Freeway Balconies Extended!

Plan to be in Berlin anytime soon? If so, you are in luck - the exhibition Freeway Balconies, at the Deutsche Guggenheim has been extended and will not close until October 10th. This group exhibition curated by photographer Collier Schorr (Season 2) features 19 emerging and established artists, including Art21-featured artist Raymond Pettibon (also Season 2).

This exhibition may be considered close to a particular kind of self-portrait as the works are arranged among a selection of Schorr’s own photographs. As such, Schorr sets up antagonistic relationships: spectacle vs. voyeurism, identity vs. identification, performance art vs. Hollywood cult and alternative culture vs. popular. Such relationships, often seemingly contradictory, have the ability to ignite a conversation, get the mind juicing and sometimes even the body heated. There is no certain outcome of such matches and in the name of art, who would want a finite answer? It all depends on what else of hers you’ve seen.

Schorr writes, “After reading Allen Ginsberg’s poem I had a fantasy…Ginsberg is at a gas station in the south and picks up a stranded traveler who he thinks is part of the Black Panther movement, but actually he is a Hollywood actor hoping to get into Hollywood. I guess that the conflation of identity is at the heart of this exhibition.”

Meanwhile, if you are unable to make it to Berlin anytime soon, don’t fret; there’s something for you as well. The book that accompanies the exhibition is a way to visually continue the round-table discussion that drives Schorr’s artmaking and curating.

On a closing note, here is a photograph (included in this exhibition) of and by Collier Schorr in a pose reminiscent of Hollywood favorite Marlon Brando:

A Cult, Some Vegans, A Ballet, Oh My!

What do you get when you mix religious overtones, memories of a few former vegan college roommates, comic book-inspired heroes and elegant ballerinas prancing around the stage in funny costumes? In the case of the collaboration between Houston-based contemporary artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) and Ballet Austin, I would say a lot of conflicting clichés: archetypal values with a bit of a focus on flesh, eggs, and orifices.

It’s clear that absurdity plays a role in the mechanics of what makes this wondrously colorful ballet tick. Alas, culture and context are what enable us to investigate eye candy on a level we can mull in our minds and chew on with our souls. How fun and exciting—it sounds like a performance to really get the heart racing! (Beckett, are you there?)

For a description of the ballet performed this past spring, see this month’s issue of Art in America and specifically “Food for Thought,” Eleanor Heartney’s review of Cult of Color: Call to Color, a collaboration between Trenton Doyle Hancock, composer Graham Reynolds, and the Austin Ballet director Stephen Mills.

Heartney’s article examines many themes that course through the ballet. She states, “Thematically, the ballet lends itself to various interpretations. On one hand, it can be read as a repudiation of asceticism in favor of optical beauty, and as an affirmation of art as a realm of freedom. On the other, the battle of the ‘good’ with Vegans, who convert, and the ‘bad’ black ones, who resist, has peculiar racial overtones that Hancock, who is African-American, must have been aware of.” Heartney goes on to say, “…however, the full spectrum of color as mediator and redemptive force might be read as a vindication of the ‘post-racial’ notion of hybridity so much in vogue in the moment.”

I can only speculate how might Trenton Doyle Hancock respond to that. Perhaps with the following quote from Susan Mansfield’s article “Son of a Preacher Man” (2007):

“I think at first I fooled myself into thinking it was about race,” he says. “There was a bit of exoticism happening, because I was black in a predominantly white art world. People saw that first and that was always the first thing mentioned in the press. I would take racial stereotypes and treat them like a cartoonist, make fun of them, make them my own. But the conversation about race is so confined, I decided to leave these things by the wayside and focus on storytelling. The icons I use now are more universal. The Mounds represent to me a kind of stabability, being at peace, growing, and acceptance. The Vegans are the complete opposite. They are about pushing out everything that’s good from themselves because they don’t trust it. In essence they get smaller and smaller as human beings, become this pale imitation of humanity, like skeletons…”

In her review, Eleanor Heartney does not fail to mention, “Color aside, the ballet offers a political parable about deceit, power oppression, and liberation…the forces of repression and tyranny can never completely overcome.” Well, I am happy to say that this superhero hasn’t given up.  This November 20th, I look forward to James Cohan Gallery’s presentation of Hancock’s fourth solo exhibition, which will include four major new paintings, a new set of prints, and elements from the Cult of Color ballet. So if you missed his lecture and installation this past spring at the ICA in Philadelphia, come check out Hancock newest work in New York this fall.

Remembering to Remember

On view until September 21st at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a collection of J.M.W. Turner’s picturesque paintings of the harrowing sea as well as some ships and their respective passengers. Turner is not a contemporary artist. He has long vanished under the sea, the rifts and wails of his sailors and mates heard long ago, and is now remembered by the violent paint strokes that so eloquently make up the rhythmic intensity beating within his canvases.

After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, one might recall Kara Walker’s (Season 2) After the Deluge, an exhibition of work that she organized featuring a variety of objects from the Met’s collection (including Turner’s infamous Slave Ship.)

Years apart in age and emerging out of different historical contexts, both artists are fascinated by the world around them and in turn have sought to explore these curiosities with the realization that the representation of a time that may seem uncertain can often produce artworks of incredible passion.

Watch Walker discussing the question of one’s role in history in relationship to an installation that she made as an artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop in 2004.