What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index
"Deer Eating." Source: http://annej6.files.wordpress.com
Spring is just around the corner!!! Whew, finally. Meanwhile, here’s What’s Cookin:
- VIDEO EXCLUSIVE | Jeff Koons: Money & Value: Artist Jeff Koons discusses themes of money, desire, perfection, and moral responsibility. Filmed in his busy New York studio and surrounded by numerous assistants at work on paintings and sculptures, Koons describes how the practicalities of running a business are often in service to creative ends.
- Matthew Savitsky, Philadelphia-based artist talks with blogger Kevin McGarry about his new project Healing With Purple (Here Lies Helvetica), inspired by a visit to a faerie cemetery in Short Mountain, Tennessee; his thoughts about Robert Gober’s piece currently on view at the New Museum, his frustration with writing and triumphs related to art as poetry; and his urge to communicate gay colloquialisms and sensibilities.
- Continued from Part 1, Kevin McGarry shares his first impressions about the controversial exhibition Skin Fruit. If you are not in New York and don’t plan to be anytime soon, never fear; McGarry describes what he has saw there in detail. If you are still not satisfied, go to YouTube and check out this video produced by NOWNESS. The question remains: how much here is transparent and how much just can’t be seen? How fun to guess?
- Sparkling Nepalese paper, race and civil rights, a northern island, circular botanics, fluorescent lights, a ton of vinyl records, and a few reviews in the Weekly Roundup.
- Welcome new guest blogger Ivan Lozano, a (mostly) video artist currently working on an MFA in Film/Video/New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In another life, while living in Austin TX, Ivan was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, an arts writer for various publications, and a co-founder of the artist collective the Austin Video Bee.
- CONVERSATIONS about CONSERVATION: How can cultural value on a place be defined? Is this an image that is always beautiful? Blogger Richard McCoy has been preparing a presentation for the colloquium at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, “Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art.” He now speaks with Mitchell Harnes Bishop, the curator of historic collections at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden responsible for its historic buildings, collections, and the cultural landscape.
- TEACHING WITH CONTEMPORARY ART: We have A LOT to learn from our colleagues! Joe Fusaro lets us in on a well-known secret, but kindly reminds us that, “sharing best practices is something that takes organization, time, and effort. Over the past nine years I have learned repeatedly that this is time well spent and absolutely worth the extra effort…Let’s face it, reading about good teaching, or just daydreaming about it, is one thing. Seeing good teaching in action is quite another…” Let’s feed the fire!
- What if an artist wants to re-create a performance? Does he or she have to credit the original artist? Some don’t. “I realized this is happening because performance is nobody’s territory. It’s never been mainstream art and there’s no rules,” says Marina Abramovic. Abramovic’s current exhibition at MoMA has received a lot of press, perhaps some in part for her continued efforts towards the conservation of time-based performance art. Um, how do you do that? Hey, check out this twist: doing the Marina Abromavic in drag? Blogger Ivan Lozano tinkers with the thought. READ THIS!
- LOOKING AT LOS ANGELES: L.A. galleries are brimming with minimal, kind-of-conceptual abstraction at the moment. According to Catherine Wagley, Mel Bochner makes a keen impression with his palette of words. “He works in the realm of one-horsed wagons and burnt tongues…”
- FLASHPOINTS: Must art be ethical? Advocating ethical practices and tolerance are two different positions. Tyler Green is an advocate for stronger ethics in the art world, while Jerry Saltz seems intent on defending the relative tolerance and heterogeneity of the commercial side no matter how dysfunctional it may appear, even lovingly referring to the art world as “Babylon.” Jerry Saltz and Tyler Green, according to William Powhida, are not talking about the same thing in their public non-debate… Worried about being late to class? Don’t worry, according to Ben Davis 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, you won’t ever be because “the art world is not separate from society or its class structure.” Please note Powhida’s point that the art world is not representative of any society in its entirety…“As an artist I am to both invent and preserve, challenge and perpetuate, be new and responsible, for the past and the future”… There’s still so much more. READ THIS!
- GASTRO-VISION: Food in Contemporary Art and Culture: Remember Mr. Creosote, the morbidly obese character of the 1983 comedy Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life? Somebody grab a bucket! Are we a culture of gluttonous over-indulgent consumers that want MORE of it ALL? Gluttony in art consumption and our craving for new things was at the center of a provocative panel discussion held earlier this month at The Independent art fair. Nicole Caruth questions and reflects.
- CALL FOR ENTRIES: WRITERS WANTED FOR THE ART21 BLOG!
Writers Wanted (New York, Berlin, Flash Points)
John Baldessari, "Raised Eyebrows/ Furrowed Foreheads: (Black and Blue Eyebrows)," 2008. Three dimensional archival print, laminated with lexan and mounted on shaped form with acrylic paint, 57 3/4 x 102 x 6 3/4 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Art21 currently seeks several freelance art bloggers to contribute to this site on a regular basis. Application processes for each opportunity are different, so please follow instructions or links below.
1) Berlin- and New York City-based writers to craft exhibition reviews and related contemporary art news, as well as to chronicle local art events, programs, and phenomena. Explore this site’s existing columns on Los Angeles and London as models.
Knowledge of contemporary art and art writing experience are essential. Experience with WordPress, the ability to break news and share contacts are all preferred. Submit letter of interest, your resume, 2 writing samples, and a draft blog post to blog [at] art21 [dot] org.
2) Writers for Art21’s Flash Points topic on the ethics of art. All are welcome to apply. Submission instructions here.
Rolling deadline. Questions? Email blog [at] art21 [dot] org.
Gastro-Vision: In the Land of Plenty
Mr. Creosote in "Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life" (film still), 1983.
Mr. Creosote, the morbidly obese character of the 1983 comedy Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, is a picture of gluttony never to be forgotten. Upon taking his seat in a fancy French restaurant, he begins to vomit, showing no concern for the people around him and the dreadfulness of his action. Throughout the skit he continues to project ridiculously large streams of matter onto the floor, into buckets, on the maître d’, cleaning woman, and himself. Between upchucks, he heedlessly orders and consumes copious amounts of food. In a darkly humorous ending, the character explodes, showering the restaurant and its patrons with human viscera. The camera pans back to Mr. Creosote, who is now a hollow carcass with a still-beating heart. The maître d’ presents him with the check.
The same year that audiences were introduced to Mr. Creosote, the art world was entering a period of phenomenal excess. The wealth enjoyed by upper and middle class Americans in the early 1980s brought about rapid growth in the art market. The resulting bubble would, like Mr. Creosote, eventually burst. At the present moment, we are acutely aware of this bulimic pattern: after the buying binge of recent years, the market (along with the larger economy) again purged, and given the latest art fair reports, is back on the rise. Might Mr. Creosote be the perfect metaphor for the contemporary art world that is always hungry for more?
Gluttony in art consumption and our craving for new things was at the center of a provocative panel discussion held earlier this month at The Independent art fair. As one of the seven deadly sins of Christianity, gluttony is of course loaded with notions of repulsive and immoral behavior. It suggests hedonism in food and drink while denying it to those less fortunate and in need. Of course, this idea is not universal. Gluttony can also be a sign of status, wealth, or desire unburdened by beliefs and moral principles. Panelists of “On Gluttony” expressed the full gamut of interpretations. Organized by Kreemart Salon (the group responsible for Haunch of Venison’s New York Cake Party), the program featured painter Will Cotton, food artist Jennifer Rubell, Rachel Lehmann of Lehmann Maupin Gallery, art advisor Raphael Castoriano, and art journalists Anthony Haden-Guest and Linda Yablonsky.
Jeff Koons: Money & Value
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Episode #098: Artist Jeff Koons discusses themes of money, desire, perfection, and moral responsibility. Filmed in his busy New York studio and surrounded by numerous assistants at work on paintings and sculptures, Koons describes how the practicalities of running a business are often in service to creative ends.
Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of Classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.
Jeff Koons is the curator of two exhibitions currently on view in New York: the group show Skin Fruit at the New Museum (through June 6th, 2010) and a survey of the work of Ed Paschke (a mentor of Koons) at Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue, through April 24th, 2010).
Jeff Koons is featured in the Season 5 (2005) episode Fantasy of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online via iTunes (opens application).
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Brian Hwang, Clair Popkin & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Jeff Koons.
The Conflation of Ethics and Morality
William Powhida, "How The New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality," 2009. Courtesy Schroeder Romero+Shredder and the Artist.
I’ve drawn myself into a debate over ethics and morality with my work, How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality (view the high-res version here). I threw a brick through the window of the museum and people want answers. My first problem with this is the assumption that I have them. I don’t. I also don’t envy the New Museum’s position. It is dependent on a few wealthy individuals instead of broad public funding to run its institution. We share the same paradoxical over-dependence on a limited number of wealthy individuals to maintain our independence from political and ideological interference. Assuming public funding, even from the NEA, can bring unwanted political scrutiny of the moral content of the art. This is a paradox the art world faces in its efforts to make art accessible, while remaining free from the kind of traumatic, political interference caused by the politician Jesse Helms, who famously tried to cut funding from photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1980s.
My second problem with the demand for answers is the conflation of ethics and morality. Art critic Jerry Saltz and blogger Tyler Green have engaged in a protracted public feud over the terms. Tyler is an advocate for stronger ethics in the art world, while Jerry seems intent on defending the relative tolerance and heterogeneity of the commercial side no matter how dysfunctional it may appear, even lovingly referring to the art world as “Babylon.” I agree with both of them. I can because they aren’t talking about the same things. Advocating ethical practices and tolerance are two different positions. This difference is key to understanding that freedom of expression is different from maintaining an ethical buffer between the market and the museum. When Jerry accuses Tyler of engaging in a witch hunt, I believe Jerry does so to protect artists and their freedom of expression. However, perhaps this is at the expense of the New Museum’s questionable ethics.
Similarly, when Jerry and the critic John Yau got into a public spat over their definitions of “America,” I believe that neither of them would side with our previous administration, which used moral authority to justify both immoral and unethical behavior. Ben Davis argues, in his “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” that the art world is not separate from society or its class structure. But I believe that the general character of the art world is far left of center. Artists are an educated class of cultural producers who routinely challenge “moral authority” and share a tolerance for minority perspectives. That this vision is supported by a wealthy elite is also paradoxical, but there aren’t many alternatives at this point in our late-capitalist democracy.
Mel Bochner’s Burnt Tongue
Mel Bochner, "No," 2009. Oil on canvas, 60 x 45 inches. Courtesy Marc Selywn Fine Art.
Los Angeles galleries are brimming with minimal, kind-of-conceptual abstraction at the moment — Paul Davis’s successions of hinges and wood and Joe Fyfe’s felt and muslin Motherwell spin-offs at ACME; Matt Connors’s posed expressionism and empty frames at Cherry and Martin; Leonor Antunes’s hanging brass triangles at Marc Foxx; or Lisa Williamson’s controlled outlines and understated installations at the recently closed David Kordansky exhibition. But of all these, it’s veteran Mel Bochner who makes the keenest impression.
Mel Bochner is obscenely smart. He has the pedigree and, when he wants to, the vocabulary of an academic. He has taught at the New School and Yale, and written about the “oddly circular history” of perspective and linguistics in Wittgenstein. But through forty-five years of making, he’s managed to keep his artwork visually crass, provocatively simplistic, and, as a result, wittily incisive. In his current exhibition at Marc Selywn Fine Art, a series of comfortably large, kinkily colored paintings run through sequences of synonyms. Visually staccato, the paintings look the way that Charles Bukowski soundbytes sound.
Bochner, who has called himself a “belated beatnik,” had his first exhibition back in 1966, at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Then, like now, he was questioning the grammar of art. In a particularly memorable piece, he used word portraits to engage work made by his contemporaries–in Portrait of Eva Hesse, a slew of tactile-sounding verbs circle around the word “wrap,” which anchors the drawing. It’s an abstraction of an abstraction that pulls Hesse’s ideas out of the context of her work and yet it’s surprisingly accessible. Pared down to “wrap,” “limit,” “ensconce,” and “tie-up,” among other words, Hesse (or at least the Hesse represented by these verbs) seems like a spatially-obsessed poet who’s fixated on everything bodily, which is actually fairly accurate.
Since then, Bochner has done a variety of public works, written about Donal Judd and serialization for Artforum and, among other ventures, begun a refreshingly whimsical series of drawing not too ingeniously derived from Roget’s Thesaurus.
Performance Art Realness with a Twist
Marina Abramovic, "The Artist Is Present," performance documentation, 2010. Courtesy the New York Times
It starts like this:
One snowy night last month, as New Yorkers rushed home in advance of a coming blizzard, more than a hundred artists, scholars and curators crowded into the boardroom of the Museum of Modern Art to talk about performance art and how it can be preserved and exhibited.
And somewhere close to the end we find this, in reference to Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005:
Ms. Abramovic saw that show, she said in a recent interview, as a way “to take charge of the history of performance.” In the 1990s, as younger artists became interested in work of the ’60s and ’70s, she said she noticed that some were restaging historical works themselves, often without consulting or even crediting the originator. “I realized this is happening because performance is nobody’s territory,” she said. “It’s never been mainstream art and there’s no rules.” Finding this unjust, she decided to set them herself, by recreating the works in consultation with the relevant artists and estates. Better she should do it now, she said, because “they will do it anyway when you’re dead behind your back.”
And so Carol Kino reports for the New York Times on March 10 in an article entitled “A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue” on the Museum of Modern Art’s private “Performance Workshops.” She brings attention to the issues raised by these “Workshops” in the field of the conservation and presentation of performance art and the involvement of museums in this project.
I decided to take those two bits of writing out of the piece to bring attention to a fact that has seemed self-evident to me from the moment I first saw Abramovic’s work, but has become completely evident after a flurry of articles and profiles on her have appeared in many publications lately: Marina Abramovic is a total stone-cold diva. Now don’t get me wrong, this is certainly not meant as a negative value judgment. It’s a fact that makes me love her more, and with the same part of my brain that loves incredible women like Kate Bush, or Tyra Banks. I could see it, from the first interlaced fields of her brushing her hair in 1975’s Art Must Be Beautiful to the time she got in people’s way in 1977’s Imponderabilia, to her most recent alpha female diva moment, The Artist Is Present, in which she stares you down in public.
In short, “doing” Marina Abramovic would be an amazing drag performance. In an alternative universe in my head, this is a very common occurrence. In my head, drag queens LOOOOOOVE “doing” La Marina with almost the same zeal they they usually reserve for “doing” Ana Mendieta or Maya Deren. Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning has a whole section on Guerrilla Girl Realness with a Twist and Chrissie Iles is a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race. But camp fantasies aside, what these extracts from Kino’s piece show is that Abramovic is tough as nails and — for better or for worse — has decided to grab the performance art bull by the horns and try to change its course in her favor. I’m ambivalent about this exertion of will on Abramovic’s part. On the one hand, who else is going to do it? She’s charismatic, people like to see her and listen to her, and she certainly has the street/ivory tower cred to do so. On the other hand, I question her intentions. Is Abramovic pulling a Rhonda Rulebook because she basically doesn’t want people touching her stuff?
Feeding Our Own Fire
Judy Pfaff at work, Art21 production still, 2007
I was recently blown away after seeing a few of our Art21 Educators in action and thought it would be a good time to talk about the best kept (or ignored) secret in education: visiting our colleagues to learn new strategies, get new ideas, and gain perspective on what’s working when we teach. You see, 95% of the time, maybe more, teachers are busy teaching, preparing to teach, or performing a variety of tasks related to just being an educator in general. Visiting our colleagues in their classrooms is often not very high on the priority list. Having reflective conversations about these visits can be as rare as a lunar eclipse. But some of our best professional development is taking place in the classrooms right next door to us! Sharing best practices is something that takes organization, time, and effort, but over the past nine years I have learned repeatedly that this is time well spent and absolutely worth the extra effort. It’s worth taking the risk to ask that veteran teacher if we can come in to check out the project everyone is talking about. It’s worth opening ourselves up to feedback when we ask a colleague to visit our classroom. Some of the most meaningful learning experiences in my career have occurred in the classrooms of colleagues, or over coffee and conversation after being mesmerized by a lesson I just saw, especially when it comes to teaching about contemporary art. Let’s face it, reading about good teaching, or just daydreaming about it, is one thing. Seeing good teaching in action is quite another. Sort of like feeding our own fire.
Cultural Landscapes, Aesthetics, and Tigers: A Conversation with Mitchell Hearns Bishop
Mitchell Bishop at the Adamson House, Malibu, California. Photo: Maria Gilbert.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been preparing a presentation about time-based art for the colloquium at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, “Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art,” which I talked about last month with Jeff Martin. I started my research for this talk with my friend Mitchell Hearns Bishop’s article, “Evolving Exemplary Pluralism: Steve McQueen’s Deadpan and Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Anne, Aki, and God–Two Case Studies for Conserving Technology-Based Installation Art.” You can read that article on the American Institute for Conservation’s website.
Even though Mitchell worked for many years in various roles at the Getty and had both Robert Irwin and James Turrell as visiting professors in art school, I’d like to move a little bit away from concepts of contemporary art in my conversation with him. Mitchell is now the curator of historic collections at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden and responsible for the historic buildings, collections, and the cultural landscape. Of course, I recognize that the L.A. Arboretum is an environmental institution, which means that its mission is more closely aligned with ecological issues rather than art history. Or is it? As much as these disciplines are different, there are similarities.
Richard McCoy: How is the Arboretum different than a fine art museum, and how has your approach shifted from that of a conservation professional to one of a curator?
Mitchell Hearns Bishop: While we do have art in the collections, the overall context is environmental so my curatorial approach needs to be aligned with that. My botanist colleagues often refer to me as the “historian,” but for me that’s problematic, as a conventional historical interpretation independent from the environmental context is meaningless.
At the Arboretum, our purpose is to promote learning and provide inspiration and enjoyment, which isn’t really that different than an art museum’s function. Take, for example, the National Gallery in Washington—the classicism and monumentality of the architecture and the quality of the collection are inspirational in a fundamental way. A lovely garden or landscape with charming old buildings provides a similar feeling. While the Arboretum has a traditional educational role, it is in the context of pleasure and inspiration. We want visitors to go away feeling good. The site itself is what I refer to as a “geography of pleasure.” It was a resort, a recreational destination one hundred forty years ago and still is today.
New guest blogger: Ivan Lozano
Photo: Ben Aqua
Thanks to Kevin McGarry for his excellent guest blogging and coverage of recent art. Up next is Ivan Lozano. Ivan Lozano is a (mostly) video artist currently working on an MFA in Film/Video/New Media at the School of the Art Institute. In another life, while living in Austin TX, Ivan was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, an arts writer for various publications, and a co-founder of the artist collective the Austin Video Bee.
