Christa Holka out and about!

Christa Holka is an American photographer based in London. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London, a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Literature from The State University of New York.  There are many reasons I went through the trouble to meet her at the cozy FIRST OUT CAFE-BAR in central London to discuss her work. At a first glance, Christa struck me to be a stylish, hip, cool, creative, on-the-scene individual with a mission – specifically a queer mission, which she rushed to define for me in Judith Butler’s words:

Christa Holka, "Harley Frosted Beard"

My understanding of queer is a term that desires that you don’t have to present an identity card before entering a meeting. Heterosexuals can join the queer movement. Bisexuals can join the queer movement. Queer is not being lesbian. Queer is not being gay. It is an argument against lesbian specificity: that if I am a lesbian I have to desire in a certain way. Or if I am a gay I have to desire in a certain way. Queer is an argument against certain normativity, what a proper lesbian or gay identity is.

Christa Holka, "Jillian & Nancy NYC"

Christa turned out to be down-to-earth conversationalist, whose vision and agenda is not coincidental but rather rooted in the very core of who she is.  Back in Chicago, she was a member of the infamous The Chicago Kings, a drag performance troupe that played a key role in the development of her work. In an Artxxmagazine interview, Christa sums up that experience:

After my first time on stage with the Chicago Kings, I was totally hooked. I mean how could I not be? At our first show there were over 300 people in this tiny back room of a sports bar in a weird neighborhood in Chicago’s West Loop and that night the bar was having some kind of flooding problem, but that didn’t stop anyone. The night was electric. The crowd was hungry and we were feeding them. It was like everyone had been waiting for this moment and finally it was there. What was so attractive about us? Jeez! I’m not sure! Maybe that’s a better question for people who were in the audience? For me, what I liked about it was being on stage, performing and getting so much attention for it. Girls were screaming, always wanting more! I seriously felt like a rock star sometimes. In the beginning I didn’t really think about the provocative statements we were making, it was just happening. It was a lot of collaborating and many of us were artists so it was this big performative collaboration that happened to be drag king performances.

Christa Holka, "Swim-suit boys," London, 2008

A highly social artist, Holka has made it her business to capture moments of queer manifestations with her Canon 5D or the Canon Ixus 960IS (digital point and shoot), Mamiya 645 Pro, or even her Diana Holga. She has long earned the trust of her subjects and nearly 50,000 images prove just that. They can be found on Flickr, Facebook, and her own website. Befriend Christa to get a sense of why she is also knows as the Queer Paparazzi and if you happen to be a socialite in London, be aware of the lady behind the flashes.

Christa Holka, "Liz"

The predecessors responsible for Christa’s career path are:  Nan Goldin Claude Cahun, Philip Lorca di Corcia, Tina Barney, Larry Clarke, Brian Finke, Wolfgang Tillmans, Dash Snow, Martin Parr, Guy Bourdin, Nikki S. Lee, Larry Sultan and others.

Read on, simply because what the naked eye sees as a plaid-shirt community, the camera lens re-articulates as a culturally and politically queer archive.

Georgia Kotretsos: Let’s take this from the beginning… tell me about the community that fills your memory cards. What does it mean to you? What are you looking at and for through your camera lens?

Christa Holka: Well, my community is made up of my very close friends, acquaintances and people in general who are engaged with non-normative temporalities, people on a different timeline than heteronormative culture. Like, we go out and play in the park at midnight and ride bikes through the streets and play games at times when people in normative communities are doing the whole reproductive schedule thing: get married, buy a house, have kids, etc. I mean, of course queers are also doing that in various ways, and I’m not against that, it’s just not the schedule I’m on at the moment. My community is also a time and a place where I feel a sense of belonging. My friends mean the world to me; they are a part of me. I think of them like family. I’m looking at my community through my camera, trying to write a part of a queer history capturing glimpses of the time and space I occupy. Like historians, I’m looking for a way to make sense of what’s happening now, looking at the past, to look forward to what’s next.

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Surrounded by various figurative sculptures in progress in his Los Angeles studio, including an over-sized bust of President George W. Bush, artist Paul McCarthy discusses the process of casting from life and the resulting perfections and imperfections.

Paul McCarthy’s video-taped performances and provocative multimedia installations lampoon polite society, ridicule authority, and bombard the viewer with a sensory overload of often sexually-tinged, violent imagery. With irreverent wit, McCarthy often takes aim at cherished American myths and icons—Walt Disney, the Western, and even the Modern Artist—adding a touch of malice to subjects that have been traditionally revered for their innocence or purity. Whether conflating real-world political figures with fantastical characters such as Santa Claus, or treating erotic and abject content with frivolity and charm, McCarthy’s work confuses codes, mixes high and low culture, and provokes an analysis of fundamental beliefs.

Through February 28 (this weekend!) Tank.tv is showing two of McCarthy’s video works: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature fellow Art21 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice.

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

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom. Sound: Doug Dunderdale. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Paul McCarthy. Special Thanks: Jacobine van der Meer.

I have never met Aaron Zinman. Not in person, anyway. I’ve spoken with him a few times on the phone, and we’ve chatted via email and Twitter, but I’ve never actually seen the man. But for a few months this past summer, Aaron’s art project became an Internet sensation, and I wanted to know why.

A quick web search tells me he’s pursuing a PhD at MIT’s Media Lab, and it looks like he did some interesting things with IBM and Google. Some of his recent Flickr images suggest he likes to go skiing or snowboarding. He’s a DJ, he frequents Cafe Fabulous in Cambridge, and according to his own Twitter feed, he’s “remarkably able at catching falling objects.” In almost all the pictures I’ve seen of Aaron, he’s flashing a big smile, and most of his emails contain at least one smiley, and more than one exclamation mark. Overall, he seems like an intelligent, passionate, likeable kind of guy.

Aaron Zinman, the artist, designer, and technologist behind Personas

I also know through my searching that last year, Aaron launched Personas, which does what I did—search around—and presents its findings. It’s a simple site, designwise, but it reveals a more complex infrastructure and compels us to ask complex questions.

You click over and enter your name. It could be your full name — first, middle, and last. It could be your professional name. Personas then searches the web, like I did for “Aaron Zinman” and uses “a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.” In painfully simplistic terms, it Googles you and paints a pretty picture.

Another quick web search shows that Personas quickly took off shortly after it was launched. All kinds of Web sites, from the niche TechCrunch, to the more mainstream CNN talked up the site. It’s easy to see why. Beautifully designed, the clean background shows you what it’s finding and processing in real time, complete with futuristic animations. What comes out is a spectrum of colors and labels, neatly arranged and visually intuitive.

The Personas search results for "An Xiao"

Typing in my name, an uncommon one on both sides of the Pacific, I’m not surprised to find large chunks of the spectrum devoted to “online” and “art.” I assume the slivers of “religion” and “books” relate to my explorations of Zen poetry. I can even see how the “genealogy” result might make sense.

But a few of them puzzle me: Why “military” and “aggression”? Why “sports”? I’ve never campaigned for or against any wars, and the only way I realized the Super Bowl had come and gone was because I was looking at Twitter’s trending topics.

“Personas is an experiment in data portraiture,” Aaron told me. “You get a sense of a machine-kind of thinking and making sense of you. How is the machine parsing you? It’s normally a very opaque process.”

Indeed, watching the animation again, I see other An Xiaos pop up in its searches. There’s “An Xiao Wei,” a kung fu champion. A number of An Xiaos who write academic papers. “An Xiao Qian,” a character in a Chinese action film. Anyone who has the vaguest idea of what I do could tell at a glance that these people obviously aren’t me, but machines can’t recognize that. Not Personas, not Bing, not Google, at least not yet.

Aaron wrote in his project description, that Personas “is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.”

In retrospect, as I learned more about the project, I came to realize that its swift popularity is less a puzzle than an inevitability.

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Christina Mazzalupo, "Countdown: Week 1," 2009. Ink and watercolor on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 in. Courtesy Mixed Greens.

Food diaries — daily records of everything one eats and drinks — are strange and fascinating objects. For nutritionists and dietitians, they are useful tools in determining a person’s eating habits and caloric intake. Taken out of a medical context, however, a blow-by-blow report of one’s ingestion seems trivial and neurotic. I’ll admit that I’ve kept my own food diary off and on over the years, repeatedly tucking it away once it became too tedious a task. When I stumbled upon one of my old journals a few years ago, I made a startling discovery: in logging teaspoons, cups, ounces and calories I had sketched a picture of my subconscious self. Bits and pieces of my life that were before unclear were laid out in my diet and notes. I was reminded of this epiphanic moment when I saw a new body of work by artist Christina Mazzalupo that takes her food diary as its starting point.

Since 2004, alternative healthcare practitioners have suggested Mazzalupo keep daily journals listing her food intake and bodily symptoms. For her exhibition Stomachache, now on view at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York, she has translated that documentation into eight drawings, one for every week leading up to her milestone 40^th birthday.

If I was doubtful about the visual interestingness of this monotonous premise, I quickly forgot and was totally enthralled by Mazzalupo’s delicate ink and watercolor works on paper. Never has a food diary possessed the charm of a children’s coloring book and the density of a Mark Lombardi diagram. In addition to food and nutritional supplements, Mazzalupo has charted her medications, ailments, feelings, and journeys to reveal an extremely and sometimes uncomfortably personal memoir. Continue reading »

Image courtesy of Esopus magazine.

Back in 2004, I was lucky enough to be introduced to Esopus magazine at a silent auction being held during a Mass MoCA fundraiser. Don’t ask me how, but my wife and I were able to bid on (and somehow afford when we won) a package that included a signed copy by every single artist and author in the very first issue of Esopus. At the time, I wasn’t as familiar with Beth Campbell or Christopher Durang, but I immediately loved their contributions. I was intrigued by the Richard Tuttle piece and had no idea what to make of Alex Shear’s work. And these were just four of the contributors!

Since then, I have managed to devour every issue at a leisurely pace (Esopus is published twice a year), been introduced to many new artists, and reintroduced to artists and writers I thought I knew. I have found ways to utilize Esopus as a teaching resource in the classroom and have shared it with many colleagues who have been impressed with the way the magazine simultaneously feels like a periodical and a group exhibit you hold in your hands.

This week, Teaching with Contemporary Art is pleased to present part one of an interview with Esopus editor, Tod Lippy, conducted via e-mail over the past month:

Joe Fusaro: What’s the story behind Esopus magazine? It’s certainly not a “regular” art magazine. As a matter of fact it’s more like a work of art that operates in a magazine-format and schedule. How did you get started?

Tod Lippy: I founded Esopus in 2003. I started it mainly because I had had a fair amount of experience in editing special-interest magazines and I wanted to take a different approach in order to create a magazine that would reach a wider audience. The idea was to come up with something that was very multidisciplinary in form and content. We have contributions from contemporary artists and filmmakers, writers, poets, musicians – a CD is included in every issue – and the idea was to avoid the kind of ghettoization that often comes with specialization in creative disciplines. If you go to a Barnes and Noble newsstand, you’ll find an Art section, and a Literature section, and a Film section, and a Design section—the idea was to somehow incorporate all of these in one magazine in order to attract a broader readership. There were several other ideas behind the founding of the magazine, but probably the most important one was that I didn’t want to include any advertising. I feel like I’m constantly fighting with advertisers when I’m going through my favorite magazines—particularly these days, when editorial and advertising are so hard to distinguish from one another—and it seemed like it was worth a shot to try to do a magazine that literally had nothing in it that was for sale.  So, in order to do that, I created a non-profit entity, the Esopus Foundation Ltd. We’re a 501(c)(3) and we depend on contributions from foundations and individuals to make up for the money we lose from not being able to count on advertising revenue which, as you probably know, is very important in the magazine publishing world.

JF: Did you also set out to create a magazine which functions as a work of art in itself? Because of the interdisciplinary nature of Esopus it also feels like purchasing a piece of art. There are things to unfold, pull out, and listen to.

TL: I can’t say that I explicitly set out to make something that functioned like a work of art.  I think that was probably a natural offshoot of my wanting to stay as invisible as possible as a designer. Most magazines have a very rigorous grid structure — an extreme example of this would be, say The New Yorker — where every article fits into a very recognizable format: Columns are generally the same width, headline and body typefaces are consistent, and artwork tends to be “framed” in relation to the composition of the page. I actually love The New Yorker and its look but that’s not what I was going for with Esopus. I wanted everything that appeared in the magazine to work visually on its own particular terms rather than conforming to a “house style” — that way, I hoped, each article or project would feel less mediated, and this would provide a more authentic experience for our readers. The idea was to give them the sense that they were flipping through a box of artifacts, each slightly different from the one before it.  This approach, I think, encourages that interaction you mentioned, which is so important to me and to the mission of the magazine. The less passive our audience feels, the better (for them and us)!

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Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:

• 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21′s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.

• Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily  life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)

• Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.

• Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”

• Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”

• Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.

"Thriller Kitty Impresses", Source: icanhascheezburger.com

• What are your manners? Where and how did you learn them? According to Ben Street’s most recent letter to us contemporary art and the Mannerist Movement could be holding hands at the table. What do you see? Peter Schjeldahl, in his review at the new exhibition of Bronzino’s drawings at the Met says, “Mannerism, the most commonly despised period in Western art history…[is] the one that best befits creative culture today. We are mostly Mannerists now…” Jerry Saltz calls Mannerism calls Bronzino, “sixteenth-century Italy’s Joey Ramone”. There’s a lot to consider here: READ this post.
• Is art your friend? Why not, it should be. John Menil says: “Art: Take it off its marble pedestal and show it as a daily companion, refreshing, human and rich: witness of its time and prophet of times to come.”For more check out this post on The Menil Collection.
• Art is Murder. Scary. But Insightful.
• Teaching with Contemporary Art is taking a break this week in order to complete special two-part interview with Esopus editor, Tod Lippy, which will be published here on the Art21 blog starting next Wednesday. Stay tuned for this unique look into a very, very distinct art magazine that has wonderful potential for art educators.
• This President’s Day roundup begins with a hotly debated exhibition and ends with a divine duo in this week’s Round-Up.
• How do you conserve a work of art that is fleeting in time? Richard McCoy speaks to Jeff Martin in this post Collaborations in Conservation: A Conversation and A Colloquium
• Do you know how to argue responsibly? How does the recent thoughts shared between Jerry Saltz and  John Yau measure up? In this week’s, FLASHPOINTS: Must art be ethical? |The Puppy Wars, Catherine Wagley writes, there are unethical ways of arguing. It’s a critic’s responsibility to try to glance past his own worldview—not to escape it (that would be impossible and uninteresting)—and invite conversation about more than what he thinks. Writing that settles for voluptuous, only half-substantiated opinion-making, however, does break the rules.
• This past Tuesday  an event at UCLA’s Hammer Museum dealt with death in a way that was less discriminating than blogger Catherine Wagley would have liked. The Museum joined forces with PEN USA to present a reading titled, “I Am Neda.” The event promised to bring together dissident poets and to celebrate freedom fighters in Iran. I went because, like so many others, I found the video of Neda Agha-Soltan, the unknown makers of which just received a George Polk Award for Videography, emotionally searing. I also went because the Neda phenomenon seems so heavily visual that I wanted to see how poetry could claim her image….READ more here.
• What better way to soundtrack an art and pop culture event than to invite an in-tune-with-pop-culture artist to curate a selection of their favorite music? Check out Culture Wars: Trivial Tunes with Mary Heilmann and Mark your calendars: The next Culture Wars night is on Wednesday, March 24, at the 92YTribeca.
• Grand Canyon Journal 4: Critique as a Destruction of Joy…”CityCenter is the biggest thing to happen to art in Las Vegas since Steve Wynn put his finger through a Picasso. The mixed-use, residential, gambling, fine dining, clubbing, high-end retail, luxury hotel behemoth opened in December with the explosive fanfare usually reserved for the demolition of buildings in Vegas.”
• VIDEO EXCLUSIVE | William Kentridge’s “Return”; Shot in his Johannesburg studio in South Africa, William Kentridge reveals the process and unusual presentation of the video work Return — a component of the larger project (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo (2008) — which had its debut on the fire screen of Teatro La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy.
• Raiding, Mining and Resurrecting: Maurizo Cattelan at the Menil Collection
• Why art school? Why now? Why does it matter? | Art21 is seeking Graduate Student Writers for Open Enrollment

Maurizio Cattelan, "Untitled," 2003. © Maurizio Cattelan. Photo: George Hixson, Houston. Installation view, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX.

The current Maurizio Cattelan exhibition at The Menil Collection, Houston (February 12– August 15, 2010) marks the U.S. debut of recent large-scale works, site-specific installations, and four new works. Cattelan’s first solo show in this country since 2003 celebrates the artist’s return to sculpture after several years of publishing and curatorial work, including his 2002 co-founding of The Wrong Gallery in Chelsea, New York, his collaborations on Permanent Food (an occasional journal comprised of altered pages torn from other magazines) from 1996-2007, his co-editorship of Charley (a conceptual project and independent series on international contemporary artists) from 2002–present, and his curation of the Caribbean Biennial in 1999 and the Berlin Biennial in 2006. The notion of revisiting to give new life–suggested by Cattelan’s own turning back to his past artistic practice –is provocatively carried through the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Maurizio Cattelan: Is There Life Before Death? on a number of levels.

The exhibition consists of large-scale works first seen in Europe in 2007, along with recent sculptures, including works created in response to Cattelan’s site visits to the Menil that riff on the museum’s renowned Surrealist holdings. Organized by Franklin Sirmans, the Menil’s former Curator of Modern and Contemporary art, the exhibition juxtaposes a range of objects–mostly from the 1960s and 70s–that Cattelan, in collaboration with Sirmans, selected from the Menil’s large permanent collection. They are suggestively installed to create conversations with the artist’s own new and recent works. This installation strategy trips up the typical arrangement of a solo artist show—an arrangement that, more often than not, isolates the featured artist’s work from examples of artistic predecessors and contemporaries in order to foreground the sense of an internal, exclusively personal, development.

Rather than confining Cattelan’s artworks to a couple of galleries, the exhibition has examples of the artist’s works sprinkled throughout, even on the Menil’s main building. Some are buried in the intimate recesses of Antiquities and Surrealist galleries, others are more visibly displayed, including Cattelan’s Untitled (2003), depicting a “drummer boy,” which has been relocated from its usual position atop The Rachofsky House in Dallas to perch coyly upon the roof of the Menil’s Renzo Piano building.

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Shot in his Johannesburg studio in South Africa, William Kentridge reveals the process and unusual presentation of the video work Return — a component of the larger project (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo (2008) — which had its debut on the fire screen of Teatro La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy.

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

The traveling exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, February 24–May 17, 2010. Kentridge’s The Nose, a multimedia production of Shostakovich’s adaptation of Gogol’s story, debuts at The Metropolitan Opera in New York, March 5-25, 2010. Get a chance to hear the artist speak about his recent projects, in conversation with Paul Holdengraber, as part of the New York Public Library’s series of talks Live from the NYPL on March 12th.

Watch Kentridge’s new trailer for The Nose below.

William Kentridge 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: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: William Kentridge.
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CityCenter is the biggest thing to happen to art in Las Vegas since Steve Wynn put his finger through a Picasso. The mixed-use, residential, gambling, fine dining, clubbing, high-end retail, luxury hotel behemoth opened in December with the explosive fanfare usually reserved for the demolition of buildings in Vegas. CityCenter boasts a collection of fine art consisting of existing works and commissioned pieces by the likes of Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, Nancy Rubins, Donald Judd, Isa Genzken, Jack Goldstein, Tony Cragg, and Frank Stella. Like the attractions that shape the identity of every hotel on the Strip (the fountains at the Bellagio, the volcano at the Mirage, the Eiffel Tower at Paris, etc.), these works, installed throughout the interior and exterior of the massive development as opposed to a gallery space, are meant to create an ambience that will draw tourists, but also, in the case of CityCenter, tenants — to play, stay, and come back for more. But what does this context do to their status as art objects? How is a work of art’s relative autonomy impacted by its placement in a landscape of attraction? Conversely, what does the designation of these objects as art (a status denied the countless other unsigned attractions that pepper the CityCenter campus) lend to the new development? And if “starchitecture” is its other primary attraction, how does the artwork fare in relationship to the assemblage of buildings that comprise CityCenter?

Based on my recent visit to CityCenter (on my way to the Grand Canyon, which I assure you we’re headed back to in the next post), the short answer to the questions posed above is that the art doesn’t do very well. In fact, like David Copperfield’s Statue of Liberty, most of it disappears. The Judd woodblock prints that grace the wall above the escalators to the Aria Self Park Entrance Lobby probably could have gotten better service at the valet, the Stella seems to have been chosen for its formal similarity to the Mandarin Oriental hotel logo and, despite their immense scale, the mud wall-paintings by Richard Long are barely visible behind soaring curtains of glass. While, as evidenced by the video above, the whirling stainless steel Cragg sculptures get a lot less attention than the tornados of water designed by WET Design, the water feature design firm that also did the fountains at the Bellagio, because they are art objects, they inevitably seek more attention than the swirling, metal tree-columns inside the casino itself. Similarly, Maya Lin’s potentially dramatic Silver River, a representation of a section of the Colorado River (Grand Canyon, here we come) cast entirely in reclaimed silver, is nearly entirely reclaimed by the glass and steel supports it hangs in front of. This ambivalent position between anonymously blending in with the overall ambience and emerging as a star attraction is paradigmatic of the confusion that lies at the heart of what it means to place art work in Vegas and is perhaps why Sin City has had such bad luck with art.

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