Outrage over an art exhibit which invites users to “deface the Bible” has put a negative spin on what would otherwise be dubbed an inspired curatorial program. The art work Untitled 2009, is being shown at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) as part of the “Made in God’s Image” exhibit. The work consists of an open Bible, a container of pens and the words “If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it.”
The exhibit, which was developed in collaboration with local religious groups intends to explore the contested notion of religion and sexuality, as part of the larger GOMA program sh[OUT], which raises awareness of issues faced by homosexuals, bisexuals, transgender and intersex people. GOMA explains: “working with various individuals, Christian and Muslim groups, artist Anthony Schrag explored the personal and communal experiences of being both LGBTI and hav[ing] a faith, and looked to defy the expectation that being religious was just as much of a choice as someone’s sexuality.”
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Call it a case of addition by subtraction. On January 23, 2003, a tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica was infamously hidden by behind a baby blue banner at the UN headquarters in New York as Colin Powell tried to sell another war in Iraq to the world. While they did avoid a visual backdrop that would foreshadow the horrors to come, a new generation was inadvertently introduced to this epic piece of political art, which remains as timeless as war itself.
With the United Nations building under construction, the tapestry — commissioned by Norman Rockwell and based on the original mural-sized canvas Picasso created during the Spanish Civil War — has been moved to the Whitechapel Gallery in East London. Following two years of its own renovations, the redesigned Whitechapel will reopen on April 5.
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The first major survey featuring the work of Judy Chicago opened at the Textile Museum of Canada last week. Predictively titled When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago in Thread, the exposition covers four decades of work by Chicago, a significant pioneer of feminist art and education.
The show’s namesake is one of Chicago’s new works, a four-banner installation entitled What If Women Ruled the World. The exhibition also features a selection of works from the Birth Project (including Creation, a more than four-metre long silk and gold stitched tapestry), the Holocaust Project (including The Fall, a room-sized tapestry exploring the choices we make to heal or destroy) and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (exquisitely crafted and inspiring reinterpretations of traditional proverbs).
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We use them as industrial input (an estimated 112 million pigs and over 8 billion chickens divvied up annually in North American alone), we invite them into our families as pets, we exoticize, fetishize and anthropomorphize them through children’s stories, literature and toys. But for most of us, we take our fellow-travelers on planet earth for granted. They are backdrop, research material, here to be used in whatever ways we see fit, for good or ill.
A new exhibition at the Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK – Interspecies – wants to challenge this notion, not with moral outrage, but with communication. The artists in this show try to incorporate the animal’s point of view as a fundamental component of their work.
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Page illustration from the graphic novel DMZ
I haven’t got my hands on a copy of this new graphic novel yet, so I thought I’d let the words of the predictably fired up independent investigative journalist Greg Palast suffice:
DMZ is New York in the future, and it looks uncomfortably too much like America today. There’s a phony war on terror, a hunt for illusory insurgents and troublemakers which becomes the trigger-point excuse for crushing the heaving, rising underclass.
Except here, in the comic, America’s culture war and class war has moved to its inevitable bloody conclusion: a corporate junta pretending to provide safety to war-torn New York while using high-tech military intelligence and scum-bag death squads to hold on to power.
In the center of the story is a half-assed but earnest journalist Matty Roth on the Lower East Side whose need to voice the story of the voiceless is at war with his reasonable cowardice. Tell me about it.
Reporter Roth is sent in to find and cover a charismatic street leader, Parco Delgado, who declares his candidacy with explosives. Is Delgado a greasy, piece-of-crap thug or a savior in a dirty T-shirt? What makes creators Wood and Burchielli such smart storytellers is that they don’t make the answer simple, but they don’t fail to give the answer. If the story sounds weird it’s because any story that’s real is weird….
DMZ is a brilliant news report from inside America’s skull dreaming into the future – when the “stimulus” has worn off and reality eats our young.
Palast wrote the introduction to the book. You can buy it through him (signed by Wood and Palast), or get it here.
Photo by Nicole Belle
On November 4, 2008, the date of the United States Election that anticipated the victory of Barack Obama, Marie-Claire MacPhee interviewed Catherine Opie. Opie’s mid-life retrospective, “Catherine Opie: American Photographer” opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on September 26, 2008 and runs until January 7, 2009. For more information about the exhibition see: www.guggenheim.org.
I’ll start out by asking you how things are looking in the US today?
Well, we’ll see. It was really amazing. I live in a predominantly African American neighbourhood. I’ve been here for 6 years, and I’ve never seen a line at the polls, but today we had to wait an hour and a half to vote. I think that it’s true that we’re going to see an unprecedented number of voters out, and that’s really exciting. Click to continue »
Shadi Ghadirian - Untitled from the Like Everyday Series
The Saatchi Gallery’s new exhibit Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, has been receiving a lot of press since it opened on January 30th. I had the chance to check out the popular show this past weekend, and although I may not be in a position to review the exhibit, I still must disagree with many reviewers who see the exhibit as overtly political, too controversial and bleak.
Featuring 21 young artists from countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia and Iran; the largely positive reviews have also referenced the show as being one which “may test the tolerance of some”, and can be seen as “brave — or foolish”. Rather, I found that the show successfully presented themes that are by and large universal. Click to continue »
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