Claes Oldenburg, "Floor Burger," 1962

The beginning of a school year, especially the first days of school, can be beautiful or brutal. I remember as a kid sitting in class after class on the first day of school listening to teachers rattle off lists of rules while we stared outside hoping that maybe, just maybe, one teacher would take a different approach that day. There were times when I could actually predict the sequence:

Rules, index cards, basic information, more rules, bizarre homework assignment, bell. Time crawled, and as my four-year old son often suggests, I sat there and wished they would just get faster clocks.

Teachers want to find ways to learn more about the students they will be working with on the first days of class. Incorporating strategies that expose them to works of art can introduce a variety of artists while simultaneously getting important information about the kids. And believe me, it’s better than another essay about summer vacation.

For example, last year I used a strategy where each student was given a postcard with a different image. Some images were famous, well known works, and others were contemporary works that students had never seen before. I asked each student to tell me “where they were” in the picture they received. To illustrate my point, I used Arthur Dove’s “Foghorns” and pointed to one of the dark gray rings just outside the black center of one of the three “horns”. I explained that I am the gray ring because while I don’t like being the center of attention, I do enjoy being near it. I enjoy being around the action, but not always the person who stars in the action. They got it immediately.

One student, whom I will call Nelson, received Claes Oldenburg’s “Floor Burger”. He thought for a moment, picked up his post-it paper and wrote, “I am the pickle on top because I stay on top of things. The wrinkles remind me of the problems in my life, especially getting good grades.”

John James Audubon, "Roseate Spoonbill," 1835-8

Another student, let’s call her Alice, received “Roseate Spoonbill” by John James Audubon, which basically looked like a cross between a duck and a goose with a really long, oddly shaped bill. She wrote, “I am the ugly duckling,” and nothing else. When I read the post-it later that day I almost cried just thinking about the way she sat in class, alone, while most others chatted as they worked.

Both of these answers allowed me to see Nelson and Alice in ways that an essay about summer vacation or basic information on an index card may have missed. In the following weeks, I was able to have short conversations with Nelson about using his organizational skills to not only get good grades, but also help run our class efficiently. I was also able to talk with Alice’s parents on Back-to-School Night about her impression of being the ugly duckling, which we gently worked on over the semester. And these are just two of the examples!

Breaking free of routines, while at the same time making investigation and inquiry part of the first few days, can kick things off in surprising ways.

Trenton Doyle Hancock, "A Hello Hollow Lullaby," 2008, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.

Happy Labor Day!

• Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), Erick Swenson, and Alison Elizabeth will be making their Shanghai debut in a three-person exhibition at James Cohan Gallery.  The three young guns in Young Americans all work in distinct, narrative modes.  September 11 through November 15.

• Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny opens his second solo exhibition with Andrea Rosen Gallery on September 12.  Proposals for a Chromatic Modernism is a “devoted analysis of twentieth century modernism and its ideological legacies.” The exhibition’s centerpiece is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glass-clad skyscraper. Through October 17.

• Opening this thursday at the Tyler Art Gallery is Kara Walker: The Emancipation Approximation Series. 26 large-screen prints  by the Season 2 artist feature her signature silhouettes that explore race and gender in America. Through Oct. 10.

• Kara Walker is also in a two-person show with Mark Bradford (Season 4) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Both employ paper, collage, and assemblage to produce much of their art, which also share an interest in exploring societal and cultural issues.  September 10 through October 17.

• Up Against is an exhibition of new work by Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine. On view from September 12 through October 24, Up Against continues the Season 2 artist’s exploration of the body as measure. From the press release: Moving between the monumental and the miniature, the artist’s own body is dwarfed, extended and aligned with various architectural structures. Through these relationships, Antoni explores ideas of destruction, motherhood, and fantasy.

Eva Hesse, "Studiowork," 1968. Courtesy of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Photograph: Abby Robinson/Courtesy of the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Sometimes the most interesting thing about an artist is the disparity between their work and the established perception of it. Eva Hesse, the late German-American sculptor of ratty latex and dog-eared fiberglass, has suffered from what Nabokov called “dotting every i with the author’s head.” Her short career (she died from a brain tumor in 1970 after only about ten years’ work) and painful life (her mother’s suicide and her father’s death not long after) have been allowed to overshadow readings of her work, letting the natural disintegration of fragile materials stand as literal equivalents for her own physical demise. Of course, this conflation of life and work is something that especially dogs the work of female artists (Artemesia Gentileschi, Virginia Woolf, Britney Spears), but in the case of Hesse’s body of work – which consists of light-heartedly erotic objects of a maudlin wit – it’s particularly galling.

A new show of previously-unseen work – a real coup for Hesse fans, since much of her best-known work is now too fragile to travel – at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, entitled Studiowork, brings to light aspects of her work that illustrate the artist’s fervent assertion of its “absurdity.” It’s not laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the false-start, experimental nature of much of the work here reveals a working process not dissimilar to that of a stand-up comedian worrying over combinations of ridiculous circumstances. And absurd combinations of things – visual equivalents for a rabbi walking into a bar, or Michael Jackson and Himmler meeting at the pearly gates – are what characterize Hesse’s contribution to the evolution of the non-metaphorical sculptural object after the 1960s.

If that last sentence had you nodding off at your keyboard, and you’ve just woken up to a screen filled with the letter ‘r’ and a river of saliva out of the corner of your mouth, it’s because Hesse’s work and the tradition it derives from (that of minimalist ‘specific objects’ after the 1960s) is visual, not verbal. Translating what is, when it’s successful (as in Richard Serra’s great arcing slabs of steel, or Donald Judd’s austere parade of aluminum boxes), a profound awareness of one’s own body in relation to the space of the gallery into the grinding rhetoric of art theory is missing the point. Minimalism is the closest thing contemporary art has come to an art of the sublime. Hesse’s work, though – sometimes bracketed, with spectacular joylessness, “post-minimalism” – plays the language of the sublime against itself, using materials that willfully accrue unsettling simile.

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"Food for pets and people", SOURCE: sheknows.com

It’s on the table! Enjoy!

Where in the world are Art21 artists? Everywhere…and Nicole Caruth gives us the scoop.

Hrag introduces Ellen Pearlman, a Brooklyn & Beijing-based writer, curator, critic and film maker, who shares her thoughts about the notion of Art + Transformation in relation to China’s art scene.

What was Williamsburg like five years ago? Loren Munk of the DIY online program, the James Kalm Report, posts a video with the support of Chris Martin’s documentation.

Play Art Loud. DIY videos on Art Babble.

Welcome Dehlia Hannah, Art21′s latest Guest Blogger.

Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof of TheArtBlog.org share their thoughts on Art + Transformation + Pop Culture and touch upon a wide range of things, including the art of Kara Walker and iPod ads.

Extra! Extra! Hot off the Online Press! Watch the latest Art21: Exclusive Jessica Stockholder | Becoming an Artist.

In this week’s Teaching with Contemporary Art, Joe Fusaro reviews Mark Slouka’s essay “Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school” from this month’s Harper’s Magazine.

Take a walk because there’s beauty out there! Artist Austin Thomas shares her thoughts about the transformative power of walking and its impact on her art practice.

What does it mean to ‘believe’ in science? It’s the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon…Dehlia Hannah writes about “On the Moon and Beyond” at the Streaming Museum.

Meet the Season 5 artist, Yinka Shonibare MBE and BOMB in the Building presents this interview by Anthony Downey with Shonibare.

Hrag wraps up the Transformation series with a look at America’s oldest artist colony, Provincetown, and how it has changed.

Provincetown Art Association & Museum, Photo by jrgts/Flickr

I admit to being surprised at the role the visual arts plays in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In college, I remember learning about Hans Hofmann’s famous school, which taught artists (Helen Frankenthaler, Allan Kaprow, Larry Rivers, Lee Krasner, etc.) about modern art. This once sleepy fishing town, it turns out, wasn’t only an important center for American theatre and art during the middle of the 20th C. but it continues to retain that role even as it transform into a very contemporary community. At the center of this change is a rather superb small museum, the Province Art Association & Museum (aka PAAM).

Last weekend, I traveled to this small town of less than 4,000 year-round residents and met PAAM’s Executive Director, Christine M. McCarthy, to find out more about the town’s fine arts soul. She was friendly, welcoming and exuberant about what has been achieved in Provincetown. “You can’t find more culture in 3 square miles anywhere else,” she offered as evidence of Provincetown’s role as cultural mecca.

Charles W. Hawthorne "His First Voyage" (1915). Gift of Joseph Hawthorne, Coll. PAAM

When I visited, PAAM was hosting five (mostly one-room) exhibitions, including a permanent collection display dominated by works by founding art colony father Charles W. Hawthorne and his ilk, a show of drawings by Hans Hofmann’s students (which included 15 drawings loaned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art), a retrospective of assemblage artist Varujan Boghosian, Anne Peretz’s paintings of Cape Cod, and a fundraising show featuring work by PAAM members. It seemed like an incredible number for such a small museum.

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Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a vintage BOMB interview relating to a Season 5 artist. Next up, Yinka Shonibare, whose exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum is on view through Sept 20, was featured in BOMB on the heels of being nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004. Critic and curator Anthony Downey interviewed the London-born Nigerian artist BOMB Isuse 95, Fall 2005. “It is easy to overlook, in all the theorizing about postcoloniality and the politics of identity, about the amount of amusement and frivolity he can pack into his work,” Downey wrote at the time. In the excerpt below, the two discuss the artist’s film, Un Ballo in Maschera [A Masked Ball], which centers around the controversial figure of King Gustav III of Sweden, who was assassinated in 1792. Read the full interview here.

Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), 2004, color digital video, 32-minute loop. Images courtesy of the artist, James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Anthony Downey: The act of not taking sides would seem to be part of an ethical, rather than political, approach if we’re looking at Un Ballo in Maschera as a historical metaphor for political redemption. Is the film a direct comment on the present day in this sense?

Yinka Shonibare: I give the audience two options. You see the king go into the ball, indulge himself in the excess and get murdered. But I give him the option to get up again. It’s up to the audience to decide which version prevails. Do they want him to stay murdered, or do they want him to be saved? The audience is seeing both possibilities. In real life, of course, there is no rewind, or replay; an event happens and that’s it.

AD: So you’re asking the audience to be complicit, if not in the assassination, then in the redemption.

YS: It depends on the person. Viewers have to make up their mind whether this person had the right to assassinate that leader or not. You need a leader, but what sort of leader? The film gives you the opportunity to engage with the various tensions. In the dance and the theatricality as well as the breathtaking visuals, you’re part of that excess and you indulge in it, but then it’s not that simple because there’s a dark side to this beauty. It’s not just a lavish banquet; there’s always this “terrible beauty.”

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Artist Jessica Stockholder recounts her earliest memories of wanting to become an artist while she and her son Charlie paint and draw in the basement of their home in New Haven, Connecticut.

A pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Jessica Stockholder’s site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but closer observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control.

Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Mead Hunt. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Jessica Stockholder. Special Thanks: Charles Pippin Chamberlain.

Kara Walker, "You Do" (1993-94). Cut Paper on canvas, 55 x 49 in. (140 x 124.5 cm). Coll. of Peter Norton & Eileen Harris Norton. Photo courtesy artist & Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NYC

Our latest reflection on the theme of art + transformation comes from two popular Philadelphia-based art bloggers, Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof. The founders of TheArtBlog.org, the pair shared some thoughts on the transformative relationship between pop culture & art:

There’s a constant conversation going on between art and pop culture. Each seems to transform the other for better and for worse. iPod advertisements quote Kara Walker‘s (Season 2) black on white silhouettes. Cai Guo-Qiang‘s (Season 3) firework explosions transform the ultimate pop culture “ooh” and “aah” experience into a commentary on light and space–but also exploding bombs.

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Everything is fodder in Ryan Trecartin’s through the looking glass world. People are transformed with face paint and audio is distorted to the verge of incomprehensibility. And the values of the corporate world and the family world are inverted so that there is no good/bad dichotomy and everything is a crazy jumble. The transformation allows the artist room to comment on how crazy and immoral the real world is.

That ability to transform has magic powers, and the ancients understood that when they donned masks and swallowed peyote buttons. Art is not peyote. It won’t get you through the doors of perception literally. But good art does open up doors of perspective that help us revise our understanding of the world around us.

- Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof

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 Yinka Shonibare MBE and what does he have to say about transformation?

Yinka Shonibare MBE was born in 1962 in London, England, but grew up in Lagos, Nigeria; he lives and works in London. Known for using batik in costumed dioramas that explore race and colonialism, Yinka Shonibare MBE also employs painting, sculpture, photography, and film in work that disrupts and challenges our notions of cultural identity. Taking on the honorific MBE as part of his name in everyday use, Shonibare plays with the ambiguities and contradictions of his attitude toward the Establishment and its legacies of colonialism and class. In multimedia projects that reveal his passion for art history, literature, and philosophy, Shonibare provides a critical tour of Western civilization and its achievements and failures. At the same time, his sensitive use of his own foibles (vanity, for one) and challenges (physical disability) provide an autobiographical perspective through which to navigate the contradictory emotions and paradoxes of his examination of individual and political power.

On the subject of transformation in art, Shonibare discusses the mutable nature of his materials (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

I started to look at the representation of the ideas of African art and at what things represented Africa. I came upon the fabrics. Although they are associated with Africa, they have their origins in Indonesia. The Dutch started to produce these fabrics industrially for the Indonesian markets towards the end of the nineteenth century but the industrially produced versions were not popular there, so they tried West Africa. There the fabrics were really popular and they were appropriated. And now they are associated with Africa. I like the fact that the fabrics have a multi-layered history. So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that things are not always what they seem. I enjoy working with that.

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

“My work, all along, has been a critique of Empire,” says Yinka Shonibare MBE, adopting the honorific title of Member of the Order of the British Empire, with willful irony, as part of his name. “I like the idea of parodying or mimicking the notion of class.”

Shown in his London studio, Shonibare is working on his first series of drawings in twelve years, taking as his subject: climate change—political, economic, environmental—and dedicating a work to “the architects of the present economic disaster” including Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Milton Friedman. The artist is on hand for the installation of a retrospective of sculptures—headless, “post-racial,” mannequins dressed in vibrant costumes—at the MCA Sydney. “The fabrics are multi-layered—things are not always what they seem,” he says about his use of industrially produced, Dutch wax print cloth, which has a complex colonial history stretching from Indonesia to the artist’s native Nigeria.

“I’ve always enjoyed using beauty and seduction as a way of engaging people with the work,” he says, pointing out the underlying dark themes in works such as Scramble for Africa (2003) and Black Gold II (2006). Acting as the protagonist in two photographic series, in Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) Shonibare re-imagines a series of paintings by William Hogarth while in the Oscar Wilde inspired Dorian Gray (2001) he explores personal themes of mortality, vanity and physical disability. The final work in the segment, the film Un Ballo in Maschera (2004), is a masked ballet that recounts the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden. “Power creates excess,” he asserts, while playfully admitting, “I also, actually, would like to have the trappings of wealth myself, even though I may be criticizing it.”

Yinka Shonibare MBE. "How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies)," 2006. Two-life size mannequins, two guns, Dutch wax printed cotton, shoes, and leather riding boots, Plinth overall 63 x 96 1/2 x 48 inches, each figure 63 x 61 x 48 inches. Collection of Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA. Photo by Stephen White, © Yinka Shonibare MBE, courtesy the artist, James Cohan Gallery, New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

What else has Shonibare done?

Shonibare studied at Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1984-89) and earned an MA from Goldsmiths College, London University (1991). Among his awards are the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) (2005); a fellowship at Goldsmith’s College (2003); and the Art for Architecture Award, Royal Society of Arts (1998). Shonibare was nominated for the Turner Prize (2004). His work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (2009); Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, (2005); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2004); and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2004), among others. He has participated in international events including Documenta (2003); Spoleto Festival, Charleston (2003); and the Venice Biennale (2001).

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

YInka Shonibare MBE is represented by James Cohan Gallery in New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. His mid-career retrospective is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art until September 20th, after which it travels to the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C. from November 11, 2009—March 7, 2010. His site-specific commission Party Time: Re-Imagine is on view at the Newark Museum of Art until January 3rd, 2010.

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

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!

Forty years ago Americans watched in awe as a spectacle of scientific achievement unfolded on their television screens. From the comfort to their 1960s living room sofas they watched as astronauts bounced over the surface of the moon and issued eloquent exclamations at the human capacity to transcend the physical and imaginative horizons that bound our recent ancestors. While the Apollo 11 mission is now remembered much more for its political value in demonstrating American technological dominance over the Soviet Union than for any great contribution to scientific knowledge, the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing has renewed flagging enthusiasm for scientific endeavors whose main purpose is to set new frontiers for the pursuit of scientific glory.

In projects like the proposed colony on Mars, in which a great boondoggle is reincarnated as an end in itself, science seems to verge on becoming art. The transfiguration is rendered complete in the video exhibition “On the Moon and Beyond” that is on view until September 14th at the Streaming Museum, Streaming Museum the web-based gallery of the Chelsea Art Museum’s Project Room. What intrigues me about this exhibition is how it retrospectively renarrates the moonwalk of 1969 as a performance artwork, and thus implicitly asks whether it wasn’t always, on some level, a kind of moon dance.

“On the Moon and Beyond” mixes selections from Dutch composer Jacob Ter Veldhuis and video artist Jaap Drupsteen‘s video oratorio, “Paradiso”, a composition based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, with images and text from Eduardo Kac transgenic artwork “Natural History of the Enigma” (2009), which was on view at the Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota from April 17th to June 21st. Kac is well known for his work with genetic engineering, most famously, for “GPF Bunny” (2000), an albino rabbit that was genetically modified to express a jellyfish protein that glows fluorescent green under black light. The work provoked heated debate about how far we should go, as artists or scientists, in altering natural phenomena for our own purposes. As an artwork, Alba the fluorescent bunny functioned as a magnet for widespread anxieties about the development of transgenic mice, rats, bacteria and other organisms used in biomedical research and agriculture.

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