Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving.

I have an interview with a critic who sent me his questions in advance, and I found them to be leading and directive. How can I approach this type of conversation in a way where I can communicate what I feel is interesting about my work? For many artists, dealing with writers and art reviewers is an inevitable part of showing work. What are some tactics in general for making these conversations go well, for both interviewer and interviewee?

Julia Wachtel. Bleep, 2014; oil, flashe, acrylic ink on canvas; 60 x 73 in. Photo: David Brichford

Interviews can be tough even when the interviewer is sympathetic and savvy. Beyond the questions, so many other considerations are at play—including various hierarchies and a hunger to please your audience—that it can be difficult to think clearly enough to describe your own process. On top of that, if you feel the interviewer has an agenda that doesn’t match your own, the experience is potentially quite uncomfortable. But take heart, there are some strategies that you can use to boost your confidence and make the conversation more pleasant.

First, the basics: Research the journalist’s prior interviews and find out where yours will be published. Be aware that it will almost certainly be tailored for a specific audience (think Artforum versus a local newspaper), and even if you don’t wish to modify your answers for a particular readership, bear in mind that the conversation will be edited before publication. If you’re meeting in person, bring your laptop or iThing pre-loaded to your website—you might answer a question by discussing a piece that the interviewer hasn’t seen before, and images will aid you. Remember to take a slow, deep breath before you reply—and don’t worry how that might appear in the moment, because it’s the final publication that counts and in print no one hears you pause. Keep your answers concise and to the point.

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Here at Daily Serving, we’re excited that Sarah Lucas will represent the UK at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Gregor Muir, a member of the selection panel, was quoted in a recent article, saying, “Having consistently pushed the limits of her practice, there’s a sense that Lucas—seemingly more active than ever—is coming into her own.” We couldn’t agree more, and so today from our archives we’re sharing a review of her work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. This article was written by Adam Rompel and originally published on December 10, 2013.

Sarah Lucas. Installation view of SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble, 2013; Courtesy of Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Stephen White.

When you think 1990s YBA, what artworks come to mind? A pickled shark, a bawdy story tent, a head made of frozen blood…and a photo of Sarah Lucas looking defiant with a limp cigarette in her mouth. Or better yet, her bent, worn mattress with anthropomorphically inserted fruit and veg with metal bucket. Mostly, her pieces distill the human body down to a sexualized and/or consumed object. The key to Lucas’s work is that it’s beautifully uncomplicated in concept and execution. Nothing is superfluous. Regardless of whether you like the work or not, it’s impossible to not get it. That simplicity is what makes each work powerfully memorable as an image.

SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble at Whitechapel Gallery is a fully considered three-room installation that weaves the entire oeuvre onto itself to create a full-on, brilliantly funny, and in-your-face kind of endeavour. Photos and collages are blown up and made into Warholian wallpaper onto which other works are hung. Sculptures are combined or positioned in near-overlapping proximity or supported by stuff that might or might not be new sculpture. The interesting restraint to this new amalgamation is that individual works retain their identity courtesy of the museum wall tag. One example of this layering effect in the first gallery is the back wall, which is covered with an enlarged and repeating pattern from Soup (1989). Originally a photo collage measuring at 152.5 x 122 cm. (60 x 48 in.), it’s an image of an unidentifiable creamed soup adorned with about three dozen penis glans. Size matters in this show, and so the image is scaled up so that the glans are around the size of a human head. Framed and hung right of center over Soup is the iconic Eating a Banana (1990). Just off to the right, the sculpture Mechanical Wanker (1999) rests on a slick-looking table made of breeze (cinder) block and MDF. And this is just the back wall of the first gallery.

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In consideration of the second day of the Los Angeles Art Book Fair, today we bring you a look back at a 2012 exhibition of Paul Thek’s books. Author Magdalen Chua describes the artist’s notebooks as filled with, “illustrations, drawings, and watercolor works [that] suggest a mind filled with both doubt and idealism.” This article was originally published on May 16, 2012.

Paul Thek. Notebook #63, 1974; Courtesy the Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Jörg Lohse.

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translating the subjective experience into artistic practice were explored in the exhibitions In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, the personal, and the self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek: If you don’t like this book you don’t like me, on view at the Modern Institute through June 2, 2012. Fragments of an artist’s life, as narrated through pages of notebooks, become a part of the works on display.

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of exhibitions and publications on Paul Thek, perhaps as part of an effort to re-insert him into the history of art. Though well received in Europe during the 1970s, he died in relative obscurity in 1988 after his return to the United States. Thek’s name is often cited in relation to the Technological Reliquaries, or “meat pieces,” a series of works made in the 1960s where body parts appearing as chunks of flesh were presented in geometric vitrines, a revelry of one’s fleshly mortality within the confines of the composed exterior of Minimalism. While these sculptures were solid and dense, he also made works from ephemeral materials, creating immersive environments that lasted for the duration of the exhibition. While little documentation remains of these installations, about eighty of Thek’s notebooks were retrieved and carefully preserved after his passing.

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For contemporary Chinese artists Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, and Sun Qinglin—known as the Yangjiang Group—art is about social action and everyday life, including the practice of calligraphy, shopping, football, gambling, drinking, and eating. They believe art and life are entirely connected, resisting the commercialism of the art market and the over-intellectualization of art. Their latest project, Actions for Tomorrow, includes a live event, Tea Office, as a feature of the exhibition, with gallery staff participating in a tea ceremony each day.

“We are not conceptual artists,” Zheng told me very firmly when we spoke (yes, over many cups of fragrant tea) at the gallery. Named after their hometown of Yangjiang, the group formed in 2002 with an anti-authoritarian and inclusive approach to art. Like Joseph Beuys, they believe that anyone is an artist, aiming to challenge the elitism and privilege that attaches to calligraphy in China—and to contemporary art. I asked the artists about their unique approach to calligraphy. Zheng Guogu responded to my questions with the help of a translator, while his two collaborators concentrated on refilling our teacups.

Yangjiang Group. Actions for Tomorrow, 2015; exhibition view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy the artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Photo: Zan Wimberley.

Luise Guest: Traditional Chinese scholars liked to drink and gamble, as well as paint and write poetry. Are you following in the footsteps of the literati, or are you challenging those traditions?

Zheng Guogu: At first we wanted to try to experience that life, like the ancient artists. We found that when we were drunk, the calligraphy we made was very beautiful. We thought it had a special energy, so we adopted this kind of practice. Then we found out that when we were drunk we could forget lots of the rules of calligraphy. We discovered that the ancient scholars also had many rules, and by breaking them they could make their calligraphy more expressive. You need to follow traditions first and then break from those traditions.

LG: You have been described as iconoclastic calligraphers who throw thousands of years of Chinese tradition out the window—are you deliberately challenging China’s cultural heritage?

ZG: Yes, we challenge the old rules because each new generation has radicals who must break with tradition.

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Today, from our partner site Art Practical, we bring you an excerpt of Patricia Maloney‘s conversation with artist Linda Montano, who says, “I am most authentic when I am performing. I am really 100 percent there. I can’t say that about any other aspect of my life.” This interview was originally published on January 19, 2015.

Linda Mary Montano with Tehching Hsieh. Art/Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), 1983–84 (still); performance documentation. Courtesy the Artist.

Linda Mary Montano, born in 1942, is a seminal figure in the field of feminist performance art. She came to prominence in the 1960s and is best known for performances of long duration that require tremendous endurance on the part of the artist. Some performances have lasted as long as fourteen years; others have required her to be bound and blindfolded and to undergo hours of physical exertion. Her most significant contribution to the field of performance art, however, is the incredible empathy she conveys to her audience. Hers is a practice of affirmation, meditation, and empowerment.

Patricia Maloney: How would you define the correspondence between performance as a spiritual practice and as a feminist practice?

Linda Montano: It took a lot of therapy and a lot of prayer and a lot of spiritual counseling to understand that question. It’s really asking the inner child to heal and to have permission to dialogue with both brains. As a performance artist, I get to play in the right brain without critique. But as the feminist woman–priest Catholic performance artist, there is incredible suffering to pull that inner child out of her position and out of that jail of the past into the dignity of both brains.

PM: Do you think that is why you created some of these early performances, like Handcuff (1973), or Art/Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), in which you are tethered to other individuals? They were, in a sense, keeping you in that jail, was it not?

LM: Well, in both cases, it was with men. It’s almost like seducing the teacher, you know? I’m sharing the power with the patriarchy in both those pieces. Tom [Marioni] was the king of the conceptual art scene here in San Francisco, and Tehching Hsieh was the reigning guru of endurance. They’re about sharing the power but also could be seen as rubbing up against the power. I now see them as both. But it takes a great deal of healing in order to see it as both and not just the slave of the patriarchy, or as the object or accouterment of the male.

Read the full article here.

Declarations of dissent can manifest in many ways. Playing with Fire: Political Interventions, Dissident Acts, and Mischievous Actions, currently on view at El Museo del Barrio, surveys a range of Latin American and Caribbean artists who through their art practices have voiced their dissent from oppressive cultural forces. The curator, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, frames these artistic impulses as foundational to the history and spirit of El Museo del Barrio. Indeed the 1969 founding of the museum by Raphael Montañez Ortiz was itself an act of noncompliance with the mainstream art world, which at the time was largely unmotivated or unwilling to exhibit the work of Latino artists. El Museo is an institution, much like the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, that was formed to provide a platform for artists whose work and/or identity excluded them from opportunities in more established, heteronormative, and Eurocentric art venues.

Adonis Flores. Visionario, 2003; digital print; 36 x 24 in. Courtesy of Ben Rodriguez-Cubenas.

Estévez’s framework proves fruitful, producing a show whose works span four decades, nearly mirroring the lifetime of El Museo. Themes of social irreverence, activism, and testimony connect works from different times and origins, without diluting the cultural specificity of each artist and intention. Undeniably, one of the exhibition’s great strengths is its underlying critique of conflating diverse Latino experiences and personhood in the United States; it accomplishes this without solidifying such tropes through reiteration.

Many works deploy dark humor to tackle overt political content. Visionario, a photograph by Adonis Flores, portrays a man in a trench, dressed in a camouflage uniform and holding two toilet-paper rolls to his eyes like binoculars. As there are few other signifiers in the image beyond the central figure, the piece can be read as satire of a militarized perspective that operates throughout the globe. Given Flores’s background as an artist born and working in Cuba, the photograph makes a more precise reference to Fidel Castro’s trademark uniform and parodies his professed vision for his people. Jessica Kairé also addresses symbols of combat through a disarming levity with her sculpture CONFORT Tropical Hand Grenade (Special Edition). The work’s plush fabric in vivid yellows, pinks, and greens recalls a stuffed toy, a commentary on the war zones that define the childhood of thousands all over the world. When read through the lens of Kairé’s Guatemalan descent, the work conjures the brutal history of the country’s civil war, a conflict catalyzed by a coup d’état funded and armed by the United States government, which led to the disappearance of tens of thousands of Guatemalan people, many of them children.

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From our friends at Glasstire, today we bring you Christina Rees’ review of Loris Gréaud’s current solo exhibition at Dallas Contemporary. Rees describes the choreographed destruction of the work and characterizes the show as “a partial and contrived ruin,” noting that neither the artist nor the visitors seem invested. This article was originally published on January 19, 2015. 

Loris Gréaud. The Unplayed Notes Museum, 2015; installation view, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas.

I suppose in the event of a chemical attack or nuclear apocalypse, a crowd of Dallas Contemporary patrons would be as good company as any to be stuck with. They are certainly relaxed, orderly, and polite.

I found this out on Saturday night at the Contemporary. Halfway through the opening for the long-anticipated Loris Gréaud show, a group of actors disguised as party-goers walked into the building and began pulling works off the walls and flinging them to the ground, and kicking over plaster sculptures. Another group of actors disguised as security guards immediately began to wrangle the half-bemused, half-blithe crowd toward the exits. Lights flashed, a few sirens sounded. People kind of good-naturedly lumbered out.

On the way, a few dozen hands shot up holding cell phones set to “photo” or “video,” but not as many as I would have expected under the circumstances. No one tried to get around security to join in the destruction, just as no one tried to intervene. Though few people in attendance knew what was meant to go down, you’d think that everyone there had all seen it before, like a rerun of a classic episode of Seinfeld or something.

Read the full article here.