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

Sr. Helen David Brancato. "Crucifixion - Haiti," 1997. MOCRA collection.

It may come as a bit of a surprise—it did to me—that Good Friday was one of our best received exhibitions ever, given that the exhibition represented a bit of risk-taking on MOCRA’s part. We are committed to an interfaith exploration of how contemporary artists engage the religious and spiritual dimensions in their work. Although our track record of over 35 exhibitions demonstrates how ample our vision has been, it would be easy for people unfamiliar with us to dismiss a show with such an overtly Christian title as being sectarian. Quite to the contrary.

For instance, at least four works in Good Friday specifically treat the theme of “Pietà” (Mary holding her dead son after he is brought down from the cross). They include a large wooden cage, an abstract marble sculpture, and an homage to a famous 15th-century work, by artists from Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish backgrounds respectively, and a frenetic etching by Salvador Dalí. Taken together, these works represent a wide spectrum of understandings and interpretations of an age-old theme.

Furthermore, we experimented with ways of inviting people to approach the work from a standpoint of contemplation, or even prayer. Is it  appropriate to encourage this sort of thing in a museum? This was a topic taken up in the MOCRA conference “Art and the Religious Imagination” in March 2009. Dr. Gerald Bolas, former Director of the Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, discussed the challenges and sensitivities for a state university art museum in displaying art and artifacts associated with a particular religious tradition, but also the opportunities for community engagement. The role of various sorts of museums as stewards and interpreters of sacred materials is also explored in the book Stewards of the Sacred, edited by Lawrence E. Sullivan and Alison Edwards.

The situation at MOCRA is a little different. First, we are a museum at a private Catholic university, and an interfaith outlook is built into our mission statement. Furthermore, Good Friday does not include liturgical objects or objects tied to particular communities. Still, how do we help people feel welcome to seek a faith experience, without putting any undue pressure on those who simply want to look at the art? One response was through a booklet of meditations on the art of Good Friday which is offered to visitors for self-guided reflection. Another was the development of group visits, facilitated by MOCRA staff, which incorporate discussion of the art from a spiritual or faith perspective as well as an art appreciation perspective.

I’ve discussed both of these approaches in posts on the MOCRA blog (here and here). In one of those posts I raised some questions, which I have refined a bit since then:

• Does the idea of approaching art this way leave you feeling ambivalent, or even opposed?
• Could (or should) something like this take place in a “public” art museum? Why or why not?
• Do MOCRA’s particular mission and setting on a private Catholic university campus give us latitude to do things other institutions can’t safely attempt?
• Good Friday has a clearly Christian point of departure, and the groups I described were coming from a standpoint of Christian faith. Is this sort of exhibition and approach to art transferable to art from other faith traditions?

We invite you to visit MOCRA and the Good Friday exhibition, and consider these questions for yourself.

Good Friday: The Suffering Christ in Contemporary Art continues through April 25. On March 28, MOCRA Director Terrence E. Dempsey gives a lecture titled “The Wounded Body of Christ and the Modern Social Conscience.” The lecture is free and open to the public. Find more information by clicking here.

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.

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

Happy tweeting!

BIRDHOUSEINCATTREE      February 19th – March  2010

Guy, Boots new gallery dog has been hanging out during the install of BIRDHOUSEINCATTREE, an exhibition by International Artist in Residence, Wilhelm Neußer. The space is looking good and is slowly being filled with paintings and sculptures.

For the last couple of days Neußer had been focusing on installing 2 sculptures in the front gallery space.  With high hopes Guy wanted to join in the efforts but “that whole not having thumbs thing” turn out to be a problem…. maybe next time Guy.

Hope everyone can join us this Friday on the 19^th for our opening reception. 6:30pm – 10:00pm.

For more information please visit our web site at http://bootscontemporaryartspace.org/blog/home/

About Wilhelm Neußer

Wilhelm Neußer lives and works in Cologne, Germany. He studied with the sculptor Harald Klingelhöller at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts.  His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and in 2007 he was awarded the prestigious ZVAB Phönix art prize for emerging artists.

For more information on the artist visit: www.wilhelmneusser.de

BIRDHOUSEINCATTREE      February 19th – March  2010

Opening reception February 19th 6:30pm- 10:00pm

For his upcoming show at Boots, opening February 19^th, 2010, Neußer embarks on an unusual expedition in the wild world of domesticated animals. With the notion of “bird house in cat tree” the artist presents the animal lover as architect, thereby revealing our desire to construct nature.

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

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