The Artifact Magazine Issue No. 012 Autumn 2018
Los Angeles. 2276 E. 16th Street. Night Gallery. A YOUNG LADY IN PINK BY TADE STYKA (1889 – 1954). COURTESY OF AMERICAN GALLERY.
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ROYAL PALACE OF VENARIA BY AMEDEO DI CASTELLAMONTE, ITALY. PHOTO COURTESY OF AWILDA AND VODYANOY.
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In This Issue, 03 ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 05 CREDITS & CONTRIBUTORS 07 ROCOCO ART Cropped Rococo
17 CLASSICISM PERIOD The Dark Side
20 MINIMALISM LIFESTYLE Goodbye Things By Fumio Sasaki
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MINIMALISM AND APPLIED II BY CHARLOTTE POSENENSKE, FERDINAND KRAMER. COURTESY OF MINIMALISM AND APPLIED II.
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Acrylic On Canvas Leanne Faye, 1999. 120cm x 100cm Hello Readers, Welcome to the first edition of The Artifact, our new quarterly magazine designed especially for people who might never normally consider picking up an art magazine. This is for readers who want to know more about art movements that are somewhat forgotten. While as a nation we might love art, we want to keep you updated on what is going on in art periods in the modern world now. We aim to cut through the confusion and give you clear, sensible and reliable information from writers and experts from different art related professions that you can trust. We want it to be entertaining and informative, at times contrary, but above all insightful. Inside you’ll find a mixture of news, features and regular columns on a review of art-related topics. Magazines are beautiful and meaningful—we hope—package of ideas, words and images that a group of experts prepares for its readers. Magazines are about trust and partnership: We will strive always to keep you engaged; you, the readers, are free to engage with us or to reject us. There is a story this month that I particularly like because it combines a great read with intriguing artworks. For our readers, stay with us—and expect more.
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Contributors & Credits Jesse Mockrin
Jesse Mockrin (born 1981, Silver Spring, Maryland) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work primarily consists of figurative paintings. Mockrin is represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles, where she had solo exhibitions in 2014 and 2016. Her 2016 show, titled “The Progress of Love,” included paintings inspired by Rococo and men’s fashion; the resulting works demonstrated the artist’s interest in “the fluidity of gender.”. Her work has been written about in The New Yorker,T Magazine, Modern Painters, Art Agenda, and The Paris Review, among other publications.
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat have been covering contemporary culture and the spiritual renaissance for nearly five decades. In 1972, they founded CIStems, Inc., a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization located in New York. In 2006, they consolidated all their work on SpiritualityandPractice.com, a multifaith website providing resources for spiritual journeys. Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat are the co-founders and co-directors of this superb and trustworthy interreligious resource. They bring decades of interreligious spiritual education communications experience to their ministry.
EDITOR LEANNE FAYE CONTENT EDITOR ELLYN TAN EDITORIAL ASSISTANT ANNA KOH DESIGNERS JAMES DAY SONIA HENDERSON RAMONE TAN JASMINE GRANT ACCOUNT DIRECTOR NICKY WRIGHT PRODUCTION DIRECTOR LUCY WANG PRODUCTION MANAGER KAY BROWN ART DIRECTOR LEIGHANNE TAN CREATIVE DIRECTOR CHIA YING CONTRIBUTORS JESSE MOCKRIN FREDERIC ANN BRUSSAT MARY ANN BRUSSAT
THE STORM, 1880, BY PIERRE AUGUSTE COT. PHOTO COURTESY OF ZAZZLE.COM
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Cropped Rococo Jesse Mockrin’s Painting Subvert Rococo’s Gender Norms, Breaking The Spell Of Art History. by Maxwell Williams
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n arm reaches through lush greenery with a raised pinkie finger, gravitating towards a figure caught midair, wrapped in a flowing pink gown; one stocking-clad leg points to the sky, just a moment after launching a tiny shoe into the air, pictured nearby. The scene is familiar and enticing, but very different than the original, like a cover of a classic love song performed well by a modern day pop singer.
VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION “THE PROGRESS OF LOVE “ AT NIGHT GALLERY LOS ANGELES (USA), 2016 BY JESSE MOCKRIN. PHOTO COURTESY OF NIGHT GALLERY.
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“Fragonard is the most-often referenced painter,” “Fragonard is the most-often referenced painter,” says Jesse Mockrin of her work, as she gestures to this painting, which directly quotes from the Rococo master’s canonical 1767 canvas, The Swing. She is standing on the cement floor of Night Gallery in South Downtown L.A., surrounded by “The Progress of Love,” her new show of paintings. “But there are some other painters [referenced] too,” she goes on, “like Boucher, and lesser-known painters like Deshays and Perronneau, who liked pastels.” And while Mockrin’s works share some of the same formal qualities as an 18th-century Rococo composition—though they’re a bit too askew to actually be mistaken for one—the works in question are decidedly 21st-century. Mockrin grew up in Maryland and began painting at 15, taking classes
at the storied Yellow Barn studio before attending Barnard College in New York. But she shied away from painting there— her thesis was a photography project— before returning to her original medium in grad school at University of California, San Diego. There, she studied under figure drawer Amy Adler, who encouraged her to continue her pursuit in the face of criticism from some of her classmates. “I got a lot of [discouragement] in grad school from a couple of students, because at that time I was working from some of my own photographs, and they were like, ‘Why paint them? Just keep the photograph. Give us the r eason,’” she says, laughing it off. “I think that ultimately people are going to keep making figurative paintings. And the more it’s taboo, the more it’s a guilty pleasure.”
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LEFT: JESSE MOCKRIN, GARDEN OF LOVE, 2016. PHOTO COURTESY OF NIGHT GALLERY; RIGHT: JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD, THE SWING, 1767. IMAGE VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
After graduating, she connected with Night Gallery, whose owners Davida Nemeroff and Mieke Marple have been champions of new figurative painting over the past few years. “The Progress of Love” is Mockrin’s second solo show with the gallery; in it, more than a dozen artworks are scattered through the space, each seemingly a fragment or detail of a larger painting. “The cropping and excerpting of these pieces suggest this larger world outside,” she says, and adds, “I’m hoping that the cropping disrupts that immersive fantasy.” The painted fantasies are luxuriantly verdant worlds of plant life and strange, pallid characters with skin the color of moonlight or perhaps uncooked pancake batter, as Mockrin suggests. “The skin is not real,” she says. “It’s got this quality that’s like plaster or porcelain. It’s not a fleshy, meaty human body. It’s some other kind of texture.” and the fact that they are all oil paintings gives the works a very flat, contained feeling—something Mockrin further highlights by draping curtains or fabric around some of the figures. In the lynchpin piece of the show, two young,
androgynous figures peek out from behind what looks like a stage curtain. “With the last group of paintings, I was thinking about the rectangle as a window or your field of vision into which things are being asserted,” she says. “I was thinking of those as if the curtain was pulling back, and you could see this fragment of a larger scene… For me, the fabric is also playing with two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, so it fills the canvas with this flatness of surface, like this whole painting is a dress, and the whole body is getting lost inside of that.” It was a men’s fashion magazine spread with the theme “Dark florals are in for men” that spurred the new paintings. “They had floral wallpaper, and all these overflowing floral prints, and it had this visual connection for me to these flowery Rococo paintings by Fragonard and Boucher,” Mockrin recalls. “That was the visual link that interested me. And there are other interesting links, like these transgressions of gender that are happening at the same time— this fluidity.”
INSTALLATION VIEW OF “THE PROGRESS OF LOVE.” COURTESY OF NIGHT GALLERY.
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LEFT: JESSIE MOCKRIN, THE STROLL, 2016; RIGHT: JESSIE MOCKRIN, TWISTED, 2016. PHOTOS COURTESY OF NIGHT GALLERY.
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The men in Mockrin’s paintings are dandies—which is perhaps 18th-century parlance for gender fluidity. “I’m definitely interested in these androgynous faces; a lot of the faces come from Ingres,” she says, conjuring images of the Neoclassical master’s famed La Grande Odalisque (1814) or lavish portrait of Napoleon. “Ingres has these amazing facial proportions happening, like the eyes are too far apart.There are always heavy eyelids and deep-set eyes, small mouths, small noses.” This synthesis of past and present fashion is something Mockrin has turned to in past shows. “In all of the bodies of work I’ve made, I’ve seen something happening in contemporary culture imagery that correlates with historical painting that interests me,” she says. “In the past body of work, the contemporary imagery was Korean pop stars, and then I was looking at historical paintings of adolescent boys—a lot of John Singer Sargent—and there were similarities just in the way they were dressed. These big bow ties that were popular for young boys in 1905 were being used by dandy K-pop stars. These things that are traditionally reserved for the realm of the feminine are now being employed by both.”
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The figures in the new paintings are of an indeterminate age (Mockrin suggests perhaps they’re 27, though trying to look 17) and are meant to have a sensual, erotic quality. “I titled the show ‘The Progress of Love’ after the Fragonard Room at the Frick. There, it is a narrative series about these suitors pursuing the woman, and her having a secret meeting, and her choosing the one. Then they’re old, and they’re looking back at their love letters. So by giving it that title, it does encourage viewing each picture as what one part of the story could be.” But Mockrin doesn’t want her images to be taken as puritanical. In fact, “pervy” is the word she chooses.
“It’s not all romance,” she says with a laugh. “There’s tension underneath that. The Swing is changed, not just by the zooming in, but also, the shoe is much closer, leaves are encroaching from all sides, and they’re much closer to you.” In this, Mockrin’s paintings are beautiful, but they’re also a bit unsettling. The way that they’re cropped creates a kind of confusion of where to look; the viewer feels uncomfortably close to the subjects. But there’s a modernity built into the images, too; Mockrin’s subversion of the classics perfectly captures the way gender shifts through history, illustrating how those norms, when faded, can encapsulate a moment.
INSTALLATION VIEW OF “THE PROGRESS OF LOVE.” COURTESY OF NIGHT GALLERY.
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The Dark Side of Classicism by unknown on March 15, 2011
WÜRBEL, THEODOR FRANZ 1886 -. OLYMPISCHE SPIELE BERLIN. OFFSET 1936. COURTESY OF POSTERCONNECTION INC.
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itler, the German dictator who in his youth had aspired to be an artist, favored classicism and disdained experimental styles. “He considered the ancient Greeks to be ‘Nordics,’ ancestors of the Germans. ‘It is therefore no surprise,’ he declared in one of his first speeches as chancellor, in September 1933, ‘that each politically historical epoch searches in its art for the link with a period of [an] equally heroic past. Greeks and Romans suddenly stand close to Teutons.’”Art’s function, he said in 1935, was to be the model for racially pure humans— “to create images which represent God’s creatures, not miscarriages between man and monkey.” After assuming power, the Nazis moved quickly to “perfect,” in their words, German culture. In November 1936, they banned all art criticism, and in 1937 confiscated virtually all modernist works in German museums—nearly 5,000 works in the first seizure—and presented 650 of them in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art, 1937) show to
demonstrate the perverted nature of modern art. The exhibition traveled throughout Germany and Austria, attracting more than two million visitors, and featured many artists who are now considered masters of 20thcentury art, including Marc Chagall (1887–1985), Max Ernst (1879–1976), Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and Paul Klee (1879–1940), among others. The Nazis also planned to demonstrate its efforts at remaking the National Socialist body in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. “Although African American track star Jesse Owens [1913– 1980] won four gold medals (rendering Hitler’s claims of Aryan superiority somewhat shaky), the German team overwhelmingly dominated, winning 89 medals.” With a stadium and pageantry that mimicked the ancient Greeks, the games provided an opportunity for the Nazi Reich to associate itself with classical antiquity. Hitler set about creating a genetically specific classicism. “‘The new
age of today is at work on a new human type,’ he told his countrymen less than a year after the Olympics had finished. ‘Tremendous efforts are being made in countless spheres of life in order to elevate our people, to make our men, boys, lads, girls, and women healthier and thereby stronger and more beautiful. . . . Never was Mankind closer than now to Antiquity in its appearance and its sensibilities.’” The official poster for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin was chosen through a competition. Franz Wu?rbel, a Berlin painter and graphic artist, won, and his poster included the Brandenburg Gate as the landmark of the host city, Berlin, with the figure of a wreathed victor with his arm raised in the Olympic salute. The five rings were also included in the background and the words, “Berlin 1936, Olympic Games, 1st–16th August,” were inscribed in capitals on the Brandenburg Gate. The poster was distributed and displayed around the world.
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Goodbye, Things Book Review on The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki. by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
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his enlightening book by Fumio Sasaki was published in Japan in 2015 and has sold over 150,000 copies. The 36-year-old editor describes how he lived alone in a one-room Tokyo apartment and decided to change things drastically by starting a minimalist life. Like many of his friends and neighbors, he had spent a lot of money on books, CDs, and DVDs until it hit him that there was little contentment in getting more stuff. Our possessions suck up our time, our energy, and our freedom. Think about all the objects and goodies you have in your home or office. Then take note of the guilt and regret you carry around inside for not making good use of them. Most of us have a room, garage, or storage space jammed with things we took up as hobbies, got tired of, and put away out of sight. Sasaki
LEFT: GOODBYE, THINGS: THE NEW JAPANESE MINIMALISM BY FUMIO SASAKI. COURTESY OF IDIGO BOOKS. RIGHT: LIGHT WALLS HOUSE BY MA-STYLE ARCHITECTS, JAPAN. PHOTO COURTESY OF KAI NAKAMURA
spent a year getting rid of things. Most he sold or gave to friends In a very helpful chapter, the author presents 55 tips to help you say goodbye to your stuff: start with the things that are clearly junk such as broken appliances. Then move on to possessions you haven’t used for a year. Be sure to differentiate between the goodies you want and those you really need. Our worth is not measured by all the things we possess. Erase from your mind that consumerist slogan “Whoever ends up with the most toys wins.” Instead Sasaki takes to heart the words and examples of minimalists such as Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and Greek philosopher Diogenes. We also remembered a quote from Edwin Teale wo said in 1899: “Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.”.
“Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.” — Rabbi Hyman Schachtel
Sasaki reminds us that our homes all his excess, he winds up with a total aren’t museums so they do not have to house collections of our things. Having fewer possessions takes away the stress they cause by soaking up our energy and draining us with the bad habit of comparisons. In place of these negatives, there is the positive influence of Zen Buddhism in Japan; this spiritual tradition models the value of austerity and thrift. Sasaki does a good job mapping the minimalist path and reports on the results. After dispensing with
quotes to inspire you on your minimalist of 150 items including clothes, futon, journey and includes a step-by-step kitchen bottles, and a toothbrush in guide on how to live a more minimalist his bathroom. He also introduces famous lifestyle. There are no less than 70 tips minimalists, for example Steve Jobs, in all, to help the reader say goodbye to possessions that they no longer use, whose love of minimalism can be seen in need or get pleasure from. the simplicity of the products he created It’s full of little snippets of and Mark Zuckerberg’s choice of having inspiration that really make you think a minimalist wardrobe. He opens our about daily choices and goals in life. It’s eyes to how making minimalist choices a book you can dip into when you have can lead to having more time to be ten minutes to spare, or you can sit creative, or to enjoy a simpler life. The down and devour it in a few sittings if book is also interspersed with beautiful you have the time.
“Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.” — James Joyce
The Artifact Magazine Issue No. 012 Autumn 2018 Los Angeles, 2276 E, 16th Street, Night Gallery.