Roughly located between New Orleans’ Business and Garden Districts, the Warehouse Arts District was a major concentrations for Prospect.1 displays. Dominated by warehouses and old industrial spaces, there is little of the ornamental architecture that gives the rest of New Orleans its distinct flavor.

While there were a few works scattered in warehouse and neighborhood non-profit spaces, the vast majority of art was on display at the city’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) which is located near many of the city’s other museums, including the World War II Museum, the Children’s Museum, the Civil War Museum and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

A modern and spacious building, the CAC was expertly curated with dozens of works that felt like a biennial in and of themselves. The Warehouse District may have been a starting point for many biennial visitors but I chose to end my posts with a jaunt through this post-industrial neighborhood.

Jacqueline Humphries, installation view at Ideal Auto Repair; work on the bottom: Soft Machine (2008)

Born in New Orleans, Humphries chose a site that evoked the fact that her family once owned a auto repair shop. Using auto enamel and oil, she created five large gestural works that came alive in this naturally lit space full of grays, browns and dirty whites. The metallic pigments seemed to absorb the subtle light and I could’ve stayed for hours to watch how the light created subtle changes in the work. There was also a curious backroom to this exhibition which included picket-like forms painted in the same manner as the larger works. They were unidentified and posted in a dark room. I could only guess they were studies for the larger panels.

Robin Rhode, Kite (2008) at CAC

One of the funniest and most poetic works in the biennial, Rhode’s work included a video component (which is hard to identify in the photograph) that displayed the sky behind the imaginary kite. Hands on another canvas held the kite into place. The work creates a mood of nostalgia and loss. Place in a darkened corner of the museum, you sense you are experiencing a very private and intimate moment.

Continue reading »

“Looking eternity in the eye.” (All photos by Luodanli.)

Almost four years ago, in the course of my web wanderings, I stumbled on the photographs of an Army serviceman  who had been deployed to Iraq. To this day, I know little about him — only that his online handle was Luodanli, he was stationed in Taji, and he had a family waiting for him back in the States. Somewhat sporadically, Luodanli would post a batch of photos to Flickr. The images rarely revealed much about his personal life, but they were beautiful, often bordering on abstract — such as the sand-clogged interior of a piece of artillery, above

What does any of this have to do with the idea of shock in art? On the surface, not much. Initially, I’d contemplated all sorts of “shocking” subjects for my final post here on Art21: nudity, racism, excrement, violence — even farm animals in formaldehyde. But given the state of our planet, it all seemed rather frivolous. Gaza is burning. Yesterday, the AP reported that more than 4,200 U.S. servicemen have died in Iraq. (Not to mention the tens of thousands Iraqi dead.) And then, of course, there’s our economy. Or lack thereof. In keeping with the times, I considered writing about the work of war photographers such as Matthew Brady, Robert Capa and James Nachtwey. (I have an abiding admiration for people who have the capacity to click a shutter at a time when I’d be running for cover.) I also considered doing something on works related to war, perhaps pieces by Goya and Picasso and Omer Fast. But then I thought that these images, collectively, might seem too familiar, or bear too much resemblance to what we take in on a daily basis.

That’s when I thought of Luodanli’s pictures — and their pithy captions (which I’ve appropriated for the purpose of this post). They bear none of the obvious markers of war. Yet we know that it’s happening somewhere beyond the edge of the frame. The images are artfully composed and find beauty in objects that, to soldiers, must be mundane. But what did Luodanli witness that went unrecorded? Who knows. Each of us could probably hazard a guess. Sometimes, what remains unseen is the most shocking thing of all.

Many more images after the jump.

Continue reading »

 Following is the second part of my conversation with Eleanor Antin, continued from Part 1 yesterday…

JF: One thing that has been important in my own work with students and colleagues is related to your suggestion about the viewer continuing to look with a playful mind, continuing to search for new meaning and relationships. How do you suggest people slow down and go about doing this in a shopping mall culture, especially with so much access to an art world that summarizes and simplifies?

EA: I hate malls. I hate shopping. When I find an artwork that interests me in a gallery or museum, I can sit with it for a long time, letting its possibilities open up to me. The problem is everybody else. My classical Greek and Roman works are allegories, and while allegories were obviously pleasurable and interesting to a medieval or renaissance audience, they’re not the way busy Americans in that hypothetical mall tend to see the world. But I have some tricks up my sleeve. My images are often funny. They can be beautiful. Some are haunting because they’re melancholy as well. Yet where do these emotional undertones come from? Why is that big strong man sitting in front of an old suitcase filled with heavy rocks? We’ve seen him carrying suitcases before. Is that what he carries around?? Rocks? Why? What does that mean? And why is that woman lying on a funeral bier with moonlight spilling down on her while a blonde adolescent girl awkwardly, perhaps fearfully, stoops to catch a ball that any second now, will be thrown by an older man with a demented grin? We’ve seen him before too, with the dead woman, though she was very much alive then.

Each image is its own allegory and since the characters reappear, we recognize them, we know something about them, so they are part of a meta allegory that hopefully is interesting enough to stop the people in that hypothetical mall and even against their will (after all, they probably want to get back to the car before they’re caught in traffic), force them to stop and really look. Because they’re curious. Maybe they’re disturbed. Maybe they’re laughing. Beautiful and sensual and comic images can seduce even self-absorbed people into entering the artist’s world and maybe recognizing something about their own. Or maybe it’s simply that my work possesses what the great anthropologist Malinowski would have referred to as a high coefficient of weirdness.

JF: You mention having “tricks up your sleeve” to get viewers to look closely at the images you create. I would think that part of it involves taking a variety of risks. Is risk-taking important in order to make these pictures funny, haunting, beautiful, or melancholy? How do you go about taking risks in your work? Is it conscious, or do opportunities present themselves and you go with it?

EA: For some reason I don’t really comprehend, people think my work is very risky as if I’m walking on a high wire, while as far as I’m concerned, I’m just walking over a crack in the pavement.  Some people find my concentrated indifference to the fit of my work with the scene a dangerous game. And I do make some effort to have relevance to the going scene; after all, I’m not a hermit, I know what’s going on in the world. But the scene is often trivial and it’s always transient. I’ve watched a lot of scenes come and go—remember I’ve been around a while and seen artists waste a lot of time on work that 4 or 5 years later has become little more than the emperor’s clothes in the fairy tale. Art is too important to come off of a fashion designer’s runway.

Continue reading »

I was surprised that Prospect.1 shied away from New Orleans’ infamous French District as much as it did. The epicenter of New Orleans’ global brand, and one of the world’s favorite Mardi Gras destinations, only one artist exhibited in the neighborhood.

Fortunately, there was art galore next door in the somewhat lesser known but equally historic Marigny neighborhood, which is also home to a significant chunk of the city’s arts community.

Another venue located at the crossroads of the French Quarter and the Marigny, the Old U.S. Mint Building, was not only one of the most impressive art venues but also filled with some of the most fascinating works of the whole biennial. Today, I offer you a small tour through this well-preserved part of the city.

Rosângela Rennó’s video work (2008)

Rennó was the only artist to exhibit in the French Quarter. Juxtaposing videos of white Cajuns and black Creoles, she attempted to offer us some insight into the cultural appropriation that is part of the cultural fabric of New Orleans and, by extension, Louisiana. Unfortunately, after asking around and doing some research, I discovered that the binary scenario (black/white, creole/cajun) that Rennó offered us in her video wasn’t all fact and partly fiction. Like all issues of cultural appropriation and hybrid cultures, the realities were far more complex than they first appear.

Srdjan Loncar, Value (2008) at the Old Mint Building

In light of the economic crisis, Loncar’s work was almost prescient. Visitors could buy a case full of Loncar’s notes (not real money) for $500. According to the security guard, the work was quite popular and dozens had already sold. Appropriately installed in the Old U.S. mint building, I wondered if Loncar was spoofing the American financial system or the biennial viewers themselves.

Continue reading »

EXCLUSIVE: Robert Ryman installing Philadelphia Prototype (2002) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

Robert Ryman’s work explodes the classical distinctions between art as object and art as surface, sculpture and painting, structure and ornament–emphasizing instead the role that perception and context play in creating an aesthetic experience. Ryman isolates the most basic of components—material, scale, and support—enforcing limitations that allow the viewer to focus on the physical presence of the work in space.

SEE: More images, videos, and news for Robert Ryman.

LEARN: Robert Ryman is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Paradox of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!

PHOTO | Robert Ryman, Philadelphia Prototype, 2002. Collection Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Alexander Harrison Fund 2005.19a-j

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom & Mead Hunt. Sound: Tom Bergin & Roger Phenix. Editor: Monte Matteotti. Artwork courtesy: Robert Ryman. Thanks: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Kaput. founders/co-editors: Christopher Marinos and Thanos Stathopoulos

kaput. is a quarterly online magazine on contemporary art, which was founded last year in Athens, Greece. The name of the magazine was inspired by Hal Foster’s widely-known phrase  “[…] art history is as kaput as art is” found in the Design and Crime (and other Diatribes) book, published by Verso books in 2002.

kaput. features articles, essays, reviews, and interviews in both Greek and English from Greece and abroad. The editors do an amazing job in putting together diverse teams of contributors for each issue. Thus, this is how a constructive, informed and critical voice in an ocean of mediocrity is beginning to hold its own.

I am very pleased to introduce to you the founders of kaput., who are no other than writer and curator Christopher Marinos and writer and independent curator Thanos Stathopoulos. It’s important to note that Marinos is one of the curators of the 2nd Athens Biennial, which will take place in June 2009 and that he also serves as a correspondent for Flash Art International and Modern Painters.  He is also a founding member of the Reading Group. Stathopoulos has equally written extensively on artists’ works for exhibition catalogs and he is a regular contributor to the Eleftherotypia newspaper.

This dynamic duo has formed an ambitious yet fundamentally needed forum of dialogue, for the sake and prosperity of Greek contemporary art. As an artist, I find immense comfort in knowing kaput. is at arm’s reach. Christopher, as you’ll read later on, acknowledges Athens Art Review, which paved the way for kaput. It’s also worth mentioning that the magazine was exceptionally edited by Theophilos Tramboulis. It’s an optimistic evolvement of the field when one can begin to trace things back to genuine initiatives. This very continuity that makes kaput. a valuable project for Greek art.

If there was a sensor that could detect when a community is ready to talk, or when its thoughts have nicely brewed and matured, things would be easier. In this case, we have two individuals who are sensitive to the art world and alert on what’s out there. Marinos and Stathopoulos are strategically setting Greek art up against a demanding international discourse.  Intellectually, creatively, sociopolitically, this may turn out to be a challenging yet exciting time for our generation in Greece, and those who are behind creative thinking outlets may have the most exciting time of all.

Considering and further acknowledging the importance of their service to the community, I invited both Christopher and Thanos to tell us a little bit about kaput. and its mission. Our conversation floats on the very surface of the job and responsibilities of an editor, but I hope I’ll have a chance to talk to them again in the near future.

Georgia Kotretsos: How did your collaboration and the idea of an online quarterly magazine come about?

Thanos Stathopoulos: The idea of creating a new magazine lies (as with any collaboration) in particular relationships, on dialogue and people who work well together so that they can bring it about. In our case, the dialogue and collaboration began some time ago. The die was cast and the magazine came about as a natural consequence. There was a common need and, in fact, an imperative because of the lamentable fact that once again the Greek art world was faced with a vacuum as far as art magazines were concerned. The choice of an online magazine reflected our inclination as well as what was considered feasible.

Christopher Marinos: However, beyond the need for people who work well together, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that a magazine is also a collective matter. In the past few years, important progressive steps were taken in the Greek art world that have contributed decisively to artistic output and to kaput. There are many new good artists, new exhibitions spaces, as well as a new group of curators and theoreticians, most of whom have studied abroad. The magazine could not have existed without this “springtime” in Greek art.

Continue reading »

Word on the street is that one of Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s images will be used as the cover for U2‘s upcoming album No Line on the Horizon, scheduled for release March 3rd.  The Season 3 photographer follows in the footsteps of other Art:21 artists who have also crossed over and “exhibited” their work as album art.  Notable favorites include Raymond Pettibon for Sonic Youth (Goo, 1990), Tim Hawkinson for Beck (Mutations, 1998), and Matthew Barney for Arto Lindsay (The Prize, 1999).

In other news, I dare say that I may be the first and only Art21 blogger to have a weird utensil named after him.

If the impact of Katrina now seems minimal in the rest of New Orleans, in the Lower Ninth Ward it was obviously devastating. My guide, who has since become a friend, explained to me that the fields all around were once as densely packed as the city’s other neighborhoods. That knowledge deeply impacted the way I looked at the art in the area.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that many artists decided to use the “home” as a basis for their art. Katherina Grosse chose to paint a home at 5418 Dauphine Street; Wangetchi Mutu “sketched” one out of wood at 540 Caffin Avenue; and Leandro Erlich erected a ladder which leans on a window in mid-air, hovering as if it was ripped from a wall.

Below are some of what I saw among the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward. It’s not surprising that many of the works seem obsessed with standing witness to the injustices that the surrounding community faced.

Janine Antoni (Season 2) T-E-A-R (2008)

The lead wrecking ball stands alone in front of a projected eye. The giant eye evokes the nightmare vision of George Orwell’s big brother (1984), where we are always being watched. But here the eye seems to have witnessed some form of destruction. The wrecking ball sits in a spotlight and echoes the shapes on the screen. I sensed the heavy burden that witnessing a tragedy can entail.

Ghada Amer, Happy Ever After (2005)

My guide told me that this piece was moved during the biennial and as a result the vines never grew up the trellises, which read, “Happy Ever After.”

Situated by the infamous levee that flooded the Lower Ninth Ward, when I sat on the round bench in the middle I could only imagine that if the vines had grown fully, the whole landscape would disappear, allowing me to imagine myself in a fantasy world of blue sky and greenery. Unfortunately like the promise of the Lower Ninth Ward, Amer’s piece was never fully realized in New Orleans, but it was a beautiful idea nonetheless.

Continue reading »

Last month I had the good fortune to speak with Eleanor Antin (Season 2) in a series of lively and engaging emails that included her thoughts on preparing for exhibitions, working with allegories, making “controversial” or “risky” art, teaching art, and working with actors (vs. models). Below is the first of two parts. Tune in tomorrow for the nail-biting conclusion. Many thanks to Eleanor for being so candid (and patient!), as we worked on the interview right through the holidays.

Eleanor Antin, The Death of Petronius from The Last Days of Pompeii, 2001. Chromogenic print, 46 5/8 x 94 5/8 inches. All images courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Joe Fusaro: When you share a series of work or create a proposal for an exhibit, what are some things you think about going into the process?

Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes at the San Diego Museum of Art was a mini retrospective of the work I’ve been doing over the last eight years. Earlier, I had a full retrospective from the late 60′s through 1999 at LACMA and I traveled with that huge show to several museums, including St. Louis and the UK while wondering, ‘where the hell do I go from here?’ Somewhere around that time, one sunny afternoon, I was driving down the mesa to La Jolla, the ocean sparkling blue green below me, La Jolla gleaming in the bay, when suddenly I had an apperçu that hit me with a strange sad power. La Jolla was Pompeii, rich and gleaming, without a clue that it was on the verge of annihilation. Pompeii was where the rich and powerful had gone to escape the heat, stink, and mosquitoes of the Roman summers, where those senators fortunate enough to live that long in the notoriously insecure world of imperial Rome went to retire. Extend the metaphor, and you have the ancient empire merging with ours, where affluent citizens lived the good life innocent of the destruction lurking just around the corner.

So since then, I’ve been working with myths, metaphors, characters, and settings invented out of the ancient world of classical Greece and Rome, all the time aware that these are really my neighbors. Maybe we don’t have a volcano on our doorstep, but with global warming, climate freakiness, wild fires, water loss, disease migrations, economic destabilization, terrorist vengeance—hey, we’re on a roll here….

Love’s Shadow, 1985. 16mm film, black-and-white, 2 1/2 minutes.

For me a show is always motivated by a generative metaphor, a kind of poetic image which opens up to related ideas, images, ambiguities, dreams, sensations. Nothing is closed, there is no end. If the viewer wants to keep looking and has a playful mind, my work can be like a hall of mirrors, expanding and suggesting new meanings which, in turn, may suggest others. Poussin and Magritte are among my favorite artists. They may have different sensibilities but their works are always restless and fluid. Unfortunately, I find the art world too ready to summarize and simplify. I’m often embarrassed by the simplistic takes even well-meaning critics may have on my work. I become a couple of declarative sentences in a stranger’s mouth.

JF: Why do you think some people consider your work controversial? How do you respond to this reaction?

EA: I’m confused when people consider my work “controversial.” Or the word most often used is “brave.” I don’t know what they mean. This isn’t Soviet Russia or Hitler’s Germany—yet. Those countries may have been intellectually monstrous and physically murderous but they seemed to think artists were important enough to persecute. Here, relatively few people care what artists do. This allows us freedom even if it assures us of irrelevance. So to call me brave is silly.

A well-known curator once said disapprovingly to me, “you always do whatever you want to do.” What should I do? What he wanted to do? You can say the art world cares what we artists do. But who are they, this art world? Dealers? Curators? Critics? Collectors? Other artists? Fellow travelers?  I’ve been with a great dealer, Ronald Feldman, since 1977 and he respects artists and assumes we will do whatever we want to do. Curators come and go. Critics have deadlines and space constraints. Collectors? Oh, please! They don’t know what they want until somebody tells them. Hopefully they have intelligent advisors, but they often don’t. Other artists, yes, they’re the best part of the art world, though many of them seem to feel that there’s a war out there, so they’re often in survival mode. They won’t always tell you how much your work means to them and that can make you unhappy, or even sometimes buggy, but hell, if they get ideas from you and you stimulate or provoke their work, isn’t that a good thing after all? It just means that there’ll be more good art around.

Continue reading »

As promised, here is a small visual taste of the sights and sounds of New Orleans’ Prospect.1 biennial. More detailed posts about the art in the Lower Ninth Ward, the French Quarter/Marigny & the Warehouse District will follow in the coming days.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Mark Bradford, Mithra (2008)

At the New Orleans African American Museum, which is located in Treme–the oldest African-American neighborhood in the United States.

William Kentridge, What Will Come (has already come) (2007)

McCallum & Tarry, The Evidence Of Things Not Seen (2007-8)

  Continue reading »