Annika Strom's "Ten Embarrassed Men" at Frieze 2010. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

As part of this year’s Frieze Art Fair, Simon Fujiwara, the winner of the 2010 Cartier award, has conjured up a faux-archaeological Roman site, bits of which are sometimes exposed in the main body of the fair. It’s all genial and non-threatening fun-poking (there’s the unearthed house of a female collector, full of coins and an archaic handbag; you get the picture) and makes enough winking references to make the cognoscenti feel good, so it’s not much of a surprise why he won. This, by and large, is the tone of a selling event that has transformed itself into a cultural one. Disingenuous self-deprecation abounds, aimed at both the skeptical outsider and the knowing insider.

Much funnier is Annika Ström’s Ten Embarrassed Men, a group of identically dressed middle-aged actors, who huddle around en masse looking awkward, organized by the artist as a response to the representation of women in art fairs. How it really works is by providing a welcome bum note to the atmosphere of overweening economic confidence (however hyperbolic) that surrounds it. David Shrigley’s stand at Stephen Friedman Gallery is, as you’d expect, properly LOL-funny, which makes his presence at the art fair a bit anachronistic, and his appropriation by the art mainstream an ongoing puzzle. The artist himself was in attendance, painting temporary tattoos on people’s arms. I watched him slowly paint a fly on a man’s forearm. Everyone looked on, looking serious, filming on their phones.

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Choreographer Sarah Michelson and Parker Lutz, image from Movement Research, Critical Correspondence 2006

Marissa Perel: The first artistic influences I had were in New York and were choreographers. I was really inspired by the dance world, but didn’t understand why it was marginalized in relationship to visual art. I guess I wanted to go to school to understand how dance, performance, and visual art are related. This was before I became aware of Tino Sehgal and his success, and people who have been able to make dance work as currency.

David Velasco: He is someone who is interesting in terms of dance and performance because well, I don’t want to say he was able to commodify dance, but certainly applied an economic structure to dance and performance that previously wasn’t there before.

MP: Yeah, that is also how I see his work, which is mostly because I have a reverence for dance that doesn’t have to be validated by an application to visual art [that’s me referencing The Kiss in a tongue-in-cheek way]. What is your relationship to dance?

DV: First off, I don’t have any formal dance training. I also don’t have any art historical or visual art training even though I’ve been at Artforum for 5 years, and I’ve been writing about art. I started writing about art because it seemed to be the best place that I could talk about ideas in relationship to the material world. It wasn’t stuck in academia, and it wasn’t stuck in any one discourse. Art writing, as turgid and complicated as it can get, is still one of the most interesting fields for experimental writing.

MP: It’s funny that you say that because when I told Jerry [Saltz] that I was going to interview you, he said, “I saw the best minds of his generation lost to academia,” and I was like, “what do you mean?” and he said, “talented writers that could have been critics went into academia or they fell to their teachers’ tastes.” Then he went on to say that he thought what you’re doing is so important for art criticism and it’s leading a new generation of critics.

DV: I did come out of academia in a heavy way. I went to Reed College where I studied anthropology, and then to NYU for critical theory, where I studied with great minds like Avital Ronell, who is a huge influence for me even now. But for me, I couldn’t stay there, and I didn’t want to take on academic writing as my only medium.

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Warm up your televisions and set your DVRs: Art21′s latest film, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible, premieres on PBS this week. The national broadcast premiere is scheduled for October 21 at 10:00 p.m., though broadcast times vary by region (for example, the New York broadcast time is Wednesday, October 20, at 10:00 p.m.). Please remember to check your local listings to find out when the program will air on your local PBS station.

Join Art21 on Twitter tonight as we share moments live from the New York premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Previews, Exclusives, and More
Visit the film site to view preview clips from the broadcast film, as well as special Exclusive videos, featuring moments and interviews not included in the broadcast film. Also available are thematic image slideshows, featuring exclusive production stills and images of artwork paired with quotes from the artist.

Screenings Across the Country
Preview screenings of William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible continue this week and throughout October at select venues across the country. Screening hosts represent a broad range of organizations and institutions. Visit the film site to find a preview screening near you.

Educators’ Guide and Screening Companion
A free 26-page educators’ guide and screening companion has been produced to accompany the film. The guide is designed for use in a wide range of cultural and educational institutions, and is available for download from the film site later this week.

Support Art21′s Educational Initiatives
Art21 is pleased to offer educators and their students a number of resources specifically designed to accompany William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible. These materials explore various facets of Kentridge’s work and offer suggestions for facilitating discussions and activities, as well as screening the film with classroom and community audiences. Help Art21 provide free resources for educators by joining Art21′s Back to School campaign.

DVD Pre-order
The William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible DVD will be released through PBS Home Video on October 21. Pre-order the film from ShopPBS and receive 20% off this and other Art21 titles. Visit ShopPBS for more information.

SUBSCRIBE TO EXCLUSIVE: RSS | ITUNES | YOUTUBE | ARTBABBLE

In celebration of Art21′s forthcoming feature film William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible — premiering October 21, 2010 at 10:00 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings) — the Exclusive series is devoting the month of October to telling stories about Kentridge’s numerous artistic collaborators whom we’ve had the distinct privilege of meeting these past few years. This is the third of six episodes.

Episode #124: Weaver Marguerite Stephens discusses translating the artist William Kentridge’s original concepts into intricate, large-scale tapestries. Located in Diepsloot (a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa), the Stephens Tapestry Studio employs a team of local weavers, spinners, and dyers who work on vertical looms using mohair spun in Swaziland.

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

William Kentridge is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion 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: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: William Kentridge. Special Thanks: Marguerite Stephens & Stephens Tapestry Studio. © 2010 Art21, Inc.

Paul Shore and Nicole Root, "New York Brownie Room (After Walter De Maria)," 2010. Brownie. Courtesy of the artists.

Has Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room ever made you crave brownies? Have you ever noticed how much Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall looks like a meandering Payday candy bar? Probably not. But trust me, your take on contemporary sculpture is about to get a whole lot sweeter.

Three years ago, New York-based artist Paul Shore and art historian Nicole Root began collaborating on a series of contemporary candy sculptures that was sparked by a conversation about Richard Serra’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “As I remember it,” said Root, “Paul and I were having a summer afternoon beer and I mentioned that I would like to make a Serra sculpture out of meat. There was something about the texture of his large ellipses that appealed to me. Paul said it would work better with a piece of taffy. Imagining a small-scale Serra you can stick in your mouth was just too funny—the opposite of his serious, large-scale, large-budget works.” Trips to Duane Reade, Economy Candy, and Dylan’s Candy Store quickly ensued and what started as a joke between the artists became a full-blown project of more than 70 miniature parodies.

"Necco Circle (After Richard Long)," 2010. Necco Wafers. Courtesy of the artists.

"L-Wafers (After Robert Morris)," 2010. Sugar Wafers and gum. Courtesy of the artists.

Shore and Root narrowed their focus to important Minimalist and Earthwork artists and sculptures that have been widely reproduced and exhibited. Shore laughs thinking back to how he hardly had room for a quart of milk after the project took off; the candy sculptures were stored in his fridge for “a long time.” Eventually, they crumbled and all that remains today are the exhibition photographs, a selection of which will be shown for the first time in Licked Sucked Stacked Stuck, opening at Brattelboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont next month.

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Sadly, this is Nick’s last post for the foreseeable future.  At least we know he’s not able to contribute for good reasons. Season 6 production has started to seriously heat up, and I know he’s also very actively engaged in pre-production for a brand new, not yet publicly announced Art21 web video series.  He hopes to return to regular posting when work (and life) calms down. — Ed.

Photo by Mark E. Hogancamp.

Yes, unhappily, it’s my last posting.  But happily, I think it’s going to be of interest to a lot of folks — an interview with director Jeff Malmberg, the filmmaker behind Marwencol, the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival Grand Jury award winner for best documentary.  Marwencol is a pretty remarkable blend of profile, first person confession, and art documentary.  Here’s the basic story, in the words of the Marwencol website:

Marwencol is a documentary about the fantasy world of Mark Hogancamp.  After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark builds a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populates the town he dubs “Marwencol” with dolls representing his friends and family and creates life-like photographs detailing the town’s many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helps Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds of the attack. When Mark and his photographs are discovered, a prestigious New York gallery sets up an art show. Suddenly Mark’s homemade therapy is deemed “art”, forcing him to choose between the safety of his fantasy life in Marwencol and the real world that he’s avoided since the attack.

There’s a lot stuff already out on there on the film and director Jeff (collected on the Marwencol site) so I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask some intentionally non-context setting, but hopefully thought-provoking questions, while still hitting all my little Art21 pet obsessions.  But before we start, I should mention a couple of ways you can experience the film and art in person.  The Esopus Gallery in New York will be showing Mark’s original photos of Marwencol thru October 28.  And even better, the film has just started its gradual national release; it’s currently at the IFC Center in New York, and will open in a lot of other big cities in November and December.

Nick Ravich:  Thanks for the time, Jeff. Marwencol is really your first directing effort — but your background is in editing.

Jeff Malmberg:  That’s why I ended up getting the bug and wanting to try “directing” is because I edited a documentary a couple years ago and had so much fun with it, and I thought, wow, there’s just so many directions you can head.  You know, it was almost like you were writing with footage, and trying to create this portrait out of these hundreds of hours of footage that you had.  And so once I finished that up, it was called Red, White, Black, and Blue, and it played on PBS in 2007.  I thought, maybe I should try my hand at directing, not realizing of course that what I was really signing up for was the ultimate editing exercise.  The directing in this case was really just going out and trying to get to know someone and just mowing down as much footage as I could so that I could come back in the edit room and really live with it for a long time and see what came out.  So the directing was really a wonderful experience, but the film was made in the edit room.  And it was such a deep and rich subject that just kept getting deeper the more I’d talk to Mark.  And I knew that if I just shot…as much as I could, I could edit my way out of it.

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We are currently seeking graduate student writers to join our Open Enrollment column beginning in January 2011. See the full announcement here.

The deadline has been extended to October 31.

Liza Minnelli in "Liza with a 'Z,'" 1972.

A hair was stuck in the main camera when Liza Minnelli first filmed Liza with a “Z” (1972), a supposedly live special for NBC. Minnelli and crew refilmed, using paid extras for audience members. Biographer Scott Schechter tells this story in The Liza Minnelli Scrapbook, and critic Bruce Hainley retells it in “Just Say Yes,” a painfully tender essay which suggests Minnelli said yes to the “‘brilliance, bisexuality, and betrayal’ she was born into.” Yet saying yes leads her into an obsession with feeling that she is “live” (or alive), rather than “living proof” of a legacy only part her own, and micro-managing how the shards of her complicated cultural identity reach audiences. Broken by culture, she lives in a constant state of “fixing herself up.”

Minnelli could easily inhabit Lari Pittman’s world. A virtuosic micro-manager, Pittman (Season 4) thrives on brokenness, using shards of culture as currency, piecing together glassy seas of artifice until they become, like Minnelli’s live performances, “shameless, intoxicating” (to borrow Hainley’s words) proof of life.

Lari Pittman, "Orangerie," installation view, 2010. Courtesy Regen Projects.

As an artist, Pittman is brutally generous. Each painting represents so much time, energy, decision-making, and rendering that it feels like both a hand-wrapped gift and a vicious affront to the natural world, an alternate landscape you could fall into if you found the organic too spontaneous. For his current dual exhibitions at Regen Projects in West Hollywood, Pittman has filled two galleries. The first exhibition, titled Orangerie, has orange-yellow painted walls with green crisscrosses and functions as a sort of self-curated retrospective.

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Courtesy Waffle Shop

This past Saturday, I attended the Creative Time Summit at The Cooper Union in NYC, and I’m glad I did. Whatever one may say about Creative Time’s role in the art world, one has to admit that the organization is one of the most visible in terms of doing things to actively promote art that engages with activism, social justice, and alternative forms of democratic politics. This weekend affirms Creative Time’s place among ongoing struggles to support artists working at the fringes of the art world/market, and at the limits of what artists can activate for civic and social well being.

The first panel I attended (all of the panels can be accessed online through Creative Time’s archive of both their 2009 and 2010 summits) focused on “markets.” Speaker Julia Bryan-Wilson focused on histories of artists using air as a material, and addressed concerns about the social impact of pollution. Among the materials Bryan-Wilson presented in her survey included Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fresh Air Cart and a recent reenactment of Matta-Clark’s performance by Katalogue Study Group in Shanghai. Bryan-Wilson made reference to a number of other artists and thinkers during her performance, which was grounded in the scholar’s own experience of air pollution through her childhood in Houston, Texas. Given that air has become a commodity, and corporations now can pay to pollute through Cap and Trade and other neoliberal policies deregulating rights to basic elements, Bryan-Wilson’s performance seemed timely, if not the tip of the iceberg in terms of art’s relationship to conflicts about the expropriation of environments and ecologies. I would add that it was surprising that Bryan-Wilson didn’t mention the San Francisco-based artist, Amy Balkin, whose work more than possibly any other I know addresses problems of elemental expropriation, such as in Balkin’s Public Smog project where the artist seeks to create a “clean air park” through the purchase of carbon emissions credits.

Superflex's Guarana Power logo. Courtesy Nossa! Brazilian Music and Culture

Among the other presenters on the “Markets” panel, the Denmark- based design group SUPERFLEX discussed their project GuaranaPower, in which they work with farmers and workers in Brazil in order to present an alternative economy to produce and distribution health drinks, alcohol, and other products.  Another alternative to the typical marketplace was presented by Anton Vidokle, organizer of the New Museum’s Night School and eflux, whose Time/Bank seeks to put individuals directly in contact with each other so that they may exchange services. Following Vidokle, J. Morgan Puett presented about Mildred’s Lane, a project which she undertakes with Mark Dion, Allison Smith, and other artists living and working on land in rural Pennsylvania. Puett’s aphoristic remarks resounded an ethos expressed by many of the presenters at Creative Time’s Summit on Saturday: that “comportment itself has become a form of art,” and “the collective seeking of new ways of being” is one of the most important things artists can strive to work towards with each other and with the members of their communities. During the Q&A, Puett followed up her statements in a direct confrontation with an audience member who asked whether or not Puett and the other panelists were endeavoring to “end capitalism” through their art practices, a statement to which Puett declared a definitive “no,” adding that she did not think that art could be successful where other forms of culture work so far had failed.

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Ah, love... Avery and Brodeur during a quiet moment. Image courtesy puckcentral.blogspot.com

Picking up on a previous column, and in honor of the recent start to a new hockey season, I’d like to continue writing for a moment about the ways that being a New York Ranger fan is much like teaching with contemporary art.

Just to recap from the last post, being a Ranger fan is a lot like teaching with contemporary art because:

• Anything can happen, and it will.
• Being prepared is half the battle.
• You’re often anxious.
• People make fun of you, but once in a while you get to laugh back.
• Practically every game (class) is exciting, no matter how much the last one sucked.
• You’re always looking to try something a little different, a little better.
• Carefully timed risks make all the difference.

After a brutally embarrassing loss to the Islanders on Monday, I want to take this opportunity to add to the list by saying that the similarities continue:

• Never assume anything. You may be ahead by two, but there’s plenty of time to lose by three.
• Being able to change on the fly and try new strategies is essential to achieving goals.
• Agitation is part of good teaching. One has to actually agitate restless and scattered minds in order to slow down- allowing students to see and focus on big questions.

Each Ranger season, like the beginning of school in the fall, starts with tremendous hope and perhaps even a little promise. The key to being a Ranger fan and teaching with contemporary art lies in always finding new ways to be inspired and consistently looking for ways to improve our practice.