Slowing Down and Visualizing Approaches
While vacationing locally this summer (since that’s all anyone has gas money for) and taking the necessary steps to slow down in order to feed your imagination and even your own art making, make sure to visit some beautiful and engaging exhibitions on view through the dog days of August. Two of these exhibits—Henry Moore’s Moore in America: Monumental Sculpture at the New York Botanical Garden and Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim Museum—are outstanding places for educators to revisit both of these artists, make important connections and visualize multiple approaches to working with our students.
When visiting the New York Botanical Garden for the Henry Moore show, plan to walk a few miles in order to see all of the sculptures. Allow for plenty of time with your sketchbook and/or camera. Most importantly, give the works attention and time; allow yourself to consider how you have approached the figure, sculpture, or figurative sculpture in your own classes while walking around the pieces. Take things slow and not only enjoy the grounds but also consider how we may teach more about context and the place a work is viewed in order to see it and engage with it.
At the Guggenheim Museum, Louise Bourgeois’ exhibit will not require nearly as much walking or a camera, but the possibilities for teaching about a wide range of sculptural materials, autobiographical themes, and depictions of the figure in a variety of roles will require a step or two backward, reflection, and a comfy sketchbook once again.
Other shows of interest for educators this summer include:
- Artist as Publisher at The Center for Book Arts in New York
- Lucky Number Seven, SITE Santa Fe’s 7th international biennial
- Jeff Koons at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art
At the end of August, after spending some time with Marlene Dumas’ Measuring Your Own Grave at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, I look forward to sharing an artist-educator’s take on the exhibit as well as possibilities for teaching with Dumas’ work.
Do you have some “best bets” to check out this summer? If so, please share them! If you have visited one of the exhibits above, please share your comments and thoughts.
Laurie Anderson at Lincoln Center
Starting tomorrow, July 22, Laurie Anderson (Season 1) performs her acclaimed piece Homeland at the Rose Theater as part of the 2008 Lincoln Center Festival. Backed by four musicians, the artist offers “an editorial narrative on the delivery of information and control, the push and pull of freedom and fear, and today’s omnipresent context of war.” Click here for sound clips from the performance.
The Rose Theater is located on the 5th floor of the Time Warner Center at Broadway and 60th Street. The show runs through Saturday, July 26, 2008; all performances start at 8pm.
A public conversation with the artist and Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro takes place on Thursday, July 24 at 6pm.
Eternal Twilight at the New Museum
Several Art21 artists temporarily engage in a moment of symbiosis in the New Museum’s new group exhibition, After Nature, curated by Massimiliano Gioni with the assistance of Jarrett Gregory and Chris Wiley. The work of the Puerto Rico-based collaborative team Allora & Calzadilla (Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla) (Season 4) often explores hybrid relationships and global politics. Their installation, Growth (Survival), 2006, presented in After Nature, pairs an existing work by Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Yellow Corner, 2002 with a Staghorn Fern (a plant native to such places as Southeast Asia and Australia, among other tropical locales). The work actually exists in two forms using the aforementioned work or with Holzer’s Blue Wall Tilt, 2004. The installation at the New Museum is placed in a darkly lit corner so the plant is exposed to virtually no other light besides the somber glow of the yellow LED screens of Holzer’s sculpture.
In his catalogue essay, Gioni describes the exhibition as “a land of wilderness and ruins that exists in an imaginary time zone suspended between a remote past and a not-so-distant future.” It’s impossible to hear this statement without recalling Rod Sterling’s hauntingly apocalyptic introduction to the 1960s television show The Twilight Zone: “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.” Gioni’s curatorial premise, not to mention Allora & Calzadilla’s installation, seems to take this notion to heart, reminding humankind that new systems of sustainability are inevitable on a planet that has been irrevocably altered by the careless endeavors of its inhabitants and also suggests that earth’s only hope for survival may be found within the unpredictable landscape of the mind.
SIDE X SIDE
Art and activism have been intimately engaged throughout contemporary art history, reiterating the notion that the personal is political. In 2007, Art:21’s Season 4 addressed activist strategies (in particular, the politics of war) in “Protest,” which included Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê, and Nancy Spero. A new investigation of art and activism (in this case, the AIDS crisis) can currently be seen in SIDE X SIDE, an exhibition curated by Dean Daderko for Visual AIDS on view through August 3, 2008 at La MaMa La Galleria in the East Village.
With works from the 1980s to the present by Scott Burton, Kate Huh, Nicholas Moufarrege, Martin Wong, and Carrie Yamaoka, Daderko’s project is rooted in the history of the 1980s in New York City where more than 10,000 people were diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. Between 1986 and 1991 there were numerous exhibitions, conferences, and artworks about AIDS in New York, while activist groups such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and Visual AIDS worked to educate the public and insist on medical research and treatment. Art21 artist Oliver Herring (Season 3) has also made works related to AIDS, in particular A Flower for Ethyl Eichelberger (1991) a tribute to the performance artist who committed suicide in 1990 after discovering that he had AIDS.
One of the most noted exhibitions about the politics of AIDS was Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (a 1989 review of the show can be found in the New York Times on-line) organized by artist Nan Goldin at Artists Space in 1989. The show highlighted a group of artists living in the lower east side of Manhattan who were directly affected by AIDS. Daderko’s project is a sobering reminder of this history as well as a tribute to those who have been lost to this vicious disease. Further details and upcoming events related to SIDE X SIDE can be found on the Visual AIDS website.
Socially Acceptable
My biggest pet peeve in New York City is watching men (and women) of all walks of life, hack and cough, then swiftly discharge a slimy wad of saliva on the sidewalk as passersby narrowly attempt to avoid its path. Despite my repulsion for this most sordid act, saliva is the product of Ana Prvacki’s innovative performance at the Sydney Biennale this year in which she produced gallons of saliva through a solemn flute solo. The bodily fluid—known for its medicinal properties—is then used as a healing salve. Though her actual saliva cannot legally be used, Prvacki has worked with a chemist to create wet wipes infused with her music-derived painkiller that were distributed at her performance at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in June. The event was reviewed in the The Sydney Morning Herald and images of her performance can be seen on the 2008 Sydney Biennale website.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Prvacki’s performance in view of the upcoming exhibition, theanyspacewhatever, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, organized by Chief Curator Nancy Spector, which will open this fall. The show addresses artists whose conceptual and social practices in the 1990s are frequently defined by the term “relational aesthetics,” a phrase coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in his collection of essays by the same name (originally published in France in 1998). Art: 21 artist Pierre Huyghe (Season 4) as well as Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Forester, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija are included in the forthcoming exhibition. Though I am eager to see how this ambitious project is executed, I can’t help but question the institutionalization of such practices. Aren’t they inherently in opposition to such institutions? And where do artists like Lygia Clark, Jeremy Deller, William Pope L., and Ana Prvacki fit into this dialogue?
Conversations: An-My Lê with Michael Almereyda part 2
Following is the second half of the conversation between An-My Lê and filmmaker Michael Almereyda that took place on May 5, 2008 at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
ALMEREYDA: There’s one bit of work that you did that I am really dazzled by that’s not featured in the movie—your video footage of Twentynine Palms. The black and white footage of the particular company at Twentynine Palms is shocking because you recognize how young these people are. We see war movies all of the time, and you see actors striving to be tough and war-ravaged, but when you see people going into war, it’s shocking. I was shocked by this footage because they seem so innocent. That’s a tricky word to apply, but they seemed beautiful—the light and their attitudes. A particular shot roves around their faces while they’re being instructed on something, but you can’t hear it because it’s without sound, so it’s just a kind of feat of observation. It’s really beautiful. The wind is rustling through their hair, they’re backlit; it’s not glamorous, but it is beautiful. I look forward to seeing it again. What are you doing with that? Is that going to be shown in a gallery at some point? Can you talk about your other film work?
LÊ: Yes. You encouraged me to make films—that’s how I started. Originally I wanted to do film because of sound. I felt that pictures could not reproduce sound. And some of the dialogues that I heard were so amazing.
ALMEREYDA: I didn’t realize that.
LÊ: So I started doing that. Then after looking at the footage it turned out that film provided the kind of ideal portraits that I had been looking for. I feel it’s been beginner’s luck! I would like to do some more, but I’m not sure what I want to do.
ALMEREYDA: In the video piece that was just shown, there are people returning and being embraced by their families. So you were shooting there, but you haven’t organized or edited it yet?
LÊ: Yes, I haven’t organized it yet. I’m mainly a photographer so…
ALMEREYDA: I look forward to seeing that edited. Part of my homework was to actually read this book that I’ve been looking at the pictures of for so long. There’s a very good essay by Richard Woodward and in it he goes to great lengths, and maybe overreaches a bit, to draw historical references to what you’ve done and how this relates to the history of landscape photography, and how landscape photography measures not just human time but also geographic time. I wonder how much of that you’d absorbed from Timothy O’Sullivan and then thought about as you were taking pictures?
LÊ: Well, I certainly love Timothy O’Sullivan’s work, [Roger] Fenton, [Eugene] Atget and all of the 19th-century photographers. I consider myself a landscape photographer working with a large format camera because I love the way it describes the space, the details, and the air between things. So when it came to working with the particular subject of war or the re-enactors, I had to reconsider my tool. I worked with a medium format at first and it did not describe space in the way that I wanted to. I’m not necessarily just interested in people fighting, holding guns, but I’m interested in people fighting and holding guns in the landscape. I felt that the large format camera was necessary so I just continue on with that tool and try to make it work. In that sense, I’m sort of a 19th-century photographer. I think it’s also about not describing the action, but about describing something before it happens or right after it happens. And there’s no reason why you can’t do that with a view camera.
Conversations: An-My Lê with Michael Almereyda part 1
The following is a conversation between An-My Lê and Michael Almereyda that took place at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library on May 5th, 2008. Stay tuned for the second part of this interview, which will be published tomorrow.
MICHAEL ALMEREYDA: I guess we’ll just leap into this. I have to confess that I’ve never interviewed anyone in public before, so you’ll have to bear with me. But I’ve known An-My for a long time—for about four years or so. I’m feeling lucky to be asked to talk with her.
I wasn’t familiar with the Art:21 series before, but it’s clearly a strong series. But I want to register my own polite protest in that I have to confess that I’m not sure how An-My’s work can really be considered “protest.” I’m really intrigued by the idea of artists who vocally protest, but it seems that what she’s doing in her work is asking questions. One of the great traps of vocalizing protest in art is that you tend to be strident, or corny, or obvious, and I think her work is none of those things. Having known her work for a long time and having recognized a certain progression, I guess we’ll just talk a little bit about that. I also wanted to mention that there’s a great show up right now at the Murray Guy Gallery on 17th Street, is it?
AN-MY LÊ: Yes.
ALMEREYDA: I recommend anyone who’s remotely interested to go check it out. In some ways the work is similar and has continuity, but it’s also very different. It’s in color and you found your way to Antarctica. It’s a different landscape, but a similar sensibility.
I’m curious about your background in that it’s touched on in the movie. There are things I didn’t know even after knowing you for a while. You grew up in and around the war—what are your clearest and most vivid memories of the war?
LÊ: I think my memories are vivid in the sense that I remember very specific events, whether they were the Tet offensive, or a mortar falling into my school half an hour before I showed up, or my great grandmother who was saved because she decided to spend the night at our house instead of going home; her house was then mortared. But at the same time, war was part of our life so we never really questioned it. I just accepted it and lived through it.
Bourgeois at Anthology Film Archives
On the occasion of Louise Bourgeois’s Guggenheim retrospective exhibition, Anthology Film Archives will present Brigitte Cornand’s trilogy of films about the artist. Screening July 9-20, Louise Bourgeois: Portrait Trilogy 1995-2007 includes a one-week world-premiere of the last film in the trilogy, La Riviére Gentille.
In these three film-portraits the artist continually returns to five major themes: her ever-present childhood, her passion for tapestry and rivers, her deep attachment to music and the poetical dimension of her visual and written oeuvre. Also showing are the films Chére Louise and The Whisper of the Whistling Water. Cornand says, “I hope that these films bring viewers beyond art or my personal relationship with Louise, and that they may feel encouraged to form their own relationship with the artist.”
Click here for a complete schedule of programs.
Spaceship Earth
Buckminster Fuller was one of the most inventive and prolific visionaries of 20th century who was keenly intuitive. Much of the work in the new Whitney exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with Universe, is on display for the first time. “We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.”
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the science fiction classic, was created at the pinnacle of the Apollo space exploration project beginning with manned Earth orbiting missions and reaching its plateau with landing on the moon on July 20, 1969. The Hal 9000 computer gave us a preview into how computers would one day dominate our lives.
In Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicolas Carr makes several references to Hal: “… the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman, in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, is calmly and coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’” Reading about Carr’s experience and how Internet searching and surfing has affected his thinking process and focus level, I realize that I am not the only one.
Are we becoming more aware of the hybridization of human and machine even though our minds are numbing by the plethora of information? As Internet has shifted our reading habits, how is it influencing the way we perceive art? Do we spend as much time contemplating works of art as we did in the past?
Depth and form are perceived in the visionary light creations of James Turrell (Season 1). His Roden Crater Project acts as a giant naked eye enabling viewers to see the sky as a dome and to feel the roundness of Earth. This is an experience similar to what Fuller experiences, “The earth is revolving to obscure the sun. The sun is not going down. I want you to really feel this with me. We’re rolling around to obscure the sun. We’re about to have a sunclipse: the earth is revolving around rapidly to obscure the sun. It’s perfectly easy to feel it, particularly if you face north and look over your left shoulder. Just watch! and you suddenly begin to feel this enormous earth revolving on its axis.”
Another visionary artist who is acutely aware of the environment is Roni Horn (Season 3). Her Vatnasafn/Library of Water replaces the solid with liquid as it engages the community to participate and to interact through a variety of activities. It is the epitome of relational art. An extensive collection of books on Fuller, Horn and Turrell are available for on site and take home use at the Art Collection of Mid-Manhattan Library.
At the 2005 Art Basel Miami Conversation, Hans Ulrich Obrist asked Robert Rauschenberg what advice he had for young artists and he replied, “Just nurture your curiosity and have respect for change. And I think the curiosity part will make life very exciting. It will also fight back habits like repeating oneself.”
Earthrise. NASA AS11-44-6548
1968 | 2008
This is not the first time that Summer Olympics Games are embroiled in environmental and political controversies. In 1968, Mexico City, with its high altitude containing 30% less oxygen than at sea level, proved to be a controversial choice. The lack of air led to terrible results for some, while others were able to achieve world records. Forty years later Beijing is faced with massive air pollution as it completes the preparations for the Olympics. The world renowned Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie has opted out of running in the marathon noting “the pollution in China” as a threat to his health. It remains to be seen how the environmental pollution in China will affect the athletes and the Games’ results.China is also plagued with its outrageous treatment of Tibet, resulting in massive protests around the world. Protest was also seen in Mexico City during the medal ceremonies when the two Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos “performed their Power to the People” salute. Peter Norman, the Australian silver medalist, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge showing his support for Smith and Carlos.
Another athlete to cancel an Olympic Games participation was Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest chess players of all time, who passed away earlier this year. He had plans to play for the United States at the 1968 Chess Olympiad in Lugano, Switzerland and backed out when he saw the playing hall with its bad lighting.
As athletes were breaking records in 1968, artists were busy reshaping culture. Nancy Spero(Season 4) was working on her War Series (1966-70). Bruce Nauman (Season 1) produced his first video titled Pinch Neck. Romare Bearden, in addition to being involved in founding The Studio Museum in Harlem, also established Cinque Gallery with the help of Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow. Cinque provided support for younger minority artists.
1968 marked the passing of Marcel Duchamp and the coinage of “15 minutes of fame” when Andy Warhol stated “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Frank Zappa released his first solo album Lumpy Gravy and performed King Kong with the Mothers of Invention at BBC Studio in London. Chou Wen-chung, who had studied with Edgard Varese, completed Nocturnal (1961-1968), an unfinished piece by Varese.
In his 1968 Nobel Lecture, Yasunari Kawabata explained, “The excitement of beauty calls forth strong fellow feelings, yearnings for companionship, and the word ‘comrade’ can be taken to mean ‘human being.’ The snow, the moon, the blossoms, words expressive of the seasons as they move one into another, include in the Japanese tradition the beauty of mountains and rivers and grasses and trees, of all the myriad manifestations of nature, of human feelings as well.”
How will 2008 be reminisced forty years from now? What will be the low and high points in our cultural and social achievements? Will 2008 be a critical year marking a pivotal change in the way we treat the environment and each other?
China Haze. Credit. Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE
