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.

Siting

Most of the time, I thinking of things in terms of food. When I used to write a lot more, I had a rule I called the popcorn principle. Once the first three pops are heard in the microwave, you know the thing is going to take off. Same thing in the art world - three unconnected references to an artist, image or idea and you know you're only a few moments away form more of it that you really need.

The latest example of the popcorn principle is Kickstarter.com, which suddenly was everywhere I looked last week (which means it's already gone mainstream, I suppose). It's a great idea; artists and entrepreneurs raise money for projects or capital expenses through video pitches posted online. You can make donations (which are collected through amazon.com) to those you like. There even a lot of NPR style premiums (not a lot of tote bags and umbrellas…better stuff generally) for those who need motivation to philanthropical.

My favorite is my friend Jane Palmer’s pitch for donations to help her business, noon design, get an industrial dying machine. I also really liked the Scrapbook: A Book of Many Authors by an artist who goes by Gaily.

There are lots of movies, artists, designers and others to check out...take a look. And listen for the pop.

Gone and Not Forgotten: Recovering History in the 21 st Century

 

CALL FOR PAPERS 

Curiouser

SECAC/MACAA Conference • October 20 – 23, 2010
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA

Gone and Not Forgotten: Recovering History in the 21 st Century

The past is with us more than at any point in the last century. Artists struggle to recover lost technical knowledge, fashion looks for inspiration to the Industrial Revolution, and the pressure to invest works with ‘authenticity’ drives artists and designers to become researchers who connect their creations to webs of allusion and historicism. In the words of Martin Davies, we live in an historicized world, where “there's nothing that can't become a historical symbol […] nothing that isn't already a historical text ”.

This panel discussion session proposes to investigate the prevalence of historical ideas and images in contemporary art and design from several of points of view, addressing how artists satisfy their curiosities about the past. We will focus on creative practices that engage archiving, collecting, and reenactment as modes of absorbing and reusing the past.

Calling all my Brilliant Readers!

The Studio Now

The idea of a studio has been central for artists and designers for centuries. From the atelier system of the medieval Europe to the loft of mid-century modernism to the post-studio practices of contemporary art, the place where something is made exerts a subtle but distinct influence on art and design.

Tyler School of Art invites artists, designers, and scholars to give presentations on the studio to its freshmen class in Fall, 2010.

Possible topics include: studio safety • collaboration • the studio in the community • history of the studio • the itinerant or mobile studio • the studio as gallery/ the gallery as studio •
sustainable studios

Please send a proposal describing your idea for a presentation (200 words max.) and up to five sample images to: gbrown@temple.edu

A modest honorarium will be offered to accepted presenters.

Deadline: May 30, 2010

Toward a comprehensive history of criticism

Last week, Columbia Journalism Review ran an interesting article by Robert Seitsema on the evolution of restaurant reviewing in New York papers. Touching on how reviews have changed from extensions of the 'women's' section of the paper (where recipes might be reprinted), to consumer advice, to a baroque form of descriptive literature, to how reviews are changing in the digital age, the article introduced readers to a number of important figures, from Craig Claiborne to blogger Danyelle Freeman. It also vividly laid out the terms of ethical debates in restaurant writing, making such industry-specific and arcane controversies relevant to readers to whom they might otherwise seem obscure or arbitrary.

It's hard for me to read such a piece without thinking of art reviewing (okay, it's hard for me to read much of anything without thinking of art reviewing). By the nature of their subject, art reviews cannot be part of the consumerist movement that restaurant reviewers might belong to (though I've seen sales happen in relation to art reviews, it's so unusual that it qualifies as an exception that proves the rule). At most, an art reviewer can tell you whether your time would be well-spent at this gallery or that museum, and as busy as we all are, a risk-taking member of the art audience doesn't really need a journalist to be her filter.

Art criticism is a heavy subject (I've just been asked to another seminar in it this summer), but food criticism is not afforded the same cultural weight (compare the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism to..what?) Is there something we can learn about writing about art from writing about food, or perfume?

I say yes. We can recapture some of the enthusiasm for our subject that it deserves. We might even be able to do this without slipping into flagrant partisan behavior, though I think that's beyond me. We can stop strangling our prose with academic distance. We can begin to write as if what we were writing was mean to be read.

Personally, I would be greatly interested in recommendations for things to read about the history of criticism of all sorts of cultural output. Some years ago, I put together a reader on art criticism that was broad and deep, but I've not kept it up in the last year. And interesting articles - like Seitsema's on restaurant reviewing - cast an indirect light on the practice of writing about art. Please send your favorites to me here...

Once again, I have students writing about art. I hope you'll check out the comments my Tyler graduate students are making on the PrintSeminar blog. Art that's worth showing is worth writing and talking about, so please keep reading.

Graduate School?

I wanted to link up to Thomas H. Benton's essay, Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go posted today on Chronicle of Higher Education website (thanks to Artjournal.com for the link).

I'll come back to it in a few days (hopefully) because it brings up a few really interesting questions about what grad school is supposed to do and what it actually does. Stay tuned...

Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things for kids | Video on TED.com

We're liking this one...I hope to get up the nerve to do these things with my kids.

Gatekeepers

I was interested in a little story in the Sunday, January 3, New York Times, and not just because Ellen Lupton did the illustration (above).

The story, by Jonathan Galassi, talks about the heirs to William Styron licensing rights for an e-book version of Sophie's Choice to Open Road Integrated Media. This could have been a really wonky, boring article about a dark corner of a very particular industry, but it avoided that by getting at how many people at Random House (the author's original publisher) were involved in bringing Styron's book into being. Reading it, a little window opened up for me between what Styron wrote and the various iterations of it (hardbound, large-type, magazine excerpts, movie rights, etc.)

Each version of the book, Galassi reminds us, is a slightly different experience. Here's a passage from the article:

The appropriate typeface was chosen and submitted to the author for approval by Random House’s designers, and a binding was selected. A dust jacket — often involving art specially commissioned by Random House to represent and advertise the book — was designed, and copy intended to induce reviewers and readers to pick the book up and pay attention to it was written.

and that's interesting, but Galassi also talks about the role of the editors in shaping the text itself and how that legacy moved on in subsequent editions. Having recently had an essay extensively re-worked by a sympathetic editor who was able to strengthen it significantly, I realized how important this would have been to the author.

But the thing that really got to me was the constant feeling of implosion in the publishing industry and its perceived threat from electronic distribution. Galassi didn't come right out and say it, but his essay strongly suggested that authors will not continue to enjoy the same kind of nurturing support editors offered in an age wherein writing is a form of 'property' that gets 'distributed'.

I feel less and less independent as a creator these days, and the idea that all of the support I require (from curators, critics, etc.) is on its way to evaporating is more than a little disconcerting. Another facet of this is that the opportunity to be part of actually creating work (as opposed to merely distributing it) seems to be getting concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and the collaborative process of creating new work is being replaced by a game of disseminating that which is already made. I think often about how a successful book sells a million copies, but a movie that gets a million people to see it is a flop. Thus, fewer people are playing a role in deciding what ultimately gets out in the world.

Should we be happy with new versions of things that have been a part of the world already? What can we do to facilitate the creation of new things? Perhaps not much, as the current carries us all toward getting Kindles and such...but for now, maybe we cna stop and think about how many hands have touched the things we enjoy.

The law of unintended consequences

Things go where they aren’t expected to.

This ought to be a universal law, up there with a-body-in-motion-tends-to-stay-in-motion, but it seems to get forgotten a lot. I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately. In part because of coming changes at the Pew Fellowships that people seem to think will ruin the art world, and in part because, as a teacher, I fret about doing more harm than good. Maybe I was clueless as a young man (okay, I was clueless) but I don’t remember thinking that what a course taught had to be contained within the fourteen or sixteen weeks I was taking it. I thought it was all about what happened afterwards, when things go where they aren’t expected.

But some of the unintended consequences I’ve observed in the last few years have me especially worried. When I heard conservatives employing the kind of theoretical architecture that makes my work interesting as justifications for their actions, I wonder about that genie getting out of his bottle. But the one that keeps me up at night is about the art world, and how it’s moving in so many interesting directions. Or should I say, so many directions I should find interesting but don’t. They don’t interest me. They worry me.

The latest example comes from the Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post. He describes going to an exhibit of Chinese terra cotta figures at Washington’s National Geographic Museum. You know the sort – thousands were buried in imperial tombs 2,000 or more years ago. The show, as Gopnik describes it sounds like a nightmare:

Overall, visiting this exhibition feels like walking through a pop-up version of a fascinating article in National Geographic magazine -- one of those photo spreads that have more sidebars than text.

Gopnik, like a good college-educated critic, goes off on Benjamin and the idea of the aura, but misses the real horror of what he’s just written. What one sees when one sees this exhibit is not the things one went to see, but the idea and history -- embodied in writing -- that surrounds them.

It’s easy to believe the exhibit is a kind of elaborate magazine article. The vast majority of exhibits I see are like heinous, overwrought term papers, made without love or enthusiasm, as if because of the existence of a deadline. (Worse yet, they're statements...what could be more bloodless and bureaucratic than a statement?) And the killer is that I used to think of exhibits as arguments or essays, and that I must have said this a million times in classes and crits. That I didn’t mean bloodless, boring things that bypass what really matters or subjugate the act of looking to the act of reading was a given. But perhaps it wasn’t heard that way. Perhaps I’ve unintentionally contributed to the mess we find ourselves in now.

Now I know the National Geographic Museum is not an art museum, and that exhibits all have different purposes, variously didactic or sensuous (and wouldn’t be friggin’ cool if they could be sensuously didactic or something? But that’s another thing…). But what bothers me is that as the pendulum of exhibiting swings toward greater intellectual engagement (yum..after all, the eye is a part of the mind) it’s swinging away from the pleasures of objects, preferring to ‘reference’ them (or some equally hideous, stale action as arid as 'reference').

One cannot practice art education like one practices medicine (above all, do no harm) because moving students out of their comfort zone is a huge part of the job and it may be unexpectedly dangerous. But one can certainly try to do more good than harm. I am generally optimistic about change. It stirs things up. But soon after change, artists and designers will learn to read the system and will undermine the positive effects of transformation and turn it into a new and dull status quo. Maybe the thing to do is try to teach people never to be satisfied with what is out there…

Winner take out

My seven year old son thinks McDonald’s is a toy store.

He thinks this because every time he goes there, he gets a toy. That’s not why I take him there – I take him because we can get something to eat. Because the meal is so forgettable (mere nutrition – such as it is at fast food restaurants) is not a big concern to seven-year olds. It’s all about the toys.

I bring this up because Ed Sozanski’s rant about the “sudden efflorescence of art competitions”, focusing on the West Prize, the Wolgin Prize, and ArtPrize, with occasional swipes at the Pew Fellowships in today’s Inquirer made me think of it. Just like my son and I think of McDonald’s differently, artists and audiences approach the question of prizes differently. I wouldn’t want readers to think Mr. Sozanki’s was the only way to consider the problem of art prizes, so I wanted to address a few points in his column.

As anyone even remotely acquainted with this history of criticism might expect, Mr. Sozanski lamented the selections for these awards. Wolgin winner Ryan Trecartin was “visually bizarre, and cacophonous to the point of felonious assault”. The Dufala brothers possess a “novelty quotient [that] was off the charts”. Reasonable people can disagree about such things, and do so without mentioning how familiar one another’s arguments for or against certain art are. Dead end – next topic.

“Giving a quarter-million dollars, or even $150,000, to a single person is inherently ridiculous and risibly unfair to the thousands of talented artists who are equally deserving of recognition and support,” Mr. Sozanski writes. Such Palin-esque populism might play well in an election, but the art world has never been a democracy. As Wolgin-finalist Sanford Biggers pointed out when speaking to Tyler students, $150,000 isn’t a lot of money in today’s art market, though it means a lot for artists who have little commercial viability (read: people who don’t make paintings or photographs). Spread that over the years of work the finalists – including Trecartin – have invested in their production and it begins to look like a barely break-even proposition. More than a few recipients of large fellowships have told me that what looks like a huge amount of money…let’s use $50,000 as an example…doesn’t have the enormous impact one might expect it to when it’s taxed at an extremely high rate and spread over two years. Even the largest awards basically allow artists to give up one of their many jobs…temporarily. The amount of ink wasted fretting over the scale of prizes acknowledging years of artistic labor that hardly amount to a year’s bonus on Wall Street indicates little more than the laziness of the media.

Where I can agree with Mr. Sozanski is on the way prizes have adversely affected artists’ lives by rewarding careerism…and weirdly, here’s where large juried prizes can make a difference. These days, nearly every art school has to offer a ‘professional practices’ course to help its students write the statements and prepare the slides (...or CDs of jpegs) required by granting agencies. It should come as no surprise that some students (and artists) excel in such clerical tasks while others are more adept in the studio, making work. The shift from application-driven processes to jurying for large awards may indicate a seismic shift in professional practice. Artists may actually be recognized for the work they do, not for their ability to get an application in on time. Exhibitions might start matters as much as or (gasp!) even more than the documentation of them. Artists might forced to become genuinely articulate about their work because the conversation they have about it might be with someone who can recommend them for an award.

It is fashionable right now to fear juries, to think of them as cabals of insiders who will reward only other insiders. The fact is that application-driven processes discriminate against a number of artists who look at the outcomes of major competitions and say, “Well, if that’s what wins, I’m not even going to apply.” Responsible juries that include artists can remedy that.

Because at the end of the day, these prizes exist to help artists and audiences. They support artists (however incompletely) and recognize both genuine achievements and the potential in emerging talent. For audiences, they bring artists into regional – even global – spotlights while placing them under the lens of criticism where they can succeed or fail. Mr. Sozanski challenges us to look up Ryan Trecartin in five years, implying that he’ll be serving lattes someplace. Has the writer looked at the roster of emerging artists, alums of Vox or Nexus, who have gone on to outstanding careers? Did they do that because they got prizes or fellowships? No! They succeeded because they worked like mad and have talent. The prizes didn’t hurt, though.

I got out of criticism for two reasons. Jousting with Ed Sozanski quickly becomes dull. But the main reason is that after a few years in journalism, I found it hard to avoid making stories into binary constructions – pitting two opposing forces against each other and (if I was fair minded) letting readers decide for themselves. The truth is that things – especially when it comes to art - are always a lot more complicated than that. It’s never either/or…more often both/and. When we go to McDonald’s, my son eats, gets a toy, and we spend time together. It’s food, prizes, and a whole lot more.

very stuck in mind...

Studio Visits

I'm starting to prepare a lecture series on artists' studios, so I photograph everyone's studio I go to. Yesterday, I saw graduate students at the University of the Arts MFA programs in Ceramics, Painting and Sculpture. Here they are in their studios...

John Thompson

Christine Colby

Tiernan Alexander

Alejandro Mendel

Andrew Walker

Matt Ziegler

Heather Peiters

Martha Ferguson

Karen Joan Topping

Renee Cortese

Sally Echoff

Teresa Palmer

What makes a critic?

This is a perennial debate and one that I have tried to clip comments on and keep track of. I have to say this latest exchange (between the Guardian's Johnathon Jones and Minnesota Orchestra's Sam Bergman) is kinda disappointing. Perhaps it's because it happens in blogs, where so much is truncated or overly general to start with. (How's that for general?) But perhaps it's because neither of them appears to be advancing an especially interesting argument.

Jones seems to think that trusting his gut and being loud is enough. Bergman is content to point out that it may not be in this polyphonic age. But neither of them seems to get at the reason there might be criticism in the first place - because art and music and theater and cinema and all manner of cultural production are things to talk about. The most interesting things in such conversations are often said by those who are deeply knowledgeable of the history and traditions of the area, invested in maintaining a high level of quality (or in attaining one), and thoughtful and attentive about the specific work under discussion. That doesn't discount the possibility that a newcomer to the conversation might have something insightful to say, or that someone from outside its usual boundaries mightn't have something to offer. I think those things happen all the time (that's why I talk to anybody who wants to talk about art). But those are unusual events that depend on an individual's sensitivity and eloquence, whereas knowledge, investment, and attentiveness are skills that can be sharpened.

I am interested in circulating one idea of Jones - in his blog posting he writes:

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised [sic], mediocrity triumphs.

This is an interesting notion. One that hints at a 'proper' way to criticize art that could be beneficial to artists (it wouldn't be construed as mere opinion) as well as audiences (who suddenly have a responsible role in making art better by criticizing it).

For a few years, I've taught graduate seminars in criticism. Every time I teach a studio class, I stress to my students that its' not enough to make your own art - you must contribute to the discussion of others (that, to me is how art is made out of mere images and objects...but talking about them as if they were important). I would be interested in anyone else's thoughts on what constitutes "proper" criticism...

..One more silly thing on 'Moby Dick'

I have been meaning to do this for a while. In Microsoft Word, there's a tremedously silly feature called 'AutoSummarize' that condenses long texts into shorter versions. It can be set to highlight key points or spit out summaries of various lengths. It's a hoot.

I put in Chapter 42 of Melville's Moby Dick and told it I wanted a summary that was 5% of the original text. Here's what it gave me:

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Goney! never! Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe.

Yipes. If you jack it up to 10%, you get the sentence "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me", which is also in the first paragraph.

Word Clouds

I saw a mention of Wordle online some place and really liked the image it made of Moby Dick. I used chapter 42 - the Whiteness of the Whale - because I'm familiar with it. Here's a screen shot (the program's sharing capacities are pretty cruddy). You might want to play with it. I suggest having a heap of words ready...say a letter you've written or something like that. Be sure to mess with all the options in the menu...
enjoy!

Lincoln - on video

This one came from artist Shawn Beeks - more Lincoln leads welcome any time...

Findings 2 - Looking at Lincoln

Here's a little more from the Lincoln picture file...

More Lincoln in the afterlife... D. T. Weist, In Memory of Abraham Lincoln: The Reward of the Just, 1865
Avenging Lincoln from The Simpsons...

It's show time...

Recent Research - Looking at Lincoln

Lately, I've been thinking about the Civil War for a bit of writing I have to do. Thus, I've been thinking of Lincoln. What with the bicentennial of is birth this year, I'm obviously not alone. Here are some of the images I've turned up in the routine process of looking for things I go through as I start doing research...I though others might be amused...

One of my favorite images of Lincoln is this print of the Apotheosis of Lincoln. I'm gathering similar images and will post them shortly...

I came across this one looking for "Lincoln Vampire" on Google...I think of it as the Lincolnator

From an episode of Star Trek (The Savage Curtain) in which Lincoln visits the Enterprise...well an alien disguised as Lincoln...who's trying to enlist Kirk and Spock's help in a battle on his home world with Ghengis Kahn and others...oh never mind...

LA Artist Trek Kelly gives a new spin on proclaiming emancipation.
Frank Wu imagines a Lunar Lincoln...who's also a zombie.

That's how the story goes

Just a pointer today; I wanted to call out about Jessica Helfand's post about narrative on Design Observer. I am looking at my students' projects on narrative and I doubt I was convincing to them as I tried to argue that its return to contemporary art is one of the most important aspects of the art of our time. Wish I'd seen this first.

Oh, and it makes me feel vindicated about asking my students to give the 'elevator pitch' for their thesis papers...

A digression on zombies (still not about life)

Up front - let me totally clear about this - I like zombies as much as the next guy. I've always been more of an aliens-person, it's true, but zombies are okay.

So don't take my following comments on Adam Cohen's New York Times Op-Ed Mr. Darcy Woos Elizabeth Bennet While Zombies Attack as some kind of anti-zombie rant. I've got no problem with the undead.

It's not even Seth Grahame-Smith's riff on Jane Austen that has me out looking for brains. It's thinking about the book as a cultural phenomenon and how it relates to the use of others' words images and ideas.

But first, about mash ups. When Cohen calls Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a mash up, some kind lexicographer's alarm goes off in my head. To me that's like saying gin and tonic is a mash up. What does the New York Times know from mash ups anyway? A lot it turns out. They've used the phrase more than 3000 times (Wired.com has on 1080 uses since 2006...which sounds awfully light...but they're good, as in when they talked to DJ Spooky in 2007). When I think mash up, I think about two or more things fused into a new whole in such a way that the component parts are still distinguishable. Somehow, the at of combining these parts has something to say about each part - it helps us see it in a new light or understand it better.

At first, I don't think of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that way - mostly because it's a specific work plus a genre of other works. So It's not like a gin and tonic, it's more like chicken nuggets with teryaki sauce...something is added to the chicken nugget to give it a general flavor. That could be anything, the distinction to me seems to reside in whether it's two individual things which bring their histories and contexts to the strange union that is a mash up, or whether it's partly made of specific and general ingredients...

...and I'm not sure what's the case with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. What's really interesting to me is how it has proliferated through a variety of conversations. When I used to teach art criticism, I had my students read a whole year of an art magazine to see what outlets covered what artists first. When we looked over a year, we could chart the trickledown of an artist from elite publications with smaller circulations to more mass-market outlets. Ideas would shift and blur as they moved through the discourse... it's kind of cool to watch.

But Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seems to be everywhere all at once. It's an exciting shift in how things work - appearing suddenly in a lot places at one time, the book seems to have achieved the kind of viral velocity that people love to imagine happening but which seldom really occurs.

Of course, to me the great fun of this is that all of this involves telling an old story through another kind of story. What it's about is storytelling and how a story is affected by bringing it into another genre. It's not about life, it's about how stories work. But more on that in our next post.

Me, I'd be okay if it were aliens. But zombies will do. Like I said, nothing against zombies.

Not About Life, Pt. 1

Inspired largely by Judith Schaechter's excellent post on her 'Late Breaking Noose' blog, I wanted to talk a write a little about others' images and ideas and how these things fit into my work lately.

But where Judith's observations were prompted by thoughts on authenticity, I'm more interested in looking at the related ideas of authorship and authority. The art world, as always a reflection of the world around it, has been comically obsessed with authenticity for years (if one more person tells me they're trying to "keep it real" I will not be held responsible for my actions). In 2005, TheoryLab convened a reading group on the subject. But what's the relationship between one image and another similar image made by another person for another purpose? Or between an image we all know and another that tries to glom on to the status of the original?

To address these questions, I want to bring in some things I was thinking about when Jane Irish asked me to come to the ICA to be part of a night of discussion and demonstrations about the Dirt on Delight show.

Jane was at my studio talking about the program and offhandedly remarked that we both use others' writing in our work. Perhaps because this is so central to me, I stopped thinking about it. Perhaps it was because there are wildly different degrees of legibility about what we do it hadn't occurred to me that we had this in common. At the time, I was reading Hillel Schwartz's odd and wonderful book, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, and a light clicked on.

Schwartz's (to me entirely reasonable) theory is that we live in a world that is dominated by duplicates, and it is through repetition that meaning is made. The unique object, he suggests, poses a challenge to contemporary culture, which obsesses about clones and copies, pirated and authorized. He cunningly covers camouflage's peculiar relation to the nature it simulates, the attraction of re-enactments, and a dozens of other details.

A particular passage, about the formerly feminine word 'typewriter', caught my attention with regard to Jane's use of text:

Women: who knew how to handle carbon paper so that it would not smudge or wrinkle. Whose use of Lebbeus H. Roger's new one-sided carbon paper in typewriters supplant the copying presses and bound letterpress books with their wetted sheets of tissue copies interspersed with protective but messy oiled paper. Whose ability to produce good clean copies simultaneously with a good clean original was, as historian W.B. Proudfoot has argued, "an outstanding step in the history of copying" (227).

An outstanding step in the history of copying? Wait - there's a histroy of copying that is not based on forgery and fakery? What Schwartz gets to - and what I think Jane's work alerts me to - is the labro invovled in copying and transcription. In Schwartz, there's also something interesting about the gendering of that labor, too.

I often see my own work as an act of faithless transcription. If I cannot be true to the texts I refer to, what authority do I have as their transcriptionist or translator? A great deal of what I'm interested in doing comes down to how alligning yourself with the words and images of others puts you close to the power of these things..a power possibly derived from authenticity.
When we were talking about, Jane was making notes on an email message. After our conversation, I asked for her notes so I could think about it more. In the margin of a paragraph about her work she'd written the phrase not about life, which struck me as perfect for what interested me about this observation she'd made. Here was an idea not about keeping it real or making an authentic expressive statement or being sincere (whatever any of that might mean). Here was an idea about taking part in an ongoing dialog with others about a body of images and idea outside ourselves, a tradition that we could volunteer to participate in, one that could be learned and absorbed - accessed not through exceptional biography or suffering but through reflection and work. What Jane Irish is doing - and what I'd like to do - is make art that enlarges life's experiences, not only describes it.

Of course, this may sound like appropriation. But it's not really...for a lot of reasons. And they are the subject of the second part of this essay, which will be posted mid-month.

Too many blogs...not enough thoughts

It's been one of those months when things never seem to let up and I've been reading (on the train, before I go to sleep...) and working in the studio and when I sit down to write, I'm suddenly out of things to say. Somehow, what seemed effortless to do a while ago seems really complicated lately...

In December, I was asked to do an a short intro for a book of photos and sat down to do it. I have been carrying around this notebook of quotes for years and in it was a passage from 1989 article Washington Post about how photography was different from all other art because it implied being there. I thought this would be a good intro, so I write the whole essay around it and when I was done, I thought - geez, I'm a college professor now, I ought to cite this quote properly. So I went back into the Post archives and it wasn't there...at all. I had transcribed it wrong or something and carrying it around for 19 years waiting to use this thing that had suddenly lost its usefulness.

Of course this is a small thing, but it's sort of indicative of how what I had been using as fuel for work is now of questionable value and I'm starting to get antsy about it. In the studio, I've always had a sense of how anything could be a painting, but how it got made is what will decide if it's any good or not.


Maybe that's what these sign projects are getting at. The one above is called Inarticulate Object and it's one of a few I've been working on without really knowing or caring where the idea goes. It might be as useless is as the Post quote. With writing, I always know or care where it's going. But I think that's getting in the way right now. So I'll be writing a little more, though I can't promise it will be worth reading. if you're interested, you can follow it here, or or in an even more cruddy state on my own website, which will be back up in the next week.

Research

I wanted to put out a quick shout for a piece in today's New York Times, Olivia Judson's Guest Column Research for America.

Though I'm no longer specifically teaching research methods to artists, I'm more and more interested in how we might be able to have an impact by participating in research conducted in health and science. This article imagines a re-invented research initiative that could ignite a new generation of discovery...rather than merely renewing the funding gravy train that stalled in the last few years. I doubt it will happen, but it's good to dream...