William Kentridge, "Felix in Exile," 1994. Production stills; 35mm animated film transferred to video. Copyright and courtesy of William Kentridge.

This past Saturday I sat down with a small group of wonderful teachers at the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Media Arts Lab for the second part of a two-part workshop on teaching with William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible (WKAIP). The group was composed of Art and English teachers who shared their successes and challenges working with the film in middle and high school settings, and I was thrilled to hear teachers reflect so honestly about what was inspiring (and difficult) about teaching with this film, particularly with regard to play and process. Below are some excerpts from the conversation:

“Usually when I prepare an assignment for my students I’m very goal-oriented. I know what the end product will be like. I give them a lot of rules and a framework for them to create. But after viewing this film, he (Kentridge) kept talking about process and how it was about the process, as if he wasn’t sure what the end product would be sometimes. So I tried to open myself up and not try to be Miss Art Dictator about what I wanted. I tried to get a feeling from them about what they wanted to create. That was a real challenge for me… to let go.” –Patty Tyrol, Newburgh High School

“Ultimately, the film was really inspiring to me and I created projects that I wouldn’t have had the nerve to try. The guide was really helpful and I really focused on play and process.”- Angela Langston, Sleepy Hollow High School

“I wanted them to see the transformation of the charcoal drawings… and the one thing that I wanted to share was the seriousness of play.”- Debra Tampone, Kingston High School

“I think it’s really interesting to hear about getting play into the classroom… so we do a lot of play, and experiment, and try to see what comes from it with the computer and the video camera.” –Brady Shoemaker, Media Arts Lab at Jacob Burns Film Center

“(Kentridge) is the anti-hero that Huck (Finn) is… I really like this to explain how the metaphor of movement is the journey itself and you really don’t know what the end is.”- Janet Matthews, Westlake High School

If you have taught with WKAIP, or have previewed the film for future units of study, what kinds of experiences can you share? Please post your comments.

To view the film simply click here. Many thanks!

This week, we introduce the fifth pair of Art21 Educators, Todd Elkin and Teri Hu, hailing from the Bay Area in Northern California.  Last week, we featured Jeannine Bardo and Mary Curry from Brooklyn, NY. Please stay tuned for three more posts in the next three weeks. These will introduce the remaining pairs of educators who will complete this year’s cohort of Art21 Educators.

Todd Elkin and Teri Hu teach at Washington High School in Fremont, CA. Todd has been teaching there for nine years and currently teaches Art 1 & 2, AP Studio Art, and Narrative Art, a course that he designed and which was adopted by the Fremont Unified School District.  Teri teaches AP English Literature, College Preparatory English, and Creative Writing. She has also taught Journalism, Publications, and Yearbook prior to arriving at Washington High six years ago.

Todd describes his work as an educator over the past years as an endeavor “to mirror contemporary disciplinary artistic practice in the classroom.”  Todd elaborates, “I support students in developing self-motivated artistic inquiry based on their own passions, preoccupations, and concerns . . . my goal as an art teacher is to help students find in themselves the proactive, engaged disposition of contemporary artists and make work that matters to them.” 

Todd designed a unique curricular unit that reflects his ambition to engage his students with contemporary artistic practice and connect that practice to conditions impacting the larger world.  The unit, entitled the “Shelter Project,” is a set of interdisciplinary learning experiences, including the creation of site-specific installations and using recycled materials to create an artwork that doubles as a functioning shelter. Todd expressed his excitement over how his unit has evolved since its first implementation in 2007.  It will now become a collaborative project between two schools in the San Francisco Bay area and one school in Bangalore, India.  Through the Shelter Project, students from these three schools consider what it means to have shelter, the effect of context on art-making, and how artists/students can participate in global conversations about important issues.

In his video biography, Todd shares examples of student artwork and expresses excitement to work with his partner, Teri, on interdisciplinary projects:

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Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare," 1932

In her essay “Certainties and Possibilities,” Janet Malcolm offers a brief genealogy of what she sees as a particularly American form of street photography. Malcolm starts by talking about European photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, and Brassaï, saying that these artists “pluck their pictures from the flux of street life and fix with their small cameras the fleeting moment that no brush or pencil (or even eye, sometimes) is fast enough to seize.”

Cartier-Bresson provides Malcolm with the best illustration of this mode of photography. His thoughts on “the decisive moment” provide further elaboration, this being Cartier-Bresson’s term for what he sought out, the instant at which the photographer can take a perfect picture because the action perfectly summarizes, or somehow metaphorizes, itself. In a somewhat deflating way, Malcolm argues that Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” occurs at the intersection of two events: “when (1) the gesture or expression or relationship or anecdote in question is at its highest peak of intensity, and (2) the picture’s composition achieves (or retains) the appearance of a formal work of art.”

Robert Frank, "Elevator, Miami Beach," 1955

Malcolm then argues that it was Swiss-born Robert Frank, with his book The Americans, who broke this mold of street photography, and for a very specific reason. “Frank’s important discovery… was that you can’t get (2) in this country [America], and you shouldn’t try. This country is too messy and ugly—there are too many cars, signs, billboards, plastic baby strollers, women in pink curlers, garbage bags, high-rise buildings.” A photograph taken in this context cannot obey classical rules of composition, and Frank’s genius, in Malcolm’s system, was to embrace this “disorder” and “vulgarity” and to seek out the highest peaks of intensity by impulse, with a blatant disregard for giving his pictures the appearance of a formal work of art. This lent his photographs an aura of blunt and brutal facticity that has often been imitated and exaggerated, not least by Frank himself in his later Polaroids.

It’s interesting to think of Malcolm’s arguments in the context of globalization. The elements of America that made it immune to the Cartier-Bresson feeling of stolen elegance—particularly cars, signs, and billboards—have metastasized (a process that was already well underway when Malcolm wrote the essay, in 1975). One wonders, too, if the growth of spectacle has impeded the process of searching out Malcolm’s (1). Finding the “highest peak of intensity” of a “gesture or expression or relationship or anecdote” might be difficult in areas where everything is perpetually raised to a high peak of intensity. What would a photographer in Times Square or Shibuya Crossing or Piccadilly Circus look for, exactly? How would she know what was important?

I would argue this is some of what’s at stake in Jon Rafman’s incredible project, “The Nine Eyes of Google Street View.”

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S and B Oriental Curry Powder is the most popular curry powder in Japan and also artist Sita Bhaumik's initials; she took it as a sign. Photo: Onlyfromhawaii.com.

New relationships are often built over food. We sit down to share a bowl of soup together and rise knowing each other better than before. But food’s not just a harbinger of the new; it’s also a pathway to the past. All ingredients, from chai tea to mayonnaise, arrive in our cups and on our plates laden with history. Food carries stories of colonialism and cultural exchange, migrations and regional settlement, and can often invoke overlooked or underrepresented legacies.

Oakland, California, artist Sita Bhaumik describes her practice as “the lovechild of Edward Said and Willy Wonka.” Favoring ingredients like ice cream and curry powder, Bhaumik uses food not only to build connections in the present, but also to investigate social exchanges of the past.

Victoria Gannon: I see a lot of artists using food as a gesture of goodwill, as something that brings people together, but your work highlights differences, rather than commonalities, investigating food as a material rather than simply a means to an end.

Sita Bhaumik: I definitely use the appeal of food and the pleasure of food in my work, but I’m also really aware of how polarizing food can be.

Sita K. Bhaumik, Studio shot of "Curry Table Installation" (close-up), curry, sugar, gold foil from chocolate wrappers, home objects. 2011. Photo: Sita Bhaumik.

Researching curry, I ran into all these complaints online about the smell. I’d never really thought that you could be racist with your other senses, other than your eyes—it’s always reduced to a visual problem—but all of these comments online were talking about, “My neighbor’s house smells like curry; what do I do?” One said, “Help, my neighbor’s house smells like curry,” and the answer was, “Call the INS.” There were other ones that were like, “Oh I bought this couch from this lovely Indian couple, but it smells like curry,” which is a more underhanded way to talk about it.

Before curry, I was obsessed with MSG. A Japanese scientist invented it; he was trying to create something that would make kids want to eat their vegetables. It started in Japan, traveled around, and got to China and other Asian countries. The West discovered it during WWII. American soldiers were leaving their rations behind and picking up Japanese rations because they tasted better. After WWII, the quartermaster general invited corporations to a symposium where he presented this newfound ingredient; Campbell’s was there, and to this day, they use tons of it.

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Tony Tasset, "Judy," 1998. 35mm six second film loop, dimensions variable. Courtesy Leo Koenig Projekte Inc.

For one week only, this Letter from London is from New York — B.S.

Tony Tasset’s Judy, currently on show at the Leo Koenig Projekte Space in Chelsea, New York, is a six-minute 35mm film of the artist’s artist wife, Judy Ledgerwood. Against an out-of-focus backdrop of what might be a rose bush (nodding to Ledgerwood’s own paintings), her head tilted, the subject stares into the camera. Two things happen in sequence: she smiles, very slightly, and a small inverted ‘v’ of concern appears between her eyebrows. The camera moves in, almost imperceptibly; a breeze catches the wisps of hair at her temples; the film is over.

As the film loops, you become aware of its means of projection: the clacking 35mm projector, used most often by contemporary artists as a signifier of cultural obsolescence (Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham). As with these artists, Tasset’s work implies a kind of easy nostalgia for the prelapsarian analogue age. Here, though, the gradual deterioration of the film itself carries a specific emotional meaning. Tasset’s film stages a particular act of looking: the searching scrutiny of a gaze passed between lovers. Ledgerwood’s gaze, at once open and guarded, apparently spontaneous, matches that of the camera. The duration of the film itself is the duration of a single and specific act of looking (six seconds between blinks), and the look itself is charged with a fear of loss. Tasset’s – the camera’s – gaze is that of the lover unwilling to contemplate its own deterioration. Lovers fear the loss of sight in old age: imagine not being able to see that face you like. Imagine how greedy the act of looking becomes when the knowledge of its impermanence sinks in.

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It’s complicated.
Last year, over 3 million Facebook users willingly adopted this dubious relationship status even after the drop-down menu expanded to accommodate eleven statuses, including newer options like civil union and domestic partnership.

Facebook relationship status options

This status is apt for those who want to publicly define the grey area that is his or her personal life, although its ambiguity may technically make it the only non-status, aside from simply hiding the option altogether. Tucked into the Basic Information page, the brief two (or rather, two and a half) words proclaim something like this: “I may or may not be formerly, presently, or  subsequently interacting with one or more person(s) or thing(s) in a manner in which I define by the fact that I can not or choose not to define it!” In this sense, the complication evades categorization by problematizing, flaunting the complexity and ambiguity of a SimCity in fog. Although it may lurk ominously in the domain of relationships, the complication is also a creative force.

When unpacking sticky situations, one should not expect to discover anything less sticky. With appropriately viscous expectations, I (artist and guest blog alum, Lindsay Lawson) present Art21’s newest column, Problematic, aimed at diffusing, rather than shedding light on subjects that are particularly tricky, paradoxical, and well… problematic. The column borrows its name from friend and artist, Guthrie Lonergan, who suggested “Problematic” as an exhibition title, playing on its buzzword status that has become all too ubiquitous, peppering the rhetoric of art discourses. But everything is problematic if you look hard enough; you just have to will it so.

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Thanks to Din Heagney for his posts on Australian artists Lily Hibberd and Carl Scrase. Look out for more from him later this week.

Up next is Tom McCormack. Tom is a writer soon to be living in New York. His criticism tends to focus on experimental film and new media art, but he has also written about Hollywood cinema, television, politics, and popular culture. His work has appeared in Rhizome, Idiom, Cinema Scope, Moving Image Source, and other publications and has been featured at Art Fag City, IFC.com, and other blogs.

From left: Richard Klein, Jessica Stockholder, and Gary Lichtenstein at Gary Lichtenstein Editions. Courtesy Gary Lichtenstein Editions.

Following on the April post for this column, which explored recent works in print-based installation, this month’s Ink takes an in-depth look at Art21 artist Jessica Stockholder’s current project for The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Printmaking — specifically screenprinting – plays a unique and significant role in the final work, titled Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood.  To create this installation, Stockholder collaborated with master printer Gary Lichtenstein of Gary Lichtenstein Editions and furniture-maker Clifford Moran to transform rough-hewn planks of ash wood.

In a break from standard nomenclature, Stockholder refers to Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood as a “situation” – a term she uses to describe a built environment comprised of pre-composed elements that she places in response to the unique features of a specific space.  The artist prefers this word to “installation,” which she finds somewhat overused and generic.  It is also meant to differentiate between other discrete approaches in her work, namely her site-specific installations, in which she composes diverse found objects and materials on site (also in response to the space at hand) and her studio works, which are self-contained objects.

The seed for this project began in 2009, when the Aldrich was forced to cut a large centenarian ash tree that stood in its sculpture garden due to infestation from the emerald ash borer, an invasive Asian beetle.  Thinking that it would receive new life in the hands of a contemporary artist, the museum sent the tree to a mill and stored the planks to cure for future use.  In a recent conversation, exhibition curator and Interim Co-Director of the museum Richard Klein related that the idea of offering the planks to Stockholder – who has worked primarily with man-made and mass produced materials in the past – came about when he was speaking with her about doing an installation at the Aldrich.  He mentioned the incident with the ash tree to her as an aside and was pleasantly surprised to learn that she had a deep connection with trees and wood due to her experience growing up in the Pacific Northwest Coast.  She spoke of the lush rainforest surroundings populated with old-growth trees and her first memories of sculptures: wood-carved totem poles created by the indigenous peoples of the area.  Though the staff at the museum had originally thought to give the wood to an artist known for working with the material, Klein realized that it might be more interesting to see what an artist like Stockholder would do with the planks.

Stockholder, who has recently been drawn to opportunities that present unusual and new circumstances which allow her to stretch her artistic practice (see, for example, two recent exhibitions: Flooded Chambers Maid,  Madison Square Park; and The Jewel Thief, Tang Museum and Sculpture Garden), was greatly intrigued and quickly provided a proposal to Klein.  In Stockholder’s words, the project is a meditation on the nature of “picture-making and seeing.”  It incorporates a repeating eye-like motif, which suggests to the process of looking and what Stockholder calls the “frame of the eye,” or the perspective from which we view the world, which is echoed by the windows of the museum gallery that “frame” the sculpture garden, where the tree once stood.  The eye concept was also inspired by the prominent use of eyes in the wood carvings of First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest.  The result is a provocative intersection of Stockholder’s two-dimensional and three-dimensional modes of working, which she characterizes as “creating fiction” and “a response to the mundane, matter-of-fact quality of objects,” respectively.

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James Turrell, Skyspace at Rice University, Houston, TX, 2011. Courtesy Rice University.

Included in this week’s roundup are James Turrell’s skyspace, William Wegman’s NASA art, Paul Pfeiffer’s time-based work, a fall Robert Adams retrospective, and more.

• James Turrell is the mastermind behind a new skyspace on the Rice University campus (Houston).  The skyspace will be characterized by a flat-topped, 72-square-foot pyramid housing a seating area for viewers.  The recent Rice skyspace groundbreaking comes on the heels of the acquisition of a dozen light-based Turrell works titled Vertical Vintage that trace the arc of the artist’s exploration of artificial light. This acquisition, along with the over 100 Turrell works in the MFAH collection, will further support a 2013 Turrell retrospective being organized in collaboration with the Guggenheim and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Janine Antoni is one of several artists to introduce Lynn Hershman Leeson’s new documentary, !Women Art Revolution (!WAR) that reaches beyond the boundaries of cinema and extends to new technology and media, as well various collaborations with educational institutions, artists, scholars, and social media architects.  The film will be shown at the IFC Center in New York City from June 1 through June 8.

• Paul Pfeiffer‘s work is in one of the galleries devoted to video installations as part of an exhibition inspired by American artist John Cage’s 1952 composition 4′33″. Silence and Time explores the work of contemporary artists who have addressed issues of absence, presence, and temporality through their creative process. Drawn primarily from the holdings of the Dallas Museum of Art and local collections, this new exhibition is on view at the Museum from May 29 – August 28.

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