Rest Energy, photo of a 1980 performance by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, photo from Galleria Lia Rumma

The Museum of Modern Art in New York currently hosts retrospectives of two idiosyncratic and uncompromising living artists, Yugoslavian born Marina Abramovic and South African William Kentridge.  The two artists could hardly be more different from each other, but each has followed the path of art as something deeply personal and necessary.

Marina Abramovic emerged as a performance artist in the 1970′s.  Using her own body as her medium, she explored the power of living presence in ritual acts of vulnerability and endurance.  Her earliest works were so raw and risky they still shock – for example, in Rhythm 2 (1974), she took drugs that caused seizures, convulsions and catatonia.  But then in the 70′s everyone was experimenting with drugs – she just did it in front of an audience.

In 1976 she began a twelve year collaboration with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen).  The work they did together achieved a kind of spiritual and aesthetic clarity that has not been surpassed, even as this kind of work has entered the mainstream with David Blaine‘s well-publicized acts of endurance.  In “Rest Energy”, pictured at the top of the post, Abramovic and Ulay lean apart, their weight suspended by the tension of a bowstring with an arrow aimed at Abramovic’s heart.

Abramovic and Ulay traveled continuously, living in an old Citroen van (the van is in the MoMA exhibit), fully devoting their lives to their artistic experiment.  A statement they wrote at the time (1975) reads:

ART VITAL

no fixed living-place
permanent movement
direct contact
local relation
self-selection
passing limitations
taking risks
mobile energy
no rehearsals
no predicted end
no repetition
extended vulnerability
exposure to chance
primary reactions

Abramovic and Ulay parted ways in 1988.  Much of Abramovic’s solo work from the 90′s looks to me more strident and more self-conscious about making “statements”, but in her most recent work she seems to be rediscovering the power of simplicity.

The Abramovic retrospective at MoMA includes documentation of a great many of these performances that tested the limits of the mind and body and the relationship between artist and audience.  It also includes living “reperformers”, re-enacting several of the most well-known actions.  The one that has been most widely discussed is Imponderabilia, originally performed by Abramovic and Ulay in 1977.  A naked male and female stand impassively facing each other in a narrow doorway, through which museumgoers may pass only by squeezing sideways between the pair.

Abramovic has long argued that performance art must be kept alive by reperformance, and in her 2005 show at the Guggenheim Museum she herself reperformed a number of seminal performance works originally done decades ago by such artists as Joseph Beuys and Valie Export.  It is undeniable that the MoMA show is more interesting with live bodies interspersed among the old documentation, but the change of context has surely altered the effect of the pieces.  It is not just that what were once radical experiments are now enshrined in the most institutional of museums.  The original pieces were radically minimalist – highly clarified simple happenings in isolation, usually presented in blank gallery spaces.  The MoMA exhibit is like a crowded menagerie of acts and images, with a steady flow of tourists trying to see it all before their feet give out or the kids start crying or they have to meet someone for dinner.

The title of the Abramovic show at MoMA is The Artist Is Present, and it is with her own simple presence that she makes the strongest statement and the deepest impression in this show.  In the great atrium of the Museum, throughout the public hours while her exhibit is open, the 63-year-old artist sits silently at a table, while museumgoers are invited to sit directly across from her.  She sits all day, and will do so for 77 days.  This is about as radically minimal as performance can get.  She is not doing anything sensational, really not doing anything at all.  But if you’ve tried to sit still for even an hour you know it becomes incredibly grueling.  You can often see the pain in her face as she holds steady eye contact with an endless stream of museum visitors, some of whom sit for moments, and some for hours.  It is an act of extreme endurance, but also, in a way, an act of extreme generosity, giving herself to her audience in direct human presence.  Observe for a while and you’ll see suffering, defiance, confrontation, resignation, engagement, boredom and bliss – the full range of the human condition living and breathing there before us.  Amazingly, her simple presence fills up the gigantic atrium space more than any of the monumental pieces of art I’ve seen there over the years.

On the opening day, her former collaborator, Ulay, showed up at the table for an unexpected tearful reunion:

Ulay and Marina Abramovic, March, 2010, photo by Scott Rudd for MoMA

Just off the Atrium is the entrance to another immersive exhibit, William Kentridge:  Five Themes.  Timed to coincide with Kentridge’s multimedia staging of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose (based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story) at the Metropolitan Opera, this retrospective shows Kentridge’s drawings, prints, animated films, theatrical designs, optical experiments and even animatronic puppets as a diverse but highly unified body of work that spans media and obliterates the traditional line dividing graphic art and theatrical storytelling.

Kentridge became widely known in the 1990′s for his 9 Drawings for Projection (1989-2003), a series of richly evocative short animated films, made by drawing, erasing and redrawing large charcoal sketches on paper.  Originally shown one at a time in galleries in conjuction with exhibits of the final-stage charcoal drawings, the series of films hangs loosely together as a single ongoing story.  They tell of an industrialist, Soho Eckstein, his wife, and her lover, the bohemian Felix Teitlebaum, who is always depicted naked.  Eckstein and Teitlebaum are opposites in a way, but both recognizably resemble Kentridge.  The story in 9 Drawings plays out across the backdrop of the upheavals of South Africa in the late apartheid and early post-apartheid eras, but the films aren’t straightforwardly political.  Instead they’re personal and poetic.  The erasures and redrawing of the filmmaking technique, the transformations of the elemental and mechanical imagery, the ebb and flow of the lives of the characters, and the shifting sands of cultural change are all of a piece, an era of life experience distilled into a cinematic dream.  I get the impression that the transformations of the drawings are not preconceived, but exploratory.

The museum show is arranged not chronologically or by media, but thematically.  The 9 Drawings and other films are projected at monumental size, with the real drawings, also quite large, nearby, allowing one to experience the images in both their forms, as mutable projections and as the tactile reality of smudgy charcoal on heavily worked paper.

Kentridge is an obsessive drawer and mark-maker.  One room in the MoMA show surrounds us with multiple projections showing him drawing, tearing paper, pouring ink, etc., often in reverse.  Other rooms are filled with projections, drawings and objects based around designs for his recent operatic productions, Mozart’s Magic Flute and Shostakovich’s The Nose.  There is almost too much to take in, a barrage of images and ideas, nearly all in bold black and white, with a rough, handmade texture.  Throughout the exhibit there are many recurring images, including water and bathing, mechanically walking figures, birds and  rhinoceroses, the industrialized landscape, Alfred Jarry’s corrupt king Ubu, and especially Kentridge’s own heavyset self-image.

Kentridge’s work is not colorful, and while it is bold, it is not simplistic.  It is gray and ambiguous and conflicted.   It draws upon the angular dynamism of early-20th-century avant-garde design, but the boldness is more than anything else the magnified theatrical gesture of the human form.  This is the closest contemporary work I know to the great etchings of Goya, the Caprichos and the Disasters of War.  For Kentridge the act of drawing is theatrical, improvisational and demonstrative, and theater is a graphic art where shadows and lines convey ideas and feelings.

Drawing for II Sole 24 Ore (World Walking), 2007, by William Kentridge; Charcoal, gouache, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, Marion Goodman Gallery

I’ll close with a quote from the Phaidon Monograph, William Kentridge, by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev et al, that reveals something about his open-ended creative process:

“Drawing for me is about fluidity.  There may be a vague sense of what you’re going to draw but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know.  So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought.  It does not arrive instantly like a photograph. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.  What ends in clarity does not begin that way.”

Marina Abramovic:  The Artist Is Present, organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art, and Director, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, is on view through May 31, 2010, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

William Kentridge:  Five Themes, originally organized for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art by Mark Rosenthal, is on view through May 17, 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Images in this post link back to the sites where I found them.

Back Study #1: Convex, 2009, by Fred Hatt

Today, March 15, 2010, this blog turns one year old.  (Above, the first illustration from the first post, “Variations”.)

I have long shared my work with others largely through underground, alternative, and community-based venues.  In many ways, the blog has been my ideal gallery – virtually cost-free, accessible to all both near and far, open 24 hours, a place where I can share the full range of my work, my process, and my passions, without concern for whether anyone will buy, or whether a dealer thinks I’m diluting my brand.

I have long tended to put all my energy into producing work, rarely finding the time to edit and present that work, much less to sell myself or promote my career.  Feeling the need to post something here once a week or thereabouts has been a much-needed self-imposed deadline for me!

I thank those of you that post comments.  A sense of dialog sustains me.  It’s also been gratifying to pick up some fans in far-flung places, where they would have been unlikely to encounter my work in an exhibit.

In reverse order, here’s a listing of the top ten posts from the first year of Drawing Life.  These are the posts that have gotten the most hits, continuing to attract readers after they’re no longer on the front page of the blog, with a sample image and quote from each.  The titles link back to the original posts.

10:  Opening the Closed Pose

“The human body is as expressive when it is turned inward as when it is expansive or active.  The guarded nature of the crouch or fetal position shows vulnerability in a different way than the open pose.  The upper and lower parts of the body are drawn together, and the energy pattern becomes circular rather than vertical.”

Hanging Head, 2009, by Fred Hatt

9:  Shapes of Things

This post featured stereoscopic photographs, presented as anaglyphs, to be viewed with red/cyan 3D glasses.

“The compositional dynamics of a flat photograph are simple, their impact immediate and graphic.  A stereo image is more complex.  Looking at it, we feel we are looking through a window, perhaps into a world that has been miniaturized and frozen in time.  The eyes caress the forms or penetrate the space of the image.  Enjoy these images, then go out and revel in the spatial complexity of the world.”

Framework, 1993, photo by Fred Hatt

8:  Fire in the Belly

“Body painting is an ancient art of transformation, to make the warrior more terrible, the young mate more enticing, or the shaman more of a dream creature.  I have used it as a medium of discovery, exploring the landscape of the body and finding the forces that lie beneath the surface.  In the type of body art shown here, there is never any preconceived design.  As the paintbrush follows the natural curves of the body, it becomes a kind of divining rod, finding the quality of energetic pools and flows and manifesting them in visible form.”

Botanic, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

7:  Painting with Light

“I first started experimenting with light painting in photography of models in 1990 or thereabouts . . . I was interested in the process because it bridged the gap between photography and painting or drawing.  As in painting, the image is created by manual gestures over a finite period of time, but instead of making pigment marks on paper or canvas, one makes light marks, through a lens, on a photograph.”

Smoke, 1996, photo by Fred Hatt

6:  Negative Space

“Clearly seeing negative space is about shifting the focus from presence to absence.  Finding the figure by looking at the negative space is one of the many artistic applications of the Hermetic principle  ‘As above, so below’ or ‘As within, so without’.  All reality exists on the cusp between interior and exterior, between past and future, or between any polarity you care to examine.  To draw is to surf on the points of contact.”

Stanley Folded, 2008, by Fred Hatt

5:  Anatomical Flux

This post featured drawings made at an artists’ sketch night event at “Bodies: The Exhibition”, a show of polymerized anatomical specimens.

“My favorite room in the exhibit is the one where blood vessels have been preserved and all the other tissues stripped away.  These figures look like my most manic scribbly drawings multiplied and exploded into three dimensions.  The arteries branch out treelike, the veins meander vinelike, and the capillaries are fuzzy like moss.  This quick sketch comes nowhere near the actual complexity of the specimen.”

Torse Vessels, 2009, by Fred Hatt

4:  The Spirit of Weeds

“In our uncertain time, everything seems to be breaking down.  Industrial civilization defines prosperity only as growth, but the limits to growth are looming everywhere . . . Such times will be hard for vast monocultures, and for hothouse flowers (and I do intend those as human metaphors).  Such times call for weedy spirits, for those that can find their earthly grounding even in the decaying manufactured world, and who burst with green power, determined to reassert the forces of life.”

Blue/Yellow/Green, 2002, photo by Fred Hatt

3:  Meanings of the Nude

“The image of the nude reminds us that we are our bodies, that sexuality and appetites and mortality are our very nature, and that the beauty of our animality cannot be separated from the beauty of our spirituality.”

Gustav Vigeland, figure from Vigeland Park, Oslo, c. 1930, photo by Simon Davey

2:  Pregnant Pose

“The roundness of the pregnant form is quite unlike the roundness of obesity.  The skin of the swelling belly and breasts is drum-tight.  The entire body is surging with life-force and all the muscles are toned.”

Fertile Structure, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And finally – drum roll, please – the number one post, the one that went viral on StumbleUpon and got twice as many hits as any other individual post of Drawing Life in the past year:

1:  Visual Cacophony

“New York City is like the rainforest, dense with competing and coexisting lifeforms . . . This kind of visual excess has an energizing effect on me, like wild music that’s dissonant yet exuberant.”

Doll Window, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Thanks to you, my readers, especially to the commenters, and stay tuned – I’m just getting started!

Blacklight body art at a party at Collective Unconscious, NYC, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

I’m involved with several events over the next few days.  Click on “Calendar” for details.

Sunday the 14th:  Opening for Spring Studio 18th Anniversary Show, featuring hundreds of artists.  Spring Studio, NYC, starts 6:30.

Sunday the 14th:  Blacklight Body Painting Dance Party at St. George Healing Arts, Staten Island, 6 pm on, donation suggested.

Tuesday the 16th:  KAMI, live music by Gregory Reynolds and butoh dance by Mariko Endo with video and light by Fred Hatt, part of a multi-media program also featuring Ben Miller and Orin Buck, at the Gershwin Hotel, NYC, 8 pm, $10.

Monday the 22nd:  New choreography by Jung Woong Kim, featuring special light effects by Fred Hatt, at Movement Research at Judson Church, NYC, 8 pm, free.

Vivid Dust, 2000, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Looking through my personal library this week, I came across an old book called “Design by Accident” by James F. O’Brien.  It’s full of ways to incorporate chance and natural phenomena into visual arts and crafts.  Just the Table of Contents makes me feel inspired, so I’ll share it here:

Tree Forms:  trunks and branches formed by the movement of pigments and liquids

Cracks and crackle:  layers in tension

Crawl:  rejection of paint by an incompatible surface

Drip, Dribble, Drop:  Pollock’s discovery and random patterns

Splash and Run:  designs formed by vigorous impact and gravity

Flow and Swirl:  “marble effect”

Wrinkles and Folds:  folding and bending of surfaces

Flowers:  patterns formed by drops of pigment on a coated surface

Max Ernst’s frottage technique and Pollock’s drips, Rorschach’s psychoanalytic ink blots and Hans Jenny’s Cymatics are among the well-known examples of this kind of thing in recent culture, but scenic painters, fabric artists, faux-finish decorators and craftsmen have always used these methods.  It is impossible to control the outcome tightly, but letting go of such control allows the magic of physics to impart its inimitable majesty.

For much of my own work the human body has been my playground, and I’ve used some of these techniques to create textural effects in body painting.  In this post I’ll share several examples.

Splatter, 1997, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Squeezing paint from squeeze botttles and letting colors run into other colors produces beautiful effects.   In the 1990′s I used to do this kind of body painting as a cabaret act in collaboration with performance artist Sue Doe, using fluorescent paints that glowed under blacklight.  One of our performances at the Blue Angel Cabaret was featured in the HBO series Real Sex.  I’ll do a whole post about the blacklight performances some day, but for now here’s one image of the squirting technique under blacklight:

Green Snake, 1998, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And here are the beautiful fluorescent colors running thin as they are cleaned off in the shower:

Rinse, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Handprints have been used since the stone age to make dynamic patterns in paint:

Handprints, 1992, bodypaint by Fred Hatt and Jen S., photo by Fred Hatt

When tempera paint dries, it cracks and flakes off.  The crackled texture adds an air of antiquity to this freeform painting:

Fresco, 1996, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

And here, a coat of paint on the body has been rewetted and worn thin, drying with a marbled effect:

Marbled Belly, 1991, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Sculptors’ clay smeared onto the body dries in a patchy way, depending on local thickness, making fleeting textural patterns:

Wet and Dry, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this one, clay was applied first for texture, and then paint was applied over the rough, earthy surface:

World Egg, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this body painting session, done for a cover illustration for Lauren Stauber‘s haunting CD, Solarheart, the first layer was yellow and red paint, with clay applied over it.  The colors subtly bleed through the dusty clay surface.  Dried flower petals are scattered on top of the body:

Petal Strewn, 1998, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, the model is covered with the dry powdered pigments used in the Hindu spring festival called Holi.  In the festival, which is celebrated in many places in India, and here in New York in Richmond Hill, Queens, celebrants plaster each other with hurled vividly colored powders and liquid colors.

Holi, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, powdered pigments and bronze powder are used on the body, blended with massage oil:

Jeweled, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here, the front of the body is painted with oil and powdered pigments, and the back with clay and red paint:

Agate, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In this one, the first layer is blue paint, with clay applied over that and bronze powder blown across to adhere to the wet areas when the clay is in the patchily dried state as seen in the black and white photo above:

Lapis and Gold, 2001, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s a combination of the bronze powder with the powdered Holi pigments:

Painted Desert, 2000, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

An important focus of my exploration of body painting is the experience of the person who is painted.  Being painted is often experienced as a bodily transformation, an external experience of the skin that reflects or enables an internal shift of consciousness.  This ritual aspect underlies the importance of body art in shamanic and theatrical performance.  The stark white body paint associated with butoh dance originated with butoh progenitor Tatsumi Hijikata‘s experimentation with using plaster on his dancers’ bodies.  He wished to intensify their movement by making them conscious of the entire expanse of their skin through tightness and discomfort.  Oil, clay, powders and cracked tempera on the skin are tactile sensations that may be experienced as being one with earth or finding one’s wild animal nature.

Animal, 1997, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

I’ll close with a dyptich of textural legs.  In the upper image the paint is done not by the scattering or dripping methods used in many of the pictures above, but by tracing the blood vessels visible through the skin.  The legs in the lower image are painted with blue powder over oil:

Vessels, 2007, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Gateway, 2006, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Other body painting, most of it more painterly in approach, can be seen on my portfolio site, or on other posts on this blog under the category “Body Art“.

Edisa at work, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan

As a child, dance artist Edisa Weeks attended Quaker meetings with her family. These meetings involved group meditation and sharing, conducted without leaders or hierarchy. As an adult artist, she found herself in a field defined by elitism and a rigid division of roles. The artists were expected to demonstrate their skill, passion, and cleverness to a separated, passive audience. There was none of the mutuality or intimacy of the Quaker meetings of her youth. She wanted her art to be a way of connecting with people, not a way of asserting her superiority to them.

Edisa is far from alone in this impulse to break through the “fourth wall” – it’s been a major thrust in experimental performing arts since at least the 1960′s. Her dance company, Delirious Dance, has done things like performing in private living rooms, exploring through movement the awkwardness of encounters between strangers.

Chashama, an arts organization based in midtown Manhattan, invites visual artists and performers to use storefront windows in the city as special venues to reach a broad audience including many that might not enter a gallery or theater. When she was offered access to this forum, Edisa hit on the idea of inviting people to get their hair done. The wacky sense of fun with which she tackled the task was a hit, and since the first window event, Edisa has done people’s hair at many parties, benefits and festivals.

Applying dinosaurs, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan

The conventional beauty school approach to hair essentially moves people towards conformity with certain established style norms, smoothing over their peculiarities. Edisa, on the other hand, tries to push the quirks to the limit. Upon meeting each new “client”, Edisa’s first question is, “How crazy can I get?” The response to this question provides the first gauge of the personality she’s working with. As she begins to play with the person’s hair, she’s assessing the shape of the head, the quality and strength of the hair and what it might support. At the same time, she’s observing the style and colors of the person’s clothing, how they speak, how they respond to touch, and so on. She’s surrounded her workstation with a huge array of flowers, toys, and sculptural and decorative items, from which she chooses the elements of her construction, weaving extravagant headdresses that may be silly, scary, or lovely.

Some of Edisa's decorative items, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Edisa's hands, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Edisa weaves flowers into a child's hair, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

I was acquainted with Edisa and had seen her performance pieces, but the first time I saw her doing hair designs (at a benefit party for Chashama), I was amazed at the speed with which she worked and at the variety of what she created. The people wearing her creations looked blissful, as though their own unique beauty had been perceived and manifested in art, on their own heads. I immediately identified with what Edisa was doing, because the impulse to use art to connect to people is exactly what I’ve explored both through body painting and through portraiture. So many artists use their talents to put themselves above people, to impress them or preach to them. It is beautiful to encounter an artist like Edisa, who seeks rather to celebrate and uplift her audience. It’s a mutual gift – they offer her their heads as a creative playground, and she shows them how much fun can be had there.

Applying a feather boa, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan

Queen of Burlesque, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Head, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan

Cleopatra, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan

Applying flies, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Catching flies with honey, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Fiber Optics, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan

Zombie Apocalypse, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan

How to impress your friends, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

You can see more examples of Edisa’s hair designs at her Delirious Hair Design website.

Photos in this post were taken by me and by Alex Kahan at Edisa’s Delirious Hair booth at the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival last month in Brooklyn.