Mona Lisa was Pregnant!

According to an article in the Daily Bulletin by Angela Doland of the Associated Press, Tursday, September 28, researchers believe Mona Lisa was probably either pregnant or had just given birth. Infrared reflectography has reavealed evidence of a gauze veil around her which had darkened over the years, making it hard to distinguish. This veil, which blends into the dress, is what gives the impression that she had her hair down while she actually has most of her hair pinned back.

This new evidence supports art historians' hypothesis of why the Mona Lisa was painted. Menu, chief of the reasearch department at the French Museums' Centre for Research noted the belief that "Giocondo asked for a painting of his wife to celebrate the birth of his second son." Traditionally, the Mona Lisa is thought to be a painting of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Gioconda and was begun in 1503. The painting is on display in the Louvre under the French version of her married name, La Joconde.

Doland ends the article noting, "No scientific reasearch will ever figure out exactly what Leonardo was trying to convey, or why exactly we was smiling. New Discoveries 'don't take away the mystery,' Menu said. "On the contrary, they merely add another layer to the meaning, which only makes things more interesting."

Unfortunately, I was not able to locate a link to the actual article itself; however, if anyone would like to look it up, this was the Thursday, September 28, 2006 issue of the Daily Bulletin, with paper delivery in the Inland Empire area around Chaffey. The auther was Angela Doland and she is/was with the Associated Press.

This is an excellent example of how science in the pursuit of history enriches our understanding of a work of art. Studying art, at least what art is about, can be a truly interdisciplinary field. As one area progresses, researchers are able to delve deeper into each puzzel of time and life that is captured in a work of art. We may never know exactly why Mona Lisa was smiling; but perhaps from what we know of today's mothers, we can imagine one reason or another that helps us appreciate what this painting is.

Administrator Addition: This article was printed in many papers today. Here is a link to the full article in the Chicago Tribune.
- John

Leaving Aztlan and Looking Forward

In this week's issue of The Breeze.

Leaving Aztlan And Looking Forward

By Julie Mason
President, Chaffey Art History Association

Chicano Art has always contained political undertones in the forms of murals and graphic arts … until now. The new exhibit at the Wignall Museum, Leaving Aztlan, displays mixed medium pieces by artists who are striving to break the stereotypes and cultural discriminations against “Chicanas/os” and “Latinas/os.”

Since the Chicano Art movement during the 1970s, Art Historians and critics have solely defined these groups of artists in a “homogenous ‘style’, defined solely in culturally specific terms”, as described by Kaytie Johnson, the guest curator. “This new generation of artists are mapping out new and important terrain as their work forces us to question, more than ever before, what it means to label work as ‘Chicana/o’ or ‘Latina/o’ art, as well as what constitutes that relationship between ethnicity and artistic production.”

This struggle with finding an independent identity is painfully evident in the show. The piece entitled Salon de Ilegals by Carlos Fresquez features a faceless family grasping onto one another fleeing city and countryside in search for a place to belong. The black silhouettes of the small family create a bold contrast against the pastels and lively colors on the canvases. The family has no where to go, no where to blend in, no where to belong. They have no individualistic qualities; they’re seeking something in this land of the “American dream.”

As all participants of various art movements have come to realize, in order to move forward, you must look to the past. By embracing these diverse artistic practices, this new generation of artists defined as “Chicano” must break the ties that are so relevant in the art of their predecessors.

Leaving Aztlan is one of the many Chicano art displays in the Los Angeles / San Bernardino areas. Olvera Street, on North Alameda in Los Angeles, is rich in living Chicano history and culture. The beauty of a culture cannot be defined by art mediums, and most of all, not by the stereotypes that are made based off those productions of art. It can only be defined by the heart and soul of the people, and by embracing the diversity.

Recent favorite piece of art from Leaving Aztlan

I saw this picture by Christina Fernandez in Leaving Aztlan display at the Wignall Museum. For one reason or another few pieces in the collection really grabbed my attention when I visited the museum, but this one really stood out to me.

I got a chance to briefly speak with the photographer, also a photography professor at another community college in the LA area, about this picture. It was a time laps picture (or whatever it is called when the photo is taken over a short period of time rather than simply once and quickly) and was taken in East LA. I mentioned how I liked the contrast in it. That was one of the things that Fernandez liked about it too. She also liked the gooey look of the graffiti and the domestic activity of the laundromat.

The photo looks into a laundromat through the graffiti marked doors of a laundromat. Graffiti often brings to mind the idea of a harsh world, one with gangs and crime, low income, and people living street life. The doors are both guards and entry–ways into another world, one of warmth. Inside the laundromat, there is warmth, comfort, and security. The warmth is expressed in a number of ways. The lighting and color give a general sense of warmth. The activity of doing laundry is also a warm, home-like activity that evokes a sense of comfort and security. Adding to this are the plants, life that is supported inside the building. Reminding one that not all is this way are the cold, utilitarian steel appliances where the cold, harsh reality that meets the doors is not entirely forgotten inside. Only one person is shown in a lapsed blur of activity, the only movement in the still world that Fernandez has captured. On the top of the right-hand door is a small, upside-down American flag. It is American, but it is not as it was meant to be.

Because I am intrigued with work that looks at the contrast between a rougher way of life and a simpler or easier one, I love Fernandez photographed this at the glass doors of the laundromat. I think that, being a passageway between two sides, the doors really enhance the sense of contrast the she has portrayed. There are so many doors in life that are like that, some we can see through and some we can’t. If we can see though different doors, we can know more about what kind of world we are in, whether we should walk through them, and sometimes what kind of places others have come from.

EM

The Artist in Words

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."

Shutterbugs

For all of you shutterbugs out there, in October both the Norton Simon Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be opening exhibitions highlighting aspects of their permanent photography collections.

The Collectible Moment: Photographs in the Norton Simon Museum

October 13, 2006 - February 26, 2007

The Collectible Moment presents, for the first time ever, a survey of the Norton Simon Museum’s photography collection, which not only includes important prints by master photographers Ansel Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston, but also modern and experimental prints by Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Judy Dater, Benedict J. Fernandez, Betty Hahn, Robert Heinecken, Anthony Hernandez, Kenneth Josephson, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Edmond Teske and Minor White. Approximately 145 works by 100 historical and modern photographers will be on view ...

Long Exposures: Contemporary Photo Essays from the Permanent Collection

October 12, 2006 – January 7, 2007

Long Exposures is an exhibition of contemporary photo essayists organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will incorporate works drawn exclusively from the Photography department's permanent collection. The exhibition explores varying themes of humanistic or environmental conversion, transition, and upheaval, and reflects a varied range of conceptual, formal, and technical approaches prominent in the genre from the 1990's to the present, with works from six artists - Simon Norfolk, Anne Fishbein, Nic Nicosia, Vincent Cianni, Andrew Freeman, and Sant Khalsa - who have established themselves as innovative and influential visual voices of the contemporary photo narrative.


UPDATE: one more...

Photography Unbound

Bob Markovich, the supervisor of Chaffey College's photo lab, will be participating in the Photography Unbound exhibition at Cal State University, San Bernardino in the Robert V. Fullerton Museum. The show opens September 30 with a reception from 5:00 to 7:00 PM and closes December 30.

Chaffey Art Movie Nights

The first Movie Night is this Thursday, September 21, at 6:00 PM at Chaffey College in room VSS-108. Join us for a free movie, snacks and discussion. This week we will be touching on issues of censorship with the classic short film Un Chien Andalou and the feature film V for Vendetta. For more info visit the CAHA website. Click on image below to enlarge poster.

The Artist in Words

Jackson Pollock responding to the question: How do you know when you're finished with a painting?

"How do you know when you're finished making love?"

Olmec Tablet Found in 1999; Possibly Inscribed with Oldest Writing in the Americas

In 1999 a tablet was discovered by road builders at Cascajal, Veracruz, approximately a mile from the Olmec site of San Lorenzo. The serpentine, or greenstone, tablet is inscribed with 62 characters, 29 of which are distinct. Archaeologists have dated the tablet to between 1000 and 900 BCE.

Although there is some skepticism over the exact date of the tablet, due to the tablet's original location not being known, archaeologists were able to use pottery shards excavated at the site and stylistic similarities from this period to derive at their early first millennium BCE date. Previously discovered Olmec artifacts with similar individual symbols and characters have been dated to as early as c. 650 BCE. What makes this discovery so important and unique is that the characters on this tablet are arranged in organized rows that points to an association between the symbols. If true, this tablet depicts the oldest known example of writing in the New World.

You might be asking, "But what do they say?" Well, frustratingly, we will likely never know. Unless many more similar examples are discovered, there are not enough characters available for linguists to break the code as was possible with the later Maya hieroglyphic writing system.

Today Maria del Carmen Rodriguez Martinez and Ponciano Ortiz Ceballos of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History published their report of this discovery in the journal Science.

The Olmec civilization of Central America [~1200 to 400 years before the common era (BCE)] may have been the precursor to later complex societies such as the Maya (100 to 600 CE) and Aztec (1200 to 1500 CE), yet unambiguous evidence of earliest Olmec writing is lacking. Rodríguez Martínez et al. (p. 1610; see the news story by Lawler) report the discovery of a stone block from Veracruz, Mexico, inscribed with an unknown system of writing. Taken from a gravel quarry, the block has been dated to the first millennium CE [I assume this is a typing error and should be BCE. -John], which is earlier than previous finds. The glyphs, still undeciphered, bear similarity to other Olmec imagery, and the pattern is consistent with a system of writing.

There is also an article with images in the Los Angeles Times.

BANKSY Exhibition in LA this Weekend

If you have not heard of Banksy, here is some background from Wikipedia:

Banksy is a world renowned, London-based graffiti artist whose artwork is often political and/or humorous in nature. He has attempted to hide his identity; however, according to The Guardian he is one Robert Banks born in 1974 in Bristol, England. His artwork has appeared throughout London and various cities around the world. His street art which combines graffiti with a distinctive stencilling technique has garnered him underground notoriety and widespread coverage in the mainstream media.

Banksy's Barely Legal will have a three-day showing in Los Angeles this weekend.

The three-day free show titled Barely Legal - and billed as a "vandalised warehouse extravaganza" - has an overall theme of global poverty and injustice.

After much hype and secretive planning, the event opens to the public on Friday following an invitation-only, celebrity launch party.

The organisers have said Cameron Diaz, Colin Farrell and Orlando Bloom are all expected to attend.

They will be treated to a familiar, but in some respects, head-scratching display of graffiti-inspired artwork.

A 37-year old Indian elephant has been painted, from head to tail, in a floral pattern reminiscent of an old fashioned living room or a British pub.

The animal is made to stand in a makeshift living room, complete with sofa, chandelier and decorated with wallpaper in the same pattern.

Banksy, as ever, was not on hand to discuss his creation, but it is understood that the elephant, blending into the background, is meant to represent the big issues in life, such as poverty, that some people choose to ignore.

You also might have caught Banksy's "installation" work at Disneyland last weekend. He placed a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay detainee inside the fence of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride.

Is YouTube a New Form of Art?

Over the last month speculations have been bubbling on YouTube about whether the musings of video-blogger lonelygirl15 were real or a staged production. This week those speculations popped.

During the summer a 16-year-old girl named Bree, home schooled with strict religious parents, and here friend Daniel, who likes Bree, became the most viewed and discussed members of the YouTube community. The series of videos were creatively edited and formed an endearing story arc that made some question their authenticity. Well, it appears the videos are part of something bigger created by a group of yet unnamed filmmakers as an art project. Now in the last week "Bree's" stuffed animals have appeared in their own spin-off series. Bloggers, news reports in New York and Los Angeles, and even Wikipedia have documented these revelations.

Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is less about the creation of these videos and more about the reaction of YouTube viewers to this discovery. They were distraught and upset. They felt foolish and deceived. They were stunned that of the millions of videos posted on YouTube some depicted fictional stories. They seemed to not want to believe this or they were not able to discern between fact and fiction. If it’s in writing, on the radio, television, or Internet it must be true. Right?

The line between entertainment and reality has become very blurred today and for many the difference is indiscernible. We are bombarded daily with commercial images that attempt to conflate fantasy with reality and opinion with fact. Filmmakers give us "docudramas" that are inspired by true events, but the facts are dramatized and fictionalized scenes are added in order to make the story more entertaining. Our televisions give us "Reality TV", which employ staffs of scriptwriters. The one-on-one "confessionals" of reality show contestants are the visual templates for the close-up videos posted on YouTube. We are so accustomed to seeing this, so it must be true. Right? Is it any wonder that so many people have difficulty discerning between fact and fiction.

This is nothing new, of course. Images are a powerful and influential part of human history. Images have been used to educate and inspire the public just as often as they have been used to deceive and manipulate. As an art history professor it should come as no surprise that I believe it is important for everyone to understand the history of images and to think critically about how they play a central role in forming our perception of the world.

Several instances from the modern era came to my mind when I first heard of the lonleygirl15 phenomenon. The first is very well known and is a classic example of how people are willing to accept as "real" information that is packaged in a format that they already are accustomed to perceiving as a factual representation. In the YouTube case this was the personal video diary. In my example it was a radio "news" broadcast. In 1938 Orson Welles broadcast a dramatization of H. G. Wells' classic The War of the Worlds. Thousands believed aliens were actually invading Earth and attacking New Jersey and New York. "The broadcast ... disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems."

Understanding the context of who created something and why it was made is crucial to our ability to interpret its meaning. This is maybe no clearer than in the ubiquitous use and acceptance of photography to document our world. Going back a little further in history an example comes to mind that reminds us that images have always had a high level of subjectivity. In the 1870s Henry Peach Robinson created artistic photographs through combining multiple negatives to create one final image. For one of his most famous images, When the Day's Work is Done (1877), he used six negatives. The end results were very impressive. But, when he later told people how he created these photographs, they were outraged. They felt foolish and deceived. During the short history of this new medium people had come to accept photography as an objective representation of reality. Their naive innocence had been shattered.

In a similar fashion, the fans of lonleygirl15 had desired to perceive the new medium of YouTube as a reality based representation of their world. Their naive innocence has been shattered. Now with open eyes they might begin to notice how many other videos on YouTube are also created for artistic, entertainment, or commercial purposes.

The arts hold an important position in developing our understanding of the world. We must approach our surroundings with a critical eye or we may unwittingly accept anything as reality. The creative potential of YouTube has only begun to be explored by video artists, cinematographers, and performers. I believe this realization will in the end benefit all concerned.

UPDATE: Lonleygirl15, Jessica Rose, on Jay Leno, MTV and NBC News.

L.A. Weekly’s Annual Biennial

Worth checking out.

Choosing the artists wasn’t easy; there are nearly 400 students enrolled in MFA programs around the city — at UCLA, USC, CalArts, Art Center, Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Long Beach and Claremont Graduate University — and many are very talented and deserving. Los Angeles already has a big student exhibition, of course, in the two-part “supersonic” show, which was at Barnsdall Art Center this year. But “supersonic,” though juried, isn’t curated — meaning that the students themselves choose what they want to show, often just one piece. We wanted to focus on fewer artists and give them more space. The monthslong process of looking at art — in studio whenever possible, otherwise via slides, disc or e-mail — was a communications nightmare, but a happy one.

If the theme that emerged from last year’s show was assemblage and atomization, this year it’s good old-fashioned craft — painting, primarily. Concept, yes, but with finish. The artists we’ve chosen are looking to make big statements, and they push their ideas to a sophisticated level of form. They show little in the way of superficial flash and, refreshingly, almost no irony. Coolness does not seem to have occurred to them. These artists are indeed emerging — from years of serious study and work.

So we make no apologies for raiding the art-school cradle. Some of the artists graduated earlier this year and have already found gallery representation; others are young and just beginning to show what they’ve got. All exhibit an impressive commitment to their work and to their futures as working artists. We have no doubt that you will be seeing a lot of them in the years to come. Check out their current work here and in person at the show, “State of Emergence 2006: MFA WMDs,” on display through October 13. Opening party Saturday, September 9, 7 to 11 p.m.; closing party Friday, October 13, 7:30 to 10:30 p.m.

Art Repatriation

We have been hearing a lot lately over issues of art repatriation. I am happy to see American institutions do their part in returning pieces of cultural heritage, which may have unknowingly (or knowingly) been acquired through illegal means, back to their rightful owners. I commend the San Diego Museum of Art for its recent repatriation of a colonial era painting stolen from San Juan Tepemazalco, Mexico.

Some years ago, this spectacular painting of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden was stolen from the little church at San Juan Tepemazalco, a small, tightly knit community located northeast of Mexico City near Zempoala, in the state of Hidalgo.

With two others, the painting promptly disappeared into the murky depths of the international art market, but in 2004, it was located in the collection of the San Diego Museum of Art. Following an intense investigation, the provenance of the art work was confirmed and, under its new director Derrick Cartwright, the museum offered to return the painting, after conservation by the museum at its own expense.

Although the offer of conservation was not taken up, in August 2006, SDMA handed over the painting to Mexican officials in a brief ceremony. Final arrangements are under way for its return to Mexico and the people of Tepemazalco. While it is heartening that this remarkable painting will soon be back in Mexico - one of the few stolen colonial art works to be recovered - the two other art works from Tepemazalco are still missing.

Are All Students Ready?

I just read this article in the New York Times. It isn't actually on an art topic, but relates to a broader issue of education. Are high school graduates prepared for the demands of college-level work? This question has been long debated, but the answers might still be surprising to some. "Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses."