Weekly Roundup
Barbara Kruger's art on a truck for "America: Here and Now," 2011. (Julia Botero/WNYC)
In this week’s roundup, Barbara Kruger on an 18-wheeler, Cao Fei presents on art and technology, artists receive awards, and more.
- Barbara Kruger is one of the 150 artists, poets, musicians, writers, filmmakers and actors who created work for America: Here and Now, a traveling exhibition that includes 18-wheeler truck-art project by Kruger. Artwork by Laurie Anderson and Kiki Smith are also in the show.
- Cao Fei is part Seven on Seven, a conference that will feature presentations by seven teams, each comprised of one artist and one technologist, who will share a new idea they have developed while working in collaboration over the course of a single day. The conference is organized by Rhizome and an affiliate of the New Museum in New York. The event will take place on May 14, 2011 from 1–6pm at the New Museum (NYC).
- Sarah Lawrence College alum Janine Antoni was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and she was selected from 3,000 applicants on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise.
- Fred Wilson was honored at the 2011 Brooklyn Artists Ball held last week at The Brooklyn Museum (NY) for his influence in the field of visual arts.
- Ursula von Rydingsvard was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture for her outstanding service to artists and the arts. This year, Ms. von Rydingsvard will be honored along with Mark Bradford and a few others.
- Mark your calendars. Laurie Simmons‘s next exhibition will take place at Wilkinson (London) June 10 – July 10.
Diane Victor (South African, born 1964), “Fading Man I,” 2010. Intaglio. Plate: 20”x16”. Publisher and printer: Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT. Edition 25. Courtesy Center for Contemporary Printmaking. © 2011 Diane Victor.
As interest in William Kentridge’s work has grown over the past decade, so has interest in South African art as a whole. Printmaking is a central component of the cultural landscape in this country and it is an important form of expression for many of its artists. In general, South African printmaking is characterized by political and emotional honesty and a refreshing fidelity to the technical roots of the medium. Kentridge, of course, is a prolific printmaker (see the November 2010 post of this column), as are Conrad Botes, Norman Catherine, Robert Hodgins, Anton Kannemeyer, Cameron Platter, Claudette Schreuders, Diane Victor, and Ernestine White, to name a few. The work of these and other artists, who are well known in their homeland, have begun to garner increased attention in the U.S. recently, appearing in art fairs and featured in solo exhibitions at major galleries and museums.
Several exhibitions this year have introduced a wider American audience to the vital printmaking scene in South Africa. Most visible and comprehensive among these is Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now, a group exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art on view through August 14. Earlier this spring, Boston University hosted dual exhibitions in honor of the 25th anniversary of Caversham Press, the first professional printmaking workshop in South Africa. At the same time, the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa, launched the first major solo exhibition of Diane Victor’s work in this country – an auspicious introduction to this important artist who is becoming better known to an international audience. In March and early April, David Krut Projects mounted “Contemporary South African Prints: DKW and I-Jusi,” a retrospective of I-Jusi magazine (an underground art ‘zine dedicated to South African identity and politics, founded in 1994), and David Krut Workshop, a professional printmaking studio established in Johannesburg in 2002. Later this fall, Jack Shainman Gallery will host a solo exhibition of Anton Kannemeyer’s work.
The MoMA exhibition now on view provides “a representative, quality cross-section of contemporary printmaking activities in South Africa over the last five decades,” as described by exhibition curator Judith Hecker, Assistant Curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books in a recent e-mail interview with the author. Drawn from the museum’s collection, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue provide critical insight to role of printmaking in South African culture and politics, presented in terms of the country’s recent massive political changes from an apartheid-ruled state to an evolving democracy. In addition to a scholarly essay by Hecker, the accompanying catalogue provides further information and bibliographic citations on each of the artists, collectives, organizations, and workshops represented. It also includes contextualizing photographs and a timeline of printmaking, cultural, and political events.
The exhibition was inspired by Hecker’s previous work with William Kentridge’s prints (she contributed to the recent traveling exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes and authored a related publication titled William Kentridge: Trace; Prints from the Museum of Modern Art) and prompted by a curatorial initiative to “expand the museum’s holdings to better represent the breadth of printmaking activities in South Africa” (Hecker in a recent e-mail interview with the author). The first South African artist to enter the print collection was Azaria Mbatha in 1967 but he was the sole representative until the department began to acquire Kentridge’s work in earnest in the 1990s. Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now (and the museum’s holdings) were developed over a period of six years; in preparation, Hecker traveled to South Africa for extended periods in 2004 and 2007. As noted in her introduction, this is not the first scholarly examination of the topic (preceded by Printmaking in a Transforming South Africa, 1997, and Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints; Twenty Years of Printmaking in South Africa, 2004, both by Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin). However, it is the first to be made widely available to a U.S. and international audience, by virtue of MoMA’s visitorship and following.
The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are divided into five categories, four of which are technique-based – the final category, Postapartheid: New Directions, shows the openness and experimentation that characterizes recent print production. Due to the nature of the exhibition, artists are generally represented by only one or a handful of works – therefore, it is best understood as a starting point for exploration. In Hecker’s words, “The show, and our holdings, do not aim to be complete or definitive… it reflects a work in progress; we plan to continue to acquire works by South African artists” (e-mail interview).
The first section focuses on the favored status of linocut amongst South African artists, a tradition that began during apartheid. As discussed by Hecker, its ease of use, affordability, and accessibility made it a natural choice for the community workshops and non-profit art schools that served black artists, who were attracted to its stark graphic power. Early practitioners included Azaria Mbatha, John Muafangejo, Dan Rkogoathe, and Charles Nkosi, many of whom were involved in the Black Consciousness Movement founded by Steve Biko. Their work centered around “themes of ancestry, religion, and liberation” (Hecker, Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011], 12).
In the early 1990s, the country moved through intense political protest and international political pressure into a peaceable – though contentious – conversion to a democratic nation. Meeting of Two Cultures (1993), a linocut by Sandile Goje, summarizes the spirit of reconciliation that characterized this period. The image shows two biomorphic homes shaking hands: the structure on the left is in the style of the Xhosa people (who were the original inhabitants of the area), at right is a home characteristic of the European ruling class. The linocut section of the exhibition also includes recent prints of stunning technical achievement by William Kentridge, Vuyile C. Voyiya, Cameron Platter, and others. These are less intensely political in their subject matter, though still grounded in the recent history of the nation.
Sustain Ability
John Baldessari, "Solving Each Problem As It Arises," acrylic on canvas, 1967. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.
Thoughts, to an artist, writer, or any individual who wants to live thoughtfully
Influence. The personal narration that comes with cinematic fiction, the fragmentary staccato of poetry or song, the conversational conventions following television drama or the full frontal cynicism of network comedy. What will you fill your head with this day? Patterns of influence easily sketched, I have waded through the mire, the hyper-linked adaptation. An associative amalgam of anything and all: I am a glut for
Stimulus. Fill my head with points of interest in the hope that some how, some day there will exist a pellet of information I can call my own. Maybe it will sell for thousands, accrue a million hits, even be given an ISBN number in countless closed libraries city wide
Inspiration. I despise the word, rather: where does creativity come from? Influence. Doubt. Every thought followed immediately by its opposite. Delete a phrase before
Doubt dispelled. No new emails. Literary devices aside a blinking black line. I am alone and free to pace my apartment. Television set less
Life-style. The availability of the available. When all questions answered the impulse to ask
Decreases. The duality of discourse.
Community. Creative community. The influence that comes from thoughtful individuals living together, thoughtfully. Go to a school or job, swim around an art world, form a collective or organize an exhibition. The events of interest in the places of myth. If it does not exist, make it. Find the like minded &
Explosion. Utopic pockets of creative professionals. That is how to write it. Live it. Forgetting what unifies artists is their individuality. The complexities of the interior the intricacies of intimate life. Alienation accompanies being your self all the time
Transgress expectation. Habit & happenstance. Let go. Make a life fit for you. Doubt dispelled. No new emails. Literary devices aside a blinking black line. I am alone and free to pace my apartment. Television set less
Kota Ezawa, "City of Nature" (2011). Video still. Courtesy the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy
Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010) opens with a slow-motion shot of waves washing upon a sandy beach. The camera then pans to the protagonist Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, lying face down in the sand, his body limp as the waves surge and retreat around him. This beach, we soon learn, is in fact an artificial construction. Cobb, we come to find out, has purposely entered this dream space in order to retrieve a friend, Saito, who has forgotten that he is lost in his dream—a fantasy space that seems so seductively real that in it a person might lose their sense of reality and become stuck. As we come to find out in the course of Nolan’s mind-bending film, rescue from this dream state hinges on somehow being able to establish that what is perceived to be reality is in fact little more than a figment of the subconscious. The question Inception poses but never fully resolves is whether these attempts to return to the real world are ever actually achieved and, more importantly, if in the end it even really matters.
I offer these brief remarks on Inception as a way to introduce Kota Ezawa’s video City of Nature (2011)—a video installation in which the artist has spliced together shots from over twenty different films—for two reasons; first, because the blurring of the distinction between the real and the imaginary is in many ways the subject of Ezawa’s latest work, and second because there is in City of Nature a shot of waves washing upon the shore that seems to have been appropriated from Inception’s opening sequence. And befitting the question posed by Inception, City of Nature asks the viewer not whether they can identify all of the different films from which Ezawa has appropriated his imagery but, more importantly, if in the end identifying the exact sources really even matters.
Kota Ezawa, "City of Nature" (2011). Video still. Courtesy the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
City of Nature is a video commissioned by Madison Square Arts and currently on view in Madison Square Park in Manhattan, comprised of imagery appropriated by Ezawa from such feature-length films as Twin Peaks, Late Spring, Deliverance, Fitzcarraldo, Brokeback Mountain, Lord of the Flies and Jaws. As some of these film titles might suggest, each of the seventy scenes that make up City of Nature’s six-minute video is taken from a movie in which nature plays a significant role in the overall narrative. Employing freehand and vector-based, digitally assisted techniques, Ezawa animates these scenes of nature frame by frame, reducing the culled source material to graphically simplified, stylized forms that gives the original film footage a cartoon-like appearance. The resulting video montage of vividly colored, animated sequences plays in a continuous loop on four flat-screen monitors placed outside in the south end of the park. As each brief snippet of film (some merely a few seconds in duration) gives way to the next at a brisk pace, the images flashing across the monitors seem quite familiar—a shot of the full moon rising over trees, a majestic mountaintop, an idyllic waterfall, and of course waves washing upon a shoreline. By stripping these nature scenes of all narrative and reducing the imagery to flattened, two-dimensional forms, Ezawa focuses the viewer’s attention away from the specific source material and onto these tropes and motifs—clichés really—that repeatedly structure the visual representation of nature in our popular media.
Blog Party: The Last 8 Days
Hello, May! We’re heading into the last week and a half of our Blog Party campaign. To date, we’ve received enough donations to fund a new column for six months. We’d love to fund it for an entire year.
Got $10? Over 50,000 of you read our blog every month. If 500 donors (that’s 1%) give, we will reach our year-end goal of paying all our writers. Please be part of the generous 1% percent!
- 6 donations of $50 will fund the other half of a new column
- 50 donations of $50 will pay for a year of guest blogging
- 50 donations of $50 will pay for a year of the Lives and Works in Berlin column
- 100 donations of $50 will pay for a year’s worth of Open Enrollment posts written by graduate students
Join the Blog Party and support arts writing! Donate here.
Teaching with Contemporary Art: The First Three Years
This week Teaching with Contemporary Art here on the blog turns 3. Frankly, I can’t believe that I’ve been writing this column for three years. At the same time, it has flown by much like academic years often do.
To celebrate I want to share some of my favorite posts from the first three years (I say the first three because if I keep from screwing things up maybe there will be another three). Links to each are provided.
A few months after beginning the column, Mining Ideas was published and began the conversation about ways of utilizing sketchbooks in the classroom. Then In-Progress initiated what would be multiple visits to the notion of in-progress critiques.
After only a few months on the job, the powers that be were crazy enough to allow me to interview Eleanor Antin for a two-part post titled Myths, Metaphors and More. Part 1 looked into how Eleanor prepares for exhibits and handles the occasional label of being “controversial”, while part 2 discussed how she uses allegory in order to slow viewers down and really see her work.
A particularly cranky but timely post, What is an Art Contest?, zoomed in on contests without criteria and It Takes Two… or Two Hundred examined how artists today rely increasingly on others in order to realize their work.
Right around TwCA’s first birthday the post Make Less Art asked readers to think about what a quality art curriculum looks and sounds like beyond the production of objects. A few months later one of my favorite posts, …. and the Not-So-Powerful, allowed me to begin sharing stories about learning experiences related to things that haven’t gone so well in my own classroom.
Where Am I? outlined some specific strategies for starting the school year and If the Shoe Fits, Pay For It zoomed in on the (still) timely report by the Center for Arts Education regarding the state of affairs in New York City schools.
My second blog interview turned out to be another surprise, pleasure, and blockbuster for the column. Janine Antoni and I spent about an hour talking about teaching, finding a balance between being an artist and a parent, as well as discussing her most recent exhibit at Luhring Augustine. Part 1 and part 2 are posted separately. Check it out!
Interview number three presented Esopus editor Tod Lippy, who discussed his magazine-as-art and his relationship with education and educators.
For TwCA’s second birthday I wrote the post Better Than Ketchup and Vaseline, which shared the dangers of teaching with film without previewing beforehand. The column also offered some simple steps to take in order to prepare students for complex and easily misinterpreted works.
Which brings us to year three…
Open Enrollment | The Art of Close Looking
I can go on my own to a museum or gallery or symposium, and I do, but going as a part of one of my classes makes me more appreciative of where (and what) I’ve chosen to study. London offers a bevy of opportunities for “in the field” study of art history, and the museums, galleries, and conferences of mainland Europe are just a cheap Eurostar or EasyJet ticket away. Plus, there’s something about going somewhere under the guise of a “field trip” that makes it that much more exciting. Hearing my professors’ and classmates’ thoughts outside of the impersonal setting of the classroom can energize my interest in a work I might have otherwise ignored or impart new perspective on something I may have been taking for granted.
In February, one of my courses went on a field trip to Paris. In three days, we went to at least twice as many museums, but that first day we only spent time at the Louvre. The eight miles of gallery space at the Louvre is a well-known fact, so you might imagine we’d look at a lot in five hours. However, I don’t think we looked at more than seven paintings as a group. We spent an hour in front of David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women, picking out the two-inch square that best represented the painting as a whole. The painting is a bustle of figures and activity, a not inconsiderable amount to take in and examine, but close consideration of the work really drew out its details in sharp relief.
We spent two hours in one room of the Mondrian show at the Pompidou. How had I never noticed the little gaps and interruptions in the logic of Mondrian's grids before?
The exercise may sound fairly elementary – looking deeply and closely at a painting or any artwork for art historical study is a given – but I think it is an easy lesson to forget or neglect. Museum fatigue can sometimes make my visits to a large exhibition feel like I’m there as a hobby, that anything my glance hits can be haphazardly checked off some unwritten list of important things to see. Close looking, as my professor calls it, really encourages you to explore the artwork, question what it is, and not just take it at face value. It was another large chunk of time in front of Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers, before a friend spotted a watch amongst the chintz in the fictional harem, a surprise to everyone, including the professors who had discussed the painting throughout their careers. I began to wonder how much I might have missed in the past, how much I might never see in any one work.
Open Enrollment | He’s Not Here Right Now
Hi Everyone! My name is Olivia and I’m Jeffrey’s imaginary studio assistant. Unfortunately, Jeffrey isn’t here right now because he’s running around the city preparing for his thesis exhibition, but he’s left me with a few bullet points to go over in this blog post. I’m a fabulous writer, a wiz with Photoshop, and I can hold a conversation at a gallery reception without three glasses of wine (which is why he hired me, but I’m also really pretty and I think he has a crush on my brother) so I’ll be sure to keep the essence of his writing intact.
Jeffrey Augustine Songco, "blindfold and McDowell bat in locked case." Courtesy the artist.
All across the country, MFA candidates are in the same boat and prepping for the annual Thesis Exhibition Season. Just in the San Francisco Bay Area, some schools participating in the season are SFAI, California College of the Arts, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Mills College. With programs ranging from the very small to the very big, one can’t forget that buried underneath the hoopla of an art show and the promotion for each academic institution’s pedagogy, there lies an anxious student-artist trying to make sense of the past, the future, and the now.
Bedfellows | Hungry in San Francisco
The news of burritos available online sends office workers into a frenzy in this ad from Grubhub.com. Photo by author.
One hundred feet below the Starbucks and suits of San Francisco’s financial district, Grubhub.com’s posters beckon from the BART station walls. The online food delivery service offers every kind of cuisine, from hamburgers to filet mignon. But its ads, placed in the city’s train stations and on its buses, broadcast the availability of only three foods: burritos, pizza, and sushi—all handheld, portable, and associated with a distinct ethnic group.
What do we seek when we pursue dining experiences that serve ethnicity alongside entrées? Feminist scholar bell hooks writes that, “within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”). When ethnic difference becomes a commodity, hooks argues, it can be purchased, consumed, and deactivated. Nuanced legacies of multiethnic interaction get overlooked in favor of decontextualized food items whose consumption diners mistake for an authentic cultural exchange.
Map of San Francisco and its public transportation routes. Source: Sfmta.com.
In their merging of public transportation, ethnicity, and food, Grubhub’s ads offer an abbreviated version of an everyday San Francisco experience. The city’s thirty-plus neighborhoods are often delineated along ethnic, as well as cultural and geographic, lines. Public transportation facilitates travel among these enclaves, many of which are associated with a type of ethnic food.
For example: You take the 38 Geary to the Richmond for pho, the 22 Fillmore to the Mission for mole burritos. The 1 California takes you through Chinatown, where you can get cheap dim sum. Grubhub provides one slice of this experience—food—offering weary train and bus riders the opportunity to stay home and order with just a computerized click. But staying home misses the point: there’s a conversation going on between San Francisco’s neighborhoods and its food, and in that dialogue’s rhythms and silences are revelations about the meals on our plates and the city around us.
Letter from London | Seeds of Discord
Ai Weiwei, "Study in Perspective: Forbidden City," 1995
When an artist dies, their work changes forever. Whatever it was they were doing at the time of their demise becomes loaded with retroactive meaning and spurious clairvoyance. With the exception of works knowingly produced in the inverted shadow of suicide – Rothko’s hyper-bleak late-60s moonscapes, almost anything on In Utero – most “late works” (in Edward Said’s famous designation) aren’t made with the intention of providing a tragic coda to a life lived publicly, but can’t help but acquire new meaning by virtue of their proximity to death. Painting especially does this: looking at Titian’s astounding Pieta, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1575 and completed by an assistant, it’s almost impossible not to be moved by the thought of the artist’s plague-crabbed fingers dragging pigment across the corpse of Christ. Even Duchamp’s Etant Donnes, designed in secret while the artist had nominally quit art to concentrate on chess, manages to acquire a funereal resonance in its evocation of a tomb (perhaps even The Tomb). David Foster Wallace’s recently published posthumous novel The Pale King will, as I write, be being scoured for allusions to his 2008 suicide, as though his life were lived backwards. In effect, all these efforts are part of the perennial human project to find meaning and pattern in the messy, unmanageable stuff of human existence.
Gustave Courbet, "Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate," 1871-2, The National Gallery, London.
When an artist is imprisoned, his or her work changes too. When Gustave Courbet was incarcerated in 1871 under a questionable accusation of involvement in violence during the Paris Commune, he produced a small body of paintings necessarily reduced in scale from his better-known works of the 1850s. A small still-life in the National Gallery, made while Courbet was in Sainte-Pelagie prison in Paris, develops an additional layer of meaning in the context of the solitude and melancholy of the prison cell (although the fact he managed to sneak in paints and canvas suggests it wasn’t quite Guantanamo). The minutely detailed phantasmagorias of paranoid schizophrenic Richard Dadd, painted while committed to Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, acquire most of their powerful charge from the viewer’s awareness of their provenance. And now Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, on display today for the last time at Tate Modern, joins that list. There’s no need to recapitulate the details of Ai’s detention by the Chinese authorities in Beijing (read Michelle Jubin’s excellent analysis here), but it is worth returning to Sunflower Seeds to consider art’s transformative powers, its ability to remake itself.
