women), even your enemies, love them not because they are your brothers (and sisters) but so that they may become your brothers (and sisters). Thus you will forever burn with fraternal love, both for him (or her) who is already your brother (or sister) and for your enemy that he may by loving become your brother (or sister)." (Yes, sorry, I felt compelled to throw the "women" "her" and "sister/s" in there.) 

The design by Bart Crosby uses a strong, hot, exciting and engaging red to reflect the passion of unconditional, merciful and transforming love, with contrasting white text with variations of the words "love", "enemy" and "brother" in bold letters uniting these concepts.  

I especially liked several of the quotes and designs. For instance, Chad Kouri's brightly patterned rippling and expanding design for Cornel West's "We have to be militants for kindness subversives for sweetness radicals for tenderness." 

Cushing's design reveals a sardonic and ironic Sojourner Truth quote turned upside down: "If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women all together ought to be able to turn it back right side up again."  Max Temkin presents a quote from Bertold Brecht in what seem to be white magnetic letters: "On my wall hangs a Japanese carving, the mask of an evil demon decorated with gold lacquer. Sympathetically I observe the swollen veins of the forehead, indicating what a strain it is to be evil."  

Pouya Ahmadi presents Rumi's quote: "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." by scattering the letters for "bewilderment" so that, at first, we get a disorienting sense of what an antipode to cleverness might be as the word "bewilderment" finally, slowly reveals itself. 

Alan Chan presents Mencius' famous quote "To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads, such is the behavior of the multitude." with a complex geometrical pattern as if one can finally see the complexity of one's social organization, its pressures for conformity, as a strange and beautiful but bizarre external structure. 

Finally, the Chicago Design Museum worked with Chicago Public School kids and encouraged them to come up with their own great quotes. My favorite from this bunch was by 7th grader Alondra D. T. with a brilliant design by Hal KugelerKugeler takes Alondra's quote "I will protect and defend you no matter what." and encases the word "you" within a pillar or fortress-like "I" in the foreground of a storm, representing the strength of selfless love and concern expressed by this young Chicago woman.