Time to Talk

Illustration by Adam Towers, Nyack High School

Art classrooms are mired in production. Too often the drive to complete work speeds right past the formation of a high quality idea or composition. How often have we ourselves seen or experienced a potential work of art get dumped because of poor planning, hasty decisions, or a fixation on completing vs. creating a work of art?

More and more time in my own classroom, especially in the past few years, has been spent cultivating ideas with students. Discussions and brainstorming in different ways can sometimes take a few days, and while my kids might accuse me of brain brutality from time to time because they are “thinking too much” instead of “just doing it”, the quality of ideas and slower pace to the planning has led to better work. Instead of work that looks like a project, more often students are creating work that looks like, well, work.

The thinking that goes into planning, sketching, talking through and articulating ideas is time well spent, even if it’s a little painful for students. Things like partner discussions, in-progress critiques and brainstorming multiple solutions to a given problem can yield so much more than a rush to “get an idea” and “put it on the paper”. When students are asked to create five different sketches for an assignment, then discuss those sketches with classmates and make a decision about which one to pursue, it’s always especially satisfying to hear many students choose one of the last sketches they created, or one sketch that changed because of the discussion itself.

Contemporary artists can teach our students a lot about the power of conversation, multiple perspectives, and exploring different possibilities in order to create great works of art. One look at artists like Allora and Calzadilla, Ann Hamilton, Oliver Herring or Doris Salcedo, for starters, can illustrate this in full color.

Art21 “Exclusive” Video, Year 2

What a year it’s been! We’re taking a look back at the 42 Exclusive videos that premiered here on the Art21 Blog, and subsequently on YouTube and iTunes. We hope you’ve enjoyed this new feature for 2009 and, as always, look forward to your comments.

What’s our New Year’s resolution? We’ll be premiering more behind-the-scenes moments with contemporary artists such as Beryl Korot, Shahzia Sikander, Allan McCollum, Julie Mehretu, Cao Fei, Florian Maier-Aichen, and many, many more. Check out what happened in year one.

Doris Salcedo | Third World Identity

In her Bogotá studio, artist Doris Salcedo discusses the stereotypes she faces as a citizen of a Third World country and how she embraces these first-hand experiences of discrimination to inform her art. Shown working alongside her team of assistants, whose collective labor underscores the political messages of her sculptures, Salcedo proposes a more humble role for artists working today.

Doris Salcedo’s understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form and open to interpretation, her works serve as testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. Salcedo’s work reflects a collective effort and close collaboration with a team of architects, engineers, and assistants and—as Salcedo says—with the victims of the senseless and brutal acts to which her work refers.

Doris Salcedo is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Doris Salcedo.

Confronting History

Doris Salcedo, La Casa Viuda I (detail), 1992-94, Collection of Worchester Art Museum

Looking through the interviews and essays featured in Art:21- Art in the Twenty- First Century 5, the companion book to season 5, I keep discovering a ton of words to teach by. This past weekend, as I prepared to work with one of my classes, I began flipping through the section featuring Doris Salcedo and found two quotes that kicked off this week:

As an artist, I have a responsibility. I have to look at historical events and work with whatever material is given to me.

The memory of anonymous victims is always being obliterated; I’m trying to rescue it. That’s why my work does not represent something; it’s simply a hint of something- trying to bring into our presence something subtle that is no longer there.

What I enjoy about these two quotes really centers on how artists must confront history- questioning beyond facts and figures in order to get to the why. How do we question the framing of history as artists and art educators working with students? How do we create work that embraces, and even encourages, multiple perspectives? How can we rescue memory, even our own?

When students choose to make work that is about a time and a place, there can be a commitment to investigate that time and place in a way that starts with history and enters into a different kind of learning through interpretation and giving that perspective a specific form.

Weekly Roundup

Matthew Ritchie, "Line Shot" Installation (detail), 2009. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery.

• The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host a talk with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie and brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner (of indie rock band The National) on Saturday, October 31 at 6pm. The event is held in conjunction with their collaborative performance The Long Count, which opens at BAM on Wednesday, Oct 28. Ritchie’s work is currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery in the solo exhibition Line Shot.

• Songs of Ascension by Ann Hamilton (Season 1) and Meredith Monk (also currently at BAM) was featured in a New York Times music review last week. Read the article here.

• For Performa 09, Mike Kelley (Season 1) will present three short dance/performance pieces inspired by his film and video installation Day Is Done (2005). These performances bring to life some of the characters featured in the film, all of whom are based on found photographs of extracurricular activities from American high school yearbooks. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns. Kelley’s show runs Nov 17 – Nov 19 at Judson Memorial Church. Purchase tickets here.

• Between Being Born and Dying, a site-specific installation by Barbara Kruger (Season 2), is on view at Lever House through November 21. Bloomberg.com describes the installation: “Kruger’s aphorisms are written in massive black-and-white letters all over the Lever House’s atrium, both inside and outside. They are printed on vinyl panels covering the floor, windows, walls and columns. The results are striking but disorienting. The 17-foot-tall letters are so big you can’t take it all in at once–or at all.”

• Season 2 artist Paul Pfeiffer has created a special project for the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The project opens with Vertical Corridor, in which Pfeiffer encourages the viewer to peer through a tiny peephole in the wall of the gallery. The peephole is the only access to an immense space, and questions “the validity of the spectacle … reminding the viewer that every such spectacle must bow to the limits of one’s perspective.” This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Russia.

• Kara Walker (Season 2) will introduce a screening of the 1926 film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York on November 11. Directed by the German animator and film director Lotte Reiniger, it is the earliest feature-length animation still believed to exist, and considered one of the greatest animated films of all time. The program — part of MoMA’s To Save and Project festival — begins at 8pm.

• Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock will speak at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai on Tuesday, October 27 at 5pm. Two print portfolios Fix (2007) and The Ossifies Theosophied (2005) will be on display in conjunction with the event. Hancock is featured in the exhibition Young Americans at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai through November 15.

• Mirror, Mirror: Contemporary Portraits and the Fugitive Self, a new exhibition at the Brigham Young Museum of Art in Utah, features works by 32 artists, including Oliver Herring (Season 3), Rebecca Campbell, Hasan Elahi, Harrell Fletcher, Douglas Gordon, Nikki Lee, and Takashi Murakami. The exhibition explores the influence of rituals, facades, social media, and the family on the formation of individual identity. On view through May 2010.

• Art critic Tyler Green talks to MoMA curator Connie Butler (organizer of the feminist exhibition, Wack!) about Season 4 artist Nancy Spero, who passed away last week. Read the interview on Green’s blog Modern Art Notes.

• Work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) is included in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Learning Modern: Bauhaus Legacy in Downtown Chicago. Building on the legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Learning Modern features projects by artists and architects who continue a legacy of interdisciplinary innovation for better living, while exploring the central role of experiential education in the modern vision. Continues through January 9, 2010.

• Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall, the fifth exhibition of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, is on view through November 20. The earliest known documentation of a fatal car crash provides a pictorial metaphor for Shonibare’s new body of photographic and sculptural work. Photographed in 1898, the image records death as a spectacle for the first time; a crowd surrounds the carcass of a motor vehicle. Shonibare has created a similar scene in the gallery, a sculptural dramatization of the death of Arthur Miller’s infamous protagonist, salesman Willy Loman. The installation suggests a parallel between Miller’s 20th century examination of greed and the human condition, and the present day.

• Now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Focus on Artists celebrates the museum’s 75th anniversary, and its close ties with modern and contemporary masters as demonstrated by works from their collection. SFMOMA holds a number of sculptures by Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo; pieces from her Unland (1995–98) and Untitled “Cabinet” series (1989-present) will be on view. Continues through May 23, 2010.

• On the occasion of Grey Area, a new work by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, the current issue of ArtMag (the online art magazine of Deutsche Bank) focuses on artists who investigate urbanism and cultural identity. Joan Young, curator at the Guggenheim Museum, has contributed an essay about Mehretu’s recent work. Read it here.

ART:21 SEASON 5 PREMIERES TONITE ON PBS!

The wait is over–Season 5 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century is here! The new season begins tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Compassion, featuring William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Might a work of art move us to temper our more destructive impulses? In what ways do artists’ feelings of empathy contribute to works that tackle problematic subjects and address the human condition? Compassion explores these questions in the work of the three featured artists.

Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. throughout October (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen; Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.

Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.

Season 5 Starts This Wednesday, October 7!

The wait is over. Season 5 of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century begins airing this week on PBS. The season kicks off with the episode Compassion, featuring William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Compassion premieres on Wednesday, October 7, 2009, at 10:00 p.m. (ET). (check local listings)

Watch a preview here:

Weekly Roundup

James Turrell, "House of Light," 2000. © Photo: Kamome. Courtesy Echigo-Tsumari Triennial

• House of Light (2000), a permanent installation in Kawanishi, Japan by Season 1 artist James Turrell, will be open through September 14 as part of the 2009 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial. The mechanical roof of this popular accommodation facility slides back to reveal the changing light and colors of the sky through a rectangular opening. “In the interior space,” Turrell writes, “one can experience a soft transforming light” by way of “familiar Japanese idioms such as shojii (paper sliding door) and tokonoma (alcove).”

• The Miami gallery O.H.W.O.W. will participate in an exhibition at the Macro Contemporary Art Center in Rome next month by setting up a shop to sell their New York Minute Poster Pack. The bundle includes prints by Barry McGee (Season 1), Aurel Schmidt, Dan Colen, Chris Johanson, Evan Gruzis, Kon Trubkovich, Tauba Auerbach, Ben Jones, JD Samson, and the late Dash Snow. Read more on Slamxhype.

• Juxtapoz Magazine gives a sneak peak at Barry McGee’s installation for the 20th anniversary exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts. The space, located in Pasadena, Ca., has commissioned 20 contemporary artists that they have worked with in the past, to make new site-specific art works both inside and outside of the Armory.

• Last year, Inhotim Contemporary Art Center in Brazil dedicated an entire gallery to Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo. On September 30, the Center will inaugurate nine new art commissions by Matthew Barney (Season 2), Chris Burden, Doug Aitken, Rivane Neuenschwander and five other artists. Barney’s De Lama Lâmina (2004-09) is situated in a geodesic dome within a eucalyptus forest. Read more about the recent commissions in The Art Newspaper.

• The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States will be on view at the Columbia Museum of Art beginning October 23. This gift to the Museum by the New York collectors includes five works on paper by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle, which are “considered to be among the seminal works of contemporary American art.”

• Pierre Huyghe (Season 4) is included in the exhibition and performance series Høvikodden Live 09 in Oslo, Norway. The annual Henie Onstad Art Centre event takes the interplay between different forms of art as its focus; this year’s curators investigate the voice as medium and metaphor. Concerts and other programs will take place in the galleries alongside static works of art.

• If you missed the Madison Square Park installation Flooded Chambers Maid by Jessica Stockholder (Season 3), you can see images and listen to the artist discuss the piece in a New York Times video.

Conveying Compassion

Doris Salcedo, "Atrabiliarios," 1992-93. Photo: Robert Pettus. Courtesy the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

When I learned that Doris Salcedo was being featured in Art21’s episode on Compassion, I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate artist to represent this theme. However to me, Salcedo goes beyond feeling compassion for the victims she represents in her work to being completely enveloped in their reality. By doing so, she’s able to give a voice to those who were silenced. This is especially strong in her work, Atrabiliarios, which powerfully illustrates what is left behind from the “disappeared ones” — empty shoes and unhealed wounds. This work is one of the few owned by the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and was featured in our exhibition Portrait/Homage/Embodiment. The shoes, which are recessed in niches that are covered by roughly-sewn animal skins, are abstracted representations of individuals who have “disappeared” as the result of  political violence in Colombia. The power of the work comes from Salcedo’s strong and immediate connection with her subject’s world.

While contemplating what to write for this post, I remembered that Salcedo gave a talk in St. Louis back in 2002, when the work was purchased. Looking through the transcript, she describes how you cannot understand a situation by analyzing it from a comfortable distance—something I think we’re all guilty of every time we open a newspaper. To fully connect with a situation she asks you to go beyond analysis and be “in the world” — to delve into the history and the lives of those involved. She emphasized that she considers her art to be “impotent” in actually changing the circumstances behind these terrible stories.  However, the ability of her work to communicate is not only strong, but essential in continuing the memory of the victim. When a viewer contemplates Salcedo’s art, the pain of the victim being represented reaches out and connects with each viewer’s own memories of pain. This personal and private interaction with the work elicits compassion from the viewer and in that moment, connects him or her to the victim.

In a series of timely posts on Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green discusses the use of art as a means for understanding the difficult subject of torture. I feel that this sentence in particular can be applied to Salcedo’s approach to her work: “Perhaps because they embrace ambiguity rather than reject it, artists often excel at embracing emotionally and intellectually difficult subjects.”  Through the openness of her work, Salcedo is able to communicate a fuller reality of the individual she represents, beyond newsprint or a CNN ticker. The violence inflicted upon the victims, the materials left behind, the artist’s position and that of the viewer — all of these combine to create a powerful cross-section of experiences and emotions, resulting in a stronger sense of understanding and compassion with those represented in the work.

Understanding Pain

Doris Salcedo, "Shibboleth," 2007. Photo: Tate Modern.

A friend of mine told me how she first learned of rape: rape happens when someone forces all your clothes off, her brother explained. My friend was, of course, horrified.

I learned about rape at the Sauk County Fair. I picked up a graphic novel at a booth, and, while I don’t remember the novel at all, I remember one phrase from the author’s biography: “raped at knifepoint.” She had been a young black woman and the one with the knife had been a white man. I imagined it happening in a barn (in the filmy, strangely accurate way I understood white-on-black violence, farms were emblematic sites), though I didn’t really know what it was. I did vaguely understand that her subsequent pregnancy meant the legacy of what happened would probably outlive her.

It’s difficult to understand the pain of others. Even now, I still often think of rape as silently happening in rural places, leading to new lives that will be tacitly ignored by those of us who weren’t there.

Art is at its most incisive when it breaks into that chasm between our own misunderstandings and the pervasive pain we don’t know how to acknowledge. Though I saw Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, an austere fissure that split into the foundation of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, only in photographs, I felt it acknowledged the difficulty of compassion with penetrating accuracy.

Salcedo works in an aloof way. Yet she’s always gutturally grappling with the most emotive and threatening sides of life—piling wooden chairs in an alley in such a way that makes death absurd and daunting, filling furniture with concrete to commemorate people whose lives have been made irrationally inert, or breaking open the floor of the Tate Modern. She responds to explicit problems—political violence in her native Colombia or racism in the post-colonial world—but her work has wide ramifications.

At first glance, Shibboleth struck me as a cold Minimalist ploy, a Richard-Serra-like testament to the power of single physical gestures. And I suppose it is cold and minimal. But watching a video of visitors stepping over and around the fissure, becoming inadvertently separated from each other, unable to close the gulf and unsure of how to navigate it, emphasized the fragility of our understanding of ourselves. What is compassion? How close can we really get to someone else’s pain? What we do once we’ve witnessed trauma?

After immersing herself in the pain of others, Salcedo has emerged with inert, gapingly industrial gestures. Cold and mute like architectural ruins, they give compassion a pragmatic face.