HyperCriticalWriting

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:21:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:57:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:18:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:00:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:01:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:40:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:39:00 +0000

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'

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:04:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:56:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:28:00 +0000

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

Findings 2 - Looking at Lincoln

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:53:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:39:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:38:00 +0000

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)

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:19:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:48:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:57:00 +0000

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)

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:26:00 +0000

1000 Words

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:08:00 +0000

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, 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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, 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yellow, write, yes, yesterday, yellow ochre, you, you're, your, zebra, zephyr, zipper, zooks, Zorro.

Some thoughts on On Teaching and Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:49:00 +0000

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,

noreply@blogger.com (tess1175) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:03:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (tess1175) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:59:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Sun, 25 May 2008 20:33:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gerard Brown) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:05:00 +0000

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?