General & Miscellaneous American Art, Historical Events in Art, Art Subjects - General & Miscellaneous, Modern Art

Joyce Kozloff: Boy's Art

Name: Joyce Kozloff: Boy's Art
Author: Joyce Kozloff
ISBN: 9781891024795

by Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner

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Overview

War. Whether it was waged at Pitcairn Island, Nagasaki, or the Falkland Islands, whether during the Han Dynasty, the English Empire, or the Cold War, battles have been fought, people slaughtered, women raped, children orphaned, and so on, as the pages of history turn. The current world situation, in the very first years of the 21st century, is certainly no exception. The visual residue of these battles changes over time, growing more and more dense, more and more immediate. But always there have been maps, detailed cartographic evidence of what was known, what was planned, what was going to happen. For over a dozen years, Joyce Kozloff has centered her art on the theme of cartography, blending into her simulacra of old maps mutations that often raise geopolitical issues. She discovered in these images of physical terrain a mental territory as well—one that charts the topography of power. Boys' Art is a series of meticulous, densely collaged maps that Kozloff has fashioned from hundreds of years of source material, the most recent of which are her son Nik's childhood drawings of war. On top of her pristine pencil copies of historic military maps—culled from the Han dynasty to the Roosevelt administration—Kozloff has layered the movements of war, as found in Tin Tin and Babar, in a 17th-century woodblock by Hokusai, in a George Grosz pen and ink drawing, or a Leonardo da Vinci sketch. Surreal narratives emerge, pitting cartoon elephants against samurai warriors, scribbled monsters against Indians on horseback, and Renaissance soldiers against Frenchmen in khaki fatigues and pith helmets.

Presented in an oversize format at a 1:1 scalewith the original collages, Boys' Art lushly presents a series of work that unfortunately could not be more timely. But then, as Kozloff herself writes in the introduction, there has always been war. A special version of Boys' Art includes a hand-tinted etching by Joyce Kozloff, produced in a limited edition of 50 at the Vermont Studio Center Press.

Synopsis

Essay by Robert Kushner.

About the Author, Joyce Kozloff

Joyce Kozloff was born in 1942 in Somerville, New Jersey. An original member of the feminist publishing collective Heresies, she is also one of the founders of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s. Since her first solo show in 1970, Kozloff has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad, including the recent Whitney Museum of American Art survey The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000, Part II. Her large-scale public commissions refer to indigenous and local motifs, employing, for example, an iconography of hand-painted ceramic tile walls in the San Francisco International Airport, the Harvard Square subway station and P.S.218 in New York. Her earlier book, Patterns of Desire, fused a world of decorative and erotic traditions into reams of roguish collage. She received a Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome for 1999-2000.