CalArts Magazine #13

The Magazine of California Institute of the Arts | Winter 2013

The Magazine of California Institute of the Arts | Winter 2013

Letter From the President As I write this letter in the first week of January, 30 students have arrived at CalArts from Hongik and Kookmin universities in Korea for a four-week intensive in motion graphics. During this time, each will create an independent project, from concept through completion; each will be challenged to draw on his or her own experience and imagination and will get a first taste of the CalArtian approach to creativity and critical thinking.

At a moment when many American products can be manufactured more cheaply abroad, our preeminence in the arts and entertainment remains highly prized. At CalArts, we are seeing a steep rise in applications from talented students from around the world. While the largest numbers are coming from China and Korea, we’re seeing growth in virtually every other region as well. A cross-section of these students are profiled in this issue of CalArts magazine. I’m struck by how closely their aspirations parallel those of our American students, that they, too, are hungry for the mentorship and interdisciplinary possibilities that are the hallmarks of a CalArts education.

Equally striking for me in this issue is the extent to which a growing internationalism is woven into everything we are doing at CalArts—whether it is the appointment of British artist and scholar Amanda Beech as the new dean of Critical Studies (who is already bringing fresh thinking about how we integrate a diversity of backgrounds into our general education courses) or the celebration of Steve Anker’s decade as dean of the School of Film/Video. During this time, not only has the student body in all four of the school’s programs become much more diverse domestically and internationally, but Steve has also worked to build international opportunities for current students, faculty and alumni. Many students have received significant recognition in film festivals around the world. This internationalism is also increasingly apparent in the selection of new trustees—all three profiled in this issue bring rich international backgrounds to the board’s deliberations.

I look forward to bringing you news of further international developments in the months ahead, particularly as we explore in our forward planning what CalArts may look like in 2030.

With my best wishes for a happy and creative 2013, steven d. lavine President, CalArts

CalArts is published twice each year by the CalArts Office of Advancement.

California Institute of the Arts Steven D. Lavine, President Bianca Roberts, Vice President, Advancement Editorial: Stuart I. Frolick and Freddie Sharmini Design: Joseph Prichard (Art mfa 08) Type in this issue includes: Roletta Sans, Roletta Serif and Wedding Sans

by Andrea Tinnes (Art mfa 98), Black-Out Stencil

by Eli Carrico (Art mfa 05), and Laika and cia by Jens Gehlhaar (Art mfa 97) Photography: Scott Groller and Steven A. Gunther Telephone: (661) 255-1050 E-mail: publicaffairs@calarts.edu

THIS PAGE Heather Hewko (left), as Prospero, and Cynthia Callejas, as Ariel, appeared in the School of Theater’s “deconstructed” production of The Tempest at the Walt Disney Modular Theater in November. In third-year mfa director Deena Selenow’s engaging version of Shakespeare’s classic, “horror breeds humility as gender roles are questioned and the power of magic is tested.” Scene design by Drew Foster, costumes by David Moyer, lighting

by Jonathan Lebovic, and technical direction by Christopher Pheiffer.

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Winter 2013

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FROM RIGHT CalArts Weekend featured classic l.a. food trucks, class visits, and an outdoor concert of orchestral rock at The Wild Beast.

Parents Convene for Second Annual CalArts Weekend Following the success of the inaugural CalArts Weekend in 2011, some 200 parents of current students arrived at the Institute in October for the second edition of the now-annual gathering.

Designed for parents to experience firsthand the rich and eclectic creative environment on campus—to see how CalArts works—the twoday program was loaded with classroom and studio visits, live performances, screenings, workshops, demonstrations, panel discussions, receptions and conversations with the Institute’s leadership.

“Attending CalArts Weekend is the closest thing to actually being a student there,” said Anne Rockhold, the mother of third-year undergrad Catherine Rockhold of the School of Art’s Program in Photography and Media. “You get to experience a wide range of classes and activities, meet the president and faculty in a relaxed and informal atmosphere, and, most importantly, meet other parents who have discovered that their children are amazing artists.”

“One of the benefits of CalArts Weekend for our faculty and staff is to be able to get to know, in person, the families of the students we serve,” said Bianca Roberts, vice president and chief advancement officer. “These families have made a significant commitment to the education of their children and they inspire us, as an institution, to deliver the best possible educational experience for our young artists.”

The proceedings began on Friday, October 19, with an outdoor luncheon and continued with an afternoon schedule of visiting classes and studios throughout the campus. Following a Parents Circle wine reception—hosted by the supporters group’s co-chairs Diane Arklin and Marta Kauffman—and dinner, there was the evening’s

entertainment lineup: a screening of the previous year’s top narrative films, a dance concert curated by students, and a production of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life.

Saturday’s daytime lineup consisted of a series of workshops introducing parents to specific topics across the arts, plus a screening of animated films by students in the world-famous Program in Character Animation. Other highlights included a q&a session with CalArts President Steven D. Lavine, who spoke, in particular, about how graduating artists can mount sustainable careers; a roundtable with faculty and students that gave visitors a back-stage glimpse into developing a new deconstructed production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and a moderated panel discussion, “Life After CalArts,” in which three alumni— musicmaker and educator Melissa Alcazar (Music mfa 11), Disney creative director Michael Jung (Theater mfa 94) and choreographer Pam Gonzales (Dance bfa 09)—shared their professional experiences and discussed the opportunities and challenges facing young artists today.

CalArts Weekend culminated on a festive, raucous note, as parents, students and faculty lined up for tastes of l.a.’s famous food truck culture before an outdoor concert of orchestral rock.

Presented as part of the yearlong Wild Beast Concert Series, the program featured the CalArts Orchestra, the indie trio Derde Verde—all three CalArts alums—and the legendary krautrock group Faust, whose free-spirited, Dada-inspired performance included the use of a chainsaw and a cement mixer.

Now we know all future CalArts Weekends will have to, by tradition, involve a cement mixer.

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FROM LEFT Atau Tanaka, chair of digital media at Newcastle University, performs on an iPhone.

Chris Kallmyer during a Machine Project Public Engagement Residency at the Hammer Museum, 2010–11.

tedx Comes to CalArts The CalArts Center for New Performance (cnp) is hosting a daylong conference called “tedx­ CalArts: Performance, Body & Presence,” an independently organized, officially licensed spinoff of the Technology Entertainment Design (ted) Conference—the famously forward-looking nonprofit that champions “ideas worth spreading.”

courtesy of machine project.

courtesy of the artist. photo by carine le malet.

Theater- and gallerygoers flock to redcat.

Leslie Tamaribuchi of the School of Theater and the cnp, where she is the director of research and strategy. “We hope to create an artistically and intellectually polyglot forum to deepen our understanding of the agency of performance in the world.”

— Leslie Tamaribuchi, director of research and strategy, cnp

The tedx program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue and connections through ted-like experiences at the local level. The central ted Conference provides general guidance for each event, as well a license, but the content of tedx presentations is organized independently.

Following the celebrated ted format, each tedx confab features a diverse lineup of 18-minute talks, demonstrations, performances, and pre­ recorded tedTalk videos. By design, the overall program is multidisciplinary, as speakers representing different fields and areas of specialty address a variety of topics in order to “foster learning, inspiration and wonder—and to provoke conversations that matter,” according to ted.

Slated for the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (redcat) on March 9, this tedx event will “bring together innovative thinkers and doers from across the performance landscape to explore how new understandings of performance as an ‘expanded field’ are changing our experience of art, technology, culture and politics,” says

Tamaribuchi says tedxCalArts will feature a broad spectrum of speakers extending into the fields of art, design, sound, science, athletics, academics and activism. Presenters will include Nigerianborn, Amsterdam-based architect Kunlé Adeyami, Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist, composer, sound artist and curator Chris Kallmyer

“CalArts graduates are using performance in a variety of areas that go beyond conventional theater—from social practice to participatory media, from community organizing to immersive environments.”

(Music mfa 09), Canadian cultural theorist, political philosopher, artist and dancer Erin Manning, Montreal-based post-structuralist theorist, radical empiricist and translator Brian Massumi, and Tokyo-born digital media artist and experimental musicmaker Atau Tanaka, now based in Newcastle, England.

“Our thematic interest,” Tamaribuchi explains, “grew out of the fact that many CalArts graduates are using performance in a variety of areas that go beyond conventional theater—from social practice to participatory media, from community organizing to immersive environments.”

More than 30 students representing all six CalArts schools are involved in organizing tedxCalArts, adds Tamaribuchi, who is joined by fellow theater faculty Shannon Scrofano (Theater mfa 06) and Chi-wang Yang (Theater–Integrated Media mfa 07) in leading this effort. tedxCalArts is made possible though an A-ha!

Think It, Do It grant, funded by MetLife and administered by Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for professional notfor-profit American theater.

For more information, see tedxcalarts.org.

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Institute Welcomes New Trustees RODRIGO GARCÍA Rodrigo García is an award-winning writer, director, producer and cinematographer working in feature films, television, and online media.

Born in Bogota, Colombia, and raised in Mexico City, he is the son of iconic novelist Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967).

García, who has taught workshops in CalArts’ Film Directing Program, is known for his deft touch with women characters. He recently helm­ed Albert Nobbs (2011), starring Glenn Close and Janet McTeer, who both earned Oscar nominations. Other films include Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (1999), which received the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes, and Nine Lives (2005). The Los Angeles resident garnered an Emmy nom for directing the pilot of hbo’s Big Love, and was the showrunner of the half-hour drama In Treatment, also on hbo. Among his other directing credits are Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. García is also vice president of the Board of Directors of Film Independent.

“I really admire CalArts, and I’ve always been impressed with the level of insight of the students when I have taught there,” says García, who holds a ba from Harvard and an ma from afi.

“As trustee, it’ll be fascinating to participate in the way major art schools will, in my opinion, have to redefine themselves, now that the concept of discreet artistic disciplines is blurring. So much art is interdisciplinary—how do we help form those artists?”

Upon joining the board, García established an annual scholarship in honor of his parents. The Mercedes and Gabriel García Márquez Scholarship will support talented CalArts undergraduates of Latino heritage. García is making this gift with his brother, graphic designer and artist Gonzalo García.

JILL KRAUS A native of Wyncote, Pennsylvania, Jill Kraus earned a bfa degree from Carnegie Mellon University, and an mfa from the Rhode Island School of Design (risd). Over the course of her 20-year career she worked as designer and design director for companies such as Monet, Swank and Marvella. Kraus lived and worked in Japan for a number of years, consulting with American companies that manufactured products there. Upon her return to the United States she was vice president–design for Swarovski and director of design at Avon Products.

Kraus’ son Jason is a 2008 graduate of CalArts’ School of Art. “My son had an extraordinary education at CalArts,” says Kraus. “Its emphasis on the conceptual framework for contemporary arts practice makes it a unique educational environment.” Of her recent election to CalArts’ Board of Trustees, she says, “I’m excited to be on the governing board that will help define how CalArts continues to move into the 21st century.” Kraus’ other board affiliations include The Museum of Modern Art (moma), where she serves on the Executive Committee and chairs the Media and Performance Committee. Kraus was recently elected board chair of Public Art Fund, and she serves on the boards of the New Museum and the Worldstudio Foundation, which awards scholarships to minority students and socially responsible artists. For more than a decade, Kraus served on the Carnegie Mellon University board, where she chaired the Advancement Committee.

MICHAEL NOCK Chairman and managing director of Michael Nock & Associates—a Hong Kong-based company he established in 2009—Michael Nock was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. While always interested in the arts, he earned a Bachelor of Commerce Degree in Accounting and Finance at the University of New South Wales, and began his career as a stockbroker and financial analyst. In an unusual interlude, in 1990, Nock decided to pursue his passion for the arts, and he and his wife moved to Los Angeles. He spent the next five years earning bfa and mfa degrees from CalArts’ Program in Experimental Animation, under the mentorship of program founder Jules Engel, who became a close personal friend. “I loved the school from day one,” says Nock. “The campus was wonderful. However, during my time at CalArts an earthquake damaged the building so badly that we required temporary premises while repairs were made. Not only was CalArts very organized and resourceful, but the whole event became something of an adventure.” Nock managed to start three companies while studying at CalArts, and following graduation, moved back to Hong Kong and returned to finance as an asset manager. He later established the Doric Group of companies, which advised and managed a number of funds. While maintaining a presence in asset management, Nock now devotes most of his time to philanthropy and the arts—and still paints two days a week.

ABOVE FROM LEFT CalArts’ newest trustees are writer-director Rodrigo García, design director Jill Kraus, and investment advisor, philanthropist and artist Michael Nock.

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Making its Debut, the n2n Digital Classroom Prompts Collaborative Learning Last spring CalArts received a $112,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (nsf) to develop and implement an arts-oriented curriculum for teaching essential computer science skills to undergraduate students with little or no background in programming. Put into action in the fall with a two-semester-long class called “Introduction to Programming for Digital Artists,” the teaching of this curriculum has now been augmented with the design of an interactive classroom configuration that allows for a new form of collaborative learning.

The programming-for-artists curriculum was created by Ajay Kapur, director of CalArts’ Program in Music Technology and now associate dean of Research and Development in Digital Arts, and visiting lecturer Perry Cook, founder of the Princeton University Sound Lab. This curriculum could also serve as a model for delivering stem (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses to non-science majors at other institutions. The new “n2n,” or “many-tomany,” classroom setup was devised by Kapur and Ge Wang, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

TOP Ajay Kapur (center), director of the Program in Music Technology and associate dean of Research and Development in Digital Arts, and Stanford’s Ge Wang (pictured on the Sony hd display) in CalArts’ new “n2n,” or “many-to-many,” digital classroom.

“As artists are increasingly using technological tools, it is essential for arts institutions to provide students with the necessary technology skills with which to generate new ideas and realize new artistic approaches,” says President Steven D. Lavine. “At CalArts, we prepare students for success in today’s creative economy, and this means guiding their artistic development while also offering them a sophisticated technology curriculum that is tailored specifically to their needs as artists.”

Taught by Kapur, the Introduction to Programming class is open to students in all of the Institute’s six schools. Relying on real-time, opensource programming languages ChucK and Processing, the course is structured to allow students to immediately apply their newly acquired know-how to digital arts practice. “Every assignment is an artmaking assignment,” Kapur points out. “We are teaching computer science principles through the arts, and with each creative project, students build on a growing repertoire of technical skills.”

Even more novel is the n2n digital classroom design by Kapur and Stanford’s Ge Wang, the first-of-its-kind at any school. It promises to usher in a new paradigm for learning. Current media education courses are taught using a “one-to-many” approach, wherein the instructor lectures or otherwise engages with students who, in turn, each work separately on their laptops, isolated from the rest of the class. In the n2n configuration, student workstations are outfitted with a laptop, hemispherical speakers, and a large-scale digital display that shows the

same information contained on each student’s laptop screen. This arrangement gives every student immediate access to the work being done by everyone else in the class. “If, for example, a student is writing code to program a robotic instrument, then all other students in the classroom are able to learn from the decisions made through­out the creative process,” explains Kapur.

“Or if the students are working on a collaborative project—for example, writing code for a laptop orchestra—this set-up allows for a dynamic and shared creative process.”

“It is essential for arts institutions to provide students with the necessary technology skills with which to generate new ideas and realize new artistic approaches.”

— Steven D. Lavine, President, CalArts Kapur elaborates further: “By enabling students to actively engage with potentially all other students at every stage of learning , and by developing a dedicated curriculum for the n2n classroom, learning processes will be not only enriched and accelerated, but fundamentally transformed.”

Thanks to the good offices of Trustee Jamie Alter Lynton and Janice Pober, senior vice president of Corporate Social Responsibility at Sony, the Institute was able to acquire, via donation and sharply discounted purchase, the large Sony hd displays used in the n2n classroom.

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT Chuck Jones drawing a frame with Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. © Warner Bros. ©cje

From left, Chuck Jones’ daughter Linda Jones Clough, John Lasseter, Jones’ wife Marian, and President Steven D. Lavine.

Celebrated Disney costume designer and Chouinard alumna Alice Davis with Disney-Pixar’s John Lasseter.

image courtesy of chuck jones center for creativity.

CalArts Celebrates the Centenary of Chuck Jones

In a special screening organized by the Office of Alumni Relations at redcat on September 26, members of the CalArts community and assembled guests feted the 100th birthday of Chuck Jones (1912–2002)—the legendary animation director and one of the most illustrious alumni of the Chouinard Art Institute, a predecessor of CalArts.

Another storied alumnus, John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, was on hand to present a program of five favorite Chuck Jones cartoons he had selected for the occasion. Following a short introduction by President Steven D. Lavine, Lasseter (Film/Video bfa 79) spoke about Jones’ place in the history of animated film, his enduring appeal to audiences today, and the artistic significance of each film in the lineup: Rabbit of Seville (1950), Mouse Wreckers (1948), Zoom and Bored (1957), Feed the Kitty (1952), and Rabbit Seasoning (1952).

Also attending as special guests were members of the Jones family: his wife Marian, his daughter Linda Jones Clough, and grandsons Craig and Todd Kausen.

Lasseter—the two-time Academy Awardwinning director of Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and Cars, and executive producer of countless Disney-Pixar titles—has been a longtime admirer of the Chouinardian’s genius. “Jones’ comic timing is the best it’s ever been in cinema,” Lasseter said in a 2011 interview with The New York Times.

“I still watch his cartoons today, and they’re just as funny as ever.”

In a career spanning more than six decades, Chuck Jones created 300 animated films, collecting three Academy Awards as director and an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He helped bring to life many of Warner Bros.’ most famous characters—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig—and personally created Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Marvin Martian, Pepe le Pew and Michigan J. Frog. In 1992, his Bugs Bunny–Elmer Fudd classic What’s Opera, Doc? was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Jones, who graduated from Chouinard in 1930 and much later served as a CalArts trustee, gave a 1997 interview to Animation World Magazine in which he dispensed valuable advice to the next generation of talent entering the animation industry. “I think you’ll find that at any studio, they don’t want you to draw Bugs Bunny,” Jones said. “They want you to be able to draw the human figure. If you look back through the history of art, all the way back to cave paintings, you’ll notice that the great painters always were able to paint with a simple line, just like we do in animation. The main thing is to learn how to do it, and then have something to say with your skills.

Any writer will tell you that it doesn’t do any good to write if you don’t have something to say.”

Proceeds from the screening were donated to the Joe Ranft/CalArts Alumni Scholarship— established in memory of beloved Pixar story artist and voice actor Joe Ranft (1960–2005, Film/Video 80)—and the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity.

photo by robert pittman.

courtesy of the asher trust. photo by giorgio colombo.

Š kunsthalle bern, switzerland.

courtesy of the santa monica museum of art. photo by grant mudford.

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Winter 2013

Michael Asher

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Michael Asher (1943–2012)

A standard-bearer for a practice that became known as Institutional Critique, “Michael devoted his work to exploring the limits of the galleries and schools and museums that give context and space for art, poking at all sorts of barriers and shibboleths with a humor that was sometimes sly, sometimes hilarious,” said Thomas Lawson, dean of the School of Art. Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote in 2008 that Asher “took the fear factor out of Institutional Critique” in works that had a “strong pleasure component and a fierce, efficient clarity, whether conceptual or experiential.”

“Teaching was a direct extension of Michael’s work, or vice versa,” Lawson noted, “since both were based on a rigorous investigative approach.” Asher joined the School of Art faculty in 1973, and successive generations of his students vividly remember him as a generous, astute and witty teacher who set the tone for the school’s discourse on contemporary art. His legendary marathon Post-Studio crit classes ran for some 12 hours at a time, deep into the night.

“For Post-Studio, we took the clock out of the equation and forgot about time,” Asher had famously said. “There is never enough time to get everything said, and I want the students to listen to themselves rather than to me.”

Artist Catherine Opie (mfa 88) has started a scholarship fund in Asher’s name to honor his immense legacy at the Institute. “I approached CalArts about establishing the Michael Asher Memorial Scholarship to support future students because of his incredible impact, both as an artist and as a teacher, upon generations,” Opie said. “Michael’s dedication and his approach to critique brought so much to CalArts.”

Asher’s 2008 exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art was an architectural maze that consisted of all the temporary walls (minus the sheet rock) used in the museum’s previous 44 exhibition displays. Two years later, at the Whitney Biennial, he won the Bucksbaum Award for a contribution that was characteristic in its deceptive simplicity: he called on the museum to stay open 24/7 for an entire week during the run of the biennial. (The Whitney only managed three days.)

Asher presented his work at dOCUMENTA, the Venice Biennale, and Skulptur Projekte Münster, and he was the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lacma), and The Art Institute of Chicago. His work was featured in major surveys at The Museum of Contemporary Art, lacma and moma, among many others.

The School of Art held a memorial service for Asher on December 7. Some 250 friends, colleagues and former students attended, and two dozen contributors offered remembrances. The service was live-streamed and drew viewers in Europe, New York, and a number of other states.

A recurrent theme touched on by several of the speakers was the hearty, heartfelt, inimitable quality of Asher’s laughter. As Thomas Lawson observed, “That laughter was everything. It explains everything.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Michael Asher, January 26– April 12, 2008. Installation view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Metal and wood studs used to recreate all temporary walls for 44 exhibitions presented previously at the museum.

Architectural floor plans for the exhibitions were displayed in an adjoining project room.

Asher graduates from uc Irvine with a bfa in 1966.

The revered artist and teacher in 2008.

Galleria Toselli, Milan, Italy, September 13–October 8, 1973.

Installation view, looking west, at Galleria Toselli. Sandblasted walls and ceiling to reveal the underlying brown plaster.

The fluorescent lights were illuminated for the purpose of photograph only.

Kunsthalle Bern, 1992, relocated radiator heating system, tubular conduits. Installation view.

by freddie sharmini

The CalArts community lost one of its most beloved and influential educators, and the art world a towering pioneer of the Conceptual Art movement, when Michael Asher passed away in his sleep on October 15 following a long illness.

Asher came of age in the late 1960s along with artists like Marcel Broodthaers, Lawrence Weiner and Dan Graham. In one early 1970 “intervention” at Pomona College, he physically removed the doors of a gallery, exposing the interior to the elements outside and leaving the space open to the public around the clock. (He reprised this work in 2011 as part of Pacific Standard Time.) In 1974, at the Claire Copley Gallery in l.a., he knocked down the wall separating the exhibition space from the gallery’s offices, defying the symbolic and functional separation between the two rooms. Asher undertook a much more elaborate “displacement of givens” in 1992 at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, where he removed the radiators from the museum’s exhibition spaces and reassembled them, in working order, in its entryway gallery. Another well-known 1999 work was simply a booklet that listed every art object that had ever been “de-accessioned” by The Museum of Modern Art (moma).

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by stuart i. frolick

Reimagining the Role of Critical Studies

AMA NDA BEE CH

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Artist, writer, curator and educator Amanda Beech joined CalArts in the summer of 2012, assuming leadership of the School of Critical Studies.

“Amanda is ideally suited for the position of dean,” says Provost Jeannene M. Przyblyski. “She brings fresh thinking, administrative verve and a wide-ranging critical interest in the arts to the position. As an artist and scholar, her intellectual investment in researchbased practices is a terrific complement to CalArts’ culture of experimentation and innovation.” Last November CalArts magazine sat down with Dr. Beech to discuss her early impressions of CalArts, the many issues surrounding an Institute-wide re-evaluation of the Critical Studies curriculum and the school’s unique relationship to the faculty and students of CalArts’ other five schools.

CalArts: Please tell us a bit about your background.

Amanda Beech: I am originally from Cheshire, which is in the northwest of England. My undergraduate degree was in Fine Art, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. After taking some time out, I then studied ma Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London and returned there later to study a PhD in Fine Art. CA: What kind of work were you making at that time?

AB: I made painting for a long time, but I also moved towards installation, sculpture, and then video with installation. So, by the time I graduated I was making what we might call expanded painting, as I still considered my work to be engaged with image-making and the qualities of representation. The work was made up of installed environments with video and sculpture.

After that I decided to take what turned out to be a short time out of education, and I visited and made new work at the University of Western Sydney in Australia.

Then I returned to the uk and continued with my practice, but also began to develop event-based curatorial events. So in that sense, already, my practice was becoming more diversified because I was starting to curate and see how curating and art production were linked in various ways.

CA: Did your work at that time already have a political component?

AB: Yes, from the time of my ba my work was always very much interested in power, force and the image… the potential for an image to have power. So, one of my key interests throughout my undergraduate degree was totalitarian art and how this took place in societies. At one point in our history it was the biggest artistic movement on the planet, and yet we have always struggled to understand it from a liberal-critical perspective to be part of our history of image-making. I wanted to try and think why people wouldn’t qualify it as “art” and how this reflects our tendency to associate art with a moral good. These basic questions opened up a whole series of issues regarding the way in which we identify the value of art, socially, politically and economically.

In particular, as a student, I was trying to deal with the apparent contradiction or problem that the images we gather around that represent our community have a certain force. For example, the Statue of Liberty is a monument to freedom—a forceful representation of how we should think of freedom—so it unites us in a particular way, but in a forceful, rhetorical sense. Thinking through the relation between image and force allows us to question how images like this constrain us to freedom as our guiding and principal discourse in politics.

What other kinds of discourses are there and could there be? In many ways, I think art is constraining and forceful and we still struggle to accept that. These kinds of questions were there for me from the start and they still have a part to play in my current writing and practice.

CA: How did you first become aware of CalArts?

AB: I’ve always known about CalArts; it’s been embedded in my cultural consciousness since I was a student.

It’s just always been part of the cultural territory for me.

CA: How so? What did you know about it?

AB: Faculty, mainly—Michael Asher would have been a huge influence on anyone working in the arts, before and after my era as a student. Other members of faculty too, but Institutional Critique was hugely consequential in Europe, and Conceptual Art seemed to be at a point at which the national divides between Europe and America had broken down. Through Conceptual Art,

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there were a whole series of exhibitions that were curated that didn’t pay much attention to those borders.

In that sense, the idea of CalArts also came with it.

CA: How do you see the role of Critical Studies in the setting of an arts college?

AB: The role of Critical Studies is to produce what we call a “self-reflexive practice.” This means that students can understand the tools they work with, the global contexts in which they operate, and that their work is thoughtful, creative and ambitious. When we’re teaching, our task is to produce identities—to enable students to achieve independence in making and thinking. If students arrive and they are unsure of what they want, and what really defines their interests, that’s fine, and often it’s expected. Our role is to support students on a path towards understanding what defines their practice as distinctive and special. The work of Critical Studies is central to this process because it is here that we produce a culture of questioning: a culture of critique.

In fact, this includes the question of what critique is in itself. Critical Studies also offers a very valuable space in which students can be open to new forms of knowledge and a place to encounter images, forms and ideas that students at first might not think as being so relevant to their practice, but then through this space, they find these apparently peripheral discourses actually could be central to their work. Without these new encounters, this culture of live discussion and critique, and these moments of reflection, one risks being left in a vacuum. Critical Studies allows that ability for students to start making sense of themselves and their practices here and in the world.

CA: What was your mandate for the position of dean?

AB: During the interview process it seemed quite clear that there was a real drive, and a strong sense of commitment, to productive change. It wasn’t just about Critical Studies; it was about the Institute. This is the idea that, through a common strategic planning exercise, all of us would start to think about what CalArts is and could be in the context of education in an evercomplex future. We wanted a chance to meet the demands of contemporary culture in all aspects. Specifically, I see my responsibility being to make sure that we are meeting standards of excellence at an international

level, not just a local or national one, and that we remain a world leader in producing radically creative students who can surprise the world out there. I am personally very committed to thinking through what we can offer that is highly competitive, in terms of its ability to produce ambitious, self-motivated, highquality graduates. When I was here for my interview, it was really clear that that’s what everybody else wanted too. I think that art schools, institutes, colleges and universities should be just as creative in pedagogy as we expect everyone to be in their research as artists or writers.

CA: How might change manifest itself in the School of Critical Studies?

AB: First, one has to review the territory and achieve familiarity with the histories we’re dealing with, and the nature of people’s ideals. A key aim of mine is to have Critical Studies become more integrated with the other schools. As a practice-based artist, writer and curator, I live through the relation between theory and practice. I think we all do to some extent. How does that manifest in a curriculum? How can we be creative with different modes of learning? And what learning outcomes do we want our students to achieve? These are all challenging questions. Once outcomes are redefined, what are the methods through which we can achieve them? They may not be standard methods. So, in reviewing all the schools and in meeting with faculty, we’ve done some reflecting. In the School of Critical Studies we have set up a curriculum development committee for both undergraduate and graduate levels. We’ve got working teams in those committees that are taking this on and drafting potential futures that will then be discussed as we move towards a developed curriculum launch in 2014. We’ll work closely with the other deans to produce a stronger sense of relevance to each student’s respective métier.

CA: It seems, though, that current students already find Critical Studies classes informative, enjoyable and relevant. Would you be more specific about how these classes may become even more so?

AB: That’s exactly it. The student experience is very positive. But what I think is missing is the availability of more informed choice-making on the part of

Amanda Beech

students that maps their degree programs towards graduation. At the moment, students have a lot of choice, which is a good thing, but what they have less of, I think, is a way in which to direct those choices towards particular goals. We’re developing more opportunities for minors in the future, so that students can declare a focus in areas of interest and towards possible career paths. If, for example, an art student wants to minor in curating, that should be an option that Critical Studies can produce. That’s a choice that supports students’ career goals, but also equips them with skills they’d use in their practice anyway. At the same time, they would be getting a clear knowledge of the histories of curating, the context of the key debates that are taking place—especially now, since curating has become a global phenomenon.

CA: I understand that you are also planning to address each student’s intellectual development in ways in which we haven’t before.

AB: Yes. We are re-examining our rubric to produce a very transparent description of learning outcomes at each level. Once we have that, it becomes a matter of how students can take classes that will enable achievement of those outcomes. It’s not about assessing what students don’t know, but, rather, to provide knowledge and help students reach a certain level in the skills of Critical Studies and making these accessible and clear to all. We’re also re-examining the First-Year Experience and discussing at an Institute level how we can deliver a new introduction for students to CalArts, to our unique interdisciplinary community, and to those first stages of contributing to our critical cultural society. I think we are really privileged in Critical Studies because we have all the students with us, and as such, by nature, we’re interdisciplinary.

CA: Let’s switch gears and talk about the two graduate programs.

AB: Well, I see two programs that are very distinctive but also share some common principles. The programs are the ma in Aesthetics and Politics and the mfa in Writing. The former concentrates on philosophicallyinspired theoretical writing on the arts and society and the mfa works with creative writers who produce novels, poetry and projects in the expanded field of writing that may encompass non-fiction, documentary and performance. Both of our programs are intensive and are committed to challenging our inherited “norms.”

Students leave with that rare potential to create new genres and to change the field in which they work.

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“I think that art schools, insti­ tutes, colleges and universities should be just as creative in pedagogy as we expect everyone to be in their research as artists or writers.”

— Amanda Beech Recognizing this creative approach to the programs was crucial and has led to the piloting of a graduate school lecture series in which visitors will speak across and beyond the relationships between creative and critical writing. We seek for this to act as the foundational space for a shared discursive space as well as the setting for new forms of production. This development goes hand-in-hand with the generation of a fuller research culture that would include the production of international conferences, visiting fellowships, and public symposia and readings. A lot of this work is already going on and at a very high level, but I think we can grow this work more effectively under one umbrella.

These are the grad school discussions that we are just beginning.

CA: How about the Aesthetics and Politics Program?

AB: Producing a stronger character to and more awareness of the graduate programs in Critical Studies is certainly key here. The existing work done by this program is of a startlingly high quality, with strong international conferences and high profile visitors who are attracted by the quality of the program and by the Institute. I would like to work with the team on developing this area as well as to take advantage of the existing resources we have across CalArts.

CA: Finally, what was your experience coming to CalArts from London?

AB: It’s a culture shift in some ways, more in terms of the city. Most of my time has been spent in art colleges, so the cultural shift is bigger in terms of lifestyle. That I spend a bit more time in the car now is noted, and the weather. I brought so many coats with me and I haven’t worn a single one yet [laughs]. Maybe they’ll just have to wait.

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Artistic Voices in Many Languages There were 35% more international students enrolled at the Institute in fall of 2012 than in the previous fall. Six artists from around the world tell us how and why they came from far and wide to pursue their dreams at CalArts.

by stuart i. frolick

Artistic Voices in Many Languages

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Newly minted alumnus Manuel Shvartzberg (Critical Studies ma 12) and current students Fernando Belo, Momo Wang, Asavari Kumar, Heisue Chung and Sally Maersk-Moeller.

Winter 2013

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Brazil

Korea

India

Denmark

Spain

China

A Korean violinist, a French dancer, a Nigerian graphic designer, a Greek performer-composer and a Russian actress were among the faces, new and returning to the CalArts campus, in fall of 2012. From 47 different countries, as far and wide as Vietnam, Kuwait, Uruguay and Kazakhstan, they come as undergraduates; they come as graduates; some, indeed, have already been working as professionals. All told, the international student population of 223 jumped by 35% from just a year ago. Why do these students choose to tangle with the bureaucratic red tape, language barriers, separation from home and family, and a range of cultural quirks to study here? Perhaps because, more than ever before, art is a human endeavor that connects people across cultures, and all serious students, especially in the arts, want to be at schools of their “first choice.” In learning about six of these emerging artists, one quickly notes that our international students are far more like than unlike their American counterparts. They come to CalArts for the same reasons; their hopes, dreams, career aspirations and extraordinary talents are exactly those of our American students. In fact, they are all CalArtian to the bone; they contribute immeasurably to the creative ferment and cultural cross-pollination out of which new artistic possibilities arise.

We asked five current international students and one who graduated last May to share some of the details of their paths to the Institute, and what they’ve discovered in their time here. These are their stories.

A — Belo in a School of Theater class exercise.

Artistic Voices in Many Languages

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A

Fernando Belo MFA Acting Program I came to CalArts directly from Brazil, where I was a professional actor. I had no contact with theater until after high school, where I sang in a rock band, and ended up in an amateur musical production. I went to business school for a year, took a year of philosophy, and then earned an undergraduate degree in marketing communication. Theater was just a hobby because I wasn’t sure that I could support myself as an actor. But my passion for the craft was growing and, fortunately, I began to get professional opportunities.

At CalArts I found an artistic environment that enables and encourages me to produce my own work. I love California, and I think because I am an actor and outgoing, it was easy making friends. My first two years I lived on campus; my suitemates were from China, Thailand, and the u.s.; they were musicians, artists…

There was some difficulty with the language—I couldn’t participate in a big conversation circle—because of the process of

CalArts creates an environment in which you can see your fellow actors and directors working. We are all very close. I often collaborate with the School of Dance. Watching the dancers, and learning how they think, has been important. So too has been going to the Thursday night gallery openings and seeing visual art like I’ve never seen in my life. It gets to a point that I no longer know where my references are coming from.

CalArts is such an avalanche of great and inspiring inputs.

In just two-and-a-half years, I’ve started a theater company—The Moving Art Collective— that, before I even graduated, traveled around the world with pieces that I produced and choreographed. That is something I couldn’t do in Brazil because of the way art is funded there. I have an artistic residency at ucla to do my own work, and, at the same time, I’m doing theater in l.a.—and still getting commercial work. My plan is to stay in l.a. if I can figure out the visa situation...

São Paulo, Brazil

There is a big musical theater scene in Brazil. I performed in American productions of Beauty and the Beast and My Fair Lady [both translated into Portuguese]; also many tv commercials, some film, and later in Brazilian soap operas. I was making a good living as an actor without any formal training. I was lucky to work with directors such as José Renato for three years—but my artistic development was not following my professional development. I couldn’t find a school in Brazil that I was interested in, and the directors I worked with suggested training here in America.

listening and translating. When I was ready to contribute, the subject was way past. It took six months before I could interact organically in English. I also had to adapt to American cultural references—either from childhood, or just the things people talk about—politics, the news, what’s on tv or sports. I still have no idea which are football teams and which are baseball!

Winter 2013

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HEISUE CHUNG

A

Seoul, South Korea

MFA Program in Photography and Media

I first heard about CalArts when I researched Chan-Kyong Park, a Korean artist whose work I admire very much. Park graduated from CalArts, where he was deeply influenced by Allan Sekula. I chose CalArts for my mfa because I wanted to study with Allan and in an environment that highly values cultural diversity.

missile attacks. Although technically it will be a South Korean naval base, due to South Korea’s Status of Forces Agreement with the United States, it is generally understood that it will be a proxy base for the u.s. Navy.

For my bfa I went to Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. However, I did not go there directly from Korea as I still had to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language (toefl). When I first arrived in the u.s. I studied at an English-as-a-second language institute for a few months and then enrolled at a community college, where I took toefl prep classes and courses that did not have language requirements such as art and math. After six months I scored well enough to be eligible for most u.s. universities, however listening to lectures in English and completing written assignments would continue to be difficult for many more semesters, and, to be honest, writing in English still presents many challenges for me.

I am working on a film, an exhibition of photographs and a book with both images and text. I often wonder, “How can I make my work universal? How can I make this project interesting to people who are not Korean?

How can I pose critical questions for viewers so that they engage with my photographs?”

My interest in the Korean diaspora goes back to when I was really young and learned that my mom spent her teenage years in the Philippines. In college I wanted to know more about the u.s. occupation of the Asia-Pacific region. I’ve looked at military bases in South Korea, Hawaii and Guam, and seen many documentaries on the subject. I was trained as a traditional photographer using 35mm film, and still shoot with a variety of film formats. As an undergrad I explored how u.s. militarization has affected the lives of women in South Korea. I interviewed Korean women who married American soldiers and migrated to the United States.

My current work is about a naval base that the South Korean government is building on the southwestern corner of Jeju Island.

The military facility being built there will serve as a home for the new Aegis destroyers, and would defend South Korea against

l.a. is a great city. It has many resources for artists—film festivals, art galleries and museums. I love that it’s close to the ocean.

I have no complaints—except A — 100 bows, Jeju Island, perhaps for the South Korea, C-Print, 2012. driving culture.

Protesters gather at 7 a.m.

Sometimes that’s outside the main gate of a a little daunting... naval base construction site. Activists bow 100 times, dedicating each to notions such as nature or death in combat zones, or to specific victims of circumstance, such as poor students (security guards) whose need of work compromises their moral and political values.

Artistic Voices in Many Languages

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C

B

ASAVARI KUMAR MFA Program in Experimental Animation

I did my undergrad in animation at the National Institute of Design in India, and worked as a broadcast designer for three years in Mumbai, which is where the Indian film industry is based.

I came to CalArts as a filmmaker, but am moving towards installation art. I have a friend, a classmate who’s been a successful installation artist in l.a. for many years. I worked with her on her film, and she’s helping me. There is a strange distance between animation and installation, and we are both trying to bridge the two. She’s starting to incorporate animation into her installations and I’m trying to make my animation a more

Time moves so fast at CalArts because of the nonstop creativity.

My brain is exploding all over the place, coming up with new ideas—some of which turn out to be failures. Faculty encourages us to see that nothing is a waste of time; nothing is actually a failed project. I used to be very afraid of experimenting, but now feel less fearful about things. I have committed to an installation having never done one before, just telling myself that, “It’s going to be awesome!”

I live on campus. I started off hanging out with my classmates— a lot of them are international students, so that was very comforting. We all understood what it felt like to be far away from home. It was a really nice vibe. Our class is very supportive and everyone is amazing at their art. Eventually, I started branching out and meeting other people. The only thing that bothers me about l.a. is that I have to travel such long distances to get anywhere. I’m trying to save up to buy a car. I guess I do miss Indian food and I am not the greatest cook. I can’t make a lot of the complicated things—I can make simple food—but I like all kinds of food as long as it’s good. l.a. is great because it has food from all over the world.

B — A ssigned the task of introducing a main character and the space in which she acts, Kumar created this forest environment for a ballerina dancing by herself, unaware that she is being watched.

C — C haracter exploration of a balloon-shaped clown that floats instead of walks. Kumar employed shadows and highlights to define the body contour rather than the more predictable outlining of the shape.

New Delhi, India

I expected the United States to be more of a culture shock, but living in a globalized world, constantly exposed to other cultures via media, the Internet, and through television and films, it’s harder to be shocked. India is really big on films; we love both Bollywood and Hollywood movies… I still haven’t decided which way I want to go with my work.

I’d like to be an independent artist, but also enjoy doing commercial work. There’s more artistic freedom in the u.s., even in the commercial work. People are more open to crazy ideas because animation plays a bigger part in the culture here than in India.

interactive experience. In class critiques I get interesting feedback from people with different points of view—not just from animators. I’ve seen how my work can be perceived in multiple ways.

Winter 2013

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A

SALLY MAERSK-MOELLER

Svendborg, Denmark

BFA Acting Program I have always enjoyed acting—from the time I played an angel, or whatever, at four or five years old. When a 10-year-old girl says to her parents, “I want to be an actress,” it’s like saying, “I want to be a princess in the circus!” My family is academically focused, but, through the years, has become very supportive of my pursuit of a career as an actor.

are you doing?” is very nice. In Denmark it takes a lot of time to get someone to say “Hi” if you’ve only seen them once or twice. But I think it is harder to get under the surface of Americans. I’ve always been fascinated with Americans and American culture.

English is mandatory in Denmark; we learn it from fourth grade on. I moved from Svendborg to Copenhagen when I was 18, and did volunteer work at a theater. Somehow, I got into a play. The director knew a man named Hugo Hopping, a visual artist who is a CalArts alum [Art bfa 05]. I heard someone speaking English and thought, “I’ve got to talk to that guy.” Any chance I had to speak English, I took it. Acting is all about the words and I knew that my English had to be almost perfect. Hugo needed an actress for a short film he was making as part of a gallery show in Paris called A Sugar Diet for Mystics. We became close friends and collaborators, and he introduced me to the CalArts way of working. It sounds tacky—but for me to be here is a dream come true.

You can really receive an individualized education, which is what I wanted. All the opportunities are here.

Through acting, I want to give people an experience, make them forget for a short time that they are sitting next to strangers in a theater; forget their everyday problems, and take them into a whole different world. By doing that, hopefully, they’ll be moved to reflect on something a little deeper. Learning to act is a long and interesting process—to find a place in myself where my character’s truth becomes my own, so that it seems real to the audience. That’s the craft, but at the same time, I’m an adult, dressing up and playing around. That’s very cool!

As part of my métier classes, I’m taking T’ai Chi Ch’uan with Sherry Tschernisch, who’s also my mentor. Many people think that acting is in the mind, but it is really more in the body. Your mind has to be present and understand what you’re saying, and the meaning behind what you’re saying—but emotions come from your body. With T’ai Chi you get good posture and alertness—an awareness of your surroundings…

Scandinavians are interesting people. We are very closed, but when you get to know us we are actually pretty open. Whereas, I feel Americans are very easy to talk to. The way you say, “Hi, how

A — M aersk-Moeller studies a script before class.

B — A rchitectural model for a performing arts theater in southern Spain designed by Shvartzberg in collaboration with Estudio Barozzi Veiga in 2005.

They were awarded second prize in the competition.

C — Cover of Arche 2011-2012. The first volume of in/form, a yearly collection of writing by students in the Aesthetics and Politics Program, contains Shvartzberg’s essay, “CalArts 1970: Art, Radicality, and Critique in the ‘New Economy.’”

Artistic Voices in Many Languages

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C

B

MANUEL SHVARTZBERG MA Aesthetics and Politics Program

I first learned about CalArts through its famed faculty and alumni, artists like Michael Asher and Mike Kelley.

In 2011 I was looking for a program that would allow me to engage architecture and the world at large in a critical way, and the ma in Aesthetics and Politics was a perfect fit. I came to CalArts attracted by its history of radical arts practice and pedagogy, and the explicit interdisciplinary focus of the Institute. As an architect with many years of professional experience working in the arts and cultural sectors, I felt the ma program in Aesthetics and Politics would provide me with a solid foundation from which to engage contemporary art and social issues more critically and incisively. I especially appreciated the program’s emphasis on the historical and philosophical relationship between aesthetic discourse and political thought—an incredibly fascinating nexus which was very well articulated in the program’s curriculum.

Overall, CalArts offers a very cosmopolitan community that is able to accommodate very different people in what I think is quite a loving, generous way. The experience was very enriching. Beyond the academic and intellectual benefits, it has significantly raised my professional profile.

CalArts is a great institution—a seriously cool, weird place that invites you to redefine the meaning of “informality” at almost every moment. It works well for people who are seeking to broaden their horizons, and makes a virtue out of having a lot of fun while working very hard.

Málaga, Spain

Obtaining an international student visa is a contemporary Kafkaesque enterprise. America needs to chill out, take a membrane tranquilizer. Fortunately, CalArts’ Penelope Weston was incredibly helpful in dealing with the draconian protocols of immigration bureaucracy.

English did not present a particular challenge since I lived in London for almost 12 years before coming here.

Martín Plot, one of the program co-founders and teacher of the core class on Contemporary Political Thought, had a visionary insight when putting this program together. Despite the almost overwhelming amount of reading and writing one has to do, it covers enormous amounts of ground in a meaningful, precise way. But beyond the curriculum itself, the main asset the program has is its amazing faculty: world class writers and scholars, all from different intellectual fields—from contemporary poetry to film, performance, social movements, or myriad aesthetic histories. Yet they are able to advise students over, across, and beyond their respective terrains of expertise. This interdisciplinary dimension made the program very rich and inspiring for me, and has certainly informed my own practice after the ma [which he received in 2012]. Now that I am teaching at CalArts (and other institutions), I see how valuable this disciplinary openness is—to be able to make connections horizontally rather than thinking with one single focus. CalArts is a site of constant conflict: a place where the real forces and tensions of society are played out through pedagogical and administrative models. This is a very exciting and challenging place to be, politically speaking.

Winter 2013

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A

B

MOMO WANG MFA Program in Experimental Animation

Beijing, China

I have been drawing since I was four years old. I learned in the traditional style and then studied animation for a bfa at Communication University of China. Each time in class, our teacher screened a student project from another school. Whenever he showed films by CalArts students, he said, “Look at the great work of others!” I wanted my work to be like theirs. CalArts is my dream school, and I am very happy to be here.

Asian people enjoy a sweet and lovely drawing style, like the work in my published books. Seven books of my work have been published in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand.

In my third year of college I became famous in China for creating a character named Tuzki, a rabbit with no facial features except for two lines for eyes. I used Flash to develop different body positions to express Tuzki’s feelings. The emoticons and drawings of Tuzki were first posted on my blog and quickly began to circulate online. Within one year, the blog reached 15 million page views and I was offered much commercial work. Tuzki is now the property of Time Warner, which owns the Turner Broadcasting System. I was specially trained by and worked in the graphic design and animation departments of tbs at its Hong Kong office for two years. At first, this job was exciting, but after a while I was so busy with commercial work and media activities that I had no time to focus on my own creative projects, which are most important to me. After I drew the rabbit and became successful, everyone wanted me to keep drawing it. But I don’t want to draw the same thing all my life. I resigned my job because I wanted to improve, advance and continue my studies at CalArts.

For Chinese students, more than 90% of the animation we see is Japanese. I had never seen American cartoons until I came to CalArts. Here I am learning new techniques like stop-motion animation, which is not taught in China. Also, how to tell a story. Of highest importance are the ideas. Writing is sometimes a problem for me. In China we learn English for 10 years and we still cannot talk to Americans [laughs].

I must finish one more film before I graduate.

It will be at least 10 minutes in length. The story is about life on a Chinese island in 200 bc, based on a ufo sighting in China in 600 bc. I will mix traditional Chinese brush, shadow puppet, and digital techniques for the first time. For the stop-motion, I created a 3-d puppet of a bird with 2,000 hand-cut feathers.

What I learned at CalArts is, if you want to do anything, just do it… I hope to bring back the best of what I have learned A — T he rabbit Tuzki lives internationally, in the surreal world of Wang's imagination. in the United collection: luoyang museum of animation.

States and at CalArts, and B — A n image from the graphic novel Wilderness, develop a new a love story about black animation commarket trafficking in hupany in China. man organs.

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THIS PAGE Playing the part of Nick, Wooster Group veteran Scott Shepherd (right) narrated word for word the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in Elevator Repair Service’s celebrated production of Gatz at redcat last fall. Seven hours long and featuring a cast of 13, this bravura feat of theatrical daring is not a retelling of the American masterpiece, but a revelatory enactment of experiencing the novel. “The show that made Gatsby even greater,” roared The Times about Gatz’s earlier summer run in London.

Winter 2013

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Shifting Focus: Steve Anker’s Decade as School of Film/Video Dean

Steve Anker is stepping down as dean of the School of Film/Video this June.

During a tenure that began in 2002, the school has successfully negotiated immense cultural and technological changes and continued to build on its mission and legacy: championing the personal vision of committed film, animation and media artists.

by holly willis

OPPOSITE FROM LEFT Dean Steve Anker.

The invitation to The Museum of Modern Art’s Tomorrowland: CalArts in Moving Pictures, a sweeping retrospective of more than 35 years of work made at CalArts.

The poster announcing a screening of Daniel Eisenberg’s 2011 film essay The Unstable Object at redcat. Eisenberg was also on campus as a visiting artist.

Poster designed by Bijan Berahimi and Pierre Nguyen.

Shifting Focus

courtesy of the designers.

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Anker is concluding his term on a high note: The Hollywood Reporter has named CalArts among the top 10 films schools in the world for two years running.

Students and alumni are garnering more raves than ever before—at major film festivals, in museums, and in the art world—and the robust curatorial program at redcat has invigorated the independent and art film scene of Los Angeles, extending the creative culture that the school promotes. Anker will continue to teach at the School of Film/Video and co-curate at redcat as he sets out to research new projects.

In late October, a capacity crowd visited the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles to view work by experimental filmmaker David Gatten. It was the first part of a three-night retrospective that would conclude at redcat. After the first film ended without incident, the second film was threaded through the projector and the lights went down—but the image was dim, a sad, dull gray. Steve Anker, CalArts’ dean of Film/Video, stood up and strode purposefully through the aisles and, working with the projectionist, wrestled open the bulb

housing, removed the projector lens and peered inside.

“16mm film projection is always a form of theater,” remarked Gatten, as Anker and the projectionist continued to tinker. Within a few minutes, Anker had repaired the projector’s heat shield mechanism and the show continued as planned.

This occasion was not so unusual, but it was illustrative, capturing the ways in which Anker has always been very hands-on and attentive to the minutia of film while also able to work on an expansive scale—uniquely able to sweat the details while keeping an eye on the big picture. Since joining CalArts after running the San Francisco Cinematheque for two decades, Anker has used this dual vision to help refresh and expand the School of Film/Video’s curriculum, modernize facilities, bring additional national and international attention to the school, and galvanize the community of independent and experimental film lovers in the region.

Winter 2013

courtesy of the filmmaker

courtesy of the hammer museum. photo by brian forrest.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT The cover of Radical Light, a comprehensive film history co-edited by Steve Anker.

Installation view of work by alumna Erika Vogt, featured at the Hammer Museum as part of Made in l.a. 2012.

courtesy of the filmmaker

redcat Jack H. Skirball Series co-curators Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud flank filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha at a revival screening of the post-colonial classic Surname Viet, Given Name Nam.

The title card for the Disney Channel’s animated series Gravity Falls, created by alum Alex Hirsch.

Still from alumnus Jason Carpenter’s award-winning short Renter.

Still from Pearblossom Hwy, the latest film directed by alum Mike Ott. Steve Anker introduces faculty member Thom Andersen’s film essay Reconversão (Reconversion) to the audience at redcat.

Shifting Focus

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“The School of Film/Video has enjoyed tremendous success over the course of Steve’s deanship,” says President Steven D. Lavine. “The school and all four of its programs are operating at a higher level than at any time since I came to CalArts [in 1988]. We have an outstanding faculty and wonderfully talented students, but Steve deserves a great deal of credit for guiding CalArts’ largest school so steadily.”

According to faculty colleague Bérénice Reynaud, the committee searching for a new dean more than a decade ago specifically sought Anker’s objective poise.

“I suggested we look toward a curator, and the logic behind this was that the film school extends across four different programs, with four different aesthetics, so our challenge was to find someone whose vision would encompass all four programs,” she says. “To me, a curator is not somebody who has an agenda and wants to push it forward, but instead someone who engages in a conversation with the culture and with audiences, and presents them with things they can appreciate.” Reynaud adds that Anker could walk into a meeting with Pixar in the morning and then cheerfully interview an experimental filmmaker in front of an audience later that day. “Steve brought this sense of balance.” +++ One of the key challenges Anker faced was to keep the School of Film/Video current in the midst of rapid cultural and technological changes throughout the 2000s. This meant assessing each of the school’s programs—Character Animation, Experimental Animation, Film and Video, and Film Directing, all four of which were transitioning from longstanding program directors to new leadership—and then, with the additional guidance of directors, faculty and staff, reformulating them where necessary. “In Experimental Animation, we embraced new digital technologies and expanded the stop-motion and bfa curricula, and we increased the presence of our students at international festivals,” Anker says. “In Character Animation, we doubled the core faculty and revamped the program by fully integrating Maya 3-d and other cg tools, enhancing story and character design, and adding more in-depth individual critiques and personalized mentoring. We also made significant and much-needed upgrades to the program’s facilities, made possible by Roy E. Disney’s legacy gift to CalArts. And not least, we were able to strengthen the program’s reputation with the animation industry, which led to increases in internship and job placements. The mfa Film Directing Program has also undergone major curriculum revisions while maintaining its focus on story- and actor-based dramatic narrative. For this program, we began a regular series of residencies with important figures in independent film.

The Program in Film and Video has more deeply

developed, and even expanded, its breadth of liveaction genres and hybrids—a range that encompasses documentary, multiple experimental forms, film essay, installation, and edges of narrative. There, we’ve maintained the program’s commitment to all available filmmaking tools and media and a plethora of stylistic approaches. So each program presented its own challenges yet each one remains second to none in the country in its range of focus.”

In addition to overseeing fundamental changes to the school’s degree programs, Anker led the way in building international partnerships with schools and institutions in Europe and Asia. “International exchanges, CalArts-developed overseas programs such as the ones in China, and student visits to festivals and animation centers like Annecy and Prague are increasingly important in a globalized world,” he says. By the same token, the school’s student population has become much more internationalized on Anker’s watch. Thanks to its increasing exposure on the world stage—faculty and students returning from abroad routinely joke that CalArts is better known in Europe and Asia than in America—the School of Film/Video has grown into a global brand. In 2011 and 2012, The Hollywood Reporter ranked CalArts as one of the top 10 film schools not just in the United States, but in the world. The Los Angeles Times called CalArts the “Harvard Business School of animation.” So it is hardly surprising that more and more international filmmakers, animators and media artists are streaming to the Valencia campus.

Film/Video students who have graduated in the last decade have already made remarkable contributions to their respective fields in a very short time—in the mainstream animation industry, in indie film, and in the art world. Many do so straight out of the starting gate, with their student work. (To sample some of their recent achievements, see the sidebar on page 29.)

Looking back at his decade as dean, Anker says, “I think what I’ve done is helped clear and enrich the paths so students can be inspired to make whatever kind of films they choose, for faculty to be as effective as they can be, and to ensure that we have the best resources and a supportive environment that can help our students make their work.” He acknowledges that these are things that past deans have championed as well, and that his goal has been to intensify the focus and keep each kind of filmmaking moving as far as the vision of each student can take it. “For me, this is an ideal, but it is a living ideal. This ideal is still alive because as challenging as it may be to sustain, personal artmaking remains the core of all four film programs just as it is in the larger institution. I think the challenge is how to retain these core values while facing inevitable and rapidly accelerating changes in technology and culture.”

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Although Anker holds an mfa in narrative filmmaking from Columbia University, he has long contributed to a revitalization of the practice and history of experimental film—first at the Boston Film/Video Foundation in the late 1970s, then during his 20-year spell at the s.f.

Cinematheque, and now at CalArts. His most recent work of scholarship is an expansive history called Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000, co-edited with fellow curators Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid, both of the Berkeley-based Pacific Film Archive. Conveying a complex, largely unheralded history through interviews and primary materials, the richly illustrated 352-page book makes a strong case for the Bay Area as an engine of postwar avant-garde imagemaking. “There have been some overviews of this history,” Anker points out, “but none that encompassed such a large arena of activities, and none that included both film and video.”

Anker is proud to point to another survey he helped facilitate: a massive 2006 show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art titled Tomorrowland: CalArts in Moving Pictures. Put together by moma curator Joshua Siegel, it featured more than 35 years of work by CalArts students—and marked the first time an American film school was the subject of a moma retrospective. The three-month-long program included animation, experimental, narrative, documentary and conceptual work, as well as feminist, queer and other highly political films and videos. The range of artists was stunning, from John Lasseter (Character Animation bfa 79) to Tony Oursler (Art bfa 79), and the work demonstrated the incredible diversity of approaches, from Naomi Uman’s (Film and Video mfa 98) bleached porn footage to an evocative essay film by Travis Wilkerson (Film and Video mfa 01). “Ours was a 39-program retrospective,” Anker says gleefully, noting that “the variety, range, and the constancy of seeing people who go on to establish careers” inspired the curator. “That was an important marker,” says Anker, and publications from The New York Times to Cinema Scope to Frieze agreed, observing that the emergence of CalArts helped signal the arrival of Los Angeles as a dynamic center for American and international art. +++ In addition to his responsibilities as dean and teacher, Anker has teamed up with faculty member Bérénice Reynaud to co-curate the Jack H. Skirball Series of alternative film and video screenings at redcat since 2003. With more than 300 shows over nine-and-a-half seasons, the Skirball Series has drawn a constant flow of artists from around the world and provided Los Angeles audiences the opportunity to see an incredibly rich array of work by independent filmmakers such as Leslie Thornton, Ernie Gehr, Abigail Child, Kevin

Jerome Everson, Peter Hutton, Sun Xun, Daniel Eisenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Martin Arnold, and other experimental artists whose films are seldom seen in l.a. The series has also highlighted key international cinemas, including showcases of new Chinese cinema and surveys of international animation. The unifying theme for the program is its focus on the artist’s vision—integral to the School of Film/Video’s ethos. “In every case the artist is expressing his or her own vision and personal absorption into both the medium and the subjects at hand,” says Anker.

The city’s alternative media scene remains distributed and divergent, but redcat has definitely made it more robust than it was 10 years ago. This impact has been due, in no small part, to the fact that redcat’s program­ ming derives from the artistic rigor of a film school. To add to a thriving citywide film culture and to cultivate wider audiences for experimental work, Anker and Reynaud routinely team with partners such as Los Angeles Filmforum and ucla’s Film and Television Archive for joint presentations. (The David Gatten retrospective was one such example; it was spread out among redcat and two other venues.)

While the film/video programming at redcat has been a boon to the city’s cultural landscape, it has added a whole new dimension to the educational experience of CalArts students. Many of the filmmakers and artists who show at redcat also visit the CalArts campus to screen their work, carry out workshops, and share their insights with students. These visits are a significant expansion of the School of Film/Video’s already extensive visiting artist program. Especially in the case of emerging international filmmakers—from China to Africa—this added exposure allows CalArts students to study how their counterparts from around the globe are taking approaches, both time-tested and completely new, to the evolving art of the moving image. +++ Two nights after Anker repaired the projector at the Velaslavasay Panorama, he was onstage at redcat introducing David Gatten to another capacity crowd.

His introduction was characteristically erudite and generous, as were his questions to the filmmaker after the screening. Again, the event was scarcely out of the ordinary, and yet… it was. Anker was gently but penetratingly insistent, finding in the details what exactly makes Gatten’s work compelling. It was just another weekend in Anker’s life, but the moment captures his ability to move from nuance and specificity to a grand vision of a world made better by drawing out the personal vision of artists.

Holly Willis writes about experimental film and video and is a faculty member in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

Shifting Focus

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A Sampling of Recent Achievements

by School of Film/Video Alumni Jason Carpenter’s (Experimental Animation mfa 06) Renter won top prizes at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and Cinanima in 2011.

Eliza Hittman (Film Directing mfa 10) has shown at Sundance for two consecutive festivals—last year with her thesis film, Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, and this year with It Felt Like Love.

Alex Hirsch (Character Animation bfa 07) is the creator of the animated show Gravity Falls, which premiered on the Disney Channel last summer.

Korean-born Minkyu Lee’s (Character Animation bfa 09) Adam and Dog has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Kirsten Lepore (Experimental Animation mfa 12) won the first-ever Student Annie Award and a host of other prizes last year. She was named one of the most creative people of 2011 by Creativity magazine.

Miwa Matreyek’s (Experimental Animation– Integrated Media mfa 07) combination of projected animation and live performance has been featured in Sundance’s New Frontier program and at the tedGlobal Conference.

Natasha Mendonca (Film and Video mfa 10) won the Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and a Tiger Award at the 2011 International Film Festival Rotterdam for her thesis film, an experimental work called Jan Villa.

Mike Ott (Film and Video mfa 05, bfa 03) has earned widespread praise and multiple accolades for his last two feature films, Littlerock and Pearlblossom Hwy. Akosua Adoma Owusu’s (Film and Video–Art mfa 08) Kwaku Ananse is premiering at this year’s Berlinale, where it is competing for the Golden Bear for Best Short Film.

Peter Bo Rappmund (Film and Video–Music Composition mfa 2010) was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. His work has been shown at the New York, Vancouver, Vienna and Locarno film festivals.

Erika Vogt (Film and Video mfa 04) was featured in the Hammer Museum’s Made in l.a. 2012 biennial last summer as well as in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

David Wolter (Character Animation 11) received the Animation Gold Medal at the 2012 Student Academy Awards.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT

courtesy of the artist

Still from Peter Bo Rappmund’s Vulgar Fractions (2011).

courtesy of the filmmaker

Miwa Matreyek’s Myth and Infrastructure, a live projection performance presented at redcat’s New Original Works (now) Festival in 2010.

courtesy of the filmmaker

Still from Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love (2013), with Gina Piersanti as Lila.

Winter 2013

JULIA HOLTER

JOHN MAUS

ARIEL PINK

30

THE NEW LO-FI POPSTERS

Over the past decade, quite a few CalArts grads have distinguished themselves through diy ingenuity, from starting nimble multidisciplinary art collectives to self-recording shimmery pop music.

by paul fraser

Among them is Los Angeles singer-composer Julia Holter, who “rose alongside kindred spirits Ariel Pink, John Maus and others schooled in music and visual art at CalArts,” noted Los Angeles Times critic Randall Roberts. Naming the artist’s sophomore album Ekstasis as one of the top 10 recordings of 2012, Roberts wrote, “Holter composes the most graceful and delicate music of the bunch, exquisitely crafted bedroom baroqueness that suggests the Cocteau Twins and Joanna Newsom but with keener attention to intricate detail, like a Laura Owens [Art mfa 94] painting come to life.”

The term “bedroom artist” refers to musicians who self-produce albums in their home studios, enabled by cheaper recording technology and a growing popular interest in a raw, murky sound. Signaling a maturation of this movement on the independent pop scene, alums Holter, Pink and Maus all released critically acclaimed albums in 2012. The three have been members of the collective Human Ear Music, on occasion collaborating with each other and musicmakers in similar circles.

Musically, each artist creates a unique brand of moody and seductive lo-fi pop.

The New Lo-Fi Popsters

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FROM LEFT The covers of albums by Julia Holter, Ariel Pink and Haunted Graffiti, and John Maus.

JULIA HOLTER The last two years have been immensely productive for Julia Holter (Music–Integrated Media mfa 09), whose chamber pop is inflected by electronica, experimental music, and the themes of classic Greek tragedies. Her sound has been embraced by tastemakers from former experimentalist bastion Altered Zones to the traditionalists of National Public Radio.

Holter released her debut record, Tragedy, on vinyl in 2011. The work listed at no. 4 on npr’s “The Best Outer Sound Albums” of that year. “Tragedy truly inhabits a world unlike any other,” said npr. “Those attuned to modern Gothic atmospheres… will no doubt be drawn to Holter, but she comes more from the [composer-vocalist] Meredith Monk spectrum of sonically-challenging ladies. Bits of musique-concrète, noise, drone, dreamy ’80s medieval-pop and avant-classical are the touchstones for this album.”

Holter’s more accessible Ekstasis arrived last spring and drew raves all around. “Ekstasis is all soft, post-New Age edges, from [Holter’s] distant vocals to subtle digital handclaps,” observed the la Weekly. “But under the production gauze lies restless, intricate music... For all its swirling arrangements, Holter’s vocals imbue the album with a pop center.”

ARIEL PINK The eccentric, prolific singer-songwriter—formerly known as Ariel Rosenberg (Art bfa 00)—and his band, Haunted Graffiti, have influenced a whole new generation of chillwave and lo-fi bedroom artists. Pink’s retro pop, which he first developed when he was at CalArts, has created a buzz on the scene with the release of two important albums over the past two years.

Between 1998 and 2004, Pink wrote and recorded eight albums’ worth of material, which Spin described as “a dissonant, discomfiting, deeply melodic ooze of eighttrack exorcisms.” As Spin’s David Bevan pointed out: “[A]s a student of drawing at CalArts, he began writing and recording what arguably has become one of the most influential bodies of work in pop music this side of [Nirvana’s famed album] Nevermind.”

Having initially signed to indie-pop titans Animal Collective, Pink and Haunted Graffiti moved to 4ad Records in 2009, and released their breakout cd Before Today the following year. Pitchfork Media named the album’s single “Round and Round” “Best Song of 2010.”

Pink followed up that effort with last year's Mature Themes, again earning high praise, ranging from Randall Roberts of the Times to the online music community Stereogum, which described the work as “the best thing Pink has ever done, a record full of characteristic darkness and jarring weirdness.”

JOHN MAUS John Maus (Music bfa 03) has, like Julia Holter, one foot in the experimental music world, the other in pop. In addition to playing keyboards in Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, he has created his own music for two decades.

These days, he is also working toward a PhD in political philosophy from the European Graduate School.

At CalArts, Maus first focused on experimental music and performance art, but developed an interest in pop after meeting Pink. Maus’ first major album, Songs, was released in 2006 to much acclaim. He has since released two more cds. His music “taps into melancholic fantasy and affirms that we are all truly alive,” as his uk label has described it. “Questing synthesizers, tensely strung bass lines and chasing drum machines provide the perfect backdrop for John’s deeply resonant reverbdrenched vocals.”

Maus’ 2011 effort, We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, incorporates ideas from the artist’s philosophy studies, deriving its title from Alain Badiou’s 15 Theses on Contemporary Art. His latest is a compilation called A Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material. cmj said the album “provides a truly uncommon and sometimes jarring glimpse into the evolution of an incredible musical mind.”

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Nikki Pressley, Re: linked, Re: layed, Re: rooted, 2012. Installation view.

Mixed media, dimensions variable.

DISPATCHES News From Faculty, Alumni, Students and Other Members of the CalArts Community

Alums Sadie Barnette (bfa 06), Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Art–Critical Studies mfa 12), Nicole Miller (bfa 05), Akosua Adoma Owusu (Art– Film/Video mfa 08), Nikki Pressley (mfa 08) and Nate Young (mfa 09) are among 29 emerging artists of African heritage whose work is featured in the exhibition Fore at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Fore is the fourth in the “F series” of emerging-artist surveys presented by the New York museum, following Freestyle (2001), Frequency (2005– 06) and Flow (2008). Bringing “a new generation into the forefront of visual and critical dialogue,” the show traces artistic developments since Flow, taking into account social, political and cultural conditions in the United States. Fore continues through March 10.

CalArts alumni and faculty ac­counted for more than a third of the 60 artists featured in the large-scale exhibition Made in l.a. 2012, the inaugural edition of the new citywide biennial that was held at the Hammer Museum, la><art, and the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery at Barnsdall Park. The show presented “the work of artists in the early

stages of their careers alongside that of midcareer artists who are vital to our community yet are arguably under-recognized,” said the exhibition’s curatorial team.

CalArts alumni whose work was included in the biennial were: Scott Benzel (mfa 01, bfa 88); Fiona Connor (mfa 11); Meg Cranston (mfa 86); Roy Dowell (mfa 75, bfa 73); Zackary Drucker (mfa 07), in collaboration with Rhys Ernst (Film/Video mfa 11); Patricia Fernández (mfa 11); Dan Finsel (mfa 11); Liz Glynn (mfa 08); Mark Hagen (mfa 02); Kenyatta A.C. Hinckle (Art–Critical Studies mfa 12); Channa Horwitz (bfa 72); Nery Gabriel Lemus (mfa 09); Matt Lucero (mfa 03) and Tuan Andrew Nguyen (mfa 04), members of The Propeller Group; Dashiell Manley (bfa 07); Alex Olson (mfa 08); Vincent Ramos (mfa 07); Henry Taylor (bfa 96); Cody Trepte (mfa 10); and Erika Vogt (Film/Video mfa 04). The lineup also included the duo of Karla Diaz (Critical Studies mfa 03) and visiting School of Art faculty Mario Ybarra Jr., who work together under the name Slanguage.

Others in the biennial were Thomas Lawson, dean of the School of Art and holder of the Jill and Peter Kraus Distinguished Chair in Art; Ashley Hunt, co-director of the Program in Photography and Media; visiting faculty Michelle Dizon;

Sam Durant, Scaffold, 2012. Wood, metal, 10.3 × 14.4 × 15.8 meters.

Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13) and designed by Sebastian Clough with punkt vier architekten and Klute & Klute Ingenieurbüro.

Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Sadie Coles HQ, Paula Cooper Gallery, and Praz-Delavallade.

The exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production at the Hammer Museum featured wallpaper design (right) by alumnus Geoff McFetridge.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, The Uninvited, 2012. Laser Jet print on polyethylene film, India ink and paint, 20 × 30 in.

former visiting faculty Ry Rocklen (98); and the legendary Simone Forti, who used to sub for founding faculty member Allan Kaprow in the Institute’s first year of operations. The curatorial team selected five finalists for the exhibition’s $100,000 Mohn Prize: Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra Jr., Simone Forti, Liz Glynn, Meleko Mokgosi, and Erika Vogt. The eventual winner of the prize, selected by online viewers, was the Botswana-born Mokgosi.

Award-winning artist Mark Bradford (mfa 97, bfa 95) collaborated with choreographer Benjamin Millepied and his l.a. Dance Project in conjunction with the exhibition The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (moca). Millepied, popularly known for the choreography in Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan, performed a 30-minute, sitespecific duet with Amanda Wells to a narrated sound­track by Bradford.

Millepied’s choreography, entitled Framework, was inspired by two large-scale paintings by Bradford in the moca exhibition: Untitled and Ghost and Stooges, both from 2011.

Millepied, incidentally, was also on campus last fall as a guest of the School of Film/Video’s mfa Film Directing Program.

courtesy of the artist and the studio museum in harlem.

School of Art

Benjamin Millepied performed at moca in a collaboration with alumnus Mark Bradford called Framework.

Dispatches

courtesy of the artists and moca. photo by christina edwards.

33

photo by nils klinger.

courtesy of the artist and the studio museum in harlem

Faculty member Sam Durant (mfa 91) had a major piece in last summer’s dOCUMENTA—one of the world’s foremost showcases of art, held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Durant’s house-sized outdoor installation, Scaffold, is an “architectural mashup” of famous gallows, from the structure where Chicago’s Haymarket Martyrs were executed in 1887 to the platform where Saddam Hussein met his end. The work was accompanied by a hand-bound publication, entitled Freedom, decrying the death penalty and the prison-industrial complex in the u.s. Durant also took part in four group exhibitions: at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the National Museum of Brazil in Rio, de Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris.

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is presenting the most comprehensive exhibition of art to date by the late Mike Kelley (mfa 78), widely acknowledged as an artist who defined his era. The show, which runs through April, brings together more than 200 works that span Kelley’s 35-year career.

Design director John Kieselhorst (mfa 96) has joined forces with two colleagues, Dave Schiff and Scott Prindle, from the ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky to launch the outfit Made, niched to promote the resurgence of American manufacturing. The trio are actually running two separate operations: Made Collection, an online sales site for u.s.-made products, and Made Movement, a marketing agency that represents companies that manufacture only in America.

Tony Oursler (bfa 79) directed the new music video from David Bowie, entitled “Where Are We Now?”—the music icon’s first new track in more than a decade. Shot in Berlin, the video harkens back to the late 1970s when Bowie lived in that city.

In a dramatic departure from tradition, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino is presenting the first exhibition of contemporary paintings and sculpture to be displayed inside the Huntington Art Gallery, showcasing the work of Lesley Vance (mfa 03) and her husband Ricky Swallow. Art by the Los Angeles pair is shown in the context of the gallery’s Old Master paintings, Renaissance bronzes, 18thcentury French decorative arts, and British grand manner portraits. The exhibition remains on view through March 11.

Faculty member Lorraine Wild has been tapped to become the creative director of design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lacma). An aiga gold medalist, Wild is one of the premier book designers in the United States. She is especially well known for book designs for architects (e.g., Mies van der Rohe, Morphosis), and for her exhibition catalogues for museums ranging from the Whitney in New York to lacma here. Wild is continuing to teach in the Program in Graphic Design. In other news, work by Wild, faculty colleague and fellow aiga gold medalist Ed Fella and alum Geoff McFetridge (mfa 95) was featured in the

courtesy of the designer and the hammer museum. photo by brian forrest.

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Writing Program faculty Jen Hofer’s translation of Mexican poet Myriam Moscona’s Negro Marfil—translated as Ivory Black—was honored with the 2012 pen Award for Poetry in Translation. “The pleasure of Ivory Black is in its shades and shadows, how it articulates writing as a gesture hovering between binaries, bodies, languages, modes of perception, cultures,” wrote judge Christian Hawkey in his citation.

The book, issued by Les Figues Press, also received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Elsewhere, Hofer’s poetry was anthologized in Al-Mutanabbi Starts Here: Poets and Writers Respond to the March 5, 2007, Bombing of Baghdad’s “Street of the Booksellers” (pm Press).

Anne-Marie Kinney’s (mfa 10) debut novel, Radio Iris, came out on Two Dollar Radio last year. Kinney, née Jetter, conveys the unsettling story of a socially awkward daydreamer, caught between expressing her inner life and the deafening banality of everyday office routine.

“Radio Iris has a lovely, eerie, anxious quality to it,” according to The New York Times Book Review. “The story has a dramatic otherworldly payoff that is unexpected and triumphant.”

The inaugural print edition of the online literary journal [out of nothing], edited by faculty member Janice Lee (mfa 08), Eric Lindley (mfa 08) and Joe Milazzo (mfa 08),

Faculty member Maggie Nelson’s review of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Weather in Proust was published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, while her essay on Eileen Myles just appeared in the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan University Press). She also contributed an essay on craft to The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House (Tin House Books).

Last fall saw the publication of two books by Critical Studies faculty.

Martín Plot co-edited, with Enrique Peruzzotti, the volume Critical Theory and Democracy: Civil Society, Constitutionalism, and Dictatorship in Andrew Arato’s Democratic Theory (Routledge). This is the first study to systematically address the influential thinker’s theory of de­moc­racy. (Arato himself will give a talk at redcat on March 20 in connection with the publication of the book.) Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too (Les Figues Press) could possibly be the first book written entirely on Facebook. Viegener’s text, which consists of 100 lists, is composed in the form of the Facebook meme “25 Random Things About Me.” Viegener gave himself a single day to compose each list, leaving his topics unlimited as he explored “relationships between family, memory, sexuality, social networks, and randomness—on and offline.”

Published earlier in the year was Arne De Boever’s States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury). The book investigates the aesthetic, ethical and

courtesy of the editors.

courtesy of the author and two dollar radio.

courtesy of the filmmaker.

School of Critical Studies

was published in October. The volume, theoretical perspectives on the substance preceding [nothing], included contributions by alums Danielle Adair (mfa 07), Nicholas Grider (Critical Studies–Art mfa 08), Ian M. McCarty (mfa 08), Gerard Olson (mfa 07), Laura A. Vena (mfa 09) and faculty member Jon Wagner.

The online [out of nothing] showcases new works in image, sound, text and the digital arts, as well as works located at the intersections of these media. The new online edition, no. 6, in the mirror, a sleep, a spectral nothing, is forthcoming in early 2013.

courtesy of hubbard street dance chicago. photo by todd rosenberg.

touring exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, which was on view at the Hammer Museum throughout the fall. Organized by the Walker Art Center and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, the show explored some of the most vibrant design produced since 2000.

The accompanying catalogue included an essay by Wild called “Unraveling.”

Dispatches

35

FROM TOP LEFT The cover of Anne-Marie Kinney’s debut novel Radio Iris (2012).

The cover of the first print edition of the online literary journal [out of nothing], edited by Janice Lee, Eric Lindley and Joe Milazzo.

Hubbard Street dancers in a staging of Mats Ek’s Casi-Casa. From left, Alejandro Cerrudo, Meredith Dincolo, CalArts alumnus Jonathan Fredrickson, and Ana Lopez.

Still from Natalie Metzger’s dance film For Water (2010). The film follows the pilgrimage of five spirits to perform water rituals at a sacred place.

The cover of Arne De Boever’s latest book, States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (2012).

© disney-pixar

courtesy of the author and bloomsbury.

Still from Disney-Pixar’s Golden Globe winner Brave (2012), directed

by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman with Steve Purcell.

political dimensions of various “decisions” represented in novels published around 9/11: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

Janice Lee’s (mfa 08) experimental, “uncategorizable” writing, meanwhile, was on display in the pages of two chapbooks: Fried Chicken Dinner (Insert Blanc Press) and The Other Worlds (Eohippus Labs).

Designer Nate Schulman (ma 09) has received a scholarship from the American Friends of the Victoria and Albert Museum to attend the Victoria and Albert/Royal College of Art History of Design Program in London. The two-year Master of Arts program is one of the leading centers for the postgraduate study of design history.

Claudia Slanar (mfa 11, ma 09) co-curated, with Georgia Holz, the exhibition With a Name Like Yours, You Might Be Any Shape at uc Irvine’s Contemporary Art Center.

The show featured artworks and writings in which the artists adopt various “disguises,” creating alteregos, doppelgängers, and other fictional personae. Included in the exhibition were Zoe Crosher (Art– Integrated Media mfa 01) and Zack Kleyn (Art mfa 10).

Lauren Strasnick’s (mfa 05) latest young adult novel, Then You Were Gone, has been published by the Simon Pulse imprint of Simon & Schuster. This story of a teenage girl obsessed with her former best friend’s disappearance is “elegant, heart-rending, and deliciously good.

Pulls you along with just enough mystery to make your breath catch,” observed author Terra Elan McVoy.

The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance Dancers Melissa Bourkas (bfa 05) and Andrew Wojtal (bfa 11) performed with bodytraffic as the Los Angeles-based repertory dance company made its debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall in September.

The troupe’s performance was part of the program The Philharmonic Dances. Featuring original choreography by former visiting artist Barak Marshall, the company danced to John Adams’ “The Chairman Dances” from the opera Nixon and China, with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Wojtal also appeared at the 2012 mtv Video Music Awards as one of the dancers backing pop-country star Taylor Swift, and his performance so impressed one of mtv’s hosts, Joslyn Davis, that she sent the CalArts grad a post-show “shout out.”

Dancer and choreographer Jonathan Fredrickson (bfa 06), a member of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, performed in the company’s staging of Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s Casi-Casa at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Chicago. Fredrickson, who joined Hubbard Street after performing for the Jose Limón Company from 2006 to 2010, was named by Dance magazine as one of “25 to Watch,” as was Bessie Award-winning independent choreographer luciana achugar (bfa 95).

Choreographer-filmmaker Natalie Metzger’s (Dance–Integrated Media mfa 11) dance film Barely, made in collaboration with choreography faculty Colin Connor, won the Jury Award for Best Director at the l-dub Film Festival in Lake Worth, fl, in the fall. Metzger also had two dance films in the Third Coast Dance Film Festival in Houston: For Water and Surgeon General’s Warning. In November, Metzger, operations manager and producer of special projects at The Sharon Disney

Lund School of Dance, collaborated with Integrated Media visiting artist Nina Waisman on a project called Body Envelope, which called on Metzger to dance inside a “chandelier” of body sensors. This action was part of the zero1 Biennial at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, ca.

Choreographer Kate Weare’s (bfa 94) company performed at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Gotham Dance, a program to promote American dance. The Kate Weare Company shared a bill with former visiting artist Lawrence Keigwin’s troupe. Performing on the second night was honorary degree recipient Alonzo King’s (dfa 07, bfa 72) lines Ballet. The three-night program was closed out by bodytraffic, featuring Melissa Bourkas (bfa 05).

School of Film/Video Faculty Thom Andersen and James Benning were the only American filmmakers featured in the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look showcase in Astoria, ny. Andersen screened Reconversão (Reconversion), in which the film essay master turns his attention to the work of the Pritzker Prize-winning Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura.

Benning, one of the greats of American experimental cinema, showed Easy Rider, his “remaking” of the 1969 classic by taking a road trip through that film’s locations.

The 2013 Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature went to Disney-Pixar’s Brave, directed by Mark Andrews (bfa 93) and Brenda Chapman (bfa 87), with Steve Purcell. Of the five nominees in the category, four were directed by CalArts alums: Brave; Disney’s Frankenweenie, by Tim Burton (79); Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, by Rich Moore (bfa 87); and Sony’s Hotel Transylvania, by Genndy Tartakovsky (cer 92). Brave was executive-produced by John Lasseter (bfa 79), Pete Docter (bfa 90) and Andrew Stanton (bfa 87); Lasseter was also the executive

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producer of Wreck-It Ralph. There were further acting accolades for a pair of previous Golden Globe winners: Don Cheadle (Theater bfa 86), for his role in Showtime’s House of Lies; and Ed Harris (Theater bfa 75), for playing John McCain in hbo’s Game Change. In other major awards news, i.e., the 85th edition of the Oscars: Brave, Frankenweenie, and Wreck-It Ralph have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.

Character Animation faculty Minkyu Lee’s (bfa 09) Adam and Dog, meanwhile, received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film. An ethereal fable set in the Garden of Eden, Lee’s beautifully realized film, which was made with creative input from toon legend Glen Keane (74), had won the Annie Award for Best Animated Short Subject in 2012. In addition to teaching at the Institute, Lee is a visual development artist at Disney.

Tahnee Gehm (bfa 12) and current student Jessica Poon, both of the Program in Character Animation, are up for the Best Student Film prize at the 40th Annual Annie Awards, which are presented by the International Animated Film Society.

(Kirsten Lepore [mfa 12] won this award last year, the first time the Annies offered this category.)

Gehm’s film, Can We Be Happy Now, was her final film at CalArts, while Poon’s Origin was her sophomore year work. In the Best Animated Feature section, four of the eight nominees were helmed by CalArtians: Brave, Frankenweenie, Hotel Transylvania, and Wreck-It Ralph. In addition, Mark Andrews (bfa 93) and Brenda Chapman (bfa 87) were nominated for writing, while Rich Moore (bfa 87) and Genndy Tartakovsky (cer 92) got nods for directing. The Best Animated Television Production for Children category included two episodes of shows created by alums: SpongeBob SquarePants, by Stephen Hillenburg (mfa 92), and Adventure Time, by Pendleton Ward (bfa 05). Other Annie nominees are Lorelay Bove (bfa 07), Yarrow Cheney (bfa 95), Leo Matsuda (bfa 08), Tom McGrath (bfa 90), Skyler Page (11), “C” Raggio iv (bfa 04), Cole Sanchez

(bfa 09), Heidi Smith (bfa 08), Lissa Treiman (bfa 07) and Ian Worrel (bfa 08). Also nominated were faculty members Minkyu Lee (bfa 09) and Andy Suriano.

Five alumni from CalArts have received nominations for the upcoming Film Independent Spirit Awards, which take place on Saturday, February 23, one night before the Oscars. Writer-director Aurora Guerrero’s (mfa 99) keenly observed coming-of-age story Mosquita y Mari, which had its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award. David Fenster’s (mfa 04) hybrid of personal documentary and fiction, Pincus, earned the writer-director a nod for the Someone to Watch Award. Pincus had premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, played at the Viennale, and won Fenster the New Directors Award at the Starz Denver Film Festival. Only The Young, a nonfiction account of teen skaters in a forlorn California exurb directed by Jason Tippet (bfa 08) and Elizabeth Mims (bfa 08), received a nomination for the Stella Artois Truer Than Fiction Award. The film had previously won the Audience Award and topped the Young Americans section of afi Fest. Oscar-nominated documentarian Kirby Dick’s (Art 76) The Invisible War, which covers the ongoing epidemic of sexual assault in the u.s. military, is up for Best Documentary. The film had collected the Audience Award at Sundance in 2012.

From Park City, Utah: The 2013 Sundance Film Festival featured the world premiere of Eliza Hittman’s (mfa 11) It Felt Like Love as part of its Next program. The drama deals with how a 14-year-old girl’s sexual quest takes a dangerous turn when she pursues an older boy and “tests the boundaries be­tween infatuation and love.” Hittman’s CalArts thesis film, Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, was shown at Sundance last year.

She was joined by rap artist Yung Jake, a.k.a. Jake Patterson (Art bfa 12), who brought performance, net art, and music videos to the festival’s New Frontier program. The Shorts Competition included the

animated shorts Bite of the Tail by Song E. Kim (mfa 07) and Thank You by Pendleton Ward (bfa 05) and Tom Herpich. Following Sundance in Park City was the Slamdance Film Festival, which presented work by 11 filmmakers from CalArts. Returning faculty member J.R. Hughto’s (mfa 06) feature Diamond on Vinyl had its world premiere as part of the festival’s new Beyond slate. The film involves a “very singular” voyeur, his fiancée, and an enigmatic young woman, who embarks on a strange seduction. Kate Marks’ (mfa 12) Pearl was Here, Ian Samuels’ (mfa 12) Caterwaul, and Rebecca SganCohen’s (mfa 11) A Time in a Dark Cloud were shown in the LiveAction Shorts program. Sean Buckelew’s (mfa 12) The Jennings Account, Ethan Clarke’s (mfa 12) Drifters, Calvin Frederick’s (bfa 12) Bermuda, Meejin Hong’s (mfa 12) Sugarcoat, Grace Nayoon Rhee’s Triangle, and Quique Rivera’s El delirio del pez léon were in the Animation Shorts lineup. Finally, Benjamin Markus’ short The War Profiteers screened in the Anarchy program.

FROM TOP Still from David Fenster’s feature Pincus (2012), with (from left) alum David Nordstrom, didgeridoo healer Joda Cook, and Paul Fenster—the director’s father.

Strip from Joanna Priestley’s iOS app Clam Bake.

Still from Quique Rivera’s stopmotion short El delirio del pez león (2012)—an underwater neo-noir about greed and hierarchy in the Caribbean reefs.

Featuring (from left) Andrew Tholl, Archie Carey and Eleanor Weigert, the music collective wild Up was the orchestra in residence at the Hammer Museum last year.

The Grammy-nominated Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, featuring (from left) Nick Terry, Matt Cook, Justin DeHart and Eric Guinivan.

Eric Leiser’s (mfa 05) Glitch in the Grid, which combines live-action and stop-motion animation, screened at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival. It was also a selection of the Annecy International Animation Festival.

Elsewhere, Leiser’s holographic paintings were featured in the exhibition Hologalactic at All Things Project in New York. Also included in the show were holograms by Critical Studies faculty member Bill Alschuler, who gave the closing night address.

A treatise on the films of Laida Lertxundi (mfa 07) was written for Cinema Scope 51. Phil Coldiron’s text is called “Eight Footnotes on a Brief Description of Footnotes to a House of Love, and Other Films by Laida Lertxundi.” Lertxundi also screened five films in Spain at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León.

courtesy of the hammer museum. photo by marianne williams.

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courtesy of the filmmaker.

Joanna Priestley (mfa 85) has released Clam Bake, an interactive iOS app for iPad, iPhone and iPod that features her iconic style of animation.

Dubbed the “queen of independent animation” by Bill Plympton, Priestley has animated, directed and produced two dozen films that explore abstraction, botany, landscape, aging, and human rights.

A study carried out by technical faculty Nathan Strum (bfa 06) has found that feature films directed by alumni from CalArts’ famous animation programs have generated a whopping $26.4 billion in worldwide box office grosses since 1985. In 2012 alone, five of the top 15 domestic earners were animated features directed or co-directed by CalArtians: Brave; Hotel Transylvania; Wreck-It Ralph; Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, helmed

by Eric Darnell (mfa 90); and Dr. Suess’ The Lorax, co-directed by Kyle Balda (93). Other notable 2012 releases include Tim Burton’s (79) Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie, and John Carter, Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton’s (bfa 87) foray into live-action.

The Herb Alpert School of Music

courtesy of the artist

Associate Dean and harp faculty Susan Allen was in Novosibirsk, Siberia, last fall for Free Music Week, teaching improvisation at the Novosibirsk College of Music. Traveling to China, she taught and gave a solo harp recital at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, performing John Cage’s In a Landscape; Allen had made the first harp recording of this work in 1981 under Cage’s supervision. In New York, she performed at Theatre 80 St. Marks with CalArts harpist Mia Theodoratus (mfa 94) in a duo recital of improvisations realized in the Cage style—by throwing the I Ching. Allen also gave the world premiere performance of current mfa composition major Josh Carro’s rippling through us is light.

courtesy of the filmmaker.

The experimental classical/contemporary ensemble wild Up was the Hammer Museum’s first-ever “orchestra in residence” from July through December.

The 24-member collective includes 10 CalArtians: trombonist Matt Barbier (mfa 10); bassoonist and composer Archie Carey (mfa 11); multi-instrumentalist, composer and sound artist Chris Kallmyer (mfa 09); violinist, violist, and composer Andrew McIntosh (mfa 08); violinist and violist Melinda Rice (mfa 06); cellist Derek Stein (mfa 10); multi-instrumentalist and composer Andrew Tholl (dma 12); pianist Richard Valitutto (mfa 11); clarinetist Brian Walsh (mfa 08, bfa 06); and cellist Ashley Walters (mfa 07). The group, led by artistic director and conductor Christopher Rountree, “unites around the belief that no music is off limits, and that a concert space should be as moving as the music heard in it: small, powerful and unlike anything else.” The Hammer residency featured three large-scale concerts and a number of open rehearsals and interactive installations. The collective is performing at redcat on April 17 in connection with the l.a. Phil’s Brooklyn Festival.

Composer and media artist Mark Coniglio (bfa 89) is among the recipients of the 2012 World Technology Awards. “The Oscars of the technology world” are presented by the World Technology Network in 10 corporate and 20 individual categories. The sole winner in the arts category, Coniglio cofounded, with Dawn Stoppiello (Dance bfa 89), the Bessie Award-winning New York-based performance company Troika Ranch. He is recognized as a pioneering force in the integration of music, dance, theater and interactive media. He has been based in Berlin since 2008.

© lapq.

Charlie Haden, founder of the storied CalArts Jazz Program, is among the Lifetime Achievement Award recipients honored at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards. Joining Haden on the lifetime achievement honor roll are Glenn Gould, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Carole King, Patti Page, the Temptations, and, lastly, the late Pandit Ravi Shankar, who passed away on December 11.

Winter 2013

Faculty member Anne LeBaron was commissioned by pianist Ana Cervantes to compose Creacion de las Aves, which received its premiere in October in Guanajuato, Mexico, at the 40th Festival Internacional Cervantino.

The pianist went on to give a second performance of the work in Aguascalientes. In other news, LeBaron’s famous Concerto for Active Frogs was performed as part of the Raudelunas Pataphysical Revue reunion at the University of Alabama. The original recording, which documents a single evening of performance in Tuscaloosa in 1975, has been named by The Wire as one of “100 Records That Set the World on Fire While No One Was Listening.”

David Rosenboom, dean of the music school and the Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music, has had four major releases, featuring plenty of CalArts faculty and alumni performers. Life Field: Retrospective Selections, 1964-2004 (Tzadik) is a collection of works from over four decades, many of which are new recordings.

Roundup Two: Selected Music with Electro-Acoustic

courtesy of the artist.

Drum set faculty Joe La Barbera and his band, the Joe La Barbera Quintet, have a new cd called Silver Streams (Jazz Compass). “Bill Evans talked about a ‘Universal Mind Force’ into which the finest musicians tap. Silver Streams demonstrates what is ultimately possible when five stellar players merge to simultaneously access that force and deliver its awesome power through their magnificent music,” noted All About Jazz. La Barbera is on leave this semester to tour Europe and Japan.

courtesy of meredith lynsey schade.

Haden, the CalArts mainstay and three-time Grammy winner, is “an all-American jazz musician best known for his signature lyrical bass lines and his ability to liberate the bassist from an accompanying role,” said the announcement by The Recording Academy. “In addition to his groundbreaking work as an original member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, he has collaborated with such jazz artists as Chet Baker, Ed Blackwell, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Billy Higgins, Art Pepper, and Archie Shepp. Throughout his five decade career, Haden has revolutionized the harmonic concept of bass playing and has covered such genres as free jazz, Portuguese fado and vintage country.” Shankar, for his part, was the most influential figure in popularizing North Indian classical music in the West. The sitar legend taught at CalArts in its earliest days, returned as a frequent visitor, and received an honorary degree from the Institute in 1985. Also on the Grammys front: the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, which consists of Matthew Cook (mfa 10), Justin DeHart (mfa 02), Nick Terry (mfa 02) and Eric Guinivan, received two nominations for its lat–pa-khandha, in the categories est studio recording, Ru of Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Surround-Sound Album. (The album’s producers, Marina and Victor Ledin, were also nominated for Best Classical Producer of the Year.) LAPQ was formed in 2008. Saxophonist and bandleader Ravi Coltrane (bfa 90), meanwhile, has been nominated for Best Improvised Jazz Solo for the track “Cross Roads” on his album Spirit Fiction—his sixth release as a leader and first on the Blue Note label.

courtesy of center theatre group.

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Dispatches

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT Ovation Award winners Hugo Armstrong (right), as Lucky, and Alan Mandell, as Estragon, in Center Theatre Group’s production of Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Forum.

Alumna Cecily Strong with Seth Meyers on Saturday Night Live.

A scene from the puppet play Hidebound— a fable of the conquest of the indigenous population in Central America by the Spanish and the Americans. The work, part of the 17-play Soulographie cycle, was written by former theater dean Erik Ehn and directed by alum Alison Heimstead at La MaMa e.t.c. in New York.

Grammy nominee Ravi Coltrane.

Landscapes (1968-1984) (Art Into Life) is a two-cd collector’s edition in which Rosenboom applies early non-linear dynamics—or chaos theory—to his music. It was released in Japan and sold out in two weeks; the producer intends to re-issue it this year. Another twocd collection is In the Beginning (New World Records), which serves up new recordings of eight compositions created from 1978 to 1981.

The fourth cd is Hymn of Change (Cold Blue Records), an anthology that features a string quartet arrangement of Rosenboom’s Bell Solaris made by Andrew Tholl (dma 12). The 12-movement work is performed by the Formalist Quartet— Tholl, faculty member Mark Menzies, and alums Andrew MacIntosh (mfa 08) and Ashley Walters (mfa 07). The cd also includes work by CalArts faculty composers, the late James Tenney and Michael Jon Fink.

Faculty member Karen Tanaka was selected as one of six Composition Fellows last year for the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Composers Lab. Currently, she is working on a new orchestral piece commissioned by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra; it will be premiered this May. Tanaka also has a cd out on the Sony label, entitled Our Planet Earth.

courtesy of nbc.

School of Theater Three CalArts theater artists collected top prizes at the 2012 edition of the la stage Alliance’s Ovation Awards, held each fall to celebrate the best of greater Los Angeles theater. Hugo Armstrong (bfa 98) won the Ovation for Featured Actor in a Play for his turn as Lucky in Center Theatre Group’s production of Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Forum. (Armstrong’s five-member cast also won for Acting Ensemble for a Play). Faculty member Lap-Chi Chu received the Ovation in the Lighting Design (Large Theater) cat­ egory for his work on The Convert, produced by ctg at the Kirk Douglas Theater. Finally, Veronika Vorel (bfa 05) shared the Ovation with John Zalewski for Sound Design

(Intimate Theater) for their work on The Children at the Theatre @ Boston Court.

Brandon Sterling Baker (mfa 10) created the lighting design for the New York City Ballet world premiere of Year of the Rabbit, a collaboration between singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens and choreographer Justin Peck that opened in October at Lincoln Center. At 24, Baker stands among the youngest artists to ever design for the acclaimed company.

It was no surprise that CalArtians took home the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film: Disney-Pixar’s Brave. School of Theater alumni also collected a pair of acting Golden Globes: Don Cheadle’s (bfa 86) role as cutthroat management consultant Marty Kaan on Showtime’s House of Lies won Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series—Comedy or Musical, while Ed Harris’ (bfa 75) turn as failed presidential candidate John McCain in hbo’s Game Change got the top honors for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television.

Both Cheadle and Harris had won the Golden Globe previously, and in the same year incidentally: Cheadle for his portrayal of Sammy Davis Jr. in Rat Pack (1998) and Harris for his rendering of director and “artistic” media manipulator Christof in The Truman Show (1998). Multiple award-winner Cheadle also has one Oscar nomination, for Hotel Rwanda (2004), and Harris, a winner of several awards himself, has four Oscar noms, for Apollo 13 (1995), The Truman Show (1998), Pollock (2000) and The Hours (2004).

Faculty member Michael Darling, the School of Theater’s head of Technical Direction and the production director of the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra, had a oneperson exhibition at the Peppers Art Gallery at the University of Redlands. Entitled Mine: I have something to show you, the show featured seven sculptures—three free-standing works and four wall pieces—that incorporate wood and

found objects salvaged from abandoned factories in Massachusetts.

Darling’s sculptures are based on the concept of the “haves” and the “have nots.” Also included in the exhibition was a painting.

Some two dozen School of Theater alums came together on New York City’s Lower East Side when the venerable venue La MaMa e.t.c. presented a weeklong run of Soulographie: Our Genocides, a cycle of 17 plays written by former CalArts theater dean Erik Ehn. Presented for the first time as a group, the plays of Soulographie became a durational performance event that looked at 20th-century America from the point of view of its relationship to genocides here (the Tulsa Race Riot), in East Africa (Rwanda, Uganda), and in Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador).

“It is clear that Mr. Ehn has something vitally important to say and a many-splendored voice with which to say it,” declared The New York Times. Participating directors included Emily Mendelsohn (mfa 09), Allison Russo (mfa 06), Katie Shook (mfa 09), Alison Heimstead (mfa 06) and Laurie O’Brien (mfa 08). Among the performers were Caitlin Lainoff (mfa 08), Kat Heverin (mfa 10), DanRae Wilson (mfa 10), Sayda Trujillo (bfa 98), Dana Gourrier (mfa 10) and Sharon Wang (mfa 10), with collaborators Sarah Dahlen (mfa 06) and Daniel Trisi (bfa 05). Designers included Shannon Scrofano (mfa 06), Ken MacKenzie (mfa 06), Cybele Moon (mfa 11), Jeannette Yew (mfa 06), John Eckert (mfa 06) and Colin Trevor (bfa 06). Meredith Lynsey Schade (mfa 06) was the producer; Erik Holden (mfa 06) and Sarah Peterson (mfa 10) served as production managers and Marisa Blankier (mfa 12) as stage manager.

Dana Gourrier (mfa 10) played the part of Cora in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the highest grossing film in the writer-director’s 20-year career. Gourrier’s performance earned her a solo title card in the movie’s credits. The actress is also in Broken City, with Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe, and Lee Daniels’ upcoming film, The Butler, which stars Forest Whitaker

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as a White House butler who ca­tered to eight presidents. Gourrier’s costars include Oprah Winfrey as the titular butler’s mother, Robin Williams as Eisenhower, John Cusack as Nixon, and Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan.

Acting Program alum Cecily Strong (bfa 06) made her debut in September on nbc’s Saturday Night Live, now in its 38th season. She has made an immediate impact with memorable characterizations such as “The Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party” in the show’s “Weekend Update” segment. “It looks like new featured player Cecily Strong is quickly becoming Saturday Night Live’s go-to ditzy girl,” wrote Liz Raftery of tv Guide. A native of Oak Park, il, and a veteran of the Second City improv troupe, Strong joins a growing list of School of Theater alumni in prominent television roles.

Tony Award nominee Condola Rashad (bfa 08) recently starred in the Lifetime Channel’s remake of Steel Magnolias, appearing as Shelby; Alison Brie (bfa 05) is on two critically acclaimed shows— nbc’s Community and amc’s Mad Men; Eliza Coupe (mfa 05) stars in abc’s Happy Endings; Michael Cudlitz (bfa 90), known for his work on hbo’s Band of Brothers, is on tnt’s cop procedural Southland; and Arron Shiver (bfa 01) has been on hbo’s Boardwalk Empire. Katey Sagal (72), of Married with Children fame, won a Golden Globe in 2011 for her turn as biker gang matriarch Gemma Teller Morrow in fx’s Sons of Anarchy.

Eleven years after it was first penned, Writing for Performance Head Alice Tuan saw her explicit dark comedy ajax (por nobody) receive its first fully-staged production at the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto. The premise of the play is simple: four characters get together for a night of fun, but the sexual spree spins out of control. The title refers to both the Greek tragedy and the household cleaner.

Institute Kathy Carbone, the Institute’s performing arts librarian and archivist and a School of Music faculty member, has received the Teresa and Roy Aaron Fellowship at ucla, where she is working toward a PhD in Information Studies. She was also named a Dean’s Scholar at the university. redcat’s new gallery director and curator, Ruth Estévez, began her tenure in December. She comes to CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts from Mexico City, where she worked as a curator and writer. From 2007 to 2011, Estévez served as chief curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Carrillo Gil before going on to cofound the independent organization liga—Space for Architecture. “I’m very excited about the opportunity to work in the city of Los Angeles, which has such strong links to Latin America,” said Estévez, who joins associate gallery curator Aram Moshayedi, the acting director for the past year.

Student Affairs counselor and theater artist Linda Hoag and her collaborator David Combs collected a 2012 la Weekly Theater Award for their puppetry work on Henry Murray’s seriocomic play Monkey Adored, produced by Rogue Machine at Theatre/Theater. The chilling creation by Hoag and Combs was a towering puppet that embodied the sole “human” role in the allegorical drama: a lab technician conducting brutal experiments on animals, whose parts were played by human actors. mfa candidates Nilja Mumin, of the Film Directing Program and the Writing Program, and Vincent Richards, of the Scene Design Program, were joined by alum Miwa Matreyek (Film/Video–Integrated Media mfa 07) in New York last fall to receive their 2012 Princess Grace Awards at the annual gala of the Princess Grace Foundation–usa. Established to continue the legacy of Princess Grace of Monaco, the awards support young artists in film, theater and dance. Over the past 10 years,

23 CalArtians have received Princess Grace Awards—with several recognized on multiple occasions.

Among those is Matreyek, who received her third prize from the foundation, this time a Special Project Award for her work in combining projected animation and live performance.

Two faculty members and four alumni are among the recipients of project grants from Creative Capital, the national arts philanthropic organization. Writing Program faculty member Maggie Nelson was selected for her work-in-progress, The Myth of Freedom and Other Essays. Her faculty colleague Matias Viegener, along with David Burns (Art bfa 93) and Austin Young, were selected for an upcoming project by their Fallen Fruit art collective. The trio’s Endless Orchard will be a site-specific public installation of fruit trees in an urban neighborhood. Choreographer luciana achugar (Dance bfa 95) has won a grant for otro teatro, “a dance meditation between aesthetics and ideology.” Writer-director Jesse Bonnell (Theater bfa 07), a founder of the Poor Dog Group theater collective, was awarded a grant for a new project called Dionysia: my parents were in a cult. Miwa Matreyek (Film/Video–Integrated Media mfa 07) rounds out the CalArts contingent, receiving a grant for This World Made Itself, a multimedia performance that explores the earth’s history.

BELOW Ruth Estévez, curator and director of the Gallery at redcat.

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— Jon Gomez (Film/Video bfa 07), Character Animation Faculty, CalArts

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Black Clock 16

In , crumbling urbanscapes, nomadic rock and roll desert rats, genetically-cloned children and their forsaken mothers occupy the fiction of Henry Bean, Craig Clevenger, Carola Dibbell, Claire Phillips, and Stephen O’Connor, among others, plus Rick Moody’s epic account of the strangest presidential candidate of all time.

Black Clock is the national literary journal published by CalArts Edited By Steve Erickson www.blackclock.org

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For more information, please contact: Courtney Mcintyre, Director of Planned Giving 661 222-2743 cmcintyre@calarts.edu calarts.edu/support

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Headliners — 2 Michael Asher — 8 Amanda Beech — 10 Artistic Voices in Many Languages — 14 Shifting Focus — 24 The New Lo-Fi Popsters — 30 Dispatches — 32

COVER IMAGE Faculty member Laurence Blake’s Rite received its world premiere as part of the 2012 Winter Dance Concert, presented on campus at the Walt Disney Modular Theater and at redcat. Set to Igor Stravinsky’s iconic The Rite of Spring, Blake’s piece explores interplay between the genders. Pictured are Shelby Alden, Hannah Anderson-Ricketts, Laura Berg, Sarah Cook and Elizabeth Houlton. The rest of the ensemble comprised Lynn Suemitsu, Wesley Ensminger, Jake Harkey, Stephen Patterson, Travis Richardson, Jordon Waters and Joshua Youngs.