Giant spider sculpture "Maman" by Louise Bourgeois at Tate Modern Art Gallery, London. Photo by Steve Greaves.

There’s a display outside one of the shops in Tate Modern, showing visitors’ comments written on little cards. That visitors’ comments are encouraged at all, let alone actually displayed in the museum, is testament enough to the transformative effect that this institution, now in its tenth year, has had on the British cultural landscape. One comment, though, in bubbly, fourteen-year-old girl writing, catches the eye above the others. It reads (with spelling errors intact): “This museum rocks! It’s soooo AWSOME!” So far, so fourteen-year-old girl. But the next bit made me laugh, then think a bit: “I hope all the artists are going to be famous one day!!!”

You almost don’t want to disavow this young visitor’s enthusiasm: clearly the works she saw (Picassos, Bacons, Richters and Rothkos) had such an immediate impact on her that they obviously were by young, upcoming, anxious artists, rather than the hoary behemoths us jaded types have stopped really looking at. My first really transformative art experiences were at the Tate, too, though in its original incarnation across the river (what’s now Tate Britain), where I saw, as a teenager, works by Bacon, Miro, and Pollock that absolutely defined what I wanted from art: a kind of visual equivalent for the outsiderish obstinacy I sought and found in music. That’s not the case now – I subsequently found an interest in milder, older art, and milder, older music – but it’s worth, I think, remembering the immediacy of that initial lapel-grabbing, electrical charge when you can. Modern art – let’s face it – will always be cool in a way that contemporary art isn’t. At Tate Modern, it’s the modern displays – the salon-hung Surrealism room, the Bacon and Picasso face-offs – that remain permanently abuzz, while the huge Beuys installation, or Arte Povera room, are as forbiddingly depeopled as towns in Western movies with a creaky saloon sign and skittering tumbleweed. Maybe the museum’s disingenuous name says more than it realizes.

Joseph Beuys, "Lightning with Stag in its Glare" (1958-85)

Over the last decade, Tate Modern has, willfully or not, engendered cultural events in Britain that bear its unmistakable hallmarks of accessibility, participation, and slightly irritating chumminess. From Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project, to the increased popularity of the Turner Prize and the reality TV show School of Saatchi, Tate Modern has permanently transformed the national interest in modern and contemporary art. 5 million people visit every year; it’s rarely not heaving with visitors. And there is an amazing diversity of work displayed. On a recent visit, I saw art by Luciano Fabro, Marisa Merz, Lucia Nogueira, Frédéric Bouabré, and Magdalena Abakanowicz – some demanding, difficult work – nestled among the crowd-pleasers by Dali, Kapoor, and Bacon. Fantastic, in-depth installations of photography by Bruce Davidson and August Sander are wonderful small exhibitions in themselves. Only a dyed-in-the-wool art snob would balk at such generally undershown work being exposed to such a huge audience. Without Tate Modern’s indisputably daring curatorial policies – enabled, almost certainly, by an extremely patchy historical collection that renders straight chronology more or less impossible – a huge swath of artists largely alien to the orthodoxies of art history would be little known.

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Allora & Calzadilla, "Hope Hippo", 2005. Installation view, 51st Venice Biennale. Photo: Giorgio Boata. Courtesy of the artists and Lisson Gallery.

• Work by Season 4 duo Allora & Calzadilla is currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum in the exhibition Restless Empathy. The exhibition examines the process of entering the interior world of another and seeking to make a connection. Eight artists were asked to create new projects or to rethink existing bodies of work to be shown throughout the museum and the town of Aspen itself. Allora & Calzadilla have created a new version of their Hope Hippo (first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2005) using local materials. Someone will be seated atop the hippo at all times, reading a newspaper. They will also be supplied a whistle, which they will blow each time they come across a story that they feel exposes or illuminates an injustice. Restless Empathy is on view through July 18.

• Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang has installed his collaborative project Peasant Da Vincis at the newly opened Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. The project, which explores the subject of individual creativity, coincides with the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai — “a major international event where countries and companies exhibit their latest inventions so as to show off their political, economic, technological and cultural strengths.” Peasant Da Vincis presents the stories of peasant inventors from all over China who have shown “great enthusiasm and courage in the pursuit of their dreams.” The project invites the inventors to recreate their works, exhibit them, and demonstrate on site how their inventions work. This is done to encourage public discussions about their creations, as well as “the social transformation of hundreds of millions of peasants in the modernization process in China and their huge contributions to urban development.” Peasant Da Vincis closes July 25.

• Out of the Box, an exhibition at the Hammer Museum, celebrates the joint acquisition of the complete archive of prints by Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel by the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since 1988 Jacob Samuel has published 43 portfolios of prints made by artists, including Barry McGee, Andrea Zittel, (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), and John Baldessari (Season 5). The number of prints included in each portfolio range from 6 to 36; the exhibition includes more than 550 individual prints. Out of the Box is on view through August 29.

• Variations & Improvisations, a solo presentation of works by Season 4 artist Robert Ryman, opens at The Phillips Collection on June 5. This group of approximately 25 small-scale paintings are drawn from private collections, some of which have rarely been shown in the United States. This will be the first solo showing of Ryman’s work in the Washington area. Variations & Improvisations closes September 12.

• Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu speaks to Artinfo’s Andrew Russeth about her new series of paintings currently on display at the Guggenheim Museum. Read Russeth’s article “All That’s Solid Explodes into Air: A Q&A with Julie Mehretu” here.

• A suite of photographs by Collier Schorr (Season 2) is featured in the June 2010 issue of Dazed & Confused.

Loul Samater at her studio in Beaufort, SC

Loul Samater is a Somali artist born and raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but currently based in Beaufort, South Carolina.  She came to the U.S. in 1994 to complete the last year of her schooling at the George boarding school in Philadelphia. Loul remained in the U.S. and she now holds a BFA from Dickinson College (1999) and an MFA in painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004). Between 1998-99, she attended the Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy, and in 2005, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Loul has shown at the Acuna-Hansen in Los Angeles, Alona Kagan in New York, and Halsey Institute of  Contemporary Art, among other galleries and institutions.

Loul recently returned from Somaliland, where she expanded the visual vocabulary that now fuels the work in her studio. It is my pleasure for you to read my interview with her and take a look at her work for yourself.

Street art gallery, Hargeisa, Somaliland. Photograph by Loul Samater.

Georgia Kotretsos:  I would like to begin this post by acquainting our readers with your background, by looking into the landscape and cityscape of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Hargeisa, Somaliland.  Do these places serve as your initial point of departure inspiration-wise?  Do you carry in your creative hard-drive Jeddah’s sculptures, the monumentality of Naasa Hablood, or the feeling of Islamic architecture?

Loul Samater: I do, I like how you put that. My background is unique – I am a Somali of the diaspora born and raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I had visited Somaliland four times in my life and only two of those times as an adult. I do indeed carry the Islamic architecture in me – you see, structures and monuments are the main things I carry in my creative hard-drive.

The city I grew up in is on the Red Sea. ‘Jeddah’ means grandmother and that is where Eve is said to be buried. The city has 400 outdoor sculptures situated at the roundabouts and they vary in sizes but most of them tower over the city – thus making Jeddah one of the largest open-air sculpture galleries in the world. The artworks are mainly modernist sculptures or abstract structures. There aren’t any figurative sculptures on display whatsoever. Anything that even depicts or represents the human form is prohibited in Saudi Arabia.

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Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.org with their avatars in Plymouth, UK. Photo by Marco Anelli.

The Italian “artist-provocateurs” Eva and Franco Mattes, aka 0100101110101101.org, are no strangers to this site. Our very first guest bloggers back in 2008, when they blogged about their Influencers festival (more on that below), they have since made semi-regular appearances in this column.

Throughout their practice, the Mattes seek to make the invisible visible, under rather clandestine circumstances. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, they operated under the name Luther Blissett (1994-99) with a collective of other artists. Notorious during this time was the figure of Darko Maver (1998-99), an imaginary Serbian artist they invented only to “murder” him soon after. The Mattes then became known for their culture-jamming projects like Nike Ground (2003), in which they convinced Vienna residents that a public square would be renamed “Nikeplatz”; Vaticano.org, their hacking of the Vatican’s website; and Life Sharing (2000-2003), a net art project that allowed anyone in the world to log on to their computer and access their personal files.

Significant in the context of this column is the Mattes’s involvement with Second Life. 13 Most Beautiful Avatars (part of their larger Portraits project from 2006-7) is a photographic series of “celebrity” avatars exhibited in a contemporary art gallery in Second Life. Directly referencing Warhol’s 13 Most Beautiful Women and 13 Most Beautiful Boys (both 1964), these images transpose the banality of celebrity and human desire onto the two-dimensional avatar. Around this same time, the Mattes began an ongoing series called Synthetic Performances (2006-present), in which their avatars reenacted seminal performance artworks in Second Life, including Marina Abramovic’s and Ulay’s Imponderabilia (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (1982-87), Gilbert & George’s The Singing Sculpture (1968), Valie Export’s Tapp und Tastkino (1968), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), and Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971).

While the Mattes continue their Second Life explorations, they have since turned away from reenactments and appropriations to produce original artworks in this virtual world. At the same time, their real-life practice thrives. With a solo exhibition of mostly new work, Reality is Overrated, currently on view at Postmasters Gallery in New York, the Mattes continue to create their provocative art with the distinctly twenty-first century variable that is the Internet. In doing so, they effectually sew the gap between art and life with the thread of the programming code.

On the occasion of this exhibition, I interviewed Eva and Franco about this show, their latest performances, and the promise of our latest procrastinatory tool, Chatroulette.

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SUPPORT ART21: We’ve reached the halfway point in our 100 x 100 Exclusive campaign and our online fans continue to impress: in 50 days we’ve received 53 donations! Every $1 in the tip jar helps underwrite the next crop of Exclusive videos. And now without further ado, today’s video:

Episode #108: Florian Maier-Aichen likens his use of infrared film to an in-between state, discussing photography’s role in picturing the American West and its ability to confound past and present.

Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.

Florian Maier-Aichen is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Fantasy of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Download-to-own the full episode from iTunes.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: 303 Gallery, New York; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and Florian Maier-Aichen.

Liz Magic Laser, "chase," 2009-10. Production still from performance, Courtesy Derek Eller Gallery, NY.

Currently on view at Derek Eller Gallery in New York, Liz Magic Laser’s chase (2009) stems from interpretation of Bertolt Brecht’s Man Equals Man (1926), performed by eight different actors in various bank vestibules throughout New York City.  The ongoing project unfolds in the gallery as a feature-length video and a theatrical set for an ancillary performance of The Elephant Calf, a one-act farce that Brecht originally intended to be the final scene of Man Equals Man, but later made as an addendum to the script.

The Elephant Calf, performed at the exhibition’s opening, is an absurdist tale of an elephant calf who is tried and convicted of murdering his mother despite the fact that his mother is very much alive and no evidence exists to condemn him. The play makes clear that truth is often a matter of opinion backed by mob rule.  Applying the same blustery irrationality that blogger Andrew Breitbart uses to dismiss every racist comment attributed to the Tea Party, claiming that the epithets are plants by the left wing media, or the faulty reasoning behind George W. Bush’s search for his WMD MacGuffin, the Elephant Calf is the parable version of Man Equals Man, a condemnation of the convenient truths that drive the logic of war.

While chase makes clear the parallel between war’s distortions and a phantom economy based on mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps by situating the play in a bank lobby, it is questionable whether invoking Brecht has the subversive potential it once had.  In an age where détournement comes in the guise of Jon Stewart and the absurdity of the theater is no match for the absurdity of the nightly news, even Brecht’s alienation technique seems up for grabs.  The most subversive potential of chase may lie in its repurposing of the ATM vestibule as public space.

Like the Surveilance Camera Players, Laser’s actors are well aware that they are playing for not one, but many cameras. Yet they do not act in accordance with the rules of conduct that normally govern such occupied territory.  Latin America has a long tradition of marrying theater and politics in an effort to liberate civic space.  Laser may want to consider some of these approaches, such as Augusto Boal’s invisible, legislative, or analytical theater.  Beyond that, an actual deliverance from wag-the-dog politics may require leaving the gallery behind to develop new techniques that can interrupt the speed at which every act of resistance is reclaimed by ever-agile corporate technologies.

Last month, MOCA published a new book dedicated to engaging children with its permanent collection.  Aimed at children age 8-12, Breaking the Rules: What is Contemporary Art? exploring works by 25 different contemporary artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Ray, Vija Celmins (Season 2), Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), and Mike Kelley (Season 3).  The full-color pages include large images of each featured painting, sculpture, installation, or photograph, along with biographical information, quotations from each artist, accessible analysis of each piece, and engaging questions to help its young readers engage with the conceptual aspects of the work. I spoke with MOCA Educator, Juliana Romano, who conducts tours for visiting school groups, to get her take on the educational potential of the book, authored by Susan Goldman Rubin.

Lily Simonson: Can you describe your approach to guiding tours with groups of students?

Juliana Romano: We use a modified visual thinking strategy, which about a basic line of inquiry.  What’s going on here?  What do you see that makes you say that?  What more can you find?  For example when we were looking at Mark Tansey’s Triumph Over Mastery today, one student said, “that thing is broken.” So I responded by asking more questions: “What do you see that makes you say it’s broken?”  Even though it’s obviously broken. That way, you get a more rich description.  “It’s crumbled…” And you get closer to seeing what their assumptions are, and closer to having a breakthrough. We try not to be didactic.  We draw out the students’ observations, and then we add onto it questions that are interpretive.

Mike Kelley, "Ouija," 1990. Courtesy MOCA Los Angeles.

LS: Susan Rubin includes questions about almost every piece in the book.  How do her questions compare to the types of questions you ask students in a discussion setting?

JR: The question she asks about Jim Shaw, “What does it mean?” is a really hard question.  I might not ask that directly, even though that’s what we’re getting at.

The question about Mike Kelley’s cat shrine is more leading: “The very absence of the cats evokes sorrow.  Was Kelley Seriously Mourning Their Loss? Or was he making a spoof of people who dedicate elaborate tributes to their deceased pets?”  I like it because it really gets at one of the things I’m more challenged by, which is: how do you get viewers to consider the level of sincerity in the artist? A lot of kids have this thing about art expressing feelings.  And it gets taught to them so young.  This idea that art is creative and art is all about feelings gets repeated so much.  It’s difficult to get to the place where art is more cerebral, that’s challenging.

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Illustration by Jon Berlingeri

Can a successful work of art make you angry, uncomfortable, or confused? This is one of the many questions we engage in as art educators and also one of the many questions we tackle in the Art21 Educators summer institute. What is successful when it comes to contemporary art? Is the form as important as the idea behind it? Does design still matter?

I am currently teaching a unit called Driven to Abstraction. In this unit, students are asked to give form to ideas or things that do not have any specific form, such as the sound of music, the smell of a flower, or the sting of cold water in your face. Being able to visually simplify and represent an idea or event, for example, is an approach many contemporary artists work with in their practice. In a recent lesson I asked my classes to warm up to abstraction by trying to picture the music of the Buena Vista Social Club without actually picturing instruments, people, or a specific place. I simply asked them to convey what they were listening to by representing these sounds in color, shape, line and juxtaposing elements of the design. As many, many of us have already learned, abstraction is hard for kids. Thinking past the representation of a horn and actually picturing, literally, the sound of a horn is no easy task. Arthur Dove’s “Foghorns” helped. So did a look into Kandinsky’s painting and watching Arturo Herrera’s video about music.

So far the response to work being created has ranged from joy to surprise to anger to, yes, confusion. Students often embark on beautiful works that are based on big ideas (I’m thinking of one particular student who is working on a piece inspired by, of all things, indecision), but they are not sure if the work is “successful” when it’s not “pretty” or as technically proficient as the “best” artists in class.

These conversations are worth the battle!

I spend a lot of time working with students to see and understand that there needs to be a balance between a good idea and carrying out the work in a way that’s also interesting for the viewer to engage with. A great idea that has no thought behind the form can certainly be confusing or just downright ugly. A beautiful piece that has nothing to share but mastery of a specific technique often feels like there’s no soul to it. But works that are about something and simultaneously well composed are often the most successful because they are exciting to create and engage with.

As the distinctions between artist, curator, writer and administrator are increasingly less definite, developments in how individuals should be educated follow these new hybrid categories of working. Recently, an intriguing new breed of MFA has popped up in several universities — the MFA in public or social practice. California College of the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, and Portland State University all offer this concentration. Social Practice, defined on the CCA student wiki as a “medium, not a genre or movement,” is a term referring to the utilization of social interaction and engagement to construct works of art. These works tend to be non-object based, temporal, performative, and often relate to structures outside of art such as knowledge or skill sharing. Artists who work this way often have activist concerns and critique the way the larger art world alienates its audience.

Last week, I flew up to beautiful springtime Portland for the three-day conference, Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse, organized by Jen Delos Reyes. The conference was presented under the auspices of Portland State University as a part of the Social Practice MFA concentration. I live in Los Angeles, and although there are plenty of artists working socially in that city, I’ve never experienced this sort of medium-specific gathering of artists, which actually makes a lot of sense considering the medium. The conference invited three artists to “headline” — Mark Dion, Nils Norman, and Amy Franceschini — and events were organized into workshops, projects and panels. Cultural producers from all over the United States, including Creative Time’s Nato Thompson, The Watts House Project, and InCUBATE, were there to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of working socially. Towards the end of the conference, I was able to sit down with the super-patient Jen Delos Reyes to hash out some of my questions about what the MFA in Social Practice means.

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I’ve been reading with great interest some of the posts and friendly debates that have taken place recently on this site concerning the relationship between art and science. As I read, I thought about the many artists I know who enthusiastically draw upon research conducted in the “non-art” fields of science and the humanities. Indeed, a lot of artists today are assuming the role of researcher, not with the idea of superceding scientific modes of inquiry, but in order to supplement or embellish upon them in ways that only art can.

Photo by Alison Ruttan

One artist who is particularly adept at bringing multiple fields of inquiry together is Alison Ruttan, a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and Adjunct Associate Professor  at the School of the Art Institute. Ruttan’s body of work revolves around the very basic — and yet infinitely complex — question of what makes us human. For the past several years, she has made a number of multi-disciplinary artworks that compare human and animal behavior. The types of questions Ruttan poses through her art are similar to those that are asked by an evolutionary biologist, for example, but Ruttan’s questions are open-ended and  intended, as she puts it, as “a conversation between the maker and the viewer.” As an artist, Ruttan seeks “a better understanding of the way biology guides our own actions.” At the same time, she asks us to consider the degree to which human beings are themselves held captive by the idea of the “primal impulse,” whether that impulse is for food, sex, or violent conflict.

Ruttan’s most recent project is titled The Four Year War at Gombe. In it, she uses human actors to restage the civil war that took place within a troop of chimpanzees living in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in western Tanzania.  This group of chimpanzees lived peacefully together for many years before violently separating into two distinct communities. Relying on Jane Goodall’s extensive research and documentation of this particular group of chimps, Ruttan asked her participants to loosely act out scenes that were depicted or otherwise described in Goodall’s book, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Goodall’s observations led not only to the discovery that chimpanzees wage war on one another, but that they are also capable of long range-planning and strategic thinking. In turn, Ruttan’s investigations lead her to surmise that for chimpanzees, like us, “the bloodiest feuds and civil wars are always waged against those whom we have the closest ties to.”

I asked Alison Ruttan to tell us a bit more about her Four Year War project, and the role that research plays in her art-making practice.

Claudine Ise: The tribe of chimpanzees that inspired your project The Four Year War at Gombe was extensively documented by Jane Goodall. Can you tell us about Goodall’s work with this particular tribe? What happened to the chimpanzees over the course of Goodall’s research?

Alison Ruttan: Goodall began researching this particular chimpanzee troop in 1960. Her first ten years at Gombe in Tanzania were spent gaining the group’s trust and understanding the individual relationships within the group. During that time, Goodall wrote about familiar relationships — sex, affection and cooperation, social hierarchies and death in the community. Initially she had seen the chimps as almost pure, maybe nicer than human beings. By 1971, this perception began to change when the troop split into two communities and she and her staff witnessed chimps conducting outright warfare. The original group strategically hunted down and killed all the former members of their group. Goodall sadly recognized that like us, chimps also had a dark side.

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