Liverpool Problem: Liverpool problems were submitted by video booth and anonymous postcards

In 2006, Christopher Robbins, John Ewing, and Matey Odonkor came together to form Ghana Think Tank, a problem-creating project with the motto Developing the First World. Drawing from their experiences working in international development, the three were frustrated by the way that so-called solutions imposed by developed countries often completely disregarded the local wisdom of the communities they were meant to assist.  Reversing the common directional flow, Ghana Think Tank invites communities such as Westport, Connecticut; Liverpool, UK; and Providence, Rhode Island to be on the receiving end of solutions provided by ad-hoc think tanks from places like Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, or Serbia.  In many ways, the subject of this work lies in the incommensurability of common sense and the complete failure of transposing one context onto another.

Recently, I visited Christopher Robbins at The Wassaic Project in upstate New York, where he is an artist-in-residence to ask him about the origins of and motivations behind Ghana Think Tank:

Erin Sickler: How did Ghana Think Tank come about?

Christopher Robbins: Well, it originally came from working in the Peace Corps and then from my experiences working and living in Fiji, West Africa, and Serbia.  When I joined the Peace Corps in Benin, I was straight out of college.  On the one hand, I was clueless. On the other, I could get a meeting with the mayor.  I suddenly had all this power.  My director at Peace Corps was very straightforward about the inherent cluelessness of my position. He said, “I don’t care if you grew up as a farmer in the States; you don’t know anything about farming here. They are going to call you an expert, because of the fact that you have a college degree, but you don’t know anything about how it works here. All you can do is give them your eager young American attitude and try to get people together.”

There was a lot of pressure on communities to accept what I (and larger aid organizations) was doing there. Conventional wisdom said that if you rejected a development package, then you would be considered a difficult community, and you could not get any more aid.  So whatever I proposed, no matter how ridiculous it was, or even damaging, it tended to be accepted.  I became very conscious, and cautious of this. After all, people had fought over the site of the new market in my village. They had physically assaulted each other.  Another aid group built beautiful pigsties out of cement. In a place where, if you had money, you lived in a mud house covered in cement, and if you didn’t, you lived in a house made out of mud with no cement, no one was going to stick an animal in a solid cement and rebar house.  But the chief said that if you put people in there — if you misuse the shelters — we would never get any more funding.

So they just sat empty.

I constantly saw instances such as these, where external solutions were being imposed on communities no matter how ridiculous.

So, Ghana Think Tank came out of a pretty negative reaction to that, an effort to see what it was like to have external solutions imposed on my own culture. At this point, Ghana Think Tank was me, John Ewing, who had worked in Cuba and El Salvador – he had lived in El Salvador for a few years working for a political radio station — and Matey Odonkor, who is from Ghana [Odonkor is no longer with the group, which now includes Carmen Montoya along with the founders John Ewing and Christopher Robbins]. For the think tanks, we purposely picked people who were very isolated from development or art and then used the structure of international aid, but reversed the flow.  Instead of imposing solutions in developing countries, we collect problems from the US and other developed countries and then seek solutions from think tanks located in the developing world.

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In a series of special posts, guest blogger alum Marc Herbst and regular contributor Catherine Wagley chronicle the University of California education crisis. Following is Wagley’s take. — Ed.

Ricardo Dominguez pictured in the OC Register, 2009. Courtesy: Ricardo Dominguez.

When I was in college, a woman named Chris Gaunt worked in our main library. She would frequently disappear for a day or more. She’d go to Des Moines, our state capital, or to D.C., or even Muscogee County, Georgia. She’d protest torture of detainees, war funding, or unfair trials. If she was gone for an especially long time, she’d been taken into custody, maybe for assaulting a peace officer — which can be hyperbolic for going limp upon arrest — trespassing in a Senator’s office, or crossing a line set up by police. Gaunt, who had the kind of short perm women get when their not-quite-gray-but-getting-there hair no longer warrants hassle, wore sweatshirts with collars and didn’t look like trouble. Though her disappearances were as predictable as her wardrobe, we students respected her more each time she returned.

“Civil disobedience in the United States has a very specific legal tradition,” said Ricardo Dominguez, in a video clip aired by Fox 5. “That is, you do a non-violent mass action. The police come, they take you in, they book you, [you spend] 24 hours in jail. You go before the judge, the judge says, ‘try not to do this again, and then you go do it again and you go through the same thing.’” But Gaunt, who has spent upwards of 6 months in jail, knows that the penalty for civil disobedience can be more severe, especially if you insist on “doing it again.”

Dominguez, like Gaunt, works at a university — though he’s a tenured professor at UC San Diego, not a librarian — and has a penchant for crossing lines. Unlike Gaunt, who primarily identifies as a peace activist, Dominguez identifies as an artist. In his May 7 post on this site, Marc Herbst detailed Dominguez’s most recent line-crossing and explained how Dominguez’s online laboratory, b.a.n.g. lab, staged a virtual sit-in to protest the University of California’s budget cuts and tuition hikes. Protesters “sat” on the UC Office of the President’s website and the few hundred who participated became the equivalent of thousands, thanks to a  “spawn” feature that multiplied the effect of each computer.

UC President Mark Yudof

Herbst also described markyudof.com, a hoax site hosted by b.a.n.g. lab and created by UC Riverside professor, Ken Ehrlich. The hoax site, which launched a few days before the sit-in, announced President Mark Yudof would resign to “go back to school to study the history of social movements.” Yudof did not, of course, really resign, or give social movements a shout-out. And even though Dominguez’s and Ehrlich’s work in digital activist art contributed to their employment at UC schools, they turned their expertise on the wrong target. An investigation into the legality of their actions is underway.

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Episode #109: Jeff Koons tells a story from his childhood about finding a sense of self through making art, asserting that art has the potential to inspire similar transformations within each viewer.

Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of Classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.

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

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Kurt Branstetter & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Jeff Koons. Special Thanks: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Astrological Chart for Lin + Lam's "Speculating Change" Project

Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and Lan Thao Lam) are the current fellows at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School University in New York. For their fellowship project, they are consulting people from a wide range of disciplines to see how they envision the notion of change. I interviewed them about their project, about change and how it is predicted, and the economy. A colloquium is scheduled to take place at The New School on 9/11/10 to launch their web project.

Erin Sickler: You started your project with the idea of change, which I would assume came from Obama’s political platform. Is this an exploration of that on a deeper level of what change really means?

Lana Lin: This project originated as a proposal for the Vera List Center. It has annual themes, and this year’s theme was Speculating on Change, which was partly a response to the Obama campaign. We were thinking more along the lines of the financial crisis, which was really present and alarming at the time we applied, so our proposal was more about the economic situation. Obama was being influenced by these behavioral economic researchers who were asking how people made choices about how to spend their money and whether these choices were rational or irrational. So we wanted to look from an economic and also a political perspective as to what kind of changes were possible.

ES: How do you select the people for interviews?

LL: It is pretty simple. We go to people who are identified with a certain profession and ask them how that profession defines change. It started with psychology and economics and then it moved to prophecy, prediction, and probability. We were interested in more offbeat science like astrology because we were hearing news reports during the whole financial crisis that banks at a corporate level regularly consult with financial astrologers.

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Antony Gormley, "Blind Light," 2007. Image via BBC Online.

“Our advanced art approaches a fragile but marvelous life, one that maintains itself by a mere thread, melting into an elusive, changeable configuration, the surroundings, the artist, his work and everyone who comes to it.”

When Allan Kaprow wrote these words in 1961, he was describing the tendency among the postwar avant-garde to physically and intellectually invite the audience into the art itself. Though he was speaking specifically in the context of Happenings, his quote could easily describe the nature of art produced by many of the earth artists, minimalists, installation, and performance artists of later decades. Furthermore, it can aptly reference the output of contemporary artists of today — those creative minds who defy any particular label but have enjoyed remarkable success at recent exhibitions in America and abroad.

Debates of nomenclature aside, the art considered here is that which allows for (or necessitates) the visitor’s physical action, manipulates his/her sensory encounters, and/or showcases his/her creative expression. In such art, it is often the experience of the audience that becomes the true object or subject of the work. Of course, art that reaches completion only through audience participation has been around for years, ranging from those conceptual pieces that feature relatively passive involvement (think treading upon Carl Andre’s sculptures), to mild interaction (taking and consuming Félix González-Torres’s cellophane-wrapped candies), to a more dynamic, total immersion of the public into the art (in 1964’s Cut Piece audience members cut off Yoko Ono’s garments until they left her completely naked).

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)," 1991. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

And what of more recent manifestations of this trend? Olafur Eliasson’s various projects have ranged from creating a venue for visitors to play with the effect of their own shadows (The Weather Project, 2003) to constructing a man-made island on which students gather to socialize and debate (The Parliament of Reality, 2009). For This Progress, Tino Sehgal lured visitors to the Guggenheim to exercise their intellectual muscles through philosophical dialogue with trained guides. If exploring your emotions is more your cup of tea, then you may have lost yourself – quite literally – in the disorienting light and darkness, respectively, of Antony Gormley’s Blind Light (2007) and Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is (2009). In his controversial One & Other work last year on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, Gormley left the burden of the performance entirely in the hands of the audience members, each of whom applied to win the spotlight for an hour. Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Doug and Mike Starn’s Big Bambú presents a more corporeal experience, offering visitors the chance to walk through a maze of pathways erected on the rooftop. All of these examples earned, or are earning, significant attention and considerable traffic, and only serve as the tip of the participatory art iceberg.

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Louise Bourgeois at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumiére, Paris, 1937. Courtesy Louise Bourgeois Archive.

When I heard that Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) passed away on the morning of May 31, I was genuinely surprised. It seemed only natural that she would live into a second century. I called a friend, an artist whose visceral, narrative work has always been explicitly about maternity and clandestinely about Bourgeois, the seminal artist-mother. My call went to her voicemail, but later she called back. “We had just been to see my grandfather in the nursing home. I was thinking about death and how hard it is to age. I was drawing a yellow rose.” This has been my friend’s proxy for Bourgeois ever since she brought a bouquet of colored roses to one of Bourgeois’s notorious New York salons and succeeded in stealing the artist’s attention away from all other attendees. “I was drawing it when she died, thinking about her,” she told me.

In reading what has been written about Bourgeois these past two days, some of it poignant and some of it predictable, I have been struck repeatedly by the emphasis placed on her late success. Certainly, this is an important detail: born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois studied at the Sorbonne, École du Louvre, and École des Beaux-Arts in the 1930s; married art historian Robert Goldwater and emigrated to the United States in 1938; and began making serious work in the 1940s. Yet, as Joan Acocella of the New Yorker explained, “It was only with the challenge to modernism which arose in the sixties and seventies that people started to notice her.” During Bourgeois’s MoMA retrospective in 1982, the first such retrospective given to a woman, she was already past 70. Still, for me and others who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s, Bourgeois has always been there, combining vulnerability and aggression with unrivaled clarity.

Louise Bourgeois, "Cumul I," 1968. Courtesy Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Even Tracy Emin and Sarah Lucas, Bourgeois’s direct descendants in the department of confessional audacity, have not managed to construct such a distinct, brute visual identity. The Femme Maison drawings, in which women were literally “domesticated” and “objectified”; the plaster, latex and marble sculptures, in which phalluses and breasts abound; the theatrical cell installations that made Bourgeois’s bourgeoisie childhood look like a surrealist film (though, according to Holland Cotter, Bourgeois disliked surrealists, calling them “smart alecks”); the huge, craggy spider called Maman, after her mother. All of these works initially compelled me because they seemed to originate in such a personal place—Bourgeois would often tell childhood stories about her father’s affair with the governess, her Freudian desire to dismember him in response to his philandering, her mother’s immense stoicism. But later, when I realized that Bourgeois the artist had created Bourgeois the child, she became more interesting to me as a droll fiction-maker who poked fun at human pain and insecurity in a gapingly honest way.

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Getting ready for this week's column

This Thursday and Friday the Guggenheim Museum hosts Thinking Like an Artist: Creativity and Problem Solving in the Classroom. Educators will arrive by plane, train, automobile, even on foot, to attend the conference. Lois Hetland will be there. Janine Antoni will be there. Jerry Saltz will be there. The lineup of presenters would make Joe Torre happy- a little high profile plus a little nuts and bolts.

Some of the many questions this conference will address include:

• What is creativity?
• What does creativity have to do with education?
• Why design? Asking questions and solving problems.
• Why does creativity matter beyond the arts and beyond the classroom?
• What comes next? Creativity and the future of education.

In advance of the big show I thought I’d take a shot at just a few of the questions to see if my thinking even remotely lines up with anyone else later in the week….

What is creativity? Creativity is the ability to see and craft possibilities, and to give these possibilities form or a venue for expression and understanding.

What does creativity have to do with education? Creativity matters to ALL of education, not just the arts and humanities (See? I did learn something from John Hammond) because it’s the enemy of habitual, automatic behavior. It makes us take a step back and reconsider what we take for granted and what we haven’t really seen yet.

Why does creativity matter beyond the arts and beyond the classroom? First off, we all know that the arts do not have exclusive rights to whole concept of creativity. All disciplines need creative thinkers and participants. If the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf doesn’t teach us this, I’m not exactly sure what will. Just a few years ago Daniel Pink spoke at the NAEA conference in Chicago and made an excellent case for a future that will be ruled by right-brain thinkers. I tend to agree. The ability to think broadly, to think beyond what’s expected, is a tremendous asset at this point in time- across disciplines and around the world.

Finally, What comes next? How does creativity fit into the future of education? One day, and I hope it’s soon, we will assess students based on how they think and how well they can express what they think and do over time vs. judging them with one-size-fits-your-age testing. Creativity can help return education to thinking seriously about portfolio assessment for students across many disciplines. Instead of looking for the answer, we can start looking for multiple answers together.

More on the conference next week as Teaching with Contemporary Art looks in the rear-view mirror and reflects on some of the panels. See you soon!

Beginning with the writings of Michel de Certeau, over the past several months, I’ve thought a lot about the idea of meandering an institutional presence. That thinking bled into my musings on art school as well. What would it mean to think of art school as an institution to be navigated?  How much of an institutional presence is art school to the practice of an artist?  What impediments does it place for the artist to work around?  What is the gravity that holds us so ubiquitously to it?

Michel de Certeau

Art graduate school is now an institution in which we invest our selves.  In an age where we are expected and needed to think on our own, most of us simply don’t.  When there is the clear, if dispiriting, option of pursuing meaningful questions and experimentation with no one’s acknowledgment but our own and that of those close to us, instead we choose to surround ourselves with people ordained in one way or another by power structures larger than ourselves who have the authority to promote us in those same structures.  We desire admittance into the hierarchy more than the freedom to operate without it.  If we ask ourselves, ‘what is the point of an artist going to graduate school?’ we might also have to ask ourselves, ‘what level of independence do we expect of our artists?’

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Great Small Works, "The Toy Theater of Terror As Usual, Episode 9: Doom 1996, A photomontage news serial," created by John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Stephen Kaplin, Jenny Romaine, Mark Sussman, Roberto Rossi. First performed at Performance Space 122, NYC. Photo courtesy of Mark Sussman

In 1934, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis coined the phrase “the curse of bigness” to describe the disastrous effect that concentrated economic power can have on small business, communities, and citizen-led governments.  For Brandeis and other Progressive-era crusaders, the “curse’ was monopolies like the New Haven Railroad and robber baron JP Morgan.

Curated by Larissa Harris, The Curse of Bigness at the Queens Museum of Art (May 16 – October 13, 2010) heeds Brandeis’s advice, reflecting the dangers of present-day behemoths.  Avoiding didacticism, the show engages with a broad range of DIY strategies, culled from art world insiders like Dennis Oppenheim, to downtown theater mainstays Great Small Works, to West Coast wizards of destruction, Survival Research Labs. Presented here are not aesthetic objects to be contemplated from afar, but rather strategies to determine the scope of what can be accomplished on a human, more sustainable scale.

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“A work of art doesn’t have to be explained….If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn’t touch you, I have failed.”

—Louise Bourgeois, Art in the Twenty-First Century (2001)

We at Art21 were saddened to hear the news yesterday regarding the passing of artist Louise Bourgeois. Bourgeois was featured in our first season nearly ten years ago. We continue to be inspired and humbled by her extraordinary work and vision.

READ: New York Times obituary, June 1, 2010

WATCH: Louise Bourgeois in Art in the Twenty-First Century (below)

Watch the full episode, Identity (2001), on PBS Video.