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EXCLUSIVE: Richard Tuttle discusses his philosophical relationship to art and life in his New Mexico studio.

Richard Tuttle commonly refers to his art as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his work. He subverts the conventions of modernist sculptural practice by creating small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble materials. Influences on his work include calligraphy, architecture, and poetry.

Richard Tuttle is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Structures of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera & Sound: Bob Elfstrom and Ray Day. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Richard Tuttle.

Toronto’s CN Tower is the world’s tallest, at 1,815 feet. I’m drawn to the smaller, unadvertised, local observation towers used to spot fires, watch nature, protect territory, and perhaps provide modest entertainment for visitors. Positioned above the tree line, the towers are distinctive features of the regional landscape, and can be seen from almost everywhere in the community. But from a distance, we’re indistinct as we stare from the platform, nearly invisible to everyone down below. If they can see us at all, they certainly can’t tell who we are. By climbing the tower and distancing ourselves from the throb of life below, paradoxically we feel as though we might be able to get a closer look. To some of us, that’s a keener vantage point than the heart of things. (SB)

At the time, working on a series of paintings loosely based on the structure of observation towers, I collected hundreds of tower images from the Internet. Here are a few.

Eleanor Antin, Art21 production still

It’s been quite a year. Quite an academic year, that is. Between the country voicing a collective NO to four more years of the same Bushed policies and Bernie Madoff being sentenced to the equivalent of a few lifetimes in prison, a lot has happened and been written about. While I haven’t had any obsessed music fans calling to threaten me lately (haven’t I mentioned the response to The Billy Joels of Art Education??) I just wanted to take this opportunity at the beginning of summer to provide a TwCA roundup of sorts….

The year started back in September 2008 with an article on Mining Ideas - examining the use of sketchbooks in the classroom. Thinking Through Possibilities shared a variety of student sketchbook work as result of this popular theme, and students continued to use sketchbooks in order to respond to and create work influenced by the highly controversial Bodies exhibit.

I was honored to be given the opportunity to interview Eleanor Antin for the TwCA column in December, and right through the holidays she and I e-mailed back and forth (and back and forth… thank you Eleanor!) to create Myths, Metaphors and More: An Interview with Eleanor Antin, which was then published in two parts on January 14th and 15th, 2009.

As winter literally plowed along it became necessary to tackle the bizarre nature of art competitions in What’s an Art Contest? The following week led to a post highlighting how contemporary artists are relying more and more on others to make their work. It Takes Two… or Two Hundred was inspired by the highly coordinated and detail-obsessed season 4 artist Mark Dion.

TwCA investigated the understated art of Robert Ryman and listened to him discuss his work live before writing the post, What Light? in February. Only a week later I came across a Scholastic Art magazine featuring five Art21 artists and was thrilled to see the periodical break free from it’s staple of Van Gogh, Cezanne and O’Keeffe. I love the artists, but don’t necessarily need classroom resources dedicated to them once a year. Working Without Warhol examined how Scholastic Art and other magazines like it can indeed incorporate contemporary art and artists meaningfully.

As spring began I was excited to share my work with students creating paintings driven by an investigation into what exactly is power? Power(ful) Painting highlighted the initial steps they took to create work about a big question and theme, which then allowed students to demonstrate skills they learned in previous lessons. Immediately following this unit, we made our way to the newly redesigned Museum of Art and Design to see Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary. Classes were in the midst of changing gears and working with everyday materials to create works of art that were more than just another project about the principle of rhythm. Remixing. Transformation. highlighted the importance of this influential museum visit.

In April, the TwCA column began reporting on the work Art21 was doing with teachers at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies. The post Teaching with Film, Teaching with Objects was the first of these updates on the three-part workshop series titled Teaching and Learning with Contemporary Art, which concluded in May.

The spring also saw the Education and Public Programs team at Art21 travel to Minneapolis for the National Art Education Association’s annual conference, punctuated by our work at the Walker Art Center and with season 4 artist, Mark Bradford (see Burn Baby Burn). The conference itself provided many possibilities for the TwCA column, and I spent the following three weeks looking into questions posed at our panel discussion with Mark Bradford, Olivia Gude and William Crow. These questions are highlighted in the posts Getting Beyond, Authoritarian?, and Make Less Art.

It summer now. Time to relax and read. Two recent columns, Summer Reading Part 1 and Summer Reading Part 2, suggest a variety of works to inspire you as we get some collective distance from 2008-2009 and prepare for beginning all over again in September. Enjoy!

As our Flash Points topic of Art and Economics comes to a close, I sat down and spoke with Jackie Battenfield, whose first book The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love was just published.

Jackie has supported herself from art sales for over twenty years and currently teaches career development at Creative Capital and Columbia University, helping artists flourish and sustain their creative practice while focusing on the professional skills needed to face the challenges and frustrations that all encounter in their careers. The Artist’s Guide presents valuable tactics that Jackie first learned head-on nearly 25 years ago as the founder of Brooklyn’s Rotunda Gallery, and taught for 15 years as the facilitator to the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM (Artist in the Marketplace) program.  The guide offers many lessons that most artists (including myself) never even heard of in an arts program—from writing a proper artist statement, to planning budgets, to time management and exhibition negotiation.

Jackie will attend a reception and signing for The Artist’s Guide on Wednesday (July 1) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, from 5:30-7:30pm. Click here for more information.

Adrian Ghenie, "Duchamp" (2009)

The problem with writing about contemporary painting is that it ends up being an excuse for a riffle through the thesaurus for the most headily baroque terms to describe the look of paint on canvas. This isn’t a problem when writers write about old paintings, because they tend not to focus on the physical presence of the work, instead treating a painting as a sort of rebus to be decoded and tacked on to a pre-existing idea. Renaissance art historians tend to look through, not at, the paintings in question. Contemporary painting has a hard time because decoding content isn’t what you’re supposed to do; you’re supposed to focus only on the physicality of the thing in front of you: at, not through. The language of at is evasive and slippery and is simply beyond the limits of the technical vocabulary of orthodox contemporary artspeak, like a caveman trying to describe the Internet. Hence the preponderance of purple prose in exhibition catalogues and press releases, laden down with nightmarish adjectival pile-ups more akin to lip-smacking restaurant reviews than anything to do with art.

Adrian Ghenie’s current show at Haunch of Venison on London presents the writer on contemporary painting with what looks like an easy premise: recognizable representational content. His suite of oil paintings collectively titled (like a Cure B-side), Darkness for an Hour, at first look visually pleasing in a loose-and-tight kind of way—neither too finicky and faux-outsiderish, nor too slappy and faux-hamfisted to put off a contemporary art cynic. Ghenie lays on the paint with just the right amount of visual splashiness to look modern and self-aware, while retaining a finessed draftsmanship in the rendering of figures which looks like an appeal to old-timey painterly virtues. To come away from the show feeling as though you’d just wandered through a needy MFA graduate resume (look! I can do abstract painting! Wait: do you like pictures of people? How about BOTH?), which I nearly did, would be understandable but unfair, because of something very rarely discussed or even considered worthy of discussion in contemporary artspeak: content.

Ghenie’s quotations of earlier paintings are there—photo-sourced multi-figure compositions recall both Michael Andrews and Larry Rivers, with areas of squeegeed abstraction out of Richter—but I suspect the references are lightly held, a resonant means of conveyance rather than allusive game playing. These are communicative, gregarious paintings that are emphatically narrative, not obliquely referential. If the heart sinks a bit at his employment of modernist art icons as protagonists (given the contemporary orthodoxy of sneering at modernism), his teasing out of mordant narratives replays well-trodden art historical episodes with a melancholy wit that’s both accessible and alien.

In his painting Duchamp (2009), everyone’s favorite conceptual art behemoth sits swamped in his fur coat, hat in hand against what looks like a railing as a broiling sea churns beyond. While the source image must have been a photograph, it’s not part of the standard repertoire of Duchampian portraiture. The wry smile and supercilious air have been replaced by a creased brow and pensive hand on the chin. His instantly recognizable face is lost in a wash of smears, like a photograph seen through running water, and Ghenie stages a battle of there and not-there, description faltering at the verge of readability. This is the artist in exile, carried across the Atlantic to lasting adoration yet strangely lost, anxious, and almost literally disembodied. In another painting, Urinal, Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain (the urinal on a pedestal) is inspected by a frock-coated officer in a gas mask in a low-lit storeroom. The title’s performance of a reverse magic spell on the found object tradition gives voice to the conceptual art elephant in the room: a urinal? As art? Why did we ever think that? It looks weird and sad, like something out of a time capsule you buried in the past and now can’t remember why.

Adrian Ghenie, "Duchamp's Funeral II" (2009)

Dada appears again as a reference point in Ghenie’s Dada is Dead, which restages the famous photograph of the 1920 International Dada Exhibition, with John Heartfield’s Prussian Archangel (a pig-faced soldier mannequin) bumping along the ceiling and (anachronistically) a Malevich black cross hanging on the wall, each a component of a secular iconography dependent upon the ghosts of art past. Angels and crosses allude to a secularized transfiguration absolutely at the core of Dadaist found object principles, but in Ghenie’s muscular assertion of the primacy of paint, how archaic that religion looks now. A slash of light illuminates a wolf stalking the abandoned gallery, frozen mid-prowl, come to pick the bones clean. The painting has a lovely reflexive weirdness. How strange that Dada is dead, how strange it ever lived, and how strange and surprising that it should be painting that performs the eulogy.

Death and demise overshadow Ghenie’s work. Two paintings depict Duchamp lying in vampiric state: one surrounded by Diana-style cascades of wreaths and bouquets in an otherwise empty space, the other in a modernist apartment complete with Mies chair and movie camera. The paint is applied ecstatically, drooling down the canvas and jumping about in big Ab Ex swathes in somber dark reds and pale grays. On the one hand, it’s an assertion of the undead art of painting itself, perpetually self-vivifying and vital; on the other, its allusiveness is a token of historical distance, of the lost world of the past. Ghenie’s paintings, like Hollywood zombies, are full of an animation that emphasizes death, images jerked alive by jolts of paint, but strange and unsettling and absent nonetheless.

Vija Celmins, "Web #1" (1999). Courtesy Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

• Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland in February 2008.  The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh kicked things off this spring with the “rooms” of Vija Celmins (Season 2), Ellen Gallagher (Season 3), Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman.  The show runs through November 8th.

• Season 2 artist Kiki Smith designed the minimalist stage set for “Pinter’s Mirror” at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts.  The production runs through August 2nd.

• Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) created a new work for Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin that will open July 10.   Compass divides the Kunsthalle horizontally and introduces a new level to the space, reducing it to less than one third of its normal height and rendering it inaccessible to the public.  Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads in an otherwise empty, resonating chamber.

• Last week the McNay Museum opened In Their Own Right, a  group exhibition focusing on the achievements of women printmakers from 1960 to the present. In Their Own Right showcases nearly 30 prints by contemporary women printmakers from the McNay’s collection, surveying the different trends and movements of American art over the past four decades. It includes artists such as Helen Frankenthaler,  Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Vija Celmins, April Gornik, Dorothy Hood, Yvonne Jacquette, Jane Kent, Agnes Martin, and Louise Nevelson. The show runs through August 23.

• Tokyo’s Gallery Koyanagi will open on August 1st a two-person show of architectural works by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Junya Ishigami. On display will be architectural models, such as Ishigami’s design for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology and Sugimoto’s maquettes for the S Foundation and Go-O shrine. Did you know the Season 3 artist was an architect too?

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EXCLUSIVE: Artist Josiah McElheny discusses the intentionally problematic nature of beauty and seduction in his “Total Reflective Abstraction” (2004) installation, on view at Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, as well as works by fellow artists and architectural masterpieces such as Renaissance palaces.

Josiah McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. McElheny’s work takes as its subject the object, idea, and social nexus of glass. Influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, McElheny’s work often takes the form of historical fictions. Part of McElheny’s fascination with storytelling is that glassmaking is part of an oral tradition handed down generation to generation, artisan to artisan. Sculptural models of Modernist ideals, these totally reflective environments are both elegant seductions as well as parables of the vices of utopian aspirations.

Josiah McElheny is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Memory of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera & Sound: Kurt Branstetter, Joel Shapiro, and Tom Bergin. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Josiah McElheny. Special Thanks: Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.

Sign up for Art21’s Access ‘09 – an international screening initiative that will present your audiences with a sneak preview of a Season 5 of Art:21-Art in the 21st Century before the premiere on PBS. Art Access ’09 provides communities with resources, free of cost, to host their own public screening events, allowing audiences to explore the creative processes and ideas behind some of today’s most thought-provoking  artists.

Art21 Access ‘09 depends on people’s enthusiasm to make contemporary art accessible and relevant to their own community, so we want you to organize your own preview event around the Peabody-Award winning Art:21 series. Consider this season’s artists and themes and host an event at your local museum, library, university, community-based organization, art space, or even coffee shop. Whether you plan a conversation with local artists, a panel discussion, a community-based art project, or just a screening-party, join Access ’09 to broaden and inspire a diverse exchange of ideas and perspectives. All participants will receive:

·    Preview DVD screener
·    Educator Guides
·    Postcards
·    Posters
·    Customizable press release
·    Embeddable trailer of each Season 5 episode
·    Press images
·    Digital logos for web sites

If you are interested in hosting an Art21 Access ‘09 event between September 28 and October 30, 2009, please sign up here! Art21 Access ‘09 is organized in collaboration with Americans for the Arts as part of National Arts and Humanities Month Get ready for another dynamic season of Art:21. We look forward to hearing about your screening plans! Check us out on Facebook and Twitter if you haven’t already!

If there’s anything revealed about the use of social media technologies in the Iranian election, it’s that Twitter, Facebook and other social spaces online have become a new form of public space.  Like any public space, social media serve as a place to meet with friends, people watch and, as we’ve seen, even protest.  The key difference with this digital public space is one of scale and access, as users find ways to reach an international and growing user base, limited only by access to a computer or mobile phone and, to a certain extent, a common language.

One question I explore in my social media work is how this new public space can become a site for public art.  I recently founded @Platea, a global online public art collective, to explore this very issue, and to take some salient features of public art–performance, displacement and activation, engagement–and both translate and transform them into the realm of online media.

Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor (photo by An Xiao)

During the week of May 3-9, @Platea gathered more than 40 individiduals from a half dozen countries to participate in @Platea’s Project II: Co-Modify, a public performance art project.  The idea was simple. First, each performer chose a megacorporation to be “sponsored by” for the week. They then acted it out, imagining the sponsorship as defined by their company. The project was designed firstly as a commentary on the commodification of social media, and, by extension, our social lives in general, but also as a look at the possibilities of collective performance art in the realm of social media.

The performances ranged from the poetic to the playful, as the social media feeds of the performers and their friends/followers became a veritable online stage.  Jonny Gray, a professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, reflected and self-reflected on the nature of branded existence and sponsorship, while Jorge Alvarez, a college student in Puerto Rico, dressed up as a human Q-Tip to explore and critique his sponsorship. The broad range of the performances was truly a testament to the creativity of those participating and their diverse backgrounds.

Jonny Gray, "sponsored by" Adobe

The most remarkable part for me, however, was to witness how Co-Modify organically embodied the spirit of Web 2.0 culture.  Unlike a regular stage, the performance became truly interactive.  @Platea members around the world who’d never met each other co-performed their sponsorships, sharing puns and fused imagery, while non-performers joined in and egged the performers on.  The public art project, rather than becoming one-way (artist to audience) or even two-way (artist to audience, audience to artist), became truly multi-way, as artists and audiences spontaneously collaborated, shared and engaged.

@Platea’s next public art piece, hopes/dreams/fears, continues in this study of connectivity and interactivity on a global scale and breaks into the physical realm.  With this project, we are gathering the hopes, dreams and fears of individuals both online and offline in the language of Facebook status updates (i.e., in the third person), to then broadcast these over time via a dedicated Facebook page.

I launched hopes/dreams/fears during a presentation I gave at the Brooklyn Museum and continued it during Figment on Governor’s Island.  At the same time, the @Platea Steering Committee and members in Illinois, Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia and a number of other locales have begun collecting the hopes, dreams and fears of those in their communities.

As those of us who use social media know, the collected status updates of an individual over time can paint a picture of who he or she is. It’s an idea often referred to as “ambient awareness“: the aggregate of little details expressed over social media leads to something of a picture of an individual.  Can the same thing happen over time amongst a slice of the world community? How does seeing the unfiltered thoughts of strangers alongside the updates of your friends affect the otherwise-habitual experience of viewing your News Feed?

Performers during Deitch Art Projects' Art Parade 2006 (photo by An Xiao)

During my time blogging for Art 2.1, I hope to explore a number of issues around social media and art, and the implications of the emerging Web 2.0 ethos on the practice and application of art.  Social media have allowed for an unprecedented level of interactivity, access and agency in all realms, and I think art has only begun to explore their potential.

For hopes/dreams/fears, we have nearly 500 responses so far, from a dozen countries.  In the spirit of Web 2.0 and open source culture, I invite you to participate in @Platea’s latest public art project by visiting our submission form and filling out your own response.  Then, be sure to join our Facebook page to watch it all unfold starting July 1.

America's most famous artist, Shepard Fairey, in his studio. Photo courtesy www.lataco.com

No matter how hard I try, avoiding reality TV is a challenge. The shows are like invasive kudzu: Nanny 911, Extreme Makeover, The Housewives of New Jersey, Jon & Kate, The Price of Beauty, COPS, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, and many, many more. This fall I’ll be avoiding American Artist, Sarah Jessica Parker’s collaboration with Magical Elves, the team behind Top Chef and Project Runway. The new show will serve a mash-up of amateur entertainers—that is, real people—engaging in old-fashioned game-show-style competition and unscripted activity. According to press reports, each episode will feature the show’s “contestants” competing in art-themed challenges from a range of disciplines—including sculpture, painting, photography and industrial design—and completing works of art that will be assessed by a panel of “top figures” in the art world, including artists, gallerists, collectors, curators, and critics.

If there are any producers out there (PBS?), here’s my suggestion for a better reality show about artists. Create a show that’s a little more verité, like an old-fashioned documentary. Forget about vetting “contestants.” Cast the net wide and choose 100 art grads from all over the country in June by random lottery. No auditions, video entries, or artist statements. Abandon any attempt to frontload charisma or talent. As the competition proceeds, to minimize the artists’ artificiality and self-consciousness (and their inclination to ham it up) they would be forbidden to reveal that they are participating in a reality TV show. Inevitably, some will be genuinely talented, some avidly self-promotional, some charismatic, some absolutely clueless—just as in real life.

Give them a list of goals to complete over the course of the viewing season. Those who fail to make the benchmarks are gradually eliminated. Here are some purposely vague goals that might be included:

• Find suitable living/working space that they can afford
• Get their work in three group shows
• Contribute in some creative way to the wider art community
• Publish three reviews (either essay or video format) of their colleagues’ art shows
• Curate a themed group show
• Get a grant or a teaching job
• Arrange five studio visits with gallerists or curators
• Get a solo show by the end of the year

Automatic ejection results if an artist:

• Fails to make art for more than four days during the period.
• Works longer than forty hours a week at their day job

In addition, in the early stages the artists are responsible for assembling a three-person crew to creatively document their progress on video, in any way they see fit. Before airing any of the results, a season’s worth of episodes would be prerecorded to avoid special treatment.

For me, a show like this, that creatively and realistically demonstrates the overwhelming challenges would-be artists face, would be must-see TV.