Political stripping – ARTnews.com

The very name “Carnegie International” practically poses for institutional criticism of postcolonialism, because it bears the name of billionaire immigrant Andrew Carnegie, who in many ways embodies the American dream. And this critique is exactly what the Filipino artist Pew Abad gave for the 58th edition. Above the entrance, the artist engraved the phrase Americans cannot grow there. It’s easy to miss the intervention, because the same font is used for the names of the donors throughout the building, so you might not bother reading it, just as you might not bother wondering who funds any particular foundation. This quote comes from a letter written by Carnegie in 1898, offering the Philippines’ purchase of its independence from the United States government. He proposed $20 million—the exact amount the United States paid Spain earlier that year under the Treaty of Paris. Carnegie argued that the colony, as it were, was hardly worth the cost it took to operate the thing. He was a staunch republican and anti-imperialist, who preferred to improve the world through capital investment rather than government control, eventually ceding nearly 90 percent of his fortune.

In 124 years, the United States has interfered with the welfare of many other nations, and it has become clear that the Carnegie model cannot be easily replicated – all the hard work and education in the world are not enough to make most immigrants benevolent. billionaires. In the show, artists from outside the West respond to the myth of the American Dream forged by Carnegie and other businessmen and politicians, as well as the attendant damages.

Abad is one of the many works on show dealing with American imperialism. And the exhibit, titled “Is It Time For You Yet?” gathers. , works produced after 1945, the year marking the end of World War II and the rise of the United States as a world power. It is also the year that many art historians take as a sign of a break with modernity. Most of the other works in the show have sharp but subtle messages, like Abad’s. Throughout the show, curator Sohrab Mohebi focuses heavily on works of political abstraction, in an apparent continuation of “Searching the Sky for Rain,” a 2019 show he co-hosted at SculptureCenter in New York with Kyle Dancewicz.

Several works show how abstraction becomes a strategy for conveying messages or showing solidarity in the face of censorship. forbidden colors, a 1988 work by Félix Gonzalez Torres, consisting of four panels of the same size installed side by side; In red, green, black and white, it evokes the Palestinian flag but does not illustrate it. The history of the work dates back to a time when the Israeli occupation prohibited the raising of the flag in the area. As one wanders around the gallery, one wonders how many of these messages remain unknown or unintelligible, missing in translation across cultures, or only meaningful to a small audience.

The show also investigates the relationship between abstraction defined as non-representational imagery – which has a long and rich history outside the West – versus the transcendental genre of painting, in which European modernists and American post-war artists dominate the law. The latter, of course, is largely derived from the former. Melika Kara’s paintings use fast lines to simulate the motifs and weaving techniques used in Kurdish textiles, techniques that changed as the stateless group endured forced migration. Translated from one medium to another, the designs counteract the distinctions between vernacular art and high art, a drawing often used to reject contributions from non-Western cultures.

In Anh Trần’s large, unstretched paintings, the Vietnamese artist confronts the history of American Abstract Expressionism. The English titles of her paintings with colorful accents and emoji fonts often contain the word “love” – ​​a concept that, as I noted in a catalog interview, doesn’t translate well into Vietnamese, which has different words for romantic love, family love, etc. , also expresses concern about pressure in art school to venerate traditional Ab-Ex painters, given that the movement was used by the CIA to promote American cultural imperialism at the same time that the United States was waging war against the country.

Works such as Tran’s, as Mohebi put it in context, challenge the idea that art may speak to some sweeping “human condition”. In the mural of his 2019 show, he questioned who is seen as having the right to talk about such a thing, and whether this covering up of difference is desirable at all. Now, at Carnegie, the selected works of Korean artists Yoon Yang and Meir Lee—which appear close to each other—evoke ill feelings in both a related and culturally related moral. In Yang’s series of paintings, close-ups of the eye, palms, and moon – among the few representative works in the exhibition – are presented in checkered dark colors that give them almost David Linchian’s aura. Lee’s melting robotic peach sculpture evokes human carnage in a way that is disgusting, frightening, beautiful and delicate at the same time. In the catalog, the two artists talk with writer Yeonsook “Rita” Lee about Han, a Korean word that roughly translates to sadness and resentment. It is a feeling that is said to be part of Korean identity, for some, a natural effect of colonialism.

Elsewhere, works assume familiar abstract forms from art history, but wall posters and catalog texts reveal themes that are not represented representatively—political messages are often present but blurred. Text on the wall explains that a striking copper plaque by Syilx Nation’s Krista Bell Stewart that welcomes visitors into the museum’s lobby is made from a pigment she developed using soil from her recently acquired land in Ottawa. In the catalog, she addresses what “ownership” of private land means for an Aboriginal person living in a reservation still owned by the British Crown, and whether ownership is desirable at all. On the second level of the museum’s large atrium, Tho Van Tran, originally from Vietnam and now based in Paris, painted frescoes very similar to Monet’s. water lilies, but with orange streaks disrupting the calm atmosphere. Tran has painted the museum’s walls in the colors the US government used to code the herbicides that were used as weapons in Vietnam – Agent Orange is the best known, others include white, pink, green, blue, and purple.

It was refreshing and moving to see a work that took seriously the pressing issues of our time and was also thoughtful about the purpose, limits, performances, forms, and history of art. The art lover’s argument—about the politics of abstraction and the enormous influence of American culture on art around the world—was one of the clearest, clearest, and most historical arguments I’ve seen in a long time. But is it the argument we need now? It follows in particular in the wake of Documenta, a show that, through its distributed organizational style and focus on sharing resources rather than artistic elements, exposed the frictions inherent in importing worldviews into Western frameworks such as “fine arts” and “museum.” Curated by the Jakarta-based Ruangrupa Art Collection, the quintet has tacitly argued that the only real way to decolonize the museum is to demolish it, bring everything back home, and redistribute wealth. Just months later, Carnegie International brought artists to grapple with those frictions and contradictions in their work, and confront the history of imperialism that gave rise to their emergence. I agree with Ruangrupa’s position, however I have benefited greatly from watching a lover’s show, which above all makes a case for artists: their ability to help us deal with the past and imagine the future, how governments and institutions are often the biggest obstacles, and their tenacity to adapt despite opposition.