Get Reviewed!

Although this event happened a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to call attention to it, for if it happens again, I would urge you to participate. Lori is a very cool person and has a great eye.

PRESS RELEASE

60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC, LORI WAXMAN, TO PERFORM AT DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL. OCTOBER 15-16, 2005, 12-6 P.M., 55 WASHINGTON STREET, 9TH FLOOR, BROOKLYN. BRIEF, SERIOUS REVIEWS GUARANTEED TO ALL ARTISTS ON A FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED BASIS.

The short review is at once a challenge, an insult, a record, and a piece of advertising. Its purpose is debatable and arguably quite different for the various parties involved: the writer gets a tear sheet, a couple of bucks, and some editorial gratification; the reader, in the best case scenario, gets a succinct, opinionated description of a body of work they probably did not see in person; and the artist gets published recognition and an entry for their bibliography. But think, for a moment, of the artist who has never been reviewed. Do you need a review to get a show? You need a show to get a review.

Installed in vacated offices overlooking the Manhattan bridge, Lori Waxman and her receptionist Frank Olive will receive artists in need of reviews between the hours of noon and six p.m. on Saturday, October 15, and Sunday, October 16. Reviews will be scheduled and written in twenty-minute increments between those hours and those hours only. Reviews will be signed, published, and ready for pick-up within the time frame of the exhibition. Artists whose work has been reviewed are invited to include mention of the text on their resume.

All submissions must be made in person and include adequate materials. Depending on the work to be reviewed, this may include but is not limited to: slides, printed matter, artist statement, brief biography. Documents that require a computer, projector, stereo, VCR, or any other media player for viewing or listening regrettably cannot be accepted. Time-based art is, however, otherwise welcome. Artists can maximize the time devoted to criticism by packaging their work in a succinct fashion. All materials will be returned to the artist in person upon completion of the review process.

Reviews are free of charge, but are not guaranteed to contain positive responses to the work submitted. Critics are not meant to be cheerleaders or educators or advertisers; they are opinionated, thoughtful, informed commentators. Or so they try.

For more information about the 60 wrd/min art critic, please contact lori.waxman@nyu.edu. Email requests for reviews cannot be answered.

That studio thing we do...

I've been envious of y'all posting images to the blog, and I finally found one so ravishing that I had to put it up. Trouble is that it's a piece of clip art from a radical pro-life site that opposes the use of stem cells in medical research. The ethics of using images from sources with which you disagree is a subject for another posting. Several years ago, I made my first forays into digital studio production using an image of HIV cells to generate a translation matrix for a poem by my favorite poet, Frank O'Hara. The resulting image - Sleeping on the Wing looks like this. But it gets at something that I have been wondering about for some time...what is work?

I have been increasingly reliant on my computer as a means of studio production rather than as a preparation for work, yet I still feel a lingering sense that I'm not makeing anything sufficiently physical to embody my ideas about what art ought to be. I'm not happy with the solution that immediately comes to mind - that of disembodying the image through projection - but at the same time, it's the only way I can get things done in this post-studio period of life and society at large. In some ways, it feels more and more like society has collectively abandoned real space for virtual space (my readings lately have been a lot about cyberspace in science fiction cinema, and authors like Scott Bukatman argue convincingly for a supplement to our real world in the ether of online experience).
This post perhaps comes in response to others' fishing for ideas on the blog, and to thinking about Mike's recent writings on the studio and its evolution as a "site" in contemporary practice, but I welcome any feedback.

"The Kids Aren't All RIght."

People looking for the very latest in criticisms of art school as ruining artists will have to stop by Aaron Rose's column in the LA Weekly for a glance. Rose stopped into Art Center to complain about the exhibit Supersonic, which features the work of some area MFA students. Not surprisingly, he finds it lacking when compared to...something he co-curated, a show called Beautiful Losers, a hymn to skater art, graffiti-inspired painting, and street culture that is currently makings its way through the spotless galleries of America (accompanied by a catalog with essays by, among others, PAFA's Alex Baker) . To give you a little sense of Rose's argument, here's a passage:

Contemporary art is not a luxury. I believe it is a necessity. It satisfies not only a visual need, but also an educational and, most importantly, a spiritual need for us. Art should teach us about how we relate to the world. It seems ironic, then, that the curriculum taught in most MFA programs addresses almost everything but fulfilling these needs. Art institutions today work more like business schools than any kind of creative laboratory...From the creative side, art theory has begun to play such a dominant role in art school that I feel it has lobotomized many young creative minds.

In my recollection, UArts' program has not come in for a lot criticism as being too focussed on "the business", so I'm curious how Rose's criticism of the MFA as an institution plays with you guys.

Dave Hickey Lecture

I see Dave Hickey is speaking at Penn on November 1...someone has got to go to this and report on it for the blog! Please!

On Trial: a new paper

When forming an opinion it is better to see art work first hand. The experience and concrete description of the work helps define the criticism. When the writer is an echo chamber, forming opinions based on another writer's experiences, the experiences are not as broad nor flexible because the (latter) writer has narrowed their focus for clarity sake. Some key pieces of the puzzle are often missing. (Although, the echo idea is an interesting angle for forming an opinion, and opening up creative options, based on conjecture rather than fact.) But after reading some articles by Jed Perl and Donald Kuspit I decided I might actually have an opinion of my own worth exploring.
Whether an artwork is considered valuable or not, either dollarwise or in a social or historical context, or whether artwork is even worth writing about, has become the an important issue in the last decade or two. Donald Kuspit's "I Wanna be an Art Star" in Art New England, June/July 2003, Jed Perl's "Oh Cool" in The New Republic, Sept. 2003, and "Beyond Belief" Feb. 2004, have presented some enlightening commentary regarding the true value of contemporary art. These articles parallel the Grayson Perry, Times article Gerard suggested reading last Monday, where the word "clever" becomes the dark casm between "good art" and just a cool idea.
So now I get to write my own personal opinion, and I can back it up by echoing great art criticism and by using examples I've seen first hand.

Note: If you want to see a critic rip the art hierarchy, "Beyond Belief" is for you. Mike would probably like this one too. Perl goes off on a related tangent discussing modern art and its relationship/counterrelationship to figurative work. Happy reading and writing.

Bumper Sticker: How's my spelling. Phone 555-555-5555

Citations

Uh...I was reading some papers this week and found a strong tendancy to ignore in-text citations and failure to assemble correct documentation of "Works Cited". I think we all want to read about ideas, and there have been some really interesting papers so far, but I'm concerned that it seems that quite a few people need to know more about when and how to cite sources.

The faculty has agreed that we will use Diana Hacker's book, A Writer's Reference, as our standard writing text book. You should have a copy. It doesn't cost much. Much of it is available on-line, and there is a link on the sidebar of the blog. Papers for this class are written in MLA format, which is exhuastively detailed on pp. 329-377.

I now consider everyone officially notified about standards for documentation. As far as grading policy goes, you cannot score above a B if you don't properly cite and integrate sources. It's a skill you'll need to have when you do your thesis; you'll need it if ever you present a paper at CAA (which many expressed interest in doing).

If there are persistant problems with this material, (or if you've simply never been introduced to it before), I can suggest some of the helpful on-line exercises that teach what kind of information needs to be cited and how it should be recorded. You can contact me by email if you're hopelessly in the dark about this, or I'll assign exercises based on how your papers look.

Heads up

There's a new reality show we all ought to be looking out for. Send celebrities to art school and see how they do? That could be frightening. But the article describing the show addresses the way art has become a complicated language of internal references. It might interest some readers, and I'd appreciate your thoughts.

New York on Tues. 10/25

Hi All, Going on the Moore bus trip to the big city this coming Tues. I welcome any suggestions for must seeums'. Thanx!

Trials and Triumphs not

Whew! I chose to explore current artistic trends and criticism regarding traditional forms of art and more controversial postmodern traditions. It was a good excuse to read current (within past 2 years) articles from Art in America, Artforum, Critical Review, etc., and to update my perception of the postmodern experience. The reading was everything I expected. Writing about those readings was another animal altogether.
One aspect of the reading was separating subject related articles from the unrelated flotsam, and some articles were just to hard to resist. For instance there was an interesting article in last month's Art in America describing how Seattle was booming as a cultural hub. This was a hard one to resist because I had just returned from there, visiting the museums, galleries, and famous Seattle artist, Fred Holcomb. It was fascinating to read another writer's description of what you've just experienced, though I think they wrongly omitted mentioning Fred's work in the article.
An article from last month's Artforum that did focus on criticism of Postmodern Art was about Michael Krebber's work. Here, three writers, Daniel Birnbaum, John Kelsey, and Jessica Morgan, wrote short essays responding to his recent exhibitions. According to these writers Krebber's recent work was not much more than stretched bed linens and scratched photographs, but they amazingly dug up background and comparisons that yielded three unique reactions. The article is a "must read" from a journalistic standpoint because they make interesting points about not- so-visually interesting work.
O.K. So what is harder than writing about not-so -interesting work? Writing about what people have written about not-so-interesting work. What was I thinking when I chose this topic for investigation? Writing about art is one thing. It can be described colorfully, it can be compared to other works of art, it can even be compared to other experiences such as eating pan seared scallops or a crunchy bag of Frittos. Writing about someone else's writing (about art) is really confusing. Does one write about the artwork based on what others have described? Does one criticize what the writers have written about the artist's artwork without having seen it? Or does one try to form an opinion backed up by what has been written? Self inflicted torture is the only way to describe the dilemma. After editing pages upon pages that combined all three strategies the final strategy emerged as the approved method.
It is enjoyable to read current articles reviewing current artwork. The difficulty in writing about what others have experienced, where you have little personal experience or research available, is like chewing on a flat inner tube.

Giving a talk

So I was asked by my studio mentor if I wouldn't mind giving a talk to the undergraduates at the local college about getting into Graduate school. At first I was a little shocked but I think I'm gonna do it! It's tomorrow at 6:00 pm. Then, my old ceramics professor ( from the same school) asked me to be part of her panel of visiting artists. Every year they find a few local graduates from the college and invite them to come back and talk about life after undergraduate school. They show slides of there work, talk about where they are in their field and so on. Sooo, I think I might say yes to that as well! So Does anybody have any scary or life-lesson-learning experiences about graduate school that they think I should mention? I guess, if there was one thing you all could have known before getting into graduate school what would it have been?

Responses

Because I have access to high-speed internet on Mondays and Thursdays, I'm trying to get all my responses out on those days. If yhou need to reach me, please feel free to call anytime, but I may reserve the right to get back to you on one of those days for convenience. My apologies for any inconvenience.

215 Festival

Hi Folks, This evening opens the 215 Literary Festival. If interested check out www.215festival.com for the schedule of events. Of particular interest is John Hodgeman's COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE presentation at the PMA on Friday, October 7th, 5-8:15. The 215 runs Oct.5th-10th. There are a variety of events, literary, art and music, encouraging all to take a peek!

See'ums

A couple of shows in Philadelphia I think no one should miss (and when I can see them from LA, one should assume they loom large...)
First, there's Very Early Pictures at Arcadia University Art Gallery. I saw this show in California this summer and it was tremedously thought provoking. What makes the drawings interesting is the sense of foreshadowing, as if one can read this interests of mature artists in their childhood works. This idea - that artists are somehow 'destined' to be what they become - seems to sit interestingly with some of the recent posts about how artists are taught, about the importance of categories in exhibiting and educating artists and understanding art output, and other subects. I strongly recommend the show.
Closer to downtown, there's Ellen Harvey's project opening at the PA Acdemy on October 15. Harvey is a smart, funny artist whose work has interested me for a long time and I'm pleased to see there's finally an opportunity to see her work in Philly (she appeared in an ICA project a couple of years back, but her piece was a bit overwhelmed by the exhibit that contained it). Examples of her other work can be found on her site (here, and the "New York Beautification Project" is just one of the many novel approaches to piracy I couldn't squeeze into summer Topics class...) and maybe she would make a good speaker for Summer 06, what do y'all think?