Exclusive Videos Now on iTunes
In its first week on iTunes, Art21’s series of Exclusive videos debuted as the Top Video Podcast for both the overall Arts and Visual Arts categories! Sorry Martha Stewart and Jamie Oliver, H&M and Vogue — but contemporary art is taking over.
All 40 videos — which got their premiere here — are now available as FREE downloads. A new video will be added each and every week. Become a regular subscriber (link opens application) today! You can also search for “Art21″ in the iTunes Store.
Be sure to leave us a customer review, and thanks to all who’ve already downloaded videos and helped to make us #1!
SFMOMA’s Explore Modern Art
SFMOMA recently launched their redesigned website with the initiative Explore Modern Art, an online learning environment and interactive space that integrates the museum’s collections information, calendar of public programs and events, and multimedia interpretive programs. Over the last decade, these features have produced engaging programming on 85 modern and contemporary artists, enabling visitors to learn about the contexts in which the artworks were created, see videos of the artists in their studios, hear first-person explanations of their creative processes, and view high-resolution digital images of the artworks. Explore Modern Art makes this substantial repository more accessible, user-friendly, and well, fun.
My favorite section is Making Sense of Modern Art, a lively video archive and guide to works in SFMOMA’s permanent collection, where one can go watch Ann Hamilton discuss her Indigo Blues Project, look up close at a Claude Cahun photograph, or listen to Richard Tuttle talk about the “presence of simple things.” Other Art:21 artists highlighted in this program include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Richard Serra, and Kara Walker.
Fundred Points of View
By now, many of you are quite familiar with Mel Chin’s nationwide Fundred project to help highlight the issue of lead contaminated soil in New Orleans. Students and professional artists all across the country are designing “Fundred” hundred dollar bills that will be collected in an artistic collaboration involving thousands of people.
This week, as part of the New York State Art Teachers Association annual conference, I will be presenting the attached lesson plan to give educators another way of sharing the Fundred project with their students. There are options for a one-day lesson or a series of four lessons that lead to making the bills and understanding how the project is truly a collaborative effort dependent on many voices being heard. Please check it out and share your thoughts, ideas, or experience with the Fundred project itself: fundredpointsof-view.doc
A brief back-note…
I saw this online yesterday as it occurred in my city. A project done by an LA-based Iraqi Veteran Against the War set out 4171 toy US Soldiers at a gas station late at night (since the action, the number of US soldiers has climbed to 4,193). Not that many people probably saw this, but the art project (what else than a Tom Friedman homage this protest be?), it reminded me of an article my brother, Robby Herbst, wrote thinking about antiwar art and activism. Disparate actions towards a disparate climate (ie. no 3 tv networks, net 2.0, yadda yadda yadda) make a heck of a lot of sense.
Gabriel Orozco | On Photography
EXCLUSIVE: Gabriel Orozco discusses recent photographs taken in Mexico and Ecuador in 2007, and the role photography plays in his broader artistic practice.
Gabriel Orozco’s sculptures and photographs disrupt conventional notions of reality. Drawing our attention to slips in logic, philosophical games, and hidden geometries, Orozco uncovers the extraordinary aspects of the seemingly everyday. His use of humble materials and means (graphite on bone, a ball of clay, a 35mm camera) engages the imagination through its disarming simplicity and intimacy.
Gabriel Orozco is featured in the Season 2 (2003) episode Loss & Desire of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
PHOTO | All works by Gabriel Orozco, 2007. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Larissa Nikola-Lisa. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork courtesy: Gabriel Orozco. Thanks: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
FEAR at James Cohan Gallery
A new body of work by Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will be on view at James Cohan Gallery New York, November 20 through January 10, 2009.
FEAR, Hancock’s fourth exhibition at the gallery, includes paintings, wall drawings, and a new portfolio of twenty mixed media prints that the artist recently completed at the Rutgers University Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions. The exhibition continues Hancock’s story of an epic battle between the forces of good, as represented by his characters the Mounds and their color-filled world, and evil, as embodied by the skeletal Vegans who live underground in a world of black and white. The centerpiece of the show is a grid-like arrangement of eight five-foot-square canvases installed atop a wall painting that references the underworld battleground between forces. In the title painting, Fear, a Baby, recognizable by its large egg-shaped head, looms above the horizon as the black background is showered in Mound Meat, a pink substance on which Mounds survive and once ingested allows all to experience a life of color. Seven other works in this series illustrate a Baby head amidst the Vegan landscape, lined up as if marching off to battle.
James Cohan Gallery will host a conversation between the artist and Merrily Kerr, a New York-based art historian and writer, on Friday, November 21 at 6:30pm. The talk is organized by The New York Center for Art and Media Studies.
7
At a recent Journal meeting with my co-editors, Christina Ulke and Robby Herbst, we were considering how the current climate would affect our work. While some of our ideals would imagine no substantive change with the recent election, we agreed optimistically to assume otherwise (I mean, Echo Park had a really good street party election night, which is distinct but not entirely unprecedented; this enthusiasm alone is something optimistic). Seizing this long moment, we thought, involved asking what a progressive social practice would look like 4 years down the road, 6 1/2 years, or more, and that we should start acting that way today.
We figure, like many around us, that our efforts at researching, investigating, and creating grassroots culture (note the two verbs before creating because rarely can an art project or any singular scene for that matter constitute community—here too) and activating said groups will continue to be a central project, made more so by the new administration’s call to lead them to water.
Image by Mark Rodriguez. Devendra and Civil War Re-enactors
Over the course of my stay here, I started imagining an agenda of outlining, in practice and experience, the 7 forms through which cultural change is advanced. This list is made up to include posts on the aesthetic sphere, the relational sphere, the organizing sphere, the social sphere, the institutional sphere plus 2 more I hadn’t yet written… seven’s such a solid number. It was to be a bold piece of writing.
I thought then to write only about precursors to art and cultural projects, as this past weekend brought me to several art spaces in transition but no actual openings. I don’t actually know if this will be the plan, but that’s a good image on which to leave. At the moment, I am into what makes things tick in terms of bringing out the now and in terms of how to plan for the future.
Don’t Miss: Catherine Sullivan at The New School
Catherine Sullivan (Season 4) will speak at The New School on Wednesday, November 19 at 6:30pm. The event is part of the Public Art Fund Talks, an ongoing series of discussions and presentations by artists, critics, and curators, organized in collaboration with the School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Tickets can be purchased at The New School Box Office at 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY. Click here for more information.
Sullivan and Walker Awarded USA Fellowship
United States Artists (USA) is a grant-making organization dedicated to supporting America’s living artists working in a diverse array of disciplines. Catherine Sullivan (Season 4) and Kara Walker (Season 2) have been awarded the organization’s 2008 fellowship, which provides each of its 50 recipients an unrestricted grant of $50,000.
According to Artinfo.com, USA was established in 2005 in response to a study finding poor support structures for American artists. To become a USA Fellow, one must be nominated. Each year nominations for the award are made by an anonymous group of arts leaders, critics, scholars, and artists chosen by the organization. Nominators are asked to submit names of artists they believe show an extraordinary commitment to their craft. Eight other visual artists will receive the award this year: Terry Adkins; Michael Asher; Andrea Bowers; Deanna Dikeman; Barkley L. Hendricks; Tehching Hsieh; Rodney McMillian; and Martha Rosler.
New guest blogger: Marc Herbst, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
Many thanks to Monika Navarro in Boston for her timely turn on the guest blog. Up next is Marc Herbst, an artist and member of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest editorial collective (www.joaap.org), along with current editors Robby Herbst and Christina Ulke. Their print and web magazine has been around since 2001 and they just released the sixth print issue this month. Marc, who lives in Los Angeles, has begun or been involved in various media and culture projects including The CalArts Student Newspaper, the Los Angeles Independent Media Center, Killradio.org, several pirate radio stations and activist projects concerning globalization, gentrification, police brutality and environmental issues. As an individual and in collaboratives, his recent projects have been displayed at the 2008 California Biennial and the South London Gallery. Currently he is working through the practical ways that individuals activate their relationships within their cities and actually move towards affecting change.
