Damage to "The Scream" Possibly Permanent

AP:

Experts fear that theft damage to Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream," one of the world's most famous images, may be too extensive to completely repair, according to a report to be released Friday.

The painting and another Munch masterpiece, "Madonna" were recovered by police in August, two years after they were stolen from Oslo's Munch Museum by masked gunmen in a brazen daylight heist on Aug. 22, 2004. Police have refused to say how they recovered the artworks, or where they had been for the two years.

After extensive study, museum experts are turning over a 200-page assessment to Oslo police, which, among other things, expresses concern about moisture damage to a swath of "The Scream."

Environmental and Ecological Art

In her article Ecoartists: Engaging Communities in a New Metaphor, Patricia Watts discusses the development as well as examples of environmental or ecological art. Through her work as a watershed education coordinator, developing workshops and festivals, Watts has observed, “that art, metaphor and visual experiences, when engaged in our daily environments, can offer a framework for our very own survival.” Environmental restoration may become the essential art of our time.

Ecological art or ecoart came out of the earth-art and land-art movements of the 1960s and 70s. This ecoart movement was particularly influenced by the work of Joseph Beuys whose environmental actions he defined a social sculpture. Ecoart provides a context for environmental education. It is an area where artists become activists, learning and creating in the context of natural and social ecosystems.

One example of how an ecoartist has not only made an impact through the art he made but also through the method he made it is Tennessee artist Gregg Schlanger. He was “commissioned by the Providence, Rhode Island, Office of Cultural Affairs to work in the city's low-income Smith Hill neighborhood on a community-based public art project entitled "Smith Hill Visions, Concrete Dreams.” He set up shop in a house across the street from a crack house and offered to pay kids 14 and old minimum wage to help him create concrete lawn sculptures of endangered animals. Approximately 200 lawn statues were given to local residents to place in their front yards. Watts notes “Schlanger felt that there was an underlying link with the endangered status of the neighborhood itself. He felt that because people in poor communities engage in a constant struggle to survive, those who participated in this project might identify with the animals as metaphors for their own survival in the game or habitat of life.”

Environmental art projects are certainly not limited to government departments. Oxfam America, a non-profit organization with American and international involvement, did a project a few years ago to raise awareness of the importance of the Mekong river in locals’ lives. Their project, My Mekong “encouraged people to articulate their experience of Mekong development through the use of popular and creative media.” This river is of particular importance as rapid economic development and conflict along this important water way threaten its environment, cultures and relationships with other communities, and the livelihoods of the millions.

Oxfam’s six-month project resulted in a exhibit of photos, posters, illustrations, traditional pictographs, woodcarvings, publications, videos and local theater productions carrying a compelling message about the damaging impact that development along the river was causing. The exhibit started in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, October 30-November 3, 2002. Participating partners took their exhibitions to educate those in the Mekong countries, raising awareness of environmental impact.

Further information on examples of environmental art can be found through the Environmental Art Museum, an online collection born as a collaborative effort among many in ecoart.

Watts article
Oxfam’s article
Green Museum

Pollock Paintings and Fractals Debate Continues

New York Times:

In an article published ... in the prestigious science journal Nature, two physicists contend that a method intended to identify complex geometric patterns in the seemingly chaotic drip paintings of Jackson Pollock is flawed and may be useless in the increasingly convoluted world of authenticating Pollock’s work.

The article, written by a physics professor and a physics doctoral student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, provides a new twist in the mystery surrounding a group of small drip paintings discovered several years ago in a storage locker in Wainscott, N.Y. They were found by Alex Matter, whose father, Herbert, and mother, Mercedes, were artists and friends of Pollock’s. Mr. Matter believes the paintings are authentic Pollocks, and if he is proved right, they will not only be worth millions of dollars but will also add an important new chapter to Pollock’s work.

But the paintings have incited a lively and sometimes bitter debate among Pollock scholars. And as a result, greater attention has been focused on the role science is now playing alongside connoisseurship in the business of art authentication.

Last winter the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which represents the artist’s estate, commissioned Richard P. Taylor, an associate professor of physics at the University of Oregon, to examine some of the disputed paintings. He used a technique he pioneered, which he said identified consistent patterns known as fractals — regularities that recur on finer and finer magnification, like those in snowflakes — in several authentic Pollocks.

Using the same computer analysis on transparencies of 6 of the 24 paintings discovered by Mr. Matter, Dr. Taylor found “significant differences” between their patterns and those of the known Pollocks he had examined. [More...]

Gold Icons of the East

Icons with gold paint are traditional of Eastern Christian art work. The icons were made to be viewed by candle light rather than bright fluorescent lights of today. The gold paint was made of powdered gold mixed with egg tempora. The art of writing in gold is called chrysography. This practice was not merely in icons, but also in early transcriptions of the Bible. The gold paint by the candle light would give almost a magical glow as it reflected on the page.

In the 11th century, Western Christians were introduced again to the iconography of the East. Jaroslav Folda notes that one must think of the use of the icon because every medivial art essentially had a function. Most icons in Christianity at least of the time were not much bigger than a sheet of paper. An icon could be blessed and thus be a holy object instead of just a holy image. A holy object has much more liturgical and devotional worth. Many icons were even used at home for personal worship. The Greek Orthodox would enter their homes and kiss the icon that they had there, like one might kiss a grandmother.

Most of the icons were first made by monks and nuns, and later by commercially trained artists. People who could afford to would request icons of people with whom they identified, a saint who fought for a soldier, a patron saint for a church, etc.

For more on this topic, visit: http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr2006/feature_04.php

Elizabeth M. (art 9)

Robert Rosenblum Dies at 79

New York Times:

Robert Rosenblum, an influential and irreverent art historian and museum curator known for his research on subjects ranging from Picasso to images of dogs, died on Wednesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 79.

He died from complications of colon cancer, said his wife, the artist Jane Kaplowitz.

For half a century, Mr. Rosenblum taught in the undergraduate and graduate art history divisions at New York University, where he occupied an endowed chair as professor of Modern European art starting in 1976. For the last decade he also served as curator of 20th-century art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Despite his illness, diagnosed in 2004, he continued his regimen of teaching, writing and lecturing until a few weeks ago.

....

Sol LeWitt

Recently we discussed the role Sol LeWitt played in Conceptual art. I think Sol LeWitt finally hit it home. Creativity really doesn’t have anything to do with physical construction; rather creativity deals with the initial creation of an idea. The very instance that something new is thought of is the moment of creativity. All semester we have discussed great artists, everything from Michelangelo to Pollock, and although their art is very different, they all have one thing in common, creativity. Pablo Picasso may stand as one of the greatest examples of true creativity. It has been shown many times with numerous examples that Picasso could mimic pretty much any style, but to be a true artist he had to create something new. He did this through cubism. If Picasso had just copied other art styles he would have been a nobody.

The argument is often made that modern or postmodern art isn’t art because the average Joe could do it. People often say anyone could drip paint on canvas like Pollock and call it art. What isn’t fully understood by the people who say things like this is that sure the average Joe could recreate the art, but the average Joe would not have come up with the initial idea. Pollock’s works are great because he came up with something new.

Along these lines Sol LeWitt isolates the creativity of art. Sol LeWitt would often design a piece of art, but instead of constructing it himself for an exhibition he would simply send off the instructions on how to construct the piece. I think Sol LeWitt takes a risk when he sends off his instructions. There is no guarantee that the person on the receiving end will construct the piece exactly as Sol LeWitt envisioned it. Nonetheless, I think that Sol LeWitt made a profound statement; art is art because of its initial creativity.

Apocalypto: Historically Inaccurate, Narrow View of Maya Culture with a Colonial Message (updated below)

As I have mentioned to my students, remember that the new movie Apocalypto is fictional with an eye to drama and action, rather than historical accuracy or cultural understanding. The movie appears to ignore Maya advances in art, mathematics, urban planning, astronomy, agriculture and the creation of a writing system, in order to focus primarily on violence. Below is an early review published by Archaeology magazine.

Traci Ardren, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, knows the Maya well. She has studied Classic Maya society for over 20 years while living in the modern Maya villages of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Espita in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Her credentials include contributing to and editing Ancient Maya Women (2002) and The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica (2006). Ardren's reaction to the new film "Apocalypto," follows. Scholars are well aware that some aspects of Maya culture were violent, but Ardren finds fault with what she sees as a pervasive colonial attitude in the film.

With great trepidation I went to an advance screening of "Apocalypto" last night in Miami. No one really expects historical dramas to be accurate, so I was not so much concerned with whether or not the film would accurately represent what we know of Classic period Maya history as I was concerned about the message Mel Gibson wanted to convey through the film. After Jared Diamond's best-selling book Collapse, it has become fashionable to use the so-called Maya collapse as a metaphor for Western society's environmental and political excesses. Setting aside the fact that the Maya lived for more than a thousand years in a fragile tropical environment before their cities were abandoned, while here in the U.S, we have polluted our urban environments in less than 200, I anticipated a heavy-handed cautionary tale wrapped up in Native American costume.

What I saw was much worse than this. The thrill of hearing melodic Yucatec Maya spoken by familiar faces (although the five lead actors are not Yucatec Maya but other talented Native American actors) during the first ten minutes of the movie is swiftly and brutally replaced with stomach churning panic at the graphic Maya-on-Maya violence depicted in a village raid scene of nearly 15 minutes. From then on the entire movie never ceases to utilize every possible excuse to depict more violence. It is unrelenting. Our hero, Jaguar Paw, played by the charismatic Cree actor Rudy Youngblood, has one hellavuh bad couple of days. Captured for sacrifice, forced to march to the putrid city nearby, he endures every tropical jungle attack conceivable and that is after he escapes the relentless brutality of the elites. I am told this part of the movie is completely derivative of the 1966 film "The Naked Prey." Pure action flick, with one ridiculous encounter after another, filmed beautifully in the way that only Hollywood blockbusters can afford, this is the part of the movie that will draw in audiences and demonstrates Gibson's skill as a cinematic storyteller.

But I find the visual appeal of the film one of the most disturbing aspects of "Apocalypto." The jungles of Veracruz and Costa Rica have never looked better, the masked priests on the temple jump right off a Classic Maya vase, and the people are gorgeous. The fact that this film was made in Mexico and filmed in the Yucatec Maya language coupled with its visual appeal makes it all the more dangerous. It looks authentic; viewers will be captivated by the crazy, exotic mess of the city and the howler monkeys in the jungle. And who really cares that the Maya were not living in cities when the Spanish arrived? Yes, Gibson includes the arrival of clearly Christian missionaries (these guys are too clean to be conquistadors) in the last five minutes of the story (in the real world the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last Maya city was abandoned). It is one of the few calm moments in an otherwise aggressively paced film. The message? The end is near and the savior has come. Gibson's efforts at authenticity of location and language might, for some viewers, mask his blatantly colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess.

Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamusel this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in "Apocalypto," no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities. Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-1990s. To see this same trope about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. How can we continue to produce such one-sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World?

I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people, who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic. It is surely no surprise that "Apolcalypto" has very little to do with Maya culture and instead is Gibson's comment on the excesses he perceives in modern Western society. I just wish he had been honest enough to say this. Instead he has created a beautiful and disturbing portrait that satisfies his need for comment but does violence to one of the most impressive of Native American cultures.

UPDATE:

Here is another review, this one by Zachary X. Hruby, Ph.D. of the University of California at Riverside, that clearly outlines some of the historical shortcomings of and potential negative responses to Gibson's vision of the ancient Maya.

Apocalypto: A New Beginning or a Step Backward?

Mel Gibson's new thriller about the ancient Maya civilization is exactly that, thrilling. However, this entertainment comes at a dear price. The Maya at the time of Spanish Contact are depicted as idyllic hunters and gatherers, or as genocidal murderers, and neither of these scenarios is accurate. The film represents a step backward in our understanding of the complex cultures that existed in the New World before the Spanish invasion, and is part of a disturbing trend reemerging in the film industry, which portrays nonwestern natives as evil savages. "King Kong" and "Pirates of the Caribbean II" show these natives as uncaring, beastlike, and virtually inhuman. Apocalypto achieves similar goals, but in a much subtler fashion.
As in "The Passion of the Christ," Gibson utilizes native language to invoke a veneer of credibility for his story, in this case Yucatec Maya, a technique that unfortunately does much to legitimize this rather strange version of Maya history. First, a typical Maya village is shown as an unorganized group of jungle people who appear to subsist on hunting alone. The Maya were an agricultural people with a very structured social and economic system. Even small villages in the hinterlands of large cities were connected to some political center. The jungle people in Gibson's movie are flabbergasted at the sight of the Maya city, exclaiming that they have never seen such buildings. The truth is that pyramids of comparable size were never more than 20 kilometers away from anywhere in the Maya world, be they occupied or abandoned.

Secondly, Mayan city people are shown as violent extremists bent on harvesting innocent villagers to provide flesh for sacrifice and women for slaves, leaving the children to die alone in the jungle. Hundreds of men are sacrificed on an Aztec-style sacrificial stone, their headless bodies thrown into a giant ditch reminiscent of a Holocaust documentary or a scene from the Killing Fields. Problem is, there exists no archaeological, historic, or ethnohistoric data to suggest that any such mass sacrifices, numbering in the thousands, or even hundreds, took place in the Maya world.

Third, once Gibson paints this bloody picture of 15th century Maya civilization using a warped characterization of events that occurred roughly five centuries before (i.e., the "Classic Maya Collapse"), the ultimate injustice is handed the Pre-Columbian Maya. As the jungle hero escapes the evil city and is chased by his antagonists all the way to the edge of the sea (literally nowhere else to turn), Spanish galleons appear, complete with a small lead boat carrying a stalwart friar hoisting a crucifix. For Gibson, the new beginning for these lost Mayan people, the Apocalypto, evidently is the coming of the Spaniards and Christianity to the Americas.

Although this film will undoubtedly create interest in the field of Maya archaeology by way of its spectacular reconstructions and beautiful jungle scenes, the lasting impression of Maya and other Pre-Columbian civilizations is this: The Maya were simple jungle bands or bloodthirsty masses duped by false religions, that their mighty but misguided civilization fell into ruin as a result, and their salvation arrived with the coming of Christian beliefs saddled on the backs of Spanish conquistadors. As we archaeologists struggle to accurately reconstruct ancient Maya society, obstructed by their decimation via Western diseases, destruction of their books, art, and history by Spanish friars, not to mention their subjugation and exploitation by the conquistadors, films such as Apocalypto represent a significant disparagement of that process. Further, inaccurate, irresponsible representations by Hollywood of indigenous peoples as amoral, inhuman, or uncivilized can only lead to greater misunderstanding and strife in contemporary society. This may be particularly important in a modern world where common ground is increasingly difficult to come by.

The Art of World AIDS Day

The history and impact of HIV/AIDS on both a personal as well as international level has been well documented through the arts. This year artists from around the world continue to call our attention to the need for greater education, understanding, and action in regard to this issue. Below is a very small sample of some of these efforts.

World AIDS Day, December 1, was first held in 1988 in order to increase awareness and education about the disease and through this understanding stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. According to the global census, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide is approximately 40,000,000 and believed to be as high as 46,000,000.

Now in its 19th year, World AIDS Day aims to bring attention to the worldwide challenges and consequences of the AIDS epidemic, in order to prevent the spread of HIV and improve the lives of people living with the virus. On Dec. 1, 2006 UCLA will present a day-long, campus-wide, cross-departmental commemoration of World AIDS Day 2006, including the opening of two major art installations: ‘Dress Up Against AIDS: Condom Couture by Adriana Bertini’ on display at the Fowler Museum, and ‘The Keiskamma Altarpiece: Transcending AIDS in South Africa’ on display in the Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater.

The Samek Art Gallery will host a display of 16 blocks of The AIDS Memorial Quilt Nov. 29 through Dec. 5. The Samek Art Gallery is located on the third floor of the Elaine Langone Center at Bucknell University. In addition, two blocks of The AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display in the lobby of the Weis Center for the Performing Arts at Bucknell.

A poignant memorial begun in San Francisco in 1987, the AIDS Memorial Quilt is a powerful tool for use in preventing new HIV infections, and the largest ongoing community arts project in the world. Because The Quilt is too large to display in its entirety, smaller community displays are held all over the world.

Every block of The AIDS Memorial Quilt measures approximately 12-feet square, and usually contains eight individual three foot by six foot panels sewn together. Virtually every one of the more than 40,000 colorful panels that make up the Quilt memorializes the life of a person or persons lost to AIDS.

As the epidemic continues to claim lives around the world and in the United States, the Quilt continues to grow and to reach more communities with its messages of remembrance, awareness, and hope. For more information, see http://www.aidsquilt.org/.

In observance of World AIDS Day, December 1, the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) presents The Sanguinary Vow. This weeklong installation, implemented by Graduate Art History student Amanda Hellman, focuses the public's attention on HIV/AIDS and addresses issues of stigma and social death connected to the disease.

In Hellman's installation, red lights will shine in two of the museum's current exhibitions, American Dreams and Creativity and Invention in African Art. To address the disparity of AIDS cases in the United States and Africa, only one red light will shine in the American art exhibition, while 24 red lights will shine in the African art exhibition. Hellman chose to use red because it is the representative color of AIDS awareness. Additionally, Hellman will install the audio-piece "Improper Fraction," created with Todd Whatley, a Chicago-based artist. In this audio-piece, derogatory and discriminatory phrases are whispered to reveal the stigmas associated with HIV/AIDS and to highlight that oppression often occurs through the social death that comes from prejudice in society.

This year, to raise awareness of the child victims of AIDS, UNICEF Australia, along with artist Michael Mucci and the Diamond Exchange, are holding an event and exhibition at The Art Gallery of NSW on Friday December 1. To raise funds and increase awareness of World AIDS Day, 16 artworks created by Michael Mucci will be displayed. These have been specifically created in support of UNICEF’s work globally and in line with the effect of the HIV and AIDS on children and Children’s Rights.

Visual AIDS strives to increase public awareness of AIDS through the visual arts, creating programs of exhibitions, events and publications, and working in partnership with artists, galleries, museums and AIDS organizations. By mobilizing the visual arts communities, Visual AIDS raises money to provide direct services to artists living with HIV/AIDS.