New guest blogger: Ivan Lozano
Photo: Ben Aqua
Thanks to Kevin McGarry for his excellent guest blogging and coverage of recent art. Up next is Ivan Lozano. Ivan Lozano is a (mostly) video artist currently working on an MFA in Film/Video/New Media at the School of the Art Institute. In another life, while living in Austin TX, Ivan was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, an arts writer for various publications, and a co-founder of the artist collective the Austin Video Bee.
Open Enrollment deadline is tomorrow!
Do-Ho Suh. "Who Am We? (Multi)," 2000. Four-color offest print on paper, 25 sheets each: 24 x 26 inches. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
Do not miss out on the chance to be a regular columnist on this site! If you are a current student—in a graduate art program, artist residency, or non-traditional higher education program—Open Enrollment wants you. Full details here. The deadline is tomorrow.
New guest blogger: Kevin McGarry
Thanks to Leanne Gilbertson for her excellent work covering the Houston contemporary art scene. Up next is Kevin McGarry. Kevin is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. His journalism has recently appeared on Rhizome, T Magazine Blog and the online editions of Art in America, Artforum and Interview. He is a director and programmer of Migrating Forms, a festival of new experimental film and video held at Anthology Film Archives in May.
Seeking graduate student writers for Open Enrollment
Do-Ho Suh. "Who Am We? (Multi)," 2000. Four-color offest print on paper, 25 sheets each: 24 x 26 inches. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
Why art school? Why now? Why does it matter?
“It wasn’t till I got to art school that I really understood how art can connect you through human history and the type of reservoir that it could be.” (Jeff Koons)
“I wanted to cause trouble. And that caused me trouble in graduate school, because by that time I had figured out that I wanted to be on the edge, original, avant-garde. And that meant going against the status quo.” (Mary Heilmann)
Open Enrollment, the newest weekly column on the Art21 Blog, chronicles the experience of graduate school via the perspective of current students. As MA and MFA degrees become ever more the norm for the professional training of artists, educators, and administrators alike, Open Enrollment functions as a time-sensitive journal, offering readers a birds-eye-view of the challenges, rewards, puzzles, and ontological questioning that a graduate education engenders.
Each semester, a selective and diverse group of students (6 max) from accredited graduate programs, as well as students studying at non-traditional institutions (temporary schools, artist’s educational projects, intensive residency programs, etc.), will take up residence on the Art21 Blog. The roster of contributors will grow over time, providing a cross-section of international venues and pedagogical approaches. While chronicling one’s own practice is encouraged in the context of larger concerns, this column is not a forum or vehicle for narrowly promoting one’s own work. It is intended to portray, through both personal examples and larger inquiries about the pursuit of higher education, the diversity of studio and critical academic experiences in art school today.
Requirements
Candidates must be:
- currently enrolled in an accredited art school at the graduate level in one of the following disciplines: studio (painting/drawing, film/video, sculpture, photography, new forms, etc.), art history, arts administration, curatorial studies, visual and critical studies, or equivalent; OR…
- currently studying in a non-traditional academic environment (in the spirit of The Public School, Bruce High Quality Foundation, the New Museum’s Night School, unitednationsplaza, etc.); OR…
- currently undertaking a post-graduate residency program (Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The MFAH CORE Program at the Glassell School of Art, Rijksakademie, etc.); AND…
- committed to contributing at least 3 blog posts over the course of one 15-week semester.
Writing is contributed on a voluntary basis to start, with the capacity for growth—with demonstrated enthusiasm, high quality writing, and commitment—into a paid position.
How to apply
To apply, send a letter of interest, 2 writing samples (blog writing preferred), and a draft of your first post for Open Enrollment. Be sure to address at least one of the following questions in your application (to be further explored in the column itself):
- Why did you decide to do pursue additional education?
- What does your learning experience look like, on both micro and macro levels?
- Does your school have a visiting artist program? How do regular encounters or interactions with professional artists impact your own studio and academic practice?
- Have you had any experiences with radical pedagogy? What were they? What does it mean to you?
- How does your school interface with local arts institutions in your community?
- Is art school relevant? How or why not?
Send materials via email only to:
Kelly Shindler
Director of Special Projects, Art21
blog [at] art21 [dot] org
Deadline: Friday, March 5, 2010.
Mike Kelley, "Educational Complex," 1995. Synthetic polymer, latex, foam core, fiberglass and wood, 51 x 192 x 96 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee 96.50. Photo by Geoffrey Clements, photograph copyright © 1998: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
New guest blogger: Leanne Gilbertson
Thanks to Karthik Pandian for posting his Grand Canyon journals during his guest blogging stint. Fortunately, there is more to come in this series, so look out for a several more posts from him in the next few weeks.
Up next is Leanne Gilbertson. Leanne recently received her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. She teaches Modern and Contemporary Art, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Art at Sam Houston State University. She has held visiting teaching positions at Bowling Green State University and the University of Pittsburgh, and also served as Curatorial Assistant at the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her writing has appeared in *Art Journal* and *InVisible Culture.* Currently she is preparing a manuscript that explores the relationships between the emergence, in the 1960s, of both feminist and queer consciousnesses, and the intermedia artistic experimentation occurring at both Warhol’s Factory and Judson Memorial Church.
Art21 Bloggers’ Top Tens of 2009 and the 2000s
Yes, we know January is more than halfway over and it’s a bit late for yet another compilation of Top Tens. But we’ve been busy speaking and planning the next year of this site. Hopefully we whetted your palate with some end-of-year roundups of the guest blog and video Exclusives rosters. And what about entertainers who moonlight as artists? Or the Year in Meat? We would be remiss, however, not to share with you some of the other images, events, websites, and phenomena caught by our radar not only in 2009 but also across the aughts.
Catherine Wagley, Columnist, Looking at Los Angeles
For art, this has been the decade of the image, just like it’s been the decade of the single song for music. Images can be downloaded as easily as MP3 files, and much of the notable art I’ve encountered since 2000 came to me via Google. I first saw each of these ten photographs on a computer screen, and while I eventually saw many in person, that initial online encounter seared them into my memory.
Outlandish, strangely severe and self-important, Levi Van Veluw’s approach to landscape seems perfectly suited to the virtual information age. It approximates the textures and colors of land, but couldn’t be more unnatural and alienating.
Coolidge’s photograph is equal parts candid and cunning. It plays with normalcy just enough to reveal what we already know: there’s no such thing as normal.
Taken in an abandoned embassy in Germany and then damaged by an airport X-ray machine, Beshty’s murk-filled Travel Pictures, literally scarred by diplomacy and bureaucracy, are relics of contemporary history.
With the uncanny composure of a Jeff Wall image and the rough-and-tumble defiance of grunge, Snow’s photograph straddles a provocative line between professionalism and rebellion.
Images are commodities and technology a game in Lassry’s work. This particular photograph acts as a one-liner, a pithy visual gesture that collapses the difference between design and meaning.
This photograph appeared in W Magazine before Brad and Angelina, the “it” couple of the decade, were officially together. It’s visually arresting, melodramatic, and a prescient mockery of the domestic lives of the rich and famous.
Maier-Aichen made landscape seem unfamiliar again and this particular topography looks so flat and textured that it feels like an intimate abstraction even though it’s an expansive aerial shot.
Pfeiffer re-imagined romanticism in the context of a basketball court, removing and manipulating contextual details and imaging emotionally raw, vulnerable scenarios.
Vulnerable, voluptuous and defiant, Opie’s self-portrait, simple in its premise, ushered identity politics into a new era.
Placing a young man in the pose of Helga, painter Andrew Wyeth’s famous muse, Schorr created what I believe is the decade’s most resonant portrayal of gender performance.
Ben Street, Columnist, Letter from London
[Caveat: one of the requirements of writing an end-of-year best-of list is that you remember what you've seen right from the beginning of the year, and I'm not sure that the pieces of art I remember seeing this year are necessarily the best ones. (I can remember, for instance, Adel Abdessemed's fighting animals video at David Zwirner in New York quite clearly, although I thought it was pretty rubbish as art). The other requirement is that you demonstrate a) that you're an enormously well-traveled and cosmopolitan person by featuring art from a broad range of far-flung locations and b) that you have privileged access to the most obscure and under-the-radar art events which most ordinary mortals won't even have heard about. So, actually, the best art show I saw this year was a video installation down a mineshaft in Azerbaijan, but in the interest of the reader, I'll try and keep it relatively mainstream. So: this is a list of (mostly) individual works of art that I've seen this year that have both stubbornly remained in my memory and are, I think, really good.]
New guest blogger: Karthik Pandian
Thanks to Joel Holmberg for guest blogging this last fortnight. Up next is Karthik Pandian. Karthik is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He is represented by Richard Telles Fine Art and has contributed essays to Bidoun and Motherwell. While his work may best be described as 16mm film installation, his practice follows in the footsteps of such diverse figures as Imhotep, Steve Wynn, Carmen Sandiego, Ole Worm, and Benjamin Franklin Gates. He is currently working on a solo exhibition slated to open at Midway Contemporary in Minneapolis in September 2010, but hopes one day to reopen the Musée de l’Homme on the Pacific Trash Vortex, where he will serve as Curator of Ruins and IMAX 3D projectionist.
BLOG THIS! Blogging the contemporary arts, a panel discussion this Friday at X-Initiative
Raised Eyebrows/ Furrowed Foreheads: (Black and Blue Eyebrows), 2008. Three dimensional archival print, laminated with lexan and mounted on shaped form with acrylic paint, 57 3/4 x 102 x 6 3/4 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
WHEN
Friday, January 15, 6:30 pm
Please note that the Gallery is open 12 – 6 pm so arrive early if you want to view the final phase of exhibitions at X.
WHERE
X Initiative
548 West 22nd Street
New York NY 10011
RSVP
Moderator: Robin White
Panelists:
Barry Hoggard, Bloggy, ArtCat, Culture Pundits: blogger, collector, entrepreneur
Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City: news and opinion blogger, writer
William Powhida: artist, blogger
Kelly Shindler, Art21: educational blogger
Edward Winkleman: gallery owner, blogger
Blogs about contemporary arts and the art world play an increasingly important role by providing multiple viewpoints, information and commentaries about the art market, the gallery scene, artists and their work on a daily basis. As the number of printed newspaper and culture journals decreases, some blogs are becoming a source for substantial art journalism and art criticism. By pairing the 5-most read, and hotly debated, bloggers of New York City, we want to touch on a topic that is timely and relevant, and offer a dynamic and lively conversation at the X-Initiative.
We have curated the panel to incorporate a wide spectrum of practicing bloggers: from art news to art education, from the perspective of the art market including both the point of view of an artist and a gallerist, and those who are taking the online art world to a whole new-networked level.
About the Panelists
Barry Hoggard writes about art and politics on bloggy.com. He is the editor, along with James Wagner, of the arts calendar ArtCat, and proprietor of CulturePundits.com, a curated network of today’s leading cultural websites and blogs. He recently began publishing Idiom, an online publication of urban artistic practice. He is also a software developer.
http://bloggy.com/
http://www.culturepundits.com/
http://www.artcat.com/
http://idiommag.com/
Paddy Johnson aka ArtFagCity blogger, has been published in artreview.com, Art in America, FlashArt, Print Magazine, Time Out NY, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post and many others. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet and in 2008, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships and became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation.
http://www.artfagcity.com/
William Powhida’s blog has covered controversial topics including creating an “enemies” list as well as letters addressed to famous contemporary curators, collectors and critics, requesting recognition. According to Wikipedia as an artist he constructs work deliberately about growing his own fame, addressing the major obstacles facing emerging contemporary artists.
http://williampowhida.blogspot.com/
Kelly Shindler, Art21 Blog Founder and Editor, has worked at Art21 since 2003, where she is presently Director of Special Projects. She is also a curator and writer, as well as a dual Master’s candidate in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism/Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
http://blog.art21.org/
Edward Winkleman is an art dealer and a blogger. He started his eponymous blog about the art world and politics in 2005 and is a contributing editor to the international blog Art World Salon. He began his career in the art world with a series of guerilla-style exhibitions organized in New York and London under the name ‘hit & run’. In 2001 he co-founded the Plus Ultra Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Moving into Manhattan’s art district Chelsea in 2006, he changed the name of the gallery to Winkleman Gallery.
http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/
New guest blogger: Joel Holmberg
Thanks to Nova Benway for her series of posts on artists employing earnestness in their work. Up next is Joel Holmberg. Joel (b. 1982, Maryland, USA) creates artwork with computers and online services, but also sometimes with his bare hands.
Art21 Guest Blog Year 2
This being the last week of 2009, it is time for our annual year in review. 2 weeks ago, we gave you a sneak preview with a guide to our second year of Art21 Exclusives. For the rest of the week, we’ll be bringing you our top picks for the year – from within the pages of this blog to real life—in exhibitions and the like around the world—courtesy of our well-traveled and art-inundated writers. But first, we kick off this week with a nod to the year’s roster of incredible guest bloggers, who enriched this site with every post. Click on each writer’s name for an index of all his or her posts. Many thanks to all twenty-six of them for their informative and often entertaining insights! Here’s to the Art21 Guest Blog Class of 2009.
Interested in guest blogging for Art21 in 2010? Email a letter of interest, 2 writing samples, and relevant links by January 15, 2010 to blog [at] art21 [dot] org.
