Bad at Sports

Rant of the Week: Art Critics Suck Edition

Claudine Ise — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:59:37 +0000

Ah, I’ve been wanting to bring back this little Rant of the Week column for awhile now, but have been stymied by either a) lack of good material or b) lack of time to scour the internet in search of good material. But today’s rant is a two-fer, or a three-fer, or something…anyway it’s good, it’s still sorta fresh, and although it’s easy enough to find on your own via the art twit- and blogosphere I present the following, for those of you who are not already aware of the Jerry Saltz vs. John Yau smackdown.

Here’s some quick background: Last December Jerry Saltz wrote a column in New York magazine praising Jeff Koons’ Puppy as the art work of the aughts–or the naughts–or the whatevers!– and Koons himself as “the emblematic artist of the decade—its thumping, thumping heart.” Saltz goes on to argue that

All of Koons’s best art—the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century’s signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory—has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy. Puppy adds to that: It is a virtual history of art, recalling the mottled surfaces of Delacroix (albeit on ’shrooms), the fantastical fairy-tale beings of Redon, a mutant Frankenstein canine from Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, and the eye-buzzing Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein. As it emits the swirling amorphousness of Tiepolo and the pathos of Watteau, it is also a magnified, misshapen abstraction of Duchamp’s urinal—a similarly deliberate gesture of antic outlandishness, and one that, of course, was signed “R. Mutt.”

Koons’s work has always stood apart for its one-at-a-time perfection, epic theatricality, a corrupted, almost sick drive for purification, and an obsession with traditional artistic values. His work embodies our time and our America: It’s big, bright, shiny, colorful, crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized, fussy, twisted, and, let’s face it, ditzy. He doesn’t go in for the savvy art-about-art gestures that occupy so many current artists. And his work retains the essential ingredient that, to my mind, is necessary to all great art: strangeness.”

And so on. A few weeks later, critic John Yau responds to Saltz’s piece with an essay of his own in The Brooklyn Rail (where Yau serves as art editor), titled “The Difference Between Jerry Saltz’s America and Mine.“ Yau starts out with a reference to a bit by the late comedian Bill Hicks, one in which Hicks rips on Jay Leno for shilling Doritos, despite the gazillions of dollars Leno already has; the implied question being how much more cash does this bloated gazillionaire need that he has to sell us junk food, too? Yau says, of Hicks,

He believed that there are some things that you just shouldn’t do, and one of them was to be a spokesperson for bad or unhealthy products. I was reminded of Hicks’s routine when I read Jerry Saltz’s paean to Jeff Koons’s Puppy, which ‘assumed the form of a West Highland white terrier constructed of stainless steel and 23 tons of soil, swathed in more than 70,000 flowers that were kept alive by an internal irrigation system.’”

So, if I’ve got this right: John Yau likens Jeff Koons and/or his art (I can’t tell which, because Yau himself doesn’t distinguish between the two) to a “bad or unhealthy product.” Like a bag of Doritos with that weird chemical stuff they put in it that made some people accidentally poop their pants. Okay, I can accept this as an argument. But if I’m getting Yau’s full meaning, not only is Koons bad for you — you, yourself, are equally “bad” if you happen to be a writer and you choose to write about Koons or his art in anything other than vilifying terms.

At least, that’s what I took away from Yau’s opener. And also from his closer, which goes as follows:

“I have a confession to make. I didn’t see Puppy. I didn’t feel like I had to. (Okay, I didn’t see Cloaca either, and for the same reason.) I think that there are some things you shouldn’t do, and promoting Jeff Koons is one of them.”

Let’s run through that last sentence again, just to make sure we’ve got it right: “I think that there are some things you shouldn’t do, and promoting Jeff Koons is one of them.”

Oh…kay. We’ll bracket for a second the fact that what John Yau calls “promoting” others might prefer to call “assessing”….but whatever, Mr. Yau: I gotcha. Art critics should not write about Jeff Koons because…it just shouldn’t be done. Because Koons makes bad art. Which, by extension, means his art is bad for you.

But wait – maybe I don’t really understand Mr. Yau’s argument as well as I thought I did, because on second, third, fourth and fifth thought he seems to think that his own read of Koons’ work is somehow the equivalent of objective fact. That just because Yau sees Koons’ vacuum cleaners, skin diving tanks, basketballs, and cast liquor bottles in the shape of cars as having in common the fact that they are all “containers of dirt, air, and liquid: shit, flatulence, and piss” that that is indeed what they are. And that if Yau sees in the polished surface of Koons’ Rabbit an exemplification of the “act of withholding,” then, so it is, end of story.

But that’s just it: Yau’s reading is a story, a critical narrative, one that relies on metaphor to make meaning. It’s just one of hundreds of competing takes on the work of Jeff Koons, but it’s by no means the reigning one. Now, I happen to find much of Yau’s take on Koons’ work to be compelling and at times fairly persuasive. But let’s not confuse a persuasive argument with, like, “The Truth” or anything. It’s a read, it’s John Yau’s read, some may buy it, some may spit it out like a bag of rancid Doritos, but it ‘aint such a great argument that not buying it means you’re a “shill” or “bad” or you want to kiss George W. Bush’s butt or anything. It’s art criticism, for Goodness’s sakes–one can certainly read a work of art politically, but shouldn’t the resulting rhetoric be of a higher sort than the divisive talk we watch on Fox News every night? Do art critics really need to stoop that low in order to get their points across?

Yau seems to think so. By linking his critique of Koons and Saltz to the sins of the Bush years (oh yes, he does, go read the thing for yourself), Yau pushes his argument way past reasoned critique into hyperbole and hysteria. He strays a bit too far from the text, as it were, and makes the sad mistake of getting viciously personal in his characterization of Saltz, which seems uncalled for, to say the least.

But oh, it all gets even better, because Jerry, Jerry isn’t any more successful at taking the high ground when his turn comes. On his Facebook page, Jerry calls Yau “dickish” and “a terrible art writer” (I think that particular entry has since been removed, but I found a screenshot preserved for posterity via the link above) and uh, rails right back at him for being “SO incoherent, rambling, self-satisfied, priggish and irrelevant.” Take that, Paco!

The real “heat” generating this argument, with its nasty name-calling on both sides, comes from an all-too familiar source of friction. Whose dick is bigger, Yau’s or Saltz’s? Let’s swing ‘em around some and see! Please. Guys, take it from this chick: you both look pretty small from where I’m standing.

This post has been edited by the author to remove numerous swear words that were unnecessary to getting her point across. No swaggering going on over here, nah uh.

Episode 232: Picturing the Studio

Admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:00:48 +0000

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This week Duncan and Richard talk to Michelle Grabner and Annika Marie about Picturing the Studio and among other things whether or not anyone does four studio visits a day. Go check out the show, even the art I disliked was interesting.

Lifted from SAIC:

This exhibition explores the richly complex politically- and psychologicaly-charged notion of the artist’s studio today. With works by over 30 artists spanning the past two decades, this exhibition also includes several specially designed installations undertaken by artists on site. Curated by Michelle Grabner, SAIC, and Annika Marie, Columbia College, “Picturing the Studio” is presented in conjunction with the College Art Association’s 98th Annual Conference in Chicago, February 11-13, 2010. It is made possible in part with funds from the College Art Association and the Illinois Art Council, a state agency.

Artists include: Bas Jan Ader, Conrad Bakker, John Baldessari, Stephanie Brooks, Ivan Brunetti, Ann Craven, Julian Dashper, Dana DeGiulio, Susanne Doremus, Joe Fig, Dan Fischer, Julia Fish, Nicholas Frank, Alicia Frankovich, Judith Geichman, Rodney Graham, Karl Haendel, Shane Huffman, Barbara Kasten, Matt Keegan, Daniel Lavitt, Adelheid Mers, Tom Moody, Bruce Nauman, Paul Nudd, Frank Piatek, Leland Rice, David Robbins, Kay Rosen, Amanda Ross-Ho, Carrie Schneider, Roman Signer, Amy Sillman, Frances Stark, Nicholas Steindorf, and James Welling.

Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam Launch “The Great Poor Farm Experiment”

Interview with Adam Ekberg

Claudine Ise — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:07:18 +0000

Cocktail umbrella and Bic lighter, 2009

Adam Ekberg has a lovely exhibition of new photographs up at Thomas Robertello Gallery that closes Saturday, February 6th — that’s tomorrow people! — so if you haven’t seen it, you should do the proverbial rush right out and see it thing before it closes. After that, get yourself over to the MCA, where Adam’s work can be seen in the group show Elements of Photography, up through April 6th. I had a brief virtual chat with the very busy Mr. Ekberg this week, and am most appreciative of him for taking the time to answer my questions.

CI: In the brief statement that accompanies the portfolio of images on your website, you mention ‘lens fallibility’ as one of the means by which you activate otherwise ordinary environments. Could you elaborate a bit on how the notion of fallibility operates in your process?

Aberration #12, 2006

AE: These pictures have been discussed as referential to spirit photography but I like to think of them more in terms of the camera malfunctioning due to misuse. Pointing the camera at the sun is generally recognized as a bad idea on the level of putting balled up tinfoil in the microwave. If you are to go to a camera shop you can even purchase a variety of lens shades that prevent this effect from happening. I love the mistakes within images, Diane Arbus had a tendency to have vignetting in her prints and Nan Goldin always used flash in an elementary way which made her work feel even more personal and intimate.

CI: Your recent bodies of work, such as the Lesser Deities series and the photographs that comprise In the Between at Thomas Robertello, are anti-monumental in terms of the gestures that are made as well as their physical results. Yet the contemplative potential in some of these images is vast. So I wonder if your approach to image-making is in some way meant to provide a modest counter-argument to the monumental aspirations that characterized a lot of contemporary photography over the past decade - I’m thinking of photographers who work big and “think big” like Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, even Thomas Demand’s perfectly executed little replicas (which are more mechanical than they are magical).

AE: It is not a counterpoint to those people but more a failure of mine to make formal photographs which registered the way I wanted them to. The more formal photography I made in the past was a response to a set of personal experiences around loss and death but I felt that those images ended up feeling about photography first and everything that I was interested in second. I concluded that this failure was partly a result of seriousness of subject matter and the monumentalizing of this iconography with photography. Recent images address the same set of concerns but I use things that I have on hand in my apartment to point to a presence despite the absence of a person in the frame. It is my hope that these images are about everything I am interested in first and photography second.

Untitled Hospital Ceiling, 2004

CI: Could you tell us a bit more about how this transition came about? For example, in your earlier work, such as the series Hospital Ceilings (2004) and Funeral Home Parlors (2003), the idea of “the trace” of human presence is handled much differently than it is now– in the Funeral Homes images, for example, the trace is implied rather than activated.

AE: These pictures of funeral parlors were made when I was working as a C.R.M.A. doing hands on palliative care. I worked in a Victorian house on the coast of Maine converted to an assisted living/ hospice house for people with AIDS. I was making that work as a response to being with people when they died. I was interested in the organic death in contrast to all of the institutions around death. Everyone dies differently, it is totally unlike what I thought it would be and its organic quality is quite different then the institutions and systems that surround it. The formal pictures of funeral parlors illustrate the serial quality of those institutions.

Untitled Funeral Home Parlor, 2003

In my work now I attempt to point to the same set of concerns but in a more specific, idiosyncratic and humble way. I arrived at this working methodology by reducing the elements in the funeral home pictures until arriving at an economy of means.

CI: A 2007 photograph from the Lesser Deities series is titled “Nickel and Dime Magic.” When I look at the work in the Lesser Deities series in particular I can’t help but think that if all you had was a camera and a lighter, you could still manage to find (or conjure) magic in a jail cell. I’m curious, what does ‘magic’ mean to you, in terms of your work, certainly, but also just in terms of life as we live it?

AE: Magic to me means that the sum is greater then the parts. Certain things when separated from their general context are transformed. Lately I have been doing a set of images of light from a flashlight cutting through an empty space. The icons in this image are really banal- flashlight, old chair and mirror. In contrast the potential read of this image which involves light existing in a void is symbolically rich.

Untitled, 2010

CI: The cop-out final question, but still, I’m genuinely curious: Tell us which artists you admire (dead or living) and why.

AE: Roman Signer
Philip Lorca Dicorcia
Diane Arbus
Peter Fischli & David Weiss
William Eggleston
Cindy Sherman
Abelardo Morell
Marcel Duchamp

Uta Barth

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

This is a super short list. I love these people for a vast array of reasons.

Nickel and Dime Magic, 2007

Match, 2007

Hamza Walker Wins $100,000 Ordway Prize

Claudine Ise — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:23:33 +0000

Hamza Walker, Director of Education and Associate Curator of The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago

Congratulations to Hamza Walker, curator at The Renaissance Society — it has just been announced that he’s won the Ordway Prize from Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum! Walker, along with artist Artur Żmijewski, will receive an unrestricted award of $100,000. Here’s the text of the announcement in full:

“Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum have announced Hamza Walker, the Director of Education and Associate Curator at Chicago’s Renaissance Society, and Polish artist Artur Żmijewski, as the recipients of the Ordway Prize. An international panel of Nominators and a Jury of leading arts world figures-led by Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum-selected the Ordway Prize recipients from a global pool of nominees. Walker and Żmijewski will each receive an unrestricted cash prize of $100,000.

“Working with artists is a reward in itself, and I feel privileged at being so generously honored for my passion. I wish I had a grand vision for the award, but as it stands, the bricks and mortar of my life are in severe need of tuckpointing,” said Hamza Walker.

“I was happy to be nominated for the Ordway Prize, but winning was quite unexpected. My art is important to me, and now it has been recognized by others in a significant way and that pleases me immensely. The considerable amount of money that comes with this award will surely help to realize my future projects,” said Artur Zmijewski.

The Ordway Prize is named for the naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway. The prize acknowledges the contributions of a Curator/Arts Writer and an Artist whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art, but who has yet to receive broad public recognition. Nominees for the Ordway Prize are midcareer talents between the ages of forty and sixty-five, with a developed body of work extending over a minimum of fifteen years.

Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts, noted that “the award honors past achievements, but it is equally dedicated to future promise. Hamza Walker’s and Artur Żmijewski’s work investigates and reveals the possibilities of humanity and is dedicated to celebrating life with all its limitations and aspirations. Both use their immeasurable talents to expose the frailties and conundrums that challenge mankind’s psyche, all the while giving hope to the viewer via the enlightenment offered by their difficult and honest questions.”

Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum said, “It’s very easy to fall in love with the young and reward them for being young. It’s a different thing to reward contributors like Hamza and Artur who have quietly and steadfastly dedicated their lives to the continuity of creativity. The Ordway Prize is a way of saying thank you for holding down the fort and moving the conversation forward; thank you for changing the way we understand the world.”

The Ordway Prize is the only unrestricted international award of this caliber that recognizes a Curator/Arts Writer and it is also one of the most generous awards given to a contemporary Artist. Past Ordway Prize recipients have included: Curator/Arts Writer Ralph Rugoff and Artist Doris Salcedo (2006); and Curator/Arts Writer James Elaine and Artist Cildo Meireles (2008).

ABOUT THE RECIPIENTS

Ordway Prize Winner: Curator/Arts Writer
Hamza Walker was born in 1966 in New York City, and currently lives in Chicago, where he is the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. He is also on the faculty of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He has written for Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett, and Artforum, and penned catalogue essays on Darren Almond, Rebecca Morris, Giovanni Anselmo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Moshekwa Langa, and Katharina Grosse. Walker’s most recent exhibition at the Renaissance Society, a solo exhibition of photographs by Chicago-based artist Anna Shteynshleyger, is currently on view through February 14, 2010. He will also organize the first United States exhibition of works by Antwerp native Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven in 2010. Past curatorial projects at the Renaissance Society include “Several Silences” (2009); “Black Is, Black Ain’t” (2008); “Kateřina Sedá” (2008); “Meanwhile, in Baghdad” (2007); “All the Pretty Corpses” (2005); “A Perfect Union…More or Less” (2004); and “New Video, New Europe” (2004). Walker currently is on the boards of Noon, a literary annual publishing short fiction; Lampo, a new and experimental-music presenter; and The Chicago Public Art Group. Prior to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker was the Public Art Coordinator for the City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs. He has served on numerous panels locally and internationally, and is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

Ordway Prize Winner: Artist
Artur Żmijewski was born in 1966 in Warsaw, Poland, where he currently lives and works. Most recently, Żmijewski presented a selection of works for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Projects 91″ series. His latest film, Sculpture Plein-air. Swiecie 2009, which premiered as part of “Projects 91″, records one of a series of staged workshops organized and documented by the artist in which the participants are invited to create art. Żmijewski asked seven artists from different parts of Poland to collaborate with steel workers in Swiecie, a small city disengaged from the contemporary art world, to create and install public sculptures. The project was modeled after similar collaborations between artists and workers in Elblag, Poland, in the late 1960s, which were inspired by utopian goals of a classless society and the union of art making and industrial technology. In 2009, the Cornerhouse presented the artist’s first major United Kingdom survey. In 2008, Żmijewski showed Oko za Oko (An Eye for an Eye) in the New Museum’s “After Nature” exhibition. In 2007-08, he was a DAAD Artists in Residence in Berlin, Germany. Żmijewski participated in Documenta 12 in 2007, and Manifesta 4 in 2002. In 2005, his film Repetition was shown in the Polish Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. In 2000, he was given the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L’Arte Prize for Oko za Oko. He studied at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1990-95, and received his diploma from the studio of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski in 1995.

ABOUT CREATIVE LINK FOR THE ARTS
Creative Link for the Arts is a privately funded nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating partnership in philanthropy and forging innovative relationships between art institutions, nonprofits, corporations, and philanthropists interested in supporting the arts and creating a cultural legacy.

ABOUT THE NEW MUSEUM
Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a leading destination for new art and new ideas. It is Manhattan’s only dedicated contemporary art museum and is respected internationally for the adventurousness and global scope of its curatorial program. For more information, visit newmuseum.org.”

Call for Proposals | Version 10 Infrastructures and Territories

Megonli — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:38:27 +0000

It is that time of year again. Version is now looking for submissions for their 10th festival entitled Infrastructures and Territories. It will be taking place from April 22nd to May 2nd. Deadline for all submissions is March 1st, 2010.

via Lumpen:

“Version 2010: now seeking proposals and presentations about tactics and strategies that help sustain our communities, find better uses of our resources, and maintain and expand our networks. For eleven days and nights, we will explore the best practices and boldest failures in interventionist, participatory, and collective social, political, and cultural practices. This year’s theme is presented in order to bring together groups and individuals seeking additional methods for connecting our networks and creating solid foundations for the practice of art, education and social activism well into the next decade. We want to use this opening during the current economic and political crisis to expand and amplify our shared ideals, values and strategies for survival and expansion.

Join us to amplify micro-movements and nowtopian ideas!

The festival will include: community gardens, historical re-enactments, antiwar organizing, an art parade, an artist-run art expo, a catalog of interventionist strategies, networking between independent groups and spaces, inflatable art, one-night exhibition formats, anti-oligarchy planning sessions, DIY and DIT media, the Terminator Bar, a mobile silkscreen printing cart, a national WPA-inspired public poster project, a free school, impressive musical performances, boring theoretical nonsense, mapping projects, pop-up galleries, Korean/Polish BBQ and your proposals.

If you would like to participate in this year’s festival please view our Program Platforms.

When you are ready you will be able to submit your proposal online via this website.
All submissions are public.”

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The Art of the Steal Documentary

Christopher — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:55:09 +0000

“The Art of the Steal” chronicles the long and dramatic struggle for control of the Barnes Foundation, a private collection of art valued at more than $25 billion. In 1922, Dr. Albert C. Barnes formed a remarkable educational institution around his priceless collection of art, located just five miles outside of Philadelphia. Now, more than 50 years after Barnes death, a group of moneyed interests have gone to court for control of the art, and intend to bring it to a new museum in Philadelphia. Standing in their way is a group of Barnes former students and his will, which contains strict instructions stating the Foundation should always be an educational institution, and that the paintings may never be removed. Will they succeed, who has the right to direct the future of the collection?

Tuesday’s Video pick | RuPaul

Megonli — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:50:09 +0000

Last night was the season premier of RuPaul’s “Drag Race”. While I do not have cable, I did find myself sifting through videos from the 90s and was a little surprised when I watched his 1993 video for Supermodel (You Better Work). Maybe I was too young to remember the campy greatness that is this week’s pick but this video is so amazing. Especially if you think of what was popular at the time, typically grunge and gangster rap.

If you saw the header, yes that is RuPaul as both Michelle and Barack Obama

“You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis and Kathie Lee; I don’t care! Just as long as you call me.”

Saya Woolfalk Lectures Tuesday at SAIC

Claudine Ise — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:23:49 +0000

Saya Woolfalk

The School of the Art Institute kicks off its current Visiting Artists Program with a lecture by Saya Woolfalk tomorrow, Tuesday February 2nd, at 6:00pm. From the Visiting Artist’s Program website:

SAIC alumna Saya Woolfalk (MFA 2004) will present her ongoing project No Place, a multimedia, fictional future that reworks tropes of sexual, racial, and gender difference. The characters and stories in Woolfalk’s constructed reality evoke travel narratives, science fiction, and the rhetoric of anthropology to investigate human possibilities (and impossibilities). Through diverse forms of installation, video, painting, drawing, performance, and sound, she reflects on human life and its future through configurations of biology, sociality, and the environment. Woolfalk’s selected exhibitions include PS1/MoMA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; and Momenta Art. She has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan, Yaddo, Sculpture Space, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Presented in collaboration with SAIC Alumni Relations.

Want to bone up on Woolfalk’s work prior to the lecture? Here are some links to get you started:

Artist’s Website

Interview with Saya Woolfalk on Art21 Blog

Saya Woolfalk Artist’s Page at Zg Gallery, Chicago

Saya Woolfalk Performs No Place: A Ritual of the Empathic at Performa 09

Woolfalk’s lecture will be held at the SAIC Columbus Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive.

Saya Woolfalk, The Lighthouse.

This round of VAP lectures is especially strong. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for these upcoming SAIC Visiting Artist Program lectures (click here for further details):

Doug Aitken, Monday, February 22nd, 6pm

Amy Franceschini, Thursday, March 11, 6pm

Doris Salcedo, Monday, March 15, 6pm

Matt Keegan, Tuesday, April 6, 6pm

Ryan Trecartin, Wednesday, April 14 and Thursday, April 15 at 6pm

Episode 231: J. Morgan Puett

Admin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:47:38 +0000

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This week Bad At Sports debuts its collaborative partnership with the online journal Art Practical. Scott Oliver, who has previously been on the show with the Collective Foundation, sits down with J. Morgan Puett. They discuss Mildred’s Lane, a collaborative project with Mark Dion, the revolutionary politics of garments, and reclaiming the term migrant worker. An abridged transcript of the conversation can be found at Art Practical .

Hooshing and the Nexus of Clothing: A Conversation with J. Morgan Puett
By Scott Oliver

I met J. Morgan Puett during her Bridge Residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts this past fall. I knew little of her or her work, but was immediately struck by her warmth and charm, and by the language she used to talk about her practice. She refers to it as “a practice of being” in which “an ethics of comportment” defines any engagement she might have—with students, collaborators, participants, fellow artists-in-residence. But also with her son’s teacher or her car mechanic. Terms like “hoosh,” “workstyles (a play on lifestyles),” “algorithm,” “emergent,” “entangled,” and “complexity” pepper Puett’s speech, effectively communicating her expansive approach to art. She doesn’t often mention “social practice,” perhaps because her work has been socially engaged all along. But the term is also insufficient, so is “installation art” (a form her work often resembles). Puett’s work is difficult to summarize. It is sprawling, layered, immersive and open-ended. It is as intellectually rich as it is sensually pleasurable. It is narrative, process-based and participatory. In short, it is meant to be experienced, yet none-the-less fascinating to discuss.

Scott Oliver is a sculptor and project-based artist living and working in Oakland, California. He has written catalogue essays for Southern Exposure, The Present Group, and independent curator Joseph del Pesco. Oliver co-founded Shotgun Review, an on-line source for reviews of Bay Area visual art exhibitions, with del Pesco in 2005 where he was a regular contributor until 2008. He is currently working on an audio walking tour of Oakland’s Lake Merritt.

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Top 5 Weekend Picks!

stephanieburke — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:45:42 +0000

Hooray!

1. Dialogue: Presented by IRUS art (an intercultural collaborative art show between artists in Iran and the U.S.) at Co-Prosperity Sphere -

The crew down at Co-Pro are always working hard to put on events that are relevant withing AND beyond our little world of art. This is obviously no exception. And I quote, “Two teams of artists, one in Tehran and another in Denver have assembled under one name: IRUS (Iran – United States). Starting with our mutual respect for art, we have established collaborative projects between our groups.” Friday night is the show reception, and Saturday is the discussion panel.

Co-Prosperity Sphere is located at 3219 S Morgan St. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm. Discussion is Saturday from 5-7pm.

2. M155 4m3r1c4 at Noble & Superior Projects –

Now, I will admit, I am rather partial to Noble and Superior Projects already, but that said, this show absolutely deserves a place in this weekend’s Top 5, regardless of my previous experience with ‘em. This show is a double whammy with Patrick Bobilin and Cara Anne Greene. Patrick’s work, and I quote, “M155 4m3r1c4 (Miss America), is a loose narrative which uses documentation and fiction together to create a broad self-portrait doubling as cultural commentary,” and involves video, photographs, and documents relating to the M155 4m3r1c4 narrative. And Cara Anne Greene, beautiful, beautiful Cara Anne Greene will be serving up cullinary complements to the story of M155 4m3r1c4. AWESOME!

Noble & Superior Projects is located at 1418 W Superior St 2R. Reception is Friday 6-10pm.

3. Closing Reception for Byron Roche –

Byron was one of the first gallerists I met in Chicago, and he set the bar high. He is endlessly knowledgeable and endlessly kind. It is, therefore,with a sad heart, that I make this addition to the Top 5. After 16 years with a public gallery, Byron is closing his space. He will continue to operate as a private art consultant, but no longer will there be that comforting island of Byron Roche Gallery in River North. No more box wine, no more Sweetheart Jewelry. So come down and say goodbye, this is your last chance.

Byron Roche is located 750 N. Franklin. Closing reception is Saturday from 11am-6pm.

4. Artist Talk with Adam Ekberg at Thomas Robertello Gallery –

The first of two not-to-be-missed artists’ lectures happening this weekend. The be-bearded countenance of Mr. Ekberg will be discussing his work at Thomas Robertello Gallery, amid his wall mounted work. And I quote, “continuing with the use of lens-based phenomena, humble celebratory gestures, and primitive constructs, Ekberg further develops two distinct bodies of work; images created in the woods or nature, and images using his apartment as stage set.” Be there or be square!

Thomas Robertello Gallery is located at 939 West Randolph St. The artist talk begins at 3pm.

5. Artist Talk with Aspen Mays at HPAC

The second not-to-be-missed artists’ lecture this weekend. Aspen Mays will be discussing works from her From the Office of Scientists exhibition currently on display at HPAC. And I quote, “Mays activates the office cubicle as a site for information production and general inquiry where “big ideas” are generated.” Sweet!

Hyde Park Art Center is located at 5020 S. Cornell Ave. The artist talk begins at 2pm.

Alison Ruttan’s “Four Year War”

Claudine Ise — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Alison Ruttan, Honey Bee Watches Unseen, from "Four Year War" series

Alison Ruttan has posted images on her website from her new “Four Year War” series, part of her ongoing Primates project. (I was able to observe one of the shoots for this project last summer, which I blogged about here). She’s now edited the resulting photographs into a narrative of sorts, including storyboard-like sequences and dramatic close-ups. Of the series, Ruttan has said:

“From the beginning of my primate projects I have been collecting individual and group histories from scientist and zookeepers that I have met or read about in my research. These narratives often seem epic in scale and uncannily human in the way individuals interact with each other in their quest for power and position. The project, “The Four Year War at Gombe” is based on Jane Goodall’s discovery that Chimpanzees wage war and are capable of long-range planning and strategic thinking. Goodall’s group of chimpanzees lived peaceably together for many years before splitting into the two communities of Kesakela and Kahama. It seems that like us, the bloodiest feuds and civil wars are always waged against those whom we have the closest ties to. It is unknown what the specific causes were of the split and violence that followed. Perhaps it was an uneven distribution between males and females, a shortage of food or possibly a long-standing grudge. If this title, “The Never Ending Story” wasn’t already taken, it would have seemed apt for this story that so closely mirrors our own history.

This large photographic and video project consists of related groupings of photographs and video that tell the story of this broken community. The series is divided between happy pastorals and a series of 9 murders that occurred between 1973 and 1977 at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. While not literal in intent I have used much of Goodall’s research photographs and notes to reconstruct the history of this group. The participants in this project were all family, neighbors and friends who generously gave of their time and I think had some fun learning about primate societies and their behavior.”

The images look pretty incredible thus far. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing this series in printed format, in a larger setting that allows for the full impact of the narrative to unfold. (More images can be found on the artist’s website).

Gigi Kissing Mustard in Moon Valley

Sherry

De Is Badly Wounded

Going Apesh*t with Alison Ruttan

Typeface

Megonli — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:55:35 +0000

Directed by Justine Nagan, Typeface takes a look at the obsolete techniques used to create and print wooden type. The film centers itself on The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum located in Twin Rivers Wisconsin. Housed in Hamilton’s factory the understaffed museum gives tours, hosts workshops, and attempt to archive the boxes upon boxes of wooden type that are piled about. In the opening scenes we get an overview of the museum while on tour with former Bad at Sports guests the Post Family. Throughout the film we weave in and out of mostly Chicago studios as, printmakers/graphic designers discuss their love for wooden type. The Walker Art Center recently caught up with Nagan and spoke with her about making the film:

W: Why make a film about an obsolete technology?

JN: I became fascinated with exploring the changing importance of analog technologies in our digital age. There is this theory that as we as a society sit at our computers all day, in the off hours, tactile and sensual experiences become all the more important. People are craving things with texture that they can hold in their hands—whether it’s knitting or playing guitar… Then there’s the whole nostalgia factor: LPs vs. ipod, film vs. video, letterpress vs. inkjet.

W: Some obsolete technologies manage to take on a second life by addressing a different need or being adopted by a new (sub)culture in a different context. Do you think a revival or re-interpretation is inherent to any successful preservation movement?

N: I think evolution is key to preservation. Re-imagining and adapting technology, while maintaining the elements that made it interesting in the first place, ensures longevity of the medium. I think the new interest in letterpress and craft is sustainable. The current styles of letterpress may fade, only to be re-invented again by some future generation.

Typeface will be playing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

The Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street
Chicago, IL 60601-3505
(312) 846-2600

January 29th—8:00pm
January 30th—3:00pm, 6:15pm
January 31st—4:45pm
February 1st—6:15pm
February 2nd—7:45pm
February 3rd—6:15pm
February 4th—7:45pm

For more info please check out the Gene Siskel Film Center or Typeface’s official site.

Random Posts

Economic Showdown & Man vs Machine All in One Day

Christopher — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:02:05 +0000

Well if you are in America today you are largely going to hear about one of two things, either President Obama’s first State of the Union and the new expected focus on the Economy in place of War or Healthcare or Apple announcing it’s new iTablet and the statement that you can buy them in Apple stores right after the announcement.

Either way the current economy is going to be the catchword of the day and in the Art world that goes double since it is largely dominated both by the current economic trends and Apple products.

So here is hoping for the best in both areas but it is an interesting contrast happening. Which has more sway? Government run economic plans or Market run announcements?

To help visualize the current debate we present a rap video since it is ever fitting of a discussion about fools and their money. It’s John Maynard Keynes vs Friedrich von Hayek in a showdown over what works best (the fact that BaS is based in Chicago, home of Hayek & the Chicago School of Economics should not be considered an endorsement of either party lol ).

Enjoy

Tuesday’s Video Pick | Sharon Hayes

Megonli — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:59:48 +0000

This week’s pick is not for everyone. Clocking in at about 20 minutes we bring you Sharon Hayes’ keynote address for the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice.

via Creative Time

“Sharon Hayes discusses how moving to New York City in the early 1990s and witnessing the AIDS crises and artistic community has forever affected both her life and artistic practice during her keynote address at the 2009 Creative Time.”

Los Angeles County Museum of Art | Reading Room

Megonli — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:24:34 +0000

Yesterday LACMA launched a new addition to their website that showcases out of print and hard to find publications. I haven’t had a chance to check out a lot of the books that are currently up for their first series “Southern California Art of the 1960s and 1970s” but; I am really excited to see what they will be offering in the following months.

via Culture Monster:

Dubbed the ‘Reading Room,’ the new site is intended to make books, catalogs and other literature available that would otherwise be difficult to access, according to LACMA. The museum said that the site currently features 10 rare art catalogs, including ‘Six More,’ the catalog for LACMA’s 1963 exhibition on L.A. pop; “Billy Al Bengston,” a rare 1968 monograph; and the surveys ‘Late Fifties at the Ferus’ (1968).

Among the features of the site are the ability to browse the publications page by page, perform text searches and download the volumes in PDF format.

For more info check out LACMA’s Reading Room

Friday’s Link Roundup

A Q & A with Richard Rezac

Claudine Ise — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:17:38 +0000

Untitled (09-01) 2009 cast bronze and aluminum 18 x 28 x 6.5 inches

Richard Rezac has a wonderful exhibition up right now at Rhona Hoffman Gallery (through February 2, 2010). In addition, the Modern Wing of the Art Institute is currently displaying six Rezac sculptures (spanning the years 1985-2008) from its Collection — they’ll be on view through early May. Rezac had a survey exhibition at the Gahlberg Gallery of the College of DuPage last year (the exhibition’s catalogue, which contains an enlightening essay by James Yood, is available for download on the Gahlberg Gallery’s website; just click on the link above to go there).

Richard generously agreed to answer a few questions about his latest works via email. I’m very grateful to him for taking the time to provide such illuminating and thoughtful responses.

You won the Rome Prize fellowship in 2006, which enabled you to travel to Italy to study Roman architecture in greater depth. To what extent did having a more sustained, daily interaction with Roman architecture impact your work?

That 11 month experience in Rome and in numerous parts of Italy has had a strong, and I trust, lasting effect, though because it was so substantive, I still do not know the extent of the influence. My purpose was to study the Baroque architecture of Francesco Borromini, whose 11 or so buildings are all in Rome. My approach in taking this in was naturally one of an artist, not an historian, though I certainly read what I could about his work and that of his immediate predecessors and those he influenced, especially Juvarra and Guarini in Turin.

Untitled (08-02), 2008. Cast bronze and aluminum. 22.5 x 10 x 9.5 inches.

The great pleasure was in seeing Borromini’s architecture (and eventually a large group of drawings in Vienna) on a near weekly basis, allowing me to feel aspects of his accomplishment and study many details. I was also privileged, by the American Academy’s offices, to gain entry to parts of his buildings normally off-limits.
The effect on my sculpture is not so clear to me, other than a continuation of some complexity – several materials or layers or juxtaposed forms within one work resulting in a, perhaps, more broad, gently argumentative, dynamic. In the long arc, though, of my sculptural language from the past 25 years, there has been an evolution from simple and concrete form to more extended, thin, linear and colored form, so the desire to be around Borromini’s architecture was in some sense anticipated by my work before I went there.

Along with architecture, I often think of interior design when viewing your sculptures. Some of them, for me, bring to mind things as mundane as contemporary kitchen and bathroom fixtures! After coming home from viewing your show, the kitchen faucets, towel racks, and cabinet knobs in my house–the particular geometries of their placement and their relationship to my body–all of a sudden stood out for me. Even the old-fashioned diamond tile in my bathroom floor started to “dance” for me in new ways. Am I being overly-specific here, or do you yourself ever draw inspiration from commonplace domestic interiors?

There is certainly a resemblance to ornament, facets of interior design objects, furniture, and architectural detail, such as moldings, in my sculpture of the past 6-8 years. I attribute this mainly to geometric form – the basic language in which my sculpture originates. Perhaps most manufactured applied design objects rely on the ease of elemental, efficient geometric forms. So there is an overlap, to be sure, between the common domestic accessories often handled or those elements produced in multiples as in tile flooring and the appearance of some of my forms or combinations.

I consider most of my sculpture, and all of those that are untitled, to be abstract and they may only arrive at some suggestiveness or association to domestic elements when completed and then exist in our space. I have rarely begun a work with the intention of representing another existing form, if anything it is in pursuit of a persona or complex phenomena. I am most interested, in as much as is possible for me, in starting with nothing and finding a satisfying form or arrangement.

Unititled (08-06) Painted cherry wood and aluminum 25 x 25 x 1.25 in.

Your sculptures are typically scaled to the human body. The size, scale, and the perceptual shifts they offer makes them especially suitable for installation in domestic spaces; living with an artwork allows for a very personal and yet ever-changing relationship with it over time. I’m curious to know if you are interested in making large-scale public sculptures?

"Frame," 2006 Glazed terracotta, brick and limestone Governor's State University, Illinois

Over the past 20 years I have been engaged in public work proposals and completed commissions: sculpture, urban plazas, landscaping and applied design (fencing and transit shelters). There were three temporary outdoor site works (Atlanta, Amsterdam and Chicago), but the only permanent work is “Frame,” 2006, at Governors State University in Illinois.

It is true, though, that the primary focus for me has been studio work, and also true that human scale tends to be my measure for sizing, and to some extent, the forms themselves. The obvious advantage to making studio work is the open-ended time and control that I can exercise – the greater personal nature that can be embedded because excessive engineering, material restriction, the near-necessity for outside fabrication and public input are not involved.

"Frame," 2006 Glazed terracotta, brick and limestone Governor's State University, Illinois.

The advantage and satisfaction that comes with a realized public project, though, is the challenge in answering it appropriately by tailoring the work to a specific place and history, its permanence, and the wide audience that can experience it. Even in the public works that I have made or that reached a final proposal stage, in every instance they rely on human scale: low to the ground and spread out, as in a garden, or in reference to domestic architecture space, or as in the example of “Frame,” the horizontal row of mid-sized windows which are set at my eye-level and represent a picture wall, as in Victorian oval frames, directed toward the prairie landscape in two directions. (This wall is situated along the main path from the Metra station to campus, so commuters walk past and in a parallel orientation to the sculpture).

Can you tell me a bit about the floor piece titled “Aesop,” 2009, that’s currently on view in your show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery? In the gallery press release you mention that it is an abstraction of a portrait of Aesop you encountered while in Rome.

I had the privilege of visiting the Albani Villa in Rome and its private collection of antiquities on two occasions. In one room was this figure, found at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli during the Renaissance period (this family collection dates to the Renaissance, and supplied the Louvre, British Museum and Glyptoteck in Munich with many of their Roman marbles). We were told by the guide/gardener of the estate that this hunchbacked figure was a court entertainer at Hadrian’s Villa, but it seems more likely, as posited by Historians, to be a portrait of Aesop, who in the literature was reportedly severely distorted physically. This sculpture’s face was calm and noble, with full beard, and his limbs were shortened and tucked in front with an original fig-leaf exposed. His back side was arched, collapsed and visually abstract, resembling an Arp sculpture. When I saw it first I was thrown off-balance, and when given the opportunity to make a second visit (and we were only given about 10 – 20 seconds in each room before being coaxed out), this sculpture was the one work that I most wanted to see again.

"Aesop," 2009. Cast hydrocal, silk and aluminum. 17.25 x 24 x 20.5 in.

So much of the impact was with the circumstance: surreal in some respects, and the very brief time allowed (strictly no photography, but I did make a brief sketch on the second trip). The sculpture’s compression and sheer beauty and seeming contradiction was profound to me, so when I embarked on my sculpture, it was only at mid-course that I felt a kinship – nothing literally descriptive was involved. For several months it only included versions of the lower hydrocal forms, then later took on the aluminum restatement of its orientation along with the cutting of one hydrocal element, and lastly the silk as a connector between the two initial materials and forms. As much as anything, “Aesop” now conveys to me a sympathy to the Roman period of sculpture.

I noticed that in the show at Rhona Hoffman, the orientation of the sculpture Untitled (09-08), 2009 was different than indicated on the drawing study (Study for Untitled 09-08), 2009. Do drawing and sculpture offer two different, and equally acceptable, possibilities? Are your drawing studies ultimately meant to exist independently from their corresponding sculptures?

The two drawings for sculpture that you cite are somewhat unusual by their disorientation. The sculptures did turn at an angle before their completion, and in resolving their particulars, the sheets also were hung at the same diagonal to guide the way. Similarly, some drawings become stitched with a second sheet, as the placement migrates or the size grows during its formation. I have always made one or several drawings as studies for every sculpture over the past 30 years, so drawings always function as the lead in defining the sculpture. As they are working drawings, I try not to compromise their purpose by making them more acceptable as two-dimensional compositions, either during or at the end of their use, so many are not interesting enough to present publicly.

Untitled (09-08) Painted wood and aluminum 24.5 x 18.25 x 2.5 in.

Those that I do frame and exhibit, by some element of chance, do offer, I think, an acceptable two-dimensional composition and can add an instructive entry to the sculpture and my process.

Do you listen to music in your studio? If so, may I ask what kind?
I do, but rarely when I am in need of concentration. The music I listen to is almost entirely classical, stretching from Early Music to mid- twentieth century, inclusive of many composers. I am an enthusiast in this area, but not knowledgeable. And I do attend concerts regularly, and this is one reason why I so appreciate being in Chicago with its access to great music performance.

Episode 230: NADA part 3 – Brendan Fowler & Paul Gabrielli

Admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:55:59 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_230-Fowler-Gabrielli.mp3)
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This week: The third of our NADA shows from Miami. This time Amanda and Duncan talk to Brendan Fowler and Paul Gabrielli.

Brendan Fowler (born 24 March 1978 in Berkeley, California) is a musician, best known for his work under the moniker BARR, based in Los Angeles. He is a regular performer at The Smell, a DIY music venue. He also co-runs Doggpony Records and is a co-editor of ANP (Artist Network Program) Quarterly – an Orange County based arts and culture publication funded by RVCA. He has recently played at the New York performance space, The Kitchen, and has been featured in Artforum Magazine. In 2006 Fowler curated a show at David Kordansky gallery in Los Angeles. New England Roses, a band consisting of Fowler, Sarah Shapiro, and Le Tigre’s JD Samson, released their debut, Face Time With Son, in 2005. His new electronic-folk-pop band, Car Clutch, with Ethan Swan, had their debut performance in fall of 2006.

New York-based artist Paul Gabrielli offers work of quiet maximalism. He approaches sculpture as an act of appropriation, assimilating other media into one comprehensive system. While Gabrielli’s practice can be seen as a continuation of his minimalist lineage, his specific objects are infused with a thwarted eroticism of both desire and restraint.

Gabrielli’s works straddle the boundaries of sculpture, photography, work on paper and video, experiments in form designed to encapsulate the physical manifestation of a single thought, with all its lyricism and paradox, desire and restraint. His pieces represent both interior visions and the very real destruction of the well-defined and corporeal.

Off-Topic | Molly Schafer and Jenny Kendler

Guest — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:28:29 +0000

Off-Topic invites artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers to discuss a subject not directly related to the practice of making art. We would like to welcome Molly Schafer and Jenny Kendler who are tag teaming this post with , “Snakes on a Plane, Lemurs on a Plate: How Human Beings’ Actions Can Have Unexpected Consequences for the Natural World”. Both Molly and Jenny are Chicago based artists that have collaborated on numerous projects. Their most recent endeavor is The Endangered Species Print Project, which has recently been featured on numerous blogs. ESPP raises money through limited-edition art prints for critically endangered species.

Snakes on a Plane, Lemurs on a Plate: How Human Beings’ Actions Can Have Unexpected Consequences for the Natural World

Molly Schafer and Jenny Kendler

If you’ve heard much about Guam, you most likely know it as the U.S. Territory that was the site of the Battle of Guam. In 1944, the U.S. took back possession of this tropical West Pacific island from the Japanese, who had occupied it following the attack on Pearl Harbor. You may have also heard the interesting story of a Japanese soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, who was discovered by hunters in 1972, having lived in a cave for 27 years.

Although Shoichi’s story is probably one of the strangest to come out of Guam, during his 27 years living in Guam’s forests, he would have been an intimate witness to one of the island’s saddest stories.

Image © IKONOS Quickbird

Let us imagine our unlikely protagonist on the night of the American invasion (with no accounting for exact historical accuracy): Our Shoichi hears shouts from the beach as the Americans land, and being a simple kind of nature-loving guy, and wanting no part of this fuss, he grabs a canteen and a flashlight and makes his way deep into the forest, nimbly leaping over lianas and roots down the forest paths he’s grown to know during his time on the island. He heads to a cave that he had found some months before, where he’d frequently camped out and laid in some supplies, most importantly, a pair of binoculars. You see, our make-believe version of Shoichi is an avid bird-lover. So, while our Shoichi was evading American troops in his grottoed refuge and keeping his ears open for the sound of shots or approaching footsteps — as darkness settled heavily on the steamy tropical night, he listened with a keen pleasure to the rich chorus of tropical birdsong filling the air.

Image © DAWR

If you or I were to walk Shoichi’s favorite paths through Guam’s forests today, we’d have a very different experience. Sure, you’d see all the hallmarks of tropical forests worldwide: lush vegetation, a truly huge variety of living growing things, moisture hanging thick and low in the warm tropical air — but then as your ears tuned into the sounds of the forest and your eyes strayed upwards, you’d notice two very unusual things — two strangely interrelated changes to the forest, with a single historic origin. Yes, you might hear the sound of insects, the sound of leaf litter being crushed under your feet, but you’d hear no birds. And as you looked upwards through your binoculars, to spy out these unusually silent birds, you’d catch a sticky web across your face, and wiping it away, you’d notice that there were webs everywhere. Guam is a tropical island now devoid of the music of birdsong and filled with enormous colonies of spiders. Clearly, these are the signs of an environmental imbalance — but what could be the cause?

The short and strange answer is, the U.S. Military — and a single reptilian species, Boiga irregularis, known by the unassuming and only slightly descriptive common name: the Brown tree snake.

Image © USGOV

At some point during or just after WWII, Brown tree snakes, a species not native to Guam, came to the island, and finding a habitat that suited them quite well, they rapidly multiplied. Though no one knows the exact method of delivery, and there is a dispute as to whether the stow-away was in the wheel-well of a military aircraft or a the cargo hold of a Navy vessel, and it is also unclear as to whether it was a group of snakes, or a single pregnant female — what can not be disputed, is the absolutely devastating effect that this plain-looking snake was to have on the avifauna of Guam.

Of the 12 beautiful and varied species of native forest-dwelling birds of Guam, 10 of them are now completely gone from the island. Almost half of these species or subspecies were found nowhere else in the world. Two of the species killed off by this introduced snake, the Guam Rail and the Guam Kingfisher, do still exist in captivity, but in small numbers.

Image © The Smithsonian’s National Zoo

Though the Brown tree snake arrived with the Americans who reclaimed Guam in the 40’s, it wasn’t until the 60’s that people began to notice the birds disappearing — and even then, no one could figure out the cause. Since the snake is well-camouflaged and hunts at night, it wasn’t until the 80’s that the the government was able to finger Boiga irregularis…and by then it was mostly too late.

Image © Ken Ilio

But how was one unassuming tree snake able to cause so much damage, you may ask? As an island, isolated from mainland species, Guam formerly had no tree-dwelling predators. The sad fact of the matter is that when the Brown tree snake slithered up to a Guam Flycatcher, a Cardinal Honeyeater or a Nightingale Reed-Warbler, the birds simply lacked the instinct to fly away. The snakes’ neurotoxic venom, aggressive nature, and predilection for eggs did the rest.

Image © US Fish & Wildlife

Image © Kurt W. Baumgartner

But what about all those spiders, you say? Though no one knows for sure, it is suspected that the spiders rose up to occupy the niche that the birds once did. Many of the extirpated birds were no doubt large consumers of insects, and since the insect population on Guam appears to have remained the same, the absence of birds seems a likely explanation for the spiders ability to flourish in such large numbers, dominating the forests as the new top insect predator.

So is that where the trickle-down effects end? If you were a very savvy researcher named Haldre Rogers from the University of Washington, and you walked those same trails where we followed in the footsteps of Shoichi, yet another indirect effect of snakes on a plane might occur to you. The subtle, yet very worrisome thing that Rogers noticed is that the forest itself seemed to be suffering with the loss of it’s birds. Because birds are often key distributors of seeds, for 60+ years, the trees of Guam’s forests had been gradually losing a key component of their life-cycle.

Seeds need to be spread away from their parent tree, a task to which birds are naturally suited. In addition, many seeds must pass through the digestive system of a bird in order to germinate. Rogers and her colleagues estimated that 60-70% of Guam’s tree species need their seeds to be consumed and dispersed by birds. The team compared Guam’s seed distribution to that of Saipan, a nearby island with a mostly intact bird population. According to Rogers, “The magnitude of difference between seed dispersal on Guam and Saipan is alarming because of its implications for Guam’s forests, and for forests worldwide experiencing a decline or complete loss of birds.”

The logical conclusion is, upsettingly, that in the near future, Guam’s forests (and other forests where many bird species have been lost) could be transformed from a healthy diverse mix, to isolated patches of related trees — a change which would have irreparable and disastrous consequences for the ecosystem as a whole.

Image © Chris Lobban

The one bright spot of this story may be that, after many years, some of the captive-bred Guam Rails are finally being released into the wild, and with some small success. In one 54 acre portion of forest, the snakes’ population has been significantly reduced via trapping — and snake repopulation prevented with a perimeter barrier. Being flightless, the Rails stayed in the no-snake zone, and chicks were produced, but the permanent status of the Rail on Guam remains to be seen. Since Guam Kingfishers fly, and therefore can’t be kept in a snake-free zone, today, they can still only survive in captivity. (A note of interest for Chicagoans: both the Lincoln Park and Brookfield Zoos participate in this captive breeding program.) For now, thanks to one medium-sized brown snake, spiders and silence dominate the canopy.

But, really, you may say, let’s not cast the Brown tree snake as a Disney cartoon villain here — they’re just snakes, doing their thing. Yes, no one really likes a plain-looking venomous snake that gobbles up songbirds — but what happened in Guam is, of course, much more complicated. The larger lesson here is that human beings now play (and have for some time) the role of the keeper of the balance in the natural world. The birds of Guam did not become extinct because of a snake, they became extinct because of us.

The accidental introduction of a tree snake to an island during a World War, causing the loss of the island’s forest birds, the rise of vast colonies of spiders, and the possible eventual collapse of the forest itself, is just one of many startling examples of how seemingly small or inconsequential human actions can have wide-ranging and serious consequences…

And sometimes human beings do much larger things that trickle down and affect the natural world in an incalculable amount of small ways. (Climate change, anyone?) Actions that we didn’t guess would precipitate such consequences, have affected, and continue to affect, habitats and species all across the world. Some are ‘accidental’, such as the incident on Guam, but some, though just as difficult to anticipate, are much more blatant and egregious.

As you read this, environmental crime is devastating the forests of Madagascar, putting the species who live there, like lemurs, in serious danger of extinction. The rate of destruction has been staggering. In only a matter of months, poachers, including the notorious “Rosewood Mafia”, have devastated endangered tree and lemur populations in Madagascar’s national parks. This ecological catastrophe is lining the pockets of a few, while ensuring poverty for many.

Image © David Haring/Duke University Primate Center

Four years ago DreamWorks’ animated film “Madagascar” earned over 47 million dollars on opening weekend in the US. Both “Madagascar” and the 2008 Sequel “Madagascar: Escape to Africa” won Kid’s Choice Awards. Lemurs were becoming a household name, so to speak, appearing on children’s snack foods and starring in PBS shows. The unique island of Madagascar, long held sacred by naturalists and conservationists, was coming out to the general US population.

This was, of course, a welcome development. The more people learn about and appreciate the island’s flora and fauna, the more they will want to help protect it — and it’s no secret that Madagascar needs all the help it can get. Since the arrival of humans, less than 2000 years ago, Madagascar extinctions include more than 16 species of lemur, (one of which was the size of a gorilla), a pygmy hippo, giant tortoises and the famous Elephant Bird, who at 10 feet tall was the largest land bird to ever walk the planet.

Today Madagascar remains a biodiversity hot spot; 80% of the species that occur on the island live nowhere else on earth, and a great deal of these species are vulnerable to extinction. 90% of the island’s natural ecology has already been destroyed by logging, mining, and slash and burn agriculture. The IUCN Red List currently includes 472 species at risk in Madagascar, among them are some of the most threatened species on the planet. Many of these species, such as the Silky Sifaka lemur, live in Marojejy National Park, a last refuge for plants and animals that once thrived throughout northeastern Madagascar. Today, nearly all of the area surrounding the park has been deforested.

Image © Jeff Gibbs

A thriving eco-tourism industry sprang up around international interest in Madagascar and it’s most-irresistible lemurs. Eco-tourism is the major contributor to Madagascar’s $390 million-a-year tourism industry, and has made wildlife conservation a priority in the region around Marojejy National Park, generating much needed revenue. Local people have financially benefited as a direct result of the ecotourism industry, one of few options for a sustainable income in the area.

The future was looking bright for the biologically unique island of Madagascar and it’s unusual plant and animal inhabitants…

Then, in early 2009 the President of Madagascar, Marc Ravalomanana was ousted in a political coup by opposition leader Andry Rajoelina with the assistance of Madagascar’s military. In Ravalomanana’s own words: “I never resigned. I was forced to hand power over, at gunpoint”.

Next, Marojejy National Park, a World Heritage Site, closed for the first time in history. Park officials posted the following notice, dated March 20, 2009, on their website:

“It is with great sadness that we report the temporary closure of Marojejy National Park to tourism. The closure was deemed necessary by park management due to the lawlessness that has descended over the SAVA region during this time of political unrest in Madagascar, and the resultant looting and destruction which is currently occurring within the park. In particular, gangs of armed men (led primarily by foreign profiteers in conjunction with the rich local mafia) are plundering the rainforests of Marojejy for the extremely valuable Rosewood that grows there”

Image © Rachel Kramer

Park officials posted more upsetting news on April 10, 2009:

“We have also recently discovered that large-scale, organized bushmeat hunting is being conducted in old-growth rainforests near and within the newly protected area of Makira. Under the control of an individual who claims huge tracts of rainforest as his own, every type of lemur in the area—including indris and the highly endangered Silky Sifaka—are hunted down by packs of trained dogs and killed. The meat is smoked on site and sold throughout the region—even as far away as the nation’s capital city, Antananarivo.”

With no central government to enforce the law, it is open season for poachers in Madagascar’s forests. Illegal activity that had previously been seen on a smaller scale, such as sustenance hunting of bushmeat by locals, has evolved into organized criminal “mafias” wreaking systematic destruction. Hundreds of endangered lemurs, notably the Golden-crowned Sifaka, Silky Sifaka, and Crowned Lemur, have been illegally poached through this organized bushmeat trade to be sold as delicacies.

Image © Fanamby/Photo by Joel Narivony.

In August, Conservation International released grisly photos of the lemur bushmeat industry. “More than anything else, these poachers are killing the goose that laid the golden egg,” said Russ Mittermeier, president of Conservation International. “Wiping out the very animals that people most want to see and undercutting the country and especially local communities by robbing them of future eco-tourism revenue.”

At particular risk is one of the rarest mammals on earth, the Silky Sifaka lemur. The most recent population count (taken before the coup) estimates between 100-1000 Silky Sifakas remain in the wild. These lemurs have a highly specialized diet and have never survived in captivity.

The loggers are also hunting and eating the lemurs as they pass through the forests, cutting down old growth rosewood and ebony trees. Over 100 species of ebony and 47 species of rosewood that are found on Madagascar are unique to the island. Rosewood is most commonly used to produce furniture, guitars, and luxury flooring. Between January and August 2009, an estimated 23,325 – 46,650 endangered rosewood trees, worth over 100 million US dollars, have been illegally harvested from Marojejy and Masoala National Parks. Some rangers in Madagascar’s parks were reported to have abandoned their posts in fear for their personal safely.

Image © Bernard Gagnon

More news came in from Marojejy National Park’s website on April 10, 2009:

“Extremely disturbing reports continue to filter out from villages near the park entrance—villages now too risky for us to access. Tons upon tons of rosewood are being cut from Marojejy and the entire SAVA region, all apparently bound for China. Loggers have their run of the park, operating large camps, conducting business openly in broad daylight, threatening villagers and bribing local policemen. The Rosewood mafia, based in Antalaha, is powerful, organized, and dangerous.”

As Madagascar is reportedly a poor nation, some may deem these environmental crimes necessary for human survival; a way to earn much needed income. However Erik R. Patel, PhD candidate at Cornell University who has been studying the Silky Sifaka since 2001 has said, “Harvesting these extremely heavy hardwoods is a labor intensive activity requiring coordination between local residents who manually cut the trees, but receive little profit, and a criminal network of exporters, domestic transporters, and corrupt officials who initiate the process and reap most of the profits.” In fact, Fanamby secretary general, Serge Rajaobelina, noted “The middlemen pay about 1,000 ariary [53 cents] [per lemur] and they sell them for 8,000 ariary [$4.20] to the restaurants and markets in the region.” In the end, the local peoples’ ability to prosper, which is linked to their environment, suffers right along with the endangered trees and lemurs.

Many experts maintain that Madagascar’s future prosperity depends on eco-tourism. Tourists who hire local guides, pay park entrance fees, and buy local handicrafts, provide an economic incentive to conserve the remaining natural resources for a country whose rural citizens are among the world’s poorest.

Image © Stuart Pimm

Sadly, millions of dollars in foreign aid slated for development to reduce poverty, as well as to support environmental programs in Madagascar, is being withheld until the political instability is resolved. At a time when it is most needed, funding is not available.

Repercussions of the political coup include Madagascar’s suspension from the African Union and the African Growth and Opportunities Act. A formal statement of protest was issued by the International Community and Conservation Partners Resident in Madagascar, and on November 4^th the US House of Representatives passed the Blumenauer Resolution condemning the illegal plundering of natural resources in Madagascar.

Despite this international outcry, a decree issued on December 31^st,by Rajoelina has legalized the export of illegally harvested rosewood logs.

As of January 18^th, the political turmoil in Madagascar continues. Rajoelina has rejected power-sharing agreements signed in 2009 with the leaders of Madagascar’s three main political parties. According to the U.S. State Department, Madagascar may soon be facing sanctions if the atmosphere of intimidation and unilateralism continues.

The effects of Madagascar’s political unrest on the natural world have been ruthless and immediate…so far. The long term effects on the forest, as we see on Guam remain unknown.

Marojejy National Park reopened in May 2009. Although the illegal logging in the park continues you are encouraged to visit and support the island’s ecosystems, where you may still see some of the world’s most charming and unique animals.

Image © Duke Lemur Center

As grand in scale as a nation-changing political coup and as seemingly inconsequential as a little brown snake in the wheel-well of a plane, human beings’ actions can have vast and surprising repercussions for the environment and the species with which we share our planet. The lesson for us all is to pay more attention to our actions, large and small. When you throw out a six-pack ring you might be ensnaring an endangered turtle 2,000 miles away. When you purchase a new rosewood dining set, you may be funding eco-criminals. The information is out there though, and it’s just a few Wikipedia articles away. So look it up; you never know when the butterfly-effect may originate with you.

About the posters:

Molly Schafer and Jenny Kendler met while studying for their MFAs at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The two artists have collaborated on many projects relating to their mutual interests in the intersection of Nature and Culture — and general nature-geekery. Most recently, they have created The Endangered Species Print Project, which raises money through limited-edition art prints for critically endangered species. They also write a blog for ESPP, which will keep you up-to-date on all kinds of great nature nerd-ness.

Got a response to this post? Let us know! Email your comments to mail@badatsports.com. We’ll feature thoughtful responses to issues generated by our posts in our Letters to the Editors Feature on Saturdays.

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Top 5 Weekend Picks!

stephanieburke — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:03:31 +0000

Hello again, my lovelies. So, as I was sayin’ on my gallery crawl blog, I was a little worried Monday when I started putting the listing together. At that point it was looking a little bleak. Thankfully that situation has remedied itself. It’s always nice when the weekend picks are relatively easy, and this weekend there is so much good stuff that picking was easy, it was whittling down that was hard. Here are a few places that still look awesome, but didn’t make it to the Top 5: Visions from a Foxhole at Pritzker Military Library, Rune at Ben Russell (dude, get a website, please! or if you have one, tell me where it is), We Are the World at Roots and Culture, and Ethan Greenbaum and Katrin Sigurdardottir at The Suburban. This is seriously the Alt. Space Weekend! As an odd testament, not one opening (that I could find) in River North. So go out, support your local project spaces, alternative spaces, apartment galleries, garage galleries, corners-of-living-rooms-with-art-badly-hung-in-them places, and enjoy the (inevitable and awesome) cheap beer. SALLY FOURTH!

1. ChicagoLand at PeregrineProgram

So I saw Daniel Lavitt out in the streets last weekend and asked him about the show. I’d seen the announcement card around (you’ve probably seen it too, him staring Godzilla-style through a tiny window), but wasn’t sure exactly what the hell was going on. Well, my friends, this stuff looks like a whole pile of awesome! I love miniaturized work, it’s always a bit creepy and awkward. For this work, Lavitt is not only miniaturizing Chicago, he’s doing it to culturally and personally significant places AND wiring them along an economic gradient. I’ve never been to this space, so I’m super stoked on seeing a new venue and Lavitt’s new work.

PeregrineProgram is located at 500 W Cermak Rd, #727. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

2. Artist Run Spaces Tour 2010: Plisen/Bridgeport (sponsored by HPAC)

I don’t know how many of you got to go on the West Side Apartment Gallery Tour last year. It was organized by HPAC along side the Artist Run Chicago madness they had going on (madness in the good way). Well, HPAC is bringing the tour back. I remember at the end of the West Side tour, as we sat munchin’ in the backyard of MiniDutch, everyone was talking about doing it again, and it looks like they have. On HPAC’s website it says this is the “first” Artist Run Space tour of 2010, so perhaps we have many to look forward to. For this round, the tour is hitting the Pilsen/Bridgeport area and visiting Antenna Gallery, Ben Russell, The Chicago Art Department, Co-Prosperity Sphere and Second Bedroom Project Space. The tour is free, and leaves from Café Jumping Bean (1439 W 18th St.) at 11am Saturday morning. Be there or be…well…lame.

3. Four Names at Barbara & Barbara

Barbara and Barbara love you. And they love photography. Or at least that’s how it looks. This show, featuring, you guessed it, four artists, consists of work that is slightly dark, slightly whimsical, and a whiplash of color. Above is one piece featured in the show: “Wild Love” by Helen Maurene Cooper. An perhaps this time they’ll have more minty cupcakes. Mmmm, tasty. The show features photographs by Eric Bessel, Helen Maurene Cooper, Grant Ray, and Jennifer Ray.

Barbara and Barbara is located at 1021 N. Western. Reception is Saturday from 7-11pm.

4. The Hills Have Thighs at The Hills Esthetic Center

And I quote: “The Hills Have Thighs features a mini-retrospective of Michael Kloss.” I guess this solo show was curated by his friends, and consists of drawings, sculptures, and collages. I couldn’t find his website to see what his other work looks like, but sounds like it could be interesting. I’m really interested in this show because it’s in a new space, and I love checking out new spaces. They have a tendency to pop up, then go flat, so often that I try to make it as soon as I hear about one. And I quote, yet again: “THE HILLS ESTHETIC CENTER is a newly developed artist-run space located in the depths of Chicago’s Western Corridor…[c]ome watch as we throw our proverbial hat (beer hat) into the ring of Chicago Alt-spaces.” Sound intriguing? I think so. Or maybe it’s just the mention of the beer hat. Either way, I’m giving the Hills a go.

The Hills Esthetic Center is located at 128 N. Campbell. Reception is Friday from 6-10pm.

5. Quarterly #1: MinimumixaM at Pentagon Gallery

You get an odd sort of two’fer on this one. The show is being held at Pentagon Gallery, a (relatively) new space down in Pilsen. It is not, however, the Pentagon crew curating the show; they’re are still busy working on their new exhibition Tragically Hip Kids on a Couch (just kidding, mostly). No, it is actually the newest incarnation of 12 Galleries taking over the Pentagon Gallery space for their first quarterly exhibition (guess they’re more like 4 Galleries now). The lineup of artists looks promisingly good: Eric Fleischauer, Chris Edwards, Xavier Jimenez, and Liz Nielsen. And with three curators (Nicholas Cueva, Dan Gunn, Heather Mekkelson) I can only assume the show’s been gone over with a fine tooth comb. But you know what happens when you assume… But really, this is probably going to be an awesome show, I’ll see ya’ll there.

Pentagon Gallery is located at 961 West 19th St. Reception is Saturday 7-10pm.

Gene Siskel Film Center | Mine

Megonli — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:35:29 +0000

In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast it left about 80% of New Orleans flooded. Approximately 1,800 people lost their lives and almost five years later the community is still rebuilding. There are not too many subjects that I continue to source out documentaries on but Katrina and it’s aftermath has produced some great docs including Spike Lee’s epic, “When the Levees Broke”, and the 2008 winner for best documentary at Sundance, “Trouble the water”. With her debut feature film Geralyn Pezanoski adds to the growing collection of films about Katrina but instead of first person narratives Pezanoski focuses her lens on the pets left behind. Aptly titled “Mine”, which won the SXSW Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature, showcases not only the rescue efforts of these animals but the complications many pet owners faced when they returned home.

When the citizens of New Orleans were forced to evacuate, many people were not able to take their pets with them. According to the film, “in New Orleans alone, an estimated 150,000 animals died in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.” Many of the animals that did survive were rescued by volunteers and shipped to shelters throughout the country. We meet a handful of people that have returned to New Orleans and are looking for their pets. Pezanoski does a great job finding subjects and shows a great amount of compassion when portraying their grief. 80-year-old Gloria was forcibly removed from her home after it had flooded because she would not leave her black lab named Murphy Brown. Jessi James rescued 20 members of his family but had to leave his dog JJ, short for Jessi Junior, behind. As they search for their dogs, all of which have been adopted by new families, we see the same discrimination that has been associated with the Katrina events unfold again. Many of them cannot afford lawyers to help with the return their animals. But, we soon see complex networks of people from around the country form that handle the daunting task of searching for one pet at a time.

The story itself is rather touching and as an animal lover it was hard not to be moved to tears several times. With that being said, the film may rely too heavily on the emotion of its characters more so than the filmmaking. Poor editing mixed with half hazard framing were probably my biggest complaints technically. More than anything, I felt that the movie did not flow smoothly. There was so much build up during the first three quarters of the film the last part just felt too much like a neat package being wrapped up. Just as in many of the circumstances of Katrina the film touches on racism and classism but not enough. When a white lawyer criticizes a black woman for leaving her dog behind he jumps to the conclusion that she did not care about her pet. When in reality she was faced with getting her children and disabled mother to safety first. Even if Pezanoski wanted to avoid an in depth discussion on these subjects there were still issues I wish she touched on more. Who is considered an ideal pet owner? After years of searching do the victims of Katrina still have rights to claim their lost pets?

“Mine” directed by Geralyn Pezanoski
January 20th—6:15pm

The Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street
Chicago, IL 60601-3505
(312) 846-2600

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Contemporary Art, Collected Collectively

Claudine Ise — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:00:17 +0000

We all know about artists banding together to work as a collective, but who knew that art collectors could operate under similar principles? File this one in your ‘how to collect art even when you don’t have much money’ drawer: An article in last week’s Financial Times looks at group-owned art collections in London, New Zealand and Australia. Although clearly not for everyone, collective group purchases of artworks enable households that normally don’t make enough to buy substantial artworks to pool their money, purchase works voted on by the entire group, and then share custody of the piece as it rotates from home to home.

It’s fascinating to see how collective acquisition practices — not unlike collective art-making — encourage individual members to question their own assumptions about and habitual ways of looking at art. From the article:

“Anne Dekker, who has participated in two groups in Australia – one focused on contemporary artists and the other interested in indigenous art – says the fact that the work is owned collectively allows members to be more honest. “Friends who see the work at your house will engage in a more open discussion. It’s less subjective because it’s not a comment on your own taste.”

Robert Lee, of the London collective, believes appreciation of the work is enhanced by the fact that the various pieces look so different in each member’s home – one lives on a houseboat, another in a flat in the city centre, while others have houses in the suburbs ranging from small Edwardian terraces to large Victorian villas.

Rotating artwork around members’ houses is not without its problems, however. “Sometimes people get attached to a picture and don’t want to see it go. Sometimes we find people are reluctant to hang a work – we’ll find it sitting in a garage or a spare room,” says Betts. Tim Eastop says for that reason one of the London collective’s rules is that “even if there’s a piece that we don’t like, we have to hang it”.

Fox believes “it works best when someone has to hang something they hated. Nine times out of 10 at the end of the six-month hanging period they love it. They are confronted by something challenging every day.”

One London art-buying group, which calls themselves The Collective and even has their own website, purchased a work of performance art by Kathryn Fry titled “Home Suite,” and hosted rotating performances of it in each member’s home (see details of the piece on the artist’s website here).

Kathryn Fry, "Home Suite," performed for The Collective in London.

I especially like how The Collective channels the discursive rhetoric of social and collective art-making into the practice of art buying. On their website, The Collective states that they aim to:

nurture the collection of contemporary art in a domestic setting as a more affordable and socially inclusive activity
encourage adults, young people and children to build their knowledge of contemporary art by living with it, meeting artists, visiting exhibitions etc.
build bridges between new audiences, the art market and artists
help to grow a larger, more culturally diverse population of collectors
encourage direct support for emerging contemporary artists and curators.

I wonder if there are any similar groups like this in the U.S.? Wouldn’t it be great if someone started something like this in Chicago (hint, hint)?

Via @AiANews.

Buying Young: 10 Reasons to Start Collecting Art When You’re, Like, in Your Early Twenties.

Tuesday’s Video Pick | Something’s Got A Hold On Me

Megonli — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:30:31 +0000

I don’t think I have ever touched on this before but I love soul music from the 60s. It’s about one of the only things I listen to. For this week’s pick I couldn’t pass up this amazing video of Etta James, who I adore, just rocking it out on Something’s Got a Hold on Me. If your familiar with the her Chess Records release you will immediately see the differences in this performance. Often a belter, James turns it up on this one. I watched it at least five times in a row.

While we are on the subject of soul music I just wanted to mention my new favorite archival based record company who happens to be based in Chicago, Numero Group. I just picked up five albums from them and are so impressed with their, design, sound, and research. There are not too many people turning out records like these. If you are interested in soul music from the Midwest other than Motown I would highly recommend giving them a shot. Plus they recently published their first book, Light: On The South Side, which takes a look at the history of night clubs on Chicago’s Southside through the photographs of Michael Abramson. This year they will also be releasing their first dvd which features the work of Al Jarnow titled Celestial Navigations. Okay, that is all I should say without sounding like I am plugging them too much.

PUBLIC NOTICES.

Claudine Ise — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:15:03 +0000

We’ve received a few very interesting announcements and solicitations over the past few days, so we’re passing them along, in no particular order, in the hopes that one or more will be of interest to you. Read on:

1. Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Visual Arts Competition

Currently seeking submissions. The competition is open to artists, 30 and younger, who are currently enrolled in school in the Chicago metropolitan area. Click the link below for guidelines for the Visual Arts competition.

http://www.civicandarts.org/images/uploads/Visual_Arts_Guidelines_2010.pdf

This competition is a great opportunity for young artists to get their work noticed and to make connections with people in the art world. Past judges have included curators from the MCA, the Art Institute, etc. Angel Otero was a Visual Arts competition winner in 2007-2008. For more information, contact Susan Carlson at SPCarlson@gmail.com, or Gina Demke at civicandarts@ulcc.org.

2. Upcoming Slot for ThreeWalls TinkerTank Residency

Because of scheduling complications related to the recent renovations at ThreeWalls there is currently a 9 week window in the tinkertank residency program between March 1st and April 30th that they would like to fill. Residenc could take place during any portion of those weeks. Program fees are $150/week. From the website:

“The tinkertank self-directed residency offers creative thinkers and producers a supportive environment in the heart of Chicago’s West Loop gallery district. threewalls encourages applications from artists working in all disciplines, scholars researching projects in all fields, and other creative researchers working on projects that would benefit from 3-5 weeks of focused time in Chicago connecting to its rich history and lively community.”

3. Tour of Convenent Sanctuary

We received this one from artist and writer Bert Stabler, who emailed Duncan about a very interesting project/proposal he’s getting involved with. Stabler writes,

“I started atteding a Presbyterian church in Wicker Park, Covenant Presbyterian Church, in August 2008 (if you check out right here, that’s okay…. still with me?). The head pastor, Aaron Baker, approached Dayton Castleman, a fabulous local artist who attends Covenant, and myself about starting an art program, with the support of the church. For my part, I want to direct the resources, conections, and interests of the church into projects that resonate with things both many churchgoers and many Chicago artists do outside of doctrinal differences– like create and extend communities through projects, ideas, objects, food, etc.

In the interest of starting a conversation about that, and gauging interest among potential artist participants, Dayton will be leading an informal, informative, and intuitive tour of the Covenant sanctuary next Thursday, January 21st, at 8:00 pm. We would hopefully sit around (or possibly go across Damen to Danny’s) afterward to discuss some ideas of what we should pitch to the church. There is absolutely no conceptual limitation on the projects– they don’t need to happen on the church premises, they don’t need to touch on religious (or irreligious) themes, it doesn’t need to be restricted to artists from Chicago, it’s a modest but open-ended proposal right now.

One idea I’m currently thinking about is a tribute and retrospective to Flo McGarrell, an amazing artist with Chicago connections who was doing fantastic work in Haiti and died in the recent disastrous earthquake. Our church has a long-standing relationship with that nation and might be interested in learning from Flo’s work– and artists could also see some of what Covenant does in Haiti.

It’s not necessarily an event that calls for a teeming throng, but if you think you might want to come, and maybe even invite others, do send me an RSVP, s’il-vous-plait, Questions and comments welcome.”

Bert can be reached at bertstabler@ameritech.net.

4. SpiderBug Call for Submissions: “Exothermia & Shadow Play”

This one’s from Erik Brown:
“I once tried to give up lighting fireworks. I even made an “ode to fireworks”. I caved in one fourth of July and lit as many fireworks that were in arm’s reach. I have used them in some tailored pinatas, with caution. I love watching fireworks dearly and the next SpiderBug Film Screening is inspired by this admiration.

SpiderBug is pleased to announce a call for short films that focus on fire, light, fireworks, and/or shadows and darkness. For this screening, we are also interested in artists creating film/video pieces that can be viewed in an off beat manner; i.e. a video shown inside of a sculpture you create, a video projected in a small pool of water, etc. The additional video/film pieces will be included alongside the “Exothremia and Shadow Play” screening.

The screening date is late March/ early April- Location TBD

Deadline: Friday, March 12th

BTW –check out these cool animations by PES!

Links to the pinatas being planted with fireworks:

Submission guidelines:
Short films and videos under 10 min.
DVD, Mini-DV tape, downloadable files or VHS
Please include filmmaker’s bio and a short synopsis of the film,
& SASE if you’d like your work returned

Please mail to:
Catie Olson
c/o SpiderBug
2332 W. Augusta, #3F
Chicago, IL 60622

Questions or Answers?
shoot an e-mail to catieo@sbcglobal.net
www.spiderbug.org

Hot Topic Alert: Granting New Ph.D.’s in a Job Market That Sucks

Claudine Ise — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:35:40 +0000

There’s a really interesting discussion taking place on Tenured Radical right now about the merits of pursuing a Ph.D. when the job market sucks so badly and there is precious little likelyhood that newly minted Doctors of whatever will find a place in academia after graduation. Tenured Radical, aka Claire Bond Potter, is Professor of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut specializing in United States political history, queer studies, and the history of gender, sex and feminism. In a post titled “Playing the Blame Game: Or, How Should Graduate Schools Respond the the Bad Job Market,” Potter writes,

“While I am deeply sympathetic to those whose dreams of a teaching life are discouraged and perhaps dashed by a foul job market that gets only fouler, I am entirely unsympathetic to claims by disappointed job seekers that they have been lied to and bamboozled by the schools that admitted them to the Ph.D. because they were not cautioned at the very beginning of their education that they might not succeed in finding a tenure-track job.

“In fact, I don’t know a single form of professional education that guarantees its graduates a job, whether the market is good or bad, and why Ph.D. granting programs have a special moral responsibility to do this is unclear. But on the job wikis and the blogs there is an emerging consensus that the jobless should have received a waiver of liability with the letter of admission (which Brown University actually used to send its graduate students in English back in the sad old 1980s, and most of us who knew someone who received one were horrified by the practice.) Resentful job seekers , in other words, speak in the language of fraud rather than regret. This I find astonishing, given that an hour of research prior to applying, or accepting an offer of admission, could tell any prospective graduate student what their academic job prospects might look like six to seven years hence.”

Potter goes on to argue (quite persuasively, to my mind) that Ph.D. programs should not allow graduate students to matriculate within three years of having attained the bachelor’s degree, Ph.D. programs should consider devoting at least one year of graduate support to administrative labor, and and that professional associations, particularly in history and literary studies, need to think about accreditation of graduate programs. A lengthy, fascinating and often heated discussion about the issue follows in the comments section afterwards. The full post is definitely worth a careful read, especially if you’re thinking about pursuing a Ph.D. right now (the discussion, while not specifically touching on the art M.F.A. or Ph.d., translates quite readily to that issue too). Related: Duncan’s conversation with James Elkins about the Art Ph.d. on Podcast Episode 191.

(Via @briansholis).

Jonathan T.D. Neil on “professionalization” vs. “academicization.”

Episode 229: NADA Nuggets 2

Admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:33:53 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_229-NADA_Nuggets_2.mp3)
download

This week Amanda and Duncan rock the Miami area with a three-fer of NADA interviews with Ruba Katrib, Scott Hug, and Atsushi Kaga.

They surf the the tricky waters of “The Reach of Realism”, the space of design, art, and cool conceptualism, and what you get out of cute? Rock. Roll and love. With two brilliant young artists and a dynamite curator!

This is the closest I have come to blowing the Sunday posting deadline in years, damn you influenza!

Top 5 Picks (1/15 & 1/16)

stephanieburke — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:06:25 +0000

Ahoy again, me mateys! Thar be arts in them thar waters. Yarg! And for this week’s briny picks, we’ll be casting broad our ores…or something. Ok, enough of that. But really, we are a bit scattered about for this weekend’s picks. I’ll be driving my trusty Jeep round, dashing through the snow and such. Perhaps, I’ll see yo ass out there? And now…

The True and Trusty Top 5:

1. Matters at Golden

Golden Gallery has impressed me with their selection of work since they opened about a year and a half ago with my buddy Jill Frank’s work. This round looks like more of the same, in the good way. Opening this week is a solo show of Joseph Cassan. And really, anyone who can take Kleenex and a bloody Band Aid, put it together, and make me think of Caravaggio is worth a look in by book. Rock on, dear Golden Gallery.

Golden Gallery is located at 816 W. Newport. Opening reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

2. The Dog and the Wolf at Monique Meloche

I friggin’ love Laura Letinsky. ‘Nuff said. She’s having a solo show at Meloche’s joint. Go see the show.

Monique Meloche is located at 2154 W. Division St. Opening reception is Saturday from 4-7pm.

3. 4.01162010 at MVSEVM

Another numerically titled show from those great kids over at MVSEVM. This round, participants in the group madness include Karen Archey, Chris Bradley, Brian Dongarra, Dominic Paul Moore, Montgomery Perry Smith, and David Schafer. Probably no taxidermied squirrels or words in the bathtub this round, but lets see what awesome thing gets added to the list of weird shit from MVSEVM. Hooray!

MVSEVM is located at 1626 N. California Ave. Opening reception is Saturday from 6-10pm.

4. Armita Raafat at ThreeWalls

For their inaugural exhibition in their newly remodeled space, the ThreeWalls crew is putting on a solo show of Armita Raafat’s work. And I quote: “Referencing Islamic and Persian architecture, Raafat applies ornament in a state of ruin, often to the perimeter of the site, with patterns spreading, dripping and crumbling from corner to floor.” Just remember, no more Grolshc.

ThreeWalls is located at 119 N. Peoria. Opening reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

5. Surabhi Sarafat at Transistor Chicago

Not quite sure about this one, but it looked like it could be promising. And I quote: “Surabhi is a new media artist whose work brings together elements from experimental sound art, classical music, choreography and video art.” Oh, and it’s BYOB, so bring your flask along!

Transistor Chicago is located at 5045 N. Clarke St. Show/performance starts Friday at 8pm.

L.A. Museum Professionals Weigh In On Deitch as New MOCA Head

Claudine Ise — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:27:05 +0000

Jeffrey Deitch, via Los Angeles Times.

One aspect of Jeffrey Deitch’s startling appointment to the director’s post at L.A. MoCA that’s undeniably positive: it’s shining a harsh light on the role played by glitz, commercialism, business savvy and showmanship in today’s art museum–not to mention the contemporary art world as a whole. The appointment of a commercial gallery director to this top Museum post has put the issue front-and-center, fueling a much-needed public debate that’s taking place in the art press, the blogosphere, and even among friends and colleagues just sitting around shooting the shit. That fact alone is inspiring, even if Deitch’s appointment may, for many, represent something quite the opposite of that.

L.A. Weekly has a feature article on Deitch’s appointment that quotes Gary Garrells, former Hammer Museum chief curator and current chief curator at SFMOMA, a former MoCA curator (speaking anonymously, natch), Andy Warhol Foundation president (and ex-L.A. City Councilmember) Joel Wachs, and MoCA board chair David G. Johnson, and others on the pros and cons of Deitch-as-Director.

All of the critical quotes are provided anonymously, of course. The ex-MoCA curator, for example, had this to say about the Deitch to MoCA transition:

“I am not worried about his commercial background, and can’t really judge what sort of management skills he has, but it is his aesthetic judgment that to me is the biggest disconnect. There is no artist on his roster that MOCA would show (the only possible exception is his newest, Tauba Auerbach). His eye seemed fairly in tune in the ’80s with Koons and Basquiat, etc., but since then he has not been a reliable arbiter of what is important in recent art. Way more flash than substance.”

Read the Weekly’s full article, written by Tom Christie, here. (Via @artwhirled).

The Strange Disappearance of the Judith Rothschild Foundation

Claudine Ise — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:40:14 +0000

Judith Rothschild, Bar Harbor. Whiteline woodblock print. Via Artnet

If you are a contemporary art curator or historian, chances are good that you have either applied for or considered applying for a Judith Rothschild Foundation grant. Founded by Judith Rothschild, an abstract painter who died in 1993, the Foundation has until recently awarded grants to curatorial and scholarly projects that highlight the work of “under-recognized, deceased artists” with the strange provision that those artists must have died “after September 12th, 1976 and before March 7th, 2008 (15 years before the date of her will and 15 years after her death).” The Rothschild Foundation been an important, if relatively modest, funding source for professionals working on books, exhibition and archival projects that promote the work of lesser-known artists who never attained a great deal of fame in their lifetimes.

No more. The New York Times reported yesterday that the Rothschild Foundation has defaulted on all 17 of its 2009 grants — including $7,000 to include a work by Simon Gouverner in a group exhibition at Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago, and a $5,000 grant to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO, for an exhibition of Dan Christensen’s paintings.

From the Times article:

The grants were to have been used in the “coming year,” the foundation said when it announced them in March 2009. But the money — more than $100,000 in total — has yet to be received, and recipients who have tried to contact the foundation for information at its New York headquarters have been met by a disconnected number and returned mail. (The foundation Web site, judithrothschildfdn.org, still listed the address and phone number on Tuesday.) Harvey S. Shipley Miller is its sole trustee.

“When I wrote to the foundation in May, and the e-mail bounced back, that sent up a red flag,” said Wendy Snyder, director of the Sam Glankoff Collection in New York, which was promised $10,000 toward the conservation of works on paper by Mr. Glankoff, a painter. Ms. Snyder said she had been led to expect that the grant money would be paid by the end of spring; other recipients interviewed said they had expected their money in the summer.

In June, she said, when the number was still connected, “no one returned my calls.”

“Then months later,” she added, “I got no response from a certified letter. Mr. Miller was clearly missing in action.”

Miller says he suffered “a serious accident” in 2009 that prevented him from finishing the Foundation’s 2009 pending business, and took an interview with the Times while wearing a neck brace.

Some of the Foundation’s grantees have also expressed criticism of Mr. Miller for using the Foundation’s money to amass a collection (all owned by the Foundation and in its name) of 2500 contemporary drawings. Miller defended these actions to the Times, saying that the Foundation’s collection of contemporary drawings was more important to the Foundation’s work than the grants program.

Regardless, if the Judith Rothschild Foundation goes under, it will be a serious loss to arts organizations across the country. Although of late the grants this foundation awarded were typically in the $5,000 – $10,000 range, these sums of money were enough to make a serious contribution to exhibition budgets, indeed to make many of these exhibitions possible, given that the type of artists Rothschild favored wouldn’t typically have a big-budget show to begin with. Here’s hoping that Miller gets his act together quickly so that the Rothschild Foundation can continue on in some capacity. The Foundation’s mission, though narrow in scope, is more important today than ever.

Random Posts

Cloth Windows and Concrete Screen Doors: Two Robert Overby Sculptures On View in Chicago

Claudine Ise — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:00:18 +0000

Not acquainted with the work of Robert Overby? Here’s a chance to start. If you live in Chicago you can currently see two stunning examples of this still under-appreciated artist’s work (which isn’t surprising, since not only did Overby die in 1993, he stopped showing his artwork in commercial contexts early on in his art career). Concrete Screen Door, 1970, now part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection, is now on view in the Modern Wing, and Two Window Wall Map, 1972 has just been installed as part of a group show of gallery artists in the back half of Rhona Hoffman Gallery in the West Loop.

Robert Overby, Concrete Screen Door

Born in 1935 in Harvey, Illinois, Overby attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in the mid-1950s and later moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a graphic designer and taught advertising and graphic design. Whereas artists like Gordon Matta Clark took a surgical approach to architectural materiality, slicing into buildings in order to unearth new and previously impossible perspectives, Overby focused on the outer layer: making latex casts of building facades and canvas “maps” of building interiors that functioned simultaneously as images and recordings. In a 2000 Freize review of Overby’s retrospective at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Charles La Belle described the artist as “specializing in a brand of corrupted (he called it ‘Baroque’) Minimalism.” Writes La Belle:

“He instilled a highly personal, poetic, and social content into what were basically reductive, process-oriented works; marrying pure materials such as rubber, lead, canvas, concrete, resin, and wood to banal objects and abject spaces. All manner of crappy, dirty, broken things formed the subject of his work: socks and handkerchiefs, shattered windows and splintered doors, bondage masks, beaver shots, coat-hangers, cans, belly-buttons, and man-hole covers all cropped up during the high point of his production in the 1970s. With his been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me sensibility Overby wasn’t afraid to crawl in the gutter and the resultant work refused to accommodate itself to the expectations of market or spectator.”

Overby’s 2000 Hammer retrospective generated lots of attention and several follow-up exhibitions at galleries and smaller museums over the following couple of years, but for now, those who wish to learn more about Overby’s work will have to check with their local museum to see if any of this artist’s works are in its collections. Chicagoans have an opportunity to see two very good examples on public view right now; hopefully one day the Art Institute or the MCA may acquire one of Overby’s more spectacular (if such a word can be applied to this low-key grunge minimalist) latex pieces as well.

Two Window Wall Map, 1972, courtesy Rhona Hoffman Gallery

An American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps

Megonli — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:24:27 +0000

Map charting Robert Frank's route while shooting The Americans

During the month of January the Gene Siskel Film Center hosts a series that spotlights new works of documentary films in a series called, Stranger Than Fiction: Documentary Premiers. For this month we will check out a couple of films including Mine, Prodigal Sons, and this week’s pick, An American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps.

Directed by Philippe Seclier, An American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps documents the filmmaker’s attempt to capture scenes from Swiss photographer Robert Frank’s seminal work The Americans. Published in 1959, the book first came under criticism before it was heralded as a body of work that portrayed a complex portrait of American life on the cusp of the 60s. Beginning his journey after winning a Gugenheim Fellowship Frank traveled 15,000 miles documenting a side of America that typically was not portrayed in photography at the time.

While meeting with friends and collegues we get a better idea of how the artist worked. Primarily editing from contact sheets and often throwing away unwanted negatives Frank appeared to have an intuitive approach when it came to selecting his frames. A scene that really stands out in the film happens near the beginning when we get a chance to see the mauquette Frank put together for the first edition. It’s worn down and dirty but the object almost feels as if it reflects many of the subjects within the series, humble, dignified, and underrepresented.

I have to give Seclier some credit, he knows how long to make a doc. Clocking in at only 60 minutes, the film, although filmed with a handheld (which I hate), quickly moves through the American landscape. It is unclear if he visited every location from the book but after viewing a handful it would be hard to show all without feeling repetitive. Although we walk away with small stories about Frank’s travel it is not a particularly powerful portrait of the artist. Instead, we are left with the notion of changing landscapes, urbanization, and mortality.

An American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps will be playing:
Thursday, January 14th at 6:00pm
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street
Chicago, IL 60601-3505
(312) 846-2600

Tuesday’s Video Pick | French Star Wars

Megonli — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:53:55 +0000

If you have never watched any of these videos and have the smallest notion of the Star Wars galaxy; then, I would highly recommend watching all of this video. The French had a really great grasp of what Lucas was doing wrong. Screw the Jedi, any plot, or any other characters beside Darth Vader and C3PO. Fucking C3PO, the pussiest of all Star Wars Characters! Thanks to Michael Czerepak for sending this my way.

This is the only info that I could get translated and it is pretty shaky to say the least:

“If star Wars had been Frenchman…
And definitely this would have had of the face…
When they think that Lucasfilm dared to take out five nouvels opus after this frenchy masterpiece”

Interview with Edra Soto: Heaven, Hell and ‘the Jesus of Dogs’

Claudine Ise — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:36:55 +0000

In Memory of Who I Was

“Forever Vegetal” is the head-scratching title given to two concurrent solo shows at Roots and Culture featuring new work by Brian McNearney and Edra Soto. The exhibition opened earlier in December and will close this weekend on January 16th. Over the weekend I spoke (o.k., emailed with) Edra Soto about the new works she created for the exhibition, which tackle all the Big Issues: Life and Death, Heaven and Hell, Roman Catholicism, Michael Jackson’s pet mouse Ben, and Soto’s loveable canine, Foster, aka “the Jesus of Dogs.”

Your show at Roots and Culture begins with a piece that takes the form of a shrine and is titled “In Memory of Who I Was.” To me it seems to frame the entire show.

Edra Soto: “In Memory of Who I Was” is a shrine that commemorates my innocence, my past and the person I will never be again. I was also trying to make a memorial for myself as form of representing a transition. It’s never been a problem for me to find ways of representing art, but when I’ve been involved in great projects that have taken a lot of time and emotional investment, like my latest show at the MCA, it was making perfect sense for me to “kill myself” theoretically, to be able to speak about something different. There are a few transitional pieces in the show.
Initially, I was trying to make an art piece that compiled photos of me from childhood to the present, and have a small memorial of who I was until yesterday. I have explored the concept of time passing with memorials, like in A Year In Review and Landfill exhibited at Gallery 400 and Memorial at Polvo, all in 2005.
What I like the most about this piece is that it seems to be confusing to some of the audience that have seen it. It’s a completely intentional set up of a digital picture that looks faded by the sun and an arrangement of dry roses.

In your exhibition statement, you mention the influence the Roman Catholic church had on you during your childhood. The works in this show seem to bounce back and forth between a tongue-and-cheek approach to religion and one that is completely earnest. Can you tell us a bit more about the ideas behind two of the pieces included in the first room, one of which is titled “Communion” — which to me resonates as a vision of the Church’s promise to unite the human/mundane and the divine (through transubstantiation, the miracle of Mary, etc.) and the other titled “This is the Darkest Hour” — which makes me think of a door knocker you’d see at the gates of Hell?

Edra Soto: Talking to curator Julie Rodrigues [of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art], I realized that I have two different ways of explaining my work. One is the story of how I came up with the idea, which tends to be too long and maybe unnecessary, and the other one is the resolved concept that I hope is the one people read when they look at my work…not necessarily something that will always happen. “Communion” was conceived in Puerto Rico while staying at a hospital taking care of my mom. I understand the concept of communion, according to the Catholic Church, as accepting the body of Christ. I also see it as unconditional love. That’s why I represent this concept by placing two winged figurines that are attached by their head through a prism type of organism that could be a cloud or a rainbow. The two figurines are part of my parents’ commercial ceramic legacy [ed. note: Soto's parents were ceramic artists who owned and operated a commercial ceramic business]. Those two pieces are little mice with wings that were never painted. Some days after finding these figurines, I saw a movie on television about the story of the Jackson 5. In between all the eccentricities that compose Michael Jackson’s life, there was a story of him talking to a little mouse named Mr. Ben in the kitchen at night with a flashlight.

This Is the Darkest Hour

The figurines find seem more exiting and cosmical, since–I know they were strange for some people–but for them to have some connection with a story was almost impossible for me to put together until I saw the story of little Ben. This is consistent with my fascination and tendency to bounce from the very personal to the popular/fictional culture and life of people I do not know. As I have told people in the past,I grew up in front of a TV, so popular culture is part of my language, but I’m determined not to have it be the only defining tone of my work.
On “This is the Darkest Hour,” I was seeking to make a representation of what hell could possibly sound or be like if transformed into some kind of embodiment. I chose as a point of departure, a mask of a lamb that I found on Halloween and made a cast of it. I kept thinking about the idea of a black sheep to represent this character…endearing and scary at the same time. On my perception of Hell I see a very ostentatious place, and I also see heavy metal music and darkness. This is the first time I got to collaborate on a piece with my husband Dan Sullivan, who is the guitarist and one of the writers for local metal band Arriver. I already made the connection of what song I wanted to use for this piece, and it just happens to be one of the songs he wrote call “This Dark Corner of the Continent”. The lyrics are not present in the loop I asked to be extracted from the song. I thought the austere sound is remarkable by itself. As I mention in my statement, I was motivated mostly by other artists’ interpretations of the ideas of Heaven and Hell (in religious art, contemporary art, and music).

Communion

Earlier last year, preparing for a lecture I did on William Blake for the Artist Connect series at The Art Institute of Chicago I realized that my Iris Chacon work had a mystical quality, intensely honest but not necessarily recognizable at first sight. When I started pairing my work to Blake’s, I saw a unexpected similarity (especially in the compositions) that moved me deeply. People in the audience during the lecture asked me if I based my work on William Blake’s paintings. I discovered Blake’s paintings after making my own, so the answer was no. That moment has stayed with me and I have carried on with my reflections and conceptual developments.

The conflation of human and animal forms is a visual trope we’ve seen before in your work, as in the drawings shown in your MCA 12 x 12 show combining your features with that of a gorilla (all drawn by other artists). In your Roots and Culture show, we see numerous pieces in which animals figure prominently. Can you tell us more about two of the drawings in the show, “The Jesus of Dogs” and “The Lion and the Lamb”?
Edra Soto: Different from the mutations other artists made of my portraits for the Chacon-Soto Show, I portray my pets as part of my ecclesiastical roster. I had them assume the role of Jesus and The Lion and the Lamb. My pets’ idiosyncrasies tend to be the subject of many conversations among my husband and I and our friends (since we have no children). I found my dog in my neighborhood a couple of years ago. He has been instrumental in episodes of my life that manifest themselves in different ways in my artwork. My husband nicknamed my dog Foster “The Jesus of Dogs,” mainly because Foster is an incredibly nice and beautiful dog (and sort of looks like Chewbacca).

My cat on the other hand has challenged our compassion and patience through the years, but we have held on to him and him to us.

The Jesus of Dogs

Where does the imagery in your work spring from? Do images like the ring of dirt-encrusted stuffed animals in “Forever” or the Goth-inflected funereal wreath dripping from the eyes of the lamb in “This Is the Darkest Hour” come into your head all at once or intuitively like a dream or a vision, or do they develop over time and through processes of revision, in a more recombinatory fashion?
Edra Soto: The first thing I do before starting to make a body of work is research my theme. I look for every possible reference that I can find, read from all kinds of sources, take a lot of notes, do a lot of writing. I then come up with a concept and the repertoire. The titles are developed as if I was making a record and these are the hits I want in to include. Forever, for example, came from the idea of making a tombstone that reflected eternal light, or the light that shines forever, or the life that will never be forgotten. It has an obvious influence from pop culture (the “Billie Jean” video by Michael Jackson). I’ve always been a huge fan, and do not mind that the reference can be seen in that manner, but I try to avoid the literal reference so as to keep the subject more universal.

Light Within the Dark

Although you use recognizable iconography in your sculpture and installations, the connections between the different element can be difficult for the viewer to tease out. There is a cryptic nature to it. You are drawing from a personal lexicon of cultural symbols/images — the gorilla, for example, which appeared
in The Chacon-Soto Show at the MCA and again in your installation “Crying for the Beast” at the Artists Run Chicago exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center. Given that a lot of your imagery stems from a personal take on popular culture (including popular religious culture), how do you imagine someone who doesn’t share those memories/cultural history might find points of entry into your work?

Edra Soto: Hopefully, the images that I’m utilizing to represent these concepts are universal enough to transcend any perceptual differences. It is an important and difficult question that I ask myself all the time during art making. I try to be as generous as I can in my expression without compromising my integrity.

The Developing LA-MOCA/Deitch Controversy

Claudine Ise — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:52:01 +0000

The art press and art blogosphere are all a-Twitter over an article in last Friday’s L.A. Times suggesting that New York big-man art dealer Jeffrey Deitch is among the top candidates for the directorship of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. You’ll recall that MOCA has been without a leader (save for Eli Broad’s not so behind-the-scenes machinations) since Jeremy Strick resigned in disgrace over his poor handling of MOCA’s finances, which nearly ran the institution into the ground. From Friday’s Times article:

L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art says it will name its new director Monday, and one of the names in play is that of Jeffrey Deitch, a high-flying New York City art dealer who, if chosen, would represent a break with art museum convention.
….

Two names from more traditional museum-world backgrounds also are being mentioned. Lisa Phillips is the longtime director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, and Lars Nittve, the former director of London’s Tate Modern, is with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where he recently staged an exhibition focusing on Los Angeles artists.

But the possibility of Deitch, with the novelty of a gallery owner and art dealer assuming a major museum directorship, was a topic of discussion in the art community.

American museum directors typically come from within the curatorial, academic or other nonprofit ranks. No major art museum in the United States is directed by a former gallery owner.

It’s unclear when MOCA will announce who it has actually chosen for the post (a press conference for the announcement had been scheduled for 10:30 am Pacific time today, but a conflict with a mayoral press conference forced postponement). At this point, however, I think it’s safe to say that whether or not Deitch ultimately wins the job, the damage (so to speak) has been done. That a commercial gallery owner could be a top contender for one of the country’s most significant museum directorships says something about the direction in which the art world as a whole is trending.

So what does it all mean (besides the fact that I don’t know how to spell the word ‘controversy’)?

I’m still working it out for myself, but here’s who I’m looking to right now for the local spin on the issue: Matt Gleason at the online L.A. art journal Coagula, whose bitchy but often dead-on takes on the backroom deals that drive L.A.’s art world have entertained me for years (subscribe to Coagula’s Twitter feed here), and whoever is behind Artwhirled, another L.A.-based art blog that has perfected the art of the Twitter art review (follow them on Twitter here). And of course, New York’s art bloggers are all over the story too, but you already know who they are.

A few more links to get you up to speed: Gawker’s “rumourmongering” post on Deitch as a “gamechanging” possibility here; and the New Yorker’s lengthy profile of Jeffrey Deitch in its November 12, 2007 issue here (full access requires subscription or one-time payment).

At any rate, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that those of us living in Chicago and other Midwestern cities will never have to worry about this kind of thing happening round these parts. Our winters are so fucking unpleasant there’s no way any celebrity candidate of Deitch’s ilk would seriously consider moving here.

Episode 228: NADA part 1 – Heather Hubbs and Chris Duncan

Admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:24:44 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_228-Hubbs-Duncan.mp3)
download

This week Bad at Sports begins a three or maybe four part series that we produced at NADA (the New Art Dealers Alliance) Art Fair for 2009.

This week Amanda Browder and Duncan MacKenzie we sit down with Heather Hubbs, NADA’s Director and Chris Duncan, a San Francisco based artist showing with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions. The conversations span a huge gulf as Heather talks about the roll she played in Chicago, galvanizing a scene and what she has done with NADA, while Chris talks about being in the studio, making and what things are like in SF.

Great conversations to kick off a great series that was produced inside one of the best fairs in the country.

We produced a set of limited edition Bad at Sports T-Shirts for the event and have a small number of L, XL, and XXL’s (maybe one or 2 mediums or smalls) left which are available from us for $20.00 a piece. Contact us at mail@badatsports.com if you are interested.
New Art Dealers Alliance
Heather Hubbs
Chris Duncan
Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions
Tom Blackman
Art Chicago
TBA Exhibition Space
Joymore
Art Basel
Britton Bertran
Law Office
Art Book Swap
Jim Lambie
Downtown Brooklyn Partnership
The Armory Show
Josef Albers
Homage to the Square
Marfa, Texas
Rothko Chapel
David Wilson
Hot and Cold zine
Santigold
New Jersey!
Life’s Blood demo

Proximity Magazine Names BaS “Best Website for Local Arts Coverage”

Christopher — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:38:33 +0000

Proximity Magazine Names BaS “Best Website for Local Arts Coverage” and says some very kind words:

Bad at Sports should have received a a grant from the XYZ foundation last year to help them make their art podcast website a real day job. But the powers that be often sleep on what is engaging, innovative and important in favor of the familiar, lame and business as usual. Bad At Sports was our top local art resource of the year. Thank you guys.

No thank you Ed, Rachael & everyone at Proximity and the Public Media Institute. We really apriciate the kind words and look forward to 2010 and what Proximity Magazine has in the works.

Also we have taken your advice and hired a few free interns to track down this XYZ foundation and get that grant asap. I can only assume that the Xavier Young Ziebold award is biennial so maybe next year

Off-Topic | Alicia Eler

Guest — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:50:09 +0000

Off-Topic invites artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers to discuss a subject not directly related to the practice of making art. We would like to welcome Alicia Eler as our latest guest with her post, “Where did all the Tweets go? A conversation lost on Twitter”. Alicia is a writer, critic, curator and the Arts & Culture Community Manager of ChicagoNow.com.

Where did all the Tweets go? A conversation lost on Twitter

GUEST POST BY ALICIA ELER

Is it easier and more efficient to host conversations on Twitter or Facebook? This was my only question when I began research for this blog post. Things changed when Twitter lost the conversation, which is ironic because the conversation is the entire point of Twitter.

I, @aliciaeler, organized what was to be my first of many conversations about lesbian movies on Twitter. The conversation would begin with tweets from Chicago celesbians @trishtype, the Afterellen.com Blog Editor; lesbian erotic fiction writer @deviantdyke; queer sex blogger @annapulley; freelance writer and bonafide lesbian @jennispinner; and ChicagoNow tattoo blogger/AfterEllen.com music blogger @chubbyjones. Later, we could move to Facebook and try it again. For the Twitter convo, @jennispinner and I came up with the idea to label tweets with hashtag #lezflix. The chat began promptly at 2pm on Tuesday, November 24, 2009, and lasted well over the 10 minutes we had originally planned. Lesbian twitterers from all over the country jumped in.

When I went back to find those tweets a few weeks later, however, they were gone. I even went to my saved search #lezflix on Twitter.com. Nothing.

With my original plan foiled, I realized that I needed to do two things:

1. Figure out how to prevent tweets from getting lost in the future, and

2. Retrieve tweets from the #lezflix conversation using search

For advice, I contacted my social media-savvy friends Leah Jones, founder of Natiiv Arts & Media, a social media coaching business for artists, musicians and writers; Craig Kanalley, Traffic and Trends Editor at Huffington Post and founder of BreakingTweets.com; and Daniel Honigman, Digital Supervisor at Weber Shandwick. I also tweeted and gchatted with Sachin Agarwal, the Operations Lead at OneForty.com, the Twitter App Store.

When I first approached Daniel Honigman with this problem the other month, he suggested two ways to avoid losing tweets: Export the tweets to an Excel spreadsheet post-conversation, or use BackUpIfy.com, a service that backs up your online life (free until January 31). Currently, you can back up Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Docs, Photobucket and Wordpress. Services in Beta include Basecamp, Gmail (!), Facebook, FriendFeed, Blogger and Hotmail; soon users will be able to back-up YouTube, Xmarks, RssFeed and Tumblr accounts.

Another way to save tweets, says Leah Jones, is to “do a search on search.twitter.com for your hashtag, then subscribe to the results via RSS and Google Reader.” If you do this, says Jones, “Google will make a database of those tweets for you, and they’ll go onto your Google Reader.”

Unfortunately, it’s too late for the #lezflix conversation. The tweets are gone. What can I do now?

Sachin Agarwal, who spends his days immersed in Twitter at oneforty.com, says that searching for different terms was the only way to retrieve tweets. “You’re searching summize (Twitter search) for the hashtag, and that search index only has a week or so of data.” Instead, he suggests I search for both the hashtag—in this case, #lezflix—and some of the movies talked about during the conversation, rather than searching for the terms #lezflix and Twitter. “Bound,” “Better Than Chocolate” and “Desert Hearts” were the first ones that came to mind. Kanalley echoed that advice, suggesting I search using both Google and Bing.com.

So let the search begin.

Search #1: Searching Google for Twitter #lezflix brought up these results.

These were the first and only tweets to come up:

reprizal #lezflix another old one, did anyone ever see the french movie “Entre Nous”? 24 Nov 2009 from Echofon

xanontl @aliciaeler re: #lezflix: bound, obviously 25 Nov 2009 from TweetDeck in reply to aliciaeler

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl
Followed by a link to Twitter user @msbutch84.

These three women all joined in the conversation after it began.

Here are the two #lezflix tweets I found on the November 24, 2009, archive of HelloChicago.com, a site that grabs Chicago tweets daily.

@AnnaPulley Is Bound a #lezflix by def? It’s made by two dudes. Can it be a les movie if it’s not written/directed by a female? Posted by jennispinner in Chicago, IL

i just couldn’t get into IBTC – too forced and i love jamie babbitt’s other work so i was so bummed! good soundtrack and effort tho #lezflix Posted by trishtype in Chicago, IL

Similarly, on the hyperlocal front, the site Localtwt.com discovered a #lezflix tweet from Elko, South Carolina.

#lezflix also showed up under the movie Spider Lilies on SeeandTweet.com, a site where users can find Twitter movie reviews, see movie trailers, get movie showtimes, and buy tickets. Unfortunately, when I went to the link that popped up on Google, I couldn’t find any mention of #lezflix.

Google found my @aliciaeler Twitter streams archived on MixTweet and Twaitter, which I didn’t know I had, and FriendFeed, a service that I set-up to stream my Twitter.

Japanese website Twimpact picked up and translated @annapulley’s tweet about the lesbian sex scene in the film Better Than Chocolate.

Search #2: Searching Bing for Twitter #lezflix

Bing does not compare to Google. Searching for Twitter #lezflix brought up a single tweet from @annapulley.

These two general searches helped uncover a few tweets, and if I wanted to get more specific I would take Sachin’s advice and do a search for #lezflix and the name of a movie (e.g. Bound, Desert Hearts, Better Than Chocolate), or just a search for Ilene Chaiken, creator of The L-Word. In fact, the first search for #lezflix Ilene Chaiken brings up every post on Tumblr that has been tagged with Ilene Chaiken.

Here’s the reality, though: Twitter kills off tweets after two weeks. The time period used to be four months or 1,000 tweets, reports ToThePC. If you want your tweets to stay alive after two weeks—the same time it takes bed bug eggs to hatch into nymphs—back them up before it’s too late.

Interested in learning more about how you can use Twitter? Check out my blog for posts about Twitter users’ reactions to the Health Care Reform Bill, how we won the Maine Question 1 vote on Twitter but lost it in real life, and sizing up Chicago LGBT publications’ Twitter feeds.

About the poster:

Alicia Eler is a writer, art critic and new media art curator. Her work has been published in Artforum.com, Art Papers, Time Out Chicago, Chicago Tribune, Newcity Newspaper, Flavorpill, Kansas City Review magazine, the Windy City Times, and Curve Magazine, among others. She is the Arts & Culture Community Manager of ChicagoNow.com, a network of hyperlocal blogs sponsored by the Chicago Tribune Media Group, and a frequent Tweeter.

Top 10 Picks…

stephanieburke — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:48:23 +0000

…To Start Off The New Year!

Hey everyone! Hope ya’ll had a good hooliday! And now we stride fourth, from the ‘Ots to the Onezies, with many a show to look forward too. This weekend (especially Friday) is particularly ripe for new year pickings, so in celebration of all that, I give you…

THE FIRST 10 OF THE NEW YEAR!
(In not much of a particular order)

Happy ‘Effen 2010!

1. In Stereo at Rotofugi

"Raised On Hi-Fi" by Netherland

I feel like I should hate this work for being hip and trite, but it just makes me think of Rosler’s 60-era “Bringing the War Home” too much for me to hate it. Make your own decision.

Reception Friday from 7-10pm. Rotofugi is located at 1953 W. Chicago Ave.

2. 3-for-1: Queen of Heaven, R&R (…&R), and Up Is Down at the Chicago Cultural Center

Joel Sheesley (left), John Allan Faier (center) & Susanne Slavick (right)

I am generally in favor of 3-for-1 shows, especially when there are actually three big shows in one place, something few other places do as well as the Cultural Center. On top of that the work looks worth seeing, to boot. Sheesley presents nearly photo-real paintings of puddles, Faier forces confrontation with death (or our refusal to confront it) with his images of mausoleums and their waiting rooms, and Slavick explores carnage in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon through over painted photographs.

Reception Friday from 6-8pm. The Chicago Cultural Center is located at 78 E. Washington St.

3. Cheat Codes: Lessons in Love at Antena

Cheat Codes announcement card

Everyone needs cheat codes now and again, especially in love. And I quote: “A lesson in love [or, a cheat code] is a key sequence, password, or series of steps to be entered within a video art work [video game] that will provide the player some object, ability, or access to a level or location within the game that is secret, hidden, or that would have otherwise been unobtainable or unavailable to the viewer [player] [12].”

Reception Friday from 6-10pm. Antena is located at 1765 S. Laflin St. #1R

4. Robert Middaugh at Printworks

"Devil Suit" by Robert Middaugh

I’m not sure which portions of Middaugh body of work are going to be on display, since Printworks doesn’t associate a specific image with his show announcement on their site, but it doesn’t matter. Surrealist suits or surrealist science projects, you get some soothing humor either way. It may seem like a Magritte redux, but sometimes that’s ok.

Reception Friday 5-8pm. Printworks is located at 311 W. Superior St.

5. Depictions at Schneider Gallery

"Bodyguard No. 3" by Luis Gonzalez Palma

Start the new something new by looking back to something old (or perhaps just old-ish)? Well, we went out last year with the first Daguerreotypes ever made of snow flakes, so why not bring in the this year with photographs of bodyguards in “Gold Tone in Ambrotype Case[s].” I have a thing for antiquated-looking work, in case you didn’t know.

Reception Friday from 5-7:30pm. Schneider Gallery is located at 230 W. Superior St.

6. Prostrate at Zg Gallery

"Autumn Piñata" by Gregory Jacobsen

Jim Nutt, R. Crumb, and GWAR. Those are the names that immediately spring to mind when I see Jacobsen’s work. His work is sexual, his work is gross, his work is perverse, his work is gluttonous. What does all that mean? It means you should go see it, damn it! It’s AWESOME!

Reception Friday from 5:30-7:30pm. Zg Gallery is located at 300 W. Superior St.

7. Le Cirque de L’Armee Rouge at Dubhe Carreño

"Le Cirque de L'Armee Rouge" by Anne Drew Potter

Perhaps I’m just in a Communist mood after hanging out with my buddy Osvaldo, but this show struck me with giddy joy. The circus of the Red Army? I’m super excited to see this piece in reality, to get to interact with it and see it’s actual scale. And, perhaps, I will perform with the circus too!

Reception Friday from 5-8pm. Dubhe Carreño is located at 118 N. Peoria St.

8. Weatherbee’s Revenge at ebersmoore

"Archie Shack" by Mark Mulroney

My reaction to this work is similar to that featured at Zg. I believe that last time I was at ebersmoore and saw the announcement card for this show I loudly gaffawed and yelped “That’s freakin’ awesome!” I say awesome alot, in case you hadn’t noticed. The Image on the card is actually a sculpture, but I’m even more fond of the images. Take that, wholesome 1950’s America!

Reception Friday from 6-9pm. ebersmoore is located at 213 N. Morgan St.

9. Deathmetalhippiekiller at Packer Schopf

One Piece Featured in Lahr's Deathmetalhippiekiller Show

I used to live in Arcata…in Humboldt County (huh huh, dude, Humboldt County maaaan)…with metal heads. It was beautiful. My dear, drunken, bottle smashin’, hippy hatin’ roomies were the only thing that kept me sane in that stoned-out wasteland (well, not the only thing, but damn near). So, my friends, you can understand why a show such as this would hit close to home. On top of that, I’ve come to find that Packer rarely steers me wrong when I comes to art. Make sure to give the whole gallery a once over, not only is Lahr is showing. Moby Dick, work by Tim Vermeulen and Vent Figure Fun!, work by Gene Hamilton are also on display.

Reception Friday from 5-8pm. Packer Schopf is located at 942 W. Lake St.

10. Getting Acquainted at Johalla Projects

"Bocek Park II" from the series Baltimore by Daniel Shea

I don’t know much about this show, but I used to live in Baltimore, and this image struck me. Last time I went to Johalla, I was not disappointed by the art (the drinks, on the other hand, were too expensive, but I digress). The current show is a group affair, including the work of In b Flat, Kristin Freeman, Shane Lavalette, Jason Polan, The Listening Project, and Daniel Shea. It was curated by Joseph Rynkiewicz.

Reception Friday from 7-10pm. Johalla Projects is located at 1561 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Culture Worker or Slacker? You Decide….

Claudine Ise — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:02:26 +0000

Thanks to my trusty feedreader, I’ve come across a contrasting viewpoint to the Art Work project that I posted on earlier this morning. On his blog Lebenskünstler Randall Szott notes that there are plenty of people who respectfully disagree with the underlying assumptions of Temporary Services’ new project. A tiny slice of the lengthier argument put forth by Szott follows:

“The idea that calling what you do “work” makes it “legitimate” or “meaningful” is the crux of the problem I have with much of what one finds in Art Work. This sort of thinking is everywhere on the left and Marx does in fact provide the theoretical mirror in which many self-identified “cultural workers” (I always shudder at this phrase) see themselves. Jean Baudrillard, the still mostly Marxist incarnation of which Bryan-Wilson cites, moved very quickly into a position not easily integrated within her piece or this newspaper as a whole. In his book The Mirror of Production he writes “The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production.” That is to say that Marxist analysis too readily embraces the terms of the debate and therefore provides a mere functional critique, one that Baudrillard might note, “…deciphers the functioning of the system of political economy; but at the same time it reproduces it as model.”

Read Szott’s full argument here, along with comments responding to his post. Okay, and now I also feel appropriately shamed by my own use of the word ‘culture worker,’ which I agree can be cumbersome, pretentious, and plain-old lame sounding, but how else to encompass the different types of work we want to talk about under a single umbrella? Suggestions?

Art Work Newspaper Looks at Economy’s Impact on Cultural Production

Claudine Ise — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:56:49 +0000

The rise of the “free economy” that Chris Anderson lauded in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (read Cory Doctorow’s astute review of the book’s arguments in the Guardian here) takes on an entirely different, and far less celebratory, meaning when applied to the work of artists, critics, curators, arts administrators and other low-paid (or no-paid) culture workers today. A newly launched newspaper called Art Work is attempting to lay bare hard truths about the flailing economy’s impact on cultural production. Finally, people are starting to talk about money, explicitly and on personal terms. Or at least, they’re trying to.

Put out by Temporary Services (who were interviewed on the Podcast in Episode 218) the newspaper, distributed in both print and online forms, looks for alternative routes past market-based economies through articles that address resource sharing, collective action and other methods of keeping on with the keeping on when there’s very little money to oil the gears. In an article titled “This is Our Real Job,” the Temporary Services crew outline their primary source of dissatisaction with the status quo: the dominance of market forces over the production of art. It’s a well-worded introduction to the project that frames the discourses contained within as a whole. In a key paragraph, they argue,

“For far too long, the rhetoric and logic of the market has dominated the production of discourse and livelihoods around art. Letting the market decide, as Reagan, Milton Friedman, and other ghosts of capital past cried, has drastically limited what we think art is and can be in our society. We have seen how quickly the commercial market collapsed, hurting large numbers of people. The commercial art market in the United States has hemorrhaged gallery after gallery. The flocks in the stables have been turned loose into the wilds of uncertainty and worry that the rest of us live in as normalcy. There will be no bailout or economic triage to save the galleries. The financial collapse has put a big crack in the hegemony over resources and discourse that the commercial system has long enjoyed. It is now even harder to see success in the speculative art market as a viable option for most artists, though the dictates of the market are still what gets passed off as curriculum for an MFA at most universities.”

My favorite section of the newspaper is tagged “Personal Economy.” Here, individual contributors really get honest –albeit anonymously–about their own financial situations as culture workers. It ‘aint pretty. But it’s strangely empowering to learn that other people are in similar boats as you are–working for free or close to it, struggling to balance soul-crushing day jobs with creative labor, and trying to make real connections with peers that aren’t based solely on what the other person can do for you.

As a writer, I mostly work for free, and I often feel embarrassed about that. Although it’s not like I made tons of cash when I worked as a museum professional, nowadays I don’t contribute any meaningful income to my family’s bank account, and yet I am engaged in “work” that takes me away from the household labor to which, as a stay at home mother and an extremely reluctant housewife, I must also be committed. Despite my own personal distaste for the type of fevered rhetoric to which projects like Art Work typically fall prey (i.e., lots of poetically-written bitching, with precious few workable solutions put forth) I found most of the articles in Art Work to be incredibly compelling and personally meaningful. “The personal is political,” Anne Elizabeth Moore reminds us in her contribution to the newspaper. By demanding that we start talking openly and explicitly about money and its impact on the work we do, Art Work reframes that old bromide in ways that have the potential to rouse and discomfit us anew.

I want my “Team Tavi” T-Shirt NOW!

Claudine Ise — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:32:27 +0000

Art people, are you reading Style Rookie? If you’re not, I’m here to say I think you should be. Although I myself tend to stay away from fashion and style blogs, because looking at things I could never buy for myself tends to make me feel bitter and depressed and old, I am obsessed with Style Rookie. It’s a blog about fashion and pop culture written by Tavi Gevinson, a thirteen year old girl who lives in a suburb just outside of Chicago (I’m thinking it’s the same one that I live in, but who knows). Tavi–already famous enough to be known by her first name only–was recently profiled in the Chicago Tribune in an article on successful teen fashion bloggers who are garnering attention not just from fashion-conscious tween readers but from fashion designers, stylists, and magazine editors themselves. (Read the Tribune’s article, published on December 30, 2009, here). The article describes Tavi’s rise to fame amongst the fashion set, and also contained some sniping about the pint-sized blogger’s success from a few jealous hags (sorry, I meant to say “fashion editors”). An editor at Elle suggested that Gevinson might have had help with the writing of her blog, remarking that she suspected there was a “Tavi team” behind her, while a fashion writer named Leslie M. M. Blume referred to the teen writer as a “novelty” with little staying power (unlike the trends Blume herself writes about).

Clearly, there are some in the fashion world who don’t like it when young women talk back, in this case by taking fashion and making it personal, something that’s wholly their own. Remember, this is an industry in which all the models, regardless of age, are called “girls”. So who does *this* girl think she is?

That’s precisely the question that fascinates me about Ms. Gevinson and her blog. The construction of identity that takes place within and through Style Rookie is made all the more powerful because the subject is a teenage girl. Adolescence is a time of identity flux for all genders, but I’d hazard that it’s young women who are most strongly battered about by its currents. Fashion magazines have always known this and have tried to capitalize on it, to steer, mold and shape it, through discursive forms of address that emphasize “do’s and don’ts”, fashion faux-pas, what’s in and out. And always, above everything else, the primary directive of Thinness. (This last one is more important than anything else). But this is how Tavi describes herself in the “About Me” section of her blog:

“Tiny 13 year old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats. Scatters black petals on Rei Kawakubo’s doorsteps and serenades her in rap. I have no where near 4 million readers. Rather cynical and cute as a drained rat. In a sewer. Farting. And spitting out guts.”

Although Tavi’s blog focuses on enthusiastic fashion commentary, including regular reports on her favorite designer’s new lines, what makes Style Rookie really stand out for me is Gevinson’s nimble connecting of the dots between fashion, popular culture, and her own daily life. Her blog is a collage of all three. She finds visual similarities between Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic silhouette, the cover of Yohji Yamamoto book and the poster art for the movie Despicable Me (all of this, mind you, in a post titled “Things I Realize While Doing the Polka in Gym Class“), posts collages of fashion models against backgrounds culled from contemporary art works, and details a classroom art project in which she made a tiny version of Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog.” (To see more images that illustrate this point, check out Gevinson’s blog or her flickr set here).

Gevinson’s bedroom-based construction of an online/virtual identity reminds me, to some degree, of Sadie Benning’s earliest pixel videos – the ones she made alone in her bedroom when she was around 15 or 16 years old. By way of privately enacted scenarios that often made use of masks and paper-cut figures and that were filmed with a child’s video camera, Benning used pastiche as a way to come to terms with who she was: young, queer, female, desiring and desirable.

Sadie Benning, It Wasn't Love, 1992. Courtesy of Video Data Bank.

Sadie Benning, Girl Power, 1992. Courtesy of Video Data Bank.

I’m fairly certain that when Sadie Benning rose to prominence as the youngest artist ever to be included in a Whitney Biennial, there was a fair amount of jealous, behind-the-scenes speculation that maybe her video artist father, James Benning, was the true author of her films.

To be sure, Gevinson’s presentation of self in Style Rookie is a far less risky proposition than Benning’s was in those early videos. Gevinson is small, cute, has an innate knack for fashion, and doesn’t seem all that shy about posting pictures of herself with fashion gurus like Chloe Sevigne or the sisters behind Rodarte (Gevison collaborated with the latter on the video for their new line for Target).

Of course, if it somehow turns out that Gevinson isn’t really author of her own blog (and I don’t for a second believe this is the case) all of the above would be rendered moot. But I think that this teenage girl, this (very) young woman, is exactly who she says she is, and that’s whoever Tavi wants to be.

Watch Mat Collishaw Discuss “Hysteria” at Freud Museum

Claudine Ise — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:01:14 +0000

File this under exhibitions I really wish I could have traveled to see. UK artist, “Secret Victorian” and David Duchovny lookalike Mat Collishaw recently created an installation at the Freud Museum in London titled “Hysteria” that reframed psychoanalytic discourse by way of Freud’s treatment (so to speak) of women. Collishaw and the Freud Museum are definitely an inspired pairing. Although Freud only lived in the London home for about a year or so after fleeing Austria, it now houses all of his relics and collections, left mostly as they were. In this video produced by the Tate, Colishaw tours several rooms in the house while talking about how his own work relates to the “dodgy” psychoanalytic practices that took place there. Hysteria, hypnosis, drugs, death, cigar smoke and naughty little boys (that’s a hint to check out the Duchovny link above – it’s not as random as you think), among other subjects, are discussed in the fascinating tapestry of past and present that Collishaw weaves as he walks through the house. Don’t forget to look for Freud’s super comfy-looking couch, pressed up against a wall in the study – it’s where all the magic happened.

Via Curated.

Random Posts

BOMB’s Series on the State of Abstraction Today

Claudine Ise — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:00:52 +0000

Somehow I missed this series when it debuted at the end of November, but my trusty feedreader eventually makes sure the good stuff gets my attention. BOMB’s Jackie Saccoccio posed this question to twelve painters whom she admires: “What is the current state of abstraction?” The answers, provided by Dan Walsh and Amy Sillman, Jessica Dickinson and Philip Taafe, Steve DiBenedetto and Eric Wendel, Jason Fox and Eva Lundsager, and Carroll Dunham and Keltie Ferris, are as tonally varied, compelling, cheeky and angst-ridden as is, well, the state of abstraction today, I guess. (Amy Sillman uses the question as the opportunity to formally break up with Abstraction). Read all of the responses here. The last entry in the series, including responses from Marc Handelman and Cheryl Donegan, are coming up in a future installment.

Jessica Dickinson. HERE, 2008-2009, oil on limestone polymer on wood panel, 56 x 53 inches. Courtesy the artist and James Fuentes LLC, New York.

Bad at Sports: One Thousand Posts Strong & Still Going

Christopher — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:43:59 +0000

It’s been over four years, over 200 episodes, over 210 hours of audio, over 300 bottles of beer & now it’s over 1,000 posts on Art & Culture for Bad at Sports. Not only that but we’re just getting warmed up. More posts, more news, more reviews, more humor & more insight into this world of Art that we love by everyone from staff to guest writers and from art celebs to letters to the editor written by everyone that reads BaS.

There is more to come and you have more voice then ever to help direct the energy.

Want to have your voice heard? Write mail@badatsports.com and let us know what you think.
Don’t like to write or are illiterate like myself? We have a phone number you can call and speak your piece 312-772-2780.
You don’t write, speak or really get out of the house? Email us a illustration expressing your opinion on the current pedagogical discourse in the new millennium and it’s relation or lack there of to the larger commercial Art market both domestic and international and we will post your drawing on our white as a fridge website, Simon.

Basically at this point there is no reason not to contact us and help make this site better for you, the art world as a whole and even people who are just getting into & interested in the Arts since let’s get real we have all “slept together” enough and need to widen the scope a bit and enlarge the party some.

Happy New Year and lets take this recovering art economy out for a spin and build it better then before.

Thanks for reading Bad at Sports and as long as your here we will be as well.

Black Rain by Semiconductor

Claudine Ise — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:15:33 +0000

Semiconductor, an artistic collaboration between the UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, have put together a three minute video titled Black Rain. It’s a compilation of heliospheric satellite images– as the artists describe it, “raw scientific satellite data which has not yet been cleaned and processed for public consumption” — that were taken during the NASA stereo solar mission, but it could easily pass for an early work of experimental film.

Black Rain from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Via Blur and Sharpen.

Anna Shteynshleyger at The Renaissance Society

Claudine Ise — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:48:00 +0000

Anna Shteynshleyger, Nylon Challah. 2004-2009

While I was looking at the photographs of Anna Shteynshleyger at the opening of this Russian-born, Chicago-based artist’s new solo exhibition at at The Renaissance Society, a middle-aged woman wearing a fluffy, faux-fur coat sidled up next to me. “Do you know what that is?” she asked me, pointing to the image I was peering at intently. It was a blue-tinged photograph of some sort of twisted, fleshy material that looked like raw bread dough.

“I’m not exactly sure,” I replied. “I can’t tell if it’s soaking in a bowl of something or what.”

“It looks organic,” the woman mused, “like an organ from a body.”

“Well, it’s challah….It’s not baked yet. But I can’t make out what this part is,” I said, gesturing to the circular, fan-like opening out of which the doughy form appeared to be rising.

“Oh, it’s challah!?” she exclaimed. “I know what challah is — I make challah. But that looks more like a body part. How do you pronounce the artist’s name?” I told her I had no idea, and she nodded. “She should have changed it to Smith!”

We both laughed at that one. Jewish immigrants have a long history of changing their names in order to better assimilate with WASP culture. They made them shorter, more easily pronounceable, less foreign-sounding. In other words, less Jewish. As it turned out, the photograph that so bemused us both wasn’t actually of challah at all. It was stuffing material, the kind used to plump up toys, that had been crammed into a pair of nylons and “braided” in the manner of challah, the iconic Jewish bread that, among other things, is integral to the Shabbat blessings performed each Friday night in observant Jewish homes.

Shteynshleyger makes photographs about her life, and Shteynshleyger, a woman in her early thirties with two young children, is an observant Jew. And yet, although a few of the images display signifiers of Jewish family life and Jewish culture (candlesticks, kippot, tzitzit) they are adamantly not about “being Jewish,” nor are they meant to portray contemporary Orthodox life in documentary fashion. Instead, exhibition curator Hamza Walker and Shteynshleyger argue, these images are about biography: its limits and possibilities, its intimate relationship to mundane fact and its kinship with fiction. But since Shteynshleyger’s Jewishness is part of her biography, the show inevitably circles back to the artist’s Jewish identity–”an extraordinarily tricky subject to deal with,” as Walker characterized it during his public talk with Shteynshleyger on Sunday.

Elisha, 2004-2009.

And how. What might be read by many as a discomfort with the idea of Jewishness and to some degree with Judaism itself that runs throughout this show could be read by others simply as a desire to represent things as matter-of-factly as possible. People are not “prettied up.” Adolescent girls look like adolescent girls (even more so, because the young Orthodox women in these images wear no makeup). Food often looks unsavory. The dirty tile and curtain in a hotel bathroom is allowed to look ugly, to convey the disgust that the artist herself felt upon regarding it for the first time.

Early on in her conversation with Walker, Shteynshleyger admitted that the Jewish part of her identity was perfectly happy with the artist part, but the artist side of her often felt “very embarrassed” about the Jewish part.

Masha, 2004-2009

Ester 2004-2009

“Nobody wants to be a Jew,” Shteynshleyger asserted, quite provocatively, right after making this admission. She added that Jews deal with the ambivalence of Jewishness by becoming either really secular or really religious. In Shteynshleyger’s own photographs, this ambivalence is registered via images culled directly from her own life and yet which reveal very little about that life. “I want to make a work about biography, but I don’t really want to talk about myself…it’s like that,” Shteynshleyger explained during the talk.

Covered, 2004-2009

There are several portraits of heterosexual married couples in this show, all of them Jewish. The men wear kippot and tzitzit. The women wear calf-length skirts and shirts with long sleeves. In all of the photographs, the couples sit with their bodies touching. Unsmiling, they stare directly into the camera, completely aware of their subjectivity at that moment. Shteynshleyger has included herself in one of these photographs, pregnant and sitting next to a man named Mordechai. She is ostensibly coupled in a manner similar to the rest, but the truth of the matter lies outside of the image, for we learn via a cryptic line in the exhibition’s essay (and explicitly during the public conversation, when the artist referred to her “ex-husband”) that Shteynshleyger is not (or at least, is no longer) one of those happily married couples.

Portrait With Mordechai, 2004-2009.

Throughout the show there is a sense of perpetual covering and uncovering, of surface blemishes laid bare in order to obscure other, more complicated and less communicable aspects of personal and cultural identity, Jewish or otherwise. During their conversation, Shteynshleyger expressed gratitude to Walker for his refusal to put her work into a “curatorial box” by framing it, as she put it, as “a Jewish show” or making it into a better-looking exhibition by selecting only those images that project the disembodied romanticism and gauzy allure seen in works like Ester or Masha. This is indeed a “tricky” exhibition: distinctly un-beautiful, anti-nostalgic, ambivalent towards the notion of an overarching cultural or religious identity and yet unapologetically embedded within the web of family and religious community. It’s a show made all the trickier by the modesty of Shteynshleyger herself: a woman, a mother, an artist and a Jew who makes images that spring from all those experiences and yet speak directly to none of them.

Chaya Mushka, 2004-2009

The Minimum Wage Machine

Claudine Ise — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:45:21 +0000

Artist Blake Fall-Conroy is in the process of making a sculpture that enables everyone to earn minimum wage (or rather, the wage set by the state of New York–Illinois law guarantees a minimum wage of $8.00 per hour for workers 18 years of age and older). From Conroy’s website:

“The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine’s mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box.”

Via New Art via Tomorrow Museum.

Episode 227: Guerra de la Paz

Admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:23:31 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_227-Guerra_de_la_Paz.mp3)
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This week: The AMANDA BROWDER SHOW! Amanda and Tom start 2010 off with an interview with Miami artists Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz about their collective Guerra de la Paz (awesome composite of their names) about their work, and how clothing can be more than just a shell over one person’s nubile body..but a story and a basis for sculptural exploration.

Then, Mike Benedetto returns!!! He offers up a meditation on Steven Seagal, Lawman.

Guerra de la Paz is the composite name of Cuban born, American artist duo Alain Guerra (born 1968) and Neraldo de la Paz (born 1955), who have been collaborating since 1996. They are based in Miami.

Guerra was born in Havana and de le Paz in Matanzas. Guerra de la Paz work in sculpture, installation and photography. Their work references the politics of modern conflict and consumerism alongside symbols of faith; they often use old clothing to build their sculptures.

Alain Guerra
Neraldo de la Paz
Guerra de la Paz
Steven Seagal
Cobble Hill, Brooklyn
“pepe” stores
Escada
Versace
Fendi
Ralph Lauren
Saatchi Collection
Art Basel Miami
Chicago Cultural Center
Tyson
JCVD

New Years Eve Music Suggestions Video

Christopher — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:21:50 +0000

Right now your doing one of two things probably

1. Shoping for beverages for a party
2. Looking for music for a party playlist

Well BaS is here to help and even though our tastes run a bit indie-rock and instrumental we can promote the biggest hits of 2009. Luckily someone has done the work for me and remixed the top 25 songs of this year in one song. Yes one song and one music video. Hopefully this will help in your search, if not you can always go with “Blitzkreig Bop” but that’s like black it goes with anything.

I still think “Take Your Shirt Off” by T-Pain is a underrated masterpiece that will be remembered years from now

UPDATE: We want to thank DJ Earworm for the remix and here is the download for the hi-bitrate mp3 file. Happy New Year!

Infosthetics.com Celebrates 5 Years by Displaying all their Posts Aesthetically On One Page

Christopher — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:33:39 +0000

Infosthetics.com a site dedicated to collecting, sharing and promoting the art of pleasing data visualization celebrates it’s 5th birthday with a flash visualization of all their posts over that time broken down by time, category, comments & author using color and line. Bad at Sports would like congratulate Infosthetics “Where form follows data” and we follow them. Keep up the good work!

Episode 226: Lou Barlow

Admin — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 04:30:43 +0000

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_226-Lou_Barlow-1.mp3)
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This week: recent addition to the BAS family Anna Kunz talks to indie rock legend Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr., Folk Implosion, Sebadoh, Sentridoh, and his own solo work) about the creative process, his music, and other exciting stuff. Lou recently released a spectacular new album out Goodnight Unknown. Richard will kick himself for a long time that he wasn’t there for this interview. Bad at Sports congratulates the Barlow family on the addition of a recent bundle of joy! The baby thing is catching kids, watch out. Before you realize it everyone you know will have a couple ankle biters running around.

Clipped from Wikipedia, and redundant:

Lou Barlow is an American alternative rock singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

A founding member of the groups Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion, Barlow is credited with helping to pioneer the lo-fi style of rock music in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Barlow was born in Dayton, Ohio and was raised in Jackson, Michigan and Westfield, Massachusetts.
Dinosaur Jr.
Folk Implosion
Sebadoh
Sentridoh
Lou Barlow
Anna Kunz
Rashid Johnson
Moniquemeloche
Janis Joplin
the Ramones
the Stooges
MC5
Kiss
Dee Dee Ramone
Devo
B52s
Nirvana
Dave Grohl
John Cage
Robert Rauschenberg
John Denver
Hannelore Baron
Goodnight, Unknown
Boxing Day

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