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. It's a shame, it was a great show.

click on images to enlarge them

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. 

Gail Anderson design for Marian Wright Edelman

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." 

Alan Chan design for Mencius

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 Kugeler. Kugeler 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.  

  

August Vilella - a will-less will that guides his painting

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

One night, just a few years ago, August Vilella dropped a gob of paint onto a canvas and began pushing it around with his brush, watching as various characters began to emerge. Previously he had had no artistic training. He had studied philosophy and was composing and performing music with his punk rock band, working on an epic (unfinished) philosophical novel which stretches more than 1,000 pages. 

This was the beginning of Vilella’s painting process, as he comes to the canvas with no preconceived concepts or drawings, and simply begins creating. His works resound with viewers as he is often among the most popular artists at fairs, sells widely and is now one of the hottest artists out of Spain, having won prestigious awards at international art fairs.

By just starting with paint on a canvas and going with the flow, he is removing his overt, conscious will from the painting process. He is not what I like to call a “symbol hunter”, looking for different images which, in conjunction with each other, create a visual allegory. This symbol hunting was mocked and impugned anyway through the work of folks like Rauschenberg and Rauch. 

Vilella dives into a bowl of Jungian primordial soup meeting the chance operations of Duchamp and Cage. Chance operations was always about setting our flawed wills and desires aside and opening ourselves to new possibilities which we, ourselves, would never have been able to create. A religious person would say we are opening ourselves to Providence, others might say we are opening ourselves to our own deep, subconscious minds. This is what Vilella also believes.

Vilella, through his process, opens himself to discover what he may be truly experiencing, what he may be in denial about, what is really lurking down there. Interestingly, his work is figurative. You would think he would be throwing gobs of paint at a canvas while screaming or dripping stuff while completely inebriated to get to his deep-seated stuff. 

No, we do not look at the brushstrokes or drip patterns to determine what his inner state of being might be. The inner state he reflects is in the form of figures against backgrounds using a fine, varnished painting technique that hearkens back to Velazquez and El Greco.

The backgrounds are now developed through the traditional technique of “veladuras” in which the artist uses many fine layers of paint to achieve what Jose Ignacio Ruiz Caparros (President of the Spanish National Art Association) described to me as “…magic gradings that create an incredibly dark atmosphere.” 

The figures which appear on the canvas as manifestations of Vilella’s will-less process are often dominated by huge eyes but ethereal or disintegrating bodies. Indeed, wide-open eyes can mean lots of things – wonder, curiosity, intense fear, shock… the ambiguity of open eyes allows us to, basically, impute our emotions to the figures. The eyes engage us to try to understand how imaginary figures might be feeling through our own introspection and by our identification with otherworldly characters.

Yet, when we think of which creatures evolution accorded big eyes to, we can think of owls or birds, in general, or insects; yet Vilella’s eyes do not seem to be compound eyes, they are more like owl eyes. Are these predatory, nocturnal figures where evolution diminished other body parts to strengthen the capacity to perceive and hunt? No, these figures do not have the accompanying claws which come with big eyes. 

Well, it could be these are creatures with the capacity to identify but not to hunt. It seems to me that these are often passive creatures who see but do not always take action. They are born hunters lacking the tools to hunt. Indeed, their eyes are bigger than their stomachs in that their bodies are often smoke-like or cracking while the eyes are substantial and real. I think what makes these works appeal to so many people is the vulnerability or helplessness of the figures with big eyes but no claws and disintegrating bodies. Perhaps we all feel like this much of the time.

These are creatures blessed with huge eyes who seem to realize that eyes are not enough. They may be praying for an inner process, or an outer divine or political process, which can hunt for them based on what they see. They seem to realize that one must surrender to something higher and look inward. 

Indeed, the eyes in these paintings are like giant planets waiting to engage in a supernova implosion, where one’s entire orientation, given to one through nature, is found faulty, and one begins the long and arduous search inward. Vilella’s will-less process reveals the need for us to become will-less in our own quests to develop further.

Do you like thoughtful, pro-social, positive writing? Read Daniel Gauss' essays at The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

Wanna buy Daniel Gauss a cup of coffee? https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielgaus6