Today is Memorial Day in the United States, a day to remember the men and women who died while serving in our armed forces. In honor of this day, we bring you author Michelle Schultz’s interview with artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, who contends, “There is an extremely thick wall that separates those who know what war is and those who don’t.” This interview was originally published on January 2, 2012.

Krzysztof Wodiczko. War Veteran Vehicle, Liverpool, 2009. Photo: Robert Ochshorn.

Krzysztof Wodiczko’s work is powerful, politically charged, and bears great momentum. Best known for transforming architectural structures and monuments through loaded public projections, Wodiczko’s projects fight for the change he wants seen in the world: a global society free from the destruction of war. When the artist and professor was recently in London for the occasion of his exhibition The Abolition of War at WORK gallery and launch of Krzysztof Wodiczko, a comprehensive monograph chronicling his decades of work, we sat down to discuss his ongoing projects and the loaded topic of war.

Michelle Schultz: With your project War Veteran Vehicle—a transformed military vehicle that fires fragments of statements by soldiers and their families on the façades of public buildings—the highly personal and revealing testimonies make the subject quite vulnerable, and I imagine there are many barriers that need to be overcome to achieve this. Could you begin by telling me a little about the process that is involved and how you approach those that you worked with in the project?

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Well, those projects would not happen if I did not establish some trust with the social workers who are trusted by veterans, homeless, or immigrants—places where people try to connect and try to help each other. I first present an idea, then they have to test me, and I have to pass their test—they have to protect people with whom they work from people like myself, and from people like you. Then, the project and myself, we have to be tested by those who are potential co-artists. This is not easy; very often you start with rejection or destruction, psychologically speaking, of my presence and of the work. It is something coming from outside and invading them and maybe manipulating them. They must first properly destroy any doubt, and if I survive this, and the project survives this, then I show up again, and I am ready to be of some kind of service. In this process, the confidence amongst some of these people develops and they might make use of this project for their own lives, and for lives of others who cannot join the project because it’s too early for them, it’s too dangerous, too risky…

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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, Calder Yates reviews Fallen Fruit’s video Fruit Machine at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, Austin Young). Fruit Machine, 2009; Still from video, edition of 3 + 3AP, dimensions variable.

Visual depictions of gustatory sensations are currently on view at Catharine Clark Gallery. Deborah Oropallo’s paintings, which portray digitally altered images of pigs, chickens, and Holstein cows, fill the two main galleries, while a quirkily risqué video by the decade-old Los Angeles arts collective Fallen Fruit is on view in the media room.

The fourteen-minute video, Fruit Machine (2009), consists of brief portraits of individual teenagers eating fruit in front of a bright white background while facing the camera. The 12-to-17-year-olds hold their assigned fruit next to their heads, make eye contact with someone behind the camera, and then proceed to eat. The fruits are pedestrian: apples, bananas, cherries, and grapes (no durians here). After each teenager takes a few bites, the video cuts to a three-second montage of all of the kids eating fruit, and then settles on a new teenager. It’s as if the viewer was watching a single reel of a slot machine, but instead of stars or bells, it’s the images of kids eating fruit that spin, arbitrarily stop, and then begin spinning again.

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As an idea and word, “curator” continues to suffer a death from overdose. Still, I am tempted to place this burdensome phrase upon Conny Purtill and his chosen allies—that is, if we can agree that curating involves working with someone else’s objects to elucidate a concept. The exhibition The Ground, recently on view at Adams and Ollman Gallery in Portland, Oregon, began with Purtill gifting canvases toned with alternating layers of gesso and ink to five artists: Felix Culpa, Jay Heikes, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Barry McGee, and Todd Norsten; he asked them to work on these prepared canvases as they would any other “ground.” Each of the five artists approached this process in a unique way, and Purtill then laid the final works out along the perimeter walls of the gallery, surrounding an X-shaped partition installed in the middle of the space. Upon the central partition, Purtill installed works he made himself, including a gestural drawing, a set of puppet legs, a collage, and four Handheld Grounds—works made on both sides of planks of wood that are created for both visual and tactile experiences. All of this made for an enigmatic and energizing show. To emulate the generative process of this exhibition, I asked Conny a question and then had Jay Heikes, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Todd Norsten comment on his reply.

Conny Purtill. The Ground, 2014; installation view, Adams and Ollman Gallery, Portland, OR. Courtesy of the Artists and Adams and Ollman.

Mack McFarland: Conny, I am wondering about language and how it operates in your process and work. The press release has some phrases in quotes such as, “…until the ground is exhausted, at which time it is ‘neutralized’ with pencil marks…” And later, “available spaces,” and even the title of the show, “ground.”

Conny Purtill: A phrase like “the ground” generates a specific force that pulls me toward things and ideas and people. It is a force that I’ve come to accept as natural and profound (and I would say it has no less an impact on me than a force like gravity). Words naturally push and pull against a thing or a person or an idea—these forces are attractive to me probably because they take such little energy to generate, and once they are generated, give so much energy back. That might be how language operates in the process and work.

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Though Susan Cantrick’s paintings are composed mostly of abstracted planes of color, they defy any notion of flatness. The more one looks at Cantrick’s rich fields of color and intricate sections of textured patterning, the more her uniquely layered perspective comes into view. Cantrick regularly employs many of the traditional elements of painting: scale, shape, color, tone, line, perspective, and texture. However, she mixes these traditional elements with other materials—paper, pencil, and ink-jet printing—to make subtle yet markedly nontraditional collage and assemblage-like compositions.

Susan Cantrick. Sbc 175, 2014; mixed media (acrylic, pencil, and pastel) on paper; 26 x 30 in. Image courtesy of the Artist.

In a recent series of paintings, sbc (2014), Cantrick meshes acrylic paint, pencil, ink-jet prints, paper, canvas, and pastel in varying combinations. What’s striking about her use of such varied materials is the remarkable aesthetic coherence of the works in the sbc series. One gets the sense that Cantrick is challenging herself to make aesthetically similar works with many sets of materials while also challenging her viewer to attempt to see and identify the varying materials as distinct components. About the difficulties involved in making abstract paintings, Cantrick says, “My challenge is to create compelling analogs not of white noise itself, but of the moment at which it begins to filter into consciousness.” Aptly, she describes her compositions as representative of the very instant when creativity solidifies first into component parts, and second into a coherent whole. In turn, this is one of the many ways that her audience might read the work, as a solidified coherence of potentially confounding materials.

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As someone born two decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I received visual access to the civil-rights era predominantly through photographic documentation. Black-and-white photos in history books, documentary films, and microfilm of front-page newspaper stories shaped my understanding of the period, suggesting a more or less linear sequence of events.

David Hammons. The Door, 1969; wood, acrylic sheet, and pigment construction, 79 x 48 x 15 in. Courtesy of Collection of Friends, the Foundation of the California African American Museum, Los Angeles.

Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, now at the Brooklyn Museum, expands and complicates any such sense of linear history or progress. Featuring painting, photography, sculpture, and assemblage from the period, the exhibition provides an inclusive yet focused look at how artists addressed the racial injustice and societal upheaval of the decade. Some works are directly political, like David Hammons’ The Door, a door to an admissions office bearing the black ink imprint of a body pressed up against the glass—a literalization of the barriers that African Americans faced in entering higher-education institutions. But there are also Minimalist, Pop Art, and Abstract Expressionist works present, delivering a more multifaceted view of how aesthetic strategy can speak to politics and communicate political emotion. Sam Gilliam’s Red April, a large, abstract painting swelling with aggressive pattern and fierce red paint splatter, was created in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The piece bubbles with emotion and violence, its aesthetic ambiguity a perfect match for an event so incomprehensible and disorienting.

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From our friends at Bad at Sports, today we bring you another assessment of the Whitney Biennial, which closes this coming Sunday. Author Jessica Cochran examines the archival nature of the current exhibition and notes, “…as the art world grows ever bigger in size and speed, one can only hope that the Whitney Biennial continues to make room for the discursive, textual, and ‘tossed-aside particulars.'”

Joseph Grigely. The Gregory Battcock Archive, 2009-2014; installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art.
Courtesy of Air de Paris, Paris. Photo: Andrés Ramírez.

This year’s Whitney Biennial curators Michelle Grabner, Anthony Elms, and Stuart Comer cast the net so far beyond Chelsea that New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz lamented “curators are so determined to stay pure, to avoid acknowledging the machinations of commerce, that the show is completely disconnected from the entire world.” Elsewhere, however, in the pages of the more academically inclined Artforum, Emily Apter took the biennial’s discursive turn away from New York–centric art objects as an opportunity to consider the “liminal space” of a museum biennial “replete with printed matter, writing, texts of all sorts—in short, with words.” “The textual object,” she writes, “demands to be seen as a live, or ‘living,’ work, an interface of bio and res.”

It’s true, the archival impulse is what set the tone and struck a chord this year, particularly in the work of Chicago-based Joseph Grigely and Public Collectors (founded in 2007 by Marc Fischer), both curated into the biennial by Anthony Elms. Each taking as their subjects the lives of a deceased creative individual and his personal belongings, their projects build meaningfully on the Whitney Biennial’s recent history of both deceased artists and artist-curated “sub-exhibitions,” notably from the 2012 edition the inclusion of George Kuchar (died, 2011); Robert Gober’s presentation of work by Forrest Bess; Nick Mauss’ curation of queer-oriented work culled from the museum collection; and also discursive contributions, such as Andrea Fraser’s essay No Place Like Home.

Read the full article here.

From our friends at Art Practical, today we bring you a publication that is more archive than article: Value/Labor/Arts: The Manifestos was one part of the spectacular issue “Valuing Labor in the Arts” that was guest-edited by Shannon Jackson, Director of the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley. Compiled by Jackson and artist Helena Keeffe, Value/Labor/Arts: The Manifestos presents seven “recent and… not-so-very-old manifestos of artists who found themselves asking how they wanted to be valued and wondering whether the available value systems were up to the task. Some worried about authorship and ownership, some about invisibility, some about whether an artists’ union could combat a highly individuating art market that kept artists from working with each other.” From the Art Workers’ Coalition of 1969 to today’s Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), this collection of declarations provides ample food for thought.

W.A.G.E., Artist Payment Graphic, excerpt from W.A.G.E. graphic poster of artist survey results, 2011.

W.A.G.E. (WORKING ARTISTS AND THE GREATER ECONOMY) WORKS TO DRAW ATTENTION TO ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES THAT EXIST IN THE ARTS, AND TO RESOLVE THEM.