Smockshop in Chinatown
The Smockshop, Andrea Zittel’s artist run enterprise that generates income for artists whose work is either non-commercial or not yet self sustaining, will be opening a store in Los Angeles Chinatown from June 27 through September 21st.
“We produce and sell smocks: a simple double wrap around garments designed by Andrea Zittel (Season 1) - then sewn by artists who often reinterprets the original design based on their individual skill sets, tastes and interests. As an active testament to Zittel’s principle that “rules make us more creative”, each resulting smock is completely unique and one of a kind.”
Summer Smockshop will be located on 936 Mei Ling Way, in the former Rental Gallery Space. Now that’s a wrap.
Pierre Huyghe | “Anlee”
EXCLUSIVE: Pierre Huyghe’s videos One Million Kingdoms (2001) and Two Minutes Out of Time (2000), part of the collaborative project No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2003) with Philippe Parreno.
Pierre Huyghe’s films, installations, and public events range from a small-town parade to a puppet theater, from a model amusement park to a wildlife expedition in Antarctica. Revealing the experience of fiction to be as palpable as anything in daily life, Huyghe’s playful work often addresses complex social topics such as the yearning for utopia, the lure of spectacle in mass media, and the capacity of cinema to shape memory.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Pierre Huyghe.
LEARN: Pierre Huyghe is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Romance of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Pierre Huyghe, No Ghost Just a Shell (collaboration with Philippe Parreno), 1999-2003. (Left) One Million Kingdoms, video still, 2001; (Right) Anlee, original image, 1999. © Pierre Huyghe, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins, Charles Atlas & Nick Ravich. Camera: Martial Barrault. Sound: Gilles Metivier. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Pierre Huyghe. Thanks: Marian Goodman Gallery.
Kara Walker in Malaga
The Black Road, a new installation by Kara Walker (Season 2), is currently on view at the Malaga Contemporary Art Center. Inspired by early cinematography, magic lanterns, and 18th century French royal court cut-outs, her signature paper silhouettes are on display along with paintings, drawings, and video.
Walker’s work touches upon themes such as apartheid, exploitation, gender issues, social injustice, and slavery. “It is a harsh and conscious critique of the ‘shadows’ of our society and the modern world, forever disguised behind the apparent simplicity and shape of her iconographies.”
The Black Road runs through August 31st.
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.
Collier Schorr at Villa Romana
Villa Romana in Florence is currently exhibiting Collier Schorr’s Blumen, the second installment of the artist’s Forest & Fields project.
For the last fifteen years Schorr (Season 2) has been documenting the life and landscapes of Schwäbisch-Gmünd, a small town in Southern Germany. Merging the identities of her subjects with her own idea of what it is to be “German,” Blumen is a play on the idea of floral arrangements. Gathering flowers from neighboring gardens and then transporting them to the higher mountaintops and slopes of the town, she then ties them together with strings which are held up by sticks. “By removing the flowers from their place of cultivation and positioning them on public land, Schorr suggests a migration or re-patriation.”
Blumen is on view through summer and also includes small black and white portraits of “the Germans” in a loose installation of pinned up images that play with scale, whereby people are dominated by the natural world. Close-ups of chairs, pears, and faucets dwarf the townspeople, “who exist in their ever changing world as almost nostalgic personages.”
Berliner Salon: Fashion Week and the Paparazzi
Yesterday inaugurated Berlin Fashion Week, which will continue through the weekend, bringing a number of “celebrities” to town, as well as designers, models and the ubiquitous hangers-on. It’s a pretty well known fact, however, that Berlin Fashion Week often leaves much to be desired, both in the way of big name runway shows, and big name industry insiders. Fortunately, the Helmut Newton Foundationhas taken it upon itself to mount an exhibition celebrating old-guard glamour and the cult of celebrity, so out-of-towners and locals alike can still indulge in some good old fashion voyeurism.Entitled Pigozzi and the Paparazzi and with “approximately 350 b/w and colour prints by Salomon, Weegee, Galella, Quinn, Angeli, Secchiaroli, Pigozzi and Newton, the exhibition presents the forerunners and central figures of the “classic” period of paparrazi photography—and provides a visual commentary about the evolution of this phenomenon. The exhibition offers an overview and critical look at the history of a photographic genre dedicated to fame and sensationalism,” according to the press release. In light of the present-day hysteria surrounding public figures, Pigozzi and the Paparazzi offers a more serene, nostalgic and somehow romantic version of celebrity sovereignty, back when it was dignified.The exhibition runs through November 16th. To view additional images from the show, click here. Schoenes Wochenende.
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.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle | Casta Paintings
EXCLUSIVE: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle at home in Chicago, with photographs of the installation The Garden of Delights (1998) at the XXIV Sao Paulo Bienal.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated works use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. The artist’s strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle.
LEARN: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, (Left) Doug, Joe and Genevieve from (Right) The Garden of Delights, 1998. Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Mark Falstad. Sound: Heidi Hesse. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Thanks: Max Protetch Gallery.
