The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Transformation, premiering on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Whether satirizing society or reinventing icons of literature, art history, and popular culture, the artists in Transformation — Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE — inhabit the characters they create and capture the sensibilities of our age.

Who is Paul McCarthy and what does he have to say about tranformation?

Paul McCarthy was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City; he lives and works in Los Angeles. McCarthy’s video-taped performances and provocative multimedia installations lampoon polite society, ridicule authority, and bombard the viewer with a sensory overload of often sexually-tinged, violent imagery. With irreverent wit, McCarthy often takes aim at cherished American myths and icons—Walt Disney, the Western, and even the Modern Artist—adding a touch of malice to subjects that have been traditionally revered for their innocence or purity. Absent or present, the human figure is a constant element in his work, whether in the form of bodies in action, satirical caricatures, or animistic sculptures; as the residue of a private ritual; or as architectural space left uninhabited for the viewer to occupy. Whether conflating real-world political figures with fantastical characters such as Santa Claus, or treating erotic and abject content with frivolity and charm, McCarthy’s work confuses codes, mixes high and low culture, and provokes an analysis of fundamental beliefs.

On the subject of transformation in art, McCarthy discusses the open-ended nature of process and time with his work (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

The question is, how does it continue? The work is evolving and changing. It’s in process. Some pieces of mine go on for quite long periods of time, or they get taken apart and included in other pieces, or they’re being worked on. There could be a point where they stop, where they are finished or at least I’m moving on from them. But I view exhibitions sometimes as not the end of something but a beginning. It’s like you see the pieces for the first time, or you see them out of their context, and you can think about them differently. Then you start again. The exhibition is not the end of the piece.

What happens in McCarthy’s segment in Transformation this October?

“My work seems to be about tearing down and opening up conventions,” says Paul McCarthy, who bristles when asked what his responsibility is to the audience for his work. “My responsibility is to the ideas,” he explains, “that’s the difference between making art and making entertainment.” The segment begins with a series of motorized architectural works—including Spinning Room (1970/2008), Bang Bang Room (1992) and Mad House (1999/2008)—installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. McCarthy’s interest in performance is introduced through the Black and White Tapes (1970-75), a series of minimal videos in which the artist uses his body as a tool, such as painting a white line on the floor with his face or whipping a storefront window with a mixture of paint and motor oil. Later works such as Bossy Burger (1991) and Painter (1995) show the artist performing similarly absurd tasks, only this time adopting a character and on a sound stage. “The persona usually started with a kind of mask or some sort of costume,” he says.

Shot in a community television studio, Family Tyranny (Modeling and Molding) (1987) shows McCarthy and fellow artist Mike Kelley improvising a scene together as father and son. “We’re conditioned into our reality,” says McCarthy, who reflects on how personal family dynamics turn into vicious patterns and how he views his art as a way of “breaking out of a conditioned attitude.” The artist’s own son Damon McCarthy talks about working collaboratively to create the raucous Caribbean Pirates (2005), a non-linear parody of the Disney ride and movie franchise. The segment concludes in McCarthy’s Los Angeles studio where he and his assistants are shown working on a series of drawings and sculptures that include elements from Snow White, Hummel figurines, and a bust of President George W. Bush. “Pieces recycle into other pieces,” he explains, describing the need for “something to act on, something to alter and shift. Like this way of working through ideas.”

Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy. "Carribbean Pirates," 2005. Installation, performance and video at McCarthy Studios, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Ann-Marie Rounkle, © Paul McCarthy, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich London.

What else has McCarthy done?

Paul McCarthy studied at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City (1968-69); earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1969) and an MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1972); and was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (1984-2003). His work has been shown in recent major exhibitions at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2007); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005), among others.  He has participated in many international events, including the Berlin Biennial (2006); SITE Santa Fe (2004); Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, 2004); and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2001).

Where can I see more of McCarthy’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?

Paul McCarthy is represented by Hauser & Wirth in Zurich and London. His work can be seen in the exhibition The Puppet Show through September 13 at the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle (along with fellow Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith, and Kara Walker). McCarthy’s exhibition of inflatable sculptures titled Air Pressure is on view at De Uithof in Utretch, The Netherlands, through September 17th.

What’s your take on McCarthy’s inclusion in Season 5?

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!

Jan Dibbets. "Untitled" (1969). Photolithographed postcard, 4 1/16 x 6” (10.3 x 15.2 cm). Publisher: Seth Siegelaub, New York. MoMA. Art & Project/Depot VBVR Gift. © 2009 Jan Dibbets/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. MoMA Imaging Studio, photograph: Jonathan Muzikar

While today Conceptual Art is utterly ubiquitous, MoMA’s current “In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976” examines a period when only a few cities in the world seemed to embrace this idea-based world of visual art, foremost among them, Amsterdam.

In this well-curated show of objects–which is somewhat ironic since conceptual art often rejected the very notion of the art object–MoMA’s curator of prints and illustrated books Chirstophe Cherix focuses on an influential gallery in Amsterdam, Art & Project, that served as a laboratory for conceptual art practice when it opened in 1968.

Spurred by a recent gift of 230 works by the founders of Art & Project (Geert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn) to the MoMA, this show fills in the blanks of our art historical knowledge, most notably the connection between Los Angeles and Amsterdam. Phillip Van den Bossche describes the unique connection between these two cities in the catalogue as “the first direct links between Europe and the American West Coast–which is to say without New York playing an intermediary role.”

The exhibition offer a great deal of insight into the work of a number of Art21 artists who were either in contact with some of these seminal figures or more significantly benefited and learned from this generation of conceptual artists, including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Allan McCollum, and Bruce Nauman, all of whom experiment with objects, language and narrative.

Lawrence Weiner's redesign of the hallway that leads to the "In & Out" exhibition

At the entrance to the exhibit there is a commissioned piece by Lawrence Weiner that combines nautical forms and triple-X wall images, both alluding to the city’s role as a major port for shipping and site for pleasure. On the right side of the hall, an eclectic collection of Dutch posters from the period set the mood. Continue reading »

Arthur Dove, "Sunrise", 1924, oil on panel

There are many reasons that educators want to visit the Circles of Influence exhibit featuring Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe at The Clark Art Institute through September 7th, but one of the biggest for me was seeing these two artists side by side in the same galleries and learning about how they influenced one another throughout their careers.

Beginning in 1914 with O’Keeffe seeing Dove’s pastels for the first time and then being introduced to the artist four years later, the two shared a close examination of the landscape inspired by their own emotional responses to it. Neither had a desire to paint or draw the landscape “realistically”, nor did they have notions about obliterating any references to nature. Instead, they used color, shape, and even sounds to jump-start their work. And while they admired one another and stayed updated on each other’s successes, they allowed the art to do the talking…. and the influencing.

Georgia O’Keeffe was quoted as saying that Arthur Dove was her primary introduction to modern art. Her early watercolors and charcoal drawings were a response to the Dove pastels she experienced in person. Dove, on the other hand, went back to the early watercolors of O’Keeffe later in his career to create some of his most beautiful abstract compositions.

Georgia O'Keeffe, "Sunrise", 1916, watercolor

Looking at these drawings and paintings hanging side by side a few weeks ago, I thought about the delicate balance some of my students, not to mention myself, often look for in our own compositions. It’s a wonderful show to examine how strong composition can make a simple gesture complete. I also thought about how influence is often a one-way street, and when it comes to art, artists are often influenced by other artists and the story ends there. In this case, a true circle is formed between Dove and O’Keeffe as they examined each other’s work over time and allowed that breadth of learning to shape their progress.

See this exhibit if you have the chance!

Cindy Sherman, "Untitled" (2004), color photograph, Courtesy Metro Pictures

Starting today (and while the Art21 Blog editor, Kelly Shindler is on vacation), I’ll be guest editing the Art21 Blog while Kelly gets some much needed R&R. To kick off my temporary stint as blog editor, I’d like to introduce our next Flash Points series: Transformation.

The fifth season of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century will premiere this fall on PBS with four thematic episodes: Compassion, Fantasy, Transformation, and Systems. In the last two months, we’ve explored Compassion and Fantasy but now we’re thrilled to present Transformation, a contemporary topic if there ever was one.

While Transformation evokes associations of all types, in relation to art the topic conjures up a long list of associations, including how we refashion identity, how we reinvent ourselves and how art adapts and changes over time.

Some of the many questions that beg to be answered, include:

• How does our ability to transform who we are, or how we look, impact the way we see ourselves?
• Is our ability to transform or reinvent ourselves what makes us truly modern?
• Has our culture’s relationship to art changed and if so, how?

For the next three weeks, we’ll publish posts about the artists profiled in the forthcoming Transformation episode — Yinka Shonibare MBE, Cindy Sherman, and Paul McCarthy — as well as showcase some thoughts on the topic by guest writers, who will explore the theme beyond the series to new and interesting places.

Feel free to help us start the conversation by leaving a comment below…and save the date for the Transformation episode which debuts nationwide October 21, 2009 on PBS!

Yinka Shonibare MBE (b. United Kingdom, 1962). "Scramble for Africa" (2003). Fourteen life-size fiberglass mannequins, fourteen chairs, table, Dutch wax printed cotton, 52 x 192 x 110 in. The Pinnell Collection, Dallas. Image courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, & James Cohan Gallery, New York. © the artist. Photo: Stephen White

Paul McCarthy "Blockhead" (2003) and "Daddies Bighead" (2003). Installation at Tate Modern, North Landscape. Courtesy: Hauser and Wirth Gallery London/Zurich & Luhring Augustine, New York © Paul McCarthy. Photocredit: Copyright Marcus Leith/Andrew Dunkley Tate Photography

Rendering of "Ghost Notes, performance 1" (2009), Basel, Switzerland. Courtesy asiootus, Basel.

This past Sunday evening in Basel could have been like any other but it wasn’t. Not quite. My partner and I finished the strangely purple dinner I had crafted—beet pasta, plum tart—and rode our bikes over the Dreirosenbrücke, the wistfully named (and entirely rose-free) Three Roses Bridge that crosses the pewter-green Rhine into an industrial neighborhood of Northern Basel. There, at the dusk-darkened corner of Elsässerstrasse and Hueningerstrasse, we found ourselves watching a harpist perform from a precarious perch in the sky, just outside the fourth-story window of a pre-war building. The shadow of the harp loomed fairy-tale large against the building’s curvy façade. The delicate music—by Béla Bartòk, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Erik Satie, and others—fell like water over the street. A man leaned out the window above the harpist, as enchanted as the audience leaning against their bicycles below. Mercy.

With the whirr of children and trams running by and streetlamps softly aglow, the bright, buoyant tones of the harp turned the entire street scene into just that: a scene. As the music moved from cheerful to sentimental to anticipatory to menacingly minimal, the now surreally cinematic street, totally ready for its close-up, morphed from a Fellini-esque comedy to a Nora Ephron romcom to a French Connection–like thriller to something far more noir. The scene was so wondrous it verged on the precious. Thankfully, the tall, boxy basket crane (itself recalling the scaffolding of film sets) that held the musician and her harp added some necessary levity, as did the costumes of the audience: flip-flops, beer cans, orange swimming bags (readers, it is August hot here). Continue reading »

This November, New York City will once again be abuzz with PERFORMA, the sprawling biennial dedicated to performance art. This year’s event boasts participation by more than 90 artists at over 70 different venues. I’m personally excited about a new piece by Saya Woolfalk at the Studio Museum in Harlem, titled A Ritual of the Empathics.

Woolfalk works across media, combining painting, performance, sculpture, and video to “playfully re-imagine the representational systems that hierarchically shape our lives.” Her works are characterized by plush multicolored costumes and toy-like forms, and a coloring book aesthetic marked by fruit punctuated landscapes, sharp-toothed creatures and a palette pink aplenty. But taking her inspiration from ethnographic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory, Woolfalks’s worlds of whimsy are for your more sophisticated inner child.

Over the last four years, Woolfalk has built up the complex tale of No Place, a fictional land inhabited by Empathics, Pleasure Machines, Cleaners and other characters (comparable to the narratives of Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock). In the conversation below, Woolfalk explains her project No Place, and how she uses fantasy to depict our present reality and multiple futures.

This interview was conducted by phone.

***********

Nicole J. Caruth: Will you start by explaining the basic storyline underlying your recent work?

Saya Woolfalk: Sure, there’s a lot of information to take in. [On my website], you’re looking at a multi-part project for which there are three temporalities: the present, the future, and the future of the future. The future of the future is the No Place project, which I predominantly worked on [as a resident] at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the exhibition there, I showed [among other pieces] Ethnography of No Place, a six chapter ethnographic film, which is basically a series of important parts of our present culture (birth, death, etc). I worked with anthropologist Rachel Lears to both imagine and document this place. Continue reading »

In 1993 the IMA acquired its first and only work by Jenny Holzer. The IMA’s 1983 piece is Untitled and consists of selections from her “Truisms Series.” It is the first in an edition of four. Cybernetic Data Products fabricated the original, which used an internal computer processor to send signals to the red LED lights to display Truisms in a variety of patterns–they flashed, dashed, blinked, etc.

Today, when you take the escalators to the contemporary galleries on the 3rd floor you will encounter this work installed just above the elevator. But this isn’t really the same sign that Ms. Holzer made in 1983… what’s there now is a little bit different.

2009 Installation of "Untitled" © 1983 Jenny Holzer

By doing some quick research in the IMA’s conservation, curatorial, and registration department’s files I was able to piece together Untitled‘s exhibition and conservation history, and even discover its previous owners and pre-IMA exhibition locations. Why did I do this? I wanted to know about its conservation history and I was looking for some guidance on “correct” installation parameters. Truth be told, I was really looking for a note from Ms. Holzer or one of her assistants that stated precisely how the work should and shouldn’t be installed. Does it have to be above a door? Or entryway? Can it be hung like a painting, 62″ on center? How about pushed into a corner?

The variable installation locations of this artwork make it dynamic and somewhat playful in that it can represent an authoritative voice and at the same time question authoritative voices. While of course a certain amount of common sense could be and should used when installing it—after all, it is a sign and it gives information so it seems rather straightforward to install it in a place where we would find a “sign” and also authoritative information. The IMA has only installed the work in one other location. In the image below taken last week you can see a gallery placard (a sign!) just about exactly where Untitled was installed from 1993-2003.

1993 - 2003 Installation location of Jenny Holzer's work, "Untitled"

In addition to looking at the IMA’s files I also searched IDAA (the INCCA Database for Artists’ Archives) which led me to this case study on Inside Installations website about Ms. Holzer’s 1997 installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, Proyecto para Bilbao. While the Guggenheim’s installation is a lot more complex than the IMA’s, there are many similarities related to its preservation and future.

Continue reading »

As we say goodbye (but never farewell) to Daniel Fuller for his extensive posts on museums living beyond their means, art hopping in Athens & Venice, a love letter to a curious museum in Philadelphia, an interview with a member of Red76, and a look at Triple Candie’s Maurizio Cattelan is Dead: Life and Work, 1960 – 2009 pseudo-memorial exhibit, we welcome a new blogger-in-residence to Art21…ladies and gentleman, introducing Quinn Latimer.

Latimer is a poet and critic based in Basel, Switzerland. She writes regularly about contemporary art and literature for numerous magazines, including Art on Paper, Artnews, Bookforum, Frieze, and Modern Painters. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, The Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals, and in the anthology Best New Poets 2006.

Most recently, she was an associate editor at Modern Painters magazine in New York; previously, she did editorial time at American Letters & Commentary, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art.

Latimer earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is currently finishing her first collection of poems. She has a small Chihuahua named Paul Celan.

As an homage to the recurring 36 Hours feature that frequently appears in the New York Times travel section, I have broken down hour by hour a recent perfect weekend at my new happiest place on earth:

Welcome. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Fuller.

Running late for the four o’clock tour of Mildred’s Lane Historical Society grounds, I quickly made a left onto the red dirt driveway, which wound and curved around the rolling woodlands of the Delaware River Valley in upper Pennsylvania. As cell phone reception became a thing of the past, the drive opened up into a clearing on the 96-acre campus that contained an old barn, a bygone farmhouse dating back to the early 1800’s, and the amazing home of J. Morgan Puett, Mark Dion (Season 4), and their son Grey Rabbit.

As I parked, the car was approached by a woman in suspenders–the first of many pairs in this large-scale “living history” collaboration. Whereas the Skowhegan’s residency in rural Maine receives 1,643 applicants to be whittled down to 65 students for a nine-week summer residency, Mildred’s Lane is highly selective, accepting only 5 to 8 fellows a session, each of which must be recommended by the advisory board over two intensive three-week sessions. The young artists must gravitate towards a like-minded community, as the work-live-research environment experiments in combining all aspects of artistic life: researching, making, cooking, eating… We are so used to stories of the mythical solitary artist toiling away in the studio, that it’s a fascinating experiment to arrange the fellows into a focused, short-term collective, then release them back to different corners of the country. At times during the weekend, Mildred’s Lane was referred to as a museum, but in talking to Morgan she clarified that it is a “form of a new contemporary art complex(ity).”

Continue reading »

Legonardo da Vinci, 'The Mona Lisa'

Last Sunday, a Russian woman walked through the galleries of the Louvre Museum in Paris carrying a small empty ceramic tea cup, which, upon arriving in one of the museum’s largest galleries steadily elbowed her way to the front of the crowd before she threw the cup, firmly and decisively, at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The hurled cup splintered into pieces on the inch-thick security glass and five guards slammed the woman to the floor as the encircling tourist cameras strobe-lit the scene.

For the four and a half minutes it took to escort the woman to the Louvre’s security offices at the rear of the building, the Mona Lisa was entirely unwatched. For four and a half minutes, it was just a painting. Then, crunching over the broken crockery, the crowds returned, like a sigh.

The Mona Lisa is not a well-looked-after painting. Its presentation (hung above average eye-level, in a rectangular recess in a huge floating wall, behind a screen of bullet-proof glass, in front of a projecting wooden shelf, behind a semicircular railing, guarded by two museum attendants) and prominence in the museum (it is announced in black-and-white reproduction on a series of signs with a big black arrow which lead straight past the Nike of Samothrace and paintings by Uccello, Mantegna, Titian and Veronese) suggests that the Louvre has been commandeered by its own PR department.

At the audioguide desk, you can pick up a special guided tour narrated by actor Jean Reno, who speaks as his character from Hollywood’s The Da Vinci Code. “In theees room,” he hisses, sexily, “is zee greatest meeestery of all.”

Can we feel just a tiny bit of sympathy for the Russian woman?

The woman’s protest (she had recently been denied French citizenship) is another addition to the long list of damaged or destroyed works of art. When suffragette Mary Richardson took a knife to the back of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus in 1914, or when the young Tony Shafrazi spray painted “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s Guernica in 1974, or when the Taliban dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001, they were reacting to an image’s power to enthrall.

In effect, attacks like these (ironically) restore an image’s potency: they shock them back to life. That’s not to say I endorse vandalism of art–although I’ll distract the guards if anyone fancies slashing a pre-Raphaelite work–but such events question Walter Benjamin’s notion that reproduction diminishes the ‘aura’ of a work of art; we still hanker after an original source, the relic in the jar.

The questions that these acts of vandalism raise are the core of what Dave Hickey (in The Invisible Dragon) calls the ‘therapeutic institution’ – what he describes as the ‘loose confederation of museums, universities, bureaus, foundations, publications and endowments.’ The notion explicitly (in wall-texts, education programs, outreach projects, young members’ programs, corporate sponsorship and online facilities) and implicitly upheld by such institutions is that art is good for us, ‘regardless…and in spite of the crazy shit that individual works might egregiously recommend’.

We should be quick to condemn acts of vandalism on works of art. At the same time, though, we ought to consider why and how works of art are able to disturb, rather than affirm, our most deeply-held beliefs, or hopes, about public virtue and the benevolence of beauty. What if we decided art was bad for us, like Philly Cheese Steaks or Wham! or Adam Sandler?

A little irreverence – a la MD – is not always such a bad thing.