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.
Giving Life
As we continue gearing up for summer and prepare for ways to fuel our work as artists and educators I wanted to take the next few columns and point out some Season 4 artists who have been particularly inspiring over the past months. Catching some of these segments over the summer can have an interesting effect on planning and preparation for the fall!
In my column on June 11th, I wrote about the segment featuring Allora & Calzadilla. This month I would like to strongly recommend taking a close look at Mark Dion. The reason I think art educators want to take notice of Mr. Dion is similar to why I choose many Art21 artists to for my own classroom. He helps redefine and change our perspective on what contemporary art can be, what installation can be, and even what sculpture can be. His work giving a tree new life (a second life!) in Neukom Vivarium (pictured above) demonstrates more of what was discussed with Allora & Calzadilla, including the fact that more and more artists are relying on others, sometimes teams of people, to realize works of art. He allows us to consider sculpture and installation that doesn’t just change over time, but grows. He raises interesting interdisciplinary connections between science and art, and the opening minutes featuring rats painted with tar will challenge viewers to talk about the things considered visual art today.
If you have seen the Mark Dion or Allora & Calzadilla segments in Season 4, I would love to hear what you think. What are your ideas about bringing these artists into the classroom? Are there other Season 4 artists you are considering?
Revolving Revolt: 16th Biennale of Sydney
From June 18 through September 7, the 16th Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions - Forms That Turn presents the work of 180 artists , including 50 newly commissioned projects. The exhibition “articulates the agency embedded in forms that express our desire for change.” Among the 180 artists are Art21’s Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Dion, and Pierre Huyghe all featured in Season 4 as well as Bruce Nauman (Season 1) and Paul Pfeiffer (Season 2). The Biennale of Sydney is taking place across the city in multiple venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cockatoo Island, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Pier 2/3, Artspace, the Sydney Opera House, and the Royal Botanic Gardens.
For those not in Australia, one can still view the online venue, revolutionsonline. Each visit to the venue presents a new series of works that include film, audio, images, interactive works, live streaming performances, texts and links to existing websites. Works are continuously uploaded to the venue, creating an ever-changing constellation.
Allora & Calzadilla’s Ode to Joy
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla create public ’situations’ where the audience commonly plays a communicative or interactive role. Their films, performances, sculptures, site-specific works and actions often address political themes through strainers of humor and absurdity.
From June 13th through September 14th, the collaborative will present Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano at the Haus der Kunst’s newly redesigned Galerie der Freunde, the former “hall of honor” where Hitler delivered his notorious speeches on culture and “degenerate art.” Addressing the history of the space, Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) will hold several performances based on the fourth movement (Ode to Joy) of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The iconic final chorus was highly regarded by the Nazi cultural ministry and even played on the Führer’s birthday. Incidentally, Ode to Joy is also the European Union’s official anthem.
Reinterpreting the composition’s internal contradictions, as well as critiquing how music can be used and abused for political goals, the performance shows a pianist standing and moving in the middle of a modified concert piano while playing the keys inside out. Creating variations on the movement, musically and literally, Stop, Repair, Prepare is a “goose-stepping journey of sound that originates where modernity begins and aims towards uncertain horizons.”
Stop, Repair, Prepare will take place concurrently with the exhibition Allora & Calzadilla: Wake Up, Clamor, Sediments Sentiments (Figures of Speech) at Kunstverein München, June 13 through July 13.
Second Look
In the May 14th column I commented on the fact that some people were having a hard time incorporating Season 4 artists into their classrooms and studios. This weekend, hiding from the heat here in New York, I had the opportunity to see the Allora and Calzadilla segment for a second time and realized not only what a fantastic few minutes of film this is, but also the many things this episode can teach. For example:
- Collaboration can produce wonderful work, but it is still a relationship that has to be navigated. Compromise is part of that relationship.
- Sound has clearly become another element of design. The traditional seven elements of design are not adequate to describe Allora and Calzadilla’s work. This is true for many Art21 artists and contemporary artists worldwide.
- Artists are often engaged in research of some kind. Sometimes contemporary artists are in search of discovering something they know very little about.
- Humor can be “beautiful, horrific, critical.”
- An artist’s job is to turn things upside down (take the discussion table, for example) and use this new perspective for more than just a new way of looking at an object. The new perspective can hold symbolic meaning or can free the artist(s) to do something unexpected.
- Engaging with and understanding contemporary art often involves becoming familiar with the “ideological glue” that holds the work together.
Segments like this one can teach our students more than providing visual examples of new and exciting work. They can provide opportunities and examples of how artists today work in a variety of styles and with a wide variety of media. They can provide starting points and big ideas for both traditional and non-traditional approaches to making works of art.
Allora and Calzadilla’s segment will be a part of my teaching next year. Have some of you discovered new and exciting contemporary artists to incorporate starting next semester? Who are they? How did you decide?
Photo by Amanda Cianciulli, age 17
