Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, Drawing for the film 'Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (Soho and Mrs. Eckstein in Pool)', 1991. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 47 1/4 x 59 in. Collection of the artist. © 2010 William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist.

With 19 bits and bites below, this week’s roundup is a whopper:

• Five Themes, the traveling survey exhibition of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, has landed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Featuring more than 100 works, the exhibition underscores the inter­relatedness of Kentridge’s various disciplines and mediums — drawing, print, animated film, theater models and books. The exhibition is organized chronologically and in five primary themes that cut across his artistic output: “Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession,” “Thick Time: Soho and Felix,” “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio,” “Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute,” and “Learning from the Absurd: The Nose.” The New York installation of Five Themes has been expanded to include 38 prints from the MoMA’s collection. The exhibition is on view through May 17.

• On March 8 at 7pm, Kentridge will perform his lecture/theatrical monologue/installation, I am not me, the horse is not mine, at MoMA. (According to museum press materials, the event is already sold out.) The piece is based on the short story The Nose (1837), by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, which “follows the travails of a pompous Russian bureaucrat who wakes one day to find his nose has escaped his face and assumed greater clout than he.” In this solo performance, Kentridge combines narration, video projection, and a vocal and instrumental soundtrack. I am not me, the horse is not mine is part of an extensive body of work Kentridge has developed in preparation for his production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, premiering at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• On March 12 at 7pm, the New York Public Library, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, will host a public conversation between Kentridge and Paul Holdengräber, the Director of Public Programs for The Research Libraries. Read more about the program and purchase tickets here.

• In conjunction with all of the above, Dieu Donné, a non-profit space in New York City that focuses on the hand papermaking process in contemporary art, presents a new limited edition book of 18 watermarked images and text created by Kentridge. Sheets of Evidence was, according to the website, conceptually designed to reveal nothing at first glance. “The viewer is encouraged to delve deeper and quite literally look beneath the surface, allowing light to reveal the subtle images and text hidden in the white sheets of handmade paper…Through the use of the watermark technique the artist continues his exploration of light and perspective, and like his films these invisible drawings are revealed only when illuminated from behind.” The exhibition will also feature two earlier projects created in collaboration with Kentridge: Thinking in Water, a suite of three works; and Receiver, a limited edition book published in 2006, which features twenty-three etchings, photogravures, and dry points by Kentridge and seven poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska. Sheets of Evidence closes March 27.

• On March 3, the Manifest Equality project will open a one-week pop up gallery in the center of Hollywood. The exhibition brings together international and local artists in “a call to present art that unites art, activism and the message of universal equal rights into a memorable multi-media moment.” Participating artists include: Barry McGee (Season 1), Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Harvey Pekar, Karen Kimmel, Robbie Conal, Ron English, Tierney Gearon, Clare Rojas, and others. Manifest Equality specifically responds to “the growing resistance to equal rights for the LGBT population” and seeks to “raise visibility for the grass roots efforts to ensure full Equal Rights to LGBT Americans.” Follow the Manifest Equality blog here.

• On March 5 at 5pm, Ida Applebroog (Season 3) will sign copies of her new monograph Monalisa, published by Hauser & Wirth. The event is part of INDEPENDENT, a hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum, conceived by New York gallerist and founder of X Initiative, Elizabeth Dee, and gallerist Darren Flook, from Hotel, London. Monalisa features an illustrated essay by critic and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson and a photographic study of the Monalisa house by Abby Robinson.

• For the annual week of New York City art fairs, Galerie Lelong will present Sheela-Na-Gig at Home, an installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. First created in 1996, the piece displays Spero’s “dark humor and interests in the female experience and the grotesque” and alludes to “women’s work.” Figures of Sheela-Na-Gig are repeated and interspersed with feminine lingerie and hung on a clothesline. Placed on the floor is a television monitor showing the artist hanging the drawings and clothes. Spero conceived Sheela-Na-Gig at Home as an “instructions” work that could be installed by anyone, similar to Fluxus and Conceptual works. This is the first time the work will be presented in New York since the year of its creation. Sheela-Na-Gig at Home will be on view March 3-7 at the Park Avenue Armory.

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin has received the National Medal of Arts, an annual award managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Chairman Rocco Landesman said the winners represent “the breadth and depth of American architecture, design, film, music, performance, theater and visual art.” Lin’s latest project, What Is Missing?, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. On April 22, her website www.whatismissing.net will go live, and a companion video will screen in Times Square.

• Three sculptures and 29 drawings by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) are currently on view in Seoul, Korea at Kukje Gallery. Les Fleurs, Bourgeois’ fourth solo show at the gallery, focuses on Bourgeois’ interest in drawing corporeal and psychological subjects such as nature, motherhood and women. The artist has chosen the title to “speak to her adoption of the flower and women as symbols for vitality, desire and sexuality.” Les Fleurs is on view through March 31.

• Season 5 artist Jeff Koons (whose personal art collection was featured in the New York Times over the weekend) has curated an exhibition of work by Ed Paschke for Gagosian Gallery. Koons was Paschke’s assistant in Chicago in the mid-1970s while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paschke would prove to be an important mentor and formative inspiration for the young artist. The exhibition includes loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, as well as rarely seen works from the Ed Paschke Foundation. Read more about the show here.

• The Ashville Art Museum has opened the exhibition Limners to Facebook: Portraiture from the 19th to the 21st Century, which explores the persistent desire to capture images of self and others. The multimedia exhibition includes formal portraits, self-portraits, portraits of animals, and portraits of friends or models. In addition to photographs by Season 1 artist William Wegman, the show includes an image of Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson taken by Annie Leibovitz. Limners to Facebook closes July 18.

• For the March issue of Modern Painters, Anderson was commissioned to visit artist Marina Abramovic and discuss the recent evolution of performance art. Abramovic’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York on March 14. Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson: Wise Women is available online. (On an unrelated note, The New York Observer recently reported that Anderson has been appointed to P.S.1’s Board of Directors.)

• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas has acquired a work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall for their collection. The museum describes the piece: In Our Town [1995], Marshall presents a tidy vision of suburbia not unlike Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play of the same title – apron-clad mother, cookie-cutter homes, two kids and their dog – and then undercuts it with the tense expressions and postures of the children in the foreground. Yellow ribbons are wrapped around most of the trees, suggesting war or other tragedy beyond the confines of the neighborhood…Floating above the image, heralded by bluebirds bearing ribbons, the title of the work calls into question who belongs in this American idyll.” Our Town will be included in Kerry James Marshall, a retrospective exhibition opening May 8 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

• On March 5 at 6pm, the Salina Art Center in South Santa Fe will host a public talk by Marshall. Titled John Brown’s Body: The Representation of Black Bodies as Revolutionary Gesture, Marshall’s presentation will explore his ongoing investigation of African American identity and culture in the United States.

• On March 5, the Brooklyn Museum will host a free open house for teens in conjunction with Sojourn, the solo exhibition of works by Kiki Smith (Season 2). The event, planned by teens working at the museum, offers hands-on activities from 4:30pm until 7pm. To RSVP call (718) 501-6588 or e-mail teen.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.

• In conjunction with the exhibition Contemplating The Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Héctor Parra, and Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie have collaborated on Hypermusic: Ascension, a new site-specific monodrama. The piece “inverts and renovates the genre of opera with an experimental score suggesting the expanding reality of a fifth dimension.” Hypermusic will debut in the museum’s rotunda on March 11 at 6:30pm.

• Reverend on Ice (2005) by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria. According to the Brisbane Times, this three-dimensional rendition of Skating Minister, an 18th-century painting by the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, is placed in the 18th-century galleries to encourage visitors to “think about the migration of ideas and culture across boundaries, from the political to the historical.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has been awarded a 2009 New England Art Award. The awards are organized by the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research to honor the best art made in New England and exhibits organized in 2009. The winners are picked by some 1,880 voters from across the region. In each category there are two winners — the critics’ choice and the people’s choice. Wodiczko won the people’s choice award in the category for New Media.

• Visit Bostonist.com to read about the public conversation between Roni Horn (Season 3) and John Waters that took place at the ICA, Boston a few weeks ago. Horn’s retrospective is on view at the ICA through June 13.

Connections at MIT Museum

I have never met Aaron Zinman. Not in person, anyway. I’ve spoken with him a few times on the phone, and we’ve chatted via email and Twitter, but I’ve never actually seen the man. But for a few months this past summer, Aaron’s art project became an Internet sensation, and I wanted to know why.

A quick web search tells me he’s pursuing a PhD at MIT’s Media Lab, and it looks like he did some interesting things with IBM and Google. Some of his recent Flickr images suggest he likes to go skiing or snowboarding. He’s a DJ, he frequents Cafe Fabulous in Cambridge, and according to his own Twitter feed, he’s “remarkably able at catching falling objects.” In almost all the pictures I’ve seen of Aaron, he’s flashing a big smile, and most of his emails contain at least one smiley, and more than one exclamation mark. Overall, he seems like an intelligent, passionate, likeable kind of guy.

Aaron Zinman, the artist, designer, and technologist behind Personas

I also know through my searching that last year, Aaron launched Personas, which does what I did—search around—and presents its findings. It’s a simple site, designwise, but it reveals a more complex infrastructure and compels us to ask complex questions.

You click over and enter your name. It could be your full name — first, middle, and last. It could be your professional name. Personas then searches the web, like I did for “Aaron Zinman” and uses “a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.” In painfully simplistic terms, it Googles you and paints a pretty picture.

Another quick web search shows that Personas quickly took off shortly after it was launched. All kinds of Web sites, from the niche TechCrunch, to the more mainstream CNN talked up the site. It’s easy to see why. Beautifully designed, the clean background shows you what it’s finding and processing in real time, complete with futuristic animations. What comes out is a spectrum of colors and labels, neatly arranged and visually intuitive.

The Personas search results for "An Xiao"

Typing in my name, an uncommon one on both sides of the Pacific, I’m not surprised to find large chunks of the spectrum devoted to “online” and “art.” I assume the slivers of “religion” and “books” relate to my explorations of Zen poetry. I can even see how the “genealogy” result might make sense.

But a few of them puzzle me: Why “military” and “aggression”? Why “sports”? I’ve never campaigned for or against any wars, and the only way I realized the Super Bowl had come and gone was because I was looking at Twitter’s trending topics.

“Personas is an experiment in data portraiture,” Aaron told me. “You get a sense of a machine-kind of thinking and making sense of you. How is the machine parsing you? It’s normally a very opaque process.”

Indeed, watching the animation again, I see other An Xiaos pop up in its searches. There’s “An Xiao Wei,” a kung fu champion. A number of An Xiaos who write academic papers. “An Xiao Qian,” a character in a Chinese action film. Anyone who has the vaguest idea of what I do could tell at a glance that these people obviously aren’t me, but machines can’t recognize that. Not Personas, not Bing, not Google, at least not yet.

Aaron wrote in his project description, that Personas “is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.”

In retrospect, as I learned more about the project, I came to realize that its swift popularity is less a puzzle than an inevitability.

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Weekly Roundup

Paul McCarthy, "Paula Jones," 2007. Fiberglass, 82 x 57 1/2 x 107 inches. via Art Daily.org

This President’s Day roundup begins with a hotly debated exhibition and ends with a divine duo:

• The New Museum has announced the details of their exhibition Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection. Curated by Season 5 artist Jeff Koons, this will be the first showing of the Athens-based collection in the United States. This will also be the first exhibition curated by Koons, whose early work is said to have inspired the evolution of the Dakis Joannou collection. Koons has selected over 100 works by 50 international artists spanning several generations, including Matthew Barney (Season 1), Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, (all Season 2), Mike Kelley (Season 3), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Paul McCarthy (Season 5), David Altmejd, Nathalie Djurberg, Robert Gober, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Christiana Soulou, Jannis Varelas, and Andro Wekua, among others. The title of the exhibition alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. “Skin and fruit,” according to the press release, “evoke the essential tensions between interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume.” The show will feature one work by Koons — One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) — the first major artwork that Dakis Joannou acquired. Skin Fruit opens March 3.

• Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), Cai Guo-Qiang, Hiroshi Sugimoto (both Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) will participate in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia’s largest contemporary visual art event. Cai’s installation Inopportune: Stage One (2004), nine cars exploding and rotating in space, will dominate Cockatoo Island’s Turbine Hall. McCarthy will premiere his sound and sculpture installation Ship of Fools #2 (2010) at Pier 2/3. And Bourgeois will have a series of painted bronze sculptures on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artistic director David Elliott says: “The aim of this Biennale is to bring together work from diverse cultures, at the same time, on the equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other.” The 17th Biennale of Sydney runs May 12 – August 1, 2010. Read more about the event in the Brisbane Times.

• Works by Season 5 artists Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari are on view in the exhibition Pop Art at the Havana Fine Arts Museum in Cuba. According to the Havana Times, the traveling exhibition (organized by Spain’s State Society for Foreign Cultural Action and the Valencian Institute of Modern Art) features nearly sixty works made by American and Spanish artists in the style/period of pop art. Works by John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, and James Rosenquist hang alongside works by Eduardo Arroyo, Equipo Cronica, Juan Genoves, Equipo Realidad, Josep Renau, Manuel Saez, Antonio Saura, Juan Antonio Toledo, and others. Pop Art continues through March 30.

• On February 22, Season 4 artist Alfredo Jaar will present his most recent short film Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini) (2009) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A tribute to the Italian filmmaker, intellectual, poet, critic, and journalist Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film incorporates footage from Pasolini’s films and rare interviews conducted prior to his sudden and mysterious death in 1975. The title refers to Pasolini’s own poem, Le Ceneri di Gramsci, itself a eulogy to the Italian left-wing intellectual Antonio Gramsci. In a separate unrelated event, Jaar will lecture in the Remis Auditorium of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on February 17. Both programs begin at 7pm.

• February is the last month that the Fundred Dollar Bill project by Season 1 artist Mel Chin will be at Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). In addition to regular museum hours, ASUAM is holding three free events to give the public a final chance to contribute: On February 9, the museum will screen Chin’s award-winning animated film 9-11/9-11: A Tale of Two Cities, A Tragedy of Two Times. February 16, the Phoenix band Peachcake will give a free concert following a screening of Chin’s 2009 interview with Planet Awesome. February 25, an armored truck will pick up ASUAM’s Fundreds — free music and other festivities will lead up to its arrival. Read more about the Fundred Dollar Bill project in Huffington Post; Utah People’s Post; and The Tartan.

• On February 17 at 6:30pm, Roni Horn (Season 3) will be in conversation with John Waters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Horn’s traveling retrospective exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn opens at the ICA on February 19 and continues through June 13.

Weekly Roundup

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.

Examining Roles and Investigating Responses; a Conversation with Rebecca Uchill

Rebecca Uchill

Caring for contemporary artworks usually requires a team effort.

I’ve been fortunate at the Indianapolis Museum of Art to work with colleagues who take their role in caring for artworks very seriously. For instance, I worked with former Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Rebecca Uchill, who arrived in 2005 and left Indy in 2008. Soon after her arrival, she began putting together exhibitions that among other things challenged the existing procedures of the museum and in a variety of ways pushed us to more clearly define our roles. In 2008 Uchill left Indianapolis to pursue a PhD at the MIT department of History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture. While I appreciated the exhibitions she brought to the IMA, one the most important projects she spearheaded is the creating of the Variable Art Team (VAT), an interdisciplinary team focused on the preservation of artworks that possess a changing observable state. Such artworks can involve variable presentation formats, time-based fluctuations or other types of variables, for example:

• Installation or site-sensitive artwork with artists’ instructions for implementation;
• Electronic or media-based art with updating platforms and devices;
• Conceptual art, ephemeral art, or art made with unsustainable materials.

Since Uchill’s departure, the VAT, currently led by Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Sarah Urist Green and myself, has grown in scope and continues to be a museum-wide collaborative and interdisciplinary effort.

Richard McCoy: Will you go back to 2006 and talk about what you had in mind when you started the Variable Art Team (VAT)?

Rebecca Uchill: I had been speaking with my friend Cara Starke, Assistant Curator of Media Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), about their similar inter-departmental group, and I was also interested in the work of Jon Ippolito in naming and thinking freshly about Variable Media. My original, very simple intention was to make clear and evident that everyone had a role not only in the process of putting an artwork on exhibition and that these roles also contributed to an artwork’s preservation in different ways.  As you know, sometimes documents related to the production of artworks weren’t archived because they seemed incidental at the time, but they would later emerge as essential–or at least desirable–records. For example, an artist’s napkin sketch drawn in the exhibition design offices might later become an important art historical document, as well as a partial roadmap to future re-creation of the work.

RM: I think finding, storing, and then retrieving all of the necessary documents around contemporary projects is among the biggest challenges facing institutions these days. One thing I remember from those early meetings is that we didn’t want to make any new institutional policies, and we didn’t want to try and force people to attend the team meetings. Raising awareness of what each person’s role in the exhibition and preservation of an artwork is complicated enough. I also remember spending a lot of time working with the VAT to make the “Variable Artwork Production and Archiving Flowchart.” While that isn’t always how artworks are produced at the IMA, it provides a good framework for how they could be commissioned.

Variable Artwork Production and Archiving Flowchart Rev. 1.1 (2008)

RU: The flowchart definitely forced a conversation about what people were actually doing, and demonstrated that almost everyone has a role. It made it possible to have a more nuanced conversation about what interactions or transactions were happening at each stage of a process.

From your perspective as a conservator, it seems what’s interesting (with the flowchart) is to figure out the legacy of the documentary traces of an artwork’s production. But what I find additionally interesting, as an art historian, is to see the distributed agency in the production of an artwork made manifest through that kind of chart. One often conceives of an artwork as being the product of a particular artistic position, but frequently it’s not that way entirely. There are other attributes–as with any other creative or productive act–that influence the outcome. Thinking about those influences that result from institutional contexts of production and display is now an academic focus for me.

This summer, for example, I am going to work in residence at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), where I will conduct research on the ways that certain 20th- and 21st-century museum architectures have affected contemporary art or reflected its changing approaches, especially towards the performative and dialogical.

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Eve Essex and Cornelius Cardew

Scratch Orchestra Reenactment at the Berwick

Continuing the tenuous thread I’ve begun to weave, today’s post concerns Eve Essex, an artist I’ve been interested in since she was a resident with the Berwick Research Institute in Boston, MA. One of her recent projects is a reenactment of British composer Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra. Cardew formed the Orchestra in the 1960s, bringing together professional musicians and amateurs to play non-traditional, group-created scores as a form of social activism. Eve’s reenactments of the original Scratch Orchestra rehearsals ask participants to operate in the present and past at the same time, realizing a forty-year-old utopian vision. Is this an antidote for political apathy or a caricature of earnestness? Eve calls it “theater” — does that make it more or less genuine (or neither)? I’m interested to know if anyone else sees a relationship between this project and Stuart Sherman’s inscrutable performances, detailed in my first post.

First Scratch Orchestra Reenactment

An Original Scratch Orchestra Score

Making Artistic Noise Part 2: Contemporary Activist Art

To continue from my first post, at Artistic Noise, we teach a curriculum that focuses on issues relevant to the lives of incarcerated and system-involved youth and uses art to encourage them to develop his or her voice. For every topic we explore, we study the work of contemporary artists who are creating work related to the one at hand. Our use of contemporary art can be as in-depth as creating an artwork inspired by an original piece or as simple as a daily check-in question. We have the luxury of ninety-minute classes to explore a different idea about contemporary artwork in almost every session.

Violence is something that affects so many of these teens. On a recent field trip to MoMA, we looked at, and took back with us, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Death by Gun). Our students used his poster-sized artwork to create books with their own views on gun violence. We have also explored Walid Ra’ad’s work, Oh, God, He Said Talking to a Tree, while discussing the issue of violence. Through these in-depth discussions, the students explore why contemporary artists, such as Gonzalez-Torres and Ra’ad, choose the materials and imagery they do to convey their idea, meaning, or message.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres. "'Untitled'" (Death by Gun)," 1990.

In our art and entrepreneurship studio, we have an entire wall of examples of contemporary artwork.  Our programs are based on the Restorative Justice philosophy, in which we begin and end every group in a circle with a check-in question and a check-out question. Quite often, our check-in question will relate to the contemporary art wall. Recently, we asked students to choose a piece and say one word that they felt described it. One of the boys chose a photo of a woman wearing a shirt with the Jenny Holzer truism stating ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE. The discussion about the artwork was lively, excited, and involved. Not knowing that this piece was part of a series entitled Truisms, the young man described the work as “the truth.”

Jenny Holzer, "Truisms," 1977–79. T-shirt worn by Lady Pink, New York, 1983.

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Making Artistic Noise Part 1: Art and Social Activism with Incarcerated Youth

noise [noiz]
noun – a loud, surprising, irritating, or unwanted sound

In 2001, I was approached by Fran Sherman of the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project to help develop an arts curriculum for a group of incarcerated girls. I never thought that eight years later I would be so heavily involved in this work. Fran and I began working on a mixed media visual autobiography project with a small group of girls in a Boston detention center. From the very beginning, the power artmaking had in such an institutional setting was obvious. Creativity and the freedom of expression involved in art is a sharp contrast from the daily life of a young person confined in a correctional facility. Through structured arts and entrepreneurship programming, the youth we work with feel safe expressing their experiences, ideas, and opinions. They feel empowered once they realize their perspective is valuable, important, and can reach a broader public.

It was through creating this original curriculum that Hear Us Make Artistic Noise (H.U.M.A.N.) in Boston and Artistic Noise in NY were formed. Both are small non-profit organizations that combine arts and entrepreneurship to build teens’ strengths, improve their ties to the community, and empower them within the juvenile justice system to advocate for themselves. As a small grassroots organization, we are able to stay in close contact with the youth we work with for many years. We focus on the transitional time from incarceration through the return home and to community. It is only through this continued support that we can really begin to impact the lives of young people involved in the justice system.

One of our original members who began working with us while incarcerated in Boston at the age of 18 is now the Assistant Director of H.U.M.A.N. The impact an arts program can have on a young person is best said in her own words:

Sitting on the inside, behind bars, made me feel like a criminal, but I knew I wasn’t. I was broken down and emotionally hurt from things that had happened and things that were to come. My time inside was like a vacation from my negative experiences. When I aged, out I was on my own and had to make the right decisions, but it’s hard to go straight after you have already taken the wrong road. The streets are like a drug—they’re addictive—and keep calling you and calling you. But my art teacher asked me if I wanted to take my art further. I told her yeah. Now look at me—I named H.U.M.A.N.—I’m a founding member, I’m selling my work, I never go broke, and I’m staying off the streets. But it’s hard for me to come up after all the things I’ve seen and had happen to me. I like doing art because it relaxes me, and all my hate is on paper, not in me.

Many of the young people we work with do not necessarily consider themselves artists at first. In fact, many of our most involved members began the program saying they couldn’t draw. Our philosophy is rooted deeply in contemporary art and does not initially focus on technique but on ideas. Art provides a visual language that can be powerful and direct. It offers a venue where youth can cope with and communicate their life experiences—even when challenging and difficult—and assert their voice positively.

Like many contemporary artists and activists, we focus on both the individual process and the ability of collaboration to initiate dialogue about social and political issues. In so many circumstances, society fails our young people. Laws are created that greatly affect their lives but rarely reflect their voice. Allowing youth to develop their individual and collaborative voice encourages students to experience a sense of personal accomplishment, develop new relationships, and become part of a community. Artistic Noise takes this process one step further by providing these youth a platform to articulate their ideas, concerns, and experiences to other people.

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Notes on sex, violence and John Brown: A conversation with Laylah Ali

“The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.” -Lester Bangs

Last night we braved the rain and bad signage in Lincoln, Massachusetts to hear a conversation with the artist Laylah Ali and Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch at the Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park. The evening was billed as a conversation on the reemergence of drawing and Ali’s new work. But with a breezy acknowledgement by the artist that she had “always drawn,” the talk centered on the always fascinating but elusive subject matter of Ali’s latest “note drawings.”

Inspired by sources such as NPR, John Brown biographies, and the dalliances of lovers outside her studio window (who knew Western Mass was so saucy?!), the “note drawings” feel more personal, more intimate, as if we are witness to the subconscious thoughts of the artist. Ali is creating form out of the minutiae of modern daily life, while still leaving room for interpretation. “The dynamic is similar (to earlier work) in that the viewer still has to make choices and name things,” said Ali.  One surprising aspect of this new work is how unmediated it is by Ali; these notes are truly random, and the drawing has a spontaneous nature and quality. The artist spoke of learning to trust her instincts more, as her earlier work was quite deliberate in planning and execution. In assigning race and gender to her characters in this new work, Ali still manages to deftly subvert the viewers assumptions about race and identity, and complicates those questions further by revealing more.

The conversation got interesting as it steered towards the questions of sex and identity. Ali spoke of a hunger in contemporary art for grotesque black female bodies, and feels audiences are not as comfortable with white mutilated bodies.  She also spoke of a sort of double standard that still exists in contemporary art, that male artists “who traffic in the female figure” are usually only discussed in terms of “ownership” and “desire.” I thought about the historical and social baggage that must come with being a black female artist—if we were discussing John Currin’s work, would the same issues of race and identity come up?  And why does the white female figure become the generic female?  One of Ali’s “note drawings” featured a blonde perky character, whose breasts were exposed through careful cutouts of her striped shirt.  She reminded me of a typical advertisement I might have seen in a teen magazine growing up, the embodiment of youth, beauty and blossoming sexuality.  But any meaning assigned to it is purely my own, as the accompanying text is random, appearing in and out of the lines and patterns of the drawing.

Spiders and Steel at the MFA, Boston

Currently showing as part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Art on Film series – Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress, and The Tangerine, by Amei Wallach and Marion Cajoli, and Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet, by Maria Anna Tappeiner.

Filming the process of making art or getting an artist to talk about their work can be an illuminating experience or a bit like having the curtain pulled back in the Wizard of Oz; what was magical or inexplicable becomes mechanic.  Each of these films prove to be the former.  Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine “reveals much about this haunting and haunted master” writes Nathan Lee of The New York Times.  At 96, Louise Bourgeois has always made work that commanded our attention.

Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet is an entirely different sort of art on film. While equally revealing about the artist, this documentary is specific to Serra’s installation The Matter of Time for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.  Serra’s magnificent steel sculptures inspire a sort of childlike awe when you see them in person, and the film offers a glimpse into the Herculean effort of making them.

Both films run at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through November 30th. See the complete calendar here.