2/2/2010
Art Department Chair, Kate Renner: Updates from Graduate School Residency
2/3/2010
Today I attended two lectures, the first by NYC based artist Lisa
Segal, and the second by Mario Ontiveros, who is a professor here.
More
on this later in the e-mail, but I have to tell you that part of this
update will be about a work that combines art with tacos. I'm not
kidding.
Because my graduate review (which is basically a
meeting with two faculty to discuss plans for the final semester) ran a
bit late, I walked into Mario Ontiveros's lecture a few minutes after
he started talking. This picture was projected on the screen:
![artwork_images_684_140547_christina-fernandez.jpg]()
I was surprised-- this did not look like a fine art print, and I had no
idea from what context it came from. As I soon found out, this
ambiguity is part of the premise of this photo, and of the series that
it is a part of. It was taken by artist Christina Fernandez in East
L.A. This building, along with the other buildings that are
photographed in this series, is actually a sweatshop. There are no
windows that open, and the only clue that might give a pedestrian a
sense of what goes on inside is the small handwritten sign on the right
door, advertising a job opening. These photographs were hung in a show
next to fragments from a woman's experience during an immigration
police raid. The idea of hidden labor is a theme that Fernandez works
with often. You can read more about Christina Fernandez here.
In 2008, the New Museum (which is associate with Eugene Lang-- some of
you have this school on your college list, nice work!) curated a show
about the culture of neighborhoods. They commissioned NYC based artist
Lisa Sigal to create a work for this show. During her lecture, she
talked her process, which involves spending time examining the
permanent architecture of the gallery space before creating the work.
Sometimes, she uses the structure of the gallery itself as part of her
work, such as this piece
she created for a gallery in Atlanta. When visiting the New Museum,
she found herself attracted to the teal paint of the bike lane that was
visible from one of the windows in the gallery. She decided to
continue this line throughout the neighborhood. You can see the result
here.
This project had an unexpected yet extremely valuable outcome-- in
order to get permission to paint the line on various buildings within
the neighborhood, she had to introduce herself and interact with the
local residents. She told a story of proposing her idea to the owners
of a local restaurant, being forcefully fold to leave several times,
and then presenting the owners of the bar with a signed photograph of
the project after they finally relented. Now, she says, the run out of
the restaurant to say hello to her whenever she walks by.
As the project developed, she decided to expand her line beyond the
neighborhood, and then beyond the continent. She made contact with
artists from Mexico, The Netherlands, Korea, and Egypt, and sent them
'lines' which they then added to their neighborhoods. If you scroll
through the photos on Sigal's website, you can see the line in all of these different places.
So I know that this update is getting pretty long, but I can't leave
out the second project that Sigal spoke about, titled 'Specials'.
Simply put, it is a traveling gallery / taco cart. Sigal and a friend
bring the cart to various places, curate small shows from well-known
artists on one side, and cook tacos from the other side. You can see
pictures of 'Specials' here.
More to come...
Best,
Kate
2/2/2010
Today I attended two lectures, the first by sound artist Don Rhine
and second by L.A. based artist Michael Minelli. Don Rhine is one of
the original founders of ultraRED, a collective that practices various
forms of activist art. A more detailed description can be found on
their website, which is located at
www.ultrared.org.
Minelli is an artist and teacher who generally
works with 3D forms. He spoke about how many of his projects start
with some sort of unexplainable urge that is physical in nature-- for
example, his most recent installation began with what he described as
an irrational urge to roll paper. He did this for several weeks, his
studio becoming gradually more crowded with paper rolls of all shapes
and sizes, until they began to take shape and form what resembles a
series of microphone stands. The resulting installation can be seen
here.
He concluded this talk with a reference to an exercise that Richard
Serra began in his studio in the late 1960's. He made what he called a
'verb list', and proceeded to execute every action on the list with a
variety of different materials. You can look at the text from this
list
here, and view examples of Serra's work (which should be familiar to some of my students)
here. This could be a great project to try at WMS some day (the verb list, not the 2 story high steel sculpture).
I had my first critique yesterday, and will
continue to have one to two critiques a day for the rest of the week.
Every professor who facilitates the crits does it differently--
yesterday, my professor asked me to talk about the work for a few
minutes, but the professor I meet with this afternoon might ask me to
stay silent for the entire discussion. It can be a bit unnerving to
stay quite for 15 - 20 minutes while a group of people discuss your
work, but I always leave the crits with some excellent suggestions.
I'll end this update with a link to a video that
one of my classmates showed us as part of his research presentation.
He focused his research on artists who use humor as part of their
work, and this video is by artist Christian Jankowski who declared that
he would subsist for a period of time on "only what he could hunt".
When you go to the website, which is located at
http://www.lissongallery.com/#/artists/christian-jankowski/video/,
click on the video on the right, titled 'the hunt'. It's a good idea
to play it once through first before you actually watch it so that you
can watch it uninterrupted.
More to come...
Best,
Kate
2/1/2010
Kate is currently spending a week completing one of her graduate school residencies. She is keeping in contact with her students with updates from her experience. Here is the first of these received this Monday:
"Today I gave a presentation on the research I did
during this past semester. Many of my students have heard me talk
about Ann Hamilton-- she did a project that entailed using her mouth as
a pinhole camera. She puts a small piece of film in her mouth, and
stands in front of her subject with her mouth open for up to a minute.
This project is about what Hamilton calls a 'threshold'. We are
taught that it is impolite to open our mouths for more than a second or
two, and so to do so (especially to do so when standing in front of
someone else) is quite uncomfortable. The threshold that Hamilton
speaks about in numerous interviews and articles is the place between
interior spaces and exterior spaces; the small, intimate space of the
inside of her mouth in contrast to, well, everywhere else in the world.
The series is a documentation of when something that is usually
personal and private comes in contact with a vast expanse of infinite
space. You can see three photos from the 'Face to Face' series
here on PBS's Art:21 website.
I also spoke about Joseph Cornell's boxes, a body
of work that my Senior Portfolio class is very familiar with. He was a
passionate collector of objects-- marbles, magazine clippings, pieces
of wood, glasses, all kinds of different momentos and knick knacks
found their way into his studio. I only had six months for this
research project, so I had to focus on a specific area of his work. I
chose the 'Soap Bubble Set' series. Cornell's persona is as notable as
his work-- although he is considered to be one of the most important
surrealist artists, he was very reclusive. Every article / essay I
read about him stated that he had a 'fear of the infinite' when he was
a kid, meaning that when he went outside to look at the night sky, he
felt more terrified of its vastness than at peace with its beauty. The
soap bubble boxes always include a pipe from a soap bubble set (a toy
that he connects with his childhood), and also objects that represent
the celestial and the infinite, such as images from star charts. You
can see a picture of boxes from his soap bubble sets
here and
here.
The visiting artist at this residency is Columbian
artist Carlos Motta. His work comes from his connection with and
response to the often tumultuous political climate that affects the
countries in Latin America, specifically the influence of the US and
the US run School of the Americas. The project that he lectured about
this evening is called 'La Buena Vida', and it is an archive of 500+
interviews that he did throughout Latin America. He found his subjects
in public places, asked them to answer his questions, and videotaped
their responses. THe questions were the same for every subject, and
asked about how they felt about democracy and the current government.
Although he began the project planning on doing some sort of film, he
instead created an online archive. You can learn more about Carlos
Motta at
www.carlosmotta.com, and you can take a closer look at the 'La Buena Vida' project at
www.la-buena-vida.info.
Tomorrow my classmates and I will have the first of many critiques-- I will send pictures of my work and of their work soon."
Best,
Kate
