Hello, people of the world! It’s a new semester for AAP NYC, and the fifteen B.F.A.’s are now in motion, all warmed up after a tad too many introductions these past two weeks. From this time I’ve gathered a sense of the various interests of my peers — we have people interested in issues surrounding design, editorial drawing, fashion photography, violence and surveillance, time and memory, transculturation and cultural appropriation, color in graphics, food, and a lot more. It’s interesting to see and experience how this group is coming along.
Most of us are settled into Cornell Tech now, occupying the 6th, 7th, and 16th floors of The House (more to be said about that soon…).
As for classes,
our first lesson was the New York City seminar with Jane Benson. We headed uptown to see “Arch”, a large and looming cage fixed within the Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village as part of Ai Wei Wei’s public exhibit Good Fences Make Good Neighbors (homage to “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost). We zoomed in and out of the polished steel cutout and then lingered in the area. In Masha Panteleyeva’s art history class, we’ve been discussing representations of the city. Forming our thoughts around urban space as an art object, we observed urban infrastructure as an optical device for potentially recognizing self identity, architecture, varying political constellations layering metropolitan grounds. We also had our first studio classes with Beverly Semmes, which consisted of a critique for our drawings of 1) a map of where we are, 2) the last piece that meant something to us, and 3) a fantasy pet. Now we’re moving into figure drawing. In Linda Norden’s professional practice seminar, our discussion revolved around a meme of the Mona Lisa, further understanding each of our viewpoints, and this week we’ll be seeing “Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017″ at the Queens Museum.
Our second class with professor Jane Benson last Friday was an artist visit. We met Ellen Harvey in her studio in Brooklyn. Upon entering, we were largely unprepared for the immediate visuals that sent eyes rattling in their sockets. We absorbed whole swathes of what resembled massive panchromatic satellite imagery, propped up against the walls of her studio. This is her new permanent installation commissioned for the renovation of the Miami Beach Convention Center entitled “Atlantis”. By leveraging an empirically rich observational lens and reconstructing the images by marks of paint, Harvey drew us a modicum closer to the ecological reality of rising water levels.
We also came to better understand her obsession with mirrors through this work. She employs the material of Claude glass, which are convex black mirrors that were used for viewing landscapes in the 18th century (by the way, anyone else still feeling chilled by the newest season of Netflix series Black Mirror?). Harvey might describe the electronic devices in our pockets to be our own Claude glasses. And this fits well with our discussion of “seeking darkness” from the essay “Manifestos for the Future.” In the wavy reflection of these mouth blown glass maps, sand blasted and laminated against mirrors, we’d see ourselves looking into “the dark.” In other words, Harvey encourages us to appreciate the artist’s oppo
rtunity to complicate simple narratives that are associable with light, clarity, and beauty. These works make up merely a glimpse into Harvey’s prolific career thus far— among other works are a “Museum of Failure,” a repurposed hot dog stand painted and stocked with Washington D.C. souvenirs for aliens, a destroyed church in Belgium transformed into an artificial ruin and public space for a village in Bossuit (Harvey narrated this excitingly, and ideas of embracing demolition and smashing projects bloomed in our minds…).
Her work is also predicated on questioning values of beauty, in cultural production— opening up ways of thought using the “pushy,” proposing new disturbance practices. While nowadays one might argue there are numerous examples in which non-humans can have political effects in the world, Harvey reminds us that viewing and making art won’t necessarily re-insert us back into the center of action— art rather serves as a site for questioning why things are the way they are, or even to apprise us of what questions aren’t being asked enough. We can see how this artistic amenability lives out in her New York Beautification Project, where she painted old-master landscapes alongside New York street graffiti (we boggled at her tale of talking to strangers and getting arrested, and then released). Harvey most of all encouraged us to feel empowered in the present regarding decisions we might make, in acknowledgement of our moral responsibility and privilege.
Although we walked in with a basic awareness of her comfort with perpetual failure (read: Tempting Failure by Henriette Huldisch), her artistic aims to “seduce people into thinking” seem to definitely have mounted a strong success in our class.
Her spirits had us buzzing with conversation in the aftermath, and it all seemed like a comforting glimpse into our steady transition into a collaborative and active group of city-goers. We look forward to more visiting, creating, and discussing in order to critically parse the ~art world~ here!
– Irene Song, B.F.A. ’20