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Episode #118: Dancer/choreographer Dean Moss discusses his collaboration with visual artist Laylah Ali, entitled figures on a field (2005). This behind-the-scenes look features preliminary rehearsals at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, as well as a preview performance at The Kitchen in New York City.

An artist working in both dance and video, Dean Moss’s recent projects use the irrational logic of the body to articulate personal, cultural, and socioeconomic forces that impact a perception of self and environment. Nameless forest, Moss’s newest work (developed in collaboration with artist Sungmyung Chun), premieres at The Kitchen in May 2011 with previews at the Arts Presenters and Producers Conference (APAP) and Yale University.

Artist Laylah Ali creates gouache-on-paper paintings that take her many months to complete. Ali meticulously plots out in advance every aspect of her work, from subject matter to choice of color, achieving a high level of emotional tension in her paintings as a result of juxtaposing brightly colored scenes with dark, often violent subject matter. In style, her paintings resemble comic-book serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions.

Laylah Ali is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Power of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch full episodes online via PBS Video, Hulu, or iTunes (link opens application).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Tom Hurwtiz & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Tom Bergin & Roger Phenix. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Laylah Ali & Dean Moss. Special Thanks: MASS MoCA & The Kitchen. © 2010 Art21, Inc.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Duck/Rabbit drawing. Courtesy Hypios.com.

This past week I received two packages in the mail. The first was from Arnold Kemp, who is an artist, curator, and teacher and currently directs the Visual Studies Program at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. The second was from Sreshta Rit Premnath, an artist, writer, and curator, with whom I have been collaborating to construct an archive of video materials dedicated to the future anterior (the French conditional tense for what “will have been”). In both packages, I saw an affinity among the printed materials, all of which have to do with certain aporias of historical representation, cultural encounter, and aesthetic mediation.

Kemp’s artist’s book, Spirit and Image, which comes from a show at Gallery ESP in San Francisco from 1998, features drawings the artist made after an exhibition of Armand P. Arman’s African Art collection at the Museum for African Art in SoHo in 1997. Throughout the book,  Kemp’s drawings—some of which are quite detailed, some sketchy or seemingly unfinished—are interspersed with various texts. The first of these texts is a series of shout outs by the artist—an endearingly exhaustive and intimate dedication to Kemp’s friends and family. The second text consists of a mock interview with (made-up?) New York-based novelist, Michael Albin, in which Albin and Kemp go back-and-forth about the possible affinities between modernist/minimalist artists and African aesthetics. Here, Kemp frames one of the central problems of his artist’s book and the show of which it was part: the implication of the subject within certain modes of cultural production.

Michael Albin: What about you as a subject? Is your own identity implicated at all?

Arnold J. Kemp: I wonder more about distance. How far away or how close one needs to be to look critically at cultural production.

To this the interviewer adds: “Where would you really like to be in your own work?” Kemp replies, “Maybe outer space.”

What follows after the interview are reproductions of Kemp’s drawings captioned with text, written in both German and English. Though the text seems to be attributed, there is not a proper attribution, and I have not been able to figure out where the text came from using Google searches. Some of the captions are of an autobiographical nature and seem to describe the artist’s cultural background. The captions are also ruminative and border, at times, on nonsense. Context accounts for this nonsense, such as in the caption: “Is this chicken a human, once all of its feathers are plucked?” Directly above this caption is a drawing of a statue from the Arman collection exhibit depicting a chicken. The chicken drawing plus caption is both funny and unnerving. In another humorous, yet comparably edgy, caption one reads:

Or if the philosophical budget can’t afford a train ticket the following truth is found:
For example, often business people, the drivers of expensive Mercedes or BMWs, pick-up hitchhikers when they are bored.

Among the captions, there is a constant—sometimes playful, sometimes ruminative, sometimes absurd—meditation on the difficulties of cultural encounter in regards to the sense of distance Kemp cites through his mock interview with Albin. What does it mean to preserve this distance—to make it palpable or present through an artist’s book or other aesthetic object? Then again, what might it also mean to draw the viewer/reader closer to the cultural production of Africa through a recognition that “Maybe nearness is produced by certain forms of cultural activity?”

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David Ndambuki, "The Maasai," oil on canvas, 2006. Courtesy Real African Art Gallery

It was an odd feeling going on my first-ever safari during my recent trip to Tanzania.  Odd because even though I had never been on one, I already had a fairly well-formed idea — a fantasy really — as to what that experience would be like.  Mine was a vision shaped since I was young by countless popular cultural sources. Everything from Looney Toons cartoons, to movies, to nature shows on cable (as well as early black and white Tarzan shows on Saturday morning TV, I suspect) played a part in this imaginary construct.  Going into my trip, it is safe to say that I had a certain fantasy conception of “African safari,” and I’m happy to report that the actual experience not only matched that vision, but far exceeded it.

It was an equally odd feeling finally going on this trip to Tanzania because of my intention of getting a sense of the local contemporary art scene — odd because my vision of what such contemporary art might look like was decidedly unformed going in.  Mine was a journey that began in the lively town of Arusha, in the western part of Tanzania not far from Mount Kilimanjaro.  One of the first and lasting lessons learned there was that the contemporary scene — and this would be the case elsewhere in Tanzania — can be somewhat difficult to identify, as the line between a glorified curio shop and a dedicated art space can become quite blurred, with works better suited in one too often found in the other.

One of the paintings that proved remarkable to me during my time in Arusha was a decidedly ordinary canvas.  The composition consisted of several long, attenuated figures repeated horizontally across the surface and rendered in rich colors and lively brushwork.  These slender forms, abstracted to little more than a handful of lines and a few splashes of color, were warriors of the Maasai tribe, which is found throughout Kenya and Tanzania.  This canvas would have been entirely unremarkable were it not for the fact that a few hours later I happened into a different galley in another section of Arusha, where my eye was drawn to a canvas containing the same rhythmic repetition of attenuated Maasai figures as the one before, hand-rendered and with nearly identical sinuous lines and color.  At the time I could not know that I would see this composition, with surprisingly little variation, nearly everywhere I went on my travels across Tanzania. I found it in a small art shop in a coastal town a few hours north of Dar es Salaam, on a side street in the sprawling city of Dar itself, and again in Stone Town, a port town on the island of Zanzibar.

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During a recent visit to Exile Gallery, I spoke with guest curator Billy Miller about his concurrent shows Head Shop/Lost Horizon, which were a part of Exile’s annual Summer Camp Series.  We chatted around a courtyard table, as a giant tarp made of discarded umbrellas loomed over us, engulfing the whole hof in cheap, translucent color and swaths of frayed paisley.

As Berlin’s erstwhile lover, the Sun, streamed through the fabric, the space flooded with light, a whimsical vision only slightly unhinged by party leftovers from one of the many events and screenings held in tandem with Head Shop/Lost Horizon.

Justin Yockel, "Untitled," 2010, courtesy of Billy Miller and Exile Gallery

While talking to Miller about consumerism and carelessness, he informed me that all the umbrellas had been gathered after a particularly rainy day in New York City by artist Justin Yockel, serving as spineless evidence of our slapdash culture. Like most of the work in Head Shop/Lost Horizon, Yockel deftly tongues around preachy or flippant tones in favor of more complicated language; a pretty impressive feat considering the topics of discussion include Facism, meth-making and Abu Ghraib.

According to Miller, Lost Horizon and Head Shop represent two different responses to a shrinking natural environment and an increasingly pervasive Beck-ish culture of fear. The difference in tenor between the rooms is immediately apparent. In Head-Shop, Miller sweetly eulogizes the head shops of the 60’s with a hyperactive installation of rambunctious political works, while Lost Horizon offers a quieter “frozen” view of loss.

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In case you’ve recently returned from summer vacation or have simply been away from the Art21 blog in July and August due to the fact that, like me, you promised to open books more often and the laptop a lot less, I put together a collection of posts from the past two months, in addition to the Teaching with Contemporary Art weekly column that may be of special interest to educators (and not just art educators). Read on! If it sounds juicy, click the link to go directly to the post…

In Seeing and Time: Video Art as Experience, Stephanie Vegh explores ways we see and experience time-based works of art. She also introduces us to artists who engage the viewer in very different ways, and suggests a few that many of us may find new and exciting.

Nicole Caruth’s Gastro Vision: Feeding Suburbia shares details about Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates, where the artist transforms front lawns into spaces for natural food production, or “edible landscapes.”

In Nettrice Gaskins’s The Paradoxical Art of “Inception”, the author explores how riddles, mysteries and puzzles inspire unique works of art, and Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” takes center stage.

Museum Nerd’s take on art appreciation is a lot of fun and offers suggestions for approaching work through our head, heart and gut. The Nerd even ends the post with some unique perspectives on artists that have appealed to each of the “metrics” used.

Meg Floryan’s recent interview with Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, is a wonderful conversation about seeing and experiencing art in spaces that aren’t confined to white walls and temperature control.

Three particularly intriguing video exclusives this summer featured Mike Kelley, Mary Heilmann, and Doris Salcedo.

And finally, Ben Street’s latest Letter from London is a beauty (but aren’t they all?) as he rips into public art and simultaneously leaves the door open for what can be, at the very least, entertaining works of art for the Fourth Plinth commissions in Trafalgar Square.

As you can see, I tried to be good and do all my homework before we really got into the swing of the school year. Please check out some (or all) of the above posts and feel free to offer suggestions for using them in and out of the classroom.

Welcome back.

I suspect most people today would agree that making art involves more than technical skill. By the seventeenth century, the intellectual and philosophical side of artistic expression had already been institutionalized in “academies,” which broke from the guild system of instruction. Even the word “academy” asserted that art was a serious mental pursuit that deserved schools like those of any other humanistic discipline.

Unlike other disciplines in the humanities, however, visual art has carried on without doctoral degrees, at least until recently. When George Smith founded the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) in 2007, the program had few peers. While the number of PhD programs in art has grown significantly since then, IDSVA remains unique for its emphasis on theory and philosophy. Notably, the program does not include any studio work. Instead, reading, writing, and on-site discussions in the world of art form the basis of the low-residency school, which convenes for intensive sessions in Europe and the United States. I recently met with Smith at his home in Portland, Maine to talk about IDSVA and the basic question of whether artists need PhDs.

George Smith at his home in Portland, ME. Background photograph by Jocelyn Lee.

Oliver Wunsch: I understand that IDSVA offers no studio instruction, but theory plays a major role in the program. As a way of beginning, could you talk about the reasoning behind this format?

George Smith: If the way an artist sees the world changes, if her range of perception broadens and deepens, then her artistic ability, her ability to represent history, human consciousness, the history of aesthetic discourse, this will change for the better because she will have changed for the better. In other words, the studio practice gets taken to the next level because the artist who goes into the studio has developed intellectually, spiritually, and as a citizen of the world. In my experience as a teacher of artists, the rigorous study of theory and philosophy can make that happen. But IDSVA is not just about making better studio artists; we’re trying to produce artist-philosophers.

OW: Does that experience need to be called a PhD? Why not just invite qualified people who want to do this sort of thinking, reading, and writing, without the doctoral degree?

GS: The PhD requires a measure of rigor that cannot be imposed upon people who are just stopping by for a conversation. For one thing, you have to write a dissertation and that dissertation has to be submitted to professional review. Writing to an audience of that kind is a tremendously important aspect of the experience. But more to the point, we want IDSVA graduates to go into universities and colleges and teach. We want them to lead the discussion that is shaping the future of American intellectual discourse, not just in visual arts, but in the humanities and in other disciplines as well. And to do that, they have to be credentialed.

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