Barry McGee, Houston Street (NYC), 2010. Photo: Art Observed.

In this week’s roundup: Barry McGee tags Houston Street in NYC,  Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra contextualize and collaborate, Robert Adams comes to Vancouver, Roni Horn channels Emily Dickinson, and more.

• Art Observed documented Barry McGee‘s new work on the “Deitch Wall” on East Houston and Bowery (NYC). With longtime collaborator Josh Lazcano (aka “AMAZE”), “McGee spray painted simple red tags of the names and crews of graffiti writers from both past and present generations.” Visit the site to watch AO’s short clip.

• The Indianapolis Museum of Art will present Framed, featuring work by several artists including a collaborative, contextualization of their work in relation to influential early films by Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. The exhibition will highlight Nauman’s and Serra’s seminal works and “include a selection of videos by artists who revisit and expand major themes of early video art including measurement, duration, masochism, collaboration, and public interventions.” Framed will be on view in the IMA’s McCormack Forefront Galleries from November 5, 2010 – March 6, 2011.

• The Contemporary Art Museum Houston presents Dance with Camera, an exhibition and a screening program that “explores the work of a group of artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features film, video, and still photography that exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space.” The show features work by Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley, and Oliver Herring.  Dance with Camera is running now through October 17.

• The Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts will host a rare showing of Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle.  “Made between 1994 and 2002, The Cremaster Cycle explores the processes of biological and artistic creation.  The series joins characters as diverse as Harry Houdini, Gary Gilmore, Richard Serra and Norman Mailer.”  The films be shown Wednesdays, September 15, 22, and 29 at 7 p.m.  Barney will introduce the series before the September 15 showing Parts 1 and 4.

• Artpark: 1974-84 will present over 200 artists’ projects through original photos, drawings, maquettes, video and film, ephemera, and some material that has been re-fabricated for this exhibit. It opens in the UB Art Gallery on September 24 and will run through December 18. The “not-to-be-missed” event during this exhibit is the October 8-9 conference that will include a panel discussion with Richard Tuttle.

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Shelley Miller, "Cargo," sugar mural, 2009. Courtesy the artist.

Shelley Miller creates exquisite, intricate artworks out of sugar. In 2009, her mural installation, Cargo, won the People’s Choice award at Montreal’s Mois de la Photo (Montreal’s biennale for contemporary photography). A collaboration between the artist and the Darling Foundry (a factory turned art center), the mural captured the public’s imagination. Referencing the azulejo ceramic tile tradition of Spanish and Portuguese cultures (and their colonies), Miller painted a scene of ships in a harbor using edible blue paint on white sugar tiles, then affixing the tiles to the wall with icing (the process for which she shared on her project blog). The beauty and power of the precise work, beyond its historical references to colonialism, was seeing it evolve over time. The audience witnessed the colors fade and run, the tiles crack and disintegrate. Throughout Miller’s installations, time, both past and present, takes center stage.

Shelley Miller, "Cargo (detail)," sugar mural, 2009. Courtesy the artist.

Trained at the Alberta College of Art and Design and Concordia University, the Saskatchewan native has worked in multiple media ranging from sand to marble, but she always returns to sugar. The self-taught confectioner quickly left behind her early feminist days of wedding cakes at art school, continued her playful, tongue-in-cheek jab at Kant’s Critique of Taste, and began exploring ideas of decoration, covering objects and furniture with delicately-patterned sugar before moving out of domestic spaces into more public realms.

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Photo: AnnMarie Wesolowski

Thanks to Thom Donovan for his excellent exhibition and artists’ books reviews, and interview with the fascinating Primary Information. Follow his writing and projects back on his own site here.

Up next is Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin. Since graduating from Harvard College in History of Art and Architecture and Italian Studies in 2008, Stefan has been working in Montreal at the Canadian Centre for Architecture as a research assistant. Currently, he is gearing up to begin his MA in Art History at The Courtauld Institute in London in 2010-2011. He continues to fuel his interest in contemporary art by attending exhibits wherever he goes (which included a recent extended jaunt to Australia). Committed to a career in the arts, Stefan has written reviews for the magazines Canadian Art, Espace Sculpture, and Vie des Arts, and has been writing regularly for The ArtBlog for over a year now. He enjoys sharing his passion for the arts in an intelligent, thoughtful, and accessible way. He also writes his own blog, where he reflects on art, fashion, yoga and cooking and shares philosophies, poetry, photos and moments of inspiration.

To this, Stefan adds:

In writing for the Art21 Blog, I hoped to create a portrait of my native Montreal as a centre of artistic production. Through eight interviews under the theme of Tradition and Technology, a variegated landscape of creative processes will unfold. Finally, I will end with a piece bringing together all the different artists’ thoughts about Montreal and how it is as an artistic centre.

Primary Information co-publisher Miriam Katzeff. Courtesy The Villager.

1. What inspired you to start Primary Information?

I think there were two reasons to start Primary Information. James [Hoff] and I are both very interested in artists’ books and some of the publications we were most interested in were rare and expensive—too expensive for us. We wanted to share these projects with people that might not be able to afford them. The second reason is that we wanted to promote artists we were interested in outside of exhibitions which are limited to a time period and place. I’d discovered European artists whose work I’d never seen in person through books and wanted to do the same for American artists or younger artists.

2. Why is there a need for projects like Primary Information, which feature printings and collation of original art historical documents?

Much of the material we work with is forgotten or rare—perhaps having only been published once. We want people to have access to these projects without already being experts. I think artists used to write more and many younger artists aren’t encouraged to do so. By highlighting these writings or publications, hopefully it encourages younger artists to write about art.

3. Are there other projects, people, things that have inspired the Primary Information project? How does your work as a curator line-up with your work as the co-publisher of Primary Information?

We are very inspired by Seth Siegelaub, a curator, gallerist, and writer active in promoting conceptual artists in the 1960s and 70s. One of the things Siegelaub is known for is curating exhibitions which take the form of books.

4. What has been your favorite project to work on and why is this the case?

Right now the Lee Lozano Notebooks are my favorite because she made diverse bodies of work and the Notebooks are a great way to get insight into her process and how the works relate to each other. Publishing facsimile reprints can be an aesthetic challenge but I think the design retains the intimacy of the notebook form while still seeming current.

5. What projects do you see in the future for Primary Information? What direction would you like to take the press in?

The future involves more projects by younger artists that are developed specifically for the press in addition to the reprints that we do. We are also expanding our downloadable PDF section on our website starting with a collection of Siegelaub’s publications.

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This past Friday, I got together with Miriam Katzeff who, along with James Hoff, publishes Primary Information, a publishing project devoted to making available printed matter of an art historic significance as well as supporting emergent artists books and other print-based artists’ projects.

What is immediately striking about all of the Primary Information books I’ve encountered is their simple yet exquisite design. What may not be so readily visible is the equally exquisite ethos that informs the publishing project. Many of us have had the experience where we encountered a treasured book or printed object in a used bookstore, but couldn’t purchase it because it was too expensive. Too often materials like the ones Primary Information republish become fetishized for their lack of availability. Through Primary Information, Katzeff and Hoff would like a readership, and younger artists and writers in particular, to be able to take a chance on printed editions because they like the design of a book or have found something compelling browsing the book’s contents. They would also like to put works back in circulation that they once could have only encountered from a distance—through poor reproductions, rumor, or exhibition.

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Ryan Trecartin, I-BE AREA (Double Jamie, Ramada Omar, and Sally Man Pause), video excerpt, 2007

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the kinship between Ryan Trecartin’s narratives and those of Maya Deren who, like Trecartin, used the camera (the Kino-Eye) as a device to expose and subsequently repair fractured and splintered humanity.

A fracture is generally not a pleasant event. Often, a certain amount of pain or violence –a loss of control and composure– accompanies a break. In the fantastic book Metal and Flesh (a favorite of mine), Ollivier Dyens describes this rupture as a necessary step in a movement towards posthumanism by using the fiction of Kafka, Wells and Orwell as examples of “plastic bodies” –bent, misshapen, bestialized, tortured and altered until their humanity is lost, or replaced, by some other state.

Posthumanism can be understood in at least two very distinct ways. One, I’ll call the material understanding, which has to do with bodies that have transcended what can be commonly understood as human. The other use of the term describes a philosophical posture that has moved beyond humanism (although it is up for debate what this “moving beyond humanism” actually means). However, one condition that both terms require is this break from humanity/humanism that Dyens describes, a rupture that can either be academic (in the philosophical understanding) or psychological/physical (in the material understanding). This rupture creates an interesting condition: despite being chronologically posterior to modernity, posthumanism’s break with humanity/humanism parallels pre-modern modes in its rejection of the category of the human.

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I’m back from my summer break and ready to change things up a bit with this column.  So instead of the usual long laundry list of documentary various and sundry, I think I’m going to keep it long but centered around a single subject.  So to inaugurate, I’m posting an interview I did back in the spring with someone who’s probably watched more documentaries in a year than I’ll see in my lifetime, Thom Powers.  He’s the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, artistic director of the “Stranger Than Fiction” documentary screening series in New York, and has just started up a new New York-based documentary storytelling festival called DOC – NYC, set to start in early November 2010.

Thom Powers. Courtesy Stranger Than Fiction.

Nick Ravich:  Where are you right now?

Thom Powers:  I’m in Hollywood, Florida, where I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks with . . . I don’t know if I told you but my wife and I have a relatively newborn child, going on nine weeks now.  So we are enjoying the support of her parents who live here.

NR:  Thanks so much for giving me the time.  There’s a lot of stuff about you online so I don’t want to cover old ground, but I wanted to start with some easy meatball questions for you.  I know you were actively producing documentary work.  Are you in production on something at the moment?

TP:  No.  I did that for a roughly 10-year period, from 1994 till about 2004.  And after doing that for 10 years, I was looking for a change.  I was passionately interested in documentary film and was burned out by production.  Which is strenuous work, as you know.  And it was around that time that I conceived the “Stranger Than Fiction” series, and then shortly thereafter got the job at the Toronto International Film Festival.  And sort of reinvented my career in programming.   I have a background as a filmmaker, so I think that’s an asset as a programmer.  I probably have a better visceral sense of what filmmakers have gone through, by the time they get to the festival stage, than someone who comes from a more academic background or who has never produced a film before.

NR:  I have to ask you about your experience at the old WNET-produced (PBS in New York City) arts show, Egg.  I was a big fan.  Though our show Art:21 is very different in a lot of ways, I see Egg as a progenitor.

TP:  Egg was a terrific show.  I’m very sorry that it didn’t last.  And I’m very happy that people like you have picked up the mantle and reinvented something like it.  The main piece I produced for them was a profile of the cartoonist Joe Saco, who pioneered a style of documentary war reportage in comics, and who comes out of my former life working for his publisher Fantagraphics books and my interest and friendship with him.  I did that piece and my partner did a couple of other pieces for Egg.  It was a great opportunity for us as filmmakers because the other films we were doing at the time were one or two year long projects.  And it was really nice to able to break out and do something in a short form more quickly.  It wasn’t terribly well-paid but it sort of covered the short amount of time you were going to spend on it.  For working filmmakers, it’s very valuable to have little outlets like that — where you can make a short investment of time and stretch your muscles in a different way; where you can work with different people, etc.

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Episode #119: Carrie Mae Weems describes the impetus for her series Roaming (2006). An investigation into “the edifice of power,” Weems performed a series of photographic actions throughout Rome, Italy, contrasting her body with grand architectural structures and monumental surroundings.

Weems’s vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms—social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths. Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans for more than a century.

Carrie Mae Weems is featured in the Season 5 (2005) episode Compassion of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch full episodes online via PBS Video or download to own via iTunes (link opens application).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Catherine Tatge. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Jack Shainman Gallery & Carrie Mae Weems. © 2010 Art21, Inc.

Emilie Halpern, "Midnight Sun," Installation view, LAX Art, 2010. Courtesy Pepin Moore.

Last weekend, I stopped at a red light and rolled forward into the intersection to turn right. I didn’t see the pedestrian who was about to cross, and came frighteningly close to hitting him. His body clenched in what I assumed to be anger before he walked around the back of my car. My windows were open and I was nervous. Certainly, I was at fault; still, I didn’t want a confrontation. But when he came up to the driver’s side, he said, in halting English, “I love you.” Then he walked away.

My summer has been like that: situations that I am convinced will be disastrous are instead uncannily poignant, and everything–my life, my work, the art I see–seems to be converging.  Art viewing trips turn into drawn out social encounters; social encounters turn into art.

The work of Emilie Halpern, an artist very much interested in convergences, became especially emblematic of the past few months. She kept appearing in shows around Los Angeles (and also in Houston, New York, and Lisbon, though I didn’t see those), and her work constantly seemed to be questioning what it means to love in quiet, unobtrusive ways. Talking with her seemed like a fitting way to end the season, so I visited her Highland Park studio and she told me the story of her summer, which actually began two years ago.

"Cosmos," Emilie Halpern and Eric Zimmerman, 2010. Installation View. Art Palace, Houston, Texas. Courtesy the artist.

Emilie Halpern: After my last solo show at Anna Helwing Gallery [in 2008], everything began to shift, partly because the gallery closed. I did two residency programs, each a year apart, and then—boom—the show at Art Palace Gallery in Houston happened [in May/June 2010].

Catherine Wagley: When I looked at images from Art Palace this morning, I was thinking about how the work broached similar subjects but felt somehow different from your past work.

EH: The shift is subtle. There’s more looseness now and I’m moving at a faster pace, doing less editing. For the last show I did with Anna Helwing Gallery, the work was interconnected, but when I look at it now, I just see how each piece was its own little thesis that I kept refining and refining. When I did these residency programs, I was doing several things at once, not knowing where I was going. Then finally, I looked back and I saw what I had created.

CW: I like the fact that your residencies happen in the spring.

EH: Always the spring. I love going to New England and that’s when things just explode out there. When I was at The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire in 2009, I arrived at the end of April. I saw the woods without a single leaf and there was still snow melting. Then, within a week, all the leaves came out and everything turned green and it was beautiful. The photographs I did there documented the bare trees in black and white and the lush spring trees that came later.

CW: Were you just responding to your surroundings? You always seem to have some sort of project.

EH: Well, I knew I’d have a black and white darkroom and I thought, okay, I’m going to shoot photographs. I just wanted to enjoy the experience of being a photographer, and I had started to switch to digital so I was getting farther and farther away…

CW: …from the tactile experience of printing?

EH: Yeah, and then I knew I wanted to do ceramics—that’s really new and I think that, more than anything, it’s responsible for the shift in the work. Making clay bowls, that’s a totally different way of being creative than making conceptual art.

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Allan McCollum, "The Dog from Pompei," 1991. Courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

In this week’s roundup: An-My Lê captures the American armed forces, Allora & Calzadilla explore physical and temporal displacement, Julie Mehretu examines the metaphysical aspects of art, and more!

Image courtesy tacotuesday.org

Years ago, on my very first day of teaching, my colleague Rose said to me that we must, at all costs, make sure people don’t treat us as interior decorators. “We teach fine art,” she would say, “not how to give rooms a facelift.” But still, pretty much every year it’s the same thing. If you’re a K-12 art educator someone ultimately asks, especially at the beginning of the year, a question that sounds something like…

Joe, do you have any art to hang in our office? We have such bare walls after the new paint job!

Never mind the fact that many teachers wait years to get a paint job, or even basic supplies for that matter, but these kinds of questions can drive you bats. What goes through my mind is often different than what I say, which winds up sweet and soothing like, “Well, we allow students to take home their portfolios at the end of the year and any visuals we have are usually used in classes as examples for different lessons.”

But that’s not enough. These people can be relentless…

Joe, you don’t have anything??? When will the kids make some stuff we can put on our walls?

This is when I remind myself that we’re here to teach the WHOLE school community and not just the kids. So, in response to this blitzkrieg of requests, I have taken a different approach this year. Instead of trying to convince my otherwise perfectly wonderful colleagues that I will not be able to furnish their office with the latest in student leftovers, I simply invite them IN to my classroom to visit. Just the other day it came out of my mouth without even thinking about it too much…

Mrs. ______, you are more than welcome to come in to the classroom next week once we get rolling to see which artists you might want to approach about their work. Maybe you can feature different artists through the year instead of having just one set of work? Perhaps you can work with the students to hang the work and even call it a mini-exhibit?

It was beautiful. It worked. Mrs. ______ is coming in next week and is excited to learn about the different artists we work with in our classes! Invitations like these are also a chance to open up others to the kinds of work we do with kids and the multiple approaches we take to create high quality work with them. It gives us an opportunity to allow colleagues, community members and even supervisors to see the range of art we share with students- from traditional approaches with drawing and painting to contemporary practice in sculpture and mixed media. From black and white darkroom photography to digital photography and even installation art. Opening up our classrooms so others may understand better goes a lot further than trying to convince people that we’re not in the interior decoration business.