Salvador Dali, "Memory of the Child-Woman," 1932. Oil on canvas, 99.1 x 120.0 cm. Courtesy The Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit Melbourne, Australia. It is a wonderful city with a thriving art scene, the centerpiece of which is the magnificent National Gallery of Victoria (the NGV). I had the good fortune of arriving in the midst of Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire, the NGV’s ambitious—and Australia’s first—retrospective exhibition of the great Surrealist’s work, which runs until October 4.

While Dali never set foot on Australian soil and his art was rarely exhibited there, Australians first came to know his work through a painting titled Memory of the Child-Woman, which was part of an exhibition of modern art from New York that toured Australia in 1939. With the outbreak of World War II making it too risky to return the paintings to New York, Memory of the Child-Woman remained in Australia for several years, giving the continent an extended viewing of Dali’s brand of Surrealism, and causing quite a stir wherever it went. Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire marks Memory of the Child-Woman’s return to Australia, and it is most certainly a triumphant one.

This kaleidoscopic show includes over 200 works drawn from The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida and Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, Spain—two of the largest collections of Dali in the world. Liquid Desire traces a path through the artist’s long and peripatetic career, beginning with some of the earliest works from his adolescence, and through Dali’s journey across multiple continents and dizzying stylistic shifts, as well as his excursions into stage design, the fashion industry, television and Hollywood. The works included span from the dependable—the Lobster Telephone and screenings of Un Chien Andalou—to the unexpected—the lesser known belated pendant piece to MoMA’s The Persistence of Memory and wonderful examples from Dali’s excursion into jewelry design (including a jewel encrusted heart-shaped brooch that actually beats due to some hidden mechanics).

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While painting in her Williamstown, Massachusetts studio, artist Laylah Ali discusses the imperative she feels to make things and the nuanced relationship of political and personal events to the work.

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.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Tom Bergin. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Laylah Ali.

Eleanor Antin, "The Death of Petronius" from "The Last Days of Pompeii," 2001. Chromogenic print, 46 5/8 x 94 5/8 inches. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

The Los Angeles art world still has a lot of the laissez-faire approachability that endeared it back in the ’60s, which is why so many artists migrate to L.A. and never leave. Lily Simonson and Catherine Wagley, who both came to the West Coast as art students, have made the city home. Looking at Los Angeles is their new bi-weekly dispatch about art in the city they love. — Ed.

For our first dispatch from the LA art world, we visited the exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, on view at LACMA until October 4. The show features sculptures, paintings, and tapestries that adorned the private villas of the Roman elite, and is accompanied by Eleanor Antin‘s The Last Days of Pompeii (Season 2), a project that brings ancient decadence to SoCal. Thoughts about aged culture, contemporary art and the City of Angels prompted the following conversation:

Catherine Wagley: Here in LA, even authentic antiquity feels like faux antiquity. That’s why I avoid shows like Pompeii. I feel so limited as a viewer–I have no concept of Pompeii as a place that occupied a past era; instead, when I look at the artifacts on exhibit, I start thinking about decorations on the Getty’s fountains. But I actually enjoyed the LACMA show because it addresses this very conundrum.

Lily Simonson: Yes, there is virtually no history embodied anywhere in Los Angeles, and that is very unsettling. My neighborhood in Hollywood is overrun by European tourists taking pictures of the Walk of Fame and trying to get to the Hollywood Sign. Is that our Eiffel Tower? Yikes! Our history is all about cultural production and artifice, so everything begins to seem inauthentic or reproducible.

Anyway, I agree that LACMA gracefully embraced the incongruity of a show like this in Los Angeles, especially by juxtaposing the exhibition with Antin’s Pompeii series. In fact, the Antin piece at once underscored this cultural “mismatch” while highlighting the parallels between the opulent Hollywood Empire and the dangerously extravagant Romans. I’ve been thinking about the inclusion of the Art21-like video that documented Antin’s process making the Pompeii photographs. It made the work feel like a Hollywood production.

CW: Do you mean the video made Antin’s work seem like a Hollywood production? Or that it made those grand ancient sculptures look like they jumped off a Hollywood set? I was entranced by the latter possibility. What’s great about Antin’s Pompeii photos is that her production value is so high, yet the scenes are flawed. Actors seem bored, bodies have blemishes, the theatricality is transparent. And it’s the same with the sculptures on exhibit. They’re crafted with such gravitas and yet time has damaged them in a way that makes their theatricality seem naked.

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The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.

Who is Kimsooja and what does she have to say about systems?

Kimsooja was born in 1957 in Taegu, South Korea; she lives and works in New York. Kimsooja’s videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through their use of repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. In many pieces, everyday actions—such as sewing or doing laundry—become two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. Central to her work is the bottari, a traditional Korean bundle used to wrap and protect personal belongings, which Kimsooja transforms into a philosophical metaphor for structure and connection.  In videos that feature her in various personas (Needle Woman, Beggar Woman, Homeless Woman), she leads us to reflect on the human condition, offering open-ended perspectives through which she presents and questions reality. Using her own body, facing away from the camera, Kimsooja becomes a void; we literally see and respond through her. While striking for their vibrant color and density of imagery, Kimsooja’s works emphasize metaphysical changes within the artist-as-performer as well as the viewer.

On the subject of systems in art, Kimsooja talks about blurring conceptual systems from art and life in her work (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

When I was doing sewing pieces, I considered all the women’s activities—sewing, cooking, laundry, pressing, cleaning the house, shopping, decorating—as two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. I wanted to appreciate that aspect and reveal the artistic context. So my work was all, in a way, related to women’s activity, but then it was also linked to contemporary art issues. I’d been working a lot using femininity and female activities, but I never considered myself as a feminist. The only thing I can agree to is that ‘feminist’ is part of ‘humanist’. So I don’t even participate in feminist shows—because that really simplifies and limits my ideas. I refuse to be in a specific ism. But my practice can be perceived in different isms—like conceptualism, globalism, feminism, minimalism. My intention is to reach to the totality of our life in art, so that’s also one reason my practice is quite broad and diverse—to reach that complexity and comprehensiveness.

What happens in Kimsooja’s segment in Systems this October?

Kimsooja’s segment opens with a series of videotaped performances in crowded cities around the world, titled A Needle Woman (1999-2001). In the videos, the artist is shown from behind, her form acting as an unmoving axis on the horizon. Comparing her body to a needle that threads through space and time, she explains that her conceptual “system is very much rooted to the practice of sewing” and that she discovers “artistic questions and answers from our daily life activities.” Discovering that bottari—a traditional Korean bundle—could be used as minimalist sculpture, the artist later explored autobiographical and cultural aspects of the form in works such as a tour of South Korea in Cities On The Move–2727 km Bottari Truck (1997) and an installation of hanging bedsheets belonging to newlyweds in A Laundry Woman (2004).

The segment focuses in depth on two recent site-specific works. Lotus: Zone of Zero (2008) in Brussels consists of 2,000 fuchsia lotus lanterns with a soundtrack of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chants. To Breathe–A Mirror Woman (2006) is an intervention at the Crystal Palace in Madrid in which rainbow-colored sunlight, diffused through diffraction grating film applied to windows, is reflected in a mirrored surface applied to the floor while a pre-recorded performance of the artist’s rythmic breathing—A Weaving Factory (2005)—fills the space. Says the artist on her ethereal and genre-bending work: “My intention is to reach to the totality of our life in art.”

Kimsooja. "Cities On The Move - 2727 km Bottari Truck," 1997. Single channel video projection, silent, 7:33 minute loop. © Kimsooja, courtesy the artist.

What else has Kimsooja done?

Kimsooja  earned a BFA (1980) and MA (1984) from Hong-Ik University, Seoul. Kimsooja has received the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002), among others, and has been an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center, New York (1998); P.S. 1 Museum, New York (1992-93); and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris (1984). She has had major exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2008); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2006); Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall, Sweden (2006); the MIT List Gallery, Cambridge (2005), and other institutions. Kimsooja has participated in international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2001, 2005, 2007); Yokohama Triennial (2005); and Whitney Biennial (2002).

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

Kimsooja maintains an extensive website of her work.

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

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!

Richard Prince, "Untitled (four single men with interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right)," 1977. Mixed media on paper. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

As summer officially winds down, I can’t help but note that 2009 marks one very significant anniversary that seems to have been somewhat underappreciated, if not totally overlooked here in New York. I’m not talking about this the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic exploration of the New York region, which also seems to have slipped by with relatively little fanfare. While perhaps not of this same scale, the underappreciated anniversary to which I’m referring does, nevertheless, mark an occasion that forever changed the course of art history. It is, after all, one hundred years ago this year that the first Futurist manifesto was published—a seismic proclamation that signaled the coalescence of a group that would alter the landscape and the trajectory of modern art (this group’s lessons and legacy are still being assessed). Although a major exhibition is irculating around Europe at the moment to observe the occasion, here in America, the centenary has been greeted with a somewhat muted response by institutions from which one might have expected a more robust commemoration (MoMA, wherefore art thou?).

While there was no centennial celebration to be found, one of the better commemorative exhibitions in New York did in fact highlight another group of radical, young artists whose lessons and legacy are also still being absorbed. I’m referring to the The Pictures Generation: 1974-1984 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this summer. This exhibition, however, felt a bit like the anniversary that wasn’t, as it commemorated and expanded upon Douglas Crimp’s landmark Pictures show. But it did so, somewhat peculiarly, two years after the thirtieth anniversary of that now legendary exhibition at Artist’s Space in 1977 (to be fair, it was the thirtieth anniversary of Crimp’s important article in October magazine, a broad articulation of his argument in which he also discussed the work of Cindy Sherman, who was not included in his original exhibition).

Face-to-face once more with some of the most iconic images from the so called Pictures generation, it struck me that few moments in the history of art match the late 1970s for its wide-ranging and sustained critique of those institutional systems through which meaning is manipulated and, more importantly, produced. Certainly the Italian Futurists and various strains of Dada vigorously attacked the mechanisms of power and the conventions of representation, and articulated a radical new vision of what art and life should be. Likewise, the 1950s witnessed Jasper Johns’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s devastating assault on both the painterly gesture as an index of authenticity and originality, as well as the mythology of the abstract expressionist artist.

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This week I want to continue sharing a few stories in the Not-So-Powerful series about units that didn’t go well and the things that happened as a result…

Years ago a colleague asked me to join him in entering our students into a contest. For a variety of reasons, I won’t go into detail about the specifics of the contest to protect the innocent… and the guilty. I agreed to participate with my classes even though the “student art contest” didn’t exactly fit with the curriculum we had written that summer. He was excited about it, so I figured I should play along and not be the geek who wanted to stick to our original plan. We’re artists, let’s go with the flow, I thought.

As soon as the project began, I could see that what we were teaching had three classic qualities of a bad idea in the art classroom:

1. The timing was all wrong. This contest theme had nothing to do with what the kids had learned or what they would be learning (and let’s just say that switching from mixed-media sculpture to making posters about a very, very specific time period wasn’t exactly riveting).
2. We lacked serious motivational resources, so my colleague and I were literally trying to teach the theme solely through words and without much visual motivation.
3. We framed the assignment as a “contest”. It was clear there would be winners and losers. As a consolation prize, I would quickly add, “But everyone will be able to display their work!” Like I said, riveting.

Students slogged through this particular project as if they were trying to cart all the furniture out of the room strapped to their backs. Every day I was listening to cracks about the current assignment and how boooooring it was. Frankly, I was bored myself and couldn’t wait to finish.

Two weeks, three sharpeners, one cracked chalkboard and a few dozen headaches later, the project ended and we sent the work to be “judged” (you see, I was out of school one day, and they took out their frustration on the room while a frightened substitute teacher hid behind one of the drying racks).

Since then, I have backed off spontaneous contests and requests for participation that takes serious time away from our core curriculum. I will stay after school, hold lunch sessions, even give private lessons if I have to, but I won’t stick oddball themes and assignments where they don’t belong. Kids winning contests, if there is clear criteria and everyone knows what they’re getting themselves into, can be a nice thing. But a majority of students whining for two weeks and practically scaring a sub to death, well, this we can’t have.

Still Life (with Oreos), 2009

The Season 5 Book is here! At 224 pages and over 400 illustrations, the book also includes an introductory essay by Art21 Executive Producer and Curator Susan Sollins. (Oreos sold separately)

You can pre-order the book, as well as the Season 5 DVD and Blu-ray, through PBS today.

Conservator Carol Stringari with Ad Reinhardt's "Black Painting" (1960–66). Photo: Kristopher McKay, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

In August of 2008, Holland Cotter began his glowing review of Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting at the Guggenheim Museum in New York with this paragraph:

Things fall apart. That’s one of the facts of art. Material gets buried under other material. That’s another art fact.  They are both about the meeting—sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden—of aesthetics and physics, the moment when it becomes clear to the eye that a thing of beauty, while always a joy, will not last forever, at least in its original form.

I don’t think there is a New York Times writer more understanding and sympathetic to the conservator’s role within the museum than Mr. Cotter. I remember reading that article and looking at the accompanying images and wishing I could see the exhibition. The two conservators who researched and conserved the painting and developed the exhibition were awarded the 2009 College Art Association/Heritage Preservation Award. These two conservators are Chris McGlinchey, the Sally and Michael Gordon Conservation Scientist at the Museum of Modern Art, and Carol Stringari, the Chief Conservator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Ms. Stringari has been at the Guggenheim since 1992, and as the Chief Conservator, she oversees a staff of six conservators who work on a wide variety of projects. Since I wasn’t able to see the exhibition Imageless myself, and because Ms. Stringari is one of the leaders and innovators in the field of the conservation of modern and contemporary art, I’ve engaged her in a discussion around some of her past and current projects in an effort to define her role in preserving art in the 21^st century.

Richard McCoy: No doubt, as the Chief Conservator, that you play a number of roles at your museum. Will you describe an “average week” for you and your department?

Carol Stringari: I can’t say that there is an “average week” at the Guggenheim. Given the fact that we have a small conservation staff and a very ambitious exhibition and affiliate program, each week can be quite different. One week could include treating an artwork in the lab, installing an exhibition in Bilbao, or attending planning meetings for future projects in Abu Dhabi.

Our conservation staff is extremely busy and since we do not see each other regularly, I encourage everyone to gather weekly to share ideas and discuss projects. I feel that everyone can learn something from the larger group, regardless of their “discipline.” By discipline I mean their specialization, be it paintings, objects, works on paper, electronic art, etc.

We also have regular meetings with our curatorial department to discuss research and treatment projects, philosophical issues, and to set priorities for upcoming exhibitions.

RM: What is your involvement in site-specific and Guggenheim-commissioned projects? Does your approach differ much in these projects from working on a more traditional work of art?

CS: We have recently become more involved in the documentation of works as they enter the museum collection. With the addition of staff we are able to engage the artists early in the process and discuss working methods and materials. When possible, we photograph and preferably videotape the installation works as they are created. When this is not possible, we conduct “variable media interviews” to determine the parameters of the artwork and how it might transform over time and in different contextual circumstances. These interviews enable us to document specific technologies and how the use of technology creates meaning within an artwork.

Fundamentally, the questions we ask are the same as for traditional artworks: How do we retain the integrity of the work? How do we preserve historical and cultural context? And how do we conserve the work for future generations? The answers to these questions can vary dramatically based on the nature of the work and the artist that created it. We own a very wide range of artworks, from quite traditional objects to conceptual art, earthworks, large installations, and technology-based works.

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Josiah McElheny, "Bruno Taut on Mies van der Rohe (1922), i," 2009. Drawing on silver gelatin photograph using color retouching pencil, 23 1/2 x 17 1/2 in., Edition variant 1 of 4 with 1 artist's proof. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery.

• New works by Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny are on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery through Oct. 17. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glassclad skyscraper. McElheny’s sculpture is an enlarged version of this original maquette that recasts Mies’s design in the spirit of rival architect Bruno Taut. Also included in the exhibition are a series of photo-based drawings inspired by a photograph Mies took of his skyscraper model in 1922. In each, the black-and-white photograph is highlighted, or defaced with photo-retouching pencil, thereby inserting Taut’s colorful ideas into Mies’s picture of purity and transparency.

• Works by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle are on view in the exhibition Pollution is Ecology also at Andrea Rosen Gallery through October 17. Visit Contemporary Art Daily to browse through images of Tuttle’s concurrent exhibition, L’nger than Life, at Modern Art, London.

• Season 3 artist Fred Wilson is recipient of the 2009 Cheek Medal from the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary. The Cheek Medal was created to recognize individuals who have impacted the fields of visual, performing and museum arts. A dinner and ceremony will be held at the Lake Matoaka Amphitheater on Sept. 18.

• Opening October 7 at the Museum of Arts & Design, Slash: Paper Under the Knife will explore the creative possibilities of paper through works by Kara Walker (Season 2), Oliver Herring (Season 3), Olafur Eliasson, Pietro Ruffo, Ishmael Randall, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, and others.

• Kara Walker (Season 2) will be the next artist in the Proposition seminar series at the New Museum. Inspired by the scientific method of hypothesis, research, and synthesis, these two-day events explore a topic of current investigation in the invited speaker’s own artistic or intellectual practice. On Sept 25 and 26 Walker will explore the object of painting and the concept of liberty.

• Mel Chin (Season 1) will lecture at Arizona State University (ASU) on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 7:30pm. The event is organized in conjunction with the Defining Sustainability season of exhibitions and projects at the ASU Art Museum.

• Dance with Camera is now on view at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Both an exhibition and screening program, Dance with Camera explores the crossover between artists, and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features works in film, video, and photography by artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Oliver Herring (both Season 3), Charles Atlas, Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, Bruce Conner, Tacita Dean,  Luis Jacob, Joachim Koester, Elad Lassry, Kelly Nipper, robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner, Uri Tzaig, Flora Wiegmann, and Christopher Williams. On view through March 21, 2010.

The “cultural cringe” – the crippling inferiority complex that members of a particular country feel about their homeland, as evidenced in the bluffed provenance of just about every college student on a year abroad – must have reached its apex in the U.S. about, what?, two years ago, when Americans I met would brazenly describe themselves as Canadian and dare you to disagree. Not any more, of course, which is why the current art world bemusement/frustration/outrage/weary familiarity around the Fox News anchor (yes, “Fox News anchor” has become the insult of choice for London’s cockneys) Glenn Beck’s series of spluttering rants — televised spluttering rants — about the hidden pinko messages in the architecture of Rockefeller Center, New York, has the unmistakable whiff of nostalgic delight.

Beck who, when he gets angry, looks like a Hanna-Barbera bear leaping up and down in frustration, little puffs of steam popping out of his ears, laid into the supposed communist undertones of the sculptural decorations with mounting, incredulous fury. “It drives me nuts that nobody knows what this is!” he says, describing a ’30s relief sculpture by Attilio Piccirilli of a chariot being led into a rising sun by a buff dude and a little boy. ‘This’ (the buff dude), according to Beck, “represents Mussolini…the wheel [of the chariot] is always representative of industry in any of these progressive, uh, uh, pictures or paintings or artwork.” Somehow, in a dizzying display of stream-of-consciousness argument, he links the presence of the child in the sculpture to President Obama’s “indoctrination” of America’s cowering schoolchildren in his education speech that implored students to, effectively, “stay in school” — something Beck might do well to consider taking on board. Beck to school!

Beck’s wild-eyed analysis continues with a close reading of Diego Rivera’s destroyed 1933 mural, Man at the Crossroads, made for Rockefeller Center’s lobby but demolished in the wake of controversy over its inclusion of a portrait of Lenin. Or pace Beck, in furious air-quotes, “some ‘crazy journalist’ raised a stink over it.” (A Beck forebear, is the implication.) His sarcastic irritation over Rivera’s juxtaposition of a syphilis bacterium and a portrait of patron John D. Rockefeller is a delight: “Yeah, the artist didn’t like Rockefeller too much, even though Rockefeller commissioned this art for the lobby of NBC!” How dare he! It’s probably fair to suggest that Beck isn’t much of a Michelangelo fan, on that evidence.

Beck’s stab at art criticism has elevated heckles to such an extent that even the mighty Jerry Saltz has thrown his hat in the ring, in a kind of open letter to Beck in New York magazine. Describing Beck (rightly) as “harebrained” and “batty,” Saltz challenges him to curate two exhibitions in New York: one of contemporary art he actually likes, and one of “works of art that exist in New York City that he would like to see demolished.” Saltz then promises to review both shows. Naturally, Beck – whose rapidly dwindling roster of sponsors and bizarre on-air blubbering and accusations of Presidential “racism” have made his show a “YouTube sensation” (= televisual train wreck) – isn’t going to indulge Saltz, enlightening though it would be.

Saltz’s implication, that Beck’s paranoid free-association and empty-headed censuring has parallels with Nazi rebranding of avant-garde art as “degenerate,” is an accurate one. It has similarities, too, with the standard line on MoMA’s promotion of Abstract Expressionist shows in Europe in the late ’50s, as a CIA-endorsed espousal of liberal democratic values during the Cold War — a reading as skewed, in its own way, as Beck’s. To quote Kirk Varnedoe, whose brilliant dissection of this theory, in Pictures of Nothing, neatly punctures any claims it has to plausibility: “the big problem with the idea of these exhibitions as tools of Cold War propaganda is that one simply cannot control the outcome of abstract art such as Pollock’s.”

That goes for all art. It’s hard not to wish one could control the outcome of a career such as Beck’s. Still, he’s doing a pretty good job of that on his own.