CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 23, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
The Cost of Being Decent to Adjuncts
Even if the adjunct movement for better working conditions succeeds, most adjuncts will lose. That’s one bold claim of a recent paper on the costs associated with a number of the movement’s goals, such as better pay and benefits. While activists and scholars have criticized what they call the paper’s inherently flawed logic, the study’s authors say it is a first step toward a more critical dialogue. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Abstraction Isn’t Neutral: Sondra Perry on the NCAA, Subjecthood, and Her Upcoming Projects
Earlier this month Ella Coon spoke with the video artist Sondra Perry to talk about recent projects, her upcoming exhibitions, and her thoughts on a variety of other subjects, including the role of generosity in her life and work. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Halting Academic Incivility (That’s the Nice Word for It)
A report published last year in the Journal of Applied Psychology confirms what many might say is obvious: “Incivility … defined as insensitive behavior that displays a lack of regard for others, is rampant and on the rise.” This will not be news for academics. Consider the regular calls for an end to faculty incivility—the rudeness, abusive language, bullying, and general meanness that seem to characterize many of our interactions. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
European Museums Adapt to the American Way of Giving
Museums in the United States, helped by favorable tax laws, are sustained by a culture of giving by private donors and a universe of trained development officials. That culture isn’t common in other parts of the world, where governments often support museums. That is changing. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Managing an MOOC
Several years ago I wrote a MOOC, “The Modern Genius: Art and Culture in the 19th Century,” which initially ran through the Canvas network, and then Kadenze. I had never assigned the MOOC course to any of my students, but that changed this January, when my honors modern art students enrolled in the MOOC, and we experimented with a completely flipped classroom. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Whither the Digital Humanities?
The digital humanities can be viewed in two ways: as emerging and as emergent. The tension between them is a central force animating the field today. There are two areas—writing and the university—in which this tension is especially apparent, as digital technologies are upending, questioning, or reframing traditional or cherished assumptions. (Read more from Digital Pedagogy Lab.)
Pirating Papers
Peer-to-peer research sharing looks a lot like sharing of other forms of media, a new study suggests. While some researchers are personally opposed to copyright, others pirate research simply for the sake of convenience. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Asia Week Raids: New Details on the Christie’s Seizures
Last week, a series of five federal raids during New York’s Asia Week led to the seizure of at least eight looted antiquities and the arrest of at least one dealer. This is the first of several posts that will discuss the alleged smuggling networks disrupted by those raids. (Read more from Chasing Aphrodite.)
caa.reviews Seeks Field Editors
posted by CAA — March 18, 2016
caa.reviews invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join its Council of Field Editors, which commissions reviews within an area of expertise or geographic region, for a term ending June 30, 2019. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to reviewing books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts.
The journal seeks field editors for books in the following subject areas: early modern Iberian and Latin American art; design history; American art; architecture and urbanism, pre-1800; eighteenth-century art; and Japanese art. The journal also seeks field editors for exhibitions in the following areas: modern and contemporary art; New York and international; and west coast pre-1900. Candidates may be artists, art or design historians, critics, curators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required.
Working with the caa.reviews editor-in-chief, the editorial board, and CAA’s staff editor, each field editor selects content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and reviews manuscripts for publication. Field editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in their fields of expertise, and field editors for exhibitions should be aware of current and upcoming exhibitions (and other related projects) in their geographic regions. The Council of Field Editors meets annually at the CAA Annual Conference. Field editors must pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not currently serve on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: caa.reviews Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Deidre Thompson, CAA publications assistant. Deadline: April 15, 2016.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 16, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Announcing NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication
The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the two largest funders of humanities research in the United States, have announced a new joint fellowship opportunity to support high-quality, born-digital research in the humanities. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
Go Pro: The Hyper-Professionalization of the Emerging Artist
I can understand the widespread notion among curators and critics that the role of the emerging artist has changed dramatically during the past few years. The shift toward professionalization is further encouraged by the growing involvement of wealthy individuals in the art market who first made their capital by investing in financial markets, real estate, or related industries. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Ten Upcoming Shows by Groundbreaking Female Artists
March is Women’s History Month, so there’s no better time to outline a few upcoming shows by female artists admired by Artnet News. From Hong Kong to Los Angeles, 2016 is brimming with exhibitions by awesome artists, who range in age from twentysomethings to one very impressive centenarian. (Read more from Artnet News.)
Winning Strategies for Journal Publishers
“The Inexorable Path of the Professional Society Publisher” takes the view of the underdog—the small or midsized professional society publisher—that struggles to remain competitive in an environment in which administrative costs explode, budgets of customers are flat or declining, and libraries invite consolidation among vendors in order to reduce administrative costs. While few journals truly lose out entirely, some publishers win bigger than others. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Should All Research Papers Be Free?
Drawing comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Job-Market Challenges for Tenure-Track Academics
Often in life our personal experience is limited, and thus we fail to understand the total, complex reality. That is certainly true of the academic job market. Many of us participate in that market only a handful of times as a candidate, and even if we serve on search committees regularly, that experience tends to be limited to certain fields and to our own institutions. (Read more from Vitae.)
Why They Stay and Why They Go
Whether the separation is voluntary or not, losing a tenure-line or otherwise full-time faculty member is always a costly to an institution. The departing professor will take any external research grants with him or her, not to mention the sunk costs of hiring and training. Then there are additional costs that are harder to quantify, such as those to morale, mentorship, service, and leadership. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
What’s the Value of a Liberal-Arts Education in Our Twenty-First Century Digital Economy?
Achieving goals associated with liberal-arts education would require business schools to move into territory more traditionally related to the liberal arts: multidisciplinary approaches, an understanding of global and historical context, a greater focus on leadership and social responsibility, and learning to think critically. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Aaron M. Wile, Winner of the James L. Clifford Prize
posted by CAA — March 15, 2016
Aaron M. Wile is the winner of the 2015-16 prize. The Prize is awarded annually by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies to the author of the best article regarding any aspect of eighteenth-century culture. Receiving the award is Wile’s “Watteau, Reverie, and Selfhood” published by College Art Association in The Art Bulletin.
The Clifford Fund was originally established to support an annual prize in honor of James L. Clifford. Clifford founded The Johnsonian News Letter in 1940, was Secretary to the English Institute, twice a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and third President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. During his long and energetic life, he produced numerous books, articles, bibliographies, essays, edited collections, editions and, of course, the much beloved, imitated, and quoted Johnsonian News Letter. Accordingly, the Clifford Prize is awarded to the author of the best article on an eighteenth-century subject, interesting to any eighteenth-century specialist, regardless of discipline.
The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is a non-profit, educational group founded to promote the study of all aspects of the eighteenth century. It sponsors conferences, awards, fellowships and prizes, and publishes Eighteenth-Century Studies and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Requests for information about the Clifford Prize and nominations may be addressed to:
ASECS
PO Box 7867, Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem, NC 27109 USA
Telephone (336) 727-4694
Fax (336) 727-4697
E-mail asecs@wfu.edu
CAA’s Fair-Use Specialists Answer Your Questions
posted by Patricia Aufderheide — March 14, 2016
Patricia Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication and director of its Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University; and Peter Jaszi is a professor at the Washington College of Law, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University.
Since CAA’s Code of Best Practices was released in February 2015, we have met with many groups and individuals in the visual arts, and we have witnessed major policy changes taking place across the visual arts field as a result of the Code.
Recently, two major organizations announced an easing of copyright restrictions that will make publishing about art infinitely easier. In late February, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation announced new guidelines for fair use that will “make images of Rauschenberg’s artwork more accessible to museums, scholars, artists, and the public.” In its press release, the foundation cites the prohibitive costs associated with rights and licensing, as well as the obstacles copyright restrictions create in converting print publications to online formats. http://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/newsfeed/foundation-announces-pioneering-fair-use-image-policy.
Also in the past few weeks, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) announced that it is revoking its guidelines on thumbnail images in online publications, which restricted the fair use of works of art to small-scale reproductions with low resolutions. Furthermore, it encouraged its members to rely on CAA’s Code of Best Practices until such time that they prepare new policies of their own. Additional important changes have taken place at Yale University Press, where they now support reliance on fair use in scholarly catalogues, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which relied on CAA’s Code when designing the online catalogue of its collection. Other museums are following suit, as are visual artists.
As we look back on one year living with and promoting the Code, we wanted to pull together some of the most common questions we received, with answers! (You will also find these questions added to the FAQs on CAA’s website.) We have been consistently amazed, but not surprised, by the interest, curiosity, and the sheer will the visual arts field has employed in applying fair use.
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Is fair use only applicable to non-commercial uses?
Fair use is applicable whether the use is commercial or non-commercial. That fact is very well established in law. Recently, the appeals court decision supporting Google Books’ use of copyrighted books as fair use explicitly says, “Google’s profit motivation does not in these circumstances [that is, Google’s transformative use of the information] justify denial of fair use.” The same would be true when an otherwise qualifying fair use occurred in the setting of a print publication offered for sale.
This is not a new or novel proposition. In fact, for the last 175 years, almost all of the creators who successfully asserted fair use have been engaged in commerce, in a big or small way. That’s because, under the prevailing definition copyright law, most things that we do in our professional lives (write, make art, publish books) are “commercial.” If money will or may change hands, that’s enough – even if the transaction is done without the expectation of profit. So treating commerciality as a knock-out factor would be the death knell of a meaningful fair use doctrine.
It is true that the non-commercial character of a use may be one feature that can add to a fair use claim. But it is not a particularly important one. Likewise, the size of the print run generally is not a relevant consideration in assessing the validity of fair use. The key to fair use is making sure your use is “transformative,” that is, using the material for a different purpose than the market purpose.
There’s more about this at pages 15-16 of the Code.
Is the Code only applicable to the so-called fine arts? What about artists working in design or photography?
The Code is carefully crafted to provide a reasoning framework in five common situations in the visual arts: analytic writing, teaching, making art, museum work, and archive/collections digital display. Any artist, teacher, writer, or curator can apply the Code’s fair use reasoning if they are engaged in one (or several) of these activities. So can students in the field, and so can independent visual arts professionals, and even amateurs. Many of the activities that graphic designers and photographers engage in give rise to the same copyright questions that confront other visual arts professionals. Sometimes, however, their work may involve other issues—trademark questions, for example, contractual disputes, that fall outside the scope of the Code. The important point is that fair use is for everyone, not just for a privileged few.
What if rights holders or brokers such as ARS and VAGA don’t accept my fair use claim?
In the first instance, of course, what is (or isn’t) fair use is for the user to decide. Rights holders and their agents don’t have the last word (or any word) on this determination. And, at least so far, they haven’t chosen to make a case of any situation in which a user proceeded without license. If your uses are made within the terms of the Code, and you are able to explain how that is true, you have such a solid argument for fair use that rights holders will be in deep peril of wasting their money and time by bringing any legal action. That doesn’t mean that “nastygrams”—letters demanding payment or expressing outrage and issuing threats of legal action—couldn’t be sent. People are free to write whatever they want in letters, even if it is not true.
You may decide, of course, not to employ fair use if you think rights holders may see it as an unfriendly act, and decide not to like you any more. Personal relationships matter in any field.
But if a rights holder threatens action in an unrelated area—for instance, threatening to withhold access to an artist for a later project, or to raise fees for an unrelated work to cover the lost license—you might want to document it. This might be an illegal act on their part.
How big can images get under fair use on a website? We used to have the pixel sizes that AAMD prescribed, but they have retired those, and currently refer us to the Code. But the Code has no specifics on that.
The Code offers no specific recommendations on image size for any purpose, and that is a deliberate choice. The heart of fair use is repurposing material and using what is appropriate for that new purpose. Therefore, individual visual arts professionals need to ask themselves what size is appropriate for any image used to accomplish their objectives. The question always is the same: what amount is (or what reproduction quality) is reasonable. And the answer to this question will always vary according to circumstance. The requirements of a scholarly monograph, for example, may be different from those of a local art blog. No one wants a document that provides a reasoning framework across fields to offer numerical prescriptions. That would not only be hazardous legally (uses have to be appropriate to the specific transformative purpose), but would run the risk of being sadly and quickly outdated, given the fast pace of digital change.
The decision of the AAMD to withdraw its 2011 recommendations on the size of “thumbnails” is an illustration of this fact. Only a few years ago, this was a pioneering document, but as visual arts professionals have become more familiar with fair use, and both practices and expectations around the use of images to support discourse (especially on-line) changed, what had once offered freedom came quickly to feel like a straitjacket.
Of course, institutions may still choose to adopt rules of thumb on image size for internal use, to simplify day-to-day decision-making. But these always should yield to case-by-case consideration when they stand in the way of completing worthwhile projects.
I don’t understand how to employ fair use when I have to get an image from a museum or archive. Often, they will want to charge me a fee just to obtain that reproduction.
Yes, if you need someone’s permission to get access to material you need, you can’t rely on fair use to get it. As a practical matter, fair use only can be employed by someone who already has independent access to the same or similar documentation. The flip side of this proposition, of course, is that if you can find appropriate documentation from another source, you don’t have to pay reproduction or access fees to the collection that holds the original. Reproduction and access fees are common; many collections still use them to cover the costs of serving you. Sometimes people confuse these with copyright licenses, but it should be clear in the contract what exactly you’re paying for. Increasingly, public museums are posting images, particularly of works in the public domain, to digital platforms. Their goal is to increase public access and limit the amount of work their own staffs have to do.
Annual Conference Committee Seeks Members
posted by CAA — March 11, 2016
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for at-large members of the Annual Conference Committee to serve a three-year term, beginning on May 1, 2016. We welcome all members to participation in the nomination process. Working with the Programs Department staff, this committee selects the sessions and shapes the program of the Annual Conference. The committee ensures that the program will reflect the goals of the association and of the Annual Conference, namely, to make the conference an effective place for intellectual, aesthetic, and professional learning and exchange, and to provide opportunities for participation that are fair, equal, and balanced.
The Annual Conference Committee meets at least two times a year at the call of the vice president for Annual Conference and the committee’s chair. Members must be available throughout May and June to review and select 2017 conference content from the submitted proposals. Please send a 150-word letter of interest and a CV to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: April 15, 2016.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for March 2016
posted by CAA — March 10, 2016
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
March 2016
Lise Haller Baggesen: Mothernism
Contemporary Art Museum for Austin
Laguna Gloria, 3809 West 35th Street, Austin, TX
February 13–Mary 22, 2016
The Gatehouse Gallery at the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria presents Mothernism by Lise Haller Baggesen, a large-scale installation with a “nod to the bright pop of midcentury Danish interior designer Verner Panton as well as snoezelenrooms, a Dutch therapy technique from the 1970s.” The bright, cozy interior, with disco balls and plush purple carpet, regularly calls back visions from disco culture.
Baggesen describes the work as “a nomadic tent camp audio installation … dedicated to staking out and making speakable the ‘mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse.’” Published as a book in 2014, the installation previously came to life an audio-visual presentation in which Baggesen read essays as her alter ego, Queen Leeba, “an amalgam of Donna Summer and a proto-feminist, Scandinavian love goddess.” In this iteration, Mothernism is more like entering a painting, “inviting the viewer into her painting-as-installation, a figure/ground relationship so upended as to become participatory, or relational.”
The exhibition in Austin also contains newly commissioned work, The Mothernist’s Audio Guide to Laguna Gloria, celebrating the history of the Driscoll Villa at Laguna Gloria and the original designer and owner, Clara Driscoll, all through Baggesen’s artistic style, incorporating her knowledge of art history, pop culture, politics, and music.
Tip of Her Tongue: Xandra Ibarra: Nude Laughing, Cassils: The Powers That Be, Shirin Neshat: Possessed
The Broad
221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA
April 2, 2016
8:30 PM
Downtown Los Angeles’s new art venue, the Broad, features Tip of Her Tongue, a three-part exhibition by the feminist artists Shirin Neshat, Xandra Ibarra, and Cassils, focusing on language and embodiment. Curated by Jennifer Doyle, professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and a member of Human Resources Los Angeles, a collectively run art space dedicated to supporting performance and interdisciplinary modes of expression, the program contains a thirteen-minute video, Possessed (2001) by Neshat, and two live performances, Nude Laughing by Ibarra and The Powers That Be by Cassils.
Neshat’s video presents a woman roaming the streets of an Iranian city without her cador. The woman, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, is ignored until she takes a public platform, where her “private suffering becomes public and political.” In Nude Laughing by Ibarra, the Oakland-based artist’s “engages the skin and skein of race.” Drawing inspiration from John Currin’s painting Laughing Nude, Ibarra herself is nude and encased in a nylon skin cocoon along with “white lady accoutrements … negotiating the simultaneous joys and pains of subjections, abjection, and personhood.” Rounding out the performances, the national premiere of The Powers That Be by Cassils is a collaborative effort with the fight choreographer Mark Steger. In the two-person fight, Cassils is left to spar alone with an invisible force. The performance will be lit by car headlights and performed in the Broad’s parking garage to a score by Kadet Kuhne, played across car stereos.
Tickets to the performances can be purchased on the Broad’s website.
Lecture: Julia Bryan-Wilson on Ruth Asawa and Louise Bourgeois
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA
April 1, 2016
12:15 PM
Julia Bryan-Wilson, associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the forthcoming book Art in the Making: From the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson), will present a lunchtime talk on Ruth Asawa and Louis Bourgeois, two artists currently on exhibition in Architecture of Life at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Bryan-Wilson’s research interests include feminist and queer art, textile handicraft, and questions of materiality—all germane to different aspects of Asawa’s and Bourgeois’s work.
Architecture of Life, on view through May 29, is the inaugural exhibition in the museum’s new building. “It explores the ways that architecture—as concept, metaphor, and practice—illuminates various aspects of life experience: the nature of the self and psyche, the fundamental structures of reality, and the power of the imagination to reshape our world.” The exhibition has over two hundred works of art in various media, including scientific illustrations and architectural drawings.
Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez: Travelers and Settlers
Museum of Nebraska Art
2401 Central Avenue, Kearney, NE
January 9–April 3, 2016
The Museum of Nebraska Art presents Travelers and Settlers, a solo exhibition by the Colombian-born artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez. Curated by Teliza Rodriguez, this engaging and introspective installation is the artist’s exploration of the experience of identity, memory, and gender.
Friedemann-Sánchez’s installation comprises paintings, sculptures, and objects—a mixed-media environment inhabited by family heirlooms alongside carved wooden boats and black mirrorlike panels that hold pearled sconces. Here the artist creates a visual novel narrated in different voices interweaved through a synchronicity of dialogues, passages, punctuations, and silences about hybrid culture and ownership, narratives that portray spiritual and physical transit.
In her project statement the artistwrites, “Anchored in feminism, my art is infused by American and Colombian cultural forms that are dominant or subordinate.” Born in Colombia and having immigrated to the United States as a grown-up, she developed her bilingual art naturally. Travelers and Settlers unfolds in this way: her multinarrative on cultural memory, migration, and the pursuit of the American dream, a bicultural and transcultural experience speaks of difference and opposites.
As Robert Mahoney states in his extensive essay about Friedemann-Sánchez’s project: “As a whole, Travelers & Settlers read as an elegiac litany to sacred space reclaimed from the pushes and pulls of modern history, with the artist acting as guider of souls, urging us to gain a deeper appreciation of the unspoken realities of cultural translation, and, beyond all that, arrive safely again at our common humanity.”
Dafna Maimon: Modern Lives
Lilith Performance Studio
Bragegatan 15, Malmö, Sweden
March 10–12 and 17–19, 2016
Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö presents Modern Lives, a new performance by the Finnish/Israeli artist Dafna Maimon (b. 1982), who lives and works in Berlin. Her work, which includes performance, short film, video, texts, and sculpture, explores and engages with human narratives that challenge stereotypical constructions. Questioning the unclear limits of identity, the self, and the body, her performances expose the economy of affect-based ties, community, and collaboration on a grassroots level.
Modern Lives draws its starting point from the life of Ulrica Maimon, the artist’s mother, who created an alter ego for herself in the early 2000s: Mrs. Gyllendaal Af Berntas. Mrs. Gyllendaal, a 1860s goldsmith’s widow moved into Maimon’s apartment, which has been furnished in the corresponding period style. Throughout the years, Gyllendaal’s biography developed, along with her wardrobe and everyday tasks, inviting family and friends to participate in the roleplay.
For Modern Lives at Lilith Performance Studio, Maimon has built up a full-sized domestic arena for the widow. This performative space becomes a construction site where the “self” can be seen as a multilayered entity, an emotional landscape in motion, a surreal and melancholic world in which its inhabitants echo themselves as prisoners of their own condition. Throughout this piece, the artist fuses her mother’s playful inner fantasies with her own absurdist expression, choreographing and representing several different bodies as one.
Modern Lives is presented as an ongoing a repetitive structure during which audience members are encouraged to visit and stay for as long as they wish.
Maud Sulter: Syrcas
Autograph ABP
Rivington Place, London, EC2A 3BA
January 15–April 2, 2016
Autograph ABP proudly presents Syrcas,an installation of sixteen original photomontages, curated by Mark Sealy, of a seminal body of work created by Maud Sulter (1960–2008). Born in Glasgow of Scots and Ghanaian descent, Sulter was an active feminist in London communities in the early 1980s. She had worked with a women’s education group to program Check It, a groundbreaking two-week show at the Drill Hall that showcased black women’s creativity. Along her influential practice, Sulter continuously explored the presence of Africa in Europe in a variety of media: text, photography, sound, and performance. Her work as artist, writer, and curator questions the lack of representation of black women in the histories of art and photography and critically investigates the complex experiences of the African diaspora in European history and culture over the past six hundred years.
Created during the early 1990s, Syrcas is Sulter’s most intricate and layered body of work. Through the technique of photomontage, this series aims to revive the forgotten history of the genocide of black Europeans during the Holocaust. The installation includes a reproduction of Sulter’s poem “Blood Money.” Written in 1994, the poem was inspired by the German photographer August Sanders’s series of images of Circus Workers (1926–32) and represents a tormenting tale of a young African woman and her family caught up in war, dealing with the constant threat of discrimination, violence, and persecution.
CAA at 2016 The Armory Show
posted by CAA — March 10, 2016
Last week marked The Armory Show’s annual takeover of New York City, bringing galleries and artists from all over the globe to Piers 92 and 94 on the banks of the Hudson River from March 3 to 6. Packed with exhibitors, artworks, and art enthusiasts, The Amory Show offered extensive visual offerings, alongside special projects and programming. CAA staff visited The Armory, taking in many of the noteworthy displays and activities on site.
An interactive installation hosted by Artsy stood at the entrance to The Armory. The booth was covered by the artist Douglas Coupland’s Slogans for the 21st Century, which also adorned tote bags distributed to visitors. Statements such as “I miss my pre-internet brain,” “You and your selfie are merging,” and “I can feel the money leaving my body” offered wry commentary on the intersection of art, commerce, and technology at a site where these issues merged in a particularly potent way.
Also at the Artsy booth was Deep Face: Comunicate with your future self, a photo booth that created “de-recognition” portraits of visitors. The photo—emailed to participants in a four-frame GIF format—features a black-and-white portrait overlaid with multicolored shapes. Coupland’s deliberate marking of faces aims to disrupt increasingly common facial recognition technologies, which add another layer of complexity to our relationship to the digital age.
Technology and art also merged in many of the artworks on display. The artist Shih Chieh Huang transformed the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts booth into a psychedelic under-the-seascape. In the darkened booth, an electronic jellyfish-like creature moved its tentacles and flashed its light in rhythmic patterns. Made from plastic bags, plastic bottles, highlighters, and other everyday objects, Disphotic Zone merges the artist’s studies of bioluminescent creatures with childhood memories and an interest in the mutability of perception.
More traditional artistic methods of painting and sculpture were also on view at The Armory. Especially dazzling was Barkley L. Hendricks’ Photo Bloke (2016) on display at the Jack Shainman Gallery booth, a large-scale oil and acrylic painting of a man in an electric pink suit and white sneakers standing before a similarly pink background. Adam Henry’s minimal, rainbow-hued canvases at the Brussels–based Meessen de Clercq’s booth were a delight to witness.
Other highlights included Sislej Xhafa’s sculpture Wyatt and Sky (2016), a life-sized mannequin in a cowboy hat lying face-down on the floor of Blain Southern’s booth with balloons tied tightly around his arms, legs, and torso, and the well-curated installation of works by Lygia Clark, Irma Blank, and Nobuo Sekie at Alison Jacques Gallery. Kapwani Kiwanga’s sculptures made out of steel and sisal fibers were intriguingly tactile.
This year’s fair also featured a focus on design, tasking designers to create site-specific works that were on displays in Piers 92 and 94. Sung Jang’s MOBI (2015), installed in the entrances to the stairwells connecting the two piers, completely transformed the usually mundane experience of moving between the two areas. In 20 Steps (2015–6) by Studio Drift, a moving installation made from glass tubes, wire, and steel hung suspended over a large lounge area like a breathing exoskeleton.
Beyond the art viewing and booth hopping, The Armory also plans forums, panels, and conversations for its annual visitors. This year’s events included a section dedicated to Focus: African Perspectives—Spotlighting Artistic Practices of Global Contemporaries. Curated by Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, Focus: African Perspectives included galleries from Africa, the work of African and African Diaspora artists, and a two-day symposium that brought together artists, gallerists, curators, and scholars for conversations. Panelists included El Anatsui, Kapwani Kiwanga, Kimberli Gant, Patrick Mudekereza, and others.
Alongside Focus: African Perspectives was Open Forum, a series of talks on modern and contemporary art, featuring curators, gallerists, artists, writers, and more. The range of topics covered by these panels included Andy Warhol, the role of design in contemporary art, and the future of art.
Especially lively was a conversation between Jerry Saltz, the senior art critic at New York Magazine and a prolific social media user, and Benjamin Genocchio, the executive director of The Armory Show. In “Like, Swipe and Double Tap: Visual Criticism in the Digital Age,” Saltz and Genocchio discussed the power of social media and the ways in which it has changed the evolving field of art criticism as well as the art world at large. Saltz took care to underscore the importance of owning your own critical language, especially in an era when the traditional system of criticism has been disrupted.
Photo Captions
Sislej Xhafa, Wyatt and Sky, 2016, mannequin, helium balloons (artwork © Sislej Xhafa)
Barkley L. Hendricks, detail of Photo Bloke, 2016, oil and acrylic on linen, 72 x 48 in. (artwork © Barkley L. Hendricks)
Sung Jang, installation view of MOBI, 2015, Pier 92 and 94 stairwell entrances (artwork © Sung Jang)
Installation view of Alison Jacques Gallery’s Booth at The Armory, 2016
Serve on a CAA Award Jury
posted by Katie Apsey — March 10, 2016
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to serve on eight of the twelve juries for the annual Awards for Distinction for three years (2016–19). Terms begin in May 2016; award years are 2017–19. CAA’s twelve awards honor artists, art historians, authors, curators, critics, and teachers whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the jury’s work and be current CAA members. They should not hold a position on a CAA committee or editorial board beyond May 31, 2016. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service.
The following jury vacancies will be filled this spring:
- Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award: three members
- Art Journal Award: two members
- Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize: two members
- CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation: two members
- Charles Rufus Morey Book Award: three members
- Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art: two members
- Distinguished Teaching of Art Award: one member
- Frank Jewett Mather Award: one member
Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) outlining the individual’s qualifications and experience and an abbreviated CV (no more than two pages). Please send all materials by email to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs; submissions must be sent as Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF attachments. For questions about jury service and responsibilities, contact Tiffany Dugan, CAA director of programs. New deadline: May 20, 2016.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 09, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Art Galleries Face Pressure to Fund Museum Shows
Galleries have always provided scholarly support for museums exhibiting their artists’ work. Now they’re expected to provide money, too. In today’s exploding art market and amid diminishing corporate donations and mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more heavily on commercial galleries to help pay for shows featuring work by artists the galleries represent. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Help Desk: Critic or Collector?
I want to write a review of a dazzling painting show. While I can’t afford the artist’s paintings, I want to buy a work on paper. Is there an ethical problem of covering this exhibition and buying a piece that is not in it—as long as I don’t write about the artist in the future? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Co-opting “Official” Channels through Infrastructures for Openness
News recently broke about a new service called DOAI that is designed to support open access. It is not a publishing model or a repository but rather a type of infrastructure. When a user inputs a DOI, DOAI connects the user to a freely available copy of the publication. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Why the Rauschenberg Foundation’s Easing of Copyright Restrictions Is Good for Art and Journalism
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has announced it would ease copyright restrictions on art belonging to the artist. The move will make images of Rauschenberg’s work much easier to access and disseminate. It will do this in a number of ways. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Taking the Family with You on a Fellowship
Seared in my mind is the memory of a day in 2006 when I received my award letter for a much-coveted fellowship in the social sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. My daughter had just turned four, and I was a recently divorced single mother with a former partner living five thousand miles away. I cried tears of joy at being accepted, followed by tears of sadness for having to turn it down. (Read more from Vitae.)
Archaeology’s Information Revolution
Archaeology, as a way of examining the material world, has always required a certain deftness in scale. You must be able to zoom in very close—at the level of, say, a single dirt-encrusted button—then zoom out again to appreciate why that one ancient button is meaningful. Carrying out that task is now possible in ways that were, until very recently, barely imaginable. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Read and Unread
Social-media use and text messaging aren’t leading college students to ignore email, according to a new study. But that doesn’t mean students read every email they get. Those findings come from Bowling Green State University, where researchers surveyed 315 students in a variety of majors about their use of email, social media, and text messaging. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
And That’s Me with the Mona Lisa!
An art museum is built for contemplation, exploration, and exhilaration. It’s a place to lose yourself as you’re transported into a wondrous world of color and light, a journey that can leave you dazzled, disturbed, and deeply moved. Or, you can just take a selfie while standing in front of a masterpiece. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)