We’re pleased to introduce Chiara Galimberti, who joins our expanded Open Enrollment team this week with her first post later this morning.  Originally from Italy, Chiara is an artist who is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She moved to the United States almost a decade ago with her young twin daughters, both of whom are now twelve. She is a Paul and Daisy Soros New American Fellow. Welcome, Chiara!

On this episode of Bad at Sports’ Fielding Practice for Centerfield, we have a special podcast on the subject of Ox-Bow, a residency program and artists retreat that is famed for its natural beauty. Duncan MacKenzie and Richard Holland talk about artists residencies and their contexts and complexities with Elizabeth Chodos, associate director of Ox-Bow’s Chicago office and Mike Andrews, Ox-Bow’s academic director, along with Nicholas Wylie, who co-directs another midwest-based artist’s residency program known as ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions). We are conducting the conversation at the NADA art fair in Miami, inside an artwork by Jonas Sebura and Alex Gartelmann that takes the form of a small residency cabin much like those housing artists at Ox-Bow. Thanks for listening!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Poster for Ox-Bow/Bad at Sports collaboration at NADA. Poster by Lauren Anderson.

John Baldessari. "The First $100,000 I Ever Made," 2011. Photo by Bill Orcutt. Courtesy John Baldessari and the Marian Goodman Gallery.

In this week’s roundup: John Baldessari’s first $100,000, Mark Dion explores archeology in Istanbul, Krzysztof Wodiczko Dis-cusses his work, and more.

• John Baldessari erected a billboard that’s also a bill board of a $100,000 bill with Woodrow Wilson’s portrait at the center of a 25-foot-by-75-foot ad space.  Only 42,000 of the real bills were printed during the Great Depression, and none of the bank notes circulated to the public. In fact, they’re illegal to own.  The First $100,000 I Ever Made is on display near the High Line, an elevated luxury park in NYC.

• Mark Dion created a specially composed installation for Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 at SALT Galata (Istanbul) that presents the story of archaeology in the Near East in a chronological narrative around selected archaeological sites.  These works further address some of the issues raised by the conceptual framework of the exhibition and touch on our everyday understanding of and relationship to the field of archaeology.  The exhibition is open until March 11, 2012.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko and Nina Katchadourian recently talked about DisFluency, a group exhibition and series of events in NYC that examine compromised communication as a universal human condition.  Wodiczko’s Dis-Armor focuses on the “psycho-social situation of Japanese students and school refusers, with their difficulty of speech and facial expression,” who use “the ancient tradition of arms-making to conceive an alternative to face-to-face communication.”  The work features a pair of video screens worn on the back that display live images of the wearer’s eyes from the cameras attached to helmets.  A loudspeaker below the screens amplifies the wearer’s voice.  This show closes December 16.

• James Turrell‘s new Skyspace will open on Winter Solstice at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.  At more than 3,000 square feet, it is the largest Skyspace yet created, featuring a 24 foot square aperture in the canopy 35 feet above, and a central colonnade composed of columns 20 feet high. Located in the William G. and Marie Selby Foundation Courtyard of the Ulla R. and Arthur F. Searing Wing of the Ringling Museum of Art, this is the only Skyspace in Florida and one of only two public Skyspaces on the East Coast.  The Skyspace will officially open during Greet the Light: Solstice Celebration in the Courtyard taking place from 8:00 pm to midnight on the Winter Solstice, December 22, 2011.

• Coming soon is Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle‘s group exhibition, Placemakers, at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.  Always After (The Glass House) is the fifth, final installment of a set of works that Manglano-Ovalle filmed in buildings by Mies van der Rohe. In this HD video, Manglano-Ovalle documents an event that “refers to the end of the utopia of transparency.” The work observes a ceremonial window smashing — by Mies’ own grandson — and aftermath at Mies’ Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus in Chicago.  The show will run January 13 – March 31, 2012.

Cover of "Documentary Protocols" (1967-1975). February 2010, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. 416 pp., b.w. illustrations.

In light of the dialogue that Occupy Wall Street  has brought to the surface, I decided to interview Erin Sickler, a New York-based curator, about her experience with the Arts & Labor movement.*

Amanda B. Friedman: Can you share a bit about your engagement with the current Arts & Labor movement spurred by and connected to Occupy Wall Street and your involvement in this dialogue prior? And, can you elaborate about your experience and broader notion of working in the arts. Where does your interest in labor and the arts come from?

Erin Sickler: First, I want to say that I only speak for myself as an individual participant in the Arts & Labor group of Occupy Wall Street and in the Occupy movement, and not for Arts & Labor as a whole. The idea of the 99% is not without problems or contradictions, but it does provide a useful umbrella for multiple voices, positions and opinions to emerge within a common purpose. I am just one of those voices.

You could say that an oversimplified trajectory of contemporary art goes something like this: ideas about art realized in the work of artists based in Western Europe in the late 19th to early 20th centuries influenced forms of art coming out of the United States in the mid to late 20th century, which influenced the globalized art world we have today (one that is still heavily weighted towards artists from the US and Europe, but occasionally recognizes artists outside of that). Within this timeline, a certain number of artists are skimmed off the top and canonized by history. What remains is what Gregory Sholette identifies as Dark Matter—all those artists that have been marginalized by this trajectory as well as those who have proposed counter-tactics to call the status quo into question. These artistic hierarchies are not merely aesthetic but aligned with larger economic, political, and historical arcs.

I often take up my position as a curator to try and tease out some of these complicated relationships, albeit in subtle ways, more or less at an affective level versus a didactic one. In part, I think this is because I came to art through the back door. I started making art in college at Oberlin. Coming from a working class background, I had little exposure to contemporary art as a child. Oddly, I think it was a reaction to that rarified academic environment that pushed me towards art making. It wasn’t that I did not enjoy theoretical debates—I actually quite liked them—but I also found them alienating. Within that context, practicing art was a way to stay grounded. Quite simply, it was the only place I could use my hands. Of course, knowing what I know now, it all seems so ridiculous that I thought of art as any less rarified then theory, but I think that by sliding sideways into art, it made me sensitive to what was being elided or overlooked in the dominant discourse, on a variety of aesthetic, affective, and social levels.

There are many reasons that people remain silent about labor conditions in the art world. Talking about auction values or questioning capitalism is fine, but try bringing up the actual working conditions of artists or other laborers within art institutions. In my early twenties, I supported my creative ambitions through all kinds of low-wage service jobs, usually several at a time. Later, I held positions in a variety of art worlds and became a curator because it seemed more stable than being an artist (I was wrong).  I have visited hundreds of artists’ studios and heard about their often-precarious economic situations. I have seen art writers, administrators, and other curators struggle to stay afloat on measly salaries with no benefits or health care. I also recognize that many of us who work in the arts chose this fate and that people who don’t have access to these same choices do a bulk of the labor in the art world and the world at large. Someone just gave me Hans Abbing’s book Why Are Artists Poor? (2004) which teases out the inverse relationship between artists’ low incomes and the high symbolic value of art.

Continue reading »

Thanks to previous guest blogger Amelia Ishmael for a fantastic series of posts that provided Art21 Blog readers with a primer on Black Metal theory. If your interest has been piqued and you want to learn more, look out for the first issue of Amelia’s online journal Helvete. Next up, Amanda Beroza Friedman joins us as our newest blogger-in-residence. Amanda is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at such venues as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Clifton Benevento, New York; and Back Yard Projects, New York; and with The Apartment Show, New York; Parlour, New York; and Daily Operation, New York. She has an upcoming (Feb. 2012) solo show at the PACS Gallery, Brooklyn. Amanda was co-curator of Soft Power, an exhibition at the Brooklyn non-profit Nurture Art in Spring 2011. She studied art at the University of Vermont and the Glasgow School of Art. You can visit Amanda’s website here.

Amy Cutler. “Cake Toss,” 2004. Lithograph in colors on Fabriano Artistico Hot Press natural white, 21-1/2 x 24 inches (image and sheet). Edition: 39; publisher: Universal Limited Art Editions, Bay Shore, NY. Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Fantastical narrative is a guiding principle for many artists who have come to prominence in the past decade; Amy Cutler and Dana Schutz are foremost among these.  Both possess extraordinary imaginative powers, creating worlds that are entirely fresh and singular. This month’s and the subsequent post of Ink will focus on the prints of these two young artists, respectively, both of whom have created a significant number of prints that directly relate to their paintings and drawings.

Amy Cutler’s world is populated by plain women who hail from an imaginary or bygone era.  They wear vaguely traditional dress of the artist’s invention, informed by an amalgam of periods and cultures, and engage in surreal or unlikely tasks, often with serious or sober expressions. Like many contemporary artists (i.e., Enrique Chagoya, Kara Walker, Laylah Ali, Shahzia Sikander), Cutler has reached beyond the history of Modern art for inspiration, finding a new vocabulary in which to address the contemporary condition.  The artist has cited Persian miniatures, fifteenth-century German painting, Japanese       ukiyo-e, and medieval art as influences in her work, as well as the folkloric heritage of the Brothers Grimm (see Lisa Freiman, “The Marvelous World of Amy Cutler,” in Amy Cutler [Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006],10).  These precedents are certainly apparent in Cutler’s jewel-like compositions that are lavished with minute detail. Her technique is alluringly skilled, but this is by no means the focus (when her process is mentioned, it is usually to note the meticulous manner in which she applies patterning to textiles).  Instead, any such description is primarily an enriching factor in the artist’s bizarre narratives that instantly capture the imagination.

Though Cutler’s work has sometimes been dismissed as illustrative (a tendency abhorred by an older generation of critics and artists), this is the very quality that contributes to its beguiling power.  Cutler’s attention to detail grounds the work in specificity; the objects and environments they depict are recognizable and appealing.  These familiar elements rope the viewer into a process of telling a story to “make sense” of it.  This impulse is noted by Freiman and analyzed in further depth by curator Laura Steward in her introduction to the catalogue for Cutler’s recent exhibition at SITE Santa Fe: “your impulse is to imagine a narrative that could take place in the scene she depicts, and further, to imagine what that narrative might mean” (Amy Cutler: Turtle Fur [Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011],12).  Yet there is no such meaning to be found; interpretation is intentionally left open-ended.

Cutler thus deftly awakens the viewer’s compulsion to apply “morals” to her tales.  One common response is a feminist one – the industriously toiling women of Cutler’s world are often engaged in “women’s work” of an absurd nature, prompting empathy or outrage for their perceived thankless labor.  Yet Cutler’s intention is contrary to this understanding.   Addressing her proclivity for female subjects in an interview with Aimee Bender, she states “I love the idea of a fictional utopia of women who are strong and self-reliant” (ibid., 23).  She also notes that her experience of attending an all-girls school may have influenced this preference.  Likewise, she does not espouse the idea that her women are engaged in drudgery.  When questioned on this point, she explains, “I think it comes from my fascination with anything that is meticulously crafted – things that are created by individuals with specifically honed skills…I am especially drawn to methodical work that requires a lot of concentration…[T]he rhythm and repetition…lends itself to introspection” (ibid., 22-3).

Continue reading »

David Wojnarowicz. "A Fire In My Belly" screenshot, 1986-7. Video. Courtesy PPOW Gallery.

Perhaps ignorantly thinking that the culture wars related to David Wojnarowicz were over, I originally intended to reflect on the long-term effects of A Fire In My Belly (1986-7) in HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from the perspective of one year after the controversy.  However a week before the HIDE/SEEK exhibition even opened at the Brooklyn Museum, the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, as well as several newspapers, were calling for the museum to remove Wojnarowicz’s unfinished film.

With protesters now traveling from Pennsylvania to picket the exhibition, a look into the effects of the A Fire In My Belly controversy gains a new urgency, as another battle begins in the new culture wars.

A little over a year ago on December 1, which is also A Day Without Art or World AIDS Day, the Smithsonian, bowing to pressure from House Republicans John Boehner and Eric Cantor, removed Wojnarowicz’s A Fire In My Belly. Responding to complaints from the National Catholic League, the House Republicans and others objected to an eleven second clip of the film portraying ants crawling over a crucifix. Fortunately, many museums took action and placed the film on display and in their collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum and the Andy Warhol Museum. Despite the controversy, the Brooklyn Museum, as well as the Tacoma Museum, received the travelling exhibition of HIDE/SEEK with the film and furthered the importance of educating the public on Wojnarowicz’s work with a room dedicated to explaining A Fire In My Belly.

While the Brooklyn Museum is dealing with a new round of outrage regarding A Fire In My Belly, conjuring a nagging sense that we are doomed to repeat the culture wars over and over again whether it is with Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano or Chris Ofili, the question remains what will be the lasting effects of this battle on Wojnarowicz’s work, future curatorial decisions and the politics of art.

Continue reading »

F stands for Fre$h.
Beverly Fre$h, that is. Artist, performer, rap star, and former corporate graphic designer, Mr. Fre$h found his first flicker of fame when he was included in the 2009 Book of Guinness World Records. History was forged before my eyes at the Cranbrook Art Museum degree show in May of 2009 when Fre$h set three world records. A frenzied crowd focused on Fre$h’s face flecked with yellow yoke as he smashed forty-one eggs on his head in under a minute. He broke further records for the most chocolate candy Whoppers caught in his mouth from a distance of 6’6” (also in under a minute) and for the tallest stack of cassette tapes.

Image courtesy the artist.

F for Fortune.
Fortune favored Fre$h in the months following his record-breaking feats when Fre$h went to Berlin–for free! Fre$h won a grant, namely, the Daimler AG Emerging Artist Grant. The award annually funds a one-month stay in Berlin for one Cranbrook graduate student who “exemplifies the spirit of DaimlerChrysler Services’ core values: integrity, openness and respect; social responsibility; inspiration and empowerment; and commitment to excellence.” A rapper might seem a far cry from the car company’s core values, but Fre$h attested his affinity for effectuating excellence as well. There is money—free money—that can and will befall even the most far-fetched of fantasists.

From the flip book, !BEVERLY EATS CAKE! Image courtesy the artist.

F for Fervor.
F is for fervor; F is not for fake. However tempted one may feel to feign enthusiasm when writing a grant proposal or pitching your part before a selection committee, most people can, in fact, spot a fake. Before a board of company officials, Fre$h delivered a fierce PowerPoint, outlining his development, influences and conceptual framework as an artist. He finished his presentation with a mouth-foaming performance of “O When the Dogs Bark.” The foundation for fruition, as Fre$h affirmed, is frankly, that you cannot fake the fervor.

Continue reading »

Pierre Huyghe, "Timekeeper", 1999 image courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery

Feeling a little under the weather this week, so as a pick-me-up I decided to write about some of the phenomenal stuff happening at Art21. Kind of like an education public service announcement through the column…

First, if you haven’t checked it out by now, Art21 finally has a new website- new design, new features and easier access to the resources. It’s like a new car. As a matter of fact, if you get close enough to your computer it even smells like a new car. Go to art21.org if you haven’t already.

Second, Access 2012 is getting ready to roll. Don’t know about Access?? (Where have you been?) Access allows schools, museums, community groups and even local non-profit organizations to host a preview screening for one of the season 6 segments before it ever airs on PBS. Pretty cool, right? All you have to do is e-mail carrie@art21.org for more info on how to host an Access event this spring. Choose from any of the four thematic segments to share with your group, which include Boundaries, Change, History and Balance.

Third, the season 6 educator’s guide is being written as we speak by yours truly, with some heavenly help from my colleague Jessica Hamlin and our interdisciplinary home run hitter, Flossie Chua from Harvard’s Project Zero. Not to mention thirteen smoooooth artist introductions by our associate curator, Wesley Miller. As soon as the season 6 guides are available, I will let you know (which may not be necessary since you’ll probably hear me shout for joy).

Finally, applications for our fourth year of Art21 Educators will be available next month. If you are an arts or humanities teacher and would like to spend 8 glorious, steamy days with us this summer learning about teaching with contemporary art, using Art21 resources, and even meeting some Art21 artists, this institute is for you. But wait, there’s more… All applicants who are chosen for the program participate in monthly online sessions where we share our work together and get the opportunity to build on experiences initiated during the summer. But wait, there’s still more… I will be interviewing a few of our current Art21 Educators in the next few months right here on the blog in order for them to share their perspectives. Stay tuned to art21.org for more details and application instructions in January.

OK, the antibiotics are kicking in. My tonsils are the size of Mitt Romney’s head (with the flowing hair of course). Time to turn in. See you next week.