Ox-Bow residents around the fire pit with view of the lagoon

We tend to spend a lot of time talking about art in terms of “work” nowadays, but we don’t always consider how important respite and retreat can be when it comes to sustaining an artmaking practice.  Artists, like all creative individuals, seek retreat for different reasons: to increase their focus and resolve; to problem-solve or brainstorm; to find new inspiration in unfamiliar surroundings; and to make new friends and and share ideas with other people.  For the past 100 years, artists living in the Midwest and beyond have decamped for the Ox-Bow School of Art, located in the town of Saugutuck in Southwestern Michigan. Ox-Bow provides a unique kind of retreat that’s part art school, part summer camp, and part bohemian artist’s colony. Its idyllic 115-acre campus includes forest areas, dunes, a lagoon, and a number of charming older buildings, some of which are still used as dormitories. This summer marks Ox-Bow’s centennial. In celebration of this event, the Chicago galleries Corbett vs. Dempsey and Roots and Culture have collaborated with Ox-Bow on a joint presentation of artworks by current and former students, teachers, and staff. (The Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan is also featuring an exhibition of works by Ox-Bow artists as part of these Centennial events).

Eleanor Coen, "Ox-Bow Lagoon," 1940s. Watercolor on paper.

Artists at Ox-Bow; historical photograph.

Ox-Bow was founded in 1910 by Frederick Fursman and Walter Marshall Clute, two Chicago artists who taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with which Ox-Bow has long been affiliated. Fursman and Clute wanted to provide artists with a reason to escape the city, and began holding art classes for their students and other artists each summer in Saugatuck, Michigan, which lies along the Kalamazoo River about 142 miles away from Chicago. At first, classes were held on a farm on the east bank of the Kalamazoo River about a mile upstream from Ox-Bow’s current location. In 1914, classes moved to the Riverside Hotel, a small inn founded by the Shriver family that soon became known as the Ox-Bow Inn. Originally built on an ox-bow-shaped bend of the Kalamazoo River, the Riverside hotel had been cut off from patrons ever since the river channel was straightened to flow directly into Lake Michigan, which dashed Saugatuck’s hopes of becoming a major Great Lakes port. Faced with a shrinking clientele, the Shrivers decided to lease the building to a group of artists for an entire summer. As Ox-Bow took on a stronger identity as a school of art over the years, Saugatuck, too, began to reinvent itself as a Midwestern resort community and artists’ enclave. Today it is known in the region as the self-proclaimed “Art Coast of Michigan.”

Edgar Rupprecht, "Untitled (Saugatuck)," 1940s. Casein on paper.

Issues of civic branding aside, Ox-Bow’s importance to the Midwestern art community over the past century has been immense. The Ox-Bow school, says John Corbett, co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, “has served as a sort of seed bed, a Utopian sanctuary for Chicago artists, replenishing them, re-connecting them with the natural environment, allowing them to experiment quite widely with unfamiliar media. If you consider the range of alums, Ox-Bow has been an important place not just to Chicago but to the American art scene in general.” Corbett and gallery co-founder Jim Dempsey were approached by the Ox-Bow Centennial committee several years ago with the idea of the gallery curating a show focused on the history of Ox-Bow.  Corbett vs. Dempsey specializes in the work of Chicago artists and the post-1940 history of art in this region, making this gallery an ideal space to showcase work by Ox-Bow founder Fursman along with artists Albert Krebiel, Edgar Rupprecht, and Isobel Steele MacKinnon–all early supporters of Ox-Bow. The show also includes works by Francis Chapin, Eleanor Coen, Max Kahn, Ellen Lanyon, Miyoko Ito, Seymour Rosofsky, Margo Hoff, Peter Brötzman, Christina Ramberg, and others.  There is also a small, very early lithograph by Claes Oldenburg on view behind the reception desk, made by the artist in the early 1950s when he was a student at Ox-Bow.

Claes Oldenburg, "Untitled (Litho #1)," c. 1950. Lithograph on paper.

Several of the works on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey depict the small, simply appointed rooms that artists call home during their summer stays at Ox-Bow. Miyoko Ito’s lithograph My Room at Ox-Bow shows a room with a twin bed, a small desk and lamp, and a window flung open to the view outside. Margo Hoff’s Untitled (Ox-Bow Interior), c. 1945, shows a similarly spare little chamber that includes an unmade iron bed, a simple wicker chair and cushion, and a bottle of wine on an otherwise empty shelf. Here, too, an open window expands the pictorial view to the grounds outside. Both artists depict their rooms as spaces of solitary refuge that nevertheless remain open to community and the outside world.  Max Kahn’s watercolor painting of several figures standing on a dock conveys a related idea: the figures in his painting are standing in proximity to one another, but they’re staring off in different directions, lost in their own private thoughts. The work of these artists suggest that at Ox-Bow, the artists’ retreat can be a space of private musing or of group conviviality. Whether it’s the former or the latter can change from moment to moment, depending on the individual’s frame of mind.

Max Kahn, "Untitled (Ox-Bow)," c. 1945. Watercolor on paper.

Today, the Ox-Bow experience combines intense study with good old-fashioned goofing off. Classes meet from 10am to 5pm each day, with dinner served at 6pm. Afterward, there’s plenty of opportunity for recreation and hanging out, to swim and canoe, play volleyball, or dance around evening campfires. Ox-Bow is famous for its costume parties (as well as for the copious fleas, ticks, mosquitoes and spiders that often plague its residents). The experience of living and working with other people in this type of close, grimy proximity can be exhausting as well as exhilarating (for a more personal take on the Ox-Bow experience, check out the online blog of Chicago artist Susan Kwon, whose journal entries detail her experiences at Ox-Bow and its impact on her work). Few come away feeling the experience wasn’t 100% worth it. Earlier this month, the LeRoy Neiman Foundation announced that it was giving a $1 million dollar gift to Ox-Bow and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which now administers Ox-Bow, in honor of the latter’s 100th anniversary. The money will be used to fund scholarships and to support Ox-Bow’s fellowship program.

Communal dining area at Ox-Bow School of Art

For the Ox-Bow Centennial Committee, coming up with a venue to showcase works from the younger Ox-Bow generation was a no-brainer: Eric May, who’s worked as head chef at Ox-Bow for the past 10 years, also happens to run the highly regarded contemporary art space Roots & Culture, which is just a few minutes walk from Corbett vs. Dempsey. In a 2006 interview with the website Center Stage Chicago, May noted that “at Ox-Bow, artists work together and live together as a community; it’s sort of an updated commune environment.” In Roots & Culture’s Ox-Bow show, the paintings, drawings, photographs and mixed-media installations tend to emphasize these types of communal social interactions over contemplative isolation. Carmen Price (who works alongside Mays in the Ox-Bow kitchen) submitted a gouache drawing titled Explore Your World, from 2006, which depicts a quirky circle of people, objects, and activities of the sort one might encounter at Ox-Bow. Nate Wolf’s oil painting Trouble, 2006, shows the sprawling activities of a mass of people; it could be the scene of a riot, a festival, or a giant playground for grown-ups. The inclusion of Mike Andrews’s 2010 yarn tapestry provides a humorous nod to the lanyard and macrame handcrafts associated with summer camp art (it’s also a terrific example of this artist’s boldly colorful works, which combine handicraft and high Abstraction to truly loopy effect). Aspen Mays’s untitled photograph was made from the glowing bodies of fireflies trapped inside her camera. The insects’ bodies provided the light that exposed the film during a one minute period on a summer night at Ox-Bow (Mays released the fireflies once the roll was exposed).

Carmen Price, "Explore Your World," 2006. Gouache on paper.

Aspen Mays, "Untitled (fireflies inside body of my camera, 8:37-8:39pm, June 26, 2008)." Archival inkjet print.

The exhibition at Roots and Culture also includes the original kitchen stove and other appliances used at Ox-Bow, which were dismantled after the kitchen was updated in 2006 so that a winter session could be added. Although the stove is now a permanent part of Roots & Culture’s kitchen area, six Ox-Bow cooks, all of whom are artists, have amplified its significance by creating an art installation around it that “conjures the spirit of the Ox-Bow kitchen.” The resulting environment provides a fittingly unpretentious metaphor for sustenance, and a tribute to those unique forms of nourishment that only a place like Ox-Bow can provide.

Paul Zografakis at his studio in Gyzi, Athens, 2010

This is the second half of the discussion I had with Paul Zografakis’ at Gyzi, Athens and the continuation of Friday’s post. He opened his studio to me and I am now showing it to you.

Georgia Kotretsos: At your studio you have old work next to NEW work, NEW territories, NEW experiments without once mentioning Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, or Guy Debord. The past six months, you ventured into 3D paintings that seem to be gripping onto the wall for dear life by creating the fine tension of an object’s struggle to fight for a spot on the wall.  They are organically placed and conceptually witty. Papier-mâché structures that almost seem painterly from afar are collaged with colored paper. Take me through your journey; break down the evolution of these new works for the Art21 readers, please.

Paul Zografakis, detail of new work in progress, 2010

Paul Zografakis: You forgot the two hours we talked about [Walter] Benjamin! Really, though, it’s more about Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art if you really want to know!

New — yes it’s great, really freeing to just start building sculptures and make paintings after some time. Having a studio allows me to work larger, messier, and right now, I have the time to start this new body of work.

Paul Zografakis, new works in progress, 2010

The new work comes out of my collages, where I dissect and rearrange an original towards an alternate composition. The new work, however, has no original reference and becomes stream of consciousness construction, an additive process. I have this idea of the God Particle in my mind since reading about it. It’s amazing — these scientists at the CERN laboratory are smashing particles together at nearly the speed of light in hopes of explaining the origins of the universe. My approach is sort of like that, but instead of sub-atomic particles, I use cardboard and paper. Its very elemental; I try to let the work build itself from the inside out towards a critical mass. Randomness is very much a part of the process, which I try to carry through so that color and form literally reference the work’s creation. Calling the sculptures 3D paintings, well, I’m not sure I’m there yet in calling them paintings.

Paul Zografakis, detail of new work in progress, 2010

As I get more comfortable with the medium and the process, I’m starting to think about taking more control in their creation regarding form and color, as well as pushing them towards modular installations.

GK: Collage is a big part of your works on paper, as well as cross hatching pen drawings.

What are your references?  Do you consider your works on paper finished works?  Last year you had a solo show in San Francisco at the Little Tree Gallery entitled TBD – To Be Determined. How was showing the first body of work that you had produced here in San Francisco?

PZ: I reference lifestyle magazines and educational material from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. They have a weird, innocent wrongness that existed in the social culture of these times. Plus, the color of the photos are amazing! These works become part of my thought process as I transition through the mediums I utilize in my practice. Drawing and collage help keep me artistically grounded.

My solo show, TBD, in San Francisco existed of primarily collage, a mural, and a three-act performance the night of the opening. The collages were made in Athens and I think are reflective of my lifestyle here.

Paul Zografakis, "Place is the Space," Mural with Found Image, 2m x 3m, 2009

It isn’t much different here than anywhere else I have lived. It’s a matter of learning to adjust to the chaos and embracing a different perspective on functional organization. In that sense, the collages become site specific in their inspiration (beauty and structure out of chaos). The opening was October 2008, during the early throws of the US financial “crisis,” and the work seemed to reference the anxiety people had been feeling at the time. The title TBD spoke to ideas of flux, disillusion, and doubt. I just didn’t think it was going to end up as a premonition.

Paul Zografakis, from left: "After Murakami," 32 x 40 cm; "Amish Explosion," 28 x 32 cm, both 2008

GK: How was your art life in San Francisco before Athens? Had you ever considered to move to New York, or Berlin? When is one a “professional” artist per se?  Does having a studio have anything to do with it?

PZ: San Francisco and Athens are similar in some ways. Both are provincial art scenes, where a handful of artists seemingly get recycled. But San Francisco carries a great history and energy through its active non-profit spaces and DIY shows. My art life in Athens is a bit better, maybe not as far as exposure or opportunities, but rent here is cheaper which has allowed me MUCH more time to make art and to me, that is a distinction of being a Professional Artist — the consistent making of artwork. Most everyone at some point considers moving to a large market. It has crossed my mind,  but for now I am very present in Athens. I see Athens as a place full of artistic opportunities; most would say the contrary. But this lack of opportunity opens up new possibilities — people just can’t sit back and wait to be approached, they have to create their own venues, their own situations to actively keep showing, and this idea, I really think, stems from conceptual thinking about art.

GK: What is next on your plate?

PZ:  I am involved with my current work and enjoy watching it evolve as I learn why I am making what I am making. I believe this work will eventually approach what one would consider installation. Further down the line, I just can’t let go of the feeling I want to do a show about Westerns, but until then, I am just enjoying my time in my studio.

And, that’s a wrap!

The act of codification that is enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights has ensured that the unspeakable has been cut down to size at the very moment that it is protested against.

—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, on the UN General Assembly’s defining of the term “genocide.”

"Voyage of the Doomed" from "They Spoke Out." Courtesy Disney Educational Productions.

This spring marked the launch of an ambitious motion comic series addressing the Holocaust, titled They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust. The project, a collaborative effort by comic book artist Neal Adams, Disney Educational Productions, and the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, is a multi-part series, the first volume of which was recently screened by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York (and whose initial graphic installments have been made available here). Each episode of this ten-part series aims to chronicle little known stories of heroism by various Americans who spoke out against Fascist extremism or otherwise performed extraordinary acts of bravery, recounting, as the authors of the series put it, the “remarkable stories of Americans of all faiths who raised their voices, marched in protest, or even helped smuggle Jewish refugees out of Hitler’s Europe.”

The mission statement of the series is set forth as follows:

Each year, educators seek new and innovative ways to teach this difficult topic. They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust addresses this need by presenting an important but little-known chapter of Holocaust history – and presenting it in a unique and compelling way: through motion comics. Blending the features of comic books, animation, period footage, and photographs, motion comics are the newest, cutting-edge way to entertain and to educate simultaneously.

This graphic project, particularly its artistic strategies and goals as articulated in the above mission statement, inevitably calls to mind and invites comparison to Art Spiegelman’s own two-volume graphic comic project, Maus.  A project engaging with the Holocaust, such as They Spoke Out, also raises the question about artistic strategies of representing traumatic events and historical catastrophe, with the prospect that representing catastrophe is fraught with the risk of diminishing the enormity of the represented event, be it the Holocaust or 9/11. Indeed, as Theodor Adorno suggests in the epigraph, codifying catastrophe carries with it the danger of diminishing the specificity and enormity of the historical event. As Alex Thomson has described it, when representations “become a shorthand way of referring to the event and placing it into the continuum of history as such, then the risk is in normalizing and taming the traumatic singularity of any given catastrophe.” (The problem of representing the Holocaust was a subject explored in the Jewish Museum in New York’s controversial 2002 exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art and one of the reasons for the vocal opposition to the exhibition).

"Rescue Over the Mountains" from "They Spoke Out." Courtesy Disney Educational Productions.

While They Spoke Out and Maus both employ a blend of word, graphic images, diagrams, and documentary photographs, they take decidedly different stances toward the catastrophic past. For unlike the straightforward narratives of various historical figures and events in They Spoke Out, Maus is a complicated and deeply personal tale about Spiegelman’s father’s experience in the Holocaust and the author’s own fraught relationship to that traumatic past. Whereas the stories chronicled in They Spoke Out aim to recover for readers heretofore unheralded or forgotten acts of heroism from the historical past through what is essentially a conventional narrative framework—presenting a kind of narrative fullness, if you will—in Spiegelman’s tale, the reader is confronted with certain gaps and discontinuities, which confound the reader’s own process of meaning production.

From Art Spiegelman's "Maus," 1986.

These challenges to narrative fullness emerge throughout Maus—perhaps most evident in those moments when there is a discrepancy between the words and their accompanying illustration, or in the fragmentary presentation and limited scope of the shifting narrative perspective as the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, unfolds. One of the biggest gaps in Spiegelman’s tale however, is the absence of his deceased mother’s voice, which once it becomes clear that her journals had been destroyed and her story irretrievably lost, leaves a palpable and insistent void at the heart of both Spiegelman’s and the reader’s efforts to reconstruct the traumatic past. Effectively calling into question Spiegelman’s own method of remembering, these disturbances and abruptions in, and to, the narrative function not, or not simply, as representations of the enormous impact and consequences of the father’s traumatic experience, but as symptoms of the author’s own inherited trauma, its disruptive capacity and disordering effects.

Spiegelman’s graphic comic does not so much attend to representing the Holocaust, but to conjuring representation’s incapacity to coalesce around the enormity of such a traumatic event, and his own traumatic relation to that event. Thus, if They Spoke Out employs the comic book’s capacity for hero-formation and affirms the redemptive possibilities of inspirational narratives, Spiegelman uses the medium to gesture to the inadequacy of any narrative—personal or otherwise—to fully master a traumatic past. In this way, Spiegelman’s text resists the “normalizing and taming” trap articulated by Alex Thomson, by instead transmitting an undigested and indigestible trauma that is anything but normalized and tamed. Indeed, any possibility of normalcy and narrative mastery in Maus is dashed in the very last cartoon panel of the book, when Vladek tells his son that he is tired from telling his story and would like to rest, but in so doing calls him not Artie but Richieu, the name of Artie’s brother who died in the war—revealing to the last trauma’s disordering effects.

From Art Spiegelman's "Maus Vol. II," 1991.

In closing, it seems fitting to mention one other project that explores the problems that invariably accompany attempts at representing and memorializing the Holocaust: Beryl Korot’s multi-channel video work Dachau, 1974. Dachau, 1974 consists of video footage taken from multiple vantage points during a visit by the artist to Dachau, the notorious Nazi camp, at a time when the camp had been open to the public (Korot described it as an “antiseptic environment inhabited by tourists”). Indeed, as Korot’s video unfolds it becomes a record not of Dachau itself, but rather of tourists interacting with it. In situating Dachau as a symbolic stand in for the Holocaust, Dachau, 1974 ostensibly threatens to veer precisely into the problematic terrain warned against by Adorno and Thomson.

In Korot’s video, however, Dachau, that haunting symbol of an unspeakable catastrophe, becomes just that — a looming presence of an ineffable past. Dachau, 1974, becomes a meditation not so much on the Holocaust itself, but on our mediated and belated relation to that traumatic event, a posterity gestured to in the title of the work, which is of course not Dachau, but Dachau, 1974. And it is here that Dachau, 1974 and Maus might be said to forge a similar stance to a traumatic past distinct from They Spoke Out. After all, the works of Spiegelman and Korot, by transmitting a fragmentary and vicarious relation to a traumatic past rather than simply an explicit narrative of the Holocaust as catastrophic historical event, function as compelling reminders of that unfathomable trauma which resists psychical closure, and one that representation cannot fully decipher.

Tim Hawkinson, "Egg", 1997 Ground fingernails and hair, superglue Courtesy Ace Gallery, Los Angeles

Friends close to me know two things- I have a coffee problem and I have a book-buying problem. If I have money in my pocket and am anywhere close to books on sale, especially books about art and artists, I am sure to spend every last cent. And no, I am not into the Kindle thing. Frankly I can’t stand reading for long periods of time from a computer screen, but I love spending summer days drinking coffee that ranges from extremely hot to ice cold and catching up on books that I’ve been wanting to get to, or get back to.

Here are some of the titles I’ll be packing as I move from home to the Art21 Educators summer institute and then onto vacation this summer….

Philip Gefter’s collection of essays, Photography After Frank (2009)

Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook’s Rethinking Curating (2010)

Phaidon’s Press Play: Contemporary Artists in Conversation (2005)

Jennifer New’s Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art (2005)

Richard Brereton’s Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives (2009)

Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life (2008)

The last three listed above are all about sketchbooks and approach the topic very similarly by highlighting a range of artists that are quite serious about the work they do- whether preparing for finished works or allowing themselves to work through ideas on the way to something even bigger. All three are worth a look, especially if you are like myself and want good examples of sketchbook possibilities to share with your students this September.

While I wanted to include Terry Smith’s What is Contemporary Art? on my summer reading list, I can’t in good conscience recommend it at this time. Has anyone been able to get past the first 40-50 pages?? The verbal gymnastics make me tired. But maybe I just need another cup of coffee.

]]> http://blog.art21.org/2010/06/30/summer-reading/feed/ 0 http://blog.art21.org/2010/06/29/weekly-roundup-59/ http://blog.art21.org/2010/06/29/weekly-roundup-59/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:36:45 +0000 Nicole Caruth The Weekly Roundup]]> http://blog.art21.org/?p=23618

John Baldessari, "Tips for Artists to Sell", 1966-68. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 56 1/2 in. The Broad Foundation, Santa Monica. © 2009 John Baldessari. Photo courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about a retrospective in the Golden State, a pack of wolves in Singapore, a dreamy gift in Berlin, de-monumentalisation in Italy, Oprah culture the world over, some fresh high-tops at Bloomingdale’s, and much more:

• The traveling retrospective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, has opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This is the only West Coast showing and features the greatest number of works (more than 150) of any venue on the show’s tour. “Pure Beauty,” says Leslie Jones, LACMA associate curator of prints and drawings, “explores Baldessari’s lifelong interest in language and mass media culture, which seems increasingly relevant — even imperative — in an era of information and image proliferation.” Beginning with his little-known paintings from the early 1960s, the exhibition features the landmark photo and text works from 1966-68, photo-compositions derived from films stills of the 1980s, irregularly shaped and over-painted works of the 1990s, as well as video and artist books. The show concludes with recent works by Baldessari (Season 5), including a special multimedia installation conceived for the retrospective. Pure Beauty closes September 12 at LACMA, and will then travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• On the occasion of Pure Beauty, Baldessari (working with the art media company ForYourArt) has created an iPad application that lets users rearrange a 17th-century Dutch still-life painting by Abraham van Beyeren. The painting, titled Banquet Still Life, is held in LACMA’s collection. According to the LA Times, Baldessari did another version of the project nine years ago. Learn more about the application at Artinfo.com.

• Stylus, a new project by Ann Hamilton (Season 1), opens at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts on July 9. Hamilton’s installation was conceived as both “a sanctuary for listening and a laboratory for experiments in collective vocal exercises.” The installation asks the following questions: How do we communicate? What external forces act upon or inhibit our collective need for social contact and response? How are relationships enacted (or not enacted) by the architectural spaces we inhabit? Go behind the scenes of the installation by visiting the Pulitzer’s blog.

• Head On — a massive installation of 99 life-sized wolves — was created by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3) for his solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2006. It is now on view at the National Museum of Singapore. Via the museum: “Seen from afar, the leaping wolf pack forms an arc full of force and power, their fierce courage and spirit of warrior camaraderie seemingly serving as a reminder to people: humanity is easily blinded by a kind of collective mentality and action, and is destined to repeat such error to an almost unbelievable degree. The crux of this installation lies just before the glass wall, as the artist reminds people: invisible walls are the hardest to dismantle.” The second and third parts of this installation, Illusion II and Vortex, are also on view. Closes August 31.

• Works by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the fourteenth edition of the International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara, Italy. The theme of this edition is the “radical process of de-monumentalisation which has freed sculpture from any celebratory, encomiastic function.” Browse the artist roster here. The biennale closes October 31.

• Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010, an exhibition of works by Beryl Korot (Season 1), has opened at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. This marks the artist’s most extensive museum project by  to date, featuring six never-before-seen works. Her new pieces reflect an ongoing interest in how our communication tools mirror the way we present and receive information. Among the works on view are Korot’s multi-channel video work, Text and Commentary, which premiered at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977. Curator Harry Philbrick points out, “Korot was the co-founder and co-editor of the ground-breaking 1970s publication Radical Software, the first magazine to explore the notion of alternative communication systems and formats for conveying information. Today, when new media is an imperative in our connected world, she continues to create fresh work that illuminates the structure of communication.” Continues through January 2, 2011.

• Dream Passage is the first major retrospective exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Bruce Nauman to be staged in Berlin. Presented by the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, the exhibition celebrates a new gift to the museum from collector Friedrich Christian Flick: Nauman’s Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care (1984). This “architectural sculpture” has been installed in collaboration with the artist and will now be on permanent display. Other examples of Nauman’s “experience architecture,” also on view, include Corridor Installation (Nick Wilder Installation) (1970), where visitors are recorded by a video camera and then confronted with their own image; and Kassel Corridor: Elliptical Space (1972), created for Documenta 5. Dream Passage closes October 10.

• Double Sexus, on view at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in Berlin, juxtaposes over 70 works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) and Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). The exhibition is designed to show their “striking parallels.” The artists never met, but they were both in Paris at the same time: Bellmer came to Paris from Berlin the same year that Bourgeois moved from Paris to New York. The central topics of the exhibition, according to the museum website, are “female fantasies and male fears, the ambiguous nature of everything sexual and the links between eroticism and creativity.” Closes August 15.

• Through July 10, new works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view at Gladstone Gallery in Brussels. In this exhibition, Pettibon continues to use collage, drawing, and painting to conjure earlier established themes and imagery mined from Noir and B movies, cult icons, literature, television, political propaganda, and old comic books. “This broad range of historical references not only foregrounds Pettibon’s own interest in appropriating past visual and literary styles,” states the Gladstone website, “but also invokes the schizophrenic and pathological impulses at work in the American imaginary.”

• Les Grands Ensembles (The Housing Projects) (1994/2001), an important video installation by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe, is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through October 19. It is included in the special exhibition Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection. Huyghe’s piece is described as: “a fixed view of two residential towers in a bleak urban landscape, swathed in fog at night. Lacking any signs of human activity, the buildings appear to take on lives of their own as the video’s buzzing electronic soundtrack, composed by Pan Sonic and Cédric Pigot, builds in intensity. Windows in the two façades begin to light up rhythmically and with increasing frequency, as if communicating in some sort of code…”

• Pattern, Costume, and Ornamentation in African and African-American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art features works by Fred Wilson (Season 3) and Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), among others. The exhibition attempts to show how African and African-American artists incorporate design and decoration into photography, sculpture, quilts, and other forms. Wilson’s photographic series of antique dolls, titled Old Salem: A Family of Strangers, is included. Closes September 12.

• Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters, a new publication from Aspen Art Museum, is the definitive collection of collages that Bradford (Season 4) has been working on since 2006. The book features more than 100 full-color reproductions, as well as essays by Dia Art Foundation Director Philippe Vergne, Los Angeles-based artist and writer Ernest Hardy, Los Angeles-based cultural critic Malik Gaines, and Aspen Art Museum Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. Purchase Merchant Posters here.

• Jenny Holzer (Season 4) is in the New York Times again, most recently for her sneaker project to benefit the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Protect Me From What I Want,” a line from her 1980s Survival series, is printed on canvas Keds sneakers that will be sold at Bloomingdale’s beginning July 8. The black-and-white high-top version retails for $75, low-tops for $70. Read more about Holzer’s project here.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) was also featured in the New York Times last week. The article discusses, among other things, Homeland, the artist’s first album of new material in nearly 10 years. Anderson is quoted as saying, “[The album] came out of frustration from living in this Oprah Winfrey culture where everything is done for you and people are just infantilized. I mean, that show is based on the premise that there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just a human being. It’s not easy being a human being.”

• Andrea Zittel (Season 1) speaks to Artforum about her project, Indianapolis Island, for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

• The Guardian names Zittel Artist of the Week.

Note: We will not post a roundup next week, July 5, due to the holiday.

Tim Hawkinson, Apples and Bananas, 2010 Apple cores, banana peels, grape skin, twist ties, bread tabs, orange peel and bronze, 9 1/2 x 4 x 3 1/2 inches. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

From intimate sculptures to mammoth collages, Tim Hawkinson (Season 2) gracefully creates tension between the playful and the profound.  His current exhibition at Blum & Poe continues longstanding threads while embarking on new investigations, exploring the human body, time, death, spirituality, and the cyclical nature of existence. He recently walked me through his exhibition, shedding light on the process for each new piece.

Lily Simonson: How does place influence your work?  Los Angeles?

Tim Hawkinson: It’s not so much Los Angeles as more specifically our home and our living circumstances.  Having banana peels lying around – Patty [Wickman, spouse] is into composting.  I think it could really be anywhere.  Any place would have a definite impact on my work, it’s just not quite as broad as Los Angeles.

LS: Did your work change when you moved from downtown Los Angeles to Altadena?

TH: Superficially, just in terms of what materials were available, what presented itself out in the alley. [Using found materials] is just one of the things that goes into the mix.  So just staying open to these things that present themselves.  They can be found objects or found ideas, or found images.

LS: With Apples and Bananas the materials become the title, too. Is it important that the viewer knows the materials used?

TH: Well for something like this, which at first seems so horrific, to know that it’s really just made of apples and bananas kind of softens the morbidity, for me anyway.  So maybe I took that into consideration when I was titling it…. For certain pieces, I have a title in mind earlier on.  But for something like this it just suggested itself. There’s also a song that my daughter Clare learned early on.  “I like to eat apples and bananas” and you change vowel sounds each time you sing it.

LS: You mentioned in your Art:21 segment that certain ideas stem from childhood fascinations.

TH: Certain ideas, yes.  Ideas revolving around certain immature fascinations–like mummy hands–would fall into that category.  That piece definitely resonates with my childhood, and wanting to create something that pulls me in but repels me at the same time

LS: What’s the significance of the jewelry in this piece?

TH: It might identify it as royalty or maybe a priest or priestess.  It’s what you would expect to see if you came across something like this in the British Museum. I wanted to make the jewelry in the same vocabulary as the hand.  The [band of the ring] is a twist tie and for the scarab, I laminated plastic tabs from a loaf of bread.  If you look underneath there’s an expiration date – February 2.

Tim Hawkinson, Cylinder Composition, 2010, Ink on paper mounted on panel, 96 x 144 inches. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

LS: Tubes and cylinders are repeated throughout the show.

TH: I’ve been thinking about the body as a blastula. It’s a simple organism that eats and shits…It looks like just a short tube thing, a mini-processing plant taking food in and waste out.  So the tubes and cylinders might relate to that model, and also the idea of containment, as well as the cyclical.

[Cylinder Composition] is kind of a crude airbrush painting. I used a Hudson sprayer meant for spraying weeds.  It’s a really course dispersion.  And then I also made a rotary/crank sprayer using a toilet brush.  It’s collaged… My thinking about this piece had to do with the relationships between the cylinders and how they are suspended within each other and form linkages.  They’re also kind of like belts in a motor.

LS: I don’t know if you think about work in art historical terms, but I always saw through-lines from dada.  But this one relates visually to Futurism.

TH: Yes, I saw a relationship to futurism. I was thinking Boccioni, the futurist, doing Morandi…I like [Futurism’s] innocence and naiveté in thinking that the future is the ultimate answer. It’s very hopeful but sort of dead-ended.

Tim Hawkinson, Bike, 2010 Collaged inkjet prints on mounted on panel, 120 x 90 inches. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

LS: Another motif in your recent work is bicycles.  Is there something about bicycles that is significant to you?

TH: I think the bike image is kind of an extension of the body.  I’m drawn to these mechanisms that are completely visible. Where you can see how all the parts work together. Ships, bikes, motorcycles.  I think I was drawn into this through the pattern of the tire tread, and using images of my fingers – which have their own kind of tread – to create that pattern.  The interlocking fingers become like praying hands.

LS: Do spirituality and religion come into your work?

TH: I don’t consciously direct it.  I think I’m a spiritual person and I find spiritual interpretations and see connections through that perspective.  But I don’t try and suggest any sort of interpretation based on my perspective.

Tim Hawkinson, Orrery, 2010, Plastic bottles, shopping bags, inkjet prints, twine, string, wire, foam, springs, tape, lead and steel 93 x 96 x 96 inches. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

LS: I could not figure out if the pattern on the figure’s dress is really moving, or if it’s an illusion.

TH: I found this pattern on the internet.  Kitaoka Akiyoshi is a Japanese psychologist who has created a number of these optically moving patterns. It’s called “Rotating Snakes.”  I printed it out in different sizes.  It’s an optical illusion, there’s a sort of interference that causes your eye to move the discs around, I think it involves the interaction of the yellow, green and blue.

The title comes from the science classroom model of the solar system where the planets and moons are operated by a system of gears and belts and they all rotate around the sun.  So here, the figure is a sort of mother/creator figure working at her spinning wheel … The cosmos, and all those other references going back to this domestic creator.

LS: When did you first become interested in creating work involving motors or creating some sort of system?

TH: One of the first motorized pieces was a really crude music box.  I wanted this way of creating music.  I didn’t want to use a computer or recording, I wanted an authentic acoustical production of sound.  The machine creating it was hesitant and faltering and I liked the idea that it could be perceived as somebody actually plunking out a tune in real time.  I like how the machine approaches our own imperfections.

LS: Do you think about imbuing the work with consciousness?

TH: No it’s more of a receptor for our own consciousness.  A sounding board for whatever consciousness we bring to it.  That’s where the life comes from, I think.

Tim Hawkinson, Wing Back, 2010, Chrome coat, paper, urethane foam and bondo Two parts; 43 x 28 x 48 inches overall photo credit: Josh White. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

LS: This piece, Wing Back, also feels different.

TH: It’s a more personal piece than most of the other work.  I wouldn’t necessarily expect the viewer to make the same associations I do with it,  but basically, it’s a calm domestic setting that contains a certain amount violence–suppressed violence.  For me it looks like shattered glass.  The image of the wingback chair is suggestive of a guardian angel, or maybe an angel of death.

LS: Do you think that death comes up in your work often?

TH: More so it seems in this show.  There seems to be a lot of mortality.

LS: Visually, Wing Back relates strongly to the Snails piece.  What was your process for Snails?

TH: I’ve made a few drawings like this where it starts as a basic grid which becomes more and more complex.  I start with a large fairly even grid composed of large dots, and use that as anchoring points for a smaller tighter grid, which then becomes the basic structure of a still denser grid, and so forth.  Since I’m doing it all without measuring or using a straight edge, this kind of turbulence surfaces. So as the grid becomes denser and more filled in, the structure created becomes more and more fluid.  The dotted lines start to look like a snail’s path.

Tim Hawkinson, Track, 2009, Aluminum tape, Faom, PVC, and Wire. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

This piece [Track] is a continuous spiral that oscillates between two points. It’s a really complicated figure 8 that continuously loops back in on itself.  I was looking at images of the Lorenz attractor, which looks kind of like a bicycle tire with the treads spinning off the tire and ripping apart.  Tread seems to be a recurring theme, like the snail track,  traction, fingerprints.  The rug in Orrery is made up of twelve rings which are photos of bicycle tire tracks in sand.  I think it’s an interest in how one thing grips another.  How we touch and grasp.

LS: Does your daughter, Clare, have a favorite piece in the show?

TH: She says it’s the candle.  She likes to go in there and shut the door.

Tim Hawkinson, Candle, 2010, Foam, wood, emergency blanket, mixed media 94 x 94 inches, photo credit: Josh White. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

LS: The doorway seems like its kind of child-sized…

TH: I just wanted to create a warm and cozy work environment for whoever has to go in and repair it. The interior is lined with gold emergency blankets.  When I was working on it, at one point, I was getting a cold and I noticed that I felt so much better when I was inside, surrounded by this warm gold incandescent light.  It feels like the embodiment of a candle. And it’s a tube. As it burns out it forms a cylinder.  Another blastula.

Mel Chin, Fundred Dollar Bill.

7,000 t-shirts, 22 paintings, two awards, a powerful pair, and one big open studio in this week’s roundup:

• Mel Chin (Season 1) has been named a finalist of the first International Award for Participatory Art. Chin and two other artists are invited to spend a research period in Bologna and develop a site specific project idea. The winning project, selected by jury, will be created in 2011. The jury includes Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Julia Draganovic, Rudolf Frieling, and Bert Theis. In addition to the budget to accomplish the project, the winning artist will receive an award of 15,000 Euros.

• Mark Bradford (Season 4), working with the Getty Museum, has unveiled Open Studio: A Collection of Artmaking Ideas by Artists, a new project to provide free online arts activities for K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms. Open Studio is the inaugural project of the Getty Artists Program, an expanded effort to involve contemporary artists in the Museum’s Education programs. Bradford designed Open Studio to provide brief, accessible activities that don’t require a great deal of preparation or supplies. A teacher can click, print, and immediately share them with his or her class. Artists such as Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), Xu Bing, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jon Cattapan, Catherine Opie, Graciela Iturbide, and Michael Joo have all contributed activities to the site. Marshall, for example, encourages the study of picture-making and provides a set of instructions to make and use plan and perspective grids. Bradford said: “We take a lot of things very seriously with young children – math, languages, phonics – but not art. We relegate that to something less than serious, something you do after the real work. Well, art is important. It’s always been important. And I wanted children to develop a work ethic about art, an ability to see things through and focus, just like the work ethic they would need to become a doctor or lawyer.” Open Studio is available at blogs.getty.edu/openstudio/.

• William Kentridge (Season 5) has won the Kyoto Prize. According to Artinfo, “The award, similar in status to Nobel Prize in Japan, is bestowed annually by the Inamori Foundation to recognize three visionaries in the categories of arts and philosophy, advanced technology, and basic sciences.” Kentridge will receive $550,000, an honorary diploma, and a 20-carat gold medal in a November ceremony.

• The New York Times reports that approximately 7,000 t-shirts bearing 10 different Jenny Holzer (Season 4) truisms will be dropped in Soweto, on the streets of downtown Johannesburg and at the Goodman Gallery space in South Africa through July 17. Holzer’s project, her first on the African continent, is part of the citywide exhibition series In Context (which also showcases works by Kentridge). Read a short Q &A with Holzer here.

• Works by Barry McGee (Season 1) and Claire Rojas are on view at the Bolinas Museum in California through August 1. The secluded town of Bolinas is, according to Juxtapoz magazine, “perfect” for McGee and Rojas, both “known to shy away from media and the public eye.” Go to Arrested Motion to see images of their installations Leave it Alone and Together at Last.

• Austria’s first exhibition of works by Walton Ford (Season 2) is on view at the Albertina through October. The show comprises 22 paintings made in the last ten years. Watch clips from Ford’s recent talk at the museum here.

• Crystal Bridges has acquired another new work by an Art21 artist, this time a tapestry by Kara Walker (Season 2). A Warm Summer Evening in 1863, Walker’s first tapestry, is based on an engraving originally published in Harper’s Magazine during the Civil War that documented the destruction of an orphanage for black children in New York City. “The black felt silhouette of a lynched female figure that is superimposed on the scene, her noose tied in a neat bow, is not based on a real person, but effectively telegraphs the horror of the racially motivated violence.” This piece was shown earlier this year in the James Cohan Gallery exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists.

• The work of Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall is featured in the current issue of Afterall. Read Kobena Mercer’s article Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life, and Terry R. Myers’s piece Kerry James Marshall’s Tempting Painting, an investigation of what’s at stake in calling an artist “a painter.”

Louise Bourgeois photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

The passing of Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) naturally prompted a host of critics to reflect on her life and artwork. They have written of her famed sculptures and textiles, recurring spider motif, pioneering exhibitions, childhood traumas, and the Sunday salons in her Chelsea home. Now, what about Bourgeois’s cooking?

They say that cooking is, like other art forms, an expression of one’s inner self. As I read Bourgeois’s obituaries, many of them recalling the artist’s charms and spunk, I began to wonder if she cooked? If her approach to food was anything like her approach to art? If her cooking looked like her artwork? Or what her artwork might tell us about her cooking? While these inquiries might seem random, chef Mario Batali has pointed out that “food, even more than art, allows an admirer to relate to [an] artist on common ground,” and there is perhaps no “better way to come to appreciate and understand an artist than through [her] appetite.” Luckily, I found that Bourgeois contributed to at least three cookbooks in her lifetime: The Museum of Modern Art’s Artists’ Cookbook (1977) by Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk, Food Sex Art: The Starving Artists’ Cookbook (1991) by Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf (aka EIDIA), and The Artist’s Palate: Cooking with the World’s Greatest Artists (2003) by Frank Fedele.

Louise Bourgeois, "The Destruction of the Father," 1974. Plaster, latex, wood, fabric and red light, 93 5/8 x 142 5/8 x 97 7/8 in. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve. Photo: Rafael Lobato.

In The Museum of Modern Art’s Artists’ Cookbook, a black and white photograph shows Bourgeois, then in her mid-sixties, sitting on top of an old brick and mortar stove with a collection of pots and pans placed near her feet. There are no pictures of Bourgeois’s cooking or artwork, only her portrait and words. These pages give more of a sense of her character than the essence of her cooking:

I was told as a child in France that cooking is the way to a man’s heart. Today I know that the notion is absurd, but I believed it for a very long time. My mother was in delicate health and could not cope with long hours of work in the kitchen. To please her, I took on the responsibility of seeing to it that my father had dinner. It wasn’t easy. He often came home very late. I waited for hours to make sure that the food stayed hot and fresh—and I became expert at just that. When my father appeared and wanted a steak, I cooked it for him. In those days, a man had the right to have his food ready for him at all times. During my student years I did not cook at all. The memory of those many wasted hours lingered. I subsisted on yogurt, honey, and pumpernickel bread. I still eat the same foods today.

By now, it is well known that Bourgeois’s early family life, with an ill mother and adulterous father, shaped her sculptures, drawings, and prints. From the above quote, it is apparent that her childhood also had a direct effect on her relationship to food and the kitchen. This plays out in her tableau The Destruction of the Father (1974), which was, according to her New York Times obituary, inspired by “a fantasy from childhood in which a pompous father, whose presence deadens the dinner hour night after night, is pulled onto the table by other family members, dismembered and gobbled up.”

Louise Bourgeois and her father Louis, 1948. Courtesy Louise Bourgeois Studio and DB Art Mag. © Copyright Louise Bourgeois, 2004. All rights reserved.

Today, it’s hard to imagine that Bourgeois, the “Grande Dame of American sculptors” and an artist who endured and achieved so much, could ever have been unsure of herself. Artists’ Cookbook reveals that Bourgeois had a vulnerable side, particularly when it came to cooking. Bourgeois is quoted as saying, “I love to cook. It amuses and relaxes me, but when it comes time to serve the food, I lose confidence in myself.” She goes on to recount preparing boeuf à la mode for her family, only to toss it out of the window before anyone could taste it; waiting for them to come to the table and approve of her cooking was “agony.”

Following these anecdotes are eleven recipes from Bourgeois. They include: Laitance Bourgeois, a traditional French dish made of fish eggs, butter, and lemon juice; Veal Blanquette Lippe with boiled potatoes; Pressure-Cooked Endive and Fennel, served “French style” on a platter covered with a white towel; and a sundae made of coffee ice cream, marzipan, and milk and decorated with candied violets.

“You have to be very sculpture conscious when you’re cooking,” said Bourgeois in Food Sex Art: The Starving Artists’ Cookbook. An image of her hanging phallic sculpture Janus (1968) practically overshadows her recipe for “Oxtail.” There is something to be said here for the unacknowledged relationship between recipe and sculpture. Oxtail, prior to being butchered, very much resembles an uncircumcised penis. Sometimes animal penis and tail are both classified as waste; othertimes, in some cultures, they are considered delicacies or (like art) luxury items.

Louise Bourgeois, "Janus," 1968. Bronze, dark and polished patina, hanging piece. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth © Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Christopher Burke.

Bourgeois’s recipe calls for seven “young stud” oxtails, four “very young and fresh” veal feet, leeks, a half bottle of wine, some olive oil, thyme, laurel (bay) leaves, and a few other ingredients. This mixture of meat (boiled in a pressure cooker until the flesh “falls off the bone”), fermented fruit juice, and fragrant herbs seems to encapsulate the artist’s life work: a well seasoned balance of bulky and delicate, the raw and the cooked. Janus, Bourgeois said, is “a reference to the kind of polarity we represent.”

It seems that oxtails were among Bourgeois’s favorite foods. In The Artist’s Palate, published nearly 16 years after The Starving Artists’ Cookbook, her recipe for Oxtail Stew appears alongside an image of her bronze floor sculpture, Avenza Revisited II (1968-69). This piece bears striking similarity to a chopped oxtail.

Louise Bourgeois, "Avenza Revisited II," 1968-1969. Bronze, silver nitrate patina, 51 1/2 x 41 x 75 1/2"; 130.8 x 104.1 x 191.7 cm. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth.

Raw Oxtails, via Wikipedia.org

The recipe, slightly different from her earlier oxtail dish, is accompanied by a story in which the actual meat overlaps with her studio practice.

I went to the wholesale meat market on 14th street in New York, and bought two packets of [whole] oxtails…I got them home and realized I had to cut them into about five pieces per tail. Being a sculptor, I put them on my band saw. The bones were so hard the band saw['s] blades snapped. I went to the corner butcher to ask him to do it with his rotary disk saw; he said ‘I would do this for a customer, too bad you went behind my back.’ I learned my lesson and since then I rely on my local butcher.

On the page opposite her sculpture is a portrait of the artist captured in more recent years, her hair thin and her skin peppered with age spots. Bourgeois holds a small frying pan with a soupy film covering the base and a shallow pile of noodles pushed to one side. It appears that she is either sniffing or just about to taste this “well-cooked” linguini with American cheese, a meal that her assistant made for her every Sunday. The dish was always followed by coffee ice cream — if you remember, a dessert that she named twenty-five years earlier in Artists’ Cookbook. It is worth mentioning that critic Lance Esplund compared two spiral forms that hung above Bourgeois’ sculpture Spider Couple (2003), when displayed at the Guggenheim, to soft-serve ice cream. He also noted that the comforts of home (of which food is always one) was a theme of this last retrospective exhibition.

If one thing is evident from these three cookbooks, it’s that food, cooking, and art were for Bourgeois truly inseparable.

The Artist’s Palate: Cooking with the World’s Greatest Artists can be purchased via Amazon.com. The Museum of Modern Art’s Artists’ Cookbook and Food Sex Art: The Starving Artists’ Cookbook are both held in the library collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Many thanks to MoMA librarian Jennifer Tobias for her assistance.

Louise Bourgeois, "Crouching Spider", 2003. Steel, 106 1/2 x 329 x 24 inches. Courtesy Cheim & Read, Hauser & Wirth, and Galerie Karsten Greve. Photo: Christopher Burke. via Art Daily.

A tribute to a great artist, a series of German faces, a big film of tiny things, some drawing restraint, and a bunch more in this week’s roundup:

• The Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation in Venice was preparing an exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois when they received news of her death last week. The exhibition — the last in which Bourgeois was actively involved — now serves as a tribute to her life and work. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works mostly comprises montages, collages and assemblages made of pieces of her own clothes and linen. Some fabrics in the show belonged to members of Bourgeois’s family including her mother. These works are, according to the Foundation, “a reincarnation of the past and of [Bourgeois's] childhood, as well as a testimony to her relationship with memory.” Bourgeois explained what drove her to create these works: “I make drawings to suppress the unspeakable. The unspeakable is not a problem for me. It’s even the beginning of the work. It’s the reason for the work; the motivation of the work is to destroy the unspeakable. Clothing is also an exercise of memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that? They are like signposts in the search of the past.” The fabric pieces are shown together with Bourgeois’s large steel sculpture Crouching Spider (2003), a recurring motif in her work. Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works is curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with Jerry Gorovoy of the Louise Bourgeois Studio. The exhibition is on view through September 19.

• Works by Bourgeois (Season 1), and Jeff Koons (Season 5) are included in the exhibition 200 Artworks 25 Years: Artists’ Editions for Parkett, on view at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). Organized by STPI with the cooperation of Parkett Publishers and Ikkan Sanada, the show fills five rooms with artists‘ sketches, letters and other material documenting collaborations between artists and Parkett. The rooms have been designed to evoke the feeling of different living spaces: a Studio, a Playroom, a Wardrobe, a City, and a Garden. In addition, a Reading room encourages viewers to browse Parkett‘s recent volumes and its page art projects. 200 Artworks 25 Years closes July 17.

• Friedman Benda Gallery in New York is showing works by Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman (both Season 1), and Janine Antoni (Season 2), among others, in the group exhibition Other Than Beauty. The show focuses on post-war and emerging artists, whose practices have “established new paradigms of art-making” and  “disregarded the primacy of formal and aesthetic beauty.” Via the press release, “By pushing the boundaries of meaning and form, these artists have, over time, expanded our ideas of what beauty can be.” The gallery has juxtaposed works from these early artists with those from younger generations including Sterling Ruby, and Chitra Ganesh, who also “challenge our expectations and expand the lexicon of both art and beauty.” The exhibition closes July 30.

• On June 11 and 13, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host the New York premiere of Tiny Furniture, an award winning film by Lena Dunham, daughter of Season 4 artist Laurie Simmons and painter Carroll Dunham. The film concerns the character Aura, who returns home from her Midwest liberal arts college to her artist family’s Tribeca loft with nothing to show but a film studies degree, a failed relationship, and a total lack of direction. Taking a job as a hostess at a restaurant, she falls into relationships with two self-centered men while struggling to define herself. According to BAM/IFC Films, “Dunham’s razor-sharp dialogue drips with caustic wit, perfectly calibrated to both cut and provoke laughter in this incisive examination of post-college ennui and self-actualization…” Lena Dunham writes, directs, and stars in Tiny Furniture. Simmons also makes an appearance in the film. The first screening will be held inside BAM Rose Cinemas. The second (presented in collaboration with Rooftop Films) will take place outdoors.

• Going to the World Cup or already there? See works by Kara Walker (Season 2), Jenny Holzer (Season 4) and William Kentridge, and Yinka Shonibare MBE (both Season 5) in the exhibition and event series In Context. Organized by Goodman Gallery, the Goethe-Institut, CulturesFrance, the French Institute of South Africa, the City of Johannesburg, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Galleria Continua, the British Council, the Apartheid Museum, the Kirsh Foundation, and Nirox Foundation, In Context brings together works by international and South African artists “who share a rigorous commitment to the dynamics and tensions of place, in reference to the African continent and its varied and complex iterations, and to South Africa in particular.”

• The 13th edition of PHotoEspaña 2010, an international festival for photography in Madrid, includes a show of approximately 60 photographs and 3 videos by Collier Schorr (Season 2) from her series German Faces. This series is described as “a photographic imaginarium that mixes documentary with fiction, where the German landscape is a map of her own story, both imagined and inherited. Combining the roles of photographer, anthropologist and researcher, [Schorr] narrates the tales of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family.” German Faces (which has been in progress for the past twenty years) is on view at PHotoEspaña through June 25.

• Through September 10, works by Robert Adams (Season 4), Mary Heilmann, and John Baldessari (both Season 5) are on view in the group exhibition On the Road at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition takes its title from a book by American poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, which recounts his road trips across the United States in the late 1940s. On the Road investigates the mythology of the American motoring adventure as it began to develop in the early 1920s, with the advent of immense expansions of the highway system, particularly in the West of the country. The first part of the exhibition presents artists whose images and works have long been associated with the exploration of the West by way of the automobile. The second part is the result of a recent two-week excursion through Texas by the curator, during which a number of artifacts and documents were collected for display. Read an interview with the curator in Selectism.

• On June 12, Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland will open Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail, an exhibition related to the Drawing Restraint series by Matthew Barney (Season 2). Curated by Neville Wakefield (MOMA PS1), the show includes 16 sculptures, drawings, videos, and a “Drawing Restraint Archive” of videos recently acquired by the Laurenz Foundation. According to SLAMXHYPE, these artworks will be juxtaposed with 15th and 16th century prints to, says Wakefield, “draw parallels, not only with the trials and tribulations of mark-making, but with Christian iconography and Matthew’s representation of the body in extremes.” Prayer Sheet With the Wound and the Nail will close October 3.

• A Voyage of Growth and Discovery, a collaborative project by Mike Kelley (Season 3) and Michael Smith, made a splash in Los Angeles with nearly 1,000 people attending the opening. Read the LA Times article.

• The BMW art car created by Jeff Koons (Season 5) has finally been unveiled. Read reports from the New York Times, New York Observer, Wall Street Journal, Nitrobahn, Motor Trend, and Wired.

• Vija Celmins (Season 2) talks to Phong Bui of the Brooklyn Rail about her current exhibition at David McKee Gallery.

• The Warholian has created a video about the Oakland Museum of California installation by Barry McGee (Season 1).

• The Art Newspaper has an update on the legal battle between James Turrell (Season 1) and art dealer Michael Hue-Williams.

• An LA Weekly reviewer calls work by Tim Hawkinson (Season 2) now on view at Blum + Poe “funny funny funny.”

• Variations and Improvisations, a solo exhibition of works by Robert Ryman (Season 4) on view at the Phillips Collection, is reviewed in the Washington Post.

• Design Folio has images of the individual works and installation by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) for the 17th Bienniale of Sydney.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Lou Reed presented their highly anticipated “dog concert” at the Sydney Opera House and, according to The Baltimore Sun animal blog, it received “two paws up.”

Joanne Lefrak, "Trinity Site (Ground Zero)," 2010. Installation view, MASS MoCA.

Good experience, bad experience. Life experience, work experience. First experience, years of experience. Learning experience. Sensory experience. Out-of-body experience. Shared experience. We experience life in innumerable, and oftentimes indescribable, ways. When Flash Points editor Rachel Craft approached me to write this post, she posed the question, “How do we experience art?” This question, almost as difficult to answer as the familiar “What is art?” (or the similar “Why is this art?”), is one I was preoccupied with while curating the exhibition InVisible: Art at the Edge of Perception.

InVisible marks a first experience for me – my foray into curatorial practice. Shortly before proposing the theme for my exhibition, I read an article that stated that the majority of museum-goers spend, on average, only six seconds looking at art. What kind of experience would one have in such a short period of time? InVisible is a group exhibition of works by six international artists who explore the line between visibility and invisibility and, in so doing, invite us to participate in a deeper, and I hope slower, act of looking. The artists in the show – Uta Barth, Christian Capurro, Joanne Lefrak, Janet Passehl, Jaime Pitarch, and Karin Sander – examine the demands and subtleties of the viewing experience and create art that tests the limits of perception.

Drawing attention to what often goes unnoticed, many of the works in the show heighten our awareness of the inconspicuous details in the artists’ materials or of mundane objects. Some of the works, pushed to the edge of legibility, disappear into the gallery space itself. Several of the artists manipulate ephemeral phenomena, harnessing the potential of light and shadow, while others use strategies of erasure and find the “something” in what might otherwise be described as “nothing.”

For Part One of this blog post, I asked a few of the artists in InVisible how they hope viewers experience their art.

Uta Barth, "Sundial (07.13)," 2010, installation view, MASS MoCA.

Many of the artists spoke about the temporal aspect associated with viewing art. Uta Barth replied, “Slowly, quietly, alone, and over time. I am interested in getting you to engage in looking rather than losing your attention to thoughts about what you are looking at. I want you to immerse yourself in the experience of looking, to become conscious of your perceptual process, to be in the moment and to then carry this beyond looking at my work and into your own world.” Barth does indeed bring her own world into ours. The photographs that make up the Sundial series chart the effect of the changing qualities of sunlight as it crawls across floors and walls of the artist’s home. Barth inverts the traditional distinctions between foreground and background and instead highlights the unoccupied spaces of our everyday lives.

Janet Passehl responded to the question in a similar way: “Looking should be approached like doing a yoga pose – purposeful but not strenuous. Not detached, but unattached. It’s important to stand before a work for a long time to go through all the phases of looking and apprehending. The intellect does come into it eventually, but that should happen as an evolution of the looking process, not as effortful thinking.” Creating subtle sculptures out of swaths of cloth, the lack of representational imagery in Passehl’s work draws our attention to the often unnoticed characteristics of the texture and weave of the raw material – the cloth itself is the subject of the work. Passehl says she “hopes that people feel confronted by the work’s simplicity and that they can experience my art for how it is more than what it is, what it does, or what it ‘says.’ I hope that each work exists in a kind of equilibrium and that this is felt by the viewer.”

Like Barth and Passehl, Christian Capurro also speaks to art’s ability to transport the viewer to a new space, time, and even psychological state. How should people experience his art? “There is no ideal way. Come curious, forget yourself a little while you’re there, and leave with doubts.” Capurro’s Compress series, six of which are exhibited in InVisible, are created through the pressure of erasing pictures from magazine pages. He lays one page on top of another and, by erasing the top page, imprints images onto the bottom one. In making Compress, Capurro uses the act of erasing as a generative, creative process. Delicate, intricate, and haunting, the works on paper present us with a palimpsest of past and present forms. What we see in these images is perhaps dependent on our own past and present experiences.

Joanne Lefrak reiterates that there is no ideal way in which to view and experience art, and asserts that no two people experience the same work of art in the same way. “Viewers bring so much of their own minds into the viewing process. While factors such as installation, presentation, and curatorial decisions influence how one experiences art, our perceptions alter and influence the experience as well.” In Lefrak’s case, proper lighting is required for a viewer to truly experience the work. Lefrak creates detailed “drawings” using light and shadow. In two new works created for InVisible, light passing through etched Plexiglas sheets casts shadows onto the gallery wall. The lines incised into the Plexi are barely visible, but the shadow’s gradations of gray convey depth and space in almost photographic detail. When the work is not illuminated, the drawing disappears. Lefrak goes on to say that “the infinite nature of seeing and experiencing art is part of what makes art’s ability to transform the viewer (and vice versa) so meaningful.”

What about art’s ability to transform artists? In Part Two of this post, the artists will give us a look at how they experience art. Check back to learn more about the viewing experience and how it may differ for those who create art.