Tania Bruguera, "Tatlin's Whispers #5," 2008. Medium: Decontextualization of an action. Year: 2008. Materials: Mounted police, crowd control techniques, audience. Dimensions: Variable Performance view at UBS. Openings: Live The Living Currency, Tate Modern. Photo: Sheila Burnett. Courtesy Tate Modern.

Tania Bruguera’s long and various career as an artist starts with a series of works made after, but mainly through, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta. I say “through,” because in Bruguera’s eleven year-long project devoted to Mendieta’s work, Tribute to Ana Mendieta, she does not just pay tribute to Mendieta, but channels the artist during a time before art historical appreciation of the Cuban-American artist’s work had taken shape in the United States —and before the popularization of re-enactment as a tool used to archive performance. In this series of performance and site-specific sculptural works, Bruguera undertakes reenactments of Mendieta’s performances in order to resurrect them for a Cuban audience. She also presents Mendieta as a kind of double (or alter ego), inasmuch as through her work, Bruguera seeks to situate Mendieta in a cultural context from which both artists emigrated, but only within which Bruguera was brought up.

Bruguera’s most recent work, an institution which intends to foreground the situations of immigrants in New York City and worldwide, called Immigration Movement International, extends the artist’s preoccupation with the situation of immigrant, emigrant, homeless, and other displaced people. As in her previous work after Mendieta, the new piece tracks a movement across cultural contexts, locations, and institutional sites in an attempt to make relationships between these places more visible, better understood (especially for those who could most benefit from understanding these relationships—those who are themselves displaced).

Tania Bruguera, "Tatlin's Whispers #5," 2008. Medium: Decontextualization of an action. Year: 2008. Materials: Mounted police, crowd control techniques, audience. Dimensions: Variable Performance view at UBS. Openings: Live The Living Currency, Tate Modern. Photo: Sheila Burnett. Courtesy Tate Modern.

Immigration Movement International also extends two practices that Bruguera has pursued for the past nine years: Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art) and Arte Útil (Useful Art). Through the creation of Behavior Art works—works the artist relates through the performances of early Dada and Soviet Constructivists, as well as the 80s generation of artists in Cuba—Bruguera wishes to not only perform certain power relationships for her audience/viewer, but also to place him or her in a situation by which one may participate in the immanent expression of certain power dynamics as they unfold within institutions.

For an example of Bruguera’s Behavior Art works, you may watch a video online filmed at the Tate Modern in London of the artist’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5. Here, Bruguera employed mounted policemen to patrol the gallery, where they demonstrate various techniques of crowd control. Visible in the expressions of the audience is annoyance, if not also some anxiety. Many do not seem to know they are participating in an artwork; the revelation only comes afterwards, or in the process of their participation. Their behavior thus enacts how (state) power operates spatially to coerce groups and multitudes. As Bruguera tells scholar and curator RoseLee Goldberg in an interview from 2005,  “I want to work with reality. Not the representation of reality. I don’t want my work to represent something. I want people not to look at it but to be in it, sometimes even without knowing it is art.” Distinguishing between “performance” and “gesture,” Bruguera relates the significance of her Behavior Art works through their ability to create actions within a set of power relationships, rather than through the representations of those relationships.

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Reyner Banham, the Silurian Lake south of Death Valley in San Bernardino County, California. Photo: Tim Street-Porter. Via archpaper.com.

Reyner Banham, the British architectural historian whose blatant enthusiasm for Los Angeles nearly got him blacklisted in an era in which the cultured loved to hate this city, revered crisps, those small potato-based chip-like products that had gone from English bar fare to brightly packaged supermarket snack stuff. Banham, speaking tongue-in-cheek, called them a “triumph of progressive technology,” and, explaining away their utter lack of food value, wondered if they might be the “nutriment of angels rather than mortal flesh.”

It’s this sort of attention to pop minutiae that Banham brought to his study of the City of Angels. When he wrote Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies in 1972, he likened L.A.’s history of flourishes to a hamburger served with all the extras on the side, and nearly salivated over the freeway system, portraying Los Angeles as a city in which living was tied up in embellishment and movement. Critic Peter Plagans, then just getting his art-writing feet wet, wrote a scathing, sprawling review for Artforum that he titled “The Ecology of Evil.” In it, he pointed out that Banham didn’t actually have to live in the smog-stifled city he enthused over.

Still from "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles," 1972.

When UCLA Press published a new edition of Banham’s book in 2003, architect Joe Day was asked to write the introduction. The Press wondered if he could consider, in this era of the green living push, whether there was anything “eco-friendly” about Banham’s ecologies. Not exactly, Day concluded; after all, this is a book written by the man who championed the nutrient-free crisp.

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Richard Long, "Berlin Circle," exhibition view, Hamburger Bahnhof. Photo: Anna Milandri.

Richard Long’s artistic medium, since the 1960s, has been walking. On his walks all over the world, he uses found materials to create formations – circles, lines, ovals — leaving behind remnants of artistic presence that are mostly ephemeral.

While his walks take place outside of the grasp of general art audiences, Long also shows and develops works for interior spaces, bringing some of the natural materials that shape his practice into galleries and museums.

For Berlin Circle, his exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Long has installed six large-scale floor works that are accompanied by two films, Walking a straight 10 mile line forward and back shooting every half mile (1969) and Richard Long in the Sahara.

Circles are the reoccurring shapes that one finds here – not only in Berlin Circle, a stone work with a diameter of 12 meters that was first shown at the opening of the Hamburger Bahnhof in 1996, but also further ones of sandstone, basalt, turf and mud.

Richard Long, "Basalt Eclipse," 2000, exhibition view Hamburger Bahnhof. Photo: Anna Milandri.

What is one to make of Richard Long’s massive indoor circles? Has earth art, once a radical artistic expression coming out of the emerging environmental movements of the 1960s, become a mere aesthetic, a formal exercise of minimalist forms with natural materials? I would say that the works definitely do function on a purely aesthetic level (and this is no diss) for many visitors. I recall that, as I was walking through the space, I also heard someone call them “meditative.”

But while they certainly seem complete, one can also grasp that these forms and materials have a history, a place and time outside of the realm of the exhibition. A realm that is really only known to the artist in full, even though their origins can be traced (the mud of River Avon Mud Circle, for example, comes from the river Avon in Bristol, Long’s hometown), in the Hamburger Bahhof’s large main space, they become abstractions of things, found things, of the natural world.

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Glenn Ligon, "Negro Sunshine," 2005.

I first saw Glenn Ligon’s Negro Sunshine at Harvard’s Fogg Museum in 2007. And for the rest of the exhibition I was trailed by a staff member to keep me from doubling over in voracious laughter. Culled from Gertrude Stein’s Melanchtha, the piece is representative of Ligon’s signature style that has made him into a chef de intertextual. It was during in his stay at the Whitney’s Independent Study Studio Program in 1985 that conceptualism rushed in. Before that, Ligon’s paintings referenced heavyweights like Willem De Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. To New Yorkers, Ligon is perhaps best remembered for his contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial and his solo show at the museum that year, which cast him as a sardonic artist with an appetite for form — a point Scott Rothkopf sets out to prove in curating Ligon’s comprehensive retrospective Glenn Ligon: AMERICA at the Whitney Museum of Art. A must-see according to every reviewer, this retrospective breakdowns the wit, lust, caution, and skillful erudition of Ligon’s work into an aesthetically pleasing, contextually accessible chronological narrative. Although the sequential take does perhaps delimit the aesthetic possibilities, it provides enough literal space between the decades for once-dismissive critics to contemplate. Walking through, the only thing I really missed was Christina Knight‘s commentary. So I rushed home to ask her about the show, Ligon, and her in-progress dissertation, Performing Passage: Contemporary Artists Stage the Slave Trade.

Daniel Martinez, "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white," 1993

Alex Freedman: In a Time Magazine article, Robert Hughes called the 1993 Whitney Biennial “A Fiesta of Whining.” Today, it’s considered a watershed exhibition that laid bare a conglomeration of critical debates fanning the culture wars. How did this installment’s overall criticism stack up?

Christina Knight: Though many critics admitted that the 1993 Whitney Biennial was responding to important trends, much of the criticism voiced exasperation with the show’s relentless focus on race, sex, the AIDS crisis, and other topics familiar to the culture wars. These complaints were couched euphemistically under terms like “multiculturalism” and “political correctness.” Race did play an important role in these debates, though I wouldn’t say that African-American artists were singled out. For instance, Daniel Martinez’s admission buttons drew particular ire: though museum-goers received different words on their badges, together they read, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” Interestingly enough, Ligon escaped some of this criticism because of his understated, non-polemical style. For example, reviewing Ligon’s work the same year, Washington Post writer Hank Burchard said, “unlike many of his fellows who exhibited in the outrage-us 1993 Whitney Biennial, Ligon has something fairly interesting to say and clever ways of saying it […]. Instead of demanding our attention, Ligon invites it by drawing upon black writers and poets and by assuming a series of ironic identities.” To me, it is interesting that Ligon gets a pass because of his “irony” in spite of the always-political content of his work.

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Work by Ida Applebroog. Art21 production still, 2005

As promised in last week’s column I want to share some possibilities when it comes to facilitating in-progress critiques with students. Critiques that take place as an idea is taking shape vs. when a work is finished can produce wonderful results, especially with classes that learn to look critically and offer manageable suggestions. Here are three options I’ve tried:

The “Easel” Critique

Instead of students putting up all works at once, the teacher asks students to put works in progress on an easel one at a time. As each is shown, class members make suggestions to add to the work or improve it. A time limit helps in two ways- it sets up a situation where students must talk about the work for a given amount of time and it allows for all students to have their work shared. For example, if there are 20 students in the group and the class is 45 minutes, each student can get two full minutes of suggestions that they jot down in a sketchbook as the discussion takes place (and you’d be amazed at how many suggestions a class can generate in two minutes once they get going). This kind of in-progress critique is especially helpful with groups that are comfortable talking with one another and with assignments where everyone is familiar with the parameters and theme.

The “Big Question” Critique

Each student in the class takes a turn sharing what their work is about and where they are in the process of creating it. Then, before moving on to the next person, the artist gets to ask the group one big question that the everyone gives specific feedback on. This kind of in-progress critique can be done in small groups to maximize the use of time. For example, a class of 30 can break into five groups of six and each student gets the chance to ask their big question to five others in order to get ideas and possibilities for next steps. Each artist takes down notes from responses to the big question and at the end of the class shares the top three responses they received with the teacher- either verbally or written.

The “Big Question” Partner Critique

Similar to the suggestion above, each student in the class shares what their work is about and where they are in the process of creating it. Only this time students pair up and discuss the work with a partner instead of a group. After each person has had a chance to share what the work is about and where they’re at, the partner then comes up with a big question for the artist that is written down in the center of a sheet of paper. Both students then brainstorm possible responses to the question and make notes using a graphic organizer of their choice. After one student has multiple answers to the big question, the process is repeated for the other partner.  This allows partners to focus their classmates on issues they may not be considering or next steps that can be explored. All graphic organizers are then posted for the teacher to add feedback before the next class.

Have ideas you’ve tried? Please share them! Willing to give one of these ideas a try? Please comment on the results or send along further questions. Enjoy!

On Friday, April 8th, two members from Temporary Services, Brett Bloom and Salem Collo-Julin, gave a presentation on their practice at Outpost for Contemporary Art here in Los Angeles. The audience completely filled Outpost’s modestly sized space, with those that arrived late having to sit on the floor and others standing in the doorway. I didn’t recognize everyone but a handful of LA’s progressive practitioners were on hand including Robby Herbst, co-founder of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, artist and cycling activist Lisa Anne Auerbach and Sarah Delaiden of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers.

Formed in 1998 and based in Chicago (although Bloom currently resides in Copenhagen), Temporary Services are a complex group with many years and dozens of publications and projects under their belts. They’ve been around for quite some time and are certainly distinct from the growing, modish attention directed towards artist collectives presently. One particularly successful project from 2009 was a release of the newspaper stock publication Art Work: A National Conversation about Art, Labor and Economics. Published through their press, Half Letter Press and available for free download, the publication was released in every state including Puerto Rico. With contributions from art historian and critic Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of 2009’s Art Workers: Radical Practices in the Vietnam War Era, art historian and artist Greg Sholette, curator Nato Thompson, artist Harrell Fletcher among many others, the publication is both a rich resource on the topic of labor and artistic production and also a call to action.

Stacks of "Art Work: A National Conversation on Art, Labor, and Economics." Courtesy studiochicago.org.

In the last few years, the discussion of art, labor, and economics has been reignited. One obvious reason stems from the current recession and how it has affected public funding structures for non-profits, education, arts organizations, and many invaluable social resources. We have also experienced a type of re-visitation to art historical precursors, such as the Art Workers’ Coalition, in what seems to be constitutive of a historical looking back in order to gain perspective on the present. During the discussion portion of the presentation, the crowd expressed varied concerns. A self-identified artist in the audience asked about how artists can ensure stable compensation when their work is viewed in museums, subject to admission fees while simultaneously, artists are not given anything beyond minimal honorariums and the non-monetary, cultural currency of exhibiting at a museum. Another person, an adjunct faculty member at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) asked about organizing strategies in the present moment, with its expanded Internet networking technologies and the full-on “MFA factory” condition of the art economy in late capitalism. There was also another comment made about the various forms of temporary and/or part-time employment, both within and outside of clearly delineated art contexts, such as studio assistants, part-time retail work, and — what I’ve seen increasingly, childcare and home nannying — that many artists and other cultural producers do in order to facilitate their own practices. This is, of course, done in full cognizance that few are able to climb the ranks towards financial stability in the opacity of art. And yet, we do it anyway.

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For this month’s post, I’ve mulled and pondered, thought and reflected, yet I could not come up with any sort of brilliant topic for my penultimate post. So I thought I would just tell it like it is and lay out all that has been on my mind lately. To be honest, a lot is going on: dissertation research, job applications, and general rumination on life and the future. And in considering all these things, my emotions have run the gamut from worry to excitement, trying to remain steadfast throughout (much like the British Ministry of Information during WWII, who promoted the slogan: “Keep Calm and Carry On”).

Every now and then, I adopt this rendition of the WWII slogan

Like fellow Open Enrollee Melinda Guillen, I have been deflecting the question, “What’s next?” While I do have an unpaid internship lined up for the fall, I am still faced with the gaping hole of the summer and the reality of living in London, complete with the economic practicalities that come with it. In looking at jobs in publishing, auction houses, galleries, and museums, London seems like an ideal setting to cultivate experience in the arts. Every now and then, however, I ask myself, “What is an MA in Art History good for?” While the additional educational credential is definitely a plus, I find the requirements of current job opportunities rely more on previous job experience. No matter how enthusiastic you may be as a potential candidate, the offer doesn’t come down to future potential but, rather, to demonstrated past performance. It’s unfortunate but true.

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Ronald Regan: Hi Ed. Call me Ron.

Edward Said: Hi Ron, you don’t mind do you.

Marcel Broodthaers: Hello Edward. Well I’m told we are waiting for Jane Fonda.

— Arpanet Dialogues, vol. 1

In the fictional serial Arpanet Dialogues, an ongoing collaboration by Bassam el Baroni, Jeremy Beaudry, and Nav Haq, the creators of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) invite diverse quadruples to test out their chat app in secret US State Department testing centers from 1975-1979. Flowing like a script from absurdist theatre, salient nods to late-1970s politics current import are flanked between revolutionary rhapsodies. In this ersatz chat room, Ronnie gets his patriot on, MB lets loose his emotional side, and Said tantrums that Jane will understand him.

Marcel Broodthaers, "Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne," filmstill, 1974.

Published a few months later, Volume 2, which debuted at Art Dubai, takes a poker-faced, allegorical tone. Though Marxist Economist Samir Amin, activist Steve Biko, last historian Francis Fukuyama, and modernist architect Minoru Yamasaki only talk Soweto, econ, and architecture, the gravity between the two works’ publication dates is apparent. Fukuyama pushes the neo-liberal democracy as endgame. Biko relays his doubts about applying readymade political action to an uprising. Amin foretells the future of capitalism. And the failure of Yamasaki’s partitioned utopian dreams take on surplus meaning when he sadly laments, “they destroyed my buildings in the end.”

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Street view of PiST///. Courtesy PiST///.

PiST///Interdisciplinary Art Space is storefront gallery space and artist project co-directed by artists Didem Özbek and Osman Bozkurt. Opened in 2006, PiST/// is located in Istanbul’s Pangaltı neighborhood, a frenetic, working class area located adjacent to posh Nişantaşı and one metro stop from crowded, chaotic Taksim Square. Despite its proximity to these areas, Pangalti feels like a different world, and even Istanbullus who live nearby confess to to rarely heading into that part of town. “It’s so far away!” an acquaintance who lives in Tophane exclaimed when I mentioned my planned visit to interview Özbek and Bozkurt. When I reminded him of just how close it was, he seems surprised. “I guess you’re right,” he responded thoughtfully. “But it seems very far.”

PiST/// space, pre-renovation. Courtesy PiST///.

In many ways, PiST/// does feel miles away from Tophane’s plucky commercial spaces and Istiklal’s larger galleries, standing shoulder to shoulder with newer institutions such as Arter and the just-opened SALT. Its isolation within the institutional geography of the city is indicative of Özbek’s and Bozkurt’s dedication to critiquing the status quo of the professional art community. However, PiST/// is more than a “cube,” more than four walls and a roof which enclose objects or events. It’s a set of practices, an experiment in relationships, collaboration, business models, and professional endeavors. “PiST/// is not an exhibition space” they explain, but rather a medium of “experience exchange,” a means by which individuals with the same interests and concerns, engaged in the same kind of work, can share knowledge, resources, and experiences so that no one has to reinvent the wheel and when the tide rises in one place, boats all over the world rise together.  Yes, things happen in PiST///–lectures, screenings, discussions, and, indeed, exhibitions–but these activities are only a portion of what “PiST///” truly means for its directors.

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We’re back with the latest edition of “Fielding Practice,” a podcast produced by Bad at Sports for Art21 readers and listeners. Before giving you the rundown on this month’s chatfest, I wanted to direct your attention to the orange “donate” button (the one with the heart on it) placed conveniently at the top and bottom of this post and ask you to consider making a small donation to Art21′s Blog Party! fundraiser. Over the next four weeks readers of this blog will have an opportunity to donate to the columns they read regularly — the funds go to compensate the columns’ writers. So help support Center Field and our new Fielding Practice podcast by throwing some change into Bad at Sports’ collective hat. It would be truly appreciated. And now, onwards…

This month on Fielding Practice, we talk copyright (inspired by Patrick Carious vs. Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery, natch), discuss the impact of Chicago Imagism on younger generations of artists (inspired by the current Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character and Seeing Is A Kind of Thinking: a Jim Nutt Companion exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago), and spend a few moments plugging that which we have seen (or plan to see) in the Windy City this month (find links to the latter below). Come hang out, and thanks for listening!

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Click to listen to the podcast.

Chicago events we’re looking at this month:

• Dan: Katy Keefe and Vanesa Zendejas at Roots and Culture, April 1-28
• Duncan: Bruce High Quality Foundation “Teach 4 Amerika!” Rally (event has passed)
• Claudine: Rinus Van de Velde at Monique Meloche, April 2-May 14