Donald Judd, "15 untitled works in concrete," 1980-1984

In a short essay dealing with the peculiarities of the West Texas that Donald Judd called home, he writes,

Here, everywhere, the destruction of new land is a brutality…Within a real view of the world and the universe this violence would be a sin – there are no words since there are no ethics that correspond to the present known nature of the world. I’ve never built anything on new land.[1]

While Judd confessed that the modification of existing structures proved to be a tiresome activity, his respect for utilitarian architecture and engineering, as well as his reverence for the landscape, trumped these frustrations throughout much of his time in Marfa.[2] Here at the Chinati Foundation, this sensitivity to the local environment, both built and natural, is particularly striking.

Judd’s interest in an authorless architecture born of necessity was first evinced in his 1963 essay, “Kansas City Report.” In this report from the field, Judd moves from an appraisal of the art housed in the Nelson Atkins Museum to consider the aesthetics of Kansas City’s edifices and environs. Structurally, in the “Kansas City Report,” Judd calls attention to the lack of connectivity between the art of the Midwestern grain elevator, mill, or silo, and the “art from five thousand miles away and usually centuries before” found in the Nelson Atkins.[3] Of the mill, Judd states, “it had a purpose, they wanted it a certain way; it was not imposed from the outside.”[4] It is this connectivity between existing buildings, local environment, and permanently installed art that Judd would achieve at Chinati.

The disposition of Judd’s approach to his architectural adaptations is a specific, responsive, and non-invasive one that has been characterized as a process of “tidying up.”[5] The barracks, mess halls, stables, gymnasium, tennis court, and artillery sheds of what was Fort D. A. Russell now comprise the exhibition, living, and working spaces of the Foundation. In shifting the buildings from one utility to another, Judd enhances, what he termed in a 1964 review, the “plain beauty of well-made things.”[6] Eschewing military-issue shingles for corrugated metal – the roofing material of choice in this region of Texas – and using adobe to modify windows and entryways were among the practical and aesthetic choices made by Judd during the renovations. He asserts, “Materials vary from place to place; local ones are cheap, are usually better suited to the climate and those doing the work know how to use them.”[7]

The Chinati Foundation, 2009

The use of proper (local) materials is perhaps best seen in the subtle metamorphosis of the two artillery sheds now housing Judd’s 100 hundred untitled works in mill aluminum.  The changes made were few, but notable. The flat roofs of the two sheds proved unsound, so to address this difficulty, a corrugated, galvanized metal Quonset hut-style roof was added. This choice of roofing material was both aesthetic and practical. Judd writes, “In Valentine nearby, thirty miles, there was a large storage building, once curve from the ground to the ground, very deep and broad corrugations, obviously structure itself. Similar vaults were built as the roofs of the two artillery sheds.”[8] Taking a cue from local utilitarian forms of the Valentine storage facility, the hut-style roof doubled the sheds in height and gave the structures a less cumbersome appearance. Quartered aluminum windows replaced the garage doors, which better suited the works of art inside and fluidly brought into view the high desert landscape and Judd’s 15 untitled works in concrete outside. In a comprehensive article dealing with the execution of the works in concrete and aluminum, Marianne Stockebrand, director of Chinati, writes, “From this angle, everything connects—indoors and outdoors, aluminum and concrete, blocks and barrel shapes, transparency and closure, light and shade, nature and built spaces.”[9]

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Doris Salcedo, La Casa Viuda I (detail), 1992-94, Collection of Worchester Art Museum

Looking through the interviews and essays featured in Art:21- Art in the Twenty- First Century 5, the companion book to season 5, I keep discovering a ton of words to teach by. This past weekend, as I prepared to work with one of my classes, I began flipping through the section featuring Doris Salcedo and found two quotes that kicked off this week:

As an artist, I have a responsibility. I have to look at historical events and work with whatever material is given to me.

The memory of anonymous victims is always being obliterated; I’m trying to rescue it. That’s why my work does not represent something; it’s simply a hint of something- trying to bring into our presence something subtle that is no longer there.

What I enjoy about these two quotes really centers on how artists must confront history- questioning beyond facts and figures in order to get to the why. How do we question the framing of history as artists and art educators working with students? How do we create work that embraces, and even encourages, multiple perspectives? How can we rescue memory, even our own?

When students choose to make work that is about a time and a place, there can be a commitment to investigate that time and place in a way that starts with history and enters into a different kind of learning through interpretation and giving that perspective a specific form.

Hello and welcome to Nothing is New via Art21. During my stint as guest blogger, you will see posts are very image-heavy with a brief, excited description explaining each set of pictures. The images are discovered while roaming around digital Internet archives of museums and libraries. Nothing is New features a vast range of themes, from artist profiles to interiors of Brooklyn apartments in the 1970s, to bead work of the Zulu. Nothing is New hopes to inspire your creative contemporary lifestyle.

Layers upon layers of vivid color, pattern and fibers create the costumes of the Hopi and Navajo katsina dolls. Katsinas are believed to be spiritual messengers that have supernatural powers controlling nature and people. The paintings above by Raymond John Poseyesva retell the strength of these vibrant icons.

via Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University

The Contemporary Art World, yesterday

It is possible to read the Court’s opinion … in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable … I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

— Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis vs Ohio, 1964

What does contemporary art look like? What a ridiculous question! It doesn’t look like anything, does it? No one in their right minds would want to begin to map out a common style across the thousands of different approaches littering the white floors and gray walls of contemporary art galleries all over the world. There have been attempts to bracket artists together, notably by Jerry Saltz in a lovely unprintable phrase that’s apparently still in style (judging by this year’s Venice Biennale), but they only ever glance at comprehensiveness. Talent contests like the Turner Prize begin to look like meaningless conflations of the Oscars, the Pulitzer, and the Nobel. Future students of art history on a tight deadline may opt to avoid the obstreperous unwillingness of 21st-century art to slip into easy categories. Yet we still call it contemporary art, and we know it when we see it. Or rather: we think we know it when we don’t.

The Contemporary Art World, this morning

Take, for example, the latest occupant of the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. On October 14, the 2,400^th and final participant in Antony Gormley’s wildly popular One and Other project left the plinth, to be replaced by a large, figure-like shape wrapped in blue plastic in homage to the late Jeanne-Claude. Unwrapped, the sculpture underneath was revealed to be a 6-meter tall figurative sculpture of Battle of Britain hero Sir Keith Park in tawny, bronze-effect fiberglass. Dressed in Royal Flying Corps goggles and lifejacket, the figure looks up to the sky and waggles on a glove in readiness. The sculpture, by Leslie Johnson, is a result of vituperative campaigning from the Sir Keith Park Memorial Campaign, and has drawn perhaps predictable criticism from both sides of the self-imposed “divide”: the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones described it, with knowing irony, as a “fascist icon,” while Frederick Forsyth and William Packer, writing in The Times, proposed that “the statue will push back boundaries and challenge what has become the received wisdom: that traditional art forms do not command as much respect in the contemporary art world.”

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Jeff Koons, "Triple Hulk Elvis I", 2007. Collection of William J. Bell. © Jeff Koons. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (via White Hot Magazine).

In this week’s roundup of 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:

• On December 17, Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will sign copies of his book Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis at Gagosian Shop in New York City (988 Madison Ave). The 2009 publication features Koons’ painting series, Hulk Elvis, in which he creates large works of the Incredible Hulk, inflatable monkeys, geishas, birds, and the Liberty Bell; a text by Scott Rothkopf, and an interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The event begins at 6pm. Contact Gagosian Gallery for more information.

• Faces & Facts: Korean Contemporary Art in New York commemorates the 30-year anniversary of the Korean Cultural Service of New York (KCSNY). The exhibition of more than 60 works by 54 Korean and Korean American artists — including Art21′s Do-Ho Suh (Season 2) and Kimsooja (Season 5) — is spread across three venues: the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery, KCSNY’s Gallery Korea and the Queens Museum of Art (QMA). Faces & Facts is on view at the first two venues through February 19, and closes February 21 at the QMA.

• Grey Area, the Deutsche Guggenheim exhibition of new paintings by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu, has been reviewed by art critic Brian Dillon of The Guardian. Dillon writes: “It’s easy to conclude that Mehretu makes history paintings of a sort, intricate tableaux of the recent geopolitical past. But that would be to ignore her commitment to painting as such, and to miss the extraordinary graphic transformations that her source images undergo.” Read the entire article here. And to watch a video (produced by Vernissage TV) of Mehretu discussing the works in Grey Area, click here.

• CityCenter in Las Vegas, a new 67 acre luxury complex on the Vegas Strip, boasts the first major permanent collection of art in Las Vegas to be integrated into a public space, as well as one of the world’s largest corporate art collections in existence today. Works by Art21 artists Maya Lin (Season 2) and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in this collection that, according to USA Today, amounts to roughly $40 million.

• Works by Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) and Richard Serra (Season 1) are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art S.M.A.K. (located in Ghent, Belgium) in the exhibition The Artists in their Own Words. The show is entirely dedicated to Gagarin, the first international magazine of artist’s texts, and brings together the zine’s entire oeuvre with a selection of related works from in the museum’s collection. The editorial lay-out of Gagarin is based on a quote by Season 5 artist John Baldessari: “Talking about art simply is not art. Talk can be art, but then it is not talking about art.” The Artists in their Own Words continues through March 14, 2010.

• Serra’s outdoor sculpture Shift has been granted heritage status by the Township of King, located just north of Toronto, Canada. This early 1970s sculpture consists of six concrete walls, each five feet long and eight inches thick but of varying lengths. It spans two hills and encompasses more than 15 acres. Serra has said of Shift, according to Yorkregion.com: “When you walk it measures your distance in relation to the landscape so it allows you to understand the shift in elevation as you’re walking because there’s no set horizon there. The boundaries of the work became the maximum distance two people could occupy and still keep each other in view…The intent of the work is an awareness of physicality in time, space and motion.” The sculpture’s new status was declared in response to a development proposal by Hickory Hills Investments, owner of the land on which it is located, that threatened its safety. Read the full story here.

• On December 10, The New School (in collaboration with Aperture Foundation) will hold a public talk titled Confounding Expectations – Photography in Context: The Projected Photograph. Paul Pfeiffer (Season 2) and Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3); George Baker, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Vice-Chair of UCLA, Department of Art History; and Andrea Geyer, artist and Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Parsons will discuss projection and installation strategies used by contemporary artists to create immersive and cinema-like experiences. The program begins at 7pm and is free and open to the public.

• More Mergers & Acquisitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is a continuation of the Center’s earlier exhibition, Mergers & Acquisitions (December 2008 – January 2009), which brought together works by modern masters and contemporary artists. The second installment is organized into four themes: Figure-Ground, Collaboration, Un-Natural, and Familiar Faces. Work by William Wegman (Season 1) is included in the latter, a variety of funny or disturbing head shots of, for instance, Osama Bin Laden, Farrah Fawcett, the Man in the Moon, and artist self portraits. More Mergers & Acquisitions runs December 10 through February 14, 2010.

• Building on a Cliff at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. features work by Arturo Herrera (Season 3), Matt Connors, and Merlin James. The exhibition title is taken from a painting by James and meant to reflect the works on view. “These three artists,” according to the press release, “work at the edges of abstraction and modes of representation to create bodies of work that are both familiar and unsettling at the same time.” Herrera’s steel sculptures based on ink drawings; large wall works from small found photo images; and collages will be on view. Building on a Cliff opens December 10.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and yogurt lids were the focus of a recent article in The New York Observer; read it here. Orozco’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York on December 13.

Kelly at 282 feet below sea level in Death Valley. Photo by Kristen Lombardi.

Thanks to Nicole Sansone for her engaging and inventive series of posts exploring the difference between systems and networks.

Up next is graphic designer Kelly Rakowski. As Head of the Book Department at Todd Oldham Studio, she designs and edits art books, including the recently published Kid Made Modern, a book of children’s crafts inspired by mid-century modern design. Kelly also participates in Hit Factorie, an artist collective whose members created FEAST (Funding Emerging Artists with Sustainable Tactics) and HIT BOOK! An obsessive collector of digital/online images and archives, Kelly uses her website (Nothing is New) to delve into deep Internet lands, surfacing with visual treasures meant to prompt thought, creativity, and action. In a dynamic example of how historic images may enliven new ideas, Kelly has just opened a NisN shop, where she sells goods of her own design inspired by images on view at Nothing is New.

Still from the film the Godfather; Source: Guardian.co.uk

Pssst…! Here’s what’s been going on these past days  at Art21…

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE(s):

• Kimsooja | “A Beggar Woman” & “A Homeless Woman”
• Yinka Shonibare MBE | Being an Artist
• Feed that brain with some more  thinking food (!) Cecilia Novero on Franza Kafka, the anti-diet, notions of  progress and much much more… Check out her new book.
• Round Up: Art21 artists play with fire, sign new books, design stained glass, collage basketballs, create new films, and pop up in Miami Beach exhibitions.
• Electrical Forrest : A Monument to the Community of Troy New York the Silicon Valley of the 19th century
• Flashpoints: How does art respond to and redefine the natural world?
• Blogalogueing with EcoArt Tech

***

• Tweet! Tweet !  An interview with Kristin Lucas
• For more info about Kristin and her work check out the other  posts in Nicole Sansome’s journey into the virtual world and the collaborative artists she meets there – Echo Art Tech and the E Team:
• Part 1 About Echo Art Tech
• Part 2: About E Team
• Part 3; More with Krisin Lucas
• ETEAM| Unite in  this Virtual World
• ETeam Reflections…An existential nihilistic crisis…

***

• Looking at Los Angeles: Catherine Wagley is thankful for senseless art with guts
• Power. Teaching with Contemporary Art. Share Here.
• Supplies Help Make the Classroom Functional: If the Shoe Fits Pay for It
• New Column!!! Art2.1 Creating on the Social Web
• Virtual Artists’ Immersive Discoveries in a Virtual 3D Frontier
• Letter from London: Remember, Remember… Ben Street reflects on some art that sticks and other art that doesn’t have as much grab.  Art needs oxygen! How is art (not) confined to present tense experience of being in a gallery?
• Exploring the Makeshift Landscape. Photographer Eirik Johnson writes about his ongoing exploration of humankind’s environmental impact.
• Julia Walker fears Sustainable Architecture is in danger. Check out her post Style vs. Substance
• Inside the Artist’s Studio: Lisa Bradley
• Making It Happen with “Email Balls”

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Artist Kimsooja reflects on her series of videotaped performances — A Beggar Woman and A Homeless Woman (both 2000-01) — realized in cities around the world: Cairo, Delhi, Lagos, and Mexico City.

Kimsooja’s videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through their use of repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. In many pieces, everyday actions—such as sewing or doing laundry—become two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. In videos that feature her in various personas (Needle Woman, Beggar Woman, Homeless Woman), she leads us to reflect on the human condition, offering open-ended perspectives through which she presents and questions reality.

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

Her work can currently be seen in the exhibitions Your Bright Future at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (through February 14th, 2010) and Dress Codes: The Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center of Photography in New York (through January 17th, 2010).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Richard Numeroff. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Kimsooja.

Noah Fischer, "Electrical Forest: Made in Troy," 2009

We invited artist Noah Fischer to write about his current project, Electrical Forest: Made in Troy, a site-specific installation in Troy, New York.  — Ed.

During my initial research missions to Troy, New York I met a colorful bunch of historians, painters, potters, professors and arborists, and was struck by the miniature grandeur of the city. There was a need to respond to its historical aura; going to Troy was stepping into another world. This was interesting to me because it’s not a gentrified international destination; it’s more or less a graveyard of American industry, a city of the Rust Belt.  Working with The Arts Center of the Capital Region and independent curator, Lauren Wolk, who invited me to Troy for the project, I crafted the outlines of Electrical Forest: Made in Troy.  It was to be a project that depended on the community of Troy to harness the aura of their city. Electrical Forest: Made in Troy would tell the story of a small American city set deep in the landscape of progress.

The project had two stages. The “Factory Phase” was a challenge to produce 10,000 “leaves” in one week on a human-powered assembly line.  The line consisted of many stations, each with a volunteer who would repeat one action on the synthetic leaf as it moved past on a conveyor system. Toward the end of the line, each leaf would be scanned and uploaded to an online database at www.electricalforest.com, creating a linear movement from industrial age to information age. For the “Forest Phase,” we headed into the woods to gather trees; re-imagining the linear architecture of the assembly line as a woody ecosystem and finally hanging the manufactured leaves on an electrical light-filled canopy. Ultimately the “Forest” overtook the “Factory,” but left traces of what had been there before. Tree trunks grew up through workers’ tables, branches pushed tools aside, a canopy of leaves covered the ceiling.

When I sketched out the assembly line, I was drawing on the history of the region, which was revealed to me by geologist, collector, artist, and local historian Bill Skerritt, who drove me around to old factories in his station wagon. As another Troy historian, Tom Carroll, contends, Troy was the Silicon Valley of the 19th century, a model of high-tech and efficient industrialism. Here, factory workers manufactured products from precision instruments to shirt collars distributed via steamboat on the Hudson River and Erie Canal, and by rail. Troy was famous for cast iron stoves, bronze bells, and the ability to stamp out a million horseshoes in a week, supplying the Union Army during the Civil War. Yet, the assembly line in Electrical Forest was not quite a historical re-creation. Rather, it was an experiment that asked a group of twelve people to sync up in a giddy rhythm and engage in serious play.

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Leave it to a web artist to push the boundaries in interview formats! Keep reading to experience mine and Kristin Lucas’s systems vs. networks conversation, Twitter style…

Nikksters: How do you define systems and networks? What’s the diff between the two?
ksl2: Systm n Netwrk not easy 2 dstnguish; they r compatibl, multifactd, structurs dependnt on connectvty. Depend on context could mean same thng.
ksl2: a couple more thoughts…
ksl2: Netwrk implies physicality (hardware) and functionality where system is rooted n ideology n abstraction. You “network”, you do not “system”.
ksl2: and…
ksl2: Network can turn off your electricity; System can ruin your credit.
ksl2: System can have Network in place; Network can have an operating System.
ksl2: next question

Nikksters: so are they interchangeable? can systems and networks morph into each other, i.e. systems become networks and vis versa?
ksl2: They can mutate, maybe not into each other like shape shifters or dopple gangers.
ksl2: i think doppleganger might be one word!
ksl2: They can share many of the same characteristics. You have to activate to know the difference sometimes.

Nikksters: Wut systems/networks do u feel u r a part of? Which of these systems and/or networks do u feel u r part of voluntarily/involuntarily?
ksl2: State, bank, service providr, buyr, insurd, account holdr, frequnt travelr progrm, list serv, direct mail target, user group, faq, audience,
ksl2: of public radio, news, music, movi reviews, Internt, news audience, social netwrks, blogs, traind artist, teachr, cat ownr, vegetarian, CSA,
ksl2: political affiliation, fan, family, friends, family-and-friends plan, arts community, patron, gallery, colleagues, nomads, early risers…
ksl2: Some of the best thriving networks don’t have names; in the naming something is lost.
ksl2: Feelings are often mixed about my participation in these relationships. Both inactive and active connections can be felt.
ksl2: Seems one is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ grid. No n between. Activity is activity, small or grand; u r there, Network thrives on yr participation.
ksl2: more coming…
ksl2: Gray area. There is a trade off. To benefit from a system/netwrk, u oftn have 2 involuntarily join othrs. There are concessions that u make.

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