For today’s installment of our Best of 2015 series, Art Practical editor Jen Stager writes, “Stills from Johanna Hedva’s Medea offer up intimate views so at odds from sitting with other audience members in an outer ring of the Theater of Dionysos in Athens. I am always drawn to adaptations of Greek plays for what they choose to change. Medea is often described as a proto-feminist. Hevda collaborated with performer Nickels Sunshine to rework Medea’s resistance to patriarchy by subverting tyrannical gender binaries.” This article was originally published on October 5, 2015.

Johanna Hedva. She Work, 2015 (performance still of Nickels Sunshine); live performance; 1:5. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Emily Lacy.

Johanna Hedva is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer whose recent piece She Work was performed at d e e p s l e e e p, a private apartment in Los Angeles, from July 11­–26, 2015. She Work is a queer adaptation of Euripides’ play Medea, in which Jason abandons Medea and their children, marrying a Greek princess to advance his political position. Medea decides to cause Jason the most amount of pain by killing his new wife and taking the lives of her own two children. Hedva’s retelling—littered with Tumblr memes, hashtags, and quotes from Girl, Interrupted—considers exile, courage, motherhood, and tragedy in the contemporary neoliberal landscape.

Vivian Sming: Your latest performance is the fourth and final installment in The Greek Cycle series. Could you talk about the three other plays that led up to She Work? At what point did it become clear to you that Medea was to be the included as the final piece of the cycle?

Johanna Hedva: The Greek Cycle was born in 2011 in the wake of a miscarriage I had at age 27, which instigated an involuntary hospitalization, my first year of real madness, a divorce, and therefore Greek tragedies seemed the closest to home. Medea was the first play I wanted to do, to deal with all that shit, but I was so stunned, without power or comprehension of my situation, that I ended up doing Hecuba instead because I needed a bath of silence. Hecuba is the story of an old queen whose fifty children are all killed in the Trojan War. In Euripides’ play, she’s made inhuman by her grief, begging the men around her for an explanation or a little mercy, but nothing comes. At the end, a seer tells her she’ll end her life as a dog. I fully related to that, so I adapted the play into Motherload (2012), a 30-hour, five-day dream play that took place in the hallway of a school. It was somnambulistic, mostly silent, a bunch of sleepwalkers reciting lines from a script that was over 160 pages. Hecuba’s incomprehensible grief—so laboring but utterly non-redemptive—was a better fit at the time.

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Today’s selection for our Best of 2015 series comes from editor Deanna Lee, who says, “Amelia Rina views a documentary film and interacts with an online artist project that address the dehumanizing effects of drone warfare on its operators and its chilling similarity to video games. This resemblance has been discussed by others, but Rina’s account of her experience with the project provided a glimpse into a medium that may be less familiar to some and brought the topic much closer to home.” This review was originally published on April 9, 2015.

Jonathan Zawada. Street View/Road to Mecha, 2013; screen shot, Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Amelia Rina.

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today,
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

—Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage (1861)[1]

Despite the seemingly endless portrayal in the media of increased violence around the world, statistical analysis suggests that, as a species, humans have become less violent.[2] I wonder, however, if, instead of moving toward more peaceful tendencies, we have just gotten better at killing. The advancements in military weaponry in the past century cannot be overstated; several of the world’s superpowers, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, are leaving behind conventional ground forces in favor of robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones.[3] Since the 2001 Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the United States, the US government has used drones to find and kill militants linked to the terrorist group, primarily in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, though the success of these missions remains inconclusive.

The US government asserts that drones allow for unprecedented sophistication and accuracy: “It’s this surgical precision, the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an Al-Qaeda terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it.”[4] Drone, the recent documentary directed by Tonje Hessen Schei, presents a powerful contradiction to the US government’s support of drone warfare. Through interviews with former military and government officials, Pakistani citizens, as well as human-rights activists, journalists, and writers, the film illuminates the devastation occurring abroad.

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Today we kick off our annual Best Of series with a selection from senior editor Vivian Sming: “Bean Gilsdorf hits the nail on the head once again in her Help Desk article on ‘selling out.’ As an artist, there will always be certain opportunities that come knocking on your door that cause you to raise an eyebrow. In part, we may carry some sort of guilt for not saying ‘yes’ immediately to anything that comes our way, especially when it’s being offered with money. Bean sits us down and asks us to put blinders on to filter out the distracting hypothetical possibilities and, instead, reflect on what makes us artists in the first place.” This article was originally published on July 20, 2015.

Tony Conrad. Two Degrees of Separation, 2014; installation view, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Buchholz. Photo: Stephan Wyckoff.

I am a painter who rarely makes any money directly from my work. Recently a design firm approached me about a project that involves artists painting on small refrigerators from which energy drinks will be sold. There will be a gallery exhibition of these fridges before they are distributed to various retail outlets in major cities around the country. The pay is pretty good, though not what I would ideally get for a painting of that size, and the designer assured me that there would be a lot of exposure for my work as each artist’s name and website will be on their fridge. I don’t buy this particular energy drink so I’m a little uncomfortable with the implication that I endorse the product, but I would really like to get some money for my painting and I like the idea of national exposure for my work. I’m also afraid that I will be “selling out” and this will cause me to be judged negatively by my peers. Will I be committing an ethical transgression if I participate in this promotion? Will I be judged harshly? Is there some thing I am missing that makes this project qualitatively different from the old Absolut Vodka ads that featured fine artists?

Let me start by saying that notions of selling out or being judged harshly should have no bearing on your decision. Instead, let’s ask a different question, one that’s lurking under the surface of the ones you’ve written: What kind of artist do you want to be? Because the answer to this question is also the answer to every other opportunity that will ever come your way, whether it’s pitched to you by an ad man hawking sports drinks or the Guggenheim Bilbao.

And you can answer the question—What kind of artist do you want to be?—by asking yourself some other questions: What’s most important to you? What do you think art is for? Who are your art heroes? Do you want to paint because it frees your soul and keeps you sane? Do you want to make work in service of other agendas? Imagine your paintings on a fridge or a T-shirt or a cellphone cover—how would that make you feel?

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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, Henry Rittenberg reviews Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, co-presented by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in San Francisco.

Janet Cardiff. The Forty Part Motet, 2001; installation view, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, gallery 308, San Francisco, 2015. Courtesy of Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo: JKA Photography.

Spem in alium nunquam habui 
Praeter in te, Dues Israel

I have never put my hope in any other
But in You, O God of Israel.

On paper, the first two lines of Thomas Tallis’s motet, composed in 1573, pack no special punch. Yet the effect of the words is rather different when the musical composition is played through forty speakers in Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet (2001), now at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The speakers are set in the form of an oval with two benches at the center, where Tallis’s motet, as recorded by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, plays on a fourteen-minute loop.

Most listeners followed one of two paths: starting in the center and spiraling out, or beginning next to one speaker and slowly spiraling their way in. The audience is allowed the opportunity to hear forty voices in unison, then they can walk a bit closer and listen to just twenty, then ten, then just five, until finally they usually end up in front of one speaker. I, too, often found myself chasing one particular voice, as if beckoned by a siren’s song. Yet seldom did I find the voice before the part was over.

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Today, from our friends at Pelican Bomb, we bring you an interview with artist Tammy Mercure. In this short interview, author Taylor Murrow talks with Mercure about her pop-up shop project, where the prices reflect the local gender wage gap. In the New Orleans iteration of this project, women paid 66% of retail price, while men paid 100%. This article was originally published on November 25, 2015.

Taylor Murrow: How did this project get started? I know that Elana Schlenker, your partner in 66<100, opened a pop-up shop in Pittsburgh (76<100) with a similar message. Why did you two choose to bring this project to New Orleans?

Tammy Mercure: Elana came up with a great idea, and when she started to tell me about it, we began having good discussions right away. It was a friendly invitation to talk about experiences with money and jobs and clients—things I don’t generally discuss. It was great to have a supportive person to talk to. Right away I wanted to bring the idea to New Orleans. There are so many amazing artists and makers here. And the job market is challenging. Most of my friends and I work several part-time jobs and juggle so many things.

Read the full article here.

Obsessively attuned to the use of space, Tony Hope stages deceptively spare sculptural environments within the gallery of ASHES/ASHES in his first Los Angeles solo exhibition, TH+. The two installations, which are suggestive of one another in their polarity, speak to the larger context of the show as it pertains to the value of manufactured identity. Hope displays a deep understanding of the transience found within subcultural materials that do not retain any value outside of what is given to them by an audience. This element is what makes TH+ so intriguing, along with a considerable derailment of reality being a deliverable in both installations.

Tony Hope. Untitled (Hugh), 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and ASHES/ASHES.

Installed within the gallery’s bathroom, Untitled (Dawn) (2015) exists as a completely formalized staging of a rustic bathroom filled with the aesthetic of family values: duck replicas, wicker wreaths, and the words “family” and “friends” hung around a collaged photo wall. The installation falls in steep contrast to the spatially barren exhibition within the gallery’s main space. Whereas Untitled (Dawn) infers a claustrophobic reminder of unrealistic, unbridled acceptance based on family collectivity, Untitled (Living Room) reveals the opposition: a stark wasteland of solo identities appropriated and later discarded. The two create a dichotomy, allowing for an assessment of one against the other, while finally arriving at the same far ends of fanaticism.

In the main gallery, the viewer is introduced to a series of sculptural works relating to Hope’s past cultural allegiances. Only open during evening hours, the installation is experienced in the dark, with the sole sources of illumination emanating from two works: Untitled (Living Room) (2015), an ambient green glow that peers through the gallery’s vertical blinds from outside the gallery, and Untitled (Journeys) (2015), a single monitor, playing music videos on loop, that faces a wall and produces an inconsistent haze. These two works provide an immediate environmental context for a viewer to access time as a static placeholder in a seemingly abandoned space.

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The stylistic shift in Frank Stella’s work has been met with fierce criticism, to say the least. Much has been written recently about his current retrospective at the Whitney, trying to connect his wildly expressive, three-dimensional works of the past few decades with his singular striped paintings of the 1960s. More than thirty years ago, Douglas Crimp characterized Stella’s late work from the 1970s as “pure idiocy.”[1] Pointing to an image of Stella’s Harēwa (1978)—the maquette of which appears in the Whitney retrospective—Crimp suggests the state of painting in 1981 is such that “only a miracle can prevent it from coming to an end.”[2]

Frank Stella. Gobba, Zoppa e Collotorto, 1985; oil, urethane enamel, fluorescent alkyd, acrylic, and printing ink on etched magnesium and aluminum; 137 x 120 1/8 x 34 3/8 in. The Art Institute of Chicago; Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; Ada Turnbull Hertle Endowment 1986.93. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

While Crimp may have been right about Stella’s works from the late 1970s and early 1980s—a number of which are on view and fail to refute Crimp’s commentary—it is wise to consider the efforts Stella has made in advancing painting in a time of mechanical and digital reproduction, especially in the past couple of decades. While Stella’s engagement of photographic and digital technologies are not quite miraculous, they have helped to reinvigorate the practice of painting since then.

Painting during a medium-specific crisis is not new to Stella. He arrived in New York in 1958—two years after the death of Jackson Pollock—a time when painting’s status was floundering. His early paintings helped catalyze the transition of the dominant mode of painting from Abstract Expressionism to a post-painterly abstraction that minimized any trace of the artist’s hand. In part, Stella’s paintings of the 1960s eradicated composition, pushing painting toward objecthood and away from a flattened pictorial plane.

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