Today’s Help Desk column is a refresher for students who are anxious about returning to school at the end of this month. In the words of artist Whitney Lynn, “[…] Your time in the program is incredibly short. Blink and it’s over. So make lots of new work, meet as many people as you can, and take advantage of everything the program offers.” This article was originally published on July 21. 2014.

I’ve been accepted to an MFA program that begins this September. As the month approaches, I find myself getting increasingly nervous and anxious (as I always do on the first day of school). It’s been a few years since I’ve participated in group critiques, and while I’m excited about this program, I also feel very vulnerable right now. Can you offer any advice to new MFA students? I wonder what former students “wish they’d known” before going into a program.

Beatriz Milhazes. Sinfonia Nordestina, 2008; acrylic on canvas; 96 7/8 x 144 7/8 in.

There are so many things I wish I’d known before I started my graduate program that I could answer your question with a book. Work hard, show up for everything, and say thank you are timeless tips, of course, but you’re looking for other suggestions calibrated to the specifics of the MFA. First, make friends with the Graduate Program Manager (or whatever they call the initial line of defense in your grad office). This individual will be your conduit to advisor selection, the assignment of teaching assistantships, and much more; woe betide the student who cops an attitude and treats the manager rudely. Second (and this is related to the above), the most bureaucratic rules only apply to students who don’t apply themselves. I’m not suggesting that you engage in risky behavior, but all fences have gates. If you are kind and polite and work diligently, someone may show you where they are. Also, if you are moving to attend school, consider staying in that city for a few years after graduation. You will make a lot of friends and contacts in two years, but if you move away immediately, you will lose them. (This last piece of advice was given to me by a colleague who still regrets that he moved away a week after receiving his degree.) Finally, stay away from drama queens, bastards, and bullies, even the ones who are powerful and who seem to hold the potential for your future professional advancement. If I were dying right now and had to give counsel with my last breath, it would be this: Assholes only ever help themselves.

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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, Serena Pascual reviews Luka Fineisen: Smoke and Mirrors at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco.

Luka Fineisen. Possibility, 2015; glitter, resin, Plexiglas shelf; 47 x 73 x 6 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.

Luka Fineisen’s solo show Smoke and Mirrors entertains with a multitude of textures, materials, and forms—ordinarily tactile sensations are turned into visual delights. On view at Hosfelt Gallery, Fineisen’s work here narrows her color palette to black, white, and grays in between. The distinct absence of colors beyond grayscale focuses attention on the works’ other properties, accentuating variations that range from lustrous to flat, pliant to rigid, large to small, and gaseous to solid. Together these elements compose a playful atmosphere.

Possibility (2015) is one of several works that capture matter in transition. A viscid, glittery substance creeps to the edge of its Plexiglas shelf. The shelf gives way and allows the mass to drip onto the floor, collecting in a mound. In spite of the sculpture’s stil­­lness and its suggestion of arrested movement, a sense of fluidity prevails. What is actually solid resembles liquid frozen in place, and these disparate phases occur in amusing coexistence.

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Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Vanessa Kauffman’s review of Night Begins the Day at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The author notes, “The many pieces in the exhibition […] do not mimic the sublimity of the universe in its raw state—a view that is impossible to achieve in a practical sense. Instead, these are revelations of the Earth and its ethers as they have been marred, imprinted, and manipulated by human hands.” This article was originally published on July 16, 2015.

Katie Paterson. The Dying Star Letters, 2010–present; ink on paper; dimensions variable; installation view, Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai.

Night, in most latitudes, is characterized by darkness: a dimming of the sky that is often accompanied by the dimming of the senses, and the mind. But our eyes can and do adjust to this darkness, and as our shadowed surroundings surrender a certain clarity—becoming amorphous in form and color—the world may appear, to us, anew. In Jewish tradition, as noted by Renny Pritikin and Lily Siegel, curators of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s exhibition Night Begins the Day: Rethinking Space, Time, and Beauty, the sun’s trajectory toward the horizon is a harbinger: Nightfall is the first spark of a new day. The show hinges on this inversion of ingrained timetables and asks us to question our relation to the Earth and its celestial bodies, the murky beauty of our natural (and at times mundane) surroundings, and also our own destruction of those surroundings. The twenty-five contemporary artists, scientists, and others included in the show put forth a remarkable “dusking,” asking viewers to embrace the rich sublimity that is to be discovered in the dark.

Disrupting the notion of any singular moment of creation, the German artist Peter Dreher’s Tag um Tag Guter Tag (Day by Day, Good Day, 1974–ongoing) is a series, to date involving 5,000 artworks, that is continually in the making. Once or twice a week, Dreher paints the same water glass, holding the same amount of water, sitting on the same table beside the same window, in an oil painting of the same dimensions. Time is measured here by an unchanging, quotidian relationship to a single object. Numbered and displayed in a grid, the paintings (and days) are hard to assess individually. And yet each does vary from its neighbor due to the subtle shifts of light Dreher captures in the reflections on the glass. As in nature, sublimity enters and exits this work through the impressive sum of its parts, and microscopically in the infinitesimal gestures that break with what is formulaic and anticipated.

Read the full article here.

After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) explores the dissonance between our innermost longings and the contemporary world we have created. Gunter Grass said, rather gloomily, that melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin. Imagining perfection, we confront the contradiction between the Arcadia of our imagination and the imperfect realities of our everyday. Featuring eighteen artists and artists’ collectives from across the Asian region, the exhibition was conceived as a four-part narrative. From the potent metaphor of the garden, we move to the city as a “contested site of the utopian ideal.”[1] Discredited utopic ideologies are juxtaposed with the notion that the search for an ideal world is now a psychological inner journey, an entirely individual pursuit.

Ian Woo. We Have Crossed the Lake, 2009; acrylic on linen; 194 x 244 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Other Edens presents the garden as a site of desire in the colonial imagination. Singaporean painter Ian Woo’s lyrical, abstract representation of foliage and water represents the solace found in the natural world. A reference to mid-20th-century abstraction is evident, but Woo has invented a powerful and idiosyncratic visual language. Underlying the gestural, calligraphic mark making of We Have Crossed the Lake (2009) is a spare restraint emerging from his deep knowledge of Chinese ink-painting traditions.

Some works reflect the bitter aftermath of totalitarian ideologies. Asian nation-states today—even the behemoth of a post-Mao China—are hostage to the forces of the global market, and old certainties have vanished. Shen Shaomin’s hyper-real embalmed bodies of Communist leaders lie in crystal sepulchres, as if awaiting a call to arms that might reanimate them. Mao lies next to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, Kim Il-sung and Lenin. Summit (2009) is a G8 meeting of cadavers. The meta-narratives of the 20th century, like these old men, lie in the morgue of history.

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Ice, compromised vision, and colonial geography: These formed the conceptual scaffolding that supported Evan Calder Williams’ live essay, T-1, performed at Artists Space on July 21, 2015.[1] Despite the three subjects’ ostensibly divergent histories, Calder Williams wove them into a complex web that expanded into several narratives that highlighted epiphanic and unexpected connections. The dynamic multimedia event—comprising video, text, and images projected on perpendicular screens, and a narration by Calder Williams—made me resent the limitations of my binocular human vision. From where I sat, I could either blurrily see the two projections with my peripheral vision by aiming my eyes at the gap between the screens, or frantically switch my focus from one screen to the other, continually wishing my eyes could turn like those of a chameleon to 360-degree vision. The multisensory experience made me feel my perception was torn in opposite directions, like the cognitive cacophony of a passionately brainstorming mind.

Evan Calder Williams. T-1 (2015) (video still); two screen projection. Courtesy of the Artist.

To call the performance an essay is both fair and unfair. Or, perhaps more importantly, it questions the history and potential future of a form so familiar to the literate world. If we consider the origin of the word essay, from the late-16th-century essai, meaning a trial or attempt, then T-1 was a live attempt. The spirit of experimentation and uncertainty associated with attempts and trials exemplifies the nature of Calder Williams’ performance; though the presentation was highly considered and intentional, it escaped the safety and finitude of sentences strung together on a page. Instead, T-1 opened itself up to an unexplored method of conveying information, becoming an expedition in search of new visual and sonic languages.

Throughout the performance, plump, white, slightly out-of-focus words faded in and out on the screen to the audience’s left. The transitions happened so slowly, and the window of legibility—when the new phrase was sufficiently visible and the old phrase sufficiently faded—was so brief that it prompted dizziness, as I snapped my head back and forth, trying to follow the unraveling narrative on the left while keeping up with the more rapid narrative on the right. On this right-hand screen, videos and images played in secession or were layered, accompanied by audio clips and Calder Williams’ voice as sonic elements, all punctuated by numbers delineating sections of varying duration.

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From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you a review of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Author Brian Karl notes: “The urgent need to collect and re-present this work—not in a static archive but in a living arena—stems from the continuing conditions of marginalization, oppression, and worse that black people have suffered over so many generations, from the Middle Passage to the present moment.” This article was originally published on July 7, 2015.

Senga Nengudi. R.S.V.P., 1975–78; nylon, sand, and mixed media; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.

Radical Presence, a survey of African American performance art curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, has come to San Francisco. The featured works are all distillations and/or documents of performances that have ended up in, or have been adapted for, a gallery setting; an exceptionally robust program of related live performances runs concurrently. The earliest work is Pond (1962) by Fluxus cofounder Benjamin Patterson. The most recent pieces date from 2015, several of them created or re-created for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ iteration of the show.

The exhibition presents a substantial and striking set of takes on race in both the art world and society more generally. These are serious matters. That said, many of the artists adopt playful, even lighthearted approaches, often forcing visitor engagement through destabilizing strategies. “Playfulness” thus becomes a tactic akin to that of the tricksters and shamans who perform criticality in so many cultures—either in intense moments of crisis or in a more ongoing fashion. It is also similar to how masters of Zen and jujitsu trip up potentially worthy students as wake-up calls or as lessons to combat placid acceptance of the status quo.

Read the full article here.

Until now, the ICA Boston’s Foster Prize has been relatively traditional. It begins with the museum’s announcement of a short list of artists who participate in its biennial. From there, an independent panel of judges selects one winner, who walks away with a cash prize. This year’s Foster Prize is different. The ICA’s Associate Director of Performing Arts, John Andress, and Senior Curator, Jenelle Porter, have chosen four artists and collaborative organizers as the winners of the Foster Prize, lending the institution’s weight to help execute their artistic objectives. The winners of the 2015 Foster Prize are Sandrine Schaefer, Vela Phelan, kijidome (Sean Downey, Carlos Jiménez Cahua, Lucy Kim, and Susan Metrican), and Ricardo De Lima (Another Spectacle).

Sandrine Schaefer. Acclimating to Horizontal Movement (Wandering with the Horizon), 2015; performance. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Nisa Ojalvo.

The 2015 Foster Prize is not about latent potential, but about creating an actualized reticulation. In this curatorial framework, individual artists aren’t grouped and isolated, or begging to be anatomized. The resulting “exhibition” can be transplanted anywhere and bears fruit: It is a rhizomatic schedule of events that assembles à la carte meals instead of a tasting menu. For art critics, reviewing the exhibition after its preview would’ve been much like reviewing a book after reading one sentence, as almost nothing had happened at that point. All four artists’ projects are ongoing and contradictory at times. The reciprocating schedule is dictated by the terms of the audience. If you’re running late because of family schedule, the pokey slow train, or any other dog-ate-my-homework excuse, you simply miss the exhibition’s event that night. As no one individual could be at all the events, each moment reflects on what was and will be, as an unfolding, multimodal semiotic chain.

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