Art 21 captures three artists, Doris Salcedo, Carrie Mae Weems, and William Kentridge, and how their work deals with the subject of compassion. Each artist explains the experiences they or others have gone through. All of the artists want the viewers to lend their hearts, eyes, and mind to the situations they present to them through their art.
Each artist comes from a different country and they all have different histories. It can be difficult for outsiders to understand the sentiments of these artists or even imagine the experiences they have lived through. That is why art is such a powerful unifier and tool for education. Although visual experience is not the same as a lived experience, it can be the closest thing to it.
Doris Salcedo, a Colombian artist, uses sculpture and installations to represent people who have died, disappeared, and have been exposed to violence in her country. But she also shares the perspective of the people on the other side of power, those that are often marginalized. Salcedo and her team often recall working in the middle of chaos and violence. While they worked away in the studio creating pieces about experiencing loss, bullets were being fired on the streets outside. Hearing the violence rage on served as their reminder of why they started the work and why they must continue. There is a piece that Doris decided to cover in hair, and it took an absurd amount of time to create, but that was her way to symbolize the absurd amount of lives lost during the paramilitary war in Colombia.
She would also conduct interviews with victims of violence and people who suffer from poverty in her country and would take objects that she believes they would have access to. She is not working from expensive materials like gold leaf or marble, she is working from accessible materials such as cow bladder and found shoes. There is a sense of morbidity when she speaks of abandoned shoes found on the streets, it speaks to the danger and the disappearances. But that is why Salcedo states that she does not work based on imagination or fiction which gives all the more seriousness to her work.
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Atrabiliarios, 1992-93, Wall installation with Cow bladder, surgical thread, shoes, and plywood.
Credit: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago |
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Unland: The Orphan's Tunic, 1997, Wooden Tables. silk, human hair, thread.
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago |
Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist that explores the stereotypes that follow African Americans and women through the lens of her camera. She captures moments that tell a deeper more painful story. In a series of thirty appropriated photographs, she placed the photographs under red glass with etched text to tell the traumatic history of slavery in the United States. The images she used were part of Harvard's collection, and they actually tried to sue her but ended up purchasing her series. Weems laughs when retelling the story of this incident. She mentions that she was happy they were threatening to sue because it brought up an issue of morality that should be discussed in public but Harvard retracted the lawsuit. It did not look good for the wealthy institution to come after the artist who had an important story to tell with these particular images. Another photo series was made in Birmingham, Alabama, and was based on reconstructing and capturing the historical events of 1968, what led to those events, and what it paved the way for. Weems utilized the local high school students to research and then reenact the images. They were asked to play the roles of real people which let them connect to history on a more personal level. Many students expressed the emotional responses they felt when they reenacted the traumatic historical moments. These events all spoke to a bigger story, a story that has its roots in slavery and branches to segregation, racism, politics, etc. Some events they reenacted were the series of assassinations, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the present day, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton were running for President of the United States. This event inspired Weems to create a part two, that reconstructed the 2008 presidential campaign and the historical moment where Obama won. Weems called a number of people to ask them how they felt when Barack Obama won, and she expresses how she heard people refer to the U.S. as their country for the first time. There was finally an African American president, and it gave many African Americans a sense of belonging and pride.
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| Some Said You Were the Spitting Image of Evil, 1995, monochromatic C-print with sandblasted text on framing glass 45.6x45.6 (Getty.edu) |
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| Mourning from the Constructing History series. 2008 |
William Kentridge, a South African artist, uses film, drawings, collages, and animations to express his ideas and occasionally perform them as well. Kentridge takes inspiration from events of his own country, the event, in particular, was the apartheid. He created two characters for a film project, that represent the Jewish people who led very ethical lives and protested the Apartheid and the other Jewish people who made a lot of money under the Nationalist government. Soho and Felix, whose names were revealed to him in a dream represent these two kinds of individuals that Kentridge perceives. Soho is the character that always wears a pinstriped suit, which is inspired by a photograph of the artist's grandfather. These characters later reveal to be two versions of Kentridge, he calls them "self-portraits in the third person" and have had their share of criticisms. They have been accused of being anti-Semitic but he challenges the notion because his film is not only a critique, it is also about memory and loss. The films he created were never scripted or planned, the scenes revealed themselves to him as he created it and were created solely for his pleasure. Kentridge wanted to create something different than the work he is known for. Another series he created centered around a viewing device. The stereoscopic viewer allows for two flat images to come together and have the appearance of depth. Kentridge provides the analysis that the viewer takes the agency to decide if they see the image as a whole or if they can resist and continue to see two separate wholes. It is a very interesting analysis because as individuals our views can be influenced, but at the same time, we can choose to see what we want.
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| Felix Crying, 1998-99. (Themodern.org) |
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| Soho Eckstein, 1999. (SFGate) |
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| Image: Ivory Press |
Total time: 54:30
The Felix Crying Drawing is really interesting as you can see a thin blue line go up from behind his head. This along with the angle of his head looks like the figure is being hung by this blue line.
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