Interview with Michelle Grabner (Part 1 of 4)

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this interview will be posted here in four parts.

Lynna Borden: What attracted you to this space? I know it’s very different from both the Suburban and the Poor Farm.

Michelle Grabner: Well, Matt and White Flag Projects have an excellent reputation. Not being from St. Louis, I don’t really have a grasp on how White Flag plays out politically in St. Louis but, since I’ve been here, I’m really getting a sense of its uniqueness and how it holds a complementary relationship to programming at the Contemporary, the Kemper, Boots, and even Laumeier Sculpture Park. As a visitor, I find this very exciting.

After talking to Matt the other day, I realized that White Flag embodies the same sensibility and relationship to contemporary art as Midway Contemporary in Minneapolis. I have great respect for Midway’s programming, so I’m really at home here in terms of White Flag’s commitment to not just playing out exhibitions that feature local talent, but actually contextualizing them within international art practices. This is always a difficult, but necessary, project if one is really committed to raising the cultural stakes in cities that are left of center. Institutions like the Contemporary here or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, certainly that is their mandate, but because they operate on a larger scale, their programming and their curatorial ideas get played out in a very slow way, sometimes so slow that they often appear behind the curve when it comes to examining what is contemporary. It’s spaces like Midway, LAX in LA, or White Flag Projects here that I think are doing the good work in terms of risk and breadth of contemporary practice and discourse.

LB: That’s true. Here, we can incorporate more artists and have exhibitions more frequently than larger institutions.

MG: That’s right, and institutions like the Contemporary or the MCA have obligations to various audiences. They’re always analyzing who their audience is and catering to them and their many expectations. Sometimes these institutions develop really great educational programs but sometimes catering to an audience leads to watered-down programming and an over-emphasis on making the institution social. But here at White Flag, it seems that your primary audience is the international art apparatus. Although this is my first time here, I’ve been following the on-goings at White Flag over the last two years from my vantage point in Chicago. I know there are curators and artists in Europe who have asked me specifically about White Flag, so my observation is that White Flag is more expansive and constructed very differently from the audiences that comprise other institutions.

LB: I feel like the work here can also push the boundaries a little bit more than in a larger institution.

MG: That’s right, or try things out—risk something. That’s my complaint all the time about other institutions. They play it safe. Artists and/or curators can try something out here and bigger institutions can’t fathom failure.

- Lynna Borden, Intern

“Drinks with Louise Bourgeois” at White Flag Projects

This Wednesday March 10th, an archival 1975 interview with Louise Bourgeois will be screened as the last installment of the season for White Flag’s DRINKS series. It’s a free event with free drinks (compliments of WFP and Schlafly Beer.)

Louise Bourgeois’ (b. 1911) long and notable career has endured several decades of art historical movements without swerving from its singular and uncategorizable identity. Her work, which spans every medium, mines the intensely personal, traveling a precarious line between psychological menace and childlike naïvity while maintaining an astute dialogue with abstract and formal concerns. She lives and works in New York.

A major traveling retrospective of her work was inaugurated at the Tate Modern in London in 2007 and ended at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2009. Further information about Bourgeouis’ life and work can be found here.

DRINKS with Louise Bourgeois will be held Wednesday, March 10th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening beings promptly at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, such as our current exhibition Newtonland, visit www.white-flag-projects.org.

Newtonland at White Flag Projects

Science and art can sometimes be seen as being at odds with one another—fact versus feeling, the tangible versus the intangible. It’s rare when the objectivity of science and the subjective nature of art come together in a harmonious pairing; however, artist and curator Michelle Grabner bridges the gap in Newtonland, an exhibition that opens this Saturday, February 27th from 7 to 10 p.m., at White Flag Projects.

The artworks featured in Newtonland are both whimsical and astute as they play on space, geometry, perception, and movement. Greg Bogin frames white space with shifting neon colors, prompting viewers to take note of what isn’t there as their eyes trace the border of his shaped canvas. Elizabeth Bryant also works with negative space by removing cutouts from an otherwise saturated photographic landscape and then hanging the fragments around the image for the viewer to piece together. Several other pieces in Newtonland also deal with the concept of negative space – Ib Geertsen’s torqued metal mobile confuses perception, while Jan Van Der Ploeg’s circular forms allow for an appreciation the pureness of color and the simplicity of shape. Anne Eastman’s mirrored mobiles skew our reflection and observation, as does Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam’s large-scale aluminum and silverpoint mobile bleacher material. Alternatively, Jonas Wood translates tenets of mobile sculpture into 2-D drawings, taking inspiration from the forms of Alexander Calder and tethe organic geometry of houseplants. Finally, the avant-garde score and movements of marine life in Jean Painlevé’s short films serve to complement both the implied and literal movement of the mobiles and the ever-present pull of gravity itself.

Newtonland opens this Saturday, February 27, 2010. The opening reception will take place between 7 and 10 PM. The exhibition will remain open through April 3rd. For more information on this exhibition and other upcoming events, please visit www.white-flag-projects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

What Lingers with Mike Bidlo

Mike Bidlo has made his career recreating and appropriating the art of other artists, replicating the work of everyone from Jackson Pollock to Marcel Duchamp to Henri Matisse to Julian Schnabel. Though the popular revival of appropriation-based art (1980-90’s) has passed, the practice continues to be relevant in part because of its reliance on the idea of re-contextualization. While other artists – such as Bidlo’s contemporary Sherrie Levine – make vast changes to the original work, Bidlo’s reproductions seek to imitate precisely the image, scale, and materials of their source. What’s more, he does not work from the original, but from reproductions, making his pieces twice-removed from their selected source material.

Bidlo’s Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawings, featured in our current exhibition, are novel only in their complex way of commenting on the hegemony of art historical influence. By meticulously reproducing Rauschenberg’s bold erasure of an actual de Kooning drawing (1953), these works disrupt the notion of a historical canon by independently asserting whom from the past we should – or should not – consider our creative forebears. Bidlo, here, is asserting which historic works are contemporarily relevant.

Rauschenberg, with his gesture, called the precious nature of art into question and challenged the status of proposed masters such as Willem de Kooning, who was at the height of his career at the time the piece was made. Bidlo, on the other hand, seems to want to re-instate the combined significance of Rauschenberg and de Kooning in the contemporary moment, offering, through the new piece, a kind of double-bind of anarchy and reverence.

The last day to view Love & Theft is tomorrow, February 13, between noon and 5 p.m. For more information about this exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

Engaging with Asher Penn

Kate Moss has inspired countless fashion designers and artists; W Magazine even had a special issue purporting just that— the timeless and boundless nature of Moss’s influence. Moss has been a muse to so many because her ubiquity has rendered her somewhat of a blank canvas. Most of the art she’s present in really isn’t about Kate Moss, it’s about the work’s creator. In this case, it’s about Asher Penn and his 300-part artwork Kate Moss Rorschach.

In his riff on the now-unreliable psychological test designed by Hermann Rorschach in 1921, Penn literally uses Moss’s image as ground for his improvised near-Rorschachs, appropriating three Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographs of the model and overlaying them with vibrant red patterns. By using a Tillmans photograph, Penn is not only taking on the model and all of the associations that come with her, but he’s also taking on high-art. The gritty photocopy method he uses to reproduce the original photographs removes the image from its glossy, high-profile context and makes it more accessible.

The accessibility of these images is heightened by both the gritty photocopy method he uses to reproduce the original photographs and the fact that they strongly imply a viewer. Moss’s gaze, which is either framed or obscured depending on the individual pattern, serves to implicate the viewer through a direct stare that draws you in or a sideways glance that suggests your presence. Looking at the images, the viewer is forced to come to terms with their desire for meaning and for possession—possession of images, of commodities, and even of others. Moss’s status as one of high fashion’s most sought-after advertisers coupled with the interpretive nature of Rorschach patterns allows viewers to project their own meaning and desires onto Penn’s work and engage with it on a level beyond the surface.

Love & Theft is on view through this Saturday, February 13, 2010. For more details on this exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

Robert Ryman at White Flag Projects

The next installment of White Flag’s DRINKS series will take place Wednesday, February 10th from 5-7pm and will feature a 1979 interview with American artist Robert Ryman (in addition to free happy hour drinks, of course).

You could say that Robert Ryman (b. 1930) came to painting by accident. His first artistic interest was jazz music, which he pursued at the George Peabody School for Teachers in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t until 1953, when Ryman took a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that his interest in painting began to take shape.

A self-taught artist, it’s as if Ryman’s paintings are a series of experiments playing with the effects of texture, brushstroke, thickness, and surface in order to call attention to the work’s physicality. This individualized method of painting calls for a similarly unique method of viewing. Since Ryman’s paintings are purely non-representational, they are not about symbolism, narrative, or even abstraction. Instead, they muse on their relationship to broader elements, such as the behavior of their medium and the environment in which they exist. The conceptual dimension of Ryman’s work is dependent upon his essential commitment to white paint, which, through its neutrality, brings forth more with less. The almost transparent quality of the tone allows viewers to consider the light, space, surface, and other such elements that usually fade into the background of a work.

Ryman is a much-lauded artist who’s had major exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London (1993); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1994); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994) to name a few. He has also participated in national and international exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1987, 1995), Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982), and the Venice Biennale (1976, 1978, 1980).

DRINKS with Robert Ryman will be held Wednesday, February 10th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening beings promptly at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

Enduring and Fading with Sara Greenberger Rafferty

The three artworks Sara Greenberger Rafferty has on view in Love & Theft at White Flag Projects all prominently feature 1970’s-era comedians (Valerie Harper, Vicki Lawrence, and Joyce Dewitt). While these works could be considered portraits, their goals are a far cry from what is traditionally expected of the genre.

The stand-up comedian is more than a random fixation for Greenberger Rafferty; rather, the aesthetics of stand-up comedy act as a metaphor for her artistic practice. Like the comic, her work stands alone; it’s not overly ornate or overwhelmingly large, and it’s accessible and human in scale while attempting to be engaging. Greenberger Rafferty’s process and choice of materials also complement the vulnerable stand-alone humanity of her works. She scans, prints, splashes, and rephotographs each image, lending the slick C-prints mounted to Plexiglas a somewhat abused, and discarded quality.

Like most appropriation art, what is interesting about these altered images is not only the present artwork but also the necessary reconsideration of the original object, and the effect Greenberger Raffterty’s strategy has had on it. The fluid stains on a Vicki Lawrence photograph that originally appeared on the 1972 album cover for The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, make Lawrence look like a demonic teenage boy. In contrast, Valerie Harper turns both gory and rain-soaked, longingly gazing to the right as if searching, and Joyce Dewitt transforms into a spectral, skeletal floating head.

Greenberger Rafferty’s pieces confer a range of emotional suggestion – from sadness to isolation, failure to obscurity. Juxtaposing these apparent sentiments against the backdrop of comedy strikes an oppositional note that allows the images to capture both the viewer’s visual and emotional attention. Greenberger Rafferty’s work in Love & Theft brings faded celebrities back into view and allows us to witness their slow dissolve.

Love & Theft will remain on view at White Flag Projects until Saturday, February 13. For more details on the exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

Love & Theft Opening Reception at White Flag

This Saturday, January 23rd, between 7 and 10 p.m., White Flag Projects celebrates the opening of Love & Theft, a group exhibition currently on view and featuring artists Mike Bidlo, Dutes Miller, Asher Penn, and Sara Greenberger Rafferty. Each of these artists explores preexisting figural motifs in order to either reinvigorate or dismantle the appropriated image.

Mike Bidlo’s Not Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawings reference both Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg’s infamous 1953 erasure of a de Kooning. Appropriation isn’t new to Bidlo–-he’s been replicating the work of 20th century Modernist masters for decades in paintings and sculptures usually titled “Not (insert artist’s name here).” Bidlo has also tied a performance aspect into many of his projects, such as his 1984 recreation of Andy Warhol’s factory in the attic of New York’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center or his public replication of Picasso’s Guernica in L.A.’s Gagosian Gallery. Bidlo’s oeuvre is as impressive as it’s extensive. His pieces are witty (he called his version of Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, She Works Hard for the Money) and layered in their associations and references.

Chicago-based multimedia artist Dutes Miller’s pornographic collages provide a literal layering of images suggestive of the stacking of bodies. At once lewd and honest, Miller’s collages, as well as many of his other works, place gay male experience at their forefront. The lowly frames used to encase the work complement the gritty, no-budget aesthetic that the barrage of unrestrained body parts evokes. The abundance of images allows Dutes’s collages to have quite the opposite effect of Bidlo’s Drawings—they become over-stimulating in both a visual and figural sense.

Brooklyn-based artist and Interview magazine contributor Asher Penn uses three different and somewhat bizarre Wolfgang Tillmans photographs of British model Kate Moss as the raw material for his series of Kate Moss Rorschach works on paper. In this series, Penn layers red acrylic paint over the photocopied Tillmans photographs (most of which I personally and painstakingly placed in clip frames) to create images reminiscent of out-moded Rorschach psychological tests. The sheer volume of the images coupled with the non-repetitious and questionably arbitrary paint-blot patterns, make the work viewed as a whole quite a spectacle.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Columbia University’s School of Arts. In the early 2000’s, Greenberger Rafferty became interested in the subject of entertainers and performance – an interest that her three works on view (all portraits of 70’s-era female comedians) evidence. Like Penn, she also works with the photographic image, but instead of using photocopy as her means of reproduction, she re-photographs each image, digitally manipulates it, and stains it with unknown fluids (???), thereby transforming the original photograph into a specter of its former self. The disparity between the vibrant sharpness and saturation of the printed photograph and the blurry washed-out quality of the fluid-soaked spots creates an uneasy visual discord.

Despite the many differences between their images and their aims, one thing each artist has in common is their use of appropriation to further complicate an original image (or lack thereof) in order to reveal something original through reproduction.

Love & Theft opens Saturday, January 23rd from 7- 10 pm at White Flag Projects. For more information about this exhibition and other White Flag events, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

Vito Acconci at White Flag Projects

A 1983 interview with boundary-pushing artist/poet/designer Vito Acconci will be screened this Wednesday, January 20th, from 5-7 p.m., as the latest installment of White Flag’s DRINKS series. In addition to the video screening, which will commence at 6 p.m., the evening promises complimentary cocktails and good conversation (well, maybe).

Vito Acconci, a Bronx-born and Brooklyn-based artist, began his artistic endeavors with the written word. Though his work has since transitioned into photography, video, and performance-based installations, he never really left his passion for writing behind. Works such as Trademark (1970), where Acconci turns himself into a kind of human printing press by smearing self-induced bite marks with ink and subsequently pressing his ink-laden body parts onto paper, evidence, in one form or another, Acconci’s reverence for language.

Associated with both the conceptual art and body art movements of the late 1960’s, it’s no surprise that Acconci is known for his confrontational and often visceral performance pieces. He is perhaps most notorious for Seedbed (1972), in which he lay beneath the floor of Manhattan’s Sonnabed Gallery, masturbating and muttering his sexual fantasies about gallery go-ers through a microphone connected to a loudspeaker. The piece not only blurred the lines between public and private, removing control from Acconci and forcing it onto his unknowing subject, but also created a relationship between the artist and the public that was both intimate and disturbing. More recently Acconci has been exploring his interest in arguably more tame undertakings, such as architecture, and even founded his own architectural firm, Acconci Studio, in 1988.

Acconci received a B.A. in literature from Holy Cross College and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. He has also taught at a number of impressive academic and arts institutions including Cooper Union, Yale University, Parsons School of Design, and Brooklyn College.

DRINKS with Vito Acconci will be held Wednesday, January 20th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening is at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, such as our current exhibition Love & Theft, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

- Lynna Borden, Intern

1001 Disasters That Could End It All At Any Given Second

In conjunction with the contemporary artists featured in White Flag Project’s current show, PRETHUNDERDOME, a Delicious account was created to catalog all of the websites we could find that address end-of-world subjects (delicious.com/whiteflagprojects). The result is a database ranging from science-based theories to apocalyptic predictions to straight-up crazy websites that verge on inadvertent satire. For example, one page actually cites Elizabeth Taylor’s eight divorces as proof that the end is near (http://www.raptureready.com/time/marriage.html). Others, such as a website titled “10 Disasters That Could End It All At Any Given Second” (http://botw.org/articles/endworld.html), are a bit more seriously alarming. 

As we rapidly approach December 22, 2012 –  the date that marks the last day of the ancient Mayan’s cyclical calendar — you can assume that this genre of website will increase exponentially in number and popularity. On White Flag’s account, there are 54 tagged websites spanning the vast gamut of 2012 prophesies. These predictions include a shift in the earth’s magnetic poles, alien invasions and a positive spiritual awakening of the masses. Cynics who dismiss the prophesy as another empty threat a la y2k can at least look forward to some killer parties come December 21 of 2012. Even Stephen Hawking has succombed to end-of-world fever, and threw a party himself the day the Large Hadron Collider was switched on (http://scienceray.com/physics/is-it-the-end-of-the-world/). 

So long as our Delicious account isn’t terminated due to suspicious activity, you’re welcome to browse the bookmarked sites at delicious.com/whiteflagprojects. Select highlights include: the choose your own apocalypse game (http://sdn.slate.com/features/endofamerica/default.htm), a photo series of personal bomb shelters (http://www.good.is/post/picture-show-waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world/), and an article about a seed vault in Norway created in advance of global crisis (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1882288,00.html). 

PRETHUNDERDOME will be on view until December 19th. You can find more information on White Flag Projects exhibitions and events at whiteflagprojects.org.

-Marie Heilich, intern