Artist at work: Matthew Barney, Art21 production still, 2001

Twice recently I have been contacted by teachers who have run into some trouble sharing Art21 videos with their classes. In both cases these teachers were called by parents (and in one case, a principal) who were surprised and angry that the teachers would share “questionable” and even “highly provocative” material with their classes. In both cases teachers were left explaining (and explaining, and explaining) to these parents the reasons for sharing artists such as Sally Mann and Kara Walker with their students.

In both cases, these teachers would have done themselves a huge favor consulting the Art21 educator guides and previewing the films before sharing them with their classes.

I know this sounds like an obvious thing, but let’s say it anyway: Never, ever share video of any kind with a classroom full of students unless you have seen it first and created a lesson that anticipates some of the questions and misinterpretations that may pop up. Both of the teachers mentioned above never fully previewed the segments they shared, nor did they have the educator guides to refer to when planning. While both teachers clearly had good intentions (I know, I spoke with both of them), the necessary steps never occurred to ensure that students would clearly understand the reasons behind what they would see.

Preparing students in advance to see complex and easily misinterpreted works by artists such as Sally Mann, Kara Walker, Paul McCarthy, or even Matthew Barney, to name just a few, allows them to come to class anticipating what was discussed in the last class session vs. being surprised, jumping to conclusions, and then reporting wild stories to their parents and friends. And while I cannot say that I have had the opportunity to incorporate Matthew Barney or Paul McCarthy’s segments into my own classes just yet, you can be sure I will be ready for student reactions when I do.

Besides, it’s a lot better than explaining to a parent why ketchup and vaseline are legitimate mediums for artists.

Grand Hall foyer at the Université de Provence

At one point, I thought that I had an understanding of what my personal practice consisted of, but it wasn’t until the end of my MFA residency that I really started to learn about the concept of ‘adaptation’ and modifying my art practice to meet certain life and educational circumstances. I remember sitting there in my emptied studio, with brown boxes to my right and garbage bags to my left, reminiscing about my two-year relationship with this studio space, coming to terms with the fact that I had now become a free-agent and was entering into my thesis year.

Concordia University in Montreal has one of the longest MFA Studio Arts program in all of Canada (probably in the world), as the typical 60 credit MFA is stretched out to three-years. From the get-go, an elusive grapevine makes it known that the third year is most likely to be the toughest because it marks the transition into this so-called ‘real world’ to become ‘real artists.’ We are without the support of our studio or seminar classes, and expected to generate a new oeuvre of work that will serve as our thesis exhibition, which will then be defended with tons of philosophical and conceptual ideas, of course…

Many of us go our separate ways in our third year. Some of my peers go on to fulfill teaching positions offered by the university, others set up shop in collectives; the choices for a third-year student are both ample and daunting. Unlike most of my peers, I decided that this year I would go an exchange with the anticipation of working on my thesis in a different part of the world and learn about art and the making of it from a different point of view.

In January, I packed my bags and went to the south of France to study arts plastiques at the Université de Provence. When I arrived, I came with certain expectations — well, preconceptions to be exact — on how a university should operate and the facilities that should be indispensable to any art student. I was surprised, to say the least.

My first week of school in France proved to be challenging, as it amplified my insecurities of studying in a foreign language, but that was only un petit défi because the real shock came when I spoke to my professor. I still recall that moment, dumbfounded with a horrified look on my face and trying my best to be composed, not to show any signs of contempt or emotional distress, especially when I sounded like a broken record, repeating the same set of questions and phrases over and over again:

Isabelle Sentenne demonstrates the use of the electronic loom located in the EV Building's Jacquard Room. Photo courtesy of IITS Creative Media Services from Concordia University Journal

– What do you mean there is no equipment to support a visual art practice?
– I have to work on my thesis.
– What do you mean there is no darkroom?
– There must be a darkroom…
– Do you have a large format printer for students?
– You don’t have that either…
– What about a wood or metal shop?
– Oh…that doesn’t exist.
– What about a digital sound-editing suite that supports Pro Tools?
– Really, there is no such thing…
– This is great news! There is a Final Cut Pro editing suite, but it’s only opened six hours a week.

I had gotten used to my life at Concordia, where I had 24-hour access to equipment and could take new media workshops at a blink of an eye. These rhetorical questions that I asked my professor made me see just how technologically dependent my visual practice had become. I had the luxury of using Hexagram, the institute for research/creation in media arts and technologies, which advocated the integration of new media in design and art. This million-dollar facility supplied: large format Mimaki and Epson inkjet printers, a Chromira LED printer, a computerized Jacquard Loom, a textile printer, a FastScan 3D scanner, a Pro Tools edit station, Final Cut Pro edit suites, and other interesting gadgets like HD video cameras, or field recording devices, and the list can go on and on. If I couldn’t find what I needed at Hexagram, there was CIAM (Centre intermédia et arts médiatique) a center that also supported the use of new media within exhibition spaces, which could satisfy the cravings of any techie artist.

When I look back at my reaction, I realized that shock has a way of putting things into perspective. It made me reflect on the need to modify my practice in order to adapt to these new circumstances, and called into question how I need to re-strategize the making of my thesis. More importantly, it made me see how difference could create opportunities for creative growth.

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"Raymond Pettibon" 1999-2000. Installation view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

While sitting in his office listening to some soon to be released albums, Ken Shipley quickly noted, “we have found a way as a record label to be like a band.” Founded in 2003 by Shipley, Tom Lunt, and Rob Sevier, Numero Group has done just that. With almost 60 releases to date, the company has garnered a devoted fan base and established itself as a leading archival record label. Similar to the alternative apartment spaces within Chicago, Numero Group has set up shop on the first floor of a three-story brick home here in town. With series like Eccentric Soul, Good God!, and Cult Cargo, it has traveled far and wide in search of records that share not only a distinct sound but also a unique story.

Album artwork for "Eccentric Soul: The Tragar & Note Labels," courtesy of Numero Group

Meg Onli: You have spoken before about building your compilations based on not only your (and everyone else in Numero Group’s) collection, but also that of retired DJs, performers, and fans. Could you talk about how you would typically go about making a compilation?

Ken Shipley: I think there is a misnomer about what it is that we actually do. The amount of time that we spend in the crates is really minimal. Most of the projects that we are working on we found through other research or development or work that we have already done. Like in the case of this Lowlands record that we just made, digging for the records are almost impossible. Two records came out of the entire studio, but we ended up buying the entire contents of the studio. I think people get the impression that we are crazy crate diggers that are running around the world looking for records.

MO: Record digging has become a romanticized act. Do you think that is why the term “music archeology” is often linked to your work, even though it may be inaccurate?

KS: I think what we do is more like cultural anthropology than music anthropology. I think people get into this archeology thing because it is a really good way to put the digging aspect into it. Like I said, our fingernails do not get dirty on a lot of projects. There are some, certainly, but for the most part it’s really just cultural anthropology. There are very few ‘arc of the covenants’ that are waiting to be found, and we have found a handful of them, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of what you are finding are small things.

***

When I first discovered Numero Group with its album, Eccentric Soul: The Big Mack Label, I was impressed by the research that was put into the liner notes. Unlike traditional liner notes that often housed lyrics and song credits, these gave a full history of the label with a thoughtful essay, and visual documentation that included photographs, business cards, and handwritten notes. I had a chance to check out some liner notes Numero Group were working on and talk to Ken about how they decided to accompany their records with a history of each project.

***

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Dan Graham, "For Gordon Bunshaft," 2008. Two-way mirror, steel, wood. Courtesy the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

One of my ongoing curatorial interests has been the relationship between perception and subject formation — how does what we perceive say about who we are, and vice versa? How do we act on this information? What is an artist’s role in making us aware of this process? How does an artwork’s site or location contribute to our perception and understanding?

These questions came to mind on a recent trip to the Hirshhorn Museum in DC (I’ll review the ColorForms exhibition in an upcoming post), where I saw Dan Graham’s For Gordon Bunshaft (2008) commissioned for the sculpture garden opposite the museum. One of the artist’s signature “pavilions,” it honors Hirshhorn architect Gordon Bunshaft (1909-1990), whose other notable achievements include Yale’s Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (1963).

Hirshhorn Museum exterior. Author photo.

Graham’s sculpture references Bunshaft’s brutalist structure specifically, as well as modernism and architecture in general, in several ways. The wooden lattice wall corresponds to the Hirshhorn’s interior courtyard windows (above); to the modernist grid employed by Sol Lewitt and other Minimalists; and to Japanese architecture. The two-way mirror glass and steel frame comprising the other sides of the triangle are materials of corporate architecture which, Graham has noted, are often used “to control a person or group’s social reality” in public spaces like airports or hospitals. (The sliding glass door does have the heft and feel of walking into a lobby.) Other references are more subtle — through a podcast talk with Hirshhorn curatorial assistant Al Miner, I learned that the common slate floor inside alludes to the backyard patios that were ubiquitous in suburban New Jersey, where Graham was raised. I didn’t notice this material on my visit, but it closes the loop on the play of opposites common to much of Graham’s work – urban/suburban, corporate/domestic, interior/exterior.

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The stage at Culture Wars, April 28, 2010. Photo: Katherine Payne.

Perhaps we took the Culture Wars theme of spring and nature a bit too far, but we hoped that it provided fertile ground for some healthy competition, and it did. We had a total of six teams compete in a final elimination because of multiple ties to win prizes donated by 20×200, the Phaidon|Store, and of course Art21 along with the 92YTribeca. Who could have predicted that the teams in attendance were just waiting to exercise their “green” contemporary art knowledge?

Inspired by spring, Jonathan Munar and I were appropriately dressed in pastel shirts and bright bowties. They were not clip-on ties, but the real deal. When heckled by the lovely audience, I even demonstrated how to properly tie a bowtie which, like many things, I learned from YouTube. Jonathan and I found this video to be the most helpful towards this endeavor.

Though an abbreviated event with only three rounds, the fifteen teams were still lively and ready to play. As always, the event started with the round, Ripped from the Headlines, culled from our regular online reading, including blogs, newspaper web sites, and random links sent to us either by Art21 colleagues or Twitter followers. The next round satiated an aural fixation, a playlist of ten songs that shared a certain “springtime” theme. The final round, titled Nurture Your Nature, was a potpourri of questions that ranged from land art to Michelle Obama. By the end of the event, it was clear that spring had sprung!

BOSTON HERE WE COME! CULTURE WARS ON THE ROAD

Art21 is coming to The Institute of Contemporary Art! Mark your calendars and brush up on your trivia for a special Beantown edition of Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21, taking place next Thursday, May 13 starting at 6:30PM. If you are in Boston, come to say hello and stay to be victorious.

TEAM STANDINGS AFTER CULTURE WARS #3

1st Place – We Come from France (Brooklyn Historical Society and Met Museum)

2nd Place – Momates (former MoMA Interns)

3rd Place – The Asscrack Expressionists (CUNY Graduate Center)

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Thanks to Evan J. Garza for sharing his take on art and the market with us.

Up next is Liz K. Sheehan, an independent curator and educator currently living in Worcester, Massachussetts. A native of the Philadelphia area, she holds degrees in art history and museum studies from Bowdoin College and Tufts University, and spent ten years working in museums and community arts organizations around New England – most recently at the Bates College Museum of Art, where she served as the Assistant Curator for Academic and Exhibition Initiatives. Sheehan is an adjunct faculty member in the humanities program at St. Joseph’s College of Maine, and an instructor for Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s “Frontiers” program, where she encourages budding scientists to experiment with art. Her own blog, as well as exhibitions past and present, can be found at www.lizksheehan.com.

Roni Horn, "Else 9", 2010. Red pigments and varnish on paper, 92 1/2 x 96 1/8 in. Image: via Hauser & Wirth.com

Holey maps, pre-natal forms, stuffed animals, and more in today’s roundup:

• The first exhibition in the United States ever devoted exclusively to the drawings of Season 3 artist Roni Horn is on view at Hauser & Wirth, New York through June 19. The show includes six large-scale works never before shown publicly. Up to eight by ten feet in size, these pieces form a group titled Else. Horn’s pigment drawings, which she began in the 1980s, have become increasingly large and more complex. Horn begins with two drawings of similar forms, which she refers to as “plates.” The two plates are then brought together through a process of cutting and pasting to create a new form. These drawings continue Horn’s exploration of identity through “doubling, repetition, and the paired form.” The artist’s work is on view concurrently at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw; closes June 13.

• Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo has been awarded the 2010 Velazquez Visual Arts Prize. She is the first woman to receive this honor, which is given annually by the Spanish government. Salcedo is “one of the most important artists on the international scene,” Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde said in announcing the jury’s decision. “The fact that on top of that she’s a woman is even better,” said Gonzalez-Sinde. The award, accompanied by a cash gift of $161,000, acknowledges “the rigor of [Salcedo's] work, both in the formal sense and in terms of her social and political commitment.”

• Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, previously on view at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, opens May 14 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This exhibition of six new and commissioned large-scale paintings by the Season 5 artist presents a suite of semiabstract works inspired by historical photographs, urban planning grids, modern art, and graffiti. Mehretu explores the intersections of power, history, dystopia, and the built environment, along with their impact on the formation of personal and communal identities. The term “gray area” speaks to a condition of indeterminacy, a liminal state in which something is not clearly defined or perhaps impossible to define. Berlin — where one still encounters the vestiges of war — played a significant role in the development of Mehretu’s Grey Area suite, which was first conceived during her residency at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007. The exhibition is on view through October 6.

• A solo exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois will open at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens on May 12. The exhibition emphasizes Bourgeois’ “Personages” sculptures. Made between 1947-1953, they were originally carved in wood and intended to be produced in bronze. These life-size sculptures were designed to be seen “like social groups of standing figures.”Avenza Revisited II (1968-1969) will also be on view. This sculpture belongs to a group of works characterized by “clustered bulges emerging from drapery” that evoke “pre-natal forms.” The works were inspired by Avenza, an area of Carrara, Italy, where Bourgeois worked briefly in the 1960s.

• Bourgeois’ work is also on view at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco through June 12. Mother and Child presents “visceral, essential images from the cycle of human life: on birth, death, sexuality and the creative power of the mother.” Using saturated red gouache, Bourgeois’ explores shapes that mark the “transition from woman to embryo to child to girl to woman.” Central to this presentation are two bronze sculptures from Bourgeois’ Echo series. The pieces are cast from discarded clothing that has been “stretched, sewn, draped and piled into abstract, organic forms…[and] then painted white to give a ghostly aura to the textured surfaces.”

• Arenas — a series by Season 3 artist Mike Kelley that debuted at Metro Pictures in 1990 — is now on view at Skarstedt Gallery in New York. Only seven of the original eleven sculptures are shown. Found handmade and machine fabricated blankets are flanked with stuffed animals and displayed on the floor. Each sculpture contains one specific motif and focuses on the assembly of stuffed animals in an “arena” for anthropomorphic observation. ” In the Arena #7, for example, four sides of a machine made blanket are surrounded with teddy bears and monkeys. One can imagine them holding a meeting or even attending a picnic,” states the press release. A fully illustrated catalogue will be produced in conjunction with this exhibition and available this Fall 2010. Arenas closes June 25.

• Spoleto Festival USA takes place in Charleston, South Carolina each year, filling its theaters, churches and outdoor spaces with over 140 performances by world-renowned artists as well as emerging performers in opera, theater, music theater, dance, and other disciplines. The 2010 official Festival poster — created by Season 2 artist Maya Lin — has been unveiled. To create the image, Lin opened an atlas to adjacent maps of Rhode Island and South Carolina. She made an image of these pages after cutting a hole through the maps to reveal sections of the underlying pages. In previous years Festival posters have been made by Ann Hamilton (Season 1), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Robert Indiana, Chuck Close, Sol Lewitt, and David Hockney, among other big names. Browse Spoleto’s online poster gallery here.

To explain the recent investigations into the web-art projects of both Ricardo Dominguez and  b.a.n.g. lab collaborators at UC San Diego and Ken Ehrlich of UC Riverside is to tell a story of social movements. This is the first of a several blog-posts written by myself and Art21 Los Angeles correspondent Catherine Wagley that tell the story. In this post, I will summarize the basic facts around what happened and provide the simplest of backgrounds to the case.

The UC Santa Cruz Occupations in September 2009 helped ignite a movement

With the announcement of a 32 percent tuition increase, the antagonism between the UC systems directing regents and many of their students, faculty, and staff was on the rise. Spurred on by a powerful manifesto and an inspiringly radical movement of  campus building occupations that began in Northern California in September and only continued to build, March 4, 2010 was planned to be a major day of protests around education throughout California. March 4 proved that the movement was spreading well into what had been the relatively quiet UC campuses of Southern California. The radical edge of the movement has been built upon a variety of very evocative slogans, including We Have Decided Not to Die, We Are the Crisis, and No Future.

….

On the morning of the fourth, Ricardo Dominguez, formerly of the Critical Art Ensemble and now with the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, set up and publicized a virtual sit-in, an Electronic Civil Disturbance (ECD) attack on the UC Office of the President website from the UC-sponsored b.a.n.g. lab server. The theatre piece, set up as contemporary protest, allowed people to act in solidarity with the day’s protesters by loading up a constantly updating webpage. With enough participants in the online protest, the act can slow down or, if you will, blockade a website.

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SUPPORT ART21: The countdown continues…there are 71 days left to join the 100 x 100 Exclusive campaign. In 29 days we’ve received 21 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 #105: Susan Rothenberg describes the blend of studio time and ranch work that she shares with her husband, the artist Bruce Nauman, at their New Mexico home.

Susan Rothenberg’s early work—large acrylic, figurative paintings—came to prominence in the 1970s New York art world, a time and place almost completely dominated and defined by Minimalist aesthetics and theories. The first body of work for which she became known centered on life-sized images of horses. Glyph-like and iconic, these images are not so much abstracted as pared down to their most essential elements. The horses, along with fragmented body parts (heads, eyes, and hands) are almost totemic, like primitive symbols, and serve as formal elements through which Rothenberg investigated the meaning, mechanics, and essence of painting. Rothenberg’s paintings since the 1990s reflect her move from New York to New Mexico, her adoption of oil painting, and her new-found interest in using the memory of observed and experienced events (a riding accident, a near-fatal bee sting, walking the dog, a game of poker or dominoes) as an armature for creating a painting. These scenes excerpted from daily life, whether highlighting an untoward event or a moment of remembrance, come to life through Rothenberg’s thickly layered and nervous brushwork. A distinctive characteristic of these paintings is a tilted perspective in which the vantage point is located high above the ground. A common experience in the New Mexico landscape, this unexpected perspective invests the work with an eerily objective psychological edge.

The exhibition Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place is currently on view at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico (through May 16, 2010). Co-organized by the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, the exhibition’s installation in Santa Fe showcases the relationship between O’Keeffe and Rothenberg: “each has established a significant place and artistic identity in the American Southwest, an area initially defined as a male domain in that the majority of its early Anglo visitors and inhabitants — explorers, ethnographers, photographers, traders, cattle ranchers, and cowboys — were men.”

Susan Rothenberg is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Memory of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online via Hulu.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom & Dyanna Taylor. Sound: Jim Gallup & Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Bruce Nauman & Susan Rothenberg. Special Thanks: Bruce Nauman.

The weather is warming and that means that the end of the academic year is coming. I am a first year student pursuing my M.F.A. at Cranbrook Academy of Art. The school, located in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, is small—only 150 students total. Many of us here call it the ‘island.’ Right now, my friends and I are gearing up for the break and trying to get the last bit of use out of the school’s facilities before we leave the island and return to normalcy for the summer. This year, I will be staying in Detroit and working to establish roots in a place targeted by the media during the financial crisis. But the biggest thing that has been on everyone’s mind for the last three months has been the degree show.

Bob Turek and the Tall Stool performance at the opening of "Out of the Woods"

At the end of each year, Cranbrook Academy of Art puts together a giant museum exhibition to showcase the work of each year’s emerging graduates. As you can imagine, because each year the school produces 75 M.F.A. graduates with work ranging from painting and 2D design to sculpture and architecture, this show can get easily cluttered.

Beverly Fre$h performs at the opening of Loose Canon, 2009

Several attendees of last year’s show likened it to a three ring circus and this year’s show was similar. In an interview with one of the artists-in-residence, we spoke of how each year there is always “a house, a car, and a song and dance show.” This time, with the exception of the car, the show proved to be quite a spectacle. There were three performances at the opening, each drawing a huge crowd, and one fully functioning house and several other house-like pieces. “In a show with this many people, everyone is trying to get seen,” the artist-in-residence commented.

Ideally, the graduate exhibition should serve as an introduction of the artist to a larger art community and at the same time, use that community to check the quality of the work. That it is why the graduate exhibition is such a valuable part of the M.F.A. education. On its website, the College Art Association states in its M.F.A. guidelines that, “each MFA student should be required to mount a substantial final exhibition of his or her work.” It speaks of this as a way to critically judge the work of  the graduates. This final exhibition can range in format from a small solo show at an on or off-campus gallery, to a larger big box museum exhibition like at Cranbrook. This year, the school joined with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit to present Out of the Woods, a show stuffed to the brim with works by the school’s graduating class.

Trina Van Ryn, "Laugh!," 2010

In reflecting on my own thoughts about the graduate exhibition, I began to wonder how my ideas correlated with those of my peers. So to get a sense of what it is like to be involved in one of these shows, I interviewed several of my classmates, first and second years. We talked about our overall impressions of the show and how being involved in it affected the general dynamic of the school. Instead of transcribing the dialogue for you, I thought it would be interesting to hear the words directly from the mouths of the students. Here are some of the answers I collected:

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