Open Enrollment | The Importance of Being Sketchy
I am freaking out! In one month, I’ll be installing my artwork at The Winery SF for San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA Thesis Exhibition. Last year at this time, my buddy and neighbor from my days in Bushwick, Bonnie Kaye Whitfield, presented her Pratt thesis exhibition in a solo-show format at a gallery on campus. Next year at this time, my buddy and undergrad classmate from Carnegie Mellon, Christopher Kardambikis, will be wrapping up his three-year program at University of California, San Diego also with a solo-show format, but one that doesn’t necessarily have to be on campus.
Jeffrey Augustine Songco, "sketch for GayGayGay robe" and "GayGayGay robe." Courtesy the artist.
Unlike Bonnie’s and Chris’s exhibitions, my thesis exhibition is one giant zootopia: about 70 of my graduating classmates will present artwork in sectioned-off spaces in an event venue on the picturesque San Francisco landmark of Treasure Island. When that many artists need to be wrangled, there’s a crucial emphasis on each student’s exhibition proposal. Will an artist’s freestanding sculpture obstruct the view of another artist’s drawings hanging on the wall? Will the volume from one artist’s sound installation be loud enough to hear without being so loud as to interfere with a nearby artist’s looping video?
Bedfellows | Coded Cloth
Alberti cipher disk, used for encrypting text. Photo source: http://www.ncard.co.cc
We speak in code when words aren’t safe to say. Faced with threats, our language goes subterranean, carving new passageways of communication.
Encrypted messages use accepted forms of expression—recognizable letters, numbers, or physical symbols—but configure them according to secret and contrary systems of organization. During the Underground Railroad, a lantern on a hitching post signaled to runaways that safety was inside. By using a common element of domestic architecture differently, new meanings were conveyed. Should danger approach, the sign could easily be explained as merely lighting the way.
Codes also delineate groups; knowledge of a secret language can function as a membership card. The Freemasons protected their rituals by encoding them with a secret cipher.
In a culture where heterosexuality is assumed and explicitly celebrated, expressions of gay identity are frequently made in alternate languages, such as dress. In the 1980 movie Cruising, undercover cop Al Pacino gets inducted into the Lower East Side gay male bar scene through an explanation of the handkerchief code.
San Francisco artist Jeremy Sanders is particularly interested in the ways gay men express themselves through clothing. He found a rich metaphor for gay male dressing habits in his study of Scottish tartans. “Tartans are a fabric that people used to identify as being a part of something, in this case, Scottish, and then particular clans or families,” he said.
“I think of the 1970s or ’80s, the handlebar mustache and sideburns and plaid flannel shirt and tight jeans and boots” in gay male dress, Sanders said. “It was a way that you could send signals to other gay men, particularly in places like New York or San Francisco. To the untrained eye, they could pass as a straight man.”
Sanders weaves coded plaids whose messages speak to gay male strategies of sartorial identification. Using a subjective system derived from his experience of synesthesia, in which numbers and letters correspond to colors, he spells out words with hues.
The Performativity of Site
Members congregating outside of OmniCorp Detroit's Eastern Market location. (c) 2010 Michael Doyle
Collectivity and site specificity are two themes that are incorporated into many artists’ projects in Detroit. Shared information, shared space, and sustained growth are what fuel the brains behind two makerspaces or hackerspaces in the city: OmniCorp Detroit (OCD) and Mt. Elliott Makerspace (MEM).
Makerspaces and hackerspaces are manifestations of the philosophy of open-source. These collective workspaces offer the tools and equipment necessary for people to test an idea or concept in a shared environment, with the ability to ask questions and work alongside knowledgeable practitioners. Members gain valuable insight from collaboration and have the ability to access the electronics and tools necessary to experiment.
Atari Punk Console Course taught by OmniCorp Detroit (c) 2010 Michael Doyle
OmniCorp Detroit is located at the intersection of Division and Riopelle Street in Detroit’s Eastern Market, the oldest public market in the city. Located just outside of the downtown area, Eastern Market is a space where local farmers can sell their produce, meat, cheese, coffee, bread, and honey at wholesale prices to city-dwellers and suburbanites alike. The people behind the Eastern Market Corporation launch initiatives that benefit the community as well. In 2009, they ran a phenomenal collaborative pilot program that increased the availability of nutritious food to low-income Detroiters. The success of this initiative led to the Eastern Market Bridge Card Program, which allows vendors to sell their food to Detroiters who get state-subsidized food benefits.
Weekly Roundup
Barry McGee, Todd James, and Steve Powers, "Street Market," Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster St., 2000.
In this week’s roundup, Barry McGee tags a street market in LA, Margaret Kilgallen is remembered, Matthew Barney to be awarded in San Francisco, Allan McCollum electrifies objects in Florida, and much more.
- Barry McGee, along with Todd James and Steve Powers, are joining forces to recreate Street Market at MOCA (Los Angeles) for Art in the Streets. The installation is their vision of an urban street that includes a liquor store, a bodega, and much more. Battered trucks, bombed with graffiti tags by McGee, lay upended on the gallery floor. The MOCA exhibition will open April 17 and close on August 8.
- The legacy of Margaret Kilgallen is featured as the newsstand cover for Juxtapoz magazine’s April 2011 issue dedicated to Art in the Streets, the first major historical survey of graffiti and street art in North America. For this particular occasion, the magazine reprinted an interview with Kilgallen from the May/June 1999 issue. Barry McGee and Raymond Pettibon are also featured in this issue.
- Matthew Barney will receive the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival, which will run April 21 through May 5. Barney will receive his award on April 30 and also participate in an onstage interview with writer, critic and curator Glen Helfand, just before the North American premiere of Drawing Restraint 17 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.
Letter from London | Grave Architecture
Will Corwin, "The Last Judgement" (2011). Courtesy the artist and George and Jorgen gallery.
There’s a long history of painters becoming architects and carrying their pictorial imaginations with them. Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome and Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence are examples of the painter’s transposition of pictorial approaches – composition, manipulation of light and tone – into an architectural language. Architecture gave back, too, providing painting with a perspectival framework by which to stage its spatial trickery. Painters often become architects, but it’s unusual for the reverse process to occur: however important painting is to the architectural processes of Zaha Hadid and Santiago Calatrava, one can’t imagine them ditching the grand ambition for the small. Will Corwin, a New York-based artist currently on show at George and Jorgen in central London, is a rare example of a trained architect turning to painting. It’s also an object lesson in architecture’s refusal to quit the aesthetic bloodstream, the impossibility of its being flushed out.
Corwin trained as an architect at Princeton and Cornell before turning his attention to painting. Working as an assistant to Sensation-era artist Richard Patterson, he was exposed to the slick painterliness of artists such as Fiona Rae and Gary Hume, and his early paintings engaged with their blend of the gestural and the deadpan. As they progressed, an increasing physicality crept into Corwin’s work: loading concrete and thick plaster onto the surfaces of his paintings, he seemed intent on literally weighing them down. For Corwin, a painting is a thing of the world, not simply in the world, and this preoccupation lent his works the sculptural qualities of immediacy and presentness. Now, in his new show in London, Corwin has followed that trail both forwards and backwards: his paintings have become not sculptural but architectural. It’s a kind of a homecoming.
Cindy Sherman: Characters
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Episode #139: Cindy Sherman reveals how dressing up in character began as a kind of performance and evolved into her earliest photographic series such as “Bus Riders” (1976), “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1980), and the untitled rear screen projections (1980).
In self-reflexive photographs and films, Cindy Sherman invents myriad guises, metamorphosing from Hollywood starlet to clown to society matron. Often with the simplest of means—a camera, a wig, makeup, an outfit—Sherman fashions ambiguous but memorable characters that suggest complex lives lived out of frame. Shermans investigations have a compelling relationship to public images, from kitsch (film stills and centerfolds) to art history (Old Masters and Surrealism) to green-screen technology and the latest advances in digital photography.
Cindy Sherman is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Transformation 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: Ian Forster, Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Cindy Sherman. Video: © 2011, Art21, Inc. All rights reserved.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Support the Art21 Blog: Announcing Blog Party!
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