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?

Mary Heilmann was a natural fit for our inaugural Culture Wars trivia event, and we were thrilled when she accepted our invitation to create a soundtrack for the evening. We really could not have asked for a better pairing. Culture Wars participants were treated to selections from Mary’s music collection—hand picked by Mary herself—as they entered the main stage at the 92YTribeca, and they were treated to more between scoring sessions during the halftime intermission and after the second half.

With Mary on hand at the trivia event, it seemed only fitting to create an entire music-themed “audio” round. Titled Personnel Changes, the round was inspired by the announcement of Jeffrey Deitch’s upcoming appointment as the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The questions involved 10 bands or musicians where a personnel change affected their musical output. Each question included a snippet of a song, and we asked the players to name the band or musician in question (for 1 point) and to briefly state the personnel change (for another point).

A video of the audio round from the January 28 event, along with Mary Heilmann’s playlist, is included below. Play along at home and let us know how you did!

Mark your calendars: The next Culture Wars night is on Wednesday, March 24, at the 92YTribeca.

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AFP/Getty Image.

I drove into a Westwood parking garage late on Monday and saw that the attendant had been crying. After an uneasy moment–I wasn’t sure where compassion and polite distance met in a situation like this–I asked, “Are you okay?”  It’s such a disingenuous question but it seems to work when you want to say, “I give a damn.” The attendant half-smiled and averted her eyes in a way that made me think she wouldn’t answer. When she handed me my change, however, she said, “My mother died.” I don’t know what I expected, but that wasn’t it. “No!” I exclaimed. “You shouldn’t even be here.” I wish I hadn’t said that.  How do I know where she should or shouldn’t have been? I don’t know anything about her or her pain. All I know is that, in general, death hurts.

Tuesday night, an event at UCLA’s Hammer Museum dealt with death in a way that was less discriminating than I 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.

The Neda video that went viral on June 20, 2009, showed a young woman, shot through the chest during a protest, dying with  renegade grace. When she fell, her legs bent and flopped tom-boyishly, seemingly disregarding the mores of a propriety-obsessed society, and her loosely-fisted hands slowly collapsed to frame her blood streaked face. All of this made her an easy symbol for freedom. She was also young and attractive, so her photograph translated well to signs and posters that started appearing in the days following her death. International correspondents began calling her “the face of a revolution” and the “voice of freedom.” She was an icon before anyone actually knew who she was or what she had been doing on the day she died.

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Jeff Koons, "Girl with Dolphin and Monkey" (The Whitney Museum of American Art 75th Anniversary Photography Portfolio), 2006. Courtesy Whitney Museum

The eerily small, closely watched world of New York art criticism experienced some infighting earlier this month, following the publication of February’s The Brooklyn Rail. “I think that there are some things you shouldn’t do, and promoting Jeff Koons is one of them,” wrote Rail editor John Yau, picking a fight with critic Jerry Saltz, who had championed Koons (featured in Season Five of Art:21) as “the emblematic artist of the decade” in New York Magazine’s end-of-the-00s issue. Saltz had also declared Koons’s work emblematic of America—it’s “crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized…” It’s this last part that Yau resented; he titled his editorial The Difference Between Saltz’s America and Mine. “In Saltz’s America,” he quipped, “Puppy is great public art and Tom Cruise is the good, handsome German with an eye patch, trying to save the world from Hitler.” Saltz retaliated via his Facebook page, calling Yau “dickish,” “incoherent,” “self-satisfied,” and “irrelevant.” It wasn’t a pretty moment for art writing.

Jerry Saltz. Courtesy Kevin Wick/Longview Photography.

John Yau, taken during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2003. Photo: Gloria Graham.

I care about what Yau and Saltz say — partly because I’m a writer, and knowing what other, more visible writers write is part of my job — but also because both of them have influenced me. Yau’s Corpse and Mirror gave me new entry into abstraction, while Saltz taught me that Charles Ray can be likable and that lush adjectives can be applied to austere conceptualism. A lot of other writers and artists care too. So much so that I’m noticeably late to comment on the Saltz-Yau tiff. Art21 contributor Hrag Vartanian “broke” the story; Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes spoke up for Yau; artist William Powhida invited the critics to debate at #class; C-Monster, art blogging’s straightest shooter, kept tabs on the squabble; poet Michael Leong wrote that Saltz hadn’t found “enough critical distance to say anything productive” (and received a retaliatory comment from Saltz). Some — Vartanian, Leong and Green in particular — did justice to the ethical problem Yau had with Saltz. But there’s another more frustrating ethical problem integral to all of this. This problem has little to do with either critic’s ultimate point. Those were actually reasonable: Saltz said that Koons embodied an era in American culture; Yau said Koons didn’t, and that saying so evidenced tunnel-vision. The problem has to do with how they went about arguing. Continue reading »

Margaret Kilgallen, Installation view at UCLA / Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 2000, Courtesy Deitch Projects, New York

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.

Also…. If you are a K-5 art educator and are interested in sharing how you work with contemporary art in your classroom, please e-mail me at: joe@art21.org so we can talk! I will be putting together a column in April focusing on the variety of ways elementary teachers approach working with contemporary art in their classrooms.

Jeff Martin

When I spoke to Jeff Martin for the first time last year, one of the first things he told me was that he wasn’t “a real art conservator.” Many professionals in my field work very hard to identify themselves as art conservators, so to have someone deny it all together struck me as a bit funny, and rather accurate. Often the things I do at the IMA leave me wondering if I too am a “real conservator,” but I think many of us have come to realize that a narrowly defined role of a conservator is not as useful as a more broadly defined one, especially when it comes to caring for art in the twenty-first century.

Jeff Martin took an indirect route to becoming a conservator (real or otherwise). He was in the first graduating class of NYU’s MA program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, where the coursework includes time-based art conservation. Before NYU, he worked as an archival footage researcher and television writer/producer. He now works as an independent conservator and archivist, with clients including the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.

Jeff organized the upcoming colloquium “Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art,” which is co-sponsored by the Hirshhorn and the Lunder Conservation Center; it will take place at the Smithsonian on March 17 and 18. Associated with the colloquium are two evening talks that are are free and open to the public:

• Keynote address by John Hanhardt, Senior Curator for Media Arts and Nam June Paik Media Arts Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, March 17th at 7 pm in the Ring Auditorium at the Hirshhorn
• Meet the Artist: talk by John Gerrard, March 18 at 7pm in the Ring Auditorium at the Hirshhorn

Richard McCoy: Will you start by defining Time-Based Art?

Jeff Martin: I have to answer that question by talking about why I don’t love the term, at least for the kind of work we’re discussing. If we’re talking about works that unfold over time—wouldn’t an Alexander Calder mobile fall in that category? It can’t be experienced properly unless it’s seen as it moves over a period of time. For that matter, the Hirshhorn had a major retrospective of Anne Truitt’s work recently. One thing that struck me was a wall text that talked about the necessity of viewing her sculptures from all sides in order to really understand them. You couldn’t get the full impact of the pieces unless you walked around them to see how the colors changed and unfolded as your perspective changed. If that’s not “time-based,” I don’t know what is.

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Paul McCarthy, "Paula Jones," 2007. Fiberglass, 82 x 57 1/2 x 107 inches. via Art Daily.org

This President’s Day roundup begins with a hotly debated exhibition and ends with a divine duo:

• The New Museum has announced the details of their exhibition Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Curated by Season 5 artist Jeff Koons, this will be the first showing of the Athens-based collection in the United States. This will also be the first exhibition curated by Koons, whose early work is said to have inspired the evolution of the Dakis Joannou collection. Koons has selected over 100 works by 50 international artists spanning several generations, including Matthew Barney (Season 1), Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, (all Season 2), Mike Kelley (Season 3), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Paul McCarthy (Season 5), David Altmejd, Nathalie Djurberg, Robert Gober, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Christiana Soulou, Jannis Varelas, and Andro Wekua, among others. The title of the exhibition alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. “Skin and fruit,” according to the press release, “evoke the essential tensions between interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume.” The show will feature one work by Koons — One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) — the first major artwork that Dakis Joannou acquired. Skin Fruit opens March 3.

• Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), Cai Guo-Qiang, Hiroshi Sugimoto (both Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) will participate in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia’s largest contemporary visual art event. Cai’s installation Inopportune: Stage One (2004), nine cars exploding and rotating in space, will dominate Cockatoo Island’s Turbine Hall. McCarthy will premiere his sound and sculpture installation Ship of Fools #2 (2010) at Pier 2/3. And Bourgeois will have a series of painted bronze sculptures on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artistic director David Elliott says: “The aim of this Biennale is to bring together work from diverse cultures, at the same time, on the equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other.” The 17th Biennale of Sydney runs May 12 – August 1, 2010. Read more about the event in the Brisbane Times.

• Works by Season 5 artists Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari are on view in the exhibition Pop Art at the Havana Fine Arts Museum in Cuba. According to the Havana Times, the traveling exhibition (organized by Spain’s State Society for Foreign Cultural Action and the Valencian Institute of Modern Art) features nearly sixty works made by American and Spanish artists in the style/period of pop art. Works by John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, and James Rosenquist hang alongside works by Eduardo Arroyo, Equipo Cronica, Juan Genoves, Equipo Realidad, Josep Renau, Manuel Saez, Antonio Saura, Juan Antonio Toledo, and others. Pop Art continues through March 30.

• On February 22, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar will present his most recent short film Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini) (2009) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A tribute to the Italian filmmaker, intellectual, poet, critic, and journalist Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film incorporates footage from Pasolini’s films and rare interviews conducted prior to his sudden and mysterious death in 1975. The title refers to Pasolini’s own poem, Le Ceneri di Gramsci, itself a eulogy to the Italian left-wing intellectual Antonio Gramsci. In a separate unrelated event, Jaar will lecture in the Remis Auditorium of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on February 17. Both programs begin at 7pm.

• February is the last month that the Fundred Dollar Bill project by Season 1 artist Mel Chin will be at Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). In addition to regular museum hours, ASUAM is holding three free events to give the public a final chance to contribute: On February 9, the museum will screen Chin’s award-winning animated film 9-11/9-11: A Tale of Two Cities, A Tragedy of Two Times. February 16, the Phoenix band Peachcake will give a free concert following a screening of Chin’s 2009 interview with Planet Awesome. February 25, an armored truck will pick up ASUAM’s Fundreds — free music and other festivities will lead up to its arrival. Read more about the Fundred Dollar Bill project in Huffington Post; Utah People’s Post; and The Tartan.

• On February 17 at 6:30pm, Roni Horn (Season 3) will be in conversation with John Waters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Horn’s traveling retrospective exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn opens at the ICA on February 19 and continues through June 13.

When I was a kid, Alice Cooper taught me everything I needed to know about art. So, ethics in art? For the most part I’m against it, but certain lines can be drawn. Tom Otterness shooting a dog? Not OK. Painting about Tom Otterness shooting a dog? OK. Probably not very interesting, but OK. Letting every single thought and feeling -  no matter its depravity or provenance – through the floodgates is an essential ingredient in the making and viewing of art. An artist needs to have his or her id wide open and a viewer has to be similarly receptive. This means that some weird, unregulated dirt is going to find its way into the carburetor occasionally. Sometimes the final audience will see the evidence (every Mayhem record); sometimes it might be a little more hidden (every Richter painting).

Salvador Dalí, "First Cylindric Crono-Hologram. Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain," 1973

Alice Cooper staggered onto the scene huffing the exhaust of the hippie vans. Peace was over. It might have been showbiz, but people were not happy with the ethics of singing about dead babies, junkie shoe salesmen, black magic, serial killers, necrophilia and confused 18-year-olds. That Alice was legitimized by hit records and a Salvador Dalí collaboration spoke to the dark truths he had hit upon underneath all the glitz and stage antics. Things are messy. Lines are always blurred, whether we like it or not. In our daily lives, we have the luxury of rejecting that notion. Artists — if they are going to speak the truth — do not. So, years later, it’s Alice I blame for my love of Richter’s Baader-Meinhof cycle of paintings and all things Black Metal.

Gerhard Richter, "Uncle Rudi (Onkel Rudi)," 1965

Gerhard Richter’s work is all about failure and decay. Whether it’s human failure or the shortcomings of painting, some kind of bad gravity is always in full effect in the artist’s work. At its most beautiful, I still feel its menace. Conversely, at its most overtly menacing, I can see the beauty. In what is arguably considered one of Richter’s masterpiece series, the Baader-Meinhof cycle, the lines of ethics get even more blurry. The striking portrait of Uncle Rudi (1965) is a portrait of the artist’s uncle in his SS uniform. It’s difficult to look at the painting without seeing the mastery in Richter’s skills and his willingness to stare so directly into the history of his family and country. Uncle Rudi possesses clear internal poles of conflict (Nazis bad. Family good.). The Baader-Meinhof paintings crank up the blur because of the conflicted feelings of the painter’s fellow citizens and the murky details surrounding the death of Ulrike Meinhof. With this series, even from the greatest distance, we are immersed in gray.

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“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.”  – John de Menil

On the evening of Friday, February 5, the director of the Menil Collection, Joseph Helfenstein, and the Menil’s former curator of modern and contemporary art and new chief curator of contemporary art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Franklin Sirmans, hosted a twenty-first century conversation about the Menil’s installation of twentieth century art. Discussing the philosophy informing the arrangement of the twentieth-century galleries, the two gave an overview of their choices while highlighting the significant divergence of the Menil’s collecting and exhibition strategies from other art institutions, like MoMA, that are committed to an encyclopedic overview and didactic presentation of the history of modernism.

The evening began in the entrance room of the Renzo Piano designed building (1982–86) where the dark wood floors, diffused lighting, and the surrounding park-like setting of the Menil offered a relaxed, contemplative environment for the approximately 100 visitors. After a brief introduction, the two led the visitors into the galleries where the artworks are, as Helfenstein pointed out, exhibited without the typical barriers that tend to prescribe the viewing experience and ensure that viewers never come too dangerously close to the art. Through a lack of didactic wall panels, docent tours, and audio guides, the institutional philosophy of the Menil Collection aims to allow its art objects to take the lead and withhold a sense of a single narrative direction. Helfenstein and Sirmans discussed how specific juxtapositions of twentieth-century and contemporary works–such as those by René Magritte and Robert Gober–generate visual and intellectual dialogues without making explicit connections or foregrounding any single concept.

Unlike MoMA, the Menil Collection is a considerably more intimate space to encounter modern and contemporary art and unlike that much larger institution, the Menil also has limited holdings in classical European modernism, specifically Cubism. Helfenstein frames these differences in terms of positive potentialities, drawing attention to the Menil’s exceptional examples of two alternative lineages, each of which weaves a significant path through modernism’s history. The first is a trend toward spiritual abstraction—represented in works by Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, and Bryce Marsden, among others. This impulse extends beyond the displays in the Piano building to the Rothko Chapel, resonates in the stunning Dan Flavin installation at Richmond Hall, and reverberates with the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. The second alternative Helfenstein identifies is what he refers to as figurative Surrealism, a tendency he aligns with a more political, activist impulse. This trend is reflected not only in the Menil’s rich holdings of Surrealism and non-Western art–specifically the arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Pacific Northwest coast–from which Surrealism drew considerable inspiration, but also in the examples of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Robert Gober.

The current exhibition of the work of Maurizio Cattelan (February 12– August 15, 2010) weaves its own unique way in and out of this Surrealist narrative, reflecting upon the Menil’s holdings, perhaps unraveling some preconceptions about several well-known works, and opening up multi-directional dialogues with other works in the Collection. In the next post, I will discuss this exhibition in relation to these issues.

Bronzino: Random!

It’s good, useless fun to pre-emptively define the times you live in. Nicholas Bourriaud’s confusingly limned term “Altermodern,” used to define works in last year’s Tate Triennial and, by extension, contemporary society as a whole, dropped out of parlance as soon as we got used to its pronunciation. Charles Saatchi’s 1999 show, New Neurotic Realism – a compendium of mainly loose-limbed realist painting, including Cecily Brown, Martin Moloney, and Dexter Dalwood – was an unsuccessful attempt at drawing the line under the YBAs. Even Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s “Neo-Dada” back in the late-50s had a lame-duck ring about it. It’s not only our era that has found its unique identity nigh-impossible to define, although the teeth-grinding muddling over “aughts” and “aughties,” “naughts” and “naughties” is perhaps the one thing that is definitively of our time: an anxiety over what our era is actually defined by. (Imagine a “naughts” or “naughties” theme party – well, you won’t have to for long – and you get the picture). Art writers suffer from pre-emptive epochal-definition disorder almost as much as music writers do (remember the New Wave of New Wave? No?), but something particular has entered the argument recently — an attempt to define today’s art in reference to the art of the past, in particular, to the art of Mannerism.

Mannerism is the only pre-Impressionist “movement” that’s meant as an insult. Loosely defined as the stretch of time between the summit of the High Renaissance and the beginnings of the Baroque in the late 1500s, it describes an art of high style (“maniera,” in Italian) and convoluted reference best exemplified in the paintings of Pontormo, Bronzino, and Parmigianino, the sculptures of Giambologna and Cellini, and the buildings of Michaelangelo and Giulio Romano. Its origins as a term are contested, but it seems to have first been used in the modern sense by 17^th century theorist Gianpietro Bellori. As John Shearman summarizes it, for Bellori, mannerism “was an ideal born in the artist’s fantasy and based not upon reality but upon pratica: stylistic convention and technical expertise.” A Mannerist audience might bust a gut at Romano’s wonky architraves at the Palazzo del Te, or titter and blush at Bronzino’s filthy Venus and Cupid, or fawn admiringly over Cellini’s camp-as-Christmas salt cellar. It’s an art aimed squarely at Renaissance cognoscenti, full of winking allusion and pictorial trickery. Picture a cross between Raphael and David Copperfield and you’ve more or less got it.

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Film still from Věra Chytilová's "Daisies" (1966), SOURCE: The Pinnocchio Theory (blog)

Hungry?

• FLASHPOINTS: How does art respond to and redefine the natural world? Dan Phillips makes houses and asks the question, what is “folk”? According to Leanne Gilberstein in  her post,  Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. 2 Phillips effectively demythologizes ideas of “the folk” that have problematically been associated specific notions of  cultural origins… accordingly  American history has used these notions to construct and solidify perceptions of certain groups (often black people and poor whites) by relegating them to an ingrained, natural condition of unchanging “folkhood.” How does Phillips make “use of the discards of the cultural mainstream and the privileging of a taste for making do rather than making perfect…?” Is Phillip’s project merely nostalgic or is his economically minded project helping to pave the way for an optimistic future in  ‘forward thinking’ production?
• Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup. (I myself am heading to MIT this week to check out Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde…!)
• Art classrooms can be noisy places. But hey, if you want a student’s attention and full-force effort why not give them A Little Heads Up about your intentions for the day’s lesson plan. Perhaps they’ll respect you for it as this knowledge has the ability to give students a particular sense of purpose. According to Joe Fusaro in this weeks addition of Teaching With Contemporary Art it’s worth a shot.
• Are you a pack rat? Lots of artists are. Check out this weeks VIDEO EXCLUSIVE:  John Baldessari | Recycling Images
• Karen Schmeer, the Maysles Brothers & Art Doc Screenings in NYC: Nick Ravich, Art21′s Director of Production pays respect to a very important important member of the independent documentary community, Karen Schmeer; Production Coordinator Ian Forster, recently got the chance to shoot at the big beautiful exhibit of Gabriel Orozco’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Ravich highly recommends some select screenings of documentary films to see in NYC. But never fear non-New Yorkers and those who are saving extra cash by not attending as many out of home screenings this year…. Ravich promises a future column detailing some online-based art documentary viewing options! (YES!)