Arts: Africa California Canada: African exhibit Paris bursts with creativity, while Calif can't discern limits of art

• Africa
• California
• Canada

Africa: Huge splashy exhibit in Paris features the creative edge of contemporary African artists

Le centre Pompidou, Paris' big art gallery and performance complex, thru August 8 features of huge exhibition of contemporary art by Africans - those located in Africa now, or dwelling and artmaking in the Diaspora (or both) - an exhibit with an atmosphere all its own, according to Emilie Boyer King, reviewing for The Christian Science Monitor, "Eye on African Art," July 22, 2005. Like an urban marketplace in a large African city or the smaller versions ubiquitously present in each village, the Pompidou bids us look well as stereotypes of African art evaporate.

"Africa Remix" is the largest collection of contemporary African art ever shown in Europe. For the first time, works by artists from the entire African continent and the diaspora are brought together in a vast, sometimes daunting space, filled with sound, color, and powerful, often disturbing, images. These works, which include painting, sculpture, photography, and video and music installations, would cause their Western counterparts envy.

We can at least dare to hope that this exhibition will travel from the Pompidou Center to North America, at least to New York and Toronto, heh? - Owlb



Kids pix from the terror-zone
Don't forget to look at this webpage of African children's art. - Owlie Skowlie

California: state's Department of Justice exhibits agitprop piece in cafeteria

To a mounting chorus of dismay and outrage, citizens of California are registering objections to a work of agitational propaganda by a California lawyer included in an exhibit of dozens of artworks in the cafeteria of the Department of Justice building, and sanctioned in the name of artistic freedom by the Deputy of that bureaucracy.

Under the rubric of "political artwork," the item consists of a ruff painting of the USA, shaped somewhat like a map of the country, with the California end sunk beyond view deep in a toilet. Along the left vertical edge is a large caption: "T'anks to Mr. Bush." Flushing the flag down the toilet, resonanting with the apparently false allegations of a GI flushing a Holy Book. However, in this case, all allegations are true, altho even Fox News Channel's email alert didn't mention the name of the agitprop lawyer.

"For those that it offends, they shouldn't look at it. For those that want to talk about public-policy matters and look at the art, they're free to do so. But it's their free choice," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer (search).

"They have a right to be upset with that piece, it's their right. They have a right to say that they don't like it, it's their right not to look at it," said Ellen Taylor of the California Lawyers for the Arts.

But critics say this isn't about censorship, it's about whether partisan political art belongs in the state government facility.

Artistic expression is a value that should not often be set aside, but at the same time art is not a limitless activity, nor its products without any constraints whatsoever in a society that has insisted there are hate-crimes which indicate a limiting criteria also for art. Usually, most objections to the display of art, even when it is questionable as just arted-up political graphics, are satisfied when the locale of exhibition or display carefully taken into account. Different places are subject to different decora, according to the specificity of the sphere involved. Two considerations come quickly to mind around the fact that the location in this case is not a free-standing artspace.

First, the display of this art by lawyers is subject to a decorum determined by its setting in a cafeteria; it is tasteless indeed to subject people who come to the space for lunch to the display of a political graphic that may seriously upset them, and indeed is calculated to do so. Not everybody in the cafeteria is a lawyer ready for a challenge, an argument, a case, and rebuttal at the noon hour. The display of this agitprop is not only tasteless; it violates the sphere-specificity of a location for enjoying a meal or snack, equally available to all whether they enjoy the defamantion of the President or not, and the displacement of anger at the President onto the American flag itself or not.

Second, the sphere-specifity of the cafeteria with its own proper decorum for discriminating what art is appropriate, what political graphics are allowable, is itself embedded within another sphere-specificity in this case - the larger context of the headquarters of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General (the top copy) of the state of California. Given the non-partisan values of a state police and prosecutorial task, there is little reason to think that art or political grahics on display should be devoted to any instance of displaying the American flag dipped in a toilet in order to interpret the policy of the President of the United States.

The idea that the freedom of art products to be exhibited anywhere at any time irrespective of their content and the community of those within a sphere-specific locality and its appropriate decorum assumes that art has no limits, that political-agitation graphics are art, and that such material should have free go in space provided for another purpose by the taxpayers of the state who expect all points of view to be expressed only within lunch-time and lunch-space decorum in accord with the justicial decorum of the broader institution in which this indiscriminate material was included. - Politicarp

Canada: website Artists in Canada includes hi-ly accessible regular art-education feature by Robert Glenn

A directory of artists and artnews sources that seeks to serve online all of Canada, includes as one of its regular features a weekly feature, "Robert Glenn's Weekly Letter: Insight and Inspiration for Your Artistic Career." Glenn seeks to be interesting in his write-ups for everyone who stops by to take a look and engage in a brief read, but it's obvious he wants to help young artists perhaps without much opportunity at art education in school, and artists of any age who are isolated or shy about seeking skill development in institutional settings. Thus, Glenn's weekly letters on the arts and the skills useful, perhaps necessary, to become a professional artist, however much one is self-tawt. This week his offering is on the theme of 'Finding form.'

A sample that struck my attention-button:

... [T]here's a difference between 'observed form' and 'developmental form.' To get an idea of this there's a simple exercise: Lay your hands on an ordinary rock, set it on a ground, light it and copy it. Leave out ancillary elements like moss or texture. Just stick to copying the form. Now try painting a similar rock from your imagination.

The website offers much more than its art-ed weekly feature. There are directories, including one of new artists who have linked up and to whom the voyaging art-voyeur can in turn click-link to see the amazing graphics displays in many media, all now digitalized for your Internet viewing. - Anaximaximum


Artists in Canada