Before I start, I must establish one thing: I’m from the east coast. My veins bleed the blood of Nor’easters, Dunkin’ Donuts, baseball rivalries, and the art and cultural Mecca that is New York City.  Boston, the “wait for me!” younger sibling to NYC, is my unofficial hometown and the city proudly stamped on my handset, Vandercook letter-pressed, 18×22 inch Bachelor of Fine Arts diploma.

It was 113° all the way across Oklahoma.

So, with my chest swelling with unequivocal New England pride, how did I find myself 3,000 miles west, living in the suburbs just outside of Los Angeles? The easy answer is grad school; the more elusive answer is an existential quest to find a meaningful place for art in my life. I tried the artist thing (hated the pressure), I tried the educator thing (hated the classroom), and I tried the museum thing (loved everything about it), so naturally the career path I found myself on after I graduated involved outdoor education, archery, and the Girl Scouts – everything my degree was not. My parents were thrilled.

Dressing up like the Golden Snitch was not proving viable to my career.

The real push for the pursuit of additional education came during a monumental breakthrough at a Sol LeWitt retrospective, and again after I decided I disliked almost every job I’d ever had since graduation.

Claremont Graduate University was always my first-choice school even when I wasn’t seriously thinking about higher education. I was drawn in by the Art Management programs’ interdisciplinary approach, its mix with the school of management, and a course I’m currently taking with the longest title in registrarial history: The Community Formerly Known as the Audience: Adapting Arts Organizations in the Era of Infinite Choice, an intensive seminar around an audience engagement project in correlation with the J. Paul Getty Trust’s phenomenal initiative, Pacific Standard Time, and taught by ArtsJournal founder, Doug McLennan.

My thought process concerning grad school went like this: it was now or never, and the now was looking bleak and the never was looking attainable. Of course I threw everything to the wind, took the GRE’s within a month of decided to go back to school, and begged for forgiveness as I gave my references a three week window to sing my praises. All you potential graduate-scholars out there, this is 100% not how to go about this. Take my advice, I drank Maalox like water.

The short story reason for why I’m here, back behind institutional-grade office furniture and end-of-term papers (papers….what is a paper? I haven’t written a paper since 2008), is because of an overwhelming love for art, its institutions and practitioners; for its theories and arguments, and the desire to be in charge of all that. In a world full of chaos, the arts are most certainly a pillar. I want to ensure the posterity of arts institutions, and make art relevant for every generation. So this is why I’m here, and you get to join me on my new, bicoastal wild ride.

© Mikey Burton

It’s going to be entertaining though, I promise you, if only for the play-by-play I will give as my right brain tries to conjure my left brain in a course called Finance and Accounting for Non Profits. I will indubitably stand as a different type of presence on the Open Enrollment blog, mainly because I won’t be in a studio, or in a crit, or in a group show, or in a solo show, or pulling an all-nighter to finish a 6-foot tall ceramic sculpture (this is a personal anecdote), but I will be dipping my fingers into the behind-the-scenes swimming pool of arts management.

In closing, new friends, I went out for drinks with some school comrades the other night. We were celebrating the launch of our audience engagement website, and as we were leaving, a joking remark was shared that involved us commissioning t-shirts logoed with a catch phrase sardonically mentioned in class. We laughed about it, rolled our eyes, got in our cars and went our seperate ways. However, I’m a semester in, a semester wiser, and the more and more I learn, and the more I think about it, walking around with “Future Arts Manager of America” emblazoned on my chest doesn’t sound like half bad an idea.

Much love.

We’re pleased to introduce the Art21 Blog’s readers to our newest Open Enrollment writer, Sarah Merianos, who joins the Open Enrollment team for the upcoming Winter/Spring semester. Sarah’s first post appears today; she’ll fill readers in on who she is, what brought her to graduate school, and what she hopes to accomplish there. Welcome, Sarah!

A bit of bio: Sarah Merianos is a 25-year-old Boston transplant, waging her way through Southern California and the Los Angeles freeway system to earn a masters degree in Arts Management at Claremont Graduate University. She holds a B.F.A. in Museum Education from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and has spent the last three summers running a sailing camp for girls. When she’s not thinking about art, she’s probably baking, embroidering, and overusing parenthetical statements. Her heroes are Jenny Holzer, Sol LeWitt, and Steve Locke; she has a cat named Abe Lincoln.

Municipal de Fútbol, 2008. Image courtesy of Texfield.

Municipal de Fútbol, Book One: Municipal de Fútbol. Image courtesy of Texfield.

The box houses two small books that are bound in the same green-colored cloth and contains an oversized poster and lithographs by artists As-Found, Arthur Ou, General Idea, Jakob Kolding, Jonathan Monk, Mari Eastman, Michael Well, Peter Piller, and Roderick Buchanan. It also includes an Adidas jersey. To put it lightly, there is a lot of stuff contained in this box, yet it all fits together perfectly, aided by black ribbon-pulls that help you leverage the contents out of the box.

Municipal de Fútbol lithographs.

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We’re pleased to announce our newest column, Bound: The Printed Object in Context, written by “Centerfield” alum Meg Onli. Bound looks at a side of publications that’s rarely discussed: the book’s status as a designed object. The column’s purview includes limited edition art books and artist’s books, along with exhibition catalogues, e-books, and other cultural publications. Meg will post reviews that explore the conceptual aspects of a publication’s design, and she’ll also feature interviews with designers and publishers who are pushing the boundaries of the book form. First up, Meg will look at Municipal de Fútbol, a limited edition publication that, through text, photography, and artists’ lithographs, explores local fútbol leagues in Los Angeles and their impact on the neighborhoods that surround the playing fields. Bound posts on the first Tuesday of each month.

Meg Onli is a artist and writer currently based in Chicago. She is the founder of the website Black Visual Archive, which is dedicated to the documentation of black and post-black visual culture, and is the former Associate Producer of the Chicago-based art and culture podcast/blog, Bad at Sports. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has worked in the printing industry since the age of sixteen. Working primarily within universities, Onli has assisted in the production of numerous small-run artist books, has worked as a senior designer for Oregon State University’s printing department, and is currently employed at Northwestern University, where she overseas the production of printed material for the Alumni Association’s Marketing Department. This winter Meg was selected to participate in the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Art Writers Workshop. She often purchases books based on their covers.

Stephen O'Malley in Prague. Photo by Lindsie Zakopal.

[Ed. note: We're squeezing in one more post from Amelia Ishmael before we introduce our next blogger-in-residence later this week. Enjoy!]

Stephen O’Malley is a wildly prolific musician and artist.

He is perhaps most widely known as a guitarist for the band Sunn O))), which is a sound project he has performed in art galleries and concert venues with Greg Anderson since 1998. Stephen’s other sonic projects include Æthenor, Burning Witch, Khanate, KTL, Lotus Eaters, Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, and Thorr’s Hammer. He has also worked collaboratively as a musician, producer, and composer with some of the most important musicians and composers in contemporary music including Boris, Merzbow, and Attila Csihar.

In addition to sonic art, Stephen has a history of designing, curating, and art directing album cover art and design since the early 90s—including those for Earth, Burzum, Emperor and Melvins. He has also worked with the French choreographer and theatre director Gisèle Vienne and the American sculptor Banks Violette.

The following interview is part of a larger conversation that I had with Stephen a few days ago. The parts I excerpted concern Stephen’s work with with Iancu Dumitrescu in the Hyperion Ensemble, his zine Descent from the early 90s, and his work as an art director and album designer. His innovations with sound waves—which become very sculptural and psychological when experienced live—have already been widely written about, so for this post I wanted to concentrate on Stephen’s visual work, which has not necessarily received the amount of recognition it deserves. Words really fail me in describing what types of sounds, images, and vision Stephen creates, so I’ll just dive into the interview now, after affirming once more that I think that Stephen is one of the most important figures in sonic and visual art working today.

AI: You were recently on tour. Could you tell me more?

Stephen O’Malley: Recently I was working with a Romanian composer, Iancu Dumitrescu, and we did several concerts last month with the Hyperion Ensemble. He developed the Hyperion Ensemble. There were three concerts in Paris, three in London, and two in Berlin that I played in. But they were Iancu Dumitrescu and a second Romanian composer named Ana Maria Avram. They promote a festival called Spectrum 21. Some guests and variations apply in each city, the same festival never happens twice, but the common denominator is that Dumitrescu and Avram are both conducting the ensemble and a lot of their compositions are what are being played, but not exclusively.

AI: You are performing composed pieces then as part of the ensemble? Isn’t that rare?

SOMA: Playing with an ensemble? Yes. That’s something I’ve just done this year actually through meeting, specifically, Dumitrescu. He’s a composer that I’ve been really interested in for quite a while and I got a chance to meet him in January of this year and play some concerts, or just kind of step into the ensemble, so it was definitely a new thing as far as playing guitar. I’ve played other instruments in the past, and sometimes in different ensemble arrangements and bands in different types of set ups, but that’s definitely a different thing. […] He’s really interesting. He has a really long history; he’s […] been composing and performing his work since the 1960s. His music is pretty hardcore in the 70s actually. He’s working with an orchestra, but he’s pretty challenging. He kind of falls into the bigger category of Spectral music. He’s a historical figure, for sure. This is why I would play with an ensemble: I get to work with this guy! It’s a good opportunity to access a lot of knowledge about sound and just the behavior of being an independently-minded artist.

AI: I’m curious about what kinds of sounds you create… what you do with this ensemble, is it related to your other projects sonically?

SOMA: Definitely. I’m playing guitar. I’m not switching modes and playing classical guitar or something. One of the reasons that we connected was just the timber of what we are doing is similar actually. So I guess in the ensemble I’m playing the low bass role. That’s basically the frequency, or the area. Something like what the double bass is playing, but it’s an electric guitar and amplifier: at least to me, as a player, as a listener, and as an appreciator of sound phenomena.

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Do Ho Suh. "Fallen Star (sketch)," 2011. Courtesy the artist and The Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego.

In this week’s roundup Do Ho Suh addresses displacement and “home,” Bruce Nauman finds inspiration in Native America, Jason Schwartzman celebrates John Baldessari, and more.

• Do Ho Suh‘s Fallen Star is under construction at The Stuart Collection, University of California San Diego.  Fallen Star takes the form of a small house that has been picked up by some mysterious force, (perhaps a tornado) and “landed” on a building, seven stories up.  A roof garden is part of Suh’s design and will be a place with panoramic views for small groups to gather.  This can be seen as a “home” for the vast numbers of students who have left their homes to come to this huge institution, the university, which has nothing even resembling a home. A video detailing the installation process was commissioned by The Stuart Collection:

• Alfredo Jaar is one of a several participating artists whose works are on view in Being American at the School of Visual Arts’ Visual Arts Gallery (NYC).  The exhibition surveys responses by visual artists to some of the most pressing social issues in America today: from recent environmental catastrophes to the pervading effects of the economic crisis; from the long shadow of 9/11 and two overseas wars to the homefront debates surrounding religious tolerance, gay marriage, capital punishment and firearms possession.  This show closes December 21.

• Allora & Calzadilla’s third solo show, Vieques Videos 2003-2011, is on view at the Lisson Gallery in London. The artists contributed to the visual culture of this campaign with a long-term, multi-sited project entitled Landmark, which is informed by the following questions: “How is land differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? Who decides what is worth preserving and what should be destroyed? What are strategies for reclaiming marked land? How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land use?”  This show can be seen through January 14, 2012.

• Bruce Nauman‘s Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor), is part of a collection of modern works that are paired with Apache, Arapaho, Hopi, and Sioux art.  Native American Kindred Spirits: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art at Peter Blum Soho (NYC) focuses on a single subject: how modern artists found inspiration in the American landscape and Native American arts and crafts.  This work is on view through January 14, 2012.

• Drawings, an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery (Paris) introduces two new series of work by Richard Serra, July and Rifts. This is Serra’s first major drawing exhibition in Paris since 1995 and “provides a space, a place for me to go to where I can concentrate on an activity that is satisfying in and of itself,” says the artist.  This work is on view until January 7, 2012.

• John Baldessari is celebrated by actor Jason Schwartzman in this video produced for Pacific Standard Time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA):

• Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine was screened on Tuesday December 4 at Cornell University’s Willard Straight Theatre (Ithaca, NY).This documentary features extensive footage of Louise Bourgeois and was directed by art historian Amei Wallach and art documentarian Marian Cajori. It captures Bourgeois, a lifelong feminist, constructing some of her most influential installations.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko‘s works are currently on view at WORK (London).  The gallery is currently showing Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Abolition of War, an exhibition that invites the public to reconsider their understanding of the impact of war on veterans who have fought (or worked as medics) in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The two featured projects, The Flame and War Veteran Vehicle, bring into focus the post-traumatic condition experienced by returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. Both are based on a set of interviews conducted by the artist with anonymous war veterans and their families.  This show is on view until January 14, 2012.

• Keltie Ferris was interviewed for Metro Pulse during her artist-in-residence and exhibition at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  The exhibition is on view until December 9.

• Maya Lin spoke to a packed audience on October 24, 2011 in Mies’ S. R. Crown Hall, home of the Illinois Institute of Technology‘s College of Architecture. Lin spoke about environmental conservation and her ambitious landscape artworks. Check out this video for the full lecture.

• Paul McCarthy is currently exhibiting in London’s St James’s Park and at two Hauser & Wirth galleries. In a video posted by The Guardian, Adrian Searle discusses The King, an installation that pokes fun at ideas of self-aggrandisement and debunks the myth of the male artist as hero.

Terence Hannum in Terence Hannum and Nicolas Lobo's "Broadcast Against Recording" performance event at de la Cruz Collection, Miami, Fl, United States, July 9, 2011.

Terence Hannum is a musician and studio artist who has recently relocated from Chicago to Baltimore to teach at Stevenson University. I first met Terence shortly after moving to Chicago myself about two years ago, at an artist book fair held at University Illinois Chicago’s Gallery 400. This event directly followed a concert that Terence performed at the Empty Bottle with Steven Hess and Andrè Foisy as the experimental Drone Metal band Locrian. I was instantly fascinated by Hannum’s art practice, which eloquently moves from stage to studio. And, I have shamelessly been a fan of Terence’s work ever since, attending nearly all of his local performances and writing reviews of his exhibitions. Attending Locrian concerts has been a significant part of my life in Chicago and, in fact, my MA thesis on Black Metal and contemporary art was conceived while I was in the audience at a Locrian concert. Indeed, Terence was the first artist that I asked to be part of my Black Thorns in the White Cube curatorial project.

Terence has shown in solo exhibitions at Depaw University, Indiana; PeregrineProgram and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Invisible NYC in New York City; and Light & Sie in Dallas. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Western Exhibitions in Chicago; Photographer’s Gallery in London, UK; Apex Art in New York; and San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco, CA; Schalter in Berlin, Germany; and Bergen in Norway. He performs music solo and with the band Locrian, and his zines and publications are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana University, Herron School of Art and Design, Columbia College Chicago, and DePaul University.

The following interview was sparked by Hannum’s recent exhibition at the Cultural Art Center of Chicago, where he currently has a solo exhibition through the end of December. In addition to the paintings, collages and video on view, he also did a solo performance event the opening week. Taking our conversation beyond this exhibition, I wanted to learn more about his background and how this exhibition compares to his previous exhibitions in Chicago throughout the past year and a half.

Amelia Ishmael: Let’s start with the most obvious question. Why Metal and underground subcultures? What does it mean to you to represent your experiences with these subcultures so dominantly in your paintings, videos, and zines? 

Terence Hannum: I have never been interested in much of popular culture. It is entertaining, but after a while it loses its relevance. Subcultures, in general, generate an interesting dynamic, I think, by skirting mainstream attention, for the most part. They tend to generate ways of dress, speaking, codes, sounds, days of remembrance, and hierarchies on their own that force the uninitiated to decipher them. Most of my work began by dissecting different arenas of hardcore and punk music, and then moved into the realm of other, more extreme, underground subcultures. I felt as if this abject periphery was important to address, it raises some interesting questions I can’t quite answer, like, for being so self-proclaimed “profane” in content or aural material, these subcultures can function with very intense definitions as to what is “sacred” for them.

Terence Hannum. "Mass," 2008. Oil on panel. Image courtesy the artist.

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Storm Janse van Rensburg at the Redcross Hospital Auction, South Africa, September 2011.

Storm Janse van Rensburg is a South African curator and Senior Curator of the Goodman Gallery group currently based in Cape Town (CT), South Africa.  Van Rensburg began his curatorial career straight out of the University of South Africa in 1995.  Until 1999, he served as assistant curator at the Market Theatre Galleries in Johannesburg. It’s important to note that the Market Theatre was founded in 1976 and operated as an independent, non-racial theatre during the apartheid regime.

Later the same year he found himself at the KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts (KZNSA) Gallery in Durban where he was offered his first curatorial position.  During those six years, he established the Young Artists Project, a stepping block for young artists and a program of national significance.  The KZNSA was founded  nearly 108 years ago as a platform where artists could discuss, exhibit and market their work.  The gallery has gone through major transformation over the years and currently is the province’s premier contemporary art gallery.

Since 2009, he holds the position of the Senior Curator at the Goodman Gallery Group. Van  Rensburg has been with the gallery since 2007 where he previously held the curatorial position at Goodman Gallery Cape while establishing the CT branch. The Goodman Gallery’s website notes that “the gallery has a long history in South African art.  It was established by Linda Goodman (now Givon) in 1966 and, from the outset, supported and encouraged artists to exhibit despite the strictures of apartheid.  It was involved in the seminal Art Against Apartheid exhibition in 1985 and held shows that spoke out against the repressive apartheid regime. The gallery is home to forty artists including visual art luminaries such as William Kentridge, Kendell Geers and David Goldblatt.”

Van Rensburg for many years has been the face of the Goodman Gallery at the Armory Show; Art Dubai; Art Basel Miami Beach; Art Basel Switzerland; Paris Photo; and at the Joburg Art fair. He has worked closely with artists Mikhael Subotzky, Hasan & Husain Essop, Sue Williamson, Hank Willis Thomas, Kudzanai Chiurai, David Goldblatt, Mikhalene Thomas, Moshekwa langa, Ghada Amer, Reza Aramesh, Kader Attia, Nontsikeleelo Veleko and many others, and has curated numerous exhibitions.

Storm Janse van Rensburg is an absolute gentleman and a multifaceted individual with a marvelous art past and an inspiring future, as he will soon venture into the art world independently. It’s my absolute pleasure to present him today.

Georgia Kotretsos:  What role has the studio visit played in your professional life as it has evolved over the passed decade?  Did the different positions you’ve held as a curator define the quality and frequency of your visits? 

Storm Janse van Rensburg: The studio visit is an important aspect of what I do, in fact what any gallerist or curator does. It is literally at the coal face. A couple of things also intersect at this point. It is a moment to see and talk about ideas, to see the progress of an artist’s project, see developments from one visit to the next. It is a moment for suggestions, resolving problems, practical and conceptual. It is a dialogue that I think is really essential to being a practicing curator.

Cat asleep, studio of William Kentridge, Johannesburg. February 2011.

It is not simply a moment to ‘chew the fat’ with an artist. It is about a trust relationship too. I am also careful during a studio visit that my feedback is not to guide or pressure artists into following a particular direction. It is simply coming in with an open mind, to engage with what is in front of you. And, if there are absences, to articulate them.

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Roy Lichtenstein. "Paintings: Mirror," 1984. Oil and Magna on canvas. 70 x 86 inches. Courtesy the Roy Lichtenstein Estate and the Leo Castelli Gallery.

“People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” – Andy Warhol

In the current exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, there is a work by Roy Lichtenstein titled Paintings: Mirror.  The work is a centerpiece of “Reflected in the Mirror There Was A Shadow,” a small yet electrifying exhibition that brings together a selection of Roy Lichtenstein’s Mirror paintings and Andy Warhol’s Shadow canvases.  As its title suggests, Lichtenstein’s Paintings: Mirror is really a diptych: the left side of the work represents the surface of a canvas, while the right hand side is the mirror.  Lichtenstein has covered the “canvas” side with broad, gestural brushstrokes reminiscent of those by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and other Abstract Expressionists.  Pop artists made something of a habit of lampooning the bravura brushwork of this previous generation, parodying their lofty aspirations to achieve authentic and unique artistic expression through the liberating excess of their painterly marks.  Lichtenstein’s Paintings: Mirror seems to fit neatly within this critical tradition of Pop.  But here is where it gets interesting.

For such a parody, the obvious, even expected maneuver would be to have the right register of Lichtenstein’s Paintings: Mirror diptych, the mirror side, contain Pop-infused, stylized brushstrokes that mimic the expressive, dripping ones on the left—reflections drained of any expressiveness, reflecting and restating the bravura brushwork but with a decidedly commercial rather than personal origin.  Having one side comprised of the gestural brushwork that has become the sign of Abstract Expressionism and the other a stylized Pop rendition of them would be an easy send-up, a one-note parody of Action Painting’s intent and incident.  Indeed, Lichtenstein began doing just such parodies of brushstrokes as early as 1965, and continued to do so throughout the remainder of his career.

Roy Lichtenstein. "Brushstrokes," 1965. Oil and Magna on canvas. 48 x 48 inches.

Mirrors first appeared in Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings in 1961, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that they became in his art something of a motif unto themselves.  Using imagery often culled from commercial mirror advertisements, Lichtenstein distills the mirror—one of the most enduring motifs in the history of art—through his Pop Art concern with consumer culture and mass media.  By 1969, with Lichtenstein’s Mirror #1, the artist’s representation of a mirror seems to have merged with the canvas itself, as the mirror’s reflective surface stands in for the entirety of the canvas, the mirror’s bevel seemingly becoming the frame of the painting itself.

Roy Lichtenstein. "Mirror #1," 1969. Oil and Magna on canvas. 24 x 18 inches. Courtesy the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein and the Leo Castelli Gallery.

But in Paintings: Mirror, the bravura strokes of Abstract Expressionism and their stylized Pop iteration are on the same side of the painting’s divide.  Here, both apparently succumb equally to the reflection of the mirror, a reflection that re-presents them both as a dense, almost totally abstract array of Ben Day dots and bands of primary colors (the telltale signs of representation made transparent).  Both styles have been impersonally rendered through Lichtenstein’s meticulous duplication of the look and techniques of commercial illustration.  But what does it mean when the expressionistic brushstroke—marks of a unique self—and the depersonalized Pop brushwork—marks of the erasure of that self within the economy of late capitalism—are not located in some dialectical tension, but are in fact both seen to be withering before their reflection in the mirror?  An answer might be found, I think, by considering what his Mirrors and Warhol’s Shadow paintings have in common—a connection that is the structuring principle of the Castelli exhibition.

Andy Warhol. "Diamond Dust Shadow," 1979. Acrylic, diamond dust and silkscreen on canvas. 78 x 50 inches. Courtesy the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.

In 1978–79 Warhol produced an extraordinary series of work in which shadows themselves became the subject his silkscreened paintings. The series is punctuated by a cycle of shadow paintings consisting of 102 individual canvases, but considered one massive environment piece (owned by the Dia Foundation).  Unlike the familiar clarity that defines much of the imagery in Warhol’s oeuvre, Warhol’s shadows refuse to take definitive shape or to yield some knowable underlying object of which they are an indexical trace.

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