Nicole Caruth is a freelance writer and curator living in New York and frequent contributor to the Art21 blog. She’ll walk around ArtPrize, observe, listen and write about her experience here. Nicole’s thoughts and opinions are her own and in no way represent an endorsement or objection from ArtPrize toward an individual artist or venue.
Aaron Heideman in front of his van. Courtesy Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Photo: Michael Henninger
Aaron Heideman is a regular commenter on this blog. His remarks are thoughtful, but he’s clearly disgruntled. I’ve been tempted to reply: Dude, why are you so angry? But instead, I went to see the artist and his project, The Man in a Van, yesterday afternoon.
Homeless man. Dodge van. Tyvek banner. Felt-tip markers. These are Heideman’s creative instruments. Since July, the artist has traveled the United States in a van, collecting stories from people affected by the recession on a paper scroll (and on the van itself). This document of our present moment — measuring almost the entire width of the standard NFL football field — is heavy with tales of loss and despair.
Aaron Heideman, "The Man in a Van" (detail). ArtPrize, Grand Rapids Community Foundation, 2009. Photo: N. Caruth
When I arrived at the Grand Rapids Community Foundation it appeared there was nothing to see — Heideman’s scroll was torn into three parts by yesterday’s high winds. I soon learned that the artist and his damaged piece were inside the building; we sat down amid the large fragments of paper for a brief chat. I expected to get an earful about all of the problems Heideman has with ArtPrize and its voters (and there would have been nothing wrong with that). Rather, I found him to be cool and composed and unusually connected to his project — he seems to carry the weight of it on his shoulders.
Nicole Caruth is a freelance writer and curator living in New York and frequent contributor to the Art21 blog. She’ll walk around ArtPrize, observe, listen and write about her experience here. Nicole’s thoughts and opinions are her own and in no way represent an endorsement or objection from ArtPrize toward an individual artist or venue.
The Moving Crew Art Collective, "The Official Bureau of Art Quality & Standards", 2009. ArtPrize, Old Federal Building, Grand Rapids, MI. Photo: N. Caruth
When Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, addressed the Kendall College of Art and Design last week, he focused his talk on notions of community. “All of us belong to multiple communities,” he said. Apropos of nothing, I’ve been exploring the little communities within ArtPrize known as collectives. How do these artist groups further encourage and create community?
Collectives were a hot topic in contemporary art a few years ago. In 2006, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter addressed this recurring trend in his article, The Collective Consciousness. He wrote:
“Basically, art collectives do away with the one-artist-one-object model. They come in various sizes and formats: couples, quartets, teams, tribes and amorphous cyberspace communities. Sometimes a group of artists assumes the identity of a single person; sometimes, a single artist assumes the identity of many…they may or may not refer to their activities as art. Joint production…scrambles existing aesthetic formulas. It may undermine the cult of the artist as media star, dislodge the supremacy of the precious object and unsettle the economic structures that make the art world a mirror image of the inequities of American culture at large. In short, it confuses how we think about art and assign value to it.”
Cotter’s piece boils down to real insider art world stuff like the affairs and absurdities of the art market. But his characterization of collectives is still broadly applicable. He suggests that these groups are less interested in producing art objects than in providing an experience. The experience of community is just as important as a community itself. Here’s a few collectives at ArtPrize that I believe model these ideas:
The Moving Crew Art Collective — In The Official Bureau of Art Quality & Standards at the Old Federal Building, artists play “pompous art experts” and attempt to educate the public about art and art history. Basically, they “get” art and you don’t. By supplying the ArtPrize community with the knowledge they supposedly need to view objects, the Bureau contributes to the greater good of humanity. This tongue-in-cheek critique of art world experts recalls early practices by artists like Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson, who used the very institutions that exhibited their work to address problems within institutions. Part performance, part installation, the Bureau includes of old glass cases reminiscent of those that display archeological finds. They are filled with ready-made tools — binoculars, magnifying lenses, syringes and teeth — used for learning and discovery. At the desk buttons, fliers, brochures and other ephemera are free for the taking. Though I haven’t been able to catch up with the artists/experts who sometimes man the desk, I did take away a handy leaflet about Dangerous Art Encounters. Tip #3: Do not stare directly at a dangerous artwork. This is a sign of aggression. Tip# 13: If you carry pepper spray, be sure that you have trained with it before trusting it during an art attack.
Nicole Caruth is a freelance writer and curator living in New York and frequent contributor to the Art21 blog. She’ll walk around ArtPrize, observe, listen and write about her experience here. Nicole’s thoughts and opinions are her own and in no way represent an endorsement or objection from ArtPrize toward an individual artist or venue.
Walking the streets, day or night, I’m amazed by the number of people outside with the common goal to look at art. This alone might prove to be the most important aspect of ArtPrize. What this event has achieved for the communities of Grand Rapids is something for many (if not all) cities to envy. Nevertheless, my role here is not to promote ArtPrize, but to observe, pose questions, and maybe even criticize.
How and where a work of art is situated in the urban environment plays a significant role in how it is seen, received and remembered. This is especially true for outdoor sculptures and installations. Perhaps I’m not understanding the process of securing one’s own venue, but I had hoped to see more site-specificity at ArtPrize — artwork that is sensitive to its setting, and created to exist in a particular place. Too often artworks seem arbitrarily placed; they could easily move from one storefront, restaurant, parking lot, sidewalk or bank to another. They could even live in another city. There is something to be said for understanding one’s site and medium, and I think that statement is made in Calder Plaza.
If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you already know that I was headed to Slide Wars on Thursday night but never made it. I got distracted by art along the way. One sculpture lead to another until I unexpectedly came upon the Grand Rapids claim to fame: Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse. In three days I’ve seen hundreds of objects, but nothing nearly as breathtaking. La Grande Vitesse doesn’t simply rest in the landscape, it makes the landscape. (It’s no wonder this piece inspired the ArtPrize logo.) But I soon found myself even more enamored by the relationship between Calder’s sculpture and nearby works by Chakaia Booker.
Calder brought humor, play and abstraction to his mobiles and bold sheet steel sculptures. Booker addresses topics of race, class and labor through manipulated strips of rubber tire. Their biomorphic and creature-like forms, created 40-years apart, are quite different in appearance and content yet resonate with one another. A conversation between these objects sort of dances back and forth across the courtyard. Calder designed La Grande Vitesse to respond to the color, size, and shape of the location. Booker and, I presume, the Frey Foundation have given the same kind of thought to the plaza and Calder’s presence within it. Acuteness of judgment, or understanding place is key to what I believe is most successful about Booker’s installation: forms complement one another in the setting. Peter Murray, Executive Director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, recently suggested that this is what art, especially when situated in the open air, is meant to do — transform space and create conversation.
My experience of Calder Plaza leads me back to the polls. I’m slightly disappointed and a tad surprised to see that Booker is not in the top 25, 50 or even 100. Are the objects on top the best in the competition or the most seen? Are voters only remembering the things that take up the most space or get in their way? Booker’s sculptures are quiet and contemplative, they exhibit an awareness of history and place, and this is not what seems to be popular. I have to wonder if the trend we are witnessing in the top 25, which weighs heavily on the side of grandiose three-dimensional objects (RedBall: Grand Rapids; Nessie on the Grand; and The Furniture City Sets the Table for the World of Art, for example), has more to do with spectacle than content.
Adam Weinberg, the Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, spoke Friday at the Lunch Box lecture series at Kendall College of Art and Design.
Weinberg discussed the shifting definition of American Art, and the various strategies the Whitney has used to explore notions of artistic identity. At the end of his slide lecture he took questions from the audience, including several regarding the open nature of ArtPrize, the role of curation, and the need for art institutions to explore a diversity of organizational structures.
Nicole Caruth is a freelance writer and curator living in New York and frequent contributor to the Art21 blog. She’ll walk around ArtPrize, observe, listen and write about her experience here. Nicole’s thoughts and opinions are her own and in no way represent an endorsement or objection from ArtPrize toward an individual artist or venue.
In less than 12 hours in Grand Rapids, I saw more artwork than I usually do in a month’s time in New York City. It’s not that there’s more to see here, but that I’m making an effort to see everything—all 1,262 artists at 159 venues spread across 3-square miles.
As I wandered the streets of downtown and crept around Twitter on opening night, people were buzzing with excitement about ArtPrize. One comment struck me as being spot on: “Unless bad art wins, this will prove to be a monumental event for years to come.” At the risk of sounding like an art snob, I arrived expecting that the majority of ArtPrize entries would fall under the umbrella of “bad art.” And indeed some works are so poorly executed that even calling them art is a stretch. (It’s probably good that I’m not voting.) The blessing and the curse of this open call is that every artist, regardless of the quality or content of their work, is given a chance. Good, brilliant, fair, kitsch and downright atrocious share the same context and sometimes hang side-by-side. Without experts to weed out the good from the bad, it seems to me, that in many cases the better objects suffer. That said, my opinion will not go far in this competition.
At the time of this writing, over 10,000 people have registered for ArtPrize and cast more than 5,700 votes. Voter registration sites are still receiving excited constituents. Though reports have stated that artists in the community were displeased with the idea of a popular vote, the heap of promotional materials that filled my purse last night suggest that they have come to terms with the idea and figured out how to work it. Every artist is a salesman. Street campaigns range from a painter quietly distributing postcards from her garden wagon to the spectacle of moving balloon sculpture accompanied by cries of “Vote for me!” (Given all that there is to do and see, the latter actually seems like a smart move.) Still, there is one lingering concern about voting that I’ve heard on several occasions: the option to vote down. “Playing favorites [voting up] is fine, but voting down is kind of telling people they’re not good enough,” said a volunteer at the West Michigan Center for Arts & Technology (WMCAT). Artist Andrea Misch, whose silicone dolls are on display at Tanaz Hair Boutique Downtown, also worried about voters being “mean.” But as viewers circled us and gushed over her dolls, Misch expressed that she’s no longer concerned.
While I might sound something like the grumbling Simon Cowell of American Idol, there’s a lot of Paula and Randy in me too: even I had a moment of uneasiness about down votes. How is that fair? These votes, I’ve learned, are not included in the final tally, but used to show which artists are creating the most discussion or controversy. Coincidentally, many of these artists are also having their moment in the top 50. I might be jumping the gun, but judging from the list of top ranking works after day one, I’m inclined to believe that the collective public might be just as discerning an audience as a group of so-called experts. (This is in fact James Surowiecki’s theory in The Wisdom of Crowds, a book that inspired the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Click!: A Crowd Curated Exhibition.) With any luck, the Grand Rapids crowd will, as they say on American Idol, “get it right.”
As we anticipated, the ArtPrize team is scrambling around like a bunch of ants to take care of anything and everything that pops up (or drops out, like the servers for our website did temporarily at 4PM Wednesday). There is so much going on. Inevitably, I’m going to miss some of it while I’m busy explaining something like text voting. Enter Nicole Caruth.
Nicole is a freelance writer and curator living in New York and a frequent contributor to the Art21 blog. She’s agreed to be our hired gun for this blog. For the next week, she’ll walk around, observe, listen and write about her experience here. It’s not been 24 hours since Nicole arrived in Grand Rapids, but she’s determined to get oriented and see everything offered this first week of ArtPrize.
Nicole’s thoughts and opinions are her own and in no way represent an endorsement or objection from ArtPrize toward an individual artist or venue.
Look for Nicole’s posts about ArtPrize here on the blog.
Nicole’s bio:
Nicole J. Caruth is a freelance writer and curator based in Brooklyn. She frequently contributes to the Art21 blog, where she writes a monthly column about the intersections of art and food; and …might be good, a contemporary art e-journal produced by Fluent~Collaborative. Her writing has been published by the Studio Museum in Harlem; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; CUE Art Foundation; the Center for Book Arts; NYFA Current, and Gastronomica among others. Recent curatorial projects include Near Sighted—Far Out, a video art festival for Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center; and Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection at the Brooklyn Museum. Visit her personal blog, www.sweetcontemporary.com.
The Lunch Box Series of lectures kicked off today at Kendall College of Art and Design. Most weekdays from now until the end of ArtPrize will feature a free lecture. The lectures are happening in the KCAD Lobby, 17 Fountain St. NW.
The first talk was by Peter Murray OBE, Executive Director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK. Murray talked about his experiences as the founding director of the Park, working with hundreds of artists through the years, and the ways in which sculpture challenges and interacts with traditional notions of landscape.
A few highlights for me: Murray’s description of how Lancelot “Capability” Brown‘s 18th century landscape architecture left a mark (literally) on British notions of landscape. And his remarks about how American earthwork sculptors viewed landscape, particularly his point about how the airplane became of one Robert Smithson‘s primary tools.
Video of the lecture and dates for future lectures after the jump. Read More »
As you can imagine, it’s very busy here in the office. We’re all running on coffee and compliments.
Voting began last night at 6:00PM for ArtPrize 2009. Just now, we passed 10,000 votes counted. Thank you to everyone for jumping in and making the last 24 hours so frenzied (in a good way).
If you didn’t notice yet, on the left side of the homepage you can click links to view the Top 100, Top 75, Top 50 and Top 25.
In a couple days, voting will go live on artprize.org. Voting, as has been mentioned, is entirely electronic. This means that on the website, we’ll be able to see which artists are getting the most votes. But exactly what will we see?
This is a question ArtPrize has put a lot of thought into. You see, when we list the top artists on the website, you will also be able to vote right on that page. There is a danger in displaying artists with their ranking and total votes like this:
1. Jane Artist (10,000)
2. Joe Sculptor (9,122)
3. Bob Painter (8,999)
The danger is that the top artist is always displayed at the top of the page, giving that artist the most exposure on the website. It potentially creates a snowball effect of votes for that artist: The most prominent on the page gets the most votes.
To create a more level playing field on the website, ArtPrize designed a system, so people can track “buckets” of which artists are in the lead without revealing who, exactly, is in the lead day to day. Read More »
