Alfond Collection: Artists H-J

In 2009, Geoff Hargadon reacted to the financial crisis in a humorous but poignant way. He produced a sign in the vernacular of pawnshops—places looking for items of economic value, with no care for their intrinsic value. The sign read “CA$H for your WARHOL” and posted Hargadon’s own cell phone number. At first view, it could be read as an insiders’ joke, a play on “Cash for Gold” signs for the 1%, but then the artist’s phone started ringing.

Hargadon, who lives a multifaceted life (day job: wealth manager, avocation: Conceptual artist), uses photography as the primary medium for documenting his interventions in public space. Seminally affected by an exhibition of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, and later taken by street art, Hargadon’s Cash for Your Warhol project is a prime example of his merged influences.

The artist planted the first Cash for Your Warhol placard, CFYW Rose (2009), on the front lawn of the Rose Art Museum next to the Museum’s sign. The act was a critique of Brandeis University’s board’s proposal to sell off its venerable art collection to generate cash for their weakened endowment and close the museum’s doors as a cost-cutting measure. This was an affront to the very sanctity of art museums and their mission: to preserve and steward their contents for the public good. Using an artist’s leverage, Hargadon documented the sign and posted it online. And as Hargadon tacked up more signs on city telephone poles, others started taking digital notice, and the project spread virally.

After the initial sign, Hargadon fabricated more like it, as well as stickers and even billboards, and sited them in places where consumption of art (the neighborhoods surrounding art fairs) or the need of the community would imbue them with a particular tension between incongruity and sincerity. The messages still accumulate. Whether instigating those seeking to turn a profit or enticing the newly downtrodden or the would-be inheritor, Hargadon is bluntly pointing to the commodification of art and the questions it provokes about true value and preciousness. Furthermore, in taking his work to the street, Hargadon creates a conceptual graffiti, leveraging the existing cultural conditions to build a frame for his reflections.

-- Abigail Ross Goodman

Grassy patches near American roadways are often studded with small signs that offer a variety of products and services, including debt relief, miracle vitamins, and the opportunity to buy a new house. These placards are similar in form to the sign by Geoff Hargadon that is now represented in the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art. Like other Hargadon works, it offers a phone number for people to call if they desire to investigate his slogan “Cash for your Warhol.” If a caller chooses not to leave a message, he or she will receive an appreciative text. If a caller is bold enough to leave a recording, he or she just might become a part of a future work.

Hargadon, a conceptual artist, investment advisor, supporter of the arts, and cultural commentator, takes an ephemeral entity and makes it permanent by presenting transcriptions of the voicemails on metal plates. These new physical pieces are offered along with the actual audio of the callers that they memorialize, serving as proof for a disbelieving listener. Through this process of documentation the participants are granted agency and their candid responses—sometimes angry, often humorous—become immortalized. The act of leaving a voicemail offers callers an opportunity to air grievances that they might not present publicly, but ultimately those willing to call participate in a larger performance piece orchestrated by Hargadon. The physical manifestation of the work provides another playful element as the composition shares an aesthetic with ubiquitous plaques that offer dedications or relate specific purposes on the inside or outside of public buildings.

Hargadon began his Cash for Your Warhol project in response to Brandeis University’s 2009 proposal to sell the permanent collection of the Rose Art Museum, an institution particularly known for its holdings in postwar American art. This plan was met with protests as the works at the Rose Art Museum were viewed as a part of our cultural heritage, and therefore, priceless. Generous donors often give works to museums with the intention that they will be held in trust for the benefit of generations to come, not sold as if they were fungible assets. The Cash for Your Warhol series includes stickers, yard signs, and a website, as well as these zinc plates and audio components. Hargadon’s website reads, “We can help you sell your art fast. Our global network of investors has helped lots of art collectors in situations like yours. They can often make you a written offer within hours of contacting us, regardless of economic conditions, and have your problems solved within days.”[1] Hargadon’s distinctive aesthetic and appropriation of commercial language continues to evolve and provoke important questions about the power and validity of the contemporary art market.

--Amy Galpin

Carmen Herrera has been described as a “quiet warrior of her art” in her uncompromising commitment to abstraction over decades of scant recognition.[1] Born in Havana in 1915, she later moved to New York and then, in 1948, to Paris, where her leap to a pure form of abstraction was inspired by the Salon des Nouvelles Réalités, a society dedicated to the exhibition of abstract art. Although she painted steadily after settling in New York in 1954, her work was marginalized, a story, unfortunately, all too familiar for many women artists of her generation. Only recently has her important position in the history of geometric abstraction in the Americas been widely recognized, a testament not just to her fearless integrity and relentless focus, but to how the questions she has explored for much of her career—the expressive possibilities of color and abstraction—remain, in her hands, fertile and vital.

Herrera works in color and shape, driven by a quest for formal simplicity and a love of line. These three paintings in the Alfond Collection are consummate examples. The juxtaposition of asymmetric swatches of bold, electric colors—deep blue adjacent to crisp yellow—packs a punch in rhythm and spatial tension. The painting is alive: assertive and animated, optically charged as the edge between the two radiant colors oscillates with energy. Weight, balance, and proportion are held in check. 

Her placement of geometric shapes against areas of flat, saturated, unmodulated color—a brilliant green pentagon on white or the slenderest flash of white across the same vivid green—is euphoric and inviting. That white lozenge recedes long and deep, opening the picture plane up to a depth that immerses us in pure, unadulterated color. The green pentagon spills off the edge of the canvas: surface, color, and form appear as discrete building blocks and yet unite in perfect balance. Herrara’s are works about the essence of painting and the essential act of seeing.

--Edward Saywell

As a photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist, Alfredo Jaar is devoted to human rights issues. Originally from Chile, Jaar has situated his artistic practice in different areas of crisis and conflict across the globe––a Brazilian gold mine, a Vietnamese refugee detention center in Hong Kong, the Mexico-United States border, or toxic dumping sites in Nigeria. At the heart of each project is significant preliminary research. What distinguishes Jaar’s practice is his desire, while communicating human plights, to give visual form to the greater breadth of his subjects’ experience and thus reverse photojournalism’s casual objectification of human suffering.

Angel (2007) is a part of the artist’s ongoing interest in the African continent, specifically Rwanda, Sudan, South Africa, and Angola. In 2004 and 2005, Jaar visited Angola, where he met the subject of the photograph. They had been discussing Angola’s stark challenges, and the young man said that angels would protect the people of his country.

In the multipartite photograph, three nearly identical clouds, varying only in color intensity, float over a distant city behind the figure in the central panel as he points heavenward. His gaze follows his outstretched arm upward to the right. Dressed in a white T-shirt, with what seems to be a homemade Nike swoosh, an icon signifying “just do it,” the boy makes a popularized Western symbol of fortitude his own. Behind him, a low horizon line delineates urban sprawl in the distance, yet the scene is serene. Without any other contextualizing information, we wonder: Who is he? What is he pointing to? Jaar has situated the figure in twilight, the moment when the sun is below the horizon casting a soft, diffused glow in the sky. Whether alerting the viewer to the morning sun or the North Star, the young man, set against a luminous cloud that enhances his ethereal presence, points to change. The title identifies him as a heroic figure, a survivor, a beacon. Indeed, he himself becomes an angel, pointing to hope for a better future.

--Martina Tanga

In 1987, Alfredo Jaar staged A Logo for America, an intervention composed of electronic billboards in New York’s iconic Times Square. Once better known for its crime and peep shows, Times Square has come to symbolize hyberbolic experiences, and Jaar selected this site to call attention to our nationalistic assumptions and to conflicting definitions of the word “America.” In this disruptive work, images and text such as “This is not America” flash across a map of the continental United States on a massive public screen.  

In an interview two decades after the project, the artist commented on the misperception common to many US citizens: “[It] is so embedded in their education that the US is America, whereas the rest of the continent is erased. I think it is important to remember language, again, is an expression of reality, and language will change only when the reality changes. In this case the geopolitical reality is that this country dominates the entire hemisphere. If that doesn’t change, then language will never change.”[1]

Jaar’s five-part photo series documenting A Logo for America captures a short, continuous time frame. The photographs, displayed in a horizontal line, function as a type of moving image as the eye travels from one shot to another. Many of the same people appear in each photograph, suggesting that these pictures were taken during a single segment of the looped, one-minute video. The background presence of the famous Times Square Armed Forces recruiting station is a subtle reminder that the US military has intervened in no fewer than sixteen countries in the Americas.

Jaar created this work just five years after he arrived in New York in 1982. Although the installation was particularly resonant in the 1980s, a time of frequent US military engagement in Latin America (Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, Honduras, and Panama), it remains compelling today.

Throughout August 2014, A Logo for America was restaged in Times Square each evening from 11:57 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. (with a technical alteration, since Times Square signage had switched from light-bulb-enabled to L.E.D.-supported hardware.) Jaar stated at the time of the reenactment, “The fact that my work’s message is still relevant today means that the general public’s perception of the US-America relationship has stagnated for twenty-seven years, if not worsened.”[2] Jaar’s suite of documentary photographs allows viewers to engage with both the original presentation of the work and the continual implications of US hegemony.

--Amy Galpin

A Filipina maid who spends her days cleaning under conditions of modern-day slavery in Dubai stands forlornly in the desert, staring into the sand dunes. The journey into the desert is a fantasy, of course; in reality, the maid is not allowed to speak with anyone and is barely permitted to leave the house where she works. Even if her employer permitted her to quit, she would have to continue working in order to send home enough money to support her three children in the Philippines. The maid is trapped in this land of wealth by her poverty.[1] The still EMERALD CITY/CAPITAL (Playtime) captures one of five vignettes knit together in Isaac Julien’s 2013 video installation Playtime. The film’s other protagonists include an art advisor, a hedge fund manager, an Icelandic victim of the financial crisis, and the prominent auctioneer Simon de Pury. The stories are bound together by capital, which the film posits as the driving force behind our contemporary world.[2]

The face of capital that Julien emphasizes throughout the film is that of the art market. The art advisor extols art’s potential to generate large sums of money for its buyers; de Pury remarks on the resilience of art auctions in the face of the global recession and assures us that “it’s never too late” to become a collector. When the camera scans the artworks lining the walls of the apartment the maid is cleaning, it is clear that the art market is complicit in the capitalist system that makes some individuals extraordinarily wealthy and leaves others struggling for survival and dignity. Julien himself makes a brief appearance in the film during de Pury’s discussion of auctions, as if to confirm his own participation in this brutal structure.

Julien first rose to prominence within the London art world in the 1980s, creating films and videos that spoke to black and gay experience. In subsequent years, he has expanded his purview, but retains an interest in the lives of marginalized individuals whose stories are not usually told. Julien’s work often features those who have been forced away from their homes by capitalism—people who must subject themselves to peril and trauma in order to sustain their existences.[3] His Ten Thousand Waves (2010) tells the story of Chinese cockle pickers who drowned on an expedition, while Western Union: Small Boats (2007) addresses the journeys of Africans crossing the Mediterranean Sea and into Europe. In EMERALD CITY/CAPITAL (Playtime), the maid’s placement in the open desert, where she is technically free, but lacks water, food, and a way to travel home, captures the paradoxical sense of both confinement and displacement that may accompany these situations.

--Davida Fernández-Barkan