Maya Kramer, “There Is Nothing You Can Measure Anymore,” 2010. Laundry detergent, black light, pump, vitrine. Courtesy the artist.

I first met Maya Kramer at a dinner party she was hosting at her home in one of the tree-lined compounds of the former French Concession in Shanghai. But it was only after we opened the second bottle of wine that I found out she was an artist.

After completing her MFA in sculpture at Hunter College, Maya worked in the curatorial department of the Guggenheim Museum for three years. She first visited China in 2009, to take up a six-month residency at the now-closed True Color Museum in Suzhou, a privately owned contemporary art and performance venue that had been set up by musical entrepreneur Chen Hanxing. Maya was the first foreign artist to be invited to China for the museum residency, and left her mark with a wishing well installation in a grove of paper trees that whispered random desires through hidden speakers.

The idea of establishing a solo practice in China presented a challenging way of both working and living, but two years on from the residency, she is now happily ensconced in the burgeoning art world of Shanghai. Her art practice is concerned with the environment, often consisting of sculptures made from everyday paper waste. She has since extended into collaborative projects, working with notions of value and exchange.

We spoke a few times in Shanghai about the many differences between America and China, the new types of work being explored in the vast number of galleries and museums opening across the country, and especially about the problems of not speaking the language (she does, while I barely scrape by). When I arrived back in New York recently, I interviewed Maya about her work and what she thinks of the now volatile relations in the art world between China and the USA.

Maya Kramer, “There Is Nothing You Can Measure Anymore,” 2010. Laundry detergent, black light, pump, vitrine. Courtesy the artist.

Maya Kramer, “There Is Nothing You Can Measure Anymore,” 2010. Laundry detergent, black light, pump, vitrine. Courtesy the artist.

Din Heagney: I’m intrigued by There Is Nothing You Can Measure Anymore, a vitrine with a tiger skull made from laundry detergent that dissolves over time as water slowly drips on it. The connections you’ve made between endangered animals, pollution, and museum aesthetics make it a very tight piece.

Maya Kramer: Upon completing this work, I was quite excited as it was one of those rare instances where the result matches with one’s original conception. For a while, I’ve been trying to come to grips with a rapidly deteriorating ecology and our place in the world.  But in the end, I’ve started to see that everything dies and transforms; it’s inescapable and has nothing to do with us.

I wanted to point to this concern for the environment by fusing various symbols, an x-ray (a diagnostic tool used to examine an underlying problem), a tiger skull (an animal nearly extinct), and laundry detergent (an everyday pollutant), and then have all those concerns literally fall apart.

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This week is the sixth installment of Art21 Educators introductions, featuring each of the eight pairs of educators who were chosen to participate in the third year of the program. Last week we featured Todd Elkin and Teri Hu from Fremont, CA. This week we are excited to introduce Samantha Melvin and Kim Timmons.

Samantha Melvin and Kim Timmons live and work in Burnet, Texas. Samantha has been a teacher for seven years, teaching for three years in her current position at RJ Richey Elementary, a campus for fourth and fifth grades.  Kim has been teaching for eleven years, and currently teaches at Burnet High School.  Burnet CISD is a Title 1, medium-sized, rural district northwest of Austin. Kim describes the unique nature of her working relationship with Samantha: “We are the only ones supporting the art programs in our school district . . . [we] only have each other for local support.”  Samantha elaborates, “I am the only art teacher at the elementary level and see only the 4^th and 5^th graders at my campus . . . All the students feed into the same middle and high school. Kim and I meet regularly to discuss our lessons, share ideas, and advocate for our students and our programs at the district, and community level.”

Samantha teaches four art classes per week serving the 390 students at her school. Two of the classes, offered to the majority of the 4^th and 5^th grade students, integrate music into the curriculum, as Samantha also holds the position of music teacher. Samantha teaches a third course – piloted during the 2010-11 school year – to 4^th grade ESL students using Art, Language Arts, and Technology. The fourth course, called E-Time, is designed for high-achieving 5^th graders and integrates Art, Language Arts, Social Studies, and Technology.

As part of the application, we asked Samantha to describe her familiarity with Art21 educational resources. Her response reflects her cross-disciplinary teaching approach, as well as her goal to create a collaborative studio atmosphere for her students:

. . .The resources have been valuable for showing how artists are inspired by the world around them – integrating concepts from history, sociology, science, technology, environmental studies, language and literacy, just as much as they refer to art history, human behavior, values and beliefs. Do-Ho Suh, a featured artist, discusses how his works point out that no one person can create a work on his or her own – there is a collaborative after-effect even if the work is completed by one person. I think his words remind us that by sharing our ideas with others, we grow – through others’ experiences just as much as we do through our own.  That studio approach is what I strive for in my art classroom.

Samantha received grant support from Crayola and the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) for an interdisciplinary unit, helping her purchase LCD Microscopes and jeweler’s loupes to observe specimens in kits and on slides.  She elaborates, “Our theme for the year is ‘Oh, Say Can You See?’ . . . as we have integrated patriotic music in our focus this year as well, we are fully exploring the use of language, symbolism, and our observations in the arts.” Samantha’s video showcases some of the artwork that her students created for this project:

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Şener Özmen with Erkan Özgen, "Tate'e Giden Yol (Road to Tate Modern)," video, 7'13" (still), 2003. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

While preparing to travel to Diyarbakır, the largest city in southeastern Turkey, I discovered that telling Turkish people who live outside of that region that you’re going to visit Diyarbakır is akin to telling an average suburban American you’re going to hang out in an inner city housing project or along the wall dividing Israel and Palestine. Their eyes grow big, there’s a lot of gasping and “ooooh”ing, and they ask you, incredulously, “why would you want to go to Diyarbakır? It’s very dangerous there, you know.” Some treated it a bit like I was going on safari–a worthwhile, possibly exotic and educational, endeavor, as long as I had the proper guidance–and protection. Because Diyarbakır is not only the largest city in southeastern Turkey but also the capital of Kurdish culture in Turkey and the epicenter of a significant amount of violence throughout the 1980s and 1990s, inevitably the news of my travels sparked conversation about “the Kurdish question”–that is, the question of what freedoms and rights ethnic Kurds living in Turkey should be granted. For example, since the founding of the Republic, teaching Kurdish in schools and printing or broadcasting media in Kurdish has been outlawed, and celebration of Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, was forbidden. In the past five years some of these restrictions have been eased, but the subject remains controversial, with many über-nationalistic Turks remaining opposed to the reforms.

So why would I want to travel to Diyarbakır? The art scene in Turkey is famously concentrated in Istanbul–what interest could a formally war-torn and politically unstable region of the country hold for a yabancı (foreigner)? In fact, Diyarbakır has produced some of the most active, intelligent, and influential figures in contemporary Turkish art. These would include artist and curator Halil Altındere, Berat Isik, Ahmet Öğüt (who, along with Banu Cennetoğlu, represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009) as well as Suat Öğüt and Mehmet Öğüt, Erkan Özgen, and Cengiz Tekin. (Fikret Atay, another well-known Kurdish artist, actually hails from Batman, a smaller city located about two hours from Diyarbakır.) All of these artists have exhibited extensively both throughout Turkey and internationally. But the godfather of the Diyarbakır art community is undoubtedly Şener Özmen. For the past twenty years, Özmen has worked not only as an artist but also as a poet, art critic, translator, and teacher. He collaborates constantly with his fellow Diyarbakır-based artists, has nurtured a new generation of artists, produces texts for exhibition catalogues, designs covers for Lîs Publishing (a prominent Kurdish language publishing house based in Diyarbakır), writes fiction and poetry, and supports the work of the Diyarbakır Arts Centre. In an essay included in the recently published monograph A Sener Ozmen Book, critic Süreyyya Evren describes him as “an artist who cannot relax.” When I visited Diyarbakır, I was honored that Özmen took the time from his busy professional and personal life (he is also a father and husband) to serve, along with Cengiz Tekin, as an attentive and wildly entertaining host. At one point, while we were riding a dolmuş (mini-bus) from Diyarbakır to have breakfast at Hasankeyf, a historical site located on the Tigris River (which, sadly, is likely to be destroyed in the near future by a hydroelectric dam project), Özmen casually remarked that this was the first day off from work that he had ever taken. It sounds like hyperbole, but given his extraordinary output, I am inclined to believe this was true.

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On this month’s episode of Fielding Practice, Bad at Sports’ co-founder Richard Holland joins Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn and Ime for our regular roundtable discussion about art, culture, and related happenings in Chicago. Duncan provides a brief report on this year’s  Open Engagement, an annual conference addressing current issues in art and social practice; and we discuss the current survey of William J. O’Brien’s ceramic sculptures at The Renaissance Society (May 15-June 26, 2011). The discussion is a little more rowdy than usual, so hang on and hang in there and as always, thanks so much for listening!

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It’s a momentous Monday here at Art21. Following Maren Miller’s thoughtful introduction of our newest documentary series, New York Close Up, last week, we are thrilled to present you with the very first episodes. Kicking off the project are films with the artists Shana Moulton (b. 1976, Oakhurst, California, USA; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) and Kalup Linzy (b. 1977, Clermont, Florida, USA;  lives and works in Brooklyn, New York).

A Brief History of Shana Moulton & Whispering Pines

Should an artist separate herself from the character she creates? In this film, artist Shana Moulton traces the development of her ongoing video and performance series Whispering Pines and its central protagonist Cynthia. Shana charts the various ways in which fiction and autobiography meld and diverge in the character of Cynthia, played by the artist herself. The title of the series is an homage to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and adopts the name of Shana’s childhood home: a trailer park for seniors near Yosemite, California. Featuring video and music from several episodes of Whispering Pines—a mix of live action, computer animation, and original songs by Jacob Ciocci and Nick Hallett.

On making the film, New York Close Up co-creator and producer Nick Ravich writes, “Shana Moulton, in shape-shifter Shana fashion, showed up to her interview with two outfits—and she wanted to wear both. Switching clothing, in the middle of an interview and with all the possible continuity headaches that it entails, is an absolute no-no in documentary production.” Visit the project’s website to hear what happened.

CREDITS | New York Close Up Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Cinematography: Andrew David Watson. Additional Camera: Don Edler & John Marton. Key Grip: John Marton. Sound: Nicholas Lindner. Associate Producer: Ian Forster. Production Assistant: Paulina V. Ahlstrom, Don Edler & Maren Miller. Design: Open. Artwork: Shana Moulton. Additional Photography: Shana Moulton. Music: Jacob Ciocci & Nick Hallett. An Art21 Workshop Production. © Art21, Inc. 2011. All rights reserved.

Kalup Linzy & James Franco, That’s Entertainment!

What’s the difference between art and entertainment? In this film, artist Kalup Linzy prepares for his debut performance as Kalup & Franco—a performance art music-based collaboration with the actor James Franco—at Rob Pruitt’s 2010 Art Awards at Webster Hall in the East Village. Kalup & Franco are the closing act for a Hollywood-style awards show where celebrity and contemporary art merge in ambiguous ways. Featuring excerpts of Linzy’s original songs Chewing Gum, Hot Mess, and Asshole, along with cameos by artists Marina Abramovic, John Currin, Rachel Feinstein, Mary Heilmann, Marilyn Minter, and Rob Pruitt; curators Klaus Biesenbach and Tom Eccles; dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn; and critic Jerry Saltz.

About the film, New York Close Up co-creator and producer Wesley Miller writes, “This film is in many ways a study in contrast: between private and public moments, being a solo artist and forming a group, the shrinking divide of the art world and celebrity culture, and Kalup’s purposefully lo-fi performance style at a glitzy event. We aimed to preserve the overall surreal quality of the day as well as convey the tension of how it feels to try something new, on a big stage, when the stakes for a young artist are so high.” Visit the project’s website to hear more behind-the-scenes takes.

Kalup & Franco’s debut EP titled Turn It Up, co-produced by DJ /rupture, is due out July 12th, 2011 on the label Dutty Artz.

CREDITS | New York Close Up Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Cinematography: Rafael Moreno Salazar, Andrew David Watson & Ava Wiland. Additional Camera: Don Edler & John Marton. Key Grip: John Marton. Sound: Ian Forster, Nicholas Lindner & Ava Wiland. Associate Producer: Ian Forster. Production Assistant: Paulina V. Ahlstrom, Don Edler & Maren Miller. Design: Open. Artwork: Kalup Linzy & James Franco. Music: The 2010 Art Awards Band. Thanks: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bronwyn Keenan, Natural Health, NYC Taxi, Glenn O’Brien, Kangmei Pan, Rob Pruitt, Rob Pruitt’s 2010 Art Awards, Lauren Van Natten, Webster Hall & White Columns. An Art21 Workshop Production. © Art21, Inc. 2011. All rights reserved.

Stay tuned for additional episodes of New York Close Up throughout the month. Up next are films with LaToya Ruby Frazier and Mika Tajima this coming Friday, June 17th. For more information on the series, visit the project’s website.

Also, if you are in NYC, join us at the launch party next Thursday, June 23, at 7 p.m. Liberty Hall at the Ace Hotel 20 W. 29th Street, New York, NY. Register now.

As part of the exhibition Dwellings at the Surrey Art Gallery, Sitely Premises is a group show of works by artists who have examined the exterior of Lower Mainland residential spaces (facades, backyards etc.) over the last five decades. Sitely Premises is inspired by “unsightly premises” by-laws which enforce codes of cleanliness and orderliness on domestic properties across municipalities in Canada. Walking through this exhibition is like watching a brief biographical-documentary; new and interesting things are learned about a previously run-of-the-mill (or so you thought) character in a way that writes history forward. You appreciate the subject – in this case, Vancouver via “residential art” – more than you did at the start. The works featured in Dwellings breathe new perspective into Metro Vancouver – a city where public art often makes people think of landscapey or decorative sculpture on condo or highrise grounds rather than critical work done on residential space and which is meant to incite discourse.

Deborah Koenker and Roberto Pacheco, “Cherry Tree Project,” 1987. Courtesy Surrey Art Gallery.

Sitely Premises includes documentation of artists Deborah Koenker and Roberto Pacheco’s 1987, site-specific “Cherry Tree Project” – an elevated structure that connected three neighboring Vancouver gardens surrounding the trunk of a cherry tree – allowed visitors to walk a kind of viewing deck across and through private yards. “Cherry Tree” reveals the exterior of one’s home as dwelling also, and by inhabiting outdoor space as place for production and exhibition of art, the artists transgress notions of trespassing. Similarly, for Kara Uzelman’s “Backyard Dig,” the artist invited people to partake in an archeological dig of her backyard; the findings are presented as a cabinet of objets trouvés.

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Kalup and Franco, "Turn It Up" EP, 2011. Courtesy Dutty Artz.

In this week’s roundup, NYCU’s Kalup Linzy teams up with James Franco, Barry McGee is featured, Trenton Doyle Hancock does all he can in Atlanta, Shahzia Sikander pays a tribute to a sultan, and more.

• New York Close Up (NYCU) artist Kalup Linzy is teaming up with actor/performer James Franco to form a duo called Kalup and Franco and the pair has an EP coming out. The EP, “Turn It Up,” will feature two songs, “Turn It Up (So We Can Turn It Out)” and “Rising (Both Sides Now),” and will be available as a digital download and as a limited edition” on July 12.  They’ll release their debut EP Turn It Up on Dutty Artz.  Here’s a preview of the collaboration.

• Barry McGee is featured in Street, 2011, a video for MOCA LA documenting Art In the Streets. Filmmaker Felipe Lima directed this piece and the full roster who helped build the installation are Todd James, Barry McGee, Stephen Powers, Devin Flynn, Josh Lazcano, Dan Murphy, and Alexis Ross.

• Fisher Landau Center for Art (New York) is pleased to announce LEGACY: Selections from Emily Fisher Landau’s Gift to the Whitney Museum of American Art, on view from June 12 – September 12, 2011.  This exhibition highlights 86 artists who have shaped the course of American Art, including John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Martin Puryear, Susan Rothenberg and Kiki Smith.

• New York Close Up (NYCU) artist Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines series was recently screened at The Black Lodge which is part of the Winnipeg Film Group in Canada.  Check out this video.

• National Black Arts Festival (NBAF) is partnering with Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Atlanta, GA to present Trenton Doyle Hancock: WE DONE ALL WE COULD AND NONE OF IT’S GOOD.  The exhibition by Hancock will present a spectrum of works executed across a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture, and print.  The show will run from June 27 – August 28.

• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts which includes the work of Sadegh Tirafkan, Shahzia Sikander, and Ahmed Mater. These three artists have been commissioned to produce new work interpreting the theme of Gifts of the Sultan.  Following its presentation at LACMA (June 5 – September 5, 2011), Gifts of the Sultan travels to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (October 23, 2011 – January 15, 2012).

New media artist Nick Briz has defined a “new media one-liner” this way:

The new media one-liner is a sub-genre of new media art. Enthusiasts and practitioners of the new media one-liner are drawn to the practice by its “reference-pleasure.” Reference-pleasure refers to the satisfaction one receives from experiencing a new media one-liner whose “one-line” is a reference to some aspect of either Internet/digital culture or media arts history/critical theory. These are usually puns or humorous “digitizations” of other artworks/practices. This can be a play on words, for example, switching, in a title of a work, the name of the Frankfurt school critical theorist/philosopher “Adorno” with the open-source hardware/software platform “Arduino.” New media one-liners are often these kinds of conceptual jokes which could exist simply as a title or thought but are often executed works of new media art. The new media one-liner can be fully appreciated at surface level in the instant of the encounter but is often the site for extraneous discussions/digressions for artists and critics alike.

I thought of this when I saw that Cory Arcangel had programmed the 1989 comedy Weekend at Bernie’s in conjunction with his exhibition at The Whitney. From the program notes for the event:

Known as one of the classic comedies of the 1980s, Weekend at Bernie’s tells the story of two junior insurance agents who—after discovering fraud at their agency—find themselves in the midst of a mafia murder plot. When they arrive at their boss’s swanky summer home only to discover him dead, they decide to conceal his murder in order to protect themselves. The movie is a classic example of the “high concept” genre of cinema, in which the hook or plot of the movie can be summed up in a sentence, or even the title—a structure mirrored in the work of Cory Arcangel.

Arcangel has become kind of the king of the new media one-liner.

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Barbara Kruger, "The Globe Shrinks," 2010, video installation. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com, Courtesy L&M Arts.

In 2008, when Eli Broad opened his big, brazen inaugural BCAM show on the Los Angeles County Museum’s Campus, Barbara Kruger (Season 1) was shafted, stuck accenting an elevator while all the boys—Rauschenberg, Twombly, Koons—strutted in main galleries. Not only that; the elevator that traveled up and down the shaft plastered with Kruger’s bold red, white, and black graphics was faulty. It had been faltering before the exhibition even opened, and then, a few months in, the museum shut it down altogether to stop it from stalling. Finally, in June, it reopened with a new piston.

Beady eyes crown Kruger’s 86-foot tall Untitled (Shaft), and then a string of consumer products spelled out in white capital letters descend: MOISTURIZER, COMPUTER, SNEAKERS, SWEATERS. “Plenty should be enough—right?” reads the red strip in the middle, and text on the side explains, “This work is about the frame and the confines…, the edge and a peripheral locator.”

Barbara Kruger, "Untitled (Shafted)," 2008. In the elevator shaft at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA.

Located on peripheries, Kruger’s brazen bright epitaphs shine brightest—in Art21’s first season, she wasn’t featured in a conventional segment but instead popped in and out smartly between clips. In the shaft, her one-liners have punch, and she soars as the reformed copywriter that she is, an artist who knows how to catch your eye in the instant. But there’s never been much meatiness or ambiguity to her message.

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Allora & Calzadilla, installation of "Track and Field," 2011. © All rights reserved by IMA - Indianapolis Museum of Art

Walking into the Venice Biennale is like traversing into an art-induced headlock set in a labyrinthian wonderland. Slather on enough Vaperetto excursions and optical trickery, and you’ve got a fabricated case of vertigo. Upping the ante are the sumptuous parties and enough celeb sightings to make LA look dull. Want Courtney Love to cuddle with another grunge rock boy, this time Salem style? Head to the Brauer and you’ve got it. Need a mega-sized yacht owned by Forbes‘s 53^rd richest man in the world (sorry Abromovich, but this is the 54^th edition), take a walk near the Giardini. This year’s rich ‘n famous lineup was so absurd it looked like Cannes on high-qual crack. As a long-time attendees put it, the Biennale used to be about seeing the exhibition, attending the afterparty, and heading back to the hotel to sleep it off and do it all over again. But this year, unless one had the willpower of a health-conscious pregnant woman or the iron tolerance of an English coal worker, it was a sure thing that full coverage was mitigated by Alka-Seltzer.

Christian Marclay, "The Clock," 2010

Having just clicked the send button on final papers, my attendance to last week’s preview checked out under the pleasure category. So while my strongsuit is probably the gossip (shoes, aristos, amorous journalists, and even hotter artists all trotting around at 4am deliciously inebriated), the recently interpolated student in me is going to abstain from discussing what happened after I fell asleep in front of Christian Marclay’s Golden Lion winning 24-hour film The Clock. For saucier coverage, tune-in to the usual suspects.

Jacopo Tintoretto, "La creazione degli animali" at the Venice Biennale

Back in 2007, Robert Storr curated a highly political biennale, and while this edition’s title, ILLUMInations, may sound like it, Bice Curiger’s edition places little emphasis on titular italicization. Curiger’s exhibition plays it safe, piecing together curating’s current top 40: a high number of strapping young artists born post-1975, artists curating artists, and the inclusion of a very deceased art star, in this case Italian Mannerist painter Jacopo Tintoretto.

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