art

Ai Weiwei’s “Study of Perspective – Tiananmen” (1995–2003). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Art21 is back with more Art in the Twenty-First Century. The sixth season of the TV series premieres tonight on PBS (check your local listings) with “Change,” an episode featuring documentary profiles of Catherine Opie, El Anatsui, and Ai Weiwei. The latter segment proved particularly challenging to complete, as Chinese authorites arrested Ai midway through filming. He was detained for 81 days (and charged with a $2 million tax bill), and Art21 arranged one of the first on-camera interviews with him after his release. In that conversation, which took place in his Beijing studio, Ai discussed his marble sculpture of a surveillance camera, which, he says is used to “secretly monitor people’s behavior.” “But once it’s marble” he continues, “it’s only being watched. It’s not functioning anymore.” Opie’s camera is always working, and tonight’s episode follows the photographer as she works on projects in Sandusky, Ohio (her childhood hometown) and her current home base of Los Angeles. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, Anatsui and his studio assistants transform old bottle caps into amazing sculptures. Here’s a video sneak peek at the season, which will also feature artists such as Marina Abramović, Glenn Ligon, and Sarah Sze.
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“Take your breathing people and scram,” weren’t the words used by the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games when talking to artist Olafur Eliasson about a project he’d proposed, but rejection was the basic sentiment and it seemed like a good way to start a post. After being encouraged to submit a proposal by the Committee, Eliasson requested £1 million to put together a project called “Take a Deep Breath,” which the BBC describes as an “installation would have invited people to inhale and exhale on behalf of ‘a person, a movement or a cause’ and record it on a website in a personal ‘breath bubble.’” The Committee took a look and decided that not only was the project not “particularly attractive” but also “seemed very expensive.” So, to extend our opening to this post, the organizers were essentially saying “Take your overly expensive breathing people and scram.” But again, we’re putting words into mouths. The tragedy, of course, is that this rejection, however well reasoned, means that the world may never see a functioning “personal breath bubble” unless Eliasson finds someone else with the cash to build, assemble, or however one would go about making a “personal breath bubble” in this day and age.

Ron Arad’s 1992 “Narrow Pappardelle” chair. (Photo: Bruno Scott)

“People in the art world are happy saying ‘I’m a designer’ and architects are happy saying ‘I’m an artist’ but I’m not allowed to be all of the above. If I do a sculpture it’s written about as ‘designed by Ron Arad‘ but if my friend Antony Gormley does one, no one ever says he ‘designed’ it. I thought it would get easier to escape these kinds of distinctions, but no. Frank Gehry told me he didn’t get taken seriously as an architect until he stopped designing furniture. I understand it: if you are doing these huge buildings it is difficult to accept that someone who isn’t an exclusive member of your club can do it too. Personally, I have no problem designing stuff for Vitra or Moroso that is made to be sold in shops, but I also like to do big projects or products that cause people in the bolshevik art world to be uncomfortable. But that’s a problem of their perception. I don’t want to stop doing anything. I want to do it all as seriously as I can, whether it’s industrial or a useless installation.”

-Ron Arad, in conversation with Reed Krakoff in this weekend’s Financial Times

“The first [poster for his cinema StudioFilmClub project in Port of Spain, Trinidad] I did was for Black Orpheus, actually, a few films in. I had started a painting, a study that I had kind of abandoned, of a black man in a boat. It was from this Duane Allman record cover, An Anthology—this image from the gatefold sleeve, with eight figures in a boat. One of them was the drummer, Jaimoe [Johanson], the only black guy in the band, and I started this painting of him, just Jaimoe, floating in a boat. I abandoned it. But then I was thinking about posting a poster for the film on the notice board here—this was when the space was the Caribbean Contemporary Arts Center; lots of artists were working here. It felt important to do something in the building, to have a weekly thing. And the film was Black Orpheus; I already had this figure in the boat seeing himself in the water. It was like Cocteau’s use of reflection to suggest entry into the underworld. So I just painted on it TONITE, BLACK ORPHEUS, STUDIO FILM CLUB and put it up. That was the first poster.

I love [hand-painted signage]. But I think it’s dying, all over the world; the technology has become so cheap. Five years ago it was cheaper to pay a guy to spend ten hours in the hot sun, painting a Stag bottle on a wall as advertising: now you can just print one up. It’s tragic—but I think it’s happened all over: in India, Africa. You see these large plastic signs going up where you once saw hand-painted ones. But when I came back to Trinidad, one of the things I was so attracted to here were these signs on the street. Often the wording was quite abstract to the outsider—NO DRAWER, BLACK AND WHITE, SOCA EXPRESS. These signs just punctuated by words. And words you can see from a distance, words in color. And with this language, too—I loved it.”

-Peter Doig, interviewed by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in the March-April issue of The Believer

So many art fairs, so little time. Between Armory week and the highly anticipated New York debut of Frieze comes the fourth annual Dallas Art Fair, which opens to the public on Friday the 13th, tornadoes be damned. Triskaidekaphobics will want to make a beeline (avoiding black cats and ladders!) for the VIP lounge, where superstition-dulling champagne from lead sponsor Ruinart will be flowing freely, chilled in “Miroir” ice buckets freshly commissioned from designer Hervé Van der Straeten. Manufactured by Christofle, the fetching vessels are silver-plated and angular, a bubbly contrast to the signature smooth lines and golden hue of Ruinart bottles. “I wanted to create a conversation between the bottle and the object,” said Van der Straeten in a statement announcing the collaboration, “like a dialogue between the light, the mirror, and the reflections.” The ice buckets were created in a limited edition of 50, but Van der Straeten also whipped up a matching coaster—look for it in “fine wine retailers” worldwide in a special gift pack, as if you need another reason to visit a fine wine retailer.

“The only valuable class I took in art school was from a guy who taught display lettering which was literally like sign painting,” says cartoonist (and screenwriter) Daniel Clowes of his formative years at Pratt Intstitute. “Everybody else was like, ‘Aww man, I can’t believe I have to take this cornball class,’ where I was front and center every week. Still to this day I use everything I learned in that class.” Clowes’s irresistible handlettering, groundbreaking graphic novels, beloved New Yorker covers, and much more are the subject of a retrospective that opens next Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” is accompanied by a splendid monograph out this month from Abrams ComicArts. Designed by Jonathan Bennett, the book includes essays by the likes Chris Ware and Chip Kidd. And feast your eyes on a test sample animation by Nicholas de Monchaux, who is masterminding the design of the exhibition:

The imminent museum survey earned the cartoonist a Clowes-up—”Humanity’s Discomfort, Punctured with a Pen“—in Sunday’s New York Times, where he shared the front page of the Arts & Leisure section with a Smurfily dressed Nicki Minaj. Among the diverse Clowes admirers that writer Carol Kino rounded up for the profile: Alexander Payne, who is directing the film adaptation of Wilson; Art Spiegelman; and (would you believe?) Neo Rauch. “Dan’s work stands out because of its precision,” Rauch told Kino. The artist was also “fascinated by its underground, slightly creepy aspect,” and added, “Plus, he has a very dark humor that appeals to me immediately.”

“I keep getting this thing about painting your own work. You don’t paint the spots and all that shit. I’m doing this other stuff where I’ve got two guys in Italy carving a sculpture out of granite. So I’ve made a plaster, working in the foundry, of two figures. One of them is based on Michelangelo’s “Slaves,” the other on the sculpture of a female slave by Hiram Powers. These two guys are amazing granite carvers and they are working day in, day out. And it’s like two and a half years to make one. And it’s an edition of three. So that’s 10 years, with an AP [Artist’s Proof]. If wanted to do it I would have to go and study for 10 years, five years. To learn how to carve granite. Fucking hell! If these guys live to be 70 they are going to be able to make 12 of these. And that’s their whole careers. And that’s your whole life gone. So you have to get people.”

-Damien Hirst, in an interview earlier this year with Anthony Haden-Guest for The New York Observer. A Hirst retrospective opens Thursday at Tate Modern in London.

Now that Andy Rooney has gone to that big grumpychamber in the sky, Morley Safer has taken over the role of irascible clean-up hitter for the doddering team of Bad News Bears that is 60 Minutes. In the final minutes of yesterday’s show, timed appropriately to coincide with April Fool’s Day, Safer filed a follow-up to the infamous 1993 segment in which he poked fun at the world of contemporary art, rolling his eyes at the work of everyone from Cy Twombly and Robert Ryman to Jean-Michel Basquiat (“heaven-sent for hype”) and a bright-eyed up and comer named Jeff Koons. Nearly twenty years later, CBS News sent Safer back to the front lines: Art Basel Miami Beach, where we spotted him last December toward the end of the VIP preview, looking gloomy and flouting the Miami Beach Convention Center’s no smoking policy.

The footage speaks for itself: here is Safer posing under Erwin Wurm’s giant police officer’s cap, there he is lobbing softballs at Larry Gagosian (“This place has become one of the places that someone like yourself have to show at?”), all interspersed with shots of parties, concerts (infernal rock music!), and the occasional graph that depicts the climbing valuation of the art market since Safer last visited. A chat with the whipsmart Guggenheim curator Alexandra Monroe about the likes of Anish Kapoor and Haegue Yang is harvested for “artspeak” soundbites, a row of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits is used for a segment-capping punchline, and don’t even get him started on video art. The conclusion: Safer still doesn’t like this contemporary art stuff, but we did notice one person he seems to be warming up to: Kara Walker. When Eli Broad beams over a recently acquired Walker, Safer refers to her as “a truly gifted young American artist.” Walker is sure to be delighted.

It’s that time of year again, when the Art Newspaper looks back at the year that was to provide their annual rankings of most popular, and therefore visited, museums and exhibitions across the world. It’s no surprise in the slightest that the Louvre once again captured the top attendance record, as it has for the past billion years or so. In 2011, they his nearly 8.9 million, an impressive increase of roughly 400,000 over the year prior. The other success stories were from the usual roster, the Met for example, broke “the six million barrier” and stole away the number two spot from the British Museum, with lots of help from one of the world’s most popular exhibitions, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” Perhaps most surprising, and the leading talk of AN‘s coverage, is that the world’s most well-attended exhibition didn’t come from the usual three locales, the US, Europe, or Asia, but from Brazil. The Centro Cultrual Banco do Brasil‘s “The Magical World of Escher” landed this year’s top spot, pulling in close to 575,000 people and nearly 10,000 daily. On the opposite side of such positive numbers were the Tate Modern, who saw a dip, despite popular exhibitions like the well-timed Ai Weiwei sunflowers, and MoMA, who had a slight decrease as well. The Art Newspaper‘s whole breakdown of all the numbers can be found here (pdf).

Serkan Ozkaya’s “Radisson/Picasso,” a “manipulated ready-made.”

Serkan Ozkaya has made a chair from 15 sticks of spaghetti, lobbied the Louvre (unsuccessfully) to turn the Mona Lisa on its head for a few days, and created hand-drawn replicas of major newspapers. With the help of a 3D rendering program, the Turkish artist made a supersize golden version of Michelangelo’s David for the Istanbul Biennial in 2005, although the 30-foot-tall statue proved impossible to install and ended up shattering into pieces before the exhibition opened. No such tragedy is likely to befall his pocket-size “Radisson/Picasso” (above), a pair of manipulated matchboxes that is among the lots on offer in Storefront for Art and Architecture’s benefit auction. Also up for online bidding in advance of Thursday evening’s NYC soirée honoring Barbara Kruger and Bernard Tschumi are works by the likes of Louis Kahn, James Welling, Vito Acconci, and Robert Venturi, who with Denise Brown contributed a jazzy sketch of a McDonald’s.