Holding Forth

The forthcoming February 2010 issue of Art in America includes a lengthy Richard Vine article on the work of Xing Danwen, and includes images from her days in the seminal “East Village” community of Beijing in the early 1990s. Like Rong Rong, Ms. Xing was on hand to document the earliest performances of Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and others. Her photos (below) show some younger versions of today’s familiar faces: Zhang, Ma, Fang Lijun reclining in his studio, Wang Jin and his bricks, bare-chested sculptors Zhan Wang & Sui Jianguo, “godfather” critic Li Xianting (lower right), and Xu Bing’s notorious “foreign” and “Chinese” coupling pigs. The 10-page article is a serious treatment of Xing, her work, and the part she played to create an important art historical moment.

Xing Danwen photographs

Another signal of Chinese contemporary art’s significance in 2010: the Museum of Modern Art will exhibit Yin Xiuzhen’s playful installation work “Collective Subconscious,” as part of the museum’s “Projects” series of solo exhibitions, from February 24th. Yin Xiuzhen is one of the most inventive sculpture/installation artists in China, and she represented China at the 2007 Venice Bienniale. This is the second Projects show for a Chinese artist at MOMA - the first was last year’s show for Song Dong, who happens to be Yin’s husband.

A conversation with the excellent people at world-class vintage photo dealer  Stephen Daiter Gallery this week yielded some info that may be of use to photographers working now:

• Some artists (Paul D’Amato is one) choose to leave an open edition in a smaller print size, then limit the edition of the same image at a larger print size (edition of 10, in D’Amato’s case).  This way he is able to widely distribute the smaller ones by keeping prices low, while gaining the higher price point of the scarcity factor for the larger prints.  Another advantage that this gives is he can have prints available for donation to museums, charity auctions etc. without eating into the numbered edition.
• Other artists keep one print size, but have larger editions, stepping the pricing up from very low to much higher.  Michael Kane is one example; when new works are released in editions of 50, there is a lot of market interest to get the work at the low price.  In this way he keeps buyer interest in his works.
• Artist proofs:  20% of the edition is standard (e.g. an edition of 10 numbered prints + 2 A.P. = 12 prints total)
• Printing the entire edition: some artists are loathe to print an entire edition if they do not have ready buyers, preferring instead to print on demand as the works sell so that they can save money, materials, storage space, etc.  This can lead to problems with consistency across the edition, as papers, chemicals (inks, in the case of inkjet), etc. change with time.  Artist Ken Josephson has a smart solution:  he prints a reference standard to which he matches all subsequent prints.

OK, finally some more news about the Pop-Up Art Loop program, and how artists can get involved.

From Crain’s Chicago Business:

The Chicago Loop Alliance will open three temporary art galleries in vacant retail spaces downtown in an effort to boost foot traffic.
Pop Up Art Loop starts later this month in locations near the Palmer House Hilton, Carson Pirie Scott and the Art Institute of Chicago — unless someone rents the shuttered spaces first.
The galleries will feature works by photographers, artists and short-form filmmakers.
Lou Raizin, CEO of Broadway in Chicago and the alliance’s board chair, came up with the idea. A noted photographer, he may have his work displayed along with other notable photo journalists in town.

[I have emailed Mr. Raizin for more details on how to get involved.  This type of opportunity is a good one for artists looking to show their work, especially as more and more galleries close their doors.  Will post updates as I get them.]

Many thanks to the very generous artist Chris Garko for posting this; though the list may need some updating, it is a fantastic resource for enterprising artists who are reaching out to this important but often under-appreciated sector of the commercial art economy.

A nice bit of coverage for Chicago art in the mainstream press: Red Eye from Chicago Tribune.

Last night at an art opening I ran into a grad school friend who recently lost her job and is trying to figure out what to do next. OK, not uncommon these days - but it got me thinking again that it’s always been creative people in any field who have come up with the way forward when they hit a dead end.   Remember the saying a few years back: “The MFA is the new MBA”?  It certainly has a different ring to it now… but regardless when money is short and the old ways don’t work no more, people have to get creative and go in new directions.

Right now there are people getting together to stimulate discussion and encourage each other to dig deep inside and find that new thing that can carry them forward, out of depression and, hopefully, toward financial stability.  This sounds a lot like what artists do anyway.   I have sent emails to a bunch of people in the last week regarding some great stuff I’ve seen on this, so I figured I’d post it here in hopes that it can be of help to a wider group.

Artists at Work Forum: Beyond Walls, Nontraditional Ways of Making a Living as an Artist - this was a panel discussion and Q&A session held a few months back at the Chicago Cultural Center, and featuring 4 artists: Lynn Basa, who has done very well building a career making public art; Nikko Moy, who figured out how she could make a living with an online art gallery business; Lee Tracy, a Chicago artist who makes art, shares / rents out her studio, and uses other means to add up to a livable income; and Chad Kouri, who works hard and uses social media to get his work out to a market.

The whole session (about 1.5 hours!) was recorded and can be viewed online for free - I found it totally worthwhile, with useful & practical ideas, as well as generally motivating and encouraging.

My own life is one of using the internet to help others buy & sell art online, and I believe that the internet remains a really powerful tool for making a living, so Nikko Moy’s example and ideas were particularly powerful for me.  Her blog goes over some of the key material.  And she also put some more on Design Sponge.

Shannon Stratton of Threewalls pointed me to a new blog called “Inspired Outsiders” that seeks to encourage creative thinking toward financial well-being, and to profile those who have made it happen for themselves.

Here are a few great examples that I know of:

• Photographer Edward Burtynsky realized that there were no professional photo labs that could print the large images he needed - and so Toronto Image Works was born, which today dominates the high-end photo output market in Canada.

Jaye Rhee is as committed an artist as you are likely to meet.  I first met her in 2001, when I was an art student in Chicago.  Jaye was on an upper floor of the 847 W Jackson building.  She was functionally dressed in black, focused and serious, documenting the work that she would show for the BFA exhibition at the School of the Art Institute.   That piece,  a video installation work called Tear, had a clear strength that put it way above the other works in that huge group show.  In Tear, she stretches a sheet of plain fabric across the screen, then slowly walks from one edge of the frame to the other, ripping the fabric as she walks.  In the 2001 show she placed 4 monitors side by side, such that the figure would move from the right edge of the rightmost monitor and walk across the 4 screens, eventually disappearing off the left edge of the leftmost monitor, the sound of tearing fabric continuing all the while.  The effect was hypnotic, and that is the only piece that stays in my mind from that show.

Jaye Rhee: still from Tear (click for video)

For the last 3 years, I have been working as an art adviser and private dealer of contemporary artworks, in addition to maintaining my own art practice.  I’ve been a student of Korean language and culture since 1993, and Korean art, ancient through contemporary, is of great interest to me.  Jaye (who was born in Korea) and I agreed to cooperate commercially, and so I am happy to promote her work through my websites and blog (also, Kasia Kay gave us a 2-person show last year).

We are also friends.  Jaye impresses me for her never-say-die attitude.  Everything she does is quality, even if it takes her a half-year to complete a work (as a rule, she works in video and also produces photograph prints that, in effect, are high-quality still images from the videos).   She continues to place her art first in her life, and she has been rewarded with inclusion in the Kobe Biennial, several shows in New York, solos in Paris, Los Angeles, Seoul and here in Chicago, a Skowhegan fellowship, and currently a residency in Korea, where she is working on a new video.

To me, Jaye’s work is a long-term inquiry into the complicated experience of seeing.  The work often plays with the flatness vs. depth issue of pictorial depiction, such as when she swims in a pool in front of a wall painting of swans, the white towel on her head looking strangely part of the scene.  Atop that layer she adds the notion of near vs. far; the wall painting itself exists as a fantasy backdrop; presumably, the patrons of this urban public bath

Jaye Rhee: Swan 2, c-print

experience themselves transported away from their daily grind to some neverland that is supremely inaccessible - a representation that exists only in their mind.  While the wall painting remains something activated by our (viewer and bather) imagination,  Jaye’s presence in the image as simultaneously artist and bather implicates us in a strange way;  we know that the artist has staged the scene for our looking, and then places herself within the frame, as though to catch the viewer in the act.  Her place is in-between our space and the fictive wall painting space, or at least it was until she clicked the shutter and thereby fully passed to the far side of the representational divide.  Not simply pure performance documentation, these images are like letters from the front, as though the artist has ventured forth into the scene on our behalf, and will report back with her findings on exactly what is happening when we see.

One message I’m getting: our brain adds meaning to the images collected by our eyes, and through that combination our mind may take off to places we never expected to go.  Jaye seems to say that to see is to submit to a mosh pit of signs, and she’s on hand to help us enter the fray.  Her new work, entitled Bambi, is a complex even richer than the bath house pictures.  At the center of the work is the eponymous cartoon figure as an almost impossibly cute dog, done up in Bambi drag via

Jaye Rhee: Bambi 2, c-print

applied white spots.  (Be sure to watch the video; Jaye collaborates with professional musicians on great custom scores for her pieces.) The work strikes an array of notes: Bambi is the archetype of “cute”, supplied in spades by the dog and some ludicrous yellow chicks; Bambi also connotes “nature” (an unsettled question of the highest order), so we have astroturf, and a ficus tree (the standard office plant, real or not - nature in domestic space; outside brought inside).  Issues of control are addressed by a fence, the stuffed head of another deer, a fallen cuckoo clock, and perhaps (stretching a bit) the scattered girly hair clips on the ground.  There is something more ominous about these images, however.  The mirror reflects a deer head different than the one on the wall, and is angled so that the latter might see an image of the viewer.  What is at stake when humans look at animals?  The animals have their own eyes, not the long-lashed sexy peepers of the Disney version.  I am reminded of the film Grizzly Man, when we see the chilling eyes of a certain bear, and the voiceover says those eyes are full of the “indifference of nature.”   Later we learn that the human protagonist, his love of nature notwithstanding, was most likely devoured by the same animal.  Jaye shows us that a single loaded trope, despite what we think we know, may actually be a wreckage site fraught with far more questions than answers.

Chicago and Shanghai are sister cities.  Columbia College has put together Focus: China, a series of exhibitions, lectures, film screenings and associated events bringing contemporary Chinese culture to Chicago audiences.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography’s exhibition entitled Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and its Contemporary Material Culture is a remarkable group show that mixes photography, installation, and video from international artists.   The opening coincided with a symposium, and artist Shi Guorui, known for his camera obscura images, gave a great presentation of his work.

Birds Nest Stadium, Beijing, camera obscura photograph, Shi Guorui

Meanwhile, the Hyde Park Art Center continues its good work of promoting strong artwork by showing a number of video works from Chinese artists (and a few non-Chinese who did special projects in Shanghai), including the prankster Xu Zhen, the new-media whiz Cao Fei, and the well-known Yang Fudong.  The opening on Sunday was quiet, but was worth it for the historical overview delivered in University of Chicago PhD candidate Peggy Wang’s presentation.  Dan S. Wang also skilfully handled the Q &A that arose following the screenings as well as did a lot of administrative legwork on the China project overall.

Both shows are up now and are worth your time.

Yang Fudong, Honey #3, still photograph