The Art21 Guide to PERFORMA 09
If you’re lucky enough to be in New York City during Performa 09 this month, there are a number of events featuring Art21 artists that are not to be missed! Here’s a quick cheat sheet:
William Kentridge: I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine
Monday, November 9 – Tuesday, November 10, 8:00pm
A comic and visually dazzling performance by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, in I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, Kentridge gives an unusual presentation related to his current opera-in-progress: a work inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s satirical opera The Nose, based on the Nikolai Gogol short story of the same name.
>> WATCH: William Kentridge preview from Art:21 Season 5
The PROMPT (a night club)
Wednesday, November 11 – Sunday, November 15, 8:00pm
A conceptual social club under the influence of Futurist Variety Theater, cues and propositions are offered each night in the form of conversation pieces, rules, performances and soundtracks, transforming this destination into a pressure cooker for ideas and intimacies. Participants include Art21 artist Mark Dion, among many, many others. Space is limited. RSVP: theprompt@kunstverein.us
>> WATCH: Mark Dion in Art:21 Season 4
Mike Kelley: Day is Done Judson Church Dance
Tuesday November 17 – Thursday, November 19 at 8pm and 10pm
In the first of two related Performa projects, Season 3 artist Mike Kelley will present three short dance/performance pieces in the Judson Memorial Church inspired by the darkly funny vignettes in his 2005 film and video installation Day Is Done. Premiering will be Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33 (Ladder Piece), a work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing music on horns.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley directing Day is Done (Art:21 Season 3)
Oliver Herring: 3 Day Weekend
Friday, November 20, 6:30-8:30pm, Saturday, November 21, 3-5pm, and Sunday November 22, 3-6pm
3 Day Weekend is both a performance and material for a live video shoot. The Weekend will unfold as a series of interactions built over the course of three days with a group of people who were chosen through an open application process. The actions will be physical, dance related, mostly unrehearsed and therefore unpredictable. Art21 artist Oliver Herring will both “direct” the actions and film the footage.
>> WATCH: Participant Davis Thompson-Moss talking about working with Oliver Herring (Art:21 Exclusive)
A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music
Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21, 6pm – midnight
Mike Kelley project #2: a mini noise music festival. In 1973, Kelley formed his own band, Destroy All Monsters. A Fantastic World continues Kelley’s continued interest in musical subcultures and focuses specifically on avant-garde music and sound art. Staged over two days, the festival will present both historic works from artists such as John Cage, Fred Frith, Fluxus, Bruce Nauman, and Max Neuhaus as well as performances by contemporary proponents of experimental music including Airway, Joan La Barbara, Tony Conrad, Jad Fair & Lumberob, Arto Lindsay, Genesis Breyer P.Orridge, z’ev, and John Zorn.
>> WATCH: Mike Kelley playing and recording music (Art:21 Season 3)
Season 5 Starts This Wednesday, October 7!
The wait is over. Season 5 of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century begins airing this week on PBS. The season kicks off with the episode Compassion, featuring William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Compassion premieres on Wednesday, October 7, 2009, at 10:00 p.m. (ET). (check local listings)
Watch a preview here:
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Julie Mehretu
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.
Who is Julie Mehretu and what does she have to say about systems?
Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; she lives and works in New York. 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.
On the subject of systems in art, Mehretu talks about the difference between rational and organic methods of working (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something. The action or behavior—or what happens organically and intuitively, rationally and spiritually, or majestically—in a world is a very different thing than what can happen in our effort to understand it. So there was more of an impulse to use those approaches, trying to make sense of these two sides of myself in the earlier work. And I developed a whole language and body of work that evolved from that investigation. But the thing that kept it all together and that keeps me going is the painting—making the pictures—and drawing. In getting lost in doing that, language is invented. And that shows you something you never thought you would know about yourself or understand.
What happens in Mehretu’s segment in Systems this October?
“Trying to figure out who I am and my work is trying to understand systems,” says Julie Mehretu, shown working with her assistants in Berlin on seven large canvases for a show at Deutsche Guggenheim (Fall 2009). “The thing that keeps me going is the painting,” she says, “and in getting lost in doing that a language is invented.”Mehretu’s abstract compositions reference modernist architecture, Google Maps, Coliseum-like buildings like those found in Stadia II (2004), and defaced structures—like the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan—which became the inspiration for Vanescere (2007).
The segment captures the artist at a moment of upheaval, both in her life and in current events, working on the biggest project of her young career: a 21 by 85 foot long mural commissioned by a major financial institution in Lower Manhattan, to be completed during the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Characterizing the task before her as “absurd,” she wonders “can you actually make a picture…of the history of capitalist development,” from the early maps of the Silk Road to the evolution of the marketplace as it exists today?
Julie Mehretu. "Stadia II," 2004. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inches. Collection of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, Gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund. Photo by Richard Stoner, © Julie Mehretu, courtesy the artist and The Project, New York.
What else has Mehretu done?
Mehretu studied at University Cheik Anta Diop, Dakar (1990-91), earning a BA from Kalamazoo College, Michigan (1992), and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1997). She was a resident of the CORE Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1997-98) and the AIR Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001). Among Mehretu’s awards are the Berlin Prize (2007), from the American Academy in Berlin; a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2005); and the American Art Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005). Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); Detroit Institute of Arts (2006); Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis (2003); and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2003), among others. Mehretu has participated in the Sydney Biennale (2006); Carnegie International (2004); Bienal de São Paulo (2004); Whitney Biennial (2004); and the Istanbul Biennial (2003).
Where can I see more of Mehretu’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
Julie Mehretu is represented by The Project in New York. Her work is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition Between Art and Life: The Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Collection (through January 3, 2010) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego as part of the exhibition Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (September 26, 2009 through January 31, 2010). An exhibition of prints is being mounted by the Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis this fall. Works filmed in-progress in Mehretu’s segment premiere at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (October 17, 2009 through January 10, 2010).
What’s your take on Mehretu’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Allan McCollum
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.
Who is Allan McCollum and what does he have to say about systems?
Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles in 1944; he lives and works in New York. In his twenties, McCollum briefly considered a career in theater, then attended trade school to study restaurant management and industrial kitchen work. In the late 1960s, he began to educate himself as an artist. Applying strategies of mass production to hand-made objects, McCollum’s labor-intensive practice questions the intrinsic value of the unique work of art. McCollum’s installations—fields of vast numbers of small-scale works, systematically arranged—are the product of many tiny gestures, built up over time. Viewing his work often produces a sublime effect as one slowly realizes that the dizzying array of thousands of identical-looking shapes is, in fact, comprised of subtly different, distinct things. Engaging assistants, scientists, and local craftspeople in his process, McCollum embraces a collaborative and democratic form of creativity. His drawings and sculptures often serve a symbolic purpose—as surrogates, faithful copies, or stand-ins for people—and are presented theatrically, transforming the exhibition space into a laboratory where artifice and context are scrutinized. Economical in form, yet curious in function, his work and mechanical-looking processes are infused with humor and humility.
On the subject of systems in art, McCollum describes how he creates low-tech combinatorial systems to generate projects on a massive scale (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
The Shapes Project (2005) is the first computer project that I’ve done. It’s all done with Adobe Illustrator, and I learned only the things I needed to know to do it. I don’t know how to program or create any kind of database that generates anything. What I do is very simple, like what I’ve been doing in combinatorial projects for twenty-five years or even longer. All my projects have had combinatorial elements where I’m taking a vocabulary of parts and putting them together to make something else, which is very computer-like, but there was never a computer involved before.
What I’m doing is incredibly simple. It’s childlike; anyone could do what I’m doing. The hard part is having the patience (and a boring, compulsive personality) that allows me to keep doing it over and over and over again. So from four shapes I can make around 200-or-so million unique shapes. But there’s another system where I use six shapes. Once you start using that, you can produce 60 billion shapes. This is consistent with wanting to make a shape for everybody on the planet. I had to come up with a system that not only created enough unique shapes for everyone on the planet, but I wanted there to be enough (even in fifty years when there are billions more people) to play with and experiment with. So I went way overboard.
What happens in Allan McCollum’s segment in Systems this October?
Allan McCollum’s segment begins with his uncle Jon Gnagy’s 1950s television program Learn to Draw. Crediting his uncle’s demonstrations as an early influence, McCollum says “whenever I design a project it’s in my head…that I would be able to show someone else how to do it.”
Describing his aesthetic motivation with the paradox of “wanting to try to work in quantities…and make things that are singular and unique at the same time,” the viewer travels with the artist and his team of studio assistants to the 28th São Paolo Bienal (2008) for the installation of Drawings (1988)—1,800 hand-stenciled, graphite pencil works. McCollum describes devising “a system that would produce a shape for everybody on the planet.” To make The Shapes Project (2005), the artist developed a set of unique forms that, when fully combined, results in 60 billion individual shapes. McCollum later collaborated with four remote home businesses in Maine, whom he only talked to via email and phone, to produce collections of silhouettes, rubber stamps, wood ornaments, and copper cookie cutters. The resulting Shapes from Maine (2009) at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York consists of over 2,200 individual hand-crafted objects, each its own one-of-a-kind shape.
Allan McCollum. "Shapes from Maine: Shapes Copper Cookie Cutters," 2005/2008. Polished copper, 5 1/2 x 3 2/3 x 1 inches each, each unique, formed in copper by hand. Produced in collaboration with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly's Copper Cookie Cutters, Trescott, Maine. Photo by Lamay Photo, © Allan McCollum, courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.
What else has McCollum done?
Allan McCollum has had more than 100 solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, where his work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (most recently in 2007); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004), among others. He has also participated in many international exhibitions, most recently at the Bienal de São Paulo (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (2009); Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston (2008); and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2006), among others. Allan McCollum lives and works in New York.
Where can I see more of McCollum’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
Allan McCollum is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. The artist also maintains an extensive website of his own works.
What’s your take on McCollum’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Kimsooja
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.
Who is Kimsooja and what does she have to say about systems?
Kimsooja was born in 1957 in Taegu, South Korea; she lives and works in New York. Kimsooja’s videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through their use of repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. In many pieces, everyday actions—such as sewing or doing laundry—become two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. Central to her work is the bottari, a traditional Korean bundle used to wrap and protect personal belongings, which Kimsooja transforms into a philosophical metaphor for structure and connection. In videos that feature her in various personas (Needle Woman, Beggar Woman, Homeless Woman), she leads us to reflect on the human condition, offering open-ended perspectives through which she presents and questions reality. Using her own body, facing away from the camera, Kimsooja becomes a void; we literally see and respond through her. While striking for their vibrant color and density of imagery, Kimsooja’s works emphasize metaphysical changes within the artist-as-performer as well as the viewer.
On the subject of systems in art, Kimsooja talks about blurring conceptual systems from art and life in her work (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
When I was doing sewing pieces, I considered all the women’s activities—sewing, cooking, laundry, pressing, cleaning the house, shopping, decorating—as two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. I wanted to appreciate that aspect and reveal the artistic context. So my work was all, in a way, related to women’s activity, but then it was also linked to contemporary art issues. I’d been working a lot using femininity and female activities, but I never considered myself as a feminist. The only thing I can agree to is that ‘feminist’ is part of ‘humanist’. So I don’t even participate in feminist shows—because that really simplifies and limits my ideas. I refuse to be in a specific ism. But my practice can be perceived in different isms—like conceptualism, globalism, feminism, minimalism. My intention is to reach to the totality of our life in art, so that’s also one reason my practice is quite broad and diverse—to reach that complexity and comprehensiveness.
What happens in Kimsooja’s segment in Systems this October?
Kimsooja’s segment opens with a series of videotaped performances in crowded cities around the world, titled A Needle Woman (1999-2001). In the videos, the artist is shown from behind, her form acting as an unmoving axis on the horizon. Comparing her body to a needle that threads through space and time, she explains that her conceptual “system is very much rooted to the practice of sewing” and that she discovers “artistic questions and answers from our daily life activities.” Discovering that bottari—a traditional Korean bundle—could be used as minimalist sculpture, the artist later explored autobiographical and cultural aspects of the form in works such as a tour of South Korea in Cities On The Move–2727 km Bottari Truck (1997) and an installation of hanging bedsheets belonging to newlyweds in A Laundry Woman (2004).
The segment focuses in depth on two recent site-specific works. Lotus: Zone of Zero (2008) in Brussels consists of 2,000 fuchsia lotus lanterns with a soundtrack of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chants. To Breathe–A Mirror Woman (2006) is an intervention at the Crystal Palace in Madrid in which rainbow-colored sunlight, diffused through diffraction grating film applied to windows, is reflected in a mirrored surface applied to the floor while a pre-recorded performance of the artist’s rythmic breathing—A Weaving Factory (2005)—fills the space. Says the artist on her ethereal and genre-bending work: “My intention is to reach to the totality of our life in art.”
Kimsooja. "Cities On The Move - 2727 km Bottari Truck," 1997. Single channel video projection, silent, 7:33 minute loop. © Kimsooja, courtesy the artist.
What else has Kimsooja done?
Kimsooja earned a BFA (1980) and MA (1984) from Hong-Ik University, Seoul. Kimsooja has received the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002), among others, and has been an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center, New York (1998); P.S. 1 Museum, New York (1992-93); and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris (1984). She has had major exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2008); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2006); Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall, Sweden (2006); the MIT List Gallery, Cambridge (2005), and other institutions. Kimsooja has participated in international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2001, 2005, 2007); Yokohama Triennial (2005); and Whitney Biennial (2002).
Where can I see more of Kimsooja’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
Kimsooja maintains an extensive website of her work.
What’s your take on Kimsooja’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
Meet the Season 5 Artist: John Baldessari
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.
Who is John Baldessari and what does he have to say about systems?
John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931; he lives and works in Venice, California. Synthesizing photomontage, painting, and language, Baldessari’s deadpan visual juxtapositions equate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge meaning. He upends commonly held expectations of how images function, often by drawing the viewer’s attention to minor details, absences, or the spaces between things. By placing colorful dots over faces, obscuring portions of scenes, or juxtaposing stock photographs with quixotic phrases, he injects humor and dissonance into vernacular imagery. For most of his career John Baldessari has also been a teacher. While some of the strategies he deploys in his work—experimentation, rule-based systems, and working within and against arbitrarily imposed limits to find new solutions to problems—share similarities with pedagogical methods, they are also intrinsic to his particular world view and philosophy.
On the subject of systems in art, Baldessari talk about the liberating potential of systems (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
Usually, I seem to start I think my emergence in the art world was linked with conceptual art, minimal art, but I never quite totally subscribed to it. I thought it was a little boring. But there were a lot of things I did want to shed, and one of them was being tasteful. The idea of using systems, which was in a lot of that work, appealed to me where I could let this taste emerge as I worked. Because, you know, it’s sort of like toilet paper on your shoe.
What’s a system? I think my idea is this: not so much structure that it’s inhibiting or that there’s no wiggle room, but not so loose that it could be anything. It’s like a corral around your idea, a corral that you can move—but not too much. And it’s that limited movement that promotes creativity. Did I just say something profound?
What happens in Baldessari’s segment in Systems this October?
“I’m always interested in things that we don’t call art, and I say why not?” asks John Baldessari. Filmed in his Venice, California studio, the artist consults with his assistant on a color-coded group of maquettes for Raised Eyebrows / Furrowed Foreheads (2008), a series of photographic bas-reliefs. “One of the reasons I gave up painting is because it’s all about being tasteful,” he explains, “I just decided to be very systematic about it and use the color wheel.” Throughout a segment that features over fifty pieces, including works in the inaugural exhibition of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA (2008), Baldessari assails conventional wisdom about art and meaning. “Words are just a way we communicate. Images are a way we communicate,” he asserts, “I couldn’t figure out why they had to be in different baskets.” In the installation Brick Bldg, Lg Windows w/ Xlent Views, Partially Furnished, Renowned Architect (2009) at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, Baldessari humorously reconfigures an entire brick building by noted architect Mies van der Rohe. “Aesthetically, I always look for the weak link in the chain,” he says, comparing his method to “a corral around your idea…limited movement that promotes creativity.”
John Baldessari "Two Person Fight (One Orange): With Spectator," 2004. Three dimensional digital archival print with acrylic paint on sintra, dibon and gatorfoam panels, 84 x 79 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
What else has Baldessari done?
John Baldessari received a BA (1953) and MA (1957) from San Diego State College, continuing his studies at Otis Art Institute (1957-59) and Chouinard Art Institute. Baldessari has received several honorary doctorates, the most recent from the National University of Ireland, Burren College of Art (2006). He has participated in Documenta (1982, 1978); the Venice Biennale (2009, 2003, 1997); and seven Whitney Biennials, most recently in 2008. His work has been shown in more than 120 solo exhibitions and 300 group exhibitions. A major retrospective will appear at the Tate Modern, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2009-10. John Baldessari was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007.
Where can I see more of Baldessari’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
John Baldessari is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. His work can be seen in the exhibition John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—Legion of Honor in San Francisco through November 8; at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, from September to October; and at the Tate Modern in London where a major retrospective titled John Baldessari: Pure Beauty is on view October 13th, 2009 until January 10th, 2010.
What’s your take on Baldessari’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Yinka Shonibare MBE
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Transformation, premiering on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Whether satirizing society or reinventing icons of literature, art history, and popular culture, the artists in Transformation—Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE—inhabit the characters they create and capture the sensibilities of our age.
Who is Yinka Shonibare MBE and what does he have to say about transformation?
Yinka Shonibare MBE was born in 1962 in London, England, but grew up in Lagos, Nigeria; he lives and works in London. Known for using batik in costumed dioramas that explore race and colonialism, Yinka Shonibare MBE also employs painting, sculpture, photography, and film in work that disrupts and challenges our notions of cultural identity. Taking on the honorific MBE as part of his name in everyday use, Shonibare plays with the ambiguities and contradictions of his attitude toward the Establishment and its legacies of colonialism and class. In multimedia projects that reveal his passion for art history, literature, and philosophy, Shonibare provides a critical tour of Western civilization and its achievements and failures. At the same time, his sensitive use of his own foibles (vanity, for one) and challenges (physical disability) provide an autobiographical perspective through which to navigate the contradictory emotions and paradoxes of his examination of individual and political power.
On the subject of transformation in art, Shonibare discusses the mutable nature of his materials (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
I started to look at the representation of the ideas of African art and at what things represented Africa. I came upon the fabrics. Although they are associated with Africa, they have their origins in Indonesia. The Dutch started to produce these fabrics industrially for the Indonesian markets towards the end of the nineteenth century but the industrially produced versions were not popular there, so they tried West Africa. There the fabrics were really popular and they were appropriated. And now they are associated with Africa. I like the fact that the fabrics have a multi-layered history. So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that things are not always what they seem. I enjoy working with that.
What happens in Shonibare’s segment in Transformation this October?
“My work, all along, has been a critique of Empire,” says Yinka Shonibare MBE, adopting the honorific title of Member of the Order of the British Empire, with willful irony, as part of his name. “I like the idea of parodying or mimicking the notion of class.”
Shown in his London studio, Shonibare is working on his first series of drawings in twelve years, taking as his subject: climate change—political, economic, environmental—and dedicating a work to “the architects of the present economic disaster” including Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Milton Friedman. The artist is on hand for the installation of a retrospective of sculptures—headless, “post-racial,” mannequins dressed in vibrant costumes—at the MCA Sydney. “The fabrics are multi-layered—things are not always what they seem,” he says about his use of industrially produced, Dutch wax print cloth, which has a complex colonial history stretching from Indonesia to the artist’s native Nigeria.
“I’ve always enjoyed using beauty and seduction as a way of engaging people with the work,” he says, pointing out the underlying dark themes in works such as Scramble for Africa (2003) and Black Gold II (2006). Acting as the protagonist in two photographic series, in Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) Shonibare re-imagines a series of paintings by William Hogarth while in the Oscar Wilde inspired Dorian Gray (2001) he explores personal themes of mortality, vanity and physical disability. The final work in the segment, the film Un Ballo in Maschera (2004), is a masked ballet that recounts the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden. “Power creates excess,” he asserts, while playfully admitting, “I also, actually, would like to have the trappings of wealth myself, even though I may be criticizing it.”
Yinka Shonibare MBE. "How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies)," 2006. Two-life size mannequins, two guns, Dutch wax printed cotton, shoes, and leather riding boots, Plinth overall 63 x 96 1/2 x 48 inches, each figure 63 x 61 x 48 inches. Collection of Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA. Photo by Stephen White, © Yinka Shonibare MBE, courtesy the artist, James Cohan Gallery, New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.
What else has Shonibare done?
Shonibare studied at Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1984-89) and earned an MA from Goldsmiths College, London University (1991). Among his awards are the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) (2005); a fellowship at Goldsmith’s College (2003); and the Art for Architecture Award, Royal Society of Arts (1998). Shonibare was nominated for the Turner Prize (2004). His work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (2009); Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, (2005); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2004); and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2004), among others. He has participated in international events including Documenta (2003); Spoleto Festival, Charleston (2003); and the Venice Biennale (2001).
Where can I see more of Shonibare’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
YInka Shonibare MBE is represented by James Cohan Gallery in New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. His mid-career retrospective is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art until September 20th, after which it travels to the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C. from November 11, 2009—March 7, 2010. His site-specific commission Party Time: Re-Imagine is on view at the Newark Museum of Art until January 3rd, 2010.
What’s your take on Shonibare’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Cindy Sherman
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Transformation, premiering on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Whether satirizing society or reinventing icons of literature, art history, and popular culture, the artists in Transformation — Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE — inhabit the characters they create and capture the sensibilities of our age.
Who is Cindy Sherman and what does she have to say about transformation?
Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; she lives and works in New York. In self-reflexive photographs and films, Cindy Sherman invents myriad guises, metamorphosing from Hollywood starlet to clown to society matron. Often with the simplest of means—a camera, a wig, makeup, an outfit—Sherman fashions ambiguous but memorable characters that suggest complex lives lived out of frame. Leaving her works untitled, Sherman refuses to impose descriptive language on her images, relying instead on the viewer’s ability to develop narratives as an essential component of appreciating the work. While rarely revealing her private intentions, Sherman’s investigations have a compelling relationship to public images, from kitsch (film stills and centerfolds) to art history (Old Masters and Surrealism) to green-screen technology and the latest advances in digital photography. Sherman’s exhaustive study of portraiture and self-portraiture—often a playful mixture of camp and horror, heightened by gritty realism—provides a new lens through which to examine societal assumptions surrounding gender and the valuation of concept over style.
On the subject of transformation in art, Sherman describes how changing the way she looks has been a lifelong interest (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
When I was a kid, I would be alone in my room and just play with makeup. Probably there’s some psychological reason why, but I was doing it at a time when it was not really p.c. for women to be wearing much makeup. In the ’50s, women did do all this stuff to themselves that wasn’t natural—and yet as the ’60s progressed and the ’70s moved on, it was all about being natural. I kind of missed the before and after of what it does to you—and the transformation. So I would just play—to see what makeup could do.
In college when I did it, I would become a character and then think, “Well, gee, here I am as Lucille Ball. What do I do now?” There’d be some friends in the other room watching Saturday Night Live and I’d just go sit with them and hang out. It became sort of a thing, a little more like performance. I started to go to parties in character. When I moved to New York I did it a few times, but suddenly it wasn’t the same. In the city I felt like I needed my own sort of ‘street armor’ just to deal with the people out on the street and the real crazy people who looked like some of my characters I didn’t want to be confused with them. But I remember going to a couple of parties as characters. I felt like people wouldn’t know I was there and it wouldn’t really matter because I didn’t know them anyway. Or it was kind of an interesting disguise.
What happens in Sherman’s segment in Transformation this October?
“It’s kind of an interesting thing to see yourself,” says Cindy Sherman about discovering her uncanny childhood photo album A Cindy Book (c. 1964–75) as an adult. Sherman decided to update the book by adding circled photos of herself and writing ‘that’s me’ under each, faking more mature handwriting with new additions. “It’s interesting to see your evolution…to think that that’s really the same person now.” Projects done in college—the animated film Doll Clothes (1975) and the photo-collaged cut outs in A Play of Selves and Murder Mystery People (both 1976)—culminate in the character-driven work she’s best know for today. “I didn’t want to make what looked like art,” she says about her series Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), explaining that “film has always kind of been more influential to me than the art world.”
The segment surveys thirty years of untitled works in which the artist photographs herself in various scenes and guises, grouped into informally-named series such as fairy tales, centerfolds, history portraits, Hollywood/Hampton types, and clowns. Sherman used a digital camera and green screen for her most recent series of society portraits, modifying each image’s “background with the same kind of license that a painter would take.” Sorting through test shots at the computer, Sherman leads the viewer through her iterative process of creating the matronly woman in Untitled (#468) (2008). “It was such a change for me to see them really big…because suddenly they seemed much more tragic,” she says about life-size photographs on view at Metro Pictures gallery in New York (2008). “I can’t imagine really doing this my whole life,” she says, with the segment later following her to a thrift store where, upon finding several “wacky pants” she wonders if this shopping trip “might be inspiring a whole new series.”
Cindy Sherman. "Untitled (#425)," 2004. Color photograph, 72 1/2 x 91 1/2 inches, (framed). © Cindy Sherman, courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures.
What else has Sherman done?
Cindy Sherman earned a BA from State University College, Buffalo, New York (1976). Among her awards are the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts (2005); American Academy of Arts and Sciences Award (2003); National Arts Award (2001); a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (1995), and others. Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at Sprüth Magers, Berlin (2009); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1997), among others. Sherman has participated in many international events, including SITE Santa Fe (2004); the Venice Biennale (1982, 1995); and five Whitney Biennials.
Where can I see more of Sherman’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
Cindy Sherman is represented by Metro Pictures in New York. Her most recent series of works can be seen at Gagosian Gallery in Rome through September 19th. Her work can also be seen in the group exhibitions The Female Gaze at Cheim & Read in New York (through September 19th); in Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden (through September 20th); and as part of the 2010 ICP Triennial at the International Center of Photography in New York (September 19th through January 4, 2010).
What’s your take on Sherman’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Paul McCarthy
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Transformation, premiering on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Whether satirizing society or reinventing icons of literature, art history, and popular culture, the artists in Transformation — Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE — inhabit the characters they create and capture the sensibilities of our age.
Who is Paul McCarthy and what does he have to say about tranformation?
Paul McCarthy was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City; he lives and works in Los Angeles. 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. Absent or present, the human figure is a constant element in his work, whether in the form of bodies in action, satirical caricatures, or animistic sculptures; as the residue of a private ritual; or as architectural space left uninhabited for the viewer to occupy. 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.
On the subject of transformation in art, McCarthy discusses the open-ended nature of process and time with his work (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
The question is, how does it continue? The work is evolving and changing. It’s in process. Some pieces of mine go on for quite long periods of time, or they get taken apart and included in other pieces, or they’re being worked on. There could be a point where they stop, where they are finished or at least I’m moving on from them. But I view exhibitions sometimes as not the end of something but a beginning. It’s like you see the pieces for the first time, or you see them out of their context, and you can think about them differently. Then you start again. The exhibition is not the end of the piece.
What happens in McCarthy’s segment in Transformation this October?
“My work seems to be about tearing down and opening up conventions,” says Paul McCarthy, who bristles when asked what his responsibility is to the audience for his work. “My responsibility is to the ideas,” he explains, “that’s the difference between making art and making entertainment.” The segment begins with a series of motorized architectural works—including Spinning Room (1970/2008), Bang Bang Room (1992) and Mad House (1999/2008)—installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. McCarthy’s interest in performance is introduced through the Black and White Tapes (1970-75), a series of minimal videos in which the artist uses his body as a tool, such as painting a white line on the floor with his face or whipping a storefront window with a mixture of paint and motor oil. Later works such as Bossy Burger (1991) and Painter (1995) show the artist performing similarly absurd tasks, only this time adopting a character and on a sound stage. “The persona usually started with a kind of mask or some sort of costume,” he says.
Shot in a community television studio, Family Tyranny (Modeling and Molding) (1987) shows McCarthy and fellow artist Mike Kelley improvising a scene together as father and son. “We’re conditioned into our reality,” says McCarthy, who reflects on how personal family dynamics turn into vicious patterns and how he views his art as a way of “breaking out of a conditioned attitude.” The artist’s own son Damon McCarthy talks about working collaboratively to create the raucous Caribbean Pirates (2005), a non-linear parody of the Disney ride and movie franchise. The segment concludes in McCarthy’s Los Angeles studio where he and his assistants are shown working on a series of drawings and sculptures that include elements from Snow White, Hummel figurines, and a bust of President George W. Bush. “Pieces recycle into other pieces,” he explains, describing the need for “something to act on, something to alter and shift. Like this way of working through ideas.”
Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy. "Carribbean Pirates," 2005. Installation, performance and video at McCarthy Studios, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Ann-Marie Rounkle, © Paul McCarthy, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich London.
What else has McCarthy done?
Paul McCarthy studied at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City (1968-69); earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1969) and an MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1972); and was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (1984-2003). His work has been shown in recent major exhibitions at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2007); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005), among others. He has participated in many international events, including the Berlin Biennial (2006); SITE Santa Fe (2004); Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, 2004); and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2001).
Where can I see more of McCarthy’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
Paul McCarthy is represented by Hauser & Wirth in Zurich and London. His work can be seen in the exhibition The Puppet Show through September 13 at the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle (along with fellow Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith, and Kara Walker). McCarthy’s exhibition of inflatable sculptures titled Air Pressure is on view at De Uithof in Utretch, The Netherlands, through September 17th.
What’s your take on McCarthy’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
Meet the Season 5 Artist: Florian Maier-Aichen
The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Fantasy, premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Fantasy presents four artists — Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen — whose hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime works transport us to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness.
Who is Florian Maier-Aichen and what does he have to say about fantasy?
Florian Maier-Aichen was born in 1973 in Stuttgart, Germany; he lives and works in Cologne, Germany and Los Angeles. Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards. Interested in places where landscape and cityscape meet, he chooses locations and subjects from the American West and Europe—from his own neighborhoods to vistas of the natural world. Looking backwards for his influences, Maier-Aichen often reenacts or pays homage to the work of the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even remaking their subject matter from their original standpoints. Always experimenting, he marries digital technologies with traditional processes and films (black-and-white, color, infrared, and tricolor), restoring and reinvigorating the artistry and alchemy of early photography.
On the subject of fantasy in art, Maier-Aichen describes liberties with which artists, including himself, have taken with picturing the American West, using his work The Best General View as a reference (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):
When I look at American landscape painting from the nineteenth century I always have in mind one painting of Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt. Yosemite is already such a theatrical place—almost like a too-drastic landscape—and Bierstadt just added more to it. He turned it into a complete fantasy by getting rid of the facts and enhancing every other aspect of Yosemite. Half Dome is an iconic image, but when I saw that Carleton Watkins had used it in one of his photographs back in the nineteenth century, it became more significant for me. Suddenly I wanted not to remake the same image but to go there and work with the subject.
I couldn’t access Watkins’s standpoint anymore because it was overgrown, so I used Glacier Point which is next door. It’s the most generic vista or viewpoint that you can get in Yosemite. It wasn’t a perfect day when I took the photograph, and I didn’t mind because it was just a starting point. I drew in the entire background with the blue sky and the clouds, and I brought in the bushes to make some foreground space. So in the end the image, except for Half Dome, is not really the way it looked when I took the picture.
What happens in Maier-Aichen’s segment in Fantasy this October?
“Photography used to be like alchemy back in the nineteenth century,” says Florian Maier-Aichen, who uses the computer to introduce imperfections and detach his photographs from reality, bringing them closer to the realm of drawing. Shown capturing his source images with a traditional large-format camera, the artist introduces painterly touches to his photographs with the aid of a digital stylus and tablet. “Illustration is just another level of abstracting,” he says, “it lifts you to another layer that is not necessarily linked to realism and it opens up your own world or your own myth-making.”
Inspired by the idealized quality of postcards and maps, the segment shows how the artist remakes images of landscapes, from a nostalgic nighttime scene of Stralsund in GDR times to epic vistas such as a pass in the Swiss Alps, ski slopes in the Sierras, Half Dome in Yosemite, and the failed St. Francis Dam near Santa Clarita (all works 2005-09). “Photography grew together with the discovery of the American West,” explains Maier-Aichen at his home and studio in Los Angeles, anchoring his fascination with the surrounding landscape to a romantic notion in Germany of California as “the end of the world.”
Florian Maier-Aichen. "Untitled," 2005. C-print, 72 x 90 1/2 inches. © Florian Maier-Aichen, courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles and 303 Gallery, New York.
What else has Maier-Aichen done?
Florain Maier-Aichen studied at Högskolan för Fotografi och Film, Göteborg, Sweden; the University of Essen, Germany; and earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Maier-Aichen’s work has appeared in recent major exhibitions at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); Yvon Lambert, New York (2007); and the Whitney Biennial (2006).
Where can I see more of Maier-Aichen’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?
Maier-Aichen is represented by Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles and 303 Gallery in New York.
What’s your take on Maier-Aichen’s inclusion in Season 5?
Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!
