The Easel

4th August 2020

Zanele Muholi: Art and activism

Hannah Abel-Hirsch | British Journal of Photography | 28th July 2020

Post-apartheid South Africa has significant violence against the black LGBTQ community. Muholi confronts this reality with portrait photography that is widely acclaimed for its beauty and impact. What gives the work its distinction is its duality – simultaneously “mourning and celebrating” black lives. “Most confrontations begin with our faces. And to face the camera is … to make yourself both vulnerable and powerful at once.”

Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971

Musa Meyer | Hauser and Wirth | 30th July 2020

Guston’s famous switch from abstraction to figuration in 1970, as told by his daughter. After 20 years, abstract expressionism was still commercially successful but he felt it was accompanied by “overwhelming apathy”. His 1970 exhibition greatly divided opinion, one critic describing the cartoonish figures as “Ku Klux Komix”. That critic later recanted, admitting that Guston had given memorable form to unhappy America’s “sense of alienation, post traumatic emptiness”.

The eerie experience of visiting a socially distanced art gallery

Ravi Ghosh | Prospect | 1st August 2020

Impatient for art galleries to re-open, this writer shares his misgivings when he finally gets to visit. Instead of enjoying their “alluring emptiness” he is filled with doubt. “Everyone is masked, and we avoid each other like repelling magnets. We can’t see each other’s smiles under the face coverings, which creates an air of imagined stand-offishness”. Was this visit a mistake? Rather than supportive, has he been “foolish and selfish”? (He did enjoy the art.)

We can see the true face of Van Eyck Lamb of God after latest restoration

Jennifer Ouellette | Ars Technica | 30th July 2020

Some may think this piece too technical. For others, it provides a great example of how science aids art history. Van Eyck’s famous Ghent Altarpiece became unexpectedly controversial last year when, at the center of the work, restoration uncovered a human-looking lamb. In fact, three versions of the lamb were found, using advanced X-ray analysis together with “deep neural-network algorithms”. Now art historians are pondering – what was Van Eyck thinking?

How Cancel Culture Made Us Forget the Art of Interpretation

Nina Power | ArtReview | 30th July 2020

Is ‘cancel culture’ a means of achieving social justice or just mob intimidation? ‘Cancelling’ can be framed as a form of censorship, based on a notion of the self “in need of permanent protection.” It deprives us of different perspectives, including art that demonstrates “the absurdity of the status quo”. Fair criticisms. The push back, of course, is that cancellation is sometimes the only tool available for needed social change.

Are sculpture parks having a moment in the sun?

Elizavetta Brandon | Smithsonian.com | 17th July 2020

An appreciation of sculpture parks. Greater diversity of materials has encouraged greater ambition in sculpture. Moving outdoors was logical. Artists relish the challenge of the interplay of light, materials and location. Civic authorities and museums have discovered the popularity of sculpture parks as “outdoor living rooms”. Just the thing when art needs “to be decentralized and dispersed”.  More images are here.

South Africa Is Fast Becoming The African Continent’s Art And Design Capital

Y-Jean Mun-Desalle | Forbes | 27th July 2020

Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum, when it opened in 2017, was Africa’s largest contemporary art space. Three years on, has there been the hoped-for growth in opportunities for art in Africa? Art fairs and galleries are reportedly healthy, the market is becoming “more professional” and African art is more visible internationally. Whether Cape Town is the continent’s “art hub” perhaps stretches what otherwise seems well-placed optimism.

28th July 2020

The Japanese-American Sculptor Who, Despite Persecution, Made Her Mark

Thessaly La Force | The New York Times | 20th July 2020

Asawa’s “rediscovery” was just over a decade ago, yet she is now regarded as a great sculptor. A student visit to Mexico introduced her to weaving techniques that later re-emerged as woven wire sculptures. She exhibited in the 1950’s but slipped off the artworld radar. Of her art career Asawa said “Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.”

Artist Bisa Butler stitches together the African American experience

Liz Logan | Smithsonian.com | 24th July 2020

Quilting has deep roots in African American history. Butler has radically extended that tradition by taking it into portraiture, a genre with its own cultural connotations. Her “hybridized” works of appliqué and painting, all about black identity, resonate with this #BLM moment. For a relatively new artist, her works are receiving unusually widespread coverage. Images are here and video (6 min) here.

Bill Brandt/Henry Moore, The Hepworth Wakefield review – a matter of perception

Katherine Waters | the arts desk | 3rd March 2020

Brandt, a photographer, and Moore, a sculptor, both recorded London during WW2, working independently but often on similar subjects. Moore’s sketches have a “mythical” quality but Brandt’s developing and cropping techniques made his images equally subjective. There is no hierarchy between these artforms says one critic, “both artists seem to have been aiming for the same semi-abstract goal.”

The greats outdoors: how Caspar David Friedrich searched the German landscape for reflections of his soul

Michael Prodger | New Statesman | 22nd July 2020

The German Romantics saw God reflected in nature but man, somehow separate from nature, was unable to grasp the divine. The ensuing “longing” was the animating emotion of that movement and Friedrich one of its great exponents. The symbols he used – “figures staring into infinity … empty shores” are clear enough although the works are not easily understood. Says one “they are vague, even in his soul”.

To Bear Witness: Real Talk about White Supremacy in Art Museums Today

Kelli Morgan | Burnaway | 24th July 2020

A confronting essay based on the writer’s curatorial experience. American art museums (like many others, surely) have internal cultures that prioritise white male art. Consequently, people of colour tend not to visit. Few [US] institutions have an “honest display of the diverse array of artists working throughout the twentieth century” Making museums truly inclusive requires institutional values that “decenters white people”.

‘Unflinching humanity’ – how photographer Paul Fusco united an America in pain

Sean O’Hagan | The Guardian | 21st July 2020

Fusco was invited into Magnum Photo in 1973, having built a reputation as a photojournalist. His signature style highlighted the human side of major social events – AIDS sufferers, destitute miners, the population affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Most famously he recorded the crowds witnessing the 1968 funeral train of Robert Kennedy – “the silent, staring faces a testimony to a dream not so much deferred as destroyed”.

What Is Lost With the Closing of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 23rd July 2020

The announced merger of the “deeply influential” Gavin Brown’s Enterprise into the “semi-mega” Gladstone Gallery has led to some amount of wailing. Mourning the loss of an innovative gallery? Apprehension that widespread gallery mergers could rob the art world of its air of romance? Says Gavin Brown, “there needs to be something more … to imagine [galleries] can all start again with business as usual is a collective delusion.”

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