A Note on El Anatsui

This morning on Modern Art Notes, I read the post on El Anatsui, and in response, I would argue that Barbara Pollack’s quoted line (although misusing the word “African” – Anatsui was born in Ghana but lives and works in Nigeria, he seems specifically Nigerian, and it is wrong to use African as a blanket term) is at least on to something. Culturally specific creative resourcefulness is indeed found in certain Sub-Saharan African countries (Nigeria included), a resourcefulness that exists in a different way than it existed for Robert Rauschenberg as a Texan, George Herms in L.A. , or Arman in France.

I never felt like Rauschenberg, Herms, and Arman’s trash and resourcefulness were very culturally specific – in other words, Rauschenberg’s trash does not tell a cultural story, it seems no more Texan than Herms seems Angeleno. Anatsui’s work seems specifically Nigerian to me, and I say this not from just the allusions to Kente cloth or the reference to the colonial sale of liquor (though both contribute greatly to the work's cultural specificity). I say this because of the works' economy and its elegance in execution – it is not Rauschenberg striving to reinvent seeing by looking at neglected overlooked objects or Herms' use of rubbish to alter our experiential surroundings. Anatsui’s trash earnestly wants to be an elegant art object the same way that for example, Kenyans use bits of wood to create refined sitting stools. It is an aesthetic that recalls folk art practices where people have very little, but do what they can with it.

In parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, you constantly see personal journeys towards a conception of “refinement” that people may get from the east, west, or elsewhere – people write Nike on their tee-shirts, traditional bands cover Kenny Rogers songs (weird, I know, but true), small huts with television sets call themselves theaters. I guess the question I’m asking is that if these phenomena are not “creativity at the heart of resourcefulness” and are not culturally specific, how would one talk about them?

Nathan Mabry

Nathan Mabry
Cherry and Martin

Through April 5th, 2008

I am almost certain that I am going to over-think Nathan Mabry’s work. I want to warn the reader of this at the outset. Elements of his work, for example his whimsical titles or his masked Maillol sculptures, definitely make me feel on the outside of a joke of I don’t understand. There is something wanton and ugly about those Mabry’s masks, as if they came out of the window of a Hollywood souvenir shop, as if Todd McFarland was running around defacing art. However with that said, Mabry’s work is far from a series of one-liners, and the more I reflected upon it, the more serious it became. Of all the sculptors in the Hammer's 2005 Thing exhibition, I am probably most interested in Mabry.

Mabry mixes artistic styles across historical divides and ideological incongruities. For instance, he can place Pre-Columbian statuary atop Minimalist sculpture by Sol Lewit, Tony Smith, or Donald Judd. He prints out patterns you might find in either high minded abstract paintings or on mustard stained adolescent tee-shirts as c-print photographs. Also, he masked Rodin’s Thinker, which he bought on the internet, with a face slightly reminiscent of Jar Jar Binx, unifying two clashing counterpoints in smooth black matte patina. The sculptures move between design, furniture, sculpture, and historic artifact efficiently and cleanly, all the “whys” of the work easing into the beauty of the “what” of the work. They are beautiful objects.

I am tempted, however, to go a little deeper into Mabry’s historical hodgepodge. For instance, how might one regard a doubled votive or fetish African sculpture leaning atop a bronze version of a John McCracken? Besides the obvious “finish fetish” pun, are we allowed to let out mind wander across history and through lost civilizations, through the inevitable losses and modifications of meaning, until we arrive in the present? Perhaps we should think of Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void, Invisible Object, 1934, a piece that is close in sensibility to the Mabry and a work that seemed for its time everywhere at once, at the same time thousands of years old, new, and thirty years in the future.

When you try to go past the beauty of Mabry’s objects, you find a contemporary discourse on the shifting nature of meaning and ideology, but Mabry presents this discourse in a dead pan fashion. Take his Pre-Columbian Judd, which he coyly titles, It Is What It Is (The Old In and Out), 2008. With the Pre-Columbian figures, you have religious figures from an ancient civilization, but more importantly figures that have lost their ritualistic function and purpose over time. They are now artifacts for the tourist and art student in a museum, but they still contain the memory of what they were and what they meant.

The Judd, on the other hand, is not a religious object though some may argue it a spiritual one in its own right. Instead of praising the unseen or divine, Judd praised the objective and things that could be verified in experience – you could say he valued immanence over transcendence if you wanted to get all philosophical on the matter. Certain aspects of Minimalism once had the rhetorical weight of religion – its pronouncements perhaps as final as a pre-Columbian ritual. In the Mabry, the Pre-Columbian and the Judd sit cozily together, one atop the other like an indoor furniture version of a totem pole.

So what are these Mabrys then? Are they deeply cynical, laughing like a nihilist at a dinner party? My answer currently is no, although I do think they are laughing in some sense. They are certainly fun and fun to think about. Is Mabry just wandering the expanded field or does he really have his hand on the pulse of something? Well, these things I currently don’t know.

Jim Welling

Jim Welling
Regen Projects
Through April 5, 2008

Jim Welling’s career spans several decades and during this time, he saw photography move from an underappreciated secondary art form to a theoretical sparring partner for painting and sculpture. He then saw photography’s subsequent demotion to an informational bullet point in conceptual projects and the subject of photography (that thing or scene in the world) reduced to a shaky falsehood used for political gain. After, there was the rise of digital imaging, new printing techniques, face mounts, and engineered framing systems. Now the digital methods leave many cold, and many young artists seek a higher purpose for photography. For that, they turn to history, all those crazy photographic inventors of the 19th century and Jim Welling who, through it all, has ceaselessly experimented and practiced a photography independent both its journalistic and critical uses. He has played with photography, confident that its quality as an object makes it worthy enough of interest and exciting enough to be consistently groundbreaking.


At Regen Projects this month, in anticipation of Welling’s upcoming inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, we see three bodies of his work. First, we have a series of drapes photographed by Welling many years ago and now saturated in monochromatic colors. There is a series of close-ups featuring barely recognizable netting performing the formal role of musculature in sculpture, and finally, there are Welling’s famous sun-stroked flowers, existing on the threshold of being visible. All of these projects could be called abstract photography, a method now gaining popularity through the works both Welling’s students and others around the world.


Loosely put, Abstract photography uses the “stuff” of the photographic process whether it is film, chemicals, light, and the mechanisms of camera itself as a stepping off point for experimentation. An artist may overexpose a photograph for a conceptual purpose. They may directly expose photographic paper to light to create abstract images. Some soil or deface film with dirt or even knives to highlight that a physical intervention has occurred. Ultimately, all of these photographers view a photograph at any stage of its process as an object to be used, defaced, or beautified. In the works of artists like Amy Granat and Jennifer West, these strategies extend to film.

Welling’s particular program not only uses the physical process of photography as a point of intervention, he also uses unconventional cropping, super-close ups, repetition of the same image over and over, and variety of other techniques that leave his photographs feeling if not like anything else, unquestionably a work of art. Welling has described his works in physical terms, saying that he wants “to control it, to organize and massage what I see and put it on a piece of paper.” He also adds that he like to make a photograph “his own.” This is a far cry from photographers that are not involved in the printing process, that transmit a snap shot or an organized scene to a negative and upon printing, accept or reject the final product.

It's not that conventional photographs are in anyway wrong. I reject the idea that journalistic or documentary photography (photos looking to reveal something essential about a subject) is irrelevant or is necessarily a dramatic part of an arching political agenda. Sometimes, as with the Abu Ghraib incident or with Roger Clemens’ steroid case, photographs can be of vast importance politically and socially, but most of the time, photographers settle for doing their best just make people slow down to actually notice and think about what they are looking at. Welling is great at doing this, great in delaying our ultimate judgment about what a photograph is or is of, facilitating the self-conscious mechanism of looking. If this makes people better, which should an artist’s idealistic hope, we receive an added bonus.