Tonight, starting at 6pm, the Guggenheim hosts a 24-hour durational event concentrating on the concept of time, including its “myriad philosophical, psychological, biological, sociological, poetic, aesthetic, and economic manifestations… geared toward both the academic and the general, art-going public.” Comprising interviews, lectures, discussions, and performances, the marathon will engage Time across a broad spectrum of fields, artists, architects, scientists, philosophers, historians, engineers, filmmakers, musicians, and other cultural producers.

Produced in conjunction with the exhibition theanyspacewhatever, time is here treated as as a malleable material itself and is a pervasive concern of the artists in the show, including Art:21 Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, and Philippe Parreno.  The latter two will be presenters at the 24-hour “performance,” along with Julieta Aranda, Shamim Momin, Alexandra Munroe, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Ritchie (Season 3), Nancy Spector, Lawrence Weiner, Lebbeus Woods, and a host of others.

There will be free coffee on hand. For the complete schedule and further information, click here.

Happy 2009! The year’s first guest blogger is Georgia Kotretsos, an artist based in Athens, Greece. Kotretsos holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004) and a BFA from The Durban Institute of Technology (2000) in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. She is a founding agent of Boots Contemporary Art Space, in St. Louis, MO and the founder and editor-in-chief of Boot Print, a publication dedicated to contemporary art and published by Boots.

In her work, Kotretsos has been exploring the interdependence and interrelation of the artwork/viewer, attempting to bind the two entities together. By challenging boundaries, authorship, and authority, she has created a body of work that is characterized by its conceptual consistency. Kotretsos has exhibited her work in South Africa, the United States, and Europe. 

Each year the tide of the art world carries hundreds of young artists into Chicago’s several art schools to earn their MFAs. And each year the tide also carries a number of newly credentialed artists away, usually to NYC or LA. The money apparently flows more freely there and the media pays attention. I’m sure this phenomenon is familiar to any US city (other than NYC and LA) that has a strong art school. These are constantly heard gripes amongst those of us who remain. The opportunities appear to be elsewhere. And what if we decide to stay? Is there any hope that we’ll actually kickstart this thing—like LA did in the 90s (the good folks at the Bad at Sports podcast have regularly aired these grievances)?

Although my adopted hometown seemed infinitely more exciting and even glamorous this year, particularly as motley thousands thronged the Loop on election night, this year’s coastal flights were more poignant for me because several peers whose work I genuinely admire numbered amongst the recently absconded (I am laughing at myself as I write this for its obituary-like tone…).

Here are a few who took off in ’08:

Aliza Nissenbaum paints large, usually squarish abstractions that seem to zoom in on gestural painting, picturing it at a granular level. The gestures don’t feel performative in an AbEx way, but neither are they allegorical, i.e. David Reed. That’s surely due to the materially denuded surfaces with their thinly applied paint and low value contrasts. Her paintings possess an intense, ghostly presence.  Their atmosphere is one of unbearable intimacy, in which our senses of scale and direction are lost.

John Opera‘s photographic practice is two-fold: remarkably beautiful but melancholy landscapes (usually forests in upstate New York; the artist is originally from Buffalo) and abstractions that recall Bauhaus precedents (Moholy-Nagy’s photograms and Albers’ nested squares, in particular). In either case, he deals intelligently with the history not only of photography, but the more historically deep pictorial traditions of painting. I enjoy, for instance, how Opera’s positioning of the blasted tree in his Friedrich-like wintry landscape, Failed Branch (pictured above), nods to Barnett Newman’s zips in its vertical bisection of the picture, and its figuring of the artist and viewer’s upright posture before the image.

I thought perhaps that the art world in Chicago would close shop for good when John Parot left for LA this past summer. His contagious laughter has resounded for years at openings. His works on paper (usually combining drawing and collage) and installations deserve a much broader audience. In much of his work, Parot embellishes pictures of men clipped from fashion and porn mags with patterns rendered in gouache. His busy decoration of the handsome faces is too manic to be simply affectionate, masking, if not totally obliterating, the likenesses of his muses. I like to think of Parot as an aesthetic cousin to Art:21 artist Lari Pittman, whose sense of pattern and decoration has a similarly disturbing edge to it.

I can’t tell whether Melanie Schiff‘s photographs are chanced upon or choreographed, casual or careful. Whether it’s two green bottles provocatively balanced lip-to-lip or a rainbow formed by the artist spitting water into sunlight, her work, although composed, always has the feeling of being bound to a single moment. Her photos almost always picture light as it passes along and through glass and water in the context of the detritus of everyday life. A lot of artists set themselves the task of finding beauty in the mundane, but I’ve seen few do it in such an intelligent and disarming manner as Schiff.

EXCLUSIVE: Robert Adams in his Oregon home.

Robert Adams’s black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. An underlying tension in Adams’s body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera.

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

LEARN: Robert Adams is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology 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 Adams, (Left) From Lookout Mountain, at Buffalo Bill’s Grave. Jefferson County, Colorado and (Right) Sunday School, a Church in a New Tract, Colorado Springs, 2007. © Robert Adams. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Doug Dunderdale. Editor: Steven Wechsler.

EXCLUSIVE: Assistant Rob van Erve during the making of Judy Pfaff’s installation Buckets of Rain (2006) in the artist’s studio in Tivoli, New York.

Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Judy Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and synthetic color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between two and three dimensions.

SEE: More images, videos, and news for Judy Pfaff.

LEARN: Judy Pfaff is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Romance 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 | Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, production stills, 2007. © Art21, Inc.

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Judy Pfaff. Thanks: Rob van Erve.