iTunes U

September 16, 2011 · Print This Article

If there’s one thing readers of the Bad at Sports blog share, besides a love of art, it’s an affection for podcasts. Duncan assures me that most of our listeners come through iTunes, which isn’t surprising. I probably interact with iTunes everyday, not because I want to, but because it’s ubiquitous. One thing I don’t do much of is spend time at the iTunes store. My podcasts load automatically, I stream my television, and I still purchase music the old fashioned way–on compact disc. Yet recently I’ve found a reason to love iTunes, and that’s iTunes U.

In case you are unfamiliar, iTunes U is just like iTunes but with less Katy Perry. Clicking on the Fine Arts tab will take you to sea of offerings from well-known universities such as Harvard and Yale as well as venerable institutions that we might not immediately consider educational, like MoMA. Before I found Bad at Sports, I listened to a dozen “art” podcasts I had browsed out of iTunes, one of which was simply two stoned guys walking around the Seattle Art Museum talking about the work they saw, but never letting their listeners in on the secret of which piece they were looking at. This kind of monkey-business won’t be found on iTunes U. Their definition of “fine art” is broad, including, of course, visual art, but also media studies, music, theater, and cooking. The variety of format is broad as well. There are regular podcasts like the one you already listen to each week, video lectures, but there are also fully-produced magazine-style shows that look as good as anything you’d see on your local PBS station.

By no means exhaustive, I’ve picked a few highlights that I thought would be of interest. The School of Visual Arts (SVA) has an impressive collection of video lectures about contemporary art and culture. These are organized in the most boring way possible, by department, with the name of the chairperson as your guide. I’m currently watching a symposium called “Where the Truth Lies” that discusses propaganda in documentary film. From The Experience Music Project (EMP) you’ll find 2009′s (and 2010 and 2011) Pop Conference on the theme of Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic. Particularly interesting is the lecture by David Scott, “Gay for Play: The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name Certainly Does Sell Records.” Here an audio only podcast is just fine. Lastly, while I usually try to steer clear of all things Florida, The University of Southern Florida has a great series called Lit2Go, which is fantastic. Really nothing more than a collection of classics read aloud by English professors, Lit2Go is a great time. I just finished re-”reading” Picture of Dorian Gray, a book that bears the distinction of being subject of Bad at Sports’ only book group.

When I was a little girl, my mother told me that in the future anyone could learn anything she wanted, all we would have to do is turn on the television and our greatest artists and teachers would come right into our living room. Maybe television didn’t quite live up to its promise, but it looks as if the Internet might.

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Top 6 Weekend Picks! (9/16-9/18)

September 15, 2011 · Print This Article

1. UPLIFT at Believe Inn

Work by work by Anthony Lewellen, Beth Pearlman, Chris Silva, Doug Fogelson, Eric Mecum, Jourdon Gullett, Justus Roe, Kim Frieders Tibbetts, Lauren Feece, Liza Berkoff, Matthew Hoffman, Renee Robbins, Robert Stevenson, Ruben Aguirre, and Tom Torluemke

Believe Inn is located at 2043 N Winchester Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

2. “Just Breathe Normally” at Autumn Space

Work by Brian Hubble

Autumn Space is located at 1700 W Irving Park Rd. Reception is Saturday from 6-9pm.

3. FLAT 10 (FBI 3) at Floor Length and Tux

Work by Edra Soto, Jon Bollo, Liz Nielsen, Erik Wenzel, Catie Olson, and EC Brown

Floor Length and Tux is located at 2332 W. Augusta #3. Reception is Saturday from 7-10pm.

4. CLUB HELTER SKELTER at Manifest Exhibitions

Work by Stephen Collier

Manifest Exhibitions is located at 2950 N Allen Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

5. Combinations Described at Donald Young Gallery

Work by Bruce Nauman

Donald Young Gallery is located at 224 S. Michigan Ave., suite 266. Reception is Friday from 5-7pm.

6. Nomadic Text at What It Is

Curated by Jessica Cochran and Mia Ruyter, with work by Joseph Grigely, Mark Booth, Alex Valentine, Karen Reimer, Jason Pickleman, Stephanie Brooks, Steven Miglio, Robert Ransick, Rachel Foster and Rebecca Foster.

What It Is is located at 1155 Lyman, Oak Park. Reception is Sunday from 3-8pm.

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Grasping Peace

September 14, 2011 · Print This Article

Dear Friends,

In 1969, John and I were so naïve to think that doing the Bed-In would help change the world.
Well, it might have. But at the time, we didn’t know.

It was good that we filmed it, though.
The film is powerful now.
What we said then could have been said now.

In fact, there are things that we said then in the film, which may give some encouragement and inspiration to the activists of today. Good luck to us all.

Let’s remember WAR IS OVER if we want it.
It’s up to us, and nobody else.
John would have wanted to say that.

Love, yoko

Yoko Ono Lennon
London, UK
August 2011

Of course nostalgia isn’t a progressive place. When looking back to the past, it’s possible to know the outcome of every action. Progressive actions happen when consequences are yet to be determined. They are insecure, idealistic and defiant. Their success is compounded by, and most likely contingent on, other idealists.

I often take the 60s for granted as a kind of failed parent to our present — I remember for instance, my disdain when America declared The War on Terror. There were protests on Market Street in San Francisco where I lived; since I worked at a gallery downtown, a number of the dissidents came through our doors. Most of them old timers, they seemed enthused and exhilarated, wearing old ponchos with old buttons — costumes from a former life. It brought back the old days, they said, enjoying a renewal of purpose to which I was highly critical. The protests that year felt more like block parties, sequestered as they were to specific streets with police lining the borders between outcry and everyday life; there was no real disruption.

Neither was an alternative supplied: while half of the country (at least) cried out for war, the other dug its heels in, adamantly opposed. The protest parties celebrated opposition without solutions. I wanted someone to come up with another way, a non-violent action — that would mark a good leader, I thought. Even in my financially challenged state, I still had a roof and a car and two jobs. I had a sister who fed me when I couldn’t buy groceries. I had access to a world our supposed enemies did not. My parents’ hippy friends gave me a bumper sticker that said, “Bomb them with butter.” At least that seemed like one new idea. I know I had none.

When soldiers brought the statue of Saddam Hussein down with a crane, we’d been in Iraq for 20 days. There was a sudden euphoria of success and achievement. It became its own short-lived propaganda. “A few minutes after the toppling, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters,’The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain’ (The New Yorker). We watched it on the news. I remember feeling both impotent and relieved.

“War became the evil pimp and illegitimate master, while society became a terrorized subaltern. War was not just about political domination through physical violence leading to death, but about the exploitation of bodies and minds for financial gain, sexual power, and the censure of our unique capacity as human beings to engage in abstract thought. As a performer, I understand you to be saying that what makes war terrible is not just that it can kill us, but that it forces us to perform against ourselves — against our will, against our interests, against our values” ( A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, Coco Fusco, Seven Stories Press, 2008). Years later, I pulled into a Pier One parking lot to listen to Cheney’s trial being broadcast on the radio. There had been headlines all week about what a creep he was. The rapid cries of infamy as we the people denounced his behavior. He admitted his sanction of torture. All the photos came out with dark men, naked, faces in black hoods, sometimes in piles. The bright burn of a camera flash in a corner as soldiers–men and women both–smiled. We know those pictures. They come from a time when popular ideas about Muslim taboos were bandied around public space like beach balls; every room I was in discussed the terror of war, the stress of soldiers. “How could this thing have happened?” The day was bright and sunny outside. The highway banal and complacent. But I’d thought everyone knew, like it was in the collective unconscious–I’d known and I didn’t even read that much back then. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were dark places, beyond citizenship, as though human rights were contingent on state. Of course that torture still exists now — because we are not innocent — and Cheney’s presently on a book tour as an advocate of his practice. ”If we give up all efforts to identify and set limits to uses of force and violence, unwarranted, and unmerited,” Fusco writes, “we essentially relinquish any agency with regard to politics, and aquiesce to authoritarian control of our lives or those of others” (p. 25).

Yes. It’s good Bin Laden is no longer a threat, but I don’t think anyone — especially a leader — should ever be proud of murder. It’s a terrible thing to have to take someone’s life, regardless of the circumstances. Circumstances that lead to such a necessity are all the more heartbreaking, stemming from a desperate responsibility. And here again, I think leaders give us examples of behavior, demonstrating through their address the weight of such a choice, thereby acknowledging the unequivocal meaning of life. Ten years later we are still at war, still shadow boxing. September 11th is still impossible to comprehend. Its tragedies will always remain irrevocable regardless of all subsequent acts, many of which have perpetuated violence: the shadows cast by our way of life. Embedded in my disappointment in the 60s is a tremendous disappointment in the present. The notion of peace seems all the more impossible, just as the emotive potency of war becomes more remote. There is so much to think about and learn from in those old performative gestures of peace–the way in which the media, still naive itself, could not get enough of those crazy kids.

..my favorite images of the aforementioned film take place at breakfast.

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Nature Museum: Morton Arboretum and Framing the Natural

September 12, 2011 · Print This Article

GUEST POST BY MONICA WESTIN

As environmental art progresses and then doubles back again between earthworks and site-specific land art to more explicitly ecological work, there’s a real question hanging in the air these days about what kind of awareness art can or even should bring to the natural world, and what successful environmental art might look like or do. Michael Wang’s article in May’s Artforum about the contemporary merging of architecture and the environment focused on the process of making the invisible visible—such as the work of experimental architect Bernard Tschumi in Santiago, who uses polluted air as “material for design”—avoiding simple propaganda about air pollution in making public encounter part of a zone of aesthetic experience that includes the weather. Wang closes his discussion with a call to “make evident” the “dissolution of boundaries” between the human and the natural.

This might seem like an overly-heady invocation to an intentionally very family-friendly art show at the Morton Arboretum—and much of the art doesn’t lend itself to much discussing in academic terms, though it’s fun for the kids to look at, like a stack of tree logs with a huge bow on top or fluttering wisps of kite-like material improbably named “Soul of the Trees”—but there are a handful of pieces that are remarkably thoughtful, even groundbreaking in their approach to the question of this boundary between nature and human. While a few works seem completely disconnected from their environment in the arboretum, others offer new perspectives on the framing of nature and the issue of medium specificity. A couple offer explicitly environmentalist messages, and a handful of them—which are as cutting-edge and thoughtful as any other art I’ve seen in Chicago this year—actually reflect on the work of this frame itself and offer up a strong model for what a critical environmental art practice might look like.

First the slightly less interesting pieces. The You are Beautiful collective presents a huge namesake sign, not unlike the Hollywood sign, at the top of a hill—white from a distance, but yellow on the sides close up. The piece is about the relation of the work to space and the perspective of the viewer, but there’s no interaction between the work and its environment; it sits in a clearing, framed by nature. It could be anywhere. Slightly more interesting but falling squarely into the old activist ecological art mold are Theodoros Zaferiropoulos’ “How Far Have We Gone?,” which turns cross-sections of a tree trunk into stepping-stones eventually disappearing into a small lake; and Thomas Matsuda’s “Purification,” consisting of tree trunks burned to charcoal and displayed provocatively amongst the living trees in the arboretum. Both are visually interesting, but they take up an old rhetoric that sometimes makes my eyes glaze over, and it’s hard to read much meaning or self-consciousness into each about the environment of the arboretum itself.

You Are Beautiful collective at the Morton Arboretum.

This is where I owe a big citation to Chris Millers’ review of the show in New City; Miller points out that the arboretum is “more about science than aesthetics” and is therefore “an appropriate setting for conceptual art.” Just pushing it one step further, I would argue that the arboretum is slightly artificial, itself on the boundary between the human and the natural; many plants growing there are not native to the area, and the only reason that this refuge exists is because the Morton Salt company family are generous and progressive enough to create this sort of natural simulacra. We might even think of an arboretum as having the kind of “dissolution of boundaries” that Wang discusses… and I wish more of the work had commented on this liminal, weird environment in which their environmental art would dwell.

Juan Angel Chavez' "Jimshoe," at the Morton Arboretum.

Juan Angel Chávez’s “Jimshoe” (named after a homeless man the artist met) seems more challenging. Built with found materials and resembling a cocoon as well as garbage, the piece holds—or possibly vandalizes—a tree that young visitors to the arboretum are encouraged to climb (the day I went, the work was framed off with an orange plastic fence). The work is closed, the tree is framed (twice over for me), and it’s hard to tell whether the piece would change much if the cocoon were surrounding an industrial swingset. Similarly, Letha Wilson’s “Wall in Blue Ash Tree,” while visually interesting—on one side, a smooth white wall with branches poking through; on the other, as though backstage, the unpainted and patchwork wood, and tree, supports for the piece–also doesn’t make any strong claims for nature/art relations or boundaries as such. What makes both pieces interesting visually has to do with the material relation between processed and raw wood, but I wanted more reflexivity about the boundary, about the framing process.

Letha Wilson’s “Wall in Blue Ash Tree,” at the Morton Arboretum.

Which brings me to the most unlikely suspect for the kind of thought-provoking, meta-aware praxis of environmental art people are looking for: a crochet-covered tree called “Lichen It,” created by Carol Hummel and a number of volunteers. It looks exactly as you’d imagine, but with garish colors in yellow, red, and purple that make the tree look diseased. It’s easily the most popular piece of art, the most photogenic, and the most funny (at least for people who are familiar with yarn-bombing and/or grew up with a plethora of throw pillows and afghans strangling their bedrooms) of any of the works in the show. The first time I saw it, I took some pictures for a couple posing in front of the tree and didn’t give it a second thought—until I walked fifty paces away and saw, in a groomed, manicured hedge with flowers growing in between, the same color combination of yellow, red, and purple. This garden was just as unnatural as the crochet, and the juxtaposition posed real questions to me about material, form, the way we frame nature in everyday life as well as art. In other words, it makes the invisible visible. “Nature doubly framed and overly implicated,” the show should read, and the kids would still have just as much fun.

Carol Hummel's "Lichen It" at the Morton Arboretum.

The show runs until November 27, and since I’m writing this delinquently late, you have probably already gone to see it if you were planning to. However, I’d urge you to go again, to see what happens to each work as the natural world, and its relationship to the work, changes.

Monica Westin is the former Deputy Editor and current contributing art editor to Flavorpill in Chicago, where she also regularly writes about art and theater for New City, Chicago Magazine, and the Huffington Post. A current PhD student in rhetoric at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Monica teaches courses on arts writing and new media in DePaul University’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse department.

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