I was going to write a review about this show but I made a Tik Tok instead.
https://vimeo.com/rockulius/review/348504178/383b4fbc43
“A lot of intention is being drained out of Artwork right now” — Abbass Akhavan
Akhavan installation is about the humanities living under a cruel despot. America is currently living under a cruel despot.
Akhavan installation at the Wattis Institute demonstrated his desire to provoke mildly
It’s a mild provocation
said of his art he can explain what is already there
What does it say about his audience that he made this art?
Simple explanation: we did this, Americans destroyed the museum.
He’s like here, share in the horror of having your treasures looted.
Be an I Iraqi, and see your museum torn apart.
Maybe you would like to know what it’s like to be in a looted museum.
The prized artifact now made of cement and grass.
To the side, a bed of grass, a fire hazard. “An incendiary situation possibly.” To the other hand a mirror, a black mirror. I n the photo referenced a tv likely.
Now a mirror for us to see ourselves. Don’t forget what happens when freedom comes to your town. Look at yourself, place yourself in their shoes.
What was it like for an artist, museum personal to walk into their precious museum and see it dismembered, mutilated, tortured.
Now Akhavan is the torturer. I soft torturer, executing our memory or instead of forgetfulness.
Hey, remember this?
Remember the fall of Bagdad, you art lovers. You know he happened.
He’s teaching us, giving us a history lesson.
In the months preceding the 2003 Iraq war, starting in December and January, various antiquities experts, including representatives from the American Council for Cultural Policy were clear. They asked the Pentagon and the UK government to ensure the museum’s safety from both combat and looting. But no promises were made.
The U.S. forces did not bomb the site.
Thefts took place between April 10 and 12
The cast for folly opened April 9th, 2019
16 years and one day after the event
Donald Rumsfeld, speaking about the museum’s looting, said “stuff happens”[12] and “to try to pass off the fact of that unfortunate activity to a deficit in the war plan strikes me as a stretch,” and described the period of looting in general as “untidiness.”
A few days later, agents of the FBI were sent to Iraq to search for stolen Museum property. UNESCO organized an emergency meeting of antiquities experts on April 17, 2003, in Paris to deal with the aftermath of the looting and its effects on the global art and antiquities market.
Many in the audience do remember; many college-age students are now possibly too young to know.
He’s a reenacted, a teacher, a preserver of memories.
Maybe in another timeline, he would have bee the staff at the museum. Perhaps as an artist or an expert on Iraq.
Notes on Abbas Akhavan
CCA Spring Semester: Artist in Residence
Collaboration with CCA and The Wattis Institute
1983 Anne Hatch residency:
Ann Hatch, Founding Owner, September 2011 — present
Ann is a native San Franciscan and longtime supporter and advocate for the Bay Area creative community. In 1983 she founded Capp Street Project, a nationally recognized artist residency program. In 1997, together with Robert and Margrit Mondavi, Ann co-founded the Oxbow School, an independent semester arts-based
High school for national students in Napa, CA. Ann currently serves on the United States Artists’ Board of Trustees. She has served as the Chair of Trustees for California College of the Arts (2005 — 2009) and on the boards of arts organizations including: the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN (since 1973), The Fabric Arts Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, PA (2009 — 2015), the Berkeley Art Museum (1996 — 99), Oakland Museum of California (1995 — 99), and the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA (1992 — 99).
Ann M. Hatch is a San Francisco native and long-time philanthropist in the areas of civic enhancement, arts, and education. She served as chairman of the board of California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has also served on the boards of the Berkeley Art Museum; the Oakland Museum of California; the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA; Intersection for the Arts; the Walker Art Center; and the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center. Ms. Hatch co-founded the Oxbow School in 1997 — an independent high school for the arts in Napa, California — and the Capp Street Project, a nationally recognized artist residency program. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University and the School for Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Salvador Dalí painted your picture when you were a young girl. How did you know him?
My mother commissioned a portrait of us in 1958, so we went to live in his village for a month. It was huge fun.
Did you ever want to be an artist yourself?
I did go to art school, but it was not my calling. I loved the process but did not have a story to tell.
Grant-making organization United States Artists (USA) has just announced the appointment of Ann Hatch to its board of trustees.
Abbas describes himself as an Artist Away or an Away Artist. He was boasting that he’s an artist with a new permanent studio. He did inhabit the studio I was going to use for my advancement review, but there was a smaller area that became available, it worked out fine.
Abbas works on a line of work that intersects the idea of communities.
He offers a unique critical perspective.
“How do you cool down soup? By revolving a small part from the whole exposing it to the air. And returning it. In repetition, the whole but the part that you intend to eat becomes cool.”
What’s The poetic ephemeral?
Conservation versus conversation. About Abbas Akhavan: a cast for a fly, An Installation at the Wattis Institute.
He describes his most active muscle as his resistance to teaching.
The Tactics of Torture and The Body in Pain by Elane Scary.
He’s interested in etymology using the example of
house
hospitable
hospital
hostage
hostile
2006 war
High Production-Responding to the Environment
Authors he likes:
Paul Macarthy
Paul McCarthy (born August 4, 1945) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Mona Hatoum Mona Hatoum (Arabic: منى حاطوم; born 1952), is a Palestinian multimedia and installation artist who lives in London, United Kingdom.[1]
Paula Rossler
Martha Rosler is an American artist. She works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture.
The friend was a guard at a jail — described shivs to him
Did own research
Replicated them — Prison rape — torture
Host — Make Shift Objects
Titles are the medium
The fragment was contaminated/ it could not return to the real
Garbage — What art can render
Prisons are domestic — elastic
Labor Pain — Rodin’s the thinker
Furniture — Chair
Objects — of the home — betrays the tortured are used to the domestic
De materialized
Art v. Garbage / Tools. Intention
What do you want to do?
Fist — dough fist — punch — weapon
Tools and technology about Andy Warhols A- B at SFMOMA
What’s shown in a Vitrine — Care into harm
The care that goes into making weapons — a spoon carefully crafted, the carefully crafted again into a sharp prison shiv.
Ghost/ Gust/ Guest/ Host
Mona Hatun Art Residency in Spain
Was called the enemy/ having something to do with a soccer game.
Color-Coded fabrics are flaring up to patriotism.
Theoretical Writing — theoretical
Prove me right for sad reasons.
See something, not a flag.
Delfina Foundation 2012 — giving money to leftist revolutionary writers.
IN CONVERSATION: ABBAS AKHAVAN AND MARK RAPPORT
25/10/2012
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
Iran Heritage Foundation
Canada House Arts Trust
Delfina Foundation, 31 Catherine Place.
Based in the heart of London, Delfina Foundation is an independent, non-profit foundation dedicated to facilitating artistic exchange and developing creative practice through residencies, partnerships, and public programming.
Delfina Foundation is a non-political and non-grant-making foundation.
create career-defining research and commissions, and
The Third Line is a Dubai based art gallery that represents contemporary Middle Eastern artists locally, regionally, and internationally.
Represented artists include: Abbas Akhavan, Ala Ebtekar, Amir H. Fallah, Babak Golkar, Farah Al Qasimi, Farhad Moshiri, Fouad Elkoury, Hassan Hajjaj, Hayv Kahraman, Huda Lutfi, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Laleh Khorramian, Lamya Gargash, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Pouran Jinchi, Rana Begum, Sahand Hesamiyan, Sara Naim, Sherin Guirguis, Shirin Aliabadi, Slavs and Tatars, Sophia Al-Maria, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Youssef Nabil and Zineb Sedira.
Study for a garden — get a key — invasive native plant species — an
oxymoron. — There are no entries in the thesaurus for this word.
Mid 17th century: from Greek oxumōron, neuter (used as a noun) of oxumōros ‘pointedly foolish’, from Oxus ‘sharp’ + mōros ‘ stupid.’
Territorial use of plant life.
The commonsHearding animal theft — landscape and garden overlap
The house is like a body
Equilibrium goes off
Makeshift — water-born terrorism
Native Grown Terrorist — horticulture tools of torture/
The English ivy is the most invasive plant species.
“Research is Funny” — Abbas
Compost percolate over time.
sprinklers are used to keep homeless out of parks
London pride is the civil — the garden (v.) of the world.
Dirt Table
Feeling that there should be a body
Absurd work
Smells and Acoustics
Vegetation — animals — war
Variations on a garden — Cedar — a broom handle
Can be a torch
The hedging continued at Block garden.
The scale of the room is indecipherable.
Museum question am I an audience or a trespasser.
“Review — I did not see it; it was so normal.”
Naturalize the way you’re maneuvering in space.
Donate trees to schools
“Desire Path”
Trees in a dead zone
With the help of gardeners, the work altered.
French Sensibility
Opened the walking path — small acts of cynicism or sadism
Etiquette rather than oppression
“Study for a curtain “
“Cover a pit trap.”
Raft or Grid
Site specific — omnipresent
PRACTICE REINSTATES MODEL OFF EXPERTISE
Depends on the sense of what tap
70 % information — 30% total disaster.
Material v. Enchantment
Hang around too long, Variations on Ghosts and guests.
House haunted
“Islands” Dubai — global economic track
Dubai Markets itself any it’s aerial views
Out of the many artificial islands, only two are functioning.
After 911 there was a lot of buying of art and gold.
Economy Boost — for sale
Unfinished buildings everywhere
Not performative
First, come — best death
Xerox — veracity
Originally Nomads — Like Abbas’s
Roof poetic pieces
Drone footage
“Kids, cat, one dog.”
Based on roof messages for aircraft lift off.
New Orleans
Second Nature When the ax struck the tree — the tree said the handle made from my body.
Playing telephone
plywood from another gallery
Animal — viewing devices
Taxidermy Animal Ethical — made a point of this.
Animal — a stand-in for the present
truest form
a portal into something else
David Sedique Foundation
http://www.artslettersandnumbers.com/programs ????
“Great ability to make things looks like they are already are.”
Dirt llamas feet
Cello musical sheets sound like a donkey
Rhino — plaster mask on poached elephants.
Long Broven
Research 2003 — Iraq work
Blue Shield Unesco building — Jasper Johns
Shield on the wall placed on the roof.
Bronze is going to become relevant again.
Ephemeral Material — bronze is promiscuous — not in a sex shame way
Bronze shapeshifts from political leader to the next.
Horticulture images in Berlin — Tigris in the Euphrates
Shown in cotton bed sheets
Inventory — funeral practice
looks like a mass grave — or condition reporting — art space
shown with a Black wall — three chairs
projected on the far left — videos of soldiers returning home
Studying a pattern of a pebble or study a wave — Abbas’s says he’s the pebble.
Sizes to be nature — equilibrium
(rare)
of you not about me — more significant infrastructure that governs and patterns your life.
Iraq too personally — I’m the Pebble.
Don’t want to be the receiving gaze back to them.
Be dumb about it in some ways.
“A lot of intention is being drained out of Artwork right now.”
Flow — sweep the floor mop the floor
Start — depends on the site
smell conveys feeling
Lilly bad living
how much of a footprint
before it sinks you
Recreating the site within site — based on a photograph
“People disseminate information to me.”
Learn from being an idiot
curiosity not strategy.
Pretend there’s not.
The gallery later as a bowie
Let them swim
go to the label
Stemming into
Artists don’t have to teach
Notes on Meeting Abbas’s in a social practice seminar
He said that his family had a lot of confrontation, and he often played the mediator.
Personal notes on Abbas
Abbas’s seems very curated
He struck me as intelligent and poetic. Knowledgeable in fundamental and formative artists practice.
I had a critique with Abbas, and he first started by asking what is it, in physical space. Leads me to believe that he is a materialist.
Notes on his show at the watts
Materials seem important.
The cast for a folly can have several meanings, and the catalog printed backward.
The show itself is a reconstruction or recreation of a photograph. The photograph is of the lobby of the national museum at Bagdad.
After the fall of Sadam Hussien, the national museum looted, and over 70,000 artifacts stolen. Upon offering amnesty, many of the objects returned. Often they returners would state that they were trying to keep the artifacts safe from looters. FIN.
National Museum of Iraq — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Iraq
About — Workshop Residence. https://workshopresidence.com/pages/about
500 Capp Street | ANN HATCH. https://500cappstreet.org/people/board-of-directors/ann-hatch/
San Francisco Patron Ann Hatch on Collecting Art, and …. https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/ann_hatch-51372
Razwana Akram appointed to Delfina Foundation’s Strategic …. https://smab.co.uk/razwana-akram-delfina-foundation-strategic-advisory-panel/
About | The Third Line | Art Gallery Dubai. http://www.thethirdline.com/about/
The Third Line — About | Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/thethirdline/about
