On Saturday, January 24 Art21 is partnering with the Museum of Modern Art to offer a full day professional development workshops titled Teaching with Objects and Film: Focus on Contemporary Art. The workshop introduces participants to a variety of strategies for engaging students with contemporary art through the study of objects in the museum’s galleries and the use of Art21 multimedia resources. This workshop will model ways to prepare for and extend museum visits with your students in the classroom through video, web, and print resources. Sessions in the museum’s galleries will focus on ways to engage students with looking at, discussing, and interpreting works of contemporary art. Workshop activities will emphasize inquiry-based learning, thematic approaches to teaching, and ways to integrate the artists’ process as described in their own words.

The workshop fee of $45 includes a copy of the Season Four Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century DVD and accompanying Educators’ Guide, MoMA Educator Guides, and an Educator’s pass that allows teachers free admission to the museum until September 2009.

Teaching with Objects and Film: Focus on Contemporary Art
In collaboration with MoMA
Saturday, January 24, 2009, 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

To register for Weekend Teacher Workshops or more information, please e-mail teacherprograms[at]moma.org or fill out this application form and fax it to (212) 333-1118.

Since this column gets posted on Wednesdays (and believe me, I didn’t arrange it this way), it’s been my pleasure to contribute posts directly after the November 4th election (see Hope and Change) and today, after the thrilling inauguration of Barack Obama as our 44th President.

Throughout President Obama’s speech, I kept thinking about ways we can teach students about being truly productive citizens- citizens that contribute, think critically, offer service, and teach others. It got me thinking about artists in the Art21 series who can help teach about these things in a variety of ways….

First, Krzysztof Wodiczko can certainly teach students that speaking out can not only be something done in a newspaper editorial or part of a speech, but it can also be a part of the art we create. Wodiczko helps voices literally project themselves and allows viewpoints to be shared in ways few artists approach.

Nancy Spero can teach about protest and history, and how protest can take many forms- somehow avoiding violence yet simultaneously picturing it.

Jenny Holzer offers students the opportunity to think critically about the text she uses in her work and then relate that to what it means to be a “good” or “productive” citizen. Her recent work with declassified documents can open up meaningful discussion about what citizens should know and be informed of.

Mark Dion can teach students about teaching others through art. Whether it’s work inspired by literature or installation inspired by natural elements, Dion shares with students that the work of contemporary artists can educate and inspire discussion about things such as sustainability, recycling, and preserving natural resources.

Lastly, I want to mention Robert Adams‘ photography. Through his quiet and intense pictures, students can reflect on the things we must do to save and reclaim the parts of our landscape that are devastated by greed and carelessness.

Have you used, or are planning to use Art21 segments and resources as part of your post-inauguration lessons? Please share them with us!

Pictured above: Jenny Holzer, “Benches”, 1989
Installation: Dorris C. Freedman Plaza New York, New York.

Our City Dreams, a new documentary by Chiara Clemente (daughter of artist Francesco Clemente), will debut at Film Forum, Feb. 4-17, 2009. Filmed over the course of two years, this “love letter” to New York City strings together self-told narratives by five women artists, ages 30 – 80: Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith (Season 2), Marina Abramovic and Nancy Spero (Season 4). Each artist has a passion for making art that is inseparable from her devotion to New York.

Clemente captures significant moments in these artists’s lives, including Swoon’s first solo exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York, Ghada Amer’s return to her Egyptian homeland, Kiki Smith’s traveling retrospective, Marina Abramovic’s week-long series of performances at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Nancy Spero’s preparation of a new piece for the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Ronnie Scheib in Variety writes that the film is “exquisitely crafted” and “ranks as a work of art itself.”

Hello everyone. I’m writing on an enormously significant day not only for United States governance and politics, but for its future cultural production as well. It is no great leap of faith to note how many key shifts in art have resulted from major changes in political context, and one can only hope that the present one is both dramatic and positive for the creative worlds that we hold dear and rely on for insight.

In my week-and-a-half of guest blogging, I will be endeavoring to shed light on practices and trends that highlight ways in which art is at present intersecting with other fields of production. I will also do my best to report on some of the best exhibitions currently taking place in New York City, where I am based.

A longer entry is coming tomorrow. For now, enjoy the inaugural glow!

I for one, am extremely excited by the Vatican’s participation in the upcoming Venice Biennale, as Ben Street mentions in Yes We (Vati) Can! After watching Rick Warren deliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration, I am reminded of the burning picket fence separating church, state, and art, perhaps something to be contended with more thoroughly in the next Flash Points feature, Art + Politics.

A slave to good ‘ol fashioned controversy, here is an inkling of what I hope to see by way of the Holy See come the year of hugs and kisses, e.g. OX:

• Damien Hirst’s crucified, bi-sected Christ and Virgin Mary in formaldehyde
• Maurizio Cattelan’s pope and meteorite (The Ninth Hour, 1999) swallowed up by a black hole created by the Hadron collider
• Kara Walker (Season 2) silhouettes of confessional indiscretions
• It’s Venice, so all Vatican reps should be walking on water if possible—a show within a show.  If the Chinese can do it…

But, with all levity aside, this is the most interesting addition to an exhibition of this magnitude in a long, long time. I might also expect the Vatican to next take out a booth at Art Basel Miami and sell off some of those ungodly works currently in the permanent collection.

It’s almost compelling as Rudy Giuliani curating the next Whitney Biennial (as yet unconfirmed from a very unreliable source).

Change comes to art too… Happy Inauguration Day!

Thanks to Georgia Kotretsos for ringing in the new year with her up-to-date posts on the Greek contemporary art scene. Look out for another post from her in the coming weeks, once we launch our next Flash Points feature, Art & Politics.

Up next on the guest blog, we welcome Daniel R. Quiles. Daniel currently is writing his dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center on Argentine conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, titled Toward a Counterpublic Sphere: Argentine Conceptual Art, 1966-1976. He is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, and is currently a co-editor of PART, the Journal of the CUNY Ph.D. Program in Art History. He has written criticism of contemporary art and exhibitions in Arte al día, ArtNexus, and Art in America and catalogue essays for expositions of postwar and contemporary art at the Americas Society, Art in General, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

Holy neo-conceptualism! The Vatican has issued a press statement announcing that it will be participating in the Venice Biennale this summer, which will make this year’s event one of the most refreshingly strange ones in its 114-year history (British artist Liam Gillick will be representing Germany, while the Welsh pavilion will show work by national genius and founding Velvet Underground member John Cale). The Vatican claims to have been “inundated” with ideas from both artists and senior church figures in a move apparently designed to counter perceived artistic assaults on Catholicism. From the furore around Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary during the Brooklyn iteration of the Sensation show in 1999, to last year’s kerfuffle over Martin Kippenberger’s crucified frog, displayed in Bolzano, Italy—in protest at which an Italian politician, Franz Pahl, went on hunger strike, describing the sculpture as “a grave offence to our Catholic population”—the Catholic church has taken more than its share of body blows in recent years. Nonetheless, there’s something undoubtedly amusing about the ease with which the Church takes offense at what are often cheap shots designed for maximum exposure, a sort of comic replaying of the tragic consequences of the controversy around the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons of 2005.

Christianity is an easy target for artistic outrage because it is so inextricably bound to the representational image. Throughout its history, the Church has had an uneasy time with representation, and for its first few hundred years artistic developments came hesitantly, haltingly. It’s worth noting that one of the first recorded representations of Christ’s crucifixion is itself a parody; scratched into a wall on Rome’s Palatine Hill, it shows a donkey-headed character on a cross being worshiped by a man, with the sarcastic inscription, “Alexamenos worships his god.” Even during the Renaissance, the high-water mark of Christian representation, controversy was commonplace. Criticism of his Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine Chapel in the 1530s led Michelangelo to depict his most outspoken critic, Biagio da Cesena, as the donkey-eared Minos, judge of the underworld, fat-bellied and engirdled by a python with its jaws clamped around his genitals. And while Caravaggio’s apparent use of a drowned prostitute as his model for the pre-Assumption Virgin Mary was (not surprisingly) rejected, almost all of his confrontational and unsettling works were not only accepted but embraced by the embattled Church of the Counter-Reformation. It remains startling to see his disturbing painting of the crucifixion of St Peter on the wall of the chapel for which it was commissioned, a frank image of a big man’s final indignity. The interpretative flexibility of the Bible is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness; its persistence as iconographic resource for contemporary artists will continue as long as art is made, as will ever more literal and divisive interpretations of its texts.

While the Vatican will have no national pavilion, it seems likely that the exhibition would occupy one of the city’s hundreds of churches in line with previous years (the baroque San Stae is used annually as an exhibition space). The question is: what kind of work will it show? While Christian imagery has its own significant presence within contemporary art (from Damien Hirst’s retellings of the lives of the saints in formaldehyde and livestock to Mark Wallinger’s channelling of Christian mysticism in his video and sculpture), it is rarely without provocation. The Vatican has always had a somewhat troubled relationship with modern art, tending to plump for a conservative abstracted realism, as seen in most modern Catholic churches; its last major commission for the basilica of St Peter’s were the bronze panels of the Door of Death by Giacomo Manzu in the late 1950s. The most obvious contender (mentioned in the press release alongside Anish Kapoor and Jannis Kounellis) is perhaps Bill Viola, whose portentous and relentlessly tasteful videos are very much in line with Catholic conservatism (and whose 2007 Venice show took place in the church of San Gallo). The press release, in its only specific description of the Vatican’s chosen works, enthuses about an “amazing” holographic projection of Pope Benedict XVI by French artist Yannig Guillevic. That whirring sound you hear is Michelangelo reaching escape velocity, somewhere far below.

The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) is currently presenting Bia Davou’s A Retrospective and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries‘ solo exhibition entitled Close your Eyes.

Starting with Davou, she was born in 1932 in Athens. She studied painting at the studio of Costas Iliades (1952-58). Her early work focused on Abstract Expressionism. In 1958, she became involved with the artist and mathematician Pantelis Xagoraris.

In 1967 she embarked on a series of three-dimensional compositions of plastic materials, where were then composed in multicolor grids. In 1978, she showed the series Serial Structures at Desmos Art Gallery for the first time.

In 1981, Serial Structures 2 –Odyssey consisted of drawings in which she copied Homeric verses and further arranged them in Fibonacci sequences. Around the same period, she began a series of presentations with sails, which allude to the journey of Ulysses.

In 1987, she participated at the 19th Biennale of Sao Paolo, where she correlated the sail environment with the land of Cimmerians, the land of the dead and one of the stops on Ulysses’ mythical journey.

The above quests culminated in the exhibition entitled Epitaph at Demos Art Gallery in 1990. In 1996, her retrospective exhibition was held at the House of Cyprus in Athens.

Bia Davou passed away in 1996.

The exhibition was co-curated by two emerging curators, Stamatis Schizakis and Tina Pandi. In 2005-08,  Schizakis worked on numerous exhibitions at EMST, such as: Videographies: The Early Decades, The Years of Defiance: The Art of the ‘70s in Greece, The Grand Promenade, and In Present Tense: Young Greek Artists with Tina Pandi & Daphne Vitali. In 2007, Pandi curated the retrospective exhibition of Nikos Kessanlis: From Matter to Image and co-curated the exhibition In Present Tense: Young Greek Artists. In 2008 she curated the exhibition Ulrich Rückriem: Shadows of the Stone, the latter being one of the finest exhibitions I have seen in Athens thus far.

Here they tell us a few words about Bia Davou’s body of work at EMST:

Continue reading »

Opening today at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, The Puppet Show brings together contemporary artworks that explore the imagery of puppets in sculpture, video and photography. The Puppet Show takes as a historic point of departure one of the first episodes of avant-garde art history: Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi that was conceived as a puppetshow. Considered by many to be the first dramatic work of the theater of the absurd, Roi (translated as “King Ubu” or “King Turd”) is an allegory of anarchy that uses farce and scatological humor to comment on art, literature, politics, and the ruling class.

The exhibition opens with an installation dubbed “Puppet Storage.” The plywood structure is filled with pictures, props, and other source material collected from artists studios as well as a historic collection of puppets from the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut selected by the Ballard’s director Dr. John Bell, an internationally renowned puppeteer and historian of puppet theater. Art21 artists Mike Kelley (Season 1), Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker (all Season 2), Laurie Simmons, and Pierre Huyghe (both Season 4) are included in the roster of more than 25 participants.

The Puppet Show is co-curated by Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, University, and Carin Kuoni, Director, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now is on view at the International Center for Photography (ICP) from January 16 through May 3, 2009. Organized by Vince Aletti and Carol Squiers, the exhibition is made up of images created by more than forty photographers working in the fashion industry today. The exhibition features tear sheets, original photographic prints, and online media to highlight the original context of the photographs, as well as to illustrate the diversity that is characteristic of current fashion imagery.

Weird Beauty presents photographs derived from both widely recognized and lesser known magazines, and includes photographers not commonly associated with fashion like Collier Schorr (Season 2), who shoots for fashion publications such as Doingbird, and Nan Goldin who contributes regularly to the German children’s fashion magazine Kid’s Wear.
The concurrent exhibition, This is Not a Fashion Photograph, similarly questions perceived notions of what fashion photography is by including works by artists who are not traditionally associated with fashion. Drawn primarily from ICP’s permanent collection, This is Not a Fashion Photograph is also organized by Aletti.

Visit the events page for a full schedule of artists that will present their work in the lecture series “The Photographers.”