Weekly Roundup

Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:

• The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.

• On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.

• Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.

• Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.

• Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.

• Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.

• A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.

• John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.

Letter from London: Ethic Minority

Matthew Broderick in "Election"

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What’s the difference between morals and ethics anyway? Anyone?”
— Matthew Broderick, Election

If there’s a tipping point in the minds of those casually interested in contemporary art, it’s almost always on moral or ethical grounds. “He/she did what to a dog/sold what for a billion dollars/did what to a dead cow/did what to a crucifix??” your amazed friend asks, and suddenly all credibility is leached from the subject. You’re embarrassed; you get your coat. Later on, you blog resentfully at your friend’s apparent narrow-mindedness (and defriend him: take that!). Art’s leapfrogging of moral and ethical niceties is a Romantic hangover that once was noble and exciting – Courbet, Baudelaire, 2 Live Crew – and now reeks of ghettoized cliché. It’s the thing people don’t like about contemporary art. And the less contemporary art complies with “real world” ethical and moral structures, the less it is of the “real world.” And yet this is what we value in art (in its current late-Romantic state): its ability to discuss the things avoided in the mainstream imagination. To ask difficult questions. This is the double bind of contemporary art’s relationship with ethics. Its purported snubbing of conventional (Judeo-Christian) ethics both allows it to discuss the undiscussable and removes it from the discussion.

When Santiago Sierra created a gas chamber in Pulheim, Germany, in 2006 – filling a synagogue with exhaust fumes from six parked cars, accessible only for five minutes to visitors wearing gas masks – he whipped up a predictable furore. That most critics of the work (including me) never experienced the work doesn’t really matter: that it raised ethical questions does. This is the unfortunate situation contemporary art gets itself into when tackling sensitive ethical or moral issues: the media storm generated by the work is the work, and the original piece itself is drowned out by the buzz of voices. Art of this kind negates its own irrefutable trump card, its visual singularity. The problem is that visual art’s status as chief cultural question-raiser has been gradually usurped, not just by other more immediate cultural products, like cinema or TV (Inglourious Basterds treats the commercialization of the Holocaust in a far more successful – read, “widely seen” and “aesthetically enjoyable” – way), but by the multiplicity of dissenting voices made possible by the advent of the Internet. Why bother jetting in an internationally recognized artist at spectacular fiscal and environmental cost to raise ethical questions when you can do so yourself, sitting at home, with Doritos crumbs all down your shirt?

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Inside the Artist’s Studio: Christa Holka

Christa Holka out and about!

Christa Holka is an American photographer based in London. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London, a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Literature from The State University of New York.  There are many reasons I went through the trouble to meet her at the cozy FIRST OUT CAFE-BAR in central London to discuss her work. At a first glance, Christa struck me to be a stylish, hip, cool, creative, on-the-scene individual with a mission – specifically a queer mission, which she rushed to define for me in Judith Butler’s words:

Christa Holka, "Harley Frosted Beard"

My understanding of queer is a term that desires that you don’t have to present an identity card before entering a meeting. Heterosexuals can join the queer movement. Bisexuals can join the queer movement. Queer is not being lesbian. Queer is not being gay. It is an argument against lesbian specificity: that if I am a lesbian I have to desire in a certain way. Or if I am a gay I have to desire in a certain way. Queer is an argument against certain normativity, what a proper lesbian or gay identity is.

Christa Holka, "Jillian & Nancy NYC"

Christa turned out to be down-to-earth conversationalist, whose vision and agenda is not coincidental but rather rooted in the very core of who she is.  Back in Chicago, she was a member of the infamous The Chicago Kings, a drag performance troupe that played a key role in the development of her work. In an Artxxmagazine interview, Christa sums up that experience:

After my first time on stage with the Chicago Kings, I was totally hooked. I mean how could I not be? At our first show there were over 300 people in this tiny back room of a sports bar in a weird neighborhood in Chicago’s West Loop and that night the bar was having some kind of flooding problem, but that didn’t stop anyone. The night was electric. The crowd was hungry and we were feeding them. It was like everyone had been waiting for this moment and finally it was there. What was so attractive about us? Jeez! I’m not sure! Maybe that’s a better question for people who were in the audience? For me, what I liked about it was being on stage, performing and getting so much attention for it. Girls were screaming, always wanting more! I seriously felt like a rock star sometimes. In the beginning I didn’t really think about the provocative statements we were making, it was just happening. It was a lot of collaborating and many of us were artists so it was this big performative collaboration that happened to be drag king performances.

Christa Holka, "Swim-suit boys," London, 2008

A highly social artist, Holka has made it her business to capture moments of queer manifestations with her Canon 5D or the Canon Ixus 960IS (digital point and shoot), Mamiya 645 Pro, or even her Diana Holga. She has long earned the trust of her subjects and nearly 50,000 images prove just that. They can be found on Flickr, Facebook, and her own website. Befriend Christa to get a sense of why she is also knows as the Queer Paparazzi and if you happen to be a socialite in London, be aware of the lady behind the flashes.

Christa Holka, "Liz"

The predecessors responsible for Christa’s career path are:  Nan Goldin Claude Cahun, Philip Lorca di Corcia, Tina Barney, Larry Clarke, Brian Finke, Wolfgang Tillmans, Dash Snow, Martin Parr, Guy Bourdin, Nikki S. Lee, Larry Sultan and others.

Read on, simply because what the naked eye sees as a plaid-shirt community, the camera lens re-articulates as a culturally and politically queer archive.

Georgia Kotretsos: Let’s take this from the beginning… tell me about the community that fills your memory cards. What does it mean to you? What are you looking at and for through your camera lens?

Christa Holka: Well, my community is made up of my very close friends, acquaintances and people in general who are engaged with non-normative temporalities, people on a different timeline than heteronormative culture. Like, we go out and play in the park at midnight and ride bikes through the streets and play games at times when people in normative communities are doing the whole reproductive schedule thing: get married, buy a house, have kids, etc. I mean, of course queers are also doing that in various ways, and I’m not against that, it’s just not the schedule I’m on at the moment. My community is also a time and a place where I feel a sense of belonging. My friends mean the world to me; they are a part of me. I think of them like family. I’m looking at my community through my camera, trying to write a part of a queer history capturing glimpses of the time and space I occupy. Like historians, I’m looking for a way to make sense of what’s happening now, looking at the past, to look forward to what’s next.

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Weekly Roundup

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:

• 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21’s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.

• Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily  life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)

• Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.

• Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”

• Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”

• Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.

Letter from London: Chris Ofili, A Mixtape

Making mixtapes is one of life’s great non-transferable skills; its lack of import in a pragmatic sense is inversely proportional to the amount of time and effort it requires (rewinding, pausing, forwarding, finding the exact moment the fade-out stops, designing the case – not too glib, not too earnest – and gouging out the square flaps at the top of the tape with a biro nib, so its permanence, and the permanence of the tape-maker’s affections in the mind of the listener, is assured). Mixtapes are tiny monuments of personal authority carried out by those usually lacking it in every other sphere. (It’s got to be a cassette, too: none of this CD business, skipping along at will and missing the carefully calibrated theme — usually a guarded and self-deprecatory expression of adoration for the listener.) I’ve often wondered where those specific and hard-won skills end up, whether they’re transmuted into filing techniques or the arrangement of ties in a wardrobe, or if they dwindle and diminish like an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

It seems increasingly obvious, though, that the mixtape maker’s most evident successor is the curator of works of art. Skip a room or walk through in the wrong order and you’re in danger of missing the theme entirely, and the curators will slam their bedroom doors and crank up The Cure so loud you can’t hear them cry. Admire one of the works and they’ll hum with misappropriated pride.

The new Chris Ofili mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain feels like walking through a mixtape of semi-obscure black American music from the last 50 years, created by a middle-aged record shop owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of musical history and a body odor problem. Arranged in a reverent chronology of the artist’s work – despite sidestepping his hilarious caganer-style defecating Rastafarian sculptures from a few years back – the show not only reveals Ofili’s indebtedness to musical history as a resource, but shows how deeply he’s absorbed it, providing visual equivalence for all manner of forms and themes in the musical past. In the interests of elucidation, then, and to provide to amateur mixtape-makers with a set of guidelines in producing their own audio tour of the show, I have put together a rough soundtrack according to the different phases of the artist’s career. Please pay attention.

David Hammons, "Bliz-aard Ball Sale" (1983)

The first room of the exhibition shows Ofili’s early, heavily David Hammons-inspired work (where are the Hammons retrospectives, by the way, Triple Candie Xerox show notwithstanding?), which introduces principle themes the artist returns to, like a tongue to a bad tooth. Shithead – a ball of dried elephant dung from Whipsnade Zoo, with human teeth and the artist’s trimmed dreads set into it – introduces (via its evident ape-ing of then-established Hammons tropes) Ofili’s major ongoing interest in the mutual attrition of the spiritual and the profane. The Rastafarian reference (Ofili was raised Catholic to Nigerian parents in Manchester, and wore dreadlocks as a student) is as lightly held as any other in the first phase of Ofili’s work. It is preoccupied with the collision of visual information, both laterally (information spreads in clusters across the large canvases, propped against the wall) and in the geological layers of their surfaces (glitter, resin, paint, collage; the material descriptions of the wall labels read like an inventory of Elton John’s costume cupboard). The spacey intricacies of these early works – Spaceshit, Popcorn Tits, and the William Blake-referencing 7 Bitches Tossing Their Pussies Before the Divine Dung – recall magic eye posters of the early nineties as much as their purported origin in African cave painting and Aboriginal Australian art. Their intergalactic obsessions, and fascination with scatology and wild sensuality, finds appropriate sonic form in George Clinton’s varied musical oeuvre, and for this room, the show’s first, the track is Funkadelic’s “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doodoo Chasers).”

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Weekly Roundup

Walton Ford, "The Island", 2009. Watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper. Panel 1: 95 1/2 x 36 in. Panel 2: 95 1/2 x 60 in. Panel 3: 95 1/2 x 36 in. © 2009 Walton Ford. Photo: Christopher Burke Studio. via Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about Tasmanian wolves, patented patterns, cartoon anthropomorphism, ancient mythology, portico projections, and a big gift:

• Bestiarium, a large-scale survey exhibition of watercolor paintings by Season 2 artist Walton Ford, is on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. His new large-scale painting The Island, recently acquired by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Betonville, Arkansas, is included in the exhibition. In this composition Ford presents, via the press release, “a writhing pyramidal mass of Tasmanian wolves (thylacines) grappling with each other and a few doomed lambs. The violent extermination of the thylacines, which were hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, calls into question who is hunter and hunted in this savage tableau.” Bestiarium is on view in Berlin through May 24. In June, the show will travel to Vienna’s Albertina Museum. This is Ford’s first show in Europe.

• Through March 21, Vancouver Art Gallery will project works from the exhibition CUE: Artists’ Videos onto the portico of their Robson Street facade. The show consists of more than 80 titles by artists from countries across the globe, such as Art21’s William Kentridge (Season 5). Cinematic language in video, and the unfolding of world events are some of the subjects covered in CUE. The videos have been arranged into seven thematic programs. Each program runs continuously on selected days between 5am – 2am.

• Works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view in the group exhibition Shudder at The Drawing Room in London. The artists in Shudder use animation to develop characters and investigate personal states of mind and relationships. Their works tap into, among other things, the cartoon tradition of anthropomorphism. Shudder will include a brand new piece by Pettibon titled Zephyr; the artist describes it as a baby playing with the wind and traveling in the sky. Zephyr continues the themes explored in Pettibon’s The Place, Where We Were created in 2008. Shudder continues through March 14.

• On January 27, London’s contemporary art gallery Sadie Coles HQ will open an exhibition of works by Season 2 artist Matthew Barney. Barney will present a new group of drawings related to his performance and film project Ancient Evenings, based on Norman Mailer’s bestselling novel by the same title. Mailer’s 1983 text reimagined ancient Egyptian mythology and ritual. Barney’s operatic performance (a collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler) occurs in seven acts symbolizing the seven stages the soul passes through after death in ancient Egyptian belief: Ren, Khu, Sekhem, Ba, Ka, Khaibit and Sekhu. The exhibition closes on March 6.

• Get a closer look at a new installation by Season 1 artist Barry McGee on the blog Arrested Motion. According to SLAMXHYPE, this installation — part of SF MoMA’s year-long Anniversary Show — is made up of many individual works created over the years including drawings, personal photos, and McGee’s iconic (and patented) patterns. The installation is on view through January 2011.

• Kelowna.com reports that Toronto art collector and philanthropist Ydessa Hendeles has offered to donate 32 Canadian and international works to the Art Gallery of Ontario. This would be the biggest single gift of contemporary art in the museum’s history. The donation includes works by artists Krzysztof Wodiczko (Season 3), James Coleman, Gary Hill, Thomas Schutte, Kim Adams, Ian Carr-Harris, Max Dean, Betty Goodwin, and Liz Magor. Plans are underway to exhibit the Hendeles donation within the next 18 months.

• Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) will participate in the panel discussion “Participatory Art: Creative Approaches to the Concept of Community“ organized by LaRete Art Projects and the Legislative Assembly of the Emilia Romagna Region in Italy. The event is part of Arte Fiera Art First 2010, Bologna, a yearly international art fair for modern and contemporary art. The event takes place Saturday, January 30 at 2pm.

Letter from London: Memento Mori

Emily Prince, detail from "American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan..." (from 2004, ongoing)

The numbers kept coming up in the daily reports. Five here, fourteen there, one day after another. And then the growing figure mounting over a thousand. Peripherally it was ever-present, but still only an abstraction. (Emily Prince)

Abstract art is the gift that keeps on giving. Just when serialism felt stretched to snapping point, along came Felix Gonzalez-Torres to re-jig the strategy in his endless stacks of stealable prints, infusing the tradition with a sad generosity. Monochrome painting looked to have painted itself into a corner, until Robert Ryman whipped it into shape, sergeant-major style. Geometric minimalism seemed spent before Eva Hesse replayed it in flaccid fiberglass. As in the Cubist bric-a-brac of the teens, these quasi-satirical take-offs proved the unexpected strength of the chosen medium by showing its capacity to accept transformation. Painting does this all the time. So too with Emily Prince’s new installation at the Saatchi Gallery, which co-opts hoary old modernist plots to create a new kind of anti-memorial, a multifarious monument of strange beauty and quixotic ambition.

Prince’s installation, which was featured in a slightly different form in the 2007 Venice Biennale, consists of thousands of portrait drawings on small (about the size of a cassette tape) rectangular pieces of brown, pink, and pale yellow paper, pinned to the wall according to a pencilled-on grid. You scan the images, pulled in by their tininess. Each drawing has its own legend, written in tiny cursive script: name, date, and place of birth and death, sometimes a character description. “He had wanted to enlist from the time he was 15.” “She was determined in everything she did in her life.” The installation is called American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis, Nor the Afghans). There are 5,218 drawings to date, arranged, in this case, in chronological order of death. The grid has vacancies. Prince will continue to make the drawings in an endless edition until both conflicts cease, in a promise she might be regretting a bit.

Prince has explained (a little confusingly) her reasons for excluding the native dead – “I am an American. This is the material I’m allowed to work with” – but there’s something just a little bit McSweeney’s about that title, isn’t there, with its faux-naïve breathless tongue-tangling. This, I think, is Prince’s problem: how to square the earnestness of a straight-up archiving project – there’s a box of files displayed nearby, showing the cards filed away according to the subjects’ home state – with a kind of knowingness in the conveyance. From the press release:

…this ongoing memorial project brings attention to the human cost of war, turning statistics back into portraits of real lives sacrificed on the field.

And yet it’s the fact that they aren’t portraits – that they are, in a sense, abstractions, inevitably drawn from official photography – that lends the drawings their weird, distanced power. Drawn in “the skinniest, hardest lead I can find,” they’re based, for the most part, on headshots used for official purposes. Each sheet of paper apparently corresponds to its subject’s skin tone, although only in a pretty schematic way: there’s only one kind of dark brown, for example, and only a couple of different pinks, which somewhat defeats any claims for individualized portraiture implied in the press kit. Clearly, the installation owes a lot – might even be seen as an homage to – Byron Kim’s Synecdoche (recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and discussed by Tyler Green in greater depth here), a wall of individual paintings reflecting a range of human skin tones, a somewhat heavy-handed spin on color-chart paintings by Gerhardt Richter and Ellsworth Kelly. Like Kim’s installation, Prince’s work might well be (pace Green) “not an important work of art” (there’s a can of worms for you), but may serve to “engage the most prominent American philosophical conversations.” For a British audience, the lack of dead native servicemen and women is an omission more poignant for its absence, bringing to mind Steve McQueen’s still-unrealized postage stamp project, Queen and Country, featuring photographs of dead British soldiers. (The petition, organized by The Art Fund, is growing in support and can be read about here; I wrote about this project for Art21 here).

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Weekly Roundup

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21’s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!

Letter from London: Scrooged

Shirazeh Houshiary's 1993 Tate Christmas Tree

Tate Britain has just unveiled its 22^nd annual Christmas Tree, designed, as usual, by a contemporary British artist. The Christmas Tree tradition at the Tate started in 1988 with Bill Woodrow’s cardboard box decorations, and has retained its position of locus for skepticism ever since. Michael Landy’s infamous tree – dumped in a bright-red bin amongst crushed beer cans and discarded packaging – looked, in 1997 (the year of Sensation at the Royal Academy), like a final, sarcastic postscript to an annus horribilis for the bastions of traditional art. The current tree, by Tacita Dean, uses a pine tree hung with beeswax candles, lit at 4pm as the sun sets, which burn out by 6, when the gallery closes. It looks like a normal Christmas tree, in other words—a “delightful, almost magical sight,” according to Martin Gayford at Bloomberg. There’s no mistaking the undertone of relief in his words.

What’s changed? Minor though the tree might seem, both institutionally (it’s generally seen as a bit of seasonal frippery on the part of the Tate) and artistically (it’s often an opportunity for artists to do a bit of festive self-mockery), there’s something here of a piece with the choice of Richard Wright as this year’s Turner Prize winner: a shift of institutional focus, maybe. Positioned in the hexagonal entrance hall in Tate Britain, a kind of public hub where exhibition tickets are purchased and directions sought, the Christmas tree is a tone-setter. Dean’s tree acts as a kind of preface, pointing into quietness rather than the sometimes predictable brashness of earlier years. Praising the tree in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones describes Dean’s work as “effortlessly going against any fashion you can think of.” I’m not sure that Dean’s elegiac analogue works (which I’m a fan of) are really so different from works by artists of a similar bent, like Rodney Graham or Rosalind Nashashibi, but never mind. Jones correctly identifies a change of tack, at least in terms of the Tate’s patronage of contemporary art.

That sense of relief – that contemporary British artists had finally “settled down,” that the Tate had stopped being silly, like a 4-year-old falling asleep after a sugar rush – characterized the coverage of the Turner Prize this year. “Publicity-grabbing stunts are refreshingly absent,” claimed Ben Hoyle in The Times, forgetting that any such “publicity stunts” are overwhelmingly orchestrated outside of the shortlist by feeble self-styled mavericks the Stuckists, hopped up on the gleeful idiocy of the tabloid press. “This year’s nominees,” Hoyle continues, “all paint, draw, or make objects that are recognisably works of art.” In actual fact, this year’s shortlist no more or less troubles the definition of art than any previous one has – apart from its continued snubbing of women artists as winners, of course. There have been only three female winners since 1984, an extraordinary situation rarely mentioned in coverage of the prize. Maybe they don’t notice.

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Rie Wares

Lucie Rie’s solid, soft ceramics combine with the dark and light of these photographs to make welcoming images. Dame Lucie Rie was a prominent British potter who became internationally known after her exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. In 1938, she fled Nazi Austria for England and started making buttons and jewelry to make ends meet. She began working with ceramics in 1946 in a cozy studio for fifty years. Via VADS - the online resource for visual arts.

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