Tyler Green
Art-focused Journalism by Tyler Green

Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Friday exhib: Patti Smith at the Wadsworth

January 27, 2012, 11:34 am
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This week’s Friday exhibition is “Patti Smith: Camera Solo” at the Wadsworth Atheneum. The museum has created this website for the show, which is on view through Feb. 19. The catalogue is available here. The exhibition was curated by Susan L. Talbott, the Wadsworth’s director.

Also worth checking out: Smith’s memoir “Just Kids,” about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. “Just Kids” won the National Book Award in 2010.

Patti Smith, Robert’s Cross, 2003.

Patti Smith, Grave, Amedeo Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne, Père Lachaise, Paris, 2010.

Patti Smith, Jim Carroll’s Bed, 2011.

Patti Smith, Walt Whitman’s Tomb, Camden, NJ, 2007.

Patti Smith, Virginia Woolf’s Bed I, Monk’s House, 2003.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast: Larry Bell

January 26, 2012, 12:10 pm
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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Larry Bell, who joins me to discuss his career as one of the foremost sculptors of the post-war period. Installations of Bell’s work in Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, including in “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (see this week’s banner), were among the highlights of the series. PST especially revealed Bell, 72, as a key pivot between California hard-edge painting, light-and-space, and minimalism, which Bell anticipated in his sculpture of the late 1950s. Bell’s work is in the collection of virtually every major museum of modern and contemporary art.

To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program through the player below.

In our conversation Bell and I discuss:

  • The specific effects he has been trying to create with his cubes and his floor-mounted pieces since the early 1960s;
  • The Santa Monica studio into which Bell moved in 1959 and how his discovery of its skylight helped him transition from painting to sculpture;
  • Bell’s breakthrough untitled minimal sculpture from 1959 and how it led to his next breakthrough: his cubes;
  • Bell’s years in New York and how and why he purchased a machine so that he could coat his own sculptures;
  • Bell’s return to Los Angeles and his transition from making cubes to floor-mounted installations;
  • Little-known major works such as his room in “Spaces,” an important show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969; and
  • Bell’s largest, most ambitious and possibly greatest work, The Iceberg and Its Shadow (ca. 1977), which is in the collection of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Thanks to the efforts of fast-working media staff and archivists and registrars at MIT, MoMA, the Walker and more, I’m able to publish rarely seen images of many of these works. Click through to the jump for both some amazing pictures and for a video slideshow that Bell’s son Ollie made last year of a large Bell survey at the Carré d’Art-Musée d’art Contemporain in Nimes, France. Further special thanks to Ron Hartwig and Julie Jaskol at the Getty for helping to arrange this week’s interview and to the Archives of American Art, for making research materials available to me on late notice.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is released under this Creative Commons license. For images of the works discussed on this week’s program, click through to the jump.

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Ed Ruscha on the manufacture of your iPhone

January 25, 2012, 6:39 pm
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As many of you know, 3rd of May is my Tumblr-based art-plus-journalism pseudo-curatorial project. It’s a simple website at which I mix other people’s journalism with selected-by-me art in an effort to demonstrate the ways in which artists are engaged with and responding to what’s going on in the world around them.

The two paintings featured above have not been on 3rd of May recently, but I’ve found myself thinking of them this week. Over the weekend, the New York Times featured an examination of Apple’s manufacturing processes. More specifically, the paper’s Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher explained why the iPhone and its relatives are built in China.

American companies manufacturing elsewhere is nothing new, but the extent of the near-imperative for many American firms to make things in China may still surprise you. I suspect it would not surprise Ed Ruscha: In 2004 Ruscha’s contribution to the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale included these two paintings, both of which are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The first painting is Blue Collar Tool & Die, which Ruscha painted in 1992. The painting on the bottom is The Old Tool & Die Building, which Ruscha made in 2004, specifically for the Venice installation.

Why the artist posed with state officials, a cow

January 25, 2012, 3:08 pm
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Perhaps inspired by the Pacific Standard Time series of exhibitions, perhaps because I live in a city not dominated by a commercial art scene, in recent months I’ve been thinking a lot about how artists choose to show and share their work with a potential audience. In today’s art world, especially in New York and Los Angeles, the commercial gallery system is the preferred, dominant means of delivery.

That has not always been so, especially in California, where numerous PST shows demonstrated how artists unlesashed their work into the world. The exhibition that most examined that story was probably “State of Mind,” at the Orange County Museum of Art, a show that just closed and that will open at the Berkeley Art Museum on Feb. 29. The Getty Research Institute’s fascinating little “Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics 1950-80″ tells different versions of the same story, which is the subject of my most recent Modern Painters column:

Chris Burden bought advertising time on television. Bonnie Sherk planted herself near a freeway off-ramp. Terry Fox set fire to a flowerbed.

It was the early 1970s and California was a state full of artists­­­ but short of significant commercial gallery infrastructure. Lacking one traditional way of presenting their work, artists hit upon another exhibition strategy: they pursued audiences outside the art world in an effort to share their work. Their ambition was to have a general impact, rather than have an effect on the art world…

San Francisco–based artist Bonnie Sherk was particularly interested in having an affect on her city and the way it considered and constructed its urban spaces, which for her meant creating installations and launching events in the most public places she could find, reaching an audience that does not necessarily go out in search of art. For Portable Park II (1970, above), she installed a palm tree at the Mission Street-Van Ness Avenue freeway off-ramp and tied a cow to it, thus injecting a little country into the city. Sherk then invited officials from the California Department of Transportation to the unveiling of her artwork. As a result, her documentation of the work shows a Caltrans official petting the head of the cow. Her installations presaged the recent design firm Rebar’s program to turn empty parking spaces into small urban parks, an intervention that was copied in dozens of cities.

Pick up a copy of the February Modern Painters for the full story, or better yet subscribe here for less than $20!

Tuesday news and links

January 24, 2012, 1:44 pm
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The 3rd annual MAN Super Bowl Bet!

January 23, 2012, 8:35 am
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Over the next couple of weeks we art lovers will hear lots about Eli Manning’s ability to author game-winning drives in the fourth quarter and overtime. We’ll read about how Tom Brady is the golden boy of National Football League quarterbacks, and that he’s married to some model. We’ll hear about how New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin’s daughter married one of Coughlin’s offensive lineman, making Coughlin father-in-law to one of his best players. We’ll see that Patriots coach Bill Belichick has deplorable fashion sense.

Phooey on all that. It’s time for the third annual Modern Art Notes Super Bowl Bet, in which the art museums in the two Super Bowl cities wager loans of major artworks on the outcome of the game. In Year One, then-Indianapolis Museum of Art director Max Anderson disparaged an artwork New Orleans Museum of Art director John Bullard proposed to bet as “sentimental blancmange,” which was immediately recognized as one of the great insults in Super Bowl history. NOMA ended up with one of Indianapolis’s best JMW Turners. Last year the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum played their paintings close to the vest and handled the whole thing via quiet, polite press releases. It was much less fun, but Milwaukee still got a CMOA Renoir.

This year’s Super Bowl of American football matches the New York Giants against the New England Patriots, New York vs. Boston. Because each city has several marquee art museums, I’m challenging two institutions in each city to step forward and to put their art where their communities’ mouthiness is. The logos of those four museums are at the top of this post: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Harvard Art Museums.

Make big wagers, y’all. Maybe MoMA and Harvard should bet their Max Beckmann self-portraits, and the winning museum could have an installation of Maxes. I’d love to see the Met and the MFA play to an old Venetian rivalry: Say, a Tintoretto up against a Titian. Or maybe the four museums will go supersize, and make two bets each. Who has other ideas? Let the (real) game begin…

Note: I’ll use this post to provide updates on the progress of the bet(s) up until when we have a final bet(s). Check back often and follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for the latest news.

Weekend roundup

January 23, 2012, 7:15 am
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Friday exhib: The new ICAA Archive at MFAH

January 20, 2012, 4:13 pm
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Instead of the usual Friday exhibition, this week I’m publishing five images from the International Center for the Arts of Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s new Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art Archive. The website went live last night. It features over 2,000 (of what will eventually be 10,000+) primary-source documents pertaining to Latin American and Latino art. Expect it to be useful to scholars, educators, anyone wanting to geek out. (Tumblr users will have a field day…) Where possible, I have linked to the document in the ICAA archive.

Don’t miss Marí Carmen Ramirez, the MFAH’s curator of Latin American art and the director of the ICAA, talking about the ICAA/MFAH new project on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program through the player here, where you can also access images of the work of the program’s lead guest, artist Shirin Neshat.

Cover of “Argentina” in II Bienal de San Pablo. São Paulo, Brazil, 1953.

Page from the 28-page document “Cry for Justice” that includes the statement “To listen and to act,” issued by the Civil Rights Department of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America [AFL/CIO] as well as the collective essay, “Museum of the streets.” This page depicts details from several Chicago street murals including the one of the crucified Puerto Rican freedom fighter Pedro Albizu Campos on the left. The link above includes color images of many other murals. Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America under the direction of its Civil Rights Department AFL/CIO, 1972.  Courtesy of the United Food and Commercial Workers, International Union.

First Issue of the Revista Senhor, March 1959. Image courtesy of MFAH, © Revista Senhor.

Prometeo : el fresco de Pomona in “Nuestra Ciudad (Mexico City) 1, no. 7 (October 1950). The article details a new mural created by José Clemente Orozco at Pomona College in California.
The myth of Prometheus, chosen by Orozco as the theme for his mural, stirred up a great deal of controversy because of its pagan connotations and also because the dean of Pomona College and José Pijoán, the director of the art history department, had imagined that the mural would have a religious theme, or would depict founding fathers of American universities, or major figures in California history. The photographs, courtesy of Paramount Studios, are by Brett Weston, the son of the photographer Edward Weston. The watermark is the ICAA/MFAH’s.

Cover of Artes Visuales (Mexico City), No. 10 (April-June 1976). The cover references an article inside titled, “In reply to a question: ‘When will the Art of Latin America become Latin American Art?” by Damián Bayón. The entire article is readable via the link above. The watermark is the ICAA/MFAH’s.

The MAN Podcast: Shirin Neshat

January 19, 2012, 12:51 pm
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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features New York-based artist Shirin Neshat, who joins me to discuss the art she’s made in response to Iran’s Green Revolution and to the Arab Spring. “The Book of Kings,” an exhibition of Neshat’s work is on view at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York through February 11. A detail from Neshat’s My House is Burning Down (2012) is featured in this week’s banner. The full image is in the jump below.

Neshat has been the subject of major survey exhibitions at museums in Spain, Germany, England, Italy, Mexico, Canada and the United States. Among many other honors, she won the Silver Lion at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival for “Women Without Men” and the First International Award at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Next year the Detroit Institute of Arts will present a major retrospective of her work.

To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program through the player below.

In our conversation Neshat and I discuss:

  • The passion she feels for her homeland of Iran even after having lived abroad for 37 years;
  • The challenges inherent in making art for audiences in Iran and the Middle East when Neshat lives and shows in the West;
  • The ways in which her art is seen in Iran today;
  • How the uprisings in the Persian and Arab worlds motivated her newest work;
  • Her recent “Winter” video op-ed for the New York Times; and
  • Why metaphor is such an important strategy for her.

Neshat’s work has been featured on Modern Art Notes and in my writing frequently over the years, including:

This week’s program also features Museum of Fine Arts Houston curator and MFAH International Center for the Arts of the Americas director Mari Carmen Ramirez. Today the ICAA launches a new digital project: Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art, a major online archive that will include 10,000 primary source documents about Latin American and Latino modern and contemporary art.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is released under this Creative Commons license. For images of the works discussed on this week’s program, click through to the jump.

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“Zoe Strauss” is a good start, PMA must do more

January 19, 2012, 9:16 am
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The striking, sad irony of the exhibition “Zoe Strauss: 10 Years” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is that the people Strauss photographs cannot afford to go see the museum’s exhibition of her work.

Strauss’s pictures typically features people and communities on the margins of American life, people who aspire to the lower-middle-class and neighborhoods that have been forgotten by most Americans. [Image: Zoe Strauss, We Love Having You Here, Ocean Springs, MS, 2008. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.]

The PMA, along with New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of America’s most class-exclusive museums. It costs a family of four $56 to enter the PMA and an almost-mandatory $10 or more to park a car. A family of four that wants to see the main exhibition on view must fork out $104 (plus parking). That’s beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of Philadelphia families. Along with those three peers, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been on the vanguard of keeping great art and a great art collection inaccessible to the audience it’s supposed to serve. (Reminder: The PMA is not a business; it’s a non-profit with a mission statement that calls for it to “extend the reach” of art.)

For a couple days over the last week, Strauss, her roots in the community and her art have helped to dissolve the PMA’s insistence on exclusivity. Tickets to the Strauss opening, which sold out, were just $8. This past Monday, the PMA opened on a holiday Monday and was effectively free. Furthermore, the PMA has spread Strauss’s work throughout the city by partnering with two billboard companies to erect 54 billboards showing Strauss’s art. These are not ads for the show, they’re Strauss’s pictures out in the city.

To new PMA director Timothy Rub’s credit, “Zoe Strauss” was the first exhibit that he approved after becoming director. It was a great decision: It used important art that happened to be made by a Philadelphian to connect  the museum to its city and to audiences the museum has traditionally excluded.

But it is not enough for an art museum to show art that features audiences that the museum fails to welcome. Rub’s next step should be to address the PMA’s longstanding failure to fully live up to its mission, to ensure that the museum is accessible to the entire region. Rub and the PMA face a special imperative to address their admissions issue: The city of Philadelphia contributed $2.3 million in operating funds to the museum in fiscal year 2011 and another $2.4 million in capital funds. So long as the city’s taxpayers are a major contributor to the museum, the museum should be accessible to the city’s residents. [Image: Strauss, We Will Win, Las Vegas, 2004. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.]

Fortunately, this is within the PMA’s reach: In its last fiscal year, the PMA brought in $3.9 million in admissions revenue. The museum’s operating expenses were $51 million. The PMA’s audience-restricting admissions fees made up a little more than seven percent of its revenue. Ergo, a director who values making art and his museum accessible to the broadest possible audience, a director who believes in better fulfilling his museum’s own mission, isn’t far from a major success.

Rub should start by making the PMA free to everyone under 21 years of age and to anyone with a student ID. Then he should start in on making sure that the rest of Philadelphia can enjoy their museum.

Related: My 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed about the PMA’s admissions fees. A personal story about why museums that charge high admissions fees are making a big mistake.

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