On March 28th, Philadelphia hosted a day-long marathon dialogue on the intersections of art and the possibility of social/political change. The day’s events included a symposium on Curating and Activism at the Moore College of Art & Design and a local stop-over of Jeremy Deller’s It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq. Continuing from his last post, Daniel Fuller, Senior Program Specialist at the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, recaps Deller’s project.

Photo by Tasha Doremus

After being obsessed for years with books and TV documentaries on the conflict in Iraq, Jeremy Deller conceived It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, as a mobile museum that would bring the emphera of war to American towns. Deciding it would be disingenuous to preemptively respond to and articulate a partial history of an unfinished war, he decided to bring together those with first-person experience in Iraq to talk about it while others, including himself, listened. Deller admits, “I’m a nosy person.”

So, with the help of Creative Time curator Nato Thompson, Deller assembled a road trip crew. Jonathan Harvey, an Army Platoon Sergeant (and Philadelphia native); Esam Pasha, an Iraqi-born translator, artist, and journalist; and Lonnie, the road manager, joined Deller and Thopson and headed out on a three-week, thirteen city, cross-country tour. After nearly six weeks at the New Museum, the crew spent two days in the South—in Washington, DC, right on the National Mall and on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. We were lucky enough to persuade them to make a loop up to Philadelphia before heading west to Cincinnati.

Photo by Tasha Doremus

As soon as we broke for lunch, the vast majority of the Curating & Activism panelists and observers hustled out to the Parkway in hopes of hailing a cab to take us over to the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall. A visitor to this section of Old City on a Saturday afternoon is generally greeted by reenactors adorned in colonial costumes, Ride The Ducks tour quacks, and horse-drawn carts on cobblestone streets. On this particular day, as we pulled up to the Mall, we saw a Winnebago towing a demolished, burned-out car parked in front of the “We The People” wall of the Constitution Center. In 2007, a car bomb was detonated on Al-Mutanabbi Street in an intellectual and literary Baghdad neighborhood. The vehicle housing the bomb was obliterated, but the shell of a car we saw in Old City had been parked further down the same Baghdad street. Serving as something of a monument for the 38 people who lost their lives to that bomb, it was a heartbreaking visual spectacle.

During our short lunchtime assembly, it was great to see the project being received so sincerely by an audience of tourists patriotic enough to spend a day in the cradle of the American Revolution. Pasha and Harvey seemed completely at ease, putting faces and voices behind a country and war to which we Americans are all now inextricably tied. They engaged the viewers in a dialogue that connected to the sting of alienation some of us feel when we have no place to express our grievances. The pair was respectful to all exchanges, all ideologies, and offered in return the best straightforward, non-partisan responses they could provide given the messy, unresolved situation. The day was not about headlines sanitized through the media and it didn’t try to draw definitive conclusions. It was about direct connections with those that have survived the ongoing Iraqi violence.

As a nightcap, our entire symposium again trekked over to a packed Slought Foundation where we were treated to further explanation of the project and a question-and-answer session with Deller, Nato, Pasha, and Harvey. Throughout the conversation, the four maintained their mission was not a formal declaration of their stance on the war. Some audience members called this provocation and accused them of being morally bankrupt. Of course, as informed rational beings they each have a position on the conflict, but the RV—with its dreadful object towed behind—is not intended to be about them. They are presenters, impartial facilitators of dialogue. For me, it seemed in the end that whichever side of the issue you fell on—anti-war or pro-war (like the Catholic nun who stopped by the RV in the afternoon)—viewing the destroyed car would reaffirm your position. Perhaps the greatest benefit to this project has been for soldiers who were able to share unscripted, cathartic tales with others who have been through similar ordeals. As a civilian, watching from afar, I cannot begin to fathom coming to terms with the aftermath of their job. A video on the project’s website (where you can follow the project’s cross-country trail) shows a college-age veteran calmly trading horror stories with Pasha and Harvey as his girlfriend quietly, uncomfortably, stands by. It is clear as you watch her face that he is telling stories she had never heard—that what he is sharing are things he thought he shouldn’t burden her with.

As Harvey pointed out, military humor is macabre, its darkness a coping mechanism and a way of distancing soldiers from the situation. They have a special way of looking at their job—to “keep rolling,” to “stay the course.” Even in the dimness of violence, “it is what it is.”

Nicholas O'Brien, Untitled still from an ongoing project made with Google SketchUp, 2009.

I thought before I get really started the guest blogging here, I’d speak a little bit about my intentions/directions/plans. BEFORE that, however, I’d like to thank Kelly Shindler for giving me this great opportunity as well as fellow Art21 bloggers and staff for their continued efforts and insight.

Although I hope not to linger too often on my own personal work while blogging here, I feel the need to provide slight context for what I will hopefully discuss. The easiest way I see myself establishing this context is through a brief examination of what I’m working on.

My academic and artistic practice (and these should be seen as being mutually influential or one in the same) filters through many sub-genres of what has often times been commonly dubbed newMedia Art (I prefer this spelling for reasons I might get into during my visit). Although I am sometimes in conflict with this classification and its specificity for mostly digitally-based artworks (according to some), I find it to be the most appropriate genre for me to identify with. Although my work encompasses Super-8mm film, photography, sound, performance, video, video games, and installation, I still feel most at home with wanting to associate with newMedia, even when the medium in which I’m working in is not often considered part of this genre, or even particularly “new.” In other words I feel as though newMedia is based more on ideology than on technology.

Nicholas O'Brien, Untitled still from a video sketch made in 2009.

With this in mind, what draws me to newMedia, and what I will be hopefully discussing her , is its possibility for multidisciplinary production. Recently, one primary concern deals with “the virtual.” In typical newMedia art narratives, the virtual is a common semantic replacement for cyberspace, or more simply the WWW. For my practice, however, I’m more interested in how/why this notion of the virtual has been primarily limited to digital experiences in cyberspace. In doing so, this bracketing overlooks a larger art historical discourse concerning representation in general being a virtual process. Virtuality extends beyond cyberworlds, refracting into different prisms; sculpted space, identity politics associated to land(scape), and memory. I feel as though we’re now seeing that the re-translation of virtual experience into physical manifestations is in disproportion to the initial transcription of ourselves into virtual realms; the machine is imperfect, the input is not (or is no longer) equal to the output. Our virtual selves contain more substance than our fleshy counterparts. We embody our tech more than we do our organs. To quote Erik Davis, “We have been cyborgs since year zero.”

Although I’m speaking somewhat abstractly (let’s get used to it), I plan on discussing these discrepancies through looking at works that are personally influential, as well as ones that represent/exemplify several stances on reconsidering the relationship between virtual spaces. Some approaches to this agenda include conversing about obsolescence (physical and cultural), art games/indie games, the disintegration/fabrication (a mutually implicated binary for me) of architectural space, rediscovering/reconsidering Home, reprogramming media myths, and exploring alternative histories(hystories) for newMedia Art.

Nicholas O'Brien, composite still from the Half-Life2 Game engine, made in 2009.

That all being said, one of the most distinct ways that I choose to trudge through this swampy mire is through Play. I love discussing Play (note capitalization, please) as an abstract ideal of cultural production. Play is enabling, empowering, and distinct in that it allows for a type of cultural liquidity that is hard to find in stringent artmaking. How can lolCats, OULIPO, Voltron, Half-Life2, and Philip Glass all be put on the same cultural pedestal without determining each element as pejoratively more or less culturally important? I’m not necessarily going to be providing answers for this, but I feel as though attempting to ask the question is testament to the subject material that I address in my work. The polymorphic significance of these different zones relate to the cultural leveling Barthes proposes in his examination of Wrestling (in Mythologies). I wish not to just analyze or observe anthropologically, I wish to engage (both skeptically and in celebration) how these environments or frameworks encourage and reinforce the importance of Play. To be able to weave through, without misappropriating/misrepresenting, these various lo(l)cals of Play is something that I hope I’m able to convey during my time with Art21.

Daniel Fuller, Senior Program Specialist at the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, recently helped organize the Curating and Activism symposium at Moore College of Art & Design. The following is a recap of a day of public conversations, on issues of responsibility, and a short interview with the artist Sharon Hayes.

From L: Martha Wilson, Lorie Mertes, Steve Kurtz, Adam Pendleton, Sharon Hayes, Stamatina Gregory, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, and Michael Rakowitz. Photo by Gabrielle Lavin.

This past fall, when Janet Kaplan and Lorie Mertes first approached us at the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative about co-organizing a symposium on curating and activism, it was an exciting time. Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding was at Parsons, Creative Time’s Democracy In America: The National Campaign was coming to a conclusion at the Convergence Center at the Park Avenue Armory, and Elizabeth Peyton was hustling to add her portrait of Michelle Obama to the New Museum retrospective. Everyone was gearing up for a historic election and there seemed to be a massive groundswell of grassroots organizing, both in the art world and everywhere else. The times have certainly changed since we first started planning the symposium, and that Saturday’s symposium was about how to maintain the level of fervor that propelled so many to the streets in the lead-up to November.

We conceived of a series of grouped conversations that would examine multiple ways in which curatorial activities can be directed toward social and political activism. The three panels included:

Curating and Self-Organization—Facilitating Interactions
featuring Katherine Carl/Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss + Michael Rakowitz + Carin Kuoni

The Project of Performance—The Body and the Public
featuring Sharon Hayes + Adam Pendleton + Martha Wilson

Models of Participation and Modes of Activism
featuring Stamatina Gregory + Steve Kurtz + Anton Vidokle

By bringing architects, artists, curators, and academics to the table, we hoped to provoke various opinions and strategies on how to effectively navigate the power dynamics involved in curating for social change. The general themes which seemed to be revisited with each panel were thoughts on participation and accidental activism. We repeatedly listened to a number of approaches to finding loopholes in the language of the law.

In regards to the battle for empowering “calls to action,” Martha Wilson got the crowd’s attention early when she declared that, “all art should be activist art and that all other is crap,” but Anton Vidokle made a plea for artists to be “radical,” not just use the “wishy-washy” term “activist,” saying that he sometimes goes to demonstrations “not as an artist, but as a person.”

In the aftermath of the symposium, I was able to reconnect via email with one of my favorite artists for a little follow-up question-and-answer. Coming of age in performance through identity politics in the downtown dance scene, New York-based Sharon Hayes works in performance, installation, and the production and perception of linguistics. Her staged speeches create opportunities to re-present the theater of politics in yesterday into contemporary public spaces. Her recent project for Creative Time, Revolutionary Love 1 & 2: I Am Your Worst Fear brought together 100 performers from the gay, lesbian, and transgendered communities of Denver and St. Paul to simultaneously read a love letter outside of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. The script employed confessional texts from the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s to confront audiences through a critical examination of love and war.

Sharon Hayes, Martha Wilson, and Lorie Mertes, Rochelle F. Levy Director & Chief Curator of The Galleries at Moore. Photo by Gabrielle Lavin

Daniel Fuller: This will be a bit out of context, but I’d like to quote you from Who Cares: “War changes everything and nothing.” Six years after the invasion of Iraq, it seems as though Obama’s exit strategy includes leaving through Afghanistan. As this or these wars drag on, so many become numb to the situation–as something going on “over there.” How does the probability of these wars being further extended impact or influence your work? Do you also find this numbing or is it strangely inspiring or reinvigorating to your artistic work?

Sharon Hayes: To me, a citizen of the U.S. whose government and military have been occupying, bombing, and leveling sanctions on Iraq and Afghanistan to greater and lesser degrees for my entire adult life, the continuation of these policies and activities are never inspiring or reinvigorating. On the other hand, I also wouldn’t say that the Obama administration’s plan for Afghanistan causes me numbness. Rather, I must admit I am perplexed and anxious, perplexed as to why Obama decided to escalate the fighting there and anxious about the impact it will have on the people in the region, the project and efforts to close Guantanamo, etc. In terms of my work, I have felt the need since the inauguration of Barack Obama in January, to work collectively with friends and colleagues to read, write, talk and think about the change (because I think it is a change) that Obama brings and brings to our work as artists.

DF: It’s been said that activism too often begins behind a computer, but if it stays there, it’s dead. Is participation, real live participation—a gathering in a town square—already a form of activism?

SH: I remember you asking this to the last panel and what popped into my head immediately then and still sticks now is NO! Participation, in and of itself, is not activism. People participate in activities, conversations on the internet, baseball games, college basketball tournaments, paint ball games, etc…and these things are not activism just because of their participation in them. It seems by “a gathering in a town square” you are already placing the frame of some political engagement onto your hypothetical scenario, but even still, going to a town square meeting that John McCain organizes during his presidential campaign is also not activism—political participation, sure. And perhaps many people who attend consider themselves activists in other facets of their life, but their attendance pure and simple does not, in my mind, constitute activism.

What your question begs is a clarified definition of activism, which is one of the questions and needs that came up on Saturday. Someone else can offer an abstract definition of activism. I can say the kind of activism that I am interested in is collectively engaged, potentially disparate, fragmented, and even pathetic activities whose aim is to increase the ability of poor, disempowered, disenfranchised, marginal groups and individuals to live lives that are safe and fulfilling to them and to resist the powers that decrease and impede on such safety and fulfillment. That includes increasing the access we all have to the resources we need to maintain a shared healthy, safe, and fulfilling set of lives over time.

Continue reading »

Allora and Calzadilla, "Hope Hippo," 2005

Beginning this Friday morning, I will be joined by my equally energetic and optimistic colleagues, Jessica Hamlin and Marc Mayer, as we descend on the National Art Education Association’s Annual Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What a conference it’s going to be! Between Mark Bradford joining us for special workshops this weekend, his keynote on Sunday, and the variety of presentations we have planned, this is going to be quite a weekend. Please join us for one or ALL of these events!

Saturday, April 18

Media-Savvy Students: Introducing Contemporary Art through Documentary Film & Web-based Resources with Marc Mayer and Kristin Farr
11 a.m., M100C/Center
Based on Art21 film and web-based resources and Spark, the Bay Area-focused arts television show, educators from Art21 and KQED will present a media-savvy approach to exploring the art and ideas of living artists with students.

Contemporary Art in Context: Teaching with Objects, Teaching with Film
1–3 p.m., The Walker Art Center  with Joe Fusaro and Courtney Gerber
This workshop introduces participants to a variety of ways to engage students with contemporary art through the study of objects in the Walker’s galleries and the use of Art21 multimedia resources. Session activities will emphasize inquiry-based strategies for looking at and discussing works of art and teaching with video, web, and print resources.

Super Session: “Art Practice, Teaching Practice”
A Conversation with Mark Bradford, Olivia Gude, William Crow, and Joe Fusaro
4 p.m., 200E/Center
This panel presents artist Mark Bradford in conversation with educators from museum, university, and public school settings to explore how the creative practice of the artist intersects with the pedagogical practice of teaching.

Q & A and Book Signing with Artist Mark Bradford
5 p.m., M100B/Center
Art21 Keynote Artist Mark Bradford will answer questions and discuss his artwork, process, and ideas with a small, intimate group. Mark will also sign copies of Season 4 DVD and the companion book of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century. These materials are available for purchase at the NAEA store during the convention.

Sunday, April 19

Art21 Artist Keynote
Mark Bradford: Paper, Language, and Layers
12 p.m., Auditorium
Mark Bradford transforms everyday materials scavenged from the urban landscape of Los Angeles—merchant posters, flyers, and advertisements—into looming wall-sized paintings and installations. Using collage, décollage, film, and photography in his work, Bradford describes himself as a maker and an excavator, a speculator and a developer, a demolisher and a builder. In his artist talk Bradford will share several bodies of work and talk about connections between a childhood steeped in craft and creativity to his current practice as an artist.

Catherine Sullivan, "Triangle of Need," 2007. Multi-channel video installation. Collection of Miami Art Museum, Gift of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros.

• The Miami Art Museum recently acquired Triangle of Need, a video installation by Catherine Sullivan (Season 4). Her piece is on view at the museum through October 11.
• A full room installation by Season 2 artist Kiki Smith is included in the exhibition Space-Time at the National Glass Centre in the UK. The artist’s three-dimensional astrological star chart, with cut-glass stars and animals of the zodiac scattered across a night-blue paper carpet, titled Constellation, is on display through September 6.
• The Times Online (in association with Saatchi Gallery) is asking readers to vote for their favorite artists of the 20th and/or 21st century. At present, Art21′s Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are included in the list of leading artists. The Top 200 will be revealed on May 25. Cast your vote now.
• On April 16, Hubbard & Birchler (Season 3) will lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The talk is the second in a series ssponsored by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership in conjunction with Confluence: Points of View on Buffalo Bayou, a public art project on Houston’s historic waterway.
• A site specific piece by Mark Dion (Season 4) has been added to the outdoor sculpture garden at the The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Antiquarian Book Shop (2008), the artist’s life-size curiosity shop, is filled with hundreds of books and collectibles from around the world. Learn more about the installation here.
• Chelsea visits Havana, an exhibition presented by Fundacion Amistad in conjunction with the 10th Biennial of Havana, features work by Season 2 artists Walton Ford and Matthew Barney, among others. The exhibition is part of the Bridges to Culture initiative, which uses the power of art to surmount the cultural, political and social boundaries between the United States and Cuba.

Thanks to Lila Kanner for providing us with insight into the great work of Artadia. Up next is Nicholas O’Brien. Nicholas is a new media artist and filmmaker based in Chicago. He co-started and ran the BUSKER (buskerchicago.com) project space, an independent artist-run non-commercial space for film/video screenings and new media performances and installations, from 2004 to 2007. For the past year he’s been teaching at Columbia College in its Interactive Arts and Media department and organizing screenings, workshops, and performances for many independent venues in Chicago and the Midwest. Most recently Nicholas has been working on art video games (or video games as art) in a collective project called Broken|Branch (brokenbranch.net) as well as developing new video and web works revolving around different modes of virtual identity (memory, sculpted space, cyberspace).

Sew for victory, 1941-3

Taking stock of the value of art is integrally tied to the value of artists. Artists’ work as educators, mentors and citizens of our communities is vital to a healthy and vibrant civic life. Currency in art has a beautiful double meaning – it’s about cultural relevance as well as economics. The fundamental question of how artists are valued in our society has been introduced in a more public dialogue in recent months by the press, and it’s long overdue. According to economic data, the arts and culture in the state of Texas in 2007 generated more revenue for the state than four Superbowls.

What is the value of art – for those who make it and how it gets made? Artadia, where I’m Executive Director, works to raise funds in specific cities and redistribute them to the awarded artists after a rigorous jury process conducted through both slide review and studio visits. A nonprofit arts services organization, Artadia was founded in 1998 in direct response to the elimination of the individual artist fellowships at the National Endowment for the Arts. Applications are open to all visual artists living and working in our specific partner cities (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston and the San Francisco Bay Area). In the past 12 months, we’ve seen our application numbers rise nearly 50% across the US.

All the headiness of the arguments of the value of artists and art in our society also makes me think of several very smart artists projects like San Francisco-based artist Josh Greene’s Service Works grants. For several years, Josh has been distributing the tips he earns from waiting tables at a high end Bay Area restaurant to artists who apply for grants with him.

"Serviceworks," Josh Greene

Here’s a graph from an April 1997 article that was titled, “Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts“:

Major cultural institutions do not need NEA funds, 1997

Artadia brings focus into local communities to show the myriad ways artists are critical to civic life and creative culture. In raising the funds locally to reinvest in the individual artists working in those cities, we act nationally to leverage funding and exposure for the artists and communities. Art and artists help our American cities prosper, innovate and grow.

The New York Times has featured almost weekly updates on the business of the arts and the role of artists since the Obama administration took office. Just today, Robin Pogrebin’s coverage of the funds available for nonprofits through the American Recovery Act points out that there is too little funding available to “spare” the positions and artist contractors at risk at the nearly 3,000 nonprofits that applied for salary support on the April 2 deadline.

I watched with bated breath as first Congress included stimulus funds for the National Endowment for the Arts, then took them away, and then re-introduced $50 million back into the landmark package passed. The mere fact that funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in the recovery act was tied in with zoos, highway beautification, and aquariums speaks volumes.

That said, the arguments presented in the papers and by arts leaders show glimmers of hope to me – though we are a long way away from the restitution of the NEA’s fellowship program, or the budget to its funding levels of the early 90s heyday. Artists in our contemporary society as both cultural producers and members of the work force are just as important as folks who hold manufacturing jobs in Detroit.

In her February 15, 2009 article, “Saving Federal Arts Funds: Selling Culture as an Economic Force,” Robin Pogrebin quotes Reynold Levy, President of Lincoln Center, saying, “I hope the maximum amount of the $50 million finds its way into the pockets of artists and those who support them. An employed dancer is as important as an employed construction worker. His or her family has many needs, owns a home, buys a car and makes an impact on the economy.”

Artists both help us see the world in new ways, and add inestimable value to our society.

Art21 Educators: Contemporary Art in Contemporary Classrooms 2009-2010

Are you interested in contemporary art?
Are you a K-12 art and/or media teacher?
Do you teach in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York?

Art21 Educators is a year-long professional development initiative designed to cultivate and support K-12 art educators interested in bringing contemporary art, artists, and themes into their classrooms. Join a national group of educators to explore, discuss, design, and document curriculum around the art of our times.

We’ll kick off the year with a 5-day workshop in NYC (July 15-21) and continue meeting virtually each month using online technologies and city-specific field trips. Art21 is looking for art and media teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City to start. The initiative will expand to include additional cities and subject areas in future years.

For more information or download an application click here. Application deadline is Monday, May 4.

Educators, have you taught lessons in your classes on the Art:21 series? Students, want a place to showcase your Art21-inspired art? Art21 recently launched a new Student Art Projects pool on Flickr and we want to feature your work! Join our group and post pictures of student work related to Art21 artists, themes, or resources. Contribute to a community of teachers promoting their students as contemporary artists and students sharing their own projects.

Find full uploading instructions at art21.org/flickr.

Coming soon: Art21 + Flickr for adults…

Barry McGee at work

Around this time of year, many teachers take a vacation of some kind. Some people go to the warm sunshine, some people go to Minnesota, and some go to the sunshine and then Minnesota. Regardless of how you spend the break over the next 1-2 weeks, take the time, as the philosopher, author and educator Maxine Greene explains, to break from the familiar in order to learn something new. In her book Variations on a Blue Guitar, Greene writes,

There are times in my own life when, half deliberately, I take a kind of restless action to uncouple from the familiar in the midst of ordinary life, just in order to see.

Over the next two weeks, I encourage you to take advantage of an exhibit in your area, a special arts program, or film festival. Use your visit to serve as inspiration for new lessons and units of study, or simply use the visit to inspire your own art work, often neglected in the maze of a school year. Vacations are a time when we can make a conscious choice to do something unfamiliar and break from the habitual.