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Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning
Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning
Harvard Art Museums
November 4, 2016 - April 9, 2017
Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning is a small yet focused show at the Harvard Art Museums, presenting recent sculptural works by the pioneering Colombian artist. Organized by Mary Schneider Enriques, an associate curator at the museum, the exhibition is accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue and an exciting array of public programming. Known especially for her poignant assemblages of furniture and other ordinary yet evocative materials, such as concrete and steel, Salcedo has repeatedly embraced the language of post-minimalist abstraction since the mid-1980s. In so doing, she eloquently fuses together material form and pointed social critique to offer up an aesthetics and ethics of memory and loss, as the title of this exhibition clearly implies.
Wrapped in Tin Foil: A Report from the Balkans
I relate to David Maljković’s (b. 1973 Yugoslavia, present day Croatia) characters in Scene for a New Heritage (2004-2006), a video trilogy set in the year 2045 about young men—“heritage-seekers”—on a road trip to Vojin Bakić’s 1981 Monument to the Partisans at Petrova Gora. I, too, grew up surrounded by monuments to a repudiated regime—in the Confederate capital—troubled and confused by their presence.
Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?
Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
February 11 - June 6, 2016
Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
October 22, 2016 - January 29, 2017
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
February 10 - April 17, 2017
The title of the spring 2016 exhibition at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum poses the question, Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is? The answer is far from singular: the pop artist’s retrospective presents a provocative point of view informed by her intersecting identities as a painter, sculptor, author, athlete, woman and mother. Curated by Katy Siegel and Caitlin Julia Rubin, the presentation builds on recent exhibitions hosted at local universities that have similarly reevaluated the contributions of women in pop, including the Tufts University Art Gallery’s Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 (2011) and the Harvard Art Museums’ Corita Kent and the Language of Pop (2015). As with these shows, Brandeis presents a subjective historical glimpse into 1960s America. Yet, Drexler’s art resonates equally strongly today in its representation of a media-saturated society that is alternately sexist and sexy.
Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence
Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
August 9, 2016 – December 4, 2016
Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence, currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, celebrates the glazed terracotta technique developed by Luca della Robbia and his workshop. Though highly valued in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, and popular among American collectors in the nineteenth century, the medium has largely been overlooked by scholars and museum audiences alike. The MFA’s exhibition, the first of its kind in the United States, redresses this lacuna by introducing visitors to the expressive and accessible qualities of reliefs and free-standing figures sculpted by three generations of the Della Robbia family and rival Florentine workshops.
Beyond Bosch: The Afterlife of a Renaissance Master in Print
Beyond Bosch: The Afterlife of a Renaissance Master in Print
January 23, 2016 – May 8, 2016
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts
In celebration of the 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516), the Harvard Art Museums present an exhibition that focuses on the development of the Netherlandish artist’s posthumous reputation. Visitors drawn in by the fame of the Bosch name might find it surprising that there is no work by the master included, but that is exactly the point of the show, which argues that it is not only by his visionary paintings that Bosch commands a reputation as one of the most fanciful, creative, and indeed hauntingly nightmarish artists of his age. Rather, this intimate exhibition is devoted to the later phenomenon of the Bosch brand, formed by the inventive Bosch-style prints, which proliferated around the mid-sixteenth century. Reinterpreting and distributing Bosch’s unique pictorial language far beyond Flanders (modern day Belgium), none of the prints are reproductions of Bosch’s paintings, yet most of the plates were inscribed with a credit to Bosch as their inventor. Then, as now, the hook was “Bosch.”
“badthingshappen…”
“badthingshappeneverydaybutnottome.com” is an ongoing web project that consists of a collaged, found-footage video and a collection of screenshots. The original footage and images are taken from Instagram humor handles and then edited to remove the funny parts of the videos. The leftover clips are reworked into a narrative, which shifts as more content is added to Instagram and the video is updated. The still images featured in the project are also taken from Instagram slapstick humor handles. Together, these images and video serve to critique complacent leisure while also considering its subversive potential.
Notes about Contributors
Steve Burges
Steve Burges is a doctoral student with a focus in Classical art and archaeology. Primarily concentrated on Roman Italy, his research interests include urbanism, cross-cultural influence, depictions of lost epics, and art historiography. He has been known to write the occasional paper on Islamic textiles or cultural heritage management.
Ewa Matyczyk
Ewa Matyczyk is a doctoral student studying Modern & Contemporary Art. Her focus is in Polish and Eastern European art and architecture of the Cold War era; particularly the 1980s and the post-socialist transition of the 1990s. Her dissertation examines artistic interventions, unrealized utopian projects, and the built environment in Warsaw as a lens through which to study the transformations of this city’s public sphere from 1970 to today.
Sophie Handler
With an academic background in French (B.A., Durham University, UK) and Art History (M.A., University of Manchester, UK), Sophie Handler chose to combine her experience and interests and pursue a Ph.D. in the History of Art at Durham University, UK. Her research focuses on concepts of childhood in the art and literature of the French Third Republic.
Janna Schoenberger
Janna Schoenberger is a Lecturer at Amsterdam University College and a doctoral candidate in art history at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. This essay was adapted from her dissertation-in-progress, Ludic Conceptualism: Art and Play in the Netherlands from 1959 to 1975.
Hyunjin Cho
Hyunjin Cho is a second-year M.A. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Boston University. She is interested in 18th and 19th century Persian/Iranian visual culture, including photographs, lithographic prints, and fashion. She has recently finished her M.A. Scholarly Paper on Iranian postage stamps issued during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896).
Shannon M. Lieberman
Shannon M. Lieberman is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, “Alongside, Outside, Within, Against: Feminist Art and the American Museum, 1965-2007,” explores the role exhibitions have played in constructing mistress narratives and definitions of feminist art.
Erin McKellar
Erin McKellar’s research focuses on the design cultures of the 1940s. Her dissertation, “Tomorrow on Display: American and British Housing Exhibitions, 1940-1955,” investigates how curators visualized, materialized and concretized abstract ideas about town planning, dwellings and home furnishings for approval and consumption by a skeptical yet curious lay public.
Joseph Saravo
Joseph Saravo is a doctoral candidate at Boston University studying seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art. His current research considers the intersections of vision and touch as related to the beholder’s experience in the early modern period.
Catherine O’Reilly
Catherine O’Reilly is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, focusing on Italian Renaissance art. Her dissertation project is entitled “Last Supper Refectory Frescoes in Fifteenth-Century Florence: Painting, Performance, Senses, and Space.” She received her M.A. in Art History from Tufts University and her B.A. in Art History from Union College.
Nicole Brunel
Nicole Brunel is a Canadian MFA student studying at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has also worked as a touring musician, archaeologist, and comic book artist.
Emily Quinn
Emily Quinn uses stories from her life as inspiration for her narrative paintings and drawings. She grew up in Decatur, AL, received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Auburn University in 2013 and is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
2015-2016 SEQUITUR Editorial Team
Senior Editors: Ewa Matyczyk, Steve Burges
Junior Editors: Sasha Goldman, Jordan Karney Chaim, Erin McKellar
Faculty Advisor: Professor Alice Tseng, Interim Chair of History of Art & Architecture
Special thanks to Susan Rice and Chris Spedaliere
Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston’s “Filthy Lucre”
Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC, through January 2017
The Peacock Room by James McNeil Whistler is composed of a full room of elaborately decorated panels that were designed for Frederick R. Leyland, a British businessman and an art collector, for his London dining room in 1876. This indoor mural reflects Whistler’s dedication to creative freedom and his strong desire to achieve aesthetic perfection. Later, Charles Lang Freer, an American collector, purchased Whistler’s Peacock Room and installed it in his own dining room in Detroit. After Freer’s death in 1919, the Peacock Room was moved to Washington D.C. where it is permanently on view at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art.
Editors’ Introduction
reproduction with pencil and white gouache, 11 3/4 x 7 7/8 in.
Welcome to “LOL,” SEQUITUR’s current issue, which takes as its theme humor, play, and amusement of all kinds. In many ways creativity lies at the core of laughter and fun, and the scholarship presented here highlights how art and visual culture reflect and engage with humor, absurdity, and parody. Our contributors examine a range of material and approach the theme from various angles: they consider funny and amusing internet content both as source material for their own work and in relation to art history and online culture; they explore the ways in which artists deploy notions of play and humor in order to mount social critiques; and they meditate on the place of humor in the content and conception of current exhibitions. Ultimately, the scholarship and art assembled here highlight the close relationship between the realms of the creative and the comedic.
The featured essays in this issue of SEQUITUR explore the role of humor in two distinct ways. In her essay, “Grotesque Irreverence: The Transformation of Ecce Homo,” Sophie Handler reflects on the phenomenon of Cecilia Giménez’s hilariously unfortunate restoration of a Spanish fresco depicting Christ in 2012. Handler follows the instant internet sensation ignited by this accidental disfigurement and the manifold Ecce Homo memes that pay tribute to it. Ultimately the simultaneous surprise, humor, and horror that Giménez’s intervention has elicited place the work within the paradigm of the grotesque, and the new appreciation it has gained as an expressive evocation of personal devotion brings new meaning to the idea of laughing at God. An artist’s intentional use of humor is examined in Janna Schoenberger’s essay “Jean Tinguely’s Cyclograveur: The Ludic Anti-Machine of Bewogen Beweging.” Shifting gears to postwar Europe, Schoenberger explores the context of a 1961 kinetic art exhibition held in Amsterdam. One of Tinguely’s pieces featured in the show was a bicycle-inspired sculpture that could be activated when a viewer sat in its “saddle” and began pedaling. Through a careful consideration of Tingueley’s Cyclograveur and a close look at the modern transformations of postwar Europe, Schoenberger argues that the artist marshaled humor and absurdity to mount a critique of the increased mechanization of Dutch society.
The four exhibition reviews within this issue examine, respectively, an ongoing installation in Washington, D.C., a recently closed show in Los Angeles, and two current exhibitions in London and Cambridge, MA. Hyunjin Cho reviews the Peacock Room REMIX at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC. This exhibition revolves around Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre installation which is inspired by James McNeil Whistler’s famous Peacock Room interior. Cho elaborates on the ways in which Waterston’s piece may be considered a parody of the original and gives readers a close account of the multifaceted concerns and subjects explored by the show. Shannon M. Lieberman’s review of The Younger Generation: Contemporary Japanese Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles keenly highlights elements of play and humor embedded in the works featured in this show. At the same time, Lieberman considers the exhibition’s aim to challenge the label “girl photography”—applied to young female Japanese photographers—and gives readers a thoughtful account of how this dated and sexist term could be further invalidated. The motif of play is explored further by SEQUITUR Junior Editor Erin McKellar in her review of Alice in Wonderland, an exhibition at the British Library in London, held in honor of the sesquicentennial of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As McKellar illustrates, the show, which features seminal manuscripts and memorabilia related to Alice, effectively evokes the childlike playfulness of the original text in its interactive design and unexpected arrangement. At the Harvard Art Museums, Joseph Saravo explores the wonder-filled world of Hieronymus Bosch in Beyond Bosch: The Afterlife of a Renaissance Master in Print. This intimate exhibition focuses on the entrepreneurial artists and printers who capitalized on the supernatural style of the master following his death, and Saravo reveals how this grouping of grotesquely humorous images, mostly from a private collection, tells an important story of the Bosch brand.
Catherine O’Reilly, coordinator of the 2016 Boston University Graduate Student Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture, reflects on this year’s conference, which took place on February 26th and 27th at the Boston University Art Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Entitled “Serious Fun: Expressions of Play in the History of Art and Architecture,” the symposium corresponds to the theme of this issue, and O’Reilly provides insights into the serious relationship of power, play, and propaganda as well as the light-hearted role of play and fun in identity construction and communal involvement. She also summarizes the keynote lecture given by Dr. Paul Barolsky, who challenged art historians to reject somber evaluations of artworks that epitomize joy, jest, and jocularity.
Finally, this issue of SEQUITUR features two visual essays by MFA students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Colorado, Boulder. Nicole Brunel’s visual essay, “badthingshappen…” documents her web project which appropriates videos and photos found on slapstick Instagram accounts. As Brunel edits, she removes the humorous contexts and fuses this material into a single narrative. What remains are only fragments of the tragic failures that so often define viral internet humor. Emily Quinn’s visual essay features four paintings in which she uses unsettlingly funny and absurd imagery to examine stereotypical masculinity. The artist draws on her experiences and family history to construct narratives that combine comedy, fantasy and a critical look at various clichéd activities and preoccupations.
Our authors approach the theme of “LOL” from diverse vantage points, and we are delighted that they engage various manifestations of humor in art with such innovative scholarship. As we finish our second and final year on the SEQUITUR editorial board, we would like to extend our warmest thanks to our readers, contributors, supporters, and collaborators. Without all of you this journal would not have grown so quickly and expanded so fruitfully. Working on the SEQUITUR team—first with Beth, Martina, and Naomi, and now with Erin, Jordan, and Sasha—has been a great pleasure. We are grateful for the experience and look forward to watching the exciting work ahead as SEQUITUR enters its third year. For now, we hope that you can find something that makes you laugh out loud within this issue, whether you LOYO or ROFL with friends.
Ewa Matyczyk & Steve Burges
Emily Quinn
My work examines stereotypical masculinity using humor, mystery, and absurdity to critique male preoccupation with sex, objectification of women, and exhibitionism. The painting, Dog Spit in Space, uses symbolism and the language of Photoshop to refer to ejaculation, while Man Camp is a folkloric representation of men policing each other’s masculinity. Working loosely from my experiences, memories, and family history, I create narratives that exist in the nexus between fantasy and reality.
I grew up in Alabama, where the tradition of storytelling is alive and well in the daily rehashing of life’s tragedy and comedy. Just as a story is exaggerated over time, my work becomes less biographical with each edit. Beginning with family photographs and stories, I edit them until the original content is transformed. Through this process, I am able to emphasize what is often left unsaid and reclaim ownership over my fears and identity as a Southern woman.