Weekly Roundup
Vija Celmins, "Web #1" (1999). Courtesy Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
- Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland in February 2008. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh kicked things off this spring with the “rooms” of Vija Celmins (Season 2), Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman. The show runs through November 8th.
- Season 2 artist Kiki Smith designed the minimalist stage set for “Pinter’s Mirror” at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. The production runs through August 2nd.
- Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) created a new work for Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin that will open July 10. Compass divides the Kunsthalle horizontally and introduces a new level to the space, reducing it to less than one third of its normal height and rendering it inaccessible to the public. Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads in an otherwise empty, resonating chamber.
- Last week the McNay Museum opened In Their Own Right, a group exhibition focusing on the achievements of women printmakers from 1960 to the present. In Their Own Right showcases nearly 30 prints by contemporary women printmakers from the McNay’s collection, surveying the different trends and movements of American art over the past four decades. It includes artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Vija Celmins, April Gornik, Dorothy Hood, Yvonne Jacquette, Jane Kent, Agnes Martin, and Louise Nevelson. The show runs through August 23.
- Tokyo’s Gallery Koyanagi will open on August 1st a two-person show of architectural works by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Junya Ishigami. On display will be architectural models, such as Ishigami’s design for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology and Sugimoto’s maquettes for the S Foundation and Go-O shrine. Did you know the Season 3 artist was an architect too?
Summer Reading Part 1
Allora and Calzadilla- production still (2007).
As we get closer to rounding out another academic year, it’s probably a good time to think about some of the books that might make it onto our summer reading lists. While many might take detective or romance novels onto the beach, I am happy and at the same time embarrassed that I can’t get away from non-fiction. I find myself reading a lot about things that connect to teaching and art in general. I’m helpless… I love my work.
If you haven’t already got some good books on the radar, here are a few to consider as you begin getting ready for those first few sniffs of summer air… wherever you are…
Arthur Danto’s Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (2005).
Jessica Hoffman Davis’ Framing Education As Art: The Octopus Has a Good Day (2005).
Maxine Greene’s Releasing the Imagination (1995).
Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind (2005).
Judith Olch Richards’ edited collection, Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York (2004).
Kirk Varnedoe’s Pictures of Nothing (2006)
Please feel free to share your recommendations for inspiring reading related to teaching and contemporary art. More to come as we get closer to the official start of summer.
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The Hope Hippos Head to NAEA
Allora and Calzadilla, "Hope Hippo," 2005
Beginning this Friday morning, I will be joined by my equally energetic and optimistic colleagues, Jessica Hamlin and Marc Mayer, as we descend on the National Art Education Association’s Annual Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What a conference it’s going to be! Between Mark Bradford joining us for special workshops this weekend, his keynote on Sunday, and the variety of presentations we have planned, this is going to be quite a weekend. Please join us for one or ALL of these events!
Saturday, April 18
Media-Savvy Students: Introducing Contemporary Art through Documentary Film & Web-based Resources with Marc Mayer and Kristin Farr
11 a.m., M100C/Center
Based on Art21 film and web-based resources and Spark, the Bay Area-focused arts television show, educators from Art21 and KQED will present a media-savvy approach to exploring the art and ideas of living artists with students.
Contemporary Art in Context: Teaching with Objects, Teaching with Film
1–3 p.m., The Walker Art Center with Joe Fusaro and Courtney Gerber
This workshop introduces participants to a variety of ways to engage students with contemporary art through the study of objects in the Walker’s galleries and the use of Art21 multimedia resources. Session activities will emphasize inquiry-based strategies for looking at and discussing works of art and teaching with video, web, and print resources.
Super Session: “Art Practice, Teaching Practice”
A Conversation with Mark Bradford, Olivia Gude, William Crow, and Joe Fusaro
4 p.m., 200E/Center
This panel presents artist Mark Bradford in conversation with educators from museum, university, and public school settings to explore how the creative practice of the artist intersects with the pedagogical practice of teaching.
Q & A and Book Signing with Artist Mark Bradford
5 p.m., M100B/Center
Art21 Keynote Artist Mark Bradford will answer questions and discuss his artwork, process, and ideas with a small, intimate group. Mark will also sign copies of Season 4 DVD and the companion book of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century. These materials are available for purchase at the NAEA store during the convention.
Sunday, April 19
Art21 Artist Keynote
Mark Bradford: Paper, Language, and Layers
12 p.m., Auditorium
Mark Bradford transforms everyday materials scavenged from the urban landscape of Los Angeles—merchant posters, flyers, and advertisements—into looming wall-sized paintings and installations. Using collage, décollage, film, and photography in his work, Bradford describes himself as a maker and an excavator, a speculator and a developer, a demolisher and a builder. In his artist talk Bradford will share several bodies of work and talk about connections between a childhood steeped in craft and creativity to his current practice as an artist.
This Week’s Roundup
Alfredo Jaar, "The Sound of Silence", 2006. Installation with wood, aluminum, fluorescent lights, strobe lights and video projection. Software design by Ravi Rajan. Installation view at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Switzerland, 2007.
What’s happening now:
- The Sound of Silence, an exhibition of works by Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), is on view at Galerie Lelong in New York through May 2. Visitors are invited to enter an enclosed aluminum structure that presents an 8-minute silent film. Read more about the exhibition here.
- Read Quinn Latimer’s interview with Season 3 artist Ellen Gallagher for Modern Painters. Gallagher’s first exhibition in London is on view at South London Gallery through May 2.
- Her Memory, an exhibition of recent works by Season 2 artist Kiki Smith, is on view at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona through May 24.
- Roni Horn’s first major museum show in the U.K. is on view at Tate Modern through May 25. Watch a webcast of the Season 3 artist in conversation with curator James Lingwood; art historian Briony Fer; and Tate Curator Mark Godfrey here.
- Through June 1, two new videos by Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) are on view at the Museum Haus Esters Krefeld in Germany.
- Andrea Zittel and Shahzia Sikander (both Season 1) are included in Fashioning Felt at Cooper-Hewitt, a survey of more than 70 contemporary objects made of the material. The exhibition is on view through September 7.
- Ann Hamilton (Season 1) has collaborated with the Los Angeles-based workshop Gemini G.E.L. to produced new works, including three 3-dimensional objects and twenty-five prints. A reception with artist and a book signing will be held on March 19 from 6 to 8pm.
Transcending protest: Looking for pragmatic or poetic art of change
Michael Rakowitz, "paraSITE," 1998-present.
This weekend I went to an opening at The Soap Factory, a scrappy and often-excellent nonprofit art space a block or so off Minneapolis’ riverfront. The description of the work, a Clive Murphy installation called Almost Nothing, was intriguing enough to draw me there: he’d filled the entire space with a series of air-filled tubes created from black plastic garbage bags, mimicking the architectural geometry of the space—which, as its name states, was once a soap-making factory, reeking of lye.
But when I arrived, the piece immediately struck me as so much hot air. Here’s my progression of thought: it’s February in Minnesota. This building is virtually unheated. We’re facing twin catastrophes of economic downturn and human-made climate change. And this guy’s art requires electric air blowers to drone constantly on whenever the gallery’s open?
Murphy’s work is what it is—a project influenced by “radical architectural proposals from the sixties” and inflatable carnival games that examine “themes of hierarchy, inter-relationality, and meaning formation”—and I don’t knock it for that. But it isn’t what I’ve been looking for lately: contemporary art with immediacy, that pragmatically or poetically addresses the challenges we face today. Not all art needs to do that, but it’s what I’m looking for. Something more along the lines of another inflatable-bag art project: paraSITE, in which artist Michael Rakowitz collaborated with homeless people to construct temporary inflatable housing designed to leech warmth from heat outtakes from apartment buildings.
In considering “political” art—especially in a non-election year, especially facing the economic and environmental problems we do—I’m reluctantly coming to believe that art doesn’t have the power I once believed it did for bringing about social change.
Suzanne Opton's "Soldier: Birkholz" billboard
Perhaps it’s creeping cynicism. As a journalist covering the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this fall, I saw magnificent, irreverent and funny artworks – from full-fledged contemporary artworks (including Ligorano/Reese’s The State of Things, gigantic ice letters spelling out the word DEMOCRACY, which melted away on the capitol lawn as time passed, or Suzanne Opton’s Soldiers billboard series) to creative protest signs and hilarious chants by nonviolent demonstrators (“You’re hot, you’re cute, take off your riot suit!”). Still, the police crackdown was powerful, unrelenting and sometimes violent—and, if hearing from Republican delegates on the convention floor is any indicator, protesters’ messages didn’t seem to register. The art was dismissed as mere protest.
My doubts also have to do with responses to my oft-asked (and admittedly naïve) question, “Can art change the world?” As an editor at the Walker Art Center and at Adbusters Magazine, I posed the question to a number of people: critic Robert Storr; artists Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sam Durant, and Thomas Hirschhorn; Artforum editor Tim Griffin and independent curator Hou Hanru, to name a few. While they all said they hoped it had that kind of power, few wholeheartedly agreed it did.
But from some of these same people, I found hope for smaller incremental change—one heart (or mind) at a time, perhaps.
During a residency at the Walker, Art21 artist Guillermo Calzadilla told me his take. Art, unlike protest, is difficult to pin down, he said, and therein lies its power. Overt agit-prop is easily to spot, categorize, and therefore dismiss wholesale by opponents of the message it carries. But art is something… else. Something nebulous and multidimensional and hard to get one’s brain around.
Before we can dismiss it, we have to figure out what it is.
It Takes Two…. or Two Hundred
Production still from "Art:21" Season 4 segment featuring Mark Dion
Recently I saw the Mark Dion segment from Season 4 for the sixth or seventh time. I love the Dion segment. I was sharing the video with teachers in a small, informal workshop introducing ways of working with Art21 in the classroom. During the discussion, we talked about the fact that many, many contemporary artists rely on others, sometimes hundreds of others, in order to realize their work. On my way home that evening, I started thinking about the number of artists in Season 4 alone that rely on other people to make their work ready for public viewing and/or consumption. The total number? Fifteen out of the seventeen, at least, rely on others to bring their work full circle into the gallery, museum, or exhibition space.
I mention this fact because it came up in discussion more than once over the past week that the days of artists working alone in a studio, tortured with their ideas and feverishly slaving over canvas, are slowly coming to an end. Artists are collaborating more and more, and using teams to realize ideas that would be impossible to complete on their own.
In a few days, I plan to visit Allora and Calzadilla’s new exhibit/performance at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. The idea to cut a hole in a grand piano and have someone stand inside and play is one thing. Actually making it happen requires more than two artists with a beautiful idea. And without musicians (able to play the keyboard upside down, no less) performing on a regular schedule, their work would be a series of still photos and cheesy background music.
Students in art classes today are most often engaged with working on projects alone. Why do so many teachers resist collaboration? Is it solely the organizational challenges? We’re certainly aware of the benefits it offers to both students and ourselves. How can we overcome the fear of planning collaborative work to more realistically reflect contemporary practice?
What’s That Thing?
Art21 artists Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) have designed the current issue of The Thing, a quarterly journal that takes the form of an everyday object that somehow incorporates text.
Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by editors Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan to create an issue of the periodical. The object is then reproduced, hand packed at a wrapping party and mailed to subscribers through the United States Postal Service. Allora & Calzadilla’s shoelace bookmark—laced into an actual shoe—begins The Thing’s current year of subscriptions (issues 6-9). The year continues with issues by writer Jonathan Lethem, the experimental geographer, artist and writer Trevor Paglen, and visual artist Ryan Gander.
The Thing does not sell single issues; subscribe for $140 a year at TheThingQuarterly.com.
Humor and Beauty
How can humor be used to say something serious?
Can unattractive or disturbing things be represented in a beautiful way?
These were just two of the questions posed at last week’s workshop for Rockland County, NY art educators. During an afternoon at the Garnerville Arts and Industrial Center’s GAGA Gallery, teachers viewed season 4 segments featuring Robert Adams and Allora & Calzadilla, worked with Season 4 Educator Guides, and learned about new Garnerville programs with James Tyler, curator of the GAGA galleries.
The workshop and discussion offered a glimpse into how contemporary artists work with redefining beauty (who can resist Allora & Calzadilla’s gesture for residents of Vieques to acknowledge a new anthem celebrating the return of their land or Adams’ passionate critique of our altered landscape?). It also brought together over two dozen art educators to think about and plan for incorporating contemporary art into a variety of curricula. Through the segments featured during the October 15th workshop, participants got a chance to reflect on how the art of today works not only with beautiful images, but also beautiful ideas set into motion- sometimes on film, sometimes through performance.
How is contemporary art shaping your curriculum this year vs. past years? How has Art21 played a role in your work?
Mining Ideas Part 2: Using Sketchbooks to Help Teach About Contemporary Art
Last week’s Teaching With Contemporary Art column, Mining Ideas, had some very interesting thoughts and perspectives submitted by Jennifer, Eric, and Sue. I want to continue the dialogue this week by suggesting two ways educators can use sketchbooks to influence teaching with and about contemporary art.
During our time working with Contemporary Art Start at MoCA, Los Angeles this past August, we asked participants to use their sketchbook to plan an installation or site-specific work inspired by a big idea after viewing and discussing Art:21 segments featuring Alfredo Jaar and Allora & Calzadilla. Participants were then encouraged, after seeing a variety of sketchbook samples, to literally think big and label their plans with specific media, effects, scale, site details, lighting, sound effects, etc. Many participants mentioned not having the chance to think and plan in this way before, but it was clear that there was a certain freedom in utilizing the sketchbook to plan for something that in the end may be too large (or expensive, or delicate) to actually build. What was important was the fact that participants thought through their idea and committed that idea to paper.
A second idea for utilizing sketchbooks in the classroom involves teaching students to use them while they view films about art and artists. Students can use their sketchbooks to jot down quotes, create questions for the artist, write a short reaction to a specific work, or even begin “working off” a particular artist to begin new ideas for themselves. Any of these starting points (and generating starting points can be one of the greatest uses for a sketchbook) can lead to thoughtful and exciting finished works of art.
Please feel free to share some specific ways you use sketchbooks in the classroom to influence teaching and learning by posting a comment below.
Gwangju Biennale
Opening events are underway for Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, the 7th Gwangju Biennale. Under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor, (and co-curated by Hyunjin Kim and Ranjit Hoskote) the exhibition is “a report on the distribution system of artistic and cultural forms and a reflection on the intermediary gap between artists, producers, practitioners, and audiences.” Annual Report includes 127 artists from 36 countries, including Art21 artists Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (Season 4) and Kerry James Marshall (Season 1); visit the GB2008 website for the complete roster.
On view through November 9, 2008, the Biennale is developed around three components: On the Road, a series of exhibitions from 2007 and 2008; Position Papers, a series of curatorial proposals and experiments by curators working in Southeast Asia, North Africa, South Korea, and the United States; and Insertions, a series of new and independent projects, either commissioned specifically for the biennale or invited as proposals into the exhibition framework. The Biennale spans five venues: Biennale Hall, Gwangju Museum of Art, Uijae Museum of Korean Art, Cinema Gwangju, and Daein Traditional Market. According to the website:
“The importance of the Gwangju Biennale is, at least, twofold: on the one hand, it is one of the key international cultural institutions to emerge from Korea’s unique modern, national, and historical experience, and linked to the dynamism of Asia in the 21st century…At the same time, the Gwangju Biennale has evolved into one of the few pioneering international exhibitions to engage in the task of analyzing the impact of globalization on the field of contemporary art, and to challenge an older system of international exhibitions based on the outmoded system of national pavilions. In so doing, Gwangju Biennale has provided the space in which to explore the changing nature of international artistic networks, and to examine new modes of artistic subjectivity and conditions of contemporary cultural production that extend beyond national borders or focus on regional modes of identification.”
Though empty at the moment, the curator’s blog will hopefully produce interesting dialogue. Planned discussions include an international symposium and an associated two-day seminar entitled The Politics of Spectacle and the Global Exhibition, which will take place in Gwangju from September 24 to September 27.
