13 January - Sweet Marina Abramovic

LAUNCHPROJECTS -

Park Avenue Winter,

one of the New York Times, New York Magazine and New York Observer's best new restaurants in New York City,

is collaborating with the non-profit Creative Time to team up with artists including Marina Abramovic, Janine Antoni, Paul Ramirez Jonas, and Michael Rakowitz to create seasonal dishes over the next few months.

Abramovic is first, collaborating with chef Kevin Lasko on a $20 dessert called the Volcano Flambe. As described by Florence Fabricant in the New York Times "Its core of dark chocolate ice cream is covered with meringue, decorated with gold leaf and a swirl of spun sugar, bedded on chocolate cookie crumbs and flambéed with rum. The artist's booklet of off-beat recipes, 'Spirit Cooking,' and an MP3 player with a talk by her accompany the dessert." I eagerly await Antoni's dish, though I can't seem get the image of her 2008 piece "Eureka" out of my mind when imagining her in the kitchen... (image above).

Santa Fe is an ideal place for such innovation and collaboration. I picture Patrick McFarlin whipping up Thiebaud-esque confections at Coyote Cafe and Clayton Porter plating wild board dishes at the Compound. How about convincing the likes of Larry Bell, Ken Price, Sherrie Levine, Susan Rothenberg, and Richard Tuttle to participate? Brian Knox and Bruce Nauman could surely cook up something spectacular and bizarre at Aqua Santa. I would eat out every night just to see what artists dream up with the inspired chefs in our community. Even better if a local non-profit benefits.

Creative Time's mission statement asserts that they are "thrilled when art breaks into the public realm in surprising ways... We like to make the impossible possible, pushing artists beyond their comfort levels, just as they push us beyond ours. In the process, artists engage in a dynamic conversation between site, audience, and context, offering up new ideas about who an artist is and what art can be, pushing culture into fresh new directions." This collaboration is precisely an enactment of that mission and I would love to see a non-profit in Santa Fe activate our community beyond the visual arts in a similar fashion. SITE's SPREAD is certainly a start - but I encourage our community to keep pushing the boundaries of how art can function in all of our daily lives.

6 Jan - SITE Santa Fe SPREAD

LAUNCHPROJECTS - I had lunch today with Irene Hofmann, the recently appointed Director of SITE Santa Fe, to hear about SPREAD, SITE's new community-based granting initiative.

Based on the models of FEAST in Brooklyn and inCUBATE in Chicago (with other iterations in Portland and Minneapolis) SPREAD is a recurring public dinner designed to generate community-driven financial support to fund artistic innovation. At each SPREAD dinner, participants pay a sliding-scale entrance fee for which they receive dinner and a ballot. During dinner, the SPREAD audience will hear short proposals from up to eight artists for innovative and yet-to-be-realized new projects. The eight finalists will be selected by a small group of community artists, dancers, performers, filmmakers and curators. Diners will then cast their votes for their favorite project. At the end of dinner, the artist whose proposal receives the most votes will be awarded all of the funds collected at the door to realize their project. In cash (see image above).

We immediately responded to a grass-roots initiative entirely dependent upon community engagement and the concept that anyone willing to spend $15 - $50 to participate equally mattered in how the money would be awarded. The direct relationship between those providing funding and those receiving the grant creates a immediacy and transparency uncommon in the art world. Further, the more supportive the community - attendance of diners, donations of food and other goods from local businesses, financial support - the more successful each local granting cycle becomes.

Although these small grants will never replace larger granting organizations and major-donors who are indispensable to the success of the arts in our community, small amounts can add up to a lot. These micro-grants empower the community and provide an opportunity for many promising New Mexico artists to realize goals they would not otherwise have the means to achieve.

7 Dec - Oscar Munoz and Cali, Colombia

LAUNCHPROJECTS - I am currently reading a great biography of Robert Irwin written by Lawrence Weschler. I will blog in detail about the book when I finish it, but reading Weschler's thoughtful words and interactions with Irwin reminded me of meeting him in 2007 in conjunction with The Disappeared Collaborative Project in Santa Fe.

This project originated as a single exhibition curated by Laurel Reuter at the North Dakota Museum of Art and consisted of twenty-seven living artists from South America who have made art about "los desaparecidos" or the disappeared. As the original exhibition press stated "these artists lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century". The Lannan Foundation invited Reuter to New Mexico to discuss the exhibition and the result of the conversation was a collaboration by nine arts organizations throughout the community, including the Center for Contemporary Arts (where I was the Visual Arts Director and Curator at the time), SITE Santa Fe, the Lannan Foundation, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. The organizations presented exhibitions, lectures, films, and workshops.

I decided on behalf of the Center for Contemporary Arts to curate a solo exhibition of works by Colombian artist Oscar Munoz. Munoz is one of Latin America’s most significant artists working today, more so now since his video piece Re/Trato (pictured above and included in the CCA exhibiton) was later selected by Robert Storr for Think with the Senses Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense for the Venice Biennale and by Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco for SITE Santa Fe's current Biennale, The Dissolve.

Ben, another CCA board member, and I traveled to Cali, Colombia to meet Munoz and get a first-hand look at his work, life, and tour Cali. We arrived to find a teeming art community amidst an otherwise impoverished and ramshackle city. This was due in large part to a small exhibition space founded by Munoz, Lugar a Dudas (Place for Doubts) in which he inspires younger artists with group exhibitions, film screenings, artist talks, and an extensive art library. Within the 36 hours we were in Cali, Munoz coordinated 14 studio visits with emerging Colombian artists. The artists were inspiring and extremely talented, each creating unorthodox and frequently political work that placed their lives in jeopardy to express their discontent with the Colombian government. Many of the artist's medium was cocaine because it was more readily available and inexpensive to use than paints or charcoals.

Lawrence Weschler states in the exhibition catalog "The challenge in these societies is to find a way of reclaiming the dead and honoring their presence in a manner that nonetheless stil allows room for, indeed, creates room for the living." Lugar a Dudas and Oscar Munoz' approach to his work, his city, and the potential of its youth was just that. Utterly inspirational.

Pictured: Me, Ben, Laurel Reuter, Oscar Munoz and others at Lugar a Dudas, Re/Trato video still

19 Nov - Roxy Paine at James Cohan Gallery

LAUNCHPROJECTS - The first time I experienced Roxy Paine's work was in 2003 when I was volunteering as a docent at SITE Santa Fe. His solo exhibition Second Nature featured computer-driven automated art making machines as well as his hand made mushrooms, poppies, and poison ivy. Smart and elegant, I immediately responded to his work at to this day it remains among my favorite SITE Santa Fe exhibitions (including Juan Munoz, Janine Antoni, Gary Simons, and the group show Uneasy Space curated by former SITE curator Norah Kabat Dolan).

Paine's latest project at James Cohan Gallery, Distillation is in Paine's words (from a New York Times Review by Hillary M. Sheets) "a meditation on seeking purity, the pure essence of something, but at the same time the piece is very impure...It also relates to the way I’ve always thought about my process. How ideas come in coarse and ferment in the brain, and eventually are distilled out of that brew. It’s a map of the way humans constantly flit between different frames of mind and fields of knowledge.”

Also included in the show is an elaborate mushroom installation and drawings, paintings, and a maquette of the Distillation installation. A gorgeous and thoughtful exhibition - Roxy Paine (who incidentally attended the College of Santa Fe) continues to grow and expand his original lexicon that straddles the lines of art making and automation, beauty and industry, perfection and rupture.

Pictured: Roxy Paine in front of a mushroom installation at SITE Santa Fe, Distillation 2010.

28 Oct - Irene Hofmann and Marcia Tucker

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Last night we attended a cocktail reception for SITE Santa Fe's new Director Irene Hofmann at the stunning home of Bill and Alicia Miller. When Hofmann stood before the small crowd to introduce herself she relayed an anecdote of her first week on the job. A SITE a staff member asked her whom she most admired as a role model. Her response was Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum in New York. I caught my breath and felt a wave of excitement - I chose Marcia Tucker as one of three inspiring and intrepid women in the arts to be the subjects of my Masters Thesis this past year (the other two were Betty Parsons and Alanna Heiss). I selected women that I wanted to know more about and whom I considered role models for their courage, tenacity, and dedication despite bitter hostility and widespread unpopularity. Marcia Tucker spent a lifetime as a subversive, an adventurer, and never ceased to challenge the boundaries of contemporary art.

When initially presented, new forms of art and installation can incite fury and derision among art patrons, critics, and general audiences. New paradigms are unsettling and artistic breakthroughs can threaten belief systems people hold dear to their understanding of the art world and how it functions. Some of the most distinguished and iconic artists in modern history have found notoriety and recognition through years, even decades, of slowly evolving acceptance into the cultural mainstream.

In many respects, the curator or director who chooses to present original work to a frequently bewildered and uncomfortable audience shares quite closely the challenges that face cutting-edge artists. Curators and directors promoting distinctively innovative contemporary art meet with harsh castigation for the work they present. In their attempts to uncover “the nerve endings of contemporary art” (as described by Tate Museum curator Nicholas Serota) , forward-thinking curators continually question the way art functions in response to the modern world. The curator must translate into exhibitions, catalogs, and discussions, concepts and forms that have yet to be defined, much less understood.

Exposing and promoting the nerve endings of contemporary art demands participation outside of and attention beyond mainstream culture. Tucker called this “loving the margins.” “I always feel that the margins tell you more than the center of the page ever could. Loving the margins is risky, because you’re not only in unfamiliar territory, but often in hostile terrain as well” . The margins reflect independent thinking rather than the perpetuation of extant cultural structures. When new art is presented to contemporary audiences, historical facts and cultural consensus are not yet available to ensure the import of the work or to allay fear of the unknown. In the words of Betty Parsons, “You can’t put something that’s just been done into history; you’ve got to talk about its creative impact for the moment. A new work by a new artist is not history. It is the present.”

Here is to Irene Hofmann, Marcia Tucker, and all of the powerful women who have come before us to continue to take risks, incite audiences, and endlessly feel for the nerve endings of contemporary art.

images: Irene Hofmann, Bill Miller introducing Irene, Marcia Tucker

1 July - Clayton Porter Studio Visit

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Art critic Kathryn M Davis joined us today at Clayton Porter's studio for a sneak preview of his upcoming exhibition Deer Hart, Dog Dick. In four new paintings, Porter explores the contemporary grotesque through influences including Gruenwald’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, the stag hunts of Paul de Vos (pictured above), the Baroque allegories of Peter Paul Rubens, and the surrealist imaginings of Max Ernst.

Porter's paintings are grotesque by the original definition of the word (as explored in detail in Robert Storr's 2004 SITE Biennial, Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque). Coined in 1490's Renaissance Rome upon the discovery of Emperor Nero's "grotto" paintings, the grotesque described the excessive and titillating imagery of Nero's cave paintings, "florid caricatures of unnatural man / beast combinations that decorated the long-hidden walls of the grottoes " (Peter Eleey for Frieze Magazine).

Porter's solo exhibition Deer Hart, Dog Dick opens at LAUNCHPROJECTS on Thursday, July 8th from 6:30 - 8:00. Previews of this exhibition have been published in Art in America, the Santa Fean Magazine, and Adobe Airstream.

Special Thanks to James Bristol for his great shot of Clayton's paint palatte (pictured above).

14 June - A good week to start blogging

After nearly two years of talking about it, we decided that it is a good week to start blogging. Over the next 10 days we will host an opening at LAUNCHPROJECTS for New York-based artist Ward Shelley, attend the opening of the eighth international Biennial at SITE Santa Fe curated by Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco, and then head to New York to be guests at the James Franco opening at Art on Air curated by Alanna Heiss. Writing as often as possible, we will document our daily experiences running a private contemporary art venue in Santa Fe, New Mexico.