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State of the Art: Smithson Trumps Snooki as Princeton Celebrates New Jersey’s role in the avant-garde

Mocked for its distinctive iterations of low culture, New Jersey was in fact the incubator and inspiration for a great deal of cutting-edge postwar art.

Allan Kaprow, an Atlantic City native, staged some of his earliest Happenings in New Jersey. Robert Watts and George Brecht celebrated their Fluxus-inspired Yam Festival at New Jersey venues including George Segal’s farm. Nancy Holt led her Stone Ruin Tours in the woods of northern part of the state, and explored the Pine Barrens on film. Robert Smithson’s first non-sites, Dan Graham’s Homes for America, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting are all iconic New Jersey works.

All of these and more will be in a show opening this October at the Princeton University Art Museum that examines New Jersey’s unsung, seemingly counterintuitive but in retrospect stunningly obvious role in the avant-garde—in performance, land art, postmodernism, identity politics.

Curated by Kelly Baum, “New Jersey as Non-Site” will consider different reasons experimental artists were drawn to New Jersey: its sense of community, its suburbs, its polluted ruins, its pristine natural settings, to name some. For others, the state’s identity as transit corridor between larger cultural hubs was itself appealing.

But what apparently attracted most was New Jersey’s lack of a strong identity—or, as the exhibition proposal puts it, its status as “a kind of non-place whose difference from the cosmopolitan center was simultaneously informative and revelatory.”

Also represented in the show are Amiri Baraka, John Cohen, George Brecht, Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dennis Oppenheim, Michelle Stuart, and Robert Watts. Read more

George Segal, The Parking Garage, 1968, mixed media. COLLECTION OF THE NEWARK MUSEUM; PURCHASE 1968 WITH FUNDS FROM THE NATIONAL COUNCIL ON THE ARTS AND TRUSTEE CONTRIBUTIONS.

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When a Butterfly Makes a Fist: The New Migrants’ Rights Art

With the Brooklyn Museum’s acquisition of a rare cache of work from the Black Arts Movement and the Tang Museum’s career survey of edgy activist Sister Corita Kent, activist art from the ’60s is entering museums—showing that the postwar-art canon has come a long way, sort of.

Meanwhile, a new generation fighting for migrants’ rights is creating an iconography of protest for today, with the Monarch Butterfly emerging as a recurring symbol. See some in Migration is Beautiful, a video recently posted on rapper Pharrell Williams’ i am OTHER YouTube channel; see others on the website of No Papers No Fear, which received a creative outpouring when it put out a call for butterfly images asserting the rights of undocumented immigrants. My favorite is Cesar Maxit’s Migrant, where the creature’s trademark whorls turn into footprints and fists. Read more.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND NO PAPERS NO FEAR

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Girl With a Hoop Earring: Fun with Vermeer

Two of Vermeer’s most beloved women have left Holland for a stint in California—Girl With a Pearl Earring is luring fans to the de Young in San Francisco, and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter goes up at the Getty in L.A. this weekend. 

While The Girl With a Pearl Earring was hardly a wallflower back home, she wasn’t quite the type to headline a show–until 2003, when she got her Hollywood break. Being played by Scarlett Johansson in Peter Webber’s film version of Tracy Chevalier’s novel brought the painting new fame; to the dismay of art historians, though, the audience sometimes concluded that the book’s main character, a maid who posed for Vermeer, was real.

Scholars don’t know who sat for the picture, which was not intended to be a specific portrait of anyone. That in itself wasn’t unusual in those days. What was unusual was the three-quarter view, which highlights the sense that the woman is about to speak.

Adding to her allure is her distinctive ultramarine turban—not exactly Dutch fashion at the time, either, but relatively easy to recreate in ours. Girl with a Bamboo Earring is from Awol Erizku’s photo series diversifying and updating art-history classics.

Vermeer’s inscrutable beauties have also been stripped by Dalí, bedecked in toilet-paper rolls, and reincarnated by Cindy Sherman. Read more at artnews.com. 

Awol Erizku, Girl with a Bamboo Earring, 2009, digital chromogenic print.COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HASTED KRAEUTLER GALLERY, NYC.

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Iran: The Other Other Modernism:

With their multi-hyphenated addresses; habit of changing hats as artist, curator, and art impresario; and tendency to sample from across the style spectrum, the Irani modernists might have more in common with today’s global avant-garde than the fabled New York School did.

During the era from the ’50s to the ’70s, Iranian artists studied abroad, traveled freely, and gallery-hopped at home, sampling freely from Western styles as they invented ways to update their own.

Yet Iranian Modernism in the West remains little known, overshadowed by revolution, sanctions, and outdated notions of the Modern. 

The Asia Society is seeking to change that equation with a major loan show that will explore the diverse, idiosyncratic, and hybrid cultural production of pre-Revolutionary Iran. Read more. 

Faramarz Pilaram, Untitled, 1982.

HOUMAN M. SARSHAR COLLECTION, NEW YORK.

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Dinner at MoMA: Take This Turmeric Pill and Call Me in the Morning:

In a “dinner event” that had the structure, social-justice motifs, and symbolic cuisine of a Passover seder, mixed with the madcap vigor of a Magical Mystery Tour, the Museum of Modern Art launched its Capital Exchange program, a series of artist-staged participatory programs, guerrilla readings, and provocative performances intended to stimulate creativity and interaction.

The evening, hosted by the Education Department in Café 2, began with an eyes-wide-shut Albariño toast and the collective downing of a single orange pill, which artist/activist Caroline Woolard assured us was turmeric powder.

Then came a series of hybrid dishes developed by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna in collaboration with Chef Diego Becerra and MoMA’s Lynn Bound, each served on limited-edition placemats reproducing images selected by Xaviera Simmons from the museum’s library and archives (one was Yayoi Kusama’s 1969 unannounced nude performance in the sculpture garden).

Later, Kenneth Goldsmith, the Ubuweb founder who has been dubbed the MoMA poet laureate, provided a discourse on Brion Gysin’s recipe for hash fudge, which became an unexpected legacy of Alice B. Toklas. The dessert, though, was Baked Alaska (a performance-art staple).

A similar spirit will infuse goings-on at the museum over the next few months, the organizers say, so look out for the Artist Experimenters in the galleries. Read more

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Love, Tracey: Emin’s Times Square Valentines Will Make You Want to Kiss—Or Cry

Every night next month, at the stroke of 11:57, Tracey Emin will restore neon and romance to Times Square. On more than 40 screens large and small, for a span of three minutes, her six messages of love will spell themselves out, digitally animated to appear as if being written by a giant unseen hand.

Urgent and plaintive, they’ll inject the Great White Way with the red glow of passion—not necessarily requited. “Love is what you want,” says one. “I can’t believe how much I loved you,” says another.

The display, curated by Times Square Arts, comes just as limited digital editions of the love messages come up for sale at s[edition] starting at $16. How about a screensaver for Valentine’s Day? Read more at ARTnews.com

© TRACEY EMIN/COURTESY OF WWW.SEDITIONART.COM.

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The Vishniac Nobody Knew:

Roman Vishniac often cut his negatives apart and seldom labeled them, so Maya Benton, the adjunct curator at the ICP who oversees the photographer’s vast archive, is accustomed to finding pictures she can’t identify. But one series had her truly stumped. They seemed to show Zionist youth working on a structure some time in the ’30s or early ’40s. But Benton knew that Vishniac didn’t visit Israel until the ’60s.

Finally, peering through a loupe, she spotted an odd detail—a wooden clog. She sent the picture to colleagues at Amsterdam’s Jewish museum, and they told her about the Werkdorp, a Zionist training camp in Holland where middle-and upper-class German Jewish children were sent to learn skills they’d need in Palestine. Using this clue, Benton was able to reconstruct Vishniac’s 1939 journey to document a nearly forgotten chapter in prewar Western European Jewish life. Shot from below, the Werkdorp picture celebrates the strong, healthy bodies of the youths, playing off a rhythmic geometry in a manner that reminds Benton of Rodchenko. In other words, it’s completely different in style from the haunting pictures of the poor Eastern European Jews that Vishniac is best known for—and was shooting around the same time.

Vishniac’s well-honed Modernist sensibility is but one surprise in “Roman Vishniac Rediscovered,” a long-overdue and previously unimaginable exhibition opening at the ICP on January 18. Curated by Benton, it’s the first to look beyond the four years Vishniac was creating what turned out to be the final, comprehensive record of an extinguished community, and to examine in detail the full scope of his career, from his Weimaresque street scenes in Germany to shots of postwar nightclubs in New York and his later career as a master of color photomicroscopy.

Read more at artnews.com.

Roman Vishniac, [Zionist youth building a school and foundry while learning construction techniques, Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, Wieringermeer, The Netherlands], 1939.

© MARA VISHNIAC KOHN/COURTESY INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY.

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Of Mice and Men:

Putting a statue of Hitler in the Warsaw Ghetto. Painting Auschwitz Blue. Rendering the races in Nazi Europe as mice, cats, and pigs in a chilling, riveting, introspective biography of your own family, as Art Spiegelman did in his brilliant graphic novel Maus.  These are some of the strategies today’s artists are using to help themselves and the public to remember what many find too painful to think about—or too easy to forget. 

Learn more about the author of Maus in “The Art of Spiegelman,” a documentary screening January 21 and 22 at the New York Jewish Film Festival. See the sweep of his achievement, beginning with his earliest experimental comics from the ’60s, when his first (!) retrospective travels to the Vancouver Art Gallery in February, or when it arrives at New York’s Jewish Museum (its only U.S.) venue in November. Read more about the ways artists from Chagall to Cattelan and more are taking on the Holocaust at artnews.com.

Art Spiegelman, Sketch for the front cover of the first American edition of MAUS II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, ca. 1991.

COURTESY THE ARTIST.

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What I Like About You: Artists to Follow on Instagram

Every social network finds its (temporary) niche. Facebook is an information hub and water cooler, salon and reunion; Twitter more suited to bullhorns and banter; Tumblr a multi-media feed of news, curiosities, and cuteness. Instagram is just photos, quick and easy. Reblogging is impossible, captions are minimal, and so are comments. It’s all about the image. And (unless accounts are private) anyone can follow along.

That’s why it’s so alluring a format for artists to share their output, their esthetic, and their obsessions. Familiar names in the Instagram directory include Wangechi Mutu, Takashi Murakami, Ai Weiwei, KAWS, Ryan Trecartin, Erik Parker, Brooke Dunn Parker, Dzine, Renee Cox, Friends with You, Shepard Fairey, Sofia Maldonado, Zoe Strauss, JR, Os Gêmeos, and Sanford Biggers. Some of these artists’ feeds are more casual, some more curated, some more personal, some more promotional. Most are a mix of everything. Check out the ones that stand out in my roundup over at artnews.

Screenshot of artist Toyin Odutola’s Instagram feed. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

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The Military Is Present

Last Veterans Day, Captain Daniel Cho, a West Point graduate who served his Army career in Germany, Iraq, and South Korea, had to make a choice. He could be part of a Veterans Day parade. Or, he could be part of an art piece.

Cho decided to take the path less traveled. So he answered a call to the Pat Tillman Foundation, which is helping to fund his current MBA studies at Harvard, for participants in a “civic dialogue station” in midtown Manhattan. That Sunday, along with other Tillman Military Scholars, some of them veterans and others still serving, he turned up at the northern end of Times Square, at a curious little structure that had materialized near the TKTS booth over the past 16 hours. Their job was simply to engage passersby in conversation.

The station, and the conversation, were part of a project called Peace & Quiet, a partnership between the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Matter Practice and Times Square Arts, the public-art division of the Times Square Alliance. The concept was to create, within one of the city’s most chaotic public spaces, a safe environment for the public and veterans to interact.

“It was a great experience,” says Cho, who spent part of the day answering questions from the public, and part of it talking to veterans who were passing through Times Square.

“A lot of the public don’t know what questions to ask”—just as he wouldn’t want to be perceived as ignorant or insensitive if he had the chance to ask artists what they do, he points out. “There needs to be some safe area to educate,” he says. “I feel like there’s a gap between the civilian population and veteran population at America. This event took a stab at bridging this gap.”

The project reflects a growing attempt to create new connections between two distinct communities—the art world and the military.

“The cultures are very different,” notes Sergeant Lyndsey Anderson, who participated in both artworks. Anderson has one foot in each world—she served in Iraq, then became a Tillman Scholar, earning her Master’s in Museum Studies at NYU. “In the military, you’re one among many,” she points out, and the qualities valued are duty and selflessness. In the art world, which tends to value nonconformity, anything or anyone that has to do with the military is often viewed with suspicion. In contemporary art, particularly, soldiers have not been not considered so much as individuals who joined and served for varying reasons but as part of a military/industrial complex.

That is beginning to change as artists use their work to present veterans not as cyphers or victims but as protagonists and narrators.

Peace & Quiet was one such project. The site achieved that certain alchemy, so elusive and potentially life-changing, that makes taboos dissolve. Once the audience accepted the station as a transformative setting, the personal could replace the political and words and thoughts could flow that had been blocked before.

“The conversation became the art object in itself,” Anderson says.

 “Courage and Strength: Portraits of Those Who Have Served,” at the Honolulu Museum of Art, features images by five photographers who have devoted long-term projects to depicting the current and former service members, including Nina Berman (who documented soldiers severely wounded in Iraq) Suzanne Opton (conceptual portraits of veterans), Ashley Gilbertson (photos of the bedrooms of young fallen soldiers), Peter Hapak (images of tattoos of former service members from Iraq and Afganistan), and the late Tim Hetherington, who shot intimate portraits of American troops stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. 

The important thing is to get people talking, she says. “Everyone’s perspective is different,” she stresses. “Awareness is the key.”

Read (much) more at artnews.com

Peter Hapak, SPC Edward Klavin, U.S. Army, 2011, color digital print. The work, part of a series documenting tattoos veterans receive at a parlor near Walter Reed Army Medical Center, is in “Courage and Strength.” ©PETER HAPAK, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.