This past weekend was ITP’s annual winter show, which marks the end of our Fall semester. I decided not to submit any of my own work because the incredibly slick Yale Evelev of Luaka Bop made my Gamelan Orchestra an offer we could not refuse: to play four amazing nights at The Stone, John Zorn’s well regarded experimental and avant-garde performance space.

Luaka Bop Residency at The Stone, December 2011. Courtesy Luaka Bop.

Yale went to Indonesia for the first time in 1979 and was struck by the casual ambience of gamelan and wayang kulit performances in the villages of Java. “…The audience and the performers were on the same level and interspersed,” Yale explained. “It was magical for me hearing these sonorities up close without the distance of a stage and the normal formalities of a western concert.” He wanted to recreate this experience by pairing us with some amazing acts, one of which I have been following for quite some time.

I first discovered Lucky Dragons, the band/art-collective consisting of Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara, while researching fabric capacitive sensors for a touch-sensitive curtain. I was directed to their “Make a Baby” project and became hooked on their music. Lucky Dragons often require their audience to touch each other in order to complete a circuit, creating electronic sound with their interaction. This basic model effectively translates a pure human-to-human experience to the digital world.

Continue reading »

Daniel Joshua Goldstein. "Invisible Man X 3," 2010. Photographic triptych of original sculpture: syringes, red crystal beads, steel wire, electric motor. Each photograph in triptych: 65" x 32". Collection of the artist.

“Sickness shows us what we are.” ~ Latin proverb

“You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and unconscious are embedded in it; they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet… and that is the place where one cannot say whether it is matter or what one calls ‘psyche’.” ~ Carl Jung

Illness and art have a long, entangled history. The human need to ameliorate suffering, to engage in a creative practice that mitigates the sense of loss brought on by illness or in some way counteracts the illness itself (however illness is imagined) is universal. A persistent example is the making of effigies–sometimes to focus the attention of the sick on images of the supernatural world (for example the Isenheim altarpiece) or to attempt to bring about change in the body itself through a mimetic process of healing (such as votive objects in the shape of body parts).

In the contemporary world, HIV/AIDS has been a potent catalyst for the making of art which marshals social activism, engenders a supportive community, or challenges the public to reinterpret the meaning of the disease. In this way, art about HIV/AIDS is a gauge of  social conscience and cultural consciousness.

Daniel Joshua Goldstein. "Icarian Angel," 1993. Photograph of the original found object sculpture: leather, sweat, black felt in case of wood, copper, Plexiglas. 36.125 x 30 x 6 inches. Private collection.

San Francisco activist and artist Daniel Joshua Goldstein has been living with HIV since 1984. As one of the few HIV+ survivors from the early time of the epidemic in America, he is an historic witness to the thirty year transformation of society’s response(s) to AIDS.  Goldstein is one of the five subjects interviewed in David Weissman’s documentary film We Were Here, which records eye-witness accounts of the devastation and collective trauma wrought by the onslaught of the illness.

The human effigy has played a significant role in a number of Goldstein’s AIDS-related works, beginning in 1993 when he first exhibited the “Icarian Series” in New York City.  These were the salvaged leather skins of exercise machines from a gay gym, their golden surfaces broken down by a decade and a half of physical impress, friction and sweat. As remnants of an entire culture, lost overnight as it were, the eerie figures shining from the surfaces could not but denote all manner of  connections to the sacred, the saintly and the spooky. The force of these effulgent effigies was so strong that during an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1998, curator Rosemary Crumlin told Goldstein she would often find visitors openly weeping in front of them.

Continue reading »

"Lick and Lather" by Janine Antoni (1993-94). Image courtesy SFMoMA.

I wanted to do a Top Ten list of contemporary conservation projects that could be seen online, but only found nine.  While I don’t mean to pretend that I completed an exhaustive search for projects from 2011, I do pay a lot attention to conservation in the news and did a fair amount of looking around…so, if you know of any other good ones, please list them in the comments below.

9. SFMoMA Conservators Turn Back Time: Michelle Barger talks to a KALW reporter about caring for Janine Antoni‘s famous set of busts titled Lick and Lather (pictured above), and a variety of other SFMoMA projects.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. "Spoonbridge and Cherry." Image courtesy Walker Art Center.

8. The Problem of Paint: Re-coating Sculptures by Calder, Oldenburg, West, and di Suvero: This is probably the most curious story in the bunch as the conservation project was atypically overseen by The Walker Art Center’s registrar (they don’t have a conservation staff), but it still provides an interesting glimpse into the restoration of one of Minneapolis’ iconic sculptures, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Spoonbridge and Cherry.

The Artists Documentation Program.

7. Artist Documentation Program (ADP): This ground-breaking web initiative went online in 2011. The ADP “interviews artists and their close associates in order to gain a better understanding of their materials, working techniques, and intent for conservation of their works.” There are lots of great artist interviews available through this project, and don’t forget to check out the talk by the folks that completed the interviews and created the web page.

"An Artificial Barrier of Blue, Red and Blue Fluorescent Light (to Flavin Starbuck Judd)," 1968. Image courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

6. Francesca Esmay Announced as the Conservator for the Panza Collection Initiative at the Guggenheim. Maybe I’m a sucker for press releases about art conservators, or maybe the Guggenheim was lucky to grab Esmay from her job as the first (and only) conservator at the Dia Art Foundation; either way, her work on the Panza Collection will be tremendously important and I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about it soon (you might remember Esmay from her brilliant work documenting Spiral Jetty).

Collections team packing up the Eames living room. Photo: Bryan Chan, Los Angeles Times.

5. Charles and Ray Eames’ Living Room Makes an Interim Home at LACMA.  While it’s clear that a project of this scale requires a team of collections staff and not just conservators, I couldn’t help but include this project after looking at the Eameses so much on this blog.

Continue reading »

Barry McGee. Mural installation at "Fifty Years of Bay Area Art," 2011. Image courtesy SFMoMA and the artist.

In this week’s roundup Barry McGee, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman make an impact, Laylah Ali draws inspiration from her notes, and more.

• For the Fifty Years of Bay Area Art retrospective, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) is displaying fantastic work by past SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) award winner Barry McGee (among several others), an artist who in recent years has had dramatic impact on contemporary art. A McGee video and mural is on display until April 03, 2012.

• Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman and 54 other artists contributed 140 works for Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977 at the Art Institute of Chicago.  These artists exploit the photographic image in every way possible: in books, slides, canvases, films, and room-size installations. The results liberated all the arts and made it possible for contemporary art to become a field without a medium.  This exhibition is on view until March 11, 2012.

• Laylah Ali: Note Drawings showcases 39 works of art by Laylah Ali now on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI.  The artist drew inspiration from and linked drawing, language and writing found in snippets of overheard conversations, media sound bites, and her own thoughts—all of which she collected on scraps of paper.  She then drew loosely-related or contrasting figures over the text, sometimes incorporating the written words in the drawing and other times obscuring them.  The exhibition closes April 1, 2012.

• The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) With Roni Horn pairs 83 of Evans’s Polaroids of American vernacular architecture—funerary monuments, faded Victorian gingerbread cottages—with photographs from “Bird,” a body of work made by Roni Horn between 1998 and 2007.  This show is at Andrea Rosen Gallery (NYC) and is on view through January 14, 2012.

• Rashid Johnson has been nominated for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize which is given to an artist whose work represents a significant development in contemporary art. The award sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, nationality, or medium, and the nominations may include emerging artists as well as more established individuals whose public recognition may be long overdue. The 2012 prize carries an award of $100,000.

• Watch as artist Richard Serra and Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, go behind-the-scenes of Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, on view at SFMOMA from October 17, 2011, to January 16, 2012.

 

Central Utah Art Center posted a A Mid-Opening Performance by Mariah Robertson, a video about Robertson playing with projections by parading a tabletop through the gallery space:

David Maxim. "Simon Peter," 1988. Mixed media on canvas. 118 x 152 x 20 inches. Private collection.

“I will incline mine ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying upon the harp.”

~ Psalm 49:4 (King James Bible)

The Biblical tradition was once considered a pillar of Western consciousness and a major component of American popular culture. Although the power of Christianity waned in the twentieth century among urban elites, modern artists, so often preoccupied with non-narrative, often returned to “The Good Book” as source material [see Rosemary Crumlin's 1998 publication Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination for the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia] . In our time knowledge of the Bible’s lore occupies a significant place in the mental landscape of large segments of the US population, in particular (though not exclusively) where forms of Evangelicalism hold sway. Apart from cultures of the religiously committed however, a number of contemporary artists, poets and authors have continued to enlist the Bible as source material, often creating alternative and subversive interpretations of the stories. Recall the popularity of Anita Diamant’s feminist novel The Red Tent a few years ago.

David Maxim. "Loaves and Fishes" (from The Miracles), 1990. Acrylic on baskets, mixed media, canvas. 72 x 54 x 20 inches.

An exciting and challenging re-imagining of key episodes from the Bible was undertaken in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s by the San Francisco based artist David Maxim. The works in this series have been brought together in print for the first time in a new catalog titled  Pictures and the Bible issued this winter by Maxim’s studio. Working on the backs of specially constructed canvases, a variety of three dimensional materials serve as tools for paint application before being incorporated into the final construction. This exposed format, with its attendant crossbeams, pulleys, ropes and hinges, makes one conscious that the Bible is a tremendous source of theater. By alluding to the hidden workings of stagecraft, Maxim asks us to consider how the Biblical tales do their work on our emotions and on our beliefs.

Continue reading »

A big thanks to our last blogger-in-residence, Amanda Beroza Friedman, for her incisive interviews with independent curator Erin Sickler and artist Josh Kline. Next up, we have Jason Lahman, a historian, poet and essayist based in San Francisco. Jason’s historical work focuses mainly on early modern (late Renaissance and Enlightenment) philosophy and science and the cultural history of 19th century Britain and France. He is especially interested in how the materials and objects, images and beliefs, rituals and practices of everyday life change over time. He studied illustration and art history at Parsons and the New School and received his MA in modern European history from San Francisco State University in 2011. He is currently working on his second opera libretto with the composer Tony Solitro. Jason maintains a somewhat regular blog on historic and cultural topics (www.myeyeinthesky.net) and another for arts educators and kids interested in art history (www.lookseedo.org). Welcome, Jason!

"Trap Rock (truck load out)," 2006 Ink-jet print, 38 1/2 x 26 inches. Edition of 5. © An-My Lê, courtesy Murray Guy, New York.

Our latest “Exclusive” has just gone live! This new video short features previously unreleased footage of artist An-My Lê photographing a basalt quarry along the Hudson River. Over the course of numerous visits, Lê used a large-format camera to document changes to the quarry and its dramatic alteration of the surrounding landscape. The photographic series, titled “Trap Rock,” was commissioned by Dia:Beacon. Click here to watch the video.

An-My Lê’s photographs and films often examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures frame a tension between the natural landscape and its violent transformation into battlefields. Projects include “Viêt Nam” (1994–98), in which Lê’s memories of a war-torn countryside are reconciled with the contemporary landscape; “Small Wars” (1999–2002), in which Lê photographed and participated in Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina; and “29 Palms” (2003–04), in which United States Marines preparing for deployment play-act scenarios in a virtual Middle East in the California desert. Suspended between the formal traditions of documentary and staged photography, Lê’s work explores the disjunction between wars as historical events and the ubiquitous representation of war in contemporary entertainment, politics, and collective consciousness.

An-My Lê is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Protest of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

CREDITS | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: An-My Lê. Video: © 2011 Art21, Inc. All rights reserved.

Josh Kline. "Sleep is for the Weak," installation detail, 2011. Bodum French press coffee makers, Coke Zero infused with Ibuprofin (pictured), DayQuil infused with Dentyne Ice, Redbull infused with Vivarin. 43 x 36 x 11 3/4 inches.

The following interview between artist Josh Kline and I was conducted via email. We cover work, media, hands, and the end. 2012!

Amanda Beroza Friedman: For your current exhibition, Dignity and Self-Respect, the press release is amazing. And fatal. Is the world ending? What do the ’90s have to do with it?

Josh Kline: Someone’s world is always ending. That’s the nature of aging and death. The teenagers and twentysomethings of the ’90s, born in the ’70s and early ’80s, are finally moving into undeniable and irreversible adulthood. It’s extremely difficult to use thirtysomethings to sell youth culture.

Unlike previous generations of artists and musicians, this generation moved into early adulthood absolutely thrilled to participate in focus groups and pose for product-placement shots in exchange for sponsored drinks, complimentary magazines, unpaid jobs, and the chance to be near some reissued retro sneakers. You spill your personal problems and innermost secrets on social media and Facebook turns it into entertainment for other people and sells advertising around it. Even after the asteroid hits the Earth, some life will go on. In this vision of the future, people will continue, but perhaps as products and services instead of as human beings.

In my show at 47 Canal, a lot of the work comes out of thinking about this transition, about the transformation of creative people into mass-produced or mass-distributed goods, services, or advertising. It’s also about a generation in the process of being deprecated by the market as trend forecasters look to the tastes of the young people of today for this season’s sounds and colorways. The youth culture of the ’90s and of the 2000s are reference points for the show, but the installation’s setting is today.

ABF: Your work speaks to communication strategies. Over the last few months, the occupation movement has brought back hand signals, chanting, and the general consensus model of group governing. From where you stand, how is Occupy Wall Street doing with communication?

JK: I think Occupy Wall Street is doing an incredible job with communication. Less than four months ago the entire conversation on the news was about austerity, deficit reduction, and finding more ways to transfer more money from the poor and the middle class to “job creators.” I sometimes wonder if the Democratic Party and their supporters are throwing the game deliberately. The 99% and the 1% is an incredibly persuasive and effective argument.

ABF: Do you read Adbusters? Where do you get your news?

JK: I bought an issue once in the late ’90s and found it forgettable.

I read the news on the Internet at my desk at work while I eat lunch. Also, I’m a podcast junky. I listen to a lot of news while I work in the studio and while I cook.

ABF: What does the creative sector mean to you? How do you define hard work?

JK: I see the creative sector as the area of the economy that encompasses creative workers: artists, designers, people in advertising, filmmakers, writers, stylists, etc. – all of the people who are making a livelihood or trying to make one generating cultural products and services. For me the idea of the creative sector has become synonymous with unpaid or underpaid precarious labor and with debt-driven aspirational lifestyles.

How do you define hard work? For some people it’s thinking and worrying until your stomach hurts. For others it’s working 70-90 hours a week. Or maybe it’s an ideology with roots in Protestantism imported from Northern Europe? If you’re an Indonesian maid working 6-7 days a week in Hong Kong who gets pushed out of a window, maybe it means something completely different.

Continue reading »

Marina Abramović. "An Artist's Life Manifesto," MOCA Gala 2011.

“A local dancer,” is what arts reporter Jori Finkel called Yvonne Rainer in an LA Times article dated November 12 (though a concurrent blog post by Finkel called Rainer “legendary,” a more accurate description of the filmmaker and performer, who worked with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham). Finkel was reporting on this year’s MOCA gala, an annual fundraiser known for featuring the work of some sort of art world star — last year’s artist was Doug Aiken, and the year before Francesco Vezzoli with help from Lady Gaga — at an exclusive, high-priced dinner for patrons. This year, Marina Abramović, fresh out of her MoMA retrospective, helmed the gala, planning an extravaganza with human centerpieces and naked-lady cakes.

Marina Abramović. “Nude With Skeleton,” 2002-05.

Finkel referred to Abramović as a “Yugoslavian-born, New York performance artist,” more cosmopolitan than “local dancer” though not terribly inflated, given that Abramović has been called, and has apparently called herself, the grandmother of performance art. Controversy erupted after Abramović hosted auditions to cast those human centerpieces, particularly the stoic heads that would turn slowly around in the middle of each table. Performers would sit on Lazy Susans below the tables and would not be able to get up or use the restroom during the three hour event. A handful of female performers would lay flat on their backs in the middle of a few special tables, naked, legs far enough apart to see what was between, with skeletons on top of them (a re-imagining of one of Abramović’s former projects, Nude with Skeleton). The performers would be paid $150 and given a year-long MOCA membership. Rainer heard about these auditions, apparently from an artist who had participated, and responded angrily. The letter she sent to MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch has, by this time, circulated widely. She accused the museum of economic exploitation — compensation was not enough — and also, in what may have been the most memorable part, wrote that the performance was

reminiscent of “Salo,” Pasolini’s controversial film of 1975 that dealt with sadism and sexual abuse of a group of adolescents at the hands of a bunch of post-war fascists. Reluctant as I am to dignify Abramović by mentioning Pasolini in the same breath, the latter at least had a socially credible justification tied to the cause of anti-fascism. Abramović and MOCA have no such credibility. . . .

More back and forth ensued, Deitch and Abramović invited Rainer to attend the ongoing audition, a number of arts blogs weighed in, among them ArtFag City, Hyperallergic, and ArtCritical. Of course, most “critics” did not attend the gala, certainly Rainer did not. I didn’t either. It’s an odd position to be in: criticizing art you didn’t see at an institution that desperately needs funding and acquires it the way many cultural institutions do, by marketing its exclusivity and creating highbrow spectacle.

Yvonne Rainer. “Assisted Living: Good Sports 2.” Performance at Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2011.

Even if I’m cagey about taking a stance on the gala itself, I have no qualms about saying that, of the two 20th century art matrons, it’s Rainer, the one who would likely cringe at even being called a matron, I’d trust to do the ethical thing.  This isn’t to suggest that Abramović is an unethical artist, just that for Rainer integrity — what it is, how to maintain it — has more or less been the subject of her now 50-year practice. She wanted to give the “everyday body,” not an idealized body, a place in dance, which led her to reject the minimalism of John Cage that she had initially embraced. Then, afraid dance wasn’t allowing her to explore her feminism and the emotional experience of being human in an honest-enough way, she began film-making in the 1970s. Her whole career reads like that — rejections, revisions, new directions, all in hopes of figuring out how to be an artist who respects real people’s experience.

What’s bothered me most about the MOCA gala debacle is the thought that Rainer would likely never be chosen to orchestrate an event like that. Why not? Granted, much of Rainer’s work is more abstract than Abramović’s, less visceral; there are no naked bodies in doorways, staring contests, or skeletons.

Yvonne Rainer. “RoS Indexical,” 2007.

But she’s done some exquisitely accessible projects, like Assisted Living, based off photographs from the New York Times sports section, or her piece in the 2008 California Biennial, where dancers wore bright red sneakers and moved loosely and unpretentiously in a way that made dance as easy and awkward as schoolyard play. If it’s true that Rainer’s just not glamorous enough or that she can’t generate enough hype or that she wouldn’t attract donors, we should have better taste.

Note: If you’re in L.A., consider attending the panel that Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) is hosting Saturday:

Abramović, Rainer, gala theater & performance art politics: a public forum

6522 Hollywood Blvd.; Sat., Dec. 17, 1-4 p.m.

This work is about the way light shapes things when “cut” by physical obstructions.- Isadora Rosenbloom

A few weeks ago I wrote a post (public therapy, actually) about my anxiety as I organized a student exhibit at Hopper House here in New York. The seventeen artists who participated were each asked to choose a work by Edward Hopper and create a new piece in response to being inspired by the artist. Students were even told in advance that a small reproduction of the painting they chose would hang alongside their work, as well as a short narrative or quote they would write upon completion.

This week I want to share some of the works that were created as part of the show, “Reasons to Paint”. Hopper once said that if it could be said in words, there would be no reason to paint. And while many of the seventeen artists chose to indeed respond in painting, others chose photography and even mixed media. Here is a sampling of works from the show, which runs through December 24^th :

In this photograph I wanted to explore the extreme contrasts of light found in Hopper paintings.- Nikolai Stern

Continue reading »