Shahzia Sikander, "Untitled" (2005). Courtesy Sikemma Jenkins Gallery.

Season 1 artist Shahzia Sikander will serve as the ninth guest curator of the Selects exhibition series at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.  Past Selects guest curators have included artist Yinka Shonibare and designers Hella Jongerius, IDEO, and the Campana Brothers.

Mining the permanent collection, Sikander will interpret the holdings and produce an installation of selected works in the museum’s Nancy and Edwin Marks Gallery.  The exhibition, opening tomorrow and running through September 7, will also include an original new piece created by the MacArthur Fellow that was inspired by the collection.

Aaron Gach, Center for Tactical Magic, "Ice Cream Man." Image via www.tacticalmagic.org.

True story: I used to hate activist art. “Why so shrill?” I thought. “Can’t we just talk about this rather than producing a bunch of bad art?” I don’t always think I was wrong; a fair amount of unsuccessful activist projects tell a story we already know in a predictable fashion, but there was a time when I let my discomfort with the tone dictate how I evaluated the work. Once I allowed myself to engage and even become an active participant in these works, I became much more moved by the genre.

Certainly the work I’ve done as a blogger has forced me to engage in ways I wouldn’t have considered otherwise; the web in and of itself almost demands action. I mention this because the way I came to appreciate work in this vein influences how I respond to art. Does the piece effectively communicate the problem? Does it incite action and demand engagement? Will it present alternative ways of thinking? If the answer to all these questions is yes, I’m interested. As such, I’m providing a write up of three activist artists worth watching.

Aaron Gach, Center for Tactical Magic. Image via www.tacticalmagic.org.

Aaron Gach, Center for Tactical Magic
Like ice cream with your activism? Aaron Gach’s Tactical Ice Cream Unit not only distributes fine candied goods, water, and other rest station goods at rallies, but it is also outfitted with all your bullhorn needs! Divided into a “mother ship” (Central Command Van) and a “scout” (Tactical Ice Cream Cart), its pamphlets, videos, and buttons can be distributed at a wide range of events. Activism has never tasted so good!

Other notable projects include, the Cricket-Activated Defense System, an electronic device that receives distressed cricket chirps and translates the sound into a firing signal for anti-logger missiles, and Bechtel Predator Drones, a remote control toy truck delivering amongst other things, the CIA [workplace] Sabatoge Manual to its employees. *[from the website] Bechtel was responsible for building chemical production facilities in Iraq prior to the second U.S. invasion of Iraq and has been listed among 24 U.S. companies that supplied Iraq with weapons and/or weapon-making capabilities during the 1980′s.

Jill Magid, "System Azure." Image courtesy Jill Magid.

Jill Magid, System Azure
In 2003 Amsterdam police headquarters decided their security cameras needed a little bling after Jill Magid approached them through her company System Azure Security Ornamentation. Originally turned down as an artist proposal, Magid founded her company as a possible means of executing her project. It worked. Not only did she receive the proper permits to beautify police security cameras, but the city paid her to do it. Magid observed in a talk at the New Museum recently that the previously ignored cameras became very visible to citizens after they were bejeweled.

Dyke Action Machine, "The Girlie Network, OB-GYN." Image courtesy Dyke Action Machine.

Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner, Dyke Action Machine
Few artists have as firm a grasp on the language of advertising as DAM (Dyke Action Machine), the two-person public art team of Carrie Moyer and photographer Sue Schaffner. Between 1991 and 2004, the collaborative canvassed New York City with posters inserting lesbians into popular ad campaigns. Early personal favorites include their wildly popular Do You Love The Dyke In Your Life Calvin Klein ads (1993), and The Girlie Network (1995), an all-lesbian television network. Their primetime line up included OB-GYN, Leave Us the Beaver, and The Snip Squad.

Visit the Steal This! section of their website to download your own DAM paraphernalia.

Paddy Johnson is a writer who lives and works in Brooklyn. She blogs at Art Fag City.

Margaret Kilgallen, Work on paper from installation at UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Last month, five different Art21 artists were featured in the first five pages of Scholastic Art magazine, an issue that celebrated contemporary women artists including Laylah Ali (featured on the cover), Margaret Kilgallen, Kiki Smith, Susan Rothenberg, and Ida Applebroog. While the overly simplified titles of the two articles, “Drawing People” and “Sketching Animals,” didn’t exactly make me lean forward in my seat, the fact that Scholastic Art has made the move (and not just with this issue) to more comprehensively include contemporary art in the magazine is encouraging. Most art educators have memories, whether they are fond or frustrating, of utilizing Scholastic Art in our classrooms. But often, we would find more than one or two issues in a relatively short time span devoted to telling stories and sharing techniques that had been shared before…and perhaps before that. Images of certain artists and artworks forced some things to be pushed into the “Stairway to Heaven” category—a classic you just don’t want to hear (or see) anymore.

In the February issue of Scholastic Art students and teachers can learn about one of the approaches Laylah Ali uses to pull viewers into her paintings and the kinds of women Margaret Kilgallen features in her work. Readers can also learn more about Ida Applebroog’s strategy of separating her paintings into panels and about Susan Rothenberg’s dreamlike drawings. The second article even concludes with a description of the etching technique used in Kiki Smith’s Wolf Girl.

Besides Scholastic Art and the usual mix of glossy art mags available in art classrooms, are there other magazines—online or hard copy—that you are using in the classroom? BOMB has become a favorite for many of the classes I work with specifically because it features artists talking with other artists. Other suggestions?

A few recently-published French titles about the rise of Barack Obama (from left to right): "Barack Obama: Le premier president noir des Etats-Unis" by Guillaume Serina; "L’intraitable beauté du monde. Adresse à Barack Obama" by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau; and "Barack Obama: L’anti-modele français" by Jean-Baptiste Onana.

At the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes (Nantes School of Art), I am teaching a course called “Contemporary Art in the United States, 2000-Today.” The premise of the course is to give students an introduction to recent American contemporary art while also giving them an opportunity to practice their English. While we will consider art made during “the Bush years” (2000-2008), I am also interested in the notion of “today” as a moving target.

The first week of the course coincided with l’investiture (inauguration) de Barack Obama. If there was Obama fever in Nantes during the week of the Inauguration, it was subdued. My French friends and colleagues shared their impressions with me, which ranged from joy…to envy…to apathy…to skepticism about the hype…and finally, to doubt as to whether France would ever elect a black president. In France under President Nicolas Sarkozy, like in the U.S. under Bush, citizens have become deflated, prone to anger, and weary of the government’s lack of response to public complaint.

In class, we watched the first several minutes of Barack Obama’s inaugural address. I invited the class to consider Obama’s address as a work of performance and spectacle. Our conversation centered on the symbolic trappings of the inaugural ceremony. First, there was the issue of the canon firing, which the students found inexplicably silly. They questioned why the inauguration would employ such an anachronistic weapon. For example, why don’t the aesthetics of the inauguration change to reflect contemporary sensibilities? The canons alluded to military salutes from the time of the nation’s founding in the late 18th century. Perhaps it was the sheer anachronism of these symbols that situated Obama in the lineage of American history on Inauguration Day (and was a reminder that some of our first Presidents were slave owners).

The students also took note of the many American flags on display, both on the National Mall and waved by the cheering audience. They explained that in today’s France, to prominently display the French flag is a gesture towards nationalism and the FN (National Front) political party. The FN, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, promotes an anti-immigrant and racist nationalist agenda and opposes France’s participation in the European Union. The younger generation doesn’t associate with the flag as a symbol of French identity.

Also, unlike the American flag, the French flag’s origins are not explicitly linked to the nation’s independence and founding. In fact, how could a single modern flag represent a history that accounts for Gaulic tribal occupation, Roman rule, monarchical succession and overthrow, and numerous revolutionary governments? The notion of historical “change” in France could be said to be more cyclical than linear in nature. As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Thanks to Paul Schmelzer for his wonderful series of posts tackling our Flash Points topic head-on. Follow his daily exploits back on his own blog, Eyeteeth.

Up next is Audrey Chan, a Los Angeles-based artist and writer whose work concerns politics, feminism, rhetoric, and satire. Her recent projects included co-organizing Exquisite Acts & Everyday Rebellions: 2007 CalArts Feminist Art Project, a collective and inter-generational investigation of feminism in the context of contemporary art practice that included a symposium, exhibition, and lecture, film, performance, and writing series (publication forthcoming). She moderated the panel discussion, “The Personal is Political, Revisited” with artists Andrea Bowers, Dorit Cypis, and Martha Rosler. Other recent projects include BOOMERANG (2006), a video concerning the memorialization of the Iraq War and the legacy of Maya Lin; and March 17-18, 2007 (Hoods), an anti-war performance that took place in Hollywood, California.  With artist Elana Mann, Audrey is one half of the performance duo, Chan & Mann, whose recent motivational exercises include: Soul Satisfaction (2005) as part of the Sounding Out series at CalArts, NATURE! This One’s For You! (2006) in artist Fritz Haeg’s event This River Is Our Parade), and A MANNdate for CHANge (2008) featured in Mann’s election-themed performance project Exchange Rate: 2008. Her interviews and writings have appeared in Afterall Online and …might be good. Her projects have been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Artweek, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She recently worked in the Education Departments of the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Audrey is currently an artist-in-residence at the École Régionale des Beaux-arts de Nantes (Nantes School of Art) in France. For her guest blog stint, she’ll be writing about her experience teaching two courses: “Contemporary Art in the United States, 2000-Today” and “Workshop: I am curious…(The Artist as Ethnographer).”

Mark Wallinger with his piece "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space" at the Hayward Gallery, 2009

Pity the poor curator, scapegoat of the contemporary art sceptic. It’s hard not to feel at least a little sorry for Nicholas Bourriaud, curator of Tate Britain’s Altermodern, who has borne the brunt of the sometimes vituperative criticism the show has received from the majority of art critics in British daily newspapers. Take, for example, Waldemar Januszczak of the Times, who lays the blame for his perceived failure of the exhibition squarely at the puffed-up status curators of contemporary art have acquired in recent years:

The second question that kept bundling itself into my mind was: what’s the best way to murder a curator? Curators are the art world’s biggest contemporary pests. The Tate is overrun with them. Twenty years ago, they barely existed. Now every ambitious display of modern art is a curator’s personal handiwork. The Tate Triennial is the achievement of a curatorial dunce called Nicolas Bourriaud…

Janucszak’s is by no means a lone voice, although he is certainly the only advocate of actual bodily harm. Unquestionably, curatorship has undergone an enormous transformation over the last twenty years. Traditionally, in what was often a literal reading of the word’s Latin root curare (to take care of, to attend to), curators were of a piece with librarians: tweedy, esoteric, averse to direct sunlight. Curators squirreled away in regional museums writing letters to the papers when an Etruscan vase was misdated in a news story, living caveats against a kind of intellectual hedonism. Nowadays it’s not uncommon for a curator’s name to be foregrounded in exhibition literature and sometimes announced in forty-point Letraset at an exhibition’s starting point (I’ve seen this many times, and always with a sinking feeling). It’s a great example of a profession’s lack of clear definition in the public eye being inversely proportional to the amount of flatulent endorsement it acquires from those who should know better.

The word ‘curate’ has become so debased from its original meaning that you can now hang an exhibition in a small commercial gallery, write a 300-word press release and claim to have ‘curated’ it. DJ’s now talk about ‘curating’ musical sets; rock festivals are no longer organized, they’re ‘curated.’ So divorced has the term become from any notion of scholarship or care that it’s become another empty contemporary art signifier like ‘sourced’ or ‘practice’ or ‘discourse’ that is barely on nodding terms with its original meaning, and exists merely to pad out skimpy press releases or grant applications. The late, great George Carlin would have loved all this: “People add words when they want things to sound more important than they really are” (from Jammin’ in New York, 1992) is a good summary of the contemporary art world’s, er, liberal approach to the English language.

But great curatorship hides itself, or, put another way, the first rule of curating is you don’t talk about curating. Mark Wallinger’s current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, The Russian Linesman (the title derives from the referee in the 1966 Germany-England World Cup soccer game whose decision—still kind of hotly contested between the two nations—is seen as instrumental in England’s victory), is not only an extraordinary collection of diverse objects but is a proposition for the future of curatorship as a whole.

Wallinger places a variety of historically and artistically anachronistic objects alongside each other in such a way that each enhances the other. So a string piece by Fred Sandback (woefully undershown in European galleries) is installed opposite a copy of Albrecht Durer’s The Painter’s Manual (1525), with its woodcuts illustrating the use of string and frames to create convincing linear perspective. Likewise, a George Stubbs drawing of a human skeleton crouching ape-style sits cheek-by-jowl with a 1665 Robert Hooke drawing of a flea, crouched in a similar pose; a suite of Muybridges riffs on the theme, so that a telescoped historical frame lets meaning flicker between objects, without ever cramping the pieces’ style, or subordinating their weird power to a half-baked curatorial whim. Wallinger’s show has the feel of a Renaissance Wunderkammer, plucking liberally from news footage (the show is bookended by Aernout Mik’s video cast-offs of footage from the Balkans and CNN’s early morning helicopter shots of Philippe Petit’s tightrope stretched between the Twin Towers in 1974) as well as literary history (a Blake illustration and a Durer woodcut of a scene from Revelations are placed beside a speaker playing James Joyce’s own sonorous reading of a passage from Finnegan’s Wake).

What is elucidated in Wallinger’s discreet, diverse, and intellectually enriching piece of magpie curatorship is the force that thoughtfully-placed objects can acquire when treated respectfully, rather than preciously or in a spirit of theoretical illustration. In Wallinger’s hands, a curator is a kind of archaeologist, taking leaps of historical imagination while regarding the things made by people as the strange and magnetizing things they often can be. This approach feels like a plan, an escape route from curatorship’s linguistic cul-de-sac, by which the role of the curator as facilitator of empathetic engagement with the debris of the past and present can be reclaimed, tweed notwithstanding.

The Victory Garden Trike in action in San Francisco

Amy Franceschini is my favorite kind of propagandist: she creates enticing imagery you can’t help but rally around, but backs it up with dirt-under-the-fingernails pragmatism in service of a nearly indisputable cause: resurrecting San Francisco’s legendary wartime Victory Gardens program.

When I first stumbled upon Franceschini’s work at a small gallery in San Francisco in 2007, I saw it through the lens of the Iraq war that then seemed like it’d never end. The art related to her then-new Victory Gardens project: a prototype rainwater harvester, and documentation of items used to plan and implement trial gardens. Across town at SFMOMA, she was part of the SECA Art Award exhibition, which showcased related sculptures, including hybrids like the “bikebarrow” and “pogoshovel,” which struck me as the result of a collaboration between Beuys’s Green Party and TV’s Mr. Green Jeans.

But two years later, it’s easy to frame the work, which is created under the auspices of Futurefarmers, in the context of the current economic crisis. The 2006 version seemed to respond to an era when the president equated patriotism with shopping, whereas today’s version offers instruction in living in bounty through hard work, communal labor, and a sense of humor.

Victory Garden planting party fliers

Catching up with Franceschini this week, I learned about the history of San Francisco’s World War II Victory Gardens and about her own background that makes this such a winning fit for her. At its heyday, San Francisco had the nation’s most vibrant system of Victory Gardens, plots planted to help grow food for citizens so government could use its reserves with the war effort. Some 250 plots were growing food on public land, but Franceschini says that’s probably a lowball figure, given all the gardens tended by private individuals on their own land. The last time the city studied it, in 1970, there were 1,800 acres of usable land. “If we’re thinking about the city as a farm,” she says, “networking all this open space as an 1,800-acre farm, that’s a pretty big food-producing area.”

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