Culture Wars: Trivial Tunes with Mary Heilmann

What better way to soundtrack an art and pop culture event than to invite an in-tune-with-pop-culture artist to curate a selection of their favorite music?

Mary Heilmann was a natural fit for our inaugural Culture Wars trivia event, and we were thrilled when she accepted our invitation to create a soundtrack for the evening. We really could not have asked for a better pairing. Culture Wars participants were treated to selections from Mary’s music collection—hand picked by Mary herself—as they entered the main stage at the 92YTribeca, and they were treated to more between scoring sessions during the halftime intermission and after the second half.

With Mary on hand at the trivia event, it seemed only fitting to create an entire music-themed “audio” round. Titled Personnel Changes, the round was inspired by the announcement of Jeffrey Deitch’s upcoming appointment as the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The questions involved 10 bands or musicians where a personnel change affected their musical output. Each question included a snippet of a song, and we asked the players to name the band or musician in question (for 1 point) and to briefly state the personnel change (for another point).

A video of the audio round from the January 28 event, along with Mary Heilmann’s playlist, is included below. Play along at home and let us know how you did!

Mark your calendars: The next Culture Wars night is on Wednesday, March 24, at the 92YTribeca.

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Weekly Roundup

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21’s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!

Art21 “Exclusive” Video, Year 2

What a year it’s been! We’re taking a look back at the 42 Exclusive videos that premiered here on the Art21 Blog, and subsequently on YouTube and iTunes. We hope you’ve enjoyed this new feature for 2009 and, as always, look forward to your comments.

What’s our New Year’s resolution? We’ll be premiering more behind-the-scenes moments with contemporary artists such as Beryl Korot, Shahzia Sikander, Allan McCollum, Julie Mehretu, Cao Fei, Florian Maier-Aichen, and many, many more. Check out what happened in year one.

Letter from London: Frieze! Rock!

The Frieze Art Fair, like other kinds of trade fair, isn’t really designed for those outside of the trade it exists to buffer; it’s a bonus if you end up seeing things you like. The organizers’ great trick is to make a trade fair the hub of a weekend of frenetic cultural activity, with big-name museum retrospectives at Tate Modern, the Hayward, and the Serpentine strongarmed into a subsidiary role. Picture an agricultural show or office furniture exposition taking such a commanding presence in the wider culture and you get a sense of the strangeness of the way we experience art now (plus the fact that members of the public paid upwards of £20 to get in). To leaven the outright commercialism of the fair itself, there are the much-vaunted “fringe” events: Club Nutz, a recreation of “the world’s smallest comedy club” in Milwaukee, the SUPERFLEX collective’s series of short films about the financial crisis, experimental/spoken word radio station Resonance FM’s temporary lodgings in the midst of the fair, and Jordan Wolfson’s theoretical physicists discussing string theory at various strategic locations. For all their whimsical appeal, visitors can’t help but sense the sugaring of pills, even while nodding insiderishly at Club Nutz’s techno set played backwards, which sounded like Robocop having a migraine.

Strategically released rumors had it that gallerists were quietly confident about sales, perhaps since many plumped for sure-fire market winners. Current Turbine Hall occupant Miroslaw Balka’s rust-encrusted bric-a-brac popped up several times, as did Emin’s neon scrawls and wall-sized Gilbert and Georges. A lobby-sized Tuymans faced off against a lobby-sized Polke, as if daring collectors to make a choice. Thankfully, not all galleries played it entirely safe. Charles Ray’s hypnotic Moving Wire (1988) at Matthew Marks – aluminium wires slowly protruding from a hole in the wall, quivering under their own weight, then retracting turtleishly back – insisted on a quiet absorption impossible not to give. Jack Strange’s display of MacBooks at Limoncello, each belonging to a different friend of the artist, showed random flippings through their subjects’ iPhoto and iTunes collections, in what was ostensibly a kind of contemporary portraiture but ended up good voyeuristic fun. Art21’s very own Ida Applebroog showed a suite of scary and lush new paintings at Hauser and Wirth alongside a lovely, zinging Mary Heilmann called Some Pretty Colours. Sadly the Heilmann was drowned out by a pair of dirty socks; dumped on the floor in front of the painting, they’re a work by Christoph Buchel. Apparently they reached their asking price of $30,000, lending credence to the truism that a good sign in the art world is literally a sign of insanity in the real one.

Even in a comparatively sober year, Frieze has a carnivalesque brashness about it, and it’s interesting that the major museum shows (of which more next time) that have coincided with the fair’s brief dominance take up the circumspection that is touched upon, if briefly, in the fair itself. At Tate Modern, Miroslaw Balka’s installation in the Turbine Hall – a vast metal room on stilts, accessible by a walkway, whose interior is entirely, pitilessly black, entitled, with weird post-Jacksonian resonance, How It Is – must have been an extraordinarily enveloping experience when first encountered (in other words, in its embryonic press-view state). Sadly, its location sets up certain expectations (light-heartedness, accessibility, interactivity) established by earlier occupants of the site, and the clanging of feet on the metal floor, and the hovering blue squares of mobile phone screens, make it feel like The Buchenwald Experience.

If you’re an artist installing works in an existing museum building, you can either accept the limitations of the space and the collection, or – if you’re Damien Hirst – you can rehang entire galleries in stripy linen to show your latest works to maximum effect. His latest show, entitled, with a characteristic blend of pomposity and unwitting irony, No Love Lost, is a display of paintings made (and this has been used as a selling point, astonishingly) entirely by himself. That they’re weak ’50s Bacon rip-offs knocked out with breathtaking ineptitude is not really the point. The point is that Hirst has been able to wangle decent gallery space inside the Wallace Collection, in the historical collection’s first ever show by a living artist. It’s another example of historical collections’ craven and weak-kneed approach to contemporary art. With an eye on one of Hirst’s gloopy, gloomy skull paintings, you can look through to a Poussin. Guess who looks more conservative, small-souled, and joyless? Go on, guess.

Mary Heilmann | Inspiration

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EXCLUSIVE: In her Long Island studio, Mary Heilmann discusses two inspirations for her work: tea bowls that adhere to the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of Wabi-sabi and the cartoon color pallette used in The Simpsons television show. Heilmann contrasts her working method with that of the Abtract Expressionists, preferring to find “the easiest way to do it” which often involves thinking through the compositions and colors with a computer. The video features ceramics and paintings installed as part of the artist’s traveling retrospective To Be Someone at the New Museum and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

For every piece of Mary Heilmann’s work—abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture—there is a backstory. Imbued with recollections, stories spun from her imagination, and references to music, aesthetic influences, and dreams, her paintings are like meditations or icons. Her compositions are often hybrid spatial environments that juxtapose two- and three-dimensional renderings in a single frame, join several canvases into new works, or create diptychs of paintings and photographs in the form of prints, slideshows, and videos. Heilmann sometimes installs her paintings alongside chairs and benches that she builds by hand, an open invitation for viewers to socialize and contemplate her work communally.

Mary Heilmann is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Fantasy of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online in the PBS Video portal (available for a limited time, through November 13, 2009).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Mark Falstad & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Mary Heilmann. Special Thanks: Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, & The New Museum, New York.

Art:21 Season 5 “Fantasy” Tonite on PBS at 10pm ET!

The premiere of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 continues tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen.

How might desires and taboos shape our ability to imagine? What role does technology play in wish fulfillment? Fantasy explores these questions in the work of the four featured artists.

Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. ET  throughout this month (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.

Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.

ART:21 SEASON 5 PREMIERES TONITE ON PBS!

The wait is over–Season 5 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century is here! The new season begins tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Compassion, featuring William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Might a work of art move us to temper our more destructive impulses? In what ways do artists’ feelings of empathy contribute to works that tackle problematic subjects and address the human condition? Compassion explores these questions in the work of the three featured artists.

Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. throughout October (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen; Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.

Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.

Ottawa Without a Passport

Mary Heilmann in her studio- production still

On Monday I had the pleasure of working with 26 teachers from a variety of settings in the Ottawa Area Intermediate School District… located in western Michigan. That’s right, Michigan. Shame on all of us for assuming you had to cross the border to get to Ottawa.

For a full day, we took the time to explore the possibilities of contemporary art in the classroom with children (and adults!) of all ages. We talked about the variety of exciting artists featured in the upcoming season and had the opportunity to work with the brand new season 5 Educator’s Guide, which definitely smells crispy-clean…. right off the press.

The Ottawa Area ISD works collaboratively with schools and communities to meet the educational needs of students in the Ottawa area. By pooling resources and working regionally, they provide important programs and services to eleven local K-12 school districts and all charter, parochial and private schools in the county. And it’s a big county, to say the least.

One of the main reasons the day was a success really had to do with the way teachers opened themselves up to the possibility of enhancing their curriculum through incorporating contemporary art. Many times we discussed using the resources Art21 has to offer in order to improve and add to what the teachers were presently teaching. I was so inspired by the range of interests in the group, the range of teaching experience, and the willingness to listen to one another as participants shared stories and questions related to teaching about contemporary art, working with big ideas, the work of Mary Heilmann, active viewing of film and video, and the work of Carrie Mae Weems. What an excellent day. I look forward to sharing some of their stories here on the blog in the coming months! Many thanks to Susan Loughrin at OAISD for organizing and scheduling the workshop, and many, many thanks to all of the teachers who participated.

Weekly Roundup

Mary Heilmann, "Two Lane Blacktop" (below) and Tony Oursler, "Five Take Radius" (above), 2009. Courtesy of AIR, Art International Radio.

• Site-specific installations by Mary Heilmann (Season 5), Tony Oursler, Todd Eberle, and Sabina Streeter are currently on view at the Clocktower Gallery in Manhattan. This is the first group of installations at the space since it became the home of Art International Radio in January 2009. For Two Lane Blacktop, Heilmann has painted white lines down a black floor, turning a corridor of the Clocktower into “a displaced highway.” Just above her piece, Tony Oursler has lined the ceiling with eleven over-sized filament light bulbs that brighten and dim as recordings of the artist’s voice emanate from speakers overhead. The Clocktower is open to the public on Thursdays from 12pm to 5pm or by appointment.

• On the occasion of their 95th anniversary, Montclair Art Museum has mounted Out of the Vault. This year-long exhibition celebrates the Museum’s American and Native American art focus. Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in the 60 piece display.

• From August 25-November 21, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois will present Reflection, a one video per day program featuring works by five artists: Andrea Zittel (Season 1), Phyllis Baldino, Patricia Esquivias, Alex Hubbard, and Glenn Ligon. Each video is scheduled for a specific day of the week; Andrea Zittel’s Small Liberties will screen on Fridays.

• Kandors (2000), a video by Season 3 artist Mike Kelley, will be shown in Switzerland as part of the 10-day St. Moritz Art Masters contemporary art program. The festivities begin Friday, August 21. Kelley’s work will be the focus of a panel discussion on Sunday, August 23.

• A newly commissioned collaboration between Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, titled A Voyage of Growth & Discovery, will open September 13 at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens. The installation comprises a two-and-a-half hour six-channel video of Smith’s character Baby IKKI, which he has performed for over thirty years. This is the first collaboration between Kelley and Smith who have been friends since 1975.

• On September 12, Bruce Nauman (Season 1) will bring his project Untitled (Leave the Land Alone) to fruition. Between 11:30am-12:30pm, the words “Leave the Land Alone” will be written across the Pasadena, California sky. Read more about Nauman’s project in the Los Angeles Times.

• Proud Flesh, a new book by Season 1 artist Sally Mann, investigates the bonds between husband and wife. Mann’s sole subject is her husband of 39 years, Larry. This body of nude studies, photographed over a six-year period, will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York beginning September 15.

• The Wall Street Journal and Artinfo.com report that Polaroid’s art collection will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s. Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late last year. Their collection includes work by William Wegman (Season 1) who, like other well-known artists, used Polaroid’s large-format, 235 pound instant camera for special projects.

An Interview with Mary Heilmann by Ross Bleckner

Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a vintage BOMB interview with a Season 5 artist. This week, we head back ten years to revisit a classic conversation with Mary Heilmann, conducted by Ross Bleckner. “Heilmann’s style defies the fashionable,” Bleckner writes, “her paintings contain a joy so contagious one smiles upon seeing them…[they] sing with a life force hard to match.” In this interview excerpt from BOMB Issue 67, Spring 1999, these old friends and peers discuss memory, nostalgia, and a body of work that was 40 years in the making. Read the full interview here.

Photo courtesy of Mary Heilmann

Ross Bleckner: What do you consider yourself?

Mary Heilmann: Sometimes I’m a light artist and sometimes I’m a heavy artist. Significantly, in the making of our work, we artists channel the artists that worked before us.

RB: Naturally, but I think you’re a light artist. That’s what I’ve always liked about your work, the casual attitude. I’ve known you for a long time but I don’t know you that well. I think you’re very serious and something of a formalist. But it’s the character of your abstraction that’s always interested me. I can’t really say whether it’s backhanded—but it seems to be—which is now equated with ironic, but wasn’t back when I first saw your work. That’s what I mean by light. I don’t mean that as good or bad—I actually think it’s very interesting in your case. I remember seeing your paintings when I was a little pup.

MH: When you first showed up here in New York, you mean?

RB: Yeah. You were showing at Holly Solomon Gallery. And what was funny about your paintings is that they were simple—squares within squares, kind of quasi-minimalist, brightly colored—everything was slightly off register, even the shape of the canvas itself, right? The square would be lopsided.

MH: I don’t think so, not on purpose anyway. The interior square—

RB: Well maybe the interior square set up a perception that made me think of it as being slightly…goofy.

MH: Yeah, it’s true. It had that.

RB: You’ve managed to maintain that character for 30 or more years and it always seems very fresh to me. It’s actually what younger artists respond to in your work. What comes around goes around—that freshness, your approach to abstraction, seems very unencumbered. It gives the paintings a lightness. You could translate it emotionally or spiritually, but it’s like air. The paintings have a lot of air in them.

Anyway, take us back and give us an idea of the book you’ve been working on and what it means to you to go back over these 30 years—finding yourself with some new popularity.

MH: The book goes back to when I was born; it’s the story of my whole life. It’s to show that the paintings reflect events and visual events that I experienced ever since I was a little child. I put this book together because it was an opportunity to make something about my work that wasn’t just another art catalog. I wanted to make my own biographical book. And in it I’ve told some stories from my life, some little anecdotes, and I’ve chosen things that the paintings recalled. The painting Rio Nido has little spots of light—in the ‘40s we went to a summer vacation spot where it was common to put colored lights around the porches.

RB: They’re very popular. Pool motif.

MH: This was a working-class resort where teachers, nurses and policemen went. The memory of this place is just fantastic to me and that picture reminds me of it; that happens all along.

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