Miranda July as Sophie, who is attempting to make a YouYube dance hit. Image via Roadside Attractions.

I didn’t know I’d go to film for the second post of this performance art column, but here’s a surprise. Miranda July’s The Future. That’s right, a performance within a film within a laptop screen within a film within a performance.  In the film, July plays Sophie, an aging dancer who fails to make a viral YouYube dance video. Pause. It’s not that I relish depictions of my generation as hapless dreamers full of delusion and neuroto-narcissism on the verge of a charming nervous breakdown.  It’s that part of indie-stream film personae that makes me want to vomit out the Winona (Ryder)-worship of my youth.  But July has captured something here about performance, the desire for visibility —  albeit a very private, framed sense of it – that is real. July’s use of a laptop, YouTube, and the, “30 Dances in 30 Days,” project she sets up for Sophie situates this character in a familiar trope of contemporary persona-making where the number of online hits determines success. Sophie, however much she tries, cannot allow herself to dance for the camera on her computer screen.  Suddenly, something very private, and therefore seemingly easy, becomes the voyeuristic eye that shames her out of her “star” potential.

Sophie's epic t-shirt dance, image via Sales on Film

She clings to a worn, yellow shirt that she feels between her fingers over and over again. When she attempts to leave it behind, it floats through the L.A. suburbs to the house where she is living with an older Daddy character. Alone in his bedroom, she folds the shirt over her body and begins to dance. Unlike the self-conscious moves she tries in earlier attempts to dance alone, she jerks about the bedroom to an internal sense of timing that doesn’t match up with the Beach House song playing on her laptop. There is no dialogue here, there’s no interaction, and yet it is an intensely climactic scene. I don’t remember how long the dance lasts, whether it’s the duration of the song or longer,  but its cathartic and eerie imagery generates a powerful impact on the viewer, as both a dance and a symbol of time travel, blindness and a dark, shrouded mystery. The Daddy character, once noiselessly peering from the bedroom door, turns away as she rolls across the door frame. Does she see him? Either way, it doesn’t matter. The character, Sophie, is dancing for no one, but Miranda July is dancing for everyone.

Continue reading »

Cy Twombly, “Untitled II,” 1967. Etching, open bite, and aquatint. Sheet: 27 1/2 in. x 40 1/2 in. (69.85 cm x 102.87 cm). Publisher and printer: Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York, edition 23. © The estate of Cy Twombly/ Universal Limited Art Editions, 1974.

Cy Twombly, who died last month at the age of 83, is frequently described as the outlier genius of contemporary art – a member of the post-expressionist triumvirate of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg who followed a unique path that confounded the postwar art world.  A painter, sculptor, draughtsman, and sometime printmaker, his work renewed classical themes for our times and explored the expressiveness of line in both written and abstracted form.  For several decades, Twombly was understood to be an acquired taste.  However, his reception has changed over the past several years and he is now firmly placed within the canon.  The trend began with a traveling exhibition organized by The Menil Collection, Houston, in 1989.  The same year, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired and installed a cycle of ten paintings in a dedicated space in its galleries.  In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art organized a major retrospective.  The following year, The Menil Collection opened a free-standing gallery dedicated to Twombly’s work.  In 2001, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, and a few years later was listed as one of the ten most expensive living artists.  In 2008, the Tate Modern organized a major traveling retrospective of his work.  Roberta Smith neatly summarized the high regard in which the artist is now held in her eulogy for Twombly in The New York Times earlier this month.

Though printmaking has been an important means of expression for many artists of his generation, it was a brief endeavor for Twombly.  The bulk of his printmaking activity was primarily confined to a single decade of his long career – from the late 1960s to the late 1970s – and his output is modest in comparison with Johns and Rauschenberg, who are each prolific printmakers.  In fact, a majority of the editions Twombly produced were a result of his close friendship with the latter.  That said, he worked in nearly all traditional printmaking techniques during this period, including line etching, mezzotint, aquatint, lithography, and screenprinting.  The prints reflect his general concerns at the time they were created, and edition sizes are generally quite small.  Many of them were issued as portfolios, in keeping with his mode of painting and drawing in cycles.

Twombly toyed with printmaking early in his career – a rare impression of his 1952 woodcut The Song of the Border-Guard is in the Tate Collection – but did not work in the medium again until the late 1960s.  His first professionally editioned prints were created at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), West Islip, Long Island, as was the case for a number of artists of his generation.  Though Twombly had relocated to Italy in 1957, he continued to spend extended periods working in New York, renting studios downtown on Canal and Bowery.  During one such stay in 1967, he accompanied Rauschenberg to ULAE and ended up in the “etching basement,”  creating a number of intaglio plates over the following months (see Proof Positive: Forty Years of Contemporary American Printmaking at ULAE, 1957-1997, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1997, 26).

Continue reading »

Thea Liberty Nichols: While trying to determine how to define what it is that you do, I hit upon the idea of just describing all of your activities in one long run-on list, which might look something like this: publisher–distributor–writer–editor–curator–blogger–teacher. (Hopefully I haven’t made any glaring omissions?) I like the idea of employing awkward hyphenations in this instance because it not only emphasizes the reach of what you do— it also creates a sort of horizontal organization of things, were all of these different forms of expression and modes of production are recognized as equals, rubbing hyphenated elbows. Can you tell us a little more about the sum of these parts, or some of these parts?

Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama

Dan Nadel: You summed it up pretty well! I see all these activities as interlocking. Basically I look for as many outlets for my sensibility, and those of my artists, as possible. The parts you reeled off are linked by my desire to present both the work of artists I’m interested in and the lineage they’re a part of. So, it’s important to me to not just publish, say, Gary Panter, but also to curate a retrospective of his work, and then look at his art history and publish or curate around that, too. So from Panter I got to the Hairy Who and Karl Wirsum, for example. And likewise, when publishing a younger artist, like C.F. or Yuichi Yokoyama, I’m interested in their total sensibility: in comics, in drawing, in music. The artists that I’m most involved with by necessity require the above linkages — I have to be all those things just to keep up with them. But I’m a bit evangelical, so while they prod me, I like to think I’m prodding them out into the public — and trying to create a space, both contemporary and historical, in which they can exist.

TLN: The works that you’ve produced over the years feature a wide-ranging slew of multi-generational and cross-disciplinary makers. In your collaborations with others on these projects, do you see yourself as a maker too, or more of an indefatigable fan and promoter?

DN: I definitely see myself as a maker, or a maker by way of facilitating. What keeps things interesting is the making — working with an artist or group of artists to determine the best way for their work to be experienced in the world. And as a writer/curator, I like to think I’m making ideas, or spaces for ideas — making the context in which this work lives. In other words, I’m not interested, for myself, in just dropping raw material into the world. I want to help form and inform it, and, to some degree, inform the response to it.

Continue reading »

L: Carl Andre, "Eighth Reversed Steel Corner," 1978, 36 parts, steel; Photo: Krzysztof Zieliński/European Art Projects. R: Lynda Benglis, "For Carl Andre," 1970, pigmented polyurethane foam.

Once, when artists Liam Gillick and Sarah Morris had legendary minimalist Carl Andre over for dinner, Andre drank a bit much and let his tongue loose. To Morris, he said, “The trouble with people like you is you only care about skirt lengths.” It sounded sexist and perhaps was, though  he meant that hers and other younger artists’ tastes vary season to season; like a slightly shorter hemline, a smaller painting might be in vogue one year, then out the next. Morris’s response? “Well, that must be nice for you, because your lasting contribution to history has been kitchen design.” [1]

Andre’s zinc and magnesium squares or his stone blocks that stand in a corner would be perfectly suited to any highly modern kitchen. Those calculated, austere spaces, like the best modern, marble-countered bathrooms, seem bent on negating the fact that they exist to service a basic bodily function.

Lynda Benglis, installation view, MOCA, 2011.

When sculptor Lynda Benglis made For Carl Andre in 1970, she exploded his cool gray kitchen design aesthetic into an aggressive mound of silver-toned polyurethane. It was this piece, not that more notorious 1974 Artforum ad, where she wields a double-headed dildo and taunts the camera, that first convinced me of Benglis’s brilliance. It was imperturbably muscular, yet, not the least bit flabby or weak-kneed, it still managed to acknowledge that people move through the world in bodies and are as emotive and susceptible as they are cerebral.

Continue reading »

On a recent trip to PS1, I had the unique opportunity to compare a few different approaches to visiting (and hopefully, seeing) exhibitions. Back in 2005 I noticed during Cai Guo Qiang’s gorgeous show, Inopportune, that people visiting the exhibit approached his work, mostly, in one of three ways. They either entered the show “cold” without reading any of the supplemental materials offered by the museum, read the material and then saw the show, or simply talked with a partner while looking at each of the works. Visiting museums across the United States since then, I often notice these three “approaches” seem to be the most popular. But is there a “best” way to view an exhibit? Does it depend on the artist, venue, or the show itself? Close colleagues and friends have weighed in on this topic and there seems to be no agreement whatsoever. Some say they read very little and see the show cold- even avoiding wall labels. Some do lots of research before committing to a show they will see. Others enjoy exhibitions most when they have someone with them to compare thoughts and ideas. So… PS1 last week offered me a rare opportunity to compare these approaches in one space since I was anxious to see three of the exhibits on display featuring Laurel Nakadate, Ryan Trecartin, and Nancy Grossman.

The first exhibit, Ryan Trecartin’s Any Ever, I entered cold. I bypassed the wall text (which I later realized was a real ball of verbal gymnastics that would have just confused me) and went straight into the first room. Not having much info to work with, I immediately fell in love with the fact that this was quite literally a video-installation. Couches were set up around the first gallery and the place looked like a living room ready for destruction- clothes on the floor, large hammers displayed on shelves. I even noticed the exact same medicine cabinet I have in my own home, which was a little creepy considering the video rolling behind me. The fact that Trecartin’s show had headsets to individually listen to the video made me compare the music happening in the room to the dialogue, if you can call it that, in the video. There was a huge difference between the relaxed music in the room to the 100 mph audio on the headsets. I stayed with this first video for almost 20 minutes before moving on and became less patient with each of the interconnected rooms I entered. The videos felt a little too similar, even though they are constructed as a series, although the installations were quite different and beautiful. I went from sitting at a picnic table to leaning on bleachers to dangling my legs from airplane seats in order to watch many of the videos. Seeing the show “cold” was initially exciting but left me a little numb by the end, and I honestly think the series of seven videos is probably impossible to see in one visit, even beyond the actual length of time it would take to see them.

The second exhibit, Laurel Nakadate’s Only the Lonely, I had read a little bit about and was excited to see for a variety of reasons. Being familiar with Nakadate’s work that “touches on voyeurism, loneliness, the manipulative power of the camera, and the urge to connect with others, through, within, and apart from technology and the media,” I felt a heck of a lot more prepared than I did for the Trecartin show. But similarly to the first exhibit, this show was impossible to see in its entirety even if I spent the entire two hours I had with this one artist. Having read about the show and being familiar with Nakadate’s photography helped me enjoy “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears”. Certain photos in this assault of an installation drew me in to the quiet of the image. They made me guess about the authenticity of Nakadate’s “sadness” each day. Exploring sadness on this level also struck me as “performing” in way that really addressed, for example, the importance of composition in order to convey the idea vs. the way she did so with her videos. Wall texts written by the artist also helped overall, so this was an added pleasure.

Continue reading »

Thea Liberty Nichols: I’ve had the pleasure of curating one of your self-published books into a show I put together a few years ago, and recently you were kind enough to have me over for a studio visit where we got to rifle through your flat file. Can you detail for us your process of taking a work from creation through to production— whether it’s an animation, inking a comic, printmaking, or book-binding— and on out into the world, either through screenings, publishing, or what-have-you?

Lilli Carré: For whichever medium I end up choosing for a project, I usually start with scribblings in my sketchbooks and loose little notes and ideas all over the pages, which end up looking something like this:

When I work on a comic, I’ll start with these ideas and start to form a narrative thread, and from there I start making thumbnail storyboards for how I’m going to draw and structure the final comic. Here’s one of my loose storyboards for a page from my story “The Carnival”:

and here’s the final page:

When I work on animation or printmaking, it’s sometimes carefully plotted out, but lately I’ve been enjoying working much more intuitively in these forms. For animation, I’ll just start drawing frames, maybe starting with a particular little motion or simple scene and then build on it as I go. This whole animation Head Garden was made in this way— just starting with the idea of a man losing his head and drawing straight-ahead as I went.

Continue reading »

Thea Liberty Nichols: I have to bashfully admit that, despite it being just a bike ride away, I’ve never visited Roxaboxen Exhibitions before. But, for a while now I’ve been keeping tabs on all of the various events you have going on, such as the openings, performances, classes and studio space you have for working artists. Can you tell us more about all the stuff you house under one roof, and let us know what motivated you all to open your doors, add a new voice to Chicago’s exhibition space topography, and cultivate the community that orbits around you?

Liz McCarthy: I wanted to leave Asheville, North Carolina, where I had been living and going to art school. I had been selling my work and doing well there but it was a small community and I wasn’t satisfied with what I was making and wanted to expand my practice and feel more challenged. I grew up outside of Chicago and went to North Carolina a lot to visit my Dad— both these places have resonated as home, but I decided to return to Chicago to be close to my Mother again. Also the rent prices were a third of the prices of other places I was looking at moving (New York and Philly). I had read a lot of articles about Pilsen and artists who rented storefronts for art spaces in college, and I had gone to Pilsen as a teen to wander. I decided that I wanted to have a storefront arts space in Pilsen.

TLN: I see from the list of ten names involved in operating your space that there’s a healthy team of folks supporting your organizational efforts. Are all of them artists? And do all these voices and hands embed themselves into the character of Roxaboxen Exhibitions as a collective, or are things more parsed, delegated and individuated?

LM: Roxaboxen was extremely disorganized in the beginning, getting into it I had this idea that we would all have jobs and function more like a collective or business. After about 6 months where I had been doing most, if not all, of the administrative work, I realized that I had developed this major role as director. I began taking more ownership of the space, and was more committed to trying to really curate and schedule in a more intentional way. The others sort of let this happen and an unspoken agreement developed wherein I did what I wanted and others could schedule stuff they were interested in whenever there was free time. So Roxaboxen has evolved over the past few years out of this original situation. I am back and forth about making money on the space, sometimes I feel like I should be, sometimes I don’t care.

Continue reading »

Berlinde de Bruyckere, (partial installation view). DHC Gallery. Photo: Raji Sohal.

Before the analysis comes rushing in like an insuppressible wave, I am struck with the straight-up “thingness” of Flemish artist, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s corporeal sculptures at gallery DHC in Montreal. For inanimate objects, the amorphous shapes, translucent white/gray/bluish depths and waxy textures on the one hand, and the immense brown-haired animals displayed on the other, these sculptures are a loud and demanding imposition when presented in a pristine, white cube. The materiality and scale are compelling enough on their own. The sculptures’ meticulously-crafted content and masterful aesthetic qualities are a visual mystery while their possible meanings stretch the interest of De Bruyckere’s work far beyond the physicality of the sculptures.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, "Les Deux," 2001 (partial installation view). DHC Gallery. Photo: Raji Sohal.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, "Les Deux," 2001 (partial installation view). DHC Gallery. Photo: Raji Sohal.

One of two rooms in De Bruyckere’s exhibition consists of casts of real humans created site-specifically for DHC – Invisible Beauty and Invisible Love (2011).  In these works, boneless and headless bodies hang vulnerably from pole-like structures fixed off the ground, to the walls. They are as arrestingly beautiful in their carefully-rendered technique and form as they are disturbingly deformed and mutilated in their meaning. There is also a trestle holding two actual-size brown-haired horse figures in a piece entitled Les Deux, (2001), in which the creatures are stacked horizontally atop one another inside a precarious scaffolding structure. Their cultural symbolism suggest extreme weight and heaviness, but of course they are actually comprised of lightweight materials. Despite their stiff and vulnerable positioning, the horses appear vibrant and life-like, still powerful with the potential of wild horses in wait. To see a horse – a symbol of strength and war – in a position of defeat, loss, and compromise, points also to the fiction of the steadfast, heroic narrative. Soldiers fall, horses too. And war is very much about death and suffering of actual bodies. The two horses’ majesty is interrupted by the disturbing trestles in which they lie on exhibit, but also by their lack of facial features and the absence of their eyes – a gateway into identifying with the animals which we commonly associate with humans. The human body sculptures on the other hand, cling inwardly, the centre of their sinewy bodies are wrapped in a way around pole-like structures, seemingly resisting the world outside them. The physical agency is introverted, like someone who has failed or fallen, and its body center – its heart – hides from spectators; this is shame personifed. The bodies are without heads and without eyes, and so spectators can look, gawk, and gaze without being seen. The scrutiny extends beyond the material instantaneously, lending itself to parallel the political realm.

Continue reading »

Jasmine Justice, "Uranium Leak," 2010. Acrylic and vinyl paint on canvas.

Thea Liberty Nichols: I had the pleasure of getting to know you while working in my previous post at 65GRAND gallery, and it was lovely seeing you in town again for your last show their. Since the last body of work of yours I saw, the physicality of the knobby linen and metallic paints and the way it interacts with an almost intuitive sense of framing, patterning and imagery has gotten stronger and more intricate. But there was a new, figurative element to some pieces— can you tell us a little more about that?

Jasmine Justice: The events that appear in my paintings largely result from an opening of my subconscious into the painting process. I discover new meaning as a result of this opening. I have always considered the experience of making and reading my paintings to be very bodily, although if a form would arise that seemed too literally figural I wouldn’t keep it. Then faces started popping out more than usual. I think my paintings were teasing me. I have finally given in to allowing some face imagery.  I find them very inviting and I accept how human it is to read faces into everything.

Jasmine Justice, "Naughty or Nice," 2011. Acrylic on linen, 23.6 x 23.6 inches.

TLN: I know previously you were based out of New York but have spent the past year or so traveling and living abroad in places including Frankfurt, Berlin and Istanbul (if I’m not mistaken!). You featured the street view from your studio window in Istanbul on your 65GRAND exhibition poster, and I know when I was there a while back everything from the tile work, to the outline of minarets, to the color palate of cooking spices gave me aesthetic arrest. How have your experiences aboard in any or all of these places impacted your practice or made their way into your work?

JJ: I left New York in 2009 and have been spending a lot of time in Germany, but my current studio is in Istanbul. It’s in a district on the Asian side, where not-very-old furniture is renovated, mostly in a Baroque style. Nothing is ever thrown out here, and objects acquire unlikely identities through this recycling. The materials are simultaneously cheap and fancy and the shoddiness of the form doesn’t always correspond to the sumptuousness of material. Velvet, satin, jewels and metallic paint are routine. All these object of wonder are displayed in various stages of their creation out in the streets where the surrounding architecture is stark and modern, mostly from the 50s and 60s. The collision of these worlds is super exciting to me.

Continue reading »

Cindy Sherman. Photographed as part of MAC Cosmetics's new makeup campaign. Photo courtesy: MAC Cosmetics.

In this week’s roundup get an early fall preview with Cindy Sherman collaborating with MAC, Hiroshi Sugimoto conveying the Buddha, several artists’ works circa 1986, several artists in a new home at MFA Boston and more.

• Cindy Sherman and MAC Cosmetics recently announced a collaboration on a fall makeup collection.  MAC has released three visuals to tease the range, depicting the artist in exaggerated looks (one is very literally clownish) meant to demonstrate the “power of transformation”: she embodies an “off-kilter Hitchcock heroine,” a “fresh corpse,” a “Caravaggio Portrait,” and a “Park Avenue Plastic Surgery Maven.”  The limited-edition collection becomes available on September 29.

• Martin Puryear and Julie Mehretu are part of an ongoing High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA) collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art. (NYC).  Modern by Design presents groundbreaking designs of the past, present, and future.  Nearly 150 objects created by over 120 of the most influential artists and designers of the twentieth century are included.  The exhibition is on view until August 21.

• Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Allan McCollum, Bruce Nauman, Jessica Stockholder and several others will be featured in CIRCA 1986 – The 80s From Six Important New York Art Collections at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (HVCCA) in Peekskill, NY.  This exhibition is dedicated to major contemporary artists and also depicts the art market’s evolution and the work of a collector.  The show will be on view September 18 – July 2012.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto contributes a set of photographs for Reflections of the Buddha at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (St. Louis, MO).  Sugimoto conveys the sensation of seeing 1001 sculptures of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara.  The exhibition will be on view September 9 – March 10, 2012 and opens with a public reception on Friday, September 9, from 5 to 9 p.m.

• Mark Bradford, Josiah McElheny, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Fred Wilson, among several others will soon find a permanent home in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art located in the building I.M. Pei designed for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in 1981.  The wing will offer new perspectives and encouraging connections between art of the past and present. o mark the opening, the Museum will host a lively 24-hour celebration – beginning with ticketed parties on September 17 and culminating in a free Open House on September 18.

• Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective will be at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) this fall.  The retrospective features Serra‘s charcoal drawings from the early 1970′s and approximatively thirty sketchbooks by the artist containing works he drew while he was in Egypt, Iceland and Peru.  The exhibition will be on view October 15 – January 2012.

• Cai Guo-Qiang is the lead planner of the Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art in the Fujian province of China.  The museum is designed by famed American architect, Frank Gehry and will feature non-profit and for-profit venues.  Cai has been working since 2004 to realize his dream of a world-class contemporary art museum in his hometown and its finally moving in the right direction.

• Paddle8 takes you inside the studio of artist Laurie Simmons.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27206443]