Allora & Calzadilla’s Munich Harmonies
Check out this interview and footage from Vernissage TV’s coverage of Allora & Calzadilla’s (Season 4) concurrent exhibitions at Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst in Munich. Kunstverein München includes several installations of “geological bunkers” with hidden opera singers and musicians plying militaristic beats and crooning apocalyptic. Continuing to explore the politicization of music, the collaborative’s Haus der Kunst show offers Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, a new performance work that scrutinizes the famous Ninth symphony and its shared history with the museum’s architecture and both their subsequent usurpation by the Nazis.
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
Louise Bourgeois—Songs Remembered
In anticipation of Art21 (Season 1) artist Louise Bourgeois‘ full-career retrospective, the Guggenheim Museum in New York presents a free concert on Saturday evening, June 21 titled Louise Bourgeois—Songs Remembered. Bourgeois, a Paris-born, NY-based artist, chose her favorite music and songs by musicians including Debussy and Billie Holiday as well as French standards such as C’est Si Bon by Jean Sablon. Metro accordionist Francois Parisi will travel from Paris to perform these selections, along with traditional Parisian street music.
The concert will take place on the sidewalk on 5th Avenue and 89th Street and is part of the museum’s popular series Works & Process, in collaboration with Make Music New York, an organization that presents over 850 free concerts across the city, once a year on the summer solstice.
Louise Bourgeois—Songs Remembered
June 21 @ 5:30 p.m.
Guggenheim sidewalk, 5th Ave. at 89th St.
As part of Make Music New York
FREE and open to the public
Second Look
In the May 14th column I commented on the fact that some people were having a hard time incorporating Season 4 artists into their classrooms and studios. This weekend, hiding from the heat here in New York, I had the opportunity to see the Allora and Calzadilla segment for a second time and realized not only what a fantastic few minutes of film this is, but also the many things this episode can teach. For example:
- Collaboration can produce wonderful work, but it is still a relationship that has to be navigated. Compromise is part of that relationship.
- Sound has clearly become another element of design. The traditional seven elements of design are not adequate to describe Allora and Calzadilla’s work. This is true for many Art21 artists and contemporary artists worldwide.
- Artists are often engaged in research of some kind. Sometimes contemporary artists are in search of discovering something they know very little about.
- Humor can be “beautiful, horrific, critical.”
- An artist’s job is to turn things upside down (take the discussion table, for example) and use this new perspective for more than just a new way of looking at an object. The new perspective can hold symbolic meaning or can free the artist(s) to do something unexpected.
- Engaging with and understanding contemporary art often involves becoming familiar with the “ideological glue” that holds the work together.
Segments like this one can teach our students more than providing visual examples of new and exciting work. They can provide opportunities and examples of how artists today work in a variety of styles and with a wide variety of media. They can provide starting points and big ideas for both traditional and non-traditional approaches to making works of art.
Allora and Calzadilla’s segment will be a part of my teaching next year. Have some of you discovered new and exciting contemporary artists to incorporate starting next semester? Who are they? How did you decide?
Photo by Amanda Cianciulli, age 17
Hot Topic is not Punk Rock!
Reading Ben Street’s recent post Pop (and) Art, I started to consider links between music and art. It is easy to support Ben’s idea that the relationship between music and art was closest in the sixties, yet the music of the 60’s and 70’s seems to be a hot topic for contemporary art institutions today. Case in point, right now Malcolm McLaren is guest blogging about ArtBasel for “The Moment” on The New York Times. While art might not be comfortable with pop music, some curators are excited to draw on the nostalgia for rock and punk music of those bygone days.
Over the last year, there has been a wave of exhibitions that point to rock and punk music as inspiration for many artists’ practices. Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer, currently on view at the New Museum, cites rock culture and male adolescence as strong influences on both artists. Music is a Better Noise, exhibited at PS1, looked at genre jumpers, “musicians who make art and artists who make music.” Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years explored the “vibrant art scene that emerged during these [punk] years,” at the Barbican; it included works by Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4).
It is Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 that seems to be receiving the most press and perhaps the most scorn. The exhibition features work by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), Mike Kelley (Season 3), and Laurie Anderson (Season 1) is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Sympathy for the Devil is described as “the most serious and comprehensive look at the intimate and inspired relationship between the visual arts and rock-and-roll culture to date.” This assertion is troubling considering omissions of influential musicians like George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, Sun Ra, and Bad Brains which makes me wonder, would rock-and-culture exist without black culture?
Considering this trend of rock and punk influenced exhibitions, I am left with a question posed by critic Pedro Velez in his artnet review of Sympathy for the Devil, “How do you tame counterculture into the prepackaged pretext of High Art?” Responses welcomed.
Pop (and) Art
The relationship between fine art and pop music is characterised most often by a specific historical period in Europe and America, the mid-sixties, which is probably the closest point there has been or will be between the two disciplines. Like its relationship with cinema, art was never completely comfortable with pop music, all smiles in public but laughing behind its back when the coast was clear. In reality, Warhol’s peelable banana on the first Velvet Underground record had little or no relation, aesthetically, to the music it contained. Double Elvis has more to do with Barnett Newman than The King. Maybe that’s partly to do with the unbridgeable gap between them: a still point of time versus three unfolding minutes; in market terms, coy flirtation (at most) versus out-and-out capitulation. In pop music, the commercial imperative has produced some of the greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century culture; in art, selling out retains its weird taboo. I imagine Rirkrit Tiravanija lost a few fans by designing a Gap t-shirt; pop music is so bound into commercialism that no-one bats an eye when Keith Richards poses for Louis Vuitton.
It’s usually implied, as befits Western cultural hierarchy, that art borrows from popular culture — that it redeems it, even — as part of a post-Duchampian mindset that lends the artist a kind of alchemical magic touch. Base matter becomes gold. But it’s when pop music returns the favour, taking art as its inspiration, that stranger and more interesting things happen. The Modern Lovers’ Pablo Picasso, David Bowie’s Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella album — it’s often when art is transmitted by other means that you end up returning to it, refreshed. Who wouldn’t love Van Gogh after hearing Jonathan Richman’s Vincent Van Gogh: “He loved, he loved life so bad/His paintings had twice the colour other paintings had”?
Picture: Salvador Dali (standing) and Alice Cooper (sitting)
Elegy for Robert Rauschenberg
Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)
— Robert Rauschenberg, 1959
Elegy for Robert Rauschenberg is an homage to an artist who was my personal hero, and my nemesis, in my student years. He was my hero because of the infallibility of his touch, and the constancy of his ability to invent and re-invent the potency and power of visual art — to push the boundaries of what art could be. He was my nemesis because I saw him as pure genius and his every gesture as perfection — conditions that were not, I thought, possible for others to attain. But my joy and delight in his work continued and my pleasure in talking with him from time to time over the years was enormous.
Curated by Paul Schimmel, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines was shown in early 2006 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. On seeing it there, and upon learning that there were no plans to film it, I asked Bob for permission to do so at the next venue, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
This elegy is dedicated to the memory of Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and to the memory of his friendship with my late husband, Earle Brown (1926-2002), whose music has been intertwined and juxtaposed here with images of the glorious Combines.
Elegy for Robert Rauschenberg has been created from footage filmed by Art21 at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles during the 2006 exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg: Combines. Among the works seen in whole or in part are Minutiae (1954); Interview (1955); Monogram (1955-59); Canyon (1959); Gift for Apollo (1959); Black Market (1961); Empire II (1961); Pantomime (1961); Ace (1962); and Gold Standard (1964).
The video is set to music composed by Earle Brown who, along with Rauschenberg, was a member of a small group of friends in the 1950s that included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Morton Feldman, Jasper Johns, and Christian Wolff, among others. In the spirit of that long-ago friendship, and in the collaborative spirit of that time and group, excerpts from the following works by Brown have been selected and collaged, with permission of The Earle Brown Music Foundation, for this video: Music for Violin, Cello, & Piano (1952); Octet I (1953); Folio and 4 Systems (1954); String Quartet (1965); New Piece (1971); and Special Events (1999).
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Special thanks to Robert Rauschenberg’s Studio and David White; Paul Schimmel and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Earle Brown Music Foundation and Thomas Fichter.
PHOTO | Production stills, 2008. © Art21, Inc.
Matthew Ritchie at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie’s The Hierarchy Problem (2003) and The Fine Constant (2003) are on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao as part of Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections, an exhibition curated by Nat Trotman and which just opened a couple of days ago. Together with three more pieces by artists David Altmejd (The University 2, 2004), Rirkrit Tiravanija (Untitled 2002 - he promised-, 2002) and Javier Pérez (Mask of Seduction, 1997), Ritchie’s multipart installation completes the selection of works that look to envelop audiences in the total experiences provided by their installations, which gain their full meaning through interaction and participation. Viewers are encouraged to dive into the pieces and explore architectural constructions and spaces through painting, sound, sculpture and a variety of different media.
In a playful game of space and physics, The Hierarchy Problem and The Fine Constant create relationships between different objects (a mural, a painting, a carpet, a light box and a sculpture), materializing the visual connections that exist in space between these objects and thus turning what we usually cannot see (the space between things in the vastness of the material universe) into a physical reality. The system of symbols used in Ritchie’s murals has a very particular beauty and appeal to the eye. Their black over white curving shapes seem to form almost an alphabet where our gaze is lost when trying to decipher its meaning.
For more information and other related materials on installations visit http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es
Laurie Anderson takes “Homeland” on tour
Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will be taking her new politico-musical on global tour starting March 26th with a kick-off at Carnegie Hall. As previously mentioned by Art21 guest blogger Seth Curcio, Homeland is composed of a series of narratives and songs that harvest everything from Greek drama to global warming, surveillance culture, the machinations of corporate America, Tuvan throat singing, technology, the Patriot Act, and even prostitution in Beverly Hills.
The full-length piece marks a return to subject matter than Anderson explored 25 years ago with United States: Parts I-IV, a work that established the artist as an innovator with a penchant for analyzing the collective psyche. Focused through the lens of technology, Anderson’s early vision of America intersected music, film, performance, electronics, and gesture-driven movement using images of telephone answering machines, televisions, and gadgetry that unmasked the human condition and ultimately heralded the age of the Internet.
Homeland ‚Äúcomes full circle with her perpetual analysis of America’s rarely talked-about inner psyche‚ĶTo watch Anderson perform is to revel in her honesty. She imparts natural truths encoded in our DNA, whether soliloquizing a narrative based on folklore or reminiscing about a trip to the laundromat in a dream. Anderson’s music and monologues are rapturous temples dedicated to our everyday existence, revealing our own insecurities‚Äù (Randy Nordschow, Playbill Arts).
An accompanying album to Homeland will be released in early 2009 on Nonesuch. For a complete listing of cities and dates for Homeland, please visit Pitchfork Media’s website.
This weekend: Trenton Doyle Hancock at Arthouse
From March 22 ‚Äì April 27, 2008, Arthouse in Austin, Texas will present the exhibition Cult of Color: Call to Color in conjunction with a new ballet by the same name. The ballet and exhibition are the results of a 2 1/2 year collaborative project between Art21 artist Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2), choreographer Stephen Mills, and composer Graham Reynolds, all Texas-based artists. Through installations, music, paintings, drawings, sketches, video collage, and more, the exhibition will “explore the complexity of translating an artist‚Äôs visual world into a compelling, innovative performance including original music and dance.”
Commissioned by Ballet Austin, Cult of Color: Call to Color tells of a battle fought between Hancock’s characters, the gentle Mounds and the mutant Vegans. Key characters include the Vegan minister, Sesom (Moses spelled backwards), a loving character, Painter, and an antagonist, Betto. A violent struggle for power between these forces are at the core of this episode in Hancock‚Äôs ongoing visual narrative.
On Saturday, March 22, from 3-5pm, Arthouse will host a panel discussion with Hancock, Mills, and Reynolds that will be conducted by Robert Faires, Arts Editor at The Austin Chronicle. This program is free and open to the public.
Arthouse is located at 700 Congress Ave., Austin, TX. 78701. Call (512) 453.5312 for more information. Visit the Arthouse website for the list of ballet performances.
