Matt Connors, installation view of "You Don't Know." Courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery.

Striped bathroom wallpaper, Cy Twombly, Imi Knoebel, and scribbles resembling Pop-like lineaments or cave markings are all evoked by Matt Connors work in his current exhibition at Canada Gallery. Red and green pillars of solid color, made from digital C-prints, stand like abstract Photoshop totems to Color Field painting. Neon splashes cover one canvas while another contains three beige, geometric rectangles. Colors, although never clashing on a single canvas, vary dramatically from brash to soft pastels throughout, as do the abstract influences that Connors depicts. One canvas resembles the frame of a painting, and the next echoes a chaotic, colorful Matisse collage. Tropical contains juxtapositions within the work itself: a brightly colored image has been overpainted by a layer of white that almost covers the surface but the edges have been left exposed so the vibrancy peeks out from behind. Another work, Tunnel, conjures a three-dimensional image through the title but consists of two colorful rectangles (one within the other) framing a brown Kenneth Noland-like bullseye that instead appears flat against the canvas. Connors refuses to stick with just one abstract model and repeatedly plays with overlooked gestures such as the doodle-like markings. It is as though he has selected sections of various Modernist works, examined them closely and then made them his own.

Matt Connors, installation view of "You Don't Know." Courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery.

As with Connors’ earlier work, frames are a crucial element — not only do pieces resemble the frame of a painting but some of the canvases actually have a frame or give the effect of having one with a white or unpainted border. The word ‘frame’ is included in the titles of three of the paintings and framing the display of the works is also something he continues to question: paintings are not necessarily hung on the walls, some lean against the wall on the floor.

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First Haircut #4, 2009

How is art influenced? What role does art education play in how artists form works of art later in their career?

Recently, when I posed these questions to colleagues (both high school and college art educators), I was surprised at the responses. Some wholeheartedly believed that education has everything to do with what an artist makes later in life. Others believed that an art education is simply a starting point and doesn’t influence an artist much beyond opening them up to strategies, ways of working, and introducing key artists that may provide inspiration.

Personally, I fall somewhere in between.

When I recall my own art education and how it has influenced the work I make today, I primarily think about artists I was introduced to by my teachers, especially in high school. Works by Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer and Käthe Kollwitz had, and still have, a profound impact on the way I approach my own subject matter. Human gesture became the foundation for much of the work I have done over the past two decades, including paintings from the “First Haircut” series (pictured above). I was literally introduced to the work of Francis Bacon after beginning a portrait series in my senior year of high school. My teacher, George Mesologites, one day remarked after a few paintings were finished that I was “using Bacon’s influence to my advantage”. Problem was, I didn’t know Francis Bacon from a hole in the wall, so I researched his work and found some of the similarities quite bizarre. But it kept me coming back to his work and led to other artists that interested me just as much as Bacon.

Years later I studied both graphic design and fine art, and was introduced to artists that enabled me to find other sources of inspiration. Artists such as Joseph Cornell, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, and Hannah Hoch made me realize how much I enjoy working with mixed-media and juxtaposition in order to convey an idea or share a memory. Even today, I often do some visual “wandering” in the studio before settling down to work- looking through tons of art books and picking up inspiration from artists I know well, along with new ones I “discover”.

Art education can influence the work an artist makes later in life only if the educational experience- those few years in school or even that single class- is transformative in some way. If it propels us, to quote Maxine Greene, to “keep arousing ourselves to begin again”, then art education has done a beautiful thing in influencing the life and work of an artist. Maybe that’s where art education can have the biggest influence? It can teach us to look beyond ourselves in order to make meaning.

Jeffrey Augustine Songco, "Headline 3 (It's His Party)," 2009. Courtesy the artist.

You are an artist living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It’s been a few years since you received your Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art degree from Carnegie Mellon University. You work as a freelance graphic and web designer and actor headshot photographer. You enjoy creating art and enjoy showing your artwork to others, so you find various opportunities to share your art with others. You participate in the Bushwick Open Studios. You apply to as many open calls for artwork as you can find on the Internet, occasionally being seduced into a pay-to-play call or donation auction event. You also create an artist’s website, but the web traffic is more like a parking lot, so you start blogging, tweeting, and uploading content to various online art communities to engage in some kind of conversation with other artists but the simplistic comments of “nice work” and “awesome stuff, man” make you sorta depressed. You meet with a Chelsea gallerist but she’s disinterested in your CV until the letters M-F-A are printed onto the paper since “that painting over there is a couple thousand more than that painting here because that artist over there went to Columbia.” So you apply to Columbia thinking you’re a shoe-in since your mom and sister got their graduate degrees there, but you’re rejected.

If you decide to give up, update your website. A security breach in your web hosting provider’s internal system devastates .0006% of online content originating in the United States and any computers accessing the affected information. Your website was erased and the virus attaches to your computer. All your artwork you’ve ever documented and digitally archived is now lost forever. THE END

If you decide to reapply to graduate school, continue reading.

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It’s not quite accurate to say that for the past few years I’ve been stalking Kendra E. Roth at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but I have been paying a lot of attention to her work.

Kendra E. Roth, Metropolitan Museum of Art Conservator

While I’d be careful to make too close of a comparison between the Met and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, it is safe to say that both started to spend a lot more resources on contemporary art around 2005. To this end, I was thrilled to have a chance to talk to Kendra about her work there and the recent growth in the Met’s contemporary program.

Kendra is Conservator at the Sherman Fairchild Center of the Met, where she has worked since 1997. She is responsible for the conservation of decorative arts and sculpture of the Nineteenth Century, Modern and Contemporary collection. After completing internships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Conservation Analytical Laboratories (Smithsonian Institution), she received her M.S. in art conservation from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1996, and a postgraduate Certificate in Advanced Training from the Straus Center for Conservation at Harvard University in 1997. She has worked on archaeological excavations at Kaman Kalehoyuk and Kerkenes Dag in Turkey and Dashur, Egypt.

Richard McCoy: In the U.S., there are no programs dedicated to the training of conservators of contemporary art so many of us have diverse backgrounds. I know that you worked on a variety of projects before becoming the Conservator of Objects for the Nineteenth Century, Modern and Contemporary Collection.  Will you start by talking about how you arrived at your current position?

Kendra Roth: I started at the Met when the Greek and Roman galleries were being renovated. At that time, I wanted to focus on archeological conservation and had worked on archaeological digs and encyclopedic museums that had a wide range of collections; so my background was in conserving artworks from all sorts of cultures, made from a variety of materials.

In 2007, after the Greek and Roman galleries opened, the conservator who was covering the contemporary projects and our director announced their retirements.  So there was an opening in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department and at the same time, a shift in the department was precipitated by Gary Tinterow becoming the Engelhard Curator in Charge of the new Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art in the Summer of 2004. I was excited to take on this new position, but a little frightened because it was unnavigated territory, so to speak.

By the time I started in 2007, it was already a dynamic time in the department as both the curator and the new director, Thomas Campbell, wanted to shake things up and bring in more contemporary art—not just more of the modern classics, if you will.

So, that’s the way I ended up taking the position: I was in the right place at the right time.  And I’ve not regretted it ever since.

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Vija Celmins, "Burning Man," 1966. Courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s roundup, Mark Bradford repurposes South L.A. urban detritus, Allora & Calzadilla perform at MoMA, Raymond Pettibon goes hard in the paint, artists have a couple of firsts, and much more.

• Mark Bradford: Alphabet features new work relating to an ongoing poster project in which Mark Bradford repurposes messages from advertisements his finds in South L.A. as social commentary.  This exhibition is currently on view at The Studio Museum in Harlem until March 13, 2011.

• William Wegman and Fay: Polaroids 1987 – 1995 is now on view at the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery.  This show features the photography of William Wegman and includes an e-catalog for online viewing.  This exhibition closes on December 24.

• An exhibition preview of the work of Vija Celmins will be on display as part of the Menil Collection on November 18.  Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-66 explores a specific time frame and subject matter of the artist’s work and will uncover groundwork that helped build her career.  This exhibition is on view from November 19, 2010 – February 20, 2011.

• Miami Art Museum presents Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place, the artist’s first museum show in over a decade and the first exhibition in South Florida. The exhibition features the work of Susan Rothenberg, including work ranging from her early horse paintings of the mid-1970s to more recent pieces.  This show is on view until March 6, 2011.

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Susan Philipsz. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

The Otolith Group ought to win this year’s Turner Prize, if their installation at Tate Britain is anything to go by, which it isn’t. Tate Britain’s press department must really enjoy having to explain annually that the prize is not awarded on the installation at the Tate (it’s for any show they’ve done over that year), but it’s unavoidable that the public – or, at least, those members of the public not used to the art fair/biennial Wurlitzer (i.e, the sort of people who use the word ‘public’ as though it doesn’t apply to them) – won’t follow that the thing you’re looking at isn’t the thing that wins. That’s good news for Angela de la Cruz, though, whose room was guest curated by Stevie Wonder. Works that looked ballsy, rambunctious, and endearing at her Camden Arts Centre show this year (reviewed here), hung haphazardly, look like the underdone Steven Parrino bootlegs they’re always being accused of being. Decisive or not, the duff hang does a good painter a disservice, and if she wins it’ll look like willful pretension by the judges, because it’ll look like that particular installation won it for her, which it won’t have done. But the Tate press department won’t be in a position to explain by that point, having all emigrated to Latvia and had their names changed.

The Otolith Group are definitely not at all cool

Having not seen anything by the Otolith Group before, I can only go on their room in the Turner show, so this may be fairly unrepresentative of what they do. If I say that it features thirteen TVs showing all thirteen episodes of a late-eighties French documentary series on the legacy of Greek philosophy and that it’s the most entertaining installation in the entire show, that could well be an indictment of the remainder of the show (which is, on the whole, pretty dour), but it’s the only room that seemed to contain pretty consistent public lingering. What’s most impressive about the Otolith Group’s darkened installation – which also contains the Group’s film of Satyajit Ray’s unproduced screenplay The Alien, as well as small pools of light illuminating intimidating-looking theoretical texts – is that its unabashed nerdiness doesn’t compromise its compelling beauty and sense of intellectual wonder. Throw a copy of Relational Aesthetics in the air and you’re bound to hit a pseudonymous conceptual art collective making work about unrealized artistic projects (right?). The Otolith Group do that, but they haven’t forgotten that it has to look good, too, and it does.

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Gedi Sibony, "The Cutters, From The Center, Her Trumpeted Spoke Lastly," 2007 /2010. Canvas, paint, wall, hollow-core door, matted drawing reversed in frame, 137 x 164 x 13 inches / 348 x 416.6 x 33 cm. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. Photo Credit: John Berens

The invitation for Gedi Sibony’s solo show at Greene Naftali consists of a large grid of uneven lines with the exhibition details run along the edges. The work in the show itself proves to be equally asymmetrical and minimal with unpolished materials creating incomplete scenes around the gallery space. A large unfinished wall partition, The Cutters, greets visitors in the main space. Parts of the wall are missing and the inner framework is exposed on the sides. The white paint job is also only half done and two pieces of canvas hang around a doorway that leads to an industrial-looking door firmly attached to the back wall. An open, jerry-built wall leading to a firmly closed one.

Gedi Sibony, "The Brighter Grows the Lantern," 2010. Vinyl, nails, and light, dimensions variable. Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. Photo Credit: John Berens.

In the following room, The Brighter Grows the Lantern consists of a large sheet of vinyl that blocks a direct view of the illuminated wall as you enter (echoing Olafur Eliasson’s recent installation at Tanya Bonakdar). The vinyl also reflects the warm shower of light back into the space and the atmospheric radiance is almost perfect until you turn to leave and find the wall by the door has been stripped away, overshadowing the corner with a darker tenor. Next door, Who Attracts All That Is Named seems like the makings of a shambolic living room stage set formed of objects plucked from the street, while the raised platform sculpture, Sets Into Motion, in the back space is equally ramshackle and resembles a flimsy, Richard-Tuttle-like loft bed, with the title also adding a domino-fall precariousness to it.

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Episode #128: Interviewed in his Los Angeles studio, Paul McCarthy discusses the genesis of his Black and White Tapes (1970–75), a suite of 13 videos begun while he was a student at the University of Southern California (USC). Also featuring excerpts from the video Ma Bell (1971) and works in the exhibition Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement—Three Installations, Two Films (2008) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Paul McCarthy’s video-taped performances and provocative multimedia installations lampoon polite society, ridicule authority, and bombard the viewer with a sensory overload of often sexually-tinged, violent imagery. With irreverent wit, McCarthy often takes aim at cherished American myths and icons—Walt Disney, the Western, and even the Modern Artist—adding a touch of malice to subjects that have been traditionally revered for their innocence or purity. Whether conflating real-world political figures with fantastical characters such as Santa Claus, or treating erotic and abject content with frivolity and charm, McCarthy’s work confuses codes, mixes high and low culture, and provokes an analysis of fundamental beliefs.

Paul McCarthy is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Transformation of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch full episodes online for free via PBS Video or Hulu, as a paid download via iTunes (link opens application), or as part of a Netflix streaming subscription.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom & Richard Numeroff. Sound: Doug Dunderdale & Merce Williams. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Paul McCarthy. Special Thanks: Whitney Museum of American Art.

On Johannesburg | “William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible” (2010) Preview | Art21 from Art21 on Vimeo.

It is nearly impossible to talk about William Kentridge’s artistic practice without mentioning – if not devoting entire exhibitions, articles, books, or blogs to – the subject of home. In fact, one rarely sees the artist’s name without the qualifier “South African,” and he himself has said that his work is rooted in his hometown of Johannesburg, where he was born and continues to live and work. It is not surprising, then, that amidst the many influences drawn out in Art21’s William Kentridge: Anything is Possible, dwells a pervading sense of hearth and home.

While home for Kentridge is Johannesburg, the traditional home of artwork — in Kentridge’s images specifically — is the studio, which is explicitly evident in his work. Kentridge employs such diverse media and techniques as drawing, tapestry, torn paper, sculpture, film, and music. “Understanding the world as process, rather than as fact,” his work is a palimpsest of form that almost always bears traces of its making. Kentridge’s artistic practice mines the turbulent history of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa, resulting in a layered picture of both historical events and personal experiences and memories. As Leah Ollman observed, in the aftermath of apartheid that Kentridge experienced, “South Africa was drawing itself, drafting, erasing and reformulating its structures of power, its social relations, and its systems of rights.” Similarly, Kentridge’s charcoal drawings, which most often form the basis of his work, are continually rendered, erased, and redrawn. Inextricably tied to the notion of home is that of memory, and the resultant smudges, shadows, and ghostly lines of the permutations that Kentridge’s drawings undergo exemplify the tenuous and fluid nature of memory itself.

An early point of origin for much of Kentridge’s subsequent work in stop-motion films is 9 Drawings for Projection, a series of nine films that began in 1989 with Johannesburg, 2^nd Greatest City after Paris, which was made through this process of drawing and erasure. In Anything is Possible, Kentridge describes Johannesburg as “a city of dichotomy between leafy suburbs which are man made to a bleak landscape around it, a complete fiction.” He goes on to say that, “the history of the city is of course the history of two cities – the white city and the black people living either invisibly in the city or in the areas around the city.” Kentridge’s work explores this dichotomy, dealing with both home and homelessness, the familiar and the foreign, black and white, reality and illusion, and the opposition between still versus moving image.

Berni Searle, "Untitled (red)," from "Colour Me" series, 1998.

Home, family, and an interrogation of identity also inhabits the work of Cape Town-based artist Berni Searle, for whom the theme of origin provides a context for understanding her work. More specifically, being of both African and German-English descent, Searle’s artistic practice often explores the split origins of her mixed racial heritage.

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One of the experiences that I miss the most about working in a museum is the luxury of having immediate access to art. When I was an employee at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, long and stressful days demanded breaks, and I often strolled through the galleries to take my mind off of work. There is one particular Stuart Davis painting, with a strategically-placed bench opposite from it, that always seemed to do the trick—just the distraction I needed before jumping right back into a project. The ritual of staring at this painting was essential for getting through the toughest days.

RxArt provides a similar comfort to medical patients in hospitals across the country. The organization—celebrating its 10th year—inspires hope in hospital guests by way of placing contemporary art in the halls and rooms of healthcare facilities. I spoke with RxArt founder and president Diane Brown to learn more about how these installations come about, and how patients, family, and medical staff alike have responded to the works.

Diane Brown, President and Founder, RxArt

Jonathan Munar: From what I’ve read, the origins of RxArt trace back to you, a CT scanner, and visions of Matthew Ritchie-esque figures covering the walls. Can you tell us more about how you came up with the idea for RxArt?

Diane Brown: I was working as the curator of a corporate collection and had a medical problem necessitating a CT-Scan. I found the experience frightening—frightening mainly because I was afraid the doctors would find what they were looking for—but additionally, the staff was humorless and cold (not that I expected a vaudeville team) and the room was totally stark. There was nothing comforting in any way, and coupled with a high level of anxiety, it was a miserable experience. I did not actively try to picture an artwork, but my subconscious took over as a defensive mechanism and I imagined a work by Matthew Ritchie. It was sufficiently complex that it kept me busy during the scan.

JM: Flash forward 10 years later, and a CT scanner comes back into play through an RxArt installation at the Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois by Jeff Koons. Was that deliberate? How did the project come about?

DB: I was invited to Chicago by a pediatric radiologist working at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital. We toured the hospital, met with members of the hospital administration and discussed a collaboration between RxArt and Hope. Since the contact had been initiated by a radiologist and because it had always been my hope to have an artist work directly on a CT-Scan machine—we decided to make that the site of our first installation together. We made a wish list of artists for the project and Jeff Koons was our first choice. We were very fortunate in that Jeff understood the project and agreed enthusiastically.

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