I’ve been trying to ignore all of the panic and mania surrounding swine flu, since as far as I know anxiety has not yet been proven to afford protection against infection and death. An article in yesterday’s New York Times, however, caught my attention, noting the ways in which Mexicans have become particularly marked by the stigma of the flu even though cases have appeared throughout North America and Europe. Apparently healthy Mexican travelers were placed under quarantine in China; several Latin American countries suspended flights from Mexico; groups seeking to limit Mexican immigration to the U.S. have been referring to the virus as “Mexican Flu” in the media.

What struck me about all of this is that it is nothing new. Remember the Gay Plague, anyone? What is important here is not the transmission of disease, but rather the transmission of affect: anxiety, fear, disgust. I drudged up NBC’s very first coverage of the “gay cancer” (1982), which had not yet been identified or named as HIV/AIDS. Right from the start “lifestyle” was named as the cause of the illness, a way of life as disease vector.

In contrast, a 1976 public service announcement from the CDC about swine flu emphasizes the ways in which anyone can catch it, and anyone can transmit it. We should all be scared into vigilance and personal responsibility.

All of this brings me around to thinking about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose artworks involving stacks of posters or pieces of candy free for the taking enact the spread of a virus from a single source. His 1991 work Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) perhaps most directly links the transmission of infection to the transmission of affect. As viewers take a piece of candy from the 175 pound pile (the weight of the artist’s lover Ross in health), they symbolically take a piece of the lost lover’s body as it wastes away at the hands of AIDS. They also take a bit of melancholy-tinged shiny sweetness, a communion with the beloved in joy and death.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)," 1991

This morning I found my piece of gold-wrapped candy from an installation of this work. I still can’t bring myself to eat it. Maybe I can’t make the move from melancholia to mourning? I seem to be resisting the work’s designed disappearance. But then again, the work is also designed for constant renewal; the pile of candy is replenished to its original weight each morning. Perhaps if the work were permanently installed around the corner with its promise of a breath of life each day, I could take that sweetness and loss into my mouth.

My shiny piece of "Portrait of Ross" in LA

Matthew Ritchie, "The Dead: Belphegor," 2004

As I mentioned last week, the Teaching with Contemporary Art column over the next few weeks will focus on questions generated at the recent NAEA conference in Minneapolis. This week’s question comes from Clyde Gaw from Indianapolis, who wrote, “Much of the teaching that takes place in art rooms today is authoritarian and actually restricts personal expression. Is this beneficial in any way?”

First of all, I do not agree that much of the teaching that takes place in art education classrooms is authoritarian. Mimicry can be a problem, but I can’t say that I’ve encountered many instances where the teaching could literally be called authoritarian. What I do find, as Olivia Gude pointed out in our Art Practice, Teaching Practice panel at the conference, is that many art educators are desperately clinging to old models of teaching from their childhood and/or teacher training. Using the elements and principles of design to drive a curriculum, for example, is simply not enough, and in some cases it’s misguided altogether.

Bringing contemporary art and artists into the classroom through the incorporation of Art21 education materials or sites like artbabble.org allows teachers to make important connections between the strengths in an existing curriculum and the gaps that curriculum faces. For example, taking ever-present artists like Andy Warhol or Alexander Calder and juxtaposing them with Margaret Kilgallen or Tim Hawkinson can teach more about all of the artists and ideas involved. What are the similarities between Warhol and Kilgallen? What do Calder and Hawkinson have in common and how is their work very different? What do Warhol and Kilgallen teach about working with popular culture? How do Calder and Hawkinson each attempt to redefine sculpture?

If, as Clyde points out, art education in your school or district leans towards an authoritarian model, then my suggestion might be to share (and model!) how contemporary art promotes choice, play, uncertainty, chance, undiscovered relationships, and new perspectives. Good teaching, much like contemporary art, has a lot to do with taking risks. Perhaps the first risk may be to push an existing curriculum into new territory.

James Turrell Museum (Photo: Florian Holzherr)

• On April 22nd, the collector Donald Hess opened the world’s first James Turrell Museum in Colomé, Argentina. The 18,084sf space is based on a plan created by Turrell himself, and showcases nine light installations representing five decades of the Season 1 artist’s career.  All works on display are drawn from the Hess Art Collection, Bern, Switzerland, in which Turrell is represented with 22 pieces.

• The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts has announced the five recipients of the 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts. They are Paul Chan, Rinde Eckert , John King, Reggie Wilson, and Season 2‘s Paul Pfeiffer. Now in its 15th year, the $75,000 Award recognizes experimenters in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre, and visual arts.

• The New Yorkers opened last Friday at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. As the press release states, the exhibition, like the Big Apple, is “difficult to map out.” The list of artists includes, among many, Agathe Snow, Peter Saul, Kostas Seremetis, Ryan Wallace, and Art21′s Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger.  The show runs through June 22nd.

• Season 4 artist Mark Dion lectures tonight at Portland State University, at the Shattuck Hall Annex. It’s at 7:30 and free!

• Oliver Herring‘s solo exhibition Teens with Masks is up now through June 13 at Max Protetch.  The show includes a number of new photo-collage works by the Season 3 artist.

Roger Hiorns, "Seizure" (2008)

I don’t know: maybe there will be a time when the announcement of the Turner Prize nominees won’t be greeted with a tiresome trotting-out of hoary old journalistic cliches (yes, I know, that’s a cliche too), but not this year. The Times goes with a sarcastic assessment of this year’s line-up—Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer, Richard Wright and Enrico David—as “a shock to rank with any in the 25-year history of the Turner Prize,” announcing that “this year’s nominees all paint, draw, or make objects that are recognizably works of art.” ‘Recognizable to whom?’ might be the sensible riposte considering that, for the billions of visitors to Tate Modern every year, the work of the previous year’s winner, Mark Leckey, would most certainly be recognizable as art. It’s befuddling to see the press lean, year after year, on tired ideas of the artist as wacky japester. The Times claims that “publicity-grabbing stunts are refreshingly absent,” but when were publicity-grabbing stunts particularly present? Ok, maybe Tracey Emin’s drunken interview on TV (which wasn’t one of her works), or Madonna’s ostentatious swearing (she wasn’t one of the artists) or Martin Creed’s lights going on and off (which is kind of the opposite of publicity-grabbing) may be what’s being alluded to, but it’s hard to see that the current nominees are any more or less avant-garde or shocking or experimental or whatever than in any previous years. Another Times columnist comments that the shortlist “puts craftsman-like skills over conceptual waffle,” thereby knocking back 600 or so years of artists trying to do more or less the exact opposite in one fell swoop.

It’s a relief to see the Times message board featuring the evergreen adage, “Turner must be turning in his grave” (as though Turner were the epitome of good-taste, MOR painting back in the early nineteenth century, etc, etc) and the deathless Emperor’s New Clothes quip (“When will the emperor and his missing clothes be found out?” As though the labor-intensive, thoughtful, and often beautiful work of artists like Hiorns and Skaer was somehow a con-trick played on the public). It’s also a bit of a downer to see the Tate publicity department play to the gallery by describing Wright as “the thinking person’s graffiti artist,” as though “thinking people” couldn’t possibly like graffiti. But you know, they’ve got to be punchy and they were probably wrapping up the press conference and they got asked the same question over and over again, and the press person went for what popped into his/her mind, like in The West Wing, so let’s not get upset about that.

Ok. But what of the shortlist? It’s quite rare these days to have a complete line-up of good or very good artists (usually half or fewer aren’t that great; last year’s was very patchy, I thought; the year before (when Wallinger won) was mainly good; the years before were hit and miss) but I think this might be the best year in a very long time. It seems to be generally agreed (in the press and among people I’ve spoken to about it) that Roger Hiorns looks likely to win for an installation that’s since been demolished. That was always part of the plan, but it’s made Hiorns’ work a kind of 2000′s version of Rachel Whiteread’s demolished and never-bettered House, for which she won the Turner in 1994. Hiorns’ Seizure from last year has already taken on a kind of legendary quality, like Dylan’s first electric gig or the invention of fire: you had to be there, man. It also means that the work has taken on the lustre of great lost works of the past, not only paintings stolen (like this one) or destroyed (like this one) but paintings that survived only in textual descriptions, recreated by later artists in a process called ekphrasis (like this one).

For Seizure, Hiorns filled a moribund council property and filled it, through an arduous and probably dangerous chemical process that I’m not even going to begin to pretend to understand (suffice to say there are photos of the artist and assistants wearing face masks and rubber gloves with steaming pipes and canisters around them, like in Weird Science), the result of which was that the flat—three smallish rooms on the ground floor of a 60′s concrete block—was filled, on every surface, with hard ultramarine crystals that glittered and crunched underfoot. Visitors had to wear thick rubber boots and gloves which made you stagger and wobble about in a way that felt appropriate in the space itself, since the blue surface had something of the quality of the deep sea. Your movements slowed. The sound was crunching and crackling and squeaking rubber (watch a shaky video of the experience here). Hiorns had made a styleless 60′s building into something like the wreck of the Lusitania through a simple (I mean, if you know how) automatic chemical process. I want Enrico David to win, really (here is Chicken Man Gong; any questions?), but it’s pretty likely that Hiorns will walk it, which is not only not a bad thing but might signal an improvement: not in the art itself, but in the rehabilitation of contemporary art in the mainstream press. It’ll be great!!

With this post, we introduce a new bi-weekly monthly column to the Art21 Blog: Inside the Artist’s Studio, written by Athens-based artist and contributor Georgia Kotretsos. Here’s an overview, in her words:

…A haven, an office, a meeting place, a thinking space where the working hours spent by an artist may easily be considered illegal by outsiders. It’s the space where one composes oneself and tunes in with one’s surroundings, where the placing of one’s own paraphernalia is sacred but at other times simply allowed to rest in ordered chaos. The space where light-footed apprentices gracefully serve the creative process. A place where the scent of art and habits of an artist pierce one’s senses. A space where an artist collects his/her thoughts and then scatters them around freely to be cast into artworks.

Can this really be true? Do we still latch onto romantic notions of what a studio is or can be? Or have they involved over the years along with artists themselves?

For this reason, I am setting out to meet with two one artist a month to discuss their studio practice, whether that is in the streets, at a computer, in their living space, etc. Inside the Artist’s Studio will introduce you to a number of artists’ work. Together we’ll discover where some of today’s art is made.

Artist Dafni E. Barbageorgopoulou at her studio in Keramikos, Athens, Greece

At Dafni E. Barbageorgopoulou’s studio, art is in the making. Right on Athens’s Keramikou Street, the nest of her creative energy previously served as an Asian restaurant. To this day, evidence of this is found in the dried-up noodles stuck on the tiles on the back wall, apparently there to stay.

There is a boyish, fresh quality in Barbageorgopoulou’s work. Her tapestries are generous gestures of art and her personality reflects this very liberty by drawing from a wide range of influences, such as from Cycladic to Mexican art, science fiction to dreams, geometry to poetry, origami to monumental architecture. A fusion of eclectic ideas, disciplines, and genres make up the profile of her work.

Dafni holds a BFA in sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in London (2006). As we speak, she is off to the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien International Studio Program in Berlin for a year.

I visited her studio several times—working with her on this post was a pure joy. She is one authentic lady and I’m very please to have her kick off the “Inside the Artist’s Studio” column on this site.

Georgia Kotretsos: Take us through the development of your practice over the past few years and then talk to us a little bit about how these three tapestries (Mother, 2006; P, 2008; Space Kraft, 2009) came to be?

"P," 2008. 350 x 400 x 250 cm

Dafni E. Barbageorgopoulou: My practice focuses on the mapping of bodily experiences, which are then transferred into two-dimensional forms (patterns, collages). These maps/motifs (as in the case of Mother) are consequently being transferred as objects/installations into space (as with P).

At the center of this process is the way in which the body tunes into creative flow. A sense of energy and repetitive movement conducts new rhythms. I am interested in how the final object or situation preserves the levels of energy released during the process of making. This release creates a certain void around the work activating the field around it. The end result becomes lighter, shifts scale, and engages with new materials. Each project is an integral part of a bigger synthesis.
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"Mom and Pop Art," The Simpsons, Season 10 Episode 19

It seems The Simpsons has something to say about everything, including the value of art. In “Mom and Pop Art,” a treasure of an episode from 1999, Homer is discovered as an “outsider artist” after a home improvement mishap. As the value of Homer’s work on rises and falls on Springfield’s art market, Marge becomes increasingly disappointed that no one seems to appreciate the worth of her representational paintings. The whole family takes an outing to the Springsonian museum, and Marge explains the art historical significance of her favorite works to Homer and the kids. Homer is then besieged by nightmares of being attacked by Andy Warhol throwing giant soup cans. Lisa tells Homer about Christo, and he finally gets some inspiration for a new work. Homer’s final artwork is vastly public; he snorkels all the zoo animals and floods the streets to turn Springfield into a nouveau Venice. If it weren’t a cartoon, the destruction that would ensue after this rogue act wouldn’t be at all light or funny (images of New Orleans post-Katrina can’t help but come to mind) but as a fiction Homer shows us some of art’s worldmaking potential, the ways in which it helps us imagine fantastical possibilities.

A cameo by Jasper Johns makes this all the more delightful.

Thanks to Marc Mayer for leading me on a dig for this little gem. Watch the full episode here.

Tony Smith, "Die," 1962

I stumbled on this YouTube video today, and immediately stopped to think about how much Michael Fried has given me. Sometimes a critic’s description of a phenomenon can be truly apt even if the values attributed to that same phenomenon are less than agreeable. Encountering  Tony Smith’s Die as a teenage college student was a key moment that led me to my lifelong obsession with performance. I’m delighted by the theatrical relation between a viewer and an object, the mental play of its potentially endless repetition, the movement necessitated to experience the work from all sides.

In an earlier post Jennifer Doyle discussed the difficulty of a work like Die; it can be hard to engage with unless you have some information about its context and place in the history of ideas about art. I do think this little video might help for imagining a particularly playful minimalist engagement…