EXCLUSIVE: Matthew Ritchie discusses the apocalyptic themes in his videos The Iron City (2007) and Raphael (2007), featured in his upcoming exhibition The Morning Line (2008) for the 3rd Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Seville. The Morning Line will be on view October 2, 2008 - January 11, 2009 at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.

Matthew Ritchie’s artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project (continually expanding and evolving like the universe itself) stems from his imagination, and is cataloged in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from Judeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles.

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

ART21: Could you say a little about the inspiration behind the videos The Iron City (2007) and Raphael (2007) that will be featured in your upcoming project The Morning Line (2008)? Isn’t part of the organizing principle behind the works John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674)? What drew you to a text that’s over 300 years old?

RTICHIE: Paradise Lost is one of the great books that nobody’s ever read. It’s the greatest epic poem in the English language — everyone agrees — but nobody can get through it because it’s like ninety percent junk. But what it really is, when you spend a little time with it, is an index to all these myths. Milton doesn’t just tell the great story of the Judeo-Christian tradition; he also goes to great lengths to include all of the Greek myths and all of the Persian myths and all of the Egyptian myths. Everybody gets a name check, and he gives all the gods little jobs to do inside the new hierarchy.

All of the religions of the world before Christianity foresaw enormous cycles of activity. The world would be destroyed, it would be rebuilt, it would be destroyed, it would be rebuilt. There was always this anticipation that not only were the gods born out of some vast violent cataclysm, but they would then die in an equally vast violent cataclysm. Milton’s making an argument that Judeo-Christian time, or what we would call teleological time, is the first religion to propose an end to that: the world was created, there’s the fall, and then the world will end — the end. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the world as we know it is not going to come back again; there’s no reincarnation, there’s just Heaven and Hell after that. So Milton is trying to grapple with this enormous new tradition and bring it into some kind of order that includes all the previous traditions. And he’s also trying to include all of the scientific stories of his day as well, which is why there are these subsets on mining and on architecture. It’s like an encyclopedia of all of the interests of society at the time.

Milton’s text was also the first great result of the Enlightenment, which in England took shape as the Republican overthrow of the Anglo-Catholic monarchy, which was the last generation to believe in the Divine Right of Kings. The Divine Right of Kings was entirely literal. It meant members of the ruling class were the direct descendants of God on earth and they could therefore do whatever they wanted. And with Republicanism what you have is a new generation of people saying, “No, that doesn’t make any sense, we’ve got to change this.” So Paradise Lost is simultaneously a political text, an ideological text, a deeply religious and spiritual text, and an attempt to encyclopedically wrap up all of the loose ends of the Bible and re-present them in the light of anthropology and history and ethnography and say, “Okay, here it is — here, finally — here’s all you need to know. Here’s how it all works.”

The kind of thing that was very new in Milton’s time — this idea that human beings had the right to challenge divine authority — has now reached a kind of limit case where, for the last hundred years, it’s been approaching the logical conclusion that “human beings” means every single human being. Because in Milton’s day “human beings” didn’t really include women, it didn’t include slaves, it didn’t include serfs, it didn’t include people who didn’t have property, it didn’t include lots of people. It really meant a small, educated class of people could substitute themselves for the monarchy. But this new class was still in a kind of covenant with God. And this has radically changed, today, because the premise of universal enfranchisement has broadened to include all the people who don’t claim to have a covenant with God, which is everybody else in the world. So with Paradise Lost you have this incredible opportunity to experience something that’s sort of like the time we’re in now: this changeover between a kind of outmoded, late 19th century Republicanism — which has become a kind of residue — and something even more radical. Paradise Lost provides a very strong analogy to the intense historical period we are living in today.

ART21: How are the films and structure of The Morning Line itself influenced by Paradise Lost?

RTICHIE: What I’m trying to do for the piece, as a whole, is to invert this idea of information we all seem to share: that the more information you have, the more you know. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Information is really just the stuff the universe is made of and the more you have of it doesn’t necessarily mean the more you know about it. It just means the more you have. (more…)

Maria Anna Tappeiner’s documentary “Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet” (2005) screens at Film Forum through September 2nd. The 94-minute film follows Serra (Season 1) through the creation and construction of his installation “The Matter of Time,” commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In the film, the artist “elucidates how ‘matter imposes form on form,’ the unique qualities of steel, and how a space may move simultaneously in two directions.”

“The Matter of Time” was the largest sculpture commission in history. Seven sculptures comprise the installation, which is permanently installed at Guggenheim Bilbao. Three related audio tours can be downloaded from the Museum’s website.

Film Forum is located at 209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, New York, NY. Showtimes are 1:15, 3:15, 6:00, 8:00, and 10:00pm.

Last Saturday, San Francisco Bay Area educators came together at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park to learn about FUNDRED/PAYDIRT, an important and compelling project initiated by Mel Chin (Season 1).

FUNDRED National Director Mary Rubin delivered a dynamic presentation about some of Mel Chin’s other community artworks including the multi-facted installation project, Recolecciones, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose, CA.

Educators received a special FUNDRED operative kit, which includes all of the tools needed to implement the project with students this fall. Our community hopes to generate over 5,000 FUNDREDS to contribute to the vault, and we look forward to the armored truck’s pick-up visit in 2009. Students at our local collection center, Rooftop K-8 Alternative School, are studying jazz this year and plan to greet the truck in true New Orleans style.

To learn more about the FUNDRED/PAYDIRT project, visit www.fundred.org.

We have more FUNDRED operative kits to distribute. If you are an educator in California, leave a comment below with your email address. We’ll be happy to recruit you as a West Coast FUNDRED operative.

In the current “Underground” issue of Cabinet magazine, Josiah McElheny (Season 3) contributes an essay titled Nowhere, Everywhere, Somewhere.  The paper investigates a series of photographs and mock-ups depicting an unrealized Mies van der Rohe project from 1922, the Glass Skyscraper. McElheny charts a form of modernism in which “the architectural past and nature were acknowledged… a modernism that is not everywhere, only somewhere.” The photographs supposedly depict a model of “accommodation” whereby co-existence and symbiosis are keys to a happy world, which sounds a lot like the present utopic globalism?

Among many other worthwhile reads in the issue is Through the Left Eye, Paul La Farge’s essay on Cao Dai, a Vietnamese universal religion invented during the French colonialism days of Indochine that counts within its cannon of saints Joan of Arc and Victor Hugo.  Each divulges such things as religious guidelines and masonic chemical formulas through séance and the medium of “table-turning.” What would Mies say?

Art21 artist Vija Celmins (Season 2) is the third woman to receive the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, first awarded in 2001. This prize is hailed as the most valuable award in Europe for contemporary artists. The Roswitha Haftmann Foundation, the organization that administers the prize, aims to recognize outstanding achievements in the visual arts. Every one-to-three years the foundation selects a living artist based on the artistic significance of their work without regard to their personal circumstances, which are loosely identified as nationality, age, gender, etc. The foundation values Celmins’ “masterly and uncanny way of exploiting widely differing artistic media to the utmost advantage for her creative purposes.” Art21 congratulates Celmins on her recent award.

Looking back, the Teaching With Contemporary Art column is off to an exciting beginning in our first four months. Since early May, we have had the opportunity to feature writing that focuses on topics such as:

• - Bringing Season 4 artists meaningfully into the classroom.
• - The difference between teaching students about making art vs. engaging with and discussing contemporary art.
• - Allora and Calzadilla in the classroom.
• - Mark Dion in the classroom.
• - Robert Ryman in the classroom.
• - Laurie Simmons in the classroom.
• - The Billy Joels of art education (although one passionate Billy Joel fan took issue with my analogy…).
• - Summer exhibits and best bets to check out, including Henry Moore at the New York Botanical Garden, Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim, SITE Santa Fe’s Biennial, Jeff Koons at the Chicago MCA, Martin Puryear in Washington DC and The Cinema Effect Part II at the Hirshhorn Museum.
• - Ways to slow down and recharge for the upcoming school year.

If you’re just returning from summer vacation… welcome back! We have arranged for gas prices to be reduced by a few cents. To celebrate and begin getting ready for the school year, reach back and check out some of the posts in our first four months. Write a comment for some of the posts you find interesting.

Next week: a report on Art Tools for High Schools, the week-long institute for high school teachers at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where Art21 presented workshops that focused on using our educational materials in the classroom.

Kittiwat Unarrom is the son of a baker and has a masters degree in fine arts. His medium is bread; his subject is human flesh. Since 2006, he has been selling his wares impaled on meat hooks or on plastic-wrapped styrofoam trays behind a glass case in his “Body Bakery” in Ratchaburi, Thailand.

For pictures, text, and a video (in Thai) about the Body Bakery, check out this post via Shape+Colour. NOTE: this may be scary for children.

He is a virtuoso of the grotesque. The skill and attention to detail are impressive, but I am not sure what to make of his work. I can find little information about his intention and it is unclear whether this is primarily due to a language barrier or because he is not one to make artist statements.

His work makes me, coming from a Western perspective, think of the flesh-to-bread transformation of the Catholic Holy Communion, Hansl and Gretl, and Halloween haunted houses where grapes mimic eyeballs and spaghetti moonlights as intestines.

From what I was able to find, he is inspired by the Buddhist concept that one shouldn’t be misled by appearances; what you see may not be true to what you thought. He is quoted as saying, “Of course, people were shocked and thought that I was mad when they saw the works. But once they knew the idea behind it, they understood and became interested in the work itself, instead of thinking that I am crazy.”

Again, maybe it’s a translation issue but this feels like an overly simple and thus frustrating answer. If the goal was to push the idea of ’seeing is believing’ with home baked trompe l’oeil, there are many different directions to go with this. The painstaking realism of his goods and the faux-cannibalism they imply is an unnerving aspect of his work that this statement doesn’t really address.

I’d be really interested to know more about the interaction with his customers, their experiences buying his products, and whether his showroom functions more closely to a gallery or to a bakery. Do most come in for the novelty or are there repeat clients? What is the life of the ‘body bread’ after it leaves the store—is it served as ‘normal bread’ in a sandwich? What happens to pieces that aren’t sold by the end of the day? Bread is quick to mold in a humid climate… How are the pieces priced compared to a regular loaf?

DISCUSSION: What do you think about the Body Bakery?

Zhang Huan, My New York, 2002, still from video performance. Courtesy of Pierre Menard Gallery.

One of the last shows I saw in the United States before leaving for Belgium was Meat After Meat Joy, an exhibit of 10 contemporary artists who use meat in their work, that was on display June 21- July 20 at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge. The title takes its cue from Carolee Schneemann’s performance/happening Meat Joy (1964) that explored flesh, gender, and the language of meat (in Schneemann’s case, “chick”)*. A video of Meat Joy is projected in the gallery but the other artists are ‘after’ Meat Joy—their works explore different significations of meat and raw flesh.

Exhibited artists included Tania Bruguera and Nezaket Ekici, Anthony Fisher, Betty Hirst, Zhang Huan, Tamara Kostianovsky, David Raymond, Dieter Roth, Carolee Schneemann, Jana Sterbak, and Jenny Walton.

Betty Hirst’s meat sculptures were only on display the opening night; July is not a friendly month for meat longevity. When I arrived, there were photographs on display instead. I liked Tamara Kostianovsky’s ’stuffed animal’ carcasses out of her own clothing. Although these pieces were the most cuddly and approachable of the works exhibited, the use of clothing encouraged consideration of our own hides and flesh and what lies beneath.

In addition to the emotional and symbolic connotations of meat, it is visually striking. “Meat is such a wonderful aesthetic subject,” says Phil Dmochowski, the gallery’s assistant director. “Its textures, color variance, striations and marbling are very seductive, really. There’s such a great history of painting meat,” he says, mentioning Rembrandt, Van Gogh and…Bacon (from The Weekly Dig).

The opening received a lot of publicity and subsequent protests drew further attention to the show. On July 9th, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) issued a press release to call for the closing of the show: “Unless you’re Hannibal Lecter, there’s nothing ‘artistic’ or ‘joyful’ about meat,” says PETA Senior Vice President Tracy Reiman. “If it’s unacceptable to kill humans for an art exhibit, then it should be unacceptable to kill animals too.”

The Pierre Menard gallery has images and introductory text that explains the significance of meat and the curator’s intent on its website.

Big Red & Shiny also has an interview with the curator, Heide Hatry.

(*We also have plenty of meat terms to objectify men—hunks, prime rib, grade A chuck etc..)

It’s summertime and, if you believe the junk magazines—I see that InTouch stashed between the pages of your ArtForum—carbohydrates will ruin you and your chances of bikini (or board short) bliss. They may just ruin your life. Luckily, there are many things to do with processed grains and refined sugar besides putting them in your mouth. Food has been used as an art material for many reasons, ranging from necessity (i.e. prior to the development of oil painting, pigments were bound with egg yolk in tempera), to novelty, to symbolic and conceptual value.

Here’s a (very) short list of artists known for their use of sugars and starch. This is by no means intended to be comprehensive so feel free to add to it below in the comments section.

1. Felix Gonzalez-Torres was selected to represent the United States at the 2007 Venice Biennale, becoming the second artist to receive this honor posthumously. He believed that politics infused all art regardless of intention and he once said that “the most successful of all political moves are ones that don’t appear to be ‘political.’” His candy spills and installations are among his signature works and touch on challenging themes and current events including the Gulf War and the AIDS crisis. Black licorice resembles missiles and piles of wrapped hard candies in his subtle protest piece Untitled (Public Opinion). Felix Gonzales-Torres is among Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh’s favorite artists.

2. Joseph Beuys was drawn to food as art materials and to the concept of art as nourishment. The instability of food materials meant that they would change, somewhat unpredictably, over time. Beuys used chocolate, sausage, gelatin, margarine, and butter in his work. He was featured in a small show at Harvard called Eat Art. Honey was one of the materials that particularly interested Joseph Beuys, as it had mystical connotations. See Honey is flowing in all directions.

3. Chandra Bocci’s Gummy Big Bang II is a literal explosion of a gummies: an ark’s worth of eviscerated bears, worms, and tarantulas fill a 120 square foot space. This piece was originally featured in the 2006 Portland Art Museum Oregon Biennial and is currently part of a curated collection at the CW Network (the same CW that shows the Gilmore Girls). Gummy Big Bang I had melted throughout the course of an installation in Portland and was disposed of at the end of the show.

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Last Thursday at the opening night party of the American Institute of Architects Gallery in Portland, Maya Lin (Season 2) presented an exhibit of drawings and models produced for her Confluence Project.

Begun in 2000, the Confluence Project is a series of seven artworks along the Columbia River Basin that were commissioned by the Pacific Northwest Native American tribes and civic groups from Washington and Oregon to honor the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06. The Confluence Project takes a pro-environment, proactive stance designed to preserve the area’s natural and cultural resources while rethinking what the commemoration of the bicentennial could be.

Later this month, two other Confluence events will also be held. On the morning of August 23, Lin and fellow architect John Paul Jones will follow children over Land Bridge near the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Later that day, a second walk continues to a bird blind at the Sandy River Delta that will conclude with the third project’s dedication.