Flash Points

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Rethinking “The Critique”: Possibilities

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Rethinking “The Critique”: Possibilities

As promised in last week’s column I want to share some possibilities when it comes to facilitating in-progress critiques with students. Critiques that take place as an idea is taking …

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | Work after work after work…

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | Work after work after work…

On Friday, April 8th, two members from Temporary Services, Brett Bloom and Salem Collo-Julin, gave a presentation on their practice at Outpost for Contemporary Art here in Los Angeles. The …

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | On the Precipice of Reality: This and That

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | On the Precipice of Reality: This and That

For this month’s post, I’ve mulled and pondered, thought and reflected, yet I could not come up with any sort of brilliant topic for my penultimate post. So I thought …

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | PiST///

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | PiST///

  PiST///Interdisciplinary Art Space is storefront gallery space and artist project co-directed by artists Didem Özbek and Osman Bozkurt. Opened in 2006, PiST/// is located in Istanbul’s Pangaltı neighborhood, a …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Rethinking “The Critique”

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Rethinking “The Critique”

Like many art students, I couldn’t stand critiques when I was in high school and especially college. I even had a professor in grad school that would survey the finished …

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | On Access and Elitism

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | On Access and Elitism

I recently visited the Tate Britain with a friend who studies history but doesn’t care much for modern or contemporary art. Standing in front of David Hockney’s Great Pyramid at …

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | Los Angeles: Nice Meeting You Again and Again

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment | Los Angeles: Nice Meeting You Again and Again

This week began with Dean Rochelle Steiner of the USC Roski School of Fine Arts signing off on my thesis and me paying the publishing and binding fee. My thesis …

Letter from London

Letter from London: The Price is Right

Letter from London

Letter from London: The Price is Right

Funny how very expensive paintings become metaphors of themselves. The 45-million-dollar Duccio bought by the Met in 2005 shows the incarnate deity supported with infinite care by his reverentially gazing …

Looking at Los Angeles

Looking at Los Angeles | Vija Celmins’s Visions of Violence

Looking at Los Angeles

Looking at Los Angeles | Vija Celmins’s Visions of Violence

Last Saturday, March 19—the day that the US began air strikes in Libya—I passed an anti-war demonstration while driving to LACMA to see Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966. It …

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | Burak Arıkan

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | Burak Arıkan

Burak Arıkan is a busy guy. When we met in Istanbul two months ago to discuss his work, he had recently returned to the city from a net art conference …

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice

5 Questions with Colectivo Situaciones

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice

5 Questions with Colectivo Situaciones

* This interview has been translated and co-edited by Brian Whitener. I first heard about Colectivo Situaciones about a year ago, when I received a publication in the mail titled …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

What I Learned at the Armory Show

Teaching with Contemporary Art

What I Learned at the Armory Show

A long stroll and purposefully slow visit to the Armory Show last week opened my eyes to quite a bit. In addition to being exposed to new artists (my main …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Trip Advisor

Letter from London

Letter from London: Trip Advisor

All travel is retrospective. We don’t travel for the experience – most traveling time is spent waiting, after all – but in order to have something to remember. The easy …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Absolutely Uncertain

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Absolutely Uncertain

Since you can’t swing a cat without hitting a picture of Charlie Sheen at this point, I thought I’d choose a classic for today’s column. I mean, Art21 shouldn’t be …

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | biriken

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | biriken

biriken is the five year old interdisciplinary, collaborative project of Melis Tezkan and Okan Urun. Working at the intersection of performance art, installation art, and traditional theater practice, Tezkan and …

Flash Points

Speaking of Influence: A Monument’s Invisible Man

Flash Points

Speaking of Influence: A Monument’s Invisible Man

“To make the monuments speak again we must question the often bland surface they show the world.” –Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves “Do I speak for everyone? No. No …

Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports.

Center Field | Characters, Not Caricatures: The Multifarious Art of Rachel Mason

Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports.

Center Field | Characters, Not Caricatures: The Multifarious Art of Rachel Mason

Rachel Mason’s work is not easy to neatly summarize. I’ve been following her projects for several years now, and I still have difficulty explaining what exactly it is that she …

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice

5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Amy Balkin

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice

5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Amy Balkin

For the past couple years, I have been teaching Bay Area-based artist Amy Balkin’s work within a curriculum about environmental art and “land expropriation.” I teach her work besides Karl …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Blue

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Blue

A few friends and colleagues have suggested that I share some of the stories I tell in class here on the blog. I sometimes forget as I write the column …

Flash Points

Flash Points: Intimacy and Art

Flash Points

Flash Points: Intimacy and Art

If deprived of intimacy—without the closeness of another human’s body and touch—a human child has little chance of survival past infancy. In societies where the majority of people have all …

What Ever Happened to the Dilettante?

What Ever Happened to the Dilettante?

In June, the contemporary art podcast Bad at Sports (and regular columnists on this site) featured an interview with artist Mark Dion. Dion said something in the interview that has …

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | An Interview with Vasıf Kortun (Part II)

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | An Interview with Vasıf Kortun (Part II)

Following is the second half an interview Elizabeth Wolfson conducted with Vasif Kortun. Read part one here. — Ed. Perhaps more than any other individual, Vasıf Kortun has redirected the …

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Courtesy Patti Smith Archive.

Looking at Los Angeles

Looking at Los Angeles: Owning Robert Mapplethorpe

Looking at Los Angeles

Looking at Los Angeles: Owning Robert Mapplethorpe

  “I don’t know why my pictures come out looking so good,” photographer Robert Mapplethorpe once told his brother. “I just don’t get it.” He had that innate knack for …

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | An Interview with Vasıf Kortun (Part I)

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights | An Interview with Vasıf Kortun (Part I)

Perhaps more than any other individual, Vasıf Kortun has redirected the trajectory of recent Turkish art history. As Chief Curator and Director of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial in 1992, Kortun …

Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports.

Special “Center Field” Podcast: Fielding Practice with Bad at Sports

Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports.

Special “Center Field” Podcast: Fielding Practice with Bad at Sports

All of us here at Bad at Sports have loved working on our twice-monthly column for this blog, Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports. It gives …

How Much Does Corn Matter? Glory and Humility in the Work of Eduardo Villanes

How Much Does Corn Matter? Glory and Humility in the Work of Eduardo Villanes

As I am grieving the disappearance of the Minimalist from the pages of the New York Times, I am also pondering Mark Bittman’s statement from his farewell column, “the continuing …

Flash Points

Flash Points: Friends and Influence

Flash Points

Flash Points: Friends and Influence

Tonight, I am sitting in a red booth at Formosa Café in Hollywood, the Cantonese restaurant Frank Sinatra reportedly frequented when heartsick over Ava Gardner. Lana Turner came here too, …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

When One Day Is Not Enough

Teaching with Contemporary Art

When One Day Is Not Enough

With all of the mandatory testing that students must be put through it’s no wonder that most kids, especially in elementary grades, receive classes in visual and performing arts one …

Between Barcelona’s Soft Shoulders and Its Hard Underbelly: A Conversation with Daniela Ortiz

Between Barcelona’s Soft Shoulders and Its Hard Underbelly: A Conversation with Daniela Ortiz

Several months ago, even before I set my foot on Catalan ground, I was captivated by a seemingly modest photograph: a chocolate candy in a golden wrapper set on a …

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights: Extramücadele/Extrastruggle

Turkish and Other Delights

Turkish and Other Delights: Extramücadele/Extrastruggle

Extrastruggle is an enormous project which began in 1997. It works on imaginary demands from imaginary customers. Just like a graphic designer designing a logo for a client, it designs …

Dissecting the Social Self: A [Wo]Man, an Animal, and an Ambiguous “I.”

Dissecting the Social Self: A [Wo]Man, an Animal, and an Ambiguous “I.”

At the turn of December and January, the myriad summaries and best-of lists of the past year I browse through coincide with a more personal check-up. There is no better …

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice

5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Rigo 23

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice

5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Rigo 23

I first encountered Rigo 23’s work this past summer staying with friends in San Francisco’s Mission, where Rigo 23 partially got his start as an artist through his engagement with …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

It Ain’t the Heat, It’s the Stupidity

Teaching with Contemporary Art

It Ain’t the Heat, It’s the Stupidity

As promised last week, let’s talk about the plight Mr. Curtis Acosta finds himself in. As a public school teacher in Arizona, obviously a state with its share of issues …

Jeffrey Augustine Songco, "The Opening Scene". Courtesy the artist.

Flash Points

Art Under the Influence

Flash Points

Art Under the Influence

After reading Flash Points Editor Rachel Craft‘s initial post (“Flash Points: What Influences Art?”) regarding William Kentridge’s love of the stage, I thought it would be appropriate to continue that line …

Visibility, Potency and Meaning: Making Sense of Art at the Crosshairs

Visibility, Potency and Meaning: Making Sense of Art at the Crosshairs

Since I made my first appearance on the Art21 blog about six weeks ago, commenting on the now-infamous censoring of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly at the …

Letter from London

Letter from London | Porn, Porn Everywhere: Analog at Riflemaker Gallery.

Letter from London

Letter from London | Porn, Porn Everywhere: Analog at Riflemaker Gallery.

In this second and last guest blog post, Kerim Aytac fills in for our hero Ben Street this month. — Ed. Looking at Richard Nicholson’s elegiac contribution to the Analog …