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...
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
A digression on zombies (still not about life)
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Not About Life, Pt. 1
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:
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.
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.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Too many blogs...not enough thoughts
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.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Research
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...
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...
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
1000 Words
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Some thoughts on On Teaching and Learning
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?”
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?”
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Dear Gilles and Felix,
Saturday, July 19, 2008
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
Monday, June 09, 2008
The Myth of the Butterfly
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.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
On Recieved Wisdom
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.
...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.
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
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Tales from the Crit
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?
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?
Saturday, March 22, 2008
You can't make this stuff up: Thoughts on research, art, and design
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.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Online Writing and Blogging
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.
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.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Some thoughts about crits...
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:
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:
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.
[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:
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.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.
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.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Murakami
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.
Monday, November 19, 2007
New conversation
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Your latest flame (Olafur Elisson @ SFMOMA)
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.
Monday, August 27, 2007
What We're Looking Forward To...
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...
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...
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