Giving Life
As we continue gearing up for summer and prepare for ways to fuel our work as artists and educators I wanted to take the next few columns and point out some Season 4 artists who have been particularly inspiring over the past months. Catching some of these segments over the summer can have an interesting effect on planning and preparation for the fall!
In my column on June 11th, I wrote about the segment featuring Allora & Calzadilla. This month I would like to strongly recommend taking a close look at Mark Dion. The reason I think art educators want to take notice of Mr. Dion is similar to why I choose many Art21 artists to for my own classroom. He helps redefine and change our perspective on what contemporary art can be, what installation can be, and even what sculpture can be. His work giving a tree new life (a second life!) in Neukom Vivarium (pictured above) demonstrates more of what was discussed with Allora & Calzadilla, including the fact that more and more artists are relying on others, sometimes teams of people, to realize works of art. He allows us to consider sculpture and installation that doesn’t just change over time, but grows. He raises interesting interdisciplinary connections between science and art, and the opening minutes featuring rats painted with tar will challenge viewers to talk about the things considered visual art today.
If you have seen the Mark Dion or Allora & Calzadilla segments in Season 4, I would love to hear what you think. What are your ideas about bringing these artists into the classroom? Are there other Season 4 artists you are considering?
Museum
The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was established eighteen years ago in Kansas City, Missouri on 18th and Vine Streets, just around the corner from the Paseo YMCA building where the Negro National League was founded in 1920 by Andrew “Rube” Foster. The founding of the eight-team league was the direct result of a silent agreement to segregate African-American players from baseball. Jonathan Earle, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas, presents an extensive review of NLBM in a feature article titled In a League of Its Own: The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in May/June 2008 issue of Museum. Several pictures and illustrations accompanying the article make the hard copy more informative and visually appealing than the electronic version. The expansion plans for NLBM will create a five-level structure complete with a gymnasium and an addition of 40,000 square feet, making the museum emerge as one of the most remarkable sport museums in the world.
The other interesting article in the same issue, titled Meet the New Boss: Opening the Door for Emerging Professionals, is a brief survey of the formation of new leadership in the museum field, and it introduces five new leaders who speak about their careers. Given the freedom and team support, this is an enormously fertile time for new leaders to grow and to make dramatic changes and improvements. Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director of MoMA, is a great advocate for open thinking and a huge source of inspiration to new museum professionals and artists. In her Museum interview, Making the Modern More Contemporary, by Robert Ayers, she reflects back on her experience as the director of the Walker Art Center and mentions the positive ripple effects of the close camaraderie and teamwork between the staff. During the April 14th “Artforum at The New School - Art and Money” panel discussion she expressed some of her thoughts on institutional traditions and the necessity for in-depth research to discover new approaches in art.
Another seasoned leader who also took up her new position in February 2008 is Sabine Folie, the Artistic and Managing Director of the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Austria. In her statement she also makes a reference to teamwork: “The time has now come for me and a highly committed team to resume work under the new premises and to continue to build a collection that constitutes a commitment to collecting far away from all criteria oriented by speculation or conforming to the market.”
Exemplary teamwork and nurturing leadership is what I also encountered during my recent collaboration with the staff of Art21. Witnessing the tremendous dedication and knowledge of contemporary art among the Art21 staff was an unprecedented experience for me. The extraordinary results of harmonious teamwork can also be seen in the work of the Art:21 Season 4 artists Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, Catherine Sullivan and Ursula von Rydingsvard. It is apropos to conclude with an interview, featuring Art:21 Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon, titled Gumby, Vavoom, & Baseball Players.
Mark Dion in Philly and New York
The curtains go up tonight at Bartram’s Garden on Mark Dion’s Travels of William Bartram – Reconsidered. The exhibition compiles artifacts, drawings, and assorted natural and unnatural objects collected and created by Dion (Season 4) as he spent seven months retracing the original trail of the 18th-century American naturalists John and his son William Bartram.
Examining the history and culture of that period using the Bartram travel journals, drawings, and maps, Dion followed their journey all the way to Northern Florida, having set off last mid-November in Philadelphia at the explorers’ historic home. Like his predecessors, the artist culled, collected, painted, wrote, drew, and subsequently sent the ‘new artifacts’ back to Bartram’s Garden, where they will be installed in cabinets.
The entire journey was document in real time and archived online HERE. The exhibition at Bertrand’s Garden will be on display until December 6th.
Ever the busy gentleman, a show curated by Dion and J. Morgan Pruett titled Mildred’s Lane opened earlier this week at Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Mildred’s Lane is the name given to Puett and Dion’s 96-acre farm in the Upper Delaware River Valley in rural Pennsylvania. Over the last ten years, Mildred’s Lane has presented workshops, readings, performances, screenings, temporary exhibitions and architectural installations. Central to the project is a connection between research, working, making, and living with art in a rural environment replete with agricultural history and natural beauty.
Mildred’s Lane extends the rich history of artist colonies and retreats and, as Puett and Dion describe it, the core of the project practice and educational philosophy is “an attempt to collectively create new modes of being in the world—this idea incorporates questions of our relation to the environment, systems of labor, forms of dwelling, all of which compose an ethics of comportment.” This summer, Mildred’s Lane will offer a summer residency and curriculum for students at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates runs through September 6th and includes works by numerous artists, including Jorge Colombo, Moyra Davey, Hope Ginsberg, John Haskell, Allison Smith, and Season 3’s Josiah McElheny. Learn more about the history and eccentricities of Mildred’s Lane from this recent Art:21 blog entry.
Revolving Revolt: 16th Biennale of Sydney
From June 18 through September 7, the 16th Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions - Forms That Turn presents the work of 180 artists , including 50 newly commissioned projects. The exhibition “articulates the agency embedded in forms that express our desire for change.” Among the 180 artists are Art21’s Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Dion, and Pierre Huyghe all featured in Season 4 as well as Bruce Nauman (Season 1) and Paul Pfeiffer (Season 2). The Biennale of Sydney is taking place across the city in multiple venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cockatoo Island, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Pier 2/3, Artspace, the Sydney Opera House, and the Royal Botanic Gardens.
For those not in Australia, one can still view the online venue, revolutionsonline. Each visit to the venue presents a new series of works that include film, audio, images, interactive works, live streaming performances, texts and links to existing websites. Works are continuously uploaded to the venue, creating an ever-changing constellation.
Mark Dion and the Folkestone Triennial
The inaugural Folkestone Triennial, titled Tales of Time and Space, will open this Saturday, June 14 with a new work by Season 4 artist Mark Dion. A medium-sized town 66 miles from London and 22 miles from France, Folkestone began as a fishing village, became a successful trading port, and later emerged as a popular Victorian seaside resort. Dion is one of 23 artists invited to engage with Folkestone’s history, culture and built environment for this three-month exhibition. According to artreview.com, Dion researched Folkestone’s gull and, seeking to foster greater love for the birds, developed a Mobile Gull Appreciation Unit (sketch above).
The Triennial is presented in public spaces–the beach, the harbour, parks, the marine promenade and in historic buildings. While some of the commissioned projects are fixed, objects like Dion’s Gull will move around the town over the course of the exhibition. All of the artworks will be on display for the public to experience free of charge through September 14, 2008.
Mark Dion at Mildred’s Lane
Somewhere in rural northern Pennsylvania, fashion designer and artist J. Morgan Puett has been steadily building a home and creating an eccentric future that is lost in the past of Thoreau cabins, Amish and Depression-era garments, Georgian clay floors, curtains dipped in beeswax, rusted metal screens, and rocking chairs. Mildred’s Lane, as the 46-acre property is called, is “an ongoing experiment in art, design and aestheticized living, an artist colony conceived in the communal spirit of 20th-century institutions like Roycroft and Black Mountain College.”
Over the last ten years, visiting artists and friends have come to collaborate with Puett on books, performances, and landscape installations. The latter category includes a garden and cemetery recording the names of distinguished American naturalists, designed by Puett and her former partner Mark Dion (Season 4), with whom she and two other friends originally purchased the property in 1997. Over this time, Dion and Puett have also been working on the main house, a three-level barn with all the fixins’ of “romantic decay” built from scratch over the foundations of an old chicken coop.
Starting this month, Mildred’s Lane (named after Mildred Miller, the last owner who passed away in 1986) begins its new phase as an “interdisciplinary art complex,” offering up to 16 residencies where students can live and work with other visiting artists. For the first session, Dion will collaborate with the students on something called “Mildred Archeology,” with the aim of using artworks, photographs, videos, and journals made at the compound over the last ten years along with old letters, photographs, and ephemera found in the original farmhouse, which had gone untouched between 1987 and 1997. From this they will begin creating the Mildred’s Lane Historical Society and Museum.
To read more about Mildred’s Lane, please go to the original article by Alastair Gordon in the New York Times.
Mark Dion | “Neukom Vivarium”
EXCLUSIVE: Mark Dion leads a discussion of his installation Neukom Vivarium (2006) at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle.
Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates artworks that question the distinctions between “objective” (”rational”) scientific methods and “subjective” (”irrational”) influences.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Mark Dion.
LEARN: Mark Dion is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium, 2006. Courtesy the Seattle Art Museum.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: John Gordon Hill. Sound: Charles Tomaras. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Mark Dion. Thanks: Olympic Sculpture Park.
Maya Lin and More at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Systematic Landscapes, a traveling exhibition of work by Season 1 artist Maya Lin, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through June 30, 2008. The exhibition focuses on a trio of large-scale sculptural installations—2×4 Landscape, Water Line, and Blue Lake Pass (pictured above)—that wed the artist’s deep interest in forces and forms of nature with her long-standing investigation into sculptural forms. Watch a video featuring the installation of 2×4 Landscape at MCA San Diego here.
In a recent Los Angeles Times article, which took the MCA San Diego exhibition as its starting point, Lin discussed her current project for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Calling it her “last memorial,” the commissioned piece will grieve for the animals, birds and plants driven into extinction—and warn of the urgency of acting now to halt the devastation. Envisioning the piece as a “multisite chronicle, including photography and video, at places around the world and with a commemorative list of names of extinct species,” it is scheduled to launch on Earth Day in April 2009.
MCA San Diego’s attention to nature and environmental issues in contemporary art continues this August with Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. Art 21 artists Mark Dion (Season 4) and Ann Hamilton (Season 1) are included in this collaborative multi-year exhibition project that sent eight leading artists to UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Rigo 23, Dario Robleto, Diana Thater and Xu Bing will also participate. Human/Nature is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in partnership with the international conservation organization Rare.
Mark Dion talk at the Ulrich Museum in Wichita
Tomorrow at 6:00pm, the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, KS (a Season 4 mini-grant partner) presents a talk by Season 4 artist Mark Dion. Dion’s interest in the natural world takes him around the globe as he probes the scientific practices that develop and construct our knowledge of the environment. Adopting scientific modes of investigation and display, the artist’s resulting installations often question and upend these traditional methods.
For more information, please contact the Ulrich Museum (316-978-3664/ulrich@wichita.edu).
Wichita State University
School of Art and Design
210 McKnight Art Center West
1845 Fairmount Street
Wichita, KS 67260
Mark Dion at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in NYC
On view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through March 15 is The Octagon Room, a major installation and sculpture project comprising Season 4 artist Mark Dion’s new solo presentation at the gallery.
In The Octagon Room, which takes the form of an architecturally scaled installation, Dion furthers his investigation into the blurred boundaries between art, society, and history, as well as the homogenized methods of their presentation and consumption. Confronting the inherent contradictions between the artifact and the context in which it is displayed, The Octagon Room takes the appearance of a brutalist styled bunker. However, within the installation, the viewer is invited to browse though an abandoned office, the contents of which represent the artist’s own labyrinthine history of the past eight years.
The imagined provenance of each of the objects in Dion’s arrangement adds up to a staggering sum of experiences. As each speaks of an individual past, collectively they present a complex mosaic, informing our understanding of the overall subject matter and material. A wunderkammer both autobiographical and sociological, The Octagon Room takes the nation’s relationship with its own people and its neighbors, and the artist’s status and position within this framework as its foundation.
Based in New York City and Pennsylvania, Dion is currently developing and ongoing project with the John Bartram Association that will result in the exhibition Mark Dion: Travels of William Bartram Reconsidered at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, June 21st - December 6th.
