Sunday, September 21, 2014
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Saturday, September 06, 2014
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Filming what cannot be seen...on seeing, watching, and reading...
For a long time, I have been interesting in how film communicates things that really aren't visual. The quintessential example is a mention in an essay, "Romans on Film", of how cinema depicts the act of thinking. Roland Barthes, wrote the piece in the early 1950s, notes that when Romans in movies have to think, they sweat. We still have a lot of these kind of signs in movies - to show someone has died, a trickle of blood will often drop from the corner of the mouth or ear, even if the injuries they sustain don't seem to indicate such a possibility...
So I was super excited to see this post from "Every Frame a Painting"..you can see text messages, but it's boring to read them. What the filmmaker is getting at is super interesting - how editors create new images that we can understand in movies...images that describe the passing of time, images that show people reading or writing. The question seems near the heart of my studio's big problem-what is the difference between seeing and reading? - only here the problem of watching is introduced. Watching allows for reading to take place. It is clearly of a different duration and focus than 'seeing'...what else?
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Saturday, August 02, 2014
Preparations for September's First Friday...
For First Friday in September, Carmina and I plan to explore experimental cinema...
The idea came to us when we visited the Leger exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art earlier this year (it was this year, right?). There were examples of Dadaist films contemporary to Leger, and we were curious. I've done a little research and now we're planning to project some of what we've found...
So I'll be posting a little play list here, and we'll no doubt have some surprises... Looking forward to September's First Friday...
Marcel Duchamp:
Hans Richter:
Harry Smith:
Joseph Cornell:
The idea came to us when we visited the Leger exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art earlier this year (it was this year, right?). There were examples of Dadaist films contemporary to Leger, and we were curious. I've done a little research and now we're planning to project some of what we've found...
So I'll be posting a little play list here, and we'll no doubt have some surprises... Looking forward to September's First Friday...
Marcel Duchamp:
Hans Richter:
Harry Smith:
Joseph Cornell:
Friday, August 01, 2014
Which craft?
A Huffington Post essay by F. Scott Hess on de-skilling has been making the rounds.
I won't spend a lot of time on this - it's irritating to read an artist writing about the systemic problems with the art world that make his obvious brilliance invisible to everyone else on the planet. However I am interested in a couple of claims about education Hess makes and feel the need to address them.
After pointing toward a 'prejudice' in academe that privileges "Postmodern hybridity, identity politics, or pure theory", Hess writes:
Arguably, there would be no innovation, either. More on that in a minute, too.
Hess' article was re-posted by a few friends who identify with the crafts world, and its to that audience that he makes his strongest appeal. His ego still bruised from an incident in college (in the 70s...please... isn't getting over insults a part of growing up? If not, dealing with criticism is certainly part of becoming an artist...) Hess rails against 'conceptual' art (which he apparently confuses with the presence of concepts in art...more on that later) by collecting anecdotes from artists who have been criticized for their aesthetic conservatism or their interest in displaying skill in their work.
And yeah, I'm not going to pretend that I have never seen crits in which a student's representational work (...or exhibits in which a practicing artist's work) was greeted with yawns. But nine times out of ten those yawns came because the work was boring, not because it was figurative (believe it or not, there is dull performance, dull video art, all kinds of dull art...it's not just figurative painters who are singled out). Artists of all kinds tend to forget that the display of skill is often very dull for audiences. Couple it with the preachy allegory of Hess' paintings or the mawkish moodiness of the work he favors in his article, and you've got a dreadful cocktail of narcissism and self pity.
Like most conspiracy theories, Hess' claim that skill is out of favor sounds like an explanation for all that's wrong with the world until you look at some evidence. There are a huge number of teaching artists (working both representationally and non-representationally) for whom the conspicuous use of craft is an issue. (Locally, I'm looking at you, artist/teachers Judith Schaechter, Kurt Kauper, Susan Moore, Mark Shetabi; on a national stage, you could start with painters Kehinde Wiley, Walton Ford, sculptor Judy Fox, and go on and on and on...)
His claim that schools are brainwashing students or withholding vital information about craft is also hollow. Hess describes his tortured studies at 'a small midwestern liberal arts college in Wisconsin' (one assumes he's trying not to invoke the anger of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from which he graduated in 1977) where the faculty failed to cater to his every whim, preferring, one assumes, to teach the curriculum they had devised...or at least to teach what they knew or believed to be important.
What Mr. Hess seems to have forgotten that to be young is to be misunderstood - terribly, savagely, horribly misunderstood. To be a young artist is to magnify that condition fifty-fold. If you're not doing something that people ten, twenty, thirty years older than you can't understand, then you're doing it wrong. Nor does he seem to appreciate that schools are not like fast food restaurants. A McDonald's hamburger in Moscow tastes exactly like one in Times Square, but a drawing class at Yale is very different from one at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Students shouldn't expect fast food hamburgers from their schools, and they should look pretty closely at the menu before they commit to attending them.
Such diversity troubles some people...especially those who hold that there are 'timeless principles' to art that must be understood. Such people tend to annoy the living daylights out of me because what is 'good' in art is what comes closest to those abstract, Platonic principles, never the messy, contingent things - the ones that tremble on the edge of falling apart in some way - that interest me. Does anyone else find it remotely troubling that all of the images that illustrate Hess' essay correspond neatly to western aesthetic fashions of the 18th and 19th centuries?
But back to clumsy surgeons and creative lawyers. Skill perfected and repeated has its place, but it's often in working beyond skill, working skillfully with unforgiving materials, or working with ideas to which the skills are not so perfectly matched that creates art in our time. (Of course one can make anything one wants in our pluralist era, but one shouldn't expect that it will be talked about...but that's another post.) It is out of these struggles that new images and ideas are born.
Once upon a time (when I happened to be an art student at the very figurative Boston University School of Fine Arts) I worked in an intensive care unit where we took care of patients who'd just had heart transplants and other cardiac procedures. (An aside: medical students - especially sleep deprived ones - are clumsy without having to be trained to be.) In our unit, physicians performed operations on some risky candidates. Some who'd had multiple previous surgeries; others whose multiple complicating factors like age and obesity made them questionable candidates. Our hospital experimented with a ventricular assist device so horrific that one doctor compared it to parking a 'lawn mower on a patient's chest'.
By working at the very edge of their skills and technologies, by working with patients that others wouldn't work with, by transcending the display of skill and testing themselves on difficult problems with real consequences, these physicians, nurses, and patients taught me what it means to make art. There were mistakes and there were failures, but we learned from them. Hess wants us to think of artists and doctors in the same frame of mind...but I am here to tell you that it wasn't enough for the doctor to be a brilliant surgeon. You needed a smart, dedicated, and tireless nursing staff. (Maybe that nurse is the curator, or the critic...essential parts of the art world who never get mentioned in Hess's essay.) And - this is the kicker - you need a patient who is going to take his meds, do her exercises, and not assume that getting cut open is his only job. (If you're following this, the patient is the audience who is as much part of the art work as the artist).
So perhaps the last word on Hess' lament really belongs to Roland Barthes, whose writing Mr. Hess no doubt despises because he's a staple of those horrible theory classes we insist on cramming down the throats of young artists. One of Barthes' contributions to the late 20th century was the idea that readers mattered as much as (if not more than) writers. As readers, we have the authority to challenge the implicit assumptions of artworks, to question what they represent and how they represent it. We have the responsibility to ask whose interests are being served by the publication or display of some works and, if we're interested in social justice or equality in the real world as opposed to the images of these ideas that have been handed down to us, to create new visions of these virtues. It's a world where literature or art or music are not automatically important because they are connected to traditions or because artists say they're important. It's a world in which paintings, stories and songs achieve significance because people use them. "The birth of the reader," Barthes writes, "must be ransomed by the death of the author."
And the birth of the viewer comes when we stop letting our artists tell us what to think.
I won't spend a lot of time on this - it's irritating to read an artist writing about the systemic problems with the art world that make his obvious brilliance invisible to everyone else on the planet. However I am interested in a couple of claims about education Hess makes and feel the need to address them.
After pointing toward a 'prejudice' in academe that privileges "Postmodern hybridity, identity politics, or pure theory", Hess writes:
The idea that you might train a surgeon to be clumsy, or an engineer to build poorly, or a lawyer to ignore law, would be patently absurd. In the arts, however, you will find an occasional musician who purposely plays badly, or a writer who ignores grammar, but only in the visual arts is training in the traditional skills of the profession systematically and often institutionally denigrated.Can we impose a ban on comparing entirely different things...like the education of artists and physicians or attorneys? Aside from its obvious foolishness (do you really train anyone to be clumsy? isn't the point of training to remove clumsiness?) Hess' analogy obscures the fact that some surgeons are clumsy, and some lawyers do flagrantly ignore (what other people to believe to be a correct interpretation of) the law. Without these incidents, there would be no malpractices suits or legal debates.
Arguably, there would be no innovation, either. More on that in a minute, too.
Hess' article was re-posted by a few friends who identify with the crafts world, and its to that audience that he makes his strongest appeal. His ego still bruised from an incident in college (in the 70s...please... isn't getting over insults a part of growing up? If not, dealing with criticism is certainly part of becoming an artist...) Hess rails against 'conceptual' art (which he apparently confuses with the presence of concepts in art...more on that later) by collecting anecdotes from artists who have been criticized for their aesthetic conservatism or their interest in displaying skill in their work.
And yeah, I'm not going to pretend that I have never seen crits in which a student's representational work (...or exhibits in which a practicing artist's work) was greeted with yawns. But nine times out of ten those yawns came because the work was boring, not because it was figurative (believe it or not, there is dull performance, dull video art, all kinds of dull art...it's not just figurative painters who are singled out). Artists of all kinds tend to forget that the display of skill is often very dull for audiences. Couple it with the preachy allegory of Hess' paintings or the mawkish moodiness of the work he favors in his article, and you've got a dreadful cocktail of narcissism and self pity.
Like most conspiracy theories, Hess' claim that skill is out of favor sounds like an explanation for all that's wrong with the world until you look at some evidence. There are a huge number of teaching artists (working both representationally and non-representationally) for whom the conspicuous use of craft is an issue. (Locally, I'm looking at you, artist/teachers Judith Schaechter, Kurt Kauper, Susan Moore, Mark Shetabi; on a national stage, you could start with painters Kehinde Wiley, Walton Ford, sculptor Judy Fox, and go on and on and on...)
His claim that schools are brainwashing students or withholding vital information about craft is also hollow. Hess describes his tortured studies at 'a small midwestern liberal arts college in Wisconsin' (one assumes he's trying not to invoke the anger of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from which he graduated in 1977) where the faculty failed to cater to his every whim, preferring, one assumes, to teach the curriculum they had devised...or at least to teach what they knew or believed to be important.
What Mr. Hess seems to have forgotten that to be young is to be misunderstood - terribly, savagely, horribly misunderstood. To be a young artist is to magnify that condition fifty-fold. If you're not doing something that people ten, twenty, thirty years older than you can't understand, then you're doing it wrong. Nor does he seem to appreciate that schools are not like fast food restaurants. A McDonald's hamburger in Moscow tastes exactly like one in Times Square, but a drawing class at Yale is very different from one at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Students shouldn't expect fast food hamburgers from their schools, and they should look pretty closely at the menu before they commit to attending them.
Such diversity troubles some people...especially those who hold that there are 'timeless principles' to art that must be understood. Such people tend to annoy the living daylights out of me because what is 'good' in art is what comes closest to those abstract, Platonic principles, never the messy, contingent things - the ones that tremble on the edge of falling apart in some way - that interest me. Does anyone else find it remotely troubling that all of the images that illustrate Hess' essay correspond neatly to western aesthetic fashions of the 18th and 19th centuries?
But back to clumsy surgeons and creative lawyers. Skill perfected and repeated has its place, but it's often in working beyond skill, working skillfully with unforgiving materials, or working with ideas to which the skills are not so perfectly matched that creates art in our time. (Of course one can make anything one wants in our pluralist era, but one shouldn't expect that it will be talked about...but that's another post.) It is out of these struggles that new images and ideas are born.
Once upon a time (when I happened to be an art student at the very figurative Boston University School of Fine Arts) I worked in an intensive care unit where we took care of patients who'd just had heart transplants and other cardiac procedures. (An aside: medical students - especially sleep deprived ones - are clumsy without having to be trained to be.) In our unit, physicians performed operations on some risky candidates. Some who'd had multiple previous surgeries; others whose multiple complicating factors like age and obesity made them questionable candidates. Our hospital experimented with a ventricular assist device so horrific that one doctor compared it to parking a 'lawn mower on a patient's chest'.
By working at the very edge of their skills and technologies, by working with patients that others wouldn't work with, by transcending the display of skill and testing themselves on difficult problems with real consequences, these physicians, nurses, and patients taught me what it means to make art. There were mistakes and there were failures, but we learned from them. Hess wants us to think of artists and doctors in the same frame of mind...but I am here to tell you that it wasn't enough for the doctor to be a brilliant surgeon. You needed a smart, dedicated, and tireless nursing staff. (Maybe that nurse is the curator, or the critic...essential parts of the art world who never get mentioned in Hess's essay.) And - this is the kicker - you need a patient who is going to take his meds, do her exercises, and not assume that getting cut open is his only job. (If you're following this, the patient is the audience who is as much part of the art work as the artist).
So perhaps the last word on Hess' lament really belongs to Roland Barthes, whose writing Mr. Hess no doubt despises because he's a staple of those horrible theory classes we insist on cramming down the throats of young artists. One of Barthes' contributions to the late 20th century was the idea that readers mattered as much as (if not more than) writers. As readers, we have the authority to challenge the implicit assumptions of artworks, to question what they represent and how they represent it. We have the responsibility to ask whose interests are being served by the publication or display of some works and, if we're interested in social justice or equality in the real world as opposed to the images of these ideas that have been handed down to us, to create new visions of these virtues. It's a world where literature or art or music are not automatically important because they are connected to traditions or because artists say they're important. It's a world in which paintings, stories and songs achieve significance because people use them. "The birth of the reader," Barthes writes, "must be ransomed by the death of the author."
And the birth of the viewer comes when we stop letting our artists tell us what to think.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
The (After)Life of Pi
Just watched "Life of Pi" and - of course - I had heard about the bankruptcy of the SFX firm that did so much of the work that made the film enchanting. Carmina came across this short documentary about the collapse of Rhythm & Hues, and it's a sobering reminder of how artists will work themselves ragged to make the best product and will do anything to realize a vision...even as those who work with them (possibly ignorantly, possibly maliciously) exploit those traits.
The parallels between contract-workers in the SFX industry and adjunct faculty in higher education are hard to ignore.
The film is a sobering reminder of the economic forces that surround the 'creative economy' and a challenge to transform creative work into sustainable careers.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron
I cannot say this was a page-turner. Many books were able to leapfrog over it when I would curl up for bedtime reading...why? Baron has chosen a fascinating subject - the transformations wrought by changing writing and reading technologies - but his book suffers from an unusual condition: too much reasonable thinking. When the conclusion of your book includes the sentence, "The effects of the technologies [forcing changes in how we write, read and circulate text] have typically been positive, with some negatives inevitably mixed in - the plusses and minuses owing as much to the vagaries of human nature as to the advantages or disadvantages of the technology itself", you're being a little wishy-washy.
While the book includes flashes of imagination (a good section of Ted Kaczynski as author, an imaginative and inclusive overview of writing technologies form clay tablets to forgotten early word processing programs, a thoughtful meditation on global citizenship in the information age), Baron seems to have written a book that would be better discussed over dinner than actually published. His informal, conversational tone contribute to this impression.
All of this perhaps says more about my expectations than about Baron's book - an effort to consider the ways we are being manipulated by our own communication is a valuable opportunity for reflection. I wish I'd gotten a little more to reflect on here.
Monday, June 23, 2014
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Back up your Kindle...
I loved this project by Jesse England (described on Hyperallergic and tweeted by Kenneth Goldsmith) that involves copying an eBook and binding it. Those who remember the story about copies of Orwell's 1984 getting removed from readers' devices (can you make this shit up?) will take special pleasure in this work...
New print in progress...
I am very psyched to be going back to the Borowsky Center at the University of the Arts later this summer to make another offset litho with Amanda D'Amico. Last time, I felt like I was learning as we went...and I made a million mistakes. This time, I hope to be a little more organized. Here is the image I am working on for this year's print...
Last year, I was making layers on the fly. This year, I plan to have everything ready to roll as soon as I walk in. That means setting up the image...I realized how much I get out of having something lay around for a few days, so I got this done. Expect some changes (I can tell I am going to be adjusting contrast, for example...)
I'll post updates as the print unfolds...
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Secrets revealed....
I'm especially interested in the segment of this where you see them setting up the shot - you can see they have projected the guides on the wall so they can place the post-its correctly...
Monday, June 16, 2014
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Monday, June 09, 2014
Sunday, June 08, 2014
Another scrapbook clipping
I've been keeping an article ("What's the most common mistake artists make?" by Corbett Barklie) open in the innumerable tabs of my browser for a few weeks...and before I lose it I want to pin it here.
Barklie suggests that the most common mistake artists make is that they, "frequently forget to acknowledge the people who help them"... and I have to agree. A bizarrely large number of my professional colleagues conduct themselves as if they expect the world to stop for them and their work. This attitude is one that students pick up on and adopt as part of their professional mannerisms...to horrible effect.
'Help' here needs to be broadly defined, too. It's not just the galleries that hang your work or the critics who notice it,; not just the community of friends that comes out to see it or the foundations that may support it. It's the people who make your life as an artist possible on a day-to-day basis.
For me, that's my family. Especially my wife, Carmina, who gives me wide latitude to follow my work in the studio as a writer and as a teacher. It's also my two sons, who endure openings and afternoons in the studio and patiently tote sketchbooks through the museum when they would rather be home watching TV or at the playground with a foursquare ball.
I'm also grateful for my job, where I am expected to do my work and from which I have been the fortunate recipient of a great deal of support and protected experimentation. I have the great privilege of sharing ideas with students, and of working with a number of talented and creative people whoa re generous enough to share their ideas with me.
The list goes on and there are too many people to name in this post, but I want share Barklie's article with other artists who see that they are part of overlapping worlds, not only citizens of some remote world world or (heaven forbid) 'creative community'...Artlandia or something. In fact, if you're reading this, I should be thanking you...
So, thank you.
Barklie suggests that the most common mistake artists make is that they, "frequently forget to acknowledge the people who help them"... and I have to agree. A bizarrely large number of my professional colleagues conduct themselves as if they expect the world to stop for them and their work. This attitude is one that students pick up on and adopt as part of their professional mannerisms...to horrible effect.
'Help' here needs to be broadly defined, too. It's not just the galleries that hang your work or the critics who notice it,; not just the community of friends that comes out to see it or the foundations that may support it. It's the people who make your life as an artist possible on a day-to-day basis.
For me, that's my family. Especially my wife, Carmina, who gives me wide latitude to follow my work in the studio as a writer and as a teacher. It's also my two sons, who endure openings and afternoons in the studio and patiently tote sketchbooks through the museum when they would rather be home watching TV or at the playground with a foursquare ball.
I'm also grateful for my job, where I am expected to do my work and from which I have been the fortunate recipient of a great deal of support and protected experimentation. I have the great privilege of sharing ideas with students, and of working with a number of talented and creative people whoa re generous enough to share their ideas with me.
The list goes on and there are too many people to name in this post, but I want share Barklie's article with other artists who see that they are part of overlapping worlds, not only citizens of some remote world world or (heaven forbid) 'creative community'...Artlandia or something. In fact, if you're reading this, I should be thanking you...
So, thank you.
Monday, June 02, 2014
Drawing...you gotta have it
While I'm putting up things I don't want to forget (and about which I would welcome conversation...) I wanted to post this piece by Anita Taylor from the Guardian online ('Why drawing needs to be a curriculum essential').
Taylor writes:
To me, a conversation about drawing as visualization and invention is long-overdue. What do you think we need to talk about when we talk about drawing?
Taylor writes:
Drawing remains a central and pivotal activity to the work of many artists and designers – a touchstone and tool of creative exploration that informs visual discovery. It fundamentally enables the visualisation and development of perceptions and ideas. With a history as long and intensive as the history of our culture, the act of drawing remains a fundamental means to translate, document, record and analyse the worlds we inhabit. The role of drawing in education remains critical, and not just to the creative disciplines in art and design for which it is foundational....and she doesn't do such a great job of supporting that claim, falling into the common trap of being very specific about the art and design applications of drawing while being too general about the rest of the world's uses of it:
Alongside a need for drawing skills for those entering employment identified by a range of industries in the creative sectors – animation, architecture, design, fashion, film, theatre, performance and the communication industries – drawing is also widely used within a range of other professions as a means to develop, document, explore, explain, interrogate and plan. This includes the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine and sport.I am trying to get a conversation that I hope will lead to a major overhaul of the drawing courses in Tyler's Foundation program underway soon. How can we make classes that fulfill the needs to 'develop, document, explore, explain, interrogate and plan' and what - exactly - are those out in the world these days?
To me, a conversation about drawing as visualization and invention is long-overdue. What do you think we need to talk about when we talk about drawing?
"Enoughness"
I tend to keep a lot of tabs open on my browser - lots of unread articles that I plan to finish, lots of ideas that catch my attention. Too often those get lost when the thing crashes, or maybe they get chucked in the Facebook stream and never thought of again. By keeping them open, I am trying to keep mulling them over. They belong here. I'll try to be better about posting.
Abigail Satinsky's April 3, 2014, essay on Art Practical (Appropriate Technologies) is one of those things...while I don't share Satinsky's enthusiasm for subscription-based marketing, I was taken by an idea she addresses early in the piece:
In a funny way, it also reminded me of seeing Gerry Lenfest speak at Temple University a few weeks ago, and hearing him mention how the sale of his cable company gave him "enough" money to be philanthropic.
Abigail Satinsky's April 3, 2014, essay on Art Practical (Appropriate Technologies) is one of those things...while I don't share Satinsky's enthusiasm for subscription-based marketing, I was taken by an idea she addresses early in the piece:
appropriate technologies [is] a term coined by the Buddhist economist E.F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, first published in 1973. Schumacher calls for economic solutions to globalization that are founded on principles of self-empowerment, self-reliance and decentralization, and local control. He advocates for decentralized working methods, or “smallness within bigness,” in which interrelated but autonomous units work together toward a greater goal. Furthermore, he presents the philosophy of “enoughness,” a Buddhist approach to economics that advocates for self-sufficiency: producing from local resources for local needs at a modest scale, appropriate for a balanced life.What attracts me to this is the notion of 'enoughness' - an idea almost completely foreign to contemporary American thought. Perhaps inspired by James Elkins' musings on the 'average, normal, mediocre artist', I've been reflecting on what a realistic life in the arts looks like and why it seems not to be enough for so many people who insist that the market is 'too small' or too 'artist-centered.'
In a funny way, it also reminded me of seeing Gerry Lenfest speak at Temple University a few weeks ago, and hearing him mention how the sale of his cable company gave him "enough" money to be philanthropic.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Portfolio of work relevant to Hacktory A.I.R. Application
I work primarily in painting, critical writing, and as an independent exhibit organizer. What unites these different forms of creative research is an interest in the use and function of written language. I have a long involvement in the use of encryption and steganography in my work, and have explored a number of script systems that allow me to conceal messages in images. As a resident artist at the Hacktory, I would like to explore the uses of programming languages and syntax and add these to my 'vocabulary'.
Below is a portfolio of five works that employ codes in various forms. The indicate the rigor of my work, and suggest the thoroughness with which I would apply myself to the opportunity. However, I am not interested in using this opportunity to display language, I am interested in use it to explore the possibilities of employing it to shape a work I have not yet conceived. In this, I am very interested in the language operations of experimental writers from the Oulipo and in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith.
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| Impossible Book: Principles of American Military Financial Planning (with Mary Beth Brown), 2014, commercially printed counterfeit credit card, edition of 250, 2 1/8 x 3 3/8. This impossible text book deals with the way the United States Congress paid for wars from the 18th- to the 20th-century. Hidden in the sixteen-digit account number are the dates of four major wars; the four-digit security code (1964) marks the year Congress gave the President a 'blank check' to conduct the war in Vietnam. |
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| Impossible Textbook: Four paradigms of Cold War Power (with Mary Beth Brown), 2014, 3D printed ABS plastic, wood, and paper. 6 x 6 x 6 in. This piece is an attempt to produce a low-cost text book that would be useful in a freshmen American history course. The text is printed on eight pyramids that a reader could print from a 3D printer. The book is 'read' like puzzle, by arranging the forms in a laser-cut wooded frame until they describe four metaphors of US-Soviet relations from 1945-1987. |
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| You will forget all the sounds and images, 2013-14, acrylic on canvas. 48 x 48 in. This painting utilizes a tumbling block pattern and maritime signal flags, unlike much of my work, I composed the encoded text in this image in response to the constraint of having three faces of the cube available. |
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| Blessed are all metrical rules (After Auden), 2012, gouache on paper 22 x 30 in. This image, like a great deal of my work, employs stolen language - in this case a passage by the poet W.H. Auden that praises the use of compositional constraints. The code is challenging to read in part because only one color 'channel' is rendered. |
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| The Recognitions (Umberto Eco), 2009, gouache on paper, 30 x 22 in. This is one drawing from a large series of stolen self-portraits. As I come across words and ideas I closely identify with in my reading, I add them to The Recognitions. In this image, a passage from an essay by Eco describing the way ancient Egyptian scribes employed hieroglyphics to send secret messages alongside ordinary message is encoded in Braille dots - each pixel of the digital photo is replaced by a part of a Braille character. |
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Found passages
So, I've been reading Marcus du Sautoy's book on Symmetry and I was some what weirded out by this passage:
As I was reading du Sautoy, Jun 'ichiro Tanizaki was playing in my mind...
Is language really that important to you, dear reader? Or is there some meaning at the core all this that somehow transcends mere words? I would love to hear from you...
Some French mathematicians believe that the quality of their mathematics is a product of the French language in which it was written. [...] Bruno Poizat is particularly proud of the French language and never bows to pressures from journals to write in in English, the universally accepted language of science. One of his most important contributions is a seminal book on mathematical logic and its interactions with the theory of groups. His insistence on publishing in French meant that no publisher would touch it. SO he went ahead and financed the publication of the book himself under his own publishing name: Nur al-Mantiq wal Ma'rifah, Aribic for 'Light and Logic of Knowledge', Because he had complete editorial control the book is rather idiosyncratic. Every chapter starts with a pornographic picture. Poizat explains in the introduction that these pictures are there to soothe the brain before the difficult mathematics that follows.
[...] the last chapter has a picture of the author in a dressing gown, leering out of an armchair at the reader. but the mathematics is so good the book could not be ignored. In Poizat's view, the material is particularly suited to the language in which it is written:
Scientific French, what a beautiful language!...I have no French nationalist feelings, nor a nostalgia for the time when French had a more dominant position...I believe the plurality of languages is use for communication of science has a value per se.
At a conference I attended in Russia, Poizat insisted on speaking in French with simultaneous translation into Russian, and was obviously delighted to leave the English-only members of the audience in the dark:
Well intentioned people have told me that it is quite rude to address a person he or she cannot understand. If this were true, the community of mathematicians would rate highly in the scale of rudeness considering the number of times its members have spoken to me in English. (174-175)Is this strange? Or is it not so unusual that people might think that English is re-wiring their brains?
As I was reading du Sautoy, Jun 'ichiro Tanizaki was playing in my mind...
To take a trivial example near at hand: I write a magazine article recently comparing the writing brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented by the ancient Chinese or Japanese it would surely have had a tufted end like out writing brush. The ink would not have been this bluish color but rather black, something like India ink, and it would have been made to seep down the handle into the brush. And since we would have found it inconvenient to write on Western paper, something near Japanese paper - even under mass production, if you will - would have been much in demand [...] But more than that: our thought and our literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed forward into new regions quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of writing equipment {...} has a vast, has a vast, almost boundless influence on our culture.Tanizaki goes on to wonder how math and science would be different if they were unshackled from English and rendered in Japanese.
Is language really that important to you, dear reader? Or is there some meaning at the core all this that somehow transcends mere words? I would love to hear from you...
This is sad...
Very sad news of the death of critic Ed Sozanski...Use code code D37Q to read the story... http://t.co/UjMrJKlevx
— gerardbrown (@gerardfbrown) April 17, 2014
Saturday, March 29, 2014
On Professionalism: Artists in their natural habitats
The conference at which I was going to present some of my research on professionalism in the arts has been postponed, so I stopped posting little teasers about it. But here's one more to think about until it gets rescheduled...
In in 1923 book The Art Spirit, influential teacher and painter Robert Henri discusses the conventions of the artist's studio. According to historian Sarah Burns, the studio of the late 19th century had become an important front in the creation of a professional identity for the American artist. Particularly thought the work of artists William Merritt Chase (whose studio was a frequent subject of his art, see below) the studio communicated a kind of worldliness to visiting collectors who were charmed by the artist's taste in furniture, textiles, and other miscellanea. American artists of Chase's generation (and audiences, as the Godey's Magazine image above suggests) saw the studio as a stage on which artist identity was performed, and a large part of that identity was the demonstration of sophistication and sensitivity.
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| William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916). Studio Interior, ca. 1882. Oil on canvas, 28 1/16 x 40 1/8 in. |
A barber has an apparatus that is surprising, and all in such remarkable order. [...] An artist proposes to make a work of art, and while his work requires infinite skill, he is generally far behind the barber in the arrangement of the most ordinary necessities. Why should this be so? Why would a studio be a boudoir, a dream of oriental splendor to have tea in, a junk shop, a dirty place, and rarely a good convenient workshop for the kind of thought and the kind of work the making of a good picture demands? [itals. mine]In opposition to a powerful visual metaphor for creativity, Henri tries to re-position the artist's studio as a kind of workshop, moving it away from the implicitly feminine 'boudoir' of an earlier generation. Connecting the studio with a rather humble job, Henri draws a circle around the creative act, limiting to certain tasks (after the completion of which, one can exercise thrift by cleaning up and saving unused material, he later writes, rather than wasting it by allowing it to become a 'crust of dirty, dust collecting dried up paint'). He doesn't reject the idea that the studio is a manifestation of the artist's identity; but he clearly seeks to shift it to a more masculine and industrial statement - one reflective of the climate of professionalism in which he lived.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
David Stephens in Translation
This is a talk I gave today at the Center for Art in Wood in Old City Philadelphia. I am grateful to artist, writer, and curator Robin Rice for the invitation and for the chance to talk about an artist I greatly admire.
I'm posting my speaking notes, and if time permits, I'll go through and add more images and hyperlinks to connect the somewhat loosely structured essay to other ideas. ~gerard
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| David Stephen, Cenotaph T.O.B.B. (Tower of Brothers' Blood), 2009-2012, painted wood, 108 x 144 x 72 in. |
David Stephens in
Translation
Gerard Brown
Presented at “David Stephens: A Colloquy”
Center for Art in Wood, Philadelphia PA
Robin Rice, Chairperson
March 22, 2014
I’ve been invited to talk about
David Stephens’ sculpture in relation to translation. In preparation for
writing about his work in the gallery guide for this exhibit, I went to David
Stephens’ studio in late December and asked him how one could utterly
misunderstand his work. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that one could ignore the
fact that it is to be read.
I began to
entertain the idea that the list of materials in his work should possibly be
more elaborate than it is. The guide describes the sculpture and installations
in the show as being made of ‘painted wood’ and I suggest that they should
possibly be described as being made of painted wood and language.
Stephens’s work is
covered in thick coats of language. For me, this calls to mind historian Steven
Roger Fisher’s descriptions of the ancient world as covered in writing that
declared the power and wealth of its ruling class to an almost illiterate public.
Rogers challenges the myth of a ‘literate’ ancient world (67), pointing out
that in a typical Greek household, the only person who could read was likely to
be a slave who read to her master or mistress (55). This description of a world
filled with language that could not be read (unless, ironically, by those who
lacked freedom) echoes the experience of being in the gallery with Stephens’
work. The fact that David Stephens uses language in such a way that its meaning
is not transparent appears to call for some sort of translation. Or does it?
In
her book on translation, Susan Bassnet describes three forms of translation –
interlingual (the most common form – one which carries a text from one language
to another), intralingual (one that
translated within a given language, such as the translations of literature from
one period or region into the idioms of another), and intersemiotic translation (in which the work is translated across
signifying systems, such as between literature and visual art) (14).
It
would appear that Stephens, whose Braille writing stands for words in English,
would be engaged in intralingual
translation. This act is sometimes called re-Englishing and happens all the
time in varying degrees of inventiveness. Romeo and Juliette was updated
and transported to mid-20th century New York by Arthur Laurents as
West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins
might be seen as intersemiotic translators who helped move the drama into music
and dance) and the Star Wars screen plays are being backdated and
transported to Victorian England by Ian Doescher.
Anyone who spends
time on translation will be happy to talk about the problems that occur when a
text is moved through time or across language borders, and most of those
problems involve the use of idioms. Idioms give us a chance to see how strange
something is and how far it needs to travel between languages. To keep things
simple, we’ll start with an example that’s interlingual (between two languages).
Every semester in high school classrooms across America, the French greeting ça va is translated in to the English
salutation hello, despite the fact
that it more literally means “it goes” (or when inflected in speech, “[how
does] it go?”). Students are taught to respond, Ça va bien merci (or, literally, “It goes well, thank you”) and all
of this maps pretty well on to the English exchange How’s it going? It’s going well, thank you. The world spins madly
on and no one really cares that these acts of interpretation (which is
different from translation in that its material is spoken, not written
language) are all being played with approximations.
The trick is when
we get to translation, which deals with written
language. You are reading a French text and one character says to another, Ça va. But the characters are not social
equals, the greeting is being spoken by an employee to her supervisor. How’s it going? and its cognates, like how goes it? seem too informal, so you
choose to translate the greeting as hello
or even good morning to keep from
making the reader feel like the French idiom has somehow changed the interaction
of characters and to meet the needs of readers for whom you’re translating.
We
need to concentrate on the act David Stephens’ writing. Occurring in English,
the only thing that prevents its immediate legibility is the script in which it
is written – Braille. Idiom has nothing to do with it. If you walk over to one
of the sculptures and start reading, you find what he wrote – lists of names,
texts with scriptural allusions. Braille is a specific form of writing,
originally developed 1824 and refined over time for greater ease of use and to
fulfill specific functions (there is a specific system of Braille writing for
the representation of mathematic symbols and equations, for example). One can
write in Braille by means of a stylus and slate, and machines for typing and
printing publications have been developed over the nearly two centuries that it
has been in use (“Braille”). Since the passage of the Americans with
Disabilities Act in 1990, Braille has become a common part of the visual
landscape in this country.
While
Braille is an important means of providing access to written text to those who
cannot see it, its use has declined precipitously in recent years (Aziz). Its
status as writing is not itself universally accepted. Author Charles Mann describes
Braille as a representation of
writing (“a translation of writing on paper”) rather than a form of writing (1651). Nor is Braille,
though it is capable of encoding other languages, a foreign language in and of
itself. In this context, it’s best understood as a script developed to meet the
needs of a community of English speaking readers and writers.
What
does it mean to regard a text that’s in your own language as foreign enough to imply the need for
translation? Doesn’t such a behavior indicate a kind of other-ing of the blind?
Braille-dependent reader Georgina Klege writes of her experiences reading in
public:
If my braille
reading prompts comment it is evidence that the blind, like other disabled
people are still invisible in mainstream American life. Our habits and
paraphernalia remain unfamiliar and exotic. Blind people continue to be
excluded from the educational and employment opportunities which would give them
access to the sort of academic and literary venues where they would need to read
in public.
There are a few dangers here. One
is that Braille might be ‘unfamiliar and exotic’ to sighted audiences (despite
its aforementioned presence in the visual landscape) and that its strangeness
might invite careless metaphors. Klege spends a good deal of her time
discussing Ann Hamilton’s well-intentioned installation in the 1999 Venice
Biennale and how, by using Braille for symbolic purposes, Hamilton (perhaps
unwittingly) equated blindness with ignorance (215).
In the context of
this exhibition, the clear and present danger of seeing Braille as a form of
language that requires translation is its equation of people in our own culture
with foreign ‘Others’ and the concurrent failing to recognize a common language
we share. The ‘unfamiliar and exotic’ code distracts through its surface
representation. What is at issue in Stephens’ work is not translation, but encryption. There is an old stand-by claim about
translation that if you give a poem to ten translators you’ll get ten different
poems back. If you walk over to David’s work and read it, you get back exactly
what he wrote. Encryption relies on the ability to pass information clearly –
if in a code - between parties while introducing as little room for (mis)interpretation
as possible.
David
concern that viewers might not recognize
the writing in his work was actually a strategy of the ancient Greeks who
sought to transmit secret messages through hostile territory by concealing them
under layers of wax on wooden tablets. When the messenger was stopped there
might be an innocuous message on the wax tablet that would be melted off when
it reached its intended audience. This practice is called steganography, or ‘hidden writing’ (Singh, 5).
By
moving between back and forth between literature to sculpture, David Stephens may
engage in an act of intersemiotic
translation, coloring the meaning of his texts through the act of inscribing
them on his work and shaping our reading of them by embodying them powerful
physical forms. In this way, he is more like the concrete poets of the late 19th
and early 20th century (or the poets who use ‘figured’ or shaped
techniques described by Dick Higgins or Charles Boultenhouse). That’s up for
debate, and would be another panel discussion altogether.
In my opinion, what
needs to be translated in David Stephens’ work is not the language itself, but the
way his highly idiosyncratic and original acts of writing and sculpture sit in
relation to culture in general – to religious cultures, African American
culture, disability culture. For this reason, Stephens’ work requires much
closer reading by scholars and critics fluent in its idioms and I look forward
to that conversation when it comes.
Works
cited
Aviv, Rachel.
“Listening to Braille.” The New York Times. 20 Dec 2009. 17 Feb 2014.
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>
Bassnet, Susan. Translation
Studies. London: Routledge, 1980.
"Braille." Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia
Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. <http://www.britannica.com.libproxy.temple.edu/EBchecked/topic/77257/Braille>.
Boultenhouse,
Charles. “Poems in the Shape of Things”. Art News Annual. 1959. 65-83.
Fisher, Steven
Roger. A History of Reading. London: Reaktion, 2005.
Higgins, Dick. Pattern
Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.
Kleege, G.
“Visible Braille/Invisible Blindness”. Journal of Visual Culture. 2006, v. 5.
P.209. 17 Feb 2014. < http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/5/2/209>
Mann, Charles.
“Cracking the Khipu Code.” Science. 13 Jun 2003. 17 Feb 2014. http://www.charlesmann.org/articles/Khipu-Science.pdf.
Singh, Simon. The
Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography.
New York, Anchor, 1999.
Friday, March 21, 2014
Notes on Professionalism
“Which occupations have gone how far in professionalizing? Established solidly since the late Middle Ages have been law, the clergy, university teaching (although the church did dominate universities, medieval faculty were by no means all clergy), and to some extent medicine (especially in Italy). During the Renaissance and after, the military provided professional careers for a dispossessed aristocracy. Officer cadres in the standing armies of Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries developed a professionalism based on a sense of brotherhood in a self-regulating fraternity dedicated to codes of honor and service. Dentistry, architecture, and some areas of engineering (e.g., civil engineering) were professionalized by the early 1900's; certified public accounting and several scientific and engineering fields came along more recently. Some are still in process-social work, correctional work, veterinary medicine, perhaps city planning and various managerial jobs for nonprofit organizations-school superintendents, foundation executives, administrators of social agencies and hospitals. There are many borderline cases, such as school teaching, librarianship, nursing, pharmacy, optometry. Finally, many occupations will assert claims to professional status and find that the claims are honored by no one but themselves. I am inclined to place here occupations in which a market orientation is overwhelming- public relations, advertising, and funeral directing”
Wilensky, Harold. “The Professionalization of Everyone” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Sep., 1964), pp. 137-158
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