Cindy Sherman’s studio. Art in the Twenty-First Century, production still, 2009. Season 5, Episode: Transformation. © Art21, Inc. 2009.

Season 5 may have wrapped up this week (cough, cough…watch it online now before it’s gone on November 13…cough), but the Art21 Blog plows on, cookin’ up the goods with our pictureless-no-more writers and contributors. All treats and no tricks this past week on the Art21 Blog—here’s what you may have missed:

• In this week’s Letter from London, Ben Street takes a look at the London art scene in light of the Frieze Art Fair
• Catch up on the posts from departing guest blogger, Nathan Townes-Anderson
• Welcome to San Francisco-based guest blogger, Kelly Huang. This week, she’s: presented questions on global art and the art market; reflected on the work of German artist, Tino Sehgal; and discussed food and community with Chicago-based artist and “problem solver,” Theaster Gates.
• Nicole Caruth rounds up the recent on-goings of Art21-featured artists, representing all 5 seasons of Art:21
• In this week’s Teaching with Contemporary Art column, Art21 senior education advisor Joe Fusaro draws parallels between the teamwork-based approach of Allan McCollum and the collaborative approach to successful art education classes
• In this month’s installment of Art 2.1, An Xiao sits down with artist Rachel Perry Welty to discuss the role of social technologies in art, exploring the use of Facebook for her project, Rachel is
• Catherine Wagley considers the challenges of contemporary public art in the latest installment of Looking at Los Angeles
• Georgia Kotretsos takes us inside the studio of Berlin-based visual artist, Joulia Strauss
• This week’s exclusive video finds Jeff Koons recounting memories of Versailles and inspiration from Louis XIV

Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates is an artist living and working in Chicago. Labeling him an artist certainly does not capture who he is and what he does, though. He is often referred to as an activist, community organizer, and performer, among other things. When asked about his art practice and all the labels attached to him, he responds by saying he is a problem solver. His interests are broad, and his solutions lead him into a variety of genres and material. Lately, he has been giving public lectures and presentations. Many times, his work is presented in exhibitions.

Gates’s work often takes place in the public arena with public gatherings or lectures. When asked what draws him to this method of engagement, Gates’s response is that, “there is a type of power in the public”—either in the ability to voice one’s opinion and know that it is being heard, or through the social aspect. As he explains, “I accept that the byproduct of me getting people together is that people might call it art or call it an activist moment, and that’s just fine. The part I’m trying to concentrate on is this: if I have a set of relationships that are broad and wide, how can I bring those relationships into conversation with each other when necessary or when I’m curious?”

To that end, Gates’s latest project confronts a variety of issues through gathering people around a meal. Gates and I spoke on October 28, 2009 by phone to discuss this developing project. His upcoming projects include Theaster Gates: Resurrecting Dave the Potter at the Milwaukee Art Museum (April 15-August 1, 2010) and an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Kelly Huang: Food has been a reoccurring subject in your work. Back in the spring, we spoke about a soul food project that you will be hosting on the South Side of Chicago in the near future. You describe how food is an important part of every culture—how it shapes people’s memories of place, speaks to history, and has the power to bring people together. Could you tell me more about the project you are working on and how you first conceptualized it?

Theaster Gates: I was approached by Stephanie Smith (Curator of Contemporary Art, Smart Museum), who was thinking about a project called Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art. Feast was to be an attempt at surveying the history of food practices in contemporary art. She asked me pretty simply, “What would you want to do?” And I said, I am feeling pretty good about doing things outside of museums and I would like to try and relocate a food space outside of your museum, and concentrate on soul food, because it has such a rich history on the South Side. I decided to acquire a building on my block and over the next one and a half years, slowly build out that space into a sort of soul food temple, where—in the spirit of critical discourse on art practices and social practices—one could eat really good food.

But, it’s not just about food to the extent that food is a signifier of certain cultural behaviors, rituals. Food acts as a material I can play with to tease out certain rituals inherent in black people, Koreans, Chinese, white people, middle Americans. I think that the project has always been my labor and I will benefit from the fact that there are museums and other types of museums that are interested in what you call the “gastro-arts.”

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EXCLUSIVE: From his studio in New York City, Jeff Koons discusses his 2008 exhibition at the Château de Versailles in France. Koons explores the power and sensuality of the grounds at Versailles, citing Louis Quatorze (Louis XIV) as an inspriation for his 1992 piece, Puppy, a large floral sculpture made out of 60,000 large flowers.

Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of Classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.

Jeff Koons is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Fantasy of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online in the PBS Video portal (available for a limited time, through November 13, 2009).

Jeff Koons. Split Rocker, 2000. Stainless steel, soil, geotextile fabric, internal irrigation system, and live flowering plants, 441 x 465 x 426 inches. Installation view, “Jeff Koons Versailles,” Château de Versailles, France, October 9, 2008–April 1, 2009. © Jeff Koons. Courtesy the artist.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Martial Barrault & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Jeff Koons. Special Thanks: L’Etablissement Public du musée et du domaine national de Versailles.

Joulia Strauss at MYLIVINGROOM studio in Athens, Greece

It would be an oversimplification to introduce Joulia Strauss to you as a Russian visual artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Joulia is a Mari, from the Mari El Republic located in the eastern part of the East European plain of the Russian Federation, along the Volga River, right where the Ural Mountains begin. This small community of approximately 600,000 people has a rich tradition in the performing arts, and Joulia grew up in the middle of this, with two of her family members at the helm of the Mari National Theater in Yoshkar-Ola.

She got an admirable start in the art world by studying at the Platonic New Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg (founded in 1989), alongside artist and founder Timur Petrovich Novikov. This evolved into the Neo-Academism art movement in the 1990s. In my discussion with Joulia, you’ll see how she entered into the exclusively all-male New Academy, finding herself at the heart of the intellectual elite and queer culture of St. Petersburg at the time.

Classically trained as a sculptor, she creates works reminiscent of an antique and neo-classical idealism, always aiming for harmony, perfection, and beauty with a contemporary twist. She continued to be a member of Neo-Academism when she decided to pursue a fine arts degree at the University of Berlin. Being a skilled craftsman on her own, Joulia soon became fascinated with technology, science, and mathematics. By finding a lot of her answers in science (with the help of prominent thinkers in Berlin), her work began achieving the rigor for which she strove. She founded an artist-run space called art_science for gatherings of critics, scientists, artists, philosophers, in order to enable vital exchange outside of their own networks.

Joulia is highly politicized and conscious of the changes our society is undergoing. The sight of last December’s riots in Greece all over the media literally shook her. Joulia’s deep love and appreciation for ancient and contemporary Greece inspired her to come to Athens on a residency at MYLIVINGROOM in Metaxourgio, to observe and begin decoding the active role of artists in contemporary Greece.

Having taken September off, I am very pleased to return to my column and to you with this Joulia Strauss interview.

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For complete details on venues and programs, visit http://access.art21.org/find-an-event-near-you/

Friday, October 30
10:00am Jersey City Museum (Transformation)
10:00am Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Systems)
12:00pm Frost Art Museum (Compassion)
4:30pm Ullens Center for Contemporary Art presents Art:21 Season 5
5:00pm Southeastern Contemporary Art Gallery (Fantasy)
6:00pm Honolulu Academy of Arts: Academy Art Center (Transformation)
6:00pm University of Pennsylvania, Graduate Program in Fine Arts (Fantasy)
6:30pm Nashville Public Television (Transformation)
7:00pm Chinese University of Hong Kong (Transformation)
7:00pm Besant Hill School (Compassion)
7:00pm Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Systems)
7:00pm Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries (Fantasy)
7:30pm Nashville Public Television (Systems)

Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009.

When I heard that Marilyn Minter’s video, Green Pink Caviar, would be showing on the Mezzanine of The Standard Hotel, I imagined something exquisite: maybe the projection would appear on a balcony that curved around the hotel’s lounge, visible to those below and above it. Mezzanine is, after all, the French rendition of something Italian, a word that slides romantically off the tongue and conjures images of wrap-around railings. I was sure seeing Minter on the Mezzanine would be a singular experience. And it was, just not the kind I expected.

Apparently, when The Standard says “Mezzanine,” it more or less means “hallway.” Projected on a back wall, a few yards away from two gold-doored elevators hotel guests seem to use sparingly, Minter’s video played at a slight angle and the hotel’s mood music drowned its soft soundtrack. Usually, Minter’s work makes glamor visceral and slightly repulsive, but in a subliminal way. In this dark hallway, glamor became visceral in the grainy, horror movie sense. The long-tongued model in the video–who, filmed from below a glass surface, licks up colorful syrups–looked like an over-sexed alien, the type David Lynch might think up.

But what bothered me most was that I was supposed to be experiencing a public art project. While I stood there watching, no public joined me and the few people who passed—mainly men in their early 30s, one of them wearing the an L.A. Lakers shirt with silver embossing—didn’t even seemed to notice the video.

Los Angeles, like many other cities, has welcomed an influx of public video and billboard art over the last few years. Many of us within the art community have celebrated this influx as noble, as if art is fighting back against the commercial videos and digital billboards that saturate urban neighborhoods. Lately, however, I’ve found myself questioning that nobility.

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Screenshot from "Rachel is" (Facebook status via iPhone), performed March 11, 2009. Online performance documented by a 551-photograph slideshow of mobile update screen captures from an iPhone. 27 minutes 55 seconds set to loop continuously.

Appropriately enough, I first met conceptual artist Rachel Perry Welty via social media, when word spread about her Facebook-based performance, “Rachel is.” On March 11, 2009, from 7:35 a.m. to 10:56 p.m., she performed using the increasingly popular social network. Every sixty seconds during waking hours she attempted to faithfully answer the status question at the time, “What are you doing right now?” (since replaced by “What’s on your mind?”). We eventually met in person at Status Update, an exhibition at Yale/Haskins Laboratories curated by Debbie Hesse and Donna Ruff that explored the work of artists looking at emerging social media technologies.

Rachel uses a variety of media in her work—sculpture, video, performance, drawing, and installation—mixing minimal aesthetics with Pop humor and homespun craft to create works that point to the mundane and poetic aspects of our everyday lives. Her obsession with mapping the remnants of her daily rituals extends to fruit stickers and bread tags, twist ties and take-out containers, wrong number messages and computer spam. The world of Facebook, quickly becoming a mundane aspect of daily life in the 21st century, presents a logical next step for her explorations.

As so much of my work of late has been with the @Platea social media art collective, I was fascinated with Rachel’s project. I sat down with her via email and chatted a bit about her performance and where she sees social media and art going today.

An Xiao: How long have you been using online social media? How do you use Facebook, Twitter, and other media in your daily life?

Rachel Perry Welty: I’ve been using Facebook and Twitter for less than a year. The New York Times magazine had an in-depth piece about these social networking sites in early September 2008, and this, combined with friends requesting that I join, prompted me to investigate. I’ve found Facebook to be useful as a view to the global artist community, but I don’t send gifts or answer quizzes or throw sheep at people. And I don’t update my status on Facebook anymore after my performance on March 11.

Twitter feels very different to me from Facebook. For one thing, tweets don’t beg for a response. I don’t always want to have a discussion, as much as I just want to report. I have decided to use Twitter as a sort of Amish diary, you know, “Today I plowed the West field and gave birth to a baby boy” sort of thing. Every action is equal. No one experience gets more or less emphasis. I am driven by the limited word count to compose carefully to get as much information in as I can while keeping the poetry alive. All the better when I can do that and twoosh.

I use Twitter as an extension of my creative process, in the sense that it’s a view into the daily life of a working artist. As an artist, my project is concerned with the minutiae of life. As humans, we spend most of our time engaged in the small moments (whether we tweet or Facebook about them or not) and in my project I am trying to get people to notice the things they wouldn’t ordinarily. In that sense, Twitter seems like a perfect platform for me. It’s an ongoing performance.

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Tino Sehgal rehearsing with interpreters

German artist Tino Sehgal recently spoke about his practice in a discussion with Jens Hoffmann at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Sehgal has been showing his work in the contemporary art context since 2004. It was in 2005 that Hoffmann curated an exhibition of Sehgal’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London that caught the attention of the art world. Since then, the duo has remained connected through an ongoing exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute, where Hoffmann is the director.

I have been interested in the work of Sehgal since reading an article about him in The New York Times in 2007. Examples of Sehgal’s work include museum guards singing “This is so contemporary” in museum galleries (2003) or a couple locked in a passionate kiss (Kiss, 2002), or a person writhing on the ground in the corner of a museum (Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things, 2000). Sehgal does not allow any documentation of his work, but the pieces can be purchased nonetheless through passing along oral instructions (if he can’t eliminate capitalistic exchange, at least he can change the nature of what is being exchanged). Sehgal recruits and trains people, whom he calls “interpreters,” to carry out the works.

Sehgal’s work is rooted in two main ideas: 1) sustainability and 2) exploring the “technologies of interconnection.” By using interpreters to carry out his works, Sehgal challenges the conventions of experiencing artwork while also eliminating the waste that naturally comes with object-based work. He cites the events of May 1968 with instilling in him the notion that exchange or transactions needs to be challenged.

I’ve personally encountered two works by Sehgal. The first was Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things at the New Museum in the exhibition, After Nature, in 2008. At the opening, there were crowds of people, and most did not notice the woman writhing on the floor in the corner near the stairwell. If you looked at her, she stared back. Her motions were derived from the experimental videos of Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham, but looked more like she was experiencing a seizure or was in pain. You quickly understand that the way you react, internally or outwardly, is part of Sehgal’s work.

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Allan McCollum, "Drawings 1989/93"

In order to create his art, Season 5 artist Allan McCollum incorporates the time-tested strategy of teamwork. Huge installations and projects that no one person could possibly pull off by themselves are essentially the product of working collaboratively with assistants, scientists, and craftspeople from, well, everywhere. Without these people to help create and arrange his mammoth works, Allan would probably either be working on a much smaller scale or banging his head against the wall trying to figure out how to do everything at once.

Teaching is a lot like this.

In order to “pull off” successful and engaging classes, we often have to work with others to research and construct units of study that are meaningful, age-appropriate, and most of all, fun. The best units, lessons, projects, and works of art that get created in any art education setting are often the result of teamwork- from teachers initiating the ideas to administration and community support to parent involvement to student effort. It’s a nice parallel to Allan McCollum’s work because when you see an installation of his drawings or sculptures, you’re often left breathless. When you hear and see a class really clicking, really constructing meaningful work and making meaning, you’re also tempted to step back in awe of the whole process.

In a school year already layered with many challenges that relate to budget cuts, shortage of personnel and limited patience, Allan McCollum’s example of teamwork reminds us that with others so much more is possible than going at it alone.

Don’t forget to catch tonight’s episode, Systems, featuring work by Allan McCollum, at 10pm (ET) on PBS.

For complete details on venues and programs, visit http://access.art21.org/find-an-event-near-you/

Thursday, October 29
9:00am River Dell Regional High School (Compassion)
10:00am Jersey City Museum (Compassion)
10:00am Frost Art Museum (Systems)
10:00am Frost Art Museum (Systems)
12:30pm Marcellin College (Fantasy)
1:00pm Frost Art Museum (Systems)
4:00pm Davis Art (Systems)
4:00pm Bellas Artes (Compassion)
4:00pm School for Creative & Performing Arts (Transformation)
5:30pm James Watrous Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy (Fantasy)
6:00pm Palmer Museum of Art (Systems)
6:00pm Standley Lake Library (Fantasy)
6:00pm Yellowstone Art Museum (Systems)
6:30pm Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Transformation)
6:30pm Universidad de los Andes (Systems)
7:00pm Dennos Museum Center (Systems)
7:00pm Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Rijeka, Croatia) (Transformation)
7:00pm North Dakota Museum of Art (Compassion)
8:30pm State University of New York at Fredonia (Compassion)