Expanding the Definition(s): Some Days Are Easier Than Others
Many thanks to those who have helped get the Teaching with Contemporary Art column off to a smooth start! Recently, a few friends and colleagues have mentioned (even e-mailed) about the fact that, well, while Season 4 of Art:21 has won quite a few prestigious awards, the selection of artists chosen can be difficult to transition into the classroom. As educators, how do we get our collective heads around teaching with Season 4 artists such as Mark Dion, Alfredo Jaar, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Laurie Simmons? These aren’t artists that lend themselves easily to K-12 or university-level curriculum, particularly if the course is production-based. How can artists like these, as well as artists such as Ann Hamilton (Season 1), Martin Puryear (Season 2), and Fred Wilson (Season 3) help us work with students in our classrooms?
First… they can help us redefine and expand on what art is and what it’s becoming in the 21st century. There aren’t too many neat little projects that fit perfectly with what some of these artists do, but the segments and related materials on art21.org help us work with students to consider new possibilities for subject matter and ways of working with traditional and non-traditional media. These segments can inspire writing in the classroom just as well as Elizabeth Murray may inspire students to paint in new ways. They can be the catalyst for spirited debate much like Trenton Doyle Hancock can act as a starting point for understanding cartooning or how artists develop/illustrate alter-egos. Mark Dion can teach about the relationship between art and ecology, as well as blurring the line between artist and curator. Alfredo Jaar can teach about public art and how contemporary art often needs a particular setting much like a great work of fiction. Ursula von Rydingsvard teaches how an artist today can create work that relates to landscapes, the human body and psychological states… sometimes simultaneously. And Laurie Simmons can teach that there is a difference between photographers as artists and artists that use photography as a tool.
While it’s hard to incorporate the ever-increasing number of artists that can meaningfully inspire and help guide students, it’s hard to NOT include artists that will help them open up definitions and engage in dialogue about what art is and what constitutes an artist to begin with. Bringing these artists into discussions and/or socratic seminars in the art classroom can have surprising and wonderful benefits. Is it easy? Never. Some days are easier than others. But it’s always worth it. I can tell you stories…..
Image: Untitled Hot Glue Drawing by Karyl DelMundo
MATRIX/REDUX at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX exhibition program with a year-long series of events, beginning with MATRIX/REDUX (on view through July 6). The MATRIX format—spontaneous, flexible, small-scale, and short-term—was “key to engendering experimentation on the part of both the artists and the institution, resulting in a mix of exhibitions that defied categorization and kept Berkeley at the forefront of international contemporary art,” according to the BAM/PFA website.
MATRIX/REDUX samples from the history of this important program with selections from the Museum’s collection and loans from local collections rarely seen by museum audiences. Included in the exhibition is Crèche (1997), a group of bronze fox, deer, bats, mice, rabbits, and owls, created by Art21 artist Kiki Smith (Season 2). Past participants of the MATRIX program that have also been featured by Art21 include Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Susan Rothenberg (Season 3), and Richard Serra (Season 1).
Art21 artists in “TRANSactions” in Atlanta
TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, a group show which opened on March 15 at the High Museum in Atlanta features work from three Art21 artists. Alfredo Jaar, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle (both Season 4), and Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) have contributed work to this exhibition which explores the boundaries of cultural identity while celebrating universal themes. The show contains work from artists in eight countries, and surveys the rich variety of methods and concerns of contemporary Latinos, dispelling the myth that they are a homogeneous cultural group.
You can find the press release for this traveling show here.
Art:21 Wins Prestigious 2007 Peabody Award!
Season Four of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century has been honored with a George Foster Peabody Award - the premiere international prize in electronic media - in the 67th Annual Peabody Awards Competition.
The Art:21 series was recognized for providing “a unique forum for the display, analysis and appreciation of myriad forms of contemporary visual art” by the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, which has administered the Peabody Award program since its inception in 1940. The Season Four episode Protest, featuring the contemporary artists Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê , and Nancy Spero, was singled out for its examination of the ways in which contemporary artists picture and question war, express outrage, and empathize with the suffering of others.
Selected from over 1,000 entries, Art:21 is the first visual art series to win a Peabody since 2002, and among only a handful of visual art programs to claim such an honor in the Peabody’s history. Art:21 is one of thirty-five recipients honored from the world of news, entertainment and radio, including such high profile programs as 60 Minutes, NOVA, Frontline, Planet Earth, Project Runway, The Colbert Report, 30 Rock, and Mad Men.
“The latest Peabody recipients reflect great diversity in content, genre and source of origination,” said Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards, at the announcement ceremony. “The Peabody Awards, in all their diverse and innovative examples, are models for what can and should be done across the board.” The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious public service.
The Peabody Awards will be presented on June 16 at a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Brian Williams, the distinguished anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, will be the master of ceremonies.
The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious public service; the awards do not recognize categories nor are there a set number of awards given each year. The Peabody Board is a 16-member group, comprised of television critics, broadcast and cable industry executives and experts in culture and the arts, that judges the entries. Winning entires become a permanent part of the Peabody Archive in the University of Georgia Libraries — one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most respected moving-image archives.
SAVE THE DATE!
A special screening of Protest, followed by a discussion with featured artist An-My Lê , will be held May 5, 6:30pm at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the The New York Public Library. This event is free and open to the public.
“It is Difficult”: documentation of Alfredo Jaar lecture at MIT
Kicking off MIT’s Zones of Emergency series on Monday, February 25, 2008, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar presented a selection of works that focused on his practice in zones of emergency like Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, and in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide (1994-2000). His talk provided a framework for considering the complexity of working across disciplines‚Äîart, education, and the public sphere‚Äîto address specific emergency situations. Kayvan Zainabadi, former president of Amnesty International at MIT, also joined the conversation, speaking about his experience at MIT working with Amnesty on the crisis in Darfur.
Season 1 artist Mel Chin will also be speaking as a visiting artist in the series on Monday, April 7 at 6:30pm. Learn more about the series, which is part of MIT’s Visual Arts Program, and other featured speakers on its site, http://www.zonesofemergency.net.
Alfredo Jaar: Politics of the Image
For his forthcoming solo show Politics of the Image, opening tomorrow at South London Gallery, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar presents six works born of his enduring interest in Africa. This is the first opportunity in fifteen years to see a significant body of his work in London.
The exhibition brings together the multi-media installation The Sound of Silence (2006); the artist’s first film, Muxima (2005); and four photographic works: The Power of Words (1984), Searching for Africa in Life (1996), From Time to Time (2006) and Greed (2007). These six works provide insight into Jaar’s contribution to the ongoing debate among art and cultural critics about documentary photography’s contested relationship to suffering.
Housed in an austere zinc-clad light-box, the 8-minute silent film in The Sound of Silence exposes the social history around a single image of a young victim of the 1990s Sudanese famine, overlooked by a vulture. The image won a Pulitzer Prize, but the South African photographer Kevin Carter committed suicide after being vilified by the public for not having intervened to save the child’s life. Jaar’s work highlights the problematic issues surrounding the image to unearth some of the broader socio-political concerns related to the West’s responsibility to Africa and the developing world.
A sensitive counter to the works in the main gallery space, Muxima is rooted in Jaar’s love of African music and the belief that music can resonate with, and therefore help communicate, the experiences of people. The film looks at the history of Angola through a series of different renditions of a traditional folk song of the same name. It traces a sense of Angola’s colonial past and maps its present, touching on issues such as the aftermath of civil war, AIDS and oil production.
This exhibition will be on view through April 6. Read more here.
Spotlight on Protest: Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile in 1956. He estudied at the Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura, Santiago (1979) and Universidad de Chile, Santiago (1981). In installations, photographs, film, and community-based projects, Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar’s work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations. Subjects addressed in his work include the holocaust in Rwanda, gold mining in Brazil, toxic pollution in Nigeria, and issues related to the border between Mexico and the United States. Many of Jaar’s works are extended meditations or elegies, including Muxima (2006), a video that portrays and contrasts the oil economy and extreme poverty of Angola, and The Gramsci Trilogy (2004-05)‚ series of installations dedicated to the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned under Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Jaar has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2000); a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1987); and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985). He has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2005); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1999); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1992). Jaar emigrated from Chile in 1981, at the height of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. His exhibition at Fundación Telefónica Chile, Santiago (2006) is his first in his native country in twenty-five years. Jaar lives and works in New York.
Watch a clip from Jaar’s Art:21 segment:
“People describe me sometimes as a conceptual artist, as a political artist, with work of a strong political connotation or social content. I always reject those labels. I’m an artist and believe it or not I’m interested in beauty and not afraid of it. It is an essential tool to attract my audience and sometimes I use it to introduce horror because the audience has to be seduced…Beauty becomes a tool to bring the audience in. And once they are closer, they discover other things. That’s a very good metaphor for what life is.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 35).
Read more about his work and watch additional clips on his Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Jaar’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view his segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Alfredo Jaar by leaving a comment below.
Art:21 Season 4 - PROTEST premieres Sunday, November 4 on PBS!
Season 2 Protest premieres Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 10 p.m.
Check local listings
How does contemporary art engage politics, inequality, and the many conflicts that besiege the world today? Episode 2 of Season 4 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century examines the ways in which four artists use their work to picture war, express outrage, and empathize with the suffering of others. Whether bearing witness to tragic events, presenting alternative histories, or engaging in activism, the artists interviewed in Protest use visual art as a means to provoke personal transformations and question social revolutions. Protest is shot on location in New York, New York; Hoosick Falls, New York; Wappingers Falls, New York; Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California; and Santiago, Chile.
about the artists
For decades, Nancy Spero has drawn from the political to create compelling works of art that make a statement against war, the abuse of power and our male-dominated society. Regarding her paintings made during the Vietnam War, Spero says: ‚”I guess maybe my art can be said to be a protest “The War” paintings are certainly a protest because it was done with indignation.” Spero further explains how the politically-inspired work of her late husband, Leon Golub, not only stimulated, but also posed a challenge for her own work. “It was pretty damned difficult contending with someone who was so brilliant,” she says. Viewers observe Spero as she creates a new work for the Venice Biennale.
Landscape photographer An-My Lê is fascinated by military war exercises. “I think my main goal is to try to photograph landscape in such a way so that history could be suggested through the landscape, whether industrial history or my personal history,” she says. Lê discusses her return to Vietnam, where she grew up amid the violence of the Vietnam War, to photograph people’s activities, revisit childhood memories, and reconnect with her homeland, as well as her experience photographing military re-enactors, whom she found on the Internet. Unable to travel to Iraq to document current U.S. incursions in the Middle East, Lê worked with marines training at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California.
“I strongly believe in the power of a single idea” says Alfredo Jaar. “My imagination starts working based on research, based on a real life event, most of the time a tragedy that I’m just starting to analyze, to reflect on - this real life event to which I’m trying to respond.” Through his work, Jaar explores both the public’s desensitization to images and the limits of art to represent events such as genocide. Art21 follows and films Jaar in his native Chile during a major retrospective of his work, which he shares for the first time with the Chilean public‚ a triumphant and moving homage in his homeland after leaving to live abroad shortly after the Pinochet regime’s military coup.
Jenny Holzer discusses the concepts behind some of her most well-known projects, including For 7 World Trade (2006), for which she projected text onto a glass wall of the lobby. Much of Holzer’s work focuses on devastation and cruelty, and uses the words of others. “I stopped writing my own text in 2001,” she explains. “I found that I couldn’t say enough adequately and so it was with great pleasure that I went to the text of others.” Viewers observe Holzer creating new work as she prepares an exhibition of paintings and prints of declassified, redacted government documents, some of which are letter-size, while others are blown-up to an overwhelming scale “in hopes that people will recoil,” she says.
Simply Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar, an eponymous solo show by the Season 4 featured artist, opens this Friday September 14 at The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.
Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile and is currently based in New York City. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and was named a MacArthur fellow in 2000. His work explores issues of displacement, the imbalance of power between industrialized and developing nations, and the effects of military conflict on human life. In this new exhibition at Wesleyan, Jaar presents three of his major works, The Sound of Silence (2006), Muxima (2005) and Untitled (Newsweek) (1995), which reflect his ongoing examination of the dichotomy between the authority of the image and its failure to fully convey an event.
Jaar’s The Sound of Silence (2006) is a haunting multimedia video installation confronting the often tortured relationship between public media and private ethics. The piece was inspired by the life of the late Pulitzer prize-winning South African photojournalist Kevin Carter (who committed suicide in 1994), whose career focused on the famine and the conflict in his native country. The piece uses strategies that go beyond simple photographic representation to evoke the horror of the images he captured.
In Jaar’s film Muxima (2005), rooted in his love of African music, he poetically portrays the evolving history of Angola through alternate interpretations of a single folk song. The third work on display, Untitled (Newsweek) (1995), is a photo installation composed of 17 covers of Newsweek magazine that addressed media coverage of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The piece aims to demonstrate the power of a single media giant to define what is newsworthy, and thus to shape public opinion.
Alfredo Jaar will be on view September 14 to December 2, 2007 at The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. Read more about the show by downloading the press release here.
Alfredo Jaar retrospective opens in Switzerland
The Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, is hosting a major retrospective of the work of Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean artist based in New York City and featured in the upcoming fourth season of Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Alfredo Jaar. La Politique des Images, curated by Nicole Schweizer and produced in close collaboration with the artist, offers a vast overview of his work, including previously unseen pieces and others that are being shown in Europe for the first time. The artwork on display goes from documentations of his first public interventions in Chile (Studies on Happiness, 1979-1981) to his latest installation to date, The Sound of Silence (2006). Other pieces included in the show are his works on gold miners in Amazonia (Introduction to a Distant World, 1985; Out of Balance, 1989), works related to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Real Pictures, 1995; Field, Road, and Cloud, 1997) as well as his latest film, Muxima (2005).
For more than thirty years, Alfredo Jaar, making use of multiple media as public interventions, installations, photography and video, has created an extremely powerful body of works that questions the nature of images and our relationship to them. The crucial questions that he explores in his work concern the very possibility of producing art based on events that we would prefer to ignore, and of creating images in a context characterized both by their over-abundance and, paradoxically, by their invisibility.
Alfredo Jaar. La Politique des Images runs through September 23, 2007.
[via e-flux]
