This 'n' That: Thinking about disciplines

To conclude the Southern Graphics Council's annual conference, a panel consisting of Arcadia University Art Gallery's Richard Torchia, Philagrafika's Jose Roca, and Gretchen Wagner of MoMA (under the moderation of Print Center Curator John Caperton) convened to talk about whether or not it was time to go beyond disciplinary labels like 'printmaking' when what people really want to know about is contemporary art.

The value of discipline-specificity (or its limitations) was a major theme of the discussion. John Caperton began the discussion witha  brief history of the Print Center, ending by saying that in its current phase they were seriously engaged in an investigation of what a print is. That this might seem an absurd question to ask at a conference of printmakers and scholars occurred to no one. Caperton entertaining noted that, in the free-for-all that is contemporary art, the Print Center is "an organization that is trying to figure out why we're still around".

The value of labels themselves came into sharper focus when Gretchen Wagner spoke next. The importance of taxonomy was a subtext for her remarks, which described the Museum of Modern Art's curatorial bureaucracy and the challenges posed by a recent acquisition, the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. Fluxus work merrily crossed any and all boundaries of art orthodoxy in its day, and one can only hope that at least some boundaries will be crossed in the name of collaboration at MoMA now that this material has come to rest there. Merriment may follow (but don't hold your breath).

Jose Roca spoke about his thoughts on printmaking in general, making several interesting remarks about how the medium (which he claimed to find less interesting than art overall) was a tool with intrinsic qualities that made it especially useful in certain situations. Answering Carperton's earlier existential question, Roca provisionally defined printmaking as a process with three constituent elements: 1) a matrix that stores information to reproduce, 2) a transfer medium, and 3) a receiving surface. Such a definition no doubt strikes some as laughably broad, but I believe that it has value as a way of opening an investigation.

Richard Torchia's role in the proceedings appeared to be that of respondent, but perhaps things had run a little long, as his response was very brief. Rumor had it that Torchia was going to mix it up. But alas, his remarks, illustrated by a single image from the Graphic Unconscious show at Moore College, hinted at a frustration with the catholicism of Philagrafika's definition of the medium that quickly got swallowed by the Q& A that followed.

Which is too bad. The conversation seemed to want to be about the perils of medium-specificity (breathlessly ask yourself: does it lead to ghetto-ization? Does it water down a medium's real meanings to open it up so wide?) and the uncritically embraced merits of interdisciplinarity.

Can no one say a bad word about interdisciplinarity these days? Perhaps not, but leave it to Louis Menand to at least try to forcefully examine the problem. In his recent book, The Market Place of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, Menand writes in detail about the phenomenon of the interdisciplinarity. He's talking about higher education, btu might as well be talking about the arts (as the conference was wall-to-wall institutions and academics). One carelessly chosen snippet form Menand's book that would have been good to chew on at the panel goes like this:

In the humanities, where talk of interdisciplinarity is most common, these practices tend to reinforce the Balkanized structure of knowledge production that universities inherited from the nineteenth century. This is the structure that divides literature by nationality and the arts by medium. It is a retrograde way to teach the humanities, but it is hard to see how interdisciplinarity per se can more than mildly ameliorate it. Professors are still trained in one national literature or artistic medium or another. In an interdisciplinary encounter, they shout at each other form the mountain tops of their own disciplines.  For, as we have already seen, the key to professional transformation is not at the knowledge production. It is at the level of professional reproduction. Until professors are produced in a different way, the structure of academic knowledge production and dissemination is unlikely to change significantly.

Add to that the budgetary fights and administrative complexity of disciplinary entrenchment and any suggestion about interdisciplinarity runs the risk of becoming a kind of masquerade, a power grab in which stake holders appear to surrender territory to gain control of adjacent parties.

I hate to feel like there has to be an elephant in every room, but I kept marveling at how differently artists talk about these things from other constituencies. At the end of the day, audiences will be confused by interdisciplinarity, funders will struggle to come up with ways to support artists but will have to rely on disciplines as guidelines, and ideas that don't fit into clear departmental niches will fall between the cracks after a short period of time.

I often think about a remark that professed non-painter Ellen Harvey made to explain why she made paintings. Tell someone at a party you make art and they'll ask you what kind of paintings you do, she said. Put that in your interdisciplinary pipe and smoke it.

Eyewitness News: When Prints were Truth

In case you missed the panel we did at the Southern Graphics Council's Conference this week, I wanted to put up some links to the panelists' sites. They were great, and I hope you enjoy considering their relation to the problem of how images are meaningful as much as I did...

This is how we opened the conversation...

This is a conversation about authority.

About who has it and who believes them. It’s about how printmaking in its many forms plays a vital role in creating and maintaining authority, even as other seemingly more reliable technologies have emerged.

If there are any ‘artistic’ print makers in the room, I beg your patience, but encourage you to listen carefully to the panelists, as an individual’s interpretations and personal expressions are part of all the seemingly objective information we intend to discuss. Inevitably part. A good deal of what we’ll talk about may not be art in the strictest sense, but, like art, it concerns itself truth. One must remember that the eyewitness doesn’t only tell the story of the thing he’s witnessed, she describes how she experienced it.

First, we’ll hear from Professor Joshua Brown, who will describe the ways in which a news hungry public experienced the American Civil War prints formed the foundation for understanding images in 19th century illustrated newspapers. We’ve all heard that the Civil War was the first war fought on camera, but few realize just how hard it was to disseminate the images captured by pioneering photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, Matthew Brady, or Alexander Gardener, or how technological limitations inherent in photography made for static, ambiguous images. In the nearly 40 years between the appearance of illustrated weeklies like Franks Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly, wood engravings carried the news in pictures to a ravenous readership. Exploring visual narratives that are unlike photographs – such as history painting or theatre – Professor Brown finds the basis for print-imagery’s acceptance as ‘truthful.’

Photography, with its ironclad reputation for objectivity, is a kind of marginalia (a remarque) that affects and our understanding of the central printed image. Added to the artist’s technical arsenal long after printing methods had been perfected, photography often fell short of the kind of authenticity printmaking that printmaking easily achieved. Professor Michael Sappol will talk about how photo’s absence at the birth of medical illustration put in place certain expectations for that particular species of imagery. Medical illustration’s heritage is in drawing and printmaking, methods particularly well-suited to selective emphasize, the rendering of certain physical properties (like texture), and a balance between the general and the specific. But even when photo-technology caught up to the printmaker’s art, printmaking still had a role to play because of its authoritative connotations.

Daniel Heyman is a painter and printmaker from Philadelphia who has been capturing the images and testimonies of victims of torture from Abu Ghraib and other black sites through out that troubled region. Treading on ground that is more commonly worked by documentary filmmakers and photojournalists, Daniel Heyman employs a discourse identified with subjectivity – that of contemporary art – in pursuit of documentary truth. His works – which incorporate a myriad of printing techniques (most often etching) – slow down a process photography tends to accelerate. His work looks to emotional truths, those beneath appearances that can only be observed over time as a story unfolds, and not in the blink of an eye or the flip of a shudder.

Before we begin, I want to thank each of the panelists for participating in this wide-ranging look at a truth and authenticity, which are curiously shifting subjects, and thank you for your attention and questions. This panel is an opportunity for me as an artist and critic to pursue a question that has weighed heavily on my mind – what kind of information can we reasonably expect to learn from pictures.

A good week for criticism articles?

Is it that time of year? The time when people start reflecting on criticism?

I ask because it was interesting to see Glenn Kenny's ARTicles piece on criticism today on ArtsJournal.com, especially after the lame-o offering that washed up on the shore the other day. Part of what I like about this piece is that Kenny gets right to why criticism is the most exciting thing to read - because it's about seeing someone deeply engaged in an art form wrestle with a work and learning - through the text - how that mind works...whether you agree with it or not.

Kenny, in fact, makes a great show of disagreeing with certain critics while asserting respect for them, suggesting that what's interesting about criticism is not the judgment it renders, but the process of arriving at a judgment in the first place. Criticism that doesn't validate readers' (or artists') positions has never been a terribly welcome thing, but critics - like the rest of the universe - now and then have better things to do than go along on your ride.

As always, I welcome your thoughts, but would prefer they go here in the comments rather than on Facebook. Those people are close enough to owning everything in the universe already, so why give them your heartfelt respsonses?

An ex-critic discovers Rule Number One...too late.

Love music, hold the criticism - The Boston Globe
(Posted using ShareThis)

I have to admit I was kind of excited when I came across a link to Steve Almond's essay (link annoying formatted above...) but it was, in short, a loser. I keep looking for missing pieces to an essay I've been working for years called "Why I'm not a critic", and all I really learned from Almond was that he should never have been one.

Why not? Rule number of one criticism: it's not about you. It's not about the snarky put downs you come up with, or about how clever you are, or about what you can connect the stuff you're writing about to. Criticism is always best when it's about the work and the world it lives in. When Almond writes about realizing that people were (*gasp*) enjoying a concert he'd already written off, he reveals that he was never qualified for his job in the first place. Criticism, you see, is about love. To criticize, you must be deeply enthralled, infatuated, head over heals with the art form you write about...or else you haven't any reason to criticize it.

I say this after a day of giving crits at an art school in town, a day in which I asked no fewer than a half dozen times (in increasingly impolite terms), why am I expected to care about this? Too often we expect some inherent quality in the work to make it matter...or else rely on the charitable disposition of an audience to accept an expression as 'interesting' (the Siberian chill of criticism). In these cases, I felt more engaged in the artists' work than they were. A sad state. What Almond realized is that when an artist (yes, he's talking about MC Hammer, but you work with what you've got) actually freakin' cares about something, it starts to matter to other people. Criticism isn't the judgment of authority passed on art (or music, or literature, or food, or movies, or whatever) by timeless authority, it's the battleground on which competing visions of the world are articulated. And to play in that arena, it's got to matter to you.

So I am so glad I never actually saw Almond's criticism when I lived in Boston and read the papers there...I'm so glad I had the chance to read people like David Bonetti writing about art, and Lloyd Schwartz writing about classical music. Writers who disappeared into the act of describing and evaluating what they wrote about. Wait...none of them were at the Globe? Hmmm...go figure.

The Times "Texts without Contexts"

A few of us got really excited by the Michiko Kakutani's March 17 article on new media in the Times, Texts without Contexts. I know I put it on my Facebook page,  hopeful that it would be picked up be friends (really and virtual) and eagerly and thoughtfully debated (I forgot it was Facebook, sorry).

Kakutani did bring up a number of the ugly little issues that our cultural embrace of digital media tends to obscure. I'm a big fan of our remixed world, but I do worry about how creative people make a living in a world where nothing new really makes a dent. Look at how Kakutani glosses Kevin Kelly:

In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”

Yeah, that's scary. But it's not just a blossoming interest in the real (or the reality TV real) that's fueling the kind of huge cultural changes Kakutain discusses. You wouldn't know it from her article, though. The ascendancy of new media (like the web, e-books, and for user-gernerated content...as unifying or fragmenting as they may be)and the eclipse of fusty old-media (like paper and ink) is something that is only partly driven by consumer interest. But it's largely driven by cold, hard economics.

It is striking that Kakutani would go on for so long about the books she's describing without mentioning that their form. Nearly every book on digital culture she mentions is available in ebook form, and the ebook editions are 10% to 65% cheaper than old-fashioned books (ironically, all those most critical of digital culture are available in Kindle format). Now, when I read Kikutani's article, the Times got to advertise to me no fewer than seven different products and services, from Lexus automobiles to Alaskan cruises to lobbying information on ethanol. The Times knows damn well that circulation isn't as big a revenue source as advertising, and as its paper business dies, it builds the brand online....pushing old media into the grave to realize profits from new media.

Can we really ignore economics and other factors in this kind of analysis? On the one hand, it's cool to read the new Malcolm Gladwell book as your zipping back and forth across the country for your job on some plane, but how much cooler will it be when you can read it on your iPad? And are your really trying to make a statement about your disdain for books when you choose one form of media over another? And the $52,000 question - are you reading the same thing when you read it one form as opposed to another? It was hard to ignore, as I checked the prices of the books and ebooks mentioned in Kikutani's article, that the old fashioned editions were described as 'hard cover with deckle edges' in several cases, a swanky, old-fangled way to make a book...and one whose texture and materiality connects it to a tradition in reading, making it a member of a family of objects - books - that have certain associations about them (what are a Kindle's material cousins? the television?)

But it's not just the ability to get things at a lower price point that drives users to digital media; media outlets gather (and trade) information about you when you use their media, finding out how long you stay on a given site, to what you link or where you come from or go to...these kinds of data are invaluable to marketers who want to be more precise about getting your number (sorry, no cruises to Alaska in my future). Sometime the embrace of the web feels more like a shotgun wedding presided over by rapacious marketing firms.

There are a lot of gifts of our age, but not all of them are given to us out of a sense of generosity and kindness. The future will likely be neither a digital utopia nor a barren reality-show wasteland, but something in between. I will be reading books sometimes and screens sometimes, writing with a pen sometimes and typing at a keyboard other times.

Risky Business

First a word about language. People who think about these things tell us that all things meaningful have two properties – they are arbitrary and conventional. The word ‘cat’ doesn’t have to signify a cute little furry animal, but we (who use English) agree it does.

So if you take a word like risk and make it the center of a conversation among curators - as was the premise of today’s symposium Curating and Risk at Moore College – you risk finding little consensus on what it means.

This phenomenon tends to annoy some people, but empty signifiers can be valuable. From time to time, we need a big, empty word into which a lot of different thoughts can be poured.

Much of the day was spent trying to fill the word 'risk' with different possible significations. But first, it had be thoroughly emptied. The first conversation, between Ruby Lerner, Lana Lin, Lan Thoa Lam, and Richard Torchia took care of that. The conversation began by addressing the changing nature of risk. Lerner acknowledged that a fear of her organization, Creative Capital, was of taking inadequate risk. Lin and Lam, a collaborative team, took the question of time a little differently, talking about how a long-term project was risky in an art world where novelty is over great importance. Torchia, always thoughtful, acknowledged that everything is a risk…thus completing the emptying of the term. (Clearly some things are riskier than others…) But Torchia usefully turned the question of whether an exhibit or project was too risky around by suggesting that we imagine the world or Philadelphia without this particular show and ask what the effect of that would be. Such a question could be useful in determining the value of an enterprise, and determining whether it’s worth the risk.

Next, Aaron Levy, David Dempewolf and Radhika Subramaniam came up to talk about DIY spaces and their inherent risks with moderator Janet Kaplan. Among the many things that got said, two stood out. One was the repeated use of the word ‘community’ in a conversation about DIY spaces. But its use didn’t always seem fitting, especially when ‘community’ appeared to describe a group of people who get together to talk about books or look at each other’s art. A real community includes people who share your interests beyond your immediate circle of friends. The bank on the corner in my Chinatown neighborhood is part of my community even though I don’t know a soul who works there, because it serves and supports others in the neighborhood. Occasional (even frequent) beers do not a community make. The second point was related to this: the question of risk was most often connected to what is at stake. But for a moment in this conversation, the stakes extended beyond the charmed circle of artists and curators to a larger world when Subramaniam acknowledged that a controversial program might cause “someone in accounting” to lose his job. For one brief, frightening moment, risk was real. Then we broke for lunch.

After lunch, a third conversation between Homer Jackson, Nato Thompson, and Sheryl Conkelton (again moderated by Kaplan) looked at intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical risks. Here, the conversational format of the day’s proceedings most clearly backfired, as Jackson and Thompson are both charming presenters with great anecdotes to recount. Conkelton is a reflective, deliberate thinker who tried to steer the conversation into questions about logistical risks, and was put in the unenviable position of occasionally reminding the room that institutions (easily caricatured as big and bad) are comprise of individuals who make decisions that may be petty, selfish, or cowardly, but who are seldom evil.

At the end of the day, it was stunning how little discussion of reward was part of the topic of risk although the possibility of failure (even humiliation) was glancingly recognized. But one of the principle motivators for taking a risk (in economic terms) is the possibility of a reward. Occasional outbursts about liberal neo-capitalism may signal that my crassly market-based thinking would be wrongheaded in such a context, but I came away thinking (much as I felt when I arrived) that the risks of mounting exhibits are, on the whole, small. That’s not to say they aren’t real. In fact, their consequences can be great for people who aren’t directly involved (think of how many people in the arts – and arguably, in the audience for the arts – paid for the ‘risky’ machinations of cultural warriors on both ends of the political spectrum). But in an art world where risk appears to be its own reward, we may not have time to think about all that.

What's wrong with this picture?

This story appeared on Artsjournal.com today...and I felt a shudder down my spine. Imagine if early printers had release incompatible versions of their books for various platforms. "Gutenberg plans to introduce a separate version of the Holy Bible for three platforms, beginning with the scroll-reader in the next couple of weeks. Versions for accordion and codex bindings will follow..."

Are we witnessing the latest iteration of the VHS-Beta wars? Must these new technologies always involve the production of huge quantities of incompatible merchandise, destined for obsolescence? The market capitalist in me is whispering that competition like this makes better products, but it's easy to shout that little voice down when you think of how the big fish (Apple?) can calculate how to weather the storm and how enormous the sheer cost of conversion will be for losers.

As a guerrilla reader, I hope the NYT Book Review will continue to be available on paper...though the article doesn't say anywhere that they plan to offer it that way...

How things get made

I'll get to this in detail later, but a friend posted an interesting article on the future of publishing that contained this passage, which I couldn't let slip by:

The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer's work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.

I'm fairly convinced the same applies to working in the studio as an artist...btu that's not the point, and we'll get back to it soon. Honest.