Cai Guo-Qiang media explosion
Art21 artist (Season 3) Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition I Want to Believe at the Guggenheim Museum may go down as the most-documented show on video of 2008 in New York. However, Cai faces some serious competition: we’ll have to wait and see if the ongoing Olafur Eliasson exhibition at MoMA, Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, or the upcoming Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) retrospective at the Guggenheim will out-spectacle the current Manhattan media blitz.
With only 7 days left until Cai’s Guggenheim exhibition closes, who knows how many more videos are in the works, but in the meantime enjoy the following sampling. And for those planning a visit this final weekend, get your tickets early (and hide those camera phones)!
New York aside…if you include Cai Guo-Qiang’s role as director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games in August, he will undoubtedly hold the record as the contemporary artist whose work has been seen by the most people on television, ever. (Who previously held the record? Mel Chin and the GALA Committee’s little-known subversive project with Melrose Place?)
Do you have a video of Cai’s Guggenheim show? Leave a link in the comments below!
VIDEO | Channel Thirteen (PBS) SundayArts
Spacey! Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe is “literally” beamed onto Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp. (Fun fact: the Guggenheim is 2 years younger than Sputnik & Cai, and 7 years older than Star Trek)
VIDEO | Guggenheim Museum
Working at the Guggenheim must induce some serious déjà vu—here riggers install Inopportune: Stage One in a way reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s climbing escapades in CREMASTER 3 (2002).
VIDEO | VernissageTV
A non-narrated, comprehensive tour of the exhibition’s major works.
VIDEO | NewArtTV
Some comments from Cai Guo-Qiang on the day of the press preview.
VIDEO | Museum TV
Hello! Enthusiastic host Mel Merio does a “profoundly postmodern” interview with Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe.
And…last but not least……..
VIDEO | Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century
Watch an excerpt of the Art:21 episode Power featuring Cai Guo-Qiang, with the artist reflecting on Inopportune: Stage Two (2004) when it was first installed at MASS MoCA.
McElheny, Mies, & Modernism
In this week’s Art:21 video and interview The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown, artist Josiah McElheny references a number of modernist figures and projects, from architects Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohe to the failed Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green. See what he’s talking about in these videos on YouTube:
VIDEO | Josiah McElheny presenting at MoMA
The lecture that Josiah McElheny gave at MoMA on the topic of “Artists and Models” is a condensed overview, with the artist riffing on Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, and other modernist icons.
VIDEO | Farnsworth House
This all access tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House illustrates some of what Josiah McElheny means when he says about Modernist architecture that “you have to live like the building tells you to live.”
VIDEO | Mies on Architecture Island
Did it take virtual reality to realize the utopian ideals of modernism? Take a Second Life tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Fansworth House on Architecture Island (The Homestead).
VIDEO | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Art:21 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) brings a sinister edge to modern architecture in Climate (2000), filmed in Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago.
VIDEO | Cabrini Green: Past and Present
Josiah McElheny’s question “how do you both believe in utopia…and at the same time keep it within limits?” can be felt in this homemade video when the narrator states that Chicago’s Cabrini-Green “started out as a place where poor people had hope.”
Robert Adams: On the Edge at Fondation Cartier
Robert Adams, who was recently featured in Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4, recently opened his first solo show in France. On view in the exhibition, titled On the Edge, are approximately 150 photographs that illustrate Adams’ lifelong devotion to the western American landscape and reflect both devastating and hopeful visions of the environment. Although human figures are usually absent from Adams’ photographs, their influence is easily perceived: a billboard mounted on a tree-covered hill, construction of suburban housing projects, graffiti in an otherwise tranquil desert view, or the consequences of “clear-cutting,” a practice of quickly and completely cutting down forests that the American West has witnessed over a period of time.
The photographic component of On the Edge is constructed around Adams’ views on the rural and urban landscape surrounding him while looking eastward and westward from his home. He is intrigued by the thought that “if we face eastward we confront the remains of what was, until we destroyed it, one of the world’s great rainforests, while if we face westward we contemplate the open sea, not itself unharmed but still beautiful and carrying with it, as all beauty does, a suggestion of promise.” Robert Adams lives on the west coast of the United States.
On the Edge is on view through January 27, 2008.
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
261, Blvd Raspail
75014 Paris
France
Watch a clip from Adams’ Art:21 segment:
See more images from the exhibition here.
Spotlight on Paradox: Catherine Sullivan
Catherine Sullivan was born in Los Angeles, California in 1968. She earned a BFA from the California Institute of Arts, Valencia (1992) and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California (1997). Sullivan’s anxiety inducing films and live performances reveal the degree to which everyday gestures and emotional states are scripted and performed, probing the border between innate and learned behavior. Under Sullivan’s direction, actors perform seemingly erratic, seizure-like jumps between gestures and emotional states, all while following a well-rehearsed, numerically derived script. Unsettling and disorienting, Sullivan’s work oscillates between the uncanny and camp, eliciting a profound critique of “acceptable” behavior in today’s media-saturated society. A maelstrom of references and influences -from vaudeville to film noir to modern dance- Sullivan’s appropriation of classic filming styles, period costumes, and contemporary spaces such as corporate offices draws the viewer’s attention away from traditional narratives and towards an examination of performance itself.
Sullivan received a CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2004) and a DAAD Fellowship (2004-2005). She has had major exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2007); Tate Modern, London (2005); Vienna Secession, Austria (2005); Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2005); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2003); UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002); and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2002). She has participated in the Prague Biennial (2005), the Whitney Biennial (2004), and La Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). Sullivan lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
Watch a clip from Sullivan’s Art:21 segment:
About her work, Sullivan says,
“For me, politics is a choice. I don’t live in a world where I’m forced to align myself ideologically with a particular regime or think on a daily basis about where my soap is coming from. So, engagement with these issues is a choice. And my choice is to reveal that freedom and privilege to think about certain things without having to suffer their consequences…My imagination can bring together a lot of very painful things and a consideration of different kinds of consequences. I’ve thought a lot as an artist about what it means to operate with any information I want and with the privilege of using that information in any way I want. If I were to make a different choice, then I would be a journalist…But I’m an artist. I’m interested in these things in an artistic sense. The end result is art.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 162).
Read more about her work and watch additional clips on her Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Sullivan’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view her segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‚’07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Catherine Sullivan by leaving a comment below.
Spotlight on Paradox: Allora & Calzadilla
Jennifer Allora was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1974. Guillermo Calzadilla was born in 1972 in Havana, Cuba. Allora received a BA from the University of Richmond in Virginia (1996) and an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003); Calzadilla received a BFA from Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, Puerto Rico (1996) and an MFA from Bard College (2001). They have collaborated since 1995; approaching visual art as a set of experiments that test whether concepts such as authorship, nationality, borders, and democracy adequately describe today’s increasingly global and consumerist society. Believing that art can function as a catalyst for social change, the artists solicit active participation and critical responses from their viewers. The artists’ emphasis on cooperation and activism have led them to develop hybrid art forms - sculptures presented solely through video documentation, digitally manipulated photographs, and public artworks generated by pedestrians.
Major exhibitions include the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2007); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2004); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2002); and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan (2001). Awards include the Korea Foundation Award (2004); Penny McCall Foundation Grant (2003); Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2002); and a Cintas Fellowship (2000–2001). Residencies include P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center, Long Island City, New York (1998–99); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003–04); and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California (2004). Allora & Calzadilla were short listed for the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize (2006). They live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Watch a clip from Allora & Calzadilla’s Art:21 segment:
About their role as artists, they say,
“It’s important as an artist to be involved in one’s own time and to try to be part of what contemporary reality is about-to try to engage the world, find a position within that, and respond to it…As an artist, it’s very important to respond to the things that affect you‚Äîmillions of things: religion, people, animals, excess, violence. Each person has to respond differently, and that response is involved with ethics, morality, history. This is, in the most basic sense, responsibility.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 129).
Read more about their work and watch additional clips on their Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Allora & Calzadilla’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view their segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Allora & Calzadilla by leaving a comment below.
Spotlight on Paradox: Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles, California in 1961. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Bradford transforms materials scavenged from the street into wall-sized collages and installations that respond to the impromptu networks “underground economies, migrant communities, or popular appropriation of abandoned public space” that emerge within a city. Drawing from the diverse cultural and geographic makeup of his southern Californian community, Bradford’s work is as informed by his personal background as a third- generation merchant there as it is by the tradition of abstract painting developed worldwide in the 20th Century. Bradford’s videos and map-like, multilayered paper collages refer not only to the organization of streets and buildings in downtown Los Angeles, but also to images of crowds, ranging from civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to contemporary protests concerning immigration issues. Mark Bradford has received many awards, including the Bucksbaum Award (2006); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2002). He has been included in major exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2006); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2004); and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2001). He has participated in the XXVII S√£o Paulo Bienal (2006); the Whitney Biennial (2006); and inSite: Art Practices in the Public Domain, San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico (2005). Bradford lives and works in Los Angeles.
Watch a clip from Bradford’s Art:21 segment:
About his work, Bradford says,
“An artist has a choice to be as political or as apolitical as anyone else who’s making choices. So I don’t think an artist is necessarily apolitical if he or she doesn’t make overtly political work. But so much of contemporary art is engaged in the ideas that are circulating in the atmosphere, in the press and the media, and oftentimes we’re influenced by that. So it seems comfortable to me to have that bleed into my work. For me, the subtext is always political.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, pp. 132-3).
Read more about his work and watch additional clips on his Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Bradford’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view his segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Mark Bradford by leaving a comment below.
Spotlight on Ecology: Ursula von Rydingsvard
Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942. She received a BA and an MA from the University of Miami, Coral Gables (1965), an MFA from Columbia University (1975), and an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (1991). Von Rydingsvard’s massive sculptures reveal the trace of the human hand and resemble wooden bowls, tools, and walls that seem to echo the artist’s family heritage in pre-industrial Poland before World War II. Having spent her childhood in Nazi slave labor and post-war refugee camps, the artist’s earliest recollections of displacement and subsistence through humble means infuses her work with emotional potency. Von Rydingsvard builds towering cedar structures, creating an intricate network of individual beams, shaped by sharp and lyrical cuts and glued together to form sensuous, puzzle-like surfaces. While abstract at its core, Von Rydingsvard’s work takes visual cues from the landscape, the human body, and utilitarian objects‚Äîsuch as the artist’s collection of household vessels‚Äîand demonstrates an interest in the point where the man-made meets nature. Von Rydingsvard has received many awards, including a Joan Mitchell Award (1997); an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994); fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1979, 1986); and exhibition prizes from the International Association of Art Critics (1992, 2000). Major exhibitions include Madison Square Park, New York (2006); the Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase, New York (2002); and Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York (1992). Von Rydingsvard lives and works in New York.
Watch a clip from von Rydingsvard’s Art:21 segment:
About her work, von Rydingsvard says,
“I’m not even sure that it’s sculpture that I drink the most from to reap imagery for my work. I think it’s vernacular architecture -everyday kinds of objects like bowls and cups- that enables me to springboard. And that gives me a lot of room and a lot of leeway because none of it has been so explicitly defined. Usually the utilitarian object is just that; it’s made to be used…If I were to say how it is that I break the convention of sculpture (and I’m not sure that’s what I do or even if that’s what I want to do) it would be by climbing into the work in a way that’s highly personal, that I can claim as being mine. I have this feeling that the more mine it is, the more I’m able to break the convention.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, pp. 106-7).
Read more about her work and watch additional clips on her Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced von Rydingsvard’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view her in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Ursula von Rydingsvard by leaving a comment below.
Spotlight on Ecology: Mark Dion
Mark Dion was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1961. He received a BFA (1986) and an honorary doctorate (2003) from the University of Hartford School of Art, Connecticut. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (’rational’) scientific methods and ’subjective’ (’irrational’) influences. The artist’s spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkabinetts of the 16th Century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Mark Dion questions the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society. He has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001). He has had major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003); and Tate Gallery, London (1999). Neukom Vivarium (2006), a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park, was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum. Dion lives and works in New York.
Watch a clip from Dion’s Art:21 segment:
“My idea of art isn’t necessarily something that provides answers or is decorative or affirmative. I like Goya. I enjoy the still-life tradition, and hunting painting, and things toward the dark side that tend to have a more critical function. That’s what I see as the job of contemporary artists: to function as critical foils to dominant culture. My job as an artist isn’t to satisfy the public. That’s not what I do. I don’t necessarily make people happy. I think the job of the artist is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception, prejudice, and convention…I think it’s really important that artists have an agitational function in culture. No one else seems to.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 78).
Read more about his work and watch additional clips on his Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Dion’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view his segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Mark Dion by leaving a comment below.
Spotlight on Ecology: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was born in Madrid, Spain in 1961, and was raised in Bogotá, Colombia and Chicago, Illinois. He earned a BA in art and art history, and a BA in Latin American and Spanish literature, from Williams College (1983), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1989). Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated sculptures and video installations use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. In collaboration with astrophysicists, meteorologists, and medical ethicists, Manglano-Ovalle harnesses extraterrestrial radio signals, weather patterns, and biological code, transforming pure data into digital video projections and sculptures realized through computer rendering. His strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment. Manglano-Ovalle’s work is attentive to points of intersection between local and global communities, emphasizing the intricate nature of ecosystems. He has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2001) and a Media Arts Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1997‚Äì2001), as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995). He has had major exhibitions at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota (2006); Art Institute of Chicago (2005); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico (2003); Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Ohio (2002); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997). Manglano-Ovalle lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
Watch a clip from Manglano-Ovalle’s Art:21 segment:
“Sometimes I think that people mistake my interest in science, thinking that I’m delving into science for its technology and its research. Really, I’m going through the back door. I’m interested in science as part of culture, as a cultural manifestation. I think of art as not necessarily being made in the studio, but through many conversations, interruptions, and different types of inputs so that one can’t discern if one made the work oneself or if so much has penetrated the process that the work (it’s authorship) is exploded and unlocatable. I also think that is part of science…People think that art fits solely in culture, and that science is not culture. I’m interested in science generated as a cultural necessity.”
(excerpted from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 35).
Read more about his work and watch additional clips on his Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Manglano-Ovalle’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view his segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle by leaving a comment below.
Spotlight on Ecology: Robert Adams
Robert Adams was born in Orange, New Jersey in 1937. His refined black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West of the past four decades, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. Although often devoid of human subjects, or sparsely populated, Adams’ photographs capture the physical traces of human life: a garbage-strewn roadside, a clear-cut forest, a half-built house. An underlying tension in Adams’ body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera. Adams’ complex photographs expose the hollowness of the 19th Century American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, expressing somber indignation at the idea (still alive in the 21st Century) that the West represents an unlimited natural resource for human consumption. But his work also conveys hope that change can be effected, and it speaks with joy of what remains glorious in the West. Adams received a BA from the University of Redlands in California and a PhD in English from the University of Southern California. He has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (1994); the Spectrum International Prize for Photography (1995); and the Deutsche B√∂rse Photography Prize (2006). Major exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2005); Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (2002); Denver Art Museum (1993); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1989); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979). Adams lives and works in northwestern Oregon.
Watch a clip from Adams’ Art:21 segment.
About his work, Adams says, “I’d like to document what’s glorious in the West and remains glorious, despite what we’ve done to it. I’d like to be very truthful about that. But I also want to show what is disturbing and what needs correction…You’re always in quest for the picture which will catch both, and occasionally that happens.”(excerpted from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 66).
Read more about his work and watch additional clips on his Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Adams’ work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view his segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Robert Adams by leaving a comment below.
