Weekly Roundup

Bruce Nauman, "One Hundred Live and Die," 1984. Neon tubing mounted on four metal monoliths. Collection of Fukake Publishing Co., Ltd., Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York, © Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

• Bruce Nauman (Season 1) has won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Visit the Daily Best Media Gallery to see images of his installation.
• Nauman is the first Art21 artist to appear on the Times list of the top 200 artists from the 20th century through today. He comes in at #24.
• Songs of Ascension, the multimedia work by Season 1 artist Ann Hamilton and composer Meredith Monk, will be included in this year’s Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
• BAM has also commissioned a new piece by the Dessner Brothers. The musical duo will collaborate with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie, as well as vocalists from The Breeders for this project.
• Videos by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe (working in collaboration with Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Liam Gillick and Melik Ohanian) are on view in VRAOUM!, an exhibition of comic strips and contemporary art, at La Maison Rouge in Paris.
• A major mid-career survey of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) will open at the Brooklyn Museum on June 26, 2009.

Weekly Roundup

• Vernissage TV takes a close look at Let the Priests Tremble…(1998/2008), a large hand-printed wall installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. The piece was included in Spero’s retrospective at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla, Spain.

• 9/11-9/11, an animated film by Season 1 artist Mel Chin, will screen tonight at MOMA (7pm). The piece will be screened twice, and a discussion with the artist and the audience will take place in between. Tickets are available at the Museum.

• On the occasion of the fourth Berlin Gallery Weekend (a program of 38 gallery openings in a 3-day span), c/o–Gerhardsen Gerner gallery will present works by Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie. Read more about the exhibition, titled The Need-Fire, here.

• Ann Hamilton (Season 1) has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science. Visit Artforum.com to read the full list of inductees in the visual art category.

• The Guggenheim exhibition catalogue Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe has won the 2008 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in visual arts and architecture. The catalogue accompanied the comprehensive exhibition of work by the Season 3 artist.

• Kara Walker and Raymond Pettibon (both Season 2) appear in the May issue of Black Book magazine.

Flash Points #3: What is the Value of Art?

Hans Haacke, "Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971." 1971.

In the late-1990s I took a graduate seminar on “museums and institutional critique” that focused on artistic and curatorial practices in the 1980s and 90s, and included a series of guest lectures by artists, curators, and the like. It became a bit of a joke that during each class there’d come a point in the conversation where we’d be talking about how an artwork, exhibition, or program was put together, and I’d always raise my hand and ask how it was funded. (Foreshadowing my future career in fundraising, perhaps?)

Leonardo da Vinci, view of a skull, c. 1489. Gabriel Orozco, "Black Kites," 1997. Damian Hirst, "For the Love of God," 2007.

Asking these questions was not a matter of tabloid curiosity, or an exercise in mapping the dirty money that fuels lofty aesthetic pursuits ala Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. Instead, it always seemed to me that how art is funded tells us something about the way it participates in a larger network of institutions, markets, and audiences. The questions of how art is valued and how it is monetized inevitably overlap: artworks perceived as “important” yield high prices at auction; economic development funding goes to out-of-the-way cultural institutions that bring high quality programming and consequently, tourists, to their neighborhoods; exhibitions that push boundaries attract grants from foundations dedicated to promoting free speech; arts education is consistently underfunded.

Kerry James Marshall, "Untitled," 2008. James Lee Byars, "The Perfect Table," 1989.

How many times have you asked yourself how Art21-featured artists were able to fund a large scale project - Ann Hamilton’s Corpus, for instance, or Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage One? Or wondered who buys works by Iñigo Maglano Ovalle, Kerry James Marshall, or Janine Antoni and how much they pay? Buried within questions about the economics of art, are assumptions and often, judgments, about its value that beg to be examined: How is the value of an artist’s intellectual versus physical labor calculated? Are collectible works valued differently than ephemeral projects?

Tom Friedman, "Untitled," 1995. Rirkrit Tiravanija, "Unititled," 2002.

How does individual “taste” and critical reception affect the value of an artwork, exhibition, or institution? What factors influence the way we value an artistic experience, as individuals and as a society?

How do we quantify the intangible benefits that art education provides? How do we talk about the subtle and personal value that art has in our lives?

1971 cover of Artforum featuring the PASTA strike; 2006 National Post article on the "gallerina" phenomenon.

The current global financial crisis has given the question “What is the value of art?” a new urgency as we come to terms with not only a downturn in the art market, but with the larger societal changes caused by the crisis that are sure to affect the way art is made, distributed, valued, and consumed in the coming years. Over the next two months Flash Points will present a multifaceted look at both topical issues—recent deaccessioning controversies, how the recession is affecting artists and institutions—as well as explore larger philosophical issues about the deeply complicated relationship between art and money, and tackle thorny questions about the value of art in our individual lives.

We welcome your input. Please feel free to comment, share ideas on what you’d like to see here, and post questions for our regular writers, guest bloggers, and Art21 staff.

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.

Laurie Anderson in Cleveland and Manhattan

Laurie Anderson, "Duets on Ice," (1974) performed in Genoa, 1975. Documentary photograph. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Bob Bielecki.

This Saturday at the Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square, Laurie Anderson will be performing Burning Leaves, a retrospective of songs and stories that culls pieces from her acclaimed solo shows The Speed of Darkness, Happiness, The End of the Moon and Homeland.

The Season 1 artist’s new sound sculpture In the House. In the Fire. is also included in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 currently at the Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition traces how Asian art, literature, and philosophy have influenced and assimilated into the work of vanguard American artists, a diverse selection that includes among them Jack Kerouac, Georgia O’Keeffe, Yoko Ono, James McNeill Whistler, Robert Irwin, and Ann Hamilton (Season 1).

SFMOMA’s Explore Modern Art

SFMOMA recently launched their redesigned website with the initiative Explore Modern Art, an online learning environment and interactive space that integrates the museum’s collections information, calendar of public programs and events, and multimedia interpretive programs. Over the last decade, these features have produced engaging programming on 85 modern and contemporary artists, enabling visitors to learn about the contexts in which the artworks were created, see videos of the artists in their studios, hear first-person explanations of their creative processes, and view high-resolution digital images of the artworks. Explore Modern Art makes this substantial repository more accessible, user-friendly, and well, fun.

My favorite section is Making Sense of Modern Art, a lively video archive and guide to works in SFMOMA’s permanent collection, where one can go watch Ann Hamilton discuss her Indigo Blues Project, look up close at a Claude Cahun photograph, or listen to Richard Tuttle talk about the “presence of simple things.” Other Art:21 artists highlighted in this program include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Richard Serra, and Kara Walker.

Soundings and Songs: Ann Hamilton

Soundings–an exhibition of sculpture, photography, prints and video by Season 1 artist Ann Hamilton–is on view at Robischon Gallery in Denver, Colorado through November 15. The exhibition expands upon Hamilton’s works from an earlier exhibition at the Gallery, Dialog: Denver, as well as her participatory choral piece that was hosted in Denver during the Democratic National Convention.

Songs of Ascension, Hamilton’s collaborative piece with Meredith Monk, is presented at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles, California through November 2. This multimedia performance, features Hamilton’s video imagery with Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, plus a string quartet led by violinist Todd Reynolds, and a 20-person choir composed of members of the voice program at the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts. See today’s article in the Los Angeles Times and preview a video of Songs of Ascension:

Ann Hamilton Wins Heinz Prize

Artforum.com and Bloomberg.com recently reported that Ann Hamilton (Season 1) is among the winners of the Heinz Family Foundation’s 2008 Human Achievement Awards. The Heinz Awards honors those who have distinguished themselves in the arts and humanities, the environment, technology, the economy and by improving the human condition. Hamilton won the $250,000 award for her installations that often use items culled from flea markets and warehouses. She’ll receive the award on October 21 at a ceremony in Pittsburgh, where the Heinz Foundation is based. Congratulations, Ann!

Artists Respond at MCA San Diego

Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet opened last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The pioneering artist residency and collaborative exhibition project is the first of its kind to operate on a large scale to investigate the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend upon them. Each of the eight participating artists took two trips (one in 2005 and a return in 2007/2008) to eight UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences in these diverse cultural and natural regions.

The exhibition at MCASD features new commissioned works by Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Rigo 23, Dario Robleto, Diana Thater and Xu Bing. The artists’ personal site selections produced a range of engagement, such as Hamilton’s visit to the Galápagos, where she observed many of the animals for which the islands are known: land iguanas, finches, sea lions, and tortoises. The artist returned home thinking about such concepts as buoyancy and balance in relation to human life and natural landforms, concepts that go to the heart of Human/Nature. In response, Hamilton created a poetic text that inventories the animals and plants of the Galápagos, citing population figures and incorporating words from Charles Darwin’s famous texts about the islands. Local elementary schoolchildren recited the words from a boat circling the islands. The exhibition installation features video footage documenting the children’s performance and including images of a wavering horizon line shot from a camera suspended in water.

Other explorations include Mark Dion’s travels to the Komodo and Rinca islands inspired by a childhood fascination with the Komodo dragon and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle to the Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaíno, where he was inspired to create an installation that emphasizes the natural beauty and ecological importance of the area in addition to raising awareness of the industrial development that threatens it.

For full project descriptions, visit the Artists Respond website.

Dialog:City Launches in Denver

Dialog:City, the exciting community-oriented, art-political showcase in Denver taking place concurrently with the Democratic National Convention, opened this past Friday at an outdoor party with Mayor John Hickenlooper in a church parking lot that featured Krzysztof Wodiczko’s (Season 3) Veteran Vehicle Project, a new media sculpture that transforms a Humvee into a traveling media projection vehicle telling the stories of more than 40 Denver homeless veterans.

Amist the “greenest convention ever,” Dialog:City is designed as a cultural program that converges education, art, democracy, and digital media. In addition to the ten artists who were officially invited to create interactive site-specific works throughout Denver neighborhoods, a slew of other connected events and happenings will invade and inhabit the city. Curated by Seth Goldenberg, Dialog:City presents new projects by Charlie Cannon, Minsuk Cho, Ann Hamilton, Sharon Hayes, Lynn Hershman, Daniel Peltz, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, and spurse.

The mind-tingling, serious though not devoid of levity art assault includes Minsuk Cho’s Air Forest, a levitating architectural pavilion, and Daniel Peltz’s Karaoke Convention ‘08. Peltz has transcribed the addresses by presidential candidates in the 2008 election into a karaoke format that will have people belting rhetoric out in song at the Supreme Court and local bars.

Season 1 artist Ann Hamilton created Circle of O’s, a collaboration with local choirs, choreographers, and composers to perform a newly written song drawn from the phrases and pace and spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson writings imagining the “new American voice.” The song will “waft across the city” in a street procession.

For a full schedule and additional information on all the projects, visit the Dialog:City website.