A Macrocosmic Zero is the title of Tivon Rice’s second solo exhibition at Lawrimore Project in Seattle, on view through March 27. Rice is a new media artist whose tactile approach seeks to present video as an object of use, and to integrate the observer as participant. The current exhibition fills the front room of the gallery, a windowless space with concrete floors. It is lit by two bright plasma screens and fluorescent bulbs suspended vertically from wooden scaffolding. The bulbs sweep on and off in patterned surges of blue-white with a series of clicks and gentle hums. A motor turns on and a central camera pans the room. As the camera goes over a screen and films an image produced a few moments ago, a slow feedback happens, layering and obscuring the present space where the viewer stands, and also the viewer if he has caught a glance at the camera lens. Rice’s video system is performing it’s routine.
The whole set is programmed for a unique experience for each viewer—a lighting display that doesn’t repeat for 18 days, a delay between the live feed and playback, a robotic camera that responds to motion, and sound feedback that swells, but never explodes. A “finished” or composite image runs at the back of the exhibition. This view allows spectators to see who enters the gallery and how others interact with the work.
The use of lights is at least a pragmatic choice, a basic component in office buildings and modern living. Their stark whiteness casts no “cinematic” shadow on its subjects, and in video perfection, imperfections of the subject are clearly and initially displayed. Through layering “real” images, subjects become formal elements of flat light. The macroscopic view of this work is what is observable to the human eye, and as the title suggests, this view is fleeting. As the art progresses, it periodically interrupts what has been displayed to return to “zero.” The art is the mechanical and sensory performance, rather than what is recorded.
Rice also presents four video portraits that act as sketches or versions of the installation. A face is seen in each one that the viewer continues to look for and find through swirling frames of mutation. A final piece, the smallest in the exhibit, is a CRT monitor taken out of television presenting a static image of the artist. For the amount of time in its title Self Portrait (3 days, 2 months, 10 days), an image of the artist’s face was lit on a small monitor. The result is a “pixel burn,” an image made by exploiting the weakness of the display. As it stays lit all over to show its ghost, it is undergoing its own decay as long as it is displayed.
Exerpt from 3 Studies for a Portrait of Bronwyn Lewis, 2010
Tivon Rice lives and works in Seattle, WA where is pursuing a doctoral degree at University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS). He obtained his master’s degree from UW in 2006 and has been a Graduate Instructor there since 2007. For his bachelor’s studies, he attended University of Colorado, graduating in 2000 with two degrees in Electronic Media and Sculpture. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries in the Pacific Northwest. His work is in private collections and his collaborative video of abstracted shaving cream with Jeffry Mitchell entitled Panda was acquired by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. He has been in group exhibitions across the nation including the CUE Art Foundation in New York, and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. His work was included in 1000 Days at the Scion Installation Space in Los Angeles, curated by DailyServing.
As a painter of political ideas—and, often, the grotesque and cruel—Luc Tuymans is a historian of images that appear banal but reveal sinister workings: colored blobs are actually disembodied eyeballs; a bare room with flattened perspective is the site of uncountable murders; a limp cloth turns out to be the emblem of a growing nationalist movement. His first U.S. retrospective, a mid-career survey now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is installed in chronological order, rewarding the viewer with a sense of how his ideas developed for each series. To mark this notable event, Mr. Tuymans conducted a personal tour of the galleries, illuminating his process and the themes behind each work. He concluded the tour with the remark, “I am not interested in having power. I am interested in looking at power.”
“I stopped painting from 1981 to 1985 because it became too suffocating and too existential. And somebody by accident shoved a Super-8 camera in my hands and I started to film. And then I came back. Making images is important in the sense that you need distance.”
“This was the first painting made after the film adventure [above]. And it’s actually one of my most conceptual works, and it’s based upon an anecdote. The anecdote is from a Dutch writer who was stationed in the Dutch Embassy from 1905 to 1910. And he didn’t have enough money to bring his wife over to Berlin. And in those days you had the grand cafes with very bourgeois interiors, and also postcards taken of them. So every time he went to eat in such places he bought a postcard, and with a red pencil he crossed out the table at which he had eaten, and he sent it to his wife during the duration of five years. So that’s why it’s called correspondence. It’s also the idea of persistence, and homesickness without an end.”
“This is something I saw on television. It’s called the Weidergutmachung, and it’s about the woman who made the documentary, it was made in ‘89, which is when I saw the documentary on the West German television. It was quite an interesting documentary because Weidergutmachung means the pay-back system towards the people who suffered in the concentration camps…this time not the Jewish people, but Gypsy twins on which the German doctors in the concentration camps had experimented. These people were never paid back because the guy who was actually responsible for the whole situation of the repayment was also a doctor who himself experimented on them during the times he was working in the concentration camp. When he dies off in ‘83 in his bureau drawer, the woman who was making the documentary found contact prints of disengaged eyeballs and hands. So this is what I saw on the television screen. It was such a poignant element that I turned it into a more organic imagery.”
“The most problematic painting that I ever painted—that I ever will paint as long as I live, probably—is the Gas Chamber. The Gas Chamber was derived from a visit to in Dachau where you have a real gas chamber and not a replica. And I stood in it, and I made a watercolor when I visited it, and for years this watercolor was on the floor of my studio, which made the color of the paper yellow. And I also made it on a frame that is deliberately not straight. It’s a metonymous image, because without the words of the title it would be completely without effect, it would be just a painting. Nevertheless, it shows the triviality of that type of horror. At the time of its use, it was masked as a place where you could get a shower. All the elements of perspective are taken out, in order to get to this feeling of claustrophobic existence. I mean, a lot of times the Germans say, ‘We can’t deal with that type of history as the Holocaust,’ but I’m not agreeing with that, it is part of the culture… This remains a very difficult and ambiguous painting.”
“This was from a show about Flemish nationalism in my hometown, where at that point (luckily not anymore) there was the biggest concentration of the right-wing political party called the Flemish Bloc. So I thought I would start with their icons. This is the Belgian lion. The Belgian lion normally is a lion on a yellow backdrop with red claws. To enlighten you about the history of Flanders is going to take us very long, because it’s a long story to begin with, but anyway, to give you an idea…During the first world war, all the officers were French speaking. This meant that during the First World War a lot of Belgian people died in that war, millions of them. The people who were the soldiers, the foot guys, they were all Flemish; there were huge massacres, because when the officers would say a gauche [French: left], they would go right, into the machine fire. In between the two world wars there was a closeness in terms of culture to the German culture, more than to the French culture. And that ended up in a collaboration with the Germans. So a very difficult situation. That’s why you have a lot of marriage trouble, which I also witnessed. My mother was Dutch, they were in the resistance. My father was the Flemish side, they had collaborated. At dinner, when I was five years old, this explodes by the accidental showing up of a photograph of the guy I was named after doing the Hitler salute. You can imagine the whole situation. So what you can see here is the Flemish lion, and I just made a watercolor of it, and then I crumbled it together, and then pinned it on the wall. And then I did something I had never done before, I took a Polaroid of it, and it was such bad quality that it totally deleted the imagery, which is actually beautiful I think. And this was the first time I used Polaroid as a device to derive imagery.”
“This was painted out of my disgust with the Bush legislation. The first idea I had was this: I was thinking of this element of regression in American society in those days, going back to an open form of conservatism, and therefore Fred Astaire, Ginger Rodgers. Ballroom dancing. So then I was on the web browsing, trying to find more contemporary imagery, and in 2005 there was the Texas Governor’s ball, this is the Texas seal, the woman swings her head out, this guy is the epitome of well-behaved and whatever. And on the other hand, this is an image that’s really classical, I really loved doing it…”
“…Then, one of my best friends who used to be the Minster of Foreign Affairs, made a remark of Condoleeza Rice—I was in a bar, reading this in a newspaper—there was a day Condoleeza Rice came and visited our country, and he said something like, “She is very intelligent, and she is not unpretty.” And this sexist remark led to my idea of Condoleeza Rice. The interesting point is that she is depicted not to be judged, she is depicted with great determination. At that point no one knew what the woman was going to achieve.”
Richard Patterson emerged in London at Damien Hirst’s Freeze exhibition in 1988 as one of the YBA group. After moving to New York he eventually settled in Dallas. He is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery in London and James Cohan Gallery in New York. He is known for paintings that combine imagery culled from popular culture and art history with painstaking detail. Combining car culture, soft porn, modernist design and the viscous seductions of paint, Patterson’s work often evokes both melancholy and desire. Here, Noah Simblist talks to him in his studio about his current paintings. They began by discussing the problems with working with appropriated imagery.
Richard Patterson: There’s so much shit to worry about. That’s what has sort of driven me to generate my own imagery rather than referencing other material because unlike in Germany where everything is seen as fair use, everywhere else it’s not. So it’s a very prohibitive time, you can’t visually comment on the world now in a satirical or ironic way without getting permission first. So, I got good enough in Photoshop where I started realizing that if you already know how to paint and draw you can actually generate stuff from scratch without sampling it.
Noah Simblist: The breasts in the Doge painting are from scratch?
RP: They are absolutely from scratch.
NS: Really?
RP: I decided to adorn these dancers with these slightly crazy, slightly cartoon breasts. And then Bellini’s Doge of Venice appears in the middle. There was a lot of power invested in this one person who is basically elected. I think of him as this benevolent type of prince. That’s not why I did it, but you know, he seems a little like the local collector Howard Rachofsky.
NS: The Doge of Dallas.
RP: The Doge of Dallas and all the breasts you know. These are my fake breasts.
NS: The Dallas fake breasts.
RP: These are the people that inhabit galleries. It’s also like Picasso. It’s the fear of impotence and death and the younger fertile woman you know. Also I think its ridiculous, it’s got a cartoony kind of dumbness to it.
NS: You have said that these paintings are not meant to be purely ironic like the way that Jeff Koons uses appropriated imagery for a sly commentary on contemporary life.
RP: Koons is all about irony. But, there is a melancholy and genuineness, a specific mood in some of my paintings that isn’t there in Koons. Koons is all about the tedious stuff about consumerism.
I think that the American understanding of irony is where you say, “I really like your new sweater…not” My understanding of irony is from English culture, which is entrenched with irony. If you had your country blown to bits in living memory or you parents memory and you’ve seen your country change…We used to have this massive empire and I was brought up to believe that there was still this kind of Great Brittania type shit and then it is so clearly dwindling. How can you not be ironic about the fact that Hitler bombed the shit out of your country. That gives you a kind of cultural irony that is so, English. English culture is shot through with being invaded and assimilating new cultures through its history and then developing a sense of humor about it.
NS: That’s interesting. What you’re talking about relates to our standard history about Dada and Surrealism that was about uncanny contradictory things being put in one place together. The idea of something that seems both funny and horrific at the same time was coming out of World War I or World War II, by people that were being confronted with the most bizarre circumstances. During the Blitz you’d see a burning building and abject destruction but people that lived next to that building still had to go about their daily lives by going to work, doing laundry and grocery shopping. So you have this kind of banal thing that is also epic at the same time.
RP: Well I think so much gets lost in translation and you know I think that there is a default setting that the Brits have that is so self-deprecating, self-questioning, self-doubting and America since 9/11 is going to be more ironic, and maybe intimate as well.
If I did a painting of whatever it was that I was painting – cartoon breasts or something – it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what I wanted to see. In fact, it was often the opposite. I wasn’t painting Spice Girls because I thought Spice Girls were great. Some people say, “You sort of like the bikes and the tits right?” It’s a difficult question cause I do. The red one is a collectible bike that raced in Europe in the sixties and I do like them but the irony is for me to put them into paintings is incredibly bad.
NS: Does this connect to an idea of taste? Is every painting or every work an artist makes an expression of their taste? Similarly, like the curator acquiring something for their museum. Is that an expression of their taste? It seems like you’re saying the opposite. These aren’t just expressions of your own likes or dislikes.
RP: Yeah, taste is a real good thing to talk about cause it’s the most objective thing. It’s the thing that sounds most nebulous, maybe least important and maybe it’s the most important thing. Because in term of these images, not only are they reproduced very, very carefully, when it comes to actually painting them, but a huge amount of work has gone into trying to balance colors and compositions to make them. I mean they are quite classical; the reason I think it looks so weird is because it’s a very classical painting in an age that isn’t. So its difficult to find a context for them. It’s like to trying to talk about Schoenberg to the MTV generation. Is it possible to paint a bright red Toyota Tacoma truck with these funny bulges, with wheel arches that are really quite ugly that Toyota described in their press release as “muscular bulges” that didn’t look like muscle at all; they looked like rolls of fat around someones middle.
NS: I read something recently about a coup within Toyota where the CEO who was responsible for bringing out these big trucks and big SUV’s and replacing their traditional model of having smaller fuel efficient cars with these bigger things because it was feeding the American appetite was publicly chastised by Toyota’s grandson. They fell into a lot of the same problems that the American car makers did. He publicly rebuked him for being greedy and too connected to the dirty obsession with power and size that Americans have and throwing away all the virtues that the company was founded on.
RP: I wrote a piece for Glenn Fuhrman’s show at the Flag Foundation in New York, about something connected to this. Glenn has the Back of the Dealership painting. The title was an obvious pun on paintings being back at the art dealership. But it was also genuine. I kept going back to the Toyota dealership on Sundays to take a look at the trucks when there was no one there. But there was always some salesman, who seemed to be on Sunday duty at the shop trying to sell you a truck and they never knew as much about the truck as I did. They’d tell you it was an eight cylinder truck and it was a six cylinder truck. They never seemed to know what they were talking about. And, then somehow oil was getting more expensive.
I was already locked into that syndrome and I was kind of aware of it and built credit by spending money I did not have just to be taken seriously in America. Politically you don’t have any power unless you’re in debt. So basically all money is debt, and if power is money you can say that power is debt. So owning one of these fucking trucks was contributing to the economy and it was also your license to be fully American. It was clearly fucked up. I think that’s why I wanted to move here. And now of course it’s going to look too obvious because its going to look like its about the economy. If it’s ironic, its going to be about trucks or the economy or something. But I was actually experiencing it as a foreign national in a slightly different way than probably ordinary Americans would.
Postscript: While the above excerpts from a conversation with Patterson covered the complex layering of conceptual tropes in his paintings, the discussion frequently turned to larger issues about living and working in a regional American city like Dallas. Patterson has taken a leading roll in recent years to bring his experiences of participating in an emerging art community in London – which in the mid-80’s was not the art center that it is today – to bear on Dallas. But he also continues to show his work internationally. Most recently he is participating in “Size Does Matter,” an exhibition curated by Shaquille O’Neal which opened on Feb 19 at The Flag Art Foundation in New York.
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley
"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles
“Becoming a human being isn’t just something you get with your birth,” novelist Zadie Smith told Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt in 2006. “It’s an exercise and it takes your whole life.” Smith said this following the publication of On Beauty, her relentless opus in which 450 pages of identity-searching ends in disaster—slander, scandal and death, all somehow stemming from the characters’ frustrating fixation on the question, “who am I?” The better question, according to Smith, and the one art should really help us ask, is, “Do other people exist in the same way I do?”
I thought of Smith earlier this week, while viewing Joint Dialogue at Overduin and Kite. This new exhibition of old work by Lee Lozano, Stephen Kaltenbach, and Dan Graham certainly treats being human, like being an artist, as a lifelong project. But, more provocatively, it also questions whether people can exist through each other and refuse to be each other at the same time.
Curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, the exhibition looks deceptively pragmatic, with text pieces tastefully spaced on each wall of the first gallery and a series of old Artforum magazines placed on wall-mounted pedestals in the second. But Joint Dialogue (the title, a double entendre, refers to joining together and smoking together) is actually irreverently curious and funny, and it traces a convergence that would make even Lawrence Weschler proud: in New York in the late 1960s, Lozano, Graham, and Kaltenbach were all grappling with the difficulty of living honestly and using drugs, sexuality and money to pull others into conversations about being artists (and just being in general). In fact, the explorations of Lozano, Graham, and Kaltenbach seem so entwined that, at time, it’s easy to forget they are three distinctly different personalities who would go on to have three distinctly different legacies.
"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles
The psychology of Dan Graham’s Income (Outflow) Piece (1969/1973), in which Graham attempted to sell shares in himself and to become solvent by “coming on” in the right way, seems to extend into Lee Lozano’s Real Money Piece, in which she offered a jar of money to other artists, who could either contribute or extract funds at will. Lozano wryly recorded people’s reactions; some, like Brice Marden (who apparently laughed at the idea), refused to take anything; others, like Graham, took and returned money on loan. It became a document of artists’ divergent opinions about money and its distribution. Lozano’s Dialogue Piece (1969) worked similarly (and again, Graham played a key role: “Dan Graham and I have important dialogue in that definite changes were immediately effected because of it,” Lozano wrote). She contacted, or tried to contact, art world all-stars like Robert Morris and (less successfully) Jasper Johns, simply inviting them to talk. The openness or aversion her peers had to this idea of dialogue, coupled with the fact that Lozano made herself vulnerable in order to draw others into an undefined, possibly precarious experience, give the piece its backbone. Lozano’s diaristic descriptions, which pointedly omit the actual content of each conversation, give the piece its charm. One of my favorites: “we discuss ‘the Revolution,’ Brice [Marden] talking almost entirely abt shitty business practices in the art world, & shitty treatment of artists by each other.“
Around the same time Lozano made her Dialogue Piece andGraham made Income (Outflow) Piece, Stephen Kaltenbach was attributing his work to others–he attributed a clock he made to Lozano–and gifting to and borrowing from the practices of his peers. His mostly steel Time Capsules, two of which he included in Joint Dialogue and some of which he dedicated to friends or acquaintances, were often engraved with pithy instructions (one said “open before my retrospective at the Tate in London”) and gave his seemingly transient, interaction-based art a comical permanence. Like Graham and Lozano, he set himself apart by wholeheartedly engaging other people.
"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles
Wind (Rom), 2009; plastic, poster, wallpaper, spray paint, loops, screws; 209 x 202 cm.
In William Gibson’s 1986 novel Count Zero, an abandoned but sentient AI robot composes art objects from detritus found in space. Despite being built by a computer from discards and rubbish, these objects have a deeply human gravity—both a grace and a yearning for grace—and are highly prized. It is precisely this evocative use of materials and imagery that Isa Genzken gives us in Wind, her response to the death of Michael Jackson. This recent work, at Neugerriemschneider Gallery in Berlin, expertly conjures the agitation between glory and coarseness in celebrity culture.
Five monumental mixed-media works, all from 2009, are hung from the walls of the gallery. The outlier of the group in materials and scale, Wind (Rom), is composed of pages torn from a floral wall calendar, plastic, satin ribbon, spray paint, and tape. The other four works are larger and a more intriguing mix of temporary and durable materials: the weight and chill of large copper and aluminum plates clashes with flimsy photocopies provisionally clamped to their edges, and the glitz and promise of mirrored disco tiles is defeated by the crassness of cheap blue painter’s tape. To say that the work is abject would be somewhat misleading; the scale and materials often point to permanence and beauty, even though it falls short of being fully realized. In Wind, Genzken tells us that true beauty is not possible under current historical and cultural conditions.
Wind (Michael/David), 2009; plastic, poster, colour copies, mirrored foil, coloured paper, spray paint, tape; 200.5 x 276 cm.
Wind (Michael), 2009; copper plate, aluminium plates, colour copies, tape, spray paint; 260.5 x 315.5 cm.
And yet, there is a scavenged poetry, too. Wind (Michael) uses repetition to evoke a sense of loss. Against a background of alternating copper and aluminum panels, the piece depicts Jackson in concert, leaping into the air in a dance routine. The photos (more cheap photocopies) are attached to the first two of the three copper panels, establishing a visual rhythm that points to the blankness of the last panel. Despite the heroic scale of the piece, the apparent permanence of the metal, and the brightly colored papers, the piece is cold and despairing.
The various compositions of the pieces are anarchic but not disorganized. Materials, too, are severely contrasting but not completely unharmonious. If the work is, as stated in the press release, “concerned with the depiction of this immaterial force of nature,” it seems that Genzken shows us a wind that can simultaneously elevate and sully. In the end, the work feels less specifically about the adoration and dejection of Michael Jackson than about the society that produced him.
San Francisco-based artist and curator Brion Nuda Rosch creates subtle, yet powerful collages, paintings, sculptures and conceptual projects, which often pair disparate but poetic associations. This ability to provide insightful connections shines through Rosch’s playful but pensive collaborative and curatorial projects as well. Rosch often partners with other artists on creative exchanges through a one-day residency program in his own home called Hallway Projects, while curating more extensive exhibitions in other venues. Earlier this month, Rosch closed a solo show at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, simply titled New Work by Brion Nuda Rosch, featuring work which investigates the value of materials and the idea of the non-monumental. The artist recently sat down with DailyServing.com founder Seth Curcio to discuss his recent Artadia Award, the next installment of his curated exhibition series, Paper! Awesome!, and his recent solo exhibition in San Francisco.
Seth Curcio: So Brion, you were notified a few weeks ago that you are one of the recipients of the Artadia award for San Francisco this year. Congratulations on your award. Tell me a little about the works that were included in your application and about the process that led to the selection.
Brion Nuda Rosch: I included a selection of collages and documentation of several assemblages. At the time I was also in the process of selecting work for my first solo exhibition and for an upcoming book project. Ultimately, the works included in my application were the starting points for the work shown at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco, CA from November 18 – January 2, 2010. I was short-listed as a finalist while preparing for this exhibition. The process was rather swift. First, a social with the jurors and other finalists, then a studio visit, then an announcement.
SC: Your creative practice is very diverse and includes curatorial projects as well as impromptu galleries and online projects, such as your blog Something home Something. Do you feel that your decentralized practice made your work more attractive to the panel at Artadia as they reviewed hundreds of artist applications? How do you feel that each of these different modes of working help to inform your greater practice?
BNR: The focus for my application was primarily centered on my art making. My curatorial efforts were only represented in my Curriculum Vitae and were discussed only briefly during my studio visit. In any discussion about my work, conversation will not remain on one topic, such as painting, or collage. I feel I could easily assert different categories for various works, however doing so would prove to be a shortcoming. I balance the roles of both art making and curating — both practices relate to one another, each sharing similar starting points. Somewhere the boundaries fade and a project initiated from a curatorial standpoint becomes a work of art, and vice versa. It is not a priority to identify each action with defined labels. Most of my work simply involves a selection of material and then a relationship to that material within a new situation.
SC: Thinking about your recent show with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions and the statement that ‘most of your work simply involves a selection of material and then a relationship to that material’, I am curious about both your humbly-constructed images and sculptures. Talk a little about the concepts that play out in that exhibition, both through your image and object construction.
BNR: The images and the collages are both humble and monumental. Minimal adjustments have been made, a waterfall placed over a waterfall, a new ridge placed over a mountain range, a vague monument placed over a field. These ideas are monumental in scale, almost impossible, while also positioning room for our own reflection into the world around us. The monuments I create are non-monuments; they lack distinct meaning. The materials lack value, found book pages, recycled dump stock paint, wood and drywall. The assemblage works are a direct reaction to accumulated materials within my studio. The assemblage titled, Contents of Studio, Gathered, Painted Brown is just that, the contents of my studio gathered, painted brown and placed in a pile. I accumulated a collection of unsuccessful and unfinished works, and painting them all the same neutral color resolved the conflict I was having with them, placing them in a pile offered a solution for their arrangement and physicality.
SC: In addition to your studio practice, I am also interested in your other more social and collaborative projects. I know that you have produced the ‘Fluxus Coloring Book’, you are now conducting day-long artist residencies out of your home, and you are in the process of curating the third installment of Paper! Awesome!, a show that features an impressive line-up of artists that work with or on paper.
BNR: The Fluxus Coloring Book was produced while in residence at Southern Exposure. During my residency, I worked with a group of artists to build The Portable Ice Cream Stand, part art object, part functioning ice cream stand, part social happening. Visiting artists and guests initiated the direction of the project. A worktable was built to make handmade fliers, later the table functioned as a place for conversation and art making. A few artists made coloring book pages, and guests colored in them. All of the work created at the table was left behind. As a reaction I wanted to develop something that could be taken away from the project. I have an interest in Fluxus art, and felt there was a relationship between the childlike tendencies of a coloring book and the humor of Fluxus art. The coloring book consisted of blank pages and non-representation lines. There was nothing to color in or around; the coloring book was failure, a document for it’s own joke.
One-Day Artist Residencies will take place within the context of Hallway Projects, which exists in my home. During these residencies, an interaction will take place in private, and then later be shared with the public via on-line documentation and distribution of printed materials. During each residency the contributor is offered both a physical venue and a reasonable timeline to execute direct actions in art making. Within the modest time frame and hospitable environment, I hope to interview each contributor and produce either collaborative works or investigate shared sensibilities in our interests as makers. For example, in a conversation many years ago, Amy Rathbone and I discovered we both dislike the colors yellow and blue. For her residency, we plan to explore the colors, and our reaction to them now. We plan to evaluate various tones of each color and rank our tolerance. In addition, we plan to directly tackle our fears by submersing ourselves in the colors and sharing our experience with the public in efforts to gain a better understanding of why we dislike the color yellow and the color blue.
And, Paper! Awesome! was first produced out of necessity for an exhibit within a short timeline. It took place at the now closed Mimi Barr Gallery in 2003. I put out a call to artists to submit work on a letter size piece of paper. I figured with the upcoming deadline, a letter size piece of paper was the most approachable form for both the artists, and my vision for installing the work in a cohesive manner. The works were hung on two walls in a quilt-like fashion. The second installment took place two years later, and involved an open call and a jury process. The range of artists selected added an important element to the exhibit. Artist who were established within the art world and artists who have not shown their work before were hung alongside one another and the proximity of the works offered a slightly anonymous experience for the viewer. For the third installment at Baer Ridgway this spring, I have invited an interesting range of artists who have shown extensively in the international art world, and I am in the process of working with members of other organizations to provide another element to the exhibit. Again, the timeline here is important, I invited the artists to participate nearly six weeks prior to the deadline of submissions. Like the One-Day Artist Residencies, I am interested in what can be produced within a limited time frame and limited space.
SC: So what can we look forward to from you in 2010? Do you have any exciting new projects that you have been wanting to tackle?
BNR: 2010 is shaping up to be very productive. I will be a curator in residence for a short period of time with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions. Little Paper Planes is publishing a book of my collages and assemblages. The book will be released in February. The Andy Warhol Foundation has funded the catalog for Artadia Awardees. I’m looking forward to returning to the studio, and having a lot of conversations about the potential to do larger projects. A very ambitious year to come!
Off Book is the title of a current exhibition by acclaimed New York based conceptual artist Glenn Ligon. The exhibition, which is on view through January 23rd at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects, continues the artist’s investigation of cultural identity, social and historical constructs, language, race, and gender. Similar to previous exhibitions by the artist, Off Book explores these ideas through text-based work, installation, and video. This new series of works investigate many themes discussed in James Baldwin’s essay entitled Figure, originally published in 1953. For this series, the artist has silk screened versions of existing text-based paintings onto colored backgrounds, and then dusted the surface with coal particles. The result is a semi-abstracted surface where the test is obscured through the application of the screen print. Also on view is a 16 mm black and white film titled, The Death of Tom, and a neon piece, which features the word AMERICA backwards, titled Rügenfigur.
Ligon’s work has been the focus of several major international exhibitions. The artist’s work was selected by the Obama’s to be on loan at the White House. This inclusion made Ligon the youngest artist ever to receive this honor. Recent solo exhibitions for the artist include, ‘Nobody’ and Other Songs at Thomas Dane Gallery in London and Figure/Paysage/Marine at Yvon Lambert in Paris and Love and Theft at Power House in Memphis. The artist is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Rhode Island School of Art and Design. Ligon lives and works in New York City.
Adidas released its 2nd Urban Art Guide, this one for Hamburg. Load it on your smart phone to find art around the city. http://bit.ly/ac5dWSabout 5 days agofrom web
Discussion
"Oh my god, this is so damn cool."
—daveconrey
"Bitte können Sie mir ein Antwordt geben auf diese Frage: ist es möglich Ihre Studio zu besuchen und Bilder zu kaufen. Wir mÖchten gerne etwas haben für unsere collection. Was is die..."
—greet hamming
"Rando, I agree."
—john
"…the beauty of art is in that everyone seems to see something different. I went twice to view this phenomenal collection. A definite must see. Above and beyond the intriguing subject at..."
—lisa