Happy Holidays from Art21!
seasons greetings!
Art21 is grateful for your support of its films and education programs this year. Many thanks to all of you who hosted or attended screenings, bought DVDs or books, or made contributions to Art21’s 2007 Annual Fund.
There is still time to make a holiday gift to Art21 by donating online HERE. If you’d like to give the gift of the Art:21 series, DVDs and books can be purchased online at Shop PBS HERE.
All of us at Art21 wish you a peaceful holiday season and joyous new year! The Art21 blog will return in January. 
Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. Donations to Art21 support the production of Art21’s PBS series, multimedia and internet-based education resources, film archive, and public programs.
Gabriel Orozco at Dallas Museum of Art
The Dallas Museum of Art presently hosts an installation by Season 2 artist Gabriel Orozco. Gabriel Orozco: Inner Circles of the Wall premieres one of his sculptural installations from 1999. Orozco, who uses multiple media including installation, photography, video and sculpture, has a keen interest in geometry. The exhibition highlights the circle motif that recurs throughout the artist’s work in both literal and compositional forms.
Orozco is known for blurring the boundaries between the conceptual and the formal, suggesting complex systems and ideas that re-imagine everyday objects and images. He has been extremely influential on a younger generation of artists in Mexico and internationally.
For the Dallas installation, Orozco had masons cut a plaster wall in his Paris gallery into numerous parts. He then drew precise graphite circles that just touch the irregular edges of these pieces, and then placed the pieces on the gallery floor and against the walls. Inner Circles of the Wall suggests the here and now of bare matter, as well as the beauty of the infinite realms of a perfect and perfectly logical geometry.
Pancha Tantra: Walton’s World
Taschen, the German publisher specializing in art, design, and architecture, has released a new monographic masterpiece on Walton Ford, an artist featured in Season 2 who creates naturalistic and consistently surprising animal illustrations. Entitled Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra, this book is the first in-depth exploration of Ford’s body of work. It includes 12 horizontal and 4 vertical foldouts, along with dozen of details, Ford’s bio, an appendix with substantial excerpts from textual sources for Ford’s paintings, and an introduction by Bill Buford, writer and former fiction editor of the New Yorker (he is still a staff writer), where he often used Ford’s work to illustrate his stories. Pancha Tantra is hand-crafted and limited to a 1,600-copy limited edition signed by the artist.
In addition, for the exclusive Art edition, limited to the first 100 copies, Ford worked with master printer Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, New Hampshire, using the traditional techniques of line etching, aquatint, drypoint, and spite-bite aquatint to make Limed Blossoms, an original six-color intaglio print.
As the Spanish magazine El Pais Semanal points out, Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra is not just a luxury book, but a discovery of the artist himself, as is work is less familiar in Europe.
For more information about Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra and prices, visit Taschen’s website.
New installation by James Turrell at Albright-Knox Art Gallery
My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light - it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing. — James Turrell
Season 1 artist James Turrell currently has a light installation on view at Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY through the end of the year. The work is entitled Gap, from the “Tiny Town series,” which he created between 2001-2006. The museum acquired the piece in 2005.
Turrell appeared on the art scene in the mid-1960s as part of the California light and space movement - an off-shoot of minimalism that took the literal and experimental nature of this New York movement in a different direction by focusing on visual perception itself.
In his work, Turrell isolates a central component of everyday experience—light. His installations grow out of a radically simple goal—to let the viewer experience light as directly as possible. In indoor installations such as Gap, he lets light take on its own otherworldly quality, creating a contemplative space where one experiences a single plane of illuminated color.
As viewers are forced to pay close attention to their own perceptions, their sense of reality is challenged, and the resulting instability generates a daydream experience.
Watch clips from James Turrell’s Art:21 segment and read extended interviews from the PBS series on his webpage here: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/index.html
Mark Dion’s Bartram’s Travels
Travels of William Bartram‚ÄîReconsidered examines the history and culture of 18th-century American naturalists, John and his son William Bartram. Using their travel journals, drawings, and maps, Season 4 artist Mark Dion is retracing the journey of William Bartram, in particular, to northern Florida. Like Bartram, he is collecting things both natural and unnatural, making drawings and paintings of them, examining them, and mailing them back to Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia. The treasures that Dion finds will be installed in cabinets in the historic home of John Bartram next year.
Dion’s journey started with a send-off from Bartram’s in mid-November in Philadelphia. His travels can be followed online here, featuring monthly video chats, video of daily travels, city stops, photo galleries, audio, Mark’s handwritten journals, drawings and maps that pinpoint where he is.
The exhibition Mark Dion: Travels of William Bartram‚ÄîReconsidered will open June 20, 2008 at Bartram’s Garden.
For more information on the project, visit its website at http://www.markdionsbartramstravels.com. See more photos on the project’s Flickr site here.
Serra, Celmins, Puryear, and Walker top TIME’s Top 10 Exhibitions of 2007
Major exhibitions of work by Richard Serra (Season 1), Vija Celmins, Martin Puryear, and Kara Walker (all Season 2) all made it onto TIME Magazine’s annual Top 10 Exhibitions list.
Serra’s seminal retrospective at MoMA clocked in at number 1, a show that, according to TIME, was the ‚Äúartworld thriller of the year.‚Äù Vija Celmins‚Äô drawings show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (#3 out of 10), garnered similar hyperbole, as did Puryear‚Äôs current retrospective at MoMA (#5; TIME‚Äôs art and architecture critic/blogger Richard Lacayo proclaims Puryear ‚Äúone of the greatest living American artists‚Äù). Walker rounds out the Art21-related roster at #6, her current Whitney retrospective described as ‚Äúa fearless combination of righteous anger, ruthless clarity and fierce imagination.‚Äù
Read the full details here.
Matthew Barney: Drawings from Guardian of the Veil
Opening this Saturday at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects is an exhibition by Season 1 artist Matthew Barney, featuring drawings from his latest work, Guardian of the Veil, as well as photographs from his earlier work Cremaster 3, establishing a point of departure from his Cremaster Cycle.
In the performance Guardian of the Veil (from “Il Tempo del Postino,” reported here back in July), Barney used remnants from the Cremaster Cycle combined with a new narrative based on elements from Norman Mailer’s novel, Ancient Evenings. In the Guardian of the Veil, the narrative follows a protagonist who died in a fire and begins his journey through the seven stages of death toward eternal afterlife. This examination of eternal life is in opposition to the trajectory of the Cremaster Cycle. The latter examines and follows a developing life from its inception to its inevitable end and the conflict presented in Guardian of the Veil is thereby set.
Drawn on black paper using graphite and petroleum jelly, the drawings from Guardian of the Veil convey Barney’s inimitable, almost surrealistic hand. As a vehicle for the narrative, the fantastical and exuberant drawings function as a story-telling device. In one drawing, a decorated bull is seen mounting a Chrysler Imperial car buried in an Egyptian pyramid, seemingly its final resting place. Pictorially conflicting imagery of eternal life after death and the creation of life leading to its ultimate demise is apparent and at odds.
An opening reception for Matthew Barney will take place this Saturday, December 15th, from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition is on view until January 20, 2008.
Shahzia Sikander and Tim Hawkinson at MCA Sydney; Art21 videos on view
On view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, Australia are two major exhibitions by Art21-featured artists: Shahzia Sikander and Tim Hawkinson. In conjunction with both of these shows, Art21 video profiles on each of these artists are running on a loop in the museum’s Resource Room.
Shahzia Sikander opened last month at the MCA and includes a major site-specific work which the artist created directly on the gallery wall.
Sikander’s work is characterised by its precision of line and delicacy of touch: from tightly structured miniature paintings to larger, more loosely formed watercolours in which pigments stain and bleed into one another. Historical tradition meets contemporary interpretation, incorporating both figurative and abstract elements. Since 2001, Sikander has also worked with digital animation, setting her miniatures into physical motion. Images break apart and reform in new hybrid permutations, while sound adds a further dimension.
Sikander was recently granted the prestigious MacArthur Award last year. She was recognised by the MacArthur Foundation for “merging the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles to create visually compelling, resonant works on multiple scales and in a dazzling array of media.”
Shahzia Sikander is on view at the MCA until February 17, 2008.
Yesterday, Art21 featured artist Tim Hawkinson (Season 2) opened his first Australian exhibition, Mapping The Marvelous, at the MCA.
Hawkinson has received widespread recognition for his ingenious constructions of everyday objects, often large-scale kinetic and sound-producing works, whose intricate and playful constructions engage with the human body and portraiture, incorporating mechanical components and materials such as latex, plastic, cardboard and string.
Showcased works are sculptures, photo collages and drawings from the mid 1990s to the present, all of which refer to the obsessive human need for order and containment, using maps and charts, volumes and measurements to document the world in all its excess.
The exhibition introduces Hawkinson’s extraordinary new creations—among them a bat created from shredded black plastic bags and twistie ties—as well as inflatable self-portraits, monstrous beings and fantastical structures that chatter, whistle, rotate and spin.
Mapping the Marvelous is on view through March 5, 2008.
Beautiful Losers trailer
Beautiful Losers, the new film about contemporary art and urban creative culture‚Äîprimarily springing from an East- (NYC) and West-coast (San Francisco/LA) do-it-yourself ethos‚Äîthat follows the book and exhibition by the same name, will hit theaters in Spring 2008. The film showcases a roster of artists whose work, inspired by the subcultures of skateboarding, surf, punk, hiphop, and graffiti, brought them together from the early 1990’s on. It also features exclusive footage of Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee shot by Art21. Other artists profiled in the documentary include Ed Templeton, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Geoff McFetridge, Mike Mills, Steve Powers, Harmony Korine, Shepherd Fairey, and more.
Watch the trailer here.
Robert Adams affected by Northwest storms, speaks with Bloomberg
Season 4 artist Robert Adams, who lives in Astoria, Oregon, survived last week’s hurricane, after losing power and his phone line for a few days (see images of the storm and its aftermath here). Rebounding quickly, he made time to speak with Bloomberg reporter Farah Nayeri about his current show at Fondation Cartier and the current state of contemporary art.
“What I would like to do is do what art has traditionally done: find a way to an affirmation,” he says. “I see the words ‘contemporary art’ and I begin to run the other direction. It seems to signify one thing: money.”
Read the full interview here.
[via Bloomberg]
