Eve Cocks: Sara Cwynar’s work brings to mind Marshall McLuhan’s notion of ‘social myths’. In his post-WW2 study of popular culture (The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man) McLuhan republishes actual advertisements to examine their true implications and comment on how the ‘collective public mind’ is being manipulated, exploited and controlled by the ideal and utopian world that America mythically projects through luscious ads.

Sara Dolfi Agostini: Her research is grounded in the interests of the Picture Generation, a group of American artists who came of age in the 70s. Their work was theorized by art scholar and curator Douglas Crimp – who sadly passed away a month ago – as an exploration into the constructed nature of images, offering a triangulation between media, art and society. Crimp curated a seminal exhibition on their work and preoccupations, Pictures, which opened at Artists Space in New York in 1977 with Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith. Later, other artists were associated with these interests, including renowned Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and of course Barbara Kruger, who like Sara Cwynar worked in the media industry before becoming a full-time artist. In fact, just after University, Cwynar worked three years as a graphic designer at the New York Times, an experience that proved relevant to understand how image-culture works today.

EC: Colour plays an integral role in Cwynar’s work – not just aesthetically but even conceptually.

SDA: Colour carries meaning and it is the primary element of representation, not just in visual culture but also in design, fashion, social networks and media images – all domains that Cwynar is actively investigating. We see colour even before we recognize shapes, that is why abstract art can be so powerful too. Also, our perception is influenced by time, context, nuances and terminology. Cwynar hovers between black and white and extremely saturated prints, echoing the past and the cyclical life and death of colour schemes, technology and taste, seizing the attention on the irony behind common behavioral patterns and long-lasting prejudices. Gold – NYT April 22, 1979 (alphabet stickers), a seminal work exhibited here at BLITZ, shows an arrangement of gilded watches and letters laid on an equally gilded background. It seemingly questions the reverence we grant to gold. Not yellow, but gold, a specific colour whose value in the viewer’s eyes never changes with the passage of time. A few days ago, we held a children’s workshop The Lives and Loves of Images. One of the main topics of discussion was actually colour. We immediately found ourselves immersed in Cwynar’s world. Is red a powerful colour? Can boys wear pink? And what makes gold expensive? All of a sudden everything we thought we knew about colour was at stake.

EC: Perfume bottles, cosmetics, towels, bags, and Tracy (Cwynar’s model/muse) feature repetitively throughout the show.

SDA: Cwynar is a compulsive collector of objects and pictures that find new life and purpose in her labor-intensive process of image-making. She often appropriates encyclopedic and commercial imageries of no artistic value, mostly from the 60s and 70s, and deftly assembles them into original compositions intertwining photography, sculpture and collage. When it comes to objects, she looks at commodities like makeup, trinkets and objects related to the heavy advertised wellness culture – which have easier access to our daily routine because they are cheap and directly affect our identity. If you look closer to the works, you will also notice that some of the objects are actually images laying under a glass, a hint to wonder if what we know, mostly from the internet, has any relation to the real thing. Does it sound like a provocation, if that still even matters? Here, Cwynar tapped into the way visual culture – its technological evolution and digital circulation– has revolutionized our relationship to the physical world to the point of altering our sense of reality.

Detail from Cover Girl, 2018
16 mm film transferred to video, 9′ 17″
Courtesy of: the artist, Foxy Production (New York), Cooper Cole (Toronto), and BLITZ (Valletta).

EC: The flowers in the Rose series are not impeccably portrayed as they initially seem to be; they are naturally represented, showing early signs of decay.

SDA: Pictures, whether artistic or vernacular, are never more than a mere imitation of nature, and as shown in the Rose series, our ways of looking at them are also biased by how we employ colours in society and culture. For example, when William Eggleston pioneered colour in photographs that were not intended for the advertising industry, critics condemned his work as extremely vulgar, because back in the 70s the privileged status of art was only granted to black and white photography. It took years to change the perception of the viewers despite the backing of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which organized his solo show in 1976. Fast forward to Cwynar’s Rose series; here she employs macro photography – usually used to shoot plants and insects – to pay homage to an icon of natural beauty, yet, the colours look so saturated and synthetic that these real roses resemble home décor textured fabric. Moreover, the pink, magenta and red colours mentioned in the titles of the three prints evoke standardized commercial nuances, further challenging the ability of the viewer to distinguish authenticity in a simulated world.

EC: One of the many sticky notes that populate A Rococo Base reads “The Baroque mostly resembles the actual arrangement of the world… there is stuff everywhere.” How does this relate to her current exhibition?

SDA: I think Cwynar was deeply influenced by the reflection of French writer Milan Kundera on kitsch and image culture. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Kundera implies that kitsch is the true engine of humanity, because it allows the daily horrors of life to become acceptable. In other words, being surrounded by kitsch stuff triggers the power of distraction – and evasion. It nurtures social emotions and collective unconsciousness. Today kitsch is everywhere, on the internet and in the physical world, and suddenly we keep talking about attention deficit disorders as the conditions of our time. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant – quoted by Cwynar in her films – argues that finding comfort in hoarding mostly low-cost objects of all sorts might be an attempt to overcome feelings of personal powerlessness in a world that is more and more in the hands of corporations and the ultra-rich.

EC: GOOD LIFE also focuses on the representation of women; on how women have been portrayed throughout history via art and mass media images.

SDA: Tracy, the model in Tracy (Gold Circle), looks straight into the camera with a serious gaze. The pose is unnatural, her hair is undone, her feet covered with a green towel hinting at the marketing cult drawing women into fitness, from yoga to spinning. She is surrounded by – and layered with – famous art reproductions of female bodies, mostly naked, along with objects hinting at the marketing cult luring women into beauty and make up. In today’s world of social media, it is all about lifestyle, and superficial appearance has become a way to a sense of belonging. But it is an empty, hollow belonging that can create sadness, anxiety, melancholy or depression. The popular quote attributed to American artist Andy Warhol, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”, truly applies to our current times. Social media supplies a platform for anyone to become an instant celebrity and be “the buzz”, the one “everybody is talking about”. Yet, in Tracy (Gold Circle) Cwynar is making it harder for the viewer to interpret her model’s celebrity moment, suggesting an attempt to go beyond the superficial, beyond the excessive standardization and commodification of female bodies in our current times.

EC: Cwynar’s analysis on the historic objectification of women is made explicit in Cover Girl. I found her comment on how “most of our information on make-up comes from a hostile tradition written by men regarding women” rather pungent.

SDA: Cover Girl, her most recent film, is narrated by a woman and Cwynar’s voice makes only a few appearances. Whilst images of Tracy getting ready for her portraits intertwine with footage of a make-up company, the viewer learns that the underlying principles for the cosmetics industry were actually set by men for women. The script doesn’t offer any specific stances into identity politics, only shares other pieces of information about the pleasure and desire to be attractive, the use of green in Cezanne’s paintings, and the psychological overtones of the colour red. The narrator mentions that cosmetics could be as old as 5000 BC and its history is written by men for women; this apparently bare finding carries an unexpected negative connotation. It is a wake-up moment. Do we own our red lips?

GOOD LIFE BY SARA CWYNAR IS CURATED BY SARA DOLFI AGOSTINI AND IT IS CURRENTLY ON SHOW AT BLITZ, VALLETTA, UNTIL 20 SEPTEMBER 2019.

SARA CWYNAR
Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver, BC) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT; a Bachelor of Design from York University, Toronto, ON; and studied English Literature at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. In between her studies, Cwynar has served a three-year stint as a graphic designer at the New York Times (2012-14) and was later commissioned two covers of the New York Times Magazine, in 2015 and 2018. At the moment, she is also working on a project for the MoMA, New York, USA. Solo exhibitions include: “Image Model Muse,” Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis (2018/19), traveled to Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee (2019); “Tracy,” Oakville Galleries, Oakville, ON, Canada (2018); “Soft Film,” MMKMuseum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2017); “Everything in the Studio Destroyed,” Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2013). Selected group exhibitions include: 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; “Mademoiselle,” Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain d’Occitane, Sète, France; “Mast Foundation for Photography Grant on Industry and Work,” Mast Foundation, Bologna, Italy (all 2018); “Hard to Picture: A Tribute to Ad Reinhardt,” Mudam, Luxembourg; “Subjektiv,” Malmö Konsthall, Sweden; “You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred,” Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (all 2017); “L’Image Volée,” Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2015/16); “Under Construction – New Positions in American Photography,” Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2015). Sara Cwynar published two books – Kitsch Encyclopedia (Blonde Art Books, 2014) and Pictures of Pictures (Printed Matter, 2014), and her works are in the permanent collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; MMKMuseum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam.

SARA DOLFI AGOSTINI
Sara Dolfi Agostini is an Italian-born contemporary art curator, writer and journalist. She currently holds the positions of adjunct faculty in the Master Degree for Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (since 2016) and advisory board member on photography for Triennale Milano (since 2017). She has worked for international institutions such as Manifesta (2008) and the International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara (2010), and co-curated the public art commission ArtLine Milano for the City of Milan (2013-16). Since 2008 she has been a regular contributor to the newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE, and has written for a number of publications including Elephant, Flash Art International, KLAT, Camera Austria, Rivista Studio, Il Giornale dell’Arte and Artribune. She moved to Malta in 2017, and shortly after she curated the presentation of Stuart Franklin in the group exhibition (Met)Afourisms (2018) at St James Cavalier in Valletta. At the end of 2018 she joined the curatorial team of Blitz Valletta, where she curated the solo exhibition of Rossella Biscotti and the group show Face with Tears of Joy with artists Cory Arcangel, Simon Denny, Andy Holden, Maurice Mbikayi, Alexandra Pace, Rob Pruitt, Paul Sochacki, Amalia Ulman, and Serena Vestrucci.

FEATURED IMAGE: Tracy (Gold Circle) by Sara Cwynar. Date: 2017. Medium: Dye Sublimation Print on Aluminum. Size: 38 x 30 inches. Photo Credit: Elisa von Brockdorff. Courtesy of: Sara Cwynar, Foxy Production (New York), Cooper Cole (Toronto), and BLITZ (Valletta).