Another ex-Texan, Regine Basha curated this intriguing exhibition of works made as theoretical gifts for the late Sol LeWitt. Opening on January 20, 2011 at Cabinet and January 22 at Mass MoCA, “An Exchange with Sol LeWitt” was inspired by LeWitt’s lifelong practice of exchanging art with everyone from his peers to amateurs and admirers.
For LeWitt, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual practice. In addition to encouraging the circulation of artworks through a gift economy that challenged the art world’s dominant economic model, LeWitt’s exchanges with strangers have the same qualities of generosity, and risk, that characterized his work in general. This kind of exchange was designed to stage an encounter between two minds, outside the familiar confines of friendship. – Regine Basha
Over the summer, Basha created an open call for artists to contribute works in any medium for this exhibition, which coincides with Mass MoCA’s “LeWitt Wall Drawing Retrospective.” Lookin’ good, Regine!
Paul Ramirez Jonas, Boarding Pass, 2010 (Courtesy Cabinet)
In Fall 2009, Waffle Shop (Pittsburgh, PA) hosted Visionary Ideas for this World or Another, a companion event to the exhibition I curated at Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery, 29 Chains to the Moon. For Visionary Ideas for this World or Another, participants were invited to “pitch” their radical, imaginative and plum loony ideas for improving life of on Earth or beyond. Ideas range from reducing the size of humans by 2%, to creating “a sport to unite us all” called “Consciousness Ball”– a sci-fi riff on Buckminster Fuller’s World Game. Jon Rubin just sent this edited version of the event, which took place at the spectacular setting of East Liberty Presbyterian Church. I accidentally opened the video twice, and enjoyed listening to the proposals as an asynchronous cacophony. Try it!
Click to watch video from "Visionary Ideas for this World or Another"
Aurora Picture Show, the organization I founded in Houston, Texas, sent a swell year-end appeal fake holiday form letter. Why not give a little bit, give a little bit of your money to them? You even can listen to Supertramp while you make your donation. It’ll be fun!
Tomorrow we move into our new home, “The Anchorage” in Sag Harbor, New York. Carlos and I intend to go nautical with the decor, and host a weekend get-away for artists who will read with us from Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But why did we travel 1760 miles from Houston, Texas to Sag Harbor, New York? Because I got a job at Parrish Art Museum! This is especially exciting as the Parrish broke ground this summer on their new Herzog and de Meuron-designed facility, opening in 2012. Official release about my appointment follows.
PARRISH ART MUSEUM ANNOUNCES
NEW ASSOCIATE CURATOR
ANDREA GROVERSOUTHAMPTON, NY 12/15/10—The Parrish Art Museum announces the appointment of Andrea Grover as Associate Curator. A native of Long Island, Ms. Grover will begin her position in January 2011.
Holding more than ten years of experience in media arts curating, Andrea Grover is well known for her innovative media arts exhibitions and pop-up cinema events produced as founder of the nonprofit cinema, Auora Picture Show, in Houston, Texas. In her new role at the Parrish Art Museum, Ms. Grover will initiate a series of associative public programs designed to stimulate a new kind of engagement with the museum. She will work extensively with Cara Conklin-Wingfield, Deputy Director, Education, Alicia Longwell, Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, Art and Education, and Mark Segal, Director of Adult Programs, to integrate curation, education, and local culture via workshops, readings, performances, and screenings. A major focus of her work will be to translate the Museum’s East End Stories online database into live events that will further illuminate the history and status of the region as an art colony.
“We are enormously pleased to welcome Andrea to the Parrish curatorial team,” Parrish Director Terrie Sultan said. “Andrea brings a depth and breadth of creative thinking, and a wealth of ideas on how to fully integrate special exhibitions, our East End Stories digital archive, and our world-class permanent collection within the context of a broader cultural engagement. She will make a wonderful addition to the Museum’s team.”
“As a native of Long Island, I have long admired the Parrish and am delighted to be returning to the region to serve this historic institution. It is particularly auspicious to be joining the creative staff at a moment of transformation, during the construction of the new building,” Ms. Grover said.
In addition to bringing extensive experience in media arts curating to the Parrish, Ms. Grover has extensive experience working at the intersection of art, technology, and social practice. She curated the first exhibition exploring the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in art (Phantom Captain, apexart, New York, 2006), and, with artist Jon Rubin, organized an exhibit in which worldwide participants created a photo-sharing album of their imaginings on Tehran (Never Been to Tehran, Parkingallery, Tehran, Iran, 2008). She has programmed an evening of films for Dia Art Foundation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York (Lessons in the Sky, 2009), and inaugurated a new semiannual screening series, From the Menil Film Archive, with The Menil Collection. In 2009 she curated an exhibition that continued her research into cooperation and distributed thinking across disciplines (29 Chains to the Moon, Carnegie Mellon University, Miller Gallery). She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Syracuse University and was a Core Fellow in residence at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Ms. Grover is presently a Warhol Curatorial Fellow with the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
About the Parrish Art Museum
The Parrish Art Museum is an American art museum located in Southampton, New York. Founded in 1897, the museum celebrates the artistic legacy of Long Island’s East End, one of America’s most vital creative centers. Since the mid 1950s the Museum has grown from a small village art gallery into an important art museum with a collection of more than 2,600 works of art from the nineteenth century to the present. It includes such contemporary painters and sculptors as John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Elizabeth Peyton, as well as such masters as Dan Flavin, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. The Parrish houses among of the world’s most important collections of works by the preeminent American Impressionist William Merritt Chase and by the groundbreaking post-war American realist painter Fairfield Porter. A vital cultural resource serving a diverse audience, the Parrish organizes and presents changing exhibitions and offers a dynamic schedule of creative and engaging public programs including lectures, films, performances, concerts, and studio classes for all ages. On July 19, 2010, the Parrish broke ground on a new building designed by internationally acclaimed architects Herzog & de Meuron. The 34,500-square-foot facility will triple the Museum’s current exhibition space and allow for the simultaneous presentation of loan exhibitions and installations drawn from the permanent collection.
For more information, contact Mark Segal: 631-283-2118, ext 22, segalm<<AT>>parrishart.org
Herzog & de Meuron design for new Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY
This open letter was written by Kevin Nelson in response to Thomas Kalil’s (Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology) introductory remarks at the National Science Foundation sponsored conference, “Innovation, Education and Makers” and the promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Coalition).
October 18th, 2010
Dear Mr. Kalil,
I cannot tell you how overjoyed I am that our Nation’s leaders have finally opened an intrigued eye to the blossoming Maker movement. Your speech following the Maker Faire in New York was encouraging, exciting, and promising. It put a well deserved spotlight on the achievements of garage tinkerers and hackers around the country (and let’s be honest, the world). That our leaders are paying attention to these atypical, underground activities and interested in turning them into mainstream, common American values is incredibly motivating to me as a maker.
There is, however, one facet of this movement that was overlooked in your speech, and as far as I can tell, is unfortunately overlooked everywhere STEM is championed. It is an undeniable aspect of humanity as valuable to Captain Picard as it was to Albert Einstein. It has been a driving force, technologically and economically, in the multi-billion dollar video game industry (and thus, the personal computer and home entertainment industries). It is introduced to Americans before Kindergarten, but somewhere along the path to high school, it is hopelessly abandoned as impractical and unproductive. But, it is also how we stop fragmenting ourselves into STEMs; it is how we come together to pick up STEAM for the renaissance (and yes, the ice cream was its idea).
Of course I am talking about art.
While art is a broad word that is dangerously all-encompasing (there is indeed an art to routing a circuit board, and a quite different art to designing a state machine), the art I am talking about here is fine art — that which Wikipedia defines as “developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application.” Fine art is no longer just painting on a canvas, drawing musical notes on a stave, or spinning clay into a pot. Fine art, in addition to everything it used to be, is electrical, dynamic, and algorithmic now, and to borrow from Oscar Wilde, as “quite useless” as it ever was. Take as an example, Syyn Labs‘ recent contribution to GLOW.
I wasn’t at the Maker Faire in New York, but I have been to two in San Mateo, and many of the projects I saw there not practically useful, but were quite inspiring. Many of the useful projects I did see had one thing in common with the beloved MakerBots and DIYDrones: They were based on an Arduino, the open-source microcontroller and programming environment designed by artists for everyone.
Yes, the Arduino does fall under the blanket category of Technology, but it would be naive to think that its developers were trained only as technologists and engineers. Their training in art, sociology, and community is doubtlessly and inextricably linked to the platform’s success across its diverse applications. Their desire to create something useful for artists is what drove them to simplify the user interface and lower the barrier to entry.
As I mentioned above, art also has a crucial role in the video game industry. Visual arts in video games are the reason why many of my friends own HDTVs. They are also the reason that companies like nVidia and ATi have had a thriving market in which to sell graphics cards and innovate parallel processing. By and large, people want the latest GeForce and Radeon cards for artistic reasons: they want their games to look good. It wasn’t until very recently that using these massively parallel architectures for anything else was even reasonable.
I could go on about other examples of influences of fine arts on technology, like “Daisy” and the Altair 8800, but your time is valuable, and so is mine, so I’ll cut to the point. This letter is to ask you to take a step back, have a look at the immense discrepancy between grant opportunities from the NSF and those from the NEA, and think about what we can do to pick up STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. Educating and encouraging our children to embrace artistic expression is just as important as teaching them calculus and the periodic table. Let’s encourage our engineers to design new Most Useless Machines. Let’s inspire our mathematicians to devise new mind-boggling N-dimensional fractal animations. Let’s teach our artists to write programs and draw schematics so that they might create an electronic Mona Lisa. And let’s show our children how fun and intertwined all of these fields are, so that they may form communities that flourish as they grow older and spread the joy to their children, and so on.
The train is headed in the right direction, we just need to invite everyone aboard.
Sincerely,
Kevin Nelson
Computer Engineer, Electronic Musician, Crasher
I agree, maker culture without art would be about as exciting as the STEM website.
From Frieze Magazine, “Dictionary Corner,” December 2010.
curate
n.
[origin: medieval Latin, curatus a person who has a cure or charge (of a parish), from cura: see cure noun, -ate]
1 A person holding a spiritual charge.
Gen: an ecclesiastical or spiritual pastor.
2 A member of the clergy engaged as a paid assistant or deputy to an incumbent in the Church of England or in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.
3 The priest of a Roman Catholic parish in Continental Europe. A person holding a temporal charge.
4 A curator; an overseer.
5 In Ireland: an assistant to a person selling spirits etc.
A bartender.
For further reading, here is a very concise etymology of the word “curate,” The Curate and the Curator, by Erin Kissane, in which she references another nice critical analysis, The Bias of the World Curating after Szeemann & Hopps, by David Levi Strauss in ArtLies:
Under the Roman Empire, the title of curator (“caretaker”) was given to officials in charge of various departments of public works: sanitation, transportation, policing. The curatores annonae were in charge of the public supplies of oil and corn. The curatores regionum were responsible for maintaining order in the fourteen regions of Rome. And the curatores aquarum took care of the aqueducts. In the Middle Ages, the role of the curator shifted to the ecclesiastical, as clergy having a spiritual cure or charge. So, one could say that the split within curating—between the management and control of public works (law) and the cure of souls (faith)—was there from the beginning. Curators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest.
On November 11, 2010, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that some of the biggest names in technology, media and fine art are coming together to support Art.sy, a Pandora Radio-type aggregator which will recommend art to users based on their “tastes.” Among the supporters and advisors to Art.sy are art collector Wendy Murdoch (wife of Rupert), art dealer Larry Gagosian, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
In an interview with Motherboard.tv, Art.sy founder Carter Cleveland stated, “We want to get people… wean them off the teat of mass production and mass consumption, back to a point where we used to be, which is appreciating original real fine art. And if you’re buying this art, you’re actually supporting a real person, you know like, a starving artist, someone who’s struggling to have a successful career.”
Wean them off the teat of mass producton? I have an intense aversion to Art.sy before it even goes live, and to existing art aggregators like www.artfacts.net, a site which ranks artists on a point system by their exhibitions and sales. This post continues on my Glasstire blog, We Have The Technology.
A precursor to Art.sy, the art aggregator Artfacts reads like NASDAQ
Like I was saying, I’m developing a thesis for an exhibition and publication about contemporary artists working at the intersection of art/science/technology, to be presented at Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon in 2011/12. I’m particularly interested in the recent shift from artist/inventor dependent on industry or academy, to independent, even rogue agent (artists conducting scientific research or technological experiments outside the framework and discourse of an institution).
Cover of "A Report on the Art and Technology Program at Los Angeles County Museum of Art" explains why women artists were not entirely happy with this program
The proliferation of artist collaborations with engineers and scientists reached a fever pitch in the late 1960s embodied in efforts like the Art and Technology Program of LACMA, Experiments in Art and Technology, and the Artist Placement Group, each which aimed to pair or place artists within scientific or industrial environments, with various intentions including to provide access to state-of-the-art technologies, scientists, engineers, manufacturing processes, or corporate culture in general. This synchronicity of these like-minded projects could be attributed to the countercultural impulses of the ’60s, a growing interest in systems theories, and a desire for artists to intervene in the industrial sector (specifically around technologies associated with warfare). As evidence of the significance of art/science/technology collaborations, two of the above mentioned programs, A&T and E.A.T., were invited to exhibit at the world’s fair Expo 70, Osaka, Japan– the theme was Progress and Harmony for Mankind.
I’ve slowly been making my way through “A Report on the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” the 397 page tome that documents LACMA’s ambitious program to place contemporary artists in residence within advanced industries (mostly in California) between 1967-1971. The entire report was put online as a free, downloadable PDF in 2008 as a result of growing requests for copies from LACMA’s archives. One of the reasons I’ve been reading it at such a leisurely pace is because the book reads like a legal deposition with documentary evidence: every correspondence and interview with an artist or a industry professional is presented in minute detail; hand-written notes, printed memos, and snapshots are included; interviews are transcribed; and winning and losing proposals are given equal time. It’s a fascinating approach to an art catalogue that more closely approximates a scientific research paper. On Friday, November 5, I had the good fortune of speaking with Maurice Tuchman, co-curator of Art & Technology, and asked him why the documentation surrounding the project was so detailed. Maurice said they wanted to create a real-time document, and to do so in a candid, objective manner. 36,000 copies of the report were printed and distributed to the museum trustees, participating sponsors, and the public. He also indicated that while E.A.T. and A&T were aware of each other (Robert Rauschenberg was a participant in both), there was no real communication about their distinct projects. He said that the marked difference between the two projects was that A&T had the goal of creating an exhibition, while E.A.T. was more theoretical and open-ended.
More on my conversation with Maurice later.
The focus of my research at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry has been artists working in scientific or technological environments during the last four decades (see Chronology of Artists in labs, tech industries, or science agencies). The mid 1960s marked an explosion of interest in cross-disciplinary projects– the paring of artists with engineers, or the placement of artists in scientific environments or industry– as exemplified by Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering, Art & Technology at LACMA, and the Artist Placement Group, all initiated in 1966. Contemporary artists working in scientific domains are heirs to the throne of these historic milestones, and have much in common with the prevailing spirit of the 1960s avant-garde. In her book Greenwich Village 1963, author Sally Banes argues that the work of the ’60s avant-garde had attributes of folk art, including the handmade & the functional, the incorporation of everyday materials, the inclusion of untrained and non-professionals in the creative process, and the refusal to participate in mainstream culture of mass production and consumption.
We call the art of traditional communities folk art– a term that implies not only function and form, but issues of training, subject matter, resources, and distribution. Folk art is embedded in the social process– it is art by the community for the community. Furthermore, it is made outside the sphere of professionalism: it need not compete in the contemporary market, and its makers are not trained toward that end. Whether this art is an object or a performance, it often appears unpolished and lively, since it is handmade and unique… What about the “tradition” forming in the Sixties artists– the avant-garde, which valued innovation over custom (the very opposite of folk art practice)? Is it possible to take folklore forms and folklore context out of their social milieu to consciously create a new American folklore from above, rather than from below?
The institutionalization of artists in scientific or technological environments never happened the way Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver had envisioned when they wrote the first statement of Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.) in 1967.
The purpose of Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. is to catalyze the inevitable involvement of industry, technology, and the arts… E.A.T. was founded on the strong belief that an industrially sponsored, effective working relationship between artists and engineers will lead to new possibilities that will benefit society as a whole.
My sense is that the practice has mostly moved outside rarified institutions and industries (the relationships were too complex and tied to capitalism and results-oriented economics), and into the hands of individuals and collectives (facilitated by networked communication which gave agency to maker culture, the open source movement, peer-to-peer sharing, crowdsourcing, etc.). From there, the types of activities exploded and yielded a variety of subtypes of Artists/Scientists/Technologists. Over the next week, I’ll fine tune this chart and add definitions, distinctions, and examples of each subtype.
Snapshot of Deskhibition-in-progress
There’s still plenty of real estate available on my desk! (See previous post about “Deskhibition” and how to submit entries.) On view are works by Dennis Nance, It’s Our Playground (Camille Le Houezec & Joey Villemont) & Jean-Nöel Reynders. (New works in transit from Amisha Gadani, Rebecca Gates, Eileen Maxson, & Your Name Here.)
After Double-Taker (Snout), Jean-Nöel Reynders. Photo: Golan Levin