Trump's Life without Art... Twit: a Show by Deborah Nehmad (January 2018, Wall Street International)

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When foreign folks in New York City ask me what the basic difference is between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the USA, I jokingly tell them that Republicans are evil while Democrats are corrupt. Why are Republicans evil? Well, their core principle is ‘survival of the fittest’ – which means those who inherit a lot of money survive and prosper while everyone else suffers and dies before their time. Everyone should take care of him/herself and whatever is good for business is good for America.

During the Great Depression a Republican president (Herbert Hoover) said that he was not going to help Americans who were hungry or out of work because government assistance makes 'the people' weak. Yes, there is nothing stronger than a guy who inherits millions of dollars, is profligately irresponsible, has no self-restraint, chickens out of military service while the less privileged go, employs a vocabulary that would embarrass a 4th grader, and manifests an overweening sense of malice toward anyone who does not look as if he belongs at an exclusive white country club. Which brings us to the current president of the United States: Donald J. Trump.

Deborah G. Nehmad has a show currently at Kim Foster Gallery in which she has collected and graphically represents numerous tweets from President Trump. Each tweet reflects what most of us who love art have aspired to overcome – human life at its most base, arbitrary and unexamined.

The tweets reveal Trump as someone with no capacity or desire for self-examination or self-control. This is a life without art and without the underlying impetus that drives many of us to art – to better understand ourselves and our world to ensure that we can rise above the random and arbitrary; to develop meaning and work toward humane change in ourselves, others and the world. The tweets show that the ideal of not returning evil for evil was abandoned by Trump long ago, as he was apparently taught as a child that there are only two types of people in this world: killers and losers (Norman Vincent Peale be damned). His tweets displayed by Nehmad are works of art about a life devoid of art and what one is left with in its absence. It is an installation about a “loser” who will not even try to observe, judge or change the worst in himself.

Trump simply cannot say 'no' to any urge or desire he feels, perhaps because Trump was a child of the Eisenhower Era, which was an era when consumerism and debt first began fully dominating the daily life of average Americans. This was a period of time when self-restraint and self-reflection were recognized as not being good for the economy and many Americans began abandoning the long-cherished values of thrift and moderation. You were not supposed to examine your emotions, motives, desires or thought processes, you were supposed to consume, live comfortably, get a gray flannel suit, buy a house, mow your lawn, get a lucrative job that conferred respect upon yourself (whether you actually did anything meaningful for others or not), pay your taxes, support your corporation.

It was this overall attitude that the beatniks, the hippies and the 60s youth movement rebelled against – yes, the 1960s, when Trump deftly avoided such political and personal awareness but tragically suffered from those bone spurs which prevented him from manifesting any macho heroics in the rice paddies of South East Asia. Unlike his more enlightened peers, Trump seems to have embraced the worst of the Eisenhower Era, forgetting, perhaps, that the Civil Rights Movement also took off during this time.

Sometimes his emotions lead him in one direction: “FoxNews totally biased and disgusting reporting!” and then the other: “FoxNews – totally gets it!” In these cases Nehmad has the contradictory Twitter birds attacking each other. The president of the USA is clearly not a person in control of his own life, but someone who drifts from one provocation to another. “Why isn’t the Senate Intel Committee looking into the fake news networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up – FAKE.” “The travel ban should be far larger, tougher and more specific, but that would not be politically correct!” “Bad people are very happy!” “When someone challenges you unfairly, fight back - be brutal, be tough – don’t take it. It is always important to win.”

He is incapable of understanding his own wrongs but seems capable of attacking and judging others for their faults and errors, not being able to wrap his brain around the concept of self-assessment, but still able to pontificate and give advice, often not realizing the irony involved. “I hate bullies!” “Perhaps Obama’s biggest shortcoming as president is his failure to unite the country.” “Be tough, be smart, be personable but don’t take things personally. That’s good business.” “Don’t give in to anger. It destroys your focus on goals and ruins your concentration.”

In the other part of the show Nehmad continues her focus on the effects of gun violence in the USA. As in previous work, Nehmad looks for ways to involve the viewer on a deeper level than one might be involved or affected by news reports or statistics. Therefore, she redesigns the American flag around the theme of gun violence. 50 circular targets represent each state and each target is punctured or stressed depending on the number of mass shootings in that state. The stripes of the flag either represent the prevalence of murder through firearms or, on alternating stripes, suicide by firearms. One can clearly see that the number of handgun-assisted suicides is quite large and a neglected aspect of the Second Amendment debate. To use the American flag in this manner is also to imply, perhaps, that the current flag does not adequately represent the over-riding values of the country that elected Donald Trump as president. We do not seem to value the concept of being able to handle our rage. The election of Trump and gun violence almost seem to go hand in hand. Trump is a popular culture celebrity and our popular culture revolves around the objectification of others and the resolution of problems through force. Guns exist to help facilitate or give license to our rage – against others and ourselves. An amendment allowing the purchasing of guns in a country’s Constitution is almost an admission that this is not a society built around humane personal development that can resolve conflict.

Nehmad has also done some needlepoint pieces of QR codes. If you download an app to read the codes through your smartphone, statistics reflecting gun violence against children for the 12 months following the Sandy Hook massacre pop up. Nehmad explained to me that she wanted this to be a type of mother’s approach and protest toward the fact that after the shooting massacre of over 20 kindergarten students by a mentally disturbed young man, basically no meaningful response was taken in the USA. BY using the QR codes, she seems to mock the consumerist nature of a culture that allows us to readily buy weapons to kill children and implies that it is more profitable when folks attack each other than when they try to understand and live peacefully with each other. The industry of the gun manufacturer is more important in the USA than the safety of developing children.

Inward Maine: Alan Bray at GARVEY|SIMON, Chelsea, Manhattan (November 2017, WSI)

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When Alan Bray was studying at the Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Arts in Florence, he was deeply influenced by the sincere faith and genuine spiritual aspirations in the work of the early Renaissance masters of that city. As he said before an audience in his home state of Maine, these were artists who “…actually believed in something”. It was a departure from the cynicism and irony he had experienced while studying in the US and, from this point on, Bray began to focus more on “stuff” he “cared about” – like his community and the natural environment of Maine.

He also picked up the method of casein-on-panel painting at that time; casein is a type of paint derived from milk protein which was used before oil paint. This type of paint dries so quickly that if an artist makes a mistake, or wants to change something, he/she has to use sandpaper. But this type of paint also seems to help to give nature, in his work, the exciting sheen and piquancy that elicits wows and oohs from many folks who look at it. To me his work is a bit like Andrew Wyeth mixed with Casper David Friedrich (many writers have mentioned a “mystical” quality to Bray’s work) with a little, to my eyes, Henri Rousseau eccentricity in there (although, unlike Rousseau, Bray does not create anything that does not exist in its original setting). 

Bray’s images compel an immediate, stunning engagement that allows us to absorb the image at a pre-cognitive or super-cognitive level. When Heinrich von Kleist first saw the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, he remarked that looking at that work was like having your eyelids torn off. Bray also offers that intense novelty or newness of vision. The intellect remains dazed for a while as we do not feel the need to articulate. Bray’s work is a narrative killer (although there are often stories behind individual pieces), a Broca’s area stupefier. It represents Bruno’s approach to the universe and not Galileo’s: a bridge between nature and us, lacking any potential to exploit the earth for profit. You do not tell yourself anything about what you see because this capacity for narrative now seems a bit anachronistic. The work packs a wallop beyond words, and becomes the type of art fully accessible beyond interpretation.

To me it packs the same wallop as, for example, something like Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation at the Frick Collection. We have the basic knowledge of the story ahead of time, we know what the Annunciation was, but seeing the postures of Gabriel and the Virgin, the tilts of their heads in relation to each other, the ‘hot’ red of Gabriel’s cape and ‘cool’ blue of the Virgin’s, their spatial relationship within the framing of the pillars, their facial expressions and gestures – this all reaches us immediately and cumulatively with a big swoosh and emotional impact beyond any narrative. It is as if all previous knowledge has primed one for this direct experience. Language and knowledge took us only so far and now we can get walloped by color and form. Bray’s work, like all work that can reach beyond interpretation, is like an injection that yields immediate results instead of a slow-working ingested pill. Bray’s work gives us that big swoosh which comes from when an artist incorporates details for an effect on the viewer and not as elements of narrative analysis.

Another influence on Bray was the book by Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, which encouraged Bray to paint ‘natural phenomena’. Bray often will sit in an area for hours until the visual begins to reveal secrets (about structure?) to him. To me, Bray’s approach asks: What can we get from nature without imputing our knowledge back to nature? What can happen when we are patiently in the presence of and within nature, allowing the mind to become a part of nature and nature to become a part of the mind? What can we glean when we try to experience nature with no scientific preconceptions but trust that nature itself can reveal deep and transformative secrets to us? Bachelard’s book is a contribution to phenomenology, which has been called the ‘science of experience’. I would suggest, however, that phenomenology should be called the experience of experience. A phenomenological approach makes one not only aware of experience but yields insights into our experience of the world. 

The mysterious contrasts between aspects of nature, familiar structures which now look a little strange and the brilliance of the colors work together in Bray’s work to represent the super-enriched experience of our experience of nature. It is the joy of the perception of perception fueling deeper engagement with the perceived, without knowledge or desire.

The fact that Bray does not paint people within his landscapes is also significant. Often, by including a person or people, a painting merely becomes a work about transience. Nature and its cycle become the permanent or eternal and the presence of people reveals how brief our hour upon nature’s stage is. Adding people also adds ‘grandeur’ to nature as there will always be a contrast between the fleeting and puny human figure and the seemingly eternal and robust nature.

Interestingly, Bray tries something a bit different as he often, in this series, shows the traces of humans within nature instead of people themselves. The scaring effects of us puny and transient people is evident in many of his works to varying degrees of severity. We see, for instance, traces of a cross-country skier on a thawing lake. In one painting we see a circular pond which was created by a farmer as a source of water for potential fires on his property. As Joseph Gross of the gallery explained to me, by creating this type of pond, the farmer’s property insurance rates dropped. In Bray’s work showing such traces of human action, we see the working of the human mind and desire on the land and the land’s always benevolently regenerative response.

 

Nautical Sculpture by David McQueen at Kim Foster Gallery, Chelsea

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Why did New York City become one of the centers of the world banking system?  It started with shipping. Before Wall Street there was South Street, and this is where the ‘rise’ of New York City began. New York Harbor is, actually, the deepest harbor in the western hemisphere and it was easier to bring in huge cargos to South Street than it was to bring them to the other places along the coast.  Indeed, you could bring the biggest ships in the world right up to land at NY Harbor (this was a huge advantage over other coastal cities).

Guys like John Jacob Astor (America’s first millionaire) used the harbor so effectively that they made a financial killing through world shipping trade.  Soon these shipping magnates began developing banks where they could loan out their huge surplus earnings and then realized it was far easier to make money through banking than shipping. Astor built one of the first banks on Wall Street and other erstwhile traders soon followed. So shipping lead to banking and banking took root and took off as New York bankers began loaning to the world. Despite the huge harbor, the shipping scene became moribund. One lifestyle was lost and another was begun.

So you can think of New York City as being pre and post Wall Street.  Indeed, before the banks on Wall Street there was a leisurely pace in lower Manhattan and the area was filled with small houses and rustic looking neighborhoods.  The cemetery and grounds at Trinity Church sprawled through the neighborhood (Trinity was forced, over the years, to relinquish the land to businesses) and Trinity remains, to me, the chief symbol of New York as it was before it became a banking center.

Yet, as David McQueen reveals in his amazing show at Kim Foster Gallery, there are still 40 light houses to be found in New York Harbor.  This attests to the importance of shipping in NY history and also is a testament to the fact that even though we have adapted to a city of bankers, the ocean still remains as a possible source of discovery and challenge.  The light houses harken back to a pre-corporate world where ingenuity and physical challenges existed side by side.  These light houses, I am assuming, are no longer being used, but stand as a reminder of how New York City ‘evolved’ and how shipping and not capital once dominated the lives of New Yorkers. With the loss of shipping we lost a type of work-ethic, sense of adventure, desire for discovery and daring and a sense of romance that the few ships remaining, which you can see as relics at South Street Seaport, do not adequately convey.  

Interestingly, however, because the light houses have lost their practical functions, McQueen experiments with them, and other nautical objects, in more fanciful and imaginative ways, often imputing fantastical purposes and functions to them.  Indeed, it’s almost as if he has created his own allegory involving the loss and search for love through the objects in this show. For instance, two light houses stand facing each other and we are challenged to view them as if they are disgruntled and puzzled lovers at the moment just before a formal breakup. A sextant and graph and other do-dads used for navigating are used to measure the increasing amount of time one might like to spend savoring meaningful aspects of a relationship. The astrolabe becomes a device used to find one’s love again while engaged in a pursuit of self-discovery. A station pointer meant to triangulate a fixed position based on three observable points is to be used to discern emotional and inner states. An object similar to a telescope is present with 31 markers which help a person document levels of desire over the course of a month.

In one room McQueen also has an installation display of 7 rotating lights which are positioned based on his research of where the 7 lighthouses represented by these pieces functioned in relation to each other. This installation is titled “Searching Still” and could represent the ever-present and somewhat desperate search for emotional engagement with another or others. There is also a separate piece, in the room with the installation, of a lighthouse beaming its light out onto a painting of the sea.  One just sees violent, tossing waves illuminated.  

One of my favorite pieces is “Breaching Pod” which shows the hull of ships emerging from a flat piece of wood.  This is almost like a fairy tale image of a piece of wood protesting against its flat and mundane appearance and trying, instead, to morph into something more romantic.  Basically this is a floor that wants to be a ship. “Balikbayan Boat” seems to be based on McQueen’s Filipino heritage and represents a type of cargo ship that never used any type of mechanism to tie down the cargo. The skill of the sailors themselves kept the cargo within the ship as it moved across the sea and the function of the journey – to bring home gifts to family and friends – provided the extra focus and effort needed to complete a perilous task.  The boat deliberately looks overburdened and as McQueen mentions in his notes for the show the boat is “extended beyond any notion of practicality”. 

David McQueen graduated with an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University - the premier grad program for sculpture in the USA - and is clearly a rising star in the field of sculpture.  His pieces are whimsical, imaginative, fanciful and often interactive.  Coming from a family of jewelers, he also shows he learned that craft well as we see intricately detailed work in regard to the metals he uses in his sculptures.  He combines the skills of a perfectionist with a need to engage the viewer thoughtfully and meaningfully through his highly creative work. 

This is me, Daniel Gauss...

On Kawara is no longer alive

(For several years On Kawara, a Japanese artist, painted the date for each day that he woke up.)

On first sight many might feel that the work of On Kawara was a kind of a conceptual art gimmick.  It could also be argued that his art was pessimistic - it seemed to reduce everything to a type of very Schopenhauer-like scheme.  If we see a date, we assume we ate, worked, did whatever we had to do to survive.  What is the common denominator of each date, after all?  The common factors are that we ate, drank, slept etc. each day.  

I think, however, that Kawara’s work was more than a gimmick and was, in fact, highly optimistic and positive. The significance of his work could be in the fact that just by representing dates we have to focus on what the mere sequence of dates cannot convey about our lives. His work becomes a type of 'via negativa.'  The 'via negativa' is a theological term - we don't know what God is, but we know what God isn't.  These individual dates do not measure or record inner growth or development or meaningful experience, but they point to these experiences. 

For example, let's say I am much more insightful and more humane than I was in 2004.  That didn't happen on a particular date.  My inner change was due to a process, probably not an event.  These individual dates, therefore, perhaps, point in a negative sense toward this type of process. Instead of the dates pointing toward mortality and demise, we can believe they point toward everything that made life livable and worth living on that date.

It is, however, such an unusual experience to look at a date we lived through and just stare at the date not having any idea what we did or what happened to us on that day.  We’re left, however, with a type of confidence that we did not ‘waste’ that day – that we did as well as we could have to engage ourselves and others in a good process, despite everything. For each date that we stare at, we may just have a vague idea of what we were doing those days or a vague idea of the sort of people we were back then, but the feeling of our sense of self-worth and engagement with others is readily apparent.  

To me the paintings call attention to how we conceive of or measure individual progress or feelings of success and failure.  Kawara's work always made me focus on how interesting but glacial my own individual change has been and these dates from the past always pointed toward possibilities for even more enriching experiences in the future.  
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Art is never just art...Magic Part II - Initiation by Alison Blickle at Kravets/Wehby Gallery

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In James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”, he makes the theory that all mythology stems from ancient magical rituals.  This is, in fact, the ‘other’ theory about the origin of mythology – most folks are familiar with the Jungian/Joseph Campbell theory that people share subconscious ‘archetypes’ around the world.  Frazer, however, did a yeoman’s job of empirically citing and cataloguing magical practices around the world, and throughout history, to support his theory.  Among other things, he shows that the concept of ‘birth-death-resurrection’ began as a magical ritual to ensure good crops during humankind’s agricultural phase.  This ritual morphed into a story (Osiris, for example, embodied the life force of vegetation which grows, is cut down and then resurrected) and when people flooded into cites, they abandoned magic but kept the stories based on magic, which became further developed as mythology. Stripped of magic and planted in the city, mythology became the language for a new type of inner spiritual journey.

So what’s interesting about Alison Blickle’s pieces at Kravets Wehby Gallery is that she is taking the traditional concept (documented by Frazer so well) of magic and applying it to a type of inner process that seems to be the primary promise of most spiritual/religious systems. Magic is no longer the ritual to ensure good crops, better health or a smooth childbirth.  The midwife from the middle ages who brought with her various secret herbs and magical practices is, in fact, in these paintings, but seems to be there to help initiate and guide the inner journey, with the aid of stone sculptures and sundry symbols (kind of like the way folks stood by in the 60s to make sure an LSD trip would not go too far south).

We see this most clearly in her “Fighting with the Shadow” (not shown) piece where one woman seems to be undergoing a St. Theresa type ecstasy, curled toes and all, while another gently holds her down.  The ecstatic woman caresses a stone sculpture which is part orb and part staircase. Indeed, the same types of symbolic objects that one sees in the paintings are scattered all over the gallery, as if the artist is inviting the public to also partake in the journey represented on canvas.  She seems to be saying, “This stuff is real!  This journey is possible!  This stuff on the walls and on the floor really means something goddarnit! This is important! This is not just art, in fact, art is never just art!”

Many of her female figures are covered with body paint replicating art deco designs, which, it seems, were based on Navajo and ancient Egyptian patterns.  It’s as if the characters in the painting are reclaiming the arcane value of designs treated as purely decorative in our world and literally clothing themselves in this for their inner trek.  The outer-trappings represent the inner process the characters are shooting for.  They have understood the patterns and the symbols and simply need to take them from the realm of outside concepts and translate them into inner states of being. In many paintings there seems to be an expert and an initiate, thus the name of the show.

In fact, there’s a lot of interesting theory behind this show.  In the program notes it seems that Blickle has been inspired by “French occultist and writer Eliphas Levi’s 1860 book on the historical use of

sacred imagery in art” as well as by the Pre-Raphaelites, Post Impressionists and the symbolic sculptures made by James Lee Byers in the 1980s.  Indeed, in the program notes it is mentioned that, viewed broadly, the show can even be about the extent to which art can succeed or is doomed to fail as a means of capturing meaningful and transformative experiences and engaging others with them, or even ‘initiating’ others into the process being depicted.

Mary Frank's clay sculptures at DC Moore Gallery

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The Chelsea art galleries in Manhattan are an amazing free public resource and the DC Moore Gallery helps to show why with their latest show - Mary Frank: Elemental Expression (Sculpture 1969 – 1985 and Recent Work).

In the press release for the show, Frank is quoted as saying: “Clay is gravity seeking. There are moments when it seems analogous to flesh.” She also states: “It is an astounding medium…so alive and dead, both.” Frank’s innovation involved how she used clay to represent her figures. Using clay’s flesh-like qualities, she created sheets of this material to form an outer layer of a figure’s body. Furthermore, she made no attempt to make the sheets seamless. Indeed, you often see intentional gaps between the sheets and you often see where the sheets of clay overlap. The result is that you perceive hollow figures of (mostly) women who were engaged in intense emotional or inner experience. The hollowed pieces seem to represent the residue, as it were, of the inner change or intense experience that occurred. This is, basically, petrified evidence of inner engagement that we are challenged to now engage and understand. The pieces often seem to capture a moment of inner change leading to tranquility or some intense bliss or serenity being directly experienced by the figure.

In many of her early works on display at DC Moore, we see these figures lying supine while having engaged in some trying type of inner process. The position of the body often implies that some type of struggle has occurred within the resting body. In other pieces we see figures upright and dancing or in some type of extreme, gravity-defying posture. By presenting the outer crust of the person undergoing intense experience, Frank seems to be pointing to the divorce between that transformative outcome within the figure and the perception of and attempt to understand what has happened by the viewer.

In these sculptural pieces, the viscera of the subject are gone and this is, basically, the de facto case any time we perceive another person undergoing something intensely emotional. We are compelled to interpret and respond to what we can see – we have no direct access to the actual feelings of the other person. If another is feeling pain, we often will also feel pain, but it is a different type of pain. Our bodies and emotions essentially deceive us with analogous but watered-down versions of the other’s experience, which does tend to draw us closer to the afflicted person, but not enough for a real sense of fellow-feeling. Conversely, when we see extreme joy, we also might feel joy, but it is not the joy the other feels, but a diluted version that intimates the deeper joy while still excluding us from the full participation that only the subject who has engaged in the initial experience can feel.

In these pieces by Frank, these are frozen, petrified experiences without the external or internal contexts. We do not know what initiated the experience and we do not know the inner workings of the body that brought about the experience. We are left with nothing but the physical expressions. Indeed, we are very much interlopers and voyeurs in this process. The figures are not attempting interpersonal engagement with us – they have sought out seclusion and we have found them, or at least found traces of what they have gone through.

Others who have seen Frank’s work point out a sensuality in these figures. That’s true but in some religious literature and art (St. Theresa by Bernini is an easy example) sexual ecstasy seems to be used as an analog to approximate complete spiritual fulfillment. It is the closest form of corporeal bliss that can approximate spiritual bliss. Religious writers and artists (including Frank) might also be pointing out the intense relationship between the spiritual and the sexual. The spiritual is literally born from the sexual and also gives meaning to the sexual process.

More than anything, Frank seems to want us, perhaps, to be aware of the distance between experience and the perception of experience, and to examine how we face this distance. How do we grasp, or can we grasp, what these figures are experiencing? Do they elicit compassion? Do we feel joy? veneration? envy? curiosity? Do we really recognize what the subject is going through? If we have not experienced intense, spiritual ecstasy, for example, but we are confronted with evidence of it (in these pieces), what is our response? Can we even believe in the experience that these figures seem to have gone through? Do these figures give us hope for something more meaningful in our lives or are we left with a feeling of disbelief?

DC Moore also presents more current work by Frank done through the process of archival pigment printing on bamboo paper. In the vibrant pieces Frank further explores the themes of experience, transformation and transcendence which are found in her sculptures.

Tracey Moffatt - Australian artist shows new work at Tyler Rollins Fine Art

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The Tyler Rollins Gallery, in Chelsea, focuses primarily on emerging and established artists from Southeast Asia. Since the mid-2000s they have done a yeoman’s job of presenting amazing art work which otherwise might have been overlooked in America. Tyler Rollins Fine Art’s latest show extends a bit beyond its usual geographical parameters to feature the work of a world-renowned Australian artist (of Aborigine descent) who deals with issues surrounding the troubled legacy of Australian/Aborigine relations and how she and others have been impacted by and have even overcome this legacy.

Some historical background can help the viewer better appreciate the work by Tracey Moffatt in her “Spirit Landscapes” show.

After the English arrival in New South Wales (Australia), the English Governor issued an 1835 proclamation that, before the arrival of the English, the land of New South Wales had belonged to ‘no-one’. This was followed by a softer proclamation declaring that Australian land could not belong to anyone without the consent of the colonial government. A legal declaration that the land on which Aborigines had lived for tens of thousands of years truly belonged to them was not issued until the Mabo Case of 1992.

Like Native American ‘Indians’ Aborigines died in huge numbers from European-borne diseases and their hunter-gathering clans were forced off of land that they needed for their survival. Aborigines who tried to resist were slaughtered (aborigines who didn’t resist were slaughtered as well) and many were forced into slavery and prostitution. Ultimately, the Australian government decided on an ‘integrationist’ approach. This, unfortunately, led to the ‘stolen generation’ (from 1910 – 1970) - the fact that 100,000 aboriginal babies were literally taken from their mothers and placed in white families. 1% of the Australian population is currently Aborigine and about half live in towns (usually in ‘slum’ areas) while others have tried to return to their original lifestyle. To this day Aborigines are routinely subjected to racism, discrimination and violence. The Aborigine population suffers from high rates of alcoholism and the Australian prison population has a disproportionate representation of Aborigine men.

The show “Spirit Landscapes” constitutes one of the first major shows by Moffatt after she returned to Australia after twelve years in New York. This theme of returning home is best embodied in Moffatt’s “As I Lay Back On My Ancestral Land” series. In these photos we see that Moffatt lies supine on the ground that allegedly had belonged to ‘no-one’ until the English found it. In the process of resting again on this land, her body seems to engage in a type of levitation in which it and the sky visually merge. These are visually arresting and beautiful images. In allegorical literature and art, spiritual fulfillment is often expressed through some type of union – the masculine and feminine, the active and passive etc. What’s unique here is that the union that denotes a type of spiritual fulfillment is between the human body and the sky. As I Lay Back On My Ancestral Land #2 seems to show this most clearly.  Moffatt seems to abandon the traditional Western concept of spiritual union for a more elemental concept in greater harmony with her people’s legacy and traditions.

In the stories of the “Dreamtime,” when the original inhabitants of Australia were created and placed on their land, the dreaming creators literally sometimes changed themselves into the places people inhabited. People who belong to an area are also literally part of the area as well. The effect of merging the body and clouds within a monotone hue, so that the curves of both the body and the clouds are sometimes hard to distinguish from each other, gives a sense of deep fulfillment. Perhaps it is the serenity of the traveler who has come full circle and has embraced the meaning that the colonizers of her land were never able to fully extinguish.

In ‘Suburban Landscape’ an apparently innocuous image of suburbia takes on a more ominous interpretation through the crayon stenciled description Moffatt places over the photo. “BULLIED HERE” represents a deeply embedded association between this spot – a sidewalk leading past a house - and an act of cruelty which happened to the artist. There are, however, more cheerful photo descriptions showing that along with the challenges of an aboriginal childhood among the dominant culture of Australia there are moments of innocence and joy. 

We see: CROSSED THE CREEK and TOSSED FLOWER PETALS, for instance.

"In and Out’ shows stills of figures at the entrance of a mining town brothel, where, presumably, aboriginal women are forced to provide pleasure for the miners. In “Picturesque Cherbourg” we see the settlement where Moffat’s own family was forced to relocate from their ancestral lands. The images are of beautiful middle class surroundings including neatly maintained houses and lavish gardens. Yet, on closer inspection, we see many of these images have been torn and placed back together.  Perhaps the rage toward these images comes from the fact that so many people succumbed to the life offered to them by the Australian government, or that they had no choice but to try to integrate. The torn images could also represent anger generated by the simple fact that the Aborigine population was forced to try to integrate but never, in fact, allowed to fully integrate.

“Pioneer Dreaming” presents images of famous Hollywood actresses in various Western movies which glorified the pioneer spirit and demonized the American Indians. The women look confidently and heroically out over the land they will soon unequivocally possess. Finally, in “Night Spirits” Moffatt drives deep into the outback, late at night, to areas where the Aborigines once, perhaps, hunted, and takes photos in the absolute darkness there. Photographing into the darkness resulted in ghostly shapes and images on the photo over otherwise benign highway or street scenes. These shapes and images can visually represent the true horrors that took place on aboriginal land and which can still be sensed and even captured, if one is willing to directly address the largely unaddressed tragedy that has occurred to the indigenous people of Australia.

Kris Kuksi at Joshua Liner Gallery

What is a Kuksi churchtank? The caterpillar tracks and the hull are two basic components of a military tank, and they are present, but, in place of a full turret (which is normally transported by the hull) Kuksi has placed a church edifice.  Indeed, the edifice of the church sports the main gun of the tank, which seems to emanate from a central narthex door of the church.

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What does a Kuksi churchtank mean? 

One interpretation could be that the hull and gun represent our aggressive, animal nature: what Schopenhauer called our Wille zum Leben (a will to live and compete).  The church edifice might then represent our higher nature, a “spiritual” nature, which can either temper or release the aggression beneath it.  The main gun or cannon seems to be at the crux of this vehicle – the one element shared by the hull and church-turret.  One could say we are all little church tanks treading our way through the world each day.   

However, thinking more geopolitically, a big implication of the church tank is that, in the real world, the forces of spirituality rarely temper the more aggressive churchtank features.  Kuksi, himself, explains that he created the churchtank series because he felt that the church seemed more interested in stifling other beliefs, religions and cultures than in promoting the core values of the Christian religion as preached by their putative founder.

The USA is, furthermore, 80% Christian.  We have recently engaged in two wars against Muslim countries.  George Bush called himself a Methodist and a born-again Christian whose alcoholism could only be tempered by the miraculous love of Jesus.  He also liked using the word “crusade.” Kuksi seems to ask to what extent the Christian religion guides our foreign policy on a conscious or unconscious level.  As David Halberstam pointed out, the guys who started and messed up the Vietnam War were all dyed-in-the-wool White Anglo Saxon Protestants who knew nothing about, nor cared to know nothing about, Asian culture. 

Kuksi asks: to what extent does the church become a validation for the military and to what extent does the military prop up and support the church.  For instance, I would be remiss not to point out that the current Pope had a position of some responsibility during Argentina’s “Dirty War” and not only did not speak out against the murder of students and dissidents, but befriended folks from the murderous junta.

In Kris Kuksi’s work at Joshua Liner we also see what would seem to be idealized godlike images contrasted, yet connected to, in some manner, surrounding images of military preparedness or outright battle.  

My first take on this was that the artist might be interested in the paradox of the extent to which only terrifying weapons and various types of military deterrence can create possibilities for peaceful spiritual pursuit.  After all, Chairman Mao showed the people of Tibet that you cannot pursue your religious goals unless you have an army to protect those goals. 

Is Kuksi saying there can be no pacifistic spiritual quest outside of a society that does not protect your quest with a zillion dollar weapons industry and military complex?  According to this interpretation, the god-like beings in Kuksi’s work are ideals of spiritual perfection and the surrounding soldiers make that perfection possible.  Yet, it could also be that the ideals and godlike idols are the ones generating the warfare.  One of Kuksi’s pieces is, after all, called Neo-Hellenism, and possesses a central Helen-like figure around which military conflict conflagrates.