Packaging a Music Experience: Ryan Catbird and Catbird Records
Moviola, “Dead Knowledge”. Catbird Records, CBR010, 2007. Image courtesy of Catbird Records.
Ryan Catbird has commanded a silent influence on the independent music scene since he began his blog, The Catbirdseat, in 2002. Ryan could possibly be credited for bringing bands such as Destroyer, Beirut, Frightened Rabbit, Pete and the Pirates closer to the public spotlight. Anyone who follows his blog would probably agree: Ryan Catbird has an honest, sincere, and genuine passion for music, with no pretense attached whatsoever. Which is why Ryan would probably never credit himself for “breaking” a band…and also why you would expect him to do more than just write about music.
In 2005, Ryan took this passion a step further by launching a boutique record label, Catbird Records. Through over 20 releases, the label has not just built a foundation of releasing reputably great music, but they’ve also managed to add a touch of personality by way of packaging and presentation. Jewel cases be damned—just about every release is a reflection of the care that went into the overall process. Machines didn’t put these packages together; people did.
The label’s most recent release is an LP reissue of the 2002 Unbunny album, Black Strawberries—the album’s first-ever vinyl pressing. This was no ordinary release, however. In one of the more exciting uses of the Kickstarter, Ryan was able to fund the entire process, releasing not just an album, but also an entire experience. I recently spoke to Ryan via email to learn more about this latest release, as well as his process.
Talking with Esopus Editor, Tod Lippy, Part Two
Image courtesy of Esopus magazine.
This is part two of my interview with Esopus editor, Tod Lippy (click here for part one). In addition to the interview, readers may also want to check out “The Assembled Picture Library of NYC”, a collaborative exhibition and workspace environment organized by artists Robin Cameron and Jason Polan. The exhibition will provide free and open access to hundreds of images from the collections of Cameron and Polan. Visitors are invited to come in during gallery hours (Mon/Tue/Thu from 12-5pm) and use these images—which include manuscripts, advertisements, prints, original drawings, and more—as raw material for their own artworks, which will be displayed on the walls of Esopus Space for the length of the exhibition. Polan and Cameron will also create a book featuring visitors’ artworks, The Assembled Picture Library of New York Book, that will be available at the closing reception on March 18th.
Joe Fusaro: Esopus is a tremendous resource on many levels. Can you talk about the magazine’s relationship with educators? Have you had experience with teachers using the magazine in their classrooms, and if so, how?
Tod Lippy: I know that Esopus has been used as an educational tool by a number of our subscribers who happen to be teachers. One issue in particular has been especially popular in that regard: Esopus 6: Process, which featured evidence of the working methods of a number of different creative people — work journals from the late Christopher Isherwood relating to the writing of A Single Man; a photographic documentation of the making of a dry-point etching by the artist Sylvia Plimack Mangold, the comic Demetri Martin’s joke diaries, and even a paper model (which our readers could build from pre-cut forms included in the magazine) of a dodecahedron offered by the mathematician John Conway, who always employs model-building when working on a new theorem. But every issue of the magazine features content — such as our “Modern Artifacts” series produced in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art Archives — that offers learning experiences for readers of all ages.
Since the editorial tone of the magazine is deliberately neutral — we try to avoid critical jargon that might be off-putting to more general readers — and since the artists’ projects in the magazine rarely have any introductions or explanations preceding them, I guess one could argue that the magazine is actually neglecting the opportunity to teach its readers about the meaning of contemporary art (much of which, of course, can feel oblique to people lacking art degrees). But to tell you the truth I think the experience readers have with the work in the magazine, which they are forced to approach on their — and its — own terms, may end up being a deeper one in many cases.
Incidentally, I think that perhaps one of the best things Esopus has to offer younger readers, particularly in this era of publishing, is an essentially commercial-free environment. I’ve spoken at a number of high schools and colleges about the magazine, and when I deliver lectures I bring along a Powerpoint presentation during which I ask for a show of hands from the audience as I project photos of spreads from current magazines. I ask them to raise their right hands when they recognize an ad, and their left hands when they see editorial content. I start with obvious choices — a Nike advertisement, a page from The Talk of the Town in The New Yorker — but it’s amazing how quickly confusion sets in when I show them an “advertorial,” or a paid-for “special supplement” that apes the look and feel of the particular magazine. Advertising is so pervasive in every nook and cranny of our culture that it really isn’t noticed anymore, and I think that’s problematic, especially for young people who should know when they are being sold something.
Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. I
Dan Phillips, "Tree House," 2008. Courtesy of Phoenix Commotion.
As a northerner recently transplanted to the Greater Houston area, I admit to having reservations about all things Texan. I have found this a tough place to love at first sight. Yet, this particular region nurtures a unique host of fascinating figures and issues in contemporary art, along with sometimes frustrating contradictions and striking visual treats—including a wealth of handmade signs and arresting juxtapositions of natural beauty confronting the manmade. In this and subsequent posts as a guest blogger, I hope to sketch out some contributions to contemporary art made by the creators, institutions, and museum professionals who have chosen to either make their homes in and around Houston, or have come here to reflect upon the region in site-specific and installation projects. In the process, I will also reflect on some of the ethical issues in contemporary art that living removed from more established art centers has allowed me to better flesh out.
On my first trip to Huntsville, where I teach art history at Sam Houston State University, I was given a drive-by tour of several structures built by Dan Phillips and his Phoenix Commotion team. Intrigued by what I saw, I visited his “tree house” (where my colleague Annie Strader is the current tenant), and last December I invited Phillips to speak to my Contemporary Art class about his project. For the past twelve years, Phillips and members of the Commotion, including his wife Marsha, have been committed to building affordable and visually-distinctive housing out of largely post-consumption building leftovers, waste from the fabrication of industrialized materials (including “landscape timbers,” a plywood by-product), and other free or discarded materials. Examples of Phillips’s sustainable building aesthetic include: a roof made from recycled license plates, floors made from wine corks, an artist’s studio ceiling lined with salvaged picture frame samples, and a range of other less-than-perfect or blemished building materials destined for the landfill that have been recovered and put into unexpected, unanticipated use.
Since 1996, the Phoenix Commotion, a for-profit rather than non-profit organization, has completed thirteen structures in Phillips’s hometown of Huntsville. In 2004, Phillips, with the cooperation of the city, established a warehouse where recyclable building materials are donated, stored, and then accessed by charitable groups and low-income housing projects. To achieve their aesthetic and ethical goal of increasing the availability of out of the ordinary, low-cost housing in Huntsville, Phillips and his crew are not only building, but have also created an alternative infrastructure that enables materials typically considered building “wastes” or “leftovers” to be creatively reused by the community.
The Fruit of Experience
Fallen Fruit Collective, "Elysian Park," 2005. Giclee print, 40 x 60 in. Courtesy the artists.
Fallen Fruit Collective formed six years ago through a project by artists David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The trio created a street-by-street diagram of fruit trees growing on or over public property in their Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. While the city boasts bananas, peaches, avocados, lemons, oranges, kumquats, plums, pomegranates, and other fruits growing year-round, this bounty is not always shared. Mapping “public fruit” was a way to approach food resource and accessibility concerns in urban space. From the beginning, Fallen Fruit urged city officials, urban planning groups, and property owners to plant with the goal of yielding edible goods for the local populace. You might call Burns, Viegener, and Young the locavores of contemporary art.
Next month, Fallen Fruit will launch EATLACMA, a year-long investigation into food, art, culture, and politics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Their ambitious plan consists of an exhibition culled from the museum’s collection; a newly commissioned work; seven curated artist gardens on the museum campus; two fruit tree giveaways; a participatory YouTube project; and Let Them Eat LACMA, a day of public performance and engagement involving over fifty artists and collectives. EATLACMA grew out of Fallen Fruit’s participation in a program at the museum in 2008 (organized by Machine Project), for which they mapped fruit in the permanent collection and designed thematic tours. In a recent interview, Burns explained this way of looking at the history of art:
“When you start organizing painting or history by looking at the subject/object/symbol of fruit, it’s really fascinating the way it collapses art. People put so much importance on the stroke, which is valid, and in what Impressionism [for instance] means, but forget that the reason [an artist] is painting oranges is because they’re colorful. Or you go back a hundred years and Dutch painters are painting them because they’re exotic, expensive, and oranges do not grow in Northern Europe. It’s a luxury item that is only possible because of shipping industries and world trade.”
In EATLACMA, depictions of fruit serve to connect the museum’s holdings in a whole new way and shed light on food in the history of human contact. (Burns informed me that fruit exists in the history of art more than any other food.) But it is living fruit that Burns, Viegener, and Young use to connect people today.
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!
International Design Conservation: A Discussion with Tim Bechthold
Are the “Design Arts” the same as “Contemporary Art?” Is Jasper Morrison a contemporary artist? Or is Jeff Koons a designer? Art objects serve different functions than design objects, don’t they?
As an art conservator, my initial focus in any project starts with from what and how art is made. To this end, there really isn’t a big difference between, say, a toaster and a gigantic puppy made of flowers. But I must consider the intent or purpose—or maybe function—of an object when creating a conservation plan.
I had these questions and thoughts in mind last month when I departed from my fair Hoosier State to Munich, Germany, to attend a conference organized by conservators Tim Bechthold and Susanne Graner and hosted by Die Neue Sammlung, The International Design Museum Munich. The conference was called “FUTURE TALKS 009: The Conservation of Modern Materials in Applied Arts and Design,” and I wouldn’t have thought of making this trip three years ago, because back then the Indianapolis Museum of Art only had a few design objects in its collection. But now, all of a sudden, we’ve acquired hundreds of objects, recently co-organized and hosted the exhibition European Design Since 1985 (which will be traveling to multiple venues in the near future), and just this year we acquired the Miller House, one of the country’s most highly regarded examples of mid-century Modernist residences. It was designed by Eero Saarinen, with interiors by Alexander Girard and landscape design by Daniel Urban Kiley. Of course, this home is filled with design objects.
But I digress. The conference in Munich was excellent, and Die Neue Sammlung is a fantastic museum. To talk more about the conference and caring for design objects, I’ve invited Tim Bechthold, the Head of the Conservation Department Die Neue Sammlung, here for a conversation. Thankfully, Mr. Bechthold is not only good at organizing conferences and working as a conservator, but is also fluent in both German and English.
Dermatographia
Ariana Page Russell, “Index,” C-print, 2005. Courtesy www.arianapagerussell.com
Hello Art:21 interweb world! I hope to do you justice with my musings and bits and pieces of contemporary art knick-knacks. I think as an artist and designer working today, it is imperative to give the art object more consideration than in the days of yore. Is it our preoccupation with being somehow truer to our practice? Our wanting to make a smaller and smaller footprint with each step? To reflect the confused state of our environment in any meaningful gesture thrust out into existence? Maybe… A struggle exists between the artist floundering to retain value of the crafted final “piece” of exhibition material and her trying to speak with less residue. I am thinking that the Art:21 Season 4 episode Ecology is a perfect demonstration of this, as artists struggle to reflect the needs of the environment while having to use materials such as wood and move trees around. What I notice, though, is that as practicioners of contemporary art making/doing, we are still desperately searching for an avenue of release from heavy use of materials, postmodernist references, the cords and motors of technological possibilities, and grand gestures of sweeping gallery galas…Perhaps it is a quest for sincerity?
So I wonder, could it be that the new “environmental” art is that which is sinfully crafted in private? Just…you know, for the love of it? Can we win back the love for ourselves and the practice (the grotesque and the sublime of it), or has the market killed it all? What happens with a lot of younger contemporary artists, as I see it, is a quiet revolution of smaller gestures, alternate materials, a kind of closing off in favor of exploring the self, the dream, the body and traditional ways of “making.” The artist above is named Ariana Page Russell and she has a skin condition known as dermatographia (the immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear, lasting about thirty minutes when the skin’s surface is lightly scratched). Her process of making involves manipulating her body as a form of self-exploration and that of coping with her condition, which became obvious to her as she was often teased for blushing excessively. She does consider herself to be as much of a photographer as a performance artist, IF one chooses to use the word performance here. What intrigues me most is the privacy of the act of manipulating skin yourself. Of experimenting with your body and only exhibiting a piece of paper as a document of the act.
Josiah McElheny | History & Originality
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EXCLUSIVE: Artist Josiah McElheny discusses the relationship between artworks and the context in which they were created, highlighting the distinctions between history and the personal and interpretive reinvention of historical facts.
Josiah McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. McElheny’s work takes as its subject the object, idea, and social nexus of glass. Influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, McElheny’s work often takes the form of historical fictions. Part of McElheny’s fascination with storytelling is that glassmaking is part of an oral tradition handed down generation to generation, artisan to artisan. Sculptural models of Modernist ideals, these totally reflective environments are both elegant seductions as well as parables of the vices of utopian aspirations.
Josiah McElheny is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Memory of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera & Sound: Kurt Branstetter, Joel Shapiro, and Tom Bergin. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Josiah McElheny. Special Thanks: Donald Young Gallery, Chicago and MoMA QNS, Long Island City.
Krzysztof Wodiczko interviewed by Giuliana Bruno
Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a BOMB contributor relating to a Season 5 artist. This week, inspired by Kimsooja’s videos and installations, we’re revisiting the work of Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. Instead of an interview this time, we’re giving you a short video clip of a BOMBLive! conversation that took place before an audience of 75 people at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, NY, on October 27, 2007. In addition to being a great event, it was significant as it marked the launched of BOMB’s “In the Open: Art in Public Spaces” series and also the occasion of our first-ever collaboration with Art21, who screened their Season 3 segment on Wodiczko as a prelude to the conversation.
In this short excerpt from the longer video, author and theorist Giuliana Bruno and the artist discuss his video installations at Hiroshima and elsewhere. You can watch the full 15-minute BOMBLive! video here.
Let Them Read Books/Play Records: Taschen, Plattfon, Stampa, Aniston
Spread from Helmut Newton's SUMO (1999). 464 pages. Courtesy Taschen, Cologne.
“This new edition is the fulfillment of an ambition conceived years ago. We jokingly referred to it as ‘Newton for the poor.’ ”
Oh, Benedikt Taschen, it’s quotes like these—and your line of über pricey, barge-like books like Helmut Newton’s SUMO, of which you speak—that always makes me wince at Taschen so. (Though, for us poor, there’s always been the oh-so-cheap stack of your invariably paper-thin monographs—Schiele or Klimt anybody?—in the remainder pile at bookstores everywhere.) Like some munchkin feather-weight wrestler, Newton’s original1999 monograph was two feet tall, with a weigh-in of 70 pounds. Mr. Taschen trumpets it as “The biggest and most expensive book production in the 20th century.” Today copies go for 10,000 euros. But in an ode to the book’s 10th anniversary, and with priceless recessionary timing, a smaller edition is about to be published for a mere $150, what Taschen reasons is “democratic dispersal.” Hmm.
If the publisher’s mania for printing books you can’t pick up and you certainly can’t afford (his editions for “the poor” notwithstanding) seems to auger well for the arrival of the recently released Kindle II (portable-to-the-extreme if not exactly cheap), I am not so convinced by his largess nor the technology that seeks to wipe it out. Nevertheless, with the constant heralding of the end of the publishing industry (despite Taschen, I don’t buy it) and the music industry (well, maybe) as we know them, I went to an opening last Friday night in Basel for a new record store cum art book shop cum gallery with the feeling that I might just be going back in time to a beautiful, beautiful place. Tonight there would be no Kindle, no online music downloading, just obscure CDs and LPs and posters and multiples and beautifully bound books with (printed!) text. Continue reading »
