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A soliD interview with Mike Kelley.

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Find out how the negative reviews of the Museum of Modern Art's “Björk” exhibition will impact celebrity-hound curator Klaus Biesenbach’s career.

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I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.

As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that...

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A signature initiative of the New Museum, the Triennial is the only recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to early-career artists from around the world.

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Damien Hirst, ‘For the Love of God (3/4) ,’ 2011, Kenneth A. Friedman & Co.

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We’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Lessons of the Whitney Museum’s “Black Male,” Two Decades Later

Thelma Golden made an intriguing admission to the crowd at the New School last night about something she did—actually, didn’t do, 20 years ago.

She claimed she had never read the reviews of Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, the groundbreaking, stereotype-busting, paradigm-shifting exhibition she organized at the Whitney Museum as a 27-year-old curator —until this year, when she recited Michael Kimmelman’s ambivalent New York Times commentary onstage at the Guggenheim. Her performance was part of a program organized by Carrie Mae Weems, who was one of the 29 male and female, black and white artists in the Whitney’s 1994 show.

Golden’s review-avoidance tactic was possible in the pre-Internet era, she reminded the audience, which the Whitney had invited to watch her, writer Hilton Als and art historian and critic Huey Copeland consider “Black Male” and its legacy on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. Not that she hadn’t gotten feedback. The questions Golden received over the last two decades could fill a book, she noted (number 1: what about black females?). She was harassed and threatened, accused (on the basis of her name) of being a Jewish woman who had no business curating black art, and was herself, like the show, indelibly linked with the word “controversial.” Golden, who in 2005 became the executive director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, just kept working, because so much work remained to be done.

That Golden was able to make such a deep impact on the cultural conversation with her very first show, the panelists noted, is a tribute to the vision of Whitney’s then-director, David Ross; to Elisabeth Sussman, whom Golden had helped organize the equally controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial; to colleagues and collaborators like Als (who wrote for the catalogue) and Glenn Ligon; and to artists including Adrian Piper, Robert Colescott, and David Hammons, three anchors of “Black Male” who had been pushing the boundaries of identity-based art long before multiculturalism became a catchword.

Lorna Simpson, Leon Golub, Lyle Ashton-Harris, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were among other voices included, along with Fred Wilson, whose headless, uniformed museum guards Golden described as a “meta-moment” linking the show to the staff and the wide audience she wanted to attract. And the audience came—given the era and the neighborhood, she could usually tell who was heading to the show when they emerged at the 77th Street subway stop.

What became of that audience is one of the unanswered questions of the panel about the exhibition’s legacy in the current moment. For while, as Golden noted, many issues at the heart of “Black Male” are now central to contemporary-art dialogue, the conversation has also moved on, to hybridity, globalism, and trans-nationalism (while multiculturalism is relegated to education departments). Even as Titus Kaphar, an heir to the “Black Male” artists, makes a Time cover ennobling the Ferguson Protestors, the role of the mainstream art world in the national conversation about race remains minimal.

Equally disappointing is the lack of progress toward a goal that might have seemed more realistic in 1994— the diversification of audiences and museum staffs. Golden is the only African American director of a major U.S. museum. Black curators are few.

Sadly, Fred Wilson’s “all too familiar crew of headless black mannequins,” as Kimmelman dubbed the 1991 piece in 1994, remains all too relevant. Two decades after “Black Male,” museum guards are usually the only people of color in the room. With a few exceptions, this goes for galleries, too.

Golden described the show as feeling like 100 years ago, and also like yesterday. The comment said it all. 

Looking at the trajectory of the players in “Black Male,” there is much to celebrate. Just not the slow pace of institutional change, courage, and imagination. 

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Happy birthday to Barbara Kruger! Explore her work in the Whitney’s collection.

Installation view of Progress (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 11, 2008–January 4, 2009). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins

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There’s a great desire for people to alter themselves, but it’s also the art of transformation. “I want a bigger butt, I want bigger boobs.” The artifice interests me—how we’re capable of altering ourselves. There’s a creative element that’s very intriguing. Black women, for hundreds of years, have had to confront the idea ���beauty” and “what it means to be beautiful.”

Mickalene Thomas (via blackcontemporaryart)

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DAVID HAMMONS

Hair Relaxer, Executed in 2001

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Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

Brian Eno

Sign up for a MoMA Class this spring. 

(via moma)

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Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self

Video short from Art 21 profiles New York digital artist whose works combine 3D, dance culture, performance, gaming, experience, and sexuality - video embedded below:

How does an artist use digital technology to perform new identities? In this film, artist Jacolby Satterwhite crafts surreal 3D animated videos while transporting characters from his virtual worlds into the streets of New York City. “We’re in the age of the remix,” says the artist, who observes that “now it’s about how you use the information around you to generate your individuality.” At a modest computer setup in his Chinatown studio, Satterwhite digitally traces by hand his mother’s schematic drawings of inventions, reimagining them into baroque, neon-colored landscapes in a constant state of flux. Adapting additional visual references—home movies, family photos, documentary footage, and images throughout art history—Satterwhite “queers” the purpose and meaning of his source material, creating a unique personal mythology through stream of consciousness storytelling techniques.

More Here

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Sam Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece), 1978-1979

There’s the temptation to see Mr. Hsieh as a political prisoner or as a fanatical devotee of some religion. But mainly his work fits squarely within performance art’s peculiar and extreme explorations of the human condition. What’s most tangible about the “Cage Piece” is the almost palpable immensity and emptiness of time, nothing but time, of life as the filling of time. Mr. Hsieh carved a notch for each day in the wall. (He didn’t consider it writing.) He said he spent the time staying alive. (via)

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The Modern Art Notes Podcast has a brand-new website! It features all 160 of our episodes, lots of images and more. Check it out!

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Candice Breitz, “Legend,” video collage

decontextualised persons singing Stir It Up together

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Paolo Scheggi, Intersuperficie, 1966

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Yayoi Kusama

Sunlight

1998

Minimalism - Contemporary Art

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Miguel Angel Rios

A Morir (Till Death), 2003. Three-Channel DVD projection.

Rìos’ video installation focuses on a popular game in Mexico that involves spinning tops. Through the documentation of this simple scenario, from one to thirty players, aged from 14 to 50, dymnamics of competition, aggression and territorialism are signaled both visually and aurally. A MORIR negotiates both politics and poetics in abstracting narratives about urban sprawl and congestion.