This week: And now for something completely different!

This week’s episode comes to us from our friends at Art Practical, whose current issue delves into the rich history of sound art in the San Francisco Bay Area. The included essays and interviews constitute a fraction of the rich and varied world of experimental sound. Here, Art Practical’s contributing editors Catherine McChrystal and Kara Q. Smith offer an all-audio version of that issue with samples of work by the artists profiled in that issue, including:

Maryann Amacher, Joshua Churchill, Paul DeMarinas, Chris Duncan, Jacqueline Gordon, Aaron Harbor, Shane Myrbeck, Pauline Oliveros, Ethan Rose, and the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

The Bay Area’s technological reign has established San Francisco as a destination for sound artists and experimental composers seeking to advance their practices through the genesis of new mediums. They explore sound’s capacity to conflate sensory experience; from the earliest days of sound art, artists and experimental musicians discovered in the genre a medium that is inclusive, participatory, disruptive, and that could embody their political goals. This episode explores how sounds are both aural and physical, producing reverberations that register in our ears and bodies and that locate or disorient us in space.

You can check out the articles included in Art Practical’s Sound Issue here.

This week: We talk to artist Katharina Fritsch!

Richard says "cock" and "Hologram Tupac" a whole lot.

Katharina Fritsch is known for her sculptures and installations that reinvigorate familiar objects with a jarring and uncanny sensibility. Her works' iconography is drawn from many different sources, including Christianity, art history and folklore. She attracted international attention for the first time in the mid-1980s with life-size works such as a true-to-scale elephant. Fritsch’s art is often concerned with the psychology and expectations of visitors to a museum. Gary Garrels wrote that “One of the remarkable features of Fritsch’s work is its ability both to capture the popular imagination by its immediate appeal and to be a focal point for the specialized discussions of the contemporary art world. This all too infrequent meeting point is at the center of her work, as it addresses the ambiguous and difficult relationships between artists and the public and between art and its display—that is, the role of art and exhibitions and of the museum in the late twentieth century.” The special role colour plays in Fritsch's work has roots in her childhood visits to her grandfather, a salesman for Faber-Castell art supplies, whose garage was well-stocked with his wares.

Her most recognized works are Rattenkönig/Rat King (1993), a giant circle of black polyester rats, included in the 1999 Venice Biennale. Other works include Mönch (Monk) (2003), a stoic, monochromatic male figure, made of solid polyester with a smooth, matte black surface; Figurengruppe / Group of Figures (2006-2008), an installation of nine elements; and Hahn (Cock) (2010), a 14ft (4.3m) cockerel in ultramarine blue to be shown on London's Trafalgar Square in 2013.

In her working process, Fritsch combines the techniques of traditional sculpture with those of industrial production. While many of her early works were handcrafted, Fritsch now makes only the models for her sculptures and then hands these over to a factory for production, to near-pathological specifications. She uses these models to create moulds, from which the final sculptures are cast in materials such as plaster, polyester and aluminium. Many are made as editions, meaning that multiple casts are taken from one mould.[5] For the duration of some of her exhibitions, Fritsch has made her multiples available for sale at the respective museums.

This week: We talk with, writer, giant of consciouness, and Chief Curator at the ICA in Boston Helen Molesworth.

This week: Another of our interviews from the Hand in Glove conference! Duncan and Patricia speak with artist Martha Wilson.

Martha Wilson is a Philadelphia based feminist performance artist. She is the founding director of Franklin Furnace. Over the past four decades she has developed and "created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformation, and 'invasions' of other peoples personas". In the early 1970s while studying in Halifax in Nova Scotia, she began to make videos and photo/text performances. When she moved to New York City in 1974 she continued to develop and explore her photo/text and video performances Due to this and her other works during her career she gained attention around America for her provocative characters, costumes, works and performances. During 1976 she founded and became director of the Franklin Furnace Archive, which is an artist-run space that focuses on the exploration, advertisement and promotion of artists books, installation art, video and performance art. By promoting these certain areas of work, due to their content they challenge the established normality of performance, art work and books. Other aspects that are addressed through the promotion of the archive are the roles artists play within the visual arts organisations, and the expectations around what is acceptable in the art mediums.

This week: San Francisco brings another great guest to the table! Kota Ezawa, video archaeologist.

Ezawa's work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London, Artpace in San Antonio, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Murray Guy Gallery in New York and Haines Gallery in San Francisco. He participated in exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, SF MOMA, Andy Warhol Museum and Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His animations were included in the 2005 Shanghai Biennale and will be presented in the upcoming Sao Paulo Biennial. He received a Tiffany Foundation Award in 2003 and the SECA Art Award in 2006. Ezawa is Assistant Professor of Media Arts at the California College of the Arts.

ALSO:

Comic Art and Fine Art: Connecting the Dots

Art Institute of ChicagoApril 12, 2012
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Art Institute of Chicago
111 S. Michigan Ave

Free with museum admission, students free with ID
A Panel Of Leading Comic Experts:


Neal Adams, Ivan Brunetti, Geofrey Darrow and J.J. Sedelmaier discuss the history and future of this popular and populist art form. Moderated by Richard Holland.

Presented with the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo.

Explore the connection between Comic Art and Fine Art. This mini-tour includes a $2 off coupon to the Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago when you show your C2E2 badge.