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While sifting through boxes of film stills in his Santa Monica studio, artist John Baldessari talks about being a pack rat and discusses his attitude towards appropriating images.

Synthesizing photomontage, painting, and language, Baldessari’s deadpan visual juxtapositions equate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge meaning. He upends commonly held expectations of how images function, often by drawing the viewer’s attention to minor details, absences, or the spaces between things.

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

Baldessari’s work can currently be seen at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in the retrospective titled Pure Beauty (through April 25). The exhibition later travels to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (June 2010) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (October 2010).

VIDEO | Producer: 
Wesley Miller & 
Nick Ravich

. Interview: 
Susan Sollins

. Camera: 
Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & 
Paulo Padilha. 

Artwork Courtesy: 
John Baldessari.

Before I do anything, I want to mention the very sad passing of an important member of the independent documentary community, Karen Schmeer. Karen was killed in a hit and run accident in New York’s Upper West side almost two weeks ago.  Karen was an exceptionally talented editor with credits including Sergio (2009), Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005), and filmmaker Errol Morris’s Fog of War (2003), and Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control (1997.)  But more importantly, she was a friend to me and many others both in and out the production world. She will be greatly, greatly missed.

Karen Schmeer. Photo: Garret Savage.

Lots to cover but let me start with another Art21 Uncut first. The in-house Art21 production team, led by our newest member, 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. So Ian and I spent a couple of quiet morning hours shooting Mobile Matrix – spectacularly suspended in the MoMA atrium – La DS, and a whole lot of other well-known and not quite so well-known Orozco works. For me, the installation of Working Tables, in the back area of the top floor gallery, was a highlight: the sheer density and variety of objects, many extremely disparate, yet all somehow connected. Below is a little uncut taste of some of the footage we shot.

Art21 Uncut: Gabriel Orozco at MoMA from Art21 on Vimeo.

Next up is something I’ve been hoping to do since I inaugurated this column and, given the current embarrassment of riches, have no choice but to mention. And that’s talking about the wealth of art documentary viewing opportunities in New York.

First up is the documentary presenting organization, Stranger Than Fiction. Screening at the IFC Center in New York for the past five years, Stranger than Fiction, in the words of its website, “presents an eclectic mix of documentaries – sneak previews and lost classics – followed by discussions with the filmmakers and post-show receptions.” Though not exclusively devoted to screening arts documentaries, it has shown a number of gems from the genre over the years. In mid-January, I caught a showing of the Maysles Brothers’ – and I’m sorry but the epithet truly works here – cinema vérité classic, Running Fence (1978), covering the epic struggle to install Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence public artwork in Sonoma and Marin Counties, California in 1976.

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John Baldessari, Two-Person Fight (One Orange): With Spectator, 2004 Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Art classrooms are often noisy places. In college they sometimes make a u-turn and become silent morgues where students wait patiently in cold studios for individual crits, but in general, art classrooms are full of activity. Because our classes have such a infectious energy many teachers are often in the position of riding a “wave” of work but putting real conversation and meaning-making on the back burner. Teachers can get caught making excuses about why their students “can’t have a conversation” or “won’t be quiet”, and consequently plan lessons that require extremely quick instructions that follow with a period of “work”- there’s no reflection, no connections, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

This is a recipe for disaster.

The most effective classrooms I have had the pleasure to visit, teach in, or simply learn about have common elements that include, but aren’t limited to:

• Varieties of teaching strategies that consider multiple learning styles
• Changes in rhythm and tempo of lessons
• Big questions and/or ideas that students are working with
• Effective and simple classroom management techniques- nothing fancy

Part of what makes students ready to discuss works of art, participate in partner work, or break their routine in any way involves something that all of us appreciate- a little heads-up.

For example, when students know in advance that the next session will involve art making AND a partnered conversation and sharing, they are more prepared to do so next time vs. being surprised and complaining. We can avoid a few of the “Why do we have to read?” comments if we prep students for when and why we’re reading in advance. Being up front about our planning and next steps is in itself a classroom management technique and a way to more effectively facilitate students talking with one another about questions and ideas that surface in contemporary art. A little heads-up can go a long way.

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.

Dan Phillips, "Chateau," 2008. Courtesy Phoenix Commotion.

In my estimation, Phoenix Commotion’s ongoing project (founded around 1998 by Dan Phillips) does much more than simply supply a university town with a rich dose of local color. While Phillips and his crew are building upon traditions of southern vernacular art, which have made significant and often under-acknowledged contributions to the evolution of American art—perhaps most-recognizably through the work of Texas-native Robert Rauschenberg—their project simultaneously engages with issues enjoying currency in contemporary art discourse. Most notably, this involves the impetus to devote one’s art, including one’s artistic process and not just the finished project, to the goal of raising an ethical awareness of our interconnectedness to each other and to the natural world.

Phillips’s project, which decades ago may have simply been understood as an example of “outsider” art and the product of some “place apart” (psychologically, culturally, and geographically), is today implicated in an ongoing and evolving international debate. The members of the Commotion do not simply belong to a cultural group entirely removed from the reach of influences acting on other contemporary artists whose similarly-minded, if aesthetically-divergent projects, have received critical attention, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land Foundation (begun 1998), Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West and A-Z East (West begun 1999 and East begun 1994), or Tyree Guyton’s The Heidelberg Project (begun 1987). The Phoenix Commotion shares with these projects an exploration of eco-friendly, low-cost solutions to design problems, and the commitment of one’s art to transforming local social conditions. But while Phillips has and continues to spread the philosophy of the Phoenix Commotion near and far, and while his project resonates with these other contemporary examples, the end products of his creative labors remain rooted in his homes of Huntsville. The Commotion’s ideas and methods may circulate in regional, national, and international circuits, but their final artworks stay resolutely put in a place that, in the end, is somewhat removed yet also intimately connected.

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"The Misfits of Modern Agribusiness", SVF Foundation Newport, RI; NY Times Slideshow, January 5, 2010

This week What’s Cookin is sent to you directly from Newport, RI  an eclectic little city on the Atlantic coast. Home to some of the best clam chowder and crab cakes I’ve ever eaten, everything seems to be within walking distance including a farm of rare animal breeds, mansions preserved from the Gilded Age, the infamous mystery tower, and the country’s first lending library, the Redwood...I’m always hungry to learn more, meanwhile here’s what’s been happening at Art21:

• It’s a mix-tape tape that flirts with Caribbean Kitsch, romance and hushed Rothko reverence, glitter(!), paint and fesis. Curate your mind around Ben Street’s letter on Chris Ofili’s retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. It sounds like an exhibition not to be missed.
• Welcom Leanne Gilbertson, the latest in the Art21 Guestblogosphere! A teacher at the Sam Houston State University  she is also preparing a manuscript that explores the relationships between the emergence, in the 1960s, of both feminist and queer consciousnesses, and the intermedia artistic experimentation occurring at both Warhol’s Factory and Judson Memorial Church.
• FLASHPOINTS: How does art respond to and define the natural world? For the past twelve years, Dan Phillips and members of the Commotion, including his wife Marsha, have been committed to building affordable and visually-distinctive housing out of largely post-consumption building leftovers, waste from the fabrication of industrialized materials (including “landscape timbers,” a plywood by-product), and other free or discarded materials.
• Nicole Rounds Them UP!  You’ll read about two anniversary exhibitions, 6,000 shapes upstate, masterworks in the Midwest, some road trip souvenirs, a whole lotta prints, and a sale you won’t want to miss.
• Teaching with Contemporary Art: Art 21 has ventured into the land of teacher institutes. Joe Fusaro reflects on the importance of  ‘teaching with ideas’ and introduces Year 2 of the Art21 Educators summer institute will run from July 7-14, 2010 and is now accepting applications from pairs of teachers. Click here for more information and to download an application!
• Grand Canyon Journal 3:  the Painter of Video to Life. Has there ever been such an elegant dramatization of the power of illusion as David Copperfield’s “The Painter”? Art and magic share the stage (which strangely recalls both David Letterman’s set and Monica’s apartment from Friends) in a trick that only gently conflates the initial discomfort of Harold and Maude with Copperfield’s problems with the law…
• If You Can Remember the ’60′s You Weren’t There. “When I moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles five years ago, I thought I was done living in a town that was devoted to perpetually remembering the ’60s. But I soon discovered that Los Angeles also carries a mega-torch for that transformative decade.” Lily Simonson thinks continues to inspire the Los Angeles as a California culural center in relationship to the Ferus Gallery and the Samuel Freeman Gallery.
• Art21 Launches the next Flash Points topic, The Ethics of Art. Ethics are defined as “a system of moral principles” which constantly factor into the choices we make. However, these decisions can become confused, making this system of principles more gray than black and white, especially when competing priorities are at work. Over the next two months, we’ll explore the relationship of ethics in art from a variety of perspectives and question the role that they should — or shouldn’t — play.
• The Dust Settles After the First Culture Wars. On January 28, Art21 and 92YTribeca piloted a program called Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21. The night began with a music play list created by artist Mary Heilmann (Season 5).
• VIDEO EXCLUSIVE — Julie Mehretu | Workday. Filmed in her Berlin studio, Julie Mehretu discusses the ups and downs of her daily studio practice. Mehretu is shown working on the painting Middle Grey (2007-2009), one work in a suite of seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, which travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York later this year (May 14 – October 6, 2010).

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Filmed in her Berlin studio, Julie Mehretu discusses the ups and downs of her daily studio practice. Mehretu is shown working on the painting Middle Grey (2007-2009), one work in a suite of seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, which travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York later this year (May 14 – October 6, 2010).

Mehretu’s paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings’ wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu’s delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.

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

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Ian Serfontein. Sound: Paul Stadden. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Julie Mehretu.

On January 28, Art21 and 92YTribeca piloted a program called Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21. The night began with a music play list created by artist Mary Heilmann (Season 5). By 6:30pm all 18 teams were registered, seated with beers in hand, and ready for the main event.  In addition to the general public forming teams, there were also teams representing institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, Cambridge University Press, Bomb Magazine, and 20X200.

Culture Wars was comprised of four rounds, ten questions per round. Every round had a different theme including; Ripped from the Headlines devoted to questions about current events in the art world, Personnel Changes was an audio round of selected song clips that represented a sonic shift because a personnel change (loosely inspired by a newly appointed director of LA MOCA), Art and the City explored the geography of NYC through public art, and finally the Best and Worst of the Naughts which was a decade of art, music, and film in review. For those of you unable to attend the first Culture Wars, the next event is set for March 24, 2010 at the 92Y Tribeca, so mark your calendars!  We also captured some rough footage with a small pocket video camera to give a sense of the evening.

Art21 Culture Wars: An Introduction from Art21 on Vimeo.

Perhaps this selected twitter feed is a better document to give you a sense of the event and the crowd.

6:46 PM    lisa_hoang I’m at Culture Wars Art21 – 92YTribeca w/ @thatwaszen.

6:55 PM    thatwaszen http://twitpic.com/1084fd – Great crowd at @art21′s #culturewars at the 92Y (via @thatwaszen)

7:33 PM    VAJIAJIA Team Guggenheim getting butts kicked at @Art21 Culture Wars at 92Y Tribeca. Hoping to make a comeback in non-audio trivia. Continue reading »

Gordon Matta-Clark, "Bingo," 1974. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Fund, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest Fund, and the Enid A. Haupt Fund, 2004. Installation photography © Francois Robert, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Gordon Matta-Clark works © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Today we launch the next Flash Points topic, The Ethics of Art. Ethics are defined as “a system of moral principles” which constantly factor into the choices we make. However, these decisions can become confused, making this system of principles more gray than black and white, especially when competing priorities are at work. Over the next two months, we’ll explore the relationship of ethics in art from a variety of perspectives and question the role that they should — or shouldn’t — play.

In the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark took a critical stance against the Hooker Chemical Company with his work Bingo, which highlighted the unethical — and as a result, dangerous — decisions they made in the community of Love Canal, New York. Throughout this topic, we’ll feature artists who make this ethical debate a focus in their work, from artists who question the role of the institution, such as Hans Haacke or Marcel Broodthaers, to artists like Alfredo Jaar, who examines the disparity between an oil-rich government and a poverty-stricken populace in his work Muxima.

Ann Hamilton. "Accountings," Jan. 22 - April 5, 1992 (installation view, Henry Art Gallery). Steel tokens, soot, steel, glass, cast wax heads, canaries. Photo: Richard Nicol.

Ethical decisions also factor into the artistic process. Does a photographer who sells a portrait owe anything, financially or psychologically, to the work’s subject? What kind of ownership does an artist have over reproduced images of his or her work? We’ll also look at the discussions taking place around the use of animals in art, such as the range of responses — from acclaim to criticism — received during Ann Hamilton’s exhibition Accountings (which included live canaries), or the severe case of Tom Otterness shooting a dog for his art (an act for which he has since apologized). Ethical issues can even come into play after an artist’s death, especially in the handling the artist’s estate and the management of his or her legacy.

Controversies and arguments abound as ethical decisions, or the lack thereof, play a role in institutional practice. With the ever-shrinking gap between commerce and culture, the prioritization of good business over public service creates an increasingly blurry set of ethical guidelines. Collector-based exhibitions, conflicts of interest, deaccessioning practices…do museums have a responsibility to their public? And if so, is this a part of institutional culture and is it being taught in today’s museum studies programs?

Marcel Broodthaers, "Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Financière (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, Financial Section)," 1970-1971. Gold bar stamped with an eagle. Courtesy Galerie Beaumont, Luxembourg. Photo: J. Romero, courtesy Maria Gilissen.

Here are a few of the questions we’ll be addressing over the coming weeks. We’d love to hear your thoughts, and any ideas you have for additional sub-topics, in the comments below:

• How do ethics factor into institutional practice?
• How do artists address ethical issues in their work?
• What kind of ethical decisions are made during the artistic process?
• Are ethics emphasized in art education today?
• Must art be ethical?

Ed Ruscha, "The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire," 1968, oil on canvas. Courtesy edruscha.com.

When I moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles five years ago, I thought I was done living in a town that was devoted to perpetually remembering the ’60s. But I soon discovered that Los Angeles also carries a mega-torch for that transformative decade. It’s easy to see why that era is appealing and continually inspiring these California cultural centers, respectively—it was during the 1960s that Berkeley distinguished itself as a hub of counter-cultural development and progressive action; meanwhile Los Angeles finally began to transcend its reputation as a vapid entertainment factory and, peeking out from under New York’s shadow, started to develop into prominent epicenter of contemporary art.

In her latest post, my co-columnist Catherine Wagley recounted how, during a recent panel discussion at LACMA, a young man asked what he should “take from” from art produced before his time. It just so happens that LACMA has good news for those of us who agree with Catherine’s conclusion that younger generations should make the most of things and “take as much as [they] possibly can” from the art of previous generations. This week, the 1960s art world became even easier to remember for those of us who weren’t really there (and even those of us who were). Two days before Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s slick Kindle rival, LACMA announced the creation of an online Reading Room–a virtual space in which the museum will present digital versions of LACMA’s publications. While the virtual Reading Room will eventually include more current books, their inaugural collection is exclusively comprised of out-of-print publications that focus on the Los Angeles art scene during the late 1960s (and late 1950s).  Now, the iPad Generation can virtually experience catalogues from ten seminal exhibitions including Six Painters and the Object, Six More, Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties, and Late Fifties at the Ferus.

Ed Moses, John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, and Irving Blum, 1959. Claxton Photo, courtesy ferusgallery.com.

Speaking of which, the Ferus Gallery, which exhibited almost all of the artists currently featured in LACMA’s Reading Room, has been enjoying a major revival. Last weekend, in conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary (yet another new LA Art Fair, this time held at the Pacific Design Center), New York dealers Tim Nye and Franklin Parrasch mounted an exhibition entitled Ferus Gallery: Greatest Hits Volume I, at the exact site of the original Ferus storefront gallery space at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, which has served as a tailor shop in the intervening decades. The exhibition featured Ferus veterans John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Jay DeFeo, Llyn Foulkes, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Roy Lictenstein, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. Word on the street is that Nye and Parrasch may take the show on the road, reprising it at The Armory Show this Spring.

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