by Yalian Yang, Jonathan Garcia, and Nahid Sultana

One of the things I love most about teaching 12th grade is the sense that I am meeting students on the border between their child and adult selves. They are experiencing one of the biggest transitions of their lives, between what has been and what they will become. I am a Media Arts teacher at Flushing International High School, one of nine in a network International Schools in the NYC school public school system that exclusively serves recent immigrants to the United States. Set in Flushing, New York, our school population represents almost 40 different countries and 20 different languages. Every student comes here with a different story, but one of the most common reasons for their relocation is the opportunity for a better education. They know better than anyone else I know what it means to follow the American Dream.

In years past, I would have scoffed at the concept of the American Dream, pointing out the blatant contradictions between what the United States claims to be and what the United States is—our legacy of oppression and the continuation of racial and class injustice. But 2008 was different. Last summer, as Barack Obama gained momentum in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President, I felt that I was in a unique position to engage students in the election process, not only by watching, but also by creating their own media responses. For recent immigrants and English language learners so used to being invisible or even shunned by the general population, this seemed to be one of the most critical “teaching moments” I’ve ever experienced.

I spent the summer exploring relevant curriculum from Rock the Vote and MTV to The League of Women Voters and The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Excited and completely overwhelmed, Erin Dowding, our English teacher, and I decided to work collaboratively. We wanted students to create their own presidential campaign advertisements, and worked backwards to figure out what other skills and activities we needed to introduce in order to prepare them. Prior to getting into the election, we wanted to prepare them for the election. What did they need to know about the electoral process?  How could we create a bridge between their own lives and the election of a US president? What tools would they need to think critically about the role of the media in politics?

In my Media Arts class, this preparation focused on media literacy. How does advertising work and how are each of us affected by it? What does it mean to live in a consumer culture and how do we participate? What is branding and target marketing?  How do art and advertising fuse to perpetuate the mythology of beauty and cool? How are teens, in particular, inculcated into the culture of desire, and who’s in control? How has technology effected, or changed, the way we think about democracy? What is the difference between consuming media and participating in it?

The first project, “Company Logo,” required students to create a logo using Photoshop that effectively “branded” an image for a fictional company:

The second project, “Ad Parody,” asked students to create satirical images that reflected a new perspective on a company, product, or political issue. Students immediately grasped the idea of poking fun at the political system. As mesmerized by Obama as many of them were, they were able to see through the artifice and theater of the campaigns themselves.

by Jean Franco Vergaray, Nasim Morad, and Sandy Rong

October arrived, and it was time to delve into the election in earnest. The excitement about Barack Obama was palpable. Students even deemed one student our own ‘Obama.’ As a teacher, I struggled to keep my political beliefs and allegiances out of the classroom, so as not to alienate those with different views. In this all-immigrant, and largely Democratic environment, it was easy to imagine that everyone was of the same mind. It was also clear that, when pressed to say WHY they supported Obama, students were at a loss for words.

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Vilgot Sjöman's "I Am Curious (Yellow)," (1967)

I’m also teaching a course at the École Régionale des Beaux-arts de Nantes called, “Workshop: I am curious… (The Artist as Ethnographer).” Each Friday morning, my students and I have made a regular practice of going to a place, talking with strangers, and asking questions. I’ve gathered a few notes on my research for the course, what we’ve done, and what we’ve discussed.

The title of the workshop is based on the films of Swedish director, Vilgot Sjöman, I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and I Am Curious (Blue) (1968), both documentaries-within-films. In the opening scenes of I Am Curious (Yellow), Lena surveys passersby, microphone in hand, asking the question, “Do you believe Sweden has a class system?” Later, we see the director and his camera crew filming the documentary, but it is Lena’s intense curious energy that drives the film.

Another source of inspiration for the course was Hal Foster’s essay, “The Artist as Ethnographer” [in The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (October Books, 1996)]. I have the vague suspicion that we may actually be performing the faux alterity or “outsideness” that he criticizes in applications of pseudo-ethnographic models in contemporary art practice. But sometimes you have to do wrong before you learn how to do right.

Artist Harrell Fletcher wrote a text called “Some Thoughts About Art and Education” (2007) based on his artistic practice and experience as a teacher. His observations about experiential education, the classroom environment, project research, and going on field trips, have influenced the way I approach teaching. For example, he writes:

Collective Learning

I teach at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, and I have a class currently where we started by having all of the students tell their life stories to everyone else. It took three classes to get through them all, but they revealed many interesting things that wouldn’t come out in more cursory introductions. Based on connections the students had we organized a series of field trips to places like a Veterans hospital, an alternative kindergarten, a campus fraternity, a high school geometry class, a Native American community center, a radio station, etc. From those experiences the students broke off into groups to develop projects like a radio show about grandmothers, and a lecture series in the frat house living room. Some of the field trips didn’t develop into projects, but were still valued as experiences. I like to think of this method as a way to lessen my role as the authority in the classroom and instead we share that role and all become collective learners. 

On the first day of the workshop, I asked the students to tell me about their experience of the city of Nantes and the art school. They said that despite the school’s location in the heart of the town center, they felt isolated both from the public of Nantes as well as students from other universities. In France, college students typically focus on their area of study exclusively (e.g. law, biology, history) and that often determines their social circle.

Motivated by our conversation, we took a fieldtrip to the campus of the nearby Université de Nantes Faculté de Sciences et Techniques, the science and technical campus of the University of Nantes. One of the students said that they felt like tourists. By making the place “strange,” we were self-conscious of our role as outside observers. We noted that most of the students and faculty were walking briskly in the opposite direction as us, heading to the tramway for their lunch break.

One of the students became the de facto interviewer based on her outgoing personality and ease with approaching strangers. We approached a few young men hanging out by the entrance of the Resto Universitaire (cafeteria), who turned out to be students from the local lycée (high school) who come to the college campus to eat because they have trouble finding seats in their own cafeteria. We learned more about the university culture from a biology student and a mathematics student who were also waiting for the cafeteria to open. It was a modest exchange, but a step in the right direction.

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Gerhard Richter, "Ella'" (2007)

I didn’t expect to crack a smile during the new show of Gerhard Richter’s portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery. Especially at a Gerhard Richter show. He is an artist routinely and tiresomely referred to as “the world’s best living painter” (the title is on a four-months-of-the-year timeshare with Jasper Johns and Lucian Freud) and whose work, we are constantly informed, waggle-fingeredly, is an “exploration of painterly potential” in “various painting strategies” with “a bewildering array of subject matter” (so a lazy Google search informs me). The Richter rhetoric is all stoic sobriety. The joyful physicality of applying paint to a canvas has been expunged from Richter’s careful, detached, restrained work. Serious as cancer. Or so we’re told. (The truth is that it’s the writing on Richter that’s had all the joy sucked out of it).

The first and perhaps most unexpected thing about the Richter show is its venue. The National Portrait Gallery (an anachronism as weird as a National Still Life Gallery, or a National Gallery of Pictures of Pigs) has a huge collection of portraiture from early Tudor royalty to contemporary celebrity politicians and athletes, whose quality veers wildly from the awesome (early Tudor royalty) to the awful (contemporary celebrity politicians and athletes). It’s a museum that values subject over style and for every great painting, there’s another ham-fisted one that sneaked in by virtue of its painter’s popularity among 19^th-century personalities who insisted on getting their beards just right.

Strange then to see, installed in its vertiginous entrance hall over the escalator, Richter’s 48 Portraits (1971-2), his passport-photo-style photorealist paintings of famous men from the turn of the 20^th century (Wilde, Hindemith, Greene, Stravinsky, Einstein, and so on), arranged in an inverted right-angled triangle. One response to this somewhat anachronistic placing (they’re portraits, but painted meticulously from posed photographs, and sidestep any claims to ‘likeness’, ‘presence,’ or ‘essence’ that are part of the armory of conventional portraiture) is that it’s a piece of ‘institutional critique,’ the process by which a hoary old institution tries to look self-deprecating by inviting artists to carefully (“just in that corner, please”) make fun of their collection and organization. It’s an old trick that rarely looks anything other than self-aggrandizing. Here, though, the joke is on the artist, not the institution. And it’s fascinating.

Richter’s much-quoted statements about the inefficacy of painting to capture the essence of its subject—a somewhat haughty riposte to anyone daring to find emotional import in his works—may be plastered in the wall texts and carefully parsed on the NPG website, but the nature of the exhibition and its location enable a reading that breathes life into an artist that attracts conventional wisdom as feces does flies. By wrestling the big man’s knowingly sprawling oeuvre (no surprise that his ongoing collection of photographic source material is given the daunting title of Atlas) into the category of portraiture, the show opens up Richter’s work in a way belied by the standard ‘anti-style’ readings. While the artist may make the somewhat laborious claim that “a portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s ‘soul’, essence, or character,” it’s hard to not look at his painting of his daughter Ella from 2007—she looks down, lost in a book, like a version of his earlier Reading from SFMOMA—as tender and rather protective, for all its petulant I-don’t-care-really fudged paint. (I was reminded of Matisse’s great 1905 Girl Reading, another image of a father watching his daughter’s absorption in something other than him. In both paintings the brushstrokes—one smeared, one electrified—look like cries for attention from childish papa).

For all his protestations, this show, in its dogged refusal to swallow the artist’s mythology whole, situates Richter as a romantic in spite of himself. Look at his 1996 Self Portrait: the artist looks down (again swerving away from what a direct gaze might give away) through a fog of squeegeed oil paint, as though behind frosted glass. At the edges of the painting the artist has meticulously rendered the cracks and chips of a battered Old Master, a visual gag that’s really half-serious. Well, I laughed.

Elizabeth Murray, "Empire," 2001 watercolor, 18" x 7 1/2" x 1 3/4"

I’m not very religious, but just the other day I was “given” a prayer that somehow spoke volumes about life, the life of teaching, and the life of artist-educators. Eleanor Roosevelt recited this prayer each night before she went to sleep:

Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of the world made new.

Now I’m not sure how religious Eleanor was, but each time I read it, it says something new so I hope you’ll enjoy it over the next week (month? year?) and perhaps pull from the words some of the reasons we’re all here in the first place—we love what art can be; we revel in the new classics; we love investigating possibilities and big questions; we believe every subject is major; we value multiple literacies; we love discovering ways of doing things and not necessarily the way. Somehow, if we are able to share and teach this in the classroom, we might even get to the beginning of spring and feel like we’re in pretty good shape.

Elizabeth Murray once described her process and said,

You’re posing problems for yourself. It’s kind of like a battle of you against you, and you are trying to figure it out. And that’s when it gets painful, when it’s not coming together. And I have no idea how I am going to bring it together. It starts to feel like a mess. Like, I’ll think I have it and I’ll change one color and instead of it being the solution it becomes this big mess.

Teaching about contemporary art and the desire to make contemporary art with others involves enjoying making a mess, actually loving the mess, and seeking even more.

It’s no secret: Art21 loves videos about art. So, naturally, we would love the idea of a Web community dedicated to showcasing videos about art, right? Right.

ArtBabble—a project initiated by the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA)—is one such site, having plans to gather, present, and discuss art-related video content from a variety of perspectives.

ArtBabble is currently in private beta, but we just so happen to have some invites available to distribute to our loyal blog visitors. Send an email to babble [at] art21.org, and we’ll send an invite your way! Then, feel free to come back here to let us know what you think.

Read more about ArtBabble on the IMA blog.

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Jenny Holzer discusses the process behind her series of Xenon Projections as part of the exhibition PROTECT PROTECT at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Featured works include Projection for Chicago (2008), a multi-part projection of the texts of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska on building facades around the city, including the Lyric Opera House & Riverside Plaza, among others. Holzer’s traveling exhibition opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York on March 12, 2009.

Whether questioning consumerist impulses, describing torture, or lamenting death and disease, Jenny Holzer’s use of language provokes a response in the viewer. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations. Holzer’s texts—such as the aphorisms “abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “protect me from what I want”—have appeared on posters and condoms, and as electronic LED signs and projections of xenon light. Holzer’s recent use of text ranges from silk-screened paintings of declassified government memoranda detailing prisoner abuse, to poetry and prose in a 65-foot wide wall of light in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, New York.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller, Nick Ravich & Kelly Shindler. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera & Sound: George Monteleone and Alexander Stewart. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Jenny Holzer. Text Courtesy: Wislawa Szymborska. Special Thanks: MCA Chicago & Karla Loring.

Jeff Koons, "Self-Portrait" (1991)

Happy Monday with a busy week of activity from Art21 artists. Here are some highlights:

• This Thursday and Friday at the Guggenheim, created in response to the museum’s current The Third Mind exhibition, Laurie Anderson presents a new solo performance of adventure stories, poems, and music. Drawn from the artist’s life and previous work, Transitory Life: Some Stories transmits a Buddhist sensibility in the zen of the Frank Lloyd Wright building.

• Jenny’s Holzer‘s PROTECT PROTECT opens March 12 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The 15-year survey of the Season 4 artist’s works makes its third stop after stints at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Fondation Beyeler, Basel. “Alternating between fact and fiction, the public and the private, the universal and the particular, Holzer’s work offers an incisive social and psychological portrait of our times.”

• Opening at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on the Ides of March Eve is Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes. Centering on three large-scale sculptural installations, the exhibition addresses geologic phenomena, exploring how people perceive and experience the landscape in a time of heightened technological influence and environmental awareness.

• On view at Gagosian Gallery through April 11 is Marble, a group exhibition that takes a compressed, over-the-ages look at the revered medium. The selection includes Anatolian and Cycladic idols as well as a Renaissance bust once owned by Andy Warhol, all of which presage the likes of Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, and the more recent Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Louise Bourgeois.

Jackson Pollock at work in his studio, photographed by Hans Namuth, 1950.

Following up our discussion about documentation of the creative process in the cases of Mark Bradford and Jackson Pollock, my students and I talked about what we might include in an Art21-style documentary about the artist at work* based upon our own experiences and observations. In the interest of  presenting a more representative picture of the artist at work in the 21st century, we brainstormed a list of scenes and topics that included:

Working at a day job
Many (if not most) artists need to find day jobs to support their art practice. This goes for both young artists who are just starting out as well as artists who are actively showing their work. Unlike in most professions, artists do not receive a regular salary or wage for their creative labor. An artist’s day job may or may not relate specifically to his or her artistic interests. These jobs may include: working as a studio assistant to a more established artist, museum administrator, teacher/professor/educational staff, gallery receptionist, retail associate, bartender, and freelance gigs (to name a few).

Art school
We talked about some of the (sometimes intangible) lessons and skills that we learn in art school. One is the importance of being part of an artistic community of peers, collaborators, and mentors. Another is discourse, or learning how to talk about art. This is a skill developed in both group critique settings and faculty reviews. Group critique is a process by which an artwork’s meaning is generated through collective conversation and debate. It is also a process of judgment and consensus. It is difficult to say whether art school prepares students for a career, a way of life, and/or a way of thinking. But upon graduating from art school, a common concern among young (American) artists is the need to pay off their student loans for tuition debt incurred during their artistic training.

Career trajectories
Artists are usually chosen to be featured in a documentary when they have achieved a measure of success and recognition in their careers. They have been included in major exhibitions, collections, and commissions.  Their work has been written about in influential publications, and it has attained a level of maturity and context. However, besides focusing on this select group of artists, a documentary series could also represent artists at different points in their careers to show the highs, lows, and plateaus in the life of a working artist. This would include artists who are just starting out, artists who have had long careers without wide recognition, as well as individuals who have stopped pursuing careers in art for various reasons, or are doing interesting things that may not be called art.

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"Notes for a People's Atlas of Chicago" exhibition of Chicagoan maps of the city. Photo By Jason Reblando. 1-15-09 opening at Wicker Park Field House, Chicago.

This post is written as a dispatch from California, where I was at the College Art Association conference and speaking in classes at CalArts, SFAI, and the CCA Social Practices studio.

Initially when invited to contribute, I was challenged by the prompting question, “how can art effect political change?” because of how broad it was and because I didn’t think that I could begin to address that in one short post. It is one of the central concerns of my work. But the challenge was interesting and offered an opportunity to try to communicate (somewhat) concisely some of the lessons I’ve learned from many years of practicing socially engaged art at various levels.

Off the cuff, I should be clear that I work in many different places and in many different ways, which strongly influence my ideas (hence my forthcoming eclectic listing and ranting). Most often the place is in Chicago, and the most consistent method or form I work in has been a biannual publication, AREA Chicago. I also find myself working on numerous other projects simultaneously. That diversity of tactics and approaches is both informed by my life situation, which requires me to work in different ways and different places to earn a living. It is also a recognition of the fact that there are limits to all forms and there is much to be learned by trying new ones. So you’ll find on my website that my time is also spend writing essays, organizing conferences and exhibitions, lecturing extensively, and working on various kinds of documentary and research projects.

Last Wednesday, while speaking on a panel discussion entitled “Relocating Art and its Public” at the CAA conference here in LA, I was compelled to think through the work that I care about and am involved with as it relates to audiences and participants. I realized I could not clearly talk about any of this without spelling out what kind of relationships I wanted to have in this world, in a broader sense. That is not to say that the work I’ve been involved in has always succeeded in creating those relationships which I desire and want others to have. But the work that I do is so informed by a political concern about people’s potential to self-actualize in a world which stifles that possibility that I have to be up front about it. This is how I intend to address the question posed on this blog.

I concluded my presentation by recounting the provocation put forth to me by my friend Chris Carlsson in San Francisco: that the challenge for those opposed to capitalism and in favor of a different (“anticapitalist”) organizing principal for life and economies is to take the “anti” part of our perspective and make it into something that we can all strive for together. A further elaboration would be that a challenge for anticapitalist cultural work is to articulate and represent a life better than the competitive and commodified social relations that currently dominate how most of us relate to one another. One step in that direction would be to create contexts that allow us to see our relationships in ways that both benefit from our diverse experiences and insights needed to face everyday challenging situations, and that also allow us to be powerful enough together through organization so we can tackle the big stuff we all face. I honestly think that most of us barely know what free feels like or looks like. We need each other to figure out how to know how to get there. In the last eight years, most of the projects that I have been involved with  have had some component that was about articulating a different kind of “we” or collective toward the ends described above. Admittedly, they are on a pretty micro scale. To the extent to which any transformed social relations are actually realized, the impact beyond the people directly involved is limited, rendering it primarily symbolic and experimental.

DSLR Call For Participation Spring 2001. For more information about DSLR and other critical public art in Chicago from 2000-2005 see "Trashing the Neoliberal City" booklet (free download) by Tucker/Forman at http://www.learningsite.info/trashing003.htm

I’ll now summarize few of the events with which I have been involved as a participant or organizer that have tried to articulate a new or different “we.” The first is the Department of Space and Land Reclamation (DSLR), which took place in Chicago in April of 2001. The “campaign”  was organized through an open call for participation circulated in email and via heavy postering throughout the city. It asked for people who are concerned about the state of public space in the city to come together and launch a coordinated and highly visible collective effort to highlight potential uses for public space, as well as to articulate criticisms or protests about how space was being controlled. This took many forms. Some were quite playful, such as poetry slams on El trains or ladders leading to nowhere placed on fences to suggest potential over-comings or transgressions. Others asked neighbors to sign petitions in order to get sidewalk kiosks to be accessible to everyone, not just real estate developers. There were over 70 similar small scale temporary initiatives that took place throughout the city that weekend. The effort, like so many complex social projects that involve people from many political persuasions and cultural backgrounds, had its successes and failures. One general success is that temporary space, opened up through coordinated space reclamation, allowed for housing activists, graffiti writers, urban planners, activist educators, pirate radio broadcasters, and critical artists to see themselves in relation to one another through a shared concern about public space in Chicago.

The DSLR spawned many relationships and catalyzed many new projects that continue to this day. By 2005, some of the folks who met through that work, along with others with overlapping interests, got together to develop the biannual publication AREA Chicago, of which I am still an editor. AREA has built on this methodology of creating a lens through which various practitioners and concerned citizens of the city can see themselves in relationship to one another. We have done that through 8 “local reader” publications, the collection of hundreds of hand-made personal maps about subjective experiences of the city into an archive entitled “Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago,” as well as over 50 events in the last 4 years.

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In the Art:21 Season 4 episode Paradox, artist Mark Bradford cites the legacy of Abstract Expressionism as an influence on his process-oriented paintings and collages. On a formal level, Bradford’s paintings share AbEx’s treatment of surface as an anti-illusionistic field of play and action. But in watching the video segments of Bradford at work in his studio, especially when working on pieces on the floor, I was struck by similarities to Hans Namuth’s documentary, Jackson Pollock 51 (1951), which is perhaps the most famous documentary of an artist at work. Namuth’s photographs of Pollock painting in his studio appeared in LIFE magazine in 1950, after which the artist became an instant sensation and celebrity. In his oft-repeated mythology, Pollock was traumatized by the public exposure of his working process and became paranoid that his celebrity persona overshadowed his actual paintings. His alcoholism deepened and he died in a drunk driving accident at the peak of his career.

In April 2007, the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London held a symposium entitled, “Did Hans Namuth Kill Jackson Pollock? The Problem of Documenting the Creative Process.” The following is from their press release:

When Hans Namuth and Jackson Pollock finished filming on the Saturday before Thanksgiving in 1950, they walked inside from the barn, out of the cold. Pollock walked over to the sink, reached down, pulled out a bottle of whiskey and said to Namuth, “This is the first drink I’ve had in two years. Dammit, we need it!” The rest, as they say, is history.
— Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave, 1985

Embedded in this brief account is the very real problem of how the creative process can be documented. Does documenting art ‘kill’ it? Arguably, the film assured Pollock his place in history, but can the archive deal with living process? If it is not possible to make a document that doesn’t impinge in some way on the creative process, can it tell us much about how creativity happens? How do we interpret and understand such documents? Does knowing about an artwork’s evolution spoil our relationship with that work?

More recently, artists have collaborated to make documents of their thinking and making, so is the Pollock anecdote simply not relevant today? Can contemporary artists use documentation creatively, as an integral part of their process? How have new technologies impacted on this documentation of process? And what role do conservators and archivists play in documenting the creative processes?

While I don’t believe that documenting a work of art ‘kills’ it, I do question whether a behind-the-scenes documentary demystifies the artistic process or in fact adds another layer to the mythology of artistic genius.

My students and I discussed the Mark Bradford Paradox episode and the excerpt of Jackson Pollock 51. We observed the similarities in the documentaries and the manner in which they construct a representation of the artist at work:

• We see the artist’s studio and working environment.
• The artist narrates his biographical origins of family and place. He also recounts his experience and influences as a student of art, which establishes his place within an art historical and pedagogical lineage.
• The artist is the primary narrator of his own practice; the director and interviewer are off camera.
• We witness the physical process of making an artwork. For example, we see the artists’ hands manipulating materials and close-up shots of the artworks’ surfaces.

The questions I posed to the students were: “Is there anything missing from this portrait of the artist at work?” and “If you were to make an Art:21 segment, what would it include?”

What transpired was a conversation about the realities of working as (young) contemporary artists—the mundane matters that both support and undermine the creative process.

(to be continued in my next post…)