Deb Sokolow invokes You, the audience. When engaging her work–wall drawings rife with text-narratives that revel in heist, hijinks and mystery, You are not a passive bystander. You are implicated as a character in her web, because she always writes in the second person. I spent some time talking to Deb about that second person device. It strikes me as particularly interesting because of its self-reflexiveness. Rather than sharing the artist’s gaze, looking through the lens of a camera say, the audience suddenly identifies with the model. You/We are in the drawing. You/We are being watched. Deb Sokolow is looking at us. Like an unnerving Welcome mat, Sokolow gives you a platform on which to stand.

Caroline Picard: How would you describe your development as an artist? Do you feel like there are different stages of Deb Sokolow work?

Deb Sokolow: Good question, maybe it’s a question I’d be able to answer better 10 or 20 years down the road. I’ve only been working in this current vein since 2003. That year, I was smack-dab in the middle of grad school, and it was the year that I had an art crisis; I realized I didn’t know what the heck I was doing or wanted to do as an artist. I had no personal investment in anything going on in the studio, so I stopped making work. I went home. I watched movies and ate Chinese take-out. “This is so much better than making art,” I told myself. But then when I started asking myself what was so compelling about watching movies, I realized that it was the stories, the narrative form that I loved, that I could get lost in. This was an A-ha! moment for me, because prior to this, I was making these blobby shapes out of glue and arranging them on table tops. It was boring. So boring! So I moved into working with the narrative form, making large, diagrammatic drawings on paper or multiple papers, always narrated by an anonymous, unreliable protagonist who’s only ever referred to as “you” and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years up until a couple of months ago where I decided to make a break with this, keep using the “you” but develop a new framework for the narrative and a new way of presenting it. So, in answer to your question, I guess I could say that I’ve recently entered dynasty #2, which is actually a pretty exciting place to be.

Deb Sokolow, "Dear Trusted Associate" (detail), 2008-2009. Graphite, charcoal, ink, acrylic on paper and on wall, approx. 40 feet long. Installed at the Van Abbemuseum in 2008 and at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2009-2010.

CP: How do you think about a single piece of paper?

DS: If it’s a small piece of paper and I’m just doing a small drawing on it, I tend to think a lot about formal concerns first. Usually, the first thought entering in my mind is, “Are you going to make a drawing smack-dab in the middle AGAIN?” Once I get over whatever frustrations I have with composition, though, and actually start drawing, I almost always erase or white-out whatever first pops up on the page, mostly because I’m never happy with it. I’m constantly erasing and whiting-out the whole way through.

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Student art: acrylic, pencil and ink on paper

Only a few days ago I was all set to write a post that highlighted the plight of Curtis Acosta, an Arizona teacher who finds himself in the position of teaching a class on Latino literature that has recently been “outlawed” in the state. But in light of the recent shootings in Arizona, while in no way diminishing the importance of the struggle Mr. Acosta and his students face, I decided to put that post on the back burner for a week or so in order to write this week about teaching with, or perhaps I should say negotiating violent imagery.

No one can argue that each day is swamped with a ton of pictures, especially for students. Some go by in a second. Some linger on the computer and tv. These images perhaps shape who we are (or become), and certainly inform how we act (and react) to things.

Students make violent images that often shock viewers just like professional artists. But in a school setting violent or controversial images have to be shared carefully. The audience has to be educated in ways that galleries and museums (sometimes) don’t have to worry about.

In a recent unit of study, many students in my classes created works that led to depicting subjects like natural disasters, the power of weapons, and even abortion. Rather than dissuade them from really exploring these topics, I encouraged them to create high quality paintings and be clear when it came to sharing what the work was about. In the end, students wrote and printed wall labels that hung with their work, explaining the inspiration and thinking behind the art.

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Tsherin Sherpa has a unique background. Trained as a Tibetan thangka painter in Nepal, he was raised within a specific regime of mark-making, proportion, and subject. Embedded in that tradition is the need to preserve and pass on an exiled cultural heritage. As such (and having relocated to California), Sherpa has carved out a practice painting traditional Bhuddist thangka paintings. In the last five ten years, however, he started working outside the traditional confines he’d inherited, embarking on a course of personally expressive work. Transferring the aesthetic of his background into the relative freedom of the contemporary art context, Sherpa currently maintains two styles at once. For that, and in both spheres, he has achieved some real success. He has exhibited internationally in a variety of museums, he is represented by a gallery, and worked on a national ad campaign. Every aspect of his work has begged a delicate balance of reflection and production. In the following interview, we talk at length about the the process of Sherpa’s development and the relationship he has with its course.

Tsherin Sherpa, "Baby Spirit # 1," 2010. Gouache, acrylic and gold leaf on paper.

Caroline Picard: Could you talk a little bit about your background and what your artistic training was like?

Tsherin Sherpa: For a couple of generations, my family had been creating traditional art. My father was originally trained under his uncle.  In turn, my uncles, my dad’s cousin, and I were handed down this craft [thangka painting] by him. At the age of 12, I began studying this art form during my school breaks.  Growing up in Nepal, I was immersed in Buddhist culture and iconography.  Even though I was not a monk, I studied Buddhist scriptures in a nearby monastery.  So, alongside the traditional art, I was seeped in the meaning of it.

As for the process of learning thangka painting, the traditional training begins by creating specific measurement grids for the Buddhist deity. Once that is understood, then we learn paint application and fine brush stroke detailing.  The basics took me about 5 years then I continued perfecting my skills for many years.

Only in the last few years did I begin experimenting in contemporary forms.

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Art21 is pleased to announce our newest column on the blog — the first of several new endeavors for 2011.

Turkish and Other Delights is a column devoted to exploring contemporary art practice in Turkey. Rather than seeking to provide a comprehensive or definitive account of the contemporary Turkish art community, this column will serve as a space for both reflection and documentation as guest blogger Elizabeth Wolfson* travels throughout the country interviewing artists, curators, and gallerists and reviewing exhibitions, museums, and galleries. Taking advantage of her current location at a small university in the central Anatolia region of the country, where she is working on Fulbright grant, Turkish and Other Delights will focus both on subjects located in Istanbul and those in more remote regions of the country, seeking to capture the diversity of identities, practices, and experiences of the Turkish artistic community. Additionally, this column will aim to provide readers with a broader perspective on the country’s recent emergence as an internationally renowned art center by placing its central themes, practices, and concerns within a wider historical, cultural, and geographical context. Turkish and Other Delights appears on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month.

Formerly based in St. Louis, MO, where she attended college and graduate school, Wolfson has spent the past several years writing about art and culture for a variety of local, regional, and international publications. She has also worked at a number of area art institutions including the Saint Louis Art Museum and White Flag Projects, St. Louis’s largest non-profit contemporary art gallery. She holds a master’s degree in American Studies with a concentration in visual culture studies from Saint Louis University.

*The views expressed by the author are solely her own and not those of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.   — Ed.

Photograph by Cengiz Tekin, courtesy Outlet-istanbul.

“Why Turkey?”

This was the most common response I received last year to the news that I had received a Fulbright teaching grant and thus would be relocating to the country for nine months. Everyone, it seems, wants to visit Turkey; in 2009 President Obama made it the destination of his first visit to a predominantly Muslim nation shortly after his inauguration, and no less distinguished a group than the collective readers of the New York Times’ Travel section nominated it as their top destination for travel in 2010. But the notion of moving there, for nine months, and not even to Istanbul, but to a tiny town in the middle of the country, a ten-hour bus ride away from the cultural capital—this seemed to strike people as a bit excessive, more of an investment of time and attention than was actually warranted. Strangely enough, upon my arrival in Turkey, I encountered this same half-confused, half-incredulous attitude among Turks themselves. Upon arriving at my university and meeting my students and colleagues, I was constantly faced with the same question: “Neden Türkiye?” “Why Turkey?”

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Still from David Wojnarowicz, "A Fire In My Belly" (Film In Progress), 1986-87, Super-8mm film, black and white & color, silent. Courtesy The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collections/ New York University.

The artist-gallery relationship presents a curious contradiction. That is, there is the notion that a gallery representing contemporary artwork has a certain responsibility for promoting challenging and inspiring ideas, whereas, simultaneously existing, and at odds with this general expectation, are calculated changes occurring within gallery rosters and inventory. In the much-affected art market, increased pressure for saleability is directly influencing decisions such as which artists a gallery is willing to represent. While artists are assumed to be chosen by galleries for producing exciting and dynamic work, they are often picked for the purpose of attaining a level of universal accessibility in an effort to generate revenue. Granted, this approach is by no means new — a for-profit arts institution is, naturally, motivated to maintain financial stability. The point of concern, though, is the escalating dominance of efforts towards ensuring saleability overshadowing the gallery’s role of cultivating and encouraging artistic growth within its local arts community.

This impulse for survival is something that all creative fields have become acutely aware of, encouraging shifts towards new (and less costly) forms of marketing and self-promotion, as well as through making “safe” directorial decisions. Now, although such tactical adjustments may indeed provide a positive long-term shift in the way many institutions are managed, it does not excuse them curatorially from denying access to potentially dialectical creators. As much as creative institutions run the risk of causing offense with works that may challenge the sensibilities of a pre-existing client base, there is perhaps even more at stake when they become overly cautious. In addition to reaching out to new members of the art community with more progressive forms of marketing, the work represented ought to reach towards this new-found progressive audience as well.
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Brandon Alvendia, "Headshot Inside a Dan Graham Sculpture," Washington DC

While conversations continue (albeit tiredly) to predict the demise of physical book production, new publishers continue to produce books. There is a wealth of new, bright-eyed small presses all over the country. None so unique as Brandon Alvendia’s Silver Galleon Press. There is a pioneer quality to Alevendia’s style of book making. It’s cheap and fast and easy. It’s also utilitarian. The preciousness of the object he creates comes from it’s easy, DIY production. These books are art objects as a result of their disregard for self-fetishization. Silver Galleon Press is one of many Branches in Alvendia’s art practice. First and foremost, Alvendia creates. The material in which his ideas manifest vary–whether its curatorial, written, published, performed, taught, filmed, or sculpted, the work follows from a verb of action. Alvendia is at the center of that action.

Caroline Picard: Where did the idea for the Silver Galleon Press come from?

Brandon Alvendia: The Silver Galleon Press comes from a desire to read from the infinite repository of texts stored online in a form that can be handled, highlighted, written-in, dog-eared, torn, collected, exhibited, archived, shelved, lost, given as a gift, traded or burned for warmth.

CP: How do you choose your publications?

BA: The continually growing collection of texts represents years of maintaining a folder on my computer named “readme.” Approaching one DVD in size, the library of PDFs is slowly built from a daily practice of hunting and gathering new reading material online. The books are published on an as-needed and on-demand basis to suit a wide range of distribution and exhibition contexts. Titles are also published by request or for personal enrichment.

Brandon Alvendia, "Silver Galleon Press," Mobile Printing Workstation

CP: Can you talk a little bit about how you make your books?

BA: The Silver Galleon Press method of bookmaking is an economical and efficient process that can be learned by all. First, the captured PDF is minimally processed using the budget page-imposition software Cheap Imposter (OS X) to rearrange pages for printing. The PDF is then printed using generic printer ink, found online for as cheap as $1.99 a cartridge ($.01/page B+W). The pages are cut, folded and bound using common office supplies such as heavy-duty staples, two-hole brackets, and a wide variety of glue and tape (as in hot and duct, respectively). Covers are made from salvaged materials of all kinds (file folders, cardboard boxes, canvas, photo-backdrop paper, fabric, mass produced books, etc) manipulated with collage, paint and other mixed media. The whole operation can be reproduced anywhere and will adapt to exploit specific resources at any given venue/institution (ie color copiers, interns, etc…) Finished titles are distributed freely, by barter or on a pay-what-you-wish basis (and often part of a larger sculptural installation.)

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Gabriel Orozco, "Black Kites," 1997. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

In this week’s roundup, Gabriel Orozco arrives at the Tate, John Baldessari wants your name in lights, Stockholder, Orozco and Koons display a new object-ivity, Carrie Mae Weems wants us to help stop the violence, and more.

• Gabriel Orozco will have a retrospective at Tate Modern (London) which will highlight the artist’s endless experimentation with found objects as well as photographs and other works.  The show opens January 19 and will run through April 25.

• John Baldessari is looking for people who want their name in lights for 15 glittering seconds.  Your Name in Lights will be presented by Kaldor Public Art Projects for the 2011 Sydney Festival as a way to engage audiences in an entirely new way.  Drawing on imagery from Broadway theatre displays and Hollywood films, this ambitious new work will involve more than 100,000 participants.

• Baldessari will also appear in conversation at a special free event as part of The Microscope series.

• The Toledo Museum of Art purchased Fred Wilson‘s Iago’s Mirror, a large ornate piece constructed from black Murano glass.   This work has been installed in Gallery 5 of the museum’s  Glass Pavilion^® and is now on view.

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This introduction is short. Anne Elizabeth Moore gave such thorough answers, it seemed more important to let those stand than offer an interpretation of her merit. Safe to say having published four books, Anne Elizabeth Moore is an accomplished author. Having shown internationally, she is a significant artist and permeating those facets of her work is a strategic, cultural investigation. She is presently on a Fulbright scholarship in Cambodia.

Caroline Picard: How would you characterize your work?

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Actually, I try not to characterize my work. This is the central issue in work that at its root hopes to investigate capitalism and the ethos of branding. Those boxes that make it easy to mark, identify, and sell something (either metaphorically or literally) also make it easy to either shut down criticism—if you identify with or have bought the item/idea/approach in question—or underscore it—if you are not the intended audience for that thing, pretending for a moment that we’re talking about “things. My work is like Justin Bieber if you like Justin Bieber:  it defies categorization automatically because you adore it. But if you think Justin Bieber is a tool, then my work is not like that at all. In fact it is the opposite of that. Except for the fact that both Justin Bieber and I tend to be adored by teenage girls. That is exactly the same and there is no use denying it.

Anne Elizabeth Moore, cover for "Unmarketable," pub. The New Press, Fall 2007

What I’m interested in is how easily systems of oppression become adopted and policed by the individuals they are aimed at oppressing. Branding is one of the primary ways this happens in the hyperconsumerist culture of the United States. But, like, you can’t just go get a job in that. You have to be a writer and an untrained lawyer and study sociology, and you have to speak a fair number of languages and appear friendly and approachable but also not be too scared when the guns come out. And also, because sometimes talking about this stuff is dangerous, you have to be willing to invent a new language, or perform, or work through ideas with a different, non-verbal part of your brain. Let’s be honest, if you study a lot of languages then you might get easily confused; sometimes you speak German or Italian to someone who only speaks Khmer, so visual communication—again, in its pure sense, as a two-way system, and not in the way they teach it at business school—is important.

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John Baldessari, "Hegel's Cellar: Two Boats," 1986. Photogravure, aquatint. 19.5 x 26.5 inches. Publisher: Marian Goodman Multiples, edition of 35. Courtesy John Baldessari and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Over the past couple of years, the art world has been ebulliently celebrating the work of conceptualist John Baldessari – a well deserved paean to this highly influential and groundbreaking artist.  To begin, he was given the Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale.  John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, a retrospective exhibition organized by the Tate Modern and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opened in London last October and is now in its final days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 9.  The exhibition and accompanying catalogue (Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2009) summarize the artist’s career from the early 1960s with a focus on unique works (as well as several important artist’s books from the 1970s).  A complementary touring exhibition and catalogue of his prints, John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, has traveled to a handful of venues across the country and will be on view February 26 – June 26, 2011 at the Palm Springs Art Museum and February 4 – May 13, 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In addition to the aforementioned exhibition catalogues, The Prints of John Baldessari: A Catalogue Raisonne 1971–2007 by Sharon Coplan Hurowitz and Wendy Weitman (Hudson Hills Press LLC, October 2009) carefully documents, beautifully illustrates, and insightfully discusses his multiples on paper (with the exception of artist’s books). His work will also be featured in the upcoming Sydney Festival, January 8-30, Sydney, Australia. Several galleries showed his work this past fall as well: Marian Goodman and Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl in New York; 1301PE Gallery in Los Angeles; and Fondazione Prada in Milan. In the media, Baldessari was profiled in the October 18, 2010 issue of the New Yorker (“No More Boring Art” by Calvin Tomkins); featured in the Systems episode in the 2009 season 5 of the Art:21 documentary series; the subject of an a documentary on the Tate Channel; and discussed in several other articles and reviews too numerous to mention.

Add to this abundance this current post, which is naturally focused on Baldessari’s prints.  In his own words, “Fingerprints and footprints can be repeated, and that’s why I make prints endlessly.” (Hurowitz and Weitman, opening page).   Quips aside, Baldessari has created a formidable body of editions and artist’s books (in addition to documenting his own footprints) in his lifetime – what he refers to as his “cheap line.”  Yet Baldessari’s irreverent and playful prints require an intellectual workout as rigorous as any other medium in which he chooses to work.  A self-described “failed writer” who “builds with images the way a writer builds with words” (public interview with David Salle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 20, 2010), Baldessari’s work is concerned with the idea of visual information as signifier and a means of communication, combining stock imagery, colors, and text to create intricate and taut visual puzzles.  His aim is to create enough “tension” between found images in order to illicit questions and curiosity.   He has often spoken of the esteem he has for his viewers, who he describes as “tremendously sophisticated.  I don’t think you need to pander to an audience, but once they’re looking then the question becomes how to hold their attention” (Tate Channel online documentary).

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John Baldessari. "Your Name in Lights," 2011. Image courtesy of Kaldor Public Art Projects and Sydney Festival.

You.  Got to have flash and flare or your name in lights, right?!

Well, John Baldessari aims to make it happen.  He is looking for people who want their name in lights for 15 glittering seconds.

Your Name in Lights reflects the changing cult of celebrity in modern society and recalls Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame. Drawing on imagery from Broadway theatre displays and Hollywood films, this ambitious new work will involve more than 100,000 participants.

In a matter of seconds, I registered my name and got an email to look for another notification in January for when my name will appear in lights on the Australian Museum’s William Street façade.  Your Name in Lights will be presented by Kaldor Public Art Projects for the 2011 Sydney Festival as a way to engage audiences in an entirely new way.  This is not the first time Baldessari has invited the public to engage in or somehow be a part of his art.  Last year the artist released, In Still Life 2001-2010, a mobile app for the iPhone.  Kaldor Public Art Projects last collaborated with Sydney Festival in 1995 to realize Jeff Koons’ giant Puppy sculpted in flowers outside the Museum of Contemporary Art.

So go on, participate and get your name up there!