Lux Art Institute, San Diego’s interactive art destination, announced today the artists who will participate in Lux’s third Artist-in-Residence season, which begins this September.

A significant contemporary art venue in San Diego County where visitors can “see art happen,” Lux is one of the first museum facilities in the United States to establish an innovative artist-in-residence program that focuses on the living artist and the creative process.

“We are thrilled with the artist line-up for the 2009-2010 season,” said Lux Director Reesey Shaw. “Lux is bringing a fresh and exciting pool of talent here, a group of inspiring artists that work in a variety of media, from marble to charcoal to metal. We hope the public will visit often throughout the new season to explore, experience and see great new art for themselves.”

Elizabeth Turk
In-Studio Sept. 10 – Oct. 3, 2009
On-Exhibit through Oct. 31, 2009
A native of Southern California, sculptor Elizabeth Turk kicks off Lux’s new season on September 10, 2009. Though she has mastered a variety of media, she currently embraces and brings new vision to the classical practice of stone carving. With chisel in hand and fueled by her fascination with patterns, she painstakingly transforms solid, 400-pound blocks of marble into fantastic and improbable shapes — collars, pinwheels and ribbons — that illustrate the tension between the inherent strength and fragility of the stone. Her exhibit at Lux will feature numerous examples of sculpture as well as works on paper. While in residence, Turk will be carving a sculpture for her “Collars” series.

Other venues for Turk has exhibited at include Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Calif.; and Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Her works are featured in such collections as the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, both in Washington, D.C., as well as the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, Claremont, Calif.

Susan Hauptman
In-Studio Nov. 12 – Nov. 21, 2009
On-Exhibit through Jan. 9, 2010
New York City-based Hauptman is Lux’s second artist of the new season. For over twenty years, her enigmatic, charcoal self-portraits have been her focus. Drawn with complete candor and near-photographic exactitude, the works display not only Hauptman’s astonishing technical mastery but also serve as the artist’s own means of self-revelation and reinvention. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the country and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; and Norton Gallery of Art, Palm Beach, Fla.

Iva Gueorguieva
In-Studio Jan. 16 – Feb. 6, 2010
On-Exhibit through March 17, 2010
Bulgarian-born Gueorguieva starts the New Year as Lux’s third resident artist. Her large-scale abstract paintings are filled with exuberant hues, dizzying brushstrokes, ghostly humanoid characters and churning landscape melodramas where themes of beauty, violence, isolation, sex and death are revealed. Gueorguieva has exhibited at Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, Calif.; Outline, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Electric Works, San Francisco; and Stephen Stux Gallery, New York. She also teaches drawing and painting at UCLA.

Robert Lobe
In-Studio March 27 - April 24, 2010
On-Exhibit through May 22, 2010
Inspired by the shapes, materials and textures found in the woods, New York City sculptor Robert Lobe depicts rock and trees in shimmering, hollow forms. He uses an adaptation of the ancient process of repoussé to recreate ephemeral, natural objects as monumental sculptures whose aluminum surfaces glimmer with the play of light and shadow. His work has been commissioned and exhibited in galleries and museums across the country, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sati Zech
In-Studio June 5 – June 26, 2010
On-Exhibit through July 31, 2010
Born in Southern Germany and currently living and working in Berlin, Zech’s vibrant cloth fields in the series titled Bollenarbeit encompass elements of painting, drawing and sculpture. While the sumptuous displays of thick, red mounds of paint on torn rows of canvas hint at domestic handicraft and historically ritualistic mark-making, her bold, dynamic creations defy category and inhabit a world of their own. She made her stateside debut in 2008 at Howard Scott Gallery in New York City. Since 1985, Zech has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, as well as art fairs, in cities including Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Salzberg, Zurich and Bilbao.

About Lux Art Institute
Lux Art Institute, located in Encinitas, Calif., opened its doors to the public in November 2007 and is redefining the museum experience with its unique artist-in-residence program. At Lux, artists live and work on site, while producing a commissioned work of art.

Throughout the year, Lux invites significant regional, national and international artists to participate in the Lux residency and encourages visitors from across the country to observe and engage them. This one-of-a-kind institution invites visitors to not only “see art,” but also to “see art happen.”

Slated to be the first “green” (LEED certified) art museum in California and located alongside one of Southern California’s few remaining coastal wetlands, Lux’s five-acre site overlooks the San Elijo Lagoon and is surrounded by a wildlife preserve that stretches to the Pacific Ocean.

Santa Monica, California-based Renzo Zecchetto, AIA, designed the two-story building, a recent recipient of the San Diego Architectural Foundation’s top design award.

Lux Art Institute is located at 1550 South El Camino Real in Encinitas. Lux hours are Thursday and Friday, 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information visit www.luxartinstitute.org or call 760.436.6611

I think, despite Russe's gibberish commentary and the apparent backlash the show has accrued, some of the problem might lie within the show's formal structure and less to do with the artist and his ideas. I have a smidgen of doubt, as incredulous as her remark may seem, that it isn't a matter of Goeltzenleuchter's work being too advanced for the public, but the intangibility of an idea put on display that simultaneously positions itself as an art form laden with art historical precedents - as Pincus clearly points out in his review (a movement that many may be unfamiliar with including Russe), appears to also point an accusatory finger in her direction (clearly tongue-in-cheek), propounds some type of scientific experiment and data to back it up, but might fail in convincing the audience that what they are viewing is relevent and can be meaningful to them. Russe's criticism in an oblique way then, might be questioning what types of art should be made for the museum. What Russe doesn't understand is that art like museums, have limits in their capacity to communicate everything to everyone. It doesn't make the adventure any less exciting for trying, but the art must somehow signal a larger purpose beyond its exhibition when in a public domain (as opposed to a much more private domain such as a gallery). How that manifests itself either didactically or pragmatically with a clear intent, is the key I believe, to a show's successful reading by the public.

In order to accomplish this though, you need bright intelligent individuals at the helm, willing to step up the game for everyone's betterment. Art is not unlike other fields of research: would you ask a scientist to pace herself in finding a cure for cancer? Of course not, that would be absurd. To think that a museum and the peuple who come to visit are not equipped to deal with contemporary ideas and the artists who furnish them is equally as absurd. Teri Sowell, the museum's director of collections and exhibitions, clearly understands the necessity to expand and not contract.

If there is an Institutional Critique to be made, which in essence, is one of the main goals of Goeltzenleuchter's exhibit - a fact clearly stated in the show's title "Institutional Well Being: An Olfactory Plan for the Oceanside Museum of Art" - emphasis on the word plan, as in a plan of action to be taken presumably against or for some cause, the show then is a complete success. It has come to remedy the sort of mentality, as myopic and shocking as it may appear, that Russe epitomizes in such a broad definition of today's modern museum. I'm all for provincialism and restraint when appropriate. I can do away with a lot of "shock art" and ideas that run amok or are simply lazy. I am at heart, a true populist willing to break down barriers between art and the public through dialogue.

It is difficult to accept however, Russe's mother-knows-best approach to governing a museum and Goeltzenleuchter's devil-may-care approach to making art, when there has been no clear attempt to "explain" either method to a public put before le fait acompli. Art should always be at the service of the public and not in service of its own interests. A cultural institution is not merely a showcase for avant-gardists, but has a direct line to the populace it's serving. In doing so, it has a larger responsibility to frame an artist's work - however obscure or difficult it might be - within a context that corresponds or at least attempts to address, the failures and successes of the artist's process in an effort to better relay that experience to the public. Art cannot feed off of its vitals forever. Let me explain.

Goeltzenleuchter's work presented in all its clinical sterility is intentional. It is cold, sometimes austere but it's not clinically dead. You can poke holes in the ideas and their execution, this is true, but only if you're unwilling to accept the show's theatricality of the absurd (a sort of Muzak for the senses through smell), its position as anti-art (against its commodification, bottling the experience as opposed to buying a derivative), and its subversive humor. None of which is difficult to understand with a moment or two of reflection on the part of the viewer. This is not a requirement of course, and maybe we shouldn't have to think at all while looking at art, but it would mean missing the whole point of the exercise if we didn't. What is missing is art's ability to communicate clearly its intent or message — we're not talking 17th century Poussin here — but 21st century contemporary art left to its own devices combined with the public's general unawareness of contemporary art practice, which ultimately results in stand-alone containers of individual thought in a form or shape we call art.

And that form is the key to the art's understanding. If art is about ideas then everyone is a conceptual artist. My point is this, sometimes, the art needs a little extra help in bridging the gap between itself and the viewing public. It may not be the artist's fault or responsibility that I do not "get" his work, the true art experience according to John Dewey, occurs when the artwork and I meet for the first time, in the same space with very different experiences which are only enhanced through an exchange of information and knowledge. The artwork in other words, does not speak unilaterally, it is as much a receptor as it is an emitter.

How does this relate to Goeltzenleuchter's exhibit? A crucial element to the show's conductivity I believe was perhaps poorly placed. I'm referring to the pitchman-like video that concludes and summarizes the rather obscure graphs, charts and olfactory experiments one enters upon in the first half of the exhibit. Placing the video at the end of the exhibit is like telling a story that is too long, the delayed gratification in knowing the outcome, dampens the excitement and the interest of the beginning. Getting to the point by placing the video at the beginning of the exhibit, I'm convinced, would have heightened the viewing experience and the understanding of the artist's intent and would have avoided the unwarranted and unnecessary intellectual flounderings of the museum's president of the board. This isn't to say that the artist by doing so, would have given us all the clues - Goeltzenleuchter is far too clever and in control to allow us this luxury - it would have however, allowed us to find some of our own, on our own, by pointing us in the right direction. There's certainly nothing wrong with that.

You can read Robert Pincus's complete review of Goeltzenleuchter's exhibit here.

Iz the Wiz — a writer who lived largely for sex in a can, and died largely of it, kidney and heart.

The NY Times obit mentions that Cooper and Chalfant's classic Subway Art was recently reissued by Chronicle Books. An art book's art book, this one's for the ages... check it out.

Speak, memory.