Art in the Aftermath: Miami’s Fairs and Thereafter

In my two-week journalistic foray on Art:21′s blog into the effects of Sandy on the lives and livelihoods in the art world, I planned one last post about the art fairs in Miami last month, as a look towards national and international reverberations. In the weeks leading up to my blogger residency, I had contacted a number of galleries who were affected by the storm and were not able to re-open. As expected, I did not hear back from a single one. I did, however, notice that a number of these galleries posted their booth addresses for Miami alongside those of their inhospitable New York locations. It made me wonder whether the fairs provided a welcomed surrogate space for galleries, or were instead poorly timed sources of stress. Because galleries from around the world gather at the Miami fairs, it seemed to me that I could use them as some sort of litmus test for the global market now and into the future, perhaps even more representative than the major auctions in November.

Unable to see for Miami myself this year, I had interviewed two of my mentors and former supervisors who make the yearly commute; one is a collector and former museum executive, and the other is an art advisor. Both wished to remain anonymous for reasonable professional and personal reasons, so I will call them L and J. Unfortunately my editor could not allow me to publish anonymous interviews on Art:21 (also reasonable), so I thought I’d post our conversation here, because this insight could be valuable to an interested readership. I am extremely grateful to have been able to steal a bit of their time and get their opinion on not only the fairs but the future of the art world around us. Please find the conversation after the cut.

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Visiting Taylor Baldwin (Virtually)

For the ongoing artist interview series with toomer labzda, I had a cross-state Skype interview with the artist Taylor Baldwin (I was in New York, he was in Virginia where he currently teaches). He was generous with his patience and his thinking in speaking to me, and I deeply enjoyed witnessing thoughts collide and cohere as the conversation went on. Taylor works mostly with found materials to make sculpture and installation with an acute sensitivity to the material memory of his medium. When I asked him about how he came to work in his current medium, he recalled the moment after he completed his thesis work:

I remember making an oath that the next year I was going to try to limit my palette to things that I could find or only to things that I could gather without engaging the new market. It was not necessarily about spending money. It was about bartering, finding things through craigslist, going through dumpsters, or stealing things.

There are a lot of artists who work that way, but I don’t think there’s any consensus on their reasoning whether it’s necessity or making their finances work. Or the environmental reasons. For me [environment] is definitely important–it’s what instigated the practice. But it’s in the types of materials and the history and age and things they accumulate by not being new–[that] ended up becoming my main drive.

 

Read the complete interview on toomer labzda.
Photo courtesy of the artist.

Visiting Jason Gringler’s Studio

Recently I have been running to the studios of toomer labzda‘s artists, and bugging them with an 8-question long conversation that I record and transcribe. With all the implausibility of coincidence, I was rained out in the same supermarket in Bushwick with Jason Gringler, minutes before our interview and just as I was about to notify him that I was going to be late. 

For all the density of his work, Jason’s studio was cleaned towards sparseness. It was perhaps most fascinating to me that his sculpture-painting, which masks its three-dimensionality as a mounted wall piece with a smooth surface, is read for violence probably in its employment of broken mirrors and sharp angularity. There is really nothing quite so vicious about the work. In fact it speaks to slow deliberation and meticulous composition, untensed and stable in its multiple layers. Perhaps it should be more startling that broken mirrors and sharp angularity can carry a thoughtfulness and a quietness.

 “Actually, initially I was doing sculpture and performance, but then when I was about 20 I discovered painting and I started pursuing it avidly, but realized quickly that I wasn’t a natural painter. So I fought with the medium, I fought with the idea of representation and idea of making images.” -Jason Gringler.

See the interview on toomer labzda.

Phaidon and Friends, Defining Contemporary Art

An article I submitted a while back, in conjunction with Phaidon’s roundtable talk at the Museum of Modern Art on the recent release of its new contemporary art non-survey survey book. Read the full article on Artlog, with excerpts and quotes from the talk.

Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks takes an innovative approach to surveying the art of the last quarter century, which is notoriously difficult to periodize or define. Eschewing grand narratives, Phaidon asked for individual artwork selections from eight of today’s most influential curators: Daniel Birnbaum, Connie Butler, Suzanne Cotter, Bice Curiger, Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Bob Nickas, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The resulting volume not only addresses the obstacle of pinning down the nebulous term “contemporary art,” but also manges to pull off a legible presentation of it in a single book.

The project never aspired to be a comprehensive or canonical text, and in fact, its self-imposed limitations make it particularly effective. The strict parameters read almost like the playful rules of a game: each curator picks twenty-five works made between 1985 and 2010; no artist can be featured twice in the entire volume (though there were two exceptions); and each curator must select one of the years to write about at length. Craig Garrett, the editor and coordinator of the project, wanted the curators to think anecdotally by picking works they would look at now and say, “After this, everything has changed.” Ultimately, Defining Contemporary Art functions as both a demonstration of contemporary curation and a poly-contextualized historical review.

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If for Anne-Lise Coste

Read another version of this article published on Artlog.

If for Anne-Lise Coste, words are at times “too narrative, too emotional,” how does one address her latest exhibition at toomer labzda, titled m, l, e (on view until April 15) after the very units of words? In the moments leading up to her gallery talk last Thursday, the French New York-based artist acknowledged the difficulties of having to speak about her work. The paintings, she told one guest beforehand, were “easier to explain with gesture.” Continue reading…

The Beginning of a Thought on Installation Art

In an attempt to re-compress some of the art and literature I’ve gathered in the past few years, I’ve been slowly pinning down corners of a subject I want to pursue in my graduate work. The recurring themes in my undergraduate studies circle around the art institutional space, how it can be transformative and plastic, validating and self-critical. Within the discourses on artistic space, I find myself returning to the idea of Installation Art, which cannot be called a medium by art historical tradition, but has in the past 40 years acquired the valence of a coagulated genre, and thus slipped into art world’s vocabulary. I have noticed a discrepancy in documentation and critical perspectives on installation art relative to its high visibility in contemporary exhibitions. While museum attention implies a certain validation in artistic and cultural currency, installation art has yet to move into the discourse of art history. This might be because the genre is perceived to be relatively young, but I would guess that this is more because installation is part performative, part conceptual, and incredibly fragile.

In the handful of survey books I’ve come in contact with, I frequently return to two prominent volumes: MOCA San Diego’s Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996 (1997), and Phaidon’s Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (2009). They offer competing methodologies by way of introduction to their subject. Continue reading…