Art for Sale Page 2

Pop stars sing praises of their favoured candidates

Trumpeter on a mission to soothe the chaos of city life

Here’s the bracket so far. I’m very fond of both of today’s contestants, so without further ado… Herman Cain was the GOP’s “it” guy, having taken the frontrunner mantle away from a fading Rick Perry.

As the first or only African American in any role, it helps to remember that you are standing on the shoulders of giants.

Ghana is the first country in Africa to protect children against two of the deadliest infant diseases with simultaneous vaccinations.

Clifford Owens: Anthology (score by Saya Woolfalk). Performance still, August 2011.

While recently exploring the bold/often controversial/always original genre of performance art, we came across artist Clifford Owens, who has burst onto the contemporary art scene this year in a big way: The 40-year-old is enjoying his first New York museum exhibition at MoMA PS1. Anthology is the artist’s attempt to right a historical wrong and provide a voice to African-American artists, whose performance art has long been underrepresented and largely undocumented. 26 major artists* contributed “scores” — written or graphical instructions for actions — for the project, which Owens brought to fruition each week during the summer at PS1.

From the museum’s boiler room to its rooftop, on view now are the videos, photographs and remnants of these performances, which range from “vague commands to highly choreographed movements and actions.” Take a peek at three of these unique scores, and check out our interview with the artist below.

Sweep
Score by Senga Nengudi
“Sweep is built on the premise that pretty much most people worldwide, from the age of 2 up, have engaged in the activity of sweeping. Sweeping stuff up is a common thread through all cultures.”

Clifford Owens: Anthology(score by Senga Nengudi). Performance still, June 11, 2011 at MoMA PS1. Owens was instructed to use a broom three times to manipulate sand into changing forms/designs, and then to invite an audience member to create a final design.

 

Score by Dave McKenzie
“Pick a corner of the room and place yourself in it and against it.
Try to conjure up a past that isn’t your own.
Get ready to move.
Don’t think too long about what you might do.
Now act!
Stop!
Now think about the future after you.
Make a phone call.”

Clifford Owens: Anthology (score by Dave McKenzie). Performance still, June 19, 2011 at MoMA PS1.

 

Come Clean
Score by Nsenga A Knight
“Using water and at least two additional materials or substances mounting to any odd number, clean everything in one entire room.”

Clifford Owens: Anthology(score by Nsenga Knight). Performance still, July 24, 2011 at MoMA PS1.

 

You can still catch Owen perform live in conjunction with the exhibition — his final 2 performances will take place on February 11 and March 11. The exhibit at MoMA PS1 closes on March 12.

MutualArt: Explain the concept for this show. How did this idea come about?
Clifford Owens: The idea for Anthology, though not fully formed at the time, came about in 2000. I was researching black American visual artists working in performance art for my graduate thesis paper. Of course, I did not find many references in my research. I realized then that I must somehow invent or imagine my own history of black American visual artists working in the expansive field of performance art.

The concept for Anthology currently on view at MoMA PS1 was to invite an intergenerational group of black American visual artists to contribute a performance art score, an instruction for an action that I would interpret based on my own aesthetic sensitivities and sensibilities.

MA: Why do you think African American performance art is so underrepresented? ?What is unique about this specific genre of performance art?
CO: First of all, there is no “specific genre of [African American] performance art.” Perhaps a more interesting question would be: Why are “African Americans” underrepresented in or wholly excluded from all forms and formalisms of contemporary cultural production? Of course, the answer to this question is quite clear to black American artists, at least black American artists who actually have a critical position and a sense of history.

MA: You collaborated with 26 other artists who contributed to this work. What was this collaborative process like?
CO: Anthology is not in collaboration with 26 other artists. Collaboration is a shared intellectual endeavor, a shared experience in the “doing and undergoing” of a work of art. Anthology is based on a kind of “gift economy,” an exchange of ideas between individual artists and myself. None of the artists in Anthology appear in the live performances or in the images that comprise the exhibition. In a sense, I function in the project as a kind of conduit between thought and action.

MA: What is the most shocking or challenging act you performed?
CO: All the scores from Anthology were a challenge to perform. On another note, a performance art score is not an “act” (an “act [is] performed” by an insipid actor in an insipid Broadway play.) I’m a visual artist with interests in “visual art performance,” to borrow a phase coined by RoseLee Goldberg.

MA: You often work in video, photography and sound, in conjunction with your performances. How does this work with or expand on the idea behind performance?
CO: The videos, photographs, and sound works that comprise the Anthology exhibition at MoMA PS1 are the results from the live performances. Of course, the experience of being present for the live performances is remarkably, in fact necessarily, different from the exhibition. However, both of these elements that comprise the project, the live performance and the exhibition, retain their own potency independent of each other.

MA: What message do you hope to relay to your audience?
CO: I’m much more interested in the messages received by my audience.

MA: What are some of your future projects?
CO: As my friend and influential artist Terry Adkins would say, and I paraphrase: “Artists need to keep some things to themselves.”

*Additional artists who contributed to Anthology: Derrick Adams, Terry Adkins, Sanford Biggers, Aisha Cousins, Sherman Fleming, Coco Fusco, Charles Gaines, Malik Gaines, Rico Gatson, Rashawn Griffin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Maren Hassinger, Steffani Jemison, Jennie C. Jones, Glenn Ligon, Lorraine O’Grady, Benjamin Patterson, William Pope.L, Jacolby Satterwhite, Xaviera Simmons, Shinique Smith, Kara Walker, and Saya Woolfalk.
(All performance stills above are courtesy of On Stellar Rays.)

Written by MutualArt writer Joanna Bledsoe.

source….

According to the National Education Department, African-American male teachers and administrators are becoming extinct.

Campaigners and human rights groups welcome a UN-backed special court’s guilty verdict against the former Liberian leader Charles Taylor.

 

Perhaps the most innocent of all the innocent victims of the 1992 Los Angeles riots was Elvira Evers and the baby inside her womb.

Elvira was seven and a half months pregnant when her Compton neighborhood was taken over by rioters and looters, NBC reports.

On April 30, 1992, she was on the street, waiting for her eldest son to come home. When her five-year-old daughter came over to her, the mother pushed her daughter away to safety.

“I started getting nervous,” she said.

A minute later, she felt a burning sensation, she said. When she looked down, she realized she had been shot in her stomach.

Because of the mayhem in the streets, it would have taken 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive so a friend drove Elvira to St. Francis Medical Center.

It was a week before Elvira opened her eyes. She had had an emergency caesarian section, and, when she awoke, she started crying. She thought she had lost her baby.

To her amazement, a nurse came up and showed Elvira a picture of her baby, Jessica.

Twenty years later, Elvira shared the terrifying experience with her grown daughter. In the video above, Jessica is brought to tears by the original news coverage of her mother being shot.

Jessica said she knows she was spared for a reason, and she’s trying to figure out that reason. “As each day goes by, I try to find something… that I’m here for,” she said.

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Sean Hannity welcomed Tavis Smiley and Cornel West onto his program by thanking them for all the times they criticize President Obama.

“Welcome back,” Hannity said to his guests. “I don’t think that we agree often but I do enjoy when both of you criticize Barack Obama. I want to thank you for that.”

“We try to tell the truth and we’re critical of you even more…you know that brother,” West responded.

West and Smiley sat down with Hannity to discuss their new book on poverty, “The Rich And The Rest Of Us.” Hannity criticized the title of the book, saying that it made him mad.

“I don’t like this division, this wedge Tavis, that the President is using in the 99 vs. the 1 percent. ‘The Rich And The Rest Of Us.’ It somehow indicates that it’s a bad thing that people are successful,” Hannity argued.

“Not at all,” Smiley responded. “Mitt Romney is wrong when he says we’re engaging in what he calls the ‘politics of envy.’ No one who happens to be poor wants what Mr. Romney has. They just want to move beyond poverty…to an opportunity to play on a level playing field. We are dangerously close, Sean, to cementing a permanent American catastrophe here. The rich, more than the poor, are responsible in fact for this catastrophe we have now, yet the poor pay the heaviest price although they’re not responsible for the damage done by the Great Recession.”

“Stop right there,” Hannity said. “Wait a minute. How about government policies are responsible?..How are the rich responsible? The top 10 percent pay 70 percent of the bill.”

“No, brother Sean. Government policies tend to reinforce Wall Street and corporate elites,” West argued.

Pictures show how the continent’s image is out of date

According to a news release from the NAACP chapter in Durham, the campaign will place ads in African-American newspapers, statewide radio spots, mailers, brochures, and robocalls to tens of thousands of North Carolina voters.

Until Thursday, the city had been reluctant to talk about a federal discrimination lawsuit against the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department since the U.S. Department of Justice’s findings were revealed a week ago.

CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux reports on the high divorce rate among those 50 and older.

Students from an Ohio high school are trying to save history and honor the memories of black war veterans buried in a local cemetery.