The facade is clean and white, and the shutters are a quaint blue. But step across the threshold and any conventional notions of a house are checked at the door. Above ground, an interior with select furnishings features clean white walls and a dedication to flux as a community-oriented space. Descending into the basement, a two-level subterranean space designed for “private rites of an aesthetic nature” unfolds. Rooms intended as working spaces for artists are connected by a series of corridors and ladders; there are no windows or doors. Welcome to Mobile Homestead, conceptual artist Mike Kelley‘s new permanent installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Mike Kelley, “Mobile Homestead,” opening night at MOCAD, May 2013. Photo: Nicole J. Caruth.

The opening this month at MOCAD follows a recent retrospective of Kelley’s work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Originally conceived as a mid-career survey, the artist’s death in early 2012 prompted the expansion of the exhibition at the newly reopened Stedelijk into a comprehensive survey encompassing over two hundred works from a prolific career spanning more than three decades. Reflecting upon the history of his work in tandem with the recent opening and vexing design of Mobile Homestead, I consider the memory of Mike Kelley—both literally and figuratively.

Memories provide the very fabric of our beings as individuals, creating an intricate and unique web woven from lived experience. Kelley long mined such personal terrain to explore the deep and confounding layers of the hidden, unconscious or forgotten. In the process, he revealed where the threads of remembrance and forgetting intertwine. For his 1995 work Educational Complex, the artist created a large-scale model including every school he’d attended as well as his childhood home. By intentionally leaving parts he could not remember blank, he aimed to illustrate “architecture as it relates to memory—how unfixed our memories of space are.” In so doing, he also created a tactile map of nebulous space, a visual representation of the places where such links begin to unravel.

Mike Kelley, “Educational Complex,” 1995 (detail). Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

When asked by Glenn O’Brien to discuss the conceptual ideas behind Educational Complex in a 2008 interview, Kelley stated that he “wasn’t really interested in remembering anything” specific to their physical structures. In creating a model of the formative spaces of his youth, it was actually the blanks he sought in order to fill them in with his personal fantasies—a blending of fact and fiction. “I found that I was filling in the blanks with pastiches of a lot of things that had affected me when I was a child—like cartoons or films or stories I’d read or things I’d heard.” By embracing these gaps as generative conceptual ground, he considered absence as form and the catalyst for distillation in navigating layers of the past.

I’ve been following Mobile Homestead since 2010, when I was a graduate student at Cranbrook and when the project was literally set in motion. A life-size replica of Mike Kelley’s childhood home made a roving journey from Midtown Detroit back to its original site in the Detroit suburbs, resulting in a series of videos featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Since then, the replica has been integrated into the development of a permanent site adjacent to MOCAD, the most fascinating aspect of which is the labyrinth built underground. The subterranean levels are meant to echo the floor plan of his original family home, but structured in such a way that, as Kelley explained, “its floor plan is unrecognizable as the mirror of the house above.”

Mike Kelley, from the “Kandor” series, 2011. Mixed media installation. Opening night at Gagosian, Los Angeles, January 2011. Photo: Erin Sweeny.

Last year, O’Brien published an expanded version of his studio conversation with the artist. There, Kelley again referenced the idea of the mirror: “We’re surrounded by invisibility, and that’s what I think art is about…it is about making things visible. You’re a mirror of the world—maybe a warped mirror.” Mobile Homestead is the artist’s first public art project anywhere and the first major permanent installation of his work in his hometown. Carrying the conceptual threads of earlier works into this life-size recreation, he leaves us with the opportunity to enter his own memory, experiencing the space as he remembered it, and the uncanny reflection of the space he sought to fill. In Kelley’s universe, it seems a fitting tribute.

"Praxis Makes Perfect | Welcome to the Funhouse: Mike Kelley’s “Mobile Homestead”" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

Allan McCollum, “The Visible Markers,” 1997-2000, Produced in collaboration with I.C. Editions, New York © Allan McCollum, Courtesy the Susan Inglett Gallery, New York

Back in October, 2009 I wrote a post called Teamwork which focused on the fact that, as educators, we often have to work creatively with others in order to construct meaningful, age-appropriate and fun lessons. The best lessons and units of study are often the product of people working together, including educators, community members, parents, and of course students.

When I look back just four years ago I realize that my experience with collaboration has changed and evolved into other forms. Collaboration today often involves taking steps on the front end of ideas to gain perspective instead of asking for assistance when I am up to my neck. Sometimes when I am excited about an idea for a particular lesson I need my colleagues to help me straighten out the initial planning before I get too involved in what I was originally excited about. Logistics need to be considered first.

Another path to collaboration these days involves getting more information from (and about) my students before planning all of the steps necessary to work through a project or series of lessons. Giving students a larger role in the planning phase, not just in the product phase, has produced significant changes to what I thought were solid ideas. For example, students recently suggested that we expand a unit involving a variety of approaches to printmaking. Instead of stopping at the approaches that were going to be introduced, students suggested adding a layer that involved pushing the definition of what printmaking can actually be. Students wound up printing on a variety of surfaces, not just paper, and realized that the “art” is not just the design itself. The surface that holds the ink completes the picture and can make or break the overall quality and success of the work.

Looking back at the Teamwork post, I realize that collaboration for me today is larger, more nuanced, and involves a broader range of those I work with.

"The Changing Shape of Teamwork" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

Aby Warburg in Rome, winter circa 1928–1929.

If it’s true that hindsight is more than an action we take from the present, but a conflation of present and past, a moment when time’s fabric bunches and we reach out and touch the object of our sights (pulling it forward), then, following in the vein of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, does this object touch us back?

The pathos of the belief in this possibility can be found in the practice of German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), particularly with his library and his final project, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. As an eldest son, Warburg should have taken over the family banking business from his father, but on his thirteenth birthday, he allegedly offered this position to his youngest brother, Max, in exchange for the promise that Max would buy him all the books he ever wanted. Max kept his word.

By 1914, Warburg had amassed somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000 volumes, most of which were related to history, art, psychology, and religion. These volumes became the Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg—a research institute located in Hamburg that attracted scholars from all over Europe and America—and, eventually, the Warburg Institute, one of the more important art-historical think tanks of the century.

Warburg’s original cataloguing system, however, left many of the visitors to his library overwhelmed. He ordered everything according to what he called “the law of the good neighbor,” physically arranging (and rearranging) the books to critique, refute, or support each other. As a later scholar wrote, “A line of speculation opening in one volume was attested to or attacked, continued or contradicted, refined or refuted in its neighbor.”

Photograph of Panel 77 from Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, taken by Aby Warburg, 1925–1929. Photograph in the collection of the Warburg Institute, London

It was an extremely physical process; one that he repeated with the Mnemosyne picture atlas, which he worked on for the five-year period up until his death, juxtaposing images from different time periods against each other, hoping to understand why a particular style of representation or type of image would surface and resurface at different points in history, or in different cultures.

Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (named for the Greek goddess of memory) has enjoyed a second life over the last decade due to a renewed interest in archival projects, but what is fascinating about Der Bilderatlas is that, just like the library, it was frequently in motion. Warburg would order and reorder the images, as though to truly understand the links between past and present, he needed the physical experience, not just the intellectual.

Warburg manifested animist tendencies, and believed that the objects in his collections were charged with energy from a particular period. The photos included in Der Bilderatlas floated on large, black, rectangular panels that Warburg considered conductive. In the words of art historian Kurt Forster, for Warburg “to tap these batteries [artifacts] was to obtain a living current of life from the past.” He both touched and was touched.

Ultimately, Warburg’s system was too confusing for others. The library only really began to thrive after his family hired Fritz Saxl as an assistant, who created a workable catalog and began to manage its daily affairs. Warburg himself is rumored to have been schizophrenic, which would explain some of his behavior patterns, but for the sake of argument, it’s just as tempting to read the figure of Saxl as Prometheus and Warburg as a modern-day Epimetheus, “acting on the wisdom of a conflated instant.” In this version of the narrative, unfortunately, it is Epimetheus who is sacrificed, as though by opening himself up to the experience of being touched by the past, he is overrun.

Danielle Sommer is Blogger-in-Residence through May 29, 2013.

"To Know Is to Touch and Be Touched" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

Public Fiction in Los Angeles, set up to look like a foreign correspondent’s office.

The vast majority of artist-run project spaces in Los Angeles tend to be casual and open-ended in nature, their raison d’être generally being to provide an alternative exhibition venue and gathering place for artists and their networks of friends. Standing out amongst this laid-back crowd is Public Fiction, a meticulously conceptualized venture launched in 2010 by curator and designer Lauren Mackler. Existing as both an exhibition/event space and a journal, Public Fiction energetically utilizes a variety of interrelated formats to explore themes and ideas that capture Mackler’s attention; over the last three years, these have included alternative spirituality, manifest destiny, and theatricality and sets, among others.

Rather than the typical setup of the journal acting as documentation or support for the live programming, Mackler has said that the programming initially existed in order to generate content for the journals, which are inspired by influential artists’ publications such as Wallace Berman’s Semina and Tom Marioni’s Vision. Both of those projects essentially collected original, not reproduced, artwork in print form; in the same way, Mackler, who designs the Public Fiction journals herself, attempts to translate live phenomena into print ephemera. The journals reference and collage events that have taken place in the physical space, but they also add other materials to make them into something new.

The first four issues of the Public Fiction journal. Courtesy Public Fiction.

Thematic explorations generally last about three months at Public Fiction, and as of this writing, it is in the midst of The Foreign Correspondent: Your Man in Los Angeles, a romantic exploration of international reporting both inspired and supported by the recent Ceci N’est Pas exchange initiative, which has brought many French artists to the city. The Public Fiction space has been outfitted with a grid of desks, evoking the newsrooms of yore, and it now functions as “an office, an exhibition, publication, performance, and residency.” In addition to producing a weekly dispatch edited by Mackler and Andrew Berardini, the “office” has hosted readings, screenings, a photography-themed exhibition, and a “secret restaurant” meal.

This may actually be the most personal of Mackler’s themes so far, as her own father was a foreign correspondent, a fact that played a huge role in her upbringing. Organizing the multitude of events and activities that comprise The Foreign Correspondent has perhaps enabled her to look back on elements of her past while engaging in the present; it may also highlight the degree to which Public Fiction constantly hearkens back to history, taking key moments and iconic gestures from the past and using them as springboards for experiments in the present.

Exterior of the Public Fiction space, while it was acting as the California Hotel.

I think back to the Gold Rush/Manifest Destiny series of late 2011—a meditation on the myths of California and westward expansion (no doubt influenced by Mackler’s own recent relocation from the East Coast) that played out in three phases. The first was La Californie, an exhibition co-curated by Mackler and Josh Peters of local artists, named after Picasso’s Mediterranean villa and emphasizing, among other qualities, bright colors and entrepreneurialism. The second was the transformation of Public Fiction into a fully functioning California Hotel, taking its cues and blessings from Al Ruppersberg’s 1971 Al’s Grand Hotel project, a classic example of cheeky California conceptualism. The hotel acted as a residency space for the Philadelphia–based collective Grizzly Grizzly and was also rented out to local artists. The final phase was a commissioned installation by David Hendren, who used frames, wires and paint to evoke the chaos and instability of earthquake territory.

David Hendren’s When…

The journal issue added more layers of investigation through selected images and commissioned texts, such as Lisa Anne Auerbach’s “Orgy Report” and Patrick Jackson’s discussion of Griffith Observatory as a stage set. Indeed, while the events that take place at Public Fiction provide constant stimuli within a lively interactive venue, the journals really are the gems of the project. To look through them is to experience a rich tumble of intellectual and historic inspiration, digested and burnished and re-fashioned. These works, informative and respectful of the past but with a strong appetite for fresh mixes, are not so much a distillation of occurrences as they are a new alchemical creation altogether.

"Word is a Virus | Public Fiction: The Play’s the Thing" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

Kerry James Marshall. “Garden of Delights,” 2013 (detail). Mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

In this week’s roundup Kerry James Marshall presents new and iconic work, Matthew Barney discusses his works on paper, El Anatsui will adorn the façade of Burlington House, Mariah Robertson is at MoMA, and more.

• Kerry James Marshall‘s new site specific installation opens this week at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (MO). The CAM scheduled this project to coincide with the June opening of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s new East Building expansion, where Marshall’s iconic work Watts 1963 (1995) will be on view. CAM’s installation closes July 7.

• Lari Pittman‘s first American solo museum exhibition in more than 15 years is on view at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. Lari Pittman: A Decorated Chronology will feature a selection of paintings and works on paper from the last 20 years and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. The show is on view through August 11.

• Matthew Barney will join Paul Holdengräber at The New York Public Library for a public discussion about Barney’s career and work, including Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney, which is now on view at The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY). Matthew Barney in Conversation takes place May 21 at 7pm. Purchase tickets here.

• James Turrell: A Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA) explores nearly fifty years of James Turrell‘s career. The exhibition, on view through April 6, includes early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional work with holograms.

• El Anatsui will adorn the façade of Burlington House with TSIATSIA—searching for connection, one of the largest wall hanging sculptures he has ever created. This display will coincide with the 245th anniversary of the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition (London, UK). The intricate, shimmering, metallic wall sculpture was created from aluminum bottle tops, printing plates and roofing sheets, amongst other materials. The work will be on view June 10–August 18.

• Barbara Kruger‘s work is in a group exhibition at Lehmann Maupin (New York, NY). Writings Without Borders features works by artists from different countries and origins, with their own approach to writing and the universal themes that relate to it. It highlights a wide variety of artistic styles, ranging from painting, drawing, photography, embroidery, and neon. The show closes July 20.

• Mariah Robertson‘s work is included in a group show at the The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY). XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography features a selection of major works by 19 contemporary artists, made between 1960 and the present, which have been acquired by the Department of Photography within the past five years. These works are on view at MoMA for the first time. The exhibition closes January 6, 2014.

• Erin Shirreff will present work at Art Basel Hong Kong. This work coincides with Erin Shirreff: Day is Long at Lisa Cooley (New York, NY) that draws together the mediums of photography, sculpture, and video to explore how the body responds to moments that are largely imagined, and the uncertainty at the root of knowing something that has transpired in a time or place other than our own. Art Basel Hong Kong takes place May 23–26. Day is Long closes June 16.

"Weekly Roundup" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

Weekly Roundup
Nettrice Gaskins gathered our art news for the week, with Ai Wei Wei in the Hong Kong group show A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story, the late Mike Kelley’s final Detroit installation Mobile Homestead, and Maya Lin’s interview in Time Style.

New Kids on the Block | “Mapping Soulville” with Aisha Cousins
Jacquelyn Gleisner followed new projects by Brooklyn artist Aisha Cousins, including a living memorial to Malcolm X in Bed-Stuy.

Pulling Things Forward
Blogger-in-Residence Danielle Sommer discussed Cherry and Martin’s 2011 exhibition Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 and its inspiration, Peter Bunnell’s controversial 1970 exhibition Photography into Sculpture–a breakthrough in hindsight.

Connecting Teachers and Artists: Year Five of Art21 Educators
Jessica Hamlin announced a new year of our Art21 Educators program, in which participants from varied disciplines meet for intense summer workshops. In-depth profiles of the selected educators are forthcoming.

100 Artists | Looking at Los Angeles: Escaping the Corporate Frame
Catherine Wagley wrote on the history of James Turrel, one of our 100 Artists, and his mid-century engagement (and later disenchantment) with the manipulation of perception.

Exclusive | James Turrell Revisits “Second Meeting”
Art21 Associate Producer Ian Forster introduced our newest Exclusive and considered the challenges of capturing James Turrel’s work on film.

Art21 Access Screenings
Access 100 Artists—the global campaign celebrating a decade of artists in our documentary series Art in the Twenty-First Century—heads to Greece this weekend for Art-Athina. Trusted Art 21 friend Kika Kyriakakaou will be documenting the Access booth on tumblr, and we thank her for it! Plus, Access events continue in Springfield, Illinois, where the Springfield Art Association will hold their next screening this Friday, May 24th.

Want to host an Access event of your own? Be sure to visit www.art21.org/access or contact access@art21.org to find out more!

"Week in Review 05.18.13" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

James Turrell, “Second Meeting” interior, 1989. Production stills from the series Exclusive. © Art21, Inc. 2013. Cinematography by Marc Levy.

“We don’t normally look at light; we’re generally looking at something light reveals.”

Filmed in early 2013, this new Exclusive shows artist James Turrell revisiting one of his first skyspaces, Second Meeting (1989), at the home of private collectors in Los Angeles, California. Second Meeting was originally installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1986. In the film, Turrell explains what initially led him to work with light, and how his skyspaces encourage examination of our own visual perceptions.

When the Art21 team goes out to film, we aim to convey the in person experience of an object or installation. Every work poses unique challenges. Rackstraw Downes’s elongated paintings can appear bowed through wide-angle lenses. Without the right microphones, important sounds in Ann Hamilton’s multisensory installation the event of a thread would go unnoticed. Subtle variations in Robert Ryman’s delicately painted white-on-white canvases can be especially difficult to capture and without them we lose the essence of his work. In my opinion, James Turrell’s installations are the most difficult to convey in documentary film.

Artist James Turrell seated inside “Second Meeting” (1989). Production still from the series Exclusive. © Art21, Inc. 2013. Cinematography by Marc Levy.

When sitting inside Second Meeting you’re not only looking at the sky—you’re also observing how your eyes and mind perceive color. At dusk, tungsten bulbs cast a warm hue on the white walls that surround the opening in the ceiling, altering one’s perspective of this blue field. Turrell isn’t trying to trick us though—the mechanics of Second Meeting are straightforward and obvious. Rather, he encourages us to look inward and acknowledge that we form our own perceptions and thus can change them.

In the space, the walls fill your field of vision as you look upward. But as you watch our film, the walls only take up a few inches of your screen. With less of your field of vision occupied by warmly lit walls, your perception is not easily shifted. We simulated the experience as best we could, in this case, through time-lapse photography, but in the end the affect of Second Meeting simply cannot be recreated.

Second Meeting sits on private residential property. However, New York residents and visitors can find a nearly identical installation at MoMA PS1 in Queens, where it has been on public view since 1986. Concurrent retrospectives of Turrell’s work are also opening soon at the Guggenheim in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Go and experience the work for yourself.

"Exclusive | James Turrell Revisits “Second Meeting”" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

James Turrell and Robert Irwin in the anechoic chamber during their collaboration with Garrett Corporation. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Maurice Tuchman, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s first modern art curator, went down to Torrance, California one day in July of 1969. Associate curator Jane Livingston and assistant curator Gail Scott came with him, and all three underwent “alpha conditioning.”

Artists James Turrell and Robert Irwin had designed alpha conditioning and a series of other experiments with Dr. Ed Wortz of the Garrett Corporation as part of LACMA’s Art and Technology Program (1967-1971). The initiative and resulting exhibition—”this hair-raising idea,” Livingston called it in retrospect [1]—involved pairing artists with corporations and asking artists to collaborate with company scientists or engineers. At the time, Tuchman said he imagined artists moving around corporations as if in their own studios.

“I believed it was the process of interchange between artist and company that was most significant, rather than whatever tangible results might quickly occur,” Tuchman wrote in 1970 [2]. But a later interview with Irwin, as well as early reports on the processes of other artists in the program, suggest Tuchman may have eased into this belief—maybe when he began to realize that only 15 or so of the 76 artist-participants would make something tangible enough to show. It’s this intangibility that makes the Art and Technology show persistently interesting: Why did corporate settings and an expanded range of hi-tech resources push artists, even those who decidedly made objects in their usual practices, toward indeterminate, impossibly conceptual projects?

Headshots of participants from the cover of the Report on Art and Technology. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

For alpha conditioning, Wortz hooked the curators up, one at a time, for thirty minutes each, to an electroencephalography machine, also known as an EEG. They sat in a reclining chair—a comfortable one, as Turrell, Irwin and Wortz specify in their notes—and put on glasses with a white light attached to the rim. Then they closed their eyes. Through their eyelids, they could see the light go on each time their alpha rhythms, or brain waves, went down to 8-12 cycles per second, putting them in meditative states. The best photo from this day shows Livingston, reclining and half-smiling while Wortz puts electrodes on her forehead. She looks relaxed. But would she still be a few moments later with a machine constantly informing her how relaxed or not she was? After returning to the museum, all three curators “experienced inexplicable sensations of anxiety or a sense of mental dislocation or dissociation,” says the report Livingston later wrote.

Neil Armstrong walked on the moon that same July. And Wortz, who worked just south of LAX in Garrett’s Life Sciences Department, had been developing “life support systems for lunar missions” using NASA money. Trained as a psychologist, he thought often about perceptual dilemmas: Would the bigness of the lunar surface disorient an astronaut? How do you prepare yourself to step out into that much space?

It made sense that Robert Irwin and James Turrell would intrigue him. At that point, Irwin was crafting translucent white disks out of acrylic lacquer, installing overlapping groups of them against white walls. Sometimes, even when you were in front of them, it looked as though they weren’t actually there, and Irwin objected to anyone taking pictures of them. “I am concerned with specifics and reject the generalities of photographs,” Irwin told ArtForum in 1965.

Turrell had been working in the empty Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica since 1966, closing up all the windows after renting it out and experimenting with projections in corners or lights shining through cut-open walls—anything that made space look dimensional in an unfamiliar way. Both artists, as they would write together in a 1969 memo, wanted “people to perceive their perceptions.”

With Wortz as their main contact at Garrett, they experimented sensory deprivation chambers, meditation processes and ganzfields (fields of sight with no objects in them to focus on), measuring the reactions volunteers had to various sensory experiments. At first, they thought they would build some kind of sound-free anechoic chamber for the LACMA show, but reading through the notes, memos and interview transcripts from the last stretch of the project, is like watching the three men gradually disengage themselves from goals and order.

James Turrell and Robert Irwin in the anechoic chamber during their collaboration with Garrett Corporation. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This has to be part of what makes the Irwin-Turrell-Wortz collaboration so fascinating: they started out wanting to manipulate perception for research purposes. But all three of them “became less inclined though spring and into summer of ‘69 to carry out [their] original plan” and more “deeply involved in the highly personal experience itself of intimate collaboration.” [3] Then Turrell abruptly “abdicated,” as both Livingston and Irwin put it, which makes it sound like Turrell had relinquished a kind of power. “All of this is very Pavlovian,” Turrell said later, vaguely explaining his abdication. “You’re not really asking much of the person, or yourself. And all you can watch are the surface responses.”

Last year, Livingston spoke on a panel at the Getty Museum and remembered with a hint of sarcasm, the goals of Art and Technology: “Here we [were] in the middle of a huge industrial complex,” she said, “and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could maybe make the new world happen?”

Maybe they did, thoug, , or at least gave some blueprints for how art could and couldn’t interact with the corporate world. The Irwin-Turrell-Wortz collaboration—which went from a goal-oriented art-science marriage to an exiting of the corporate frame by artists and company man (Wortz would soon become a Buddhist therapist specializing in helping artists)—feels like a muscular response to the growing inability to tell where corporate interests and art and science begin.

"100 Artists | Looking at Los Angeles: Escaping the Corporate Frame" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

Spring is that time of year when anyone in school, students and teachers alike, are in a frenzied countdown, holding their collective breath until they are officially out for the summer.

Art21 is excited to announce that soon after the big exhale, an exceptional group of teachers will join us in New York City for the fifth year of Art21 Educators.

Art21 Educators is a program for practicing teachers, museum educators, artists, and university faculty from a wide range of disciplines. Our alumni and new participants comprise a dynamic community (75 and growing) who are curious and passionate about contemporary art, and committed to transforming education through the work of living artists.

All educators are required to apply with a partner who can provide additional support and feedback, as well as opportunities for collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching. Six pairs are selected annually. Our 2013-2014 Art21 Educators are:

Renee Bareno + Sara Fromboluti, The Aaron School, New York, NY
Carol Barker + Anna Grimes, Turquoise Trail Charter School, Santa Fe, NM
Thomas Dareneau + Domenic Frunzi, Boyertown Area High School, Boyertown, PA
Rebecca Belleville + Eric Pugh, Maritime Industries Academy, and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Baltimore, MD, respectively
Ryan Schmidt + Erin Shafkind, South Shore PreK-8, and Nathan Hale High School, Seattle, WA, respectively
Alyssa Greenberg + Rebecca Mir, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, Chicago, IL, and Voelker Orth Museum, Bird Sanctuary and Victorian Garden, Queens, NY, respectively

This July, the group will meet for the first time to participate in eight intense days of workshops and discussions about Art21’s films and curricular resources, which includes visits to galleries, museums, and artists’ studios for intimate conversations with curators and Art21-featured artists. After the summer, we’ll continue working as a group (though virtually) to share the different ways that we are introducing contemporary art and artists in classrooms throughout the country.

Congratulations to this year’s participants!

Editor’s Note: In the coming weeks, we’ll post in-depth profiles of our 2013-2014 Art21 Educators, telling you more about their interests and lives as teachers.

"Connecting Teachers and Artists: Year Five of Art21 Educators" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents

Carl Cheng, “U.N. of C.,” 1967. Film, molded plastic, Styrofoam and Plexiglas. 15 x 20.75 x 9 in. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

In the fall of 2011, the Los Angeles gallery Cherry and Martin offered its visitors the chance to relive a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, gallerists Philip Martin and Mary Leigh Cherry presented selected works from curator Peter Bunnell’s 1970 exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, including some of the first examples of artists working with photographs in a “fully dimensional” manner.

The original exhibition, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with a roster of primarily West Coast- and L.A.-based artists, shocked and appalled its audience, winning scorn from many critics. Hilton Kramer, for instance, insisted that the integrity of the photographic process had been compromised. Forty years later, however, most of the show’s reviewers comment instead on the exhibition’s continued relevance and surprising freshness. Carl Cheng’s dioramas of molded plastic photographic figures and Michael de Courcy’s tower of photo boxes seemed as intriguing in 2011 as they did in 1970. What critics seem to disagree on was what word to use to describe the show. Was it a “re-staging,” a “revision,” or simply a “reprise?”

In an interview, gallerist Philip Martin made it clear that the goal was never to simply reach back into the past and recreate the minutiae of the original exhibition. “You want the work to live and to be present as current objects,” Martin stated. “It doesn’t feel like historical material to me.” At the same time, the effect of Cherry and Martin’s decisions to pull the exhibition forward—to apply the lens of hindsight—can’t be ignored. “Art history is a narrative. It’s a story that we’re clearly always retelling ourselves. As a gallerist, as a curator, you’re trying to create a narrative that sparks people’s interest so they can see things afresh.”

When asked if the recent version of Photography into Sculpture revised history, Martin replied, “I’m not really sure what that means. I would assume that means you’re saying to people that history is not what they thought it was. I suppose to some degree that’s true, but at the same time, I think that to reach back and say ‘Hey, we couldn’t read this object, or we were reading it in a different way…’ That’s a statement of the present.”

There’s a famous photograph from 1913 called The Smoker. The smoker sits in profile, his face double-exposed with his hairline lost against the black background. His left hand is raised toward the camera, grasping an indistinguishable object. His right hand—actually, both hands—seem to be in multiple places at once, leaving blurry motion trails across the photograph, an effect the photographer, Italian Futurist Anton Bragaglia (1890–1960), carefully cultivated by leaving the shutter open for long periods. The same technique transforms the sitter’s cigarette and cigarette smoke into solid, white cords that snake from lap to mouth.

Michael de Courcy. “untitled,” 1970-2011. Photoserigraph and corrugated cardboard boxes. 12 x 12 x 12 in each box; overall dimensions variable. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

The image is an example of what Bragaglia called photodynamism, a process developed by Anton and his brother, Arturo, in reaction to the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey. Chronophotography, according to Bragaglia, only interested itself in “the precise reconstruction of movement,” while photodynamism’s concern was with “the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness.”

It occurs to me again that there are competing versions of hindsight. One presumes distance from what came before, along with a more precise, Marey-esque catalogue of movement (of causes and effects). The second—the sight on a gun as it links my eye and my target—involves the messiness of Benjamin’s flash and the conflated instant, of multiple layers of time pierced by the same arrow. In this version, the second we loose our arrow, we enter Bragaglia’s landscape, where the legibility of individual objects and trajectories is compromised and nothing is as important as the connective tissue that vibrates between and around things.

There is no prescription for the results of such an encounter, but perhaps this is a way we can have our cake and eat it too—to steal fire and bring our past along. After all, the clumsiest narratives are often the narratives that assume prescribed movement from A to B. Perhaps what makes shows like Cherry and Martin’s stand above the rest is that they don’t.

"Pulling Things Forward" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

Subscribe to Art21 for mobile on Google Currents