Weekly Roundup

John Feodorov, "Fairy Tale", (detail), 2007. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 50 in. Courtesy Valise Gallery.

Sparkling Nepalese paper, race and civil rights, a northern island, circular botanics, fluorescent lights, a ton of vinyl records, and a few reviews in today’s roundup:

• Season 1 artist John Feodorov is included in the two-person exhibition De-Natured at Valise Gallery, an artist-run collective on the island of Vashon, Washington. Feodorov (based in Seattle) and Lauren Atkinson (of Whidbey Island) were students of Valise member Beverly Naidus over twenty years ago when they were undergraduate art students at California State University Long Beach. Their work in De-Natured addresses “our complex relationship with nature and the conflicting sensations many of us feel in its presence.” Feodorov explains his work: “Several years ago, I visited the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon, near my family’s land in New Mexico. This was during the much-hyped Harmonic Convergence when people were gathering at numerous traditional sacred sites around the world. Along the inside perimeter of one of the large kivas, a throng of tie-dyed spiritual enthusiasts formed a circle while sitting in lotus position. At the axis, they had erected a plastic totem pole, an object possessing no significance to the native peoples of the Southwest. Their act, while well intentioned, seemed more like an act of spiritual desperation than of re-connection. It is this kind of sincere yet misguided event that interests me as an artist.” De-Natured closes March 31.

• On March 16, The Getty Center will screen Legacy: Black and White in America, a documentary that premiered on PBS that explores the legacy of the civil rights movement and looks at the lives of African Americans today through conversations with figures in business, politics, academia, the media, and the arts. Following the screening, cultural commentator Lawrence Weschler will lead a discussion about the legacy of race and civil rights in contemporary art and museum practice. Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), who is featured in the video, will be part of that conversation. The event begins at 6pm. Click here for more information.

• La Saison the F[euml]tes (The Season of Celebrations) — a site-specific installation of flowers, plants and trees by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe — opens March 17 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reine Sofia in the Palacio de Cristal. For this project, Huyghe will place different plants associated with various holiday periods in a circle, each one of them characteristic of a specific time of year. The arrangement is to be read as a clock with the different seasons marked by the diversity of flora — roses, violets, chrysanthemums, palm trees, plum trees, jasmine, bamboo, and firs. La Saison the F[euml]tes closes May 31.

• On March 30, Kiki Smith (Season 2) will speak at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) along with the curators of Philagrafika 2010, an exhibition that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. Smith’s work is included in the core exhibition of Philagrafika, The Graphic Unconscious, simultaneously on view at PAFA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, the Temple Gallery at Tyler School of Art, and The Print Center. Using fragile sheets of Nepalese paper, Kiki Smith installed two walls of PAFA’s gallery with an array of small and large-scale works. Smith will discuss the major themes in this work and her ongoing interest in printmaking techniques and processes. The event begins at 6pm.

• Through May 16, works by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view in Vinyl at La Maison Rouge in Paris. The exhibition of close to 800 albums, tapes, CDs, specialist magazines, reference books, catalogues and artworks is drawn from the collection of British collector, publisher and curator Guy Schraenen. Vinyl shows LPs from “an acoustic and visual angle” to illustrate how artists from the 1920s through today have experimented with language and sound. Visitors can listen to every record in the collection at a specially-designed deck.

• Martin Puryear Prints, an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, surveys a decade of the Season 2 artist’s printmaking. Puryear’s prints are inspired by various interests that are also visible in his well-known sculptures — furniture, basketry and his international travels. Curator of Prints, Kristin Spangenberg, says, “Puryear has created a body of printed works that extract the essence of minimalist abstraction with an appreciation of natural forms and ordinary objects.” The exhibition continues through June 13.

• Colorforms, a long-term exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, explores color and abstract form in artworks from the Hirshhorn’s collection that date from 1949 to the present. Milk Run (1996), a fluorescent-light installation by Season 1 artist James Turrell, is on view alongside works by Paul Sharits, Fred Sandback, Mark Rothko, Anish Kapoor, and Wolfgang Laib through winter 2011.

• The traveling survey exhibition of works by Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has made its way to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in the UK. Read recent reviews of the show from Laura Cumming of The Observer; Adrian Searle of The Guardian; and Jonathan Brown of The Independent.

• Read what critics for Bloomberg and the New York Times are saying about The Nose, produced by William Kentridge (Season 5) for the Metropolitan Opera. The performance continues through March 25.

Letter from London: Vandalabra!

Legonardo da Vinci, 'The Mona Lisa'

Last Sunday, a Russian woman walked through the galleries of the Louvre Museum in Paris carrying a small empty ceramic tea cup, which, upon arriving in one of the museum’s largest galleries steadily elbowed her way to the front of the crowd before she threw the cup, firmly and decisively, at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The hurled cup splintered into pieces on the inch-thick security glass and five guards slammed the woman to the floor as the encircling tourist cameras strobe-lit the scene.

For the four and a half minutes it took to escort the woman to the Louvre’s security offices at the rear of the building, the Mona Lisa was entirely unwatched. For four and a half minutes, it was just a painting. Then, crunching over the broken crockery, the crowds returned, like a sigh.

The Mona Lisa is not a well-looked-after painting. Its presentation (hung above average eye-level, in a rectangular recess in a huge floating wall, behind a screen of bullet-proof glass, in front of a projecting wooden shelf, behind a semicircular railing, guarded by two museum attendants) and prominence in the museum (it is announced in black-and-white reproduction on a series of signs with a big black arrow which lead straight past the Nike of Samothrace and paintings by Uccello, Mantegna, Titian and Veronese) suggests that the Louvre has been commandeered by its own PR department.

At the audioguide desk, you can pick up a special guided tour narrated by actor Jean Reno, who speaks as his character from Hollywood’s The Da Vinci Code. “In theees room,” he hisses, sexily, “is zee greatest meeestery of all.”

Can we feel just a tiny bit of sympathy for the Russian woman?

The woman’s protest (she had recently been denied French citizenship) is another addition to the long list of damaged or destroyed works of art. When suffragette Mary Richardson took a knife to the back of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus in 1914, or when the young Tony Shafrazi spray painted “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s Guernica in 1974, or when the Taliban dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001, they were reacting to an image’s power to enthrall.

In effect, attacks like these (ironically) restore an image’s potency: they shock them back to life. That’s not to say I endorse vandalism of art–although I’ll distract the guards if anyone fancies slashing a pre-Raphaelite work–but such events question Walter Benjamin’s notion that reproduction diminishes the ‘aura’ of a work of art; we still hanker after an original source, the relic in the jar.

The questions that these acts of vandalism raise are the core of what Dave Hickey (in The Invisible Dragon) calls the ‘therapeutic institution’ – what he describes as the ‘loose confederation of museums, universities, bureaus, foundations, publications and endowments.’ The notion explicitly (in wall-texts, education programs, outreach projects, young members’ programs, corporate sponsorship and online facilities) and implicitly upheld by such institutions is that art is good for us, ‘regardless…and in spite of the crazy shit that individual works might egregiously recommend’.

We should be quick to condemn acts of vandalism on works of art. At the same time, though, we ought to consider why and how works of art are able to disturb, rather than affirm, our most deeply-held beliefs, or hopes, about public virtue and the benevolence of beauty. What if we decided art was bad for us, like Philly Cheese Steaks or Wham! or Adam Sandler?

A little irreverence – a la MD – is not always such a bad thing.

Behind the Scenes: A Bird’s Eye View of Art21’s Production Process

Filming Carrie Mae Weems in Syracuse

Producing the Art:21 series feels a lot like creating a work of art. One of the big revelations in working on the series is the tremendous amount of detail, planning, and collaboration often involved in making art. While some of the artists we’ve profiled work primarily alone in the quiet intimacy of their studio, many others (especially in Season 5!) work on projects that can involve a cast of dozens or more, including not just the artists but also studio assistants, fabricators, and exhibition space personnel – all of whom can play an important role in creating the final work.

At Art21, our core production team consists of only 5 members of our full-time staff but to make the series, we work closely with a broader team that includes our consulting directors, editors, crews, and post-production personnel, with whom we have worked with for many years. Perhaps the most important collaboration, however, is with the artists themselves.  Rather than try to impose a pre-determined structure onto the artists’ segments, we work hard to determine a story and approach that works for them.

So the starting point to our production process is always a conversation with the artists we are profiling. In an ideal world, we would love to film each artist over many weeks, and even the months or years that artworks sometimes take to complete. However, given our limited resources as a nonprofit, we have to plan our shoots judiciously, so the next step is to get more details from the artists about their upcoming schedule. While we are often told that our segments feel very in-depth, we typically film only a few days with each artist – sometimes as little as 1-2 days, and rarely more than 5.  The key is to use those days to capture their story, which can include the making of a specific work, a special installation, the rhythm of the studio, the role of their collaborators, or a broader overview of their ideas and methods over time.

Paul McCarthy and assistants in his Los Angeles studio

The tricky part is determining which are the best days for us to film. With some artists, there is a huge hum of activity in the studio at all times. For example, with Paul McCarthy, we basically found a time that the studio could accommodate our crew and once there, we let our cameras roll as a seemingly endless stream of activity took place all around. Likewise, our visit to Doris Salcedo’s Bogota studio involved a witnessing of an ongoing process, a way of life among a committed group of people working together to collectively create art. Filming on-site installations or key moments in the production of a specific artwork can be more challenging since our goal is to film at the moment when an artwork or installation is far enough along that viewers can start to get a sense of what it will become. But we don’t want it to be so far along as to be nearly done, since we still want to reveal to our viewers the hidden alchemy of the process – that moment when the work starts to come together and its inner logic begins to shine through.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Bruce Nauman, "One Hundred Live and Die," 1984. Neon tubing mounted on four metal monoliths. Collection of Fukake Publishing Co., Ltd., Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York, © Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

• Bruce Nauman (Season 1) has won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Visit the Daily Best Media Gallery to see images of his installation.
• Nauman is the first Art21 artist to appear on the Times list of the top 200 artists from the 20th century through today. He comes in at #24.
• Songs of Ascension, the multimedia work by Season 1 artist Ann Hamilton and composer Meredith Monk, will be included in this year’s Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
• BAM has also commissioned a new piece by the Dessner Brothers. The musical duo will collaborate with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie, as well as vocalists from The Breeders for this project.
• Videos by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe (working in collaboration with Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Liam Gillick and Melik Ohanian) are on view in VRAOUM!, an exhibition of comic strips and contemporary art, at La Maison Rouge in Paris.
• A major mid-career survey of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) will open at the Brooklyn Museum on June 26, 2009.

Letter from London: Parisian Break

Duane Hanson, "High School Student," 1990. Bronze, polychromed with oil, mixed media accessories, 70 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 17 inches. Courtesy Emmanuel Perotin Gallery, Paris.

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

Paris’s gallery zone, clustered for the most part around the Marais district east of the center, is so amazingly lovely and elegant that even the most vituperative conceptual art looks like a pithy witticism at a nineteenth-century dinner party met with high, tinkling nineteenth-century laughter. In the right light, it makes London’s galleries look snarky and scruffy. As Adam Ant so aptly put it, “Young Parisians are so French/not like me and you.”

Stephane Vigny at Galerie LHK. Photo: Ben Street.

Stephane Vigny, showing at Galerie LHK (as curated by Daria de Beauvais) shows an array of apparently unaltered building materials: a great concrete cylinder supported by museum-style brackets, corrugated plastic tubing sprouting from the floor, aluminum guttering snaking below the cornice. Vigny’s frank aesthetic is leavened by a lightly held, mordant wit. A door-sized sheet of glass leans against the wall, complete with obsolete peephole; masticated chewing gum lines the inside of the gallery window, like putty; a pencil sharpener is set into the wall at the artist’s groin height, called, inevitably, Glory Hole (yowch). While Vigny’s trenchant references to minimalism’s stony-faced employment of unadulterated industrial materials is sort of funny, if a bit passé (I mean, hasn’t minimalism been parodied enough?), where it succeeds is in his eccentric enjoyment of the doggedly ugly. The dominant sculpture—a prehistoric dolmen in concrete, made to appear like polystyrene—is slapstick archaeology, dumb as a brick, and perhaps unintentionally reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge.” It’s the visual equivalent of Nigel Tufnel’s explanation of the druids: “Nobody knows ‘oo they were…or what they were doin.’” Vigny’s work starts as a challenge and ends as a charm. It’s an old gag, but it still works.

Luca Francesconi at the Palais de Tokyo

Vigny’s concrete electricity pylons also feature in the new group show across town at the Palais de Tokyo. Laid as a pair in the entrance to the show Spy Numbers, they’re easy to miss around the artfully exposed concrete and laissez-faire industrial chic of the Palais (in fact, you sometimes have to double check that you’re seeing an interior design feature and not a Vigny). The Palais de Tokyo can veer towards curatorial contrivance, but Spy Numbers, which occupies a vast, split-level hall of the ground floor, holds together well, never forcing a relationship between works for the sake of a thesis. As a chronically myopic guy, I was drawn to Norma Jeane’s twin petri dishes, each containing 365 one-day contact lenses—a year’s worth of looking, crammed in like frogs’ spawn. Luca Francesconi’s To Lower the Mountains—four vaguely pyramidal chunks of rock displayed on pedestals—is actually the peaks of four Alpine mountains, lopped off by the artist on a hike and transported back down again, in a supremely quixotic act reminiscent of Hans Schabus. Willfully fruitless romanticism is ubiquitous in contemporary art, but Francesconi’s work manages to retain a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality that’s pretty rare in that particular sub-genre. Other works—cylinders playing recordings of the building’s electromagnetic activity, a complex apparatus designed to create an aurora borealis—make reference to the exhibition’s vaunted interest in mysterious radio signals and clandestine messaging systems, but that’s all for the birds. Spy Numbers brings a welcome blast of whimsy to an overserious institution.

Continue reading »

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

Martin Puryear, "Untitled I", 2002. Aquatint etching. Ed: 40. Courtesy of Barbara Krakow.

• The Cincinnati Art Museum has announced an exhibition of prints by Season 2 artist Martin Puryear. The show is scheduled to open December 2009.
   
• Barbara Kruger (Season 1) is included in the forthcoming exhibition of work by women artists at the Centre Pompidou. Read about this ambitious display in the Los Angeles Times.
   
• Seven works by Ursula von Rydingsvard (Season 4) will be installed at the ancient site of Pilane, Sweden for the annual exhibition, Sculpture at Pilane. Opens June 6.
   
• The MacDowell Colony, a leading artist residency program, will present their annual medal to Season 2 artist Kiki Smith.
   
• Season 1 artist Richard Serra has received a 2009 honorary degree from Yale University.
   
• Louis Vuitton; A Passion for Creation at the Hong Kong Museum of Art features a selection of objects from the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création. Pierre Huyghe (Season 4) is included in this display of works by European, American and Chinese artists.
   
• Work by Andrea Zittel (Season 1) is on view in U.F.O. Art and Design at the NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaf in Düsseldorf. Continues through July 5.
   
• The 2009 edition of Art-Athina–Greece’s leading international art fair for contemporary art–will include work by Kara Walker (Season 2) and William Kentridge (Season 5) in a collateral event/exhibition, entitled Praise of Shadows. Through July 26 at the Benaki Museum.
   
• Season 5 artist Yinka Shonibare has enlisted children to assist with his piece for the National Gallery, London. Read the Times Online article.

Notes on a workshop (Part 2)

(continued from Part 1…)

My students and I had knocked on the door of the Éloignement office of the Préfecture in Nantes. The woman who answered asked us what we wanted and why we were there. My students said, “We came to learn about the Préfecture and to ask you what éloignement means.” After we established the understanding that it was indeed a strange situation for us to be asking her this question, she remarked that it was ironic that of all the offices in the Préfecture, we would be knocking on hers. She explained to us that she oversaw the deportation of migrants sans-papiers (undocumented immigrants). She was apprehensive when she opened the door because the people who come to her office are in the situation of imminent deportation or they are activists who come to protest on the immigrants’ behalf. She said that as a victim of aggression, she found her job sometimes stressful. However, she had worked in the same office for fifteen years and would stay on.

After leaving, the students and I talked about the exchange that took place. What was necessary for the conversation to have even happened was the establishment of rapport or mutual trust. However, one student noted that she didn’t feel comfortable identifying herself as an artist when talking with the woman. As artists are often associated with liberal political views, the woman might have questioned our motives for talking with her and been less forthcoming about what is admittedly a sensitive subject in France. However, this raised an ethical dilemma. Did it count as lying or withholding the truth for us not to tell her that we were artists? But we were not there to judge or condemn her. We arrived at her door due to our curiosity, and she had respected it by speaking with us.

The next week, we considered the question of documentation. Specifically, how does the presence of a camera affect an exchange between individuals? These days, people are often nervous in the presence of a camcorder because they are afraid of appearing on YouTube. Perhaps some exchanges can only take place off camera. In an earlier conversation, we had talked about the use of video by activists during protests to document instances of police brutality. One student expressed doubt about this kind of “speaking truth to power.” She explained that she had participated in a protest in which she and others were standing with linked arms with scarves tied under their eyes to hide their identities. In response, policemen pulled their scarves down and took photographs of each of their faces. Given the ubiquity of surveillance cameras mounted in public spaces, it is in some ways surprising that people are more nervous about cameras wielded by other ordinary citizens.

Documentation can take a number of forms, including photography, video, writing, and oral histories (recorded or told in passing conversations). We talked about what is gained and lost by allowing an experience to maintain its own integrity or by committing it to documentation. In both cases, the live moment of interaction can never be replaced (this can also be said of performance) but it is in the retelling or mediation of an experience that makes it possible to share it with others, and hopefully generate dialogue and other meanings.

We decided to test out these ideas by returning to the nearby university campus, this time with a video camcorder in hand. At the campus entrance gate, we saw a poster announcing an open debate between faculty and students regarding the government’s proposed reforms to higher education policy (which includes eliminating a financial program) and the decision of the majority of students and faculty to go on strike. Some of the students shot video footage and did some informal interviews with students and professors. Another student had a long conversation with a lab technician about his job and the relationship between art and science.

We were interested in pursuing the question of this relationship further. Last week, a friend of one of the students, who is currently studying physics at the university, gave us an introductory lesson on Einstein’s theory of relativity. We spoke about the relationship between conceptual art and physics in terms of using abstract models to represent invisible forces. And how perhaps Marcel Duchamp is the art historical equivalent of Albert Einstein.

In the workshop, we often start with identifying our common questions and concerns (artistic and social), and looking for ways to address them outside of the classroom, often with other people. Sometimes it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and at other times, it’s a matter of responding spontaneously to the circumstances at hand. Now we’re trying to figure out together how to translate these experiences and observations into the gallery to share with an audience. We already know something will be lost in the white cube, but hopefully something will be gained as well.

Notes on a workshop (Part 1)

Vilgot Sjöman's "I Am Curious (Yellow)," (1967)

I’m also teaching a course at the École Régionale des Beaux-arts de Nantes called, “Workshop: I am curious… (The Artist as Ethnographer).” Each Friday morning, my students and I have made a regular practice of going to a place, talking with strangers, and asking questions. I’ve gathered a few notes on my research for the course, what we’ve done, and what we’ve discussed.

The title of the workshop is based on the films of Swedish director, Vilgot Sjöman, I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and I Am Curious (Blue) (1968), both documentaries-within-films. In the opening scenes of I Am Curious (Yellow), Lena surveys passersby, microphone in hand, asking the question, “Do you believe Sweden has a class system?” Later, we see the director and his camera crew filming the documentary, but it is Lena’s intense curious energy that drives the film.

Another source of inspiration for the course was Hal Foster’s essay, “The Artist as Ethnographer” [in The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (October Books, 1996)]. I have the vague suspicion that we may actually be performing the faux alterity or “outsideness” that he criticizes in applications of pseudo-ethnographic models in contemporary art practice. But sometimes you have to do wrong before you learn how to do right.

Artist Harrell Fletcher wrote a text called “Some Thoughts About Art and Education” (2007) based on his artistic practice and experience as a teacher. His observations about experiential education, the classroom environment, project research, and going on field trips, have influenced the way I approach teaching. For example, he writes:

Collective Learning

I teach at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, and I have a class currently where we started by having all of the students tell their life stories to everyone else. It took three classes to get through them all, but they revealed many interesting things that wouldn’t come out in more cursory introductions. Based on connections the students had we organized a series of field trips to places like a Veterans hospital, an alternative kindergarten, a campus fraternity, a high school geometry class, a Native American community center, a radio station, etc. From those experiences the students broke off into groups to develop projects like a radio show about grandmothers, and a lecture series in the frat house living room. Some of the field trips didn’t develop into projects, but were still valued as experiences. I like to think of this method as a way to lessen my role as the authority in the classroom and instead we share that role and all become collective learners. 

On the first day of the workshop, I asked the students to tell me about their experience of the city of Nantes and the art school. They said that despite the school’s location in the heart of the town center, they felt isolated both from the public of Nantes as well as students from other universities. In France, college students typically focus on their area of study exclusively (e.g. law, biology, history) and that often determines their social circle.

Motivated by our conversation, we took a fieldtrip to the campus of the nearby Université de Nantes Faculté de Sciences et Techniques, the science and technical campus of the University of Nantes. One of the students said that they felt like tourists. By making the place “strange,” we were self-conscious of our role as outside observers. We noted that most of the students and faculty were walking briskly in the opposite direction as us, heading to the tramway for their lunch break.

One of the students became the de facto interviewer based on her outgoing personality and ease with approaching strangers. We approached a few young men hanging out by the entrance of the Resto Universitaire (cafeteria), who turned out to be students from the local lycée (high school) who come to the college campus to eat because they have trouble finding seats in their own cafeteria. We learned more about the university culture from a biology student and a mathematics student who were also waiting for the cafeteria to open. It was a modest exchange, but a step in the right direction.

Continue reading »

On representations of the artist at work (Part 2)

Jackson Pollock at work in his studio, photographed by Hans Namuth, 1950.

Following up our discussion about documentation of the creative process in the cases of Mark Bradford and Jackson Pollock, my students and I talked about what we might include in an Art21-style documentary about the artist at work* based upon our own experiences and observations. In the interest of  presenting a more representative picture of the artist at work in the 21st century, we brainstormed a list of scenes and topics that included:

Working at a day job
Many (if not most) artists need to find day jobs to support their art practice. This goes for both young artists who are just starting out as well as artists who are actively showing their work. Unlike in most professions, artists do not receive a regular salary or wage for their creative labor. An artist’s day job may or may not relate specifically to his or her artistic interests. These jobs may include: working as a studio assistant to a more established artist, museum administrator, teacher/professor/educational staff, gallery receptionist, retail associate, bartender, and freelance gigs (to name a few).

Art school
We talked about some of the (sometimes intangible) lessons and skills that we learn in art school. One is the importance of being part of an artistic community of peers, collaborators, and mentors. Another is discourse, or learning how to talk about art. This is a skill developed in both group critique settings and faculty reviews. Group critique is a process by which an artwork’s meaning is generated through collective conversation and debate. It is also a process of judgment and consensus. It is difficult to say whether art school prepares students for a career, a way of life, and/or a way of thinking. But upon graduating from art school, a common concern among young (American) artists is the need to pay off their student loans for tuition debt incurred during their artistic training.

Career trajectories
Artists are usually chosen to be featured in a documentary when they have achieved a measure of success and recognition in their careers. They have been included in major exhibitions, collections, and commissions.  Their work has been written about in influential publications, and it has attained a level of maturity and context. However, besides focusing on this select group of artists, a documentary series could also represent artists at different points in their careers to show the highs, lows, and plateaus in the life of a working artist. This would include artists who are just starting out, artists who have had long careers without wide recognition, as well as individuals who have stopped pursuing careers in art for various reasons, or are doing interesting things that may not be called art.

Continue reading »