Several years ago when I went back to the Anne Frank house, I was struck again by her room-when she first pasted the photos on the wall she declared it to be (I’m paraphrasing here?) like a "huge drawing" and it really does work this way… I also realized that I had spent a large part of my career making shows of open-ended narratives, by juxtaposing "high" and "low" images together in installations of paintings and drawings that have a distant cousin in that room. Certainly there is a melancholy associated with any photo of an almost-lost moment, and in the patina of time as the yellowing clippings became almost the same color as the mustard-palate wallpaper behind it, the collective peeling look brought out the synaesthetic emotions of the whole environment. I found an affinity in how she was able to juxtapose art reproductions with pop iconography, and, by being on the same plane and surface, make powerful historical images equatable (and more personable) by bringing them next to charming illustrations and photos from her everyday world. When I first went to the Anne Frank house in the late 80’s after college, I was deeply moved by the experience, and in particular, was struck by the way that she had pasted, salon-style, images that gave her optimism, contemplation, and hope in her room. This is a micro-managed world of the install itself, with high/low imagery mixed together, that I have truly painted in all these years to give myself hope, and as a young American when I first saw the wall on a trip after just graduating college, I had deep empathy for not only Anne but her writing and art (as did much of America, who read before Judy Blume her story, not just of the holocaust, but of her coming of age as a young independent woman and writer).įrom a letter in 2009 to Daniel Belasco, then curator at the Jewish Museum in NY, for an article in book published in 2012 as “Suturing In: Anne Frank as Conceptual Model for Visual Art,” in Anne Frank Unbound: Media/Imagination/Memory, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Indiana University Press. Like her (but in MUCH less of a tragic way of course!) I grew up with posters salon-style hung in my room, mixing high and low, to give me hope, and continue to this day to live in environments of salon-style hangings of my own and friend’s work, among many other images, that feng shui my world. The painting, of a wall in the Anne Frank House that remains basically as it was when Anne first wheat-pasted the images on it to give her hope, is a “key” or “legend” to the map of images in the installation itself. Although when I initially conceived of “My American Dream” to not have images that referenced things outside of our country, Stuart Comer felt strongly otherwise, especially in regard to this painting, which he felt was essential and was right.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |