China’s “Sex And The City” (Chairman Mao Would Be Horrified)

tiny times

The Tiny Times film franchise “is a wholesale celebration of conspicuous consumption … a cross between Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada.” The series has greatly irked “those who think individualism and materialism have gone too far in China.” It has also pulled in $200 million so far.

SOURCE: ArtsJournal - Read entire story here.

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The Times Are Not a-Changin, They Have Already a-Changed

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Chris Cobb’s essay on counterculture, money, and the annual Burning Man festival. Cobb wonders: “…what if successful tech companies—the ones whose leaders have bought into the Burning Man/Black Rock value of art that ‘connect[s] community members in creation, curiosity, and wonderment’—decided to allocate one or two percent of their investment income to cultivating the arts in the Bay?” This article was originally published on July 9, 2014.

Sean Orlando, Nathaniel Taylor, and David Shulman. Raygun Gothic Rocketship, 2010; installation at Pier 14, San Francisco. Courtesy of Black Rock Arts Foundation. Photo: David Yu.

Sean Orlando, Nathaniel Taylor, and David Shulman. Raygun Gothic Rocketship, 2010; installation at Pier 14, San Francisco. Courtesy of Black Rock Arts Foundation. Photo: David Yu.

1. The Decline of Bohemia

It’s hard to say something new about how the Bay Area art establishment is falling apart. Everybody already knows that rents are skyrocketing, artists and musicians are fleeing, and a four-year art degree now costs a quarter of a million dollars. Even prominent curators are being forced to relocate because of evictions and real-estate speculation. It’s enough to make any sane person wonder if the struggle is worth it. So, retreading acknowledged, it still might benefit artists to take a fresh look at what has brought the city’s cultural life to this moment, and where we can go from here.

Can I quote Bob Dylan?

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief
“There’s too much confusion, I cant get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth

The harsh truth is that things are changing rapidly, which has resulted in a collective sense of confusion and helplessness. It reminds me of a scene in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, where an imprisoned artist finds out he won’t be allowed to paint ever again and so he uses an axe to chop off his own fingers. This profound act of self-destruction dramatizes the collective plight of the prisoners, making them realize that if they don’t get off the island, they too will have whatever makes them unique taken away or crushed. Each inmate is left to consider his own disheartening future.

Read the full article here.

SOURCE: DAILY SERVING - Read entire story here.

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ART-O-MAT: Pocket Art

buck cellar101

Many art lovers simply don’t have the budget to purchase original works of art.  Enter the Art-O-Mat – re-purposed cigarette vending machines that have been converted to sell pocket size original works of art.

North Carolina artist Clark Whittington created the first Art-O-Mat in 1997 which he showed along side his paintings at a solo show at a local cafe. The machine sold his black & white photographs for $1.00 each. The art show was scheduled to close, however, the owner of the Penny Universitie Gallery, Cynthia Giles, loved the Art-O-Mat and asked that it stay.  It remains in its original location to this day. Following the show, the involvement of other artists was necessary for the project to continue. Giles introduced Whittington to other local artists and the group “Artists in Cellophane” was formed.

“Artists in Cellophane (A.I.C.), the sponsoring organization of Art-O-Mat is based on the concept of taking art and “repackaging” it to make it part of our daily lives. The mission of A.I.C. is to encourage art consumption by combining the worlds of art and commerce in an innovative form. A.I.C believes that art should be progressive, yet personal and approachable.”

The Art-O-Mat dispenses original art-works and may include paintings, photographs, sculpture, collage, illustration, handmade jewellery, textile arts, and more. There are 82 machines in at least 28 American States, one in Quebec, Canada, and one in Vienna, Austria. There are around 400 contributing artists from 10 different countries currently involved in the Art-o-mat project.

For more information, to get involved, or to find an Art-O-Mat near you, visit Art-O-Mat.org.

took ashevilleartworks

SOURCE: Daily Art Fixx - Art Blog: Modern Art, Art History, Painting, Illustration, Photography, Sculpture - Read entire story here.

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Now Philly’s Fringe Festival Has A Fringe Of Its Own

fringe fringe

Fringe/Fringe “was conceived by Joshua McLucas, 21, a Swarthmore College senior who thought the 18-year-old Fringe Festival, and even its little sister, the Neighborhood Fringe, were just too mainstream, too big, and too expensive for his fledgling [redacted] Theater Company.”

SOURCE: ArtsJournal - Read entire story here.

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Here’s What a $650 Knockoff Koons Balloon Dog Looks Like

AlibabaBlueDog

Photo: Courtesy VLA Sculpture.

Beijing-based company VLA Sculpture is selling stainless steel and resin balloon dog sculptures that look a lot like those of a certain art world star (hint: his name rhymes with “balloons”) now having a retrospective at the Whitney Museum. The works were for sale on China’s largest e-commerce site, Alibaba.com, though the original link does not appear to be active anymore and a search of the VLA Sculpture site turns up no balloon dogs.

Two weeks ago artnet News received a detailed brochure notifying us that the Jeff Koons balloon dog lookalikes, which come in a variety of colors and sizes, are now being offered in resin as well as stainless steel. Some clients had complained that stainless steel versions are too expensive, a VLA rep named Rebecca informed us.

On the morning of August 12, another email arrived asking whether we are still interested in purchasing one of the pups, with an attached photo showing an example of our potential acquisition (see above). “How many pieces do you need and what’s the nearest port?”

This one, presumably the smallest sized example, measuring 19.7 inches high by 19.7 inches long and 7.88 inches wide, is priced at $650 for the stainless steel version and $780 for the resin variety. The larger resin pieces are cheaper than the stainless steel. While we don’t profess to be Koons or canine balloon sculpture experts in general, we immediately noticed that this puppy is not quite as perky as the real thing; note the lack of detailing where the legs meet the body as well as the shape of the tail (especially at the very end), and the fact that the angle of the back legs appears to be quite wide. But hey, can you really complain when you may be able to  impress your friends by passing off this faux Koons pooch as the real deal, and save a few million dollars in the process?

Each of the four color options—orange, yellow, red, and blue—in the PDF is illustrated with an image of a Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture in situ. The picture of Balloon Dog (Blue) is of an edition of the work owned by Eli Broad that was shown at LACMA; the picture of Balloon Dog (Red) is the example of the work owned by Dakis Joannou, photographed while on display at Christie’s last year. Balloon Dog (Orange) is illustrated by an image of the artist’s MCA Chicago retrospective (the same image had been used to illustrate the original Alibaba listing, though the background been stripped out even before the link became inactive).

The post Here’s What a $650 Knockoff Koons Balloon Dog Looks Like appeared first on artnet News.

SOURCE: artnet News - Read entire story here.

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George Tooker: 1920 – 2011

Born on August 5, 1920, in Brooklyn, New York, George Clair Tooker Jr. grew up in suburban Bellport, Long Island and took painting lessons from a family friend as a child.  Tooker  graduated from Harvard University in 1942 where he studied English Literature and continued to pursue his interest in art.

Tooker was discharged from officer training school in the U.S. Marines during World War II due to illness brought on by stress. In 1943, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York and studied under leading social realist painters Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller.  Tooker was introduced to the medium of egg tempera by painter Paul Cadmus, with whom he spent six months together traveling and studying art in Italy and France in 1949. In 1949, Tooker also met painter William Christopher, who became his lifelong companion.

In 1950, Tooker began to earn both recognition and income from his art and in 1953, the Whitney Museum bought his best-known painting, The Subway. Further recognition followed, beginning with a solo exhibition at a New York gallery in 1951; followed by four  more solo shows and numerous group exhibitions.

“Working on wood panels or Masonite board, Tooker painstakingly built luminous matte surfaces, inch by square inch; soft, powdery colors complemented the rounded forms and fabrics of the paintings.” His early work depicted social and public issues, and stresses the loneliness and alienation of modern urban existence. In the 1970s, the Tooker began to explore more personal states of being expressed in symbolic imagery, often drawn from the bible, mythology, and classic literature.

Tooker’s works have been associated with the Magic Realism and Social Realism movements but he resisted attempts to define his works as such. “I am after reality — painting impressed on the mind so hard that it recurs as a dream,” he said, “but I am not after dreams as such, or fantasy.”

In 1960, Tooker and Christopher moved to Vermont, where they had a weekend home. Tooker taught at the Art Students League between 1965 and 1968, and they spent winters on the Mediterranean coast of Spain as Christopher’s health declined. Tooker returned to Vermont, in 1973 after Christopher’s death.

“In the 1970s, the Tooker began to explore more personal states of being expressed in symbolic imagery, often drawn from the bible, mythology, and classic literature. Tooker, though greatly respected, remained apart from the modernist trends that dominated American art for much of the second half of the twentieth century.”

In 2007, Tooker was awarded the National Medal of Arts – the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States Government.

George Tooker died on March 27, 2011 at his home in Hartland, Vermont.  He was 90 years old.

The-Subway-George-Tooker-1950
Highway-George-Tooker
Cornice-George-Tooker-1949
Embrace-of-Peace-George-Tooker
The-Waiting-Room-George-Tooker-1959
Ward-George-Tooker-1970
George Tooker, Un Ballo in Maschera, from the portfolio The Metropolitan Opera Fine Art Collection II- 1983
Coney-Island-1947
Mirror-II-George-Tooker-1963
Bathers-George-Tooker-1950
Window-VII-George-Tooker
Government-Bureau-George-Tooker-1956

Sources: New York Times, Terra Foundation
Post inspired by David Platt

SOURCE: Daily Art Fixx - Art Blog: Modern Art, Art History, Painting, Illustration, Photography, Sculpture - Read entire story here.

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Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees

Not only is George Dubinsky’s newest collection made of wood, it’s also inspired by the way trees grow and celebrates wood as a natural, living organism.

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

The co-founder of Edgewood Made, Dubinsky takes a page from the book of trees, especially the way knots subtly alter the structure of wood. Even the construction of the furniture mimics the way the wood grows through the use of coopering. Pairing craftsmanship and Danish modern design, this collection of furniture thoroughly embodies the essence of wood.

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category

Furniture Inspired by the Growth of Trees in main home furnishings art  Category


SOURCE: Design Milk » Art - Read entire story here.

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The End of Genius and the Rise of the Compassionate Artist

2014-08-08-Cesare_pavese.jpg

In his recent Times Sunday Review piece "Love People, Not Pleasure" (NYT, 7/18/14), Arthur C. Brooks quotes the Buddhist Dhammapada to the effect that:

"The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life...Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains."

In the piece Brooks deals with the need to seek external pleasures (fame, money, sex) "to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction but it never lasts and it is never enough. And so we crave more." The Brooks article segues neatly into another piece in the same issue of the Sunday Review, Joshua Wolf Shenk's "The End of 'Genius'" (NYT, 7/19/14) Shenk writes,

"The lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer's room at 'The Daily Show' or--the real heart of creativity--the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we've yet to fully reckon."

Getting back to the Brooks piece can we conclude in the age of networking, of the hive mentality, fame will no longer be one of the illusory pleasures available to creative and others who seek to accolades as an analgesic to emptiness? Abstract expressionism thrived on this once highly touted notion of fame. Rothko, Pollock, De Kooning were larger than life figures who spun their own mythologies and whose eccentricities were tolerated for the sake of talent. They were given the license to venture where angels feared to tread. The path of destruction they left behind was excused as the price paid by genius. Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Cesare Pavese and John Berryman paid an even more severe price, if the cultivation of an aloof and self-consciously alien artistic persona is at all connected to their suicides. Self-destruction and the destruction of others didn't seem too high a price to pay for the sake of Art. But was it or is it ever worth the cost? The moral philosopher Ronald Dworkin dealt with a similar problem in his final book Justice for Hedgehogs. Can the pursuit of good really be justified when it results in extreme self-sacrifice (that ultimately entails the destruction of the self)? How great is greatness? How exalted are the productions of so called great men? Beauty may be truth and it may be mind blowing, but it's like planned obsolescence. It has a certain expendability. Great artistic endeavors may be immortal but they're also human and by definition corruptible and imperfect. Without the qualities that mitigate against ultimate greatness, we would not be able to see ourselves in them. Art would be food for gods, rather than men. For good or bad, in the 21st century artists, writers, and poets have received a demotion and are looked at as craftsmen who satisfy our need for works that are beautiful and edifying. Nowhere in the Poetics does Aristotle outline society's need for superior individuals who create oversized reputations bought at the price of their own well-being and those closest to them. Flaubert said it best, "be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

This was originally post to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture

photo of Cesare Pavese
SOURCE: Arts - The Huffington Post - Read entire story here.

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Richard Avedon’s Grandson Shoots Audrey Hepburn’s Granddaughter

ferrer

The Harper’s Bazaar September Issue subscribers cover image, with model Emma Ferrer.
Photo: Michael Avedon/Harper’s Bazaar.

In a display of both sweet nostalgia and predictable nepotism, the subscriber cover of Harper’s Bazaar‘s September issue will feature a photograph of Audrey Hepburn’s granddaughter, Emma Ferrer, shot by Richard Avedon’s grandson, Michael Avedon, alongside a longer spread in both editions of the magazine. The original Avedon and Hepburn had a legendary working relationship (Fred Astaire’s character in

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" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Face is said to be based on Avedon), and he shot her for Bazaar several times over the course of their careers, so the homage is on target, if a bit eye roll-inducing.

Emma Ferrer and Michael Avedon. Photo: Courtesy of Hearst

Emma Ferrer and Michael Avedon.
Photo: Courtesy of Hearst.

Ferrer, a 20-year-old student at the Florence Academy of Art, certainly inherited her grandmother’s cheekbones and her ability to wear an evening gown, but maintains that she is “interested in being involved in the fashion world, but not completely,” according to her interview with Harper’s Bazaar. She would prefer instead to become a professional artist, listing Rembrandt, Titian, Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán as painters she admires.

Michael Avedon, 23, has been pursuing photography since 2006, and has done fashion editorials for Harper’s Bazaar Paris and Carine Roitfeld’s CR Fashion Book. He’s also active on the New York art scene, and has shot black-and-white portraits of several artists, including Chuck Close, Richard Serra, Julian Schnabel, and Francesco Clemente, all of which are heavily influenced by his grandfather’s legacy of portraiture. Luckily for both up-and-comers, there’s usually plenty of demand for artists with ties to the fashion world, especially if they have the right last name.

The post Richard Avedon’s Grandson Shoots Audrey Hepburn’s Granddaughter appeared first on artnet News.

SOURCE: artnet News - Read entire story here.

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From the Archives – #Hashtags: Mimics and Minstrels

Since July 2013, Daily Serving’s #Hashtags column has been written by Anuradha Vikram, Director of the Residency Programs at the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles. For the past year, Vikram has eloquently and intelligently voiced arguments about—among other topics—institutionalized racism, representations of marginalized identities, and economic inequality, all the while offering nuanced critiques of the artworks that take up these subjects. (For example, see her incisive review of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs at the Brooklyn Museum, in which Vikram underscores the artist’s capacity to meld “oppression and self-investigation.”)

In September, we’ll introduce new #Hashtags contributors who will bring their priorities and perspectives to the column. But this week, we’d like to highlight Vikram’s tenure by republishing one of her many standout entries. In the article below, she astutely pairs reflections on Sturtevant’s practice of appropriation with the highly contested inclusion of Joe Scalan’s “Donelle Woolford” project in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. As she does so often, Vikram goes to the heart of the matter by observing that the works potential to critique “the interchangeability of minority faces in an exclusionary environment” is negated by the Whitney’s maintenance of just such an environment. We are deeply grateful to Vikram for her resolute voice, and for solidly laying a foundation by which Daily Serving might continue these urgent conversations.—Patricia Maloney, Publisher

Sturtevant. Warhol Black Marilyn. 2004. Synthetic polymer silkscreen and acrylic on canvas. 15 ¾ x 13 ¾ in. (40 x 35 cm). Ringier Collection, courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.  © Sturtevant.

Sturtevant. Warhol Black Marilyn, 2004; synthetic polymer silkscreen and acrylic on canvas; 15 ¾ x 13 ¾ in. (40 x 35 cm). Ringier Collection. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. © Sturtevant.

#access #discrimination #appropriation #institutions #representation #re-performance

Two important events transpired in the art world last week that have brought the complications of diversity and hierarchy into sharp focus. The first is the passing of artist Elaine Sturtevant, an artist who sublimated a critique of gendered inequity among artist peers into works that appropriated and re-created works deemed significant to the canon of contemporary art. The other is the withdrawal of the artist group Yams Collective from the Whitney Biennial following their unsuccessful resolution of objections to a racially problematic project by Joe Scanlan. These two stories illustrate the challenges that appropriation-based institutional critique continues to represent for art-world institutions that are resistant to change.

Rather than address gender inequity directly in her work, Sturtevant critiqued the negotiation between economics and art history that drives the valuation of art objects. Feminism was not her stated objective; in fact she disavowed gender’s relevance to her practice. Still, it is hardly a coincidence that the artists whose works she re-created were mostly white, heterosexual men, as these were the majority of works being shown and cited among her peers. She reenacted performances and re-created objects by Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Frank Stella, among others. By her acts of remaking, she thought through the processes and experiences of the artists who made these works before her, demystifying “genius” into a collection of styles and techniques; a catalog of contemporary practices that mirrored the distance and intellect of her own. Her work as an archivist and a re-producer prefigures important trends in contemporary art of the 1980s and 1990s by two decades.

Sturtevant was born in Ohio and came of age in New York, but the United States has been slow to embrace her. Exhibitions of her work were organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Musée Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm over the past decade, yet the Sturtevant retrospective slated to open at MoMA in November 2014 will be the first museum show of her work in the U.S. since 1973. The wariness of American museums toward Sturtevant is surprising given their embrace of later appropriation artists such as the 1980s Pictures Generation, but less so considering the ongoing gender disparity among artists represented in museum collections. The market continues to prefer a canon defined by individual male superstars whom Sturtevant’s whole existence reflects as negation.

Micol Hebron. (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Project. Poster for Sara Meltzer Gallery (NYC) by Krista Feld, 2014.

Micol Hebron. (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Project. Poster for Sara Meltzer Gallery (NYC) by Krista Feld, 2014.

Micol Hebron’s recent (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project at For Your Art in Los Angeles visualized the realities of gender imbalance in the art market on a grand scale. The galleries Hebron and her accomplices tallied in Los Angeles and New York represented nearly 70{b29860ee6b7af5bf99d3058cca3182816eed414b47dab251265e93b8c00e69b1} male artists overall. As Sturtevant’s work so deftly makes clear, that economic circumstance also determines whose work is deemed significant to history. As yet, no similar assessment has been made of ethnic diversity among artists represented in galleries or museums. This would seem a logical next step and one that I intend to help initiate down the line.

A 2010 report commissioned by the American Alliance of Museums indicated that the racial composition of contemporary museum audiences has remained at a level of diversity reminiscent of the 1970s while the diversity of the general population has more than tripled during that time. Worse still, comparative data shows that the percentage of people of color who are visitors to museums and art galleries has decreased as those populations have increased. For example, in 1992 the data shows that 17.5{b29860ee6b7af5bf99d3058cca3182816eed414b47dab251265e93b8c00e69b1} of Hispanics visited museums and galleries, but in 2008 it was only 14.5 percent. Meanwhile, the population of Hispanics in the U.S. multiplied from 9 percent to 30.2 percent. In approximate but digestible terms, while the population of Hispanics in the United States grew from 1:10 to 1:3, the population of Hispanics among art audiences dropped from 1:5 to 1:7. Similar, if less dramatic, trends are apparent among African Americans, the other minority group singled out in the NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, cited in the AAM report. Given that art-gallery and museum attendance is shown to be dropping overall, the lack of traction with growing minority populations should be a significant cause for concern within the art world. Inexplicably, the Whitney Museum has instead opted to openly alienate minority audiences in this year’s Biennial.

Donelle Woolford. Avatar, 2007. Digital file. Photograph by Donelle Woolford.

Donelle Woolford. Avatar, 2007; digital file. Photograph by Donelle Woolford.

The subject of the current controversy is Joe Scanlan’s contribution to the Biennial, curated in by Michelle Grabner. Scanlan is a white man and Princeton professor whose work engages consumerism and persona in the parodic, conceptual vein mined by Sturtevant. His project for the Whitney Biennial involves creating the fictional persona of an Ivy League-educated black female artist, “Donelle Woolford,” and presenting performances and art objects conceptualized by Scanlan as the creative products of this fictional artist who is played by a variety of actors. One of “Woolford’s” works consists of re-performing a censored Richard Pryor stand-up routine from 1977 entitled “Dick’s Last Stand.” Work that manipulates artistic persona is not unprecedented. Beuys and Warhol self-mythologized, and many contemporary artists work under assumed or collective names, or even through simulacra. Adrian Piper’s work Mythic Being (1973) and the work of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, an artist whose critique of social roles in stand-up comedy Grabner also curated into the Biennial, appear to have directly influenced Scanlan’s choices.The problem with his project is that it functions by exploiting rather than critiquing the severely limited representation of minority artists at the Whitney, and in the art world more broadly. Scanlan’s own name does not appear in exhibitions that include “Donelle Woolford,” who is represented as if a real person. On the Whitney’s artist roster, the inclusion of “Woolford” brings the number of African American participants in the Biennial to 9 out of 103 (8{b29860ee6b7af5bf99d3058cca3182816eed414b47dab251265e93b8c00e69b1}), and the number of female participants to 38 (37{b29860ee6b7af5bf99d3058cca3182816eed414b47dab251265e93b8c00e69b1}) (statistics reported by Jillian Steinhauer at Hyperallergic).

The form of Scanlan’s project mimics the structures by which minority voices are circumscribed and appropriated by white-dominated institutions under increasingly multicultural social conditions. Their perspectives are edited and reconstructed according to the established priorities of the dominant political class, such that their presence is ultimately represented as justification of policies that actively exclude others like them. The actors who portray “Donelle Woolford” adopt dissimilar personae, potentially critiquing the interchangeability of minority faces in an exclusionary environment. However, by maintaining that exclusionary environment, the Whitney negates any credibility it might gain from enabling the critique. Scanlan’s presence as manipulator mirrors larger oppressive structures, but rather than open those structures to change, this project reinforces their inflexibility. There is simply no reason apart from institutional racism that the multiplicity of black female perspectives that inform Scanlan’s project could not be gained through an actual multiplicity of black female artists participating in the Biennial. The fact that the Whitney prefers to present Joe Scanlan speaks volumes.

The artist Joe Scanlan.

Calculated to stand out from the several dozen white male artists at the Biennial (and in every other high-profile show and job applicant pool), Scanlan uses “Woolford” to usurp the visibility accrued to minority artists in the contemporary art spotlight by the fact of their relative absence. For artists of color, that visibility is a small and hard-fought concession, a minor boost that does little to offset entrenched limitations on their access to art-world power structures. For Scanlan, the attention garnered by this project—and granted only because of the basic conditions of inequity within the exhibition and the art world—situates him to accrue benefits to his profile and market value commensurate with his position of privilege. He has parlayed this work into a professorship at Princeton (in a department where all of the tenured faculty appear to be white). He attempts to deflect the reality of that privilege by casting his fictional black-woman persona as a person of privilege herself, as if this negates the structural power imbalance that his work exploits. (It does not.) Meanwhile, his inclusion sends a clear message to minority artists and art viewers that while the Whitney is welcoming on its face, the perspectives of people of color are subject to mediation by the white academic establishment.

HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, 2014. Video, color, sound; 54 minutes. Collection of the artists. © HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?

HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, 2014; video, color, sound; 54 minutes. Collection of the Artists. © HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?

Many artists and art supporters of color have already heard this message implicitly at countless exhibitions and art fairs. Yams Collective’s alias HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? used for the Biennial speaks to how pervasive the generic view of blackness remains even in the new global art world, such that “Africa” is broadly and shallowly referenced as a historical and cultural framework, and only when compatible with a white-led agenda. Still, the inclusion of Scanlan’s project at the Whitney reads as blatantly exclusionary to many people of color. Already situated as a single entity charged with representing a vast diaspora in the absence of true parity, Yams Collective ultimately chose to withdraw their work from the exhibition after failing to receive what they felt was an adequately sensitive response from the museum staff or Grabner regarding their concerns. The collective explains that their withdrawal came at the tail end of the exhibition only after they abandoned a process of dialogue and reconciliation sought with the institution. It was met with a response from Joe Scanlan that underscores the tone-deaf nature of the whole undertaking, in which he justifies the “Donelle Woolford” project by extolling the educational value that producing the work has had for him personally: “I only want to say that the experiences I have had working on Donelle Woolford have been some of the most intellectually challenging and humanly rewarding experiences of my life.”

This self-centered perspective is at the heart of Scanlan’s decision to cast black women as agents for his personal edification and creative expression. It supercedes concern for those women’s lack of cultural space for self-determination, self-edification, or self-expression, or even whether the present undertaking further erodes that space. If Joe Scanlan wants to make art that looks at the world from someone else’s perspective, he would do better to work collectively and share the credit for his undertaking with peers who can help him to broaden it rather than engage superficially through contracted performers whose influence over the project’s trajectory is secondary to his own. This also requires that the Whitney value the contributions of a mixed-race group of artists as highly as they do those of a single white man. If the Biennial is to be redeemed from the obstinacy displayed by this debacle, it will only be by including a genuine diversity of artists and points of view in 2016. They could start by hiring some non-white curators next time around.

The 2014 Whitney Biennial was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through May 25, 2014. Sturtevant’s retrospective will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

SOURCE: DAILY SERVING - Read entire story here.

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Hocus-Focus: This Photographer’s Magic Touch with Camera Is a Work of Art

I open the door and pause. It's dark and warm. I'm not sure what to expect, but I know something unusual awaits.

Maybe a trapdoor on the floor to swallow me up, Alice in Wonderland style. Or the gaping door to a UFO. I take a cautious step forward, half-expecting my stiletto not to land, but instead I stair-step upward through gravity-free air.

Clunk. One normal step.

That's the weirdest part: How normal this feels.

But it can't be. I have seen the photos created here: Bodies twisted in impossible angles, floating, on fire, bursting droplets, growing from tree branches, crammed into bubbles, skin glowing like human stars.

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Like a rumbling wave over the past six months, I heard increasingly more people in Boulder County and beyond talking about this artist. More of his photos shocked me through my newsfeeds, until I reached the curiosity threshold to either go mad or go investigate for myself.

So here I am: G. Mark (aka gmark) Lewis' lab. As he directs me to slip on a white full-head bunny mask, I realize madness is a gift here. I feel like Alice's white rabbit.

Lewis himself is a mad scientist, only he experiments with light and shadows instead of chemicals in beakers. In fact, he calls his Loveland-based studio a "lab" because he tries something different every day. He affectionately calls his regular models his "lab rats."

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Then there are the "monkeys." That's what he calls his imaginative mind.

He writes on Facebook: Today starts the next era of gmark art. New lab, same monkeys!

Lewis recently relocated across the downtown railroad tracks to 310 N. Railroad at Loveland's Artworks studio, a collaboration of 15 juried artists supported in part by a foundation. His Zero G lab came, too.

That's one of gmark's trademarks that baffles audiences and has landed him in shows across the country, such as the Seattle Erotic Art Festival several years ago. The Seattle Times wrote about Lewis's "black-and-white underwater shots of dancers in dynamic motion," and that's how the show's organizers described it, too.

But there is no swimming pool here. The photos were shot on dry land, Lewis says. Few people can solve the mystery of how.

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"I had a 10-year-old kid figure it out. I had lighting people and an engineer figure it out, but not many people do," Lewis says. "I had someone else say, 'I don't know how you do it, and I don't care.' He didn't need to know."

Much like a magician, Lewis does not reveal his tricks -- unless you come by his lab.

Even as I looked at his Zero G lab, my brain twisted and tied itself into tangles trying to fully grasp the concept. As with all of Lewis' art, the light is the secret. Not extensive Photoshopping (he barely uses the technique.) No special digital effects. Control the light, and you control reality -- even the laws of physics.

Light is why Lewis specializes on shooting the female body.

"The female form is full of s-curves: from the shoulders down the side to the hip, the back of the calf, the knee, the side of the butt, it's nothing but s-curves and lines and shadows," he says. "Because of the roundness of everything, you can create wonderful drop-offs on shadows. It's an incredible canvas for light."

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Although far from pornographic, gmark's (Tumblr page) might best be viewed at home, not with your coworkers peeping over your shoulder.

He jokes on Facebook: It's wrong to shoot nudes or any form of exotica. From now on I'm only doing barns, horses, and aspen trees.

But his Tumblr bio states the truth: I believe in equal photographic opportunity for all genres of lifestyles.

From pole dancers, to bubble-floaters, to earthbound astronaut dancers, to freaks in bunny masks, tumbling through the looking glass of this unusual artistic lab, compelled by curiosity to see what is on the other side.

It's fun over here.

This column originally appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera. Read more stories from the strangest city in America, Boulder, Colorado, here: Only In Boulder.
SOURCE: Arts Blog on The Huffington Post - Read entire story here.

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