1968 | 2008
This is not the first time that Summer Olympics Games are embroiled in environmental and political controversies. In 1968, Mexico City, with its high altitude containing 30% less oxygen than at sea level, proved to be a controversial choice. The lack of air led to terrible results for some, while others were able to achieve world records. Forty years later Beijing is faced with massive air pollution as it completes the preparations for the Olympics. The world renowned Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie has opted out of running in the marathon noting “the pollution in China” as a threat to his health. It remains to be seen how the environmental pollution in China will affect the athletes and the Games’ results.China is also plagued with its outrageous treatment of Tibet, resulting in massive protests around the world. Protest was also seen in Mexico City during the medal ceremonies when the two Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos “performed their Power to the People” salute. Peter Norman, the Australian silver medalist, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge showing his support for Smith and Carlos.
Another athlete to cancel an Olympic Games participation was Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest chess players of all time, who passed away earlier this year. He had plans to play for the United States at the 1968 Chess Olympiad in Lugano, Switzerland and backed out when he saw the playing hall with its bad lighting.
As athletes were breaking records in 1968, artists were busy reshaping culture. Nancy Spero(Season 4) was working on her War Series (1966-70). Bruce Nauman (Season 1) produced his first video titled Pinch Neck. Romare Bearden, in addition to being involved in founding The Studio Museum in Harlem, also established Cinque Gallery with the help of Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow. Cinque provided support for younger minority artists.
1968 marked the passing of Marcel Duchamp and the coinage of “15 minutes of fame” when Andy Warhol stated “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Frank Zappa released his first solo album Lumpy Gravy and performed King Kong with the Mothers of Invention at BBC Studio in London. Chou Wen-chung, who had studied with Edgard Varese, completed Nocturnal (1961-1968), an unfinished piece by Varese.
In his 1968 Nobel Lecture, Yasunari Kawabata explained, “The excitement of beauty calls forth strong fellow feelings, yearnings for companionship, and the word ‘comrade’ can be taken to mean ‘human being.’ The snow, the moon, the blossoms, words expressive of the seasons as they move one into another, include in the Japanese tradition the beauty of mountains and rivers and grasses and trees, of all the myriad manifestations of nature, of human feelings as well.”
How will 2008 be reminisced forty years from now? What will be the low and high points in our cultural and social achievements? Will 2008 be a critical year marking a pivotal change in the way we treat the environment and each other?
China Haze. Credit. Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE
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.
(Artist) Frays Book
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Blood on Paper: The Art of The Book, showcases book-based work by a wealth of modern and contemporary artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 1).
Since the book form implies a beginning, middle and end, it’s always been a popular form for artists looking to meddle with heads, from Max Ernst’s superlative The Hundred Headless Woman onwards. The exhibition traces a significant transformation in the definition of the artist’s book: from a kind of freeform improvisation on textual illustration (Matisse’s Jazz, Sol LeWitt’s take on Borges’ Ficciones) to an artwork taking the form of a book as its conceptual jumping-off point (Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton’s Inter Faces and Richard Tuttle’s NotThePoint). The connotations of books as cornerstones of religious doctrine are underscored by Damien Hirst’s New Religion, a huge, plinth-mounted mixed-media sculpture in the form of a shelved Bible, set off by a display of Francis Bacon’s much-pored-over ephemera, battered Muybridge photos and snaggly Polaroids, displayed in glass like the fingerbones of a saint.
The most fun is to be had in the illumination artists’ work can cast on a canonical text; Balthus replays Wuthering Heights as a pas de deux of feral adolesence; Paula Rego turns Jane Eyre into a mad psychodrama of Gothic puppetry. Serialism found an easy home in the book form, with Ed Ruscha’s deadpan series of swimming pools and gas stations repeated on every page of a pocketsize book, insouciance itself. Meanwhile, the pages of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Danger Books, charred with the spidery remainders of fireworks, indicate the book as a site of explosive excitement, and anyone who’s ever been 7 will probably agree.
Berliner Salon: Aaron Rose curates “Passion for the Possible” at Circle Culture Gallery
Aaron Rose, the California-based curator/musician behind the now-infamous Beautiful Losers exhibition, which championed the work of subculture “street artists” like Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen (both Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), has another genre-defying exhibition currently on view in Berlin at Circle Culture Gallery, the city’s preeminent commercial space for urban contemporary art. Entitled Passion for the Possible, this show presents a surprising facet of urban pop art (especially in conjunction with street art and all of its subversive implications), specifically the obsessive print-making efforts of Sister Corita, a one-time Catholic nun.
Actually, Sister Corita was more of a deviant than her sanctified vocation avowed and she ultimately left the church after being labeled “a guerilla with a paintbrush” (according to the press release). Her artistic practice is thus a fitting anachronism for Aaron Rose’s curatorial framework and general penchant for blurring boundaries between disparate cultures. The works on view, a combination of silkscreen prints, murals and sculpture incorporating “popular culture images such as archetypal American consumerist products…alongside spiritual texts, song lyrics and literary writings,” explicitly oppose the conformity typically associated with her brand of Catholicism’s hyper-conservative doctrine.
Sister Corita was predominately active in California during the 1960’s and 70’s. Her use of collective consumer imagery in mass-produced prints is noted in the press release as “the positive west-coast alternative to Warhol, possibly pre-dating him.” She left the Church in 1969, only to be diagnosed with cancer in the early 1970’s and given six months to live. She didn’t succumb to her illness for another seven years, but she nonetheless began an intense period of artistic production immediately following her diagnosis. Her work and her biography are both inspiring and inherently American (in relation to the bygone era that her work represents), bridging the divide between public service and self-expression, social responsibility and anti-institutional rebellion.
Passion for the Possible runs through May 30th. A monograph of works by Sister Corita, aka Corita Kent, entitled Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita, was recently published by Four Corners Books.
Sikander and Barney in concurrent shows at MIT’s List Center
Matthew Barney and Shahzia Sikander, both Season 1 artists, currently have exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Boston. Barney is best known for his work in sculpture and video, but his printmaking practice is an interesting and unexplored part of his body of work. As a result Photogravure Prints from Drawing Restraint 9 will have a lot to offer those attempting to keep up with the ever-expansive Barney mythology. Drawing Restraint 9, the latest in Barney’s ongoing metaphorical investigation of creativity, takes place on a Japanese whaling ship, and shows Barney, his life partner Bj√∂rk, and the ship’s crew ritualistically recreating his field emblem image with petroleum jelly. The prints in this exhibit are from production stills showing this sequence.
Shahzia Sikander’s Pursuit Curve is a digital animation with accompanying music by composer David Abir. Sikander uses the pursuit curve, a mathematical function which describes the progress of a chase, as a visual starting point from which to investigate the way culture, identity, and iconography interact. These brightly colored sequences, which contain suggestions of bomb blasts, fireworks, and turbans, resist easy interpretation, and challenge viewers to name what they’re seeing. The animation is currently playing continuously throughout the day at the Media Test Wall. You can find more information about the exhibition here.
Kiki Smith: Her Home and Wallpaper
Studio Printworks has produced a hand-screened wallpaper in collaboration with Kiki Smith (Season 2). Maiden & Moonflower depicts an evening scene of a woman standing beneath a tree bough inhabited by night creatures and surrounded by stars. The manual production technique calls to mind 14th-century German woodcut patterns, but in Smith’s inimitable drawing style.
Maiden & Moonflower addresses spiritual and eternal aspects of human nature, our connection to the universe, yet our solitary journey. The wallpaper was produced specifically for the artist’s current exhibition Kiki Smith: Her Home at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany. The show runs through August 24 and will travel to Kunsthalle N√ºrnberg from September 18 ‚Äì November 16, 2008.
Thematically, Her Home spans a woman’s life from birth to death. Using domestic existence as a starting point, Kiki Smith revisits her own history rooted in protestant New England. Combining a number of genres and materials, from plaster and porcelain sculpture to drawing and photography, Smith develops a metaphor-rich spectrum of lifestyles for women beyond marriage.
Robert Adams | Books & Gravures
EXCLUSIVE: Robert Adam’s with photogravure plates for Harney County, Oregon (1999-2003) in his Oregon studio.
Robert Adams’s black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. An underlying tension in Adams’s body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Robert Adams.
LEARN: Robert Adams is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Robert Adams, Harney County, Oregon, 1999-2003. © Robert Adams. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Doug Dunderdale. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Robert Adams. Thanks: Matthew Marks Gallery & Fraenkel Gallery.
Beautiful Losers at SXSW
Headed to Austin, Texas this weekend for the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference? Don’t miss the world premier of Beautiful Losers, a film showcasing the work of artists Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen from Season 1 of Art:21, and Spark-featured artist Chris Johanson.
Pioneer skateboarding legend and musician Tommy Guerrero, also featured on Spark, will perform at SXSW this weekend with Money Mark, the composer of the Beautiful Losers soundtrack.
Educator guides related to the Spark films on Tommy Guerrero and Chris Johanson are available for free download.
Walton Ford’s home video
Check out this short video, shot by Season 2 artist Walton Ford himself in his Berkshire studio, in conjunction with the release of his book Pancha Tantra by Taschen.
Art21 Guest Blog starts Monday: Eva + Franco Mattes
Art21 is thrilled to announce the launch of our guest blog on Monday, February 18, featuring new media artists Eva and Franco Mattes, aka 0100101110101101.ORG. They will be blogging about The Influencers festival at CCCB Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (February 27-March 1). As the festival’s curators, they will write about the seven participating artists whose work they find inspiring, funny, irritating, thought-provoking, and always interesting.
One of the Mattes’ most recent projects is Synthetic Performances, a series of reenactments of historical performances inside the synthetic world of Second Life, beginning in January 2007. From Chris Burden’s Shoot to Vito Acconci’s Seedbed and Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks, all the actions are performed by the Mattes in real time through their avatars, the customizable personas that people inhabit in online virtual worlds. People from all over the world can attend and interact with the live performances by experiencing them in Second Life.
Since 2006, the Mattes have created portraits of avatars. Addressing new online environments as places to socialize, nurture celebrity, and perhaps leave one’s real self behind, these images capture members of Second Life, combining the traditions of glamour photography with the brilliant colors and hard-line aesthetics of the game-world. The Mattes’ work questions both the traditional role of portraiture and the nature of the morphing relationship between identity and public presentation in virtual worlds.
Excerpted from the Gameworld exhibition catalogue, Laboral Art Center, Spain 2007
Read more about Eva and Franco Mattes’ projects and view lots of artwork images on their extensive website, http://0100101110101101.org.
