Weekly Roundup
A teaser image for the exhibition "Blood of Two: Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton." Courtesy of Deste Foundation.
- Matthew Barney (Season 2) and Elizabeth Peyton have collaborated on a site-specific installation for the Deste Foundation in Hydra, Greece. Blood of Two is on view through September 30 in the foundation’s new project space, which used to be the local slaughterhouse. Read The Moment to learn more.
- Tonight at 7pm, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh will lecture at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.
- Sally Mann (Season 1), Kara Walker, Collier Schorr, Louise Bourgeois (all Season 2), Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn (both Season 3), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in a mega display of works by women artists at Cheim & Read. The Female Gaze: Women Looking at Women opens June 25.
- Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Josiah McElheny (Season 3) are on view in the exhibition Universal Code at The Power Plant in Toronto. Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents artists responses to cosmology and ideas of the universal in the current age of information. Continues through August 30, 2009.
- The Art Newspaper reports that nearly twenty bronze sculptures in the Tasting Garden (1998), a public art project by Season 4 artist Mark Dion, have been stolen. The garden was created for the inaugural Artranspennine exhibition organized by Tate Liverpool and the Henry Moore Institute.
- Art critic Christopher Knight of the LA Times has reviewed Hipnostasis, a collaborative video and multi-screen installation by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) and Yoshua Okon at Armory Center for Arts in Southern California.
- Read Deborah Sontag’s extensive New York Times article about Yinka Shonibare (Season 5), poetically titled Headless Bodies From a Bottomless Imagination.
Summer Reading Part 2
Jenny Holzer, "WISH LIST BLACK," detail, 2006
Continuing with my column from May 27, I’d like to suggest a few more books related to contemporary art education that you may be inspired to buy, borrow or steal this summer (but please, steal from someone who has the book sitting on a shelf waiting to be opened, not from your local library!).
First, Julie Thompson’s suggestion to check out Paulo Freire’s Teachers as Cultural Workers - Letters to Those Who Dare Teach is an excellent one. Thank you, Julie! She also mentioned John Dewey’s Art as Experience, which is must reading if you haven’t already.
Other suggestions include:
Elliot Eisner’s The Arts and the Creation of Mind
Olivia Gude’s article, Postmodern Principles: In Search of a 21st Century Art Education (also a must!)
Anne-Celine Jaeger’s Image Makers, Image Takers: Interviews with Today’s Leading Curators, Editors and Photographers
Please continue to share your ideas for summer reading as we get closer to the official start of the season….
This Week’s Round-Up
James Turrell Museum (Photo: Florian Holzherr)
- On April 22nd, the collector Donald Hess opened the world’s first James Turrell Museum in Colomé, Argentina. The 18,084sf space is based on a plan created by Turrell himself, and showcases nine light installations representing five decades of the Season 1 artist’s career. All works on display are drawn from the Hess Art Collection, Bern, Switzerland, in which Turrell is represented with 22 pieces.
- The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts has announced the five recipients of the 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts. They are Paul Chan, Rinde Eckert , John King, Reggie Wilson, and Season 2’s Paul Pfeiffer. Now in its 15th year, the $75,000 Award recognizes experimenters in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre, and visual arts.
- The New Yorkers opened last Friday at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. As the press release states, the exhibition, like the Big Apple, is “difficult to map out.” The list of artists includes, among many, Agathe Snow, Peter Saul, Kostas Seremetis, Ryan Wallace, and Art21’s Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. The show runs through June 22nd.
- Season 4 artist Mark Dion lectures tonight at Portland State University, at the Shattuck Hall Annex. It’s at 7:30 and free!
- Oliver Herring’s solo exhibition Teens with Masks is up now through June 13 at Max Protetch. The show includes a number of new photo-collage works by the Season 3 artist.
Flash Points: Art+Politics, Looking Back & Moving Forward
Everything old is new again, (left) a Soviet-era poster by Alexander Rodchenko, and (right) a contemporary poster by Shepard Fairey
These last two months have proved to be full of lively posts about the sometimes clear and often nebulous intersection of Art+Politics.
Art21’s own Marc Mayer kicked things off when he asked:
Is art inherently political, regardless of its intentions or motives? What role has political art played both in the history of art but also in the broader context of history? Can and will art participate in this new mandate of “change,” and if so, how?
His provocative questions allowed for a whole slew of people to chime in with their thoughts about a topic that never gets old.
As expected, there was a lot of talk about Obama (1, 2, 3, 4) and Shepard Fairey in particular, since the latter’s iconic image of the former sparked a global debate about the recent marriage of art and politics in a modern democracy.
Jenny Holzer (Season 4) was a hot topic since her retrospective PROTECT PROTECT traveled from Chicago to New York during the series. Posts focused on many aspects of Holzer’s work, but most poignantly on her deconstruction of a Pentagon PowerPoint presentation that proceeded the 2003 Iraq invasion and hand prints of U.S. soldiers accused of war crimes.
There were also enlightening discussions about:
- the use of art in the classroom during the 2008 election;
- arts programming for incarcerated girls (pt. 1, pt. 2);
- how an artist not traditionally associated with politics—Jessica Stockholder—uses beauty and taste to address political issues;
- a British perspective on art + politics in America;
- an arts group, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), which has been advocating for collective action by arts workers;
- two perspectives from artists working in Oakland, CA;
- a blogger’s look at the “Extimasies: Art, Politics, Society in Times of Crisis” conference in Athens, Greece;
- another blogger points out “a few of the artists who exemplify the shift from an inward to an outward focus” which, she says, is part of the dawn of the new Obama era;
- one writer uses Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade as a springboard to discuss the character of art in the political arena;
- a sneak peak at the politics of this summer’s La Biennale de Venezia;
- guest blogger Paul Schmelzer asks: Where’s All the Right-Wing Street Artists?;
- three activist artists to watch; and
- a discussion about what Obama should do with the arts and a post lauding the $50 million in arts funding in the stimulus bill that was approved by Congress…
A view of the bombed car part of Jeremy Deller's "It Is What It Is" in Philadelphia. (via the artblog)
…which brings us to our next Flash Points topic, Art+Economics.
But before we closed out this current topic, let’s take a quick look at some other noteworthy news or opinions from around the web on the always relevant and controversial topic of Art+Politics:
- The Abu Ghraib JPEGs, museums and national responsibility (Modern Art Notes);
- A Chinese art dealer whose winning bid of $40 million snagged him two 18th C. Chinese bronzes from the Yves St-Laurent estate is now regretting his foray into international politics (Bloomberg);
- A writer asks “Can Art Impact Politics?” and discusses the archetypal political painting, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (The Oregonian);
- Another blog looks at the lasting power of Guernica (Art Threat);
- Is art being used to heal the rift between Cuba and the United States? (BBC);
- A New York art dealer thinks about how the humanities can save America (Edward Winkleman):
- Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana cuts state funding for the arts 83% (Culture Monster/LA Times);
- A look at the Annual Arts Advocacy day on Capitol Hill (Looking Around/Time); and
- Jeremy Deller’s It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq is spotted in Philadelphia (the artblog).
Next up: Art+Economics
Making Artistic Noise Part 2: Contemporary Activist Art
To continue from my first post, at Artistic Noise, we teach a curriculum that focuses on issues relevant to the lives of incarcerated and system-involved youth and uses art to encourage them to develop his or her voice. For every topic we explore, we study the work of contemporary artists who are creating work related to the one at hand. Our use of contemporary art can be as in-depth as creating an artwork inspired by an original piece or as simple as a daily check-in question. We have the luxury of ninety-minute classes to explore a different idea about contemporary artwork in almost every session.
Violence is something that affects so many of these teens. On a recent field trip to MoMA, we looked at, and took back with us, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Death by Gun). Our students used his poster-sized artwork to create books with their own views on gun violence. We have also explored Walid Ra’ad’s work, Oh, God, He Said Talking to a Tree, while discussing the issue of violence. Through these in-depth discussions, the students explore why contemporary artists, such as Gonzalez-Torres and Ra’ad, choose the materials and imagery they do to convey their idea, meaning, or message.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. "'Untitled'" (Death by Gun)," 1990.
In our art and entrepreneurship studio, we have an entire wall of examples of contemporary artwork. Our programs are based on the Restorative Justice philosophy, in which we begin and end every group in a circle with a check-in question and a check-out question. Quite often, our check-in question will relate to the contemporary art wall. Recently, we asked students to choose a piece and say one word that they felt described it. One of the boys chose a photo of a woman wearing a shirt with the Jenny Holzer truism stating ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE. The discussion about the artwork was lively, excited, and involved. Not knowing that this piece was part of a series entitled Truisms, the young man described the work as “the truth.”
Jenny Holzer, "Truisms," 1977–79. T-shirt worn by Lady Pink, New York, 1983.
Jenny Holzer talks about her Whitney show
Paddy Johnson interviewed Jenny Holzer for New York Press about her new show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (it opened yesterday, March 12).
Titled PROTECT PROTECT, the exhibition is packed into one floor of the Upper East Side museum and shows a selection of Holzer’s work from the last two decades.
Art21 released a new video on Holzer this week, featuring the outdoor Xenon Projections of PROTECT PROTECT in Chicago. Watch it here and view the others released earlier this year here and here.
Following is a short excerpt from an information-packed interview that covers the technical execution of Holzer’s works, her thoughts about the curation of text and the role of intuition in her art:
Paddy Johnson: You’ve talked about how you like your work to be socially useful. In your opinion, what are the more useful capacities art can serve today?
Jenny Holzer: A translation is that I want to be useful somehow to justify my existence. I don’t think that art has to be useful, at least not in any straightforward way. I don’t want art in service. But good art can be responsive, alive to and so truthful about what’s around, and that’s potentially helpful. Being awestruck, dumbstruck and transfixed by art can be dandy. And being aroused, stunned, terrified, lulled, intrigued, confounded, freed, schooled and euphoric is a lot, and art can do that and more.
PJ: Indexable text on the Internet has created both the desire and need for textual curation. Has this influenced your practice in any way?
JH: Since I stopped writing, I’m always pulling text off the web and trying to put it in order so that I can give collections to people.The Redaction, Hand and Map paintings at the Whitney are a result of this activity. I searched for declassified and other sensitive material on the war in Iraq and the treatment of detainees in hopes of understanding more about what happened, then I silk-screened the pages that seemed most representative and telling. Often I chose first-person accounts because the “I” stays alive and helps me understand and reply to the history. And to my surprise, I’ve been picking images sometimes rather than text, so that the stories can be glimpsed rather than read. I’m working on the installation of these paintings for the Whitney and am finding that the hanging can reflect the original searches at times and that’s interesting.
Read the whole interview here.
Jenny Holzer | “Projection for Chicago”
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Jenny Holzer discusses the process behind her series of Xenon Projections as part of the exhibition PROTECT PROTECT at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Featured works include Projection for Chicago (2008), a multi-part projection of the texts of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska on building facades around the city, including the Lyric Opera House & Riverside Plaza, among others. Holzer’s traveling exhibition opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York on March 12, 2009.
Whether questioning consumerist impulses, describing torture, or lamenting death and disease, Jenny Holzer’s use of language provokes a response in the viewer. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations. Holzer’s texts—such as the aphorisms “abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “protect me from what I want”—have appeared on posters and condoms, and as electronic LED signs and projections of xenon light. Holzer’s recent use of text ranges from silk-screened paintings of declassified government memoranda detailing prisoner abuse, to poetry and prose in a 65-foot wide wall of light in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller, Nick Ravich & Kelly Shindler. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera & Sound: George Monteleone and Alexander Stewart. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Jenny Holzer. Text Courtesy: Wislawa Szymborska. Special Thanks: MCA Chicago & Karla Loring.
This Week…
Jeff Koons, "Self-Portrait" (1991)
Happy Monday with a busy week of activity from Art21 artists. Here are some highlights:
- This Thursday and Friday at the Guggenheim, created in response to the museum’s current The Third Mind exhibition, Laurie Anderson presents a new solo performance of adventure stories, poems, and music. Drawn from the artist’s life and previous work, Transitory Life: Some Stories transmits a Buddhist sensibility in the zen of the Frank Lloyd Wright building.
- Jenny’s Holzer’s PROTECT PROTECT opens March 12 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The 15-year survey of the Season 4 artist’s works makes its third stop after stints at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Fondation Beyeler, Basel. “Alternating between fact and fiction, the public and the private, the universal and the particular, Holzer’s work offers an incisive social and psychological portrait of our times.”
- Opening at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on the Ides of March Eve is Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes. Centering on three large-scale sculptural installations, the exhibition addresses geologic phenomena, exploring how people perceive and experience the landscape in a time of heightened technological influence and environmental awareness.
- On view at Gagosian Gallery through April 11 is Marble, a group exhibition that takes a compressed, over-the-ages look at the revered medium. The selection includes Anatolian and Cycladic idols as well as a Renaissance bust once owned by Andy Warhol, all of which presage the likes of Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, and the more recent Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Louise Bourgeois.
Women in the City - One Year Later
Barbara Kruger, "Plenty", 2008. Video billboard, 3 min.15 sec. looping. Courtesy of West of Rome.
Last year, gallerist Emi Fontana curated Women in the City, a public art exhibition spread throughout the streets of Los Angeles. Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman were displayed as posters and billboards; on video screens; at a movie theater; in storefronts and gardens; and widely distributed as stickers. The project was cited in the year-end issue of Artforum as one of the best in 2008.
Tomorrow at 4pm, Fontana, Kruger, and Joanne Heyler will participate in a panel discussion about the state of public art in Los Angeles and its future. The program, moderated by Joshua Decter, will be held at The Standard in downtown L.A.
What’s an Art Contest?
Catherine Sullivan, "Baby Jane/Amusement Infusion," production still, 2002. Performer: Michael Garvey. From "Big Hunt," five channels shot on 16mm film transferred to video, projected from DVD, 21 min 48 sec per channel, black and white, silent. © Catherine Sullivan.
Contests. Art Shows. Expos. Special Exhibits. Art Festivals. It’s crazy.
While they are called by different names, art educators often have a similar reaction: Someone has a big idea and wants student art to decorate a space. The number of art contests we see in the average school year can make your head spin. There are contests to make posters about everything from teeth to tap water to trash recycling. There are contests for holidays and anniversaries. There are even contests for exhibits that the student artists themselves can’t attend. I’m serious!
But contests, if there is a clear set of criteria that judges are using to pick the artists, can offer students and teachers a chance try new ideas and tap into themes, media, and forms of expression that may not see the light of day in an existing curriculum. Distinguishing between contests that essentially exploit students vs. participating in meaningful and interesting opportunities with them is part our work. Classroom time is never enough for many kids and creating works of art outside of school that utilize meaningful exhibition opportunites can actually enhance curriculum and student portfolios.
Contemporary art gives students a basis and starting point for looking at themes, such as Protest and Consumption, that can influence extra-curricular work dramatically. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Nancy Spero, Michael Ray Charles and Kerry James Marshall, for example, can give students new insights into work that’s about race, activism, propaganda and stereotypes. Exhibit opportunities and contests can be a chance for students to get inspired by art outside of the planned curriculum.
How do you use (or not use) these kinds of “opportunities” in your own classroom?
