The dominance of the word

I really should be quoting this to get it right, but the thought is familiar enough that how eloquently it's expressed is really a matter of pitch not substance, but I've been thinking about an idea of communication linguist Steven Pinker puts forth when marvels about how the arrangement of bursts of air from our mouth or marks on a page and accurately and successful transmit an idea from the brain of one person to the brain of another.

While it would be wrong to take the miracle of language for granted, it would be, I think, equally wrong to assume that all communication must be based on this assumed outcome - that what is going on in the head of one person is transmitted accurately to the head of another. This notion seems especially troubling in art. (Maybe I'm just depressed because I get bummed every time I hear someone say he or she wants to 'make a new language' in his or her art - what's wrong with the ones that already exist? Who are you going to talk to in this new language? - and I heard that one in one form or another a half dozen times as I met with the first year grad painters yesterday). It's troubling because it defends an idea of stability of message that threatens some of the most important things art can do.

Art perhaps ought not so often be viewed so much as form of conversation, but perhaps more like a relay game. An artist observes something or invents it. She displays it (there is something etymologically suggestive about display, as if it were to cut off from play, but it's not that at all). Another person sees it. That person is now in the position of the artist, able to make through conversation, literature, or creative practice another thing. And on and on.

Of course the conversation model can't, and shouldn't, be utterly abandoned, but perhaps its dominance should be questioned a little more thoroughly. As if all conversations you’ve ever been invoved in went the way you wanted them...

Pictures of Pictures

One of the oddest things about going to the MoMA the other day was visiting the permanent collection and people-watching. I had heard so much about the building and the re-installation of the collection, but hadn't had a chance to visit. Clearly, the forces of reification had been successfully brought to bear on the works, as evinced by the number of people who whipped out their cellphones and started shooting pictures of their favorite works. (What, the bookstore stopped selling postcards?) I thought I would share these photos, taken with my phone.

I guess I can imagine sending photos to people live ("Look, honey! I'm in New York CIty and they've got a big Picasso!") but I can't quite see what one hopes to capture when one shoots a picture of a painting with the modern equivalent of a pinhole camera.

There were so many people milling around the galleries, and taking pictures - the cell phone came out in the galleries in which Picassos hung, and stayed out through the Impressionist and Post-Impressionists. Before that, one would see people posing next to large works while other took pictures of them. I wished I'd taken a picture of a teenager standing next to a large Warhol making the kind of gesture one sees at a heavy metal concert as her friends took her picture.

Perhaps I sound cynical, but I'm not. I really enjoyed watching all these people interacting with the art they were looking at, and the frantic duplication of the museum into pixels was ultimately moving. After all, before it says anything, photography says I was there, and if the museum is an important enough site to click, preserve, and share - as important as the smiles of people out for drinks or whatever we use cell phone cameras for - then something must be right with the world...

Art & Craft...

Back on the subject of Craft...

I had a chance this spring to be in the cultural Mecca of Northern Florida, Gainsville.

There was an interesting exhibit at the Harn Museum at the University of Florida …

A Closer Look: Art and Museums.
“This exhibition examines some key issues faced by museums in these areas of their operations. The exhibition is designed to inform visitors about the strategic decisions that underlie the presentation of art in museums, with the hope that this information will heighten the visitors’ critical awareness and enjoyment of those institutions”

The show was divided into five thematic sections: Defining Art, Collecting Art, Displaying Art, Interpreting Art, and Preserving Art. In the Defining Art area there was a display about art and craft.

This was the text panel was posted by the exhibit.

(What, I didn’t take a picture of the exhibit, just the text panel?)

Ants and Grasshoppers

So another summer begins in Philadelphia and I see that we've got a greater population of grasshoppers than ants. I expect things will get crazy as time goes on, but for now it's awfully quiet in the studios. What are we waiting for?
There have been a few people putting things together, but perhaps the the length of crits has cut into the desire to get going. The heat in the building is pretty bad. Maybe we should just go look at art rather than make it.

Mastery

A few weeks ago I visited the studios of a graduate program that shall remain nameless. The students – painters, sculptors, performance and video artists, what have you – exhibited work in their studios (which, I was reassured to see, were as much like veal fattening pens as they are at every institution) as visitors poked in, occasionally committing to cross the threshold and see what was inside.

What was inside was an astonishingly uniform arrangement of works. In each studio, the artist appeared to have gone to great lengths to remain casual about work. Evidence of production was apparent (cans of paint, tools) even when they had nothing to do with the objects that were present (ubiquitous videos). Each room suggested a kind of domesticated pathology, as if the student had received a message that he or she should be obsessed with a subject, but not so obsessed as to appear genuinely interested in it.

One student was the exception casting all the others into sharp relief. He had painted the walls with a fresh coat of blinding, gallery-white paint. He’d hung three large canvases that were thematically consistent (all representing fire in a way that called to mind the work of Philadelphia painter Sydney Goodman). These supplemented a group of several similar works hanging in a near by gallery. All were large, thoroughly accomplished (if slightly conventional) works that had been carried to a point that one could reasonably conclude was finished. Taken together, they constituted a body of work, a thesis about painting with a light source in the composition, or perhaps about the transformative violence of fire, or perhaps about something else.

Another student had taken a similar path, painting abstract landscapes that were too vaporous to coalesce into such a concrete thing as a thesis, though they had the consistency and coherence of a body of works. These two, more or less only these two, appeared to working in an engaged mode that allowed new work to be born out of earlier work, as if each piece suggested possibilities and challenges for the next piece – in short, as one might be able to work over the course of a career. The other twenty or twenty five student were more like bees who buzzed from flower to flower, making a video here, making a sculpture, adding a sound track. Their method may have been more organic, may have more accurately reflected the diversity of their interests, but it came across as a profound manifestation of attention deficit disorder.

Now this was an open studio - a very informal event (that just happened to coincide with the formal graduate thesis exhibit that was just too dull to mention) - but it is an occasion to think about how one want to behave at a critical point in one's career. Is it best to let it all hang out, or to try to bring (or force, in some cases) structure to your work by establishing parameters? What is the role of the studio in your practice - workspace? showroom? place to put old sofa and listen to tunes while waiting for the next exhibit opportunity?

Thoughts on Craft (Evolving)

I'm going to post some responses to the idea of craft from an email I sent to handful of interesting artists to whom I think such a question would be relevant. This post will evolve as I get responses, so check in a couple of times if you want the whole story.

From Candy Depew

witches practice "the craft"
ie witchcraft

crafty = sly and devilish

so with this line of thinking, this theory
of craft clearly implies
sly and devilish witches practicing
(or witch practice- singular)

thats pretty radical : )

From Mary Barrett

I wonder if the paleolithic cave painters thought their renderings were more "high art" than the crafters of bowls, clothes or bodily ornamentation? We'll never know, but one can speculate that if paintings of auroch stampeding across the cave wall provided some sort of ritualistc invocation for a good hunt, they may have been seen as fulfilling a magical/spiritual function. But who is to say that the adornment of the body with beads made from shells or teeth or such didn't also fulfill an important spiritual function? Or even an aesthetic function? And why is intellectual sometimes perceived to be more important than spiritual? I think interaction between all aspects is inevitable. At any rate, the beauty of the beast is captured, and humans are fulfilling what I believe to be an innate need to create and connect the physical and spiritual worlds. I also think that so called tradition crafts can also fulfill this need. The difference seems to be that craft, yes, relying heavily on the notion of work and product, also relies on tradition. "Fine Art" at least in modern times, seems at times to want to break tradition, to move forward, to reflect change. But wait a minute, didn't the arts and crafts movement do that too? I guess Radical Craft also seeks to create change, and at the same time to preserve community.

I think that art and craft both involve body mind and spirit. When Adrian Saxe curated the 2001 Scripps College 57th annual Ceramic Annual, he chose for the theme: "Between Thee and Me: Objects of Agency." He noted in the curators statement that this theme is present in some of the most compelling artists today. "It is the potential for an object to become an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace, or of inner conflict and evil, and serve as a conduit of emotion and memory for both the maker and the user of the object."

I think crafts and the communal aspect of crafts is important to identify who we are as humans and how we interact with each other and something else, on a physical, mental and meta-physical(spiritual) basis.

From Bill Gerhard:

I don't know what I think about craft anymore. I guess there are two kinds of thinking, one that has to do with a high level of skill and technique and another that has to do with appropriateness of means, which means you shouldn't have to think about it. I think in grad school someone said the moment you notice craft is when you stop looking. Craft people are very proud and defensive, which is their big problem.

From Sumi Maeshima:

What is curious about the word craft (used provincially in the U.S.) is that it seems to lack autonomy, as if it always needs clarifications of what one means by the word. Or it needs a contrasting word: craft v.s. fine arts, crafting v.s. thinking. At the same time, there is something moralistic about the word craft, and that moralistic stance can be fashionable or unfashionable, radical or conservative, which in turn tells where the speaker stands, instead of what she/he means.

Radical (cr)After Thoughts

So I've been mulling over the conference and the whole notion of radical craft and its intersection with industry and art practice and I keep coming back to the simple idea that craft is a code for labor and that radical craft - building on Harold Koda's thinking - is code for a whole lot of labor. And this has been making me a little sad.

It seems to fundamentally reinforce a notion that craft is something done with the hands and that there is still some un-bridgeable schism between the working hands the thinking brain. Work - almost by definition - must proceed according to plan to minimize waste. If the plan is found to be inefficient and is later revised, existing labor might be unspooled and erased so the product can be completed. The emphasis lands solidly on product despite any attempt to call attention to product.

Perhaps this is what was so striking about Billy Collins' poetry - it's polish speaks to the care with which he selects each word. (Digression: when Collins picks on Paul Valery, as he did in a poem he read at the conference, I think something terribly misleading is happening. I am reminded of a story about Frank O'Hara arriving at a poetry reading on Staten Island and delivering a work he had composed on the ferry on the way to the event. The other poet on the bill - whose name escapes me - brushed this aside, saying something about how he was going to read things he'd composed in advance and implying the superiority of that method. But O'Hara - I believe like Valery - had done unthinkable amounts of work preparing to write that poem in his reading, writing, observing and participating in the world up to the moment in which it was fixed on the paper. It's a little like the Whistler/Ruskin argument about a painting that took an afternoon to make but a lifetime to get ready for, and what's the role of craft in that?) It is not possible for craft to be thought of less as polish than as fuel? Might we not benefit from including in our definition of radical craft such things as edits, false starts, and erasure?

The more I think about it, the more I take comfort in Isaac Mizrahi's response to a question about the relative importance of brand and product. Mizrahi seemed a little stunned by the question - as if it were so fundamental that he had to think about his answer. Like the courtier that a fashion-person must be, he answered without offending anyone yet not without being unequivocal - he said that you needed product - content - to have a brand in the first place. It was reassuring to hear someone so confidently assert that things are where meaning begins (especially after the weirdness of the College Art Association Annual Meeting, wherein people complained that panelists were spending too much time talking about "things and images" rather than "ideas" as if they could be separated in visual art...)

I hope others will weigh in on the subject of craft and its possible radicalism with comments. We're looking forward to a few more posts on the panels I missed from students to whom I offered extra credit for writing. I'll also post links to whatever I see about it here, like this one to Jonathan Ive's site. Or this one, to christung, a design blog.

Part II: Word Craft

As I watched musicians perform on the giant projection screens in the wind tunnel, I figured out what is so strange about the Radical Craft conference...it looks more like an awards show than a conference. Think about it. Musical interludes. Short films (including segments from the Muppets and the Simpsons) to introduce speakers. Big corporate sponsorship. Fashion people. Stars!

Anyway - the first speaker in the wolrd craft segment of the show was Erin McKean(see the picture), whose stand-up lexicography drew cheers. It should be noted that McKean had a better dress than any of the fashionistas present. Setting out to dispell the "nun/librarian" myth of the lexicographer, she introdeced the scientist/reporter metaphor in its place. She cleverly walked the audience through the basics of assembling a dictionary, talking about the importance of the corpus with amusing examples (one can hardly resist adding to the Google footprint of "asshat" by including it here...). But her connection to the subject of craft was tenuous. In fact, her talk appeared to dissolve when it came time to "beg" for a new design for the dictionary itself. One was left questioning what kind of room there is for radicalism in a field as inherently conservative as dictionary compilations.

As she was leaving the stage, I began to wonder what place the dictionary McKean was talking about had in the brave and much-hyped new world of Wiki. And show should take the stage next but Jimmy Wales, founder and CEO of Wikipedia.org, the online encylcopedia. Those who have studied with me in any kind of research capacity know my distrust of the Wikipedia hive mind concept, and I tried ot give Wales a fair listening, but I still felt as though he was missing the point. As amped as he is about making a new encyclopedia available to the world for free, he doesn't seem to realize that the world expects it to be the same kind of authority as the old encylopedia. (Think of Jasper Johns remark about how one who intends to make chewing gum that is used as glue is actually making glue.) So when he points out that half the edits on the site are done by just .7% of the users and that the most active 2% of the users generate more than 70% of the entries, he seems to miss the fact that these are really small percentages - obviously larger than those of conventional authorship but still in figures that sound downright elite. His arguments were weak and biased - after all, can you really trust someone who uses the words "community" and "friends" interchangeably? - and his assertion that Wikipedia's radicalism resided in its open-source ideology struck me as too broad. What's radical and useful about Wiki is the way it reflects its users' understanding of any given subject, and that's also a limitation on it. It may be interesting and, in ways, radical (as if that's really worth anything at the end of the day...) but it's also not an ecylcopedia in the traditional sense.

I really want to dislike poet Billy Collins but one cannot dislike work that's so beautifully crafted. He describes his work as "suburban" and "domestic", and he reiterated a definition of craft offered earlier in the conference ("craft is something made by one person for another") as a way of asserting his reader-consciousness. Rather than lecturing, Collins performed his poems in relaxed way, reading from several collections, including his latest, The Trouble With Poetry. Beyond the exceptional skill with which Collins renders his subjects, his poems are enchanting for the way they are about poetry itself. Just as it seemed that he was going to coast by on the charm of his work itself, Collins let drop a terrific remark about the how art can be evaluated. Talking about haiku, he talked about how the strict, 17-sylable form “offers resistance to your self-expressive tantrum.” That craft might be a form of form – of container or barrier to the fluid nature of content – seemed radical in that instant. And rewarding.

Glamour Craft: From High to Humble

Greetings from the Art Center College Radical Craft design conference, where I'm pleased to be writing through the good graces of a heap of cold medication. This morning's panels included Entrepreneurial Craft (meds hadn't kicked in - I'm trying to find someone who can report on that one for you) and Glamour Craft: From High to Humble, which featured speakers Harold Koda, Claudy Jongstra, and Isaac Mizrahi.

Harold Koda was the epitome of the fashion scholar in his talk about the importance of cut as a basic craft of fashion. Spanning centuries of couture, his most compelling images were perhaps those of Issey Miyake's pieces made from single pieces of cloth. Along the way, he showed some exquisitely made dresses in which craft could be defined as the lavishing of extraordinary labor on a work (moderator John Hockenberry joked about designer jeans made "at the cost of sickening several dozen and killing a few of the laborers"). I was also pleased to see Martin Margiela's clothes dyed by molds and bacteria. But for Koda, it appeared that truly radical craft resided in the modernist adherence to material possibilities and that all the beading and dying was secondary to the cutting and draping. This struck me as a kind of attempt to reassert modernist principles, and a sad one in light of a passing remark that was part of Koda's talk - about the way that couture garments were really lures that attracted audiences for the more profitable lines of a designer's output - fragrances, accessories or ready-to-wear. It was as if to say artists should labor excessively on a few pieces that will attract attention to cheaper, more profitable wares (those that fulfilled what Hockenberry called and “acquisitive” lust.)

Cloudy Jongstra’s talk about her work in felt was staggeringly unfashionable – and, in the context of the group, therefore refreshing. She reminded me of Winifred Lutz in her concentration on the material properties of the wool, silk, cotton, and hay from which her felt is made. If there was anything “radical” about Jongstra’s craft (which she repeatedly asserted was ancient in its origins) it was her insistence on the craftsperson’s knowledge of a material’s properties and possibilities.

Isaac Mizrahi was clearly the star of the morning’s talk – and he appeared to know it. Anyone looking for a working definition of “radical craft” in his talk would be hard pressed to synthesize one from the anecdotes and sound bites he offered in response to Hockenberry’s questions (that Mizrahi was interviewed rather than delivering any prepared remarks made him seem even more like a bauble included to attract attention). This is not to say he wasn’t entertaining, but rather that one felt he’d say anything to earn the temporary love of the audience. And he was successful. Declaring at one point that “craft is getting the meds right” Mizrahi left the impression that he was saying whatever came into his head at the moment (a little like a blogger…), but he had clearly thought a little about some things. When Hockenberry asked him to explain his success at wedding high and low, Mizrahi admitted that he felt it wasn’t because he “did a great job” so much as that we are “culturally, socially and economically ready” for such a phenomenon (a little self deprecation goes a long way with me…). When an audience member asked him about “nostalgia” she clearly touched a nerve. “Everything I do refers tot he past,” Mizrahi said, “because it’s beautiful enough to refer to.” Perhaps the radicalism of Mizrahi’s craft is the construction of a stable identity in so many strata of the market and mass consciousness.

After all this, Target served us a swell lunch on which I’ve been picking as I write. But now, back the conferring.

Radical Craft

I'm pleased to say I scored a couple of session passes for the Art Center College of Design's swanky Radical Craft conference this weekend. Expect posts. Meanwhile, you can visit here for more info.

Others are noticing this event - see the designed objects blog for more hype.

Going it alone or getting along

''Who Gets to Call it Art?," Peter Rosen's documentary about the rapid-fire changes in American art in the 1960s, begins with a startling premise that it never really follows up on. ''What will the public think?" asks sculptor John Chamberlain of trends in art. He answers it himself: ''Well, who gives [an expletive]? It's their job to catch up."

Cate McQuiad of the Boston Globe begins her short review of Rosen's movie with this little anecdote, which is very much to the point of something I've been thinking about lately.

The other day in class I mentioned the "avant garde" and was met with blank stares by my students, who needed the idea explained to them (part of me was relieved...I mean, after all, wasn't the avant garde myth something a lot of us were out to get rid of in the first place?) I thought of one of my favorite reflections on an artist's relation to his audience, which appeared in an essay Jonathan Franzen wrote about William Gaddis called "Mr. Difficult". Here's a brief excerpt:

It turns out that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience. In one model...the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work, it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel...exists independent of how many people appreciate it. We call this the Status model. It invites a discourse of genius and art historical importance.

In the opposing model a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, the writer providing the words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group...This is the Contract model. The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection.

Substitute "artist" for "writer" and "artwork" for "novel" and you've got a common loggerhead at which artists often find themselves - should we concentrate on the nutrional value of the meal we're serving, or should we be looking for clever dressings to make the vegetables more appealing? Do we want to challenge or please or audiences?

The answers appear to be more complicated than one might expect. Nearly every artist I talk to these days - and maybe it's an LA thing - seems concerned with "serious" subjects and goes out of his or her way to avoid things that could be seen as trivial or self-absorbed. What you get is a lot of art that one feels people ought to be interested in because it's serious - like the problem of rural illiteracy or hunger in the developing world - but which few actually care about, a concerned minority that almost always excludes the artist himself. Everyone gets challenged; no one gets pleased.

I feel like the Dave Hickey of "Frivolity and Unction" - like making a rallying cry for art that artists actually care about enough to debate whether or not it needs to be shown in the first place. Art that they are too pleased by to let go, but too bothered by their own selfishness to keep to themselves. This is closely relates to my other platform these days - a forced anonymity for all artists under the age of 60. Under my scheme, all contemporary art would be sold as "anonymous" and the revenues passed through secret accounts to the artists. Besides destroying the market for fashionable artists whose names are more interesting than their work (insert your favorite example here), this initiative would have the added benefit of discouraging anyone from entering the profession for purposes of seeking fame, as any renown - even recognition - would be off the table for decades. Audiences would be free to choose their own pleasures and their own challenges in a world in which one could no longer call challenge a pleasure or pleasure a challenge as a means of excusing lapses of personal judgment.

Finding Someone to Envy

As a first year painting teacher and MFA student, I find myself regularly evaluating how to best instruct someone in the methods of painting. I waver between step by step, technical tutelage and simply giving the students the supplies and a loose assignment and helping them struggle (currently I live in the later). But all this thinking has got me evaluating how we are taught, or guided, because really I think that is a better description of MFA instruction.
Critiques seem to focus on looking at someone's work, at times I feel, just long enough or deeply enough to make a connection to some other artist, and then directing the artistic-sheep toward a new potential shepherd. Sometimes I feel like this process does more to expand my mental card catalog of artists, rather than expand my abilities to paint, but there is some merit to this method.
Since everything has already been done, more or less, all the wheels have been invented, there is little sense in totally reinventing, when we can get right to "pimping our paintings," taking the valuable framework of another, established artist, combining it with some shiny, chrome-like techniques of a few others, welding it all together with some ideas, and calling the galleries. But seriously as Robert Henri taught "whatever an artist leaves is so much for others to use as stones to step on or stones to avoid." Indeed there is some truth in that quote, another great quote, which really speaks to the value of this teaching method, came from Billy Collins, a Poet Laureate, whom I met last week, and had the pleasure of listening to. Mr Collins was asked how he learned to write, and how he teaches/ can others be taught to write poems, and his response was to the effect that, "all artists need to find people who make them jealous; people who can do the things they wish they could do, then through aspiring to be like that individual, they may discover themselves." He in fact mentioned that he spent years "stealing" from other poets and he turned out alright.
Perhaps artistic individuality is not an inborn idea, but based more on the particular composition of our experiences, influences and all those artists to whom we are directed who fill us with envy.

Blogstorm

Our first ever BlogStorm, scheduled to begin today, has been postponed (as much in my life has been) by the arrival of the baby and attendant scheduling conflicts. Hopefully, it will be presented before the end of the term; no one will be penalized for this unexpected change of plan. My apologies.

Bill Harris Painting ( I think of Keith)

Hey there! Keith, there is a local artist here at the shop that my studio is located that reminds me of your work. I thought maybe you'd like to check him out. His name is Bill Harris, and he's one of the nicest guys I've ever met. I really enjoy is stuff and there is a quality that reminds me of your work over the summer. Mainly the self portait you did. If you ever want any more info besides his website let me know cause I work almost right next to him. The website is http://www.wcharris.com Have fun!

You're all appropriate

InLiquid.com regulary has get togethers for curators and directors at various watering holes in and around Philadlephia. I cannot make the next one, but it came with a line in the invitiaton encouraging us to "feel free to extend the invitation to anyone who might be appropriate"... And I think you're all appropriate.

Here's the details:
@ N. 3rd, Tuesday evening, February 28th from 6:30-8:30 pm (N. 3rd, incase you are not familiar, is located on the corner of 3rd and Brown in Northern Liberties.)

Enjoy!

THE LAST FAVOUR

You are cordially invited to a spirited reading from Teresa Jayne's new book, The Last Favour, "a primer for young men on how to woo a woman." The event will take place on Wed., March 1-5:30pm at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, 2008-2010 DeLancey Place in Philadelphia. For more details, call (215) 732-1600, ext. 113 or visit the Rosenbach online at http://www.rosenbach.org. RSVP'S are kindly requested. Jaynes' is a gifted artist who was invited to create this book after her last installation at the Rosenbach in 2000, titled, Red Room. The Last Favour was co-published by the Rosenbach and the Borowsky Center at the University of the Arts, with funding from the Leeway Foundation and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. 

Of Patronage

I wanted to shout a little shout for Rebecca Solnit's piece in this weekend's LA Times about the recent sale of Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirits to Walmart heiress Alice Walton.
Solnit's suggestions that Walmart is trying to clean up its act by opening a museum of all the things it is not is a shrewd bit of linguist prestidigitation, but one wishes she's lingered longer on the history of robber barons cleansing their consciences through acts of public largess than on the preposterous notion that Walton might take an interest in "the art of her time". The fact remains that few have an interest in the "art of their time", especially among the patronage classes, who are inclined to even less interest when said art is critical of them and their business dealings.
Though I find the idea of a Walmart Biennial amusing, it would be foolish to insist it include only artists who protest Walmart’s policies and practices, in part because such a show would be a dreadful bore. As if providing any artist whose work amounts to propaganda - from the right or the left - would be a public service. Better to recognize the terrible complexity of the issue and look for artists who don't pretend to be above it. Perhaps, if they could be found, such artists might rekindle the public's interest in contemporary art, which they might (rightly) feel shares little with their own lives.
Then, we might really be kindred spirits again.

Fred Tomiselli Lecture @ The Fabric Workshop 2/3/06

Hi All, This post comes after the Fred Tomiselli lecture this evening. After a fried Bologna w/potato sandwich and two glasses of wine, I'm watching The Grizzley Man: with Timothy Treadwell, on the Discovery Channel. I think it has scared me to my bones! (I'm contemplating another glass/bottle!) That's another story. Since we Americans are all officially addicted to oil, I thought that I would relate an interesting project that Mr. Tomiselli offered. Tomiselli was talking about his process of collecting images. He showed pages of bird books with the images cut out. The images were haunting. They were perfectly liberated from their former rectangle with a surgeon's precision, like the empty silhouettes of Victorian shadow portraits. He mentioned the enormous amount of catalogues he received in the mail. He thought... Here we are, outside and observing nature, dressed in our petroleum based, weather managing wear! He made the most amazing collages of the birds wearing images of fleece and Gortex that he cut out of catalogues. The colors and textures mimic the actual colors of the creatures studied. More to come! Insightful and witty talk. (Agati, Doreen and I were not the "scruffy" art students he noticed in the audience!) Terri

NCECA

Just a quick question. Is anyone thinking about going to the Clay conference in Portland Oregan? Jamin London has offered a free place to stay (her house) and so far Tammi and myself have thought about going. I'm pretty sure as UARTS students we get a student discount so the registration is about $155.00. If anyone works in clay and has the time to take off in the middle of March then I'd take the oppurtunity to go.

Artists? We don't need no stinkin' artists!

Anyone else see Holland Carter's piece from today's New York Times about David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective at Harlem's Triple Candie gallery? Excuse me as I muddle through my complex feelings on the subject.

For those who missed it (or are too busy to click through the links) the gallery has long been interested in doing a show with the artist David Hammons, who has, for one reason or another, long not been doing a show with the gallery (collectors of major pieces were also unwilling to lend their holdings, Cotter reports). So, to make a long story short, the gallery Xeroxed and printed from its computers nearly 100 images of Hammons' pieces and taped them to the wall, and voila, instant retrospective. Call it the Kitty Kelly school of curating, but it sounds brilliant. (an image of the installation from their website appears above). A passage from Triple Candies' website notes that

On one level, the exhibition is about David Hammons' art and career. On another, it is about the art world: particularly how the strategic process of ascribing value to an artist's - by galleries, collectors, and even artists - changes the art's relationship to the public. Finally, this collection of reproductions is meant to question the status-quo of exhibition-making itself.

As a teacher, I've asked artists to simulate exhibitions in which they locate their work in the context of other artists with whom they wish to be associated using architectural models and PowerPoint presentations. Asking artists to behave like curators has - for a long time to me - been like asking workers to behave like management for a day. These purely theoretical exhibit projects have expended and attracted only intellectual capital, not the cold hard cash that dealers and institutions use to accomplish their missions, and have demanded from their audience - mostly other students - only the outlay of a few minutes of thought.

But as a curator, I’ve always felt like it’s my job to bring the real deal to audiences. If I cannot obtain the piece I want for a show, I have to reconsider the show (it has always struck me as being like editing a book; if I cannot get a brilliant essay by someone on a certain topic, I can’t take another one they had lying around as a replacement).

Part of me feels like Triple Candie is doing something (through its simulation) that many of us have been engaged in all along. Part of me now realizes the ethical complexity of what we’ve been engaged in all along through simulation. In a world in which the art object is increasingly irrelevant in the first place (see Sunday’s LA Times article on the use of modern architecture as a means of increasing snob appeal for shampoo and car ads…) art images reign supreme. If we want to participate in our culutre in the way it wants or expects us to participate, artists should be making images limited to the palette of web browsers, scalable for printers, and sufficiently graphic for production at any size. We should be ready for whatever we make to be repurposed and incorporated into others' work and products. We should recognize that we are in the raw materials business.