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.

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.

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.

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...

Insurgent / Fugitive Fuel for Thought

Just a topic for discussion!
Check out:

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

Hope all have a productive semester.
Best,
Terri

So the Drama...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A-Z@LAMoCA

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

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

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

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

New addition

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

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

because who can resist that?

As always, we welcome suggestions for links and readings.

Required Reading

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

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

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

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

More Marla

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Migrating

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

Words words words or, a small flurry

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

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

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

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

Hmmm...should we migrate or move on?

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

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

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

New reading

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