PRESS
Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post, Style Section, Friday December 18, 2009.
Collector Mera Rubell Makes Rounds of Washington's Isolated Artists
You could call it a Hanukkah miracle. Or the arrival of intelligent life from another planet.
Last Saturday at 5 a.m., while the rest of us slept, megacollector Mera Rubell walked among
us, hunting local art.
The Miami-based maker of artists' fortunes has, with her husband, Don, put a dozen Leipzig-
based painters on the international art map. Together the couple bought some of the earliest
Jeff Koonses. Their collection includes works by Takashi Murakami, Keith Haring and Kara
Walker. Mera Rubell, 66, has access to art stars stratospherically more successful than anyone
working in Washington.
And yet, here she was. She'd bolted into Washington for an art marathon, visiting 36 artist studios in 36 hours. Straight.
It was Mera's idea. (We must call her that. She'd insist.) She did it for the Washington Project for the Arts, the city's beleaguered but still humming arts group. She offered to pick 12 artists whose works would be among those that would hang in "Cream" a WPA benefit auction exhibition opening at American University's Katzen Arts Center on Jan. 30. A lottery system determined the 36 studio stops.
From her first appointment on Saturday at 5 a.m. in Southwest to her final Gaithersburg rendezvous at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Mera chatted, questioned, prodded, hugged, gesticulated and even adjusted one artist's errant scarf during studio visits of exactly 30 minutes each.
How did she do it? Efficiently. WPA Executive Director Lisa Gold traveled alongside and held Mera to a tight schedule. Her chariot? A white Mercury Grand Marquis belonging to independent taxi driver Bunchar Panich. Mera hired him from the taxi stand outside her hotel. He shuttled her and her small posse for all 36 hours, resting when Mera rested, in a hotel room she booked for him.
(Yes, she scheduled snacks and two naps back at her home away from home, the hip, low-budget Capitol Skyline Hotel near Nationals Park that her hotelier family owns. But does a break from 2:15 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. really count as rest?)
At each studio Mera was all warmth and encouraging words -- even as she told artists that they weren't working hard enough. Or when she asked if there was more to their practice when she clearly hoped there was. To put her hosts at ease, she asked about partners and kids.
"There's a wealth of amazing talent in this area," she gushed after 12 hours of touring. She has found work she was excited about, artists she wanted to know better, artists who turned her on.
Yet by the end of her trip, Mera came away with some stark impressions, impressions Washington art insiders already know but are loath to discuss.
Like: "There's nothing to fight for here. There's not enough contemporary art being shown."
And: "As an artist, you're not going to make any money. A few nice words from [this critic] -- that's all you can get."
And: "There are so many desperate situations here. It's scary."
Mera's troll through Washington's art warrens was akin to Santa visiting the Island of Misfit Toys. Below, a snapshot of her odyssey.
Sunday, 8:30 a.m.:
Harrison Street NW
After huddling in Barbara Liotta's studio examining rock sculptures suspended from the ceiling, the group is back inside Liotta's living room. This is Mera's fifth studio since 5:30 a.m.
Liotta offers coffee and food. Gold gives the okay -- the group is ahead of schedule.
"There are artists who feel extremely isolated here," Mera ventures between bites of frittata. "I've never seen such isolation and loneliness." She asks Liotta who she talks to about her work.
Liotta pauses. Her answer: No one. Not other artists. Not her dealer.
Why not?
"It's some combination of not trusting it and not . . . " Liotta trails off. "I haven't a clue."
"If you were living in New York, you'd be pushing your work a lot harder," Mera says with firmness. "With all of the millions of dollars poured into museums here, why are artists so contained?"
A few minutes later, taking cover under Liotta's doorway before venturing into the cold rain, Mera considers the peculiar situation that is the Washington art world.
"The pecking order is so vague here, so nebulous," the collector says. In New York, top artists become untouchable. For them, it's a badge of achievement to pull up younger ones, to mentor them. Not so in Washington, where no one knows who's on top and everyone is on the defensive.
"It's like children fighting for their parents' attention," Mera say. "It's basic competitive survival here -- you don't give an inch."
There's a reason artists move to New York.
Rafael Valero, writing for The Pinkline Project, December 14, 2009.
Monkey Biz at The Phillips Collection
by Rafael Enrique Valero
“There was a side of me that wanted to smash the [Communist] Party to pieces,” Ma told a rapt audience last November at the first Intersections, The Phillips Collections' new contemporary art series presenting artworks by Tayo Heuser, Barbara Liotta, and Ma in conversation with the museum’s mostly modernist works. “But,” Ma said, noting that officials kept a weary eye on her shenanigans. “I also recognized I couldn’t escape the Party’s influence.”
Context is important. With peasants rallying, sometimes violently, against local government and corporate corruption in the wake of China’s exploding economy, Communist authorities likely had to calculate. It’s not hard to imagine the equation given the world was watching. Would the Monkey King spark dissent, even revolution, as it floated on a smoke cloud above Tiananmen Square, China’s symbol of a quashed democratic movement? Or had Sun Wukong devolved into oh-so-much kitsch that authorities could co-opt him with a creepy smile? The tipsy dance between Ma and the authorities could have gone anywhere, dangerously so for Ma. But in the end – lacking any widespread revolution across China – it seems the Monkey King’s mythic power had faded.
I bring this up because The Phillips Collections’ Intersections series, which intends to regularly invite contemporary artists to hang their works in odd spots (or activate "experiment stations") in the museum – a walkway, a staircase, a gallery regularly known for other works – has, I think, very quietly returned to a once volatile conversation between modern and postmodern (or post-post modern or whatever) art. It’s an understated conversation that might explain the Monkey King’s iffy dissident status in China and why burgeoning democracies necessarily co-opt myth with kitsch.
Organized by the Phillips’s new modern and contemporary art curator, Vesela Streneovich, the three instillations from Ma, Heuser, and Liotta are distinct and divergent “conversations” with the Phillips’s artworks. Ma’s ten minute Chinese ink-wash animated film - watch it here – is projected in a room adjoining several modernist works; Paul Cezanne’s The Garden at Les Lauves, Arthur Dove’s Me and the Moon, Vassily Kandiinsky’s Autumn II, and one half of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. Liotta’s string and granite sculpture, Icarus – watch her assemble it for the Phillips here – is half-surrounded by Honore Daumier’s The Painter at His Easel, Eugene Delacoix’s Paganini, Chaim Soutine’s Woman in Profile, and Amedeo Modigliani’s Elena Povolzky. While Heuser has created new works inspired by the museums collection of Mark Rothkos. But with the works meant to quietly show beside their installations, visitors are mostly left to decide Intersections' broader context and meaning.
“I have trouble with titles. I don’t like using “untitled.” I want to give you a way to address the piece,” Liotta explained during an Intersections Q&A, flatly dismissing the Greek myth of Icarus as a literal inspiration. “But I don’t want to tell you specifically what you have to think. I don’t want to give you the story.”
Indeed, Liotta also scrubbed the contextual history of the Phillips paintings, recasting them rather as psychological archetypes surrounding Icarus, which to her mind were representations of strength. Delacoix’s Paganini is a mad violinist. Daumier’s painter is following an inspirational “ray of light.” Soutine’s Woman in Profile is an agonized, furious woman, etc.
“I’m interested in humanity,” Liotta said. “I see each painting as a figure. I see each one as a personality.”
Stripping away mythic or academic history frees Liotta’s delicate work from a lot of baggage, certainly, but it also democratizes it for the viewer. In the “postmodern” world, broadly defined – whether in art, American Idol, The Real Wives of New Jersey, or the Internet – the right to decide quality and meaning for oneself is a blessed given. Walter Benjamin’s prescient 1936 essay “Age of Mechanical Reproduction” perhaps explains why. Benjamin saw film, record recordings, and photography as artistic mass mediums that essentially kill the “aura” of fine art and empowers the individual within the masses politically. By 1977, with pop and conceptual art smothering the stringently modernist aesthetics of Clement Greenberg (read about it here), Richard Kazis writing for Jump Cut summed up Benjamin’s thoughts nicely:
A work of art that once could only be seen by the wealthy in a museum or gallery could be reproduced at little cost and made accessible to many more people. The advent of inexpensive illustrated newspapers meant that current events had become the business of the masses. Film allows an event or a performance to be recorded and be available for countless audiences to see. Mechanical reproduction makes possible the involvement of the masses in culture and politics; it makes possible mass culture and mass politics.
. . . Benjamin analyzes how mechanical reproduction destroys the uniqueness and authenticity, the “aura” as he labeled it, of the work of art. The withering of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction is inevitable. And, in many respects, it is a good thing.
Quite obviously, the Mona Lisa reproduced and sold as posters – or co-opted by Andy Warhol, or here by Banksy, (that's his fiesty Mona Lisa above) a British street artist – makes Benjamin’s point. Visiting the Musee de Louvre who hasn’t been at first underwhelmed by Leonardo DiVinci’s modest masterwork after having seen it enlarged and reproduced or parodied so many times. With the Internet’s ascent and its impact on politics, the music industry, and our economy Benjamin’s pre-postmodern thesis should probably now be thought a new cornerstone of Western democratic thinking (or at least a newly dedicated archway).
Interestingly, Benjamin’s “mechanical reproduction” theory was more broadly a Marxist response to Capitalism’s unfettered appetites in the 1920s and, more to point, if I can take you there, really a questioning of who had the right to declare oneself a “Great Sage Equal of Heaven” as the Monkey King dared. That is to say, the right to question who decides the “aura” of art – its quality and authenticity – or who decides who is a God is one in the same thread of thinking isn’t it? As a “democratic” myth, the Monkey King’s populist inspiration was a revolutionary ideal widely disseminated first by the oral tradition, scrolls, then books, in pamphlets from Mao, and now today by the Internet.
So what happened? Why wasn’t Ma’s Monkey King ultimately a threat that Chinese officials needed to squash? Well, it doesn’t help that trendy Chinese clothing lines like Akufuncture have co-opted SunWukong even as his tale, Journey to the West, has been re-imagined in near pornographic terms, turning Sun Wukong into revolutionary product third to only Che Guevera and, yes, Mao Zedong. Exactly as mechanical reproduction destroys the “aura” it also erodes the necessary mythic dialectic that inspires rebellion, which art really can’t do anymore in the light of, say, Damien Hirst’s ridiculous shark in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living being re-pickled for God knows how much. In the attempt to hand art over to the masses, postmodernism eventually destroyed the necessary tether between art and myth’s aura. Sounds awful, I know, but with Intersections I think the Phillips has begun to help repair that dialectic. Indeed as the art world struggles to reconcile modern and postmodern contradictions, the Phillips is perhaps best positioned to refine that conversation with Intersections as the sounding board.
After a second look at Liotta’s work it becomes clear that Icarus – as much as it adheres to postmodern conceits – is fundamentally mythic even without contextual constraint, which is to say it’s refreshing. Meanwhile, Heuser’s abstract “Pulse” paintings are as much a by-product of process – her works were created on “Turkish” paper she made using ancient Ottoman Empire techniques at a Manhattan boutique papermill, as they were a natural progression from her early expressionist days.
The Washington Times, November 29, 2009.
"Barbara Liotta conceived her installation "Icarus" (pictured) as
representing "the strong will to rise and soar," rather than a literal
portrait of the Greek mythological figure. She drew inspiration
from five character studies, including Eugene Delacroix's 1831
"Paganini," whose violin strings are recalled in the cords of her
installation."
James Fallows, blogging for The Atlantic, November 8, 2009.
Phillips Collection: This very elegant small museum/gallery near DuPont Circle in Washington now has has a display by the sculptor and artist Barbara Liotta (a close friend of my wife's). This brief clip she shows how she installed her piece "Icarus" at the Phillips. This is interesting to me in showing the combination of elementary manual skills -- like tying knots around the small stones she is suspending -- with an original vision of how strings and stones can create a powerful 3-D structure. She has another gallery show in Washington here.
The Washington Post, Thursday October 22, 2009.
"Strung Up: Hanging shattered rock with wire, Barbara Liotta's sculptures mix graceful civility with raw naturalism and are on display..."
Blake Gopnik's Picks, The Washington Post, Sunday October 18th, 2009.
"Local artist Barbara Liotta will also pair one of her large sculptures with works by Delacroix and Modigliani."
Lavanya Ramanthan of The Washington Post calls "Icarus 1" a "stunning centerpiece." February 1, 2008.
Claire Huschle, Sculpture Magazine, July/August 2008.
Katzen Arts Center, American University Museum
"Barbara Josephs Liotta's Terrace Descent examined the shared vocabulary of sculpture and architecture. Over a corner facing the stairs, Liotta used cord to suspend chucks of black marble and granite from a series of parallel metal rods. As the rods receded into the corner, the marble and granite pieces likewise seemed to recede, resulting in and inverted "marble staircase." Liotta's work removed all sense of functionality. Liotta called up notions of quarries and earth movers. But Liotta's work also exploited the architecture of the space by incorporating motion. As the wind swept down the stairs, Terrace Descent shifted and twisted, despite its apparent weight. The work combined the kinetic experience of sculpture with the environmental experience of the space itself."
Ferdinand Protzman, The Washington Post, April 6, 2000.
Art That Rocks
"Liotta's minimalist sculptures are made from rocks she finds in riverbeds or on the seashore and then binds with cords or chains.
There is something strange, severe and dynamic about these stones in bondage. That power derives from the tension between the materials and the use to which Liotta puts them. The stones are inherently beautiful, shaped and smoothed since time immemorial by the forces of nature. But those qualities take on different meanings when the stones are placed in tightly controlled context as part of an artwork. Instead of nature as a free-flowing force, it becomes captive, forced to play a role in art.
Seeing a cluster of rocks bound with black cord and hanging in midair, suspended from a chrome chain, calls to mind all manner of images. Up close, it looks like a riverbed, hovering above ground. From a distance, the same piece can seem ominous, like a person dangling in the air, or utterly benign, like a weird Stone Age wind chime.
Those associations vary from one work to the next, depending on the shape, size, color and type of the stones, such as slate or granite, and the way Liotta employs them. But all of them have a psychological presence. Its an impressive body of work."
Crothers Quarterly, Winter 2000.
Barbara Liotta - "Stoneworks"
Liotta's work is best classified as post-minimalist abstraction. She pares away extraneous embellishment and creates sculptures, drawings, and installations that transform but do not emasculate their often-difficult materials. She is interested in the traditional visual challenges of line, shape, color, and form, and her work plays back and forth across the divide between two and three dimensions. Concerned with essential aesthetic values, she strives to make art that is both beautiful and powerful.
