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

Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): Yes, I found this idea of disconnection and the lack of traditional support and structure very thought-provoking. Would you be able to talk a bit more about why you think that’s relevant today?

Michelle Grabner: From a studio perspective, and as a painter, the idea of the support, the idea of edges, of contours, or boundaries, or limitations has been something that has been pushed at and is perennially challenged. In theory, we discuss rhizomes and topple vertical and stabilized position, so we’ve been playing with structure and the ideas about structures for years. One of the histories of modernism is based on a relationship of how we unravel, dissolve, and reinforce these kinds of structures.

But as of late, our relationships to networks, how we move through time and space, and how we negotiate our own narratives in the age of social-networking, has us re-evaluating old dependable structures and unable to recognize the ones that shape our current condition. I like to think that the dissolving of a boundary, or a surface, or a support is a critical gesture but that might be too idealistic.

Realistically, I think the renewed interest in mobiles is not a critical breaking down in a kind of post-modern execution or an undoing of frames; instead, it ends up being something that is much more external and reflects a network condition.

LB: I think it’s interesting that you talk about social networking because that’s not something I’d originally considered as an aspect of this show, but it makes a lot of sense. Now, you can have five minutes of real-time interaction and then continue your “friendship” through these various interfaces like facebook, text messaging, and twitter. It’s sort of disconcerting.

MG: Yeah, see, that’s really great because then you’re talking about these structures of time or just being in the physical space of somebody else before you can develop a friendship, those things have been pulled away. Space, time – those kind of organizational foundations are not necessary anymore, but then you have to talk about the quality of friendship.

LB: Right. It’s definitely not the same.

LB: The show also relates a lot to science, of course the title, Newtonland, the idea of gravity, and Painlevé’s compilation of films entitled Science is Fiction. What do you see as the relation between all of these elements?

MG: This is where I’m quite simple in terms of the idea of Newton and gravity. So we’re talking about some contours and structures that have been pulled away, but we still have this overarching natural, albeit weak, force called gravity. Within the deep seas, gravity and pressure is distorted, but here, in this space, gravity is literally being featured. The law of gravity takes the spotlight. Structures may be dissolving around us but things aren’t floating away quite yet, though they’re coming close.

Science is Fiction is a kind of wonderful thing too because there are other forces at play so there’s a kind of corrective element to Painlevé’s title of how he thinks. Again, it’s a construction of science, an investigation that doesn’t add up to a kind of truth, but the perception of truth.

So I value gravity and do not take it for granted. I need it as a law of nature to literally and figuratively get out of bed in the morning. There’s something welcoming about some universal truths and, as simple as gravity is, at least it gives you something to work with. A lot of the work in this show works through the poetics of gravity, harnessing it to create these beautiful systems of balance and movement within this natural force.

LB: Many of the pieces also recall Calder’s mobiles. Why did you choose to bring those back into focus right now?

MG: Right now, Gagosian gallery in Manhattan is hosting a big Calder show and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago has a collection of Calder’s works and they’re going to be opening in June along with contemporary artists influences by Calder. It’s funny, thinking about and seeing more suspended and dispersed work in contemporary art. A couple years ago, sculptors were thinking about the aggregate—pulling together, packing, compressing. Now we’re seeing this different kind of approach to organizing form. This is an interesting phenomenon—artists are choosing to do away with cohesion.

Calder’s stabile or mobile presentations are iconic, acutely negotiating, color, shape, movement, and balance. Calder hasn’t been rediscovered by contemporary artists—don’t get me wrong, his pieces are extraordinary, but there’s something beyond Calder, something within a greater context that I believe compels artists to the idea of suspension. Calder may be the grandfather, but why Calder was exploring this vocabulary and why artists are looking at this now isn’t comparable. The context is different, and I’m interested in exploring this trend and, hopefully, this show starts to ask those questions.

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 is the second of four installments of that interview.

Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): You’ve worked with a couple of the artists in this show before, Jan Van Der Ploeg and Elizabeth Bryant, what attracts you to their work?

Michelle Grabner: Good question. They have a really solid foundational practice. Jan is a classical abstract formalist—interested in elemental, two-dimensional vocabulary and known primarily for his wall paintings that explore architectural constructs: interior/exterior, public/private. There is a kind of great graphic sensibility with Jan’s work that is super compelling and I am always pulled to it.

Elizabeth Bryant is really interested in the negotiation of nature and culture, and you see that with her work presented here—a manufactured photograph of a landscape. Playing with an innocuous mass-produced vista, she pulls out shapes, looking for other types of topographical elements that get worked into this clichéd landscape. And she’s been doing that for a long time, looking at gardens, looking at different kinds of landscapes and integrating cultural objects into that. At what point do these integrations break? When do they create balance and harmony? I think the piece here does that with a sense of balance, movement, and physical and illusionary space.

Also, both Jan and Elizabeth are solid mid-career artists, which is something I am really committed to. They’ve really been slugging it out for years and all too often that doesn’t get rewarded in the larger contemporary art apparatus. The contemporary art landscape prefers the new and the young so I have a commitment, as a mid-career artist myself, to look at the work of those who have been around the block a few times.

LB: Did Jan create his piece specifically for this show? His other work is very different, especially in the way it’s bound to the wall.

MG: My guess is that his mobile is a prototype. It has this kind of sketchy potential—color and movement overlapping. When we were installing it, Matt was astute to notice that maybe it’s supposed to be this flat viewing plane that is at the heart of this work. Identifying where these colored circles are overlapping each other is at the core of this mobile. Jan has made objects before, but my guess is that this may be the first time he’s integrating movement in the form of a mobile. I look forward to seeing more from him in the future.

LB: When I was first looking at the artists in this show and thinking about their work, the one I had trouble relating was Jean Painlevé. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to include his videos and how they relate to the other works in the exhibition?

MG: Some of it has to do with my own love of his film making, which is vast, funny, and erudite. There’s fantasy and surrealism as well as delight in the formal investigation of movement, shape, balance, and color, which this show features. Even the straightest documentary- nature-oriented videos, the ones that are looking at nature in the most empirical way, still have a soundtrack or a narration that is not “good science.” So, there is this great subjectivity that he brings to the natural world exploiting our wonder. There are hyperbolic-like spaces that get articulated in the underwater creatures he films. But formally, the movement of some of those animals, how they are suspended and move through another realm, is formally exquisite.

LB: Yeah, after spending more time with the works and watching the videos, you can definitely see the similarities in movement and form but, at first, on the surface, I found it difficult to relate.

MG: That’s right and this is why I brought Elizabeth’s mobile into the exhibition, to give context to the nature videos with another piece that negotiates images or constructs of nature.

When we were installing the show, what I really liked was that you can see the show as three distinct spaces— and each space is shaped around an investigation of distinct formal elements and movements. You have the front space with Greg Bogin, and then the piece that I did with my husband Brad Killam that starts to make reference to text and has signifiers, and then there are the works that play with reflection and dynamic movement and so forth, and then you have the two works that pull suspensions of nature into the exhibition.

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 (White Flag Projects): 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.

Mike Venso, the director of Communications at Laumeier Sculpture Park, interviews Kim Humphries, Director of Exhibitions and Collections, and Mark Newport about Newport’s art in the exhibition Self-Made Man.

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.

Matthew Strauss, the founder and director of White Flag Projects, describes the current and upcoming exhibitions for 2010.

Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Director at the Sheldon Art Galleries, gives an overview of the Sheldon’s current exhibits.

Alex Elmestad, a graduate research assistant from University of Missouri–St. Louis, describes new media he’s working on at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Here on Saint Louis Art Map, we’re launching a video series, “Catching up with ______,” in which I visit St. Louis Art Map spaces and ask people there, “What have you been working on?”

Let us begin with words from Nicholas Kania, an intern at Boots Contemporary Art Space.

Nicholas Kania, an intern at Boots Contemporary Art Space, describes recent art shows he’s worked on at Boots.

If you missed the first installment of this season’s DRINKS series at White Flag Projects, don’t worry: the next artist interview will be screened (with free happy hour drinks) on Wednesday, November 18th. This time, the featured artist will be Barbara Kruger, an American conceptualist known for pairing black and white photography with alarming red slogans that target the viewer and question the status quo of consumerism and standards of beauty.

After earning her MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1965, Kruger worked in publishing as a graphic designer, photo editor and art director. Following her job as chief art director at Mademoiselle magazine and a number of other notable Conde Nast glossies, Kruger moved to the Los Angeles area, where she began teaching at CalArts. It wasn’t until 1977 that Kruger began to experiment with photography and collage. At first, she took photos of architecture; then she began appropriating mid-century American ads and adding her own text to the imagery – an approach resulting in the singularly identifiable work that’s garnered her current reknown. Kruger continues to make art today, working in the form of public installation and other alternative media, and splits her time between New York and L.A.

The interview to be screened was filmed in 1980, when Kruger’s coupling of photo and text was making its first public appearances. It will be interesting to see how she articulates her design-influenced aesthetic and theoretical inspirations at this budding stage of her career. Cocktails will be served from 5 to 7 p.m.; the interview screens at 6 p.m.

For more details on the DRINKS series, other WFP events and our current exhibition PRETHUNDERDOME, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.