Weekly Roundup
Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.
Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:
- 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21’s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.
- Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)
- Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.
- Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”
- Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”
- Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.
Costumes of Katsinas.
Hello and welcome to Nothing is New via Art21. During my stint as guest blogger, you will see posts are very image-heavy with a brief, excited description explaining each set of pictures. The images are discovered while roaming around digital Internet archives of museums and libraries. Nothing is New features a vast range of themes, from artist profiles to interiors of Brooklyn apartments in the 1970s, to bead work of the Zulu. Nothing is New hopes to inspire your creative contemporary lifestyle.
Layers upon layers of vivid color, pattern and fibers create the costumes of the Hopi and Navajo katsina dolls. Katsinas are believed to be spiritual messengers that have supernatural powers controlling nature and people. The paintings above by Raymond John Poseyesva retell the strength of these vibrant icons.
via Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University
Four Questions with Alicia Ross
Alicia Ross, "Motherboard_6 (A Chicken Waits for a Good Cock)," 2008. Cross-stitch on cotton, 72 x 41. Courtesy the Artist.
This young artist’s Motherboard series features appropriated Internet porn—nubile women sprawl across large cotton panels, cross-stitched in silver and gold thread with digital precision…Witty videos filter sex scenes through those round eye-test patterns of colored dots you might remember from grade school. Substantially more men than women are color-blind—Ross offers one way to subvert the “male gaze” amid the Internet’s panopticon of voyeurism. — Village Voice
In pursuit of finding more groundbreaking contemporary work that explores the self (and the shame of being the self), I had thought of Alicia Ross. I remember the first day I met her, when I was doing a photography project at a company she then worked for in Cleveland. She is bubbly, kind, outgoing, and (I mean this as a true compliment, Alicia) vulnerable. In other words, she is so Midwestern that I long for her kind of smile as I now wander the streets of ice cold NYC. When she handed me the catalog to her recent exhibition at the Black and White Gallery in Chelsea, I was blown away. Her work is truly provocative, sublime, rich with color, texture, and questions. I wanted to have four of those questions answered, and like a good Midwestern girl, one that likes to cross-stich and embroider pornographic images at that, Alicia responded.
Alicia Ross, "Motherboard_5 (The Siren)" (detail), 2008. Cross-stitch on cotton, 36 x 51 in. Courtesy the Artist.
Maria Stenina: Your work is so sinful. It is not a woman’s place, after all, to explore pornography and overt sexuality with such craft and beauty. Can you address your dealings with the grotesque and the sensual?
Alicia Ross: My work isn’t necessarily an exploration of the grotesque or the sensual independently, but rather an examination of the marriage between the two. The tension that I am specifically interested in is the domestic woman vs. the woman of sexual desire or the conflict between mother vs. mistress. The work isn’t necessarily taking sides between the taboo or the ladylike but materializing the balance for the viewer to decipher.
I think it’s interesting you would use the word ’sinful.’ Unless you see sexuality as sinful, I don’t think the work is sinful at all, but honest. I do think it’s precisely a female gesture to take something taboo or grotesque and want to make it beautiful. Just like the work is taking pornographic images and through manipulation and sometimes by sheer output, is transforming the images into a more widely excepted form: embroidery. To me, the whole point of the work is to question two often clashing, feminine impulses.
(Interviewer’s note: I should have said “deliciously sinful,” as I meant it to be a positive kind of sinful.)
Weekly Roundup
John Baldessari, ”How We Do Art Now”, 1973. Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY.
- Vital Signals: Japanese and American Video Art from the 1960s and 70s is a three-part screening program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Presented in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix, the series focuses on artists experimenting with video in both the United States and Japan. On October 20, early videos by Art21 artists William Wegman (Season 1), and John Baldessari (Season 5), will be screened along with works by Joan Jonas, Mako Idemitsu, Norio Imai, and Hakudo Kobayashi.
- On October 8, Tim Gunn of Project Runway (a former student of Anne Truitt) will moderate a panel discussion at the Hirshhorn Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Season 2 artist Martin Puryear, filmmaker Jem Cohen, and photographer John Gossage will also be on hand to discuss Truitt’s installations. The event begins at 7 p.m.
- Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth is launching Ecstatic Peace Library (EPL), a boutique publisher of art books. A catalog listing the publisher’s first releases was available at the New York Art Book Fair this past weekend. If you missed the event, the information will be available on the EPL website beginning January 1. Moore plans to release books in tandem with recordings from artist-authors, including Raymond Pettibon (Season 2). Read more on the LA Times blog.
- A New Literary History of America, an anthology edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, comprises 219 essays that, together, give a picture of U.S. history and culture. The book begins in the year 1507 (when “America” appeared on a map), and concludes with Obama’s election last year. This final entry features a six-page illustration by Kara Walker (Season 2).
- Wind Shadow, a new piece from Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-Min and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, is at the Barbican Theatre through October 10. Lin has collaborated with Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang on the set, which the Barbican describes as “projections of Cai’s gunpowder drawings that merge into silhouettes and form a moving art installation within which the dancers engage.” See a clip of the performance here.
- On Thursday, November 19, 2009, Season 2 artist Kiki Smith will be honored by the Brooklyn Museum at their seventh annual Women in the Arts luncheon. An exhibition of Smith’s work will open in the Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on February 5, 2010.
Summer Reading Part 2
Jenny Holzer, "WISH LIST BLACK," detail, 2006
Continuing with my column from May 27, I’d like to suggest a few more books related to contemporary art education that you may be inspired to buy, borrow or steal this summer (but please, steal from someone who has the book sitting on a shelf waiting to be opened, not from your local library!).
First, Julie Thompson’s suggestion to check out Paulo Freire’s Teachers as Cultural Workers – Letters to Those Who Dare Teach is an excellent one. Thank you, Julie! She also mentioned John Dewey’s Art as Experience, which is must reading if you haven’t already.
Other suggestions include:
Elliot Eisner’s The Arts and the Creation of Mind
Olivia Gude’s article, Postmodern Principles: In Search of a 21st Century Art Education (also a must!)
Anne-Celine Jaeger’s Image Makers, Image Takers: Interviews with Today’s Leading Curators, Editors and Photographers
Please continue to share your ideas for summer reading as we get closer to the official start of the season….
Chakkrit Chimnok’s banana-leaf utopia
Chakkrit Chimnok at a cafe in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photo by Paul Schmelzer
Chakkrit Chimnok dreams of a “banana world,” a utopia in which overlooked or discarded items — specifically, the ubiquitous banana leaves that litter the streets in his home city of Chiang Mai, Thailand — can become the material for a renewed world. Chimnok’s recent forays into this idea (or ideal) transformed the ever-present leaves into clothing modeled after western haute-couture.
“One day I was sitting in a banana garden, when a banana leaf fell on me,” he told me last year. He picked it up and felt it: It was smooth and flexible, unlike the dried leaves many locals get rid of by burning. Senses piqued, he began paying attention to how the leaves had different characteristics, depending on where he found them, their age and the level of humidity where they grew.
Installation at Art Space, Japan Foundation, Bangkok. Courtesy of Chakkrit Chimnok
He says he was struck by how perfect banana trees are. Both the fruit and the flowers are edible, and the leaves — as his explorations would later prove — could be made into apparel. Chimnok enrolled in a clothing-design class, taking 60 hours of instruction on sewing and pattern-making, and then set out to make functional objects, including a space suit and a dress (sized for his parents, pictured in the installation shot above), handbags, boots and tennis shoes.
Chakkrit Chimnok, "Body – Imagination – Dried Banana Leaf," 2006. Courtesy of the artist.
This functionality is questionable — as the leaves dry, they become too brittle for regular use — but he appreciates the various layers of symbolism as well. He’s taking gentle jabs at both Thai and western cultures. To often brand-conscious Thai people, he offers fashions from one of the country’s most plentiful, banal and unbranded materials. He patterns his ensembles after western styles, forgoing patongs and flip-flops for western-style skirts and shoes, in order to put the designs both within the vocabulary of fashion but also starkly opposed (the hard, crunchy leaves also stand in contrast to the silk textiles for which Thailand is best known). “We always have the sense that the west looks at us as the third world,” he told me.
Shoes by Chakkrit Chimnok. Photo by Paul Schmelzer.
While his message addresses international audiences — it was featured in the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2005 and was shortlisted for the 2008 Signature Art Prize by the Singapore Art Museum — it is, in essence, local. In his artist’s statement, he writes, “Following the west is viewed as part of destruction of community culture.” His art is a celebration of the local, he says, even if it celebrates one of that environment’s more overlookable features.
But he’s not Thai-centric about it. During the project’s showing in Fukuoka, Japan, he promoted a local variation of recycling. By the end of his three-month residency, he was showing at a fashion show the 20 kimono-inspired garments he’d created — from bamboo leaves.
Hallowgreen
This week’s Teaching With Contemporary Art column is written by Carolyn Sutton, Director of Arts at The Park School in Baltimore and a member of Art21’s National Education Advisory Council.
Last October, inspired by the spirit of sustainability, Betsy Leighton, Lower School Principal at The Park School of Baltimore, challenged her students to consider the environment as they thought about Halloween. She coined the phrase, Hallowgreen, and students and teachers set about collecting various recyclable materials for costumes. Cardboard, empty containers, fabric scraps, old computer parts and broken toys filled “help yourself” boxes for the students to select from. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to introduce our youngest students, in grades pre-k to 5, to the contemporary artist Nick Cave.
Nick Cave’s Soundsuits are fabulous creations, made of thrift store finds, twigs, plastic bags, discarded thcotchkes, and just about anything else that strikes his fancy. Children loved seeing his work and guessing the materials they were made from, and seeing a video presentation of people inhabiting them. They enjoyed learning about his process, too. Often, Cave’s Soundsuits are assembled by a multigenerational, multicultural group of volunteers in his Chicago neighborhood.
With the second Hallowgreen Challenge underway, I visited Obi Okobi’s fourth grade class at Park. The students talked about how Cave’s work influenced their thinking about artists in general: Naomi said he had stretched her thinking about what art is – that it can be much more than drawing or painting or sculpture. Olivia noted that he has the freedom to bring together two things he loves – visual art and performance – into something bigger and better. Henry commented that the pieces could be interpreted lots of ways, which the students found exciting. They were inspired by his use of materials and several talked about their own costumes using unusual materials. Connor plans to head to antique stores to look for inspiration. Atira thinks she may fashion her outfit using empty snack food wrappers. With the election in mind Naomi plans to become an election booth. Gabe wants to be a domino, and the entire class helped Meg work out possible materials to make wings for a butterfly. Last year the halls were filled with students dressed as computers, recycling bins. Max was a bubble-wrap snowman last year, and there were three lovely ladies (sisters!) dressed in gowns made entirely of blue plastic grocery bags.
While we often think of contemporary art and how our older students might respond to it, we are always pleased that our very youngest students are so enthusiastic about it, too. Nick Cave is one reason why.
Cave, chair of the Department of Fashion Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, brings together his interests in fashion, performance and sculpture while making reference to African ceremonial costumes. Watch a video of Nick Cave, produced by United States Artists:
Artists Vote for _________.
On October 8, Gap launched its “Vote for” initiative to coincide with the American election season. Centered on a customizable classic white t-shirt that reads, “Vote for ______.”, the retail chain is encouraging customers to fill in the blank with whatever word, expression or presidential candidate they are passionate about.
Gap has also enlisted artists Kara Walker (Season 2), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Fab5Freddy, John Baldessari, Adam Pendleton, Nate Lowman, John Waters, Deborah Kass, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, and Sean Landers to design a limited edition “Vote for” button. The buttons can be purchased in select stores for $5 each with $1 from every purchase donated to Declare Yourself, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign to empower and encourage every eligible 18-year-old in America to register and vote. Beginning Thursday, October 23, Gap will auction off an exclusive set of buttons autographed by the artists on eBay. All proceeds from the auction will benefit Declare Yourself.
A limited number of unique ”Vote for” buttons can be added to your Facebook profile or sent to friends using the gallery of buttons at Gap.com, Gap’s Facebook Fan Page, or Facebook’s Pieces of Flair application.
Click here for more information about Gap’s multifaceted “Vote for” campaign.
Rebirth of Danish art and design
If you want to keep track of modern Danish art and design, Forårsudstillingen at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen is a pivotal point of departure. Yesterday was the final day of the annual censored exhibition, where artists like Per Kirkeby and Olafur Eliasson once had their debut, and I went there to catch a last glimpse of the exhibition’s proposition as to what the Scandinavian art scene will look like in the years to come. In its 151 year-history, Forårsudstillingen obviously draws on a number of traditions and codes of practice; however, a new and substantial initiative has been introduced this year, triggering critics to designate it a rebirth and a mall-like ornamentation. The 2008 exhibition has been curated much in line with the direction of the art scene in general, where hierarchies between different art directions are loosened, juxtaposed, and discussed.
Chief curator is the internationally acclaimed, New York-based designer Karim Rashid, who is responsible for the overall design and title of the exhibition, 21. With this title, Rashid lets the exhibition leap into the twenty-first century, where the boundaries between art and design become increasingly vague. Therefore, this year’s exhibition offers fashion, graphic design, and sound art aside from the more traditional genres of architecture and visual arts—all indicating renewal and a relation to our current social, political, spiritual, and technological development. Karim Rashid’s own aesthetic expression is present throughout the exhibition, not only in the selection and composition of the works, but also in the separate works that have been placed on walls covered with his colorful, digitally designed wallpapers, manifesting the unity of the exhibition as a whole.
Whitney Biennial Model Tees
The Whitney Museum has collaborated with the Gap on a series of t-shirts designed by past Whitney Biennial artists, including Art21 artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Barbara Kruger (her design is pictured above), Kerry James Marshall, and Kiki Smith. There are thirteen in all, and the prominent remainder includes Ashley Bickerton, Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Hanna Liden, Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Kenny Scharf, Sarah Sze, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
The t-shirts will be available at select Gap stores and online beginning May 15. In the meantime, with the opening of the 2008 Whitney Biennial last week, they can also be found in advance at the museum gift store.
