On September 17, Miz Cracker visited the celebrated poet and artist John Giorno (1936–2019) in his storied home on the Bowery to discuss Buddhism, inspiration, and his exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery.
Since the late 1980s, Pat Steir has slung her paint from a loaded brush, letting oils arc and flow in a signature gesture of both creation and sublime surrender. For her latest exhibition, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the American artist has filled the building’s rotunda with a new suite of thirty paintings that, together, form a color wheel—an art fundamental that dates back to the early eighteenth century. “What Goethe was really pursuing was not a physiological but a psychological theory of colors,” Wittgenstein once wrote. The same might be said of Steir’s singular approach to the subject. “Pat Steir: Color Wheel” opened on October 24, 2019 and runs through September 7, 2020.
David Lynch talks about his first love—painting—and his subsequent lifelong devotion to artmaking—from his student years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, to his move to Los Angeles to pursue cinema (“moving paintings,” per Lynch), to his discovery of Transcendental Meditation, which has been an important part of his life since 1973.
Filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl talks about her most recent installation, “Drill,” comprised of pre-existing works as well as new projects utilizing the Drill Hall and other interiors of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The show is up through July 21, 2019.
Film critic and 4columns Film editor Melissa Anderson talks about Jack Hazan’s “effulgently yet casually gay” A Bigger Splash (1974), an intimate documentary portrait of English-born artist David Hockney and his coterie. The film opens at Metrograph in New York on June 21, 2019.
To read more from Melissa Anderson on A Bigger Splash, pick up the Summer 2019 issue of Artforum, or read it online.
New York–based artist Philip Vanderhyden talks about curating and reconstructing the work of Gretchen Bender (1951–2004) for shows at the Poor Farm in Waupaca County, Wisconsin (2012); The Kitchen in New York (2013); and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He also discusses his work for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018) and his collaboration with artist and musician Stuart Argabright for a forthcoming event at Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room, which is copresented with Red Bull Arts New York.
For the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, K.E. will bring together performance, video, sculpture, and hieroglyphs from Asomtavruli, the original Georgian alphabet, in a single architectural environment for the Georgian pavilion, curated by Margot Norton. Here, she discusses moving to New York, as well as her piece, REARMIRRORVIEW, Simulation is Simulation, is Simulation, is Simulation, (2019).
Akosua Adoma Owusu talks about her filmmaking process and the importance of thinking plurality in an excerpt from this interview.
Ser Serpas talks about her work and her show, “Against Attachment,” on view from April 25 through June 2, 2019 at Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies, Ludlow 38, in New York.
New York-based writer Christopher Glazek’s 2017 investigation of the Sacklers for Esquire helped inspire Nan Goldin’s activism against the Sackler family—a family which owns Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxycontin. Here, Glazek talks about Goldin’s actions at the Metropolitan and Guggenheim museums, as well as his own interest in what he calls “billionaire democracy.”
This video is part of an Art and Activism package for the May 2019 issue of Artforum.
Los Angeles-based photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya talks about his portraiture, his thoughts on New York and LA, and his show “The Conditions,” on view at Team Gallery through April 20, 2019. Sepuya was the subject of an Artist Project in the March 2019 issue of Artforum, which can be read in print, or online here.
Musician Stephen O’Malley—founder of the drone-metal band Sunn O)))—talks about his approach to sound, his collaborations with the late Scott Walker, and Sunn O)))'s latest album, Life Metal, which is out on April 13, 2019.
On September 17, Miz Cracker visited the celebrated poet and artist John Giorno (1936–2019) in his storied home on the Bowery to discuss Buddhism, inspiration, and his exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery.
“Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Artist: Helen Keller.
Since the late 1980s, Pat Steir has slung her paint from a loaded brush, letting oils arc and flow in a signature gesture of both creation and sublime surrender. For her latest exhibition, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the American artist has filled the building’s rotunda with a new suite of thirty paintings that, together, form a color wheel—an art fundamental that dates back to the early eighteenth century. “What Goethe was really pursuing was not a physiological but a psychological theory of colors,” Wittgenstein once wrote. The same might be said of Steir’s singular approach to the subject. “Pat Steir: Color Wheel” opened on October 24, 2019 and runs through September 7, 2020.
Miz Cracker Visits
Episode 1
Starring:
Miz Cracker
Raúl de Nieves
Directed by:
Ryan McNamara
Camera and Editing by:
Matthew Carlson
Titles:
Bevin McNamara
Travel Coordinator:
Liam O’Malley Davy
“Raúl de Nieves: As Far As UUU Take Me” runs through October 20, 2019 at Company Gallery
88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10002
Maren Hassinger very nearly became a dancer. As it happened, two fortuitous turns in her education in the 1970s led her to create sculptures hewn of fibrous metal and knotted detritus. From her early work in Los Angeles—including the 1979 installation of twelve wire rope “trees” near the Mulholland Drive exit ramp—to her recent “mandala” of repurposed pages from the New York Times, questions of ecological and spiritual consciousness have long underscored Hassinger’s practice. She is known for works in a range of media as well as for her collaborative bent. Following last year’s retrospective at Mark Bradford’s Art + Practice and the Baltimore Museum of Art, Hassinger’s first solo show outside of the United States, “Passing Through,” runs at London’s Tiwani Contemporary from October 2, 2019, to November 15, 2019.
Widely known and celebrated as a jazz musician, composer, and improviser, Jason Moran also produces drawings, sculptures, and installations, expanding the forms of his ongoing inquiries regarding the natures of sound and silence, history and presence. He is also a prolific collaborator, creating with, for, and alongside luminaries such as Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Joan Jonas, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition—which runs until January 5, 2020, at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and comprises both his works-do-date as well as live musical performances—Moran talks about the many registers of his singular artistic practice.
David Lynch talks about his first love—painting—and his subsequent lifelong devotion to artmaking—from his student years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, to his move to Los Angeles to pursue cinema (“moving paintings,” per Lynch), to his discovery of Transcendental Meditation, which has been an important part of his life since 1973.
Filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl talks about her most recent installation, “Drill,” comprised of pre-existing works as well as new projects utilizing the Drill Hall and other interiors of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The show is up through July 21, 2019.
New York–based video artist Dara Birnbaum talks about her life and work—from her beginnings as an architecture student at Carnegie Mellon and her formative years in Berkeley, California, to her first encounter with video art in a storefront in Florence and her return to New York, where she fell in with a community of like-minded artists.
Film critic and 4columns Film editor Melissa Anderson talks about Jack Hazan’s “effulgently yet casually gay” A Bigger Splash (1974), an intimate documentary portrait of English-born artist David Hockney and his coterie. The film opens at Metrograph in New York on June 21, 2019.
To read more from Melissa Anderson on A Bigger Splash, pick up the Summer 2019 issue of Artforum, or read it online.
New York–based artist Philip Vanderhyden talks about curating and reconstructing the work of Gretchen Bender (1951–2004) for shows at the Poor Farm in Waupaca County, Wisconsin (2012); The Kitchen in New York (2013); and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He also discusses his work for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018) and his collaboration with artist and musician Stuart Argabright for a forthcoming event at Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room, which is copresented with Red Bull Arts New York.
For the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, K.E. will bring together performance, video, sculpture, and hieroglyphs from Asomtavruli, the original Georgian alphabet, in a single architectural environment for the Georgian pavilion, curated by Margot Norton. Here, she discusses moving to New York, as well as her piece, REARMIRRORVIEW, Simulation is Simulation, is Simulation, is Simulation, (2019).
For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art on December 1, 2019, Visual AIDS presented STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,” the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades. STILL BEGINNING screened at 110 venues worldwide, premiering at the Whitney Museum of American Art on December 1, with additional marquee screenings at the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the MCA Chicago and MOCA LA.
I Remember Dancing brings together an intergenerational cast of “trans and queer gaysians” ruminating on the past and future of AIDS, activism, gay culture, love, and (un)safe sex. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s I Remember poems, these confessions illuminate perspectives of queer Asian communities often absent from whitewashed narratives of HIV and AIDS. Grief, regret, longing, risk, and pleasure surface as their memories and fantasies blur into one another.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
visualaids.org/projects/day-without-art-2019
Nguyen Tan Hoang is a videomaker and film and media scholar. His short experimental videos include K.I.P, Forever Bottom!, PIRATED! and look_im_azn. He is the author of A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke UP, 2014) and articles on porn pedagogy and Southeast Asian queer cinema. He teaches literature, film, and cultural studies at UC San Diego.
For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art on December 1, 2019, Visual AIDS presented STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,” the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades. STILL BEGINNING screened at 110 venues worldwide, premiering at the Whitney Museum of American Art on December 1, with additional marquee screenings at the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the MCA Chicago and MOCA LA.
I'm Still Me explores how digital platforms have created community and connections for Sian, a Black woman living with HIV and navigating the stigma and misinformation that is prevalent in the American South. Through her blog, social media accounts and online video platforms, Sian connects with (predominately) heterosexual Black women that send her messages, ask questions, and share their experiences with stigma and fear, all the while creating community that may have previously only existed in the shadows.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
visualaids.org/projects/day-without-art-2019
Iman Shervington is the Director of Media & Communications at the Institute of Women & Ethnic Studies (IWES), a public health non-profit. Through IWES, Iman has utilized her script development, cinematography, directing, producing, and editing skills to create over 50 short films and PSAs, a web-series, a feature-length documentary, two feature-length narrative films and an award-winning podcast. In 2016, Iman was chosen as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leader to promote a culture of health in New Orleans and she received the award as a “Changemaker” in the New Orleans-based Millennial Awards. Outside of film, Iman specializes in social marketing, social media management, graphic design, photography, positive youth development, participatory action research, and media literacy.
For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art on December 1, 2019, Visual AIDS presented STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,” the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades. STILL BEGINNING screened at 110 venues worldwide, premiering at the Whitney Museum of American Art on December 1, with additional marquee screenings at the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the MCA Chicago and MOCA LA.
Through an experimental collage of video and pictographs, (eye, virus) explores how conversations around disclosure, stigma, and harm reduction shift across generations and from public to private realms. Combining street interviews with footage from a punk show and a mobile testing site, the video centers pleasure and community as it expands the conversation around HIV to include hepatitis C and the opioid epidemic. (eye, virus) extends from documentation of a 2017 public program titled AIDS OS Y Version 10.11.6, and is collaboratively produced with Nikki Sweet.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
visualaids.org/projects/day-without-art-2019
Jack Waters is a visual artist, film maker, writer, media artist, choreographer and performer. Jack’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the New York and London Film Makers Cooperatives, Center for Contemporary Culture Barcelona, and Anthology Film Archives. With his partner Peter Cramer, Jack co-directed ABC No Rio from 1983–1991 and founded the non-profit arts umbrella Allied Productions, Inc., as well as the community art garden Le Petit Versailles. The first part of Jack’s musical opus Pestilence will premiere at LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in Spring 2020. His visual art can be seen on the Visual AIDS Artist Registry.
Victor F. M. Torres is an intermedia artist born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Torres holds an MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts and a BA in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, both from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is an Adjunct Faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Torres has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Stevenson University, George Mason University, and UMBC. He is the author of Language Writes Myth Writes Reality: Or How Does the Acculturated Body Take the Role of Culture Maker?. Torres’ sculptural work snapshots the relationship between information retention, capacitive touch, and bronze age aesthetics, thinning the threshold between primitivism and futurism. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Monmouth Museum, MIX NYC, Maryland Art Place, and Grace Exhibition Space, among others.
For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art on December 1, 2019, Visual AIDS presented STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,” the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades. STILL BEGINNING screened at 110 venues worldwide, premiering at the Whitney Museum of American Art on December 1, with additional marquee screenings at the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the MCA Chicago and MOCA LA.
Viva Ruiz invites transgender AIDS activist, artist, and beloved friend Chloe Dzubilo (1960–2011) to speak via never before seen Hi-8 footage filmed by Chloe's then-partner Kelly McGowan in the 1990s. The process triangulates mother (Chloe), lover (Kelly), and child (Viva) in a deliberate ritual to uplift the spirit and legacy of an ancestral teacher. Through artifacts from the moment when video first became accessible and before mobile phone cameras became ubiquitous, we witness Chloe declare herself and her sisters as leaders in art, advocacy and culture for evermore.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
visualaids.org/projects/day-without-art-2019
Viva Ruiz is the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants and a community and nightlife-educated advocate and artist born and based in New York City. The throughline of her work across mediums is a passion to dismantle white supremacy and exorcise the colonial/colonized mindset. In 2017, she programmed sex education and practical spirituality workshops as an invited curator for the New Museum’s “Scamming the Patriarchy” youth summit. Her 2019 solo exhibition “ProAbortion Shakira: A Thank God For Abortion Introspective” at PARTICIPANT, INC included work related to the multimedia abortion de-stigmatization experiment THANK GOD FOR ABORTION.
For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art on December 1, 2019, Visual AIDS presented STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,” the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades. STILL BEGINNING screened at 110 venues worldwide, premiering at the Whitney Museum of American Art on December 1, with additional marquee screenings at the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the MCA Chicago and MOCA LA.
The Lie is the latest in an ongoing series of short films drawing on found footage and materials from the artist’s archive. Offering “ruminations on ruined nations,” the film aims to expose the links between war, AIDS, capitalism, and the persistent mythologies that bind them all.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
visualaids.org/projects/day-without-art-2019
Carl George is an artist and activist working in experimental film, painting and collage. His short experimental films have shown in festivals internationally and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim Museum and the New York Public Library. His 1989 film DHPG Mon Amour, documenting the radical advances made by people with AIDS in developing their own health care, is a classic of AIDS activist filmmaking and was incorporated into the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012).
For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art on December 1, 2019, Visual AIDS presented STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,” the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades. STILL BEGINNING screened at 110 venues worldwide, premiering at the Whitney Museum of American Art on December 1, with additional marquee screenings at the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the MCA Chicago and MOCA LA.
Beat Goes On is an impressionistic portrait of the activist Keith Cylar (1958–2004), co-founder of Housing Works and a central figure in the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) NY. Cylar spoke clearly, frequently and with moral force about the struggles of people living with HIV/AIDS in New York City, many of whom were impoverished and struggling with multiple social and medical problems. His openness about his own drug use and the centrality of the fight against the criminalization of drugs for AIDS activism make Cylar's legacy especially resonant and relevant at this time. A fellow harm reduction activist recalls how “Keith moved from mixing with the government, to threatening the government, to beating the government—all in the space of five minutes.” By resurfacing and weaving together archival media of Cylar's own words and actions, this video will endeavor to convey—in the space of about five minutes—some of the personal charisma, political savvy and fearlessness that characterized Cylar's advocacy.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
visualaids.org/projects/day-without-art-2019
Shanti Avirgan is a documentary producer and archival researcher who has worked on several films related to the AIDS crisis including Pills Profits Protest (2004); Sex in an Epidemic (2009); Larry Kramer in Love & Anger (2015); 5B (2019) and a forthcoming film about the photographer Peter Hujar. She was a producer for National Geographic's climate change TV series Years of Living Dangerously and associate producer for the feature documentaries The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014) and Life, Animated (2016). Shanti is currently producing Jean Carlomusto's new film Esther Newton Made Me Gay (2020) and working as an archival producer for a new Netflix comedy series and a documentary series for HBO.
For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art on December 1, 2019, Visual AIDS presented STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,” the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades. STILL BEGINNING screened at 110 venues worldwide, premiering at the Whitney Museum of American Art on December 1, with additional marquee screenings at the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the MCA Chicago and MOCA LA.
“Much handled things are always soft” unearths the unwritten and undocumented histories of public sex culture in the south-side of Chicago. Through conversation with longterm survivor Patric McCoy, the film traces the height of activity in the 1970s, the downfall of cruising culture in the 1980s, and the prevailing summer heat, which continues to linger. Together, McCoy and Woods-Morrow reflect on their relationship to cruising, to photography, and to each other; attempting to bridge the gap between what was, and what still remains to be explored.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
visualaids.org/projects/day-without-art-2019
Derrick Woods-Morrow’s work is a meditation on deviation and disruption. Currently based in Chicago his artistic practice deploys a wide variety of media – photographic transfers, digital video collage, ceramics, and narrative performance. Exploring modes of representation, he salvages, displaces, and removes raw material from sites of historical significance and trauma, reimagines their future purpose and denies their perceived function, as he actively interrogates the correlation between labor and play. A recipient of the 2018 Artadia Award, Derrick received his MFA in Photography from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, and was most recently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Photography and Teaching Artist at the University of Illinois Chicago. His work appears in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, in collaboration with Paul Mpagi Sepuya and his recent works will show in YNCI V: Detroit Art Week Expo, in a solo exhibition, curated by Darryl Terrell.
The trailer for Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s I prayed to the wrong god for you (2019), which will premiere at the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Music: Plegaria a Chango by Celia Cruz.
ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today by commissioning compelling short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives—ACT UP NY, Positive Women’s Network, Sero Project, The SPOT, Tacoma Action Collective, and VOCAL NY, centering creative practices in activist responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis.
Maria Gaspar, On the Border of What Is Formless and Monstrous (excerpt), 2016, five-channel sound and video installation, dimensions variable.
The trailer for Wong Ping’s Fables 1 (2018), which premiered at the New Museum in 2018.
A 2-minute excerpt from Liza Béar and Keith Sonnier’s Phase II, Send/Receive Satellite Network (1977).
Bookforum presents “Fool that I Am,” a Valentine’s Day reading featuring Lexi Freiman, Amitava Kumar, Sam Lipsyte, Minna Zallman Proctor, and Jess Row, at the New Museum in New York, 2019.
Bookforum presents “False Starts,” a Valentine’s Day reading featuring William Finnegan, Marlon James, Ed Park, Lynne Tillman, and Joy Williams, at the New Museum in New York.
Bookforum presents “Trial & Error,” featuring readings by Mary Gaitskill, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Marx, A. O. Scott, and Christopher Sorrentino, at the New Museum, New York, on February 12, 2016.
Bookforum presents “The Night We Called It a Day,” readings by David Byrne, Rivka Galchen, Ed Park, Zadie Smith, and Colm Tóibín, held at the New Museum, New York, on February 12, 2014.
LGM Television presents an excerpt from Trisha Brown, Newark (Niweweorce), 1987 at l'Opéra de Lyon.
A fragment from Ryan McNamara's MEƎM: A Story Ballet About the Internet, performed November 8–12, 2013, at the Connelly Theater in New York. Commissioned by Performa for Performa13. This clip features Jason Collins.
Winner of the 2013 Malcolm McLaren Award.
Excerpt from Eleanor Bauer’s Midday & Eternity (the time piece) (2013).
Yvonne Rainer interviewed at the Artforum offices on October 17, 2011, which is part of an ongoing commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Judson. Here, Rainer recalls her introduction to dance and development. For more, read Rainer’s interview here.
Meet Fabrizio (Fab) Moretti, visual artist and drummer for The Strokes. Then, meet Fabrizio Moretti, art dealer and proprietor of the London-based Galleria Moretti. At Sotheby’s New York headquarters, these two Fabrizios introduce “Fabrizio Moretti x Fabrizio Moretti In Passing|,” an auction and exhibition of Old Master paintings and sculptures. This sale features a rare selection of twenty-four works curated by Fabrizio Moretti and showcased in a series of installations designed by Fab Moretti. These two men share more than just a name, and although they each bring a distinctive vision, their carefully designed collaboration reflects a mutual love of art, particularly Old Masters. “Fabrizio Moretti x Fabrizio Moretti” will be on view at Sotheby’s New York December 15–18, ahead of the live auction on December 18. Online bidding for the auction is now open, and all works in the auction will be sold without reserve.
Sue Williamson’s Messages from the Atlantic Passage (2017), on view here at Basel Unlimited 2017.
Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton discusses his first U.S. Survey, which is comprised of his works from the 1980s to the present. The exhibition is on view at the FLAG Art Foundation from September 23–December 16, 2017.
Group exhibition at Georg Kargl Fine Arts in Vienna featuring Andreas Fogarasi, Björn Kämmerer, Manuel Knapp, David Maljkovic, Wolfgang Plöger and Tobias Putrih. Curated by Fiona Liewehr.
Alex Prager’s short film La Grande Sortie (2016). The work was commissioned by the Paris Opera Ballet and scored by Radiohead’s Nigel Godrich. Prager’s film accompanies production stills in “La Grande Sortie”, opening at Lehmann Maupin on September 7, 2016.
Undiscovered Territory (2016), featuring Ed Ruscha; a segment from Doug Aitken’s Station to Station, a feature film comprising sixty-two one-minute films, now available on iTunes.
The Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art presents its inaugural year of programming as an “incubator for innovative thinking on the photographic image.”
In part 4 of The Invisible Photograph, learn how Berlin-based artist Joachim Schmid's “anti-museum” of found and discarded imagery challenges us to reconsider our assumptions of photographic worth.
Watch other parts of The Invisible Photograph series.
Part 1 (Underground): click here.
Part 2 (Trapped): click here.
Part 3 (Extraterrestrial): click here.
Part 5 (Subatomic): click here.
The Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art presents its inaugural year of programming as an “incubator for innovative thinking on the photographic image.”
Part 5 of The Invisible Photograph, investigates how photographic technologies are being used to visualize the subatomic world at CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world—where photography and the world’s most physics research collide.
Watch other parts of The Invisible Photograph series.
Part 1 (Underground): click here.
Part 2 (Trapped): click here.
Part 3 (Extraterrestrial): click here.
Part 4 (Discarded): click here.
Lyle Ashton Harris' Selections from the Ektachrome Archive is a snapshot from 1986–1996, chronicling the moments—now memories—of this charged decade, featuring over one hundred images taken by Harris.
The work was commissioned by Visual AIDS as part of “Alternate Endings,” a video program launching December 1, 2014, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Day With(out) Art—a national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis.
The jazz pianist Jason Moran reflects on his collaborative experiences with legendary performance artist Joan Jonas. Video is excerpted from Grammar - A Documentary Film about Jazz through Jason Moran and co-directed by Radiclani Clytus, Gregg Conde, Anthony Gannon, and Joseph Paul Alvarado.
The Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art presents its inaugural year of programing as an “incubator for innovative thinking on the photographic image.”
In Part III of The Invisible Photograph, see how the “techno archaeologists” of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project digitally recovered the first photographs of the moon taken by a set of unmanned space probes in the 1960s.
Watch other parts of The Invisible Photograph series.
Part 1 (Underground): click here.
Part 2 (Trapped): click here.
Part 4 (Discarded): click here.
Part 5 (Subatomic): click here.
Preview for Jennifer West’s Arrid Extra Dry 1965 TV Commercial Film (2013), 16mm film print painted with birth control pills, writing inks and sweat and transferred to HD.
The Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art presents its inaugural year of programing as an “incubator for innovative thinking on the photographic image.”
Part II of The Invisible Photograph follows a team of computer scientists, archivists, artists, and curators, including Corey Arcangel, as they unearth Andy Warhol’s lost digital works.
Watch other parts of The Invisible Photograph series.
Part 1 (Underground): click here.
Part 3 (Extraterrestrial): click here.
Part 4 (Discarded): click here.
Part 5 (Subatomic): click here.
The Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art presents its inaugural year of programing as an “incubator for innovative thinking on the photographic image.”
Here, a safe haven for thousands of images is explored hundreds of feet below ground in a repurposed limestone mine.
Watch other parts of The Invisible Photograph series.
Part 2 (Trapped): click here.
Part 3 (Extraterrestrial): click here.
Part 4 (Discarded): click here.
Part 5 (Subatomic): click here.
An excerpt from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). To read Andrew Hultkrans’s review of the film, click here.
Grayson Perry discusses his new exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair, “Super Rich Interior Decoration,” casting an anthropological eye on the heady collision of art, money, power, and desire.
Adam Pendleton discusses his work within the context of his exhibition “Who We Are” at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin. Pendleton’s first exhibition with the gallery includes the latest examples of his spray-painted and silkscreened canvases, works on Mylar, System of Display, and video portraits, as well as a monumental wall intervention. The new work, much of which incorporates language from the composer Julius Eastman, demonstrates Pendleton’s layered, archival approach to creation as he inquires into the relationship between representation and abstraction, history, and notions of “blackness”.
In this video, designer David Korins reveals how he chose to display “Treasures From Chatsworth,” a rare and intimate presentation of works from the Devonshire Collection. Free of charge and open to the public, the exhibition will be on view from June 28 to September 18, 2019, in Sotheby’s renovated New York galleries at 1334 York Avenue.
Howardena Pindell’s first solo exhibition in the UK includes abstract paintings and collages drawn from two distinct periods in the artist’s career: large-scale spray paintings from the early 1970s and smaller wall-mounted three-dimensional works completed since 2007.
In this video, Pindell responds to seeing her work installed at Victoria Miro’s Mayfair gallery. The exhibition continues through July 27, 2019.
The Devonshire Collection has been passed down through sixteen generations of the Cavendish Family and encompasses fine art, design, and jewelry from the past five centuries. Forty-five masterworks from the collection will be on view in “Treasures from Chatsworth” at Sotheby’s newly expanded and reimagined New York galleries, from June 29 to September 18. In this video, the 12th Duke of Devonshire previews the works coming to New York, from Rembrandt van Rijn to Lucian Freud.
Chris Levine works with light to create expanded states of perception and awareness. At his London studio, Levine explains how a childhood fascination with holography informed his future career, and traces how his personal struggles eventually led to his unusual approach to portraiture—including his portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in Lightness of Being, 2004.
Daniel Arsham takes a near-scientific approach to art in order to transform ordinary objects—cameras, cassette tapes, mobile phones—into archaeological discoveries from a future, dystopian world. In this studio visit, the artist tracks his development from early forays in photography and painting to a formative collaboration with Merce Cunningham, through to his work today and his vision of the world in 3019.
Jasper Sharp, curator of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s current Mark Rothko retrospective, and Sotheby’s Contemporary Art specialist Saara Pritchard examine one of the most important periods of the artist’s career.
In the 1960s, Rothko abandoned the bright colors that characterize his work of the early 1950s in favor of deep reds and burgundies. Untitled, 1960, a highlight of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on May 16, illuminates this profound shift. “Seen close up and in a penumbra, as these paintings are meant to be seen, they absorb, they envelop the viewer,” wrote Peter Selz, curator of the 1961 MoMA retrospective. “For they are mirrors of our fantasy and serve as echoes of our experience.”
Sold on behalf of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this work will benefit the institution’s Acquisitions Fund. Mark Rothko is on view at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, through June 30.
Artist Jonas Wood reflects on his move to Los Angeles, the importance of the Hammer Museum, and his singular approach to creating art. Wood and his wife, artist and studio mate Shio Kusaka, have donated their works Shio Butterfly Still Life (2019) and (Line 65) (2017) as part of Artists for the Hammer Museum—a collection of pieces given by over forty leading contemporary artists to help establish a new Artist Fund at the Hammer Museum. This fund directly supports the museum’s pioneering exhibition program and work with emerging artists. The full collection of donated works will be offered across Sotheby's Evening and Day Auctions of Contemporary Art on May 16–17 in New York.
Lee Krasner’s resilient spirit and groundbreaking talent is captured in her large-scale masterpiece The Eye is the First Circle, offered as a highlight of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction (May 16th, New York). Contemporary art specialist Saara Pritchard joins Eleanor Naire, curator at the Barbican Art Gallery and organizer of the upcoming exhibition “Lee Krasner: Living Colour,” in an exploration of how The Eye is the First Circle exemplifies Krasner's iconic vision. Painted in 1960 following the death of her husband, Jackson Pollock, this immense canvas is the embodiment of Krasner’s “Umber” series, whose twenty-four gestural works form the pinnacle of her oeuvre.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents “The Artist Project,” a video series in which artists respond to the Met’s collection of art. Here, Nan Goldin talks about the work of Julia Margaret Cameron.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents “The Artist Project,” a video series in which artists respond to the Met’s collection of art. Here, Carolee Schneemann talks about Cycladic female figures.
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art,” Susan Sontag, one of America’s most astute interpreters of art, once wrote—surely with a touch of irony. But is critical thinking really an enemy of the creative spirit? Or is it precisely this friction that makes for a richer, more dynamic cultural landscape? This conversation addresses the necessity, and the limits, of both art and criticism, and how the relationship between artist and critic has evolved over time.
Moderator: Jennifer Krasinski, Senior Editor, Artforum.
Participants: Rhonda Lieberman, Writer and Artist, Contributing Editor, Artforum; Carroll Dunham, Artist and Critic; Tobi Haslett, Writer and Critic.
An excerpt from a lecture by critic J. Hoberman on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and No President (1968) at the Filmmakers Cooperative in New York, November 3, 2018. A full transcript of the lecture is available to read here.
Artist Zachary Cahill speaks with critic Jan Verwoert about Cahill’s exhibition “USSA Love Chapel” at Regina Rex Gallery, May 21–June 25, 2017.
Actress Fiona Shaw and philosopher Simon Critchley discuss the tragedy of Medea in this walk through of “A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700BC–200AD,” on view at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York until June 24, 2017.
Philosopher Simon Critchley speaks about collaborative relationships at the Guggenheim Museum as part of “It Takes Two,” a symposia presented on the occasion of the retrospective “Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better,” on April 23–24, 2016.
Artist John Knight speaks with art historian Bettina Funcke about his site-specific works that engage institutional critique. This video is part of Artists Space’s “Dialogues” series, in which Funcke speaks with an influential member of the art world about their life and work.
Tony Conrad talks about rhythm, being an artist, his influences and his filmmaking process at Doug Aitken’s “MIRROR HAPPENING” in Seattle, 2013.
A panel on the exhibition “Language of the Birds: Occult and Art,” moderated by curator Pam Grossman, with Professor Susan L. Aberth, artist Jesse Bransford, and musician William Breeze, on February 10, 2016 at 80WSE Gallery in New York.
A roundtable on a digital approach to poetics with panelists Dennis Tenen, Karla Nielsen, Taeyoon Choi, Kendra Sullivan, Iris Cushing, and moderated by Mary Catherine Kinniburgh at the CUNY Graduate Center on February 5, 2016.
Artists Juan Betancurth and Benjamin Frederickson speak with artist Allen Frame about “Nydia,” Betancurth and Frederickson’s newest collaborative body of work at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York on February 6, 2016.
The “Eye of Sauron” on the Salesforce Tower light display at night as seen from Pine Street and Mason Street in the Nob Hill neighborhood of San Francisco on Wednesday, October 31, 2018.
Ariana Reines, January 12, 2018, 2018, video, color, sound, 11 seconds.
I swear I didn’t do anything to my phone except mentally recite the phrase “warmest sunrise of the year” as I hit record.
Christian Fennesz’s “Don't Talk (put your head on my shoulder)” (Editions Mego, 1998).
The third track on Christian Fennesz’s Agora, his latest solo album (Touch Records, 2019).
In We Have Always Been on Fire, artist Morgan Bassichis sings about the abysmal political present and the long histories of burning that we come from. A spell is cast conjuring Fire Island's queer ghosts into the contemporary moment. The film blends material shot in Cherry Grove during the summer of 2017 with found footage shot in the same location during fourth of July weekend in 1976.
Martin Creed’s Understanding (2016). To read Alan Licht’s piece on Martin Creed’s “The Back Door,” pick up the September 2016 issue of Artforum, or read it online.
The music video for Anohni’s “Drone Bomb Me,” 2016, directed by filmmaker Nabil and featuring supermodel Naomi Campbell. “Drone Bomb Me” is the opening track on ANOHNI’S debut solo album Hopelessness, co-produced by Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never.
Music Video for DR00idS, “Vacation Apparel,” the first release from Merkx&Gwynne’s King Arthur Rock Opera project.
Contessa Stuto // CUNTMAFIA
Horny Lil' Slut
Director: Rosalina Merrihue
Assistant Director: Gabriel Magdaleno
Assistant stylists: Markko Donto & Kim De'ville
Hi Tiger, the Portland, Maine based art-punk band fronted by visual artist and performer Derek Jackson, recreates the song “The Village” by New Order, which was originally recorded as an upbeat new wave tune in 1982.
The work was commissioned by Visual AIDS as part of “Alternate Endings,” a video program launching December 1, 2014, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Day With(out) Art—a national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis.
In Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event, each of the three participating institutions—the Barbican, London, BAM in New York City, and CAP UCLA in Los Angeles—will present a ninety (90) minute performance comprised of 100 solos choreographed by Merce Cunningham. In each city, a former dancer experienced in creating Cunningham Events will work with an associate stager and other Merce Cunningham Dance Company alumni to impart the choreography to a new generation of dancers.
In Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event, each of the three participating institutions—the Barbican, London, BAM in New York City, and CAP UCLA in Los Angeles—will present a ninety (90) minute performance comprised of 100 solos choreographed by Merce Cunningham. In each city, a former dancer experienced in creating Cunningham Events will work with an associate stager and other Merce Cunningham Dance Company alumni to impart the choreography to a new generation of dancers.
In Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event, each of the three participating institutions—the Barbican, London, BAM in New York City, and CAP UCLA in Los Angeles—will present a ninety (90) minute performance comprised of 100 solos choreographed by Merce Cunningham. In each city, a former dancer experienced in creating Cunningham Events will work with an associate stager and other Merce Cunningham Dance Company alumni to impart the choreography to a new generation of dancers.
Christoph Cox discusses his new book Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (University of Chicago Press) with artist Aura Satz. The performance also includes solo sets by Maria Chavez (turntables) and Jake Meginsky (electronics).
In this performative lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer shares guidelines and film clips from her long-term art-making practice, October 10, 2018.
A short video of Papo Colo's Procesión-Migración, January 7, 2017 in Puerto Rico.
Sandra Bernhard performs with Thomas Bartlett at Justin Vivian Bond—Trans/Art/Family: The Vivification of NYC, September 11, 2016.
Young Jean Lee visits the Performing Garage in early rehearsals for The Wooster Group’s The Town Hall Affair (2016). To read J. Hoberman’s Performance piece on The Wooster Group, pick up the September 2016 issue of Artforum, or read it online at Artforum.com here.
Wang Dongling performs at the British Museum.
Artist C. Spencer Yeh performs a live adaptation of his project America: The Artist’s Eye with Triple Canopy editors Lucy Ives and Alexander Provan. C. Spencer Yeh also discusses his work with sound and the particularities of voice in his interview, here.
Tori Wrånes’s performance featuring Lisa Asplund, Lasse Marhaug, and Constance Tenvik, for “The Eccentrics” at the SculptureCenter in New York on January 24, 2016.
Bookforum presents “Fool that I Am,” a Valentine’s Day reading featuring Lexi Freiman, Amitava Kumar, Sam Lipsyte, Minna Zallman Proctor, and Jess Row, at the New Museum in New York, 2019.
Anthropologist Michael Taussig talks about Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous and Juan Downey’s The Laughing Alligator at Artists Space Books & Talks, December 2015.
Excerpt from Marthe Ramm Fortun’s I hate Old poetmen (February 2nd, 2012).
As Marc Jacobs relocates from his West Village townhouse to the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Max Hoffman House in Rye, New York, the iconic designer explores his eclectic collection of contemporary art—and its focus on figuration including artists such as Mike Kelley, John Currin, and Urs Fischer—with Sotheby’s chairman Amy Cappellazzo.
This November, Sotheby’s will offer an exceptional selection of works from Jacobs’ collection in their Contemporary Art Evening and Day sales.
A look inside “Return to the Real,” an exhibition of new works by Doug Aitken now on view at Victoria Miro London. Conceived as a unified composition of sound, light, form and movement, the show explores our rapidly changing relationships to one another and the world around us in an age dominated by technology.
On New Year’s Day, 2018, Chantal Joffe set herself the challenge of working on a self-portrait every day for the coming year. This daily practice has resulted in a series of characteristically unflinching works. On the opening of her solo presentation at Victoria Miro in London, the artist walks through her studio and process.
This body of work will be on view at Victoria Miro from 11 April to 18 May, 2019.
Whose stories do tattoos tell?
In 2018, at the height of the Black Panther motion picture excitement, Doreen Garner hosts Invisible Man Tattoo, a pop-up tattoo shop in Brooklyn's Recess art space. A noted sculptor and licensed tattoo artist, Garner swaps sculpture for skin, and inks iconic Black American heroes and imagery on those who identify as being of the African Diaspora.
Doreen Garner (b. 1986, Philadelphia, PA, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Learn more about the artist at: art21.org/artist/doreen-garner/
Does the past have a sound? Celebrated for his material-oriented practice, Kevin Beasley juxtaposes sound, silence, and sculpture to examine the legacy of cotton in the American South. Set to the beat of his improvised drumming, the film shows Beasley at work in his Queens studio finishing his multipart exhibition, “A view of a landscape,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art—his most ambitious work to date.
Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA) lives and works in Queens, New York. Learn more about the artist at: art21.org/artist/kevin-beasley/
Artist Sean Raspet discusses his interest in the chemical structure of flavors, scents, and how molecular analysis presents new ways of thinking about art objects and their relationship to audiences.
This video is part of Swiss Institute’s “SI: VISIONS” video series, in collaboration with UBS.
Artist Christina Forrer discusses her process of using online videos of fights with animals and people, as well as scenes of everyday conflict from life, as inspiration in her weavings.
This video is part of Swiss Institute’s “SI: VISIONS” video series, in collaboration with UBS.
Charlie Ahearn’s video portrait of artist Martin Wong and his autobiographical Chinatown series based on his youth in San Francisco and New York.
Watch a teaser of Isaac Julien’s new nine-screen installation, which meditates on the work and legacy of Lina Bo Bardi, the visionary architect and designer. The US premiere of Julien’s Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement will take place December 5–8 at Art Basel Miami Beach for Meridians, a new sector that will launch at the eighteenth edition of the show.
Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a political revenge fable which offers an unwriting of Australian national mythologies. Binding together a documentary impulse with the bent plotlines of Australian film texts, Soda_Jerk’s revisionist history opens a willful narrative space where cinema fictions and historical facts permeate each other in new ways. The apocalyptic desert camps of Mad Max 2 become the site of refugee detention, feminist motorcycle gangs rule the highways, and flesh-eating sheep are recast as anti-colonial insurgents.
ALTERNATE ENDINGS, ACTIVIST RISINGS highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today by commissioning compelling short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives—ACT UP NY, Positive Women’s Network, Sero Project, The SPOT, Tacoma Action Collective, and VOCAL NY. The program represents a wide range of organizational strategies, from direct action to grassroots service providers to nation-wide movement building, while considering the role of creative practices in activist responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis.
A promo for Josephine Halvorson’s Measures, 2016, three new works presented as part of the annual “Outlooks” exhibition series at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, which is on view May 14 to November 13, 2016.
Musician Herb Alpert and various winners of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts talk about the award as well as the importance of the arts in our society. This video was created by Wondros, and directed by Jesse Dylan.
The official trailer for Kathryn Karwat and George Pitts’s Ann Liv Young / I Don’t Exist If You Don’t (2016), a documentary on the many characters of performance artist Ann Liv Young that combines video of her performances with in-depth interviews on her life and art.
The trailer for Maggie Lee’s Mommy (2015), a portrait of the artist’s mother before and after her unexpected death. To read Maggie Lee’s 1000 Words piece where she discusses her film, pick up the April 2016 issue of Artforum, or click here.
Trailer for Cecil B. Evans’ Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen (2014). Part of the New York Film Festival Projections series.