Cheese Fondue, Source: JustHungry.com

• VIDEO EXCLUSIVE — Doris Salcedo | Third World Identity
• New Guest Blogger: Kelly Rakowski, a graphic designer and Head of the Book Department at Todd Oldham Studio.
• Check out this post of images of the Costumes of the Katsinas as part of her Nothing is New project.
• Future Russia
• Nicole Caruth ROUNDS THEM UP! In this week’s Art21 artist news you’ll read about a forty-million dollar art collection in Las Vegas, a major exhibition of work by Korean and Korean American artists, an installation made of yogurt caps, a massive concrete sculpture in Canada, and more.
• Justice Potter Stewart and Contemporary Art… What does art look like?
  Ben Street writes to us from London
• TEACHING WITH CONTEMPORART ART | Confronting History
  Joe Fusaro refers to Doris Salcedo : “As an artist, I have a responsibility. I have to look at historical events and work with whatever material is given to me.”
• On Location: Filming Art21 Educators in Southern California
• FLASHPOINTS: How does art respond to the natural world? | Deference to the Vernacular , Artists and Athletes:Riyas Komu’s Mark Him … and a Tree Museum!
• Dutch Bound Books | Wolfsonian Library
• Blogalogue, Part 4: Lee Montgomery … and now.
• Looking at Los Angeles: Squeak Carnwath’s Unique Lexicon Channels the Universal

LeE:
this is me.. LeE… the one I told you about.
You:
Hi Lee! You know I just realized I could have probably been doing the interview this whole time, just set a deadline and you coulda responded at your leisure.
You:
Here are the four questions I’ve been using as a jumping off point for all the conversations, esp the first one:

1. How do you define systems, networks, and systems vs. networks?
2. What, if any, system and/or network do you feel you are a part of? As individuals? As artists? As NPR?
3. What, if any, systems and/or networks do you feel you are unwillingly a part of? As individuals? As artists? As NPR?
4. How do you feel that your work interfaces with your definition of systems and network?
5. How does the system and/or network act upon your work? What effect, that is entirely out of your control, do systems and/or networks alone have on your work?

You:
Are you there? Just checking in…
LeE:
now I am here
LeE:
in my office.. headed home in about a half hour…
LeE:
I will start answering these quex as soon as I get home….. and you can follow up at your liesure… this google wave thing is awesome that way.
You:
that sounds great. safe travels!
LeE:
alright.. here begin my answers….

1. How do you define systems, networks, and systems vs. networks?
I think I consider the terms largely synonymous, though due to the vagaries of the English language, and perhaps even the nature of technology/corporate ownership, they can take on vastly different meanings. I was thinking of a sewer system versus a network of sewers, or the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS) versus the Cable News Network (CNN). System seems a more generalized word, and in my mind a more centralized almost fascist sense of the concept, whereas a network implies more of a sense of possibility and connection. It is a framework to be used and moved about within rather than a set of rules to be imposed. That said, I see no significant difference between a sewer system and a network of sewers.

2. What, if any, system and/or network do you feel you are a part of? As an individual? As an artist? As NPR?
With NPR, there has certainly been a commentary on the system of corporate owned media networks in the United States. In my recent personal work there has been an engagement with the system of copyright law in the U.S. and abroad. (i.e. http://www.lee-web.net/symphony/). But these are operations within those sewers I was mentioning before.

On the sunny side of the street from that sewer I have had the pleasure, through these endeavours, of collaborating with a number of artists and artist spaces like Kristin Lucas, Artist’s Television Accces, Southern Exposure, Red76, kuda.org and a host of badass and not so badass expressive individuals who have passed through the doors or in front of the microphones of any of the numerous radio stations that NPR has had the pleasure of establishing for short periods of time of the past 6 years.

Recently I found myself attached to the network of University of New Mexico faculty (not yet a Facebook network), which resulted in working with my colleague Catherine Harris to build a system of propellers activated by a hand operated water pump (I just did the pump)… so now I operate within the network of tinkerers who work with water pumps??? (and believe me, there is a network there) … which I guess also puts me in the Ecological/Land Art network.. which is kinda hard to avoid here in New Mexico.

I guess what I am getting at…. is that I like to consider myself part of a network or a system (in the most positive sense) at all times(a really big one), and the more the merrier, for me. I don’t think I work well in a vacuum or in isolation. I love Facebook… and want to make art with it… I love Lee Walton’s work where he interpret’s his friends status messages, though I’m deeply saddened that he hasn’t made a video about any of mine. (We’re in the Lee network after all.) I’m inclined towards an almost new age interpretation of quantum physics, wherein we all realize ourselves as part of a larger whole system, network, whatevs.

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Picture taken from Switch22

Lee Montgomery got his BA in Film at Bard College, and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. As the founder of Neighborhood Public Radio, Lee has received grants from CEC Artslink, the Creative Work Fund, and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund.  He has been an artist in residence with kuda in Novi Sad, Serbia and the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Hamburg.

Neighborhood Public Radio has been named “Best Super Local Radio Station” by San Francisco magazine and has been featured in The San Francsico Chronicle, Punk Planet magazine, Artforum, the Chicago Reader, and Women’s Wear Daily. As a traveling band of guerilla broadcasters, NPR has hosted thematic broadcasts far and wide, including at both Artist’s Television Access and Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District,  The DeYoung Museum and the Museum for Contemporary Art Novi Sad, Serbia.  In 2008, NPR completed an unprecedented 4 month residency in a storefront next door to the Whitney Museum as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

In his solo work, Lee continues to explore d.i.y. approaches to technology and issues of copyright law.

Stick around for my blogalogue with Lee by way of Google Wave…because, as if this blogalogue experiment weren’t interesting enough, now all of you who are still eagerly awaiting your invitations to Google Wave have a chance to see the app put to use in real life! Just slap a red hat on my head and call me Mama Noel. The smiles on your faces that I will never see are thanks enough.

In her Bogotá studio, artist Doris Salcedo discusses the stereotypes she faces as a citizen of a Third World country and how she embraces these first-hand experiences of discrimination to inform her art. Shown working alongside her team of assistants, whose collective labor underscores the political messages of her sculptures, Salcedo proposes a more humble role for artists working today.

Doris Salcedo’s understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form and open to interpretation, her works serve as testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. Salcedo’s work reflects a collective effort and close collaboration with a team of architects, engineers, and assistants and—as Salcedo says—with the victims of the senseless and brutal acts to which her work refers.

Doris Salcedo is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion 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. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Doris Salcedo.

The future is here! — constructions of text and image created by Russian Futurist Aleksei Kruchenykh along with Vasilii Kamenskii, Kirill Zdanevich and his wife Olga Rozanova. Kruchenykh was a poet and critic best known for his artist books from 1912 and 1916. Working together with Velimir Khlebnikov, created a idea of zaum or “nonsense language” in which they wrote poetry. The disjointed, senseless, rapid poems inspired dynamic collages that became known as “transrational paintings.”

via MoMA

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In our new column, On Location, Art21 Director of Production Nick Ravich breaks his silence and gives you the scoop on Art21’s production comings and goings including, among other things, straight-from-the-set reports on recent shoots and some (hopefully) enlightening discussions on those areas where television production and contemporary art collide. And if we’re lucky, Nick will expand his column to include some non-Art21 related musings, reviews, interviews, and other ephemera on the world of production and art in general. — Ed.

If you’re willing to indulge a little Art21 navel-gazing for this very first post, I’d like to inaugurate this column by highlighting something I’ve been hoping to spread the word on for some time – our web exclusive video production. As a lot of you readers are probably aware, in addition to the content we specifically shoot for the broadcast series, Art21 has been actively shooting footage specifically for release on the web. Past exclusive pieces have included our three recent videos on Kerry James Marshall (On Museums, Being an Artist, Black Romantic).  But what a lot of folks might not be aware of is that, as opposed to the broadcast model where we hire outside crew, we’re using in-house personnel and gear to produce these shorts, soup to nuts. And it’s not just production staffers like coordinators Larissa Nikola-Lisa and Ian Forster, but other non-production folks like our Associate Curator, Wesley Miller, and our Education and Public Programming personnel, Jessica Hamlin and Marc Mayer, have all been involved. More importantly, we’re starting to expand the scope of these videos beyond Art21’s roster of broadcast artists.

And now’s a particularly opportune time to mention the widening range of this project because we’ve just come off one of our most ambitious and non-artist centered shoots to date: two full days shooting with the rather amazing art students and teachers at the Besant Hill School in Ojai, CA, and Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, CA. Our subjects weren’t Art21 broadcast artists, but teachers and students who actively use Art21 in the classroom. (The teachers are part of our Art21 Educators art education initiative. They had participated in an intensive Art21-organized professional development session in New York last summer; this shoot was part of a follow up classroom visit with the teachers.)

At the Besant Hill School in ludicrously beautiful Ojai, CA, we shot with teacher Lucia Vinograd and her uninhibited Advanced Class. The following pictures can only really do the experience justice. And yes, you’re looking at students who were body painting-dancing, blind water gun painting, and acetylene torching (a la Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff.) Oh, to be young again.

Left: A Besant Hill School (Ojai, CA) student gets ready for a body paint performance. Right: Early Judy Pfaff? No, a Besant Hill School student draws with an acetylene torch. All stills are from Art21's HDV original video footage, shot by Nick Ravich, 2009.

These and other student projects were all precociously creative responses to Lucia’s semester long curricula, “The Uses of Chaos, Chance, and the Unpredictable in Art” — a lesson plan influenced by some of the chance strategies of previous Art21 artists, like Cai Guo-Qiang. Students were asked to set up an art-making situation where some primary creative/mark-making element was out of their control. (I wish I had an art teacher like that in high school. I’d be a much cooler person today.)

At the very urbane Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica, CA, teacher Pam Posey – an accomplished artist in her own right — took her 9th grade art class down the street to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, to check out the Tell Me Something Good: A Collaboration between Kim Schoenstadt and Rita McBride show. The exhibition of photographs and documents is, in the words of the museum’s website, “inspired by the conceptual art exhibition, Art By Telephone (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1969), in which participants phoned in their specifications for their works of art.” A pretty heady premise for 9th graders but one that, as they got comfortable on the exhibit’s floor and were guided by Pam’s expert promptings, they were able to really bite into and discuss.  Are the instructions hindering or helping the artist’s creativity? In the end, are the instructions more interesting than the art? Moreover, this show and discussion dovetailed nicely with Pam’s on-going lesson plan, “What Roles do Rules Play in Art?” – itself nicely reminiscent of some of the rules-based thinking behind the work of Season Five’s Systems artists.

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Riyas Komu, "Syed Nabi" from the "Mark Him" series, 2007. Courtesy Komu Studio.

Flash Points contributor and University of Riverside professor Jennifer Doyle is currently spending 2 weeks in India, traveling with the Indian artist Riyas Komu. Following is the first in a series of dispatches from Doyle on the road. — Ed.

Since he produced Mark Him (2007), a series of portraits of Indian National Team soccer players, Riyas Komu has been haunted by the sport.

“Mark him” is something one shouts to a defender: it means to track your opponent’s movements, to limit them. To mark is to anticipate where your player wants to go and contain him. An expert defender will study his opponent as he advances and deduce if he wants to take the ball down the outside, or if he dares to cut through the center. He’ll know his opponent’s preferences (which foot is stronger or more accurate) and if his ego can be engaged (if challenged, will he give the ball to a teammate, or will engage the defender directly). Marking yields a kind of intimacy. It can be surprising, too – a smart attacker knows well what you are doing, and can seduce you right our of your boots — taking you on a trip whose itinerary is of his design, not yours.

I came here to India on the force of this imperative: Mark Him. Somehow my interest in Komu’s work demanded not simply that I get to know the artist, but that I get to know the player who haunts him.

We look at the men in Komu’s portraits from the distinct perspective of heroic propaganda. We look up at them; their eyes are directed forward. We are lifted with their gaze according to a monumental logic. Mark Him is reparative, offering a visual attention to a class of athletes who are largely invisible to the cricket-mad Indian mass media. The team is currently ranked 135th by FIFA, and enjoys little glory even as it represents this large and diverse country (players hail from all over India, speak four different languages, and come from distinctly different cultures). Soccer here is a minor sport, edged out of the newspapers by the glitz and glam of cricket and by the television spectacle of England’s top league (the “Premiership”). To even India’s fans, the sport as played here seems slow and boring. The level is just not what it should be.

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Squeak Carnwath, "Invisible," 2009. Oil and alkyd on canvas, 12" x 12". Courtesy Peter Mendenhall Gallery.

“Most of life is invisible to the naked eye,” proclaims Invisible, a painting in Squeak Carnwath’s new exhibition at Peter Mendenhall Gallery in Los Angeles.  At first glance, it appears that the statement is scrawled in pencil onto notebook paper, but upon closer inspection, we see that Carnwath has formed the picture with only oil paint. As with all trompe l’oeil painting, upon discovering that we have been tricked by a pictorial sleight of hand, we find ourselves seduced into carefully examining its mechanics. In doing so, we may discover that–as with life itself–most of the happenings within Carnwath’s paintings are invisible to our naked eye. And–apologies readers– almost all of its happenings are invisible to the camera lens.

Squeak Carnwath, "New Research," 2009. Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel, 70" x 70". Courtesy Peter Mendenhall Gallery.

Ghostly marks hover beneath the filmy surface of each canvas, suspended at varying depths within countless luminous semi-transparent layers of paint. Observing the work becomes a process of active excavation, rather than passive looking. Even though more discernible words and images float to the glowing surface, they do not congeal into a single pictorial narrative, but force the viewer to assemble, bit by bit, his or her own meaning. Perhaps this demand for subjective interpretation accounts for why, according to curator Karen Tsujimoto, “the critical establishment has largely been occupied with the formalist and painterly aspects of [Carnwath’s] work, ignoring its iconographic features…”

Virginia Woolf, whom Carnwath identifies as a major influence, writes, in To the Lighthouse, “What is the meaning of life?…The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark…”  During my days as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I studied with Squeak Carnwath. In the same way that Carnwath’s paintings offer up discrete images and statements that are simultaneously obtuse and resonant, her teaching style is characterized by the offering of koan-like anecdotes and assertions about the nature of painting, and the role of the artist in contemporary society.

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We invited artist Katie Holten to write about her current project, Tree Museum, a public artwork in the Bronx, New York.  — Ed.

Katie Holten, "Tree Museum," Grand Concourse, Bronx, New York, 2009. Aerial view from the roof of the former Concourse Plaza Hotel.

I think it’s fair to say that Tree Museum is unlike most other recent public art projects in New York City. The scale of the project is huge and at ten miles in length, rivals that of recent blockbusters such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (Central Park, 2005), Olafur Eliasson’s The New York City Waterfalls (NYC waterfronts, produced by the Public Art Fund, 2008) and PLOT: This World and Nearer Ones (Governor’s Island, produced by CREATIVE TIME, 2009). But the comparison ends there. In all other regards, the Tree Museum is a different species.

Almost invisible, the Tree Museum, which quietly opened on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in June, makes the hidden elements of the street visible. At the root of my practice is an understanding that nature is not somewhere else. Nature is not far away on an abandoned island or in a prairie; it is everything around us, including the unforgiving city streets and the inherently urban communities of the South Bronx. These very streets are natural and this environment – our sidewalk, our block, our apartment building, and of course our street tree — is our place in the city.

Katie Holten, "Tree Museum," Grand Concourse, Bronx, New York, 2009

The Tree Museum invites pedestrians to experience the Bronx, and New York City, in unexpected ways. One hundred street trees, from 138th Street at the southern tip of the Grand Concourse to Mosholu Parkway at the northern tip, are the points of entry to this “museum-without-walls.”  The audio guide at the core of the Tree Museum links the natural and social ecosystems. The recorded voices and stories are used sculpturally to create an artwork whose roots reach down into the history of the place, while the branches spread out and offer insights into the resilient communities, fragile ecologies, and vibrant daily scenes to be found along the street.

I was commissioned in December 2007 to create a public artwork to celebrate the centennial of the four-and-a-half-mile stretch of the Grand Concourse, the historic boulevard connecting Manhattan to the parks of the north Bronx. I moved to New York City in 2004 on a Fulbright Scholarship to investigate nature and landscape in the urban context. I began working with street trees, as they are the most palpable connection most city dwellers have with nature.

I walked the Grand Concourse countless times and photographed the entire length, documenting the street through drawings of its trees.  On the one hand, I was taking my time, trying to get a grip on the scale of the most important boulevard in the borough.  On the other hand, I was forming a simple portrait of the Grand Concourse through the trees, some of which date back to before the Concourse was constructed. Throughout these months, I met hundreds of people, gathered stories and histories, and eventually these simple black and white line drawings developed into the Tree Museum.

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On Monday, I had the rare opportunity to feast my eyes (in real life) upon the wonders of the Wolfsonian Library in Miami, Florida. Knowledgeable librarian Niki Harsanyi, introduced me to beautiful books made in Holland at the turn of the 20th century. The Wolfsonian Library has the second largest collection of Dutch bound books next to Holland. For those who don’t live or visit Miami—Niki also pointed me to PALMM (Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials), a online digital image resource for the Wolfsonian’s vast collection of Nieuwe Kunst and Art Nouveau era books. Many thanks to Tim Hossler for arranging the visit.

via Wolfsonian-FIU Modern Dutch Collection at PALMM

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