“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.

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

Barbara Kruger would like to have drinks with you.

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.

-Marie Heilich, Intern

You Missed Having Drinks with John Baldessari

There’s something refreshing about artist interviews. For their brief  duration, the artist is not described through a museum wall text or an exhibition catalogue essay, but by themselves, in their own words.
 Without the filter of third party interpretation, what remains is
 simply raw human insight into an artist’s intentions, processes and
insecurities. With this frank and casual approach to visual inquiry in
mind, White Flag created its Drinks series, wherein archival video 
interviews with highly accomplished artists are screened once a month at happy hour 
(with free happy hour drinks).

This season’s series was inaugurated by a 1979 interview with  California-based artist John Baldessari. Best known as a
 major contributor to the conceptual art movement of the 1960’s and
 70’s, Baldessari stripped away the physicality of art objects and
 reduced art to theory and concept. As his works were founded on ideas
 rather than materials, text was often used either with or without an
 image to critique the definition of art to the point of absurdity. The
 shift in perception initiated by Baldessari and his contemporaries
 resonates strongly within the current art discourse.

The next interview in the Drinks Series will be on November 18th with
  Barbara Kruger. Drinks served 5 to 7pm, video screens at 6.

-Marie Heilich, Intern