I recently made the trip from Montréal to Toronto – clocking in over six hours of driving on the dismal 401 Highway in my packed rental car. In the backseat were artist friends participating in the Toronto version of BYOB, or Bring Your Own Beamer. I was making the great sojourn in part to also attend BYOB, but primarily to attend the hyped reopening of Toronto’s snazzy Power Plant art gallery and its unveiling of Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s Das Auge (The Eye). Two shows on the opposite sides of town, on the opposite sides of the spectrum.

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Das Auge (The Eye),” detail from installation view. Photo by Raji Sohal.

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Das Auge (The Eye),” detail from installation view. Photo by Raji Sohal.

Imagine a giant room in one of Toronto’s most important galleries overtaken by the colors red and white; squirted, splurged, and oozed fake blood is dried all over objects in the room. From stuffed animal baby seals and real fur coats covered in red paint, to groups of Coke bottles and hanging red and white country flags, to white lawn chairs affixed with celebrity face cutouts, to newspaper clippings of war atrocities, walking through the room feels like making your way through a physical collage: a child’s giant school project, a dioramic meditation on war and consumerism, pulled together with packing tape. Small mountains of objects pulled from their usual context – mannequins that belong in store windows, studio wigs from salons etc., are mixed with the decidedly cheap materials you may see on the curb on garbage day – their golden homes are broken plasterboard, chunks of Styrofoam, excessive amounts of duct tape.

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Thanks to Allison Glenn for her series of compelling posts on Detroit confirming that art is alive and well in the Motor City.

Up next is Alex Freedman. You may know Alex as a regular contributor to our Lives and Works in Berlin column. An independent writer, curator, and truant graduate student based in New York, Alex has studied History at George Washington University, African Literature at Harvard, and Art History at Hunter College. Her 2011 projects include Present Tense, interviewing for Look Until Blind, and collectively curating.

Image of Tyree Guyton's Street Folk, a public art installation on Edmund Street (at Woodward Avenue), Detroit, MI, April 2011. Image (c) 2011 Meghan Glenn.

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One cannot talk about the relational art projects in Detroit without discussing the Heidelberg Project. Begun in 1986, the Heidelberg can be billed as one of the first artist projects in the city to tackle issues of site, ruin, dilapidation, blight, and poverty. The project was created by Tyree Guyton, an artist and activist who can be considered the father of the site-specific public art initiatives in Detroit, and rightly so. Guyton was one of the first to use the house as a platform for communicating the contemporary issues and concerns of Detroit to the local government, while bringing national and international attention to the city.

Image of the Heidelberg Project (c) Google Images

Guyton began in the mid-80s, and legend has it that the artist returned to Heidelberg Street and found that the neighborhood that he grew up in had fallen into severe disrepair. Urged by his grandfather to do something constructive with the blight, the artists began collecting debris around the neighborhood and installed it onto the houses and in the open lots in the neighborhood. The houses quickly received attention and for years, the Project was threatened to be demolished by certain members of the city government. The artist’s retort to these threats was to paint large colored dots on abandoned buildings around Detroit, which he felt would be a more constructive use of the city’s demolishing efforts. In the early 2000s, the city moved on its threats, and part of the Heidelberg was torn down.

But what’s with all the shoes?

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Richard Serra, "Dreiser," 2010. Paintstick on handmade paper. © Richard Serra. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photo: Robert McKeever.

In this week’s roundup, Richard Serra’s elemental drawings, Laurie Anderson’s Brazilian retrospective, Maya Lin is commissioned, a couple of artist talks, and much more.

• Richard Serra has recent drawings executed between 2007 and 2010, now on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Geneva.  Serra’s method uses black paintsticks heated to a fluid state to create elemental forms through direction action on the paper and the accretion of medium. These drawings are explorations and  integral to the overall concerns of his sculptural practice.  The exhibition closes on May 14.

• Laurie Anderson‘s retrospective exhibition opened at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) and it is titled I in U (Eu em Tu). The show features installations, photographs, drawings, videos, music and documentations of performances, creations produced since the 1970s to the present day.  The exhibition runs through June 26.

• Lari Pittman will give a talk at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on April 11, 5:30-7:30pm.  This event is a celebration of the publication of  Lari Pittman, the first monograph on the artist.  Curator Paul Schimmel will talk to the artist about love, violence, and desire in his “big, visually gripping and psychologically strange paintings.”

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The Lot is an open-air collaborative performance space in the Detroit neighborhood of Corktown. Photo courtesy Kathy Leisen.

The Lot is a curatorial project that began in 2009 with the goal to provide space for site-responsive performance art while pushing the boundaries of what non-commissioned public art in the city would look like. The project, curated by Kathy Leisen, placed an emphasis on artistic collaboration and gave impetus to empty spaces in Detroit. As Leisen noted, and anyone who is familiar with Detroit can affirm, the city is full of people and space that, when joined, have the potential to create and affect change.

The inspiration for The Lot came from the OxBow School of Art and Artist Residencies located in Saugatuck, MI, where Leisen worked as a campus administrator. The attitude of the artists she encountered at OxBow and the brevity of site-specific performance art that was being created made the artist and curator ponder what she could do with her community space in Detroit. “Ox-Bow is a very rural art community that encourages site-specific sculpture and projects because of its natural landscape and also because of its “try anything” attitude,” says Leisen. “While there, I witnessed some beautiful pieces, and when I came back to Detroit, I realized that there was no reason why that could not happen here.” After returning to her Corktown neighborhood, Leisen set out to transform the vacant lot adjacent to her Detroit residence into an environmental nexus of local and international talent.

Leisen wanted The Lot to be, in her words, a completely different experience. For each performance, she paired one local artist with a visiting artist, and allowed them to interpret the space however they determined was suitable to their practice.

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Nicola López, "Closed System," 2009. Installation view, “Next Wave Festival,” Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2009. © Nicola López. Image courtesy the artist.

With the onset of spring, renewal is in the air.  In the world of contemporary prints, a fresh format that seems to be popping up everywhere is print-based installation.  In recent years, celebrated contemporary artists Swoon, Nicola López, Ryan McGinness, and others have pushed the boundaries of traditional printmaking techniques to create unique works that have the power, presence, and conceptual rigor of work in traditionally associated with “high-brow” media.

Like most new trends in art, printstallation has important precedents.  Monumental prints have been created since the Renaissance, primarily to commemorate military victories: Dürer’s Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I (1515-17) and Andreani’s The Triumph of Julius Caesar (after paintings by Mantegna, 1599) are two famed early examples – Jacques Callot also etched a number of oversized battle scenes in the early Seventeenth Century.  Yet few artists attempted to work on this scale in prints again until the Postwar period, when Andy Warhol created his famous Cow Wallpaper in 1966 (currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art’s Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building – a later variant in blue and yellow is also on view on the fourth floor mezzanine).

Nancy Spero, "Torture of Women," panel 10 (detail), 1976. Handprinting and typewriter collage on paper, 14 panels totaling 1 2/3 x 125 feet. Photo by David Reynolds. © Nancy Spero, courtesy the artist’s estate and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Over the past four decades, other major artists made headway into using printmaking as a basis for installation, including Robert Rauschenberg, Xu Bing, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Vito Acconci, Peter Halley, and Kiki Smith (some examples can be seen in Deborah Wye, et al. Artists and Prints: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, 2004).  However, Nancy Spero (1926-2009) contributed most significantly to the development of the potential of print-based media as a vehicle for installation work.  As discussed in Christopher Lyon’s recent critical survey (Nancy Spero: The Work, Prestel, 2010, 186-192), Spero developed her signature large hand-printed works on paper in the early 1970s in response to her struggle with Rheumatoid arthritis.  The disease prevented her from painting and drawing on the level she had previously, and she discovered that printmaking media allowed her to continue to work on the scale and production level she desired.  Spero eventually developed a lexicon of over 450 stock letterpress plates based on her drawings, which she used in combination with letterpress typeface to create tableaux of interwoven images and text. Though early work was invariably on paper, over time she began to print on other surfaces and incorporate additional materials into her installations.   All of Spero’s work is unique and hand-printed – for installations, she mounted the paper on the wall in panoramic or floor-to-ceiling banners.  Her uniquely expressionistic and simple figures – which convey pain, mystical power, and monstrosity – are frequently surrounded by text in French, Latin, or English (some borrowed, some of her own creation).  Spero combined these elements to expose the cruelty of political oppression, war, and violence against women – subjects to which she was dedicated throughout her career.

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Georgia Kotretsos in her studio, Vari, Athens, 2011. Photo credit: Christoforos Doulgeris.

Georgia Kotretsos is a visual artist, writer, and curator currently based in Athens, Greece.  She earned a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from The Durban Institute of Technology, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Born in Greece, raised in South Africa and repatriated in 2005, she was educated in South Africa and the United States and since has worked in studios across the globe.  I first met Georgia in 2003 while she was an ambitious graduate student. Since then, her ambition continues to grow alongside a fierce intellectual curiosity, a passion for art, and a spirit that is truly her own. She has exhibited her work at many venues in Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Athens, Istanbul, Berlin, Rome, Bitola, Macedonia (FYROM), and Durban, South Africa.  In 2010, she was awarded the Summer Studio Program Residency from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  She curated a recent solo exhibition with artist Serkan Ozkaya, among others, and has curated and initiated many group exhibitions with emerging artists in the United States and Athens.  She co-founded Boots Contemporary Art Space in St. Louis and was founder and editor-in-chief of Boot Print, a publication dedicated to global contemporary art, from 2006-2010. She wrote the foreword for Pablo Helguera’s Artoons. Volume 3, published in 2011. She has published many articles on contemporary art and artists’ practice, including the dozens of insightful tours she has taken us on through artists’ studios as a regular columnist for this blog!

Interested in art history, institutional critique, and art audiences, many of Georgia’s  projects often center on notions of looking, specifically looking at the various relationships that unfold around experiencing a work of art, as seen in museums.  She begins her inquiry through a reconsideration of traditional and contemporary art masterpieces located in prominent museum galleries across the globe.  As a voyeur, she then observes and documents visitors’ engagement and responses to these works.  Concerned with the phenomenology of the viewer, she literally and conceptually (re)frames the conditions of observation, cultural tourism, and the memory of such experiences in compelling new narratives that create yet another access point to a work of art.  As such, her work functions as a conduit between image making, images, and the beholder, thus narrowing the space between the function of art, art museums, and audience expectation.  She effectively challenges meaning as a construct derived both from works of art, as objects, and the experience of seeing, as spectacle. Often employing materials that echo content, Georgia’s discursive acts of re-articulation thoughtfully and wittingly blur conceptual boundaries between authorship and authority, ownership and circulation, and positions of seeing and power.

On the occasion of her exhibition at TinT Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece, I am delighted to share what is happening with Georgia!

Georgia Kotretsos, main studio area, Athens, 2011. Photo credit: Christoforos Doulgeris.

Shannon Fitzgerald: Can you describe your working environment, the conditions you require for productivity, and how your studio functions as a site for your creative practice, as an artist? As a writer? A curator?

Georgia Kotretsos: The ground floor of the house I’m staying at has been my studio for nearly 6 years now. It’s my base, where I have shipped my books and works from both South Africa and the States. I spend endless hours in there. This is where I make work, read, think, write — I have a cocoon-like office area and yeah, in regards to curating – I don’t really curate in the sense most curators do, but I have given myself the liberty to showcase some of my peers’ work when I can and want to. I don’t believe in roles, I’m in the art ‘business’ and as an artist, all parameters of this industry are of my concern.

In regards to the space itself, it is about 40 minutes out of the city center, I have very little traffic here and I treasure the luxury of having olive and orange trees outside my door and the beach within walking distance. As dysfunctional as downtown Athens is, this very quality is its charisma too. I do indulge in Athenian doses often – it has quite a potent and if I may, positive — affect on my work.

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Rachel Whiteread, "Long Eyes," installation view, 2011. Courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery.

In the vast inventory of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a painting that I seek it out whenever possible.  It a painting of modest size, yet it is one that arrests my gaze like few others for the way in which it captures the evocative power of light.  The work is by Camille Corot, its subject a forest and pond near Ville-d’Avray, a town outside Paris where the artist owned property.  In the painting the pond—which was on Corot’s property and one of his favorite motifs—slowly emerges through a delicate lattice of foliage dappled by late day sun.  A peasant woman leans over in a small clearing in the foreground.  She is camouflaged amid the scrim of trees, with only the slightest splash of color from her headscarf keeping her from being wholly subsumed into her surroundings.  The scene is tranquil, motionless; the woman, pond, and forest seem suspended in the subdued half-light of dusk that envelopes them.  The painting’s tonal harmonies and Corot’s feathery brushstrokes soften contours, shrouding the mottled landscape in a timeless tranquility.  Painted near the end of Corot’s life, the view of Ville-d’Avray is idyllic, the light—even though the waning light of dusk—hypnotic, eternal.  Corot’s subject is less a forest outside Paris than the sublime beauty of Nature itself.

Rachel Whiteread, "Daylight," resin, 2010. Courtesy Luhring Augustine.

Almost a century and a half after Corot, the London-based artist Rachel Whiteread explores the subtleties and evocative power of light in a series of new works with equally arresting results.  For her current exhibition at Luhring Augustine, Whiteread—who is known for casting the negative space of domestic objects and architectural elements (bathtubs, the space beneath a chair, floorboards and even entire rooms including the plaster imprints of the moldings, fireplaces, windows and sockets)—has cast a series of doors and windows in translucent resin.  Using resins tinted with soft tones of grey, lilac, and amber, Whiteread produces diaphanous sculptures that in their own ways conjure the ethereal, magical qualities of light. Her faint gray Dawn (2010) and pale lilac Daylight (2010) even approaches Corot’s delicate luminosity.  But if Corot’s subdued half-light offered up the visual pleasure of atmospheric effects in the phenomenal world as an invitation into a timeless space seemingly free of social commentary or even moral message, Whiteread’s objects, while no doubt beautiful and certainly evocative, are meant to conjure neither light’s timeless beauty nor the eternal itself.  Rather, what Whiteread’s recent casts of architectural portals and thresholds do ultimately attest to is her ongoing exploration of domestic objects and architecture spaces as sites of individual and collective meaning, history and memory.

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Illustration by Miguel Gonzalez Enamorado

Like many art students, I couldn’t stand critiques when I was in high school and especially college. I even had a professor in grad school that would survey the finished work silently while we waited what seemed like days for those first syllables of sophistication to leave his crummy lips. And each time, right before he spoke, he would abruptly pull out the pushpins on five or six works that didn’t meet his approval. More than once I saw my drawing gently fall to the floor like a leaf. Hours of work sitting in the middle of eraser shavings while the class discussion took place as if nothing was wrong with this scenario.

Now I absolutely realize that most critiques are not this horrific and that many, many teachers from coast to coast do not conduct business this way. But still, I wonder about the purpose of critiques at the “end” of assignments, projects, or units of study. I mean, as an art student, I rarely if ever went back to a “finished” work and improved it after a class critique. As a matter of fact I can only remember doing it once and it was primarily to get a better grade, not because I thought the composition really needed that extra banana.

Often, students are “done” (in more ways than one) with a given assignment before the final critique rolls in, and what we’re left with is usually an opportunity for a teacher (or students) to pontificate or for a class to try in every way possible to say things that won’t hurt someone’s feelings…. and yet somehow be constructive- not an easy task.

I propose we think long and hard about planning less critiques that take place at the end of assignments and more that take place in the middle of them. In-progress critiques allow for constructive criticism and suggestions right when students need it the most- when they have formed an idea and are in the midst of giving that idea form. Students get to ask questions of each other instead of being judged and often receive suggestions from classmates that I would never have come up with myself.

Next week I would like to introduce some specific strategies for setting up in-progress critiques. See you then. Don’t touch that dial.

David Hockney, “Going To Be A Queen For Tonight,” 1960

I recently visited the Tate Britain with a friend who studies history but doesn’t care much for modern or contemporary art. Standing in front of David Hockney’s Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head from Thebes (1963), she asked me to give my “art historical” opinion on the painting, presumably as explanation for the painting’s more abstract elements. I commented on the exposed canvas representing sand and the sketchy, half-visible figures, suggesting that the work could represent a memory of a person, or maybe a mirage. I also pointed out what appear to be butt-cheeks floating amorphously near the solid broken head. My “explanation” ended there, and I felt embarrassed about how little it must have helped her. (If only it had been one of Hockney’s pool paintings, I might have had more to say!)

David Hockney, “Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool,” 1966

The incident brought to mind others where my non-arty friends had asked for or mentioned my “expert opinion” on some artwork or another. Perhaps these are just my own insecurities showing, but I tend to push away the idea that my studies toward a Master’s degree in art history mean that my opinion or feelings about an artwork should be deferred to in favor of someone else’s, at least within a casual context. An image or artistic experience can evoke an infinite amount of responses, and I dislike the idea of granting hierarchy to opinions. On the other hand, if all analyses of art are made equal, then what value do we give to the advanced study of art history?

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