Production still from the film William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible. © Art21, Inc., 2010.
The PBS broadcast premiere of Art21′s latest film, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible, is just over a week away, and we want you to join us in celebrating.
Art21 is giving away FIVE pairs of tickets to the invite-only New York City premiere of the film, taking place on Monday, October 18 at the Museum of Modern Art. For readers not in the New York City area, we are also giving away FIVE copies of the William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible DVD (shipping at the end of October). The deadline for entry has just been extended to Tuesday, October 12, 11:59 p.m. ET, so be sure to throw your name in the hat before the drawing closes.
Visit the film site to enter the drawing and to view related videos, images, and more.
There are also other opportunties to win tickets and DVDs. Additional drawings are being held at Hyperallergic, Artlog, and Thirteen/WNET. Visit their sites for more information.
Best of luck to everyone, and be sure to tune in to the national PBS broadcast premiere on October 21 at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings on pbs.org).
William Kentridge: Composer Philip Miller
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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 second of six episodes.
Episode #123: Composer Philip Miller talks about his long-time collaboration with William Kentridge, scoring and performing original music for the artist’s animated films such as Felix in Exile (1994) and the multi-channel video installation I am not me, the horse is not mine (2009). Miller’s compositions synthesize and draw inspiration from various musical traditions, from the romantic classicism of Antonín Dvořák, to the modern atonality of Dmitri Shostakovich, to the folk instrumentation and harmonies of contemporary South African choral music.
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: Jarred Alterman & Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: William Kentridge. Special Thanks: Philip Miller & The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2010 Art21, Inc.
Lives and Works in Berlin: Berlin’s Fair Weather
The grand entrance to Art Forum Berlin at Messe Berlin. Photo: Ethan Hayes-Chute
To use a very versatile phrase, “It’s that time of year again.” In this case, we mean: it’s art fair-season in Berlin. With the 15th anniversary of the somewhat-confusingly-named Art Forum Berlin (originally named “European Art Forum Berlin”) art fair upon us this week, we are embarking upon yet another generally exhausting “big art weekends.” This one, particularly, is a real soul-suck.
The opening night crowd at Art Forum Berlin, 2010. Photo: Ethan Hayes-Chute
110 galleries from 20 countries will present their works/wares. For the last 5 years, there had been an additional curated (and themed) exhibition running along with the fair, adjacent to the 2 main halls of booths; however this year, that seems to not to be the case, and thankfully so. For the most part, it’s hard to switch gears from the browsing mode in the main halls to real’art-looking — to give the art a fair glance, especially after someone worked so hard on a presentation with a four-day lifespan. Instead of an exhibition, a new way of introducing smaller, younger galleries and artists to Berliners and visitors from afar to the Art Forum Berlin (AFB) world has been devised. It borrows an idea from the small, one-day 7×2 fair (now renamed SUNDAY), in which, at the tail-end of Gallery Weekend Berlin, seven galleries banded together to produce a somewhat off-the-cuff mini-art fair. In turn, they each invited their own counterpart gallery to exhibit and interact with in the same space (at the original 7×2, the space given was one of 7 lobbies of a high-rise on Strausberger Platz.) 7×2/SUNDAY is a fresh take on the collaboration and quid-pro-quo style used by young galleries and artists just to survive, and AFB is right to follow their lead. AFB calls this sector “focus” and sets the galleries up in the center of each hall, giving them a more equal cut of the audience. However, one does wonder, is all this space available because of a lack of participating galleries? Or something else? Esther Schipper, Galerie Neu, and Klosterfelde are sharing one booth, and these aren’t small-potatoes galleries.
Running a Gallery on a Shoestring Budget
Mike Brenner's Hotcakes tattoo
Had I sat down and written a business plan first, I may not have opened my art gallery, Hotcakes. In a post I wrote for Art21 in April, I broke down my monthly expenses to roughly $1600. After a couple years though, I was forced to find creative ways to scale that back to a much more manageable figure. At closer to $1000, even if I had a couple months of slow sales, I could cover my nut (the gallery’s fixed costs) with freelance design work and the meager stipend I was getting paid as Executive Director of the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network. I pushed every boundary I could to make my budget work, but a lot of months, I couldn’t afford much more than the gallery’s expenses, which lead to some tough decisions and bizarre experiences.
I remember being in line at McDonald’s one afternoon when a homeless guy came up and asked if I could spare a dollar. I just shook my head and laid $2 of nickels and dimes on the counter to pay for my Extra Value Menu meal. I ate so many McChickens and double cheeseburgers while I owned the gallery that it got to the point that I would gag if I even smelled a cheeseburger. One summer day though, I was in line in the drive-thru and overheard a guy order a double cheeseburger “plain but with Big Mac sauce.” I was so overjoyed with my discovery that I mentioned it in a lecture to a bunch of art students. Two weeks later, McDonald’s started charging extra for Big Mac sauce.
In Wisconsin, the utility company can’t shut off the power or heat in the winter, and every year I would put off paying that bill as long as I could. One Friday in April, three hours before Milwaukee’s quarterly, city–wide Gallery Night, a WeEnergies employee came and shut off my power. I immediately sped to their offices and paid the bill. The woman behind the bulletproof glass smiled as she told me they wouldn’t send anyone to turn my lights back on until the next day. I sat in my gallery for over an hour imagining how I would explain a gallery opening by candlelight. Luckily, I had a very handy friend and neighbor who was able to yank out the circuit breakers and run live wires from the breakers of my apartment (which was in the same building) to Hotcakes’ electrical panel. The building didn’t burn down and nobody was the wiser.
On View Now | Rock and Roll Fantasy: Yoshitomo Nara at the Asia Society
Yoshitomo Nara, "The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand," 1991. Acrylic on cotton: H. 59 1/16 x W. 55 1/8 in. Image courtesy the Asia Society Museum.
For those who enjoy Yoshitomo Nara’s mischievousness characters and pop-culture inspired iconography, or those who are not yet familiar with them, the current show at the Asia Society in New York City, Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, will no doubt be a revelation. One of the key figures of the Japanese Pop movement of the 1990s, Nara is perhaps best known for his portraits of solitary children who are as menacing as they are cute. Rendered with a child-like simplicity and straightforward use of color that belies their often insolent and defiant posture, Nara’s cast of recalcitrant characters is well represented by a number of important paintings and drawings.
Among them is The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand, a simple, cartoon-like painting of a little girl in a bright red uniform and matching beret looking up unflinchingly at an implied viewer who dwarfs her, her impassive expression and sturdy stance becoming alarmingly aggressive on account of the small knife clenched in her hand. Many other iconic works are on display besides The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand, and seeing them together allows a fuller appreciation of the tension in Nara’s work between his cartoon-like imagery and their careful execution and dark themes.
One of my first revelations actually occurred before I even set foot inside the exhibition. To my mild disappointment, given the musical theme of the exhibition, I realized that the title of the show was not a reference to the song “Nobody’s Fool” by the 1980s band Cinderella (yes, that fantastically big-haired, highly stylized glam band), but rather to a 1973 album by American soul musician Dan Penn. Nara referenced Penn’s album in a 1998 watercolor and as this exhibition reveals, it is but one of many musical allusions in Nara’s art—from Penn and Neil Young to the Ramones and Green Day.
I will admit that I was slightly embarrassed, going into the Nara exhibition, that Cinderella would be my first popular cultural reference point, especially given my assumption that Penn and his 1973 album (neither of which I had ever heard of before) must be some sort of authentic, expressive rock album seeping with an angst and defiance from which Nara drew inspiration. Penn, I speculated, must certainly be heaps more authentic than the commercialized musical chords and mannered stylings of a band like Cinderella, whose aesthetic and music seemed to delight self-consciously in the clichéd visual and sonic codes of rock and roll. But I couldn’t have envisioned then just how prophetic my innocent invocation of that glam band would be by the time I exited the Asia Society show. But more on that in a moment.
Teaching with William Kentridge
William Kentridge’s drawing from Stereoscope 1998–99. Courtesy of MoMA. Copyright 2010- William Kentridge
There are many reasons to teach with the art of William Kentridge, and as we get closer to the premiere of Art21′s new film, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible, airing on PBS October 21st, I thought I might take a moment to highlight why we should consider his diverse work and how it may fit into very different teaching scenarios.
For educators interested in questions about the history of South Africa, apartheid, violence and segregation, Kentridge is a natural choice. Kentridge’s films and drawings deal with his first-hand experience witnessing the dissolution of apartheid. Much like artists such as Kara Walker, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Nancy Spero, his work allows viewers to actually re-see violence and particular human struggles in ways a history book cannot share or even begin to evoke.
But Kentridge’s work is not all about history or his personal experience living in South Africa. His work also involves questions around what it means to actually be an artist. While Tim Hawkinson, Elizabeth Murray, Barry McGee and even Mark Dion discuss this topic in their own Art21 segments, William Kentridge is particularly blunt in his explanation when it comes to how he got where he is today. To make things even more appealing, he often takes us into his studio to see his process and experience how he thinks as an artist.
A third reason to consider Kentridge is certainly the fact that play has such a central role in creating beautiful and sometimes very critical work. While Oliver Herring and Cai Guo-Qiang may take very different approaches to play as a vehicle for making art, again, Kentridge makes the reasons and sequence visible for all of us.
Tune in to experience William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible on October 21st at 10pm (ET) on PBS. And stay tuned for information about downloading the brand new Educator Guide for the film, too!
Techno-Trash: Mika Taanila and Pixelache
Mika Taanila, "Twilight," video installation, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Heino.
One of the best exhibitions I saw in Helsinki this summer was at Galleria Heino, a small space on the hip street Uudenmaankatu. On the recommendation of an artist friend, I went to see Mika Taanila’s show, Installations. Taanila is a moving image artist working with both film and video. For over twenty years, he has created a body of work —short and long, narrative and experimental — that looks at technological evolution and the intersection of art and science in particular. I first discovered Taanila when I saw his documentary about the electronic music pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, The Future Is Not What It Used To Be (2002), in Arctic Hysteria, a recent historical survey of Finnish contemporary art at Taidehalli (Helsinki’s kunsthalle) in 2009. At Galleria Heino, ironically, part of Taanila’s show was out of order; one of the two installations was “broken” the day I went. Ultimately, it didn’t much matter for what I did see allowed me to consider Finnish contemporary cultural practices’ address of technology on a broader scale.
The Zone of Total Eclipse (2006) – Mika Taanila from mediateletipos on Vimeo.
Taanila’s video installation that was functioning, Twilight (2010), consisted of two old-school video projectors mounted on rails on the gallery floor, slowly traveling back and forth across the diameter of the space and repeating the same linear movement in an endless loop. These projectors threw a large doubled image on the wall: a grainy, barely moving portrait of a single laboratory toad looking for worms. Taanila’s clever formal and conceptual doubling of the projectors, as well as the natural and the synthetic — the use of technology to view the “natural” world of the toad in the lab and, conversely, viewing the natural world in a way making one hyper-aware of the technology involved —was, if you were patient enough to pick up on the snail-paced moving projectors, rather sublime. Taanila, in the show’s press release, likens both the toads and the conveyer belt rails to the cycle of light — “the waiting, the reward, the light, the darkness.” Recalling the materialist and time-based concerns of structuralist filmmaking as well as more recent forays into artists’ cinema involving projectors (think Tacita Dean and Rodney Graham), the installation allows the viewer a phenomenological experience of the work itself.
Continuing Taanila’s interest in merging humans and machines, the exhibition points to the ceaseless presence of technology, as both aid and passive witness, in our everyday lives. My experience of Taanila’s exhibition reinforced stereotypes of Finland’s technological prowess (Nokia, anyone?), but in a good way. These could be, like Taanila’s installation, purposely archaic and paying homage to a simpler techno-era (think the synthesizer-jams of Pan Sonic and Vladislav Delay). Or they can be more generative, I thought — which brings me to Pixelache, a real-life activist translation of Taanila’s phenomeno-formalist investigations.
Open Enrollment: Stories About Stories About Pictures
I tried to write this blog post in the form of a story. The approach would have fit the topic: an upcoming conference at the Clark Art Institute on the relationship between fiction and art history. Somehow I couldn’t manage. Or maybe I wasn’t comfortable. I always feel uneasy about writing stories. They lack precision, thoroughness, and verifiability. Or am I reassuring myself here? Are these the self-justifying words of an art history student who doubts the rigorousness of his own methods? Am I nervously denying my propensity for narrative because it sounds unseemly? If we allow stories into the history of art, then what would that say about the people who want to make this “storytelling” their profession?
Fictions of Art History deals with these sorts of questions. At its most fundamental level, the conference asks what it is that art historians actually do. In order to examine fiction in relation to art history, we need to consider the origins of art history itself. Many of the early models of the discipline take narrative form. For instance, when Giorgio Vasari wrote The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (1550), he created a foundation for the history of art as biographical semi-fiction.
We now know enough to question the content of Vasari’s accounts, yet they continue to maintain a powerful grip on us. When Vasari tells us that Giotto fooled Cimabue by painting a perfectly realistic fly on one of the elder master’s works, I want to believe the legend. Or at least I want to find an excuse to retell it. Of course we can invoke such stories as meaningful evidence of the mythology surrounding an artist, providing the disclaimer that they offer little information about the reality of history. Yes, I can say to myself, I am not perpetuating the myth but interrogating it through my carefully honed skills of analytic fact checking.
“Free” and Online Experience
Lisa Oppenheim, "The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else," 2006. 35mm slide projection. Courtesy the artist.
Free, an exhibition that opens October 20 at the New Museum, will explore the web’s impact on how we digest information and experience public space through the work of twenty-three artists working in a wide range of mediums. I chatted with curator Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome and New Museum Adjunct Curator, about how these artists are engaging with the online experience.
Rachel Craft: The web has broadened our notion of public space, and forever altered how we share and receive information. We’ve come to expect a certain level of openness and immediacy from these interactions. What kind of impact has this had on how we experience art?
Lauren Cornell: I can’t generalize the experience of art, but I can say the Internet has created new kinds of art experiences. Artists have created exhibition platforms that expand exhibition spaces past galleries and museums, and carried over web content and logic into a broad range of disciplines.
RC: I’m curious to learn more about how the expectation of openness in our online experiences impacts how artists are engaging with viewers on the web. How is this reflected in the work of artists in Free?
LC: There is one work in the show that directly speaks to online experience. It’s a piece by the artist Joel Holmberg who derives inspiration, in his own words, from the “contemporary Internet user experience.” It’s a project called Legendary Account (2007-2010) and it involves the artist asking profound, existential questions in the user-generated forum Yahoo Answers, which is commonly used for questions like “where is the nearest pet store?” Holmberg’s questions, which include “How does it feel to be in love?” or “How do I best convince someone I am an artist,” or “How do I occupy space?”—subvert the simple Q&A service, requiring users to select categories like “Pets” or “Home Maintenance” before posting. His questions are too big; they bust in and kind of break things down, compelling commenters to interpret and grapple with philosophical questions. The work exists both online, in a series of answers on Holmberg’s Yahoo Answers account, and will exist in the gallery as installation, with documentation of the questions and answers as long scrolls on the wall.
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Navel-Gazing: Jenni Rope & the Napa Enterprise
Napa's wonderful map of Helsinki. Courtesy Jenni Rope/Napa.
“I enjoy working with drawing, painting and collage. My studio is full of little pieces of drawings, colour papers and different colour tapes. I find a piece of paper on my studio floor that has a shape of a tree. I will get to know the shape, I ask what other shapes it likes. One piece will lead me to another. My latest paintings show a world in a new order. You can find the tree there, the forgotten city, and the mountains that look soft like pillows.”
— Jenni Rope
While in much of the world, summer art-viewing options are comprised mainly of biennials and the ubiquitous group show, in Helsinki — and throughout the Nordic countries, I would venture — visible art is in short supply in June through August. Around the start of Juhannus, galleries close for months and museums have limited hours. How this is economically viable is beyond me. And forget trying to see anything in August, when the entire country takes off on extended holiday.
"Science Poems" book launch (note summer holiday announcement). Courtesy Jenni Rope/Napa.
Eerikinkatu is a short street full of enticing boutiques, Asian restaurants, and Corona, the Kaurismaki brothers’ (Aki and Mika) infamous bar in central Helsinki. A short block down lies a small, intriguing gallery and shop named Napa. Run by the Finnish artist Jenni Rope, the sunny space is neatly organized, its spare shelves lined with artists’ books, zines, multiples, and even jewelry. All of this forms the backdrop to the rotating contemporary art exhibitions on view. This summer, I visited Napa the day after it shut down for Juhannus so it was between shows at the time (Jenni kindly opened it up for me). When it is up and running, Napa has recently featured a pop-up vintage café; a release party for Science Poems, a book of writing exploring the intersection of science and art; an annual flip book competition; and, as of last week, an exhibition by the international graffiti collective, WMD.
