Andy Warhol. Dennis Hopper, Screen Tests Reel #4, 1964-65.

I spent Sunday looking at boys. It began at LACMA, where I saw Catherine Opie’s quarterbacks, linebackers and surfers  followed by Thomas Eakins’s rowers, wrestlers and athletic but stationary nudes. It continued at the Egyptian Theater, with ten of Andy Warhol’s four-minute screen tests: Buffy Phelps with delicate, defiant eyes and blondish curls; John Giorno of Sleep, darker and rougher than Buffy; Kip “Bima” Stagg, equally dark but not as rough; Dennis Hopper, twenty-eight but looking younger; Hopper again, still near twenty-eight, but suit-clad and looking older; Gregory Battock with Clark Gable jauntiness; Richard Schmidt and Paul Winterbottom; Kenneth King and Richard Markowitz, who, along with Giorno and Hopper, would appear in the compilation The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.

Because Warhol’s tests are meditative and slow, I lost myself in their static silence, and didn’t think about gender until the reel played out. “They were all men, weren’t they?” I said to the friend sitting next to me. He’d noticed before I had.

Collier Schorr. Jens F., 2005.

Three weeks ago, when Catherine Opie’s unprovocatively titled Figure and Landscape opened, the artist talked about her work in LACMA’s Bing Theater. She mentioned comparisons often made between her sports photographs and the work of Collier Schorr, which depicts, among other things, young male bodies posing and sparring. “Collier wants to be her boys,” said Opie. “I don’t . . . I’m not interested in seeing my butch body through them.” What she’s interested in is bearing witness, and she’s been witnessing a precariously in-between generation, some of which has gone to Iraq, some of which has died.

Being versus bearing is not so simple a distinction, of course—Opie’s boys, as poet-critic Eileen Myles has pointed out, tend to adopt the Opie expression, which resembles a “scary duh.” Even so, it’s possible Schorr wants to be her boys while Opie wants to be aware of her boys; certainly, Eakins wanted to be with his boys while Warhol wanted to collect them.

Thomas Eakins. The Champion Single Sculls, 1871. Courtesy LACMA.

It’s Warhol and Schorr who most prominently prefer male subjects. Warhol’s Screen Test Reel #5 includes only two women and, like Reel #4, Reel #6 is an exclusive boy’s club. Schorr, when asked why she doesn’t photograph girls, has said she does; she just uses boys to do it. But the strange, sports-focused mannishness of the paired Opie-Eakins exhibitions is even stranger in light of both artists’ genuine interest in women. Opie’s girl-only Girlfriends series showed at Gladstone Gallery in New York last year, and Eakins consistently included women in his work, and even in his controversies. It was his uninhibited disrobing in front of female students and his insistence on the removal of a male model’s “loin cloth” during a drawing session women attended, not his obsession with his “beloved” (as one wall label reads) young men, that forced him to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886.

Catherine Opie. Untitled #10 (Surfers), 2003. Courtesy Regen Projects.

In Manly Pursuits and Figure and Landscape, Eakins and Opie, both realists, show themselves to be exquisite technicians with a virtuosic, if predictable, eye for poetic composition. In Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls, a burnt sienna scull cuts smoothly across royal-blue water and its inhabitant looks elegantly, if illogically, casual as he turns to look back. In Opie’s portraits, skin, eyes, pose, gaze, the position of the football helmet, have all been carefully considered; royal blue makes frequent appearances in her work as well. But both artists render the trappings of a conventional masculinity and gender-play to which neither quite belong—to which no one quite belongs—and it’s the work that revels in inaction that seems most gaping and honest.

A room at the back of Figure and Landscape features only surfing images, and, though Opie has made striking portraits of the surfers she’s shadowed, none of those portraits are included here. Instead, there’s just expansive gray rectangles in which far-off bodies float, largely unmoving, waiting for a chance to resume their sport. They’re certainly skilled surfers; everyone Opie photographs seems to be good at what they do. They’re also like little pawns or bobbing black buoys. They don’t look volitional but they do look comfortable; like the artist who made them, they’re virtuosic and yet awkward precisely because they’re virtuosic.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

Julie Henson selected Catlin Moore‘s article on Lari Pittman’s recent exhibition at Regen Projects.

Lari Pittman is a gardener. Particularly fond of succulents, he maintains precisely manicured rows of cacti that borrow from a methodical landscape sensibility, a rational formation he claims “pushes back” against the chaos of nature. A composite of Columbian and American Southern heritage, Pittman is fluent in the duality of cultivated life. He understands that mortality is the only fixed variable in our otherwise unique existence, that micromanaging our realities affords us a sense of archive in the face of impermanence. His proficiency in composed ephemerality thus manifests itself in one hell of a cactus garden, not to mention two staggering concurrent exhibitions currently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, CA.

In the ten studio-fresh works that comprise Pittman’s New Paintings at the gallery’s secondary location (Regen Projects II), there is a painstaking compression of the opulent and familiar. A purposefully cluttered fullness that conjures a likeness to Grandma’s armoire, the canvases are rife with nostalgic ornaments and exotic trifles alike. Potted flowers and picket fences indicative of quiet Americana intertwine with flamboyant nesting dolls and henna-stained feet, affording a visual legibility unspecific to any one demographic.

While initially jarring in their vibrant pandemonium, Pittman’s paintings unearth a system of carefully meditated codes – a series of optical cryptograms that ruminate on the magnificence of hybridity and its modern ubiquity. Pittman celebrates plurality, and through his seemingly paradoxical menagerie of figures, abstractions, silhouettes and patterns he achieves an unanticipated harmony between disparate practices and imagery. Meticulous embellishment reminiscent of early 20th-century decorative arts coexists with cartoonishly provocative characters, forging a relationship that is both comical and wistful in its imaginative meandering. Given Pittman’s sensitivity to the trajectory of life – as echoed through the repeated use of clocks and the (literal) hands of time – it seems only natural to acknowledge our habitual reliance on humor and sentimentality in navigating our own humanity.

Just a crosswalk away from Pittman’s current paintings, Regen Projects I houses Orangerie, a curated repository of the artist’s renderings dating 1980 – 2010. The gallery features 108 works on paper suspended salon-style on bold yellow and green latticed walls, a cheeky allusion to the exhibition’s namesake. Acting as excerpts from Pittman’s larger topography, these pieces chart the exploration of identity, faith, sexuality and ritual through intricate pop-cultural and autobiographical signifiers.

Formative seeds to the artist’s opus, the earlier works probe foundational elements to those in New Paintings. The snappy text of period advertisements is often ensconced in erotically charged sketches proposing weighty inquiries like “How do I find meaning?” or “Why was I born?” in the place of hollow solicitations.

Conversely, some later works operate as narrative flowcharts to a constructed concept of self, as various phrases and labels snake between anthropomorphic contours and diagrams. Acting as a conservatory for Pittman’s most delicate and earnest ventures, this Orangerie is appropriately ripe with the rigorous labor of his oeuvre – its fruit alluringly complex and bittersweet.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

Seth Curcio selected Julie Henson‘s article from the week long series, Rise of Rebellion.

Nan Goldin. Joana with Valerie and Reine in the Mirror, L'Hotel des Beaux Arts, Paris, 1999.

Today on DS, we look at the desire and longing for rebellion embedded in the work of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley. Check out how the acts captured in these artists’ work become an icon for a generation desperate for a more rebellious lifestyle.

Thinking back to the days of being a rebellious teenager make me want to run the other direction. There is nothing worse than revisiting the angst and discomfort of adolescence – my mild rebellious behavior and general dislike of the world around me. Rebellious acts always seem mediocre and immature to me these days, despite living a very 20-something lifestyle. But there have always been those artists that so tactfully ride the line between a perfectly composed yet rebellious life that I inherently envy. I find it fascinating to watch the career of artists who successfully make work that is both personal and universal, unruly and conforming, attractive and disgusting – who document their own outsider world and show our distance to it.

Dash Snow. "TBT", 2008. Photograph - Digital C Print 40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 151.8 cm) + frame Edition of 3 + 2AP. Courtesy of Peres Projects.

This rebel has long been the muse of the artist. And when I consider the muse, Nan Goldin and Larry Clark‘s use and abuse of the rebellious lifestyle become both personal document and cultural reality, while assuming the roll of Art Historical mainstay in the category of the documentary photograph. But Dash Snow, a true example of both insider and outsider, straddled this relationship and found a way to make the chaos of his life appear both seductive and desirable. A hero of punk culture, Snow’s rebellious history and lifestyle was the subject and an embodiment of his work – both personal anthem and documentation. Snow sold his own context, using his life as a guarantee of credibility and reality to the outside world, by choosing to participate in the contemporary art system, yet his product was a life through the photographic document.

Both “genius” and tortured soul, Snow’s lifestyle was muse and product- and ultimately it was his rebellious lifestyle that brought him to an early death. Ryan McGinley equally rides this ambiguous line, to the point that I can’t decide if his work is rebellious or utopian. There is something about the idealized reality in his work that harks back to the personal documentation of Clark and Goldin, but successfully sells his own contemporary youthful lifestyle.

Ryan McGinley, Coley (Injured), 2007

The act of rebellion doesn’t always lead you in the opposing path of the system or lifestyles that it moves against. And, often the very thought or association of rebellion becomes so desirable to the masses because it appears to be simply out of their grasp. All of these artists have successfully depicted their own rebellious lifestyle and have offered this spirit back to a complacent public that longs for the moment to give up the boredom that fills their normal lives and grab onto the freedom that is falsely associated with rebellion.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

This article by Kelly Nosari was chosen by Nicole Powell.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Artist Rachel Khedoori explores encounters with space and their psychological implications. According to the Venice Biennale’s Making Worlds catalog, Khedoori’s art practice ‘invites viewers to see hidden or forgotten spaces’ – spaces that are ‘generated by the limits of memory’. In Cave Model, presented at that show, Khedoori referenced Plato’s Cave Myth and cited it as a source of inspiration. Yet her art practice deviates from this allegory by not seeking to escape ‘the cave’ and thereby gain philosophical clarity. Instead, Khedoori directs us towards the untenable shadows that more often define the human condition.

Khedoori experiments with ambiguous spaces through a diverse practice that includes installation, sculpture and film. The artist’s current solo exhibition of new and recent work at Hauser & Wirth in London is remarkable for the artist’s foray into documentation. The Iraq Book Project, an ongoing documentary piece, was first shown at The Box in Los Angeles in 2009. It is comprised of online news articles dating to the start of the Iraq War – 18 March 2003. Sourced from around the world, the articles are retrieved using the search terms ‘Iraq’, ‘Iraqi’ or ‘Baghdad’. They are then translated into English, compiled and presented in a series of large books arranged chronologically. The articles are printed in a uniform, seamless manner and each is demarcated by title, date and source. These large books are arranged in the main gallery space at Hauser & Wirth on tables along with stools for gallery visitors to interact with the work. Khedoori’s Iraq Book Project is an on-going effort that is updated continuously. Its conclusion will depend upon the length of the war.

Khedoori is certainly not alone in responding to the Iraq War, but has typically eschewed such content in her work. While The Iraq Book Project is somewhat of a departure, it can also be viewed as a repositioning of Khedoori’s engagement with space. In this work, Khedoori locates information within the digital realm and extracts it. This process allows viewers to explore the changing face of and attitudes towards the war. It also stores information as a part of our collective memory that would otherwise be dispersed and largely be forgotten. Khedoori preserves war coverage and places it within the physical world. She chooses book form, which is a lasting and traditional mode of recording and passing on knowledge.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

A film installation and a photographic series are found upstairs in the American Room of the gallery. Film is an important medium for the artist, who has returned to it throughout her career. The photographic series is set in a natural Australian landscape at 5.00 am, while the film is set 12 hours later at 5.00 pm. For the film installation, Khedoori returns to the device of the mirror to manipulate the moving image. The film is projected onto a screen that meets a mirror at a 90 degree angle – causing the looped footage to appear to continually separate from itself as it plays. The Hauser & Wirth gallery points out that the affect is much like a Rorschach ink blot test. Yet, in this instance it is set in landscape and in motion. This work allows the gallery visitor to encounter ambiguous, psychologically-tinged space.

Rachel Khedoori’s work has shown internationally since the mid-1990s. In 2001, the artist’s high-profile solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland brought her work increased international attention. Subsequently, Khedoori has taken part in several noteworthy group exhibitions. In 2008, the artist was included in the traveling exhibition Visual Tactics or how pictures emerge, which opened at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Seigen, Germany. Khedoori’s work received a lot of attention in 2009 when she took part in the Venice Biennale‘s Fare Mondi/Making Worlds exhibition and Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life: Part 2 at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Rachel Khedoori is the identical twin sister of fellow artist Toba Khedoori. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles CA and is represented by Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner in New York. Khedoori received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988 and her MFA from the University of California in Los Angeles in 1994.

Untitled, 2010 (Film, 3:33 minutes). Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010.© Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Rachel Khedoori concludes at Hauser & Wirth in London on 31 July. It marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK’s capital city.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

This article by Allison Gibson was chosen by Rebekah Drysdale.

Ray Tomlinson. @. 1971. Here displayed in ITC American Typewriter Medium, the closest approximation to the character used by a Model 33 Teletype in the early 1970s. Courtesy MoMA.

Days ago, the Museum of Modern Art‘s Department of Architecture and Design announced their acquisition of a new work into the collection. The piece is one that we of the age of email and Twitter know well—the @ symbol. Since the announcement, the Internet has been abuzz with the news, mostly because its implications reach far beyond the art and design world. It’s so familiar to us all. It’s either momentous or silly, depending on your personal view, but it can’t be denied that the acquisition marks a poignant point in the history of art, in that “It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary,” as was stated by MoMA Department of Architecture and Design Senior Curator, Paola Antonelli, in her essay on the matter of the acquisition published on March 22, 2010 by MoMA.

In her essay, Antonelli explains the history of the @, and how it came to be valued as a piece important enough for the permanent collection at MoMA. Though the symbol “dates back to the sixth or seventh century,” it’s Ray Tomilson—creator of the first email system in 1971—who elevated it “to [be a] defining symbol of the computer age,” according to Antonelli. She goes on to defend the symbol as a design, saying, “Tomlinson performed a powerful act of design that not only forever changed the @ sign’s significance and function, but which also has become an important part of our identity in relationship and communication with others,” and that “His (unintended) role as a designer must be acknowledged and celebrated by the one collection—MoMA’s—that has always celebrated elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time, the essence of modern.”

What do you think about the acquisition? You can always comment below, email us at info@dailyserving.com, or let us know on Twitter: @DAILYSERVING. (Get it? Basically you can’t escape the symbol, which is now a precious work of art. Something to consider when crafting your responses.)

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

John Pyper couldn’t decide on a favorite pick. “As for the fav writing of the year, it’s between two from the weekly column L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast, by Catherine Wagley: Women of California Coolness and Sunday Boys. The pair talk to each other.”

Frank J. Thomas, photograph of Irving Blum, John Coplans, and Shirley Nielson Hopps. Courtesy Pasadena Museum of California Art.

Back when L.A. art was in its adolescence, critic Peter Plagens asked painter John Altoon why being an artist couldn’t just be about making work:

I used to say, “John, what about the artist who just goes into his studio, paints paintings and tries to make them the best that he can? What about an artist that just does that?” He said, “[Ed] Kienholz goes out at night in his pick up truck and tries to find them and run them down.” Meaning, if you’re a real guy it’s all about that power structure.

Real artists, of course, were not just guys, but guys with balls who knew how to strut.

Vivian Rowan, who entered L.A.’s machismo-filled scene as gallerist Irving Blum’s assistant and left as artist Craig Kauffman’s ex-wife, has a theory about the group’s maximal mannishness: “They didn’t have much control—over their careers, their lives. But they could control what was immediately around them, and boy did they.” And what did the women do? “They serviced the men, it was as simple as that,” says Shirley Nielson Blum in The Cool School, a documentary about L.A.’s earliest art studs. She continues, eyes watering vaguely, “They put up with it, and they cheered, and they cried. They cooked.”

Nielson Blum, an art historian with a delicately smart face, wrinkles in just the right places and hair that’s a golden sort of white, is a careful talker. Her voice, and the polished observations it offers, provide much of the narrative cohesion for the 2003 documentary. She never talks about herself, but nearly every time she appears, a slightly different name is at the bottom of the screen. She is Shirley Nielson, the art history student who becomes Shirley Nielson Hopps, the wife of acclaimed and eccentric curator/gallerist Walter Hopps. Sometimes, she is referred to as just Shirley Hopps, no maiden name. When she leaves Hopps for his ex-partner Blum, her name actually changes on-screen from Shirley Hopps to Shirley Blum. At the end of the film, she’s Shirley Nielson Blum, with a clarifying subtitle: “Ex-wife of Walter Hopps and Irving Blum.” She has lived through the man-centric period of L.A. art and effectively divorced herself from it. This makes her a vested but resigned expert, regal like a former diplomat.

Carlee Fernandez, "Self-Portrait As Franz West's Sculpture," C-Print, 2006. Courtesy the artist.

Much of the work I have most wanted to think about lately has been made by L.A. women and has a deeply aware coolness that reminds me of Nielson Blum. It also has a surface-conscious breeziness that seems to both channel and re-imagine the mood of the early Cool School.

Stanya Kahn’s It’s Cool, I’m Good, which I have praised in this column before, displays a breeziness that’s broken down and almost numb. Currently on view at the California Biennial, the video shows a bandaged, slightly androgynous body moving through the California landscape, sitting by the beach, driving through open space or down main city streets, eating at hot dog stands, loitering in Beverly Hills. All those elements that made L.A. an ideal home for Light and Space appear, and while It’s Cool, I’m Good is narrative video, it has the attitude of a Ken Price ceramic–sun-soaked, goofy, globular, yet precise–coupled with a darker subjectivity that makes California cool seem like a coping mechanism rather than a birthright.

Carlee Fernandez also has work in the Biennial, an installation/performance called Life After Death in which her own body lies roguishly, playing dead beside a taxidermy leopard, a gun, a Davy-Crockett-worthy jacket, and other paraphernalia reminiscent of a colonial explorer. In the past, Fernandez has photographed herself in the guise of men she admires–Franz West, Charles Bukowski, Werner Herzog, her father–and the casualness with which she inhabits these male idols exposes masculinity as performance while indulging in frank and genuine tribute.

Stanya Kahn, "It's Cool, I'm Good," Video Still, 2010. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

This last September, Fernandez’s ACME exhibition, World According to Xavier, treated motherhood with refreshing distance. It included hybridized and exotic taxidermy animals, along with a few videos in which Fernandez and infant Xavier roll around in linked but divided Franz-West-style cocoons. She gave her son what struck me as a generous gift, treating him with the same critical admiration she’d awarded male icons, and presenting her world and his as attached, co-dependent but always separate.

Then there’s Rachel Lachowicz’s muscular and clean-edged exhibition at Shoshana Wayne, the material of which is as synthetically sleek as anything used by her Cool School predecessors; Amanda Ross Ho at Cherry and Martin, whose characteristic slanginess has been tightened, making her work seem “cool” in a composed and but still stereotypically sprawling L.A. way; and Alexandra Grant, now in the Artist’s Museum at MOCA and the California Biennial, whose recent paintings have been sunnier, more dumb-fisted and, again, Ken-Price-like in their globular gracefulness.

Rachel Lachowicz, Installation View, 2010. Courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

At the end of The Cool School, Shirley Nielson Blum has the last word:

The great sadness as I look back on it now, is that in that little space, in that space of time, . . . there were major beautiful works to be seen by anybody. You could walk in, you could get close to them, you could stay as long as you wanted. . . . Most people walked by, and that was sad.

I like to think that the California women, the ones making the smartest work right now, walked in and got close (not literally but essentially, since most were born either during or well after The Cool School’s prime), and figured out how to take the beauty they saw and recapitulate it, so that it became less exclusive and less brutish, but kept its cool.

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L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, Screen Tests Reel #4, 1964-65.

I spent Sunday looking at boys. It began at LACMA, where I saw Catherine Opie’s quarterbacks, linebackers and surfers followed by Thomas Eakins’s rowers, wrestlers and athletic but stationary nudes. It continued at the Egyptian Theater, with ten of Andy Warhol’s four-minute screen tests: Buffy Phelps with delicate, defiant eyes and blondish curls; John Giorno of Sleep, darker and rougher than Buffy; Kip “Bima” Stagg, equally dark but not as rough; Dennis Hopper, twenty-eight but looking younger; Hopper again, still near twenty-eight, but suit-clad and looking older; Gregory Battock with Clark Gable jauntiness; Richard Schmidt and Paul Winterbottom; Kenneth King and Richard Markowitz, who, along with Giorno and Hopper, would appear in the compilation The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.

Because Warhol’s tests are meditative and slow, I lost myself in their static silence, and didn’t think about gender until the reel played out. “They were all men, weren’t they?” I said to the friend sitting next to me. He’d noticed before I had.

Collier Schorr, "Jens F.," 2005.

Three weeks ago, when Catherine Opie’s unprovocatively titled Figure and Landscape opened, Opie talked about her work in LACMA’s Bing Theater. She mentioned comparisons often made between her sports photographs and the work of Collier Schorr, which depicts, among other things, young male bodies posing and sparring. “Collier wants to be her boys,” said Opie. “I don’t . . . I’m not interested in seeing my butch body through them.” What she’s interested in is bearing witness, and she’s been witnessing a precariously in-between generation, some of which has gone to Iraq, some of which has died.

Being versus bearing is not so simple a distinction, of course–Opie’s boys, as poet-critic Eileen Myles has pointed out, tend to adopt the Opie expression, which resembles a “scary duh.” Even so, it’s possible Schorr wants to be her boys while Opie wants to be aware of her boys; certainly, Eakins wanted to be with his boys while Warhol wanted to collect them.

Thomas Eakins,"The Champion Single Sculls," 1871. Courtesy LACMA.

It’s Warhol and Schorr who most prominently prefer male subjects. Warhol’s Screen Test Reel #5 includes only two women and, like Reel #4, Reel #6 is an exclusive boy’s club. Schorr, when asked why she doesn’t photograph girls, has said she does; she just uses boys to do it. But the strange, sports-focused mannishness of the paired Opie-Eakins exhibitions is even stranger in light of both artists’ genuine interest in women. Opie’s girl-only Girlfriends series showed at Gladstone Gallery in New York last year, and Eakins consistently included women in his work, and even in his controversies. It was his uninhibited disrobing in front of female students and his insistence on the removal of a male model’s “loin cloth” during a drawing session women attended, not his obsession with his “beloved” (as one wall label reads) young men, that forced him to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886.

Catherine Opie, "Untitled #10 (Surfers)," 2003. Courtesy Regen Projects.

In Manly Pursuits and Figure and Landscape, Eakins and Opie, both realists, show themselves to be exquisite technicians with a virtuosic, if predictable, eye for poetic composition. In Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls, a burnt sienna scull cuts smoothly across royal blue water and its inhabitant looks elegantly, if illogically, casual as he turns to look back. In Opie’s portraits, skin, eyes, pose, gaze, the position of the football helmet, have all been carefully considered; royal blue makes frequent appearances in her work as well. But both artists render the trappings of a conventional masculinity and gender-play to which neither quite belong–to which no one quite belongs–and it’s the work that revels in inaction that seems most gaping and honest.

A room at the back of Figure and Landscape features only surfing images, and, though Opie has made striking portraits of surfers she’s shadowed, none of those portraits are included here. Instead, there’s just expansive gray rectangles in which far-off bodies float, largely unmoving, waiting for a chance to resume their sport. They’re certainly skilled surfers; everyone Opie photographs seems to be good at what they do. They’re also like little pawns or bobbing black buoys. They don’t look volitional but they do look comfortable; like the artist who made them, they’re virtuosic and yet awkward precisely because they’re virtuosic.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

This interview between Seth Curcio and Brion Nuda Rosch was selected by L.A. Expanded columnist, Catherine Wagley.

San Francisco-based artist and curator Brion Nuda Rosch creates subtle, yet powerful collages, paintings, sculptures and conceptual projects, which often pair disparate but poetic associations. This ability to provide insightful connections shines through Rosch’s playful but pensive collaborative and curatorial projects as well. Rosch often partners with other artists on creative exchanges through a one-day residency program in his own home called Hallway Projects, while curating more extensive exhibitions in other venues. Earlier this month, Rosch closed a solo show at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, simply titled New Work by Brion Nuda Rosch, featuring work which investigates the value of materials and the idea of the non-monumental. The artist recently sat down with DailyServing.com founder Seth Curcio to discuss his recent Artadia Award, the next installment of his curated exhibition series, Paper! Awesome!, and his recent solo exhibition in San Francisco.

Seth Curcio: So Brion, you were notified a few weeks ago that you are one of the recipients of the Artadia award for San Francisco this year. Congratulations on your award. Tell me a little about the works that were included in your application and about the process that led to the selection.

Brion Nuda Rosch: I included a selection of collages and documentation of several assemblages. At the time I was also in the process of selecting work for my first solo exhibition and for an upcoming book project. Ultimately, the works included in my application were the starting points for the work shown at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco, CA from November 18 – January 2, 2010. I was short-listed as a finalist while preparing for this exhibition. The process was rather swift. First, a social with the jurors and other finalists, then a studio visit, then an announcement.

SC: Your creative practice is very diverse and includes curatorial projects as well as impromptu galleries and online projects, such as your blog Something home Something. Do you feel that your decentralized practice made your work more attractive to the panel at Artadia as they reviewed hundreds of artist applications? How do you feel that each of these different modes of working help to inform your greater practice?

BNR: The focus for my application was primarily centered on my art making. My curatorial efforts were only represented in my Curriculum Vitae and were discussed only briefly during my studio visit. In any discussion about my work, conversation will not remain on one topic, such as painting, or collage. I feel I could easily assert different categories for various works, however doing so would prove to be a shortcoming. I balance the roles of both art making and curating — both practices relate to one another, each sharing similar starting points. Somewhere the boundaries fade and a project initiated from a curatorial standpoint becomes a work of art, and vice versa. It is not a priority to identify each action with defined labels. Most of my work simply involves a selection of material and then a relationship to that material within a new situation.

SC: Thinking about your recent show with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions and the statement that ‘most of your work simply involves a selection of material and then a relationship to that material’, I am curious about both your humbly-constructed images and sculptures. Talk a little about the concepts that play out in that exhibition, both through your image and object construction.

BNR: The images and the collages are both humble and monumental. Minimal adjustments have been made, a waterfall placed over a waterfall, a new ridge placed over a mountain range, a vague monument placed over a field. These ideas are monumental in scale, almost impossible, while also positioning room for our own reflection into the world around us. The monuments I create are non-monuments; they lack distinct meaning. The materials lack value, found book pages, recycled dump stock paint, wood and drywall. The assemblage works are a direct reaction to accumulated materials within my studio. The assemblage titled, Contents of Studio, Gathered, Painted Brown is just that, the contents of my studio gathered, painted brown and placed in a pile. I accumulated a collection of unsuccessful and unfinished works, and painting them all the same neutral color resolved the conflict I was having with them, placing them in a pile offered a solution for their arrangement and physicality.

SC: In addition to your studio practice, I am also interested in your other more social and collaborative projects. I know that you have produced the ‘Fluxus Coloring Book’, you are now conducting day-long artist residencies out of your home, and you are in the process of curating the third installment of Paper! Awesome!, a show that features an impressive line-up of artists that work with or on paper.

BNR: The Fluxus Coloring Book was produced while in residence at Southern Exposure. During my residency, I worked with a group of artists to build The Portable Ice Cream Stand, part art object, part functioning ice cream stand, part social happening. Visiting artists and guests initiated the direction of the project. A worktable was built to make handmade fliers, later the table functioned as a place for conversation and art making. A few artists made coloring book pages, and guests colored in them. All of the work created at the table was left behind. As a reaction I wanted to develop something that could be taken away from the project. I have an interest in Fluxus art, and felt there was a relationship between the childlike tendencies of a coloring book and the humor of Fluxus art. The coloring book consisted of blank pages and non-representation lines. There was nothing to color in or around; the coloring book was failure, a document for it’s own joke.

One-Day Artist Residencies will take place within the context of Hallway Projects, which exists in my home. During these residencies, an interaction will take place in private, and then later be shared with the public via on-line documentation and distribution of printed materials. During each residency the contributor is offered both a physical venue and a reasonable timeline to execute direct actions in art making. Within the modest time frame and hospitable environment, I hope to interview each contributor and produce either collaborative works or investigate shared sensibilities in our interests as makers. For example, in a conversation many years ago, Amy Rathbone and I discovered we both dislike the colors yellow and blue. For her residency, we plan to explore the colors, and our reaction to them now. We plan to evaluate various tones of each color and rank our tolerance. In addition, we plan to directly tackle our fears by submersing ourselves in the colors and sharing our experience with the public in efforts to gain a better understanding of why we dislike the color yellow and the color blue.

And, Paper! Awesome! was first produced out of necessity for an exhibit within a short timeline. It took place at the now closed Mimi Barr Gallery in 2003. I put out a call to artists to submit work on a letter size piece of paper. I figured with the upcoming deadline, a letter size piece of paper was the most approachable form for both the artists, and my vision for installing the work in a cohesive manner. The works were hung on two walls in a quilt-like fashion. The second installment took place two years later, and involved an open call and a jury process. The range of artists selected added an important element to the exhibit. Artist who were established within the art world and artists who have not shown their work before were hung alongside one another and the proximity of the works offered a slightly anonymous experience for the viewer. For the third installment at Baer Ridgway this spring, I have invited an interesting range of artists who have shown extensively in the international art world, and I am in the process of working with members of other organizations to provide another element to the exhibit. Again, the timeline here is important, I invited the artists to participate nearly six weeks prior to the deadline of submissions. Like the One-Day Artist Residencies, I am interested in what can be produced within a limited time frame and limited space.

SC: So what can we look forward to from you in 2010? Do you have any exciting new projects that you have been wanting to tackle?

BNR: 2010 is shaping up to be very productive. I will be a curator in residence for a short period of time with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions. Little Paper Planes is publishing a book of my collages and assemblages. The book will be released in February. The Andy Warhol Foundation has funded the catalog for Artadia Awardees. I’m looking forward to returning to the studio, and having a lot of conversations about the potential to do larger projects. A very ambitious year to come!

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2010 year has brought on many new partnerships with publications around the country. We now regularly partner with the Huffington Post, Flavorwire, Art Practical, DaWire and KQED Arts in San Francisco. Marilyn Goh selected this article is from our friends at KQED Arts, where Danielle Sommer discusses R. H. Quaytman’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In the 1950s, San Francisco poet Jack Spicer wrote that he considered a collection of poems to be a community meant to “echo and re-echo against each other.” A quick look at R.H. Quaytman’s new installation, I Love — The Eyelid Clicks / I See / Cold Poetry, Chapter 18, created just for SFMOMA, assures us that the analogy holds for a collection of paintings, too. Perhaps this is the reason that Quaytman and curator Apsara diQuinzio settled on Spicer as a guidepost for the exhibition.

Quaytman works primarily as a painter, but her installations are site-based and could in many ways be considered sculpture. Images are meant to “echo” — to complement and conflict with each other, and with the architecture of the room. The paintings in Quaytman’s one room show-within-a-show at the Whitney Biennial last spring stunningly incorporated one of the Whitney’s trapezoidal windows as a visual motif, making the actual window look like a trompe l’oeil painting.

With the SFMOMA show, Quaytman is again confined to a single room, a constraint that works well for her. The colors are subdued: a pastel pink just beyond cream and plenty of shades of gray. Using SFMOMA’s photo archive, Quaytman silk-screens images onto beveled, wooden panels of various sizes. The images are somehow relevant to Spicer’s work, although I’m fuzzy on the details: a snake, a creased photograph of a young man, a tripod, and a set of moons. Despite this specificity, the show is not drastically different from other Quaytman shows; while she works in “chapters” and uses specific people — like Spicer — as a way to dive into her work, her formal and conceptual concerns remain constant — and exquisite.

Techniques you’re more-or-less guaranteed to see from Quaytman include parallel lines so closely placed that they shimmer and pain the eyes, paint mixed with crushed glass, and every once and a while a flash of bright, bold color like florescent yellow or magenta. Perspective shifts and jarring juxtapositions between flat, geometric designs and representational images with deep space are par for the course, and most horizon lines lead you to a vanishing point that is off the canvas or in between two works. Shapes repeat, including a realistic representation of the edge of the wooden panels, an effect that serves to remind us that the paintings are objects, not just images.

Stare at any one painting for too long and the danger is retinal burn. The silhouette of a snake surrounded by a sea of sparkling turquoise remains as I blink my way around the room. The clutter in my retinal field builds, disperses, and builds again. Across the room is another painting with the same snake, larger and not in silhouette. Its pebbly skin is visible, and it becomes tangled with the afterimage of its cousin. There are two paintings that contain actual poems by Spicer. Each poem is placed central to its canvas, and yet each is downright painful to look at. Quaytman’s closely-placed lines prevent the text from dominating the image, although when you do manage to lock onto a poem and read it, everything in the periphery melts away.

“The poem begins to mirror itself,” writes Spicer. Poems mirror poems. Paintings mirror paintings. Images appear, accumulate and disperse, only to reappear. Jack Spicer passed away in 1965, but the rhythm and resonance of Quaytman’s installation is a reminder of more than the man. It’s a reminder of the cycling complexity of time in all its invisible and visible moments.

New Work: R.H. Quaytman is on view at through January 16, 2011 at SFMOMA.

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Noah Simblist selected Rebekah Drysdale‘s interview with Marc Horowitz, saying “I’ve been following The Advice of Strangers through Creative Time and this DS post – an interview with Marc in which he talks about his career – puts this brilliantly bizarre project into context. BTW – a favorite post from The Advice of Strangers in which he writes a play with a 6 year old.”

Marc Horowitz, a self-described “maximalist,” has permeated American culture with his socially-oriented projects and playful enterprises. His work includes video, drawing, cultural experiments, and the dynamic use of networks like twitter and youtube. In 2004, while working as a photo assistant for Crate & Barrel, Horowitz wrote “Dinner w/ Marc 510-872-7326″ on a dry erase board that was included in their fall catalog. He received over 30,000 requests for dinner dates, and began driving around the country to dine with people. The National Dinner Tour garnered attention from numerous press outlets; Horowitz appeared on The Today Show and was named one of People Magazine‘s 50 Hottest Bachelors in June 2005.

In 2009, Horowitz embarked on The Marc Horowitz Signature Series, for which he signed his name on a map of the United States and drove that route, stopping at 19 towns along the way. He documented these adventures in short webisodes. In Nampa, Idaho, Horowitz established the first Anonymous Semi-Nudist Colony (complete with complimentary jean shorts and ski masks). In Battle Mountain, Nevada, he pitched an idea to local politicians that involved changing the name of the town to something less pugnacious, suggesting the gentler alternative “Tender Pie Hill.” Other notable projects include Google Maps Road Trip and Talkshow 247.

In December 2009, Horowitz participated in a panel discussion as part of Art Basel Miami Beach‘s Video Art Program, “Video Art and Mainstream Distribution,” curated by New York’s Creative Time. Short films from The Marc Horowitz Signature Series were shown prior to the discussion. DailyServing’s Rebekah Drysdale was able to ask him a few questions about his past projects and future pursuits during an interview conducted over Skype in December.

Rebekah Drysdale: At your discussion in Miami, you mentioned you studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute after leaving the business world. Do you think the tools you are using now, such as YouTube and Google maps, are the new media for this generation of artists?

Marc Horowitz: I think so. Painting and drawing will never die, obviously, but with the advent of the internet and the accessibility of video and broadcasting, I think that there is going to be such an insurgence of artists using these media.

RD: Your work engages the public, but seems very personal as well. What is the most influential encounter you have had in the making of your films?

MH: Omigod, there are so many of them!

RD: Can you pick one or two?

MH: The most memorable project is probably one you have never seen before. It was one I did while at the Art Institute, called Free Ideas. I went down to the corner of Market and Powell streets in San Francisco, where they turn the cable car. There are all kinds of tourists and homeless people there, the Seven Galaxies guy, preaching about the end of the world, religious people, preaching about God, and then there was me. I had two blank white sandwich boards that I made. I was handing out blank sheets of paper saying “free ideas.” People were confused. Most of the business people didn’t want to deal with me. One guy came up to me and said I was doing God’s work, for whatever reason. Several tourists thought that I was always there and wanted to have their pictures taken with me. Homeless people wanted me to write letters to their family members, so we would, and when we were done, they wouldn’t have their address. Kids wanted to have paper airplane throwing contests. I honestly think that project was what got me started in most everything I’m doing now.

RD: How did Free Ideas influence your later works?

MH: It was just taking such a simple idea as a blank sheet of paper and putting yourself out there in the world with that one element and then seeing what happens. I think that notion informed a lot of my projects after that. The Dinner Tour is the simple idea of dinner, at its least common denominator. Driving your signature across the United States is just a signature, something we use everyday. The Google Maps Road Trip was me and my friend wanting to take a simple road trip together, but not having the time or money, so we had to do it virtually.

RD: Tell me more about the experience and execution of the Google Maps Road Trip.

MH: The Google Maps Road Trip was a fascinating way of seeing America. It was also a really great way to get to know Peter (Baldes). In 2003, he e-mailed me saying I should have a blog. I had no idea who he was and why he was contacting me. Nevertheless, I immediately called him up because he put his phone number in the e-mail. We talked for a bit and he seemed nice enough, so we loosely kept in touch. I didn’t actually meet Peter in person until last year at a friend’s wedding. So all in all, we had only spent about twelve hours together in-real-life before we executed GMRT, and then we shared 40+ hours together “driving” across the country virtually. For me, it was like the Dinner Tour, except I got to know a single person, Peter, much more in depth.

The technical aspects of the project get a little complicated, but basically we left my house in LA and began driving together to Pete’s place in Richmond exclusively on Google Maps. For nine straight days, we “virtually drove” across the country by zooming in all the way on Google Maps and continuously pressing the Google Maps arrow keys eastward. We broadcast the entire experience live on googlemapsroadtrip.com. This meant that folks were able to not only see and hear us as we traveled, but also join us in a real-time chat room. Just think of it as an invitation for someone to hop in the backseat and ride along with us for part of the adventure.

RD: It sounds like your interaction with Peter during the Google Maps Road Trip was similar to what travel buddies may experience on a real cross country road trip. Do you think virtual travel will become more popular?

MH: Google Maps Road Trip is very lo-fi and basic. I would love to see it be implemented in schools. You could have an American fourth grade class travel around Europe, and (time zones permitting) they could travel with European students. They could go back and forth and talk about the things that are local to them. With the accessibility of Flickr photos, YouTube, and Panoramio (Google’s photo program), you can see all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t otherwise see. You can even bring up peoples’ live broadcasts while you are traveling. So, yeah I definitely think it is the start of something.

RD: In terms of your creative process, it seems that projects like The National Dinner Tour or the Marc Horowitz Signature Series would require much more planning than something live like the virtual road trip. Do you prefer to work with a plan or broadcast live?

MH: The Dinner Tour involved a serious amount of logistical planning more than anything else. Getting places on time, setting up dinner dates, etc. And I had no help. It was just a one man army. But that was a not-for-broadcast type of project. It was more experiential. Then I did the Signature Series, which was highly planned. A lot of it was written. We had to have all of the props, the locations secured, etc. It was a different way of working for me, but I really enjoyed it. Through all of the planning, there was still a lot of room for chance because we were doing the project in public, and in that way it felt very improvisational, like my previous works.

After that, I did Talkshow 247, where I broadcast myself live for three months, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on talkshow247.com. This project about destroyed me. There was always a live audience chatting away, commenting on my every action. It made me feel like I constantly had to be entertaining an audience that wasn’t even physically there. I really just wanted to live my life, but it became addictive to look at the chat and see what the audience was saying, and then do things to make my life more exciting. I didn’t really like that. So, to answer the question, I would much rather do some more planned out projects in the future, like the Signature Series. That is the direction I want to head with these projects.

RD: What type of work do you show in galleries?

MH: I had some shows in Europe that were mostly drawings and sculptures because it is really hard to sell video art. It’s almost impossible. At some point, you have to make a product if you want to make a living as an artist, which is weird, you know? I did a show in Italy, called More Better. In it, I had made a drawing on how to make a helicopter out of a disassembled brick house and GMC truck. Really futile stuff, like a remote control bearskin rug. I made a suit of armor out of kids’ shin guards that is designed for people with a fear of sharp objects who are on a budget. Also included was The Tragedy Car Series, drawings of cars dedicated to terrible moments in history. For example, The Titanic Car. The drawings are interesting to me because I can really go way far out there, without actually having to execute these proposals. For a show I had at Nuke Gallery in Paris, I did a series called At Least You Don’t Have it This Bad. One of the drawings is a guy with circular saws for hands, and he’s trying to eat chicken McNuggets. That stuff is more fantasy-based. It’s really one big joke, they’re one liners. I like that.

RD: What are you working on now?

MH: I’m about to launch a new project called The Advice of Strangers. I’ve been working on it for about a year, but haven’t told anyone about it yet. Basically folks will be able to vote online on all my life decisions, small to large. Should I comfort the girl across from me who is crying? Do I tell my mom she should work out? Should I eat the noodle that fell on the floor that my roommate jokingly offered me? Should I start looking for a new place to live cause my landlord is an asshole? Do I move in with my girlfriend? Each decision will have a time constraint depending on the magnitude of the choice. And when the poll closes, I’ll post photo and/or video documentation of what happened as a result of the poll so people can see how their vote has effected my life.

The website for the project is www.theadviceofstrangers.com. If you are interested in participating, please check the site for the launch date.

RD: Your work certainly has a refreshingly witty appeal. Is there one last thing you would like DailyServing readers to know about you or your practice?

MH: A big component of my work is my blog, www.ineedtostopsoon.com. I am always posting fresh stuff there. Another thing that I am really into is Twitter. I’m so addicted to it. I’m using it as sort of a diary! You can follow me at www.twitter.com/marchorowitz.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

Catlin Moore selected one of Michael Tomeo‘s articles, saying “I totally love everything Michael Tomeo has written this year – he’s so hilarious! I think his writing is really poignant and engaging while also remaining (god forbid, in the art world) entertaining.”

Today I Made Nothing, Organized by Tim Saltarelli, Elizabeth Dee, New York, NY, July 27 – September 18, 2010, Installation view Courtesy Elizabeth Dee, New York

On the heels of our week-long themed series 7 Days of Myth and Summer of Utopia, DailyServing is proud to bring you a collection of writings that explore the use of rebellion in contemporary art in this week’s series Rise of Rebellion. In this latest week-long series, our writers will explore the ways in which contemporary artists are using rebellion as a central concept in their artwork through exclusive interviews, articles, essays and daily features. Check in each day to examine the rebel that lives in all of us.

Today we begin our investigation into rebellion with Jobs Suck and Art Rules: Today I Made Nothing at Elizabeth Dee by Michael Tomeo.

I’m so over jobs right now. Sure, we need them, we’re thankful for the paycheck and it’s fun to hang out with coworkers (sometimes), but let’s face it, jobs blow. While the total freedom associated with making art seems antithetical to the 9 to 5 slog, there are definite correlations between art and work and they are given form in the impeccably timed Today I Made Nothing at Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

Virginia Overton, Untitled (chairs with lights), 2009, chairs, light fixture, ratchet strap, Dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

There are two types of workplace rebellion on view here. In one, the artist is an outsider, fighting for equal rights and clashing against the system. Works like Alejandro Cesarco’s Why Work?, Duncan Campbell’s Factories Act 1961, and Jonathan Monk’s The Sound of Music (A Record With the Sound Of Its Own Making), each use techniques and ideas from the 1960s and ‘70s such as appropriation and institutional critique. Vaguely recalling the efforts of the late-60s collectives such as the Art Workers Coalition, these works feel a bit dated, but they lend the show a historic scope.

Joseph Strau, title forthcoming, 2010, mixed media installation with floor lamp and two paintings, dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

Another group of artists is more successfully subversive. Mika Tajima, Renée Green, Joseph Strau and Virginia Overton each use the visual vocabulary of today’s corporate world as if they are involved in a diabolical inside job. Overton’s Untitled (chairs with lights) reconfigures mordant institutional design to create what is ostensibly a badass floor lamp/sculpture. Joseph Strau’s title forthcoming, presents two dainty abstractions with a lamp in front of them, as if Franz West were the display manager at IKEA. Mika Tajima’s A Facility Based on Change, an impenetrable work cubicle, updates the underlying claustrophobia in minimal sculpture for the middle management set. Renée Green’s banners take on the look of corporate brainstorming lists in what she calls Space Poems. They’re funny, off-putting and deceptively smart. In a room full of works attempting to challenge the boundaries of what art is, these might take the cake.

Renée Green, United Space of Conditioned Becoming: Space Poem #1, From My Institution Corporation Factory Blackberry Cellphone Mouth To Yours, 2007, double-sided color banner 42 x 32 inches (106.7 x 81.3 cm), Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

It’s a sign of progress that, in a show about working, women have the strongest presence. However, other forms of advancement prove more difficult to measure. In the ‘60s, artists protested museums at a level unheard of today. As rebellious as this show portends to be, many of the artists on view are up and coming museum stars in their own right. Museums have begun to absorb rebellion as part of their aesthetic and they increasingly embrace and reward all forms of institutional critique and artist manipulation. By welcoming more acts of critique into their halls, they glean the benefit of appearing like nurturing patrons, but they also anesthetize any sense of real rebellion. We still have a long way to go, but Today I Made Nothing is an excellent place to start the conversation.

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Sha Najak selected the interview between Babak Golkar and Sasha Lee, saying “the works are unique and I’ve never seen contemporary Islamic art portrayed in the way he did it. Golkar said in his interview that the ability he’s noticed about himself is the part where he can see things and compare and contrast them, to examine their relationship. I liked the simplicity of his purpose.”

Babak Golkar is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice, at its fundamental roots, takes aim to deconstruct, recontextualize and rearrange our perceptions of the world around us. Like Zen koans, Golkar’s work seems to arrive at new understandings by setting up impossible questions. At it’s core is a spirit of unbridled philosophical investigation; one that exhibits a Duchampian twist on the visual pun mixed with a Gestalt sense of multistability and reification. Golkar’s work understands both the destructive and regenerative aspects of perspective and shifting visions; and fundamentally contests the fixity of subject and object and space. And, like his work, Golkar’s visual language maneuvers between seemingly oppositional realms–East and West, politics and revolution, Modernity and antiquity, Minimalism and ornament—ultimately exposing not the dialectical relationship between polarities, but rather the poeticism in the world around us.

Sasha M. Lee: I wanted to begin with your series “Negotiating Space,” in which you use Nomadic Persian Carpets as a kind of architectural support, transforming its geometric twists and turns into rough blueprints for gleaming, white, three-dimensional models, rising from the woven geometric patterns. I thought the title and the conceptual framework of the work, for me, was actually a poetic way to summarize many of the themes that run through your work. Can you talk about how these forms interact, and why you chose to juxtapose these particular forms in this manner?

Babak Golkar: I’m interested in the alchemy of the art practice…arriving at gold, metaphorically of course, some sort of proposal for new understandings, the creation of new meaning. I like the idea of a particular piece transforming from two dimensions to three dimensions; something non-existent becoming a possible structure, and the subsequent interaction between the two. I like to talk about my work in terms of “becoming,” of interdependency between these two forms. In the case of the series “Negotiating Space” I don’t like to look at the nomadic Persian carpet as the origin of the whole thing per say…but rather one visual form constantly becoming the other and vise versa.

Hence the title—I like to use titles as materials in and of themselves– it is carefully chosen to hint at a state of uncertainty, a fluid or malleable state of existence. Really, I call the works “proposals,” rather than installations or sculptures.

Even though the carpet is technically the blueprint for the architectural scale-models, the structure adds a vertical dimension, which, as you move above the piece it collapses back to carpet once again. I like to talk about this idea of 2D to 3D, and its reversal; in particular the Duchampian aspect of playing with space. I’m inspired by Duchamp’s alchemical approaches to art making. In some ways I make a reference to Duchamp, in particular his piece, 3 Standard Stoppages. Do you know that piece?

SML: I think so, it’s the piece where he sort of makes a conceptual joke out on the meter?

BG: Yes. Duchamp takes three threads, each one meter long, and drops them onto a stretched canvas. The random shapes the threads created were fashioned into new sculptures that preserved the shape of how they fell. It takes your pre-existing notions…like what is a standard meter? And transforms it to a whole new understanding, one that undermines your rational perceptions. To me, that’s alchemy.

SML: So in many ways you are using both Eastern and Western ideologies equally, but by using these seemingly oppositional ideas in congruency with another, you are able to effectively speak to both, and critique both. In setting up these proposals though for imagined spaces, that seem to confound and complicate more than rationalize and resolve, there seems to be an underlying sense of humor that evolves out of them?

BG: Yes, a sense of humor is important in looking at my works. I find it sort of culturally specific…but also, a reaction towards the rationalism of the West. I personally find rationalism boring, I much prefer poeticism.

SML: I like the idea that humor draws the viewer in. One of my favorite interviews with Chris Ofili was describing this trick as the great seduction, using beauty as a sort of tool to draw the viewer in, put them at ease, allow the mind to unlock, and then allow them to come to the more politically & culturally charged meaning and metaphors sort of organically.

BG: Yes, exactly. It sounds like something I always say, which is that many things in art can be used as a “hook,” whether it’s humor, beauty, spectacle… these hook you right off the bat, allowing for multiple levels of engagement. I think laughter is the best, as viewers are literally opening their mouth, and bodies to the work. But above all, it does put the audience at ease and welcomes them.

SML: One piece I found had a very interesting effect on spatial understanding, or this epistemological context was in the piece “From God to Malevich.” As the title suggests, you riff off Malevich’s spiritual/Suprematist ideology surrounding the cube, in particular his own iconic “Black Square;” it seems almost a play on his temporal philosophies, in particular the weightless and relative “fourth dimension,” posited in opposition to the fixity of Renaissance perspective. And of course there’s a kind of humor that emerges, a kind of Duchampian joke of being able to visually travel “around the entire cube” by way of optical illusion, while physically travelling in a straight line from left to right.

BG: There is the idea of ghost image at play with the piece “From God to Malevich,” in which case the literal and conceptual space of the piece are determined by the notion of sight and vision. As you move in a linear direction from left to right of the diptych images, which are side by side, the lenticular black polygon changes shape, creating the illusion that a black cube is moving right in front of you, hence, the viewer moving around an imaginary cube. Beyond its “visuality,” this piece has to do with Malevich’s proposal of “art for art’s sake”…. considering the idea of ridding an object of art from any external meaning. I find this quite funny to be honest, especially for such a spiritual artist as Malevich! It sort of contradicts him. So in that light, I wanted to put the most significant external meaning to this piece, God. And of course by using the image of a black cube, I am referencing the Ka’aba, the most minimalist piece of architecture in Islam, credited to Abraham for building it as a house of God. If you buy it, you can have his house in your house!

SML: So you’ve created a kind of ironic interpretation of the black cube, religion, etc through the visual trope of the parallax. I absolutely love that the philosophical implications of parallax here. The textbook definition of parallax is the apparent displacement of an object, or a way to describe how objects can appear differently when viewed from different points of vision or lines of site. But I love the concept of parallax to sort of poetically describe your practice, the whole notion of shifting visions, playing within an ocular culture, and understanding that calculating is a fluid process, often containing many shifts. You are literally avoiding a fixity of perspective with this shifting painting.

BG: This makes sense in the idea of the overlapping and the overlaying, of understanding originating and moving between multiple realms.

I’m interested in layering iconographies. I’m hoping that what this piece does is push the viewer to realize that it’s nothing, that they’re basically tricked, or at least have experienced a shift in understanding.

SML: Hegel has said that “subject and object are inherently mediated so that an epistemological shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.” In some ways you’ve elegantly “shifted” both the conceptual framework and perspective (again, literal and metaphorical of the cube. On this subject Lacan has also said, “the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its ‘blind spot,’ that which is ‘in the object more than object itself’, the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. Sure the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture.”

BG: Right now the black cube is a void: metaphorically, physically, literally, by way of the illusion that’s transposed. The idea of Ka’aba; it’s a cube and physically it’s empty, it’s nothing. And yet for these reasons it works immensely as a symbol. In that sense, this piece hopes to re-enact that, and parallel the concept that art for art’s sake in and of itself can also be nothing.

I think for me the relationship between subject and object is the driving force behind the works, it’s all about what these works are doing to the audience. I often get asked what my art means. But I’m actually interested less in my own positing of meaning into the works, but rather the moment of alchemy that occurs when somebody views the works.

Going back to the idea of parallax, by collapsing all these metaphors together, I am trying to construct a parallel between different systems of belief. Art can be a system of belief as we’ve seen; the object functions as a relic, and you fetishize it the same way you fetishize a religious relic. There is that parallel. All obsessions can be illusionary.

SML: It’s such an elegant solution to a seemingly impossible question; how do you condense multiple viewpoints into one, while at the same time exposing the shifting nature of the gaze in and of itself…how do you travel 360 degrees while only walking a straight line. What you have done crosses from the absurd to the rational, scientific and spiritual….I guess I’m curious how you came up with not just the solution to this…but also the question?

BG: Well, my first approach to the work was actually in a completely different format, though rooted in the same conceptual framework. At first, I was going to make a black cube from charcoal, by grinding charcoal down to a powder and re-casting into a mold of the cube. Then, I was going to use that as a material for drawing a cube from multiple perspectives. Then I would create a room that you entered, with all these frozen moments, and in the center of the room I would display the charcoal that was used to create the drawings.

This seemed somewhat complicated, and then I discovered the lenticular frames; it’s actually used predominantly in advertising. But it had all the elements that interest me within my work, the idea of shift, of 2D/3D, the gaze, the idea of alchemy and illusion. And so I thought fantastic, I can take 9 unique points of view and condense them into two simple paintings.

SML: In some ways, a good term may be visual puns. Or, the kind of philosophical practice of the Zen koan, in that they focus on the nature of truth, and a truth unobstructed by the oppositions or differentiations of language or view- so to come to an understanding by letting go of conceptual approaches, logic, rationality, so that new insight arises naturally.

BG:Yes- I think the idea of this visual pun is quite relevant, one that pokes at the deeper nature of things. But I always get accused of being ambitious! And I say accused, because people see these queries as something I can’t acheive or shouldn’t touch.

SML: There’s definitely something meditative, spiritually probing- it’s almost a humanist practice, in a sense, and concerned with kind of the historical, fundamental question that thinkers have tackled across the board—and that’s kind of, what’s the meaning of life or an individual in society…

BG: Yes, there’s the idea of what’s the role of us? Its a privileged situation to be conceptualizing culture, to be involved with culture on this level. I think Julian calls it a “zone of freedom.” We have this element of freedom and creative expression, but in exchange for what? What do we do with this free zone?

SML: I wanted to ask you about your work conceptualizing Western colonialist practice of representation of the East; specifically with regard to historical intermediacy in context of Said’s seminal text “Orientalism.” In particular, I’m thinking about his text on coevality, in which Eastern cultural production was placed in a non-synchronous “past,” and thus carrying a pejorative implication that Eastern artists work was submissive to a form of “critical” or conceptual prescription and thus unoriginal or decidedly non-Modern.

BG: The idea of coevality is very significant. I must say that some of my works have been looked at in that light. I have had conversations with some very well informed people in terms of contemporary art, and they have talked about my work as the kind of art that deals with “decorative” and the “ornate”, or some put it more politely and use the word “design”! This is a significant take on my work. I think it goes back to the idea of “make it exotic, or get rid of it” type of attitude. I mean, it doesn’t change anything for me or the way my work is done, but it shows that old systems are not so old after all. Imperialism and colonialism are very relevant to our time; they have just changed their form.

SML:In some ways it amazes me though, that this sort of dialectical relationship that posits the West as the center of rational thought and contemporary, relevant cultural production, and East as being firmly rooted in a mystical, decorative, irrational past, is still being furthered, even after Said sort of called attention to this problematic Euro-centric dichotomy here. As you show in the works, actually both encompass each other and are quite literally on top of each other as far as temporality, conceptually. I mean the Nomadic Persian Carpet is a symbol of cultural production, ingenuity and artistic practice that has survived long before the Renaissance and into today- it’s an icon really.

BG: I’m particularly influenced by them [the Nomadic Persian Carpet makers]…they are hugely modern, displaying an early reductivism and abstraction. These concepts have been there for centuries, and Modernists, not only have they looked at these cultures, but they have also heavily borrowed from them. Bauhaus artists and architects alike had looked at them. There are records of Gropius and Breuer, doing projects in Iran for example, Le Corbusier designing the Olympique Stadium in Baghdad. They must have looked at the context very carefully and studied the Eastern cultures. More importantly, I think, the works of the textile artists at the Bauhaus, like Anni Albers, Alma Buscher and Gunta Stölzl, not only were quiet directly linked to the patterns of the nomadic rugs, but also very significant in the development of the Bauhaus and the forms that came out of it. But as usual, you never hear about the women of the Bauhaus! What a surprise! I wonder if Said’s coevality concept is relevant to this situation too, women making textile!

Bauhaus aside, there’s a real story of ingenuity with the patterns in the nomadic carpets. It’s a fact that they developed the geometric patterns this way because they couldn’t compete with the more established carpet makers, the floral Kashan, Tabriz or Esfahan carpets, and they didn’t have the luxury of time and space to develop those things in months. The nomads had to move really quickly, and so they came up with their own expression, with the geometric shapes; floral patterns reduced to geometric shapes, to their “essence.” That’s exactly what Modernists did! They had to part away with the pre-existing accepted traditions, so economically they had to part away, and logically this was the step that they took.

SML:This is the ultimate irony; that many Modernist expressions that were being touted as novel, innovative, avant-garde and fundamentally Modern, where actually concepts that had been in movement and in use in other cultures before. So not only did they steal the forms, somehow they managed to deny ever borrowing from these outside sources, and then on top of it all, construct a philosophy that essentially framed their cultural production as being archaic, irrational, of the past and essentially not relevant. It’s interesting how they sort of got away with it. How is an African mask, with all its symbolism and geometric abstraction, use of pattern, shape and reductivism an anonymous relic that belongs in a natural history museum, while that same mask, painted and reappropriated by Picasso, becomes an icon of Modernist expression, the author and artist is firmly acknowledged, and it’s placed in the trope of the museum to reinforce the hierarchy.

BG: They don’t get treated the same way, and this really needs to be looked at institutionally and looked at critically. This was my line of thinking with the series “Impositions,” where I literally bleach and paint over a Persian Carpet with pure white paint, then frame it and hang it on the wall. I figure, if they don’t deserve to be looked at institutionally okay fine, I’ll paint them over. Fuck it! If they’re not worth looking at it, then let’s give them something that they think is worth looking at: a Monochrome. In the end though, the pattern still peeks through the paint.

SML:The process you underwent in this piece though, poetically, seems like it became an integral part of the final work’s meaning; I personally can’t help but imagine it as a kind of furious battle between polarized visual languages- minimalism and the decorative arts, etc. What’s nice is the final outcome encompasses both a kind of reductive and constructive aesthetic; a work of wavering Minimalism that could almost become a Rauschenberg, a Rothko, or even the infamous Ad Reinhardt black painting, forged from the ashes of the carpet. Of course the irony is that your piece is almost a comical expose on the limitations of removing all external reference from a work. “Impositions” seems to make the point of the sheer impossibility to obliterate context. It’s almost like Duchamp’s mustache on the Mona Lisa piece, a work that slyly questions the canon that came before.

BG: I was quite conscious of what I was doing. This piece is in line with those types of works, of Duchamp’s defacing of Mona Lisa and Rauschenberg erasing the drawing by de Kooning. It’s all vulgar gestures. But, for me it goes beyond the gesture, it’s more about the culture that here is being used as a material. In a way, “Impositions” operate exactly in reversal of those works. It just uses the same language.

SML:It’s quite a transgressive act, really- but I like to think the carpet had the last laugh as no matter how hard you tried, you really couldn’t remove all traces of its existence.

BG: Yes, the carpet had the last laugh, though it’s sort of a too little too late kind of thing. Funny thing; once it is defaced and enters the realm of contemporary art, the value of the carpet is multiplied in fact by being ruined.

SML: There’s something really backwards about that.

BG: Yes it’s sort of sickening, but this is something that I am working on, as far as expanding the understanding of both the work and the issues at hand.

You have to hear this story about a city called Baghdad in Northern California. A friend of mine was researching satellite cities, I believe, and got a permission to go and visit this site. Baghdad, CA is a massive piece of land restricted to a section of the US army, but I believe a private security firm runs it. The idea came from a private contractor- who was a Hollywood producer and now the director of the site. The army used to train soldiers through simulations similar to video games; remote offense. But when they began to face the insurgents, they found that when they took a step back, really in situ one-on-one negotiation, and simulacra such as these to train personnel worked best. Basically, the California site is a reconstruction of parts of Baghdad and is built as a training camp for one-on-one situations to train the army personnel. The funny thing is, they have Iraqi people there, imported from Iraq straight to this camp. They speak Arabic and interact as if they are back home. It’s fucked up. That’s besides my point, the point I was going to make is that when my friend went to clear everything at the office of the director of the camp, there was this Iraqi military outfit hanging on his wall. When the director walked in he proudly said that the outfit was Saddam’s personal uniform. He said his buddy brought it back as a gift when they first invaded Bagdad and raided Saddam’s palace. Isn’t that fucked up? So, not much has changed…

SML:Wow, that’s insane…but in some ways this ties into the layers of meaning; I mean this site-specific simulacra, of imposing one structure, one culture on the land of another ties into your idea of reverse recontextualization, right? Or this bizarre kind of cultural schizophrenia. I mean the premise that you can cut and paste a culture is kind of absurdist.

BG: Exactly, I consider my work “performative” and what I often perform through the works is what I like to call: “performing systems.” Sort of reconstructing what already exists, but by recontextualizing it in the realm of art, there is a chance for rethinking it. This one instance with the story is not unique. Is there much difference between Baghdad, CA and the city of Dubai? In the sense of imposition? Cultural and political impositions happen constantly, but the question is, are there any opportunities for negotiation?

SML:That’s interesting, it’s such a nice metaphor for the kind of physical disruptions you create, the notion of the trophy, cultural impositions, in particular with the aforementioned use of the carpets. There’s something undeniably bizarre ….

BG: And uncanny, I believe. With these works there is a sense of familiarity because of the objects I use, yet there are put together in a way, which creates estrangement. I think that shift is important…

SML:Within your works, it seems that there is a kind of tentative equal reverence…and irreverence towards the idioms, the ocular culture of the West, Modernism…all these expressions you approach with a kind of schizophrenic adulation and adversity?

BG: I do want to say yes… when was the last time anything like that was publically disclosed or even practiced? We’ve become so cynical and so rejective of anything that is considered an inspiration like Modernism. You have to kind of keep a distance….even if you are infatuated by the ideas. I’ve never admitted that, but I think there is truth to that. Becoming an institution is next to impossible though Beuys and Duchamp, figures like them did it. There are potentials and possibilities. For Beuys, also the idea of reconciliation is huge, the idea of healing as opposed to dealing…approaching real issues…through art. I guess there could be a slight sense of purity to it. But, that can come across as a naïve thing to say.

SML:Your work still, at a deeper level create physical disruptions to both the Modernism and perceptions of the East. By straddling the middle and using these tropes you sort of use one to call the other into question, and vice versa. It’s a beautiful kind of jiu jitsu really, to pair the two to complicate understandings of both.

BG: I think one of the very few talents that I have is the ability to compare and contrast things, putting things against one another to examine their relationship. Not only do I enjoy the process, but also I firmly believe that there is a potential in it for creating art, and subsequently new meaning.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

Michelle Schultz selected an article by Lindsay Pichaske, saying “while it is exhilarating to find a new artist, there is a wonderful nostalgia in rediscovering a familiar favourite – Brian Jungen, for me, is one of the poignant, significant, challenging artists coming out of North America, whose work poetically tackles issues of colonial identity, commodification and consumer culture – all while bringing a smile to my face.”

Strange Comfort, Brian Jungen‘s exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), is as delightful as it is disquieting. Jungen, who is part Northwest American Indian, transforms objects of American consumption into relics of tribal culture. The result is transcendent hybrids that raise questions about the relationship between art, culture and commodity.

Six pieces from the Prototype for New Understanding series greet viewers entering the exhibit. While these pieces appear to be authentic tribal headdresses displayed under glass vitrines, it is soon revealed that they are in fact made of Nike Air Jordans. Because of this material transformation, the sculptures are in a state of constant becoming—at once creatures, masks, animals, shoes, and fantastical hybrids. There is a confusion of body parts as plushy shoe openings become eyes, rubber-tipped toes become mouths, and thick fabric tongues become beaks. The reassigning of parts designed for the anatomy of a foot to fit the anatomy of a face is as grotesque as it is wonderful.

Jungen ironically critiques the way marginalized cultures have been pillaged for their goods by Western colonialists. He attacks commodity by making a triple-commodity—tribal relic, Nike shoes, and marketable art object. Jungen brings us further into his natural history museum of commodities with Shapeshifter, a huge whale skeleton made of white plastic chairs.

Side by side, the chairs become the sleek vertebrae and ribs of this immense animal. Suspended several feet above its platform, the whale’s shadows are haunting and give it the believability of an extinct, magnificent sea creature. Its empty body and ghostly shadows play foil to the recognizable lawn chairs that are its bones, for as much as we believe that this creature was once living in a faraway time, we know that it is part of our vernacular existence.

Questioning our own knowledge, we wonder if this whale could have really existed, or is it a made up version of Western history?

The context of the NMAI lends another layer to Jungen’s work. We are invited to view his sculptures as more than art. In this context, they become American Indian artifacts. By marrying seeming opposites, consumer and tribal cultures, Jungen proves that the treasures that fill the NMAI are not merely relics of a faraway past—they are the thoughtful products of a people that are part of contemporary society. This assimilation into mainstream commodity culture, for better or worse, perhaps provides a “strange comfort,” for both seekers of these treasures, and also the people to whom they belong.

Brian Jungen’s Strange Comfort is on view October 16, 2009–August 8, 2010 at the NMAI on the National Mall, Washington, DC.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

This article written by Bean Gilsdorf was selected by Michael Tomeo.

Paul Chan, The laws are my whores (2009). Suite of nine drawings, charcoal on paper, 39.5 x 27.5 inches each.

Today, Bean Gilsdorf looks at some of the artists that have broken the art world’s mold in her latest article Rebellion, Four Ways, as a continuation of our week-long series Rise of Rebellion.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a fellow artist. “I’m thirty years old,” she said, “and I’ve never really rebelled.” We talked about what rebellion means; it turns out that while I was imagining the traditional route of sex/drugs/rock-n-roll, she had something tamer in mind: “I was thinking about not bathing for a while.” I admit that I laughed out loud.

She and I were both thinking about social nonconformity in general, yet there are forms of revolt more specific to art and its milieu. True rebellion is a personal action, a stance to take against the machination of a system whether overt or hidden. When people talk about “the art world” they refer specifically to the capitalist market-driven system of exchange that takes place in the slim area of overlap between makers, dealers, and buyers. It’s a system of production and consumption like many others that relies on indoctrination, social pressure, and buy-in to a set of assumptions. In order to succeed in this world artists must play the game and follow the rules—all very insidious in a field that is purported to be about freedom and expression. Winners learn to play well and are rewarded for running within the confines of the maze and pressing the lever at the end. But the “art world” is not art, and never should the two be confused. Below are some of the tacit rules of the art world and the iconoclasts who break them. Consider this food for thought.

Paul Chan, Oh why so serious? (2008). Plastic and electronics, computer keyboard, 3.25 x 18.5 x 8 inches.

Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot (2007). Performance view, South Ward, New Orleans.

1.) Make all your work recognizable. A body of work is consistent and easily identified.

You’re a brand, and if you want to sell you need to make your brand instantly recognizable—just like a Louis Vuitton handbag or an Apple computer. Tell that to Paul Chan, the 37 year-old auteur of videos, sculpture, drawings, paintings, light projections, computer fonts, and the co-stager of five site-specific performances of “Waiting for Godot” in post-Katrina New Orleans. There is no “recognizable” here, no direct sense of continuity from show to show or even piece to piece; if you didn’t read the wall label you might not know who made the work. There is only a joy of making; freedom of expression, indeed.

Cady Noland, SLA #4 (1990). Silkscreen on aluminum, edition 4/4, 78 3/8 x 60 5/8 x 3/8 inches.

2.) Promote your brand incessantly: lectures, residencies, studio visits, and visiting-professor gigs will help you advance.

It’s true that for most artists there is a social context to the work: after all, if no one knows what you make, how will they know if they like it or not? But is it true that one must exploit every connection, every opportunity, every possible avenue for social growth to create a career in the arts? Ask Cady Noland…oh, but you can’t. The reclusive artist won’t answer your email and won’t work with you if you she doesn’t trust you. Despite her many successes, Noland dropped out of the art world; self-promotion is not a game that she plays. In a 1994 review of Noland’s work, critic David Bussel wrote with keen prescience, “Anyone can be made into a hero or villain because minor celebrity is just another disposable object of mass consumption.” Despite Noland’s reticence to engage with the public, her work continues to be in demand.

Dana Schutz, Blind Foot Massage (2009). Oil and acrylic on canvas, 36.25 x 34 inches.

3.) Hit the big time: get rich, develop a waiting list, and hire a cadre of laborers to keep up with the demand.

(Bonus points if your laborers live in “developing” countries and you make this part of your schtick.) This is the model proposed by Andy Warhol and adopted by Jeff Koons. Some, like Kehinde Wiley and Takeshi Murakami, even make it an overt part of their practice to manage a hive of workers. In the overheated atmosphere of the art world, it’s easy to think that the artist who doesn’t meet the production quota dictated by collectors is a species of failure. It is said that Dana Schutz makes all her own paintings (unconfirmed by her gallery at the time of this publication), waiting list be damned. For an artist of her stature to do so is a very passionate and hopeful gesture, proof that rebellion isn’t always some kind of adolescent sneer: sometimes it’s just sticking to one’s principles.

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, (2010). Performance at MOMA, New York.

4.) Be famous, get old, drop out.

You’ve got enough money, and maybe university tenure. This is the time to take it easy: make work that just repeats your best years ad nauseum, or even stop working altogether. Disproving this are John Baldessari and Marina Abramović, who continue to work hard and push beyond previous limits. Baldessari is 79 years old; in the last five years he designed the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art, had strong new work at his show at Sprüth Magers (Berlin) earlier this year, and currently has a long-overdue retrospective, Pure Beauty, at LACMA. Abramović, now 64, describes herself as “the grandmother of performance art.” Performing The Artist is Present this past spring at MOMA, she asserted the right and privilege of the artist to continue to explore her own work, to mine it and delve ever-deeper into unknown territory. This is the benefit of utilizing a lifetime of knowledge, growth, and experience to make innovative art. May we all be so blessed.

But, we want to hear from you! Send us your favorite articles to info@dailyserving.com this week, and tell us why you love it. If chosen, your selected post and your comment will also publish as part of our Best of 2010.

Magdalen Chua selected Bean Gilsdorf‘s interview with Ted Purves from our series Summer of Utopia, saying “it’s hard to choose a favorite article, but I enjoyed reading the interview by Bean Gilsdorf with Ted Purves. I admire the way Ted Purves has thought about his process and intentions for producing work which, in today’s context, seems formulaic, and also his immense contribution to discussion on social change and art. ”

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

Today, DailyServing continues our 7-day summer series, Summer of Utopia, where we investigate seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Full disclosure: Ted Purves was the first person I met at the California College of the Arts and—despite the fact that I don’t work in relational aesthetics—one of the reasons I decided to apply to their graduate program. He is the editor of the seminal book What We Want Is Free and founder of the country’s first MFA in Social Practice. Last week he took some time to discuss utopia, democracy, morality, and the success of the projects he creates with his partner Susanne Cockrell.

Bean Gilsdorf: I listened to your interview at Bad At Sports and you said, “I’m not a utopian in any way” and that intrigued me. Tell me how you’re not a utopian, working in social practice.

Ted Purves: Let’s think about what the utopian project is: generally, to design a coherent social system that satisfies all basic needs. Thomas More created this very intense class structure, and utopia saw to the needs of the upper and middle classes. It’s really horrifying, utopia, because it’s the idea of agreement about what a perfect society is. We don’t live in times of agreement or tribal identity or singular religious identity. We live in a situation of disagreement and negotiation. I’m much more interested in the notion of democracy rather than the notion of utopia, because it allows for the possibility of negotiation and change and alteration. Democracy is about the peaceful negotiation of disagreement.

BG: Has that come up in your work, like the Temescal Amity Works, that feeling of negotiating disagreement? Where has that come in for you guys?

TP: I wouldn’t say that we’ve actively looked at disagreement in our projects. We’ve been working from another starting point: the position of economies in people’s lives and how exchange functions. Even though we tend to think of ourselves as living in this highly capitalist market economy, we actually live within several different economic systems all at the same time. Getting paid and going shopping is participating in a larger capital economy, but giving a friend a lift to the store is a different, casual kind of economy. Not all of our relationships are of cliency and payment. We are interested in the way people are negotiating between competing or overlapping economies within their own lives, and creating a way to see that there are different ways to view your own personal economy. For instance, the projects about sharing fruit were about getting people to think about latent caloric energy that’s growing in the neighborhood, free of charge, at the same time that people are going out to stores to maintain their bodily lives. It’s getting people to see that we’re living in one system where we’re working to get money to buy calories when, yet, there’s another production of calories that’s going on…

BG: …aside from that, parallel with that…

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

TP: …yeah, right under our noses, that’s not being used. And how do you create a project that illuminates this other kind of economy? One project I admire is The Blue House project. It’s a really interesting counter-utopian project because it’s about creating a space for unplanning, a space for ongoing negotiation and debate in a highly planned suburb—even though the idea of that suburb wasn’t necessarily to be a utopia. I think there is a utopian interest in most kinds of civic planning because they are based on the idea that there is a perfect fix or a mostly-perfect decision to make about how you apportion resources, how you set up where people are going to live, what people need, and what’s going to make them happy.

BG: There seems to be a kind of benevolence that underlies a lot of these projects, and I wonder if you guys think about that explicitly in your work. Does morality enter into this at all?

TP: I don’t know if morality does because from our “negotiation-and-disagreement” mindset, morality is another sort of thing that is always going to be disparate among people, so it’s always going to be a negotiated space. We’re interested in working with the public and in public spaces to learn what people think and how people perceive public space around them. We start a lot of these because we don’t know everything about a situation and we’re curious about it, and we are interested in creating opportunities for research and dialogue with people.

BG: So you start with a question?

TP: Exactly. Temescal Amity Works started with questions: What is the history of the neighborhood that so many fruit trees were planted here? How do we negotiate the idea of the developed economy of the neighborhood? And that’s given way to a larger set of questions that we’re thinking about: how does the social imagination continue to drive people’s decisions, beliefs, lifestyle choices? What kinds of social imaginaries regarding the rural inhabit the minds of people in cities?

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery, San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art (2008).

BG: When do you feel a project is successful? What makes you go home and high-five each other at the end of the day?

TP: I feel like a project is successful if we have had substantive encounters with people, if we have created spaces where a kind of exchange—whether it’s family history, or talking about why something should or shouldn’t be in an art museum, or sometimes it’s just swapping recipes—some form of animated or engaged dialogue comes out, or some sort of story emerges. It means we learn something, a story can be brought forward from that, that’s when things are successful. Another high-five moment comes when there is something compelling to look at. A lot of times when you see a social practice show, it’s either a room full of crap to read, or it looks like a place where they had a party and you didn’t get to go. I’ve been to a lot of those, and they’re not satisfying! You either wish they had just printed a book you could take home and read in your own chair—because it’s not very comfortable to sit in a museum—or you wish that you’d been at the party. When we did Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery we had hundreds of jars of lemons on this table, and it was beautiful.

BG: It sounds like bringing aesthetics back into it is important.

TP: Yes, certainly when there’s a material expectation for it to be art. [Lemon Everlasting] was great for us, because it got to be beautiful-looking, but it also got to do something; two things were happening in the same space. It occupied the institution and it challenged the institution in ways that were playful, functional and aesthetically critical. Aesthetics are important. Obviously some artists don’t think this way. They can just go in and do straight up exercises, and by the rules of the game that’s art too, but for us there’s got to be something else, a twist, a different way of seeing. We’re working in public space, so we need to challenge public expectations, a kind of weirdness, wrongness, whatever that might be.

BG: Do you think of projects as iterative? Would you want to restage that project, or do something similar someplace else? Or have the questions been answered and now you can move on to other questions that have been formed by the outcome?

TP: That’s a great question. I think it depends from project to project. I would definitely say that you never answer all the questions. The new thing we’ve been working on is this ongoing newspaper project, The Meadow Network. We structured it in a specific way because a thing like Temescal Amity Works was such a Herculean effort that you don’t want to do it again! We created TMN so that there was an option to have a repeatable form that could grow on itself, so that we wouldn’t have to reinvent an entire project every single time… That only half answers the question: I think it is good to have some projects or programs that are sort of open-ended but able to be temporarily concluded, because some questions don’t go away.