The new Season 6 educators’ guide is now available as a quick and easy downloadable PDF. As we celebrate the broadcast of our new season, I thought this week might be a good time to highlight some of what the new guide has to offer educators interested in teaching with contemporary art.

First, the new guide has a lot of the same great introductory features from previous seasons. You get to learn about Art21 and the philosophy behind the organization of the guide in the first three pages. Simple, straight up and to the point.

Also within the introduction, on pages 4 and 5, there is a short description titled “What Is Contemporary Art?” and ideas for utilizing contemporary art in the classroom and community.

Each of the Season 6 programs is organized around a theme and all four themes, along with the artists featured, are described in the thematic introductions. A broad overview of the theme is presented in addition to introducing the artists with some foundational discussion questions.

Then, beginning with Marina Abramović’s page, each artist is given the star treatment complete with information about the artist, questions to share before, while, and after viewing, along with suggestions for creating different kinds of work in response to the segment.

It’s hard for me to have “favorites” because I wrote our new educator guide with the blessed help of my colleagues Jessica Hamlin and Flossie Chua. But when I reflect on the artists featured this season I just know I’ll be using artists like Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui, David Altmejd, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, Rackstraw Downes, Tabaimo and Sarah Sze in the classroom… probably sooner than later. I think about how artists like Ai Weiwei and Tabaimo can broaden student understanding of what an artist does. I think about sharing the passion David Altmejd and Rackstraw Downes have for their work. I think about the way Catherine Opie and Sarah Sze speak to what students already know about their world.

I sincerely hope you get the chance to spend some time with the new guide and episodes from our new season. Once you have, please let me know your thoughts here on the blog or e-mail me at joe@art21.org

Many thanks! See you next week.

Well it’s finally happening. The day has come. As of around noon EST today, someone will announce over a loudspeaker at a crowded Yankee stadium that I am officially a member of the BAMPS – Bachelor of Arts and Master of Professional Studies. If you want to get technical, it should really be BLAMPS, since I did my undergrad in liberal arts. But there’s something phonaesthetically displeasing about that extra L, so I’ll stick with BAMPS.

Emily Ryan (ITP, 2011) with famous person James Franco (Tisch, 2011) via gothamist.com

So what is exactly an MPS and why does my graduate program, ITP at NYU Tisch, choose to award it rather than an MFA? I think the answer lies with why Red Burns, the founder of my program, calls her course Applications. It’s a course that every ITP student has to take during their first semester. We converged every week as one classroom and engaged in a dialogue with a different lecturer from the new media field. The visiting speakers are artists, entrepreneurs and activists and each one of them still practices their craft. From Foursquare founder and ITP alum Dennis Crowley to artist and designer Vito Acconci, we got to hear these visionaries share their stories, their obstacles and their triumphs.

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"United States: Most Wanted Painting" by Komar and Melamid.

An alarming number of Americans are taken by the notion that all past and present leaders of their Executive Branch converge and coexist in a state of simultaneity on a mysterious plane of existence decorated in the neo-classical style.  I kind of believe it too. I call it The Hall of Presidents Syndrome.

The Hall of Presidents is a feature of Disneyworld wherein animatronic approximations of all 44 American Presidents are presented to an audience in a kind of civic religious ceremony.  Within the Hall of Presidents, matters of grave importance are perpetually being discussed, historic speeches both eloquent and pithy are continually paraphrased, and the Union is forever validated and supported.  The physical presence of these Presidential avatars tricks the minds of Americans into thinking that these men would be able to get along reasonably, and that the Americas they inhabited in their various lifetimes are all reconcilable, according to the linear march of Progress and each man’s unstinting devotion to The American Dream.

"The Forgotten Man" by Jon McNaughton, 2010. Limited edition print. Via http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/.

It is this fantasy that is reinforced, then threatened, in The Forgotten Man, a painting by Utah artist Jon McNaughton, which has become an internet sensation due to its guileless, ham-fisted, yet somehow opaque use of history painting conventions in the service of a doctrinaire Christian conservative value system.  In The Forgotten Man, current President Barack Obama, who gets along with everyone just fine in the actual Hall of Presidents, is carelessly stepping on the Constitution as he looks glumly to his left. James Madison looks on in horror and makes a very George-Costanza-like show of his dismay. Behind Obama stand a bunch of Democrats (like Clinton and FDR) who applaud for some vague reason (’cause they’re all looking at a future of big government socialism or something?).  Either way, what McNaughton employs his own 2-D Obamavatar to do in his next painting would surely get the 44th President kicked out of the club for good.

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Sonya Clark. "madam cj walker," 2008. Plastic combs. Via artist's website.

I’ve had to take a break from this column for the past few months to focus on my conservation projects at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the graduate course I taught in the IUPU Museum Studies Program this semester — my course was a survey and research project that looked at the artworks and artifacts housed inside the famous Madame Walker Theater (here’s a link to blog posts my students have written about the project). The above artwork of Madame C.J. Walker by Sonya Clark is destined for a new hotel in Indianapolis.

While I’ve been away, there has been a lot going on in the world of contemporary art conservation; as a way to catch up on what I’ve missed, I’ve assembled the following list of news and notes:

• In early March, The Preservation of Plastic Artifacts (POPART) conference was convened; the conference included lectures by many of the world’s experts who have been researching the difficulties of preserving plastics in museum collections. This European Union-funded initiative includes a significant print publication (and not much online).   The IMA’s own Laura Kubick provided a first-person summary of the conference on the IMA’s blog.

• In both February and April the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art — North America (INCCA-NA) hosted two Artist Interview Training Workshops.  These workshops were hosted by SFMoMA and the Hirshhorn Museum as part of an Andrew W. Mellon-Funded initative.  One of the participants of the Hirshhorn workshop, Rose Cull, wrote about her experience here.

"Just 3 Boyz" from "Funny or Die Presents." From left to right: Tim Heidecker, Zach Galifiniakis, Eric Wareheim.

I was recently asked by my friend Audrey Chan to guest lecture in a class she’s teaching about gender roles in art.  She was planning on showing the students my own creepy, grief-and-pathos-laden grad school video piece Give Thanks as well as Mike Builds A Shelter by Michael Smith, and asked if I could suggest any other videos. Audrey had also thought of Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup, the collaboration between Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley (featured in Season 5 and Season 3, respectively, of Art in the Twenty-First Century) in which the (loosely interpreted) act of making soup in a cooking show format is made analogous to the abuse of one’s son.  It’s probably telling that my contribution was the comedy duo Tim and Eric’s internet short Just 3 Boyz, a sitcom parody which represents the cancellation, if not annihilation, of middle class American manhood in popular culture.

Still from "Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup," 1987 by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.

Like Pop Rocks and Coke, the combination of watching Family Tyranny followed immediately by Just 3 Boyz is, if not lethal, at least nauseating and generally ill-advised.  In their own way, both works explore the mental space that results when mass entertainment commingles with interpersonal abuse and dysfunction; the cooking show and the sitcom revisited as sites of trauma.

In Just 3 Boyz, Tim and Eric assume parental roles.  Shades is a lampshade puppet voiced by Richard Lewis, and Zach Galifiniakis plays the prodigal son, a roommate who is returning from college.  Much is left unexplained: Why are these “boys” living together, especially when one of them actually went away to college, and is now returning?  Why are Tim and Eric acting simultaneously like the Three Stooges and an old married couple?  It is inferred that this is one of many episodes, and the awkward situation of three presumably platonic male friends sharing a suburban house echo the elaborate and unlikely means by which sitcoms keep their casts on one set.

When Zach returns home from college, the air is thick with tension.  He is dressed in a Juicy couture tracksuit (actually, “Saucy” couture in this instance) and pigtails.   Zach is extremely impatient and verbally abusive.  Given Galifiniakis’ “That’s so Raven” jokes in his standup routine, we can safely assume Zach is playing the role of the uncompromising teenage diva; but this attitude, when assumed by a surly, overweight bearded middle aged man, is intimidating and scary.  Decidedly not Raven.

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Martin Puryear. "Night Watch," 2012. Courtesy the artist and McKee Gallery, New York.

In this week’s roundup Martin Puryear has new sculpture, James Turrell unveils a new Skyspace, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu explore contemporary painting, and more.

• Martin Puryear: New Sculpture is on view at the McKee Gallery (NYC). This is the first exhibition of Martin Puryear’s work since his retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art (NYC) in 2007. In the current show some works are supported on wheels, some resemble relics, traverse the history of time, or spiral upwards towards unknown mysteries. The exhibition closes June 29.

• James Turrell‘s latest Skyspace is featured in CultureMap Houston, who interviewed the artist before the formal dedication at Rice University last week. The outdoor installation is encased within a large mound and topped with a elevated flat roof containing a large square window. Inside the space observers will see the Houston sky with new eyes when they peer through the ceiling as an interior lighting display changes colors for an otherworldly optical effect.

• Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, and Julie Mehretu are in The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles). The exhibition examines how a painting tradition that was once seen as essentially reductive has now become expansive, bringing popular culture and current technology into its vocabulary. Rather than reducing itself to a narrow definition of the medium, it has re-emerged as an arena where opposing concepts can invigorate each other. This work is on view through August 20. Continue reading »

Marina Abramović in ELLE Serbia. Photo by Dusan Reljin.

Art21′s latest “Exclusive” video has just gone live: check out Marina Abramović: Embracing Fashion on Art21.org! This is our first Exclusive to feature a Season 6 artist, and our first in HD.

Filmed at her New York office in 2011, Marina Abramović discusses how her relationship to fashion and femininity has evolved over the course of a 40-year career. In the 1970s, Abramović relied upon stark, neutral performance uniforms that were always either “naked or dirty black or dirty white.” She reached a turning point in 1988 after the dissolution of her artistic collaboration with Ulay Laysiepen, which culminated in ”The Great Wall Walk” (1988). Abramović’s subsequent embrace of fashion and femininity parallel her re-emergence as a solo performance artist in the 1990s and 2000s.

Marina Abramović is featured in the Season 6 (2012) episode History of the  Art in the Twenty-First Century series on PBS. Watch full episodes online for free via PBS Video or Hulu, as a paid download via iTunes, or as part of a Netflix streaming subscription.

CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Charles Atlas. Camera: Paul Gibson. Sound: Mark Mandler. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Morgan Riles. Artwork Courtesy: Marina Abramović Archives & Sean Kelly Gallery. Photography Courtesy: ELLE Serbia, Givenchy, Museum of Modern Art, Dusan Reljin, Mario Testino / Art Partner & V Magazine. Special Thanks: Danica Newell & Sidney Russell. Theme Music: Peter Foley

"Big Youth II," installation view, Jonathan Gardner + Betsy Odom, courtesy Bourourina Gallery.

For the past few weeks, Berlin has been a whirring art world engine as Gallery Weekend and the Berlin Biennale, usually held separately, finally coincided like two awkward studio-mates reluctantly sharing a bathroom.  This collision in turn created a week-long art gauntlet for those people alternately hungry for pretty and political things.  The Biennale itself, a meandering but well-intentioned glimpse into art-as-social-activism and social-activism-as-art is hilariously contrasted by the gestures towards marketability made by Berlin galleries during their annual art-selling bender.

“Big Youth II” at Bourouina Gallery is an incredibly handsome and salable show, and the work included exudes a homespun hand-verkehr nostalgia when contrasted with the cool photography of its Mitte neighbors Carlier & Gebauer (Paul Graham).  “Big Youth” (semicolon: the transcontinental artsplosion blown all the way from the Windy City!) aims to export Chicago’s emerging (?) artists to an international audience.

*I don’t live in Chicago (unlike many Art21 readers) and so I’ll recuse myself from evaluating the “emerging” category in this case.

There seems to be a diluted strain of Chicago Imagism among the artists (a relationship noted in the press release) including an interest in quirky figuration, absurd bodily structures and brightly colored/patterned backgrounds.  Todd Chilton shows tiny optical paintings built using a thick impasto and cleverly situated near the entrance.  Nearby, Jonathan Gardner’s well-rendered trompe l’oeil paintings of cartoon drawings seem like a 2^nd or 3^rd generation Jim Nutt; reserved and removed portrayals of his wacky predecessor.

Lilli Carré, (whose comics are really great), exhibits two short animated films.  Both are somewhat subdued explorations of characters in space, and recall the sweet innocence and jerky movements of pre-WWII animation.  “What Hits the Moon,” about a woman’s conspiratorial understanding with the moon, is plaintively funny and deceptively naiive.

"Big Youth II" installation view, Lilli Carré, courtesy Bourourina Gallery.

In the back room, Rachel Niffenegger displays a suite of tie-dyed memento moris that straddle the line between psychedelic and skeletal, revealing a larger preoccupation in “Big Youth,” with fecundity and the macabre.  On the back wall Isak Applin exhibits sweet Fauvist-ish interiors with a slightly sinister undertone despite a painterly lightness.  Next to them, Alex Chitty pairs mysterious large-scale photographs with an odd wooden sculpture in patterned casing.

Alex Chitty, "Clutch," 2011, courtesy of the artist.

The sculpture, called “Clutch,” is compelling in it’s textural “otherness.”  It has a cumbersome quality not unlike Betsy Odom’s sculptures, which are equally anthropomorphic and overtly sexual.  Odom garnishes her pieces with tube socks, hair, and a cast shuttlecock, among other things.  Like much of the work in “Big Youth II,” Odom’s sculptures have a certain alluring or seductive quality.  Yes Chicago, you’re a handsome one.

We’re back with another episode of Fielding Practice, Bad at Sports’ special podcast produced exclusively for the Art21 Blog. This month, we talk to artists Pamela Fraser and John Neff about Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations), the group exhibition they’ve curated for Gallery 400 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, which is on view through June 9, 2012. Spectral Landscape explores color “as both a formal and a social force,”  and arrays artworks around the gallery according to a loose color spectrum. We asked Fraser and Neff to tell us more about the concept behind this excursion into color, and as always, we bring you our picks for some of the most interesting events and exhibitions coming up this month in Chicago. As always, thanks so much for listening!

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Richard Mosse. "Taking Tiger Mountain," 2011. Digital C-print. Courtesy Nick Cave. On view in "Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations)" at Gallery 400, University of Chicago, Illinois.

Panelist’s picks for the month of May:

Claudine Ise: other exhibitions about color, including:

–Sense and Sensibility, works by Jessica Labatte and David Malek at Golden Gallery, through June 9.

–Jessica Stockholder’s public installation Color Jam, Chicago Art Alliance/Art Loop, through summer.

–Did You See Heaven: Spectra, group show at Peregrine Program, through June 10.

Duncan MacKenzie: Open Engagement: Art and Social Practice conference, May 18-20.

Dan Gunn: Alison Ruttan: Natural Disaster at Adds Donna, through May 13.

A cartoon from "Don't Get Taught Art This Way! As So Many People Do" by Theodore L. Shaw, Stuart Publications, 1967.

Not so long ago, the L.A. art world seemed split in a rift of Beatles vs. Stones proportions.  This time around, it was Rainer vs. Abramovic.  People who read art blogs are probably familiar with the conflict: In her letter to MOCA president Jeffrey Deitch, Yvonne Rainer called Marina Abramovic onto the carpet for requiring performers to lie nude beneath skeletons for hours at a time for the benefit of “frolicking donors.” According to Rainer, with the performers paid at “sub-minimal wages,” the fundraiser “verges on economic exploitation and criminality.” After attending a rehearsal at the invitation of Jeffrey Deitch, Rainer released a revised letter to reflect her own observations and to address some of the criticism sent her way from the event’s pro-Abramovic performers:  “Their cheerful voluntarism says something about the pervasive desperation and cynicism of the art world such that young people must become abject table ornaments and clichéd living symbols of mortality in order to assume a novitiate role in the temple of art.”

It seems both ironic and fitting that Los Angeles, with its history of Aimee Semple McPherson, Charles Manson, and L. Ron Hubbard, would be the site where Abramovic got bullshit called on her for using a shamanic priestess persona to exploit the labor of idealistic young people. Maybe if the guests consisted solely of obscure continental millionaires and not, say, Pamela Anderson, the line between confrontational critique and the exploitation of lithe bodies would seem more clearly delineated?

At the time, I was squarely pro-Rainer, but unfortunately I felt the initial labor dispute angle was muddied by an insistence on involving questions of artistic merit, so that it became a question not of Exploitation vs. Compensation, but Entertainment vs. Authenticity.  More Beatles vs. Stones …to which I must respond “I don’t know, does anyone want to listen to Led Zeppelin?”

AND YET, the questions the debate bring up are important:  Could it be that some of the sacrifices we artists and performers make in order to be part of the contemporary art world are not actually worth it?  Could it be that some of our heroes, some of the living legends, some of the pillars of the contemporary art world, are capable of missteps and doing stuff that’s dumb or even wrong??

What would Theodore L. Shaw say about all this?

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