Weekly Roundup

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:

• 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21’s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.

• Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily  life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)

• Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.

• Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”

• Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”

• Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.

Weekly Roundup

Barbara Kruger, "Untitled (It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it)", 1990. Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 143 x 103 in. Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about two anniversary exhibitions, 6,000 shapes upstate, masterworks in the Midwest, some road trip souvenirs, a whole lotta prints, and a sale you won’t want to miss:

• The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles celebrates their thirty year anniversary with Collection: MoCA’s First Thirty Years. The two-part exhibition is the largest-ever installation of MoCA’s permanent collection. Part one is on view at MoCA Grand Avenue and features works made between 1939 and 1979, beginning with Piet Mondrian’s Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III (1939). The second part, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, features works made since the museum’s founding in 1979. Included in Collection are Art21 artists Barbara Kruger, Mike Kelley (both Season 1), Vija Celmins, Gabriel Orozco, Kara Walker, Raymond Pettibon (all Season 2), Hiroshi Sugimoto, Roni Horn, Richard Tuttle (all Season 3), Lari Pittman (Season 4), Jeff Koons, and John Baldessari (both Season 5). The exhibition, which opened in November, is ongoing.

• Artinfo.com reports that Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) has won the University of Vienna’s Oscar Kokoschka Prize for 2010. The Kokoschka Prize is awarded to one contemporary artist every two years. Pettibon will receive a check for $28,000 in a ceremony at the university on March 1.

• Prints by Pepón Osario (Season 1), Kiki Smith (Season 2), and Mark Bradford (Season 4) are included in The Graphic Unconscious, the core exhibition of Philagrafika 2010, a new international festival in Philadelphia that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. The exhibit features 35 artists from 18 countries and is spread across five venues: Moore College of Art & Design; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Print Center; and Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. In Osorio’s installation, according to Philly.com, “he ponders his mother’s mortality and anticipates longing for her in a 12-foot-square bed of mostly black confetti on which he prints a blue X-ray of her skull with an ink-jet printer.” Philagrafika 2010 continues through April 11.

• Speaking of prints: If you attended Art21’s Culture Wars event last week, you’re already familiar with 20×200, the limited-edition print and photograph company that donated prizes for the winning team. (Congrats, @GlennLsApt!) On February 3 at 2pm (EST) 20×200 will release two works from Season 1 artist William Wegman. (We hear there’s one photograph and one painting.) 20×200’s mailing list subscribers will have the chance to purchase prints an hour or two before they are released on the homepage. Given their “ridiculously affordable” prices, we advise you to get on the list now!

• On February 3, Allan McCollum (Season 5) will speak at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. The event kicks off his project Shapes for Hamilton for which McCollum — working in collaboration with local residents, staff, faculty and students of Colgate — will create a unique shape for each inhabitant of the town. At the conclusion of the project, which will include an exhibition of the complete set of nearly 6,000 shapes, each resident will be invited to collect their own shape signed by the artist. The Shapes Project: Shapes for Hamilton will open March 8 in Colgate’s Clifford Gallery.

• On February 5 Max Protetch Gallery in New York will open Happiness is a State of Inertia, an exhibition of new work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4). Manglano-Ovalle will debut a major new sculpture, inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe, that functions as a working fish tank. The tank will be filled with Blind Mexican Cave Fish who make their way via smell and touch. Via the press release, “The object itself is profoundly transparent, but because it has been installed below eye level, and its inhabitants are blind fish, it inverts the notion of transparency, calling into question what true visibility looks like. In order to look inside the tank, a viewer would have to prostrate himself, offering a gesture of submission in exchange for verification of the seemingly transparent scene inside.” Happiness will be on view through March 27.

• Also opening February 5 is The Chemistry of Color: Contemporary African-American Artists at Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. This 60-year anniversary show chronicles “the accomplishments and struggles of African-American artists in the latter half of the 20th century.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in the artist roster along with Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Moe Brooker, James Brantley, Charles Searles, Sam Gilliam, and others.

• Works by Weems and Kara Walker (Season 2) are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in From Then to Now: Masterworks of Contemporary African American Art. This multigenerational show brings together, for the first time, holdings of contemporary African American art from collections in the region: Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Akron Art Museum, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Progressive Corporation, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Works by Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Lenardo Drew, Alison Saar, Willie Cole, David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, René Green, and Kehinde Wiley will also be on view. From Then to Now continues through May 9.

• The Bartram Project by Mark Dion (Season 4), which is on view through February 6 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine article titled “Art of the Road Trip.” Read it here.

Weekly Roundup

Ann Hamilton, "accountings . soot wall", 2009. Flame-licked walls, dimensions variable. Courtesy Carl Solway Gallery.

In this week’s roundup, Art21 artists play with fire, sign new books, design stained glass, collage basketballs, create new films, and pop up in Miami Beach exhibitions:

• Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati is paying homage to installation art with their exhibition Walls, Ceiling & Floors, which focuses on the transformation of space through large-scale works by 15 different artists. Among them is Ohio native Ann Hamilton (Season 1) who has delicately burned walls of the space (pictured above) to “create a dense environment.” Walls, Ceiling & Floors continues through December 23.

• The Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio has announced that Mark Bradford (Season 4) is one of three recipients of their 2009-10 Residency Award. Bradford will develop new work for his survey exhibition Mark Bradford: You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You), on view at the Wexner beginning May 8, 2010. His projects will include a new sculpture entitled Lazarus, comprised of more than 1,000 collaged basketballs; Pinocchio, a sound-based sculptural environment that explores the social experiences of a young black man growing up in L.A. in the early 1980s; and the film Mithra, which documents and reflects on his mammoth public sculpture created for Prospect.1 in New Orleans.

• Kiki Smith (Season 2) has been commissioned (along with architect Deborah Gans) to design a stained glass window for the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Founded in 1887, the original window has been missing since the mid 1940s, when the congregation had it removed due to high maintenance costs. The new window is scheduled for completion in the spring. The New York Times is one of many media outlets to report on this commission; read more about the project on their Arts Beat blog.

• On Wed., December 2, Walton Ford (Season 2) will lecture and sign copies of his new book, Pancha Tantra, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The program begins at 6:30pm and is free and open to the public. (New paintings by Ford are on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York through December 23.)

• Paste Up, a survey of early work by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), is on view at Sprueth Magers London through January 23. The title of the exhibition reflects the professional term for the works on view and underscores the influence Kruger’s experience as a magazine editorial designer had on her career.

• Spazialismo, a group exhibition at Bitforms Gallery in New York City, takes the writings of Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana as its point of departure. Through works by Matthew Ritchie (Season 3), Mel Bochner, R. Luke DuBois, Michael Joaquin Grey, and Yael Kanarek, Fontana’s mid-twentieth century concepts of space in the modern yet natural world are explored. Spazialismo closes December 30.

If you’re in Florida this week for Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), here’s a few things to check out:

• The annual Rubell Family Collection exhibition is this year inspired by Picasso’s saying, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Beg, Borrow, and Steal highlights the works of 74 late and living artists who “embrace their influences even as they reinvent them.” Works by Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger (both Season 1), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Allan McCollum, Jeff Koons, and Paul McCarthy (all Season 5) are included in this display. The Collection opens at 9am on Wed., December 2. Admission is free during ABMB.

• On Thurs., December 3 at noon, the Bass Museum of Art will debut Latin America’s largest private collection of contemporary art; the collection has never before been shown in the United States. Where Do We Go From Here? Selections from La Coleccion Jumex brings together familiar names on the international art circuit, such as Mike Kelley (Season 1) and Urs Fisher, with Mexican conceptualists Damian Ortega, Inaki Bonillas and Stephan Bruggeman. Visitors with a Bass Museum invitation, VIP card, exhibitor’s pass, press pass, or Bass Museum membership card can attend the opening reception on Wed., December 2, 8-10pm.

• The Swiss Institute has published a calendar of New York artists photographed on their bicycles. Collier Schorr (Season 2), Pierre Huyghe (Season 4), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5) are pictured. This limited-edition piece will be unveiled later this week at ABMB, however, it can be immediately ordered online or downloaded as a PDF.

• On Fri., December 4, catch up with Schorr at the book launch for Forest and Fields. Volume 2. Blumen. Forest and Fields is an ongoing suite of artist’s books; each volume is part diary, photo annual, palimpsest, and scrapbook. In the latest release, Schorr focuses on arrangements in landscapes and domestic and commercial settings. This program is part of ABMB Salon, an open platform for discussion with an emphasis on current themes in contemporary art. The event begins at 5pm.

Talking with Janine Antoni, Part One

Janine Antoni, "Conduit" (detail), 2009. Courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery.

To say it was a pleasure to be given the opportunity to interview Janine Antoni for this column is a gross understatement. In 2003, Janine Antoni’s Season 2 segment was my first introduction to Art21. It’s no surprise that I’ve been hooked since. As an art educator who, at that time was quite frustrated with the lack of quality programming related to visual artists working today, this series seemed a little too good to be true. Fifteen minute segments in hour-long episodes? Educators’ Guides? Someone who answers the phone when I call? It was absolutely bizarre. Fast-forward six years and here we are, talking about a wonderful conversation for a column called Teaching with Contemporary Art.

Janine Antoni’s work, although it’s featured in the episode titled Loss and Desire, is also related to many of our new Season 5 themes. Specifically we discussed the themes of Systems, Transformation and Fantasy as they relate to her work. We also discussed her work as a teacher, her experience as a young artist, her new show at Luhring Augustine, and possibilities moving forward.

The following conversation took place this past September 16th. Part Two will be featured in next week’s column.

Joe Fusaro: I was wondering about your own art education growing up. What was it like for you to study art as a teenager and then go to both Sarah Lawrence College and the Rhode Island School of Design?

Janine Antoni: I grew up in the Bahamas, so I didn’t grow up going to galleries or museums. I basically came to art through craft. I was always making things, with stuff I found on the beach or in the woods. As a family we used to make things together, from Christmas decorations to objects to sell at the church fair. In high school, I made stage sets for theater productions. I am sure this experience has played into my interest in installation. College was my first introduction to contemporary art and I remember being really challenged… and disturbed. It turns out that the art that bothered me the most at that time was made by some of my favorite artists now. This fact has changed my perspective about my judgment. Now when I see something I really don’t like, I take note because it might be triggering something that is worth paying attention to.

JF: Is there a particular work or artist that you initially didn’t like and now love for some reason?

JA: Richard Long comes to mind. I used to think that art had to be beautiful in a traditional way. I remember thinking, “this guy picks up a rock, walks with it for two miles, sets it down in a gallery, and that’s an art work?” It seemed strange to me, but now I can relate it to a way of extending the tradition of the figure in the landscape and our relationship to space. I compare his approach to the brutality of certain earthworks and it seems like such a gentle intercession into the landscape. It is a poetic and truly beautiful gesture.

JF: What was RISD like?

JA: Can I step back and talk about Sarah Lawrence College first?

JF: Sure.

JA: At Sarah Lawrence College, I had a very classical training. I painted the still life and sculpted the figure. At RISD, I discovered conceptual art. It was like changing religions! I realized I could allow my ideas to dictate what I wanted to make and not be bound by predetermined forms or materials. I take on a variety of media and ways of speaking, but it’s really the same ideas that haunt me. I studied with Mira Schorr, who introduced me to Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and Carolee Schneeman, artists that weren’t canonized at that time by the culture or art history. I was also working with Thomas Lawson, who taught me about Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger. Looking back, I realize that when I started my career, I was picking up on a thread that was left open in work from the 1970s. I was instantly attracted to the visceral language of the 1970s, but was able to look at it through the lens of feminist ideas from the 1980s. So I wound up locating myself between those two sources.

Continue reading »

Barbara Kruger interviewed by Richard Prince

Barbara Kruger, 1981, photo montage.

Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a vintage BOMB interview relating to a Season 5 artist. This week, we stepped back into our archive looking for a piece by John Baldessari only to find this portfolio of his work from 1986. But since we promised you an interview, we stepped back further in time to find this conversation that correlated to Baldessari’s work instead. In this interview from BOMB Issue 3, Summer 1983 (26 years ago!), Richard Prince and Art21 artist Barbara Kruger ask each other the same question that result with some varied responses. Read the full interview here.

Richard Prince: What about all these recorded conversations we hear about these days?

Barbara Kruger: Presidents, interview, things like that?

RP: Yes.

BK: Well, in most cases recording seems to offer both the curiosity of replication and the resoluteness of evidence.

RP: Does this have anything to do with the pictures we’re looking at?

BK: Yes. I think in some ways their definitions are interchangeable.

RP: Fiction feels good and recanting causes stress. Like lying, in the physiological sense, the telling of a true story is an unnatural act. Do you think fiction has anything to do with replication?

BK: Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.

Continue reading »

Play Art Loud: Creating Characters on ArtBabble

Have you ever pretended to be someone else? Is there a difference between fictional characters and historical figures lost to time? This week we’re looking at videos of artists who create memorable characters in their work, often by adapting existing personae—be they well known, obscure, or anonymous.

Artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased a Japanese Manga character and, through some legal wizardy, returned the copyright to the character itself. (via Art21)

Joshua Mosley imagines an imaginary conversation between the philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal on the subject of nature and faith. (via MCASD)

Catherine Sullivan and Sean Griffin (introduced by fellow Art21 alumn Barbara Kruger) have a conversation about Sullivan’s anxiety-inducing recent work Triangle of Need set in James Deering’s faux-historic Vizcaya Museum & Gardens in Florida. (via Hammer)
Continue reading »

MoMA Trumpets Amsterdam’s Role as Hub of Conceptual Art

Jan Dibbets. "Untitled" (1969). Photolithographed postcard, 4 1/16 x 6” (10.3 x 15.2 cm). Publisher: Seth Siegelaub, New York. MoMA. Art & Project/Depot VBVR Gift. © 2009 Jan Dibbets/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. MoMA Imaging Studio, photograph: Jonathan Muzikar

While today Conceptual Art is utterly ubiquitous, MoMA’s current “In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976” examines a period when only a few cities in the world seemed to embrace this idea-based world of visual art, foremost among them, Amsterdam.

In this well-curated show of objects–which is somewhat ironic since conceptual art often rejected the very notion of the art object–MoMA’s curator of prints and illustrated books Chirstophe Cherix focuses on an influential gallery in Amsterdam, Art & Project, that served as a laboratory for conceptual art practice when it opened in 1968.

Spurred by a recent gift of 230 works by the founders of Art & Project (Geert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn) to the MoMA, this show fills in the blanks of our art historical knowledge, most notably the connection between Los Angeles and Amsterdam. Phillip Van den Bossche describes the unique connection between these two cities in the catalogue as “the first direct links between Europe and the American West Coast–which is to say without New York playing an intermediary role.”

The exhibition offer a great deal of insight into the work of a number of Art21 artists who were either in contact with some of these seminal figures or more significantly benefited and learned from this generation of conceptual artists, including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Allan McCollum, and Bruce Nauman, all of whom experiment with objects, language and narrative.

Lawrence Weiner's redesign of the hallway that leads to the "In & Out" exhibition

At the entrance to the exhibit there is a commissioned piece by Lawrence Weiner that combines nautical forms and triple-X wall images, both alluding to the city’s role as a major port for shipping and site for pleasure. On the right side of the hall, an eclectic collection of Dutch posters from the period set the mood. Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Mary Heilmann, "Two Lane Blacktop" (below) and Tony Oursler, "Five Take Radius" (above), 2009. Courtesy of AIR, Art International Radio.

• Site-specific installations by Mary Heilmann (Season 5), Tony Oursler, Todd Eberle, and Sabina Streeter are currently on view at the Clocktower Gallery in Manhattan. This is the first group of installations at the space since it became the home of Art International Radio in January 2009. For Two Lane Blacktop, Heilmann has painted white lines down a black floor, turning a corridor of the Clocktower into “a displaced highway.” Just above her piece, Tony Oursler has lined the ceiling with eleven over-sized filament light bulbs that brighten and dim as recordings of the artist’s voice emanate from speakers overhead. The Clocktower is open to the public on Thursdays from 12pm to 5pm or by appointment.

• On the occasion of their 95th anniversary, Montclair Art Museum has mounted Out of the Vault. This year-long exhibition celebrates the Museum’s American and Native American art focus. Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in the 60 piece display.

• From August 25-November 21, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois will present Reflection, a one video per day program featuring works by five artists: Andrea Zittel (Season 1), Phyllis Baldino, Patricia Esquivias, Alex Hubbard, and Glenn Ligon. Each video is scheduled for a specific day of the week; Andrea Zittel’s Small Liberties will screen on Fridays.

• Kandors (2000), a video by Season 3 artist Mike Kelley, will be shown in Switzerland as part of the 10-day St. Moritz Art Masters contemporary art program. The festivities begin Friday, August 21. Kelley’s work will be the focus of a panel discussion on Sunday, August 23.

• A newly commissioned collaboration between Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, titled A Voyage of Growth & Discovery, will open September 13 at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens. The installation comprises a two-and-a-half hour six-channel video of Smith’s character Baby IKKI, which he has performed for over thirty years. This is the first collaboration between Kelley and Smith who have been friends since 1975.

• On September 12, Bruce Nauman (Season 1) will bring his project Untitled (Leave the Land Alone) to fruition. Between 11:30am-12:30pm, the words “Leave the Land Alone” will be written across the Pasadena, California sky. Read more about Nauman’s project in the Los Angeles Times.

• Proud Flesh, a new book by Season 1 artist Sally Mann, investigates the bonds between husband and wife. Mann’s sole subject is her husband of 39 years, Larry. This body of nude studies, photographed over a six-year period, will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York beginning September 15.

• The Wall Street Journal and Artinfo.com report that Polaroid’s art collection will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s. Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late last year. Their collection includes work by William Wegman (Season 1) who, like other well-known artists, used Polaroid’s large-format, 235 pound instant camera for special projects.

James Casebere interviewed by Roberto Juarez

Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we feature a vintage BOMB interview relating to a Season 5 artist or theme. This week we look to the work of James Casebere, who, like Florian Maier-Aichen, has been aggressively pushing the boundaries of what photography is and could be with his tabletop simulations of archetypal institutions. “Casebere’s photographs evoke our deepest fears and longings,” wrote Roberto Juarez, who interviewed the photographer in BOMB 77, Fall 2001. “Perhaps this is because his images captivate our collective imagination, the one ruled by instinct.” Read the full interview here.

James Casebere, "Monticello #3," 2001, digital chromogenic print, 48×60”. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, NY.

Roberto Juarez: I have my ideas of why you used black-and-white photographs in your earlier work, but tell me—why did you use black and white instead of color?

James Casebere: Black and white had more to do with memory and the past. Color was too much about the present, I associated it with color TV, which was not a part of my past. I wanted the images to be related to a sense of history, let’s say, whether personal or social. And I think black and white adds a certain level of abstraction.

Roberto Juarez: What were the images, in the Penn Station installation?

James Casebere: Most of it was a synthesis between two bodies of work, a combination of domestic space in the foreground with romantic, faraway places in the background. I tried, in part, to simulate the experience of sitting on a train, looking out the window. But the foreground might also be a dining room, or a kitchen, or a café.

Roberto Juarez: How did you create that? Was it a layering of pictures through exposure, or was it from a model that you built?

James Casebere: I built a model. Half the time, there’d be a frame dividing the foreground from the background. The backgrounds were images of the American West, corrals, and also one image of a sinking canoe, and one which was simply an outdoor train platform. There was a mission facade in another image. I was trying to create a sense of wistful reverie.

Roberto Juarez: The West is a very romantic idea in the American psyche. I’ve gotten invitations to submit proposals for light boxes in train stations. It’s become such a fad, or an easy art form for public projects to take on, because it’s not that expensive. But you were early.

James Casebere: I used a light box for a show I did at Franklin Furnace in 1981. It sat in the window, facing the street. I was never interested in the context of a fine art photo gallery. I was really interested in the usefulness of art—in a Constructivist sense, or as in the Bauhaus or de Stijl. What all these movements shared—and they overlapped, of course—was the belief that art should not be broken up into separate disciplines. An artist might make paintings, design buildings, do graphics, photographs and sculpture. It was very multimedia. They also shared the belief that an artist had a purpose, a usefulness within the context of the larger society.

I was looking at how art worked within the larger social world and wanted to place my work where most people see other photographs. So I wanted to put my images into the advertising context, the way conceptual artists like Dan Graham were using pages in a magazine as their art. The magazine is one kind of public space, street signs are another. I wanted to design things that relate to people’s everyday experience. People like Dennis Adams and Jeff Wall began using light boxes at about the same time as myself. Adams actually designed the public spaces, the bus shelters, to show them in. There were Holzer’s broadsides, and Barbara Kruger’s billboards. It was the same impulse. We were all thinking about mass media. One of the first images I shot in New York was of a courtroom which I made into a poster, and put up anonymously around Lower Manhattan. There was that anonymous poster phenomenon going on in the Lower East Side at that time.

Continue reading »

Weekly Round Up

Bob and Roberta Smith, "So I Came to Bourgeois." Courtesy Grey Gallery.

• Last year the Guardian asked its sports and art writers to swap pieces for a day. Tennis correspondent Steve Bierley reviewed a Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) exhibition, which Bob and Roberta Smith fell in love with and subsequently made into a text-based painting. As part of the current Edinburgh Art Festival, Smith (it’s one person) has turned the project into a full fledged exhibition at the nomadic Grey Gallery. Now if only they would swap athletes and artists salaries for a day….

• In other sports and arts news, America’s team the Dallas Cowboys just finished building their state of the art football stadium at the cost of $1.15 billion dollars. Owners Gene and Jerry Jones formed an art program that brings site-specific installations to the venue, including commissioned works from Franz Ackermann, Olafur Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), and Matthew Ritchie (Season 3).  Additionally, the program will develop educational initiatives and tours focused on the collection of works.

• Through September 20th at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Your Bright Future, a show of twelve artists from South Korea who were born between 1957 and 1972. Your Bright Future includes, among others, Kimsooja (Season 5), Jooyeon Park, Do-Ho Suh (Season 2), and Haegue Yangthe.

• Season 2 artist Kiki Smith has received the Edward MacDowell Medal at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.   She is the 50th MacDowell Medalist, with past recipients including I.M. Pei, Merce Cunningham, Georgia O’Keeffe, and John Updike.  The award is given each year to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to his or her field.

• Through September 7, the Pompidou Centre is displaying the “feminine side of its own collections” in an exhibition titled elles@centrepompidou.  Giving the galleries over to 200+ women artists from the 20th century to now, sub-themes take the headings of Pioneer, Free Fire, and Body Slogan, and includes many notables like Art21’s Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger.