New guest blogger: Damien James
Drawing by Gabe Mejia
Thanks to Victoria Gannon for her excellent posts and interviews chronicling California culture. Up next is Damien James. Damien is a self-taught artist and writer based in Chicago. His art is in collections in New York, London, Berlin, and Mumbai, and has been seen at Around the Coyote Gallery, Aldo Castillo, Schaller + Jaquish Projects, and the River East Art Center, among others. In 2011, he will complete illustrations for a short story by Jonathan Lethem.
As a writer, James has contributed to The Chicago Reader, New City, and badatsports.com, served as correspondent for Saatchi Gallery, guest editor for the New Orleans-based magazine Art Voices, and has had 22 words published on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He and his paramour run an arts and culture weblog called grippinglyauthentic.com.
Going to California: Nightmare City, Part 2
Nightmare City, "Nightmare City Copy Lake The Horde," 2010, multimedia. Courtesy the artists.
“It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone’s memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else’s memory …”
―Joan Didion, “Notes from a Native Daughter” (1965)
“The past is not always a burden or a sacred ground. Sometimes it’s just a fun place to shop.”
―Sasha Frere-Jones, in the New Yorker, Nov. 8, 2010, describing the bands Black Angels and Black Mountain.
Working together as Nightmare City, Carol Anne McChrystal and Keturah Cummings make video-based work in which the medium’s disorienting and outdated aesthetic mirrors the unstable meaning of the content itself. For their recent project, Nightmare City Copy Lake The Horde, the duo traveled to hot spots of 1960s California counterculture. Dressed in exaggerated hippie clothing, they attempted to reunite those signifiers with their origins. Once there, they were greeted by empty landscapes whose barrenness suggests a lack of meaning underlying such aesthetics, typifying an elusiveness that underlies much of California culture and history.
Here I talk to the artists about the inspiration for their recent project and their performance of California-themed songs at Queen’s Nails Projects in September 2010.
Victoria Gannon: What sorts of things inspired Nightmare City Copy Lake The Horde?
Carol Anne McChrystal: We came up with the first inkling of that project when we were at an Indian Jewelry concert.
Keturah Cummings: They’re a noise band based in Houston. It was a whole slew of bands, primarily out of L.A., like Pocahaunted and the Psychic Ills. The music is droney, but very hip, and they were definitely using hippie aesthetics and vague pan-ethnic references.
VG: Just the name, Indian Jewelry, is very pan–Native American.
KC: But I loved the music, we all did, and I guess that conflict spurred the interest.
CM: In the past couple years, there’s been a general hipness, a back-to-the-land sort of style.
Ink | Notes from Underground: William Powhida
William Powhida, "Unconscious Collaboration (number 1)," 2008, edition of 75. Screenprint and digital inkjet with collage, image: 11 1/2 x 19 3/4 in., sheet: 22 x 30 in. Courtesy Lower East Side Printshop, New York.
The contemporary art fair Art Basel Miami Beach takes place this week, bringing with it a flurry of activity. In the spirit of participation, Ink is dedicated this month to the prints of William Powhida, a Brooklyn-based artist whose work lays bare the inner workings of the contemporary art world (in fact, his current project is taking place in Miami, see below). A reluctant yet active insider, he offers his frank, unadorned view of the contemporary art world’s mostly uncharted territory. His text-based work is peppered with strong terms, ribald satire, and ironic self-aggrandizement (his Tumblr blog page is titled G-E-N-I-U-S). In an interview with the artist, when speaking of his work, Powhida describes two distinct strands – the “overtly comedic [that is] topical in the sense that it is reactive to what is going on” and the “imaginary universe where anything can be made to happen.” He is simultaneously celebrated and reviled by the art world players he exposes, and his work can precipitate a formidable storm under the right conditions.
In addition to working in traditional art-object formats (drawing, painting, prints), Powhida maintains a strong presence in cyberspace. He has the requisite artist’s website, but he is also a veteran blogger, tumblr-er, tweeter, and commentator. In addition, he frequently participates in and organizes public discussions and events. Earlier this year Powhida collaborated with Jennifer Dalton on a month-long series of events and discussions at Winkleman Gallery that were open to all. The project, titled #Class, was designed to question the systems and hierarchies that attach monetary value to art. Events were documented in real time with twitter feeds, blog posts, and live streaming video. The two pair up again this week with a similar project titled #Rank to probe the hierarchies that dictate one’s place in the culture of the contemporary art fair, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach. #Rank takes place through December 4 at Seven, a nearby venue, and will be documented in real time on the project website.
Powhida’s two-dimensional works are primarily text-heavy drawings in the form of lists, satirical faux-articles and editorials, or caricatures of the art-world figures he skewers, surrounded by commentary. He has produced a handful of original prints in the same vein. His first – Lower East Side Printshop’s 2008 mystery benefit edition titled Unconscious Collaboration (number 1)–was parody of an article from the defunct magazine Art on Paper, titled Unusual Appropriation: Making Something Out of Nothing. The opening line reads, “Brooklyn based [sic] artist William Powhida has gained notoriety for making art about a pompous, self-absorbed genius also named William Powhida, a fictional character loosely based on the artist’s experiences.” The text goes on to describe an imagined series of events surrounding Powhida’s process of creating the mystery print edition in which he is overwhelmed by the task, frequently leaves the studio to frequent bars and strip clubs, and eventually fails to deliver an original print, instead signing the work of another artist. The illustrations for the article show Powhida in various states of inaction at LESP with appropriate captions – “Powhida in repose” (passed out on the floor), “doing something in the Printshop” (dabbling with inks), and “doing something at the window” (gazing outside, hand on his head).
Beryl Korot: “Babel: the 7 minute scroll”
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Episode #130: Beryl Korot discusses a recent work — Babel: the 7 minute scroll (2007) — which takes the form as both a large-scale print and an animated digital video. With pictographs that reference ancient Egypt and the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Korot’s work investigates the history of tools and technology, language and narrative.
An early video-art pioneer and an internationally exhibited artist, Beryl Korot’s multiple-channel (and multiple-monitor) video installation works explored the relationship between programming tools as diverse as the technology of the loom and multiple-channel video. For most of the 1980s, Korot concentrated on a series of paintings that were based on a language she created that was an analogue to the Latin alphabet. Drawing on her earlier interest in weaving and video as related technologies, she made most of these paintings on hand-woven and traditional linen canvas. More recently, she has collaborated with her husband, the composer Steve Reich, on Three Tales, a documentary digital video opera in three acts that explores the way technology creates and frames our experience.
The exhibition Beryl Korot: Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010 is on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through January 2, 2011 The exhibition presents her latest body of work as well as the 5 channel weaving/video installation Text and Commentary which premiered at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977.
Beryl Korot created the opening segment, featuring actress S. Epatha Merkerson, in the Season 1 (2001) episode Spirituality of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online at PBS Video and Hulu, or purchase it for download from iTunes.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Beryl Korot.
“I am the invisible being”: The Smithsonian, Wojnarowicz, and the Othering of AIDS
David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled (Face in Dirt)," 1990. Silver print, 28.5 x 28.5 inches. Courtesy P.P.O.W.
The decision of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, G. Wayne Clough, to pull David Wojnarowicz’s video, The Fire in My Belly, from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, has been decried on many valid grounds. In both print and online publications, the controversy has already signified, variably, a looming return of the Culture Wars, another attack on the LGBTQ community, and the antagonists’ – Bill Donahue of the Catholic League backed by a number of Republican congressmen including Reps. John Boehner (Ohio) and Eric Cantor (Virginia) – lack of interest in the piece itself, since their opinions were formed in less than the 11 seconds that the depiction of the “blasphemous” cross in the video lasts. No less ironic is the fact that the removal of the work took place on the eve of December 1, World AIDS Day, while the artist himself had fallen victim to AIDS-related disease in 1992.
In many outlets, the removal of the video has been described as censorship. However, I think the case actually points to an act of self-censorship. Even though the decision came “from above” (and this information didn’t emerge until the next day) — from Clough calling on the Portrait Gallery to remove Wojnarowicz’s piece, with poor director Martin Sullivan left to justify the decision — the truth is that a robust, highly visible institution succumbed to the pressure of a few loudmouths, thereby counteracting the rationale for featuring A Fire in My Belly in the first place. In order to protect its interests and its federal funding, the Smithsonian preemptively capitulated to the protesters’ demands. The very same mechanism led the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC to cancel the presentation of the retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe 20 years ago — clearly demonstrating how little has really changed since then.
The situation sets up a(nother) dangerous precedent with repercussions reaching far beyond LGBTQ, religious, HIV/AIDS, or any other identifying community. It promises a compromised art-viewing experience for us, the public that actually bothers to go to the museums and is interested in determining the meaning of art for ourselves. Big institutions not willing to stand up to the bullies, as Robert Storr suggested on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Mapplethrope/NEA scandals, paint a very bleak picture indeed for exhibitions we might encounter in the near future. So much for the very nature of artistic production, particularly its affective and thought-provoking capabilities.
Going to California: Nightmare City
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Handbill for the Human Be-in, which took place in January 1967 in San Francisco. Image courtesy of Oldhandbills.com.
Every few decades, people decide it’s a good idea to move to California. First, it was for the gold. Then aerospace technology, then Los Angeles. In the 1960s, it happened again, as idealistic teenagers arrived in San Francisco to build a new world in which previous generations’ hang-ups didn’t apply. They joined ongoing protests at UC Berkeley, where students had seized a parcel of land to create a park for the people. They held be-ins against the verdant green of Golden Gate Park, believing their positive energy had the power to halt a war thousands of miles away. They attended West Coast versions of Woodstock, where Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin performed.
Though vibrant, the summer of love couldn’t last. Fall came; the hippies got older. Many succumbed to drugs, and many “sold out,” choosing careers and capitalism over their youthful radicalism. The movement petered out, but it did inspire a psychedelic, romantic visual culture and sensibility that lives on in Northern California. Think mandalas, geodesic domes, sacred geometry, and magical pyramids. Now divorced from their radical origins, such signs currently stand in for a generalized mysticism, a vague allusion to mystery and free-spiritedness that is peddled in stores and incorporated into artwork.
"Have a Hippie Holiday," Barneys New York 2008 catalog. From the collection of Carol Anne McChrystal.
How do insights get reduced to commodified images? When is the moment that radical possibility becomes disappointment? Working as Nightmare City, Carol Anne McChrystal and Keturah Cummings make digital-based work that addresses these moments of unfortunate transition. With an aggressive aesthetic, the duo’s work embraces repetition, disorientation, and illegibility, pushing viewers into a zone of discomfort where images lose their commonly understood meanings and re-emerge with new significance. At the core of their practice is an interest in images and their signification. Again and again, they ask: how does an aesthetic assume a cultural value, and how does it lose that value and gain a subsequent one?
Inside the Artist’s Studio: Jan-Henri Booyens
Jan-Henri Booyens at his studio, in Pretoria, South Africa
Jan-Henri Booyens is a South African artist based in Pretoria, South Africa. Jan holds a BFA in painting from the Durban Institute of Technology, in KwaZulu Natal. Since 2000, he has widely exhibited nationally as well as internationally. His work may be found at numerous collections but the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris is the one that stands out. He is currently represented by WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery in Cape Town and he is a member of the visual art collective, Avant Car Guard.
I am presenting Jan today because his work reflects the “sensation,” as he put it, of being a South African. His textures, pallet, forms, and chaos are there to serve the edginess of a reality he naturally discusses in the interview later on. His works read as the artist’s very signature, as a fingerprint — a generous portion of his visual intake is mirrored on his surfaces and I recognize him and his world in paint clearer than by anyone else among his generation of artists. Jan’s work has myriad layers, yet the one that conceptually excites me the most is his take on Modernism and his guts to experiment with and stretch this dogma as if it’s gum between his fingertips. It takes intelligence and informed decisions to initiate a dialogue with a tradition from the past and further successfully produce contemporary paintings today by using a supposedly exhausted vernacular.
Jan-Henri Booyens, "Stoned," 170 x 200 cm, 2010
The minute he held up Stoned at the depot of his gallery at the Johannesburg Art Fair last April, I stood there instinctively connecting the dots. Images and texts of Abstract Expressionist painting were flashing before my eyes – it was mentally a cross-art history puzzle. All the information was there, all the clues are still right there; thus, I stand by his side when he wishes he could respond by saying “you figure it out!” every time he’s being asked about the content of his work.
Jan speaks directly to a specialized audience — his work is developing rapidly and with this body of work, he is significantly contributing to the evolution of South Africa painting. It is always a pleasure to present a fellow Durban Institute of Technology alumnus. Please read on…
Georgia Kotretsos: What does it mean to be a contemporary artist/painter in South Africa right now? What kind of voice do artists have and why have you chosen to have two — one as a painter with an independent practice and one as a member of Avant Car Guard?
Jan Henri Booyens: Well it is a cutthroat business out there. Literarily I saw an artist stab a gallerist in the throat one time.
Jokes aside, I’m working in an ambiguous space — between a history of South African art known for its political undertones and that of South African and African abstraction that is rich in mysticism, ritual, and an emotive understanding of the world.
Translating Ai Weiwei: Bringing Chinese Social Media Art to the English Twittersphere, Part 2
Ai Weiwei. Sunflower Seeds, 2010. Installation view, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. Photo courtesy of Aaron Chen.
An Xiao follows up on yesterday’s post and continues her discussion with Bird’s Nest: Ai Weiwei in English editor Jennifer Ng and translator André Holthe.
An Xiao: Yeah, here in the West, we’re encouraged to brand ourselves and put our names everywhere, but I can certainly see the challenges and why the activity was a powerful one. So what happened after all these individuals participated?
Jennifer Ng: While I cannot prove this, I don’t think anyone was arrested for the activity, at least there were no reports on Twitter about it. In retrospect, the activity really was an interesting social experiment, that when ordinary folks get together to take responsibility and to publicly give out a message, the government really does not have the resources or is simply unable to control the voice of a vast amount of Chinese people that are on the Internet.
Mr. Ai sent them T-shirts and DVDs of his documentaries. It wasn’t just for that one activity however. I think he sends out presents for all of his Twitter projects. Basically he gives them out to whoever requests the DVDs and recently of course the sunflower seeds. For him it’s just an excuse to distribute his work, especially with the t-shirts and the documentaries. I don’t think he needs to do it for fame, but his heart is on giving them out so people can gain exposure to the problems of contemporary Chinese society.
All the documentaries and presents are politically themed. They’re various forms of documentation for the investigations he’s done on problems he’s explored in Chinese society. Giving them out lets more people have access and know about his side of the story in contrast to the official side of the story. They realize the so-called harmonious society is not that harmonious, at least not harmonious in the sense the government wants you to believe.
AX: He gives them out for free?
JN: Yes. Only within China, not sure if shipping is included. 
Art 2.1 | Translating Ai Weiwei: Bringing Chinese Social Media Art to the English Twittersphere, Part 1
Artist Ai Weiwei in conversation with Tate Modern curator Katie Hill, October 2010. Photo by An Xiao.
This past summer, Jennifer Ng and I launched Bird’s Nest: Ai Weiwei in English. Mr. Ai, artist and a vocal critic of the Chinese government, enjoys a following of more than 50,000 on Twitter.
He is the second most-followed contemporary artist on Twitter after Yoko Ono and in my opinion, he engages his audiences in some of the most compelling and engaging social media art projects. However, to English-speaking audiences, by the far the dominant group on Twitter, his tweets fly past with not even a sense to how to pronounce them.
As the site name suggests, Bird’s Nest relies on a team of translators and contributors to translate and bring context to the tweets of artist Ai Weiwei. Since the beginning, Jennifer and I have relied on split management: while I worked on the operations, functionality, and design of the site, Jennifer managed the language and culture posts.
The nature of the Chinese language, whose words take up only 1–2 characters on screen, mean that Chinese-language tweets can be as long as a paragraph. Thus, we opted for Tumblr, which preserves the real-time and social nature of Twitter while allowing greater flexibility in translation and contextualization. I worked with our anonymous designer to develop a two-column format ideally suited for translation, and I work to ensure the site’s operations are running smoothly while contributing my own translations and working with Jennifer to determine the overall direction of the site.
As our editor, Jennifer has been closely involved in the almost all the tweets that Mr. Ai sends out. She is uniquely suited for the job, as a freelance translator and native speaker of both languages; active user of social media and proponent of social media art; and coordinator of the Master of Communications Sciences in Technology-Enhanced Communications for Cultural Heritage at the University of Lugano, with a background in semiotics and museum studies. Her dedication to accuracy has ensured the highest quality of translations, and our site has now been cited in The Wall Street Journal, CNNGo, Shanghaiist, and others. She was also asked recently to contribute translations for Mr. Ai’s current installation the Tate Modern.
I sat down with Jennifer over Skype to talk about how Ai Weiwei uses Twitter, and some of the challenges of translation. I also spoke separately with one of our translators, André Holthe, a Chinese scholar and industrial economist based in Norway and editor of Faces of China; I’ve blended in his responses here as appropriate.
An Xiao: When did you start following @aiww?
Jennifer Ng: It must have been about less than a year before we started translating his tweets. I think it was before or after his injury in Germany that I realized he actually has a Twitter account. I have continued to pay attention to his tweets since then for two reasons. One, because his tweets can be funny and inspiring at the same time. Two, because his tweets appear on the screen a lot. At his peak, I believe he posted hundreds of tweets a day.
Jaunting to K’ruhe
ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, ©2010 ZKM
When asked a few weeks ago to accompany a friend to Karlsruhe earlier this month for Elmgreen & Dragset‘s opening of Celebrity: The One and The Many at ZKM, I jumped at the chance to participate in my favorite activity: traveling to meet an institution whose net presence I’m familiar with. So while the column’s next post will chat up Berlin-based artists Elmgreen & Dragset, this week takes a turn out of Berlin to look at ZKM ❘ Center for Art and Media, Germany’s bastion of intermedia arts. Founded in 1989, the Center for Art and Media has championed digital media, acting as a leading force within the global community in exhibiting, collecting, and conserving works in the days before most museums thought about digital database systems. So what better timing to get acquainted than during an opening and the ZKM’s hosted symposium, The Digital Oblivion?
IMAGINING MEDIA@ZKM im ZKM | Medienmuseum, 2009, installation view, © ZKM, Foto: ONUK.
Coming from Berlin, the first thing one notices about ZKM is its sheer size. And then, for those of us often confused at Germany’s lack of digitization, the automatic question is: “Karlsruhe, really? The seat of the German Federal Constitutional Court?” (For those unfamiliar with the German legal system, it’s a lot of paperwork). Yet, it makes sense. ZKM is home to to a core group of arts-related practitioners focused on developing theoretically sound strategies for long-term institution building. When asked, museum sources will tell the story of how in 1988, a committee of professors, politicians, and nuclear researchers put forth Konzept 88, which outlined the creation of a research institution for the emerging field of media arts technologies. Following the Center’s 1997 move into its current residence, the roving center transformed into ZKM ❘ Center for Art and Media, a think tank whose vast programming is a testament to director Peter Weibel’s philosophy that media art is not entertainment. But as it turns out, the history is a lot less stoic than it sounds: until reunification, Karlsruhe was Germany’s Internet capital (Universität Karlsruhe sent out the nation’s first emails in 1984) and from 1980-1994, the munition factory was outfitted with squatting artists’ studios. Though the institution’s press department would eschew this kind of language, it’s safe to say that ZKM was built out of a whole lotta cyber love. And no where is that more apparent than in Peter Weibel and Berhard Serexhe’s exhibition, IMAGINING MEDIA@ZKM.
