Protest on the steps of the National Portrait Gallery, December 2010. Courtesy the Washington Post, photo: Bill O'Leary.

Since I made my first appearance on the Art21 blog about six weeks ago, commenting on the now-infamous censoring of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly at the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek exhibition, the incident has continued to make waves. Among many blogs, Hyperallergic and ArtInfo have followed the story closely, providing careful updates throughout its development. A few decisive twists and turns deserve to be highlighted here, as not many cases have echoed so strongly in the recent years. This run-through will serve as a brief introduction to my main theme of interest: the difficult relationship between art’s visibility, potency, and meaning, as they unravel in the context of presentation and interpretation.

The manifestation of support for Wojnarowicz’s video has been overwhelming, with multiple institutions and organizations taking it up as soon as the Smithsonian Institution decided to pull it from the show. Transformer Gallery in Washington D.C., the New Museum in NYC, as well as a slew of institutions throughout the country put on display what was meant to be erased, on the scale that – arguably – has never been seen before. Even Stephen Colbert weighed in on the issue.

In condemnation of his action, Secretary of the Smithsonian, G. Wayne Clough, who single-handedly made the decision to take down Wojnarowicz’s video, has been repeatedly called to resign.

Artist AA Bronson asked for his own contribution to the exhibition to be returned and is currently in legal deadlock with the institution, which refused to return the piece before the loan agreement’s stipulated date. According to the Art Newspaper, another request for the “solidarity” removal came in an unprecedented gesture from the owner of Untitled, Self-Portrait by Jack Pierson, a hedge-fund specialist, and collector Jim Hedges, who demanded that his work be taken down, at least until Wojnarowicz’s video is brought back on view.

Following this outpouring of various attempts to counteract the conservatives’ demands to severely limit what constitutes art, Robin Cembalest, the executive editor of ARTnews, wrote incisive commentary on what institutions can and should do to prevent the escalation of the next Culture Wars.

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Cindy Sherman, "Untitled," 2010. Wall installation, pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

In this week’s roundup, Ellen Gallagher engages the empirical, Cindy Sherman breaks out of the frame, Nancy Spero is honored, Cao Fei employs virtuality and more.

• Ellen Gallagher‘s latest work will soon be on view at the Gagosian Gallery (NYC).  Her experimental works on canvas constitute a syntax of marks, gestures and windswept ephemera collected by the artist.  Gallagher’s approach navigates unfamiliar territories and liminal realms that swings back and forth between “legibility and blankness and which appears at different velocities, both sudden and perpetual.”  This exhibition will run from January 22 – February 26.

• Nancy Spero is honored in Christopher Lyon’s Nancy Spero: The Work, a “sweeping survey” of her expressive text-and-image art, investigations of pain and torture in her innovative works on paper and bold site installations.

• Cao Fei‘s RMB City is part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s Real Virtuality exhibition.  Coming from artists from multiple disciplines, the works on display employ “video game engines, motion- and position-tracking, stereoscopic (3-D) digital video, and sophisticated image processing software to create simulated worlds that extend, augment, or disrupt the physical environment of the Museum space.”  This exhibition is on view January 15 – June 12.

• Cindy Sherman has new work on view at Sprüth Magers (London).   For this series, Sherman has assembled a cast of uniquely individual characters on large photographic murals, marking a departure within Cindy Sherman’s artistic practice from the format of the framed photograph.  This show will run until February 19.

• James Turrel‘s Atlan is a highlight of the Musee d’Art Contemporain (Montreal) Blue exhibition.  Atlan is a room-sized optical illusion of ultraviolet blue lighting.  The exhibition will close on March 27.

• In conjunction with Triumphs — the current Dublin City Gallery exhibition by Richard Tuttle — The Hugh Lane will present a seminar series that engages artists, critics, and curators in conversations as a response and “a point of departure to discuss current art practice.”  The seminars will look at Tuttle’s work in the context of aesthetics, philosophy, science and history.  These sessions take place starting on Thursday, January 20.

In this second and last guest blog post, Kerim Aytac fills in for our hero Ben Street this month. — Ed.

Looking at Richard Nicholson’s elegiac contribution to the Analog show at Riflemaker gallery in London, I couldn’t help but apply my new knee-jerk additive term de rigeur: Porn. His nostalgic but gracious images of the now defunct space of the darkroom are gratuitous, fetishistic even, but are they actually pornographic? Analogue pornographic?  Has the term become a substitute for fantasy or escapism, instead of the darker desires the genre is traditionally associated with? Porn is demeaning. Porn is titillating and voyeuristic. Porn is seeing a lot of one thing one is not supposed to want to see, perhaps, but when applied to mainstream filmmaking, for example, it may have come to encompass the fulfillment of a need for the explicit acknowledgment of a pleasure indulged.

Richard Nicholson, "Gordon Bishop Associates, Paddington Street," 2006

Nicholson began to document London’s remaining professional darkrooms in the Summer of 2006, when there were 204 of them. By 2009, only six remained. Only the most masochistic of photographers would truly lament their passing, given the opportunities and ease of use afforded by digital post-production, but many still shoot on film. The images are big, taken with a large-format (film) camera, and pinned to the walls without frames in the manner of the work-print one might find in a darkroom. Their resolution is almost blinding. What is most striking is the aesthetic shift that seems to have occurred during this project. These professional spaces are all controlled chaos with so much stuff needing to be accessed so often, but are a far cry from the minimalist digital workspaces one encounters today. The enlargers are the focal point of most of the compositions, erect and elegant in their dominions, but each is individual in a way that computers rarely are. It has also been surprisingly easy to forget how some spaces were designed for standing before digital ubiquity. Each image represents a sense of the artisanal, a sense of the process. The notes, prints, and clippings affixed to the walls serve as biographical testimony to the many days and months spent occupying these spaces and hint at a lost allegiance to craft over technical mastery. This aspect of image-making has lost its physicality as Nicholson states:  “I do miss the aura of the red safelight and the soothing sound of running water. I miss the excited sense of performance.”

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Thanks to Caroline Picard for a record number of fabulous interviews. Follow her work back on her site, Lantern Projects.

Up next is Dorota Biczel. Dorota Biczel is a Polish-born artist, writer, independent researcher and curator, currently based in Barcelona, Spain. She pursues what Vilém Flusser called “the freedom of a migrant,” and has lived and worked in Poland, the United States and Peru. She first studied graphics at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in Poland and her critical writing and curatorial practice grew out of the experience working at a politically unstable periphery with a weak institutional scene. Dorota has taught classes at the Warsaw Academy, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has realized independent curatorial projects in Warsaw, Milwaukee, and Lima, Peru. Her research interests include issues of artistic labor, critical pedagogy, systems of valuation in the art world, and questions about art historiographies of the “new democracies” under neoliberal policies in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Currently, her main focus is neo-Conceptual art in Peru and the challenge of its narration after the fall of dictatorship – the subject of her MA thesis, Weak Signals in the Fog: Tactics of [In] visibility in the Neo-Conceptual Peruvian Art. Dorota was recently invited to join the research group, Red Conceptualismos del Sur / Southern Conceptualisms Network.

While Ellen Rothenberg works in a range of scale and material, there is a tactile quality to her work–a directness that calls attention to the body. I always think of organic bodies, bodies that don’t recognize an essential authority in our human structures. Like a climbing vine or water, her work seems to stretch through and around expectations. There are cracks in the street where weeds grow. The roof boasts an almost mystical, wandering leak. Ellen investigates literal and psychological structures, delving into the tension between what we take for granted and what has been overlooked. She activates the porousness of an assumption, nestling into its marginalized areas in order to produce new, self-reflexive spaces.

Caroline Picard: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your background.

Ellen Rothenberg: I was born in NYC and grew up in and around the NY metropolitan area. My parents were both engaged in progressive politics and the arts. My mother was a painter and my father a director of television commercials, industrial films, and documentaries. They were involved with leftist politics, the civil rights and the anti-war movement.  I guess you could say I’m a classic red-diaper baby. My father helped to integrate the film production unions in NY and during the McCarthy era, he employed many blacklisted actors who were under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.  It was this mix of urbanism, politics, and the arts that was influential on my own development as an artist.

As a teenager, I took drawing classes at the Art Students League and went on to Cornell University’s College of Art and Architecture and later studied Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, the only state supported art school in the country.  I lived and worked in Boston before moving to Chicago.

CP: How does a new project occur to you? Is it a consistent process? Is it easy? Do you always work in the same way?

ER: Projects occur in different ways; I’m not sure about consistency. Sometimes, like in Stealth, ideas occur in relation to events — in this case the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It was the discrepancy between the abstracted satellite and smart bomb images of landscapes and “facilities” transmitted on the news, against the images from the ground of refugees and the violence, which triggered the project.  Stealth was also my attempt to acknowledge and address the distance between these events and daily life in the US.

As the wars progressed, I also began to notice the infiltration of militarization into life in the States. This produced some strange material anomalies like pink camouflage baby pajamas or camouflage patterned bikinis! For more formal research into camouflage, I arranged to visit the Natick Soldier Systems Center, a Department of Defense installation responsible for technology development and engineering of US military food, clothing, shelters, airdrop systems, and soldier support. I met with a member of the Materials and Systems Integration Team, the group that develops and tests camouflage for the US military.  The visit ended with a strange doubling back to artmaking, when a product engineer asked about Mondrian and Seurat and what they had to do with camouflage.  Later we had an exchange. I sent him books on the artists and he forwarded samples of ‘failed’ camouflage patterns, which I later incorporated into Stealth.

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Nadine Nakanishi has been working with Nick Butcher in their collaborative independent print shop since 2005. Under the shared moniker, Sonnenzimmer, they’ve made posters for such notables as Beach House, The Books, and Broken Social Scene. They also make posters for comedians, design shows, and the like. While I’ve been consistently astonished by Sonnenzimer’s dedicated success, Nadine and Nick  mustered additional energy to kickstart a Creative Printer’s Guild. Through that network, screen printers are able to troubleshoot, share resources, and develop a community around their interest. All of that is of itself worth note: starting a business is not easy; neither is facilitating community. Nevertheless, Nadine manages a personal practice in addition. She is a painter, a sculptor, and (of course) a screenprinter. Here, too, she has a distinct voice. Everything she makes is perfectly placed, perfectly balanced, and often with a distilled or sun-bleached pallet. Embedded in her highly aesthetic objects is a research-based practice. Like poetry, each element in the work is purposeful, abstract, and pregnant with meaning. Consistent throughout those facets of her work lies a buoyant optimism–what I think she’d call pragmatic; and although her work manifests itself differently, there is an underlying foundation of careful, political thought. Last year, I remember there was all this buzz around the artist being the “new entrepreneur.” While I don’t know what to make of that contraction, I do think Nadine epitomizes a self-made, conscientious spirit.

Nadine Nakanishi, "Archive," 2010. Found materials, 46" x 32" x 4".

Caroline Picard: How did you start Sonnenzimmer?

Nadine Nakanishi: Sonnenzimmer started as a consequence of Nick, my partner, and me getting together to share art space. We both had separate painting studios and we thought that, through sharing resources, we could get more and finally print out of our own space. At that time, we both were printing out of Jay Ryan’s shop, The Bird Machine, and we were starting to overextend the invitation to use the shop. When we set up our studio, we worked part-time jobs not thinking of anything else, but eventually here and there a poster job helped pay the rent. Those jobs increased a bit, which lead to the next uncertainty, could we even work together? Would there even be a space for our visuals to make it commercially? And as those two things intensified, we slowly started formulating the idea of Sonnenzimmer. This will be our fifth year in business and it’s still much of an experiment, honestly.

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Episode #133: Filmed at the Interrogative Design Group offices at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, designer Adam Whiton discusses his work with artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. By developing innovative technology for projects such as The Tijuana Projection (2001), Dis-Armor (1999-2000), and AEgis (2000), Wodiczko and Whiton explore the potential for design to be used in a way that will “get people to think more…trigger questions and make people uncomfortable.”

By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections, Krzysztof Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history. Projecting images of community members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies, Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions of public space and architecture. He challenges the silent, stark monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social interaction in present-day society.

Krzysztof Wodiczko is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Power 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: Gary Henoch. Sound: Steve Bores. Editor: Joaquin Perez

. Artwork Courtesy: Interrogative Design Group & Krzysztof Wodiczko. Special Thanks
: Catherine Tatge, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). @ 2011, Art21, Inc.

“…We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look downward to go upward. And withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.” — Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977)

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in Las Vegas, 1966 © Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc., Philadelphia

In October 1968, Yale professors Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, along with Steven Izenour, embarked on a study trip with thirteen students. They headed out to the Sunset Strip of L.A. and Route 91, or simply the Strip, of Las Vegas, with the hope of conducting sensorial and experiential architectural research. Since both of their chosen destinations defied reduction down to a singular vision or architectural style, they were the perfect sites for the class’s collaborative research activities and, ultimately, for revealing how architectural design relates to urban planning.

Originally named “Learning from Las Vegas, or form analysis as design research,” by the end of the trip, students had taken to calling the course, “The great proletarian cultural locomotive.” Along with a trip to Disneyland, while in L.A. they went on a studio visit with Ed Ruscha and landed a ride in Howard Hughes’s helicopter.

View of "Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown," Dining Room, Madlener House, Chicago, 2010 © Graham Foundation

A related exhibition, now on view at the Graham Foundation, is entitled Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. It’s a mixture of super-saturated Technicolor photographs, films, slides, and printed ephemera from their trip, some of which were included in their subsequent book, and which viewers can spot in the facsimile page layouts on view, and some of which were left like buried treasure in the Venturi/ Scott Brown Archives.

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I am fascinated by varying scales of reference, especially when one has to negotiate multiple scales over the course of a single day. Hiro Sakaguchi works as an art handler, a professor, and an artist. As an art handler in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he negotiates the canon of art history within a massive, authoritative building. He spends most of his time in the basement. He also teaches where, respective to his students, he necessarily affords greater authority. He is at the front of the class, creating assignments and offering knowledge. He is also an active member of the Philadelphia art community, where (I would argue) he is among peers. If this were a movie, the camera angle would begin over his head during a working day. The camera (the eye of the museum) looks down on him. Perhaps, to make it feel less creepy, you could imagine a smiling, benevolent lens. The camera follows Hiro from the museum (passing by the Rocky statue) to his class. Over the course of that journey, the camera angle shifts and by the time he begins to teach, the camera is seated, below his eye level. At the end of the class, the camera follows him to dinner, or an opening. There it is at everyone’s eye level. Yes. Imagine everyone in the room is exactly the same height. Everyone is laughing, chatting, and it’s difficult to parse any one conversation from the din. Overall there is an impression of camaraderie. Lastly, we follow Hiro to his studio. Maybe it is just beginning to snow.

I have seen his studio: located in the heart of Philadelphia’s Chinatown, I hiked several flights of stairs before arriving on a dusty, dark landing. Temporary walls divided the space into smaller, padlocked studios belonging to others. There was a lasting after-smell of incense. Many things were wrapped in plastic, and I remember feeling as if I had entered a labyrinth. No one else was there, except Hiro, of course. Behind Hiro’s door, there lies a ping pong table, a cot, and several canvases. There are other materials as well, but I don’t remember those precisely, only that they were there. Some paintings are in progress, others are complete. I’m still not sure where the camera is, but I notice variant scales in his paintings also. Bears eat airplanes like trout while people watch on the side like plastic figurines. Hiro is playful in his work. The ranging scales seem pleasant rather than confounding. Why would they be confounding? you might ask. Because one’s sense of one’s own size would constantly shift relative to that variant context. I asked Hiro what he considered home. He answered, “I do not consider myself a Japanese artist.  I am an artist based in Philadelphia but I think I may be somewhat more global at the same time.” Hearing him say this, I recognized his frame of reference was even greater than I’d given him credit. His variant scale is not simply about his life in this old American city, but also about his relationship to a cultural past. In everything, he is his own center.

Hiro Sakaguchi, "Chrysanthemum Delivery," 2009. Graphite, ink, and gesso on panel, 18" x 24".

Caroline Picard: Would you say there was a turning point in your career, a moment when you felt especially validated as an artist?

Hiro Sakaguchi: Turning point….It is hard to say when or what changed my artist’s career, but one memorable one was when I was chosen for 2004 Fleisher Challenge exhibition at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia after I applied 9 times.

I wanted to be a painter since I was 11 years old when I saw Japanese painter Yuzo Saeki’s retrospective at the Tokyo National Modern Museum. I called myself an artist after graduating art school, even though I did not have any exhibition records. No one bought my work yet. I guess by calling myself an artist, I was encouraging myself to be one.

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Eli Broad at the unveiling of the Broad Art Foundation contemporary art museum designs in Los Angeles on Thursday. Photo: Jae C. Hong.

Eli Broad, Los Angeles’s most aggressive philanthropist, nearly always wears solid, primary colored ties. Last Thursday, he wore a red one to unveil the plan for his new museum on Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. It stood out nicely against the projected images of the honeycomb-like building that will be situated beside Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, which Broad largely funded, and across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), which Broad helped found in the late 1970s and saved from financial ruin just a year and a half ago. Designed by New York firm Diller Scofidio +Renfro, the Broad Museum will cost approximately $1,140 per square-foot, or $130 million total. It will house Broad’s mammoth collection of work by Koons, Rauschenberg, and Johns, among others, as well as rotating, curated exhibitions. MoCA members will receive free admission.

It was Taft Schreiber, an MCA executive, who first roped Broad into art collecting in the 1970s, though Broad’s wife, Edye, already owned a Braque print, among other gems (she’d wanted to snatch up a Warhol soup can, but was afraid her husband would think she’d gone crazy). Schreiber, an art maven with a collection of de Koonings, Giacomettis, and Pollocks, had intended to make Broad a Republican, but instead made him a connoisseur of 20^th century pop and abstraction–or a connoisseur of sorts. “Eli would ask everybody who was informed what their opinion was,” former Broad Foundation curator Shelley D’Angelus told the New Yorker‘s Connie Bruck, “and [he] put together his world view based on that. That’s what a good CEO does.”

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