Kathy Butterly

KATHY BUTTERLY: Slide lecture and dinner! Friday, February 10, 2006. This sought after ceramic artist and Moore College of Art and Design / UC Davis graduate, will lecture at 6:30pm at the University of Pennsylvania Chemistry Building, 231 S. 34th Street in Philadelphia. The event will be followed by dinner in a private area residence at 8pm. For more info and ticket information contact Christina Edleman at The Clay Studio, 215-925-3453 x13 or go to www.theclaystudio.org. Seating for both events is limited.

Where is your art supposed to go, anyway?

Is it really a surprise to anyone that museums exhibit less than 5% of the work they collect?

The Los Angeles Times would have us believe that this is, in fact, news. And while artists are shocked (...shocked!) to find there's no room in the museum for their work, museums remain the gold standard for achievement in our profession. What is wrong with this picture?

I've been having this sidebar conversation via email with an artist who's getting his MFA and is thinking about his thesis show and how it seems like an artificial thing. While everyone asks him if he's showing, his frustration about the need to exhibit while he's still growing as an artist has been simmering. To him, rolling out a bunch of canvases and standing there delivering the artspeak to his teachers and invited guests isn't going to transform him into the artist he wants to be. To him, showing these paintings is a step on a path that is supposed to last a lifetime. When I was in school, we used to say we were learning to paint so we could be great artists in our 60s. That's what I read between the lines of this artist’s emails.

Of course, at the time we were all saying this, others were snickering that we were only saying it because there was no room in the Whitney Biennial for us and that this was some sort of sour-grapes strategy. But really. With nearly 10,000 new artists getting degrees every year, where the hell are all these paintings, sculptures, installations, ceramics, prints, books, and whatever supposed to go?

I recall preparing for my thesis exhibition and working on these paintings that I wanted to have a certain pearly finish. One of the people who came to my studio, perhaps in an effort to get me to lighten up, told me that she regarded student work as proposals for mature work. Maquettes, essentially, for work we’d be really do when we got out of school. I did lighten up and get the paintings done, but I’ve been haunted by this feeling for a few years, that most art I look at is really a discursive foray, not an object made to any kind of exacting specifications.

One of the most interesting books I’ve looked at recently is Deep Storage: Storing, Collecting Archiving in Contemporary Art, edited by Ingrid Schaffner and Matthais Winzen. It’s a kind of index of an exhibition and a practice artists (and – whoa- non-artists, too) are deeply engaged with in society (Google “scrapbooking” if you don’t believe me). In a weird way, it reminded me of an equally fascinating but less hip book, David Halle’s Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home. Halle’s writing is not exactly memorable, but the book is illustrated with dozens of images of the interiors of people’s houses and the art that hangs in such spaces. It’s a little like a hardcore version of Dwell or Met Home except that unlike these sterilized decorator magazines, one sees how lives are rearranged to accommodate paintings and sculpture and how these things – removed from their white cubes and glossy art magazines – might really affect people who live with them.

Maybe this is just another way of getting at the problem of gross overproduction in studio art. Consider the thing you’re making in its life outside of the studio, the gallery, the museum, or the magazine. Consider making things that cannot be photographed so you don’t place more value on the slide or digital image than on the thing you’re making. Consider that the art most of us love, doesn’t come with an artist who stands beside it and drones on in artspeak.

Out of Body

Perhaps it began with Dave Hickey's successful attempt to make beauty an "issue", but it seems that the thing underlying most contemporary exhibitions now is a desire on the part of curators to present art as overwhelming, even ravishing, to the viewer. The beauty debate returned sensualism to the table, giving it some long-overdue new vocabulary.

As a result, it's not enough now to look at work or think about it, one must be staggered by it. Consider the complexity-theme in the Fabric Workshop's "Swarm" exhibit. It exists to create the impression that art is just too much to understand intellectually, that at some point, the information passing through your eyes will be too much for your brain, that overload is inevitable and your flight instinct ought to be kicking in soon lest you face a dangerous neurological episode brought on by too much looking.

This ideas followed me to Ecstasy: In and About Altered States at the LA MoCA. The show is at times like a flashback to early teenage parties – complete with the boredom of watching stoned people fascinated by themselves. Matt Mullican’s entranced video, in which the artist plays with pens, rolls of tape and trash cans in a hypnotized state - is a chore, and Paul Sietsema’s Untitled (Beautiful Place) is nineteen minutes of starting at a houseplant. That’s more than I could do even under the influence of some passport to an Altered State.

But thankfully, there’s more to the show than ruminations on drug culture, though these references are abundant (more on that in a minute). One of the exhibit’s announced agendas is to “simulate or induce” metaphysical states in the viewer. Here is where the show’s most successful works can be found. Olafur Eiasson’s Your strange certainty still kept (1996) employs economical means to extraordinary ends. In a darkened room, four strobe lights pulse and appear to freeze tiny droplets of water in midair. As you and other viewers walk around the room at normal speed, the droplets hover and hop around as if they’re in another part of the time/space continuum.

Erwin Redl’s Matrix II is similarly low-tech (which matters in a town where special effects are a big deal). Hundreds of tiny green LEDs hang in straight lines from the ceiling, creating rows of pale blips that call to mind the torrents of computer code in the Wachowski bothers’ movies. The piece, which at first seemed underwhelming, is saved by its enormity. At first, it’s hard to believe one isn’t looking at house-of-mirrors trick, but when you walk into the illuminated field and see the various tricks simple geometry can play, it’s hard not to be stunned into a pleasurable numbness.

The show also includes strong works by Pipilotti Rist (whose video installation of dreamy projections and ethereal music suggests a ride at some future conglomerate of Disney and MTV) and Eija-Liisa Ahtila (whose multi channel video, Talo/The House gives one hope that artists might in fact be able to produce compelling cinematic works). And of course there are some pleasant standbys as well, like Tom Friedman’s Play-Doh placebos Sylvie Fleury's glam space orb, 8.

But too often the show is a parody of itself. I overheard people walking the galleries peeking into rooms and asking one another, “have we done this room yet?” At one point, a visitor asked the guard about the work upstairs. “Is there anything worth seeing up there?” One can’t fault a show for the visitors it attracts, God knows museums should be happy enough to see anything with a pulse walk in the door these days. But exhibitions can be faulted for the way arrange art works and create experience. To that end, one wants to laugh at Peter Huyghe’s L’expedition scintillant: a musical Acte 2: Lightbox in which tiny curls of smoke drift toward miniature theater lights, suggesting fantastic images. It’s not the object that is so ridiculous, but the artist’s use of music by Eric Satie and the arrangement of work itself, which suggests nothing so much as a banal 1970s living room where hip parents aspire to aesthetic transcendence while their children are upstairs raiding the medicine cabinet.

The whole drug thing goes horribly overboard with the repetitious mushroom imagery. Come now. Do were really need three different artists mushroom images? One looks to curators for choices – select the best image for the show. Shrooms from Roxy Paine and Takashi Murakami and Carsten Holler (whose Upside-Down Mushroom Room is in the picture above, by the way) make it look like you’re covering your bases, not like we’re getting insight into nuances of a subject.

On the whole, Ecstasy’s greatest strength is its articulation of visual experiences so exciting they defy judgment. When looking at the best works in the show, it simply seems irrelevant to ask about their importance as art; they’re too busy delivering a charge. Those pieces that “simulate or induce” perceptual phenomena from sci-fi to schizophrenia are magical in ways that conventional representation cannot be. Painting suffers horribly in Ecstasy. It’s too abstract, too pictorial

Perhaps all this is a reflection of ongoing tensions over the split between the mind and the body. Perhaps it's a feverish attempt to relocate the mind inside the body, to make art less intellectually forceful and more, well, forceful. I’m not sure I think it’s a good thing for art to enter a realm where criticism is irrelevant, but it makes for a good trip.

Turn it up.

Maybe it's just that seeing MFA shows puts me in a frame of mind that seeks underlying aesthetics that could unify disparate artists, but I was amused to read Jerry Saltz Village Voice reviews of Mike Kelly and Jon Kessler's exhibits. Like a scientist diagnosing a new strain of art virus, Saltz whizzes through a flurry of names for the syndrome he’s trying to articulate – “the New Cacophony or the Old Cacophony, Agglomerationism, Disorientationism, the Anti Dia, or just a raging bile duct” – before asserting that “terms that describe this sculptural strategy include grandiose and testosterone-driven.” (italics original)

Hmmm. "Testosterone-driven?" I wonder what Erin, whose thesis installation was conceptually and structurally a whirlwind would say about that (and I'll invite her to respond). I wonder what Vanessa, who expressed such keen interest in the Swarm Exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum would say. Or Terri, whose work may not manifest clutter in the way Kessler or Kelley do, but who pours references from the body to Beslan into her work. Or anyone who is a little curious about the ease with which such approaches are regarded as "strategic" rather than "tactical" or even in non-oppositional terms all together. But let's save that for another posting.

Before asserting that the "new cacophony" is "very gendered and very male", Saltz did offer one interesting read of the shows, which went like this:

Nowadays this all-at-once gambit can be seen as a way to compete with the paranoia and havoc of everyday life; a homeopathic dose of poison whereby ruins are created to counteract ruin; a manic-depressive panic attack in the face of information overload; a rejoinder to minimalism; a way to fill space and get attention.

Which put me in the mind of the Ellen Harvey show I was able to run in and see while in Philly. If you've not seen it yet, get off yer' ass and go(there's tiny picture above. It's tiny to frustrate you into going to see the real deal...). The four large mirrors are, on their own, enchanting enough to hold the space without the video elements of the show. But this notion that the image of a ruin of the Academy within its walls might constitute some form of inoculation rather than assault (Alex Baker's essay on the show was stunningly confrontational, wasn't it?) is an engaging notion, and perhaps one that deserves more thorough and consideration than the latest incarnation of bad-boy art.

Arts Journal Dance Forum

I know, I know. You hardly have time to read about art let alone dance, but I wanted to point out the ArtsJournal.com on-line debate on the state of dance as a model for our spring BlogStorm. Give it a look to get the idea, and be in touch.

The Coming Storm

I want to thank everyone for the fascinating and skillful presentations in yesterday's all-too-brief meeting of the Writing Projects and Thesis Prep class. In several cases, talking about your research gave me insights into how it might be made more focused and useful for your studio - I hope it was helpful for you all to cap off the term by talking about the work you'd done and to hear about the impressive variety of work done by your peers.

Plans are afoot for the spring - I will distribute a revised syllabus by e-mail but I wanted to alert you to some significant changes:

Deadlines: It became almost unmanageably confusing for me to have writing coming in from all directions at anytime in the term. In order to budget time to properly respond to your papers, I'm going to set three target dates for you to pass in writing to me. You may continue to explore numerous short pieces (as Keith did) or develop longer works (like Mike or Paul), but I will respond to everything I get in relation to the target dates. It's important that I get writing at each target, because they will be tied to the dates I need to issue deficiency notices or take other administrative actions.

BlogStorm: I'm going to try something this spring. In lieu of writing one major paper, students may participate in a week-long BlogStorm I'm cooking up. I alluded to this in class yesterday and details will be forthcoming, but the gist of the idea is that everyday for a week invited guests will contribute blog postings on ideas that have been found in several students' writing to that point; you must provide three comments (totaling about 750 words) in the week to be excused from one of the papers. I think this will help restore some of the sense of information sharing that is missing from this remote and nomadic course, and hopefully it will put you in touch with a few new resources.

Bibliographies: I'm going to be revisiting the way the bibliography is incorporated into the proposals you submit at the beginning of the semester. I can't unilaterally abolish them, but I want them to be more evolutionary than summary documents (in other words, I want to change the idea that the class is about retrieving information and reporting it in a linear fashion and introduce the idea that this process is more of a loop; information begets expression, which instigates a search for new information that needs to be processed, summarized and expressed, leading to new inquiry). What we're after in the big picture is a more sustainable practice in the studio, and I think we can model that a little hear. I will therefore be asking you to look at the bibliography a little differently.

Again, details on all these will follow, but they are the major modifications I'm suggesting. I look forward to reading the course evals, but it would be more direct to comment on this posting if there's something you'd like to see happen in this class.

best of luck to all and I look forward to hearing about the crits - perhaps we could post comments about crits on the general MFA blog, which is still available but also under-used...

Arts Journal Changes

It looks like changes are afoot over at ArtsJournal.com, one of my perennial favorite news sources for arts-related gab and info. I encourage everyone to bookmark the site and look at it daily, but I'm especially keen to see that they are going to be doing some topic-driven group blogging in the weeks ahead, in which invited guests will comment on aspects of a specific subject (it begins with dance).
Frankly, as a discussion forum, this blog has turned out to be something of a disappointment and I fear that one of the worst aspects of UArts' traditional modus operandi continues unabated. I'm referring to the tendency of discourse to be a two-way track between teacher and student rather than a multi-focal dialog among peers (a far and away more appropriate way for things to work in graduate school). So far this semester, I've read literally dozens of papers in which the research and discoveries of one student would have been useful to another. Concluding with presentations is an opportunity to present findings, but I'm concerned that the rush to give everyone time will severely limit discussion and information-sharing.
Seeing as how we won't have a great deal of time to talk in ourt meeting (between the hour and forty minutes alotted for presentations, changing computers a handful of times, loading new PowerPoints, taking a little coffee-or-pee break once, we're going to puch that two hour limit pretty hard) the blog provides a chance for interaction and comment that appears to being high demand (as I read the FUTURES Committee report, the single greatest issue facing the program is the need for improved communication). I urge you all to use this space to hash out how we're going to make better use of the course you're taking.

Final Presentations...take two

Okay - I haven't heard from many people about the final presentations, which is not terribly reassuring since I asked for some input on speaking order, etc. Here are the updated announcements on final presentations:

• We are meeting in Anderson Hall, Room 633 (this is a change - we are not in 808)
• All of us are meeting from as one large group from Noon to 2pm
• You should be prepared to make a ten minute presentation including allowance for questions on your research this semester. It may be a summary of the papers you've written or you may present the most successful one you've written.
• Unless there are strong objectiosn, we'll go in alphbetical order by class year; first years first (Gruber, Murphy, Schick, Yarrington) then second years (DeMarco, Houston, Juriga, Navarro, Reenock, Saulin). That's one hour and forty minutes if everyone takes the ten he or she is allotted. We'll have to keep it moving.
•Visuals are strongly encouraged. I have reserved a computer cart wit h DVD, projector, and speakers. If you need special gear, tell Erin right away.
• After the last presentation, I'll need a few minutes to talk about the way things went this semester from my perspective and to hear about it form yours. We will be working together again next semester and there are some things I think we could fix to make it more productive. Please bring your suggestions as well.
• I'll be available for short one-on-one meetings after our group meeting, at which time I can talk about grades if you're curious.
• After the presentations you'll fill out evaluations for this course.

The end of the insurgency...in name only

Those who suffered through Topics this summer might be amused to know that the Pentagon has decided that the fighting in Iraq is not against an insurgency. In the latest bit of linguist ballet from an administration that, this summer, tried to change what it had originally and aggressively sold as "The War on Terror" to "The Global Conflict Against Violent Extremism" (see George Packer's item in the August 8 & 15 issue of The New Yorker), National Public Radio today reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld objects to the use of the word insurgent to describe the opposition in Iraq. You can listen to the story by taking the NPR link.

Politics of the war not withstanding, it seemed by the end of summer of that the investigation of the insurgent personality had attained some traction among students who regarded it as continuous with the iconoclastic and avant gardist persona of the modern artist. I’ve been pouring over writing about artists and research lately (see the November 16 post asking for help with "research") and one thing that's impressed me is the importance of an artist's "iconoclastic tradition" of inquiry when art and research are combined. Stephan WIlson writes eloquently about it in his book Information Art: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (which I know Terri and Denise have looked through - and thanks to Jane Marsching for reminding me of Wilson's thoughts in her artist's statement.)

Perhaps, at least as far as insurgency in the arts, the war is at home after all.