Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving.

Should there be a limit on the number of times you apply for the same opportunity before you come to the realization that they just aren’t buying what you’re selling? The application process for many residencies, fellowships, and publishing opportunities is annual, and it’s tough not to continually try your luck. While obviously submitting the same materials every year would be a fool’s errand, does there come a time when (even with diversified submissions) it’s reasonable to assume they aren’t interested in your practice and you need to move on? Is there a risk of being viewed as oblivious to when you’re being told “no”? Or is it more valuable to demonstrate a little fortitude?

Jim Lambie. Shaved Ice, 2012; wooden ladders, mirrors, household fluorescent paint; dimensions variable.

There’s no doubt that one of the easiest ways to get your work out into the world is by applying for exhibitions and residencies/fellowships. (See my prior advice on this subject here.) Ridiculous application fees notwithstanding, the process is fairly low-risk: You mail the envelope or hit “submit” on a web page, dust off your palms, and head to the bar for a celebratory drink with the other hopefuls. Yet despite the overall simplicity, it’s just not worth it—emotionally or economically—to approach this process haphazardly. It helps to have a strategy, so let’s discuss the options.

To start, most competitions are juried by a different person (or persons) every year, so it’s not exactly “the same opportunity.” Some years might present better odds because the juror is someone who is specifically interested in practices like yours; other years, you may want to skip the application after discovering that the jury is primarily sympathetic to new-media work, when you make ceramic sculptures. So the first strategy is: consider your audience and apply only when it would be an advantage to present your work.

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Vanessa Thill reviews Other Primary Structures at The Jewish Museum in New York City.

Nubuo Sekine. Phase of Nothingness—Water, 1969/2005; steel, lacquer, water; 47 ¼ x 47 ¼ in. (diameter) and 11 7/8 x 86 5/8 x 63 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Blum & Poe Gallery, New York.

In 1966, the exhibition Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors filled the Jewish Museum with large-scale Minimalist sculptures of steel and plastic and helped define a generation of artists and a new wave of critique. The original show is now visible as a miniature model in the current exhibition, Other Primary Structures. Divided into two parts, Others 1 examines work from 1960–1967, while Others 2 focuses on work between 1967–1970. Curator Jens Hoffman includes artists from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who offer more nuanced approaches to the monolithic style of famous Minimalists like Donald Judd or Robert Morris.

In Others 2, non-industrial materials in a monochrome palette contrast with the bright, pop colors and perfect, smooth forms of the 1966 show. Artists Susumu Koshimizu and Benni Efrat break down the solid platonic cube into familiar textures and unstable structures in their respective works, both created in 1969: Paper and Matter on the Move. Koshimizu’s thin paper cube containing a centrally placed granite rock is echoed in silhouette by Efrat’s work, with its sloping sides of foam inset with a slab of steel. A simple gesture by South Korean Lee Ufan, Relatum (1969) consists of two blank, unstretched canvases placed on the ground next to a third canvas hung on the wall. The space is boldly yet subtly activated by their scale and their position: One can feel the room’s axes, the blank quietude, and the residue of movement. In Jiro Takamatsu’s Slack of Net (1968–1969), loose cotton ropes knotted into a grid form a fishing net, countering the perfect grid structure of modernist painting that continues in Minimalist aesthetics. Slight ripples in the water are created on the surface of two large, black lacquered steel rectangular and cylindrical forms with each approaching movement in Phase of Nothingness—Water (1969), a striking work by Nobuo Sekine.

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From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you author Danica Willard Sachs‘ review of Geof Oppenheimer‘s Monsters at Ratio 3 in San Francisco. This article was originally published on June 18, 2014.  

Geof Oppenheimer. The Embarrassing Statue, 2014; electroplated steel, Husqvarna 150BT, marble, Brooks Brothers pants, plaster bandages, and MDF; 101 x 33 x 33 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio 3, San Francisco.

Geof Oppenheimer’s current solo exhibition at Ratio 3, Monsters, continues his investigation of the physical markers of violence. In previous exhibitions, such as Inside Us All There Is a Part That Would Like to Burn Down Our Own House  from 2011, Oppenheimer’s focus has been on the convergence of violence with politics and nationalism. In Monsters, the artist takes an oblique approach, presenting bodies that are variously mutilated and degraded in order to question, in his words, “how the body is affected by the political systems we live under.”

With Monsters, Oppenheimer’s sculptures employ a litany of art-historical allusions. In the back corner of the main gallery stands The Embarrassing Statue (2014), a Duchampian amalgam of high and low objects combined into an abstract figure. Comprising a brass-plated armature rising from a marble slab resting on a stout pedestal, the piece also echoes Constantin Brancusi’s sleek brass forms and meticulous sculptural supports. With a hulking leaf blower strapped to its back—its hose protruding phallically forward—and a pair of Brooks Brothers slacks pooling around its ankles, the figure is a disjointed combination of gendered signifiers of artistic labor, as well as white- and blue-collar labor (expensive slacks versus gardening tools), literally caught with its pants down. The punch line here about there being something inherently humiliating about the performance of any sort of labor is less compelling than Oppenheimer’s experimentation with sculptural tropes to align a concern with artistic labor with manual labor.

Read the full article here.

When describing his paintings, Gabriel Liston often uses words commonly associated with cinematic film creation: shot and frame, story and sketch, backstory and narrative. Many of his works—small paintings rendered in black-and-white or color—depict scenes from real events taken from the artist’s life.

Gabriel Liston. Their Efforts Are In Vain, 2011; oil on linen; 14 x 16 in. Image courtesy of Plus Gallery.

However, once painted, these moments from Liston’s life—due in part to their modest scale and a pervasive illusory quality—become surreal vignettes, yet remain remarkably knowable or nearly remembered. Each painting resounds with an intense yet unimposing painterly depth, both psychological and technical.

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Soldier, a series of large-scale color portraits by the photographer Suzanne Opton now on view at Sikemma Jenkins, adheres to a simple framework. It features close-ups of the faces of young soldiers who recently served in Iraq or Afghanistan, all of whom assume the same position before the camera: lying prone, one cheek resting on the ground, face turned toward the camera. While this pose certainly carries the morbid suggestion of a soldier who has been struck down, it also conveys the familiar intimacy of staring at the face of someone very close, as though you were in a shared bed.

Suzanne Opton. Soldier: Doherty – 302 days in Afghanistan, 2004; archival pigment print; 41 x 52 in. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins.

The studio backdrop, which tightly frames the soldiers’ faces, strips away any contextual clues that might encourage a viewer to “place” the subjects. This ambiguity is at odds with much war photography, which tends to capture soldiers at a medium distance, situating them as mere players within a complex but defined landscape of conflict. Such conventions satisfy journalistic pretenses of objectivity as well as, perhaps, nationalistic desires to portray the army as strong, uniform, and cohesive. Opton’s alternative focus on the unique features of soldiers’ faces brings these conventions into high relief and calls them into question. Read More »

“There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”—H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)

In 1992, Rirkrit Tiravanija converted the spaces of 303 Gallery in New York into a kitchen where he served rice and Thai curry to a crowd that became unwitting participants in a hybrid installation titled Untitled (Free). Seven years later, Tiravanija further blurred the experience between art and life in Untitled (Tomorrow Can Shut Up and Go Away) (1999) by re-creating the interior dimensions and spaces of his three-room East Village apartment, then extending the invitation to the public to spend time in it the way they would in a friend’s home.

The transactional quality in Tiravanija’s hybrid installations is unmistakable, even for those who are sceptical of art that takes participation as its point of departure as well as its endpoint.[1] In fact, it’s better termed as relational aesthetics, a concept coined by Nicolas Bourriaud as a practice that seeks to establish “live” encounters in a carefully constructed environment where the experience of the viewer becomes the art in question, despite that smacking a little too optimistically of art’s relatively recent paranoia regarding the audience’s role and function in the gallery space.

Rirkrit Tiravanija. Doubt Does Not Travel in a Straight Line, 2013; etching, screen print, metal foil, horse hair, STPI handmade abaca paper; 99.5 x 99.5 cm. Edition of 6. Image courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

At the very least, Tiravanija’s staged tableaux of exaggerating, then capturing unscripted human responses throws the spotlight on the fine demarcation lines that stand between viewer, materiality, and artist by shifting the onus of art production to spectator-artist interactivity, even if the purpose of what the spectator is supposed to glean from his or her participation is often unclear. Considering Tiravanija’s constant desire to redefine these boundaries, it is surprising to find the apparent absence of the patois of socially engaged art and interpersonal activity in his latest show Time Travelers Chronicle (Doubt): 2014 – 802,701 A.D. at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, a conceptually driven exploration of time and space that’s loosely inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine.

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Perhaps the most striking aspect of Isa Genzken: Retrospective—an expansive four-decade survey of the German artist’s work at MCA Chicago featuring sculpture, film, installation, painting, and photography—is the fact that it was all made by the same person. Over the course of her career, Genzken has successfully assimilated a wide array of styles without losing sight of a handful of core concerns: architectural structure, the decay woven into the fabric of empires, the melancholy in the absurd and the absurd in the melancholy, and the creative power of destruction. Throughout the exhibition, the heart of a Dadaist is revealed as the steady bassline underneath the artist’s improvisational approach to form, both of which have grown more bombastic over the years.

Isa Genzken: Retrospective; installation view, MCA Chicago. April 12-August 3, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Chicago is the second stop for this show (it was in New York over the winter), which was organized in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art and the Dallas Museum of Art. Maybe audiences were slightly befuddled the first time around? The museum has a little fun with the idea that the Berlin-based artist may not have “man-on-the-street” name recognition in America. In a short video near the entrance to the show, an interviewer asks a string of puzzled faces, “Do you know who Isa Genzken is?” Seems a bit graceless in the context of a multi-decade career retrospective, particularly given that the MCA press release declares—in the first sentence—“Isa Genzken is one of the most important and influential sculptors of our time.” Of course, the last time a major Chicago-based institution featured Genzken’s work—in 1992—the gallery had the word “renaissance,” not “contemporary,” in its title.

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