Art21 is proud to present another new column, Center Field | Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports.

Since 2005, Bad at Sports’s podcast and blog have acted as a guide to the Chicago art scene through interviews and editorials with artists and cultural practitioners. With Center Field | Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports, the team hopes to do the same for Art21′s readers. Every other week on Tuesdays, we’ll show you a different aspect of the city’s art scene through interviews, profiles, reviews and editorial pieces written by members of the BaS collective: Meg Onli, Claudine Ise, Duncan MacKenzie, and Richard Holland.

Bad at Sports is a weekly podcast and daily blog produced in Chicago that features artists, arts writers, curators and other cultural practitioners talking about art and the community that participates in it. Founded in 2005 as a podcast by Duncan MacKenzie and Richard Holland, the website has been expanded to include a blog, overseen by Meg Onli and Claudine Ise, that features news, interviews, editorials, and reviews. With its primary hub in Chicago, BaS is the midwest’s most trafficked art blog, while the podcast has grown to become international in scope, thanks to contributors stationed in San Francisco, New York City, London, and Zurich. BaS’s archive currently holds over 230 hours of audio interviews with arts professionals, while the blog contains hundreds of reviews and editorial essays on the subject of contemporary art in Chicago and beyond. — Ed.

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Jacob Meehan sitting on "Seats" by Mike Schuh, 2010. Custom window seat cushions.

Welcome to Center Field | Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports, where every other Tuesday we give a little insight into the Chicago art scene. For our debut post, we speak with the director of Chicago gallery GOLDEN, Jacob Meehan.

Starting with his gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Psychodrama, by photographer Jill Frank in the Fall of 2008, Jacob Meehan of GOLDEN has shown a definitive eye for compelling work. With shows by both emerging and mid-career artists like Aspen Mays, Doug Ischar, and Pamela Fraser, GOLDEN has quickly established itself as one of Chicago’s most interesting new venues for contemporary art. Located in a residential building in the heart of Chicago’s predominantly gay neighborhood known as Boystown, GOLDEN combines the energy of an alternative apartment space with the professionalism of a commercial art gallery.

In the following conversation, Jacob and I discuss how GOLDEN utilizes its apartment showroom, the history of its neighborhood and how this relates to some of the work it has shown, as well as some of the artists that have exhibited in the space.

Meg Onli: There has been a lot of press covering the rise of apartment galleries in New York City. Chicago has had a very rich alternative/apartment gallery scene for years. GOLDEN, however, is a commercial gallery that uses an apartment as a showroom. Could you talk about how you utilize your space and discuss how you try to distinguish yourself from an apartment gallery?

Jacob Meehan: The showroom of our gallery occupies the entire first floor of a 120+ year old graystone, nestled on a landmarked avenue between Chicago’s Wrigleyville and Boystown neighborhoods. So what would be a generous two-bedroom apartment has been converted into a contemporary art gallery.  At first, I was worried that people were going to hate the fact that it wasn’t a massive white cube, but it has proven to be a great space for showing work.  The segmentation from the various rooms is actually an asset because it allows us to play with pace and rhythm.

I don’t mind being deemed an apartment gallery because we are a gallery in an apartment, but the notion of an apartment gallery usually brings up thoughts of artist-run types of spaces. I’m not actively trying to distinguish our space from those types of ventures, because those places are important and necessary. I think that what we’re doing is (unknowingly) from a more European model.  I was in Milan last month (my first trip to Europe, proper) with my boyfriend, Henry, and the first gallery that we went to was, to our surprise, exactly like GOLDEN…and this space (Studio Guenzani) shows artists like Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie, and Laura Owens. Unlike traditional apartment spaces, we are concerned with exhibiting, but furthermore, representing some of the best talent that is out there right now.

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Still from "ménage à trois," Selavy Oh, 2010. © All rights reserved.

Art production in virtual 3D worlds usually doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  As a contemporary practice, virtual art can create social capital that provides opportunities for individual and collective action, generated by networks of relationships, reciprocity, and new social customs.  Today’s entry and my subsequent posts feature individual artists and networks who are creating art inspired by or within perceptually immersive 3D spaces, from local groups and meetups to larger, international collectives that cross geographical, social, and cultural boundaries.

“Over the course of the last generation or two, a variety of technological, economic and social changes have rendered obsolete the stuff of American social capital.” — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone

Rather than disappearing, social capital in the arts is undergoing fundamental shifts regarding participation as an aesthetic in emerging, new media forms on a constantly advancing Web platform. Art production in virtual 3D worlds bring digitally mediated art within a frame of contemporary, conceptual work.  Artists are actively involved in this new media context, which is characterized by lower barriers of entry to artistic expression, production, and engagement.  They receive support for creating their work, from monetary and virtual land grants to informal mentoring, wherein technical knowledge is passed along to novices. They are engaging in an online, participatory culture in which individual contributions matter, and artists in distant places feel some degree of connection to one another.

My series of posts present emerging, innovative practices in contemporary art, specifically through Web 2.0, a conceptual, web-based platform upon which new environments are being built to create art as a form of immersion and online social media.  This includes accessible technological tools that allow artists to create and exchange content and engage in peer-to-peer discourse.  Web 2.0 has come to play an integral part in the expansion of new art forms because it increasingly enables artists to work collaboratively; generate and disseminate information, ideas, and creative works; and connect with people who share similar goals and interests.  This is Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone vs. virtual art as a participatory culture and social capital.  In virtual 3D worlds like Second Life, the social network is a primary factor of art production.

Through the Virtual Looking Glass, a mixed reality exhibition of art that converges real world art with virtual worlds, is happening this month, as a result of an international collaboration between the Virtual Arts Initiative, Pirats Art Nework, Cybernetic Art Research Project (CARP), and the University of Western Australia as the UWA Cultural Precinct.

The Caerleon sims are part of the Virtual Art Initiative, founded in Second Life by Dr. Gary Zabel (Georg Janick in SL) in 2008.  The project has grown to include several sims (short for simulations) in Second Life and on Reaction Grid, another virtual 3D world. The Caerleon sims are home to over 30 resident artists and feature a wide range of exhibitions, collaborative projects, classes, and experimental virtual art spaces.  I became aware of the Caerleon sims a little over a year ago, when I was invited to check out The Lost Wages of Sin, an “environmental assemblage installation” in Second Life by Pixel Sideways.  The installation included a Betty Page peep show, among several wonderfully kitschy 1950s-themed posters, galleries, 3D objects and video displays.

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Nancy Spero, 2003. Photo: Abe Frajndlich. Courtesy Galerie Lelong.

This week’s roundup is dedicated to the ladies:

• On Sunday, April 18, a public commemoration will be held for Season 4 artist Nancy Spero (1926-2009) in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Spero was a pioneer of feminist art. She is remembered for work that, among other things, made unapologetic statements against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance. Spero lived and worked in New York, where she passed away last October. (See Marc Mayer’s post, In Memoriam: Nancy Spero.) Speakers at her commemoration will include Kiki Smith (Season 2), Jon Bird, Benjamin Buchloh, Donna De Salvo, Christopher Lyon, Bartomeu Marí, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Robert Storr, Nora York, and others. The service begins at 3pm.

• On April 16, Season 2 artist Maya Lin will lecture at the Sleeping Lady Chapel Theater in Washington. The event is held in conjunction with Lin’s ongoing Confluence Project, a multi-site artwork that memorializes the Lewis and Clark expedition, highlights the tremendous changes it brought to the Pacific Northwest, and encourages action to create a future that preserves and protects the area’s natural and cultural resources. One of the seven sites in the project, the basalt sculpture “Story Circles,” will be dedicated April 17 in Pasco. Other sites are at Chief Timothy Park, Celilo Park, the Sandy River Delta, Fort Vancouver, Ridgefield and Cape Disappointment. Lin’s lecture begins at 7pm.

• David Weinberg Gallery will present Chicago’s first solo exhibition of works by Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff. Pfaffʼs current body of work, contained in deep shadowbox titanium frames, consists of various assemblage materials from her studio, monoprint paperwork, and a combination of hand painting and drawing. According to the gallery, “Pfaff is clearly inspired by the fields outside her studio at the foot of the Catskill Mountains…One will [also] find her reverence for oriental calligraphy, Japanese scrolls and eastern philosophy…” The exhibition runs April 16-May 29.

• Works by Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Carroll Dunham, Philip Guston, and Peter Saul are on view in iconoGRAPHIC at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York. The exhibition connects the work of these artist’s through their individual use of cartoon-like and/or political narratives. Via the press release, “These artists use exaggeration of recognizable forms, the symbolic meanings of color, and altered scale as the components of a new language; a visual vocabulary that transcends generations.” iconoGRAPHIC closes May 8.

• Through May 1, Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston is exhibiting works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois. Tufts Daily says, “…Experiencing this exhibition is more like a meditative practice of active contemplation, in which viewers read a story between the works, rather than anything close to the shock and awe generally associated with Bourgeois’ most celebrated art.”

• Opening April 16, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) celebrates its new commitment to contemporary art with Until Now: Collecting the New (1960–2010). The exhibition is organized around general themes and includes more than 75 works of art by artists who have “altered the direction of art over the past five decades, and in some cases challenged our basic conceptions about art.” Kara Walker (Season 2), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5) are include in the show. Until Now mixes objects from the museum’s collection with works borrowed from artists, collectors, and galleries. Selected works will be scattered throughout the museum and juxtaposed with the MIA’s encyclopedic holdings. Until Now closes August 1.

• Season 5 artist Carrie Mae Weems currently has work on view in the Sheldon Museum of Art’s biannual invitational exhibition, Shrew’d: The Smart and Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, as well as in their concurrent exhibition Better Half, Better Twelfth: Women Artists in the Collection, a rehanging of the museum’s permanent collection. Weems recently visited the Sheldon (located in Nebraska) and sat down for an interview with L. Kent Wolgamott of the Journal Star — read it here.

• In the April issue of Brooklyn Rail, Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard talks to editors Irving Sandler and John Yau about her life and work. In the interview von Rydingsvard says, “One of my nightmares would be to have my brain clamped to a final look or a final image, it would be torturous. I think it’s the wandering through the possibilities and the record of that wandering. I have a feeling that this is one of the reasons why the large pieces have more possibilities for me … I like the idea of a piece having a rich history of coming upon it every day for a month, for three months, for five months. And a record of that history, a record of the pencil marks, a record of the sweat of the hands, of the grinder, of the saw, and in that layered, recorded history is a part of the visual richness of the piece.”

• “Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was,” writes art journalist Linda Yablonsky for the New York Times. Click here to read more of what Yablonsky had to say about the Season 1 artist and her multichannel installation, The Globe Shrinks, now on view at the Chelsea location of Mary Boone Gallery in New York.

Thanks to Baseera Khan for her thoughtful posts. Follow her work back on her own site, baseerakhan.com. Up next is Nettrice Gaskins. A regular writer for Art 2.1, Nettrice is an artist and educator who bridges the actual and virtual worlds and explores how these realities can have a transformative impact on people’s lives and experiences when it can be fully implemented and realized. Her purpose is to bring together people, concepts, modalities, media, and worlds through art. In Fall 2010, she will join a vibrant community of practitioner/theorists in the Digital Media PhD program at Georgia Tech as a student and teacher.  Follow Nettrice’s blogs to explore writings on new media art and art in the classroom.

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Episode #101: Luca Bonetti leads the installation of artist Julie Mehretu’s massive painting Mural (2009) at Goldman Sachs, coordinating a team of installers and studio assistants.

Be sure to check out our recent video of Mural in Mehretu’s Berlin studio, narrated by the artist’s studio assistants (Episode #097) and stay tuned for a third video on this project, featuring Mehretu herself, to premiere on May 14th.

Last week’s New Yorker article — “Big Art, Big Money” — by Calvin Tomkins takes an incisive, behind-the-scenes look at Mehretu’s career and her journey over the past year as she wrestled with completing the largest work of her career at Goldman Sachs during the most sweeping worldwide financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Tomkins talks to many of the players that brought the work into existence, from then dealer and now MoCA Los Angeles Director Jeffrey Deitch (who led the artist search committee) to Goldman Sach’s own Timur Galen (the executive responsible for the corporate building and art commissions) about the project:

[Galen] was surprisingly candid in discussing the complexities of commissioning art that spanned the boundaries between public and private spheres. (Goldman has a substantial private collection of art works, acquired over many years and installed throughout its many different offices, but it had never before commissioned something new.) Although the building was not public, he said, Goldman had wanted to endow it with art works that would benefit the public. At one time, he indicated, the company had plans to “position” the two commissioned works more prominently within New York’s cultural community—presumably, by inviting people to see them. Why hadn’t that happened? “We would really like the work of people like Julie…to be judged on it’s own merits,” he replied carefully—with the unsaid implication that in today’s anti-Goldman climate they might not be. Fair enough, I guess. If art were judged by the company it keeps, much of the High Renaissance would go down the drain.

In turn, Tomkins questions Julie Mehretu about the context of the commission:

“It took me a long time—six months or so—to decide I wanted to do this,” Mehretu said, pulling off her cap and running a hand through her short dark curls. Mehretu is thirty-nine, friendly, and open. “What would be the reason to make a painting for a financial institution, you know? Why would that be interesting? One reason was this wall, which is so clearly visible from the outside of the building. It’s not so often that a painting has a chance to be public art. I was thinking about that and about how I could never make a painting on this scale anywhere else.”

[ ... ] Knowing what we now know about Goldman Sachs, I asked Mehretu, would she have taken on the commission? “Without hesitation,” she replied. “I don’t see it as an evil institution, but as part of the larger system we all participate in. We’re all part of it. And, anyway, for me it was about making something—it was about the art.” As she had said earlier, “I was more concerned about participating in the legacy of painting. You just hope it will feel O.K. over time.”

Visible from the street, Mehretu’s Mural is located in the lobby of Goldman Sachs’s new world headquarters at 200 West Street, between Vesey and Murray streets, in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan.

Upcoming: An exhibition of recent works will be on view as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (May 14 – October 6, 2010). The 15th in a series of commissions by Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the works were inspired by Mehretu’s time spent in Berlin. As critic Brian Dillon writes in the accompanying catalog essay: “If there is an archaeology of the recent past in Mehretu’s work, it is the archaeology of an atmosphere charged with the dust of demolition and rebuilding. There is a new grayness and indeterminacy in these paintings that it would be trite to conclude is merely melancholy or phantomic: Mehretu’s grey is rather the color of possibility, of the inchoate and unrealized. In this sense, the ruin points no longer towards the recent past but towards a potential future; the ruin passes away and comes into being at the same time.”

About the Artist: Julie 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 (2005) episode Systems of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online via iTunes (opens application).

VIDEO | Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Nick Ravich. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Thanks: Luca Bonetti; Travis Fitzgerald; Goldman, Sachs, & Co.; and Harmony Murphy.

Michael Ashkin, image from the Long Branch writings, 2010

For any fiending New York City art and culture aficionado, renting an automobile and driving up to The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art to see Michael Ashkin’s recently installed exhibition is a perfect weekend getaway. The museum itself, designed by I.M. Pei, sits on the northwest corner of the main Cornell University’s campus in Ithaca. Walking around on campus, your peripheral vision becomes excited by the architecture of this museum and other impressive buildings.

Michael Ashkin, "Untitled (where each new sunrise promises only the continuation of yesterday) (an abridged title, the first of twenty-one lines)," 2009. Recycled cardboard, 75’ x 6.5’ x 3 inches, installation at Sculpture Center, NY.

Ashkin’s prolific interconnectivity in photography, writing, video, and sculptural installation informs and references actual geographic spaces. My initial reactions to his elegant installations of ephemeral urban and suburban landscapes was a shift of focus to my vision that occurs outside the very center — less of sight than of thought. Ashkin has created a universe of peripheral visions, allowing people to only focus on the sidelines, however hard they try to focus on the center. Researching the margins of urban city lines and territories of the contemporary American landscape, Ashkin asks his viewers “to sustain a look at these zones for longer than (your) attention might allow” (Anthony Graves). In exercising this type of mediation, all I can really see after a while is the essence of color and shape. When you look into Ashkin’s work, most of the desaturated bedouin color palettes and expansive yet portable cities support my prior experiences of sustaining the look.

Michael Ashkin, "Untitled (where each new sunrise promises only the continuation of yesterday) (an abridged title, the first of twenty-one lines)," 2009. 548" x 244" x 3 inches, cardboard, installation at Secession, Austria.

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As usual, there’s a lot of production-related ground to cover I’d like to cover.  First, I really need to publicly acknowledge what’s hopefully no longer a private landmark, the release of our 100th Exclusive video last Friday, William Kentridge: Pain & Sympathy.  Rather than bore you with some self-congratulatory shout outs to the folks who’ve been responsible for this two years (and counting) effort – Art21 associate curator Wes Miller and web manager Jonathan Munar; freelance editors Mark Sutton, Lizzie Donahue, Mary Ann Toman, Joaquin Perez, Paulo Padilha, and Jenny Chiurco; Art21 Executive Director Susan Sollins and Series Producer Eve Moros Ortega; Art21 production coordinators Larissa Nikola-Lisa and Ian Forster – I thought I’d take this as a chance to pull back the curtain on our online video production process.

The trio of Exclusive William Kentridge videos we’ve released so far – Breathe, Return, and Pain & Sympathy – are a great way to start. Each had the same starting point – a multiple day shoot at William Kentridge’s studio in Johannesburg, South Africa in the Fall of 2008 (initially intended for the Kentridge Season 5 broadcast segment) – but each had a different editorial genesis and trajectory. A  little breakdown of which will, hopefully, shed some new and interesting light on our online video production process.

The Breathe Exclusive may be in a way the most typical. It started quite literally as an outtake from the broadcast segment, a sequence that didn’t quite make the final cut; Wes Miller and myself, Art21’s online video producers, inherited it from the broadcast segment’s editor, Mark Sutton.  After seeing it for the first time, there was little question in my mind of whether it would make the Exclusive cut.  I loved the immersive quality of it, how quickly you’re dropped in on William’s creative process.  But I loved the quick pay-off even more.  It’s rare that an artist’s process can yield such a complete narrative cycle – a beginning (organizing of cut papers),  middle (paper fanning), and end (footage in camera monitor) – in such a short time frame.

The Return Exclusive started, embryonically, as a broadcast segment outtake – basically an uncut 45-second clip of the composer sequence from Kentridge’s original Return video.  Wes and I were intrigued when we first saw it.  Editorially, it gave us the opportunity to give an idea central to the broadcast segment – William’s fascination with the messily human process of visual perception – a new wrinkle.  But we knew we wanted to deliver something more fleshed out, something a bit more directed than just an extended clip.  Digging further into the broadcast footage, we discovered we had footage of William actively describing the work at a laptop in his studio (footage not exploited in the broadcast segment).  That footage became the skeleton for the segment, the support upon which we could extend and further clip from William’s original video. As we cut the piece, we realized that we were battling against the same perceptual conundrum that William’s describes in his video – our desperate need to resolve chaos into order.  As producers, our particular balancing act was to find a way to reveal enough of each individual sequence to suggest some kind of resolution, but not so much that we’ve given away the punchline.

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This backflip stands out among the many iconic scenes of the seminal 1992 film, Encino Man, for its purposefully calibrated relationship to time and space, history and gravity. (Full disclosure: I grew up in Encino, California and yes, I am a Man; we’ll get to Encino Woman in a bit.) While it is surely important to note that the conventions of film editing have the potential to effect a form of time travel themselves, as they can span great distances in time (see what is perhaps the most famous graphic match cut in film history: a falling bone flung skyward by early man “becomes” a futuristic spacecraft through the magic of editing in the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey — a cut that is directly referenced in the opening earthquake sequence of Encino Man), space often comes to figure time, as in the hallucinatory fall that foretells the temporal undoing of the main characters of Vertigo, not to mention my own recourse to measuring time in “distances” earlier. What then do we make of Link’s backflip, the first thing this ice age caveman manages to do right after being excavated in a suburban backyard and stepping on a rake, mistaking a garbage truck for a mastodon, walking into glass, etc.? What can this prehistoric body gracefully falling through space tell us about time?

Falling Shaman, Lascaux

Art always unfolds in the present. It is historical insofar as it releases other times into our own. Regardless of how ancient it is, it, more often than not, tells us more about ourselves than it gives us an accurate picture of life at the time of its making. Perhaps that is what is so compelling about the cave paintings at Lascaux. Like the backflip that announces Link’s arrival at high school, the figure of the erect, bird-masked shaman falling through the sky seems to say, “I am here.” Not, “I was here,” but “I am here.”

It is the presentness of the past in even the most novel contemporary forms that I seek to address in this monthly column for Art21. While I will not limit myself  to the excavation of prehistoric forms, I will be digging the contemporary visual landscape for lingering intensities from yesterday and decades, centuries, millennia ago. One way I will do this will be to mine contemporary art, film, and museum practices for wonderful and perverse histories. Another will be to dig into my own ever-expanding collection of VHS videotapes, which I regularly acquire from the many thrift stores here in Los Angeles. These cast-offs from a not-too-distant era of cinematic consumption, embedded as YouTube videos in the column, will allow us to hold the present in material relation to an eclipsed technology that haunts our second-hand stores, if not our notions of technological advancement.

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Tara Donovan: Untitled opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art last week. For this exhibition, the IMA commissioned Donovan to create a new room-sized installation that will appear along with five other major installations and fourteen drawings produced over the past ten years. As a special program for the exhibition, the IMA has invited Jill Sterrett, SFMoMA Director of Collections and Conservation, to participate in a panel discussion about issues related to Donovan’s and the conservation of installation art.

The panel discussion will be held at the IMA today, Thursday, April 8, and is called The Care & Feeding of Contemporary Art: Panel Discussion on Tara Donovan: Untitled.

Jill and I will be joined on the panel with Lisa Freiman, IMA Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art and Greg Smith, IMA Senior Conservation Scientist.

In order to have some of Tara’s thoughts represented at our panel discussion, I’ve invited Jill here to help me interview her (and  create an extra installment of my monthly column, No Preservatives).

Tara Donovan (2005). Photo by Ellen Labenski.

Richard McCoy & Jill Sterrett: Will you tell us a bit about your studio and your practice?

TD: I use the word experimental to describe my practice but that may be a bit of a misleading term, as I think the word has taken on a different meaning in the context of art. Although highly idiosyncratic, my approach is often much more clinical, similar to a scientist who allows research and findings to build into a hypothetical proposal. Over the years, I have refined certain categories and tendencies to guide this process, but I also remain very open to spontaneous discoveries, as I have learned that fleeting moments of observation often yield the most substantive approaches. My studio is organized as a “factory” in the sense that it is focused entirely on production, which requires a tremendous amount of repetitive labor.

Tara Donovan, "Transplanted," 2001. Private Collection, New York. (c) Tara Donovan

RM & JS: In your recent conversation with Lawrence Weschler in the Institute of Contemporary Art catalog, you describe a moment when you were creating the ripped tar-paper installation Transplanted, in which the work became a kind of “expansive field.” Will you talk about the difference between a sculpture, an installation, and a landscape?

TD: My notion of the “field” is essentially co-opted from discussions of high modernist abstract painting, in which the edge of the canvas is understood as the only delimiting factor in what would otherwise be an infinite plane extending in all directions.  For me, the architecture of a space is the only delimiting factor of my work. I don’t really invest too much thought into making precise distinctions between what is a sculpture, installation, or landscape. I think that debate and the resulting collapse of such categories occurred in the ’60s and ’70s, and contemporary artists such as myself get to enjoy the fruits of that polemic.

RM & JS: In looking at various installation shots of Strata (2000-2001), which is made from Elmer’s glue, we noticed that there is considerable variability about how the installation has appeared over time. This seems to be true for many of your installations. Can you talk about how Strata has evolved from the first instance it was created to how it appears now at the IMA?

TD: Each and every installation of my work contains inevitable variabilities that relate to space, context, and environmental/atmospheric conditions.

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Still from "Art School Confidential." Left: John Malkovich as Professor Sandford, Right: Max Minghellas as Jerome. Photo by Suzanne Hanover, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, all rights reserved (c) Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.

Art21′s Open Enrollment column is a forum for nine people currently enrolled in some form of art graduate study to take on a variety of topics and to challenge some of the existing conventions concerning the education of artists and art professionals. It will also serve as a document on the current state of advanced study in art.

Over the next several months, we eight will speak from our very different perspectives to cover a variety of topics: the crit, life after graduation, the educational canon, the role of history in art practice, the studio vs. the field, interdisciplinary study, competition, and many others.

So, to introduce you to ourselves and to the Open Enrollment column, Vency Yun and myself, Matthew Newton, have profiled our fellow bloggers and their schools to give you some perspective on who we are and how we are being educated.

First, Vency presents Lily Rossebo, Jeffrey Augustine Songco, Oliver Wunsch, and Daniel Ingroff while I profile Mike Brenner, Corina Reynolds, and Carrie McGath. Please enjoy this peek into our worlds, feel free to comment on this and future posts, and thank you for reading!

A collage of Vency's cyber-interviews on Skype

Vency Yun: It is 3pm in France and I’m sitting in my apartment with my afternoon café crème in hand, waiting for Lily, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Skype me. In many ways, this feels like the first day of school, where I’m about to meet four of my classmates: Lily (Edinburgh College of Art), Jeffrey (San Francisco Art Institute), Oliver (Williams College), and Daniel (The Mountain School of Arts) for the first time. Except our school is in cyberspace where they, like me, have registered for this Open Enrollment virtual classroom, to share and to write about our graduate school experiences. So this entry will be like a diary, where I note down what I so humbly learned from each person in contrast to the experiences that I’ve had at Concordia University in Montreal — because after all, I am a student who learns from her peers.

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