Satomi Shirai, “Breakfast” (2007) (via Arario Gallery) (click to enlarge)

The postcard for “Irrelevant”

Last week, a show titled Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian opened at Arario Gallery’s New York branch. The South Korean gallery has a mission to exhibit Asian art but their latest exhibition, which includes nearly fifty artists and it is curated by Joann Kim and Lesley Sheng, seems more interested in changing New Yorkers’ perception of what Asian art is or could be than anything else.

Don’t expect your typical Asian fare, which the press release makes clear:

You will not find paintings about the Cultural Revolution or Mao Zedong that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You will not find manga-infused characters performing acts of hypersexuality nor will you find decorative miniature drawings with motifs embedded within a specific cultural history.

After a curious description like that I set out to talk to curator Joann Kim about the parameters of her show and what we can expect from a visit.

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Hello Kitty (left) getting no love from curator Joann Kim (right).

Hrag Vartanian: So, what do you have against Hello Kitty?

Joann Kim: She’s cuter and more generically consumable than I am. We also had a big falling out when Keroppi came to town and confessed he was looking for someone more “animated” and ran off with Hello Kitty. Also, she symbolizes all that is twisted and cruel in the underpit of sexually repressed Asian culture.

HV: So, we shouldn’t expect art in the show to address the sex trade, geishas or the whole “ping pong balls being shot out of the vagina” thing?

JK: No bukaki, no octopus arms gushing through open orifices. However, there IS a decapitated deer head, urination, nipple pinching, self-gorging, rotten bread squares, and various other aesthetic mindfucking creations.

HV: You sound like an angry Asian. What gives?

JK: Asians are by nature a cruel race (according to a quote from a movie I can’t now remember). We’re emotionally and psychologically stifled, our outlets are what come out of demented sex fetishes and hyper-realized cutedom. The Angry Little Girl in me comes out from a cultural ambivalence from Asians towards stereotypes and an unwillingness (or inability) to create a relevant identity that doesn’t pathetically adhere to American expectations.

Kikuko Tanaka, “A Tragic Bambi: Mother’s Tears” (2009 - Present) (courtesy Arario Gallery) (click to enlarge)

This may sound vague but I swear somewhere in my head it makes sense, this direct link to the art market and how folks fetishized contemporary Asian art during the market’s boom and bought anything related to the Cultural Revolution or had the stamp of a Chinese imported painting. It was frivolous and incestuous, this obsession that was so short lived, arbitrary and meaningless. Then the market crashed and no one cares about Asian art anymore.

Irrelevant is a sidetracked response to that, a mocking of what sprouted from this weak trend, and a highlighting of what occurred outside of this small community of know-nothings blossoming in this city, beneath the high towers of the neurotic art world. The artists in the show reveal their race whilst dismissing it, showcasing works that may not end up in the pages of a Christie’s auction catalogue but will leave the slightest dent within art history as a whole. I sound like a blinded idealizer but I swear, it all makes sense to me.

HV: How are you defining Asian?

JK: Majority of the artists in the show are of Japanese, Korean, Chinese descent. It was easy to find them according to their last names in art registries. There are also artists of Pacific Island and Central Asian backgrounds. We even have a few mixed Asians in there.

HV: What did the artists think of the concept for the show? Were they relieved? Confused?

Pixy Liao, “Intimacy will improve your relationship” (2007) (courtesy ArarioNewYork.com)

JK: They thought it brilliant of course. Seriously, they were excited to participate and found it a relief to not be scapegoated as an Asian artist, precisely by being scapegoated as an Asian artist, who doesn’t make work about being Asian or doesn’t make work about being scapegoated as an Asian artist.

There were also participating artist who found it slightly offensive to make an invitation card with the back of their heads to the camera because it might come off as defeating and “giving in” to the whole idea of what we’re “fighting against” with the show. Others thought it hysterical and was happy to contribute.

HV: Tell me about 3 people we should we excited to see in the show?

JK: Kikuko Tanaka’s performance July 29th titled “Tragic Bambi: A Mother’s Tears,” Tattfoo Tan’s urban agriculture and environmentalism infused social sculptures, and Yijun Liao’s photograph series Experimental Relationships.

HV: Any surprises curating this show? Did any major themes emerge?

JK: My only surprise was how good the works actually ended up being. And how themes emerged from these random searches for Asian artists who don’t make work about being Asian. Themes that found it’s way to the show is as quoted in the press release:

What you’ll find is a surging flow of creativity where artists actively engage in their practice, exploring the absurd within everyday experience, the use and misuse of materials both new and found, and the curiosity of defining artistic practice. Food and consumption is considered within an urban agricultural environment, and social interaction is taken out of norm and reenacted in refreshing alternative ways. Pictured narratives gear toward a dark and isolated realm and obsession is the source behind abstracted images.

Irrelevant continues at Arario Gallery (521 W 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) until August 6. It features work by Seong Min Ahn, Shin Young An, Sophia Chai, Louis Chan, Karen Chan, Rona Chang, Gigi Chen, Yoon Cho, Micah Ganske, Hyoungsun Ha, Geujin Han, Takashi Horisaki, Jane V Hsu, Hidenori Ishii, Hong Seon Jang, Kyoung Eun Kang, Heige Kim, Seung Ae Kim, Nancy Kim, Hein Koh, Shizuka Kusayanagi, Amy Fung-yi Lee & Caroline Jung-ah Park, JaeEun Lee, Sinae Lee, Soo Im Lee, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, Yijun Liao, Juri Morioka, Tadashi Moriyama, Joel Morrison, Dominic Neitz, Christian Nguyen, Asuka Osawa, Eung Ho Park, Youngna Park, Jung Eun Park, R&D, Ruijun Shen, Satomi Shirai, Hidemi Takagi, Tattfoo Tan, Kikuko Tanaka, Jason Tomme, Mai Ueda, Kako Ueda, InJoo Whang, Wenjie Yang, Mika Yokobori, Yejin Yoo, Jayoung Yoon, Seldon Yuan

A view of Jennifer Dalton’s “What Are We Not Shutting Up About? (Five Months of Status Updates and Responses from Jerry Saltz's Facebook Page)” (2010) (via Jennifer Dalton’s Facebook profile) … better photos to follow

Now that Jerry Saltz has proven himself — yet again — to be an attention whore with his role on the Work of Art reality TV show, I’m starting to like him more … yes, I love a car crash. (I’m complex, I know.) And just when we were all jonesing for another fix of “What is crazy uncle Jerry going to do next?” Artist Jennifer Dalton is opening a show today at the Flag Art Foundation called Making Sense, which is an:

… attempt to make sense of Artforum’s yearly “Best of” roundup of shows and events, the New Yorker magazine’s representation of artists, and New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz’s incredibly popular Facebook page.

Detail of Dalton’s “What Are We Not Shutting Up About? (Five Months of Status Updates and Responses from Jerry Saltz's Facebook Page)” (2010) (click to enlarge)

Sure, some of us have moved onto curator Dan Cameron’s Facebook profile — he recently mentioned that he spent the holiday weekend going through his personal papers from the 1980s & 90s, which are about to be handed over to the Archives of American Art … JUICY!!! – but I still lament what I call the golden age (ok, maybe tin) of Saltz’s Facebook profile and its rough-and-tumble typos, ALL CAPS TIRADES, and non sequiturs … oh, Jerry. Where have you gone? Oh right, you unfriended me and I stopped reading. Nevermind.

But alas, I still care for you Saltz, ok, maybe worry is the right word. And now that artist Jennifer Dalton has resurrected what were probably intended to be ephemeral posts, she has — in essence — written your biography, kinda.

Some other facts about Dalton’s Saltz project (via an email from the Winkleman Gallery, which represents her):

She analyzed the period from January 1, 2010 through May 31, 2010 … color-coded all Jerry’s posts by subject topic so one can see which topics tended to generate the most responses and the most “likes.” The two posts that went through the roof with over 800 responses were on two of the more “bland” seeming subject topics: “old dead artists” (a post on Picasso’s auction sale) and “art in general” (a post on the best artists’ names).

There were over 155,000 words published in response to Jerry’s posts during this time. From the five months of comments, Jen then concentrated on January’s approximately 20,000 words and a few of the things she gleaned from them were that:

• more men than women posted responses
• the word “disagree” is used nine times more often than the word “agree”
• five of Jerry’s “friends” post almost 20% of all the responses

So, now that Dalton has a Ph.D. in Saltz I couldn’t resist interviewing her about the latest C-list reality TV celebrity and what looks like a fascinating exhibition that travels down the rabbit hole of New York’s art world wonderland.

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Hrag Vartanian: Why is the online art world so obsessed with Jerry Saltz?

“What Are We Not Shutting Up About? (Five Months of Status Updates and Responses from Jerry Saltz’s Facebook Page)” (Detail - Photo of Printed Facebook Pages) (via Jennifer Dalton’s Facebook page)

Jennifer Dalton: I think my friend Gina Magid said it best when I was trying to figure out this piece in my studio a couple of months ago. I wrote down what she said and pinned it on my studio wall, because it rang so true: “Artists are fairly desperate to hear from someone else who thinks what we’re all doing is important.” Jerry Saltz makes himself very accessible, and he makes it clear that he values what artists — and not just famous artists — do and think.

HV: Are you suggesting that Saltz’s Facebook page is dominated by artists desperate for attention?

JD: Nice bait! But no I don’t think so. Jerry Saltz cares about about what artists and others around him *think*, and none of us gets that very often. That’s not really the same thing as wanting “attention.” Or, perhaps I should say it’s a very specific kind of attention, and it’s not just from Jerry but also from the other members of the community he’s created. I think what people crave is dialogue and community, and Saltz’s page has become a mecca for that.

HV: Did all the data you amassed reveal any surprises?

JD: Yes, I was surprised that some of the most popular discussions were on on topics that did not seem to be “hot button” ones. There were 845 responses on a post in which Jerry Saltz asked what are some of the best artists’ names. In some other ways I was less surprised. Responders were more likely to disagree than to agree with other posters, and more likely to agree than to disagree with Jerry Saltz himself. And during the month of January 2010, which I analyzed in the most depth, the top five responders generated 18.5% of the responses.

HV: But isn’t some of this a form of “inside baseball?” Meaning, what is the importance of this in the bigger scheme of art and your work. What was it about this topic that intrigued you?

JD: Sure it is “inside baseball.” But like other microcosms it can be seen as having wider implications and meanings for the culture as a whole. Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page is a community of colleagues and competitors, supportive, and antagonistic alternately, or sometimes at the same time. I am fascinated by it as an archive of conversations and emotions that ebb and flow, flare-up and smooth over.

For the purposes of this work I was only able to dig deep into the posts for a five month period (January – May 2010), but when I looked back that far and further Saltz’s Facebook page is an amazing record of events in both art and the larger culture and an archive of what was being argued about at the time. Reading those discussions of the very recent past makes me feel like an archaeologist of contemporary history. We forget so quickly what was a really really big deal a year and a half ago. One thing that has always driven my work is my own obsession with figuring out to what extent what I think is true is really true. I tend to say, “Is it just me or are my impressions all wrong? What’s happening here and what does it mean?” and then I want to go somewhere I can count things up and categorize them to try to figure it out.

HV: Do you participate in the conversations on Saltz’s profile wall?

JD: I have occasionally, but I don’t very often. I am guilty of being a major lurker on online forums. I read them all the time but I am very shy in certain ways so when I post something first of all it takes me an hour to compose even if it’s just a couple of sentences, and then I lose the next few hours watching to see if people respond to what I wrote. So I have a hard time participating very often because it takes up my whole day!

Installation view of Jennifer Dalton’s “Making Sense” at the Flag Art Foundation (via JenniferDalton.com) (click to enlarge)

HV: Who do you think is the ideal audience for your recent show? What kind of response do you expect?

JD: I make work for the same reason I think many artists do, which is that we hope for other people to see the world in the same way we do so we might feel less alone. In terms of my ideal audience, I can’t really profile who that would be. People who are interested in issues around contemporary art will perhaps get the most out of this piece we’ve been talking about, but there are other works in the show that focus on our culture as a whole. “What Does An Artist Look Like?” shows every photograph of all different types of artists, from actors to designers to writers, that appeared in the New Yorker magazine in the years 1999 and 2009, and ranks each photograph on my own made-up scale from “genius” to “pinup” (that seeming to me to be the axis of representation of artists in mainstream culture). I always just hope to get other people interested in the same things that I can’t stop obsessing about.

Making Sense is on view at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea (545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor) until September 10, 2010.

The suicide of Chinese tech workers inspired these street sculptures. (via Xylo.me) (click to enlarge)

Yesterday, I received an email from street artist Xylo who has started mounting fake iPhones to walls in London. The cement objects look quite realistic in the photos and they are surfaced by black and white paintings that depict suicides, which Xylo says, is in reference to the recent news stories about the shocking suicides at a Chinese electronics factory.

It should be noted that China generally has a very high suicide rate, but this story directly ties the shocking incidents to devices that people in affluent societies use everyday, and that association makes the facts feel more powerful.

He pointed me to the online post that prompted his response, which includes this passage:

The Shenzhen plant in Guangdong province houses 400,000 workers, making products from iPhones and iPads to PlayStations for international brands like Apple, Sony, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Analysts estimate that about 70 percent of Apple’s products are manufactured there.

Most of the 13 workers who tried to kill themselves [since January] jumped from buildings because they were unable to bear the stress, alienation and humiliation they experience daily.

Xylo’s visual response is a combination of curious and skillful. He has taken something that most people have a positive association with and revealed a more sinister side to state-of-the-art technology. He seems intent on making electronics consumers realize that their buying power impacts people around the world. As an iPhone user myself I found the images quite disturbing, and they evoke a very real feeling visual association I didn’t have when I first read the reports about the suicides last week.

Xylo, who has been creating street art for a few years but still hesitates to call himself an artist since it the “term feels a bit pretentious and elitist somehow when I apply it to myself, plus I don’t sell the things I make, so it’s not a profession,” answered some of my questions via email about his latest fake iPhone series.

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Crafted out of fine cement, these fake iPhones are designed to raise awareness in the streets of London. (via xylo.me) (click to enlarge)

Hrag: Why are you concerned about the death of electronic workers?

Xylo: When I saw the news reports about this wave of suicides I felt very disturbed about the militaristic prison camp type conditions and abuse these workers have to endure. It feels like a hidden dystopian nightmare has been created that contrasts sharply with the affluent consumers I see every day in London staring vacantly into their phone screens, seemingly oblivious to the suffering embodied in the devices they have increasingly become slavish to.

Shortly after this I then saw a much greater amount of news coverage of people queuing overnight to buy the latest versions of these items and upon having made their purchase and exiting the store some were even punching the air and repeatedly kissing the box that contained the phone in a triumphalist act of devotion. I was shocked by the skewed sense of priorities that appeared to be in effect and felt a strong sense of injustice that made me decide to attempt to redress the balance in whatever small way I could.

Another street piece by Xylo (via xylo.me)

H: Are your street sculptures designed to influence people’s relationship to electronics?

X: I’d hope they will make some of them consider the choices they make regarding the social and environmental implications of all the products they use, whether electronic or not.

H: Tell me about how you crafted these. They look like pretty realistic sculptures, but they’re casted, aren’t they? What are they made off?

X: I made a mould of an iPhone and then cast them using a smooth cement type mixture that I concocted myself. Once they’d dried I then painted the pictures and other details onto them by hand.

One of Xylo’s earlier posters mashes up 9/11 and the London skyline. (via xylo.me) (click to enlarge)

H: How many have you put up and any idea how people are reacting to them?

X: I’ve only just started putting them up in the last few days, The reactions I’ve encountered so far have mostly been quite perplexed. It seems that hardly anyone here has even heard about the suicides and maltreatment of the workers, as it didn’t really seem to be a priority for the media.

Someone said to me that they had interpreted the depicted suicide victim as being the phone user. I found this to be an interesting way of looking at it, especially considering a recently published scientific report which concluded that the proliferation of technology has made people more isolated and lonely.

H: Why use stark black and white graphics on the faces of the iPhones?

X: As the subject matter is so psychologically dark, a bright color scheme might have seemed joyful, and therefore somewhat inappropriate in the circumstances.

H: What do you think is the role of street art?

X: I think it offers a very necessary arena of expression free from the constraints of commerce, and has an important role to play in providing a physical manifestation of dissent. This in turn then makes people feel slightly more liberated by it’s presence, perhaps looking on it as something essential to the human spirit which defies an increasingly sinister type of sanitization and control of public space.

On a more personal level, I’ve found that making it can help lessen feelings of alienation and powerlessness that arise due to various negative aspects of society. Hopefully through the use of street art to highlight some of these issues people will become more aware of the need for change and thus form a critical mass of consciousness to overcome inertia.

Dread Scott’s arrest during his protest flag burning in defiance of the Flag Protection Act in 1989. Photo via DreadScott.net

Happy Fourth of July! — because no matter where you are or how you feel about the state of politics in the United States, you can at least celebrate the fourth of this month, which marks American Independence Day and the 234th anniversary of the approval of the final draft of the Declaration of Independence.

In recognition of this occasion, I interviewed artist Dread Scott, whose work is directly engaged in challenging public perception of and reactions to US politics and history.

His 1988 piece “What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?” resulted in a landmark Supreme Court case, ultimately coming out in favor of protecting “flag desecration” as freedom of expression, although there have been numerous attempts to pass legislation and constitutional amendments banning desecration of the flag. In a recent performance, he criticized the financial industry by burning $250 on Wall Street — to bankers’ and passerbys’ bemusement. His works often do the difficult work of making audiences and critics alike uncomfortable, recognizing the contradictions ingrained in American culture and its culture of politics.

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Dread Scott performing “I Am Not a Man” (2009) in Harlem (photo via dreadscott.net) (click to enlarge)

Janelle Grace: Where does your desire to engage come from? How do you sustain that motivation for conflict?

Dread Scott: The world as it is is intolerable and it doesn’t have to be this way. Wars of plunder and occupation; oil spills wiping out whole ecosystems and devastating many people who depended upon them; youth killing each over nothing and with no future at all under this system; immigrants criminalized; women afraid to walk the streets at night and unsafe in their own homes; fundamentalism on the rise; and people terrorized and shamed because of who they love.

This system is horrible and it all this horror is unnecessary. So my desire to engage starts from recognizing all of this and wanting to contribute to humanity getting to a whole new era. As for conflict, I don’t actually have a desire for conflict. I have a desire to make powerful work about a world that is profoundly polarized. And if you do that people are bound to have strong opinions about the work and some of those will want to see it suppressed and keep it from finding a wide audience.

JG: The American Flag and US currency are treated as inherent symbols of the country — the language and legal issues around them, the flag especially, suggests that a person is literally burning the country if they are to burn either. Your work directly challenges those symbols and raises questions about the role and potential limitations of dissent in an American context. What do you think about the history and state of dissent and the US’s relationship to freedom of expression today — either in general or within the contexts of your work and the legal issues around it?

DS: There is not nearly enough dissent in this country, or for that matter the world as a whole. There are many courageous people who find ways to resist and there are many important dissident voices in the arts. And this dissent is often met with repression. But I believe that the main thing that is stifling dissent is not repression or threats to freedom of expression but rather that far too many people continue to place their hope in this government and this system. Many are opposed to the war in Iraq, they don’t like the mass foreclosures and the greatest transfer of wealth from Black people in the modern era, they are deeply troubled by the oil spill … but they think that this government or this or that politician or some law will somehow resolve these problems in a way that they would like. And the bitter truth is that this system stands above the people and the elected officials don’t work for us. Stopping the crimes of this system will take a movement of millions from below.

As for challenging symbols, I think that this is very important and my work often does that. Burning money on Wall Street, a symbol of capitalism, and US capitalism in particular, points to the absurdity of a system based on profit and shines a light on the profound polarization of wealth in the world. I hope that this performance helps people reflect on this. And because this was resonating with people and challenging a taboo, police moved in to stop the performance. This system can “burn” hundreds of billions of dollars and steal people houses and this is all legal. My burning $250, an infinitesimal sum by comparison, ends up with a citation and a day in court.

Dread Scott during his “Money to Burn” (2010) performance (photo via Heart as Arena)

JG: How do you feel about nationalism in general, what benefits and disservices and purposes does it serve?

DS: These are big questions and I feel that a real answer would take several pages which would be inappropriate here. That said, briefly, nationalism for and in imperialist countries is a real problem. Should people support the invasions and occupations and ugly national chauvinism? Or the “sealing the southern border” and all the racism (and defense of land stolen from Mexico) that this is founded upon? Ultimately, I think that humanity needs to get beyond nations, but how to do that and what roll national liberation struggles can play in that and how nationalism of oppressed people should be viewed would require a blog for that topic alone, so we’ll leave that for another time.

JG: What are your goals — in terms of how the government frames theses issues, and how the public reacts or takes action around these issues?

DS: I don’t have a goal for how this government frames these questions. What I care about is how people look at the world. Whether they are increasingly able to confront it as it is and imagine how it could be radically different and far better. And whether they take joy in the work and are inspired, even when experiencing and thinking about difficult topics.

JG: What legacy do you expect your work to have? (versus what do you want it to have?)

DS: I don’t know. There isn’t a lot of critical writing about my work. However my work is often discussed in mainstream newspapers and on TV and in radio. So it is a bit unclear what legacy my work will have. That said, if people think that my work is important and is looking at significant questions and is formally innovative, then I hope that they would write about it and contribute to more people now and in the future knowing about the work.

JG: Why do you think there’s a lack of criticism about your work?

Dread Scott, “Imagine a World Without America” (nd) (via dreadscott.net)

DS: I think that the limited amount of critical writing around my work is the result of two things. The first is that taken as a whole my work is about revolution and humanity getting to a radically different and far better world. This perspective is not what most people in the arts and society more broadly are thinking about most of the time. And related to this it is sometimes dismissed as “political art” or put in categories where people think they get what the work is but don’t really end up engaging it because it is not how other artists they are familiar with are approaching related questions. And beyond this my work is challenging and it makes some people uncomfortable. This is fine and absolutely necessary for the art but I suspect it is a bit off-putting to some writers. The other reason for the lack of critical engagement is the same problem most artists face. There’s a lot of art out there and not all of it is going to be the subject focus in the arts. So part of it is just luck and timing and perhaps that will change.

JG: How do you feel about the Art World or art world today? What artists are you excited about? Who do you draw inspiration or influence from?

DS: There is a lot of good work being made today and the arts is one area in this society where there are a lot of critical thinking, dissenting voices, and inspiring ideas. That said, I wouldn’t say that dissent in the arts is the dominant thing going on. A lot of it is really boring and not compelling and some is actually fucked up. Volta NY (one of the major art fairs) this year had several misogynist works by several artist and even some really racist art, which was surprising. I’m influenced by many things, music and movies, particle physics and cutting edge Marxist theory. As for artists, I’m excited by, I think William Pope L, Cai Guo-Qiang, Kyle Goen, Jenny Polak, Hank Willis Thomas, and Waafa Bilal, are all doing great work. I really liked the Abramović show.

JG: What do you think about the ways the American public discusses or celebrates the country/its freedoms or symbols thereof/etc?

DS: Frederick Douglass gave a very good speech on July 5, 1852 — “What to the Slave is your 4th of July.” This speech is still very relevant and is well worth reading. Sure the barbecue is tasty and fireworks are nice, but what this holiday is about is celebrating a country that was founded on genocide and slavery and is now an imperialist superpower. It plunders the planet and gives a comparatively high standard of living to some and allows a little bit of room to make minor criticism. America uses predator drones to kill Afghan children as they sleep. It imprisons 10% of young Black men and its police murder and terrorize people in staggering numbers. America’s so-called freedoms are nothing to celebrate. Quoting Douglass:

Go where you may, search  where you will, roam through all the monarchies, and despotism, of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me that for revolting barbarity, and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without rival.

A view of Anita Glesta’s landscape intervention at the US Federal Census Building. (photo by Sacha Lecca) (click to enlarge)

In 2004, Brooklyn-based artist Anita Glesta was commissioned by the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program to create a permanent seven-acre landscape intervention at a cost of $500,000 for the Census Bureau Headquarters Building in Suitland, Maryland. Six years in the making, on July 12 Glesta will inaugurate her artistic meditation on the idea of counting and numeric order with a global perspective.

Sketches by Anita Glesta for the numeric aspects of her “Census Project” (2010) (via the artist) (click to enlarge)

“I like to create a kind of environment … where people feel like they are participants in this environment. So, very often they include a participatory touch or feel or something that includes the viewer to transform just the observation of a visual art into something that’s larger than that,” she explains. Glesta says that her public works often have an educational aspect, which informs people about art and this one is no different.

“I’ve never worked with data, per se, but I do work with history and memory,” she says about the work’s artistic foundations. “I’ve addressed the notion of census and what that has meant for humans on this planet, all the way back to Sumerians and the Romans … people were always using the census to count their crops, count each other, or know who is crossing their borders. So, my only way of addressing this is not in terms of data but using numerical symbols that represent the history of humans and particularly the ethnic diversity of this country.”

A view of some of the figures in Glesta’s “Census Project,” including the disappearing figures. (photo by Sacha Lecca) (click to enlarge)

In addition to the more widely known numeric systems of the Arabs, Sumerians, Ethiopians, Mayans, Persians and others, Glesta made a point of incorporating Native American numeric traditions, which are not widely known to the American public. The Native Americans, Glesta explains, often used phrases that also meant other things. For instance, the Zuni people of the New Mexico region used the term “hai” for both the number three and the phrase “equally dividing one.” Glesta played up these metaphoric possibilities for numbers and their meanings. Her research into the census in America also uncovered some fascinating stories that she used as inspiration for her work. One case from the 1800s involved a group of southwestern Native Americans who produced bundles of twigs for the US census workers to denote their numbers. “The Native American people gave bundles of twigs to the census takers,” she says. “Some [of the sticks] were forked in the end, and those represented the women, and some were small, and some were old. And that was their way of describing the members of the family, and I was really fascinated by this. I really questioned where those twigs and those numbers ended up going, and whether it was acknowledged at all. That had a lot of input in this work and how I was going to effect some kind of statement about what census might mean.”

A detail of “Census Project” (2010) (photo by Sacha Lecca) (click to enlarge)

She also explored the margins of personhood and being counted as part of the census by including figures who were half there, as she describes them. These fading or emerging — depending on your perspective — people are, for Glesta, both a metaphor for the disappearing people and those who may not be counted, like the undocumented people of America. “I actually was very interested in doing this project because I felt that I had an opportunity to speak as an artist about counting the under counted in the United States, and drawing attention to who is the population of this country. So, it was really great to think about the census in a humane way and to hope … and I do believe from the sense I got from the census … that counting the people right now in 2010 can make a difference to this country … to know who are becoming the new profile of this ever-changing nation.”

As part of her project, she tried to take into account the 10,000 employees who work in the million square foot Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed Census building. Her humanizing of the space included adding benches, landscaping, and small nooks that make the area appear fun to explore. “All I can do is hope that my role as an artist can effect some kind of other thinking about census, even from the employees, who look at these symbols everyday and might think ‘gee, this is actually more than data, this is about the history of counting humans’ and ‘who are the people of this country,’” she says.

The “Census Project” (2010) is Glesta’s biggest commission to date, and she says the event is as much to familiarize the workers inside with the project as anything else. She hopes to answer their questions as to what it all means. “I think the inauguration will clarify for them that this is a user-friendly piece of art, as well as, an informative one about the history of counting,” she says. “[I was] looking at the census on a human level.”

For more photos of Glesta’s “Census Project” (2010) visit anitaglesta.com.

Left, a digital drawing of the proposed wall piece at the home of “Carol” and, right, the finished mural with its owner (photo via momoshowpalace.com) (click to enlarge)

New York street artist Momo is known for his large paper pieces typically found on or near construction site scaffolding that provide him with a large flat wooden surface to paste up his colorful creations.

His latest project took place in the unlikely town of Key West in the Florida Keys. The veteran street paster decided to work with locals on a one-on-one basis to create art works that would be integrated into their lives and bring what was normally a public piece of art into a very private domain, the home. Key West’s The Citizen newspaper described the project as “art for the masses.”

The resulting works are brash, dazzling, and luminous. They integrate a digitally informed playfulness and look back to an idealized version of Florida design as much informed by Miami Vice as South Beach deco. I interviewed Momo via email about his Key West project.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hrag Vartanian: Why did you choose Key West?

Michael and his boat adorned by Momo (via momoshowpalace.com) (click to enlarge)

Momo: Actually I came at it backwards; knowing some people there, and hence hanging around a bit, I knew of the local TSKW [The Studios of Key West] arts residency, and proposed this as a project. Key West is a fascinating place and mostly for its people. I hoped this project would get at them directly; locals might steal the show and my art could be just an excuse.

HV: How did you choose the people you created art for?

M: I arrived with a crude metric to keep things as diverse as possible, hoping for the most democratic representation. The art crowd was easy to win over, but others deserved more time, like you’d guess. My main interest was in seeing art where it doesn’t belong, so the harder won became more appealing. Usually the issue was renters not wanting to cause trouble with a landlord. I think this could be worked around with enough time, but I had just two months, so I came up short, by my reckoning. I mention in the documentation, “as a project, it’s incomplete, but as an open ended inquiry, we’ve taken one step, learned some things, and had a good time.”

HV: How much was their input important and what role did it play?

M: Residents had minimal say. I wanted to try one kind of art work against a changing context. Painting on request would be a different thing. The point here was everybody takes a chance.

The family dog enjoys Momo’s seemingly 1980s inspired tropical abstractions (via momoshowpalace.com) (click to enlarge)

HV: How was this process different from creating street art?

M: At first I thought the work should be exactly the same (size/material) as some street pieces I’ve done. But then I realized there’s lots I’d like to try, like airbrush, and painting. So I pursued the same things as ever, but let technique and level of polish grow a little too. A big drag was needing to set schedules with people, to get in and out of their houses. I’m not really gifted for that sort of thing.

HV: Were there any surprises for you in what ended up coming out? Did you find that your work adapted to the light and style of the place?

Kiernan leans against Momo’s vibrant mural (via momoshowpalace.com) (click to enlarge)

M: Surprises. Everything takes so long to do. Best compositions “violently” “oppose” the space, even indoors in a residential setting. Someone disliked a shape I was using, said it looked like a spent condom. Though I wasn’t going to cave to each resident’s whims, I made a small concession, and changed it. It really was a condom in my mind also.

I hoped my work would absorb a tropical feeling. I came across a David Hockney book in the local library, and really felt the tropical sensuality he had in his pictures. I’ve also spent most my adult life in the South, so it’s like my reserve life-thing I know, love, return for.

I’m not sure people get the project. As someone who has made “street” art for 11 years, it was exciting for me to try to fool its meaning. It seems to me there’s some fertile ground; to play with the significence, value, and place of artwork, without always needing to sell it in “street” context, for easy understanding.

It’s funny to me how the growth in interest in “street” art has locked-in a meaning for something that essentially breaks rules. Like when I first got into aerosol graffiti in the late 90s I found there were all these entrenched rules and definitions, and that seemed funny, how a group of outlaws would define themselves with new laws.

More photos of Momo’s Key West murals here.

A placeholder for Tyler Green’s new blog that will appear on Artinfo.com (via Artinfo.com)

On Tuesday, Tyler Green announced that he will be ending his 8 1/2 year stint at ArtsJournal for the mainstream art media world of Louise Blouin Media’s Artinfo and Modern Painters. The news came as a surprise to many who view Green’s online voice as a cornerstone of the indy art blogosphere. Yet the veteran art blogger — though he dislikes the label — doesn’t expect to change what he already does. When I asked him if he thought the bigger soapbox was going to change the nature of what he writes, he answered, “It’s still me. I’m not going to try to be something I’m not. Let’s wait and see. I don’t know, writers write, right?”

Starting Monday, May 17, Green will begin blogging from his new URL, blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes. He explained that his online contributions will not be edited by anyone else and joked “my grammatical mistakes will be my own.” He said that he thinks the new blog will also feature a commenting feature — which his current blog lacks — but he didn’t know if he know if he had the kind of audience, which he described as a hipster/Gawker cheeky readership, to make them must-reads. He added that he hopes that the new blog on Artinfo will also host hour-long online chats once a week.

As part of the preparation of my interview with Green I asked my Twitter and Facebook friends to suggest questions I should ask. One person asked that I ask Green if his new gig will make him feel obliged to cover more art market or auction-related news, which is par for the course for Artinfo’s daily coverage. “I will continue to ignore the things that don’t interest me. The blog is going to be what it has always been but it will be in a different place. They want what I’ve been doing … and everyone seems happy with that,” he replied.

Tyler Green (via mediabistro.com)

“How does it feel to be a complete and utter sell-out as the granddaddy of art blogging?” another Internet friend wanted me to ask Green. “It’s not clear to me how I’m selling out,” he said.

If the blog isn’t going to change — he expects to debut on Monday with the same “Weekend Links” that his readers are greeted with every week — there is more curiosity about his column for Modern Painters, which Green says, will not appear until at least the October issue.

What was curious for me was that when I originally planned to interview Green at the beginning of this year, it was in relation to a white paper he wrote entitled, “Re-thinking cultural journalism.” It is a fascinating read filled with strong statements like “arts journalism is dying — and quickly,” all backed up with evidence to prove his point, including that in 2009 only two or three US newspapers had more than one full-time art journalist, and that only five out of the top 25 major US papers have dedicated art critics on staff. I have to admit that while I knew the scope of the crisis but the way Green laid them out scared the hell of out me.

Yet, Green’s new move seems like a departure from the doom and gloom he prophesied last year, when he argued that some type of nonprofit created by a consortium of art museums and/or college or university was the only way forward, and “without the emergence of a project such as one described in these pages, art will fall further and further outside the national dialogue.”

Green doesn’t see how his new job diverges with that diagnosis, “I’m not sure how I’m charting a different course, I’m just doing what I’ve been doing for years only at Artinfo instead of at ArtsJournal.”

I asked him if his view of arts journalism and its demise has shifted at all from last year, or if he saw signs that it is accelerating or slowing down. He replied:

There’s been a continuing decline in journalism that is art inclusive at traditional commercial multitopic — if you will — journalism outlets. Obviously the advertising slump and layoffs [that came out of the recession] resulted in that decline … places are pretty much cut to the bone and cut what they could cut. It isn’t like the New York Times is going to lay-off Roberta [Smith] or a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic or the LA Times is going to get rid of Christopher Knight. We’re pretty much down to the number of traditional outlets that include art and the arts in their coverage, it’s down to about how low it’s going to get. Papers like the Washington Post or the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have eliminated their weekend arts section all together … there still isn’t a full-time arts reporter at a traditional commercial publication in Illinois, in the whole state, and there’s only one in the state of Texas. I don’t see any sign of any of that coming back.

While I would argue that it is a big change for a mainstream arts publication to hire a blogger, Green disagrees:

The stuff I do is going to be exactly the stuff I did. It’s hosted somewhere else and I’ll have more resources available to me. I’m not really sure what traditional art blogging is anyway. I don’t buy that there is a particularly separate thing called “blogging” it’s just a medium, like there isn’t a separate thing called “magazining.” Digital media enforces, or enables, depending on your point of view, what would generally be considered or historically be considered rapid changes in the way content is published, and journalism and criticism is disseminated. Hopefully, I’m not doing the same blog I did in 2004, hopefully it’s different and the content is different, I think it’s broader, more engaged with the present …

He wouldn’t disclose the nature of his contract with Louise Blouin Media or the length of the agreement but he did discuss who he thought was the imagined audience for his writing:

Me. (laughs) I like the stuff that I would like to read, I guess. People who are digitally engaged and art interested. I think for years the audience has been more arts professionals and a kind of arts enthusiast. I think that’s fine. I think that is probably who is motivated to find newsy content that is arts inclusive on the web. Compared to other journals my demographics are skewed younger. My guess, and I have no way of knowing as I have no data to support this, my strong guess is that Artinfo picks up a whole lot more people who are engaged on the commercial side [of the art world] than I get now and maybe some of them will take a look at what I do and will find it interesting and maybe they won’t.

Some tweeters react to the news that Tyler Green will be joining Artinfo and Modern Painters (click to enlarge)

I asked him what he thought of being such a lightning rod figure in the art world, specifically in New York, where his name solicits very strong opinions that range from love and hate but never apathy. “I didn’t know I did,” he said before he laughed. Come on, I prodded him, reminding him of a recent comment by Artnet critic Charlie Finch who said Green was “simply stuck in the sinkhole of its own very minor self-regard,” or Jerry Saltz, who a number of times hurled critical words his way. “I don’t wake up every day thinking about Charlie Finch and Jerry Saltz or caring all that much about what latest broadside Charlie has come up with to provoke me,” he said seemingly uninterested in talking about his detractors. “Does it ever get under your skin when people like Saltz basically call you a boring one-note geek?” I asked him, which was another question submitted to me from the Internet. “No,” he assured me.

Some of the questions I received from the online world were less than serious, but I asked them anyway.

“Do you kiss on the first date, Tyler?”

“It depends on the date,” he said.

“So, you don’t have a hard, fast rule on that?”

“No (laughs). I probably wouldn’t kiss Charlie Finch on the first date, put it that way.”

“Wow. I’m sure he’s upset to hear that,” I said.

“I’m sure he’s glad. Well then again, maybe I should work on my ‘self-regard.’”

Green has a multitude of opinions about every aspect of arts journalism and he is genuinely concerned with finding ways to integrate art back into the national consciousness. Earlier this year, his tweets to the Indianapolis and New Orleans Museums during the run up to the Super Bowl lead to a real world wager of art on the big game. It was a scenario that only Green could pull off, marrying his love of visual arts and sports. The story went viral and everyone from the godfather of blogging Jason Kottke to BBC News picked up the story. I can’t remember the last time the mainstream media seemed to be so interested in a visual art story that wasn’t centered around an art work’s value at auction or some criminal action associated with an artist.

He mentioned that there’s an interesting dichotomy at the root of the problems facing visual art in America:

Certainly there are more Americans interested in contemporary art and the art of the present now than there ever has been before. To a substantial extent the embedding, if you will, or engagement of arts institutions, museums, and schools, in the visual culture of the now is higher across the country than it ever has been. But on the other hand, that has not been reflected in places where the nation carries on its broader discourse.

So, there are more people having a more intense conversation about contemporary art than ever before but that is mostly within the self-interested art world but doesn’t get beyond that. A good example is the events of the last 18 months in Iran, where it seemed like every time I turned on CNN or NPR there was a novelist, someone who is creatively engaged from a ficitional point of view in the now, talking about events in Iran and we would never see — or at least I never saw — a visual artist included in the conversations or discussions.

I think some of that is because we don’t insist upon it and the art world is very happy talking to the art world and not being challenged by anyone else and we’re in our own little bubble and leave us alone. Which I think is unfortunate. And I think there are some critics in New York who actively promote that mindset. So I try to write from the point of view that we should want to and I want us to be included in as many conversations as possible.

Being an arts writer based in Washington, DC, makes Green unique. He admits to shying away from openings and art parties, which he dislikes. “The point of going to an opening is not to see the art and think about it, but the point of going to the opening is to be seen.” he said. He suggests there are advantages to being based in the nation’s capital, which is a far cry from his origins in Northern California, where he was born:

One of the things I enjoy about Washington is the collections and the scholarships and the permanence in the art community. A place where conservators and curators and their ideas and work are more important to the fiber of community than in other places because we’re an institutionally dominated town. Where as in New York you have hundreds of commercial galleries and it’s a commercially driven town. I absolutely prefer that.

Even if Green disagrees with my assessment that his leap to Artinfo and Modern Painters is a seismic shift for art blogging, he must know that people will be watching Modern Art Notes to see if the new association with Louise Blouin Media, or LTB Media, as it is more commonly known, will cause him to pull any punches.

Supported by the Louise T. Blouin Foundation, LTB Media is widely known as a difficult workplace. When New York Magazine profiled LTB Foundation head, Louise MacBain, back in 2006, they wrote that “Five heads of finance have left this year, and there has been near-100 percent turnover in the past eighteen months.” The reputation of LTB has some people wondering behind closed doors how long Green will last. The scenarios people — often ex-employees — paint of the office culture at LTB sometimes make it sound like an art magazine version of The Apprentice.

If Green sounds optimistic that nothing will change when he begins blogging at his new home, one thing is certain, Green will continue to be a singular voice in arts writing and we’ll all find out soon enough if the arts blogosphere can change the mainstream or if it will be the other way around.

@MuseumNerd’s avatar, which An describes as, “…a quirky icon that looked a little like Groucho glasses and a strange wig.”

One of the most popular art feeds on Twitter right now doesn’t have a name or a face or a gender. It doesn’t represent an established arts institution or magazine, nor does it have any kind of credentials. And yet, less than a year since it started, it now boasts 10,000 followers (as of yesterday), a feat helped along by making Twitter’s staff picks.

The first time I’d heard of @museumnerd, I had just given a talk about social media art at the Brooklyn Museum. Shelley Bernstein, who manages the Brooklyn Museum’s Twitter feed, sent me a direct message: “Did you see that @museumnerd was there?”

“Who?” I asked. I clicked over to the feed to find a nice note about my talk but also a quirky icon that looked a little like Groucho glasses and a strange wig.

It seemed a little odd to me. Why hide behind the cloak of anonymity? No matter — all I knew is that he or she had interesting things to say about art and museums, so I started following.

What arrived in my feed was a treasure trove of tweets celebrating museums around the world, with a focus on New York. The notes are simple and unpretentious, but surprisingly insightful and personal. A recent one from DC declared:

Art brings tears to my eyes for the second time today. Whew. This time it was Velazquez at National Gallery of Art. Nice show, NGA London!

But far more than just museums, the tweets also point to issues in contemporary art, street art, and postage stamps, and sometimes they’re even in Spanish.

“I love that @museumnerd is everywhere all the time,” said San Francisco-based artist Alexis K. Manheim, an avid @MuseumNerd follower. “He/she is not tweeting from any one museum’s perspective but about all of them, or as many as he/she can get to in a day.”

“Which is a lot,” she added.

A Trip Down Museum Lane

To learn more about how this smooth operator operates, I contacted @Museumnerd and arranged a meeting. “Wear comfortable shoes,” was the message I received, and I soon find myself standing on the corner of Broadway and Grand with my most walkable pair of boots. A mysterious figure in smart jeans and a sweater approaches, juggling a Droid smartphone, a Canon G10 camera and a nerdy but friendly smile. I know who it is immediately.

The map @MuseumNerd carried around while we toured SoHo arts institutions.

Taking a trip with @MuseumNerd around SoHo and the Village is as much a physical exercise as it was an aesthetic one. We make at least ten official stops in the course of a few hours, checking in so many times on Foursquare that we both earn an “Overshare badge.”

Our first stop is Walter De Maria’s “The Broken Kilometer” (1979), which is located on a block on West Broadway I must have passed a dozen times before.

“This is such a cool piece,” @MuseumNerd says in a half-whisper, even though we were the only ones there besides the desk attendant. “This is my first time seeing it. I’m glad, because I get depressed when I feel like I’ve been everywhere.”

Before acquiring a smartphone, @MuseumNerd used to keep a list of all the museums in New York City, complete with cross street information, so that it was possible to drop by a museum at a moments notice regardless of the neighborhood. Except for the Intrepid Museum and the Museum of Sex, @MuseumNerd claims to have visited all of them.

“If I had to have a goal, it would be to champion little-known museums,” @MuseumNerd explains as we dart past a coffee shop. “The community has to celebrate those places to get people psyched about going.”

@MuseumNerd’s view from Walter De Maria’s “Earth Room” (1977) (click to enlarge)

Indeed, each stop we make puts me in a space I’ve passed countless times before but had never heard of — the Merchant’s House Museum, the Earth Room, Mercer Street Books — and with each stop @MuseumNerd reveals how “nerd” has become an essential part of the Twitter handle.

“Where’s the dirt from?” @MuseumNerd asks the gallery attendant in Earth Room, which is a piece by Walter de Maria and is, well, a room filled with moist earth.

“There’s a guy who had to drive around for the perfect color and texture,” the attendant replies.

“I bet. There’s much more clay content here in Brooklyn. It’s more like peat.”

@MuseumNerd returns to the piece and leans against the wall while tapping away on a Droid. It’s quite a sight: a concentrated look on their face, thumbs moving furiously, the camera casually around the neck, and then a tweet:

You can actually feel it here (& smell it). Walter de Maria’s Earth Room doesn’t allow pictures. They wouldn’t be worth it anything anyway.

The tweet is sent and off we go.

Feed for Thought

Stopping for a quick snack at the taqueria near The Storefront of Art and Architecture, I ask @MuseumNerd, “What’s the drive to tweet?”

“I love museums. It’s so exciting to see so much stuff,” @MuseumNerd says between helpings of a pork taco. “And I learn the most from teaching. It sticks more when I tell people what I think, because then I get a reaction from them that makes me think about the work a little more.”

And it’s easy to ask questions. As approachable in person as online, @MuseumNerd’s natural curiosity and enthusiasm made me want to learn more too.

“It’s not just pure critical artspeak,” suggested Michigan-based artist Michael Mayer about @MuseumNerd’s Twitterfeed. “It’s a person writing about the experience of art and asking questions that can reveal a certain vulnerability that I think everyone feels at some point in the artistic experience.”

@MuseumNerd's famous Droid in the backyard of the Merchant's House Museum.

The feed began in April of 2009 like most people start Twitterfeeds: to keep in touch. But one day, on a trip through the Brooklyn Museum, @MuseumNerd noticed that iPod Touches featuring video of the artists had been mistakenly placed under the wrong artists. Tweeting about this error caught the attention of the always online attentive Brooklyn Museum staff and a conversation began.

“I was like, oh my gosh, the museum talked back to me,” @MuseumNerd remembers. “It was an incredible new way to communicate with an institution that seems so big.”

In many ways, @MuseumNerd helps personalize arts institutions that not only seem remote but actually are remote, geographically speaking. The ubiquity of the Internet means that many Twitter followers are based not only around the US but the world, and @MuseumNerd has found a way to make museums accessible to anyone.

“What @MuseumNerd is doing is fabulous,” said Francesca Merlino (@idealee), marketing manager and half of the team behind @Guggenheim. Merlino played a critical role in encouraging @MuseumNerd when the feed had just started and the follower count still numbered in the triple digits. “[The account has] created awareness and advocates for other events and exhibitions in New York and internationally that people don’t know about.”

I asked her why she thinks the feed has seen so much success: “MuseumNerd gets people excited and involved about arts and culture in the city. The feed is very specific. It doesn’t really stray off course in terms of the topic of conversation.”

A True Museum Nerd

Indeed, @MuseumNerd in person is as engaging as @MuseumNerd online. Perhaps because of the freedom granted by anonymity, @MuseumNerd can explore a visceral passion for museums and art openly and honestly. There’s no brand to maintain, no institution to represent, no academic credentials, no tenuous relationships to uphold: just a truly energizing love of art.

We pause at the gift shop and lobby of Merchant’s House Museum, which is Manhattan’s only perfectly preserved home from the 19th century. After touring the house and its nooks and crannies, @MuseumNerd strikes up a conversation with the woman collecting the entrance fee.

“I love this place,” @Museumnerd says, “You totally have to be a museum nerd to enjoy it.”

“Well, here I am,” she responds. “A true museum nerd.”

“Yeah,” says the anonymous and famous Twitterist, “so am I.”

…

I asked @MuseumNerd to compile a short list of recommended cultural institutions around the world.  Here’s what @MuseumNerd had to say:

As a true Museum Nerd, I have dozens of favorite museums in all genres, but I was asked to come up with 10, so I got out my lists and a dart board and here is a fairly random list of 10 art museums that are a bit off the beaten path or don’t get as much attention as they should. In no particular order:

City Reliquary (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) — A great favorite little museum that shows the community’s collections. The first time I went to the place they had a community member’s giant souvenir pencil collection in the front window! Quirky is an understatement when it comes to this neat little place. “Be civic!” If the Queens Museum of Art wasn’t so famous, they might have been my outer borough pick for their amazing panorama alone!

Barnes Foundation (Merion, PA) — This is a place you have to see to believe and you have to get there ASAP before it moves into Philadelphia. The bizarre Van Gogh nude alone makes it worth the trip, let alone the hundred of works you’ve seen before in art books. It looks like it’s too late to prevent the move, but it would be great if we could still “Save the Barnes!” Don’t forget to make an appointment.

Isabella Stewart Gardner (Boston, MA) — One of my all-time favorites and a quirky wonderful collection of an art-obsessed woman of means who was also a very smart art scholar. This is one of the world’s best collections in one of the most beautiful museums I’ve ever been to. The central courtyard is gorgeous. Don’t miss John Singer Sargent’s huge painting of a Spanish dancer, “El Jaleo.”

Museo Amparo (Puebla, Mexico) — I was surprised to find this amazing little contemporary art museum on a recent trip to Mexico. Mexico City has fantastic museums which could fill a list like this easily, but who knew Puebla, known for churches and Spanish colonial history, would have this awesome little gem.

Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA) — This was a toss up between the Frye and the wonderful Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington which has James Turrell’s amazing and punnily titled sky space, “Light Reign.” Ultimately I went with the Frye because it’s FREE and has wonderful contemporary art exhibitions and the best tiny gift & book shop.

Sir John Soane’s Museum (London, England) — As you can tell, I’m a fan of museums put together by one obsessed collector. This is probably my favorite museum in London. A fabulous collection including art, architecture and sculpture all in a gorgeous house. It has officially been a museum since 1837!

Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD) — Another toss up here. I wanted to go with the Walters Museum whose fabulous semi-encyclopedic permanent collection can be seen for FREE, but in the end, the Cone Sisters Collection of Modern Art, including 500 works by Matisse, overpowered me.

Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Santiago, Chile) — This is an eclectic collection of contemporary art donated by the artists in solidarity to the former Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. The building is fantastic too and includes a great outdoor sculpture garden. If you are in Chile and make it to Viña del Mar do not miss the Museo Fonck!

Hispanic Society of America (New York, NY) — Yes, I know this is technically the same city as Brooklyn, but only technically. The HSA has a world class collection in Manhattan that very few New Yorkers even know about. They have Goya’s “Duchess of Alba” and Velazquez’s “Portrait of a Little Girl” for crying out loud! Go immediately!!! Well, actually wait until they re-open after renovations on May 8th.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA) — Excellent contemporary art exhibits and just a really fun place. Its close proximity to one of my absolute favorite (but not obscure at all) museums, SFMoMA, means I almost always go to both in succession.

Now get off the computer and go to a museum!

The header of Newsgrist, which includes its slogan “where spin is art.”

Ten years is a longtime for a web-based project and Newsgrist is celebrating a decade of existence this month.

Created by artist and online maven Joy Garnett, she considers Newsgrist as “a kind of artist’s journal. It happens online, and it predates blogs, and I imagine that it can and will adapt to whatever vehicles crop up.”

What is Newsgrist? It is a compilation of links and information of interest to those in the arts. In other words, before art blogs existed there was Newsgrist.

I spoke with Garnett about her online project and how it has evolved since its inception. She assured me that, “after all these years [it] remains as close to my heart as ever.”

*  *  *

Hrag Vartanian: A decade ago the blogosphere was a pretty lonely place, wasn’t it? Why the hell did you start?

Joy Garnett: Ah! Well, Newsgrist didn’t start as a blog. In fact, I didn’t convert it to a blog until I absolutely had to, in 2004. Before that, it was a subscriber-based email “newsletter” that went out irregularly several times a week. It was funky: plain text with links.

The whole thing started as a kind of irritated joke directed at my compatriots on various listservs, which were the dominant social networking form of the moment.

HV: What do you mean, “until I absolutely had to?” And when you did make it a blog, what blogging platform did you use?

Joy Garnett

JG: The context for social discourse was changing. From about 1998 I had been vocal on a number of listservs — from unfiltered, new media art lists such as ‘Rhizome RAW’ and Wolfgang Staehle’s thingist to theory-driven filtred lists such as nettime and Jordan Crandall’s eyebeam, which started operating in the late ’90s. I speak of the days when Wolfgang’s The Thing still had its original offices in the Starrett-Lehigh building, and before Rhizome regrouped under the aegis of The New Museum.

The web was still a wild and woolly place. There was a lively, art e-list culture, as yet unhampered by spam and the commercialization of the web. Newsgrist grew out of my relationship to that space of social interaction. Ironically, it was, at first, merely a statement of personal pique with people on the lists. (Ironic because now I feel nostalgia for the lists and those people. Well, almost.) Annoyed over something or other, I put together a fake newsletter and posted it to a list where I was embroiled, instead of responding as myself. It was probably on thingist now that I think of it.

Someone, an artist, then sent me an email with “subscribe” in the subject line. And then after I posted several more such “newsletters” a few more people sent me requests to subscribe. So I registered the domain name “Newsgrist,” created a logo and started an electronic newsletter. It was not that much different, content-wise, then it is today: basically, my idea at the time was that there was so much talk — so much hot air — already on the web, why add to it? I chose instead to aggregate excerpts of various articles and chatter, to ‘curate’ them into themed broadsheets. Each one had a slightly different theme.

Later I added links to photographs that I was then taking with my new digital camera and uploaded to my server. This was a digital camera with a floppy disk drive! Later I would post announcements to events or open calls, classifieds, etc. But by around 2003, email was becoming difficult. It was hampered first by spam, and then by spam filters, which in those days tended to be very blunt instruments. I wondered whether it was time to call it a day, but several people encouraged me to keep it going by moving it over to a blog format, which I did in may 2004. I chose Typepad.

…  I thought I might dig up a ‘typical’ newsgrist for you, from it’s first volume/year.

…  Wow — I didn’t even realize my original geocities site is still there — hilarious! Check it out for its proto-blogness: http://www.geocities.com/newsgrist/home.html

HV: Looking back, what were your most popular posts?

JG: Oh, oops, sorry, I don’t really know what were the most popular posts. I don’t really care or keep track of hits all that much anymore. I do remember a huge outcry some years ago over some museum censorship of an Emily Jacir show — I scooped the story, and followed up. But it’s gone now: I accidentally deleted the blog archives once, around 2005! Trigger finger …

The main thing is, I think, that I never let the email thing go, despite the over-zealous spam filter problem; the mailing list has always been worth keeping. Now, I cut and paste a week’s worth of blog posts into a loose format and email that off. A while back I automated the mailing list, and it’s grown gradually to a modest 1,000 subscribers who range from the truly digitally challenged, to busy art museum directors, to the young striving artist.

Some people shun aggregators and still like to get it directly in their inbox, apparently. The ‘mission,’ if there is one, is to bridge those disconnected communities, hierarchies and varied digi skills/habits, somehow, all the while while still functioning for me as my personal stash of interesting stuff … that I just happen to share.

HV: Which blogs, art or otherwise, do you read? How has the changed over the years?

JG: Lately, I just seem to read all kinds of new (to me) blogs and news solely and directly through Twitter.

The fact that I’m on the road a lot has changed the way I consume info. I no longer bother with my aggregator, which generates the absurdly long, categorically indexed blogroll on Newsgrist. It’s there if I need it I suppose. I am totally enamored of techdirt.com, have been for a while. For politics this year, no one rocks my boat like balloon-juice.com. I quite like The Awl. I used to spend a lot more time with Gawker, especially when Choire Sicha was editor, but not so much anymore. I think my attention shifted reluctantly at first from listservs to blogs, and now it’s shifting again somewhat with Twitter. I’m not sure exactly where my attention is headed, or what new software apps the next wave of info-consumption will entail. I figure I’ll just roll with it.

HV: Any predictions for the next 10 years?

JG: The future is overrated. (Lolz)

*   *   *

More about Joy Garnett on Wikipedia.

Self-Portrait by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Recently I had the opportunity to speak with photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders about The Black List: Volume III, his increasingly popular documentary series on the African American It-list, which premiered February 8, 2010, on HBO.

By coopting a play on words, the project deals with African Americans gaining newfound power status through embracing a long-held negatively construed phrase of the English language. Through the years Greenfield-Sanders has focused his lens on a multitude of sources, including everyone from Jenna Jamison to Iraqi war vet amputees, but here his usual clinical and sparse sets fade into the background, giving way to his subjects’ grandiose personalities and first-hand experiences that lay before us with nothing to hide.

With A-list talent such as comedian Whoopi Goldberg, musician John Legend, Precious director Lee Daniels, and supermodel Beverly Johnson, I came into the screening fully expecting to:

1. be bored to tears at the thought of listening to celebrities and their navel gazing; or
2. to be made to feel guilty, sorry, or angry given the subject material.

Instead I walked away feeling nothing less than triumphant, for as a director and an artist, Greenfield-Sanders, along with journalist and co-producer Elvis Mitchell, has allowed his subjects to dictate the focus of the work. Their account of what it means to be black in 2010 emote joy, sadness and laughter, all combining into a melting pot of what it’s like to revel in the American dream only 145 years from the grasp of slavery.

A snapshot of Kara Walker's profile on The Black List Project website

In many aspects, the traditional contemporary art circuit is one of the more light-skinned inner sanctums, barring the country club circuit. With only a smattering of success stories in comparison to other career fields (Kara Walker, William Pope L., Martin Puryear to name a few), contemporary art still has a long journey ahead to true equality. But as I started to fully consider the project and its spotlight of race in America, I realized there, too, must be a letting go on my part. There can be no blame assigned to the fact I am white, nor Sanders, nor his subjects’ race. In fact, perhaps it’s not an institutionally based issue at all, but one of a sheer numbers game. Is this due to a conscious effort by those in authority, or are there simply less artists of color working in contemporary art, and less collectors of their work? It’s something I’m now trying to figure out myself. And as the documentary shows, analysis of issues of race cannot be owned by either side, for we all play a role in the common American experience.

Of course, I’ll never be able to share the exact feeling of triumph that Whoopi Goldberg refers to when she so succinctly states, “I love science fiction. In watching sci-fi as a kid, there was never any black people. Anything you saw in the future never had any black people ever. Ever! But Star Trek comes on the air, and then this beautiful woman … [Uhura appears]. I watched and I thought, ‘Not only are we gonna be in the future, but we gonna be fly.’” Or when Beverly Johnson says after her school swim team would compete against neighboring white schools, “They would actually drain the pool after we left.” What I can take away as a viewer from these personal accounts is shared compassion, and a renewed sense of community as we continue on a journey that is far from completing the dream of post-MLK America.

Below are some questions that Greenfield-Sanders answered in person during his screening and talk at the Paley Center for Media , and via email.

*    *   *

Olympia Lambert: Hi, Timothy. I wanted to ask you some specific art world questions. One, your subject material over the years has been very diverse, ranging from celebrities, to porn stars, to politicians. I wanted to know how you found this project, what inspired you to take it on, given your past experiences. Second part of the question, the art world is one of the final glass walls to fall, and maybe you can talk a little about that in specific — especially the current Chelsea art scene for African Americans. As a white artist, how have you related to your subjects directly?

Greenfield-Sanders: That’s five questions! [audience laughs] I had been thinking after during the course of our project, I was sort of looking for another project that would be interesting to me and I started to think about the people I knew who were black, as I thought that might be an interesting subject for me in some way. Elvis [Mitchell] and I were friends, we lived on the same block, and I thought, you know, I’ve always been very good at looking into the future. I’m somehow able to see what’s coming. And I thought it’s a fascinating group of portraits. I think it’s his [Elvis'] book, I think it’s all these things. Obviously I can’t do it alone. Elvis and I sat down to lunch, and that’s really how it developed. So we got excited about it.

And the moment I reached out to Thelma Golden, who was the director of the Studio Museum [in Harlem] and said, “Could you come sit for us? Elvis is going to interview you. I’m going to take your portrait. We don’t really know what it is exactly, but you’re going to sit in front of a plain background and you’re going to talk to the camera.” And we did that, and then Toni Morrison agreed to do it. And after we looked at these, we knew we had something gold here, just knew it was different and special.

In terms of relating to my subjects, that’s what I do as a photographer. I’m very good at meeting someone very quickly, making him or her feel comfortable, setting up that atmosphere. And that’s what Elvis does brilliantly as an interviewer. So I think the team was so perfect, really.

In terms of your question about the art world, you know, we were very excited to get Kara Walker and Lorna Simpson and people like that into the project, because as wide as we wanted to make it, the art world is still a very tough place, and those are two women who were … who’ve made it, I guess, as artists. So we were thrilled to have them.

And Lorna I were friends for many years, and Kara I knew very peripherally. But Lorna just told her to do it. [audience laughs]

*** email interview portion now below ***

OL: Racism, though not exclusive to the United States, seems to be more openly discussed here than in other countries. I was wondering if being exposed to your subjects’ stories of direct experience with racism has brought about any changes in your own thinking with stereotypes, etc.? Take, for instance, the recent Kentucky Fried Chicken advertisement controvery overseas.

G-S: I think the Kentucky Fried Chicken incident in Australia is EXACTLY in line with what Debra Lee [President and CEO of BET] discusses in The Black List: Volume Three. She talks about how networks don’t have blacks, Asians, latinos, etc., in the upper executive offices, and as a result there is no one around to say that something like, “This is inappropriate.” Same goes for ad agencies … who don’t have minority representation on a high level … to point out crap like this. Or to at least question it.

Precious Director Lee Daniels, c-print, by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

OL: I know you use large format cameras in your work. I was hoping you could tell me a bit more about how you’re embracing new technology in your work, and where you may see your future endeavors going.

G-S: I love large format and have for 30 years shot that way. That said, digital photography is amazing and I don’t reject. But at this point, while film is still around … I will continue to use it, the special lens I have and create e unique images that way. Truth is that in 10 years I probably won’t be able to get film for my 8×10 camera. (My 11×14 camera is now filmless).

OL: Lastly, I was hoping you could tell me a bit about your own views of the boundaries between fine art and commercial endeavors, especially given the continued success of the Black List project. In your opinion, is there a blending between the two with this project, or does it fall more on either side?

G-S: As an artist I have been fortunate. My portraits are viewed not only in museums and galleries but also in ads and in editorials. That’s rare. I started out taking a certain kind of portrait and stuck with it … and eventually everyone came to me for what I did. I’m not asked to shoot still life or landscapes or interiors … I don’t want to. I like taking portraits.

With The Black List Project I took portraits that I hoped would hang in museums. Fortunately, these same images were ideal for press, for use in the film, for the web, for PR, etc.

** The Black List will screen on HBO throughout the month of February. Check local listings.