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.
Cai Guo-Qiang media explosion
Art21 artist (Season 3) Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition I Want to Believe at the Guggenheim Museum may go down as the most-documented show on video of 2008 in New York. However, Cai faces some serious competition: we’ll have to wait and see if the ongoing Olafur Eliasson exhibition at MoMA, Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, or the upcoming Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) retrospective at the Guggenheim will out-spectacle the current Manhattan media blitz.
With only 7 days left until Cai’s Guggenheim exhibition closes, who knows how many more videos are in the works, but in the meantime enjoy the following sampling. And for those planning a visit this final weekend, get your tickets early (and hide those camera phones)!
New York aside…if you include Cai Guo-Qiang’s role as director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games in August, he will undoubtedly hold the record as the contemporary artist whose work has been seen by the most people on television, ever. (Who previously held the record? Mel Chin and the GALA Committee’s little-known subversive project with Melrose Place?)
Do you have a video of Cai’s Guggenheim show? Leave a link in the comments below!
VIDEO | Channel Thirteen (PBS) SundayArts
Spacey! Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe is “literally” beamed onto Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp. (Fun fact: the Guggenheim is 2 years younger than Sputnik & Cai, and 7 years older than Star Trek)
VIDEO | Guggenheim Museum
Working at the Guggenheim must induce some serious déjà vu—here riggers install Inopportune: Stage One in a way reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s climbing escapades in CREMASTER 3 (2002).
VIDEO | VernissageTV
A non-narrated, comprehensive tour of the exhibition’s major works.
VIDEO | NewArtTV
Some comments from Cai Guo-Qiang on the day of the press preview.
VIDEO | Museum TV
Hello! Enthusiastic host Mel Merio does a “profoundly postmodern” interview with Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe.
And…last but not least……..
VIDEO | Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century
Watch an excerpt of the Art:21 episode Power featuring Cai Guo-Qiang, with the artist reflecting on Inopportune: Stage Two (2004) when it was first installed at MASS MoCA.
Up to the Minute: Cai Guo-Qiang
Exhibition: I Want to Believe, the acclaimed retrospective exhibition of works by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3) closes at the Guggenheim Museum, New York next Wednesday, May 28. Also closing is the special exhibition Everything Is Museum curated by Cai as part of the retrospective. Located in the Guggenheim’s Sackler Center for Arts Education, this installment of the artist’s ongoing series features works by Art21 artist Kiki Smith (Season 2), architect Norman Foster, retrospective co-curator Thomas Krens, artist Jennifer Wen Ma, and composer Tan Dun, as well as submissions by the public.
Book: Available in the Aye Simon Reading Room at the Guggenheim is Cai’s recent collaboration with Ivory Press, London–the limited edition publication Danger Book: Suicide Fireworks. The concept according to Cai: “Be careful of books. Be careful with books. Be careful or one can become a weapon-wielder. Be careful or one can become the victim.” The book, which can be “exploded,” is also on view through June 29 in the exhibition Blood on Paper: Art of the Book at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Installation: In Cordoipo, Italy, the artist’s installation “Dream” (pictured above) is included in God & Goods: Spirituality and Mass Confusion at Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art. Curated by Francesco Bonami and Sarah Cosulich Canarutto, the show aims to present the idea of the sacred and the spiritual through the interpretations of 28 artists. God & Goods closes September 28, 2008.
Fashion: Cai was one of twelve artists to design a t-shirt for a special project with the Whitney Museum, Art Production Fund, and the Gap. See his design at Gap.com.
Bacon: Whoopee
Roman Abramovich, the partially-bearded Russian owner of Chelsea Football Club (AKA ‘Chelski’), and 16th-richest person in the world (according to Forbes), was this week reportedly the purchaser of two paintings by significant British painters. Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping and Francis Bacon’s Triptych (1976) sold at auction in New York for a collective total of around $120 million.
Meanwhile, it emerged that the model for Freud’s vast canvas of a overweight woman reclining on a bulging couch, Sue Tilley, was paid about £20 ($38) a day to pose. While it’s tempting (and very high school maths exam) to work out how long she’d have to pose to be able to afford the painting she was posing for, it’s perhaps more interesting to consider the always-baffling disparity between an object and its value.
Freud’s painterly insistence on the quiddity of his subject - the lunar impasto of paint on the bulge of Tilley’s stomach, the layers of tone gradually ‘becoming’ flesh - is predicated on the idea that paintings are in their essence traces of elapsing time, time that (here) directly corresponds to a financial transaction. The thought that each brushstroke translates into a before-and-after set of specific values is weirdly giddying, like comparing the price on the menu and the price on the bill.
Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman Gallery
Recent paintings by Art21 artist Kerry James Marshall (Season 1) are on view May 22 through July 3, 2008 at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. The exhibition, titled Black Romantic, is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery in many years.
According to the website ArtCal, Marshall takes his show title from the 2002 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated by Thelma Golden. Using Golden’s Black Romantic as a point of departure, Marshall continues his exploration of the black figure represented in pictorial space. Whereas Golden “explored populist notions of ‘Black Art’ and the uncritical realm of image making,” Marshall “investigates the critical pretensions of the fine art establishment in which he participates.” In these new works, the artist employs genres of painting, ranging from seascapes to classical artist self-portraits. Marshall will also present a mixed media sculptural installation.
Jack Shainman Gallery is located at 513 West 20th Street. An opening reception takes place tomorrow from 6-8pm.
Watch the Art:21 video “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self,” to hear Marshall discuss the first painting in which he used his signature black figure.
Conversations | Judy Pfaff with Betsy Sussler part 3
Following is the conclusion of the conversation between Judy Pfaff and BOMB Magazine’s Betsy Sussler that took place on March 3, 2008 at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
BS: I’m going to ask you two more questions, and one of them actually comes from Patricia Spears Jones, who’s a poet. I don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s a contributing editor to BOMB. A.M. Homes, the writer, has this really great trick when she interviews people. She calls up all of her friends in a panic and says, “I don’t know what I’m going to say. What would you ask if you were interviewing this person?” and then she comes with a list of their questions combined with her questions. So I did that too. I thought, this will be fun. So, Patricia Spears Jones asks this: “I have been fascinated by the colors in your work? What do they mean and are there ones that you have never used and why?”
JP: I’m very involved with color. Initially, I was involved with Goethe’s idea of color, then Madame Blavatsky, and I worked for [Josef] Albers, believe it or not. So each piece actually is very coded. I don’t usually talk about that, but what I mean is that even just black and white mean this or that. When I sampled things in earlier pieces, they were always specifically about color and emotional and even visual sensations. But no, color is a huge deal to me.
BS: The earlier ones especially were so exuberant. It was never just instinctive? You really always had an idea of what the color….
JP: Yeah. The first show in New York that someone might have seen was called Deep Water. I had just come from a trip to the Yucatan as a response to doing a failed show about subatomic physics, and I thought, painters don’t use color? There was this equivocation that thinking is sort of gray and black and brown and sober and in Merida, which is this perfect colonial town in the Yucatan, and is also my favorite town of all time, there were just beautiful flowers. The sea is turquoise, and I just thought this really has the color of life. The way things look when they’re alive, like flowers and birds and fish and this and that. Also, I was probably at war with—do I say it again?—Richard Serra, who is about weight and mass, and I thought, throw it away. Get the air in there and make it circulate. You don’t own it. You don’t dominate anything. Don’t have the language that painting could have. That was a very south of the border show.
The next one I did at Albright-Knox, the whole palette was for all of the people. There was the Clyfford Still motif, there was the Jackson Pollock; it was the moment. So there was a kind of homage. It’s like, if I go to Japan, I think it’s totally Japanese, but they don’t think it’s Japanese at all. I think there is a difference between references to things and paying homage to things.
BS: That actually might answer my last question, which is, do all the installations have a back-story?
JP: Yes.
BS: They do. So can you tell us one, a really personal one that perhaps nobody knows yet?
JP: Yeah, one was called War In Italy. My grandmother worked for the RAF, the Women’s Royal Air Force, as a seamstress. And she sewed all these…she says she saved London. She said that she made all of these sorts of balloons. And it was the day that we arrived in Venice, and there were a couple of wars going on. And the whole thing, I thought, referenced this because we were also in Italy, and so I thought it would be about the Futurists, and I really realized that the Futurists were about noises. My grandmother used to say, “what was the most frightening thing? The noises above your head and the sound of things exploding.” So the whole piece, I thought, had this very Italian aspect to it as well as this back-story about my grandmother and what she thought was frightening. But all of them have that. I don’t usually tell anybody, but I’ll tell you now that it’s twenty years later.
BS: Oh, I should have gone through [every installation] one at a time. How did she think she saved London? What was she selling?
JP: Because these balloons were inflated and the German planes couldn’t tell the difference between the sky and the balloons. They were all around London. London was full of balloons, big balloons. These balloons, what are they called?
BS: Balloons… I don’t know.
JP: Blimps. And they were silver, which is a good look because it reflected the sky. So the planes, the Messerschmitt, is that right? The planes couldn’t locate them so instead of bombing them they just flew into this invisible protection. I hope I’m remembering this correctly.
BS: Even if you’re not, it’s really fabulous. I’m going to read how you answered Mimi’s question, which is actually exactly what you said ten years ago. Mimi asked how your installations are “psychologically dangerous,” and you said…“for me, because nothing is preset, I feel that it reveals a lot about what I’m going through at the moment.”
JP: I said exactly the same…
BS: You said exactly the same thing. If things are theoretically well thought-out then you’re in fairly safe territory. It’s like ,“I know my parameters and what the thing is going to look like.” So yeah, ten years doesn’t make any difference.
JP: She lies consistently…
BS: And with that….
JP: By the way, I don’t drink beer. I don’t know why I said that because I never ever drink beer.
BS: I was going to say, you don’t look like you drink beer.
JP: No, I never drink it. I think there are three lies in that thing, the first one, and then the cock crows, but no, the first one is that I don’t drink beer.
BS: But it was funny.
JP: It was funny. It was a joke, yeah.
END
Maya Lin Awarded Van Alen Prize
Van Alen Institute announced yesterday that Maya Lin (Season 2) has been awarded the New York Prize Senior Fellowship. Appointed Senior Fellows are accomplished thinkers, artists and practitioners who have a demonstrated record of exceptional work and are identified as leaders in their fields. During her tenure as Senior Fellow, Lin will further develop Missing - a project she describes as her “last memorial” that will “focus attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime.”
Now in its second year, the New York Prize Fellowship was established to bring practitioners and scholars to Van Alen Institute’s headquarters in New York City to pursue and present advanced independent projects on the most significant issues shaping the conception, design and use of public space today.
Jessie Mann Discusses the Role of the Subject in Art
This week, photography blog Subjectify is featuring a serialized interview with Jessie Mann, daughter of photographer Sally Mann (Season One) and the subject of much of her mother’s work. (That’s Jessie with her brother and sister, in Sally Mann’s 1989 photo, “Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia.”)
In the interview, Jessie talks about Self Possessed, her collaborative project with photographer Len Prince, examining the role of the subject in art.
Installments of the interview will be published on Subjectify throughout the week.
Finding A Balance (Part 1)
Time and time again, we are reminded how sharing work by a variety of artists can inspire new thinking, perspectives, techniques, and meaningful questions, but we often get swept up in the drive to produce strong portfolios or “cover the curriculum” when, as Elliot Eisner puts it, we should be “uncovering” it.
This week’s blog asks many questions and I invite you to weigh in on the possible answers….
- As art educators, how do we find a balance between teaching students to create art and teaching them how to engage with art?
- Is it wise to spend more time getting students to articulate their thoughts about art orally and in writing?
- Is it worth it to take time away from production in introductory art courses in order to teach students to understand, enter into dialogue, and ask good questions about art?
- What are the benefits of having students graduate from our classes who are more prepared to discuss their thoughts about art and perhaps less prepared to draw from observation?
PHOTO | Hairbrush painting by Ashley Lewis, Age 17
(Artist) Frays Book
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Blood on Paper: The Art of The Book, showcases book-based work by a wealth of modern and contemporary artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 1).
Since the book form implies a beginning, middle and end, it’s always been a popular form for artists looking to meddle with heads, from Max Ernst’s superlative The Hundred Headless Woman onwards. The exhibition traces a significant transformation in the definition of the artist’s book: from a kind of freeform improvisation on textual illustration (Matisse’s Jazz, Sol LeWitt’s take on Borges’ Ficciones) to an artwork taking the form of a book as its conceptual jumping-off point (Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton’s Inter Faces and Richard Tuttle’s NotThePoint). The connotations of books as cornerstones of religious doctrine are underscored by Damien Hirst’s New Religion, a huge, plinth-mounted mixed-media sculpture in the form of a shelved Bible, set off by a display of Francis Bacon’s much-pored-over ephemera, battered Muybridge photos and snaggly Polaroids, displayed in glass like the fingerbones of a saint.
The most fun is to be had in the illumination artists’ work can cast on a canonical text; Balthus replays Wuthering Heights as a pas de deux of feral adolesence; Paula Rego turns Jane Eyre into a mad psychodrama of Gothic puppetry. Serialism found an easy home in the book form, with Ed Ruscha’s deadpan series of swimming pools and gas stations repeated on every page of a pocketsize book, insouciance itself. Meanwhile, the pages of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Danger Books, charred with the spidery remainders of fireworks, indicate the book as a site of explosive excitement, and anyone who’s ever been 7 will probably agree.
