I spent yesterday with two of my oldest friends. At ten, Ben and Neill came over. We’d cleared our schedules to hang and create material for A Weavexx Yuxtapongo. Weavexx is the operational name of a thirteen or fourteen year-old improv music project we began in Ben’s parents‘ basement on weekends and summers off during college. The model for the Weavexx jam was always Can — the persistent Kraut rhythm provided the ground on which we’d build wacky, heinous, uncanny rock spectacles for our own expansion and enjoyment (and ultimate commitment to Maxell audiotape]. We don’t meet often to play music together anymore, but the principle still holds: spontaneous, creatively-centered interaction and collaboration for hilarity and poignance.

Yuxtapongo is Neill’s monthly cable-access show devoted to experimental video, broadcast in Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Durham, North Carolina. (More on the show and project of Yuxtapongo in future posts.) Though the program has an expanding international cast of contributing artists, Neill produces much of the content each month. Collaboration and spontaneity oil the chassis. Yesterday’s shoot and editing session was a pretty brilliant example of what this kind of work scenario can be: maudlin, exhilarating, stupid, fraught, hysterical, mundane, sublime and finally, somehow, completely satisfying. Starting from nothing, we called it quits with three finished pieces of totally different video, interpolations of experience documented and remade into something I’m going to go ahead and call art.

Figuring out that the things we did in our parents’ basements qualify and stand as records of creative, intentional engagement with the world is a pretty big deal. For me at least, these unstructured, oblique, contraproductive projects were always for their own sake, manifesting zones of transcendence wherein I didn‘t have to correspond to any reflective or higher-order processes or considered decisions or plans. The immediate was the grail. The realization that I seek these spaces as part of a practice has been parcel of my fundamental appraisal of my life as an artist, which is relatively young in title even as I begin my thirty-fourth year. Practice, of course, connotes mindful intent and skillful engagement in a particular scenario. As I move forward, I look to these signposts to indicate where I might find rich ways to meet the world.

John Baldessari, "Tips for Artists to Sell", 1966-68. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 56 1/2 in. The Broad Foundation, Santa Monica. © 2009 John Baldessari. Photo courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about a retrospective in the Golden State, a pack of wolves in Singapore, a dreamy gift in Berlin, de-monumentalisation in Italy, Oprah culture the world over, some fresh high-tops at Bloomingdale’s, and much more:

• The traveling retrospective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, has opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This is the only West Coast showing and features the greatest number of works (more than 150) of any venue on the show’s tour. “Pure Beauty,” says Leslie Jones, LACMA associate curator of prints and drawings, “explores Baldessari’s lifelong interest in language and mass media culture, which seems increasingly relevant — even imperative — in an era of information and image proliferation.” Beginning with his little-known paintings from the early 1960s, the exhibition features the landmark photo and text works from 1966-68, photo-compositions derived from films stills of the 1980s, irregularly shaped and over-painted works of the 1990s, as well as video and artist books. The show concludes with recent works by Baldessari (Season 5), including a special multimedia installation conceived for the retrospective. Pure Beauty closes September 12 at LACMA, and will then travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• On the occasion of Pure Beauty, Baldessari (working with the art media company ForYourArt) has created an iPad application that lets users rearrange a 17th-century Dutch still-life painting by Abraham van Beyeren. The painting, titled Banquet Still Life, is held in LACMA’s collection. According to the LA Times, Baldessari did another version of the project nine years ago. Learn more about the application at Artinfo.com.

• Stylus, a new project by Ann Hamilton (Season 1), opens at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts on July 9. Hamilton’s installation was conceived as both “a sanctuary for listening and a laboratory for experiments in collective vocal exercises.” The installation asks the following questions: How do we communicate? What external forces act upon or inhibit our collective need for social contact and response? How are relationships enacted (or not enacted) by the architectural spaces we inhabit? Go behind the scenes of the installation by visiting the Pulitzer’s blog.

• Head On — a massive installation of 99 life-sized wolves — was created by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3) for his solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2006. It is now on view at the National Museum of Singapore. Via the museum: “Seen from afar, the leaping wolf pack forms an arc full of force and power, their fierce courage and spirit of warrior camaraderie seemingly serving as a reminder to people: humanity is easily blinded by a kind of collective mentality and action, and is destined to repeat such error to an almost unbelievable degree. The crux of this installation lies just before the glass wall, as the artist reminds people: invisible walls are the hardest to dismantle.” The second and third parts of this installation, Illusion II and Vortex, are also on view. Closes August 31.

• Works by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the fourteenth edition of the International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara, Italy. The theme of this edition is the “radical process of de-monumentalisation which has freed sculpture from any celebratory, encomiastic function.” Browse the artist roster here. The biennale closes October 31.

• Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010, an exhibition of works by Beryl Korot (Season 1), has opened at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. This marks the artist’s most extensive museum project by  to date, featuring six never-before-seen works. Her new pieces reflect an ongoing interest in how our communication tools mirror the way we present and receive information. Among the works on view are Korot’s multi-channel video work, Text and Commentary, which premiered at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977. Curator Harry Philbrick points out, “Korot was the co-founder and co-editor of the ground-breaking 1970s publication Radical Software, the first magazine to explore the notion of alternative communication systems and formats for conveying information. Today, when new media is an imperative in our connected world, she continues to create fresh work that illuminates the structure of communication.” Continues through January 2, 2011.

• Dream Passage is the first major retrospective exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Bruce Nauman to be staged in Berlin. Presented by the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, the exhibition celebrates a new gift to the museum from collector Friedrich Christian Flick: Nauman’s Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care (1984). This “architectural sculpture” has been installed in collaboration with the artist and will now be on permanent display. Other examples of Nauman’s “experience architecture,” also on view, include Corridor Installation (Nick Wilder Installation) (1970), where visitors are recorded by a video camera and then confronted with their own image; and Kassel Corridor: Elliptical Space (1972), created for Documenta 5. Dream Passage closes October 10.

• Double Sexus, on view at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in Berlin, juxtaposes over 70 works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) and Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). The exhibition is designed to show their “striking parallels.” The artists never met, but they were both in Paris at the same time: Bellmer came to Paris from Berlin the same year that Bourgeois moved from Paris to New York. The central topics of the exhibition, according to the museum website, are “female fantasies and male fears, the ambiguous nature of everything sexual and the links between eroticism and creativity.” Closes August 15.

• Through July 10, new works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view at Gladstone Gallery in Brussels. In this exhibition, Pettibon continues to use collage, drawing, and painting to conjure earlier established themes and imagery mined from Noir and B movies, cult icons, literature, television, political propaganda, and old comic books. “This broad range of historical references not only foregrounds Pettibon’s own interest in appropriating past visual and literary styles,” states the Gladstone website, “but also invokes the schizophrenic and pathological impulses at work in the American imaginary.”

• Les Grands Ensembles (The Housing Projects) (1994/2001), an important video installation by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe, is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through October 19. It is included in the special exhibition Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection. Huyghe’s piece is described as: “a fixed view of two residential towers in a bleak urban landscape, swathed in fog at night. Lacking any signs of human activity, the buildings appear to take on lives of their own as the video’s buzzing electronic soundtrack, composed by Pan Sonic and Cédric Pigot, builds in intensity. Windows in the two façades begin to light up rhythmically and with increasing frequency, as if communicating in some sort of code…”

• Pattern, Costume, and Ornamentation in African and African-American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art features works by Fred Wilson (Season 3) and Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), among others. The exhibition attempts to show how African and African-American artists incorporate design and decoration into photography, sculpture, quilts, and other forms. Wilson’s photographic series of antique dolls, titled Old Salem: A Family of Strangers, is included. Closes September 12.

• Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters, a new publication from Aspen Art Museum, is the definitive collection of collages that Bradford (Season 4) has been working on since 2006. The book features more than 100 full-color reproductions, as well as essays by Dia Art Foundation Director Philippe Vergne, Los Angeles-based artist and writer Ernest Hardy, Los Angeles-based cultural critic Malik Gaines, and Aspen Art Museum Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. Purchase Merchant Posters here.

• Jenny Holzer (Season 4) is in the New York Times again, most recently for her sneaker project to benefit the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Protect Me From What I Want,” a line from her 1980s Survival series, is printed on canvas Keds sneakers that will be sold at Bloomingdale’s beginning July 8. The black-and-white high-top version retails for $75, low-tops for $70. Read more about Holzer’s project here.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) was also featured in the New York Times last week. The article discusses, among other things, Homeland, the artist’s first album of new material in nearly 10 years. Anderson is quoted as saying, “[The album] came out of frustration from living in this Oprah Winfrey culture where everything is done for you and people are just infantilized. I mean, that show is based on the premise that there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just a human being. It’s not easy being a human being.”

• Andrea Zittel (Season 1) speaks to Artforum about her project, Indianapolis Island, for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

• The Guardian names Zittel Artist of the Week.

Note: We will not post a roundup next week, July 5, due to the holiday.

Scenery by Santiago Calatrava, image (c) Paul Kolnik

As an art form, dance is a mixture of the visual and the auditory. While we watch dancers perform aesthetic pieces onstage, we hear music meant to enhance the experience. Because of this inclusive nature of dance, collaborations among designers, musicians, and choreographers are commonplace and have been for some time, allowing for artists in their respective fields to showcase their talent alongside each other. In 1913, Nijinsky and Stravinsky brought audiences the ballet, The Rite of Spring before a set by the designer Roerich. Picasso designed the scenery and costumes for Cocteau’s ballet Parade in 1917, which was set to music by Satie. And closer to home, Merce Cunningham initiated a number of creative and fruitful partnerships. He worked with musicians such as John Cage, Sonic Youth, Sigur Rós and Radiohead, and visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Olafur Eliasson. Though he hasn’t worked with a dance company yet, William Kentridge, who was featured in Art:21 Season 5, has designed sets for productions of The Magic Flute and The Nose.

The New York City Ballet is presenting the latest dance-art relationship, offering what could be described as a gesamtkunstwerk, the Wagnerian term for a total work of art. Their Spring 2010 season features an extensive listing of artistic collaborations among instrumental music, dance choreography, and the visual arts. Among the new commissions are four original scores and seven new ballets, five of which are to be performed against backdrops designed by renowned Spanish architect and artist Santiago Calatrava. It is appropriately called The Architecture of Dance. Commissioning scenery from an architect is an interesting choice on the part of the Ballet and must have been an exciting challenge for Calatrava. While sets change throughout a short work of dance, buildings and bridges — Calatrava’s usual fare — are meant to last.

Scenery by Santiago Calatrava, image (c) Paul Kolnik

Calavatra is known for designing light-filled, airy buildings. Best known in this country for his expansion to the Milwaukee Art Museum, he has designed prolifically in Europe, bringing France the Lyon Airport Station, and Spain the Alamillo Bridge in Seville. In 2014, his World Trade Center Transportation Hub is scheduled to open in lower Manhattan. Calatrava is also an artist and a sculptor; the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently staged Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture into Architecture, an exhibit showing how many of his signature buildings began as sculptures.

Over at Lincoln Center, I went to see Melissa Barak’s new work, Call Me Ben, about the 1940s gangster Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, who built the first luxury hotel in Las Vegas. The New York City Ballet commissioned Barak’s choreography to accompany a commissioned score by Jay Greenberg. Gilles Mendel designed the glamorous costumes. The scenery Calatrava designed for Call Me Ben is simple and painterly, relying on palm trees and golden-hued mountains to evoke the American West. The other Calatrava sets for this project are a mix of painted backdrops and sleek geometric designs.

A collaboration such as this highlights the close-knit nature of the greater art world and the possibility for artists in any field to think outside the box and explore new modes of creativity. Bringing in a visual artist to work on a ballet project reminds those of us in the fine art world to view dance as a visual art form. Instead of using paint and canvas, dance relies on its dancers’ bodies to make shapes and forms on the stage. These are sometimes more literal, telling a clear story, and sometimes abstract. The increase in the popularity and visibility of performance art (more on this in a later post) certainly helps bridge the dance-art/architecture gap. Hopefully we will see more contemporary artists teaming up with visionaries from other artistic fields to bring us more exciting and thoughtful pieces.

"Raymond Pettibon" 1999-2000. Installation view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

While sitting in his office listening to some soon to be released albums, Ken Shipley quickly noted, “we have found a way as a record label to be like a band.” Founded in 2003 by Shipley, Tom Lunt, and Rob Sevier, Numero Group has done just that. With almost 60 releases to date, the company has garnered a devoted fan base and established itself as a leading archival record label. Similar to the alternative apartment spaces within Chicago, Numero Group has set up shop on the first floor of a three-story brick home here in town. With series like Eccentric Soul, Good God!, and Cult Cargo, it has traveled far and wide in search of records that share not only a distinct sound but also a unique story.

Album artwork for "Eccentric Soul: The Tragar & Note Labels," courtesy of Numero Group

Meg Onli: You have spoken before about building your compilations based on not only your (and everyone else in Numero Group’s) collection, but also that of retired DJs, performers, and fans. Could you talk about how you would typically go about making a compilation?

Ken Shipley: I think there is a misnomer about what it is that we actually do. The amount of time that we spend in the crates is really minimal. Most of the projects that we are working on we found through other research or development or work that we have already done. Like in the case of this Lowlands record that we just made, digging for the records are almost impossible. Two records came out of the entire studio, but we ended up buying the entire contents of the studio. I think people get the impression that we are crazy crate diggers that are running around the world looking for records.

MO: Record digging has become a romanticized act. Do you think that is why the term “music archeology” is often linked to your work, even though it may be inaccurate?

KS: I think what we do is more like cultural anthropology than music anthropology. I think people get into this archeology thing because it is a really good way to put the digging aspect into it. Like I said, our fingernails do not get dirty on a lot of projects. There are some, certainly, but for the most part it’s really just cultural anthropology. There are very few ‘arc of the covenants’ that are waiting to be found, and we have found a handful of them, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of what you are finding are small things.

***

When I first discovered Numero Group with its album, Eccentric Soul: The Big Mack Label, I was impressed by the research that was put into the liner notes. Unlike traditional liner notes that often housed lyrics and song credits, these gave a full history of the label with a thoughtful essay, and visual documentation that included photographs, business cards, and handwritten notes. I had a chance to check out some liner notes Numero Group were working on and talk to Ken about how they decided to accompany their records with a history of each project.

***

Album artwork for "Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up," courtesy of Numero Group

KS: When we make a record, we want to make something that is not only aurally orally satisfying but also satisfying as a story to read. You have a two-prong element, you have a good listen, but it is also a really fascinating story…I will be the first person to admit that we certainly have records [where] the story is stronger than the music. A lot of the time, we make those because it is a great story and the records are kind of like the soundtrack. Not every great soundtrack to a great movie is a great soundtrack. There are plenty of fantastic movies that have [bad] soundtracks. I don’t think we have ever made a shitty soundtrack, but we have made some things that are very curious.

There are a lot of reissue companies out there that, I won’t name any names, write a set of liner notes and they’re filled with things like, ‘There are two known copies of this record.’ They want to insert themselves as a character into the story. Numero is not a character in the story of a fifty-year-old black record label. It’s just not.

MO: Some people have noted your sixth album, Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up as a turning point in your production. This past year, you have released a book, Light on the South Side (documenting the club life of Chicago’s South Side from 1975-1977) and a film, Celestial Navigations (archiving the work of Al Jarnow). What milestones do you see in your catalog?

KS: There is a trajectory over the first twelve records, and it just gets better. You can see a progression. I can see how we got to thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. We hit our stride in those records. In one of them, we went to the Bahamas, did our second Miami record, and Don’t Stop: Recording Tap in one trip. The record that is really the turning point is Twinight. It was the record that we put so much into because we knew we could not go back from this.

"Light: On The South Side," courtesy of Numero Group

I think the book is certainly one point for us. When the dummy came back from the printer, we asked ourselves, ‘How do [we] go back to [picks up a cd booklet] this after [we] made that?’ It does not compute. Everything we have been doing since then has to be as great as that.

***

This month, Numero will be releasing a curiosity within its collection, Eccentric Breaks and Beats, an album that is essentially a bootleg of its catalog. With no “real” beginning or end, the 40-minute album mixes samples from many of their records. Weaving Baltimore girl groups with soul music from the Bahamas, the pastiche seamlessly blends the songs I already liked into what I imagine would be perfect lounge music (the kind you would want to hear in a mod blaxploitation film). As we listened to some of Ken’s favorite samples from the record, I checked out the album artwork. Unlike anything in their collection, the cover is in the style of a 90s rap compilation, fully equipped with a skeleton and a bad graffiti font. When asked about the artwork for the album, Ken discussed how they decided to use a style not typical of their previous works.

***

KS: When we decided to make this record, we wondered how we could make a record that feels like a fake. Something that is like a really good forgery, when in fact it is a forgery. The music itself is an edit. It is a very long edit of a bunch of Numero stuff. We looked at the Ultimate Breaks and Beats cover and [thought] that stupid skull and ghetto [font] really kind of worked for us. It was like we were paying tribute to a shitty time in making records as in how low the expectations were. [In this album] we are not trying to tell the story of the bootleg. So we said, ‘Why don’t we make this?’ [He hands me a small booklet that reads, '1 stop records, 2348 S. Marshall Field']

The back of the record says, “distributed by Little Village One Stop Record Exchange,” which is our fake distribution company. So we asked ourselves, ‘what other records would One Stop Record Exchange do?’ That is how we came up with it. These are the liner notes for a record that basically doesn’t exist.

Album artwork for "Eccentric Breaks & Beats," courtesy of Numero Group

MO: Any major record company would have shut the album down. How did you guys decide to publish it?

KS: We heard the record and we really liked it and we asked, ‘how do we monetize this instead of taking the Danger Mouse Grey Album approach of just shutting it down?’ We could have just pulled it out of print, but that is where it becomes something that is really scarce. The Danger Mouse record bootlegged far more after the bootleg was shut down. It kind of created more mystique for that record, which is great, but also nobody got paid. We wanted everyone to win on this record, every artist sampled. It doesn’t just have to be the distributors, the record stores, and some guy selling them for $4.50 a piece. We thought it was a really cool record and we thought ‘God, we can make this. Lets not stifle it, let’s let it bloom.’

I feel like this record is going to transcend our audience and become a record for a lot of different people. It’s just such a cool listen that I think people are going to gravitate towards it. Does it get picked up? Do people want to sample it? That is why I think it can be a bigger record, let’s say, than an Eccentric Soul album or the Fern Jones. And because it is in two twenty-minute segments, there is no breaking it up. There is no single. You just listen to it. I really liken it to the Avalanche’s record. I do not have a favorite track. I like it all the way through.

MO: Well, the album is breaking the convention of what a track should be. You are not limited to your 2 to 4 minutes in order for it to be a single that might be played on the radio or made into a music video.

KS: We don’t care about the single. We don’t have any singles. We can live within the margins of the music business and be extremely successful. We have a completely different mindset. If you are in this office right now, there are no brushed metal nameplates, there are no glass doors. There is nothing like that. That is an old world, which is a dying world. The new music business is going to be built in people’s basements, in run-down little houses, and all kinds of secondary environments that don’t have to be on the fourteenth floor of a building in Manhattan.

Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko in "Red"

John Logan’s play Red, currently playing at the Golden Theater, New York, centers around a perennial ethical conundrum many successful artists face: whether or not to “sell out” to corporate interests. In the play, Mark Rothko, played by Alfred Molina (you can’t help but wonder if Pollock would have been a more appropriate choice, given his multi-limbed turn as Dr. Octopus in Spider Man 2) battles through the ethics of accepting the Four Seasons commission for the Seagram building in 1959 for a series of mural-sized paintings. Rothko’s quandary, played out through combative and discursive dialogues with his young assistant, has become a modernist parable and yardstick of art’s relationship to the wider society. In the end (spoiler alert!), Rothko turned down the commission after having dinner in the restaurant with his wife (“Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine,” he growled famously, making sure his assistant got the words down right), perhaps having assumed that his works would be visible to office workers rather than the upper echelons of Manhattan society. This seems unlikely, given his apparent intention to create a nightmarish, claustrophobic atmosphere in the paintings, inspired by the unsettling vestibule of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence. It’s more probable that his airless, funereal canvases were made as an act of spectacularly ungrateful hand-biting.

Whatever the reason, Rothko did ultimately refuse the commission, offering the majority of his paintings instead to the Tate in London, where nine of them now hang. Their belated redemption – in a public, free museum, where their low-lit installation implicitly evokes a hermetic, sacred space – has secured the artist as a kind of latterday spiritualist, committed entirely to the production of art and not the swelling of his bank balance. With one beady eye on posterity (Rothko was obsessed with his own place in art history, as were many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists), Rothko sought to save himself from accusations of craven commercialism. By refusing the commission, he bought himself a place in a Romantic pantheon alongside Courbet, Michelangelo, and Pollock. Even his death – by his own hand, in a bath, in 1970 – seemed calculated to resonate with art-historical tradition: a bit Marat, a bit Van Gogh.

The relationship between culture and commercialism is an implicit and ongoing subject in our contemporary society of late Romantic yearning for significance. Rock music – the last real bastion of Romanticism, after Warhol made commercialism a fit artistic subject in itself – has been obsessed since its inception with its own authenticity. Popular music’s fixation with authenticity – from hip hop’s disingenuous rallying-cry to “keep it real” while bathed in spangly bling, to Kurt Cobain’s willful rejection of his band’s own popularity and that eternal riposte to populism, “the difficult second album” – is part of its self-definition, whatever it sounds like. So if rock music had, by the late 60s, siphoned off the residue of the 19^th century Romantic tradition, where does that leave art now?

Kurt Cobain with daughter Frances Bean

The fact is that the conjoining of art and corporate interests apparently ushered in by Warhol has been (like almost anything ostensibly ushered in by Warhol) greatly exaggerated. Even in his time, contemporaries like Judd and, latterly, Smithson and Heizer – always white and nearly always male – perpetuated a cartoonishly Romantic mistrust of commerce by making works of art that couldn’t be sold – ephemeral, site-specific, geographically isolated large-scale interventions into a landscape. There were, however, always ways to make money on the side, through various kinds of documentation associated with the project. Land art’s apparent anti-commercial bias did what any cultural movement away from the commercial mainstream did – it drove more buyers to it (we’re all 15-year old boys at heart). Much to Cobain’s chagrin, In Utero sold as well as Nevermind. What’s tied up in this is a 19^th-century notion of an artist’s ethical purity, that artists are a society’s conscience. Rothko’s conundrum is axiomatic but not isolated.

Peter Paul Rubens, "Self-Portrait," 1639. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The retention of the notion that artists should be against society rather than for it draws the line more definitively between art of our time and that of the past. Whatever superficial connections we’re encouraged to draw between contemporary and historical art, they rarely have much in common. Rothko’s brow-clutching angst would have been laughable to, say, Rubens, who quite happily made aggrandizing portraits of the very wealthy at the same time as producing impassioned visual pleas against war. Corporate sponsorship simply wasn’t a matter for concern before Romanticism made it an issue. Artists in the Renaissance had their works funded by bankers whose portraits they agreed to wedge into religious scenes, even letting them play the Magi if the price was right. This sort of self-aggrandizing patronage was necessary and wasn’t a choice for artists in the 15^th century, given the paucity of patronal options. And yet it’s not at all the same thing as corporate patronage now, which leads us on to a very contemporary kerfuffle over contemporary art’s relationship with unethical fiscal power.

Julie Mehretu’s 80-foot-long painting for the lobby of the Goldman Sachs office in New York provides an apt lesson in the ethics of corporate patronage in 2010. Revelations of the investment bank’s misleading mortage investments (which lead Gordon Brown to describe the firm as “morally bankrupt”) had not appeared by the time Mehretu accepted the commission. Interviewed by Calvin Tompkins in The New Yorker recently, the artist made her motives quite clear: this would be her largest commission to date, and would be visible to the public through the glass-fronted lobby (with more than a shade of Rothko’s quasi-socialist aspirations for the Seagram murals). The huge canvas, made in Mehretu’s signature exploded-diagram style, hasn’t been entirely popular with staff (see Courtney Comstock’s blog post here, which berates the painting because it doesn’t even have a title!), but what’s more interesting is Tompkins and Mehretu’s awkward justifications for its existence.

At one point, the author asks the painter if she’d have accepted the commission if the revelations of corporate wrongdoing had been made available to her. “Without hesitation,” she replies. “I don’t see it as an evil institution, but part of the larger system we all participate in.” The virtue of Mehretu’s own work aside, isn’t the point of the unfolding Goldman Sachs scandal that it was operating outside of “the larger system” of corporate ethical responsibility? In reference to artist’s acceptance of commissions from ethically dubious patrons, Tompkins whimsically concludes: “Fair enough, I guess. If art were judged by the company it keeps, much of the High Renaissance would go down the drain.” Which isn’t an honest comparison, given the limited range of available patrons during the Renaissance due to a more or less feudal economic system. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to artists such as Raphael or Titian that the conditions of their practice had ethical repercussions. That’s what artmaking was then.

Julie Mehretu

Is it reasonable to berate Mehretu for her acceptance of the commission? On the one hand, it’s a bit adolescent to take a finger-wagging position on “sell-outs.” It’s not as though corporate interests don’t dominate both public and private institutions, from UBS’s extensive funding of the rehang of Tate Modern to the Letrasetted lists of corporate funders on every museum wall in the world. On the other, residual Romantic reservations about the overt capitulation to corporate interests generate a queasy aftertaste, especially given Goldman Sachs’ unspooling ethical wrongdoings. It’s hard not to see Mehretu’s mural as backdrop to and symbol of the unraveling of unchecked greed, as it became last week on a Huffington Post page accompanying further revelations – those whirling, dismantling blocks and curves are almost embarrassingly prescient and metaphorical. Maybe it’s inappropriate to look back at Rothko’s “bodacious kernels of windbaggery,” as Stephanie Zacharek brilliantly put it, but there’s something about the artist’s genuine anxiety over his art’s function in the world – however pompously or portentously put – that provides an historical corrective to the sometimes ethically confused world of contemporary art.

Photo courtesy of LA Opera.

All my windows look into windows of other apartments and, on warm days like those we’ve had lately, I’m set up for delicious eavesdropping. I like it best when my neighbors sing. Two nights ago, it was to Lady Gaga. Yesterday afternoon, however, the neighbor to my south, whose voice is as endearingly over-eager as Rachel’s from Glee, was singing opera. A cappella. Usually this would have fascinated me, but yesterday I was listening to opera of my own, trying to understand the Wagner’s Ring Cycle before L.A.’s immense, city-wide Ring Festival commences in L.A.

Staging Wagner’s Ring Cycle typically involves elaborate sets, exuberant costumes, and 17 hours of highly produced, melodramatic music that pits mortals against gods. L.A.’s Ring Festival is headier, functioning almost like a city-wide conference set up to parse every nuance of Wagner’s music and life. Not surprisingly, the Festival has riled up its share of controversy. L.A. isn’t rolling in green at the moment, as my co-blogger Lily Simonson recently explained, and the Ring Cycle costs $32 million, some of which is on loan from the county (“that’s what counties do, build subways and put on Rings,” LA Times’s critic Mark Swed said Tuesday on KCRW’s Politics of Culture). But money isn’t the most interesting controversy surrounding the Ring.

Ed Winkleman recently gave a rational, convincing argument for the “non-existence of unethical art,” and I think most people would instinctively agree that bad (unethical) artists don’t always make bad art and good (ethical) artists don’t always make good art and that ethics aren’t really the best barometer for determining the goodness and badness of art. Still, the prospect of a truly unethical artist making stunning art is seductively mysterious.

Wagner, notorious for fierce anti-Semitism, was not a good man (had he not written great music dramas, Marc A. Weiner suggests at a Hammer Museum lecture, “he would be just a forgotten narcissistic crackpot from 19^th-century Germany, bombastic racist and social theorist with a mean personality and bad manners”). Some dissenters argue that such a man does not deserve a festival. The response given by the heads behind this festival is: “it’s complicated.” This festival endeavors to show just how complicated by addressing everything from Wagner’s renegade politics to his resonance with superheroes.

Ryan Taber, "Looking out fearfully upon the confined deep," 2010. Courtesy Torrance Art Museum.

It is complicated, of course. So are most things, and acknowledging that has lately become synonymous with taking a conscientious approach to making and thinking. This weekend, I drove down to the Torrance Art Museum to visit a sweeping, half-elegant, half-fugitive exhibition by sculptor Ryan Taber. Called Looking out fearfully upon the confined deep, the exhibition acknowledges complexity with neurotic diligence.

Home Depot-style pallets make up the stacked foundation on which a monstrous paper lantern with a long trunk; a non-functional pulley-system balancing fangs of petrified wood, out of which grows a derelict National Parks sign, with a circular modernist cage that resembles an industrial floor plan; and intentionally rustic furniture crafted by Taber for Kaguya, his own collaborative line. The level of disrepair and the level of precision vary. Styles and ideas of the past—the nationalism of fossil-finders like Thomas Jefferson; the sense of entitlement that architects and artists of early America and America of the 50s, 60s, and 70s equally embraced; or the belief that ideology is equivalent to identity—are presented as un-selfconscious, blind to the damages they caused. But then Taber’s own crafted furniture wholeheartedly indulges in the romance of the rustic, and the arrangements of the sculptures on exhibit reveal a fascination with composition for composition’s sake, aesthetic decisions that are simply elegant. The whole exhibition casts a mirror on itself, mimicking, critiquing, and parodying its stylistic predecessors but also reverently reflecting their famous tropes.

Ryan Taber, "Looking out fearfully upon the confined deep," 2010. Courtesy Torrance Art Museum

I remember listening to an interview David Foster Wallace gave just after he published Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. He talked about how self-conscious artists and writers of his generation had become. “The idea of being perceived and judged by another subjectivity is horrifying,” Wallace said. “Everything has an element of presentation and interpretation…before I say the thing, I already scan and triage your possible responses to it and my responses to your responses and the portraits we’re going to get of each other.”

Wallace’s strategy for avoiding judgment was to acknowledge as many complexities as he could in his writing, to juxtapose charmlessness with charm, to mimic different voices in order to foreground the authenticity of his own, and to be pretentiously smart without being pretentiously off-putting. The organizers of the Ring Festival, like Ryan Taber, adopt a similar method–acknowledging complexity in order to, hopefully, use intense self-awareness to locate something honest. I’m not sure how well this method works, whether it’s ethical or if it’s the way to get to good art, but it’s certainly of our time.

John Feodorov, "Fairy Tale", (detail), 2007. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 50 in. Courtesy Valise Gallery.

Sparkling Nepalese paper, race and civil rights, a northern island, circular botanics, fluorescent lights, a ton of vinyl records, and a few reviews in today’s roundup:

• Season 1 artist John Feodorov is included in the two-person exhibition De-Natured at Valise Gallery, an artist-run collective on the island of Vashon, Washington. Feodorov (based in Seattle) and Lauren Atkinson (of Whidbey Island) were students of Valise member Beverly Naidus over twenty years ago when they were undergraduate art students at California State University Long Beach. Their work in De-Natured addresses “our complex relationship with nature and the conflicting sensations many of us feel in its presence.” Feodorov explains his work: “Several years ago, I visited the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon, near my family’s land in New Mexico. This was during the much-hyped Harmonic Convergence when people were gathering at numerous traditional sacred sites around the world. Along the inside perimeter of one of the large kivas, a throng of tie-dyed spiritual enthusiasts formed a circle while sitting in lotus position. At the axis, they had erected a plastic totem pole, an object possessing no significance to the native peoples of the Southwest. Their act, while well intentioned, seemed more like an act of spiritual desperation than of re-connection. It is this kind of sincere yet misguided event that interests me as an artist.” De-Natured closes March 31.

• On March 16, The Getty Center will screen Legacy: Black and White in America, a documentary that premiered on PBS that explores the legacy of the civil rights movement and looks at the lives of African Americans today through conversations with figures in business, politics, academia, the media, and the arts. Following the screening, cultural commentator Lawrence Weschler will lead a discussion about the legacy of race and civil rights in contemporary art and museum practice. Kerry James Marshall (Season 1), who is featured in the video, will be part of that conversation. The event begins at 6pm. Click here for more information.

• La Saison the F[euml]tes (The Season of Celebrations) — a site-specific installation of flowers, plants and trees by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe — opens March 17 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reine Sofia in the Palacio de Cristal. For this project, Huyghe will place different plants associated with various holiday periods in a circle, each one of them characteristic of a specific time of year. The arrangement is to be read as a clock with the different seasons marked by the diversity of flora — roses, violets, chrysanthemums, palm trees, plum trees, jasmine, bamboo, and firs. La Saison the F[euml]tes closes May 31.

• On March 30, Kiki Smith (Season 2) will speak at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) along with the curators of Philagrafika 2010, an exhibition that celebrates printmaking in contemporary art. Smith’s work is included in the core exhibition of Philagrafika, The Graphic Unconscious, simultaneously on view at PAFA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, the Temple Gallery at Tyler School of Art, and The Print Center. Using fragile sheets of Nepalese paper, Kiki Smith installed two walls of PAFA’s gallery with an array of small and large-scale works. Smith will discuss the major themes in this work and her ongoing interest in printmaking techniques and processes. The event begins at 6pm.

• Through May 16, works by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view in Vinyl at La Maison Rouge in Paris. The exhibition of close to 800 albums, tapes, CDs, specialist magazines, reference books, catalogues and artworks is drawn from the collection of British collector, publisher and curator Guy Schraenen. Vinyl shows LPs from “an acoustic and visual angle” to illustrate how artists from the 1920s through today have experimented with language and sound. Visitors can listen to every record in the collection at a specially-designed deck.

• Martin Puryear Prints, an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, surveys a decade of the Season 2 artist’s printmaking. Puryear’s prints are inspired by various interests that are also visible in his well-known sculptures — furniture, basketry and his international travels. Curator of Prints, Kristin Spangenberg, says, “Puryear has created a body of printed works that extract the essence of minimalist abstraction with an appreciation of natural forms and ordinary objects.” The exhibition continues through June 13.

• Colorforms, a long-term exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, explores color and abstract form in artworks from the Hirshhorn’s collection that date from 1949 to the present. Milk Run (1996), a fluorescent-light installation by Season 1 artist James Turrell, is on view alongside works by Paul Sharits, Fred Sandback, Mark Rothko, Anish Kapoor, and Wolfgang Laib through winter 2011.

• The traveling survey exhibition of works by Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has made its way to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in the UK. Read recent reviews of the show from Laura Cumming of The Observer; Adrian Searle of The Guardian; and Jonathan Brown of The Independent.

• Read what critics for Bloomberg and the New York Times are saying about The Nose, produced by William Kentridge (Season 5) for the Metropolitan Opera. The performance continues through March 25.

Moviola, “Dead Knowledge”. Catbird Records, CBR010, 2007. Image courtesy of Catbird Records.

Ryan Catbird has commanded a silent influence on the independent music scene since he began his blog, The Catbirdseat, in 2002. Ryan could possibly be credited for bringing bands such as Destroyer, Beirut, Frightened Rabbit, Pete and the Pirates closer to the public spotlight. Anyone who follows his blog would probably agree: Ryan Catbird has an honest, sincere, and genuine passion for music, with no pretense attached whatsoever. Which is why Ryan would probably never credit himself for “breaking” a band…and also why you would expect him to do more than just write about music.

In 2005, Ryan took this passion a step further by launching a boutique record label, Catbird Records. Through over 20 releases, the label has not just built a foundation of releasing reputably great music, but they’ve also managed to add a touch of personality by way of packaging and presentation. Jewel cases be damned—just about every release is a reflection of the care that went into the overall process. Machines didn’t put these packages together; people did.

The label’s most recent release is an LP reissue of the 2002 Unbunny album, Black Strawberries—the album’s first-ever vinyl pressing. This was no ordinary release, however. In one of the more exciting uses of the Kickstarter, Ryan was able to fund the entire process, releasing not just an album, but also an entire experience. I recently spoke to Ryan via email to learn more about this latest release, as well as his process.

Unbunny, “Black Strawberries” deluxe edition, one of the 75. Catbird Records, CSP008, 2010.

Jonathan Munar: There must be plenty of albums that you think deserve the “deluxe reissue” treatment. How did you arrive at Unbunny’s Black Strawberries for your inaugural Kickstarter project?

Ryan Catbird: It’s true that my head holds a long list of worthy reissues, but I think Black Strawberries was at the fore for this one simply because it’s the one I’ve pined for (vinyl-wise) the most over this last handful of years. And I definitely pined, because when I really love an album (as I do Black Strawberries), I always want it on vinyl. We listen to a lot of records in my house, and certainly not for any sort of “indie hipness” reasons, and not necessarily for nostalgia’s sake, but because I really like to sit down and actively listen to albums—as opposed to them just being background noise while I do something else—and the LP format really lends itself to that.

JM: Let’s talk a bit about the packaging process. It was nice to see a return of the one-of-a-kind, hand-painted packaging, which you used for the outer sleeves of the Black Strawberries deluxe version, and which you introduced with the very first Catbird Records release in 2005 (a split LP with Michael Holt and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin). What inspired the return to this process?

RC: Ha, I think it was less “inspiration” in this case, and more just a “creative solution” to a situation! The situation being that during the early funding phase, I sold a lot of people on copies of a (nebulous at that time) “Deluxe” edition of the LP. At the time, I had no concrete idea about just what exactly would comprise a “Deluxe” edition, but once I had 75 people committed to paying $40 each for them, I really needed to sit down and figure out a way to give all those people some real bang for those bucks they so generously pledged. The hand-painting came to mind because it adds such a unique value to every copy, and, from a budgetary standpoint, only costs as much as paint and paper stock (assuming my time and labor is equivalent to $0).

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin/Michael Holt split, “Someone Still Loves You Michael Holt: A Scrapbook For You”. Catbird Records, CBR001, 2005. Image courtesy of Catbird Records.

JM: The Michael Holt/SSLYBY split was an edition of 250, while the Black Strawberries sleeves were an edition of 75. How do the processes compare between both projects? Do you do all of that painting yourself?

RC: The difference between that first one and this one was that with the split, I had a lot of help in the fabrication. I had a “construction party” one night at my house, and all my friends came over and help piece all the copies together. On top of that, the responsibility for this pressing was split up amongst Holt, Yeltsin, and myself, meaning that I was only responsible for fabricating about 83 copies. But though I did have help on the actual package construction, I did do all of those cover paintings on my lot alone (Holt and Yeltsin both painted their own respective sets). With Unbunny, I handled everything, and again, I did all the paintings myself. And the biggest difference between the Holt/Yelstin split and Black Strawberries is that painting the first one was a much simpler process—those covers were essentially a background color and line art on top. With Black Strawberries, the paintings were all much more elaborate and substantial and required quite a bit more time and effort to complete.

JM: All of the items in the Black Strawberries deluxe version utilize techniques and formats that you used in previous releases—the aforementioned hand-painted component; the Catbird Mini 7″ sleeve; the black paper sleeve—but one format, which you haven’t used in a while, is the hand-screened arigato sleeve. In fact, PWRFL Power used that same type of packaging for the album that followed his own EP on Catbird Records. Have you decided to no longer produce that type of packaging? If so, why?

RC: There are a few reasons why I phased out of the screenprinted sleeves, and both of them are practical. First, the japanese Gocco company, which manufactured my screening setup, went under. The supplies—the inks, the bulbs, the screens—became increasingly hard to procure, and are actually now pretty much nonexistent. On top of that, I decided I needed to switch from a “selling inventory” kind of process to a more “on demand” system. So I invested in a disc replicator and large-format Epson pigment printer, and now, instead of sitting on a large pile of inventory that hangs around waiting to be bought, I’ve got a pretty modular system where I can just fabricate a copy of a release as the orders are placed.

Just to be clear: I love those screenprinted packages, and I really do wish I could continue doing them, but it’s hard to justify the cost and labor involved with those, particularly when it becomes harder and harder with each passing day to sell a CD copy of anything—screenprinted sleeve or otherwise.

Pet Politics, “The Spring” EP. Catbird Records, CBR007, 2006. Image courtesy of Catbird Records.

JM: It’s really fascinating—and totally logical—how your process has evolved from a “selling inventory” model to a “print on demand” model. In fact, you have quite often advocated for labels/publications/etc. to shift to print-on-demand production processes. So then I have to ask: in moving to an on-demand production process, do you intend to keep certain titles in print beyond a limited run (I noticed that the Apollo Ghosts’ Forgotten Triangle EP is still available)? Likewise, would you ever consider making “second editions” of out-of-print titles that are more “on-demand friendly”? Those two Pet Politics EPs were pretty good.

RC: For the most part (with a few exceptions), the latest CD releases are not “set” at a certain pressing amount. Basically, current releases will just be kept in print as long as there’s still interest—and with the Apollo Ghosts disc, it still sells a copy or two every few weeks. As far as doing represses of anything older, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Those were all created with finite pressings in mind, so they’ll stay that way—unless of course the band wants to rerelease it themselves, which they are totally free to do; Air Waves does this with her CD.

But yes, I agree, those two Pet Politics EPs were pretty good

JM: You’ve also dabbled with giclee prints for both the “giant size” version of Forest Fire’s Survival (in an edition of 20…yeah, I totally bought one) and Jason Zumpano’s Roses 9.99 Dozen. Do you expect to revisit this technique, as well?

RC: Oh, I’ll absolutely continue doing the art prints, because as far as I’m concerned, that’s the next-best thing to having, say, hand-screenprinted stuff. In the end, it’s not really cheaper in terms of materials cost (because the paper stock and inks are extraordinarily expensive), but it’s so much more practical from a labor standpoint.

Jason Zumpano, “Roses $9.99 Dozen” + giclee/310gsm prints of art by Shayne Ehman. Catbird Records, CSP006, 2009.

JM: Given the logistics and the time spent on the Black Strawberries project, do you plan on doing another project of comparable scale? Would you use Kickstarter again for funding?

RC: I would love to do another, and yes, I would absolutely use Kickstarter again—they are such an amazing service for endeavors like this. Again, it’s the practicality issue: why drain $5000 out of your pocket to get saddled with a roomful of inventory that you may or may not sell? It seems so much more logical to get the copies spoken for first, and then have them pressed up to meet that demand.

JM: I recall a blog post of yours from right before you released Forest Fire’s Survival, where you mentioned the importance of track sequencing. And you were right: the record flows so well. Did you actually end up sequencing that album yourself? How much involvement do you have in the production of each recording?

RC: It’s definitely rare for me to get involved in “creative” aspects of a record, like the recording process or the sequencing. Survival was really just one of those rare cases where I felt a compulsion to experiment with the sequencing…and then once I did, I grew more and more convinced of my intuition about it. And man, the band was so great about it—whew! We talked and talked about it, and explored all sorts of variations on the sequence. The end result you hear is not in fact mine, but rather one that the band themselves eventually put together, after weeks of us powwowwing about it.

Forest Fire, “Survival” “Giant” edition. Catbird Records, CBR015, 2008. Image courtesy of Catbird Records.

JM: You’ve released records by an amazing roster of artists, from “veterans” such as Moviola, Manishevitz, and Maestro Echoplex/Fulton Lights, to relative newcomers such as Air Waves, Clear Tigers, and, most recently, Apollo Ghosts. What is your typical relationship with the artists you’ve worked with?

RC: Heh, there’s definitely no “typical” relationship, that’s for sure! With every artist, it differs greatly, but from a very simple standpoint, one thing that’s always the same is that no artist ever signs a contract or anything like that. The artist always retains all their full rights to everything, etc., and we simply agree to work together for a particular release until it’s sold out (or in some cases, just stops selling).

JM: Catbird Records is now entering its fifth year. How has your approach evolved since you sent out your first stack of hand-addressed packages, and what can we expect to see from Catbird Records in 2010?

RC: I wish I could tell you what to expect in 2010, but I’m definitely not going to go there… 2009 was my second or third year of vowing that I was going to take a break and slow down Catbird Records—and 2009 ended up being my second or third year failing to do exactly that! If the trend holds, I’m going to be here one year from today, saying the exact same thing about 2010!

William Kentridge, Drawing for the film 'Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (Soho and Mrs. Eckstein in Pool)', 1991. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 47 1/4 x 59 in. Collection of the artist. © 2010 William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist.

With 19 bits and bites below, this week’s roundup is a whopper:

• Five Themes, the traveling survey exhibition of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, has landed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Featuring more than 100 works, the exhibition underscores the inter­relatedness of Kentridge’s various disciplines and mediums — drawing, print, animated film, theater models and books. The exhibition is organized chronologically and in five primary themes that cut across his artistic output: “Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession,” “Thick Time: Soho and Felix,” “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio,” “Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute,” and “Learning from the Absurd: The Nose.” The New York installation of Five Themes has been expanded to include 38 prints from the MoMA’s collection. The exhibition is on view through May 17.

• On March 8 at 7pm, Kentridge will perform his lecture/theatrical monologue/installation, I am not me, the horse is not mine, at MoMA. (According to museum press materials, the event is already sold out.) The piece is based on the short story The Nose (1837), by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, which “follows the travails of a pompous Russian bureaucrat who wakes one day to find his nose has escaped his face and assumed greater clout than he.” In this solo performance, Kentridge combines narration, video projection, and a vocal and instrumental soundtrack. I am not me, the horse is not mine is part of an extensive body of work Kentridge has developed in preparation for his production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, premiering at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• On March 12 at 7pm, the New York Public Library, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, will host a public conversation between Kentridge and Paul Holdengräber, the Director of Public Programs for The Research Libraries. Read more about the program and purchase tickets here.

• In conjunction with all of the above, Dieu Donné, a non-profit space in New York City that focuses on the hand papermaking process in contemporary art, presents a new limited edition book of 18 watermarked images and text created by Kentridge. Sheets of Evidence was, according to the website, conceptually designed to reveal nothing at first glance. “The viewer is encouraged to delve deeper and quite literally look beneath the surface, allowing light to reveal the subtle images and text hidden in the white sheets of handmade paper…Through the use of the watermark technique the artist continues his exploration of light and perspective, and like his films these invisible drawings are revealed only when illuminated from behind.” The exhibition will also feature two earlier projects created in collaboration with Kentridge: Thinking in Water, a suite of three works; and Receiver, a limited edition book published in 2006, which features twenty-three etchings, photogravures, and dry points by Kentridge and seven poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska. Sheets of Evidence closes March 27.

• On March 3, the Manifest Equality project will open a one-week pop up gallery in the center of Hollywood. The exhibition brings together international and local artists in “a call to present art that unites art, activism and the message of universal equal rights into a memorable multi-media moment.” Participating artists include: Barry McGee (Season 1), Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Harvey Pekar, Karen Kimmel, Robbie Conal, Ron English, Tierney Gearon, Clare Rojas, and others. Manifest Equality specifically responds to “the growing resistance to equal rights for the LGBT population” and seeks to “raise visibility for the grass roots efforts to ensure full Equal Rights to LGBT Americans.” Follow the Manifest Equality blog here.

• On March 5 at 5pm, Ida Applebroog (Season 3) will sign copies of her new monograph Monalisa, published by Hauser & Wirth. The event is part of INDEPENDENT, a hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum, conceived by New York gallerist and founder of X Initiative, Elizabeth Dee, and gallerist Darren Flook, from Hotel, London. Monalisa features an illustrated essay by critic and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson and a photographic study of the Monalisa house by Abby Robinson.

• For the annual week of New York City art fairs, Galerie Lelong will present Sheela-Na-Gig at Home, an installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. First created in 1996, the piece displays Spero’s “dark humor and interests in the female experience and the grotesque” and alludes to “women’s work.” Figures of Sheela-Na-Gig are repeated and interspersed with feminine lingerie and hung on a clothesline. Placed on the floor is a television monitor showing the artist hanging the drawings and clothes. Spero conceived Sheela-Na-Gig at Home as an “instructions” work that could be installed by anyone, similar to Fluxus and Conceptual works. This is the first time the work will be presented in New York since the year of its creation. Sheela-Na-Gig at Home will be on view March 3-7 at the Park Avenue Armory.

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin has received the National Medal of Arts, an annual award managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Chairman Rocco Landesman said the winners represent “the breadth and depth of American architecture, design, film, music, performance, theater and visual art.” Lin’s latest project, What Is Missing?, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. On April 22, her website www.whatismissing.net will go live, and a companion video will screen in Times Square.

• Three sculptures and 29 drawings by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) are currently on view in Seoul, Korea at Kukje Gallery. Les Fleurs, Bourgeois’ fourth solo show at the gallery, focuses on Bourgeois’ interest in drawing corporeal and psychological subjects such as nature, motherhood and women. The artist has chosen the title to “speak to her adoption of the flower and women as symbols for vitality, desire and sexuality.” Les Fleurs is on view through March 31.

• Season 5 artist Jeff Koons (whose personal art collection was featured in the New York Times over the weekend) has curated an exhibition of work by Ed Paschke for Gagosian Gallery. Koons was Paschke’s assistant in Chicago in the mid-1970s while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paschke would prove to be an important mentor and formative inspiration for the young artist. The exhibition includes loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, as well as rarely seen works from the Ed Paschke Foundation. Read more about the show here.

• The Ashville Art Museum has opened the exhibition Limners to Facebook: Portraiture from the 19th to the 21st Century, which explores the persistent desire to capture images of self and others. The multimedia exhibition includes formal portraits, self-portraits, portraits of animals, and portraits of friends or models. In addition to photographs by Season 1 artist William Wegman, the show includes an image of Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson taken by Annie Leibovitz. Limners to Facebook closes July 18.

• For the March issue of Modern Painters, Anderson was commissioned to visit artist Marina Abramovic and discuss the recent evolution of performance art. Abramovic’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York on March 14. Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson: Wise Women is available online. (On an unrelated note, The New York Observer recently reported that Anderson has been appointed to P.S.1’s Board of Directors.)

• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas has acquired a work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall for their collection. The museum describes the piece: In Our Town [1995], Marshall presents a tidy vision of suburbia not unlike Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play of the same title – apron-clad mother, cookie-cutter homes, two kids and their dog – and then undercuts it with the tense expressions and postures of the children in the foreground. Yellow ribbons are wrapped around most of the trees, suggesting war or other tragedy beyond the confines of the neighborhood…Floating above the image, heralded by bluebirds bearing ribbons, the title of the work calls into question who belongs in this American idyll.” Our Town will be included in Kerry James Marshall, a retrospective exhibition opening May 8 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

• On March 5 at 6pm, the Salina Art Center in South Santa Fe will host a public talk by Marshall. Titled John Brown’s Body: The Representation of Black Bodies as Revolutionary Gesture, Marshall’s presentation will explore his ongoing investigation of African American identity and culture in the United States.

• On March 5, the Brooklyn Museum will host a free open house for teens in conjunction with Sojourn, the solo exhibition of works by Kiki Smith (Season 2). The event, planned by teens working at the museum, offers hands-on activities from 4:30pm until 7pm. To RSVP call (718) 501-6588 or e-mail teen.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.

• In conjunction with the exhibition Contemplating The Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Héctor Parra, and Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie have collaborated on Hypermusic: Ascension, a new site-specific monodrama. The piece “inverts and renovates the genre of opera with an experimental score suggesting the expanding reality of a fifth dimension.” Hypermusic will debut in the museum’s rotunda on March 11 at 6:30pm.

• Reverend on Ice (2005) by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria. According to the Brisbane Times, this three-dimensional rendition of Skating Minister, an 18th-century painting by the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, is placed in the 18th-century galleries to encourage visitors to “think about the migration of ideas and culture across boundaries, from the political to the historical.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has been awarded a 2009 New England Art Award. The awards are organized by the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research to honor the best art made in New England and exhibits organized in 2009. The winners are picked by some 1,880 voters from across the region. In each category there are two winners — the critics’ choice and the people’s choice. Wodiczko won the people’s choice award in the category for New Media.

• Visit Bostonist.com to read about the public conversation between Roni Horn (Season 3) and John Waters that took place at the ICA, Boston a few weeks ago. Horn’s retrospective is on view at the ICA through June 13.

Left: Mary Heilmann. Art in the Twenty-First Century, production still, 2009. Season 5, Episode: Fantasy. © Art21, Inc. 2009. Right: Sleevefacin’ the Art21 Culture Wars soldier.

What better way to soundtrack an art and pop culture event than to invite an in-tune-with-pop-culture artist to curate a selection of their favorite music?

Mary Heilmann was a natural fit for our inaugural Culture Wars trivia event, and we were thrilled when she accepted our invitation to create a soundtrack for the evening. We really could not have asked for a better pairing. Culture Wars participants were treated to selections from Mary’s music collection—hand picked by Mary herself—as they entered the main stage at the 92YTribeca, and they were treated to more between scoring sessions during the halftime intermission and after the second half.

With Mary on hand at the trivia event, it seemed only fitting to create an entire music-themed “audio” round. Titled Personnel Changes, the round was inspired by the announcement of Jeffrey Deitch’s upcoming appointment as the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The questions involved 10 bands or musicians where a personnel change affected their musical output. Each question included a snippet of a song, and we asked the players to name the band or musician in question (for 1 point) and to briefly state the personnel change (for another point).

A video of the audio round from the January 28 event, along with Mary Heilmann’s playlist, is included below. Play along at home and let us know how you did!

Mark your calendars: The next Culture Wars night is on Wednesday, March 24, at the 92YTribeca.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

Mary’s Playlist

Neil Young, “After the Garden” [from Living with War, 2006]
New Order, “Age of Consent” [from Power, Corruption & Lies, 1983]
Einstürzende Neubauten, “Alles Wieder Offen” [from Alles Wieder Offen, 2007]
Pink Floyd, “Arnold Layne” [from Relics, 1971]
Warron Zevon, “Back in the High Life Again” [from Life'll Kill Ya, 2000]
Marianne Faithfull, “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” [from Broken English, 1979]
Del tha Funkee Homosapien, “Mistadobalina” [from I Wish My Brother George Was Here, 1991]
Pulp, “Common People” [from Different Class, 1996]
Country Joe McDonald, “The ‘Fish’ Cheer I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin-To-Die-Rag” [from Woodstock, original soundtrack, 1970]
Chaka Demus and Pliers, “Don’t Be Cruel” [from Help them Lord, 2001]
The Doors, “The End” [from The Doors, 1967]
Brian Eno, “Here He Comes” [from Before and After Science: Ten Pictures, 1977]
Bernthøler, “My Suitor” [from Merry Lines in the Sky, 2004]
Jane Siberry, “Calling All Angels” [from the Until the End of the World, original soundtrack, 1991]
John Cale, “Emily” [from Fear, 1974]
Shoukichi Kina, “Flowers for Your Heart” [from Bloodlines, 1980]
Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit” [from Surrealistic Pillow, 1967]
Stevie Wonder, “Happy Birthday” [from Hotter than July, 1980]
House of Pain, “Jump Around” [from House of Pain, 1992]
Desmond Dekker, “Israelites” [from The Original Reggae Hitsound of Desmond Dekker and the Aces, 1985]
Joan Baez, “Jesse” [from Diamonds and Rust, 1975]
Joan Weber, “Let Me Go Lover” [from The Complete Recordings, 2004]
Miriam Makeba and the Belafonte Singers, “The Click Song” [from Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall, 1960]
The Raincoats, “Lola” [from The Raincoats, 1980]
Donovan, “Mellow Yellow” [from Mellow Yellow, 1967]
Coumba Gawlo, “Miniyamba” [from Coumba Gawlo, 1996]
Musical Youth, “Pass the Dutchie” [from The Youth of Today, 1982]
William Orbit, “Harry Flowers” [from Strange Cargo III, 1993]
Townes Van Zandt, “Poncho and Lefty” [from The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, 1972]
Kraftwerk, “Radioactivity” [from Radio-Aktivität, 1975]
The Rolling Stones, “I Am Waiting” [from Aftermath, 1966]
Desmond Dekker, “Rudy Got Soul” [from This is Desmond Dekker, 1969]
Amadou and Miriam, “Sabali” [from Welcome to Mali, 2008]
Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne” [from The Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1968]
Amy LaVere, “Take ‘em or Leave ‘em” [from This World Is Not My Home, 2006]
The Who, “Baba O’Riley” [from Who's Next, 1971]
David Grisman, “Tennessee Waltz” [from Life of Sorrow, 2003]
Echo and the Bunnymen, “It’s All Over” [from Crystal Days: 1979–1999, 2001]
Daft Punk, “One More Time” [from Discovery, 2001]
Noel Gallagher, “To Be Someone (Didn’t We Have a Nice Time)” [from Fire & Skill: The Songs of the Jam, 2000]
Jimi Hendrix, “Wind Cries Mary” [from Are You Experienced?, 1967]
Flaming Lips, “Yoshimi Vs. The Pink Robots” [from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, 2002]
Annie Lennox, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” [from Medusa, 1995]
Randy Newman, “Louisiana 1927″ [from Good Old Boys, 1974]
Jimi Hendrix, “The Star Spangled Banner” [from Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock, 1994]
Funkadelic, “Maggot Brain” [from Maggot Brain, 1971]
Jeff Buckley, “Lilac Wine” [from Grace, 1994]
Bryan Ferry, “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” [from Frantic, 2002]
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth” [from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, 2005]