• The Hermann Park installation is part of a six-stop US tour that includes New York, Los Angeles, Princeton, NJ, Washington D.C., and Pittsburgh.

• The 12 monumental bronze heads each weigh 800 pounds and stand roughly 10 feet high.

• They’re giant copies of elements from a famous water clock made for the Yuanming Yuan (Old Summer Palace) outside Beijing by Jesuits in the 18th century. The sculptures were looted by European soldiers in 1860.

• Seven of the 12 original heads, the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, horse, monkey and boar, have been recovered. The dragon, snake, goat, rooster and dog are still missing.

• Ai Weiwei gained global recognition for his Bird’s Nest Stadium designed for the 2008 Olympic Games

• In 2011, Weiwei was imprisoned, held incommunicado by the Chinese government for 81 days on charges widely thought to be a pretext for politically-motivated intimidation.

•  The exhibit is scheduled to coincide with the April 14 – 15 opening of the new Asia Society Texas Center.

• The sculptures require three 40-foot trucks to be transported. Thirty man hours (or three 10-hour shifts) are needed to install all 12 sculptures in Hermann Park.

Quotable quotes:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, about the  piece’s NY premier: “As we continue to showcase the best art exhibits and attractions, we maintain our status as the cultural capital of the world.”

HAA’ director Jonathan Glus, about the Houston installation: “Thousands from Houston and beyond will share in this culturally relevant experience, which helps build our city’s visibility as an international arts center.”

Weiwei, about his  first public art work: “because Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is composed of animal heads, it’s a work that everyone can understand, including children and people who are not in the art world.”

The gun was added by artists David Newton and Tomas Bustos despite the fact that the Fort Worth Art Commission approved a gun-less design, and the Vaqero Core Committee, representing the project’s major funders, explicitly opposed the gunbelt as historically inaccurate, a hollywood stereotype.

Repeated objections to the gun at various phases of the project were ignored until the piece had already been cast in bronze; the city refused to accept it.  The artists refused to make the by-then expensive alteration, saying that removing the gunbelt it would be a mutilation of their piece. Tuesday, Fort Worth City Council gave in, allowing the piece to be installed, hardware and all, at Vaquero Plaza on North Main Street and Central and Ellis avenues in May or June.

One of East Texas’ best kept secrets, Stagg began the free-range building project, the A. V. Stagg Art Studio and Wildlife Preserve, his major work, in 1981, on family farmland. Although he lived alone with cats, dogs, goats and king snakes, but no air conditioning, he welcomed frequent visitors to his visionary environment, where he continued to carve and assemble works from pine branches and found objects which have been featured in many shows across the country.

Despite his outsider lifestyle, Stagg was an academically trained artist with a Degree from the Tyler School of Art who chose to isolate and immerse himself in his work, free from the distractions and pressures.

“This film was made secretly in order to portray the true conditions of life in South Africa today. There are no professional actors in this drama of the fate of a man and his country.” So begins Lionel Rogosin’s fascinating 1959 film, Come Back, Africa. A new, restored film print makes its way to Houston, showing at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, March 3, 4, & 9.

After his Oscar-nominated first film, On The Bowery, American filmmaker Lionel Rogosin spent a year in South Africa making a film that would open eyes around the world to both the teeming culture and intolerable conditions of that country under the rule of apartheid. Whenever the authorities noticed him, he told them he was making a travelogue to promote tourism or a musical film about the “happy natives.” In fact, under constant danger, he was observing the political system of oppression, documenting everyday life, and working with anti-apartheid Africans to fashion a story true to the black South African’s experience.

With great black and white photography and a soundtrack mixing the flutes of street musicians with the clangs of industry, Come Back, Africa is a captivating experience and an invaluable time capsule taking the viewer to the bustling streets of Johannesburg, down into the gold mines near the city, and to the black township of Sophiatown (which was being evacuated and torn down by the government even at the time of filming.) The story­ is about a young man, Zachariah (played by Zachariah Mgabi, a day laborer that Rogosin met waiting for a bus) who is mistreated by his bosses, hassled by the law, and troubled by the violent nature of life in the impoverished black community.

Come Back, Africa is not strictly a documentary by conventional standards, but it serves as an important film document of that place, time, and situation. I love this kind of hybrid film, although they’re often a little confusing to audiences and critics. (Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 film Wild Style about the burgeoning hip hop culture in New York comes to mind as an example.) A film that combines documentary-style location shooting with a fictional story performed by authentic yet unskilled actors is tough to judge within the usual confines of either documentary or narrative film. Or rather, it’s tough not to judge. But at their best– and this film is the shining example­– they can convey an authenticity that few straight documentaries or slick narratives are able to achieve.

It’s worth pointing out the presence of an amazing, young, and then unknown singer in the film. Miriam Makeba’s appearance in Come Back, Africa made an impression on international audiences and it began her rapid rise to world fame. She attended the premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where the film won the Italian Critics’ Award. Soon Makeba had signed with RCA Records and in the years to come, she had great success with such songs as “Pata Pata” and “The Click Song”, she met and performed for John F. Kennedy, she testified against apartheid before the United Nations (for which her South African citizenship was revoked), and she became the first African to win a Grammy. Although exiled from her home country for most of her life, Makeba remained dedicated to bringing its music and the plight of its black population to the world, earning the title, “Mama Africa.” I should be clear that the film does not star Makeba. Her appearance is brief. But her intimate musical performances are really outstanding and frame an important part of the film. And it’s this film that widened the reach of the singer and activist’s voice.

The chance to see Come Back, Africa on celluloid is a rare one, and I really urge you to go. I’ve included the trailer for the film below, as well as a couple of other interesting bits here for some context.

Come Back, Africa trailer:

Hendrik Verwoerd defines apartheid

A brief clip of Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister of South Africa 1958-66, and architect of the apartheid system of racial separation and repression. He explains…

Miriam Makeba – Beware, Verwoerd

Singer Miriam Makeba’s version of “Beware Verwoerd (Naants’ Indod’Emnyama)”, one of the first South African freedom songs, masking a powerful message in gentle music. (Here are the Black People. Beware, Verwoerd!) The composer of this song, Vuyisile Mini, was arrested and hanged by the South African government in 1964.

For fans of combined boxing/fine arts news coverage, Bart Barry has a piece on 15 rounds.com that critiques both the art Museum of South Texas’  Art of the Dive: Portraits of the Deep show and the IBF light heavyweight title fight between Tavoris “Thunder” Cloud and Gabriel “Chico Guapo” Campillo at the American Bank Center Arena, across the two venues’ shared parking lot.

Barry’s art criticism (“did the artist paint this or trace it?”) is rudimentary compared with his fight analyses, (“a wondrous 150 seconds of violence, punctuated by a decisive overhand right.”) but juxtaposing the two in print, as they are juxtaposed in reality in bayside Corpus Christi is a treat.

Smudge Studio, Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York (2010-2011)

The exhibition In the Interest of Time presents three projects by the Brooklyn collaborative Smudge Studio, comprised of artists Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse. Their primary subject is the landscape, and their approach includes embodying the roles of scientist, historian, anthropologist and, of course, artist. Their process is a performative journey, navigating, investigating and documenting phenomena within the landscape. In some ways, it is easier to describe what their work is not. It is not tourism; it is not activism; nor is it documentary photography/video. Rather, they are interested in using the aesthetic experience to project imagination and address deep time. So what does that look like?

Smudge Studio, Below the Line (2010-2011)

In their project Worlds to Come: a field guide (2009), the duo visited six sites of nuclear detonation in Nevada and New Mexico, photographically documenting their visits. The bleak landscape images show traces of human intervention, as well as scars from nuclear testing and detonation. The artists also produced a newsprint field guide, with information and directions for each site. Lest you think it’s all about doom and gloom, the artists subversively insert humor into the field guide. The guide’s center layout includes examples of graffiti, humorously entitled “Post-Land Art” at one of the Nevada nuclear test sites. In a conversation with the artists, they spoke about human scale vs. the larger forces of time, as well as detonations’ scale of impact—how it will continue to affect/shift/transform the land for millennia.

Smudge Studio, Worlds to Come: a field guide (2009)

In their recent project/publication Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York (2010-2011), the artists shift from the Western landscape to the cityscape. Choosing 20 sites, the field guide playfully uses geologic language to present an alternative map of the city. When I asked the artists about their shift to the urban landscape, they spoke about the similarities in the projects. Both have toxic sites where photography is prohibited. (Of course like all artists who break the rules, they took photos anyway.) The New York field guide focuses on making the invisible visible by drawing connections between larger geologic forces. For example, the salt the city uses to melt snow is thousands of years old and hails from South America.

Using maps, photography and Super 8 film, Smudge Studio’s third project Below the Line (2010-2011) examines the intersections where human structures interact with the shoreline of the formerly underwater Lake Bonneville in Utah. The challenge in exhibiting complex conceptual work is that it requires a time commitment from the viewer. Not deep time, mind you, but certainly more than a cursory walkthrough. In our ADD society, many viewers will bail. But for those who invest, it’s worth it.

In the Interest of Time—Smudge Studio
Brazos Gallery at Richland College
Through March 2, 2012

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Multi-media artist Colette Copeland recently relocated to Dallas from Philadelphia. She writes for Afterimage—Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and Ceramics: Art and Perception Magazine. Her work can be found at www.colettecopeland.com.

The fact that there is an exhibition of abstract painting in nearly every cluster of galleries in Houston makes you wonder what might be behind this surge– economics, aesthetics, politics, gender, or the constant cycle of painting dying and being reborn . . . It’s hard to say. Nonetheless, it is somehow reassuring to see artists still working on the basic tools of their craft, such as color, form, and texture, in ever more inventive ways. And there is something profoundly mysterious and beautiful about an artistic language that is at once intensely idiosyncratic and nearly universally understood. One thing that is certain is that you can learn a lot about artmaking by looking at these exhibitions and seeing how each artist makes their own way through the myriad of influences from the history of painting to create images that push that artistic language forward in their own way.

Michael Kennaugh Slipstream 2011 oil on canvas 14" x 11"