Mary Heilmann, "Two Lane Blacktop" (below) and Tony Oursler, "Five Take Radius" (above), 2009. Courtesy of AIR, Art International Radio.

• Site-specific installations by Mary Heilmann (Season 5), Tony Oursler, Todd Eberle, and Sabina Streeter are currently on view at the Clocktower Gallery in Manhattan. This is the first group of installations at the space since it became the home of Art International Radio in January 2009. For Two Lane Blacktop, Heilmann has painted white lines down a black floor, turning a corridor of the Clocktower into “a displaced highway.” Just above her piece, Tony Oursler has lined the ceiling with eleven over-sized filament light bulbs that brighten and dim as recordings of the artist’s voice emanate from speakers overhead. The Clocktower is open to the public on Thursdays from 12pm to 5pm or by appointment.

• On the occasion of their 95th anniversary, Montclair Art Museum has mounted Out of the Vault. This year-long exhibition celebrates the Museum’s American and Native American art focus. Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in the 60 piece display.

• From August 25-November 21, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois will present Reflection, a one video per day program featuring works by five artists: Andrea Zittel (Season 1), Phyllis Baldino, Patricia Esquivias, Alex Hubbard, and Glenn Ligon. Each video is scheduled for a specific day of the week; Andrea Zittel’s Small Liberties will screen on Fridays.

• Kandors (2000), a video by Season 3 artist Mike Kelley, will be shown in Switzerland as part of the 10-day St. Moritz Art Masters contemporary art program. The festivities begin Friday, August 21. Kelley’s work will be the focus of a panel discussion on Sunday, August 23.

• A newly commissioned collaboration between Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, titled A Voyage of Growth & Discovery, will open September 13 at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens. The installation comprises a two-and-a-half hour six-channel video of Smith’s character Baby IKKI, which he has performed for over thirty years. This is the first collaboration between Kelley and Smith who have been friends since 1975.

• On September 12, Bruce Nauman (Season 1) will bring his project Untitled (Leave the Land Alone) to fruition. Between 11:30am-12:30pm, the words “Leave the Land Alone” will be written across the Pasadena, California sky. Read more about Nauman’s project in the Los Angeles Times.

• Proud Flesh, a new book by Season 1 artist Sally Mann, investigates the bonds between husband and wife. Mann’s sole subject is her husband of 39 years, Larry. This body of nude studies, photographed over a six-year period, will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York beginning September 15.

• The Wall Street Journal and Artinfo.com report that Polaroid’s art collection will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s. Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late last year. Their collection includes work by William Wegman (Season 1) who, like other well-known artists, used Polaroid’s large-format, 235 pound instant camera for special projects.

Sam Gould introducing Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat

Several weeks ago I found in my email inbox a listing of upcoming events produced by the Portland collective Red76. I regretted that scheduling would prevent me from catching all their activities during their East Coast events, but I would have been remiss if I had neglected to head north for the fourth installment of the Pop-Up Book Academy. Beside an active auto body shop in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I joined the audience for a conversation with Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, author/editors of An Atlas of Radical Cartography, a compilation of 10 maps and 10 essays giving visibility to migration, surveillance, and globalization. (Previous Pop-Up Book Academy engagements involved lectures by Steve Lambert and Michael Rakowitz.)

Laid out on makeshift shelves of cinder blocks and plywood was a beautiful collection of well thumbed-through books on race, philosophy, cooking and art…and such assorted pop culture disasters as Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose by Paris Hilton.

But, this assembly didn’t just focus on socialites. Since their founding in 2000, Red76 has invited diverse audiences for shared talks about ethical responsibility into non-traditional venues. Recent used spaces have included laundromats, YouTube, institutional settings such as The Drawing Center and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and various taverns across Portland. An aspiration for their events is to investigate the possibilities and viability of gray markets, channels for skill sharing to achieve communal self-betterment.

Pop-Up Book Academy #4

All proceeds from the night went towards Red76′s newspaper, The Journal of Radical Shimming, and profits exceeded expectations. The collective redistributed the funds to other liked-minded, free printed matter. Continue reading »

all welcome. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Fuller.

Immediately upon entering  Triple Candie’s Harlem gallery you are greeted by a flamboyantly painted coffin lying on a bier, a memorial to an artist who, in many ways, defined the past decade’s guiltiest pleasures. For 49 years, Maurizio Cattelan’s endearing wit has provided instant gratification for a new generation of the global rich—he’s a favorite of oligarchs and industrialists. Was it the faltering economy that Cattelan couldn’t handle or was this a final performance a la Ray Johnson?

For the bereaved coming to say their final goodbyes, Cattelan has arranged for a decidedly optimistic affair. A small wooden tree with paper leaves grows out of the head end of the closed casket. Depending on your faith, this could be a sign of life after death, hope and resurrection—or perhaps it’s evidence of a hoax. Either way, you have entered a posthumous retrospective for an artist that you probably hadn’t heard had passed on.

Final resting place. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Fuller.

This is Maurizio Cattelan is Dead: Life and Work, 1960 – 2009. And if this were any other gallery, you would be scrambling for a newspaper, or more likely ArtForum, wondering how you could have missed the news of Cattelan’s death. Much in line with Triple Candie’s classic 2006 show, David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective, this is a conceptual curatorial game and skeptical critics will assume the artist was on board or maybe even contributed to it–but not in this case. Continue reading »

Sports and art are holding hands. Trong Gia Nguyen takes us to first base with that and other news relating to Art21 artists.

Bruce Willis was a pub rocker, Scarlett Johansson an indie vocalist, and Paul McCartney an abstract painter? Ben Street reflects on cross-over artist Steve McQueen’s addition to the Venice Biennale.

What does the Mütter Museum have to show? Guilty pleasures and the off-beat alike from Daniel Fuller.

No Nukes! Get involved with the art of Lisi Raskin.

Yup, it’s hot. It’s August. And it’s never too late to add to your reference archive. A Marlene Dumas exhibit is a source of inspiration for Joe Fusaro.

Imagine what character you would play? An Xiao whispers her secret. (P.S. -  Cao Fei’s work is awesome, in the most true sense of the word.)

Photography may “feel visually right” but is factually wrong. What does Season 5 artist Florian Maier Aichen have to say about Fantasy?

Hungry for some Green Pink Caviar or how about a visit to Above June Lake? Catherine Wagley finds that Marilyn Minter brings us in while Florian Maier-Aichen pulls away, yet both professionalize fantasy.

The past as noir and domestic spaces in faraway places? Juan Juarez knocks on the door of artist James Casebere and shares the consequent vintage BOMB interview.

Meet Josiah McElheny‘s long time assistant and collaborator Anders Rydstedt in this week’s Exclusive video.

Still hungry? There’s more where that came from. Stay tuned.

Long-time assistant and collaborator Anders Rydstedt discusses the differences between creating traditional forms in glass—such as vases—with Josiah McElheny’s sculptural objects and installations. Filmed at the Michael Davis Stained Glass workshop in Long Island City, New York, objects from this session were later given a mirrored surface as part of the artist’s Total Reflective Abstraction series of works that took as their point of departure a conversation between Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi.

Josiah McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. McElheny’s work takes as its subject the object, idea, and social nexus of glass. Influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, McElheny’s work often takes the form of historical fictions.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Gary Silver. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Josiah McElheny. Special Thanks: Michael Davis Stained Glass & Anders Rydstedt.

Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we feature a vintage BOMB interview relating to a Season 5 artist or theme. This week we look to the work of James Casebere, who, like Florian Maier-Aichen, has been aggressively pushing the boundaries of what photography is and could be with his tabletop simulations of archetypal institutions. “Casebere’s photographs evoke our deepest fears and longings,” wrote Roberto Juarez, who interviewed the photographer in BOMB 77, Fall 2001. “Perhaps this is because his images captivate our collective imagination, the one ruled by instinct.” Read the full interview here.

James Casebere, "Monticello #3," 2001, digital chromogenic print, 48×60”. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, NY.

Roberto Juarez: I have my ideas of why you used black-and-white photographs in your earlier work, but tell me—why did you use black and white instead of color?

James Casebere: Black and white had more to do with memory and the past. Color was too much about the present, I associated it with color TV, which was not a part of my past. I wanted the images to be related to a sense of history, let’s say, whether personal or social. And I think black and white adds a certain level of abstraction.

Roberto Juarez: What were the images, in the Penn Station installation?

James Casebere: Most of it was a synthesis between two bodies of work, a combination of domestic space in the foreground with romantic, faraway places in the background. I tried, in part, to simulate the experience of sitting on a train, looking out the window. But the foreground might also be a dining room, or a kitchen, or a café.

Roberto Juarez: How did you create that? Was it a layering of pictures through exposure, or was it from a model that you built?

James Casebere: I built a model. Half the time, there’d be a frame dividing the foreground from the background. The backgrounds were images of the American West, corrals, and also one image of a sinking canoe, and one which was simply an outdoor train platform. There was a mission facade in another image. I was trying to create a sense of wistful reverie.

Roberto Juarez: The West is a very romantic idea in the American psyche. I’ve gotten invitations to submit proposals for light boxes in train stations. It’s become such a fad, or an easy art form for public projects to take on, because it’s not that expensive. But you were early.

James Casebere: I used a light box for a show I did at Franklin Furnace in 1981. It sat in the window, facing the street. I was never interested in the context of a fine art photo gallery. I was really interested in the usefulness of art—in a Constructivist sense, or as in the Bauhaus or de Stijl. What all these movements shared—and they overlapped, of course—was the belief that art should not be broken up into separate disciplines. An artist might make paintings, design buildings, do graphics, photographs and sculpture. It was very multimedia. They also shared the belief that an artist had a purpose, a usefulness within the context of the larger society.

I was looking at how art worked within the larger social world and wanted to place my work where most people see other photographs. So I wanted to put my images into the advertising context, the way conceptual artists like Dan Graham were using pages in a magazine as their art. The magazine is one kind of public space, street signs are another. I wanted to design things that relate to people’s everyday experience. People like Dennis Adams and Jeff Wall began using light boxes at about the same time as myself. Adams actually designed the public spaces, the bus shelters, to show them in. There were Holzer’s broadsides, and Barbara Kruger’s billboards. It was the same impulse. We were all thinking about mass media. One of the first images I shot in New York was of a courtroom which I made into a poster, and put up anonymously around Lower Manhattan. There was that anonymous poster phenomenon going on in the Lower East Side at that time.

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Florian Maier-Aichen, "Above June Lake," 2005, C-print

If I were to name art’s King and Queen of sleek professionalism, Florian Maier-Aichen and Marilyn Minter would take the crowns. They compliment each other, Maier-Aichen bringing out Minter’s reliance on textured terrain and Minter reminding us that Maier-Aichen works within a bodily lexicon. But the artists belong together because they both obfuscate fact expertly. They produce such seductive pictures of the world (tongues swooshing amidst jewels, landscapes crusted in blood-red soil) that my first reaction is to guilelessly fall into the illusion they’ve fashioned. Yet the illusion is so shallow—really, Maier-Aichen and Minter work only with surfaces—that I can’t fall far. It’s a funny paradox: fantasies have to be carefully manufactured and refined before they become fantastic. Then once presented, glossily produced spin-offs on human desire supposedly let us access our raw, innermost selves, as if looking into what we want leads us to who we are.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually work that way. Fantasy is notoriously disinterested in authenticity, which is precisely why I find the story behind Marilyn Minter’s Green Pink Caviar captivating. Apparently (I didn’t hear this account first-hand, but I’ve heard it often enough to embrace it), Minter had been thinking about painting with her tongue when she called up Ford Modeling Agency—who else would you call?—and asked for a long-tongued, full-lipped model. Ford sent Louisa Taadou, a slender girl from Marseilles whose lips are the heaviest feature on her otherwise wispy face. Louisa used her tongue, framed by carefully painted lips, to lick colorful pastries off of a glass surface while a camera watched from below.

Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009

This whole sequence of events evidences capitalism at its most abstract. Minter has an idea, she decides to execute it, and she calls an associate to request the services she needs. Her associate sends over the proper material—a girl who, upon understanding the task at hand, skillfully wills her anatomy to perform. No one questions the props, in this case the meringue and crumbs, lipstick and glass surface; all parties simply do their job. The resulting video and images, called Green Pink Caviar (a title that reveals little about Minter), do the professionalism that enabled them proud. The self-contained works of art co-opt the culturally determined standards of desirability on which they rely (fashion, confections, cosmetics). Cheeks and chins, flattened against glass, play into the rhythm of the crumbs and filling that move across the frame, looking too primordial to be edible. The lips, less hungry than obedient, do their job with requisite relish. Minter gets so close to her subject that it loses its identity and retains only sensuousness.

Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009

Here, it would be easy to turn to a conversation about feminism and objectification (a conversation certainly worth having in relation to Minter), but I’m more interested in what it means to fabricate fantasy through expertly co-opting particularities, which is where Florian Maier-Aichen comes in.

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The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Fantasy, premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Fantasy presents four artists — Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen — whose hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime works transport us to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness.

Who is Florian Maier-Aichen and what does he have to say about fantasy?

Florian Maier-Aichen was born in 1973 in Stuttgart, Germany; he lives and works in Cologne, Germany and Los Angeles. Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.

On the subject of fantasy in art, Maier-Aichen describes liberties with which artists, including himself, have taken with picturing the American West, using his work The Best General View as a reference (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

When I look at American landscape painting from the nineteenth century I always have in mind one painting of Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt. Yosemite is already such a theatrical place—almost like a too-drastic landscape—and Bierstadt just added more to it. He turned it into a complete fantasy by getting rid of the facts and enhancing every other aspect of Yosemite. Half Dome is an iconic image, but when I saw that Carleton Watkins had used it in one of his photographs back in the nineteenth century, it became more significant for me. Suddenly I wanted not to remake the same image but to go there and work with the subject.

I couldn’t access Watkins’s standpoint anymore because it was overgrown, so I used Glacier Point which is next door. It’s the most generic vista or viewpoint that you can get in Yosemite. It wasn’t a perfect day when I took the photograph, and I didn’t mind because it was just a starting point. I drew in the entire background with the blue sky and the clouds, and I brought in the bushes to make some foreground space. So in the end the image, except for Half Dome, is not really the way it looked when I took the picture.

What happens in Maier-Aichen’s segment in Fantasy this October?

“Photography used to be like alchemy back in the nineteenth century,” says Florian Maier-Aichen, who uses the computer to introduce imperfections and detach his photographs from reality, bringing them closer to the realm of drawing. Shown capturing his source images with a traditional large-format camera, the artist introduces painterly touches to his photographs with the aid of a digital stylus and tablet. “Illustration is just another level of abstracting,” he says, “it lifts you to another layer that is not necessarily linked to realism and it opens up your own world or your own myth-making.”

Inspired by the idealized quality of postcards and maps, the segment shows how the artist remakes images of landscapes, from a nostalgic nighttime scene of Stralsund in GDR times to epic vistas such as a pass in the Swiss Alps, ski slopes in the Sierras, Half Dome in Yosemite, and the failed St. Francis Dam near Santa Clarita (all works 2005-09). “Photography grew together with the discovery of the American West,” explains Maier-Aichen at his home and studio in Los Angeles, anchoring his fascination with the surrounding landscape to a romantic notion in Germany of California as “the end of the world.”

Florian Maier-Aichen. "Untitled," 2005. C-print, 72 x 90 1/2 inches. © Florian Maier-Aichen, courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles and 303 Gallery, New York.

What else has Maier-Aichen done?

Florain Maier-Aichen studied at Högskolan för Fotografi och Film, Göteborg, Sweden; the University of Essen, Germany; and earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Maier-Aichen’s work has appeared in recent major exhibitions at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); Yvon Lambert, New York (2007); and the Whitney Biennial (2006).

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

Maier-Aichen is represented by Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles and 303 Gallery in New York.

What’s your take on Maier-Aichen’s inclusion in Season 5?

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!

I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m a bit of a cosplay fanatic. Yes, these days I sport DKNY glasses and sleek monochromatic clothing, but my urban fashionability is merely a cloak for a tremendous amount of geekery. To be fair, I don’t cosplay myself. When I was most active, I served more as the tagalong, helping with costumes and the like, and these days, I focus on photographing others, rather than participating myself.

Cao Fei, "Golden Fighter (COSPlayers Series)," 2004. © Cao Fei, courtesy the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York.

But there will always be a special place in my heart for cosplay, so you’ll understand my excitement when I first stumbled upon Cao Fei’s visual work at The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now, a group exhibition at PS1 three years ago. In the video, cosplayers venture through the streets of a rapidly-growing but desolate Guangzhou, acting out epic battles while the normalcy of the city chugs along. In both her photos and videos, we see cosplayers outside the glitzy-geekery of anime and comic conventions and immersed in the context of the everyday.

The work itself is visually stunning. The contrast of the colorful costumes with the staid backdrop of the city speaks to the fantasy projected in cosplay culture, and how much that fantasy can clash with the mundanities of making a living, getting along with parents and growing up in a country that itself is coming of age in the 21st century.

The series struck a personal chord in me in particular, as it reminded me so much of my cosplaying friends. After each convention, I’d watch them shed their outfits, cram into nondescript cars, don school uniforms and work attire, argue with their parents, watch television and just generally return to a normal life. In their heads, they still wanted to live the epic lives of Tifa Lockheart and Naruto, normal life be damned, and they’d immerse themselves in anime message boards and costume-making circles in anticipation of the next big event.

Cao Fei, "Yanmy at Home (COSPlayers Series)," 2004. © Cao Fei, courtesy the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York.

Does art expand our ability to imagine? Cao Fei’s series is no doubt imaginative. After my first exposure to her work, I found myself lost in her images, and I started seeing swords and fireballs coursing through the streets of Manhattan. But it’s also the imagination of her subjects that helps bring these photos to life. In their eyes is a world far removed from the anxieties of a developing China, a world where people (not always human) fly and shoot fireballs and twirl weapons effortlessly, and the fate of the universe rests in the balance. In so many ways, Cao Fei’s subjects are as much artists as the artist herself.

Perhaps it’s my bias as an artist, but engaging in art, creating art both as a response to and in imitation of others’ work is often the best way to step into an artist’s imagination, whether it be faraway surrealist dreams or sharp technical realism. Rather than passively absorb the stories told in hard-to-find DVDs of their favorite Japanese animation, cosplayers take the experience further by creating these worlds in their daily lives. They construct three dimensional costumes based on two dimensional designs and act out alternate storylines inspired by a limited series run. In other words, their imaginations come alive.

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Marlene Dumas, "Blue Marilyn", 2008

Last summer, while working at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, I had the good fortune of being blown away by the Marlene Dumas exhibition, Measuring Your Own Grave, before it traveled to New York. What impressed me about Dumas’ work was the way she handled gestures with sensitivity and very few brush strokes, and at the same time created compositions that were particularly jarring in one way or another- beautiful, strange portraits that often dealt with sexuality and mortality side by side.

After seeing the exhibit for the third or fourth time, I began looking into how Dumas organizes the image banks that inform her work. One of the first pages in the exhibition catalogue features rows of files labeled, “War”, “Jesus”, “The Nude Female”, “Eros”, “Photography”, etc. I then began thinking about how I gather my own references for creating art in and out of the classroom. Sadly, I had to admit that references in both my studio and classroom were loosely organized at best.

Each summer, even before I saw the Dumas exhibit, I try to do a little image banking of my own as I get ready for another school year. The dog days of August are a good time to prepare the variety of visuals we need to convey big ideas and share good quality examples with students in each of the units we will be teaching. Don’t wait for the night before the lesson, as I’ve done too many times over the years, to begin searching for that perfect set of examples to inspire your class. Have fun searching and collecting those images now, before you’re hit with a myriad of other duties related to school. Sock these images away in folders and keep track of Web addresses where online images can be found. As I get better at taking my own advice on this particular topic, I find that I’m sleeping better during the school year and spending a lot less money on coffee.