Bite 83: Marina Abramović - Nude with Skeleton, 2002-5

Nude with Skeleton, 2002-5, colour video without sounds, 12.36 min looped

The supine skeleton rises and falls, seemingly coming to life, as the body beneath it breathes in deeply and then exhales, repeatedly. Marina Abramović is nude beneath a skeleton created to her own dimensions. As she animates it, so it reflects her imminent death. She holds its hand in hers in an intimate coupling, the twelve-and-a-half minute video looped – condemning Abramović in this open coffin indefinitely. 

Abramović’s synthesis of spiritual symbolism and a clinical stripping down of the body to its bare bones is rooted in that moment in the seventeenth-century when allegorical mysticism collided with the emerging ‘rational’ disciplines of science, anatomy and medicine. With Abramović’s fleshy, physical performance we voyeuristically witness her private meditation. She gazes up, perhaps waiting for something, or someone. A living sculpture, she is a live body becoming sculpture in the inverse of how we can see the best sculptures by Bernini as ‘object becoming live body’, Bernini’s expert drapery making his figures seem as alive as Abramović’s nude body. 

Her extended sombre vigil on mortality embraces both pain and pleasure, Marina becoming a contemporary St. Teresa – simultaneously transcendent and earthy, erotic and religious. Her fragile body on the hard floor manifests a Baroque fear as she continues to breathe, almost painstakingly, and, eventually, cries. Likewise, Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, also presents a woman glancing the eternal, the arrow a materialization of eroticism and divine revelation. 

Moreover, looking at Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni one can even imagine a skeleton lying with her. On the threshold of death, her head inclined upwards, here also, as with Abramović’s piece, mortality is coupled with eroticism. Consciousness and a sense of the mystical pervade both works, even being 400 odd years apart and presented in very different or even opposing mediums. Both use a respectively contemporarily relevant medium to present a physical depiction of struggling against mortality. 

We witness a religious transformation – the body comprehending its own demise and the soul triumphing over death. Albertoni is in her final moments – as well as her most mystical – while Abramović breathes slowly and methodically, accepting her own gradual descent into the grave. These works are idealisations of death – vitally alive and transcendent images of morbidity – embodied paradoxes of the human condition.

Bite 82: Keith Haring - Elvis, n.d



Elvis, n.d, sumi ink and gold paint on Elvis poster, 97 x 67 cm

A post of Elvis has been painted over in black, signifying death (Haring more often used white paint). 

There is no person here - only an image. Made meaningless and stripped of humanity by overexposure and reproduction. We see a created entity - man-cum-commodity. The immortal clichéd image that is Elvis Presley. 

A religious icon of the most iconic of celebrities, he appears to weep, as a Blessed statue of St. Mary would - frozen in stone, dripping in bloody tears.


Currently on view in the exhibition Figuratively Speaking: A Survey of the Human Form at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Las Vegas.

Bite 81: Jack Pierson - Last Chance Lost, 2007

Last Chance Lost, 2007, metal, neon, wood, and plastic, 122 x 8 x 61 cm

Jack Pierson creates word sculptures by combining found objects - old neon letters, harking back to old Las Vegas hotels and casinos. 

Each letter has its own story to tell and Pierson highlights this by bringing them together into words and phrases redolent in meaning and ambiguity. Letters slanted and mismatched appear as if coincidentally forming words, heaped together in The Boneyard, lit up for no one in particular, stripped of previous hollow purposes.

Last Chance Lost evokes the loneliness and inevitable failure behind the bright, flashing lights of Las Vegas casinos - where there never seems to be a last chance, until it's lost.

Currently on view in the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, Los Angeles.

Bite 80: Robert Frank - U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1956

U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1956, from the book The Americans, 1958

"Long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat of impossible-to-believe America in New Mexico under the prisoner's moon."

                                                                - Jack Kerouac (Introduction to The Americans)

Bite 79: Ansel Adams - Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941

"A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words."

                                                                  - Ansel Adams

Bite 78: Grant Pecoff - Little Italy, San Diego, 2010

Little Italy, San Diego, 2010, oil on canvas

Based in San Diego, artist Grant Pecoff has a studio above a pizzeria in Little Italy. Focusing largely on his locality, his warped impressionist/realist style is consciously indebted to Van Gogh yet, equally, decidedly more positive in outlook, presenting the spaces of his city imbued with life, amplified colours and new perspectives.

The large arching sign lit up with neon blue is open and welcoming. The scene is as if taken with a fish-eye lens, edges curving away, enhancing the sense of the location as an expansive, hip, urban community. Everything leans toward to viewer, who thus becomes present within the space - with tree above and the street bending into the distance.

I visited Grant Pecoff's studio today before pizza on our last night in San Diego. Some of my photographs and more on our travels can be seen over at Andrew's blog, The Antipodean.

Bite 77: Christian Eckart - White Painting #606, 1987

White Painting #606, 1987, formica on birch plywood with 23 carat gold

Through Abstraction and the emergence of Conceptual Art, painting, in exploring the medium of painting itself, became reduced to its simplest form - the blank canvas. Here Christian Eckart takes this deconstruction a step further still, questioning the confines of the canvas and its frame, presenting a gold frame as the dominant subject - an art object in itself. The frame even becomes its own composition, shifted against the wall, breaking the confines of the painting. 

The painted surface remains neutral, overly glossed. The gold frame becomes malleable, rising and falling, disrupting the integrity of the rectangle traditionally containing the artwork. 

This frame - not merely a frame, but rather the very concept of a frame, standing-in for all others - becomes a metaphor for the ability of art to reach beyond its confines, to touch the viewer. If they will let it.

On exhibition in the show Color and Form at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, Los Angeles.

Bite 76: Paul Nicklen - Leopard Seal, Antarctica, 2006

Leopard Seal, Antarctica, 2006 (National Geographic)

Photographing below the ice in sub-zero temperatures in Antarctica, nature and wildlife photographer Paul Nicklen was confronted by a large leopard seal. An animal with few natural predators and being potentially highly dangerous towards humans, Nicklen was fearful for his life when the creature approached him.

What commenced however was a never-before-seen encounter with a little-known animal, resulting in award-winning images captured in the most extreme of circumstances.

The leopard seal, instead of killing Nicklen, as it could easily have, proceeded to collect animals to 'aid' the photographer, treating him as a creature in need. It would leave, kill a small animal, bring it back and parade it before him. This misunderstood animal is revealed then as having a very different side to its fearsome reputation.

The series is currently on view in the exhibition Extreme Exposure at The Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles.

Bite 75: Roberto Matta - Burn, Baby, Burn, 1965-66

Burn, Baby, Burn, 1965-66, oil on canvas, 298 x 981 cm

A key work of peripatetic Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta, Burn, Baby, Burn was created following the violence of the Vietnam War and the 1965 Watts Race riots in Los Angeles. The title refers to the phrase coined by a radio DJ which was shouted by rioters in the streets of LA in anger over continued racial discrimination and police brutality.

A monumental and visceral response to the destructiveness of human beings, in the tradition of Picasso's Guernica, this epic work features Matta's characteristic 'webs' of paint across the canvas, which he referred to as  “psychological morphologies” or “inscapes”. Futuristic and mechanical, the violent abstraction of the piece combined with bright contrasting colours and heavy grays, grips the viewers attention, dragging them throughout the work. 

Catalytic to Abstract Expressionism, Burn, Baby, Burn uses the scale of the canvas and Surrealist techniques to demand a response from the viewer. There is no realistic figuration to tie the atmospheric composition down. Instead it appears to change before you as strange objects and figures - or rather non-objects and non-figures - advance and recede, Matta's unique use of line and colour giving the illusion of depth.

To sit before a Matta work is to get lost in a whole new universe. In this case it is one in which atrocities are abundant and hope is only in the distance. This 'universe' is very much our own world.

Currently in the Art of the Americas Building at LACMA, Los Angeles.

Bite 74: Richard Serra - Sequence, 2006

Sequence, 2006, steel

Two colossal rusted metal 'S's stand within each other, filling the room.

Moving between the tall metal sheets the body is enveloped, metal towering above and around. Your whole body is affected as you move through and around the work. It appears to change as you move, the tilt of the red metal bearing down on you. Walking into the work, getting lost within it, it becomes a room itself. You lose your sense of direction as it twists and you proceed deeper into its recesses. 

A metal 'canyon', mimicking nature, its edges converge and diverge with resultant changes in light and shade, as the work moves around you and you around it, almost appearing to breathe. 

In the centre at each end of the shape you are fully contained within the work, giving the illusion of being trapped, no visible escape - yet it comforts and relaxes, solid and open.

Moving again into the other end comes deja vu for a moment as you come to another hollow before leaving the work, still not fully able to grasp its shape in totality. 

This is not a work to be seen, but rather to be experienced, in the fullest sense of the word.

Installed in the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, Los Angeles.

Links:

YouTube: Richard Serra at MoMA

LACMA Blog

On the Road

“What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

                                                              - Jack Kerouac 

I'm going on the road. I leave in 112 hours. Qantas to LA, around SoCal and on to NYC, then London and the rest of Europe. 

I am busy with packing up our flat and good-byes this week, so the daily element of the blog will be on hold until next Monday (14 March).

By then I will be half-way around the world.

Bite 73: Edward Ruscha - Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966

Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, artist's book (above: concertina, below: detail)

"The images, taken during the day, capture only the facades of the buildings. Ignorance is given to cars or people, both of which are often cut in half between separate exposures. The imperfections of matching the facades are cracks along Ruscha’s drive. Through these cracks we find Ruscha, not such an anonymous author after all. Splitting cars in two, and mismatching facades we become keenly aware of the passage of time. The facades of buildings may appear as stage sets but they are active points on other itineraries, anticipating future and past narratives."

                                                                        - Chris Balaschak

In a literal survey of the Sunset Strip, LA Ruscha mounted a camera to the back of a pick-up truck, photographed every building on the street, on both sides, and pasted the resulting photographs together, one side above, the other below, with building numbers indicated beneath each image.

An exercise in arbitrariness, this small but ground-breaking accordion artist's book presents what would normally be a topographical study - photographs of an entire street - as an artwork. An archiving of a street lived by the artist, this early 'Street View' is a dead pan, thorough exploration, of the landscape of a repeated journey.

Bite 72: Louise Bourgeois & Alex Van Gelder - Armed Forces, 2010

Louise Bourgeois, 2010, from the series Armed Forces

Utilising the talents of photographer Alex Van Gelder, Louise Bourgeois presents her hands - essential tools in the creation of her sculpture - as works of art in themselves. Sinewy and wrinkled, aged and used, yet also very much alive, these hands are fulled with personality and the evidence of a life fully lived. 

Photographed at the invitation of Bourgeois in her New York townhouse over the last year of her life, Van Gelder beautifully composes and lights Bourgeois's hands against a stark black background emphasising the physicality of her artistic production and her lived philosophy of art and life. Here Louise Bourgeois becomes a sculpture herself.

Currently showing at Hauser & Wirth Zürich.

Bite 71: Fernando Ortega - N. Clavipes Meets S. Erard, Movement 5, 2008

N. Clavipes Meets S. Erard, Movement 5, 2008, photographic print, 52 x 34 cm

The only strings on this silent harp are from a spider who, with the artists insistence, has made the instrument its home. With associations of the heavenly and the decaying combined, the 'harp' becomes a surrealist object dealing with temporality and contradiction. The series, in 6 'movements', acts as a kind of visual symphony, the arachnid creating its own seemingly chance orchestration, as it moves around the frame building a web of 'strings'.

Featured in the exhibition All of This and Nothing at Hammer Gallery, Los Angeles.

Bite 70: Jorge Macchi - Monoblock, 2003

Monoblock, 2003, newsprint paper, 93 x 73 cm

The obituary pages of several newspapers are presented on the wall, layered one on the other. All text has been removed, rendering the pages into abstract grids with crosses and crucifixes above vacant spaces. 

Out of context these symbols stand obsolete, yet redolent in meaning and mystery. The gaps speak mutely of lives lived and lost, families grieving, funerals held. 

The focus here is on the mundanity of 'everyday' newspaper obituaries. Passed through looking for the arts section or the classifieds, they are a cataloging of death; the brutal fact of mortality carefully contained, hidden in the back. 

Here framed, no longer displaying 'only' strangers, we can imagine the deaths of our own family members, friends - even ourselves - succinctly described and placed beneath a religious symbol, neatly packaged, soon to be yesterday's news.


Featured in the exhibition All of This and Nothing at Hammer Gallery, Los Angeles.

Bite 69: Jorge Macchi - Parallel Lives, 1998

Parallel Lives, 1998, two glass mirrors, 60 x 80 cm each

Two mirrors. One cracked with a hammer and nail, the other painstakingly chiseled to be identical to the first. An abstract pattern, random and coincidental, yet carefully crafted. A unique moment facsimiled - one a reflective representation of the other cracked reflection (but which is which?). One taking moments, the other hours, to create.

This is a conflation of destruction and creation - destruction as creation and vice versa.


Featured in the exhibition All of This and Nothing at Hammer Gallery, Los Angeles.

Bite 68: James Rosenquist - I Love You With My Ford, 1961

I Love You With My Ford, 1961, oil on canvas, 210 x 238 cm

“When I copied a 1940s spaghetti illustration, I had to ask myself, why am I doing this? I didn’t honestly know. It was just an instinct about images as pure form… in a sense the spaghetti is like an abstract expressionist painting. De Kooning loved it. He said it was sexy.”

                                                                                   - James Rosenquist

Originally an advertising billboard painter, Rosenquist applied his style and skill to create equally monumental anti-advertising images, combining images and icons to dissect mass-media and the mechanisations of advertising imagery.

The grill of a Ford. A woman opening her mouth sensually. A close-up of spaghetti. What do these three disparate images have in common? 

All used to sell commodities they are 'zoomed in' on to remove their contexts, becoming abstract vignettes of consumer culture. Icons, of sorts, of the American Dream, absurdly combined, tinged with sexuality - auto-erotic, carnal, and gastronomic desires (all tapped into through advertising), with the spaghetti coming alive as snakes, in close-up vibrant colour.

Bite 67: Jasper Johns - Three Flags, 1958

Three Flags, 1958, encaustic on canvas, 78 x 116 x 13 cm

One flags sits in front of another which sits in front of another; the Stars-and-Stripes in reverse perspective, flat and painterly while simultaneously sculptural (sitting out from the wall) and 'pure' appropriation. This is not the flag itself but rather the reference of a reference of the flag of the United States of America - a monument to the flag as simulacra.

Where does painting cease to be painting? And when does a symbol, from overuse and misappropiation, become meaningless?

This 'flag' does not symbolise patriotism, freedom or liberty. It is instead an open question; the Stars-and-Stripes becoming conceptual art.

Bite 66: Ford Madox Brown - The Last of England, 1855

The Last of England, 1855, oil on panel, 83 x 75 cm

A baby clutches its mother's hand. The mother in turn holds tight to her husband's. He holds his hand to his chest. Lost in anxious thought they gaze uncertainly toward their future: Australia, many months travel ahead of them. The White Cliffs of Dover, England, are behind them. They struggle to leave.

Ford Madox Brown, in one of his most successful paintings, brings the small yet momentous moment between emigrants leaving their home, probably for good, to the viewer with profound and touching intimacy. The entire circular composition is centred on the couple and their child - only evidenced by a small hand. We feel their fear and apprehension, the mystery of the unknown, of what must now surely come.

Brown states, "To ensure the peculiar look of light all round which objects have on a dull day at sea, it was painted for the most part in the open air on dull days."

More brightly lit the woman's face is the key here. Her heart is still with her home, she has great uncertainty and fear for her child, and her husband. Taking hold of his hand she offers support as much as needing it. She realises that she must work to keep them together in their great voyage. The stiffly blowing ribbon, her firm lips and hard-set eyes attest to her strength. We see this is a strong-willed woman with determination, as well as fear, in her eyes. 

My grandmother emigrated from Yorkshire to Australia many decades ago. In two weeks I will retrace that journey, in a way, returning from New Zealand to England, where all my grandparents were born.

Bite 65: Kegan Fisher - Earthquake, 2006

Earthquake, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 213 x 152 cm

Christchurch, New Zealand has been torn apart again by a devastating earthquake. This time dozens have died.  The total effect and lives lost is yet to be determined. It is, however, no doubt, New Zealand's worst disaster in over 30 years.

My thoughts are completely with the people of Christchurch at the moment. I can only imagine the horror of the earth beneath your feet continually shaking from the quake and its aftershocks. We will never forget this day.

Bite 64: Richard Avedon - Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, 1963

Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, Poets, New York, December 30, 1963

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York..."

                                                                - Allen Ginsberg, Howl

Bite 63: Duane Michals - The Illuminated Man, 1968

“How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.”

                                                                      - Duane Michals

Today is Duane Michal's 79th birthday. 

Bite 62: J. W. Black - Walt Whitman, c. 1860

"Whitman late in his life identified the date of this photo as between 1845 and 1850, but no one has agreed with him; Dr. Bucke guessed 1856, but most estimates have been a later date. Seeing this photo late in his life, Whitman exclaimed, "How shaggy! looks like a returned Californian, out of the mines, or Coloradoan," but he was fascinated with "the expression of benignity" that shone through, though he felt "such benignity, such sweetness, such satisfiedness - ” it does not belong. I know it often appears - ” but that's the trick of the camera, the photographer." Whitman called it his "young man" picture ("when did I not look old? At twenty-five or twenty-six they used already to remark it"), and claimed "it is me, me, un formed, undeveloped - ”hits off phases not common in my photos." He described his physique at the time: "I was very much slenderer then: weighed from one hundred and fifty-five to one hundred and sixty-five pounds: had kept that weight for about thirty years: then got heavier." Whitman was amused by the clothing - "how natural the clothes! . . . the suit was a beautiful misfit, as usual, eh?" - and he was impressed with "its calm don't-care-a-damnativeness - ”its go-to-hell-and-find-outativeness: it has that air strong, yet is not impertinent: defiant: yet it is genial." Whitman was mystified by this portrait - ”he began calling it "the mysterious photograph" - ”when he first saw it in 1889: "When it could have been taken - ”by whom - ”where - ”I cannot even guess. . . . it's a devilish, tantalizing mystery. . . .""

                                                                        -  The Walt Whitman Archive

Bite 61: Shigeyuki Kihara - Sina Ma Tuna: Sina and Her Eel, 2003

Sina Ma Tuna: Sina and Her Eel, 2003

In the series Vavau - Tales from ancient Samoa Shigeyuki Kihara mimics the tradition of velvet painting through photography and self-portraiture. “Where the velvet painters are notorious for portraying Pacific people from the colonial gaze, what I do is re-occupy that gaze" she says. "I come from a point of view from the insider.” 

The work Sina Ma Tuna: Sina and Her Eel  depicts Kihara in the role of Sina from the traditional Samoan myth ‘Sina and the Eel’, in which the origins of the coconut are explained. After being attacked by the eel some men kill it and, in mourning, Sina buries the head of the eel. The head then grows into the first coconut tree. 

Kihara, in this image, has chosen to portray the grieving Sina with her head turned, out of the blackness, toward the viewer. Holding up the eel, the object of her loss, with blood running down her arm, the viewer is invited into her pain. 

One possible interpretation of this re-enactment, in relation to gender performance and the ambiguity surrounding the ‘third gender’, would see the eel as a phallic symbol. While society expects her to grieve the loss of her masculinity Kihara is ironically pointing out that there is in fact nothing to grieve: she is both male and female, breaking the binary. Again Kihara is challenging her own marginalisation and societal categorisations about who she is and how her body should be portrayed. Through the image of a beautiful grieving ‘dusky maiden’ Kihara is confronting the expectation that she has anything to grieve or feel sorry for at all. On the contrary, it is others who should be feeling sorry. 

As Jim Vivieaere puts it “‘Who am I, what am I, and what are you?' are questions that will never haunt or torment Kihara.” But, these certainly are questions that Kihara wants to confront us, and our colonial legacy, with. It is this myriad of questions, challenges, ambiguities and compromising of binaries, throughout Kihara’s work, that never leaves the viewer without feeling challenged.

Sources:

Absolutearts.com

C. Vercoe, “The Many Faces of Paradise” in Paradise Now: Contemporary Art from the Pacific (Auckland: David Bateman Ltd., 2004), 46.

J. Vivieaere, Exhibition Catalogue for Shigeyuki Kihara: In the manner of a woman. Sherman Galleries, 2005. 

Bite 60: Shigeyuki Kihara - My Samoan Girl, 2004-5

My Samoan Girl, 2004-5

In a similar vein to the Fa'afafine work, My Samoan Girl also utilises a mimicry of traditional studio portraiture of the late 19th century. 

Colonial portraiture came in many forms but one ongoing theme in the representation of the exotic female was one of ownership. As the historian Anne Maxwell points out “[s]uch images endowed indigenous peoples with the romantic characteristics associated with renewal, while portraying them as children in need of tutelage and protection.” This ‘Samoan girl’ then is presented just as Kihara’s ancestors would have been: objectified, sexual, passive, obedient, in need of direction and protection and thus ownership. 

The way that her arms are held up makes it clear that she is being asked to do this by the photographer. Her comfort is not taken into consideration and her identity is not what is being photographed. She is merely an exotic artefact holding another exotic artefact. The surrounding plants heighten the feeling of the exotic expected in such images. “That mainstream culture has periodically expressed desire for subaltern art has never obligated anyone to deal with subaltern peoples as human beings, compatriots, or artists. That is, perhaps, until now,” writes post-colonial theorist Coco Fusco. 

The colonial assumes her need for ownership. But for now her image will do; for is not photography another form of ownership? – a simulation of possession – a way to have your ‘Samoan girl’ in your pocket for whenever needed. In contrast to her stance in the triptych, in My Samoan Girl Kihara portrays a girl vulnerable and passive; looking slightly off to the left one imagines that she is picturing her island paradise, or perhaps her long-lost colonial lover.

Sources:

A. Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibition (Leicester: Leicester University, 2000), 165.

C. Fusco, English is Broken Here (New York: New Press, 1995), 28.

Bite 59: Shigeyuki Kihara - Fa’afafine: In the Manner of A Woman, 2004-5

Fa’afafine: In the Manner of A Woman, 2004-5

The colonisation of Samoa coincided almost exactly with the announcement of the invention of photography in the early 19th century. By the 1850’s photographers were travelling from Europe all over the world with anthropological aims to capture through photography a cultural ‘Other’ whom they saw as exotic and savage, bringing back the images for study and sale within a number of contexts. Over time Samoa began to be imaged in, as academic Alison Nordstrom puts it, “a few manageable and marketable clichés. These clichés consistently presented Samoans as primitive types inhabiting an unchanging Eden that did not participate in the Western world of technology, progress and time.” 

These clichés included that of the South Sea Belle or Dusky Maiden, the stereotype of a sexually available exotic female body. Images were sold as exotic postcards and pornography, disconnecting the photographic representations from the identities of their subjects. As artist Shigeyuki Kihara explains: “There [were] more [other] people photographing Samoans than Samoans photographing themselves.” As such Samoan identities were defined not by Samoans but by the voyeuristic colonial gaze. A gaze that was largely white, straight and male. 

In the triptych Fa’afafine: In the Manner of A Woman Samoan-born, Auckland and Sydney based Shigeyuki Kihara takes on the stereotype of the ‘dusky maiden’ as a way of criticizing and reconstructing the colonial gaze. Kihara herself had relatives who posed in such 19th century portraits and by choosing to photograph herself in the role of the ‘dusky maiden’ she is able to pay homage to her ancestors while simultaneously examining the hurtful legacy of colonial portraiture. By the time photography arrived in Samoa, Samoan people were already dressing in Western clothing, yet when they were invited into the studio they were often asked to strip nude so they would more fully embody the European fictional idea of the exotic ‘noble savage’.

This confronting series portrays Kihara in three states of undress posing in a traditional Western art historically influenced reclining pose. The third image disrupts the viewer’s expectations further by challenging the Western classifications of male/female gender. Kihara herself identifies as fa'afafine, “a liminal gender that encapsulates both a male and a female gender," as Kihara explains it. It takes a moment for the viewer to see the difference between the two fully nude figures. When one does, in viewing the final image, the confrontation is complete. She goes on to say, “I feel that portraying man and woman is a responsibility of mine because I am a manifestation of both.” 

A parallel is made here between the ‘construction’ of her body to match her gender identity and the highlighting of the social construction of the stereotyped native belle. The double meaning of the title references this further. In the manner of a woman: fa’afafine, and, in the manner of a woman: exotic beauty. 

Here we have a Samoan Olympia. And just as with the painting by Manet her body may be nude but she is not as vulnerable as this would suggest. Kihara is not merely an object for male delectation. Instead she is upright and confident, challenging and reoccupying the white male gaze. Her pluralities heighten this confrontation with the viewer further. Three people stare out at us from what we are tricked into imagining is three period photographs (which in reality were photographed on a digital camera). 

The extraordinarily direct gaze is the dead give away though (even more so perhaps than the phallus) that these images are distinctly post-colonial and very much contemporary. For this ‘native belle’ is no passive exotic subject as her ancestors were. She is in on it: the subject, the photographer, the viewer herself in one. In this way she has become the (de)coloniser of her own body. As Kihara herself puts it “'the Fa`a fafine work questions the western classification of races, gender and sexuality. I can never fit into them, but at the same time I ask myself – are they worth fitting into?”

Sources:

Alison Nordstrom, “Persistent Images”, Continuum: The Australian Journal of media & Culture vol. 6 no. 2 (1991), 1.

Alison Nordstrom, “Paradise Recycled: Photographs of Samoa in Changing Contexts”, The Journal of the Society for Photographic Education, vol. 28, no. 3 (1991-92): 15.

Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust

Assembling Bodies 

Sarah Robins interviewing Kihara

Bite 58: Barnett Newman - Broken Obelisk, 1963-9

Broken Obelisk, 1963-9, Cor-Ten steel, 750 x 319 x 319 cm

The top of a broken off obelisk 'kisses' the top of a pyramid. Both symbols from Egyptian art, they are borrowed here, combined in a kind of 'surrealist' object, becoming a monument to nothing, a monument to everything, a monument to monuments themselves. 

The point of meeting in the work - mathematical triangles barely touching yet one mass holding up the other - creates a sense of tension, ambiguity in an otherwise solid object. But this 'solidity' is an illusion. The work, in its abstraction and lack of apparent purpose tends to float - the concept as well as the obelisk itself, uprooted from the ground. 

Inverted and aimless, this monument speaks not of grand ambitions or successful lives lived, but rather of unfulfillment, of banality and futility.

It explores similar themes to Steve Woodward's sculpture Step Touch Stone.

In the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Bite 57: Andrew Wyeth - Christina's World, 1948

Christina's World, 1948, tempura on gessoed panel, 82 x 121 cm

One of the most popular works in the permanent MoMA collection (although not necessarily so highly-acclaimed among academics), Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth can be seen as somewhat against the grain of the Modernism of the period. 

Considered an example of 'Magic Realism', each hair and blade of grass is minutely defined and the entire scene is imbued with a dense ambiguous quality, a sense of impending events. A portrait of the artist's neighbour who was crippled by polio, she "was limited physically but by no means spiritually." As Wyeth explained, "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless." 

This rather melancholic work none-the-less speaks of a kind of hopelessness. The girl, face turned from the viewer, gazes toward a house in the distance, dark clouds hovering above. The overall impression is that she will never make it back there, her paralyzed legs and downtrodden spirit withholding her from anything she may have once dreamed of becoming.

In the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Bite 56: Lucio Fontana - Spatial Concept: Expectations, 1959



Spatial Concept: Expectations, 1959, synthetic polymer paint on slashed burlap, 100 x 82 cm



Q: By slashing the canvas does the artist turn this painting into a sculpture?


In the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Bite 55: Jackson Pollock - Full Fathom Five, 1947

Full Fathom Five, 1947, oil on canvas with nails, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, etc., 129 x 76 cm 

"Imagine a man brought up from birth in a white cell so that he has never seen anything except the growth of his own body. And then imagine that suddenly he is given some sticks and bright paints. If he were a man with an innate sense of balance and colour harmony, he would then, I think, cover the white walls of his cell as Pollock has painted his canvases. He would want to express his ideas and feelings about growth, time, energy, death, but he would lack any vocabulary of seen or remembered visual images with which to do so. He would have nothing more than the gestures he could discover through the act of applying his coloured marks to his white walls. These gestures might be passionate and frenzied but to us they could mean no more than the spectacle of a deaf mute trying to talk."

                                                                                      - John Berger, 1958


In the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.


Source:
John Berger, Selected Essays, (ed. Geoff Dyer), Vintage, 2001.