Woody Harrelson as dirty cop Dan Brown in "Rampart" (2011)

Rampart, an “L.A. Noir” set for limited release the day before Thanksgiving, is a relentless film with a hero who’s impossible to love but a narrative thrust that forces you to root for him anyway. I saw it last weekend at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, as part of the American Film Institute’s annual festival, and left thinking not that it was a good film but rather that was riskily aggressive in the way it offered no way out of its protagonist’s bigotry.

Woody Harrelson plays a dirty cop in the Rampart police district, who just gets dirtier and dirtier as the film progresses, to the point of absurdity. The only people who give a damn about him are women, mainly the two sisters who live with him–or, rather, live in the main house in front of his backhouse. He’s been married to both of the sisters and has a daughter by each. It’s a very Old Testament scenario, like Leah and Rachel with Isaac, though it seems impressively progressive sometimes too. Then there’s the lawyer he meets, played by Robin Wright, a smart, driven woman whose role in the film is basically to be there when Harrelson’s cop needs to lose himself in either passion or paranoia. The sister ex-wives seem smart and interesting too, probably more so than their former husband. But throughout the film, they just provide a backdrop for his dysfunction.

Frank J. Thomas, photograph of Irving Blum, John Coplans, and Shirley Nielson Hopps. Courtesy Pasadena Museum of California Art.

I thought of Rampart when, a few nights later, I read this line in Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s Rebels in Paradise, a non-fiction, art historical L.A. Noir published earlier this year: “the two blondes went to Western Costume in Hollywood and rented lace bodices and short skirts” to attend the black-tie Marcel Duchamp opening at the Pasadena Art Museum. The “two blonds” were Gloria Nielson Bell and Shirley Nielson Hopps, the former soon to marry L.A. artist Larry Bell and the latter already married to Ferus Gallery founder and Pasadena Art Museum curator Walter Hopps. Shirley Nielson would eventually divorce Hopps and marry Irving Blum, Ferus’ co-owner–quite the scandal–but only after Hopps’s neuroses and haphazardness (and, probably, his love affairs) had worn her down and after she’d used much of her income as an art history instructor and all her spare time keeping his now-seminal art-world-making efforts afloat. But on page 84 of Rebels in Paradise, she’s just a blond in a bodice. “They both looked so cute,” remembered Larry Bell.

Variety of cheese stuffed into thirty-seven suitcases. Image courtesy of Eugenia P. Butler Estate, © Eugenia P. Butler Estate

I’ve never really seen Shirley Nielson given her due, not in this book or in the film The Cool School, about the Ferus gallery crew, which included Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Craig Kaufmann, a lot of the “big names” associated with SoCal pop and fetish finish. And so far not in any catalogues or literature for Pacific Standard Time (PST), the current region-wide initiative to celebrate SoCal’s art history. That said, there’s a great show up until Thanksgiving in–of course–one of the smallest galleries participating in PST, Sam Francis Gallery on the second floor of Crossroads School in Santa Monica. Called She Accepts the Proposition, it features risky work shown in woman-run galleries in the late 1960s through the 1970s.

Rather than historical photos and artifacts, the exhibition thankfully shows actual art by the mostly male conceptualists exhibited by these women, who included Eugenia Butler, Claire Copley, Constance Lewallen, Riko Mizuno and Morgan Thomas. Artists like William Leavitt, Daniel Buren, Jack Goldstein and Lawrence Weiner were not easy to sell at that point, and none of the galleries referenced in She Accepts had much if any financial success.

Malcolm Lubliner, 1968 photo of Eugenia Butler speaking with Elise Grinstein at a dinner party for Roy Lichtenstein, held at collector Betty Asher's home.

There’s another opening in January too, called Perpetual Conceptual, organized by the nonprofit Los Angeles Nomadic Division that will just focus on Eugenia Butler, the artist-gallerist who showed a William Leavitt sound piece in the 1960s and offered German Dieter Roth his first U.S. exhibition, which he filled with thirty-seven suitcases of unwrapped cheeses. Like the one at Crossroads, this exhibition will be relatively small, but still the best kind of revisionist history, in which a woman plays the right kind of supporting role.

“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” -Aristotle

“Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.”  -David Hockney

Artists Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw in their studio. Image: J. Gleisner.

There is a scene in Woody Allen’s classic movie Annie Hall in which children announce to the viewer not what they aspire to become when they grow up, but what they actually become in their adult lives. One boy is the proud president of the Pinkus Plumbing Company. Another sells tallises. The third boy says, “I used to be a heroin addict.  Now I’m a methadone addict.” From the mouth of babes Allen voices the truism that sometimes there’s a gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing.

Many of us, this writer included, have confronted this gap. Not once as a child did I dreamily gaze into the future and say, “When I grow up, I want to be an administrative assistant.” Actually I knew from a very young age that I wanted to become an artist. I am. But I also have a full-time job.

Between my full-time job and full-time studio practice, I work hard—very hard. I’m not alone. Indeed, the will to work must mutate from an academic obligation into herculean determination in young artists out on their own. Without a maniacal, insistent drive to create you will surely drown in the sea of other aspiring artists around you. Feeling adrift after a full day of filing and faxing at my day job, I headed to Greenpoint a few weeks ago for a rousing evening with two of the most ambitious young artists I know: Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw.

Chances are you have met Jen and Paul. If you haven’t, you will. They will make sure of this. I was first introduced to Jen and Paul at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where they began in the sculpture department and left together as a performance artist ensemble. Since they graduated from Cranbrook in 2010, Jen and Paul have been busy. In slightly less than two years, they have operated their own Fish Fry truck, been featured at Scope New York, hosted a series of apocalypse-themed dinner parties/performances at the Lower East Side Gallery, Allegra LaViola, and performed at Mass MoCA.  Later this month, the pair will participate in the show “No Object is an Island” at the re-opening of the Cranbrook Museum of Art.

Paul's Rattail. Image: J. Gleisner.

A curious (but by no means unexpected) development since Cranbrook is the appearance of Paul’s rattail, which commenced, fittingly, at our graduate commencement. Symbolically, Paul’s hair tassel tracks his growth since grad school. Inside their basement studio the rat tail is at home with its feral surroundings; the tanned hide of a cow carcass is folded in a corner next to a stack of oversized gambling chips. Remarkably, Outlaw is Paul’s real last name; he looks and acts the part.

Likewise Jen is a maverick in her own right. Whereas Paul prefers sleeveless undershirts, Miss Catron has branded her own combination of quirk and elegance. On the evening we met, Jen was stylishly dressed in the color of the season, camel. Her get-up—part cowgirl, part seventies power suit— was evidently hand-made, as are all her clothes. The charming concoction was offset by her vibrant red hair. With her brilliant mane, her theatrical outfits, her alien energy—Jen could generally be described as high-octane.

Jen and Paul are distinct in my circle of friends not only in appearance but because they are making waves in the larger pool of talented emerging artists in New York. A worthy goal for recent grads is to find a way to fund your artistic production. The more taxing challenge is to get paid for your artistic production. Admirably, how Jen and Paul make money and how they make art are not always unrelated. Like me, they also have day jobs.

Jen and Paul's Fish Fry Truck. Image courtesy the artists.

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Edward Hopper, "New York Movie", 1939 Image: heaviestcorner.org

It’s amazing… After over twenty years teaching I still get nervous. And I’m not thinking about the first day of classes (everyone gets nervous then), I was actually thinking about putting together an exhibition of student work. While it doesn’t carry the weight of big-ticket shows in Chelsea, student shows on college campuses, high school galleries, community centers, middle school hallways and even elementary school gymnasiums carry the weight of student ambition and often serve as a form of self-assessment for everyone involved, not just the students.

In a few weeks I am putting together an exhibition of student work at Hopper House here in New York called Reasons to Paint. This is the second show I have organized in the small, three-room gallery that once was the ground floor of Edward Hopper’s home. The first, an exhibition called Common Ground in 2008, paired student and teacher work side by side. Art educators from across our district were asked to identify a student who, in some way, shared a common concern, theme or approach in their own work and then exhibit alongside them. I was interested in students and teachers having the chance to show together on the same walls. In the end the opening was packed. Everyone was enthusiastic to be part of an exhibit in a professional gallery space. Best of all, parents and community members got to see the students in a way they didn’t experience all that often- seriously talking about their own work and having a dialogue about the works of classmates and teachers. Many of those students were at critical stages in their own school careers at the time, and I sincerely believe the opportunity to be part of a unique exhibit really made a difference as they began thinking about their own next steps after graduation.

This show, which opens on November 20th, asks students to take a work by Edward Hopper and simply be inspired by it to create a new work of art. The artist himself once said, “If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint,” and students are being asked this time around to look into the work they select in order to decide what exactly it is that’s so inspiring. Whether it’s the way unexpected colors come together, the gesture of two figures, the memory a particular image recalls, or even the ambiguity of a solitary figure in a room, students need to take that point of inspiration and create a work in response. Some students have understandably decided to paint, others have chosen photography or mixed-media. I even have one student who has chosen to make a sculpture… in a glass box, of course.

So why am I sweating it? Because I am dealing with high school students who have little regard for the word DEADLINE. While works were “due” this past Monday I still have these wonderful student artists casually coming by the classroom (as I am nearing a stroke) and saying things like, “I was thinking about cropping that photo we discussed instead of using the version we agreed on.” Whaaaaat??

Regardless of how they understand what it means to be prepared… in advance… I am hanging a show next week. And many of these students, like the students in Common Ground years ago, have some important decisions to make. This show, if we’re lucky, will be a tipping point for some that not only says it’s “ok” to make art, but it’s important to make art.

So, this morning I’m off to sunny Savannah, Georgia, for SECAC (the Southeastern College Art Conference) to present on some of the ideas I shared at the Now Museum earlier this year on radical museum education practice. I’ll report back in my next post at the end of this month: from the airplane snacks, to whether or not sleeping eight people (read: cash-poor grad student presenters) in a two bedroom historic Savannah home is a workable plan.

Hey Wall Street, your parents called. They can't afford to make your student loan payments for you anymore. Good luck with that.

As I think of the artist-educator interventionists of the 1970s, I’m also fixated upon the current practices of contemporary occupation, from the Arab Spring to #OWS. So much, from so many different perspectives, has been written about these heterogeneous protests and their polymorphous demands, ideas and cries. The things we know: the major targets are corrupt administrations (namely banks and political institutions, dictatorial or otherwise) and their suffocation of disparate populations (who are agitating on far-ranging issues, from the right to democratic elections to foreclosures and student debt). Solutions have been posed, and enacted: governmental overthrow; civil war; occupying public spaces; peaceful protest; organizing labor.

The thing I’m less sure about: what works in practice for those of us in graduate school? The Open Enrollment column is about discussing graduate life in the arts. What do we do in this moment? While the theoretical discussions of what’s happening down on Wall Street or in Tahrir Square have been rich and necessary, the most enlightening conversation I’ve had to date on the subject of the immediate protests in New York was with one of my undergrad students at Baruch. She supported the strong dissatisfaction with mounting student debt, precarious job prospects, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, but would never go down to Wall Street to join in because “I work two jobs to go to school. I have kids to look after at home. I don’t have time to protest, and nor does anyone else I know who actually has the problems “they” are protesting about.”

Her conundrum, her sense of shared purpose and simultaneous disassociation, is where my question for this post originates. It’s a rising sense of conflict that I’ll share in hopes of being persuaded to a more nuanced position by anyone reading. The students I teach are, for the most part, directly affected by the serious issues that those camped out on Wall Street, or protesting in Oakland, or elsewhere are making visible through their persistent presence. These students tick many of the following boxes: they are first generation to college, from single income households, and work multiple jobs to make their state school tuition. They go to class at night, juggling parental duties with their homework. They feel lost at times because they didn’t get as much attention to the fundamentals of writing or math at high school as they might have hoped for before entering undergraduate life. They speak English as a second language in jumbo classes where teachers are overwhelmed and under-resourced. These are gross generalizations, but they form the greater backdrop of my teaching experience so far.

Apply to TARP? It seemed to work for a number or major banks......

And this is where my question comes in. Given this picture, why would anyone choose a city or state school if they had other options? Sometimes, you make that choice because it is the only option presented. Sometimes it’s the best option (I got to pick from Edinburgh, Glasgow and St. Andrews, all tuition-free for a Scottish national). In the case of my grad school, it’s about joining a community where you respect the mission, even while you recognize the flaws of the institution and its administration (and, if nothing else, I think the protests have been highlighting the anger directed at the individuals and institutions that have egregiously strayed from their missions to protect, to serve, to act in beneficial manners to the communities to which they answer). While the call to forgive student debt is persuasive, there’s a flip side to that coin that often gets dropped from the discussion. Why aren’t we asking why the heck it’s ok to charge 50K per semester in the first place, and recognizing that the marketplace of higher education is as slimy as the corporations we’re protesting or the politicians we want to hold to account. So my question for this post regarding something we can do is this: can we make a meaningful political statement to support egalitarian educational opportunities by choosing a city or state school to attend or to teach in?

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Miami Contemporary Artists publication, 2007.

When I started Dirty Pink 305, I was well aware of two very important projects that have already taken big strides in documenting Miami’s artist community. The first was the Miami Contemporary Artists book edited by artists Julie Davidow and Paul Clemence that, in 2007, published the work of over 100 artists living and working in Miami, making it the first comprehensive collection of artist information from the area.

Bill Bilowit and Grela Orihuela of Wet Heat Project. Courtesy Wet Heat Project.

The other is Wet Heat Project, an ongoing collaboration by the artist/documentary team Grela Orihuela (producer) and Bill Billowit (director), who created two artist documentaries on Miami-born artists Hernan Bas and Bert Rodriguez. Under this project name, they started Wet Heat TV, a platform to create ongoing short films of artists-in-studio, artist couples, and art professionals sharing personal insights, as well as a series of performance projects by New World School of the Arts students.These two projects focused specifically on documenting artististic practice, and offer us invaluable insight into the ideas circulating within Miami’s art community. However, the value of such initiatives hasn’t quite resonated within that community as yet.

As it stands, no one in Miami seems very interested in investing in documentation. As a result, Miami has been in what Domingo Castillo has referred to as a state of “amnesia.” The desire to constantly push forward to discover the next “hot thing,” fueled by Miami’s prevailing commercial art forces—art fairs, galleries, collectors—has left little interest in placing those practices with a context, and even less interest in spending money to preserve Miami art’s recent history. Why so little support for documentation, the need for which is usually so easily understood?

"Making Sh*t Up," a documentary about Bert Rodriguez. Courtesy Wet Heat Project.

Over the past decade, Miami galleries have been incentivized by Art Basel Miami Beach, and as a result, they have shifted their focus toward a single week of exhibiting emerging artists, fostering collectorship, and moneymaking. Perhaps inadvertently, Art Basel offers a somewhat superficial aura of inclusion by encouraging galleries to present something “new” each year. Young artists fresh out of art school are given wonderful opportunities to exhibit their work to an international audience. However, these opportunities are a kind of double-edged sword. Encumbered to create work in the same mode for anywhere between one and five  years, depending on how their career sustains the market, these artists quickly find themselves outmoded as soon as the next “new” comes on the scene. Investment in an artist’s career over the long term has been rare. This inclusion of local artists in Art Basel Miami is, however, peripheral to the showcase of internationally renowned artists for which Miami provides the proverbial white walls. The last ten years have provided a fascinating case study on how an art community has been (somewhat willingly) cajoled into becoming something for which they are perhaps not best suited, or ready, to be. However, this seems to be changing.

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David Wojnarowicz, "Fire," 1987. Synthetic polymer paint and pasted paper on plywood, two panels, 6 x 8 feet (182.9 x 243.8 cm). Gift of Agnes Gund and Barbara Jakobson Fund. © 2011 Estate of David Wojnarowicz. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In connection with Ideas, a new section of Art21′s website that will explore a single theme in depth over a period of several months, the Art21 Blog is calling for essays for our latest Flash Points series. The inaugural edition of Ideas looks at The Culture Wars, Redux in the context of the seemingly endless number of controversies that have engulfed the art world over the past several years–from Ai Wei Wei’s April 2011 detention by Chinese authorities, the National Portrait Gallery’s removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly, and MoCA Los Angeles’s whitewashing of a mural by the artist Blu, to the United States House of Representative’s Spending Reduction Act of 2011, a bill which proposed to end the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities (fortunately the crisis was averted, though both agencies experienced budget cuts of 7.5% each). The October, 2011 print edition of Art in America also pointed to the rise of art censorship and vandalism across the world in an article titled “The Global Culture War” written by Eleanor Heartney.

In many ways, the questions asked in The Culture Wars, Redux circle back to the blog’s very first Flash Points question “What’s so shocking about contemporary art?” We’d like to continue the discussion, while re-contextualizing it within our current cultural climate, by asking “What’s at stake in the new culture wars?”  We encourage you to explore the essays, images, and video materials that are collected in Ideas, and to respond by proposing a Flash Points essay sparked by an idea of your own.

We are eager to hear from a range of perspectives from those of you who work as artists, arts professionals, students, art educators, funders, organizers, and academics. If you’d like to write a piece for Flash Points, please email your ideas and pitches to blog [at] art21 [dot] org with the subject heading FLASH POINTS PROPOSAL. We look forward to hearing from you!

Hiroshi Sugimoto. "Mathematical Model 002 Dini's surface: a surface of constant negative curvature obtained by twisting a pseudosphere," 2005. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy The Pace Gallery. Photo courtesy the artist and The Pace Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Hiroshi Sugimoto explores a Buddhist stupa, Florian Maier-Aichen lectures in NYC, Pratt honors Laurie Anderson and William Wegman, Matthew Ritchie debuts in Los Angeles, and more.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto: Surface of the Third Order presents new sculptures by Hiroshi Sugimoto, at the Pace Gallery (NYC).  Made from optical-quality glass, each Five-Element Pagoda is based on the form of a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist stupa, a traditional reliquary used to hold the ashes of Buddha. Enshrined within the sphere of each pagoda is a unique photograph from Sugimoto’s Seascapes series (begun in 1980).  This show closes December 23.

• Laylah Ali, Martha Colburn, Ann Hamilton, Raymond Pettibon and 26 other artists interspersed with poetry works are part of The Air We Breathe, a thematic exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) that explores issues surrounding the cause to legalize same-sex marriage. The show’s title is drawn from a Langston Hughes poem: “Equality is in the air we breathe,” from Let America Be America Again. The poem was written in 1938 but still resonates today.  The exhibition is on view until February 20, 2012.

• Carrie Mae Weems is one of three artists in Narrative Interventions in Photography, at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles).   This show includes 34 pieces primarily drawn from the Getty’s collection which contains images that are intimate and shocking, puzzling and poignant. Each artist expresses a new narrative by altering literary objects in their works, either by mutilating books, inserting words, or shredding printed pages. The exhibition closes March 11, 2012.

• Florian Maier-Aichen will lecture as part of the Aperture and the Photography Program in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design (NYC) on Tuesday, November 15.  Maier-Aichen often pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the 19th century.  He marries digital technology with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.

• Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle employs footage shot on a high-speed film camera for Always After, a public art project that focuses on the broken glass accumulated after the windows of the Mies-designed Illinois Institute of Technology’s Crown Hall were smashed by the architect’s own grandson as part of a ceremony in advance of the building’s renovation.  The project operates electronic exhibition sites along the Connective Corridor in Syracuse, NY at Syracuse Stage and the Everson Museum of Art. This work will be projected on site until December 31.

• James Turrell will soon install a new Skyspace light project, Building in the LIGHT, in Northwest Philadelphia.  The Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting (CHFM) will be building a new meetinghouse within the next year and will feature Turrell’s work which is similar to the one at the Quaker Meetinghouse in Houston, Texas.  Incorporating a Skyspace in this new, environmentally-friendly building and surrounding gardens and woods will not only accommodate the vibrant local Quaker community, but also offer people of all faiths a place to gather for quiet reflection, fellowship, education, and social action.

• Last week Pratt Institute honored Laurie Anderson and William Wegman as “distinguished individuals whose accomplishments and values resonate with those of Pratt.”  The occasion was the school’s annual Legends scholarship benefit.

• Julie Mehretu headlines Seeing/Knowing, an exhibition at the new Gund Gallery (Gambier, Ohio) that explores the contemporary overlap between art and data — work that expresses knowledge in graphical terms.  Mehretu’s Auguries is the first piece on display. It channels architectural systems and layered vectors across 12 panels. In addition, Seeing/Knowing showcases up-and-coming artists.  This show closes March 4, 2012.

• Matthew Ritchie‘s Los Angeles debut, Monstrance, includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, a site-specific multimedia installation and a performance.  The title refers to a ritual vessel created in the medieval period for the public display of relics, and is derived from the Latin word meaning ‘to show.’ In the performance, presented at the exhibition’s opening, a masked singer, representing the many forms of the sun, presents the ‘office of the evening’ as the sun sets.  This exhibition is on view at L&M Arts (Los Angeles) until December 10.

• Mark your calendars now for the next stops of a traveling exhibition of work by Mark Bradford that will be view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from February 18 through June 17, 2012, and at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) from February 18 through May 27, 2012. These will be the only West Coast presentations of this show, a major museum survey of paintings, sculptures, and multimedia works by Bradford.

TM Sisters, Natasha and Monica Lopez de Victoria being interviewed. Image courtesy Dity Pink 305.

Most cities have their “art stars.” Instead, Miami has an art fair, a handful of renowned institutions, and some really impressive private collections. This is not due to a lack of creative and boundary-pushing artists and artist spaces—a local “underground,” or what I like to call “real;” Miami’s art scene is very present and also, refreshingly , a little “wild west” in feel.

This “real art world”  just happens to be out of the mainstream dialogue that characterizes Miami and is, as a result, under-recognized and placed as secondary to the institutions whose “bark” is louder.

I have lived and worked in Miami for over eight years, and–at the risk of sounding sentimental–artists living and working in Miami are used to the exposure that comes with having the art world at their doorstep, and yet despite this, they have chosen to maintain an ethic of community (or rather, of communities plural, echoing Miami’s true diversity). These artist communities remain largely undiscovered, and as a result, the artists’ voices have remained unheard, undocumented, and in many respects excluded from a larger global art dialogue.  There are of course individual exceptions: artists such as Robert Chambers, Bob Thiele, Mark Handforth and Dara Friedman have managed to create careers outside of Miami, and are well-known outside of their home base. There are also artists like Bert Rodriguez and Adler Guerrier who have been featured in the Whitney Biennal—but has this helped them to capitalize on further opportunities and establish their careers elsewhere? Bert Rodriguez, in an interview with Dirty Pink 305, shared his experience of the Miami art landscape:

Over the past decade, the commercial forces in the field have encouraged a fervor among collectors to seek out the “new.” Over time, this has created a lot of frustration amongst artists—an older generation of artists felt excluded, and a younger generation recognized their moment of recognition to be fleeting. This cultivated an attitude that emphasized “the now” along with the compulsion to consistently push forward without taking stock of what had come before. To make matters worse, aside from a few individual initiatives, nobody seemed to be documenting what was happening. In my next blog post, I will introduce these initiatives and the partners in our project.

To capture a moment that felt like it could slip away undocumented, I started Dirty Pink 305. This has begun as a website (www.dirtypink305.com) to collate artist interviews and provide a resource for artist opinion. The interviews are straightforward and roughly edited, and each interview has been transcribed to create links to every person, place and thing an artist talks about in order to establish who has really impacted the artist community. So far through these interviews, I have learned of many events and exhibitions that I had no idea about, even though I was living and working in Miami’s art community. I have also seen how multi-faceted that art community is, and how Art Basel Miami has acted as a singular unifying force on Miami’s art scene–and not always to a positive end. Magnus Sigurdarson elaborated on this point in his interview with us:

Dirty Pink 305 aims to do two things: document artist opinion in order to re-create history in the context of those artists’ experiences, and expand the public’s understanding of the local art scene beyond the peripheral and superficial.

Next step… a publication that collates, statistically analyzes and contextualizes the interview material we’ve collected in order to redevelop a narrative and statistical overview based on artist opinion alone. I, along with my blogging partner Tina Acevedo, will be explaining what this means in more detail in our upcoming posts.

Post written by Claire Breukel of Dirty Pink 305.

Thanks to our previous blogger-in-residence DeWitt Cheng for highlighting the fascinating work of several under-recognized artists from the San Francisco Bay area. You can read more of DeWitt’s SF Bay coverage on his personal webpage.

Next up, we turn to Miami, where a significant faction of the global art world will descend next month for the Art Basel Miami and New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) art fairs. Miami is known as the site of this glitzy convergence of the international art world– but what about the artists who live and work there all year round? Dirty Pink 305, a new organization founded by independent curator and writer Claire Breukel, is in the process of mapping that scene. Along with her Dirty Pink 305 partner Tina Acevedo, Claire will take up residence here on the Art21 Blog for the next two weeks to share some of what they’ve learned from their ongoing research into Miami’s artists and vibrant art community.

Claire Breukel, Founder, Dirty Pink 305, is an independent curator/writer and works as a Creative Advisor for Miami DDA. She has worked as Curator for Sportlifestyle company PUMA and as Executive Director for Locust Projects, Miami, and has written for Eikon, ArtPulse, Wynwood magazine, Arte Aldia and has a weekly column on Hyperallergic.com. She has curated exhibitions in Cape Town, New York, Miami, Vienna and San Salvador.

Tina Acevedo, Project Coordinator, Dirty Pink 305 is an artist and art student. For reasons she cannot recall she decided to pursue art and to become immersed in the art world. She completed her A.A. at Parsons School for Design and is currently working on obtaining her B.F.A. with a concentration in painting and film/electronic arts. Tina is interested in art that is compelling and breaks new ground. She is the project coordinator for Dirty Pink 305 and is based in Miami for the time being.

Claire Breukel, Founder of Dirty Pink 305.

Mel Bochner. “Amazing,” 2011. Monoprint with collage, engraving and embossment on hand-dyed Twinrocker handmade paper, 94 1/4 x 70 3/4 inches 239.4 x 179.7 cm. Image courtesy Two Palms Press, New York.

“At the root of all my work is the recognition that we tend to take most of our experience for granted” (Mel Bochner in “Art in Conversation: Mel Bochner with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, May 2006).

Mel Bochner’s recent work barrages the senses with a parade of related words that demand attention. In paintings and monoprints, he blasts the common language of the modern era in capital sans-serif letters across the surface of his choosing, using carefully selected colors that highlight some terms and obfuscate others, sometimes even confusing one word from the next.  Though these pieces often provoke an initial response of amusement, even laughter, the viewer is led into a deeper inquiry upon extended viewing.   The scale, physicality, and visual impact – coupled with an involuntary compulsion to read the text – provoke a visceral and cognitive response, leading the mind into a labyrinth of free association.  These often include collective or cultural connections as well as personal experiences or biases toward the terms on display.

As discussed in detail by Johanna Burton in her essay “The Weight of the Word: Mel Bochner’s Material Language” in Mel Bochner: Language 1966-2006 (New Haven and Chicago: Yale University Press and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007), Bochner’s work posits questions and opens dialogue rather than provides answers.  This seems a natural result of the work of an artist who places inquiry at the center of his practice.  “I work by making up hypotheses, ‘What would happen if…’ and then working through the contradictions as they come up” (Bochner in  The Brooklyn Rail). Though he has also explored other systems of communication and knowledge (such as measurements, numbers, and spacial geometries and relationships), language has been a central concern from the beginning.

This interest in – and investigation of – language started shortly after he moved to New York in the mid-1960s when he taught at the School of Visual Arts (please see a brief bio here).  Though he was a painter, he was asked to teach art history.  Perhaps due to his prior study of Phenomenology giants Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as an auditing student at Northwestern University, this experience prompted him “to think about how visual ideas can be discussed—the relationship between language and images” (ibid.).  While at SVA, he also curated a ground-breaking 1966 exhibition (which is now understood as a work of art in its own right), Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed As Art, shown at the SVA’s gallery.  The exhibition was comprised of four binders that contained photocopies of works by his colleagues and contemporaries in art, music, philosophy, biology, engineering, and mathematics, placed on pedestals.

In its infancy, Conceptual art – which was frequently text-based – was thought to bear no trace of personal expression and to exist in a purely cognitive realm;  in other words, it did not need to exist as a physical object.   Among artists, “an assumption was floating around that using language in your art was a communicative shortcut, a direct route from one mind to another” (Bochner in “Mel Bochner in conversation with James Meyer” in Burton, et al., Mel Bochner: Language 1966-2006, 133).  However, in both writings and artwork, Bochner asserted that language itself is implicitly idiosyncratic and political, and that ideas cannot exist without a material component – what he called a “support” – be it a piece of paper, a wall, or a canvas. His position is best exemplified by the now-iconic 1970 work Language is Not Transparent in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in which he painted a messy, drippy field of black paint on the wall and scrawled the words of the title in chalk, as if on a blackboard.   Likewise, in the 1969-70 work Theories of Boundaries in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, he explored the relationship between language and physicality.

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