so today we're gonna talk about how to visit an art museum which may seem like an easy enough thing to do step 1 go to a museum step 2 look at art step 3 hopefully get something out of the experience but the other week when we were filming in Kansas City Missouri I paid a visit to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and started thinking it's really not so simple if you want to have a really rewarding trip to a museum there are some tricks first wear sensible shoes because you do not want to stand before this gorgeous Helen Frankenthaler painting only thinking about how much your feet hurt also before you even go you should check the museum's website to make sure they're open and most importantly to figure out if there's any way you can get in for free if you can get in for free do luckily the Kemper is always free when you check in at the front desk and hopefully find a way not to pay admission make sure to get a map this is also your chance to ask the attendant what you shouldn't miss which brings me to something important ask people questions it's okay they actually want you to ask them questions because otherwise work is boring okay so some general pointers on how to behave in the galleries assume that you cannot touch anything unless there are instructions stating otherwise this is not because people who run museums are autocrats trying too harsh on your buzz it is because even the oil on your skin can damage the art if you're not sure whether you can touch something ask a guard they want you to ask they will be thrilled that you have asked speaking of which also feel free to ask about the museum's photo policy many museums allow photography so your syrup Tisha's I'm just checking my email no I'm actually taking a secret pic of this war Hall may not actually be necessary when I take photos and galleries I like to also take a pic of the label it's a good way of remembering later what you saw and handy when properly attributing your photo when posting it online which you should never forget to do sometimes I like to first walk through a show without taking out my camera or even reading labels just letting my eyes and brain do the work then I'll go back and take a longer look at works I find interesting or once I might want to take a pic of or notes about when you watch a video in a museum make room for others coming in this means not spreading out your jacket and bag on the only bench and also not lingering in the doorway when there's plenty of space to hang out inside also don't be afraid to go into dark galleries there's good stuff in there and it very rarely bites and then there's the actual business of looking at and experiencing the art there are no rules here you decide what to look at and for how long and whether to read the wall Abel's offering context or whether to use the audio guides you also decide whether to look at all the galleries or only a few and all of these decisions should be guided by what's working what makes you feel emotionally and intellectually engaged is it helpful to know that someone once tried to lick this Wayne Tebow painting or do you just like the visual pleasure of taking it in like a lot of things in life what you take from a museum experience is dependent upon what you put into it I think it's great to go to museums and experience that which you might be skeptical of but mostly I think you should go to museums they're not cold dead places where people smarter than you look at ancient art in hushed galleries museums are for you they are cultural centers where your relationship with the universe can get better and more interesting and lastly perhaps most importantly don't forget to leave the museum staying overnight is frowned upon what are your personal do's and don'ts for museum going and what if your museum experience has been like let's talk about it in the comments
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The One That Got Away – Oliver Blank | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios
July 17, 2019
[MUSIC PLAYING] Today we're in Columbus,
Indiana outside of a 1954 building designed by the
great Eero Saarinen that used to house a
bank but now, it's a conference center owned
by the company Cummins. It's here in the
former vault that we're going to be meeting with
composer Oliver Blank who's in town for an exhibition. Oliver was born in England
but lives in several cities, including San Francisco,
New Orleans, and Helsinki. He makes symphonic
cinematic music, sound toys, and public
installations that seek to give you alternative
and surprising experiences with the places you inhabit. I got to know Oliver's
work because of a project he did in Indianapolis
with the writer James A. Reeves called The
Bureau of Manufactured History. For this, he made a 45 minute
composition incorporating accounts collected from
city residents that were submitted by telephone. The assignment
this week is going to be a little bit different. Instead of asking you to
go off and create something on your own, you're all going to
collaborate to make something. Oliver is going to
ask you to contribute to a new composition. So let's go talk to him and
see what he has in mind. Hello. I'm Oliver Blank. And this is your art assignment. [MUSIC PLAYING] We were invited to Indianapolis
by the We Are City folks to undertake a residency. And so we had a few constraints
that we had to work within. It had to be about cities. It probably should be
about Indianapolis. And also we were told we have
a room, a space you can use where you can show something. So we agreed, well, we
have to build a thing and the thing has
to go in the room. We thought about how
can we not only just present a generic
history of Indianapolis or the history of
Indianapolis, but maybe a manufactured history. One that we could make and
contribute to ourselves and invite the community
at large and the citizens at large to contribute too. So we formed an
organization or an office in Indianapolis, which is The
Bureau of Manufactured History. And so the first
thing that we did was produce these
gorgeous little cards. You might be given a card in
the street by James or even by a friend. And it might say, run to a high
point and call this number. And on the phone line,
you're asked a question, such as what are you afraid
of most in Indianapolis. And you'll leave a message
and answer that question. So we collated loads
of these phone calls. And then we put
that all together in one place, which
was the first desk of the former office of The
Bureau of Manufactured History. So we put it all in this desk. And the idea is that
the desk is really a few different components. It's a desk with a chair,
the soul of Indianapolis, and a media player as well. Your assignment is to call the
number that's on the screen now and leave a message
saying what you would say to the one who got away. It could be a question or
it could be a statement. Maybe you just want to
tell them something. Just call the number
and leave a message. And you can also go and ask
a friend or a family member, brother, sister, mom, dad. Or even just some
random guy at a shop. Call the number, pass
the phone over to them, and have them leave a message. And the question
is, what would you say to the one who got away? This reminds me a lot
of PostSecret, you know? Frank Warren's art project
where people send in postcards with their secrets on them? Right. Anonymously. But some people have
done it not anonymously, like Tracy Emin's
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With where she embroidered
the names of everyone she's ever slept with to
the inside of a tent. What I like about
this is that we're kind of giving Oliver material. This isn't like previous
art assignments. Like, we're all in it together. We're all making
something together that he's going to form. Right. It's indicative of more recent
trends in contemporary art and that's participatory art. It's art that requires you. Since the '90s,
Yoko Ono has been making wish trees,
inspired by trees she saw as a child in Japan
in the courtyards of Buddhist temples, where people would
write out a wish on thin paper and tie it to a branch. She said they look like white
flowers blossoming from afar. And she's created her own wish
trees all around the world, collecting over
a million wishes. Rivane Neuenschwander
recalls a tradition where visitors to a
church in Salvador, Brazil make a wish as a ribbon is
knotted around their wrist or at the front gate. It's said that the wish comes
true when the ribbon falls off. For her work, I Wish
Your Wish, Neuenschwander printed others
wishes onto ribbons and asked visitors to take
one as long as they also left behind their own wish. Then there's Candy
Chang's project where she turned the wall
of an house in New Orleans into a place where people were
asked to complete the sentence, before I die, I want to. Within a day, it was filled. And since then, more
than 500 similar walls have been created
all over the world. Oliver is asking you to
contribute in a similar way. To reflect upon
a very particular wish so that together
we might create a work that reflects on the
past, but also the future. I love this very
pure, simple question that deals with the
one that got away. If you should've
told them something, what was it that you
should've told them? Or if you screwed up
and you're saying sorry, like, how did you screw up? What are you sorry for? Why are you sorry? Why is this so important? I'm really interested in that. Once we get past the I
miss you, I love you, or I want to be with you, or
maybe it's not about a person, it's about a thing. An opportunity for a job. A change of career that you,
years later, feel like that could've change my life. If you could now call up someone
and ask for that opportunity again or change that, what would
you, what would you tell them? I want to know what the thing
was and what the context was, and what you would try
and do about it right now. We'll wait a certain
amount of time to collect a certain
volume of material. And then it'll be
a case of going through all of these
recordings, editing them. I don't want anything
personally identifying, so if you name
names, I'll edit it out last names and
that kind of thing. I'll create a recording. You'll submit stuff and we'll
create a piece of sound art together that people
can listen to. [MUSIC PLAYING] I think we should
call the number and leave our messages
for the one who got away. OLIVER BLANK (ON PHONE):
Hello, this is Oliver Blank, and here is your art assignment. I'm really sorry
about the jerky thing I said about the power bill the
last time that we spoke, where you wanted me to pay
half the power bill and I was a real jerk about it. I feel bad about that. Gah. I just, I can't do it. You're not going to do it? I'm going to do it. I'll do it later. But I have to think about it. I really want to
take this seriously. The result will be
better if I'm like really genuine and on my own. This is, you have this
thing, a private life. I find it very strange. [MUSIC PLAYING]
this episode of the art assignment is supported by Prudential we spent quite a bit of time exploring art in other people's cities so we thought it was high time we gave the same treatment to our own but how does one attempt to tourism in one's own town first I recruited Stuart Hyatt fellow resident and also superb sound artist who has done quite a bit of city exploring as part of his work second we met up in a coffee shop to ditch our primary modes of transport and see how much we could accomplish in a day without a car and third well coffee we ordered Americanos at caffeine coffee and sat down to plan our route we wanted to go full analogue and use a paper map and did a fair bit of plotting that way until well it would have been silly not to use our magical devices at all we then walked down the road to pick up rental bikes at the closest Indiana Pacers bike share pickup location you need to bring your own helmet but the rest is fairly simple you'll see in the background the first of our many encounters with the work of past art assignment contributor Matt Russell of fake flyer Fame was commissioned by a real estate development company to create a temporary public artwork to disguise / beautify the construction site behind it you'll notice a fair bit of construction in this video because downtown Indy is in a bit of a boom cycle when it comes to development and a good portion of this development border is one of the city's newer amenities the cultural trail 1/8 mile biking and walking path that connects neighborhoods and cultural districts and the bike share is part of it – along it you'll pass a number of public artworks including this mural of indianapolis-based poet Mary Evans by artist Michael alchemy Jordan one of her best-known works through 1970 poem I am a black woman and it feels appropriate to recite its concluding stanza Here I am a black woman tall as a cypress strong beyond all definition still defying place and time and circumstance a failed impervious indestructible look on me and be renewed we kept going along Massachusetts Avenue and past Julian Opie's and dancing and Anne really is always dancing there is something supremely comforting about Anne dancing morning noon and night through snow rain and presidential transitions and she never quit just beyond we encountered another literal literary giant this one a thirty eight foot tall Kurt Vonnegut native son of Indianapolis Vonnegut said in 1986 what people liked about me is Indianapolis so it's nice cities here although it hasn't gone unnoticed that he spent very little time here after leaving for college in 1940 then we wrote over to Prairie modules one and two created by the art collective m12 which Stewart is part of they made works heavily informed by the context or place where they're working and here the trust formed structures referenced both the covered bridges that parts of rural Indiana are known for as well as the interstate infrastructure that gives Indianapolis its tagline crossroads of America it's green roof grasses are reminders of the surrounding Prairie and its solar panels return power to the grid on we went to City Market outside of which we founded artist design book share stations it's part of an art and literacy project called the public collection it's really awesome excellently functioning one made by Bruce Partington was inspired by agricultural equipment and the Linotype machine Stewart and I each picked up a book I snagged my daddy was a pistol and I'm a son of a gun by Lewis Grizzard for obvious reasons and Stewart picked up the classic the house of the spirits by Isabel Allende here's US comparing the last lines of each book and I'll spare you the suspense until you mine won the contest I just hope heaven doesn't run out of camels and Fried Chicken having extracted all we needed from our finds we'd liked a few blocks to monument circle and return the books to another lending station this one designed by Brian McCutcheon of customize that same column support an 1894 quote by Mark Twain extolling public libraries as the memorials that really lasts preserving names and events and also outlasting them a fitting sentiment for a city full of traditional memorial then we headed south to the Alexander Hotel home to a remarkable gathering of artworks commissioned specifically for the spaces you'll find an installation by Paul velinski of birds cut from vinyl records emerging from a turntable here we also admired the work of Sonja Clarke of our measuring history's assignment who created out of over 3000 combs a portrait of Indianapolis's own madam CJ Walker a haircare tycoon known as one of the first self-made millionaire asses in America are a number of other excellent works here but the ps/2 resistance is the bar and lounge by Jorge Pardo who designed the colorful array of light fixtures the trails from the lobby into the lounge and recall a school of fantastical sea creatures Pardo was also responsible for the pattern cement tiles and most of the furnishings but she was not responsible for the amazing cocktails this place serves which I was very sad we were too early for we done locked up our bikes and hopped in the car with Marc because Stuart got a tip from a friend that there was a lunchtime concert in ten minutes over at Eskenazi hospital the new-made campus of the public hospital opened in 2013 and along with featuring a number of our works it hosts a music program that on this day brought us the outstanding musical stylings of indiana soul legend lonnie lester his concert offered free of charge to whomever happened to be at the hospital that day was thoroughly appreciated by those of us who stayed a while as well as those who let a smile slip as they hurried on to an appointment the unexpected pleasure of Lonnie lustre coupled with our walk through the gardens in plaza outside made the hospital stated goal of lifting spirits and promoting helpful living seemed left like marketing and more like truth as we drove away we enjoyed rob leis parking structure facade inspired by camouflage techniques and composed of thousands of metal panels that shift in appearance as you pass it was then back to our bikes in the cultural trail which we followed along Virginia Avenue to experience an artwork by a Conchie Studios led by Vito Akashi who will never live down his renown for masturbating underneath the floor of an art gallery with visitors above in 1972 lucky for us whose work is taken a turn for the much less controversial and he now leads a studio that realizes architecture and public space projects like this one in what used to be one of the darkest and most terrifying passageways in Indy there is now swarm Street which activates as you pass through and illuminates thousands of LED lights embedded in the pavement and in a framework above you not only trace your own path but you can see the paths of others generating either a sense of camaraderie with their fellow passers-by or helpful signal to pick up your pace it was beyond time for lunch when we made it to Fountain Square and stopped at Wildwood Market to ogle at all of the goods we couldn't carry with us and enjoy their delicious sandwich of the day with our blood sugar back at a funky level we were ready to see more art and headed to Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art or I'm Moka as it's called around here they were hosting an exhibition titled unloaded here at the Murphy building as well as at their other locations back near the Alexander presenting works by a variety of artists all in some way exploring the forum image and impact of guns in contemporary culture Mel chins crossed for the Unforgiven drew us in immediately a maltese cross made from cut and welded ak-47 assault rifles I also appreciated the dissonance of medium and subject matter and Stephanie few coats crocheted rifle as well as my very visceral reaction to Andrew Ellis Johnson's finely detailed sculptural rendering of the maxim see no evil hear no evil speak no evil there's a lot of good work in this show demonstrating the bottomless diversity of responses to a most American of issues we then headed upstairs in the Murphy building where you can find an eclectic and changing collection of artists studios shops and arcade and music venues we were there to pay a visit to the tiny and mysterious Museum of psyche phonics which occupies a small nook and contains among other curiosities a spaceship prop that was once part of Parliament Funkadelic mothership connection stage show the museum is the brainchild of a group of local artists and musicians aiming to make a place that explores the interconnectedness of music mystery spiritual realms pop culture sci-fi and the extraordinary it's exactly the kind of specific oddity that a bland leanin chain restaurant loving city like Indianapolis needs while there we also ducked into people for urban progress an excellent nonprofit organization the rescues discarded materials and redesigns them for public benefit this is meant salvaging old stadium seats and repurposing them at bus stops throughout the city and it has also meant finding new uses for the 13 acres of fabric that used to serve as a roof for the former RCA Dome here in town I decided it was high time I ditched my saddled backpack so I purchased a lovely new drawstring bag made from dome fabric Super Bowl banner mesh and reclaimed seat belts although I did create a new problem of how to repurpose my old one if you're an art assignment for that then we made a quick stop across the street to general public collective an artist's run project space and concept shop which was then hosts an exhibition called mr. sad Apple skin jacket of amusing and impressive works by artist Lisa Berlin we enjoyed it but then a sign told us it was okay to access so we did back on our bikes we trekked on to the Garfield Park neighborhood to visit the new headquarters for big car collective who offered us the what how where assignment it's called the tube factory and it's housed in you guessed it an old tube Factory it's a community center as well as an exhibition space and we caught the tail end of Detroit based artist Scott Hocking show which was magnificent continuing the repurposing theme of the day Hopkins exhibition brought together materials found in a building that was once an RCA Factory and was most recently a recycling plant it was filled with materials that had been left there unrecycled until Hawking came along and spent weeks sorting through them and arranging selections of them in the tube factory space massive hunks of burned styrofoam form a mountain in the far end of the main gallery and on the surrounding walls are mounted enthralling multi-hued plastic blobs artists spent hours days months and years pursuing the kind of formal and textural effects created here through the accident of industrial waste Hawking brings it together with brilliant economy big cars developing several buildings on this block including the sound art space listen here which was still hosting Pablo hell Jerez libre diadem selleth where we film the assignment combinatory play earlier in the year by this point we were beat so we'd like to the nearest drop-off point and once again to comfort in marks gas-powered ride we drove north and stopped by our favorite periodical shop print Tex run by Benjamin and Jeannine Blevins they've hosted a series of exhibitions here organized by territorial collective a.m. called syntax season featuring artists whose practices engage in various kinds of language games we were there for the month show with Jessie mama whose show included daily called an excerpt from late-night talk shows as well as a theme song that plays out of a standing microphone the light and our spirits were fading but we revived with ice coffees at open society and decided to end our day at hundred acres the art in nature park adjacent to the main campus of the Indianapolis Museum of Art full disclosure I am the opposite of objective about this particular space since I dedicated six years of my – working for this museum and had a hand in the creation of the park it opened in 2010 and the whole idea of this place is to reconsider what an art park is supposed to be and do called 100 acres because it occupies 100 acres the park features site-specific installations a visitor center designed by architect Marlon Blackwell and a series of pathways designed to guide visitors through a landscape much less change than most museum parks the works here were created by artists from all over the world each of whom had vastly different approaches to their contributions very little in the way of text is provided on site as you're meant to interact with what you find and seek answers online or in brochures if you're so inclined I've had the privilege of getting to know this Park over the course of many years before there was art here walking through it with artists on-site visits and as construction unfolded and now after as it's become a valued refuge in the city so yes I am biased toward it but isn't that always the case in the place where you live the longer you're there the more ties you have to the people and places and objects that inhabit it so I couldn't look at this city with clear eyes but I did have a great day within it I spent time with a friend explored life without a car in this car dependence city up to my backpack gained considerably and despite having visited all of these places before still have surprises along the way after it was over I realized nearly everything we visited had been created within the past 10 years which made me equal parts grateful for this city's present and hopeful for its future thanks to Prudential for sponsoring this episode it's human nature to prioritize present needs and what matters most to us today but when planning for your retirement it's best to prioritize tomorrow's needs over today according to a Prudential study one in three Americans is not saving enough for retirement and over 52% are not on track to be able to maintain their current standard of living go to Prudential comm slash save more and see how if you start saving more today you can continue to enjoy the things you love tomorrow you
in 1995 Chinese artist Ai Weiwei photographed himself as he picked up a 2000 year old urn and let it smash to the ground if we're appalled when cultural heritage is destroyed in the name of God and state how can we possibly defend eyes action how can we buy a ticket to see photos of it in a museum how come those photos sell for over a million dollars how can this man be one of the most renowned artists of our time this is the case for AI weiwei i Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957 to writer Gao yang and famed poet I Ching whom communist leader Mao Zedong initially embraced but soon after denounced during the anti-rightist movement of 1958 the family was exiled to labor camps and remote provinces until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 they then returned to Beijing and I and by that I mean I Weiwei enrolled in Beijing Film Academy in 1978 and co-founded a group of avant-garde artists called the Stars in 1981 he decamped to the US and settled in New York where he scraped by hung out with his neighbor renowned beat poet Allen Ginsberg and took lots and lots of pictures he also immersed himself in art studying Marcel Duchamp and considering the idea of the ready-made as a way to make art when he returned to China in 1993 he met with a country undergoing tremendous change many were still reeling from the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators and dung shoppings focus on economic development had tripped off the massive transformation of China's cities eyes earn dropping occurred not long after his return but his irreverence had surfaced before that he turned a critical eye toward all edifice 'as of power at home as well as abroad well-versed in antiques he knew the value of historic objects and the symbolic power of manipulating them Chinese antiquities became eyes raw material for a new kind of ready-made dynamically synthesizing the clash between reverence for the past and the irrepressible drive toward the future for modernization is a mixed bag with change there is loss history is erased how can we condemn an artist for destroying cultural heritage when his government has raised neighborhoods and entire cities to build new roads buildings giant dams and Olympic stadiums eyes work allows us to reckon with the destruction that construction requires but to be clear he is more of a creator and destroyer he is repurposed wood from demolished temples and transformed it into intricate and dramatic installations he takes a basic unit say an antique stool and multiplies it compounds it to see where it takes us history that would otherwise be relegated to dusty shops or landfills is made strikingly unforgettably visible and he has found new uses for old techniques hiring craftspeople adept in ancient joinery traditions he's enlisted the most skilled porcelain makers in the world to demonstrate their mastery commissioning exquisitely made copies and objects like watermelons crabs and millions and millions of sunflower seeds he's embraced the hand made within an economy whose incredible growth has been fueled by automation and mass production he has synthesized traditionally Chinese materials to think about the part in relationship to the whole the self in relationship to the collective if a nation cannot face its past he has said it has no future and I is equally concerned with the present in 2008 when the Sichuan earthquake struck he visited the region in the immediate aftermath and assembled volunteers to gather the names of the dead addressing attempts by authorities to cover up the disproportionate number of schoolchildren who died because of poorly built schools he amassed tons of twisted rebar from the wreckage painstakingly straightened it and assembled it in despair aleejack memorials he arranged 9,000 backpacks on the facade of the house der kunst in Munich to represent the young lives lost spelling out a quote from a victim's mother she lived happily for seven years in this world I has been a ceaseless unflagging voice for the voiceless in 2009 he was beaten and detained in his hotel room in Chengdu when attempting to testify in the trial of human rights activist han xue RN he visits with refugees fleeing the war in Syria organized a London walk of compassion in their honour covered his sculptures with thermal blankets and wrapped the columns of Berlin's concert hall with Salvage refugee life vests an early adherent of social media he is an adamant supporter of free speech he reports on his life in minut detail he did so up until his 2011 arrest in confinement for 81 days on unfounded tax evasion charges as well as after authorities have demolished his Shanghai studio threatened to demolish his Beijing studio and forced him to pay a tax-evasion fine of 15 million un he has been continually surveilled and followed prevented from leaving his country and through it all his refused censorship within China as well as abroad not everything he does is genius but he remains committed to reaching an ever wider public his work does not sit firmly in the realm of art but radiates out he's often called an iconoclast and an urn crusher would certainly seem to adhere to the definition but there's another way to see AI weiwei as someone who desperately wants the cherished beliefs and institutions of china's past to be remembered and resuscitated and in that sense as radicals go he's brilliantly conservative his work is deeply rooted in history and tradition it is steeped in remembering valuing preserving he stands defiantly opposed to a culture that wants to move on with little regard for the past he is resistance to forgetting to silence his work asks us to consider what we value why we value it and what we are accountable for destroying preserving or transforming he asks fundamental questions about our human rights and responsibilities Liberty he says is about our rights to question everything out of a source of constant irritation the oyster develops a pearl I is that constant source of irritation and we are lucky not only to bear witness to it but to be called to action by it
you're out in the world exploring a part of the immensely varied landscape of our dear planet Earth freed from your desk or whatever in life chains you you marvel at the beauty the grandeur the unfathomable immensity of it all you reflect on humankind's ability to control the landscape and dramatically fail to control it it's a multi-sensory experience being in the outdoors with visual input of course but also with plenty to hear touch taste and beyond our world has dimensionality and it's always changing to why oh why would anyone feel the urge the hubris to put art out here what kind of an art can thrive in the presence of such a formidable co-star as Earth this is the case for land art we tend to think of art as primarily belonging to the indoor realm to museums galleries to our homes and places we congregate sure there are murals and sculptures here and there but even when art is outside it's still framed bolted to a pedestal or concrete slab perched next to a fancy building or nestled within a manicured sculpture park drafting off the reputation of the institution to which is tethered this framing helps divide these objects from the other lesser objects that surround you and tell you that what you're looking at is special authentic rare and valuable beginning in the late 1960s an increasing number of artists started questioning this kind of separation and framing of art leaving the city and making stuff out in the world sometimes it involves putting new material out into the world like Robert Smithson's temporary mirror displacements and sometimes it entailed taking material away like Michael Heizer cements excisions from a Nevada Mesa some of the projects were monumental and long-lasting like James Charles ongoing Roden crater and other times light and ephemeral like richard long's a line made by walking where he walked back and forth across a meadow drawing in his way a line of flattened grass people started to call these things earth art earthworks environmental art or land art catch-all terms for a wide range of activities that were not an organized movement but were certainly a noticeable tendency we're going to call it land art and we'll define it as art that is made within or a top or involve being a landscape or art that is made from materials drawn from the landscape yeah yeah yeah all art is technically made from natural materials but we have to work from somewhere let's just agree that it's a spectrum and this is more land art than say this but there's a lot in between and of course humans have been making dramatic marks on the landscape since prehistoric times across cultures and centuries people have made highly site-specific gestures drawing lines building mounds and erecting massive geometric earthworks but just as each of these stem from vastly different motivations the artists who've made land art since the 60s have done so with specific and differing approaches it's said that a visit to the pre-columbian Great Serpent Mound in Ohio inspired Robert Smithson's best-known work Spiral Jetty in 1970 he and two assistants moved nearly 7,000 tons of Earth basalt and boulders into the form you see here projecting into Utah's Great Salt Lake it became submerged in 1972 and stayed that way until drought caused it to re-emerge thirty years later but that's precisely what attracted him to the site drawn to the concept of entropy Smithson explored in this work and others the reality that an artwork is never fixed and experiences decay from the moment it's made he also theorized the relationship between a site out in the world and what happens in an art gallery in a series he called non sites Smithson brought materials like rocks from a specific place into a gallery and put them into shaped bins positioning them next to a wall map indicating where the material originated for Smithson the site was that natural location and the non site was its reprocessed contained State in the gallery so in other words and using example Smithson never did actual Yosemite Valley California would be a site and then Albert Bierstadt 1865 painting looking down Yosemite Valley California is the non site Smithson wrote the relation of an on site to the site is also like that of language to the world it is a signifier and the site is that which is signified many artists at the time we're trying to escape these terms and break free from the museum or gallery making work out in and with the landscape was a way to do just that Nancy Holt's son tunnels in northwestern Utah stemmed from our motivation to allow visitors a way to experience the vastness of the land while also meeting the human desire for containment for concrete tunnels are arranged in an open act a lined with the rising and setting of the Sun on the summer and winter solstices holes pierced through the tunnels represent the stars of four constellations to provide a sense of connection to the universe and also allow light to filter through and create changing patterns of shadows throughout the day Holt's work and that of many working in the landscape depends heavily on photography film and video to document it in its various and changing state and also allow people to see it who can't get to it sometimes the documentation was the work as in the land interventions of onam and Yetta who's haunting silhouettes a series saw her in scribing female forms sometimes hers into a range of natural sight she creates her marks and then photographed them or film them on super aid with only herself or a handful of others as witness the way the body moves through space was of great concern to many land artists who often blurred the boundaries between art and architecture in 1979 art historian Rosalind Krauss wrote an essay trying to make sense or at least begin to of land art as it relates to the category of sculpture whereas modernist sculpture which had its origins in the tradition of the monument could maybe once be seen as the thing that was not landscape and not Architecture with all this wacky new installation and land art at the time perhaps sculpture would now be better understood as being part of a structuralist diagram or an expanded field that she proposed might look like this this is pretty impossible to part but that's kind of what she was getting at working to complicate and break up the firmly divided categories for art that had ruled the day up until then art in a gallery was isolated from the outside world which in the 1960s and 70s was rife with conflicts the Vietnam War the civil rights and Black Power movement and second wave feminism were easier to forget within the white cube as art critic Barbara Rhodes wrote in nineteen g9a dissatisfaction with the current social and political system results in an unwillingness to produce commodities which gratify and perpetuate that system here the sphere of ethics and aesthetics merge the 70s saw the birth of the modern environmental movement and land artworks also addressed a number of ecological concerns and not just out in the desert but firmly in civilization as well for his work time landscape Allen songfest replanted an abandoned rubble-strewn lot in Manhattan with plants indigenous to the island recreating what might have existed there before it was settled the work sought to connect urbanites to their city's natural heritage and bring light to the seemingly runaway train of development it's still there by the way Agnes Dennis cleared the rubble from a landfill further downtown planted a two acre wheat field has maintained it for four months and harvested a yield of healthy wheat just blocks from Wall Street in the World Trade Center the work took place on hugely valuable land and called attention to the choices we make in managing and mismanaging our resources land art opened up a whole new way of working with place kicking off a trend in art that remains strong of paying attention to the particularity of a site its geology its ownership its histories its present weather in a dense city or out in the middle of nowhere everything everywhere is site-specific and land art strips away those framing mechanisms to help us realize that the best of land art makes it impossible to forget where you are and sets in to relief your surroundings with the clarity that chokes you out of the one thing after another nests of everyday life land art at its best helps us map our location in the world and in time it's often inconvenient and it cannot be rushed it must be walked through and around and revisited at different times of day and in varying weather but in this the age of the Anthropocene in which we acknowledge the extent to which humans are actors on the natural systems of our planet its land art that is perhaps best suited to help us contemplate our complicated relationship with nature are we part of nature or separate from it do we make nature or does it make us what is the right way to live here on what kinds of structures and places and systems do we want to build what is conquest and what is cultivation the art assignment is funded in part by viewers like you through patreon comm a subscription-based platform that allows you to support creators you like in the form of a monthly donation special thanks to our Grand Master of the Arts Indianapolis combs Realty if you'd like to support the show check out our page at patreon.com slash art assignment
a few weeks ago I made a video listing five fierce women of art and it didn't even begin to cover the tremendous volume of interesting and boundary-pushing work made by women and many of you shared with us the fierce artist you admire so let's do it again but let's be clear about my motivations here I too am suspicious any time an artist sex is brought up like when I see a museum or gallery bragging about having up only women artists I'm like Whoopi do you want a ribbon you boast when you have up a group show of all men we all have different approaches to our feminism and you can surely find fault with mine but I encourage you to read Linden Auckland's 1971 essay why are there no great women artists where she says the fault lies not in our stars our hormones our menstrual cycles or are empty internal spaces but in our institutions and our education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols signs and signals and at this moment YouTube is a new institution a new place where education happens and where history is written and wouldn't it be cool if in this new platform there were an equal number of videos about women who make art as men or more and not because they are women but because they make great art so here are five more artists who've made incredible work and who happen to be women Artemisia Gentileschi is one of very few women artists from the 17th century that we know anything about her father a rat Co was a famous painter and that's the only reason she was able to learn how to paint as women generally weren't allowed to apprentice or enter at the academy but she was a masterful painter from a very young age taking on ambitious large-scale figure painting of religious and historic subject matter Gentileschi was a follower of Caravaggio the most prominent of italian baroque painters and she's similarly depicted dramatic lifelike scenes defined by their rich colors and high contrast between light and dark unlike male artists of the day she was permitted to work with female nude models and she depicted many powerful women in her work including Susanna and the elders Judith slaying Holofernes danyay Venus Lucretia Mary Magdalene and herself at 15 her father felt he could teach her no more and broaden Agostino Tasi as her private tutor he raped her and then so generously offered to marry her but she refused and he was already married anyway a bitter court battle ensued that involved Gentileschi being tortured while defending her testimony and Tasi was ultimately convicted many see her painting of the courageous heroine Judith saving her people by slaying the brutish general Holofernes as her revenge for the rape soon after she married another man and moved to Florence where she had a successful career and was the first woman admitted to Florence's academia del disegno while her work was long neglected and frequently miss attributed to male artists Gentileschi has emerged victorious from the misogynistic past and is now finally heralded for her intense and masterful paintings retelling canonical stories from the rare perspective of the woman and managing to tell her own story despite centuries of distance and discrimination motiva tomb first gained attention in the early 1980s for her performance and video works that involved her own body in 1982 she contained herself in a transparent box covered herself in clay and smeared the walls with it to the sounds of news reporting and revolutionary songs for another in 1985 the tomb walked barefoot through the street in London with a pair of Doc Martens laced around her ankles and dragging behind her but by the late 80s she subsumed the energy of these performances into objects with works such as the light at the end six heating rods installed vertically like prison bars approaching the piste you feel the increasing heat of the rods and note immediately that this is no Dan Flavin for light sentence she made a u-shaped enclosure of mesh lockers with a bare light bulb inside moving up and down to cast dramatic and disorienting shadows the pieces allude to confinement imprisonment and the threat of violence but remain open to interpretation and her tooms works are almost always interpreted through her biography she was born in Beirut in 1952 to a Palestinian family who had fled after the outbreak of the arab-israeli war the tomb travelled to Britain in the 1970s and the Civil War back home in Lebanon prevented her from returning so there she stayed ideas of home and homeland linger in many of her works presenting objects and situations that reference everyday domestic items that are usually harmless but under her treatment are unstable and threatening Pitou is often asked what in her work comes from her own culture and she said as if I have a recipe and can actually isolate the Arab ingredient the woman ingredient the Palestinian ingredient people often expect tidy definitions of other nests as if identity is something fixed and easily definable and of course your work does address the instability of identity but it goes much further than that the tunes installations are both beautiful and disturbing seductive and dangerous one is never safe around her work violence is imminent even in the most domestic of settings her work has the uncanny ability to impart the precariousness of each of our situations whether we are surrounded by war threatened by war or believe ourselves to be impervious to it we all love frida kahlo but it's important to remember why we do she had a tumultuous life filled with accident and intrigue and pain and suffering and it's impossible to talk about her work without talking about her life because the two are very much intertwined about a third of her entire body of work is self-portrait although Kahlo was born outside of Mexico City in 1907 she claimed her birth year to be 1910 the same year the Mexican Revolution began she contracted polio as a child and didn't learn to paint until the age of 18 while recovering from a debilitating bus accident making self-portraits and still lifes influenced by the colors and forms of Mexican folk art in 1929 she married muralist Diego Rivera whom she called my child my lover my universe they shared a love of art and politics and they traveled the world making art meeting amazing people and fighting a lot because Rivera was a serial cheater cholera Jeeves some renown during her lifetime but her work only really gained traction in the 1970s when the feminist movement began to unearth and celebrate remarkable work like collars through her works you see Kahlo addressing her many hardships displacement from home losing her mother miscarriage and divorce her images reflect upon her own life but also universal issues of course pain heartbreak revolution the world she constructed seemed surrealist to some but she insisted I never painted dreams I paint my own reality and it's that reality that remains so strong it feels almost electric as she gazes out at us from her pictures testifying to her suffering into our own Hana who was a master of collage synthesizing the fractured state of post-world War one Germany into ingenious montages of disparate images pulled from magazines journals and newspapers she also made what she calls Dada dolls a kind of sculptural montage that also reflected on the fractured state of individuals at the time physically and psychologically mutilated from the war Huck was the only female member of the Berlin Dada group which included among others George gross and raoul hausmann but despite their progressive politics the members didn't really treat her as an equal even though she was deeply involved and participated in the first international Dada fair of 1920 it was in that show that she presented her masterpiece cut with the kitchen knife Dada through the last vimar BeerBelly cultural epoch of Germany Huck was critical of the bimah government and the political chaos at the time and she used the medium of collage to express it she also challenged the standards of beauty of the quote new woman promoted in post-war media culture and questioned the oppressive ideals of homogeneity set forth by the National Socialist Party ha bravely embraced difference at a time when it was increasingly dangerous to do so her art was branded degenerate by the Nazis but Huck remained in Germany during the Second World War although wasn't allowed to exhibit a pioneering feminist who continued to make innovative and astute work until her death in 1978 using humor and startling beauty to define alternative views of self during a time of enormous social change you may not know you know you Yahoo Selma's work but you do you may have waited in line or seen people waiting in line to experience one of her miraculous infinity rooms or notice one of her bright patterns on a passing handbag or done a double take a vibrant distinctive look but Kusama at age 87 is one of the world's best known living artists and has had a remarkable career she was born in Japan and moved to New York in 1958 first creating paintings she called infinity Nets large-scale canvases covered completely in small painted loops this obsessive accumulation of gesture is extended into objects phallic soft sculptures as well as walk-ins sensorial environment in 1966 she created narcissus garden for the Venice Biennale a kinetic carpet of hundreds of mirrored spheres which she sold for $2 each until the organizers shut her down back in New York she began staging happenings and events painting participants with polka dots and choreographing orgiastic performances she published a sexual freedom newspaper opened naked painting studios and made an experimental film called kazama's self obliteration it's an apt term for her practice she calls her work art medicine which applies to both herself and her audience asking us to quote forget yourself become one with eternity become part of your environment she burnt out in the 70s and returned home to Japan where she admitted herself to a mental hospital and continued to make art and write novels she eventually built a studio near the hospital and still works there every day creating a wide range of works all within her own language of optically vibrating accumulated marks she once said I wanted to start a revolution using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned and what's remarkable about Kusama is not just her work but the persistence and singularity of that vision she and her work are immediately recognizable and that her brand can resound so clearly through the din of contemporary visual culture is an astounding feat making another list of fierce women of art has made me think about why I'm using the adjective fierce to describe them when you look back upon the history of art the women whose work is able to stand out and persevere despite centuries of discrimination have had to be fierce and in truth they still do so stay fierce and thanks for watching you
hey everybody we're back in Chicago and we're in the studio of yan tiki and we're here to discuss your responses to Yuans assignment that was called expanded moment and it was to find a place with potential of visual movement place your camera on a stable object build a frame and record at least two minutes of video without moving your camera so this one was by Abigail Elmen so what she's done is she has taken footage of people viewing another photograph it almost sets up this kind of station where people come into the frame and exit the frame and there is this timekeeping aspect to it and it makes me think a lot about how museums do research about how long people look at a picture and it's quite short and this is this is evidence supporting that there was as well something that maybe because it was in a museum and we are not sure if we actually can replace a camera on tripod there right there yeah I mean if it's a party and asked vance would have been oh yes the trembling in this situation sort of is part of this situation that we understand culturally one of the ones that you that you picked out was this one called ribbon by apple juice jade dear I like that there was something that in a way was staged most of the submissions were not staged the artists sort of went out in most cases and even though they did expect things to happened it was sort of very open here that there was a really beautiful way of paying attention to something which we might not expect and I think that there is as well some type of a transformation that is happening to the ribbon as the time go the ribbon starts to build into almost sculptural form so the next one I wanted to bring up was by grace Miller wushu which is Chinese martial art there were a few instances of this in the responses of people putting the camera on the floor you feel like you're really there like it firmly plants you you're there too and as the time goes and the fighters are entering the frame and rolling we are getting these glimpses of their faces right and so this sort of a group portrait is sort of slowly coming together as they're entering into the space and and filling it so this next one I was by my Charlie Quinn there is a really beautiful thoughtful introduction to this one and I thought that was interesting was a lot of them were just what they they were the expanded moment that was the whole video and maybe there was a little description in the text but for this one it was incredibly touching and in a way I think like with the previous video it's a sort of a portrait a portrait of what I think this one is portrait of the artist and this table is sort of this central object to the frame that my Charlie Quinn talks about as as this very important place for her and so allowing us through observing that space to to feel her to be in her place and to sit there for half an hour and feel how it is this one is just titled and expanded moment by crumb part I think what attracted me to it is how different it was from many of the other responses it's very much following the assignment in a very kind of simple way that I found very compelling to watch where you set up they've set up a situation where there is the potential for movement and then we're watching it play out and I think that what is as well interesting is as this sort of almost literally relation to expansion because these objects sort of floating in the air feel like they're going to expand and we are sort of caught in this endless tension and an expectation so this one that you selected is by Marco and it's titled dead or alive it does look like a very old and important symmetry and it seems like the people that are coming are not necessarily coming to visit their relatives but probably coming as tourists and therefore their activities are different we don't see people bringing flowers or to take care graves they're coming and they're taking pictures just walking through and there's there's something so dramatic that I about a cemetery from from media from movies and this is so banal you know it is so every day I mean it makes you think about how strange it is to take pictures in a cemetery this one was definitely one of my favorites and it's by Michael and it is a video documenting a Magic the Gathering Grand Prix in New Jersey and here you're in this terribly lit convention hall packed with people but for me the movement is in their heads all of these things happening in their in their imagination in their mind you know strategizing as they're playing this game but it's in this terrible Convention Center what they're all packed in and you're seeing them like you know rows of cans on a shelf in a grocery store and the way that Michael Frayn lived he doesn't allow us to actually see the game we cannot really follow what's happening and so we are left just with the head and with the hands of these hundreds of people it almost feels like one organism but when you look at them they're each in their own worlds like looking at an apartment building where there's all these stories within the building there is a whole intense relationship and world that's happening with each pair yeah thank you so much for giving us this assignment and for reviewing them and talking about them with me it's a wonderful activity to do it's something that I want to continue doing and even though we've discussed them today please continue to create expanded moments and share them with us on your social media platform of choice with the hashtag the art assignment thanks a lot young thank you and please do you
for centuries we humans have put the stuff we value into safe houses and locked it away historical artifacts precious metals biological specimens and some art – this was mostly done by the powerful and privileged those who had or stole stuff valuable enough to try to save but they mostly kept it to themselves and it was only pretty recently that such treasures were made available to the likes of us now it seems every city must have one if not several of these public storehouses for allegedly non-functional objects why do we need these and why should we visit them not just once but again and again and again this is the case for museums the word comes from the Greek moosian or seat of the muses referring to places like the ancient Museum at Alexandria which Thao's manuscripts and was more like a modern-day library and university the Latin derivation museum described for ancient Romans places for philosophical discussion now there was certainly art at the time but it was paintings honoring the gods housed in pineco tech on the Acropolis or sculpture on public display in Rome and of course the wealthy had art in their homes just as they do today but as far back as we can trace people have treasured and hoarded objects we know that from what early humans buried with them and wanted to take into the afterlife there's evidence that Babylonian king nabonidus collected antiquities and it seems that his daughter created a kind of educational Museum where clay cylinders described those antiquities the very first wall labels let's say during the Italian Renaissance the Medicis amassed an enormous collection which they eventually gave to the state as a public good National Museum spring to life in Europe in the 18th century as the wealthy gave up their collections to be preserved and shared after their deaths revolution forced the opening of the French royal collections to the public collecting stuff is and always has been complicated be they trophies of war or conquest objects of worship exotic curiosities or even recently completed paintings the objects that populate our museums have been removed from their original context rested from the individuals and communities and civil that birthed them tracing an object's provenance or its history of ownership is murky business and the subject of many court cases necessitating the return of cultural heritage and private property decades or even centuries after it was looted but it's precisely these complications that make museums relevant they may be full of decontextualized problematic objects but museums uphold the charge of not only keeping these things safe but recontextualizing them in novel and enlightening ways making them available to us for enjoyment and study and returning them to their rightful owners when called for being stewards of these objects means experimenting with their classification their description their juxtaposition with things similar and dissimilar how we display things has shifted over the centuries from the tightly packed arrangement of natural specimens and miscellany in the von der commerce or cabinets of curiosity of 16th and 17th century Europe to paintings hung salon style in the grand galleries of the Louvre in the 19th century and all the way to now when the nearly ubiquitous white cube is the display convention of choice and technology has transformed how we learn about what we're seeing the style of building we store our treasures in has evolved as well from pyramids and classical structures to neoclassical structures lots and lots and lots of neoclassical structures and classical structures with glowing cubes next to them and pyramids next to them some of our museums are circular some are whatever kind of shape this is some of them float but what museums do is bring us into contact with the things that those before us have made and used and valued philosophers Georg Dede uberman wrote in 2003 that in each historical objects all times encounter one another bifurcate or even become entangled with each other things and museums can give us clues as to what it was like to be a particular person in a particular place at the particular time they were made but they can also provide us access to other temporalities to each moment since the objects creation when it was altered sould changed hands when it entered the collection and when it has and has not been on display museums are sites where we can visibly see the negotiation of values what they are now what they used to be and what we hope they'll be in the future it's in these places that we can revisit and revise histories give platforms to marginalized voices and resurrect narratives of the oppressed that its contents can be shuffled around in endless combinations or stay the same for years and years makes tangible that history isn't a cold dead thing but is always contested and in flux not a singular line running backward but a dense and multi-dimensional tangle governed by mission statements that vary in specificity and scope fueled by coffers that range from obscene to non-existent museums are vulnerable to a host of influences and threats the fluctuating interests of leadership and boards of directors the vicissitudes of public funding the unpredictable allotment of private funding grants and sponsorships tasked with making their collections available to the public museums make tough sometimes reckless decisions to keep the lights on salaries paid and attendance flowing but they must always be held to task who are the public's being served and can a place be counted as public when it costs that much to get in what museums do for us that non collecting for and not-for-profit institutions don't is make a commitment that they will take care of these objects for pretty much ever when sea levels rise and forest fires loom its teams of museum nerds like these that put disaster plans into action less dramatically its conservators who try to prevent things from falling apart and restored dingy works to pass glory highly-trained people guard the objects pack the objects and expertly install and D install them careers are spent studying objects generating exhibitions around them and using them to tell stories about past and present the research that comes out of museums benefits society in direct ways giving us insight into the past and future of the world we inhabit loads of people many of them volunteers work to share the collection with you and figure out ways to share it with you even if you can't get there yourself these may be hordes of goods that once belonged to rich people presented in flawed ways but they may be all that's left after the asteroid hits and future intelligent my forms try to piece together what the heck happened and let's be clear museums are not Leanback entertainment sure you can sit yourself down and be bowled over by that epic history painting letting its magnificence vibrate out and penetrate your jaded image soaked consciousness but the real value of museums lies not in their ability to anesthetize us with beauty but in their power to make us active agents in reconsidering our histories understanding where we are now and what we might be able to do to change what happens next this work happens not in the art itself or in the wall labels but inside our heads they can't spoon-feed you transcendence but it's there if you're curious patient and do the work a museum turns out to be more like a university or library after all and that's also why it's worthwhile to return again and again even if the museum doesn't change much you change and what you notice changes when museums and the things they contain don't meet our expectations we get angry we imbue these places with authority and trust them with our cultural heritage and it's upsetting when they don't reflect our histories or experience of the world but while they might look like impenetrable fortresses they are not you can get the training to work in these places you can jockey to join the board you can give your treasured objects to help them tell better stories most importantly you can shape the conversation that surrounds museums make demands that they be better and be the vocal and engaged public these places were founded to support this episode is supported in part by viewers like you through patreon special thanks to indianapolis homes realty and all of our patrons if you'd like to support the show head on over to patreon comm slash art assignment you you