1968

During my visit to the Oakland Museum where I saw Daniel Clowes and the Social Justice Posters, I spent most of my time in the 1968 exhibition. It’s an ambitious project and one which I’m not entirely sure works on its own—too much to cover and too many things to tie into it. At the same time, it’s a great first step and start of discussion which will make a big impression on most visitors. It’s well worth the trip to see it.

The biggest impression it made on me was how much it helped me understand where my parents came from. It’s not like I didn’t know about any of the stuff which was on display. It’s just that the examples and stories reminded me of items I was already personally familiar with and so my parents’ stories fit into the bigger context in a way I had not fully understood previously. As someone who felt reasonably versed in the events of the 1960s, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned.

This is definitely an exhibit worth attending as a family with the intent of telling stories, discussing what happened, and relearning the past.

Where it fails is that it never really steps out from the past and into the present. There’s no sense of current-day applicability to the events. No references to how things turned out and no questions about whether the fuss was worth it. This was most apparent to me when I was watching the Chicago Convention footage. I don’t think anyone protesting the Democratic platform wanted Nixon to win the election. But look what happened. Nixon won. The war got worse. It’s still not clear that the Democrats have recovered.

I also can’t watch scenes of the riot in Grant Park without thinking about Obama’s victory speech in 2008. I think it’s important to remind viewers what happened to these places and what they’re like now. The Ambassador Hotel is demolished now but Grant Park still exists as an important gathering point where the world still watches.

The concept of “where are we now?” is also completely relevant to the portions on the Women’s Movement. There are some tremendously good accomplishments which are noted* but other things like the concept of throwing away bras, girdles, heels, etc. tell a different story than they’re meant to. The story is always how throwing those away was empowering. Yet today we have cosmetic surgery which accomplishes the same thing. Is it really an improvement to go from an age where everyone knew what was accomplished by shaping undergarments to one where your body is supposed to be perfect before you put your clothes on?**

*Especially the increase in college attendance.

**This realization came to me while I was in a Vivienne Westwood exhibition. There’s a reason why almost every woman now chooses a wedding dress with a corset in it. It’s not the corset which is the problem.

Which brings me to the other big impression I got in this exhibition. I was very stuck by how simple the issues appeared and the ease of achieving protest action. It was almost quaint. Today, we seem to get sidetracked by the complexity of things. It’s hard to focus on a complex issue yet at the same time, people who focus too much on simple issues are now perceived to be missing the point. Movements today—assuming they get off of Facebook and into the streets—are criticized for either being too narrow-minded or too unfocused.

Other thoughts as I wandered through the displays:

War has changed an awful lot since Vietnam. It’s news now when one soldier dies. It’s also completely okay now to be both anti-war and supportive of the troops. I think those are both positive developments.

It’s nice to see César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers included. All too often the 60s are portrayed as white/black/women issues and the rise of the UFW is hugely important to note.

The treatment of black rights and black power is interesting. The exhibition marks the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the foundering of the Poor People’s Campaign but doesn’t really call out anything else. You have to be alert to see things like Aretha Franklin on the cover of Time or Arthur Ashe winning the US Open woven into the general timeline.

The only other time black issues are explicitly featured is Tommie Smith and John Carlos* at the 1968 Olympics. Which brings up another interesting point. The 1968 games are not just about the black power salute. I saw no mention of Bob Beamon or Dick Fosbury or the phenomenal legacy each of them left on the games and sport in general. Nor was it mentioned that the games arguably shouldn’t even have been held at all—Tlateloco** shows up in the timeline but is never tied to the Olympics.

*I also always feel bad that Peter Norman always seems to get overlooked.

**What is it with museums assuming Americans know about Tlateloco? SFMoMA did the same thing.

There is also a silent majority section. Which is great. We do often get the sense that 1968 is full of conflict and that everyone was involved. Yet there was also a constituency which was powerful enough to elect Nixon.

I would like to see more about the presidential campaigns. The McCarthy to RFK to Humphrey transition is presented as something which just happened (well, besides the assassination thing) rather than an evolution in support. And Nixon’s campaign isn’t covered much at all.

I’d also like to see more about sports. Felt kind of like an afterthought. Sports is a different kind of common-culture which runs orthogonal to the rest of the movements on display. If anything, it’s the closest Americans have to an agreed-upon shared history which cuts across the rest of the divisions.

The comparison of television to movies is shocking. TV in 1968 is horrible and only worth watching today for kitsch sentimentality. The movies meanwhile represent the beginning of New Hollywood and are as important and impressive today as they were then. From what I can tell, the most important show on TV was the news.

The music, clothing, or industrial design displays are all very very familiar. The items are either still cool* or completely in-keeping with the myth of the 60s.

*Especially with the retro-cool trends we’re in the midst of right now where anything 1950s–1970s is cool.

I love the amount of ashtrays that they had scattered around. It’s going to be very weird explaining the omnipresence of cigarette smoke to my son.

And the glass grape sculptures. Total flashback to grandma’s house.

Ending the show with Apollo 8 and Earthrise. It still blows my mind that we hadn’t known the Earth that way until then. And the poignancy of seeing the hope for the moon during that time while we’re shipping the space shuttles to drydock now wasn’t lost on me.

Social Justice Posters

Also at the Oakland Museum with the Daniel Clowes exhibition is an exhibition of Social Justice posters. The exhibition itself kind of skips a lot of historical context. Since it’s about local history, I was able to fill in the gaps. But I’d still like a bit more context as to what the poster is about.

What I found really interesting though was the craft and aesthetics of these protest posters.* In the 1960s and 1970s, the posters designs and graphic styles were mandated by the limitations of cheap printing technology—no screening, two colors, hand-drawn type, etc. Despite the fact that the printing world has completely flipped now to where process-color printing is super cheap, heavy-coverage spot-color printing is expensive, and everyone has more fonts than they know what to do with; the style of what protest posters are supposed to look like hasn’t changed much.

*Surprise surprise, I geeked out on printing yet again. 

That silkscreen is still a cheap point of entry for making personal posters helps a lot with this.* But more and more people have access to computers and laser printers now. I’m surprised and disappointed that I didn’t see any toner-based posters. It doesn’t seem unrealistic to expect people to be printing these on a Fiery at FedEx Office now.

*As does the fact that merchandising on tshirts is still alive and kicking.

Though at the same time, I’m not so surprised. The ease of access to printing has resulted in people who have no idea how to design being able to print anything they want. Whereas the higher barriers of entry required to create non-process offset of silkscreen work mean that those posters still look better.

There’s also the fact that nowadays, people are more likely to publicize an event on the web* than through postering a city.** I get the sense that the posters of today are more likely to be art pieces for purchase to support a cause than for any large-scale distribution. And that digital printing using cheap toner-based printers is not making it into museums yet.

*It’s been a dozen years since I was in college. Do people even flyer on campus now?

**Something Mark Bradford has noted as he has discussed how his raw materials are disappearing.

But enough about digital. The exhibition does show a lot of good silkscreen and offset work. I especially liked the blue on blue Earth Day poster which shows how much an abstracted globe still reads as home. It’s also always fascinating how few lines and colors you actually need to define faces and emotion. And it’s somewhat sobering to see that a lot of the protest posters are decades old and still as relevant as ever.

Daniel Clowes

It’s always interesting to see exhibitions consisting of the original artwork for book illustrations. Between my photography and printing backgrounds, I’m very sensitive to the distinction between the initial creation and the finished piece. It’s nice to see the behind-the-scenes nature of pasteups and contact prints. Yet very rarely can those components overshadow the intended final printed piece.

The Daniel Clowes exhibition  at the Oakland Museum is the third such exhibition I’ve seen in the past year.* Clowes’s work in particular is worth seeing in the museum. His drawings are super-precise and are served well by being seen in their original larger size.** It’s also instructive to see how he pastes fine details like faces and highlights on top of the base drawings and how he uses pre-printed fill patterns to give texture to things like clothing and hair. The results are almost computer-generated, even in the large paste-up versions.

*Previous two are Robert Crumb’s Genesis and Sandow Birk’s Commedia, both at the San José Museum of Art.

**roughly twice the dimensions of the printed pieces.

Yet, as much as I can appreciate the craft, over and over again I found myself just reading the panels and getting into the story—generally a good thing for this kind of art but frustrating in a museum where not all panels are present. I’m not familiar-enough with all the comics to fully appreciate the panel artwork—unlike Genesis or the Commedia, each of which I’m somewhat familiar with storywise. Many of the panels though did stand on their own so it’s not all frustrating.

To be fair, the museum has provided samples of the various graphic novels and bench to sit on while you read them. But that’s a much longer-term commitment to the museum than I had available to me last weekend.

I just wish they were selling prints of the “Oakland” panel from Wilson. Any exhibition which can produce a laugh-out-load moment like that is worth seeing.

Documentary Art

I had my Art and Artifact post all queued up and ready to go when a post from Fototazo* started me thinking about additional variables besides the time question. Time is still relevant, but not as much as it used to be. A lot of photography is coming out now which satisfies the documentary function while also being acceptable to the art world. It’s an interesting change.

*Prompted by the same discussion which inspired my post about all photography being propaganda. I probably need to go more in depth on that point too since it seems many people forget how much personal snapshots are edited to present only the memories we want to remember and show.

The idea that the transition of “journalism” from being news-based to personal-based has blurred the lines where a new project can both be functional and artistic at the same time is interesting to consider and makes perfect sense since it’s a rationalization of photography with its inherent function.

Unlike a lot of other fine art which thrived on the commission-based model. Photography can be distinguished as an artform by its extremely low barrier of entry. Its history is one of consistently-increased access to the means of creation. As a result, it’s much much easier for people to do their own personal-driven projects.

Fototazo’s follow-up post also brings up another great point in this area. As we’ve become more familiar with post-processing and the mechanics of creating a photograph* we’re starting to accept the idea that photographs can be questioned just like any other evidence. That we now know photographs are not true is why current documentary photography can be accepted as art.

*I see this on Facebook all the time now too. It’s completely common for me to see responses to photos be something—whether it’s a sarcastic “shopped” comment or a curious “what filter” question—which questions the technical means of creating or producing the image. People know more is going on now.

If anything, the standard photojournalism restrictions about photo manipulation—and the controversies when people violate them—have actually helped in this department. People remember the controversies, not the resolutions. Each time the news tears a photo apart as being “manipulated,” our distrust of images as being true decreases. This is not a bad thing.

We’re reaching a point now where the context matters almost more than the image. Photographs are being displayed in multiple functions at the same time now. The meanings we take from them and the way we react to them will vary greatly depending on the functions we perceive.

It’s no longer just about treating art in a way which shows its function. And it’s not as simple as making it clear that there are multiple functions at play. When an object is presented as both functional and as “fine art” at the same time but in different contexts, it’s almost impossible for a museum to truly step back without changing the meaning.

The good news is that artists like Mark Dion and Fred Wilson are have already started the ball rolling on meta-level art which critiques the context we give things. I’d love to see an approach like theirs be taken with photography. And I’d love to see a museum try and address the multiple functions that photography can have by displaying the same collection in different ways.

Art and Artifact

Visit any art museum and you find that, up until the renaissance, most of the western art on display is actually functional. And that most of the non-western art is always displayed as being functional.* Yet even now, when western art has been decoupled from its function, functional western art still shows up in museums. The catch is that it always old when it shows up.

*Read my Art, Craft, and Function post for more context on this point.

I don’t think it’s possible to set a specific time value for when things become objects in and of themselves. It does seem though that we need time to let the context settle down.

Richard Misrach waited 20 years before displaying his photos of the Oakland Hills Fire. This kept his photos from being opportunistic ruin porn and instead added some historical context for us to reflect on what we were seeing yet also allowed us to add our own narratives to the story and abstract the images so they can describe other disasters.

Similarly, old photojournalism will often show up in museums as art since the photos are no longer burdened by a single specific narrative.

Which makes sense considering photography’s function. A lot of the appeal of Walker Evans now is the historical side of the photos and how they illustrate a time in American history. They’re no longer specific stories, they evoke the sense of a decade.

The transition of a photo from image to artifact is especially interesting given the hang-ups many people have about archival life. Museums happily display old prints and tintypes without explaining how they may have faded or tarnished over the years. That the objects and images have survived is sufficient. And this is fine. How an object ages is an important part of its impact. We don’t look at ancient sculpture fragments and think that they’re ruined because they’ve broken.* We appreciate what’s survived. If a calamity happens, that becomes part of the history of the object.**

*Something that artists like Mitoraj take full advantage of.

**For example, Cimabue’s crucifix which was “destroyed” by floods.

What we see in the museum is as much about what the object has survived and its specific life story as it is about what the object actually is and represents.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this will change as more and more art becomes technology-based and no longer degrades physically. We’re not really used to this idea yet we’re already seeing this phenomenon in movies where once-cutting-edge special effects end up severely dating the movie later. Watching King Kong, Jason and the Argonauts, or even Jurassic Park now forces us to see the technical evolution of the medium. I’m not sure we’ve adjusted to being able to view those as much more than technological time capsules.

I’m a bit worried that the focus on archival life in photography will result in a second round of technological hangups once prints begin to age. It’s much more interesting to focus on what the photos are of and what they represent from the past than just talking about the technicalities—no matter how interesting—of how they were made.