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.
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
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!)
What’s Cookin at the Art21 Blog: A Weekly Index
"The Misfits of Modern Agribusiness", SVF Foundation Newport, RI; NY Times Slideshow, January 5, 2010
This week What’s Cookin is sent to you directly from Newport, RI an eclectic little city on the Atlantic coast. Home to some of the best clam chowder and crab cakes I’ve ever eaten, everything seems to be within walking distance including a farm of rare animal breeds, mansions preserved from the Gilded Age, the infamous mystery tower, and the country’s first lending library, the Redwood...I’m always hungry to learn more, meanwhile here’s what’s been happening at Art21:
- It’s a mix-tape tape that flirts with Caribbean Kitsch, romance and hushed Rothko reverence, glitter(!), paint and fesis. Curate your mind around Ben Street’s letter on Chris Ofili’s retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. It sounds like an exhibition not to be missed.
- Welcom Leanne Gilbertson, the latest in the Art21 Guestblogosphere! A teacher at the Sam Houston State University she is also preparing a manuscript that explores the relationships between the emergence, in the 1960s, of both feminist and queer consciousnesses, and the intermedia artistic experimentation occurring at both Warhol’s Factory and Judson Memorial Church.
- FLASHPOINTS: How does art respond to and define the natural world? For the past twelve years, Dan Phillips and members of the Commotion, including his wife Marsha, have been committed to building affordable and visually-distinctive housing out of largely post-consumption building leftovers, waste from the fabrication of industrialized materials (including “landscape timbers,” a plywood by-product), and other free or discarded materials.
- Nicole Rounds Them UP! You’ll read about two anniversary exhibitions, 6,000 shapes upstate, masterworks in the Midwest, some road trip souvenirs, a whole lotta prints, and a sale you won’t want to miss.
- Teaching with Contemporary Art: Art 21 has ventured into the land of teacher institutes. Joe Fusaro reflects on the importance of ‘teaching with ideas’ and introduces Year 2 of the Art21 Educators summer institute will run from July 7-14, 2010 and is now accepting applications from pairs of teachers. Click here for more information and to download an application!
- Grand Canyon Journal 3: the Painter of Video to Life. Has there ever been such an elegant dramatization of the power of illusion as David Copperfield’s “The Painter”? Art and magic share the stage (which strangely recalls both David Letterman’s set and Monica’s apartment from Friends) in a trick that only gently conflates the initial discomfort of Harold and Maude with Copperfield’s problems with the law…
- If You Can Remember the ’60’s You Weren’t There. “When I moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles five years ago, I thought I was done living in a town that was devoted to perpetually remembering the ’60s. But I soon discovered that Los Angeles also carries a mega-torch for that transformative decade.” Lily Simonson thinks continues to inspire the Los Angeles as a California culural center in relationship to the Ferus Gallery and the Samuel Freeman Gallery.
- Art21 Launches the next Flash Points topic, The Ethics of Art. Ethics are defined as “a system of moral principles” which constantly factor into the choices we make. However, these decisions can become confused, making this system of principles more gray than black and white, especially when competing priorities are at work. Over the next two months, we’ll explore the relationship of ethics in art from a variety of perspectives and question the role that they should — or shouldn’t — play.
- The Dust Settles After the First Culture Wars. On January 28, Art21 and 92YTribeca piloted a program called Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21. The night began with a music play list created by artist Mary Heilmann (Season 5).
- VIDEO EXCLUSIVE — Julie Mehretu | Workday. Filmed in her Berlin studio, Julie Mehretu discusses the ups and downs of her daily studio practice. Mehretu is shown working on the painting Middle Grey (2007-2009), one work in a suite of seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, which travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York later this year (May 14 – October 6, 2010).
Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. I
Dan Phillips, "Tree House," 2008. Courtesy of Phoenix Commotion.
As a northerner recently transplanted to the Greater Houston area, I admit to having reservations about all things Texan. I have found this a tough place to love at first sight. Yet, this particular region nurtures a unique host of fascinating figures and issues in contemporary art, along with sometimes frustrating contradictions and striking visual treats—including a wealth of handmade signs and arresting juxtapositions of natural beauty confronting the manmade. In this and subsequent posts as a guest blogger, I hope to sketch out some contributions to contemporary art made by the creators, institutions, and museum professionals who have chosen to either make their homes in and around Houston, or have come here to reflect upon the region in site-specific and installation projects. In the process, I will also reflect on some of the ethical issues in contemporary art that living removed from more established art centers has allowed me to better flesh out.
On my first trip to Huntsville, where I teach art history at Sam Houston State University, I was given a drive-by tour of several structures built by Dan Phillips and his Phoenix Commotion team. Intrigued by what I saw, I visited his “tree house” (where my colleague Annie Strader is the current tenant), and last December I invited Phillips to speak to my Contemporary Art class about his project. For the past twelve years, Phillips and members of the Commotion, including his wife Marsha, have been committed to building affordable and visually-distinctive housing out of largely post-consumption building leftovers, waste from the fabrication of industrialized materials (including “landscape timbers,” a plywood by-product), and other free or discarded materials. Examples of Phillips’s sustainable building aesthetic include: a roof made from recycled license plates, floors made from wine corks, an artist’s studio ceiling lined with salvaged picture frame samples, and a range of other less-than-perfect or blemished building materials destined for the landfill that have been recovered and put into unexpected, unanticipated use.
Since 1996, the Phoenix Commotion, a for-profit rather than non-profit organization, has completed thirteen structures in Phillips’s hometown of Huntsville. In 2004, Phillips, with the cooperation of the city, established a warehouse where recyclable building materials are donated, stored, and then accessed by charitable groups and low-income housing projects. To achieve their aesthetic and ethical goal of increasing the availability of out of the ordinary, low-cost housing in Huntsville, Phillips and his crew are not only building, but have also created an alternative infrastructure that enables materials typically considered building “wastes” or “leftovers” to be creatively reused by the community.
Grand Canyon Journal 3: The Painter of Video to Life
Our previous guest blogger, Karthik Pandian, continues his Grand Canyon journal in the following post. — Ed.
Has there ever been such an elegant dramatization of the power of illusion as David Copperfield’s “The Painter”? Art and magic share the stage (which strangely recalls both David Letterman’s set and Monica’s apartment from Friends) in a trick that only gently conflates the initial discomfort of Harold and Maude with Copperfield’s problems with the law. This trick has surprisingly old-fashioned art direction compared to the techno-industrial fetishism we’ve come to expect from Copperfield. Perhaps this is to suggest that art is the dustier of the two illusory practices, in need of far more maintenance by doddering old maids. Indeed, in the first few moments of the video, Copperfield’s artist puts down the paintbrush in favor of the magician’s rose. While “The Painter” is certainly not his most spectacular trick, it thematizes an emerging struggle between art and magic that is surprisingly relevant to the experience of post-thematic Las Vegas today and does so through a romantic vision of geriatric love without recourse to even a single bathtub!
“Video to Life” provides more evidence to support our hypothesis that members of the Italian architecture collective Superstudio art-directed Copperfield’s performances after they disbanded in 1978. The recurrence of the motorcycle in his oeuvre (it’s one of his go-to entrance and exit strategies) also warmly reminds us that we got here not only from the Grand Canyon on David Copperfield’s magic carpet, but also Ed Harris’s trusty steed. But what “Video to Life” also brilliantly dramatizes is how video as conjured by television, and not painting or even performance, is the central medium of Copperfield’s work and of the countless magicians that follow in his footsteps to take advantage of this already deeply illusionistic medium. However, rather than play with the formal codes, framing and documentary pretentions of television in the age of the flatscreen á la David Blaine (who is the verité-dedicated Jean Rouch of illusion) and Criss Angel (the more gothic Grunewald-ian who gets extra points for location scouting and the use of available light), Copperfield is more like the Nam June Paik of magic, preferring to use TV-like objects in his performances. The box in “Video to Life” is in between an inverted rear-projection TV (with the projector on the outside) and a magic hat which Copperfield pulls televisual objects out of. Copperfield works his magic by conducting the beliefs and disbeliefs that are entangled in this strange object. These include our belief in the light projected from a projector and the shadows cast by a body moving before it, our disbelief in the images projected from that projector or any TV, but also our totemic belief in television as a medium that speaks to us and that we have the potential to occupy. Thus, there is another immaterial projection, embodied by the physical projector at the bottom of the frame, that speaks to our desire to enter the image, to get on the motorcycle, to be Copperfield: “David Copperfield.”
Remembering artist and friend Flo McGarrell
Flores McGarrell I lost my voice. Incredibly frustrating because I have a lot I need to say right now. I just make ridiculous squeaking sounds. […] I think I should just shut up for a while, I have a lot to think about right now anyway.
January 12 at 9:43pm · Comment · Like
This is what everybody who cared about Flo McGarrell was confronted with on his Facebook wall, from January 12 onwards. An outpouring of solicitous messages from friends, relatives, and peers filled his wall again and again and again for days. The first hopeful piece of information that was posted informed us that Flo’s good friend Sue Frame, who was visiting him in Haiti, had survived the earthquake and she knew where Flo was trapped.
I will skip everything else in between and take you to a few days ago, when Sue Frame finally made it back to the States with her friend. Flo McGarrell (1974-2010) passed away on Tuesday, January 12, when the Peace of Mind Hotel collapsed while Flo and Sue were inside. They were making a quick stop on their way back to Jacmel from Port-Au-Prince.
It was not so long ago that I worked with Flo on a post for this site, and I absolutely hate that I am now writing a Remembering artist and friend Flo McGarrell piece. You see, when I think of Flo, I instantly think of an enormous inflatable TV, a bright pink installation, beavers, cats, and her passion to turn trash into treasures. I met Flo when he was a young woman – we were both graduate students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. He had intense sky-blue eyes, a memorable hairdo, a huggable frame, and a hospitable home. There was a drive, a force, and a spirit so well entrenched that they made Flo indestructible. He often raised his left eyebrow. I could never tell what that meant.
Grand Canyon Journal 2: Let’s Get Medievalist on that Crevasse
With the haunting mix of bodily certainty and existential confusion that characterizes a case of morning wood, the naked, supine torso of Ed Harris comes to sudden erection in a primeval forest, shooting up into the verdant frame like a rake that’s been stepped on. The shot is a crucial one in the opening sequence of George A. Romero’s Knightriders. The precipitousness of the montage conjures up both the identification of man and nature, as figured by Harris’s out-of-body “crow’s eye view” flight through the forest as well as his sudden awakening to the central conflict between the Rousseauist utopianism of the merry band of Medievalist motorcyclists he leads versus the alienating threat that modernity and capital pose to their way of life.
While this image may seem an unlikely entry point into the Grand Canyon, the proliferation of Arthurian place names in the Canyon (Excalibur Tower, Modred Abyss, Lancelot Point, Holy Grail, Gawain Abyss, Bedivere Point, The Dragon, Guinevere Castle, Merlin Abyss, Elaine Castle, and Galahad Point) speaks otherwise. Moreover, Ed Harris’s ontological sit-up echoes the axial leap of the horizontal geological striations that spatialize time along the canyon’s walls to the arbitrariness of the names (an arbitrariness that we will hungrily feast upon) that identify vertical rock formations and voids.
Geological section of the Grand Canyon covering roughly 1.5 billion years of sedimentation
Let us rewind for a moment to the Edenic state of nature envisaged before “the rise” of Ed, if you will. During the “crow-cam” sequence that opens Knightriders, we can now imagine Ed Harris lying down naked, out of frame, presumably asleep or dreaming on the forest floor. In this as-yet-unseen state, the Ed Harris-to-come is a kind of pure potential, a horizontal being that has yet to emerge from the plenitude of the forest. This avatar of Ed Harris finds his mirror image in the horizontal geological strata exposed on the walls of the Grand Canyon. Whereas Ed, in his latent form, is being as pure potential, the spatialization of time and temporalization of space that characterizes the geological stratum make it a crucible for the materialization of being as history in which space and time are co-extensive. In the layers of the Grand Canyon, space and time refine and compress one another. Being travels further and further away from pure potential until it almost sublimates into it; hence, the feeling of irreality that, like the veils of smog that descend into the chasm during peak season, tends to both intensify and obscure the experience of the Canyon.
What does it mean to point to time? Could we point to the Middle Ages on the geological calendar wall of the Grand Canyon? Does the tip of Excalibur Tower, which is said to look like King Arthur’s legendary sword, contain the moment when its namesake was thrust into a soon-to-be-slain dragon? Does Guinevere Castle house a temporal room in which the Queen scandalously gave herself to Lancelot? The answer is no, since even the uppermost strata of the Canyon are approximately 200 million years old. Kim Novak’s character from Vertigo would have to ethereally drive a few hundred miles away from that ringed redwood in order to ethereally point to a time that would approximate that temporal distance.
