Mark Dion | “Neukom Vivarium”
EXCLUSIVE: Mark Dion leads a discussion of his installation Neukom Vivarium (2006) at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle.
Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates artworks that question the distinctions between “objective” (”rational”) scientific methods and “subjective” (”irrational”) influences.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Mark Dion.
LEARN: Mark Dion 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 | Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium, 2006. Courtesy the Seattle Art Museum.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: John Gordon Hill. Sound: Charles Tomaras. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Mark Dion. Thanks: Olympic Sculpture Park.
Conversations | Judy Pfaff with Betsy Sussler part 3
Following is the conclusion of the conversation between Judy Pfaff and BOMB Magazine’s Betsy Sussler that took place on March 3, 2008 at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
BS: I’m going to ask you two more questions, and one of them actually comes from Patricia Spears Jones, who’s a poet. I don’t know if you’ve met her, but she’s a contributing editor to BOMB. A.M. Homes, the writer, has this really great trick when she interviews people. She calls up all of her friends in a panic and says, “I don’t know what I’m going to say. What would you ask if you were interviewing this person?” and then she comes with a list of their questions combined with her questions. So I did that too. I thought, this will be fun. So, Patricia Spears Jones asks this: “I have been fascinated by the colors in your work? What do they mean and are there ones that you have never used and why?”
JP: I’m very involved with color. Initially, I was involved with Goethe’s idea of color, then Madame Blavatsky, and I worked for [Josef] Albers, believe it or not. So each piece actually is very coded. I don’t usually talk about that, but what I mean is that even just black and white mean this or that. When I sampled things in earlier pieces, they were always specifically about color and emotional and even visual sensations. But no, color is a huge deal to me.
BS: The earlier ones especially were so exuberant. It was never just instinctive? You really always had an idea of what the color….
JP: Yeah. The first show in New York that someone might have seen was called Deep Water. I had just come from a trip to the Yucatan as a response to doing a failed show about subatomic physics, and I thought, painters don’t use color? There was this equivocation that thinking is sort of gray and black and brown and sober and in Merida, which is this perfect colonial town in the Yucatan, and is also my favorite town of all time, there were just beautiful flowers. The sea is turquoise, and I just thought this really has the color of life. The way things look when they’re alive, like flowers and birds and fish and this and that. Also, I was probably at war with—do I say it again?—Richard Serra, who is about weight and mass, and I thought, throw it away. Get the air in there and make it circulate. You don’t own it. You don’t dominate anything. Don’t have the language that painting could have. That was a very south of the border show.
The next one I did at Albright-Knox, the whole palette was for all of the people. There was the Clyfford Still motif, there was the Jackson Pollock; it was the moment. So there was a kind of homage. It’s like, if I go to Japan, I think it’s totally Japanese, but they don’t think it’s Japanese at all. I think there is a difference between references to things and paying homage to things.
BS: That actually might answer my last question, which is, do all the installations have a back-story?
JP: Yes.
BS: They do. So can you tell us one, a really personal one that perhaps nobody knows yet?
JP: Yeah, one was called War In Italy. My grandmother worked for the RAF, the Women’s Royal Air Force, as a seamstress. And she sewed all these…she says she saved London. She said that she made all of these sorts of balloons. And it was the day that we arrived in Venice, and there were a couple of wars going on. And the whole thing, I thought, referenced this because we were also in Italy, and so I thought it would be about the Futurists, and I really realized that the Futurists were about noises. My grandmother used to say, “what was the most frightening thing? The noises above your head and the sound of things exploding.” So the whole piece, I thought, had this very Italian aspect to it as well as this back-story about my grandmother and what she thought was frightening. But all of them have that. I don’t usually tell anybody, but I’ll tell you now that it’s twenty years later.
BS: Oh, I should have gone through [every installation] one at a time. How did she think she saved London? What was she selling?
JP: Because these balloons were inflated and the German planes couldn’t tell the difference between the sky and the balloons. They were all around London. London was full of balloons, big balloons. These balloons, what are they called?
BS: Balloons… I don’t know.
JP: Blimps. And they were silver, which is a good look because it reflected the sky. So the planes, the Messerschmitt, is that right? The planes couldn’t locate them so instead of bombing them they just flew into this invisible protection. I hope I’m remembering this correctly.
BS: Even if you’re not, it’s really fabulous. I’m going to read how you answered Mimi’s question, which is actually exactly what you said ten years ago. Mimi asked how your installations are “psychologically dangerous,” and you said…“for me, because nothing is preset, I feel that it reveals a lot about what I’m going through at the moment.”
JP: I said exactly the same…
BS: You said exactly the same thing. If things are theoretically well thought-out then you’re in fairly safe territory. It’s like ,“I know my parameters and what the thing is going to look like.” So yeah, ten years doesn’t make any difference.
JP: She lies consistently…
BS: And with that….
JP: By the way, I don’t drink beer. I don’t know why I said that because I never ever drink beer.
BS: I was going to say, you don’t look like you drink beer.
JP: No, I never drink it. I think there are three lies in that thing, the first one, and then the cock crows, but no, the first one is that I don’t drink beer.
BS: But it was funny.
JP: It was funny. It was a joke, yeah.
END
Maya Lin Awarded Van Alen Prize
Van Alen Institute announced yesterday that Maya Lin (Season 2) has been awarded the New York Prize Senior Fellowship. Appointed Senior Fellows are accomplished thinkers, artists and practitioners who have a demonstrated record of exceptional work and are identified as leaders in their fields. During her tenure as Senior Fellow, Lin will further develop Missing - a project she describes as her “last memorial” that will “focus attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime.”
Now in its second year, the New York Prize Fellowship was established to bring practitioners and scholars to Van Alen Institute’s headquarters in New York City to pursue and present advanced independent projects on the most significant issues shaping the conception, design and use of public space today.
Conversations | Judy Pfaff with Betsy Sussler part 2
The following is the second part of the conversation between Judy Pfaff and BOMB Magazine’s Betsy Sussler that took place on March 3, 2008 at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
BS: I wanted to ask you about the burning kits and drawing with fire. Given that fire is an all-consuming element that has connotations about being a life force and also leaving darkness in its wake while calling up images of hell, what is it like to draw with fire?
JP: It is the very coolest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ve always thought that artists are pyromaniacs and believed that they are orphans. I don’t know any artists who think of themselves as being the product of a mother and father. Fire is always major. I think the funniest thing about fire, and there’s a mischief in this, is that a gallery on 57th street—which is about as clean as you can get—the gallery owners just decided to leave until I was finished installing because they were having heart attacks because of the soot everywhere. They’ve got Hans Hoffmans in the back room and the soot was going through the ventilation system and it was fabulous because it’s carbon! Acetylene is very dirty stuff, but it’s the purest sort of soot. You know how Sumi ink is made by capturing the soot from candles? Well, like Sumi, acetylene has a velvety quality to it and if you touch it, it just falls.
BS: It’s like paint and graphite.
JP: Yeah, it’s like shadows. It’s beautiful, beautiful stuff. You can’t focus on it so you sink into it, like a lovely spacelessness or something. It’s nice.
Conversations | Judy Pfaff with Betsy Sussler part 1
The following interview took place at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library on March 3, 2008, following a screening of the Art:21 episode Romance. Featured artist Judy Pfaff spoke with Betsy Sussler, Editor-in-Chief of BOMB magazine.
BETSY SUSSLER: Hi everyone, I’m really pleased to be here, not only with Judy, but also with Art21. Both Art21 and BOMB magazine are about presenting the artist’s voice and developing ideas through conversation. And at BOMB, we do in-depth interviews between artists about the creative process. BOMB interviewed Judy almost ten years ago in 1999, and actually the woman who interviewed her, Mimi Thompson, is here tonight. I thought I would start my series of questions by reading one of the questions that Mimi posed to Judy ten years ago and take it from there. It’s still certainly apropos…
JUDY PFAFF: Are you going to read the answer?
BS: I thought I would let you answer it and then at the end of our talk I would read the answer that you gave ten years ago. And really, you are not required to give the same answer. So in your interview with Mimi you described your installation work as “psychologically dangerous,” which is a very interesting question given the piece that we just saw. And what Mimi wanted to know then, I also want to know now, which is, what did you mean by “psychologically dangerous”?
JP: I’m trying to put myself back there. I have a feeling that what was happening then is that the works were so spontaneous and so of-the-moment because there was not a lot of censoring going on, and because I listened to everybody and saw how much self-awareness they have and how brilliant they are. I don’t have that going for me. It’s sort of like the clock is ticking and it’s really ticking the moment the work is being done. I can read the work sometimes, especially later, and think, oh my god, I was a mess or that this particular thing was happening or that the exhaustion is in the work. There’s stuff in the installation that I don’t really want to put in there, but I think it gets in there. Maybe I was speaking about that. Continue reading »
The Confluence Project looks for volunteers
Season 1 artist Maya Lin’s Confluence Project is looking for volunteers during June and October 2008 to complete a trail at Sandy River Delta in Oregon, which leads to Lin’s Bird Blind installation. Lin’s Confluence Project was born in 2000, when she was asked to create a series of installations along the Columbia River basin to commemorate the bicentennial of the journey of the Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, which ran from Chief Timothy Park to Cape Disappointment. Maya Lin was asked by local Native American tribes to rethink the meaning of the expedition by creating art pieces on the same trails that were minutely described by these travelers 200 years ago.
If you are interested in collaborating in this ongoing project or to see Maya Lin’s online video explaining the project herself, visit www.confluenceproject.org
Barry McGee video on ArtTalk
Watch this two-part conversation between artists Aaron Rose and Barry McGee(Season 1) on VBS’s ArtTalk. While the video features live shots of McGee’s artwork and installations, the interview subjects are recast as animated robotic talking heads, as though the dialogue was fed into a Speak & Spell. As elusive and reluctant to talk about his work as ever, here McGee lets his artwork literally speak for itself.
Art21 and Mel Chin’s “Fundred” team in overdrive at NAEA
Last month, Art21 and Mel Chin (Season 1) took arts educators from around the world by storm as they presented two of the most dynamic sessions the National Arts Education Association’s annual convention had to offer.The professional development session, presented by Kelly Shindler and Mel Chin, was standing-room only. Teachers were treated to a special presentation about Mel Chin’s Fundred Dollar Bill Project by Mel Chin himself. The following day, the Art21 Super Session was also packed with educators. After creating their own works of “Fundred Dollar Bill” art, teachers headed out to the street for a dramatic suprise entrance of the Fundred Project’s armored truck (pictured above), which runs on cooking oil supplied by school cafeterias.
Here on the left coast, plans to present the Fundred Dollar Bill Project to California’s educators are already underway through partnerships with local museums, KQED’s Spark program, and the Fundred Project’s national director.
Be sure to check out Art:21’s video of students who have already participated in the Fundred Dollar Bill Project and, if you’re an educator, help your students create their own Fundreds for donation to a neccessary and worthy cause. More information can be found on the project’s Web site, www.fundred.org. Password = Paydirt.
James Turrell Skyspace at Pomona College
Pomona College alumnus James Turrell (Season 1) has produced a Skyspace for his alma mater in the Draper Courtyard of the campus, realized in collaboration with consulting architects Marmol Radziner + Associates AIA. It is the first Skyspace regularly accessible to the public in Southern California.
Skyspace takes the form of an architectural optical illusion that heightens the viewer’s perception of light and space, whereby a seemingly paper-thin ceiling opens a rectangular frame “into” the sky above. For Pomona, Turrell has created an artificial transitioning keyed to sunrise and sunset using a floating metal canopy with sensors programmed to change in intensity and hue on the underside. Directly beneath, a shallow pool echoes the changing light and time.
Turrell studied mathematics and perceptual psychology at Pomona in the early 1980s. Appropriately, the new Skyspace is situated among the buildings housing the academic disciplines related to the science of mind –psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science– as well as the earth sciences of geology and environmental analysis.
In addition to the new Skyspace, the Pomona College Museum of Art is presenting James Turrell at Pomona College, an exhibition uniting the various threads of Turrell’s artistic practice. The exhibition continues through May 17, 2008. For further information, please visit www.pomona.edu/museum.
Last chance to apply for Oliver Herring | Task
Tuesday, April 1, 2008, is the last day to apply for participation in Task, a recurrent performance by Season 3 artist Oliver Herring. This iteration is organized by the Frye Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, On the Boards, and the Seattle Public Central Library where the performance will be held on Saturday, June 28, 2008. Herring will select 35 applicants of various ages, professions and backgrounds for this day-long interactive. Visit the Frye Museum website to download an application. Selected applicants will be notified by the Frye no later than May 1.
Herring has staged Task at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2006); Plaza de Toros in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2003), the Former Federal Security Bank in Lake Worth, Fla. (2003); L’Ecole Supérieur National des Beaux Arts, Paris (2002); and the Masonic Temple at the Great Eastern Hotel, London (2003). The Seattle Public Library performance will be the first staged indoors, and involving multiple organizations. The Hirshhorn Museum continues to offer a podcast of their 60 participants discussing the experience.
Herring recently performed Task at the University of Maryland where he is the Spring 2008 Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Art. His residency will conclude on Wednesday, April 2nd with a public performance that coincides with the opening of a video installation titled Basic, a new component of an ongoing series by the same title. A series of playful videos that are the product of collaborations between the artist and strangers, Basic is on display at the University Art Gallery from April 2-26, 2008.
