Artists Unite Issue

This morning I was thinking about health care reform, and the vociferous opposition to it in the form of people, many armed, showing up to disrupt town hall meetings on the subject. I thought about those who would say it’s not wise for an artist to publicly express an opinion about this issue, because he or she could risk alienating collectors or others who may bear some power over them. Then I went back to thinking about those fearful, raging people who are so afraid that providing health care for the over 50 million uninsured people in this country is somehow going to infringe upon their own freedoms, especially their right to carry weapons. Who are these people who hate so much? Oh yeah. They’re the same people who hate gays and and anyone of color (especially in the Oval Office). They are the same people who want to wrest the right of reproductive choice from women, and who are suspicious of artists and anybody who doesn’t fit into their mold.

Americans for the Arts has joined with 20 national arts organizations to issue a statement calling on Congress for health care reform, and “to fully recognize the rights of individual artists and arts groups in the health care reform debate.” I want to exercise those rights.

So, when I got dressed this morning, I pulled from deep in my drawer a T-shirt I got after going on the AIDS walk many years ago. It was imprinted with words and an image by the late artist David Wojnarowicz, who was one of the legions of talented people the art community lost too early because people tolerated a screwed up system for too long. I pulled on my T-shirt and got on the crowded subway for the long ride downtown. On my back, his words seared:

If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare I’d rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS…” says the healthcare official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour long video of people dying on camera because they can’t afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can’t even remember what his official looked like because I reached in through the T.V. screen and ripped his face in half and I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country “If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers” says the governor of texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the governor was only joking and didn’t know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn’t think it would hurt his chances for re-election anyways and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government healthcare officials or those thinly disguised walking swastika’s that wear religious garments over their murerous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs there’s a thin line a very thin line between the inside and the outside and I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media or on peoples lips; the religious types outside st. patricks cathedral shouting to men and women in the gay parade: “You won’t be here next year–you’ll get AIDS and die ha ha” and the areas of the u.s.a. where it is possible to murder a man and when brought to trial one only has to say that the victim was a queer and that he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free and the difficulties that a bunch of republican senators have in albany with supporting an anti-violence bill that includes ’sexual orientation’ as a category of crime victims there’s a thin line a very thin line and as each t-cell disappears from my body it’s replaced by ten pounds of pressure ten pounds of rage and I focus that rage into non-violent resistance but that focus is starting to slip my hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack america seems to understand and accept murder as a self defense against those who would murder other people and its been murder on a daily basis for eight count them eight [nine, ten...] long years and we’re expected to quietly and politely make house in this windstorm of murder but I say there’s certain politicians that had better increase their security forces and there’s religious leaders and heathcare officials that had better get bigger dogs and higher fences and more complex security alarms for their homes and queer-bashers better start doing their work from inside howitzer tanks because the thin line between the inside and the outside is beginning to erode and at the moment I’m a thirty seven foot tall one thousand one hundred and seventy-two pound man inside this six foot frame and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.

I took more than a moment to remember all those who were gone like Wojnarowicz and Keith Haring, and countless others who were willing to Act Up to save lives. It’s not just about AIDS now, nor was it then, really. Think about it.

Tomorrow I will have to resurrect another ancient T-shirt, one emblazoned with an image by the late Keith Haring, and bearing the ever-so-relevant words: IGNORANCE=FEAR, SILENCE=DEATH.

[originally published on Sky Pape's blog, "Drawn Together: Sky Pape's Drawing and Fine Art Blog"]

[Text from my T-shirt: copyright Estate of David Wojnarowicz. Audio of David Wojnarowicz reading at The Drawing Center in 1992, shortly before his death.]

[images from top: David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled (Peter Hujar), 1989, silver print, 30-1/2" x 24-1/2"); David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled (Face in Dirt", 1990, silver print, 28-1/2" x 28-1/2", both copyright Estate of David Wojnarowicz and courtesy of PPOW Gallery. Keith Haring, "Ignorance=Fear", 1989, poster, 24" x 43-1/4", copyright the Estate of Keith Haring, courtesy of The Keith Haring Foundation.]

My thoughts have returned to the superiority of first-hand over virtual experience. By this, I mean looking at original artwork as opposed to viewing it on a computer monitor, taking off your iPod and going to hear live music, attending a dance performance, a play, a poetry or book reading, and yes, even just kicking yourself outside to move your legs, smell the flowers, and hear the birds sing.

The in-person experience and meaning of a large-scale work of art cannot be conveyed by a jpeg any more than looking at a picture of a gourmet meal can compare to savoring it oneself. Any more than typing XOXO is like kissing and hugging someone you love. This is the problem. Seeing or reading something on-line is not an acceptable substitute for real experience, yet the more we get sucked into it, the harder becomes to pull away, unplug, and venture out into the physical world, where engaging with people and art and nature can be challenging and even messy, and slightly risky because you can’t just click and instantly transport yourself somewhere else.

I recognize the irony in writing about disconnecting oneself from the computer and other electronic devices, and then posting it on my blog. Well, life is full of little ironies, including the one about how computers were going to save us all scads of time and make us all so much more productive (except for those Facebook and Twitter junkies who get themselves fired).

When psychiatric diagnosis-like terms such as “Information Anxiety” (coined by Richard Saul Wurman who created the TED conferences) and “Nature Deficit Disorder” start showing up, it’s time to acknowledge there’s a problem. “We must keep in mind that information or raw data is not knowledge. Individuals achieve knowledge by using their own experience, distinguishing the important from the irrelevant and making critical value judgments.”

[Note: Extra reading - You also might enjoy Nicholas Kristof's NDD-related article "How to Lick a Slug" if you missed it, and Brad Stone's NY Times article, "Breakfast Can Wait. The Day's First Stop Is Online."]

Today, people spend less time looking at a work of art itself than they do looking through the viewfinder of their digital cameras so they can snap a picture to post online to show others what they’ve seen - when they haven’t even really looked at it! This NY Times article by Michael Kimmelman hit it dead on:

“Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover…”

“…The art historian T. J. Clark…has lately written a book about devoting several months of his time to looking intently at two paintings by Poussin. Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.”

“Until then we grapple with our impatience and cultural cornucopia. Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be. I almost hesitate to mention our sketching. It seems pretentious and old-fogeyish in a cultural moment when we can too easily feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed just to look hard.”

I could go on, but I realize this post has just exceeded 600 words, and I don’t want to strain anyone’s techno-abbreviated attention span. More importantly, it’s time to begin my weekly 24-hour, technology-free, official Day Off, so I want to get away from the computer as much as I want you to do so too.

So that’s it until next time, but ’til then, let’s all do something to get out there and remind ourselves there ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby.

[article reposted from "Drawn Together" - Sky Pape's Drawing and Fine Art Blog. Please visit it for more!]

Like So Many Things… 

(but so very unlike most of what’s out there in viral video garage band land)

In 2001 BMW set the bar for short indie film work on the internet with the magnificent series “The Hire.” And then they came back and hit it high again with the 2002 edition   really setting us up for a big fall. How exciting was that? It seemed like a promise of great things to come but instead it’s mostly been Jackass style hi-jinx, family pet, and frat boy part-tee videos, or uploads of that guy doing his jig or the Complaint Chorus since then. Some things better than others, but still basically nothing more than visual garage band land - “uh-huh, that’s great, good for you, yeah and oh hey, are you gonna finish those fries” stuff. Nothing nowhere near what “The Hire” was about – which is inspired short feature filmmaking.1

Probably there’s been some good video work out there on the so called “viral video” scene that is trying to break away, but I’m not finding it. Luckily IFC has also been on the lookout for good work for their website programming and they found something: “Like So Many Things…,” a new online video series by This Thing Films. “Like So Many Things…” is smart and funny, beautifully shot and edited, well acted and well directed with good writing - seven “webisodes” that are spot on and spot on for the internet.

The series follows Lucy and Karl, two lonely, but young and game, hearts who meet at a bar on a Friday night. We meet them when Karl (played by Greg Keller) runs out of the bar looking for Lucy (played by Marin Gazzaniga) with an offer to walk her home.

Okay, they just left a bar; they’d been drinking; figure reason and sound judgment, or at least common sense standards, have dropped far out of sight. That leaves them thinking they maybe got something here and neither wants to let go of the possibility of a possibility so they’re off and running, or rather lurching and stumbling about, in pursuit of the connection.  The filmmakers run that thread through the seven episodes of timed and chanced meetings of this idiotic, pathetic, funny, charming and dear duo with great success.  Episode 2, Future Days, Future Nights, begins on a wonderfully comical moment as Lucy and Karl run into each other on the street and stand on opposite sidewalks shouting their conversation over and through the traffic. It’s as hilarious as it is touching and sad and you find yourself shaking your head wondering what’s wrong with these two while hoping like mad that they can get it right.  You recognize them; they’re familiar in fact that could be you out there – or me. Could be, that is, if our lives are so much more together.

As the story takes turns, leaps here or bounds there, and suggests, hides, or reveals itself the filmmakers are right on it, with nary a misstep, and like good short film making the pieces have the tease that slips in from nowhere lands a punch, or a slap, a soft caress or a kiss, and then just as just when you thought you were getting on to it; it slyly slides out of your life.

(1 The Complaints Chorus is good, but it’s the choral work that inspired, not the filmmaking, and this is true of most of the good video work on the internet - the good part isn’t related to video/filmmaking, and that’s what we’re talking about here; that’s what we’re wanting.)

Traversing the vast expanse of Audubon Terrace always brings on a sense of exhilaration. There just aren’t that many wide open public spaces surrounded by imposing Beaux Arts architecture to be found these days. So, last Tuesday night, passing the statue of El Cid on a rearing stallion, I took a deep breath of brisk air and soaked up the scene as I made my way to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the opening of their annual invitational exhibition.

The Academy’s premises have just undergone an enormous expansion, and the new exhibition space is impressive. There’s a lot of work in this show (116 paintings, photographs, multi-media works, sculptures, installations, and works on paper by 30 artists), up until April 5th, so I’m just going to point out a few highlights:

A trio of neon pieces by Stephen Antonakos infused the east gallery of the new space with their jewel-like glow. This mature artist not only knows how confident, modern, & minimal can still be engaging, warm & welcoming in terms of art, he lives it!

In the south gallery, three portraits (one of herself) by Ann Gale assert a subtle, yet undeniably strong presence. The canvases coalesce animism of paint and the energy of the living human. These paintings evince a kindred connection to Lucien Freud, but perhaps more importantly to both Cezanne and even Giacometti in the attention paid to locating a mark or bit of paint in a very particular physical space, with the paint simultaneously describing and deconstructing. When much portraiture relies on photography and digital resources, becoming flat and lifeless, these portraits hum and buzz and bristle with the intensity of living and looking — the experience of the eyes, interpreted by the mind behind them, without any intervention. The portraits’ subjects are rendered alive and real, and the recognition of these daubs of paint coming together to convey an individual with such psychological power is to wonder at how our own cells happen to hang together to create the assumed reality of self.

Artists ultimately selected to participate in this exhibition have first been invited by one of Academy’s members to submit work, so it’s a generally high bar of peer recognition. In this year’s show, there are a number of big-name artists such as April Gornik, Gregory Crewdson, Roxy Paine, and Beverly McIver. To these eyes, the biggest surprise and stand-out of the exhibition came by way of paintings bearing titles like “To Crack a Smile,” and “Vaudeville Hook” by David Nelson, an artist with whom I was not familiar. Nelson’s non-objective canvases are both technically and aesthetically seductive in a manner as modest, genuine and self-effacing artist as the artist himself. I’ve rarely met anyone who seemed so truly touched and surprised to receive well-earned compliments and congratulations. Unfortunately, my camera was out of juice, and I couldn’t find any other images of his work on-line to show you, so you’ll have to take my word for it or go see for yourself!

[images above: Audubon Terrace looking east, c. 1950, courtesy American Academy of Arts & Letters; Installation view of work by Stephen Antonakos, "Departure" 1993-2007, 61 x 51 x 5"; "Arrival" 2008, 88 x 46 x 5", and "Respite" 2000-2001, all pieces white paint on versacel, neon, copyright and courtesy of Stephen Antonakos; Ann Gale, "Self Portrait with Blue Stripes", 14 x 11", oil on masonite, courtesy of Hckett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, copyright Ann Gale.]

[review via Drawn Together]

Our February 13th gallery crawl began at Howard Greenberg Gallery on 57th Street, in the magnificent Fuller Building, itself a fine example of Art Deco architecture. We passed beneath the limestone frieze by sculptor Elie Nadelman, and headed up to the gallery to see an assortment of photographs from India. There are three separate exhibitions on view, Betsy Karel: Bombay Jadoo, Sacred Sight, and Mary Ellen Mark: Indian Circus, all united by the theme of India . (On view until March 14th.)

Off in a side area is a very small selection of photos of Indian circus performers by Mary Ellen Mark. You could easily make the mistake of bypassing the unobtrusive portal to this strange and impassioned world. Mark’s camera seems to disappear, and the viewer steps right into her place, experiencing with a direct jolt the intensity of connection with her subjects.

Betsy Karel’s “Bombay Jadoo” and the assortment of photographs in the main gallery by ‘Anonymous’ to not-so-anonymous artists like Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson fully rounds out this large range of images that effectively transports one to India old and new, conveying little of the misery, and much of the jadoo (A Hindu term for magic or wonder-working).

From there, we saw Judy Pfaff’s show Paper, at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art. [Exhibition closed Feb 21.] An affinity between sculpture and drawing is often remarked upon, and that was clearly evident here. These pieces exist somewhere in the realm between the two disciplines, leaning closer to relief sculpture and assemblage or collage, but none of those are fitting labels. They are works on/of paper, but you can find just about anything else amidst the layered and cut paper, including found images, ink, wire, artificial flowers, coffee filters, plant stems, fishing floats, and umbrella parts. The colors range from earthy to day-glo, and as wild and chaotic as these pieces may be, one doesn’t lose confidence in Pfaff’s ability to orchestrate the entire composition. It’s easy to envision how these pieces would evolve organically in the studio with the artist deliberating over each decision to build the complete whole, which deceptively looks as if it burst forth into being all at once.

Pfaff’s dynamic works encompass the complex experience of the natural world around us. Within each piece one can find beauty and decay, messiness and fine detail, chaos and order, fear and delight — all the stuff of life. Pfaff comes across as a fearless, mature artist who obviously loves her creative process — one of discovery and adventure. Viewing this work, you feel you get to take that exciting ride along with her.

Next was Kori Newkirk’s show at The Project [up until March 20th]. There was something very affecting about being in The Project’s space. Rounding the corner from the large, open main room, one turns to the left and enters the more intimate gallery spaces. There are less than a handful of pieces in this show–three drawings in the small front room, and then a lit, sculptural piece in the darkened back space. The sensitive, seductive lines of Newkirk’s drawn self-portraits are done using bleach on pigmented paper, a sort of reductive process that appears paradoxically both ghostly and very physical. For such a spare show, Newkirk’s work fills the space with a silent forcefulness that has remained strong and persistent in memory.

At the front of the gallery, there is a display of literature on some of the other gallery artists. I picked up a catalogue on Julie Mehretu, and although Meheretu’s accomplished drawings/paintings are much more tightly worked than Pfaff’s, there seemed to be a visual connection, a language in common between these artists of different generations.

Jack Sal at Zone Contemporary Art, [closed Feb 28th]. This show presented a varied cross-section from small, naturally weathered lead plates that look allude to landscapes and natural phenomena, to minimal works on canvas of gesso, ink, and silk surgical tape.

As noted in the gallery’s press release, Sal is an under-recognized artist in the United States, in spite of his long, accomplished career, including a series of site-specific installations in Europe, collaborative projects with William Wegman and Sol Lewitt, and inclusion in public collections such as MoMA. In the front of the gallery, one was able to get a nice sense of this artist’s journey by spending some time with a wonderfully installed wall of dozens of widely varied smaller pieces, hung salon-style.

We ended up at MoMA to see Rebus (closed Feb 23), curated by artist Vik Muniz, and while there, also stopped in to see the show of work by Marlene Dumas, both of which have been widely reviewed. A “rebus” is a combination of visual images and symbols that piece together to add up to another meaning. As a kids’ brainteaser, you might see a letter, then a plus sign, then an image that would add up to an unrelated word or phrase.

Muniz was the 9th artist in MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series to don the curator’s hat and hand-pick this show from the museum’s vast collection. The pieces included are not just culled from the art collections, but also include many design items, such as a piece of bubble wrap, that may leave viewers scratching their heads. But scratching your head is indeed part of Muniz’s intention, as this show is one big brainteaser. You are intended to follow through it as chronologically installed, and make a connection between each piece you see and the one situated before and after it. This makes for some fun, especially if you’re visiting with friends. Who can guess the connection first?

I feared Muniz’s concept would turn out to be a bit of a one-liner, leading one to dash away as quickly as one could figure out the connection, rather than stopping to really consider the pieces in the show. “Oh, it’s yellow, and the glass piece that looks like an egg-yolk is yellow, and next to that is a timer, like you’d use to time your egg, and next…” But besides providing an easy in for looking at the work, it also provides a context to think about the ways art connects to our world, the ways it evolves from our world, the ways things are connected, and ultimately to the basic concept that making connections between things is a key to understanding. The show’s first piece is the tremendous 1987 homage to Rube Goldberg in film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss called The Way Things Go, and it’s hard to go wrong with a start like that!

[...article continued at Drawn Together]

[Images above: Contortionist with Sweety the Puppy, Great Raj Kamal Circus, Upleta, India, copyright Mary Ellen Mark , 19" x 19", 1989, Platinum print, printed later, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery; Benares, India 1956, copyright Marc Riboud, gelatin silver print, 40 x 30cm, printed later, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery; Konya, 2008, copyright Judy Pfaff, Layered/cut paper, Joss paper, found images, ink, wire, artificial flowers, wire, Crown Kozo paper, umbrella parts, framed: 94 1/2 x 94 1/2 inches, courtesy Ameringer Yohe Fine Art; Detail of drawing, copyright Kori Newkirk, bleach on paper, courtesy The Project Gallery; White/Wash III, 2008, copyright Jack Sal, courtesy Zone Contemporary Art; Yellow from the series Line, Form, Color, 1951, copyright Ellsworth Kelly, colored paper, 7-1/2 x 8", The Museum of Modern Art; Yolk, 1999, copyright Kiki Smith, Multiple of glass, overall: 3/4 x 1-1/2 x 1-1/2", The Museum of Modern Art; Timer Model No. 152, 1960, copyright Rodolfo Bonette, ABS polymer, 2-3/8" x 4-1/2", The Museum of Modern Art; Installation view of portraits by Marlene Dumas at the Museum of Modern Art.]

Can you picture this? Arrested for taking photos of the NYC subway, even though it’s legal. Don’t these guys have anything better to do? The camera-wielding perp knew his rights and it didn’t seem to matter. Still, you might want to know your rights:

“I said, ‘According to the rules of conduct, we are allowed to take pictures,’ ” Mr. Taylor said. “I showed him the rules — they’re bookmarked on my BlackBerry.”

Rule 1050.9 (c) of the state code says, “Photography, filming or video recording in any facility or conveyance is permitted except that ancillary equipment such as lights, reflectors or tripods may not be used.”

I guess the cops don’t need to keep up on the laws that much. Maybe policing is more of an intuitive art than I’ve realized, and has less to do with enforcing actual laws. More info on the photography ban (or lack thereof).

[continued on Drawn Together]

I confess: I know less than nothing about sports. In fact, my closest connection to any football field came last Thursday at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, where I went to see Jane Dickson’s show Night Driving, an exhibition of about twenty recent oil paintings on astroturf. Yes, that’s right. Astroturf. Think pointillism meets the playing field. It’s difficult to capture in reproduction, but the effect is quietly mesmerizing, even hypnotic.

Dickson is no stranger to the exploration of unusual painting grounds, having already used sandpaper and carpet surfaces for her paintings. The astroturf bears a certain relationship to velvet paintings, imbuing an eerie luminosity to the works, but these lack any overt sentimentality or kitschiness.

Dickson provides views of cars on highways, bridges, garages, and sights so familiar they might seem bland. However, as the artist states, she is “…drawn to represent the uncanny, defined by Freud as, ‘the familiar grown strange,’ aiming to pull the unnoticed, the unquestioned, into the foreground, aiming to provide a space within my work for reflection on where we now find ourselves and what that tells us about who we are.” These stated intentions are extremely well-realized through her new paintings. Slightly three-dimensional and definitely tactile, these works, not just for their scale, demand to be seen in person.

From afar the paintings appear to be realistic, but with each step closer, shapes dissolve into a shimmering surface of color. Depth perception disappears, and indeed the familiar grows wonderfully strange.

This show is up until February 14th at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, 525 W 25th St., New York, NY.

(FYI, Jane Dickson is also the artist responsible for the mosaic of New Year’s Eve Revelers, permanently installed in the NYC subway tunnel between Port Authority and Times Square.)

[image above: Blue Tunnel 2, 2006-2008, Oil on astroturf, 29 x 36 in., 73.7 x 91.4 cm. Copyright Jane Dickson, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.]

For more reviews, visit Sky Pape’s blog Drawn Together

This weekend is the last chance to see “Pour Your Body Out,” the new Pipilotti Rist video installation at MoMA. 

It’s not perfect, it’s not even great but it is bold and it reaches even if it doesn’t grasp, and it’s provocative in a number of ways, and it’s worth seeing. Rist’s MoMA commissioned, site-specific installation doesn’t relate to the museum’s atrium space or set up a dialogue with it the way the recent Olafur Eliasson free-swinging by virtue of it’s own essence fan by did, but it certainly transforms the space. The artist has created a lush and warming colorful, almost baroque, womb at the heart of an ice-cold, white walled, grey steel and glass skinned modernist box which is something in and of itself.

And it’s big, 7,354 cubic meters, a panorama of moving imagery 25 feet high and 200 feet across in almost every direction. Big doesn’t necessarily mean better, but it does mean something. There is something to big; think of big deal, big idea, talk big, think big, make it big, go over big, in a big way. To stand or lay around in the big room on the big sofa on the big rug that’s part and parcel of “Pour Your Body Out”, while giant floating dripping bodies, or giant green strawberries, or giant bubbling pits of pinky liquid, or giant monstrous wild boars traverse the four walls two stories high is surely curious. The big scale dictated slowing the speed so nothing happens in real time. It’s not quite slo-mo, but slow enough that the lush organic forms creepily morph into close ups of facial pores in the dreamiest of ways.

Of course one of the problems with big is that there’s always bigger, and in fact I immediately wanted that. Why weren’t the walls of the uppermost floors were also covered with video images?  Why not seventy-foot wild boars peeking through one hundred foot grasses, and eighty-foot high feets sloshing through muddy puddles the size of Rhode Island, and psychedelic flora and fauna the size of houses floating from two hundred foot heights? 

No doubt the imagery was meant to provoke and it does. For me it most provoked thoughts of a slightly-almost R rated version of Bugdom, the third-person action platform computer game developed and published by Pangea Software. Like In Bugdom, there’s a mesmerizing sound track. The “Pour Your Body Out” sound piece composed by Anders Guggisberg loops at a slightly shorter time frame than the video so at no time does the image and sound match-up repeat. Bugdom doesn’t have that but it is also set in a garden or outdoor bug kingdom. There the goal is to help a pillbug named Rollie McFly defeat evil fire ants, free imprisoned ladybugs, and restore peace and tranquility to the wonderful world of Bugdom^. In “Pour Your Body Out” unlike in Bugdom, it’s not obvious who the protagonist is, though you get the sense that there is a one; nor is the through line clear, but there is something Stanislavskian or at least psychophysical about the entire experience.

It’s also evocative of the Disney experience. I was reminded of someone’s explanation of why she and her husband continue to vacation at Disney World long after their kids were grown. And that is, for example, because they have this big theatre with a big screen (IMAX I’m guessing) and they show these cool movies, like the one of the rain forest, and you stand there inside this big room with big screens and you feel like you’re smack dab in the middle of the forest and then they have misters that all of a sudden spritz water and you really think for a second that you’re really in a forest in the rain.

This person as it turns out lives in the woods and when it was suggested that they might just take a walk in their back yard the next time it rains she further explained, in total exasperation, that it’s not that easy, not everyone can just go out in their backyard in the rain.

Which is all to say that despite the fabulousness of the experience - size, sound, color, and couch wise - something essential is missing, something like meaning.  Unless of course the medium is the message, and unless this is what it looks like when you push up against a new art frontier, one that lies beyond the land of viewing art into a realm where we inhabit it.

Like that of other contemporary installation artists, for example Olafur Eliasson’s “The Weather Project” and Doug Aitken’s   “Migration”) - both with recent major MoMA installations also curated by the razor smart, fearlessly grooving head of media, Klaus Biesenbach - Rist’s work seeks to take humanist thing further than it’s ever been.  So there they are, re-visioning art in a world full of re-visioning, like a Renaissance Redux.

Go see it if only to see what you think and while you’re there check out the Viz Muniz curated show, “Artist’s Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus.”

Pamela Popeson

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is the kind of institution that exists in my dreams and happily, in reality: a gorgeous industrial building complex, beautifully repurposed into an art space with exciting visual arts, mainstream and avant garde performance and good food to boot.

A recent Saturday was the finale of the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, a full day of new music performed by a group of musicians who spent a three-week residency with members of Bang on a Can Allstars and other top new music performers. The featured artist was Terry Riley, who reportedly taught the residents Indian ragas every morning. There were a few pieces on the program with a visual or multimedia component. They were not so interesting from my perspective, as the relationships between components seemed weak. But overall, I have no complaints about a full-day program of New Music that is almost never performed in a venue that hosts artists like Beth Orton other nights of the week.

The gallery spaces house two hands full of shows this month. I was able to fit in several between visits to the Festival performances. The first is sculpture and paintings by Anselm Kiefer, including a 50-meter long ribbon of concrete and some spectacular paintings whose surfaces now look like a dry cracking desert. The show includes about 6 paintings plus the sculpture.

On the huge ground floor, an exhibit that explores new landscape art was varied and interesting. 

I admit to rushing through, but was taken by two works in my survey. The first was Jennifer Steinkamp’s animation in which a tree, possibly inspired by the upside-down tree installation by Natalie Jeremijenko in the MoCA entranceway, moves from one position to another and back, tracing a huge reordering of branches along the way. The second was a set of terrariums by Vaughn Bell (Personal Biospheres) in which the viewer is invited to join the microenvironments by putting his/her head through a hole in the bottom. While the photo op this creates is irresistible, I tried to focus on my own experience of being in the miniature world when I put my own head into one.

On the top two floors, a group show surveys the artistic impressions of numerous Western artists visiting China. Some of the work is really good, such as a pair of photographs by Wolf that show the dense architecture of Hong Kong, but most of the work states the obvious: China is crowded and busy. The one piece that tackled the idea of scale metaphorically was a video installation by Catherine Yass entitled Lock in which we experience the view fore and aft from an industrial river barge as it changes levels in a gargantuan lock. I couldn’t help feeling like I was watching a TV show (and waiting for the host’s commentary, “Here we are fifteen minutes later—notice the water beginning to flow through the gates…”) but the idea was clever.

The highlight of the day for me, though was Jennie Holzer’s installation in a darkened room the size of a football field. From both ends of the room, cinema projectors send rolling credits across the floor walls and ceiling as the viewers walk through or lounge on the 8-person bean bag chairs mushrooming around the room. The text was a work of fiction of no particular relevance or politics. The piece appeared to be more of a formal experiment in using some medium-tech sleight of hand to put you in a state of wonder.

Getting to Mass MoCA takes you through some beautiful country from any approach, and these shows are continuing through Spring ‘09.

Wendy and I were invited to visit Wroclaw (which through the oddities of Polish pronounciation is vr-ah-tsw-ah-v) by Joanna Klass, who is organizing the Year of Grotowski for 2009. Joanna is a theater producer from Poland who has lived in Southern California for 15 years and brought cutting edge theater to major L.A. venues and alternative places like the Getty Museum.

In Wroclaw, we were treated to a tour of this beautiful city, which became Poland as part of the Post WWII division of territories between Germany, Russia and the Eastern Bloc. We were told by other Poles that Wroclaw has a unique flavor partly due to the fact that all the Poles who live there were “assigned” to this home after the war and so share that unusual uprooted background.

One of the stunning features of the city is an architectural phenomenon by Max Berg, the largest dome of its time made of formed concrete for the 1912 World Exhibition. The structure was so controversial that 4 different sets of authorities required evaluation and sign off, and the construction crew refused to remove the supporting scaffolding — forcing Berg to start the removal himself with passersby whom he snagged to help.

The theater in which drama revolutionary Jerzy Grotowski worked before leaving Poland is now the Grotowski Institute, which houses the performance space, an archive of Grotowski’s writings and photographs and administrative offices. The Institute is the base for the year of Grotowski, which will include a festival in Wroclaw during June of next year.

We viewed two parts of a triptych in progress from the Institute’s resident theater company, Zar. The work was directed by Jarek Fret, who knew — but never worked with — Grotowski and is in the generation of theater-makers who were both influenced by the master and have an independence from his technique. The evening consisted of unrelated one-acts which were presented in reverse of the order they will hold in the finished triptych, according to Fret. The first, Cesarian Section, was an unsettling dance of love, loss and transcendence. The in-the-round production began with music of a string ensemble with piano, two glasses of wine and a plywood floor divided in two by a 4-inch trench of shattered glass. The lights went out and in the dark, the sound of smashing wine glasses shattered the room. When the lights came back up, there ensued a beautiful interplay between Ditte Berkeley, Kamila Klamut and Tomasz Bojarski that had them playing powerful visual metaphors around, in, and straddling the now lit-from-below stripe of broken glass; wine as blood; running without breaking free and destruction as a response to frustration.

The second part, Gospels of Childhood, resulted from primary research in the Caucuses Mountains, where the group investigated lingering forms of early Christianity and learned songs used there that have their roots in the beginning of the Common Era. The resulting piece is a cross between bible reenactment and authentic ritual that the director later told me aims to fulfill the same purpose as a religious practice, activating spiritual energy through the intercession of art.

The music in both pieces (the first a mix of Satie, Balkan-flavored accordian and Corsican song; the second polyphonic church sect music of the Caucuses), and the musical and physical talent of this young troupe, is superb. Gospels of Childhood comes to its end with a song accompanying the miracle of Lazarus raised from the dead. In complete darkness with the sound of shovel and dirt and mourning wails, the funeral song type called “Zar” from which the company takes its name, fills the air with a potent prayer that is followed by the lighting of four suspended wheels of candles. These primative candleabra are pushed to swing the piece to its eventual dissolution. In both pieces the audience remained silent at the end; in the case of the latter many of us watched the candles swing for five minutes before leaving the magical space.

Save the date for the festival in June 2009 and Zar’s performances in L.A. in Fall 2009. Both promise to be fantastic.

That’s 6 places you could choose to look in 3LD Performance Center’s new production of Charles Mee’s Fire Island, directed by Kevin Cunningham. It’s hard to imagine how this play existed on a page, but Mr. Cunningham said the dialog all comes from Mee. Intrigued? Okay, I’ll elaborate…

3LD (also known as 3-legged Dog) is a state-of-the-art multimedia center deep downtown. The “theater” for Fire Island is a space the size of my suburban elementary school lunchroom, and two of the walls are covered in curving LCD screens. Imagine being at eye level next to one of those buildings in Times Square and you get an idea of the impact. The remaining two walls hold stages that are covered with a 45-degree slanted glass screen. Projections onto the screen look holographic, as do any actors who wander behind the glass.

And wander is an apt word for the nature of this spectacle. The audience wanders in and receives a key on a lanyard as a ticket stub; the hot dog cart and bar are open; you take your pick of cushion, beach chair or backjack and claim a piece of beachfront facing any which way in the middle of the room. Tubs of soda and beer dot the audience and complete the feeling of being at an outdoor picnic. Actors begin to wander about. You can pick out the more outrageous by their costumes and the less outrageous by the fact that you begin to hear soft amplified voices in the aural cacaphony and notice that the person 50 yards away is moving her mouth as she cuts through the crowd. Some of the wanderers end up in one corner of the room — in front of the tiki hut containing 10 computer monitors that are clearly firing on all chips to keep this display going — to become a band.

Once the structured part of the performance kicks in,which doesn’t require anyone to stay put; it’s still run like a picnic, the drama unfolds: we’re watching lovers quarrel and former lovers hint at why they are finished and potential lovers connect. The dialog rings true to any number of personal memories and friends’ stories, but never really resolves anything. Instead it serves as a medium to explore this amazing performance method. Much like an opera can take any story, but you watch for the singing, this is a show about audio/visual theatrical technique, and there’s a lot to enjoy.

The story takes place in layers. One layer is played out by the actors in the room. A second takes place on screen in video shot in Fire Island during the summer. The dialog is the same, so you have the sense of memory and immediacy, filmic scenery and visceral contact with actors, who might be standing right next to you with a knife in hand. A third layer is abstraction, which manifests as the clown who pranks his way through the play in pursuit of various audience members, but ultimately ends up with the waif, played by Allison Keating, who adds to the abstraction layer by appearing on the ‘holographic’ screens smashing a mountain of plates.

The casting and musical choices are terrific; players are a varied assembly of old and young, pretty boy, plain boy simple girl and exotic girl. Some cast members double up on talent: Tami Stronach acts and dances and several musicians play key roles. The choice of music, Tuvan throat singer and rock band leader Albert Kuvezin of the band Yat Kha, makes this show worth the price even if nothing else was happening. But of course there’s much, much more to take in.

Fire island is that unique venture onto new ground that has you a little worried going in and has you telling friends not to miss on the way out.

New music band Alarm Will Sound performed at the Kitchen March 21st to a full house. When Bjork walked in behind me, I figured it was a good place to be, and sure enough, the evening-long work, 1969, was an event that was well-conceived and executed. Alarm… takes the step that so many audience members seem to desire: explaining things; while at the same time doing things that are outside the realm of what most audiences see: innovative performance.

The title of the program, 1969, is the result of the band’s desire to focus on one year during which history and the arts went through dramatic changes (another year that were considered was 1945). The theme that emerged from 1969 was “revolution” and the band drew on music from Berio, Stockhausen, Bernstein, Wolf, Stravinsky, the Beatles and their own keyboardist, John Orfe, for the musical fare. The band is very tech-savvy, and 1969 is a multi-media piece. A colleague told me he last saw them in an ipod symphony of sorts; this work pairs a typical classical orchestral setup with a continuous power-point style backdrop (granted that your average marketing pro doesn’t have this kind of typographical acumen — the visuals were beautiful).

Conceptually the piece is right on. Alarm Will Sound’s Managing Director, Gavin Chuck, prefaced the work by saying the group will be working on this material for a while; that we were seeing it at the beginning of the process. I think it’s kind of a cheap caveat, but okay. As a work in progress, 1969 is interesting. The evening began and ended with a play on long notes. It began with an excerpt from Kalheinz Stockhausen’s “Aus den sieben Tagen: Meeting Point,” and the group entered one by one on the note and left similarly at the end of the evening with the sound moving from tonic confusion to harmony (a second excerpt from the Stockhausen piece, “Set Sail for the Sun”). Variations on the Beatles’ “Michelle” with classical treatment were notable and featured first violinist Courtney Orlando as an equally talented soprano. The group shared some of its background research with us. A piece from Bernstein’s Mass was introduced with the story of a radical priest whose letters from prison served as the basis of “Epistle,” arranged in this performance by Stefan Freund, also the cellist. The song was performed by Michael Harley, another instrumentalist, who sang in addition to his duties on bassoon.

The band was very likeable. They balanced a sincerity with lightheartedness. The topic of revolution, though, is not a lighthearted topic. “Revolution 9,” the Beatles’ work, arranged by Matt Marks (horn player of Alarm…) was a dazzling display of orchestration and recreating sound effects and tape loops live. But the entire evening left me feeling less like I was present at a revolution than at the study of one. Which brings me back to the premise of the night: that it is a work in progress…

…as hopefully this review will be as I follow Alarm Will Sound from this point on…

Being known as “a painter’s painter,” or more broadly, as “an artist’s artist” has always connoted a significant cachet, in that artists themselves hold a special distinction as arbiters of quality when it comes to art. This is just one aspect that makes the annual invitational exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters uniquely and reliably appealing. The exhibiting artists must first be nominated by a member of the academy to submit work for consideration. Following nomination, finalists are culled by a selection committee composed of some of the most esteemed artists in our nation.

A coincidence of timing, AAA&L’s Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts opened March 5^th, just the day before the Whitney Biennial. As Holland Cotter noted in his NY Times review of the Whitney’s exhibition,… “Advertisements for the 2008 Whitney Biennial promise a show that will tell us “where American art stands today,” although we basically already know. A lot of new art stands in the booths of international art fairs, where styles change fast, and one high-polish item instantly replaces another. The turnover is great for business, but it has made time-lag surveys like the biennial irrelevant as news.” The AAA&L has mounted a survey of contemporary art that may garner a lot less hype than the Biennial, but which is anything but irrelevant.

Cotter notes that at the Whitney, “Devotees of painting will be on a near-starvation diet…” and “Hard-line believers in art as visual pleasure will have, poor things, a bitter slog.” Pushing the criteria of ‘hipness’ and art market trends aside, the AAA&L show presents a very different picture of original and exceptional American art today. Overall, the show is not as outstanding as last year’s, but for those who want to be visually nourished and believers in art as something more than the latest in high-end consumer accessories, I’d still heartily suggest hopping on the 1 train to 155^th St and Broadway, and paying a visit.

The exhibition is housed in two elegant buildings that face each other across Audubon Terrace. In the southern building, one is immediately struck by the monumental presence of three concrete and steel pieces by Ledelle Moe. Two enormous heads, each titled Memorial (Collapse), 2005-06, nearly fill the entire gallery space. The third piece, Congregation, (2006-07) consists of a grouping of portrait-like heads arranged on the gallery’s western wall. While not the direct intention of the artist (discussed on her website), these works were the first I have encountered that invoke and commemorate the tragedy of the World Trade Center in such a moving, effective way. Moe has managed to express the inexpressible by being subtle, shunning the literal references, and powerfully integrating content and materials in complex, multi-layered meanings. The two massive pieces are perceived first as structural forms even before one identifies them as heads. The metal armatures and dark, internal spaces of the heads recall the eerie, silent chasms of seminal works by Lee Bontecou. The disembodied heads, hollow forms of concrete and steel, are potent death-portraits of the twin towers. Along with Congregation, which could represent those who perished as well as those who remain and mourn, this installation is an environment conducive for reflection and remembrance. For those struggling with the question of what would be an appropriate memorial at the site of 2001’s horror, they should take note of Ledelle Moe’s perceptive work.

There were several other outstanding artists also in the southern building. Robert Yasuda’s canvases of layers of iridescent paint on fabric stretched over carefully shaped wooden supports bring a new twist to the realm of color field painting. The colors shift and change as the viewer moves, making it all but impossible to capture them photographically. Here is art defiantly insistent upon an in-person experience with the viewer, and those willing to show up and look will be rewarded. These coolly luminous paintings draw the viewer in, inviting the kind of internal wandering that the changing colors of the sky at dusk, the shimmer of a mist over water, or a close look at a dragonfly’s wings could inspire.

Heide Fasnacht is another artist of consistent strength and originality. An exceptional draftsman, her contribution to this show is Jump Zone, a huge installation that is part wall-drawing and part 3-D realization of the cartoon-like explosion of an architectural armature. With sculptural “poofs” made of the expanding, hardening foam more than a few New Yorkers have used to plug up mouse-holes (sometimes sold under the name “Great Stuff”), Fasnacht reveals that our attempts at structure and fortitude are merely flimsy illusions. Fasnacht’s installation is less obsessively fragmented than Cornelia Parker’s work, less extravagant than Cai Guo-Qiang’s “exploding” car at the Guggenheim, yet perhaps more substantial and engaging, even as its cartoonish elements give the initial appearance of something far less serious.

The northern building in the plaza houses the majority of the works in the show. A half-dozen silver gelatin prints of Paris shot in 2005-06 by Bruce Davidson stand out amidst the painting and sculpture.  There’s not enough room to write in detail about everything, but these pieces are some of the most understated gems of the show. Davidson has written of this body of work, “As I explored the urban green spaces of Paris, I became aware of its old weathered trees, variety of flowers, and array of plant life that are an integral part of the Parisian experience and help to define the city’s beauty and significance. I thought of what trees see and endure. Their presence have inspired passion and sustained my quest throughout the project.” The vaguely disturbing, idiosyncratic, and incredibly detailed paintings by Mark Greenwold are also among the highlights here.

If you make the trip up to see this show (on view until April 6^th), I always recommend stopping by the Hispanic Society of America too, which, in addition to the treasures one expects to see there (El Greco, Velazquez, and more), there’s a Dia Foundation project by Francis Alÿs also up until April 6^th, free and open to the public.

[Images from top to bottom: Ledelle Moe, two views of "Collapse (Memorial)" concrete and steel, 5 x 7 x 6 feet and 6.5 x 8.5 x 10 feet, 2005-06, courtesy the artist and Reynolds Gallery, VA; Robert Yasuda, "Panorama," 2007, acrylic on fabric on wood, 48 x 80", courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NY; Heide Fasnacht, "Jump Zone," 2008, tape, urethane foam, styrofoam, variable dimensions, courtesy the artist and Kent Gallery, NY; Bruce Davidson, "Eiffel Tower" 2005, silver gelatin print, 21 x 21", courtesy the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY. All copyrights belong to the respected artists.]

by Joel Adas

It began about seven years ago. After looking out the same windows in my apartment for years, a sort of curiosity grew in me for what I could see through them: a slow parade of clouds of all shapes and sizes, tops of buildings, early spring tree branches studded with buds, birds swooping by, planes floating off into the ether, wires criss-crossing everything. The paintings I was working on at the time were highly detailed simulations of old photographs with small scenes within scenes floating in them. They were intricate images that created odd narratives that revolved around pet’s dreams, memories, and fantasies.

Then it occurred to me: why not simply depict what I see out the window—nothing more, nothing less—no need for irony or narrative or agenda, just straightforward depiction. Drawing with a pencil on paper seemed the easiest approach and was something I hadn’t done in quite a while. The first drawings were meticulous. I was fascinated by the intersection of various elements, such as where the patterned siding of a building met the soft forms of a cloudy sky. There was real pleasure in sitting perched by a window and slowly modeling these forms into existence with pencil and eraser on antique yellow Ingres drawing paper. I felt very connected to what I saw and, by extension, to the place where I lived.

This new approach of making art from the world immediately around me was, in a sense, a bit unnerving. I kept asking myself, can I do this? Will this be interesting to anyone else? I remember thinking of artists of the past who had turned to something very simple as the subject of their artistic practice. Giorgio Morandi came to mind, setting up still lifes with simple objects—jars, pots, boxes—and then combining them in various ways. His method resulted in stunningly simple, but interesting and beautiful, paintings. The lesson I learned from Morandi is that there is ample material for art all around us, in the most common, overlooked places and objects. They simply need to be seen with a set of fresh eyes that can translate them into intriguing paintings.

Moreover, seeing things that we are all familiar with, that we can all relate to, but seeing them in a new light, has some magic in it, and that magic is art. It is magical to look at a Chardin still life or a Vermeer interior because we all know what the artist is painting, and yet it is the familiar turned strikingly beautiful. In fact, my favorite Vermeer painting is not one of his famous interiors, but rather one of some buildings in Delft, called “The Little Street”. It depicts an alleyway, some women working and washing clothes. The shapes of the buildings, the colors of the window covers, they all become essential. It is a perfect composition—simple, straightforward, and yet wonderful. I think if I have had a mission statement over the past seven years, it would be just that: take the ordinary and make it into something wonderful through painting.

Two other artists who come readily to mind are Hokusai and Hiroshige. The latter in particular made art out of the most mundane street scenes. By having us look at the street through the looming form of a lantern or kite, he gave us a new way to see a scene that was as familiar in 19th century Japan as it is today. We still understand a busy street or a city lane at night. We can all relate to people crossing a bridge in the pouring rain, struggling to keep their umbrellas upright. It translates across time because of its universality. It is part of the alchemy of taking the ordinary and making it into art.

One conundrum that I run into in pursuing this line of inquiry is, when is ordinary too ordinary? I sometimes wonder if a telephone pole that strikes me as incredibly beautiful, its contours and colors resonating against a deep blue sky, is in fact interesting to anyone else. But in the end I have to have a simple faith in my fascination with what I see around me. If it interests me, then that is enough to begin a painting or a drawing.

What began as a simple exercise seven years ago has now evolved into the focus of my artistic practice. I keep coming back to those first drawings, to their directness. The simple motifs I started with still preoccupy me. I am still trying to make an interesting painting of tree branches against an ever changing sky, or of the hulk of a building criss-crossed with telephone wires. I have to trust the idea that within these images that we see around us continually, but which we often take for granted, is an endless variation of forms and colors and textures that can ultimately result in interesting, timeless images.

images: Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta, 1955, oil on canvas; Johannes Vermeer, The Little Street (Het Straatje) c. 1657-1661 oil on canvas, 21 3/8 x 17 3/8 in. (53.3 x 44 cm.); Hiroshige, Osahi Bridge in the Rain, 1857, print; Joel Adas, 2007

interviewed by Sky Pape

Part 1 of this interview is available here.

5. You have a great belief in activism, which obviously informs your art. While all humans may share the responsibility to be politically and socially aware and active, do you believe artists have a particular responsibility to grapple with these issues in their work? What would you describe as the responsibility of the artist?

I think artists have the same responsibility as everyone else. This is a profoundly lopsided world where a tiny handful controls the wealth and knowledge that humanity as a whole has created. Should this be maintained or transformed? How do people place themselves in relation to that? And for people who are in the minority on the planet and who have the relative freedom to work with their heads and not their hands, for those of us who eat food others grow and wear shoes that others make, we can choose to contribute to maintaining the status quo, where the world feeds us, or we can contribute to getting rid of this whole setup. I don’t think that this means that all art must be narrowly and didactically addressing social questions, but I do think that in this era, all people need to recognize that humanity is confronting both grave danger, as the Bush regime plunges the world into a high-tech Dark Ages, as well as a potential opportunity to wrench an entirely different future out of this madness and get the world to a whole new era through revolutionary struggle. And artists can play an important part at this moment. There are very, very, very big ideological, philosophical and political questions up for debate at the moment. The world is changing very rapidly, and the cohering norms of this society are fraying and being challenged. And there is much transition throughout the world. Artists can make work that addressees some of this, including the instability and transition that we are seeing within our culture. We can make work that directly looks at this, and we can make work that reflects on it indirectly and abstractly. I don’t believe that there is only one formal strategy or method to engage these questions. But if artists try and stand aside from these questions, they are accepting the world the way it is, and their relatively privileged position within it. And beyond general and ongoing need for major social change, history will judge what people at this particular moment do or don’t do. Artists are as accountable as everyone else. And our art matters. It reflects a viewpoint of how the artist looks at the world and what is important. We are all sitting on top of a volcano that is about to blow. Are we encouraging people to look at the beautiful scenery that can be seen from the mountain, walk gently down the hill, or grapple with the mounting pressure and magma below our feet and helping people imagine and bring into being a world much further from Vesuvius.

6. Besides yourself, Hans Haacke, Fred Wilson, Leon Golub, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Sue Coe, and recently Judy Chicago, are names that have come up in discussions of creators of visual political art. Are there any artists you would cite as examples who create arguably good visual art that presents potent socio-political content?

I think that there are lots, though many more are needed. A few examples I like are William Pope L, Alfredo Jaar, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Nancy Spero, Diego Rivera, Edward Kienholz, Roy DeCarava, Cai Guo-Qiang, Jacob Lawrence, and Carrie Mae Weems. Also Arnold Mesches, Basquiat, and Banksy.

7. Who is your intended audience?

This is a good question and one which I think more artists should think about. Who is your art for? That said, I don’t look at this narrowly. I want my work to reach a very broad audience. As I have indicated, I want my work to contribute to humanity getting to a whole new era of freely associating human beings, a communist world. For that to happen there needs to be revolution, proletarian revolution, led by the proletariat. As part of contributing to this, I want people who are oppressed and exploited in this society to be able to relate to my work. When they see it, by and large I want them to see their world reflected in it and I want them to be able to “get it” on some level. I show some of my work on street corners and sidewalks to reach some people who wouldn’t go to the museums and galleries where most of my work is shown.

That said, most of my work is shown in venues where it is mostly seen by an art world audience. There is a very positive side to this. As I said earlier, it matters tremendously what the debate and discourse in society is and how the people in the broad middle class view the key questions of the day. For example, at a time when religious fundamentalism, and in the US, Christian fundamentalism, is a huge question, how people think about issues like this matters. So, last summer, I made Literal Biblical Horror (http://dreadscott.net/biblical.html) to encourage people to think about what the world would be like if the bible were taken and applied literally and made the law of the land. While I hope that it is viewed by a range of people, mostly it will be seen by people who go to sculpture parks. But for the world I want to help bring into being, I refuse to let those who wish to keep the status quo have unchallenged access to my friends, colleagues, peers and fans.

8. Your work, which you describe as “Revolutionary Art — to propel history forward,” deals bluntly yet also metaphorically with so many critical issues: racism, patriotism, censorship, police brutality, war, historical revisionism, and more. In the spirit of an ongoing project of our own here at Artists Unite, we’d like to pose the question, “What is the most important thing on your mind right now?”

In a word, Revolution. In relation to this, the big thing I’m really grappling with is rupturing through the ceiling on people’s dreams and engaging in dialog to help people think about a radically different future. Millions and millions of people are deeply worried, upset, opposed to and angered by where Bush has dragged the world. They don’t like the unending, unjust, illegal and immoral war for empire, complete with threat of war with Iran. They don’t like torture and the gutting of basic legal rights. They don’t like the attacks on science, where many kids can’t even learn about evolution. They don’t like the assaults on abortion rights. They don’t like people shot 50 times on their wedding day by NY cops. But many people’s hopes are limited to a belief that in 2008 somehow this will all magically go away. And peoples’ hopes for the future have been channeled to a dream that perhaps we could get Obama or Hillary and that somehow these candidates share the same values, goals and morality that we hold dear. We desperately need to have loftier goals and have our sights set much higher. As part of contributing to this dialog, I recently made Let 100 Flowers Blossom, Let 100 Schools of Thought Contend (http://dreadscott.net/100Flowers.html). From the 1870s to the 1970s millions of people believed they could change the world and set out to do just that. This work looks at the past with an eye to the future. It consists of 100 photographs and 100 flowers in vases on shelves in front of each of the photographs. The photographs are images from the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese revolution—revolutions where the proletariat held power and was attempting to lead all of humanity to a classless communist world. People all over the world don’t have to live the way we are forced to now. To get to a brighter future people need to break out of the shackles that have been set on peoples’ sights. A brighter world is possible, and I would encourage people to engage with the writings and speeches of Bob Avakian as part of getting to that brighter world.

image: Literal Biblical Horror, 2006, permanent outdoor installation at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota

The new season is upon us, and the weather is beautiful. What better time to get out and visit some galleries? Group shows are not typically reviewed by the major art magazines and papers. Galleries tend to offer them up right before the summer, and use that time as an opportunity to introduce new talent when people are leaving town and the stakes are less high. Therefore, it was a bit surprising to see several of the galleries we visited on 57th Street were starting the season with group shows.

We started at Edward Tyler Nahem, under the mistaken notion that the space designed by Michael Gabellini was still Anthony Grant Gallery. The architectural design features very nifty “floating planes and a pivoting wall that allows the gallery to adapt to various exhibitions.” The current gallery specializes in the kind of blue-chip secondary market works that one would expect to find on 57th Street, but this well-designed, intimate space makes it all about the art and not the price tags or celebrity status. Nahem presented a small and colorful group show with pieces by a lot of big fish like De Kooning, Lee Krasner, James Rosenquist, Sigmar Polke, and some less frequently viewed artists like Mimmo Rotella (above). The works were of surprisingly high quality, and felt like a preview of the ADAA’s annual exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, where one gets the chance to see unusual pieces that have been hidden away in private collections.

Next, we stopped at Galerie St. Etienne, where until Sept 28th, one had the chance to take in an impressive array of recent acquisitions, focused on Austrian & German Expressionism, and self-taught & outsider art. It’s not as unlikely a combination as it may sound at first.

This gallery stands out not only for its distinct identity and mission, but also for its contribution to the scholarly, historical discourse of the works they present. In a thoughtful essay on their site, they consider recent trends in the art market in depth. Here are a couple short excerpts:

“Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge. Great collectors should ideally become nearly as knowledgeable as the curators and dealers who help them build their collections. But not all of today’s collectors have the passion or the time necessary to develop this depth of knowledge……Today’s rich are an international elite whose members can measure their cachet by the level of VIP services given them at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. Anointed by the glamour that today attends the public display of great wealth, the art world has acquired the patina of trendiness that was formerly exclusive to the entertainment and fashion industries. The contemporary focus on trendiness and investment potential, each of which operates on a relatively short timeline, obscures the fact that lasting value in art accrues over the course of generations.”

“If it sometimes seems that the art-historical establishment is missing in action, this is in part because, while the market has been aggressively constructing a new canon, academia has been busy deconstructing the old one. For several decades now, scholars have generally agreed that the white, male, Eurocentric canon that traditionally dominated Western art evolved from historical biases that are no longer morally or intellectually justifiable. Although this change in orientation has literally opened up a whole new world of aesthetic possibilities, it has discouraged academics from making qualitative judgments.”

Lush and mysterious prints by Kathe Kollwitz and Leonard Baskin, drawings by Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Gustav Klimt, paintings by Henry Darger, Grandma Moses and Bill Traylor and more rounded out this staggering collection of thought-provoking, singular works.

If the show at St. Etienne was something of an art historical survey, so too was the show at Marian Goodman, but of a very different nature. On view until October 13th is Part I of the show “30/40: A Selection of Forty Artists from Thirty Years at Marian Goodman Gallery.” Coincidentally, this beautiful, well-proportioned 8,000 square foot exhibition space was also designed by Gabellini Associates. An internationalist, Goodman is also a dealer with a clear mission. In 30 years, she has realized and continues to expand on her goals of playing “an important role in introducing European artists to American audiences and helping to establish a vital dialogue among artists and institutions working internationally…”

One of the things that set Goodman’s gallery apart from St. Etienne is that much of what St. Etienne presents is an important look and critical understanding of now-deceased artists from the early to mid 20th century, whereas Goodman’s vision was formed primarily by working directly with living, contemporary artists. In her own words, from the exhibition’s press release, “…My thoughts were somehow about the perspective of time, about enduring values or conditions, and about society’s and the individual’s struggle throughout time to find them and express them. And it is still a source of amazement to me - what a human being is capable of creating and how art can move people. It is what draws me to work with artists and to respect them so deeply. Art is a human need, an expression of one’s soul and intellect, and one of the very last moral positions in our society - an affirmation of the highest in the human spirit.”

This show is as important an historical view of the past 30 years in contemporary art as you’d be likely to see at any museum or top-tier nonprofit institution like The Drawing Center. The show itself is impressive, but even more so is the 30 year history behind it, that makes Marian Goodman’s probably the only space in town that has the capability of presenting something like this. Fantastic pieces by Fred Sandback and Dan Graham (don’t forget to step inside the sculpture!) are only the tip of the iceberg here (and that’s one mighty, massive iceberg that includes work by Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, John Baldessari, Tacita Dean, Sol Lewitt, and many others). We’ll be back for more, and can’t wait for Part II.

DC Moore Gallery offered a solo exhibition of mixed-media work and prints by Joyce Kozloff (up until October 6th). In the exhibition catalog, Lucy Lippard observes, “One theme leads to another and then another geographical site — a world cut and pasted and reinvented. Kozloff’s work is about as visually and narratively complex as art can be…But to get it, the viewer needs to spend time, enter the images and stay a while…Overlays and interceptions transform anything like a straightforward picture into a swirling, not-quite-chaos of references offering first once meaning, then another, undermining both truth and lies…This is what history really looks like.” The painted masks, tondos, collages, and prints are intricately detailed and present an overwhelming amount of work, but one might leave this gallery feeling more overrun by the imagery than drawn into it.

A sparsely hung group exhibition at McKee Gallery offered a terrific selection of gallery artists including Martin Puryear, Philip Guston, Daisy Youngblood, and Leonid Lerman. On one wall, a large Guston canvas seemed to converse with a Puryear sculpture and print hung on either side of it, their comic-like imagery imbued with melancholy that spoke a shared and sympathetic language. On the facing wall, a huge 4-panel painting by Kit Rank was the centerpiece of the show. Like Kozloff, Rank doesn’t stint on the symbolic imagery. Painted in an idiosyncratic style and confined to just four canvases, it engaged the viewer absolutely, rather than causing sensory overload.

Mary Boone’s group show, titled “View (Thirteen): Practical F/X” was guest curated by Kevin Zucker, and is on view until October 27th. The most immediately engaging of the works on view are Hilary Berseth’s “programmed hives” and his two intricately and finely drawn graphite pieces. For his sculptures, Berseth has subtly manipulated the bees building process (some bees may have been hurt…). his drawings depict “digitally-rendered models of information originating from numbers or data sets.” While nothing could seem more dry, the resulting drawings are intensely dynamic. The treatment of the gallery’s interior is also worth noting in this case. The soft dove-gray of the skim-coated walls against the polished cement floor seem to set off and heighten the colors and textures of the art.

In Chelsea: A few goodies definitely worth seeing in the gallery mall at 529 W 20th St: Daniel Rozin at Bitforms. His pegboard mirror is wonderful. He’s a notable artist in the digital realm, using technology as a tool in much the same way others would use a brush or a chisel. And quirky new ceramic sculptures by Arlene Shechet at Elizabeth Harris Gallery (’til October 6th–last week for Shechet, who just got noted in the NY Times).

Information about our upcoming October gallery crawl will be posted here soon, so check back, and feel free to join us!

[Image info, from top to bottom: Mimmo Rotella, Untitled, 1959, collage on canvas, 105 1/8" x 101 3/8" at Edward Tyler Nahem; at Galerie St. Etienne: Käthe Kollwitz, Conspiracy, 1893-97, Etching on cream wove paper, 11 5/8" x 7"; Henry Darger "General Concentinian Aronburg (Father of Annie Aronburg), General Nero and Francis Viviananna", 1915-25?, Watercolor and pencil on halftone illustration or paper, mounted on cardboard, 13 1/2" x 15"; Bill Traylor, See'd One in a Show Once, Circa 1939-42, Poster paint and pencil on cardboard, 9 1/2" x 12"; Tacita Dean, Yardarm, 1997, chalk on blackboard, 70 7/8" x 79 15/16" at Marian Goodman; Joyce Kozloff, installation view at DC Moore; Kit Rank, Dopo Pranzo (two details), 2002, oil on canvas, 72 5/8 x 47 5/8 each of 4 panels, at McKee Gallery; Hilary Berseth, Programmed Hive #5, 48" x 22" x 22", wax, paint, UV laquer, wood, metal; Hilary Berseth, Tetrahedrons Instanced to the Stars of the Milky Way (detail), 22" x 30", graphite/paper, 2007, at Mary Boone.]

by Sky Pape

In this forum, political art has often been a topic of discussion. We decided to delve into the subject more deeply by interviewing the artist Dread Scott, who has dedicated himself to the challenge of making “revolutionary art to propel history forward.” He works in a variety of media, including photography, installation, sculpture, and screenprinting, and has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, as well as many galleries and museums around the country and internationally.

In 1989, an installation by Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, became the center of controversy over its use of the American flag. President Bush (the first) declared What is the Proper Way… “disgraceful,” and the entire U.S. Senate denounced the work when it passed legislation to “protect the flag.” As part of the popular effort to oppose moves to make patriotism compulsory, Dread Scott, along with three others, burned flags in protest on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, resulting in a Supreme Court case and a landmark decision.

Since then, he has made numerous media appearances, including on Oprah, The Today Show, and CBS This Morning, speaking about his work and the controversy surrounding it. He has been written about in The New York Times, Art In America, ArtNews, The Village Voice, Time, People, The London Guardian, and several other publications.

Artists Unite Issue would like to thank Dread Scott for taking the time to reflect on his work and ideas in response to Sky Pape’s questions.

More information on Dread Scott and his work can be found on his website: www.dreadscott.net

(This is part 1 of a two-part interview.)

1. Visual art has its own language and concerns (both societal and self-reflective) and the same is true for socio-political activism. Where do the two intersect?

While I believe that art has its own language and one can make the same argument for social-political activism, I don’t think that there is a “concern” of either art or of activism that is it’s own purview, or that that no other realm has the capacity or freedom to explore those concerns. For me, the question with art, at least art that I feel is helpful to humanity, is whether it enables people to see and understand the world more deeply, and on that basis, help change it. Specifically, change it so that we move towards a world without exploitation or oppression. I don’t mean that art should be utilitarian or serve a political aim in a didactic way. Many times, art, even great art, will indirectly affect how people see the world and not have a 1 to 1 relation with how they act in changing it. But I do think that art reflects an artist’s worldview and often casts light on how they would like it to be. And while I think that there needs to be more activism in the world, my greatest concern is with how people view the world. What is their ideology? I think that art and activism can influence that. And while much activism often hopes to achieve a particular goal (stopping a war, ending discrimination, securing abortion rights…), as important as that is, I think what is most needed is for people to make revolution and take the first great step in being able to eliminate all of the horrors that plague humanity. And then move towards a communist world without exploitation — a world of freely associating human beings. To do that, what people think matters. How they view the world matters. From this perspective, I think that the intersection of art and political activism should be to help contribute to a situation where people can take that step — both helping to change the social landscape so that there is more upheaval in society, where the powers that be are more isolated and on the defensive, where people are more willing to fight for freedom. And where their sights are set on a radical transformation of society and a vision of what the world could be. Art and activism will contribute to that in their own distinct ways, but I think that this should be the aim of both for people who want their life to be about helping to usher in a better world.

2. Can political art be more than propaganda? Can it have staying power beyond the time when the specific issues cease to be relevant? Is political art a more valid cultural artifact of our society, or is a relic a relic?

I think that art that typifies contradictions powerfully is bound to have some lasting value. Look at Guernica. The horror of imperialist war and the destruction of being bombed from the air is still a huge question. And so Picasso’s work is still all too relevant. That said, social situations do change, and work that was powerful for a year or a decade or century may at some point be of more interest understood in its historical context. The Rite of Spring, the Igor Stravinsky ballet which caused fistfights when first performed, or Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads, which was destroyed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who commissioned the work, or the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” which was a No. 1 record yet banned from play by the BBC and led to the group’s arrest, may need a little contextualization nowadays to understand the effect at the time the work was premiered. But with that context we can learn a great deal, gain new appreciation for the work, and it can still be quite effective generations later.

3. Considering the artistic legacies of the Soviet Union, China, and even Nazi Germany, can art serve politics in a meaningful way, while still allowing freedom of expression?

I think that art can contribute in significant and profound ways to discourse and thoughts about what society is and how it could be. That said, I think that the way this question is framed is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, I think that the aims and goals of the Soviet Union and China (when they were revolutionary societies — the Soviet union from 1917-1953 and China from 1949-1976) and Nazi Germany were very different, and all too often intellectuals, and others, facilely lump them together. The aims, goals and practice of China and the Soviet Union when they were socialist was to serve as a transition from capitalism to a worldwide classless communist world of freely associating human beings. And while there are important and substantive criticisms of these socialist societies and the theories that led them that need to be made, overwhelmingly the experience of these first socialist societies is something that should be upheld. The aim of Nazi Germany was to extend and reinforce German imperialism, to install an openly militaristic fascistic form of rule — within the borders of Germany and beyond — and, as part of that, to commit genocide of a whole people. These days, those profound differences are glossed over by far too many people.

So looking at the legacy of the art of revolutionary China and the Soviet Union, I think that some of the art made there is profound and work that many people need to study and learn from. This is true of the Soviet avant-garde as well as some of the socialist realist work. People should look again at Rodchenko, the Stenberg Brothers, Eisenstein, etc. And look as well at the peasant paintings from China. Unfortunately, by the 1930s in the Soviet Union, the intellectual air was sucked out of the society and the socialist realist art was very contradictory. I feel that some of the work is engaging and compelling and explored the connection of the masses to the revolution, but the art became increasingly constrained. This is an experience that should not be repeated and must be critically summed up. But to do so, the criterion must be how to keep your eyes on continually transforming society to eliminate oppression. To do that you need to have a vibrant society.

Which brings me to my second problem with the framing of the question about art serving politics being in contradiction to free expression. First, I think that it is wrong to believe that many artists in both the revolutionary and fascist countries didn’t make art they believed in. They were expressing themselves. It’s not as if Stalin or Hitler forced Dziga Vertov and Leni Riefenstahl to make films that reflected the official State outlook. As far as I know, each, and many other artists, made films and art they were passionate about. But more to the point, my problem with socialist realism and the sharp constraints on intellectual ferment in the Soviet Union, and to a lesser degree in China, is not that the artists didn’t have their individual expression and they lost out as individuals. Though a problem, the real problem with the Soviet Union, specifically looking at the arts, was not that each artist didn’t get his or her individual viewpoint expressed. My criticism is that many aspects of the intellectual life of those societies were lifeless and boring and did not end up serving the aim of getting to a classless world. Bob Avakian (www.revcom.us), who is a great contemporary Marxist intellectual and leader, has looked deeply at the history of socialist societies and has formulated that what is needed, particularly with respect to intellectual activity, is to have a solid core (of people grounded in the aims and goals of getting to a communist future) with a lot of elasticity. In this context, the point is that artistic individuality and expression can contribute greatly to getting humanity to a new era. If a significant section of artists and intellectuals were grounded in the aim of getting to a communist world, and based on that were allowed and encouraged to run in wild and woolly directions, it would have been, and in the future will be, messy. It would have posed certain challenges to keeping society moving forward. But society would have been vibrant, and this is the only way to actually move society forward in the way I’m discussing.

4. Is good political art, and by that I mean art that is both successful as a work of art and as a political statement, still the province of a small intellectual elite rather than the people?

No. Beloved (Toni Morrison), The River (Bruce Springsteen), Burn! (Gillo Pontecorvo) “The Star Spangled Banner” (Jimi Hendrix), Interrogation II (Leon Golub), Michael Stewart - USA for Africa (Keith Haring), Disasters of War (Goya), Ironers (Jacob Lawrence), Uprising (Kathe Kollwitz), The Gift (Man Ray), The Americans (Robert Frank) Five Car Stud (Edward Kienholz), Terminal or Tilted Arc (Richard Serra), Sheep Raffle (David Hammons). Add your own. Obviously the fine art is less well known than the films, songs and novels, but they have been seen by and influenced tens of thousands, and often many, many more. This is not an elite. But to the degree it is seen by a smaller and more privileged audience, this is still important, including for the wider masses. If the intellectuals and middle class more broadly in this society are complacent and in support of the way things are, or if they are questioning the nature of society and want to change it, that is of great importance to the larger masses of people. Art like this affects how they see the world and what they feel needs to change.

(…to be continued)