issue
# 70, May 26, 2006 Austin, TX
II. San Antonio: Zane Lewis: Beyond Pink Lemonade
III. Elsewhere: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist: Jakup Ferri at Artists Space in New York & Regine Basha from Cairo
IV. Some Thoughts on Prizes & A Single Question: If You Could Select the Trio of Artists for an Artpace International-Artist-in-Residence Project, Who Would You Choose?
V. Announcements: I Can't Anymore.
I. Austin: Kelly Baum Interviews Christopher Eamon, curator of SLAPstick at Lora Reynolds Gallery, AMODA's Sound Performances by Stephen Vitiello and Holland Hopson & An Interview with Sarah Lasley Whose Work Appears in Sugarcoated at Women & Their Work
Kelly Baum Interviews Christopher Eamon, curator of SLAPstick at Lora Reynolds Gallery
On May 19, 2006, Kelly Baum, Assistant Curator of American and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, interviewed Christopher Eamon, Curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection and Executive Director of the New Art Trust in San Francisco. Eamon is also the guest curator of SLAPstick at Lora Reynolds Gallery, which will be on view through June 24, 2006. Excerpts from their conversation follow.
...might be good: Let’s talk about your background, how you came to do what you do, how you decided to curate contemporary art, new media art specifically. Also, the fact that there still seems to be a specific category for new media art, and that it’s not yet been completely integrated into contemporary art as a whole—this is an issue that fascinates me. I’d be interested to know what you think about the degree to which new media art is still compartmentalized as a practice, as an approach.
Christopher Eamon: I was a painter—twenty years ago. . . . but it was the eighties, and the critique of the object was in full flex. . . The eighties was [a moment when] critical discourse was more valuable than the object. This discourse made it seem like sale—that all commodification of art—was problematic. . . . I was interested in experimental film, so I could be involved in the art world, but not in a way that partook of this double bind. I also worked at a film society. My first program had in it . . . film and video, experimental film and new quasi-documentary film, so it was a very mixed bag, unlike anything that had come before. These communities were completely separate at that time. But I didn’t see it that way. Actually, all of my colleagues who were doing experimental film would never have even gone to a video screening, because they would think that it was formally bankrupt. . . . I was looking to content, so I guess they put up with me. . . .
...mbg: So right from the beginning the split or dichotomy between film and video—this has always been a dichotomy that you’ve tried to bridge.
CE: That’s true…the dichotomies, they’ve been going on in various forms since the sixties. Mel Bochner made films that could easily have been shown in Anthology, but he would never go there. Robert Barry was taught how to make films by Hollis Framptom, who screened Dan Graham and Michael Snow together at Hunter College. So there were bridgers and non-bridgers. Paula Cooper was a bridger. . . . Artists and filmmakers—these were two categories that seemed unbridgeable in the seventies.
...mbg: To what degree is that dichotomy a problem that curators invent and how much of it is a problem that actually exists for the artists? Maybe it’s both? It’s a material, a practical problem, but perhaps conceptually it’s not as dire as it seems?
CE: It doesn’t have to be. It seems that today the categories feel, even more than ever, arbitrary. They’re based on many factors, and one of them is a pure material, technological one, which is to say that you can screen pretty competently anything anywhere today. . . . Technically, it’s possible to do a lot more now than before. But as a result, [artists need to think through the issue of] what belongs where. If you’re a moving-image artist today, you have to be sensitive to what it’s like when you show a 5-minute looped piece in a theater setting. . . . There is a different expectation there. . . And I’m not sure that you see curators and programmers paying so much attention to that. A fascinating feature of our context [is that] even film festivals have installation programs now. . . . I think that there are false categories, but there are also sensitivities, and I’m sure not everybody is equally educating themselves about the various sites [at which films and videos can be shown].
...mbg: Before we get to this other question about compartmentalizing new media art as a specific curatorial category, maybe we could first discuss your professional background. You worked as a curator at the Whitney, where you assisted Chrissie Iles on the 2001 exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977. In 2001 you became the curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection of Media Art, and you’re also the director of the New Art Trust. I’d like to know more about your perspective on the difference between being the curator of a museum collection and being the curator of a private collection (a private collection that’s twice been reconceptualized as a public exhibition for a museum, though). I think it’s interesting that so much of what you do seems to involve crossing and bridging all sorts of categories (public/private, film/art).
CE: Yes, I’ve worked in both. They’re very different places, and you can find yourself in similar binds in both. Sometimes you think that having less bureaucracy will make everything lithe and flexible, but sometimes it’s just not true, and at other times it is. What’s nice about curating for a collection as tightly conceived as this one is that you can make slight alterations. You can also do a lot more without trying to represent the contemporary scene in its entirety. . . . The focus is not so broad, and, therefore, you can make exhibition-like relationships with every acquisition. So in one move you’re serving both the public and the private realms—in theory.
Actually, that was a big step from 2001 on: we started to think about collecting in this way, first historical works and then works in other media that relate and that become interstitial material that produces—in answer to your other questions—media art within the context of all other art. . . . Before that (because I did work as [the Kramlich’s] art advisor for three years before the Whitney) it was more about acquiring the best works, the masterpieces contemporaneously with them being exhibited for the first time. . . Now we have [a premiere collection with] works from 1959 to the present.
...mbg: And many of those were shown in Video Acts at P.S.1 in 2002.
CE: And that’s just the single-channel collection.
...mbg: And the historical material.
CE: Yes, mostly historical.
...mbg: Did you curate the show or co-curate the show?
CE: We co-curated it, Klaus Biesenbach and I, but in a sense it was pre-curated, because I had bought all of those works. But then we also had to figure out [which pieces to include]—not everything was shown from [the Kramlich] collection—still, it was quite a bit, 134 works….
...mbg: I know. It was exhaustive and exhausting. I felt like I should have spent a week in New York just to see the show.
CE: It was a good local event for Queens, for Long Island City, and for New York. I heard so many people say that they would go, see one or two things, and then they’d leave, but return next week. It was like a crash course….
...mbg: I thought it was very important for that reason because it’s so hard to see….
CE: …the actual, primary sources…
...mbg: Yes, and also displayed in the manner in which they were originally intended.
CE: One would wonder why it wasn’t done like that before. . . . Was it the real estate or was it a lack of institutional support? Actually, the answer is simple—it’s really costly to do it that way….
...mbg: I remember Chrissie Iles gave a lecture at UT a few years ago, I guess it was 2004, around the time of the Whitney Biennial, and she devoted one of her three lectures to Into the Light. She talked about the importance of adhering to the artist’s original intentions with regard to display. . . . She stated it in such an emphatic manner. I could tell that to her this was primary—being true to the materiality of film and video. We think of it sometimes as being just insubstantial, moving images, but in fact there’s a materiality to it that needs to be respected.
CE: Yes, I agree with that. But it’s also true that some artists don’t care about that, so it’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of rule. It is true, though, that there are different qualities to the different media, and if you’re going to work with a history . . . or produce a context where history is learned and appropriated into the culture through students or the public, then we should be looking at the thing as it really was. And when it isn’t, it should actually say what it really was, somewhere in the didactic panel. . . . I agree with Chrissie on this. I think that the museum is, should be, the place that preserves the whole work of art, not just the images on a tape, but the feeling and the experience, even if that means re-building projectors from scratch. And it has to be that way, or [the museum is] going to lose credibility with the artists and scholars. Can you imagine if there were no real documents in the Library of Congress, if they were all just Photoshop documents? How would you know if there was a scribble on the back by Thomas Jefferson? It could be an important little scribble.
However, there’s also a line between the artistic intention as it was and the artistic intention as it may have changed with regard to time-based, especially installation, works, between the preservation of the tape or film as object and its preservation through transition, through change, which is how you preserve media—it’s through migration, as it’s called. There’s always a degree of both inherent in the material. If you talk to the artists of the seventies and eighties, like Gary Hill and Dara Birnbaum, they treated each site as an occasion to instantiate the work. So that means that it could have a radically different life in all those places. It’s not as clear as if there had been just one artistic intention. Especially with media art, there is a range within which [the artists operated]. We’re working within ranges and degrees of departure, and allowances for change. That’s really hard to assess, but you can do it, and this is part of our New Art Trust preservation project. You can do it through the documentation of all those changes.
...mbg: Do you want to talk a little bit about the New Art Trust? This is a position that’s attached to your other position as curator of the Kramlich Collection.
CE: The New Art Trust is a family foundation in the state of California. It’s a charitable trust [whose mandate] is to support our institutional partners, which are SFMOMA, the Tate, MoMA, and the Bay Area Video Coalition (an artist, not-for-profit production facility in San Francisco). So far we’ve supported commissions, publications, not so many exhibitions, some acquisitions, and we’ve supported our own preservation initiative. . . . The whole point is to support the viability of media arts at these organizations.
...mbg: And what are some of the commissions?
CE: The Pippilotti Rist piece Stir Heart, Rinse Heart at SFMOMA in 2004. And we commissioned partially the Doug Aitken seven-channel piece Eraser with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1998. We also restored all of the Nauman and Acconci tapes [in New York through Electronic Arts Intermix] and all of the Wegman tapes [through the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley]. That’s how we acquired all those works for Video Acts—it was partially through these preservation initiatives.
...mbg: Let’s talk about your independent curatorial projects. You curated an exhibition for Art Basel in Miami in 2005, and it looks like there’s something coming up very soon that’s in Europe.
CE: The Berlin project, which is the other reason I was in Europe. This project has grown very elaborately over the years. It’s very exciting, and it’s only a few months away.
...mbg: What’s it called?
CE: It’s called Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection, and it’s at the Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin. It’s co-curated with myself, Stan Douglas, Joachim Jaeger, and Gabrielle Knapstein, who are the curators at the Hamburger Bahnhof. It all started because I wanted to edit an anthology covering the last twenty years of video art, [but I wanted to do so with an artist], so I approached Stan Douglas. . . . We decided we would commission ten very good art historians to write on different moments that had occurred [in the development of video art] since the nineties. And then [the anthology project was joined by plans for a symposium and an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof.] [We’ve modeled] a large-scale historical exhibition spanning forty years, 1962 to 2002, with a broad chronology but with a narrow focus on projections in space . . . There’s also a month of screenings [at the Arsenal Kino] that are going to be non-categorical artist films (i.e., films that are artistic, and not just by “artists,” whoever they are). The program is called Beyond the Museum: Art in the Cinema, so it’s the other side to the question that we’ve already been talking about. The exhibition Beyond Cinema and the program Beyond the Museum—each is the inverse of the other. Screenings still happen, although we seem to be privileging the site of the museum today, but the works in this program belong in the screenings. They have a duration. There’s something about them that makes them belong there. They have a beginning and an end…
...mbg: It’s mainly structural? It’s some structural feature that makes them belong in a screening as opposed to a white cube?
CE: Or the mode of address. Or even where they’ve been screened historically. But you’re right—it has something to do with the structure, the time-frame. Is it narrative? Does it have a thread that needs to be followed continuously? Does it address you in a quasi-documentary sense?
...mbg: This reminds me of Paul Chan’s work. Paul makes a wide variety of objects, projections, images, but you don’t see them shown together in the same space. For him there seems to be a distinction between his more documentary films and videos, such as the one on Lynne Stewart, which was first screened at the New School for Social Research, and his double-screen projections like My Birds…trash…the future (2004) or his floor projections like 2ndLight (2006), which are typically screened at museums and in galleries. It’s interesting to me that the “where” of the video for him is contingent upon its content as well as its style.
CE: Yes, and I really respect that. I think that there has been, at least up until recently, [some disregard for context]. Does the context mean nothing? Are [videos and films] just autonomous things? Because in that case, I’d rather just have it all on my iPod. I’m really interested in the specificity of the location, so I respect that Paul would do that, because they’re not the same things, those videos that you described. They’re totally different experiences, and the public has a different interaction with those works. The installations are more subliminal in a way, more curious and enigmatic, while the documentaries aren’t.
...mbg: Is there anything we’ve missed? Anything else I should ask you?
CE: I think we missed the question you first asked about the compartmentalization of new media art. This is a very interesting topic, and it’s as blurry as all the others. The discourse of universalizing and marginalizing narratives [that is drawn] from literary theory is so applicable to media art and to the institution. The discourse of media art as it’s been present in the institution over the years has been the marginalizing kind, because [media art] needed separate nomination. It needed to have its own name and its own place in order to actually get in the door. [Think of] John Hanhardt’s New American Film and Video Series at the Whitney, or the program at SFMOMA, the original media arts program, where they had a separate curator and a separate department, and even of [the Kramlich Collection]. Why did you need to marginalize [media art]? Why can’t it just be contemporary art? And more and more it is just contemporary art. Many collectors have some video art in their collection because it represents what artists do today.
...mbg: But media art needed this initial moment of nomination, you’re saying.
CE: Yes, it did. And also expertise. So I’m really split on the marginalizing versus the universalizing approaches. Printmaking curators still exist, drawing [and photography] curators still exist, even when the boundaries [between disciplines] have broken down. There are degrees of expertise required because of the technology and preservation aspects, and also [because of the need to understand] the artist’s intent within these realms, which is so subtly altered by very overlooked things, like the number of lumens in the projector and whether it’s LCD or something else. I’m of two minds. I think that there has to be a specialty—you need specialized knowledge and you need to be aware of the specialized history. . . . I like the idea of having a curator of contemporary art who specializes in media art as a new middle road between the two paradigms. . . . When the whole area is folded into contemporary art de facto with no specialty, you get strange anomalies in the valuation and evaluation of works. [The valuation and evaluation] becomes skewed because there is a special history to be learned. This is a pet issue for me. It’s a great question, and I don’t really know the answer. I think the marginalization mode can be put behind us, but “now what?” is still an open question.
AMODA's Sound Performances by Stephen Vitiello and Holland Hopson
A review of Vitiello and Holland's May 20, 2006 Performances
Dorothy Meiburg
Austin’s itinerant Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) touched down at Ballet Austin’s Guadalupe Street location last weekend for an evening of sound. The 7th installment of AMODA’s Performance Series paired Holland Hopson, an artist based in Austin, with Stephen Vitiello, a visiting artist from Richmond, Virginia. Vitiello, whose work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, headed from Austin directly to appearances in London, Australia and New Zealand.
Sound art has found its way into contemporary art spaces, but the integration of the aural and the visual hasn’t always been graceful. For a museum of digital art, however, music and sound are natural inclusions. The great virtue of digitized information, after all, is logistical: once transformed into compatible electronic files, it’s easy to juxtapose a picture with a sound, or one sound with another recorded under different circumstances. Artists like Hopson and Vitiello take these possibilities to extremes and modern audiences can be forgiven for resembling their forebears at a magic lantern show when witness to the sort of splendid parlor tricks that were on view and in earshot last Saturday night.
In the first act, the standout was a reprise of a piece Hopson conceived for the Austin New Music Co-op’s Rock Music in December 2003. Standing calmly in front of a microphone, Hopson knocked two small white rocks together at a constant pace for the duration of the piece. The simple sound of the rocks’ collision seemed to incite a battery of mysterious clicking and searing noises that echoed throughout the room from the quad speakers. The personable white rocks were front men, of course, for Hopson’s use of the Max/MSP program as a medium for organizing performed sounds with previously recorded material. A bank of pedals provided the invisible controls, which is why Hopson, joining the ranks of shoegazers, seemed to be staring at his feet the whole time.
Like Hopson, Vitiello uses computer-based digital programs to store and organize sounds. But Vitiello rarely gives a show like the one he put on for AMODA last week. More commonly, he makes installations and recordings that do their own work in his absence and that may be displayed alongside traditional forms like paintings and sculptures. Vitiello’s work investigates the great variety of places where sound waves become audible, often in places where we aren’t usually listening to, like (as in a piece he first exhibited in early 2001) the surface of the World Trade Center in a high wind. Time constraints replaced physical ones for his performance in Austin and moment-by-moment composition became a primary factor in form.
Before the show last Saturday, Vitiello half-joked about the possibility of basing a piece on the imperceptible sounds made by paint peeling off the walls of the old fire-station-turned-ballet-studio where the AMODA performance took place. Outlandish as it sounds, that kind of engagement with physical space would have been more everyday for him than his live performance with a bevy of processors, a modular synthesizer, and a laptop. Nonetheless, the flair for stagecraft that Hopson had introduced earlier in the night was evident in Vitiello’s work, too. At one point, Vitiello produced a child’s toy that whirred with rainbow lights. With all other lights extinguished, a photo cell held up to the toy translated the rainbow into aspects of sound. Though the light’s alterations of the sound were apparent to the audience as aural analogues of the simultaneous light patterns, it wasn’t as though the light itself created a new sound. Rather, it altered the qualities of sounds that had already been introduced into the composition.
If sound art has any one effective goal, it might be to change the things we pay attention to as listeners. Vitiello’s sounds weren’t idiomatic. They didn’t operate in symbols or melodies or anything that compels conscious interpretation. Instead, the performance was suggestive of certain moods and feelings of air—a subtle aural inventory of being in a place, one conjured by Vitiello as his listeners, somehow, “watched.” There was a steady rush of water and what might have been a child’s voice, but no words. The sound suggestions of that place became more convincing than the dimly recollected walls of the darkened room.
Dorothy Meiburg lives in Austin where she writes essays and poems and works in a public library.
An Interview with Sarah Lasley
Sarah Lasley is a New York-based artist who grew up in Kentucky. Her work appears in the group show Sugarcoated at Women & Their Work. This fall, Sarah will begin her M.F.A at Yale. Sarah visited Fluent~Collaborative on May 11, 2006 and later corresponded with ...might be good over email. Sugarcoated remains on view through June 17, 2006
…might be good: Your image on the “cover” of this week’s …might be good makes this our first ever swimsuit edition. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started working with the motif of the bikini-clad woman?
Sarah Lasley: The series really began when I acquired a lot of four of those novelty stripper ink pens. As a child, I would encounter them in gift shops while on family vacations to Daytona Beach or Miami. I always thought they were so scandalous, but now twenty years later, they seemed so mild. I liked that the bikinis were generic flat shapes on normal looking women in cheesecake poses. I quickly became obsessed with the idea of "the girl in the bikini" and with the way that the bikini has culturally and morally transformed from X-rated status to something more like PG-13. It shows up on Pamela Anderson as well as your fifteen-year-old sister. I tend to use myself as the model for the first of a series of works and so I made My Floaties (see above image right), really enjoying the physical contradiction of a sexy bikini paired with inflated neon puppy floaties. Humorously, I never learned how to swim, and legitimately wear the floaties when in deep water.
…mbg: Why do you think your work was included in Sugarcoated? There’s more to it than just the cupcakes on the bikinis right?
SL: I feel like Sugarcoated speaks to something sweet on the outside, or sweet-seeming, and with these paintings, I try to affect the viewer differently from afar than from at a close range. The pin-up poses and bright, patterned color on the bikinis are meant to entice viewers, lure them closer with the promise of seeing soft, sexy skin. But I use charcoal for the flesh, so that up close the dry, chalky, colorless and often pixelated texture actually counters what is promised at a distance. This also references the visual inauthenticity of the source material from which these poses are derived.
…mbg: How do you use photographs in your process? There’s definitely a sense that the images come from photographs, but the compositions have angles that one doesn’t find in photographs.
SL: Aside from the physical difficulties of hitting and holding the poses and facial expressions that I depict in my paintings, the photographic process provides an exchange of control between me and the model—they behave a certain way instinctively and I direct it into what I want to portray. I photograph the body in pieces and then create and assemble the pose directly onto the paper, placing final authorship back into my own hands. This process also makes it easy for me to use distortion to blur the expected borders of the female form. Eight feet from the floor, the large, grotesque heads confront and loom over you. The legs are short and stumpy, against the standard for hotness. There is also a stoic falseness to working from photographs that supports my concept.
…mbg: You have three other series that have commonalities with the pieces in Sugarcoated, but aren’t in the show. Specifically, I’m speaking of the completed Walk of Shame series, your After Sex series and your Evening or Morning? series. Do you see these bodies of work playing off of each other or do you consider them discrete projects?
SL: All of those series deal with sexiness and the point at which that sexiness sours. How far can hotness be pushed until it borders on the grotesque? Each project was related to the one before it and each directly reflects the place, both geographically and socially, that I was at in my life. Making Walk of Shame paintings after leaving Kentucky and my Southern Baptist environment didn't really make any sense. The idea suddenly became out-dated in New York and so I adapted.
…mbg: Do you think your work shows differently in Texas than in New York?
SL: Not necessarily... One of the major problems with making work about tits n' ass is that you risk people enjoying it purely for its sensory, titillating aspects and not for anything thought-provoking or critical. You find those misinterpreting viewers everywhere. As an artist this is always an issue. I find that the only true variants between the northeast and the south are fluctuations in shock values. I don't think that the images I portray are outright shocking (especially because of that X-rated, PG-13 bracketing that the bikini takes on). My bikini paintings are meant to speak to the universal idea of the public presentation of women in all media. For older viewers, they might reference pin-up photography and for younger ones, it might be MTV's Spring Break in Cancun. Either way, I can only hope that those open-minded enough to seek out contemporary art are also open-minded enough to think about it.
…mbg: Final question: What’s your favorite sweet?
SL: Ice cream. Or maybe donuts. Probably donuts.
Kelly Baum Interviews Christopher Eamon, curator of SLAPstick at Lora Reynolds Gallery
On May 19, 2006, Kelly Baum, Assistant Curator of American and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, interviewed Christopher Eamon, Curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection and Executive Director of the New Art Trust in San Francisco. Eamon is also the guest curator of SLAPstick at Lora Reynolds Gallery, which will be on view through June 24, 2006. Excerpts from their conversation follow.
...might be good: Let’s talk about your background, how you came to do what you do, how you decided to curate contemporary art, new media art specifically. Also, the fact that there still seems to be a specific category for new media art, and that it’s not yet been completely integrated into contemporary art as a whole—this is an issue that fascinates me. I’d be interested to know what you think about the degree to which new media art is still compartmentalized as a practice, as an approach.
Christopher Eamon: I was a painter—twenty years ago. . . . but it was the eighties, and the critique of the object was in full flex. . . The eighties was [a moment when] critical discourse was more valuable than the object. This discourse made it seem like sale—that all commodification of art—was problematic. . . . I was interested in experimental film, so I could be involved in the art world, but not in a way that partook of this double bind. I also worked at a film society. My first program had in it . . . film and video, experimental film and new quasi-documentary film, so it was a very mixed bag, unlike anything that had come before. These communities were completely separate at that time. But I didn’t see it that way. Actually, all of my colleagues who were doing experimental film would never have even gone to a video screening, because they would think that it was formally bankrupt. . . . I was looking to content, so I guess they put up with me. . . .
...mbg: So right from the beginning the split or dichotomy between film and video—this has always been a dichotomy that you’ve tried to bridge.
CE: That’s true…the dichotomies, they’ve been going on in various forms since the sixties. Mel Bochner made films that could easily have been shown in Anthology, but he would never go there. Robert Barry was taught how to make films by Hollis Framptom, who screened Dan Graham and Michael Snow together at Hunter College. So there were bridgers and non-bridgers. Paula Cooper was a bridger. . . . Artists and filmmakers—these were two categories that seemed unbridgeable in the seventies.
...mbg: To what degree is that dichotomy a problem that curators invent and how much of it is a problem that actually exists for the artists? Maybe it’s both? It’s a material, a practical problem, but perhaps conceptually it’s not as dire as it seems?
CE: It doesn’t have to be. It seems that today the categories feel, even more than ever, arbitrary. They’re based on many factors, and one of them is a pure material, technological one, which is to say that you can screen pretty competently anything anywhere today. . . . Technically, it’s possible to do a lot more now than before. But as a result, [artists need to think through the issue of] what belongs where. If you’re a moving-image artist today, you have to be sensitive to what it’s like when you show a 5-minute looped piece in a theater setting. . . . There is a different expectation there. . . And I’m not sure that you see curators and programmers paying so much attention to that. A fascinating feature of our context [is that] even film festivals have installation programs now. . . . I think that there are false categories, but there are also sensitivities, and I’m sure not everybody is equally educating themselves about the various sites [at which films and videos can be shown].
...mbg: Before we get to this other question about compartmentalizing new media art as a specific curatorial category, maybe we could first discuss your professional background. You worked as a curator at the Whitney, where you assisted Chrissie Iles on the 2001 exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977. In 2001 you became the curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection of Media Art, and you’re also the director of the New Art Trust. I’d like to know more about your perspective on the difference between being the curator of a museum collection and being the curator of a private collection (a private collection that’s twice been reconceptualized as a public exhibition for a museum, though). I think it’s interesting that so much of what you do seems to involve crossing and bridging all sorts of categories (public/private, film/art).
CE: Yes, I’ve worked in both. They’re very different places, and you can find yourself in similar binds in both. Sometimes you think that having less bureaucracy will make everything lithe and flexible, but sometimes it’s just not true, and at other times it is. What’s nice about curating for a collection as tightly conceived as this one is that you can make slight alterations. You can also do a lot more without trying to represent the contemporary scene in its entirety. . . . The focus is not so broad, and, therefore, you can make exhibition-like relationships with every acquisition. So in one move you’re serving both the public and the private realms—in theory.
Actually, that was a big step from 2001 on: we started to think about collecting in this way, first historical works and then works in other media that relate and that become interstitial material that produces—in answer to your other questions—media art within the context of all other art. . . . Before that (because I did work as [the Kramlich’s] art advisor for three years before the Whitney) it was more about acquiring the best works, the masterpieces contemporaneously with them being exhibited for the first time. . . Now we have [a premiere collection with] works from 1959 to the present.
...mbg: And many of those were shown in Video Acts at P.S.1 in 2002.
CE: And that’s just the single-channel collection.
...mbg: And the historical material.
CE: Yes, mostly historical.
...mbg: Did you curate the show or co-curate the show?
CE: We co-curated it, Klaus Biesenbach and I, but in a sense it was pre-curated, because I had bought all of those works. But then we also had to figure out [which pieces to include]—not everything was shown from [the Kramlich] collection—still, it was quite a bit, 134 works….
...mbg: I know. It was exhaustive and exhausting. I felt like I should have spent a week in New York just to see the show.
CE: It was a good local event for Queens, for Long Island City, and for New York. I heard so many people say that they would go, see one or two things, and then they’d leave, but return next week. It was like a crash course….
...mbg: I thought it was very important for that reason because it’s so hard to see….
CE: …the actual, primary sources…
...mbg: Yes, and also displayed in the manner in which they were originally intended.
CE: One would wonder why it wasn’t done like that before. . . . Was it the real estate or was it a lack of institutional support? Actually, the answer is simple—it’s really costly to do it that way….
...mbg: I remember Chrissie Iles gave a lecture at UT a few years ago, I guess it was 2004, around the time of the Whitney Biennial, and she devoted one of her three lectures to Into the Light. She talked about the importance of adhering to the artist’s original intentions with regard to display. . . . She stated it in such an emphatic manner. I could tell that to her this was primary—being true to the materiality of film and video. We think of it sometimes as being just insubstantial, moving images, but in fact there’s a materiality to it that needs to be respected.
CE: Yes, I agree with that. But it’s also true that some artists don’t care about that, so it’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of rule. It is true, though, that there are different qualities to the different media, and if you’re going to work with a history . . . or produce a context where history is learned and appropriated into the culture through students or the public, then we should be looking at the thing as it really was. And when it isn’t, it should actually say what it really was, somewhere in the didactic panel. . . . I agree with Chrissie on this. I think that the museum is, should be, the place that preserves the whole work of art, not just the images on a tape, but the feeling and the experience, even if that means re-building projectors from scratch. And it has to be that way, or [the museum is] going to lose credibility with the artists and scholars. Can you imagine if there were no real documents in the Library of Congress, if they were all just Photoshop documents? How would you know if there was a scribble on the back by Thomas Jefferson? It could be an important little scribble.
However, there’s also a line between the artistic intention as it was and the artistic intention as it may have changed with regard to time-based, especially installation, works, between the preservation of the tape or film as object and its preservation through transition, through change, which is how you preserve media—it’s through migration, as it’s called. There’s always a degree of both inherent in the material. If you talk to the artists of the seventies and eighties, like Gary Hill and Dara Birnbaum, they treated each site as an occasion to instantiate the work. So that means that it could have a radically different life in all those places. It’s not as clear as if there had been just one artistic intention. Especially with media art, there is a range within which [the artists operated]. We’re working within ranges and degrees of departure, and allowances for change. That’s really hard to assess, but you can do it, and this is part of our New Art Trust preservation project. You can do it through the documentation of all those changes.
...mbg: Do you want to talk a little bit about the New Art Trust? This is a position that’s attached to your other position as curator of the Kramlich Collection.
CE: The New Art Trust is a family foundation in the state of California. It’s a charitable trust [whose mandate] is to support our institutional partners, which are SFMOMA, the Tate, MoMA, and the Bay Area Video Coalition (an artist, not-for-profit production facility in San Francisco). So far we’ve supported commissions, publications, not so many exhibitions, some acquisitions, and we’ve supported our own preservation initiative. . . . The whole point is to support the viability of media arts at these organizations.
...mbg: And what are some of the commissions?
CE: The Pippilotti Rist piece Stir Heart, Rinse Heart at SFMOMA in 2004. And we commissioned partially the Doug Aitken seven-channel piece Eraser with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1998. We also restored all of the Nauman and Acconci tapes [in New York through Electronic Arts Intermix] and all of the Wegman tapes [through the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley]. That’s how we acquired all those works for Video Acts—it was partially through these preservation initiatives.
...mbg: Let’s talk about your independent curatorial projects. You curated an exhibition for Art Basel in Miami in 2005, and it looks like there’s something coming up very soon that’s in Europe.
CE: The Berlin project, which is the other reason I was in Europe. This project has grown very elaborately over the years. It’s very exciting, and it’s only a few months away.
...mbg: What’s it called?
CE: It’s called Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection, and it’s at the Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin. It’s co-curated with myself, Stan Douglas, Joachim Jaeger, and Gabrielle Knapstein, who are the curators at the Hamburger Bahnhof. It all started because I wanted to edit an anthology covering the last twenty years of video art, [but I wanted to do so with an artist], so I approached Stan Douglas. . . . We decided we would commission ten very good art historians to write on different moments that had occurred [in the development of video art] since the nineties. And then [the anthology project was joined by plans for a symposium and an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof.] [We’ve modeled] a large-scale historical exhibition spanning forty years, 1962 to 2002, with a broad chronology but with a narrow focus on projections in space . . . There’s also a month of screenings [at the Arsenal Kino] that are going to be non-categorical artist films (i.e., films that are artistic, and not just by “artists,” whoever they are). The program is called Beyond the Museum: Art in the Cinema, so it’s the other side to the question that we’ve already been talking about. The exhibition Beyond Cinema and the program Beyond the Museum—each is the inverse of the other. Screenings still happen, although we seem to be privileging the site of the museum today, but the works in this program belong in the screenings. They have a duration. There’s something about them that makes them belong there. They have a beginning and an end…
...mbg: It’s mainly structural? It’s some structural feature that makes them belong in a screening as opposed to a white cube?
CE: Or the mode of address. Or even where they’ve been screened historically. But you’re right—it has something to do with the structure, the time-frame. Is it narrative? Does it have a thread that needs to be followed continuously? Does it address you in a quasi-documentary sense?
...mbg: This reminds me of Paul Chan’s work. Paul makes a wide variety of objects, projections, images, but you don’t see them shown together in the same space. For him there seems to be a distinction between his more documentary films and videos, such as the one on Lynne Stewart, which was first screened at the New School for Social Research, and his double-screen projections like My Birds…trash…the future (2004) or his floor projections like 2nd
CE: Yes, and I really respect that. I think that there has been, at least up until recently, [some disregard for context]. Does the context mean nothing? Are [videos and films] just autonomous things? Because in that case, I’d rather just have it all on my iPod. I’m really interested in the specificity of the location, so I respect that Paul would do that, because they’re not the same things, those videos that you described. They’re totally different experiences, and the public has a different interaction with those works. The installations are more subliminal in a way, more curious and enigmatic, while the documentaries aren’t.
...mbg: Is there anything we’ve missed? Anything else I should ask you?
CE: I think we missed the question you first asked about the compartmentalization of new media art. This is a very interesting topic, and it’s as blurry as all the others. The discourse of universalizing and marginalizing narratives [that is drawn] from literary theory is so applicable to media art and to the institution. The discourse of media art as it’s been present in the institution over the years has been the marginalizing kind, because [media art] needed separate nomination. It needed to have its own name and its own place in order to actually get in the door. [Think of] John Hanhardt’s New American Film and Video Series at the Whitney, or the program at SFMOMA, the original media arts program, where they had a separate curator and a separate department, and even of [the Kramlich Collection]. Why did you need to marginalize [media art]? Why can’t it just be contemporary art? And more and more it is just contemporary art. Many collectors have some video art in their collection because it represents what artists do today.
...mbg: But media art needed this initial moment of nomination, you’re saying.
CE: Yes, it did. And also expertise. So I’m really split on the marginalizing versus the universalizing approaches. Printmaking curators still exist, drawing [and photography] curators still exist, even when the boundaries [between disciplines] have broken down. There are degrees of expertise required because of the technology and preservation aspects, and also [because of the need to understand] the artist’s intent within these realms, which is so subtly altered by very overlooked things, like the number of lumens in the projector and whether it’s LCD or something else. I’m of two minds. I think that there has to be a specialty—you need specialized knowledge and you need to be aware of the specialized history. . . . I like the idea of having a curator of contemporary art who specializes in media art as a new middle road between the two paradigms. . . . When the whole area is folded into contemporary art de facto with no specialty, you get strange anomalies in the valuation and evaluation of works. [The valuation and evaluation] becomes skewed because there is a special history to be learned. This is a pet issue for me. It’s a great question, and I don’t really know the answer. I think the marginalization mode can be put behind us, but “now what?” is still an open question.
AMODA's Sound Performances by Stephen Vitiello and Holland Hopson
A review of Vitiello and Holland's May 20, 2006 Performances
Dorothy Meiburg
Austin’s itinerant Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) touched down at Ballet Austin’s Guadalupe Street location last weekend for an evening of sound. The 7th installment of AMODA’s Performance Series paired Holland Hopson, an artist based in Austin, with Stephen Vitiello, a visiting artist from Richmond, Virginia. Vitiello, whose work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, headed from Austin directly to appearances in London, Australia and New Zealand.
Sound art has found its way into contemporary art spaces, but the integration of the aural and the visual hasn’t always been graceful. For a museum of digital art, however, music and sound are natural inclusions. The great virtue of digitized information, after all, is logistical: once transformed into compatible electronic files, it’s easy to juxtapose a picture with a sound, or one sound with another recorded under different circumstances. Artists like Hopson and Vitiello take these possibilities to extremes and modern audiences can be forgiven for resembling their forebears at a magic lantern show when witness to the sort of splendid parlor tricks that were on view and in earshot last Saturday night.
In the first act, the standout was a reprise of a piece Hopson conceived for the Austin New Music Co-op’s Rock Music in December 2003. Standing calmly in front of a microphone, Hopson knocked two small white rocks together at a constant pace for the duration of the piece. The simple sound of the rocks’ collision seemed to incite a battery of mysterious clicking and searing noises that echoed throughout the room from the quad speakers. The personable white rocks were front men, of course, for Hopson’s use of the Max/MSP program as a medium for organizing performed sounds with previously recorded material. A bank of pedals provided the invisible controls, which is why Hopson, joining the ranks of shoegazers, seemed to be staring at his feet the whole time.
Like Hopson, Vitiello uses computer-based digital programs to store and organize sounds. But Vitiello rarely gives a show like the one he put on for AMODA last week. More commonly, he makes installations and recordings that do their own work in his absence and that may be displayed alongside traditional forms like paintings and sculptures. Vitiello’s work investigates the great variety of places where sound waves become audible, often in places where we aren’t usually listening to, like (as in a piece he first exhibited in early 2001) the surface of the World Trade Center in a high wind. Time constraints replaced physical ones for his performance in Austin and moment-by-moment composition became a primary factor in form.
Before the show last Saturday, Vitiello half-joked about the possibility of basing a piece on the imperceptible sounds made by paint peeling off the walls of the old fire-station-turned-ballet-studio where the AMODA performance took place. Outlandish as it sounds, that kind of engagement with physical space would have been more everyday for him than his live performance with a bevy of processors, a modular synthesizer, and a laptop. Nonetheless, the flair for stagecraft that Hopson had introduced earlier in the night was evident in Vitiello’s work, too. At one point, Vitiello produced a child’s toy that whirred with rainbow lights. With all other lights extinguished, a photo cell held up to the toy translated the rainbow into aspects of sound. Though the light’s alterations of the sound were apparent to the audience as aural analogues of the simultaneous light patterns, it wasn’t as though the light itself created a new sound. Rather, it altered the qualities of sounds that had already been introduced into the composition.
If sound art has any one effective goal, it might be to change the things we pay attention to as listeners. Vitiello’s sounds weren’t idiomatic. They didn’t operate in symbols or melodies or anything that compels conscious interpretation. Instead, the performance was suggestive of certain moods and feelings of air—a subtle aural inventory of being in a place, one conjured by Vitiello as his listeners, somehow, “watched.” There was a steady rush of water and what might have been a child’s voice, but no words. The sound suggestions of that place became more convincing than the dimly recollected walls of the darkened room.
Dorothy Meiburg lives in Austin where she writes essays and poems and works in a public library.
An Interview with Sarah Lasley
Sarah Lasley is a New York-based artist who grew up in Kentucky. Her work appears in the group show Sugarcoated at Women & Their Work. This fall, Sarah will begin her M.F.A at Yale. Sarah visited Fluent~Collaborative on May 11, 2006 and later corresponded with ...might be good over email. Sugarcoated remains on view through June 17, 2006
…might be good: Your image on the “cover” of this week’s …might be good makes this our first ever swimsuit edition. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started working with the motif of the bikini-clad woman?
Sarah Lasley: The series really began when I acquired a lot of four of those novelty stripper ink pens. As a child, I would encounter them in gift shops while on family vacations to Daytona Beach or Miami. I always thought they were so scandalous, but now twenty years later, they seemed so mild. I liked that the bikinis were generic flat shapes on normal looking women in cheesecake poses. I quickly became obsessed with the idea of "the girl in the bikini" and with the way that the bikini has culturally and morally transformed from X-rated status to something more like PG-13. It shows up on Pamela Anderson as well as your fifteen-year-old sister. I tend to use myself as the model for the first of a series of works and so I made My Floaties (see above image right), really enjoying the physical contradiction of a sexy bikini paired with inflated neon puppy floaties. Humorously, I never learned how to swim, and legitimately wear the floaties when in deep water.
…mbg: Why do you think your work was included in Sugarcoated? There’s more to it than just the cupcakes on the bikinis right?
SL: I feel like Sugarcoated speaks to something sweet on the outside, or sweet-seeming, and with these paintings, I try to affect the viewer differently from afar than from at a close range. The pin-up poses and bright, patterned color on the bikinis are meant to entice viewers, lure them closer with the promise of seeing soft, sexy skin. But I use charcoal for the flesh, so that up close the dry, chalky, colorless and often pixelated texture actually counters what is promised at a distance. This also references the visual inauthenticity of the source material from which these poses are derived.
…mbg: How do you use photographs in your process? There’s definitely a sense that the images come from photographs, but the compositions have angles that one doesn’t find in photographs.
SL: Aside from the physical difficulties of hitting and holding the poses and facial expressions that I depict in my paintings, the photographic process provides an exchange of control between me and the model—they behave a certain way instinctively and I direct it into what I want to portray. I photograph the body in pieces and then create and assemble the pose directly onto the paper, placing final authorship back into my own hands. This process also makes it easy for me to use distortion to blur the expected borders of the female form. Eight feet from the floor, the large, grotesque heads confront and loom over you. The legs are short and stumpy, against the standard for hotness. There is also a stoic falseness to working from photographs that supports my concept.
…mbg: You have three other series that have commonalities with the pieces in Sugarcoated, but aren’t in the show. Specifically, I’m speaking of the completed Walk of Shame series, your After Sex series and your Evening or Morning? series. Do you see these bodies of work playing off of each other or do you consider them discrete projects?
SL: All of those series deal with sexiness and the point at which that sexiness sours. How far can hotness be pushed until it borders on the grotesque? Each project was related to the one before it and each directly reflects the place, both geographically and socially, that I was at in my life. Making Walk of Shame paintings after leaving Kentucky and my Southern Baptist environment didn't really make any sense. The idea suddenly became out-dated in New York and so I adapted.
…mbg: Do you think your work shows differently in Texas than in New York?
SL: Not necessarily... One of the major problems with making work about tits n' ass is that you risk people enjoying it purely for its sensory, titillating aspects and not for anything thought-provoking or critical. You find those misinterpreting viewers everywhere. As an artist this is always an issue. I find that the only true variants between the northeast and the south are fluctuations in shock values. I don't think that the images I portray are outright shocking (especially because of that X-rated, PG-13 bracketing that the bikini takes on). My bikini paintings are meant to speak to the universal idea of the public presentation of women in all media. For older viewers, they might reference pin-up photography and for younger ones, it might be MTV's Spring Break in Cancun. Either way, I can only hope that those open-minded enough to seek out contemporary art are also open-minded enough to think about it.
…mbg: Final question: What’s your favorite sweet?
SL: Ice cream. Or maybe donuts. Probably donuts.
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Lora Reynolds Gallery 300 West Ave. #1318 Austin, Texas tel. 512.215.4965 Austin Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) 6905 Miranda Drive Austin, Texas www.amoda.org Women and Their Work Gallery 1710 Lavaca St. Austin, Texas tel. 512.477.1064 www.womenandtheirwork.org |
II. San Antonio: Zane Lewis: Beyond Pink Lemonade
The air conditioning at the Finesilver building malfunctioned, so …might be good endured a stifling summer afternoon in Zane Lewis’ studio in San Antonio last week to assemble the young artist's thoughts on giant chemical baths, paint-by-numbers aesthetics and monoliths.
...might be good: Tell me about your initial vision for the Pink Lemonade installation. Primarily because that one was recently mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and created a lot of attention for your work.
Zane Lewis: From the beginning, I guess I actually did three Pink Lemonade pieces. And it really just stemmed from this core idea of wanting to make a sculpture out of a completely mundane material, accessible to the general public. Really just wanting to work with something almost pathetic and make a sublime object or space out of it. So that's where it all started and that was sort of the base of this idea. The first Pink Lemonade piece was kind of the "birth" piece. It was an installation where I had 290 gallons of pink lemonade in a chemical tank that was restrained in a steel cage. So, basically, the first piece is almost like the "monolith" or the beginning. And the "monolith" kind of stands for evolution. So, I took this kind of mundane treat and put it on a pedestal which escalated into something else, something sublime. The first piece is this chemical tank with the pink lemonade illuminated and then I added to the piece and re-showed it at the Commerce Street Artist Warehouse in Houston. Then I added an audio score to it. I played the theme from 2001: Space Odyssey. Every time the monolith is present in this film, there's this composition, this musical score.
...mbg: So, that's the companion to the lemonade. Do you ever open it?
ZL: I have to drain it because when it's full. It probably weighs a few tons.
...mbg: Alright, so that's the Pink Lemonade story.
ZL: Then it just evolved into two other stories. The second sculpture was called Pink Lemonade: Itty Bitty. That was exhibited at The Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. It's a completely big, open space and I blacked out the entire room and then had an inch tall vial of illuminated pink lemonade. The room was so dark, it looked like it was floating in space. A bird somehow got into the project space and I guess was attracted to the vial. Eventually the bird knocked it over and broke it. And I thought well, shit, I can't end this here. I gotta make the Pink Lemonade trilogy. So Diverse Works in Houston commissioned me to do an installation. They gave me a $5,000 budget so I made Pink Lemonade: The Procession. It was a 16-foot-long by 18-foot-wide glass mirrored room that created an infinitesimal number of glowing vials.
...mbg: It's almost like this extra element in the Periodic Table.
ZL: Yes.
...mbg: What are you working on right now? What's the next show lined up?
ZL: The next show is a group show. It's the Blue Star 21 exhibition at Blue Star [Contemporary] Art Center [June 29- August 20]. That's the next project I'm focusing on right now.
...mbg: Is it similar work to the Pink Lemonade work or is it the new paintings?
ZL: I'm kind of leaving the Pink Lemonade stuff behind. I'm going to focus more on the paintings. I really feel like the paintings... Well, I feel like I've come to a point where I'm still working with ideas like Pink Lemonade with the water sculptures but in a more tangible object form and in a much more conventional format. It's a lot more contained—not all this moving everywhere, fluid spilling everywhere sort of stuff. I'm using a lot of similar ideas but in a new format.
...mbg: One characteristic that sort of permeates most of your paintings and sculptures is this lucid sense of a finished product. To what extent would you say that you know what your finished work is going to look like before you start a project?
ZL: I don't exactly know. I have an idea of what I want to convey to the audience and then I work towards fabricating that. Really my aesthetic is this removal of the artist. There's not much of the artist's hand. You don't see brush strokes or drawings. I want it to look like it's an entity aside from the hand. Often there's this element of chance in my work, some sort of phenomenology that I can't control. Specifically, with the paint-by-numbers paintings, I took the original photograph of water and I transferred it into a paint-by-numbers image. So that was this first step of removal and then instead of painting these images or canvases—usually that's the intention—I wanted it to have this quality of a fountain that's overflowing and I wanted to emphasize this magical quality as it started to spill out of the frame.
The air conditioning at the Finesilver building malfunctioned, so …might be good endured a stifling summer afternoon in Zane Lewis’ studio in San Antonio last week to assemble the young artist's thoughts on giant chemical baths, paint-by-numbers aesthetics and monoliths.
...might be good: Tell me about your initial vision for the Pink Lemonade installation. Primarily because that one was recently mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and created a lot of attention for your work.
Zane Lewis: From the beginning, I guess I actually did three Pink Lemonade pieces. And it really just stemmed from this core idea of wanting to make a sculpture out of a completely mundane material, accessible to the general public. Really just wanting to work with something almost pathetic and make a sublime object or space out of it. So that's where it all started and that was sort of the base of this idea. The first Pink Lemonade piece was kind of the "birth" piece. It was an installation where I had 290 gallons of pink lemonade in a chemical tank that was restrained in a steel cage. So, basically, the first piece is almost like the "monolith" or the beginning. And the "monolith" kind of stands for evolution. So, I took this kind of mundane treat and put it on a pedestal which escalated into something else, something sublime. The first piece is this chemical tank with the pink lemonade illuminated and then I added to the piece and re-showed it at the Commerce Street Artist Warehouse in Houston. Then I added an audio score to it. I played the theme from 2001: Space Odyssey. Every time the monolith is present in this film, there's this composition, this musical score.
...mbg: So, that's the companion to the lemonade. Do you ever open it?
ZL: I have to drain it because when it's full. It probably weighs a few tons.
...mbg: Alright, so that's the Pink Lemonade story.
ZL: Then it just evolved into two other stories. The second sculpture was called Pink Lemonade: Itty Bitty. That was exhibited at The Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. It's a completely big, open space and I blacked out the entire room and then had an inch tall vial of illuminated pink lemonade. The room was so dark, it looked like it was floating in space. A bird somehow got into the project space and I guess was attracted to the vial. Eventually the bird knocked it over and broke it. And I thought well, shit, I can't end this here. I gotta make the Pink Lemonade trilogy. So Diverse Works in Houston commissioned me to do an installation. They gave me a $5,000 budget so I made Pink Lemonade: The Procession. It was a 16-foot-long by 18-foot-wide glass mirrored room that created an infinitesimal number of glowing vials.
...mbg: It's almost like this extra element in the Periodic Table.
ZL: Yes.
...mbg: What are you working on right now? What's the next show lined up?
ZL: The next show is a group show. It's the Blue Star 21 exhibition at Blue Star [Contemporary] Art Center [June 29- August 20]. That's the next project I'm focusing on right now.
...mbg: Is it similar work to the Pink Lemonade work or is it the new paintings?
ZL: I'm kind of leaving the Pink Lemonade stuff behind. I'm going to focus more on the paintings. I really feel like the paintings... Well, I feel like I've come to a point where I'm still working with ideas like Pink Lemonade with the water sculptures but in a more tangible object form and in a much more conventional format. It's a lot more contained—not all this moving everywhere, fluid spilling everywhere sort of stuff. I'm using a lot of similar ideas but in a new format.
...mbg: One characteristic that sort of permeates most of your paintings and sculptures is this lucid sense of a finished product. To what extent would you say that you know what your finished work is going to look like before you start a project?
ZL: I don't exactly know. I have an idea of what I want to convey to the audience and then I work towards fabricating that. Really my aesthetic is this removal of the artist. There's not much of the artist's hand. You don't see brush strokes or drawings. I want it to look like it's an entity aside from the hand. Often there's this element of chance in my work, some sort of phenomenology that I can't control. Specifically, with the paint-by-numbers paintings, I took the original photograph of water and I transferred it into a paint-by-numbers image. So that was this first step of removal and then instead of painting these images or canvases—usually that's the intention—I wanted it to have this quality of a fountain that's overflowing and I wanted to emphasize this magical quality as it started to spill out of the frame.
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III. Elsewhere: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist: Jakup Ferri at Artists Space in New York & Regine Basha from Cairo
An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist: Jakup Ferri at Artists Space in New York
Lyra Kilston
If Artworld Idol was a TV show, Jakup Ferri would be prepared. He already has a small group of home videos that portray his desire to be discovered, including an interview where his family thanks curators for inviting him to his first biennial in the West and another where he faces the camera and assures us that he will be a very famous artist in the future.
But Ferri (b. 1981) is up to a lot more than a search for celebrity status. Like many artists living outside of the spangled Western art-belt, Ferri, who hails from Kosovo, struggles with his position of being both an exotic and marketable subject (“artists from war-torn countries are deep”), yet aware of being perceived as a bit clunky and out of the loop.
This stance of yearning and subversion is the subject of his current show on view at Artists Space in New York. Bluntly titled An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, this group of four videos, curated by Pelin Uran, addresses the frustration of desiring fame and recognition in a world in which your network, specifically your English-speaking network, counts for everything. These works were made at a fitting moment as the “global” art world remains deliriously caught up in biennial-hopping and border-dissolving and curators and theorists endlessly discuss the jargon-laden entanglements of periphery and center, post-colonial exoticism and the ethics of trans-national art, primarily in, you betcha, English.
Ferri’s works, fortunately, are not overtly freighted with such ponderous matters. These minimal, low budget videos, all made in 2003, rely on humor and direct emotion to convey his position and leave the essays on globalism to the academics. In Three Virgins, the artist is shown sitting on the floor holding two cheap computer speakers playing a piece by John Lennon and Yoko Ono which consists of them calling each others’ names: “John” “Yoko” “John” “Yoko”. Ferri holds the speakers close to his face and howls back at them “Jakup!” “Jakup!” “Jakup!,” wedging himself into their insular world of high art fame.
In Save me, Help me, Ferri creates a video studio visit for an imagined curator to whom he shows his work, assuring his audience that one day he will be extremely famous. He talks to the camera in Albanian, with flawed English subtitles, and presents drawn diagrams for sucess for artists such as Matthew Barney and Damien Hirst, as though their success could perhaps be deciphered and thus replicated. As seen in numerous acts of homage and appropriation, the impulse to imitate success in order to absorb its powers is strong, and has a thorny history in art, what with that whole value of originality. But Ferri is less concerned with imitating his artist-heroes’ work than in achieving their global stature. He instead parodies artistic self-obsession, celebrity worship and the Careerism that, as I heard announced recently, is the number one art movement of the last 30 years. However, every few sentences he reiterates, “Save me, Help me” to the imagined curator, in a deadpan manner that makes us realize that feeling so peripheral and dependent on recognition from the West is a real problem, despite his comical approach.
In An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, Ferri faces the camera and rambles nonsensically in the handful of English words he knows, attempting American pronunciation through his thick accent. This clumsy stream of consciousness appears to be another cheeky attempt at finding some key (is it doing what Barney’s done? Is it doing a bed-in? Or is it these magical English nouns?) to worldwide fame.
Lastly, in Jakup Come Back, the artist’s mother, father and two sisters face the camera and thank the first curator who has included Ferri’s work in an international exhibition. In the midst of this, his mother begins crying, perhaps overwhelmed with either gratitude or trepidation by her son’s new found success, but mostly just worried that he won’t return home. His sisters begin mocking their sentimental mother, revealing the wide gap between Balkan generations.
Part of a group of young Kosovarian artists grappling with their place in the world, Ferri employs a classic post-Soviet, post-War approach of irony, absurdity and funny-ouch humor. As issues of identity and place, not to mention a voracious art market, play out their vexing roles in contemporary art, it’s a relief to poke some fun. And, if you’re able to do so in English, then you might actually get famous for it.
Lyra Kilston is a writer living in Brooklyn. She studied art criticism at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies.
Regine Basha from Cairo
Here’s a letter dated May 10 from Regine Basha’s most recent trip to Cairo:
Time to update. It's been quite an experience so far. All my (our) fears about the potential political unrest was overtaken by a more imminent fear of sand! Sandstorms swept across Cairo yesterday (while it was hailing in Austin) and the sky turned burnt orange like a science fiction movie, like the scene from the pod race in Star Wars. It literally looked like the sky was falling. Hence my curatorial presentation for the Open Studio residency was cancelled (and rescheduled) and all wireless technology shut down. We took refuge indoors and drank.
Let me first say that the people running this wonderful program and space Townhouse should be given some kind of art-world medal for the work they do here. It's amazing to find a place dedicated to the most current contemporary art and ideas in the middle of a working class neighborhood in chaotic downtown Cairo. It feels as if people really survive intellectually by its very existence (check it out: www.thetownhousegallery.com) Situated in a large, expansive nineteenth-century building with barely the paint and plumbing to hold it together—and don’t forget sand of course—it does as much as it possibly can to be a hub for the artist community of Cairo and visitors from abroad. It houses a library with books, catalogues and art magazines from around the world and an archive room for files and videos of local artists.
Open Studio is a two-week residency program every one to two years or so that mixes Egyptian artists with invited international artists and sometimes curators this year it's me and Basak Senova a digital media curator from Turkey); usually about 10-15 people. We dubbed it “The Real World: Cairo" because of all the characters that have been thrown together or a United Colors of Benetton ad because this year's characters are exceptionally diverse in background and artistic production. Though this was to be a residency concerning work in sound art—we've got a spectrum of practitioners including a Lebanese sound artist and record producer, a Botswanan drummer, a Berkeley-based digital game designer, an Indian musician and Bollywood composer, a Pakistani sound artist, a Brazilian sound installation artist, a Berlin-based sound publishers and so on, some of us are really wondering what we're doing here. But once we start listening to each other's interest in music and sound, it immediately becomes clear—and truly exciting. There hasn't been a lot of site-seeing yet and I must say it took me at least 3 days to adjust to the sensorial overload, so site-seeing right away would have been easily wasted on my zombie brain.
I did something really odd today. As part of the program, these Berlin-based artists called Staalplaat conducted “sound therapies” at the Goethe Institut using hospital beds and headphones. We signed up and were each assigned a form of therapy (unbeknownst to us). Mine turned out to be a tour of the Goethe Institut’s parking lot while being carried on a stretcher blindfolded and with headphones on. Needless to say everyone got to see me getting Carried Away (title of this particular piece) as I just got dizzy and disoriented…like Cairo is not disorienting enough.
Until soon.
All best, Regine
P.S. Just to clarify things, here is an update of changes and exciting news ahead: After 3 years as Adjunct Curator at Arthouse where I have been launching new programs, bringing in guest curators and touring exhibitions (and curated the exhibitions Life Drawings: Beth Cambell, Danica Phelps, Eric Schnell, LOUNGE! by Matthew Geller, The Gospel of Lead: Dario Robleto and Jeremy Blake), my status at Arthouse will be shifting to Consulting Curator this year. In this role, I will be conducting research and consultation towards Arthouse's future building and expanded programming. For the renovation, Arthouse has enlisted LTL architects from Brooklyn and will be embarking on a capital campaign to renovate its 2nd floor - adding a residency program and an additional exhibition space.
Also, I am still working towards Daniel Bozhkov's first major solo exhibition and special project for Austin which will open at Arthouse this September of 2006 with a full color publication (in conjunction with UNT Denton and Fluent~Collaborative) funded in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.
In addition to these activities, I will be joining Manifesta 6 in Cyprus later this fall as an invited participant (www.manifesta6.org.cy/main.html) as well as working on the production of various other national and international projects for 2007.
Thanks,
Regine
An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist: Jakup Ferri at Artists Space in New York
Lyra Kilston
If Artworld Idol was a TV show, Jakup Ferri would be prepared. He already has a small group of home videos that portray his desire to be discovered, including an interview where his family thanks curators for inviting him to his first biennial in the West and another where he faces the camera and assures us that he will be a very famous artist in the future.
But Ferri (b. 1981) is up to a lot more than a search for celebrity status. Like many artists living outside of the spangled Western art-belt, Ferri, who hails from Kosovo, struggles with his position of being both an exotic and marketable subject (“artists from war-torn countries are deep”), yet aware of being perceived as a bit clunky and out of the loop.
This stance of yearning and subversion is the subject of his current show on view at Artists Space in New York. Bluntly titled An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, this group of four videos, curated by Pelin Uran, addresses the frustration of desiring fame and recognition in a world in which your network, specifically your English-speaking network, counts for everything. These works were made at a fitting moment as the “global” art world remains deliriously caught up in biennial-hopping and border-dissolving and curators and theorists endlessly discuss the jargon-laden entanglements of periphery and center, post-colonial exoticism and the ethics of trans-national art, primarily in, you betcha, English.
Ferri’s works, fortunately, are not overtly freighted with such ponderous matters. These minimal, low budget videos, all made in 2003, rely on humor and direct emotion to convey his position and leave the essays on globalism to the academics. In Three Virgins, the artist is shown sitting on the floor holding two cheap computer speakers playing a piece by John Lennon and Yoko Ono which consists of them calling each others’ names: “John” “Yoko” “John” “Yoko”. Ferri holds the speakers close to his face and howls back at them “Jakup!” “Jakup!” “Jakup!,” wedging himself into their insular world of high art fame.
In Save me, Help me, Ferri creates a video studio visit for an imagined curator to whom he shows his work, assuring his audience that one day he will be extremely famous. He talks to the camera in Albanian, with flawed English subtitles, and presents drawn diagrams for sucess for artists such as Matthew Barney and Damien Hirst, as though their success could perhaps be deciphered and thus replicated. As seen in numerous acts of homage and appropriation, the impulse to imitate success in order to absorb its powers is strong, and has a thorny history in art, what with that whole value of originality. But Ferri is less concerned with imitating his artist-heroes’ work than in achieving their global stature. He instead parodies artistic self-obsession, celebrity worship and the Careerism that, as I heard announced recently, is the number one art movement of the last 30 years. However, every few sentences he reiterates, “Save me, Help me” to the imagined curator, in a deadpan manner that makes us realize that feeling so peripheral and dependent on recognition from the West is a real problem, despite his comical approach.
In An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, Ferri faces the camera and rambles nonsensically in the handful of English words he knows, attempting American pronunciation through his thick accent. This clumsy stream of consciousness appears to be another cheeky attempt at finding some key (is it doing what Barney’s done? Is it doing a bed-in? Or is it these magical English nouns?) to worldwide fame.
Lastly, in Jakup Come Back, the artist’s mother, father and two sisters face the camera and thank the first curator who has included Ferri’s work in an international exhibition. In the midst of this, his mother begins crying, perhaps overwhelmed with either gratitude or trepidation by her son’s new found success, but mostly just worried that he won’t return home. His sisters begin mocking their sentimental mother, revealing the wide gap between Balkan generations.
Part of a group of young Kosovarian artists grappling with their place in the world, Ferri employs a classic post-Soviet, post-War approach of irony, absurdity and funny-ouch humor. As issues of identity and place, not to mention a voracious art market, play out their vexing roles in contemporary art, it’s a relief to poke some fun. And, if you’re able to do so in English, then you might actually get famous for it.
Lyra Kilston is a writer living in Brooklyn. She studied art criticism at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies.
Regine Basha from Cairo
Here’s a letter dated May 10 from Regine Basha’s most recent trip to Cairo:
Time to update. It's been quite an experience so far. All my (our) fears about the potential political unrest was overtaken by a more imminent fear of sand! Sandstorms swept across Cairo yesterday (while it was hailing in Austin) and the sky turned burnt orange like a science fiction movie, like the scene from the pod race in Star Wars. It literally looked like the sky was falling. Hence my curatorial presentation for the Open Studio residency was cancelled (and rescheduled) and all wireless technology shut down. We took refuge indoors and drank.
Let me first say that the people running this wonderful program and space Townhouse should be given some kind of art-world medal for the work they do here. It's amazing to find a place dedicated to the most current contemporary art and ideas in the middle of a working class neighborhood in chaotic downtown Cairo. It feels as if people really survive intellectually by its very existence (check it out: www.thetownhousegallery.com) Situated in a large, expansive nineteenth-century building with barely the paint and plumbing to hold it together—and don’t forget sand of course—it does as much as it possibly can to be a hub for the artist community of Cairo and visitors from abroad. It houses a library with books, catalogues and art magazines from around the world and an archive room for files and videos of local artists.
Open Studio is a two-week residency program every one to two years or so that mixes Egyptian artists with invited international artists and sometimes curators this year it's me and Basak Senova a digital media curator from Turkey); usually about 10-15 people. We dubbed it “The Real World: Cairo" because of all the characters that have been thrown together or a United Colors of Benetton ad because this year's characters are exceptionally diverse in background and artistic production. Though this was to be a residency concerning work in sound art—we've got a spectrum of practitioners including a Lebanese sound artist and record producer, a Botswanan drummer, a Berkeley-based digital game designer, an Indian musician and Bollywood composer, a Pakistani sound artist, a Brazilian sound installation artist, a Berlin-based sound publishers and so on, some of us are really wondering what we're doing here. But once we start listening to each other's interest in music and sound, it immediately becomes clear—and truly exciting. There hasn't been a lot of site-seeing yet and I must say it took me at least 3 days to adjust to the sensorial overload, so site-seeing right away would have been easily wasted on my zombie brain.
I did something really odd today. As part of the program, these Berlin-based artists called Staalplaat conducted “sound therapies” at the Goethe Institut using hospital beds and headphones. We signed up and were each assigned a form of therapy (unbeknownst to us). Mine turned out to be a tour of the Goethe Institut’s parking lot while being carried on a stretcher blindfolded and with headphones on. Needless to say everyone got to see me getting Carried Away (title of this particular piece) as I just got dizzy and disoriented…like Cairo is not disorienting enough.
Until soon.
All best, Regine
P.S. Just to clarify things, here is an update of changes and exciting news ahead: After 3 years as Adjunct Curator at Arthouse where I have been launching new programs, bringing in guest curators and touring exhibitions (and curated the exhibitions Life Drawings: Beth Cambell, Danica Phelps, Eric Schnell, LOUNGE! by Matthew Geller, The Gospel of Lead: Dario Robleto and Jeremy Blake), my status at Arthouse will be shifting to Consulting Curator this year. In this role, I will be conducting research and consultation towards Arthouse's future building and expanded programming. For the renovation, Arthouse has enlisted LTL architects from Brooklyn and will be embarking on a capital campaign to renovate its 2nd floor - adding a residency program and an additional exhibition space.
Also, I am still working towards Daniel Bozhkov's first major solo exhibition and special project for Austin which will open at Arthouse this September of 2006 with a full color publication (in conjunction with UNT Denton and Fluent~Collaborative) funded in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.
In addition to these activities, I will be joining Manifesta 6 in Cyprus later this fall as an invited participant (www.manifesta6.org.cy/main.html) as well as working on the production of various other national and international projects for 2007.
Thanks,
Regine
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IV. Some Thoughts on Prizes & A Single Question: If You Could Select the Trio of Artists for an Artpace International-Artist-in-Residence Project, Who Would You Choose?
Some Thoughts on Prizes: A Letter to the Editor from James Bae
"A man can be imprisoned in a room with an unlocked door which opens inwards, so long as it does not occur to him to pull it rather than push it."
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
I've been housebound for a matter of three days. Cabin fever or cloistered imbecile? It's a moralism yet to be determined. One gets the sense that an Ice Age is setting in, regardless.
One way I've been passing time is reading lists. There's one that's particularly bothersome: the Austin Chronicle's recent list of critic's award nominees. I find awards distasteful in the first place; there's always an idea that critics aren't seeing everything to begin with and it's simply a media-attention attempt. But to go on with such an attempt and create a Best Female Artist Award? This just doesn't sound right.
I know the Big Swinging Dick factor is back in New York with a renewed vengeance. I'm in the camp that women are horribly under-represented in the arts; this surely has to do with market forces. For every Marlene Dumas, there are about 10 equally well-selling counterparts in her auction milieu. I think the market will correct itself, hopefully, within the next decade. However, to categorically separate aesthetic value in terms of male and female bits is counterproductive. This seems to be a confusion of methodology with undue political correctness. They don't have awards for "Best Female Mathematician" do they? Neither should art.
It wouldn't change if, say, they collapsed the list of five male artists with corresponding five female, which would be skimming past the issue as well. However, it seems the implication here that gender-specific art must have gender-specific categorization also creates an uneasy distorting effect: Is this art for women—women who make art as women? Art for the Oxygen channel? Equality must be taken at equality's ethic: value above all else. Separate the two and I think the inference is creativity still comes from the well-source of Adam's rib.
But, I think this is the general attitude when proscribing awards at all. They're tawdry when it comes to things like art and literature and hazy enough when debating who's got the best falafel or used clothes store in town. It seems rendering merit this way cheapens the value of the artists themselves: Are these women battling it out in the way Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and the Simpson sisters do at the Grammy's? I can only think of what William Gaddis surmised the feeling of winning a Pulitzer Prize would be like: crucified by the "ultimate seal of mediocrity." In the end, isn't that what's taken away for these women? What Gaddis expounds at the conclusion of Agape Agape as the artist's expiation: "the Youth who could do anything" to "the self who could do more"—to fail or succeed on their own, regardless of society's implicatures.
~ James Bae
A Single Question: If You Could Select the Trio of Artists for an Artpace International-Artist-in-Residence Project, Who Would You Choose?
Last week, Artpace announced its first set of 2007 residents. Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, Debra Singer, selected Paul Chan, Troy Brauntuch, and Katja Strunz. Chan is the 2006 Whitney Biennial artist whose exhibition Present Tense is on view at the Blanton through August 31st (see ...mbg #69). Brauntach is a professor of Art at The University of Texas at Austin and was also featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial. And Strunz is a Berlin-based sculptor whose work has been featured in museums and galleries across in Europe.
In the meantime, the 06.2 Residencies are about to open on July 6th with Curator of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, Yuko Hasegawa’s picks: Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger (Switzerland), Do-Ho Suh (New York), and Luz María Sánchez (San Antonio).
We at …might be good through it ...might be interesting to see who some of our readers would select for an Artpace residency. We asked a group of artists, collectors, curators, critics, gallerists and museum professionals to use Artpace’s criteria to choose a Texas-based artist, a national artist and an international artist. Here are the responses we got back:
"I'm just going to choose artists that I'm interested in regardless of whether or not they make sense together. 1) Paul Slocum (Texas). Paul runs And/Or gallery with Lauren Gray in Dallas. They have a band called Tree Wave that uses obsolete computers as instruments. He has a really different approach to electronics. http://qotile.net/ 2) Gedi Sibony ( New York). Don't make the mistake, which The New York Times makes regularly, of thinking his work shares much in common with Richard Tuttle. 3) Brian Jungen (International) http://www.potrc.org/ "
~ Roy Stanfield~ Arturo Palacios
~ Catherine Walworth
Some Thoughts on Prizes: A Letter to the Editor from James Bae
"A man can be imprisoned in a room with an unlocked door which opens inwards, so long as it does not occur to him to pull it rather than push it."
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
I've been housebound for a matter of three days. Cabin fever or cloistered imbecile? It's a moralism yet to be determined. One gets the sense that an Ice Age is setting in, regardless.
One way I've been passing time is reading lists. There's one that's particularly bothersome: the Austin Chronicle's recent list of critic's award nominees. I find awards distasteful in the first place; there's always an idea that critics aren't seeing everything to begin with and it's simply a media-attention attempt. But to go on with such an attempt and create a Best Female Artist Award? This just doesn't sound right.
I know the Big Swinging Dick factor is back in New York with a renewed vengeance. I'm in the camp that women are horribly under-represented in the arts; this surely has to do with market forces. For every Marlene Dumas, there are about 10 equally well-selling counterparts in her auction milieu. I think the market will correct itself, hopefully, within the next decade. However, to categorically separate aesthetic value in terms of male and female bits is counterproductive. This seems to be a confusion of methodology with undue political correctness. They don't have awards for "Best Female Mathematician" do they? Neither should art.
It wouldn't change if, say, they collapsed the list of five male artists with corresponding five female, which would be skimming past the issue as well. However, it seems the implication here that gender-specific art must have gender-specific categorization also creates an uneasy distorting effect: Is this art for women—women who make art as women? Art for the Oxygen channel? Equality must be taken at equality's ethic: value above all else. Separate the two and I think the inference is creativity still comes from the well-source of Adam's rib.
But, I think this is the general attitude when proscribing awards at all. They're tawdry when it comes to things like art and literature and hazy enough when debating who's got the best falafel or used clothes store in town. It seems rendering merit this way cheapens the value of the artists themselves: Are these women battling it out in the way Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and the Simpson sisters do at the Grammy's? I can only think of what William Gaddis surmised the feeling of winning a Pulitzer Prize would be like: crucified by the "ultimate seal of mediocrity." In the end, isn't that what's taken away for these women? What Gaddis expounds at the conclusion of Agape Agape as the artist's expiation: "the Youth who could do anything" to "the self who could do more"—to fail or succeed on their own, regardless of society's implicatures.
~ James Bae
A Single Question: If You Could Select the Trio of Artists for an Artpace International-Artist-in-Residence Project, Who Would You Choose?
Last week, Artpace announced its first set of 2007 residents. Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, Debra Singer, selected Paul Chan, Troy Brauntuch, and Katja Strunz. Chan is the 2006 Whitney Biennial artist whose exhibition Present Tense is on view at the Blanton through August 31st (see ...mbg #69). Brauntach is a professor of Art at The University of Texas at Austin and was also featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial. And Strunz is a Berlin-based sculptor whose work has been featured in museums and galleries across in Europe.
In the meantime, the 06.2 Residencies are about to open on July 6th with Curator of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, Yuko Hasegawa’s picks: Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger (Switzerland), Do-Ho Suh (New York), and Luz María Sánchez (San Antonio).
We at …might be good through it ...might be interesting to see who some of our readers would select for an Artpace residency. We asked a group of artists, collectors, curators, critics, gallerists and museum professionals to use Artpace’s criteria to choose a Texas-based artist, a national artist and an international artist. Here are the responses we got back:
"I'm just going to choose artists that I'm interested in regardless of whether or not they make sense together. 1) Paul Slocum (Texas). Paul runs And/Or gallery with Lauren Gray in Dallas. They have a band called Tree Wave that uses obsolete computers as instruments. He has a really different approach to electronics. http://qotile.net/ 2) Gedi Sibony ( New York). Don't make the mistake, which The New York Times makes regularly, of thinking his work shares much in common with Richard Tuttle. 3) Brian Jungen (International) http://www.potrc.org/ "
~ Roy Stanfield
Randy Wallace (San Antonio), Steve Roden (San Francisco) and Gilles Barbier (Marseilles).
~ Hills Snyder
Beatriz Milhazes
Someone said to me the other night that curators are just frustrated artists and I could't disagree more. I'd love to turn the tables a bit and ask three curator/artists to be residents, giving them the time to really focus on their art. From Texas, I'm thinking about Paula Owen from the Southwest School of Art & Craft because she is smart and has a broad range of media knowledge, either Rob Storr or British expat Matthew Higgs from the States, and Jean-Noel Laszlo from France, a Fluxus-inspired artist, writer and curator who has turned from mail art to monumental installation.
~ Catherine Walworth
Laura Lark (Houston), Francis
| A single question: If You Could Select the Trio of Artists for an Artpace International-Artist-in-Residence Project, Who Would You Choose?
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V. Announcements: I Can't Anymore.
I can’t anymore.
1. Openings
Austin
Opening June 1: Heat @ dberman gallery with work by Robert Dale Anderson, Cynthia Camlin, Sandra Fiedorek, Faith Gay, Sarah Greene Reed, Christopher Schade and Steve Wiman.
Opening June 6: 666 @ Volitant Gallery
Ongoing through June 16: Slick, Flurry, Lush, Line @ Studio 107
Closing May 31: Peat Duggins: The Moment That Changed My Life Forever @ Art Palace
San Antonio
Closing June 3: Sincerity, curated by Rachel Cook, @ Finesilver Gallery
Closing May 28: Feminine Beauty in Japanese Art @ San Antonio Museum of Art
Closing May 26: Enrique Martinez: Fully Little People @ Three Walls (106D Blue Star, Building B, San Antonio)
Closing May 28: Eric Hollander: The Umbrella Clouds @ i2i Gallery ( 2110 McCullough)
Opening June 1: Judith Cottrell: Just Gel with a Little Bic and Brian Jobe: The Forest Underneath @ UTSA Satellite Space (115 Blue Star)
Texas and Beyond
Through June 18: Joseph Havel: A Decade of Sculpture, 1996-2006 @ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Through July 1: Drawing Inside Out curated by Michelle White @ Lawndale Art Center includes work by Joey Fauerso, Eric Gibbons, Heather Johnson, Jonathan Marshall and others .
Through July 22: Todd Brandt, Richie Budd and Mark Schelsinger @ Finesilver Gallery, Houston
Closing May 28: Last chance to see Texas Prize Finalists @ Galveston Art Center
Through June 17: Roy Stanfield and Wendy Red Star @ And/Or Gallery, Dallas
Through July 16: I Can’t Quite Place It…, curated by Elizabeth M. Grady and featuring Roy Stanfield @ Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn
2 . Events
Tonight! May 26 and May 27, 8 pm: Scott Turner Schofield: Gala Debutant Ball @ Jump Start Performance Theatre, San Antonio. Tickets: $9 for students and senior citizens and $12 for general public.
Tonight! May 26, 9 pm: Austin Museum of Digital Art presents Digital Showcase #37 @ Copa (3 rd & Congress, Austin) Tickets: $5-9.
May 28, 1-2 pm: 25 th Anniversary Public Tour highlighting SAMA’s Collections @ San Antonio Museum of Art. Tickets $10.
June 6: Mediterranean Film Festival @ San Antonio Museum of Art. Free for members, $10 for non-members.
June 8, 8:30 pm: The Creative Music Workshop presents Tetuzi Akiyama and Kurt Newman @ Little City, Downtown Austin, 916 Congress Avenue .Tickets $8-15.
June 8, 7 pm: Screening of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life @ The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Free.
3 . Calls for Entry
Deadline July 15: IDKE seeking submissions from artists that “envisions (and manifests!) new expressions of gender, identity and self for Casting Off: Eyes on the Horizon. See www.idkeaustin.com for guidelines and applications.
Deadline September 1: ArtPace Open Call Guidelines are available for their 2008 Residencies www.artpace.org/aboutTheResidency.php.
Deadline July 5: Lawndale Art Center in Houston will be accepting submissions for their annual Big Show. Artists must live within 100 miles of Houston to apply and work must have been made between 2003-2005. Go to www.lawndaleartcenter.org/bigshow.php for terms of eligibility and submission guidelines.
4 . News
The shortlist for the Turner Prize was announced this week. The finalists are: Tomma Abts, Mark Titchner, Rebecca Warren and Phil Collins. (Men and women in the same competition? What were they thinking?!) Collins' exhibition The World Won’t Listen showcased at Lora Reynolds Gallery last fall (see …mbg # 54). Great foresight, Lora!
I can’t anymore.
1. Openings
Austin
Opening June 1: Heat @ dberman gallery with work by Robert Dale Anderson, Cynthia Camlin, Sandra Fiedorek, Faith Gay, Sarah Greene Reed, Christopher Schade and Steve Wiman.
Opening June 6: 666 @ Volitant Gallery
Ongoing through June 16: Slick, Flurry, Lush, Line @ Studio 107
Closing May 31: Peat Duggins: The Moment That Changed My Life Forever @ Art Palace
San Antonio
Closing June 3: Sincerity, curated by Rachel Cook, @ Finesilver Gallery
Closing May 28: Feminine Beauty in Japanese Art @ San Antonio Museum of Art
Closing May 26: Enrique Martinez: Fully Little People @ Three Walls (106D Blue Star, Building B, San Antonio)
Closing May 28: Eric Hollander: The Umbrella Clouds @ i2i Gallery ( 2110 McCullough)
Opening June 1: Judith Cottrell: Just Gel with a Little Bic and Brian Jobe: The Forest Underneath @ UTSA Satellite Space (115 Blue Star)
Texas and Beyond
Through June 18: Joseph Havel: A Decade of Sculpture, 1996-2006 @ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Through July 1: Drawing Inside Out curated by Michelle White @ Lawndale Art Center includes work by Joey Fauerso, Eric Gibbons, Heather Johnson, Jonathan Marshall and others .
Through July 22: Todd Brandt, Richie Budd and Mark Schelsinger @ Finesilver Gallery, Houston
Closing May 28: Last chance to see Texas Prize Finalists @ Galveston Art Center
Through June 17: Roy Stanfield and Wendy Red Star @ And/Or Gallery, Dallas
Through July 16: I Can’t Quite Place It…, curated by Elizabeth M. Grady and featuring Roy Stanfield @ Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn
2 . Events
Tonight! May 26 and May 27, 8 pm: Scott Turner Schofield: Gala Debutant Ball @ Jump Start Performance Theatre, San Antonio. Tickets: $9 for students and senior citizens and $12 for general public.
Tonight! May 26, 9 pm: Austin Museum of Digital Art presents Digital Showcase #37 @ Copa (3 rd & Congress, Austin) Tickets: $5-9.
May 28, 1-2 pm: 25 th Anniversary Public Tour highlighting SAMA’s Collections @ San Antonio Museum of Art. Tickets $10.
June 6: Mediterranean Film Festival @ San Antonio Museum of Art. Free for members, $10 for non-members.
June 8, 8:30 pm: The Creative Music Workshop presents Tetuzi Akiyama and Kurt Newman @ Little City, Downtown Austin, 916 Congress Avenue .Tickets $8-15.
June 8, 7 pm: Screening of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life @ The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Free.
3 . Calls for Entry
Deadline July 15: IDKE seeking submissions from artists that “envisions (and manifests!) new expressions of gender, identity and self for Casting Off: Eyes on the Horizon. See www.idkeaustin.com for guidelines and applications.
Deadline September 1: ArtPace Open Call Guidelines are available for their 2008 Residencies www.artpace.org/aboutTheResidency.php.
Deadline July 5: Lawndale Art Center in Houston will be accepting submissions for their annual Big Show. Artists must live within 100 miles of Houston to apply and work must have been made between 2003-2005. Go to www.lawndaleartcenter.org/bigshow.php for terms of eligibility and submission guidelines.
4 . News
The shortlist for the Turner Prize was announced this week. The finalists are: Tomma Abts, Mark Titchner, Rebecca Warren and Phil Collins. (Men and women in the same competition? What were they thinking?!) Collins' exhibition The World Won’t Listen showcased at Lora Reynolds Gallery last fall (see …mbg # 54). Great foresight, Lora!
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Cover Images: Sarah Lasley, Left: Charlene’s Pink Bikini, 2005. Charcoal, acrylic on
paper. 84” x 36”; Center: Susan’s Cupcakes, 2005 Charcoal, acrylic on paper. 84”x36”; Right: My Floaties, 2005. Charcoal, ink, marker on paper. 84”x36”
Image courtesy of the artist and
Women & Their Work Gallery.
Fluent~Collaborative is a speculative non-profit initiative established to increase awareness of new developments in the contemporary visual arts and the ideas and issues that inform contemporary culture. We are a place where a critical and creative mix of visual, media and performance artists join authors, filmmakers, musicians, architects, poets and other diverse communities outside of the arts to enable a new awareness and sophisticated discernment of changing thought and culture around the world. ..might be good is a contemporary art biweekly produced by Fluent~Collaborative that reaches over 4,000 international subscribers via email and at our website: www.fluentcollab.org/mbg. An independent voice based out of Austin and San Antonio, with a team of writers covering exhibitions from Paris, France to Marfa, Texas, …might be good encourages close looking, smart writing and brave thinking about art.
Situating itself between an exhibition space, an open studio, a temporary residency program and a private home, testsite explores new ideas in contemporary art through the initiation of collaborations. An artist and a writer are invited to create an experimental project that develops out of conversation, fruitful exploration and healthy doubt.
Women & Their Work Gallery.
Fluent~Collaborative is a speculative non-profit initiative established to increase awareness of new developments in the contemporary visual arts and the ideas and issues that inform contemporary culture. We are a place where a critical and creative mix of visual, media and performance artists join authors, filmmakers, musicians, architects, poets and other diverse communities outside of the arts to enable a new awareness and sophisticated discernment of changing thought and culture around the world. ..might be good is a contemporary art biweekly produced by Fluent~Collaborative that reaches over 4,000 international subscribers via email and at our website: www.fluentcollab.org/mbg. An independent voice based out of Austin and San Antonio, with a team of writers covering exhibitions from Paris, France to Marfa, Texas, …might be good encourages close looking, smart writing and brave thinking about art.
Situating itself between an exhibition space, an open studio, a temporary residency program and a private home, testsite explores new ideas in contemporary art through the initiation of collaborations. An artist and a writer are invited to create an experimental project that develops out of conversation, fruitful exploration and healthy doubt.
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