Introducing “New York Close Up”
New York Close Up is Art21’s new online documentary series profiling the lives and works of New York-based artists in the first phase of their career. New York Close Up is also an experiment.
As a production assistant, researcher (and fellow artist), I’ve been with this project since its inception—on shoots, in the edit room, working with artists and galleries. A question has dominated the filmmaking process: How does one make a compelling film that represents the complexity of an artist’s creative process? The aim has been to collaborate with each artist to imagine new ways of telling stories about what it’s like to live, work, and make art in New York City.
The first 10 videos, to be released starting June 13th, introduce the initial New York Close Up crop of artists: Lucas Blalock, Martha Colburn, Keltie Ferris, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Tommy Hartung, Rashid Johnson, Kalup Linzy, Shana Moulton, Mariah Robertson, and Mika Tajima.
Curator Wesley Miller, artist Mika Tajima, and cinematographer Jarred Alterman film contortionist Tony Mitchell performance during an exhibition at Elizabeth Dee Gallery. Chelsea, Manhattan, 01.29.11. Production still from the series "New York Close Up." © Art21, Inc. 2011.
We came into the project familiar with each artist’s work. However, how they work is rather mysterious. Yes, there’s the “studio”—but there’s also exhibitions, friends’ houses, conversations, performances, and the city itself. Who’s to say where the “art happens?”
So we filmed. A lot. It was a little intimidating at first. Hundreds of hours of footage. A growing number of filming opportunities we couldn’t pass up. But as we got to know the artists, stories would emerge. Collaborations happened. Pieces of everyday life suddenly began to crystallize into the elusive “creative process”—and into films.
Artist Mariah Robertson hand-processing color photographs in her darkroom. Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 12.13.10. Production still from the series "New York Close Up." © Art21, Inc. 2011.
Each video looks at the creative process from a different angle: the psychology of moving art from the studio to an exhibition space; personal history and its effect on one’s art; how to document a practice when an artist’s work and personal life blur. They’re short bytes—5 to 9 minutes—of innovative film-making and a truly unique view of some of the most interesting artists working in New York City today.
Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier during the performance "If Everybody's Work Is Equally Important" (2010) outside Levi’s Photo Workshop. SoHo, Manhattan, 12.08.10. Production still from the series "New York Close Up." © Art21, Inc. 2011.
And these 10 videos are only the beginning. We’ll be making more films on these artists, and adding new ones, in the coming months. That’s one of the most exciting parts of the New York Close Up project: the filmmaker/artist collaboration has room to evolve.
At the core of Art21 is the belief that contemporary art can be accessible, open, and revelatory. New York Close Up not only allows artists to speak, but also to have a hand in the way their process—and their world—is offered up to the viewer.
Artist Shana Moulton and singer Daisy Press performing in the opera "Whispering Pines 10" (2011) at the New Museum. The Bowery, Manhattan, 01.08.11. Production still from the series "New York Close Up." © Art21, Inc. 2011.
PUBLIC AMNESIA
History isn’t was. History is. No matter how much we wipe our feet at the front door, we track history through the house. Leaving its muddy footprints all over the carpet.
This quote is from Phillip Adams, one of Australia’s most respected broadcasters and a left-wing atheist humanist who happens to write for a national and mostly right-wing newspaper. He’s also on the advisory board of WikiLeaks, so it’s quite telling that this quote makes an appearance in Australian artist Lily Hibberd’s latest work, one that unravels some of the gruesome history of institutionalization.
Lily Hibberd has always been interested in ideas of love and time (and let’s be honest, who hasn’t?), but her overall practice is difficult to describe, only as it has evolved so much in recent years. As a painter, her early works show an interest in pictorial illusion of cinema, such as the Blinded by the Light series, large canvases of recreated film stills that glow in the dark with phosphorescence. I still remember when the lights were switched off for the opening night at a gallery in Melbourne some years ago and a shocked woman spilled her drink all over me then spent the rest of the night apologizing. But the same woman also introduced me to someone who would become a fantastic lover, so both the evening and the paintings have always stayed with me and I’ve followed Lily’s practice ever since. The lover, alas, moved into the vestiges of time.
Lily Hibberd, "Blinded by the Light," oil and phosphorescent paint on canvas, 91 x 153 cm, 2002.
Then there are other series, like Paint Tin Fantasias, where characters confront their own delusions in famous movie scenes, each recreated in oil and pigment, shimmering and swirling inside old paint tins. And again, later works including I Want To Break Free, which saw her paint urban scenes that went to extreme ends with subjects such as death-by-dishwasher and other domestic disaster scenarios.
Lily Hibberd, "Paint Tin Fantasias," pigment, oil paint, tins, 2004
Since then, Hibberd has moved onto more challenging historical and performance-installation projects, such as the large-scale work from 2008, Bordertown, a monolithic black sound wall featuring audio narratives from two women who lived in a divided community on two sides of a remote state border.
Lily Hibberd, "Bordertown" (installation view), wood, paint, speakers, computer, Artspace, Sydney, 2008.
When thinking about how Hibberd reached this point from painting to examining Australia’s dark penal and mental institution history – a search that took her to London and Paris and back to some remote albeit scenic places in Australia – it seems that much of her oeuvre shows people being confronted with the unknown, or what they consider to be the unknown, when in reality, it is something they have deliberately forgotten.
Maxwell Snow, "Untitled," 2011. Photograph. Courtesy Maxwell Snow.
In Black Magic at Serieuze Zaken Studioos in Amsterdam, New York-based photographer Max Snow continues to pursue themes that have become the central preoccupations of his photography: beauty, fantasy, mortality. Expanding on the stark frontality and straightforward style that characterized the penetrating images of his earlier KKK series, Snow turns his attention in this latest suite of photographs to the time-honored subject of the nude, exploring the power and the poignancy of the human body in portraits of such hallucinatory clarity that his subjects seem conjured from the deep recesses of his own imagination as much as they do from popular culture or classical tradition.
Photographing nude models in an even studio lighting and against a featureless black backdrop, Snow focuses the viewer’s gaze firmly on his subjects by abstracting them from any precise time or place and capturing them in symbolically charged and often dramatic poses. In many of these images, Snow juxtaposes his nudes with live animals—a wolf, a bear, and birds of prey: real equivalents of powerful symbols of spirituality and revelation but also emblems of nature’s unflinching power and ferocity. In others, his graceful nudes are accompanied by objects—a crystal orb, a spear, an animal’s pelvic bone or antler—that seem freighted with symbolic significance yet which defy easy interpretation. Imbued with apparent meaning—here death and dying, there perhaps spiritual regeneration or potency—Snow’s photographic fantasy world of animals, objects and seductive bodies becomes less an arrangement of iconographic symbols than a labyrinth of enigmatic signifiers.
Installation in Installments
Doug and Mike Starn, "Big Bambú" (detail). Image: cubeme.com
Each year the graduates and upperclassmen I work with look forward to their final project as a way of leaving a stamp on the school itself. Students are asked to create an installation on their own, or with a partner, and display it somewhere inside or outside the school building. I only ask that it be placed (or performed) in a spot that doesn’t usually feature art. Students learn in this final unit that artists sometimes use rooms or unexpected places as their canvas and often make works that are specific for a site- such as a stairwell or an underutilized office. They also learn that installations, being works of art designed for three-dimensional spaces, sometimes involve the viewer IN the work, such as Doug and Mike Starn’s “Big Bambú” exhibited on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum last year. Occasionally, as was the case with this piece, viewers are even able to walk into the work itself.
But teaching about installation is much more than showing a collection of great images by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Kiki Smith, Hans Haacke, Judy Pfaff, Pepon Osorio and Sarah Sze, for example, and asking students to have a go at it. Great installations, like lots of great art, require a ton of good planning. So while I may start students off with showing a variety of approaches to installation, I also want to make sure that their initial sketches are working with themes that are meaningful to them and include materials that are accessible in one way or another. There’s nothing more frustrating than having a great idea and then finding out the cost or scale of the project will bring everything to a grinding halt. This initial planning often makes or breaks these student installations. I know because I’ve seen both ends of the installation success stick… I’ve had students abandon great projects because ideas were just too big and had others generate tremendous excitement through straightforward, unique works.
Taking the first stages of installation slowly and really getting involved in the planning with students, as well as those that will help create the art, is crucial. As we proceed into this coming week, I have some students creating installations involving performance, some enabling viewers to “re-see” things they take for granted (like each other), and some using everyday objects as design elements for larger-scale works. Students have begun gathering materials and assembling the works. They have secured spots for their work and have enlisted the help of others to assist in realizing their ideas. As we get closer and closer to the end of the school year, I realize that in units such as this I can probably be most helpful at the start. But I also need to be mindful about getting out of the way once all the “front-end work” is complete.
More to come!
Art21 Educators 2011-2012: Jeannine Bardo and Mary Curry
Last week, we featured Jethro Gillespie and James Rees from Utah. This week, in the fourth installment of Art21 Educators introductions, allow us to introduce Jeannine Bardo and Mary Curry. Brooklyn represents!
Jeannine Bardo and Mary Curry live in Brooklyn, NY, and teach at St. Ephrem School. Jeannine has been the art teacher there for the last twelve years. Her partner, Mary, has been teaching for fifteen years and has spent the past seven years working at St. Ephrem as a fourth grade teacher. The two teachers often work together and complement each other in the classroom. Jeannine describes Mary as being technologically savvy and says, “We both are very open to new experiences and we believe a good teacher is one who is always learning.” Mary notes that she learned about Art21 from Jeannine and enjoys collaborating with her “to provide enriched, multi-disciplinary opportunities for our students.”
Jeannine teaches 1st through 8th grades and in her application, she describes the unique atmosphere of the school and the opportunity to build effective relationships with students over the course of several years attending St. Ephrem. She says the administration “is very supportive of the art program . . .[and] of any professional development teachers’ endeavor, especially if it is collaborative.” She regularly uses Art21 films, Educators’ Guides, and website resources to introduce her students to contemporary art and to build cross-curricular projects. Jeannine introduced students to Art21 artist Mark Dion to enhance one of Mary’s lessons on ecosystems, noting, “I used the video of his installation Neukom Vivarium to discuss our connection to the natural world, how art and science can be connected in Mark Dion’s artistic process.”
Jeanine also taught a unit that examined how artists create art in public contexts and across media by looking at the work and working methods of Richard Serra and William Kentridge. For Jeannine, contemporary art is:
. . . a reaction to our ever-changing world. It can sometimes make sense out of the senseless, raise awareness, or foster understanding of our place in this world and challenge us to strive for change. These are also the reasons I am drawn to it as an artist and teacher. I believe art strikes a chord in all of us; it keeps the human spirit alive.
Jeannine’s video biography provides a glimpse into her classroom and student work, including image-filled sketchbooks that her students create on their own time. She also introduces herself as an artist and triathlon athlete:
Open Enrollment | So Long Grad School!
Over the last four weeks, I daydreamed about my final post for my contribution to Art21 Blog’s Open Enrollment column. Since January, my final semester at San Francisco Art Institute had taken a darker, more socially and politically relevant turn with my interest in American cults and hate groups like the KKK and Westboro Baptist Church. My personal on-going artistic endeavor of a secret brotherhood known as the Society of 23 went from a philanthropic supporter of fine arts to a mischievous band of misfits. I found myself ironically using the rhetoric of hate to continue my wild obsession and addiction to contemporary art.
In those terms, I only thought it appropriate to ironically trash this year’s SFAI MFA graduate exhibition for my final blog post. I wanted to share some images of my classmates’ artworks while complimenting it with such poor reviews that you would feel compelled to investigate my claims and visit their websites. From my research as a hater, I find that the more you hate something, the more other people want to know why. It’s the best PR ever! I wanted to pull out classic texts from Plato, Greenberg, Adorno, Smith, and Saltz and maneuver a fancy critical analysis that dangerously went where no review of a graduate show had gone before. But, like any good life lived as a dérive, something can happen overnight and change everything.
I’ve learned that irony is a wonderful strategy for communication in this age of Facebook – the other is secrecy. As a brother of the Society of 23, I’ve had to keep a lot of secrets. It’s nice to quietly giggle to myself when others want to know something that I’m not at liberty to say. So in those terms, I’d like to share a handful of artwork from the 72 newly-crowned SFAI MFA students sans my personal thoughts. Love it or hate it, this is the stuff that grad school’s made of…
