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shaynamillernysemester-blog · 7 years ago

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October 27-Harlem: Words, Recreation (Fictions), and Repetition

Today, October 27th, we visited the Studio Museum in Harlem as well as some galleries in Harlem. Each exhibit was different; the show at the Studio Museum in Harlem focused on up-and-coming African American artists. At Elizabeth Dee Gallery and Gavin Brown Enterprise, words and repetition became recurring elements; yet, ideas about fictions and recreating or rearranging elements or ideas was present at both galleries and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

At Elizabeth Dee gallery, we saw an exhibition titled Perfect Flowers, a retrospective of John Giorno’s work. The retrospective includes paintings, graphite drawings, and watercolors. The composition of these works are all the same with text forming a box within the square paper or canvas frame; they are “Albers-esque” compositions. Some of these compositions include “LILACS LUXURIOUSLY LICKING THE AIR”, “BAD NEWS IS ALWAYS TRUE”, and “ZINNIAS SHOUT POSITIVE PARANOIA”. Some appear almost as motivational quotes while others are more frank or provoking. There is a condensation with image, content, and text. There is an interest in “applying cut up and montage techniques to found texts” (“John Giorno: Perfect Flowers”). The words become repetitive in different compositions and contexts.

At Gavin Brown Enterprise, we viewed Rirkrit Tiravanjia’s work. One of the works in the installation was a remake of a film, Fassbinder’s Ali: Angst Essen Seele Auf. The gallery was turned into a recreation of the set, and the gallery set was used to film a remake of the film. In televisions throughout the gallery, the recreated film was played. It turns out that in one of the rooms, that was set up to appear as a bar, one of the main actors in this film was sitting there. Later on, I realized that the actor was actually Karl Holmqvist, another artist who uses words and poetry in his work similar to that of John Giorno (“Karl Holmqvist Bio”).

Recreations or fictions were also present at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the exhibit aptly titled Fictions. The show features emerging African artists who “draw inspiration from diverse sources—such as everyday objects, childhood memories, current and historic events, and the body—often creating parallel or alternate narratives that complicate fact, fiction and memory” (Fictions). Genevieve Gaignard’s installation in the show creates a two-walled room similar to the sets at Gavin Brown. However, unlike the one at Gavin Brown, this setting can not be entered. While the installations look inviting from afar, closer viewing reveals the specificity of each object displayed and the story that tells. Figurines have been altered so that “instead of statuettes depicting white southern debutantes or Disney princesses, the artist’s figurines are all black women, frozen in moments of escape, activism, and even revenge” (Gotthardt).

While each show’s content was disparate, qualities of repetition and recreation were apparent throughout. All three of these shows were complicated. As in Giorno’s show, words do not always make sense together. At the Harlem Museum, memories and events are complicated; it is difficult to identify fact versus fiction. Words become images, and repetitions become creations.

Works Cited

Fictions. The Studio Museum Harlem, 2017, www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/fictions.

Gotthardt, Alexxa. “With Costumes and Camp, Genevieve Gaignard Is Telling New Stories about Race and Beauty.” Artsy, 6 Oct. 2017.

“John Giorno: Perfect Flowers.” Elizabeth Dee.

“Karl Holmqvist Bio.” Gavin Brown Enterprise.

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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The Erotic Artist Who Became the Queen of Bohemian New York

Clara Tice, Nude with Butterfly, n.d. Courtesy of Francis Naumann Fine Art.

When the artist Clara Tice first showed her nudes—paintings and drawings depicting the sinuousness and lyricism of the human form—she wasn’t expecting to make enemies.

It was March 1915, and members of Tice’s bohemian Greenwich Village community had organized an exhibition of her work at one of their preferred watering holes: Polly’s Restaurant. While the show began as an early outing of a young, unknown artist, it became an overnight sensation when it caught the eye of Anthony Comstock, the head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a morality squad backed by the YMCA and other moneyed donors interested in moral reform.

(The group sought to eradicate “every obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character” in New York City.)

In a surprise raid, Comstock—nicknamed “Simon Pure” by those he targeted—attempted to seize Tice’s nudes. Luckily, the artist’s friends had gotten wind of the impending crusade and removed the artworks just an hour before Comstock could snatch them away and add them to his “unrivaled collection,” as Tice sarcastically referred to his trove of confiscated works. The next day, Tice and her risqué work were the talk of downtown Manhattan.

“Clara liked to say that Comstock was her best publicist,” Dada scholar and dealer Francis Naumann tells me, as we flip through Tice’s unpublished autobiography. Naumann and his wife, fellow scholar Marie T. Keller, have written extensively on Tice, and are two of several champions of the late artist, who was all but written out of history books until recently (along with other female Dadaists, like Beatrice Wood and Mina Loy, who worked alongside Marcel Duchamp in the early 1900s).

“Most women who were part of the New York Dada group were pushed off into the periphery of scholarship,” continues Naumann. “It’s hard to believe, given what a sensation Tice’s work was in her time.”

Clara Tice, from her Candide series (1927). Image via Honest Erotica.

Tice was born in 1888 in Elmira, New York, on the border of Pennsylvania, but not long after, she moved to New York City with her family. She grew up above the lodging house for homeless children where her father worked, and was raised primarily by her good-humored, liberally-minded mother, who encouraged Tice’s creative instincts from a young age.

Thanks to her parents’ laissez-faire, progressive approach to child-rearing, as Keller points out in her essay on Tice in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender and Identity (1998), the budding artist “encountered none of the familial obstacles usually imposed upon a young woman of that time eager to pursue an artistic career.” By her late teens, Tice had enrolled in Hunter College, but she left after celebrated painter Robert Henri accepted her as one of the rare female students he took under his wing.

In Henri’s Greenwich Village school, Tice began to develop the fluid style she became known for, depicting female and male nudes and other lively, rhythmic creatures like birds, afghans, and butterflies that filled her bohemian life. When Henri and several other established artists of the day organized the first exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910, Tice showed a whopping 21 works. But it wasn’t until the 1915 exhibition at Polly’s, and the controversy it stirred, that Tice skyrocketed to New York fame.

While Tice admitted that she worried “a bit over Mr. Comstock’s pronouncement of my work as ‘obscene,’” she was generally unfazed by criticism—and responded with typical gusto, wit, and her wry sense of humor. “I have never heeded academics and critics with their set rules and formulas attempting to limit the freedom of the artist, forcing him to follow the ‘old masters,’” she wrote in her autobiography.

In response to Comstock’s crackdown, she and gallerist Guido Bruno also organized a performative mock trial in which Tice would be “tried and therefore acquitted of the charges of having committed unspeakable, black atrocities on white paper, abusing slender bodies of girls, cats, peacocks, and butterflies,” as the delightfully sarcastic announcement for the event, written by Tice, stated.

News of the performance was also published, along with reproductions of Tice’s nudes, in the then-budding magazine Vanity Fair, whose editor, Frank Crowninshield, had become a passionate fan of Tice’s work and later anointed her “the queen of Greenwich Village.”

Clara Tice, Man with Monocle and Two Floating Dancers, ca. 1917. Courtesy of Francis Naumann Fine Art

Clara Tice, Nude with Dog, n.d. Courtesy of Francis Naumann Fine Art.

Tice’s drawings began to appear in both very avant-garde and very mainstream publications across New York and, in some cases, the country. According to Naumann, The World, the Chicago Tribune, The Sun, The Globe, the New York Times, Vanity Fair and others ran her illustrations and comics, including whimsical illustrations of operas, ballets (one stunning 1916–17 drawing shows the sculpted, nude body of the male dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in Serge Diaghilev’s L’Après-Midi d’un Faune), and even sports events.

“Clara Tice is the only woman, to my knowledge, who ever drew for a sports page,” wrote Mrs. Bobby Edwards in a popular New York newspaper column in 1949. “Her prizefighters, baseball pitchers, etc. appeared for years in the St. Louis Star.”

She also contributed a children’s serial cartoon, “Lucy Lou, the Kangaroo,” to another New York paper. The piece tracked the adventures of Lucy as she encountered different animals (favored subjects for Tice throughout her work—she owned some 12 dogs over the course of her life). The Blind Man, a Dada journal run by Dada artists Duchamp, Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roché, also ran Tice’s work, confirming her place in their bohemian circle.

She became a regular at the famed salons of Dada patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg, and attended and designed the posters for Greenwich Village’s fancy dress balls, wild parties with names like “Insect Frolic” and “Pagan Rout” that often ended in participants shedding their costumes and frolicking in the buff.

These events, as well as the live models she worked with, informed her nudes, which were her most talked-about works (and which she continued to make until she passed away, in 1973).

In the 1920s, for instance, Tice painted a spellbinding mural for a swanky new restaurant, the Fifth Avenue Club, populated by 45 cavorting nymphs rendered in silver and gold. “It was so spectacular,” Keller writes in her essay, “that Heywood Broun, sitting beneath her exotic painting, altered his customary beverage order. Sending back the beer, he proclaimed: ‘Under that mural, I can drink only champagne.’”

Clara Tice, from The Adventures of King Pausole series (1926). Image via Honest Erotica.

Around this time, she also illustrated a series of books for the Pierre Loüys Society—including One Hundred Merry and Delightsome Tales, The Decameron, Candide, The Adventures of King Pausaole (1926)—with erotic drawings. In them, women lounge naked and supine, engaging in all manner of earthly pleasures: caressing others, playing flutes, making cartwheels, eating strawberries and plums. Their bodies are curvaceous, strong, and full of life.

More than erotic activities, though, Tice’s body of work harnessed the unbridled energy, experimentation, and freedom of the community that surrounded her. “It was literally a dream world, where anything could happen—and almost always did!” she wrote of Greenwich Village.

“Unlike most American artists, she not only paints life but feels it; feels it intensely and poignantly; especially its happiness, its humor, and its fantastic gaiety,” Vanity Fair editor Crowninshield gushed of her work in the intro of her autobiography. In his view, Tice’s virile, vibrant figures coursed with her own independent spirit and passion.

“This young artist has discovered a great truth,” he wrote, “namely, that any work of art which is conceived with the sole idea of pleasing a patron, has a way of dying still-born; whereas, if it were only designed to delight the creator herself, it has already gone a considerable way toward immortality.”

Tice confirmed his impressions in her own reflections: “There are two great joys of the artist which make him more self-sufficient than anyone else: They are the grueling ecstasy of creation, and the realization that one’s artistic productions will be a constant source of delight and pleasure, to the creator—if no one else.”

Yet during her lifetime, the artist’s work was a source of pleasure for many, not just Tice. And now, as growing number of scholars advocate for the importance of her sensuous paintings and illustrations to the New York Dada movement, the hope is that Tice’s practice will delight for many years to come.

—Alexxa Gotthardt

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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hessenhenker · 10 years ago

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Innenminister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) ist NICHT mein Vater!

Innenminister Thomas de Maizière ist NICHT mein Vater!

Ich distanziere mich von diesem Mann, er ist NICHT mein Vater. Der Innenminister sagte laut STERN in einem Interview zu den “deutschen Djihadisten” des IS: “Es sind unsere Söhne und Töchter”.

Möglicherweise sind es seine Söhne, aber es sind nicht meine Brüder. Meine Brüder schneiden keinen jezidischen Frauen in Syrien und dem Irak den Kopf ab! Kopf ab zum Gebet gilt möglicherweise für die CDU, bei…

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#Aussteigerprogramm #Brandanschlag #CDU #Dschihadisten #Frank Gotthardt #Gaza #Hitlergeburtstag #Innenminister Thomas de Maizière #Irak #IS #Isis #Jeziden #Syrien #Terroristen

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politikwatch · 1 year ago

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Die CDU-#Verstrickungen des #JulianReichelt Ein Trommelfeuer auf die #CDU, nach #rechts zu rücken. "In die Mitte, zur Mehrheit", nennt #Reichelt das. Themen, die angeblich nur die #AfD behandele, müssten dort angesiedelt werden, "wo Menschen jahrzehntelang gewählt haben". Es gibt in der #CDU Leute, bei denen er damit offene Türen einrennt.

#CDU #Verstrickungen #julian reichelt #Frank Gotthardt

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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Meet the Artist Making Fantastical, Modernist Sandcastles

Photo courtesy of Calvin Seibert.

It’s early September on New York’s Rockaway Beach, and the strong winds—aftershocks of Hurricane Harvey—keep most beachgoers away. But not sandcastle artist Calvin Seibert.

He’s sitting on the shore, midway through sculpting the latest of the many whimsical castles he’s made over the course of the summer. This one—whose angled edges and shadowy nooks resemble a Brutalist temple by way of M.C. Escher—rises from a plot close to the crashing waves.

I meet Seibert around 4 p.m. in the late-afternoon glow of Beach 67th Street. He’s alone, stationed between two rock jetties. He’s hard to spot at first, dressed in a sort of camouflage: beige pants and hat matching the sand, and a blue button-down blending with the sea.

It’s no surprise that Seibert’s wardrobe has begun to imitate his work. The artist, now 59 years old, has been making sandcastles most of his life. Over the last five years, he’s made the ephemeral structures the focus of his overall art practice, which has also included sculptures forged from cardboard salvaged from the street. “I’ve always made things outdoors from the materials I find around me, so this is sort of a long continuation of that,” Seibert tells me, as he angles edges and adds passageways to today’s castle, his second-to-last of the summer.

Seibert working on a castle.

Seibert grew up in Vail, Colorado, in the 1960s, when the resort town was growing fast and mired in construction projects. “Everywhere you looked, there were construction and sand piles to play in, and scrap and garbage mounds to pull stuff from,” he remembers. From these leavings, he built treehouses, fantasy worlds, and models of buildings that he’d glimpsed, like the TWA Flight Center at New York’s JFK Airport.

Seibert admits that he hasn’t changed much since those days: “There are pictures of me from back then, and I look exactly the same as I do now. My hands are covered with cement and sand,” he shrugs.

Seibert’s early days playing in sand piles led him to New York, in 1979, to study at the School of Visual Arts. Through the 1980s and ’90s, he explored different mediums, but often found his way back to the beach. “I used to do drawings,” he remembers. “but ultimately I stopped making them, because the light in them was too flat and not atmospheric enough. I had to move on to another way of expressing myself.”

Working en plein air, in places where natural light reflected off the glittering sand and ocean, provided an appealing alternative. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Seibert drove several times from Colorado to California, where he’d build castles on Laguna Beach and elsewhere. In the early ’80s, he also began taking advantage of the beaches much closer to Manhattan, taking the train out to Jones Beach in between construction gigs, assisting other artists, and making art out of his small, rent-controlled apartment in Chelsea.

Photo courtesy of Calvin Seibert.

For the past several years, Seibert has spent the bulk of his summers on New York’s beaches, building his own unique vision as an architect of modernist sandcastles. Most mornings, between June and early September, he sets off from his apartment in Manhattan around 7:30 in the morning. He travels light, given the scale of the forms he’s about to carve: a sketchbook and tools; buckets for carrying water; and plastic strips with bevelled edges, used to cut and smooth the sand.

Like most other aspects of Seibert’s life, his process is economical. “I do this partly because the main materials I use, sand and water, are free—and there’s a lot of them,” he explains, smiling. “I also live very frugally. No eating out. No movies. No air conditioning. No dog. No car. That’s how I can afford to do this.”

To many artists, Seibert’s approach might seem restricting, but he prefers to keep things simple. “I’ve never wanted to be famous,” he explains. “And showing my work in galleries never gave me any satisfaction.” Last winter, Seibert did buck his own preference, though, and exhibited his sandcastles at Ramiken Crucible on New York’s Lower East Side. For several months this past winter, he made them on the gallery floor with construction-grade sand trucked in from a local lumberyard. The show marked a rare occasion that Seibert’s castles were for sale (one went to an unnamed private collector).

Seibert has made money from his sand creations in other ways, too. In May 2016, he was the artist-in-residence at Summit Series, a favorite leadership conference of the tech industry. The gig brought him to Tulum, Mexico, where he built castles on the beach everyday for a week. Hermès also tapped Seibert’s skills for one of the luxury brand’s photo shoots. The trip to took him first to Paris, where he gathered supplies. “On Facebook, I said, ‘I knocked that off my bucket list.…I’m in Paris, shopping for buckets!’” he laughs. From there he headed to Cap Ferret, where he built castles for Hermès models to pose with.

Seibert working on a castle.

Despite keeping a low profile in the art world, however, Seibert and his sandcastles have garnered quite a fan base during the last several years, helped along by his popular Instagram account. Everyone seems curious about his beach artistry; over the course of our hour-and-a-half conversation, we’re interrupted by passerby, surfers, and a parks-service ranger who all want to watch, ask questions, and marvel at the strange structures emerging from the sand.

Most fans, he admits, will simply express their appreciation (“That’s amazing!”). But others offer more critical takes. The day prior, Seibert had built a towering castle with steep surfaces and vertiginous staircases to nowhere. A passing stranger commented “that it looked like the North Korean nuclear facility,” he recalls. “I thought that was great. That was imaginative. It was kind of brutalist and monstrous, so that idea seemed perfect.”

Seibert’s mind-bending structures have taken many forms—and recall a host of references, from real to fantastical. This summer, one crowd favorite obliquely resembled Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, or a futuristic factory that might produce cyborg parts within its bulbous accretions and angular spires. Another castle, this one cone-shaped and spotted with faceted growths, looked as if it might be the hiding place for a magical talisman.

And what would his next castle—the final of the season—look like, I wondered? “No idea yet,” he says. “You’ll have to come out to the beach to see.”

—Alexxa Gotthardt

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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A Brief History of Mail Art, from Cleopatra to Miranda July

Jean-Leon-Gerome, Cleopatra and Caesar, 1866. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Marcel Duchamp, Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916 (Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916), 1916. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. Via, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In 48 BC, Cleopatra created what some have dubbed the first piece of mail art.

As part of a genius power-play aimed at aligning with Julius Caesar, the young queen smuggled herself into his quarters by wrapping her body in a carpet. Upon being unfurled, she emerged at the Roman ruler’s feet.

Cleopatra was thinking about politics, not art, when she devised the plan. But in the early 1960s, when a group of artists began using mail to disseminate their ideas, some of them adopted the wily Egyptian pharaoh as their movement’s unwitting progenitor. It was a fittingly dramatic origin story for the new “mail art” movement, with its irreverent energy, urge to forge connections, and love of surprise.

Mail has served as a both a vehicle and medium for artists throughout history. Van Gogh posted ideas for future paintings to his brother Theo in the form of long, expressive letters decorated with preparatory drawings. A few decades later, Dadaist George Grosz staged an anti-war protest by mailing satirical “care packages” to German soldiers during World War I; they contained wholly impractical objects, like crisply ironed white shirts. Concurrently, the game-changing absurdist Marcel Duchamp penned four nonsensical postcards to his neighbor in order to underscore the inefficacy of language itself (Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916, 1916).

Untitled (Miss Size 12), c. 1972. Ray Johnson Wright

Untitled (Jean-Patrice Spit), c. 1970. Ray Johnson Wright

It wasn’t until the early ’60s that a group of artists began to use correspondence as the crux of a cohesive movement. Radical Pop and conceptual artist Ray Johnson kicked things off. He began to ship packages via USPS from his home in New York: collages, drawings, annotated newspaper clippings, and found images and objects (from snakeskins to plastic forks). These were sent to art-world celebrities, friends, and strangers alike. Sometimes, he’d add interactive instructions to his work: “please add to and return...” Many heeded his call, and a creative network developed, whose members made and mailed art to each other across the world.

According to Johnson’s estate, he was attracted to the democratic nature of mail art—he “privileged inclusivity, deeming anyone and everyone with whom he interacted suitable for creative exchange.” Both he and the artists who followed his lead liked the way these dispatches propelled art across space, connecting a far-flung constellation of peers.

Because the mailed collages and drawings were quick to craft and inexpensive to produce, it also alleviated creative pressure and allowed for spontaneity and humor to enter the works. In one 1984 note to the actor James Dean, Johnson wrote: “Dear James Dean, Please Send me your shirt. Sincerely yours, Ray Johnson.” Dean, unsurprisingly, did not reply.

It was Johnson’s friend and sometime collaborator, Ed Plunkett, who gave the growing group of mail art enthusiasts a name: The New York Correspondence School. (Plunkett is also the one who liked to call Cleopatra the first mail artist.) The name stuck, but sometimes Johnson cheekily misspelled the title’s fourth word as “Correspondance,” the word evoking the crew’s casual, quick-moving, tongue-in-cheek spirit.

Telegram to Sol LeWitt, February 5-1970. On Kawara "On Kawara - Silence" at Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015)

The Correspondence School officially ceased operating in 1973, but Johnson continued to post his irreverent correspondence art until his death in 1995. Other artists have kept that legacy alive.

From 1993 to 1998, a young curator named Matthew Higgs (now the director of the progressive not-for-profit White Columns in New York), adopted and updated Johnson’s concept when he mailed the work of a then-unknown group of British artists to bigwigs at museums and galleries. As part of Imprint 93, as the project was called, Martin Creed crumpled a piece of paper (Work 88, 1995) which Higgs sent to then-Tate director Nicholas Serota. While this story has since made it into the conceptual art canon, the piece of mail art itself did not: Serota’s assistant uncrumpled the work and promptly sent it back.

Higgs’s approach, like Johnson’s, was simultaneously DIY and cheeky. It was also a reaction against the market-minded, shock-mongering YBA movement, led by Damien Hirst—and a means to connect a group of like-minded artists who didn’t share Hirst’s sensibilities, including Billy Childish, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, Ceal Floyer, Alan Kane, Elizabeth Peyton, and Chris Ofili.

Subway Writers, 2011. Moyra Davey Spring Workshop

In Portland, Oregon, circa 1995, Miranda July was also building on the mail art possibilities envisioned by Johnson. After dropping out of college, the young filmmaker and performance artist used an accessible networking platform—the postal service—to catalyze a feminist art community. She began to tack up pamphlets wherever she went that urged: “Lady, you send me your movie and I’ll send you the latest Big Miss Moviola Chainletter Tape.” Word about the project (later named Joanie 4 Jackie) spread, and clips and short films from young female artists and filmmakers around the country flooded July’s mailbox. July pieced the submissions together into small anthologies, making 19 chainletter videos that she mailed back to the group of strangers, in turn inspiring a far-flung community of likeminded women.

Artists have continued to keep pace with evolving communication technologies, even as snail mail has been replaced by swifter electronic messaging. Mail art these days tends to be a hybrid of the analog and the digital.

When Frank Warren launched PostSecret in 2005, it became an almost immediate sensation. Part crowd-sourcing phenomenon, part psychological experiment, the website encouraged visitors to write or illustrate their secrets on a postcard, then send them to a single address. Today, Warren publishes 10 anonymous secrets to the blog each week, still attracting confessions from every corner of the globe.

Similarly, art galleries and exhibition spaces have also used a blend of old-fashioned mail and social media to grow their networks and bring creatives together.

Photo by @postsecret, via Instagram.

This month, the Brooklyn space Ground Floor Gallery is hosting its second “mail art” biennial. Its walls are covered in artworks small enough to palm—and to fit into the local P.O. box where submissions for the show were sent.

Krista Saunders Scenna, who runs the gallery with Jill Benson, publicized the exhibition’s open call through email and Facebook, and received mail art submissions from India, Cyprus, and Mexico—as well as from a mere few blocks away. “A big part of the excitement of this show was opening the postbox and being introduced to new artists, new work,” says Saunders Scenna, “and then making connections between them.”

The show, designed to be “accessible to both artists and collectors,” is overwhelmingly democratic. The first 250 submissions are included at the gallery, all bearing the same $100 price tag. In this way, Ground Floor Gallery is keeping alive the ethos of Johnson and the early mail art pioneers, celebrating inclusivity, community-building, playfulness, and a mischievous upending of what the art world considers valuable.

—Alexxa Gotthardt

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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When Judy Chicago Rejected a Male-Centric Art World with a Puff of Smoke

Judy Chicago, Purple Atmosphere, 1969. © Judy Chicago. Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives.

Judy Chicago likes to play with fire. Most of us know her as a fierce ringleader of the 1960s feminist art movement, in which she pushed back against the patriarchal establishment. “The biggest compliment you could get back then was ‘You paint like a man.’ Can you believe that?” she tells me over the phone with her usual frankness. “Now if someone tried to say that to me, I’d probably kick them in the balls!”

Chicago did pick at least one fight with a male artist in the early years of her career. She wasn’t a fan of Richard Serra’s 1970 show at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum), in which he cut down Redwood trees and piled them up in the gallery. A squabble between the two ensued: “I was and am horrified by the masculine built environment and the masculine gesture of knocking down trees and digging holes in the earth,” she says.

But instead of letting her reaction to the work fester, she channeled it into her own art practice—into fireworks, to be exact.

In 1968, several years after she graduated from the MFA program at UCLA, Chicago had begun a series called “Atmospheres.” In the first iteration, she used smoke machines to cloak a Pasadena street in a shroud of ethereal white mist. “It softened everything,” she recalls of the vapor’s effects. “There was a moment when the smoke began to clear, but a haze lingered. And the whole world was feminized—if only for a moment.”

Judy Chicago, Immolation, 1972. Performed by Faith Wilding. © Judy Chicago. Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives.

Judy Chicago, Smoke Bodies, 1972. © Judy Chicago. Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives.

The piece set off the artist’s interest both in feminizing the male-dominated atmosphere around her and in pyrotechnics. At the time, as a young female artist, Chicago struggled with what she describes as “the macho art scene of southern California.” She wanted to “soften that macho environment,” she explains.

And when she looked up into the sky and saw diaphanous light filtered through mist, an idea struck her. “I thought, ‘I’m going to do fireworks.’”

In the early 1960s, Chicago was surrounded by the work of Land Artists like Serra, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson. She was also rubbing elbows with participants in the Light and Space group, all of whom were men. She met James Turrell when he was just 25, and Robert Irwin came to her graduate show at UCLA.

As a wall label from her 2014 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum remembered: She “[hung] around with male artists at the bar Barney’s Beanery and adopt[ed] their tough-guy attitudes; she repressed imagery that directly referenced her gender.”

But the approach didn’t sit right with her. “I had an inherently different sensibility, which has to do with touching and merging with and sensitivity to the environment,” she explains. By the late 1960s, she began to move away from the group and their penchant for power tools, “Finish Fetish,” and physical alterations of the land (like felling trees).

Judy Chicago, Orange Atmosphere, 1968. © Judy Chicago. Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives.

Through an apprenticeship with a pyrotechnics company, Chicago learned to set off fireworks herself. She’d always had an interest in the emotional resonance of color, and she began to experiment with tinted smoke. In 1968, she filled Los Angeles’s Brookside Park with ethereal orange clouds (Orange Atmosphere). In 1969, she took the series to the beach in Santa Barbara, where she ignited sublime billows of purple mist (Purple Atmosphere #4). They diffused into the sea air, seeming to rise over the ocean.

Unlike the actions of some of her male peers, Chicago’s interventions in the natural world didn’t involve any destruction of the landscape. Rather, they softened it and highlighted its beauty. At times, the smoke acted like a curtain, slowly lifting to reveal the stunning landscape behind it. At others, it curled across the environment’s curves and grooves, emphasizing its elegant and varied contours.

But when Chicago began to bring her “Atmospheres” into the built environment, their meaning shifted: They became more aggressive. When the Santa Barbara Museum of Art commissioned a piece, Chicago exploded orange and yellow smoke along a strip of the museum’s concrete wall. “It looked like the museum was on fire. I loved that,” she remembers. “Because, of course, museums were not exactly hospitable to women artists.” The flares scarred the wall with permanent black marks.

As the series developed, Chicago introduced female performers into her interventions. In her 1972 “Atmospheres,” women whose nude bodies were painted purple, orange, and green mingled with clouds of the same colors. Surrounded by a spectacular desert landscape, they resembled goddesses in the throes of a ritual that honors Mother Earth.

Judy Chicago, A Butterfly for Pomona, 2012. © Judy Chicago. Photo © Donald Woodman.

These goddess images, as Chicago sometimes refers to them, introduce a theme that she would later explore in her most famous piece, The Dinner Party (1974–79). In both works, she addressed the oft-neglected fact that “all ancient civilizations worship goddesses,” she says.

Notably, the women in Chicago’s performances were her students in the country’s first-ever feminist art program, which she established in 1970 at Fresno State College, now the California State University at Fresno. “There, I was helping young women find a way to make art without having to do what I had to do in my first decade of my professional practice, which was distance myself from my gender,” she explains.

There is an element of sacrifice in some of Chicago’s late “Atmospheres” that mirrors the frustration she experienced in her early days as an artist, when she felt forced to suppress any femininity in her work. In Immolation (1972), a woman sits in the middle of burning flares that emit deep orange smoke. “That was also a reference to sati, the practice where women are pushed into the bonfire in India when their husbands die and are cremated,” Chicago explains of the work.

In the mid-1970s, Chicago stopped making “Atmospheres.” They became too expensive for her to produce on the meager income she was making. She also describes having been sexually harassed by the owner of the fireworks company where she apprenticed, which brought her education in pyrotechnics to an end—at least temporarily.

Judy Chicago, Desert Atmosphere, 1969. © Judy Chicago. Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives.

Over the past five years, as institutional interest in both early California art and Feminist art has steadily grown, Chicago has again returned to the series. As part of L.A.’s sprawling, multi-venue series of exhibitions about California art known as “Pacific Standard Time,” launched in 2012, The Getty commissioned her to create a new fireworks piece, Sublime Environment.

The same year, curator Philipp Kaiser and art historian Miwon Kwon included a photo of Immolation in their Land Art survey “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974” at MoCA Los Angeles. “It was the first time anybody realized that while the guys were carving up the landscape, I was feminizing it, and softening it,” Chicago says.

In recent months, after finding a new colored smoke source in China, Chicago has begun to work on another “Atmospheres” piece. She’s not revealing the full details just yet, but she has big ambitions for it. “I’m thinking the Grand Canyon,” she says, laughing. “Wouldn’t that be incredible? Actually, I had that idea in the ’70s, but there was no way I could get the kind of support needed to execute that back then.”

These days, thanks to the increasing interest in the feminist art movement that Chicago helped to forge, she might just be able to realize it. “Imagine,” she says, “filling that space with feminist smoke.”

—Alexxa Gotthardt

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caveartfair · 8 years ago

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14 Artists You’ll Be Talking about Long after the Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale’s centerpiece exhibition, “Viva Arte Viva,” may altogether falter in the breadth of its curatorial framework. But, in its central ambition, as a celebration of artists, there is a wealth of work to celebrate, ponder, and discuss. Here are a few of the projects and presentations the art world will remember long after this epic show closes.

Pauline Curnier Jardin

B. 1980, Marseille, France • Lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin

Installation view of work by Pauline Curnier Jardin in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

Grotta Profunda, Approfondita is ostensibly based on the 19th-century religious experiences of Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes. That historical nugget is merely a springboard for an exercise in high camp, one that includes a sort of psychedelic nude ballet and a didactic explanation of racial divisions that uses ice cream as a defining metaphor.

The purpose-built theater for Jardin’s piece is easy to overlook—keep an eye out for the funky, gooey-looking sculpture of a hand that serves as an entryway. Inside, you can ponder some big questions: What’s up with Jardin’s come-hither Jesus, who coyly promises, “You love me, and I love you,” while clad in a blue loincloth? What exactly is a “mermaid-monkey,” and why is she in such pain? And, perhaps most importantly, how seriously does the artist take her own pseudo-philosophical voiceover script (probing nature, art, the human race, and everything under the sun)? The film offers a lusty, absurd break from the bustle of the main show—an actual cave to hide inside, gleaming with a satanic red glow. —Scott Indrisek

Michel Blazy

B. 1966, Monaco • Lives and works in Paris

Installation view of work by Michel Blazy in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

The artist “likes to watch everyday objects slowly metamorphose,” according to his accompanying wall text, which is both unpretentious and pretty damn accurate. For one sculpture in the biennial, Blazy arranged beat-up sneakers on a minimalist retail fixture, growing plants and various mosses on the shoe’s interiors and exteriors (a fecundity that’s helped along by a constant flow of water from the top of the apparatus). It’s a deceptively beautiful take on what our malls might look like once the human race has successfully obliterated itself via global warming or nuclear war.

Nearby, the artist has arranged four stacks of paper—printed with various colorful images of touristic scenes—which are degraded over time by water which drips from the Arsenale’s rafters onto the pages. The resulting, almost geological erosions bored into the printed matter are captivating. —SI

Nevin Aladağ

B. 1972, Van, Turkey • Lives and works in Berlin

For Traces, a 2015 film, the Berlin-based, Turkish artist used balloons, tambourines, and a children’s playground to create what is both a kinetic sculpture and a piece of minimalist experimental music. The three-channel piece combines footage and audio of various soundmaking set-ups: a balloon inflated, stuck onto the end of a flute, and allowed to wheeze its air through the instrument; a merry-go-round with a violin affixed to its outer edge, so that every time it rotates it strikes a bow placed, just so, by the artist; an accordion hung from a lamp post, groaning as it stretches its bellows. The whole scenario has the intricate choreography of a Rube Goldberg machine, but one that’s been broken down into its constituent parts and taught to sing.

Aladağ was also an early favorite at April’s opening of the Athens chapter of Documenta 14 for her installation and performance Music Room. And, throughout the preview days of the Venice Biennale at 12 p.m. and 3 p.m., she will also activate an exterior stretch of the Arsenale with a new performance, Raise the Roof, which features headphone-clad young women dancing on plinths of varying heights to songs whose lyrics are emblazoned on their black t-shirts. —SI

Achraf Touloub

B. 1986, Casablanca, Morocco • Lives and works in Paris

Installation view of work by Achraf Touloub in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

This young Moroccan artist, based in Paris, is showing a trio of mixed-media assemblages and accompanying drawings. The wall-hung sculptures pair stitched and painted expanses of nylon—resembling lumpy sleeping bags—from whose bottom edges are affixed lengths of heavy chain, like flaccid tentacles dangling from the larger body. Inset within the textiles are ink drawings, looping abstract tracks. The end result is both seductive and gross, or perhaps grossly seductive. The freedom of the stitched and drawn elements jars against the implications of the chainlink, as if the sculpture is just waiting to wrap and bind its own energy. —SI

Irina Korina

B. 1977, Moscow • Lives and works in Moscow

Installation view of work by Irina Korina in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017.

Korina constructed a standalone room within the Arsenale out of corrugated aluminum and covered its interior, wall-to-wall, with exuberant kitsch. Huge, lush arrangements of fake flowers, modeled after those created for memorial services (though, in this case, perhaps a memorial service in 2150), hang on garish animal-print wallpaper, while neons shaped like war medals bathe the environment in a tawdry glow.

The room feels like a funeral home accessed through Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole: It takes familiar objects and exaggerates them. Korina, who got her start as a set designer, was inspired by a growing cult, which worships fallen soldiers in her home country; the movement honors and embellishes Russia’s triumphs during World War II. Like much of Korina’s work, this installation channels the changing face of Russian contemporary culture—and questions the ease with which reality is manipulated for political gain. —Alexxa Gotthardt

Taus Makhacheva

B. 1983, Moscow • Lives and works in Makhachkala and Moscow

In this absurd, nerve-racking film, a famous tightrope walker moves expensive-looking paintings across a mountain crevasse. At the end of the rope, on a very high bluff overlooking an awe-inducing landscape, the subject hangs the artworks on a structure resembling the storage apparatuses found in the back rooms of galleries.

The artworks are reproductions of local masterpieces housed in the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts’s collection. Located in the Republic of Dagestan, a remote, contested corner of the Caucasus, the museum is rarely visited, or its works viewed, by foreigners. Makhacheva’s film addresses the precarious future of art housed in war-torn areas, and the omission of Dagestani and other non-Western art from the Western canon. —AG

Maria Lai

B. 1919, Ulassai, Italy • D. 2013, Cardedu, Italy

Installation view of work by Maria Lai in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

What forms can a book or a map take? Does it have to be legible? These are some of the questions that the late Italian artist’s work flirts with at the Biennale. Christine Macel selected stitched textiles from the 1980s and ’90s for “Vive Arte Viva” that abstractly reference global geographies (scraggy threads trace what might be shipping or travel routes). The artist also used cloth—and, in one case, brittle bread—to create sculptural “books” that beg to be admired, if not read in the practical sense. (Something about these objects, which are literally scrapbooks, points ahead to the crafty, ragtag spirit of Susan Cianciolo.)

Also on view is film and photographic documentation of a 1981 project in which the artist conscripted an entire Italian town to string bright lengths of blue cloth from their private homes to a centralized location. The residents’ obvious enjoyment of the happily pointless project—as they learn that art can be about playing as much at is about thinking—is a joy to observe. —SI

McArthur Binion

B. 1946, Macon, Mississippi • Lives and works in Chicago

Until he came to install for the Biennale, the 70-year-old Binion had never set foot in Venice. “I told friends that I wouldn’t go unless my work was in this show,” he said, smiling, on opening day. The Chicago-based artist’s work has received belated recognition in the U.S. over the past several years. But a room devoted to Binion’s paintings in the Biennale’s central pavilion marks his first major international outing.

It’s hung with canvases from Binion’s DNA Series (2013–ongoing). From afar, they look like pure abstractions. But the closer you get, the content embedded behind painted striations pushes through. Binion primed these canvases by first applying papers that contain intimate autobiographical information. In one, bits of his birth certificate can be glimpsed through black grids. In another, images of his childhood Mississippi home emerge from a patchwork of sepia squares. As elements of Binion’s personal history reveal themselves, his painted marks look more like the quilts and jazz scores that surrounded him during his youth than pure geometric abstraction. —AG

Edi Rama

B. 1964, Tirana, Albania • Lives and works in Tirana

Installation view of work by Edi Rama in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

Over at the Giardini segment of “Viva Arte Viva,” one huge room is wallpapered with a series of colorful, geometric drawings, a bit like the sketchbook experiments of a particularly talented collegiate stoner. To be perfectly frank, the works wouldn’t matter so much if they hadn’t been made by the prime minister of Albania, the guy famously responsible for repainting all the buildings in Tirana when he was the city’s mayor.

It turns out that a wallpaper similar to the one in the Biennale is used to decorate Rama’s governmental office. The drawings themselves are done on stray documents and papers, culled from the prime minister’s daily business. As Rama told The Guardian late last year, “If art cannot make politics more sane, politics, with its insanity, can sometimes make art even better.” —SI

Edith Dekyndt

B. 1960, Ieper, Belgium • Lives and works in Berlin and Tournai, Belgium

Installation view of work by Edith Dekyndt in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

Macel situates Dekyndt’s One Thousand and One Nights (2016) in the last hall of the Arsenale, where it provides a contemplative postscript for the show. In the performance, a person sweeps a thick carpet of dust around a dark room, so that it stays within a roving rectangle of light issued by an overhead spotlight. As the performer brushes methodically, ethereal clouds of white dust billow into the dimly illuminated room. The effect is spellbinding, inspiring meditations on impermanence and transience; simultaneously, thoughts of mortality (dust as an allusion to death) and mysticism (stoked by the title’s allusion to magic carpets) emerge. —AG

Hajra Waheed

B. 1980, Calgary, Canada • Lives and works in Montreal

Installation view of work by Hajra Waheed in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

Waheed, who is based in Montreal, spent the majority of her youth in a gated community in Saudi Arabia where photography and other forms of documentation were forbidden. Across her body of work, she interprets the stories and of migrants whose voices have gone unheard.

Thirty-eight tiny paintings line two walls of her installation at the Biennale; together, they act like film stills visualizing the dreams of migrants seeking a better life. Instead of showing the atrocities that often attend the journeys of those forced to leave their home countries, Waheed renders the quieter moments—glimpses of starry night skies, sunrises that light calm seas—that give these travelers the strength to forge on. —AG

Kananginak Pootoogook

B. 1935, Cape Dorset, Canada • D. 2010, Cape Dorset

Installation view of work by Kananginak Pootoogook in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

These large-scale ink-and-colored-pencil drawings capture vignettes from contemporary Inuit life, and are wonderfully tender, fun, and expressive. Even mundane moments—a man with a snowmobile, a couple sitting on a couch in their living room—are given a sense of drama. The showstopper, though, is Untitled (Successful Walrus Hunt) (2009). The sky is presented as an unnatural stack of purples, pinks, and yellows; we peer down into an almost diagrammatic rendering of a hunting boat, where men are celebrating their bounty—the eponymous dead walrus, flopped alongside their craft. —SI

Sebastián Díaz Morales

B. 1975, Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina • Lives and works in Amsterdam

This spellbinding film is the last work that most visitors will see as they exit the central pavilion of “Viva Arte Viva.” In it, a man falls ever so slowly through an atmosphere of colorful vapors, as if suspended in a dream. Like most of the artist’s output, the stunning and unnerving Suspension (2014) uses fantasy to harness the existential fears with which humans wrestle. Here, as Díaz Morales’s sleeping subject moves through the surreal atmosphere, it’s hard not to think of the recurring dreams of falling that many of us experience over the course of our lives. According to psychologists, they are a response to deep-seated anxieties—feelings that Díaz Morales conveys viscerally in this film. —AG

Luboš Plný

B. 1961, Ceska Lipa, Czech Republic • Lives and works in Prague

Installation view of work by Luboš Plný in “Viva Arte Viva” at the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh for Artsy.

Plný has long been fascinated with the inner-workings of the human body and mind—as well as their potential to break down. When the Czech artist was young, he dissected dead animals. Later in life completed a course in grave digging—and spent time exploring the recesses of his mind after being committed to a psychiatric clinic and diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Plný reconstitutes these experiences in a group of large-scale, wildly-intricate collages that layer his own drawings with images cut from fashion magazines and anatomy books. The masterwork of the room shows two figures in the act of doggy-style sex. Their body parts float, multiply, and merge. One finger gently pokes a turgid red ball labeled “nipple.” Elsewhere, a finger and schematic drawing of a penis simultaneously move towards a circle labeled “vestibule of vagina” and the two heads mirror each other and touch as if becoming one. The whole erotic shebang is grounded in the word “LOVE,” rendered at the bottom of the composition in all caps, tying the act of hot sex to intense emotions. —AG

—Alexxa Gotthardt and Scott Indrisek

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Was Frank Ocean’s New Single Cover Inspired by Kerry James Marshall?

Image via Frank Ocean.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980. Kerry James Marshall "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry" at MCA Chicago, Chicago

Without warning, R&B singer Frank Ocean dropped his newest single, “Lens,” late Saturday night. With it came a striking cover image that’s already become inseparable from the haunting track. It shows the face of a black man whose only visible feature is a white, gap-toothed smile. And to many who’ve made the museum rounds this past year, it looks stirringly familiar.

Ocean, who’s cultivated an aura of mystery since the beginning of his music career in the early 2010s, is often oblique about the inspirations behind his music. But the cover for “Lens” pays pronounced homage to at least one: the painter Kerry James Marshall.

Since the 1980s, Marshall has countered the absence of black men and women in the Western art canon by making them the subject of his powerful, monumental paintings. However, although his work had previously been shown in number of gallery and museum exhibitions, it wasn’t until 2016 that the Chicago painter received the retrospective he’d long deserved. The exhibition traveled from the MCA Chicago to The Met Breuer in New York to MOCA, Los Angeles.

In each location, the same small painting served as the exhibition’s anchor. It, too, wears a broad, white, gap-toothed smile.

Kerry James Marshall’s Bronzeville studio. Photo by Peter Hoffman for Artsy.

The piece is titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980), and in it, the bust of a black-skinned man sits against a backdrop of the same hue. His figure—save for his white eyes and smile—becomes almost indistinguishable from its surroundings.

Ocean’s new cover bears clear resemblance to the painting. So much so that, just minutes after the track and its image were released, the comparison was being drawn on social media.

Marshall painted the self-portrait in 1980, when he was just 25 years old and at the beginning of his career in an art world that had for centuries ignored the contributions of black and minority artists. The piece uncomfortably recalls the racist stereotypes that have long glutted popular culture. But it also boldly voices Marshall’s own experience as an “invisible” black man and his desire to been seen and heard.

Marshall has noted that the piece was inspired by both his personal experience and writer Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” (1952), in which the young African-American protagonist says that because of his race, he is “invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

The piece would go on to serve as the potent seed for Marshall’s influential body of work, which would insert images of black lives and culture—like a barber shop scene—into the language of European history painting. In the process, he helped bring to light the prejudice that for so long whitewashed art history.

De Style, 1993. Kerry James Marshall "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry" at MCA Chicago, Chicago

Untitled, 2009. Kerry James Marshall "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry" at MCA Chicago, Chicago

Ocean, too, addresses invisibility and discrimination in his work. On the first track of his celebrated 2016 album Blonde, titled “Nikes,” he pays tribute to Trayvon Martin, a black man killed by police at age 17, with the line: “RIP Trayvon, that nigga look just like me.” The allusion to police brutality and racial profiling is one of several made across the record.

Ocean has also made the prejudice and shaming the LGBTQ community faces the subject of his songs. “Lens,” in particular—through its hypnotic, labyrinthine rhymes—advocates for greater acceptance by telling the story of a closeted relationship. “Can’t be my type, I’m a low life,” he chants in one section, alluding to a fear he’s expressed of being honest with himself and others about his own sexuality. “Despite the life I lead, all this life in me, spirits watch me, pants down, can’t be ’barrassed of it,” he sings in the chorus.

It’s in this context that Ocean has riffed on Marshall’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self as the visual manifestation of his newest ballad. With the image, Ocean seems to acknowledge not only that “Lens” is a self-portrait, but also that it could very well, like Marshall’s work, represent the struggle of many oppressed, unheard minorities, whether racial, sexual, or cultural.

—Alexxa Gotthardt

Thumbnail image by Ole Haug via Flickr.

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Frank Ocean Channels Kerry James Marshall on Cover for Brand New Track

Image courtesy of Frank Ocean.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980. Kerry James Marshall "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry" at MCA Chicago, Chicago

In each location, the same small painting served as the exhibition’s anchor. It, too, wears a broad, white, gap-toothed smile.

Kerry James Marshall’s Bronzeville studio. Photo by Peter Hoffman for Artsy.

Ocean’s new cover bears clear resemblance to the painting. So much so that, just minutes after the track and its image were released, the comparison was being drawn on social media.

De Style, 1993. Kerry James Marshall "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry" at MCA Chicago, Chicago

Untitled, 2009. Kerry James Marshall "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry" at MCA Chicago, Chicago

—Alexxa Gotthardt

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A Hidden Room at the Guggenheim Will Transport You into a Soundless, Sublime World

Installation view of “Doug Wheeler: PSAD Synthetic Desert III,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, March 24-August 2, 2017. Photo by David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Tucked away on the Guggenheim’s seventh floor, in a tiny room accessible only to visitors who pass through a red stanchion and three heavy doors bearing industrial locks, lies one of the museum’s most mind-bending shows in recent memory.

It’s not imposing or loud like some of the big, buzzy exhibitions that have occupied the museum’s spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda in the past. Doug Wheeler’s “PSAD Synthetic Desert III,” up through August 2nd, is a different kind of sensory experience: one decidedly quieter and altogether more transportive.

The morning I visit, it’s bright and noisy outside the museum, and the queue for timed tickets to enter Wheeler’s show is growing fast. Patient museumgoers pull out sunglasses as cars honk down Fifth Avenue in rush-hour traffic and street vendors set up shop. To most in line, these are sights and sounds so typical of a New York day that they barely register. Not for long, though; Wheeler’s installation would soon throw them into high relief.

“PSAD Synthetic Desert III” is a tricked-out semi-anechoic chamber, or a space almost completely void of sound. Rooms such as these—heavily insulated and covered floor-to-ceiling in pyramid-shaped sound absorbers—are used to hone the voice recognition capabilities of computers or test noise levels for audio-sensitive equipment, like microphones. Microsoft famously built one in 2015 that the Guinness World Records has since deemed the quietest room in the world.

But Wheeler, an enigmatic artist who founded the Light and Space movement, along with Larry Bell and Robert Irwin, isn’t out to beat any records. Instead, he wants to transport people out of their everyday rigamarole and into an unrecognizable, mystical void.

The environment I enter—past the stanchion and three doors—indeed bears no resemblance to New York. At first, the extreme silence feels heavy and tangible—like the wet air of a humid day. But the body acclimates quickly, and soon a sensation of weightlessness sets in that’s enhanced by the room’s physical attributes: an otherworldly blue glow that emerges from imperceptible corners and a carpet of triangular forms resembling a landscape from the fantasy video game Monument Valley.

I forget about my body. At least until my stomach gurgles awkwardly—a sound that might normally go unnoticed, but here sounds like thunder. I’m reminded of my physicality and, even more acutely, my ego, as I worry about disrupting the experience for the four other people in the room. (The Guggenheim allows five people into the room at a time, though Wheeler would have preferred that visitors enter alone.)

Inside, time stretches and fades away. Before entering, we were told that we’d have 10 minutes in the installation. But instead, it feels like blissful eons of silence and calm.

Wheeler grew up in the Arizona desert, began his artistic practice in Los Angeles, and these days forges installations and objects from light and sound out of a studio in arid New Mexico. So perhaps it’s no surprise that “PSAD Synthetic Desert III” was inspired by the artist’s transcendent experiences in the Southwestern desert. Wheeler spends his free time flying planes, gliding over open expanses of dusty landscape.

In a conversation with Guggenheim curator Jeffrey Weiss, Wheeler explained that there, in the breezeless, disorienting environment, “you can’t tell a human voice from a car door closing or an eagle screaming more than a mile up.”

At the Guggenheim, Wheeler powerfully invokes those surroundings. And that’s what makes returning to the real world—in this case, the clamor of New York—so overwhelming.

As I move from the soothing silence back into the luminous, crowded museum rotunda, the aura of calm produced by Wheeler’s installation evaporates. But the keen awareness of my body, and its sensitivity to the world’s many intense, stimulating sensations doesn’t. The sun feels warmer, the city sounds more nuanced, and the faces of the people that pass me more detailed, expressive, and—thanks to 10 minutes in Wheeler’s alien landscape—more human.

—Alexxa Gotthardt

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As Berlin Grows Up, Legendary Art Space KW Fights to Keep Its Edge

Philippe Van Snick, Dag/Nacht, 1984–ongoing. Installation view entrance gate, KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Frank Sperling, courtesy Tatjana Pieters. Courtesy of KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

Stroll down a quiet street in Berlin’s Mitte district, pass through a blue door, walk across a cobblestone courtyard, and you’ll find one of contemporary art’s mythological stomping grounds.

It’s here, in the long corridors and cold cellars of a former margarine factory, that a good number of the last quarter-century’s most influential artists—from Susan Sontag and Mike Kelley to Thomas Demand and Marina Abramović—have unveiled radical work, met their collaborators, made their beds, and partied ’til the sun came up.

This is KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the storied kunsthalle that is credited with launching the careers of countless artists. And these days, it’s in the throes of a much-talked-about makeover.

“I wanted to open the space up again—and not just spatially,” explains Krist Gruijthuijsen, as he gazes out the window of his second-floor office onto KW’s courtyard. “In its first years, KW was an extremely open place that was all about community-building; all kinds of creatively minded people gathered here. My goal is to expand on this.”

It’s a biting-cold day in February, and 36-year-old Gruijthuijsen has seven months under his belt as the new director of KW. He arrived in July with a laundry list of accomplishments to his name, including co-founding the curatorial association Kunstverein Amsterdam, a respected stint as the artistic director of the nonprofit art space Grazer Kunstverein, and shepherding exhibitions and publications for artists ranging from Mierle Laderman Ukeles to Adam Pendleton to David Wojnarowicz. But despite his glowing CV, he has big shoes to fill—a fact of which he’s fully aware.

Krist Gruijthuijsen, director of KW, and his artistic team. From left to right: Leaver-Yap, Anna Gritz, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Maurin Dietrich, Tirdad Zolghadr, Cathrin Mayer, Marc Hollenstein. Photo: Ali Kepenek. Courtesy of KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

“We’re blessed and haunted by the nostalgic feeling towards this institution,” he says, as we walk down a flight of stairs coated in construction dust toward one of KW’s galleries. Gruijthuijsen is referring to the legendary 25-year history of the space.

It all started in 1990 when a 23-year-old Klaus Biesenbach, the cult curator who today leads New York’s MoMA PS1, posted up in a derelict Baroque building in former East Berlin. Abandoned after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the structure was in bad shape, without heat or a roof. But that didn’t stop Biesenbach and a cohort of young artists and curators from hosting exhibitions, making work, and living in the ragtag compound.

A group of international artists quickly gravitated toward the space, drawn to Berlin for its cheap or nonexistent rent, wild parties in former bunkers, and unrestrained atmosphere ripe for artistic experimentation. Joan Jonas, Monica Bonvicini, Dan Graham, Hedi Slimane, and Joseph Kosuth were early KW regulars, among many others. The Berlin Biennale was born within its walls. And a legendary bar—Pogo—cropped up in its basement, where weekly performances and all-night fêtes raged.

But times have changed since then, and Berlin—and KW in step—have become more polished. “In the ’90s, Pogo was technically illegal and operating without permits. That was part of the excitement around not only the bar, but KW as a whole,” Gruijthuijsen says. “But now it’s 2017, when nothing can operate illegally—at least not for long. So the question I’m trying to answer is: How do we bring back that energy within a structured, funded institution?”

Gruijthuijsen’s appointment, and much of the makeover he’s spearheading, is the result of a 2016 funding influx KW received from the city government, a happy consequence of Berlin’s mayor acknowledging what an “enormous attraction Berlin’s cultural scene offers to tourists,” Gruijthuijsen explains. “The realization provided the government with a reason to invest real money back into anchor institutions and positions—and they recognized KW as one of those.”

Since his arrival, and thanks to this new source of capital, Gruijthuijsen has initiated a slew of “small but radical changes,” he says. As we traverse the space, the structural alterations prove most conspicuous—evidenced, primarily, by the drone of saws and shoring on the building’s third floor.

“I really want the building to breathe,” he says, as he points to how, in each of KW’s five exhibition spaces, his team has re-exposed all of the building’s original windows and removed any superfluous walls. He’s also moved the entrance and added a bookshop and coat room.

Hanne Lippard, Flesh, 2016. Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina. Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy of KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

For Gruijthuijsen, these modifications not only optimize the amount of natural light and allow for more exhibition space, they also serve to “unify the whole building,” he explains. “In previous years, KW’s spaces have often been divided into small and large galleries, but I wanted to remove any sense of hierarchy. Every artist we present is as important as the other, whether you’re 21 or 75, or you get 250 square meters or 400.”

Gruijthuijsen’s curatorial strategy has long been to encourage parity between artistic practices, “whether emerging, established, or obscure.” At KW, he plans to realize this goal first and foremost through an exhibition schedule focused on solo exhibitions by a diverse swath of artists, instead of concept-driven, sprawling group shows.

His inaugural shows include site-specific work by British sound artist Hanne Lippard, American conceptual artist Adam Pendleton, and South African conceptual artist Ian Wilson, all of which explore communication and its political reverberations—but through distinct lenses.

“I’m an exhibition-maker in the traditional sense, so I want to show and help actualize the projects of individual artists,” he says. “I want to give the building back to the artists, because at KW’s core, it’s a space for and by artists.”

Gruijthuijsen is bolstering this objective with several strategies that aim to bring more of the Berlin community into KW and broadcast the institution’s message well beyond its confines. For one, his team is planning to update the kunsthalle’s Café Bravo, a jewel box of a space designed by Dan Graham in 1999, but in need of some cosmetic work.

He and his team of curators have also conceived of an event series called The Berlin Sessions, which invites one Berlin creative to speak to another who has influenced his or her practice. The series will travel to a matrix of locations around the city, encouraging the expansion and cross-pollination of Berlin’s arts community.

“If we didn’t branch out in this way, it’d be relegated to my KW lens, or my foreign, external, non-German lens on top of it,” Gruijthuijsen, a Netherlands native, muses. “I’m happily naive, and I want to activate aspects of the program in which I’m just a sponge, learning more about Berlin and the community and its history.”

Robert Wilhite, Bob’s Pogo Bar, 2016. Installation view, KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy of KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

But perhaps the most-anticipated of Gruijthuijsen’s plans is the reopening of the infamous Pogo bar. No amount of history-exhuming could resurrect the basement haunt as it was in its bohemian heyday—but that’s not the director’s intention.

“We’ve been turning over how the Pogo bar can function today. Is it still a techno club in a basement?” he ponders, looking around the dark, stone space that’s already hosted six rowdy (but legal) performances, open to all on Thursday nights. “Or can it be a place for people to be together, a platform where everybody from the community can have a voice?”

By planting the seeds of a multivalent community, Gruijthuijsen hopes KW will draw both international art professionals and Berliners of all stripes. “You can have a very small, dedicated audience to the bar, you can have your professional, culturally consuming audience who attend exhibitions regularly,” he says. “But in the end, I would also love to engage the passersby.”

As word of the changes that Gruijthuijsen has put into motion at KW spreads through Berlin and beyond, his goal appears to be within reach.

—Alexxa Gotthardt

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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