January 23, 2011—August 15, 2011

Laurel Nakadate is known for her works in video, photography, and feature-length film. This is Nakadate’s first large-scale museum exhibition and will feature works made over the last ten years in all three media, including her early video works, in which she was invited into the homes of anonymous men to dance, pose, or even play dead in their kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms.

To most, the term ‘dumpster diving’ comes to mind with only enough consideration allotted to last resort preoccupations or musing the  questionable antics of an evolving freegan culture.  To the locals of Jardim Gramacho, the essence of the act comes with the urgency of everyday survival.  Lucy Walker’s recent film “Waste Land”, starring the contemporary Vik Muniz, follows the recycling lives of the towns natives in documentary style.  The film interweaves several dumpster-side chats with the catadores and Muniz’s recyclable portraiture of them.  Carol Kino’s article in The New York Times relates in lexical documentary the worlds of people like Tião Santos, who used the junkyards discarded literature to educate himself to the point of heading an organization for the catadores, and Muniz, who would find himself using the same remains for protraiture of whom the profits would benefit:

“The film, directed by Lucy Walker (“Blindsight,” “Countdown to Zero”), tracks the development of a 2008 series of monumental photographic portraits made from trash. Called “Pictures of Garbage,” they were created by Mr. Muniz in collaboration with the garbage pickers of Jardim Gramacho, a 321-acre open-air dump just outside Rio that is one of the largest landfills in Latin America.

This informal workforce — or catadores, as they are known — are the reason Brazil, with only a few municipal recycling programs, manages to reclaim a huge percentage of its trash, said Sonia Dias, the waste-picker specialist for Wiego, a global policy research group. This summer Brazil passed a law to eradicate open dumps and integrate the catadores into the recycling industry. Yet the catadores are still an underclass. The film tells the story of Mr. Muniz’s efforts to help those at Jardim Gramacho take charge of their lives, while giving them a new perspective on the world through art. …

The catadores in the film soon reveal themselves to be as personality-packed as Mr. Muniz. They include Tião Santos, president of the workers’ cooperative Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho; the scholarly Zumbi, who has educated himself by reading discarded books; Suellem, a teenage mother who has worked at Gramacho and lived in its shantytown since her childhood; and Magna, who became a catador when she and her husband fell on hard times. Though their work may be grim and dangerous, many of them seem to have a crystal clear idea of its environmental worth. And, as Magna says, “It’s better than turning tricks at Copacabana.” “

To read further about Muniz’s own progression from his past, continue with the rest of the article at The New York Times.
The official trailer for ‘Waste Land’:

In many cases, success acts as the best promotional advertisement.  It doesn’t take more than a single first-place cross country runner to initiate a spike in Nike sales, or an exemplary actor to charmingly draw in record-breaking ticket sales for Warner Bros. Pictures.  Three young gentlemen–Stuart Bury, Jeremy Casper, and Isaiah Powers–have happened upon the role of poster boys for Dragon Stop Motion.  Silver medal winner of the 37th Student Academy Awards, their six-minute short “Dried Up” exemplified the ease and efficiency of animated film now made accessible with such programs.  From “serious college and high school students” such as the three, Dragon Stop Motion and other such programs are expanding their reach to other hands: autistic children.  The user-friendly functioning now enables those deprived of expression and communication to more conveniently circumnavigate the realms of speech and writing, too laden with semantic structure and the pressure of articulation.  By sanctioning a greater threshold of ability, these new functions translate to new faculties for those barred from the freedom of self-expression.  Peter Wayner of The New York Times reviews this program in its success and outreach to Arts & Technology:

“To simulate movement and expression, animators bend or twist their objects ever so slightly between shots, a painstaking process that makes it difficult to achieve consistency from frame to frame. But now, software can help remedy that, with programs that help check the alignment of the camera and the lighting of the scene while letting the animator flip between recent images to see if the items are moving realistically.

That part of the process — synchronizing the shots — was what made it difficult for amateurs to make a good movie. “We have one really solid product, and we make it reachable for a serious college or high school student, considering the gadgets that kids have these days,” said Jamie Caliri, a stop-action film director and a founder of Dragon Stop. His co-founder and brother, Dyami, is the software programmer.

“I really enjoy putting the real tools into someone’s hands.”

“Young kids can make a film in their room and distribute it and have half a million people view it,” said Mr. Howell. “Very young kids can have huge audiences for their work. Not long ago, it was impossible to consider someone that young having access to an audience that large. Students of the art can find hundreds of stop-motion films on video-sharing sites like YouTube, many of which are constructed by children who are younger than 10.”

Mr. Howell also says that many schools, and even some medical centers, are using the software to tell stories because it lets children express themselves when traditional words fail them.

“It’s become the software of choice for working with autistic children,” said Mr. Howell. “They’re uncovering issues that they’re finding hard to talk about conventionally or by writing down, but they’re quite comfortable making a film about it.” “

See for yourself in 6 minutes and 8 seconds what technology has made possible; Bury, Casper, and Powers’ “Dried Up:”

The Thoreau in each of us has, at one time or another, been captivated by such forms of nature as a winding mass of a tree trunk or the sensuous caverns of earth-worn rock formations, intuitively feeling some relation to the rhythmic curves and empathetic hollows of these wreathing limbs.  Has Arlene Shechet pegged this intuitive connection in her own work?  The contemporary sculptor, in her recent show “The Sound of It” at Jack Shainman Gallery, kneads and carefully plies her way through and with the fleshy body of clay, later fired and glazed into the stony, aborigine forms that grow out of the space which they occupy.  Several stand pillared upon what seem like structures of avant-garde Jenga and loom with, despite their size, the authority and air of ancient totems.

“Expanding her reach into the possibilities of making sculpture with clay and glaze, Arlene Shechet articulates forms that hover between representation, abstraction, and the sublime. With her sculpture, Shechet extends the precarious by using a new coil method in which the lines of clay hold together but are barely attached.  On the verge of unraveling or in the process of being woven, they incorporate an element of drawing as well as tension into the three dimensional form.  Shown in relationship to other wheel-thrown and hand-built clay, the resulting shapes are both unidentifiable and unnameable in a palette whose colors are similarly elusive.  Falling somewhere between beauty and ugliness, elegance and clumsiness, and humor and pathos, these material but ethereal pieces have obvious emotional, psychological and philosophical associations.  Large forms: puffing and floating, leaning and extending, barely balancing; Shechet’s sculptures both embarrass and compel.”

Is the image of coated folk in white interiors, standing bemused with thumb perched under chin and index finger sprawling across the right cheek far from the mind at the mention of an art exhibit?  Stereotypes do have an origin.  The isolated experience of art-viewing has too seldom betrayed this particular one.  As the origami of art continually unfolds into something new, dexterous minds have been trying to wear down this image with new ways of integrating the audience into the art experience; not the least of these personalities, Pipilotti Rist.  Nicknamed after the gravity-defying pigtailed Pippi Longstocking, Rist is none short of the character’s defining audacious eccentricity which she channels generously into her art.  “Heroes of Birth”, her most recent exhibition, follows in the manner of her others: viewers and art become integrated into one landscape.  With kaleidoscopic neon geometries raking the walls and adapting themselves to the contours of chance persons in the line of their projection, the show makes the audience not a necessary part of the exhibition dichotomy but of the entire art experience.  ”Fellow-viewers silhouetted behind the scrims–aswim in deeply layered, peaceable torrents of sheep and geometry–make membership in humanity a great idea.”  In an age where gallery exhibited art silently pressures burgeoning ambition with the challenge of inaugurating fresh functions of art, Rist eschews these implied responsibilities.  ”Rist resolves no critical problems of contemporary art.  She just makes you forget that there are any.”  Peter Schjeldahl of The New York Times transcribes the communal experience of both the show and Rist herself:

“Rist is remarkable for having insisted on bliss throughout an era, which peaked in the nineteen-nineties, when a paarade of artists ambitiously expanded art’s physical scale and social address only to burden it, self-importantly, with theoretical arcana and political sanctimony. (Going to galleries and museums became like attending church or school.)  Today, after a subsequent spell of market-bedizened, balefully frisky seductiveness, from the likes of Jeff Koons (a gifted artist with a lot to answer for) and Damien Hirst (from whose nightmare of chipper cynicism we may finally be awakening), Pist stands out in a graver light.  Responsible as well as responsive to contemporary art’s enlarged public sphere, she maintains standards of craft and sincerity–outward discipline, inward necessity–that speak for themselves, without critical gloss or winking irony.  She is innovative but conveys no wish to be congratulated on it.  Rather, she makes advanced techniques of video and installation seem like common-sense means, as normal as pencils.”

A just-over 5-minute recap of Rist’s exhibition at the Luhring Augustine gallery:

Jean Baudrillard and the New Museum seem to be on the same wavelength conerning contemporary culture.  In the 86, 400 seconds that make up one day, how many 30-second increments of informational exposure does an individual experience?  Our relation to the world beyond ourselves is often comprised of capitalized headliners and allusive photographs; a gestalt phantasmagoria that often turns communication into a mad-libs exercise rather than a vicarious experience of the experiential spectrum that defies physics.  A single day in the cosmopolitan stratum of sociality tends to look like a Google Image Search, bearing an eclectic array of images that represent our influx experience;  our memory recall patterned “with quotations and…ellipses.”  The New Museum’s current exhibition “The Last Newspaper” vies with the myriad of media kineses to bring this fact to the fore of our mind.  Holland Cotter of The New York Times writes, in more than errant phraseology, about the exhibit’s agenda of communiqué:

“The idea behind the exhibition — print journalism as a visual and existential phenomenon — is timely, and specific enough to be addressed and illustrated through art. Is the phenomenon intrinsically ephemeral or monumental? Is it truth telling or illusion spinning? One asks the same questions of art.

One also asks: Who has the power to write the news, or make art, and by extension to create something called history? What are the similarities between newspapers and museums? To what degree are both responsible for providing social information as well as entertainment?

If the show does nothing else, it demonstrates how widely and variously newspapers have served as raw material for contemporary art, old and new. Two very different works from 1967 are the earliest here. And they point up the contradictions inherent in a medium that is all about “on the record” and about constant change.

An installation by the conceptual artist Luciano Fabro (1936-2007) consists of several open newspaper pages placed side by side on the gallery floor. Every day the pages are picked up, the floor is washed, and different pages, always from a day-old edition of a local paper, are laid down. This pattern is repeated daily for the duration of the show. The simple gesture was inspired by a domestic routine practiced by Italian housewives. In that gesture, as in Mr. Fabro’s art, news is incidental, disposable, gone.”

For more information on the specific projects that will span the durarion of the exhibit (October 6, 2010-January 9,2011), visit the New Museum’s site directly or stop in for The New York Times’s review.

Two words comprise Roland Barthes’s cherished motto: “Larvatus prodeo,” or “I go forward masked.”  The two years between his maman’s death and his own embody this, not only in waking moments but also the journal recording them.  “I seem to have a kind of ease, of control that makes people think I’m suffering less than they would have imagined.  But it comes over me when our love for each other is torn apart once again.  The most painful point at the most abstract moment…”  The very day proceeding his mother’s passing, Barthes began keeping a journal of these visceral amalgamations; a compilation of fragmentary notes which serve as individual glimpses of the maskless Barthes.  Thirty-ones years after his own passing, the notes have been composed into a literary publication in which a piecemeal portrait of the stripped Barthes may be read word by word. Dwight Garner of The New York Times recounts the “Abandonitis” that fueled Roland Barthes’s journal:

““Mourning Diary” is not his finest work, but it is his most ardent and approachable. Barthes for Beginners, cynics may label it. I prefer to think of it as something else: the literary equivalent of an acoustic recording, a welcome, belated, stripped-down addition to his oeuvre. Barthes was suspicious of language’s intended meanings; his favorite motto was “Larvatus prodeo” (“I advance pointing to my mask”). Here that mask is largely left behind.

Roland Barthes was many things, central among them, we learn here, his mama’s boy. How close were he and his mother? They lived together most of their adult lives. “I remember,” Barthes declares, “every one of her tastes, of her judgments.”…

“Mourning Diary” is a work of vigorous ego, as perhaps all good books are. It is a portrait of Barthes, a master class in filial piety if not outright matrophilia. It is hardly a portrait of his mother, about whom we learn little. Suffering, Barthes points out, “is a form of egoism.” Indeed he arrives at a clinical term for his state: “Abandonitis.””

Excerpts from the Journal can be found in The New Yorker.

For John Baldessari, however, a satiated palate seemed continually thwarted.  The Chardonnays of his oil painting days seemd fruitless, lexical Carbernet Sauvignons savored of the wrong fermentation, and the piquancy of photo montage Merlots lacked the sweet of ‘bittersweet.’  Yet the wines of his trials appear to have appropriately matured into ambrosia for his exclusive exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty.  The show speaks to several aspects of the artist’s career and life.  From early on, Baldessari met the state of art with dissatification and aimed for a literal verisimilitude of how people relate to art.  “I thought, What if you just give people what they want?  People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks” was one of various sentiments that inspired pieces such as “What This Painting Aims to Do” and “Space.”  “With the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is,” he went on to experiment with photographic pieces of intentionally less-than-amateur quality.  He remained, despite the mileage he made in his personal investigations, on the fringe of Conceptualism: “The conceptualists thought I was just doing joke art.”  With this reputation circulating, he became more recognized for his (non)teaching methods than for his art; the harbored acclaim of students such as Cindy Sherman, Barabara Kruger, and Davis Salle over their instructor further subverted that art practice that reinforced his teaching.  The moral of the story, though, may be that persistence pays off.  With global recognition and this solo exhibition at the MET, John Baldessari’s inseparable art and living finally relish of their latent flavor.  Calvin Tomkins of The New Yorker gives this artist a five-star review:

“Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations with his contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor. In L.A., he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. Most of the early works at LACMA are dated 1966-68, and some combine texts with greatly enlarged photographic images. After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work becomes more complicated and increasingly ambitious, but no less playful.”

View images of the pieces on show from October 20, 2010 through January 9, 2011 here.

John Baldessari exchanges his thoughts on art in an interview about his work:

The art universe, that is.  We’ll leave the cosmological investigations of existence to Carl Sagan, and the intergalactic tour of Abstract Expressionism to Curator Ann Tempkin.  Organizing for the MoMA’s current exhibit, Abstract Expressionist New York, Tempkin has had to peruse the museum’s holdings for the pieces that best represent the phasic developments of the movement.  The three floors of work from, but not limited to, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and Richard Pousette-Dart, speak for Abstract Expression not only as an artistic movement that challenged the then axioms of art, but also as the human disposition that lurked and haunted “lofts, apartments, and a bar or two below Fourteenth Street.”  The stellar nucelosynthesis that brought a precipitating human climate to the state of art’s topsy-turvy reincarnation is here exhibited on a grand-scale to evoke the essence that served as the origin of inspiration.  Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker tracks the growth of this galaxy from its nebulous beginnings to its polysemous supernova:

“Like a slow motion animation of the big bang, the show starts with the impacted fury of such late-Surrealist pictures by Jackson Pollock as “The She-Wolf” (1934), proceeds through the movement’s burgeoning maturities, then trails off with the lesser but still glowing efforts of second-generation artists. Along the way, photographs by Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, and others demonstrate Abstract Expressionism’s influence on the camera arts. Questions how the artists, fierce competitors all, stack up now. There are too many pieces by what might be termed major secondary figures—Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann, and Ad Reinhardt—and a lot too many by the long overrated Robert Motherwell and Adolf Gottlieb. Pleasant surprises abound in seldom seen works, including Larry Rivers at his insouciant peak: “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1953). Altogether, the event satisfyingly captures the coherence and intensity of a scene that was small in size—confined to lofts, apartments, and a bar or two below Fourteenth Street, and a colony in the Hamptons—but monumentally consequential.”

A short video about Abstract Expressionism with footage of the artists at work: