Tim Hawkinson, "Point", 2009. Eggshells, 10 1/2 x 4 1/4 x 1 in. Photo: G.R. Christmas; © Tim Hawkinson; Courtesy The Pace Gallery, New York.

Avant-garde cinema, organic designs, sculpture theory, animal extinction, and more in today’s roundup:

• Dead or Alive, an exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), will showcase the work of over 30 artists who transform organic materials that were produced by or once part of living organisms—insects, feathers, shells, bones, silkworm cocoons, plant materials, and fur—into installations and sculptures. Organized by the Museum’s Chief Curator David McFadden, and Curator Lowery Sims with Assistant Curator Elizabeth Edwards Kirrane, Dead or Alive features new site-specific installations and recent work by Tim Hawkinson (Season 2), Jennifer Angus, Nick Cave, Tessa Farmer, Jochem Hendricks, Damien Hirst, Alastair Mackie, Kate MccGwire, Susie MacMurray, Shen Shaomin, and Levi van Veluw among others. A special weeklong visitor preview starting Tuesday, April 20, will allow MAD visitors to observe artists as they create and install site-specific works in the museum galleries. Dead or Alive opens to the public on April 27 and will run through October 24, 2010.

• Tonight at 6:30pm, catch Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny in the panel discussion Expanded, Exploded, Collapsed?. Organized by SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, panelists will reconsider Rosalind Krauss’ concept of the “expanded field” (published in her now famous essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, spring 1979) in light of contemporary art production. Other participants include performance artist and professor William Pope.L; art historian and critic Johanna Burton; and SculptureCenter curator Fionn Meade (moderator). Admission to the New School event is $8.

• Through April 30, Creative Time is screening What is Missing? — a series of four new videos by Maya Lin (Season 2) — on MTV’s outdoor HD screen located in the heart of Times Square. Lin’s piece, her fifth and final memorial, deals with mass extinction precipitated by the degradation of natural habitats. As a participant in Creative Time’s Global Residency Program, Lin traveled to diverse parts of the world to connect with disappearing species. There will be a special, expanded schedule of screenings on April 22 for Earth Day. Get the complete viewing schedule here.

• Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson will perform at Santos House in New York City on April 28. The concert, also featuring the talents of Transgendered Jesus, Tony Conrad, Erik Friedlander, and Text of Light (Alan Licht & Lee Ranaldo), has been organized by the Film-Makers Cooperative, the largest and oldest artist-run collection of avant-garde cinema. Each performance will be paired with a rare screening of an experimental film. Founded in 1961 by a group of artists including Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie and Jonas Mekas, Film-Makers Cooperative continues to restore, archive and distribute more than 5,000 titles. The concert begins at 7pm. Purchase tickets online or at the door.

• The first solo show of work by Jenny Holzer (Season 4) to be presented in Scotland is on view through May 15 at the University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. Holzer’s 2007 work, Blue Purple Tilt, has transformed the institution’s historic Georgian wing into “a vivid place of reverence.” This LED display combines four previous works and charts Holzer’s development from the early Truisms and Survival series through to the anonymous declarations of her Inflamatory Essays and the personal musings of Laments. The three-floor exhibition is part of Artist Rooms on Tour 2010, a program in which 21 museums and galleries across the UK will present 25 exhibitions from the collection created by curator, collector and Edinburgh University alumnus Anthony d’Offay.

• Beginning April 22, work by Barry McGee (Season 1) will be on view at East London’s BlackRat Press Gallery in the street art exhibition Now’s the Time. Titled after a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of the same title, works by Basquiat, Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Banksy, Faile, and Os Gemeos are also included in the show. Via the press release, “What unites these artists is a refusal to play by the rules, to conform to the establishment, to follow the traditional paths set out by the art world…” Now’s The Time closes May 20.

Dustin Wayne Harris, "Stephanie," 2009-10. C-print, 20 x 24 in. Courtesy Heist Gallery.

My love of cake straddles the line between innocent obsession and utter perversion. I tend to think of cakes like my favorite celebrity bodies. Be it big and firm like Hugh Jackman, petite and voluptuous like Salma Hayek, or thick and stacked à la Serena Williams, I have never laid eyes on a cake I didn’t fancy the same way. In my most delicious and twisted fantasy, I die face-down in red velvet with pound cake in my left hand and German chocolate in my right—an orgy so sweet that it literally takes me all the way to heaven. You see, I am absolutely crazy about cake, and so the (self-indulgent) focus of this Gastro-Vision post: three artists who take vastly different approaches to my most loved confection and, like me, somehow connect cake to people and personalities.

Dustin Wayne Harris

In Dustin Wayne Harris’s solo exhibition Cake Mixx, now on view at Heist Gallery in New York, viewers are invited to consider cake as more than dessert, but as a “valuable tool in the arsenal of psychoanalysis.” For the past year, following a first date, Harris has asked women to bake him a cake. He then reads it like a crystal ball. Harris says, “The way the cake looks never fails to become a metaphor for the relationship.” The artist’s collection of nine moderately-sized C-prints are each named for their baker.

Dustin Wayne Harris, "Chloe," 2009-10. C-print, 20 x 24 in. Courtesy Heist Gallery.

“Take Chloe for example,” writes the artist, “you can see from her first cake, [that] the relationship had great promise. The second cake tells you that it ended badly.” With this bit of coaching from Harris, I found myself digging analytically deeper into his photographs, and in sudden awe of my new found faculty for cake reading. “That relationship turned into a mess,” I thought to myself in view of Erika, a blue cake that looked to be having a meltdown. Another cake titled Stephanie, a tall white-frosted mold with multi-colored confetti sprinkles and a shimmering cherry on top, led me to imagine a relationship that was nearly perfect, or at least that’s how it appeared on the surface.

Dustin Wayne Harris, "Meera," 2009-10. C-print, 20 x 24 in. Courtesy Heist Gallery.

Harris’s cake photos are not the stuff of Martha Stewart or Better Homes & Gardens. Unlike professional food photography, where styling agents like Vaseline and toothpicks are often used to create mouthwatering images, Harris’s works sometimes resemble the instantaneous snapshots of Flickr foodies. Some photographs are far more appealing than others, a technique that I gather is intentional. Meera, a gooey chocolate layer cake, crumbling at the edges where white cream seeps from the cracks, appears to have been tossed around in the back seat of a car. Harris captures this brown muddle atop a moss green cloth and a grimy wall that is equally as drab. While the cake is symbolic of the relationship in general, the care that Harris has taken to arrange it might speak to his own outlook. In Lindsey, for example, Harris has pulled back the pink wrapping to reveal a lovely, though oddly iridescent, frosted square. But in Lindsey 2, her pink heart-shaped cake is still covered and obscured by plastic wrap, perhaps a metaphor for Harris’s unwillingness to go further. On the other hand, Harris revealed in a recent interview that psychoanalysis is the primary and maybe only purpose of these cakes. One stayed in his fridge for a whole year. “All that sugar and preservatives,” Harris said, “…You shouldn’t eat cake.”

Victoria Howe

Culinary artist and pastry chef Victoria Howe launched Chinatown Cake Club (CCC) last December as a private fan club and secret New York City dessert spot. CCC offers a new menu every month featuring cakes of all kinds, with one cake made especially to honor an artist. Howe invites her guests to eat and socialize, watch screened movies, read the paper, or “simply sit in the corner and eat cake until you puke.” Sounds like my kind of party.

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This is immersive and interactive virtual 3D art.

Solkide Auer, Shellina Winkler, and Binary Quandry are Second Life artists who are part of the Pirats Art Network, a partner and major contributor in the Through the Virtual Looking Glass exhibition.

I wrote about Pirats in my introductory blog post earlier this week and I will close my series with wisdom from founders Newbab Zsigmond and Merlina Rokocoko of Pirats and the much-quoted theorist Georg Janick from the Virtual Arts Initiative.  Most of the virtual 3D art in Through the Virtual Looking Glass is immersive.  It is made up of 3D objects called prims (in SL) that can be coated in moving video, or accompanied by densely layered sounds.  The latest version of the Second Life viewer features HTML On A Prim, linking prims to live webpages, Flash movies, and more.

Artists have attempted to create the illusion of distance and depth on a flat surface since the early fifteenth century. Realities, other than the material world we live in, have existed for centuries. In essence, what defines human consciousness is the ability to imagine other “realities,” starting with the nuances such as sound, inflection, pauses, gestures, and other subtle signs.  In virtual 3D worlds, these feelings create varying levels of emotional bandwidth.  In other words, art in virtual 3D worlds can activate real emotions.

The feeling of being part of an artwork, in a perceptually immersive 3D space is very much akin to the feeling of being on a carnival ride, minus certain degrees of emotional bandwidth.  Immersive 3D artworks often simulate the real life experience of being in material space.  You lose your critical distance to the experience and get emotionally involved.  You feel as if the art is very real but know it is not.

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Episode #102: Mary Heilmann leads a tour of her home and studio on Long Island, pointing out how she’s modified the surrounding landscape and the ways in which the scenery has seeped into her paintings.

For every piece of Mary Heilmann’s work—abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture—there is a backstory. Imbued with recollections, stories spun from her imagination, and references to music, aesthetic influences, and dreams, her paintings are like meditations or icons. Her compositions are often hybrid spatial environments that juxtapose two- and three-dimensional renderings in a single frame, join several canvases into new works, or create diptychs of paintings and photographs in the form of prints, slideshows, and videos. Heilmann sometimes installs her paintings alongside chairs and benches that she builds by hand, an open invitation for viewers to socialize and contemplate her work communally.

Mary Heilmann is featured in the Season 5 (2005) episode Fantasy of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online via iTunes (opens application).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: David Howe. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Mary Heilmann.

From "Torture of Women" by Nancy Spero, Siglio Press, 2010. Photos courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

“In our day, [when] we came back from war,” said Seymour Hersh to Bill O’Reilly in 2004, “We would take our pictures and hide them behind the socks in the drawer and look at them once in a while.” But this generation is different, Hersh lamented, appearing on Fox just after his infamous Abu Ghraib expose debuted in the New Yorker; this generation sends sensitive pictures around on CDs, uploads them to the Internet, and even sells them—God forbid—to news outlets. “Some kid right now is negotiating with some European magazine,” Hersh said, confident that the onslaught of Abu Ghraib visuals had only just begun.

When Nancy Spero (Art:21 Season 4) began making her biting panoramas, war pictures were still hidden behind the socks in American bedrooms. The subject of torture seemed the ideal province for a socially driven artist who wanted to cut through the strange sheen of silence that surrounded political trauma. Spero, sensitive but unrelenting, was perfect to do the cutting. A new book by Siglio Press, out April 30, re-presents Spero’s often talked about yet rarely seen project, Torture of Women (1976) — 125 feet of drawings that pair accounts of female torture victims with willowy, mythical figures.

From "Torture of Women" by Nancy Spero, Siglio Press, 2010. Photos courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

In book form, Spero’s drawings are jarringly seductive, quaint like Henry Darger, pious like Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and angry like Emma Goldman. They also look old. But their datedness may actually be the book’s greatest asset. Spero was quick to say that art should talk to its time and, though the subject of Torture of Women matters now as much as ever, a lot changed when photographs of torture catapulted out of drawers and into the blogosphere.

I first encountered Spero in the pages of Michael Kimmelman’s 1998 book Portraits, a down-to-earth take on the “artists-on-art” formula. Kimmelman joined Spero and Spero’s husband, painter Leon Golub, for a stroll through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, in the resulting essay, Spero and Golub come off as two deeply conscientious artists. They apologize for resenting Pollock, talk about Tiepolo as if he were their contemporary, and praise one another’s subversiveness. Though they react to art viscerally, they care more about how it relates to the world than its identity as art. “Nancy and I are both content-oriented,” says Golub. “I have often thought of myself as a history painter and I think Nancy looks at things in a similar way.”

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Shopping bag from the 2009 Armory Show. Photo credit: David Willems.

Accepting the trope of the struggling artist, many decide to go ahead and brazenly attempt to carve out a spot for themselves in the art world. You just need to be willing to work really, really hard, right? Right? If only it were that simple. If only the system that determines success for an artist working in the U.S. today lived up to the expectations set forth by our meritocratic upbringing, where hard work and a little pluck can elevate you to the top.

Instead, most artists quickly find that they are reliant on a system of various profit-driven art institutions with a general mission to foster original thinking and multiple modes of expression, while simultaneously practicing narrowly focused methods of supporting the careers of artists. Jennifer Dalton highlights this point in her recent Flash Points interview with Hrag Vartanian, stating that, “what used to be multiple avenues of artistic ‘success’ have winnowed down into the single definition of conspicuous validation by the art market.” Oh the art market, where artwork can transform into a luxury commodity and where the collectors, museums, and galleries determine what good art is. Considering the interests of these parties, it wouldn’t be too brash to assume that good art should be saleable art as well. Discussion over so-so blockbuster exhibitions and the general consensus that having a gallery in Chelsea does not mean you show quality work seem to confirm that this method of determining the cultural landscape has its definitive pitfalls, not to mention conflicts of interest. For someone like myself outside the boundaries of “success,” the system that artists must work in already seems somewhat fixed and in great need of ethical re-examination.

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Photo courtesy of LA Opera.

All my windows look into windows of other apartments and, on warm days like those we’ve had lately, I’m set up for delicious eavesdropping. I like it best when my neighbors sing. Two nights ago, it was to Lady Gaga. Yesterday afternoon, however, the neighbor to my south, whose voice is as endearingly over-eager as Rachel’s from Glee, was singing opera. A cappella. Usually this would have fascinated me, but yesterday I was listening to opera of my own, trying to understand the Wagner’s Ring Cycle before L.A.’s immense, city-wide Ring Festival commences in L.A.

Staging Wagner’s Ring Cycle typically involves elaborate sets, exuberant costumes, and 17 hours of highly produced, melodramatic music that pits mortals against gods. L.A.’s Ring Festival is headier, functioning almost like a city-wide conference set up to parse every nuance of Wagner’s music and life. Not surprisingly, the Festival has riled up its share of controversy. L.A. isn’t rolling in green at the moment, as my co-blogger Lily Simonson recently explained, and the Ring Cycle costs $32 million, some of which is on loan from the county (“that’s what counties do, build subways and put on Rings,” LA Times‘s critic Mark Swed said Tuesday on KCRW’s Politics of Culture). But money isn’t the most interesting controversy surrounding the Ring.

Ed Winkleman recently gave a rational, convincing argument for the “non-existence of unethical art,” and I think most people would instinctively agree that bad (unethical) artists don’t always make bad art and good (ethical) artists don’t always make good art and that ethics aren’t really the best barometer for determining the goodness and badness of art. Still, the prospect of a truly unethical artist making stunning art is seductively mysterious.

Wagner, notorious for fierce anti-Semitism, was not a good man (had he not written great music dramas, Marc A. Weiner suggests at a Hammer Museum lecture, “he would be just a forgotten narcissistic crackpot from 19^th-century Germany, bombastic racist and social theorist with a mean personality and bad manners”). Some dissenters argue that such a man does not deserve a festival. The response given by the heads behind this festival is: “it’s complicated.” This festival endeavors to show just how complicated by addressing everything from Wagner’s renegade politics to his resonance with superheroes.

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by Lily Rossebo and Carrie McGath

Lily and Carrie add their two cents about the significance of radical workshops in art school programs.

Winold Reiss’s drawing classes at 4 Christopher Street, NYC, c. 1920

Lily Rossebo: Without student protests, what would art school be like today? Would we still be drawing from casts or maybe, with some luck, from a live model? A number of student uprisings and independent schools have helped to dismantle old methods of teaching and reshape art education in the twenty-first century. Present-day programs continue to refer to the Bauhaus (1919-1933) or Black Mountain College (1933-1957) as models for effective and innovative learning. But since the conception of these two prototypical schools, has there been any progress? Are art school programs in touch with contemporary social issues and innovative pedagogical practices?

In recent years, as the DIY spirit has spread across disciplines and subcultures, the current generation of students may be more accustomed to the idea of self-organization. Outside of traditional, degree-granting programs, many art collectives such as Just Seeds and the Radical Art Caucus, offer a wide range of alternative opportunities for artists, emphasizing activism and social change.

In the essay, “There Is No Alternative: The Future Is Self-Organized,” writers Stephan Dillemuth, Anthony Davies, and Jakob Jakobsen propose that artists must take more control and not rely on pre-existing institutional structures. “In our view, self-organization is a by-word for the productive energy of those who have nothing left to lose. It offers up a space for a radical re-politicization of social relations — the first tentative steps towards realizable freedoms … Self-organization is: something, which predates representational institutions. To be more precise: institutions are built on (and often paralyze) the predicates and social forms generated by self-organization” (excerpt from Art and Social Change, 2005).

Interflügs (Interflight)

A few weeks ago, I attended a five-day workshop at Interflügs, an autonomous student-run project at the University of the Arts Berlin (Universität der Künste Berlin, UdK). I applied to the workshop unaware of Interflügs’s amazing history and ongoing mission.

The Interflügs (a German word meaning Interflight) project was founded in 1989/90 in an atmosphere of political change and student protest. Students, unhappy with the hierarchical and ineffective structure of their school, decided to take matters into their own hands. Various groups began to form, crossing traditional department lines to create an independent study alternative to the regular course listings. The initiative proved to be both popular and effective, and it began receiving university funding. Twenty years later, Interflügs is a multi-operational project, offering an extensive and changing list of workshops and lectures. These range from the practical (photo and video editing) to the exploratory, such as creating discussions around current issues and topics.

The particular workshop I attended was called, “Mass – Public Space – Response.” Its aim was to explore the movement of people in public places in order to gain a better understanding of how these areas can be changed, modified, frequented, or avoided. The workshop involved collaborating with participants in groups of four or five; fieldwork in designated public places; a final presentation using photography, video, or projection; and a publication including text and images from each group. Students of all disciplines were invited to attend, including architects, urban planners, artists, and designers.

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Opensource Obscure, "Chromutate." Photo by Torley Linden, 2009. © Some rights reserved.

To the uninitiated, virtual 3D worlds may seem like games.  However, game culture often revolves around rules of play.  Artists creating work in virtual 3D worlds are usually trying to break set rules and establish new social practices that extend participation.  Dr. Gary Zabel, director of the Virtual Art Initiative, identifies six aesthetic-technological dimensions that distinguish the art of virtual worlds from more traditional forms: immersion, interaction, ambiguity of identity, environmental fluidity, artificial agency, and networked collaboration.  My previous posts investigated the immersive, interactive, and participatory aspects of art in Second Life.  Today’s post examines artificial agency in virtual art.  Dr. Zabel writes,

Artificial agency refers to the facility with which software agents can be embedded in virtual worlds. Because the virtual world is itself a complex program, it is relatively easy to introduce into it forms of artificial life and artificial intelligence as responsive and even evolving forms of aesthetic expression.

Wizard Gynoid, "E8 Polytope," 2010. © All rights reserved.

Virtual 3D worlds are in fact true social networks.  The merging of 3D virtual worlds with social networks imposes upon software agents.  Software agents act for users as part of art in virtual worlds. Agents have flexible behaviors that are reactive, responsive, and social.  Using scripts, artists can transform objects into virtual robots inhabited by software agents that work behind the scenes while human-driven avatars interact or become immersed in the art. The artists featured in this post are exploring this technology through their work.  For example, SL artist Selavy Oh relies on the idea of code as concept.  Selavy writes,

The perceptually immersive 3D environment reacts dynamically to the presence of visitors and respond to their actions.  The underlying code opens a space of possibilities, and the visitors, sometimes involuntarily, shape the actual manifestation of the manifold of these possibilities.

Selavy Oh paid homage to sculptor Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a real-life earthen sculpture constructed in 1970, by erasing it — à la Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning.

Selavy writes,

erasing the spiral consists of scripted terraforming covering almost the whole area of the art simulator, East of Odyssey, in the virtual world of Second Life. A spiral slowly emerges out of the virtual water, [while] white spheres cover the ground like pearls, structuring the ground and [reminiscent] of the salt crystals in Smithson’s work. And suddenly, like a splash, a huge wave consisting of virtual ground forms and propagates over the water, erasing the subtle traces of the spiral. Then the cycle recommences and the spiral is slowly rebuilding.

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Detail from the current Kidspace exhibition, "You Art What You Eat"

Below is the second part of my conversation with Laura Thompson, Director of Exhibitions and Education at Kidspace (part one of the interview can be found here). Many thanks to Laura and the staff at Kidspace for an exciting and entertaining visit on March 20th!

Joe Fusaro: Kidspace works within MASS MoCA and develops programs in a close relationship with The Clark and Williams College of Art. One would think that the three museums in such close proximity would be in competition with one another for visitors, but it sounds like MASS MoCA has a great relationship with The Clark and WCMA. What do you enjoy most about the partnership with these museums?

Laura Thompson: The partnership with the three museums really is beneficial to the schools.  As part of their Kidspace program, the students also visit MASS MoCA, WCMA, and The Clark. There they follow up on themes addressed in Kidspace exhibitions or utilize their visual literacy skills in different ways or in different contexts. In such a small community, it is wonderful to be able to offer the schools numerous engagements with the arts.

JF: How is Kidspace aware of the themes and questions students are studying in schools? Do you look at curriculum and help find ways for Kidspace to fit into the overall plan?

LT: Kidspace is an integral partner of the local schools.  We work closely with classroom and art teachers, as well as administrators and coordinators to develop our ideas for exhibitions and programs.  We review the schools’ curriculums and even their text books. Through training sessions, we learn more about the specific concerns in the schools and try to shape our programs accordingly. When we are able, we hire teachers to work with us to develop the curriculum guides, which are available on our website.

The final element that contributes to our awareness of the themes students study in school is that both Shannon Toye, Kidspace Education Coordinator, and I are certified educators.  We have taught in the schools and have a solid understanding of the learning standards and appropriate classroom projects.

JF: At Kidspace, it sounds like it’s all about, “Let’s look at this work and how it relates to our lives. How does it relate to what we’re working on?” vs. looking at art to learn the history of a particular artist or get a lot of facts about a particular style.

LT: Yes! And how you can even process it here. The art is all around us. In some museums, the art is in the galleries and then kids go to the basement to make something. Here, students get to make art in the gallery space.

JF: What goes into getting kids to open up and speak freely about the art when they are here?

LT: Longevity is a big part of it. By the time students are in 2^nd grade, these local students  have already been to Kidspace four times. That in itself lends to being comfortable. It’s also a personality thing. Shannon and Casey, two of our guides here at Kidspace, are passionate about the work. They motivate the students to open up about how they feel and encourage them to take risks.

JF: What advice do you have for teachers who want to address and work with sensitive subject matter?

LT: I would plan programs that allow for multiple perspectives. Plan programs that are not bound by rigid rules and expectations and are adjustable to the immediate needs of the schools and the student population. Think through expected responses to the topic, conduct focus groups to learn more about possible reactions, and be prepared to hear interpretations that might not have been previously considered. It goes without saying that it is important to design curriculum that encourages dialogue and offers teachers open-ended questions to help them facilitate these activities.

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