The proposed "South California." Via SFist.com.

At a meeting on Tuesday, July 12, officials in California’s Riverside County decided seceding from the rest of the state might not be such a good idea after all. The possibility of secession has bounced around in recent weeks, mostly thanks to Riverside Republican Jeff Stone, who wants to liberate counties south of Sacramento from the capital’s fiscal dysfunction. In the division Stone and party proposed, most of SoCal would be red, with the exception of the one blue strip of Los Angeles. L.A. is just as annoyingly liberal (as evidence, Stone cited the county’s recent outlawing of plastic grocery bags) and as municipally messy as Sacramento. So it had to be excluded.

Secession plans like these have been nixed before, hundreds of times—since California’s beginning, state-splitting has frequently seemed an alluring solution to fiscal and cultural complications. But it’s already a free country, right? Why not just move someplace more to your liking? An aid to Governor Jerry Brown pointed out that for anyone who badly wants to live in a red state, “there’s a place called Arizona” nearby.

The red versus blue distinction is a relatively new one. Or, at least, it hasn’t been fixed all that long. It used to be, in electoral maps of presidential elections, the incumbent took on blue, while the challenger took on the more agitated red. This changed in 2000, when states Bush won in his race against Al Gore—who, as Clinton’s former VP, was the closest thing to an incumbent—were portrayed as red. The color caught on, and Bush stayed red in 2004. By 2008, the “red Republican,” “blue Democrat” image had become so entrenched that Obama’s winnings were colored blue. Maybe this newly tightened tie to the color red has enhanced the perceptions of the right, not as stick-in-the-mud traditionalists, but recalcitrant crazies.

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Art21 Educators has been in full swing over the past week with professional development workshops, curriculum planning, artist talks, studio visits, special events, museum programs and lots of soul-searching.

Tune in next Wednesday, July 20th, for my full report on the institute. See you then.

I’ve been thinking about Based In Berlin for weeks.  And while it’s been difficult to keep my pretentious guffaws in check, I have recognized that the show tackles the formidable (unfeasible?) but ultimately worthwhile task of capturing the dynamism of Berlin’s art scene.

Based in Berlin, an exciting if uneven survey of the city’s talent, was mounted by Berlin’s leading art institutions (KW, NBK, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlinische Galerie), supervised by super-curators (Klaus Biesenbach, Christine Macel and Hans Ulrich Obrist), organized by energetic and well-connected curatorial talent, and stamped by Mayor Klaus Wowereit as an important election-year event.

I have a lot of issues with the show, notably the repackaging of artist-led initiatives like After the Butcher and The Forgotten Bar Project, which seem to lose subversive and sustaining energy in their relocation.  It’s like transporting a 1970s Czech darkroom to the private collection of a mustard heiress in Kansas…or kidnapping David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and pinning him to the wall at a suburban cocktail party.

But then the deadening effect of institutionalization is difficult to avoid; the five curators of BIB are also clearly engaged with the city’s extensive and varied art stratum and have included younger net artists like Timur Si Qin, alongside rising art stars and Berlin favorites Klara Liden and Aids 3-D.

But is this a show about amassing and selling Berlin’s artistic chi?  Hyping the city’s young stable of artists?  Re-electing Wowereit?  Luring the monied Basel-Venice crowd to Berlin on an extended artistic layover?  Trying desperately to make good on Berlin’s ten-year promise as a viable art destination?  Kimberley Bradley at Artnet ponders BIB’s validity and claims that it might portend the end of Berlin’s “leftover Bohemia.”

The varied motives and outcomes of such a grandiose show are difficult to unpack, so in the spirit of a Lindsay Lohan movie, I’ve compiled a list of superlatives for Based in Berlin.

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This month’s episode of Fielding Practice, a special podcast produced by Bad at Sports exclusively for the Art21 blog, is action-packed and filled with discussion of the latest art happenings in Chicago and beyond. Guesting this week are Nicholas O’Brien, our regular Bad at Sports columnist and an independent curator and writer on net art, and Abraham Ritchie, Chicago editor of Art Slant online magazine and The Chicago Art Blog. Along with Duncan Mackenzie and myself, they discuss recent changes to the long-running 12 x 12 exhibition series at the Museum of Contemporary Art and review its current exhibition, Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection. We move on to take a look at Jeff Carter’s current solo show, The Common Citizenship of Forms, at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in which the artist uses hacked Ikea furniture to recreate a number of Chicago buildings by Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius that were demolished in 2009. Finally, we discuss the situation faced by Chinese artist and activist Ai Wei Wei, who was recently released from a 3 month detention by the Chinese government. Plus, our picks for events and other happenings in Chicago for the month of July, with handy links provided below. As always, thanks for joining us!

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Cengiz Tekin, "Enentegre," C-print, 2007. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

If Şener Özmen (the subject of last month’s Turkish and Other Delights post) is the godfather of Diyarbakır’s contemporary art community, then his long-time collaborateur, artist Cengiz Tekin, is its prankster, its Puck, and possibly (though this is pure speculation) its Keith Richards. He exudes a sly, crackling energy, walks with a fast gait just this side of nervous, and is constantly grinning, cracking jokes, and generally entertaining those around him. Despite the considerable language barrier between us (his English was definitely better than my Turkish, but then again my Turkish is limited to ordering takeout and buying groceries and bus tickets), Tekin was, along with Özmen, an engaging and endlessly generous host during my stay in Diyarbakır. I will never forget the two-hour bus ride we spent entertaining ourselves by going through a children’s Turkish-English textbook/dictionary at random, laughing hysterically at its bizarre contextualizing sentences for such essential vocabulary words as “lobster,” “beach ball,” and “criminal.”

Unsurprisingly, this spirit and humor spills into Tekin’s art, where seemingly typical, unremarkable people, locations, and situations are staged and tweaked by the artist to reveal the underlying violence, trauma, instability, and uncertainty that remains the reality for the Kurds of southeastern Turkey. Often they capture moments just before or after a violent act has taken place, but it is never clear what exactly happened (or is about to happen), why the act took place, or the identity of the victim or perpetrator. For example, in Tekin’s 2007 photograph, Natürmort (Still Life), a man lies splayed in a field of wheat, his face obscured by the stalks. Dressed in blue, his attire mirrors the fiery sky that looms above the field, making him seem like a piece of the heavens dropped to the earth. The gun in his limp hand implies that a shoot-out or stand-off of some kind has just transpired–or could it be a suicide? Is the angle of the gun, still cocked and pointed up, a coincidence of the way he fell? Or is he still alive and playing dead in order to ambush his foe, or escape further fighting?

Cengiz Tekin, "Natürmort" ("Still Life"). C-print. 2007. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

Likewise, in his 2009 essay, “The Stranger,” critic Süreyyya Evren questions the unnatural angle of the neck belonging to a man sandwiched between a giant stack of blankets and pillows in the 2003 photograph Untitled (Press) (one a series of similar images Tekin created involving a human figure inserted into such stacks of bedding), wondering if he is even “really alive? Or faking death like some animals do to survive?” Evren sees Tekin’s photographs as giving voice to “the Stranger,” who, he argues, is

“crucial in the construction of Turkish national identity, and who has been in this position since the beginning of the Turkish Republic. This ‘privilege’ of being considered as ‘the Stranger’ is given to people who are categorized as ‘others within ourselves.’ These strangers, who originate from ‘us’–the Ottoman Empire–and who on various political grounds played an important role as the other for the new Turkish Republic, are the ones who in the national imagination supposedly represent the biggest threat (the ethnic side of this spectrum contains most prominently Armenians, Kurds and Jewish immigrants, and Arabs of various origins).”

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Roni Horn, "Double Mobius," 2009. Photo: Hermann Feldhaus (c) Roni Horn.

In this week’s roundup, new and permanent exhibitions offset the “dog days of summer” with Louise Bourgeois and Laylah Ali promoting domestic violence awareness, Roni Horn addressing gender issues in gold, and more.

• Louise Bourgeois and Laylah Ali are among 28 international artists whose works are on view in Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art, a multimedia contemporary art exhibition that promotes awareness and fosters dialogue about violence against women and its effects on victims, families, and communities.  The exhibition is at CDC’s Global Health Odyssey Museum (Atlanta, GA) and closes September 9.

• Roni Horn is featured in Double Mobius at the Flag Art Foundation (NYC).  The show consists of a selection of works including sculptures, works on paper, photography, and books. Horn’s work addresses issues of gender, identity, and androgyny, while crafting complex relationships between the viewer and her work. The materials she uses reflects her fascination with the mythological and economic significance of gold since her childhood.  This exhibition closes September 2.

• Robert Ryman‘s Philadelphia Prototype, 2002 is on view in a permanent exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academic of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia).  This work consists of ten buff-colored vinyl sheets attached to the wall with white acrylic paint.  Reducing painting to pure surface – dispensing with a painting’s “objectness” – has been an ongoing goal for Ryman.

• Barry McGee has New Work at Modern Art Gallery, marking his first solo show in London in three years.  His work draws its inspiration from the influences of tagging, “Mission School” abstraction, vandalism, and the conventions of contemporary painting and sculpture. Here you can see McGee’s signature hand-lettered glyph-like typography echoing the geometry of op-art, with comic-style imagery.  The show closes August 13.

Shirley Clarke with a Portapak camera

Being a fan of “themes,” my posts as guest blogger for Art21 will revolve around (digital) archives and feminist/women’s art (histories), issues that my own work is heavily concerned with. As such, I want to begin with a little shameless self-promotion.

Last year, I initiated an archival project bringing together the work and documents of Shirley Clarke’s 1970s video workshops. Though Clarke is more well-known as a filmmaker, for films such as The Connection (1961), The Cool World (1964) and Portrait of Jason (1967), Clarke’s work in video was just as interesting and groundbreaking as these films. From 1969-75, Clarke ran these workshops out of her Chelsea Hotel studio, a triangular-shaped structure dubbed the “Tee Pee” by the New York early video community. She divided her home into several smaller spaces on several levels, all of which she equipped with cameras and monitors stacked on top of one another in totem-pole like structures to resemble the human form. The body of these “totems” was a large monitor, flipped on its side; the arms and legs were smaller monitors, and the head was a circular shaped “ball” monitor. Spaces were wired for video and audio and images could be transmitted simultaneously between them using a custom-made patch board. The participants of these workshops―a disparate and ever-changing band of video makers, filmmakers, poets, artists and dancers―called themselves the Tee Pee Video Space Troupe.

I discovered Clarke’s video workshops through a 2004 essay for Millennium Film Journal written by Andrew Gurian, a participant in these workshops, and became interested in finding out why they were near absent from the numerous canonical (read: gallery art) and alternative accounts of early video, despite the fact that they were attended at one time or another by video art pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and the Videofreex.

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Robert Rauschenberg, "Cy (Twombly) + Relics - Rome #5," 1952

The pairing of Cy Twombly and Nicolas Poussin in the current exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery reveals an embarrassment of shared interests that make it surprising they hadn’t been paired before. Both artists moved to Rome around the age of thirty, making work that reflected back on their native traditions (American abstraction and courtly French Renaissance painting, respectively) as filtered through a reappraisal of the ancient past – which in imperial Rome was a reappraisal of an even more ancient past: that of the Greeks. For everyone concerned, then – from the wide-eyed Twombly of the fifties, having himself photographed by Constantine’s massive digit, to Poussin, wangling his way into the inner circle of antiquarian patrons, to the Romans themselves, gawping back over their shoulder at the silent grandeur of their adopted ancestors – the classical past was something at a remove, to be jolted back to life through art and writing. This cultural electrode-clamping is something so recurrent in Western culture as to be conspicuous only by its absence. And it’s particularly conspicuous now, with the loss of Twombly this week, as though a golden thread, passed from hand to hand, had fallen to the floor.

Nicolas Poussin, "Self-Portrait," 1649 (Gemaldegalerie Berlin)

Classicism’s associations, particularly in the UK, with rarefied educational backgrounds and paternalistic power structures, have always created unwitting cultural and social division. And yet there’s nothing in the work of either Poussin or Twombly that demands any form of classical erudition, despite the exhibition’s abundance of dense wall-labels, which caper about like a neurotic matchmaker, desperately looking for common ground between the two, as they apologize for Twombly’s table manners and Poussin’s inability to crack a smile. The excess of text in the exhibition doesn’t do much to assuage the modern anxiety around the classical past. Classicism is associatively verbal and literary, stuffed away in the mind as interminable verse translation and hypnotic lists of verb endings, and the exhibition, necessarily scaled to Poussin’s advantage, ends up resembling a walk-in illustrated text, rather than a meeting of visual imaginations. And because neither artist requires textual scaffolding, it would be to both of their advantages to knock it away and ditch all wall labels entirely (that’ll never happen, but try walking through not reading anything; there’s only two artists anyway, and you’re unlikely to confuse them). That way, the startling weirdness of the classical mythology that fired both artists up – a child suckled by a goat! Babies born out of gods’ thighs! A cursed swarm of bees! – will come alive, as suddenly and as resonantly as it must have for each of them, and the centuries will concertina, just like that.

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For this month’s edition of Ink, guest writer Nicole Simpson fills in for regular columnist Sarah Kirk Hanley. — Ed.

Jonathan Seliger, "Triple Scoop: Pistachio, Raspberry, Fudge Brownie," 2004. Pigmented Celluclay (ice cream) on pigmented cast cotton (cone) on cotton base sheet with pigmented abaca/cotton stripes. Printed at Dieu Donné. Courtesy Dieu Donné.

During these hot days of summer, visions of ice cream, sand castles, and swimming pools abound. Triple Scoop: Pistachio, Raspberry, Fudge Brownie (2004) by Jonathan Seliger offers up such a treat in an unexpected material – paper pulp. A medium that is well suited to the season – wet, messy, and playful – paper pulp can be used for more than making paper. Beginning in the 1970s, a wide range of artists, from Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists to Pop artists and Environmental artists, began experimenting with ways to use paper pulp as a medium for artistic expression. They were supported by a number of specialized workshops that opened throughout the United States and their inventive works continue to inspire contemporary artists.

Seliger’s Triple Scoop was made at Dieu Donné, a workshop established in New York City in 1976 by Sue Gosin and Bruce Weinberg. Celebrating its 35^th-anniversary this fall, this space and its staff are “dedicated to the creation, promotion, and preservation of new contemporary art utilizing the hand papermaking process.” The workshop has hosted numerous artists, including William Kentridge, who produced a book of watermarks, and Richard Tuttle, who made several sculptural editions from paper pulp.

Tuttle’s most recent work is The Triumph of Night (2009). While the title is a meditation on Petrarch’s 14th-century poems, it displays, like all of Tuttle’s work, the artist’s obvious joy and devotion to the process of art-making. Tuttle formed wet pulp into “sandcastles” and presents these richly-colored and textured objects in a shadowbox, recalling displays of natural specimens. In videos of Tuttle working on earlier projects at Dieu Donné, you can watch his physical engagement with the medium. At one point, he gleefully tosses a “water balloon” (a plastic glove filled with methyl cellulose, a plant-based adhesive) onto a bed of fluffy pulp.

Dieu Donné was one of several workshops that opened in the United States during the 1970s where artists could work with paper pulp. As part of the American printmaking revival that began in the previous decade, a number of trained printers began opening shops throughout the country. Many of these printers fostered a collaborative relationship with artists and they were quick to try new materials and techniques. What began as printers seeking out paper mills to supply specialized paper for artists, turned into a number of printers engaging artists in the process of paper making and, eventually, the material of paper pulp itself.

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Brian Rea, "Visions and Fears Mural" (detail). Mural installation at the Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain.

Every Wednesday night, my grammar teacher takes chalk to blackboard to underline subjects and circle direct objects. White dust falling to the floor, she puts brackets around prepositional phrases and writes sentence codes on the side of the board. As students look out the window at summer’s hazy dusk and green grass, she remains resolute, unyielding in her mission to transform language into a series of arcs, underlines, and circles. Unconcerned with each word’s meaning and cadence, its syllables or suffix, she cares only for the larger system, the rigid categories into which each word fits.

I hate her, not simply because she gives pop quizzes and accepts late homework only through the U.S. Postal Service. I hate her because she tries to rob language of its mystery. Nuance, individuality, and meaning are lost when complex entities are squished into finite slots. A line of poetry and a piece of technical writing may be diagrammed identically, but they are hardly the same. While poet Mary Oliver writes, “I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel,” and my computer’s owner’s manual explains, “The battery will be hot; it may explode in water,” her logic simplifies both to “S-LV-PA; S-AV-P-OP” (that’s “subject-linking verb-predicate adjective; subject-active verb-preposition-object of the preposition” for those not enrolled).

An early Wunderkammer. Courtesy copperandwood.wordpress.com.

This tension between the technical and the poetic is hardly limited to my Wednesday night grammar class, or even to language. It reflects a philosophical divide that dates back to the Enlightenment, the period during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when reason replaced mysticism and theology as the dominant mode of thought. Scientific rigor and rational thinking was prized above all else; the accumulation of knowledge became an end in itself.

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