Joe Scanlan (artist)
[7] He continues to teach a diverse range of courses at Princeton, from a freshman seminar titled Contemporary Art and the Amateur to an advanced interdisciplinary studio class entitled Extraordinary Processes.
[8][9] Scanlan quit graduate school in 1986 but remained in Chicago for the next decade as part of a group of young artists and critics intent on expanding the kinds of art being made and discussed in the city, including Theaster Gates, Gaylen Gerber, Michelle Grabner, Hudson, Jin Lee, Kerry James Marshall, Hirsch Perlman, Dan Peterman, Kay Rosen, David Sedaris, and Tony Tasset.
For every work as captivating and touching as [Gary] Hill's video installation depicting ghostly figures, walking toward and away from the viewer, there are numerous visually numbing pieces like Joe Scanlan's section of a bathroom floor.
(Counting the works of Mr. Scanlan and [Mike] Kelley, Wim Delvoye's tiles decorated with images of excrement, [Ilya] Kabakov's reconstruction of a Soviet public rest room, and Attila Richard Lukac's pissoir, the show's most dominant motif may very well be the toilet.
Pay Dirt (2002) was a site-specific project commissioned by the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England, in which Scanlan sought, attained, and enacted United States Utility Patent #6,488,732, a process for converting consumer waste into viable potting soil.
[17] The exhibition featured Traveling Salesman, a conceptual artwork in the form of a collapsible market table retrofitted with chambers that held the artist's wares; Circular Economy, a collaboratively produced animation depicting a short loop of consumer objects morphing into other consumer objects; and The Process of Creative Destruction in Action, a room-sized installation of Joseph Schumpeter's classic essay The Process of Creative Destruction chromatically altered and edited so as to apply contemporary art.
[21][22] Store A culminated in the exhibition Passing Through (2007–08) at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21) in Düsseldorf, in which a flexible modular pavilion modeled on the artist's original Brooklyn studio was commissioned by K21.
Over the course of eighteen months, the structure slowly morphed and circumnavigated the museum's top-floor winter garden while an evolving array of exhibitions and store displays took place within its walls.
Its first issue was a spoof of October Magazine titled Commerce that mimicked the legendary MIT publication's academic style and included a roster of five editors, three of whom were anagrams of "Joe Scanlan" (Neal Jac[k]son, Anna Lojecs, and Jane C. Sloan) and the fourth of whom was Töte Winkel (German for "blind spot").
[28][29][30][31] In a Bomb interview with Jeremy Sigler in 2010, Scanlan discussed the role the actors had played in the project to that point, saying that Jenn [Kidwell] sees it as a political gesture, a kind of territorial claiming of a type of behavior black artists supposedly aren't allowed to have.
The Society offers access to its archive,[38] organizes public lectures and events,[39] and hosts short- and long-term scholars in an adjacent private residence[40][41] Throughout his career Scanlan has made objects that begin their lives as artworks in galleries and museums.
It was first conceived and made on site at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in 1999 as part of a group exhibition organized by Christina Ritchie titled Waste Management.
[44][45] The artwork was elaborated on three years later in DIY, Or How To Kill Yourself Anywhere in the World for Under $399, an artist's book that provides a shopping list, an inventory of required hand tools, and 120 pages of step-by-step instructions for reverse-engineering standard Ikea products into a fully functioning coffin.
It was made of refuse carefully collected from Birmingham's waste stream, and the reconstituted material was ultimately packaged and resold out of the museum's bookstore as IKON Earth and Black Country Rock brand potting soil.
For part two, Truffle Finds Pig, Scanlan and the museum drew up a lending agreement with which any citizen in the town of Ostende can request to borrow and use a Nesting Bookcase for a period of time in their home or place of business.
