Thanks to Steven Frost for giving us some amazing insights in fiber art, and extra bonus points for whipping up a fascinating post that combines Catwoman & patriarchy.

Next up is Meg Floryan, who is a freelance arts writer and recent graduate of Sotheby’s Institute of Art,with a Master’s degree in American Fine & Decorative Art. Meg has lived and studied in New Orleans, Boston, and New York, and she has developed a wide-ranging repertoire of interests that includes everything from Hellenistic jewelry and post-war children’s book illustrations to a fascination with art crime.

Inspired by the diversity and freedom of online forums, Meg writes regularly for SmARThistory.org and is constantly in search of new ways to explore and experience art. Meg’s other hobbies include yoga and watching foreign horror films — which we assume she does separately and not at the same time.

The closest I'm ever going to come to my 15 minutes of fame … here I am being interviewed last weekend by James Kalm of the Kalm Report. (Photo by Veken Gueyikian)

Starting today, and running through to August 25, I will be filling in for Kelly Shindler as guest editor of the Art21 blog.

Kelly, who has taken a much needed vacation, has entrusted me to guide the Art21 blog through the dog days of August … thanks, Kelly!

I’m probably no stranger to many of you — some of you may remember me for my past contributions to this blog or my brief stint as editor last summer — while others may know me as the editor of Brooklyn-based art blogazine Hyperallergic or my personal blog, but all you really need to know is that I’m passionate about art and online media … which makes the Art21 blog a natural fit. Continue reading »

View of the chalkboards that covered the walls of the Winkleman Gallery during the #class exhibition. Visitors were welcome to write or draw on the boards. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Dalton)

Last week, the #class exhibition at the Winkleman Gallery closed after a month of functioning as New York’s laboratory for art world gripes, think tank for new ideas, and classroom full of possibilities. Co-curated by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, the show welcomed a long list of guests to present events, actions, discussions, lectures, and everything in between, for an audience that was both real and virtual (all the events were video streamed live on Ustream, which was also embedded on the exhibition blog).

It felt like half the city’s art world took part in this mediated meeting of the minds. I even contributed a small project that welcomed people to submit ballots filled out with information about who in the art world owes them money (I received dozens of submissions).

After #class started, what already felt like a sprawling project began to feel all-consuming, as you could participate in person or online. Simultaneous conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and some art blogs endlessly chattered about the events and the perceived successes and failures of #class. Yet as the exhibition progressed, I really found myself more and more interested in what Dalton had to say about the project and its evolving accomplishments. Unlike Powhida, Dalton is much more reserved and not as quick to express opinions or challenge people publicly over ideas. She is an accomplished conceptual artist and her work feels  coolly objective and measured in its response to the world. I wanted to understand what the significance of #class was for her and asked her to speak to me over email. She agreed.

This online conversation took place throughout the last two weeks of #class and represents some of her evolving ideas about the exhibition.

*   *   *

Hrag Vartanian: What role do you think ethics should and/or does play in the art world? If any.

Jennifer Dalton: I think ethics should play a role in every area of human activity; the art world is not separate in any meaningful way. I think we should always try to do what is right, honest, helpful and productive, and strive to act in a way that we wish everyone else would act. It is not always achievable, but that’s the goal.

Co-curators William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton as depicted in An Xiao's "Photoglam" series that was taken during the opening night of #class. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

HV: Is that your goal? Either way, do you think it helps you succeed or holds you back?

JD: Yes, it’s my goal. Sometimes I think it helps me succeed and sometimes I think it holds me back. I think it has helped me more than it has hurt me, both because I am willing to work really hard and because I do my best not to make anyone else’s life more difficult. People don’t like to work with you when you make their life difficult. Ed Winkleman’s an exception, bless him.

HV: Now, how does #class fit into the recent debate about ethics in the art world? It seems as though it emerged from a real sense that the art world may have partly lost its way and was starting to have trouble distinguishing what was right and wrong.

JD: In part, the #class project definitely evolved from a feeling that the art world is not governed by a normal sense of right and wrong. Some of our particular bones to pick were that artists cannot count on getting paid for sales by their galleries (many of which are run by people who have no business running a business), that the finances of contemporary museums seem to be forcing them toward inane blockbusters and/or exhibitions of ethically challenged conception, that the most “important” art events have become absurd parodies of spectacles, and that what used to be multiple avenues of artistic “success” have winnowed down into the single definition of conspicuous validation by the art market.

Further inspiration behind #class was also a queasiness that William and I identified in ourselves about participating, even honestly and in good faith, in this strange marketplace. It’s uncomfortable to sell work (or attempt to sell work!) that is priced at nearly your own yearly income. It means that no one in your own circumstances can afford to buy your work, which feels alienating. We don’t know if there is a better way to support art and artists so, among many other things, #class is about trying to figure that out.

Continue reading »

A still of Florian Maier-Aichen at work from Season 5's "Fantasy" episode

On October 9, over a hundred art fans arrived at the Apple Store Soho to gain insight into the work and life of German-American artist Florian Maier-Aichen. Organized by Art21, the early evening event featured a special advance screening of Season 5′s Fantasy episode, which features Maier-Aichen, and it provided an opportunity for the public to ask the artist about his artistic practice and inspirations.

Introduced by Art21 Manager of Education and Public Programs, Marc Mayer, the event began with the video segment and continued with a Q&A session moderated by Art21 Associate Curator, Wesley Miller.

Ansel Adams, "The Tetons and the Snake River" (1942) (via Wikipedia)

Known for his digitally altered images, Maier-Aichen arrived in Southern California in the mid-1990s as a student to study art at UCLA. During his studies in Los Angeles, he discovered the American photographic tradition of the late 19th- and early 20th-century that popularized the majesty of the American West. He wondered if America’s love of photography, which he said is more respected as an art form here than it is in Germany, is rooted in this historic period when Americans discovered their nation’s natural beauty through the power of the lens. Miller added, to support Maier-Aichen’s point, that the awe most people felt when viewing those same early photographs contributed to the establishment of America’s first national parks.

While Maier-Aichen felt affinities with those early landscape photographers, such as Ansel Adams and Eadweard Muybridge, he says his work shies away from simple landscape images. “I don’t like pure landscape—it is too boring for me. I like the tension between [the city and nature],” he said.

Continue reading »

Provincetown Art Association & Museum, Photo by jrgts/Flickr

I admit to being surprised at the role the visual arts plays in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In college, I remember learning about Hans Hofmann’s famous school, which taught artists (Helen Frankenthaler, Allan Kaprow, Larry Rivers, Lee Krasner, etc.) about modern art. This once sleepy fishing town, it turns out, wasn’t only an important center for American theatre and art during the middle of the 20th C. but it continues to retain that role even as it transform into a very contemporary community. At the center of this change is a rather superb small museum, the Province Art Association & Museum (aka PAAM).

Last weekend, I traveled to this small town of less than 4,000 year-round residents and met PAAM’s Executive Director, Christine M. McCarthy, to find out more about the town’s fine arts soul. She was friendly, welcoming and exuberant about what has been achieved in Provincetown. “You can’t find more culture in 3 square miles anywhere else,” she offered as evidence of Provincetown’s role as cultural mecca.

Charles W. Hawthorne "His First Voyage" (1915). Gift of Joseph Hawthorne, Coll. PAAM

When I visited, PAAM was hosting five (mostly one-room) exhibitions, including a permanent collection display dominated by works by founding art colony father Charles W. Hawthorne and his ilk, a show of drawings by Hans Hofmann’s students (which included 15 drawings loaned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art), a retrospective of assemblage artist Varujan Boghosian, Anne Peretz’s paintings of Cape Cod, and a fundraising show featuring work by PAAM members. It seemed like an incredible number for such a small museum.

Continue reading »

Kara Walker, "You Do" (1993-94). Cut Paper on canvas, 55 x 49 in. (140 x 124.5 cm). Coll. of Peter Norton & Eileen Harris Norton. Photo courtesy artist & Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NYC

Our latest reflection on the theme of art + transformation comes from two popular Philadelphia-based art bloggers, Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof. The founders of TheArtBlog.org, the pair shared some thoughts on the transformative relationship between pop culture & art:

There’s a constant conversation going on between art and pop culture. Each seems to transform the other for better and for worse. iPod advertisements quote Kara Walker‘s (Season 2) black on white silhouettes. Cai Guo-Qiang‘s (Season 3) firework explosions transform the ultimate pop culture “ooh” and “aah” experience into a commentary on light and space–but also exploding bombs.

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Everything is fodder in Ryan Trecartin’s through the looking glass world. People are transformed with face paint and audio is distorted to the verge of incomprehensibility. And the values of the corporate world and the family world are inverted so that there is no good/bad dichotomy and everything is a crazy jumble. The transformation allows the artist room to comment on how crazy and immoral the real world is.

That ability to transform has magic powers, and the ancients understood that when they donned masks and swallowed peyote buttons. Art is not peyote. It won’t get you through the doors of perception literally. But good art does open up doors of perspective that help us revise our understanding of the world around us.

- Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof

Photo of Pocket Utopia's Rolling Gate. Courtesy Sharon Butler

Austin Thomas is a New York-based artist, curator & sometimes salon host. When I asked her about art + transformation, she offered these thoughts about the transformative power of walking and its impact on her art practice.

“The best ideas come when I’m doing the dishes,” That’s what Tracey Moffatt once told me. (But I never really do dishes.) She also told me, “the best ideas come back” and they do. I get my ideas and do my best thinking when I walk.

After completing Pocket Utopia, a 2-year, community-based salon project in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, I’ve started organizing art walking tours called “Art Stumbles.” These tours offer up food for thought, refreshments and refreshing perspectives on the art geography of a particular place.

Until recently, Pocket Utopia was a place for showing other artists’ work, and I thought of it as an extension of my own artwork. I re-engaged my ideas by constructing a social space. I learned what it really meant to be an artist running Pocket Utopia.

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It has been a fun two weeks with Quinn Latimer as she offered us a window into her corner of the Swiss art world. We traveled to the “Holbein to Tillmans” exhibition, visited new “roommates” Plattfon + Stampa, read some thoughts on the relationship (if any) between high culture and crime in Dresden, and enjoyed her musings about wandering the streets of Basel.

Next up, we welcome our latest blogger-in-residence, Dehlia Hannah.

Dehlia Hannah is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Columbia University completing a dissertation entitled “Nature Vexed: Scientific Experiment as Aesthetic Form,” which examines the use of scientific methods and materials in contemporary art and the aesthetics of scientifically-mediated nature.

She is a graduate of Smith College, where she studied philosophy and chemistry, and has received an M. Phil. and a Certificate in Feminist Inquiry from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. Her areas of specialization are philosophy of science and aesthetic theory and philosophy of art, and her work is informed by feminist and queer theory.

She is currently teaching Contemporary Civilization in the West at Columbia College.

Her posts will begin tomorrow.

Loren Munk–of the infamous DIY online video program James Kalm Report–is a walking encyclopedia of the history of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg art community. So when I asked him about his take on the notion of Art + Transformation, he shared his thoughts through words and video on the transformation of Williamsburg:

Until recently, Williamsburg has been the venue of choice for underground gorilla art actions. The crumbling old piers on the west side of the ‘Berg have provided generations of local kids, the homeless and the avant-garde with unregulated space to play.

In June 2005, artist Chris Martin in preparation for his upcoming exhibition, decided to throw an unauthorized “happening/photo-shoot” to create an image for a poster.  The resulting party represents the last gasp of Old Williamsburg.

Four years latter, developers have seized on this strip of coast as some of the most desirable real estate in New York City. The unrestrained construction of glass and steal apartment towers and massive throngs of tattooed hipsters, being cajoled by Borough President Marty Markowitz bares testament to the extraordinary, though not necessarily positive, transformation of this area.

-Loren Munk

Mu Li "The Fruits of Blue Lotus Flower"

In the final week of the Transformation series, I’ve asked a number of people with diverse points of view to offer their thoughts on the topic.

To kick things off, I introduce Ellen Pearlman, a Brooklyn & Beijing-based writer, curator, critic and film maker, who shares her thoughts about the notion of Art + Transformation in regards to China’s art scene:

Cao Fei, one of the featured artists on Art21, came of age during China’s accelerating transformation playing out through Second Life scenarios issues of fragility, loss and alienation. Other young Chinese artists are also delving into issues of their country’s transformation. International cities like Shanghai just had its first gay festival and though Beijing remains the art hub, second tier industrial and provincial regions like Wuhan and Sichuan and Hangzhou are also adding their voices into the mix. Instead of the block buster exhibits mounted by more recognized artists experiments are exploring themes of infantilism and powerlessness with new Chinese Anime, existentialism and ennui with WAZA, and issues of cultural dislocation and transgression with O Zhang.

O Zhang, "Daddy and I" No. 16

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