LOOK

This week in my seminar on artist's books at Cooper Union we are looking at publications by a diverse group of women from the 1960s and 1970s, including Yoko Ono's 1964 Grapefruit and Adrian Piper's 1974 Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object. These books are connected to the artists' performances, which led me to think about Ono's Cut Piece from 1964 (above left) and Piper's Catalysis IV from 1971 (right).

The photograph depicts Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall, during which Ono sat on the stage with a pair of scissors beside her and invited audience members one by one to cut a portion of her clothes and take the fragment with them. Ono's performance responds to composer John Cage's experiments with chance during the 1950s and George Brecht's event scores, which consist of simple instructions. Ono called her scores "instruction pieces" and the earliest of these in Grapefruit date to 1960.

Instead of the theater, Piper's performance of Catalysis IV took place on a New York City bus and in other everyday locales. In this performance, she took a large white bath towel, stuffed it into her mouth, and let the remainder hang down. As she writes in Talking to Myself, her performance responds to other artists' investigations into space during the 1960s. Whereas Donald Judd sought to investigate an abstract "real space" through imposing sculptures made from large industrial materials, Piper investigated the power of her own body, racialized as Black, and its ability to affect others within the social space of an urban environment.

Although many focus on violence when discussing Cut Piece, I see the work differently as about care and community. Ono invites members of the audience to remove and receive a gift of her clothing if they are able to take care of her body in the process. The conditional nature of the gift is implicit, but it safeguards Ono's wellbeing, as does the protection of the community in which she performs: the audience and the theater's staff. In contrast, Piper's performances take place amidst an unsuspecting public. Her actions break social conventions and the audience is free to retaliate in keeping with societal norms. Viewed by her public as an anonymous Black woman on the stage of the everyday in a white supremacist culture, Piper's actions involved significant personal risk. The stakes of Piper's chance encounters with her public are so high that Ono's open-ended performance seems almost predictable in comparison.

ACT

You may be vaguely aware about the assault on higher education in Florida at the moment. The folks in the non-profit newsroom The 19th have the best article I've seen breaking down the pending Flordia House Bill 999 and its ban on the teaching of gender and ethnic studies in higher education. The American Council of Learned Societies has issued a statement signed by numerous professional organizations, including the College Art Association. Students are protesting while university presidents remain silent.

LEARN

The next session of my lunchtime Zoom workshop Looking at Art to Nurture Your Child runs from April until May on Tuesdays or Thursdays for 4 weeks. Curious about how to connect with your child around art? Join us! Free orientation sessions on 4/18 and 4/20.

LISTEN

On the latest episode of the Pre-Raphaelite Podcast, art historian Roberto Ferrari talks about the Jewish-sibling artists Simeon, Rebecca and Abraham Solomon in Victorian London. Tune in to learn about the queerness of Simeon and Rebecca's feminism.

The art historian Jennifer Shaw was recently featured on an episode of the podcast The Alarmist (Apple Podcast / Google Podcast), where she discusses the life and work of the queer French surrealist Claude Cahun and her partner Marcel Moore, including their acts of resistance during the Nazi occupation.

SEE/VISIT

A new exhibition opened this week in London at the Tate on the Pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris. The exhibition was recently featured in the London Times (paywalled link here.)

The exhibition After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art also just opened at the Tate in London. Check out this trailer for the exhibition and some great installation photos.

The library at Cambridge University is exhibiting their collection of over 1,000 lithographs depicting caricatures that were distributed during the the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (1870-1). If you can't make it to Cambridge, check out the exhibition website, which comes with a great film.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to send along your thoughts. Until next week!

If you happen to visit the Met and the Whitney Museum in a single day, you can make a rather remarkable comparison between two sculptures depicting Black women: French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved!, from 1868, and Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richmond Barthé’s African Dancer, from 1933.

Carpeaux’s sculpture was the subject of a thoughtful exhibition that just closed at the Met and is a work that I spent a bit of time thinking about in my seminar Reclaiming the Black Body in European Art. In the recent exhibit, the power and the problem of the work was obscured slightly by its display on a high pedestal, which made it difficult to fully comprehend the figure’s pose. We might imagine that the figure is turned away from the viewer, but her gaze locates us behind and above, placing us in the role of her oppressor. Although Carpeaux sought to celebrate abolition, the sculpture re-enacts a scene of subjugation.

In contrast, the body of Barthé's dancer has a very different relationship to the viewer. Rather than look away, the dancer’s eyes are closed, and thus she does not perform for us, but looks within herself as she moves her body in space. Although at first glance her body may seem static, if you attempt to inhabit a similar form in your own body, you will find that her pose is full of movement and ready to propel forward. The agency that Barthé gives his dancer is particularly striking when considered in relation to Carpeaux's sculpture.

LEARN:

Space is still available in my lunchtime Zoom workshop Looking at Art to Nurture Your Child. The next session runs on Tuesdays or Thursdays for 4 weeks from April until May. Join us and discover your capacity to make meaning in the moment with the people you love. Free orientation sessions on 4/18 and 4/20.

READ:

If the recent NYT article about problems at the women’s leadership network Chief piqued your interest, you’ll enjoy this critique of The Story of Art Without Men as “regressive girl-boss feminism” from the Penitent Review.

Early modern historian Pamela H. Smith, who founded the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University, has a new book out: From Lived Experience to the Written Word that was recently profiled in an article from Hyperallergic.

Check out this blog post about the nineteenth-century African-American lion tamer Martini Maccomo and his career touring in the United Kingdom by historian Steve Ward in the Journal of Victorian Culture online.

LISTEN:

Tyler Green of the Modern Notes Podcast recently interviewed art historian Jennifer Van Horn about her new book Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery.

VISIT/SEE:

On Monday, the exhibition Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter opens at the Met. The exhibit contextualizes Pareja’s work with paintings by other 17th-century artists depicting Spain’s Black and Morisco populations and through Arturo Schomburg’s scholarship on Pareja during the Harlem Renaissance. Great installation photos here and here.

The exhibition Manet / Degas just opened this past week at the Museé d’Orsay and will travel to the Met this fall. Check out the wonderful exhibition photos here, here, and here.

Rijksmuseum exhibition Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery at the United Nations Headquarters in NYC closed this week. (My photo of the installation here.) The exhibition website continues on and is a great resource.

Emily Dickinson copied poems by hand and sewed them into small booklets. These are now on view in an exhibition at the Houghton Library at Harvard on self publishing.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to send along your thoughts. Until next week!