Ryan Trecartin, "K-Corea INC. K (Section A)," 2009. HD Video, 31 minutes, 20 seconds. Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.

In September of last year, Kelly Klaasmeyer, the Houston art critic and Glasstire.com editor, made a pretty deft observation. Writing for the Houston Press, she noted that, “Internet content is the ‘found object’ of the 21st century.” And rightly so. While the web will almost certainly be used as a medium for decades to come, its cultural influence may inevitably become more visible and more pervasive than invoking the Internet itself. What kind of work can we expect to see from generations of young artists breastfed on social networking sites, webisodes, pornography, and video blogging?

Artists like Ryan Trecartin and Ivan Lozano might have the answer. The chaotic and gender-bending characters in Trecartin’s films use a unique vernacular of hyperglobalization consumer-speak, and his work—often jarring and non-linear—effectively captures the extent to which the web has become embedded in our lives. His videos are a complete mind-fuck and just as disturbing to watch as they are captivating.

Artists like Ivan Lozano are using the web not as inspiration, but as source material. His 2007 video, 21st Century Machines: A Technodrama for Future Generations, uses found footage from peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to depict a star-crossed gay cyborg love affair soured by technological incompatibility. Works like these are precisely what Klaasmeyer is describing, and they point to a seemingly immeasurable landscape of artistic possibilities.

Continue reading »

Thanks to Nettrice Gaskins for her series of scintillating posts on the wonders and complexities of art and community in Second Life. Follow her adventures back on her own site here.

Up next is Evan J. Garza. A native of Houston, TX (b. 1982), Evan is Editor-at-Large for New American Paintings and Curator at Villa Victoria Center for the Arts in Bostonʼs South End. He is a contributing writer and critic for ART PAPERS and Art Lies, and was the weekly “Museums + Galleries” columnist for The Boston Phoenix from 2008 – 2009. In January 2010, he was the inaugural curator for a new annual series of guest-curated exhibitions at the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) and accepted an invitation to join New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) as an independent curator. He has organized several exhibitions nationally and was recently selected as a finalist for the inaugural Art Writing Workshop, a collaboration between the International Association of Art Critics/USA Section (AICA/USA) and Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. He earned his B.A. from the University of Houston.

DOWNLOAD VIA ITUNES | SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS

SUPPORT ART21: The countdown is on…there are 85 days left to join the 100 x 100 Exclusive campaign. In 15 days we’ve received 11 donations. Don’t slow down! For the first 7 days we received a donation a day. For as little as $1, you can stand up and be counted as part of Art21′s fan base. Your participation helps underwrite the next 100 videos and your name will be listed on our website as a 100 x 100 Exclusive member. And now without further ado, today’s video:

Episode #103: Beryl Korot describes the impetus behind the innovative 1970s publication Radical Software, elucidating the history of video in art and the impact of mass media on society. Emerging from an independent video community that included media visionaries such as Marshall McLuhan and groups such as Televisionaries, Videofreex, People’s Video Theater, and Global Village, the first issue of Radical Software debuted in Spring of 1970 as a publication by the Raindance Corporation. Beryl Korot and Phyllis Segura (Gershuny) acted as Editors, while Michael Shamburg served as Publisher with Ira Schneider as co-Originator. Early contributors included Nam June Paik, Buckminster Fuller, Ant Farm, Frank Gillette, and Paul Ryan, among others. After eleven issues, Radical Software ceased publication in the Spring of 1974 and is now an invaluable time capsule of an era. This video is published on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the first issue.

An early video-art pioneer and an internationally exhibited artist, Beryl Korot’s multiple-channel (and multiple-monitor) video installation works explored the relationship between programming tools as diverse as the technology of the loom and multiple-channel video. For most of the 1980s, Korot concentrated on a series of paintings that were based on a language she created that was an analogue to the Latin alphabet. Drawing on her earlier interest in weaving and video as related technologies, she made most of these paintings on hand-woven and traditional linen canvas. More recently, she has collaborated with her husband, the composer Steve Reich, on Three Tales, a documentary digital video opera in three acts that explores the way technology creates and frames our experience.

The exhibition Beryl Korot: Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010 opens at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum on June 27th. The exhibition presents her latest body of work as well as the 5 channel weaving/video installation Text and Commentary which premiered at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977.

Beryl Korot created the opening segment, featuring actress S. Epatha Merkerson, in the Season 1 (2005) episode Spirituality of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the video online via Hulu.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Archival Material Courtesy: Beryl Korot & the Daniel Langlois Foundation of Montreal. Special Thanks: Davidson Gigliotti & Ira Schneider.

"Through the Virtual Looking Glass," UMB Harbor Gallery USA and Pirats Art Gallery in Second Life.

I like using the word ‘totality’ as in the ‘totality of one’s surroundings.’  Self provides the essentials of our internal existence  and environment is the external display of all that.  The environment presents our existence as individuals to others.  Through Web 2.0, the conceptual platform that facilitates creativity, information sharing, and, most important, collaboration, we have been able to extend the material or real environment.  Art in virtual 3D worlds implement new possibilities for environments that are perceived and accessible from a unique set of dimensions.  Each aesthetic-technological dimension has been used as a basis for artistic experimentation here except for one.  Georg Janick AKA Dr. Gary Zabel writes,

Environment fluidity is to the external virtual world what the protean character of identity is to the internal sphere. In Second Life, for example, the environment is constructed from graphical primitives and scripts that can be altered very rapidly. Constancy of environment is the exception rather than the norm. It is in the virtual world that Marx’s famous observation about capitalist modernity first reaches fruition: All that is solid melts into air.

When I began writing my first post last week I knew that, eventually, I would return to the topic of participation in virtual art that originates in both real and artificial environments. Central to the exhibition of virtual art is the integral involvement of 3D avatars (and the humans driving them), the traditional elements of visual and time-based art, new aesthetic-technological dimensions, and the ephemeral qualities of art produced in immersive 3D space.  This requires a distinctly different way of solving problems, thinking about new issues, and communicating ideas to a broad, evolving audience.

As an example of environmental fluidity, check out Through the Virtual Looking Glass, a mixed reality virtual art project currently being exhibited in real life and Second Life by a network of international art collectives, including the Caerleon sims/Virtual Art Initiative and the Pirats Art Network.  I interviewed the founders to close my current Art21 blogging stint but first here is a recap of the main themes explored in my previous posts.

Continue reading »

by Matthew Newton and Jeffrey Augustine Songco

First, Matthew interviews Hunter College alum Jules de Balincourt on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Deitch Projects, followed by Jeffrey’s look at what his peers are planning to do after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Matthew Newton, “The Continuing Education of Jules de Balincourt”

Jules de Balincourt in his Bushwick studio following his solo exhibition opening at Deitch Projects in SoHo

In discussing the topic of “life after graduation,” it is important for me to call it “life after graduation from Hunter College.”  The personality of this school is so different from others I’ve encountered that the qualification seems necessary.  As compared to our many high-profile private and Ivy League neighbors, Hunter is the rugged, under-funded, scrappy underdog; a public school pulling out surprising back-door success stories, of which Jules de Balincourt’s is one of our recent favorites.

Jules has the “life after graduation” story that most MFA hopefuls privately expect, and yet only a tiny percentage actually experience.  It’s a narrative that pretty much any young artist would want: arrive at school, start making work, get noticed by an up-and-coming gallerist, have a roundly loved solo exhibition (or two), get glowing reviews from important art critics, sell a lot of art, buy a big studio and keep working. And after all of that, graduate with your MFA. Jules’s arc from just another kid in Brooklyn making art to having important exhibitions worldwide is as sharp as it is unusual.

As a current Hunter student wondering how to stitch together my own career, I sat down with Jules on the occasion of his solo show Premonitions at Deitch Projects — his first since leaving Zach Feuer Gallery and the second-to-last exhibition ever at Jeffrey Deitch’s iconic SoHo gallery — to discuss his time at Hunter, the years following, and to track the circumstances that contributed to his enviable rise.

Continue reading »

Artistide Depres, "Untitled Mask." Photo by the author, 2009. © All rights reserved.

Self is the essential being of a person.  Art is a mirror image of a person’s identity, circle of influence, and perceived worlds or realities.  Art reflects what we feel, think, practice, believe, or imagine.  Season 1 of Art:21 introduced several artists who explore identity in their work.  The documentary on Identity addressed how contemporary artists reveal and question commonly held assumptions about stereotypes, self-awareness, portraiture, and what it means to be an artist.  This is based on how identity is constructed in the tangible world, but what about the virtual 3D world?

In virtual 3D worlds, artists release conceptions of self and extend perceptions of self beyond real life, material, superficial, or traditional ideas.  The 3D avatar represents the human or a fantasy-based representation of a person’s self that can constantly be altered or changed.  Artists explore these representations in their work, often using their avatar as art, or as part of an artwork, adding to it, or using it to perform.  In Performative Interventions, I included a few examples of artists who see immersion as a means of taking their virtual performances directly to a global audience.

In keeping with previous posts regarding Dr. Gary Zabel’s “aesthetic-technological dimensions” of art in virtual 3D worlds, I pulled his text on ambiguity of identity.  He writes:

Ambiguity of identity results from the fact that our bodily presence in the virtual world is mediated by a digital representation. All dwelling within a world involves being present in a body which both constitutes our perspective on things and makes us present to other embodied experiencers. Though personal identity can be a very complex construction, its ultimate foundation is continuity of bodily presence. However digital bodies, and the names that uniquely identify them, can be altered, multiplied, discarded, or exchanged at the will of the user. Since bodily presence is open to such radical discontinuity, the identity of the virtual person is protean and ambiguous, including indicators of age, gender, race, and even biological species.

When I first met Artistide Despres in Second Life, her avatar was entirely blue in color.  She told me it was a holdover from a previous collaboration with Pete Jiminy.  Artistide is a real life artist and teacher of photography and new art technologies.  She resides in The Netherlands and came to Second Life expecting to use it as a tool for teaching and learning.  She is also actively involved with the Caerleon sims art collective.  I met Artistide at her virtual studio in SL.

Continue reading »

Each year the National Art Education Association holds a conference for a few thousand people and streams of art teachers, art professors, artist-educators, museum educators, administrators, starving artists, starving administrators, student teachers, writers, bloggers, and art-product-pushers descend on a convention center somewhere in the country to present panels, give workshops, share research and think through ideas for teaching visual art in and out of the classroom. But this annual conference, like any I’m sure, also has its share of problems and challenges. Over the past two years NAEA has booked huge convention centers without wi-fi access and continues to run a head-spinning number of workshops and presentations, simultaneously, that are literally one-time affairs (last Friday I counted four different presentations that I wanted to attend… all at 4pm). If you do your homework going in, you usually have a few things that you MUST see (or participate in) over the span of the conference. The rest of your time is ripe for pleasant surprises or disappointing Powerpoints in rooms without windows.

Being the optimist I am, let’s talk about a truly pleasant surprise.

This past Saturday I had the opportunity to share a stage at NAEA with five impressive Baltimore high school students and Carrie Mae Weems. It was my job, if you can even call it that, to moderate a Q&A inspired by Carrie Mae’s season 5 segment after developing questions with the students and teachers using the Art21 season 5 educator’s guide. The students chosen by Carolyn Sutton and Lauren Selig, teachers at the Park School and Baltimore Freedom Academy, were Thomas Jones, Laila Phillips, Alex Marion, Mihija Cox and Ken Greller. To say that the conversation which took place on that stage Saturday was transformational is not pushing the envelope. I know because I have listened to a digital recording of the interview about five times through over the last three days alone.

Now if you have heard Carrie Mae Weems speak before, you’re probably not surprised that she managed to create a beautiful and moving experience with five high school students in conversation. But what I found so inspiring and interesting was how the conversation shifted back and forth between talking about Carrie Mae Weems’ work and the work of the students….

Carrie Mae Weems: It’s such a pleasure to be on the same stage with you. I wonder about who are the people that you care about? What do you care about as a young artist? I know that Ken, you’re interested in theater and Albee as a playwright, but what do you think about? What’s on your mind when it comes to the arts and your practice?

Ken Greller: I think figuring out your practice as a young artist is really important. It’s very subject to change as a student when you have all these “non-art” responsibilities in your life. You could wake up at 5am and do your art work until you have to go to school but that’s hard. But then again if that’s what you want to do…

Carrie Mae Weems: You do it.

Ken Greller: And you’re probably a happier person for it, albeit sleep deprived. I personally think about how to become an artist ALL the time and not having to be other things, especially over the next few years. I like the idea of practice as nourishment. I think that’s a really good way to think about it.

Tune in next week to Teaching with Contemporary Art as I highlight many special moments in this broad and stimulating conversation about the work of Carrie Mae Weems, teaching about social justice, art practice and living passionately.

Following is a final post from our previous guest blogger, Baseera Khan. — Ed.

On Saturday March 20, I practically walked my way up from Chelsea to 125^th Street. It was one of those days where every cab disappeared and every subway wrapped their platforms with pink ribbon. The whole modern city had shut down for repairs. My pedestrian efforts led me to Maysles Cinema, a non-profit theater in Harlem dedicated to the exhibition of documentary film and video. That night, the cinema was hosting a Tibetan filmmaker named Pema Tseden who, on his first trip to the US from Tibet, presented one of his films called The Search.

The Search depicts a movie director and his crew navigating through the vast Himalayan Mountains in and around Lhasa, Tibet. The group travels by way of sports utility vehicle (SUV), searching for dramatic characters and elements for a film adaptation of the Tibetan opera, Prince Drime Kundun — though what exactly they are looking for that they cannot quite describe. What they do find seems rooted in specific places, and their search is complicated by the expansive passages from one town to the next. Lhasa, located at the bottom of a small basin surrounded by mountains, has an elevation of about 11,800 feet, and lies in the center of the Tibetan Plateau with the surrounding mountains rising to 18,000 feet. The film tells a familiar story, pitting modernity against traditional culture and it questions how the expansive role of movies can capture the micro-narratives that each town embodies. Ambivalent himself, Tseden’s work suggests that the greatest weapon his native culture has against the forces of modernization is its domineering landscape.

The space and conversation is typically enveloped by the landscape in this film, as the director quotes, “I don’t shoot close-ups of my characters, I want the view to take part in directing the story.” Tseden does this by placing the characters far enough away from the viewer to suggest room for interpretation. Communication is difficult, the film claims. A boy is bribed with school supplies to run a message from one town to the next. Inevitably, the words will change in the space between one town and the next and in this space, Tseden seems to find the heart of his Tibet.

Burning Life, 2009. Photo by Poid Mahovlich, 2009. © All rights reserved.

Collaborative art as joint production by two or more artists is a typical style among sound, video, and performance artists.  Many artists are changing the concept of art into something that can be engaged in by more than individual artists alone.  Last week, I wrote about how Web 2.0 has come to play an integral part in the expansion of new art forms because it increasingly enables artists from all across the globe to work collaboratively, communicate ideas, and connect with others who share similar interests.  Art production in virtual 3D worlds brings together people with different knowledge and skills.  A few examples are highlighted here.

Burning Life, a festival of community, art, and fire in Second Life exemplifies collaborative art in virtual 3D worlds. It was first held in 2003 and is inspired by the real-life Burning Man festival that takes place in the Nevada desert.  Second Life’s Burning Life 2009 remained true to the spirit of the Burning Man. A cooperatively built space, it arose from a virtual 3D desert to serve as a shining example of creativity and community.  When it ended, every scrap was removed, leaving only a bare desert floor.  The Ten Principles of both Burning Man and Burning Life underline the spirit guiding the virtual art that once was:

Radical Inclusion: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man/Life.

Gifting: Burning Man/Life is devoted to acts of gift giving.

Radical Self-Reliance: Burning Man/Life encourages the individual to discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources.

Communal Effort: Creative cooperation and collaboration.

Leaving No Trace: Leave nothing behind.

Many of the artists featured in my series of posts for Art21 have participated in previous Burning Life festivals and their current work embodies these principles to varying degrees.  Although the Burning Life 2009 work exists no mor,e you can find several galleries on photo sharing and video sharing sites.

Continue reading »

Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko in "Red"

John Logan’s play Red, currently playing at the Golden Theater, New York, centers around a perennial ethical conundrum many successful artists face: whether or not to “sell out” to corporate interests. In the play, Mark Rothko, played by Alfred Molina (you can’t help but wonder if Pollock would have been a more appropriate choice, given his multi-limbed turn as Dr. Octopus in Spider Man 2) battles through the ethics of accepting the Four Seasons commission for the Seagram building in 1959 for a series of mural-sized paintings. Rothko’s quandary, played out through combative and discursive dialogues with his young assistant, has become a modernist parable and yardstick of art’s relationship to the wider society. In the end (spoiler alert!), Rothko turned down the commission after having dinner in the restaurant with his wife (“Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine,” he growled famously, making sure his assistant got the words down right), perhaps having assumed that his works would be visible to office workers rather than the upper echelons of Manhattan society. This seems unlikely, given his apparent intention to create a nightmarish, claustrophobic atmosphere in the paintings, inspired by the unsettling vestibule of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence. It’s more probable that his airless, funereal canvases were made as an act of spectacularly ungrateful hand-biting.

Whatever the reason, Rothko did ultimately refuse the commission, offering the majority of his paintings instead to the Tate in London, where nine of them now hang. Their belated redemption – in a public, free museum, where their low-lit installation implicitly evokes a hermetic, sacred space – has secured the artist as a kind of latterday spiritualist, committed entirely to the production of art and not the swelling of his bank balance. With one beady eye on posterity (Rothko was obsessed with his own place in art history, as were many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists), Rothko sought to save himself from accusations of craven commercialism. By refusing the commission, he bought himself a place in a Romantic pantheon alongside Courbet, Michelangelo, and Pollock. Even his death – by his own hand, in a bath, in 1970 – seemed calculated to resonate with art-historical tradition: a bit Marat, a bit Van Gogh.

The relationship between culture and commercialism is an implicit and ongoing subject in our contemporary society of late Romantic yearning for significance. Rock music – the last real bastion of Romanticism, after Warhol made commercialism a fit artistic subject in itself – has been obsessed since its inception with its own authenticity. Popular music’s fixation with authenticity – from hip hop’s disingenuous rallying-cry to “keep it real” while bathed in spangly bling, to Kurt Cobain’s willful rejection of his band’s own popularity and that eternal riposte to populism, “the difficult second album” – is part of its self-definition, whatever it sounds like. So if rock music had, by the late 60s, siphoned off the residue of the 19^th century Romantic tradition, where does that leave art now?

Continue reading »