Saloua Raouda Choucair at CRG Gallery

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I loved this little piece by Choucair - are the tubes supposed to expel something toxic or are they supposed to absorb something sustaining (or maybe both)?

In the 2013 Tate Modern retrospective of the work of Saloua Raouda Choucair, there was a painting that had been torn by a bomb explosion near her home in her native Beirut.  One might have expected a Lebanese artist to reference the violence, corruption and suffering of the 15 year Lebanese Civil War in her art. Yet, there seems to be no overt commentary on the war or politics in any of Choucair’s pieces throughout her long career. Indeed, this seems to point to the level of integrity Choucair brought to her art. I am guessing that Choucair’s attitude was that the war was the doing of unenlightened others and she wasn’t going to become engaged in their insanity.

Choucair might have decided that art is simply not about the overtly political and that it should not be sullied by being extended in that direction. Easy artistic attacks against transitory corruption (which might have made her more famous as a ‘regional artist responding to her times’) were a temptation she easily resisted – instead she was interested in the pith and essence of the extent to which art could capture the process of what is most meaningful and eternal in our lives.

The press around the 2013 retrospective highlighted that Choucair was one of the first artists, if not the first, of her region to begin using the techniques of contemporary abstraction. After moving to Paris after World War II, she studied at the atelier of Fernand Leger and became fascinated by the architecture of Le Corbusier. Upon returning, a few years later, to Beirut, however, it became difficult for her to show and sell her work – in part because she is a woman, in part because the work was so groundbreaking. Ms. Choucair, who is now 99 years old and suffering from Alzheimers, worked in relative silence and obscurity for decades amassing her collection in her own home (her daughter has tirelessly continued to champion her mother’s work). A curator for the Tate Modern stumbled upon her work while looking for promising Lebanese artists and, upon discovering the extent and breath of the work, immediately began organizing the retrospective which finally brought attention to this amazing and significant artist. CRG Gallery, on the Lower East Side, now represents the artist in New York City and has put together a wonderful first show for this artist in the USA.

To appreciate Choucair’s art it’s important to know that she was influenced by contemporary science, mathematics and the philosophy of Sufism.  The basic components of her work would seem to involve symmetry, line and curve and what she expresses comes from her experimentation with these elements. Her work also uses the principle of repetition which she may have taken from her study of Le Corbusier’s architecture. Much of her sculpture is, for example, ‘modular’ and it is even possible to rearrange the components of her sculpture. This also mirrors Sufi poetry in which each stanza is supposed to stand alone as well as be an integral part of the whole poem.

In a letter from 1951, she states that one of the greatest contributions of Arabic scholars to the world was the idea of ‘distillation’. Wine was first distilled into purer or more potent ‘spirits’ in the Arabic world in the 900s and she points out that distillation is merely the process of returning substances to their true or original nature or ‘essence’.  The essence of life is repetition as it is, to a great extent, in Sufism – one who experiences a higher awareness necessarily becomes an influence in the world for peace and justice and kindness and mercy.

Choucair was based in Beirut for most of her life but was continually open to the progress going on in all parts of the world and this often made its way into her art. When a critic once asked her whether she was merely imitating European styles, she stated, “What I experience, everyone in the world experiences.” There wasn’t just regional or continental progress or innovation; any change or development from anywhere could and would become a global influence in Choucair’s eyes. This neglected artist was, in fact, an early believer in a more global and more universal outlook in which borders might be dissolved and humanity might become unified in its common search for what is most worth pursuing. 

Pardon the Interruption, Please : Will Kurtz at Kim Foster Gallery

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The first Thursday after Labor Day, in the USA, is the traditional beginning of the art gallery season in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. One of the highlights of the Chelsea opening night on September 10^th was the sculptures of Will Kurtz at the Kim Foster Gallery, which engaged and dazzled the hordes of folks who came out for the night of art-viewing, people-watching and free wine. 

Kurtz makes life-sized figures of humans and animals out of New York City newspapers (often the New York Times) using an internal wood and wire structure. He usually chooses to depict the types of folks we see around us in public spaces as we are moving about the city and in the past he has often focused on marginalized people with their pet dogs. In his online artist statement he states that he wants to reveal both the ‘resilience and vulnerability’ of these folks to create a feeling of empathy in the viewer. He likes using a person’s dog in many of his works because of the ‘innocence’ the animals bring to the situation. The innocence and raw energy of the dogs is often in stark contrast to the beaten-up, obese, enervated, abject person nearby. Indeed, the dogs might even represent symbolic proxy figures for the people depicted, representing a pure, guileless core of the person which we should be able to better recognize in order to make this person more worthy of our concern and feelings of fellowship. 

On each figure we see little glimpses from the newspapers of stories, headlines or images. On the big butt of one woman we see the phrase, for instance, “…half the sky…”. Like the ever-present news, photos from the news, ads, headlines, we cannot escape the effects of these folks who seem to be permanent markers of our journeys through the city each day. Indeed, like the buildings and streets they occupy they seem to also be permanent fixtures that we have seen a zillion times, can anticipate constantly seeing and therefore tend to ignore or disregard. It’s as if we are subjected to an endless and unbreakable cycle of the same emotional responses from the news and these people through each day.

As we experience them, they are mixed into the advertisements and the news we almost unconsciously absorb just as readily as the news and ads are mixed into them in these sculptures and this reflects our relationship to these people. If one of them does catch our attention again long enough, it’s the same compassion, disgust, admiration, the same limited range of emotions engaged in us by the papers. Like lurid headlines, they can engender interest, sympathy and disgust all at once.  These folks are as ubiquitous as the news and run us through the same untiring pace of responses as the news. It’s as if Kurtz wants us to realize that there is so much more to be felt and understood in regard to these people than we have felt before or tend to feel. Likewise, there is so much that we are missing by merely reading the news and not taking steps to more deeply engage our personal worlds on deep and meaningful levels.

Newspapers are, of course, partially in the business of soliciting empathy from us and often we read about suffering around the world that we are helpless to address on an individual basis. Therefore, newspapers might be the perfect medium for the depiction of these folks. Newspapers help to convey an aging process to these pieces as well. The dates of the stories, ads and headlines do not change just as our birthdays do not change; the newspaper grows older in a discernible way just as we and these folks do. The folks in these sculptures represent a type of urban permanence and transience at the same time.

Interestingly, Kurtz also includes a couple New York City police officers among the folks we commonly see on the streets and this is of real, timely significance in New York City. There is constant chatter in the press as to how the homeless in New York are proliferating and destroying the ‘quality of life’ that more conservative mayors had allegedly created in the past. The police are now being used, according to what we can see in the papers, to break up little communities of homeless people so that they do not create such an eyesore to ‘the rest of us’. So we have police in this gallery, watching over the street folks.

Furthermore, the police, in New York City and the USA in general, have come under deep scrutiny. In New York City, about a year ago, a black man was needlessly and cruelly killed by police officers making an arrest – sparking massive protests.  Just a few days ago an African American, Harvard educated, ex-tennis star was attacked by a police officer for absolutely no good reason. People around the world are currently watching the video and wondering why this kind of thing keeps happening here.  So the presence of these officers in the show is just brilliant given the changing perceptions of the police in the USA and especially New York City. The NY police chief, himself, has said that he has not witnessed such an anti-police attitude since the early 1970s. So the police are standing vigil in this gallery – are they our protectors? Are they benign? Are they evil? Each viewer has to deal with his/her own feelings about seeing these cops in a gallery in light of all the recent news. Each person also has to ask him/herself what can be done about the apparent abuses that seem to happen regularly in this city in regard to the police. New York City has more police officers than Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston combined – they are everywhere in this city, including, now, an art gallery. 

To many of us the people depicted in this show are of as much value as old, discarded newspaper. Kurtz helps to show that there is something separating all of us from each other on very basic levels in our society – it’s up to each of us to ask why and how and to try to break down any barriers on a personal basis. The show runs until October 10^th 2015 at Kim Foster Gallery at 529 W. 20^th Street in New York City’s Chelsea district.