Artful Reading Prompts and Math-Based Inquiry, Streamwood High School Photography Program

Reading Prompt Six

2009-12-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

Cindy Sherman Retrospective: An artist to be taken seriously
By Richard Phillips
18 August 1999

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is hosting a major retrospective by American artist/photographer Cindy Sherman. The exhibition, which includes photographs from the mid-1970s through to 1996, is jointly organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles and will be shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto after the Sydney season concludes on August 30.

Sherman first won artistic recognition for her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80)—a series of 69 enigmatic black-and-white self-portraits emulating movie publicity shots from the 1940s and 50s. Over the last 30 years she has risen to become the most widely known and financially successful art photographer in the United States. Her latest photographs are large colour prints of masks and dolls, as well as detailed arrangements of dummies, body parts and other inanimate objects.

Sherman's prints generally sell for between $20,000 and $50,000. A 20 x 25 centimetre print from the Untitled Film Stills series was recently auctioned by Christie's for a record $190,000—an unprecedented figure for a living artist/photographer. In 1996, New York's Museum of Modern Art paid $US1 million for the complete Untitled Film Stills series.

Much praise and numerous critiques have been published about Sherman. She has been elevated to virtual heroine status by a number of post-modernist ideologues. "Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman", an essay by Amelia Jones in the current exhibition's catalogue provides an example of the overblown verbiage used by some critics. [1] Those able to decipher this impenetrable essay will discover little substance, let alone any explanation of the evolution of Sherman's work over the last two decades, its strengths and, most importantly, some of its underlying weaknesses.

Born in New Jersey in 1954, Sherman grew up in suburban Long Island and attended the State University College in Buffalo, New York where she studied painting and photography. After initial difficulties with the technical aspects of photographic printmaking, Sherman was introduced to conceptual art and began using the camera to produce self-portraits. The first of these are included in the retrospective.

After graduation Sherman moved to New York with artist Robert Longo, and at the end of 1977 began to produce the first of her Untitled Film Stills. Using her apartment and a range of locations in and around New York City, Sherman's strangely nostalgic and lonely self-portraits record her masquerading as a range of characters: a blonde actress, a secretary, housewife, schoolgirl, a Latin film star and a young girl running away from home.

None of Sherman's photographs are titled, her aim being to force the viewer to draw their own conclusions from the works. "These are pictures of emotions personified, entirely of themselves with their own presence—not of me," Sherman commented in an earlier exhibition catalogue.

"The issue of the identity of the model is no more interesting than the possible symbolism of any other detail. When I prepare each character I have to consider what I'm working against; that people are going to look under the make-up and wigs for that common denominator, the recognisable. I'm trying to make other people recognise something of themselves rather than me."

In 1980-81, Sherman began using colour film and placed her invented characters in front of scenes projected onto backdrops. Known as the Rear Screen Projections, these photographs were inspired by television images and other contemporary visuals. These were followed by Centrefolds, photographs commissioned for the Artforum magazine. The larger-than-life images parodied semi-pornographic magazine photographs. Artforum rejected the pictures with some feminist critics claiming that Sherman was "reinforcing sexist stereotypes". The Pink Robe series followed in 1982 together with commission work for some prestigious fashion houses.

One of the most striking images from this period is her 1983 Untitled #122, a stark self-portrait in which Sherman wears a platinum blonde wig and shoulder-padded overcoat. The long blonde hair covers Sherman's face, one blood-shot eye is partially visible, her arms are by her side, and fists are tightly clenched. The character, who is charged with unreleased tension and anger, is ready to fly into a rage. What individuals or event, what sort of society, has produced this almost apoplectic state? The untitled photograph provides no real clues and therefore forces the viewers to find their own answers.

Fairy Tales (1985) marked another departure. Sherman began using a range of theatrical props and other accoutrements to create disturbing and partly comic images influenced by horror movies. This was followed by the History Portraits (1989-90), in which the artist, using plastic body parts and other bits and pieces, photographed herself as characters drawn from old master paintings, in particular Caravaggio's Sick Bacchus, Jean Fouquet's Madonna of Melun and Raphael's La Fornarina.

Sex Pictures (1992), Sherman's next major series, was produced in response to attacks on freedom of expression by the Christian Fundamentalists and extreme rightwing elements in the United States. It followed government amendments prohibiting the National Endowment for the Arts from providing grants for art work considered obscene and the attempted prosecution of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati over an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. Sherman's sexually explicit and partly abstract photographs mock conventional conceptions of obscenity and defied those demanding increased censorship. The photographs are a surreal combination of artificial body parts, fake genitalia and dismembered medical dummies in lewd poses.

The most recent photographs included in the current retrospective—the Horror and Surrealist Pictures (1994-96)—are without doubt Sherman's most demanding images. Many have been favourably compared to paintings and prints by Hieronymous Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Francisco Goya; in particular Goya's Los Caprichos and his famous The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

These images fall into two categories: the mask portraits; and photographed arrangements of mannequins, toys, rotten garbage, broken domestic goods and unidentifiable waste products. More abstract in form, these works are intensely claustrophobic works, saturated with sadness and disillusionment. Many of these pictures are grotesque, challenge conventional conceptions of beauty, and demand that the viewer explore the darker depths of their subconscious and imagination—sensations and thoughts that generally only come to the surface during dreams or nightmares.

In a 1997 interview, Sherman explained that she started creating these images in an effort to more deeply examine and then transcend ordinary conceptions of beauty. "I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realise what you are looking at is something totally opposite. It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest or the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side," she said.

Not all of this is successful. Some photographs are simply too clever or self-conscious. The History Portraits (1989-90) in my opinion represent an artistic and creative low. The images are little more than smug parodies of classical art portraiture and make no emotional connection, or provoke any inner exploration by the viewer. They contain none of the intense irreverence of the best Dadaist work or the mysterious radicalism of the Surrealists. The political message, drawn from the post-modernist schema, is obvious: civilisation and history is entirely subjective—something invented, to be chopped up and reconstituted according to one's own whim. History has no value, other than what it can provide for the immediate needs of those studying it.

It would be a mistake, though, to write off Sherman or conclude that this posturing—and there is an echo of this in the Sex Pictures —is a permanent feature of her work. The artist/photographer's less successful work, moreover, has to be understood within the social and intellectual conditions in which it was produced.

Sherman emerged in the rarified New York art scene during the 1980s. As art critic Robert Hughes explained in his essay, "The Decline of the City of Mahagonny":

"At the end of the eighties there may have been five hundred people in the world who could pay more than $25 million for a work of art, and tens of thousands who could pay a million: a situation with no historical precedents at all. Never before have the impulses of art appreciation and collecting been so nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display as in the late 1980s, and nowhere more so than in the United States".

And New York, Hughes declared, had become an "immense bourse in which every kind of art is traded for ever-escalating prices". A place of "premature canonizations and record bids, and the conversion of much of its museum system into a promotional machine".

The latest generation of American artists, according to Hughes, operate on the basis that "nature is dead, culture is all" and everything is "mediated to the point where nothing can be seen in its true quality". The inflated prices, art dealer speculation and vast amounts of media hype and premature careerism had so distorted the American art world "that a serious artist in New York must face the same unreality and weightlessness as a serious actor in Los Angeles."

So while the art market was booming, the artistic and intellectual life was being hollowed out with a predominance of overrated and mainly unemotional work. Typical, and especially from those influenced by the Andy Warhol school, was a tendency to blandly reproduce images from the popular media—film, television and advertising—in the belief that such presentations rebelled against traditional artistic values or represented some new initiative.

Sherman worked in, and was no doubt influenced by, these intellectually unfavourable conditions. But while popular cultural icons and conceptions were her starting point, Sherman's photographs rose above the trite and largely forgettable work then on display. Instead of passively recreating the images around her—frequently an indication that the artist has little to say—Sherman often made a real emotional connection and compelled her viewers to think.

Sherman is a serious artist who is attempting to explore, and perhaps understand more profoundly, some aspects of the disturbing social and psychic reality of society at the end of the 20th century. Her staged photographs and unsettling "still-life" arrangements are the means through she is conducting this exploration. Those approaching the retrospective with fixed ideas about what a photographer should or should not do will gain little from a visit to the exhibition. Those able to immerse themselves in her work will be rewarded.

Footnote
1. A typical paragraph:
"...Sherman's practice participates in what I have argued to be the opening of the subject to otherness (the baring of the circuits of desire connecting self and other in a dynamic of intersubjectivity) that gives what we might call postermodernism its most remarkable and particular antimodernist thrust. In feminist and phenomenological terms, the body, which instantiates the self, is a 'modality of reflexivity,' posing the subject in relation to the other in a reciprocal relationship; through gendered/sexual performances of the body, the subject is situated and situates herself through the other. The subject, then, is never complete within itself but is always contingent on others, and the glue of this intersubjectivity is the desire binding us together (the projective gaze is one mode of intersubjectivity but functions specifically to veil this contingency by projecting lack onto the other rather than admitting its own). It is the intersubjective dimension of Sherman's work that has largely been ignored (not surprisingly since it exposed the investedness and contingency of every reading of her pictures)."
["Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman", by Amelia Jones, Cindy Sherman: Retrospective; Thames and Hudson, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; 1997, page 33]

1. The main point that the author seeks to make in this passage is that Cindy Sherman:
a. is a famous photographer who makes between $20,000 and $50,000 a print.
b. only photographed herself.
c. is a photographer who, over the past 30 years, has made a prominent name for herself in the art world.
d. watched a lot of films for inspiration.

2. In the fourth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “verbiage.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. An overabundance of words
b. A critique
c. An compliment
d. A quick witted remark

3. What reasoning does the author provide for the lack of titles for Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills?
a. The artist was lazy
b. The artist didn’t want to give away any information
c. The hardest had writer’s block
d. The artist wanted viewers to draw their own conclusions

4. In the tenth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “apoplectic.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. A sudden loss of body control
b. To faint
c. To succumb to joy
d. To succumb to fear

Math-Based Inquiry Five

2009-11-12T13:56:00.000-08:00

Imagine you are matting a 2' by 5' print. Create a sketch illustrating the proper dimensions for a 5" and 5 1/2" border surrounding.

Math-Based Inquiry Four

2009-11-12T13:52:00.000-08:00

You are preparing to take a blurred action image outdoors. When referencing your light meter, you discover that you have too much light with the current settings. Your teacher instructs you to decrease two stops. If your aperture is set to f/4 and your shutter is set to 15, what will you change, and to what denomination?

Math-Based Inquiry Three

2009-11-12T13:49:00.000-08:00

You are preparing to take a stop action image outdoors. When referencing your light meter, you discover that you do not have enough light with the current settings. Your teacher instructs you to increase two stops. If your aperture is set to f/5.6 and your shutter is set to 1000, what will you change, and to what denomination?

Math-Based Inquiry Two

2009-11-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

Imagine you are matting a 16" by 20" print. Create a sketch illustrating the proper dimensions for a 3" and 3 1/2" border surrounding.

Math-Based Inquiry One

2009-11-12T13:47:00.000-08:00

Imagine you are matting a 4" by 5" print. Create a sketch illustrating the proper dimensions for a 2" and 2 1/2" border surrounding.

Reading Prompt Five

2009-11-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

From The Sunday Times October 5, 2008
Report by Cathy Galvin.

Annie Leibovitz: Nothing left to hide

The rich, famous and powerful will do almost anything to be immortalized by Annie Leibovitz. But now it’s her turn in the spotlight — and she is ready to be as candid as her photographs.

Annie Leibovitz is marching towards destiny with a giant stride – and today it’s her fate to be photographed for this magazine. It’s not a thing she welcomes. The most famous female portrait photographer in the world is about to be scrutinized by one of the trendiest. She knows he’ll be focusing on every line in her 59-year-old face – “But I don’t want to be an idiot about it,” she says. So instead she’s encouraging me to keep up as we bounce from her offices to a nearby studio in Greenwich Village, New York.

Awaiting her is the diminutive Platon: dynamic young photographers love a bold brand name. She’s nervous, muttering: “What do I call him? Plat?” We’re crushed into what appears to be a large black box with just enough room for Leibovitz and her assistants, Chad and Kathryn, Platon and his team of three, and some scorching lights. I’m on the floor, watching Little Platon and Big Annie, him at her knees in every sense as he stares up at her. “Couldn’t you get a ditch dug in your studio?” she quips as he pleads for her to keep still. He adores her but he seems to adore everyone, and I know she’s clocked that. His technique is to hunker down and shoot up at his subjects, a plankton’s perspective on the world. “The smallest movements, Annie, the smallest movements,” he begs.

Leibovitz is a challenge. For any woman, such close examination is agonizing, but the pain is even greater for someone who lives their life behind, not in front of, the lens. She’s gripping her camera for support, determined to make her face and body obey him, but her booming voice rebels: “Kathryn. Where’s Kathryn? Can we have some good music here? I’m going crazy. Have you got some Springsteen? Some early Dylan? Some Emmylou?”

He wants her to look down, but every atom in her body is exploding with an instinctive aversion to that instruction. Her iconic status in the photographic pantheon is based on stamina, 35 years of consistent and often brilliant work, not neurosis. We may like our heroines to have a touch of the tragic about them, but she’s having none of it. “I do not want to look sad,” she tells me later, though in the moment she wants to help. At one point she can’t contain herself any longer, grabs a camera and shoots back at him.

He tries to chat, to warm her up – not something she has much time for. She’s written: “I don’t like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me.” When he questions her about her mother, she patiently explains that she died not too long ago. So, as it happens, did her father and her lover, the novelist and essayist Susan Sontag. When he asks, in the same way he once apparently asked President Bill Clinton, to “give him love”, she roars with laughter. All the while, she’s giving him a masterclass. The key to success, she says, is to go back: “Don’t think that you’ve got it from one sitting. If you don’t like what you see, go back. I do it all the time. Build relationships. It has to be intimate.”

None of it, she’s suggesting – the body of work, the attention, the reputation – comes in a moment. And none of it necessarily reveals the soul of the sitter or the photographer. She sees what she does as a series of one-dimensional fragments in a complex world. “What is reality anyway?” she asks me.

It’s a good question, and one that has a particular bearing on the flood of celebrity portraits she’s been shooting for magazines and advertising campaigns since the 1980s, photographs that helped define a particular era. When her cover shot of Demi Moore, pregnant and naked, appeared in 1991, some outlets displayed it in a white wrapper. There were howls of protest, followed by applause for her daring feminist take on female nudity, none of which she had intended. She simply loved the picture.

The range of her portraiture is breathtaking: from her trademark Hollywood group shots, as lavish as any film set, to quirky conceptual pieces – Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk or John Cleese dangling from a tree – to her elegant black-and-white portraits of dancers, writers and musicians. The Queen, according to the BBC, stormed out of a session with Leibovitz at Buckingham Palace last year. In fact, she was storming in. And they’re all at it –Hollywood stars, international politicians, big corporates and magazines, all rushing towards her, ready to fly her anywhere, pay her anything, in the hope she will immortalise them. It’s formidable work, and the familiarity of it can breed contempt. The photographic critic Vicki Goldberg once said Leibovitz had captured a culture, “and what a shabby culture it is”. Leibovitz is aware of that tension: selling a cover has little to do with truth or art.

What’s real for Leibovitz comes in the shape of three-year-old twins, Susan and Samuelle, angelic girls in a halo of blonde curls who are playing at dressing up in their bedroom at the top of a fairy-tale brownstone house. They’re at the centre of a personal reappraisal of her life and work. She wants to snatch a few moments with them before I skitter after her to the dreaded photoshoot. When I ask how many people there are in Team Leibovitz, from studio, personal and photographic assistants to housekeepers and nannies, she laughs. She laughs a great deal, despite the austere appearance. There’s no definitive answer because she’s absorbed in tickling Samuelle, and I get drawn in to the play, but it’s a significant number. There’s a business, two homes – one here at the heart of New York and a 200-acre estate at Rhinebeck, near the Hudson river – to run with her staff. You notice the portraits around the house, because they aren’t by Leibovitz. “I’ve got enough pictures of the children. I want to be with them, not photograph them,” she says. Scattered about are snapshots of some of the wider Leibovitz clan, many in sepia. She’s collating their family past and saving it for her children and five siblings.

At around the age of 50, Leibovitz made the bold, unconventional and life-changing decision to have children. It was her choice to be a single mother, not one that involved Sontag assuming the role of second parent. She doesn’t discuss it. Her first child, Sarah, was born in October 2001, reportedly by sperm donor, when she was 51; the twins arrived by surrogate birth 3½ years later.

The other reality for Leibovitz is contained within the vast range of her photography over a lifetime: her love affair with reportage, not studio, photography. It’s work that can still astonish. At her best, her journalistic instinct is acute. It was this that allowed her to take the remarkable photograph of a naked John Lennon coiled against the clothed figure of Yoko Ono just hours before he was killed in December 1980; to virtually live with the Rolling Stones and shoot some of the most memorable reportage of the 1970s. From the moment she left the San Francisco Art Institute and student photography to pursue a dizzying magazine career with the embryonic Rolling Stone magazine, hitting the road with the writers Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe and establishing herself as the leading music photographer of the time, she felt guilt that her photography wasn’t art: “But that’s the thing that drives the work, that tension between selling out and not selling out, doing it or not doing it, and I still maintain magazines are interesting vehicles for doing it. Sometimes you get squashed and then sometimes you just break through and you get to do something that’s a complete surprise.”

This month, a retrospective of her work, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, drawn from photographs that appeared in a book of the same name in 2006, will open at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition celebrates her personal story: hanging with memorable portraits of celebrity and power are gentler images that capture those moments when supercharged Leibovitz has stood still. There are surprises: landscapes, family photographs, erotic memories, even some war images, the private collection of a very public figure, at times disturbingly intimate.

It’s an account of the years 1990 to 2005, the years she spent with Susan Sontag, before both Sontag and her father died – Sontag in December 2004 and her father, Samuel, in early February the following year. The project began when she started to sift through undeveloped film and other personal images to find images of Sontag for her memorial service. She dismisses the idea those years were intense: “Yes of course, but everyone has this. We’re going to have babies and we’re going to die. This is everyman’s story.”

Yes and no. That collision of life and death in her middle years has changed Leibovitz’s work. It’s softer in the sense of being more revealing, yet carries the distinctive toughness of her journalistic instinct. Not everyone could reveal their own experiences of mortality in this way, or the experience of their loved ones.

In addition to the book and soon-to-open exhibition, another book called Annie Leibovitz at Work, aimed at answering every question that a young photographer might want to ask her, is published this month. All this retrospective introspection marks her awareness of her legacy: the story she will be leaving behind for her fans, her family, for history. What will she be remembered for – her shots of Demi Moore naked, or those that appeared in A Photographer’s Life of her father and Susan Sontag dead? Or something else entirely – other work still to be published?

Few who see the exhibition will fail to be impressed by Leibovitz’s scale and range; some will argue about whether a magazine photographer’s output can be of lasting quality. She’s unsure what the verdict will be on her life and work. “I remember meeting [the legendary US photographer] Ansel Adams in his late seventies, and they had him in his dark room – he only came out for five minutes – working on his master set. He did a whole series of master sets, and it’s interesting to think along those lines… The thing that holds up, the thing that is remarkable, that I can stand outside of myself and look at and feel so lucky, is that it’s all getting more interesting.”

There are also regrets. She swings between confidence in her achievements and a rawness that shows it’s too soon to have recovered from her losses. For all the pleasure in showing her family pictures, she knows that she and others have paid a price.

Did any of the family try to stop her showing their private moments; their struggle to cope with her father’s death and his death-bed scene? “My mom. I showed my mom the book and she was worried about pictures of my dad and then she let it go. When I look back now, I wouldn’t do what I did then. In Paris [the exhibition was held there this summer] when I was walking through the show, oh my gosh, I realised I’d left my family so vulnerable. God knows why you do it, on some level, but it came out of these moments and I won’t do it again. I won’t touch my family again. I have great respect for that moment – you know it was crazed and sad and vulnerable, and it’s probably my best work.” Visitors to the exhibition will find themselves drawn to a small black-and-white photograph that carries a heavy weight of bitterness, the most controversial she has taken. It shows the body of Susan Sontag laid out in a funeral home, her once beautiful, distinctive face almost unrecognisable, racked by the struggle to beat a virulent form of blood cancer. Leibovitz acknowledges: “There are good deaths and bad deaths. And Susan’s was a bad death.” The image spares the viewer nothing.

Earlier this year, I had interviewed Sontag’s son, the writer David Rieff, who has written an anguished account of his mother’s death and is now editing her journals and letters. When I tell her this, it throws her. She’s known for checking out her interviewers, and has earlier told me how many children I have and listed some of the more inane projects I’ve worked on as proof of her investigative powers, but this detail had escaped her. She asks her assistant, Karen, to bring her the article, and reads it in front of me. In it, Rieff makes plain his contempt for Leibovitz – not for taking the photograph, but for showing it in her book and exhibition. “I think she had a choice. But for whatever purposes it served in her psyche or her career, there was no way I could stop her,” he had said.

It’s clear the two of them were uncomfortable with each other while Sontag was alive, and Leibovitz comments on their capacity to have made each other miserable after Sontag’s death. Rieff called Leibovitz Sontag’s “on-again, off-again lover”, while friends of Leibovitz recall the abruptness of Rieff’s behaviour in death, failing to acknowledge the love and support Leibovitz had offered his mother during her life. She had renovated a cottage for Sontag on her estate, had bought both of them a home at the Quai des Grands-Augustins in Paris; and had chartered planes to take Sontag to hospital for a bone-marrow transplant and later back to New York.

Recovering herself, Leibovitz says: “I showed the book to everyone I was worried about before it was published – with the exception of David Rieff. Most of those people were close to Susan, like Joan Didion and Susan’s sister, Judith. The most important person I showed it to was Andrew Wylie [Sontag’s agent], who knows David and was executor of Susan’s estate, and he was very supportive and said leave David to me and I’ll talk to him.”

She says of Rieff’s book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, which charts his mother’s final months: “I thought it was terrible. Only because it was so cold. But if you notice, nobody else was there in David’s book except David.”

But was she there for Susan’s final moments? “I wasn’t there. It was the first death that I ever experienced. Would I do it differently now? I certainly would. But at the time even David was going away, and my father was dying. I had this trip to Florida to see him, and I was taking my Christmas vacation and splitting it between Susan and my father… so I was with Susan up until that Sunday, and she said I love you and I said goodbye, and I left and felt sure she’d be fine for a few days. Then I got down to Florida and had literally just landed, and David called me and said there was a turn for the worse. I tried to get on a plane to get back, and there wasn’t a plane until the morning. She died when I was in the plane. “I begged him to keep her there until I saw her, and he did. In retrospect, David was desperately trying to hold on to his mother in some way, and of course pushed everyone else away – and it was painful to a lot of people. He had a lot to deal with.”

Has she questioned her decision to keep the picture of Sontag in the funeral home in the exhibition? In her book, Leibovitz admits she was in a trance when she took the picture, and had provided Sontag’s funeral clothes: a dress they had bought in Milan, scarves from Venice, a favourite black velvet coat she liked to wear to the theatre. “No, I think it is a strong picture. I have absolutely no problem about it. I think there’s a genre to it and I’m a photographer and I feel like it was totally appropriate.” She wouldn’t release the picture for publication here.

We can’t know what Sontag would have thought. She loved photography, wrote eloquently about its cultural impact and there’s something prescient about one of her later books, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), an analysis of how horrific images can make voyeurs of us all. Sontag had encouraged Leibovitz to broaden her work, and the two had travelled together twice to Sarajevo during the Serbian siege. In her book, Sontag notes: “People are often unable to take in the sufferings of those close to them.” She also wrote: “Photographs turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”

Leibovitz continues: “I went down to the funeral home and I did it. I think David is quoted as saying it was some kind of circus-like picture. I shot it with a digital camera, and I got home and the printing machine had run out of ink, and it came out this kind of strange green, which I thought was interesting at the time… it just happened.” Those painful green images make a spread in the book.

She doesn’t attempt to present either the book or the exhibition as a kind of truth: it is, she says, a moment: “You see things in the work. You can start to create fictions some time. That’s all right. The whole thing is a kind of fiction. We made up a story for you to see… there’s just enough pictures to tell a story.”

And what drives Annie’s own story? The sense of never stopping for breath? It began young, the patterns established in childhood. Anna-Lou Leibovitz has been on the move since the day she was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1949. Her father was in the air force, and the family – she was lost in the middle of five siblings – were used to being bundled in the car and transported from base to base, the classic American road story. They never stayed anywhere long. There were fights between them all: “I think the fact that we were on the move saved us. It kept us together, and it’s interesting because I’m thinking now what it must be like for my kids growing up in one spot; because for us, for good or bad, the fact we were moving every couple of years, it solved all our problems. I never even knew you saw people again. That made us closer, because your siblings became your best friends and you travelled together. I do see a parallel with taking pictures – you go in for a quick study and you get out.”

Leibovitz was the third child in an exuberant, physical family. Their vitality, and her love of them, bursts out of the photographs on display in the book and exhibition: strong father and brother; a mother who had been a dancer. None of them afraid of the camera. “There were kind of two halves. I had an older brother I was enamoured with, and an older sister who was a bit too old for me… so I was the youngest of the oldest set and the oldest of the younger set.

“When I got older, I felt like I was totally abandoned. I was left to my own devices pretty much. And by the time I was older my mom was too pooped to do too much with me.

“If you talk to my siblings, they just can’t sit down. I think there’s something chemically wrong with us all! We all have this kind of workaholism – I think they’ve now labelled it attention deficit disorder. I’m sure there’s something in that.”

Others have observed her inability to settle, including Susan Sontag, whom she met in 1988. “She said I was always passing through.” Another kind of speed caught up with her in the 1970s, when she became briefly addicted to drugs. “Cocaine propelled you. It kept you believing you were thinking,” she has said.

I suggest she thrives on being at the calm centre of chaos, but she says the rush is over: “When I had the children, I finally hit the wall. Okay, it just seemed like you were going and going and going – and then you had the children and you are finally filled up. It takes care of every single thing that you have, even to the point that you realise you have too much to do, and you try to figure out how to manage that the best you can.”

It’s unstated but evident that Leibovitz worries her children may be left without her before they are grown up. “I feel like a summer-camp director. Having a family, especially being a single mother, having the sense of family for my children is so important, so that they understand there’s this extended family.

You know, I probably work to see my siblings more than I would – just so my children understand they are not alone, that they have a bigger family. With my parents gone [her mother died last year], I thought I’d maybe have a break from my brothers and sisters for a while – but on the contrary, we kind of closed rank.” She spends August at Rhinebeck with the children and an assortment of her siblings, nephews and nieces. At an age when others consider stepping off the treadmill, Leibovitz is flirting with the idea of slowing down – a little. She may work a four-day week from July.

The feminist writer Gloria Steinem once said of Leibovitz that she was the most authoritative, uncertain person she knew. It’s easy to see why, particularly at this point in her life: “You absolutely continue to question what you’ve done. It’s an interesting time. I was very pleased when A Photographer’s Life was published: I’d been trying to express that work for so long, and it has emotional impact. You get that opportunity in your lifetime – where you know that you really did do art; though you really didn’t know what you did until you’d done it.”

Now she wants to make time for more projects close to her heart. “Because of the children, I have a cause. I have to question myself about whether I am doing what I want to do or should be doing, and I’m trying to sort it out.” Meanwhile, the jobs roll in, including presidential candidate Barack Obama for Men’s Vogue, though she recently said no to his running mate, Joe Biden, because she wants to work fewer weekends. The Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin would, however, be irresistible.

Who makes her laugh? She roars. Pointing at her facial muscles she says: “These muscles are so underused… I’m not kidding! There are those people who never smile and they just get that look? And then when I had the children – my Samuelle is like my own little Lindsay Lohan, a little troublemaker: if she can put her finger in a socket, she’ll do it. But you have to admire her. It’s funny how they come out of the box like that.

“I have to say right now I haven’t quite figured out how to walk and chew gum at the same time. I go to bed pretty early and I’m with the kids and I don’t really go out that much – and it’s pretty much work or kids, work or kids… What the hell – but it’s definitely a two-man job. I’d like to have one more relationship in my life. I’ve always had great help and a great nanny but…”

She may be taking a quieter road – and a tough one – but the Leibovitz journey is far from over. “Beautiful, Annie. F***ing wicked,” Platon had barked at the end of our photo shoot. It’s hard not to agree.

1. The main points that the author seeks to make in this passage is that Annie Leibovitz:
a. is a famous photographer and mother.
b. only photographed celebrities.
c. even amongst scrutinization, remains true to herself as an artist.
d. has twin children, whom she incorporates into her photography often.

2. In the third paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “quips.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. A sharp sarcastic remark
b. A serious uttering
c. An innuendo
d. A sharp gesture with the hand

3. In the tenth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “austere.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. silly
b. beautiful
c. regal
d. severe

4. According to the author, what was Leibovitz’s most controversial image?
a. The image depicting a nude Demi Moore
b. The image depicting Susan Sontag’s death
c. The image depicting her father’s death
d. The image depicting John Cleese dangling from a tree

Reading Prompt Four

2009-11-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

What They See in Van Gogh’s Ear

In the decades since van Gogh sliced off a portion of his left earlobe, the event has given rise to theories, pranks, merchandise, and a host of references in culture high and low
by Ann Landi

In the history of art, few afflictions have generated as much curiosity as Vincent van Gogh’s severed ear. Not Michelangelo’s broken nose, not Degas’s blindness, not even Toulouse-Lautrec’s misshapen body. The story of the ear (and the purported insanity that led to the self-mutilation) endures with the tenacity of myth—and sparks renewed argument whenever the myth gets tweaked. The prevailing account is that on December 23, 1888, Van Gogh stalked his housemate, Paul Gauguin, brandishing a razor, but instead of attacking Gauguin, he went home and cut off the lower part of his left earlobe, wrapped it in newspaper, and gave it to a prostitute named Rachel.

In 2001 two Hamburg-based scholars, Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, proposed a different theory, which grew to book length over the years and was published last year as Van Goghs Ohr: Paul Gauguin und der Pakt des Schweigens (Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, Osburg). Kaufmann, a retired headmaster with a Ph.D. in history, and Wildegans, who holds a doctorate in art history and works at a cultural foundation, spent ten years sifting through police reports, witness statements, and other material before coming to the conclusion that Gauguin, an expert fencer, sliced off van Gogh’s earlobe with his sword during a fight. To hush up the matter and keep Gauguin out of jail, the two conspired to cover up the crime. The authors argue that the official version of events, based largely on Gauguin’s accounts, is rife with inconsistencies, and that both artists later hinted that the truth was much more complicated.

The media immediately pounced; even morning-news shows devoted airtime to the new theory. Art historians have also ventured opinions, some calling it hogwash, just another layer of speculation added to the already overburdened van Gogh saga. Martin Gayford, author of The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence (Mariner Books 2008), a book about the brief time the two artists lived together, characterizes Kaufmann and Wildegans’s retelling as a “leap into wild conjecture.” Stefan Koldehoff, a journalist and van Gogh scholar who researched the subject for his own book Van Gogh: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Van Gogh: Myth and Reality, DuMont 2003), describes the new book as “carefully researched and written” but says he has “found not even the smallest piece of truth for that thesis.” On the other hand, Nina Zimmer, curator of 19th-century and modern art at the Kunstmuseum Basel and co-curator of “Vincent van Gogh: Between Earth and Heaven” (at the Kunstmuseum through the 27th of this month), is not quite as negative: “What I like about this book is that it brings new material together and it is well researched, and this is why it’s worth looking at.” In the end, though, she says, “I don't buy into the new theory. It's not much more than fun to be looked at as an alternative reading.”

Either way, in the decades since van Gogh’s suicide, in 1890, that ear has taken on a life of its own—from the lowbrow to the literary—inspiring pranks, merchandise, movies, music, album covers, stories, plays, and even YouTube videos. A Google search of “Vincent van Gogh ear” pulled up a staggering 96,900 references, ranging from a restaurant in Union, New Jersey, called Van Gogh’s Ear Café to New York Times columnist Deborah Solomon’s discovery of what she called, in 2000, “a mass-produced souvenir of artistic torment: a curvy, pinkish rubber object described with typical eBay poetry as ‘Van Gogh’s Ear—squish it, squeeze it!’”

A clutch of videos on YouTube documents the dissemination of the ear legend in digital culture. In one, Genco Gülan, a Turkish artist, offers up the remarkably realistic removal of his left ear with a straightedge razor. Another is an advertisement for the Van Gogh Disappearing Ear Mug in which the ear fades from a self-portrait when the mug is filled with hot liquids. And in a sweetly surrealist video contributed by an eighth-grader, the severed ear morphs into a tree with purple branches.

In the realm of pop music, at least three rock bands have taken their names from the subject: the Brit group Deaf to Van Gogh’s Ear, the American rockers Van Gogh’s Ear, and the Spanish La Oreja de Van Gogh. Perhaps best known among the musical offerings is Joni Mitchell’s famous 1994 album cover for Turbulent Indigo: a self-portrait of the singer-composer with the side of her face swaddled in a white bandage à la van Gogh’s two self-portraits with a bandaged ear.

Other offshoots include Matt Swan’s two-character one-act comedy in which the tormented painter admonishes a friend who asks why he has injured himself (“I don’t need to hear to paint!”) and a short story by Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar about a failed businessman who tries to bribe his creditor by selling him van Gogh’s ear. The late Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-grandson and namesake of van Gogh’s art-dealer brother, once considered producing a film called “Golden Ear” (“Most films about van Gogh are so serious about this humane guy, and they’re boring,” the director told the New York Times in 1995. “I mean, he cut off his ear. He had a venereal disease. He was just a human being.”) And of course the ear episode has figured in many of the films devoted to van Gogh’s life, including Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) and Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo (1990). A Turkish composer, Nevit Kodalli, even put the incident to music in 1957 as part of an opera, Van Gogh—a work described by Time magazine’s music critic as a “weary series of recitatives . . . daubed with great splashes of instrumental color.”

Jokes and hoaxes abound. “In 2003, on the 150th anniversary of van Gogh’s birth, a British colleague put on his website a photo of a glass supposedly containing the artist’s ear,” says Koldehoff. The colleague claimed it had been found recently in southern France and that there was now a dispute between the Netherlands and France as to where it should go as a national treasure. “Of course it was an ironic comment on the big brouhaha over the anniversary,” Koldehoff says, “but several serious news agencies and newspapers printed it as fact.”

All of this raises questions: What do we really know of van Gogh, and how important is his story to understanding his art? And why do theories about the artist—whether they concern his self-mutilation, his supposed insanity, or his suicide—have such a powerful grasp on the public imagination?

“People who have never set foot in an art gallery or an art museum, who don’t know much about artists, do know two names: Leonardo and van Gogh,” says Joachim Pissarro, great-grandson of Camille Pissarro and curator of the recent “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “One of the reasons that van Gogh is so prevalent is because of these layers and layers of accreted ideas about the craziness. These have created an image of van Gogh that is much bigger than and almost independent of his art. Most people who have read the books and seen the films don’t necessarily look at the work, and the work in that particular context is seen as a symptom of a disorder.

“There are a lot of things we just don’t know about van Gogh,” Pissarro adds, especially when it comes to the source of his mental condition. “Some people say it was epilepsy, some say it was bouts of alcoholism, and there are other theories. What I prefer to do is go through the letters and stay with what we have, which is in itself completely fascinating. Van Gogh was extremely learned, extremely erudite, and passionately well read. He wrote and read in four languages. He was interested in poetry and literary works, comparing novels to other great landmarks in the history of 19th-century art. That’s an aspect of van Gogh that nobody mentions, because it goes against the grain of our received ideas.”

And so the more additions there are to the van Gogh story—from pop culture, medical research, and even serious historical scholarship—the more elusive the artist becomes. Scliar’s narrator seems to express the impossibility of accessing the truth about the man behind the mesmerizing work when he says, in the final lines of the story, “If you examine an ear carefully—any ear, whether Van Gogh’s or not, you’ll see that it is designed much like a labyrinth. In this labyrinth I got lost. And I would never find my way out again.”

Ann Landi is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

1. The main points that the author seeks to make in this passage is that Vincent Van Gogh:
a. Was insane and an alcoholic
b. Had one of the worst cases of epilepsy
c. Was extremely learned, extremely erudite, and passionately well read
d. Was best friends with Gauguin

2. In the third paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “conjecture.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. a generalization
b. A day dream
c. Proof of a specific event
d. an opinion or theory

3. When the author makes mention of the fact that a Google search of “Vincent van Gogh ear” pulled up a staggering 96,900 references, he is bringing light to the opinion that…
a. Vincent Van Gogh is a famous and popular artist.
b. Viewers have created an image of Van Gogh that is much bigger than and almost independent of his art.
c. People google Van Gogh daily.
d. Vincent Van Gogh is famous because he was a talented artist with epilepsy.

4. In the second to last paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “erudite.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. To have great knowledge
b. To have an addiction to alcohol
c. To be hard of hearing
d. To be eccentric

Reading Prompt Three

2009-11-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

Turning the Subject into the Artist

Oliver Herring is guided by social interaction—in communally made photosculptures, in giddy performances where volunteers take on bizarre tasks, and in videos featuring strangers who come by his Brooklyn studio
by Hilarie M. Sheets

On the opening day of his 2007 exhibition at Max Protetch gallery in New York, Oliver Herring made a secret resolution to start saying yes to any request made to him. His resolve was soon put to the test by two recent art-school graduates from Philadelphia. Chris Golas and Joe DiGiuseppe had heard Herring, appearing in an episode of PBS’s “Art: 21” series, talk about collaborating with strangers for his short films that find quirky beauty in mundane activities. They asked Herring if he would come to Philadelphia, in the belief that his methods might help them make inroads into a Puerto Rican community in the area where they had found cheap studio space. He agreed to visit, and his initial trip to Philadelphia snowballed in ways he could not have anticipated. “The work that interests me the most is when I don’t know if it’s even art,” says Herring, 45. “To say yes to everything was a way to meet that head-on, to become more flexible in my thinking, and learn that there are no wasted situations. It changed my life and my work.”

Herring, who has often opened up his Brooklyn studio to anyone interested in making a video, brought his improvisational approach to north Philadelphia. Showing up on a street corner with his camera, he lured some of the neighborhood kids into performing. He suggested they try the trust exercise of falling and being caught by their friends. Throughout the day the children’s playacting developed into all manner of exuberant jumping, leaping, and levitating. “It really became about flying, which was poignant because in this poor neighborhood, there are so few opportunities for physical escape,” says the artist. Herring edited the footage into the short video Howard Street (airborne) and later returned to shoot kids “swimming” in streams formed by open fire hydrants for the companion piece, Waterloo Street (both 2007).

Months later, at the first showing of these videos, in the raw warehouse space where Golas and DiGiuseppe had their studios, Herring implemented another collaborative concept with which he’s been experimenting for several years, called “TASK.” For these events he designates a stage—usually a simple expanse of brown paper on the floor, loaded up with materials like cardboard, tape, markers, string, face paint, aluminum foil, and chairs—and offers participants a basket of tasks to choose from. Written on slips of paper, they could range from “stand on one leg” to “start a revolution.” These “collaborators” pull a slip from the basket and interpret their tasks however they wish, and then they write out a new task to replenish the pool. In Philadelphia the event drew together 350 people from the neighborhood and art community in a giddy, chaotic, ephemeral experience. Herring returned to the city to do another “TASK” party, drawing 600 people to the building, which is now known as FLUXspace and used regularly for art and community events. “It’s a completely changed environment, and I do believe ‘TASK’ had a lot to do with this,” says Herring, who has organized a third “TASK” party there this month.

Social interaction has permeated all of Herring’s work over the last decade, from the videos and the “TASK” events to the sculptural portraits he pieces together from thousands of photos. This collective approach might seem incongruous for an artist who first made his name in the art world through the solitary activity of knitting—throughout the ’90s he fashioned ethereal sculptures from Mylar “yarn.” Despite the change in media and the radical shift in attitude, Herring believes that, in retrospect, his work has been remarkably linear—something that struck him when he first walked around his survey “Me Us Them” at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, earlier this year. “Everything was about gravity, about using your bodily limitations but aspiring towards the transcendent experience of flight,” says Herring, who is tall and gangly and speaks with a trace of a German accent left over from his youth in Heidelberg. “The knitting was a great way to think and move through time and show at the end of the day a certain amount of material that had been transformed. But doing it for so many years was difficult because I was contained in my chair with my mind racing. I really wanted to fly away. As soon as I picked up a video camera, that’s exactly what expressed itself.”

Herring arrived at art by default. He was always good at drawing, but it wasn’t a main interest as a child. He remembers going as a teenager with his parents to the opening of an installation by Joseph Beuys—a controversial figure in Germany at the time. Herring hated the show, which was filled with little pieces of dried sausage, felt, and fat, until Beuys himself arrived and talked about the work in very accessible language. “That was a powerful experience because I looked at something and then I looked at it again and it was totally different,” says Herring. Still, his early passion was playing tennis, and he planned to study medicine. Then in 1985 he took English classes at the language school at Oxford University, and he learned he could get out of his two-year military-service requirement by enrolling as a full-time foreign student. He chose to study art because he thought he could handle that without much language. “I don’t know what was more surreal—that I got into Oxford without speaking English or that I was suddenly making art for 24 hours a day,” says Herring, who focused on representational expressionistic painting.

Despite the demands of the program, Herring maintained diverse interests. He frequented performances by the drag queen Ethyl Eichelberger, whom Herring first saw perform in an adaptation of King Lear in which Eichelberger played all the parts simultaneously. Herring liked it so much he returned the next day, and saw how Eichelberger changed his interpretation on the spot in response to the mood of a different audience. “It was so inspiring to see the sacrifice of something structural for something ephemeral,” says Herring. “That really stayed with me.”

Herring graduated in 1988 and moved to the United States with his American boyfriend, the painter Peter Krashes. While studying at Hunter College in New York, where he earned an M.F.A. in 1991, he was devastated to hear that Eichelberger, who had AIDS, had committed suicide. Herring’s response was to make a larger-than-life flower out of transparent tape that he suspended in the air and lit up like a lantern. “I felt it was the first piece I’d ever made that needed to exist,” says Herring. He stopped painting altogether after Eichelberger’s death.

Feeling a connection with the material of the flower, he began fiddling with packaging tape, rolling it into itself to make nonsticky “yarn.” He asked his mother to show him a basic stitch and began knitting coats and clothing. These transparent objects suggested protection, like a luminous armor, but were also hollow. “The knitting was very diaristic and therapeutic at first and freed up my mind to meditate,” says Herring, who took away the literalness of his garments by knitting larger structures—like blankets or mattresses—around the clothes that seemed to hover over the floor. He had his first solo show at the New Museum in 1993 and began showing with Max Protetch in 1994. This led to broader exposure, with a 1996 “Projects” show at the Museum of Modern Art. Throughout the ’90s his work received broad critical acclaim, particularly as it was emblematic of the AIDS crisis.

What began as a liberating experience took a physical toll on Herring. After close to a decade of such repetitive activity, a pinched nerve in his arm from a slipped disk led him to put aside knitting and begin experimenting with a new video camera. For an early piece titled Exit (2000) Herring used a stop-motion technique that gives the film the feel of a Buster Keaton vignette. The work shows the artist sleeping in his chair, which then flies around the room, and culminates in a whimsical and surreal dance number with multiple Herrings and other characters, who emerge out of camouflage from a jungle painting. “I realized some of what I had been fantasizing about,” says Herring.

Herring continued to create filmic flights of fancy, using friends to perform actions as simple as moving boxes or spitting water. When shown in reverse, the spitting shots look as though people are sucking the life force back into their bodies. In 2002 he decided to abandon any script or preconceived idea. He advertised in his Brooklyn neighborhood that his studio was open to people who wanted to come make a video with him. While most of these experiments were total failures, one of them proved especially successful. Two mismatched people arrived one day—a young man and an older woman. Not sure what to do with them, Herring put on bombastic music and had them do a mock ballet. In Dance 1 (2002) their superserious performance of clichéd movements in unison—raised arms, extended legs—gives way to absurdity and affection in a touching duet.

“I learned that if you put people right from the get-go on equal footing, all the social roles they play fall away. You can’t rely on those when you’re dancing and know nothing about dancing,” says Herring, who listens to a lot of opera, particularly Maria Callas records, and likes sharing music with people who come to his studio. Herring has continued to use dance as a strategy to tap into something essential about who people are. For his piece Nathan (2007), part of the exhibition “50,000 Beds,” shown at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut in 2007, the young man who arrived at the hotel room to shoot a video became so committed to his over-the-top ballet he sweated through his suit and eventually broke the bed. “If you give someone an opportunity, and it’s the right person who wants to use that outlet, you don’t know where it’s going to go,” says Herring.

The “TASK” performances, which he first tested in 2002 at a Masonic temple in London with just ten participants, are another way of giving people that type of creative outlet. When Kristen Hileman, a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., came to do a studio visit, “TASK” was what grabbed her most. She invited Herring to try it large-scale at the museum in 2006. Herring spent a year planning the event, preselecting the participants from an open application process, which yielded a diverse group of 60, including a priest, a self-proclaimed vagabond, and a White House intern. Performing outdoors on a brown-paper stage that he set up around the fountain in the Hirshhorn’s round plaza, the participants constructed a catapult and then toilet-papered the building, elected a prom queen and king, built a kayak and paddled across the fountain, extended the stage out across the street toward the mall to the consternation of the police, and, at the end, all gathered in a circle around the fountain to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

“As an audience member, it was like a play or complicated movie where you picked out your favorite characters—the heroes and the troublemakers,” says Hileman. “Oliver succeeded in giving 60 people an experience that will probably never be repeated in their lives and showing that one can connect with complete strangers around making a visual experience. How does that compare to an artist who puts an object in a gallery that thousands may see? It’s interesting in terms of quantity and quality, but I think these meaningful things for small groups of people are equally important.”

While Herring has increasingly focused his energy on “TASK,” which he is expanding through workshops with teachers, he has not forsaken the object. In 2004, interested in returning to three-dimensional work and the slower pace of knitting, he made his first photosculptural piece. His subject for Patrick (2004) was someone he didn’t know well and whom he talked into participating. After carving a full-scale figure in foam of Patrick sitting pensively like Rodin’s Thinker, Herring photographed every inch of his subject’s body over an extended time period and glued these images to the figure to create a kind of cubist yet hyperreal skin. “The experience of spending months with the same person is incredibly illuminating,” says Herring, who has sought out particular types of people to get to know this way, including a marine who was deployed to Iraq in the middle of the process. Herring likes the way all the variations in the commercially printed photographs and the changes in the individual’s body are incorporated into the piece.

The artist has shown these photosculptures at Max Protetch, where they sell for up to $25,000; his videos start at $6,500, with multichannel installations reaching $35,000. Next month Herring will make the photosculptures the centerpiece of an exhibition that will tour several venues in the South, starting with the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. After selecting a volunteer at each location to be the subject of one of these pieces, Herring will create a studio space in the galleries showing earlier examples of his work, where he will carve a figure and photograph the participant and then leave the 1,000 or so images, plus the figure and lots of other raw art materials, for visitors to play with. By the end of the Frist show, there will be a communally made photosculpture that will travel to the next venue, where Herring will get a new community started on one. “They can do anything they want, chop into it, I don’t care,” says Herring, who plans to have half a dozen figures by the end of the tour. “I hope that someone walks into the next museum, sees the Nashville piece and ups the ante by saying, ‘I can do better than that.’”

Hilarie M. Sheets is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

1. From the videos and the “TASK” events, to the sculptural portraits he pieces together from thousands of photos, what has permeated all of Herring’s work over the last decade?
a. An obsession with painting people
b. A brown paper bag
c. Common everyday life
d. Social interaction

2. In the first paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “mundane.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. Boring
b. Common, ordinary
c. Strange
d. exciting

3. In the second paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “improvisational.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. to drill or train
b. to rehearse
c. a unique experience
d. made or said without previous preparation

4. In the third paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “ephemeral.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. Existing for a lifetime
b. Lasting a very short time
c. exotic
d. strange

Reading Prompt Two

2009-11-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

In Memoriam: Nancy Spero

Often using mere paper as a medium and a powerful pictorial vocabulary of her own invention, Nancy Spero spun tales of ferocious, heroic women
by Phoebe Hoban

Nancy Spero isn’t usually one to toot her own horn. But that’s exactly what she did when she made a grand entrance into the opening of a show of her “Black Paintings,” titled “Un Coup de Dent,” at New York’s Galerie Lelong this past January. The 82-year-old artist, dressed in a fitted black blouse and a borrowed black beret, arrived at the gallery steering her “Porsche,” a black three-wheeled device equipped with an old-fashioned horn. Spero beeped loudly as she crossed the threshold of the gallery and was immediately greeted by a wave of applause, as her fans held her hostage at the gallery’s entrance. “I’m having a great time. It’s wonderful. I’m seeing a lot of old friends,” she said, beaming.

It’s difficult to think of the slight, spritelike Spero as a grande dame of the art world. But apart from Louise Bourgeois, few living female artists have carved out a similarly singular niche. Both are trenchant woman warriors who have invented powerful pictorial vocabularies that are simultaneously idiosyncratic and universal. If Bourgeois is Spider Woman, a provocative weaver of monumental webs, Spero is the High Priestess of Hieroglyphics whose lifework is the visual equivalent of an epic poem. Bourgeois has mostly made her mark with objects that forcefully occupy space, but Spero has chosen a more ephemeral path, often using mere paper to create mythic scrolls, collages, and “Maypoles,” that explore her ongoing quest, the eternal feminine.

Spero’s reputation has grown exponentially in the past several years. Last year she had two big shows in Europe—at Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London, where one of her Maypoles burst through the ceiling (“Isn’t that great? This pristine place!” she exclaims), and at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, where she had a large retrospective that traveled to Madrid and Seville. “She is a major 20th-century artist,” says curator and Fordham University professor of art history Jo Anna Isaak, who has organized several Spero shows. “I think that she is now assuming her proper role and getting her critical due.” Or as the artist puts it, “I didn’t have a catalogue until I was 51. I now have entered the art world. I can call the shots. Not all the time. But a lot. It’s amazing it took so long.”

Spero sits at the long kitchen table in the double studio she shared for over 30 years with her late husband, Leon Golub, who died in 2004. Hanging over the table is a huge Andres Serrano photograph showing Golub posed in blood-stained cardinal’s garb. “It’s a great photo,” Spero says, “and Leon’s here at the head of the table, and I just love it.”

The studio, in the kitchen half of the loft, is crammed with worktables piled high with what look like heaps of paper dolls—it’s like a paper-doll morgue, with multitudinous cutouts of leaping, swimming, dancing, stripping, birthing, dying, screaming, mournful, joyful women. “They are manipulated and they are played with, and because they are paper, I call them paper dolls,” says Spero. “Isn’t that what a little girl would do with paper dolls? So it’s totally with some irony and amusement that I call them paper dolls.” But Spero insists that the “irony of paper dolls” is not a feminist statement in and of itself.

“I’m really omnivorous,” says Spero. “Nevertheless I come around to what I call my stars, figures which I use over and over. One of them is this athletic figure; she’s nude, naked, running forward. And another one has been Sheela,” she says, gesturing at a ferocious figure with an open vagina. “It’s a powerful Celtic fertility figure. I find it humorous. I don’t have a clue how it really is intended, but I just find it full of energy and humor, just lively.”

Spero’s work has not only been influenced by her struggles as a mother, an artist, and a woman, but also by her 54-year relationship with Golub. In the studio adjoining hers, an enormous Golub canvas confronts a maquette of the Maypole shown in London, a version of which Spero originally created for the 2007 Venice Biennale. Typically, she has transformed a celebratory symbol into something spooky and dangerous.

Her Maypole is like a lynching tree, bearing the strange fruit of decapitated heads. Cannibalizing her own work, she used the heads of images from her past collages and prints; in fact, the Maypole image itself first appeared in her 1967 drawing Kill Commies/Maypole. As Spero speaks, one of the heads, stirred by a breeze, dangles near a large figure in Golub’s painting. “A screaming head leaning up against Leon,” says Spero. “See how similar they are in their angst? Or just kind of an attitude of defiance, of exaggerated confrontation.”

Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father sold used printing presses and, according to Spero’s oldest son, Steve, had a “whimsical” sensibility. Frustrated in his original desire to become a writer, he penned long, thoughtful letters. Spero’s early exposure to the pleasure—and power—of text later informed her work.
In 1927 Spero’s family moved to Chicago, where she attended the Art Institute and met Golub, who was getting his master’s degree there. Spero went off to Paris to study from 1949 to 1950, when she returned to Chicago and married Golub. “We lived and worked together, and it was pretty wonderful—a perpetual dialogue. The influence was mutual,” she says.

Both artists were devoted to figurative work, which they produced even at the height of Abstract Expressionism. But, as Spero explains, Golub was always political. “I wasn’t political then. I didn’t go into art overtly as a political artist, but I didn’t go into it for my youth and beauty either,” she says modestly.
With her distinctive features topped off by a pixie-punkish blond bob, Spero always cut a striking figure. Says her son Steve, “She dressed in a very provocative, unusual way—very stylish, very different from the other mothers. She had these black leather boots all the way up to her hips, and she wore very tight-fitting clothes in unusual colors.”

Spero and Golub lived in Italy for a year before moving to Paris, where they stayed from 1959 to 1965. During that time, Spero gave birth to three sons—Steve, Philip, and Paul. “You know I worked the minute a child was born and I came home,” she recalls, “but it was really a shame. Instead of enjoying this funny-looking little thing full time, I would put the little thing to bed, and when it was sleeping do my artwork. And then when the little thing got up, I would take care of it, and when the little thing went back to sleep, finally, I would go back to the studio. So I was pretty exhausted.”

Spero created her enigmatic Black Paintings during that Paris period. The looming figures, painted as if glimpsed through a torn veil or scrim, portray mothers, intercourse, and childbirth. Their disturbing palette may have derived from being painted mostly at night. In these works Spero first addressed one of her central themes: language as a voice for the disenfranchised. “It was particularly one of the Black Paintings,” she explains, “in which there’s a figure coming out of a kind of angel—the figure is a woman with four breasts and wings instead of arms, and it’s about eight feet tall. It’s a profile, so out of her mouth comes this head, this little figurine, that had to do with speech. It was like a birth of language, not of a human being.”

In 1965, the height of the Vietnam War, Spero, Golub, and their sons moved back to America, settling in New York, first on the Upper West Side and then in Golub’s West Village loft. Spero abandoned oil painting to work on her “War Series”—furious ink and gouache drawings on paper that articulated the obscenity of war. She sexualized its violence with images of phallic helicopters and bombs spewing fire and blood, and she introduced the image that would epitomize her entire oeuvre: the phallicized tongue, the same tongue that gives voice to both Spero and the silent female protagonists that populate human history—and her work.

Spero’s next major series, produced in the early ’70s, also dealt with language. Mesmerized by the French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, whose illnesses and addictions rendered him, in effect, an outsider artist, she turned Artaud’s manifesto The Theater of Cruelty into her own by typing portions of it onto paper, which she then collaged into a printed repertoire of images. She glued the sheets of paper together in a long scroll, which she called the “Codex Artaud.”

Spero’s lexicon of classical images became an armature upon which she could build. “The classical is so ostensibly timeless and beautiful and serene, you can’t see all the craft around it; you just see the surface thing,” she says. “And so I disrupt that.” Printmaking provided a flexible means for doing so. “Each one is quite individual. And I can make another and another and another.”

Although Spero’s work can be beautiful, that is not its primary goal. “A lot of my work has explosions of anger and violence,” she says. “I want my work to be telling and strong, but not in a masculine sense. Strong,” she continues, “in that it has a certain message—and it can be a strong message.” Says artist Kiki Smith, “Nancy’s work is radical. For people of my generation, she and Leon were role models as artists. There are very few people who represent their social beliefs in their work and lives, and they are two people who embody that.”

Spero’s feminism has extended well beyond her art. She was a member of the Art Workers’ Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), and she picketed the Whitney Museum, among other institutions, for failing to represent women. She was also a founding member of the Artists in Residence gallery (A.I.R.), started in 1972. It was the first art cooperative to show only women. “We were very firm that this was not a man-hating group of women artists,” Spero says, “but I was frustrated. I couldn’t get my voice out; it was like I was being pushed down.” A.I.R. gave her a more secure foundation. “I saw you have to have a base in which to be planted so you can go out and see what’s going on and kind of confront the art world with a little bit more assurance,” she says.

By the mid ’70s, Spero had decided to use only women in her work, portraying them as heroic—not as repressed and victimized. She is a feminist artist, she says, in the way she depicts women’s plight. “I am thinking about the women’s condition, showing victimage or celebratory sexuality in an exaggerated way.” She embarked on several series that dealt explicitly with torture—a recurrent Golub subject. The first, called “Torture in Chile” (1974), and the next, “Torture of Women” (1976), combine oral testimony by South American women taken from Amnesty International documents with Spero’s trademark female figures.

Her most extensive scrolls are Notes in Time on Women (1976–79) and The First Language (1979–81). In the 210-foot-long Notes in Time on Women, she chronicles the impact of war on women throughout history. For the 190-foot-long The First Language, Spero made a radical decision and excised text from her work, relying solely on her own hand-printed and collaged characters. Says Smith, “Nancy’s work as a precedent really enables me: it gives me and other artists space to construct a narrative, to construct meaning using disparate images.”

In the ’80s, she began printing her hieroglyphs directly on the walls, floors, and ceilings of museums and galleries, including The Birth of Venus (1989), a frieze installed at the Schirn Kuntshalle in Frankfurt. In 1999 Spero created a mosaic frieze celebrating the performing arts for the 66th Street–Lincoln Center subway station in New York.

One work that did not involve deleting text is the powerful Masha Bruskina (1995), an image taken from a photograph found in a Gestapo soldier’s pocket. It shows a young Jewish woman bound, gagged, and naked except for her stockings and shoes. Spero had used it in several earlier installations, including Ballad of Marie Sanders, the Jew’s Whore (1991), upon which is printed Bertolt Brecht’s poem of the same name. In its potent blurring of victimization, pornography, and tragedy, it is a quintessential Spero work. Observes curator Susan Harris: “I think Nancy has developed a new scale and a new language and a new relevance for narrative art. She exploded the notion of scale by bringing the wall into play.”

Spero’s work, which sells for between $10,000 and $600,000, has always combined fragility with steely strength. Her art in the wake of Golub’s death was no exception. In 2005 she unfurled a 160-foot-long paper frieze along the base of the walls at Galerie Lelong. The dark figures in the frieze, with their slender, long-fingered hands, were based on an Egyptian wall painting found in the tomb of Ramose, a high-ranking scribe and artisan during the reign of Ramses II. The piece, Cri du Coeur, speaks volumes about Spero’s resilient cycle of celebration and mourning—for herself and for the war- and catastrophe-fraught world we live in. “It’s the extreme that draws me,” she says.

Spero is the last person to leave the gallery the night of her Lelong opening. But, like her favorite “running” figure, she just keeps moving forward. She already has a new project in mind for her next show, although superstition prevents her from talking about it yet. But it will definitely incorporate images of severed heads. And this time, she hints, they will occupy a whole new dimension.

Phoebe Hoban is a New York–based writer on culture. She is the author of Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Viking Penguin), and her biography of Alice Neel is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.

1. The main points that the author seeks to make in this passage is that Spero:
a. Her work sells for between $10,000 and $600,000
b. Although her work can be beautiful, that is not its primary goal.
c. She was a feminist artist that engulfed all aspects of feminist cause in her work and livelihood.
d. She was very provocative, in an unusual way and very stylish.

2. In the second paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “trenchant.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. Artistic
b. Famous
c. Talkative
d. Vigorous and energetic

3. In the fifth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “multitudinous.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. Comprising many items
b. grotesque
c. morbid
d. manipulated

4. In the twenty-first paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “disparate.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. Unsettling to the viewer
b. Essentially different
c. In reference to feminism
d. Egotistical

Reading Prompt One

2009-11-12T07:22:00.000-08:00

A Gothic Pop Surrealist

An upcoming retrospective at MoMA highlights filmmaker Tim Burton's private artwork—and his humorous side
by Jenny Brown

Through his films, Tim Burton has become known as a master of the macabre, concocting sumptuous feasts of grotesque, distorted imagery that make even his children's stories unsettling to the palate. But when the Museum of Modern Art introduces the public to the auteur's private paintings, sketches, photographs, and sculptures in a major retrospective, viewers may be surprised to discover a more lighthearted Burton—the class-clown doodler within filmdom's brooding goth.
Much of the director's noncinematic art is "humorous and high spirited," says Ron Magliozzi, MoMA's assistant film curator, who organized the show with curatorial assistant Jenny He and chief film curator Rajendra Roy. When Magliozzi visited Burton's personal archive in London last year, he "went in thinking Tim was this gothic artist, and that he was heavily influenced by Expressionism." But searching through the voluminous collection of private artwork—Burton has kept nearly everything he's produced, even from his earliest youth—Magliozzi was reminded more of newspaper comics, sci-fi movies, and bubble-gum cards than of Otto Dix or Hans Bellmer.

There were childlike sketches with captions like "Why you shouldn't shoot a constipated poodle," buffoonish portraits of amorous couples, cartoons of doctors and disaffected teens, whimsical storybook illustrations, a caricature of President Reagan, and even a ceramic totem pole of clown heads.

"I started to think that pop surrealism was a much more appropriate and more rewarding way of framing the work" in the exhibition, says Magliozzi, referring to the genre that took root in California during the '60s, when painters like Robert Williams began to base their work on "lowbrow" consumer culture—tattoos, cartoons, pinups, and toys—rather than on fine-art traditions. Pop surrealists share a "hip outsider perspective," writes Magliozzi in the show's catalogue, and promote "an alternative to the usual museum fare."

Burton, who was raised in Burbank and studied animation at the California Institute of the Arts in the late '70s, says it's "a surreal thing" to be at MoMA. "I didn't grow up in a culture of museums. I got most of my art from TV and movies." While attracted to the "energy" of Matisse and van Gogh paintings, he says, "I never concerned myself with great art." He names Dr. Seuss as "the first artist I recognized who had a particular style," and calls the Louvre "an energy vampire—it just sort of drains the life out of you."

The 700-piece retrospective, up from the 22nd of this month through April 26, will place Burton's playful artwork alongside storyboards, props, and costumes from grim fantasies such as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Sweeney Todd—which, Magliozzi hopes, will give viewers a more nuanced perception of the director's filmic vision.

"His films are funny. People often forget this," says Magliozzi. "When I told Tim, 'You seem to spend more time studying humor than tragedy,' he said, 'Well, there is humor in tragedy. All great tragedy has a comic aspect.' I came to think our exhibition should reflect that."

1. The main points that the author seeks to make in this passage is that Tim Burton:
a. Considers all great tragedies to have some sort of comical aspect.
b. Does not have an appreciation for the fine arts.
c. Is most famous for his sumptuous feasts of grotesque and distorted imagery.
d. Is a gothic artist chiefly inspired through expressionism.

2. In the first paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “macabre.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. Artistically unsettling
b. Gruesome and horrifying
c. Whimsical and comical
d. Harmful to children

3. The author contrasts the work of Tim Burton to Otto Dix and Hans Bellmer. From the passage what would you infer the artistic style of Dix and Bellmer to be?
a. Goths
b. Pop surrealists
c. Expressionists
d. Comic artists

4. In the fourth paragraph of the passage, the author uses the word, “lowbrow.” Within the context provided, what is the definition of that term?
a. Traditional fine art
b. Work created by professionals that are not yet famous
c. Work that is not regularly displayed in art museums
d. Visual components of everyday consumer society