Julie Mehretu, "Berliner Plätze", 2008-2009. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 168 in. © Julie Mehretu

Where in the world are Art21 artists?

• In Germany — where the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today — a new suite of paintings by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu is on view at the Deutsche Guggenheim. This specially commissioned body of work, titled Grey Area, evokes the “psychogeography” of the city of Berlin and its past, raising matters of erasure, decay, and liminality. A number of programs will be held throughout the exhibition, including a lecture by culture journalist and author Magdalena Kroener; and a commissioned concert by Jochen Neurath based on Mehretu’s new paintings. Get the complete schedule here.

• Also in Berlin, an exhibition of works by John Baldessari (Season 5) will open at Sprüth Magers Gallery on November 20. In Hands And/Or Feet (Part Two) Baldessari takes these extremities as his focus in five large-scale diptychs of found photographs or media images, characteristically painted over and colored in by the artist.

• In London, Stephen Friedman Gallery is displaying works by Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare. Several “meaty” images of Shonibare’s new photographic and sculptural series, which is based on both Arthur Miller’s protagonist Willy Loman, and an early photograph of a fatal car crash, are available on the gallery’s website.

• Circling around to California, beginning November 14 new paintings by Jeff Koons (Season 5) will be on display at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills. “At first glance,” reads the press release, “the works may seem abstract and gestural, but at the same time they are embedded in the traditions of figurative  painting. The brush strokes, which are photorealistic in their application, are actually fake brush strokes in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.” On view through January 9, 2010.

• Down in Atlanta, Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will deliver a lecture at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) as part of their inaugural deFINE ART festival, which celebrates the SCAD School of Fine Arts. The event takes place on November 11 at 7 pm.

• Here in New York there’s a lot happening as usual: On November 12 Stitches opens at Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery in  midtown. This large group exhibition, curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, will feature works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) and Kiki Smith (Season 2) among others.

• Opening that same day at Paul Kasmin Gallery (in the Chelsea art district) is an exhibition of new paintings by Walton Ford (Season 2). Works on view include In The Island, a painting conjuring the paranoia that caused Tasmanian settlers to hunt thylacines into extinction in the 20th century. The show continues through December 23.

• And last but not least, the exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum of American Art has been reviewed by Roberta Smith of the New York Times. She writes of Horn (Season 3): “She has expanded the art of drawing with works that swing dramatically between intimate and monumental. Her method involves splicing two or more smaller sheets with nearly identical images into a single very large one — a process that cannily combines carving, cartography and quilting. In breathtaking photographs she has documented the terrain, shoreline and geothermal wonders of Iceland, whose strange, isolated beauty is one of the mainstays of her art.” Read the entire piece here.

William Scott self-portrait (courtesy of Creative Growth)

How many artists are there in the world right now? Let’s be honest. No matter how globalized we’re constantly being reminded the art world is – in symposia, biennales, lists of powerful people, and the perennial curatorial job description as”‘working between Berlin, LA and Sao Paolo” (pithily pointed out in Hyperallergic) – the contemporary art world barely represents a fraction of artists actually working right now. The art world is a world, not the world, and so it’s perhaps ironic that the institution currently most actively and successfully articulating that idea has sprung up alongside the festivities and venalities of the Frieze Art Fair: the Museum of Everything, a temporary exhibition space in north London, established to display “outsider art” (according to the Museum, “the untrained, unintentional and unseen”).

There are many miraculous things about the Museum of Everything, one of which is its location, right in the heart of the very posh and celebrified Primrose Hill. A huge, semi-dilapidated space that’s been both a dairy and a recording studio, it’s a series of small, scruffy rooms and one huge one, in cracked concrete and rusted beams, which is much less of a cynical presentation style for outsider art than it sounds. The perennial problem of outsider art – apart from its roll call of artists, which includes Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, and Martin Ramirez but not, say, Henri Rousseau or Vincent Van Gogh, despite their very evident fulfillment of “outsider” criteria – is that of presentation. Is a clean, white, sterile gallery space appropriate? Probably not, given its similarity to a mental institution. But a studiedly “mad” and shambolic location is pretty patronizing, too. The Museum of Everything has hedged its bets, and it’s probably as good as it can be — eccentric to a point, but careful and thoughtful above all. The collection, amassed by filmmaker James Brett, has no precedent in UK museums; there’s no outsider art in the Tate Modern collection (or at least none displayed), and the nearest dedicated museum space is in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The absence is puzzling, given the rich tradition of eccentricity in the work of William Blake, say, or the amazing Richard Dadd. Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s Folk Archive, shown in the Barbican several years ago, came close, but there’s still no UK equivalent to the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Brett’s museum points towards the articulation of voices left out from mainstream British museum collections, although its permanence is somewhat in question (“if people come, we’ll stay open”).

It’s a collection of amazing quality. Despite no Ramirez, Wolfli or Hundertwasser, there’s a suite of staggering Henry Darger drawings and Bill Traylor paintings as good as any in US collections. Darger’s work continually eludes reductive analysis. His 15,000 page illustrated novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, prefigures so many contemporary artists’ work, from Jeff Koons to Peter Doig to Marcel Dzama, that it’s sometimes difficult to imagine him working entirely guilelessly. Yet Darger did, working on his vast manuscript and several others entirely in private; this is, as Peter Schjeldahl pointed out, “a culture of one.” And those seeking psychoanalytical rebuses in Darger’s skipping, panicky prepubescent girls would do well to address the works themselves, which are stranger and more resistant to join-the-dots analysis than the biography might suggest.

Brett’s collection also features significant works by artists fostered through Creative Growth in Oakland, California. In a talk by Creative Growth director Tom di Maria and White Columns director Matthew Higgs during Frieze, the work of this nurturing organization – and its roots in radical politics – was discussed. Established over 35 years ago to provide studio and exhibition space, as well as tuition and support for local artists with disabilities, Creative Growth is (in Higgs’ words) “the most important cultural institution of our time.” Higgs has shown a number of Creative Growth artists at White Columns in New York, including the bound objects of Judith Scott. Scott’s works – bulbous, hanging forms, like internal organs or musical instruments, tightly bound in coloured threads – seem unwilling to be described as sculpture. Although artistic kinship can be found in the work of Franz West or Louise Bourgeois, the fact that Scott, who died in 2005, was a deaf woman with Down’s Syndrome who came to art making late in life via Creative Growth, transforms the viewer’s experience. So complete and insistent is Scott’s work that it renders artistic parallels somewhat futile, and comparable artists mannered.

That earnest intensity makes many outsider works both compelling and disturbing. Given that this is work made in “a culture of one,” what’s the role of the viewer here? One can feel complicit in a kind of voyeuristic, sometimes prurient fascination with the lives of the unwittingly and unintentionally excluded. It’s easy to find oneself convulsed in art world guilt over these works, but it’s disingenuous to self-flagellate over the sensation of reading the diaries of madmen. If the works’ communication is only with themselves (which is perhaps the abiding connection between artists whose work is as hugely diverse as the many thousands of nuanced “conditions” they labored under), then the viewer is experiencing a kind of pure blast of creativity unfettered by the heavy breathing of institutional requirements or conventions.

Art is made everywhere, all the time. Another Creative Growth artist, William Scott (no relation to either Judith or the British abstract painter), is shown in the Museum of Everything in some depth. His paintings act as a kind of surrogate social life denied to the artist himself. He appears as “The Tolerant Popular Guy” in a number of self-portraits, and shows himself as a high school basketball star, a besuited prom attendee, a successful police officer, a happy husband. His meticulous pencil drawings show maps of towns he’d inhabit in a “normal” life; he makes paintings of a utopian future San Francisco, ruled over by beaming, voluptuous female bureaucrats. Scott’s disabilities mean that he has had to fictionalize a conventionally successful life; the basketball portrait is emblazoned with the phrase, “Reinvent The Past.” Given that so many of the artists we’d conventionally classify as “outsiders” so successfully, and so variously, fulfill the criteria we should be demanding from artists of our time – command of materials, breadth of imagination, frank and unflinching assessment of the world around them – is it time to start thinking outside-in – and inside-out?

Thanks to Kelly Huang for her series of excellent posts. Up next is Maria Stenina, a writer and multimedia designer in New York City. She received her BFA in Technology and Integrated Media Environment from the Cleveland Institute of Art, as well as minors in African/African-American Literature and Drawing/Printmaking. She has worked for several museums’ education departments, as an art consultant, and was the Assistant Director of the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea until recently when she left her position to pursue graduate studies and work on her book project entitled Cleveland.  She is in the process of starting an online collective and critique space for women writers at freerangewords.com, which will be up by the end of November. When she is not designing websites, doing homework, and working as a freelance writer/editor, she is busy with poetry and performance, growing her huge love of Russian Literature, and perfecting her sushi skills.

"Sea lions in the Palamino Islands." Source: Guardian.co.uk

Water, water, everywhere! Ever-changing and ever-constant, see a glimpse into Roni Horn’s vast exploration of this traveling landscape in this weeks Art:21 Video Exclusive.

• Her art was suffused with [a] very human hope, which she saw as being grounded in the intractability of human struggle. Her work was never crudely utopian—as she told me, “utopia, like heaven, is kind of boring…” EVER SPERO
• What do you want to know about Art21? Ask us.
• To Biennial or Not to Biennial? Notes by Kelly Huang
• $5 for Season Five! You help to make what we do possible. You can donate here.
• Another Kick in the Pants – Teaching with Contemporary Art, Joe Fusaro, and TED.com
• FLASH POINTs : Rachel Craft, NEW Flash Points Editor introduces the topic, Art and the Environment
• Center of the Artworld? Artist Glenn Ligon shares his thoughts.
• Art21 artists track the world. Round ‘em up Nicole!

Art21 Guide to PERFORMA ’09

• DAZZING – -See it! In addition, William Kentridge will perform I am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine
• PROMPT: A Conceptual Social Club, under the influence by the Futurist Variety Theatre. Participants include Mark Dion among many others.
• DARKLY FUNNY: The Day is Done Judson Church Dance by Mike Kelley
  Tuesday November 17 – Thursday, November 19 at 8pm and 10pm
• UNPREDICATABLE: physicality, dance and ACTION. It’s part of 3-Day Weekend, a performance piece directed by Oliver Herring. Friday, November 20, 6:30-8:30pm, Saturday, November 21, 3-5pm, and Sunday November 22, 3-6pm

Still hungry? Stay tuned.

Source: Vallatra-Adventures.com

Photo by Flickr user Badger 23

The San Francisco Bay Area is still new to me. I am still trying to learn as much as I can about both the history of art in the area and look forward to the future while taking in the present. My interest in the global/local dynamic as well as the concept of having art world centers means that I’m always trying to assess what kind of art city San Francisco is within a larger context. Glenn Ligon certainly isn’t the first or only person to claim that New York is no longer the center of the art world. While New York is still host to the largest concentration of galleries and museums in the US, it is also just one of many art world centers around the globe, and Los Angeles is developing quickly as another US center. At the same time, locations such as Berlin have become incubation grounds for artists who want the freedom to experiment outside the art market pressures. Then, there are cities like San Francisco and Chicago that are somewhere in between.

San Francisco is often perceived as a city whose regional artists and local nonprofits dominate the city alongside long-standing galleries. As a recent transplant from Chicago, this structure and attitude is familiar; however, this time there are different forces behind why the city’s art scene has developed or is perceived in this way. San Francisco is home to the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts—schools that attract curators and teaching artists such as Jens Hoffmann, Hou Hanru, Trisha Donnelly, and Kota Ezawa, among others. The schools also graduate a large number of emerging artists and arts professionals. But, like Chicago, many leave after graduating because the market is not big enough to support them all.

The collector base here is small but strong—and most importantly, values discretion. The flashiness of nearby Los Angeles is not present here. As Ratio3 gallery owner Chris Perez noted in a recent conversation, the collectors in the Bay Area are relaxed but in touch internationally. And it seems that more collectors are looking at work produced in the region now than previously.

So what is it about San Francisco that drives some to call the city’s art scene “eternally becoming”? And is it approaching another moment of “becoming” now that many people from the New York art world are moving to the city and opening spaces? And what does “becoming” allude to? Certainly, San Francisco’s scene (or any other) shouldn’t just be judged on the commercial art market.

I don’t have the answers to these questions yet, but as I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve come across a few interesting articles that I would like to share, as well as some links to exciting new spaces in the city. I’m excited to be in a new city with such a vibrant and complex diversity of the arts.

1. First, a thoughtful assessment of Chicago by writer and curator, Anthony Elms in May Magazine.
2. A feature in SF Magazine about the “young and hungry” in the SF art world
3. Recent New York transplant Claudia Altman-Siegel’s new space: Altman Siegel Gallery S/F
4. A small (in size) gallery that is building a big reputation for their thoughtful shows: Jancar Jones Gallery

Artist Roni Horn discusses the paradoxical identity and dependency of water, paired with scenes of Icelandic landscapes. Water and Iceland serve as both subjects and metaphors in the artist’s work, coming together most recently in Vatnasafn/Library of Water, a building designed by the artist in Stykkishólmur, Iceland.

Roni Horn explores the mutable nature of art through sculptures, works on paper, photography, and books. Horn describes drawing as the key activity in all her work because drawing is about composing relationships. Horn crafts complex relationships between the viewer and her work by installing a single piece on opposing walls or in adjoining rooms.

Horn’s work can be seen in two exhibitions currently on view in New York: Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through January 24th, 2010) and Paired, Gold: Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn at the Guggenheim Museum (through January 6th, 2010).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Terry Doe & Mead Hunt. Sound: Ron Garson & Mark Mandler. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Special Thanks: Hauser & Wirth, London.

If you’re lucky enough to be in New York City during Performa 09 this month, there are a number of events featuring Art21 artists that are not to be missed! Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

William Kentridge: I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine
Monday, November 9 – Tuesday, November 10, 8:00pm
A comic and visually dazzling performance by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, in I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, Kentridge gives an unusual presentation related to his current opera-in-progress: a work inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s satirical opera The Nose, based on the Nikolai Gogol short story of the same name.
>> WATCH: William Kentridge preview from Art:21 Season 5

The PROMPT (a night club)
Wednesday, November 11 – Sunday, November 15, 8:00pm
A conceptual social club under the influence of Futurist Variety Theater, cues and propositions are offered each night in the form of conversation pieces, rules, performances and soundtracks, transforming this destination into a pressure cooker for ideas and intimacies. Participants include Art21 artist Mark Dion, among many, many others. Space is limited. RSVP: theprompt@kunstverein.us
>> WATCH: Mark Dion in Art:21 Season 4

Mike Kelley: Day is Done Judson Church Dance
Tuesday November 17 – Thursday, November 19 at 8pm and 10pm
In the first of two related Performa projects, Season 3 artist Mike Kelley will present three short dance/performance pieces in the Judson Memorial Church inspired by the darkly funny vignettes in his 2005 film and video installation Day Is Done. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley directing Day is Done (Art:21 Season 3)

Oliver Herring: 3 Day Weekend
Friday, November 20, 6:30-8:30pm, Saturday, November 21, 3-5pm, and Sunday November 22, 3-6pm
3 Day Weekend is both a performance and material for a live video shoot. The Weekend will unfold as a series of interactions built over the course of three days with a group of people who were chosen through an open application process. The actions will be physical, dance related, mostly unrehearsed and therefore unpredictable. Art21 artist Oliver Herring will both “direct” the actions and film the footage.
>> WATCH: Participant Davis Thompson-Moss talking about working with Oliver Herring (Art:21 Exclusive)

A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music
Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21, 6pm – midnight
Mike Kelley project #2: a mini noise music festival. In 1973, Kelley formed his own band, Destroy All Monsters. A Fantastic World continues Kelley’s continued interest in musical subcultures and focuses specifically on avant-garde music and sound art. Staged over two days, the festival will present both historic works from artists such as John Cage, Fred Frith, Fluxus, Bruce Nauman, and Max Neuhaus as well as performances by contemporary proponents of experimental music including Airway, Joan La Barbara, Tony Conrad, Jad Fair & Lumberob, Arto Lindsay, Genesis Breyer P.Orridge, z’ev, and John Zorn.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley playing and recording music (Art:21 Season 3)

Nancy Spero, "The Hours of the Night II," detail, 2001. Handprinting and printed collage on paper, 11 panels approximately 9 x 22 feet overall. Photo by David Reynolds, © Nancy Spero. Courtesy the Artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Spero’s art was suffused with [a] very human hope, which she saw as being grounded in the intractability of human struggle. Her work was never crudely utopian—as she told me, “utopia, like heaven, is kind of boring.”

Beyond a body of pioneering and exceptional work spanning more than half a century of tumultuous social change, this sense of hope will be her legacy. It was an everyday hope that she lived and breathed, and a hope for today rather than tomorrow…

— Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Ever Spero”

Read the full essay here.

Why are there only 4 episodes a season, and 1 season every 2 years? How do you choose the artists to feature? What is it like filming [INSERT ANY ARTIST] in their studio?

Here’s your chance to ask us these questions or anything else that you’ve ever wondered about Art21.

Earlier this year, associate curator Wesley Miller gave us a look inside the curatorial process. That same week, series producer Eve Moros Ortega took us behind the scenes of the production process. This week, both Wes and Eve are back to field questions from our audience. The latest installment of the Inside PBS blog’s Q&A series opens the door for you to ask us anything—anything—about what we do here at Art21.

Please feel free to leave a question either here or on the Inside PBS blog, and Wes and Eve will try to answer as many as possible. The answers will be posted next week on the Inside PBS blog.

Need to refer to Season 5 episodes for inspiration? Not to worry, we’ve got you covered on the PBS Video portal! Just interested in a discussion about clowns? Well, the PBS Facebook audience has you covered there!

Wow! We can’t believe Season 5 of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century is over. Hopefully you joined the over 4 million viewers who watched Season 5 on PBS during October, or were able to go to one of the more than 600 screenings nation-wide and in 24 foreign countries as part of Art21 Access ’09. Additional thousands followed Art21 on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to catch all the Season 5 news.

You can also join the many others who are recognizing this moment in Art21’s history by making a donation today.

Please consider supporting Art21 with a donation of as little as $5 in honor of our fifth season. Your contribution would help underwrite Art21’s activities and programs in the coming year.

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