Weekly Roundup
BMW Art Car. Jeff Koons, 2010. Photo courtesy of BMW Drives.
Back after a two-week hiatus Art21 blogger Nettrice R. Gaskins takes the Weekly Roundup baton, so to speak. In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Cindy Sherman wall decals, crying, cranky babies at the Whitney, Jeff Koon’s art on a BMW and the wall of a CT scan room, and much, much more (it’s been a very busy summer).
- BMW Drives selected Jeff Koons (Season 5) to join the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) in creating an Art Car for the 2010 The 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s oldest sports car race held annually near the town of Le Mans, France. The 17th BMW Art Car, customized with “a rainbow of good vibes” by Koons, led the competition in aesthetic appeal but was forced to retire early due to an incident on the track. “It’s unfortunate,” said Koons, “but it’s part of racing.”
- Koons‘s art has been permanently installed in the main CT scan room at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital in Chicago, in cooperation with RxArt, a New York-based non-profit whose mission is to “bring contemporary art to hospitals, transforming otherwise sterile environments, which are often frightening and alienating to patients, to more comforting, meditative and positive environments.”
- The Getty Museum and artist Mark Bradford (Season 4) unveiled Open Studio: A Collection of Artmaking Ideas by artists, a new project conceived by Bradford to provide free online arts activities for for K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms.
Machine Project: A.I.R. at the Hammer
Dream-in at the Hammer Museum. Photo courtesy of Machine Project.
On a recent weekend at the Hammer Museum, you may have stumbled across other visitors napping on the gallery floor and wondered if they had succumbed to museum fatigue. In fact, they were participating in a Nap-in hosted by Artist-in-Residence Machine Project in conjunction with Adam Overton for the Hammer’s special exhibition of Carl Jung’s Red Book. One of Machine Project’s long-time collaborative partners, Adam Overton is an experimental sound artist, composer, and massage therapist whose recent work with ArtSpa explores different forms of intimacy and meditative consciousness. The Nap-in at the Hammer followed a Dream-in held the previous night: visitors slept over at the museum and recorded interviews about their dreams the next morning. Throughout the day, volunteers reenacted scenarios from the dreams in the gallery, while a video of dream interviews played downstairs in the lobby. Museum-goers could participate, watch, or just glance and pass by any of these activities. However they if chose to engage, they were offered a different experience than simply walking past an art object encased in glass. The Dream-in provided an opportunity for visitors to connect the Jungian notion of a collective unconscious with their own dream recollections.
For the Hammer, Machine Project’s residency is the start of a new visitor engagement and education program, reflected upon by Hammer Museum Director Ann Philbin in the Summer 2010 issue of Artforum. Machine Project is spending this year at the Hammer, investigating and expanding the ways that visitors negotiate the social space created by the museum’s structure and the impact it has on their aesthetic experience. The collaboration aims to foreground the museum as forum for conversation about art, as well as to be a cultural repository.
I founded Machine Project in 2003 at a storefront gallery in Echo Park, Los Angeles, because I wanted to create an informal public space for intellectual and artistic community. When I think about the question of how we experience art, I am specifically interested in how we experience through art — the perspective that an object or technology offers on the world. The concept of art functions to open up a flexible, permissive sphere in which people can re-imagine the way their immediate reality is structured — an ambulatory thought bubble in which possibilities materialize.
The Great White North, as Canada is affectionately known, could be called something altogether different in the heated summer months. Try “Huge Hot Land” or “Expansive Land Mass Connected by Intermittent Places That Matter to Tourists.” The latter statement is definitely a bit crude, but every country is guilty of defining a nation’s arts and culture industries through a few select cities. And tourists help reaffirm the notion as they flock here when temperatures are more tolerable. In my following posts in this column, I will look at exhibitions in Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver and provide an entry point to begin to talk about art in Canada and how it shapes the nation’s identity and cultural landscape. For a country that normally gets treated like the kid sister across the border, the arts are surprisingly vibrant in Canada, with many of its artistic exports doing well internationally. And this deserves some attention. Let’s start things off with Montréal.
One of the great things about summer in Montréal is that the laissez-faire attitude which the French-Canadian city is best known for explodes to its greatest heights. As it stands now, bicycles have taken over the city, café patios (until yesterday) brimmed with boisterous World Cup watchers, and picnic real estate is at a premium in public parks. Background is critical here: Montréal’s financial situation has been on a permanent hiatus since the economically disastrous 1976 Summer Olympics pummeled it into debt. This has inadvertently contributed to a thriving arts scene and a bohemian café culture to support it. Like Berliners, Montréalers appreciate affordable housing and the leisure time to enjoy it.
Summer boasts Montréal’s submission to major international music festivals (International Jazz Festival, MUTEK, Osheaga, Fringe etc.), while major art galleries’ and museums’ stab at summer programming represents something more modest with lower-profile exhibitions.
New column: Calling from Canada
We are pleased to announce another new column this month, Calling from Canada.
Calling from Canada chronicles the burgeoning art scene across the border. The column will deliver the goods on exhibitions taking place in cities like Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver, and will look at how art shapes and contributes to a changing Canadian cultural landscape.
Calling from Canada is written by Raji Sohal, a CBC Radio One host, arts journalist, independent curator, fashion stylist, and pop culture fiend. Her work has been featured in the Globe and Mail, XLR8R, and on CBC Television. Research from her Master’s on Janet Cardiff and sound installation art will be published later this year. She lives in Montréal.
Florian Maier-Aichen: Rejecting Tradition
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Episode #113: Florian Maier-Aichen talks about rejecting the dogmatic approach and lighting sensibility of the Dusseldorf School of photography, traveling to Los Angeles to make a fresh start.
Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.
Florian Maier-Aichen 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: Robert Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Joaquin Perez, Mark Sutton & Jake Yuzna.
One Day Only De Maria
Walter De Maria, "The 2000 Sculpture" in the Resnick Pavilion, Courtesy LACMA
In 1969, when Lee Lozano began her Dialogue Piece, a project for which she simply invited artists and others to talk with her, she called Walter De Maria twice, once on May 11 and once on May 13. On June 18, she sent him a postcard:
The reason I called you twice to which you have not been gracious enough to reply was to invite you for a dialogue. Love, Lozano. [Walter replies by letter before he leaves town for summer. July.]
She never did catch him. When Thomas Kellein wrote about De Maria’s Broken Kilometer for Tate Etc., he described the difficulty he’d had in meeting De Maria. Kellein unsuccessfully requested an interview during Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. He recalls, “[De Maria] explained to me at length – in a telephone call lasting around 40 minutes – that he was unfortunately not able to meet my request.” Soon after, Kellein flew to New York, struggled again to arrange an interview with the artist and then luckily ran into him at the Dia Art Foundation in SoHo. Three days later, the two men were together in a cafe, only the conversation did not go as planned. Writes Kellein,
I had a whole sheaf of questions with me. But there seemed to be no chance of talking about art. And in the weeks, even years, to come, whenever De Maria and I met, in the friendliest of circumstances, the conversation never turned to his works. They were to remain a mystery, and De Maria didn’t even want to talk about that.
That an artist whose work has always been theatrically sprawling would have a Jasper Johns-like penchant for privacy seems incongruous, but also makes the aloofness of his exhibitions all the more intriguing.
Walter de Maria, "The Broken Kilometer," 1979. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: John Abbott.
Last month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced a one day-only showing of a De Maria installation inside the Resnick Pavilion, the museum’s freshly constructed, soon-to-open building. This showing would, according to LACMA Director Michael Govan, allow the museum to “test the Resnick Pavilion’s capacity to deal with large-scale work,” though “test” may be a stand-in for “show off.” The prestige of the “one day only” designation slipped slightly as the museum announced subsequent day-only showings, but the elusiveness of the whole endeavor still matches the elusiveness I’ve come to associate with De Maria.
Going for the Gold(en Age)
Partial exterior of the Rijksmuseum, as seen behind the City of Amsterdam tourism slogan
Over the past few years, I have developed a persistent desire to live and work in the Netherlands. My fantasies of Dutch relocation have been largely indulged and inflated through publication envy, funding-for-the-arts envy, contemporary-art-institution envy, and access-to-Europe envy.The main problem with this interest, though, is that it has been nursed from afar; up until this June, I had previously only spent three days in the country.
During my next two weeks of guest blogging, I will reflect upon my recent trip to the Netherlands (May 30 – June 15, 2010), one that I embarked upon with the hope that through interviews, site visits, and bar conversations, I might come away with a deeper understanding of the functioning of and my interest in the Dutch art world (grounded in actual experiences). As I revisit that journey with you, I will discuss encounters, artworks, individuals, and institutions that served to bolster or erode my romantic vision.
It took a surprisingly short amount of time for my bubble of naiveté to burst.* Upon disembarking the plane, an artist friend welcomed me to the Netherlands by flatly stating (and I paraphrase) that there’s nothing going on with contemporary art in Amsterdam. While this was not what I was hoping to hear in the first twenty minutes, I swallowed the urge to protest and gave him a concerned and knowing nod.
(*Rest assured, it will re-inflate.)
I had anticipated this attitude—to an extent. After all, I had done my research and was well aware of consistent criticism over Amsterdam’s plague of museum closures (with both the Stedelijk Museum and the majority of the Rijksmuseum having been closed since 2003). But my list of places that were open and intriguing had steadily been growing, and like a lab technician eschewing the scientific method, I was already convinced my hypothesis was true.
Quit Grad School.
Well, that title may overstate it a little and perhaps it comes from a sullen mood, but in recent days I’ve found myself ruminating about giving up on grad school altogether; unplugging from the system. More and more I feel that art schools have nothing to teach. But, in equal portion to my growing disenchantment grows my satisfaction with how thoroughly I’ve been educated while in graduate school. I have no use for my education, and yet in two swift years it propelled me from a squandering and teetering artist-hopeful to someone who feels confident about having a legitimate practice for many years ahead. Nothing can be taught and yet I’ve learned plenty. So, what accounts for the difference? What have I learned and how did I learn it?
But first, why do art schools have nothing to teach? For most artists, being a good one means a tremendous amount of education just as in any other advanced field. Pointed, nuanced, daily lessons and long hours of labor accompany the slow growth of one’s trade. Further, just as art production has become granularly nuanced to the desires of individuals, their educational needs are individually specific. In order to accommodate the growing curiosities of artists, art school curriculum panned backward, increasing scope of possibility while decreasing in details and determined instruction (life drawing in grad school?! Ha!). Prioritizing inclusivity over specificity, schools abandon skill for cognition, then cognition for validation, then validation for oblique encouragements. Perhaps rightly so, but the spiral of what not to teach has left us in a place where the only thing agreeable to teach is essentially how to teach one’s self. Personally, I support that. But if we are able to teach ourselves, what need is there for the ensconced institution of school to continue?
Yet for every whining lament I make about the system holding us down, my artistic life would not be anywhere near as full and sustainable if I had not attended. The fact is that my grad school experience is helping me to do without it, or more specifically, to want to do without it. I don’t think that is the case with many schools. Whether through debt burdens or outmoded lessons (we certainly have our share of each of these), many programs leave young artists at the exit without a clear idea of how to continue making their work. (That is most definitely not to be confused with “how to make it in the art world.” That cancerous aim awaits the radiation of my next diatribe. The last thing we need are expensive art schools telling us how to earn money with our art to pay for the expensive art schools we attended.) The only truly effective plan that schools give students is how to get into the school, not out of it.
A recent SVA poster advertisement superbly illustrates an art school disguising its total lack of direction for students with bizarrely opaque warm-fuzzies in the form of a motivational quote from President Obama: “In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never given, it must be earned.” Oh yeah, and the quote surrounds a pretty flower. Again, this is an advertisement for advanced study in art.
SVA advertisements in NYC subways
Yes, the aim of art school should be to write itself out. And now, three generations into our current structure, we’ve had ample time and example to create a roadmap to swiftly adapt away from the staggering influence of institutional teaching. So, to balance my gratitude with my curmudgeonly rants, I’ve briefly addressed a couple very basic and important lessons that graduate school has given me and that one doesn’t need graduate school to get.
Shake It Up
Jessica Stockholder, "Photo Cut Up" 2005 Courtesy the artist and Dieu Donné Papermill
For about ten summers now I have enjoyed teaching and traveling in some capacity. It’s become increasingly important over the past decade to broaden my own experience as an artist-educator, whether it has involved working with colleagues at Massachusetts College as an artist-in-residence or participating in TICA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Summer, to me, has become a time to both relax and shake it up a bit.
Last summer Art21 launched Art21 Educators, a six-day summer institute where pairs of teachers from New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles and Chicago came to work with us here in NYC to explore ways of teaching with contemporary art, utilizing big ideas, thematic units and essential questions. The group included art educators at the very start of their careers as well as experienced teachers with many years in the classroom. During our week together we got the opportunity to work with Oliver Herring, Jessica Stockholder and Olivia Gude, and held sessions at New York University, Oliver Herring’s studio, and the Museum of Modern Art. It was an exciting and exhausting time.
What made last year’s institute special, among other things, was a shared vision that my colleagues Jessica Hamlin, Marc Mayer and myself had. We wanted to provide teachers with an experience that was not only meaningful, but one that also lasted into the school year. Let’s face it, there are many institutes out there that allow teachers, artists, teaching artists, etc., to attend workshops in the summertime. Once it’s over, it’s usually, well….. over. The relationship rarely extends between the institution and the participant. We wanted to provide teachers with an exciting week of workshops, discussions and direct experiences with works of art (as well as artists themselves) that kicked off a yearlong relationship- planning units of study, revising curriculum, and using contemporary art to teach students together. Our first year was plenty successful, but like anything brand new there were things we wanted to improve.
Seeing and Time: Video Art as Experience
Ryan Trecartin, "Any Ever," 2010, installation view. Photo by Steve Payne, courtesy The Power Plant.
It is neither a secret nor a surprise to know that, irregardless of broad worldly appeal, the average Louvre visitor views the Mona Lisa for a scarce fifteen seconds before moving on. In comparison to this unmoving matriarch of art history, one almost expects film and video art to defy this short attention span by virtue of its tendency to unfold over a longer period of time. However, in my capacity as both artist and critic, I have all too often witnessed people bring a new flavor of evasiveness to the viewing of time-based works. The darkened gallery space is approached tentatively like the site of an unseemly peep show, where the visitor clings hesitantly to the threshold of the room – inevitably hindering the entrance of braver souls – before slinking off with the visible shame of one who feels he/she has failed to get the point of it all.
Rather than turning a blind eye to this phenomenon, it is more productive to acknowledge the very real and physical challenges presented by film and video art in order to appreciate the transformative potential of a thorough engagement with this temporal, and sometimes spatial, burden. In a cumulative context such as the recent Images Festival (a Toronto-wide exhibition that pushes the time limits of even the most seasoned art viewer — after one day of gallery visits, my pupils had dilated to twice their usual size), these challenges can be rewarded or exacerbated by the intent of the artist, who is increasingly conscious of the viewer’s presence as an indispensable part of the finished work.
Peter Campus, "Anamnesis," 1974, installation view. Photo by Steve Payne, courtesy The Power Plant.
At The Power Plant, which contributed to this deluge with four separate installations, the role of the audience is immediately apparent in Peter Campus’s Anamnesis, an early work dating from 1974. From a distance, Anamnesis is a blank projection of the gallery’s empty wall with the sneakiest hint of floor, waiting for the viewer to arrive and fulfill its function as an artwork dependent upon human presence. The viewer’s arrival is captured on a closed-circuit video camera that literally pulls the body into the projected space. Even more insidious is the three-second delay that drags the appropriated likeness out-of-sync with time. These ghostly echoes preserve past movements for several disquieting moments, though even these vanish shortly after the viewer’s withdrawal from the camera’s reach, unrecorded and infinitely unique. Part of the work’s liberating appeal is owed to this lack of enforced duration and accompanying promise of a participatory voice.
