Right: Alex Bag, Mickey Mother, 2002, color photograph, 33 x 41".
 

Since the mid-1990s, the New York–based artist Alex Bag has created a wide array of acerbic video art––by turns hilarious and horrific––that frequently features Bag herself. Her latest commission opens on January 9 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Coinciding with the exhibition, Electronic Arts Intermix is expanding its catalogue to include all of Bag’s videos for distribution.

MY MOTHER STARRED in two children’s television programs: In the mid-to-late ’60s she hosted The Carol Corbett Show on WPIX in New York City, and in the ’70s, in the tristate area, she had a show on WCBS called The Patchwork Family. Each show follows a conventional format: My mother sits behind a desk with a puppet and is joined by various guests. A music guy sings a song with a small studio audience of children, someone paints with the kids, somebody comes on with animals, and another person brings a moon rock, to name a few examples.

My new work is based on preexisting footage of both of these shows. Using Chroma-key technology, I’ll be appropriating whole segments. Chroma key is my new best friend. I only recently began to work with it. Nothing is ever high-tech in my work, and I like Chroma key for its DIY aspect. If anyone is inspired by my work, or simply thinks that they could do it better, then that’s the greatest thing. In theory, but also in practice, I prefer not to seduce the viewer with technology.

In this new work, instead of being happy, smiley, and full of song, the hostess will be prone to depression, maybe a cutter—I don’t know yet. I’m working with actors who are my friends. I give them some direction; in this project, for example, I instructed them to act as though they are writing a suicide note to the youth of today. If they can only tell them about one thing, what will it be? If you’re going to have a studio audience full of children, don’t think about entertaining them. Instead, think about where you can derive some degree of earnestness. I don’t think my work has to be age-appropriate, but it does need to have a sense of urgency.

I’m a writer, and I consider that to be my primary strength. I’m really not an actress. Even though my videos look improvised, much of it is typically scripted. Since no one is a professional actor, we always use cue cards. When you’re shooting on video, you can keep doing it until you have it right. The whole thing is planned out, and then I leave room for . . . magic!

The Whitney show is new for me in terms of the size and scope of the audience. Anyone can walk in and see the piece in the lobby—you don’t even have to pay to see it, which I really like. It’s nice to have this kind of challenge. I like being given assignments. It’s easier than simply pulling things out of the air. The fact that there are set parameters based on the space and its accessibility produces its own set of complications and joys.

I was a guest on The Patchwork Family when I was a child. Once there was a guy from a zoo, and because it was my mother’s show, I had a monkey to myself all day. I pushed the monkey around in a doll stroller. It was the greatest day of my life––and it's been all downhill since then! Reruns of my mother’s shows were on rotation through the early ’90s, and I recall watching them Saturday mornings when I was in college. My clearest memories of the shows are from that period. If I stayed up all night on a Friday, as I was wont to do, there she was in the morning, standing before a psychedelic background sporting a big collar and singing songs to a puppet; it was great footage to fall asleep to. When I was really young, I found the shows disturbing; there was always an audience full of children with whom she’d share stories that she had already told to me, which could get very confusing. It was only in reruns that I really began to enjoy them.

— As told to Lauren O'Neill-Butler

Left: Sara Greenberger Rafferty, At the Table I, 2008, archival ink-jet print with silk-screen and albumen printing, 14 1/2 x 20". Right: Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Frog in the Pond, 2009, color photograph, 16 x 20".

The New York–based artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty has exhibited widely since 2001. Her latest exhibition, “Bananas”—exploring humor, performance, and everyday life—is on view January 9–March 7 at the Kitchen.

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT of my work in the context of performance, so I was thrilled when the Kitchen, a long-standing nonprofit performance venue, proposed this exhibition. Even though I don’t make “performance art” as such, my work engages with that medium via more static forms. The exhibition space at the Kitchen is quite large, which has forced me to consider scale in this show more than in other contexts. There are several small pieces and other works that have parts that fit into a larger whole. Rather than an “installation,” it is a show of discrete objects and images. As opposed to a novel, I thought of the show as a collection of short stories.

The imagery refers to cooking, women, and stand-up comedy—subjects I’ve been working with for a while. But the works were primarily born out of simple color studies. I had previously made a lot of monochrome works based on black-and-white photography from the 1950s and ’60s, and I wanted to reincorporate color. But I had pared down the color vocabulary in my work so much that the process felt a little like coping with a broken leg. In trying to teach myself how to walk again, I began to do color studies and look at Josef Albers’s pedagogy. I read historical and contemporary texts on color theory and examined a few New Age texts on color therapy. I wanted to try to use colors conceptually to explore cultural connotations and associations.

For instance, with the color yellow, I began to incorporate the theme of the egg. It seemed very related to motifs and objects I had previously used in my work, such as cream pies and other foods that could be thrown at someone’s face. And of course, it’s gendered as female. In this show, there are a series of silk-screen prints that were made with egg whites; they are like bootleg albumen prints. For these, I worked with Forth Estate Editions, an enterprise that publishes prints by mostly young artists. Like other works I’ve made, these are prints of drawings based on photographs, but they are silk-screened with egg whites over the top, which forms a latent or invisible image.

In addition to bringing color back into my work, I have been trying to make the work actually funny rather than simply about funny. Previously, I was invested in tropes of comedy and imagery involving jokes, but now I’m interested in works themselves operating more as comedians. Something seemed a little off with making work about comedy while never garnering any laughs. Typically, my work tends to be on the scale of just one person. I’m not interested in being a master of something; I want my work to look physically underwhelming. That’s basically the idea of the stand-up comic anyway—it’s not a Broadway production but a single person on a stage. It’s just one body in front of a microphone with a stool and a glass of water. I like the idea of that solitary presence that functions like an artwork, with its back against the wall. As I was making the work over the past year, there were ups and downs in the world as well as in my own life, so in the end there are some funny works and there are some melancholy pieces; but these are, after all, just two sides of the same depreciated coin.

— As told to Lauren O'Neill-Butler

Ai WeiWei, Bubble, 2008, porcelain. Installation view, Watson Island, Miami, 2008.

Beijing-based artist Ai Weiwei has exhibited widely around the world and is a leading architectural designer, curator, and cultural critic in China. In conjunction with Art Basel Miami Beach, he is presenting two new outdoor installations, which mark his first ventures into making work at an art fair.

I’M DOING TWO PROJECTS for this fair. The first is a large cube made of chandeliers. It took 170,000 amber-colored beads to put it together. It looks like a Minimal cube and brings to mind the work of Donald Judd or Dan Flavin. The other work, Bubble, 2008, comprises one hundred high-quality blue porcelain bubbles spread over an area of nearly two thousand feet. These are each about nineteen inches tall and measure nearly twenty-seven inches each on the diagonal. They are installed nine feet apart from one another. The work is outdoors on Watson Island as part of the Island Gardens development near the shore; it reflects the weather and the waterfront.

It took nearly two years to make Bubble and to experiment with the material properties of porcelain. It was very difficult to get everything right, including the shade and the glaze of each piece. I wasn’t sure what it would look like and it really surprised me that it worked out so well. I really love the idea of making work outside; normally, art fairs are just for the galleries and collectors, but these pieces are part of the urban environment. Many families and children, who perhaps don’t look at much art, are surprised by it. It’s a joy to see that they are playing with it in a hands-on way.

In the classical sense, porcelain in China is the highest art form, and it belongs to the imperial court. In fact, it’s almost synonymous with Chinese culture. My work has always focused on how to bring older craftsmanship into a contemporary context and how to create or to use a new language. At the same time, I try to reinterpret artifacts from Chinese traditions and manipulate items from the country’s everyday modern culture. This has many layers of meaning, but in the end, the appearance of the work is the most important aspect. The appearance can, of course, be very misleading or fake, and yet the work always has to be attractive. But it also has to be natural, and people need to feel naturally attracted by it. Bubble, for example, is startling: It reflects the city far across the water and the sky. It seems to have its own life; it changes color constantly.

Bubble might provoke a dialogue about glamour and wealth in today’s society and about what is happening in China. The Olympics––even though the media and the world received the event very well––was the saddest thing that has happened in contemporary Chinese history. It was a huge performance by a propaganda machine and it had nothing to do with China or democracy. Now that the Olympics are over and the world is facing multiple economic problems, I think some people in China are still pretending that nothing is happening. But there is a heightened feeling of crisis all over. There are so many problems and many protests and uprisings. The judicial system is not working. There is a broad gap in Chinese society and it’s really dangerous.

— As told to Lauren O'Neill-Butler

Left: Weegee, Their First Murder, 1941, gelatin silver print, 10 1/8 x 11". © International Center of Photography. Right: Cover of William Chapman Sharpe's New York Nocturne (2008).

William Chapman Sharpe, professor of English at Barnard College in New York City, is the author of Unreal Cities (1990) and coeditor of Visions of the Modern City (1983). His new book, New York Nocturne (2008), examines images of the city after dark in literature, painting, and photography from 1850 to 1950.

I’VE SPENT MY ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL LIFE engaged with the modern city’s representation in art and literature. Unreal Cities discussed poetry about the metropolis by Wordsworth, Whitman, Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and others. I’ve always straddled the Atlantic, surveying not only New York but also London and Paris. This book germinated when I looked at works by James McNeill Whistler and realized that his art must have influenced the way people imagined the city at that time. My original effort was an attempt to understand how Whistler’s vision of the Thames, which is mostly represented horizontally in his paintings, was translated into representations of the vertical reach of New York City. The darkness and mist that covers the bridges and the far shore of the Thames revealed to Whistler an abstract and elemental formal quality that was instrumental in making his art so revolutionary—a deliberate arrangement of colors and shapes on a flat surface. As soon as photographers began looking at the vertical geography of New York, they began to see ways they could capture the unusual forms by covering details in the same cloak of darkness.

Whistler wasn’t afraid to make enemies or to go to court (as in the famous lawsuit against John Ruskin) to demand that he be recognized as a revolutionary artist who had showed urban citizens something they had never seen before. He even compiled his rebuttals to his critics in a book called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. His influence extended beyond the realm of the visual arts; for example, when Ezra Pound was trying to promote Imagism in London in the second decade of the twentieth century, he cited Whistler’s courageous artwork in support of his ideas. Returning to the visual arts, even so brash and semiabstract a painter as Joseph Stella, whose sharp angles seem distinct from Whistler’s delicacy of touch, also began his career as a maker of Whistleresque nocturnes.

It can be said that Whistler showed people how to paint a “moonlight” (his original term for what he later called nocturnes) without ever depicting the moon. This, coupled with the increasing ubiquity of artificial light, helped liberate the representation of night from a number of qualities that had become clichéd, most notably that it was a time of reflection and pastoral repose that would carry us back to childlike innocence.

But of course the book is not all about Whistler. The motif of the flaneur runs throughout. I try to show that Edgar Allan Poe had partly celebrated and partly parodied this figure in his story “The Man of the Crowd.” What he notices is that the flaneur can’t really make anything happen; his whole job is to observe and comment. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, the flaneur becomes an investigator. Think of Jacob Riis, who was dedicated not just to observing the world but also to changing what he saw.

The book shows that we have a number of ways of looking at the night—from seeing it as a gaslit immoral Babylon to wondering at the skyscraper fantasia. We alternate between fear of what might be out there and absolute delight in the way it looks. We’re beguiled and discomposed at the same time that we wander down the streets. Such fluctuation is an omnipresent quality in the nocturnal city. While I try to tease out separate strands of it, any time we regard the city at night we do so with a bundle of ideas and emotions that range from fear and dismay to sexual excitement to a sense of being both voyeur and victim. The word voyeur seems key to understanding an artist like Weegee, who tried to bring us a flash-lit consciousness of the city. In his clever comments on the staginess of city life, he became a producer and director of the night. But he was a producer who urged us to indulge ourselves in the thrill of watching somebody else suffer, and for this reason I ultimately found him less honest and compelling than Riis. Weegee was more enamored of himself than anything he depicted. While he shows us the worst about the night, he also shows how the night can bring out the worst in ourselves.

In the book’s epilogue, I discuss various attempts to reconnect the human species to the full range of natural experience, including natural night. If for no other reason than economic reality, people will gradually change the way they light up the night. We may see a more consciously managed image of the sparkling city. The classic views of the skyline offered a totally unplanned panopoly of light. But perhaps greater patches of darkness, and the understanding that when it’s dark it’s not necessarily as unsafe as we fear, will intrude on this vision of the city. We will gain a lot as human beings if we can look up once again and see the stars.

— As told to Brian Sholis

Left: David Hammons, Elephant Chair, Location: Sultan Hussein Street in Front of the Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria University, 2008. Right: David Hammons, Pink Tree, Location: Sultan Hussein Street in Front of Sultan Hussein Cafe, 2008.

David Hammons has been making art and challenging the conditions of artmaking for nearly forty years. In 1991, Hammons was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in the field. Recently, the artist was invited by the nonprofit multidisciplinary arts initiative Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum to realize a project in Egypt, which opens on November 24. Here he discusses his artistic intervention, called “Six Sites in Alexandria.”

LAST YEAR, Salah Hassan, the curator of this project, went to Egypt to take part in the Alexandria Biennale. I said, “Let me tag along and see what’s happening.” I hung out in the city while he was doing his thing. He showed me this small gallery of young people—the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum—and I told him to ask if I could do something there. They agreed, and here I am.

The hotel I’m staying in, the Windsor Palace, is about twenty minutes from the gallery. Walking the streets between the gallery and the hotel, I found five separate sites; I was looking for abstract things that normal people don’t look at. I found a wooden chair chained to a pole—I guess some security guards use this chair to sit in. There’s a puddle of water in the street; a piece of cardboard caught on a light fixture, hanging on a wire. There’s an appliance store filled with televisions and refrigerators and stoves—the music was so loud at this place that I decided to call it a sound installation. There’s also a tree painted green. It’s so green I decided to call it the Pink Tree. The sixth site was Sight Unseen—I leave the audience to find their own.

At first, the sites were further stretched out, but there’s no way people could have gone to see them all. So I narrowed it down to sites between the hotel and the gallery. I only had forty-eight hours in which to do it, and this factor helped to quicken the pace. I had to think spontaneously as opposed to intellectually. It’s like being on a boat that’s going down—you just grab on to whatever’s at hand to stay afloat. There wasn’t time to overthink anything.

I had to explain that it wasn’t going to be in their gallery. They had hoped it would be—it’s a very nice space, a marvelous, beautiful restoration of an apartment. As beautiful as the space was, that was too easy to do. I don’t particularly care for galleries. I’d rather walk through the city and find my own spaces.

I do that a lot in New York. I’ll find something and call people up with the address and tell people to go look at it. It could be a stack of wood in the subway or something that looks like a Joseph Beuys or something lying around.

We made a little sketch of each piece with the address and the title. The gallery director said that if there wasn’t a visual clue, then the people wouldn’t even go to look for them. I don’t really care much if they go to see them. The concept is more interesting than the actual objects, because the concept is invisible while the objects are visible. Except for the sixth site—there they have to use the mind’s eye.

The adventure of coming here is more important to me than the exhibition—to get to faraway places is more exciting than to do something in a normal space. Have you heard of the White Night in Paris? It is cosponsored by Fondation Cartier and the City of Paris. I think it’s been going on for some time. Each year, they invite thirteen artists to do installations around the city, and everyone stays up from 7 PM to 7 AM. I was invited to participate this year. For my piece, I predicted that a double rainbow would appear over the city at night on the fourth of October. Actually, I saw a double rainbow about just two days before I met with representatives from the Fondation Cartier and the City of Paris about the project. Both agreed, but then approximately three days beforehand, the City of Paris removed my name from the exhibition. I think they canceled it because they couldn’t explain it to anyone. But how do you stop or remove the rainbow from happening?

For a piece at Skulptur Projekte Münster 2007, I predicted rain on the eighteenth of August. It didn’t rain. However, I wanted them to follow the concept more than the act. I was more interested in shifting the idea of how artists think about producing art. Artists are often more interested in the act itself. I choose artworks that are ephemeral because, well, life is that. It’s such a temporary journey.

I was watching a video on YouTube in which Ornette Coleman presents a tune called “Spring” in Germany; he tells the audience, “Follow the idea of the song, not the song itself.” He also said, “Follow the idea, not the sound.” I was impressed with that. Follow how my ideas are put together, as opposed to whether the rainbow appears or the rain comes. I use this logic a lot. It moves in the realm of poetry as opposed to the actuality that people are used to or expect.

— As told to David Velasco

Left: Frances Stark, The New Vision, 2008, collage on paper, 29 x 24". Right: View of Frances Stark, “The New Vision,” 2008, Portikus, Frankfurt. Photo: Katrin Schilling.

Los Angeles–based artist Frances Stark is widely known for combining text, image, and literary sources in her collages, which often include thoughtful though tenuous self-referential links to her roles as artist, mother, woman, and professor. “The New Vision,” an exhibition of new work, opens on November 22 at Portikus in Frankfurt.

THIS EXHIBITION WAS quite a surprise. Although I had been planning to do it for at least a year, before I was able to start on my original plans an opportunity arose for another show, which took up a tremendous amount of energy. That large-scale exhibition, at the Secession [“A Torment of Follies,” April 26–June 22, 2008], was organized around an excerpt from a novel that I was “putting to music,” so to speak. There I used text in a rhythmic way and choreographed graphic figures around the room almost as if they were performing the text. This show is nearly the opposite of that one.

I had a conversation with a curator from the Hammer Museum, which has an extensive print collection, about the form of “the folly” and more specifically about Goya’s follies, or Caprichos [caprices]. I began to look at these more, and one image in particular really hit me, a print titled They Already Have a Seat [1799]. It depicts two women with chairs on their heads and skirts pulled up to their faces. This particularly ridiculous image struck me.

There were a few other Caprichos that inspired some of the pieces in this new body of work. I did a version of the most famous, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters [1797], with the flurry of bats and monsters behind the figure, as an exhibition poster for a gigantic summer group show I was in, “Pretty Ugly” at Gavin Brown and Maccarone. Instead of Goya’s slumping, somewhat gentle figure, mine is more exasperated. Each of these Caprichos has a text that Goya has written, a little snippet or a comment that isn’t part of the title but is somehow associated with that particular print. I liked how this text exists in a no-man’s-land. About the image of the women and chairs, Goya writes, “If conceited girls want to show they have a seat, the best thing is for them to put it on their head.” That really egged me on.

I really felt, when I started to make this show, that it would end up being an exhibition of paintings—despite the fact that I really don’t make paintings per se. I hate that I keep having to offer this caveat, but honestly, one could actually call this a figurative painting show—but not entirely, of course.

In a way, the work has more of a “trashy collage” aesthetic. But the images are also more solid and singular and depict bodies in subtly ridiculous, exhausted, or slightly compromising positions, and there is a lot of play with black-and-white versus color. One of my favorites is a foreshortened figure seen from above with a kind of giant head weighing down the image, and her feet kind of just floating at the top of the canvas. In her hands is a sheet of paper, which reads: “Why should you not be able to assemble yourself and write?” This text comes from a letter I received from a very smart and sympathetic friend, who, in asking me for a contribution to a publication, lamented the fact that I have been writing less and less to focus on making “work.” It asks a lot of difficult questions about appropriating text in artworks versus producing original texts for publication. An abridged version of this letter appears in the exhibition in one of the few nonfigurative works, on a painted music stand, next to another letter received from an artist friend who strikes a completely different tone. The juxtaposition becomes a kind of score for the possibility of what I can or will perform.

— As told to Lauren O'Neill-Butler