5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Amy Balkin
Amy Balkin, "Public Smog is a Scheme," Flash loop still, 2006-2011. Courtesy the artist.
For the past couple years, I have been teaching Bay Area-based artist Amy Balkin’s work within a curriculum about environmental art and “land expropriation.” I teach her work besides Karl Marx’s twenty-seventh chapter of Capital vol. 1, regarding “Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the land” in 14th- throughout 19th-century Europe. I also teach her work alongside Robert Smithson’s writings on the planning and maintenance of Central Park in New York City, and Agnes Denes’s writings about her Wheatfield (1982) and Tree Mountain (1992-1996) remediation projects. These art writings/projects form obvious parallels with Balkin’s work, which has to do with land use, the creation of public space, as well as the legal, economic, political, and social problematic of positing a “global commons”—an international, public space that would be the property of all and none simultaneously. Which is to say, would be shared in common.
The speculative aspects of Balkin’s work are redolent both with science fiction narratives and historical utopias from a variety of different periods and cultural locations. The Paris Commune comes to mind, but so does Afro-Futurism, or the work of Samuel Delaney. The purpose of the speculative, as Balkin discusses below, is to project a reality that may become true if it is ardently worked towards. As such, what Balkin calls “counter-speculative spaces” model relationships and phenomena that one would want to have had. That, in other words, might create conditions of possibility whereby “global commons” might actually be able to exist in some way, shape, and form. Future conditional tenses abound in Balkin’s very future-directed projects, whereby the future enfolds multiple presents and vice versa.
Amy Balkin, "Public Smog" billboards, Douala, Cameroon 2009. Image: Benoît Mangin. Courtesy the artist.
While artists and thinkers have attempted to think through utopias alternative social, economic, and political realities for a long time, there are very few precedents that I can see for Balkin’s work in art history, a work which the poet and critical theorist Rob Halpern recognizes as one which takes as its “material” the law. What does it mean for the law to become a legal material?
Blue
Ellsworth Kelly, "Blue Panel", 1977 Metropolitan Museum of Art
A few friends and colleagues have suggested that I share some of the stories I tell in class here on the blog. I sometimes forget as I write the column each week that there are things that have happened in the past (and sometimes in the foggy, distant past) that really do apply to what’s happening now. Some of it has even profoundly influenced what is happening now in my own classroom and perhaps through teachers I’ve worked with.
Anyway, here goes…
One afternoon I was running a field trip with a class of elementary school students at the Met and we were approaching Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Panel”. As we got closer, we realized that a docent was leading a tour of very serious-looking adults through the Modern wing and had stopped right in front of the very same painting to discuss it. We stood back and waited (and waited) as the docent shared with the crowd a myriad of things that influenced Kelly’s work. She spoke volumes about how this painting was connected to different sources of inspiration and even mentioned that it was an important piece in Kelly’s career. I saw my students’ faces changing expression. They were becoming impatient. Even some of the adults in the docent’s group began shifting their weight. No one was speaking except for the docent! She continued (and continued) to “reveal” what the painting was “about” when one student began to tug on my pant leg. The little chowderhead looked up at me quizzically and said, “Isn’t the painting just about the color blue??”
After the docent finished and we all got the opportunity to discuss Kelly’s work, I immediately let that student know that the piece IS about the color blue, but it’s also about the size (I mean, this was a big painting!) and shape (it’s a parallelogram, not a rectangle). We discussed why an artist would make this kind of painting and what kind of steps were necessary to create a painting like this vs. painting something “realistic” on perhaps a smaller canvas. We looked closely at the kind of blue it was. We compared it to the blue different students were wearing- all the while happily ignoring official interpretations of the piece.
Open Enrollment: Letters to a Young Art Historian?
November 2009, I was in the middle of a dark blue funk, something along the lines of a post-collegiate quarter-life crisis. Working a menial, low-paying job in museum retail and facing dwindling savings, I was forced to make certain deadlines regarding what I was doing in New York given paltry job prospects in the art professional world. Increasingly, it seemed like the smart decision to make was to leave New York and move back into my mother’s house in the Washington, DC suburbs. I’d apply to graduate school and jobs in the DC area and take it from there. I loved New York and the connections I had made through internships, as well as my friends and relatives there, but it was beginning to look like I had to cut my losses before totally going belly up. It tore me up to face my diminished returns, put my tail between my legs, and leave what was becoming my home.
The cover for "Letters to a Young Artist," published by artonpaper
Privy to this turmoil, one of my best friends surprised me with a copy of Letters to a Young Artist while at the NY Art Book Fair. The slim volume is composed of twenty-three letters of inspiration from established artists directed at some young person trying to make it in the New York art scene. The nature of the advice varies, but general themes of persistence, trust in oneself, and devotion to ones work arise over and over. I have never considered myself a practicing artist, but the advice was relevant to my commitment to supporting the arts in some professional realm. The book, among other things, encouraged a confidence boost, and I would stay in New York until I left for my art history master’s program in London the following September. In a concerted effort to travel light, or less heavy anyway, I brought almost no books with me to the UK. The one exception was my little green copy of Letters to a Young Artist.
José Muñoz in Chicago
José Muñoz
I write with the animating glow of philosophical idealism, and I articulate my thought through descriptions of performances of queer aesthetics practiced in everyday life, literature and art.
— José Muñoz, Social Text Journal online, June 2010
José Muñoz was The Visiting Artists Program (VAP) at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s first speaker of the Spring semester. As somewhat of a newcomer to his work, and having never had the pleasure of hearing him speak before, I was really inspired by his lecture, entitled “Wise Latinas: Mario Montez and Others,” and the patience and grace with which he interfaced with the audience and responded to their questions. The lecture itself was a clever conflation between the confirmation hearings of Sonya Sotomayor and Andy Warhol’s Screen Test No. 2 (featuring Mario Montez), with some amazing Nao Bustamante video thrown in for good measure. It focused on issues of camp, affect, and stereotype, with Muñoz stating that the “…calculating, strategic use of history is one way we can reject coercive mimesis.” Through his examination of the politicized biography, he mined notions of universalizing versus particularizing lived experience in smart, unexpected, and humorous ways.
Aside from his interest in punk and the DIY aesthetics of amateurism– subjects that are very meaningful to me too– Muñoz is probably best known as the author of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, a book that presents a “critical idea of hope.” The very idea that hope can be something other then naïve or flowery and instead can be used to critique the here and now, with its itinerant how and why, is powerful stuff. Muñoz says it best when he writes:
Cruising Utopia is a book that longs for collectivity during moments of escalating political isolation. It is my hope that Cruising Utopia offers readers resources that will help us belong to a future that is often narrated as impossible but is nonetheless attainable and utterly necessary. (Social Text Journal online, June 2010)
"Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity" by José Esteban Muñoz
I enjoy reading Muñoz because his writing style is an engaging mixture of theory and media criticism laced with emotionally raw personal anecdotes. During his visit, he said he tries to “push the conventions of what critical writing is” by letting the artwork he’s writing about dictate the voice of his writing. This focus on a more collaborative approach to writing reflects the often hybridized practices of both contemporary artists and contemporary art writers– and it also reflects how one’s creative approach to even non-fiction writing can function as an art practice in and of itself.
To read more of Muñoz’s thoughts, check out the excellent interview conducted by Claudine Ise, fellow Art21 blog contributor, over on Bad at Sports. And to join the dialogue on Muñoz with VAP, please become a fan on Facebook and get commenting!
Flash Points: Intimacy and Art
Arnold Newman, "Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz," silver print photograph, 1944.
If deprived of intimacy—without the closeness of another human’s body and touch—a human child has little chance of survival past infancy. In societies where the majority of people have all their basic needs met—food, potable water, clothing, shelter—our need for intimacy, both physical and emotional, remains the one essential need that neither charitable organizations nor public welfare programs can satisfy. When it comes to the production of art, we often think of artists’ intimate relationships in conflicting terms—supportive and nurturing, as in the case of Henri Matisse’s mother, who gave him his first paint set and encouraged him to pursue his artistic talent, or destructive and suffocating, as exemplified in photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s attempts to dictate the direction of his lover Georgia O’Keefe’s career and mold her development as a painter.
Max Beckmann, "Les Artistes mit Gemüse (Artists With Vegetable)," oil on canvas, 1943.
We are used to thinking of intimacy in these dualistic models, both in the sense of it being either constructive or destructive, and in the sense of it existing only between two people. But the relationship between a pair is only the basic unit of intimacy. Intimacy exists between groups as well, within families and communities of friends, neighbors, or colleagues, giving rise to self-defined, self-identified collectives. Art schools and artist colonies can also provide intimate environments that may either nurture or inhibit creativity. At the Black Mountain School in North Carolina, European and American modernists were brought together to pursue common creative goals and teach new generations of artists to think differently about their work. Max Beckmann’s poignant Les Artistes mit Gemüse (Artists With Vegetable) depicts an artistic community lost as a result of war. Depicting himself and four friends, from whom he was separated by World War II, at an imaginary dinner party, Beckmann attempts to recreate the intimacy rendered impossible by the war’s violence, reuniting himself with his friends within the space of the canvas.
No Preservatives: Getting to Know Thornton Dial
While I’ve only had the opportunity to call him Mr. Dial a few times, his friends call him “Buck.” Over his 82 years of working and living in Alabama, he’s probably been called a lot of other things and his artworks have been categorized and labeled in a variety of ways. Many in the art world haven’t heard of him, but I think all of this is about to change. Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial opens on February 25th at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Along with the corresponding book, this exhibition, which is curated by Joanne Cubbs, will show Dial as an important contemporary artist working in the 21st century.
Dial is an artist who helps to represent a generation of Americans that are fading into a history that still hasn’t been properly recognized or written. His artworks serve as a kind of visual direct-action on the politics and culture of the United States, and deep personal explorations of friends, family, and self.
Working along side my conservation colleague, Kathleen Kiefer, and many others involved in the project, including IMA Chief Photographer Hadley Fruits, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at and caring for Mr. Dial’s artworks. Having had this experience I know that his artworks work best when you stand in front of them. Images, books, and videos simply don’t work as well.
Thornton Dial, Richard McCoy, and Kathleen Kiefer at Dial Metal Patterns, 2009. Photo by Tad Fruits.
The three of us first met Dial back in 2009 when we visited him and members of his family at Dial Metal Patterns in Bessamer, Alabama. After spending a week examining and documenting his artworks in the warehouse of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta in preparation for the IMA exhibition, we drove with noted collector, researcher, and writer William Arnett to meet Dial. (Arnett and his Foundation are most well-known for bringing the exhibition Quilts of Gees Bend to the Whitney Museum in 2003.)
My goal in setting up this meeting was to have a conversation with Dial about the process and materials from which he makes art. I wanted to develop a theoretical framework for our conservation approach, a practice I work through for all contemporary artists.
While this afternoon was productive and informative, in the end what we all took away from that experience changed the way we understood this artist and the importance of seeing his work properly represented inside museums.
The School of the Art Institute’s Visting Artists Program
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is one of the oldest accredited art and design schools in the US, and The Visiting Artists Program (VAP), where I work as the Program Coordinator, is SAIC’s oldest public program. Founded in 1866, its roots can be traced all the way back to the early days of the School when artists would travel to Chicago to lecture, teach, and conduct studio visits with students. Nowadays, VAP still draws an enthusiastic crowd of SAIC students and faculty, but is also free and open to the general public, making it one of the city’s leading public forums for the presentation and contemplation of contemporary art.
VAP has stayed true to its original mission of initiating a dialogue via lectures, symposia, performances, and screenings with a host of world-renowned speakers. Just like the cross-disciplinary approach that students, staff, and faculty at SAIC take to the artwork they make, write about, organize, and collaborate on, VAP invites artists working across media to come speak. Alongside artists, VAP also brings in curators, critics, art historians, and scholars to give presentations that cross boundaries and grapple with significant ideas. VAP has also maintained a long-standing commitment to diversity amongst our speakers, pioneering an engaged, informed, and accessible first-hand account of the art of our time across perspective and place.
The long list of VAP’s guest speakers include noteworthy artists such as John Cage, Jeffery Deitch, Olafur Eliasson, Hal Foster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zaha Hadid, Dave Hickey, Robert Mapplethorp, Adrian Piper, Doris Salcedo, Peter Schjeldahl, Lorna Simpson and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Several more of VAP’s hundreds of guest speakers have also been the focus of Art21 documentaries, such as Laylah Ali, Mel Chin, Barry McGee, Julie Mehretu, and Richard Tuttle.
Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing several posts about the speakers who are part of our upcoming season, which include artists, a filmmaker, a curator, and a scholar. For a sneak peek, feel free to visit our website and checkout our calendar of events.
New guest blogger: Thea Liberty Nichols
Thanks to Kevin Buist for his terrific posts on design, technology, and dilettantes. Follow his pursuits with ArtPrize here.
Up next is Thea Liberty Nichols, a Chicago-based arts administrator, independent curator and freelance writer. Formerly, she served as Director of 65GRAND gallery and Study Center Manager at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, and she now works with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Visiting Artists Program. As the Program Coordinator, Thea and Andrea Green, the Director, work together to select, host and facilitate opportunities to engage with the dozens of speakers VAP brings in each academic year.
Weekly Roundup
Laurie Simmons, "Day 8 (Lying On Bed)," 2011. Photo: Mustafah Abdulaziz for The Wall Street Journal.
In this week’s roundup, Laurie Simmons shows us her love dolls, Collier Schorr is backstage at Barneys New York, Yinka Shonibare MBE inspires live action origami, and more.
- Laurie Simmons‘s The Love Doll: Days 1-30 will soon be on view on the Bowery, inaugurating Salon 94’s renovated gallery in NYC. The Love Doll series explores Simmons’s past examinations of the dollhouse, and engages with adult fantasies and fetishes, infused with an even more potent sense of desire and regret. The exhibition will run February 15 – March 16.
- Carrie Mae Weems‘s work is on view in Posing Beauty: African-American Images from the 1890s to the Present, a photography exhibition that explores the ways in which African and African-American beauty has been represented in the media historically and in contemporary times. The exhibition considers the idealization of beauty in Western art and image-making through photography, video, fashion and advertising. The show is at the Newark Museum through April 28, 2011.
- Collier Schorr‘s photography has been selected for the Barneys New York Backstage Spring 2011 campaign which features unique black and white images taken backstage at the world’s most prestigious fashion shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. The black and white theme will be carried across all Barneys channels for several weeks, along with deployed QR codes into both traditional and interactive media to add another dimension to the backstage experience.
- The work of Louise Bourgeois is currently on tour in Asia with The Absolut Art Collection, a celebration of art, creativity and popular culture that includes works by several well-known artists.
- Inspired by Yinka Shonibare MBE‘s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle currently adorning Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, the National Maritime Museum (UK) will hold a series of events, debates and workshops in a nod to his original work. One highlight will be a live action origami recreation of the battle of Trafalgar. The events will take place on February 26 and 27.
A willing participant at EMPAC’s “Uncertain Spectator”
Ship in a bottle: EMPAC. Photo courtesy of Kris Qua.
No matter how many times I fly, there are several minutes while tons of metal lift dozens or hundreds of bodies into the air that I can’t help but think about death. Taxiing down the runway and watching heat pour from turbines of planes ahead of mine, feeling speed increase as we come closer to take-off and the cabin shake while we lift invokes pictures that I can’t deny. During a recent flight to Albany on a 57-seat plane, I sat just behind the wing and watched it vibrate against the force of frigid air through which it sliced, imagining what that wing would look like if it suddenly buckled and snapped off, the way the plane would lurch and twist downward with a deafening roar of violence.
As the thought continued rolling through my head, it attracted the germs of real anxiety and panic. My palms got clammy and my eyes darted around the cabin. The aisle seat one row up and over from me was filled with a man much farther gone, his hands trying to make themselves one with the armrests, jaw muscles wearing down his teeth. His back was rigid and sweat draped his temples. We’ve seen the same disaster movies, share the same shaky-cam perspectives of what a crash would feel and sound and hurt like.
Approaching Albany, and ultimately Troy, New York, to see an exhibition called Uncertain Spectator at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, my awareness of anxiety was undoubtedly heightened because the catalog for the show told me there would be more to come. “Uncertain Spectator asks individuals to cross a threshold – to place themselves in situations riddled with tension, confront deeply charged emotional content, and grapple with feelings of apprehension.” Sounds fun, right? “The works presented deal with a general mood of uneasiness arising from recent political and economic events that frames a future rife with imminent threats. Uncertain Spectator not only responds to these unsettling situations, but also creates them by challenging individuals to step outside of a place of comfort both physically and emotionally.” In the interest of accepting that challenge, I spent a few hours with Uncertain Spectator and the night in Troy.
