Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Marianne Stockebrand, the curator of “Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works” and the former director of the Chinati Foundation. The program was taped before a live audience at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, where “The Multicolored Works” is on view through January 4.

This is the first museum exhibition to focus on Judd’s use of color, and more specifically Judd’s use of color in the 1980s, when he discovered a process that enabled a new kind of sculpture. “The Multicolored Works” includes 23 Judd sculptures as well as works on paper and collages from the collection of the Judd Foundation that reveal Judd’s creative process.

Stockebrand and I discussed:

• How Judd quite suddenly shifted from making works with no more than two colors to making pieces with many colors;
• Why Judd thought artists had to reclaim color from science;
• How Judd came to the colors he used — and how a painting he remembered seeing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art helped him to one of the colors he used; and
• The relationship between Judd’s early paintings and these late sculptures.

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license. Special thanks to Philip Matthews and Shane Simmons for their help with this week’s show.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Philip Taaffe. An exhibition of Taaffe’s most recent work opens Friday, May 3 at Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea. Taaffe has re-designed his website just in time for the show. Among the better artist websites, it features most (if not all) of the paintings he’s made since 1980.

Taaffe’s work engages cultural, natural and art history, often all at once. Taaffe’s work is in the collection of major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A 2001 survey of his work was launched by the Galleria Civica of Trento, Italy.

Among the topics we discuss are:

• Whether Taaffe hopes his deployment of imagery from the sciences or world history motivates his viewers to learn more about those topics;
• Why he has deployed many of the same objects over and over again, objects such as diatoms, snakes and thorny plants;
• How he builds a painting both on a loose grid, but also from the surface of the canvas ‘up’; and
• Whether he is a different kind of history painter.

On the second segment, William Powhida discusses new work he’s exhibiting at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. The gallery has made available a PDF catalogue of the exhibition. Powhida’s work typically engages in a pointed critique of the art market and the institutions and individuals who are part of its ecosystem. In 2010, Powhida created a drawing that served as the announcement that Modern Art Notes was moving from its previous home to Artinfo. Despite living and showing in New York, he has not been included in a Whitney Biennial because, well… awkward. [Image: William Powhida, A (really bad, bad) Neo-Expressionist Painting, 2013.]

Nota bene: Regarding  the Powhida images below: Each object comes with a ‘written’ panel. The panels are easily readable in the PDF catalogue of the exhibition, but not so much at the size at which I’d have to publish them here. So download the catalogue!

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Wangechi Mutu. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is currently showing “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” the first mid-career survey of Mutu’s work. Curated by the Nasher’s Trevor Schoonmaker, the exhibition is on view through July 21. On May 23 the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney will debut a concurrent (but obviously different) Mutu survey. It will be up through August 14.

Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, schooled in Wales and New York and lives in Brooklyn. Her work, which began as mostly collage-based but has evolved to include sculpture and room-sized installations. The winner of the 2010 Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year,” Mutu has been featured in solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Pace, the Miami Art Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, the Art Gallery of Ontario and more.

Among the topics we discussed are:

• How she builds her collages;
• Her use of color, and whether it is prompted by her collaged elements or external factors;
• Why she is interested in some of the materials she uses, including dirt; and
• How and why she addresses the way global issues are played out on women’s bodies.

During the program I referenced this Art Gallery of Ontario-produced studio visit video.

This week’s tragic events in Boston caused the cancellation of the taping of this week’s second segment. Instead, this week’s program features a clip from my interview with Barry McGee last September. McGee is the subject of two significant exhibitions that are on view now: The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is hosting the survey organized last year by the Berkeley Art Museum. It’s on view at the ICA through September 2. See ICA Boston curator Jenelle Porter’s video tour of the show. McGee is showing new work at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth (at right) through June 2 as part of the museum’s “Focus” series.

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights “Photography and the American Civil War” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Opening Tuesday, April 2, the exhibition surveys photography of and related to the conflict, including battlefield daguerreotypes, post-battle scenes and intense pictures of the dead and wounded. The program’s lead guest is Jeff Rosenheim, the curator of the exhibition and the author of the excellent book that accompanies it. The exhibition will be on view through September 2.

Rosenheim is the curator in charge of the Met’s photography department. His primary focus is American photography: He facilitated the Met’s acquisitions of the complete archives of photographers Walker Evans in 1994 and Diane Arbus in 2007. He has also organized several exhibitions of Evans’ and written several books about him.

The topics we discuss include:

• Why new discoveries and information in the Civil War photography field is happening so quickly that Rosenheim thinks he’ll have to update the museum’s wall labels during the exhibition;
• The many portraits of Abraham Lincoln and why some were disseminated more than others;
• Why the war itself was a boon to the emerging field of photography; and
• Why Civil War commanders found photographers useful.

On the second segment, artist Dara Friedman discusses her video installation Dancer (2011), which is on view at the Hammer Museum through April 14. The piece celebrates movement and dance on the streets of Miami, revealing both the city’s residents and the city’s urban fabric. Hammer curator Anne Ellegood’s essay on Dancer is available here. Dancer was previously exhibited at the Miami Art Museum and at the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh.

To download: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights “Gutai: Splendid Playground” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The program’s first guest is Alexandra Munroe, who co-curated the exhibition with Ming Tiampo. The exhibition’s beautiful and important (but index-lacking) catalogue was published by the Guggenheim and the show’s website is rich with information, images and a 10-minute introductory video.

Gutai was a two-generation Japanese art movement that was active from about 1954-72. Gutai artists built upon post-war openness and explored art as a particular kind of freedom, making work that embraced performance, including audience in artworks and non-traditional materials. The Gutai artists were particularly eager to engage with international developments in art such as abstract expressionism, Fluxus, art informel and more. Gutai’s focus on embracing new materials and methods led affiliated artists to performative painting, exhibitions in public parks, and art that engaged electronics and light. Fifty-nine artists participated in Gutai activities; the work of 25 of them is in the Guggenheim’s exhibition.

Alexandra Munroe is the senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim. Her previous exhibitions include “Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity, “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia 1860-1989, and “Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe” and a 1989 retrospective of Yayoi Kusama.

Among the topics Munroe discusses with host Tyler Green are:

• The numerous ways in which Gutai artists interacted with their peers around the world, especially in the United States…;
• … and yet how the movement has been substantially overlooked by American art historians over the last 30-plus years;
• The impact of Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of Jackson Pollock influenced Gutai artists — and how photographs of Gutai performances and art trafficked int he West; and
• The legacies of artists Tanaka Atsuko (the only Gutai artist to be the subject of a monographic exhibition in the U.S. in the last 40 years), Yoshihara Jiro (who founded Gutai), Shimamoto Shozo and Saburo Murakami.

During the program, Munroe references Roberta Smith’s New York Times review of “Gutai,” which can be found here.

On the second segment, artist Yevgeniy Fiks discusses his exhibition “Homosexuality is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America” at Winkleman Gallery. Fiks’ exhibition examines the way anti-gay and anti-Communist rhetoric fed each other and overlapped during the McCarthy years. The exhibition is on view through March 23.

How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. Stream the program at MANPodcast.com.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. The program is edited by Wilson Butterworth. The MAN Podcast is released under this Creative Commons license.

For links images of artworks discussed on this week’s show, please click through to the jump.

(more…)