Hitting someone with a shoe is considered the supreme insult in Iraq. It means that the target is even lower than the shoe, which is always on the ground and dirty.
— The Times, Dec. 15
IN France, of course, it's a waffle. Throw a waffle at someone and you have said, in essence: "I loathe you. You are scum. Your people are donkey traders." It suggests that the target is even lower than a waffle, which is sometimes on the ground if it happens to fall off a plate, and the ground could be dirty, depending upon the ground.
Who's to say why, exactly? Some say the waffle's association with Belgium is enough to disgust any Frenchman. Others suggest it is its annoyingly spongy consistency. Still others say it's the derivation of the word — "le waffle" in French, from the Flemish "wafflintis" and originally the Latin "wafflibus," all of which translate, loosely, to "waffle."
For scholars of insults, what comes to mind almost immediately after a high-profile insulting incident is the central African nation of Chad, where hitting someone with a pair of pants is the highest form of insult. It means that the target is lower than pants, the hem of which, while not on the ground, is often near the ground and, again, unclean. The only problem with this form of insult is that the thrower then has to retrieve the pants, as he or she had been wearing them.
For many years people threw shorts, but almost no one was offended, as the hem of shorts is a great distance from the ground. "We're working on new forms of insult, as well as changing our country's name, which, strangely, is a common first name in California," said a Chadian cultural attaché. "We need to be taken more seriously."
In the former Soviet Union it is not uncommon, especially among the savage Russian mafia, to throw a 68-ton American-made Abrams M1A1 tank. It means that the target is even lower than a tank, whose treads are always on the ground, unless they're not for some reason — say, repairs or what-have-you. In fairness, though, the throwing of tanks appears to be happening with less frequency, due to the near impossibility of surprise, especially at indoor events.
In Peru, meanwhile, people throw their voices as a form of insult. While not technically near the ground, a voice suggests "sound" and "sound" rhymes with "ground," the ground being low and possibly unclean, depending upon where, exactly, you're standing.
Peruvians say that throwing your voice is the ultimate insult because the intended victim doesn't know where it came from. It is not uncommon to hear someone say, "Who said that?!" on the streets of Lima after a particularly cutting remark. The danger, of course, is insulting someone by trying to throw your voice, but doing it poorly and instead moving your lips. The intended victim knows immediately where it came from.
And what of tiny Bhutan, snug between Tibet in the north and India to the south? In this mysterious Buddhist country, perhaps the only one in the world that measures its Gross National Happiness, people throw brightly colored tissue paper, so as not to hurt anyone. The paper falls harmlessly to the ground — a symbol of both lowness and dirt — and the thrower quickly picks it up, disposes of it, and then apologizes profusely.
blue rose garden
Yeah, so I'm busy. I work all the time, have too many papers to write, etc etc. Blah blah blah.
Philippe Halsman, Dalì Atomicus, (1948)
Woohoo!
Really, just how many adjectives do you need for one title? Especially when the cover pretty much says it all (i.e., SEX).
pæl
m
s
st
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-), The Italians, 1961, oil, pencil, and crayon on canvas, 6 feet 6 5/8 inches x 8 feet 6 1/4 inches (199.5 x 259.6 cm), Museum of Modern Art, NY.
It serves absolutely no purpose other than being witty, and for that, I love it.
This poster was pasted on the vacant lot next to my gallery. It's rather amusing, of course, but what's even better is exactly *where* it was posted [see after the jump]...
Heh heh heh. One can only dream, right?
See? Still disgusting.Sir, we don't take Maestro. Do you have another card?...you need to go home.
[mumble mumble. Present $20 bill.]
Sir, that's not enough.
[Present $20 bill AGAIN.]
No. [She waits for the penny to drop. It doesn't.]
Do you have a different card?
[Pulls random dollar bills out of pocket.]
Noooo. Do you just have a different card? If you give me a--
[Presents $20 bill. "Thasss not enouf?"]
A different--grrrr. Do you--Do you have a wallet? Give me your wallet.
[You are befuddled by its inexplicable presence in your pocket.]
I'm going to use this card, ok? [She runs card. You put your head on the bar.] You need to sign the receipt, sir. [You don't look up. She mutters: I'm putting my own damn tip on here.] Sign here, sir.
Sir. Sign. Here. THANK YOU. ... ... Sir? Sir, you can't sleep on the bar.
Do they ever get kneed in the face, I wonder?
Look at that one in the little red jumper, she's all like, "Wow." It reminds me of the reactions my cats give me when I'm doing something particularly foreign to feline behavior.
Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953; traces of ink and crayon; Collection SFMOMA, purchased through a gift of Phyllis Wattis; © Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA, New York
At the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, we are greeted at the entrance by a large metal spider and what look to be two victims suspended in shiny bright cocoons from above. As Nancy Spector, the curator of the exhibition and the Guggenheim’s chief curator, acknowledges in the introductory text, the spiral of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim at 88th Street is a uniquely fitting venue in which to present a retrospective of this ever-avant-garde artist who has returned to themes and motifs throughout her career. Bourgeois’ work functions in a world of unstable, opposing binaries: open/closed, young/old, gravity/attenuation, benign/threatening, human/building, soft/hard, spiral/linear. Works cluster along the walls in chronological groupings; the architectural scale (and color) of the winding path at the Guggenheim lends itself felicitously to the presentation of these objects, and the narrowness of the presentation space focuses the attention by permitting only a few works in the viewer’s field of vision at any one time. Though the spiral ramp forces a linear narrative, its great benefit is its ability to disrupt this strict chronology: by merely peering across the vertigo-inducing open center, the visitor sees works that came before and glimpses of what will follow. In fact, it is largely by virtue of Lloyd Wright’s whorl of an exhibition space that the show coheres—one might almost hope that all retrospectives be shown here, for nowhere else is there the ability to experience both a linear (that is to say, chronological) progression as well as a cross-section of an artist’s oeuvre.
After the opening salvo of the spider and a brief introduction to her paintings, we are launched into Bourgeois’ career in 1940s New York while married to art historian Robert Goldwater—a more propitious time and place (and husband) is hard to imagine. It was during this time in the late 1940s and early 50s that Bourgeois created the sculptural series known as “Personages,” (left) whose totemesque, vaguely anthropomorphic wood and metal forms, notably “Portrait of C.V.” (1947-49; wood, paint, metal wire), “Persistent Antagonism” (1946-48; wood, paint, metal wire), “The Winged Figure” (1948; wood, paint, nails), and “Sleeping Figure” (1950, bronze), have their relatives in the sculptural art of central equatorial Africa (as the exhibition “Eternal Ancestors: Art of the Central African Reliquary” at the Metropolitan Museum so effectively demonstrated last winter). The slightly later wooden stacked sculptures, whose attenuation recalls Giacommetti’s emaciated figures, often present an escarpment near or at the top, frustrating the ascension to the topmost level and recalling Bourgeois’ quote that “Skyscrapers reflect the human condition. They do not touch.”
After a decade of absence, Bourgeois emerged in the 1960s to create an odd topsy-turvy world where phallic buds derive from clouds and breasts emerge from the earth to become “cumuls.” Extraordinarily adept at segmenting and de-humanizing the human body, she others it, rendering it insectlike and, by so doing, reinforcing its messy actuality and the earthy humor of human existence. Biomorphic forms (like “Lair,” 1962), which occupy one section look nothing so much as sculpted excremental blobs, have something of the honeycomb—or, in the case of “Fee Couturiere” (1963), the wasps’ nest—about them. Who—or what—lives in these funny little dwellings? What is hidden inside?
Though the uncircumcised penile tips—or are they preternaturally perky breast buds? Or are they fingertips?—poking their heads hopefully through drapery in “Cumul I” (1969; above) is enough to horrify one’s conservative relatives (one dare not say grandmother in this context), Bourgeois has a mastery of texture and form that renders these things all rather beautiful. Beautiful in the way that earthworms, or giving birth, or the relief of a long-awaited bodily function is beautiful. Or, in the case of “Sleeper” (1967; left)—a “cumul” wrapped protectively in a turtleneck and sitting atop two rough wooden timbers—the way a pig in a blanket carved out of marble is beautiful.
“Cell IV,” whose doors enclose a very finely carved pink marble ear across from a wood block with a large clock-like disk leaning against the wall, evokes a psychiatrist’s office, inviting the viewer to lean into the scene and whisper her secrets to the aural vessel. One of the largest and most sinister pieces in the retrospective, “Cell (Choisy)” (1990-93), encloses a marble scale model of the artist’s childhood home in a cage with dirty windows; a guillotine is poised above the only entry to the structure. Embedded in the structure of this cage and other cells, mirrors fracture the scene inside, imposing fractured, partial views on the visitor.
The soft sculptures, at the end of an arduous climb to the topmost level of the Guggenheim, have something of the taxidermy form to them. Not only are textile heads and bodies on display (as though hunting trophies, scientific specimens, or cadavers ready for autopsy), but certain stacked wood sculptures are reincarnated in quilted fabric blocks. The patchwork nature of the soft sculpture is an effective proxy for the nature of memory and the rediscovery of earlier forms and themes. The familiar textures of cloth, coupled with the explicit representations of human bodies, renders these sculptures perhaps the most viscerally disturbing pieces in the show. “Three Horizontals” (1998; fabric and steel), shows three pinkly patchworked figures coming apart at the seams and prepared for dissection on metal slabs. As they contract in size, their recognizability as human forms diminishes until the final, smallest figure is nothing more than a plucked chicken carcass with vestigial arm, leg, neck, and breast buds.
To be sure, Bourgeois maintains her sense of humor throughout—witness the last work of the show, “Couple IV” (1997): two headless and footless black fabric figures, one with a 19th century-era prosthetic leg, fornicate in a glass box. The overstuffed squeezability of these figures, sewn out of familiar, comfortable thermal waffle knit, is disturbingly at odds with the foreignness of the prosthesis and leaves one unprepared for the waffle-fabric scrotum nestled between the figures’ legs.
Overall, in surveying Bourgeois’ mastery of many different media, styles of presentation, and artistic reinvention, one must appreciate her chameleon-like nature, the best parallel for which is most certainly Madonna (or should we instead be saying that Madonna is pop culture’s Louise Bourgeois?). Though the presentation of the show, with all phases of Bourgeois’ long career represented, supports this reading, Bourgeois might as well have already cocked up her toes for all that the Guggenheim enshrines these different incarnations. Whereas the J.M.W. Turner show at the Metropolitan Museum down the street suffers from too much of a good thing, the Bourgeois show strikes this viewer as almost a little superficial; the arachnid in the center foyer notwithstanding, the absence of the spider series is a serious oversight. But perhaps, like a good actor, that is the mark of a good artist’s retrospective: leave them panting for more.
Adam Stennett. Four Mice in Diagonal Pipe. 2003. Oil on linen, 36 x 36 inches
Adam Stennett. Nutmeg (Myristica fragrans). 2008. Acrylic on paper, 30 x 44 inches
I am at a fabulous graduate school for art history.
I am female.
I own two fabulous cats.
I live in New York City with a fabulous roommate who works at a museum.
I work part-time at a fabulous art gallery.
I am fabulous (check the header).
I am a huge dork.
Parents
Professors who write recommendations for jobs and internships
Potential employers at museums, galleries, and universities
Roommates
Friends of friends
Dating
Drinking
General stupidity
Things about people/jobs/work/etc that piss me off
Random absurdity
Art
Cats
Movies/music/etc (all that culture besides art)
Things that I think are fabulous about people/jobs/work/etc
I can't wait.
It's now 6pm and I haven't eaten since midnight the night before. GET IN MY MOUTH, SALTINES!
I am unsuccessful.
Back in fifth grade, I thought getting a cast would be really cool.
Mask with Encircling Horns
Pipibudze Mask
Gong Mask
Mask with Trunk (Elephant)
Antelope Mask
