As part of our ongoing partnership with Art Practical, today we bring you the work of writer and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. The original introduction to the piece explains, “A native of Mexico City, Gómez-Peña has created pioneering work in performance, video, radio, installation, poetry, journalism, and cultural theory that explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, ‘extreme culture,’ and new technologies.” He is also the co-author, with Robert Sifuentes, of the book Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy. No Portraits was first published in February 2013.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña. No Portraits: Not James Luna, 2012, from the No Portraits photo-performance series. Courtesy of La Pocha Nostra, San Francisco. Photo: Jen Cohen.

For more than thirty years, I’ve been obsessed with photographic documentation of my performance work in dialogue with history. As a self-defined Chicano, I need to be in control of my image. Throughout the years, I have been lucky to be able to work with amazing photographers such as the Mexican Antonio Turok, the Italian Manuel Vason, the Canarian Teresa Correa, the Spanish Javier Caballero, the Lebanese-American R.J. Muna, and the Argentine Julio Pantoja, among others. In collaboration, my performance and photographer colleagues and I have developed amazing photo-performance archives and portfolios. Many of these photos populate my ten books and myriad magazines, newspapers, websites, posters, brochures, and even a few murals and comic books. Others are virtually unknown, especially those capturing projects that were invisible to the art world.

Read the full article here.

Currently on view at Taipei Fine Art Museum, Parkett: 220 Artist Editions and Collaborations since 1984 is the 10th edition of international art journal Parkett’s traveling retrospective. Since its debut at the Museum of Modern Art in 2001, the exhibition has toured across the globe via a network of museums spaces including London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, Singapore’s Tyler Institute, and Beijing’s Ullens Center of Contemporary Art. Parkett has consistently demonstrated resilience against permanent historicization by a continual process of re-editing, thereby incorporating new works, curatorial modifications, and new local collaborations into each new show. The Taipei retrospective showcases ninety-one Parkett journals, five collaborations with Taiwanese and Japanese institutions, and two hundred and twenty works created by iconic contemporary artists from Europe, US, and Asia. This encyclopedic show not only provides a survey of contemporary art today, it also reveals the creative potential of retrospection to inspire new ways of reading art.

Parkett: 220 Artist Editions and Collaborations since 1984, 2013; installation view, Taipei Fine Art Museum.

This prestigious congregation of prominent artist names and elite institutions may be considered a blockbuster, but with a twist –the presented photographs, prints, drawings, sculptures, and video art are all relatively obscure works by well-known artists.  Anish Kapoor’s Untitled (2003), a red-stained stocking stretched out in a transparent acrylic box, appears to be a miniature sketch of Kapoor’s larger-than-life PVC sculpture Marsyas. Daniel Buren’s Unique Tablecloth with Laser-Cut Lace (2002), a series of four white tablecloths patterned with stripes, is an anomaly in the artist’s oeuvre noted for an evasion of object-making. Together the 220 art pieces offer an alternative panorama into celebrated art practices, which is particularly intriguing for the Taiwanese art audience whose knowledge of international art heavily depend upon jpegs of key artwork found online and in art magazines. The show offers a side b to the contemporary art landscape that promises a more intimate glimpse into mainstream art production today.

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Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt makes kitsch from the kitchen, using everyday materials such as cellophane, glitter, foil, and Easter-display grass to construct minutely detailed and coded ephemera that sanctify camp, trash, and a kind of queer sentimentality particular to the artist’s experience of the 1970s Hell’s Kitchen scene in New York. Ecce Homo, Pavel Zoubok Gallery’s current three-part exhibition, orbits around this artist’s counter-historical queer aesthetic. On the heels of his extensive solo show at MoMA PS1 earlier this year, the exhibition situates his work within a larger context of queer materiality in art making, presenting a selection of Lanigan-Schmidt’s intricate, devotional mixed-media compositions alongside the work of other queer artists who have preceded him. The final part of the exhibition’s trifecta is an orchestrated group show of artists who have continued working with the tropes of Lanigan-Schmidt’s technique, aesthetic, and cultural caché.

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt. The Fountain of Youth (Spritzer Thaw), 1969; Aluminum foil, plastic wrap, pipe cleaner, holographic tape, glitter, staples, mirror, colored marker; 13 x 10 x 9 in. Courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York.

The exhibition functions as a pocket of queer history, presenting an alternative and largely unassimilated history of queer art making. It situates Lanigan-Schmidt’s work within the context of the underground, culturally illicit queer community of the pre-Stonewall era. The gallery’s Cabinet space presents a range of documentation surrounding the now fabled 1969 riots (in which the artist was an active participant). Fred W. McDarrah’s photograph Celebration After Riots Outside Stonewall Inn (1969) positions “Tommy” Lanigan-Schmidt at the scene; Uzi Parnes’s Marsha P. Johnson (1979) documents the arrest of the famous transgender rights activist. When presented in this context, Lanigan-Schmidt’s gaudiness is lent gravity and perspective. In late 1960s America, queerness was not only repressed but also punishable by jail and even death. As an openly gay artist, Lanigan-Schmidt produced his work not only from the trashy materiality of his kitchen drawer but also from the social position of “cultural trash,” of refuse and violent ostracization.

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Boston-based painter Andrew Fish is working out solutions—proofs perhaps—to a complex problem we all deal with on some level, every day: what is the difference between an analog and a digital visual experience? Fish, interestingly, has chosen painting—arguably the most antiquated form of visual production—to seek answers to this query. His choice of medium confronts the proliferation of digital image making and publishing made possible by programs such as Instagram, Facebook, Vine, and Snapchat.

Andrew Fish. Mini-Golf, 2013; oil on canvas; 36 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist

Intriguingly, Fish’s paintings share a number of visual similarities with platforms like Instagram. Both often use a kind of eye-grabbing and faux-nostalgic visual language—sepia tones or washed-out imagery—that one attributes to old photographs and hazy memories. Though Fish creates paintings that share this set of visual language markers, his work has a subversive edge. Fish is drawing out a distinction that most overlook, and his thesis is that a re-evaluation of time by both the artist and his audience is what his work brings to the problem of digital versus analog production. On the importance of time, the artist says, “My paintings take a lot longer to ‘develop’ than an Instagram photo or even a film photograph…. I employ the same photographic visual language as a digital image and participate in an act of sharing what I see in the world with others, similar to what Instagram users do, but I have to look at a picture longer to determine what is important and what can be manipulated in the paint medium to engage the viewer in a distinct experience with the imagery.”

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Cheryl Pope’s Just Yell seeks to bring attention to differing experiences of Chicago’s epidemic of youth violence, and Monique Meloche Gallery provides an excellent site for the project. The gallery is located on Division Street, where the divide between Chicago’s neighborhoods is clearly illustrated. The tides of millennial capital have twice swept through Bucktown, raising rents and evacuating families until reaching a high-water mark three blocks east of Humboldt Park, the heart of Puerto Rican culture in Chicago and one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Just in sight of the sixty-foot Puerto Rican flags that form a gateway to the stretch of Division Street known as Paseo Boricua, Monique Meloche Gallery sits like a forward outpost of another world.

Cheryl Pope. Remember to Remember, 2013. Metal, glass casing, light, brass name plates. 36 x 47 x 2 1/2 in. moniquemeloche, Chicago; Photo: James Prinz

As you continue up the street, the different atmospheres are clearly marked. Ahead, in Wicker Park, hundreds of the city’s mostly white middle class pack into cafés and restaurant patios, enjoying the weather and anticipating the evening’s Blackhawks hockey game; behind, in Humboldt Park, empty storefronts and struggling social services create an atmosphere of violence that increases block by westward block. Chicago is a city where warm weather brings a unique threat to vulnerable populations; more than five hundred people were killed here last year, most young, black, and Hispanic and killed in the summer.

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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. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED.org.

What’s the best way to write a press release so that my show gets reviewed?

If you poke around on the internet, you’ll find that there’s a lot of information out there about how to write a press release. In fact, there is so much information on the subject that I recommend you start with a broad search to familiarize yourself with the fundamentals, which are too numerous (and somewhat boring) to cover in this column. Go do that now, and I’ll wait here.

Larry Bell and Sarah Crowner, Meet Marlow Moss, installation view, Kunstverein, Amsterdam; Courtesy of Kunstverein, Amsterdam; photo: Tabea Feuerstein

You’re back! You probably noticed that much of what you’ve gleaned from the web about press releases is still written as though you’re going to print one, stick it in an envelope, and mail it; bear in mind that tips such as “to ensure readability, your press release should be typed, double-spaced, on white letterhead” are a little outdated. There’s nothing wrong with an e-mailed press release, and that’s what I recommend.

Now that you’ve researched the basics and committed to the e-mail format, we can move on to the strategies that will actually get your press release read (you can follow the links back to the original sites):

“Get right to the point in the first paragraph. Because reporters are busy people, you must assume that they will only read the first sentence and then scan the rest—and even that’s a generous assumption. Get the message of your press release out quickly. Every important point should be addressed in the first few sentences. The subsequent paragraphs should be for supporting information.”

“Don’t embellish or hype the information. Remember, you are not writing the article, you are merely presenting the information and showing why it is relevant to that publication in hopes that they will write about it.”

“Your goal is to communicate your news using everyday language, so avoid overusing technical jargon. Not everyone understands your industry terminology as well as you do. Excess jargon will confuse your reader and may be enough for a journalist to pass over your release for one that is easier to understand.”

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses (250–400 words) 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, Ariel Zaccheo reviews Proximities 1: What Time Is It There? at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Proximities 1: What Time Is It There?, installation view, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Entering the gallery that houses What Time Is It There?, the first installment of the three-part exhibition Proximities, is like emerging for air after diving into a deep pool. The gallery is sandwiched between the Korean and Japanese portions of the immersive ocean of the Asian Art Museum’s permanent collection, which spans at least six thousand years. Dripping from the resonances of the bottomless expanse of complicated histories represented by the collection of art and artifacts, the exhibition offers a refreshing interstice, a moment to sit and consider contemporary perspectives amidst preceding ones.

The exhibition’s connections to water are particularly clear in Andrew Witrak’s Trouble in Paradise #2 (2013), which is constructed of thousands of cocktail umbrellas enveloping a swimming pool float. Its effect is overwhelmingly haptic and surreal; the sculpture is reminiscent of a tropical version of Méret Oppenheim’s Breakfast in Fur (1936), eliciting an instinctual desire to touch the pointed toothpick ends—which jut into space in equally distributed densities and directions, like quills—despite a tacit understanding of the impossibility and danger of the object’s physical use. The umbrellas, which alternate in sunny-hued clusters of pink, yellow, and green, are a standard garnish for tropical cocktails and standard-issue symbols for exploitative tourism and exoticism in the West, suggestive of American consumers gulping down mai tais on an indistinct, faraway island. A video screen paired with the float mimes clichéd tropical resort hotel TV channels: a golfer tees off on a perfectly coiffed green; a spa with crisp white towels offers relaxation; a tropical blue drink with a pineapple garnish sweats in the heat. Together, the work is enticing and off-putting, evoking the potential pleasures and dangers inherent in the tourism industry.

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