Weekly Roundup

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.

Weekly Roundup

Barbara Kruger, "Untitled (It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it)", 1990. Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 143 x 103 in. Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about two anniversary exhibitions, 6,000 shapes upstate, masterworks in the Midwest, some road trip souvenirs, a whole lotta prints, and a sale you won’t want to miss:

• The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles celebrates their thirty year anniversary with Collection: MoCA’s First Thirty Years. The two-part exhibition is the largest-ever installation of MoCA’s permanent collection. Part one is on view at MoCA Grand Avenue and features works made between 1939 and 1979, beginning with Piet Mondrian’s Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III (1939). The second part, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, features works made since the museum’s founding in 1979. Included in Collection are Art21 artists Barbara Kruger, Mike Kelley (both Season 1), Vija Celmins, Gabriel Orozco, Kara Walker, Raymond Pettibon (all Season 2), Hiroshi Sugimoto, Roni Horn, Richard Tuttle (all Season 3), Lari Pittman (Season 4), Jeff Koons, and John Baldessari (both Season 5). The exhibition, which opened in November, is ongoing.

• Artinfo.com reports that Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) has won the University of Vienna’s Oscar Kokoschka Prize for 2010. The Kokoschka Prize is awarded to one contemporary artist every two years. Pettibon will receive a check for $28,000 in a ceremony at the university on March 1.

• Prints by Pepón Osario (Season 1), Kiki Smith (Season 2), and Mark Bradford (Season 4) are included in The Graphic Unconscious, the core exhibition of Philagrafika 2010, a new international festival in Philadelphia that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. The exhibit features 35 artists from 18 countries and is spread across five venues: Moore College of Art & Design; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Print Center; and Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. In Osorio’s installation, according to Philly.com, “he ponders his mother’s mortality and anticipates longing for her in a 12-foot-square bed of mostly black confetti on which he prints a blue X-ray of her skull with an ink-jet printer.” Philagrafika 2010 continues through April 11.

• Speaking of prints: If you attended Art21’s Culture Wars event last week, you’re already familiar with 20×200, the limited-edition print and photograph company that donated prizes for the winning team. (Congrats, @GlennLsApt!) On February 3 at 2pm (EST) 20×200 will release two works from Season 1 artist William Wegman. (We hear there’s one photograph and one painting.) 20×200’s mailing list subscribers will have the chance to purchase prints an hour or two before they are released on the homepage. Given their “ridiculously affordable” prices, we advise you to get on the list now!

• On February 3, Allan McCollum (Season 5) will speak at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. The event kicks off his project Shapes for Hamilton for which McCollum — working in collaboration with local residents, staff, faculty and students of Colgate — will create a unique shape for each inhabitant of the town. At the conclusion of the project, which will include an exhibition of the complete set of nearly 6,000 shapes, each resident will be invited to collect their own shape signed by the artist. The Shapes Project: Shapes for Hamilton will open March 8 in Colgate’s Clifford Gallery.

• On February 5 Max Protetch Gallery in New York will open Happiness is a State of Inertia, an exhibition of new work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4). Manglano-Ovalle will debut a major new sculpture, inspired by the work of Mies van der Rohe, that functions as a working fish tank. The tank will be filled with Blind Mexican Cave Fish who make their way via smell and touch. Via the press release, “The object itself is profoundly transparent, but because it has been installed below eye level, and its inhabitants are blind fish, it inverts the notion of transparency, calling into question what true visibility looks like. In order to look inside the tank, a viewer would have to prostrate himself, offering a gesture of submission in exchange for verification of the seemingly transparent scene inside.” Happiness will be on view through March 27.

• Also opening February 5 is The Chemistry of Color: Contemporary African-American Artists at Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. This 60-year anniversary show chronicles “the accomplishments and struggles of African-American artists in the latter half of the 20th century.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5) is included in the artist roster along with Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Moe Brooker, James Brantley, Charles Searles, Sam Gilliam, and others.

• Works by Weems and Kara Walker (Season 2) are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in From Then to Now: Masterworks of Contemporary African American Art. This multigenerational show brings together, for the first time, holdings of contemporary African American art from collections in the region: Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Akron Art Museum, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Progressive Corporation, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Works by Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Lenardo Drew, Alison Saar, Willie Cole, David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, René Green, and Kehinde Wiley will also be on view. From Then to Now continues through May 9.

• The Bartram Project by Mark Dion (Season 4), which is on view through February 6 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine article titled “Art of the Road Trip.” Read it here.

Letter from London: Avatarnation!

Paul Gauguin, "Pandora" (1892)

What was it like before the internet was invented? Can you remember? Where did all that pent-up aggression go before you were able to express your rage with the world via the medium of the comments thread underneath a video of a cat falling into a pond? Were we all walking around corking a volcano of white-hot fury, clenching and unclenching our fists, unable even to lol or rofl to let off much-needed steam? And what about all those knee and cushion and peanut butter fetishists, trapped in loveless marriages, unable to voice their darkest passions in the anonymity of the chatroom?

The triumphant rise of the lonely voice of boiling frustration and melancholy has transformed the way we interact with culture these days, which brings us on to Avatar, James Cameron’s big, loud, colourful, enjoyable, silly 3D film about magical blue cat-men who live in a neon jungle planet. In it, a soldier in a wheelchair gets to hop and skip with the big blue aliens via a lookalike avatar while his ‘real’ body is passive and immobile, in a brilliant bit of self-reference that has made the film wildly successful among its passive and immobile audiences, perhaps disturbingly so. CNN quotes a blogger named Mike, whose comments on one of many discussion forums for the film characterize what appears to be a widespread phenomenon:

Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora [the neon jungle planet] and all the Na’vi [the magical blue cat-men] made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora.

Another poster, who wisely opts for a psedonym (“Eltu”), comments:

When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.

Evidently for Mike and “Eltu,” the experience of seeing the film unlocked a more profound psychological disquiet that would be insensitive to diagnose. But haven’t we all had similar, if less dramatic, reactions when reaching the end credits of a film we’ve invested in emotionally (for me, it’s Tremors every time)? Who wasn’t depressed when they realized R2D2 wasn’t real? Or elated that the Ewoks weren’t? That’s the nature of art’s power to move (that it’s ephemeral) and the reaction evidence of the possession of a soul. And it might be suggested that the presence of a forum to voice their despair led these writers to exaggerate their angst in a perfect illustration of Godwin’s Law (thanks, Joel). However, the reactions and the extraordinary popularity of the film as cultural phenomenon (buoyed by the proliferation of self-styled “Avatards,” obsessive fans that paint their heads blue and see the film again and again, in alarming echo of Tobias Funke) speaks to a human delight in illusion that’s been a staple of art and its reception for hundreds of years.

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Understanding the Economy Photoshop Tutorial

Citing articles published in the Economist is always a good strategy for intelligent conversation, but you don’t want to be the person at the dinner party who halts the dialogue in utter confusion and pantomiming of algebraic functions. While it might sound like a good idea to reference Greg Ip’s colorful description of the economic recovery, please stop yourself before the words “economy” and “reverse-square-root symbol” escape from your mouth.

I guess if you really want to take it there, you should be prepared to describe what a square root symbol looks like and be able to reverse it using Photoshop. First create a text field and copy and paste the Square-Root unicode character √ into the newly created text field. Make the font size big enough for you to see the symbol in details. I went with 200pt.

Next move your cursor up to the menubar and click the word “image,” select “Image Rotation” from the drop-down menu, and then choose “Flip Canvas Horizontal,”

Unfortunately, Greg Ip left us to guess what typeface to use. I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I can only hope it isn’t Lucida Handwriting.

Weekly Roundup

Ellen Gallagher, "bling bling", 2001. Rubber, paper and enamel on linen, 96" x 120." The Eli Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

This week Art21 artists illustrate NASA’s history, depict child’s play, map the Black Atlantic, render galaxies in glass, leave their mark on the last decade, and reflect on our future:

• Opening January 29 at Tate Liverpool, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is the first major exhibition in the UK to trace the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism. Works by Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Chris Ofili, Walker Evans, Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and others show visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has “arisen from journeys made by people of Black African descent.” Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), the seven chapters of the exhibition run from early avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around Post-Black art. Afro Modern will close on April 25.

• Through March 7, work by William Wegman (Season 1) is on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in the exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Organized by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the exhibition explores NASA’s history and pioneering legacy and the impact their achievements have had on American artists. NASA | ART includes more than 70 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other forms. “Scientists, astronauts, and artists have one important quality in common,” said Smithsonian co-curator Bert Ulrich. “All share the inclination to explore, whether by means of scientific investigation, a mission to the moon, or a paint brush…After all, art is often an important byproduct of any great era of history, including the space age.” 

• Dutch wax fabrics, Victorian dress, decorative arts, and child’s play merge in the Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Child-sized, headless figures dressed in Shonibare’s signature costumes are installed throughout the museum’s period rooms with the idea of hide-and-go-seek, or treasure hunt in mind. The artist transforms these spaces into a series of “multi-layered tableaux” that collapse time and challenge histories. The figures, who play marbles, jump rope, perform cartwheels and more, are presented as youth who have benefited from the hard work of their ancestors. However, the origins of these ancestors are rendered unclear. Mother and Father (which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009) continues through March 14.

• Design Boom has posted preliminary sketches of the new stained glass window for The Museum at Eldridge Street, designed by Kiki Smith (Season 2) and architect Deborah Gans. The window depicts “a galaxy of golden stars against an undulating blue firmament that recalls the painted murals already on the interior.”

In year-end and decade roundups:

• Jeff Koons (Season 5) is named “the comeback kid of the 2000s” in Artinfo.com’s Decade in Review.

• Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Mark Bradford (Season 4) Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu and Mary Heilmann (all Season 5) are mentioned in Martha Schwendener’s Village Voice list “The Decade’s Best Art.”

• Part II: Cutting-Room Floor Show, an exhibition of works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, made Juxtapoz Magazine’s list of the top 100 moments of 2009.

• Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle cites Ballast (2004), a sculpture by Richard Serra (Season 1) installed on the Mission Bay campus of University of California San Francisco, as a high point of the last decade.

• James S. Russell of the Wall Street Journal closed the year with “Chinese-American Past Rescued From Chop Suey Cliche,” a review of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York designed by Maya Lin (Season 2).

• Linda Yablonsky of New York Times Magazine thought 2009 a “lackluster” year for art with the exception of 10 exhibitions or events. The first on her list was Stop, Repair, Prepare by Season 4 artists Allora & Calzadilla (which Yablonsky admits to seeing six times).

• Tim Leberecht of CNET News.com chose to focus less on the past by borrowing a list of quotes about the future compiled by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Art21’s Cao Fei, John Baldessari (both Season 5) Matthew Barney (Season 2), Nancy Spero, Allora & Calzadilla; and Pierre Huyghe (all Season 4) are included in this lineup of forward thinkers.

• And in a bit of shameless self promotion, our documentary television series Art:21-Art in the Twenty First Century made The Daily Loaf’s list of the top 10 phenomena in visual art since the year 2000!

Performative Interventions: The Progression of 4D Art in a Virtual 3D World

“Time” is always present in our interaction with works of art, whether we sit to contemplate a painting, stroll past a sculpture, or watch a video piece for its entire duration or cycle. Some works of art are time-based in that the viewer must experience them through the passage of time, as with music, while others refer to time through links or references to art history, our collective human history, or the timelessness of nature.
—Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 2, Episode: Time

Art in the twenty-first century, reflecting and defining new developments in a variety of areas, has radically extended the conventional media of time-based, or 4D work. Following Virtual Artists’ Immersive Discoveries in a Virtual 3D Frontier, I interviewed several Second Life artists who evoke time in their work.

Second Life artists are exploring how to captivate, or use the element of time to interact with an active audience. They have abandoned strict adherence to traditional hierarchies of art and embraced the virtual. In the past fifty years especially, ideas about time have shifted from passive to interactive and, currently, to perceptually immersive, via filmmaking and animation, the theatricality of performance, and virtual reality. This post highlights early visionaries in Second Life who are re-imagining how immersive 3D space can change, or transform 4D art.

Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. It uses real-world filmmaking techniques that are applied within an interactive, immersive 3D space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans or scripts. In Second Life, the actors are avatars in the scene, and the computer (via screen capture software) doubles as the camera, recording everything that happens in the virtual world. It connotes the artistic and performative, or the collaborative action of artist and computer. [The Second Life elements from the Art:21 segment on Cao Fei were filmed using machinima methods. —Ed.]

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Season’s Treatings

Still from Tim Burton spot for MoMA, 2009

Before the holidays hit us, I thought I might suggest a few destinations, dates, and stocking stuffers for those who are as late with the shopping as I am. Below are some beautiful shows and books that are sure to please, whether you’re looking for inspiration in the classroom, in your own practice, or just a memorable gift to give or share….

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim Museum

Goeorgia O’Keeffe : Abstraction at the Whitney Museum

Tim Burton at MoMA

Yinka Shonibare MBE

Graffiti Kings: New York City Mass Transit Art of the 1970s

Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” Expanded Edition

Surface Tension: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection at the Metropolitan Museum

Happy Holidays to all! Enjoy!

Weekly Roundup

Kara Walker, "A Warm Summer Evening in 1863", 2008. Wool tapestry with hand cut felt silhouette figure, 5' 9" x 8' 2". Edition of 5. ©Kara Walker. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

This week in Art21 artist news we have two tapestry makers, a silk archway, the master of Cremaster, an artist who likes to do laundry, a magical sound installation, environmental issues, creative explosions, and more.

• Opening January 8 at James Cohen Gallery, Demons, Yarns & Tales features hand-woven tapestries created by thirteen contemporary artists: Kara Walker (Season 2), Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), avaf, Peter Blake, Gary Hume, Jaime Gili, Francesca Lowe, Beatriz Milhazes, Paul Noble, Grayson Perry, Fred Tomaselli, Gavin Turk, and Julie Verhoeven. The exhibition was created by the London-based art organization, Banners of Persuasion, who commissioned each artist to design a tapestry, a medium foreign to his or her usual practice. Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 uses an image published in Harpers Magazine during the American Civil War, captioned “The Destruction of the Coloured Orphan Asylum on 5th Avenue.” A black silhouette of a lynched female figure hangs in front of this scene. The exhibition will be on view through February 13.

• Renaissance Unframed, an exhibition at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in New York, consists of twenty-five encaustic drawings on muslin and two companion bronze sculptures by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle. Tuttle’s drawings “explore fabric as a medium to receive color and as a tool to direct its movement” and the bronze works “represent the antithesis of the fabric on the wall.” The fabric pieces are rotated every 2 weeks with only five works being shown at a time. The exhibition is on view through January 9.

• On January 13, Season 2 artist Matthew Barney will speak at the Detroit Institute of Arts and discuss his newest project Khu, a performance and film loosely based on Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. Barney updates Mailer’s plot from an ancient Egyptian narrative to a present day account of reincarnation and rebirth set in an American landscape. Each chapter will be set in a different city and correspond to the seven stages of the soul’s departure from the body according to Egyptian mythology. The first chapter was performed in Los Angeles in 2007. The latest chapter takes place in Detroit. Barney’s lecture begins at 7pm; a (free) pass is required and can be obtained here.

• Through January 17, work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall is on view at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in the exhibition Heartland. The show features site-specific installations and performances as well as drawing, photography, and video by artists and collaboratives working in, and in response to, Detroit, Kansas City, and other cities and rural communities across the region. Also included in the exhibition are artists Carnal Torpor, Compass Group, Cody Critcheloe, Jeremiah Day, Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, Design 99, Scott Hocking, Greely Myatt, Marjetica Potrč, Julika Rudelius, Artur Silva, Deb Sokolow, and Whoop Dee Doo.

• Gate (2005) by Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh is now on view in the Los Angles County Museum of Art’s Korean art galleries. Made of translucent silk, the piece is a full-size rendering of one of the gates to the artist’s childhood home in Seoul. Suh’s father, the artist and scholar Suh Se-Ok, built the house based on the design of traditional Korean architecture of the 1880s.

• Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change (part of the official culture program for the United Nations Climate Change Conference) is a collaboration of the National Gallery of Denmark, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, and Moesgård Museum. The exhibition includes more than 25 artists spread across the four venues. Each space is dedicated to a different theme: Relations, The Implicit, Kakotopia, and Information, respectively. At the Nat’l Gallery of Denmark, A Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear, a 2008 film by duo Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) presents viewers with three scenes: gently flowing images of a lush river landscape, a dilapidated interior in an abandoned house, and footage of a young man who drums rhythmically on the slats of a Venetian blind. The piece, shot in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Delta, draws attention to the remaining wreckage of Hurricane Katrina. A Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear is on view through April 5. (Note: each theme/venue closes on a different day; check the website for more information.)

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin unveiled her new video, Unchopping a Tree, in Copenhagen last week. This is the latest iteration of Lin’s larger and last memorial project, What is Missing? The video addresses deforestation prevention and sustainable reforestation to reduce carbon emissions and protect endangered species and habitats — watch it here.

• In Roberta Smith’s review of Days and Giorni by Bruce Nauman (Season 1) — two sound installations on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — she writes: “Each piece consists of 14 recordings of seven people reciting the days of the week. Their voices are broadcast from 14 wafer-thin white speakers, around 23 inches square, arranged in seven facing pairs, one for each person’s voice. Each speaker is simply clipped to two wires strung tautly from floor to ceiling. It’s like paintings by Robert Ryman hanging on Fred Sandback’s string sculptures, and the effect is magical. Read more here.

• “A countdown began two minutes out. 90 seconds. One minute. 50 seconds. 40. 30. And so on. And then: fireworks! And then: fire! The blossom burned, glowing orange against the museum and the now dusky sky, and dark smoke billowed into the air. The crowd oohed and aahed.” Click here to read more about the recent “explosion events” by Season 3 artist Cai Guo-Qiang (as reported by Kris Wilton of Artinfo.com).

• Congratulations to Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2), and Judy Pfaff (Season 4) who have been granted the United States Artists annual award for $50k.

• Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has shared her morning routine, favorite household chore, travel rituals, and more with Times Magazine. Read her witty profile here.

• More on the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2): Man of the World, The New Yorker; Pic of the Day: Gabriel Orozco’s Home Run, Flavorwire; and Gabriel Orozco: The Art of the Readymade, WNYC.

Blogalogueing with Kristin Lucas

Leave it to a web artist to push the boundaries in interview formats! Keep reading to experience mine and Kristin Lucas’s systems vs. networks conversation, Twitter style…

Nikksters: How do you define systems and networks? What’s the diff between the two?
ksl2: Systm n Netwrk not easy 2 dstnguish; they r compatibl, multifactd, structurs dependnt on connectvty. Depend on context could mean same thng.
ksl2: a couple more thoughts…
ksl2: Netwrk implies physicality (hardware) and functionality where system is rooted n ideology n abstraction. You “network”, you do not “system”.
ksl2: and…
ksl2: Network can turn off your electricity; System can ruin your credit.
ksl2: System can have Network in place; Network can have an operating System.
ksl2: next question

Nikksters: so are they interchangeable? can systems and networks morph into each other, i.e. systems become networks and vis versa?
ksl2: They can mutate, maybe not into each other like shape shifters or dopple gangers.
ksl2: i think doppleganger might be one word!
ksl2: They can share many of the same characteristics. You have to activate to know the difference sometimes.

Nikksters: Wut systems/networks do u feel u r a part of? Which of these systems and/or networks do u feel u r part of voluntarily/involuntarily?
ksl2: State, bank, service providr, buyr, insurd, account holdr, frequnt travelr progrm, list serv, direct mail target, user group, faq, audience,
ksl2: of public radio, news, music, movi reviews, Internt, news audience, social netwrks, blogs, traind artist, teachr, cat ownr, vegetarian, CSA,
ksl2: political affiliation, fan, family, friends, family-and-friends plan, arts community, patron, gallery, colleagues, nomads, early risers…
ksl2: Some of the best thriving networks don’t have names; in the naming something is lost.
ksl2: Feelings are often mixed about my participation in these relationships. Both inactive and active connections can be felt.
ksl2: Seems one is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ grid. No n between. Activity is activity, small or grand; u r there, Network thrives on yr participation.
ksl2: more coming…
ksl2: Gray area. There is a trade off. To benefit from a system/netwrk, u oftn have 2 involuntarily join othrs. There are concessions that u make.

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Blogalogue, Part 3: Kristin Lucas

Kristin Lucas creates video, installation, intervention, digital photographs, sculpture, and projects for the web. Positioning herself at the center of her projects, Lucas’s work addresses the effects of rapid-spread technology on the human condition. Reversing a popular concept of infusing humanity into machines, she instead applies familiar strategies of electronic media to her own life. Transformations, mutations, and portraiture are the focus of works set to the backdrop of empty and meaningful exchanges with automated tellers, healing arts therapists, celebrity impersonators, police officers, and a judge.

And on a little side note/tangent, I chose to start the blog off with this particular image because I think it communicates a strong message in a simple, clean, and effective way. It reminds me a lot of the work that EcoArtTech does, and the themes that they work with in terms of sustainability and the reconciliation of natural and synthetic environments.

Highlighted Works

Refresh | Lucas has herself legally “refreshed,” in (almost) exactly the same way you would refresh a web page…
The Versionhood Blog | There is a forthcoming web project that is not online yet, but read the blog to watch it all unfold from the very beginning…

And click here to see Kristin at Electronic Arts Intermix and here to see Kristin at her gallery, Postmasters.

And, of course, be sure to visit Kristin’s newly renovated website, www.kristinlucas.com

Lucas’ work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including Queens Nails, San Francisco; Artefact Festival, Leuven; ICA, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Cheekwood Museum, Nashville; The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Artists Space, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Postmasters Gallery, New York; And/Or Gallery, Dallas; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Plugin, Basel; Windows, Brussels; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; O.K Center for Contemporary Arts, Linz, Austria; and FACT, Liverpool, England.

Lucas has been awarded numerous artist residencies including the Edith Russ Site for Media Art New Work Stipend, Oldenburg, Germany; the 13th International Studio Program of ACC Weimar and the City of Weimar, Germany; World Views, Experimental Television Center, Harvestworks, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program and P.S.1 National Studio Program, New York; and the ARCUS A.I.R. Program, Ibaraki, Japan.