60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Yi-Ping Hou, Sylvia Krüger, and Charlotte Lohr

photo © Nils_Klinger

The following was announced on the windows of a small blue house at dOCUMENTA (13), the summer 2012 installment of the international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany: The “60 wrd/min art critic” is available. Reviews are free of charge, and are written here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. Lori Waxman will spend 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writing a 200-word review. Thoughtful responses are guaranteed. Completed reviews will be published in the Hessische/NiedersächsischeAllgemeine (HNA) weekly, and will remain on view here throughout dOCUMENTA (13).

Lori Waxman is an art critic and historian who lives in Chicago. For d13 she decamped to Kassel for three-and-a-half months, together with her husband Michael Rakowitz, an artist also included in the exhibition, and their daughter Renée, who at the time was two-and-a-half years old. Lori wrote a total of 241 reviews during the course of the project. A few of them were for artists whose work revealed their existence as parents; some were even for children.   

A book of the entire project was published by Onestar Press, with an afterword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13). It can be purchased in print or downloaded as a free PDF.  Cultural ReProducers is pleased to share a series of reviews excerpted from the project, which recognizes children and parents as relevant participants in cultural dialogue.

Yi-Ping Hou

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Yi-Ping Hou
 Yi-Ping Hou and I have been sipping oolong tea for 20 minutes, as part of an artwork she calls “Serve Tea.” Her set is delicate and she uses it with sureness. Her three-year-old son Jasper flits around, wondering if it’s time to pour yet, time to paint. Are young children compatible with “tea,” a centuries-old practice meant to take the participants out of the space and time of quotidian circumstances? We discuss this and decide they are not. This feels painful but true. Is the self-conscious nature imposed by my open, public performance space compatible with “tea,” a ritual whose mastery involves slowing down and relaxing into intimate, subtle communion? We discuss this and decide it is not either. Finally, we take the wet, open tea leaves, scatter them on thick white paper, and together with Jasper’s help, ink them down in black and a bit of red. (Hou took up printmaking when her pregnancy forced her to stop using oil paint.) Would one of the Japanese masters Okakura writes about in “The Book of Tea” recognize or even appreciate our interaction? If he was a true master, then yes, if only for the deep honesty, flexibility and generosity that Yi-Ping Hou’s “Serve Tea” brought out in us all.

—Lori Waxman 9/12/12 4:06 PM

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Sylvia Krüger

Sylvia Krüger
The compatibility of motherhood and art making is not a given, but it is excruciatingly important to raise as a possibility. Sylvia Krüger, a weaver and the mother of a boy who will turn three next week, is currently working out her own answers to its complicated questions. This feels like more of a necessity than a choice, as it similarly was for feminist artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mary Kelly beginning in the 1970s. Krüger, like her predecessors, works with and in her domestic and quotidian environment: she shreds and re-weaves used dishtowels; embroiders nighttime musings into her pillow (when finally there is enough quiet to think adult thoughts); builds the image of a house as a kind of feminist portraiture; spins yarn on a record-player bobbin, marking the constant passage of time; carves found sticks into hundreds of spools; and even fashions conventional, fairy-tale like tapestries. It is not easy to raise a child, and it is even more difficult to do this while making art; Krüger reveals these tensions with great honesty when she cuts up an unsettlingly chaotic tapestry, allows the record player to spin endlessly, and leaves the angry wood chips of her whittling spread across the floor, with three kitchen knives nearby. Redemption comes when these gestures and materials join together to form works of art.

—Lori Waxman 9/15/12 2:09 PM

Charlotte Lohr

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Charlotte Lohr
Charlotte Lohr is six years old. She has made her first canvas, and it is a picture of a red bird. The bird stands dead center in the middle of a large white expanse, filling it with its round body, pointy beak, tail feathers, two feet and one eye. A phrase runs along the top of the chick’s head. From this description, you might imagine a sweet blob of red paint and some cheery ditty, all squashed onto a wee canvas. You would be wrong. Lohr paints her 90 cm square composition with a bold, thoughtful line, and her sense of restraint appeals. The bird isn’t colored in, and its schematic form feels original and cheeky. The caption, meanwhile, is not only stamped on in a nifty font, it’s an impudent play on one of the most annoying of sayings: The early bird catches the worm. Instead, Lohr wrote: I don’t give a shit about the early bird. This is surprising coming from a six year old, but also not. Children absorb and question everything in their environment, and the alternative maxim hangs in the Lohr family kitchen. So Lohr junior decided to interpret it and picture it. What’s so novel is the witty minimalism of her illustration, a style any grown-up would be hard-pressed to follow.

—Lori Waxman 8/25/12 2:00 PM

Also in this series:
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Walter Peter and Anna Yema Ditzel
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Julie Bernattz and Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira

60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Walter Peter and Anna Yema Ditzel

photo © Nils_Klinger

The following was announced on the windows of a small blue house at
dOCUMENTA (13), the summer 2012 installment of the international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany: The “60 wrd/min art critic” is available. Reviews are free of charge, and are written here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. Lori Waxman will spend 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writing a 200-word review. Thoughtful responses are guaranteed. Completed reviews will be published in the Hessische/NiedersächsischeAllgemeine (HNA) weekly, and will remain on view here throughout dOCUMENTA (13).

Lori Waxman is an art critic and historian who lives in Chicago. For d13 she decamped to Kassel for three-and-a-half months, together with her husband Michael Rakowitz, an artist also included in the exhibition, and their daughter Renée, who at the time was two-and-a-half years old. Lori wrote a total of 241 reviews during the course of the project. A few of them were for artists whose work revealed their existence as parents; some were even for children.   

A book of the entire project was published by Onestar Press, with an afterword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13). It can be purchased in print or downloaded as a free PDF.  Over the next few weeks Cultural ReProducers will share a series of reviews excerpted from the project, which recognizes children and parents as relevant participants in cultural dialogue.

Walter Peter

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Walter Peter
Children live in another, parallel universe that sometimes overlaps but mostly conflicts with the adult world. In a series of large colorful paintings and high contrast pencil drawings made using digitally altered photographs of his two young daughters, Walter Peter envisions this realm of endless curiosity, rampant play and unmetered time. On this planet, when balls are dropped and roll, cause and effect is learned. When swings go higher and higher, excitement and risk are tested. How does this work? What does that do? How does it feel, taste, smell? The world is fascinating to children, and children are fascinating to adults. That’s partly why we have them. But children are also mischievous and careless. Any honest parent knows this, though few admit it. Peter does, in drawings whose unforgivingly dark pencils and blown-out details sketch the edge between children having fun and children being impish trolls.

—Lori Waxman 8/15/12 2:47 PM

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Anna Yema Ditzel
I love rainbows. Who doesn’t? But most of us, myself included, would be too unsentimental, or too afraid of appearing sentimental, or naïve, or guileless, to actually paint a picture of

Anna Yema Ditzel

one. For this, as for many other images and acts of the simplest joy and beauty, we need a child. And here we have one: Anna Yema Ditzel, age five, who loves to paint not just the large canvas she presents here but also playthings, tables and walls. Apart from the general loveliness of rainbows, which Ditzel certainly captures, and the accompanying pleasantness of a big green field and a bright blue sky dappled with plump white clouds, what distinguishes her painting from other similar representations is three-fold. Ditzel gives the rainbow in question more than the usual number of colors and arranges them in a novel order. She portrays the sun with not just yellow rays but also green ones. Finally, she signs her name without any restraint, using half the hues on her palette to write the letters A-N-N-A out twice, tall and energetic, as if they were horses running free across the grassy field of her imagination.

—Lori Waxman 9/15/12 3:15 PM

Also in this series: 
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Yi-Ping Hou, Sylvia Krüger, and Charlotte Lohr
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Julie Bernattz and Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira

60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Julie Bernattz and Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira

photo © Nils_Klinger

The following was announced on the windows of a small blue house at dOCUMENTA (13), the summer 2012 installment of the international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany: The “60 wrd/min art critic” is available. Reviews are free of charge, and are written here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. Lori Waxman will spend 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writing a 200-word review. Thoughtful responses are guaranteed. Completed reviews will be published in the Hessische/NiedersächsischeAllgemeine (HNA) weekly, and will remain on view here throughout dOCUMENTA (13).

Lori Waxman is an art critic and historian who lives in Chicago. For d13 she decamped to Kassel for three-and-a-half months, together with her husband Michael Rakowitz, an artist also included in the exhibition, and their daughter Renée, who at the time was two-and-a-half years old. Lori wrote a total of 241 reviews during the course of the project. A few of them were for artists whose work revealed their existence as parents; some were even for children.  

A book of the entire project was published by Onestar Press, with an afterword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13). It can be purchased in print or downloaded as a free PDF.  Over the next few weeks Cultural ReProducers will share a series of reviews excerpted from the project, which recognizes children and parents as relevant participants in cultural dialogue.

Julie Bernattz

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Julie Bernattz
Give a child a gift and watch what happens. Most prefer the packaging to the toy wrapped inside. It isn’t that dolls and blocks aren’t fun, but that boxes and wrapping are there to be torn, open and closed, balled up and thrown. No one is going to tell you not to destroy a piece of die-cut cardboard. Julie Bernattz, an artist who trained as a printmaker, works with the materials she has at hand. As the mother of a young girl, she has an endless supply of My Little Pony and Lalaloopsy containers that have been ripped open by eager hands. Arranged against a hot pink ground, some of these scraps reveal totally unexpected interest. Simple cardboard shapes prove most compelling. The printed sides are faerie lands empty of their inhabitants, like when Cory Arcangel removed Mario from the Super Mario Bros. video game. The backsides are raw abstractions, recalling Robert Rauschenberg’s cardboard reliefs. It’s trash but it also isn’t. In a land increasingly filled with garbage that we can just barely manage to recycle, Bernattz’s approach may become a necessary one, practically and ethically, as well as aesthetically. If you can’t toss it, look at it again, rethink it, and see if you can’t find something worthwhile there.

—Lori Waxman 6/16/12 2:37 PM

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Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira

Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira
The art of children has long been prized among the avant-garde for its supposedly radical freedom and beautiful naiveté, because children are believed to be unfettered by the tradition of representational accuracy, by the fact that an apple must be round and red, that a face must have two eyes, two ears, one mouth and one nose, and all in the right space. This is hogwash. Consider the artwork of Sofia Frank de Morais Barreira, the four-year-old daughter of a conceptual performance artist. In one vibrant crayon sketch, palm trees sway in the breeze, an orange hut in their shade, a lush hilly landscape in the background. In another, a bright yellow fish swims in the wet blue sea. An odd composition of horizontal black lines and a little red house turns out to be a reproduction of a taxi receipt. A stunning pencil sketch gathers together a mass of dark scribbles that change direction and intensity to form a bird and cloud. One of Sofia’s most abstract pictures, of wavy red and blue stripes, is the result of a firm task given to her mother, to fill in the lines with precise coloring. None of these pieces are the product of wild imagination unbound by the reality of the world. They are the result of a young person continuously figuring out the world as she encounters it, tries it on and tests it out. With, admittedly, great color sense, sweet composition and a very willing maternal collaborator.

—Lori Waxman 6/18/12 5:40 PM

Also in this series: 
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Yi-Ping Hou, Sylvia Krüger, and Charlotte Lohr
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC // Walter Peter and Anna Yema Ditzel

Children Are A People

Artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen presented the following talk as part of The ‘M’ Word, a day of panels dedicated to critical discussion about artists and motherhood, organized by The Feminist Art Project for the 2014 College Art Association Conference. It’s a remarkable piece that reconsiders the role of children both in her own practice and in the art world, and we liked it so much that we asked to share it here. Lise is the author of the forthcoming book "Mothernism," published by Green Lantern Press and The Poor Farm Press.

“Children are a People” implies the perspective that children are not only fellow human beings but also members of a group with its own cultural significance, and that collaborating with children would therefore imply navigating a shared (psychological) space with diplomacy and curiosity.

I borrowed the title from an exhibition held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (In Humlebæk, north of Copenhagen, where I grew up) in honor of the International year of the child, 1979. Its vision was as simple as it was profound: real art by real artists for real children! Works in the show included a winged contraption on which you could hang from the ceiling and pretend to fly, and a grass-clad Volkswagen Beetle. But what I remember most vividly was a giant MOTHER, (pictured here) - that you could lie inside and pretend you were back in the womb. My visit to this exhibition as a 10 year old was seminal to my own education as an artist, as this was the first time I was addressed at eye level as a museum visitor, not with belittling “kid friendly art”, but instead as an “art friendly kid”.

In order to raise “Art Friendly Kids” -- and by this I mean Children who are interested and invested in art, which in my view is what you look for in a collaborator of any age --instead of conforming to ideas of “Child Friendly Art,” we need to accept the premise of a bilateral knowledge transfer, based on trust. The intersection of family life and artistic practice is contested territory rife with cultural anxiety, but can be fertile ground which can serve as starting points for new artistic strategies.

Here I'll examine some of the “rules” of critical play, knowledge, transfer and trust, as it relates my own experience from collaborating with my son Adam when he was about 4 years old:

The first of these collaborations came about in rather a mundane way: One day after dinner my husband was joking around with Adam, pretending to eat him, and I recorded the event with a digital camera, as one does. When Adam felt that his luck was running out, he introduced an inflatable plastic crocodile into the game, to eat his dad - and let him win the game. When I looked at the pictures afterwards, I couldn’t help feeling a slight pang of jealousy: “Damn, if I could only draw something like that,” followed by “…why not?”

In the following months, we acted and recorded a number of short scenarios, resulting in the body of work 'Stories for Boys' from 2004: simple narratives consisting of 7-8 drawings each. Most of the storylines were triggered by everyday experience - Daddy Chainsaw Massacre is a tale of jealousy and woe in which Adam takes revenge on his dad for ignoring him while playing with his nephews, while the purchase of a Halloween skeleton suit inspired the adventures of “Skeleton Boy” -an orphaned skeleton baby who is found by “Mummy Death” one day as she roams the forest; an alter-ego invented to make his fears, inherent to growing up, a subject of conversation and jest.

Young children’s fascination with scary things can be disturbing for parents, but it is nevertheless important to them. Sometimes what one is afraid of has to be wrapped up in something more comfortable in order to cope. Hence the theme in many of these role playing games of ‘playing dead’. Like the classic game “you are the monster mummy and I am the monster baby”, they reinforce the parent/child relationship and serve as affirmation of the recurring question “would you still love me if...”

Mummy Death & the Skeleton Baby, 2004, pencil on paper

Tellingly, there is also a parallel development to the obsession with morbidity in this age group: the development of humor. Not only are we facing the blind wall of our own death, we also find the jib door to get us out of this cul-de sac: the joke! And so, to me at least, these stories are also very funny. As an example, Mommy and the Hoover teaches you how to deal with the sheer feeling of disempowerment that makes you want to hoover up your mummy if she doesn’t behave. Either way, you don’t have to be 4 years old to sympathize. This last story came about as straightforward bargain: One day when I was telling Adam off for something he’d done he turned to me and said, "Mom, when you talk to me like that I just wanna throw you on the floor so you break and then hoover you up in the hoover." And I said, "Ok, you get to do that if I get to photograph it! "

What fascinates me in these stories is the way children conquer the world through play, and how they manipulate the world in order to make sense of it and to get to grips with the sometimes frightening truths you encounter in recognizing the limitations of your own individuality.

from the series House Arrest, 2005

In terms of narrative structures children’s logic and solutions are often surprisingly elegant. An example of this is 'House Arrest,' a story I developed partly in frustration over my at times homebound existence, in which I play the guitar thief which is arrested and driven off by two police officers. It ended on Adam’s suggestion of a lighter, playful note with an air guitar session at the police station, which in turn became the next series, 'Electric Motherland.'

Through our work with these stories I (re)discovered what I already knew, namely that children are deep — sometimes disturbingly so — and they don’t shy away from big existential problems if given the opportunity to delve into them. Their wild and weirdly fantastic narratives are not a threat to their sense of reality, but serve as reaffirmation of, and ongoing commentary on, same reality. And this intersection of fantasy and reality is where play, and art, can happen.

Even so, to many of those in support of art education for kids, the notion of kids as a topic or as participants in the ‘real’ art world remains an uneasy notion. Part of this reserve, I believe, stems from the fact that mothers -- not the mythological creatures, but the real ones and their very real experiences — are still a rarity in the contemporary art museum and in academic discourse.

In ‘The Family Track: Keeping your Faculties while you Mentor, Nurture, Teach and Serve’ Coiner and George offers this explanation: “the fear of children [in academia] specifically extends from adults’ distinct awareness of the capacity of children [...] Children embarrass us because they point ever too cleverly and clearly to our denial of personal, material, and maternal history.” Motherhood, it seems, is still too embarrassingly feminine a topic for the art establishment to embrace.

But outside of that, I am convinced that the latent issue of “exploitation” in relation to children as collaborative art producers arises because we, collectively, do not children seriously as (critical) cultural agents, alongside adults. In other words, even when we invite children to contribute to the production of artwork, we still assume that they do not have a stake or an interest in the art world for which these works are conceived.

The implied knowledge being that children don’t “get” art, and so if they are involved in any
matter of art production, this innocence must have been taken advantage of -and they can therefore only participate in cultural production as “nimble fingers”, their “nimble wits” left unexplored.

Added to this is the fact that the art market values a steady art production, in order to ‘market’ an artist, whereas a (true) collaboration with your child will develop with it –which in

Eskimo Kiss of Death, 2004, oil and acrylic on panel

turn might mean that just as you have “struck gold” with something that resonates with your professional support system (gallery, museum or whatever), your collaborator might already have moved on… at which point you need to make clear to yourself where your loyalties lie and who you are advocating for!

I decided to end my presentation with a picture from last summer’s Great Poor Farm Experiment in Wisconsin, where Adam assisted me in installing my Mothernism tent. Although this was not strictly speaking a collaborative work, I was very happy when he referred to it as our installation. The week we spent building there together, reminded me of one of the cardinal rules of collaboration: Shared investment involves shared decision-making.

In the works with 'Stories for Boys' I used as my example, our respective roles were fairly clear-cut: Adam being the storyteller and I the illustrator, with a clear distinction between the home and the studio. But if I ever wondered about it, Adams investment and authorship in these drawings became apparent, when on the day of the opening, he ran ahead to the gallery space and opened the door to me and my friends with the greeting:
“WELCOME TO MY EXHIBITION!”