Off Center

A postscript of sorts to our earlier post about Elizabeth Peyton’s brand-new portrait of Michelle and Sasha Obama, which was added to Peyton’s survey at the New Museum after our soon-to-be brand-new president was elected (and will also travel with the exhibition, which arrives here in February). That portrait was commissioned by W magazine in conjunction with its November issue, which is dedicated to all things cool and cutting-edge in the art world and therefore features a profile of the Walker’s director Olga Viso.

The story, while brief (it’s also a profile of Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art), offers a solid overview of Viso’s background, and also allows her to air her views on multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary art, as well as the contemporary art market. The latter was described in the piece as “exploding,” though keep in mind, glossy magazines work on very long lead times …

Meanwhile, plenty of artists and others are commenting on what the financial meltdown portends not just for the art market, but for art itself. More on that soon.

Leave it to Paul Schmelzer, the former chief blogger on Off-Center, to find the fine-art connection in Minnesota’s infamous Senate ballot recount.

On his own blog, Eyeteeth, he’s mentioned how the “Lizard People” write-in vote on one ballot made waves last week, thanks mostly to MPR’s excellent “Challenged Ballots: You Be the Judge”, a feature that provided an all-too rare occasion for election transparency.

But more to the point at hand, in a story for the Minnesota Independent, where he works as managing editor, Schmelzer talked to photographer Paul Shambroom about capturing the mind-numbing process of (re-)counting thousands of ballots. Shambroom, whose Meetings series masterfully - even majestically - documented small-town civic proceedings across the USA, said that if he were to return to his days as a news photographer, he might try “try to embrace the boredom” of such a task.

That got me trying to think of works of art that might “try to embrace the boredom” of something. What about Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things? That ’s the “situation” by Tino Sehgal where a single person writhes slowly and soundlessly, kind of starfish-like, on the floor of an empty gallery; it played out last winter in the Walker’s Medtronic Gallery as part of Sehgal’s largest “show” to date in the first U.S.

Other examples of tedium-as-art? Send a comment below.

The Walker has a Christo imitator lurking around. He hit Witt Siasoco, Teen Programs Manager. From the WACTAC blog:

At least the mouse stayed fresh while on vacation.

Elizabeth Peyton originally painted this portrait, Michelle and Sasha Obama Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention August 2008, for the art issue of W magazine. It was added to Peyton’s Live Forever retrospective at the New Museum on the day after the election, when the show had already been up since early October. Why? Senior curator Laura Hoptman deemed it “appropriate.”

The release from the New Museum is as follows: “The New Museum joins Elizabeth Peyton in paying tribute to incoming First Lady Michelle Obama, whose portrait with her daughter Sasha will be unveiled today on the 4th floor as a new component of the exhibition Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton. This is the first time this newly created painting is on public view. Please join us in celebrating as we look forward to rousing changes both large and small.”

Now that she’s been added to the show, is the First Lady coming here when Live Forever packs it up to the Walker in February?

At the DNC and RNC, the artist team ligorano/reese set up a project, The State of Things, that melted in the hot afternoon sun. It would seem that the visual message was too apt to not re-use:

In a new, time-based event, called Main Street Meltdown the artists will install the word “Economy,” carved in ice, in Foley Square, using the New York Supreme Court as a back drop. The artists chose Foley Square, close to the heart of Wall Street, as the site to focus on the timeliness of the financial crisis in the final week of the presidential campaign. The artists refer to Main Street Meltdown as a “temporary sculpture.”

The monument measures 15 feet long, 5 feet tall, and weighs almost 1,500 pounds. It is the fourth in a series of ice sculptures by the artists that deal with important political issues. 

It is not often I learn of new work via The Consumerist, but as the work demonstrates, these are exraordinary times.

Every so often we like to take a survey of our readers to see what you think. Our last survey was in March of 2007, so it’s time for a new one. The questions are focused on the blogs and a little demographic information, which you can skip if you like.

We’re sweetening the deal this time. If you take the survey, you can enter your name into the pool and we’ll select one person to win a 1GB iPod Shuffle.

Take the survey.

Photo by bluetsunami.

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.

(click for more…)

• 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.

Calvin Tomkins has a lengthy piece on Elizabeth Peyton and her “pictures of people” (as she prefers to call her portraits), in the October 6th New Yorker. It’s pegged to a new survey of her work, Elizabeth Peyton: Live Forever, which opened yesterday at the New Museum in New York, and arrives here at the Walker on Valentine’s Day.

The article traces the evolution of Peyton’s style, from her early years of painting mostly from photographs (she used to have a day job as a photo researcher), to her recent focus on doing live sittings with people who are part of her life. Tomkins, who writes of sitting for Peyton along with his wife, Dodie Kazanjian, also delves to some degree into the personal life of Peyton, whose biography enters her work most markdly through her renderings of close friends and lovers.

The article is available only in print (and no one has put it elsewhere on the Web that I can find), but the New Yorker website features a web-only slide show of 9 images, ranging from one of her early works, a charcoal portrait of Napolean, to a recent likeness of Matthew Barney.

charcoal drawing by Elizabeth Peyton

Also: here’s a 10-minute audio interview on the New Museum’s website, in which Peyton talks with curator Laura Hoptman; and a few notes, courtesy of WWD, on the “fashion flock” who attended the Tuesday night preview in New York: you know you want to read it!