Angry White Men.

LOS ANGELES — Judging from the paintings and drawings on view at Susan Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Nicole Eisenman has been thinking a lot about angry white men. They are almost the exclusive population throughout the expansive gallery. There is a large contingent of shooters, each confronting us from behind a firearm aimed directly outward, so that to look at the drawings is to stare down a gun-barrel. These shooter drawings are almost all from 2016, with a few from 2017 and one from 2018, elaborated in ink, charcoal, oil, acrylic, and pencil. This last is the largest, and the only one bearing a title, “The Shooter.” One of the untitled drawings, in pencil and blue ballpoint pen, shows a man pointing his gun at us with one hand while the other grasps his penis. Along the bottom margin Eisenman has written “BAMSPLOOSH.”

Nicole Eisenman, “The Tea Party” (2012–2017), ink on gessoed paper, 40” x 35″ paper size, 52” x 45.50” x 2″ framed (photo by Robert Wedemeyer).

Nicole Eisenman, “The Tea Party” (2012–2017), ink on gessoed paper, 40” x 35″ paper size, 52” x 45.50” x 2″ framed (photo by Robert Wedemeyer).

While there is nothing original about equating guns with penises, the full array of drawings in Dark Light reveals Eisenman’s mind ping-ponging through a number of visual rhymes, adding up to many of the show’s most compelling moments. The circle of the gun barrel becomes the end of a cigarette smoked by impassive men. In one case, smoke billows from a man’s right nostril; in another, a sooty cloud issues from a cigarette belonging to an African American in a drawing titled “A Moment of General Anesthesia” (2018), suggesting this man’s need for relief from pain of America’s continuous police shootings of black men. Further iterations of the black circle appear: in a small 2016 sketch it is a bullet hole in the middle of someone’s face, in others it is a darkened sun. A 2015 ink drawing titled “Black Sun” has the cheerless orb spewing fecal liquid that piles like a mound of pudding below, resembling a pipe depositing sewage in our waterways. Finally and inescapably, the circle is an anus.

Nicole Eisenman, “Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass” (2017), oil on canvas, 127.25” x 105” x 1.75″(all images courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; photo by Robert Wedemeyer).

Nicole Eisenman, “Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass” (2017), oil on canvas, 127.25” x 105” x 1.75″(all images courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; photo by Robert Wedemeyer).

Nicole Eisenman: Dark Light continues at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (6006 Washington Blvd, Culver City, Los Angeles) through April 21.

Fascinating viewing and reading, you can do more of both at Hyperallergic.

The Amazing Egg Dance: Peasants to Politics.

Contrast between Carnival and Fasting (ca. 1550–99), artist unknown — Source.

Contrast between Carnival and Fasting (ca. 1550–99), artist unknown — Source. Click for full size.

Whoever the artist of the above piece was, I’d say they had been most impressed with Hieronymus Bosch. The Egg Dance, from village revelry to romance to politics. This is a wonderful piece of history, which demonstrates several cultural shifts throughout the centuries.

The egg dance was a traditional Easter game involving the laying down of eggs on the ground and dancing among them whilst trying to break as few as possible. Another variation (depicted in many of the images featured here) involved tipping an egg from a bowl, and then trying to flip the bowl over on top of it, all with only using one’s feet and staying within a chalk circle drawn on the ground. Although, as shown in many of its depictions in art, the pastime is associated with peasant villages of the 16th and 17th century, one of the earliest references to egg-dancing relates to the marriage of Margaret of Austria and Philibert of Savoy on Easter Monday in 1498.

[…]

This blindfolded version of the egg dance features in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795). … According to some scholars Goethe’s mention gave birth to the phrase “einen wahren Eiertanz aufführen” (to perform a true egg dance) which refers to moving carefully in a difficult situation. This particularly association of the egg dance with navigating danger was expressed time and time again in political cartoons of the 19th-century: various political figures, from Bismarck to Disraeli, precariously trying to make there way about a floor strewn with potential upsets.

Democracy’s Disastrous Egg-dance, (1884), Joseph Keppler. A woman labeled “Democracy” wearing a blindfold labeled “Stupidity” is pushed by Samuel J. Randall toward a chair labeled “Presidenti[al] Chair”, with several eggs in the way on the ground, they are labeled “Honest Naval Appropriation, Civil Service Reform, Honest River – Harbor Appropriation, Economy, Anti-Silver Coinage, National Banking System, Tariff Reform, [and] Prompt Legislation”, two of the eggs are broken; among a group of men laughing, in the background on the right, are John Logan, John Sherman, and William D. Kelley. — Source.

Democracy’s Disastrous Egg-dance, (1884), Joseph Keppler. A woman labeled “Democracy” wearing a blindfold labeled “Stupidity” is pushed by Samuel J. Randall toward a chair labeled “Presidenti[al] Chair”, with several eggs in the way on the ground, they are labeled “Honest Naval Appropriation, Civil Service Reform, Honest River – Harbor Appropriation, Economy, Anti-Silver Coinage, National Banking System, Tariff Reform, [and] Prompt Legislation”, two of the eggs are broken; among a group of men laughing, in the background on the right, are John Logan, John Sherman, and William D. Kelley. — Source.

The Journalistic Egg Dance (ca. 1840), Andreas Geiger. A caricature of press censorship before the 1848 revolution in Austria. During the Restoration after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the European powers, led by Austrian Chancellor Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859), restricted the freedom of speech and expression to contain any kind of critical, nationalist or anti-authoritarian movement — Source.

The Journalistic Egg Dance (ca. 1840), Andreas Geiger. A caricature of press censorship before the 1848 revolution in Austria. During the Restoration after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the European powers, led by Austrian Chancellor Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859), restricted the freedom of speech and expression to contain any kind of critical, nationalist or anti-authoritarian movement — Source.

You read and see much more at The Public Domain Review.

Swedish House-Gymnastics (1913).

These exercises and the photographic illustrations are splendid! Exercises anyone can do, without taking up much time, and can be done conveniently at home.

These wonderful photographs, which make such innovative use of multiple exposure, are from a 1913 German book titled Schwedische Haus-Gymnastik nach dem System P.H. Ling’s by Theodor Bergquist, Director of the Swedish Gymnastic Institute in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Wörishofen. As the title tells us, this style of “Swedish house-gymnastics” demonstrated by Bergquist (and his mysterious female colleague) is based on a system developed by Pehr Henrik Ling (1776–1839), a pioneer in the teaching of physical education in Sweden. Inventor of various physical education apparatus including the box horse, wall bars, and beams, Ling is also credited with establishing calisthenics as a distinct discipline and is considered by some as the father of Swedish massage.

I think I could choose a series to do each day from these, without over exertion, and it might really help to be a bit more flexible these days. You can see much more at The Public Domain Review.

The Last Fiction.

This looks to be fascinating, and it’s a great way to learn too. The Last Fiction is a feature-length animation based on a Persian legend told in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. I will be looking for it, and looking forward to seeing it. The best bit might be that it’s out of an Iranian studio, so it will not end up being a stupid, offensive, Disnified version. If you could use a bit more information: Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), and Abu ʾl-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi.

The Last Fiction.

Banksy Blitz NYC.

One of the new Banksy murals in Midwood, Brooklyn. Benjamin Sutton.

One of the new Banksy murals in Midwood, Brooklyn. Benjamin Sutton.

Banksy’slatest series of interventions in the New York City streetscape continued apace today. This afternoon the artist revealed on Instagram that a mural in the Midwood section of Brooklyn that had come to widespread attention last week is in fact his doing.

The mural is a characteristically coy commentary on capitalism, although it is accompanied by a smaller piece that depicts a seal. The pair is located in Midwood, at Coney Island Avenue and Avenue I. The larger one features what looks like a real estate developer (equipped with both a briefcase and a hardhat) brandishing a whip in the shape a rising red line graph, while a procession of children, a woman, an elderly person, and a dog flee. Nearby, a smaller mural whose connection to the theme of gentrification is indecipherable, features a seal balancing a ball — formed by the unpainted circle where a sign used to hang — on its nose.

It’s always interesting, tracking Banksy, and this is no exception. Benjamin Sutton at Hyperallergic has the story.

Katastwóf Karavan.

Kara Walker with her “Katastwóf Karavan” at the Mississippi River Trail on February 23, 2018, in New Orleans. Josh Brasted/Getty Images.

Kara Walker with her “Katastwóf Karavan” at the Mississippi River Trail on February 23, 2018, in New Orleans. Josh Brasted/Getty Images.

[…] Walker titled the whole montage the Katastwóf Karavan, or Caravan of Catastrophe, the use of Haitian Creole signaling the mix of Caribbean and Southern histories that shaped New Orleans. Walker’s first public installation since the 2014 Marvelous Sugar Baby — the enormous Sphinx-like mammy figure that she built out of sugar in the now-demolished Domino factory in Williamsburg — the Karavan went up for the closing weekend of the Prospect.4 triennial, which ran for three months at multiple sites around New Orleans. The installation was freighted with layers of site-specific symbolism — none of it subtle if you knew a bit about local history, yet all of it obscured by years of avoidance or, at best, awkward notes in the narratives delivered by school curricula or tourist brochures.

Thus Algiers Point: Here, in the eighteenth century, traders warehoused disembarked captives — those who survived the Middle Passage — before selling them on the opposite bank in the markets that dotted the French Quarter and surroundings. This is where families were rent apart, humans assessed and packaged as commodities. Thus, too, Walker’s tableaux, relevant across the landscape of chattel slavery but especially here.

And thus the calliope, a direct retort to the one on the Natchez — “the OTHER calliope,” Walker called it on her handout for the event — and its sonic broadcast of a whitewashed history. Several times a day, the vessel’s instrument blares out to the city (there is no such thing as a quiet calliope) items from a hoary playlist such as “Old Man River,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “God Bless America,” and, yes, “Dixie’s Land.” […]

You can read and see much more about Kara Walker’s latest piece here.

Pantherpedia: An Essay Guide.

Members of the Dora Milaje in "Black Panther." From left: Okoye (Danai Gurira), Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) and Ayo (Florence Kasumba). Matt Kennedy / Marvel Studios

Members of the Dora Milaje in “Black Panther.” From left: Okoye (Danai Gurira), Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Ayo (Florence Kasumba). Matt Kennedy / Marvel Studios.

Carolina Miranda has the compleat rundown on Pantherian analysis:

Have you heard about the little movie that tells the story of a royal man-feline named T’Challa who is powered by vibranium and defends a secret African paradise named Wakanda?

Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” is not just an epic comic-book action flick — it could approach the $1-billion mark globally after its opening in China this weekend — the movie is a full-blown cultural phenomenon, generating a cottage industry of cultural criticism that touches on a spectacular array of topics, including racial politics, geopolitics, gender issues, beauty standards, design and urbanism. (Hello, Wakandan municipal transit system!)

In fact, there are so many takes on “Black Panther” that New York-based educator Roberto Soto-Carrion has helpfully compiled dozens of analytical stories related to the film and the “Black Panther” comics in general into a 14-page Google Doc called “The Black Panther Reader.”

Ms. Miranda’s summary is excellent, and provides a great overview, with many links for those who wish to delve deeper. You can read it here.

Roentgenizdat: Bone Music.

Example of an x-ray record (all photos courtesy X-Ray Audio Project/Paul Heartfield).

Example of an x-ray record (all photos courtesy X-Ray Audio Project/Paul Heartfield).

Several years ago, while poking around a flea market in St. Petersburg, musician Stephen Coates came across a record unlike any other he had ever seen. Rather than etched on vinyl, its tiny grooves were cut onto a medical X-ray, tracing shallow circles over the ghostly shapes of bones.

“I immediately knew I had to find out who made it, why they made it, and how they made it,” Coates told Hyperallergic in a recent phone interview. He soon realized that the 78 RPM he had purchased — a single of “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets — was just one of many strange, makeshift records created in the Cold War years of the Soviet Union. Produced and disseminated on an underground market to circumvent government control of culture, these flimsy sheets were known as roentgenizdat, or “bone music.”

Installation view of ‘Forbidden Music: X-Ray Audio in the USSR, 1946 – 1964’ at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Installation view of ‘Forbidden Music: X-Ray Audio in the USSR, 1946 – 1964’ at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Working with photographer Paul Heartfield, Coates has since established the X-Ray Audio Project, a multi-faceted endeavor to chronicle and share the history of roentgenizdat. The pair has released a book and documentary on their extensive research and have also organized a traveling exhibition. It is currently at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where examples of the decades-old transparencies are on view along with documents and other ephemera that together tell the technical, cultural, and human stories of this particular form of audio. Visitors can also listen to digitized recordings of the bone music, which, like homemade mixtapes, are far from crystal clear.

An absolutely fascinating subject! Humans are utterly amazing in their ability to circumvent control, and there’s nothing like declaring something forbidden to bring out the creative rebellion in people. You can read and see much more at Hyperallergic. I would love to be able to see this show, if you have the chance, don’t miss it!

Seductive Sins: 100 Years of Ads.

In this catalog of twentieth-century advertisements, Taschen has drawn together examples of advertorial seduction that were employed by liquor and tobacco companies over the past 100 years.

This colorful tome showcases an undeniably vibrant chapter of advertising history: highlighting trends — from the kitsch to the cliché and the classy — in drinking and smoking in America. 20th Century Alcohol and Tobacco Ads is as much a lesson in popular culture and pseudo-science as it is in advertising: see the pages dedicated to doctors testifying that smoking soothes the throat and liquor bring social success! With contemporary legislation in many countries moving cigarettes to plain packaging and alcohol advertisements to after hours on TV, the images in this publication seem almost closer to caricature than they do to real life.

You can see several more ads at iGNANT, and buy the book here.

The Bracero Program.

Blueprints for the El Paso [Santa Fe Bridge] disinfection plant, 1916 (image from Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez:1893-1923 by David Dorado Romo).

Blueprints for the El Paso [Santa Fe Bridge] disinfection plant, 1916 (image from Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez:1893-1923 by David Dorado Romo).

During the Second World War, with industrial resources bent toward the war effort, the US suffered a dangerous shortfall of farm and railroad workers. From 1942 to 1964, the federal government, in partnership with Mexico, oversaw one of the largest foreign worker programs in US history. It was called the “Bracero Program,” from the Spanish word for manual labor. Between 1951 and 1964, Rio Vista Farm, near El Paso, Texas, accepted more than 80,000 Mexican workers per year. The contractual time, wages, and transportation of workers were documented at these sites after they underwent medical and psychological examinations, which often included fumigation with DDT. Approximately 4.6 million braceros went through the system over a 22-year period.

Artist Adriana Corral, with assistance from the National Trust Foundation and historian David Romo, has spent several years preparing to erect a site-specific installation at the historic Rio Vista Farm, titled “Unearthed: Desenterrado.” The work, curated by Cortney Lane Stell and produced by the Denver-based traveling museum Black Cube, is composed of a 60- by 40- foot flag. On each side of its semi-translucent white cotton support, a single eagle is embroidered: the Mexican golden eagle on one side and the American bald eagle on the other, claws connecting. Artist Vincent Valdez, who collaborated on the idea and design, told Hyperallergic in an email:

The historic usage of the eagle as nationalistic and patriotic symbols are used to evoke power, aggression, invulnerability and triumph. In this case, two eagles caught dueling in mid-flight speak to the tangled love and hate relationship between the neighboring countries.

It symbolizes the monumental contributions made by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the US, and captures a neglected narrative in American history. Corral discussed the project with Hyperallergic.

Hyperallergic has an in-depth article and interview about this project, and the history of the Bracero Program, along with more images. Click on over to read all about it.

Quilts: Tools For Resistance.

Yaneli Martinez, “Inequality 4 All”.

Yaneli Martinez, “Inequality 4 All”.

Jaquie Gering, “Veer”.

Jaquie Gering, “Veer”.

PASADENA, Calif. — “SHUT UP and Listen,” proclaims a quilt in bold, red letters. It shows a muted American flag, hung upside down on its phantom flagpole. The aggressive “SHUT UP” is rendered in darker red fabric, like oxidized blood. But the message softens with the word “Listen,” looped in beautiful script, using sweeter reds and an assemblage of floral, plaid, and paisley fabrics. The quilt is willing to have a conversation if I’m willing to hold my tongue.

Jessica Wohl’s quilt was just one of many beckoning calls to action at QuiltCon 2018, the Modern Quilt Guild’s annual convention, held at the Pasadena Convention Center late February. The guild launched in 2009, after quilters making innovative, nontraditional works began forming connections online and realized they weren’t alone in their experimentation. The guild has established chapters internationally, in which quilters come together and show their work, workshop new techniques, and build a community.

Embedded in this year’s quilt show, which featured over 350 works, were acts of protest. They carried messages like “strong women taught us to quilt…and to fight,” “rise up, resist,” and simply, “oh no.” Others depicted difficult, but insightful, interpretations of mass incarceration, police brutality, school shootings, and acts of terror. The need quilters have felt to channel their frustrations into their craft during Trump’s America was palpable. But the members of the Modern Quilt Guild are also continuing a very old tradition of using the quilt as a tool for resistance.

You can read and see much more at Hyperallergic. I wish I could have seen this show.

NO.

It seems today is yet another fucking special ‘holiday’, “National Love Your Pet Day” which is unofficial, thankfully. This mania needs to bloody stop. A very small sample:

Baby Grace.

Doll & Jayne.

Barnaby Jones & Sullivan.

I have had pets all my life. There has never been one godsdamn day I have not loved them and cared for them. Much like my feelings for V.D., my answer to such fucking nonsense is NO. What is this but yet another way companies have to push insanely overpriced goodies and treats, and to guilt you for being a rotten pet owner if you aren’t spending a ton on junk for them? NO. If you need a day to remind you to play with your pet, dig around in the treat drawer, go for a walk with them, or whatever, then you should not have a bloody pet in the first place. All responsible owners love their animals, they mean the world, and they would do anything for them already.

Besides this being a greedy capitalist’s wet dream, this is also yet another burden on all those people who have lost their beloved, no matter what type of animal. Back when I kept koi, I about collapsed when I lost my beautiful Guin when he was yet a babe, I’d had him for 16 years. Whatever being it might be which captures a human heart, we already care. We don’t need yet another stupid manufactured day. This sort of “special day” thing needs to die. In a fire.