Solid Sound
Tobias Putrih, Re-projection: Hoosac, 2010 Source: MASS MoCA
Is sound an element of design right alongside biggies like line, color, shape and texture? Teachers today are faced with the unseemly job of breaking outside “the” seven elements of design many of us grew up with, and now must educate students about a range of additional elements one really can’t skirt if you’re teaching with contemporary art.
Sound as an element of design was front and center at MASS MoCA this weekend as Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival hit North Adams, MA, and basically took over the town. What was impressive, along with the variety of bands featured, was the way sound created unique experiences as and with art throughout the museum, rather than serve as a backdrop to objects. Nels Cline’s installation on the second floor allowed visitors to sit and manipulate over a dozen electronic effects boxes and create waves of distortion, vibration, pulsation and other ations I won’t even mention here. I found myself creating a whole concert with a child across from me that couldn’t have been more than eight years old. We had a ball! But the placement of this installation next to (underneath) Tobias Putrih’s Re-projection: Hoosac made the dialogue between these works even more beautiful. The changes in volume, rhythm, and overall noise allowed for experiencing Putrih’s wall-to-wall sculpture in different aural settings depending on when you came through the gallery (for the purists at the festival, the installation was only turned on for 30-minute increments on the half hour, rather than having it running full time… and you needed a breather if you were making a lot of that kind of music).
Artists who use sound as a primary element such as Bruce Nauman and Christian Marclay allow us to consider it as an element of design that helps get an idea or experience across. Sometimes it is supported by other elements such as color or texture and sometimes it stands on its own. Becoming familiar with art and artists using sound in a wide range of settings has become part of what art educators need to consider when teaching about art today.
Letter from London: Masterpiece Theatre
“Philip IV” and “Mariana of Austria” shoot the breeze in the Prado. Period costume memo not picked up by majority of attendees
On a single day this week I saw a clutch of paintings that would, by most reckonings, be referred to as “masterpieces”: Velazquez’ Las Meninas (1656), Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814), Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-4), and Picasso’s Guernica (1937). I’m deliberately not linking to images of them, because you already know what they look like. Perhaps the images flicked into your mind on reading the titles. I thought I knew them too, but this prior knowledge made it almost impossible to look at the real object with any kind of immediacy. Anecdotal historical information, the stuff upon which wall labels and guided tours are built, deadens an immediate response to a work of art. It thickens the air; it slows down your reactions. This distancing from the physicality of the thing in front of you is made literal in the Louvre’s disastrous hang of the Mona Lisa, pinioned behind glass like an entomological specimen: dead. Continue reading »
Teaching with Film and Objects
Alfredo Jaar, "Lament of the Images (Version 1)" 2002 Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
Teaching with film or taking a trip with students to a museum can sometimes be an experience somewhere between total bliss and a dental visit. It can be eye-opening or so bad you want to forget it altogether. Personally, I have experienced no shortage in my own career where these scenarios have gone extremely well (students getting it, real dialogue, feeling the buzz of the conversation, making connections) or really, really wrong (students setting off museum alarms, falling asleep and actually injuring themselves doing so… you get the idea). But there are some strong similarities in how we can prepare and engage students when teaching with film and taking meaningful field trips. Here are four examples we shared recently with our Art21 Educators:
Take a good look at the films before you show them- Film and field trips need to be previewed by the teacher in advance in order to plan effectively. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but you can’t imagine how many people have cut corners and assumed certain things about films or exhibits when suddenly… WHAM!…. the shock of, “What did I just do?” sets in. Do NOT show any film or take a field trip with students unless you have previewed the material first…. Unless, of course, you just love surprises.
Do the front-end work- Prepare students in advance for what they will see by sharing images, quotes and (his)stories about the artist(s). Prepare students for what you expect when watching the film or participating in the field trip. What will excellent participation look and sound like? Tell students in advance what your expectations are and motivate students with high quality visuals that pose questions in order to get them excited to see and explore the work.
Secrets of Art Appreciation
"Some people say modern art is pretentious, but if you look at it like this..." Photo by the author at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. July 2009.
I am not an “art critic.” I can tell you how I feel about a given work of art, but I may feel differently over time or if I see the same work in another space. Mood is a powerful factor, and it usually takes several interactions to develop a meaningful relationship. It is indeed rare that I fall for an artwork at first sight.
I (mostly unconsciously) employ three metrics for deciding if, how, and how much I’m enjoying a work of art. The shorthand I’ve adopted to describe them is “head,” “heart,” and “gut.” Here’s a quick explanation of what they each mean to me.
Head. Is a work intellectually stimulating to me? Perhaps I’m making connections to other works of art or to knowledge I have of the time and circumstances in which the work was created. Maybe the work cleverly embodies a joke to which I know the punchline. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is a seminal example in modern art. If you know the story of how challenging it was to those who had to decide if it was art or not, and whether it could be included in an exhibition that claimed it would include all submitted artworks, you laugh with Duchamp and his pals. Not getting the joke is frustrating, but it doesn’t preclude an eventual appreciation of that same piece. I just still need someone to tell me the joke. I enjoy humor in art a great deal, but I’m also aware that my sense of humor is particular to me, which is one of the reasons I am not willing to call myself an art critic. However, I will happily own up to being an avid art appreciator. In this realm, as in criticism, we carry context with us. This is especially true in the following two metrics.
Letter from London: In the Loop
Siena's Campo dei Miracoli at Mini-Europe, Brussels
My favorite things in Pallant House, the excellent gallery of modern British art in Chichester on the south coast of England, are a couple of small models made before its reopening in 2006. Each model is a dramatically scaled-down version of one of the principal rooms of the gallery, about the scale of a train set or civil war diorama. Inevitably, one model is of the room you’re standing in as you stoop down to look, and hung on the mini-walls are mini-versions of the works of art around you (by artists like Peter Blake, Anthony Caro, and Patrick Caulfield). Sadly, there’s no succession of mini-yous and mini-models telescoping into infinity. But here’s the great thing: all of the works are mini-versions by the artists themselves! So, peering through the Plexiglass fourth wall, you get that God-looking-down-on-His-creation satisfaction that all curators must feel when they’ve finished shuffling the pieces around with long rods, Churchill-style, in low-lit backrooms thick with cigar smoke (note to self: may need to meet an actual curator one of these days). I’ve always loved the picture — Google Images doesn’t sympathize — of Bill Rubin in his curatorial wheelchair, jabbing at little images of Picassos as his minions scamper to rearrange their placement according to his magisterial will and booming baritone (see note to self, again). Curating as an idea is a kind of intellectual board game: metonymic tokens are pushed around an artificially sequential space. Think of the similarity between the Cluedo (Clue) board and the standard museum layout. See? Like a game (and like a mix-tape, now I think of it), curating imbues its players with an inflamed sense of personal agency usually denied in social settings (I should know).
The 1965 Cluedo board
The English art critic David Sylvester used to create fantasy cricket teams composed of famous artists – Vermeer in the slips, Michelangelo at the wicket – which draws a pretty convincing parallel between the world of curatorship and that of the fantasy sports leaguer. And although my dream museum pairing, Poussin’s The Seven Sacraments placed alongside a row of Judd’s aluminum boxes, won’t happen unless a serious clerical error occurs in the HR department of a major art museum, capricious artistic pairings occur naturally anyway, in the way that we experience and process works of art. Two recent shows in London are a case in point: the two artists have never (as far as I know) been shown alongside each other, but their conceptual and aesthetic similarities, compounded by a mulched and misfiring memory for what I saw where, have created for me a kind of ideal model of curatorial strategy. So let’s assume that the two shows, Mark Wallinger at Anthony Reynolds and Rodney Graham at Lisson Gallery, were in fact just one, as I shuffle the pieces around from the comfort of my wheelchair.
Effervescent Condition
Installation shot of "Effervescent Condition" at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2010.
Effervescent Condition, curated by Fang-Tze Hsu (MA 2010) was the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) contribution to The Power of Copying, a large-scale, international group exhibition held at the Xuzhou Museum of Art in Xuzhou, China. With The Power of Copying, curator Qin Jian wished to explore the theme of copying, and how the context of an image or concept, when duplicated, is not steadfast. Jian wished to initiate a debate about the copy and how one’s nationality or ethnic identity informs image and object reproduction, and therefore invited various international pedagogical art institutions to participate.
Fang-Tze Hsu chose a group of artists working with and researching new media, as well as an instructor who is well-versed on the subject matter, to participate in the two concurrent iterations that were her vision for Effervescent Condition; one exhibition was held in Xuzhou Art Museum and the other at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The five artists chosen were Nadav Assor, Florian Graf, Adelheid Mers, Joshua Sampson and Wang Yefeng. The exhibition is, for Hsu, a reaction “to the effervescent condition of globalization… [and] the metamorphosis of citizenship under globalization, in which highly skilled, creative individuals are enticed to move freely from one metropolis to the other.”
Walking into SAIC’s Gallery X for the reception, I was immediately struck by Joshua Sampson’s (MFA 2011) Dodgedraw set-up. Utilizing readily available digital technology was highly important to the artist. He constructed real-time, interactive, and simultaneous electronic situations that incorporated the same elements: Skype, a webcam, a projector, markers, and white seamless paper. The digital components were wired so that the web camera recorded the actions and fed it over the Internet in real time via Skype. The Skype video was then translated into life-sized projections onto the seamless paper at both institutions.
The participant in China would frantically work to draw the digital outline of the person in Chicago onto the paper, and vice versa. Both people worked to dodge their counterpart’s attempts to draw them while working to complete their rendering. The result was a time-based, performative, participant-dependent artwork.
The Paradoxical Art of “Inception”
M.C. Escher, "Relativity," 1953
What is so compelling about riddles, mysteries, and puzzles? Most people are fascinated by images and objects that are paradoxical or impossible in real life but look oddly convincing and perplexing in 2D. Art:21 Season Four featured contemporary artists Allora & Calzadilla, Mark Bradford, Robert Ryman, and Catherine Sullivan who investigate the boundaries between “abstraction and representation, fact and fiction, order and chaos.” Throughout history, artists have been compelled to explore paradox as contradiction, ambiguity, and truth.
Ann Hamilton, "kaph," detail 1997.
The paradoxical structure of my work is often to engage that place of in-betweenness; to engage it, not to make a picture of it, not to make it its subject, but actually to try to work at that place in a way that demonstrates it, that’s demonstrative, that occupies it. You know it’s very abstract, but concrete.
It would seem that paradox inspires artists to expand their imaginations, derive abstract concepts, and dream bigger.
Art is paradoxical by nature. It both reflects the past and creates the future. It both orders and dis-integrates, and somehow, through the course of both, defies entropy.
Maybe that’s what humans do, too: reflect and create.
Maybe that’s why we need art so badly.
The Penrose stairs is a 2D depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop, so that a person could climb them forever and never get any higher. This is clearly impossible in 3D but the 2D version achieves this paradox by distorting perspective. The best known examples of Penrose stairs appears in a couple of famous lithographs by M.C. Escher (see top image) and this brings us to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film that is billed as a story about dreams but also delves deeper into our fascination with paradox.
Note that this entry is not a review of the film, nor are there any major plot spoilers for those who have yet to see the film. I have seen this film three times on the big screen because if you want to truly understand the mechanics of Inception rather than simply going along for the ride, you need to see the film more than once and spend some time solving its puzzles and untangling its mysteries. I had a different purpose for each viewing and spent some serious time analyzing the art (and design) in the film.
Freewaves: Video Between Their Toes
Caitlin Berrigan, "Teeth in the Wrong Places," 2004
Freewaves turned 20 this year. The grassroots new media organization that began in 1989 with a gaping, loosely defined mission to show Los Angeles to itself celebrated its birthday on June 26 with Video on the Loose, a one-night festival at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In the wide-open plaza that links the museum’s newly built Resnick Pavilion and Broad complex to the older Ahmanson Building, 21 monitors each displayed a video from Freewaves’ double-decade archive. They made up a surprisingly compact circle and Freewaves founder and director Anne Bray originally imagined that viewers would look over the tops of the monitors and into the faces of people watching on the circle’s opposite side. But tall monitor stands prohibited this sort of voyeuristic camaraderie. Instead, to hear over the dint of the DJ and surrounding videos, viewers gathered close to the speakers and, at times, tight circles formed around screens. This close proximity added a subtle sense of peer-pressure to the evening’s experience. You didn’t want to be the first to leave your circle, especially if others were intent.
The first time I watched Meena Nanji’s Voices of the Morning, a hauntingly rhythmic black and white film narrated by a young Muslim woman learning how to have a self, I stood beside a tall man with graying golden-blond hair. His intentness worked on me like a weight; even though the faster-moving imagery on the subsequent screen tempted me, I stayed put, acting just as focused as him (and by the video’s end, I really wasn’t acting; I returned to Voices of the Morning two more times that evening).
Social dynamics like these are, in part, what Freewaves is all about.
Dear Oliver
Oliver Herring, "Chris After Hours of Spitting Food Dye Outdoors", 2004 Courtesy Max Protetch Gallery
You know what I like about Oliver Herring? Pretty much everything.
Oliver was generous enough to join us for the 2nd year in a row to jump-start the Art21 Educators summer institute and set in motion (again) his signature TASK project last week. All of the institute participants, along with members of the Art21 staff, came together for TASK at the Chashama Gallery on 44th Street in Manhattan. After over two hours, we not only had a layered and stimulating installation of art works, but also a sensational setting for the start of our summer institute.
But besides Oliver’s work with Art21 and TASK, I truly believe, especially in light of recent student experience with his work, that there is more to talk about than simply celebrate TASK. Oliver is a photographer, sculptor and mixed-media artist who appeals to a variety of students and artists. His approach is one that investigates possibilities through media that best serve his ideas. Students who engage with his collaborative and commemorative work can learn about installation, performance, and work that highlights process as part of what the work is about.
The very first question posed on Oliver Herring’s page in the season 3 educator guide asks, “In art, is the process or the product more important?” Teaching and learning through his art allows us to think long and hard about that very question, because in some works, like TASK, the process is clearly more important. But in other works such as “Chris After Hours of Spitting Food Dye Outdoors” (2004), one could certainly make a case for both. The photo is stunning. The end product seems to be a crowning achievement after longs hours of photographing and working with this stranger as he literally spit into the wind.
As we complete the second half of the Art21 Educators summer institute this week I just want to publicly thank Oliver for his expertise and assistance with this important initiative that now involves thirty teachers in ten cities across the United States. Many thanks also go to Lois Hetland (Project Zero), Olivia Gude (Spiral Workshop), Susan Rotile (Walker Art Center), Lisa Mazzola (MoMA), Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Allan McCollum for their help in the first few days…
More next week!
Experience in Art Education
"Figure 1. Curiosity as a function of information," graph from "Naive Set Theory," by Anthony Humberman, 2007.
“An art school, it would appear, does not teach art, but sets up the conditions necessary for creative production, and by extension the conditions for collaboration and social engagement.” — Anton Vidokle
Recently a young artist told me he believes Photoshop to be the most elegant synopsis of the process of artmaking and how we learn to use artistic talents. His theory is simple: proficiency breeds reserve. Photoshop is no different – once you become a master, the drop shadow tool becomes less exciting and more vapid. An ideal arts education would foster a student’s proficiency to be reserved. His claim is supported by a hypothetical solution posed by Dexter Sinister to use the Photoshop toolbox as a method for investigating and understanding the historical references and skills behind each tool. Though it is subversive in its re-appropriation of economized technology as the symbol for deeper understandings of art, this method is pedagogically recursive and intellectually emancipating. The opportunity presented to members of the arts community, and arts educators specifically, by incorporating highly conceptual forms and anti-conceptual work into their curriculum to support and motivate students is unprecedented.
Pieces of art theory that traditionally require a history of point and counterpoint can become incredible aphorisms in the modern age to inform the entire spectrum of education. It’s useful to instill in young learners the simple notion that the fixity of meaning can be questioned, or more importantly, that the creation of meaning does not have to take a predetermined form. This suspension of information becomes a part of the new toolbox for a new generation, irrational in everyday representation, but nonetheless informing and influencing the entire schema of thought within each individual.
In order to overcome conceptual alchemy and become a tangible object, art must be surreptitious in its tactics. A derived arts education will not hold up to the Internet and the radically cheapening status of the image. New methods are needed that are flexible and strategic – methods that provide multi-disciplinary, hands on, and truly empowering experiences. By providing a deeply considered program of exhibitions, happenings, experiences, and general chaos that parallels the real life of art, arts educators can help students to better understand the ways in which art can change and manipulate their lives and the world around them.
