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.

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!

Blogalogueing with Lee Montgomery

LeE:
this is me.. LeE… the one I told you about.
You:
Hi Lee! You know I just realized I could have probably been doing the interview this whole time, just set a deadline and you coulda responded at your leisure.
You:
Here are the four questions I’ve been using as a jumping off point for all the conversations, esp the first one:

1. How do you define systems, networks, and systems vs. networks?
2. What, if any, system and/or network do you feel you are a part of? As individuals? As artists? As NPR?
3. What, if any, systems and/or networks do you feel you are unwillingly a part of? As individuals? As artists? As NPR?
4. How do you feel that your work interfaces with your definition of systems and network?
5. How does the system and/or network act upon your work? What effect, that is entirely out of your control, do systems and/or networks alone have on your work?

You:
Are you there? Just checking in…
LeE:
now I am here
LeE:
in my office.. headed home in about a half hour…
LeE:
I will start answering these quex as soon as I get home….. and you can follow up at your liesure… this google wave thing is awesome that way.
You:
that sounds great. safe travels!
LeE:
alright.. here begin my answers….

1. How do you define systems, networks, and systems vs. networks?
I think I consider the terms largely synonymous, though due to the vagaries of the English language, and perhaps even the nature of technology/corporate ownership, they can take on vastly different meanings. I was thinking of a sewer system versus a network of sewers, or the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS) versus the Cable News Network (CNN). System seems a more generalized word, and in my mind a more centralized almost fascist sense of the concept, whereas a network implies more of a sense of possibility and connection. It is a framework to be used and moved about within rather than a set of rules to be imposed. That said, I see no significant difference between a sewer system and a network of sewers.

2. What, if any, system and/or network do you feel you are a part of? As an individual? As an artist? As NPR?
With NPR, there has certainly been a commentary on the system of corporate owned media networks in the United States. In my recent personal work there has been an engagement with the system of copyright law in the U.S. and abroad. (i.e. http://www.lee-web.net/symphony/). But these are operations within those sewers I was mentioning before.

On the sunny side of the street from that sewer I have had the pleasure, through these endeavours, of collaborating with a number of artists and artist spaces like Kristin Lucas, Artist’s Television Accces, Southern Exposure, Red76, kuda.org and a host of badass and not so badass expressive individuals who have passed through the doors or in front of the microphones of any of the numerous radio stations that NPR has had the pleasure of establishing for short periods of time of the past 6 years.

Recently I found myself attached to the network of University of New Mexico faculty (not yet a Facebook network), which resulted in working with my colleague Catherine Harris to build a system of propellers activated by a hand operated water pump (I just did the pump)… so now I operate within the network of tinkerers who work with water pumps??? (and believe me, there is a network there) … which I guess also puts me in the Ecological/Land Art network.. which is kinda hard to avoid here in New Mexico.

I guess what I am getting at…. is that I like to consider myself part of a network or a system (in the most positive sense) at all times(a really big one), and the more the merrier, for me. I don’t think I work well in a vacuum or in isolation. I love Facebook… and want to make art with it… I love Lee Walton’s work where he interpret’s his friends status messages, though I’m deeply saddened that he hasn’t made a video about any of mine. (We’re in the Lee network after all.) I’m inclined towards an almost new age interpretation of quantum physics, wherein we all realize ourselves as part of a larger whole system, network, whatevs.

Continue reading »

Blogalogue, Part 4: Lee Montgomery

Picture taken from Switch22

Lee Montgomery got his BA in Film at Bard College, and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. As the founder of Neighborhood Public Radio, Lee has received grants from CEC Artslink, the Creative Work Fund, and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund.  He has been an artist in residence with kuda in Novi Sad, Serbia and the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Hamburg.

Neighborhood Public Radio has been named “Best Super Local Radio Station” by San Francisco magazine and has been featured in The San Francsico Chronicle, Punk Planet magazine, Artforum, the Chicago Reader, and Women’s Wear Daily. As a traveling band of guerilla broadcasters, NPR has hosted thematic broadcasts far and wide, including at both Artist’s Television Access and Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District,  The DeYoung Museum and the Museum for Contemporary Art Novi Sad, Serbia.  In 2008, NPR completed an unprecedented 4 month residency in a storefront next door to the Whitney Museum as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

In his solo work, Lee continues to explore d.i.y. approaches to technology and issues of copyright law.

Stick around for my blogalogue with Lee by way of Google Wave…because, as if this blogalogue experiment weren’t interesting enough, now all of you who are still eagerly awaiting your invitations to Google Wave have a chance to see the app put to use in real life! Just slap a red hat on my head and call me Mama Noel. The smiles on your faces that I will never see are thanks enough.

Initial Thoughts on SF

Photo by Flickr user Badger 23

The San Francisco Bay Area is still new to me. I am still trying to learn as much as I can about both the history of art in the area and look forward to the future while taking in the present. My interest in the global/local dynamic as well as the concept of having art world centers means that I’m always trying to assess what kind of art city San Francisco is within a larger context. Glenn Ligon certainly isn’t the first or only person to claim that New York is no longer the center of the art world. While New York is still host to the largest concentration of galleries and museums in the US, it is also just one of many art world centers around the globe, and Los Angeles is developing quickly as another US center. At the same time, locations such as Berlin have become incubation grounds for artists who want the freedom to experiment outside the art market pressures. Then, there are cities like San Francisco and Chicago that are somewhere in between.

San Francisco is often perceived as a city whose regional artists and local nonprofits dominate the city alongside long-standing galleries. As a recent transplant from Chicago, this structure and attitude is familiar; however, this time there are different forces behind why the city’s art scene has developed or is perceived in this way. San Francisco is home to the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts—schools that attract curators and teaching artists such as Jens Hoffmann, Hou Hanru, Trisha Donnelly, and Kota Ezawa, among others. The schools also graduate a large number of emerging artists and arts professionals. But, like Chicago, many leave after graduating because the market is not big enough to support them all.

The collector base here is small but strong—and most importantly, values discretion. The flashiness of nearby Los Angeles is not present here. As Ratio3 gallery owner Chris Perez noted in a recent conversation, the collectors in the Bay Area are relaxed but in touch internationally. And it seems that more collectors are looking at work produced in the region now than previously.

So what is it about San Francisco that drives some to call the city’s art scene “eternally becoming”? And is it approaching another moment of “becoming” now that many people from the New York art world are moving to the city and opening spaces? And what does “becoming” allude to? Certainly, San Francisco’s scene (or any other) shouldn’t just be judged on the commercial art market.

I don’t have the answers to these questions yet, but as I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve come across a few interesting articles that I would like to share, as well as some links to exciting new spaces in the city. I’m excited to be in a new city with such a vibrant and complex diversity of the arts.

1. First, a thoughtful assessment of Chicago by writer and curator, Anthony Elms in May Magazine.
2. A feature in SF Magazine about the “young and hungry” in the SF art world
3. Recent New York transplant Claudia Altman-Siegel’s new space: Altman Siegel Gallery S/F
4. A small (in size) gallery that is building a big reputation for their thoughtful shows: Jancar Jones Gallery

This is so contemporary!

Tino Sehgal rehearsing with interpreters

German artist Tino Sehgal recently spoke about his practice in a discussion with Jens Hoffmann at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Sehgal has been showing his work in the contemporary art context since 2004. It was in 2005 that Hoffmann curated an exhibition of Sehgal’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London that caught the attention of the art world. Since then, the duo has remained connected through an ongoing exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute, where Hoffmann is the director.

I have been interested in the work of Sehgal since reading an article about him in The New York Times in 2007. Examples of Sehgal’s work include museum guards singing “This is so contemporary” in museum galleries (2003) or a couple locked in a passionate kiss (Kiss, 2002), or a person writhing on the ground in the corner of a museum (Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things, 2000). Sehgal does not allow any documentation of his work, but the pieces can be purchased nonetheless through passing along oral instructions (if he can’t eliminate capitalistic exchange, at least he can change the nature of what is being exchanged). Sehgal recruits and trains people, whom he calls “interpreters,” to carry out the works.

Sehgal’s work is rooted in two main ideas: 1) sustainability and 2) exploring the “technologies of interconnection.” By using interpreters to carry out his works, Sehgal challenges the conventions of experiencing artwork while also eliminating the waste that naturally comes with object-based work. He cites the events of May 1968 with instilling in him the notion that exchange or transactions needs to be challenged.

I’ve personally encountered two works by Sehgal. The first was Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things at the New Museum in the exhibition, After Nature, in 2008. At the opening, there were crowds of people, and most did not notice the woman writhing on the floor in the corner near the stairwell. If you looked at her, she stared back. Her motions were derived from the experimental videos of Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham, but looked more like she was experiencing a seizure or was in pain. You quickly understand that the way you react, internally or outwardly, is part of Sehgal’s work.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Matthew Ritchie, "Line Shot" Installation (detail), 2009. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery.

• The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host a talk with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie and brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner (of indie rock band The National) on Saturday, October 31 at 6pm. The event is held in conjunction with their collaborative performance The Long Count, which opens at BAM on Wednesday, Oct 28. Ritchie’s work is currently on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery in the solo exhibition Line Shot.

• Songs of Ascension by Ann Hamilton (Season 1) and Meredith Monk (also currently at BAM) was featured in a New York Times music review last week. Read the article here.

• For Performa 09, Mike Kelley (Season 1) will present three short dance/performance pieces inspired by his film and video installation Day Is Done (2005). These performances bring to life some of the characters featured in the film, all of whom are based on found photographs of extracurricular activities from American high school yearbooks. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns. Kelley’s show runs Nov 17 – Nov 19 at Judson Memorial Church. Purchase tickets here.

• Between Being Born and Dying, a site-specific installation by Barbara Kruger (Season 2), is on view at Lever House through November 21. Bloomberg.com describes the installation: “Kruger’s aphorisms are written in massive black-and-white letters all over the Lever House’s atrium, both inside and outside. They are printed on vinyl panels covering the floor, windows, walls and columns. The results are striking but disorienting. The 17-foot-tall letters are so big you can’t take it all in at once–or at all.”

• Season 2 artist Paul Pfeiffer has created a special project for the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The project opens with Vertical Corridor, in which Pfeiffer encourages the viewer to peer through a tiny peephole in the wall of the gallery. The peephole is the only access to an immense space, and questions “the validity of the spectacle … reminding the viewer that every such spectacle must bow to the limits of one’s perspective.” This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Russia.

• Kara Walker (Season 2) will introduce a screening of the 1926 film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York on November 11. Directed by the German animator and film director Lotte Reiniger, it is the earliest feature-length animation still believed to exist, and considered one of the greatest animated films of all time. The program — part of MoMA’s To Save and Project festival — begins at 8pm.

• Season 2 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock will speak at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai on Tuesday, October 27 at 5pm. Two print portfolios Fix (2007) and The Ossifies Theosophied (2005) will be on display in conjunction with the event. Hancock is featured in the exhibition Young Americans at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai through November 15.

• Mirror, Mirror: Contemporary Portraits and the Fugitive Self, a new exhibition at the Brigham Young Museum of Art in Utah, features works by 32 artists, including Oliver Herring (Season 3), Rebecca Campbell, Hasan Elahi, Harrell Fletcher, Douglas Gordon, Nikki Lee, and Takashi Murakami. The exhibition explores the influence of rituals, facades, social media, and the family on the formation of individual identity. On view through May 2010.

• Art critic Tyler Green talks to MoMA curator Connie Butler (organizer of the feminist exhibition, Wack!) about Season 4 artist Nancy Spero, who passed away last week. Read the interview on Green’s blog Modern Art Notes.

• Work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) is included in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Learning Modern: Bauhaus Legacy in Downtown Chicago. Building on the legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Learning Modern features projects by artists and architects who continue a legacy of interdisciplinary innovation for better living, while exploring the central role of experiential education in the modern vision. Continues through January 9, 2010.

• Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall, the fifth exhibition of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, is on view through November 20. The earliest known documentation of a fatal car crash provides a pictorial metaphor for Shonibare’s new body of photographic and sculptural work. Photographed in 1898, the image records death as a spectacle for the first time; a crowd surrounds the carcass of a motor vehicle. Shonibare has created a similar scene in the gallery, a sculptural dramatization of the death of Arthur Miller’s infamous protagonist, salesman Willy Loman. The installation suggests a parallel between Miller’s 20th century examination of greed and the human condition, and the present day.

• Now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Focus on Artists celebrates the museum’s 75th anniversary, and its close ties with modern and contemporary masters as demonstrated by works from their collection. SFMOMA holds a number of sculptures by Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo; pieces from her Unland (1995–98) and Untitled “Cabinet” series (1989-present) will be on view. Continues through May 23, 2010.

• On the occasion of Grey Area, a new work by Season 5 artist Julie Mehretu commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, the current issue of ArtMag (the online art magazine of Deutsche Bank) focuses on artists who investigate urbanism and cultural identity. Joan Young, curator at the Guggenheim Museum, has contributed an essay about Mehretu’s recent work. Read it here.

Weekly Roundup

Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Lightning Fields 145", 2009. Gelatin-silver print, 22.9 x 18.4 inches. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery.

• New photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) are on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco through October 31. Sugimoto’s latest body of work titled Lightning Fields depicts electricity. To create each image, the artist uses a Van De Graaff 400,000-volt generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto film. The result in each case is a unique, instantaneous image of an electrical current, sometimes resembling a meteor shower, or a “treeing effect” on the film.

• On October 21, Season 2 artist Walton Ford will sign copies of the popular edition of Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra at the TASCHEN Store in New York (107 Greene Street). Only 100 copies of the book will be available. The ticketed event begins at 7pm; reservations are accepted via telephone. New work by Ford will be displayed at Paul Kasmin Gallery beginning November 12.

• October 27 – December 23, two sculptures by Richard Serra (Season 1) — Blind Spot (2002-2003) and Open Ended (2007-2008) — will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. These similar concentric structures each consist of six weatherproof steel plates. Open Ended was exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in London last year. The New York exhibition brings both sculptures together for the first time.

• On November 7, a new stage performance by Season 5 artist Cao Fei will premiere at Teatro Astra/Artissima 16 Theatre Project in Turin. RMB City Opera (part of Fei’s ongoing RMB City project in Second Life) is based on the “model dramas” (Yang Ban Xi) of the Cultural Revolution period. Yang Ban Xi were the only politically-approved types of performance at the time, as traditional opera was banned by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing. Read more about RMB City Opera here.

• Art Review has released their 2009 Power 100 list, a look at “who’s who in contemporary art,” and a “guide to general trends and forces that shape the artworld.” Bruce Nauman (Season 1) comes in at #10; Jeff Koons (Season 5) holds the #13 spot; Mike Kelley (Season 1) is #20; and John Baldessari (Season 5) ranks #37. View the complete list.

• Paul Laster of ArtKrush has reviewed the “massive, energetic show,” New York Minute: 60 Artists on the New York Scene, which includes work by Barry McGee (Season 1). “Exploring street punk, wild figuration, and new abstraction, the artists in this colorful show represent a new generation of creative minds, responding to the world around them in rapid and unpredictable ways,” writes Laster. Read the entire piece on Flavorwire.

• Two concurrent exhibitions by Season 2 artist Maya Lin at Pace Wildenstein and Salon 94 have been reviewed by Justin Wolf (also on Flavorwire). He writes: “While not unimpressive, [Recycled Landscapes, at Salon 94] pales next to its Chelsea counterpart, but maybe that’s the point. Here the utterly polished gallery space has been transformed into an obsessive-compulsive’s playroom; refinement infused with touches of juvenility.” Read more…

• The new issue of Parkett (no. 86) features artists Josiah McElheny (Season 3), John Baldessari (Season 5), Carol Bove and Philippe Parreno. See excerpts and images from the publication here.

Harrell Fletcher interviewed by Allan McCollum

Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a BOMB contributor relating to a Season 5 artist. This week, we’re switching it up again and featuring an interview by an Art21 artist instead. In BOMB Issue 95, Spring 2006, Allan McCollum spoke with Harrell Fletcher about his project at Domaine de Kerguéhennec Centre d’Art, Bignan, in France. The conversations fits neatly into the Systems theme for this week, as well as being one of our favorite recent interviews to appear in BOMB. We hope you like it as much as we do!

Harrell Fletcher, "The Report," 2003. Xeroxed publication. All images courtesy the artist, Christine Burgin Gallery, New York, and Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco.

Allan McCollum: I enjoy that the meaning of your work doesn’t reside in any one piece. In fact, looking at any one piece you might pass over it; they’re often so simple and easy to describe. But looking at project after project (the number seems to go into the hundreds), and then your Learning to Love You More website with a couple of thousand more projects, a certain set of values comes through. You’re not trying to produce singular masterpieces, and almost all your work is about people other than yourself. A lot of the things that we expect an artist to do, you do backward. It constantly takes me by surprise.

Harrell Fletcher: It’s about having a set of natural proclivities. I see the structure of how an artist is supposed to operate, but some of those things don’t feel comfortable to me. In graduate school, I started realizing that I did not have to follow the normal course.

AM: How did you perceive the “normal course” while you were in school?

HF: It’s so concentrated in graduate school; you see all of these people going into their studios, spending hours and hours making objects or paintings. And it’s supposed to be about isolating themselves. Maybe they have a wall of inspirational clippings from magazines, but that’s the extent of their interaction with the world. Continue reading »

Straight from the Source

Melanie Pullen-American Revolution Soldier

New media tools are a rich addition to an art teacher’s toolbox and the Web is overflowing with opportunities to discover new artists and art forms. Here in San Francisco, we are fortunate to be surrounded by a myriad of creative folks. Our public media station, KQED produces two artist documentary series, Spark and Gallery Crawl which, like Art:21 Web Exclusive content, are available for free download as video podcasts from iTunes, where you can edit video podcast clips and compile them into playlists. As you start planning innovative, new curriculum for fall 2009, spend some time exploring the endless possibilities of podcasting.

Invite students to practice self-directed art study and become curators, creating thematic playlists highlighting artwork that speaks to their sensibilities. As they discover new artists on iTunes or ArtBabble.org, students should practice critical viewing skills and consider how they might create their own podcast highlighting an emerging artist from their school or community. What further questions do students have for the artists they “meet” in the videos? How would they conduct an interview? Would they include music or graphics? There are endless new media production tools available to our students today, and it’s entirely possible that they’ll be interested in starting their own artist documentary series.

For a specific example of a thematic playlist, take a look at Melanie Pullen’s interview and soldier-focused photographs in her exhibition Violent Times on Gallery Crawl and compare it with Art:21 Season 2 photographer, Collier Schorr’s series of German youth in uniform. How are Pullen and Schorr’s photographs fundamentally similar, and how do the artists’ intentions differ? How does each artist’s treatment of her subjects differ? Do the photographs seem feminine, masculine, or both? Are there other portraitists or photographers who come to mind when viewing these artists’ work? Who are they? Students might choose to create a playlist of video podcasts based on a theme or genre, and close the playlist with their own piece of media such as a video response or short film that ties in with the selected topic.

As Joe Fusaro and Olivia Gude mentioned in their panel discussion at this year’s NAEA conference, teachers should try making less art with their students and focus on thematic study of contemporary artists, considering their relation to artists throughout history. By exploring renowned and emerging artists online and learning about artists’ intentions straight from the source, students will begin to intuitively make connections with their own art-making practices, and be inspired to experiment with fresh ideas and new media tools.

Kristin Farr is an artist and Project Supervisor for Arts Education at KQED in San Francisco.