10/31/2017 - Comics Workbook

Aaron here today with Schneemann; Walker; Ernst; Reinhardt; Short Run 2017

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Interior Scroll
Here’s something from the Kinetic Painting show at MoMA PS1 (via PS1’s Instagram):

While we can’t show you the photo documentation of Carolee Schneemann’s iconic performance work, “Interior Scroll,” on Instagram, above is a portion of the scroll itself on view in our new exhibition “Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting.” From the second of only two performances of the piece in 1977, the scroll reads:

I don’t
take the
advice
of men
who talk
only
to
themselves

PAY ATTENTION
TO CRITICAL
AND PRACTICAL
FILM
LANGUAGE
IT
EXISTS
FOR
AND
IN
ONLY
ONE
GENDER

These powerful reflections were a response to a screening at the Telluride Film Festival, where Schneemann’s films “Fuses” and “Plumb Line” were included in a program entitled “The Erotic Woman.” Schneemann objected to the program for being proscribed by the male imagination, and having a contradictory effect to the films themselves. Explore more documentation of “Interior Scroll” and other seminal performances by Carolee Schneemann in her retrospective #KineticPainting on view through March 11.

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‘She said she was thinking of Thomas Eakins’s surgical theater paintings as she was also imagining house slaves disemboweling their master with a soup ladle.’
At the New York Review, Darryl Pinckney looks at the recently closed Kara Walker exhibit, Kara Walker: Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!

I sometimes find myself remembering the great Sphinx of white sugar that Kara Walker built three years ago in an unused, emptied-out sugar refinery in Brooklyn along the East River: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. The refinery was enormous, the walls streaked with sugar. In the distance, the large figure of a Mammy rested in her Egyptian pose, a bandana on her head. The small basket-carrying boys made of dark red molasses who attended her were melting in the summer heat, folding over onto the floor. The large and roving crowd was quiet, as if under a spell. People took photographs of themselves standing between her creamy-looking arms.

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Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, through January 1, 2018

This exhibition surveys the career of the preeminent Dada and Surrealist artist Max Ernst (French and American, born Germany, 1891–1976), with particular emphasis on his ceaseless experimentation. Ernst began his pursuit of radical new techniques that went “beyond painting” to articulate the irrational and unexplainable in the wake of World War I, continuing through the advent and aftermath of World War II. Featuring approximately 100 works drawn from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition includes paintings that challenged material and compositional conventions; collages and overpaintings utilizing found printed reproductions; frottages (rubbings); illustrated books and collage novels; sculptures of painted stone and bronze; and prints made using a range of techniques. Several major, multipart projects represent key moments in Ernst’s long career, ranging from early Dada and Surrealist portfolios of the late 1910s and 1920s to his late masterpiece—a recent acquisition to MoMA’s collection—65 Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy (1964). This illustrated book comprises 34 aquatints complemented by imaginative typographic designs and a secret hieroglyphic script of the artist’s own invention.

From MoMA’s Instagram:

Max Ernst’s love of puns was likely fostered by Sigmund Freud’s book “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.” Here, the Dada artist overpainted a page from a sales catalogue showing women’s hats printed in an orderly grid. Ernst added more cut-and-pasted hats to make the phallic tower at the left. This visual pun relates to Freud’s identification of the hat—the requisite accessory of the bourgeois man—as a common symbol of repressed desire, adding new meaning and gender ambiguity to the cliché inscribed on the work, “C’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme” (“The hat makes the man”).

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‘A lot of the best horror movies give you the sense that the movie you’re watching is itself somehow evil.’
Today (Tuesday, October 31, 2017) is Halloween, and what better way to celebrate than looking back at Simon Reinhardt’s reviews of horror movies from this past month. Reinhardt reviews some classics (TBOF, seen below; The Fog) as well as some rarities and gems (Kuroneko; Beyond the Darkness) and newer works (Prevenge; Butter on the Latch). Take a look, maybe your favorite horror movie was reviewed.