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.
Contemporary Art Start at MoCA, Los Angeles
Two weeks ago, from August 11-15, I had the pleasure of spending a week working with a number of outstanding art teachers at the MoCA, Los Angeles summer institute, Contemporary Art Start: High School. Organized by Jeanne Hoel and Denise Gray in MoCA’s Education Department, the institute brought together two dozen L.A. teachers from a variety of districts to learn more about bringing contemporary art into the classroom, as well as giving teachers the chance to create some of their own work inspired by Marlene Dumas (currently on view at the museum) and by Season 4 Art21 artists.
Over the course of one week, teachers created three separate works of art (one being a site-specific work on the 7th floor of the museum itself) and critically viewed eight different Season 4 artist segments including Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford, Jenny Holzer, Lari Pittman, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. They also had the opportunity to learn ways of incorporating Art21 and contemporary art in their curriculum, options for encouraging active participation while watching film with students, ways of organizing a variety of critiques, and considerations before giving praise in the classroom. This was a packed week that featured a lot of hard work all around and it was an honor to be in Los Angeles as this institute kicked off its first year.
Please feel free to share some of your summer work and experiences as we prepare for a new school year. Exhibits that were particularly influential? Destinations that inspired new ideas for the classroom?
2008 Lucelia Artist Award Nominees Announced
The Smithsonian American Art Museum recently announced the nominees for their annual 2008 Lucelia Artist Award. The nominees are: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Mark Dion (both Season 4), Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), Slater Bradley, Matthew Buckingham, Doug Aitken, Keith Edmier, Spencer Finch, Harrell Fletcher, Mark Grotjahn, Rachel Harrison, Zoe Leonard, Suzanne McClelland, Wangechi Mutu and Dana Schutz.
Established in 2001, the award of $25,000 recognizes an American artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity. Five jurors, each with a wide knowledge of contemporary American art, nominate the artists and determine the award winner in a day of discussion and review. Jurors remain anonymous until the winner is announced in September.
Art21 artists Jessica Stockholder (Season 3), Andrea Zittel (Season 1) and Kara Walker (Season 2) were recipients of the award in previous years. Joanna Marsh, The James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum says, “The artists nominated this year “continue to show a sustained commitment to distinctive work that challenges conventional thinking and expectations about the nature of art.”
( An installation by Zittel–winner of the 2005 Lucelia Artist Award–is pictured above.)
Celebrating Four Months…
Looking back, the Teaching With Contemporary Art column is off to an exciting beginning in our first four months. Since early May, we have had the opportunity to feature writing that focuses on topics such as:
- - Bringing Season 4 artists meaningfully into the classroom.
- - The difference between teaching students about making art vs. engaging with and discussing contemporary art.
- - Allora and Calzadilla in the classroom.
- - Mark Dion in the classroom.
- - Robert Ryman in the classroom.
- - Laurie Simmons in the classroom.
- - The Billy Joels of art education (although one passionate Billy Joel fan took issue with my analogy…).
- - Summer exhibits and best bets to check out, including Henry Moore at the New York Botanical Garden, Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim, SITE Santa Fe’s Biennial, Jeff Koons at the Chicago MCA, Martin Puryear in Washington DC and The Cinema Effect Part II at the Hirshhorn Museum.
- - Ways to slow down and recharge for the upcoming school year.
If you’re just returning from summer vacation… welcome back! We have arranged for gas prices to be reduced by a few cents. To celebrate and begin getting ready for the school year, reach back and check out some of the posts in our first four months. Write a comment for some of the posts you find interesting.
Next week: a report on Art Tools for High Schools, the week-long institute for high school teachers at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where Art21 presented workshops that focused on using our educational materials in the classroom.
Eternal Twilight at the New Museum
Several Art21 artists temporarily engage in a moment of symbiosis in the New Museum’s new group exhibition, After Nature, curated by Massimiliano Gioni with the assistance of Jarrett Gregory and Chris Wiley. The work of the Puerto Rico-based collaborative team Allora & Calzadilla (Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla) (Season 4) often explores hybrid relationships and global politics. Their installation, Growth (Survival), 2006, presented in After Nature, pairs an existing work by Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Yellow Corner, 2002 with a Staghorn Fern (a plant native to such places as Southeast Asia and Australia, among other tropical locales). The work actually exists in two forms using the aforementioned work or with Holzer’s Blue Wall Tilt, 2004. The installation at the New Museum is placed in a darkly lit corner so the plant is exposed to virtually no other light besides the somber glow of the yellow LED screens of Holzer’s sculpture.
In his catalogue essay, Gioni describes the exhibition as “a land of wilderness and ruins that exists in an imaginary time zone suspended between a remote past and a not-so-distant future.” It’s impossible to hear this statement without recalling Rod Sterling’s hauntingly apocalyptic introduction to the 1960s television show The Twilight Zone: “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.” Gioni’s curatorial premise, not to mention Allora & Calzadilla’s installation, seems to take this notion to heart, reminding humankind that new systems of sustainability are inevitable on a planet that has been irrevocably altered by the careless endeavors of its inhabitants and also suggests that earth’s only hope for survival may be found within the unpredictable landscape of the mind.
A new reason to go to M.I.T.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has an amazing program where students can borrow a framed work by major artists from their List Visual Arts Center’s collection for an entire academic year. The Student Loan Art Program was founded in 1996 and boasts of over 400 pieces with which your dormroom can be beautified. There are plenty of big names on the list including Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Sol LeWitt, and Ed Ruscha to name a few, as well as many Art:21 artists like Allora & Calzadilla, Ida Applebroog, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Susan Rothenberg, Collier Schorr, Laurie Simmons, Nancy Spero, Richard Tuttle, and Fred Wilson. At the top of my own M.I.T. wishlist would be Bernd & Hilla Becher’s Cooling Tower. Learn more about the Student Loan Art Program here.
Above, from the M.I.T. Student Loan Art Program’s collection: Alex Katz’s Portrait of a Poet : Kenneth Koch, 1970
Allora & Calzadilla’s Munich Harmonies
Check out this interview and footage from Vernissage TV’s coverage of Allora & Calzadilla’s (Season 4) concurrent exhibitions at Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst in Munich. Kunstverein München includes several installations of “geological bunkers” with hidden opera singers and musicians plying militaristic beats and crooning apocalyptic. Continuing to explore the politicization of music, the collaborative’s Haus der Kunst show offers Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, a new performance work that scrutinizes the famous Ninth symphony and its shared history with the museum’s architecture and both their subsequent usurpation by the Nazis.
