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.”
The Confluence Project looks for volunteers
Season 1 artist Maya Lin’s Confluence Project is looking for volunteers during June and October 2008 to complete a trail at Sandy River Delta in Oregon, which leads to Lin’s Bird Blind installation. Lin’s Confluence Project was born in 2000, when she was asked to create a series of installations along the Columbia River basin to commemorate the bicentennial of the journey of the Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, which ran from Chief Timothy Park to Cape Disappointment. Maya Lin was asked by local Native American tribes to rethink the meaning of the expedition by creating art pieces on the same trails that were minutely described by these travelers 200 years ago.
If you are interested in collaborating in this ongoing project or to see Maya Lin’s online video explaining the project herself, visit www.confluenceproject.org
Barry McGee video on ArtTalk
Watch this two-part conversation between artists Aaron Rose and Barry McGee(Season 1) on VBS’s ArtTalk. While the video features live shots of McGee’s artwork and installations, the interview subjects are recast as animated robotic talking heads, as though the dialogue was fed into a Speak & Spell. As elusive and reluctant to talk about his work as ever, here McGee lets his artwork literally speak for itself.
Orozco Revelation
One of the most interesting documentaries I have ever seen about Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) - and which was a total revelation into his work - is the Mexican production directed by Juan Carlos Martin in 2002. Excellent soundtrack and music too by Manuel Rocha Iturbide and the trance band Tosca Tango. I first saw it at INPUT’s (International Public TV) 2003 edition in Aarhus, Denmark, when it was presented in a session entitled “Artsy Fartsy?” dedicated to art documentaries. The documentary followed Orozco around the world while working in different projects and art pieces and allowed for a tremendously personal insight into the artist’s thoughts, creative process, and day-to-day life. We meet his friends, we see him drinking a beer and taking a nap in a hammock by a Mexican beach, we mingle in openings with him and see how he picks up trash from New York streets for his readymade installations. Orozco talks to us (the camera) and we wonder to what point his artistic vision influenced the filmmaker in his way of shaping the 82’ piece that keeps us stuck to the screen all along. It was specially interesting to discuss with the filmmaker the larger role of audiovisual production when tackling the theme of art or specific artists’ biographies. Fascinating questions about captivating audiences through sometimes intellectually challenging art arose in discussions with J. C. Martin and the other film directors during the session, as well as the format and shape art documentaries end up taking depending on the creative impulses and dictates of the artists themselves. Definitely worth looking into…
Tim Hawkinson on NewArtTV
A video featuring Art21 artist Tim Hawkinson was recently released on NewArtTV.com. In this interview, Hawkinson discusses many of the objects in How Man is Knit, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Pace Wildenstein Gallery in May 2007.
Podcast: Kara Walker
A new podcast featuring Art21 artist Kara Walker is now available¬†through iTunes¬†or¬†KCET.org. Walker discusses her work with Gary Garrels,¬†chief curator¬†at the Hammer Museum,¬†where the artist’s¬†touring survey¬†My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love is currently on view.
Juliana Snapper’s Vocal Hysteria
Juliana Snapper is a trained opera singer who uses her voice to ululate at the edge of music, creating visually stunning, highly theatrical performance pieces, combining the sex appeal of 50’s burlesque with futuristic imprisonment scenarios. I recently had the pleasure of seeing one of her performances, Watermouth Coda, at PS1, as a part of Ridykeulous: The Odds Are Against Us:, an “over-animated panel discussion with special performances that subverts, sabotages and overturns the language commonly used to define feminism and lesbian art.” This panel was in conjunction with the current exhibition at PS1 that runs from February 14 through May 12 WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution.
Snapper’s performance involved her total submersion in a black tank filled with water. Outside on a chilly day on the steps of PS1, she was visible through a large window in the tank that framed her like a picture, as she floated ethereally in a kind of anti-space, dressed in fishnets, furs, a blonde wig and bright red lipstick. Snapper sang underwater for almost an hour, gurgling and shrieking in dissheveled but glamorous distress, into a microphone suspended in the water. She managed to fuse intense discpline, self-inflicted trauma and the desire to communicate through the even the most compromised means, evoking a palpable power and rawness.
Check out one of her videos, Cavatina Crumpletta (2006):
Currently Snapper is writing her doctoral dissertation on hysteria in the 20th century, in the Department of Critical Studies and Experimental Music Practices at UCSD.
Update: Oliver Herring | TASK
As announced earlier this week, Art21 artist Oliver Herring (Season 3) concluded his residency at the University of Maryland on April 2nd with a Task performance. Videos such as the one above, titled “Dance Fight,” were created by UMD students and can be viewed on the UMD Task Force blog. Photos from Wednesday’s performance are available on Facebook.
More Task in 2008: In conjunction with the Luminato Festival, Herring will transform an empty outdoor public swimming pool in Regent Park, Toronto into a stage for a Task-party on June 14; Herring will perform Task at the Seattle Public Library on June 28; and on September 6, the artist, in conjunction with FLUXSPACE, will perform Task in Philadelphia for the second time.
“Dan Flavin: Constructed Light” at the Pulitzer Foundation
There is an amazing exhibition of Dan Flavin’s work at the Contemporary’s neighbor, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. Dan Flavin: Constructed Light will be on view until October 2008.
The exhibition showcases the power of Flavin’s work better than anywhere I’ve seen the work installed. This is partly due to the fact that Tadao Ando’s entire building has been turned over to Dan Flavin’s work and Tiffany Bell, who was the project director of the Dan Flavin catalogue raisonné and who serves as curator and archivist for the Flavin Studio, curated the exhibition. The installation was realized with the oversight and assistance of Stephen Morse, who is the Exhibition Coordinator and Conservator of the Flavin Studio. This show equally shows off the talents of the architect Ando and the artist Flavin – and together the audience is given something magical.
Here’s a link to a video of Steve Morse as he describes the installation of the exhibition and where he answers: how can you posthumously install an exhibition of Dan Flavin‚Äôs work in a space he is not familiar with?
