Jack Tworkov in his Provincetown studio. Photo by © Arnold Newman, for an article written by Robert Hatch, "At The Tip Of Cape Cod," July 1961 issue of Horizon.Via the Provincetown Artist Registry.

Owing to its timeless insights about artmaking and life, art teachers traditionally assign Ashcan School painter Robert Henri’s 1923 collection of writing,  The Art Spirit, to beginning painters. The newly-released collection, The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, seems destined to be another such classic. Edited and annotated by painter Mira Schor, the 500-page book includes letters, lectures, journal entries, and published essays from the 1930s to the 1980s in which Tworkov intersperses unpretentious philosophical inquiry with progress reports from the studio. One of the primary players among the New York School painters in the 1950s, Tworkov recognized that his ideas were often at odds with prevailing theories. Nevertheless, he was committed to teasing out not what he ought to believe, but what he actually believed. The book is rooted in Tworkov’s era, which spanned the rise and decline of American painting, and manages to entertain readers with amusing anecdotes about his famous cohort while also imparting wisdom gained from a lifetime spent in the studio. Here are some excerpts.

“Every art can only say what the medium allows it to say. Every change in medium is a change in content. A painter knows that what was originally suggested by charcoal can never be said in paint. If you paint you say one thing. If you stain you say another. If you paste, you say still another. By the time you use a computer you will say an utterly different thing—that’s why painting will go on…” Feb. 12, 1967

“Among artists much more sure of their seeing, there is a much more instantaneous agreement on the worth of a painting than there is among laymen. It is interesting to note and compare the artist’s positive tone in speaking of a painting and the layman’s hesitativeness and vagueness. The layman is vague because he is guessing, because he does not see as fast, or at all [what], the artist sees….” October 16, 1961

“My main problem at Yale [Tworkov chaired the Art Department 1963-1969] was to establish the degree of my responsibility and authority. To smother the fights of the faculty, which mostly was between Chaet and Peterdi on the one hand and Albers followers on the other…” November 19, 1963

“A Mr. Slesinger from the Guggenheim Foundation called to say that I’ve been awarded a fellowship. Because of the mail strike they could not mail the award. So Wally [his wife] went to the office to pick it up. What is strange is that Motherwell and Geldzahler are on the jury, two people I have no high regard for….” March 20, 1970

“There was a time when painters could ignore what critics said about painting,  since it was agreed that they did not know what they were talking about. Now it is no longer true. Critics have caught up with painting. They are talking sense about it. And that is perhaps what is wrong with painting. Painting needs once more to go beyond ABC.” Feb. 12, 1967

An exhibition of Tworkov’s paintings, organized by Jason Andrew and the Estate of Jack Tworkov, will be at the UBS Art Gallery, New York, NY, August 13-November 13, 2009.

Melanie Pullen-American Revolution Soldier

New media tools are a rich addition to an art teacher’s toolbox and the Web is overflowing with opportunities to discover new artists and art forms. Here in San Francisco, we are fortunate to be surrounded by a myriad of creative folks. Our public media station, KQED produces two artist documentary series, Spark and Gallery Crawl which, like Art:21 Web Exclusive content, are available for free download as video podcasts from iTunes, where you can edit video podcast clips and compile them into playlists. As you start planning innovative, new curriculum for fall 2009, spend some time exploring the endless possibilities of podcasting.

Invite students to practice self-directed art study and become curators, creating thematic playlists highlighting artwork that speaks to their sensibilities. As they discover new artists on iTunes or ArtBabble.org, students should practice critical viewing skills and consider how they might create their own podcast highlighting an emerging artist from their school or community. What further questions do students have for the artists they “meet” in the videos? How would they conduct an interview? Would they include music or graphics? There are endless new media production tools available to our students today, and it’s entirely possible that they’ll be interested in starting their own artist documentary series.

For a specific example of a thematic playlist, take a look at Melanie Pullen’s interview and soldier-focused photographs in her exhibition Violent Times on Gallery Crawl and compare it with Art:21 Season 2 photographer, Collier Schorr’s series of German youth in uniform. How are Pullen and Schorr’s photographs fundamentally similar, and how do the artists’ intentions differ? How does each artist’s treatment of her subjects differ? Do the photographs seem feminine, masculine, or both? Are there other portraitists or photographers who come to mind when viewing these artists’ work? Who are they? Students might choose to create a playlist of video podcasts based on a theme or genre, and close the playlist with their own piece of media such as a video response or short film that ties in with the selected topic.

As Joe Fusaro and Olivia Gude mentioned in their panel discussion at this year’s NAEA conference, teachers should try making less art with their students and focus on thematic study of contemporary artists, considering their relation to artists throughout history. By exploring renowned and emerging artists online and learning about artists’ intentions straight from the source, students will begin to intuitively make connections with their own art-making practices, and be inspired to experiment with fresh ideas and new media tools.

Kristin Farr is an artist and Project Supervisor for Arts Education at KQED in San Francisco.

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.

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.

Christian Marclay, still from "Video Quartet," 2002

With the opening of Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (on view through July 26, 2009), I have been thinking about how to share this 14-minute video work of art with students.

For educators, I think there is often a reluctance to discuss video art on tours. Sometimes there are logistical issues in terms of time and sequencing, while at other times, the narrative of the video poses challenges. However, works like Video Quartet—videos that can be watched for a portion of time and then discussed—offer possibilities for meaningful exchanges with students and exposure to this medium.

I developed some strategies to discuss Video Quartet after hearing a talk from educator Denise Gray. In regards to looking at video art with students, she emphasized a structured interaction, such that it includes time to experience the work, as well as the conditions in which to discuss it. The discussion portion sometimes requires you to step away from the work, or even outside of the gallery where it is being shown. These comments might be helpful for talking about video art by Art21 artists Matthew Barney, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, and Paul Pfeiffer.

Before entering the gallery showing Video Quartet, I introduce students briefly to what they will see: a collage of over 700 film clips of sounds edited together by the artist Christian Marclay to create a musical composition—a quartet. I mention that they will watch about five minutes of this 15-minute work. I also ask students to look for something specific: the various ways in which sounds are made, as well as how the image of the sound fits with the recorded sound.

A recent group of eighth graders, upon viewing part of Video Quartet, discussed “traditional music,” and how combined sounds—such as those made by car horns, feet tapping, and glasses filled with water—also create a type of music. The musical possibilities of car horns caused many of them to view the sound in new ways.

Marclay’s process to create Video Quartet was also something they wanted to discuss. While they were familiar with collage, seeing a collage made with video allowed them to think about repetition and arrangement in new ways. One student said how she thought the four screens was a really engaging choice, and another commented on how the clips on different screens competed for his attention. Through this work, Marclay also demonstrates an interest in the memory that viewers may have with some of these movies—which is something else that the students picked up on, recognizing films including Back to the Future and The Addams Family.

In addition to talking with students about this work, we plan to facilitate a drawing activity for summer K-12 tours where students draw the pattern of a sound or sounds they choose to focus on, creating an alternate image to accompany the sound and image pairing that Marclay produced. At our May Family Day, we also had stations where students could experiment with the mixing and editing process, creating their own song using an application called Super Duper Music Looper.

In our media-saturated lives, Christian Marclay reminds us to question the relationships that we are presented with—the sounds and images edited together for films. I also feel he encourages viewers to think creatively about ways in which they can change their role from being a consumer to being a producer.

Julie Thomson is the Associate Curator of Education at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University where she develops materials for docents and teachers to use with K-12 audiences.

Marcelo Bonevardi, "Wall with Objects," 1966, Indan ink on paper with plaster form, 14” x 11.” Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Armand Versaci.

Mel Bochner’s new book, Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965–2007, is a compilation of his writing, both about art and as art. The book opens with thirty-five sharp, pithy reviews he wrote for Arts Magazine in the sixties. The editor paid $2.50 per review whether they were published or not, so Bochner turned in thirty each month, earning enough to pay his rent.

After reading the reviews, I wondered whatever became of the unfamiliar artists he had skewered. Consider a 1965 review of Marcelo Bonevardi’s work:

Competency, craftsmanship, and professionalism lend these large painting-constructions a certain interest. Into shallow spaces constructed behind a heavily surfaced canvas, small wooden abstract shapes are placed in the manner of meticulous Nevelson. The keyed-down color, non-referential shapes, and small esoteric numerals and arrows do not quite achieve an intended aura of mystery. If Bonevardi aspires to enigma, his all-too-familiar international vocabulary is incapable of expressing it.

Marcelo Bonevardi? For many of the artists Bochner reviews, a web search yields few results, but Bonevardi’s son Gustavo created a website for his father. Marcelo died in 1994 of cancer, and therefore won’t have to experience the disappointment of reading this review again. In any case, despite Bochner’s defensible assessment, it turns out Bonevardi fared well. “A native of Argentina, Marcelo Bonevardi spent most of his career in New York City, where he absorbed avant-garde practices and influences such as abstraction and primitivism, using them to invent a pictorial and symbolic language with which to express his deep spirituality and affinity for myth and ritual,” his website reports. “During his lifetime, Bonevardi received many honors, and his work has been collected by the leading North American and Latin American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.”

A book about his life and work, Bonevardi: Chasing Shadows, Constructing Art, which includes essays by Dore Ashton and Ronald Christ, was awarded Best Arts Book by the International 2008 Latino Book Awards. Gustavo Bonevardi, who has an architecture degree from Princeton, and John Bennett were the editors.

Gustavo and Bennett are co-founders of Proun Studio Space, which was part of the team that created “Tribute in Light” after 9/11.  Their videos have been included in the exhibitions The Un-Private House and Mies in Berlin (including the documentary Mies and Exhibition Design 1926-1945).

Marcelo also had a daughter, Cecilia, who lives in Argentina.

Marcelo Bonevardi, "The Supreme Astrolabe," 1973. Acrylic on stitched linen and wood construction with textured substrate, polished wood assemblage and carvings, 70.25” x 87”. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift The Dorothy Beskind Foundation, 1973.

Marcelo Bonevardi, "Trapped Angel III," 1980. Stitched burlap and wood construction with textured substrate, painted wood assemblage, 97.25” x 48”. Museo National des Bellas Artes, B.A. Argentina.

Marcelo Bonevardi, "Study for Head," 1993. Charcoal pastel and acrylic on pigmented stucco over wood construction polished wood carving, 24.75” x 13.5”. Private collection.

Related post: In honor of fathers who like to make things

Sharon Butler leading a discussion about artmaking, art blogging and world making at Pocket Utopia in Bushwick, January 2009. In July, Butler will resume activities as an Artist-in-Residence at Pocket Utopia. She invites people to stop by and say hello. Photo: Hrag Vartanian.

Thanks to Thomas Micchelli for his thoughtful posts about art and artists old and new. Please follow his pursuits on his own site here.

Up next is Sharon Butler. A painter whose art practice spills beyond traditional studio and gallery situations, Sharon maintains the art blog Two Coats of Paint and is a contributing writer at The Brooklyn Rail. Her work is on view in Status Update, an exhibition about artists and social media at Yale’s Haskin Laboratories through August 1. Since 2000, she has been a faculty member in the Digital Art & Design Program at Eastern Connecticut State University. To learn more about Butler’s projects, please visit her web site at www.sharonlbutler.com.

Opicinus de Canistris (1296–ca. 1354), Diagram with Zodiac Symbols, folio 24r, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Pal. Lat. 1993

Turning again to the oracular nature of art (see Monday’s post), it is compelling to consider that, in the Western canon, drawing as an autonomous art form first came into its own in the medieval period, embellishing the texts of the Bible and other works, both sacred and profane. If you believe, as I do, that drawing is the most direct route to the subconscious, this historical association implies a solid link between the psychological impetus of visionary art and the theological objectives harnessing its iconography. In other words, an id running wild might be reframed by its context, but it can never be tamed.

These thoughts were prompted by Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is easily (Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective and The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 notwithstanding) the most of-the-moment exhibition in the building. The overwhelming majority of works on display are presented in book form, rather than broken out of their original bindings. So it is hard to ignore their prima facie similarity to graphic novels and comic books, especially the simplified Matt Groening-style curves of the theatrical masks depicted in a mid-12th-century copy of Terence’s Six Comedies from Saint Albans, England.

The technical experimentation of these anonymous illustrators and scribes (often the same person), such as the variously colored contour lines in the Psychomachia and other texts written by Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, would feel as much at home in Pierogi 2000 as in Canterbury circa 1000. Not to mention the utter weirdness of the squat, schematic and anatomically inaccurate figures from the Salomon Glosseries, which were drawn in 1158 and 1165 in Prüfening, Germany. Or the text-free, comic book framing of a double-page spread from The Dialogues of the Holy Cross (1170-1180, Regensburg-Prüfening, Germany) and its detailed depictions of outrageous violence.

The most fascinating discovery of the show is the work of Opicinus de Canistris (1296-ca.1354), a priest and scribe for the Papal Curia in Avignon who, according to the wall text, “suffered from a stroke-like episode that rendered his right arm almost useless, yet he still managed to draw” and thereafter “worked obsessively to develop and convey his unique understanding of the divine order.” An actual visionary (“His illness, he felt, had brought him a vision from God…”), the large diagrammatic drawings selected from his portfolio of 52 works on 27 sheets of parchment (all made in Avignon between 1335 and 1350 and now held at the Vatican Library) bear a startling resemblance to modern outsider art. The drawings are built up rather than composed, with information overriding decoration as their primary motivation, which endows them with the same freakish, nonlinear narrative found in the most outré ‘zine art.

The crisp lines and sharp contrasts emblematic of both Opicinus de Canistris and comix artists like Eamon Espey return us to the kind of primal visual pleasure that drew us to illustrated books and comics when we were children. They also reestablish the intimate though often-denied connection between the verbal and the visual – a resetting of the dial to the image’s most basic form and function. The works on display in Pen and Parchment emerged at the turn of a millennium in the clearing between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance; graphic novels and ‘zines came into their own at the turn of a millennium after the rigors of modernism and the platitudes of postmodernism had both fallen apart. We are again back at zero, hallelujah.

Pablo Picasso, "The King of the Minotaurs" (1958). Oil on canvas.

The other night I was at a dinner where someone suggested that, all things being equal, what ultimately makes the difference in a body of work is the character of the artist. This might fall on most ears as a wildly dicey proposition, but in the context of the conversation it seemed plausible. An artist who is capable of making hard choices and facing unpleasant truths, especially personal ones, will develop a more substantial and exacting practice than someone who possesses a similar range of intellectual and aesthetic gifts but is too narcissistic or insecure for ruthless self-criticism.

Still, the prickly issue of an artist’s character got me thinking about the tendency to regard creative personalities, especially those at an historical remove, as glamorous and forward-thinking, if not downright heroic. This doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, of course. But it does reflect a need for consensus among artists and aficionados—whose values are assaulted daily by the dominant bottom-line culture—that they are on the right side of history.

Never mind that Cezanne, the father of modern art, broke with his childhood friend, Emile Zola, over the Dreyfus case, which was the litmus test for progressive thinkers at the end of the 19th century. The paradoxes and complexities of history include the Fascist affiliations of the Futurists and Ezra Pound, as well as the reputed, though unverified, reason for Fritz Lang’s emigration to the United States—not to escape Nazi persecution, as was the case with Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, and countless others, but to elude a prestigious job offer from Joseph Goebbels.

Perhaps it is a throwback to the ancient belief that the inscrutable pronouncements of the oracles were the disguised prophecies of the gods, but when an artwork thrusts us into new experiential territory, we seem atavistically susceptible to the notion that it contains the spark of the divine. And what is the divine if not all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful? How could the vessels through which such revelations pass, to paraphrase Stravinsky’s famous remark on The Rite of Spring, be liable to the mundane corruptions of the flesh?

Easily. Instead of retreating into misty, neoclassical visions of Apollo speaking through the Oracle of Delphi, maybe we should recast our imaginations to consider the influence of hallucinogenic vapors (as archeologists have recently conjectured) on the prophetic voice. Not to advocate artificial stimulants or to diminish the power of imagination, but to emphasize the bodily origins of prophecy which, like aesthetic innovation, define themselves by stepping outside the slipstream of their own time. Prophets and artists, both in the business of extracting undiscovered or unacknowledged truths, must peel away the strictures of social conventions in order to see the world anew. They are not necessarily good persons, but certainly uninhibited ones, compulsively groping through the intricacies of their own flawed humanity. This is why someone as self-contradictory as Picasso so dominated the art of the last century.

Mythology is replete with tales of those who challenged the supremacy of the gods or the limits of the human condition (Marsyas, Icarus, Prometheus) and paid a hideous price for their hubris. That is one metaphor of the artist—reaching for the heavens one moment, crashing and burning the next. Another can be found in Picasso’s innumerable images of the Minotaur, a figure who can navigate the labyrinthine passages between human aspirations and animal instincts, but only because he is himself a grotesque amalgam of man and beast. Picasso gives form to our inner monsters by calling out his own.

Dan Colen, "Untitled" (2008). Chewing gum and chewing gum residue on canvas in artist's frame. 19.1 x 15.1 inches. Courtesy David Nolan New York.

In his New York Times article on the opening of the Venice Biennale, Michael Kimmelman laments that the look of the exhibition “suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus.”

Without reading too much into it, the critique that contemporary art has been “professionalized to a fault” feels analogous to the sentiment expressed by the anonymous graffito I mentioned in my previous post: “The only true artists are amateurs.”

Of course, the word “amateur” cuts both ways. In most contexts it connotes a lack of training, sophistication, or seriousness, but its derivation from the Latin amator implies that its foremost meaning is “lover.” Simply put, the amateur is someone who, motivated only by the love of the game, engages in an activity without expecting anything to come of it.

Two exhibitions that I encountered yesterday, Slough at David Nolan New York and Alice Neel: Selected Works at David Zwirner, brought this concept into focus in very different ways. Slough, astutely curated by the artist Steve DiBenedetto, is a group show with a complicated backstory based on the title word’s multiple meanings. As explained in the press release, the range includes “bog-like” and “primordial,” “moral degradation or spiritual dejection,” “cast aside or shed off,” and “the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.”

The show includes striking works by Dieter Roth, Jon Kessler, Robert Bordo, and Michael Scott, who represent quite a heterogeneity of aesthetic objectives and studio practice, but who are nonetheless united by a sense of improvisation, accident, and play: a what-if approach akin to kicking over a can of paint to see what happens next (which, in fact, is what Hermann Nitsch’s untitled canvas seems to be). Philip Taaffe’s swirls of pigment, titled Slough I and Slough IV (both 2003), and Andy Warhol’s invariably lovely Piss Paintings from 1978 adopt pure serendipity as their method and meaning; densely laden works by Larry Poons and the late Eugène Leroy revel in their raw materiality; Carroll Dunham’s surprisingly aggressive Untitled (1984-85), in graphite, ink and paint on wood veneer, bespeaks a jittery call-and-response that, like most of the strongest works in the show, seems to spring from an ethos of risk-taking oblivious to the ultimate salvageability of the results. Nothing is calculated, preconceived, strategized, theorized, or prejudged. The object comes into existence solely to delight its maker or, as it seems with Dan Colen’s chewing gum pictures, for the sheer giddy hell of it.

Alice Neel, "Young Woman" (c.1946). Oil on canvas. 32 x 25 inches. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

One Sunday last month I was sitting in Sara Delano Roosevelt Park in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown. A small ensemble of musicians were playing traditional instruments while neighborhood residents crowded the benches or milled about. An old man found the musicians’ wireless microphone and sang an apparently unsolicited solo. The tunes came one after another.  No one clapped or even paid the instrumentalists much mind; for their part, the players seemed indifferent to whether anyone was listening or not.  They were most likely amateurs, yet their musicianship was top-flight. The way the neighbors seemed to take them for granted, however, did not strike me as rude or condescending; instead, it evidenced how culture, rather than standing apart from the community, is woven into its fabric.

This is how I see the pictures of Alice Neel. Her paintings of lovers and friends seem part of a daily conversation, a record of who dropped by that day and had the time to sit.  This feels especially true of the works in the first room of the David Zwirner exhibition, and of the nudes in a related show uptown at Zwirner & Wirth, all of which were done in the 1930s and 1940s. Neel was working in near-total professional obscurity, but this circumstance never diminished her drive to infuse these images with a solidity of form and a magnificence of color that bears comparison to the titans of European modernism. Her expectations for her work might have been humble, but not her aesthetic ambition, which she fulfilled through a searching eye, a sculptural line, and a savage palette. Her art was not her career, but her life. How many of us wouldn’t wish that for ourselves?