Pastiche Lumumba, ‘Endless scrolling generation’ (2012)
Tag Archives: culture
Ed van der Elsken
Ed van der Elsken, ‘Blotebillenharingkarklanten’ (Barebuttherringcartcustomers), Zandvoort beach (1975)
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine, ‘African Masks after Walker Evans’ (2015)
In 1979, Sherrie Levine received widespread acclaim for her series ‘After Walker Evans’, in which she re-photographed 24 of Walker Evans’s photographs out of an exhibition catalogue, depicting the impoverished rural population in Alabama at the end of the 1920s. 35 years later, in a further series after Walker Evans, Levine addresses similar issues with new layers of relevance.
For the series ‘African Masks after Walker Evans’, the artist chose her motifs from an extensive collection of over 400 photographs of African artworks that Walker Evans was commissioned to produce in 1935 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Evans photographed numerous objects from “African Negro Art,” a major exhibition shown in 1935 at the Museum of Modern Art and other American museums. These photographs were not used for the exhibition catalogue, but were compiled into a portfolio of more than 400 original prints, provided to museums and specialized libraries for educational purposes. This comprehensive project made a significant contribution to the reception of African art in the western aesthetic canon.
Selecting only masks for her series, Sherrie Levine hones in on the question of the identity of the artwork creator. Walker Evans’s photographs already indicate the aesthetic primacy of the works he depicted: through the act of being photographed, they are transformed in status from foreign ritual artifacts into modern sculptures.
Ana Navas
Ana Navas, ‘Yet far more often than these text based pieces, one would play pure melodies on the mouth organ (version II)’ (2013)
Based on descriptions of audio guides from ethnographic museums, 10 objects are created out of paper napkins. The originals remain unseen; the reconstruction relies only on the information heard.
Carol Bove
Carol Bove, ‘Vague Pure Affection’ (2012)
In Vague Pure Affection (2012), books, photographs, found objects, and small sculptures allude to drug culture and the expanded consciousness that many hoped to achieve through the use of psychedelics. However, Bove has drawn the work’s title from a volume that does not appear on the shelves: the 1901 Theosophist treatise Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. This text, which outlines the shapes and colors of auras associated with various mental states, greatly influenced the invention of abstract painting by Vasily Kandinsky and others.