‪Cai Guo-Qiang. "1040M Underground‬," 2011. Photo courtesy the artist and Izolyatsia.

In this week’s roundup, Cai Guo-Qiang goes underground, Josiah McElheny curates for Andrea Zittel and Roni Horn, Beryl Korot composes in Krakow and more.

• Cai Guo-Qiang‘s 1040M Underground at Izolyatsia is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Ukraine. The title is inspired by the artist’s experience of the coal and salt mines of Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region.

• Art by Andrea Zittel and Roni Horn are on view at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) in New York, in an exhibition co-curated by Josiah McElheny.  If you lived here, you’d be home by now presents Horn’s two-part photographic installation, This is me, This is You (1999-2000). For Horn’s work (and for others in the exhibition), McElheny “re-designed” and built Donald Judd-like furniture from which to view the artwork. The show closes December 16.

• Barbara Kruger and Carrie Mae Weems, among several other artists, are featured in At Fifty: Krannert Art Museum, 1961–2011 (Illinois), an exhibition that places art objects from ancient Greece and Latin America in dialogue with 19th century European paintings and 20th century video; realism sits astride abstraction; photography and drawings illustrate how artists have represented humanity for more than a century.  This work is on view until October 23.

• Carrie Mae Weems was one of the artists featured in part three of the seven-part series, XX Chromosocial: Women Artists Cross the Homosocial Divide. Weems’ photographs focus on the “codes that underpin and perpetuate women’s homosocialization,” to demonstrate how art can act as a mirror of its maker.  Weems’ work shows iconic images of the “girlchild” and of girls’ “first attention to mothers, sisters, and girlfriends they learn from and compare themselves to long before they (if ever) appeal to male desire.”

• Beryl Korot is one of a few select composers presenting work at the 9th Sacrum Profanum Festival in Krakow, Poland.  This will be a celebration of American Minimalism and the 75th birthday of Steve Reich – an icon of the genre.  The concert events will take place September 11–17.

• Cao Fei‘s film Shadow Life will be on display at Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas.  The film is an adaptation of traditional Chinese shadow puppetry. The intricate hand puppets animating Shadow Life merge these traditional art forms to tell a distinctly contemporary story of modern China.  This film will be shown until October 30.  Admission is free.

• Maya Lin‘s Confluence Project: Reimaging the Columbia River is now on view at the Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts & History in Lewiston, ID.  This exhibit includes models created by Lin and her New York studio, as well as images and models of the Vancouver Land Bridge created by Jones and Jones Architects in Seattle.  This work will be on display through February 10.

• Josiah McElheny’s Island Universe will be screened at the Harvard Film Archive (Boston, MA).  This film explores the origins of the universe and J. & L. Lobmeyr’s Space Age chandeliers for New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Melissa Franklin, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, and Chair, Department of Physics, Harvard University, and Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.  This film will be shown October 15, from 3–5pm.  Admission is free.

• Collier Schorr worked with actress Rachel Weisz for a Wall Street Journal photo cover shoot.  Schorr was chosen for her body of work exploring androgynous sexuality and her ability to capture Weisz’s sensual look in a modern way.

Louisa Conrad in conversation with students in Singapore.

As the artist-in-residence at an all-girls high school in Singapore, I have been working on an environmental project with the students. Twenty students and myself have each been carrying an IKEA bag in which we’ve collected our personal trash. I figured the best way to see how much junk we produce on a daily basis is to not throw any of it away. So, for the last sixty days, I have been carrying my IKEA bags everywhere I go, as a performance art piece that now weighs about 4kg [almost 9 lbs]. The girls–who I think are very brave to do this–have to explain to their mothers why they are keeping trash. I think this is awesome, because it is not exactly a very “lady-like” thing to do.

Teaching art in the school is great, especially because there is time set aside for the art students to learn art history (which I myself didn’t do until I went to university).  Besides some local Southeast Asian art history, a good portion of the art history curriculum is based on Western art.  The students are taught Romanticism all the way to Pop Art.  Since I get to design some of the courses, I can teach a little bit of performance art, Land Art, and Conceptual art, which are my favorite dishes. Just last year, the school had its first-ever art trip to London and Paris to let the students see all the great masterworks in person. The experience was as invaluable as it was magical: the textbooks came alive!

This also points to one of the problems of teaching art on an island nation.  Resources are somewhat limited, and every place else is a flight away. But Singapore’s advantage as a port city is its special relationship to the rest of the world (through economic trade, etc).  I thought I would use that to my own advantage by bringing artists a little bit closer to the classroom.  I have been running Foxriver, a small art space in the school, where I invite friends from different places to send works to be exhibited.  Last year I had artists Gala Porras-Kim, Juka Araikawa, Krister Olssen, Josh Miller, Guan Rong, and Lindsay Foster, along with many other artists who participated in a comic book show curated by John Burtle.

The highlight, though, was when I invited Gala Porras-Kim to have an artist talk via Skype while her exhibition was on view in the space.  So this week, I brought Louisa Conrad, a friend of mine from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), to chat with the students about her experiences as an artist and her interest in environmental issues. Over the last three years, Louisa has spent time in Iceland photographing volcanic landscapes, researching sea pollution, and investigating the impact of industrial development on salmon. She has traveled throughout the Northwest Territories and the Canadian Arctic, and she now lives and works on a goat farm in Vermont called Big Picture Farm.

Louisa Conrad. "Worker I," 2010. C-print, 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Below is an excerpt from our classroom’s Skype conversation with Louisa.

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Thomas Struth, "San Zaccaria," 1995. Image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 1996 (1996.297) © Thomas Struth.

Maybe Thomas Struth’s 1995 photograph of the interior of the church of San Zaccaria in Venice is too obvious a way to epitomise the relationship between contemporary art and the art of the past. Not only that: it’s also nearly 20 years old, it’s over-familiar, and it’s representative of a moment in photography that now looks old hat, very pre-2008. The thing itself seems like a relic of a time when photography set out to be object first and image second: a huge glossy C-print, designed for easy installation over a plutocrat’s mantle. There’s something obscene about it, even: a photographic object, printed in an edition made to sate commercial tastes, recording a unique painted object, whose placement – as much as whose content and author – generates a heightened aura of sacramental exclusivity. There’s pathos to that, too, on first look. It might be used to head an article on the indifference of the modern public to great artistic masterpieces (look at that dude on the bottom left! He’s not even looking!), or an op-ed on the rise of atheism. So the reaction to the work is sometimes a bit sneering. That, or – as I witnessed while looking at this work in Struth’s current show at the Whitechapel gallery – awe. Strewth!

Giovanni Bellini, San Zaccaria Altarpiece, 1505. Church of San Zaccaria, Venice.

If the response to the image is so often one of wonder, it’s in reaction to the church interior itself. On being looked at, the photograph removes itself, like a pane of glass in a window. (Its size, which is enveloping and vision-filling, is a part of this: not seeing the parenthetical white wall around the photograph is an easy way of stepping in). There are discontinuities and un-picturesque bits in Struth’s image that look unintentional: the arbitrary scattering of visitors, for instance, which on closer inspection reveal themselves to be part of a pattern that locks together the image-in-the-image, the image, and the world of the observer. Look at how those tourists sitting in the pews – contemplating the last of their currency, or the best time to leave for the airport – become correlatives of the painted figures behind them. Not the main narrative events, like the young Mary ascending the steps of the temple, or the saints gravely reading the sacred texts, but the peripheral characters, the mechanicals: the startled onlookers, gesticulating dumbly to something they don’t quite understand. (There’s a cropped painted figure in the top right of the photograph, for instance, that appears to mimic a seated figure in the pews directly below, and there are plenty of other serendipitous pairings). The whole image, then, becomes about the condition of being peripheral to a main event, like an illustration of Auden’s poem about Breughel’s Fall of Icarus (“it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window”). Bellini’s Mary is still at dead center, more or less at eye-level, and the altarpiece contains its own centrifugal hierarchy, from Madonna and child to saints to slivers of landscape beyond, which in turn sits in the center of a wall of pretty B-league later painting, which in turn is observed by real visitors (and us, of course), with the entire composition locked together by the two piers, cousins of Bellini’s real, and painted, versions. There are main events, and there are onlookers. (The photograph below, by Thomas Hoepker, enacts a similar centralised event/centrifuged onlookers tension, with very different results; the main event still holds the perspectival center ground). Struth’s photograph is a parable about history, using art history as its metaphor.

September 11th image by Thomas Hoepker. Photograph: Thomas Hoepker/Magnum.

Struth’s image illustrates a notion that is key to unpacking art’s relationship to its own past. Beyond the niceties of art history (and I’ve been in this church many times with groups of teenagers, feeling the eyes in Bellini’s painting bore holes in the back of my skull, while trying to explain terms like “perspective” and “symbolism” that seem posthumous and petty in relation to such a painting), what makes art most come alive – what makes it most justify its reasons for being, beyond being an academic ice-breaker or a mere product of its time, thrown up automatically in a kind of historical gag reflex – is the transferral of ideas. Struth’s photo demarcates the looker and the looked at, the main event and the audience, and in doing so makes a case in the only way it knows how – visually – for the real art history, which is something passed, hand to hand, from artist to artist, on and on.

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I’m taking an extended sabbatical from Letter from London for the remainder of the year to focus on a number of educational, curatorial and writing projects, all of which will be previewed on my blog, here. Thanks for reading.

Ann Hamilton, “ciliary #3,” 2010. Lithograph, fabric, bamboo and hardwood dowel construction. Approx. diameter: 58" (147.3 cm). Variable edition of 19 unique works, published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles and New York. "ciliary" © 2010 Ann Hamilton and Gemini G.E.L. LLC.

Ann Hamilton’s work is founded on the idea of the line – both in its material form as thread, fiber, and hair; and its conceptual form in written and drawn communication.  From this deceptively simple beginning point, she creates subtle and profound worlds and objects that stretch our understanding of contemporary life in a technological age and touch upon the deepest reaches of what it means to be human – in particular, our ability to relate to others, build meaningful relationships, and share ideas through communication.  This path of inquiry began over three decades ago from her first love of textiles, then expanded into sophisticated and revelatory installation/performance works, a number of which can be reviewed on the artist’s website.  Though she has ventured into increasingly conceptual territory over the years, Hamilton has never lost sight of her beginnings in material culture and the rich presence of the hand-made object.  Her work first seduces with its visual and tactile appeal, and then reveals its conceptual underpinnings.

An online interview with Art21 raises the dilemma of ephemerality for Hamilton’s work – the fact that it must be experienced in a particular time and place.  This issue is endemic to artists who work in site-specific installation, and it often becomes increasingly problematic as time passes.  Though Hamilton has created objects throughout her career, the early examples do not fully stand on their own.  Some, such as the body object series of 1984-93, were “performed” and documented with photography (the images were then editioned and published); others are sculptural objects or digital media that played a role in an installation at one time.  However, as noted by scholar Joan Simon in her 2008 essay on Hamilton’s editions for Gemini G.E.L., she has recently “turned to different sorts of makings.  At one end of the spectrum are … chants and song; at the other reach of the spectrum are the objects that bespeak individually and as ensembles.” (Ann Hamilton at Gemini [exh.cat.], Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, New York, 2008, 15).  The human voice has certainly played a greater role in Hamilton’s recent work, but she has also created objects and architectural structures that are self-contained and have a material presence, including a number of prints and variable editions.  This new direction in her work partially satisfies, as it has for many artists, an interest in reaching a wider audience and also presents new challenges and avenues of exploration.

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Richard Prince, "Untitled (Covering Pollock)," 2010. Collage and acrylic on c-print. 40 x 52 1/2 inches. Courtesy Richard Prince, Gagosian Gallery, and Guild Hall Museum.

“I am nature.” –Jackson Pollock

“We are all a combination of constructions and inventions, a mixture of truth and lies.”  —Richard Prince

Richard Prince’s new body of work at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, continues the artist’s career-long preoccupation with using the images of mass media to explore issues of originality and uniqueness in art.  The exhibition, titled Richard Prince: Covering Pollock, brings together a series of works in which Prince has layered images of punk rock musicians, swimsuit models, and vintage pornographic centerfolds atop photographs of the great Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.  The images of Pollock that Prince has selected (and selectively covered over) are largely culled from a book of photographs by Hans Namuth. The photographs reveal Pollock in the act of painting—his wife and fellow artist Lee Krasner perched on a stool observing him work, clusters of paint cans and brushes on the floor of his workspace—as well as views of Pollock’s bucolic Springs studio and of the overturned car from the crash that took Pollock’s life in the summer of 1956.

Onto these photographs Prince has collaged much smaller images of rock musicians and beautiful women, and occasionally even images of Pollock and Krasner themselves. Prince has collaged these smaller images into across the surfaces of the Pollock photographs in grid-like fashion, often repeating a select few images across the picture plane.  In a number of these works the one prominent feature of Pollock left uncovered by Prince’s layering is the painter’s hand—that ultimate symbol of artistic creation—seen clutching either a brush or a cigarette.

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