Calling From Canada: Scott Yoell’s “Tsunami”
When I interview an artist for radio format, I go in hoping for interesting and honest statements about his/her work and ideas, because I know that in the editing suite, I’m going to have to be economical. If an artist can succinctly (so little air time, people!) express something original, and thought-provoking about his or her work, I find a way for the clip to make the cut. And yet, although I hate to admit it, with the occasional artist, this requires me having to wade through rehearsed grant-speak that they’ve plucked verbatim from their artist statements. So when I sat down recently with Canadian artist, Scott Yoell, after his exhibition as part of The Contemporary Museum Biennial of Hawai’i Artists, I was delighted that he spoke candidly, from the heart, about his work. Already, Yoell’s Biennial-presented conceptual work entitled Tsunami elicits a lingering cerebral response that continues to cause you to think about it long after you’ve seen it. And an hour-long conversation with him about the work revealed even more layers of philosophical connections to the work and the artist who made it.
Scott Yoell, "Tsunami," installation view, 2010. Courtesy the artist and The Contemporary Museum Honolulu.
Scott Yoell, "Tsunami," installation view, 2010. Courtesy the artist and The Contemporary Museum Honolulu.
Tsunami is an installation work that consists of three thousand, four-inch tall businessman figures cast in flesh-toned plastic. Each man wears a hat and carries a briefcase. The mass of the figures together forms what appears to be a surge of water, a tsunami — the whole of the formation is more overwhelming than the small parts that devise it, no one figure able to resist the swell of what is naturally unstoppable. The scale of the work – too many replicas to count – is a brash statement in itself. In our capitalism-critiquing era post-Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a glib comment discrediting obtuse representations of mass production might be expected here, but Yoell’s work is more complex. With a background of training in sculpture, Yoell’s own handiwork went into the fabrication of each figurine; the mold that he employed to create each figure deteriorated with every use in the art-making process, and so despite the result of general uniformity among the men, each one is slightly individualized and imperfect, different though undetectably so. The work is metaphorically-rich to say the least, but its origins are perhaps the most interesting aspect to me.
Clients, Pithy Quotes, and Jenny Holzer
Kedz shoes designed by Jenny Holzer with the text "PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT." Commissioned by the Whitney Museum.
Clients are the difference between design and art. — Michael Bierut
Last week I looked at two nearly identical works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Tobias Wong as a way of exploring the differences, and similarities, between art and design. The temptation to sum up the complex relationship between these two vast areas of practice in a pithy statement is as tempting as it is futile. But that futility can be a really useful tool for further exploration. These one sentence definitions can be used as a metric for comparisons, to hold up against real world examples to see when and how the axioms inevitably fail.
Michael Bierut, superstar graphic designer for Pentagram, has said that the difference between art and design is clients. Design is made with a client in mind, art is not. But is this always true? What happens when artists do work directly for clients? Are they suddenly designers and not artists?
Bierut’s distinction is smart in that it doesn’t even mention what designers or artists are physically producing. Instead it gets right to the how and why of their practice. The idea of artists moving beyond mere object production–the dematerialization of the art object–is well documented and explored. What was surprising to me, when I was first exposed to it about a year ago, is that approaches to design have undergone a similar process.
Design thinking is a term popularized by the principals of the design firm IDEO. It refers to using design strategies in a broad context, putting tools usually used in the design process–research, ideation, prototyping, etc.–into practice at a much higher strategic and conceptual level. The process may or may not lead to the production of a new product or campaign. It could just as easily lead to a rethinking of existing resources. The concern is with designing whole processes rather than just designing objects and images. In short, design thinking is the dematerialization of the design object.
Letter from London: Being Boring
19th century sculpture in the Musee d'Orsay: sexy but boring
“Why is sculpture so boring?” So said Charles Baudelaire in 1848. Sculpture in Baudelaire’s time was boring. In actual fact, with some notable exceptions, sculpture was, for a very long time, very boring indeed. Have a wander through the Musee d’Orsay or the second floor of the Met and you might well be struck by the disparity between painting and sculpture in the mid- to late- nineteenth century. On the one hand, there’s Gustave Courbet’s ferocious, gnarled tableaux of ugly peasants and aggressively sexual maidens; on the other, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s dreary trudge through mythological subjects. With the occasional blip – all of Degas’s sculptures and some of Rodin’s – sculpture at the birth of modernism looked like something we were planning to ditch once we worked out what paintings should look like. This wasn’t new in the nineteenth century – Leonardo da Vinci had famously already slammed sculpture as retrograde and coarse, something for the horny-handed working classes/Michelangelo – and nothing had really changed by the time of Ad Reinhardt’s dinner party witticism in the 1950s: “sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” after which he waggled his eyebrows and pinched an heiress on the backside.
Ad Reinhardt in action
The thing is that sculpture is only boring, in Baudelaire’s terms, as sculpture. What set aside someone like Courbet from someone like Carpeaux was that what he was painting was completely unprecedented: it might as well not have been “painting.” This is the beginning of a long line of people decrying things as “not being art”; well, maybe they aren’t. Maybe Duchamp’s readymades aren’t art. That’s fine, because it’s a semantic discussion: Duchamp’s Bottle Rack isn’t art as long as you’re quite sure what art is. (The same argument goes for Adam Sandler: I think he’s funny because he complies with my definition of what “funny” is — farts and falling over, thanks for asking — but everyone I have ever met thinks the exact opposite, which is fine. It’s a semantic discussion, I tell them, weakly, as they leave). The problem gets stickier when we take apart the statement “sculpture is boring”: sculpture in Baudelaire’s time was (mostly) boring, simply because it was certain it was sculpture, and within that narrow definition, it seemed washed-up. Reinhardt’s quip was made on the cusp of sculpture changing irreversibly in the shape of minimalism, which ditched the metaphor of traditional sculpture for good. Now every piece of contemporary sculpture has to be seen through that legacy, best summed-up in Frank Stella’s less waspish “what you see is what you see.” And because of that statement and the vast impact the art it represents has had on makers of objects, the term ‘sculpture’ feels less and less appropriate, like a childhood nickname you still cling to, even though you’re a 56-year-old divorcee living in a hotel just outside Birmingham (hi, Timmy!).
Ink | “Remembering so as not to forget the past is still not over”: Selected Meditations on Black History
Kerry James Marshall. "Memento," 1996. Color lithograph with gold powder on soft white Somerset. 30 x 44 in. Edition of 33, Printed and published by Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
In celebration of National African American History month, this issue of Ink is focused on selected prints by Art21 artists that react to and re-interpret African-American history. Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson are deeply engaged with this topic in all of their chosen media, including prints, bringing past events and practices to the forefront in order to provoke thought on the present and future state of race relations and Black identity in this country.
Ellen Gallagher’s groundbreaking DeLuxe portfolio (a detail of which is the signature image for this blog, below), 2004-2005, remains one of the most sensational and influential editioned works to have been published in the past decade. The portfolio, a series of 60 multimedia prints in an edition of 20, is part of a larger body of work in which she re-purposed and transformed advertisements for beauty products and vocational schools aimed at African-Americans (primarily women) from vintage magazines, cutting out the eyes, hair, and other details of the models and replacing selected areas with collaged elements, then arranged the results into dizzying grid patterns that consume the viewer’s field of vision. This series of unique and editioned works had a deep impact on the cultural landscape and instigated renewed dialogue on race issues and ideals of beauty. In addition, the DeLuxe prints were a great feat of technical achievement.
Many of Gallagher’s works from this period heavily incorporate or focus entirely on wig advertisements, and DeLuxe includes several such images. Commenting on her “wig ladies” in the April 2004 issue of Artforum, the artist reflected:
the wigs admit an anxiety about identity and loss: they map integration, the civil rights movement right through to Vietnam and women’s rights…These women are not just trying to be beautiful: they had to have these prosthetics. It’s about what you needed to go out the door, like you weren’t even reasonable until you put these on.
Gallagher has also examined the use of exaggerated eyes and lips in racial caricatures, isolating and repeating them endlessly in a kind of visual babble that underscores their absurdity. She thoroughly explored this idea in her first portfolio of prints, Ssblak!Ssblak!!Ssblakallblak! Wonder #9, 2000.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Cabinet of Curiosities
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Episode #135: Filmed in his New York studio, artist Hiroshi Sugimoto gives a tour of his private cabinet of curiosities which includes meteorites, stone age tools, and whimsical toys.
Central to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work is the idea that photography is a time machine, a method of preserving and picturing memory and time. Sugimoto sees with the eye of the sculptor, painter, architect, and philosopher. He creates images that seem to convey his subjects’ essence, whether architectural, sculptural, painterly, or of the natural world.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Memory 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.
CREDITS | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Mead Hunt. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Hiroshi Sugimoto. Video: © 2011, Art21, Inc. All rights reserved.
On View Now: Piotr Uklański’s “Discharge!”
"Piotr Uklanski: Discharge!" installation view. Courtesy Rob McKeever and Gagosian Gallery
In the main gallery of Discharge!, Piotr Uklański’s current show at Gagosian Gallery, fourteen vibrantly colored large-scale paintings hang unusually close together on walls covered in equally dynamic wallpaper. The overall effect is striking, and stepping into the room is to step into a dense and immersive visual experience (the press release describes the exhibition as “a mise-en-scène of new paintings”). Uklański’s abstract panels are not your typical oil paintings, but commercially sourced cotton bedsheets stretched over canvas. To produce his kaledescopic surfaces, the Polish-born artist saturates the store-bought sheets with fiber-reactive dyes, which he then carefully removes—or discharges—using bleach and other agents to create complex surface patterns and effects.
While Uklański’s methods and results certainly call to mind the tie-dyeing commonly associated with a 1960s counter culture aesthetic, his panels suggest other antecedents as well, especially the gestural and chromatic abstraction that prevailed in New York in the 1950s. The broad expanses of color in Uklański’s Sous le Soleil, for example, evoke the luminous fields of a Helen Frankenthaler stain painting, or perhaps a spare yet serene seascape by Milton Avery. The frenetic splatters and centrifugal energy of Uklański’s Untitled (Orgasmatron) or Untitled (Tropical Floral) conjure the vigorously applied pigment and restless movement of a Jackson Pollock canvas.
Lives and Works in Berlin: January Jones
January isn’t often a big month for art, and the same usually goes for Berlin, but this year, galleries seem to be pushing things a bit further to present exciting shows, even if a majority of them seem to have opened in November. In addition to “regular programming,” January brought the third instance of the Berlin-Paris gallery swap to town, as well as the lead into the Transmediale festival, which straddles the lines between music, performance, and art (now currently underway). But since this is actually happening in February (thankfully, it’s not as sloppy, so far, as last February), here’s a look at a few shows that eased us through the month of Janus.
3-inch chunks of month-old ice in Berlin, February 2010. Photo by Ethan Hayes-Chute
At the Schinkel Pavillion, an installation by Aaron Curry presents us with a tangle of purple and green-chromed tubes with a complicated accumulation of paper-covered cardboard chunks hanging from various points on the colorful tubing. Actually 6 separate works, they first appear somewhat haphazard and unconsidered (a cynic might view this as someone carelessly blowing their production budget on bent chromed tubes); upon further contemplation, one realizes that not only are these purple and brown colored cardboard pieces more well-crafted and considered than expected, they have tasty painted elements as well, nestled into the (silkscreened?) color swaths. Purple shapes have brown smears, brown shapes have purple smears. Painted within these smears, there are simply rendered “water droplets: condensed on the contrasting colors, as if they were made of a material cooler than the air around them, or possible to some oily substance, retaining and repelling the dew of summer mornings. The cardboard shapes recall those of Miró or Tanguy, as do many of Curry’s other sculptural works, the markings upon them suggesting edits or bandages, as do the strips of cloth tape in matching colors holding further cut-up pieces of purple or brown to the main body of these often squiggly, choppy shapes.
Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith
Nancy Spero, "Azur," detail 2002 courtesy Galerie Lelong
It seems like a good time for Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith.
Artists whose work incorporate storytelling, pointed statements and using the female body to do so, Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith have been compared beautifully in a variety of contexts, including Jon Bird’s Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith.
Looking through images I also think about certain characterizations of each artist and perhaps reversing them. I think about questions like: Can Smith’s work be considered political? Can Spero’s be about resurrection?
Google’s Art Project and the Uncanny Museum
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. As seen in Google's Art Project. Screen shot: Kevin Buist.
Yesterday, Google launched Art Project. Art Project brings the technology of Google Maps Street View into a handful of the world’s best art museums. Users can virtually wander through various galleries and click and drag to explore full panoramic views. The experience moves beyond the street version, however, in that it lets you click to see hi-res details of selected works and allows users to save and share collections of the their favorite finds.
Most art and technology news outlets heralded Art Project as a great step forward in bringing museums and technology together, and it is. But as I started clicking around various virtual museums I found myself dwelling on the limits of the experience, despite the fact that it does so much to expand access to these museums. Running up against virtual barriers eventually became more intriguing than the art itself.
I started my journey in the Art and the Sublime gallery in Tate Britain. I’ve never been to the real Tate Britain, and I was pleased to find a truly fantastic collection of paintings there. As I meandered from piece to piece, I came to a doorway through which I could see another gallery containing paintings too distant to make out. I clicked to move through the doorway and I was awkwardly shunted to the side. Trying again, I was shifted to the other side of doorway, still unable to pass through. Checking the floor plan in a window to the right, I realized that only a limited number of galleries in the Tate were photographed for the project. As much as I loved the Sublime gallery, I found myself instead transfixed by the doorway through which I could look but not pass.
Open Enrollment: From My Institution to Yours
In the spring of every year, the Master of Public Art Studies: Art/Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere program at the University of Southern California, one of two graduate programs in the Roski School of Fine Arts (the other, of course, being the MFA), holds a series of lectures called “Critical Conversations.” The series is also a required class for the first year students and all lectures are open to the public. Since 2009, a number of artists, curators, critics and scholars including Vito Acconci, Gregg Bordowitz, Maria Lind, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Rick Lowe, Mark Bradford, and others presented on their work and the intersection between their practice and larger questions and problems surrounding public art discourse. More recently, and just three weeks into the semester, we’ve had artists Edgar Arceneaux speak about his durational “collaborative artwork in the shape of a neighborhood redevelopment,” Watts House Project, and how it intersects with his studio practice. Sam Durant has also spoken on his recent series of works focused on capital punishment and manifested in raw architectural replications of gallows, as well as his involvement with artist Rick Lowe in a project sited in post-Katrina New Orleans called Transforma Projects.
The visits are always diverse and range in preparation, interest, depth and energy. In fact, my favorite lecture was delivered by artist, writer and activist Gregg Bordowitz. Opening up last year’s lecture series, and setting the bar high enough that it would never be reached again, Bordowitz gave a highly performative lecture, loose in structure but with a fluidity only a mind like his, coupled with an obvious passion for literature and literary theory, could deliver.
One of the houses in the Watts House Project in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts.
Interaction with artists is an obviously crucial component to those interested in becoming curators, writers, and other cultural producers in an economy structured heavily on networking and mentorship. My fellow colleagues and I, like most graduate students, were eager to gain access to insider information and welcomed any sort of advice handed down by professionals that have navigated the contemporary art world to varying degrees of success. The specific form of this interaction is of particular interest to me, as one of the perhaps unfortunate people willfully entering the terrain of doctoral programs in visual studies after I graduate from USC in May. My interest is in art writing and theory and I am curious as to how one is able to make a career out of that. Late last year, I attended a lecture by writer, curator, and feminist activist Lucy Lippard, someone that has sustained a living through her informal titles and did not, like so many others, enter the field of academia. When a person in the audience asked Lippard how she has been able to live through her writing and curatorial and activist endeavors, she bluntly replied, “Keep your living standards low.” I’m really looking forward to it.
