Photo: Trong G. Nguyen

The 92nd Street Y continues its excellent conversations program this Thursday night with Art and Insight: Fred Wilson.  The Season 3 artist is best known for works that blur the boundaries between the artist and curator, gaining acclaim in the 1990s for his museum installations that rearranged displays of that institution’s existing collections to highlight the history of African Americans in colonial America. Wilson was the U.S. representative at the Venice Biennale in 2003.

Donna De Salvo, Associate Director for Programs and Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will moderate the discussion. For further information, click here.

MoMA takes over Brooklyn's Atlantic/Pacific subway station with reproductions from the permanent collection. This shot taken by Bradly Brown on Feb. 09, mid installation.

Last weekend the BOMB folks cut a swath through the NYC cultural scene, so we thought we would share a sampling of what we found.

We started off at Terminal 5 for the Black Keys show.  None of our faces were intact by the end of the night.  For a two piece band the Keys produce an enormous and mind boggling amount of sound.  Every once in a while its nice to escape into some good old fashioned American blues rock. (Really tried to find a good interview with them, but they seem to be resistant to the form, so went with this interview they did with GZA)

Saturday night we saw the insanely young and wildly talented Beirut at Brooklyn Academy of Music.  They’re amazing, but you have to think this performance would have killed if place in Vienna during the 17th Century.

Saturday afternoon we went to the Lower East Side, stopping in at galleries along our walk.  It was a pretty stark contrast to the Chelsea trudge, and refreshing to pass things other than galleries along the way (and even places to go to the bathroom!).

Highlights included:

• The Brand New Heavies, a show curated by Mickalene Thomas
• Francesca Dimattio’s incredible paintings at Salon 94 Freemans
• Ibn Kendall’s intriguing “Coon Alchemy” at NYSG
• We got “got” by the press release for James J. Williams show at Envoy

Finally, since the Atlantic-Pacific subway stop is right next door to us, we’ve been thinking a lot about the MOMA installation there.  Our first impression was that we loved the idea of blanketing this large public space in art, but didn’t think the show in the end was ambitious enough (and a little awkwardly curated).

Showing only reproductions of works makes us go straight to Walter Benjamin.  The translation of 3-d works into subway ads really raises the issue of how reproduction influences our experience of the work of art.  In light of this issue, some of the curatorial choices struck us as really strange.

The image of  Pipolotti Rists’ installation seemed completely incomprehensible, and was among several works which can only be understood in their 3-d state (a fur teacup comes to mind). MoMA does itself (and the kinds of art that people think of as non-traditional) no favors by showing it in a reproduction that gives little to no sense of the impact of the work .

In the end we wondered why one would show a picture of a readymade when you could just as easily make a fake one and leave it in the middle of the station somewhere? (How much could a stool and bicycle wheel really cost anyway? They could have made hundreds.)  Has anyone else walked through this?  What did you think?

Josiah McElheny, "Early Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely" (2004). Private collection, New York. © Josiah McElheny. Photo: Paul Mutino.

The very ambitious Innovations in the Third Dimension: Sculpture of Our Time is up now at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.  Spanning the bronze age of Auguste Rodin to the tech-driven mixed-media of Robert Whitman, Innovations attempts to illustrate how “virtually every time-honored idea about sculpture has been challenged in the 20th and 21st centuries.” Of course where would art be if it were not aligned with progress?

Drawn from local collections, the exhibit includes forty-five works that aim to chart the successive radical changes in size, media, presentation, and techniques that have kept sculpture on the cutting edge path. From traditional statuary to sticky chewing gum, from figuration to figuring out what is what, Innovations makes its case with three centuries worth of big-leaguers, like Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Niki de Saint-Phalle, and Art21’s  Louise Bourgeois, Josiah McElheny, and Do-Ho Suh.

Innovations in the Third Dimension: Sculpture of Our Time runs through May 24, 2009.

Adam 5-100, "Liberty Bird," 2008. Spray paint on paper. Courtesy White Walls Gallery.

politic
adjective
1. marked by artful prudence, expedience, and shrewdness.

Art and politics have a complex relationship. In the past week, I’ve seen city officials propose the elimination of arts positions, read about Shepard Fairey’s recent arrest possibly being a political stunt performed by Boston police, signed a petition supporting the induction of a Secretary of the Arts  into the Presidential cabinet, and sent a letter to my senator expressing my disappointment in her vote against arts funding in the stimulus package. It’s been a long week for heavyweight tangles between art and politics, and the question about one effecting the other is not easily answered.

I asked two local artists living and working in Oakland, California to respond to the current Flash Points question, “How can art effect political change?” Their responses are quoted below.

Like Art:21 Season 1‘s featured artist Margaret Kilgallen, Adam 5-100 spent time in San Francisco and has roots in graffiti.  His latest paintings are the result of an intricate and incomparable stencil layering process. Adam 5-100 has worked in the fine art, design, and illustration arenas and was featured on KQED’s Spark series in 2007.

Art has never set the political agenda for a major party, or a minor party, for that matter. It probably never will. The interests of artists have never been that important to the masses until recently when, after 8 years (the Bush debacle), not only artists, but a large segment of the population felt completely voiceless in the operations, actions, agendas, and attitudes of our government. Even then it was not just art, it was everybody. Then Obama shows up and all that pent up energy was released (e.g., Shepard Fairey’s Obama image) — I doubt there was one visual artist in the country who didn’t paint or design Obama’s portrait.

Art is a magical weapon of propaganda. It can’t make people who are entrenched in a certain belief change their minds, but it can propagate the faith of someone who is on the fringes of the targeted agenda. Liberal or Conservative.

If the question was “How can art affect change?” my answer would be a lot longer, and full of metaphors for how culture pulls and pushes, squeaks forward then is dragged begrudgingly back.

— Adam 5-100 Fiebelman

Favianna Rodriguez, "We Are the Change," digital image, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

Favianna Rodriguez is a new media artist and printmaker who was also featured on Spark in 2007. She develops community collaboration and web projects, works with immigrant rights groups, and is currently teaching as part of her residency at the University of Illinois.

As a woman of color artist and first generation American, my art practice serves as a voice for marginalized, disenfranchised people all over the world. In my work, I depict and critique the daily reality of immigrant workers, youth in prison, black and brown kids on the streets that have been left behind by our deteriorating school system.

I view art as a tool for education, agitation, and social critique. Through an artistic practice, it is possible to confront the multitude of images of disempowerment fed to us by mainstream media. Essentially, art can serve as a manifestation of the world we seek to create. It is imperative to understand that we practice art in a time of increased media monopoly. The level of self-censorship in mainstream media leads to one-dimensional coverage of issues that are important to all citizens—the war in Iraq, our dependence on oil, the true costs of “free trade” and globalization (to name a few). In this context, the voice of dissent becomes of even greater importance. We, as political artists living in the most powerful country of the world, have a responsibility to expose the stories that are most censored, and to build ties with the people on the ground who are working for social change. Art alone does not transform the world. Mass movements do. It is the unique collaborations between artists, activists, and people that forge true social change.

As artists, we can also easily be co-opted by corporate America—our art turned into a commodity. Too often, transnational corporations take the message of change, sell it back to us, and behind our backs violate the very principles for which we fight. The reality is that corporate America is responsible for the waste on the planet, the degradation of workers rights across the world, and the devastation of our natural resources. Ultimately, we must elect to fight for the people and for the planet, not for their bottom line. And that is the hardest stance to take. We must BE the change we talk about. Our future depends on it.

— Favianna Rodriguez

Kristin Farr is an artist and Project Supervisor for Arts Education at KQED in San Francisco. She was a featured guest blogger on this site in 2008.

Photo: Mary Cook

Chiara Clemente’s documentary Our City Dreams, currently on view at NYC’s Film Forum, gives us a glimpse into the lives of five women artists living in New York City: Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic and Nancy Spero.

Reviewed by the NY Art Beat as an affecting love letter from Clemente to the Big Apple, this documentary had some special moments:

1. We meet Swoon, a young and vibrant woman with a smile to warm your heart. She’s had her first opening at Deitch Projects—it was a huge party.

2. Ghada Amer’s mother saying that Ghada makes paintings of “bad women…” and (ooops) Ghada forgot to invite the filmmaker to her opening at the Gagosian Gallery.

3. Marina Abramovic, on the one-year anniversary of the tsunami, jokes that Thai women are bad performers because of too much coconut milk.

4. Kiki Smith finishing the installation of her show for the Whitney Museum up until the last moment…it’s part of a venerable tradition!

5. Nancy Spero blowing out candles at her 80th birthday party. Beautiful.

Our City Dreams is on view at Film Forum until Tuesday, February 17th.

In the meantime, a question for all you New York artists: What is it like for you to live and work in this city? What either brought you here and/or made you stay? If you would, please share!

Not at all surprisingly for a corporate entity, the Associated Press recently established ownership of a photograph of Barack Obama taken at a 2006 National Press Club event by photographer Mannie Garcia. After some extensive sleuthing, the Garcia photograph was  identified as the source for Shepard Fairey’s Hope image that we all have grown to know and love. That image has, in turn, gone into the world to flank numerous buttons, hats, t-shirts, stickers and countless other presidential tchotchkes.

L: Mannie Garcia/AP, 2006. R: Shepard Fairey, c. 2008. Via www.nytimes.com

In a wise and pretty gutsy move, Fairey preemptively sued the AP, claiming that he cannot be accused of copyright infringement and that his image is protected under fair-use copyright statutes. Money is at issue here too, though I can’t imagine Fairey made significant, if any, profit from the image. The same cannot be said for his Saks Fifth Avenue spring season marketing commission that borrows from early- to mid-20th-century propaganda-style imagery. No shade…

This whole scenario recalls the Alberto Korda photograph of Che Guevara that too went on to have a more successful life as a high-contrast graphic (yes, I had it on a t-shirt also; black image on a red background, of course).

Alberto Korda, Ernersto “Che” Guevara at the La Coubre memorial service, March 5, 1960.

Like Garcia’s photo, Korda’s image was taken while he was in the employ of a news service, which pretty much denies the photographer of any significant credit or direct financial benefits aside from the occasional lawsuit. What irony, considering Korda’s image ended up on the Cuban 3-peso note, but it also points toward the fact that legal courts are about the most effective option artists may have for financial remuneration for the lifetime of their artworks. Garcia, in a further twist, is claiming that the photo copyright is his and not the AP’s and that any credit or money should come to him. In the meantime, the AP wants credit and a cut of the profit from any subsequent use of Fairey’s image.

Um, I’m going to wager that no one from the AP has been on Harlem’s 125th street lately. Obama, unlike the litigants, has prudently distanced himself from the micro-economy that has sprung up around images of himself, his family, and that Fairey image. For instance, I ran into this guy in DC working the inaugural crowds and I normally see him in Harlem doing much of the same.

Harlem vendor in D.C.

Now that the president has become an icon, his image is, and has been, a boon for petit entrepreneurs in Harlem, and I’m sure any other site for a thriving street market where standards of “original” and “bootleg” are rarely considered. I wish the lawyers luck in tracking down all the subsequent profitable uses of the Fairey image.

Continue reading »

Oliver Herring, "Gloria" (detail), 2004, Polystyrene, vitrine.

Currently on view at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is Oliver Herring‘s Me Us Them, an exhibition culling fifteen years of work by the Season 3 artist. The show includes early knit-Mylar objects, experimental videos, elaborate photo-collages, and documentation of recent Task events, which invite participants to entirely shape the piece.

Herring’s work is centralized around human relationships and the intimacies of social interaction. You can find this out firsthand by applying to be one of the 35 willing-and-able for his next improvisational art-making Task force on March 22nd, which will take place in Saratoga Springs at Universal Preservation Hall. To apply for duty, click here.

Here’s a trailer for the exhibition:

DOWNLOAD VIA ITUNES | SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS

EXCLUSIVE: In her New Haven, Connecticut studio, artist Jessica Stockholder discusses the relationship between beauty, pleasure and taste, and how all three have a role in defining and being defined by politics — alongside documentation of an exhibition of her sculptures at Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York City.

A pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Jessica Stockholder’s site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but closer observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control.

Jessica Stockholder. Left: 2006 (inv. #438) Bamboo flooring boards, 2 green plastic bins, green thermos, lamp parts, plastic volume with tulle, wooden stool, hardware, rope, acrylic and oil paint, level caulking used as a primer on plastic and small parts; 96 x 144 x 112 inches. Right: 2006 (inv. #429), Furniture, tarp, pillows, lamp, plastic, glass jars; 105 x 51 x 30 inches. Courtesy the Artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Jessica Stockholder. Left: 2006 (inv. #427), Plastic lids, plastic parts, hardware, brackets, lamps, paper mache, paint, extension cords, plastic ball, dishwashing scrubby; 104 x 47 x 63 inches. Right: 2006 (inv. #435), Plastic parts, cushion, fabric, wood, cable, shelf, yarn, electric cord, tulle, light fixture, paint; 114 x 108 x 84 inches. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Jessica Stockholder, 2006 (inv. #433), Plastic baskets, mirror, nylon, carpet, tulle, thread, paint, arn, squirrel trap, sculpy, blanket, shower curtain, roof flashing, fur, roofing tar, plastic ties; 24 x 56 x 21 inches. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Mead Hunt & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Jessica Stockholder. Special Thanks: Jay Gorney and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Production still from "Art:21" Season 4 segment featuring Mark Dion

Recently I saw the Mark Dion segment from Season 4 for the sixth or seventh time. I love the Dion segment. I was sharing the video with teachers in a small, informal workshop introducing ways of working with Art21 in the classroom. During the discussion, we talked about the fact that many, many contemporary artists rely on others, sometimes hundreds of others, in order to realize their work. On my way home that evening, I started thinking about the number of artists in Season 4 alone that rely on other people to make their work ready for public viewing and/or consumption. The total number? Fifteen out of the seventeen, at least, rely on others to bring their work full circle into the gallery, museum, or exhibition space.

I mention this fact because it came up in discussion more than once over the past week that the days of artists working alone in a studio, tortured with their ideas and feverishly slaving over canvas, are slowly coming to an end. Artists are collaborating more and more, and using teams to realize ideas that would be impossible to complete on their own.

In a few days, I plan to visit Allora and Calzadilla’s new exhibit/performance at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. The idea to cut a hole in a grand piano and have someone stand inside and play is one thing. Actually making it happen requires more than two artists with a beautiful idea. And without musicians (able to play the keyboard upside down, no less) performing on a regular schedule, their work would be a series of still photos and cheesy background music.

Students in art classes today are most often engaged with working on projects alone. Why do so many teachers resist collaboration? Is it solely the organizational challenges? We’re certainly aware of the benefits it offers to both students and ourselves. How can we overcome the fear of planning collaborative work to more realistically reflect contemporary practice?

In the depths of a seemingly endless New York winter, my mind is already thinking toward late spring days on the Adriatic and the 53rd International Art Exhibition at la grande dame of all international art fairs, La Biennale de Venezia. There will be sultry nights, hobnobbing amongst the cognoscenti and, most importantly, a three-gelati-per-day minimum for all art lovers.

This year’s director, Daniel Birnbaum, has eschewed sections in favor of a thematically tight mega-exhibition. Organized around mostly “process” and “painting,” 53 seems poised to steer way clear of the epic knock-down-drag-out mainly between Okwui Enwezor and Rob Storr (with several punches landed by Francesco Bonami and Jessica Morgan) over the African Pavilion at the last Biennale. Though the debate quickly descended into sheer mudslinging, primarily at issue was Storr’s over-reliance on the holdings of a morally suspect Congolese collector. This time around, no African “big men” are rearing their heads, the unglamorous but stable and relatively prosperous west African nation of Gabon is participating for the first time and Mother Africa is present in Venice in a wonderful display of peace and inclusivity.

As it happens, I am re-reading Miwon Kwon’s book on site-specificity, One Place After Another, and like any good student of critical theory, I believe context gives meaning. I am having a hard time thinking about Italy outside the context of Africa, or more specifically, the increasingly precarious situation of African immigrants.

In the past few years, tens of thousands of Africans have illegally landed on southern Italian shores. While this is clearly many more than the southern towns and islands can legally process, police and support, the angst over the rapidly arriving clandestini has fueled xenophobic legislation, attacks against and murders of eastern Europeans, Roma and Africans—not to mention the number of immigrants who die either in boat crossings or are killed once they land ashore. I don’t mean to make too light of the situation, but you know something’s going slightly awry in Italy when there’s a serious move afoot that could possibly ban Sicilian cuisine in the north of the country.

The Biennale bears no responsibility for any of these racist developments, clearly, but there’s no point in burying well-coiffed heads in the Giardini’s gravel about it. And if the news is too depressing for any dear readers, I’d like to suggest two fantastic art projects that have deftly and poetically presented the movement of immigrant bodies through the Italian landscape.

Moroccan-born French artist, Bouchra Khalili, recently made a series of videos called Mapping Journey that trace the routes of several African immigrants through Italy to France where they have ultimately joined the French Foreign Legion.

Bouchra Khalili, "Mapping Journey #1," 2008

Very short and shot from a single vantage point in a documentary style, the videos leave the viewer almost confused while watching the matter-of-fact way the anonymous subjects dryly narrate their dangerous (and often multiple) attempts to cross the Mediterranean, slip past borders and only to find a safe haven in a military hangover from imperial France.

Isaac Julien’s high-calorie films and videos are as lush and beautiful as Khalili’s are straightforward and his WESTERN UNION: Small Boats (2007) is no exception.

Isaac Julien, "WESTERN UNION Series No. 8 (Sculpture for a New Millenium)," 2007

In a project encompassing multi-channel video, photography, installation and a collaboration with choreographer Russell Maliphant, Julien moves his viewers wordlessly through a sweeping visual tale of vulnerable bodies in sublime southern Italian landscapes. In interior scenes, Julien situates his protagonists in a baroque ballroom that Luchino Visconti fans (count me among the faithful) will recognize from The Leopard and, like Visconti’s epic film about an Italy in cultural crisis, WESTERN UNION is downright decadent in its beauty.