HyperCriticalWriting

Things that annoy me, volume 1,964

2011-11-16T06:19:00.001-08:00

The other day I promised I would go through this and address its most irritating moments. I should stop making promises like this. They exhaust me.

Where to begin? How about at 35 seconds, where entrepreneur Steve Blank begins a riff on van Gogh's Starry Night, suggesting that when a painter sets out to make a picture s/he has "no idea what's going to come out". Let's put aside romantic ideas for a minute and just think about this...we'll assume that the painting Blank is talking about is the one in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, painted in June, 1889...thirteen months before van Gogh's death of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It's also worth noting that by the time he painted this picture, van Gogh had been working on his craft for nine years. Van Gogh was an astonishingly prolific painter, and some 800 canvases (and many, many more drawings) in his short career. In that short decade, his work underwent considerable transformation from early, gloomy works like the 1885 Potato Eaters. Such changes came - if one trusts art historians (or, for that matter, the artists' own letters, instead of the myths one prefers to invent because they make things so much more interesting...) - after van Gogh started thinking about Seurat's use of color, about the nature of Japanese art and prints, and through exposure to the pictures and ideas of Paul Gaugin.

The point here is that van Gogh didn't just randomly toss canvases on his easel and hope for the best. as Blank implies. At this moment in his reverie, Blank is trying to make a point about how entrepreneurs are not like scientists (rational operators? people who can achieve predictable results under controlled circumstances???) but rather that they are like "artists...but a special breed of artists [...] composers"

Mixed metaphors (artists/composers...what's the diff?) notwithstanding, let's move to 1:16 in the tape, where Blank, with infuriating smugness, observes, "we've been teaching art for hundreds, probably thousands of years in our society [...] yet we still don't know what makes world class composers." Please, Steve, don't include yourself in that 'we.' I don't see any studio teaching in your resume. But, for the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that over those thousands of years, no one had identified any principles about harmony, about form, or about any other aesthetic properties that could be passed down from generation to generation so as to constitute a tradition. Let's imagine that every artists figured it out for herself or himself...that no one ever successfully offered advice or considered how another generation might approach an art form. Let's say, because if I get Blank's meaning, that knowledge of how art has been made in the past is of no use to an artist in the present because the circumstances have changed. Then what does it take to make a work of art (or, a successful business, because Blank is really talking about entrepreneurship, not art, about which he evidently knows little)?

Well, duh, it takes an appreciative audience.

The creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. ~Marcel Duchamp

But acknowledging that works of art come not from brilliant, inspired (or loony) individuals but from our collective interest in what brilliant, inspired (or even, occasionally, loony) individuals make would seriously undermine a motivational speech whose primary message is that it's who you are not what you do that matters. I mean, who cares what you do anyway? It certainly doesn't matter in the arts, where all you really need is a name that can become your brand...why should it matter in business?

Anyway...at about 1:50, Blank talks about the 'irony' of giving scientific tools to people who are artists (note that entrepreneurs are no longer like artists, they are artists...Barthes would have something to say about the way myth is being used here...but fortunately the reader doesn't get any harder than Malcolm Gladwell). Steve Blank, meet Stephen Wilson, and David Edwards. I am as excited as anyone about the possibility that artists in the 21st century can all hang up our velvet smocks and do something new and innovative and (gasp!) relevant outside of the museum/gallery universe, but that doesn't turn every creative act into a work of art, and it doesn't mean that everyone who create something is an artist.

What I really left Blank's short and grating talk with was a strong sense of the self-loathing that entrepreneurs must have. If I understand it correctly, it's necessary for people starting businesses to come up with some alternate universe in which what they do is more important than what it is - in which the design, manufacture, and marketing of a new widget is of the same cultural consequence as a symphony. How about letting things be what they are? Entrepreneurship requires vision, organizational skill, risk-tolerance, and a host of other traits (that are, coincidentally, valuable for artists to possess as well) but dressing it up as an expression of a culture's values and achievements - turning it into a work of art - is a recipe for making fun of art and commerce.

Copyleft sing along

2011-11-07T09:48:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Terri for this addition to the copyleft song book. It's like an updated version of Jefferson's comment about whoever lights his candle from mine...Remember, sharing doesn't hurt.

New work

2011-09-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

I put a few new images of things I'm working on for my show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid up on my site. Hope they amuse you...

Back to writing about teaching

2011-09-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm teaching this large lecture class with a handful of other people, it seems I am getting a lot to think about and will try to use this blog as the place to put it...

Today we were talking to our huge section of about 180 students about research. We had done a poll at the first class meeting and found that huge majority thought research was an important part of art and design practice, but in another question we saw that they were not necessarily so comfortable doing it. So we asked them why they didn't feel comfortable in class today and the answers came back in high school, research was a highly prescriptive process and that it relied heavily on secondary sources and received wisdom.

We kind of expected this - and that's why we were about to launch a project that addressed observational research tactics - but my colleague, Sneha Patel of Tyler's Architecture program - made this really interesting observation at that moment. She pointed out that the students seemed to be hampered by the interface of research.

This struck me as really important, as if I had been confusing the substance with the means of recognizing that substance...as if there suddenly was some sort of wall between information and informed. Observation seemed like a useful way to pull down that wall, and to stand in direct relation to the thing you're trying to understand.

Of course, primary sources are that sort of thing, too, and they may be the only available way to 'observe'' someone or something remote in time or space, but I thought that image - of a wall - was a keeper...

Screen Testing

2011-09-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

Artists - opportunity

2011-06-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

NAPOLEON CALLING!

We'd like to welcome you to apply to be an original member of a new artist run project space. In the blossoming 319 N. 11th Street building which is home to popular galleries such as Vox Populi, Grizzly Grizzly, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, comes NAPOLEON. NAPOLEON's mission is to give artists complete freedom to conquer space through experimentation and risk taking. NAPOLEON offers members free reign in the space for a month a year on a rotational basis. Members will be free to present their own work or curate a show in space 2L (225 sq. foot gallery). Once members are chosen, there is no more jury process.

Aside from showing at NAPOLEON, members will also help run the space by attending monthly meetings, gallery sitting, maintaining the space, and helping with various administrative tasks. While the gallery itself is the primary focus of the group, NAPOLEON could be much more. First year members will mold the reputation of the collective and set its agenda. NAPOLEON will be a group from which artists can find community and an artistic outlet. So, come be a NAPOLEON.

Eligibility:

must reside in the Philadelphia area
must be out of school (to avoid conflicts)
must commit to one full year (August 2011 to July 2012)

Dues:

$45 a month membership dues
commitment to one full year membership
commitment to meetings and gallery sitting
Application: Please email napoleon.philadelphia@gmail.com
3 examples of your work (jpgs or short video)
an artist statement
a current resume
3 - 4 sentences about why you'd like to be in an artist run project space (may be written in the body of the email)

Application due July 20th. Email widely.
Thank you,
Daryl Bergman and Leslie Friedman, co-founders of Napoleon

COMING SOON!
napoleonnapoleon.com

July Show: Christopher Hartshorne, "Stark Matter." Two opening receptions! Friday July 1st and Friday July 8th. Come check out the space!

Character is victory organized -- Napoleon I

Some new images

2011-06-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

These are some images from a notebook of idea for an upcoming show...more to follow soon.

Virtual Studio Tour - Slideshow

2011-05-20T11:59:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to put this up forever - hope you find it interesting...

Virtual Studio Tour

View more presentations from gerard brown.

Interesting participatory design project...

2011-04-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Polly McKenna-Cress for posting this link to the Center for the Future of Museums, who I will now be following.

I promise to one day write something original again (though I've notices that the sun continues to rise in the east even if I don't...). For now, thanks for checking in on this blog from time to time.

Dangerous minds - late edition

2011-03-31T18:51:00.000-07:00

The Head, from Quark

Coming attractions

2010-10-15T07:22:00.000-07:00

Gone but not forgotten on Prezi

If you're going to be in Richmond next week, come see:

Gone But Not Forgotten: Recovering History int he 21st Century

with panelists
Jane Irish, University of Pennsylvania
Consumed By Painting: Commemorating + Reenactment +Internalitzation
Wendy Deschene, Auburn University
My Latest Inheritance
Christine Colby, The University of the Arts
The Allure of the Fantastic: Reflections of the Past...in the Present

9:45am Harrison Meeting Room of the Jefferson Hotel in sunny Richmond, VA.

Details: Curiouser

Publish Post

Found

2010-09-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

"There is a book (or at least a glossy catalogue) yet to be written, not on the art of the '80s but on the ramifications of the art of the '80s on all of us who were too young to actually participate but old enough to be schooled in it. My sense is that much of the work produced by this group today is the visual equivalent of the poor soul who was really smart in school but never fit in socially -- you know, the one you would always get drunk at parties just to see him do something stupid and completely out of character. Hovering precariously between a critical knowledge that has resonated so loudly and for so long that it is impossible to forget and a new world that says a big whatever, we go through our art life like a conflicted Fred Flintstone, angel and devil Freds popping up out of the blue to whisper conflicting truths in our ears."
~Charles Kissick, Border Crossings, August, 2009

Sometimes, information doesn't want to be free

2010-07-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

(Preface: I should know better to get involved in something like this, but you can call it a weakness. On ArtFag City, comments from Elizabeth and Ken have been very perceptive and done more than I expect to here. I posted this on a blog I use for teaching graduate seminars, but here it is again...you comments are invited)

So I wanted to talk about writing for a minute. I came across an interesting little kerfuffle online this weekend as I read ArtFag City. It seems that Paddy Johnson has been mixing it up with a writer who posts as Tremblings. At issue is Johnson's sense that Tremblings' writing engages in "linguistic privilege — the practice of using big words as means of ensuring the reader (and typically the author) doesn’t know the essay lacks substantiated ideas".

In an effort to restrain this sort of excessive privilege-taking, Johnson proposes changes, and asks a 'friend in academia' to propose further edits. In the process, words are changed, avenues of investigation are pared down, and whatever they essay's original content was is redirected in the interest of some unarticulated ideal of 'readability'.

Johnson's bias against academic writing is so obvious (the story ran under a headline "The Problem with Academic Writing Isn't Big Words") as to be not worth discussing. What is interesting is the notion - proposed here by a writer in a popular media - that an idea occurring in writing should be accessible to readers. This is opposed to another idea - that what is being written should be understood by those for whom it is written. Tremblings gets at this fine distinction in a very interesting passage:

I have to be incredibly specific in the words I use because remembrance means 35 different things to the scholars in my field. Same goes for memory, repetition, performance, etc. I have to take the time to say more than what might be necessary in some circles in order to not be perceived as misrepresenting the people I cite or the theories I believe in.

Much of this semester, I have tried to wave the banner of readability and be an advocate for prose that engages the reader. I have recited the journalistic dictum, "You are writing for an educated and curious reader who has no idea what you're talking about" as a model to which one might subscribe. But that model applies well to criticism, especially of the journalistic stripe, and not so well to other forms of academic writing.

I spent much of the day fuming about this problem inclusive and exclusive writing because it is so easy to attack exclusive practices as elitist that their value has become obscured. At the end of the day, not everything is for everyone. Some writing is for 35 peers and colleagues who are going to take issue with the ideas it contains and use those as grist to teaching seminars of 10 - 15 graduate students. Subsequently, those 350-525 graduates are going to go into their profession talking about these ideas and their audiences, students, and peers are going to form opinions about them. Gradually, the idea will move through the culture, growing and diminishing in importance as it does. All too rarely, a truly gifted scholar (a Louis Menand or Lewis Hyde or Lawrence Weschler, for instance) will figure out how to communicate directly with a larger community.

Communicate - which is to say, figure out how to make subjects relevant to that larger community so they will engage in discussion. Honestly, when is the art world going to be okay with the fact that there are differences among our interests and that not everything is okay with everybody? Somethings may never be relevant to some people (I am struggling to figure out why Marina Abramovic, whose exhibit at MoMA started the Johnson/Tremblings argument, matters in the first place).

So what we have in academic writing (aside from the obvious allusion to Cool Hand Luke) is an opportunity to define and address one's audience, to think about community in narrower terms than the art world usually does (a dear friend of mine laments the way the artists always say 'community' when 'industry' is more appropriate) and to speak to the people who need to understand what you're doing because they're invested in the same conversation. Academic writing is not intended for everyone, but when it's done, its ideas can be examined, evaluated, disseminated, or critiqued. It is - in the most real sense - writing for a community because communities have boundaries, shared interests that place them in genuine opposition to other communities' interests. Such writing requires precision, insight, depth, and conviction.

Readability can be helpful, too. But there's a time and place for it.

Interesting to see something you've been thinking about for a while online...

2010-07-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

Graffiti Analysis: 3D from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

I love the cross over between 2- and 3-D, between the very straightforward and the embedded in computer technology. It reminds me of these amazing wire sculptures photographed by Marcus Raetz.

Schatten (Shadows), 1991, published by Crown Point Press

Cannibalism

2010-06-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

I will be doing a lot of my writing this summer on my Criticism Seminar's blog. If you want to follow it, you can take a peek over there...

Criticism Seminar Summer, 2010: Beyond the pale (some thoughts on the craft of writing)

Dangerous minds - part 2

2010-06-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

In the first post on Dangerous Minds, I think I was too general when I moved away from exaggerated emblems for intelligence (big brains) to scientists...so here's a new attempt to get to the point.

First, a disclaimer. Most of these images were suggested by Fernando Vidal's essay Ectobrains in the Movies in the Getty's The Fragment: An Incomplete History. The above image comes from a 1953 film called Donovan's Brain (a trailer is on YouTube). In a nut shell, the brain of a deadman goes looking for a body to rule. Good times.

I've not yet seen the Brain that Wouldn't Die, but it sounds like a winner in this genre. Part of what I think creeps us out about brains is tied up in mortality. And if your decapitated girlfriend's brain must be kept alive at all costs, well there's a potent symbol for you...

I'm sooo into this image from The Fiend without a Face (Science gone wild!). Too bad it seems the brains tend to go invisible when they hunt.

...one could only wish the brain in The Brain were a little less visible. I can see a few Spanish dub versions of the film have made it online, but it may be time for some Netflicks research...

Finally, when Vidal mentions Steve Martin in The Man With Two Brains, all I can think of this this more recent analog....

I have a few more up my sleeve, but they will require some video rentals. Meanwhile I hope you enjoyed this installation of Dangerous Minds....

Okay, back to thinking about writing...

2010-06-11T06:27:00.000-07:00

Time to get ready for the summer seminar, and to think about writing a little more...both in the traditional sense and in the expanded way I was trying to get at in the last post.

I was interested in Laura Miller's Salon post, The Hyperlink War, that some how came to my attention yesterday. Now that I only write once in a very blue moon (I mean for people to read...), I have missed the raging debate she describes between those who feel that incorporating hyperlinks into the body of the writing is beneficial and those who find it too distracting and prefer them clustered at the end of the text.

There has been a lot in the media about being distracted lately, and about how the way information is coming to us is 'changing' us as a species. Steven Pinker poo-poos the idea in today's New York Times, the same paper that started the debate a few days ago with a review of The Invisible Gorilla (by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons) that made it sound like we have no freaking idea what's going around us. Another winner was Matt Ritchel's story of a profoundly distracted and horribly over-privileged family in San Francisco that cannot unplug for five minutes.

My personal favorite entry in this debate came out in the stone age - I mean, in 2008 - when the Atlantic ran an essay by Nicholas Carr that asked if Google was making us stupid. I like Carr's essay because I identify with his description of the Algernon-effect (notice I didn't stick a link there???) that comes with using the Internet to get at information. I think this is what Miller is bothered by, too - the way the texture of a piece of writing is disturbed by the inclusion of pointers beyond the boundaries of that piece of writing. (Okay, specifically, Miller thinks that using hypertext links in writing is lazy because it alleviates the responsibility to explain things in your own writing...but I see these things as connected.)

And while I can share in Carr and Miller's pique, I wonder if maybe writing (and therefore, reading) ought be recognized as fundamentally different from speech, just as pictures of spaces are fundamentally different form the spaces they depict. When I teach writing, I try to impress upon my students that 'good' writing works like perspective in visual art - it seems to rationalize the space in the text and make it continuous with our world, not to call attention to itself. I'm fascinated by style in writing and visual art, but more interested in it when it creeps up on me - when fantastic ideas and images are teased out of a world that seems connected to the one I know and understand, where the progree toward the strange and wonderful is barely noticed. When things begin in a strange and stylized space, they can seem mannered and thin. But I digress.

Clearly, we need better writing, better art, things that can capture our attention and hold it - not more that can apparently be consumed in seconds, making room for the next thing. Which brings me to an idea Robin Rice floated in a review of the Bravo's Work of Art.

Already, judges have floated the suggestion that successful art (like a successful television show) should clearly communicate something specific or should be marketable. This trivializes the potential of art; some of the best art, indeed, is murky and contradictory. The show is not likely to favor artists who are oblique or subtle or conceptual.

What is good writing, what is good art? These questions matter because writing and art matter to us - they embody our culture, the are the ways in which we pass things on to one another in our own time...nevermind future generations. We all have a stake in figuring out what is 'good' and why.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to do some work.

Artists not writing...

2010-05-31T18:14:00.000-07:00

I've done a lot of work on artists' writing, on how as authors artists contribute to the discussion of their work or navigate their ways out of creative or critical cul de sacs (often not ones of their own making, more like ossified inherited critical positions whose dogma is shattered as much by writing as by making) through its use.

I think it's important to point out (as I always do when I'm talking) that I don't always mean writing when I say 'writing'. I'm really talking about anything that requires one to slow down, choose one's words, take advantage of the opportunity to edit for clarity or emphasis...Lately I've been thinking about short films as a way of getting thins kind of 'writing' out to the world.

I'm interested in the one above because it seems like a generative example. If you know of others, please pass them on. I hope to spend some time with this stuff in a seminar I'm doing this summer. Meanwhile, enjoy...

Dangerous minds

2010-05-28T14:09:00.000-07:00

For some time, I've been wanting to gather images of intellectual threats. My kids are very into superhero cartoons these days, and it's hard to ignore the number of arch villains whose identity is bound to intellect. This might be a sequel to last year's Lincolnpalooza...or maybe not. As someone who spends a lot of time in school, I'm curious about this whole smart and dangerous thing. Please suggest intelligent enemies in the comments, and enjoy....

Brainiac, from Justice League, wants ot know about all things in the universe. His curiosity is consuming... planets.

The Brain, from Teen Titans - don't know what's up with him.

Who can forget Vincent Price, as Batman's nemesis - Egghead? "The World's Smartest Criminal", who seems to have fallen from between the lines of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

I'm fairly sure this evil scientist is supposed to be Peter Lorre...a Frankenstein reference?

Syndrome wanted to use his brilliance to confer superpowers on everyone (after making himself rich and destroying Mr. Incredible)

Dr. Frankenstein is probably the archetypal evil genius - one whose pursuit of knowledge leads him beyond the pale of conventional ethics. Is that what people are afraid of?

Eyewitness News: Now on Video!

2010-04-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

So, you want to see what we were talking about at the Southern Graphics Council Conference? You can flip over to Tyler's Printmaking Department website for video of the talks. (The text of the introductions appears in this post).

Would love to hear what you think...especially since we're gearing up for another one at Virginia Commonwealth University as part of the SECAC and MACCA conference, Curiouser.

printseminar: Does the Low Need the High More Than the High Needs the Low?

2010-04-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

Leslie Friedman, one of the students in my Grad Print Seminar at Tyler, posted this and I think it's worth a read - please give her your feedback, and thanks for reading:

printseminar: Does the Low Need the High More Than the High Needs the Low?

Criticism...continued

2010-04-01T16:09:00.000-07:00

A little more stuff on criticism I just wanted to toss up here. First, there's A.O. Scott's piece on film criticism in today's Times. There's also this very interesting piece where two critics, Christopher Isherwood and Alastair Macaulay, talk about a dance piece by Twyla Tharp. It's one of those rare pieces where a critic gets exasperated and says what he thinks his job is...enjoy.

This 'n' That: Thinking about disciplines

2010-03-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

To conclude the Southern Graphics Council's annual conference, a panel consisting of Arcadia University Art Gallery's Richard Torchia, Philagrafika's Jose Roca, and Gretchen Wagner of MoMA (under the moderation of Print Center Curator John Caperton) convened to talk about whether or not it was time to go beyond disciplinary labels like 'printmaking' when what people really want to know about is contemporary art.

The value of discipline-specificity (or its limitations) was a major theme of the discussion. John Caperton began the discussion witha brief history of the Print Center, ending by saying that in its current phase they were seriously engaged in an investigation of what a print is. That this might seem an absurd question to ask at a conference of printmakers and scholars occurred to no one. Caperton entertaining noted that, in the free-for-all that is contemporary art, the Print Center is "an organization that is trying to figure out why we're still around".

The value of labels themselves came into sharper focus when Gretchen Wagner spoke next. The importance of taxonomy was a subtext for her remarks, which described the Museum of Modern Art's curatorial bureaucracy and the challenges posed by a recent acquisition, the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. Fluxus work merrily crossed any and all boundaries of art orthodoxy in its day, and one can only hope that at least some boundaries will be crossed in the name of collaboration at MoMA now that this material has come to rest there. Merriment may follow (but don't hold your breath).

Jose Roca spoke about his thoughts on printmaking in general, making several interesting remarks about how the medium (which he claimed to find less interesting than art overall) was a tool with intrinsic qualities that made it especially useful in certain situations. Answering Carperton's earlier existential question, Roca provisionally defined printmaking as a process with three constituent elements: 1) a matrix that stores information to reproduce, 2) a transfer medium, and 3) a receiving surface. Such a definition no doubt strikes some as laughably broad, but I believe that it has value as a way of opening an investigation.

Richard Torchia's role in the proceedings appeared to be that of respondent, but perhaps things had run a little long, as his response was very brief. Rumor had it that Torchia was going to mix it up. But alas, his remarks, illustrated by a single image from the Graphic Unconscious show at Moore College, hinted at a frustration with the catholicism of Philagrafika's definition of the medium that quickly got swallowed by the Q& A that followed.

Which is too bad. The conversation seemed to want to be about the perils of medium-specificity (breathlessly ask yourself: does it lead to ghetto-ization? Does it water down a medium's real meanings to open it up so wide?) and the uncritically embraced merits of interdisciplinarity.

Can no one say a bad word about interdisciplinarity these days? Perhaps not, but leave it to Louis Menand to at least try to forcefully examine the problem. In his recent book, The Market Place of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, Menand writes in detail about the phenomenon of the interdisciplinarity. He's talking about higher education, btu might as well be talking about the arts (as the conference was wall-to-wall institutions and academics). One carelessly chosen snippet form Menand's book that would have been good to chew on at the panel goes like this:

In the humanities, where talk of interdisciplinarity is most common, these practices tend to reinforce the Balkanized structure of knowledge production that universities inherited from the nineteenth century. This is the structure that divides literature by nationality and the arts by medium. It is a retrograde way to teach the humanities, but it is hard to see how interdisciplinarity per se can more than mildly ameliorate it. Professors are still trained in one national literature or artistic medium or another. In an interdisciplinary encounter, they shout at each other form the mountain tops of their own disciplines. For, as we have already seen, the key to professional transformation is not at the knowledge production. It is at the level of professional reproduction. Until professors are produced in a different way, the structure of academic knowledge production and dissemination is unlikely to change significantly.

Add to that the budgetary fights and administrative complexity of disciplinary entrenchment and any suggestion about interdisciplinarity runs the risk of becoming a kind of masquerade, a power grab in which stake holders appear to surrender territory to gain control of adjacent parties.

I hate to feel like there has to be an elephant in every room, but I kept marveling at how differently artists talk about these things from other constituencies. At the end of the day, audiences will be confused by interdisciplinarity, funders will struggle to come up with ways to support artists but will have to rely on disciplines as guidelines, and ideas that don't fit into clear departmental niches will fall between the cracks after a short period of time.

I often think about a remark that professed non-painter Ellen Harvey made to explain why she made paintings. Tell someone at a party you make art and they'll ask you what kind of paintings you do, she said. Put that in your interdisciplinary pipe and smoke it.

Eyewitness News: When Prints were Truth

2010-03-26T20:03:00.001-07:00

In case you missed the panel we did at the Southern Graphics Council's Conference this week, I wanted to put up some links to the panelists' sites. They were great, and I hope you enjoy considering their relation to the problem of how images are meaningful as much as I did...

This is how we opened the conversation...

This is a conversation about authority.

About who has it and who believes them. It’s about how printmaking in its many forms plays a vital role in creating and maintaining authority, even as other seemingly more reliable technologies have emerged.

If there are any ‘artistic’ print makers in the room, I beg your patience, but encourage you to listen carefully to the panelists, as an individual’s interpretations and personal expressions are part of all the seemingly objective information we intend to discuss. Inevitably part. A good deal of what we’ll talk about may not be art in the strictest sense, but, like art, it concerns itself truth. One must remember that the eyewitness doesn’t only tell the story of the thing he’s witnessed, she describes how she experienced it.

First, we’ll hear from Professor Joshua Brown, who will describe the ways in which a news hungry public experienced the American Civil War prints formed the foundation for understanding images in 19th century illustrated newspapers. We’ve all heard that the Civil War was the first war fought on camera, but few realize just how hard it was to disseminate the images captured by pioneering photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, Matthew Brady, or Alexander Gardener, or how technological limitations inherent in photography made for static, ambiguous images. In the nearly 40 years between the appearance of illustrated weeklies like Franks Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly, wood engravings carried the news in pictures to a ravenous readership. Exploring visual narratives that are unlike photographs – such as history painting or theatre – Professor Brown finds the basis for print-imagery’s acceptance as ‘truthful.’

Photography, with its ironclad reputation for objectivity, is a kind of marginalia (a remarque) that affects and our understanding of the central printed image. Added to the artist’s technical arsenal long after printing methods had been perfected, photography often fell short of the kind of authenticity printmaking that printmaking easily achieved. Professor Michael Sappol will talk about how photo’s absence at the birth of medical illustration put in place certain expectations for that particular species of imagery. Medical illustration’s heritage is in drawing and printmaking, methods particularly well-suited to selective emphasize, the rendering of certain physical properties (like texture), and a balance between the general and the specific. But even when photo-technology caught up to the printmaker’s art, printmaking still had a role to play because of its authoritative connotations.

Daniel Heyman is a painter and printmaker from Philadelphia who has been capturing the images and testimonies of victims of torture from Abu Ghraib and other black sites through out that troubled region. Treading on ground that is more commonly worked by documentary filmmakers and photojournalists, Daniel Heyman employs a discourse identified with subjectivity – that of contemporary art – in pursuit of documentary truth. His works – which incorporate a myriad of printing techniques (most often etching) – slow down a process photography tends to accelerate. His work looks to emotional truths, those beneath appearances that can only be observed over time as a story unfolds, and not in the blink of an eye or the flip of a shudder.

Before we begin, I want to thank each of the panelists for participating in this wide-ranging look at a truth and authenticity, which are curiously shifting subjects, and thank you for your attention and questions. This panel is an opportunity for me as an artist and critic to pursue a question that has weighed heavily on my mind – what kind of information can we reasonably expect to learn from pictures.

A good week for criticism articles?

2010-03-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

Is it that time of year? The time when people start reflecting on criticism?

I ask because it was interesting to see Glenn Kenny's ARTicles piece on criticism today on ArtsJournal.com, especially after the lame-o offering that washed up on the shore the other day. Part of what I like about this piece is that Kenny gets right to why criticism is the most exciting thing to read - because it's about seeing someone deeply engaged in an art form wrestle with a work and learning - through the text - how that mind works...whether you agree with it or not.

Kenny, in fact, makes a great show of disagreeing with certain critics while asserting respect for them, suggesting that what's interesting about criticism is not the judgment it renders, but the process of arriving at a judgment in the first place. Criticism that doesn't validate readers' (or artists') positions has never been a terribly welcome thing, but critics - like the rest of the universe - now and then have better things to do than go along on your ride.

As always, I welcome your thoughts, but would prefer they go here in the comments rather than on Facebook. Those people are close enough to owning everything in the universe already, so why give them your heartfelt respsonses?

An ex-critic discovers Rule Number One...too late.

2010-03-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

Love music, hold the criticism - The Boston Globe
(Posted using ShareThis)

I have to admit I was kind of excited when I came across a link to Steve Almond's essay (link annoying formatted above...) but it was, in short, a loser. I keep looking for missing pieces to an essay I've been working for years called "Why I'm not a critic", and all I really learned from Almond was that he should never have been one.

Why not? Rule number of one criticism: it's not about you. It's not about the snarky put downs you come up with, or about how clever you are, or about what you can connect the stuff you're writing about to. Criticism is always best when it's about the work and the world it lives in. When Almond writes about realizing that people were (*gasp*) enjoying a concert he'd already written off, he reveals that he was never qualified for his job in the first place. Criticism, you see, is about love. To criticize, you must be deeply enthralled, infatuated, head over heals with the art form you write about...or else you haven't any reason to criticize it.

I say this after a day of giving crits at an art school in town, a day in which I asked no fewer than a half dozen times (in increasingly impolite terms), why am I expected to care about this? Too often we expect some inherent quality in the work to make it matter...or else rely on the charitable disposition of an audience to accept an expression as 'interesting' (the Siberian chill of criticism). In these cases, I felt more engaged in the artists' work than they were. A sad state. What Almond realized is that when an artist (yes, he's talking about MC Hammer, but you work with what you've got) actually freakin' cares about something, it starts to matter to other people. Criticism isn't the judgment of authority passed on art (or music, or literature, or food, or movies, or whatever) by timeless authority, it's the battleground on which competing visions of the world are articulated. And to play in that arena, it's got to matter to you.

So I am so glad I never actually saw Almond's criticism when I lived in Boston and read the papers there...I'm so glad I had the chance to read people like David Bonetti writing about art, and Lloyd Schwartz writing about classical music. Writers who disappeared into the act of describing and evaluating what they wrote about. Wait...none of them were at the Globe? Hmmm...go figure.

The Times "Texts without Contexts"

2010-03-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

A few of us got really excited by the Michiko Kakutani's March 17 article on new media in the Times, Texts without Contexts. I know I put it on my Facebook page, hopeful that it would be picked up be friends (really and virtual) and eagerly and thoughtfully debated (I forgot it was Facebook, sorry).

Kakutani did bring up a number of the ugly little issues that our cultural embrace of digital media tends to obscure. I'm a big fan of our remixed world, but I do worry about how creative people make a living in a world where nothing new really makes a dent. Look at how Kakutani glosses Kevin Kelly:

In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”

Yeah, that's scary. But it's not just a blossoming interest in the real (or the reality TV real) that's fueling the kind of huge cultural changes Kakutain discusses. You wouldn't know it from her article, though. The ascendancy of new media (like the web, e-books, and for user-gernerated content...as unifying or fragmenting as they may be)and the eclipse of fusty old-media (like paper and ink) is something that is only partly driven by consumer interest. But it's largely driven by cold, hard economics.

It is striking that Kakutani would go on for so long about the books she's describing without mentioning that their form. Nearly every book on digital culture she mentions is available in ebook form, and the ebook editions are 10% to 65% cheaper than old-fashioned books (ironically, all those most critical of digital culture are available in Kindle format). Now, when I read Kikutani's article, the Times got to advertise to me no fewer than seven different products and services, from Lexus automobiles to Alaskan cruises to lobbying information on ethanol. The Times knows damn well that circulation isn't as big a revenue source as advertising, and as its paper business dies, it builds the brand online....pushing old media into the grave to realize profits from new media.

Can we really ignore economics and other factors in this kind of analysis? On the one hand, it's cool to read the new Malcolm Gladwell book as your zipping back and forth across the country for your job on some plane, but how much cooler will it be when you can read it on your iPad? And are your really trying to make a statement about your disdain for books when you choose one form of media over another? And the $52,000 question - are you reading the same thing when you read it one form as opposed to another? It was hard to ignore, as I checked the prices of the books and ebooks mentioned in Kikutani's article, that the old fashioned editions were described as 'hard cover with deckle edges' in several cases, a swanky, old-fangled way to make a book...and one whose texture and materiality connects it to a tradition in reading, making it a member of a family of objects - books - that have certain associations about them (what are a Kindle's material cousins? the television?)

But it's not just the ability to get things at a lower price point that drives users to digital media; media outlets gather (and trade) information about you when you use their media, finding out how long you stay on a given site, to what you link or where you come from or go to...these kinds of data are invaluable to marketers who want to be more precise about getting your number (sorry, no cruises to Alaska in my future). Sometime the embrace of the web feels more like a shotgun wedding presided over by rapacious marketing firms.

There are a lot of gifts of our age, but not all of them are given to us out of a sense of generosity and kindness. The future will likely be neither a digital utopia nor a barren reality-show wasteland, but something in between. I will be reading books sometimes and screens sometimes, writing with a pen sometimes and typing at a keyboard other times.

Risky Business

2010-03-13T17:03:00.000-08:00

First a word about language. People who think about these things tell us that all things meaningful have two properties – they are arbitrary and conventional. The word ‘cat’ doesn’t have to signify a cute little furry animal, but we (who use English) agree it does.

So if you take a word like risk and make it the center of a conversation among curators - as was the premise of today’s symposium Curating and Risk at Moore College – you risk finding little consensus on what it means.

This phenomenon tends to annoy some people, but empty signifiers can be valuable. From time to time, we need a big, empty word into which a lot of different thoughts can be poured.

Much of the day was spent trying to fill the word 'risk' with different possible significations. But first, it had be thoroughly emptied. The first conversation, between Ruby Lerner, Lana Lin, Lan Thoa Lam, and Richard Torchia took care of that. The conversation began by addressing the changing nature of risk. Lerner acknowledged that a fear of her organization, Creative Capital, was of taking inadequate risk. Lin and Lam, a collaborative team, took the question of time a little differently, talking about how a long-term project was risky in an art world where novelty is over great importance. Torchia, always thoughtful, acknowledged that everything is a risk…thus completing the emptying of the term. (Clearly some things are riskier than others…) But Torchia usefully turned the question of whether an exhibit or project was too risky around by suggesting that we imagine the world or Philadelphia without this particular show and ask what the effect of that would be. Such a question could be useful in determining the value of an enterprise, and determining whether it’s worth the risk.

Next, Aaron Levy, David Dempewolf and Radhika Subramaniam came up to talk about DIY spaces and their inherent risks with moderator Janet Kaplan. Among the many things that got said, two stood out. One was the repeated use of the word ‘community’ in a conversation about DIY spaces. But its use didn’t always seem fitting, especially when ‘community’ appeared to describe a group of people who get together to talk about books or look at each other’s art. A real community includes people who share your interests beyond your immediate circle of friends. The bank on the corner in my Chinatown neighborhood is part of my community even though I don’t know a soul who works there, because it serves and supports others in the neighborhood. Occasional (even frequent) beers do not a community make. The second point was related to this: the question of risk was most often connected to what is at stake. But for a moment in this conversation, the stakes extended beyond the charmed circle of artists and curators to a larger world when Subramaniam acknowledged that a controversial program might cause “someone in accounting” to lose his job. For one brief, frightening moment, risk was real. Then we broke for lunch.

After lunch, a third conversation between Homer Jackson, Nato Thompson, and Sheryl Conkelton (again moderated by Kaplan) looked at intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical risks. Here, the conversational format of the day’s proceedings most clearly backfired, as Jackson and Thompson are both charming presenters with great anecdotes to recount. Conkelton is a reflective, deliberate thinker who tried to steer the conversation into questions about logistical risks, and was put in the unenviable position of occasionally reminding the room that institutions (easily caricatured as big and bad) are comprise of individuals who make decisions that may be petty, selfish, or cowardly, but who are seldom evil.

At the end of the day, it was stunning how little discussion of reward was part of the topic of risk although the possibility of failure (even humiliation) was glancingly recognized. But one of the principle motivators for taking a risk (in economic terms) is the possibility of a reward. Occasional outbursts about liberal neo-capitalism may signal that my crassly market-based thinking would be wrongheaded in such a context, but I came away thinking (much as I felt when I arrived) that the risks of mounting exhibits are, on the whole, small. That’s not to say they aren’t real. In fact, their consequences can be great for people who aren’t directly involved (think of how many people in the arts – and arguably, in the audience for the arts – paid for the ‘risky’ machinations of cultural warriors on both ends of the political spectrum). But in an art world where risk appears to be its own reward, we may not have time to think about all that.

What's wrong with this picture?

2010-03-09T07:22:00.000-08:00

This story appeared on Artsjournal.com today...and I felt a shudder down my spine. Imagine if early printers had release incompatible versions of their books for various platforms. "Gutenberg plans to introduce a separate version of the Holy Bible for three platforms, beginning with the scroll-reader in the next couple of weeks. Versions for accordion and codex bindings will follow..."

Are we witnessing the latest iteration of the VHS-Beta wars? Must these new technologies always involve the production of huge quantities of incompatible merchandise, destined for obsolescence? The market capitalist in me is whispering that competition like this makes better products, but it's easy to shout that little voice down when you think of how the big fish (Apple?) can calculate how to weather the storm and how enormous the sheer cost of conversion will be for losers.

As a guerrilla reader, I hope the NYT Book Review will continue to be available on paper...though the article doesn't say anywhere that they plan to offer it that way...

How things get made

2010-03-05T10:13:00.000-08:00

I'll get to this in detail later, but a friend posted an interesting article on the future of publishing that contained this passage, which I couldn't let slip by:

The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer's work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.

I'm fairly convinced the same applies to working in the studio as an artist...btu that's not the point, and we'll get back to it soon. Honest.

Siting

2010-02-28T05:32:00.000-08:00

Most of the time, I thinking of things in terms of food. When I used to write a lot more, I had a rule I called the popcorn principle. Once the first three pops are heard in the microwave, you know the thing is going to take off. Same thing in the art world - three unconnected references to an artist, image or idea and you know you're only a few moments away form more of it that you really need.

The latest example of the popcorn principle is Kickstarter.com, which suddenly was everywhere I looked last week (which means it's already gone mainstream, I suppose). It's a great idea; artists and entrepreneurs raise money for projects or capital expenses through video pitches posted online. You can make donations (which are collected through amazon.com) to those you like. There even a lot of NPR style premiums (not a lot of tote bags and umbrellas…better stuff generally) for those who need motivation to philanthropical.

My favorite is my friend Jane Palmer’s pitch for donations to help her business, noon design, get an industrial dying machine. I also really liked the Scrapbook: A Book of Many Authors by an artist who goes by Gaily.

There are lots of movies, artists, designers and others to check out...take a look. And listen for the pop.

Gone and Not Forgotten: Recovering History in the 21 st Century

2010-02-27T12:18:00.000-08:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Curiouser

SECAC/MACAA Conference • October 20 – 23, 2010
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA

Gone and Not Forgotten: Recovering History in the 21 st Century

The past is with us more than at any point in the last century. Artists struggle to recover lost technical knowledge, fashion looks for inspiration to the Industrial Revolution, and the pressure to invest works with ‘authenticity’ drives artists and designers to become researchers who connect their creations to webs of allusion and historicism. In the words of Martin Davies, we live in an historicized world, where “there's nothing that can't become a historical symbol […] nothing that isn't already a historical text ”.

This panel discussion session proposes to investigate the prevalence of historical ideas and images in contemporary art and design from several of points of view, addressing how artists satisfy their curiosities about the past. We will focus on creative practices that engage archiving, collecting, and reenactment as modes of absorbing and reusing the past.

Calling all my Brilliant Readers!

2010-02-26T10:45:00.000-08:00

The Studio Now

The idea of a studio has been central for artists and designers for centuries. From the atelier system of the medieval Europe to the loft of mid-century modernism to the post-studio practices of contemporary art, the place where something is made exerts a subtle but distinct influence on art and design.

Tyler School of Art invites artists, designers, and scholars to give presentations on the studio to its freshmen class in Fall, 2010.

Possible topics include: studio safety • collaboration • the studio in the community • history of the studio • the itinerant or mobile studio • the studio as gallery/ the gallery as studio •
sustainable studios

Please send a proposal describing your idea for a presentation (200 words max.) and up to five sample images to: gbrown@temple.edu

A modest honorarium will be offered to accepted presenters.

Deadline: May 30, 2010

Toward a comprehensive history of criticism

2010-02-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

Last week, Columbia Journalism Review ran an interesting article by Robert Seitsema on the evolution of restaurant reviewing in New York papers. Touching on how reviews have changed from extensions of the 'women's' section of the paper (where recipes might be reprinted), to consumer advice, to a baroque form of descriptive literature, to how reviews are changing in the digital age, the article introduced readers to a number of important figures, from Craig Claiborne to blogger Danyelle Freeman. It also vividly laid out the terms of ethical debates in restaurant writing, making such industry-specific and arcane controversies relevant to readers to whom they might otherwise seem obscure or arbitrary.

It's hard for me to read such a piece without thinking of art reviewing (okay, it's hard for me to read much of anything without thinking of art reviewing). By the nature of their subject, art reviews cannot be part of the consumerist movement that restaurant reviewers might belong to (though I've seen sales happen in relation to art reviews, it's so unusual that it qualifies as an exception that proves the rule). At most, an art reviewer can tell you whether your time would be well-spent at this gallery or that museum, and as busy as we all are, a risk-taking member of the art audience doesn't really need a journalist to be her filter.

Art criticism is a heavy subject (I've just been asked to another seminar in it this summer), but food criticism is not afforded the same cultural weight (compare the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism to..what?) Is there something we can learn about writing about art from writing about food, or perfume?

I say yes. We can recapture some of the enthusiasm for our subject that it deserves. We might even be able to do this without slipping into flagrant partisan behavior, though I think that's beyond me. We can stop strangling our prose with academic distance. We can begin to write as if what we were writing was mean to be read.

Personally, I would be greatly interested in recommendations for things to read about the history of criticism of all sorts of cultural output. Some years ago, I put together a reader on art criticism that was broad and deep, but I've not kept it up in the last year. And interesting articles - like Seitsema's on restaurant reviewing - cast an indirect light on the practice of writing about art. Please send your favorites to me here...

Once again, I have students writing about art. I hope you'll check out the comments my Tyler graduate students are making on the PrintSeminar blog. Art that's worth showing is worth writing and talking about, so please keep reading.

Graduate School?

2010-01-08T08:41:00.000-08:00

I wanted to link up to Thomas H. Benton's essay, Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go posted today on Chronicle of Higher Education website (thanks to Artjournal.com for the link).

I'll come back to it in a few days (hopefully) because it brings up a few really interesting questions about what grad school is supposed to do and what it actually does. Stay tuned...

Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things for kids | Video on TED.com

2010-01-05T10:21:00.000-08:00

Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things for kids | Video on TED.com

We're liking this one...I hope to get up the nerve to do these things with my kids.

Gatekeepers

2010-01-03T11:57:00.000-08:00

I was interested in a little story in the Sunday, January 3, New York Times, and not just because Ellen Lupton did the illustration (above).

The story, by Jonathan Galassi, talks about the heirs to William Styron licensing rights for an e-book version of Sophie's Choice to Open Road Integrated Media. This could have been a really wonky, boring article about a dark corner of a very particular industry, but it avoided that by getting at how many people at Random House (the author's original publisher) were involved in bringing Styron's book into being. Reading it, a little window opened up for me between what Styron wrote and the various iterations of it (hardbound, large-type, magazine excerpts, movie rights, etc.)

Each version of the book, Galassi reminds us, is a slightly different experience. Here's a passage from the article:

The appropriate typeface was chosen and submitted to the author for approval by Random House’s designers, and a binding was selected. A dust jacket — often involving art specially commissioned by Random House to represent and advertise the book — was designed, and copy intended to induce reviewers and readers to pick the book up and pay attention to it was written.

and that's interesting, but Galassi also talks about the role of the editors in shaping the text itself and how that legacy moved on in subsequent editions. Having recently had an essay extensively re-worked by a sympathetic editor who was able to strengthen it significantly, I realized how important this would have been to the author.

But the thing that really got to me was the constant feeling of implosion in the publishing industry and its perceived threat from electronic distribution. Galassi didn't come right out and say it, but his essay strongly suggested that authors will not continue to enjoy the same kind of nurturing support editors offered in an age wherein writing is a form of 'property' that gets 'distributed'.

I feel less and less independent as a creator these days, and the idea that all of the support I require (from curators, critics, etc.) is on its way to evaporating is more than a little disconcerting. Another facet of this is that the opportunity to be part of actually creating work (as opposed to merely distributing it) seems to be getting concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and the collaborative process of creating new work is being replaced by a game of disseminating that which is already made. I think often about how a successful book sells a million copies, but a movie that gets a million people to see it is a flop. Thus, fewer people are playing a role in deciding what ultimately gets out in the world.

Should we be happy with new versions of things that have been a part of the world already? What can we do to facilitate the creation of new things? Perhaps not much, as the current carries us all toward getting Kindles and such...but for now, maybe we cna stop and think about how many hands have touched the things we enjoy.

The law of unintended consequences

2009-12-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

Things go where they aren’t expected to.

This ought to be a universal law, up there with a-body-in-motion-tends-to-stay-in-motion, but it seems to get forgotten a lot. I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately. In part because of coming changes at the Pew Fellowships that people seem to think will ruin the art world, and in part because, as a teacher, I fret about doing more harm than good. Maybe I was clueless as a young man (okay, I was clueless) but I don’t remember thinking that what a course taught had to be contained within the fourteen or sixteen weeks I was taking it. I thought it was all about what happened afterwards, when things go where they aren’t expected.

But some of the unintended consequences I’ve observed in the last few years have me especially worried. When I heard conservatives employing the kind of theoretical architecture that makes my work interesting as justifications for their actions, I wonder about that genie getting out of his bottle. But the one that keeps me up at night is about the art world, and how it’s moving in so many interesting directions. Or should I say, so many directions I should find interesting but don’t. They don’t interest me. They worry me.

The latest example comes from the Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post. He describes going to an exhibit of Chinese terra cotta figures at Washington’s National Geographic Museum. You know the sort – thousands were buried in imperial tombs 2,000 or more years ago. The show, as Gopnik describes it sounds like a nightmare:

Overall, visiting this exhibition feels like walking through a pop-up version of a fascinating article in National Geographic magazine -- one of those photo spreads that have more sidebars than text.

Gopnik, like a good college-educated critic, goes off on Benjamin and the idea of the aura, but misses the real horror of what he’s just written. What one sees when one sees this exhibit is not the things one went to see, but the idea and history -- embodied in writing -- that surrounds them.

It’s easy to believe the exhibit is a kind of elaborate magazine article. The vast majority of exhibits I see are like heinous, overwrought term papers, made without love or enthusiasm, as if because of the existence of a deadline. (Worse yet, they're statements...what could be more bloodless and bureaucratic than a statement?) And the killer is that I used to think of exhibits as arguments or essays, and that I must have said this a million times in classes and crits. That I didn’t mean bloodless, boring things that bypass what really matters or subjugate the act of looking to the act of reading was a given. But perhaps it wasn’t heard that way. Perhaps I’ve unintentionally contributed to the mess we find ourselves in now.

Now I know the National Geographic Museum is not an art museum, and that exhibits all have different purposes, variously didactic or sensuous (and wouldn’t be friggin’ cool if they could be sensuously didactic or something? But that’s another thing…). But what bothers me is that as the pendulum of exhibiting swings toward greater intellectual engagement (yum..after all, the eye is a part of the mind) it’s swinging away from the pleasures of objects, preferring to ‘reference’ them (or some equally hideous, stale action as arid as 'reference').

One cannot practice art education like one practices medicine (above all, do no harm) because moving students out of their comfort zone is a huge part of the job and it may be unexpectedly dangerous. But one can certainly try to do more good than harm. I am generally optimistic about change. It stirs things up. But soon after change, artists and designers will learn to read the system and will undermine the positive effects of transformation and turn it into a new and dull status quo. Maybe the thing to do is try to teach people never to be satisfied with what is out there…

Winner take out

2009-11-15T18:00:00.001-08:00

My seven year old son thinks McDonald’s is a toy store.

He thinks this because every time he goes there, he gets a toy. That’s not why I take him there – I take him because we can get something to eat. Because the meal is so forgettable (mere nutrition – such as it is at fast food restaurants) is not a big concern to seven-year olds. It’s all about the toys.

I bring this up because Ed Sozanski’s rant about the “sudden efflorescence of art competitions”, focusing on the West Prize, the Wolgin Prize, and ArtPrize, with occasional swipes at the Pew Fellowships in today’s Inquirer made me think of it. Just like my son and I think of McDonald’s differently, artists and audiences approach the question of prizes differently. I wouldn’t want readers to think Mr. Sozanki’s was the only way to consider the problem of art prizes, so I wanted to address a few points in his column.

As anyone even remotely acquainted with this history of criticism might expect, Mr. Sozanski lamented the selections for these awards. Wolgin winner Ryan Trecartin was “visually bizarre, and cacophonous to the point of felonious assault”. The Dufala brothers possess a “novelty quotient [that] was off the charts”. Reasonable people can disagree about such things, and do so without mentioning how familiar one another’s arguments for or against certain art are. Dead end – next topic.

“Giving a quarter-million dollars, or even $150,000, to a single person is inherently ridiculous and risibly unfair to the thousands of talented artists who are equally deserving of recognition and support,” Mr. Sozanski writes. Such Palin-esque populism might play well in an election, but the art world has never been a democracy. As Wolgin-finalist Sanford Biggers pointed out when speaking to Tyler students, $150,000 isn’t a lot of money in today’s art market, though it means a lot for artists who have little commercial viability (read: people who don’t make paintings or photographs). Spread that over the years of work the finalists – including Trecartin – have invested in their production and it begins to look like a barely break-even proposition. More than a few recipients of large fellowships have told me that what looks like a huge amount of money…let’s use $50,000 as an example…doesn’t have the enormous impact one might expect it to when it’s taxed at an extremely high rate and spread over two years. Even the largest awards basically allow artists to give up one of their many jobs…temporarily. The amount of ink wasted fretting over the scale of prizes acknowledging years of artistic labor that hardly amount to a year’s bonus on Wall Street indicates little more than the laziness of the media.

Where I can agree with Mr. Sozanski is on the way prizes have adversely affected artists’ lives by rewarding careerism…and weirdly, here’s where large juried prizes can make a difference. These days, nearly every art school has to offer a ‘professional practices’ course to help its students write the statements and prepare the slides (...or CDs of jpegs) required by granting agencies. It should come as no surprise that some students (and artists) excel in such clerical tasks while others are more adept in the studio, making work. The shift from application-driven processes to jurying for large awards may indicate a seismic shift in professional practice. Artists may actually be recognized for the work they do, not for their ability to get an application in on time. Exhibitions might start matters as much as or (gasp!) even more than the documentation of them. Artists might forced to become genuinely articulate about their work because the conversation they have about it might be with someone who can recommend them for an award.

It is fashionable right now to fear juries, to think of them as cabals of insiders who will reward only other insiders. The fact is that application-driven processes discriminate against a number of artists who look at the outcomes of major competitions and say, “Well, if that’s what wins, I’m not even going to apply.” Responsible juries that include artists can remedy that.

Because at the end of the day, these prizes exist to help artists and audiences. They support artists (however incompletely) and recognize both genuine achievements and the potential in emerging talent. For audiences, they bring artists into regional – even global – spotlights while placing them under the lens of criticism where they can succeed or fail. Mr. Sozanski challenges us to look up Ryan Trecartin in five years, implying that he’ll be serving lattes someplace. Has the writer looked at the roster of emerging artists, alums of Vox or Nexus, who have gone on to outstanding careers? Did they do that because they got prizes or fellowships? No! They succeeded because they worked like mad and have talent. The prizes didn’t hurt, though.

I got out of criticism for two reasons. Jousting with Ed Sozanski quickly becomes dull. But the main reason is that after a few years in journalism, I found it hard to avoid making stories into binary constructions – pitting two opposing forces against each other and (if I was fair minded) letting readers decide for themselves. The truth is that things – especially when it comes to art - are always a lot more complicated than that. It’s never either/or…more often both/and. When we go to McDonald’s, my son eats, gets a toy, and we spend time together. It’s food, prizes, and a whole lot more.

very stuck in mind...

2009-07-23T13:01:00.000-07:00

I think about this story a lot...not so much as a way to teach or as a lesson itself, but a reason to teach art.

Studio Visits

2009-07-08T12:40:00.001-07:00

I'm starting to prepare a lecture series on artists' studios, so I photograph everyone's studio I go to. Yesterday, I saw graduate students at the University of the Arts MFA programs in Ceramics, Painting and Sculpture. Here they are in their studios...

John Thompson

Christine Colby

Tiernan Alexander

Alejandro Mendel

Andrew Walker

Matt Ziegler

Heather Peiters

Martha Ferguson

Karen Joan Topping

Renee Cortese

Sally Echoff

Teresa Palmer

What makes a critic?

2009-06-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

This is a perennial debate and one that I have tried to clip comments on and keep track of. I have to say this latest exchange (between the Guardian's Johnathon Jones and Minnesota Orchestra's Sam Bergman) is kinda disappointing. Perhaps it's because it happens in blogs, where so much is truncated or overly general to start with. (How's that for general?) But perhaps it's because neither of them appears to be advancing an especially interesting argument.

Jones seems to think that trusting his gut and being loud is enough. Bergman is content to point out that it may not be in this polyphonic age. But neither of them seems to get at the reason there might be criticism in the first place - because art and music and theater and cinema and all manner of cultural production are things to talk about. The most interesting things in such conversations are often said by those who are deeply knowledgeable of the history and traditions of the area, invested in maintaining a high level of quality (or in attaining one), and thoughtful and attentive about the specific work under discussion. That doesn't discount the possibility that a newcomer to the conversation might have something insightful to say, or that someone from outside its usual boundaries mightn't have something to offer. I think those things happen all the time (that's why I talk to anybody who wants to talk about art). But those are unusual events that depend on an individual's sensitivity and eloquence, whereas knowledge, investment, and attentiveness are skills that can be sharpened.

I am interested in circulating one idea of Jones - in his blog posting he writes:

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised [sic], mediocrity triumphs.

This is an interesting notion. One that hints at a 'proper' way to criticize art that could be beneficial to artists (it wouldn't be construed as mere opinion) as well as audiences (who suddenly have a responsible role in making art better by criticizing it).

For a few years, I've taught graduate seminars in criticism. Every time I teach a studio class, I stress to my students that its' not enough to make your own art - you must contribute to the discussion of others (that, to me is how art is made out of mere images and objects...but talking about them as if they were important). I would be interested in anyone else's thoughts on what constitutes "proper" criticism...

..One more silly thing on 'Moby Dick'

2009-06-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to do this for a while. In Microsoft Word, there's a tremedously silly feature called 'AutoSummarize' that condenses long texts into shorter versions. It can be set to highlight key points or spit out summaries of various lengths. It's a hoot.

I put in Chapter 42 of Melville's Moby Dick and told it I wanted a summary that was 5% of the original text. Here's what it gave me:

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Goney! never! Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe.

Yipes. If you jack it up to 10%, you get the sentence "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me", which is also in the first paragraph.

Word Clouds

2009-06-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

I saw a mention of Wordle online some place and really liked the image it made of Moby Dick. I used chapter 42 - the Whiteness of the Whale - because I'm familiar with it. Here's a screen shot (the program's sharing capacities are pretty cruddy). You might want to play with it. I suggest having a heap of words ready...say a letter you've written or something like that. Be sure to mess with all the options in the menu...
enjoy!

Lincoln - on video

2009-06-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

This one came from artist Shawn Beeks - more Lincoln leads welcome any time...

Findings 2 - Looking at Lincoln

2009-06-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a little more from the Lincoln picture file...

More Lincoln in the afterlife... D. T. Weist, In Memory of Abraham Lincoln: The Reward of the Just, 1865

Avenging Lincoln from The Simpsons...

It's show time...

Recent Research - Looking at Lincoln

2009-06-20T13:39:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been thinking about the Civil War for a bit of writing I have to do. Thus, I've been thinking of Lincoln. What with the bicentennial of is birth this year, I'm obviously not alone. Here are some of the images I've turned up in the routine process of looking for things I go through as I start doing research...I though others might be amused...

One of my favorite images of Lincoln is this print of the Apotheosis of Lincoln. I'm gathering similar images and will post them shortly...

I came across this one looking for "Lincoln Vampire" on Google...I think of it as the Lincolnator

From an episode of Star Trek (The Savage Curtain) in which Lincoln visits the Enterprise...well an alien disguised as Lincoln...who's trying to enlist Kirk and Spock's help in a battle on his home world with Ghengis Kahn and others...oh never mind...

LA Artist Trek Kelly gives a new spin on proclaiming emancipation.

Frank Wu imagines a Lunar Lincoln...who's also a zombie.

That's how the story goes

2009-05-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

Just a pointer today; I wanted to call out about Jessica Helfand's post about narrative on Design Observer. I am looking at my students' projects on narrative and I doubt I was convincing to them as I tried to argue that its return to contemporary art is one of the most important aspects of the art of our time. Wish I'd seen this first.

Oh, and it makes me feel vindicated about asking my students to give the 'elevator pitch' for their thesis papers...

A digression on zombies (still not about life)

2009-04-14T05:19:00.001-07:00

Up front - let me totally clear about this - I like zombies as much as the next guy. I've always been more of an aliens-person, it's true, but zombies are okay.

So don't take my following comments on Adam Cohen's New York Times Op-Ed Mr. Darcy Woos Elizabeth Bennet While Zombies Attack as some kind of anti-zombie rant. I've got no problem with the undead.

It's not even Seth Grahame-Smith's riff on Jane Austen that has me out looking for brains. It's thinking about the book as a cultural phenomenon and how it relates to the use of others' words images and ideas.

But first, about mash ups. When Cohen calls Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a mash up, some kind lexicographer's alarm goes off in my head. To me that's like saying gin and tonic is a mash up. What does the New York Times know from mash ups anyway? A lot it turns out. They've used the phrase more than 3000 times (Wired.com has on 1080 uses since 2006...which sounds awfully light...but they're good, as in when they talked to DJ Spooky in 2007). When I think mash up, I think about two or more things fused into a new whole in such a way that the component parts are still distinguishable. Somehow, the at of combining these parts has something to say about each part - it helps us see it in a new light or understand it better.

At first, I don't think of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that way - mostly because it's a specific work plus a genre of other works. So It's not like a gin and tonic, it's more like chicken nuggets with teryaki sauce...something is added to the chicken nugget to give it a general flavor. That could be anything, the distinction to me seems to reside in whether it's two individual things which bring their histories and contexts to the strange union that is a mash up, or whether it's partly made of specific and general ingredients...

...and I'm not sure what's the case with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. What's really interesting to me is how it has proliferated through a variety of conversations. When I used to teach art criticism, I had my students read a whole year of an art magazine to see what outlets covered what artists first. When we looked over a year, we could chart the trickledown of an artist from elite publications with smaller circulations to more mass-market outlets. Ideas would shift and blur as they moved through the discourse... it's kind of cool to watch.

But Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seems to be everywhere all at once. It's an exciting shift in how things work - appearing suddenly in a lot places at one time, the book seems to have achieved the kind of viral velocity that people love to imagine happening but which seldom really occurs.

Of course, to me the great fun of this is that all of this involves telling an old story through another kind of story. What it's about is storytelling and how a story is affected by bringing it into another genre. It's not about life, it's about how stories work. But more on that in our next post.

Me, I'd be okay if it were aliens. But zombies will do. Like I said, nothing against zombies.

Not About Life, Pt. 1

2009-04-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

Inspired largely by Judith Schaechter's excellent post on her 'Late Breaking Noose' blog, I wanted to talk a write a little about others' images and ideas and how these things fit into my work lately.

But where Judith's observations were prompted by thoughts on authenticity, I'm more interested in looking at the related ideas of authorship and authority. The art world, as always a reflection of the world around it, has been comically obsessed with authenticity for years (if one more person tells me they're trying to "keep it real" I will not be held responsible for my actions). In 2005, TheoryLab convened a reading group on the subject. But what's the relationship between one image and another similar image made by another person for another purpose? Or between an image we all know and another that tries to glom on to the status of the original?

To address these questions, I want to bring in some things I was thinking about when Jane Irish asked me to come to the ICA to be part of a night of discussion and demonstrations about the Dirt on Delight show.

Jane was at my studio talking about the program and offhandedly remarked that we both use others' writing in our work. Perhaps because this is so central to me, I stopped thinking about it. Perhaps it was because there are wildly different degrees of legibility about what we do it hadn't occurred to me that we had this in common. At the time, I was reading Hillel Schwartz's odd and wonderful book, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, and a light clicked on.

Schwartz's (to me entirely reasonable) theory is that we live in a world that is dominated by duplicates, and it is through repetition that meaning is made. The unique object, he suggests, poses a challenge to contemporary culture, which obsesses about clones and copies, pirated and authorized. He cunningly covers camouflage's peculiar relation to the nature it simulates, the attraction of re-enactments, and a dozens of other details.

A particular passage, about the formerly feminine word 'typewriter', caught my attention with regard to Jane's use of text:

Women: who knew how to handle carbon paper so that it would not smudge or wrinkle. Whose use of Lebbeus H. Roger's new one-sided carbon paper in typewriters supplant the copying presses and bound letterpress books with their wetted sheets of tissue copies interspersed with protective but messy oiled paper. Whose ability to produce good clean copies simultaneously with a good clean original was, as historian W.B. Proudfoot has argued, "an outstanding step in the history of copying" (227).

An outstanding step in the history of copying? Wait - there's a histroy of copying that is not based on forgery and fakery? What Schwartz gets to - and what I think Jane's work alerts me to - is the labro invovled in copying and transcription. In Schwartz, there's also something interesting about the gendering of that labor, too.

I often see my own work as an act of faithless transcription. If I cannot be true to the texts I refer to, what authority do I have as their transcriptionist or translator? A great deal of what I'm interested in doing comes down to how alligning yourself with the words and images of others puts you close to the power of these things..a power possibly derived from authenticity.
When we were talking about, Jane was making notes on an email message. After our conversation, I asked for her notes so I could think about it more. In the margin of a paragraph about her work she'd written the phrase not about life, which struck me as perfect for what interested me about this observation she'd made. Here was an idea not about keeping it real or making an authentic expressive statement or being sincere (whatever any of that might mean). Here was an idea about taking part in an ongoing dialog with others about a body of images and idea outside ourselves, a tradition that we could volunteer to participate in, one that could be learned and absorbed - accessed not through exceptional biography or suffering but through reflection and work. What Jane Irish is doing - and what I'd like to do - is make art that enlarges life's experiences, not only describes it.

Of course, this may sound like appropriation. But it's not really...for a lot of reasons. And they are the subject of the second part of this essay, which will be posted mid-month.

Too many blogs...not enough thoughts

2009-03-22T06:48:00.000-07:00

It's been one of those months when things never seem to let up and I've been reading (on the train, before I go to sleep...) and working in the studio and when I sit down to write, I'm suddenly out of things to say. Somehow, what seemed effortless to do a while ago seems really complicated lately...

In December, I was asked to do an a short intro for a book of photos and sat down to do it. I have been carrying around this notebook of quotes for years and in it was a passage from 1989 article Washington Post about how photography was different from all other art because it implied being there. I thought this would be a good intro, so I write the whole essay around it and when I was done, I thought - geez, I'm a college professor now, I ought to cite this quote properly. So I went back into the Post archives and it wasn't there...at all. I had transcribed it wrong or something and carrying it around for 19 years waiting to use this thing that had suddenly lost its usefulness.

Of course this is a small thing, but it's sort of indicative of how what I had been using as fuel for work is now of questionable value and I'm starting to get antsy about it. In the studio, I've always had a sense of how anything could be a painting, but how it got made is what will decide if it's any good or not.

Maybe that's what these sign projects are getting at. The one above is called Inarticulate Object and it's one of a few I've been working on without really knowing or caring where the idea goes. It might be as useless is as the Post quote. With writing, I always know or care where it's going. But I think that's getting in the way right now. So I'll be writing a little more, though I can't promise it will be worth reading. if you're interested, you can follow it here, or or in an even more cruddy state on my own website, which will be back up in the next week.

Research

2009-03-18T13:57:00.001-07:00

I wanted to put out a quick shout for a piece in today's New York Times, Olivia Judson's Guest Column Research for America.

Though I'm no longer specifically teaching research methods to artists, I'm more and more interested in how we might be able to have an impact by participating in research conducted in health and science. This article imagines a re-invented research initiative that could ignite a new generation of discovery...rather than merely renewing the funding gravy train that stalled in the last few years. I doubt it will happen, but it's good to dream...

1,000 Words (A Trailer)

2009-01-27T17:26:00.000-08:00

1000 Words

2009-01-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

Near the end of graduate school, I started a project I've been working on very slowly over the years, I asked 50 friends to contribute 20 favorite words that would constitute the literary spine for a picture. I've finally begin getting images out of this mass of data, so I will post them here from time to time, but I thought it would be good to post the original list as a preface.

a, Abba, abecedarium, academic, accent, actants, address, adhere, adjective, adoring, adverb, adz, aerial, afloat, Africa, agents, agitator, alchemy, alligator, align, alizarin crimson, alkalization, Amen, amoebae, amphitheater, and, anima/animus, animation, annihilate, ant, anthrax, anticipation, antique, any, anyway, apocalyptic, appointments, aqua, architect, arson, art, as, asked, Assata, associate, astronomy, Astroturf, at, avant garde, awkward, ayer, back hoe, ballet, banal, barrel chested, basis, bastardized, bat, bayou, beauty, bed, bed sheets, beefy tee, behavior, believe, bella, Bellini, betray, bicycles, binder, bird, black, blissful, blond, blood pudding, bloom, blossom, blue, boil, boll-weevil, bologna, bolt, bonkers, books, boss, bottle, bounty, bow, Braille, brand, bratwurst, Brazil, breath, breathe, bridge, Brock, broke, bronze, Bronzino, Brooklyn, Brown, brushing, buck, buckle, bunny, butterfly, button, buttons, by, caduceus, cake, calculating, calibrate, California, callous, calming, camera, can't, cancellation, cappuccino, car, cardamom, cardigan, caricature, carpet, carriage, cartography, casket, cat, cataclysmic, catchword, catharsis, cavort, celebrate, celebration, celibate, cellar, centipede, cerulean, chain, chairs, charismatic, chartreuse, chiaroscuro, Chicago, Chile, chives, chocolate, chocolates, chrysanthemum, chum, chunk, church, ciao, circumlocution, circumstance, civility, clamp, classified, clause, clean, closure, cloud, clunker, cob, coda, coddle, coffee, collective, columbine, combination, comer, comida, commandment, commercial, comrade, comunitas, conjunction, connect, connected, consumed, context, conundrum, conversion, cooperation, copacetic, copper, corn, corny, corollary, corpse, corsage, cotton, count, counting, courage, cradle, crash, crazy, create, creative, creature, creepy, crime, critic, critical, crosshair, crossover, crud, crusty, crystal, crystallize, Cuba, cunning, curve, cut, dagger, damar, dark, daydream, Dear, death, deck, deferential, denouement, deploy, desirous, devilry, dextrose, dialectic, diet, dignity, dinner, dip, dirt, disappointment, disarticulate, disco, distance, disturb, do, dog, dogma, dominion, door, dormant, double mint, Douglas, down, dream, dream catcher, dreams, dregs, driving, dry-clean, dumpster, dunes, duty, dynamite, dynasty, dyslexia, dystopia, e-mail, eagle, ear, earth, earth, eep, eggs, egregious, elbow, electric, elegiac, elf, embarrasses, encompassing, end, endure, energize, energy, engender, entrance, entreat, entropy, eponymous, equilibrium, erp, esteem, Etruscan, Eucharist, every, excavator, exercise, exigent, exit, experiment, explorer, extension, extension, face, fad, fade, failure, fair-weather, Fairchild, faith, faithful, fall, false, family, fancy, fandango, farewell, fedora, feelers, feet, feet, fell, fellow, fesnoo, fester, festoon, fez, fibrillate, field, fill, finial, fish, Fish's Eddy, flaneur, flannel, flare, flattened, flea, flooey, floralist, flower, fluid, flush, fly, focus, foil, footnote, for, force, fork, forlorn, forsake, fortunate, forty-two, foul, fountain, fourteen, fragile, frame, free, fresco, fresh, Friend John, frizzy, from, frontal, frou-frou, fruit, full, fun, funny, fuss, futon, gabble, Gabrielle, game, gamut, garbage, garden, garrulous, gelato, gender, general, generous, geometer, geometrical, geometry, Gerard, gerund, gewgaw, giggle, giraffe, glance, glass, glassware, global, gnome, go, gob, God, gold, goober, good-bye, goose flesh, gorgeous, grandmother, goofy, grass, gray, green, grieve, grunt, gush, gym, ground, haiku, Halifax, hamper, hand, hangnail, happenstance, happy, hard, harmony, hash, haste, he, healing, hear, heart, heat, hellcat, here, heroic, herring, hero, high, hiking, hinge, heterotopia, hmmm, hold, home, hip, hoopty, hope, home, hotels, howitzer, Hoyne, hose, hunger, hydration, human being, I, ice, ideology, idiom, illuminate, immorality, impending, impish, impromptu, impossibility, in, incandescent, incubus, indeed, India, incense, infinitive, infinity, inflammability, inebriate, information, information, infrastructure, inflect, inside, insistent, insouciant, inoculate, intellectual, intense, intention, instant, interiority, interview, inundate, interdisciplinary, investigation, inversion, is, isosceles, it, iterative, Japanese, jet, joy, juice, just, kine, kitty, knock, knowledge, la Coeur, lackluster, lake, laser, last, lazy, lamp, lemonade, letting, lexicographic, leisure, light, lighthouse, lightly, life, lily, limitation, limned, like, lion, list, listen, linen, lofty, lollygag, long, loose, loosen, lots, love, low, love, Lucerne, ludicrous, machine, magazine, magenta, magic, Mama, mandate, manner, marble, marbles, manna, marsupial, masticate, materiality, Maria, mayonnaise, meaning, meddlesome, meeting, memoranda, memory, Memphis, merkin, Michigan, mimesis, mimetic, mersnoo, mire, mirror, misanthrope, mimic, moat, mode, moist, missing, moment, Mommy, money, monkey, moon, moon, moralist, moon, morning, mosquito, moth, moth, mourning, mouse, movement, mundane, murmur, music, music, murmur, my, musk, narcissus, navigate, nebulous, needle, nasty, Nero, nerve, new, neighborhood, next, nice, nicety, niggardly, nip, night, nine, ninety, night, no, nocturnal, nomad, non sequitur, nonsense, nodule, nonsense, north, noun, now, nozzle, obfuscate, obsolete, obstreperous, ocean, oeuvre, of, okay, oil, on, on-line, one, onomatopoeia, oof, open, one, optimistic, options, opium, orange, orphic, Otis, orifice, overslept, overwhelmed, oxymoron, overcome, painter, palfrey, papa, padded, paradigm, parents, paper, past, pastiche, path, participle, pedestrian, pelt, penultimate, paucity, perfunctory, phantom, pheasant, people, phoneme, piddle-paddle, pillows, philology, pine cones, pink, placement, plane, planning, play, placenta, plenty, Plus Ultra, polymath, pleasant, polymorphous set, Polynesia, porqué, posing, posthumous, postulate, practical, possibility, previous, princess, prism, present, problem, prosaic, psychedelic, psychic, public, puddle, puissant, quack, query, question, question mark, quid, quake, quip, quirt, quoin, quiet, rabbit, rabbit, quotidian, rain, rainy, raspberry, radiant, re-entry, reader, red, ratio, red-soldier, relation, relinquish, red, Renaissance, renovation, repetitive, reliquary, reverie, rhinoplasty, rhomb line, restless, ride, rifle, ring, river, rhyme, road, roar, rock, rocket, Roma, roots, rose, round, rooftop, run, runaway, sable, route, sadness, saint, salad, sad, salty, Samson, sandwich, saline, Saskatchewan, sate, Satiricon, sandwich, sausage, say, schism, sauce, science, scooter, scribble, school, sea, seal, season, scrofula, sedition, seek, seepy, seasonal, selfish, senescence, secret, seer, seventeen, sew, Sesquipedalian, sex, sexo, sfumato, shine, shiroi, shell, shoals, shod, shoe, shovel, sidelong, sight, shopping, silence, silly, simpatico, silence, sip, Situationist, skirt, since, sky, sleepy, sloth, slow, smarty-pants, slippery, snake, sneep, snide, smelly, snirk, snoop, snow, sniff, so, soaring, sock, sole, somersault, songs, soothe, solidarity, soul, sound, sound, sorrow, space, space, spank, soup, spectacular, sphinx, spider, spare, spirit, splendid, spring loaded, spinach, squib, squire, squirrel, springtime, stanza, stellar, stercoraceous, stand, stop, storm, strabismus, stone, strap, “strategery,” stream, strain, strength, strenuous, stress, streets, struggle, struggle, studio, struggle, stupendous, suffice, suit, stuff, sun, sun, sunshine, summons, surrogate, survey, sustainability, super, Swedish, sweep, svelte, sweetness, swim, swimming, sweet, sycamore, sycophant, syllable, swing, syringe, tack, tactile, sympathizer, take, tampon, tawdry, tailback, team, tea time, tell, teal, tender, tent, tenure, temporary, tested, Thanksgiving, that, the, thermos, think, this, thistle, third, threat, 3-D, threshold, threshold, thought, thumb, thumbprint, thump, tickle, tied-up, tiger, ticking, time, to, tile, toastale, tomato, tonal, tongue, to-do, tonic, too, topiary, tonic, topography, torment, torque, topobiology, tourist, Toussaint, townie, tour, traffic lights, trail, train, traffic, transcendence, transgress, transient, trajectory, travel, tree, tremor, tree, triumph, trope, trouser, trench, trustafarian, truth, tulip, true, twitch, two, 2-D, 2001, type, U-haul, unctuous, underwear, uh, unique, up, UNICEF, utensil, uterus, utopia, urban, vacillate, vase, vassal, uxoriousness, verge, verism, vernacular, Velcro, versus, vertigo, vestigial, verse, vintage, virtual, visionary, Vienna, visual, vowel, vista, walk, walking, walkman, waffle, waltz, warm, warning, Walter, warthog, was, wash, warrant, waste, water, watershed, wave, web, weekly, weep, waver, weird, well, well-mannered, weevil, whelp, which, whine, what, whisper, whisper, white, whippersnapper, white, why, wild, will, willow, wind, winsome, winter, wing, wonder, wood, wool, work, yashmak, yearlong, yellow, write, yes, yesterday, yellow ochre, you, you're, your, zebra, zephyr, zipper, zooks, Zorro.

Some thoughts on On Teaching and Learning

2008-10-08T18:49:00.000-07:00

Note: I was asked by a friend who runs a website that collects stories to write about teaching. It didn't work out, but I wanted to post the piece on this blog to get some ideas I had while working on it aired out. Comments are welcome.

From go, I knew that my work was slow to develop and that I wanted teaching to be a big part of my professional life. So I paid attention to teachers who I found effective.

Problem was I paid attention only to those who taught me, not those sitting in the classes and studios where I worked and studied. Thank heaven not every student was like me. It’s enough to say I learned the most from teachers who could teach students like me, ones who might politely be called ‘focused’ but who might more accurately be described as obsessed, or even nuts.

This became apparent when I was first asked to teach a workshop on piecing and quilting. That my students might have enrolled because they had a curiosity about the medium rather than a consuming obsession struck me as odd. Why go to the trouble of taking a class if your desire to know about this was any less than unbearable? Why not teach your self? That these students might have been smarter than me (they were) and realized that teaching is not a form of indoctrination but rather the transfer of knowledge was…well, it wasn’t how I approached being a student. As a student, I have enormous appetite and probably unhealthy appetite. As a teacher, I had to learn how to prepare meals – even courses – that were digestible.

So I had to learn all over again how to be in a studio or class room, how to listen to where my students were coming from and not try to cram everything I knew about a subject into a single session or even semester. I had to learn that people come to learning for a variety of reasons, and that they bring with them an astounding range of skills and experiences that may facilitate or complicate their education, but which nonetheless enrich it. I had to learn that the knowledge you convey as a teacher is a neutral power, and it’s up to the student to use it for good. As a teacher, you can model ethical behavior, but you cannot dictate it.

Teaching gradually shifted for me from a form of evangelism to something else. Rather than seeing myself on a mission to convey certain techniques and information before they disappear in the vapor of ‘progress’, I now see myself as a sort of arms dealer. I try to listen to what my students objectives are and I provide students with technical and ideological weaponry and force multipliers to express ideas they have which may require fortification. The process of education has changed for me from a steady ascend toward enlightenment (in which the teacher might illuminate a path for student) to an ongoing battle against complacency in which I can only hope my students are wise and mature enough to choose what I believe is the right side (after all, I’m not totally without ethics). If they’re not, they still deserve an education and I’ll deal with them in my civic and professional life.

After all, what animates our professional lives and private curiosities may not be what sparks a student’s imagination. As a teacher, one must rethink and re-imagine the subject one teaches over and over from multiple points of view, looking for ways into it. I get a taste in my mouth like sour milk when someone talks about teachers ‘making a subject interesting’ for students, but I suppose that may just be another way of addressing the importance of making it relevant for the learner. Teachers (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone) occasionally feel that their subject’s importance needn’t be investigated…it was important enough to get into the curriculum, right? A lot of what I teach (in courses ranging from first years studio classes to graduate seminars) is material for which there are no right answers…only more and less suitable temporarily meaningful solutions.

One day, I had a student teach me something good. He was a trombone player in a section of first year writing, and was pretty bright. Art, he suggested, is a verb. Things get ‘art-ed’; they undergo a kind of transformation. I had been watching him and his classmates struggle with the idea that art might not reside in mere objecthood in our class discussions, and his solution – simple and elegant – has been an inspiration to me. Did I teach him to think of art in that expansive way? No, not in anyway I’d previously understood teaching. I’d just set up conditions under which he could learn it.

This was an accident, but one I have tried to turn into a method. I realized I had become the teacher I wanted to be in a painting class not long ago, when I was in high arms-dealer mode, working through the possibilities a student might entertain to get unstuck in her work. After going through a range of complicated options, I mentioned some rather ludicrous possibility that drifted into my mind. My student interrupted me and asked, somewhat breathlessly, “Can I do that?”

Part of me wanted to list all the artists who had done that, and provide a brief homily on how one might go about doing that. But part of me had become a better teacher. So I said, “I don’t know, can you?”

Dear Gilles and Felix,

2008-08-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

Hello Friends,
I'm doing a small installation in the window of Moore College of Art and Design's ARTShop. The opening is Monday, September 8, 2008 from 5-7pm, 20th and Race Street in Philadelphia. All are invited to attend!
Hope you are well and looking forward to Fall!
Best,
Terri

2008-07-19T07:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce that….
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired my large photogram titled Optical Bridge.
It is in the museum's permanent photography and print collection.

Sincerely,
Walter
http://www.walterplotnick.com

The Myth of the Butterfly

2008-06-09T16:59:00.000-07:00

I was amused to see Peter Dizikes' story The Meaning of the Butterfly in the June 8 Boston Globe. In it, he writes:

MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the "butterfly effect," the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz's suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly's wings.
Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

Dizikes goes on to talk about how the idea of the butterfly effect has come to reflect mass culture's expectations of research - that it should be able to explain anything (he cites a line from a Robert Redford film as being evidence of this influence).

Yeah, whatever. I think Dizikes had some interesting things to say about the universe's ultimate randomness in his essay and our collective desire to compact such frightening complexity into Ashton Kutcher vehicles. But for the artists, there's something else the myth of the butterfly promises.

If we accept the premise that any tiny force can rock the world, we buy into a game in which we can work in relative obscurity in the hope that we'll be causing a cultural tsunami without even knowing it. To the butterfly effect, you can add the first few minutes of Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, in which the critic Rene Ricard talks about how a critic cannot miss the next big thing laboring in obscurity (this is Van Gogh's great lesson, not anything about what he saw or how he represented it...it's about how undervalued artists can be redeemed in death). Artists flap their wings in the obscure jungles of their studios hoping to trigger tidal waves on the shores of major cultural capitals.

And that would be great. If it didn't keep artists from being engaged in the world. The cultural butterfly effect decrees that an artist who actually tries to affect the climate is acting out of hubris, not in response to the necessities of his or her work. Art is too easily disentangled from politics, and attempts to reconnect art and daily life are sadly regarded as attempts to make your own weather.

Forget the butterfly. Forget looking for little things that can leverage large things. Maybe it's time to start using big causes to achieve big effects. Perhaps what that will lead to is great, big, messy failures. But at least there won't be any more self-marginalizing, intentionally 'minor' work to fret over.

On Recieved Wisdom

2008-05-25T13:33:00.000-07:00

I read a lot of students' writing and patterns start to emerge. One of the most prevalent is the confusion between real experience and received wisdom. Almost every semester, there's a class discussion in which we need to separate what it's like to see a picture on a website or a book or a magazine from seeing it at a gallery, or a museum, or in a studio or someone's home. There is always that student who sees these things as fundamentally similar, and I'm always a little confused about that. Hughes is talking about his relation to Abstract Expressionism, but what he said was immediately applicable to the German art that was so hot when I was in school in the 80s.

So I wanted to share a passage from an essay by Robert Hughes that helped clarify this problem some years ago.

Thirty years ago, Abstract Expressionism was pretty well a mandatory world style. We in Australia looked at it with awe. The bottle in which its messages washed up on our shores (since the paintings themselves did not cross the Pacific) was the magazine ARTnews. Its hagiographic tone was clear. Except for the titans of the history books, whose work we hadn't seen either - from Michelangelo and Leonardo down to Picasso and Matisse - we had never read the kinds of claims made for any artist that Harold Rosenberg or Thomas Hess made for Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. They were grand enough to stifle aesthetic dissent. Only contact with the originals could have tested them, and we could not see the originals. Thus, although we didn't know it, we were in a situation of man American artists outside New York in the 1960s - flat on our backs, waiting for the missionary.

The copy of ARTnews would arrive and we would dissect it, cutting out the black-and-white reproductions and pinning them on the studio wall. One was, say a Newman. You had just read one of Thomas Hess's discourses on how Newman's vertical zip was Adam, or the primal act of division of light from darkness, or the figure of the unnamable Yahweh himself. How could you disagree? On what could you base your trivial act of colonial dissent? A mere reproduction, two inches by three? But Yahweh doesn't show his face in reproductions. He shows it only in paintings. And if you got to see the paintings, what if you didn't see it? Did that mean that his terrible and sublime visage was not there either? Of course not; it meant that you had a bad eye; or that Yahweh doesn't show himself to goyim in the South Pacific. And since it is difficult for the young and otherwise uninitiated to avoid, still less be skeptical about, the language in which peak experiences are offered to them, you were apt to assume that it was your own unpreparedness or sheer obtuseness prevented you from seeing the deity that lurked within Newman's zip or Rothko 's fuzzy rectangle.

...which is a round about way of retelling the emperor-has-no-clothes story, but not just that. Images are used in arguments as evidence, to be persuasive. If they're included, it's because they're persuasive...a truism that's too seldom open to critique. What I think young artists writing about their work in relation to others sometimes forget is that the image is evidence in someone else's argument, not the argument itself. To cite a painting or sculpture (or whatever) without having really looked at it is too often to try to bring, whole cloth, the value of that object to your writing. And how can you really look at it without, well, really looking at it? And to what extent are we really looking at things when what we see is what another writer has written? Or what a photographer has framed, excluding all else?

Art surprises us. It is, in spite of the cliche, in some fundamental way, both window and mirror. We get a view to something else while the art works simultaneously tells us something about where we stand (and whether we are funny looking or have bad hair). Seeing in art what you're told by historians and critics should be as much a cause for alarm as for celebration. It's great to have the validation that comes with having your unfocused, unspoken impressions converted into language, but it's an act of robbery if that language gets between you and the object you're interested in.

Works Cited

Hughes, Robert. “The Decline of the City of Mahagonny.” Nothing if not critical: selected essays on art and artists. New York: Pengun, 1990. p.5

Tales from the Crit

2008-04-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

At Art Center, I have classes in which students from a variety of disciplines crit one another. 'Fine Art' is among the smallest programs at Art Center, so an interdisciplinary course will skew toward other areas - photo, film, and illustration. This can lead to some interesting conversations, as the basis for critiques varies so widely between areas of study. But last week, I got to thinking about what constitutes 'art' in a crit dominated by photo students.

It seems one of the primary functions of a crit for my students is to identify possible uses for what they're looking at. Could it be used to sell a product? for fashion? As an answer to a technical problem about lighting? If no apparent use presents itself, Art Center students will start to talk about the work in question as "fine art". To an anthropologist from Mars, fine art at Art Center sounds like a market segment for objects that don't play well with others, ones that observe no apparent rules, ones that seem 'expressive' in some undefined way.

Because I spend most of my professional life thinking about fine art (to the exclusion of other things, such that the addition of the word 'fine' seems prissy), I come to this conversation with a pronounced bias. In a nut shell, I think it's interesting that something attains art status by not having some properties. To get into the 'art' conversation, I have always thought that an object or activity needed something in excess of the ordinary, not the lack of something.

In his book, Why Art Cannot Be Taught, James Elkins lists the possible 'orientations' crits may follow, and I think this observation is important here. Art Center's students seem most interested in what Elkins calls 'rhetorical' and 'profession' orientations - those that speak to how effective the work is or how well it responds to professional standards. I'm more interested in what Elkins calls 'ethical' or 'teleological' crits - those that consider the life of the work in the world.

My objective here isn't to argue for some absolute method of running crits or discussing art; it's to get a conversation going about how students see the relations between parts of the field. My concern is that students - driven by what they regard as important...grades - will dismiss crits from unexpected orientations. Can they be met half way? Should we be more focused on the long term life of the work or on the short term? Can additional resources be brought to bear on a crit to make it fulfill more than one function?

You can't make this stuff up: Thoughts on research, art, and design

2008-03-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

This post was given in response to the symposium Cultures of Inquiry: Context at Art Center College of Design on March 18, 2008. I invite any thoughts on the subject of research in art and design education in the comments area.

One thing came through loud and clear at Tuesday’s talks: design research regards information as a resource too valuable to ignore. In this way, it’s no different from the rest of contemporary culture, where a specific relation to ideas and events outside the work has become a valuable ingredient in successful art or entertainment. Consider the explosion of films “based on a true story”, or the rise of the memoir and the autobiography as literary forms threatening to eclipsing the novel. When readers learn that what they’d thought was factual is actually invented, the backlash can be swift and harsh, as we saw in the recent scandal surrounding the revelation that Margaret B. Jones’ searing autobiography “Love and Consequences” was actually Margaret Seltzer’s novel about gang life in South Central LA. Would Seltzer’s book have earned the ecstatic reviews it garnered if it had been published as a novel? Many in the publishing industry thought readers would have overlooked the book if it had been published as a work of fiction, and it’s immediately obvious that information derived from lived experience is considered differently than invention (“Writing Truth”).

So the interest in design research can be seen as a reflection of the larger culture’s interest in setting design, art, and entertainment products into a context of ideas and experiences that are more widely accessible to users and readers than in an earlier age, when creativity was seen as a primarily internal or intuitive act. There are a lot of great things about this for artists, designers and ordinary people; we give up the somewhat shabby ideal of a heroic, protean genius-creator for one who’s engaged in the problems and practices of the very people who will ultimately use or consume the products they produce. Great. But there are a few things we, especially if we’re involved in education (which has a responsibility not only to promote new ideas but to preserve past knowledge), need to be cautious about, too.

To begin with, an emphasis on research (especially empirical research) as integral to creativity in design or art practice perfectly reflects our current collective distain for traditional authority. The distillation of contemporary abhorrence of authority to a slogan, such as Onny Eikhaug’s claim that, “the problem with experts is that they know too much”, is a mantra for the Wikipedia era, in which expertise is distrusted as somehow out of touch with the fast pace of life, or merely inadequate to challenges better suited to crowd-sourcing or maverick outsiders with original insights. As educators, we ought to think this one through. Writing about the way our relation to authority is changing, Peter J.M. Nicholson points out that “the agents we have traditionally relied on to filter and manage information – agents like research universities, the traditional media, and highly trained experts of all kinds – are less trusted as intermediaries than they once were”. Trying to fight that change is like trying to stop the sun from setting. But rather than fostering distrust for expertise by endlessly repeating its prevalence, we should provide students with skills to be able to evaluate sources of information and employ them responsibly and the encouragement that doing so will have rewards not only in the marketplace, but for them as participants in an increasingly crowded media environment.

Both Rama Gheerawo and Tina Park offered intriguing reflections on the use of design research, but each suggested the difficulties that lie ahead for those of us training a new generation of designers and artists in research. Right up front, we need to realize that how data is solicited, collected, documented, and categorized have profound effects on how it’s ultimately interpreted and valued. In my third year of teaching the Art of Research and countless conversations on the emergence of design research, I remain uncomfortable with the use of specific terms – e.g. “visual ethnography” – in art and design school. Not because I feel the techniques of sociology and anthropology don’t have a place in the lives of our students (I think they do), but as I learn more about these ideas, I realize the shallowness of our use of them in relation to the richness of their use in their native discourses. This is an old problem for art education, especially as it takes place outside of universities: how do we get the expertise necessary to teach our students, when most of our own expertise is in the handling of the materials necessary to make the products of our discourse? One can go around and around about the value of having photographers teach photo history or graphic designers teach design history, but at the end of the day, with all due respect to the few artists and designers who have a secondary, scholarly practice, students who study art history under art historians learn differently than those who learn from practitioners in the field. It’s not just a matter of defining research for our selves. Rama Gheerawo usefully talked about the connotations of ‘research’ when he introduced and concluded his talk, but I’m not sure that as, as a profession, we have the power to re-brand what research means to our clients and community.

Perhaps a more productive approach is one suggested by University of Chicago sociologist Ronald S. Burt, who has been working on a theory of “structural holes” (Erard). Burt, like research advocate Stephen Wilson, sees creativity as a collaborative endeavor in which designers and artists must continually expand social networks that, in practice, tend toward stasis. At Art Center, we are well positioned to exploit structural holes and put our student designers and artists in contact with engineers and entrepreneurs so they can integrate the ideas of these professionals into their work. Of course we do this in some programs, but it’s a challenge to continually open networks and lines of communication, one that is made all the more difficult by suggesting that designers and artists can somehow go it alone by picking up a few useful research skills.

Some of these sort of “holes” were revealed in Shona Kitchen’s presentation. One could neatly divide the idea of research into “pure” and “applied” foci, but doing so runs the risk of marginalizing the most original and valuable contributions a hybrid (or perhaps even mongrel) idea like design research has to offer. Artist/designers Kitchen (or Nina Katchadourian, or Stacy Levy, or Fritz Haeg, whose work is embedded in questions of language, ecology, and sustainability) and are powerful arguments for leaving room in the discussion of research for speculation and critique. Critic Martin Kemp has talked about the value of research-based practice in contemporary art, and there’s room for a more detailed exploration of that idea at Art Center (Honigman).

By now, I’ve probably revealed some fundamental misunderstanding of what design research is. If so, my apology takes the form of pointing out that describing what something does can help imply what it is, but not always. (For instance, I can tell you that a hernia hurts, might be unsightly, and can ruin your day, but you’d be hard-pressed to infer exactly what one is from that description.) It’s because I believe in the potential of what design research does, as I’ve seen it employed by my colleagues and students at Art Center, that I’m interested in seeing it more fully integrated into the curriculum and seeing its use adopted on the professional level. But as a user of design rather than a designer, my stake in design research is quite different than many of the values expressed at the conference. As a user of design, I’m for design research because it turns the designer into my advocate; armed with information gleaned form design research, the designer can explain to her client why her solution is superior to other solutions that may not embody my interests. As a user of design, I’m for design research because it puts the objects I use and look at into a larger cultural context, rather than leaving me with nothing more than some ‘creatively’ styled object. And, a user of design, I’m for design research because it promises to get designers out from behind their computers and out into the world where they have consider the impact of their work on the environment and the market.

The context one can build for one’s work through research is an asset too valuable to ignore. But, like all resources, the knowledge gained through design research needs to be thought of in terms of stewardship. Like all resources, it can be responsibly employed or carelessly exploited. Research creates responsibility; not only to utilize the information it yields, but to put it to just and ethical use as well (after all, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). In the end, the value a researched context can provide to designers is enormous. But its value to others outside the practice of art and design – whether they’re configured as users, audience, readers, or whatever – is incalculable.

gerard brown is an instructor in the Humanities and Design Sciences and teaches The Art of Research to students on the Film, Fine Art, Illustration, and Photography tracks.

Works Cited

Erard, Michael. “Where to get a good idea: Steal it outside your group.” The New York Times. 22 May, 2004.

Honigman, Ana Finel. "Universal Leonardo". Artnet.com. 12 April 2007. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/honigman/honigman1-19-06.asp

Nicholson, Peter J.M. “The Intellectual in the Infosphere”. The Chronicle Review. 29 Mar 2007. 20 Aug 2007 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i27/27b00601.htm

Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. Cambridge, MIT, 2002 (p. 38).

“Writing Truth in Fact and Fiction.” Weekend Edition. Natl. Public Radio. 8 Mar, 2008. 22 Mar 2008 http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=88008140.

Online Writing and Blogging

2008-02-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

Hello All!
Gerard recently passed this list of on-line Art Writing and Blogging from Frank Smiegel. As you are all in the midst of thesis preparation and other scholarly pursuits this could be a helpful list of resources. Frank mentioned that having a decent spectrum of art writing to explore, from the very personal to the very polished & almost scholarly--will help folks see some viable writing types they might develop into a voice that isn't the dutiful term paper or diaristic ones. Note that the comments listed next to the links are Mr. Smiegel’s!

* Alec Soth: www.alecsoth.com. Mr. Soth seems to have stopped blogging for the time being; a big drag. There are still a wealth of archives there.

* The performer/artist Momus has a fantastic and almost daily meditation on culture high + low, near + far http://imomus.livejournal.com. There's a great entry up from a few days ago on Nick Cave's Grinderman band and their song "No Pussy Blues"--required reading, establishing for aging post-punks like me. . . .

* Jerry Saltz is a weekly must-read for anyone involved in contemporary art. He's at www.nymag.com.

* Artforum critic Brian Sholis blogs smartly at: www.briansholis.com.

* NYC-based www.artfagcity.com. can be decent.

* The "Scene & Herd" gossip column at www.artforum.com. is always more than art world fun--and will often make you want to quit the whole biz and just take up farming.

* For small journal-based writing, you can sample Cabinet Magazine at www.cabinetmagazine.org. There's a great piece up now about Duchamp's urinals.

* Good reviews are also found at www.theartnewspaper.com.,www.artsjournal.com., and www.stretcher.org.

Some thoughts about crits...

2008-01-07T14:20:00.000-08:00

I've been having a lot of trouble with an article I came across over winter break in the December 10, 2007, Washington Post. The story, by Shankar Vedanta, walked a fine line between being a business piece and a holiday story. A passage sets up the basic premise:

[William B.] Swann's research [published in the Academy of Management Journal] suggests that the conventional wisdom about end-of-year performance evaluations and the general good cheer demanded by the Christmas season might have paradoxical effects for many people. Managers who offer inaccurately glowing reports in the hope of encouraging employee loyalty may discover that employees with low self-esteem feel less loyal afterward, And high expectations of goodwill, charity and bonhomie at Christmastime can cause these types of people not to feel better about themselves, but worse.

Vedanta reported on research that addressed the relation between performance reviews and workers' self-images, particularly in relation to self-verification theory, described in this way:

All people carry around an image of themselves that tells them who they are, whether they are good-looking or average-looking, for example, or clever at math, or kind and thoughtful or largely self-centered. Inasmuch as people want to be recognized for the things they are good at, Swann's work suggests many people also want honest acknowledgments of their flaws, and that when these flaws are minimized or wished away, people end up feeling worse rather than better.

Being just off a long weekend of critiques at UArts and in the middle of another week of them at Art Center, the article seemed to be about more than end-of-the-year performance reviews. It seemed to be about how crits go awry, and about what is expected by someone who is getting a critique - something about reaffirming their idea of themself. And that is something I cannot deliver.

Much has been made (by people my age and older) of the way the generation now completing graduate school and entering the workforce deals with criticism. The idea that this generation enjoyed uncritical praise in its youth that causes them to meltdown in the face of criticism as adults has been rolled out so often that it has attained the status of conventional wisdom. Such a broad societal observation may be ultimately untestable, and therefore should be looked at with some suspicion. There's a certain 'blame-the-victim' logic at work here, too. But more sinister is the way it turns the subject from the object of criticism - the work - to the other person in the conversation - the worker.

Outside the art world, there are millions - perhaps billions of people whose identity isn't based on their work. They may be accountants or teachers by day or for forty hours a week, but they're musicians or athletes or filmmakers at their core. While it would be foolish to pretend that criticism of a job done less-than-stunningly has no effect on the person who did it, it would be similarly off-base to assume that criticism of the work and of the person are one and the same. Artists - more than any other professionals - obviously must be capable of separating self from work to benefit from critique.

No duh. But Vedanta points to a strange problem when he uses "honest" to signifies a concordance between an individual's self-image and what others say about him or her. It's as if to say what we recognize as accurate isn't what is in fact accurate, but rather what fits our image of ourselves.

My job as a viewer is different than my job as an art-maker. My job as a viewer is to look at the work and evaluate in relation to other works I've seen or can imagine. It's not that I don't care about people; it's that I do care about art objects. Expecting a critic (or your boss, who's evaluating your performance) to provide feedback that's in line with your image of yourself is absurd. Arguably, a good deal of the art in the world is about departing from the limits of one's identity into a larger, imagined world. Fencing art works into the limits of individuals' personalities seems...sad. Not to mention impossible.

But as a teacher it seems that there is often no middle ground between students who think every positive crit is Pollyanna-ish blather and every negative crit is a personal attack. To me, it's not that emerging artists can't take criticism, it's that too many of them see the work as first and foremost an extension of or surrogate for themselves. They seem to overlook the opportunity for artworks to live in a world of other artworks, just like other products live in their contexts, and to talk about them as separate from themselves.

I feel as though I'm just scratching the surface of this problem, and that I'm declaring a position that requires a lot more explanation than this space allows. But since so many of the people who might read this are involved in making, discussing, and teaching other to make art, I wanted to put it out there.

Murakami

2007-11-26T09:53:00.000-08:00

It’s sometimes hard to know what to think when you’re looking at an exhibit. It’s harder when a museum’s entire arsenal of opinion shaping is being brought to bear on you. One can long for a dark quiet room to retreat and think. The Murakami exhibit at LAMoCA has a dark room, but it’s got movies playing inside. It will have to do.

Sitting in the dark watching Murakami’s forays into animation and live action film, trying to get my head around the sheer volume of things – paintings, sculpture, installations, products, etc. – in the main exhibit outside, I began to wonder, is it a good thing that we live in an age where artists have the means to make whatever comes to mind without concern for patronage?

It’s not the thirty-foot cast aluminum Buddha with a platinum patina. It’s not the startlingly similar paintings, or the acres of wallpaper. Not even the slightly sepulchral room in which Murakami’s ‘multiples’ (has that word ever been a thinner art-veil for the ordinary word ‘merchandise’?). It’s all of it taken together under the banner of one artist that makes me worried. The disappearance of dozens -- perhaps scores -- of people’s labor in the manufacturing of a brand of contemporary art seems suddenly disturbing.

Whoa there, don’t think I’m going to rant about the sell-out factor. I love sellouts. They give me something to buy. I’m not opposed to Murakami or anyone making work at a variety of prices for anyone – from sticker-struck kids to LV bag mules. What imparts a vaguely unpleasant, metallic taste to exhibit experience is the way all this is taken to be interesting when some of it is not. Which brings me to patronage.

Once upon a time, artists lavished materials and technique on objects made to realize a patron’s world-view. Religious or secular narratives of power were given splendid props by artists and artisans who learned to balance their own interpretations with the cultural frame in which they worked. Works became memorable for the extent to which they encompassed the complexities of their subjects – shared concerns of a whole society - and balanced them against the individual's vision.

Now, not so much. The watershed moment in art of the last 200 years has been the artist’s ability to determine his or her own ‘content’. Monet had his haystacks, Pollock had his drips, Warhol had his soup cans, Vito Acconci had his…well, Vito had a lot of things going on. But all of them were singular, individual, often idiosyncratic concerns that audiences took on faith were worth talking about. Murakami has singular, individual, and idiosyncratic down, but where preceding artists more or less made work in spite of mass-production, Murakami works on an industrial scale.

Not a public scale, an industrial one. The difference is important. In terms of glossiness of output, sheer size, degree of polish, Murakami is unbeatable. Everything seems ready to go into a store, ready to be consumed, as if it were already a souvenir of itself. (The show's biggest disappointment is that paintings wither in any room where sculpture is present, as if 2D work were just wrapping paper or stage dressing for the 3D objects.) There is little public memory in Murakami’s work (the oft-repeated mushroom clouds are an exception, but more on that in a minute). There is a fertile – almost fecund – play with images and characters, but they’re largely self-referential and seldom turn out to the world at large.

And, to what extent can Murakami really be seen as a Japanese artist? The question is a little goofy. Murakami is a global product-generating force. But the more I thought about it, the more I plowed through the exhibit’s luxurious, lavishly illustrated catalog and its accompanying essays, the more I realized I know nothing at all about Japan. And then I realized this wasn’t helping. Throughout the essays, the curators make strenuous efforts to connect Murakami to both American and Japanese contemporary art. I cannot say how successful they are on the Asian side, but some of the comparisons to American art are, well, reaching. This suggests that the connections to Japanese art and culture may be rather tenuous and perhaps should not be taken on faith. In my line of work, I read essays be people who want to convince me of things all the time. Often, I have no way of knowing if they’ve got their facts straight, let alone any real means of testing their interpretations of these facts. But when I come across a reference to something I know well, I can evaluate whether the writer is making sense on that point. If so, things should be okay throughout. If not… yipes.

Yipes.

So I hate this show, right? Wrong! I love it. But not for the reasons I felt the labels, curators, and institution want me to love it. First, Murakami may or may not be a genius, but what’s clear as glass from seeing this show is that he can marshal the skills and creativity of numerous invisible workers to make stunning installations and ensembles. Trying to cram him into the mould of the 20th century artist is too limiting for Murakami, who shines in his ability to collect and synthesize. Second, the show may not have much to say about Japan or America, but it has a lot to say about the emerging global interplay of images and ideas and, as such, it feels fresh and alive rather than clever but stale.

New conversation

2007-11-19T09:50:00.000-08:00

Sorting throught he 1,200+ emails that have accumulated this term, I came across a mention of Art in Context and thought it would be good to give a pointer toward them here. It seems that the site - started by Alex Gartelmann - wants to get people talking about the conditions artists face in Philly. Sounds good. I'm all ears.

I'll add them to our horribly out-of-date link list, and take a moment to solicit suggestions for new link nominees. Please. Suggest.

Your latest flame (Olafur Elisson @ SFMOMA)

2007-10-23T23:06:00.000-07:00

The thermometer on the door outside Olafur Eliasson’s Your Mobile Expectations reads five degrees Fahrenheit. I’m wrapped in a grey fleecy blanket, waiting to go inside. As I read the wall texts, I try to figure out whether SFMOMA could actually be buying geothermal electricity for the project, or if they’ve done some kind of economic voodoo to make it look greener. Then it’s time to go in.

Your Mobile Expectations (pictured above in an image from SFMOMA's website) is like no art installation you’ve been in. It is like a giant beer distributor’s fridge…or maybe an operating room in which some alien autopsy is about to begin. More specious than any apartment I ever had, the giant refrigerated room accommodates about two-dozen visitors at a time. Our frozen breath swirls around us in misty curlicues. Most of the audience passes through the room fast, hardly pausing to look at the sculpture at its center. A few of us linger in the chilly space, getting down on our knees to peer under the rapidly forming icicles.

The sculpture at the center of all this – a very swanky BMW race car wrapped in some sort of CG carapace that makes it look like it was captured at a raid on a Klingon outpost – is interesting enough in itself, but what can compete with all the ideas Eliasson throws around? The car, a factor in global warming, enshrouded in funereal ice. The power, coming from a geothermal source that could power the entire city indefinately (were it not for corporate inertia), is just one extravagance in a small world of extra-extravagances.

For all this, I think the ideal vantage point for the installation is outside it. One can observe through little windows, like a scientist waiting for the hibernating creature to awaken. In my estimation, Eliasson is at his best when he is most economical, creating enchantments that defy the apparent simplicity of their apparatus. Upstairs in SFMOMA’s larger show, aptly named “Take Your Time”, there are several examples of Elisson’s best work (and, thank heaven, a few clunkers lest we get too exicted). Elegant works like his 2003 Yellow versus Purple and the spectacular 2005 work Notion Motion provide magical spatial transformations at the same time they reveal all their secrets. Hiding the machinery of illusions diminishes their magic.

Now I sound chilly. But Eliasson’s generousity makes me suspicious. Not of him (or his studio) but of how the spectacles he (they) might trickle down into popular culture. Some works – like 360 degree room for all colors begin looking like trendy nightclubs awaiting furniture. Anxiety about Eliassoin's popularity is picking up. Writing about the artist and his work in the September 2 New York Times, Dorothy Spears fretted openly about his accessiblilty.

From rainbows glistening in curtains of tumbling water droplets, to echoing rooms steeped in a single saturated color, to reverse waterfalls and walk-through kaleidoscopes, these are marvels of optics, sound, smell and touch. Mr. Eliasson’s admirers have kept the museum turnstiles spinning, although he is sometimes skeptical of the attention surrounding his work.

His “Weather Project,” a giant fake sun made of 200 yellow sodium lamps and a bit of trickery involving mirrors and mist, attracted more than two million visitors to the Tate Modern in the winter of 2003-4. Asked to extend the show, Mr. Eliasson declined.

“The media attention was very flattering,” he recalled, sitting at a communal table on a loading dock outside his Berlin studio’s backyard of scrubby trees, grass and abandoned train tracks. “But it was also becoming very brutal. There was a danger that the project might slip from an artistic experience to mindless entertainment.” But on a dark winter day in London, who wouldn’t long to see a sun glowing in atmospheric fog while lying on a concrete floor, watching one’s own reflection make the indoor equivalent of snow angels?

It's not worth getting into whether the choice of the word 'fake' over a more neutral word, like 'simulated', is indicative of Ms. Spears’ feelings towards Eliasson's work. What Eliasson's show offers is a moment to consider how having the resources to do what you want might actually diminish the quality of one’s work and detract from its meaning. Later in the same article, Eliasson talks about the political subtext of his work:

For some reason [...] our history has produced the misconception that experiencing individuality has to do with being alone. But being together is greater than being alone, because we can do more. We are more responsible.

What more beautiful, subversive idea could an artist have in today's economic and political environment? And it's brilliantly reflected in works that achieve spectacular effects using hardware store technologies. When it takes the backing of BMW or begins to look like something we might soon see in a Banana Republic's window behind the latest khakis, art that aspires to build community runs aground in the shallow waters of corporate aesthetics.

Too often, when I talk to young artists, they are confused about the nature of public space. Eliasson has reinvigorated our awareness of space, making him a subject of great interest to those who stand to benefit from having 'interesting spaces' (not just public institutions like museums, but commercial ones interested in spectacle for its ability to pack in the customers). A work like Your Mobile Expectations fails because it cannot wiggle out from under the marketing imperative that made it possible - it can, at best, comment obliquely on the concerns it raises. Small successes, we learn, can be greater than thundering ovations. That may explain why Eliasson's latest work leaves me a little cold.

What We're Looking Forward To...

2007-08-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

The season is getting underway slowly out here. It's still August and museums and galleries are slow, but there are a few things winding up that look good and a few things on the horizon that I'll be sure to report on. Here's what I'm planning on:

Zoom +/- is at Arena 1 gallery in Santa Monica for a few more days (or so says the paper...). The show deals with mapping and includes one of my favorite artists, Nina Katchadourian. Hope I haven't missed this.

Over at the Getty, there's one of those if-you-miss-this-ytou're-an-idiot opportunities. Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere (yes that one...from your Intro to Art History text book...) is in town through September 9. Gotta brush up for my visit. Time to blow the dust off my copy of Bradford Collins' book 12 Views of Manet's Bar.

Thank heaven not everything is ending in the next few weeks. The Pasadena Museum of California Art is hosting the California Design Biennial through September 30. Maybe I'll get a little closer to figuring out what is so California about California Design...But what I'm really looking forward to is the PMCA's show Beyond Ultraman: Seven Artists Explore the Vinyl Frontier. The impact of toy design on contemporary sculpture has been one of my favorite subjects of late, and I've got high hopes for this show...tune it after it opens October 10 to see if they're dashed on the rocks of cruel curatorial fate...

Finally, there's the big Gordon Matta Clark show, "You Are The Measure". With the mortgage crisis and the crashing of the real estate market, I'm looking forawrd to seeing how Matta Clark's dismembered houses reflect our current domestic malaise...

All this and more will be reported on here, so stay tuned...

Insurgent / Fugitive Fuel for Thought

2007-06-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

Just a topic for discussion!
Check out:

The Handwriting on the Road: An Artist Draws the Flood Line
Randy Kennedy, June 16, 2007

Hope all have a productive semester.
Best,
Terri

So the Drama...

2007-06-17T21:37:00.000-07:00

This blog usually deals with things visual, but recent events have conspired to turn our attention to issues of representation in theater. Politcal theater, to be precise. “Pure” political theater in the president’s words. Take this detour into theater criticism for what it is…dilettante.

According to the New York Times, there have been more than a half dozen uses of the phrase “political theater” in the last few weeks. Some focus group must find this an especially damning criticism given the spike in its use. But what does it mean coming from a president whose administration is more fond of conducting pageantry than setting policy (in case you forgot, this is one heck of a stage-managed administration…)?

The idea that genuine disagreements over political issues could be dismissed as “theatrics” is shared by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently described wrangling over the state budget as “kabuki”. Wait...didn't the governor used to have another career?

But the straw that broke the camel's back here at HyperCriticalWriting was an NPR report on a terrorism readiness drill at the Orange Bowl. Listen to the FBI's Stephanie Veigas talking about the "more highly choreographed demonstration than we would usually have", narrating the "dynamic entrance" of the SWAT team (armed with paintball guns for the demo), and excitedly doing play-by-play on the demise of the “bad guys”. Message? Political theater...bad. Terror theater...? Good!

This last foolishness deserves comment not only for its insistance that the world can be divided into “good guys” and “bad guys”, but for its status as the supreme theatrical spectacle of the week. The premise of the exercise --ripped from TV drama -- was that terrorists had a ‘dirty bomb’ (I’d love to see some polling on how many Americans know what a ‘dirty bomb’ is…who cares? It sure sounds bad.) Nevermind that the most damaging acts of terror have been accomplished with such mundane things as commercial aircraft )the four 9/11 hijackings), a speedboat (the 2000 attack on the USS Cole), and, in 1995, fertilizer (the Murrah Federal Building…oops! That one was conducted by a US citizen!).

Shortly after 9/11, the media beat itself up for covering too many shark attacks not noticing who was enrolled in flight school. Now it seems everyone has decided it’s okay to go back into spectacle mode, to stop thinking of the world as a place in which people have genuinely opposing views of how the world ought to be run – not “good guy” and bad guy” views like on 24 or some thing (it's worth noting that some people are glad that shark attack coverage is up again...see here). When I started asking around if anyone had noticed the up-tick in references to theater, my colleague Paul Falzone, saw right away that it was code for gay, for artificial, for insincere.

As anyone who’s ever been to the theater knows, extreme artifice is capable of generating extraordinary amounts of genuine emotion. But it reduces legitimate viewpoints to potagonist/antagonist dynamics and suggests a kind of extreme egotism in which the accuser is really saying that his foil is just spouting lines before the plot reaches an inevitable conclusion. Politics isn't literature, or film, or theater. It's people arguing for what they believe they need, struggling for the right to say what will happen and what won't. Marginalizing the concerns of your opponents by calling there actions "theatrics" is a cheap tactic...not mention an extreme case of the pot calling the kettle black.

A-Z@LAMoCA

2007-03-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

I got to see the Andrea Zittel "Critical Space" exhibit at LA MOcCA this weekend and it was (to no one's surprise) great. But it left me a little thrown off. I'd been largely acquainted with Zittel's work through reproductions and criticism, so going through it on my own led me to some things I hadn't really thought of about her work, and they weren't pretty. Here goes...

It's hard not to think of Zittel's work in terms of consumables. Mimicing a design studio, she makes delightful objects that one want to acquire. Looking through the exhibit, it was hard to ignore how many of these things were meant for her own use, and how others had been "customized" for collectors (I'm especially fond of the idea that Peter Norton needs a tidy little office from A-Z Administrative Services). I love art that can be part of the exchange economy as well as the economy of ideas, but a little light went off when someone said about Zittel's work that she "was alone a lot".

There's a monastic tradition in which one withdraws from the world to contemplate and pray and seek connection to god through solitude. However, asceticism ain’t cheap. In Zittel’s sculpture of solitude, one senses that moments alone for reflection are privileges, not rights. The gradual transition from severity to formal experimentation in her A-Z Personal Uniforms (above) implies a drift from discipline to austere luxury. The Met-Home just-so-ness of her structures – from the archly ironic airstream-inspired escape pods to the IKEA-slickness of her customized comfort units, there’s a feeling that the works perhaps too eagerly leapt into the embrace of the exchange economy. Aping a design agency is, on the one hand, clever and subversive (code for “good” in most art discourse, but not here) but on the other hand, a little bit too close to providing the kind of design advice persons in the position of providing patronage have come to expect from artists.

Let’s not kid ourselves, as great as Zittel’s work is as sculpture, it has limited implications for the design community – let alone for areas of social justice it nearly addresses (such as affordable housing). This is privacy for the privatized era. Solitude for the socially superior, hair shirts for those who wish to now and then trade in their Armani and Prada. The best thing that can come from this show (aesthetic delight notwithstanding) is that socially engaged designers might visit and adapt Zittel’s down market notions for populations in need of efficient, workable domestic design.

New addition

2007-03-07T19:53:00.000-08:00

Just a note to point out that we've added Boot Print to our links on the right edge of the page. Check 'em out. We liked the fact that they felt responsible to

"...Art beyond the known institutional walls, geographical art centers, and parameters of the Artdome."

because who can resist that?

As always, we welcome suggestions for links and readings.

Required Reading

2007-03-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

As a teacher, I've been interested in finding alternatives to big heavy text books for a long time. When I was a student, I always admired the professors who arranged their classes with course readers drawn from media sources and relevant excerpts from various books. This seemed to suggest a higher level of specificity about a class - as if its materials were too timely for the slow-moving textbook publishing industry. So when I started putting together classes, I started making readers. First came Xerox packets, then CD-ROMS and websites. Now I podcast parts of lectures and run a handful of course-specific blogs. I do all this because I think it will help - but I'm sure the textbook publishers think they're helping by concentrating info in one volume, too.

All this comes up because of two things that came across the radar recently - one is an article by Stuart Silverstein in today's Los Angeles Times (Panel Studies the High Cost of College Texts) about hearings into "inflated" book prices. The other is the announcement of a call for papers for a panel being organized by William Ganis of Wells College at the next CAA. "Beatified but not Canonized" proposes scholars look to the last pages of out-of-date art history books to see who the smart money was on at the time of publication. The panel plans to consider how the history of once-acclaimed/ now-obscure artists reflects larger political and aesthetic values. Hmm. Interesting.

What makes these things interesting to me is the combination of two things - first, the assumption that text books are overpriced in the present and, second, that their value might actually increase when they are out of date. I have a small shelf on my bookcase dedicated to wacky art histories that never made it -- books that try to explain abstraction to readers in the 40s, things like that. When students complain that textbooks cost too much and lawmakers start advocating for internet sources, we should pause and think what we'll lose when we trade in the text for the surging tide of internet communication. Information - they say - wants to be free. And it is...if you go to the library where it's usually on reserve. Online, nothing will ever go out of date because revisions will erase the bad information...along with any sense that history is a constant argument over whose story makes the most sense of the facts.

When I think about all the effort I put into learning how to teach when I was a student, I think I might cry. I realize now that teaching is (at best) a partial project for anyone. All one can do is try to coverone's beat adn hope everyone else your students see is doing his or her job, too. But students don't expect that kind of scattershot approach, and they have a right to expect more. Not more accurate or relevant information, but more about how to learn in the first place.

More Marla

2007-01-24T20:28:00.000-08:00

For those who couldn't get enough of Marla Olmstead (remember the toddler artist who was at the center of a storm of publicity, excuse me, hype, in spring of 2004 and, to a diminishing degree, over the last few years? I guess no one gets old on the web...she's still four years according to what I've seen...a refresher can be found here), she's back...with a movie!

The New York Times ran an interesting piece about Amir Bar-Lev's new film My Kid Could Paint That in its January 25 edition. The article purports to be about the ethics of documentary filmmaking, but for artfolk, it's so much more.

Miss Olmstead (to whom I don't mean to sound as patronizing as I must in this entry) attracts comment for so many reasons. She's financially successful at something few American understand in the first place, let alone understand well enough to know how its market works. It's possible to see her as a prodigy or as a victim of child exploitation. And best of all, it's possible to do any of these things _ and more - without really knowing anything at all about her work. That's what cultural commentators like best - art they can comment on without ever having to see....

But it's not really Ms. Olmstead I want to talk about; it's the way she's being talked about. It's interesting to note that on Ms. Olmstead's website (in a font I'd previously thought was reserved for missives from the bridge of the starship Enterprise) appears a message declaring that "start-to-finish video documentation [is now] provided for Marla's work". If, like me, you missed the scandal that followed her success - the insinuation that her paintings had been retouched by her father - this assertion of completely individual authorship seems, well...wierd.

Arguably, Hans Namuth's pictures of Jackson Pollock painting (see above) had more impact on artists than the canvases themselves. In his hyponotic dance around the perimeters of his work, artists saw new possibilities for how a painting aight be thought of. Now that there controversy swirls around the authenticity of certain pictures alleged to be Pollocks, one has to wonder if artists should be thinking - as Marla might have been (or, as someone might have been) - of setting up surveillance cameras to record each work's birth for the security of future auction houses.

What this is all about is how artworks remain - for many - relics of an object's time spent in someone's presence. Should we appreciate a Pollock or an Olmstead because of what it is, or because of who made it and how much assistance that person had? How far down the rabbit hole should we go with this? Should we get videos of Ms. Olmstead selecting her paint at the store, so we know her palette isn't determined by some corrupting force (some people feel the intrusion of others' color ideas very forcefully in late de Kooning...)? Should we watch her grind pigment, so we know it's not just a given from the manufacturer? Should we wait for her to outgrow her clothing and sell that instead?

Artworks are interesting to me precisely because they're not people. Because they offer the chance for people to construct ideas of themselve, not endless chances to repeat who they are. Reducing a work to a surname (I'm certain no one is looking for 'browns' on eBay...) strikes me as terribly limiting to the imagination of the artist.

So here's hoping Marla had some help on her canvases, and that she learned from her helper who she was and who she wanted to be.

Migrating

2007-01-22T13:09:00.000-08:00

The decision is...use the new Google thing. For now at least. Hope you'll all keep checking in on us here.

Words words words or, a small flurry

2007-01-17T09:40:00.000-08:00

In The Language Instinct, linguist Stephen Pinker tackles the myth that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow and its implicit assumption that more words for something means greater cognitive subtlety. Pinker's book is a great read, but not for every artist, so it was with a certain glee that I read a piece in today's Chicago Tribune discussing this artic legend.

One of the enduring myths of art education is that we're somehow smarter because we've sharpened our observational skills (or at least that was the myth when art students used to observe something other than the limitations of the assignments they've been given, but that's a topic for another cranky blog post...). I'll get back to this in a minute. Maybe what's going on here is a way of embracing Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, but I'm inclined to agree with DeKooning when he rhetorically asked, “was it such a smart idea for Monet to paint those haystacks?" Yes, art training can enhance observation (I’ve always loved this example of a study in which medical students noticed more on X-rays after art tutorials), but it seems to me a related problem – can we connect the capacity describe things we perceive with the idea of intelligence?

Language and thinking are so entwined because thinking finds expression in language. If one cannot express one’s thinking, one is assumed to be thinking poorly. And language – writing, speaking – is 700 lb. gorilla in the expression arena. Those of us who hope that other forms of making (maybe this is what Joe Deal is talking about when he refers to ‘Delta Knowledge’) can achieve some autonomy from language (that we’ll, for instance, stop talking about metaphor in visual art in such literary ways) can take a little relief in seeing the decoupling of words and ideas that Pinker indicates in the Eskimo snow-thesaurus myth.

Me - I'm not going to crack this glass ceiling I'm talking about. I can't see a way out of the language trap. But here's what I think: linguistic and visual expression intersect at the point where signs are made. Artists (and good writers) are capable of generating new signifiers that achieve conventionality rapidly enough to contain meaning. The newness of their way of addressing their subjects makes their expression appear enlightened...but the subject hasn't changed (it's still snow), just the way in which the artist puts it in the mind of the viewer. Call it snowblindness...or any one of a hundred other things.

Hmmm...should we migrate or move on?

2007-01-08T10:35:00.000-08:00

It seems Blogger now requires a Google Account from its users. I'm loathe to make everyone who uses this site get another account so Google can track your movements around the web and market things to you, so I'm thinking of ending this blog and setting up a new one attached to my .Mac account.

There are several ramifications of this. Only I'll be able to initiate discussions (though I can set it up to receive comments). I'm sure .Mac isn't entirely innocent of tracking, but it won't require a password to participate in the conversation, but the .Mac site has a terrible URL. And I'm not sure anyone cares in the first place.

So please comment about this before January 22 when I'll announce the decision. Thanks.

New reading

2007-01-03T20:43:00.000-08:00

Artist and critic James Rosenthal was a big hit with the Criticism Seminar students last summer. You will be glad to know he's started a blog of his own, Pocket Intellectual. You can check it out and post your comments. I don't think I'm letting anything out of the bag by saying James will be back next summer to work with the thesis year students, so read up. At least one teacher can be figured out...

Should we need a laugh...

2006-11-10T15:13:00.000-08:00

Save this piece from McSweeney's for Criticism Seminar next summer...or read it now if you need a laugh:

An Art History Professor Explains to his 4-year-old Daughter Why The Fair Market Value of Her Picture is Actually Far Less and that of a Thousand Words , by Ethan Ryan

It's not like this in my home. Really.

Things I wish I'd seen...Notes on the Remote and the Invisible

2006-11-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

I suppose it's maudlin to post about a show I couldn't get to, but I wanted to remark on the Tauba Auerbach show that just closed at Deitch. Or rather, I wanted to remark on the sadness I have for not seeing it. Sometimes you find out about these thigs too late, sometimes they're three thousand miles away. This looked like something I really should have seen...if only to make me feel stuck in my ways and unoriginal. Now and then, a kick in the pants like that is good thing. From the images on the Deitch site, one can see that Auerbach's work is playful with language, if not staggeringly original in its maneuvers or approach to the subject.

Perhaps because I’ve been reading thesis papers and thinking about influence and context a great deal, I feel rather without context these days. I read Steven Millhauser’s story, In the Reign of Harad IV, in a recent New Yorker a few days ago and it’s been haunting me. In it, the master miniaturist (I don’t pretend to that level of authority…) realizes the potential for his craft and embarks on a journey into the invisibly small. At the conclusion, two students come to see his recent work and there is - literally – nothing to see. It’s too small. They compliment him on it nonetheless, and the master miniaturist

…returned with some impatience to his work; and as he sank below the crust of the visible world, into his dazzling kingdom, he understood that he had traveled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.

This is what I thought being an artist was – finding that thing that you want to see, whether anyone wants to see it or not, and making it visible…if only to yourself. As I think about the humor and charm of Auerbach’s work, I find myself at once humored and charmed and slightly annoyed. Playing in the same field with language, I’m not too terribly interested in the kind of cleverness I see in that work. But I’m interested in something it contains or reflects.

And so, with some impatience, I must return to my work.

2006 MFA Thesis are online

2006-11-04T09:58:00.000-08:00

Candidates for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics, Painting, and Sculpture are in the final stages of completing their Thesis Exhibitions. Cards have begun to go out, and Thesis Papers are being recieved. You are invited to review the thesis papers by visiting the class website.

The receptions for the Thesis Exhibitions will take place Friday, December 8 from 6-8pm at the University of the Arts Galleries and Saturday from 5-8pm at Highwire Gallery, 1315 Cherry Street in Center City Philadelphia.

Texas...and something about "mess"

2006-10-02T09:25:00.001-07:00

One of the many things I remember Dario Robleto saying when he spoke at UArts was that he liked being in Texas because it was a stand-in for all of American culture. Of course he didn't say this was necessarily a good thing, but it took a turn for the worse recently, if we're to believe a recent report in the New York Times describing the suspension of teacher whose student complained about being exposed to nude statues on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art (no nudes on their home page...).

Yes, this is another example of the idea that one upset parent can derail the education of hundreds of students. Yes, this is an examples of how conservatives bent on speaking their minds can intimidate a school and the media (reports that Dallas television stations broadcast pictures taped at the museum's collection with black boxes concealing their sculpted naughty bits hints at how salacious, sensational, and ultimately cowardly local coverage of the event has been). But what's really interesting to me - as a teacher - is the way a cowardly administration can decide that such a complaint is an occasion to reprimand a teacher for past transgressions (as frivolous as "wearing flip flops" (the Times takes issue and reports that the art teacher wore sandals).

Although one gets the feeling that the Times article was intended to depict a Texas in which conservatives wield scary power over teachers and school administrators, it left me thinking more about the expectations to which education is held these days. If no child is left behind, it’s because we’re too afraid to go anywhere with our students. The complaining parents’ argument (I can only infer because they aren’t interviewed) appears to boil down to “Little Timmy got something on the museum trip which we didn’t expect to find bundled into an education and for which we refuse to pay.” Never mind that it’s unsafe to assume that liberal education is goal of any district, it appears now that schools are expected to be in the business of keeping students from experience and knowledge. The uncontrollable assets exceed the narrow limits of what passes for education and expose children to possibilities their parents might not recognize. At all levels, education now appears to be more oriented toward certification than the development of critical thinking, and this is yet another example of that phenomenon.

And, if you followed the above link and want to play devil’s advocate (wait, who am I alienating with that?) by reminding readers that it was the child who complained to the parent about the nude statue, by all means, remind away. I maintain that children are interested in making their parents happy and in combating the institutions in their lives that challenge stability, e.g. school. The complaining parent no doubt thinks his or her little angel has been brutally scarred by the experience. Thank heaven legions of future kids in Marlboro country will almost surely be spared the spectacles of human anatomy of inappropriate footwear, as this will surely linger in one form or another until school budgets are discussed in the next legislative cycle.

Spin Art

2006-08-20T22:45:00.000-07:00

It's been years since I "liked" making a painting in any way I could explain to someone. I don't consider this tragic, I consider it rather a good sign. I like feeling like my work is work. But today I made some paintings I enjoyed. I made spin art.

Eventually, no matter where I'm teaching, I seem to come across a crit that includes a statement like, "I like it, I had fun making it" as a defense of the work in question. As if liking anything ever mattered in any professional sense. When are people going to realize that art is not there to make artists happy? I take is as a manifestation of entertainment culture that young artists tend to gauge the success or failure of their work by the pleasure its making gave them. Entertainment culture or maybe vestigial therapy culture – after all, the pleasure principle also works nicely with the idea that one should be 'releasing' things through one's art.

Spin art was great fun not for its expressive products (how expressive an they be?) so much as for the formal opportunities I'd never noticed before. I realized that the spinning paper is like a potter's wheel, and that a line pulled straight out from center would result in a spiral on the surface. I realized that even with kindergarten tempera paint, simple color chords could be made. I remembered that keeping the ground available was a good way to keep some energy in the picture.

Of course I'm familiar with Damien Hirst's spin art paintings, and I'm not about to give up my pain-in-the ass methods for a frolic at the fair. I'm not even going to claim special status for the works I'm talking about - I wouldn't even think of them as sketches in any real sense. They’re more like color swatches or something – sort of like pure research rather than applied research. But they are fun, for whatever that’s worth.

Words

2006-07-31T09:23:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in the middle of today's studio visits, after I described a painting as being like a date with someone who tells you all about herself before the appetizer has reached the table thus killing any further conversation, I found myself thinking of what I don't say in crits out here that I do say in crits at Art Center. What follows is an evolving lexicon of critical terms that have little or no purchase out here. I imagine this post will grow once I apply myself to the problem (or when someone from there reminds me of all I've left out).

Bling: I realize this may not be a word I'm expected to use in crits anyway, but we seem to be suffering a drought of bling in art in Philadelphia. The word has immense currency among my students, and is applied to photography, product and transportation design, film and fine art. As in its original use, it indicates a level of polish and seductive surface that is intensively attractive. It can be contrasted against other terms of desirablity (like the overworked sexy of a few years ago) not only for its trendiness, but for its embrace of fashion as a positive aspect of a work's content.

Research: This is a problematic term that has been tossed around here a lot lately, usually in a context like I wanted to make this and did a lot of research.... Research is arguably the thing an artist needs to do these days, a self-justifying activity that has no apparent discipline and appears to be quantified only in variations of "lots". To me, research in art is evidence the other major art-making paradigms are not in use - those of inspiration or self-expression. Historicaly, these have been dominant principles of art practice. In the inspiration paradigm, artists were conduits of messages from religious (and later more worldly) authority. The Romantic era replaced this model with the self-expression paradigm, wherein the artist essentially looked inward, rather than upward, for ignition in the studio. Now, we have seen a surge toward looking outward and backward - through research - for fuel.

Guy Art: Jon Fortmiller's Intelligent Designs

2006-07-28T05:49:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's the news that Floyd Landis is in trouble for "test[ing] positive...for illegally high levels of testosterone" that has me thinking of the studio visit we paid to Jon Fortmiller in the middle of Denise's Vandeville's weekly debauch. For those who've not been there, Jon is hard at work on a troop of plaster monkeys who are occupying themselves, as monkeys do, by flinging poo, masturbating furiously, and same-sex coupling. John basked in the enthusiastic support of his classmates for this work, which he regards as critical of frat boy behavior, and got an especially warm crit from alum Romi Schroeder-Falzone for depicting maleness with such conviction in a culture and art world where the female form is so ubiquitous as to be a trite, formal device rather than a body.

The humor and wisdom of Jon's displacement of human male carnality on to other primates notwithstanding, I think it's time to complicate this critique before the discourse on Guy-Art at UArts gets over-determined. From my perch among the faculty, this seems like the most exaggeratedly raunchy year I've seen since I got here four years ago. I've been in crits framed by S&M, seen the most articulately painted breasts the school has had on view in perhaps decades (painted by both male and female painters, and generally played witness to what has been a more playful and frank atmosphere than we've had around here in a few years. Who threw open the windows?

But guy-ness appears to be everywhere all the sudden - here's what Roberta Smith observed in a piece in today's Times on summer shows in Chelsea:

Chelsea’s group-show summer fray can evoke a farmyard with a surplus of roosters. This was especially the case last summer when male artists and curators seemed to dominate, along with a plethora of Conceptually-based black-on-black appropriation art. At the time the term “boys in black” came to mind, and to a certain extent they’re back.

But it should be remembered that gender is a nuanced thing, not a start division. Lest we fall in to the mirror trap of objectification, perhaps we ought to think twice before getting serious about a formula that reads something like male=sexual=aggressive=primitive. What is lust and who gets to express it openly? What's the meeting ground between the intellectual discourse of gender and rather-more-difficult-to intellectualize arena of sex? (An amusing photo-essay on maculinity can be found at a blog by Graham Milton.) As tired as people might be of the sensitive metrosexual male, essentializing masculinity as restrictively as femininity has been circumscribed isn't necessarily the solution.

Newsletter Pitches

2006-07-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

Criticism students - these are the ideas that came over the transom for the newsletter. I've put a few remarks in after each one to help shape the piece, but we will be talking about these and discussing progress on July 19 with me and on July 21 with James Rosenthal. At the end of the list, I've put in some things that no one pitched that are worth considering, so let me know if youy want to change tracks.

Melinda Steffy - "I'm writing a feature on the Bike Parts show at Nexus, a fund-raising auction for a non-profit bike organization, especially considering the dynamics of a non-art organization using 'outsider' art to raise money."

gerard suggests - the big question here may be about the social usefulness of art, and in some ways the story is in line with the debate between Croce and Oates. Do such things diminish or help art? Another example might be the vogue for using art to address issues of violence, as in Goods for Guns

Denise Vandeville - need written pitch!

Aubrey Navarro - need written pitch!

Paul DeMarco - 1. 600 words: Review of Charles Long’s recent ICA exhibit Gone Formalism in the context of his recent UARTS lecture using a completely arbitrary set of standards and condition.

gerard says: Good. Go for it.

2. Table and 400 words: A brief review of Philadelphia area MFA programs based solely on the available promotional materials. Areas of interest will include: program focus, demographic, goals/mission, accessibility, etc.

gerard says: This is good – I assume the schools are Arts, Tyler, Penn and PAFA. The sooner you can specify four-to-six criteria the better, because then the designer can ration out the space for the table.

Jason Pemberton - need written pitch!

Fred Holcomb - "I plan to write one 1200 word newsletter article on the current “grid” show at Gallery Joe. The use of the grid can be both bold and mundane. But after a half century of minimalism, what more needs to be said of it.? The show is not a historical review. Having recently read Rosiland Krauss’s comments on the grid in her 1981 “The Originality of the Avant-Garde…,” I am particularly interested in this exhibit. After the class discussion yesterday, I agree to shorten the "grid" review and add another gallery review. I mentioned the Black Mountain show in class but am now leaning toward the William T. Wiley show at Locks, but haven't seen it yet."

gerard suggests - the histoircally conscious approach to the Gallery Joe show sounds good, and it can probably be addressed n less than 750 words. If you drop the Black Mountain show, some one else should pick it up, but I would encourage you to choose between the Locks and Mayer shows based on your interest in the work.

Mike Reenock - "I intend to write a descriptive piece about Philadelphia painter Robert Goodman’s studio. This piece will be focus primarily on the physical aspects of Goodman’'s studio and its role as something other than merely a “place to paint.”"

gerard suggests:This sounds like a good feature, it's a profile, but it's not. Perhaps we can run it under a department heading like "studio view". The folks in publicaitons who are designing our newsletter said photos are good, and I'll give you the specs. The one caution I have is that you go with an open mind. It's possible that the studiois just a place to paint for some artists: always try to approach your writing as an open question that can be proven or disproven through research.

Chris Houston - I plan to review the current show, Dialogues: A Group Exhibition at the Sande Webster Gallery, 2006 Walnut St., July 5th though August 23rd. The show opening is Friday July 14th.

gerard suggests: it would be good to articulate hte angle of this piece as soon as possible. Is it reportage (this happened, I saw it)? Or in some way critical?

Vanessa Juriga - Is writing about Woodmere Art Museum's members' exhibit. need written pitch!

Walter Plotnick - I plan write 6 short reviews, mainly focused on art in the Philadelphia Northern Suburbs. Four of which will be reviews of work that are presently on display at various galleries. Two will be studio visits, seek peeks of new work....behind the scenes of established artists who happen to live in the Northern Suburbs of Philadelphia. First, Anthony Lent, Senior Professor at F.I.T in NYC. Second Jon Clark, Professor & Chair of the Glass Dept. at Tyler School of Art.

Jared Udell - "The article will be a converstation with artist Adam Parker Smith. Adam recieved his MFA at Tyler and has been showing and teaching throughout Philadelphia. He is another painter gone hybrid, who creates soft sculpture which are shown along with his drawings and a paintings. Adam is represented by Peng Gallery. This past month he has made the move to NYC. I will discuss his time in Philadelphia and his decison to move to New York.

I see parallels in our goals and I am interested in this for my own experience, and to hear about the pros and cons of both art worlds; NYC and Philly."

gerard replies: We've already talked about this not being so much an interview or profile as a piece in which the phenomenon of the artist who migrates to NY is addressed through the example. Because this is the point of the article, I think you should back off the description of his work and focus on his decision to move, the contributing factors that influenced it, and what it's lead to so far.

Terri Saulin - "I would like to write a piece discussing the chasm between fine art and craft. Specifically, ceramic art and sculpture. I plan to interview Jeff Guido from the Clay Studio, either Ken Vavrek or Jack Thompson, perhaps Paula Winokour during my critique this wed. I am also interested in a poetic reading of the Louise Bougeois show at The Fabric Workshop."

gerard replies: This is very, very good. Jeff is a good source, and Paula would be great. I would remember that a good argument is usually built on three points, and choose your interview subjects carefully to express those ideas. I assume we're talking about two things - an essay on craft (a feature? 600-800wds?) and a poetic review of Louise Bourgois (200-400wds.)?

Other things to think about: Louise Bourgeois @ Fabric Workshop/Lonnie Graham @ Fabric Workshop/ Zoe Strauss July 19 slide show/ Stories based on access to visiting artists (Ellen Harvey!)

Criticism Title Storm

2006-07-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

Okay everyone (in Gerard’s Criticism Seminar):

Here are the names that we’ve brainstormed so far. Assume that whatever we choose will be “appended to with a subtitle” indicating the source (See below). We’re not limited to this list so please put your mind to it for more ideas. If you come up with a new idea please add it via the comment link to this post. Anticipating an active response to this post, please make your suggestion clear and distinct from any tendency to support your contribution with discussion and/or other written support. I’ll keep track of the master list as more ideas come in.

Our Current List:

Peripheral Vision
Unreliable Witness
Beyond Sight
Innocent Bystander
Philadelphia Art
Cowbell
More Cowbell
P4
OFF10SEEN
ARTicles
Super-impositions
The Visual Axis
Visual Intuition
Grown-Up Doodling
Form and Function
Second-Hand Facts

Happy idea making.......

Under the Influence

2006-07-06T12:26:00.000-07:00

Tonight is the first of our film screenings. and I've been interested in addressing the question of influence for some time now. It seems that now is time.

The Oxford American Dictionary, in defining influence, offers the following word history:

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, or from medieval Latin influential| ‘inflow,’ from Latin influere, from in- ‘into’ + fluere ‘to flow.’ The word originally had the general sense [an influx, flowing matter,] also specifically (in astrology) [the flowing in of ethereal fluid (affecting human destiny).] The sense [imperceptible or indirect action exerted to cause changes] was established in Scholastic Latin by the 13th cent., but not recorded in English until the late 16th cent.

The operative word in the definition since the 16th century seems to be imperceptible or indirect, that the influence of one thing on another is observed by a third party, more than recognized by the changed subject. Somehow or another, that connotation of mysterious or imperceptible action still resides in the word, which perhaps explains why it feels so much like someone is dragging his finger nails across a blackboard when he names his “influences” in a critique or statement.

Influence is, I assert, being too narrowly understood and converted to a neutral, almost clinical term in such instances. When citing their influences, artists often sound more like bibliographers than introspective critics of their practice. In almost all cases, it would be more apt to say “I admire so and so’s work…” or “I have tried to steal this or that property of so and so’s paintings…” (a valuable attempt to re-think this problem came from Keith Gruber in his March 10 post on this blog.) Using the word influence generally allows the artist to behave like an infected person, one who cannot take responsibility for the reference to other art or ideas in his or her work (the word, influenza actually entered the English language from Italian in the mid 1700's by way of the root that influentia, a medieval forerunner of influence).

But artworks are not sneezes, scabs, or otherwise to be confused with the results of infection. They are, if anything, discursive objects and most of them are made with the intent to act in this capacity (those that are not made to do this but instead are selected from all the other objects in the word to function like this are called “found objects”…but that’s another essay). Disregarding the responsibility to intent diminished the force of a work. This doesn’t mean unconscious or spontaneous allusions are impermissible, it means that they should be rigorously and thoroughly understood by the artist as soon as they are identified so their power can be harnessed and directed where the artist wants to employ it.

I’m especially keen to hear form the artists who responded to the call for participation – Jane Irosh, Joe Nanashe, Isaac Resnikoff and Paul Falzone - because they have been thoughtful and deliberate in our correspondence and have indulged me by trying to understand how talking about movies might be a roundabout way of talking about their work.

It doesn’t seem that we’re going to get over the essentially pathological discourse of art practice that dominates contemporary art any time (more obsessive drawings, anyone?) but perhaps we start to be more specific about our relation to the world around us, what enters our making processes through which doors, and how it is greeted.

The dominance of the word

2006-06-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

I really should be quoting this to get it right, but the thought is familiar enough that how eloquently it's expressed is really a matter of pitch not substance, but I've been thinking about an idea of communication linguist Steven Pinker puts forth when marvels about how the arrangement of bursts of air from our mouth or marks on a page and accurately and successful transmit an idea from the brain of one person to the brain of another.

While it would be wrong to take the miracle of language for granted, it would be, I think, equally wrong to assume that all communication must be based on this assumed outcome - that what is going on in the head of one person is transmitted accurately to the head of another. This notion seems especially troubling in art. (Maybe I'm just depressed because I get bummed every time I hear someone say he or she wants to 'make a new language' in his or her art - what's wrong with the ones that already exist? Who are you going to talk to in this new language? - and I heard that one in one form or another a half dozen times as I met with the first year grad painters yesterday). It's troubling because it defends an idea of stability of message that threatens some of the most important things art can do.

Art perhaps ought not so often be viewed so much as form of conversation, but perhaps more like a relay game. An artist observes something or invents it. She displays it (there is something etymologically suggestive about display, as if it were to cut off from play, but it's not that at all). Another person sees it. That person is now in the position of the artist, able to make through conversation, literature, or creative practice another thing. And on and on.

Of course the conversation model can't, and shouldn't, be utterly abandoned, but perhaps its dominance should be questioned a little more thoroughly. As if all conversations you’ve ever been invoved in went the way you wanted them...

Pictures of Pictures

2006-06-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

One of the oddest things about going to the MoMA the other day was visiting the permanent collection and people-watching. I had heard so much about the building and the re-installation of the collection, but hadn't had a chance to visit. Clearly, the forces of reification had been successfully brought to bear on the works, as evinced by the number of people who whipped out their cellphones and started shooting pictures of their favorite works. (What, the bookstore stopped selling postcards?) I thought I would share these photos, taken with my phone.

I guess I can imagine sending photos to people live ("Look, honey! I'm in New York CIty and they've got a big Picasso!") but I can't quite see what one hopes to capture when one shoots a picture of a painting with the modern equivalent of a pinhole camera.

There were so many people milling around the galleries, and taking pictures - the cell phone came out in the galleries in which Picassos hung, and stayed out through the Impressionist and Post-Impressionists. Before that, one would see people posing next to large works while other took pictures of them. I wished I'd taken a picture of a teenager standing next to a large Warhol making the kind of gesture one sees at a heavy metal concert as her friends took her picture.

Perhaps I sound cynical, but I'm not. I really enjoyed watching all these people interacting with the art they were looking at, and the frantic duplication of the museum into pixels was ultimately moving. After all, before it says anything, photography says I was there, and if the museum is an important enough site to click, preserve, and share - as important as the smiles of people out for drinks or whatever we use cell phone cameras for - then something must be right with the world...

Art & Craft...

2006-06-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

Back on the subject of Craft...

I had a chance this spring to be in the cultural Mecca of Northern Florida, Gainsville.

There was an interesting exhibit at the Harn Museum at the University of Florida …

A Closer Look: Art and Museums.
“This exhibition examines some key issues faced by museums in these areas of their operations. The exhibition is designed to inform visitors about the strategic decisions that underlie the presentation of art in museums, with the hope that this information will heighten the visitors’ critical awareness and enjoyment of those institutions”

The show was divided into five thematic sections: Defining Art, Collecting Art, Displaying Art, Interpreting Art, and Preserving Art. In the Defining Art area there was a display about art and craft.

This was the text panel was posted by the exhibit.

(What, I didn’t take a picture of the exhibit, just the text panel?)

Ants and Grasshoppers

2006-06-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

So another summer begins in Philadelphia and I see that we've got a greater population of grasshoppers than ants. I expect things will get crazy as time goes on, but for now it's awfully quiet in the studios. What are we waiting for?
There have been a few people putting things together, but perhaps the the length of crits has cut into the desire to get going. The heat in the building is pretty bad. Maybe we should just go look at art rather than make it.

My Semester's Work.

2006-06-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

By: Paul DeMarco

Struggle and Artistry

All profound philosophical thoughts about modernity, decadence, or the post-modern condition aside, the most significant lesson I have learned over the course of this Spring 2006 semester has proven to be grounded much more in my own personal and subjective reality than in the objective discourse that my past work has so intently focused. Not to say that my interests in philosophy or objective reasoning, particularly in the area of aesthetics, have subsided entirely or at all, for that matter. But rather, I have recently become aware of the value of real experience as an artist and the actual, physical necessities that demand one’s attention. It is a fact that has become all the clearer, that my pursuits in objectivity are entirely dependent on my physical aptitude and that the aesthetic and philosophical endeavors to which I engage require the very struggle that I am so fortunate to have realized.
Pragmatically speaking, one lesson of value that I have realized is perhaps best stated through the thoughts of Heinrich Wölfflin when he asserted in The Principles of Art History that not all things are possible at all times and that some things can only be realized at certain moments in one’s quest. As a young philosopher and aspiring artist who is often intensely engaged in work, both physical and philosophical, Wölfflin’s insight offers a valuable and refreshing approach to the self demands of this academic. Throughout the milieu of my current life, i.e. graduate school, full-time instruction, studio work, etc., I personally found myself attempting and testing the possibility of all things at the same time. Through this omniscient and omnipotent perspective, I often felt the responsibility to force all realizations into one objectifiable and testable subset of time. Angst ridden and pressured, I assumed the burden of solving the most intense and potent philosophical and aesthetic problems in contemporary culture immediately, while simultaneously making attempts to perform at Übermensch levels as a professional in each area that I engage.
As a finite being constantly struggling with physical force, the incessant need to meet the demands of the Übermensch carry a heavy burden of consequence. And it was in only the second week of this spring semester that consequence had its way. A jolting and mysterious sickness befell me at the ripe age of twenty-nine, perplexing medical professionals and awakening my physical soul. The cause of illness unknown still to this day, at least, that is, it remains undiagnosed and named only by me as a form of physiological decadence. Suffice to say, it was my intuition, yes! intuition—that completely subjective antennae of truth that has the potential of flashing 100,000,000 lumen worth of realization to the conscious mind in less than one second—that spoke clearly to me of the need to focus attention towards my physical being rather than on the mental that I had become so heavily focused upon. It is here that my realization occurred and my experience coincides with the life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche, making the subject of decadence all too apropos.
Nietzsche was an extraordinary talent in the school of philosophy in which he studied. Proving to be so precocious an academic that at the age of twenty-five, he was appointed professor of philology at Basle University. It was ten years later when Nietzsche made the difficult decision to resign from his professorship as a consequence of a reoccurring prolonged bout with illness. Upon resignation, Nietzsche devoted himself entirely to thinking and writing to become the epoch philosopher that he is today. (Smith, xi)
Central to Nietzsche’s core of philosophical thoughts was his actual experience as a sick man. For the sick man actually experiences what no “healthy,” or rather, unsick being is capable of, i.e. the decadent state of mind. Nietzsche writes:
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. (GM III, 12, 383) (Vattimo, 129-130)

That is to say that through ill health, the sick man experiences a more rounded sense of his own terms. To consider the only set of conditions is to disregard the more set of other conditions that have equally significant affect. The process of decadence, therefore, that is, the process by which the mental self is made to suffer by way of a deteriorating, or at least struggling, physical self, exposes the mind to the necessity of struggle and profound insights that struggle will proffer.
Admittedly, Nietzsche’s biography tells a story of mastery in thought that has yielded a complexity paramount to my immediate thesis and to which scholars, to this day, continue to dedicate their professional careers investigating. As pertains to me however, the decadent state of mind has no less profound an effect. Approaching the point to which I fell ill I had no awareness of my own personal need to attend to the physical in pursuit of personal and professional success. In a way much less reverent than Siddhartha Gotama I committed my mind to the tasks of solving all necessary problems aesthetic, philosophical, professional, personal, etc. A commitment that disregarded emotion, eschewed sentiment, and ignored self to the point of physical distress. Essentially, I negated being altogether disallowing the opportunity for struggle and opposition to occur, disallowing conflict, allowing nothing.
* * *
In his revised edition of Five Faces of Modernity, Matei Calinescu explicates the necessary and intricate struggles that constitute an era of thought and action that has controlled the last century of social discourse, the paradigmatic machine of Modernity. For Calinescu, Modernity, as it is widely understood today, is actually a process that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century sits in opposition to the principles of Classicism, where the newfound metaphysical notions of a universal intelligence and timeless beauty begin to ware on each other through a dynamic relationship of time. The major kinetic element of Modernity is the forward momentum that the paradigm manifests where contemporary truths become based on and relative to those truths that are realized in the past. Calinescu locates the first occurrence of this vector-like reference to the Modern mode of thinking in the form of an allegory found in an 1126 publication of John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, where Bernard of Chartres spells out the image of a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant. (15) As the allegory is intended to read the giant represents the past and all truths that have been explicated thus far. And so, by a dwarf standing atop the shoulders of a giant, he who is small, less developed, and naïve may rest himself on all of the knowledge of the past, as given assumptions of truth and be able to look forward and beyond with a solid foundation of intellectual givens. The ‘giant’ represents the whole of greatness, the mass of past knowledge, and the great pool of pre-established excellence (philosophical insights, technological progress, moral orders, etc.) while the dwarf represents present man, as he stands so young in relation to the ‘giant’ of predeceasing knowledge.
The allegory of the dwarf and giant asserts a clear interdependency amongst the immediate and subjective self and the wave of objective time. Modern time, in this case, is best understood through the capital market, where time, as an objective and measurable entity, becomes bought and sold as a modern commodity (minimum-wage stands as a sufficient example but the phenomenon can be observed readily on the auction block where antique and older objects warrant more value than the new and how quite often, new items such as automobiles depreciate in value as soon as they are purchased and occupied). At the same time, and in the aesthetic sense, the independent Self, within the massive set of time, experiences a subset of personal time; a duration specific to the Self by which it explores, unravels, and reveals truths on its own terms. For Calinescu, the essence of Modernity as we know it today lies in the tension between the giant and dwarf, or rather, the set of truths yielded through objective time as it develops in relation to the subjective journey of the selves that serve to carry it further.
In my case, I, the dwarf, made all attempts to carry the giant on my shoulders, to support the giant and help it on its journey. This pressure negated any opportunity for me to engage in the experience of the very tension that exists independent of my actions for or against the machine. Ill health, on the other hand, rid the pressure and exposed the real tension that was necessary to vanquish such a nihilistic state of mind. For what objectivity is there to look towards, what tension can be looked past when one employs the task of carrying a giant single handedly? The necessary polemic requires a shift from epistemological and metaphysical questions (how do I know I’m doing it right?; if modernity fails, how can one judge form?...) to a dialectic of ontology that addresses the state of being in the superlative quest towards artistry.
Nietzsche’s ontology is particularly interesting in this case because of his overt ambiguity, transcendence, and relativism. Never is there a defined system in Nietzsche’s works but an intricate philological schemata of tension, resistance, and power that serve to create the Übermensch, or Overman—Nietzsche’s concept of the ideal human being manifested ultimately as the artist. Gianni Vattimo, an Italian scholar of Nietzsche’s work, elucidates, “the artist is, today, the most visible form of ‘Übermensch’. He is a kind of ‘stepping stone’ in the coming-into-being of the word.…‘as a work of art giving birth to itself’ (N Autumn 1885—Autumn 1887)” (136-137) The artist understands that “’Truth is ugly; we have art so that we are not destroyed by truth’…because the will to truth is ‘already a symptom of decadence’ (N Early 1888—January 1889, VIII.3, 296 16[40])” (Vattimo, 134) It is worth noting, that decadence in Nietzsche’s ontology is a modifying condition that serves its ultimate purpose as the liar of all liars. The idealists, that is, the healthy men, or perhaps the giants, and the giants alone fool themselves into objectifying Truth. All the while, truth be told, or rather, is interpreted by the artist who interprets interpretations in such a way that he understands truth only in relation to the complex relationships to which he discovers importance. Truth, in the Nietzschian sense is interpretation—interpretation of struggle, resistance, and torture of the will. With regards then to health, there is no way to determine a ‘normal’ state. Rather, there is only strength in relation to weakness and good health in relation to ill health. And if the Übermensch, that is, the artist demonstrates any mode of a healthy state, it is because he not only understands but delights in the opportunity to experience “the whole panoply of values and desiderata to date…(GS 382,318)” (Vattimo, 128) and finds value in the state of decadence of the mind as it extends his vision beyond those who are otherwise settled and mindfully inactive.
The struggle of the will, as Nietzsche describes it, the decadent state of mind, the interdependence of what the East might refer to as the yin and the yang, bares striking similarity to Calinescu’s five faces of modernity, as paradigmatic modes that interact with and upon each other to create one single philosophical force known as Modernity. The avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernity are manifestations of the Modern dialect, each serving a necessary purpose and eliciting one another in the Modern relationship. That is to say that without one aspect of Modernity, including the concept of Modernity itself, the others are not possible, in the same way that good health, for Nietzsche, is possible only in the wake of sickness and suffering. Calinescu writes of the paradoxical struggle inherent in the notion of the avant-garde circa 1950-1960:
The avant-garde, whose limited popularity had long rested exclusively on scandal, all of a sudden became one of the major cultural myths of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Its offensive, insulting rhetoric came to be regarded as merely amusing, and its apocalyptic outcries were changed into comfortable and innocuous clichés….This situation prompted some artists and critics to question not only the historical role of the avant-garde but the adequacy of the concept itself. (120-121)

Calinescu postulates the onset of decadence as a necessary outcome of the Modern avant-garde movement. In his essay entitled The Idea of Decadence he is quick to point out that decadence, as for Nietzsche, is a condition, a state, or a tendency in which things occur and not a thing in itself. Moreover, it is a condition that necessarily occurs in the Modern machine as constituents within the paradigm, e.g. the dwarfs, become more and more self-conscious of the machine itself. To revert back to Bernard of Chartres’ allegory, a dwarf standing square on the shoulders of a giant is to Modernity as two dwarfs each standing on one leg atop either shoulder of a giant is to the avant-garde. As more and more dwarfs realize the benefit to be gained by doubling up on each giant, a new allegory transposes, the allegorical structure of multiple dwarves becomes commonplace and attempts to add more and more continues until the simple framework of the allegory—the dwarf standing on the giant’s shoulders—dissolves completely. Decadence is the decline of the paradigm, the fall of the rebel, and homogenization of radical moments. In modern art, decadence is in motion and gives way to a unique modern style known to readers as kitsch.
And how beautiful a thing kitsch is! as it entertains so many levels of interest, thought, and intrigue. Kitsch is that thing—those ridiculous little things!—that unite being at so many levels. Kitsch can bring the most fulfillment to the simplest mind while at the same time destroy the credibility of another. It can insult style while complementing form and disguises itself constantly as a thing it is not. Calinescu remarks,
The possibility of the avant-garde’s using kitsch elements and, conversely, of kitsch’s making use of avant-garde devices is just an indication of how complex a concept kitsch is. We are dealing here indeed with one of the most bewildering and elusive categories of modern aesthetics. Like art itself…(232)

With obvious references to masters like Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons, Calinescu notes the paradox in works by such artists as the marketplace itself appropriates styles and techniques from them for its own similar and private benefit. With Calinescu’s observation we find the Nietzschian struggle present in kitsch itself. If decadence is the tendency for struggle within a state of being, then kitsch is the manifestation of the struggle and relative and newly defined state of being. Kitsch becoming a necessary condition for the artist’s ability to fully realize Truth(s); serving also as a deceptive force with leveling potentials.
Celeste Olalquiaga approaches such a dual nature of kitsch through a dichotomization of the concept in her exposition on kitsch, The Artificial Kingdom. On Olalquiaga’s account there are two modes in which kitsch is manifest. On the one hand there is nostalgic kitsch and on the other, melancholic kitsch each serving antithetically with the other. Nostalgic kitsch is that state of being that negates any potential discourse between the viewer and the thing. Nostalgic kitsch is found viz. theme/amusement parks, movies made from books, and any instance where mystery, struggle, and exploration are allowed to occur. So in the case of the theme park, Disneyland for example, the ability to explore the potentials of the fairytale is lost in the face of a concrete interpretation presented as healthy and True. Olalquiaga prioritizes what she terms melancholic kitsch, objects like decorative glass paperweights, snow-globes, and the legend of the lost city of Atlantis, through its ability to allow conflict, struggle, and various modes of interpretation through the process of allegorization. For Olalquiaga, occurrences of kitsch like the legend of Atlantis offer the viewer and the expanse of culture to which it is entertained the ability to explore versions of Truth “…based on a symbol’s disintegration, simultaneously erasing and anecdotally maintaining that symbol’s primary meaning.” (122) Thus, the legend of Atlantis devoid of any actual and real appearance of the place offers the viewer a myriad journey of interpretation, realization, and Truth. Consistent with Nietzsche, Olalquiaga asserts that through allegory, melancholic kitsch results from the decadent state, allowing a perceptual and conceptual struggle at the level of the viewer and appearing in times of struggle and serving the expanse of collective and advancing knowledge in the broader sense.
* * *
Ultimately what must occur in the struggle as artist is a dynamic interplay of conflict and sought resolve. As I show in my previous essays on the subjects of popular culture, art, and the homogeneous condition, contemporary culture (and more specifically the artworld) is in the midst of a most decadent state. At all levels of the artworld Truths are asserted as axiomatic principles. Even some postmoderns themselves, have settled on the notion that struggle and opposition are unnecessary in such an enlightened era. Kuspit argues such a point in The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art where he denounces the credibility of an avant-garde in the face of the decadent artist. And to his point, I can only accept half and disagree with the other, holding that the avant-garde artist plays as significant a role as any other. Kuspit’s argument seems to disregard the total exhaustive qualities of the allegory of the giant and the dwarf, assuming that the massive set of time and the personal subset of time exist on equal planes. Coincidentally, by arguing Judd’s point about the worthless nature of the decadent artist, Kuspit appropriately accepts the challenge of a struggle and engages in an opportunity to resist and argue, but falls short in attempting a conclusion to his decry by disallowing the credibility of Judd’s work altogether.
As demonstrated above, the plight of the artist lies in his struggle and without the work of one artist, the good work of another could not be possible. Validity in art making relies on the artist’s ability to discover potent relationships, aesthetic and philosophical problems as it were, that warrant the need for exhaustive contemplation, abuse, and allegorization. Kuspit is right to discuss the notion of decadence as a dialectic. Nonetheless, by postulating a way to be, that is by asserting a truth, viz. a solution to the dialectic, he disallows the dialectic to work within the machine that necessarily supports the very existence of it.
In many ways, Kuspit’s position on decadence reflects the blindsided view of the system of Modernity in general that I too fell victim. The major device in Modernity that leads to such deception is the very model of the giant and dwarf to boot. The allegory disregards the fact, like Kuspit, that the dwarf, independent of the giant, contains within himself, the necessary ability to interpret truth both dependent and independent of the giant’s formidable hindsight. The dwarf needs the giant but, most importantly, needs itself and its own struggle for sight, both to and fro. The image of the giant assumes a static position of past truth(s) while importance lies in the dwarf’s ability to both understand the position of the giants’ truth(s) at the same time reevaluating such truths and interpreting them for himself. The dwarf needs to understand the importance of himself as the perceiver of things past and future and kindly thank the giant for the simple assistance.
In my struggle as artist, I must assume the responsibility as Übermensch, and delight in the opportunity to experience the physical and mental distress that such a position demands. It is now clear that decadence cannot be illustrated or even demonstrated but offered through an intricate system of signs, relationships, and interpretations. As an artist, I may access interpretation readily, stand atop giants as necessary, and argue confidently towards a transposed system of contemporary thought. What characterizes the pale of postmodernity is its overwhelming self-realization of the modern machine in general. What characterizes the modus operendus of this struggling student of art now, is my overwhelming self-realization as a seeker of Truth(s) and an opportune maker of interpretation.

Works Cited

Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity. Duke University Press. Durham. 1987.

Kuspit, Donald. The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art. Allworth Press, NY. 2000. pp. All

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. By Douglas Smith. Oxford University Press, NY. 1996.

Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of The Kitsch Esperience. New York, Pantheon Books. 1998.

Vattimo, Gianni. Nietzsche: An Introduction. Trans. By Nicholas Martin. Stanford University Press, CA. 2001.

Wölfflin, Heinrich, The Principles of Art History. Dover Publications. 1950.

Mastery

2006-05-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I visited the studios of a graduate program that shall remain nameless. The students – painters, sculptors, performance and video artists, what have you – exhibited work in their studios (which, I was reassured to see, were as much like veal fattening pens as they are at every institution) as visitors poked in, occasionally committing to cross the threshold and see what was inside.

What was inside was an astonishingly uniform arrangement of works. In each studio, the artist appeared to have gone to great lengths to remain casual about work. Evidence of production was apparent (cans of paint, tools) even when they had nothing to do with the objects that were present (ubiquitous videos). Each room suggested a kind of domesticated pathology, as if the student had received a message that he or she should be obsessed with a subject, but not so obsessed as to appear genuinely interested in it.

One student was the exception casting all the others into sharp relief. He had painted the walls with a fresh coat of blinding, gallery-white paint. He’d hung three large canvases that were thematically consistent (all representing fire in a way that called to mind the work of Philadelphia painter Sydney Goodman). These supplemented a group of several similar works hanging in a near by gallery. All were large, thoroughly accomplished (if slightly conventional) works that had been carried to a point that one could reasonably conclude was finished. Taken together, they constituted a body of work, a thesis about painting with a light source in the composition, or perhaps about the transformative violence of fire, or perhaps about something else.

Another student had taken a similar path, painting abstract landscapes that were too vaporous to coalesce into such a concrete thing as a thesis, though they had the consistency and coherence of a body of works. These two, more or less only these two, appeared to working in an engaged mode that allowed new work to be born out of earlier work, as if each piece suggested possibilities and challenges for the next piece – in short, as one might be able to work over the course of a career. The other twenty or twenty five student were more like bees who buzzed from flower to flower, making a video here, making a sculpture, adding a sound track. Their method may have been more organic, may have more accurately reflected the diversity of their interests, but it came across as a profound manifestation of attention deficit disorder.

Now this was an open studio - a very informal event (that just happened to coincide with the formal graduate thesis exhibit that was just too dull to mention) - but it is an occasion to think about how one want to behave at a critical point in one's career. Is it best to let it all hang out, or to try to bring (or force, in some cases) structure to your work by establishing parameters? What is the role of the studio in your practice - workspace? showroom? place to put old sofa and listen to tunes while waiting for the next exhibit opportunity?

Thoughts on Craft (Evolving)

2006-04-02T21:22:00.000-07:00

I'm going to post some responses to the idea of craft from an email I sent to handful of interesting artists to whom I think such a question would be relevant. This post will evolve as I get responses, so check in a couple of times if you want the whole story.

From Candy Depew

witches practice "the craft"
ie witchcraft

crafty = sly and devilish

so with this line of thinking, this theory
of craft clearly implies
sly and devilish witches practicing
(or witch practice- singular)

thats pretty radical : )

From Mary Barrett

I wonder if the paleolithic cave painters thought their renderings were more "high art" than the crafters of bowls, clothes or bodily ornamentation? We'll never know, but one can speculate that if paintings of auroch stampeding across the cave wall provided some sort of ritualistc invocation for a good hunt, they may have been seen as fulfilling a magical/spiritual function. But who is to say that the adornment of the body with beads made from shells or teeth or such didn't also fulfill an important spiritual function? Or even an aesthetic function? And why is intellectual sometimes perceived to be more important than spiritual? I think interaction between all aspects is inevitable. At any rate, the beauty of the beast is captured, and humans are fulfilling what I believe to be an innate need to create and connect the physical and spiritual worlds. I also think that so called tradition crafts can also fulfill this need. The difference seems to be that craft, yes, relying heavily on the notion of work and product, also relies on tradition. "Fine Art" at least in modern times, seems at times to want to break tradition, to move forward, to reflect change. But wait a minute, didn't the arts and crafts movement do that too? I guess Radical Craft also seeks to create change, and at the same time to preserve community.

I think that art and craft both involve body mind and spirit. When Adrian Saxe curated the 2001 Scripps College 57th annual Ceramic Annual, he chose for the theme: "Between Thee and Me: Objects of Agency." He noted in the curators statement that this theme is present in some of the most compelling artists today. "It is the potential for an object to become an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace, or of inner conflict and evil, and serve as a conduit of emotion and memory for both the maker and the user of the object."

I think crafts and the communal aspect of crafts is important to identify who we are as humans and how we interact with each other and something else, on a physical, mental and meta-physical(spiritual) basis.

From Bill Gerhard:

I don't know what I think about craft anymore. I guess there are two kinds of thinking, one that has to do with a high level of skill and technique and another that has to do with appropriateness of means, which means you shouldn't have to think about it. I think in grad school someone said the moment you notice craft is when you stop looking. Craft people are very proud and defensive, which is their big problem.

From Sumi Maeshima:

What is curious about the word craft (used provincially in the U.S.) is that it seems to lack autonomy, as if it always needs clarifications of what one means by the word. Or it needs a contrasting word: craft v.s. fine arts, crafting v.s. thinking. At the same time, there is something moralistic about the word craft, and that moralistic stance can be fashionable or unfashionable, radical or conservative, which in turn tells where the speaker stands, instead of what she/he means.

A not so crafty summary of Radical Craft

2006-04-01T10:14:00.000-08:00

David Gallo, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, spoke of the progress of deep sea exploration. Advances in technology such as compact LED lights and digital cameras have revealed the unknown some seven miles underwater in mountain ranges that dwarf the Himalayas. These devices must be small and energy efficient because, unlike space exploration where solar energy can be obtained, deep sea craft must bring all of their power on board.

In a session entitled "Crafting Big Ideas," speakers discussed how craft can help the world and humanity. Jane Olson of the Human Rights Watch shared an anecdote about how one person can bring about change in the world. One night while she was in Balkans as an investigative reporter during the war, it was very cold and she had nothing else to do, so she began knitting a pair of socks for a family member back home. Some local women were gathered around watching her, then some of them started doing their own knitting. A few days later at the end of her stay in the village, a woman handed her a pair of socks she had knitted. Olson could not speak the language, but she could see in the knitter's eyes that it would be rude for her to refuse it and also that there was hope in her eyes that Jane could help them since they had nothing. Olson took the socks, and thought of the woman during her travels. When she returned to the States, she told the story to others and it was so inspirational that throngs of people in knitting circles in Boston and elsewhere in the country began shipping yarn and knitting needles to Olson to send to Balkans. Olson contends that because the women are skilled and capable it is better and more cost effective to send the people materials instead of manufactured sweaters. She still has the socks today.

Martin Fischer extends his generosity to the underprivileged and the world by selling hand/leg powered irrigation pumps to poor farmers in Africa and other developing nations. The machines are essentially a modified stair-climber that generates pressure to irrigate up to 2 acres of land by one person over the course of an undisclosed period of time. Clicking to the website KickStart.org shows a happy, young African farmer pumping away in the foreground while two, healthy-build, middle-aged women smile towards the camera while sprinkling the pumped water over enormous crops. Fischer's goal is to create and expand a middle class by helping the people move beyond hand to mouth. These "self-motivated entrepreneurs" are able to "climb out of their poverty forever," and even send their children to school. Neat. The pump only costs $99. Quite a bargain and labor saver for people making less than a dollar per day. Perhaps supply and demand will dictate cheaper produce prices for the really poor who do not have the cash flow to spend $99 up front for a Kickstart or for those who have been laid off from traditional irrigation hire. Kickstart is an NGO and Non-Profit, but I was really expecting something more like Heifer International where $99 would be the cost for Westerners to donate money to buy a machine for a family with the promise of the recipient to help the community after reaping the reward. Kickstart does seems to be aware of the discouraging price which is why they have started manufacturing more products out of Asia.

Onwards, Maurice Cox, introduced as America's own "modern day Thomas Jefferson," is an architect/urban planner with democracy on the mind. A former mayor of Charlottesville, he believes in working with the inhabitants of the city to develop successful "density." Residential areas are integrated with retail spaces, much like in Europe, so a sense of community can be established instead isolating residential areas from commercially zoned spaces. In addition, he realized a Monument to Free Speech. Strategically situated in front of city hall is a blackboard installation where any person is free to write notes or comments, in particular, issues directed at city officials and representatives.

Radical (cr)After Thoughts

2006-03-27T08:57:00.000-08:00

So I've been mulling over the conference and the whole notion of radical craft and its intersection with industry and art practice and I keep coming back to the simple idea that craft is a code for labor and that radical craft - building on Harold Koda's thinking - is code for a whole lot of labor. And this has been making me a little sad.

It seems to fundamentally reinforce a notion that craft is something done with the hands and that there is still some un-bridgeable schism between the working hands the thinking brain. Work - almost by definition - must proceed according to plan to minimize waste. If the plan is found to be inefficient and is later revised, existing labor might be unspooled and erased so the product can be completed. The emphasis lands solidly on product despite any attempt to call attention to product.

Perhaps this is what was so striking about Billy Collins' poetry - it's polish speaks to the care with which he selects each word. (Digression: when Collins picks on Paul Valery, as he did in a poem he read at the conference, I think something terribly misleading is happening. I am reminded of a story about Frank O'Hara arriving at a poetry reading on Staten Island and delivering a work he had composed on the ferry on the way to the event. The other poet on the bill - whose name escapes me - brushed this aside, saying something about how he was going to read things he'd composed in advance and implying the superiority of that method. But O'Hara - I believe like Valery - had done unthinkable amounts of work preparing to write that poem in his reading, writing, observing and participating in the world up to the moment in which it was fixed on the paper. It's a little like the Whistler/Ruskin argument about a painting that took an afternoon to make but a lifetime to get ready for, and what's the role of craft in that?) It is not possible for craft to be thought of less as polish than as fuel? Might we not benefit from including in our definition of radical craft such things as edits, false starts, and erasure?

The more I think about it, the more I take comfort in Isaac Mizrahi's response to a question about the relative importance of brand and product. Mizrahi seemed a little stunned by the question - as if it were so fundamental that he had to think about his answer. Like the courtier that a fashion-person must be, he answered without offending anyone yet not without being unequivocal - he said that you needed product - content - to have a brand in the first place. It was reassuring to hear someone so confidently assert that things are where meaning begins (especially after the weirdness of the College Art Association Annual Meeting, wherein people complained that panelists were spending too much time talking about "things and images" rather than "ideas" as if they could be separated in visual art...)

I hope others will weigh in on the subject of craft and its possible radicalism with comments. We're looking forward to a few more posts on the panels I missed from students to whom I offered extra credit for writing. I'll also post links to whatever I see about it here, like this one to Jonathan Ive's site. Or this one, to christung, a design blog.

Part II: Word Craft

2006-03-25T18:27:00.000-08:00

As I watched musicians perform on the giant projection screens in the wind tunnel, I figured out what is so strange about the Radical Craft conference...it looks more like an awards show than a conference. Think about it. Musical interludes. Short films (including segments from the Muppets and the Simpsons) to introduce speakers. Big corporate sponsorship. Fashion people. Stars!

Anyway - the first speaker in the wolrd craft segment of the show was Erin McKean(see the picture), whose stand-up lexicography drew cheers. It should be noted that McKean had a better dress than any of the fashionistas present. Setting out to dispell the "nun/librarian" myth of the lexicographer, she introdeced the scientist/reporter metaphor in its place. She cleverly walked the audience through the basics of assembling a dictionary, talking about the importance of the corpus with amusing examples (one can hardly resist adding to the Google footprint of "asshat" by including it here...). But her connection to the subject of craft was tenuous. In fact, her talk appeared to dissolve when it came time to "beg" for a new design for the dictionary itself. One was left questioning what kind of room there is for radicalism in a field as inherently conservative as dictionary compilations.

As she was leaving the stage, I began to wonder what place the dictionary McKean was talking about had in the brave and much-hyped new world of Wiki. And show should take the stage next but Jimmy Wales, founder and CEO of Wikipedia.org, the online encylcopedia. Those who have studied with me in any kind of research capacity know my distrust of the Wikipedia hive mind concept, and I tried ot give Wales a fair listening, but I still felt as though he was missing the point. As amped as he is about making a new encyclopedia available to the world for free, he doesn't seem to realize that the world expects it to be the same kind of authority as the old encylopedia. (Think of Jasper Johns remark about how one who intends to make chewing gum that is used as glue is actually making glue.) So when he points out that half the edits on the site are done by just .7% of the users and that the most active 2% of the users generate more than 70% of the entries, he seems to miss the fact that these are really small percentages - obviously larger than those of conventional authorship but still in figures that sound downright elite. His arguments were weak and biased - after all, can you really trust someone who uses the words "community" and "friends" interchangeably? - and his assertion that Wikipedia's radicalism resided in its open-source ideology struck me as too broad. What's radical and useful about Wiki is the way it reflects its users' understanding of any given subject, and that's also a limitation on it. It may be interesting and, in ways, radical (as if that's really worth anything at the end of the day...) but it's also not an ecylcopedia in the traditional sense.

I really want to dislike poet Billy Collins but one cannot dislike work that's so beautifully crafted. He describes his work as "suburban" and "domestic", and he reiterated a definition of craft offered earlier in the conference ("craft is something made by one person for another") as a way of asserting his reader-consciousness. Rather than lecturing, Collins performed his poems in relaxed way, reading from several collections, including his latest, The Trouble With Poetry. Beyond the exceptional skill with which Collins renders his subjects, his poems are enchanting for the way they are about poetry itself. Just as it seemed that he was going to coast by on the charm of his work itself, Collins let drop a terrific remark about the how art can be evaluated. Talking about haiku, he talked about how the strict, 17-sylable form “offers resistance to your self-expressive tantrum.” That craft might be a form of form – of container or barrier to the fluid nature of content – seemed radical in that instant. And rewarding.

Glamour Craft: From High to Humble

2006-03-25T13:58:00.000-08:00

Greetings from the Art Center College Radical Craft design conference, where I'm pleased to be writing through the good graces of a heap of cold medication. This morning's panels included Entrepreneurial Craft (meds hadn't kicked in - I'm trying to find someone who can report on that one for you) and Glamour Craft: From High to Humble, which featured speakers Harold Koda, Claudy Jongstra, and Isaac Mizrahi.

Harold Koda was the epitome of the fashion scholar in his talk about the importance of cut as a basic craft of fashion. Spanning centuries of couture, his most compelling images were perhaps those of Issey Miyake's pieces made from single pieces of cloth. Along the way, he showed some exquisitely made dresses in which craft could be defined as the lavishing of extraordinary labor on a work (moderator John Hockenberry joked about designer jeans made "at the cost of sickening several dozen and killing a few of the laborers"). I was also pleased to see Martin Margiela's clothes dyed by molds and bacteria. But for Koda, it appeared that truly radical craft resided in the modernist adherence to material possibilities and that all the beading and dying was secondary to the cutting and draping. This struck me as a kind of attempt to reassert modernist principles, and a sad one in light of a passing remark that was part of Koda's talk - about the way that couture garments were really lures that attracted audiences for the more profitable lines of a designer's output - fragrances, accessories or ready-to-wear. It was as if to say artists should labor excessively on a few pieces that will attract attention to cheaper, more profitable wares (those that fulfilled what Hockenberry called and “acquisitive” lust.)

Cloudy Jongstra’s talk about her work in felt was staggeringly unfashionable – and, in the context of the group, therefore refreshing. She reminded me of Winifred Lutz in her concentration on the material properties of the wool, silk, cotton, and hay from which her felt is made. If there was anything “radical” about Jongstra’s craft (which she repeatedly asserted was ancient in its origins) it was her insistence on the craftsperson’s knowledge of a material’s properties and possibilities.

Isaac Mizrahi was clearly the star of the morning’s talk – and he appeared to know it. Anyone looking for a working definition of “radical craft” in his talk would be hard pressed to synthesize one from the anecdotes and sound bites he offered in response to Hockenberry’s questions (that Mizrahi was interviewed rather than delivering any prepared remarks made him seem even more like a bauble included to attract attention). This is not to say he wasn’t entertaining, but rather that one felt he’d say anything to earn the temporary love of the audience. And he was successful. Declaring at one point that “craft is getting the meds right” Mizrahi left the impression that he was saying whatever came into his head at the moment (a little like a blogger…), but he had clearly thought a little about some things. When Hockenberry asked him to explain his success at wedding high and low, Mizrahi admitted that he felt it wasn’t because he “did a great job” so much as that we are “culturally, socially and economically ready” for such a phenomenon (a little self deprecation goes a long way with me…). When an audience member asked him about “nostalgia” she clearly touched a nerve. “Everything I do refers tot he past,” Mizrahi said, “because it’s beautiful enough to refer to.” Perhaps the radicalism of Mizrahi’s craft is the construction of a stable identity in so many strata of the market and mass consciousness.

After all this, Target served us a swell lunch on which I’ve been picking as I write. But now, back the conferring.

Radical Craft

2006-03-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to say I scored a couple of session passes for the Art Center College of Design's swanky Radical Craft conference this weekend. Expect posts. Meanwhile, you can visit here for more info.

Others are noticing this event - see the designed objects blog for more hype.

HyperCriticalWriting

Things that annoy me, volume 1,964

Copyleft sing along

New work

Back to writing about teaching

Screen Testing

Artists - opportunity

Some new images

Virtual Studio Tour - Slideshow

Interesting participatory design project...

Dangerous minds - late edition

Suggested readings

Coming attractions

Found

Sometimes, information doesn't want to be free

Interesting to see something you've been thinking about for a while online...

Cannibalism

Dangerous minds - part 2

Okay, back to thinking about writing...

Artists not writing...

Dangerous minds

Eyewitness News: Now on Video!

printseminar: Does the Low Need the High More Than the High Needs the Low?

Criticism...continued

This 'n' That: Thinking about disciplines

Eyewitness News: When Prints were Truth

A good week for criticism articles?

An ex-critic discovers Rule Number One...too late.

The Times "Texts without Contexts"

Risky Business

What's wrong with this picture?

How things get made

Siting

Gone and Not Forgotten: Recovering History in the 21 st Century

Calling all my Brilliant Readers!

Toward a comprehensive history of criticism

Graduate School?

Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things for kids | Video on TED.com

Gatekeepers

The law of unintended consequences

Winner take out

very stuck in mind...

Studio Visits

What makes a critic?

..One more silly thing on 'Moby Dick'

Word Clouds

Lincoln - on video

Findings 2 - Looking at Lincoln

Recent Research - Looking at Lincoln

That's how the story goes

A digression on zombies (still not about life)

Not About Life, Pt. 1

Too many blogs...not enough thoughts

Research

1,000 Words (A Trailer)

1000 Words

Some thoughts on On Teaching and Learning

Dear Gilles and Felix,

The Myth of the Butterfly

On Recieved Wisdom

Tales from the Crit

You can't make this stuff up: Thoughts on research, art, and design

Online Writing and Blogging

Some thoughts about crits...

Murakami

New conversation

Your latest flame (Olafur Elisson @ SFMOMA)

What We're Looking Forward To...

Insurgent / Fugitive Fuel for Thought

So the Drama...

A-Z@LAMoCA

New addition

Required Reading

More Marla

Migrating

Words words words or, a small flurry

Hmmm...should we migrate or move on?

New reading

Should we need a laugh...

Things I wish I'd seen...Notes on the Remote and the Invisible