As part of our ongoing partnership with Beautiful/Decay, today we bring you the work of artist Faig Ahmed. Ahmed, who lives in Baku, was recently nominated for the Jameel Prize at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The article was written by Larissa Erin Greer and originally published on June 25, 2013.

Faig Ahmed. Double Stretching, 2010; woolen handmade carpet; 98 x 39 in. Courtesy Faig Ahmed.

With a serious understanding of classic carpet-making techniques, Azerbaijani sculptor Faig Ahmed is able to stretch, distort and reinvent an iconic symbol steeped in tradition and cultural significance. “The carpet is a symbol of invincible tradition of the East, it’s a visualization of an undestroyable icon,” Ahmed states, noting that the manipulation of the woven medium gives visual form to ideas he has relating to “destroying the stereotypes of tradition to create new modern boundaries.” The rug, as a medium, works well for Ahmed, helping to deploy a deeper message about the stretching, bending and restructuring of physical and political boundaries in the Middle East. His technical mastery is evident in the movements of each thread, and his generous use of color gives the work an overall vibrancy—perhaps hinting at the artist’s sense of optimism in a time of great uncertainty and turmoil.

Read the full article here.

In an era when organized religion is losing its hold on the industrialized world, it may seem strange that curators would want to reengage with spirituality when considering Western Modernism of the past one hundred years. Stranger still that a museum focused on exploring the contemporary shape of Jewish life would take an interest in exhibiting work by practicing Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and New Age spiritualists in its galleries. Nonetheless, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco has done exactly this with its current collaborative exhibition with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art.

Nam June Paik. TV Buddha, 1989; closed-circuit video installation, bronze; 23 3/4 x 27 1/2 x 98 1/2 in. (60.3 x 69.9 x 250.2 cm); Partial gift of Pamela and Richard Kramlich to the New Art Trust to benefit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate, United Kingdom; © Estate of Nam June Paik

It bears noting that this museum differs from other Jewish museums in the United States, most of which sprung up in the aftermath of the Second World War and are charged with documenting and preserving Jewish traditions for future generations. San Francisco’s is a contemporary Jewish museum, meaning that its mission is to understand Jewish traditions from the perspective of the present rather than the past. Furthermore, the Contemporary Jewish Museum is committed to understanding Judaism in its contemporary context, which helps explain why a show such as this one, which presents artists of differing faiths comparatively, would be appropriate to present here.

Historically, art and spirituality have had a cozy relationship. Nearly every major religion and any number of less popular faiths have used visual art as a means of communicating stories and tenets to congregations and converts in an era when literacy was not widespread. In Europe, religious patronage rivaled that of royalty for most of academic art history, waning somewhat in Northern Europe following the Lutheran schism that brought iconoclasts to power in the church, but with a commensurate revival in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Only in the later nineteenth century did it become commonplace for artists to claim a purely material motivation for (and reading of) their works, and only in the mid-twentieth century did the notion arise that spiritualism had no place in the avant-garde. Speaking in 2003, Donald Kuspit lamented artists’ turn away from interior life toward what he perceived as a purely commercial externality. His appeal for a return to spiritual values in the avant-garde, the shape of which he attributes to the writings and art of Wassily Kandinsky, has had a clear and significant influence on the seven curators from SFMOMA and the CJM who organized the current show.

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Empathy may not be one of the first words people associate with modern documentary photography, but Ireland-born photographer Tom Wood has it in spades. Wood, who currently resides in North Wales, lived for twenty-five years in Merseyside, a seaside county in North West England, and photographed local residents in portraits that are relatable, real, and fundamentally sympathetic toward their subjects. Though he is often compared to contemporary British photographers such as Paul Graham and Martin Parr, who helped popularize documentary-style color portraiture in the 1980s, there is a crucial difference: Wood was a member of the working class suburban community he chronicled. Rather than an outsider looking in and satirizing what he found, Wood was an insider recognizing the inherent humor, warmth, and pathos in the faces he saw at the corner store or the pub.

Tom Wood. Untitled, 1985; C-print, edition of 7 (+2 AP). Image courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.

Men and Women, a traveling exhibition currently on view at Thomas Erben Gallery, presents Wood’s local cast of characters in portraits taken from 1975 to 2012. The prints are small—most slightly larger than a sheet of computer paper—and the majority are frontal, closely cropped shots that show residents in a variety of settings: on the ferry, at the carnival, waiting for the bus under a leaden sky. Wood’s rapport with his subjects is palpable; they appear relaxed and eager to pose, often gazing directly at the camera. While the dated cherry red blazers and headbands worn by the subjects clearly capture a specific place and time, the unique intimacy between photographer and subject prevents the photographs from reading as mere period pieces.

Tom Wood. Men and Women, 2013; installation view, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery. Photo: Andreas Vesterlund

Though the show is called Men and Women, it could, on first glance, just have easily have been called Merseyside or People (which was actually the title of Wood’s 1999 book). This title, however, forces the viewer to consider the gender dynamics on display and the ways in which men and women are socialized to interact. There are shots of teenage girls whispering to each other or looking at the camera seductively and others of their male counterparts sneering at the camera, cigarettes dangling from their lips. Bored stevedores relax in a break room papered with busty Page 3 girls (that problematic British institution), and young mothers clutch babies to their chests.

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For this edition of Fan Mail, artist Gillian Willans of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada has been selected from our commendable reader submissions. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you! If you would like to be considered, please submit your website link to info@dailyserving.com with “Fan Mail” in the subject line.

Gillian Willans. Mise-en-scene: Red Room, 2012–13; acrylic and oil on canvas; 12 x 16 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Telephone Booth Gallery, Toronto

Gillian Willans’s series Mise-en-scène: The Paris Suite is on view at the Telephone Booth Gallery in Toronto, Canada, until July 21, 2013. The series resulted from Willans’s time in 2011 as one of sixteen international artists in residence at Parsons Paris, an experience, she says, that reshaped her. “It was a good thing,” she says.

“I went to Paris being a post-Impressionist junkie and was attracted to artists such as Vuillard and Bonnard. I came back to Canada transformed by artists such as Corot, Courbet, and Manet, all of whom had a huge impact on the advent of what is known as Realism in painting. I became enamored by the color and the shift of subject matter in that mid-1800s period when painting stepped out of the academy rules and into the personal realm.”

Gillian Willans. Mise-en-scene: The Library, 2012–13; acrylic and oil on board; 13 x 15 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Telephone Booth Gallery, Toronto

From Parisian flea markets Willans collected black-and-white photographs and postcards, which ultimately became the sources for these new paintings. Meditating on the influence of early photography on painting, Willans made color bear on this series more so than in her previous work. She added black to her palette as an homage to Manet and Courbet and used gray tones “because Paris is in itself at times a gray city—built with gray stone that is tinted and transformed by reflected light and dashes of color like the parks and store signs.”

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As a part of our ongoing partnership with Art Practical, today we bring you Helena Keeffe‘s essay on labor and transparency. If you’ve ever been an intern, volunteered, or otherwise worked for free, looked for ways to support yourself as an artist, or wondered where you might get the tools necessary to weigh the risks and benefits of low-paying opportunities, you should take the time to read this article and the accompanying PDF that Keeffe provides. “Perhaps one way to address the complexity of the issue of valuing artists’ labor,” notes Keeffe, “is for artists to more consciously set our standards as individuals.” The article was originally published on June 13, 2013.

Helena Keeffe. Standard Deviation, 2013; broadside. Courtesy of the Artist.

In statistical and financial analyses, standard deviation measures the dispersion of a set of data from its mean. The more spread apart the data, the higher the deviation. Investors use this method as a gauge for expected volatility: high standard deviation equals more volatility. In the art world, the volatile and precarious economic conditions that working artists face provide evidence of a high standard deviation in the value of artistic labor. This is particularly evident in the discrepancies in how value is assigned to artistic labor by institutions of varying scales and financial means.

What kinds of strategies might artists employ to create a sense of agency when it comes to artistic production? What are the key questions artists should ask themselves in seeking to define standards for valuing their labor? Standard Deviation—a multiphase project that includes a series of conversations, a printed broadside for distribution, and an online forum—addresses these questions so that artists might identify the kinds of opportunities that serve their artistic goals and help them sustain viable practices over time. The printed broadside functions as a tool to generate public awareness and as an aid to personal conviction. It uses the imagery of a hand as a mnemonic device for five key questions artists can ask themselves when presented with exhibition opportunities. It also includes a Request for Funders form, a flow chart to help answer the question, “Should I work for free?” and symbolic currency whose exchange is intended to acknowledge volunteer labor.

Read the full article here.

#institutions #work #language #InternationalArtEnglish

Writing in Triple Canopy last year, Alix Rule and David Levine coined the term “International Art English” (hereby referred to as IAE) to describe a linguistic mode that is part polyglot, part jargon—peppered with French, German, and Latin but based on the structure of English. The authors took this hybrid language to task for lending a veneer of substance to numerous examples of art world vapidity, which they culled from press releases circulated via the e-flux listserv. The resulting dialogue has identified a troubling but well-known tendency in the art world: making the pretense of saying something while actually saying nothing.

Sketch Engine Module #1: Concordance (Search Term: Language), from Rule & Levine's "International Art English"

Numerous writers more prominent than I have addressed IAE in recent months, but none of their responses has hit the nail square on the head. What exactly is so dangerous, so insidious, and so telling about the over-abundance of inscrutable language in the press blasts that flood our inboxes daily? Why be concerned with this ephemeral space of language when more influential and elitist modes of expression yet exist within the arts? Before we can even address these questions, we ought to establish a few facts about e-flux. The subscription-based email service is open to nonprofit and state-run institutions but not to commercial galleries. Income from the subscription-based listserv underwrites e-flux journal, a publication edited by e-flux’s founders that promotes sharp and thoughtful debate around global and postcolonial perspectives in the arts. E-flux’s founders, and many of the journal’s contributors, are also prominent exhibiting artists on the international museum and biennial circuits.

Upon its publication, International Art English generated some buzz and some chuckles but little backlash. Months later, in February 2013, Triple Canopy editor Peter Russo and e-flux cofounder Anton Vidokle met on a College Art Association (CAA) panel about art magazines and the scheiβe promptly hit the fan. Vidokle asserted that the article’s focus on e-flux press releases was uncharitable, given that so many are generated by public and nonprofit art institutions outside the English-speaking world and produced by entry-level staff or volunteers. Russo defended the piece as being well researched and methodologically sound, arguing that press releases are as representative of institutional priorities as any other texts produced there.

At CAA, I was troubled by the suggestion that any museum, whether a large corporate venue in a major city or a small state-affiliated venue in a developing country, could be above institutional critique. While many of e-flux’s clients are small compared to the behemoths of MoMA or the Guggenheim, they are nonetheless official spaces of culture, supported largely by public funds. These institutions are situated globally, with the majority in Europe, where there are fewer alternative spaces and nonprofits that exist without state support than in the United States. This latter category, more common in the United States and increasingly in the developing world, is generally unable to afford e-flux’s services. As such, the listserv’s clients do represent a certain conflation of state, cultural, and market interests that warrants examination. While I thoroughly agree that neocolonial power structures are rampant within global contemporary art, I disagree with Vidokle’s assertion at CAA that Rule and Levine’s conclusions constitute a colonial imposition of language standards on an otherwise democratic mode of expression. This argument, which has since been reiterated in texts on IAE by Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl in e-flux journal, leaps over real concerns raised by Rule and Levine regarding the public accessibility of e-flux’s client institutions and quickly assumes a perch of moral superiority from which the blame for art world elitism can be comfortably shifted elsewhere.

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum to which 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 follow this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Colin L. Fernandes, M.D, reviews James Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany Skyspace at Rice University. 

James Turrell. Twilight Epiphany Skyspace, 2012. Photo: Colin L. Fernandes

I followed the stone path through the manicured lawns of Rice University, where hungry blue jays were eagerly foraging for insects. It was nearing 8 p.m., and the sun would soon set. That must be it, I thought, catching sight of a spaceship-like object parked rather incongruously in front of a brick-clad campus building.

If this leviathan was in fact a spacecraft, the grass overgrowing its sloping exterior walls suggested that it had been at this location a while now. Four rows of steps flanked opposite walls, terminating in a viewing platform; below, doorways opened into what appeared to be a central ceremonial chamber. Eight stilt-like columns extended upward from the periphery of the chamber, supporting a canopy of sorts, its center punctured by a square opening.

The other visitors and I were admitted, one by one, into the lower chamber. There we sat, hushed, on the circumferential stone seat that lined the room, looking through the square-shaped oculus at the sky above. Fluffy clouds hovered, suspended in space; the only indication of the passage of time was the occasional arcs transcribed by birds flying overhead. Then, at precisely 8:14 p.m., the Light Sequence began.

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