Thanks to Nova Benway for her series of posts on artists employing earnestness in their work. Up next is Joel Holmberg. Joel (b. 1982, Maryland, USA) creates artwork with computers and online services, but also sometimes with his bare hands.

David Olsen, "Witness," mixed media, 2008.

The last artist I’ll include in my discussion of earnestness, or what one might also call exuberant seriousness, is David Olsen, a sculptor who has spent the last several years documenting actions using his work on Newtown Creek in Brooklyn. The creek is one of the most polluted waterways in the country, and the sculptures are, in a certain sense, tools for healing. Made from natural materials like clay, wax, and rope, they employ humble filtration devices to purify tiny amounts of water, or crystals intended to absorb negative forces. One recent work, Witness (2008), is a seal skull with crystals embedded in the eye sockets. A rope attaches the skull to a glass buoy, so when it is lowered into the water it can float through the depths, “seeing” and collecting information or negative energy, until it is retrieved by the artist. Olsen adopts the identity of “Vulture” for these actions, wearing a handmade protective helmet and suit to mimic the bird’s heightened immune system. Of course, these activities have negligible impact on the rampant pollution of the waterway. Olsen’s deliberate mixing of pragmatic and mystical solutions to the problem further obfuscate their effectiveness, while retaining the urgent desire for change.

David Olsen as Vulture.

These past few weeks, I’ve clearly chosen artists working not only in a variety of different media but also in different historical contexts and with divergent concerns, but perhaps there is something Stuart Sherman, Eve Essex, Bibi Calderaro, and Olsen all share: the desire to make an offering while leaving the reaction or result open-ended. Sherman once claimed, “I’m influenced the most by myself as a child. I don’t feel so very different from when I was 5.” Yet the complex work I’ve discussed is not naïve. It recalls the pure childish gesture of opening one’s hand simply to show what is in it, shaded with the adult knowledge that there is a peculiar strength in such simplicity.

David Olsen, "Vessel Placement," 2008.

Bibi Calderaro, “PRESENT,” performance at P.S.1, 2008-9.

Like Eve Essex and Stuart Sherman, mentioned in my other posts, Brooklyn-based artist Bibi Calderaro has a peculiar relationship to performance and audience. Last year’s project, PRESENT, found her at a desk near P.S.1’s cafeteria every Thursday from October 2008 to April 2009, browsing through a collection of books she’d brought with her. With heady titles like World and Life as One and Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason, her self-selected library seemed primed to elicit responses, and she pecked out her wandering thoughts, often obscurely poetic, on a typewriter as she read. The typewritten pages were then stacked on the desk for passersby to take with them if they chose. (For an interview with Calderaro about the project and a complete list of the books, click here.)

Another project that bears description is her video Labor Contract, in which she enters into a legal arrangement with a linden tree, clearing the tall grass around it in exchange for the use of its shade (for images and descriptions of this and other projects, see here). Now that this process has become a video, what exactly is being presented to us as the audience? Clearly, Calderaro is interested in the act of making an offering, but of what? Although there has been much talk recently of the social significance of gift-giving, most popularly articulated in Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift, I would draw a distinction between this type of social process and what Essex, Sherman, and Calderaro are working through in their performances. The impulse to give is, I believe, distinct from the act of giving, though usually they are bound together in our quotidian lives. I see that your hands are cold and offer you a pair of gloves; the circuit is closed. Perhaps it is when the impulse and the act are only loosely connected – when practicality is displaced by pure magnanimous desire – that what I called earnestness in my first post emerges.

Bibi Calderaro, “Labor Contract,” production still, 2005.

Photo: Jean Shrimpton, evening dress by Cardin, Paris studio, January 1970. © Richard Avedon, Source:GraeMitchell.com

As we jump into the early New Year 2010, here’s What’s Cookin… enjoy!

• FLASHPOINTS: How does art respond to and define the natural world? The University of New Mexico launched their Art and Ecology as an outgrowth of its ten-year old program, Land Arts of the American West. Read Mattias Merkel Hess’s interview with UNM Art and Ecology professor Catherine Page Harris about how the program started, its relationship with other programs at UNM, and the future of ecological art.
• Inhale. Exhale. Whew. What is the power of positive thinking in relationship to climate change? Nicole Caruth thinks about Marisa Olsen’s upcoming February exhibition, opening in February at NYC’s PS122 called Whew Age. Nicole also provides information about the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
• Nicole Rounds Them Up! To learn about some new and upcoming exhibitions featuring Art21 artists who envision utopia; manipulate patterns and dress; summon Baroque culture; and reflect on the intimate act of bathing click here.
• Art21 Guest Blog Year 2. Many thanks to all twenty-six of them for their informative and often entertaining insights! Here’s to the Art21 Guest Blog Class of 2009
• LOOKING AT LOS ANGELES: Against The Deluge. Calfornia resident Catherine Wagley looks back at 2009. “…The decade should belong to artists who saw the supposed deluge as a reason to stop trying to make history and start rephrasing, breaking apart, and rearranging their cultural heritage, freeing repressed fragments of meaning in hopes of informing an unknown future…”
• EDUCATION: Teaching with Contemporary Art — Bringing It Back Home. December, January, May, June…. These are popular months for graduates to visit their former high schools because they are either between semesters at college or finished for the school year altogether….
• GASTRO VISION: The Year in Meat. Here’s a look back at some meaty moments in 2009
• Entertainers Who Moonlight as Artists: The Top 10 of 2009
• Performative Interventions: The Progression of 4D Art in a Virtual 3D World. Second Life, performance artists see immersion as a means of taking their art directly to a global audience, thus completely eliminating the need for physical exhibition spaces, although augmented reality exhibitions are becoming the norm…” Artist, Franco Mattes says “In our synthetic performances the performers and the audience only interact thorough avatars, they never meet. Everything is mediated. But this doesn’t mean the relationship is not “real”, as much as, for example, a “phone conversation” is a “real conversation”…