A visitor and a dog embody Elana Mann (left) and Audrey Chan (right) in the interactive painting “Chan & Mann’s New Fantasy.” (Image courtesy Audrey Chan)

Turning the Seven Year Itch into a Retrospective

by An Xiao, April 18, 2012

(Excerpt)

LOS ANGELES — Most artist retrospectives occur decades after an artist’s career really takes off, once their name has been recognized in the annals of art world lore. But long time collaborators Chan and Mann — Audrey Chan and Elana Mann, respectively — have organized their own retrospective to recognize their “seven year itch” of collaboration and “historicize now.”

Read the review: http://hyperallergic.com/50141/chann-mhann-retrospective/

Myths of Rape (2012), performance by Audrey Chan and Elana Mann, a reinterpretation of Leslie Labowitz-Starus’ Myths of Rape (1977), part of Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May (1977). (Photo by Neda Moridpour)

The production was presented by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) for Three Weeks in January (2012) as part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival. Thanks to Mecca Vazie Andrews and Sandra Mueller.

The performance took place on the opening night of the LA Art Show on January 18, 2012 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Parsons The New School for Design
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY

The conference will consider feminist art as a zone of multi-disciplinary art production associated with a radical critique of gendered power relations in society. The women artists participating will speak about their current work, their history within feminism, and the relevance of feminist identification and communities to their creative endeavors. They will discuss what it means to be a feminist artist today within an extended range of diverse political engagement. Speakers include Susan Bee, A. K. Burns, Audrey Chan, Maureen Connor, Andrea Geyer, Caitlin Rueter & Suzanne Stroebe, Ulrike Müller, and Mira Schor. The conference concludes the first MFA Advanced Practice course in Feminist Art taught by Mira Schor.

This event is FREE: no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served

Schedule
*9AM Brief introductory remarks

*Group 1 (start time as close to 9:15 as possible)
A.K. Burns, Andrea Geyer, Maureen Connor

*Group 2 (morning)
Susan Bee, Ulrike Müller, Mira Schor

*Lunch break

*Group 3
Caitlin Martin-Rueter & Suzanne Stroebe (collaborative+individual presentation), Audrey Chan

*General discussion

Further information on the participants:

Susan Bee is a painter, editor, teacher, and book artist, living in New York City. Bee is represented by Accola Griefen Gallery and A.I.R. Gallery in New York. Bee teaches at the Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts and at the University of Pennsylvania. Bee has collaborated with a number of major poets including Adrienne Rich and Johanna Drucker. She is coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee

A.K. Burns is an artists and compulsive collaborator who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Burns uses sculpture, video, collage and performed social actions to play with tropes, pervert meaning and exploit the shape things are given and take. Burns is a founding member and co-organizer of the activist group W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), and co-editor of RANDY, an annual trans-feminist arts magazine. Burns has recently shown at the Hessel Museum of Art, NY; the Sculpture Center, NY and TAG, the Hague, Netherlands. Burns’ collaborative work with A.L. Steiner, a feature length video entitled Community Action Center was released in 2010 and was recently screened at MoMA. Burns currently has a solo show at Callicoon Fine Arts, NY. http://akburns.net/index.html

Audrey Chan is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator whose multidisciplinary work addresses civic discourse, rhetoric, and the feminist construct of “the personal is political.” Chan co-organized Exquisite Acts & Everyday Rebellions: 2007 CalArts Feminist Art Project, a collective and inter-generational investigation of contemporary feminist art practice. In 2011, she published her first book, Conseil juridique et artistique / Legal and Artistic Counsel, which explores the promiscuous relationship between art and politics in French law. Recently, Chan and Elana Mann presented a large-scale performance work “Myths of Rape” (2012), a reinterpretation of Leslie Labowitz-Starus’ “Myths of Rape” (1977) for Suzanne Lacy’s “Three Weeks in January” project (presented by LACE and the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative). Other projects include include a video meditation on the Iraq War and the legacy of Maya Lin and performances as Judy Chicago’s Chinese-American doppelganger. http://www.audreychan.net

Maureen Connor is a visual artist whose work combines elements of installation, video, design, human resources and social justice. As part of a collective, the Institute for Wishful Thinking, she is currently artist in residence for the United States Government (self declared). Since 2000 she has been developing Personnel, a series of interventions concerned with the workplace, which explore the attitudes, needs and desires of the staff at various organizations. Personnel and related projects have been produced for a diverse group of venues that include Periferic 8 Biennial for Contemporary Art, Romania, the Department of Art and Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008, Wyspa Art Institute, Gdansk, Poland,2004-7; Tapies Foundation, Barcelona, 2003; and the Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2001 among others. She is a Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY and is currently Co-Director (with Gregory Sholette) of a new program Social Practice Queens in collaboration with the Queens Museum of Art, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. http://www.maureenconnor.net

Andrea Geyer uses both fiction and documentary strategies in her image and text based works. Recent works include “Comrades of Times” a series of video vignettes in which young women embody texts originating in the Weimar Republic invoking a political Imaginary that resonates strongly with the current political climate; “Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb,” a six-channel video engaging the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961) and the questions it raised about the relationship of truth and justice and about the responsibility an individual carries within a nation state. She has shown in work in recent months in a solo show at Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne, at Peter Blum Gallery and Art in General, New York and was part of Performa 11 with the CSRT readings at MoMA. Andrea Geyer has published two artist’s books: Audrey Munson, The Queen of the Artists’ Studios (Art In General/New York) and Spiral Lands / Chapter 1 (Koenig Books/London). Geyer is Assistant Professor of fine ARts, New Genres at Parsons The New School for Design. http://www.andreageyer.info

Ulrike Müller is an Austrian born artist based in New York City.Recent solo exhibitions include the Cairo Biennial (2010), Steinle Contemporary, Munich, Germany (2010), and Artpace, San Antonio, Texas (2010). Her work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Ecstatic Resistance, X Initiative, New York, New York (2009-10); Sonic Episodes: An Evening of Audio Works, Dia Art Foundation at the Hispanic Society, New York, New York (2009); 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); and Unmonumental Audio at the New Museum, New York (2008). She is the editor of Work the Room, A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006), from 2005-2008 was a member of the queer feminist collective LTTR, and currently serves as faculty for Vermont College of Fine Arts’ low-residency MFA in Visual Arts program. http://um.encore.at/

Caitlin Rueter is a Canadian-born artist living in New York City. Rueter is an interdisciplinary artist whose work draws on historical texts and artifacts. A Feminist Tea Party, with her collaborator Suzanne Stroebe, is a performance and participatory project that has been ongoing since early 2010. Rueter and Stroebe have brought their project Winkleman Gallery, the 2011 CAA Conference with the Women’s Caucus for Art, exhibited their project in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time at Pomona College Museum of Art in 2011. Rueter had a solo exhibition at bildkultur gallerie in Stuttgart, Germany in 2011 and is represented by O’Born Contemporary in Toronto. Her work has been reviewed in The Huffington Post, Stuttgarter Zeitung, and Bitch Magazine, among other publications. Together with Suzanne Stroebe, her writing has been published in M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online and NYFA Current. http://www.caitlinrueter.com/

Suzanne Stroebe is is an interdisciplinary artist; her practice encompasses drawing, sculpture, installation and performance. . She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2009. A Feminist Tea Party, with her collaborator Caitlin Rueter, is a performance and participatory project that has been ongoing since early 2010. She was awarded the Ellen Hoffman Memorial Fellowship at SOHO20 Gallery in Chelsea, where she will have a solo exhibition in early 2013. Her work has been written about in The Huffington Post, ArtInfo, Art Critical, and Bitch Magazine among other publications. http://www.suzannestroebe.com/

Mira Schor is a painter and writer living in New York City. In both painting and writing, Schor’s areas of interest include the gendered production of art history, the analysis and praxis of painting in contemporary culture, and the relationship between political and conceptual concerns with the materiality of expression. Schor is represented by CB1 Gallery in LA and Marvelli Gallery in New York where her exhibition of recent paintings, Mira Schor: “Voice” and “Speech,” opens March 29 and will be on view through April 2012. She has collaborated with Susan Bee on the artist’s journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G since 1986. Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack of Tworkov. She is Associate Teaching Professor in Fine Arts MFA at Parsons School of Design. http://www.miraschor.com

Celebrating their “seven year itch,” the dogmatic duo Chan & Mann decided not to stray but to stay together.  Their collaboration blossomed as roommates in the condominium community of Sienna Villas.  Like sponges, they absorbed the critical discourse of their turbulent times and learned how to wring out their ids in front of large crowds.  Are you ready to help them mop ids up?

Inspired by their suburban upbringings, multi-cultural education, and ‘90s issue-based pop culture they sought to create a new way of making conceptual art.  Together, they enter one side of a problem and emerge from the other side of a different problem.

Chan & Mann are not waiting for the dust to settle on their grocery bags full of old props.  They are ready to historicize now.  This might be your one opportunity to see this work in-person; feel the lush fur of an authentic squirrel chapeau, savor the delightful crunch of a misfortune cookie, name that which can’t be named: it is called Licorice.

Opening reception: March 30, 2012, 8-11pm
Exhibition dates: March 30-April 19, 2012

Elephant Art Space
3325 Division Street
Los Angeles, CA 90065
http://elephantartspace.blogspot.com/

This year’s Feminist Art Project day of panels organized by artists Audrey Chan and Elana Mann gauges the present and future of feminist artistic thought and practice. What are the stakes—and who are the stakeholders—of the feminist future? The day’s conversations will reflect the greater inclusivity of a contemporary feminist art that embraces a multiplicity of identities and philosophies.

Topics of discussion will include: feminist art educational models, the roles of men in feminist art, interventionist art strategies, radical queer art making, and feminism as a daily humanist practice. These panels will build upon a tradition of feminism in Los Angeles through new readings and modes of engagement with this vital movement. Speakers will share their perspectives as artists, educators, curators, art historians, filmmakers and writers who are invested in the feminist future.

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited. For more information and a full schedule of the day’s discussions, please visit: http://sharesandstakeholders.com.

Saturday, February 25, 2012
9am-5pm
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

The Feminist Art Project is an international collaborative initiative celebrating the aesthetic, intellectual and political impact of women on the visual arts, art history and art practice, past and present. The project promotes diverse feminist art events, education and publications through its website and online calendar; and facilitates networking and regional program development throughout the world.

Nancy Buchanan, National Mortality Consciousness Day, 1982, image and text. Published in Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2, Issue 14.

Nancy Buchanan is a key figure of the performance art scene and of the feminist art movement that emerged in Southern California during the 1970s. Her works have often positioned the audience as participants in a wider conversation on the gendered and defamilarised body, the perils of commercialised spectatorship and consequences of the increasing militarisation in contemporary society. There is an ethical core to Buchanan’s artistic practice, grounded in the observation of lived history. At the same time, a disarming element of ‘serious play’ characterises many of her performances, installations and works in image and text.

Audrey Chan interviewed Nancy Buchanan at her home and studio in the Mount Washington neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Here, the artist maps her trajectory in her own words, beginning with her education in the progressive and influential art programme at University of California-Irvine, alongside a selection of artworks from the past forty years.

Buchanan’s works are currently featured in the ‘Pacific Standard Time’ exhibitions: ‘Under the Big Black Sun’ at LA MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary (through February 13th 2012), ‘Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971’ at the Laguna Art Museum (through 22nd January 2012), and ‘L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy’ at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (22 January–20 May 2012). She is co-curator with Kathy Rae Huffman of ‘Exchange and Evolution: Worldwide Video Long Beach 1974-1999’ at the Long Beach Museum of Art (through 12 February 2012). ‘Pacific Standard Time’ is the Getty Foundation’s unprecedented initiative to present Los Angeles art made during the formative post-War period of 1945-1980 in an expansive series of exhibitions across Southern California.

–Audrey Chan

Read the full interview with Nancy Buchanan in Afterall Online: http://afterall.org/online/nancy-buchanan/

Car Hood, Judy Chicago, 1964. Sprayed acrylic lacquer on Corvair car hood, 42 15/16 x 49 3/16 x 4 5/16 in. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Acquired 2007 with means from The Second Museum of our Wishes. © Judy Chicago, 1964. Photo © Donald Woodman

In 1964, while a student in UCLA’s graduate program in painting and sculpture, artist Judy Chicago enrolled in auto-body school—the only woman in a class of 250 men. They were all there to learn how to custom-paint cars with candy-colored lacquer finishes and pinstriped detail work, hallmarks of the hot-rod car culture of Southern California in the 1960s.

Chicago’s Car Hood, featured in the exhibition Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970, was her final project: an early ‘60s Chevrolet Corvair car hood sprayed with glossy acrylic lacquer. In her 1977 memoir, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, she described the gendered symbolism of Car Hood: “the vaginal form, penetrated by a phallic arrow, was mounted on the ‘masculine’ hood of a car, a very clear symbol of my state of mind at the time.”

–Audrey Chan

Read more on the Getty Iris Blog: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/question-of-the-week-is-it-still-a-mans-world/

SATURDAY JANUARY 21, 2012
6 PM

RE-CREATING FEMINISM: Performance and Politics 1977/2012
A lively discussion between artists Audrey Chan, Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Mecca Vazie Andrews, Nancy Buchanan, and Alexandra Grant exploring connections between the current interest in performance re-creation and its relationship to feminism past and present.

LA Art Show, Booth K340, West Hall A, LA Convention Center
http://laartshow.com/pages/symposia_series.html

Myths of Rape (1977/2012)

LA Art Show Opening Night Premiere Party

A special LA ART SHOW opening night performance by Elana Mann and Audrey Chan, working with Leslie Labowitz-Starus and Suzanne Lacy, re-creates a 1977 performance by Labowitz-Starus, originally performed as part of Three Weeks in May. Performers re-enact a compelling tableaux, typical of 1970s street demonstrations, exploring past and current forms of activism.

Ticketed Event

6-9pm

Los Angeles Convention Center

1201 S Figueroa St. LA, CA 90015

www.laartshow.com

PRESS RELEASE

Three Weeks in January: End Rape in Los Angeles
12 January - 1 February 2012
A project by Suzanne Lacy as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival
threeweeksinjanuary.org

Thursday December 8, 2011
8 pm – 10 pm
at
Human Resources
410 Cottage Home St
in Chinatown, Los Angeles 90012

Inspired by the Artist’s Project in our new winter issue, the editors of X-TRA invite you to join us for a reading of artworks that exist only in written, immaterial form. The evening’s readings will be a mix of historical and contemporary works: outlined ideas and proposals for imagined objects, images, events, or exhibitions that remain text only – scripts, descriptions or proposals that could never be or intentionally have never been realized in other forms.

Participants:
Stephen Berens, Audrey Chan, Leslie Dick, Karen Dunbar, Rita Gonzalez, Micol Hebron, Julian Hoeber, Shana Lutker, Emily Mast, Anna Mayer and Jemima Wyman, Joseph Mosconi, Aram Moshayedi, Kris Paulsen, Elizabeth Pulsinelli, Kim Schoen, Nizan Shaked, Damon Willick and others.

Some of the readings:
Edward Kienholz’s Concept Tableau, Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy, Leslie Dick’s RULES FOR DREAMING, Chris Burden’s The Moon Piece, Tom Marioni’s Predictions ‘78, Harold Gregor’s Everyman’s Infinite Art.

About the Artist’s Project:
The new issue of X-TRA features a reproduction of Harold Gregor’s 1966 project, Everyman’s Infinite Art.

Everyman’s Infinite Art contained thirteen works that were meant to minimize the functions of the gallery, artist, and critic while challenging the prevailing assumptions of what works of art entailed. The gallery, in fact, was closed for the two weeks that the exhibition took place, thus making its catalog with its written descriptions of the art the art itself. In this issue of X-TRA, we present a reprint of the catalog along with an interview with Gregor by Damon Willick and an essay by Lane Relyea. Learn more about the project here: http://x-traonline.org/artproj.php