The Dust Settles After the First Culture Wars
On January 28, Art21 and 92YTribeca piloted a program called Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21. The night began with a music play list created by artist Mary Heilmann (Season 5). By 6:30pm all 18 teams were registered, seated with beers in hand, and ready for the main event. In addition to the general public forming teams, there were also teams representing institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, Cambridge University Press, Bomb Magazine, and 20X200.
Culture Wars was comprised of four rounds, ten questions per round. Every round had a different theme including; Ripped from the Headlines devoted to questions about current events in the art world, Personnel Changes was an audio round of selected song clips that represented a sonic shift because a personnel change (loosely inspired by a newly appointed director of LA MOCA), Art and the City explored the geography of NYC through public art, and finally the Best and Worst of the Naughts which was a decade of art, music, and film in review. For those of you unable to attend the first Culture Wars, the next event is set for March 24, 2010 at the 92Y Tribeca, so mark your calendars! We also captured some rough footage with a small pocket video camera to give a sense of the evening.
Art21 Culture Wars: An Introduction from Art21 on Vimeo.
Perhaps this selected twitter feed is a better document to give you a sense of the event and the crowd.
6:46 PM lisa_hoang I’m at Culture Wars Art21 – 92YTribeca w/ @thatwaszen.
6:55 PM thatwaszen http://twitpic.com/1084fd – Great crowd at @art21’s #culturewars at the 92Y (via @thatwaszen)
7:33 PM VAJIAJIA Team Guggenheim getting butts kicked at @Art21 Culture Wars at 92Y Tribeca. Hoping to make a comeback in non-audio trivia. Continue reading »
Join Us for Culture Wars!
For those of you who will be in the New York metropolitan area this Thursday, we invite you to participate in a NEW trivia event inspired by contemporary art and the culture of our time presented by Art21 and 92YTribeca. In the spirit of Art21’s mission to increase knowledge of contemporary art and in combination with the social traditions of game night and happy hour, this multi-media event invites you to test your knowledge of current art, film, music and online cultural phenomena. Form a team of colleagues, friends and frienemies—or come solo and join a team on the spot to meet other art appreciators/lovers/aficionados —and compete for cultural greatness…or maybe just a prize.
Art:21 Season 5 featured artist Mary Heilmann will be in attendance and is providing music for the first trivia night. The event will take place this Thursday, January 28 at 6:30 pm at the 92YTribeca, located at 200 Hudson Street. Prizes for Culture Wars are generously donated by the Phaidon Store, Soho and 20X200.
Teams will be limited to 5 people. This is not a ticketed event; however, there will be a cost of $5 per team, payable at the bar, to participate.
Letter from London: Scrooged
Shirazeh Houshiary's 1993 Tate Christmas Tree
Tate Britain has just unveiled its 22nd annual Christmas Tree, designed, as usual, by a contemporary British artist. The Christmas Tree tradition at the Tate started in 1988 with Bill Woodrow’s cardboard box decorations, and has retained its position of locus for skepticism ever since. Michael Landy’s infamous tree – dumped in a bright-red bin amongst crushed beer cans and discarded packaging – looked, in 1997 (the year of Sensation at the Royal Academy), like a final, sarcastic postscript to an annus horribilis for the bastions of traditional art. The current tree, by Tacita Dean, uses a pine tree hung with beeswax candles, lit at 4pm as the sun sets, which burn out by 6, when the gallery closes. It looks like a normal Christmas tree, in other words—a “delightful, almost magical sight,” according to Martin Gayford at Bloomberg. There’s no mistaking the undertone of relief in his words.
What’s changed? Minor though the tree might seem, both institutionally (it’s generally seen as a bit of seasonal frippery on the part of the Tate) and artistically (it’s often an opportunity for artists to do a bit of festive self-mockery), there’s something here of a piece with the choice of Richard Wright as this year’s Turner Prize winner: a shift of institutional focus, maybe. Positioned in the hexagonal entrance hall in Tate Britain, a kind of public hub where exhibition tickets are purchased and directions sought, the Christmas tree is a tone-setter. Dean’s tree acts as a kind of preface, pointing into quietness rather than the sometimes predictable brashness of earlier years. Praising the tree in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones describes Dean’s work as “effortlessly going against any fashion you can think of.” I’m not sure that Dean’s elegiac analogue works (which I’m a fan of) are really so different from works by artists of a similar bent, like Rodney Graham or Rosalind Nashashibi, but never mind. Jones correctly identifies a change of tack, at least in terms of the Tate’s patronage of contemporary art.
That sense of relief – that contemporary British artists had finally “settled down,” that the Tate had stopped being silly, like a 4-year-old falling asleep after a sugar rush – characterized the coverage of the Turner Prize this year. “Publicity-grabbing stunts are refreshingly absent,” claimed Ben Hoyle in The Times, forgetting that any such “publicity stunts” are overwhelmingly orchestrated outside of the shortlist by feeble self-styled mavericks the Stuckists, hopped up on the gleeful idiocy of the tabloid press. “This year’s nominees,” Hoyle continues, “all paint, draw, or make objects that are recognisably works of art.” In actual fact, this year’s shortlist no more or less troubles the definition of art than any previous one has – apart from its continued snubbing of women artists as winners, of course. There have been only three female winners since 1984, an extraordinary situation rarely mentioned in coverage of the prize. Maybe they don’t notice.
….and the Not-So-Powerful, Part 2
This week I want to continue sharing a few stories in the Not-So-Powerful series about units that didn’t go well and the things that happened as a result…
Years ago a colleague asked me to join him in entering our students into a contest. For a variety of reasons, I won’t go into detail about the specifics of the contest to protect the innocent… and the guilty. I agreed to participate with my classes even though the “student art contest” didn’t exactly fit with the curriculum we had written that summer. He was excited about it, so I figured I should play along and not be the geek who wanted to stick to our original plan. We’re artists, let’s go with the flow, I thought.
As soon as the project began, I could see that what we were teaching had three classic qualities of a bad idea in the art classroom:
- The timing was all wrong. This contest theme had nothing to do with what the kids had learned or what they would be learning (and let’s just say that switching from mixed-media sculpture to making posters about a very, very specific time period wasn’t exactly riveting).
- We lacked serious motivational resources, so my colleague and I were literally trying to teach the theme solely through words and without much visual motivation.
- We framed the assignment as a “contest”. It was clear there would be winners and losers. As a consolation prize, I would quickly add, “But everyone will be able to display their work!” Like I said, riveting.
Students slogged through this particular project as if they were trying to cart all the furniture out of the room strapped to their backs. Every day I was listening to cracks about the current assignment and how boooooring it was. Frankly, I was bored myself and couldn’t wait to finish.
Two weeks, three sharpeners, one cracked chalkboard and a few dozen headaches later, the project ended and we sent the work to be “judged” (you see, I was out of school one day, and they took out their frustration on the room while a frightened substitute teacher hid behind one of the drying racks).
Since then, I have backed off spontaneous contests and requests for participation that takes serious time away from our core curriculum. I will stay after school, hold lunch sessions, even give private lessons if I have to, but I won’t stick oddball themes and assignments where they don’t belong. Kids winning contests, if there is clear criteria and everyone knows what they’re getting themselves into, can be a nice thing. But a majority of students whining for two weeks and practically scaring a sub to death, well, this we can’t have.
Weekly Roundup
Bruce Nauman, "One Hundred Live and Die," 1984. Neon tubing mounted on four metal monoliths. Collection of Fukake Publishing Co., Ltd., Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York, © Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
- Bruce Nauman (Season 1) has won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Visit the Daily Best Media Gallery to see images of his installation.
- Nauman is the first Art21 artist to appear on the Times list of the top 200 artists from the 20th century through today. He comes in at #24.
- Songs of Ascension, the multimedia work by Season 1 artist Ann Hamilton and composer Meredith Monk, will be included in this year’s Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
- BAM has also commissioned a new piece by the Dessner Brothers. The musical duo will collaborate with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie, as well as vocalists from The Breeders for this project.
- Videos by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe (working in collaboration with Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Liam Gillick and Melik Ohanian) are on view in VRAOUM!, an exhibition of comic strips and contemporary art, at La Maison Rouge in Paris.
- A major mid-career survey of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) will open at the Brooklyn Museum on June 26, 2009.
This Week’s Round-Up
James Turrell Museum (Photo: Florian Holzherr)
- On April 22nd, the collector Donald Hess opened the world’s first James Turrell Museum in Colomé, Argentina. The 18,084sf space is based on a plan created by Turrell himself, and showcases nine light installations representing five decades of the Season 1 artist’s career. All works on display are drawn from the Hess Art Collection, Bern, Switzerland, in which Turrell is represented with 22 pieces.
- The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts has announced the five recipients of the 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts. They are Paul Chan, Rinde Eckert , John King, Reggie Wilson, and Season 2’s Paul Pfeiffer. Now in its 15th year, the $75,000 Award recognizes experimenters in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre, and visual arts.
- The New Yorkers opened last Friday at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. As the press release states, the exhibition, like the Big Apple, is “difficult to map out.” The list of artists includes, among many, Agathe Snow, Peter Saul, Kostas Seremetis, Ryan Wallace, and Art21’s Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. The show runs through June 22nd.
- Season 4 artist Mark Dion lectures tonight at Portland State University, at the Shattuck Hall Annex. It’s at 7:30 and free!
- Oliver Herring’s solo exhibition Teens with Masks is up now through June 13 at Max Protetch. The show includes a number of new photo-collage works by the Season 3 artist.
Letter from London: Turner Round, Bright Eyes!
Roger Hiorns, "Seizure" (2008)
I don’t know: maybe there will be a time when the announcement of the Turner Prize nominees won’t be greeted with a tiresome trotting-out of hoary old journalistic cliches (yes, I know, that’s a cliche too), but not this year. The Times goes with a sarcastic assessment of this year’s line-up—Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer, Richard Wright and Enrico David—as “a shock to rank with any in the 25-year history of the Turner Prize,” announcing that “this year’s nominees all paint, draw, or make objects that are recognizably works of art.” ‘Recognizable to whom?’ might be the sensible riposte considering that, for the billions of visitors to Tate Modern every year, the work of the previous year’s winner, Mark Leckey, would most certainly be recognizable as art. It’s befuddling to see the press lean, year after year, on tired ideas of the artist as wacky japester. The Times claims that “publicity-grabbing stunts are refreshingly absent,” but when were publicity-grabbing stunts particularly present? Ok, maybe Tracey Emin’s drunken interview on TV (which wasn’t one of her works), or Madonna’s ostentatious swearing (she wasn’t one of the artists) or Martin Creed’s lights going on and off (which is kind of the opposite of publicity-grabbing) may be what’s being alluded to, but it’s hard to see that the current nominees are any more or less avant-garde or shocking or experimental or whatever than in any previous years. Another Times columnist comments that the shortlist “puts craftsman-like skills over conceptual waffle,” thereby knocking back 600 or so years of artists trying to do more or less the exact opposite in one fell swoop.
It’s a relief to see the Times message board featuring the evergreen adage, “Turner must be turning in his grave” (as though Turner were the epitome of good-taste, MOR painting back in the early nineteenth century, etc, etc) and the deathless Emperor’s New Clothes quip (“When will the emperor and his missing clothes be found out?” As though the labor-intensive, thoughtful, and often beautiful work of artists like Hiorns and Skaer was somehow a con-trick played on the public). It’s also a bit of a downer to see the Tate publicity department play to the gallery by describing Wright as “the thinking person’s graffiti artist,” as though “thinking people” couldn’t possibly like graffiti. But you know, they’ve got to be punchy and they were probably wrapping up the press conference and they got asked the same question over and over again, and the press person went for what popped into his/her mind, like in The West Wing, so let’s not get upset about that.
Ok. But what of the shortlist? It’s quite rare these days to have a complete line-up of good or very good artists (usually half or fewer aren’t that great; last year’s was very patchy, I thought; the year before (when Wallinger won) was mainly good; the years before were hit and miss) but I think this might be the best year in a very long time. It seems to be generally agreed (in the press and among people I’ve spoken to about it) that Roger Hiorns looks likely to win for an installation that’s since been demolished. That was always part of the plan, but it’s made Hiorns’ work a kind of 2000’s version of Rachel Whiteread’s demolished and never-bettered House, for which she won the Turner in 1994. Hiorns’ Seizure from last year has already taken on a kind of legendary quality, like Dylan’s first electric gig or the invention of fire: you had to be there, man. It also means that the work has taken on the lustre of great lost works of the past, not only paintings stolen (like this one) or destroyed (like this one) but paintings that survived only in textual descriptions, recreated by later artists in a process called ekphrasis (like this one).
For Seizure, Hiorns filled a moribund council property and filled it, through an arduous and probably dangerous chemical process that I’m not even going to begin to pretend to understand (suffice to say there are photos of the artist and assistants wearing face masks and rubber gloves with steaming pipes and canisters around them, like in Weird Science), the result of which was that the flat—three smallish rooms on the ground floor of a 60’s concrete block—was filled, on every surface, with hard ultramarine crystals that glittered and crunched underfoot. Visitors had to wear thick rubber boots and gloves which made you stagger and wobble about in a way that felt appropriate in the space itself, since the blue surface had something of the quality of the deep sea. Your movements slowed. The sound was crunching and crackling and squeaking rubber (watch a shaky video of the experience here). Hiorns had made a styleless 60’s building into something like the wreck of the Lusitania through a simple (I mean, if you know how) automatic chemical process. I want Enrico David to win, really (here is Chicken Man Gong; any questions?), but it’s pretty likely that Hiorns will walk it, which is not only not a bad thing but might signal an improvement: not in the art itself, but in the rehabilitation of contemporary art in the mainstream press. It’ll be great!!
Sullivan and Walker Awarded USA Fellowship
United States Artists (USA) is a grant-making organization dedicated to supporting America’s living artists working in a diverse array of disciplines. Catherine Sullivan (Season 4) and Kara Walker (Season 2) have been awarded the organization’s 2008 fellowship, which provides each of its 50 recipients an unrestricted grant of $50,000.
According to Artinfo.com, USA was established in 2005 in response to a study finding poor support structures for American artists. To become a USA Fellow, one must be nominated. Each year nominations for the award are made by an anonymous group of arts leaders, critics, scholars, and artists chosen by the organization. Nominators are asked to submit names of artists they believe show an extraordinary commitment to their craft. Eight other visual artists will receive the award this year: Terry Adkins; Michael Asher; Andrea Bowers; Deanna Dikeman; Barkley L. Hendricks; Tehching Hsieh; Rodney McMillian; and Martha Rosler.
Shahzia Sikander Awarded Creative Arts Fellowship
The Rockefeller Foundation earlier this week held a ceremony at the Langham Hotel in London to honor the 2008 recipients for its inaugural Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellowship. The three are Mona Hatoum, Kofi Setordji, and Shahzia Sikander (Season 1).
The award includes 12000 euros and a three-month residency with private apartment and studio on the idyllic grounds of the Bellagio Center, adjacent to Lake Como. The fellows were selected by a distinguished advisory panel of curators, artists, and scholars from around the world.
According to Judith Rosen, the foundation’s president, “the fellowships serve a dual mission: they help groundbreaking artists reach their full potential and they enable the arts to inspire our shared creativity and imagination. There is a deep and timeless connection between cultural advances and social progress. This new program will help strengthen both.”
James Turrell Awarded RIBA Honorary Fellowship
The Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) Council, which each year awards Honary Fellowships to individuals who have contributed to architecture in the broadest sense, has named this season’s recipients. The list of fourteen comprises writers, landscape architects, engineers, developers, and artists including Season 1’s James Turrell.
“It is rare for an artist to influence directly the progress of architecture. The work of James Turrell is an outstanding example of this unusual circumstance and for this reason the RIBA is honouring him. As a sculptor Turrell works directly with light and the impact it has on the perception of space. His installations can be seen throughout the world and have moved even the harshest critics to wonder at the beauty and simplicity of his work.”
The RIBA Honorary Fellowships will be presented in February 2009 in London.
