Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

On the heels of our week-long themed series 7 Days of Myth and Summer of Utopia, DailyServing is proud to bring you a collection of writings that explore the use of rebellion in contemporary art in this week’s series Rise of Rebellion. In this latest week-long series, our writers will explore the ways in which contemporary artists are using rebellion as a central concept in their artwork through exclusive interviews, articles, essays and daily features. Check in each day to examine the rebel that lives in all of us.

Today we begin our investigation into rebellion with Jobs Suck and Art Rules: Today I Made Nothing at Elizabeth Dee by Michael Tomeo.

Today I Made Nothing, Organized by Tim Saltarelli, Elizabeth Dee, New York, NY, July 27 – September 18, 2010, Installation view Courtesy Elizabeth Dee, New York

I’m so over jobs right now. Sure, we need them, we’re thankful for the paycheck and it’s fun to hang out with coworkers (sometimes), but let’s face it, jobs blow.  While the total freedom associated with making art seems antithetical to the 9 to 5 slog, there are definite correlations between art and work and they are given form in the impeccably timed Today I Made Nothing at Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

Virginia Overton, Untitled (chairs with lights), 2009, chairs, light fixture, ratchet strap, Dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

There are two types of workplace rebellion on view here. In one, the artist is an outsider, fighting for equal rights and clashing against the system. Works like Alejandro Cesarco’s Why Work?, Duncan Campbell’s Factories Act 1961, and Jonathan Monk’s The Sound of Music (A Record With the Sound Of Its Own Making), each use techniques and ideas from the 1960s and ‘70s such as appropriation and institutional critique. Vaguely recalling the efforts of the late-60s collectives such as the Art Workers Coalition, these works feel a bit dated, but they lend the show a historic scope.

Joseph Strau, title forthcoming, 2010, mixed media installation with floor lamp and two paintings, dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

Another group of artists is more successfully subversive. Mika Tajima, Renée Green, Joseph Strau and Virginia Overton each use the visual vocabulary of today’s corporate world as if they are involved in a diabolical inside job. Overton’s Untitled (chairs with lights) reconfigures mordant institutional design to create what is ostensibly a badass floor lamp/sculpture.  Joseph Strau’s title forthcoming, presents two dainty abstractions with a lamp in front of them, as if Franz West were the display manager at IKEA. Mika Tajima’s A Facility Based on Change, an impenetrable work cubicle, updates the underlying claustrophobia in minimal sculpture for the middle management set. Renée Green’s banners take on the look of corporate brainstorming lists in what she calls Space Poems. They’re funny, off-putting and deceptively smart. In a room full of works attempting to challenge the boundaries of what art is, these might take the cake.

Renée Green, United Space of Conditioned Becoming: Space Poem #1, From My Institution Corporation Factory Blackberry Cellphone Mouth To Yours, 2007, double-sided color banner 42 x 32 inches (106.7 x 81.3 cm), Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

It’s a sign of progress that, in a show about working, women have the strongest presence.  However, other forms of advancement prove more difficult to measure. In the ‘60s, artists protested museums at a level unheard of today. As rebellious as this show portends to be, many of the artists on view are up and coming museum stars in their own right. Museums have begun to absorb rebellion as part of their aesthetic and they increasingly embrace and reward all forms of institutional critique and artist manipulation.  By welcoming more acts of critique into their halls, they glean the benefit of appearing like nurturing patrons, but they also anesthetize any sense of real rebellion. We still have a long way to go, but Today I Made Nothing is an excellent place to start the conversation.

Bryan Graf, Lake Accumulation 2010, c-print, 13 x 19 inches- Curator, Kate Greenberg & Hilary Schaffner

I love how far the term “curate” has fallen. Once particular to egg-headed museum types who cared for collections of rarities, now curating, at least in marketing terms, means nothing more than making a kind of fancy or personalized choice. Instead of plain old dinner and a movie, you can now curate the best locavorian burger and artisanal fries while selecting a companion film from your finely tuned Netflix queue.

In the art world, strains of this populist streak were found in Roberta Smith’s recent assail against New York museums’ predilection toward chilly post-minimalism. Coining the term “curator’s art,” Smith called into question the blitz of retrospectives of artists like Roni Horn, Robert Smithson, and Gabriel Orozco that as she put it, “share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note.” She added that while she liked these shows, she also wants to see shows by artists whose work belies an intense personal necessity. I took this to mean that she wants to see the same level of passion on museum walls that some employ in everyday decisions such as where to eat.

With this criteria in mind, I judged Young Curators, New Ideas III to mostly be heading in the right direction. Each curator or curatorial team was given their own section of the gallery that they treated like an individual show.  The overall result looks like your average M.F.A. Thesis exhibition, but there were a couple of standouts.

Bryan Graf, An Encyclopedia of Gardening, 1969 2010, two panels of hardcover book covers, 24 x 32 inches each - Curator, Kate Greenberg & Hilary Schaffner

Broken Lattice, featuring the work of Bryan Graf, curated by Kate Greenberg and Hilary Schaffner, feels both cohesive and well varied. Graf uses a multitude of photographic techniques to convey a distant sense of place and memory.  He borrows heavily from the James Welling playbook, but it’s OK, as his intention feels pure and the curators seem humble. The works are given just enough space to breathe easily and the relaxed pace of the installation is completely in sync with the laid-back vibe of Graf’s photography. You can get lost in a floor piece, peer into a smaller work, and lean over a table of seemingly found snapshots—in total, a satisfying experience.

Jan Tichy, Installation No. 5 (Threshold) 2008, three-channel digital video projection, one hundred 250g white paper objects, variable dimensions- Curator, Gabriella Hiatt

Another respite from the competing voices in this show was Jan Tichy’s Installation No. 5 (Threshold), curated by Gabriella Hiatt. Here, four walls of a darkened gallery are adorned with common cardboard tubes and cylindrical lids. After languishing in the dark for a while, the walls are blasted with rectangles of projected white light that transforms the tubes into what looks like the austere post-minimal abstraction of, say, Gabriel Orozco.  Then a layer of black lines snake onto these objects and transforms them once again. Although it’s a bit theatrical, I like how the references in this work slip between DIY craft, high abstraction, mapping, and biological systems.

The rest of Young Curators/ New Ideas III feels a bit scattered. Some of the work that I liked, such as Victor Vaughn’s digital prints, suffered from bad placement and odd context.  Too much of the other work on view bears the heavy influence of grad school obsessions like Marcel Broodthaers, Felix Gonzáles-Torres and Christian Marclay. While it is difficult to know whom to blame for the less successful parts of the show, the artist or the curator, in the best installations it feels as if the curator simply placed the work into a complimentary context and then got out of the way.

Maybe all of the hardworking museum curators out there are over-thinking it. For instance, we shouldn’t need to read a laborious wall label to experience great art. Although Young Curators, New Ideas III misses in parts, it spares us from heady essays and shows how selection, placement, and juxtaposition can go a long way.

On the north-west corner of Trafalger Square in London lies a structure simply coined the Fourth Plinth. Originally designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, the massive pedestal was intended to display an equestrian statue, but the sculpture was never finished due to a lack of funds. Since the late nineties, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts has commissioned several sculptural works for the Fourth Plinth including works from Marc Quinn to Rachel Whiteread.

Last summer, British artist Antony Gormley was also invited to complete a project utilizing the Fourth Plinth. Instead of creating a static sculptural form to sit elevated on a pedestal before the city, the artist took a risky move to randomly invite 2,400 people to occupy the structure for a period of one hour, twenty four hours a day for a total of 100 days. Titled One & Other, the pieced allowed each person that inhabited the plinth to become the work of art,  leveling any hierarchy that defines who should be represented in a work of art. Each attendee occupied the structure alone, but was allowed to do anything they like for the hour, providing that it is legal in the UK.

For a brief period, participants could address the world at large and speak to any issue that is of concern to them.  Certainly a momentary equality of voice doesn’t exactly elicit the illusions of grandeur that are usually associated with political or societal utopias, but the ability to speak openly to an audience about an idea or issue that you are invested in without consequence is certainly the first step to identifying a common ideal. To further extend the impact and reach of each participants voice, every minute of the 100 day project was streamed live over the internet and then archived for indefinite public access.

However, Gormley’s work isn’t just interested in the idea of or struggle for utopia in relation to society, politics or even a specific place. Most often the work quietly references the notion of balance and harmony as a state of being. Gormley’s training in archaeology, anthropology and art history at Cambridge University, mixed with years of practice with Buddhist meditation in India and Sri Lanka has positioned him in a unique place to express the experience of inner balance to a greater audience though the language of visual art. When describing the material usage for the majority of his figurative sculptures, the artist will state air as a fundamental material. This is because Gormley is as interested in the inner ’space’ of his forms as he is the ‘outer space’ that the form itself occupies.

For his first US public art project, the artist is presenting Event Horizon, a current project that includes 31 life-sized figures cast in iron and bronze modeled form the artist’s own body and now populate Madison Square Park and rooftops throughout New York’s Flatiron District. In an area that is vibrant, hectic and anything but still and quiet, these forms serve as a reminder of the balance and utopia that can be obtained inwardly even in the most chaotic of locations. However, this reminder often happens in an abrupt and oddly irritating way. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the artist addressed this notion stating, “You could almost say the insertion of the sculpture is like the insertion of acupuncture needles within a collective body. And seeing how the body as a whole reacts to the presence of this irritation is very much the point.”

If the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh keeps putting on shows like Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol then maybe the ol’ Burgh deserves a place on the official Dia art pilgrimage map, along with James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona and Walter De Maria’s New Mexican Lightning Field.  Curated by longtime Warhol archivist Matt Wrbican, Twisted Pair is smart, funny and long overdue. Where many curators employ obscure art theory in attempts to somehow prove that what they are doing is true, Wrbican actually uses the archive. This makes for a much more grounded take on these artists, which is exactly what they need after decades of art world deification.

This show reminds us that before all of the flashbulbs, fame and auction numbers, Andy Warhol was just another young New York artist, albeit a very promising one. It also accurately depicts Duchamp as being fairly aware of what young artists were up to, despite his status as art world legend. He was more accessible as a chess playing jokester than a solitary genius.

Andy Warhol, Oxidation, 1978. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/1964.

There are some terrific pairings in this show, like Warhol’s Oxidation paintings next to Duchamp’s Urinal. There are also a few rare finds like Warhol’s The Lord Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose, 1948 and Duchamp’s Door at 11 Rue Larrey Photographic Enlargement, 1964. But some of the best stuff on view are the letters and archival material that might truly feel sacred to fans of either artist. Usually ephemera bores me to tears but here I was fascinated to see a butcher-paper test print for one of Warhol’s Shadows hanging above a case full of Duchamp’s optical illusion machines.

Among the qualities that Warhol and Duchamp share are a desire to shock, a taste for celebrity, a belief in the everyday object, a penchant for drag, and a strong voyeuristic impulse.  Duchamp’s groundbreaking idea of the readymade looms larger than any other in the 20^th century and no one did more with it than Warhol.  Warhol understood that advertisements, consumer objects, newspaper photos, the Empire State Building, and people themselves were all up for grabs as objects d’art. If Duchamp’s Bottle Rack looks rather pedestrian next to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, it’s because Warhol never fully committed to the anti-retinal to the same degree that Duchamp did.

Andy Warhol, The Lord Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose, 1948, Collection Paul Warhola Family.

This show is so effective in pointing out connections between these two artists that it is tempting to see them as the same creative force formed by two separate eras. However, their differences are just as striking as their similarities. Duchamp embodied an authentic lackadaisical attitude that Warhol could only feign. With a work ethic that would make his Pittsburghian forebears proud, Warhol called his studio the Factory and constantly cranked out product.  Duchamp let large amounts of time, not to mention dust, seep into his works before finishing them. Warhol was a worldwide sensation while Duchamp only appealed to art-nerds. These days it is impossible to imagine any appropriation art, assemblage, or hip art collective like the Paris-based Claire Fontaine without these two artists – they are so influential that we are almost tired of them.

My friends in Pittsburgh roll their eyes when I over-praise their city’s magnificent bridges, or go on about how the PPG Building is like the best Banks Violette sculpture ever. And yes, I’ve been caught on Greenpoint Avenue in Brooklyn wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball hat.  But hometown bias aside, this show is worth traveling for.

On the other hand, Twisted Pair is so essentially New York that its next destination really should be the Whitney, but I doubt this will happen.  If a real sense of what these artists were like intrigues you, and the thought of seeing relics pertaining to their lives and work gets you all fluttery, then a trip to Pittsburgh is a must. After the show, indulge yourself with a little urban exploration. Vacant, post-industrial downtown Pittsburgh might be the closest thing to 60s SoHo to be found.

DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

Andreas Templin’s multi-dimensional body of work includes sculpture, video, installation, photography, and urban interventions. His diverse practice is guided by a critical approach to the making of art; each work is the outcome of an insightful process that examines culture from a philosophical point of view. As the artist states, “The adult individual consumer is faced with the creative possibility of reinventing his identity each day, with the wide variety of enhancement products now available for use. The artist, too, must move with the times, and avoid being a fixed label, but use everything available to him.”

Templin’s technically simplistic, and somewhat disconcerting, video work, As if to nothing (9:54), consists of the constant display of earth’s qualitative statistical data, culled from governmental sources, accompanied by a recording of Anton Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. The emotional depth of the audio heightens the impact and immediacy of the dreary data display. Selected statistics include a tally of the world’s population, military expenditures, infectious diseases, and species extinct. The environmental data set “Ocean Oil Spills (tons)” holds particular poignancy in our current cultural moment.

This type of cultural insight, and perhaps critique, appears in Templin’s vinyl record album, Andreas Templin plays Bach, a recording of the artist whistling Bach throughout the city streets. This more playful form of artistic commentary was born out of the artist’s distaste with the “clean and highly competitive virtuoso-recordings” that exist of the German composer, and was recorded in the red light district of Amsterdam. The album cover was created by classical music photographer Felix Broede.

Templin, who lives and works in Berlin, is currently participating in the group show Consume at Exit Art in New York. The exhibition, which is a project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), investigates world food production, consummation, distribution, and waste. Consume will remain on view until August 28th.

At six o’clock on Saturday evening in SoHo, Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman made public their intent to fill the hole that Jeffrey Deitch’s trans-continental career move created in the world of New York art, which is no small undertaking. The two former directors of Deitch Projects opened a much anticipated new space at 104 Greene Street, aptly titled The Hole. The inaugural exhibition, Not Quite Open for Business, was directed by Taylor McKimens and showcases unfinished works by over twenty artists, including Nate Lowman and Rosson Crow.

When their originally planned exhibition fell through mere weeks before the scheduled opening, Grayson and Coleman decided to make the best of what others might deem an impossible situation. They solicited their artists to “Give us an incomplete piece…Give us a drawing that you just cant bring yourself to finish from your flat files. Put half your makeup on and give us most of a performance!” In a press release littered with intentional “typoos,” Grayson and Coleman clarify that this is not about the process of the artist, or the deliberate incompletion of work, but about “being caught with your pants down and your lipstick smudged and your armpits sweaty because you didn’t have time to take a shower before YOUR FIRST GALLERY SHOW.” A personal and self-deprecating tone replaced the more traditional formality of this document. The opening was a straightforward and unpretentious debut for Grayson and Coleman, making up in energy what it lacked in polish.

The unfinished theme pervades, and the space resembles a construction site overtaken by creatives. Painted scrap lumber, an industrial ladder, bare studs and unfinished sheetrock share the space with art. Works on paper are mounted with thumbtacks. A half painted logo contributes to the the display’s impromptu, work-in-progress quality, disarming the viewer and generating unlimited interest in future progress.

Not Quite Open for Business will remain on view until August 14th. As mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article written by Erica Orden, upcoming exhibitions include a solo show by Mat Brinkman and an installation by Kenny Scharf and the collective Dearraindrop. Other projects in the plans for The Hole include a book store in the back room of the gallery, Holey Books, and a dating service for artists, purportedly titled Hole Lotta Love. We’ll keep you posted.

This week, the Christian Marclay: Festival will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The exhibition celebrates many of the artist’s graphic scores for performance and will take the form of multiple daily performances by individual musicians and vocalists. The Whitney has pulled together some of country’s finest Avant-garde musicians to play more than a dozen of Marclay’s scores dated from 1985 to 2010. Some of the works to be performed include, ChalkBoard (2010), Covers (2007-10) and Screen Play (2005). Many of the pieces take the form of a physical art object produced from videos, photographs, found images, and readymade objects which are intended to elicit a musical response from the performers.

Christian Marclay, Screen Play, 2005. Courtesy the artist. © Christian Marclay

Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is internationally known for his innovative artworks that explore the intersection of image and sound. Over the past several decades, the artist has combined performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video to create unique work that provides commentary on many aspects of contemporary culture, while continuing to push the boundaries of visual art and music. Marclay is often recognized as an early pioneer of turntablism, as he first began to use turntables and physically altered records as instruments for performances in the late 1970’s.

Festival begins this Thursday, July 1st with two pieces performed by Min Xiao-Fen and Elliot Sharp at 1pm and Ulrich Kieger at 2:30pm. The exhibition will continue through September 26, 2010.