Nine-year editor of Walker magazine (1998-2007), Paul writes on art, media, and activism for publications including Adbusters, Artforum.com, Ode, Utne, Cabinet, Raw Vision and others. He blogs at Eyeteeth, Minnesota Independent, and wherever else anyone will let him. His interviews with architect Cameron Sinclair, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and activist Winona La Duke appear in the book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Royal Society of Arts, 2006).
The politics edition:
• Presidential art policy: CultureGrrl Lee Rosenbaum dug up Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s art policy, noting that, at just four sentences long, it’d be more accurate to “call that an education policy, not an arts policy.” (Update: LACMA’s new blog Unframed apparently found it first, according to the LA Times’ Christopher Knight). Democrat Barack Obama’s version, which is much more substantial. Noteworthy is his support of the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which allows “artists to deduct the fair market value of their work, rather than just the costs of the materials, when they make charitable contributions.” Obama’s community blog has much more.
• Cast your vote in the People’s Design Awards: Both Barack Obama and John McCain have campaign logos in the running for the Cooper-Hewitt People’s Design Award, although only Obama’s is among the top vote-getters. Entries, as the name suggests, are submitted and voted on by visitors to the contest website. Vote now through Oct. 23. (Minnesota has two entries.)
• Kruger’s “Brain”: Among her many accolades, artist Barbara Kruger can add another: Last week she won three prizes, including “Cover of the Year” in the Magazine Publishers of America Best Magazine Covers contest for her trademark alteration of a New York cover image of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer. For the top honor, judges wrote:
Artist Barbara Kruger’s graphic interpretation on Henry Leutwyler’s photograph—the word “BRAIN” in a bright-red box with an arrow pointing to the area of Spitzer’s anatomy that seemed to have been thinking for him—was quickly selected, thanks to its directness, humor, and simplicity. The cover required no headlines. The image succeeded powerfully all by itself.
• AIGA GOTV: Last month the AIGA created a series of juried get-out-the-vote posters for distribution and download. Among the 24 posters, which were printed and dropped off for display in storefronts and kiosks, is AIGA Minnesota’s Brad D. Norr. Pictured above: Agustín Garza, AIGA Los Angeles.
• Flagging the arts: This week Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes is asking curators to share their favorite contemporary artwork featuring an American flag. First up, a selection by David S. Rubin, curator of contemporary art at the San Antonio Museum of Art: Sam Wiener’s Those Who Fail to Remember the Past are Condemned to Repeat It (1970). He writes:
Created at the time when Minimalism was still in vogue, this sculpture takes the form of a simple cube on its exterior. But looks are deceptive here, as Wiener infused a Minimalist form with significant and timely social commentary. As viewers peer through slats along the sculpture’s upper edges, we see endless rows of flag-draped coffins, an effect created by a mirrored interior.
• “Democracy is merry”: Get your free button this Thursday.
While the “statements” on view in the exhibition Statements: Beuys, Flavin, Judd may seem less-than-political at first glance, all three artists — Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd — were deeply engaged in political matters. According to exhibition curator Yasmil Raymond, all three men, who were adult artists working in the turbulent 1960s, were both military veterans and pacifists and had bold views on politics of their day. Of course, theirs wasn’t politics in the traditional sense. As Beuys once said, “I have nothing to do with with politics — I know only art.” Yet he and environmentalist Likas Beckmann founded Germany’s Green Party. And Judd, who was bitterly opposed to war of all kinds, wrote the seminal essay “Art and Internationalism” in protest of imperialism; his withdrawal to Marfa, Texas, some say, was a response to the war in Vietnam.
With a contentious and historic election three weeks away, the Walker has taken some of the political quotations by artists in the show and reproduced them on simple red and blue buttons, to be given away free at each Target Free Thursday Night. The statements, selected by Raymond and Education’s Sarah Peters, are bold, positive and quirky — like Beuys’ quizzical “Democracy is Merry” — serving as either a welcome respite from the clichés of modern horserace politics or a transcendent view of a different possibility for democracy.
• Object-based new media: Former Walker visual arts curatorial fellow Sarah Cook is interviewed by Rhizome about Untethered, the show she curated for Eyebeam. “I was tiring of new media exhibitions that rely on video documentation, screens, text, and proof-of-concept, and I wanted to question one of the assumptions that the art world has about new media, namely that it isn’t an object,” she says. Fittingly then, Untethered, which closes Oct. 25, is about hacked objects. It’s described as “a sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function, embedded with new intelligence, and transformed into surrealist and surprising readymades, including a photocopier that reads the night sky; a PDA turned guitar; and a piano that plays the Internet. The exhibition features pieces by 15 artists working at the intersection of art and technology, including current and former Eyebeam residents and fellows, as well as leading international artists.” See exhibition images here, including Michael de Broin’s Dead Star (pictured above, in detail).
• Deerhoof interview: Culture Bully, my go-to source for Deerhoof news, interviews Greg Saunier, drummer for the Bay Area art-rock band, on the new album Offend Maggie, its cover art and his Oct. 14 show at Minneapolis’ First Avenue. Deerhoof also makes today’s Art Fag City post on the top-10 music videos made by contemporary artists for a video by Martha Colburn.
• Found Barney: Culture Pundits directs our attention to CremasterFanatic.com, which catalogues found “field emblems” from Matthew Barney’s film series.
• Lydia Fong speaks: “I needed to become another person — to be in a different persona to make that work,” says Barry McGee in a KQED video interview as Lydia Fong, his artistic alter ego.
The science of decay: Part Sally Mann’s What Remains, part Corpse Farm, our friends at the Science Museum of Minnesota are liveblogging the decomposition of a pig — all in the name of science. By Day 8, I’ve got to add: Gross-out alert!
Kitundu on NPR: A few days ago, NPR interviewed MacArthur “genius” grant winner and former Walker Performing Arts residency coordinator Walter Kitundu. Listen here as he describes how the phonoharp he invented works, how “trial and terror” experimentations lead to a few exploded turntables, and more.
Military “Muse”: Artworks from Suzane Opton’s “Soldier’s Face” billboard project are now on view at LA’s Stephen Cohen Gallery. The series was scheduled to appear in the Twin Cities to coincide with the Republican National Convention, but the local billboard company pulled the plug, fearing viewers might think the boards show dead soldiers (my colleague Chris Steller reports that one version was ultimately produced here). The LA Times‘ Christopher Knight offers an (ahem) dead-on explanation of the vulnerable, horizontal heads Opton features: They derive from Brancusi’s emblematic “Sleeping Muse” sculptures. Beautifully, Knight writes that Opton’s “vulnerable images depict the always shocking youth of soldiers who, like the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods in Brancusi’s title, have witnessed devastating power up close. They seem almost shell-shocked, caught between the fragile beauty of youth and the desperate gravity of adulthood.”
Free form: Deerhoof (SM&M 2003 and last fall’s Walker concert) offers a free mp3 of its new single “Fresh Born” — and an invitation for fans to download the song’s sheet music, modify it, upload it to fans’ blogs and link to it on their site More than 30 people have already done so. Culture Bully has the “Fresh Born” video.
“Everything must go! Sofa-sized oils!” Twin Cities-based painter (and 2006 Whitney Biennial artist) Todd Norsten’s having a “massive inventory reduction sale and funfest,” tomorrow evening in St. Paul. Download the invite.
Paddy Johnson at the Brooklyn art blog Art Fag City reports that the Chelsea Art Museum has cancelled its November opening of The Aesthetics of Terror and its chief curator has resigned in protest. Museum president Dorothea Keeser reportedly felt the exhibition — which was to include artists like Jenny Holzer, Harun Farocki, Martha Rosler and the Chapman brothers — “ glorified terrorism and showed disrespect for its victims,” according to Josh Azzarella, one of the show’s artists. CAM chief curator Manon Slome has, according to Johnson, left over the cancellation.
The museum has deleted mention of the exhibition, which was to run Nov. 21 though Jan. 31, but a cached version (with the title The Dialectics of Terror) is still available.
UPDATE: The Chelsea Museum of Art has released a statement [pdf], which contradicts the above. It states that Chief Curator Manon Slome resigned for “personal reasons.” It continues: “Upon resigning, she unilaterally decided to cancel the exhibition The Dialectics of Terror (formerly The Aesthetics of Terror) and informed all the participating artists without prior discussion with Dorothea Keeser, Chelsea Art Museum’s Founder and President, or any Museum personnel.”
Reached by email on Friday, Keeser said that the exhibition will go on, but likely not at her museum. “As the show is ready to be installed and the catalogue is ready, it surely will be shown somewhere,”she said. “For the time being, we are too hurt to show it here after what happened and was said about us.”
UPDATE 2: Johnson interviews Keeser and offers a note from former CAM chief curator Manon Slome.
MORE: “The Chelsea Art Museum’s Dialectics of Terror Catalog Raises More Questions” (with catalogue pdf)
A description of the show after the jump:
Park(ing) Day last Friday was a resounding success in Minneapolis and nationally. According to local organizer Shanai Matteson, participation was good, but, better yet, the event gave her an opportunity to meet people and raise critical issues. In an email, she writes:
I think the most interesting thing for me was that the park became an excuse to talk to strangers about the city and the public spaces we do (and don’t) share. A number of people who passed by stopped to hang out for a bit, and when they did, we started talking. More than a few of remarked that it was great to see even a little bit of green downtown, and that they enjoyed the fact that they could talk with strangers about things like public space, politics (there happened to be a rally for Barack Obama just down the block), environment, or anything else that the park made them think of. One woman – a longtime resident of Minneapolis – told stories about how the city has changed in the past 20 years. It was fascinating! Park(ing) Daywas successful in that regard. I believe it made an impression, even upon those people who peered suspiciously from the skyway above.
See photos from Minneapolis interventions here.
Seeds of discontent: Minneapolis-based painter (and onetime Walker employee) Rich Barlow touches on a topic near and dear: political seed art — something I once dubbed “agit-crop” — at the Minnesota State Fair and how this year’s offerings, perhaps due to the Republican National Convention hosted just a few miles away, had a sharper sense of urgency.
Ominous: I missed the irony of this when it happened: As the U.S. was seeing history’s biggest bankruptcy, that of Lehman Brothers, last week, Damien Hirst’s The Golden Calf, a biblical symbol of false idolatry, sold for 10.3 million pounds at auction, a new record for Hirst.
KAWS queried: In a recent New York Times Q&A, Brooklyn artist KAWS reveals an affection for the music Bonnie Prince Billy — who’s coming to the Walker in March — and the late great H.C. Westerman.
Emin’s bronze sparrow flies off (again): Who keeps swiping the bronze sparrow atop Tracy Emin’s Liverpool sculpture The Roman Standard? The bird was taken and returned twice in three months.
File under: Flaccid vagaries disguised as intellectual engagement: Regina Hackett offers proof that artspeak is alive and well in a gallery press release that discusses how an artist’s “structural examination of totalities and their constituent fragments — particularly viewed as kindred — is amplified by the presence of several works with family roots.”
Best headline: “They gave me a Pritzker and all I got was this lousy toilet.” Via C-Monster, who keeps the theme going with links to bathroom graffiti, a musing on the theme of feces in art, and a link to a review in which Jerry Saltz calls Andres Serrano’s Shit “crap.”
Hamilton’s Heinz: Ann Hamilton (whose long history with the Walker most recently includes her June 2008 collaboration with Meredith Monk) has won a prestigious Heinz Award. Created by Teresa Heinz to “celebrate the accomplishments and spirit of [her late husband, Sen. John Heinz] by recognizing the extraordinary achievements of individuals in the areas of greatest importance to him,” the prize awards a medallion and $250,000 in unrestricted funds. Via art:21.
Two to see: San Francisco’s Ratio 3 is now showing A Moment for Reflection: new work by Lydia Fong — an unannounced show by Barry McGee, through October 18. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s commissioned “Demonstration Drawings” — straightforward renderings of protest imagery from the International Herald Tribune, created by commissioned Thai artists — is on view at The Drawing Center through election day.
Kureishi on the battle for America: Pakistani English novelist/screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, subject of a 2001 Regis Dialogue and Retrospective, recently discussed sex, old age and politics with NPR. A Londoner visiting the US, he weighed in on the American elections: “I have to say that, having been in America for less than a week, it’s fascinating and absolutely riveting for someone like me to come and see what a struggle there is going on, really, for the soul of the United States. After all, the United States that I loved in the post-war period was really the United States of Jimi Hendrix and of Dylan and of Kerouc and of Ginsberg and so on. On the other hand, there’s a very small-town, kind of narrow-minded religious gun-toting America, too. And to come here and to see what a conflict there is now, represented between Obama and Sarah Palin — and to see how heavy and serious it is– is really fascinating for us outsiders to see.”
GOP togs: Thank you local blogger Karl Pearson-Cater for showing me these Vans-style McCain-Palin shoes — as well as these: 1, 2, 3 — a followup to his post on Obama sneakers.
Tyler Green points out a somewhat sad commentary on the state of things: A sculpture by street provocateur Mark Jenkins set off a suspicious packages alert. “The bomb squad promptly arrived, a poetic but misguided, out-of-proportion response to a non-existent threat,” Green writes. “Throughout the day DCist chronicled other polar bear sightings, including this one pushing a shopping cart with a globe in it around the National Mall. And later I found that Wooster Collective had posted a couple pictures on its site that seem to indicate that this whole ‘public art’ thing was nothing more than a tree-hugging-style environmentalist stunt.” Indeed, Greenpeace has revealed it that it teamed up with Jenkins to raise awareness of the “shared plight of polar bears and humans in the face of global warming.”
For more images, see the project’s Flickr pool. And, after the jump, a Washington Post photo of the bomb squad doing its thing. (click for the more…)
On Friday it’s all hail the impromptu green space, and strike a (temporary, verdant) blow against the hegemony of the automobile! September 19 is Park(ing) Day 2008, a day urban interventionists convert parking stalls into parks, complete with rolled-out sod, lawn chairs and potted foliage. The brainchild of multidisciplinary arts collective REBAR and The Trust for Public Land, Park(ing) Day actions are happening all over the country, including here in the Twin Cities.
I got in touch with Shanai Matteson, who’s organizing the event locally. She says she’s asked people to look for (or ask the city to put hoods on meters, for a fee) parking spaces in downtown Minneapolis. She’ll be greening up a pavement swath on Nicollet Mall and another one outside the Community Design Group on 3rd Avenue. While it all sounds so guerrilla, each team will be responsible for plugging the meters the entire time they’re there. For maximum exposure of the parking/parks idea, most participants are keeping their spots at least through the lunch hour.
Check back here later, or take a look at the project’s Flickr pool to see how it went. Or, if you’re taking part, don’t miss the post park(ing) happy hour with our friends from Solutions Twin Cities.
Pictured: Park(ing) Day 2006 in Minneapolis, by Landform Minneapolis.
