Today is your final chance to participate in advance of Wednesday’s live event, The Present Perfect with Art21. Submissions close tonight at 11:59 p.m. ET. Current participants can give soon-to-be participants a sense of what’s possible: performing with friends, colleagues, or even solo!

A steady stream of submissions kicked off the weekend on Friday with a string of questions posted for Laurie Simmons in response to her recent collaborations.

With gorgeous weather this past Saturday, we packed our camera and boombox and set up camp outside of the Brooklyn Museum to film participants, museum goers, and passersby as they performed their own takes on Three Day Weekend and The Present Perfect Weekend. We captured iced coffee dancers (below), fountain dwellers, juggling puppets, and many more spirited performances throughout the day. The results were absolutely amazing! Watch the performances on Vimeo or via the embedded widgets at the end of this post.

Remote audiences also took a chance to upload their own performances, including a contribution by a frequent Oliver Herring project participant, Davis Thompson-Moss, who reminded us how much we love Johnny Gill’s Rub You the Right Way.

Time is ticking, so don’t miss out on this opportunity to contribute to this unique experience: Ask Laurie a question or perform with Oliver! More videos from the weekend embedded below.

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Thanks to Caroline Lagnado for her plethora of terrific posts. Up next is Ajay RS Hothi.
Ajay RS Hothi is a London-based documentary maker and writer.  His films focus on social development of specific communities predominantly through the arts and have been screened and broadcast internationally.  He writes for Animate Projects APEgine.org and freelances on art and the moving image.

Yves Klein, “Obsession de la lévitation," 1960. Private Collection. © 2010(ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris. by Shunk-Kender, © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, courtesy Yves Klein Archives.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. is currently showing the first Yves Klein retrospective to hit the United States in nearly 30 years. Called Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers, it was co-organized with Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center. The show traces Klein’s evolution from monochromes to his Anthropometries and Fire paintings in nearly 200 works of art.

As an artist, Klein distanced himself from the strict confines of painting. Instead of conceiving of ideas to paint figuratively or abstractly, his plans were more along the lines of body painting and air architecture. Early on, he invented his own shade of ultramarine blue, called his International Klein Blue, which was inspired by a blue he saw used in Assisi by the Italian fresco painter, Giotto, in the Basilica of St Francis. Klein, in his desire to step away from the canvas, was an early performance artist. He was likely inspired by American abstract expressionists, but he took the performative aspect of artistry a step further; the making of his art was often a public spectacle.

Klein and a model during the performance "Anthropométries de l'époque bleue," 1960. © 2010 (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Shunk-Kender, © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, courtesy Yves Klein Archives.

Klein’s performances didn’t always include himself. In his unrealized plans for “Capture du vide,” the residents of a particular city would be asked to return home at a designated hour, leaving the outside world devoid of people and their sounds. At the opening of the Galerie international d’art contemporain, Klein organized nine musicians to perform his Symphonie-Monoton-Silence. The musicians were instructed to play one note for twenty minutes. Klein dressed to the nines in a tuxedo and a white bowtie and was a step removed from the performance. Though he was the artist, he wasn’t creating the art or the music. Instead, he directed the musicians as well as a group of models to make his paintings. The models were nude women who slathered paint on their bodies and then pressed themselves up against sheets of paper, their body marks becoming Klein’s paintings.

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Louise Bourgeois photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

The passing of Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) naturally prompted a host of critics to reflect on her life and artwork. They have written of her famed sculptures and textiles, recurring spider motif, pioneering exhibitions, childhood traumas, and the Sunday salons in her Chelsea home. Now, what about Bourgeois’s cooking?

They say that cooking is, like other art forms, an expression of one’s inner self. As I read Bourgeois’s obituaries, many of them recalling the artist’s charms and spunk, I began to wonder if she cooked? If her approach to food was anything like her approach to art? If her cooking looked like her artwork? Or what her artwork might tell us about her cooking? While these inquiries might seem random, chef Mario Batali has pointed out that “food, even more than art, allows an admirer to relate to [an] artist on common ground,” and there is perhaps no “better way to come to appreciate and understand an artist than through [her] appetite.” Luckily, I found that Bourgeois contributed to at least three cookbooks in her lifetime: The Museum of Modern Art’s Artists’ Cookbook (1977) by Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk, Food Sex Art: The Starving Artists’ Cookbook (1991) by Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf (aka EIDIA), and The Artist’s Palate: Cooking with the World’s Greatest Artists (2003) by Frank Fedele.

Louise Bourgeois, "The Destruction of the Father," 1974. Plaster, latex, wood, fabric and red light, 93 5/8 x 142 5/8 x 97 7/8 in. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve. Photo: Rafael Lobato.

In The Museum of Modern Art’s Artists’ Cookbook, a black and white photograph shows Bourgeois, then in her mid-sixties, sitting on top of an old brick and mortar stove with a collection of pots and pans placed near her feet. There are no pictures of Bourgeois’s cooking or artwork, only her portrait and words. These pages give more of a sense of her character than the essence of her cooking:

I was told as a child in France that cooking is the way to a man’s heart. Today I know that the notion is absurd, but I believed it for a very long time. My mother was in delicate health and could not cope with long hours of work in the kitchen. To please her, I took on the responsibility of seeing to it that my father had dinner. It wasn’t easy. He often came home very late. I waited for hours to make sure that the food stayed hot and fresh—and I became expert at just that. When my father appeared and wanted a steak, I cooked it for him. In those days, a man had the right to have his food ready for him at all times. During my student years I did not cook at all. The memory of those many wasted hours lingered. I subsisted on yogurt, honey, and pumpernickel bread. I still eat the same foods today.

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Christian Boltanski, "No Man's Land" at the Park Avenue Armory

With our poor economy and tough times in general, it would be natural for artists to look ahead to happier days. Like the rest of us, they are frustrated, and probably wish they could sell some more work. However, artists continue to deal with the past. They are looking back to difficult times, and making art that expresses fear, anxiety, and sadness stemming from events in their own lives as well due to world events like war, genocide, and state-imposed repression.

At the Park Avenue Armory, French artist Christian Boltanski recently mounted a large-scale installation called No Man’s Land, for which he assembled a giant heap of clothes in the center of the 55,000 square-foot Drill Hall. This mountain was surrounded by 45 rectangles—“plots,” the release calls them—of jackets and coats neatly laid out on the floor.  Throughout these plots, anonymous poles played the sound of hearts beating—each one different, and taken from Boltanski’s ongoing heartbeat collection project, Les Archives du Coeur. At the front of the Hall, an intimidating arrangement of oxidized biscuit tins formed a towering 66’-long wall halting a visitor’s entry into the large, dim space and forced him to consider a path left or right to get inside.

Christian Boltanski, "No Man's Land" at the Park Avenue Armory

The Holocaust connections seemed to be everywhere. Boltanski’s 40-year career has been absorbed with the Shoah, and he is known, to a certain extent, as a Holocaust artist. Born in occupied Paris in 1944, Boltanski grew up in postwar France. It was not only the pile of clothes in the center of the room that was reminiscent of victims forced to part with their packed belongings upon entering concentration camps, but also the rectangles of clothes on the ground and the steel beams holding up the heartbeat speakers that suggested the blocks of a camp. The sounds of the anonymous heartbeats reverberating throughout the old-fashioned Drill Hall and the massive amount of objects belonging to unseen people call the extent and anonymity of the Nazi genocide to mind.

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SUPPORT ART21: It seems like only yesterday that the 100 x 100 Exclusive campaign kicked off! Now with 32 days left, we’re looking for 41 donors to add to our list of 100 x 100 Exclusive supporters. Help us out – give any amount – and help ensure a continuing supply of videos chronicling art from all over world, like this video filmed in London only a few weeks ago.

Episode #111: Yinka Shonibare MBE discusses the theatricality and sense of wonder inherent in his public sculpture Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, installed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Situated across from Nelson’s Column, a monument erected to honor Admiral Lord Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars, the brightly-colored sails of Shonibare’s boat reference the complex heritage of British colonialism and its multicultural present. The work is on view throughout this summer.

Known for using batik in costumed dioramas that explore race and colonialism, Yinka Shonibare MBE also employs painting, sculpture, photography, and film in work that disrupts and challenges our notions of cultural identity. Taking on the honorific MBE as part of his name in everyday use, Shonibare plays with the ambiguities and contradictions of his attitude toward the Establishment and its legacies of colonialism and class. In multimedia projects that reveal his passion for art history, literature, and philosophy, Shonibare provides a critical tour of Western civilization and its achievements and failures.

Yinka Shonibare MBE is featured in the Season 5 (2010) episode Transformation of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Download-to-own the full episode from iTunes.

Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Ian Serfontein. Sound: Paul Stadden & Luke Williams. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Yinka Shonibare MBE. Thanks: Tamsin Selby & Greater London Authority.

Aligning smoothly with the start of Art Basel for the first time, the 6th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (BB6) opened this past week, two months later than its previous April time slot. While this meant that Berlin’s gallerists had to juggle between the openings of their own summer shows and a smooth departure to Switzerland, art buffs and collectors from abroad seem to have appreciated the synchronization of the two major art events — similar to 2007′s “Super European Art Tour”: Skulptur Projekte Münster (every 10 years) / Documenta XII (every 5 years) / 52nd Venice Biennale (every 2 years) / Art Basel 38 (every year).

While using multiple alternative exhibition venues is standard practice for the Berlin Biennial, the BB6 marks the first major departure from Berlin-Mitte and the location of its central hub, KW Institute of Contemporary Art. With six different sites, mostly located to the south in the district of Kreuzberg, the Biennial asks its audience to consider more rough and tumble situations in which to view art. Although the drive to stake out new neighborhoods is nothing new for Berlin’s art crowd, it seems this curatorial decision is fueling the discussion about the gentrification of (already hip) neighborhoods, such as Kreuzberg. Below, Art21′s Berlin columnists discuss this shift in locale among other developments in the 6th iteration of the Berlin Biennale.

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Art21 is thrilled to announce the launch of our latest column. Heading the curriculum vitae of Berlin’s artists, curators, and other breeds of art junkies, Lives and Works in Berlin. A title both eschewed and coveted, each year hundreds of emerging artists and art professionals oscillate in and out of the city to take it on or give it up. Berlin is a city with no shortage of sensational coverage, yet its constantly changing rosters of spaces, artists, and daily arts buzz remain shrouded in mystery.  Lives and Works in Berlin offers readers a biweekly behind-the-scenes peek into art collectives’ cellars and blockbuster museum hits, as told by three artists and a curator living and working in this transient town.

Meet our writers…

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Courtesy brooklynmuseum.org

A popular article in Tuesday’s New York Times discusses the Brooklyn Museum’s failed efforts at drawing bigger and more serious crowds. This historic museum has tried everything from Saturday night dance parties to exhibitions that sometimes push the boundaries of art. Even its entrance, made from glass, was meant to attract locals. Though it has attempted to bring in more visitors by what the article calls its “populist tack,” its efforts don’t seem to be working.

"Star Wars: The Magic of Myth," courtesy brooklynmuseum.org

The Times reports that attendance dropped 23% last year while it grew over at New York’s major Manhattan museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. The article raises some important questions about how a museum can bring in new crowds without alienating established art-loving visitors. To that end, I have spoken with quite a few art world people who feel uncomfortable at the Brooklyn Museum and try to avoid it.

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This Sunday, 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park officially opens to the public. There’s a whole weekend of events scheduled. The one I’m looking forward to is the Artist’s Forum this Saturday where we’ll hear from the park artists and architects (the forum will be emceed by writer and celebrity vlogger John Green—represent, Nerdfighters!).

Of recent there’s been a lot published about our new park in newspapers and magazines. While those stories are interesting (and filled with a fair amount of inaccuracies), I’ve been just as intrigued by the many IMA images that have been shared by IMA staffers via Twitter and/or Facebook accounts.

Twitpic by @MaxAndersonUSA of steel workers atop Free Basket

So now that we are so close to the opening, I’ve been looking back through the information that has been shared or created by IMA staff around the artists and projects. And because I’m the conservator charged with caring for these artworks, I can’t help but consider how this information will figure into the IMA’s archives and affect how we understand and represent these projects through the coming years.

A few years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to hear so much from so many different people. Take, for example, the Los Carpinteros project, Free Basket. Now you can not only hear some personal anecdotes directly from the artists in this In The Factory video but you can also hear from a lot of other folks that had a hand in its creation.

100 Acres Project Manager, Dave Hunt describes the early construction stages of  Free Basket:

Indianapolis stealworker Tom Williams talks about his role in the project:

While those videos concentrate on the construction process of that project, Alfredo Jaar provided a thoughtful look into his creative process back when his project was still in the proposal stages.

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