Welcome to the Good Life
Until recently, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I could be Kanye West. I did a double take the first time I saw the advertisement one morning on a downtown C-train: “Be someone else. Be KANYE!” the large print suggested. “For a few hours or a lifetime, now anytime can be Kanye time in an Absolut world…. Fast-acting tablets transform anyone into Kanye West,” it continued. Even Kanye himself—who as we know, doesn’t mince words —promised: “Two fast-acting Be KANYE Tablets can unleash the superstar within.” By dialing 1-877-BeKanye or visiting bekanyenow.com, the transformation could be mine.
Did I want to Be Kanye? The bling beckoned. But what, I hedged, might be the side effects. Deciding I’d wait for official FDA approval, I turned my thoughts to wondering how this peculiar and politically incorrect endorsement had elbowed its way into the subway’s ad space. My assumption was graphic guerilla tactics—someone had snuck onto the train late at night and replaced an NYPD recruitment poster with the suggestion of Being Kanye as an alternative route to self-improvement. It was not until I got to work that morning and as first order of procrastination, went to bekanyenow.com, that I learned that BeKanye is Absolut Vodka’s new ad campaign.
At a glance, or even a look, you are not meant to know that ingesting BeKanye Tablets stands for drinking Absolut Vodka—the brand name is only printed twice and in both cases, through clever graphic maneuvers, it is practically invisible.
Why would an advertisement conceal the brand-name it endorses? Continue reading »
Ursula von Rydingsvard in Wyoming
The University of Wyoming Art Museum recently mounted the exhibition Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational. Pictured above on the Museum’s terrace is ”Doolin, Doolin” by Art21 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard (Season 4). This large-scale sculpture (83 x 212 x 77 inches) was the centerpiece for von Rydingsvard’s 1997 solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong. A New York Times reviewer of the Lelong show commented on the piece: ”Doolin, Doolin, [named] after an Irish seacoast town, evokes a set of stout, ocean-battered cliffs or, more fancifully, a cluster of clifflike sentinels bent on guarding a land of myth and poetry.”
The sculpture (detail above) is created from carved 2 x 4-inch cedar beams rather than von Rydingsvard’s more commonly used 4 x 4-inch beams. In an Art21 interview the artist said, “If I were to point to something from the [postwar refugee] camps that one can see most directly in my work it is that we stayed in barracks—with raw wooden floors, walls, and ceilings. I have a feeling that that fed into my working with wood. And the first time I ever saw Poland—all of the villages, all the homes there, were made of wood. There were stacks of wood, doors, and troughs of wood. Wood was the building material. So it’s somewhere in my blood, and I’m dipping into that source. The way in which I manipulate the cedar is very important to me, but I have a feeling that I even learned from things that I never saw.”
Sculpture is on view at the UW Art Museum through July 31, 2009. Visit the exhibition blog for the latest information.
Positively Puryear
There is no substitute for seeing Martin Puryear’s sculptures firsthand. Martin Puryear at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., spanning the museum’s two buildings, offers such an opportunity through September 28, 2008. In Art:21’s Martin Puryear episode (Season 2) I first learned about his working methods and interest in materials, both important elements in the 50 plus sculptures on view.
The contrast of the stone of the East Building with the wood of Puryear’s sculptures on view in the East Building is breathtaking. The East Building’s spacious court also gives Puryear’s sculptures room to breathe (a sense of life Puryear has talked about his sculptures having).
In the West Building’s Rotunda, Ladder for Booker T. Washington (featured prominently in Art:21) is installed. From certain angles the sculpture is dwarfed by the rotunda’s scale and the sculpture’s placement may even go unnoticed by some visitors. The time-lapse photographs of the installation and seeing the work installed offer possibilities for thinking about and discussing how installation and the choice of site affects the perception of (and potentially the interpretation) of a work of art.
Puryear’s sculptures are also shown in multiple galleries in the West Building. A gallery with five circular sculptures from 1978 to 1980 caught my attention. All wood (though different varieties), some are painted while the natural is manipulated in others. The ends of some connect, while others overlap and a few stop short of the ends meeting. While all circular, Puryear here offers the many possibilities of the circle. Each sculpture reflects the considerations he made his choices.
If you are not able to see Puryear’s sculptures firsthand, or if you want to share them with your students, the National Gallery has some useful online resources including images (with details of the surfaces) and a Family Guide with interesting, thoughtful questions to consider while looking at Puryear’s work.
This exhibition left me thinking about choices: Puryear’s choices of materials, choice in terms of the ways he works with materials, choices in repeating forms, choice of titles, as well as the choice of site. The choices artists make is one of my favorite themes to talk about with students visiting a museum. While formal analysis is often used to discuss choices, as an educator how have you discussed with your students the choices an artist has made in a work of art?
Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light
Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light–on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla–focuses solely on the Season 1artist’s neon sculptures and light-room installations. The exhibition consists of approximately 15 works created over the first two decades of Nauman’s career (1965–1985) and is arranged in sections. One area features Nauman’s early neons, which focus on the subject of identity; language, signs, and symbols make up another section; and the mechanics of perception are explored in the artist’s installations.
The exhibition was assembled by the Milwaukee Art Museum and has traveled to six additional venues in the United States, Canada and Australia. MCASD’s presentation includes several works not featured in previous installations of the show, such as Green Light Corridor (1970-71). This piece, which is illuminated with fluorescent lights, was first exhibited at the Museum as part of the 1971 exhibition, Body Movements; it is reinstalled in its original location. In a recent LA Times review, Leah Ollman wrote: “Nauman’s work in neon plays its reassuring vibrancy against the unease generated by its content. The two installations in the show are similarly seductive and destabilizing. Green Light Corridor…presents a narrow, free-standing hallway bathed in a lime glow. The passageway is passable, but not comfortably.”
The second installation, Helman Gallery Parallelogram (1971), is a room also lit with fluorescent lights that saturate the viewer’s vision with an intense green color. Upon leaving the room, one’s vision is, according to the press release, tinged with images of magenta, providing a spatial counterpoint to the neon signs. Ollman says, ”The piece works like an optical fun house, a twisted Turrell.”
Elusive Signs closes August 31, 2008. A related publication is available at the MCASD and at Amazon.com.
Give Up and Laugh About It
The other day I had accidentally hit the strikethrough function in Microsoft Word and so as I was typing my carefully chosen words, they were simultaneously being crossed out. “Okay, I get it,” I said to my MacBook, irritated that my machine was mocking my toil.
Two of this summer’s group shows addressed the sense of futility I felt: Cancelled, Erased & Removed, at Sean Kelly Gallery, included works spanning 1960-2008 that took as their subject paradoxical instances when the opposing forces of making and unmaking, growing and disintegrating, presenting and concealing are inseparable. Meanwhile, a distinctive vein of humor in Marion Goodman Gallery’s Deep Comedy, which covered 1970-2008, was the absurdity of meaningless gestures.
The historical cornerstone of Cancelled, Erased & Removed was Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning (1953), in which the artist took an eraser to a drawing that the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning had given him—thus the obliteration of one work gave birth to another. Knowing Rauschenberg’s plans, however, de Kooning challenged the younger artist by giving him the most heavily marked drawing he had, and indeed, Rauschenberg was not able to entirely rid the paper of its original image; faint traces of ink and crayon remain.
Fast forward half a century: in Mike Bidlo’s suite of 16 Erased de Kooning drawings (2005), one of which was up at Sean Kelly, Bidlo meticulously copied de Kooning’s drawings of women, photographed the replicas, erased his own work and then attached the photographed drawings to the backs of the their “originals.”
Rauschenberg’s act was art historically Oedipal: overtly hostile to Abstract Expressionism, the transformation of de Kooning’s dark drawing—via painstaking labor—to an essentially blank page signaled a revolt against AbsEx’s emphasis on universal expression, and the celebration of the unique painterly mark spilling forth from the tortured artist-genius.
Bidlo’s work is focused around a different, if related, set of issues—primarily the implications of appropriation. There are of course many ways to read this work, but one aspect of its meaning is that through its excess, Bidlo’s reprise pushes Rauschenberg’s gesture into the realm of the absurd. To spend endless hours mimicking the work of one artist (de Kooning) and to then un-do that work by mimicking the work of another artist (Rauschenberg) and to save the record of the original effort in a place where no one can see it (on the back of the erased drawing), is a colossal act of deadpan self-effacement.
Enter Deep Comedy. Curated by the artist Dan Graham with independent curator Silvia Chivaratanond, this exhibition brought together work that critiques social, political and artistic institutions through formal and conceptual strategies involving play and an inclination toward the absurd.
One of the strands within the show featured works that represented great amounts of energy being expended on pointless or fruitless activities, epitomized perhaps by Allen Ruppersberg’s Honey, I rearranged the collection (The Red and the Black) (2002). This poster-size silkscreened image of a fancy domestic interior is covered in Post-It Notes that offer desperate, funny, and poignant explanations of the work’s title: “Honey I rearranged the collection to separate works which seem to be about ideas from those which are truly splendid”; “Honey I rearranged the collection because that is all there is left to talk about”; “Honey I rearranged the collection but everything remained the same only more so.”
Humor is subjective, of course, but within the genre there is a lineage predicated on reaching too high, undertaking Sisyphusian tasks, and other acts that will most likely be wastes of energy ending in failure. When, against all odds, the underdog triumphs, we feel good; when he doesn’t, we’re supposed to think it’s funny. Lucy in the candy factory; Charlie Brown with his football; Corky St. Clair waiting for Guffman. What is it that’s so funny about futility?
“Qué Hay Que Hacer Mas?”: Reflections on “The Disasters of War” at Peter Blum SoHo
I’m hard-pressed to remember the last time I found a thank you note from a President Elect presidential candidate in a gallery exhibition’s press file. But there it was, at Peter Blum SoHo, sandwiched between praise from the New York Times and the Village Voice, a letter from Barack applauding Peter for the timeliness of his gallery’s current exhibition: Francisco de Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) print series.
Goya (1746-1828) made these etchings circa 1810-1820 in response to Spain’s War of Independence against Napoleon’s armies (1808-1814). Filtering traditions of history painting through caricature, irony and emotional immediacy, this complete set of eighty prints (first published in 1906) retains its power to conjure the visceral horror and inhumanities of war. Physical atrocity is expressed in Great Deeds! With Dead Men! where the dead weight of the central figure pulls against the ropes that bind his naked body to a barren tree, which is decorated by the body parts of his comrades; equally disturbing, in I saw it, is the terror on the faces of the father and child who look at something beyond the picture frame—rather than revealing the it, Goya uses these facial expressions to give license to our darker imaginings. Throughout the series, the aftermath of war is shown in desiccated landscapes where vultures pick at corpses.
Matching the arresting content of these prints is their compositional ingenuity: in They Do Not Agree, nearly half the plate was left unetched; the chaotic foreground gives way to the background via a single face that fades from dense to sparer hatchmarks and eventually to a blank page—a formal operation pulverizes a figure into thin air. 200 years after it was created, this work remains formally, psychologically and, unfortunately, thematically relevant.
It’s generous of Peter Blum to show us The Disasters of War while probably dispensing with a summer’s worth of exhibition-generated gallery income. And judging from Obama’s thanks to him for “the countless ways you’ve supported our campaign,” this is not all he’s doing for the Democratic Party.
Still, standing in this white box in SoHo, the surprise of flipping from the familiar layout of the New Yorker’s art listings to Barack’s official red, white and blue letterhead made me wonder what it could really mean if the contemporary artworld “took action.” So a thought experiment: what if the exhibition were revised from Goya’s Disasters of War to OUR Disasters of War and instead of the 80 prints wrapping around the elegant gallery space, a sign in its window that read: “Peter Blum SoHo is closed through November while its staff works for the Obama campaign wherever Barack needs us.” (Imagining this on a large scale serves up the appealing image of the rural south being flooded by New York gallerina/gallerino transplants working for the future of our country.)
A similar idea was posed by the artist Mary Kelly when she suggested to Connie Butler, curator of the recent exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, that the exhibition consist not of objects, but of participatory consciousness raising sessions about the issue of feminism.
I was inspired by seeing both The Disasters of War and WACK!, but with a whole host of upcoming shows on theme of Democracy in honor of the election season (previews to come), I think it’s worth considering what contemporary art and its artworld can and can’t do to effect Change We Can Believe In.
Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) is on view at Peter Blum SoHo, 99 Wooster Street until August 1 and will reopen August 26-September 1.
Slowing Down and Visualizing Approaches, Part 2
Following up on last week’s column, I was thinking about ways to slow down during the summer months and properly recharge for the upcoming school year. I also got to thinking about ways to inject new artists, media and themes into my teaching while preparing during the summer. Three ways I wanted to share include…..
Vacationing with a sketchbook and at least one way to make art:
New ideas come on suddenly. Without a way to take notes and perhaps create an example of the idea itself, some of the best stuff gets lost.
Getting together with other teachers to rethink and update curriculum maps:
I happen to be blessed in this area because I work with a tremendous team of teachers in Nyack who are willing to visualize new approaches to make the classes we offer more interesting for students AND teachers. We spent a full day together early in July to update and revise one of our core foundations courses and now each of us have the remainder of the summer to work off of that session in order to revise and update other advanced electives we teach.
Exploring exhibitions in person and online:
While we can’t possibly get to everything we want to see over the summer, many galleries and museums offer fantastic slideshows and background information on their exhibits. If you can’t get to the exhibit you want to see, check it out online and take note of where the show may be traveling. You might be able to see it in another city or at another time.
Teachers who incorporate contemporary art into their classes are constantly involved in a process of choosing who and what to share with students. What are some ways you make these decisions during the summer months?
Shahzia Sikander at Ikon Gallery
Works by Season 1 artist Shahzia Sikander are on view at Ikon Gallery July 30 through September 14, 2008 in what constitutes the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the UK and her largest to-date in Europe. Shahzia Sikander: Intimate Ambivalence primarily focuses on works created in the last two years, including large-scale gouaches and a wall drawing made specifically for Ikon. A selection of early works will be presented alongside recent pieces that will be on view to the public for the first time.
Also included in the exhibition are a suite of graphite portraits of novices and monks resulting from Sikander’s recent travels to Laos. According to Ikon Gallery, these drawings “[establish] an interesting conceptual parallel between the monks’ changing lives under the influence of tourism and the artist’s ongoing preoccupations: contemplation of our ever-changing world where issues of mutability and transformation are crucial.” Visit Ikon’s online Media Gallery to view a brief slideshow related to Intimate Ambivalence.
Ikon Gallery is housed in the neo-gothic Oozells Street School in Birmingham, UK. Over the past 40 years, the space has developed a reputation for innovation, internationalism and excellence. Click here to learn more about Ikon and the four areas the make up their artistic program.
Berliner Salon: Obama, Brotherhood and XV. Rohkunstbau
After Obama’s electrifying speech at the Siegessäule this past Thursday, it seems appropriate to mention the fifteenth installment of Rohkunstbau, a trilogy entitled THREE COLORS- BLUE WHITE RED, the final chapter of which (RED) opened two weeks ago at its new location at Villa Kellermann on the Heiliger Lake in Potsdam, which the press release describes as possessing “a layered and ambiguous aristocratic, bourgeois and proletarian history.”
The exhibition coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” The participating artists, Marc Bauer, Guy Ben-Ner, Richard Hamilton, Britta Jones, Alexandra Khlestkina, Jonathan Monk, Jose Noguero, Bettina Pousttchi, Cornelia Renz and Brigitte Waldach, were asked to create work that addressed their understanding of “brotherhood” in the politically-charged, geographically fragmented and fundamentally combative climate of our contemporary times.
From the press release, “At no time in recent history has the idea of an international brotherhood of man been under greater threat. The United Nations, the promulgator of ‘endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,’ appears today to be a deeply troubled organisation. Within Europe a sense of a shared human endeavour seems equally problematic and put into doubt and question. Contemporary artists engaging with the subject matter becomes as a result a prescient means to discuss and open up issues related to what was once taken as a given, namely the brotherhood of life declared as the meaningful manifestation of our shared human existence.”
THREE COLORS- RED is on view until October 5th. For more information on the exhibition, click here. Schoenes Wochenende.
Roni Horn at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills
July 24 through August 29, 2008, works by Season 3 artist Roni Horn will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, California. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Los Angeles area in almost ten years, and her first with the gallery. A reception for the artist will be held on July 24 from 6-8pm.
Included in the exhibition are sculptures from the ongoing series of inlaid aluminum rods that Horn began in the early nineties. As seen in the picture above, the rods lean against the wall and bear bits of text. In this exhibition the texts relate to writers Flannery O’Connor and Emily Dickinson. In an Art21 interview, Horn said, “My relationship to my work is extremely verbal, extremely language-based. I am probably more language-based than I am visual, and I move through language to arrive at the visual. So I’ve always questioned whether I am really a visual artist. You get into this situation where your ‘identity’ takes over your actual being because you get stuck with whatever it is you resemble to other people- not who you are. They’re not necessarily the same thing.”
Click here to read about other objects in the exhibition. Follow this link for directions to the gallery.
