Liz Kueneke, "Locating Ourselves in Los Angeles," 2009. Embroidery on fabric/public intervention.

Many thanks to all of you who commented on my posts last week, particularly “On teaching art to scientists,” which seems to have resonated strongly with Art21 and PBS readers. One of my lesson plans surveys contemporary mapmaking, a subject that fascinates artists, scientists, and wanderers alike.

In One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, art historian Miwon Kwon traces how site-specific art practices have, over time, revealed “site” to be an unfixed concept. Rather than a synonym for a particular geographic location, a site can be temporary, nomadic, virtual, and ultimately discursive, existing in and as dialogue. “…the increasing instances of locational unspecificity,” Kwon writes, “are seen to exacerbate the sense of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life.” With site in flux, the very idea of community itself is elusive.

If we can’t define where we come from, then who are we? A response to contemporary life “as a network of unanchored flows” can be located in the explosion of cartographic practices in contemporary art over the last fifteen years. A partial list includes artists physically altering existing maps in order to point out their fragility as constructions (Nina Katchadourian, Shannon Rankin, Miguel Angel Rios), re-imagining “real” territories or creating new ones, to question cartographic authority (Lordy Rodriguez, Ross Racine, Bill Rankin), plotting experiences and memories both collaborative and individual (Liz Kueneke, Denis Wood, Simon Evans). Accordingly, there have also been scores of map-related art exhibitions, which are themselves attempts to map the maps, and so on into infinite regress (check The Map Room for a comprehensive list of map-related activities).

At the conclusion of One Place After Another, Kwon recounts the plot of Valparaiso, the play by Don DeLillo in which the protagonist Michael Majeski leaves on a business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana, and accidentally winds up in Valparaiso, Chile. As the play unfolds, we understand that Majeski’s mis-adventure parallels his sense of identity – he is both literally and figuratively lost. When he returns home to find himself a newly-minted celebrity, he reconstructs his trip and, by extension, his sense of self, via a series of media interviews. Majeski’s journey, Kwon suggests, allows us to see how arriving at the “wrong” destination can lead us to new self-discoveries. The process of getting “lost” can be disorienting but ultimately liberating and, one hopes, rewarding.

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Norah Fletchall. Photo: Indianapolis Zoo.

Contemporary artworks in museums are like animals in zoos.  (Those artworks still in the “wild” and roaming free are in private collections.) In this way, caring for some contemporary artworks requires that we consider the artwork’s needs, environment, and its future. Think of performance-based works, site-specific installations, ephemeral and interactive works, and all of the projects that have elements with built-in variability, ongoing maintenance needs, and components that need to be replaced or refreshed.

Here to help explore this analogy from a zoological conservation perspective is Norah Fletchall, the Vice President of Conservation at the Indianapolis Zoo. Norah came to the Indianapolis Zoo in 2009 from the John Ball Zoological Garden in Grand Rapids, MI, where she served as Deputy Director. She started her zoo career at the Saint Louis Zoo, where she was a zookeeper. With an undergraduate degree in animal science and a MBA, Norah is an active Professional Fellow with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and a founding member of the Thailand Clouded Leopard Consortium.

Richard McCoy: Will you describe your role and responsibilities as a conservator at the Indianapolis Zoo?

Nora Fletchall: Connecting our visitors and our community to wildlife and moving them towards support of our efforts to preserve and restore our planet’s biodiversity is my primary role at the Indianapolis Zoo.  We strive to engage our guests to care about wildlife through effective and powerful exhibits while at the same time providing them with opportunities to support conservation of animal species in the wild.

Zoos and aquariums contribute to conservation of animals in the wild through support of conservation biologists such as those honored by the Indianapolis Prize; ongoing research on the biology of animals living in the wild and through education of people living in areas where wildlife and humans are in conflict.  This education is designed to help them discover ways that reduce that conflict.

RM: Many art conservators are moving towards a team approach when it comes to caring for contemporary artworks (I’ve talked about this team approach on this blog here and here).  I know the Indianapolis Zoo works as a team to care for its animals.  Will you talk about the specific roles zoo staff take on while caring for animals and how they work as a team?

NF: Providing high quality animal care is one of the foundations of what we do at the Indianapolis Zoo.  Our animal collections team works tirelessly to provide excellent care for our living collection.  Zookeepers are charged with the daily care of the animals and this involves not only cleaning and feeding the animals but also making sure that the animal’s lives are enriched.  Zookeepers provide this enrichment daily to our animals through a variety of methods depending upon the species.

For primates, enrichment might be done via providing food in ways that encourages foraging.  For other animals like cats, that enrichment might be items that stimulate their desire to chase or hunt.  Zookeepers work continually to assure each animal under their care has not only its physical needs met but also its psychological needs.

Our curatorial staff oversees animal care and works closely with other zoos to assure that our collection is genetically diverse and sustainable. Veterinarians implement and oversee the health of our animal collection while those of us in the education department strive to provide opportunities for our audiences to understand and appreciate wildlife and wild places.

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Kerry James Marshall, "Portrait of a Curator (In Memory of Beryl Wright)", 2009. Acrylic on pvc. Collection of Penny Pritzker and Bryan Traubert.

An ancient proposition, a group of Modern women, life-restoring elixir, and more in this week’s roundup:

• Vancouver Art Gallery has organized Canada’s first solo exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall. The exhibition presents approximately 20 paintings created since the early 1990s. Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels says of Marshall: “[His] skill as an artist, his keen observation of other genres, and his acuity as a thinker have led to a twenty-five year practice characterized by historically informed explorations of the representation of the black figure in pictorial space, as well as investigations into the pretensions of the art world in which he participates.” Kerry James Marshall (co-curated by Jeff Wall) is on view through January 3, 2011. Read recent interviews with the artist in The Globe and Mail and National Post.

• Tonight from 6pm to 8pm, meet Season 2 artist Walton Ford at the Taschen store in Miami. Ford will sign copies of the trade edition of his book Pancha Tantra. Only 100 copies will be available. Reservations are accepted only via telephone order, on a first come first serve basis. Get more information about this event here.

• This is the last week to see two exhibitions of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge in New York: Five Themes at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) ends today, and Sheets of Evidence at Dieu Donné closes May 22.

• Catch Season 4 artist Mark Bradford at MoMA on May 26. Bradford will be in conversation with Christopher Bedford, Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts. MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry will moderate the discussion. Tickets are available online or at the Museum information and Film desks. (The first major survey of Bradford’s work is on view at the Wexner through August 15.)

• Works by Art21 artists Kiki Smith (Season 2), Roni Horn (Season 3), An My Lê (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Carrie Mae Weems (both Season 5) are on view at MoMA through March 21, 2011. Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography brings together over 200 photographs by women artists in the museum’s collection, charting the history of photography from the beginning of the modern period to the present. This exhibition is presented in conjunction with MoMA’s publication of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art due out next month.

• Resurrectine, a new group show at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, is titled after the fictive life-restoring elixir imagined by Raymond Roussel in his 1914 novel Locus Solus. The exhibition, according to the gallery’s website, “embraces the notion of transformation – the creative act of taking form, appearance, nature, character, or meaning, and making it new again.” More than fifty artists — including Art21′s Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Pepón Osorio (Season 1), and Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) — are included in the show. From June 15 to 19, visitors are invited to bring in their old clothes, which will be “resurrected” courtesy of Junky Styling.

• Works by Josiah McElheny (Season 3), Blinky Palermo, and Heimo Zobernig are currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery. The exhibition, titled Blue Design, consists of three works, each of a similar blue tone, that relate through their use of architectural and design language, and the idea that color is “a narrative element of abstraction.” McElheny’s new sculptural work, Charlotte Perriand (and Carlos Scarpa), Blue, (2010), is a shelving design by Charlotte Perriand that has been remade in a deep glossy blue color. The shelves are filled with designs by Carlo Scarpa that have been reconstructed in blue glass. McElheny’s work connects to Palermo’s early exploration of material, narrative, and abstraction. (McElheny’s upcoming summer project at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art will coincide with Palermo’s retrospective exhibition, jointly presented by CCS Bard and Dia: Beacon.)

• The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), a five-part film by Season 2 artist Matthew Barney, will screen at the IFC Center in New York, May 19 through June 3. According to the New York Post, one reason to attend this screening is that The Cycle will never be available to audiences on DVD. Another reason is that “the films make for damn good viewing.” And if that’s not enough, the artist will make an appearance on May 20 at the 7pm showing of Cremaster 4 and 5. See all show times and purchase tickets here.

• On May 21 at 7pm, Barney will speak at the New Museum as part of the discussion series “A Proposition.” The artist will discuss his developing project Ancient Evenings and share the storyboards and video sequences for this seven-act performance. Purchase tickets here.

• In more Barney news, Carol Vogel of the New York Times reports that MoMA has purchased 50 percent interest in the “Drawing Restraint Archive,” the artist’s chronicle that began in 1987 and to which he continues to add. Read more.

• Season 1 artist Richard Serra has won Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias award in the arts. The Prince of Asturias Foundation described Serra as one of the “most relevant sculptors of the second half of the 20th century” and said his minimalist works were of “great visual power that are an invitation to reflection and wonder.” The prize includes a $63,000 cash award and a sculpture by Joan Miro.

John Gerrard, "Oil Stick Work," 2008. Courtesy the artist and Art on the Underground.

“Time-based art” is a great new contemporary art phrase to drop into conversations, with the redoubtable Orwellian tautology of “movement-based dancing” or “sound-based music.” It’s one of those phrases that sounds neat but falls apart when you try to grasp it, like a stale meringue. All cultural endeavor is, by its very nature, time-based. After all, the 400,000 year-old Moroccan “figurine” discovered in 2003 (nominally the world’s oldest extant sculptural object), which is about as far away from contemporary art discourse as you can get on this planet, is intrinsically time-based — it exists in time and cannot be experienced immediately. Nonsensical though the phrase might seem, it does represent the good intentions of curators and academics to discuss a strain of contemporary art not satisfactorily contained by the term “video art” (nor its painfully literal cousin, “lens-based art”). The urge to categorize and identify is one of those Enlightenment hangovers we thought we’d shaken off, like Corinthian columns and powdered pompadours.

A new installation by John Gerrard, an Irish artist whose work is most often described as “time-based” (there’s not a lot of precedent for what he does, and calling it “video art” or “virtual art” isn’t quite accurate), opened this week in the Canary Wharf underground station. The station is a cavernous raw-concrete and steel Norman Foster construction completed in the late 1990s, set in London’s principal financial district. Canary Wharf creates the city’s only homogenous skyline as well as a catch-all visual metaphor for the flow of international capitalism. Its spiky towers, like the busted teeth of old robots, formed a prominent backdrop to recent scenes of sacked workers scuttling for the tube, cacti under their arms. And with the installation of Gerrard’s work – commissioned by Art on the Underground, Transport for London’s excellent series of installations in and around tube stations – the subterranean becomes both literal and metaphorical.

Gerrard’s piece, entitled Oil Stick Work, has been shown before, perhaps most notably on the island of Certosa during the 2009 Venice Biennale. In Venice, Gerrard’s piece – a real-time digital animation of a desolate Kansas landscape as setting for a Beckettian drama of fruitless labor – looked like a sober corrective to some of the splashier efforts of artists in the Giardini, like a guy tapping his watch at a party, encouraging everyone to get their coats and leave. In Canary Wharf, the virtual nature of his work takes on a poignancy provided in part by the site itself, the nexus of virtual transaction, of imaginary amounts of money swelling and falling every second of the day.

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Art21’s Season 6, at least as far as video production is concerned, is getting a little more real everyday.  We’re deep in the throes of pre-producing our first honest-to-god shoot for Season 6.  I can’t reveal many details but I can say that it’ll be in London, cover multiple artists (some London/UK-based, some not), is going to require some serious on location live translation, and – I’m deeply embarrassed to admit – will be our first truly all digital/tapeless shoot.  I’m furiously researching now how to make both the tapeless location and post-production processes work within our existing tape-based model.  Any tapeless geniuses out there can feel free to contact me here; I’ve got all sorts of questions.  It’s a brave, not-so-new world out there (but more on that later.)

Yinka Shonibare, "Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle," 2010. Photo Credit: James Jenkins.

One concrete thing I can reveal about our London shoot is that we’ll be covering the unveiling of Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare MBE’s Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth project, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle.  Unfortunately we were a little too early in the game to shoot the work’s fabrication back when we originally shot with Yinka in the Fall of 2008.  But we’ll definitely make up for that now; expect the footage to appear in an upcoming Exclusive video, or at the very least an Uncut video.

Speaking of Uncut video, our industrious production unit shot two more Art21-sponsored artists conversations since my last blog post.  I’ll save you the last installment’s angst (the eternal problem of shooting a necessarily static, talk-based event) and just give you a nice video nugget instead.  And in early May, we shot a unique meeting of two super smart minds:  Art21 Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny and art critic and historian Boris Groys.  Modernism-obsessed Josiah and 20th-century Russian avant-garde expert Boris vibed almost too well (both were actually taking notes throughout their talk), discussing the more than ideological differences between translucency and transparency and, in the clip above, the very real dangers of the modernist glass box.

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SUPPORT ART21: The countdown continues…there are 64 days left to join the 100 x 100 Exclusive campaign. In 36 days we’ve received 35 donations. 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 #106: Julie Mehretu puts the finishing touches on her large-scale painting Mural at Goldman Sachs, adjusting shapes and colors in dialogue with the architecture and views from the street. Be sure to check out our recent videos of Mural narrated by the artist’s studio assistants (Episode #097) and painting conservator Luca Bonetti (Episode #101).

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.

Opening Today: An exhibition of recent works as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (through 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.

Julie Mehretu is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Systems of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online via iTunes (opens application).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Thanks: Erika Fortner; Jessica Kingdon; Goldman, Sachs, & Co.; Harmony Murphy; and Damien Young.

ArtPrize 2009, Grand Rapids, MI. Photo courtesy of Brian Kelly.

Last August, I wrote a post on this blog called ArtPrize: An Experiment in Decentralized Curation and Competition. At that time, the team I work with was a month away from launching the inaugural ArtPrize event. It ended up being five times bigger than any of our estimates—200,000 visitors flooded downtown Grand Rapids to see 1,262 artists in 159 venues during 17 days. The explosion of activity was thrilling, and at times perplexing. I’ve been asked to reflect on what we learned the first year, and where ArtPrize is headed.

ArtPrize is moving toward new ways of thinking about public art. This is not because we’ve cooked up a new definition for the term, but rather, because we’ve built a platform upon which art and the public can encounter each another in new ways.

More on that later; first a few basics. ArtPrize gives away the world’s largest art prize: $250,000 to first place, $449,000 total. The prize is decided by public vote. The parameters are simple. Artists must show within a venue during the 17-day event. Venues must be within a three square-mile area of downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. There is both an open call to artists (deadline is May 27) and open call to venues (already registered for 2010). Artists and venues connect directly with one another through artprize.org. ArtPrize 2010 will take place from September 22–October 10. We’ve made some small but significant adjustments, like introducing series of juried awards, and expanding partnerships with art and cultural institutions.

Artists can be from anywhere and show anything they can get a venue to agree to exhibit. Venues range from professionally curated art institutions and public parks, to night clubs and vacant storefronts. Voters must register in person at the event.

Last year, the top prize went to Brooklyn-based painter Ran Ortner, whom Nicole Caruth recently interviewed.

Ran Ortner, "Open Water #24," 2009. Winner of ArtPrize 2009, Grand Rapids, MI. Photo courtesy of Brian Kelly.

In my last post, I focused on two ideas that were driving much of our thinking heading into the first year. First, ArtPrize is an experiment, and second, the idea of incentive is central to what we’re doing. We provide the reactive agents, a giant pot of money and a public vote, to incentivize artists and the public to re-negotiate their relationship to one another.

As we reflected on the results of the first iteration of this experiment, we felt the need to refine exactly what our role is — to state what we are doing and, of equal importance, what we are not doing. The result of this process was a design brief, which can be downloaded here.

At first, it seems like using the term “design brief” is just a fashionable way of saying “mission statement.” But there are some important differences. Art institutions direct processes and outcomes using a mission statement as a guide. We don’t want to be an institution; instead, we’re designing a platform upon which many players — art institutions among them — can interact, experiment with new strategies, and tailor their involvement to meet their specific goals.

The distinction between developing an institution and developing a platform plays out in a number of ways.

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Liz Larner, 2010. Courtesy Regen Projects.

Judith Butler, the always agile theorist responsible for Gender Trouble, often says diplomatically dense things like, “a lesbian is what I have been being since college.” She would not say, “I am a lesbian,” nor would she even say “I have been a lesbian.”  This might seem tricky, but it’s really not. It is, among other things, an acknowledgment of how much work it takes to be real.

Last week’s Blogger-in-Residence, Evan J. Garza, posted a set of videos by Rashaad Newsome, a multi-media artist whose video and performance work for the current Whitney Biennial takes a high-tech approach to voguing. For one video, Newsome merged footage of multiple dancers into a single body, virtually choreographing a strange, abrasive routine in which a gangly figure in a small white room twists, turns, and splits his body with an almost inhuman degree of composure. The dance never really happened, but it feels like what would happen if someone ever had total control over who they were being: the way the dancer eyes the camera with a carefully composed defiance; the way he makes contortion seem natural; the way his movements have a totally consistent rhythm; the fact that he looks like he could keep moving forever. Garza called Newsome “wholeheartedly real” description is warranted. Newsome must be wholehearted–I can’t imagine anything half-hearted being half this good–and he’s impeccable when it comes to exacting realness. But he never lets us think that being real comes easily.

Rashaad Newsome, still from "Untitled (New Way)," 2009. Silent single channel HD video; 6:48 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Ramis Barquet, New York.

A pair of current exhibitions in West Hollywood grapple with realness in a less kinetic way. At Regen Projects’s two Almont Drive galleries, Catherine Opie’s crisp seascapes and Liz Larner’s tongue-in-cheek sculptures marry realism and wholeheartedness with a precision that I initially found off-putting. Opie’s photographs, images of sunset and sunrise taken from the deck of a container ship during the ten days it took to get from Long Beach to Korea, are composed so that the horizon line almost always cuts across the image’s center. In a review that went live this morning, LA Weekly’s Christopher Miles pointed to “the neat stack of compositional components and natural elements” in Opie’s series that played out like “an idea set in motion like a machine.” Continue reading »

The band Art vs. Science, Courtesy www.artvsscience.net

This July, I’ll be teaching a course I developed on the intersections of contemporary art and science, for Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). My students are advanced high schoolers, attending two-week courses on physics, robotics, aerospace engineering, and biology, among other lab sciences. Many of them have had no academic art experience. We begin the first day by discussing where the boundaries might be between the two disciplines, listing responses to “what do scientists do?” and “what do artists do?” Experiment, create, observe, invent, analyze – they quickly realize that there are many overlaps, but no clear divisions.

Walmor Correa, "Ondina," 2006. Acrylic and graphite on canvas, 76x51".

Mark Dion noted in Art:21 Season 4 that humor, irony, and metaphor are tools artists have that scientists don’t. Or, as a recent New York Times review of the exhibition Dead or Alive at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), put it – “artists are allowed to make stuff up and scientists really shouldn’t.” Is truth, then, the burden of scientists? This has been fertile ground for contemporary artists like Dion, Walton Ford, Alexis Rockman, and Walmor Correa, among many others. Their work challenges both the authoritative scientific voice and the structure of its presentation.

I’m interested in raising this question here, as I do in my classroom, because it continues to be a point of debate in the academic community, as it relates to practicing and teaching the two disciplines. Over and over again in current discussions about education, an interdisciplinary approach is stressed, and the Renaissance is held up as the ideal academic environment, a time when intellectual pursuits were not as narrowly defined. Leonardo had it made, we’re led to believe, because he could work fluidly between what we now know as art and science.

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Lygia Clark, "Diálogo: Óculos (Dialogue: Goggles)," 1968. Modified diving goggles, metal, and mirror. Clark Family Collection, Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Eduardo Clark. © 2008 "The World of Lygia Clark" Cultural Association.

We each look at the world from our own individual perspectives, within contexts that are constantly shifting.  Our unique outlook as viewers, the specific viewpoint of the artist, the curatorial decisions of the institution — all influence the following question: How do we experience art? Today, we launch the new Flash Points topic, Art and Experience, which will explore this question from different vantage points.

In John Dewey‘s book on aesthetic perception, Art as Experience, he discusses how art can become removed from our everyday reality:

The very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience.

Throughout this topic, we’ll look at artists who seek to bring art back into the realm of human experience and remove the walls between viewer and creator — from those who immerse the visitor in a new environment, to artists who encourage direct interaction with the work of art. As Allan Kaprow has famously stated, “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.”

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