Time to Talk

Illustration by Adam Towers, Nyack High School

Art classrooms are mired in production. Too often the drive to complete work speeds right past the formation of a high quality idea or composition. How often have we ourselves seen or experienced a potential work of art get dumped because of poor planning, hasty decisions, or a fixation on completing vs. creating a work of art?

More and more time in my own classroom, especially in the past few years, has been spent cultivating ideas with students. Discussions and brainstorming in different ways can sometimes take a few days, and while my kids might accuse me of brain brutality from time to time because they are “thinking too much” instead of “just doing it”, the quality of ideas and slower pace to the planning has led to better work. Instead of work that looks like a project, more often students are creating work that looks like, well, work.

The thinking that goes into planning, sketching, talking through and articulating ideas is time well spent, even if it’s a little painful for students. Things like partner discussions, in-progress critiques and brainstorming multiple solutions to a given problem can yield so much more than a rush to “get an idea” and “put it on the paper”. When students are asked to create five different sketches for an assignment, then discuss those sketches with classmates and make a decision about which one to pursue, it’s always especially satisfying to hear many students choose one of the last sketches they created, or one sketch that changed because of the discussion itself.

Contemporary artists can teach our students a lot about the power of conversation, multiple perspectives, and exploring different possibilities in order to create great works of art. One look at artists like Allora and Calzadilla, Ann Hamilton, Oliver Herring or Doris Salcedo, for starters, can illustrate this in full color.

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.

The Art21 Guide to PERFORMA 09

If you’re lucky enough to be in New York City during Performa 09 this month, there are a number of events featuring Art21 artists that are not to be missed! Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

William Kentridge: I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine
Monday, November 9 – Tuesday, November 10, 8:00pm
A comic and visually dazzling performance by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, in I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, Kentridge gives an unusual presentation related to his current opera-in-progress: a work inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s satirical opera The Nose, based on the Nikolai Gogol short story of the same name.
>> WATCH: William Kentridge preview from Art:21 Season 5

The PROMPT (a night club)
Wednesday, November 11 – Sunday, November 15, 8:00pm
A conceptual social club under the influence of Futurist Variety Theater, cues and propositions are offered each night in the form of conversation pieces, rules, performances and soundtracks, transforming this destination into a pressure cooker for ideas and intimacies. Participants include Art21 artist Mark Dion, among many, many others. Space is limited. RSVP: theprompt@kunstverein.us
>> WATCH: Mark Dion in Art:21 Season 4

Mike Kelley: Day is Done Judson Church Dance
Tuesday November 17 – Thursday, November 19 at 8pm and 10pm
In the first of two related Performa projects, Season 3 artist Mike Kelley will present three short dance/performance pieces in the Judson Memorial Church inspired by the darkly funny vignettes in his 2005 film and video installation Day Is Done. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley directing Day is Done (Art:21 Season 3)

Oliver Herring: 3 Day Weekend
Friday, November 20, 6:30-8:30pm, Saturday, November 21, 3-5pm, and Sunday November 22, 3-6pm
3 Day Weekend is both a performance and material for a live video shoot. The Weekend will unfold as a series of interactions built over the course of three days with a group of people who were chosen through an open application process. The actions will be physical, dance related, mostly unrehearsed and therefore unpredictable. Art21 artist Oliver Herring will both “direct” the actions and film the footage.
>> WATCH: Participant Davis Thompson-Moss talking about working with Oliver Herring (Art:21 Exclusive)

A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music
Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21, 6pm – midnight
Mike Kelley project #2: a mini noise music festival. In 1973, Kelley formed his own band, Destroy All Monsters. A Fantastic World continues Kelley’s continued interest in musical subcultures and focuses specifically on avant-garde music and sound art. Staged over two days, the festival will present both historic works from artists such as John Cage, Fred Frith, Fluxus, Bruce Nauman, and Max Neuhaus as well as performances by contemporary proponents of experimental music including Airway, Joan La Barbara, Tony Conrad, Jad Fair & Lumberob, Arto Lindsay, Genesis Breyer P.Orridge, z’ev, and John Zorn.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley playing and recording music (Art:21 Season 3)

Weekly Roundup

Matthew Ritchie, "Line Shot" Installation (detail), 2009. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery.

• The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host a talk with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie and brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner (of indie rock band The National) on Saturday, October 31 at 6pm. The event is held in conjunction with their collaborative performance The Long Count, which opens at BAM on Wednesday, Oct 28. Ritchie’s work is currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery in the solo exhibition Line Shot.

• Songs of Ascension by Ann Hamilton (Season 1) and Meredith Monk (also currently at BAM) was featured in a New York Times music review last week. Read the article here.

• For Performa 09, Mike Kelley (Season 1) will present three short dance/performance pieces inspired by his film and video installation Day Is Done (2005). These performances bring to life some of the characters featured in the film, all of whom are based on found photographs of extracurricular activities from American high school yearbooks. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns. Kelley’s show runs Nov 17 – Nov 19 at Judson Memorial Church. Purchase tickets here.

• Between Being Born and Dying, a site-specific installation by Barbara Kruger (Season 2), is on view at Lever House through November 21. Bloomberg.com describes the installation: “Kruger’s aphorisms are written in massive black-and-white letters all over the Lever House’s atrium, both inside and outside. They are printed on vinyl panels covering the floor, windows, walls and columns. The results are striking but disorienting. The 17-foot-tall letters are so big you can’t take it all in at once–or at all.”

• Season 2 artist Paul Pfeiffer has created a special project for the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The project opens with Vertical Corridor, in which Pfeiffer encourages the viewer to peer through a tiny peephole in the wall of the gallery. The peephole is the only access to an immense space, and questions “the validity of the spectacle … reminding the viewer that every such spectacle must bow to the limits of one’s perspective.” This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Russia.

• Kara Walker (Season 2) will introduce a screening of the 1926 film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York on November 11. Directed by the German animator and film director Lotte Reiniger, it is the earliest feature-length animation still believed to exist, and considered one of the greatest animated films of all time. The program — part of MoMA’s To Save and Project festival — begins at 8pm.

• Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock will speak at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai on Tuesday, October 27 at 5pm. Two print portfolios Fix (2007) and The Ossifies Theosophied (2005) will be on display in conjunction with the event. Hancock is featured in the exhibition Young Americans at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai through November 15.

• Mirror, Mirror: Contemporary Portraits and the Fugitive Self, a new exhibition at the Brigham Young Museum of Art in Utah, features works by 32 artists, including Oliver Herring (Season 3), Rebecca Campbell, Hasan Elahi, Harrell Fletcher, Douglas Gordon, Nikki Lee, and Takashi Murakami. The exhibition explores the influence of rituals, facades, social media, and the family on the formation of individual identity. On view through May 2010.

• Art critic Tyler Green talks to MoMA curator Connie Butler (organizer of the feminist exhibition, Wack!) about Season 4 artist Nancy Spero, who passed away last week. Read the interview on Green’s blog Modern Art Notes.

• Work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) is included in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Learning Modern: Bauhaus Legacy in Downtown Chicago. Building on the legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Learning Modern features projects by artists and architects who continue a legacy of interdisciplinary innovation for better living, while exploring the central role of experiential education in the modern vision. Continues through January 9, 2010.

• Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall, the fifth exhibition of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, is on view through November 20. The earliest known documentation of a fatal car crash provides a pictorial metaphor for Shonibare’s new body of photographic and sculptural work. Photographed in 1898, the image records death as a spectacle for the first time; a crowd surrounds the carcass of a motor vehicle. Shonibare has created a similar scene in the gallery, a sculptural dramatization of the death of Arthur Miller’s infamous protagonist, salesman Willy Loman. The installation suggests a parallel between Miller’s 20th century examination of greed and the human condition, and the present day.

• Now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Focus on Artists celebrates the museum’s 75th anniversary, and its close ties with modern and contemporary masters as demonstrated by works from their collection. SFMOMA holds a number of sculptures by Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo; pieces from her Unland (1995–98) and Untitled “Cabinet” series (1989-present) will be on view. Continues through May 23, 2010.

• On the occasion of Grey Area, a new work by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, the current issue of ArtMag (the online art magazine of Deutsche Bank) focuses on artists who investigate urbanism and cultural identity. Joan Young, curator at the Guggenheim Museum, has contributed an essay about Mehretu’s recent work. Read it here.

Weekly Roundup

Sally Mann, "Hephaestus" (2008), Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

• Proud Flesh is up through October 31 at Gagosian Gallery.  Sally Mann’s (Season 1) new body of work focuses on a photographic study of her husband, taken over a period of six years. Proud Flesh “suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more.”

• Sally Mann is also in the group exhibition Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which opens this Saturday.  The show focuses on photographs of children “as collective memories of childhood itself—a phase of life to which we can never return.”  This long history represented in Hide & Seek also includes images by Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Käsebier, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Emmet Gowin, Wendy Ewald, Sage Sohier, Julie Blackmon and Gloria Baker Feinstein. Through Feb. 21, 2010.

• The 10th Biennale of Lyon opened last week and includes projects by over 50 artists, including Art21’s Oliver Herring (Season 3) and Barry McGee (Season 1). Themed The Spectacle of the Everyday, this year’s situationist version is curated by Hou Hanru. Through January 3, 2010.

• James Turrell’s solo show Large Holograms is up now through October 17 at Pace Wildenstein Gallery.  Fifteen unique large-scale works by the Season 1 artist explore the phenomenon of light itself, letting it become the object while capturing it’s normally fleeting qualities.

• The Guardian UK website has a great section called the Guide to Drawing in its Art and Design pages. Here’s a nice little slideshow of graphite portrait drawings by Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), and a few notes on how Jeff Koons (Season 5) articulates his ideas through draughtsmanship.

• The big 20th anniversary exhibition of the beloved Armory Center for the Arts opened this past weekend with Inside/Out.  The venerable teaching institution in Pasadena has been around since 1947, but has been programming dynamic exhibitions only in the last twenty years since moving to its current location in an old National Guard building. The anniversary show’s lineup includes artists such as Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Daniel Buren, Betye Saar, and Barry McGee.  Through December 31.

• This Saturday, September 26 at 3pm, Stanford-based ecologist Gretchen Daily and artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) will share their ideas about value, ownership, biodiversity, the art world, and political economies of participation in the Conversation series at the Berkley Museum of Art. The talk is part of the Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet exhibition currently up at the museum.  Artists in Human/Nature visited remote, fragile places in the world and present their responses. Other participants include Mark Dion (Season 4), Diana Thater, Xu Bing, Dario Robleto, and Ann Hamilton (Season 1).  The show ends this Saturday, September 26.

Weekly Roundup

Josiah McElheny, "Bruno Taut on Mies van der Rohe (1922), i," 2009. Drawing on silver gelatin photograph using color retouching pencil, 23 1/2 x 17 1/2 in., Edition variant 1 of 4 with 1 artist's proof. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery.

• New works by Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny are on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery through Oct. 17. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an eight-foot tall sculpture based on Mies van der Rohe’s earliest model of a glassclad skyscraper. McElheny’s sculpture is an enlarged version of this original maquette that recasts Mies’s design in the spirit of rival architect Bruno Taut. Also included in the exhibition are a series of photo-based drawings inspired by a photograph Mies took of his skyscraper model in 1922. In each, the black-and-white photograph is highlighted, or defaced with photo-retouching pencil, thereby inserting Taut’s colorful ideas into Mies’s picture of purity and transparency.

• Works by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle are on view in the exhibition Pollution is Ecology also at Andrea Rosen Gallery through October 17. Visit Contemporary Art Daily to browse through images of Tuttle’s concurrent exhibition, L’nger than Life, at Modern Art, London.

• Season 3 artist Fred Wilson is recipient of the 2009 Cheek Medal from the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary. The Cheek Medal was created to recognize individuals who have impacted the fields of visual, performing and museum arts. A dinner and ceremony will be held at the Lake Matoaka Amphitheater on Sept. 18.

• Opening October 7 at the Museum of Arts & Design, Slash: Paper Under the Knife will explore the creative possibilities of paper through works by Kara Walker (Season 2), Oliver Herring (Season 3), Olafur Eliasson, Pietro Ruffo, Ishmael Randall, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, and others.

• Kara Walker (Season 2) will be the next artist in the Proposition seminar series at the New Museum. Inspired by the scientific method of hypothesis, research, and synthesis, these two-day events explore a topic of current investigation in the invited speaker’s own artistic or intellectual practice. On Sept 25 and 26 Walker will explore the object of painting and the concept of liberty.

• Mel Chin (Season 1) will lecture at Arizona State University (ASU) on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 7:30pm. The event is organized in conjunction with the Defining Sustainability season of exhibitions and projects at the ASU Art Museum.

• Dance with Camera is now on view at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Both an exhibition and screening program, Dance with Camera explores the crossover between artists, and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features works in film, video, and photography by artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Oliver Herring (both Season 3), Charles Atlas, Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, Bruce Conner, Tacita Dean,  Luis Jacob, Joachim Koester, Elad Lassry, Kelly Nipper, robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner, Uri Tzaig, Flora Wiegmann, and Christopher Williams. On view through March 21, 2010.

Play Art Loud: DIY Videos on ArtBabble

Ever wanted to make a movie? This week we’re looking at DIY-style videos on ArtBabble, pulling together a potpourri of all things homemade, rough, and celebratory of the do-it-yourself attitude (adding a few of our own videos to the mix).

Paul McCarthy let’s his freak flag fly with this excerpt from the video installation Caribbean Pirates (2005). (via Art21)

The reigning king of DIY-style videos, Michel Gondry, explains it all in this conversation with Anthony Breznican (via Hammer)

Mark Bradford lent us some of his home movies! (again) Mark Bradford lent us some of his home movies! (via Art21)
Continue reading »

Oliver Herring | Participant Davis Thompson-Moss

DOWNLOAD VIA ITUNES | SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS

Artist Davis Thompson-Moss discusses his experiences appearing as a performer, alongside his brother, in two videos by Oliver Herring: BASIC (2003) and THE DAY I PERSUADED TWO BROTHERS TO TURN THEIR BACKYARD INTO A MUD POOL (2004).

Among Oliver Herring’s earliest works were his woven sculptures and performance pieces in which he knitted Mylar, a transparent and reflective material, into human figures, clothing and furniture. Since 1998, Herring has created stop-motion videos, photo-collaged sculptures, and impromptu participatory performances with ‘off-the-street’ strangers, embracing chance and chance-encounters in his work.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Eve Moros Ortega. Camera & Sound: Joel Shapiro and Roger Phenix. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Oliver Herring. Special Thanks: Davis Thompson-Moss.

Weekly Round Up

John Grande, "My Cindy, Your Cindy" (installation view). Courtesy Sara Nightingale Gallery.

• On view through October 4th at the Katonah Museum is Dress Codes: Clothing As Metaphor.  36 artists tackle wide-ranging issues from feminism to globalism using clothing as the medium. The list includes Art21’s Louise Bourgeois, Oliver Herring, and Do-Ho Suh.

• Closing this week at the Berkeley Art Museum is Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye, curated by Lawrence Rinder.  The museum’s director has selected a number of works that survey the evolution of the institution’s holdings, from Albert Bierstadt, to Hans Hofmann, to Barry McGee (Season 1). Through August 30.

• Extended Family is currently on extended view at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition looks at the loose establishment that has come to define “family values” and the art world, which reaches beyond geographical and blood lines.  Extended Family is culled from the museum’s permanent collection and highlights a host of artists, including Ghada Amer, Nick Cave, Vera Lutter, Louise Bourgeois(Season 2), and Fred Wilson (Season 3).

• In its 40th year, the venerable Rencontres d’Arles photo festival is up for a few more weeks until September 13th.  Known for championing the art form that is photography, this year’s edition features a special exhibition curated by Nan Goldin, as well as this solo exhibition by Roni Horn (Season 3).

• Have you ever wondered how the art world would shake up if Cindy Sherman (Season 5) were a male painter, making the same images except on large scale canvases using paint? Enter John Grande, whose solo show posits this exact scenario.  My Cindy, Your Cindy is up through September 3 at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Shelter Island.

What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index

It’s mealtime! Join Sonya for a fine helping of nutrients and adventure with this week’s Index:

Round ‘em up Nicole! Here’s what Art21 artists have been up to this past week.

The Pop-Up Book Academy: An Interview with Sam Gould of Red 76 by Daniel Fuller … a  requiem for Maurizio Cattelan? Read more details about the latest show at Harlem’s Triple Candie. Also… a day at Art Disneyland! Jump in the car with Daniel and head to Mildred’s Lane.

Thank you to Daniel for so many of your fabulous posts! Hrag Vartanian introduces new Art21 Guest Blogger, (drum roll, please) …Quinn Latimer.

In the latest Letter From London, Ben Street writes to us with some thoughts pertaining to acts of vandalism on works of art.

Conserve contemporary art! Check out the Art21 Blog’s new column: No preservatives: Conversations about Conservation and read Richard McCoy’s interview with Hugh Shockey from the Lunder Conservation Center.

Mark your calendars … Performa is scheduled to open in NYC this November. In this week’s Flash Points:  Nicole Caruth interviews participating artist Saya Woolfalk.

In this week’s addition to the column Teaching with Contemporary Art, Joe Fusaro highly recommends that we visit exhibition, Circles of Influence at the Clark Institute before it closes September 7th!

MoMA Trumpets Amsterdams’ Role as Hub of Conceptual Art by Hrag Vartanian.

Wesley Miller provides an introduction to Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy.

But what if those enemies, just outside the door, came armed with Bach and Mozart and Caravaggio and Goethe? What is the relationship between artistic greatness and democratic inclusiveness?  Quinn Latimer asks that and other provocative questions in her response to a recent New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman.

Paul McCarthy is described as a pulsing ID.  Read this interview with McCarthy by Benjamin Weisman in this weeks BOMB in the Building.

Check out the newest Art21 column dedicated to all things food! (I’m lovin it!) Gastro-Vision: Aesthetics in Urban Farming, Part I by Nicole Caruth.

And the latest Art21 Exclusive: Artist Joyce Pensato discusses her experiences appearing as a performer in Oliver Herring’s videos.