• Krzysztof Wodiczko is the sole artist representing Poland at this summer’s Venice Biennale. The striking video installation of milky windows depicts the shadows of immigrant workers as they take on the daily tasks and routines of life, conversing in various languages. Above is a ScribeMedia video interview with the Season 3 artist.

• Elements of Photography opened this past weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.  The exhibition focuses on two fundamental elements of nature inherent to the medium: light and water.  The “naturalists” in the show include artists Luisa Lambri, Walead Beshty, Adam Ekberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), and others.  Through October 4.

• The Stenersen Museum in Oslo opens an intriguing show this week that explores the many dimensions of gender-based violence. Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women, and Art is curated by Randy Rosenberg of Art Works For Change.  Several of the 17 participating artists include Marina Abramovic, Laylah Ali (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Icelandic Love Corporation, and Lucy Orta. Through August 9.

• Ongoing at LACMA is Classical Frieze, an exhibit of recent films and photographs by Eleanor Antin (Season 2).  The works on display mimic the ancient world by way of  19th-century neo-classical paintings. Through September 14th.

• White Noise opens this week at James Cohan Gallery. The group show features works that exist at the intersection of visual art, music and sound, exploring “how sound can obliterate as well as elevate; how silence can involve both absence and presence.” Some of the artists include Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Joseph Beuys, Martha Colburn, Rodney Graham, Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, Christian Marclay, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). June 18-August 12.

Robert Morris’s "Bodyspacemotionthings" at Tate Modern. Photo: Ben Street

Interactivity is now so commonplace at Tate Modern that I sometimes wonder if visitors are disappointed when they see works of art they aren’t allowed to touch. Not that they don’t. A Donald Judd work, Untitled (1972), until recently the centerpiece of the Tate’s minimalism room, was speckled with fingerprints of the curious (and quickly disappointed; it’s an empty copper box). That room’s been replaced with an awesome display of (roped off, phew) postminimalist works, including a leaning piece in black felt by Robert Morris. Morris’s massive work Bodyspacemotionthings occupies the far end of the Turbine Hall. It’s a recreation of his display of plywood ramps, beams, ropes and platforms, designed to be clambered upon by members of the public, which they did with unforeseen abandon when it was first shown at the Tate in 1971. The American Morris had unwisely predicted sedate interaction from the stuffy limeys who, in fact, went bananas. “The trouble is they went bloody mad,” reported The Telegraph, quoting a museum guard who seemed to share the view of the then-director, who closed the exhibition down within days of its opening. Monocles flew out of eyes. Stern letters were penned. Parents just didn’t understand.

That was then. Now, with Tate Modern as one of the biggest tourist draws in London, and interactivity not only an accepted part of the modern art experience but, to some extent, an assumption of it (this in the days of Holler, Gonzalez-Foerster, Gormley, etc.), what can a venerable work of participative art offer to the savvy museum-goer of today?

Here’s the bit where the writer humorously points out the health and safety measures of our litigious times. But it’s a bit pointless to bemoan the precautions necessarily enforced in the installation, given that slides ending in sheer plywood walls are unsupervised, liable to end up with more than the besplintered buttocks described with relish in the write-ups of the show’s original incarnation. Tate guards are positioned at every part of the piece and participants are let in a few at a time, but once they’re wobbling/pushing/sliding/climbing, they’re interacting with the piece in the right way, concentrating on the feeling of the body in space as the artist intended. All of the individual pieces, in a blank plywood structure with towers and walkways, like a toy castle, engender a specific physical moment of concentration—you focus on the feel of a push. Balancing narrows the mind (and yes, you can balance anywhere), but balancing in an art gallery, a place built for thinking, lets the hemispheres of the brain zap each other happily. And the castle is, of course, a modernist one, boxy and utilitarian—Schwitters’ Merzbau after a garage sale. You watch the participants charging in like rebels storming ramparts.

"Bodyspacemotionthings" from above. Photo: Ben Street.

Back to that postminimalism room. What a thoughtful installation of interactive art, like this one, can do is ease the way to understanding other apparently diffident works. Morris’s felt piece slumped against the wall accrues sympathetic understanding after you’ve slid into a wall yourself, and a blobby lead Lynda Benglis in the corner becomes oddly reminiscent of that overweight child you just saw, huffing in a heap after a strenuous rope-climb. The point is that physical interaction with art lights up parts of human understanding that are rarely used in our interpretations of art. Everything is worked. It’s a successful playing out of Robert Storr’s Venice Biennale tagline from 2007, “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind.” Only this time it doesn’t sound like a Grateful Dead live album.

The Tate’s reenactment of the Morris installation is on par with a contemporary reappraisal of classic performance art of the ’60s and ’70s (Marina Abramovic’s 2005 Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim was its recent pinnacle). Performance art’s impermanence is its quintessence and its curse, and reenacting it is often the only means of articulating the historical relevance of something that refuted the permanence of the mega-museum, usually surviving, if at all, in largely unwatchable wobbly video footage or typewritten instructions on yellowing paper. And historical re-enactment suits performance art; it’s appropriate for something that became dated quickly, which made a virtue of its historicism. Show a clip of Meat Joy or Cut Piece and you can instantly locate them historically, and not just in their straight-faced earnestness and laissez-faire attitude to body hair. Great art, like great pop music, is sealed in its time, and a cover version (and isn’t that what these reenactments more or less are?) can draw out the power of the absent original in a way impossible to achieve through historical documentation. And it’s easy to do (OK, mostly). It’s karaoke performance time: who’s for a Relation in Time-off?

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EXCLUSIVE: Artist Laylah Ali and graphic designer Nicole Parente work together in the designer’s home office in Cambridge, MA. The artist’s hand-drawn notes are transformed into precise digital illustrations otherwise impossible without a computer.

Laylah Ali creates gouache-on-paper paintings that take her many months to complete. Ali meticulously plots out in advance every aspect of her work, from subject matter to choice of color, achieving a high level of emotional tension in her paintings as a result of juxtaposing brightly colored scenes with dark, often violent subject matter. In style, her paintings resemble comic-book serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions.

Laylah Ali is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Power of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Dowling. Camera & Sound: Ken Willinger and Bob Freeman. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Laylah Ali. Special Thanks: Nicole Parente.

Dan Colen, "Untitled" (2008). Chewing gum and chewing gum residue on canvas in artist's frame. 19.1 x 15.1 inches. Courtesy David Nolan New York.

In his New York Times article on the opening of the Venice Biennale, Michael Kimmelman laments that the look of the exhibition “suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus.”

Without reading too much into it, the critique that contemporary art has been “professionalized to a fault” feels analogous to the sentiment expressed by the anonymous graffito I mentioned in my previous post: “The only true artists are amateurs.”

Of course, the word “amateur” cuts both ways. In most contexts it connotes a lack of training, sophistication, or seriousness, but its derivation from the Latin amator implies that its foremost meaning is “lover.” Simply put, the amateur is someone who, motivated only by the love of the game, engages in an activity without expecting anything to come of it.

Two exhibitions that I encountered yesterday, Slough at David Nolan New York and Alice Neel: Selected Works at David Zwirner, brought this concept into focus in very different ways. Slough, astutely curated by the artist Steve DiBenedetto, is a group show with a complicated backstory based on the title word’s multiple meanings. As explained in the press release, the range includes “bog-like” and “primordial,” “moral degradation or spiritual dejection,” “cast aside or shed off,” and “the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.”

The show includes striking works by Dieter Roth, Jon Kessler, Robert Bordo, and Michael Scott, who represent quite a heterogeneity of aesthetic objectives and studio practice, but who are nonetheless united by a sense of improvisation, accident, and play: a what-if approach akin to kicking over a can of paint to see what happens next (which, in fact, is what Hermann Nitsch’s untitled canvas seems to be). Philip Taaffe’s swirls of pigment, titled Slough I and Slough IV (both 2003), and Andy Warhol’s invariably lovely Piss Paintings from 1978 adopt pure serendipity as their method and meaning; densely laden works by Larry Poons and the late Eugène Leroy revel in their raw materiality; Carroll Dunham’s surprisingly aggressive Untitled (1984-85), in graphite, ink and paint on wood veneer, bespeaks a jittery call-and-response that, like most of the strongest works in the show, seems to spring from an ethos of risk-taking oblivious to the ultimate salvageability of the results. Nothing is calculated, preconceived, strategized, theorized, or prejudged. The object comes into existence solely to delight its maker or, as it seems with Dan Colen’s chewing gum pictures, for the sheer giddy hell of it.

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Webpage from the redesigned MoMA.org, with images from the Online Collection

I remember, back when I was in art school, walking into a lecture hall where someone had scrawled on the chalkboard, “The only true artists are amateurs.”

That was the 1970s, when the object was dematerialized and the gallery system, for the avant-moralist, was integrity’s sinkhole. Extremes beget extremes, and after Vietnam, Nixon, and Kent State, a rage against authority of any stripe channeled young artists toward ideological purity and radical form. It was fun while it lasted.

The other day I revisited the exhibition, Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, at the Museum of Modern Art, which I reviewed for the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail. The show had left me with such a negative reaction that I began to second-guess myself – which I’d never done before – on the validity of my response. I came away feeling even worse but while I was there, I overheard a couple discussing a wall of drawings by Per Kirkeby, Luc Tuymans, Rosemarie Trockel, H.C. Westermann, and others, solely in terms of what they would fetch at auction.

I’m not sure why this surprised me, perhaps some lingering, willful naïveté about what ultimately matters in a work of art. It’s probably the same reason why I kept looking through the various Flash Points entries on the value of art for one that would discuss it in terms of anything other than price (though, to be fair, this was how Beth Allen framed the question in her original post).

Although the notion that the only true artists are amateurs is flagrantly impertinent, it does strike at the core of the question. It certainly lies beneath the ongoing fascination with outsider art – that the pressure of passion (or obsession or compulsion) must be expressed at all costs.

Incandescent passion – no matter how unpleasant or fatuous – is surely what is drawing such large crowds to the current Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, while on the other side of the building, the deliberate avoidance of emotional commitment among the artists of The Pictures Generation succeeds in turning that show into a suffocating bore.

But to return to the Museum of Modern Art, what bothered me about many drawings in Compass in Hand, particularly the more recent work, was their disregard of shared experience in favor of esoteric, often hermetic pursuits. By shared experience I’m not referring to social exchange (indexed by monetary worth) as discussed in the previous Flash Points posts, but to the personal and communal rituals that mark off the progression of our days.

Taking the escalator to the fourth floor, I stopped in front of Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes from 1939, which hangs at the entrance to the permanent collection. Never my favorite Picasso due to its cartoonish over-stylization, I was nonetheless struck by the tension between the universality of its theme – the eternal search for food from the sea – and the eccentricity of its formal invention; the former provides intelligibility while the latter does all it can to subvert it.

This is the gist of modernism – distrust of appearances, truth revealed through distortion, exploration of the medium as its own reality: qualities that existed in the work of the School of Paris, including the amateur painter Henri Rousseau, before anyone put a price tag on it.

Money may be a shared commodity but it fractures perception; not only is it the most unreliable historical indicator of aesthetic value, but when art is rendered into a trophy and displayed as such, its role as a piece of communal experience, owned by all, is diminished. Nowhere is this more graphically demonstrated than in MoMA’s 2004 expansion and reinstallation, where masterpieces of the 20th Century hang like caribou heads in barnlike, one-size-fits-all galleries – not connecting, not conversing, not communicating anything beyond their spot in a predetermined timeline, as independent of one another as the thumbnails on the museum’s website.

It’s a sorry state, but not the end of the game. Artists will continue to find ways to inoculate themselves against the confusion of price and value, the conversation will proceed apace, and the golden calves and diamond skulls of our recent, benighted past will inevitably fade into obsolescence.

Raymond Pettibon, "No title (I must tell)", 2002

June can be a real catharsis of both the most beautiful and ugly kinds, but it doesn’t have to be a week-to-week whirlwind waiting for the next test. The last few weeks of the academic year are a chance to step up and possibly do a few things different, or daring, or even a little dangerous. Here are a few ideas we have recently tried:

• Ask students to work alone or in teams to create an installation. Install art in parts of the school that never see any art (What will the phys ed teacher think?).
• Have students select showcase portfolios- three or four examples from their entire body of work- and create a group exhibition with classmates. Again, think about installing exhibitions in  places that don’t usually feature art to get a different kind of attention.
• Ask alumni, who are usually around and available before summer jobs start in July, to come in and give an artist talk about their work since graduating. If they have portfolios to share, have them show students who will be entering their senior year, giving them food for thought as they begin planning to apply for undergraduate programs.

As I simultaneously get ready for the end of the school year and the opening of my own exhibition beginning this Friday, I’m also thinking about the fact that it’s time to take stock of what went well and what kinds of challenges I faced. It’s a perfect time to revise and update goals for the following year and get some good books together for the summer (more recommendations on the way!). Whatever you do, please don’t be one of those people who sits around and “counts” the days until “it’s over”… Do something different, or daring, or even a little dangerous.

Installation shot of Bruce Nauman, "Pink and Yellow Light Corridor (Variable Lights)," 1972. Pink and yellow fluorescent lights. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Panza Collection, 1991. 91.3828 © 2009 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: Michele Lamanna, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I have never thought of myself as susceptible to patriotism, but for the second time this year, I’ve felt proud to be an American.  The first incident of pride stemmed from the victory of a certain groundbreaker whose name begins with a “B” and ends with “arack Obama.” Incident number two occurred this weekend, when the United States Pavilion received the Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale, honoring a certain artist who was featured in the inaugural season of Art:21 (2001). Ahem! Given my previous post’s shameless rhapsodizing on the bewitching beauty of Venice, you will probably not be surprised when I say that my favorite works in the Biennale are those that engage in some way with the magical surrounding city. Perhaps the committee that selected Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens for this exciting award shared my sentiment, since the very structure of the exhibition is rooted in a rich and exciting interplay with the history, geography, architecture, and people of Venice.

Biennalers (as I have taken to calling them) have been lining up since last week outside the American Pavilion in the Giardini.  Sometimes they chatted with each other, sometimes they scanned the surrounding area, but mostly they just stared straight ahead, their eyes fixed on the spiraling neon text piece that is visible through the doorway.  You know the one, it’s titled The True Artist Helps the World By Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign).  In this case, it is a window sign rather than a wall sign, hung in front of the arched glass on the far side of the Pavilion’s foyer, facing outward. This orientation means that viewers entering the pavilion read the words backwards, and only those walking outside the rear of the pavilion can read the text the “right” way.  Thus the glowing pink and blue work draws viewers into the pavilion, only to suggest that they go outside of it again.

Bruce Nauman, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)," 1967. Neon, edition a/p, 59 x 55 x 2 inches, SW 99073. Private Collection. Courtesy Sperone Westwater.

Indeed, brochures, posters, banners, and even t-shirts worn by the exhibition’s security guards explicitly direct viewers to continue their experience of Bruce Nauman‘s four-decade oeuvre at two additional sites outside of the official American Pavilion. In case you consider skipping these excursions outside the Giardini, you are sure to be dissuaded from your laziness when you learn that the only new pieces of the 30-odd works in the sprawling exhibition are found in these off-site…sites. The new works, entitled Giorni and Days, are installed at the Universita Ca’Foscari, and the Universita Iuay di Venezia, respectively. Each piece is comprised of seven white panels facing each other, extending across a long corridor. The pairs of panels emanate different voices reading out days of the week, in order, over and over. As you might guess, the disembodied voices of  Giordini recite the days in Italian, while Days is, yep, in English.

I have to admit, when I first learned that the American pavilion had spread Nauman’s works across three separate locations–a Biennale “first”—I was concerned that it might be an art-world version of American imperialism. Upon experiencing the diasporal exhibition, however, it became clear that these installations were, in fact, functioning in a way that destabalizes the very notion of borders, segregation, and hierarchy. Moreover, the works strive to fully integrate Nauman’s work into the exquisite context of Venice, in a way that enhances both the work and its surroundings. This is especially true for the new works, which were created specifically for this context, in collaboration with the students at the universities that house them.  Not only do the rows of white rectangles visually mirror the glowing windows that line the corridor around Giorni, but the voices themselves are those of the students, and were recorded in Venice. The repetitition of the names of days not only conjures repetition in Nauman’s blinking signs and looping videos, but also the repetition of meditation. Given that the building was originally a convent, I feel that Nauman intends to reference Venice’s broader history of transition from private palaces and religious institutions to public buildings for visitors and learners. In turn, this seems to echo his own process of expanding private studio revelations to public installations.

Installation shot of Bruce Nauman, "Days," 2009. Audio (fourteen channels); continuous play; one audio source consisting of seven stereo audio files with fourteen speakers. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York © 2009 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: Michele Lamanna, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In his Art:21 segment, Nauman reveals, “I don’t generally think about large audiences. I think about, ‘who would I like to show this to?’ Who that came over to visit would I say, ‘Let me show you this…’” Whether it becomes a sign, or a projection, or a loud voice in a large space, Nauman’s work always gives the feeling that you are experiencing, in a very public way, something that is terribly intimate. In the context of the very grand Venice Biennale, this tension becomes even more exaggerated, and the work is that much more striking.

We received some great feedback and enthusiasm for Season 5 since the release of the trailer back in April. When that went up, we challenged our audience to name the artists, and a good amount of you responded throughout the Web: on ArtBabble, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

The official Season 5 artist roster will be announced very soon, so we thought we would give you one more chance at guessing the artists. Throughout the week, we are releasing images of works from artists that are featured in Season 5 (without naming the artists, of course).

Images will be posted to Facebook, and we invite you to leave your guesses there, on Twitter, or right here on this very blog post! The answers will follow when the Season 5 artist roster is announced next week.

We have a lot in store leading into the October premiere of Season 5. Needless to say, we are very excited…are you?

Exclusive to the blog this week are the chronicles of artist Lily Simonson’s visit to the 53rd annual Venice Biennale, which opened to the public this past Sunday. Stay tuned all week for special posts on this most monolithic of contemporary art fairs. — Ed.

Aleksandra Mir, "VENEZIA (all places contain all others)," 1 million postcards for free distribution, 2009. Photography: Medioimages, Photodisc Getty Images, Courtesy the Artist.

In a corner of Venice’s 13th-century shipbuilding complex-cum-contemporary art exhibition space called the Arsenale, attendees of the 53rd International Art Exhibition swarm around an unruly stack of boxes, each overflowing with postcards.  Squinting in the dim light, you see that the postcards are all glowing shiny blue with “VENEZIA” splashed across each image in various colorful fonts. As you look closer, it becomes clear that the photographs are not pictures of “Venezia” at all. Some depict oil rigs, others capture waterfalls, and still others display joyful whitewater rafters. There are, in fact, 1 million postcards available for exhibition-goers to take away over the next 6 months. Polish artist Aleksandra Mir chose 100 images by searching stock photography services for images of water. Mir’s own website states that water operates in this piece as a metaphor for globalization. Since the installation also includes a “real Poste Italiane mailbox” and purchasable stamps, viewers can mail the works to anywhere in the world.

In the context of this year’s Biennale theme, “Making Worlds,” and my own experience as a newcomer to Venice, I see Mir’s creation of 13 tons of fake postcards as a metaphor for the artist’s role as a creator of new realities, and as a messenger between fact and fantasy. Stock photographs strive to tap directly into our collective imaginations, with images that are at once versatile and specific. Souvenirs such as postcards are more than just photographs; they reify our most personal and extraordinary memories and emotions, in turn allowing us to share them with others. Meanwhile, isn’t artmaking almost always about manifesting imagination in reality, and ultimately blurring the line between the two? Mir’s installation achieves all of that.

Ok, so I’m waxing a bit romantic…but wait! I can explain!

My visit to Venice for the opening week of the Biennale marks my maiden voyage to the city. I arrived here equipped with preconceived notions from two very different, and more or less embarrassing sources (in that order): the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Before you LOL too hard at me, I have to say that even if I had been able to assemble my impressions of the Venetian hotel and Mann’s renowned story into a cohesive fantasy prior to my visit, it would have surely imploded upon my arrival. Venice is beauty incarnate and, to clunkily paraphrase Elaine Scarry, nothing can prepare a brain for that.

Ornate, ancient, crumbly buildings emerge from glowing pale-emerald waters all around you. Flowers overflow from wrought iron balconies. And there are no cars (I live in Los Angeles)! The same foolish shock I felt years ago when I discovered that French people really do say “voila!” and Londoners really do ride double-decker buses consumed me twenty-fold when I discovered that Venice really is a Floating City.  I mean, how imaginary can you get?

Which brings me back to Vegas, Thomas Mann, and the world’s most celebrated international art exhibition. Rather than mere financial gain, the gambler seeks a jolt of bliss that accompanies magically beating the odds and merging with divine Lady Luck. Similarly, the jouissance ultimately experienced by Mann’s stalker protagonist does not derive from mere sexual gratification, but from the search for a metaphysical melding with aesthetic perfection (which happens to be represented by a prepubescent blonde Polish boy). While some art collectors might be interested in all of the above, I believe that each and every Biennale attendee—and each and every viewer of art everywhere—is seeking to find a work that will transfix and transport them, a work with which they can merge themselves with the forces of imagination, beauty, and knowledge of some kind. And what better setting to achieve this state than in a city (or in the former two cases, a fictionalized version thereof) that literally sweeps viewers off their feet, and leaves its visitors disoriented, dazzled, enchanted.

Up next: Season 1 artist Bruce Nauman receives the Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation!

Lily Simonson received her MFA in painting from UCLA in 2008. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Images of her paintings can be found at www.oldgenres.com, although the site itself is a work in progress.

A million thanks to Victoria Lichtendorf for providing us with such a rich view of Atlanta’s contemporary art scene. Her stint sets a new record for the greatest number of interviews. Now joining us for the next two weeks is Thomas Micchelli, is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Thomas originally blogged for us back in February on the Flash Points topic, “How can art effect political change?” His paintings and drawings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. His videos have been seen at the United States Super 8 Film + Digital Video Festival at Rutgers University, the Cape May Film Festival and Magnetic Field in Brooklyn, among other venues. His essays and reviews appear regularly in The Brooklyn Rail, where he is Managing Art Editor. He is also the editor of the forthcoming book, On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators by Carolee Thea, published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.