Robert Smithson, "Spiral Jetty," 1970

When I first saw that this site’s new Flash Points topic was Art and the Environment, I immediately thought of two artists: Robert Smithson and Eames Demetrios. They are not contemporaries. Smithson, a seminal land art pioneer, died tragically in the height of his career in 1973. Demetrios, a currently active artist and filmmaker, is the namesake of his designer grandparents, Charles and Ray Eames. Demetrios is creating an elaborate global installation called Kcymaerxthaere, a manifestation of what he calls “3-dimensional story telling.” These two artists provide compelling arguments for the value of natural resources precisely because neither deals with the topic directly. Rather, both engage in a form of artistic practice that stretches back to prehistory. By creating monuments to complex mythologies and situating them in both a physical and historical context, the apparent value of these sites is renewed.

Robert Smithson is most famous as an early proponent of the land art movement. His most famous work, Spiral Jetty (1970), is a 1,500 foot curled protrusion into a remote part of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It’s made of truckloads of basalt rock, salt, and earth. It’s easy to mistake Smithson as simply a precursor to someone like Andy Goldsworthy. While Goldsworthy’s earthworks draw attention to the beauty of the site with delicate and sensible interventions, Smithson’s approach was not nearly so tidy. Smithson was fascinated by entropy, the unstoppable loss of energy, and increase of chaos, within natural systems. Far from a zen-like harmony with nature, Smithson’s interactions with the natural world hinted at an apocalyptic tension. For an example of a very un-Goldsworthy Smithson work, check out Glue Pour (Vancouver, 1969).

In the case of Spiral Jetty, Smithson’s intervention in the landscape manages to inspire compassion for the natural world despite his sometimes brutal approach. Smithson selected the site for its pinkish red water. In an essay about the work, he explains, “Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean.”

Smithson was intent on situating Spiral Jetty not only at a specific site in Utah, but also within the epic sweep of geologic time. In a film he made to document the piece, he intercuts a map of the Jurassic Period, about which he said, “I needed a map that would show the prehistoric world as coextensive with the world I existed in.” This is where I find a clear connection to the recent work of Eames Demetrios. As I mentioned earlier, Demetrios is six years in to a global series of site-specific installations known as Kcymaerxthaere. Kcymaerxthaere consists of a series of sculptural installations and faux historical bronze plaques, each one telling a portion of a story about a fantasy world that parallels our own. It’s a bit like trying to read a Tolkien novel spread out across 63 sites in ten countries, in locations as diverse as the Australian outback and the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Scotland.

Continue reading »

Gabriel Orozco, "Dark Wave", 2006. Calcium carbonate and resin with graphite, 119 11/16 x 154 5/16 x 541 5/16 in. Courtesy Jay Jopling / White Cube (via artnet.com).

From exhibitions and public talks, to limited-edition prints and digital calendars, this week you can find Art21 artists involved in various activities in New York, Washington D.C., Dublin, and Johannesburg:

• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has announced a mid-career retrospective exhibition of work by Season 2 artist Gabriel Orozco. In 1993, MoMA organized Projects 41: Gabriel Orozco, the artist’s first solo museum show. Many of the well-known objects he has created since that time (such as Black Kites, 1997) will be shown alongside lesser-known drawings, paintings, photographs, large sculptures and installations. Gabriel Orozco runs December 13, 2009–March 1, 2010. Jump to Wesley Miller’s 2008 blog post, Gabriel Orozco: Mobile Matrix, to learn more about the sculpture pictured above.

• High on my wish list this holiday season is the electronic plug-in issue of Visionaire Magazine, a tri-annual limited-edition publication. Visionaire worked with 52 curators and art collectors to select one artwork for every day of the year; Orozco, Bruce Nauman (Season 1) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 2)  are among the 365 artists chosen. The Visionaire 2010 is available in stores now.

• Picturing New York – an exhibition of 145 works from MoMA’s photographic collection – will open at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on November 25. Through the work of nearly 40 photographers, including Cindy Sherman (Season 5), Berenice Abbott, and Diane Arbus, the show celebrates the tradition of photographing the city.

• In other Sherman news, Artinfo.com reports that the artist will receive the Jewish Museum’s Man Ray Award for “her distinguished accomplishments in advancing the world’s understanding of the limitless possibilities of identity, and the profound impact of her work on the contemporary art world.” The award will be presented on November 17.

• On November 18, the Whitney Museum of American Art will host a public conversation between Roni Horn (Season 3) and chief curator Donna De Salvo. They will discuss Horn’s work over the last 30-years and her mid-career survey now on view at the Whitney. The program begins at 7pm. (Check out the Bomb Magazine website, where you can read an interview with Horn from 1989.)

• Yinka Shonibare MBE, the traveling exhibition of work by the Season 5 artist, opened at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian last week. The museum has dedicated a blog, as well as a twitter account exclusively to their Shonibare show. The exhibition runs through March 7, 2010.

• If you missed the mention on Art21′s twitter page, I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine – a performance by Season 5 artist William Kentridge commissioned for Performa 09 – was reviewed by Roberta Smith of the New York Times. Smith called the piece “an exquisitely polished work of art in itself, thanks largely to Mr. Kentridge’s marvelous stage presence.” Read the complete review here.

• Later this month, the award-winning South African puppet company Handspring – who has collaborated with Kentridge in the past – will celebrate the release of their first full-length book exploring their work in adult puppet theatre. On the occasion, Kentridge (who served as an editor on the project) has designed two limited-edition prints based on his work with Handspring; they are available through David Krut Projects in Johannesburg.

Sreshta Rit Premnath, "A Cage Went in Search of a Bird," 2009. Digital C-Print, 27” x 45”. Courtesy the Artist.

“A cage went in search of a bird.”
— The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka

What is so frustrating, yet so sublimely pleasing about conceptual work? Is it the slight feeling of the guilt of making a big something out of seemingly nothing? As the viewer, allowing yourself to walk in on someone else’s private meditation? Is it exploitative of the art form? Exploitative of us?

I think of contemporary conceptual artmaking as a word which is said so many times over that it somehow abstracts, heaves, turns inside out, and becomes something else. That’s the transformative power of working with ideas and allowing them to stand on their own: the indulgence of making a big something out of seemingly nothing. A passing thought, a political agenda, a literary phrase regurgitated by the wonder of the human brain. It somehow makes life grander, doesn’t it? Other disciplines seem to fall away, as there are no rules with this one. We can be writers, philosophers, children, designers, photographers, drawers, painters, performers. The idea leads. It is unadulterated. Now isn’t that noble? The image above is from the latest series of work by Sreshta Rit Premnath, an art practitioner living and working in New York City.

Sreshta Rit Premnath, "Surrender" (from the series “A Cage Went in Search of a Bird”), 2009. Digital C-Print Triptych, 90”X45”. Courtesy the Artist.

From his statement about the work:

In this series of photographic interventions, images culled from the US Navy’s website, linked to the operations being carried out against pirates in Somalia, are cropped, cut, reassembled and reframed under the headings “Surrender” and “Surround.” The lexicon of the sublime landscape is collided with that of military operations. While the sublime landscape is said to surround the viewer thus enticing his soul to surrender, strategic operations are carried out by the Navy in order to surround the pirates and force them to surrender.

The ocean is explored as territory that lies outside the realm of governmentality – a site of awe and threat. Day and night enormous quantities of cargo – the embodied process of the distribution of commodities – ply these waters silently, transparently. It is only at the moment of their disappearance that they suddenly become present to us all. Suddenly, when an oil tanker goes missing, its enormous body comes into focus. It is then that the cage goes in search of the bird. Law must be forced upon the lawless in order to make the absent present. In order to, once again, make the present disappear.

Continue reading »

Source: pegasusnews.com

• How many artists are in the world right now? Ben Street writes to us about ‘letting the outside in’ and the Museum of Everything located on Primrose Hill in London.
• Big welcome to the new Guest Blogger Maria Stenina!
• ART, art everywhere! Circling around California, through Germany, in Atlanta, and NYC … Where are YOU? Nicole rounds up a tasty menu of things to check out
• FLASHPOINTS: How does art respond to redefine the natural world? Ariana Page Russell uses her skin as a departure point…&…What does it mean for an exhibition to be both coolly barren and radical? Check out Catherine Wagley’s post on the New Topography Exhibition at LACMA.
• VROOM! VROOM! Joe Fusaro test drives the Season 5 Educator’s Guide
• On crafting the grotesque and sensual: Four questions for Alicia Ross
• Looking at Los Angeles: The Public School
• VIDEO Exclusive: Raised Eyebrows | Furrowed Foreheads — From the mouth of John Baldessari himself: some thoughts on his recent exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery

DOWNLOAD VIA ITUNES | SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS

During the installation of his exhibition Raised Eyebrows/ Furrowed Foreheads (2009) at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, artist John Baldessari discusses his life-long obsession with the distinction between parts and wholes, as well as his reductive philosophy of art-making.

Synthesizing photomontage, painting, and language, Baldessari’s deadpan visual juxtapositions equate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge meaning. He upends commonly held expectations of how images function, often by drawing the viewer’s attention to minor details, absences, or the spaces between things.

Baldessari’s work can currently be seen at Tate Modern in London in the retrospective titled Pure Beauty (through January 2010) and at Sprüeth Magers in London in the solo exhibition Ear Sofa Nose Sconces with Flowers (in Stage Setting) (through tomorrow, November 14th).

John Baldessari is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Systems of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: 
Wesley Miller & 
Nick Ravich

. Interview: 
Susan Sollins

. Camera: 
Bob Elfstrom & Sam Henriques. Sound: Tom Bergin. Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & 
Paulo Padilha. 

Artwork Courtesy: 
John Baldessari. Thanks: Analia Saban & Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Bernd and Hilla Becher. "Harry E. Colliery Coal Breaker, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania," 1974. 8 Gelatin Silver Prints, 16 x 12 in. each. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“Life is boring,” said Matthew Coolidge, talking about how most of us live in the uneventful “periods between the monuments.” Coolidge, the director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, an institute that explores often-overlooked landscapes, has made a career out of documenting everything “boring” and in-between—helipads, hidden oil wells, mile markers. He spoke at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Saturday as part of a day-long symposium. Called “What’s at Stake? New Topographics and the Man-Altered Landscape,” the symposium accompanied LACMA’s current exhibition of neutral, mostly black-and-white landscape photographs (though every landscape is marked by man-made structures) from the 1970s. These photographs render the boring parts of the US topography in a way that seems to presciently foreshadow today’s general wariness toward monumentality and obsession with sustainability.

Joe Deal, "Untitled View (Albuquerque)," Gelatin Silver Print, 1974. Courtesy George Eastman House.

LACMA’s New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape is actually the restaging of an earlier exhibition by the same name. The first New Topographics appeared at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 1975. Like its restaging, it included images by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. None of these photographers aggrandized their geographical subjects. Instead, their intentionally composed photographs were coolly barren in ways that almost seemed radical.
Continue reading »

The Public School, 2009. Courtesy Telic Arts Exchange.

Gold Leafing. Sadism & Masochism. Practical Electro-Mechanisms. The Coming Insurrection. What do these topics have in common? Perhaps with some head-scratching we could ferret out a few threads, but here’s the one I’m going to address: they are all examples of courses offered by The Public School in Los Angeles. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’ public school system, The Public School operates under the auspices of Telic Arts Exchange, a nonprofit organization nestled in amongst a stretch of contemporary commercial galleries in LA’s Chinatown. The notions of public and private have been a hot topic in our Looking at Los Angeles posts, perhaps because there is more of the latter than the former, and the arenas that are demarcated as public often fail to deliver.

The Public School, however, is true to its name and functions as a site of porous, transmutable, open and democratic educational exchanges. Anybody can propose a class. Anybody can express interest in that class. Once a critical mass of people express interest, anybody can offer to teach the class. A small committee moderates the final steps of the process, including finding an instructor and scheduling the course. However, committee members typically step down after several months, making room for new committee members to join and keeping the system as open to transformation as possible. The result, as you can see from the extensive list of courses offered, is an incredibly varied selection of subjects, ranging from pragmatic to esoteric, concrete to abstract. Yet all classes share a collaborative spirit, owing, most likely, to the democratic method employed in actualizing each course.

Developed in early 2008 as an arena for discourse related to Telic’s exhibitions, The Public School began to grow immediately.  Within months, Telic co-directors Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton decided to discontinue Telic’s long-running program of exhibitions, performances, lectures, happenings, etc. and concentrate on The Public School. Since that time, affiliate public schools have been initiated in five other cities. Dockray answered my questions via email from Brussels, where the newest arm of The Public School opened last week.

Continue reading »

Alicia Ross, "Motherboard_6 (A Chicken Waits for a Good Cock)," 2008. Cross-stitch on cotton, 72 x 41. Courtesy the Artist.

This young artist’s Motherboard series features appropriated Internet porn—nubile women sprawl across large cotton panels, cross-stitched in silver and gold thread with digital precision…Witty videos filter sex scenes through those round eye-test patterns of colored dots you might remember from grade school. Substantially more men than women are color-blind—Ross offers one way to subvert the “male gaze” amid the Internet’s panopticon of voyeurism. — Village Voice

In pursuit of finding more groundbreaking contemporary work that explores the self (and the shame of being the self), I had thought of Alicia Ross. I remember the first day I met her, when I was doing a photography project at a company she then worked for in Cleveland. She is bubbly, kind, outgoing, and (I mean this as a true compliment, Alicia) vulnerable. In other words, she is so Midwestern that I long for her kind of smile as I now wander the streets of ice cold NYC. When she handed me the catalog to her recent exhibition at the Black and White Gallery in Chelsea, I was blown away. Her work is truly provocative, sublime, rich with color, texture, and questions. I wanted to have four of those questions answered, and like a good Midwestern girl, one that likes to cross-stich and embroider pornographic images at that, Alicia responded.

Alicia Ross, "Motherboard_5 (The Siren)" (detail), 2008. Cross-stitch on cotton, 36 x 51 in. Courtesy the Artist.

Maria Stenina: Your work is so sinful. It is not a woman’s place, after all, to explore pornography and overt sexuality with such craft and beauty. Can you address your dealings with the grotesque and the sensual?

Alicia Ross: My work isn’t necessarily an exploration of the grotesque or the sensual independently, but rather an examination of the marriage between the two. The tension that I am specifically interested in is the domestic woman vs. the woman of sexual desire or the conflict between mother vs. mistress. The work isn’t necessarily taking sides between the taboo or the ladylike but materializing the balance for the viewer to decipher.

I think it’s interesting you would use the word ‘sinful.’ Unless you see sexuality as sinful, I don’t think the work is sinful at all, but honest. I do think it’s precisely a female gesture to take something taboo or grotesque and want to make it beautiful. Just like the work is taking pornographic images and through manipulation and sometimes by sheer output, is transforming the images into a more widely excepted form: embroidery. To me, the whole point of the work is to question two often clashing, feminine impulses.

(Interviewer’s note: I should have said “deliciously sinful,” as I meant it to be a positive kind of sinful.)

Continue reading »

Paul McCarthy, "Painting Face Down- White Line," 1972. Courtesy Scala Archives.

Yesterday I was talking with a two students who attended a recent preview screening that featured Paul McCarthy in the Transformation episode. The students asked me about why McCarthy’s work seems to purposely make the viewer uncomfortable, and then the discussion got around to the kinds of things we do in response to feeling uncomfortable, especially as artists. It was like a lightning bolt. One of the students interrupted the conversation to blurt out, “Wait a minute, a ton of art work is made BECAUSE artists are uncomfortable or don’t like something—something they have a strong reaction to.”

It was at this point that I decided to test-drive the new Season 5 Educators’ Guide.

I asked both students about recent works they created that they didn’t like—works that were “ok” but not really being considered for their final portfolio. Literally taking a page from the Guide itself, I asked the students to destroy those works and then put them back together in a way that sends a different or opposing message. They thought I was absolutely nuts…. and then they loved it. Both students agreed to give it a try and update me on the results. I made it clear that while this approach won’t guarantee a portfolio-quality work, it’s the idea and process that I am interested in them experiencing.

As many of you begin to use the Season 5 Educators’ Guide, please share your stories and anecdotes about how questions and ideas in the Guide inspire your teaching and student learning.

Ariana Page Russell, “Index,” C-print, 2005. Courtesy www.arianapagerussell.com

Hello Art:21 interweb world! I hope to do you justice with my musings and bits and pieces of contemporary art knick-knacks. I think as an artist and designer working today, it is imperative to give the art object more consideration than in the days of yore. Is it our preoccupation with being somehow truer to our practice? Our wanting to make a smaller and smaller footprint with each step? To reflect the confused state of our environment in any meaningful gesture thrust out into existence? Maybe… A struggle exists between the artist floundering to retain value of the crafted final “piece” of exhibition material and her trying to speak with less residue. I am thinking that the Art:21 Season 4 episode Ecology is a perfect demonstration of this, as artists struggle to reflect the needs of the environment while having to use materials such as wood and move trees around. What I notice, though, is that as practicioners of contemporary art making/doing, we are still desperately searching for an avenue of release from heavy use of materials, postmodernist references, the cords and motors of technological possibilities, and grand gestures of sweeping gallery galas…Perhaps it is a quest for sincerity?

So I wonder, could it be that the new “environmental” art is that which is sinfully crafted in private? Just…you know, for the love of it? Can we win back the love for ourselves and the practice (the grotesque and the sublime of it), or has the market killed it all? What happens with a lot of younger contemporary artists, as I see it, is a quiet revolution of smaller gestures, alternate materials, a kind of closing off in favor of exploring the self, the dream, the body and traditional ways of “making.” The artist above is named Ariana Page Russell and she has a skin condition known as dermatographia (the immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear, lasting about thirty minutes when the skin’s surface is lightly scratched). Her process of making involves manipulating her body as a form of self-exploration and that of coping with her condition, which became obvious to her as she was often teased for blushing excessively. She does consider herself to be as much of a photographer as a performance artist, IF one chooses to use the word performance here. What intrigues me most is the privacy of the act of manipulating skin yourself. Of experimenting with your body and only exhibiting a piece of paper as a document of the act.