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.

Say It Ain’t Sew

Smock by V. Smiley

Andrea Zittel’s traveling Smockshop makes its first appearance in Europe today before sadly closing shop for good.  This is the final opportunity to experience Zittel’s economic experiment, which invites other artists to take infinite liberties reinterpreting the Season 1 artist’s original double-wrap around smock design. The enterprise generates income for artists whose works may be noncommercial or insubsistent.  Since it was founded in 2007, almost 300 smocks have been made by the collaborative.

At Sprüth Magers, two artisans will turn out the goods inside the Berlin gallery for the first four days of the exhibition and make them available for purchase right after their production.  The smocks will remain on display until April 10.

After that, a bid adieu.

Letter from London: Altermodern Love

Nathaniel Mellor, "Giantbum" (2008)

I have to confess to a fear that strikes me whenever I go into a gallery of contemporary art and see the entrance to a video installation. Does anyone else get this? I get this sinking realization that if I walk down that darkening corridor towards the sound of that whirring projector or muffled dialogue, I’m going to have to be there for at least 20 seconds. I’ll have to crunch myself up against the wall. That might hurt. And what if I don’t like it? When is it ok to slowly walk back out of the room, as though lost in contemplation of the muzzily out-of-focus shots of deserted parking lots with subtitled dialogue? Is five seconds enough? I might smile knowingly to myself as though I have reached a level of understanding beyond most of the other visitors, while secretly thinking to myself that I’d far rather be watching the last 20 minutes of Liar Liar. Again.

I had this feeling a couple of times while visiting the new triennial of contemporary art at Tate Britain. The triennial has, over the years, showcased contemporary British art, but, perhaps in order to better illustrate the guiding thesis of its curator, Nicholas Bourriaud, this iteration takes in a range of artists working all over the world but within a fairly established artistic strategy, i.e. one well-versed in the writings of N. Bourriaud. The triennial’s title, Altermodern, needs a bit of explaining. Unfortunately, and despite the good intentions both of Bourriaud and the Tate publicity and interpretation department (the Tate really does have a department called “Interpretation and Education”; I think Stalin had one of those, too), explaining this intentionally open-ended term has proved something of a headache. The Tate website has a video interview with Bourriaud and a (slightly tongue-in-cheek, I hope) manifesto that aims to pinpoint the times in which we live with pithy phrases like “our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.” Having taken the Tube to the gallery that day, I totally got that bit.

I think Bourriaud realizes he’s in deep water trying to define art being made now, as anyone would (no one confidently used the term ‘Renaissance’ until the nineteenth century, after all, and even now no one can quite agree when that got going), but for all the obfuscation and slippery language of the manifesto, the exhibition itself makes thoughtful and often compelling links across a range of artistic approaches. Credit is due to Bourriaud for allowing the art to take precedence over the curatorial conceit and not the other way around. Although when the conceit is this vague it’s hard to know what wouldn’t be considered “altermodern.” A hint at the broadness of Bourriaud’s brief is given in the inclusion of veteran art maverick Gustav Metzger, whose past as lighting designer for sixties bands like Cream and The Who is evident in his 2006 piece shown here: five liquid crystal color projections of an exceptionally trippy nature that brought me right back to the last time I watched a documentary on “the swinging Sixties.” Those were the days.

Video projections dominate Bourriaud’s exhibition, although happily the majority of them feel like real extensions of the language of video. Marcus Coates’s The Plover’s Wing, a 30-minute interview between the artist, dressed in an old-school Adidas tracksuit with a dead badger on his head and a dead rabbit poking out of his top (no, wait! Come back!), and an Israeli mayor concerned about the impact of the region’s violence on the young generation, is a strange, deadpan, hilarious and ultimately heartening work that has a warmth about it I don’t remember seeing in previous triennials. Honestly, it’s truly touching to watch the patient seriousness of the mayor and his translator as they observe Coates performing various animal sounds while acting as a mediator between the human and animal worlds. Lindsay Seers’s film Extramission 6 (Black Maria)—projected inside a wooden mock-up of Thomas Edison’s 1893 film production studio Black Maria—is a kind of patchwork documentary of Seers’s childhood. Suffering from memory loss as a young child, Seers retreated into an obsession with film that led her to using her mouth as a camera. It’s all filmed and staged in a way that steers clear of sentimentality while packing a significant emotional punch. Both films—connected, I suppose, by an interest in translation and the slippages it succumbs to—are both witty and unashamedly emotive. It’s also maybe the first time I’ve sat through an entire video installation without itching to leave. That’s that fear conquered.

Altermodern does sometimes slip into neutral. Simon Starling out-banals his own impressive record of drearily quixotic projects with a piece involving camera phones and Francis Bacon furniture that I’d rather not go into (the brevity of life suddenly being particularly apparent); Rachel Harrison, darling of the New Museum’s Unmonumental show, looks lazily hip and studiedly noncommittal with her stack of painted buckets wired up to a tiny video of some people in Florida smashing up a car. There’s a smattering of post-Matthew Barney D&D style mythologizing in the work of Charles Avery and Nathaniel Mellors, whose palatability is directly proportional to your resistance to whimsy and interest in made-up maps. Andrea Zittel’s influence continues to proliferate, as seen in the nudge-nudge utopianism of Olivia Plender, whose handmade costumes and knowingly obscure reference points can be a bit wearisome. And the seemingly omnipresent Subodh Gupta fills one of the central halls with a vast mushroom cloud of reflective kitchen utensils, a hangover from the brash days of the YBAs, like a big silver fart.

There are, though, many more hits than misses, especially Tacita Dean’s suite of photogravures entitled The Russian Ending, a reference to the doctored sad endings of Danish films released in Russia (they reserved the happy endings for the American market). The photos, culled from flea market postcards, show beached whales, collapsed bridges, and open-casket wakes, each etched with Dean’s storyboard-style notes (”zoom in,” “pan out,” and so on). As with Dean’s best work, it’s a contemplative experience that never sacrifices a kind of melancholy beauty to its conceptual rigor, and epitomizes the best bits of Altermodern: uncertain, searching, witty, serious and—this is the really radical bit—generous.

single strand, forward motion: Andrea Zittel

Andrea Zittel, "Single Strand Shapes: Forward Motion with 90˚ and 180˚ Rotations (Black and Ivory)," 2009. Crocheted black and ivory wool on plywood. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery

single strand, forward motion, an exhibition of new works by Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel, will open at Andrea Rosen Gallery tomorrow, Friday, February 6.  This is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at the gallery.

In a statement for the exhibition, Zittel writes:

I feel that my practice continually negotiates the fine line between emancipation and restriction, and in doing so reveals how creativity often stems from a reaction to a series of constraints. The works in this show attempt to bridge these concerns in both art and life and to show how problem solving and planning can result in a complex visual language…I have been recently drawn into a reinvestigation of logic based works such as Frank Stella’s black paintings (in which the logic of the making fully embodies the resulting shape), Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings (in terms of setting up a series of rules that can create a coherent visual structure), and incremental works such as Carl Andre’s floor pieces (which also embody an element of time and distance because one is required to ‘travel’ in order to view the entire work). All of these works have fundamental elements both formal and conceptual that have strongly influenced my own work.

single strand, forward motion will include a series of bronze hooks titled Energetic Accumulators: Digits that, in the exhibition space, become a temporary armature for some of Zittel’s own personal accumulations: a group of sewing scissors inherited from her grandmother, and a collection of tea bags. Although placed in sometimes random and/or temporary arrangements, the accumulated objects are organized into a regulated system by the supporting armatures.

Walking Patterns, a performance piece, begins with participants in a parallel line walking to the rhythm of a simple percussive soundtrack, the sound of hands clapping. Each performer begins to walk a pattern based on a simple crochet element; the process of “linking chains” is translated to walking steps. Performances of Walking Patterns will occur on February 6 from 6-8pm, and on Saturday, February 7 at noon and 3pm. These events are free and open to the public.

Lilly Ledbetter* Art

It is only a coincidence that the world’s largest franchised art fair and the international banking regulatory body share a moniker from their shared base, Basel, Switzerland, but no coincidence at all that each are currently in a bit of a funk. From Basel to Boston, institutions all over are now contemplating how to function in a financial black hole. Equally funky and oddly inspiring have been the community-based, democratically modeled responses to these crises-induced measures. One such example of this is an online petition to preserve the Rose Art Museum collection. No doubt this action is inspired by such tactics like the one that is lobbying the new Obama administration for a culture czar. How do we really feel about Quincy Jones at the helm of U.S. cultural institutions?

I’m more intrigued by artists’ responses to the increasingly challenging economic conditions—ones that are taking the form of community action groups. It seems that collaborations as community actions are the way forward for artists’ and art mavens’ take on large issues and institutions, even when the goal is individual empowerment. W.A.G.E. is one such feminist art group seeking economic parity for artists’ work.

Democracy in America: W.A.G.E. from Creative Time on Vimeo.

W.A.G.E. was formed well before the global credit crunch. In fact, it developed in the midst of a hyperbolic market where (generally male) artists such as Michael Landy, the Chapman Brothers, and Jeff Koons were parodying the same market forces that were feeding them. When the art world was awash in obscene amounts of cash, W.A.G.E. wondered why more artists weren’t seeing more of it. Granted, this is the complication of peculiar economic relationships in the art world based on buying, selling, and patronage, but not on the basic equation of labor and compensation. And thus the question remains: how do artists make a living from the practice of making art alone without wholly capitulating to market forces?

I have no answers at all to the big economic questions but personally, when things are a bit tight, I like to fall back on the old-school green motto that is both earth-friendly and cost-effective: the 3Rs. Below is an offering of some art projects that exemplify each in principle.

REDUCE
This collage is more of a collaboration between Art21 artist Andrea Zittel and MOMA curator Klaus Biesenbach featured in the latest W magazine. Biesenbach’s austere downtown digs inspired a collage, which adds some visual texture to his monk-like quarters. Granted, this is a design editorial for a luxury-goods magazine but it’s amazing how idealistically anti-consumerist it comes across.

Photographed by Dean Kaufman for "W" magazine.

REUSE
The largest of Phoebe Washburn’s installations mimic landscapes and the most ambitious ones create their own biosphere.

Phoebe Washburn, "Manning Stay Station," 2005. Installation view.

Yes it’s cool that Washburn goes on walks, collecting discarded materials on her meanderings and then sorts them with her own cataloging system, but it’s even cooler that she retrieves the materials when the installations are dismantled and re-catalogs them for possible use in future projects. Granted, there are all sorts of formal and conceptual issues to tackle in this work and it’s really more about an obsessive practice, but it’s great to think about these practices as self-sustaining systems that form a tacit critique of consumption-based market systems.

RECYCLE
I think it may be high time to reinvigorate The Black Factory, William Pope.L’s peripatetic truck that solicits folks to bring objects they associate with black culture. The Factory’s workers then “convert” those objects into products to be sold.

William Pope.L’s “Black Factory,” 2006, via sokref1 on Flickr.

Perhaps these conversations on race would be interesting to revisit now that Obama is in office but, in a more compelling sense, I like that Pope.L’s art has often been based on the consumption habits of the working class and the poor. No one often thinks of the words “poor” and “consumer” at the same time, but those consumed things make for a material culture that has been fueling art projects for years.

* Lilly Ledbetter is the namesake of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, President Obama’s first official piece of legislation. It expands workers’ rights to sue on the grounds of race, sex, age, and/or disability discrimination.

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.)

Smockshop in Chinatown

The Smockshop, Andrea Zittel’s artist run enterprise that generates income for artists whose work is either non-commercial or not yet self sustaining, will be opening a store in Los Angeles Chinatown from June 27 through September 21st.

“We produce and sell smocks: a simple double wrap around garments designed by Andrea Zittel (Season 1) - then sewn by artists who often reinterprets the original design based on their individual skill sets, tastes and interests. As an active testament to Zittel’s principle that “rules make us more creative”, each resulting smock is completely unique and one of a kind.”

Summer Smockshop will be located on 936 Mei Ling Way, in the former Rental Gallery Space. Now that’s a wrap.

Last Call for Lucelia Award Exhibition

Last chance to see Celebrating the Lucelia Artist Award, 2001-2006 before it closes June 22nd. Installed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition features works by each of the previous winners: Matthew Coolidge, Andrea Zittel (Art:21 Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liz Larner, and Jorge Pardo.

Chosen by a distinguished independent panel of jurors, the $25000 prize annually recognizes an American artist under 50 who has demonstrated exceptional creativity and whose work is “emblematic of this period in contemporary art.” The 2007 winner, Jessica Stockholder (Season 3), was announced last September in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition.

AZ in LA at RP

Andrea Zittel (Season 1) presents two new installations at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. The first, Energetic Accumulators, is an extension of the Raugh Furniture series, begun in 1998. While embracing human imperfection, the work nonetheless attempts to create structure, guidelines and ideology through reconsideration of the shared properties between furniture and sculpture, particularly their ‘horizontality.’ Energetic Accumulators also posits that perception is shaped more by psychological function than by actual function, how sculpture adapts and ‘accumulates’ its surroundings.

The second body of work, Token Exchanges, looks at how value shifts in perspective to different formats of exchange, such as the retail store. Zittel proposes an “understanding of exchange-value that transcends any specific market and relates instead to the psychology of desire, as well as the social relationships that are enacted through the art of initiating an exchange. ‘Token Exchange’ asks viewers to become aware of their own projected value systems and in the process to reveal larger patterns of meaning.”

Andrea Zittel: Energetic Accumulators and Token Exchanges opened May 24th and runs until June 28th.

Catherine Sullivan in BOMB Magazine

In a BOMB Magazine web exclusive, Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan (pictured top right) and choreographer Meg Stuart discuss mining the history of the avant-garde tradition and emotional overflow in ensemble-based work. BOMB’s Summer 2008 print issue will include the full-length conversation.

The magazine’s online art section, which currently archives 1,206 articles and interviews, features numerous Art21 artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Andrea Zittel (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, Kara Walker (all Season 2), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).