Art21 is thrilled to announce our latest program, The Present Perfect with Art21, featuring Art21 artists Oliver Herring and Laurie Simmons in conversation with Robert MacNeil. It takes place Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 8:00 p.m. EST.

The Present Perfect with Art21, co-presented with PBS and the 92YTribeca, is a live-streamed interactive event about the role of collaboration and performance in contemporary art and everyday life. Herring and Simmons will explore how elements of performance inform their work and how they incorporate media — from film and video to dance, fashion, and photography — in their creative processes and collaborations.

The in-person portion takes place at the 92YTribeca in New York City. Tickets are free and open to the public, but advance registration is encouraged. RSVP online at the 92YTribeca website or by phone at the 92YTribeca Box Office, 212-601-1000. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; event begins at 8 p.m. sharp.

Online, tune in to PBS.org at 8pm EST and join the online conversation via Facebook, Twitter, and more!

Participate!
The Present Perfect features an interactive creative project by Oliver Herring that invites you to participate before and during the program. Then watch film work by Laurie Simmons and a sneak preview of the new film in which she stars, Tiny Furniture. Whether in-person or online, we encourage you to submit questions, comments, and your own media for the artists to respond to during the event.

Further information, including details on how you can participate, is available online at art21.org/thepresentperfect.

Google's new Jeff Koons background, courtesy of googleblog.blogspot.com

Today Google unveils a new “choose your own background” feature. According to the company’s official blog, “You can choose a photo from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery hosted by Picasa which includes a selection of beautiful photos.” The publicly available options include pictures by contemporary artists like the French environmental photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, glass blower Dale Chihuly, and painter/sculptor Polly Apfelbaum.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand, courtesy of googleblog.blogspot.com

Making Google a more personal experience is the reason the blog offers for this new option. However, it also makes Google’s homepage look similar to Bing‘s, Microsoft’s search engine that has used colorful background images from its start. In any case, this innovation from the company that brings many their email, chat, and documents on a daily basis will not only brighten up the search page’s typically plain, white background, but it also brings attention to some lesser-known artists whose work they have chosen to feature.

Kathryn Andrews, "Gaylen Gerber," 2010. Installation view. Courtesy Thomas Solomon Gallery.

If you type the phrase “I need support” into Google, the first hit is a letter addressed to “Dear Sugar.” Sugar is the advice columnist for the Pop Sugar spin-off Très Sugar and in this particular letter, a mentally unstable woman called “Depressed and Unsupported Debra” explains her desire to distance herself from her long-time boyfriend. She believes refusing the support he has offered her will protect him from her and ultimately save their relationship. But refusing him has left her feeling lonely. And unsupported.

Support Group, an exhibition organized by Thomas Solomon Gallery and held in Chinatown’s cavernous Cottage Home space, indulges the structures, intimacy, isolation, selflessness, and selfishness wrapped up in the word “support.” Curated by critic Michael Ned Holte, who calls the show’s title a pun in his curatorial statement, Support Group is a collaboration between Chicago-based conceptualist Gaylen Gerber, L.A. artist Kathryn Andrews, and L.A. artist Mateo Tannatt. Tannatt used to run an exhibition space called Pauline out of his Hollywood apartment, and Andrews still runs an exhibition space called Apartment 2 in Eagle Rock. Gerber, best known for enlisting other artists to put their work on top of walls and canvases (he calls his canvases “supports”) that he first paints gray, practically is an exhibition space and, in some ways, Support Group, pays homage to his work.

A former theater, Cottage Home has a boxy blue exterior that Kathryn Andrews takes advantage of, posting two printed billboards that make the gallery’s outside wall look especially festive. These billboards announce that “it’s all about Gaylen Gerber” in red lower-case script that dances across a chain-linked pattern. The shout-out either gets the exhibition off to a supportive start, or suggests a hierarchy. If it’s all about Gaylen Gerber, then are Andrews and Tannatt here to support him? Or is he supporting them?

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Janine Antoni, "Tear" courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery

The Guggenheim Museum’s recent conference, Thinking Like an Artist: Creativity and Problem-Solving in the Classroom, turned out to be both an exciting and frustrating two days of panel-lectures and keynote addresses. As a matter of fact, the rollercoaster ride between inspiring moments and mind-numbing stretches of time almost gave me whiplash.

While Michael Hanchett Hanson and Ellen Lupton both gave keynotes on the first day that had us leaning forward in our seats to hear more about creativity’s developing roles in education and design, as well as seeing design as both a verb and a way of thinking, a series of panels through the late morning and early afternoon had everyone sitting for hours straight doing little but listening. Now I’m no museum-conference-event-organizer, but someone along the line had to have thought, “Hmmm…. I wonder if keeping everyone in their seats listening to people speak for hours on end is a good thing?” With no K-12 educators on any of the panels over the two days, this could have been an easy fix if it was spotted earlier. If audience members were allowed to become participants and actually talk for a few minutes about what was being discussed, I truly believe this conference could have gone a lot further than it did. While Q&A periods for a few minutes after many of the 90-minute panels may have been helpful for the four or five people that got to ask questions each time, it still left a few hundred of us staring at notebooks wanting to say something…. anything…. to make sense of it all. If there is one lesson we stress in the Art21 Educators summer institute and throughout our professional development work it is that learning must be active, not passive. If we were expected to learn about what was being presented, it would have made great sense to get the place involved.

Day two of the conference went a little like the first. Janine Antoni’s wonderful and engaging keynote during the morning session (and I’m really not saying this just because she’s featured on Art21) meticulously described two of her recent works, “Tear” and “Inhabit”, and led everyone through the inspiration and decision-making that produced them. She described being creative as being “limber” and connected her work as a dancer to her definition. And she not only described herself as an artist, but also as a teacher and learner, which scored points with many of us who kept wondering where all the classroom teachers were. After all, the conference title did conclude with “in the Classroom.”

Big questions that the conference raised, even if they weren’t entirely new, included:

• Can creativity be taught?
• What role do mistakes play in creativity?
• How does play influence creativity?
• How do we as teachers talk about ways people get ideas?
• Are there essential skills involved in being creative? If so, what are they?

Perhaps the most unfortunate part of the two days was the embarrassing way it ended. Jerry Saltz is an art critic that I’ve read for many years. I enjoyed his work long before he moved to New York Magazine and was excited to hear his keynote at the conclusion of the conference. Instead of a speech (or even a slideshow) that addressed the theme of the conference, Jerry Saltz shared (performed?) a rambling, incoherent series of remarks that seemed to be put together in the taxicab ride to the museum. It’s a shame that he wasn’t able to pull his socks on earlier and join all of us for Janine Antoni’s keynote, because if he did he would have surely thrown out his plan to make his remarks a public rehearsal for an upcoming reality show venture. He perhaps spent five minutes on the theme of the conference, and in between, well, I can’t really tell you much except for the fact that he tried awfully hard to entertain. But it wasn’t entertaining. I kept wondering if people were laughing with him or at him. By the time he reached for a chair to sit down, over 45 minutes into doing his shtick, I decided it was time to head for the hills. As I made my way to the door, Jerry Saltz, the same Jerry Saltz I was excited to see just an hour earlier, was actually asking if anyone in the audience would like him to speak at future college commencement ceremonies. Seriously, I’m not making this up. The closing address turned out to be a closing mess.

While the Guggenheim gave us the opportunity and pleasure to hear speakers like Matt Williams (KnowledgeWorks Foundation), Yvette Russel (Harlem Children’s Zone) and Sarah Cunningham (NEA) talk about creativity and the future of education, I would certainly welcome a second round of this conference in order to go even further. Next time let’s all talk with one another more in order to make meaning and really think about what things look and sound like in the classroom…. and hold the Saltz.

In front of two computers, somewhere between Detroit and Marseille, towards the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Concordia University, and Université de Provence, Corina Reynolds and Vency Yun decided to sit down in front of their Skype accounts and talk about everything related  to their MFA experience.  There were giggles, moments where thoughts fleeted away, but on the whole they talked about: their worries their life, their expectations, their practices, their studios, their virtual communities, and their potential life after the MFA.  These videos gives you a shimmer into the life and opinions behind the walls of two art institutions and the people who reside in it.  Enjoy!

Corina Reynolds is an artist based in Detroit, Michigan. She holds a B.F.A. from San Diego State University and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Fiber at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work explores the different ways individuals process their surroundings through the use of interactive objects and performances.

Vency Yun is a neurotic, artist, foodie, and writer who grew up in Toronto and Hong Kong. She is completing her M.F.A in Sculpture at Concordia University, Montreal. Her work often involves food allergies, narration, and language. Currently she is in Marseille, France, working on the bouillabaisse project, an existential philosophical inquiry into fish soup!

During the golden age of comic books, All-American Comics debuted Alan Scott as the Green Lantern in 1940. At the time, Scott was a railroad engineer who, when in possession of a ring had multiple powers. In Chicago, The Green Lantern is a gallery and press that exhibits and publishes emerging artists and writers. Although Founding Director Caroline Picard lacks the ability to walk through walls and read minds, she has acquired the ability to balance artmaking, running a gallery space and press, writing, and co-producing a podcast about literature.

Caroline Picard. Photo: Devin King.

Meg Onli: The Green Lantern operates both as a gallery and as a publisher. Did you initially see yourself having an exhibition space that also published books or did it begin as one idea that sort of grew into a larger project? Do the two projects ever cross?

Caroline Picard: Yes, actually. I’d been thinking about running a print project for years before The Green Lantern took shape in Chicago. I’d also been exposed to different gallery environments — as an undergrad, I happened into a Baltimore warehouse that had been converted into a gallery where a bunch of artists lived. And then, of course, I worked at threewalls and frequented unusal exhibition spaces here. My impression of those spaces conspired so that when I happened into the loft at 1511 N. Milwaukee Avenue, the idea of opening a gallery/press hit me all at once. The space, the press, and the gallery became a single idea at the same instant, despite being vague notions before. Having said that, my interests in writing and visual work stem from the same place. Because I’m interested in how ideas and mediums influence one another, I like drawing connections between those mediums. It’s the same with public programming. I hosted live music events, performances, screenings, lectures. I started thinking of the space as a gateway for independent and emerging art practice — practices that were not often accessed outside of more traditional, specialized venues.

MO: In the past year, The Green Lantern closed its exhibition space. There has been some discussion about the sustainability of apartment galleries if the city of Chicago continues to regulate how they are operated. What are your future plans for The Green Lantern’s gallery presence?

CP: I love this subject. I find it incredibly interesting that there is an inherent, legal conflict between the apartment gallery and the city. While the conflict seems unnecessary (and silly), it points to the way in which apartment galleries defy traditional models of business classification. The city’s laws are accidentally prohibitive of apartment spaces. The city prosecutes them because it needs money and some dude walking around wants to make his ticket quota to keep his job. To change the laws would mean navigating a bureaucratic mess of red tape. While I think it would benefit everyone to create legal avenues for idiosyncratic, non-commercial exhibition practices, I nevertheless appreciate the way that this relatively self-sustaining community defies civil categories. There is a mix of domestic and public space in which the public party becomes an intimate one. There is very little (if any) money earned from these ventures and as such, the apartment gallery illicits confusion and disbelief. When I talked to people at City Hall it was sort of like, “If it quacks like a gallery and looks like a gallery, what do you mean it’s not a gallery?” or, “You don’t sell artwork? But in these pictures, there is art on the wall. What do you mean there isn’t any revenue?” What I find most interesting, however, is that the community that attends those spaces understands how to relate to them.

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Louise Bourgeois, "Crouching Spider", 2003. Steel, 106 1/2 x 329 x 24 inches. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve. Photo: Christopher Burke. via Art Daily.

A tribute to a great artist, a series of German faces, a big film of tiny things, some drawing restraint, and a bunch more in this week’s roundup:

• The Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation in Venice was preparing an exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois when they received news of her death last week. The exhibition — the last in which Bourgeois was actively involved — now serves as a tribute to her life and work. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works mostly comprises montages, collages and assemblages made of pieces of her own clothes and linen. Some fabrics in the show belonged to members of Bourgeois’s family including her mother. These works are, according to the Foundation, “a reincarnation of the past and of [Bourgeois's] childhood, as well as a testimony to her relationship with memory.” Bourgeois explained what drove her to create these works: “I make drawings to suppress the unspeakable. The unspeakable is not a problem for me. It’s even the beginning of the work. It’s the reason for the work; the motivation of the work is to destroy the unspeakable. Clothing is also an exercise of memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that? They are like signposts in the search of the past.” The fabric pieces are shown together with Bourgeois’s large steel sculpture Crouching Spider (2003), a recurring motif in her work. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works is curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with Jerry Gorovoy of the Louise Bourgeois Studio. The exhibition is on view through September 19.

• Works by Bourgeois (Season 1), and Jeff Koons (Season 5) are included in the exhibition 200 Artworks 25 Years: Artists’ Editions for Parkett, on view at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). Organized by STPI with the cooperation of Parkett Publishers and Ikkan Sanada, the show fills five rooms with artists‘ sketches, letters and other material documenting collaborations between artists and Parkett. The rooms have been designed to evoke the feeling of different living spaces: a Studio, a Playroom, a Wardrobe, a City, and a Garden. In addition, a Reading room encourages viewers to browse Parkett‘s recent volumes and its page art projects. 200 Artworks 25 Years closes July 17.

• Friedman Benda Gallery in New York is showing works by Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman (both Season 1), and Janine Antoni (Season 2), among others, in the group exhibition Other Than Beauty. The show focuses on post-war and emerging artists, whose practices have “established new paradigms of art-making” and  “disregarded the primacy of formal and aesthetic beauty.” Via the press release, “By pushing the boundaries of meaning and form, these artists have, over time, expanded our ideas of what beauty can be.” The gallery has juxtaposed works from these early artists with those from younger generations including Sterling Ruby, and Chitra Ganesh, who also “challenge our expectations and expand the lexicon of both art and beauty.” The exhibition closes July 30.

• On June 11 and 13, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host the New York premiere of Tiny Furniture, an award winning film by Lena Dunham, daughter of Season 4 artist Laurie Simmons and painter Carroll Dunham. The film concerns the character Aura, who returns home from her Midwest liberal arts college to her artist family’s Tribeca loft with nothing to show but a film studies degree, a failed relationship, and a total lack of direction. Taking a job as a hostess at a restaurant, she falls into relationships with two self-centered men while struggling to define herself. According to BAM/IFC Films, “Dunham’s razor-sharp dialogue drips with caustic wit, perfectly calibrated to both cut and provoke laughter in this incisive examination of post-college ennui and self-actualization…” Lena Dunham writes, directs, and stars in Tiny Furniture. Simmons also makes an appearance in the film. The first screening will be held inside BAM Rose Cinemas. The second (presented in collaboration with Rooftop Films) will take place outdoors.

• Going to the World Cup or already there? See works by Kara Walker (Season 2), Jenny Holzer (Season 4) and William Kentridge, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (both Season 5) in the exhibition and event series In Context. Organized by Goodman Gallery, the Goethe-Institut, CulturesFrance, the French Institute of South Africa, the City of Johannesburg, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Galleria Continua, the British Council, the Apartheid Museum, the Kirsh Foundation, and Nirox Foundation, In Context brings together works by international and South African artists “who share a rigorous commitment to the dynamics and tensions of place, in reference to the African continent and its varied and complex iterations, and to South Africa in particular.”

• The 13th edition of PHotoEspaña 2010, an international festival for photography in Madrid, includes a show of approximately 60 photographs and 3 videos by Collier Schorr (Season 2) from her series German Faces. This series is described as “a photographic imaginarium that mixes documentary with fiction, where the German landscape is a map of her own story, both imagined and inherited. Combining the roles of photographer, anthropologist and researcher, [Schorr] narrates the tales of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family.” German Faces (which has been in progress for the past twenty years) is on view at PHotoEspaña through June 25.

• Through September 10, works by Robert Adams (Season 4), Mary Heilmann, and John Baldessari (both Season 5) are on view in the group exhibition On the Road at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition takes its title from a book by American poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, which recounts his road trips across the United States in the late 1940s. On the Road investigates the mythology of the American motoring adventure as it began to develop in the early 1920s, with the advent of immense expansions of the highway system, particularly in the West of the country. The first part of the exhibition presents artists whose images and works have long been associated with the exploration of the West by way of the automobile. The second part is the result of a recent two-week excursion through Texas by the curator, during which a number of artifacts and documents were collected for display. Read an interview with the curator in Selectism.

• On June 12, Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland will open Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail, an exhibition related to the Drawing Restraint series by Matthew Barney (Season 2). Curated by Neville Wakefield (MOMA PS1), the show includes 16 sculptures, drawings, videos, and a “Drawing Restraint Archive” of videos recently acquired by the Laurenz Foundation. According to SLAMXHYPE, these artworks will be juxtaposed with 15th and 16th century prints to, says Wakefield, “draw parallels, not only with the trials and tribulations of mark-making, but with Christian iconography and Matthew’s representation of the body in extremes.” Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail will close October 3.

• A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, a collaborative project by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and Michael Smith, made a splash in Los Angeles with nearly 1,000 people attending the opening. Read the LA Times article.

• The BMW art car created by Jeff Koons (Season 5) has finally been unveiled. Read reports from the New York Times, New York Observer, Wall Street Journal, Nitrobahn, Motor Trend, and Wired.

• Vija Celmins (Season 2) talks to Phong Bui of the Brooklyn Rail about her current exhibition at David McKee Gallery.

• The Warholian has created a video about the Oakland Museum of California installation by Barry McGee (Season 1).

• The Art Newspaper has an update on the legal battle between James Turrell (Season 1) and art dealer Michael Hue-Williams.

• An LA Weekly reviewer calls work by Tim Hawkinson (Season 2) now on view at Blum + Poe “funny funny funny.”

• Variations and Improvisations, a solo exhibition of works by Robert Ryman (Season 4) on view at the Phillips Collection, is reviewed in the Washington Post.

• Design Folio has images of the individual works and installation by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) for the 17th Bienniale of Sydney.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Lou Reed presented their highly anticipated “dog concert” at the Sydney Opera House and, according to The Baltimore Sun animal blog, it received “two paws up.”

Joanne Lefrak, "Trinity Site (Ground Zero)," 2010. Installation view, MASS MoCA.

Good experience, bad experience. Life experience, work experience. First experience, years of experience. Learning experience. Sensory experience. Out-of-body experience. Shared experience. We experience life in innumerable, and oftentimes indescribable, ways. When Flash Points editor Rachel Craft approached me to write this post, she posed the question, “How do we experience art?” This question, almost as difficult to answer as the familiar “What is art?” (or the similar “Why is this art?”), is one I was preoccupied with while curating the exhibition InVisible: Art at the Edge of Perception.

InVisible marks a first experience for me – my foray into curatorial practice. Shortly before proposing the theme for my exhibition, I read an article that stated that the majority of museum-goers spend, on average, only six seconds looking at art. What kind of experience would one have in such a short period of time? InVisible is a group exhibition of works by six international artists who explore the line between visibility and invisibility and, in so doing, invite us to participate in a deeper, and I hope slower, act of looking. The artists in the show – Uta Barth, Christian Capurro, Joanne Lefrak, Janet Passehl, Jaime Pitarch, and Karin Sander – examine the demands and subtleties of the viewing experience and create art that tests the limits of perception.

Drawing attention to what often goes unnoticed, many of the works in the show heighten our awareness of the inconspicuous details in the artists’ materials or of mundane objects. Some of the works, pushed to the edge of legibility, disappear into the gallery space itself. Several of the artists manipulate ephemeral phenomena, harnessing the potential of light and shadow, while others use strategies of erasure and find the “something” in what might otherwise be described as “nothing.”

For Part One of this blog post, I asked a few of the artists in InVisible how they hope viewers experience their art.

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Boris Rasin, "Arch Masons," 2010

To support themselves, artists typically have day jobs. While many teach, some find other ways to make ends meet. Warhol and Hopper earned money in advertising and commercial art, while Koons worked for a time as a Wall Street broker. For my inaugural guest post for Art21, I interviewed a typically silent member of the art world, an artist’s assistant.  Boris Rasin is currently the assistant to a major contemporary painter and is an artist himself. Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Rasin immigrated to Brooklyn in 1991. A graduate of Manhattan’s LaGuardia High School and The Cooper Union, Rasin has dabbled in everything from drawing to video and multimedia sculpture. In this Q&A, we talk about what it’s like for him to work for an artist while being an artist himself.

Caroline Lagnado: What have some of your jobs as an artist assistant been like?

Boris Rasin: When I used to freelance, I worked for several artists in their studios, and helped several others through the galleries where they exhibited. I always liked doing these gigs. You got to hang around artists in their element, have a hand in making their work, see their quirks, etc. I especially liked seeing the art workspaces, which always give you clues about their personalities. All the gigs were different and they showed me how diverse the art world was. One moment I worked for a guy who was so broke, he shook me down for change to buy coffee; the next, I worked on a sculpture that will be sold for hundreds of thousand dollars.

CL : How does being an artist assistant jive (or not) with being an artist yourself?

BR: It definitely jives for me. I’ve picked up useful techniques and have gotten to see how people react to the pressure of deadlines and production problems. Also, it’s really inspiring to be part of the creative process.

CL: How did you get the job you have now?

BR : I worked part-time at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise for a number of years, helping them with special events, bartending, or whenever their staff was over-stretched. I became acquainted with a few of the artists that show there and one of them, my current boss, asked me if I was interested in being a personal assistant. I said yes.

CL: When do you find the time to work on your own projects?

BR: It’s tough. Between my full-time job and my personal life, there isn’t too much studio art time left. But if the motivation to work is there, you find the time. When it comes to doing site specific installations, it usually ends up with me taking time off from work and applying myself 24/7 until the job is done.

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Thanks to Erin Sickler for her series of posts on and interviews with innovative artists seeking and creating solutions under trying economic circumstances.

Up next is Caroline Lagnado. A native New Yorker, Caroline graduated from Tufts University and is currently an art history graduate student at the City University of New York. Her research interests include transnationalism, gender, and identity issues. She has studied in Montreal and Florence and has traveled to the Middle East, Europe, and India. Caroline has held a number of arts and journalism positions, and is currently an independent arts writer. She has published in ARTnews, The Jewish Week, boston.com, and oldmastersnewperspective.com, among other places.

Can you guess in which European contemporary art space this picture was taken?