Currently Showing – Joan Semmel (NYC) An Artistic History of Death (Nashville)

Joan Semmel in NYC
Joan Semmel has a show at Alexander Gray Associates (NYC) – sadly I will only be in town the week after, but for those of you fortunate enough to be able to go, it’s a great retrospective by an artist who really deserves a lot more recognition.

“Joan Semmel: You have to realize that was written back in the early ’70s, and things were very different then. Sexuality now is an open book. The conditions today are quite different. That’s why I say that younger women have to get on board, because I can’t project myself into where they are and I can’t speak for them. If you are talking about whether it is still that way, it is in more subtle ways. For instance, Alice Neel and Louise Bourgeois were both being shown early on. They were there, but they didn’t get much attention until they got a lot older. I used to say, at that time, that you had to be at an age when you were no longer threatening sexually to get any kind of validation from the culture. I think that is still valid, but at this point the fact that women have desire is obvious to everybody, not just to feminists. Shame about the body is not the same kind of thing as it was back then. A lot of those aspects of sexuality are very different now. But the underlying fear is still there. The problems so many men have, in terms of being potent, are enormous. Now that women are competing with men economically and are more aggressive sexually, men are that much more fearful. Rape is prevalent in the military and colleges. Repression takes many forms.”

Read the full interview on Hyperallergic –  Some images in the attached interview are NSFW.

Memento Mori in Nashville
This sounds like a pretty interesting show – should you be in Nashville, it’s definitely worth checking out! My mother had a reproduction of the Kollwitz print below on her study wall when I was growing up. Boy, could Kollwitz ever draw… Litho pencils, sigh.

“Memento Mori — Looking at Death in Art and Illustration at the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery considers death’s role in society over the past 500 years. The oldest object in the exhibition is Vesalius’s anatomical treatise De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1555), which shows — as co-curator Holly Tucker wrote in her book Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution — how “medical exploration took place most frequently in the domain of death.” Other pieces on display include a second-stage silk mourning dress from 1909, memorial jewelry woven from the hair of the dead, and a tombstone carved by sculptor William Edmondson. “Many of these traditions are no longer a part of Western culture,” Gallery Director Joseph S. Mella told Hyperallergic. He explained that these are set alongside the show’s contemporary works, like Enrique Chagoya’s 2003 lithograph “La Portentosa Vida de la Muerte,” which “deal more with the idea of death and issues of death in society rather than the death of individuals.”

Check out the full article on Hyperallergic