Looking at Los Angeles: Senators with No Talent
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano at Milan's La Scala Opera House on December 7, 2010.
I woke up Wednesday morning to news of fracas at the opera. The La Scala opera house in Milan had just hosted its annual gala, the sort of event heads of state and millionaires attend (box seats went for 2,000 euros each). The gala happens every year, and every year, protesters line up outside to dispute one thing or another; it’s too good to pass up when the president and the country’s top execs and stars are all sharing a night out. This year, budget cuts fueled much of the dissent. And this year, there were “clashes” between students and geared-up police officers, tear gas, firecrackers, smoke bombs, arrests, and hospital trips.
As the gassing and clashing occurred outside, Daniel Barenboim, the same Jewish virtuoso known for bringing Wagner to Israel and receiving honorary Palestinian citizenship, was inside, preparing to conduct The Valkyrie. But before lifting the baton, he reportedly turned to the audience and looked directly into President Giorgio Napolitano’s box. “We are deeply worried for the future of culture in the country and in Europe,” he said as applause erupted. Of course, Napolitano clapped, too. In the single photograph I have seen from that evening, he looks like he’s even smiling, which isn’t something he’s known for. And he should have been; even if he’s not about to reevaluate budget cuts, enjoying art was his job Tuesday night.
Ohio Senator John Boehner crying while speaking in the House, 2007. Via ThinkProgress.
Politicians and art have been on my mind lately. I assume I’m not alone, following the events of last week, involving two Republican soon-to-be House leaders who went up in arms about the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, leading to the removal of an exquisite and important video by activist-artist David Wojnarowicz. (Guest contributor Dorota Biczel wrote this spot-on response to the debacle).
“Elephant,” or Why I Love Performance Art
Recent guest blogger Marissa Perel wrote a post following up her residency on this site. — Ed.
Deke Weaver as Hero in "Elephant." Photo by Valerie Oliveiro.
2010 wouldn’t be complete without the Art21 world knowing about this mind-blowing show in a stock pavilion at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign from September 23-27. I don’t know where to begin here — whether it was Deke Weaver’s humor, epic video productions, or thoughtfully crafted dance and music by his collaborators, Jennifer Allen and Chris Peck. Of course, I loved all of those aspects of Elephant, which is why I love performance art. It might be one of the rare forms where too many cooks can actually make a genius broth that appeals to more than one palate.
Elephant is the second in Deke Weaver’s Unreliable Bestiary, a project that utilizes writing, video, and performance to explore the lineage of animals and chart our relationships with them in feats of compelling and intimate grandeur. The show, which was funded by Creative Capital and the Center for Advanced Study has been picked up by the Sundance Film Festival to be performed there this January.
The show opens with four dancers led by Allen, dressed in gray jeans and playing on the iron rails that line the pavilion. The clothing doesn’t give anything away, but as they continue tilting their heads and necks, it becomes evident that they are in fact embodying baby elephants. The pavilion darkens to reveal a video and what looks like a talk show. Weaver comes out in an elephant mask and gray suit to tell the story of his life as an elephant to a TV personality.
Need-to-Know (Basics)
James Turrell, "Afrum-Proto" 1996 Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
On a recent visit to one of Lois Hetland’s classes at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Lois and I were engaged in a discussion about what teachers of art educators need to know in order to do our work effectively. Specifically, where does contemporary art fit in and how do we make a commitment to teach about (and with) contemporary art? What kind of commitment are we willing to make? What do professors on the college-level need to know about contemporary art in order to teach new art educators?
Steve Locke, an artist, professor at Mass Art and colleague of Lois’ made the point that many people involved in art education programs may consistently go to conferences like those hosted by the National Art Education Association, but how often do the same people attend contemporary art fairs? He argued that the knowledge base and experience with contemporary art just isn’t there. Now maybe I’m being naive, but you would think there would be a huge commitment on the part of university art education programs, and even on the part of art education organizations, to make direct experience with contemporary art a main priority.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
In classrooms from Seattle to the South Bronx teachers continue to rely on “Andy Warhol projects” or mimicry-driven assignments that have students copy the styles of “modern” artists (aka dead for a while but a little less dead than Donatello and da Vinci) in the name of teaching about contemporary art. But what many call “modern” art isn’t really contemporary art: Cubism isn’t contemporary art; Dadaism isn’t contemporary art; Expressionism isn’t contemporary art; Impressionism and Post-Impressionism aren’t contemporary art. All of these isms influence contemporary art in one way or another, but they aren’t stand-ins. The Mark Bradfords and Mark Dions of the world aren’t found here. The Cao Feis and Ann Hamiltons of the world aren’t found in these isms.
Support Art21: Donate to the 2011 Annual Fund
Dear Friends,
I know you receive many requests for support at this time of year. Here is the reason you should respond generously to this one – stated quite elegantly in a recent email from New York-based South African teacher, poet, and novelist Yvette Christensë:
…. the Art21 broadcasts and podcasts enable my classrooms. They help me teach students about different ways of seeing, and they help underscore for students the fact that art is inseparable from our lives, from our daily, our political, our psychic lives. Which is to say that art is inseparable from our membership in what we hope is a just society.
I founded Art21 in order to provide a forum for artists’ voices to be heard by the broadest possible audience via television, the Internet, and an assortment of publications. Since its premiere on PBS in 2001, our ongoing series Art in the Twenty-First Century has showcased 86 artists at work and in their own words, presenting the artists themselves as role models for creative thinking. In a brief ten years, Art21’s accomplishments, among others, include:
- The Peabody Award for Art in the Twenty-First Century, “a unique forum for the display, analysis and appreciation of myriad forms of contemporary visual art”
- Education and public programs that annually reach over 1.8 million people in more than 200 countries
- A growing national educator network – graduates of Art21’s Teachers’ Institute
- The Art21 Blog – to date, nearly 2,000 posts focused on contemporary art and its social impact; over 36,000 readers per month hailing from 206 countries; in 2010, a total of over half a million visitors
- A collaboration with PBS to produce an Art21-hosted live-streamed conversation about performance in contemporary art, with local, national, and international viewer participation
- William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible, an in-depth feature film on the creative process, political and artistic philosophies, and personal background of one of the most dynamic artists working today, premiered on PBS October 21, 2010
A donation to the Annual Fund – in any amount – contributes directly to Art21’s programs, ensuring that resources on contemporary art are available free around the globe.
Your gift today helps us share countless examples of why art is inseparable from the daily act of living. Thank you for your support.
With heartfelt thanks,
Susan Sollins
Executive Director
All gifts are 100% tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. Learn more about making a donation to Art21, or select an amount below to make a secure donation using Paypal.
Connecting – Part 2: Useful Junk
Pamela Johnson, "House II," 2006. Oil on canvas, 44 x 36 in. Courtesy the artist.
Sometime in September of 2006, I came across the paintings of Pamela Michelle Johnson, vaguely oppressive canvases dominated by clouds of slate and steel gray, foregrounds indistinguishable from back, and expanses of heavy color upon which occasionally sat detailed tiny houses or which crawled white-knuckled women in a tensed-muscle distress of indeterminate origin, their heads turned down and eyes unseen.
Aside from striking me as beautifully thick with paint in the way of Gerhard Richter’s abstracts, I just didn’t connect with the work, couldn’t wrap my fingers around the images or project my own little world into them. They intrigued me and started me wondering about Johnson’s history, but I found the paintings inaccessible overall. I could stare at length at where colors touched and pressed themselves into other colors, but I couldn’t read their stories. In hindsight, it could be that the averted faces and cloud cover created an impenetrable wall, or that whatever those taut bodies were crawling away from somehow intimidated me or struck a chord I wasn’t ready or able to consider.
Pamela Johnson I connected with, however. She’s self-effacing and quietly eloquent in a way that made me realize she’s a lot smarter than me. Based on the quality of her painting, I was surprised to learn that she not so long ago had an entirely different profession. “I was an engineer until 2003, working on the construction side for Webcor Builders,” a full-service general contractor which has erected many of California’s important and environmentally responsible structures since 1971. She graduated from California Polytechnic with a B.S. in Civil Engineering and a minor with honors in art. While working as an engineer, Johnson was awarded a three-month residency at The Institute of Ceramic Studies in Shigaraki, Japan, which she said was “an amazing experience that came at a crazy hard time in my life.” She credits this period with being instrumental in changing her focus from engineering to art, which ultimately led her from San Francisco to Chicago.
Open Enrollment: Words
As I struggle with papers at the end of the semester, I feel tempted to bemoan the futility of writing about art. I want to reassure myself that my problems come from the impossibility of my task, not from my scholarly inadequacies. In this rationalizing process, words often serve as a useful scapegoat. “Words get in the way,” as Gloria Estefan so trenchantly put it. We might reason that in matters of love and art alike, language doesn’t suffice.
If an early 90s pop ballad doesn’t carry enough gravitas, I could marshal plenty of academic machinery in support of a comparable claim about the insufficiency of language. The incommensurability of words and images, or the structuralist critique of the illusory nature of textual description…these words come all too easily. Deploying them might provide a boost to my intellectual ego at moments when I would otherwise feel helpless at expressing myself, but that defense seems like a cop-out. Plenty of writers whom I admire have done just fine with words, without recourse to qualifications about the impossibility of expression.
At the recent Fictions of Art History conference, organized by Mark Ledbury and Michael Hatt at the Clark Art Institute, a collection of speakers convincingly opened up the poetic possibilities of writing about art. For a full rehearsal of their arguments, we will have to wait for the planned book version of the conference. In the meantime, I thought I would highlight one moment that particularly caught my attention.
Music and Art
Patti Smith, "Horses," Arista Records, 1975. Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Examples of the influence of music on art are as iconic as they are profuse: Jackson Pollack madly swirling paint around him as Dizzy Gillespie blares on the hi-fi; Andy Warhol’s cover design of the denim-clad male crotch for the Rolling Stones’ album, Sticky Fingers; Robert Mapplethorpe‘s portrait of Patti Smith for the cover of Horses; Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s stint as a punk rocker while playing in Gray; Mike Kelley‘s early involvement in the Detroit-based noise project Destroy All Monsters; Robert Rauschenberg taking inspiration from John Cage’s musical interest in chance by creating bodies of work such as his White Paintings and the Combines.
These works, performances, relationships, and interactions all represent instances where the boundaries between music and visual art have bent and blurred, where sonic experiences have shaped artistic practice and visual expression. In these cases, music — whether created while playing in bands, or consumed while attending live performances or listening to records — acts as a vital social outlet that interrupts the isolation of studio practice. It becomes a productive distraction that ameliorates the intense focus demanded by creative productivity, or an alternative creative outlet that encourages new ways of working out questions about representation and artistic production. In all of these uses, music functions as a sort of fertilizer, absorbed by artists and incorporated into their work in the same way the plants soak up enriching nitrates.
On View Now | Mirrors with Memories: The Photographs of Binh Danh
Binh Danh, “Ghost of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #2,” 2008. Daguerreotype, 11 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist
Binh Danh: In the Eclipse of Angkor at the North Carolina Museum of Art reveals Vietnamese born artist Binh Danh’s search to imbue photographs with meaning not only through subject matter but also through process. The subject of Danh’s latest photographic series, The Eclipse of Angkor, is the anonymous victims of genocide in Southeast Asia. Danh re-photographs the portraits of unidentified victims of the Khmer Rouge who were executed in Cambodia’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison, which, along with the Killing Fields, became synonymous with the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign of terror. Danh employs two photographic techniques to produce his images—the daguerreotype process and a unique chlorophyll method invented by the artist.
The photographs in In The Eclipse of Angkor stem from Danh’s 2008 trip to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Choeung Ek, the site of the Killing Fields and Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s celebrated twelfth-century temple complex. During the trip Danh was struck by the meticulous photographic documentation on the part of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge of the estimated 30,000 Vietnamese and Cambodians who were imprisoned and died in Tuol Sleng prison between 1975 and 1979. Danh, who was born in Vietnam in 1977 to a Cambodian father and Vietnamese mother, has no personal memory of the Vietnam War or Cambodian genocide. His family fled to the United States when he was only two years old, and he did not return to the region again until 1999. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Danh’s artwork aims to restore and reclaim memories, identities and histories—both personal and collective— in an effort to come to terms with a dark period in Cambodian history.
Binh Danh, “Memories of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #1,” 2008. Chlorophyll print on nasturtium and resin, 12 x 10 inches. Courtesy the artist.
The first photographic process Danh uses to make his prints of the Khmer Rouge era images for his In The Eclipse of Angkor series is a chlorophyll process, which he invented. The process involves placing a photographic negative of one of the re-photographed images directly onto the surface of a living leaf, securing both leaf and negative under glass, and exposing then them to sunlight for days or weeks at a time. Through the natural process of photosynthesis, the image from the negative becomes printed into the leaf’s light-sensitive surface, incised directly into the leaf’s very structure. Danh then preserves the resulting image—which he refers to as a “chlorophyll print”—by coating it in resin.
Weekly Roundup
John Feodorov, "Emergence 3," 2010. Courtesy the artist.
Highlights in this week’s roundup: Mark Dion speaks about public art partnership, Gabriel Orozco is inside out, an exclusive Cindy Sherman documentary film can be viewed for free online, and more.
- Mark Dion will be among the first visiting artists invited to create on-site art and give a public lecture at the University of Arkansas. Dion will help the university increase the amount of public art on campus. Dion was a unanimous top choice of the public art committee volunteers.
- Guest of Cindy Sherman, a critically acclaimed documentary about the elusive Cindy Sherman, provides a unique insight into the 90s art scene, including a candid look at the culture of celebrity among contemporary artists and a bittersweet love story between Sherman and former lover, Paul H-O. The feature-length film is available to stream for free via Babelgum.com.
- Gabriel Orozco is one of several artists whose works are on view for Inside Out, Photography After Form: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection. This exhibition, which is on view at The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), focuses solely on the medium of photography and includes many new acquisitions. The show closes on March 6, 2011.
Connecting – Part 1: Art as Transportation
From "The Cabinet," 2010. Courtesy of Ryan Bourque.
There have been times in my short life when I’ve had the good fortune to witness something new and amazing, from births to deaths and the exhausting amount of possibilities in between. Incredibly, though far less frequent, as I bear witness I am momentarily granted insight, and I become aware of how whatever I’m experiencing engrams itself upon me by drawing some hidden, forgotten, or suppressed piece of me into the open air where I can pay it proper attention. In some cases, an image or phrase will act as a Rosetta Stone which makes sense out of my internal chaos and unifies what I once thought were disparate ideas.
Those moments of insight and clarity, fleeting though they may be, are what I enjoy talking about, and the added benefit is that talking about them keeps the moments in mind, which is where I need insight and clarity to be.
For example, I saw Redmoon Theater’s flawless production of The Cabinet, a puppetry-driven performance based on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the 1920 German Expressionist film about a psych ward director who manipulates his somnambulant patient into committing murder, and two things occurred to me while witnessing this performance. First (and for the first time, really), I became acutely aware of how intricately tuned actors must be to each other – moving in unison down to the subatomic level – in order to create art; and second, I was compelled to project my own history into the spectacle. After the show, I couldn’t help but wonder how many people in Redmoon’s sold-out audience saw in The Cabinet, as I did, a snapshot of the feeling of their childhoods?
