Mary Cassatt, "The Child's Bath," Oil on canvas, 1893.

When I first encountered the warm voluptuousness of Mary Cassatt’s paintings, it annoyed me. Then I realized the artist had never married, living much of her life frequenting Paris salons, arguing about the merits of Velasquez, and putting Edgar Degas in his place. (One biography, in an effort to dispel rumors that Cassatt had been Degas’ mistress, cited Degas’ misogyny; Cassatt wouldn’t have stood for that.) The matronly sentimentality of images like The Child’s Bath seemed okay in light of Cassatt’s gutsy, single childlessness. In fact, such images began to feel like clever inside jokes. Their femininity, something Cassatt must have been expected to embody or at least embrace, was actually a convention in which she had only a peripheral stake. She used its tropes and material maybe even spitefully, while experimenting with other things, like becoming the only recognized American Impressionist.

There’s an homage to Cassatt in sculptor Rachel Lachowicz’s current exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. It’s a circular stack of blocks as rosy as any Cassatt-rendered flesh, made of soap and shaped like Allan Kaprow’s Fluids, only less precarious and more solitary. It also smells great. Lachowicz has used bergamot essence, and the strength of the scent makes touching the blocks all but irresistible. They’re begging to be a sensual experience on every level.

Rachel Lachowicz, main gallery, installation view, 2010. Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Photo: Gene Ogami.

Each sculpture in the exhibition uses as its material something conventionally, or cosmetically, feminine. In addition to the rosy-pink soap, there’s pressed eyeshadow in tins, blue and purple cosmetic compound, brutally red lipstick wax, and tissue paper lining metal shoe boxes. But like Cassatt, Lachowicz occupies a limited material vocabulary of the feminine in a way that’s conflicted and aimed at bigger, knottier questions.

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New Kentridge Resources for Educators
With the release of our new film, William Kentridge: Anything is Possible, those of us involved in developing the educational resources presented in tandem with our films suddenly had a new kind of resource with which to work. This hour-long study of Kentridge’s work provided an opportunity to delve deeper into the motivations, intentions, considerations, and machinations of an artist working in many media, with many collaborators, and on a wide range of visual and performance-based projects. We spent some time thinking about the most suggestive and useful ways to inspire teachers to use the film.

In addition to producing the Educators’ Guide and Screening Companion that looks at the 10 individual chapters of the film as unique opportunities for dialogue and exploration, we wanted to utilize the amazing collection of related media being presented on the companion website. We wanted to capitalize on the unique opportunity to connect video, images, and quotes with compelling questions and projects that would help teachers explore some of the themes that are central to Kentridge’s work with students.

Learn more about the new Kentridge resources for educators

This is the second of three posts by Daniel Quiles that are loosely based around contemporary art from/in Latin America. — Ed.

Seth Wulsin, "16 Tons," 2006 (west wall of Caseros Prison two months after installation).

Born in 1981 in Spring Valley, New York, Seth Wulsin first moved to Argentina in 2005. Soon after his arrival, he began work on a series of artistic projects based on Caseros, a prison opened in the Parque Patricios neighborhood during the brutal military dictatorship of the 1970s. Demolition had already begun on the structure, which with its history of abuse of political and criminal prisoners alike had become a symbol of the country’s traumatic past. Wulsin ultimately produced two quite distinct projects about Caseros: 16 Tons (2006), in which he created a series of faces by knocking out windows on the façade (which gradually disappeared as the demolition proceeded); the other is a work-in-progress using video interviews with a group of homeless people who later moved into the remains of the building.

Wulsin’s recent work has included Selva Vertical (2009), a proposal for an unfinished Perón-era building to be overgrown with foliage, and Animas (2010), shown at the Biennial of the Americas in Denver, Colorado, from June to September 2010.

Daniel Quiles: How did you first become interested in the Caseros site as a possible focus of artistic inquiry?

Seth Wulsin: I happened across the Caseros prison building while exploring the Parque Patricios neighborhood with the artist Charlie Higgins. We were interested in working with buildings as raw material for sculptures—not just as inanimate objects or spaces but as living, human ecosystems. Caseros had such an extreme pull on its surroundings that I became totally caught up in its powerful presence, and started focusing more on how to open up dimensions in its ongoing demolition. I was drawn to its scale and its window panels gave me a chance to develop work I’d been doing with reflective pixel portraits, which I integrated into the natural solar and lunar cycles of the building. The more I got to know the site and the stories that surrounded and emanated from it, the portraits seemed like the most transcendent and incisive action I could take on the building.

The history of Caseros was defined by the struggle of the prisoners to gain access to light and to communicate amongst themselves and the outside world, often at the expense of the building.¹

Prisoners communicated with the outside world through holes they made in the walls of the jail.

I made a rule of not imposing anything on the overlapping structural, historical and bureaucratic mazes of the site. I wasn’t interested in a definitive history, but rather a dynamic, shape-shifting one, rooted in the multifaceted experience of the building. The architecture revealed itself with unfolding layers of resonance through the stories and presence of people who’d had direct contact with the prison. These layers informed the work at every step.

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IFPDA Print Fair. Photography by Andrew Sciaulino.

An air of refinement hung fairly heavily throughout the old Armory building this weekend with a weighty reminder of the long history of printmaking at the IFPDA Print Fair. Many of the booths such as David Tunick’s, where Rembrandt etchings, Matisse lithographs, Picasso etchings, Edvard Munch drypoints, as well as nine Whistler prints of Venice hung salon-style, could have been plucked from the Drawings and Prints Room of somewhere like the Metropolitan Museum.

Barbara Krakow Gallery featured polygon etchings by Robert Mangold, with deliberate imperfections in his architectural lines and ruptures of bright green and orange bursting out of some of the shapes. Around the corner, Sol LeWitt etchings with aquatint Stars — Light Center in various gradations of gray were similar in tone to James Turrell’s spatial Series E, from 1st Light pieces on the next wall. Krakow also had a print of Philip Guston’s The Street, which seemed to provide an underfoot perspective of the chaotic street scenes depicted in a number of the Max Beckmann prints on the wall opposite at Alice Adam.

IFPDA Print Fair. Photography by Andrew Sciaulino

In fact, a whole wall was dedicated to Max Beckmann prints at Alice Adam as well as at another booth, Jörg Maass. The former gallery was offering pieces from his earlier period of 1916-22, while Maass had more from between the wars, which are a lot less salacious and no longer depicting a heady glamor. Albrecht Dürer was also as prolific as ever: C.G. Boerner had Dürer’s Melencolia I, Adam & Eve, as well as St. Jerome in his Cell, while R.E. Lewis & Daughter were selling his Joachim and the Angel woodcut from 1554 for $24,000. Five rare Goya etchings were available at Kunsthandlung Helmut H. Rumbler, featuring violent bullfights, the aftermath of warfare as well as his 1797 print Until Death of a decrepit-looking woman adjusting her headdress at her cosmetic table while surrounded by her servants.

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Fred Wilson, "Untitled" 2005 Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

In the New York Times last week, Nicholas Kristof reported that the richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of the income, up from 9 percent in 1976.  One percent gets paid almost one quarter of the payroll. He goes on to say that the United States most likely has a more unequal distribution of wealth at this point than countries long known for it, such as Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

Recently, the film Waiting for Superman attempted to explore inequality in American schools by choosing to focus a great deal on the painful process of school lotteries. Lesley Chilcott, the film’s producer , was quoted in a recent article on NOTwaitingforsuperman.org that, “We chose the lottery as the spine of the film because it was the cruelest metaphor we could find to represent the crisis in public education.” Other metaphors went untouched, such as the inequity in financing public schools as well as who is benefitting in the rush to create more and more charter schools.

Exploring inequality in the classroom can be a slippery slope at best, especially for young teachers, and often provides a load of issues to consider regarding presentation and perspective. Utilizing contemporary art and artists can help provide entry points to ways of understanding and representing inequality. Artists such as Fred Wilson use juxtaposition and context to highlight bias and inequality in our museums and cultural institutions. Others such as Doris Salcedo create sculpture and installations that give form to oppression. Some artists utilize public intervention and video, such as Alfredo Jaar, to emphasize specific events or issues of inequality. In all of these cases, the artists create experiences where the viewer only slowly comes to realize what the work is about- a forced reflection of sorts.

Giving students a chance to see and experience art that explores themes of inequality, marginalization, political corruption and power can lead to not only dynamic and important works of art, but also surprising and insightful discourse in the classroom. Making artists such as Fred Wilson, Doris Salcedo, Alfredo Jaar, Kara Walker and Jenny Holzer part of the curriculum, to name just a few, allow hard conversations to begin.

Over the past few decades, “interdisciplinary” has emerged as a popular designation in academic culture, particularly in the arts and humanities. Both as an undergraduate in studio art and as a graduate student in art history, I have felt the lure of this word, which packages a spirit of emancipation inside of institutionally sanctioned language. At the same time, I have always felt uncomfortable with the term since so many divergent activities seem to take place under its name. In an effort to work through some of these concerns, I spoke with Jesse Aron Green, an artist whose practice we might place under the interdisciplinary banner.

Green was born in 1979 in Boston, MA. He received his MFA from UCLA and his BA from Harvard University. His recent exhibitions include: a solo show at Halle14, Leipzig; a solo project in the Oil Tanks at Tate Modern, London; the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, NY; MOVE, Hayward Gallery, London; CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; and various other gallery and museum exhibitions. His upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at the CCA Ujazdowksi, Warsaw, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown. He was a Henry Luce Scholar for 2008/09, a Trust for Mutual Understanding/Location One Fellow for 2009/10, and is the Arthur Leavitt Fellow at Williams College for 2010/11.

Jesse Aron Green, "Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik," 2010. Artists book. Hand-bound, hard-bound, with 56 french-folded pages. Featuring a reproduction of the complete series of 45 photographs titled "Illustration and Description of the Medico-Gymnastic Exercises," and 122 computer-assisted drawings. Courtesy the artist.

Oliver Wunsch: Can you talk about what it means for you to have an “interdisciplinary” approach to making art (if you accept this characterization)?

Jesse Aron Green: Interdisciplinarity is claimed for many practices and across many fields, which speaks to both the aspirational aspect of working across normative disciplinary boundaries, and the very vagueness of this kind of action or movement. I imagine the term is used liberally in the academy due to the influence of Cultural Studies as it is descends from both post-structuralist theory and post-Marxian critiques of ideology, with their emphasis on understanding social and historical phenomena in relation to both the objects of cultural production and their related subjects (and subjectivities).

However, we’re concerned with the field of art, within which the usage of the term “interdisciplinary” is a bit clearer (i.e. its lineage is clear, if not necessarily its current usage). Modernist practices from the middle of the last century claimed a kind of interdisciplinarity in their production across or between media. One thinks of everything from Black Mountain and the Situationist International to conceptual practices, performance, and so on (including all of preceding practices from earlier in the century to which these later ones claimed lineage, but which may have not made similar claims themselves); that is, all the practices that occupied the space of that which falls between [Michael] Fried’s refined, self-specific arts.

Moving forward, one can point to a range of factors that expanded interdisciplinary practice: technology’s erosion of medium-specificity; the dynamics of cultural stratification; and social movements that critiqued political and cultural institutions (Feminism, Civil Rights, and so on). It’s their legacy, and that of post-structuralism, that leads to a greater critique of forms and frames within the field of art, as well as the eventual theorization of post-modernism and the political imperatives of post-colonialism. It’s at this point, in the 1990s, that interdisciplinary practices are understood as those that borrow processes from other discursive fields: one thinks of both the “semiotic” and the “ethnographic turn,” as they have been called.

What interdisciplinarity means in the field of art at the current moment is unclear to me, except that those who make claims to it seem to do so out of an understanding of its relationship to critique, ideology, and histories of social change, especially as it also inheres a commitment or investment (or what have you) to other disciplinary or intellectual fields within or without the Academy. What the term signifies is even less clear when one tries to account for those who use it more generally: those who point in the direction of historical themes, or those who casually borrow the language of theory from one or another academic field.

None of this, of course, answers your question, which was about my practice.

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When I think of Minneapolis, MN, two things typically come to mind: the first being Janet Jackson’s song “Escapade” off of her 1989 album, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, where she emphatically interjects an interlude by yelling “Minneapolis!” and the second being a bit more obvious — the Walker Art Center. Although this is a bit of an exaggeration, it is meant to show how little I knew of Minneapolis or its art scene before I happened upon a back issue of Art Review & Preview (ARP!) entitled “Selective Recall: Twin Cities Art History.” The issue traced the history of the Twin Cities’ art scene. Founded by Tiff Hockin, Ariel Pate, and Troy Pieper after returning from art school in Kansas City,  ARP! has supplied Minnesota with a valuable quarterly publication. This past Spring, ARP! released its final edition, “HET EINDE / HOW THIS REALITY CAME TO BE.” Ariel Pate discussed past issues, their final issue, and some offshoot projects they have been working on.

Meg Onli: The first issue of ARP! came out in the Fall of 2007. What prompted the project? What was arts writing like at the time?

Ariel Pate: ARP! was founded based on the perceived lack of a critical venue in the Minneapolis/St. Paul (Twin Cities) art community. We had originally wanted to start some kind of artist residency, but after talking to people who lived here, it seemed that an art publication would be more useful. Twin Cities art writing has been kind of an up-and-down thing. In the late 80s/early 90s, we had Artpaper, which was a big deal. Artpaper folded in 1993, conveniently preceding the rise of the Internet, which probably would have delivered the death blow anyway. After that, art writing and criticism lived on in the City Pages and other magazines, until the City Pages was Village-Voice-ized, and its competition folded.

Cover of ARP! last release, "Het Einde." Courtesy of ARP!

By the time we started up, the local arts writing was primarily online at mnartists.org, a joint project of the Walker Art Center and the McKnight Foundation. There also happened to be a community of art critics, the Visual Art Critics Union of Minnesota (VACUM), who were really doing most of the art writing in the available venues. We saw that there wasn’t a reliable place for art writing in print and that when it was in print, it wasn’t very interesting. I don’t think we really knew what we were getting into. After all, we had just graduated from college.

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AA Bronson. Photo by Rebecca Sahn, courtesy of Printed Matter, Inc.

This year’s NY Art Book Fair marks the departure of AA Bronson, one of the fair’s original organizers. Bronson resigned from Printed Matter only a few weeks ago, intending to focus on a retrospective of General Idea, of which he is one of the three founding members, along with studying for his Master’s of Divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary. Despite this seismic shift in the art book world, this year’s fair at MoMA PS1 still succeeded in bringing together not only New York publishers but also a wide variety of both young and established book publishers, distributors, antiquarians, booksellers, and artists from all over the world.

Photo by Rebecca Sahn, courtesy of Printed Matter, Inc

The first eye-catcher on the ground floor was the Purple Portfolio, featuring prints by Richard Prince, Terry Richardson, and Juergen Teller, selling for a whopping $25,000 at John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. Other high-price, rare books were scattered around at stalls like Anartist, who had Keith Haring ephemera as well as small books and exhibitions catalogues from Christian Boltanski, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Richard Serra, Sol Le Witt and Marcel Broodthaers, to name just a few. The latter, as with previous years, continues to prove popular with a number of booksellers, including Banana Books, who also featured his publications. There was a white-glove, ask-before-you-touch affair at the Belgian publisher mfc-michéle didier’s table, with exclusive books by Philippe Parreno and AA Bronson; while Francesco Clemente’s mammoth 50-leave portfolio The Departure of the Argonaut was on sale at Sims Reed for $5,500. Bookseller Marcus Campbell was offering slightly more affordable options by the artist Max Ernst, however. Unbound sheets from the original print run of Une Semaine de Bonte from 1934 were just $20.00 a sheet.

Sales seemed to be going quite well in general — the German publisher Sternberg Press had been finding John Kelsey’s Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art was particularly popular with visitors and sales had also been going well for other German publishers, including the seasonal interview magazine mono.kultur.

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Gabriel Orozco, Details of the working "Table (Desert Samples)", 2010. Courtesy of the artist and PKM Trinity Gallery.

In this week’s roundup: Gabriel Orozco is on view in Seoul, Cindy Sherman imagines the social, several artists are honored for their contributions, and more.

• Gabriel Orozco: Selected Works which is on view at PKM Trinity Gallery (Seoul), showcases 50 works by Gabriel Orozco.  This includes sculptures, paintings, photos, drawings and installations.  The exhibition runs through November 30.

• Janine Antoni and Ann Hamilton were among eighteen artists and architects recently inducted into The National Academy Museum and School for 2010. Academicians are elected by peer artists and architects who are members of the Academy.

• Mel Chin will give a lecture on November 14th in Museum Het Domein Sittard (The Netherlands).  Chin was the winner of the biennial Fritschy Culture award, which is given to artists who give shape to cultural diversity and make world citizenship the subject of their art.  Chin’s Disputed Territories is on view at the museum through December 12.

• Cindy Sherman imagines the social through her photography as part of Embarrassment of Riches: Picturing Global Wealth at the Harrison Photography Gallery 365.  This exhibition explores how photographers picture and examine the new evolving political economy.  The show is on view until January 2, 2011.

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In 1913, Marcel Duchamp created a ruckus with an assembled inverted bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. The provocateur stirred controversy soon after with more found objects, most famously a urinal entitled Fountain (1917). Duchamp’s witty play with gallerists and major art shows did more than question what constitutes art; it shone a light on the fabrication of the art world itself – a commercial construct defined somewhat arbitrarily by elites. It’s a tough pill for any institution to admit to, but today many major museums make deliberate attempts to dismiss distinctions between high and low art, decrying elitism in art. But one such line seems to be drawn in vanishing chalk – endorsing private companies in public institutions. At major Québec museum Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, an exhibition celebrating local fashion designer Denis Gagnon’s tenth anniversary features designs from his latest collections. Almost across the street, at luxury department store Holt Renfrew one can purchase some of said designs where they hang in a much more user-friendly context: on regular hangers and clothing racks, with price tags in the vicinity of “too-damn-expensive-for-me-to-even-THINK-of-trying-these-on!” So there you have it: in one place these “sculptures” float esoterically in a white cube and are sold as art; in another, they’re sold as clothes. Semantics and context are everything in art; they can be called upon to strategically craft meaning in the most inconspicuous of ways. Perhaps it is because of these reasons that the museum decidedly chose to steer clear of the “is fashion art?” debate for this exhibition. Instead, a markedly Montreal show unabashedly does more to celebrate local work than it provokes.

"Denis Shows All" exhibition at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. Photo: Raji Sohal.

As a fashion stylist and an arts journalist, it would be tempting to say that I attended the Denis Shows All exhibition wearing two hats; but I didn’t. For me, both of these seemingly worlds apart spheres inform one another. I like to think that I approach fashion with a critical mind and that I approach art criticism from a productively experiential standpoint as an artist myself who constantly experiments with materials for costume and clothing. When I interviewed the exhibition’s curator Stéphane Aquin, he echoed a similar disdain for the application of airtight categories, citing architecture as an example of (public) art and paintings as design in so far that they also serve a function in covering wall space. Despite our best efforts to champion the theoretical transgression of categories, practically speaking, we often end up enforcing them. Aquin makes the point by having invited acclaimed architect and Governor General medal recipient, Gilles Saucier, to collaborate on the show, allowing Gagnon’s clothing to more justifiably call the gallery walls “home.”

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