A Conversation with Kiki Smith and Others at Deitch Projects
On Thursday evening, Deitch Projects hosted a conversation featuring Kiki Smith (Season Two), alongside Ann Messner and Swoon. The talk was held at Deitch Studios in Long Island City, NY, the location of a new massive installation by Swoon titled Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. It is also the site of Swoon’s recent performance featuring several crafted mid-sized boating vessels designed by the artist, which set sail down the East River, eventually docking at Deitch Studios. A crowd of hundreds welcomed the ships and the combined crew of 40 on opening night, as the band Dark, Dark, Dark played in the middle of an excited crowd.
The conversation was moderated by Carlo McCormick, a critic, curator, and the Senior Editor of Paper Magazine, who also conducted a brief interview with Kiki Smith for the Journal of Contemporary Art.
In addition to the conversation, selections from Todd Chandler’s upcoming film FLOOD, shot aboard several of the Switchback Sea vessels, was screened.
Documenting The Light Project
Wrapping up my previous post’s theme of installation—the online catalogue for the Pulitzer’s outdoor exhibition, The Light Project, allowed me to humor my love of the installation process on a whole new level.
Some background: In conjunction with our exhibition indoors, Dan Flavin: Constructed Light, The Light Project includes four outdoor light-based works installed in the neighborhood surrounding the Pulitzer. We collaborated with three local arts organizations: the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and White Flag Projects, which each curated a work in the project.
A major component of this project was a commitment to interaction with our neighborhood, Grand Center (you’ll be hearing more about this area in my StL-themed posts next week). Each work of art was installed outdoors and within walking distance to encourage exploration in this normally quiet (and at times, pretty desolate) area.
Not just interaction, but also the transformation of these neighborhood locations, meant that we wanted to showcase this development online and give visitors a platform to provide feedback. The month prior to the opening, the installation of each artwork could be tracked on mini-blogs within our web catalogue. Users could watch each work of art come to life and leave comments to let us know what they thought of the process. In addition, each work of art is very different (with very different installation challenges), making their development all the more interesting to watch.
Mark Bradford and Hurricane Katrina
Tomorrow, October 11, the Carnegie Museum of Art will host a public conversation between Art21 artist Mark Bradford (Season 4) and 2008 Carnegie International curator, Douglas Fogle. Topics include the artist’s rooftop installation Help Us, which was inspired by the stranded victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The free one-hour program takes place at 4pm in the Carnegie Lecture Hall.
Bradford’s latest project for the U.S. biennial, Prospect.1 New Orleans, was recently featured in the LA Times. Pictured above on the streets of Los Angeles, the “Post-Katrina Ark for New Orleans,” measures in at twenty-two feet high and 64 feet long. The ark will be reassembled in the city’s Ninth Ward, which is located in the easternmost downriver portion of the city–the area hardest hit by the hurricane. Read more about Bradford’s project here.
FLAG, Ruscha, Kruger, Brain
The FLAG Art Foundation last week opened the exhibition WALL ROCKETS: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha, curated by Lisa Dennison. The title of the exhibition refers to a painting made in 2000 by Ruscha, whose consumerist aesthetic has influenced a host of artists. Gathered together in this broad show is photography, painting, and sculpture from over 70 artists, including Art:21’s Mark Bradford (Season 4), Roni Horn (Season 3), and Barbara Kruger (Season 1).
By extension, Kruger’s “brainy illustration” for a New York Magazine cover with Eliot Spitzer also recently won magazine cover of the year from the American Society of Magazine Editors.
New Lydia Fong Video
The fine folks at San Francisco’s KQED just released a brand-new film and interview with Art21 artist Lydia Fong, on the occasion of her current show at Ratio 3 Gallery.
Gabriel Orozco | “Obit”
EXCLUSIVE: Gabriel Orozco discusses his installation Obit (2008), on view at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.
Gabriel Orozco’s sculptures and photographs disrupt conventional notions of reality. Drawing our attention to slips in logic, philosophical games, and hidden geometries, Orozco uncovers the extraordinary aspects of the seemingly everyday. His use of humble materials and means (graphite on bone, a ball of clay, a 35mm camera) engages the imagination through its disarming simplicity and intimacy.
Gabriel Orozco is featured in the Season 2 (2003) episode Loss & Desire of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Larissa Nikola-Lisa. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Gabriel Orozco. Thanks: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
PHOTO | Gabriel Orozco. Obit, installation view and detail, 2008. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Installing Art
Art installation = my favorite time to blog. In fact, while writing this, I found an embarrassing number of posts about installation in our archives. I think it plays into why I like blogging in the first place - they are the ultimate behind-the-scenes stories of how exhibitions come to life. I like hearing how they figure out how to handle an installation, I like harassing our registrars about their jobs (which they love too ….*cough cough*) and what I really like are installations of works that are extra challenging (and usually very heavy). Two of my favorite examples also happen to be from an Art:21 artist: Richard Serra.
Richard Serra’s works present a range of installation challenges. Our facilities manager Steve Morby calls his works an “instable stability…when they’re assembled they are relatively stable, the problem comes when you start to disassemble or put them together.” Before we opened our exhibition Dan Flavin: Constructed Light, we de-installed two works from the galleries. Standpoint and Joplin were highly complex (i.e. HEAVY) works to move. Here’s Steve explaining how they handled this:
Aside from the building itself, I think our most dramatic undertaking has to be Serra’s work Joe. One of my first installation posts, I think it’s still my favorite and worth re-visiting. The story is complete with ocean steamers from Germany, Mississippi River barges, and the biggest crane in St. Louis…..want more?
Hubbard & Birchler at Liverpool Biennial
The Liverpool Biennial is under way. Organized by the Tate Liverpool, this year’s Made Up theme includes nine special new commissions under the subcategory Between the Real. Encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, video, and drawing, the artists invited include Omar Fast, David Altmejd, Rodney Graham, and Season 3’s Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler.
Tate says it has commissioned works that are “rooted in disparate levels of actuality – history, memory, conflict, art, myth and fable. Using strategies of appropriation and transformation, the artists distort, embellish and rebuild until the familiar nature of our reality is radically displaced.”
Along with show stealers such as Altmejd’s otherwordly sleeping giants, Hubbard & Birchler are presenting The Year without a Summer, a two channel video projection based on paintings of Mary Shelley and her mother installed in Room 18 at the National Portrait Gallery. You’ll want to know more about this one.
Storytelling
This week’s column features more works and artist statements by Sue Chenoweth’s students at The Metropolitan Arts Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. For more on Sue and the Metropolitan Arts Institute red vinyl installations inspired by student sketchbook work, see Mining Ideas Part 3 in last week’s column.
“Crooked Boy, Straight Boy” deals with ideas of sexuality, the body, and the desire to be, or have, something different. In our society we are being conditioned to fit certain stereotypes from birth; stereotypes shaping the way we look, interact, and make decisions. How much do we create and perpetuate stereotypes and standards, and how much do they create and perpetuate us? Where does the desire to be, or not to be, root from? In what space does the difference between the two exist and collide?” -Morgan Zwicky - Senior (now at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
“The City” is a reflection on what I know as my own habitat, what I wish that habitat could be and what it can offer me.” - Fritz Abrahamson, Senior.
“I Live On An Island” is a visual narrative of personal sexual history. I am interested in the social dynamics of the gay male community. - Creighton Baxter, Senior (now at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Next week….. stunning sketchbook pages from Eric Scott’s classes at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, VA.
Letter From London: Bacon Movies
The current (brilliant) retrospective of Francis Bacon at Tate Britain ends with a montage of filmed interviews the artist gave, largely with David Sylvester as part of his extended sequence of interviews with the artist, which drew me back to thinking about artists on film in the pre-Art:21 days. Bacon’s televisual presence gives, I think, a greater understanding of his work as self-reflexive and theatrical in a way that isn’t often discussed in the extensive writing about the artist. Extracts from a 1985 interview with Bacon reveal him to be acutely aware of his own (to him negligible) stature as an artist, and he sits in the soon-to-be-defunct Colony Room in Soho looking and sounding every inch the disdainful nihilist/hedonist of popular legend, in his boho scarf and geography-teacher jacket. What’s unusual about Bacon in these films is his slightly camp self-awareness. In print his many aphorisms look viciously misanthropic; on film, there’s something avuncular, even cuddly, about his resting-actor hamminess and pantomime pessimism. A famous quote of Bacon’s often used to illustrate his supposed gruesomeness (“I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset”) is somewhat sheepishly amended (in a compelling early Sylvester interview in 1966) with “I’d like to paint a smile too, but I can’t quite get it right.”
By contrast, Bacon’s near-contemporary (and kindred spirit, in a way) Willem de Kooning, comes off as somewhat awkward, uneasy in front of the camera, describing himself as a “country dumpling” in Hans Namuth’s 1964 film. Namuth’s 1951 film of Jackson Pollock remains instructive, not as intended (to demystify or perhaps justify to the viewing public the artist’s ‘dripping’ technique), but as epitaph to a division between public and private personas. Pollock stomps around, frowning, both aware of the camera and apparently fearful of how he’ll be seen, like an actor concentrating on remembering his lines but terrified he’ll mess them up.
Andy Warhol’s appearances on television can be seen (as they are in the current retrospective of his work at the Hayward Gallery) as part of his body of work as a whole. Answering a sequence of questions in a 1964 interview, his responses remain as curt and affectless (and likewise studiedly so–he gives a little smirk at one point) as his paintings, sculptures, films and photographs. In looking at these films in sequence, there’s a sense of a relationship between art and its audience undergoing a subtle shift, a sort of coming of age, not to be rewound.
