Sometimes, we have to look at something a second, or third, or fourth time to understand it. This is one of the reasons that makes Danielle Sommer’s article on Pacific Standard Time so intriguing. Chosen for our Best of 2011 by Los Angeles based contributor, Catlin Moore, Danielle breaks through the steep history of 70s California art, giving us all a reason to take another look.

Eleanor Antin, “100 Boots,” 1971-73.

Alright, I’ll say it. A show that features conceptual art circa 1970 threatens to be dry. At the outset, you know you’ll be getting mostly documentation: photographic, video, film, and paper. Beyond the ordinary wall text, there will probably be artists’ statements explaining what was done while you weren’t looking. The typewriter, the mimeograph, and the camera will act as not-so-silent partners to the artists’ projects. “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” at the Orange County Museum of Art doesn’t escape these confines, but ends up offering you just a little bit more.

Bruce Nauman, “Studies for Holograms (Pinched Lips; Pulled Lower Lip; Pulled Neck; Pulled Cheeks; and Squeezed Lips),” 1970.

The show is divided into categories like “Mapping the Land,” “Politics,” “Public and Private Space,” and “Language and Wordplay.” As with previous shows I’ve seen at OCMA, these divisions hinder the overall experience. I found myself wishing that the curators had stuck to working chronologically or geographically, simply because most of the works are more interesting when viewed across categories, instead of in isolation. Bruce Nauman and Bonnie Sherk, for instance, would have made interesting counterpoints to each other; “State of Mind” includes Nauman’s Thighing (1967), Studies for Holograms (Pinched Lips; Pulled Lower Lip; Pulled Neck; Pulled Cheeks; and Squeezed Lips) (1970), and Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), to name a few, which pair nicely with Sherk’s Sitting Still series, where the artist photographs herself sitting in public locations usually used for passing through, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the corner of Mission and 20^th in San Francisco.

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Today we bring you another great article from Poland. For Best of 2011, Ruth Hodgins selected Bean Gilsdorf’s article, Bring on the Dwarves. One of my favorite articles was bring on the dwarves, it was new for me to learn about social art practice in Poland, and and was an interesting account of the changes that have happened in Poland since 10980’s. I also like the title: Bring on the Dwarves! - Ruth Hodgins

Dwarves, videos, homemade t-shirts and cardboard tanks: this is what you’ll find in Happenings Against Communism by the Orange Alternative at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury in Krakow.  It’s a multi-roomed tour of Polish protest in the 1980s, the retrospective of a social practice movement that swept an entire country.  Although the tone of the exhibition is playfully iconoclastic—that’s the whole point—I often found myself moved nearly to tears by the many video works scattered throughout the space.  It’s not often that art changes the world, but when it does it is extremely poignant and inspiring.

An uncredited photograph from the exhibition Pomaranczowa Alternatywa Happeningiem w Komunizm (Happening Against Communism by the Orange Alternative) at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury.

Some background: various political and economic factors plunged Poland into a period of deep decline around 1980, and on December 12, 1980 martial law was declared.  Both an immense buildup of Soviet military at the borders and the arrest of union members and intellectuals precipitated an economic sanction by the US and other nations.  Rapidly, Poland became a nation of fear and scarcity.  Working with the influences of the Surrealist and Dada movements, “Major” Waldemar Fydrych decided to take matters into his own hands.  As a former art history student at the University of Wroclaw, Fydrych had co-organized the Independent Students Union and a massive peace march as well as cooperatively publishing a student newspaper called Orange Alternative, so he was no stranger to both art and politics.  When he saw all the patches of white paint the government was using to cover anti-regime graffiti, he had an idea that eventually shaped itself into a revolution.  His goal was to protest the brutality and militarism of the regime without replacing one dogma for another by shouting political slogans or creating formal hierarchical structures.  From the moment he picked up a brush, Poland became a site for the absurd pushing against the militaristic.  Enter the dwarf.

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As the Best of 2011 continues, our Singapore-based editor, Marilyn Goh, chose Michael Tomeo’s Interview with Folkert de Jong. “I’ve chosen Michael’s An Interview with Folkert de Jong because I’m intrigued by the stylistic strains of the old Dutch Masters that run through the artist’s work – it was also great to read about de Jong’s creative processes.”

FOLKERT DE JONG The Balance: Trader's Deal 9, (detail) 2010 Styrofoam, pigmented polyurethane foam Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

The figures in Dutch artist Folkert de Jong’s work are both historical totems and cautionary tales. Suggesting that our darkest impulses are unavoidably cyclical in nature, he evades didactics through a combination of period details and contemporary imagery. de Jong seems to understand that every nationalistic conquest brings with it trumpet bleats, shiny shoes and other supposed finery—things that, while often treated as symbols of greatness, are often nothing more than cover ups. His current show, Operation Harmony, at James Cohan Gallery is up through May 7^th. I had a chance to catch up with him over email this past week.

Michael Tomeo: I’m really into the Trader’s Deal pieces. From the moment we learn about it in grade school, Americans laugh at how foolish native people were to sell the island of Manhattan for a bunch of beads. You make the pitch made to the native people seem goofily transparent and demeaning, like some sort of song and dance. But there’s also an oddly hypnotic quality in the stares of the offerers. It’s like they’re half street hustler, half visionary. Could you elaborate on these?

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Picked by Allie Haeusslein for our Best of 2011 is History in Art at MOCAK, at Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow written by Bean Gilsdorf. “I have recently come to terms with the fact that I will not, at least in the near future, be the world traveler I would so like to be. Until that day comes, I will gladly live vicariously though the experiences of others. Bean’s intelligent series of pieces from her travels to Poland provided a beautiful, articulate introduction to the art and culture of a place I have yet to visit.”

Shinji Ogawa, Then and Now, Krakow, 2010, acrylic on book

With the work of over forty artists, History in Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow is a sizeable exhibition; but its scale is not only warranted, it is necessary. If the internet age ushered in a global culture of multiplicity, then History in Art demonstrates the contemporary attitude toward the formation of a historical record: individual voices make up a flexible, imaginative whole.

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Every once and a while, a review comes along that manages to completely shift the way you see an artist’s work. Today on Best of 2011, Magdalen Chua found just this in Noah Simblist’s review of Lisa Tan’s recent project in Austin. “I was intrigued by Noah’s reading of the “notion of the double” in Lisa Tan’s works. For me, this perspective elevated both the sense of serendipity and solitude in her works.” – Magdalen Chua.

Les Samouraïs , 2010 Single-channel video lightstands, painted wood, projector 3 min 36 sec, sound Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Vidal Cuglietta

One might be tempted to call Lisa Tan’s exhibition at Arthouse in Austin poetic. But what would this mean? It is spare, filled with layered and complex allusions, much like a poem. The imagistic lyricism of two finches in a cage; a lone man smoking as he stares out a window; flashes of barren mountain peaks; and a doctor’s stark appraisal of an aging body might suggest something more than prose as an apt metaphor. But regardless of the correct literary comparison, this exhibition is an aggregate of images – a series of artworks that collect around a few themes. One of the most evocative is the notion of the double.

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When asked to make a selection for DailyServing’s Best of 2011, contributor Bean Gilsdorf chose Art in Limbo by Danielle Sommer.  “I loved the mix of art-political reporting and personal experience, which are combined here to bring depth and emotional meaning to a bureaucratic tangle involving one of the most significant pieces of land art in the United States.  In describing Spiral Jetty and its particular site, Danielle makes a great case for its continued preservation.” -Bean Gilsforf

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970). Image copyright Danielle Sommer.

It’s true. The state of Utah now owns Spiral Jetty. For the last decade, the Dia Foundation has paid Utah’s Department of Natural Resources $250 a year to maintain the 20-year lease on the land surrounding the earthwork. In February, the Dia received and paid its annual invoice, only to have the payment returned in June with a note that the lease had expired—a fact that had somehow escaped everyone’s attention, including the DNR’s. According to an article by Jennifer Dobner of the Associated Press, the oversight may have occurred due to the fact that the DNR’s Sovereign Lands coordinator, Dave Grierson—the man who should have sent Dia a notice about the lease renewal—passed away last year. Conspiracy theories about drilling aside, the Dia maintains that it has a “collegial” working relationship with the DNR and that they are in the process of re-negotiating the lease. But for the moment, the Jetty belongs to Utah, a fact that has the art community unsettled.

I first visited Spiral Jetty in August 2007, thirty-seven years after Robert Smithson installed it and thirty-four years after his death. I’d heard that the water level was low enough that the jetty was visible again, so I made a point to visit it on my way from Portland, Oregon, to Chicago, Illinois. I’d seen photographs, as well as the film of the construction that Smithson had made with his wife, Nancy Holt, but the physical experience caught me unprepared. Visiting Spiral Jetty in the flesh provides an experience of time unlike any other. Everything seems to halt, even as it remains in motion.

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Today on Best of 2011, we revisit Rob Mark’s Recovering Site and Mind. Selected by New York-based contributor, Carmen Winant, Rob Mark’s essay beautifully recontextualizes Serra’s lifelong practice through the recent installation at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Over the course of its three-day installation in July 2011, Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, both reveals itself and conceals the expansive space it inhabits. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a concrete slab three-quarters the size of a baseball diamond. The ironworkers from the Hauppauge, New York, rigging company, Budco Enterprises, have handled all of Serra’s North American installations for the past 20 years. The dangerous experiment is, instead, the transplantation of the sixty-five by forty-foot labyrinthine sculpture into a site that the artist did not specify when he first created the piece.

Two 20-ton plates from Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, swing into place. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra is famous for his site-specific sculptures. Of Tilted Arc, 1981, the 200-foot long grandparent to arced works like Sequence, Serra proclaimed, during a U.S. General Services Administration hearing to determine the disposition of the piece, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” Commissioned and approved by the Carter administration, and constructed in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, Tilted Arc was eventually decommissioned, forsworn, and bundled into storage by the Reagan administration. We can never know whether the Tilted Arc controversy—the first salvo of the 1980s culture wars—would have subsided had the surrounding political context not pre-empted the community’s process of coming to know the sculpture. Many of Serra’s public works, however, are now valued by the communities that first rejected them.

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