Weekly Roundup

A teaser image for the exhibition "Blood of Two: Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton." Courtesy of Deste Foundation.

• Matthew Barney (Season 2) and Elizabeth Peyton have collaborated on a site-specific installation for the Deste Foundation in Hydra, Greece. Blood of Two is on view through September 30 in the foundation’s new project space, which used to be the local slaughterhouse. Read The Moment to learn more.

• Tonight at 7pm, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh will lecture at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

• Sally Mann (Season 1), Kara Walker, Collier Schorr, Louise Bourgeois (all Season 2), Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn (both Season 3), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in a mega display of works by women artists at Cheim & Read. The Female Gaze: Women Looking at Women opens June 25.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Josiah McElheny (Season 3) are on view in the exhibition Universal Code at The Power Plant in Toronto. Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents artists responses to cosmology and ideas of the universal in the current age of information. Continues through August 30, 2009.

• The Art Newspaper reports that nearly twenty bronze sculptures in the Tasting Garden (1998), a public art project by Season 4 artist Mark Dion, have been stolen. The garden was created for the inaugural Artranspennine exhibition organized by Tate Liverpool and the Henry Moore Institute.

• Art critic Christopher Knight of the LA Times has reviewed Hipnostasis, a collaborative video and multi-screen installation by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) and Yoshua Okon at Armory Center for Arts in Southern California.

• Read Deborah Sontag’s extensive New York Times article about Yinka Shonibare (Season 5), poetically titled Headless Bodies From a Bottomless Imagination.

Weekly Roundup

• Krzysztof Wodiczko is the sole artist representing Poland at this summer’s Venice Biennale. The striking video installation of milky windows depicts the shadows of immigrant workers as they take on the daily tasks and routines of life, conversing in various languages. Above is a ScribeMedia video interview with the Season 3 artist.

• Elements of Photography opened this past weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.  The exhibition focuses on two fundamental elements of nature inherent to the medium: light and water.  The “naturalists” in the show include artists Luisa Lambri, Walead Beshty, Adam Ekberg, Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), and others.  Through October 4.

• The Stenersen Museum in Oslo opens an intriguing show this week that explores the many dimensions of gender-based violence. Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women, and Art is curated by Randy Rosenberg of Art Works For Change.  Several of the 17 participating artists include Marina Abramovic, Laylah Ali (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Icelandic Love Corporation, and Lucy Orta. Through August 9.

• Ongoing at LACMA is Classical Frieze, an exhibit of recent films and photographs by Eleanor Antin (Season 2).  The works on display mimic the ancient world by way of  19th-century neo-classical paintings. Through September 14th.

• White Noise opens this week at James Cohan Gallery. The group show features works that exist at the intersection of visual art, music and sound, exploring “how sound can obliterate as well as elevate; how silence can involve both absence and presence.” Some of the artists include Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Joseph Beuys, Martha Colburn, Rodney Graham, Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, Christian Marclay, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). June 18-August 12.

What’s “The End” Good For?

Raymond Pettibon, "No title (I must tell)", 2002

June can be a real catharsis of both the most beautiful and ugly kinds, but it doesn’t have to be a week-to-week whirlwind waiting for the next test. The last few weeks of the academic year are a chance to step up and possibly do a few things different, or daring, or even a little dangerous. Here are a few ideas we have recently tried:

• Ask students to work alone or in teams to create an installation. Install art in parts of the school that never see any art (What will the phys ed teacher think?).
• Have students select showcase portfolios- three or four examples from their entire body of work- and create a group exhibition with classmates. Again, think about installing exhibitions in  places that don’t usually feature art to get a different kind of attention.
• Ask alumni, who are usually around and available before summer jobs start in July, to come in and give an artist talk about their work since graduating. If they have portfolios to share, have them show students who will be entering their senior year, giving them food for thought as they begin planning to apply for undergraduate programs.

As I simultaneously get ready for the end of the school year and the opening of my own exhibition beginning this Friday, I’m also thinking about the fact that it’s time to take stock of what went well and what kinds of challenges I faced. It’s a perfect time to revise and update goals for the following year and get some good books together for the summer (more recommendations on the way!). Whatever you do, please don’t be one of those people who sits around and “counts” the days until “it’s over”… Do something different, or daring, or even a little dangerous.

Weekly Round-Up

Shiloh Baptist Church. Courtesy Hidden Philadelphia.

• A collaborative video installation by Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon premiered last week at the  Armory Center for the Arts. The work  explores the tight-knit subculture of old hippies and beach bums who have lived in Venice Beach for more than thirty years.   The inspiration behind the piece comes from the past-life therapist which Okon and Pettibon (Season 2) visited together, and who told the artists that one of them had been a hippie cult-leader in a past life. Through August 31.

• CITYarts recently presented a Royal Simplicity award to honor the artistic patronage and endeavors of Sheikha Manal Bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.  The award was specially designed by artist Ursula Von Rydingsvard (Season 4) and depicts an abstracted castle and forest hideaway.

• Hidden Philadelphia opens up the city’s lesser known historical and architectural landmarks to the public through artists collaborations.  One of this year’s highlights takes place in the maze-like Victorian space of the Shiloh Baptist Church, where Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) has installed the sound installation Sonambulo. The festival runs May 30 - June 28.

• At PHotoEspaña, Manglano-Ovalle is also presenting two surveillance video installations inside the slaughterhouse-turned-contemporary art center Matadero Madrid.  The artist presents Nocturne (White Poppies) and  Sonambulo III (Infrared). The former shows a  field of Afghan poppies while the second monitors the artist’s son sleeping, “confronting beauty with danger.” From May 30 through July 12.

• Universal Code opens next week at Toronto’s Power Plant.  Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents the work of artists whose work is fascinated with the origin and nature of the universe, including Franz Ackermann, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Art21’s Josiah McElheny and Gabriel Orozco.

Letter from London: Comics Trip

Roy Lichtenstein, "Tintin in the New World," 1993

(Disclaimer: this Letter from London is actually from Paris. Apologies.)

Speaking French makes your mouth assume a range of attractive poses, which is why I always say the word boulangerie while being photographed (try it). French confers an instant silken attractiveness to banal things like English people’s faces. The French term Bande Dessinée (BD), for instance, makes its English equivalent—comic strips—sound infantile and crude, the province of mooby monomaniacs in lightless basements. Hence the new show at the Maison Rouge, Paris, Vraoum! Treasures [my translation] of Bande Dessinée and Contemporary Art, sounds so much more intellectually refined than a similar show would in the UK or US. (Even that Vraoum! is the sound of a very nice car being driven past you at speed by a man called Jean-Baptiste with a flowing white silk scarf, whereas our Whoosh! or Whizz! is an out-of-control jalopy driven by a pack of wise-cracking rodents).

As befits their illustrious-sounding name, BD’s have a particularly elevated status in France, and it’s a much better term for the richness of a genre which includes amazing geniuses like Chris Ware, Ben Katchor, Daniel Clowes, and Alison Bechdel, not to mention the earlyand mid-twentieth century pioneers of the genre (of which more later). For me, graphic novels means Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller, so that’s out. It’ll have to be “comic strips” until something better comes along. The tricky nomenclature is fitting, since the comic strip genre has been so twisted and transformed over the last hundred years that it contains its own accelerated art history, its baroques and gothics and rococos, perennially postmodern before anyone else cottoned on. But they did eventually, and like an old soak at a children’s party, modern art crashed in, reeking of discount vodka and pomposity, and the relationship (here’s where the metaphor has to stop) has veered between doting and dodgy, the fruits of which (it really does have to stop now) are on display, dotted among original comic strip art in the Maison Rouge.

The Maison Rouge is a foundation set up by collector Antoine de Galbert and it is, unlike many other contemporary art spaces its size, both huge and amenable, its central space the eponymous red house (really a house-shaped room) from which increasingly large exhibition spaces bloom outwards. The show benefits from this steady architectural unraveling, with its sense of graduated discovery. The eked-out pleasures of narrative—of being led, slowly, unwitting, into uncharted territories—marks the best comic strip art, which is really a system of tiny narrative allowances, like being fed a loaf of bread piece by piece. I spent quite a lot of time reading Windsor McKay’s pre-WWI Little Nemo in Slumberland, of which there are several hand-colored pages on display, marveling at McKay’s steady accumulations of elegant weirdnesses which culminate, always, in our hero falling out of bed and waking up. Or George Herriman’s original drawings for Krazy Kat, whose menagerie of eloquent and sadistic animals smashing cars and getting each other arrested is wilder and weirder even than their great fan, Philip Guston’s work. Or the peerless Hergé’s drawings for Tintin, one of which—a lovely pen and ink drawing on what looks like graph paper of Tintin descending via parachute through a black sky, clutching a petrified Snowy—reminded me, unexpectedly, of minimalist drawings (that parachute!). Seeing panels, laid out individually and planned to be whisked through in one Saturday afternoon, is a great delight. And how long did you last spend looking at a minimalist drawing?

I’ve been using words like “reading” and “original” to draw out the differences in reception between these works and the contemporary art they’re surrounded by, many of which (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Murakami) make great play of the refutation of both the original and the sequential, treating comic strips as the flotsam of modern culture, just another surface to be reheated and farmed out to an intern to make. But the pop project of comic-culling starts to look shallow and silly when placed alongside Herge, Herriman, and McKay (not to mention Schultz, McManus, and Outcault); in other words, when thought of as Bande Dessinée and not comic strips. At its worst, contemporary art’s mining of comic sources comes off as both smug and condescending, as in Hyungkoo Lee’s cynical (and plagiaristic) skeletons of Roadrunner and Felix the Cat, and the apparently endlessly viable strategy of making mannequins of out-of-shape superheroes. At its best—as in Jochen Gerner’s partly painted-over school map of Africa, with the names of countries and cities reduced to floating speech bubbles (”Go,” “Iq,” “Of”), or Raymond Pettibon’s noir-ish one-liners—contemporary art picks up where the comics leave off, seeing them as a point of departure rather than merely signs to serve a vaguely political purpose (and yes, there are a lot of creepy Mickeys here).

What the show explores is the troubled notion of crossover in culture, which is always top-down, high to low, and never vice-versa (Picasso, Guston, Warhol, McCarthy, etc.), in which the bits and bobs of popular culture magically become worthy of note once ushered into the hallowed halls of highness. What’s left at the door, though, with your coat and bag, is pleasure. Twice I heard visitors laugh in galleries over the last few days: once at the Pompidou, while watching an Andrea Fraser video (in-the-know nasal snorts), and once at the Maison Rouge: a proper, guttural, rib-rattling guffaw coming from an elderly gent next to me at the Herrimans. Which would you prefer?

Weekly Roundup

• Vernissage TV takes a close look at Let the Priests Tremble…(1998/2008), a large hand-printed wall installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. The piece was included in Spero’s retrospective at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla, Spain.

• 9/11-9/11, an animated film by Season 1 artist Mel Chin, will screen tonight at MOMA (7pm). The piece will be screened twice, and a discussion with the artist and the audience will take place in between. Tickets are available at the Museum.

• On the occasion of the fourth Berlin Gallery Weekend (a program of 38 gallery openings in a 3-day span), c/o–Gerhardsen Gerner gallery will present works by Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie. Read more about the exhibition, titled The Need-Fire, here.

• Ann Hamilton (Season 1) has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science. Visit Artforum.com to read the full list of inductees in the visual art category.

• The Guggenheim exhibition catalogue Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe has won the 2008 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in visual arts and architecture. The catalogue accompanied the comprehensive exhibition of work by the Season 3 artist.

• Kara Walker and Raymond Pettibon (both Season 2) appear in the May issue of Black Book magazine.

Weekly Roundup

Shahzia Sikander, "Blood Lines," 2009. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins.

• Tonight at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts, Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko will engage in a discussion with Teddy Cruz and Marjetica Potrč about their socially engaged projects as part of the series Participation and Friction: Rethinking Art and Architecture as Public Culture.

• Congratulations to Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, recipient of the DeCordova Museum’s 2008 Rappaport Prize.

• A little follow-up on that Hiroshi Sugimoto image of the Boden Sea at Uttwil that adorns the new U2 album cover.  Read more about the Season 3 artist’s barter with Bono.

• At Mary Boone Gallery, dealer Javier Perez curates an exhibition of three of his favorite artists: Mike Kelley (Season 3), Terence Koh, and Jeff Koons.  The show opened April 4 and runs through May 16.

• Shazia Sikander’s (Season 1) solo exhibition Stalemate opened last week at Sikemma Jenkins, and features two video works and a series of drawings and paintings entitled Mapping the End of Something.

• At Circleculture Gallery in Berlin, scenes from the skateboarding, graffiti, and punk underground intersect in a three-person show of works by Barry McGee (Season 1), Ed Templeton, and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). The exhibition opens April 10.

Sugimoto + U2

Word on the street is that one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images will be used as the cover for U2’s upcoming album No Line on the Horizon, scheduled for release March 3rd.  The Season 3 photographer follows in the footsteps of other Art:21 artists who have also crossed over and “exhibited” their work as album art.  Notable favorites include Raymond Pettibon for Sonic Youth (Goo, 1990), Tim Hawkinson for Beck (Mutations, 1998), and Matthew Barney for Arto Lindsay (The Prize, 1999).

In other news, I dare say that I may be the first and only Art21 blogger to have a weird utensil named after him.

Raymond Pettibon at Regen Projects (Part II)

Los Angeles’ Regen Projects II will be hosting a new exhibition by artist Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) from December 13, 2008 to January 24, 2009. Entitled Cutting-Room Floor Show, Pettibon’s latest show is Part II of a two-part exhibition that began with Part I: Seminal Work (1978-1988) in September–this focused on his early ‘zine work–and continues with his recent artistic explorations.

This latest crop of work is multi-layered and incorporates his signature text passages that help convey and sometimes question or elude the meaning of his rich graphic images.

Long an underground icon for his early work in LA’s punk scene, particular his graphics for his brother’s band Black Flag, Pettibon will also show some of his paintings on paper that depict chaotic mash-ups of history, politics and the present day all with his characteristic take on popular culture and its discontents.

In his essay on the work of Pettibon, critic Francisco Javier San Martín writes that Pettibon’s drawings:

…attract the spectator’s attention through their use of a familiar vernacular iconography…one that displays the emblems of optimism and bravery in a kind of equivalent to progress, the revelation of a social subconscious in which sin and pain dwell…the perfectly-delimited roles of hero and villain become confused and interchanged, introducing a new relativism that calls into question society’s established values and immovable vision.

Read more about the show at Regen Projects’s site here.

Pettibon’s “I thought California would be different…” in Hollywood

While we posted about the 2008 California Biennial back in May, I discovered this image via the SuperTouch blog about Raymond Pettibon’s (Season 2) contribution:

Legendary punk artist/Black Flag branding mastermind turned bona fide gallery world phenomenon RAYMOND PETTIBON is currently looming large over Hollywood following the recent erection of his massive I thought California would be different… billboard as part of LA’s native 2008 CALIFORNIA BIENNIAL and its series of outdoor site-specific interventions.

(via C-Monster)