The Last Days of Pompeii in LA
Eleanor Antin, "The Death of Petronius" from "The Last Days of Pompeii," 2001. Chromogenic print, 46 5/8 x 94 5/8 inches. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
The Los Angeles art world still has a lot of the laissez-faire approachability that endeared it back in the ’60s, which is why so many artists migrate to L.A. and never leave. Lily Simonson and Catherine Wagley, who both came to the West Coast as art students, have made the city home. Looking at Los Angeles is their new bi-weekly dispatch about art in the city they love. — Ed.
For our first dispatch from the LA art world, we visited the exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, on view at LACMA until October 4. The show features sculptures, paintings, and tapestries that adorned the private villas of the Roman elite, and is accompanied by Eleanor Antin’s The Last Days of Pompeii (Season 2), a project that brings ancient decadence to SoCal. Thoughts about aged culture, contemporary art and the City of Angels prompted the following conversation:
Catherine Wagley: Here in LA, even authentic antiquity feels like faux antiquity. That’s why I avoid shows like Pompeii. I feel so limited as a viewer–I have no concept of Pompeii as a place that occupied a past era; instead, when I look at the artifacts on exhibit, I start thinking about decorations on the Getty’s fountains. But I actually enjoyed the LACMA show because it addresses this very conundrum.
Lily Simonson: Yes, there is virtually no history embodied anywhere in Los Angeles, and that is very unsettling. My neighborhood in Hollywood is overrun by European tourists taking pictures of the Walk of Fame and trying to get to the Hollywood Sign. Is that our Eiffel Tower? Yikes! Our history is all about cultural production and artifice, so everything begins to seem inauthentic or reproducible.
Anyway, I agree that LACMA gracefully embraced the incongruity of a show like this in Los Angeles, especially by juxtaposing the exhibition with Antin’s Pompeii series. In fact, the Antin piece at once underscored this cultural “mismatch” while highlighting the parallels between the opulent Hollywood Empire and the dangerously extravagant Romans. I’ve been thinking about the inclusion of the Art21-like video that documented Antin’s process making the Pompeii photographs. It made the work feel like a Hollywood production.
CW: Do you mean the video made Antin’s work seem like a Hollywood production? Or that it made those grand ancient sculptures look like they jumped off a Hollywood set? I was entranced by the latter possibility. What’s great about Antin’s Pompeii photos is that her production value is so high, yet the scenes are flawed. Actors seem bored, bodies have blemishes, the theatricality is transparent. And it’s the same with the sculptures on exhibit. They’re crafted with such gravitas and yet time has damaged them in a way that makes their theatricality seem naked.
Weekly Roundup
Josiah McElheny, "Bruno Taut on Mies van der Rohe (1922), i," 2009. Drawing on silver gelatin photograph using color retouching pencil, 23 1/2 x 17 1/2 in., Edition variant 1 of 4 with 1 artist's proof. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery.
- New works by Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny are on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery through Oct. 17. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glassclad skyscraper. McElheny’s sculpture is an enlarged version of this original maquette that recasts Mies’s design in the spirit of rival architect Bruno Taut. Also included in the exhibition are a series of photo-based drawings inspired by a photograph Mies took of his skyscraper model in 1922. In each, the black-and-white photograph is highlighted, or defaced with photo-retouching pencil, thereby inserting Taut’s colorful ideas into Mies’s picture of purity and transparency.
- Works by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle are on view in the exhibition Pollution is Ecology also at Andrea Rosen Gallery through October 17. Visit Contemporary Art Daily to browse through images of Tuttle’s concurrent exhibition, L’nger than Life, at Modern Art, London.
- Season 3 artist Fred Wilson is recipient of the 2009 Cheek Medal from the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary. The Cheek Medal was created to recognize individuals who have impacted the fields of visual, performing and museum arts. A dinner and ceremony will be held at the Lake Matoaka Amphitheater on Sept. 18.
- Opening October 7 at the Museum of Arts & Design, Slash: Paper Under the Knife will explore the creative possibilities of paper through works by Kara Walker (Season 2), Oliver Herring (Season 3), Olafur Eliasson, Pietro Ruffo, Ishmael Randall, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, and others.
- Kara Walker (Season 2) will be the next artist in the Proposition seminar series at the New Museum. Inspired by the scientific method of hypothesis, research, and synthesis, these two-day events explore a topic of current investigation in the invited speaker’s own artistic or intellectual practice. On Sept 25 and 26 Walker will explore the object of painting and the concept of liberty.
- Mel Chin (Season 1) will lecture at Arizona State University (ASU) on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 7:30pm. The event is organized in conjunction with the Defining Sustainability season of exhibitions and projects at the ASU Art Museum.
- Dance with Camera is now on view at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Both an exhibition and screening program, Dance with Camera explores the crossover between artists, and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features works in film, video, and photography by artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Oliver Herring (both Season 3), Charles Atlas, Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, Bruce Conner, Tacita Dean, Luis Jacob, Joachim Koester, Elad Lassry, Kelly Nipper, robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner, Uri Tzaig, Flora Wiegmann, and Christopher Williams. On view through March 21, 2010.
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 »
Wrestling with the Past: A TwCA 2008-2009 Roundup
Eleanor Antin, Art21 production still
It’s been quite a year. Quite an academic year, that is. Between the country voicing a collective NO to four more years of the same Bushed policies and Bernie Madoff being sentenced to the equivalent of a few lifetimes in prison, a lot has happened and been written about. While I haven’t had any obsessed music fans calling to threaten me lately (haven’t I mentioned the response to The Billy Joels of Art Education??) I just wanted to take this opportunity at the beginning of summer to provide a TwCA roundup of sorts….
The year started back in September 2008 with an article on Mining Ideas – examining the use of sketchbooks in the classroom. Thinking Through Possibilities shared a variety of student sketchbook work as result of this popular theme, and students continued to use sketchbooks in order to respond to and create work influenced by the highly controversial Bodies exhibit.
I was honored to be given the opportunity to interview Eleanor Antin for the TwCA column in December, and right through the holidays she and I e-mailed back and forth (and back and forth… thank you Eleanor!) to create Myths, Metaphors and More: An Interview with Eleanor Antin, which was then published in two parts on January 14th and 15th, 2009.
As winter literally plowed along it became necessary to tackle the bizarre nature of art competitions in What’s an Art Contest? The following week led to a post highlighting how contemporary artists are relying more and more on others to make their work. It Takes Two… or Two Hundred was inspired by the highly coordinated and detail-obsessed season 4 artist Mark Dion.
TwCA investigated the understated art of Robert Ryman and listened to him discuss his work live before writing the post, What Light? in February. Only a week later I came across a Scholastic Art magazine featuring five Art21 artists and was thrilled to see the periodical break free from it’s staple of Van Gogh, Cezanne and O’Keeffe. I love the artists, but don’t necessarily need classroom resources dedicated to them once a year. Working Without Warhol examined how Scholastic Art and other magazines like it can indeed incorporate contemporary art and artists meaningfully.
As spring began I was excited to share my work with students creating paintings driven by an investigation into what exactly is power? Power(ful) Painting highlighted the initial steps they took to create work about a big question and theme, which then allowed students to demonstrate skills they learned in previous lessons. Immediately following this unit, we made our way to the newly redesigned Museum of Art and Design to see Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary. Classes were in the midst of changing gears and working with everyday materials to create works of art that were more than just another project about the principle of rhythm. Remixing. Transformation. highlighted the importance of this influential museum visit.
In April, the TwCA column began reporting on the work Art21 was doing with teachers at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies. The post Teaching with Film, Teaching with Objects was the first of these updates on the three-part workshop series titled Teaching and Learning with Contemporary Art, which concluded in May.
The spring also saw the Education and Public Programs team at Art21 travel to Minneapolis for the National Art Education Association’s annual conference, punctuated by our work at the Walker Art Center and with season 4 artist, Mark Bradford (see Burn Baby Burn). The conference itself provided many possibilities for the TwCA column, and I spent the following three weeks looking into questions posed at our panel discussion with Mark Bradford, Olivia Gude and William Crow. These questions are highlighted in the posts Getting Beyond, Authoritarian?, and Make Less Art.
It summer now. Time to relax and read. Two recent columns, Summer Reading Part 1 and Summer Reading Part 2, suggest a variety of works to inspire you as we get some collective distance from 2008-2009 and prepare for beginning all over again in September. Enjoy!
Weekly Roundup
- Krzysztof Wodiczko is the sole artist representing Poland at this summer’s Venice Biennale. The striking video installation of milky windows depicts the shadows of immigrant workers as they take on the daily tasks and routines of life, conversing in various languages. Above is a ScribeMedia video interview with the Season 3 artist.
- Elements of Photography opened this past weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibition focuses on two fundamental elements of nature inherent to the medium: light and water. The “naturalists” in the show include artists Luisa Lambri, Walead Beshty, Adam Ekberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), and others. Through October 4.
- The Stenersen Museum in Oslo opens an intriguing show this week that explores the many dimensions of gender-based violence. Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women, and Art is curated by Randy Rosenberg of Art Works For Change. Several of the 17 participating artists include Marina Abramovic, Laylah Ali (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Icelandic Love Corporation, and Lucy Orta. Through August 9.
- Ongoing at LACMA is Classical Frieze, an exhibit of recent films and photographs by Eleanor Antin (Season 2). The works on display mimic the ancient world by way of 19th-century neo-classical paintings. Through September 14th.
- White Noise opens this week at James Cohan Gallery. The group show features works that exist at the intersection of visual art, music and sound, exploring “how sound can obliterate as well as elevate; how silence can involve both absence and presence.” Some of the artists include Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Joseph Beuys, Martha Colburn, Rodney Graham, Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, Christian Marclay, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). June 18-August 12.
Don’t Miss: Eleanor Antin at the Drawing Center
Eleanor Antin, "The King," 1972. Video (black and white, silent), TRT: 52 min. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
If you missed Eleanor Antin (Season 2) at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) last night, you can catch her at the Drawing Center this evening. Antin will be reading from her memoir entitled, Conversations with Stalin. An excerpt:
I was what was called in the days of the old left, a red diaper baby. My mother was a Stalinist and though I had a father, nobody ever listened to him because he was just a socialist and everybody knew they were wimps. It was hard in those days, senator McCarthy was putting people in jail, people were losing their jobs, but we were strong because we always knew what was right. Comrade Stalin told us. Or he would have told us if he wasn’t so far away…These are my recollections, more or less, about growing up with the many romantic, economic and psychological problems young people face in our country and how by the end of the day, Comrade Stalin always solved my problems in his own inimitable way, by fucking them up.
The reading begins at 6:30pm and is held in conjunction with the Drawing Center’s current exhibition Unica Zürn: Dark Spring.
On the Road Again in San Jose
With spirits lifting, gas prices lowering and fun-employment escalating, and although it may not be the wisest of economic choices under the sun, the roads nonetheless seem paved with more possibility and promise. Thus maybe it’s time to dust off the thumb, tune up the hybrid engines and give that great American excursion one more try.
Exploring how the “trip takes us” instead of the other way around, the current Road Trip exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art is devoted to this distinctly American rite of passage in which the journey is equally compelling to the destination. Road Trip (through January 25) examines the travel experience through photography, video, sculpture, and works on paper. Some artists methodically document their surroundings and search for remnants of their pasts, while others discard GPS, reinterpret maps and invent their own landscapes for their own imagined journeys, “which often entail not only a physical displacement but also a psychological and emotional passage.” Among the participants are Sophie Calle, Steven Deo, Lordy Rodriguez, Ed Ruscha, and Season 2 artist Eleanor Antin.
Interview with Eleanor Antin Part 2
Following is the second part of my conversation with Eleanor Antin, continued from Part 1 yesterday…
JF: One thing that has been important in my own work with students and colleagues is related to your suggestion about the viewer continuing to look with a playful mind, continuing to search for new meaning and relationships. How do you suggest people slow down and go about doing this in a shopping mall culture, especially with so much access to an art world that summarizes and simplifies?
EA: I hate malls. I hate shopping. When I find an artwork that interests me in a gallery or museum, I can sit with it for a long time, letting its possibilities open up to me. The problem is everybody else. My classical Greek and Roman works are allegories, and while allegories were obviously pleasurable and interesting to a medieval or renaissance audience, they’re not the way busy Americans in that hypothetical mall tend to see the world. But I have some tricks up my sleeve. My images are often funny. They can be beautiful. Some are haunting because they’re melancholy as well. Yet where do these emotional undertones come from? Why is that big strong man sitting in front of an old suitcase filled with heavy rocks? We’ve seen him carrying suitcases before. Is that what he carries around?? Rocks? Why? What does that mean? And why is that woman lying on a funeral bier with moonlight spilling down on her while a blonde adolescent girl awkwardly, perhaps fearfully, stoops to catch a ball that any second now, will be thrown by an older man with a demented grin? We’ve seen him before too, with the dead woman, though she was very much alive then.
Each image is its own allegory and since the characters reappear, we recognize them, we know something about them, so they are part of a meta allegory that hopefully is interesting enough to stop the people in that hypothetical mall and even against their will (after all, they probably want to get back to the car before they’re caught in traffic), force them to stop and really look. Because they’re curious. Maybe they’re disturbed. Maybe they’re laughing. Beautiful and sensual and comic images can seduce even self-absorbed people into entering the artist’s world and maybe recognizing something about their own. Or maybe it’s simply that my work possesses what the great anthropologist Malinowski would have referred to as a high coefficient of weirdness.
JF: You mention having “tricks up your sleeve” to get viewers to look closely at the images you create. I would think that part of it involves taking a variety of risks. Is risk-taking important in order to make these pictures funny, haunting, beautiful, or melancholy? How do you go about taking risks in your work? Is it conscious, or do opportunities present themselves and you go with it?
EA: For some reason I don’t really comprehend, people think my work is very risky as if I’m walking on a high wire, while as far as I’m concerned, I’m just walking over a crack in the pavement. Some people find my concentrated indifference to the fit of my work with the scene a dangerous game. And I do make some effort to have relevance to the going scene; after all, I’m not a hermit, I know what’s going on in the world. But the scene is often trivial and it’s always transient. I’ve watched a lot of scenes come and go—remember I’ve been around a while and seen artists waste a lot of time on work that 4 or 5 years later has become little more than the emperor’s clothes in the fairy tale. Art is too important to come off of a fashion designer’s runway.
Myths, metaphors, and more: Interview with Eleanor Antin, Part 1
Last month I had the good fortune to speak with Eleanor Antin (Season 2) in a series of lively and engaging emails that included her thoughts on preparing for exhibitions, working with allegories, making “controversial” or “risky” art, teaching art, and working with actors (vs. models). Below is the first of two parts. Tune in tomorrow for the nail-biting conclusion. Many thanks to Eleanor for being so candid (and patient!), as we worked on the interview right through the holidays.
Eleanor Antin, The Death of Petronius from The Last Days of Pompeii, 2001. Chromogenic print, 46 5/8 x 94 5/8 inches. All images courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
Joe Fusaro: When you share a series of work or create a proposal for an exhibit, what are some things you think about going into the process?
Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes at the San Diego Museum of Art was a mini retrospective of the work I’ve been doing over the last eight years. Earlier, I had a full retrospective from the late 60’s through 1999 at LACMA and I traveled with that huge show to several museums, including St. Louis and the UK while wondering, ‘where the hell do I go from here?’ Somewhere around that time, one sunny afternoon, I was driving down the mesa to La Jolla, the ocean sparkling blue green below me, La Jolla gleaming in the bay, when suddenly I had an apperçu that hit me with a strange sad power. La Jolla was Pompeii, rich and gleaming, without a clue that it was on the verge of annihilation. Pompeii was where the rich and powerful had gone to escape the heat, stink, and mosquitoes of the Roman summers, where those senators fortunate enough to live that long in the notoriously insecure world of imperial Rome went to retire. Extend the metaphor, and you have the ancient empire merging with ours, where affluent citizens lived the good life innocent of the destruction lurking just around the corner.
So since then, I’ve been working with myths, metaphors, characters, and settings invented out of the ancient world of classical Greece and Rome, all the time aware that these are really my neighbors. Maybe we don’t have a volcano on our doorstep, but with global warming, climate freakiness, wild fires, water loss, disease migrations, economic destabilization, terrorist vengeance—hey, we’re on a roll here….
Love’s Shadow, 1985. 16mm film, black-and-white, 2 1/2 minutes.
For me a show is always motivated by a generative metaphor, a kind of poetic image which opens up to related ideas, images, ambiguities, dreams, sensations. Nothing is closed, there is no end. If the viewer wants to keep looking and has a playful mind, my work can be like a hall of mirrors, expanding and suggesting new meanings which, in turn, may suggest others. Poussin and Magritte are among my favorite artists. They may have different sensibilities but their works are always restless and fluid. Unfortunately, I find the art world too ready to summarize and simplify. I’m often embarrassed by the simplistic takes even well-meaning critics may have on my work. I become a couple of declarative sentences in a stranger’s mouth.
JF: Why do you think some people consider your work controversial? How do you respond to this reaction?
EA: I’m confused when people consider my work “controversial.” Or the word most often used is “brave.” I don’t know what they mean. This isn’t Soviet Russia or Hitler’s Germany—yet. Those countries may have been intellectually monstrous and physically murderous but they seemed to think artists were important enough to persecute. Here, relatively few people care what artists do. This allows us freedom even if it assures us of irrelevance. So to call me brave is silly.
A well-known curator once said disapprovingly to me, “you always do whatever you want to do.” What should I do? What he wanted to do? You can say the art world cares what we artists do. But who are they, this art world? Dealers? Curators? Critics? Collectors? Other artists? Fellow travelers? I’ve been with a great dealer, Ronald Feldman, since 1977 and he respects artists and assumes we will do whatever we want to do. Curators come and go. Critics have deadlines and space constraints. Collectors? Oh, please! They don’t know what they want until somebody tells them. Hopefully they have intelligent advisors, but they often don’t. Other artists, yes, they’re the best part of the art world, though many of them seem to feel that there’s a war out there, so they’re often in survival mode. They won’t always tell you how much your work means to them and that can make you unhappy, or even sometimes buggy, but hell, if they get ideas from you and you stimulate or provoke their work, isn’t that a good thing after all? It just means that there’ll be more good art around.
All I Want For Christmas
All I want for Christmas is to catch up.
The break between Christmas and the New Year provides teachers a time for catching up with family and friends, but also time to reassess how the year is going and plan important next steps for our classes. At this point, I’m in the midst of some great work with the students I teach, including a unit that asks students to create paintings interpreting the theme of power, one that asks students to visually define SELF in a variety of ways and a new unit called OTHERS where AP Studio Art students work one-on-one with models (inspired by an ongoing conversation I’m having with Eleanor Antin, which will be published here on the blog in January). Taking the time over the break to do some purposeful wandering is also a great way to refresh planning and get ready for the second semester. Get out to the exhibit you’ve been wanting to see. Get into the studio (or wherever you make your art) for a little extra time. Catch up on the Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Art in America, Aperture and Art on Paper issues that have been waiting in a neat pile. Make notes. Scribble ideas for big ideas and plans. Lay them all out a few days before going back to teach and begin to plug in artists, art, and maybe even plans for a field trip or two.
Happy Holidays!
Pictured above: Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms”, 1977–79
Spectacolor electronic sign. Times Square, New York, 1986.
