This week, from our friends at Huffington Post, we bring you an article by artist and writer Jacqueline Bishop exploring the career of art historian Amelia Jones, who has long questioned and worked to challenge existing disciminatory structures as they relate to race, gender, and identity. Bishop quotes Jones, saying “From very early on I found myself interrogating the structures of the discipline, by asking such questions as, ‘Where are the black artists? The women artists?’” This article was originally published on January 21, 2016.

“What I am trying to do in my academic life is change art discourse. I want to change the field of art history. It is time to have a new narrative and it is time to bring new, more diverse voices to the field.” So maintains Amelia Jones, the Robert A. Day Professor of Art & Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

(Image courtesy of Steve Wood)

One of the most iconic faces of the 20th century is about to be rediscovered. On May 3, lost images of pop art icon Andy Warhol will be unveiled in Manhattan for the first time in public in an exhibition sponsored by Interview Magazine, which the artist founded in 1969 . “Lost, then Found”will give viewers a never-before-seen glimpse of Warhol, circa 1981, shot by British photographer Steve Wood.

While the late Mr. Warhol is perennially popular, this week he’d be thrilled to know that he’s getting well beyond his 15 minutes. His New York pad is up for sale for $5.8 million, and his iconic Studio 54 escapades forever immortalized in photographs are on the virtual auction block on April 26 atChristie’s.

(Image courtesy of Steve Wood)

British photographer Steve Wood had spent his life in the world of photography. As one of the chief photographers of the English national paper, The Daily Express, Wood spent time on the front lines of war, in fashion shows, and found a way to document the Royal family. In the summer of 1981, he traveled to France for the American Film Festival of Deauville, which takes place every August to capitalize on the high celebrity quotient that would be in attendance. By chance he ran into his longtime friend, Elaine Kaufman, her new husband, and their friend Andy Warhol.

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Do you remember your first time you saw dry ice? Mine was in a punch bowl as part of a Halloween school dance. There was something inherently magical about the material; when I first encountered it I kept blinking, waiting for what looked like an illusion to reveal itself. Watching Judy Chicago’s revival of ‘Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment’ revives that initial excitement and gives it poetic understanding. Chicago teamed up with Materials & Applications to revive her 1968 ‘Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment’ performance, originally by Chicago, Lloyd Hamrol, and Eric Orr. The piece consisted of 25 tons of dry ice into pyramid formations that shrouded the surrounding environment in a hazy fog. At sunset, the installation was incited with road flares and left to disintegrate over the following four days until it disappeared.

Chicago described the medium of dry ice as “a metaphor for the preciousness of life.” The performance piece alters the landscape of the Santa Monica Barker Hanger, turning an airport structure into an outdoor dream laboratory in which an experiment had gone awry. The dry ice creations are a combination of architectural pyramids and apocalyptic wedding cakes. Continuing in Chicago’s language of confusing typically masculine and feminine fields, traditionally male pyrotechnic flares gave way to a pinkish rolling fog that softened and feminized the landscape. The piece was a stunning addition to the Art Los Angeles Contemporary art fair, and can be seen in all its glory in the video below:

It’s no big shocker that we are not at our finest economic hour, but John Baldessari may have stumbled upon a solution to our money woes. All this time we have been trying to make more money, when maybe we should have focused on making bigger money.

Just look at Baldessari’s new installation towering over 18th Street in New York, an $100,000 bill board entitled ‘The First $100,000 I Ever Made.’ At 25-by-75-feet, this grand-scale gravy is big enough for everyone to enjoy, in some capacity at least.

The $100,000 dollar bill was issued in a previous attempt to assuage financial hardships during the Great Depression when 42,000 were circulated. Today they are illegal, though some have been kept in the Smithsonian Museum and Federal Reserve. But big problems need big solutions! Bring back those bills and supersize them, please.

Baldessari is known for his conceptual work toying with the relationship between narrative, language and image in art. What is he saying here? Are we in a Greater Depression? Is this the final equation of art and capital? Or was the whole ‘bill board’ pun just too good to pass up? What do you think?

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The aim of the Frieze Art Fair is to create a unique destination with an atmosphere that is of cultural and commercial value. This year’s Frieze programme — curated by Sarah McCrory — included seven specially commissioned projects as well as the Emdash Award. The programme integrates a number of unique viewpoints throughout the fair that will demand a shift in viewers’ perception.

Crane.tv met with several of the artists, including Peles Empire, Laure Prouvost, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski and Emdash Award winner Anahita Razmi:

Laure Prouvost’s idiosyncratic signs had to be made up just a few days prior to the fair as a response to its architecture. Pierre Huyghe’s aquarium, a live ecosystem, hosted a specific narrative which had the effect of exchanging the chaotic bustle and bright lights of the fair for a dark contemplative space. Christian Jankowski’s project engages directly with the idea of sales and the value of luxury goods. The extravagant and functional boat which he created was available to buy not only as exactly that, but as a Christian Jankowski artwork. Peles Empire is a collaboration between Katharina Stoever and Barbara Wolff, founded in 2005. At the fair, they installed a bar that acts as a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which everything — from the reproduced room and its decorative furnishings, to the serving of the guests and taking part in the fair — was part of the work.

Anahita Razmi won this year’s Emdash Award. Her proposal was selected from amongst 579 applicants of the highest quality. Her commission highlights how Tehran’s skyline was recently used by protestors after the Iranian presidential election. Her art was deemed to embody the principles of the Emdash Foundation in an exemplary way: thought provoking, supporting new ideas, and allowing time for reflection with a focus on topicality. She uses Trisha Brown’s 1971 “Roof Piece”, which took place on 12 different rooftops over a ten-block area in downtown New York, as its point of departure.

Text by Natasha Seagrove for Crane.tv

Lucian Freud, Reflection (Self Portrait), 1985

Today’s article is brought to you from our friends at the Huffington Post, written by Edward Goldman.

The death of great cultural figures always prompts us to assess their impact on art and, ultimately, on the way we perceive ourselves. The recent death of the great painter, Lucian Freud (1922 -2011), at the age of 88, is definitely one of these occasions. Through more than six decades of his career, he stubbornly clung to the particular subject that defines his art: the human body, in all its dark glory. The artist was the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family left Germany for England in 1933, and that’s where Lucian got his education and lived all his life. Not being fond of traveling, he stayed mostly in London.

When the Metropolitan Museum, in 1993, presented an ambitious, in-depth exhibition devoted to the art of this great painter, it was not only Lucian Freud’s first museum exhibition in the United States, but it was the first retrospective the Met gave to a living artist ever. For me, it was the first encounter with the artist’s work, and I remember walking slowly, entranced by the power emanating from his paintings, with their piles of naked, often grotesque bodies. Even the portraits of somber-looking, fully-clothed people looked as if they’d been undressed by the artist’s eye and completely exposed by his brush.

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Literature supplies the concept of an unreliable narrator, whose credibility one questions or otherwise doubts in the telling of a particular story. The Orange County Museum of Art‘s 2010 California Biennial, curated by Sarah C. Bancroft, suggests that the concept can be applied to art museums as well: the idea of an unreliable curator who tells a story of California art in 2010 seems appropriate here.

Brian Dick, OC Mascot

Forget the jejune nature of some of the work in the lobby and, especially, an institutional mascot-making contraption. Forget the elementary installation determined by medium, geography, and thematic groupings that you could just as easily find with a few well-chosen search terms on Google. Focus instead on the absence on any sort of unifying theme, stance, or insight the Curator might have brought to the exhibition. The Curator wrote an essay to accompany the exhibition, of which a not-useful-at-all excerpt was made available, but the catalogue won’t be published until after the show, to accommodate some of the work created during the exhibition’s run. Fair enough, to a point.

“To capture the pulse of what’s happening in California,” as the Curator states in a YouTube video, is more of a starting-, not an end-point of the show. Indeed, we’re dying to know the pulse. Is it a death-defying 197 or a moribund 35? What about temperature, for that matter? It goes without saying that the process of creating the checklist was no little task. Indeed, the Curator made 150 visits that spanned the State, visits culled down from an “incredibly large list” that she created from personal research and recommendations from colleagues, to arrive at an exhibition of work of art by 45 emerging and mid-career artists. What exists here, though, is not what one would expect from a Curator who, having spent her ten previous years in New York and who, theoretically -hopefully – would be able to offer a fresh, outsider’s perspective – as De Tocqueville did when he visited America – on the State of the Art of the art of the state.

Andy Ralph, Reclining Lawn Chair

The show seemed more administered – “wrangling disparate practices into a coherent presentation” – than curated, more passive than engaging, moreso when she democratically states her hope that the show will present something for everyone. The experience is not so much that one is looking at a distillation of discrete, individual works of art convened, with an agenda, as that the work has been installed with a feel for branding, as happens in a supermarket; which then makes you wonder if the Museum has become a Costco emporium of branded artistic commodities, practical, to be sure, but prey to the flim-flam of advertising. There’s a lot going on in each of the galleries but without any sort of curatorial impulse as to what they all mean, collectively if not individually, the experience resembles the museum equivalent of White Noise.

Dru Donovan, Untitled

In Bambi Versus Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business, David Mamet makes a useful distinction between the circus and theatre. The circus, he writes, consists of events/tricks/performances strung together for the purpose of entertainment. You see one act, without thinking you gawk or marvel at the spectacle of the thing, and then you move on to the next act. There’s no delayed gratification because each act is separate and complete; there are no conflicts and so there are no resolutions (Just as, in another century, Marcel Duchamp said there were no solutions because there were no problems). Individual acts are sequenced; their impact is more of a sustained buzz than of an anticipated climax.

Circus acts, Mamet continues, are routined, which he defines as “optimally ordering the arbitrary,” which describes this exhibition to a tee. Drama, he writes, offers “the enjoyment of the postponement of enjoyment.” The experience of drama is one of fulfillment, because the conflicts the protagonist faces have been resolved; because we identify with the protagonist, his success or failure is our success or failure. The only identification we make here is with a Curator who describes her “voyage of discovery” without mentioning what she saw once she got there. If she got there.

Luke Butler, Landing Party II

That’s what this Biennial feels like, a circus. In setting and atmosphere, work and installation, the place feels festive, brimming with spectacle but not, I hasten to add, the potential for speculation. Most revealing – or, depending on your point of view, most damning – is the text-piece that you can’t see upon entrance because it’s over the door, and so you see it upon exit: “So, what are we going to do?” As in, “Well, that was fun, let’s go bowling.” It’s not necessarily a bad thing, the Museum as circus, the Curator as ringleader. The Museum as venue for mindless down-time, sure, why not? The implications of such a view, however, are a little more troubling.

By not articulating something qualitative about California art in 2010, this Biennial issues no challenge to the viewers and so it doesn’t answer one. Taken at face value, the exhibition comes across as glib. More worrisome, does it suggest the prospect of the deflation of the moral authority of art and the museums that exhibit it or does it reflect what is already the case?

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Jeffrey Deitch said to me as we walked through the Hopper exhibit at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporaries. “This is the place to be right now.”

A transplant myself, I especially love recent New York immigrants to Los Angeles. Their pallor is still a bit pasty and a bright sharpened halo hovers about them like static electricity. Eventually the golden light, the horizon lines and all those “superficial vapid people” start to wear them down and seep into the first layer. See them a couple months later, and they’re not only a different color, well, they’re different people.

Installation: Hopper Exhibit at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary

And then there’s Jeffrey Deitch. An energy field all by himself, he belongs to that rare breed of individuals who treats cities like their very own living room – casually rearranging furniture, redecorating, inviting people and entertaining as he pleases. Lest we forget, this is the man whose Deitch Projects produced over 250 projects in 15 years featuring contemporary artists and performers, the likes of which included everyone from Yoko Ono, Oleg Kulik, Shepard Fairey, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente to Fischerspooner, Scissor Sisters and The Voluptous Horror of Karen Black. He created the first reality TV Show about art called Art Star. His annual one day Art Parade in on West Broadway in SoHo regularly attracted 1000+ participants. Only last year with Goldman Properties he organized The Wynwood Walls, where 15 artists created 11 permanent murals throughout Miami’s Wynwood district. As the new director of MOCA, I am more curious to see how the landscape of Los Angeles and its art scene will be changed/altered/rearranged/electrified by him.

Kimberly Brooks: You have been in New York for the last thirty years. This was a dramatic move for you. Why Los Angeles? Why now?

Jeffrey Deitch: From 1940 to the present, the art world and particularly Los Angeles, has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance. First, there are the eight art schools and the artistic heritage of the city. There is a convergence of really great artists who continue to do great work, such as Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelly, Mark Bradford and Amanda Ross Ho. It is all happening so fast — there’s a lot to sort out. Right now there’s a new group of abstract artists looking at abstract expressionism in a new way. There is a lot to mine and understand. A lot of artists born from 1960 onward haven’t yet gotten their due yet.

Installation: Hopper Exhibit at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary

Installation: Hopper Exhibit at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary

KB: What inspired you to make Dennis Hopper’s work your inaugural exhibition?

JD: Dennis was still alive when we worked on his show. I knew him very well and it was obvious to me that this was his time to see the body of his work in this setting. I knew I had to seize the opportunity for him to be a part of it. Selecting Julian Schnabel to curate, a long-time friend of Dennis’ and mine, was also obvious.

KB: You were one of the first to imagine a reality television show about the art world called “Art Star”. A lot has been written about of Bravo’s recent show “Work of Art“. Did you watch the show what did you think of it?

JD: I did watch episodes of the show and liked it. Although we did it differently in that it was less like the typical reality show and the artists didn’t have to live together. When we made Art Star, hundreds of artists lined up around the block to audition. I saw the population as brimming with creative people and artists who had something to share. This led to the creation of the Art Parade which we had from 2004 until 2007, when it got rained out.

KB: When you arrived, you made a splash not only with the Hopper exhibit, but also an appearance on General Hospital with James Franco and his art project. I watched them before our interview. How did that project come about?

JD: I actually was talking with James Franco about doing an exhibit about his appearances on General Hospital well before MOCA made me the offer to be its director. In fact, we were going to relocate the entire set of General Hospital to Deitch Projects in New York as an installation. I spoke with ABC about it, but the transfer of the set and all the actors was going to be millions of dollars, more than the cost of the production of the show. Then MOCA called, and everything fell into place to stage it in Los Angeles at the [Pacific Design Center] within that context.

Jeffrey Deitch, James Franco on set at General Hospital

KB: What is it about television as a medium, combined with art, that intrigues you most.

JD: Overall, I think any opportunity to expose people to art on a mass level — to have some kid in Oklahoma say to his mother, “I want to be an artist”– is a good thing. Somewhere out there, there is the next major American artist who might not have even thought of it as an option before.

KB: What was your first reaction upon hearing that Eli Broad would be housing his museum of works right across from MOCA?

JD: I think it’s a great idea.

KB: Overall, how are you adjusting to life on the West Coast? Let me guess, you live in Hollywood and you’re driving a convertible.

I live in Los Feliz, right down the street from a handful of celebrities. I like driving. The transition has been easy. Much easier than it would be than the other way around.

John Baldessari, Pure Beauty 1966-68, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Baldessari Studio and Glenstone

1. It’s all relative, especially Beauty

I can’t imagine a more fitting title for Baldessari’s current retrospective (on view at LACMA through 12 September 2010) than Pure Beauty. The exhibition title references an early Baldessari work of the same name from 1966-68, an off-white canvas with the phrase literally painted in black, capital letters, and was explicitly selected by the artist himself. From the dawning of Greek Classicism to well beyond the Italian Renaissance, artists learned to faithfully master contrapposto, linear perspective, and the like in order to achieve the great, mythic aspiration of beauty. Room after room in the exhibition reminds the viewer of the ubiquitous, albeit trite, truth that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For example, in Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Carrots (1972), Baldessari asks two participants to impose their own aesthetic criteria upon a grouping of carrots (or green beans in the case of Choosing: Green Beans, 1971). As participants select the carrot that appeals most to them, said carrot is advanced to the next round and compared against two new carrots, and so on, and so forth. Ultimately this “faux exercise of taste,” as David Salle calls it, communicates the message that if there isn’t even consistency in scrutinizing a vegetable, how could we possibly impose a universal definition of beauty? Long-coveted, it continues to elude us.

2. The Rightness of Wrong

In 1996 art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau penned the essay “The Rightness of Wrong” (1996) which praised Baldessari’s now infamous hybrid painting/photograph Wrong (1966-68) showing the artist purposefully disregarding the “rules” of photography and positioning himself in the shadow of a giant palm tree, that seems to emanate from his head, as he stands directly facing the camera in front of an ordinary tract home. Embracing “the wrong” extends well beyond this singular work and infiltrates Baldessari’s entire oeuvre, whether it’s circumventing the essence of a portrait by obliterating the face of the sitter (Portrait: Artist’s Identity Hidden with Various Hats, 1974) or using subliminal seduction – a la the panned low-art of advertising – to sell himself in his works (Embed Series: Ice Cubes: U-BUY BAL DES SSARI, 1974). Baldessari proves time and again that it’s right to be wrong.

3. Clement Greenberg doesn’t know it all

Baldessari’s Clement Greenberg (1966-68) quotes the critic’s canonical text: “ESTHETIC JUDGMENTS ARE GIVEN AND CONTAINED IN THE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE OF ART. THEY COINCIDE WITH IT; THEY ARE NOT ARRIVED AT AFTERWARDS THROUGH REFLECTION OR THOUGHT.” I couldn’t disagree more. What sets a work apart for me is not necessarily my initial reaction or experience – though I’m not discounting works who do pack an immediate punch, as they say – but that which infiltrates the subconscious and, in the words of Baldessari, “lingers in one’s mind.” One might liken it to the fleeting passion of puppy love, often brought on in an instant, versus the staying power of a genuine friendship, earned through time and manifestation.

John Baldessari, Heel (1986). Courtesy of Museum Associates/ LACMA

4. Banal ≠ boring

Whether arranging mundane objects in his studio according to their actual height (Alignment Series: Things in My Studio (by Height), 1975), throwing a ball in the air repeatedly to try and photograph the object in the center of the frame (Aligning: balls, 1972), methodically scribbling on a sheet of paper (I will not make any more boring art, 1971), or juxtaposing a vase of flowers with the apocalyptical text “There isn’t time” (Goya Series: There isn’t Time (1997), the ordinary becomes extraordinary when manipulated by the hands (or more accurately, the mind) of Baldessari. According to John, Sol Lewitt once told him that boredom is interesting when you work through it, and Baldessari has consistently proven this to be the case during his forty-plus year career.

5. Question what is not there with as much tenacity as you question what is there

Nam June Paik once explicated to Baldessari one of the most profound, and idiosyncratic, aspects of his work, saying that what he liked best about John’s work was what he left out. For example, in his Extended Corner series, Baldessari reproduces the exact measurements of famous canvases by Parmigianino, Bruegel, and other masters, but literally whites out the entire image, save a small rectangle in the corner. All that’s left of an epic battle scene or archetypal allegory is a small foot or corner of a building or table. Why does he negate all but the most, seemingly, trivial piece of visual information? In providing his viewer with only small, carefully selected pieces of information, Baldessari creates a conundrum for which there is no solution and allows the viewer the freedom to connect the dots and draw their own conclusions.

6. Always Rise from the Ashes

Baldessari’s work is infused with the notion that art comes out of failure and destroying things. He even describes his practice as reductive – “removing things until the work is nearly dead.” There’s no greater example than his landmark performative piece Cremation Project (1970), in which he formally ended his career as a painter. First, he gathered all the paintings he’d created prior to his photo-and-text compositions (meaning everything done before 1966) – save four he’d forgotten were in his sister’s garage -and had them cremated. In an affidavit published in the San Diego Union, Baldessari formally and publicly renounced painting in favor of a hands-off, post-studio approach. The ashes of the paintings were permanently immortalized in a book-shaped urn and a memorial plaque was commissioned declaring:

JOHN ANTHONY BALDESSARI
MAY 1953 MARCH 1966

John Baldessari (centre) overseeing Cremation Project 1970, from "Somebody to Talk To," by Jessica Morgan and John Baldessari, Tate Etc., Issue 17 / Autumn 2009.

7. Reject the stranglehold of the L.A. aesthetic, and all prevailing aesthetic authorities for that matter

The only thing consistent about Baldessari’s style is his inconsistency. He perpetually oscillates between color and black-and-white, large and small scale, text and image, etc. Beyond that, he defies simplistic categorizations. Is he a photographer or a painter? A performance or video artist? An installation or land artist? Yes, yes, and yes. Baldessari systematically rejected the pervasive L.A. style, oft called “the cool school,” and likewise rejected the philosophies of New York conceptualists Joseph Kosuth and Sol Lewitt, opting instead for his own unique visual language that defies categorization, but is irrefutably John Baldessari.

8. Viewership is active, not passive

Baldessari reminds the viewer of their importance in so many subtle ways throughout the exhibition, but most notably in A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation (1966-68), whereby the canvas is transformed into a work of art simply because it has been displayed and seen. For Baldessari, a viewer has a responsibility, not to consume images passively, but really look. In one of his iconic photo-and-text pieces, he reproduces the revered artforum (an issue with a painting by Frank Stella on the cover) and juxtaposes the magazine with a confusing edict that This is not to be looked at (1968). Baldessari, ever the contrarian, spins a tangled web with this diktat. Whether it’s a play on the meaning of image vs. object (a la Magritte), a call to “read” rather than simply look, or an autobiographical reference to his own isolation from the New York art world, the diversity of meanings and narratives derived from this “simple” juxtaposition have kept critics opining for years.

9. Irreverence is always in good order, even in regards to high art

“In the beginning, I asked myself ‘What would happen if I did this?’ and the work proceeded from there,” (Baldessari in conversation with Matthew Higgs at Frieze, 2009). This statement underscores the artist’s belief that the reason kids often make the best art is because it is made without the pretension that they’re doing “art.” Perhaps that is Baldessari’s greatest talent, humility in the face of fame and success, always making art that stems from a question rather than art for art’s sake. Indeed, Baldessari’s irreverence for the sanctity of art permeates his oeuvre, whether it be negating all but a corner of a Parmigianino masterpiece, mocking the great art critic Clement Greenberg with his own words, parodying the color-field painters by “floating” large rectangular blocks of color outside the second-story window of his home (Floating: Color, 1972), or pairing Goya’s catastrophic texts from his Disasters of War series with everyday objects like a paper clip.

10. The best way to teach art is to live art

Baldessari’s roster of former students reads like a who’s who of important artists from the past 40 years: Barbara Bloom, Liz Craft, Meg Cranston, Jack Goldstein, Karl Haendel, Skylar Haskard, Elliott Hundley, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Liz Larner, Matt Mullican, Analia Saban, David Salle, and James Welling, to name a few. Stories of Baldessari’s post-studio classes, a term he first heard from Carl Andre and employed thereafter, are the stuff of legends in Los Angeles. The most often repeated description of John’s teaching style was that he treated them with respects, always thinking of them as artists, not students, and allowing them to find their own voice. Baldessari himself has said, “You can’t teach art but it might help to have really good artists around.”