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.

Richard Misrach: Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath, 1991

My grandmother’s house is at the base of the Oakland hills.* We drove through the hills to get there for holidays and visits and there’s always something very comforting about that area as a result. It’s not where I grew up, but there’s a similar comfort in knowing and seeing where my father grew up.**

*Even though someone else has lived there for over a decade, it will always be my grandmother’s house.

**I have similar feelings about Kane‘ohe even though I visited there far less frequently.

I still remember the fire in 1991—both in terms of watching the news and then driving through the neighborhood soon after for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Watching the fire was scary and worrisome. Even though we knew she was okay, we were watching to see if our roots survived. While the house and immediate neighborhood did (being surrounded by the Claremont Country Club), we still had no idea what the greater area would look like until we drove through it later.

We didn’t drive through the area so soon after as Richard Misrach did but his photos of the aftermath still ring familiar to me. It’s easy to dismiss photos of devastation and disaster as ruin porn but when those photos become personal, it’s quite a bit different. That Misrach sat on these for 20 years before publishing shows that he understands the difference too. He’s thought through what these photos are for—they aren’t voyeuristic photos intended for people to gawk, they’re personal and intended for people to remember.

That they’re being displayed first in Oakland and Berkeley sort of forgives the one major fault of the exhibition. There are no pre-fire or post-reconstruction photographs available so we have to rely on our own memories or commit to driving up Broadway after the museum visit. But by being displayed first to locals, it’s likely that there will always be someone in the exhibition who can make it personal.

There is a memory wall which does alleviate some of this, but I still found myself directly comparing this exhibition to Gohlke’s work with either the aftermath of the Wichita Falls tornado or the Mt. St. Helens eruption. Gohlke is great about demonstrating a lot more of the cause and effect both in single frames as well as multiple frames from the same location over the years. The most I get a sense for this in the Misrach exhibition is the noticeable motion blur in a number of the frames—the wind which fed the firestorm was still whipping through the area.

I also, as a Bay Area native who expects to be wiped out via earthquakes, couldn’t help but appreciate how fire takes all of the house except the portion which earthquakes take first. Wood rides out earthquakes pretty well, stone and brick chimneys don’t. And yes, I know that the chief danger during an earthquake is still fire.

Two photos which struck me most. The car at the edge of the world. There’s always something striking about what remains in a landscape when everything else is taken away. In this case, you can also see how precariously those houses must have actually been on the hillside and you can see how the view must have looked before we began building there. There’s also a much closer shot of just the burned-out car showing how everything flammable has been consumed. I prefer this shot with the context but the two together* work well.

*And really, how often do you see two shots of the same subject taken at the same time presented together?

The melted tricycle. This one gets to me on many levels. It’s probably the most ruin-porn of the photos. But then the subject matter is also the most emotional. We’re always going to react strongly to a kid’s toy. It also reminds me of William Eggleston’s tricycle and the idea that these kind of photos can be art.* Plus this photo is one of the few which still maintains any sense of color. Everything else is neutral. It’s all been burned or covered in ash and soot. But the tricycle still pops.

*That it’s also the cover of the exhibition catalog suggests that I’m not the only one to make this connection.

Serious Art

Things that piss me of now: "serious" when it's used as an adjective to denote high-brow superiority.—
nick (@vossbrink) June 06, 2011

@kukkurovaca We used to just say "art." No idea how art morphed to serious. With photography, it should be "pretentious and deceitful."—
nick (@vossbrink) June 06, 2011

Inspired by a blogpost from Colin Pantall.

The discourse of art photography is a discourse of pretension and deceit on the whole

And an article on the Online Photographer.

anybody want to tell me where the image sites are that are edited (moderated), where serious photographers present redacted bodies of work? I’ve heard that the founders of Facebook, flickr et al have raked in millions; now what we need are people willing to run some sites to present serious photography in a serious way and rake in thousands.

And expanding on one of my previous posts on how artwork is presented.

I’m not sure why photography is treated the opposite of other artwork in museums. Most museums distinguish between art and craft by describing art through its content and craft through its purpose or provenance.

One of the chief distinctions in a museum is between functional objects displayed as examples of craft and non-functional objets d’art. Curation, in general, tends toward suggesting that non-functional art is more important. Objects of craft are often presented as cultural artifacts. Purely non-functional items are presented as fine art.* I don’t mind the distinction but I have a problem with implied superiority of one over the other.

*An item for another post is the heavy western bias where non-functional items from the third world are assigned pseudo-functional descriptions such as “fetish figure” when the same kind of item from the west will be given a name and creator.

The distinction is good because it is important to know the purpose behind a given work. Is this intended to be used? Is it decorative? Is it ceremonial? Is it an intellectual exercise? Without knowing the purpose, you risk not understanding the piece at all.

Duchamp’s Fountain at SFMoMA

While I embrace the distinction, I reject the idea that non-functional items are somehow superior or more important than functional ones. It bothers me when museums and other art appreciators buy into that way of thinking.* What’s more annoying though is when that way of thinking starts to be applied to items outside of the museum.

*One of the reasons why I loved the Oakland Museum’s Marvelous Museum exhibition was because of how it mixed functional and non-functional items together. My favorite example of this was the large overhead powerline insulator amidst the rest of the art ceramics.

Visiting museums involves a willingness to be surprised and provoked. I attend with the expectation that my mind will be engaged and for the entire experience to be intellectual at some level. What is art inside a museum loses much of its context when it is taken outside. It is no longer curated and so I have to do it myself. While I can decide how I wish to approach things, I cannot presume that my taste in art is applicable to others. I can only state what I like, not what someone else should like.

Which brings us to the overuse of the word “serious.” Like the porn designation, serious is used as a way of dismissing things which aren’t Art. Unlike porn,where there’s an implied surface appeal and a gut-level critique at whether there’s actual meaning, the labeling of what is serious* is a conscious choice at distinguishing what is intellectually worthwhile. People who label things as serious also tend to do so in a way which suggests that there is some sort of universal criteria for making that choice.

*Except in cases where serious is used to denote an extreme quantity of something.

The entire point of art (especially modern art) is that there is no such criteria.

What is serious for one person is frivolous to another. And, often, vice versa. Is food for sustenance or for show? Are movies for entertainment or enlightenment? Is photography for family scrapbooks or gallery walls? Yes—while only some of them are art, all are serious.

Let’s go back to describing things as “art.” We don’t need a value judgement, just whether an object was created for a purpose beyond its usual intent.