MITPressLog

A Round Peg at the Whitney

What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?  Randy Kennedy poses this art-world stumper in his New York Times look at the Dan Graham retrospective which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art last week. 

Kennedy's piece provides an interesting look at Graham's life and work.  Liz Kotz wrote a bit about the exhibit for Artforum, commenting:

Tracing the evolution of Graham’s practice, the exhibition aims to loosely unite the artist’s divergent production around “the changing relationship of individual to society as mirrored through American mass media and architecture at the end of the twentieth century,” per cocurators Chrissie Iles and Bennett Simpson. The show, comprising about one hundred works, will navigate vastly different kinds of visual and perceptual experiences, from the private space of the page to screen-based and time-based works to the emphatically public pavilions. The events program will include a panel on music and collaboration featuring Graham, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore, in addition to other talks and screenings.

But don't take our word for it.  The exhibit runs at the Whitney until October 11th then moves to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in November. 

The Third Way--A Meditation on Creativity

In the most recent issue of Tin House, famed editor Daniel Menaker discusses his tenure at The New Yorker, Random House, and HarperCollins.  What struck me in this conversation is when the interviewer asked:

What do you think the motivating factor is for most writers you’ve worked with?

Menaker answered:

Artists and writers and performers basically want the recognition and admiration of people they don’t know, which is weird.  Unless you take the phrase “people they don’t know” and translate it to “parents,” which is what Maxwell [Ed: William Maxwell, famed editor who preceded Menaker at The New Yorker, and author of the great novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow] would say; the people you don’t essentially know as a writer are your parents, and the people whose approval and attention you want are your families, your parents. Then it suddenly all falls into place.  And I think that’s a dark reason that people write and perform and act and sing and so on. 
And then there’s the brighter side, which is the genuine desire to share your feelings and insights and your observations with others.  And to make them all into art and to create something of reasonably lasting value that others can get something from. 

Menaker continues later in the interview:

I think it tends towards the darker side.  Not the bad side, by the way, but the more troubled side—to continue to seek, in basically an unfulfillable way, whatever it is that’s missing.

What I wonder is do all the motivations for creating art, for living in an artful way essentially boil down to either approval seeking or insight sharing?  Is there a third way? A fifth?  A tenth way to explore and define the motivations driving artists and writers?  While I find this dichotomy unsatisfying, I’m not sure he isn’t correct. 

How do artists and writers who create for only themselves fit into this picture, those whose focus is personal challenge, or creating intrigue for the sole purpose of feeding their private, inner lives? 

Forty Years of Leonardo

Check out the following video to hear Leonardo editor Roger F. Malina discuss the evolution of the Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Advanced Science and Technology) now marking its 40 year anniversary.

Leonardo/ISAST was founded in 1968 with the goal of integrating science and art, becoming a channel of international communication for artists who use science and developing technologies in their work.

In more recent news, the folks at Leonardo have also organized a book series based on the values and ideas in the journal.  They also have a Facebook page where you can get news about new projects, issues, and events. 

Wednesday Blog Watch: Robert Giard

One of the academic library blogs mentioned last week, Yale's "Poetry at Beinecke Library", recently posted about their acquisition of the photographs of Robert Giard. Giard (1939-2002) was known primarily for the hundreds of portraits he took of gay literary figures, including (with links to the Yale images) Edward Albee, Adrienne Rich, David Leavitt, Allen Ginsberg, Quentin Crisp, Doris Grumbach, and others. To see more of the Yale images, they can be found in Beinecke's Digital Library. Around 200 of Giard's gay literary portraits were published in the MIT Press book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers. An interview with Giard about this book can be found here.
If you happen to be in the Toronto area, there are a couple of shows featuring Giard's work: the Stephen Bulger gallery is presenting a significant number of his photographs in the "Portraits, Nudes, and Landscapes" show (which ends August 2nd), and also some of Giard's photos can be seen at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto in an exhibit called Queer CanLit which runs until August 29.
 

From Gospel to the Godfather

Tonight, there's a concert between DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist at McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn at 8:00 pm. Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid has put together an after party for the event.  It will be one of his only shows in New York this summer, as he's been busy with events for his new book, Sound Unbound.   The show is a special presentation of his next film project - it's a remix of the Stax Records archive. If you don't know Stax Records, I guess you can think of it as the Motown Records of the South. Soul, Funk, Power!!! The concert will be a video remix party with rare video material from Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam and Dave, and lots of crazy rare video material from the deep soul music archives of Stax Records. Here's a video clip:

It's not to be missed!  And it's FREE!

Music Hall of Williamsburg
66 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn
Doors 9:30 pm / Show 10:30 pm / 18+
Map and directions: HERE

6 Questions for Boris Groys

In the new issue of Art Lies, Kurt Mueller asked NYU's Boris Groys six questions about urban space and its relationship with art.  Here is one of them.

What is the relationship of art to urban public space (in whatever form it exists)? Is this a productive relationship? To what ends?

Every urban population believes in having its own collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go though all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions.

The rest can be found here.

Groys discusses some of these issues in greater detail in his new book, Art Power.  Check it out. 

The ubiquitous Anish Kapoor

Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art is the site of a major exhibit of the works of Turner Prize-winning sculptor Anish Kapoor. The exhibit - Past, Present, Future - runs through September 7 and has been widely (and mostly positively) reviewed in recent weeks.

From the New York Times:

[A] brilliant and unpredictable if sometimes ingratiating synthesizer who has simultaneously refined, repurposed and betrayed some of the dearest beliefs and most despised bêtes noires of late-20th-century sculpture.

From the Boston Globe:

The clean contours of Kapoor's biomorphic shapes are constantly dissolving into optical fuzz. Again and again, they confound our attempts to see how they were made, how they are prevented from falling over, or where they begin and end.

And in Time magazine:

The paradox of Kapoor's work is that it has debts to the blunt boxes of minimalists like Donald Judd and Robert Morris as well as to the weightless atmospheres of James Turrell. But the blend of heavy and vaporous, declaring and beckoning--that's all Kapoor's.

Though it isn't mentioned in the reviews, the catalogue for the show was published by the MIT Press and has recently been released. More information on the book is available here.

AGO Hires New Director of Exhibitions and Publications

Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario, which is currently closed awaiting completion of its extensive Frank Gehry-designed renovation, has hired Catherine de Zegher as new director of exhibitions and publications.   de Zegher, former executive director of The Drawing Center in New York, will work with other AGO curators to create a vibrant exhibitions program for the AGO, which is scheduled to reopen this fall.   She is involved with creating the European exhibits, among others.

According to the  CBC, The AGO said it was attracted by her "passion for connecting historical and contemporary themes" as well as her understanding of "audience interaction."  She has curated exhibits on the drawings of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin and art from Latin America and the low countries.

De Zegher has a background in archeology and art history and was co-founder and director of the Kanaal Art Foundation in Belgium, which is involved in publishing and curating shows.  She is the co-editor of Women Artists at the Millennium. 

The AGO has not yet announced the date it will reopen.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Participation

Wednesday Blog Watch is always interested in new social networking websites - this week we're enthralled with the artreview website set up by UK-based Art Review magazine.  The website is described as "social networking site for the art world, creating a global forum for discussion, interactivity and debate".  Anyone can join, and "members are artists, galleries, collectors, critics, curators and the curious" who can post their own artwork, share comments and critiques, review art shows and books, and so on.  More about it can be found here.  In the book section, we just happened to notice a review of Participation.  Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, discusses the desire to move art viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers. An apt title to review on this new website!  Interested in participating?  Have a look.

Trinidad Carnival

In honor of this year's Cambridge Carnival (Sunday, August 26 here in Kendall Square) The MIT Press Bookstore is featuring the photography of Kathy-Ann Hart in its Main Street windows. The work, entitled "Trinidad Carnival", is an exhibition of photographs from the internationally renowned Trinidad Carnival. All photographs were shot on location in San Fernando, Trinidad, in February 2007. Stop by and take a look!

More information on the Cambridge Carnival can be found here.