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For this episode created for Contemporary Lynx Magazine, I traveled to London to attend the press view of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope at Tate Modern. After joining the curators tour I got the chance to sit down with Mary Jane Jacob - one of the three curators of the exhibition and speak about the work of Abakanowicz, her inspirations, philosophy and ways of creating art and life. Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017) was an extraordinary Polish artist known among others for her large fiber sculptures called the Abakans. Her use of organic materials broke new ground for art in the 1960s and 70s. Bringing together 26 of these radical works for the first time in the UK, the exhibition at Tate Modern presents a forest of towering sculptures, enabling visitors to explore their ambiguous forms and earthy scents. This episode was created for Contemporary LYNX and with support of Polish Cultural Institute London References: Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope at Tate Modern (17 November 2022 – 21 May 2023) Exhibition Curators: Ann Coxon, Mary Jane Jacob, Dina Akhmadeeva Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago School of the Art Institute of Chicago Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation UAx Platform Podcast thumbnail credits: Abakan Orange 1968, Baroque Dress, Orange Garment, Sisal 360 x 360 x 45, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, p.69 --- Recording & editing: Patrycja Rozwora Mix & master: Jonas Kröper
This week: Duncan, Brian, and Abigail Satinsky in conversation with Christine Hill at the Open Engagement conference, which took place from May 13 to 15, 2011 at Portland State University. Open Engagement is an initiative of PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program that encourages discussion on various perspectives in social practice. Christine Hill is an artist, musician, hobby librarian and the proprietor of Volksboutique, a former second-hand shop turned production facility operating out of Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany. Hill's work proposes new investigations into mixed-media installation and performance. Examining contemporary forms of popular entertainment (for example, producing a television talk show in a New York gallery, in Pilot, 2000), imitating paradigms of elite advertising, and deploying businesses as art projects (a second-hand clothing store in Berlin, Volksboutique in 1996-97, a fully operable tour guide agency in New York in 1999) Hill investigates the proximity of contemporary art to mass entertainment, consumerism, and popular culture. In the process, she proposes new roles for viewers (as consumers, tourists, members of a TV audience), redefines artistic spaces of exhibition (as stores, studios, catwalks), and reinvents a mobile artistic identity (whether as talk show host, store owner, or tour guide). She defines these interventions as 'Organizational Ventures.' Hill has exhibited and lectured widely internationally. She has been the subject of numerous publications and she shows regularly. Recent solo exhibitions include Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Galerie EIGEN+ART, Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig; the MigrosMuseum in Zurich and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. Forthcoming projects include collaboration with the curator Mary Jane Jacob for Chicago's Sullivan Galleries and a solo presentation at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, both in 2009. She was included in documenta X in 1997, and has participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Her work has been reviewed extensively, including in Artforum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Art in America and in considerable international publications. The "Volksboutique Style Manual" is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Volksboutique project "Minutes" was included in the 2007 Venice Biennale under the curation of Robert Storr. Christine Hill is Professor and Chair of Media, Trend and Public Appearance at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. www.volksboutique.org
The five year behemoth is upon us! Episode 260 kicks off with a discussion with Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner about the artist and studio. Then we turn the camera on ourselves and have a discussion about where we are and where we are headed, if anywhere. Thanks for listening! It has been a great five years! P.S. Cauleen S. you are a sad, sad, petty whiner. Grow the hell up.
This week Duncan sneaks into The School of the Art Institute of Chicago to interview Mary Jane Jacob, Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions. Mary Jane Jacob's name is synonymous with the phrase "art as social practice" or the field of art that is now more widely known as "Relational Aesthetics." Jacob was at the center of the nineties debate about what was and could be considered an art object/experience and was putting on festivals, exhibitions, and public art programming that expanded our art consciousness long before Bourriaud "sexy-ed" up the field with his now seminal book. Aside from being a former Chief Curator at the MCA Chicago and LA MoCA, Jacob was also the person behind "Culture in Action," Chicago's progressive, but widely debated 90's public arts program. She is the author/co-author of several books including, "Learning Mind: Experience into Art," "Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art," "Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago," "Conversations at The Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art," and "On the Being of Being an Artist." She is the recipient of many grants, awards, fellowships and residencies, amongst the most notable are the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Study Center Residency, and the Getty Residency Program.
Mary Jane Jacob is Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of the most nonconformist U.S. curators of the last 20 years, Jacob has critically engaged the discourse around art in public spaces with such innovative exhibitions as Places with a Past, Charleston (1991), Culture in Action, Chicago (1993), Conversation in the Castle, Atlanta (1996) and Evoking History, Charleston (2001-present). Away from large-scale sculptures on public plazas, Jacob supports a form of art in public space that explicitly deals with the history and the current realties of the locations in which she works. With the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, she has furthered her research into the nature of artmaking today and the forthcoming anthology, Slow: Experience into Art, will deal with the art experience and its relation to pedagogy. Jacob's lecture will draw upon her own practice as a curator; creating spaces and situations for art to be made and experienced in cities and communities, as well as in galleries. Importantly, she will ground her remarks in the work of artists who cross cultures, some following the Buddha, others reaching points of wisdom along other paths, and all of which move beyond national or ethnic identity to speak on universal terms. It will include the work of Marina Abramovic, Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Kimsooja, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Bill Viola. January 22, 2009
An audiobook recording of Suzi Gablik's 'Conversations Before the End of Time', produced by Cast Iron Radio for European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017. Conversations Before the End of Time was first published by Thames and Hudson in 1995. Copyright © 1995 Suzi Gablik Reproduced by permission of Thames & Hudson Inc. All rights reserved.