Image: newspaper.li

Anyone who knows me often asks about how I coordinate three jobs. I teach two high school classes and serve as department chair in my school district, work as Art21’s education advisor, and teach a class at NYU in the department of Art and Art Professions. This semester I was thrown a little curveball and asked to teach a completely different class at NYU- School Arts: Issues in Pedagogy and Curriculum (Secondary). The course, an intense fourteen weeks where graduate students explore current questions and topics in secondary art education, also has a component where each student takes part in teaching a Saturday course for high school students. This Saturday program, called Visionary Studios (a title I happen to love), asks New York City high school students to sign up for nine weeks of classes around a chosen theme. So, instead of signing up for extra-curricular classes with titles like “Mixed-Media” or “Ceramics” or “Painting”, students this fall are asked to choose from “The Changing City”, “Under Pressure”, “Transformation” or “Soundscapes”. Instead of offering classes that are media-centric, classes are thematic where teenagers can explore the theme through a variety of approaches over nine weeks. Students in the graduate course not only explore current issues in art education and teaching for social justice, but they also plan units of study and individual lessons for these Saturday classes, as well as team-teach every Saturday morning.

It’s a lot of work.

This Saturday is the first session with our high school students and I am excited for the possibilities that exist within the curricula that has been developed so far. Big, and sometimes challenging questions are driving the themes, such as:

• How can art be transformative?
• What role(s) does pressure play in our environment?
• How does sound shape our daily experience?
• What makes a city?

Artists already being considered to inspire students include Ai Wei Wei, Allora and Calzadilla, Cindy Sherman, Do-Ho Suh, El Anatsui, Eleanor Antin, Kerry James Marshall, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Mark Bradford, Mike Kelley and Yinka Shonibare, to name just a few.

Going into the first session this weekend, my student teachers will obviously be thinking about how to get off to a good start. After all, these high school students are coming from all over the city to attend classes on Saturday mornings. One doesn’t need a roadmap to realize that you better have some good stuff to share, otherwise you will be left with dwindling enrollment. Students will simply stop coming if the course isn’t exciting and engaging.

So what does getting off to a good start look and sound like in a situation like this (or, for that matter, in most courses)? It involves students coming in, being warmly welcomed and getting to know who is teaching. It involves students getting to know their classmates a bit and why they have chosen to be there. It involves sharing interests and broad goals for the course. It involves talking about which directions the theme can take. Most importantly it involves building community and trust from the start. Once that gets rolling, students can begin to feel comfortable creating quality work that will address the theme.

I am also excited for the start to our Saturday sessions because the student teachers will be developing curriculum with the students vs. having each and every lesson planned out ahead of time. Student teachers will be asking different kinds of questions to explore how these high school students want to investigate the four themes vs. being told how the themes will be approached. They will even be asked to help form the supply lists for each of the courses instead of having a “set” of supplies to work with from the start.

Wish us luck. More to come.

© Mary Heilmann; Private Collection, London. Foto Alex Delfanne.

In this week’s roundup An-My Lê and Jeff Koons are honored, Kiki Smith and other artists’ work in Italy, several artist retrospectives and more.

• An-My Lê is being honored among 23 MacArthur Fellows for 2012. The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. The fellowships come with a no-strings-attached $100,000 a year for five years.

• Jeff Koons will be honored at the Hermitage Museum Foundation’s (HMF) 3rd Annual Gala co-hosted withPhillips de Pury & Company on November 10, in New York. Hermitage Museum Director Dr. Mikhail B. Piotrovsky will present Foundation Awards to Koons and Erik Bulatov for their lifelong artistic achievements and contributions to contemporary art.

• Kara Walker has a solo show at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery (Portland, OR). More & Less includes Walker’s most recent film—Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale (2011)—and a body of prints and works that explore the symbolism and theatricality of imagined historical space and the visual and pictorial history of the Civil War through appropriated images from the popular periodicals of the time, namely Harper’s Weekly. The show closes November 18. You can listen to Walker’s talk on October 2 here.

• Mary Heilmann‘s first European retrospective is on view at BACA Projects, the Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht, NL). The exhibition Good Vibrations is devoted to the 2012 BACA Laureate and it is the only major award for international visual art in the Netherlands. The exhibition gives insight into the varied work she has created over fifty active years, which comprises gouaches, graphic work, sculpture, furniture and ceramics, along with paintings. This exhibition runs through January 27, 2013.

• Kiki Smith‘s photographs are being exhibited at Galleria Raffaella Cortese (Milan, Italy). By the Stream is Smith’s third solo exhibition at the gallery and features photographs that evoke a fairytale tradition and build an iconographic narrative laden with femininity. Using the camera, Smith draws a conceptual dimension of space and body set in a world of childlike dreams. The show closes November 15.

• Rashid Johnson presents his first London exhibition at the South London Gallery (London, England). Rashid Johnson: Shelter is inspired by the idea of an imagined society in which psychotherapy is a freely available drop-in service. Johnson’s installation questions established definitions of the art object and its limitations, as well as the relationship between individual and shared cultural experience. This work is on view through November 25.

• Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, 1978-86 is on view at the McIntosh Gallery (London, Canada). The show includes over 150 examples of Raymond Pettibon‘s zines, fliers, posters and album covers made for punk bands such as Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Go-Go’s, Meat Puppets and the Ramones. The exhibition runs through November 3.

• Mike Kelley: Themes and Variations from 35 Years is scheduled to debut at Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) in December. The exhibition will include work from the 1970s right up until Mike Kelly‘s death, including 250 paintings, sculptures, objects, works on paper and videos. The show is expected to travel to MoMA PS1 in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., according to the site GalleristNY, but dates haven’t been announced.

• Marina Abramović, El Anatsui and Tabaimo were featured via Art21 for Festival Artecinema (Rome, Italy) that ran October 4–7.

• Mark Bradford waxes poetic on MOCAtv, an extension of the legendary Los Angeles art museum into the digital realm with the first-ever original YouTube channel devoted to contemporary art. The YouTube page features five-minute videos with artists.

• Barry McGee completed a mural called Untitled 2012 on the east wall of the Mark Morris Dance Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn (NY). Vanity Fair commissioned McGee as part of their Art in the Streets program. The mural will be photographed by Jason Schmidt and showcased in the December issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

Mike Kelley. “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991-1999.” Photo courtesy Perry Rubenstein Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Sarah Sze to be honored, Robert Adams depicts seabirds, Hiroshi Sugimoto with Mark Rothko, Mike Kelley’s plush sculptures are on display, and more.

• Sarah Sze will be honored by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) on October 24, 2012, at the Metropolitan Club (NYC). This will take place at AFA’s 2012 Gala & Cultural Leadership Award event. This AFA award is presented annually to artists, museum leaders, and philanthropists in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the art and museum community. Sze will be introduced by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and a Chief Curator at Large at the Museum of Modern Art.

• Robert Adams: On Any Given Day in Spring & Light Balances is now on view at Matthew Marks Gallery (NYC). Light Balances refers to a group of photographs made between 2005 and 2011 in a protected forest around the Columbia River estuary near the town of Astoria, Oregon where Robert Adams has lived since 1997. The 30 photographs in the show depict flocks of seabirds on the North Beach Peninsula in Washington State. The exhibition runs through November 3. You can view a video walkthrough of the exhibition here.

•  Carrie Mae Weems‘s new book is featured at Time LightBox. Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video highlights over 200 of the artist’s most important works. Accompanying essays by leading scholars explore Weems’s interest in folklore, her focus on the spoken and written word, the performative aspect of her constructed tableaux, and her expressions of black beauty. The book will be released on October 3. A retrospective exhibition is also on view at the Frist Center in Nashville through January 13, 2013.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto‘s photographs will be juxtaposed with Mark Rothko paintings to inaugurate the Pace Gallery’s new London location. Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes aims to explore the philosophical kinship between the artists and their quest to explore space and emotion through a limited color range. The exhibition will run October 4 – November 17.

• Josiah McElheny and Rodney Graham have work on view at the Donald Young Gallery (Chicago) as part of the series In the Spirit of Walser. McElheny presents two works based on a short story by Robert Walser, A Painterʼs Life (1916), both of which recall McElheny’s work on mirrors and more recently his exploration of the potential of color. The show closes November 1.

• Mike Kelley‘s Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites will soon be on display at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery (Los Angeles). This marks the first time the work has been presented in a museum or gallery since 1999, as well as its first-ever fully realized exhibition in the United States. The installation consists of a thirteen-part hanging plush sculpture, surrounded by slick geometric wall reliefs which fill the room with a subtle chemical pine scent. The exhibition will run November 2 – December 15.

Walton Ford. "The Rolling Stones, Grrr!," 2012. Image courtesy rollingstones.com.

In this week’s roundup Cai Guo-Qiang is a 2012 prize laureate, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman are honored, Laurie Anderson performs in Albuquerque, several artist celebrate Warhol, Walton Ford designs the Stones’ album cover and more.

• Cai Guo-Qiang won the Praemium Imperiale, an international arts prize patronized by Japan’s ruling dynasty, worth 15 million yen ($192,600). This is a global arts prize awarded annually by the Japan Art Association.

• Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman will be honored at the Hammer Museum’s 10th anniversary Gala in the Garden, which will include a performance by singer Katy Perry. Actor Steve Martin will present the tribute to Sherman and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow will make the presentation for Kruger. This year’s Gala is set for October 6.

• Carrie Mae Weems is having her first comprehensive retrospective, which opened at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville, TN). Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video includes some 225 photographs, videos and installations, from her earliest, never-before-published ’70s documentary photographs to brand-new pieces. It will travel to the Portland Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the Guggenheim Museum. The Frist show is on view through January 13.

• Kalup Linzy celebrated Andy Warhol at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC). Linzy performed as Kaye (who the artist refers to as the “Romantic Loner”) in a video and live performance that comprised this weekend’s Warhol Cabaret. The event was part of the kickoff for the museum’s new exhibition Regarding Warhol which also features work by Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Vija Celmins, Alfredo Jaar, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Allan McCollum, Bruce Nauman, Catherine Opie, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto and many more. The exhibition runs through December 31.

• Walton Ford joins a list that has included Andy Warhol, Guy Peellaert and Peter Corriston by designing the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary album. For the cover of The Rolling Stones, GRRR!, the compilation album due out in November, Ford recontextualised John Pasche’s iconic lips-and-lolling-tongue logo.

• Laurie Anderson is a featured speaker at the Inter-society for Electronic Arts (ISEA2012) conference in Albuquerque, NM. For A Conversation with Laurie Anderson & Tom Leeser Anderson will speak with Leeser, co-leader for The Cosmos: Radical Cosmologies theme. This event takes place on September 24.

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Barry McGee. "Roseville Trainyards," 1995. Photo by Craig Costello. Courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s roundup Barry McGee’s mid-career show, Cai Guo-Qiang in Copenhagen, Ida Applebroog and Krzysztof Wodiczko explore free speech, Cindy Sherman is celebrated by drag artists and more.

• Barry McGee is at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California (BAM/PFA). This exhibition is the first mid-career survey of Barry McGee and provides a much-anticipated opportunity to experience his work from the late 1980s to the present. It includes rarely-seen early work, vibrant op-art painted panels, animatronic taggers, and a re-creation of a cacophonous street-corner bodega, along with many new projects. The show runs through December 9.

• Cai Guo-Qiang: A Clan of Boats opens next week at the Faurschou Foundation (Copenhagen). The exhibition will mark Cai Guo-Qiang‘s first one-man show in Scandinavia since 1997 and will include a series of newly-commissioned gunpowder drawings inspired by Denmark’s nature, culture, and history. On the opening day, the artist will realize an outdoor explosion event. The show will run September 7 – December 7.

• Paul Pfeiffer‘s Playroom opens next week at the Paula Cooper Gallery (NYC). The exhibitions features a sculpture based on the “playroom” from legendary basketball player Wilt Chamberlain’s Los Angeles mansion. It also includes video work that has been digitally altered, contains fragments of a storyline and invites the viewer to piece together the nature of the characters’ relationship and the narrative they are performing. The exhibition is on view September 8 – October 13.

• Ida Applebroog and Krzysztof Wodiczko have work featured in Ruptures: Form of Public Address, a group exhibition at the 41 Cooper Gallery (NYC). Situated within the context of the upcoming U.S. elections and the one-year anniversary of the Occupy movement, the exhibition explores the promise and fragility of fearless speech in the aftermath of the 2011 demonstrations, which have erupted across the world in city streets, university campuses, and urban centers. The show will run September 4 – October 13.

• Mike Kelley: 1954 – 2012 is a tribute exhibition to Mike Kelley in collaboration with LUMA Foundation at The Watermill Center (New York). The show includes works from the Kandor Project and opened at The Big Bang: The 19th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit. The “Kandors” series, which Kelley initiated in 1999, are sculptural depictions of Superman’s birthplace Kandor. The exhibition closes September 16.

• Barbara Kruger talked about her new installation, Belief+Doubt at the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington DC), and art in the Digital Age with Complex magazine. Kruger’s installation reminds us to question assumed authority and pay attention to how we treat one another. Kruger’s installation is currently on view in the Hirshhorn’s Lower Level Lobby.

• Cindy Sherman‘s work is currently on view at SFMOMA, and to celebrate this retrospective four of San Francisco’s premier drag performance artists have re-enacted four of Sherman’s iconic portraits. Featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the performances are “all about looking twice — or in Sherman’s case, four or five times — and we wanted to see how many layers of gaze her work could hold.” The SFMOMA exhibition is on view through October 8.

• Next year James Turrell: A Retrospective will explore nearly fifty years in the career of James Turrell. The exhibition includes early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional experiments with holograms. The exhibition will run May 26, 2013 – April 6, 2014.

There’s no place like home. The old adage rings true, but its simplicity is deceiving. Each of us has a complex and storied relationship with our place(s) of origin; for me, it is those places that quietly call me out while also calling me back time and again. Beyond the formative years of my youth, this extends to those places I’ve chosen to call home since. During a recent trip back to the Pacific Northwest, I experienced these notions at work on both levels. In an insightful essay exploring the very idea of home, the art critic John Berger described its historical roots as the place from which the world could be founded. It was, as he said, “at the heart of the real.” Considering this idea in relation to my own mobility and the ambulatory pursuits of many artists engaged in contemporary practice, I return to the evolving idea of home and the role it now plays in our lives.

Fieldwork, 2012.

Earlier this month, I returned to my hometown of Yakima – an agriculturally-minded town on the east side of the Cascade Mountains boasting apples, hops and fine wine. Fondly mocked for introducing itself as The Palm Springs of Washington by way of highway billboard, Yakima is only two hours from Seattle. Yet, it is also a world away. Time slows, and the summer twilight hours suspend in its hot, dry air. Pretension falls away and priorities shift, if just for enough time to breathe and remember that of which we came, spending precious time with family. Berger describes the axis of home as the place where the vertical line of a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld intersects with a horizontal line representing the traffic of the world, including all possible roads leading to other places. This axis is a starting point as well as our point of reference, often underestimated but vital amidst many such roads.

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Robert Adams. "Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado," 1969. Photo courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup a Robert Adams retrospective, a Mike Kelley tribute, an honor for Ursula von Rydingsvard, a first for Laylah Ali’s Greenheads series, and more.

• Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT).  Featuring over 200 photographs, this retrospective traces more than 45 years of work by Robert Adams, including his work on the suburbs of Colorado, his portrayal of southern California, and his recent meditations on the endangered landscape of the Pacific Northwest. The show runs through October 28.

• Mike Kelley 1954 – 2012, a tribute exhibition at The Watermill Center in New York, includes selected soundtracks from The Poetics, Mike Kelley’s art punk band, and videos by Kelley dating from 1978–1986. The various pieces in different media include models and banners from an initial Kandor-Con 2000 installation, seven large-scale projections (2007), one of the sculptures with video projection of Kandors (2007) and Kelley’s last performance video, Vice Anglais (2011). This work is on view through September 16 and can be seen by appointment only.

• Robert Ryman: A Painting in Four Parts, 1963–1964 is now on view at the Gagosian Gallery (NYC). The show features four untitled paintings from 1963–1964, on which Robert Ryman explores the nuanced effects of acrylic paint on aluminum. The exhibition ends August 24.

• Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series will be presented at the Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA). The show includes over forty of Laylah Ali‘s gouache paintings—created between 1996 and 2005—that will be shown for the first time as a comprehensive body of work. The WCMA exhibition runs from August 18–November 25.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto will present a collection of his portraits of Henry VIII and his six wives at Sudeley Castle (Winchcombe, Gloucestershire). The show is in honor of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Queen Catherine Parr. The seven photographs feature wax figures staged and lit like Renaissance portraits and are drawn from Sugimoto’s Portraits series, which was commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in 1999.

• Ursula von Rydingsvard will be honored by the Storm King Art Center (Mountainville, NY) for an annual gala dinner and live auction that will take place October 17.

• Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed John Baldessari for the Institute of the 21st Century (I21c), a non-profit initiative to consolidate and digitally archive the entirety of Obrist’s Interview Project. This event took place on July 29 at LACMA.

• Do-Ho Suh‘s Bridging Home, an outdoor installation originally commissioned for the Liverpool Biennial in 2010, will be part of Roundtable: 9th Gwangui Biennale at the Tate Modern. Made of a steel structural frame and finished with marine plywood, this structure was installed at an angle to highlight the sense of tension between the traditional Korean architecture of the miniature house and the more British architecture of its neighbors. This work will be on view September 7 – November 11.

• Sally Mann: Upon Reflection will be at the Edwynn Houk Gallery (NYC) and features an exhibition of new photographic self-portraits by Sally Mann. The artist will showcase a new technique based on 19th century processes but that incorporates a modern sensibility. The show runs September 13–November 3.

• Behind the Scenes Barry McGee at BAM/PFA covers Barry McGee‘s new installation in progress at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco). This mid-career survey will span over three decades of work, from spray painted objects to a myriad of rainbow geometric patterns. McGee is currently artist-in-residence as he prepares for this exhibition, which will tour to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston next spring. This exhibition will run August 24–December 9.

• Krzysztof Wodiczko: Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection will be presented by Galerie Lelong and More Art later this year. This marks a return of sorts to Union Square for Krzysztof Wodiczko, who in 1986 developed Homeless Projection: A Proposal for Union Square. For his new project, slated to begin on November 9, approximately 30 veterans will animate the statue of Abraham Lincoln with their stories in the now commercially-thriving and historically civic center of Union Square.

Kara Walker. "Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta," 2005. Courtesy of Kara Walker and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

In this week’s roundup Kara Walker sources work from Harper’s, Cindy Sherman arrives in San Francisco, several artists address political and aesthetic urgency in Minneapolis, and more.

• Kara Walker‘s series Works from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is featured in the July 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The series, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art last spring, consists of fifteen lithographs and prints created using enlargements of woodcut prints from the book. Four images, all named after their source images’ captions, are featured: Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, Occupation of Alexandria, and Pack-Mules in the Mountains.

• Robert Adams and An-My Lê are on the shortlist for Prix Pictet. This international photography competition seeks to promote sustainability, and this year’s theme is power. Portfolios tackle subjects such as Lê’s training maneuvers at a Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. This work will be part of an exhibition set to open at Saatchi Gallery (London) following the award announcement on October 9.

• Cindy Sherman opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the exhibition Cindy Sherman draws from many sources and she has produced series of works – consistently untitled – known by nicknames such as “head shots,” “clowns,” “centerfolds” and “society pictures.” In the process, she has taken the artifice of photography to new levels of scale, complexity and intensity. The show closes October 8.

Alfred Barr, with MOMA's art.

Because of Prohibition, Margaret Barr had never had much more than a glass of sherry, and only on rare occasions. But she learned how to make Old-Fashioneds when her husband, Alfred Barr, was fired, or “forced to resign,” from his job as director of the Museum of Modern Art.  It was 1943, World War II was on and Barr, who was the first director of MoMA and famous for championing Picasso, got the letter on a Saturday morning. When Margaret wanted to go to a movie with their six-year-old daughter, Barr went along but was in a “ghastly mood.” He showed her the letter when they returned.

It was from millionaire Stephen Clark, the chair of MoMA’s board of directors, and it said that he and Mrs. Rockefeller had decided that, really, all Barr was good at was writing, not curating or directing. And so he was being asked to relinquish the directoral job and stay on to write things if he so chose, but, of course, at a greatly reduced salary. Barr stayed inside the house for days, in despair, writing responses to Clark that he never sent. Said Margaret:

I still remember seeing him lying on the couch in the living room — still everything is exactly in the same place in our house to this day — lying on the couch. . . always in his pajamas and bathrobe. I remember kneeling beside him and offering him an Old-Fashioned in order to make him drink something so that he would eat something. It was unbelievable.

As the story goes, MoMA had hung a show by new primitivist Morris Hirshfield, with awkward, “offensive” nudes. Stephen Clark had not liked this, nor had critics. Or perhaps Clark hadn’t liked it because critics hadn’t liked it. I’m not sure. Regardless, the board forced Barr out, even though he’d made the museum what it was.

It’s probably not unfair to say Paul Schimmel made MOCA what it is – or what it has been the last decade and a half. After all, the museum’s still more or less an adolescent; it only opened in 1983. Schimmel curated at MOCA for more time (22 years) than Barr directed MoMA (14 years). The MOCA board forced Schimmel out on June 28 (they say he resigned, which is what Clark said when Barr was on the couch being force-fed Old-Fashioneds).

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"Just 3 Boyz" from "Funny or Die Presents." From left to right: Tim Heidecker, Zach Galifiniakis, Eric Wareheim.

I was recently asked by my friend Audrey Chan to guest lecture in a class she’s teaching about gender roles in art.  She was planning on showing the students my own creepy, grief-and-pathos-laden grad school video piece Give Thanks as well as Mike Builds A Shelter by Michael Smith, and asked if I could suggest any other videos. Audrey had also thought of Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup, the collaboration between Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley (featured in Season 5 and Season 3, respectively, of Art in the Twenty-First Century) in which the (loosely interpreted) act of making soup in a cooking show format is made analogous to the abuse of one’s son.  It’s probably telling that my contribution was the comedy duo Tim and Eric’s internet short Just 3 Boyz, a sitcom parody which represents the cancellation, if not annihilation, of middle class American manhood in popular culture.

Still from "Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup," 1987 by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.

Like Pop Rocks and Coke, the combination of watching Family Tyranny followed immediately by Just 3 Boyz is, if not lethal, at least nauseating and generally ill-advised.  In their own way, both works explore the mental space that results when mass entertainment commingles with interpersonal abuse and dysfunction; the cooking show and the sitcom revisited as sites of trauma.

In Just 3 Boyz, Tim and Eric assume parental roles.  Shades is a lampshade puppet voiced by Richard Lewis, and Zach Galifiniakis plays the prodigal son, a roommate who is returning from college.  Much is left unexplained: Why are these “boys” living together, especially when one of them actually went away to college, and is now returning?  Why are Tim and Eric acting simultaneously like the Three Stooges and an old married couple?  It is inferred that this is one of many episodes, and the awkward situation of three presumably platonic male friends sharing a suburban house echo the elaborate and unlikely means by which sitcoms keep their casts on one set.

When Zach returns home from college, the air is thick with tension.  He is dressed in a Juicy couture tracksuit (actually, “Saucy” couture in this instance) and pigtails.   Zach is extremely impatient and verbally abusive.  Given Galifiniakis’ “That’s so Raven” jokes in his standup routine, we can safely assume Zach is playing the role of the uncompromising teenage diva; but this attitude, when assumed by a surly, overweight bearded middle aged man, is intimidating and scary.  Decidedly not Raven.

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