Art:21 Systems Episode tonight

Art:21 tonight 10:00 PM ET "Systems" with Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, Kimsooja, and Allan McCollum.

Synopsis: Whether through acts of appropriation, repetition, or accumulation, the artists in this episode realize projects both vast in scope and beyond comprehension. (link)

Julie Mehretu's Grey Area for the Deutsche Guggenheim (link)

John Baldessari at Sprueth Magers (link)

Kimsooja's website (link)

Allan McCollum The Shapes Project (link)

Burning Life

Mab has been out sick, or traveling, or sick and traveling, for the past couple of months but did get inworld to juggle fire torches and watch the Burning Man in Burning Life burn down last night.

View large on black (link)

Burning Life (link)

Art:21 Fantasy Episode tonight

Fantasy presents four artists whose works or personal stories transport viewers to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness. With works that seem at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime, each of these artists pursues a vision first held in the mind’s eye.

Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century tonight on PBS 10:00 ET Fantasy episode with Jeff Koons, Mary Heilmann, Florian Maier-Aichen, and Cao Fei, who identifies herself as the avatar of SL artist China Tracy:

Through a blend of documentary and magical realism, the artist investigates various aspects of role play: costumed youth and their families, workers’ dreams come to life at a Siemens light factory, and the simulated romance between avatars. The segment culminates in the artist’s ongoing project, "RMB City," an artificial island built in the 3D virtual world of Second Life that resembles a postmodern collage of landmarks, urban over-development, and Chinese landscape painting.

Read more (link)

Cao Fei biography (link)

eyebeam

video via Alan Sondheim (link)

Last Friday (9 October 2009) was SL Performance Night at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City. Artists/groups included Alan Sondheim with Foofwa d'Imobilité, Lily & Honglei, and Second Front members Patrick Lichty and Scott Kildall. The evening was also occasion to a formal launch party for Second Front's Second DVD of performance works, Avvie Road.

More:

Performing in Second Life (eyebeam.org) (link)

Lily & Honglei (Land of Illusion) (link)

Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (link)

Art:21

Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 begins tonight on PBS 10:00 ET with the episode Compassion (link)

Field Trip: John Baldessari

John Baldessari's Six Colorful Inside Jobs 1971

Q To some degree would you say that Baldessari’s work is like an encyclopedia of maleness?

A Hard to say no to that question. I’d say that’s one of the bigger yeses in the history of answers.

Q To use or misuse the regularly bastardized word, does he deconstruct the male? 


A How could he not?

Q Does Baldessari’s gaze around and through the male gaze render a double-dude staredown? 


A Affirmative. There’s a German phrase for it.

Q Wissenschaftler der mannlichen Schwierigheit?

A Scholar of male complexity.

-- Benjamin Weissman on John Baldessari, in 'Men Swallowing Swords, Men Blowing Out Candles" frieze 126 (link)

John Baldessari talks to Jessica Morgan (curator of his upcoming retrospective at Tate Modern) in TATE ETC 17 (link)

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at Tate Modern 13 October 2009 till 10 January 2010 (link)

Field Trip: Robert Irwin

Robert Irwin, Untitled @Hirshhorn Museum (Music: Sigur Ros)

I couldn't find an image to illustrate the story of the stairwell so am using this video of Untitled instead.

"Then I ran into a utility stairwell which presented a very interesting situation. There were a couple things that were very nice about it. One was that while the front stairwell was very formal, with floating steps and everything, and was the architect's attempt to be very 'designed,' very artistic, in a way–I didn't like it particularly–this utility stairwell was simply that, a utility stairwell. It had the minimum. It met all the legal requirements, period, and nothing else. How steep it was–I don't think it could have been any steeper. It had those kind of institutional railings. The corners had an angle on them. It was the simplest kind of concrete shaft; I mean, in terms of architecture, there was no attempt to modify or make that space interesting at all. Institutional light fixtures, the whole thing, just by the book.

"But there was one thing funny about it: the architect, in wanting to continue his illusions about the building from an architectural point of view, did not want the exterior facade of the building to stop at a certain point; so he continued it on to include this utility stairwell, which was very funny, in a way, because it had nothing to do with the stairwell at all; it had all to do with this idea about facade. In other words, he ran this series of windows the entire length of the building so as to fit his modular conception.

"But the unintended effect of all of that was that that utility stairwell was quite a nice place. One of the things that was very nice about it was that all the light in there was reflected light. Only in the morning was there a little slit of direct light, but most of the light was reflected. And interestingly enough, in this situation it was reflected off an awful lot of different kinds of surfaces–a very red building across the way, some very strong green grass; it depended on the time of day you were there as to the color the stairwell was. I mean, it was subtle. Most people would have probably said it was white all the time; but to me, you'd walk in there, and at a certain time of day it was violet, and another time of day it was green, and another time of day it was a subtle mixture of colors. It was a very loaded kind of situation.

"So I did a lot of things in that stairwell. I changed a lot of things. I neutralized things and blocked things and removed things. I fooled around with the covering of the baseboard; there was a situation in terms of one of the windows where I made it look as though it continued where in fact it didn't. I covered up one section of one window so that the far corner looked as if it were angled as all the other corners were angled. All sorts of things like that, which no one really saw–which, by the way, they weren't intended to see; it was just the presence of the situation which I liked.

"Then, I think, I probably made an error, and it probably had a little bit to do with my not being on top of the situation. I put a piece of scrim material up near the second floor, up high, and stretched it out flat. It did a nice thing; I mean, it did work in the room in a way. But in a way it also defeated me in the sense that the few people who did deal with the stairwell at all finally said, 'Oh that's it,' and pointed, dealt with the scrim as though it were the art; whereas it was simply a device that I had used hopefully to try and get the situation maybe a little more strongly identified. Without the scrim I don't know if anybody would have seen it–maybe one or two people. And a curious thing, when the show eventually came down, I went back there and found a number of the things which I had done had not been removed. For some reason they either didn't notice them or didn't know that I had put them there. But in a funny way, even with a lot of the things removed, that stairwell still was doing exactly what it did so well. It didn't need my scrim. And in a funny way, maybe it didn't need any of the details I added. What was really essential was going on there anyway."

-- Robert Irwin to Lawrence Weschler, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees by Lawrence Weschler

Robert Irwin (link)

Robert Irwin @Hirshhorn (link)

Untitled (a variation) @MoMA (link)

Field Trip: Warhol TV

La Maison Rouge (Paris) (link)

Via Walker Art Center (link)

Field Trip: Marcel Duchamp:The Art of Chess

Will Shutes in Frieze Magazine:

To use Naumann’s terms, Duchamp’s opening move was to develop – as with chess – an intellectual system of symbols and imagined mechanical movements between figures in his practice. This ambition was most fully realized in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), which Bailey takes as a focus in order to illustrate the thematic and iconographic correlation between the aesthetics and concepts of Duchamp’s artistic production and his identity as a chess player. Proposing that chess is a critical and largely unrecognized thematic element in The Large Glass, Bailey finds within the work a disguised self-portrait.

. . . As Duchamp said, ‘The transformation of the visual aspect to the grey matter is what always happens in chess and what should happen in art.’

Read more (link)

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (link)

Art21 Season 5 and SL's China Tracy

China Tracy's i.Mirror part 1 (2007), part of the China Tracy Pavilion Project, exhibited in China Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale 2007

Today's Art:21 blog (link) featured a screenshot from Cao Fei's RMB CITY. Known as China Tracy in Second Life®, Cao Fei will be spotlighted in Art:21 Season 5 in the upcoming Fantasy episode along with Jeff Koons, Mary Heilmann, and Florian Maier-Aichen. The episode will air Wednesday 14 October 10PM (ET) on PBS.

Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century is the Peabody Award-winning series produced by contemporary art organization Art21. From the press release:

In its most international season to date, Art21’s four-part series reveals artists’ perspectives on current affairs, politics, economics, history and popular culture, as well as showcases the artists’ working processes and their studios. For the first time ever, the series is presented in high definition and made available, beyond broadcast, in its entirety on-line via Hulu, iTunes and other digital platforms. (more)

art:21's Youtube channel (link)

About Cao Fei (link)

China Tracy's RMB City on Youtube (link)

Field Trip: The Last Clean Shirt

Artist Alfred Leslie's film The Last Clean Shirt with subtitles by poet Frank O'Hara (who lifted some of them from Alfred Leslie) was first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1964.

From Tate Modern (who screened the film this past Wednesday, 24 June 2009):

In a letter to his friend and collaborator, the poet Frank O'Hara, Leslie writes: 'We will shoot for two SEPERATE LEVELS on the film. One is the VISUAL, the other the HEARD & the spectator will be in TWO places or more SIMULTANEOUSLY. NOT AS MEMORY BUT AT THE SAME MOMENT. PARALLELISM! MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW!'

It is a blueprint for The Last Clean Shirt in which a man and a woman take a car ride through the streets of downtown Manhattan. A clock on the dashboard foregrounds the fact that the film is a single shot. The woman speaks in double-talk Finnish, interpreted by the beautiful and brilliant story told via O'Hara's subtitles that run throughout. (more)

From NYS Writers Institute:

The Last Clean Shirt is a rarely-screened film that has become even more intriguing and thought-provoking with the passage of time. A young black man and white woman get in a car at Astor Place, tape an alarm clock to the dashboard, and start driving around as the woman yaks in an unknown language. This action is repeated three times, each segment featuring a different subtitled stream-of-consciousness narration by poet Frank O’Hara. Predating the rise of structural filmmakers like Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton by several years, Leslie’s film anticipates later avant-garde interest in the limits of cinematic form. 

Snubbed by critics and booed by audiences . . . at the 1964 New York Film Festival, The Last Clean Shirt was considered audacious and excessive in its day. During a run at the New Yorker, one crowd hounded the owner of the theater so badly that he was chased out of the building and hid in a dumpster. (more)

From Jacket 23:

The Last Clean Shirt was even more avant-garde or visionary than critics were able to see at the time: it is not merely a film but a new form of work of art, a new literary object, in the wake of the simultaneous poem (Blaise Cendrars). One might then wonder how the film goes beyond simultaneity in the mapping of a new artistic space created between images and words . . .

The film betrays the concerns of the painter: lines, planes and dimensions are carefully organized on the screen and enter a field of tension. The spectator can see vertical lines: the characters, the street, the buildings, the windshield frame and the hands of the clock. Horizontal lines also come into play: the subtitles, the upper part of the seats and of the windshield and a series of small horizontal lines can be seen on different parts of the screen.
     

Circularity also finds its place with the clock, the wheel and various buttons on the dashboard of the car. There seems to be no depth, no relief whatsoever on the screen. It is as though Alfred Leslie went back to the early years of cinema to show us that what we take for granted i.e. verisimilitude, lifelikeness, 3-D relief are but a construct, an illusion. (more)

Alfred Leslie (link)

Frank O'Hara (link)

Art21 Season 5 Trailer: Sneak Peek