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EXCLUSIVE: As part of a panel discussion moderated by Baraka Sele at the 20th National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, artist Carrie Mae Weems poses thirteen questions to musician Wynton Marsalis and professor Cornel West, followed by an impromptu song and dance by the participants and audience.

Weems’s vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms—social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths. Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans for more than a century.

Carrie Mae Weems is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion 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).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Evan McIntosh. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Thanks: Wynton Marsalis, Baraka Sele, Dr. Cornel West, and the National Black Arts Festival.

Still from "Moon," 2009. Directed by Duncan Jones, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

“The peculiarity of the self is a monopoly commodity determined by society; it is falsely represented as natural.” – Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Englightenment

Moon (2009), directed by Duncan Jones, is a reiteration of such iconic science fiction films as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and Blade Runner (1982). This is not unintentional: in Moon’s press kit, the director admits that he has, “always wanted to make a film that felt like it could fit into that canon.” To this end, Jones worked with Bill Pearson, the supervising model maker on Alien (1979), and shot the film at Shepperton Studios in London, where both Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick made sci-fi masterpieces.

When compared to Kubrick or Scott, then, Jones’ direction is decidedly conventional. He prefers to repurpose, recombine, and/or directly steal aspects of these earlier works rather than embody these directors’ restless “genius.” Moon is relevant to our contemporary moment because of this reiteration, rather than in spite of it. This moment might be characterized in terms of the contingent or the ephemeral, rather than the absolute or the timeless. In this way, Moon does not aim to transcend its predecessors, but instead desires to reanimate these canonized works at any cost.

A similar struggle is enacted by the protagonist of Moon, Lunar Industries employee Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell). Sam/Sam longs to realize himself as a subject amongst the fragments of Moon‘s late capitalist world. Here individuals are controlled and manipulated (i.e. de-subjectified) in order to produce profits. The means of this manipulation are a variety of oppressive technologies, from a robot companion named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) who communicates in “emoticons,” to the repetitive pop music blaring from Sam’s clock radio.

As with anyone, it is difficult to tell if Sam’s actions and choices are truly free in any sense.  He seems less a human being than a simulation of one. A clone is to a human like the Moon is to the Earth.

“Even when the public does – exceptionally – rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is that feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it.” — M.H. & T.A.

Before attempting a daring escape, Sam lays an earlier generation to rest on the lunar surface. From my seat in the theater, I felt as if I were burying my own father, now exhausted and confused from a lifetime of work. Jones’ father is none other than musician David Bowie, and this scene signals a transition to a new wave of artist/soldiers.

The ending is disappointing, but perhaps purposely so.

“The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery.  Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point.” — M.H. & T.A.

Events are taking place all weekend, including in Lagos! For complete details on venues and programs, visit http://access.art21.org/find-an-event-near-you/

Friday, October 16
10:00am Western Michigan University (Transformation)
5:00pm Scranton Cultural Center at the Masonic Temple (Transformation)
6:30pm Florida State University, School of Art and Design and Art History Dept (Transformation)
7:00pm Orange Coast College Art Department (Fantasy)
7:00pm Republic of Peace and O Salon (Systems)
7:00pm Savannah College of Art and Design (Fantasy)
7:00pm The College of Southern Nevada (Transformation)
7:30pm Canyon Ridge High School (Systems)
7:45pm Savannah College of Art and Design (Compassion)
8:00pm Elsewhere Artist Collaborative (Transformation)
8:30pm Orange Coast College Art Department (Transformation)
9:00pm Sophia University (Fantasy)
9:30pm KACV (Transformation)

Saturday, October 17
12:00pm Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (Compassion)
12:00pm Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary (Transformation)
1:00pm St. Philip’s College (Systems)
1:00pm Left of Center Gallery (Transformation)
2:00pm Virginia Tech School of Visual Arts (Transformation)
3:00pm Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (Transformation)
6:30pm Boots Contemporary Art Space (Systems)

Sunday, October 18
12:00pm Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Transformation)
12:30pm Frost Art Museum (Fantasy)
1:00pm Missoula Art Museum (Transformation)
1:00pm Rochester Contemporary (Transformation)
7:30pm Redux Contemporary Art Center (Transformation)

Bruce Nauman, Raw War, 1968, 30 x 22", Pencil, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper

Inscribed: “WAR 1/ WAR 2/ WAR 3/ Sign to hang when there is a war on—/ This size or up to 6 feet long./ Sequence is 1 + 2 + 3 + off + 1 + 2 + 3 + off + 1 – etc. – About 1 sec or so moves ½ ½ sec. Or ½ sec or less flash on 1 then off then flash 2 then off then flash 3 then/ off and repeat etc./ ‘Off’ should be about 2 seconds or more.”

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

Thursday, October 15
9:00am Trinity Christian Academy (Compassion)
11:30am University of Memphis (Transformation)
12:00pm Alvin High School National Art Honor Society (Transformation)
12:00pm Portland State University (Compassion)
12:00pm The Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art (Compassion)
2:00pm Housatonic Museum of Art (Fantasy)
4:00pm Loyola University New Orleans (Systems)
4:30pm The Art Institute of Chicago (Transformation)
4:55pm Loyola University New Orleans (Systems)
5:00pm George Westinghouse High School, Chicago Public Schools (Systems)
5:30pm Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Transformation)
5:30pm Salina Art Center / Art Center Cinema (Transformation)
5:30pm Canyon Ridge High School (Systems)
6:00pm Madison Museum of Fine Art (Transformation)
6:00pm Mohile Parikh Center (Compassion)
6:00pm New Wilmington Art Association (Transformation)
6:00pm Onalaska Art Club (Fantasy)
6:00pm Palmer Museum of Art (Fantasy)
6:00pm The Dayton Art Institute (Compassion)
6:00pm Think TV (Compassion)
6:00pm University of Pennsylvania, Graduate Program in Fine Arts (Compassion)
6:00pm Wallace State Community College (Transformation)
6:00pm West Virginia University, College of Creative Arts, Division of Art and Design (Compassion)
6:00pm WVSA ARTs connection (Compassion)
6:30pm Holter Museum of Art (Fantasy)
6:30pm Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Transformation)
6:30pm The RISD Museum (Compassion)
6:30pm Universidad de los Andes (Compassion)
6:30pm Weatherspoon Art Museum (Systems)
7:00pm Art Institute of Boston Library at Lesley University (Systems)
7:00pm Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (Transformation)
7:00pm El Paso Museum of Art (Transformation)
7:00pm Figge Art Museum (Systems)
7:00pm Mobile Literacy Arts Bus (MLAB)
7:00pm Nazareth College of Rochester – Art Ed. Department (Transformation)
7:00pm Northwood Art Honor Society and NHS Arts Education Foundation (Transformation)
7:00pm Sleepy Hollow High School (Fantasy)
7:00pm Student Artist Coalition, University of Central Missouri Department of Art & Design (Compassion)
7:00pm Walnut Gallery (Systems)
7:30pm Morean Arts Center (Fantasy)
7:30pm KACV (Transformation)
7:30pm New Wilmington Art Association (Systems)
7:30pm The ARTS at Marks Garage (Systems)
8:00pm Franconia Sculpture Park (Systems)
8:00pm Orange County Museum of Art (Fantasy)
8:30pm Montserrat College of Art (Transformation)

Florian Maier-Aichen, "Untitled (Dewatered)," 2009. C-print, 71 3/4 x 94 inches (182 x 239 cm framed). Courtesy the Artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, 303 Gallery, New York and Gagosian Gallery, London

In the previous Looking at Los Angeles post, Catherine Wagley explored the still-healing schism of East and West Germany through an Angelino lens. Meanwhile, the premiere last night of Season 5’s Fantasy episode offered us a glimpse of Los Angeles through the eyes of German-born artist Florian Maier-Aichen. Maier-Aichen explains that for him, the landscape of Los Angeles “has a great meaning [because] it’s the end of American pioneerism, it’s the end of the American West.”

Indeed, one could argue that Los Angeles has been an epicenter of creativity, fantasy, and innovation partly because it feels like a perpetual final frontier of the Wild West—the apex of lawless expansion, openness, and freedom. We may be short on some resources, but we’ve got space and we’re not afraid to use it. For a prime example, look to the gallery that discovered Maier-Aichen while he was still an MFA student at UCLA: Blum & Poe.

While galleries around the globe are shuttering or shrinking, native Angelinos Tim Blum and Jeff Poe just moved into a new 21,000-square foot venue–four times the size of their previous space. While they could have opted to open an outpost in another art world hotspot, the gallery decided to focus on expanding within their hometown. In fact, they ended up staying in their home neighborhood and found an ideal property directly across the street from their previous space in Culver City. Blum & Poe is known for being one of the first galleries to set up shop in the since-revitalized Culver City Arts District, which the New York Times backhandedly praised as a “nascent Chelsea” in 2005.  When I asked Tim Blum what he liked about Culver City, he highlighted the same feeling of openness and expansiveness that Maier-Aichen alluded to in last night’s Art21 segment, referring to the area as appealingly “airy, flat, and fluid – just the opposite of congested.”

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The premiere of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 continues tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen.

How might desires and taboos shape our ability to imagine? What role does technology play in wish fulfillment? Fantasy explores these questions in the work of the four featured artists.

Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. ET  throughout this month (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.

Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.

A Conversation with Carrie Mae Weems and Patricia J. Williams

Thursday, October 15, 7 p.m.
Columbia University, Jerome Green Hall, Room 102
West 116th Street between Amsterdam Ave and Morningside Dr.
FREE
To register and reserve a seat, please visit neighbors.columbia.edu

Join Season 5 featured artist Carrie Mae Weems and Patricia J. Williams, the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University in conversation as they explore critical issues of race, history, and memory through the artist’s work, making connections to current cultural and political events of our time. A screening of Carrie Mae Weems’ segment from the Art:21 episode Compassion will proceed the conversation.

This event is co-presented by Art21 and The Studio Museum in Harlem. The event is hosted by Columbia University, Office of Government and Community Affairs.

Carrie Mae Weems is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion, which premiered last Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10:00 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Missed Compassion on TV? Watch it online!

Preview Weems’s Season 5 segment here.

Have a question for Carrie Mae Weems? Tell us in the comments below for a chance to have it asked at the event. If so, we’ll post her response on this site.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, "War Is Over!," 1969-

I’d like to start my visit to Art21 with a close reading of a favorite artwork of mine: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s War Is Over! slogan. This work relates to many of my current preoccupations, and will hopefully serve as a good introduction to the other subjects I will be covering in the next two weeks. Specifically, I am interested in this work’s aspirations towards presence and how, over the course of the past 40 years, this presence has been revealed to be contingent in various ways.  I’ll be breaking up this post into two parts for brevity’s sake, with the first post focusing on the slogan’s original context and function in 1969-70, and the second examining its material reappearance as a postcard in 1970, 2002, and 2007 (1).

To be clear, many art practices of the 1960s and 70s aspired towards a kind of presence.  For example, Michael Fried’s famous 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” lays out the terms and stakes of an anthropomorphized presence in minimalist art. We can see these aspirations in pop art too, as Clement Greenberg implies when he discusses how presence can be achieved through both “size” (e.g. minimalism’s human scale) and “the look of non-art” (e.g. pop’s commercial design) (2). Indeed, in hindsight, it is interesting to compare minimalism’s gestalt with Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola gestalt, in which “all the Cokes are the same, and all the Cokes are good” (3, 4).  Finally, it is possible to see this aspiration in the direct linguistic address of conceptual art of the period, as well (5).

In their 1969 slogan, “War Is Over! (If You Want It) Happy Christmas from John & Yoko,” the artists approach presence through a combination of the pop advertisement and conceptual art’s linguistic address (6). This combination conflates the existential responsibility of individual choice with the consumer’s buy/not-buy binary. The slogan also plays upon the utopian longing that animates all advertising, in which a commodity promises to solve life’s problems. This blending of the sacred and the profane might strike one as unexpectedly cynical, and it is possible to further draw this out through an examination of the slogan as discourse. For this, I turn to art historian Janet Kraynak’s excellent essay, “Bruce Nauman’s Words” (7).

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Janine Antoni, "Inhabit," 2009. Courtesy of Luhring Augustine Gallery

The following is part two of my discussion with Janine Antoni from last week. Be sure to catch her new show at Luhring Augustine Gallery, titled Up Against, through October 24th!

Joe Fusaro: Many artist-educators have to strike a balance between their work in the studio, the classroom, and even at home as parents. The current photographs at Luhring Augustine, such as Inhabit, are about being a mother so I was wondering how you strike a balance between being a professional artist and being a mother? How is that going?

Janine Antoni: (laughs) Well… my daughter is five. I’m still figuring it out, and as I figure it out she keeps changing, which means I never quite figure it out.

JF: I have a son that’s four, so I’m right there with you.

JA: I am not good at compartmentalizing—my preferred method is one of integration. One can see from my current exhibition that I have been preoccupied with my daughter for the last five years. The effect of her presence in my life is the overarching theme—she has definitely been leading me in terms of developing the work. As a result of the balance and flexibility that I have had to embody as a mother, I have completely loosened the terms of my production. There is more trust in my instincts in the moment of making. This is definitely the result of having spent the last five years trying so hard to be a good mother. I have also learned so much from watching my daughter play—especially early on, when she didn’t know what an object was used for. I loved the way she treated everything with such curiosity.

JF: And re-seeing it.

JA: And re-seeing it! Using it in a way that you would never imagine. I long for that sense of wonder in the studio.

JF: I read about the new installation, Tear, after seeing the video for a few minutes. I went back after reading about it and experienced the work in a totally different way—relating the wrecking ball to the video. Do you feel viewers need the context or the story behind the work in order to appreciate it?

JA:  I have very little control of that, so I have to let go after making the work. Ultimately the work has its own life. As far as control goes, the viewer’s physical experience of the work is the most important aspect of an exhibition to me, which is why I concentrate so much on the installation.

JF: I was very conscious about moving through the work.

JA: Right. At first one is attracted to the video, because it’s a moving image, but on seeing it again, one has more time to be with the wrecking ball. What you did was ideal in my mind, because you formed your own opinion and then you read my story. You had space to navigate between those two versions.

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