Pulp Art: The Robert Lesser Collection

In 1901 a group of nine artists and a businessman founded the Society of Illustrators with the object to promote the art of illustration and to hold exhibitions.

The 90 works on display at the Museum of American Illustration courtesy the society are now a part of the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art, promised gift of Robert Lesser, who started collecting pulp paintings, comic books, and comic-character toys in the 1950s. As a student at the University of Chicago, Lesser’s literature studies combined with his fascination with popular culture kindled his interest in studying and collecting pulp art and comic memorabilia.

In 1975 he wrote ‘A Celebration of Comic Art and Memorabilia’, an informational collector’s guide; in 1997 he published ‘Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines’, a full-color collection of pulp paintings and history that includes expert interpretation.

The style of artwork created for pulp magazines is often compared to Norman Rockwell’s cover designs for the “Saturday Evening Post,” but the character of the paintings was quite disparate from Rockwell’s jovial depictions of everyday life. Pulp Art flaunted unsettling images of violence, racism, sex, and crime. The publishing houses that produced pulp fiction destroyed much of the artwork produced for the magazines after printing. The images weren’t suitable for display in homes or museums so artists and auctioneers deemed them worthless. Tens of thousands of pulp paintings were created, out of which only a small number survive today.

The virtual National Museum of American Illustration, where artworks from the ‘Golden Age of American Illustration’ and from other eras are presented in the ‘Gilded Age’ architectural frame of Vernon Court (1898). Visitors can appreciate our American Imagist Collection as a medley of beautiful pictures, but also as a historical overview of our unique culture.

These works sum up the country’s visual history, as if illustrating American civilization. The original paintings and drawings in the Collection were created for reproduction in books, periodicals, advertisements, and art prints. In the process, illustrators created iconic images, a mythology of history, and a virtual catalog of bygone styles and days.

Prayas Abhinav’s unconventional curatorial project at The Guild, Mumbai

The “sidereal time” along with its voice may transform into anything that it seeks – with tools like desire, recklessness and confusion towards this. Space then will be persuaded to take on many other contours, and will dream with the things it contains. The reason why perhaps time cannot be cast in any permanent mold – but for nostalgia, for some time!

We witness fracturing of our experience; into the time that that we sell to earn our keep and also the time we don’t. All is work time, what’s the “sidereal”? ‘If all time is eternally present, All time is unredeemable,’ - Buirnt Norton, T.S. Eliot

‘On The Sidereal’ is an unconventional project that takes place at Mumbai’s Guild Art Gallery from 18 to 26 July, 2011. The public exhibit will be on view from July 27 until August 28. Among the participating artists are Eelco Wagenaar, Amitabh Pandey, Asim Waqif, Kiran Subbaiah, Tahireh Lal and Prayas Abhinav who has also curated the project.

Prayas Abhinav is based in Bangalore.He has honed his art skills at the Center for Experimental Media Arts as part of the Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology in Bangalore. Having taught at the Srishti School, he has also been a researcher at s (CEMA), apart from being a faculty at Dutch Art Institute and Center for Environmental Planning and Technology. He has received fellowships from Sarai/ CSDS (2005), Center for Media Studies (2006), and Openspace India (2009).

His projects have been presented at Exit Art, New York (2010); Periferry, Guwahati (2010); Futuresonic, Manchester (2009); Wintercamp, Amsterdam (2009); 48c: Public Art Ecology (2008); Urban Climate Camp, ISEA (2008); Khoj (2008); Sensory Urbanism, Glasgow (2008); The Paris Accord (2006); and First Monday, Chicago (2006) among others. He has also taken part in the exhibitions like ‘Continuum Transfunctioner’, exhibit320 in New Delhi (2010); ‘Contested Space - Incursions‘, Gallery Seven Arts, Delhi (2010), and ‘Astonishment of Being’ at the Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata (2009).

Understanding the dynamics and mechanics of time

‘On The Sidereal’ is an interesting project arranged by Mumbai-based Guild Art Gallery. Curated by Prayas Abhinav, it is based on a premise that time is the material with which we can construct our waking experience.

What would we really make of it if the fountain of youth; eternity itself, suddenly lands up at the doorstep? Amidst things that surround us, we try to decipher meaning. And we exchange the time available on our hands with things we aspire for. Jung's Alchemist happened to seek a spiritual process within the world of material things. Things that rise above their very thingness to be nothing at the same time, were the desire and hope of many.

If that chase was to be cut short, what is it that we would replace it with? Time. Just empty time. Sheer void; a thing that falls into an infinite abyss… And for now, to stay with the curious process of knowing the abyss a bit better, we will term it ‘sidereal’. It sidesteps our knowing of multiple realities and universalities, in a way, but still forms a part of our existence and experience.

How do you then plug a void plugging a void?: R. D. Laing

What should we do after de-shackling time from its intrinsic commodity exchange value? Not many can bear naked time’s weight of. We seek to dullen, diffuse and fragment our awareness of it. Also, media creates a dreamy realm for our waking selves that placates us, offers us a sense of periodic piecemeal victory and look to keep us engaged, locking us in, and preventing our ‘sidereality’ to be brought to life.

Catharsis is achieved only from a liberal pollination of desires as well as use-values for our sidereal time lapse. Looking to camouflage a personal theatre on the inside with disengagement and boredom is a defensive tactic from the barrage of the tabloid newspaper and reality TV. It is obvious that the everyday & the mundane do hide a performance space of adventure, poetry and passion, in very private envelopes of time.

A rising interest in Web based art buying

Here are a few instance, suggesting the growing interest in Web based art buying:

• The VIP Art Fair, a weeklong online event that mimicked the mechanics of a traditional art fair with virtual booths, attracted a large international group of blue-chip galleries last January and, despite some well-publicized technical glitches, was seen as a success by dealers and collectors.
  
  
• Art.sy, a venture that will use Pandora-like technology to help art buyers find pieces and the galleries selling them, has already lined up heavyweight supporters like the dealer Larry Gagosian and Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter. And most major auction houses also now allow online bidding for sales happening in the physical world.
  
  
• The average price of an artwork won through an Artnet auction is about $6,800 now, up from $5,600 last year, which wouldn’t come close to paying the commission on most high-end auction sales. But Artnet is one of many companies that believe the time might finally be right for a sizable portion of the art market to begin migrating online, the way sales for specialized items like rare books and antiques already have.

Main reason for starting to buy through online auctions (one recent acquisition was a small Elaine de Kooning work on paper) for some has been the prices. An online art buyer explains: “My sense is that a lot of the sellers aren’t taking a haircut by having to go through galleries, and so those savings are coming to me.”

Artnet chief executive, Hans Mr. Neuendorf, said that while they operated in a different world from Sotheby’s and Christie’s, he believed that it had only begun to mine a huge swath of the secondary art market that will move onto the Web. “I think they’re very happy doing what they’re doing; we’re not even on their radar,” he said of the major auction houses. “And that’s good,” he added: “because it gives us time to catch up…”

(Information courtesy: 'A Resurgence in Art Buying Over the Web', Randy Kennedy of The New York Times)

Art buying online is reviving

Art sellers have been waiting for it to happen for many years. Sotheby’s tried online-only sales for lower-priced works in the late 1990s, but, like Artnet, it abandoned the initiative a few years later, convinced that buyers simply were not willing to pay four- or five-figure sums for art they had not seen in person.

In an insightful news report (A Resurgence in Art Buying Over the Web), Randy Kennedy of The New York Times, notes; “While online bidding and fairs and services like Art.sy essentially serve as a digital bridge to bricks-and-mortar galleries and auction houses, Artnet officials say that much of the art market below a certain price level will soon operate almost entirely in the virtual realm.

Auctions on Artnet take place around the clock, eBay-style (though the lots close only on weekdays, so far), and the company vets sellers and relies on their photographs and descriptions of the provenance and quality of artworks. A buyer, who pays a 15 percent commission, usually sees only a single picture of the work and often doesn’t talk to the seller, who could be an art dealer, a private collector or an artist’s family. (Sellers pay a 10 percent commission.) After the auction, the buyer pays the seller, and the work is shipped.

“It’s one thing to point out to someone where they can find something and give them a gallery’s phone number,” said the company’s chief executive, Hans Neuendorf, referring to many other online art-selling services. “It’s another thing to make a sale online. That’s a sea change, in my opinion, and it’s happening.”

The CEO added that several factors led Artnet, a public company based in Berlin, with offices in New York, to venture back into the field. One was the comfort people have begun to feel with online commerce in general, he said. But the more important factor was the considerable increase in the last decade in the number of people who spend money on contemporary art as a pastime or as an investment.

(Information courtesy: 'A Resurgence in Art Buying Over the Web', Randy Kennedy of The New York Times)

Is online art rising up the popularity and demand scale?

Buyers tend to see online art sales as more accessible and transparent than sales in the gallery world, with its reputation, fair or not, for being a kind of exclusionary club. And as many online art vendors like to point out, there are far more $5,000 and $10,000 prints and photographs in the world than there are $50,000,000 Warhols changing hands at marquee auctions.

According to Michael Moriarty, the chairman of Skate’s Art Market Research, a consulting firm that closely follows Artnet’s business, his analysts had been skeptical about Artnet’s ability to make online auctions a significant part of its business.

In an analysis of the trend, Randy Kennedy, The New York Times writer, states in an article; “Artnet has long been known as the Bloomberg terminal of the auction business; it made its name even before the advent of the Web by building a database of historical auction prices that now numbers in the millions, on which collectors, dealers and auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s rely.

“But the company’s online auction business has now moved more than 6,500 pieces, generating $2.5 million in commissions on $12 million in sales for Artnet in 2010, including a few high-dollar outliers, like a Richard Prince painting that sold for $295,000 (before commissions). The business is not yet profitable for Artnet, but the company says that is only because it has been spending considerable money to develop the auctions.

It projects that they will begin to turn a profit toward the end of next year. “Now it seems that the technology has reached a point, and the market has evolved to a point, where this kind of business is really gaining traction,” said Mr. Moriarty, a former lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Of Artnet, he added, “It’s not going to be long before they’re going to have to worry about a lot of competition.”

(Information courtesy: 'A Resurgence in Art Buying Over the Web', Randy Kennedy of The New York Times)

An artist who seeks inspiration from her experiences and socio-political concerns

Whether painting her own world, portraying her immediate realm (in the 1970s and ’80s) as her children grew up, or trying to engage with the burning issue of dowry deaths, in her sensitive serial folios, of a girl who died because of the indifferent of her marital family, Nilima Sheikh seeks alternative ways of expression.

The sensitive artist further counts the presence of parallel textual narratives as well as performative forms in her practice. She has also done illustrations for children’s books apart from painting sets and backdrops for dramas; quietly letting these experiences seep into her work: sometimes large, hanging captivating canvas scrolls richly painted on both sides and sometimes miniatures on paper. Through means like oral poetry tradition, folklore, contemporary historical annotations and her own experiences, she has explored the variables of varied feminine experiences.

The artist has stated: “I’ve no problem in (sharing) emotional views or using sentiment. For me it is important. But I also don’t wish to just put it out there on the wall, as something to be stared at all the time and amongst other things. I didn’t want to trivialize (the issue).” In a broader context, Nilima Sheikh maintains that she doesn’t reject modernism as a mode of our work, sensibility etc. However, there are some things one needs to find a way around, as she explains.

“Modernism does allow some freedoms, albeit it has certain closures. And I feel my job (as an artist) is to work around them - open up, open up & open up. In modernism, illustration is a bad word; so is sentiment and maybe even narrative. You open them up. So in a sense, that is the constant effort.

“Also with history, and certain stereotype in artistic expression: of for example, a lovely tree with a moon hidden behind it. That would appear one of a worst order to depict something romantic, but therein lies the challenge as one needs to ‘uncorrupt’ it so form has been a significant aspect of my artistic struggle, in a way, to say something. The choice is part of the whole context and content. One must be striving to constantly change them; they are not necessarily fixed things, and need to be reread and reactivated, she sums up.