John Baldessari, "Beach Scene/Nuns/Nurse (with Choices)", 1991 courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Within the first few pages of the season 5 Educators’ Guide, readers are asked to think about the power and influence of juxtaposing images in order to give the viewer very different experiences. Working with artists like John Baldessari, a few of my classes recently began a unit to explore how juxtaposition has the power to send visual messages, tell stories, and even share qualities about ourselves.

Over the course of a few days, I asked students to bring in and collect a variety of images they would like to combine in a single artwork. After assembling the images and cropping them a bit, I asked them about the images they selected and what these images said about their interests, their habits and even their passions. One student remarked that the images he selected basically described his obsession with money. Another described her images as being primarily connected to food, which is something finds comfort in. Still another described his images revolving around his work related to environmental projects.

As students assemble their works this week, we will also begin moving into some small-group research exploring how juxtaposition can be used to send messages simply by placing certain images side-by side.

Nancy Spero "Masha Bruskina / Gestapo Victim" 1994, courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York

Students will be asked to work with partners to research and collect images (fine art reproductions, advertisements, posters, etc.) that send specific messages through juxtaposition. Along with viewing works by John Baldessari, we will be also be looking into artists such as Yinka Shonibare MBE, Nancy Spero, Kerry James Marshall, and Eleanor Antin.

Creating high quality works of art that are technically proficient is always very satisfying for both teachers and students, but when we have the opportunity to make students more aware of the images they see, and how they relate to larger themes and broader issues, we are teaching students not only how to create works of art but also how to interpret them.

Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:

• The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.

• On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.

• Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.

• Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.

• Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.

• Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.

• A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.

• John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.

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.

"Satyr and Hermaphrodite." Oplontis, so-called Villa of Poppaea. Installation at LACMA. Courtesy of Museum Associates/LACMA

One of my favorite pieces in Pompeii, Satyr and Hermaphrodite, shows two androgynous figures engaged in a struggle. The Hermaphrodite’s hand is forced into the Satyr’s face, the Satyr is reaching for the Hermaphrodite, and you can’t quite tell if they’re trying to pull one another closer or ward one another off. To top it off, the limbs of these figures have broken off in key places–the Satyr’s missing part of his forearm and I think the Hermaphrodite is missing a knee cap–making the activity they’re engaged more absurd. Looking at this sculpture now, I have trouble imagining it was ever anything but theatrical.

LS: Wow, this feels like the elephant in the room! There is always a lot of hubbub about preserving ancient art, to the extent that the conservation process can overshadow the work itself. The art from Pompeii is particularly enthralling because Vesuvius’ lava paradoxically destroyed the culture while preserving much of the art. But nobody really talks about the effects these imperfections have on the impact of the work itself. As viewers, we are implicitly charged to admire the feats of conservators (human or volcanic), while ignoring the bits and pieces that cannot be restored. Yet if we accept that form generates meaning, then these kinds of changes in the form are going to alter the experience of the viewer.

It’s interesting that you brought up Satyr and Hermaphrodite as an example of this twist in the visual experience–it’s certainly replete with ambiguities. You come upon the sculpture and it feels like a good old scene of female victimization. Then as you circle it, you see that those sumptuous breasts are accompanied by male genitalia. When this show was exhibited at the National Gallery last year, there was a potted plant obscuring the view of the Hermaphrodite’s genitalia. That seems like such a travesty! One thing I can say for LA is that we’re not afraid of sexuality, no matter how weird it gets.

CW: Maybe we just identify with weirdness, or want to. I like what you said about Vesuvius destroying a culture and preserving art. Here’s how I loosely relate that to LA: Irving Blum, the co-owner of the famed Ferus gallery, found in LA general hostility to anything new. He said, “In the one place where that hostility had no right to exist, one encountered [it].” Angelinos wanted their art to preserve past cultures, cultures to which they had no real relationship. Of course, things have changed since Blum’s reign in the 1960s. Now, contemporary art, in LA and elsewhere, is pretty much accepted as the making or remaking of culture (not that it always does this well).

LS: Perhaps Angelinos were more like the Romans, who wanted their art to be like the Greeks. But then Los Angeles got tired of its reputation for being barren of culture and made a concerted effort to create culture. The success of those attempts is of course dubious. Can you fabricate culture? I guess we should ask Eli Broad. Now that the money is disappearing, is our bit of culture going to vanish like Pompeii? Is the recession our Vesuvius? On the other hand, this could be the most fertile time of all… and we’ll be here watching!

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.

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)


Too much of a woman? Eleanor Antin employs two actresses—one blond and one brunette—to play Helen of Troy in a series of photographic scenes. (via Art21)

Continuing our tour of ancient Greece, filmmaker Eve Sussman talks about the process of producing The Rape of the Sabine Women. (via IMA)

“Why are they a clown?” wonders Cindy Sherman, investigating the dark side of family entertainment. (via Art21)

Not dark enough? Try the work of Melanie Pullen, Marci Washington, and Tara Tucker who explore murder, cannibalism, war, and conflict in their works. (via KQED)

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!

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

JF: Students often have difficulty when they first work with models/actors. There is something about developing a relationship between the artist and the model to get at truly beautiful (or unique, or shocking) works of art. In the Art:21 series, artists like Sally Mann and Oliver Herring have talked about working with models and how they go about their work. How do you go about your work with actors before a shoot? Are there things that you do beforehand that make the actors more comfortable and able to visualize what you want and what will happen?

EA: I never have any trouble getting my actors to relax. They are all relaxed. They are either professional artist’s models, actors, and when an occasional plumber or cabbie gets into the act, he goes with the flow. I have stopped interesting looking people in the street, asking them if they’d like to be an ancient Roman or even, if they look cool, a dead Trojan. It turns out that everybody wants to be an ancient Roman. When my actors walk dressed and made up into the set, they’re already in character. Sure, some people are better actors than others but the pleasure and excitement of transcending their every day Southern California environment takes over. And with the few people who suddenly feel clumsy and misplaced, I jump into rescue mode. I charm them, I caress them, I flatter them, I love them, and I show it.

You know, I was a professor at UCSD for almost 30 years. I mostly taught performance, video, personal narrative, grad seminars….but I still loved to draw and at one point, I began to teach a course in Life Drawing, though our conceptual art department didn’t want to spend money for models. This was the 70’s when people were into self-understanding and personal growth, so I said, “Ok guys, we’ll model for ourselves.” Those who felt brave could take off their clothes during their poses, the others were welcome to pose with clothes. Some kids said they’d never take off their clothes. They were shocked. One visiting student from Africa would die first. “No problem, sweetie, just sit here and read a book and we’ll draw you.” But the kids who posed nude, I gave them a loving analysis of their bodies, its language, its elegance, what it said about them. By the end of the term, everybody, including our visitor from Africa, demanded to pose nude. They all wanted to learn about their bodies, because they would learn about themselves. They knew that I wouldn’t lie but that I saw things nobody else did. And I’m the kind of person for whom the cup is always half full, so when I didn’t have beauty to deal with, I certainly could find character, impulse, clarity, expressiveness. And it was always there, of course. As they knew, I wouldn’t lie.

It’s the same now with my actors (and I always call them actors, because ‘model’ is a static word—it implies a certain limpness of action and character. Actors are active artists). Of course, I position them the precise way I want them to be before the camera. I give them their story characters, their relationships. But they always add something of their own. With only 1 or 2 exceptions, I’m very good at casting. With photography, that’s half the job. In a moving picture, a film or video, the actor has a chance to add to his or her affect, to build a character in time and with action. But in a still image, there’s just a fraction of a second. So a large part of the job is to choose the actors to fit visually with my complex allegorical images. Many of my actors have told me that working with me changed their lives. I don’t think it was me; it was the chance to shed their own skin, to work themselves into another time and place without fear or danger and then safely return.

JF: I love the teaching story from UCSD. How has your work as an artist been influenced by your time teaching and how is/was your teaching influenced by your work as an artist?

EA: I think I was a good teacher because I always thought of it as a kind of cooperative artmaking.  My intention as a teacher was not to teach any rules or “right ways”—there aren’t any. I tried to locate within their young work an impulse towards some kind of meaning, a direction toward which it tended, and then worked with them to help them realize it. If we were successful, they released, discovered, and invented their own voice. In that way, my teaching over 30 years has afforded me the intense pleasure of experiencing the making of many kinds of artworks that I myself would never have made.

JF: What was one of your greatest challenges as a teacher?

EA: Usually the students who took my classes had a more conceptual bent. And unlike life, I put no limits on what they wanted to do or say. Though perhaps there was one kind of limit. I remember the time I stopped an artwork and for me, that’s one of the 8 deadly sins, censoring an artwork. I had asked the students to make a criminal artwork, to do a crime, as it were, but not to hurt themselves or anybody else. One kid brought in a thriving rubber plant and as we watched, proceeded to carefully paint each of its full leaves with black paint. It was shocking. It was also one of the strongest works in the class. We were witnessing what you might call a little murder. He was killing the plant, making it powerless to breathe. It was wrenching to watch, and after a couple of leaves were painted over, I stopped him. I congratulated him on an especially powerful and elegant art work but I couldn’t allow it to go on. We discussed why and what each of our actions, his and mine, meant.

JF: Last question…. Do YOU have any questions?

EA: No questions, Joe. Yours have opened up some interesting discourse, some interesting memories, too. I don’t always answer in standard Q&A fashion, but then, as they say, I don’t make art in standard ways, either.