Jeff Koons: Money & Value
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Episode #098: Artist Jeff Koons discusses themes of money, desire, perfection, and moral responsibility. Filmed in his busy New York studio and surrounded by numerous assistants at work on paintings and sculptures, Koons describes how the practicalities of running a business are often in service to creative ends.
Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of Classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.
Jeff Koons is the curator of two exhibitions currently on view in New York: the group show Skin Fruit at the New Museum (through June 6th, 2010) and a survey of the work of Ed Paschke (a mentor of Koons) at Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue, through April 24th, 2010).
Jeff Koons is featured in the Season 5 (2005) episode Fantasy of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online via iTunes (opens application).
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Brian Hwang, Clair Popkin & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Jeff Koons.
Julie Mehretu: Studio Assistants
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Episode #097: Filmed in her Berlin studio, a group of Julie Mehretu’s assistants — Sarah Rentz, Damien Young, Erika Fortner and Harmony Murphy — discuss how they each bring different areas of expertise to the process of making paintings, from fine art backgrounds in printmaking and illustration to furniture polishing techniques and administrative skills.
Julie Mehretu’s paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings’ wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu’s delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.
An exhibition of recent works will be on view as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (May 14 – October 6, 2010). The 15th in a series of commissions by Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the works were inspired by Mehretu’s time spent in Berlin. As critic Brian Dillon writes in the accompanying catalog essay: “If there is an archaeology of the recent past in Mehretu’s work, it is the archaeology of an atmosphere charged with the dust of demolition and rebuilding. There is a new grayness and indeterminacy in these paintings that it would be trite to conclude is merely melancholy or phantomic: Mehretu’s grey is rather the color of possibility, of the inchoate and unrealized. In this sense, the ruin points no longer towards the recent past but towards a potential future; the ruin passes away and comes into being at the same time.”
Julie Mehretu is featured in the Season 5 (2005) episode Systems of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online via iTunes (opens application).
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Ian Serfontein. Sound: Paul Stadden. Editor: Lizzie Donahue, Paulo Padilha & Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Julie Mehretu. Special Thanks: Erika Fortner, Harmony Murphy, Sarah Rentz & Damien Young.
Profile: Nina Schwanse (artist, New Orleans)
In 2009, artist Nina Schwanse relocated from New York City/Philadelphia to New Orleans to continue her video practice at the University of New Orleans. Her work refreshes the typically didactic terrain of mediated female objectification with verbal and visual wit. With each video, she channels a fascination with notoriety into an ongoing exploration of self-representation—an ontological dilemma faced in social contexts of all scales, but especially the macro that is increasingly common in our technological age of instant and accidental celebrity.
In her words, she aims to “restructure the narrative and formal language of news media, advertising, and pornography to create disjunctive portraits that intend to disappoint the expected course of entertainment,” and while doing so, she evokes personas that are genuinely entertaining. She plays most of these characters herself, limiting the degree to which they are allowed to present themselves on camera. When they address the viewer in first person, their speech is matched with speechless modeling, a separation whose tension produces caricatures that resonate beyond superficiality.
k-a-t-e(s) (11 mins., 2010)
Schwanse becomes the pantheon of celebrity Kates who congeal as a somewhat multi-faceted contemporary definition of the name. Her Kates offer deadpan excerpts of their biographies, personal PR, and, of course, humility.
Jessica Stockholder | Form
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EXCLUSIVE: From her home in New Haven, Connecticut, Jessica Stockholder discusses the strength of form and the difficulty in articulating the meaning behind abstract shapes.
A pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Jessica Stockholder’s site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but closer observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control.
Work by Jessica Stockholder is included in the exhibition Embrace! at the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition includes site-specific installtions by 17 artists, spread throughout the museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building. Stockholder’s installation, titled Wide Eyes Smeared Here Dear, spans several levels of the Daniel Libeskind-designed building. Embrace! is currently on view at the Denver Art Museum through April 4, 2010.
Jessica Stockholder is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Play of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online at PBS Video
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Mead Hunt. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Jenny Chiurco and Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Jessica Stockholder.
Paul McCarthy | Lifecasting
Surrounded by various figurative sculptures in progress in his Los Angeles studio, including an over-sized bust of President George W. Bush, artist Paul McCarthy discusses the process of casting from life and the resulting perfections and imperfections.
Paul McCarthy’s video-taped performances and provocative multimedia installations lampoon polite society, ridicule authority, and bombard the viewer with a sensory overload of often sexually-tinged, violent imagery. With irreverent wit, McCarthy often takes aim at cherished American myths and icons—Walt Disney, the Western, and even the Modern Artist—adding a touch of malice to subjects that have been traditionally revered for their innocence or purity. Whether conflating real-world political figures with fantastical characters such as Santa Claus, or treating erotic and abject content with frivolity and charm, McCarthy’s work confuses codes, mixes high and low culture, and provokes an analysis of fundamental beliefs.
Through February 28 (this weekend!) Tank.tv is showing two of McCarthy’s video works: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature fellow Art21 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice.
Paul McCarthy is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Transformation of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom. Sound: Doug Dunderdale. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Paul McCarthy. Special Thanks: Jacobine van der Meer.
What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index
"Thriller Kitty Impresses", Source: icanhascheezburger.com
- What are your manners? Where and how did you learn them? According to Ben Street’s most recent letter to us contemporary art and the Mannerist Movement could be holding hands at the table. What do you see? Peter Schjeldahl, in his review at the new exhibition of Bronzino’s drawings at the Met says, “Mannerism, the most commonly despised period in Western art history…[is] the one that best befits creative culture today. We are mostly Mannerists now…” Jerry Saltz calls Mannerism calls Bronzino, “sixteenth-century Italy’s Joey Ramone”. There’s a lot to consider here: READ this post.
- Is art your friend? Why not, it should be. John Menil says: “Art: Take it off its marble pedestal and show it as a daily companion, refreshing, human and rich: witness of its time and prophet of times to come.”For more check out this post on The Menil Collection.
- Art is Murder. Scary. But Insightful.
- Teaching with Contemporary Art is taking a break this week in order to complete special two-part interview with Esopus editor, Tod Lippy, which will be published here on the Art21 blog starting next Wednesday. Stay tuned for this unique look into a very, very distinct art magazine that has wonderful potential for art educators.
- This President’s Day roundup begins with a hotly debated exhibition and ends with a divine duo in this week’s Round-Up.
- How do you conserve a work of art that is fleeting in time? Richard McCoy speaks to Jeff Martin in this post Collaborations in Conservation: A Conversation and A Colloquium
- Do you know how to argue responsibly? How does the recent thoughts shared between Jerry Saltz and John Yau measure up? In this week’s, FLASHPOINTS: Must art be ethical? |The Puppy Wars, Catherine Wagley writes, there are unethical ways of arguing. It’s a critic’s responsibility to try to glance past his own worldview—not to escape it (that would be impossible and uninteresting)—and invite conversation about more than what he thinks. Writing that settles for voluptuous, only half-substantiated opinion-making, however, does break the rules.
- This past Tuesday an event at UCLA’s Hammer Museum dealt with death in a way that was less discriminating than blogger Catherine Wagley would have liked. The Museum joined forces with PEN USA to present a reading titled, “I Am Neda.” The event promised to bring together dissident poets and to celebrate freedom fighters in Iran. I went because, like so many others, I found the video of Neda Agha-Soltan, the unknown makers of which just received a George Polk Award for Videography, emotionally searing. I also went because the Neda phenomenon seems so heavily visual that I wanted to see how poetry could claim her image….READ more here.
- 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? Check out Culture Wars: Trivial Tunes with Mary Heilmann and Mark your calendars: The next Culture Wars night is on Wednesday, March 24, at the 92YTribeca.
- Grand Canyon Journal 4: Critique as a Destruction of Joy…”CityCenter is the biggest thing to happen to art in Las Vegas since Steve Wynn put his finger through a Picasso. The mixed-use, residential, gambling, fine dining, clubbing, high-end retail, luxury hotel behemoth opened in December with the explosive fanfare usually reserved for the demolition of buildings in Vegas.”
- VIDEO EXCLUSIVE | William Kentridge’s “Return”; Shot in his Johannesburg studio in South Africa, William Kentridge reveals the process and unusual presentation of the video work Return — a component of the larger project (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo (2008) — which had its debut on the fire screen of Teatro La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy.
- Raiding, Mining and Resurrecting: Maurizo Cattelan at the Menil Collection
- Why art school? Why now? Why does it matter? | Art21 is seeking Graduate Student Writers for Open Enrollment
William Kentridge | “Return”
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Shot in his Johannesburg studio in South Africa, William Kentridge reveals the process and unusual presentation of the video work Return — a component of the larger project (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo (2008) — which had its debut on the fire screen of Teatro La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy.
Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.
The traveling exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, February 24–May 17, 2010. Kentridge’s The Nose, a multimedia production of Shostakovich’s adaptation of Gogol’s story, debuts at The Metropolitan Opera in New York, March 5-25, 2010. Get a chance to hear the artist speak about his recent projects, in conversation with Paul Holdengraber, as part of the New York Public Library’s series of talks Live from the NYPL on March 12th.
Watch Kentridge’s new trailer for The Nose below.
William Kentridge is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: William Kentridge.
Continue reading »
Grand Canyon Journal 4: Critique Is Destruction as Joy
CityCenter is the biggest thing to happen to art in Las Vegas since Steve Wynn put his finger through a Picasso. The mixed-use, residential, gambling, fine dining, clubbing, high-end retail, luxury hotel behemoth opened in December with the explosive fanfare usually reserved for the demolition of buildings in Vegas. CityCenter boasts a collection of fine art consisting of existing works and commissioned pieces by the likes of Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, Nancy Rubins, Donald Judd, Isa Genzken, Jack Goldstein, Tony Cragg, and Frank Stella. Like the attractions that shape the identity of every hotel on the Strip (the fountains at the Bellagio, the volcano at the Mirage, the Eiffel Tower at Paris, etc.), these works, installed throughout the interior and exterior of the massive development as opposed to a gallery space, are meant to create an ambience that will draw tourists, but also, in the case of CityCenter, tenants — to play, stay, and come back for more. But what does this context do to their status as art objects? How is a work of art’s relative autonomy impacted by its placement in a landscape of attraction? Conversely, what does the designation of these objects as art (a status denied the countless other unsigned attractions that pepper the CityCenter campus) lend to the new development? And if “starchitecture” is its other primary attraction, how does the artwork fare in relationship to the assemblage of buildings that comprise CityCenter?
Based on my recent visit to CityCenter (on my way to the Grand Canyon, which I assure you we’re headed back to in the next post), the short answer to the questions posed above is that the art doesn’t do very well. In fact, like David Copperfield’s Statue of Liberty, most of it disappears. The Judd woodblock prints that grace the wall above the escalators to the Aria Self Park Entrance Lobby probably could have gotten better service at the valet, the Stella seems to have been chosen for its formal similarity to the Mandarin Oriental hotel logo and, despite their immense scale, the mud wall-paintings by Richard Long are barely visible behind soaring curtains of glass. While, as evidenced by the video above, the whirling stainless steel Cragg sculptures get a lot less attention than the tornados of water designed by WET Design, the water feature design firm that also did the fountains at the Bellagio, because they are art objects, they inevitably seek more attention than the swirling, metal tree-columns inside the casino itself. Similarly, Maya Lin’s potentially dramatic Silver River, a representation of a section of the Colorado River (Grand Canyon, here we come) cast entirely in reclaimed silver, is nearly entirely reclaimed by the glass and steel supports it hangs in front of. This ambivalent position between anonymously blending in with the overall ambience and emerging as a star attraction is paradigmatic of the confusion that lies at the heart of what it means to place art work in Vegas and is perhaps why Sin City has had such bad luck with art.
Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art: a Conversation and a Colloquium
Jeff Martin
When I spoke to Jeff Martin for the first time last year, one of the first things he told me was that he wasn’t “a real art conservator.” Many professionals in my field work very hard to identify themselves as art conservators, so to have someone deny it all together struck me as a bit funny, and rather accurate. Often the things I do at the IMA leave me wondering if I too am a “real conservator,” but I think many of us have come to realize that a narrowly defined role of a conservator is not as useful as a more broadly defined one, especially when it comes to caring for art in the twenty-first century.
Jeff Martin took an indirect route to becoming a conservator (real or otherwise). He was in the first graduating class of NYU’s MA program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, where the coursework includes time-based art conservation. Before NYU, he worked as an archival footage researcher and television writer/producer. He now works as an independent conservator and archivist, with clients including the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.
Jeff organized the upcoming colloquium “Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art,” which is co-sponsored by the Hirshhorn and the Lunder Conservation Center; it will take place at the Smithsonian on March 17 and 18. Associated with the colloquium are two evening talks that are are free and open to the public:
- Keynote address by John Hanhardt, Senior Curator for Media Arts and Nam June Paik Media Arts Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, March 17th at 7 pm in the Ring Auditorium at the Hirshhorn
- Meet the Artist: talk by John Gerrard, March 18 at 7pm in the Ring Auditorium at the Hirshhorn
Richard McCoy: Will you start by defining Time-Based Art?
Jeff Martin: I have to answer that question by talking about why I don’t love the term, at least for the kind of work we’re discussing. If we’re talking about works that unfold over time—wouldn’t an Alexander Calder mobile fall in that category? It can’t be experienced properly unless it’s seen as it moves over a period of time. For that matter, the Hirshhorn had a major retrospective of Anne Truitt’s work recently. One thing that struck me was a wall text that talked about the necessity of viewing her sculptures from all sides in order to really understand them. You couldn’t get the full impact of the pieces unless you walked around them to see how the colors changed and unfolded as your perspective changed. If that’s not “time-based,” I don’t know what is.
What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index
Film still from Věra Chytilová's "Daisies" (1966), SOURCE: The Pinnocchio Theory (blog)
Hungry?
- FLASHPOINTS: How does art respond to and redefine the natural world? Dan Phillips makes houses and asks the question, what is “folk”? According to Leanne Gilberstein in her post, Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. 2 Phillips effectively demythologizes ideas of “the folk” that have problematically been associated specific notions of cultural origins… accordingly American history has used these notions to construct and solidify perceptions of certain groups (often black people and poor whites) by relegating them to an ingrained, natural condition of unchanging “folkhood.” How does Phillips make “use of the discards of the cultural mainstream and the privileging of a taste for making do rather than making perfect…?” Is Phillip’s project merely nostalgic or is his economically minded project helping to pave the way for an optimistic future in ‘forward thinking’ production?
- Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup. (I myself am heading to MIT this week to check out Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde…!)
- Art classrooms can be noisy places. But hey, if you want a student’s attention and full-force effort why not give them A Little Heads Up about your intentions for the day’s lesson plan. Perhaps they’ll respect you for it as this knowledge has the ability to give students a particular sense of purpose. According to Joe Fusaro in this weeks addition of Teaching With Contemporary Art it’s worth a shot.
- Are you a pack rat? Lots of artists are. Check out this weeks VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: John Baldessari | Recycling Images
- Karen Schmeer, the Maysles Brothers & Art Doc Screenings in NYC: Nick Ravich, Art21’s Director of Production pays respect to a very important important member of the independent documentary community, Karen Schmeer; Production Coordinator Ian Forster, recently got the chance to shoot at the big beautiful exhibit of Gabriel Orozco’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Ravich highly recommends some select screenings of documentary films to see in NYC. But never fear non-New Yorkers and those who are saving extra cash by not attending as many out of home screenings this year…. Ravich promises a future column detailing some online-based art documentary viewing options! (YES!)
