Contemporary Artists

I chose to view a playlist of videos curated by Art 21 about “Teaching with the Great Outdoors.” I chose this video because I have always had a personal interest in the outdoors, and have been working with my advanced high school class with a non-traditional media project for the past 5 years, 3 of which have been focused on themes of environmentalism. I had hoped to gain some inspiration on projects that could also be done that could incorporate our new high school facility or the surrounding country area.

The common theme aside from the curated videos about “The Outdoors” seems to be one of reinventing a place or location. Several of these artists focus on observation of a space, and some go further in making work that helps reframe our thinking about that space.

Rackstraw Downs is an English artist who spent most his time creating in Maine or Texas. He works traditionally as a plein air oil painter on wood panels. His focus is on close observation of the places. His process also involves an amount of discovery of the location. He has said that many times when he finishes working in a location, he will notice several more spaces that would also make a good artwork. His connection to the idea of place involves a close observation of how one observes a location through the act of painting it.

Andrea Zittel is a California based artist who featured her “Wagon Stations” in the Art 21 video. These wagons stations are in their second generation now, and they serve as both an architectural artwork and a means to create a communal living space in Joshua Tree. Her work typically deals with the question “how we live” and blurs the lines between art and life. Her work often takes the shape of an experiment, and the Wagon Stations also serve as a location for something like a cross between an artist residency, a camping trip, and a retreat. Her connection to the idea of transforming a space includes how she creates spaces for people to live, and interact with the space they occupy.

Sarah Sze is an installation and sculpture artist that sometimes works with other STEM groups to create her work and explores the use of technology and information in our daily lives. Her featured work on the New York City’s High Line Park is a collaboration with the Cornell Ornithology Lab to create a sculpture that both beatifies the space as well as create a functional structure that local birds can use. Food, water, and housing is included in the structure for the local birds. She focuses on observation of a space and typically works with spaces that go unused. I really appreciated learning about her work and how it created artwork that causes viewers or passers-by to think differently about the other animal inhabitants of a space, and how we interact with them.

Mary Mattingly can be described as an “apocalyptic” artist in the regard that she creates works that could function in her perverse, invented future, that sadly seems closer to a reality given the state of environmental and political events of late. Mattingly works with architecture in her pieces, sometimes in the form of wearable artwork. Her more recent work include Triple Island (featured in the video), and Swale (2016). Both of which focus on a communal space in which viewers can interact with the work and in the case of Swale, learn about gardening and collect local food. A point of fact I found interesting about Swale is that she created the “floating food forest” on a barge because it is illegal to grow fruits or vegetables in parks in New York, but no law says the same about the waterways. Her interesting in reframing how we think about a space seemed most poignant to me in how she focused more on her work as a means to interaction with the ecosystem we are a part of, and how to teach others to work towards a better future ecosystem.

Robin Rhode is a South African artist based in Johannesburg, with a family and studio in Berlin. He could be described as a “Street Interventionalist.” The work he does combines the use of space as a graffiti artist would, as well as a use of costume and figurative work that would be more familiar to a video artist, to create finished products that live as photographs. He works with a team of locals (known as “born frees” due to their birth after Apartheid) in Johannesburg that he pays a daily rate to and provides a sense of worth in the creating of their works. The murals are geometric in appearance, and are done as a stop motion video through their production while the crew poses with each change of the mural to create a story upon completion. He typically works with abandoned wall structures in South Africa. Rhode’s work is a creation of still image and movement, with his subjects interacting with the local spaces they have had a hand in transforming.

David Goldblatt is a white South African photographer who recently passed in 2018. He saw the other side of Apartheid than Robin Rhode. He photographed much of apartheid through his work with architecture and people as his subjects. Many of his early works he sent to magazines with stories about apartheid, and they were either rejected because the apartheid wasn’t apparent enough, or that it was too apparent. Goldblatt was fascinated by the architecture of South Africa as symbols of power structures and evidence of what the culture valued. Goldblatt’s artwork documents the place of South Africa and the way in which the culture of the place altered itself and the structures that create its landscape.

Several of these artists had a sub-themes of experimentation, play, and environmentalism. I found the connections to other fields like Sarah Sze’s interactions with the Cornell Ornithology Lab of interest. Working with other STEM fields to create a collaborative space in which art becomes a functional part of a community, and at the same time an experiment, was something I would like to explore further. Many of these artists also worked in some type of architectural interest into their projects, whether it was depicting existing structures, creating new structures, or rethinking how we use existing buildings. As stated previously, I would like to work with my school district in our new facility and surrounding area to eventually create some type of work that is meaningful and potentially useful to the school. We are currently having difficulties with local wildlife “invading” our space, though in actuality it is we that set up camp in their home. I am toying with ideas of collaborating with our science and tech departments to create something to allow both needs of people and animals to be served.

After watching and reflecting on the work of these artists, I have found a few questions that could continue their line of thinking:

1. How do we as individuals living in a space both reflect it, and change it?

2. How can artists inspire seeds of positive change in an environment?

3. How does changing an environment affect those who live there?

References: Art 21. (2021, September 5). David Goldblatt. https://art21.org/artist/david-goldblatt/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw-NaJBhDsARIsAAja6dOpJxS_N6QaHP2qXffkv2WxS2WrIHuk3jYBF0oEFUXs-OPakJJvb2waAjQoEALw_wcB.

Art 21. (2021, September 5). Robin Rhode. https://art21.org/artist/robin-rhode/.

Betty Cunningham Gallery. (2021, September 4). Rackstraw Downes. Betty Cunningham Gallery. http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com/artists/rackstraw-downes.

Fusaro, J. (2020). Teaching with the Great Outdoors. Art21. https://art21.org/playlist/teaching-with-the-great-outdoors/#/1.

Mattingly, M. (2021, September 5). Mary Mattingly. https://marymattingly.com/DefaultMattingly.html.

Sze, Sarah. (2021, September 6). Sarah Sze. https://www.sarahsze.com/.

Zittel, Andrea. (2021, September 5). The Institute of Investigative Living. https://www.zittel.org/.