Art21 is proud to announce the forthcoming broadcast of our latest film, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible, the first film produced by Art21 for national television broadcast outside of the biennial Art in the Twenty-First Century series. The film is also Art21′s first feature to focus on a single artist.

The broadcast premiere of William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible takes place this October 21 at 10:00 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings).

The film gives viewers an intimate look into the mind and creative process of William Kentridge, the South African artist whose acclaimed charcoal drawings, animations, video installations, shadow plays, mechanical puppets, tapestries, sculptures, live performance pieces, and operas have made him one of the most dynamic and exciting contemporary artists working today.

A Web site complements the film, where you can learn more about the film, watch related videos, and browse through image slideshows. Throughout the coming weeks leading into the October 21 broadcast, we will be releasing additional features related to William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible. Features will include essays and interviews contributed by writers from the Art21 Blog stable of contributors, preview and exclusive videos, thematic image slideshows, educational features, and much more.

Stay tuned, we’re just getting started!

Barbara Kruger, "Between" installation, 2010. Photo credit: Guild Hall.

This week in the roundup … Barbara Kruger gets a celebration started, Cao Fei has her eyes on a prize, Cai Guo-Qiang goes in with a bang, Raymond Pettibon is into OFF!, Maya Lin dedicates her Confluence, Laurie Anderson opens BAM and much more!

• Barbara Kruger presents Plenty at Guild Hall through October 11. A special preview on August 13 celebrates the exhibition.  “Barbara Kruger is one of the most important artists of this century. Her work is exciting and challenging. I have wanted to work with her since I first became Curator of Guild Hall in 1990 and am delighted that the opportunity finally arrived for our schedules to coincide and work together on this amazing exhibition,” said Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Museum Director and Chief Curator.

• The Guggenheim Museum and Hugo Boss announced the artists short-listed for The Hugo Boss Prize 2010, which will be awarded on November 4, followed by a solo exhibition for the winning artist in 2011. One of the Prize nominees, Cao Fei also had her work in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, and she was nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize 2010.

• Cai Guo-Qian has been invited by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to make Odyssey that will adorn a new Arts of China Gallery on October 17. “Cai Quo-Qiang is a master of the poetic on a grand scale,” director of the MFA Houston Peter C. Marzio said in a statement. He added that he believes Cai’s project will foster a “dialogue between artworks from different time periods within the galleries.” Continue reading »

Matthew Albanese, “Salt Water Falls,” 2009, mixed media. Image courtesy the artist.

Get to the root of the matter. Plant an idea. Sow the seeds.

Call it what you will — the environment, biosphere, landscape, wilderness, terra firma, mother earth, etc. — but nothing is as synonymous with the beginning of life as the flora and fauna that surround and support us. Often we equate the idea of nature with that of a primal past, the origin of all life, a time idealized as pristine and pure in addition to uncompromising, wild, even cruel. Yet simultaneously, discussion of our ecosystems connotes growth, progress, and the future. Using such oft-touted terms as “sustainability” and “renewability,” those individuals concerned with eco-friendliness and “going green” are deemed forward-minded thinkers with their fingertips on the pulse of our modern society’s ongoing evolution. Continue reading »

Thanks to Steven Frost for giving us some amazing insights in fiber art, and extra bonus points for whipping up a fascinating post that combines Catwoman & patriarchy.

Next up is Meg Floryan, who is a freelance arts writer and recent graduate of Sotheby’s Institute of Art,with a Master’s degree in American Fine & Decorative Art. Meg has lived and studied in New Orleans, Boston, and New York, and she has developed a wide-ranging repertoire of interests that includes everything from Hellenistic jewelry and post-war children’s book illustrations to a fascination with art crime.

Inspired by the diversity and freedom of online forums, Meg writes regularly for SmARThistory.org and is constantly in search of new ways to explore and experience art. Meg’s other hobbies include yoga and watching foreign horror films — which we assume she does separately and not at the same time.

“Philip IV” and “Mariana of Austria” shoot the breeze in the Prado. Period costume memo not picked up by majority of attendees

On a single day this week I saw a clutch of paintings that would, by most reckonings, be referred to as “masterpieces”: Velazquez’ Las Meninas (1656), Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814), Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-4), and Picasso’s Guernica (1937). I’m deliberately not linking to images of them, because you already know what they look like. Perhaps the images flicked into your mind on reading the titles. I thought I knew them too, but this prior knowledge made it almost impossible to look at the real object with any kind of immediacy. Anecdotal historical information, the stuff upon which wall labels and guided tours are built, deadens an immediate response to a work of art. It thickens the air; it slows down your reactions. This distancing from the physicality of the thing in front of you is made literal in the Louvre’s disastrous hang of the Mona Lisa, pinioned behind glass like an entomological specimen: dead. Continue reading »

Dear Santa,

Hi! My name is Jeffrey, I’m 26 years old, and I live in San Francisco, California.  I know it’s kind of early to be writing to you in the middle of August, but by the time the holidays come around, I’m wrapping gifts and watching new movies and going to parties that there’s no time to sit down and breathe! Plus, a lot of this letter requires your absolute immediate attention ASAP and it just cannot wait until December! It’s already winter here in San Francisco so you don’t have to worry about changing out of your red suit – in fact, I suggest you bring an extra layer because it is cold at night. So now that I have your attention, I want to start out by saying thank you very much for overturning Prop 8 last week — the celebration in the Castro was a lot of fun and instead of snow there was pink confetti! I know I shouldn’t be asking for any more things after that, but I’m about to start my last year of grad school at San Francisco Art Institute and I would really appreciate it if you could help me make it the bestest year ever.

Jeffrey Augustine Songco, "Holiday 2007 Invitation" (2007). Courtesy the artist.

Continue reading »

Stephen Shore, Andy Warhol with Kip Stagg, 1965-1967.

Kip[p] Stagg, nineteen years old and a Columbia undergraduate, was walking in New York one night in 1965 when he heard a man’s voice shouting names at him from somewhere across the street: Igor Stravinsky, Maria Callas, Mick Jagger (there was a fourth too, but I’ve forgotten it). The personality behind each name had made a seminal appearance in the city that year—The Rolling Stones played Carnegie Hall on their first-ever American tour—and Stagg knew this. The shouting man, who turned out to be the same Chuck Wein who purportedly got Edie Sedgwick stoned to sabotage Warhol’s Kitchen, knew this too. But to peg Stagg so well, he must have either had stand-out hustling savvy or eerie good luck.

Intrigued, Stagg joined Wein and talked as they walked toward Wein’s destination, which turned out to be Warhol’s Factory. Wein invited Stagg up and they rode the freight elevator to the landing, where they met a topless Brigid Berlin. “It was not a pretty sight,” said Stagg, who soon found himself trapped behind a running camera. The four-minute Screen Test that resulted played at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater Sunday, August 8th, two days after Warhol’s 82nd birthday. Stagg saw it for the first time that night, right before telling all of us in the audience his story of nighttime New York, precocious Wein and brazen Berlin.

Andy Warhol, "Tarzan and Jane Regained...Sort of," 1964.

Sunday’s screening, hosted by The Los Angeles Filmforum, included nine other Screen Tests from Warhol’s Reel #4. In each, the unmoving camera meets its subject head on. The result is silently slow and pensive. “You would see the person fighting with his image—trying to protect it,” said Mary Woronov, a self-described “rebel artist” who belonged to the Factory and wrote about it in a memoir called Swimming Underground. Such fighting happens in most of the tests that ran Sunday, but clean-shaven Dennis Hopper of 1964, who appears on the reel twice, seems uncannily comfortable with himself.

The screening coincided with MoCA’s Dennis Hopper Double Standard, and Hopper also made a brief appearance in the evening’s longer film, Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort of, a peripatetic, painfully drawn-out farce in which the elfish and flimsy Taylor Mead cavorts in a loin cloth at beaches, hotel pools and other Los Angeles haunts (Warhol made Tarzan on his first trip to L.A.). Hopper plays Mead’s stunt double, dashing up a tree to pick a coconut, and fleetingly comparing his biceps with the less-endowed Mead’s. He looks intermittently awestruck and amused the whole time he’s on camera.

James Franco and Jeffrey Deitch, "Soap at MOCA."

There’s a faux looseness to Tarzan that mirrors the faux looseness of what’s been happening in a segment of Los Angeles’ art scene this summer—characters and locations seem haphazardly intertwined, when, actually, they’re deliberate and specific. Easy Rider screened at Hollywood Forever Cemetery a week before clips from the same film would appear in the just-opened Double Standard. James Franco and Kalup Linzy performed for a maudlin soap episode at MoCA’s Pacific Design Center a week before the inside of the same space would be turned into an equally maudlin but more aggressive habitat for Ryan Trecartin’s visually raucous and linguistically agile Any Ever. The films installed in the galleries at MoCA PDC would then be projected to audiences at Cinefamily, the vintage theater on Fairfax Avenue. And Hopper would reappear at the Egyptian. Though none of these events occurred spontaneously, the fact that they feel as though they could have makes them Warholian.

Critic Stephen Koch described Warhol’s shtick in the 1989 documentary A Mirror for the Sixties:

He was constantly asking people, Do you have any ideas? I don’t have any ideas. It was almost a Buddhistic pose of transparency which used other people and sometime someone . . . would say, yes, I do. And that answer would then be fed into what was a very selective understanding of what he, Warhol, was up to.

Warhol was up to curating people. He wanted a microcosm of sometimes attractive, sometimes eccentric, hungry personalities with obsessive brains, the sort who looked like Dennis Hopper or James Franco, knew what Stravinsky and Mick Jagger had in common, and would follow someone as strange as Chuck Wein home late at night.

Alfredo Jaar, "Lament of the Images (Version 1)" 2002 Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

Teaching with film or taking a trip with students to a museum can sometimes be an experience somewhere between total bliss and a dental visit. It can be eye-opening or so bad you want to forget it altogether. Personally, I have experienced no shortage in my own career where these scenarios have gone extremely well (students getting it, real dialogue, feeling the buzz of the conversation, making connections) or really, really wrong (students setting off museum alarms, falling asleep and actually injuring themselves doing so… you get the idea). But there are some strong similarities in how we can prepare and engage students when teaching with film and taking meaningful field trips. Here are four examples we shared recently with our Art21 Educators:

Take a good look at the films before you show them- Film and field trips need to be previewed by the teacher in advance in order to plan effectively. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but you can’t imagine how many people have cut corners and assumed certain things about films or exhibits when suddenly… WHAM!…. the shock of, “What did I just do?” sets in. Do NOT show any film or take a field trip with students unless you have previewed the material first…. Unless, of course, you just love surprises.

Do the front-end work- Prepare students in advance for what they will see by sharing images, quotes and (his)stories about the artist(s). Prepare students for what you expect when watching the film or participating in the field trip. What will excellent participation look and sound like? Tell students in advance what your expectations are and motivate students with high quality visuals that pose questions in order to get them excited to see and explore the work.

Continue reading »

Tim Burton, “Batman Returns,” 1992, video still. Courtesy Warner Bros Pictures

When I was a little kid I was obsessed with comic books. I consumed anything super hero related with a sense of urgency. I imagined that some day I would move to a big city to take up fighting crime. Instead I’ve become a fiber artist, which in many ways is as close as I can get without being bitten by a radioactive spider.

Mark Newport, “Spiderman,” 2003, hand knit acrylic and buttons. Courtesy of the Artist

Comic books and fiber arts share a history of composing of identity through the use of cloth. Take Mark Newport’s 2009 exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum Super Heroes in Action, for example. Acrylic yarn is clearly not the best fabric choice for dodging bullets or, like in Newport’s “Aquaman” (2004), swimming through the depths of the ocean. Yet evoking images such as these (and perhaps some childhood aspirations), Newport suspends acrylic yarn costumes from coat hangers in order to reflect a modern sense of ironic vulnerability. Continue reading »

After passing away in 1997, painter, sculptor, and notorious collector, Roger Brown bequeathed his homes and collections to his alma mater, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His Chicago home located at 1926 N. Halsted became what is now the Roger Brown Study Collection (RBSC). Known as an “artist’s museum,” the study collection houses Brown’s work and collection intact. His New Buffalo home, which was designed by his partner, architect George Veronda, has become an artists’ retreat for SAIC staff and faculty.

Unlike his other residences, Brown’s home in La Conchita, California, was sold in 1998 and the contents were archived and moved to the RBSC. With the help of the study collection’s curator Lisa Stone, assistant curator James Connolly, and SAIC alum Dana Boutin, Chicago-based artist and curator Nicholas Lowe has organized an exhibition based on the work that Brown made and the objects he collected while living in California. Roger Brown: California U.S.A, currently on view at the Hyde Park Art Center, explores Brown’s Virtual Still Life paintings and the intricate relations that formed while working in his home in California. Continue reading »