My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation at Brooklyn Museum of Art

My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation

Brooklyn Museum of Art 

July 28 – October 7, 2001

Synergies between Japanese and American popular culture are explored in the exhibition My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation, on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The exhibition showcases some forty works by eighteen artists who investigate the influence of Japanese animation and techno-culture on art today. The show features photography, paintings, sculpture, and video’s whose visual characteristics and themes resemble those found in Japanese animation (anime) and comic books (manga) whose sources lie in forms of Western entertainment such as animated films produced by Disney and Warner Brothers. This style is distinguished by its ultra-cute appearance and sci-fi settings replete with robots, aliens, and space vessels. 

My Reality features creations by established Asian artists such as Takashi Murakami, Mariko Mori, Mr. (Masakatsu Iwamoto), and Kenji Yanobe. Work by Westerners such as Paul McCarthy, Tom Sachs, Charlie White and Richard Patterson is also included in the exhibition with items that reflect aesthetic themes of their Japanese counterparts and address similar issues of altered realities, consumerism, fantasy and techno-savvy.

Concepts of entertainment, escapism, and futuristic technology are often the focus of anime artists. Anime is incredibly versatile in its ability to comment on social and sexual mores, gender roles, and traditional values in the face of an increasingly alien future. 

The clean, colorful look of anime that has become familiar to us through such international phenomena as Pokemon and Hello Kitty is in stark contrast to the grimly apocalyptic anime and manga exemplified by such cartoons as “X”, which betrays a sense of apprehension about a future filled with technology and more change than we can be comfortable with.

Kenji Yanobe’s atomic cars, visually a cross between a robot and a Volkswagen Beetle, confront the feasible reality of a nuclear holocaust. The boldly colored, prophetic auto surfaces display a multitude of flashing lights and the radiation measurement devices necessary in a nuclear war ravaged world. 

Takashi Murakami’s sculpture’s, paintings, and drawings - and those of many of his peers - pay homage to Pop artist Andy Warhol. In Murakami’s case, his working methods are similar. Like Warhol’s Factory, Murakami’s “Hiropon Factory” creates artwork, toys, T-shirts, and publications via teamwork. This process of joint creation also bears similarities to the commercial animation process.

Masakatsu Iwamoto (a.k.a. Mr.), a young member of the Hiropon Factory, has works of his own in the show that explore gender, cultural colonialism, and Japanese absorption. His comic-style images have in many ways grown and developed out of older Asian art forms that often portray female subjects. 

Mariko Mori, a fashion model turned photographer and performance artist, presented the critically acclaimed solo show Mariko Mori: Empty Dream at the BMA in the spring of 1999. Here she is represented by a recent work that examines the female image and popular culture, Japanese traditions, and high technology in her signature style.

Images of “cuteness” and sexual perversity are often compounded in anime. Los Angeles based artist, Paul McCarthy, is well-known for similar sensibility in his works. McCarthy examines mass media and consumerism in pieces filled with debasement and anxiety. The source material for his contribution to My Reality is the 1937 Disney classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. According to many creators of anime, Walt Disney has been a considerable aesthetic and contextual influence. 

A conception of entertainment, escapism, and futuristic technology is often the focus of anime and now a launching point for contemporary Eastern and Western artists. The exhibition itself offers various perspectives of the “reality” offered in the vision new world community. Globalization and technology both contribute to this continually evolving image. This exhibition gives museum goers a chance to see the latest developments in Japanese art, ponder its sources, and witness its impact both here and in Japan. That a movement in high art could develop from cartoons is itself astonishing. That the art can be colorful, whimsical, terrifying, and similar in meaning in such different milieus is its own work of art.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art is the first stop on a national tour coordinated by Independent Curators International (ICI). Originally curated by Jeff Fleming, Senior Curator, and Susan Lubowsky Talbott Director of the Des Moines Art Center. The exhibition is coordinated at the Brooklyn Museum of Art by Charlotta Kotik, Curator of Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture. 

BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY

www.brooklynart.org

Leon Golub: Paintings, 1950–2000, Brooklyn Museum of Art - Retrospective Exhibition + Catalogue by Jon Bird

Leon Golub: Paintings, 1950–2000

Brooklyn Museum of Art

May 18 - August 19, 2001

Leon Golub: Paintings, 1950–2000, an exhibition of some thirty-five works depicting the effects of individual and institutional power, is presented at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the final venue of an international tour. These expressive political paintings, many of which are mural-sized, explore issues of race, violence, war, and human suffering.

Leon Golub, who has always painted in a unique figural style, draws upon diverse representations of the body from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, to photographs of athletic competitions, to gay pornography; often pulled directly from a huge database he has assembled of journalistic images from the mass media. He has likened his painting process to sculptural technique and employs a method of layering and scraping away paint, sometimes using a meat cleaver, leaving varying amounts of canvas untouched.

Born in Chicago in 1922, Leon Golub received his B.A. in Art History from the University of Chicago in 1942. From 1947 to 1949 he studied, under the G.I. Bill, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met the artist Nancy Spero, to whom he has been married for nearly fifty years. In Chicago he became involved with other painters, known as the Monster Rostergroup, who believed that an observable connection to the external world and to actual events was essential if a painting was to have any relevance to the viewer or society. This is a view that has informed Leon Golub’s work throughout his career.

Included in the exhibition are works from the 1950s that are based on a single totemic figure and were intended to portray the post-war sensibility and systems of power and conflict. These figures refer to classical mythology and portray kings, warriors, and shamans, as well as hybrid man-and-beast monsters, among them The Bug (War Machine) (1953); Prince Sphinx (1955); and Birth III (1956); a part of a series inspired by Leon Golub’s becoming a father. An extended trip to Italy in 1956 deepened his interest in Roman and Etruscan art and influenced works such as Fallen Warrior (Burnt Man) (1959) and Gigantomachy II (1966), which reference the warriors of classical art.

From 1959 through 1964 Leon Golub and his family lived in Paris, a move occasioned in part by the belief that Europe would be more receptive to his figural style. During this period Leon Golub’s work increased in size because of larger available studio space and the inspiration of the French tradition of large-scale history painting. He also switched from using lacquer to acrylics, turned leaving more of the surface unpainted, and began to grind the paint directly into the canvas.

When Leon Golub returned to New York, the Vietnam War was escalating, and he responded with his two series: Napalm and Vietnam, which are represented in the exhibition by Napalm I (1969), which marks a transition in the artist’s work from generic to specific social issues, and the wall-sized Vietnam II (1973), which depicts the bodies of civilians under attack.

In the mid-seventies Leon Golub was beset with self-doubt. He destroyed nearly every work he produced during this period and nearly abandoned painting. In the late seventies, however, he produced more than a hundred portraits of public figures, among them political leaders, dictators, and religious figures. Leon Golub: Paintings 1950–2000 includes several portraits of Nelson Rockefeller and Ho Chi Minh, along with images of Fidel Castro, Francisco Franco, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger.

In the 1980s Leon Golub turned his attention to terrorism in a variety of forms, from the subversive operations of governments to urban street violence. Killing fields, torture chambers, bars, and brothels became inspiration and subject for work that dealt with such themes as violent aggression, racial inequality, gender ambiguity, oppression, and exclusion. Among the work produced in this period are the series Mercenaries, Interrogation, Riot, and Horsing Around, examples of which are included in the exhibition. Horsing Around III (1983) and Two Black Women and A White Man (1986), containing images that resonate with racial and sexual tension, have broad cultural and psychological meanings.

From the nineties to the present, Leon Golub’s work has shifted toward the illusionistic, with forms now semi-visible, and appropriating graphic styles from ancient carvings, medieval manuscripts, and contemporary graffiti. As an older person now considering mortality, he has moved towards themes of separation, loss, and death. Text appears in many of the paintings and is combined with a series of symbolic references, including dogs, lions, skulls, and skeletons.

Leon Golub’s work has been seen in solo exhibitions throughout the world, among them World Wide (1991), a Grand Lobby project at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. For World Wide the artist created a process, repeated in exhibitions at several other museums, by which he enlarged images and details from his paintings and screened them on transparent sheets of vinyl, hung so that they surround the viewer. He has also been represented in many group exhibitions and was one of the few white artists included in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Artat the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994.

Leon Golub: Paintings 1950–2000 was organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where it was curated by Jon Bird. The presentation of this exhibition at the BMA has been organized by Associate Curator, Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Department of Contemporary Art . 

Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real

Text by Jon Bird

Published by Reaktion Books, August 2000

210 x 275 mm, 224 pages, 148 illustrations, 113 in full colour

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, by Jon Bird, published by Reaktion Books. Jon Bird is Professor of Art and Critical Theory at Middlesex University and a tutor in the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie, Maastricht.

Publisher presentation: "Now in his late 70s, Leon Golub is a leading exponent of history painting – painting as a narrative, symbolic expression of global, social and political relations and of the realities of power. In this book, published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition travelling to Ireland, England and the United States, Jon Bird examines the artist's work from the classically influenced early paintings through depictions of conflict and masculine aggression to compelling images of the last two decades. Despite the widespread critical attention his work has received, the range and extent of his practice and its complex interweaving of the iconographic traditions of both high and popular art have not been properly examined. As a history painter, Golub is acutely aware of the antecedents to his own imagery and symbolism; part of Jon Bird's critical project is to track and define the artist's relationship to modernism. Making a case for Golub's practice of 'critical realism' that also takes account of the unconscious, Bird focuses on two themes that dominate Golub's work: how his art figures the body as a sign for social and psychic identity, and what might be termed the symbolic expression of social space."

BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY

www.brooklynart.org

Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966 - Retrospective Exhibition

Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

June 19 - October 3, 1999 

The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH 

November 6, 1999 - January 23 

Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY

February 19 - April 30, 2000 

Brooklyn Museum of Art

May 26 - August 6, 2000 

Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966 is the first major critical retrospective devoted to one of the most popular artists of this century. Comprising over 100 paintings, drawings, prints, models, photographs, and ephemera, the exhibition is organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and The American Federation of Arts.

Sylvia Yount, Chief Curator, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, arranged the exhibition chronologically, highlighting the various phases of MaxParrish's prolific 70-year career, to examine the artist's reputation among colleagues, critics, and the public, within the context of American culture. The exhibition considers Parrish's historical importance, his enduring influence, and provides a critical reappraisal of the artist's work after his death.

Frederick Maxfield Parrish was born into Philadelphia's Quaker elite and encouraged from childhood to develop his talent by his father, Stephen (1848-1938), an acclaimed etcher and landscape painter. A student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1892 to 1894, Parrish came of age during a time when there was a flowering of artistic practices, including painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts as well as decorative arts, architecture, and landscape design. In her essay in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Dr. Yount writes, "Encompassing both the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements, this phenomenon [the so-called American Renaissance] challenged traditional artistic hierarchies of fine and applied arts, reconsidered the relationship between amateur and professional, and prompted a great deal of experimentation and collaboration in the art world. That Parrish's expansive artistic sensibility found expression in all these forms throughout his career marks him as an exemplary product of his age."

Designing magazine covers and posters, he illustrated books by L. Frank Baum and Kenneth Grahame, and a cover for a book by Edith Wharton. Iconic works, such as Princess Parizade Bringing Home the Singing Tree (1906), reveal his remarkable narrative skills and craftsmanship. School Days (Alphabet) (1909) and The Idiot (1910), commissioned by Collier's magazine, showcase his ingenious manipulation of formal layering and optical effects.

His lifelong interest in architecture, the decorative arts, and the theater informed his art. Although he frequently worked with amateur groups creating backdrops and set designs, his last known involvement with professional theater was a production of Snow White, for which he created the free-standing Gnome (c. 1916).

The 1920s witnessed an explosion of popular culture, from comic strips to jazz, and an accord between "low" and "high" art forms. This was a period of artistic experimentation in which Parrish achieved great success with his dream worlds and fantastical images of exotic and erotic innocence, typified by Interlude (The Lute Players) (1922). In 1925, three of his best-known paintings, including Daybreak (1922), sold for ten thousand dollars each, setting a record at the time for a living American artist.

Maxfield Parrish's fame continued to advance as his color reproductions were mass-produced and broadly circulated. He saw himself as a "public" artist and worked diligently to democratize art. Soon, his girls on rocks bathed in golden light, breathtaking landscapes, and images of youthful abandon were ubiquitous in American households. In 1936, Time magazine commented on his extraordinary public recognition with the report, "as far as the sale of expensive color reproductions is concerned, the three most popular artists in the world are van Gogh, Cézanne, and Maxfield Parrish."

From the 1930s and 1940s and until his death, his sole interest was in landscape painting, his first love. (His last figurative composition was a caricature of himself, Jack Frost, in 1936.) He focused on two distinctive regions associated with national authenticity, New England and the Southwest, to create a visual definition of American quintessence and a pairing of the Old World with the New.

Maxfield Parrish's posthumous revival occurred during the decade of Pop Art and the current postmodern period. According Dr. Yount, Parrish endures as "a Peter Pan figure in the art world–captivating the 'young at heart' of all ages."

PUBLICATION - In conjunction with the exhibition, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. published Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966. This richly illustrated catalogue addresses the artist's place in the history of American art and culture, challenging the artistic boundaries of "high" and "low" art. Dr. Yount's lead essay examines the enormous popularity of Parrish's work during his lifetime and today. Mark F. Bockrath, Paintings Conservator, the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, discusses the working methods and techniques used by the artist. 160 pages, 9 x 12", 81 color illustrations.

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF ARTS

41 East 65th Street, New York, NY 10021

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