Anderson and Walker Among 85 Weirdest
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales magazine is featuring “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” Each day since March 26th the Weird Tales website is posting an honoree, in no particular order.
The big list from “the original magazine of the unique, fantastic, and bizarre” was compiled from magazine advisors and readers, who were asked to not limit their suggestions to just fiction writers, but also filmmakers, songwriters, cartoonists, and more. The 85 include among them David Bowie, William S. Burroughs, Salvador Dali, Franz Kafka, Wim Wenders, and Art21 artists Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Kara Walker (Season 2).
For the entire list, pick up an issue or visit the Weird Tales website.
Laurie Anderson takes “Homeland” on tour
Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will be taking her new politico-musical on global tour starting March 26th with a kick-off at Carnegie Hall. As previously mentioned by Art21 guest blogger Seth Curcio, Homeland is composed of a series of narratives and songs that harvest everything from Greek drama to global warming, surveillance culture, the machinations of corporate America, Tuvan throat singing, technology, the Patriot Act, and even prostitution in Beverly Hills.
The full-length piece marks a return to subject matter than Anderson explored 25 years ago with United States: Parts I-IV, a work that established the artist as an innovator with a penchant for analyzing the collective psyche. Focused through the lens of technology, Anderson’s early vision of America intersected music, film, performance, electronics, and gesture-driven movement using images of telephone answering machines, televisions, and gadgetry that unmasked the human condition and ultimately heralded the age of the Internet.
Homeland ‚Äúcomes full circle with her perpetual analysis of America’s rarely talked-about inner psyche‚ĶTo watch Anderson perform is to revel in her honesty. She imparts natural truths encoded in our DNA, whether soliloquizing a narrative based on folklore or reminiscing about a trip to the laundromat in a dream. Anderson’s music and monologues are rapturous temples dedicated to our everyday existence, revealing our own insecurities‚Äù (Randy Nordschow, Playbill Arts).
An accompanying album to Homeland will be released in early 2009 on Nonesuch. For a complete listing of cities and dates for Homeland, please visit Pitchfork Media’s website.
The Missing Peace at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Currently on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama is a traveling multimedia exhibition that brings together 88 artists whose work reflects the principles or essence of the Dalai Lama. Organized by the Committee of 100 for Tibet and the Dalai Lama Foundation, the exhibition has a remarkable roster of contemporary artists, including Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Marina Abramovic, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Spencer Finch, Pat Steir, Santiago Cucullu, Lewis DeSoto, Anish Kapoor, and El Anatsui to name just a few.
Photographs of the Dalai Lama taken by Chuck Close, Herb Ritts, and Richard Avedon begin the exhibition under the heading “Interpreted Portraits.” An abstract portrait painted by Ken Aptekar‚Äîbased on Charles Demuth’s 1928 painting The Figure 5 in Gold‚Äîis also included in the introductory space. Though organized in nine sections, objects and themes overlap in their shared threads of Buddhist philosophy such as peace, unity, tolerance, impermanence, and unity.
On view at YBCA until March 16, 2008, The Missing Peace is “intended to be simultaneously educational, inspirational, and transformative; its goal is to engage and heal,‚Äù writes curator Randy Jayne Rosenberg. Visit The Missing Peace website for a full list of artists, venues, and a virtual tour; see a NY Times slideshow of works in the exhibition; or become part of Making Peace, an associated community-based project using mobile phones.
Chuck Close show at Tacoma Art Museum features Art21 artists
Those in the Seattle area will want to check out A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a show of photographs by Chuck Close and typeset poetry by Bob Holman, and featuring portraits of Art21 artists Laurie Anderson, James Turrell (both Season 1), and Kiki Smith (Season 3). The show, which opened March 1 at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, explores Close’s use of the daguerreotype as a starting point to create other works. Close often draws on his friends, many of them artists themselves, as subjects for his photographs and paintings. In addition to Anderson, Turrell, and Smith, visitors will also see images of artists Phillip Glass, Cindy Sherman, and Elizabeth Peyton. The show also finds Close examining the limits of photographic portraiture, employing other related media such as tapestries and photogravures in unconventional ways.
The exhibition continues through June 15. Read more about the exhibition and view additional images here.
Laurie Anderson: Spring Homeland Tour
Laurie Anderson, Art:21 Season 1 artist, will be conducting a follow-up spring tour for her project Homeland, which traveled throughout Europe last summer. The tour will begin on April 4th and will continue into June with her final confirmed date at the Spoleto USA festival in Charleston, South Carolina. The tour will visit several international venues, including stops in Moscow, London, and Spain, as well as domestic cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Boston.
The Homeland tour will follow the artist’s latest projects, including Night Life, a new book of drawings released in March of 2007, and the re-release of Big Science with exclusive bonus material by nonesuch records in July of 2007.
The Return of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science
Laurie Anderson‚Äôs landmark debut album from 1981, Big Science, gets a second life courtesy of the new 25th-anniversary reissue from Nonesuch Records. Along with a remastered version of Anderson‚Äôs chart topper, ‚ÄúO Superman,‚Äù the album features a new recording of the 1981 debut title single “Big Science,” this time with Lou Reed, and Antony Hegarty (Antony & the Johnsons namesake and recent Bj√∂rk collaborator).
Big Science has its own mini-website within Laurie’s site. There, you can also listen to a few iterations of “O Superman” in various languages and forms, including a disco version.
Listen to the original here.
And watch the video:
Three Art21 artists exchange roles at Sean Kelly
Art21 featured artists Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Janine Antoni (Season 2) and Matthew Barney (Season 3) are all taking part in Role Exchange, a group show of twenty-seven artists at Sean Kelly Gallery through August 3, 2007.
These artists address the process through which identity is constructed by exploring different roles and characters. Though disparate in formal resolution, the artists in this exhibition share an impulse to transform traditional social roles. They require us to redefine our perceived categorizations of gender and identity, allowing for more nuanced systems of classification and a greater understanding of their abiding interest in role exchange.
Other artists in Role Exchange include: Marina Abramovic, Sophie Calle, Samuel Fosso, Robert Gober, Anthony Goicolea, Douglas Gordon, Fergus Greer / Leigh Bowery, Johan Grimonprez, Lyle Ashton Harris, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Michel Journiac, Nikki S. Lee, Kalup Linzy, Urs Lüthi, Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, Yasumasa Morimura, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Gavin Turk, Andy Warhol, and Gillian Wearing.
Three Art21 Artists in Automatic Update exhibition at MoMA
MoMA’s new media exhibition, Automatic Update, features work by Art21 artists Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Paul Pfeiffer (Season 2), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).
Laurie Anderson’s short film about cloning herself, What You Mean We? (1986) screens during the program “Automatic Update: Shorts,” this Wednesday and also Thursday, August 30 at 6 p.m.
Paul Pfeiffer’s installed video loop, John 3:16 (2000, on left) is currently on view in MoMA’s Media Gallery.
Two Minutes Out of Time (2000, right), a video by Pierre Huyghe about purchasing the rights to a Manga character, is screening Thursday, August 30 at 8:30 p.m. as part of the exhibition’s ‚ÄúThe Artist and the Computer‚Äù program.
