Contemporary Visual Culture

The Currency of Currency

2011-02-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

This essay accompanies the exhibition "Currency Part 2: Means of Exchange" opening Friday February 18th at the UAB Visual Arts Gallery.

Srdjan Loncar, "Value" (detail), courtesy the artist and Beta Pictoris Gallery, Birmingham, AL

To The Contrary

I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Money. It is many things. It has been described, variously, as the root of all evil, a gas, something you can’t take with you, or too tight to mention, among others. It is a source of power, jealously and comfort, and at times it is all three.

I am writing this while listening to “Got The Money”, a mashup of The Beatles and the Wu-Tang Clan, a sample from “You Never Give Me Your Money” providing a foundation, with Ol’ Dirty Bastard rapping over the top, and Kelis nailing the chorus melodically, if you can call “Hey/Dirty/Baby I got your money” a chorus…wait, what’s that he’s saying? “If you wanna look good and not be bummy/girl you better give me that money.” Means of exchange indeed.

In the arts, money has been interrogated and represented again and again, whether in Andy Warhol’s dollar bill and dollar sign silkscreens (pause here to contextualize Warhol’s unexpected transition from documentarian to semiotician), or, in more abstract terms, in Damian Hirst’s recent diamond encrusted skull. If there is something that incites passions and inflames tempers, something that is both factual and almost pornographic at the same time, it could be the value of art.

I begin here because Currency Part 2: Means of Exchange is an exhibition that critically interrogates and that maps the oscillating relationships between value and value – between some form of currency exchange on one hand, and, on the other, a work of art. This is not to suggest that this is a study of worth, or of price. Instead, it is a revelation that the artists in Currency Part 2: Means of Exchange, are well aware of art’s tendency towards this conflation of values and, through their works, each skewers it.

Let’s begin, out of curating’s traditional alphabetical order, with the works that first caused my realization that two consecutive print exhibitions could explore two different constructions of currency. In this case, Derek Cracco and I began with works by Curtis Readel, works that both appropriated and recontextualized money at precisely the same time. Readel is difficult to classify, for he works across a range of media.

What happens in his works is entirely unexpected. Before we descend into a post 9/11 pathos, let’s think philosophically about the fact that Readel’s works tease the edges of precisely the sort of ruins that many Americans find themselves in today – financial ruin, brought on in part by both executive decisions by former and current leaders, and by laissez-faire fiscal policies propounded by the U.S. Treasury. So what Readel does is simply appropriate imagery so familiar that most people don’t even consider its existence. Think, for example, of what is on the back of the U.S. fifty dollar bill. In fact, we categorize paper currency not by what is on the back, but who is on the front.

So when Readel creates either White House in Ruins, or U.S. Treasury in Ruins, he is playing upon both the ubiquitousness and the invisibility of the material itself as much as he is commenting on social structure or political voice. Then, to make the matter more complex, he takes something that normally appears roughly two by four inches, and he recreates it over a space of three by six feet. Here, the specificity of the object becomes apparent, and the comments and ideas gain voice.

At times, Readel also makes the two dimensional become three. We see the Genuis Seculi, a bronze bust of the dead George Washington. The term translates roughly to “Guardian spirit of the age”, something we could definitely attribute to Washington as one of the founding fathers and the ‘father of our country.’ With this depiction, Readel clearly recognizes how even the most venerated forebears aren’t necessarily immune from the rages of time, nor is what they represent.

This complex relationship, between the economic and the political, is also ‘ground zero’ for Dan Tague. Using a recurring element, the dollar bill in its many denominations, Tague teases out hidden texts. One need only think here of the post 9/11 examples of how a $20 bill could be folded to reveal “hidden” pictures of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, as well as the word “Osama”. Tague skewers this conspiracy theory rhetoric, highlighting both the elusive and the elisive natures of language. I am reminded here of an episode of Batman where the caped crusader crosses out letters on a penny to create the words, “Ted Tate: Mica”, leading the Boy Wonder to find Ted Tate at the mica quarry.

What Tague realizes is that given the almost demonic regard in which paper money is held, with the constant references to its value, or lack thereof, it provides the perfect ground for constructing complex dialogues. So, for Currency Part 2: Means of Exchange, we encounter four examples of folded or modified money. Tague highlights both the insidiousness of the process and the disparity of the outcomes in works such as “Unite Us.”

Srdjan Loncar’s briefcases, each containing a million dollars, do far more to divide us than unite us. Wielding something that looks like it came from Goldfinger, and Scarface and any hip hop video, Loncar’s briefcases highlight the relationships between money and desire. “I really wanted to make a work using money,” Loncar explained, “but there are really strict and specific U.S. Treasury guidelines on how you can and cannot reproduce currency. In the end,” he continues, “I realized that if I included the band as part of the work it removed the issue entirely.” “Has anyone stolen pieces from these works?” I asked recently in his studio. “Of course they have,” he laughed.

Loncar’s briefcases represent both the absolutely desirable and the absolutely taboo. Who wouldn’t want a briefcase containing a million dollars in hundred dollar bills? But who, at the same time, would be constantly afraid of its loss – stolen? Lost? Confiscated? It is as if Loncar has created desirability ne plus ultra, through a copy, a simulacrum, an other. He explains this work as part of a discourse on the value of art. Of course, complicating the matter is that Loncar’s million dollars doesn’t actually cost a million dollars, which isn’t to say that it isn’t worth a million dollars. It is just caught up in that oscillating relationship between stated value, use value and exchange value. And just what is a million dollars actually ‘worth’ in any event?

For Jonathan Ferrara, the issue is not about the value of money, but about its representation. In Shifting Dynamics, Ferrara also highlights the changing nature of the value of money. Installed, variously, from a traditional gallery work to a pile on the floor, its shifting characteristics embody the oscillating nature of the thing it represents. “The work was inspired in part,” Ferrara remarked recently, “by the shifting natures of the stock market, the housing market, and the idea of net worth. One day you are worth x,” he continues, “and the next you are worth x – 40%.”

Of course, the unspoken variable in any analysis of market worth is for our purposes the value of art. Ferrara, as both a practicing artist and a gallerist, has the unique perspective of being both a maker and a marketer of objects that circulate as currency in the world of visual arts. So when we encounter Shifting Dynamics as a pile on the floor, it is both an enticing pile of money and the rubble that remains after the market, whatever market it may be, has begun to crumble under our very feet, or at least off our very walls.

For Imin Yeh, that value can be depicted precisely. In her “Benjamin Print Project”, Yeh has created an exact relationship between the value of the works in the series and the value of on portion of the cost of her education. As Yeh explains, “The Ben-Jam Project is a hand-pulled edition of 85 woodblock prints. I am selling each Benjamins for one hundred dollars each. If and when the edition sells out for a total value of $8500, the proceeds would be equal to one federal subsized Stafford Loan.” In fact, this is the entire student loan amount that Yeh has for graduate school, so she has visually and economically represented the ‘cost’ of her graduate education. She has also reduced participation in the retirement of this debt to $100, being the value of the dollar that would be represented if Benjamin Franklin were to appear on its face.

So, in this moment, Yeh synthesizes face value, exchange value and cost, pegging it incrementally at $100, and overall at $8500. This process of establishing value may seem arbitrary, for $100 seems like a small price to pay for a hand-pulled woodblock, In many ways, this is precisely the point – that the print, capable of being reproduced in a multiple, creates the opportunity for exchange at values that become lower and lower the more times a work is created.

Turn then to the works by Obadiah Eelcut. Entitled Noney, these are handprinted sheets of money that can, as the artist states, be used “for the payment of any amount, anywhere.” Its lineage lies as much in Marcel Duchamp’s Tzanck Check as it does in other forms of non-government issued printed money. Its value derives both from its face and from its capacity to be used as a negotiable instrument.

Eelcut recognizes the disparity between perceived and actual value, writing on noney.net that “[c]urrency today is more abstract than ever. The concept of a guaranteed standard is gone. Money, whether in your pocket or your bank account only has value because everyone believes it does.” In fact, Eelcut highlights the value of his money, Noney, by giving it the value of “0”. He offers noney as something that has the power, or lack thereof, to negotiate its agreed value as itself, and in itself, at each point of exchange. In a sense, this renders the value of Noney as both nonexistent and infinite in precisely the same moment, which is precisely Eelcut’s point.

Eelcut is also interested in the journey Noney makes, and he invites people to send their Noney stories to him. In a sense, this is reminiscent of the “Where’s George” currency tracking project where bills, identified by their serial numbers, can be tracked geographically. But while the possibility of encountering a “Where’s George” bill is reasonably high, Noney’s limited printing makes the likelihood both smaller and more special. Eelcut’s commitment to Noney as simply a means of exchange makes its existence even more compelling.

Regardless of intention, both money and representations of money exist as means of exchange. Currency is the printed or minted expression of a shared belief in value as representational. For Currency Part 2: Means of Exchange, each artist calls this common delusion into question. Readel explores the frailty of its architecture, both physically and psychologically. Ferrara depicts is indeterminate value. Yeh highlights its regularity, and its simplicity. Eelcut reminds us of its opportunities for exchange, and of alternate systems thereof. Loncar brings both humor and vice to its depiction. And Tague takes us on an almost mystical journey through systems, meanings and messages.

In every instance, we participate as willing believers in the value of the objects and the means by which they are exchanged. It is here, in the realms of currency, that values are made, remade, destroyed and made again.

The Simplicity of Multiplicity

2011-02-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

Printmaking’s complexity, as well as its simplicity, lies is its multiplicity. The capacity for seriality and repetition places printmaking in a class of artistic practices that sits uneasily within the fine arts precisely because of this capacity. The idea of repetition being an anathema to fine arts is as common a statement as is Walter Benjamin’s observations on the aura, authenticity and originality.

I begin here because the two exhibitions that form the season of Currency are framed not by this idea, but instead by a framework that is both far simpler, and perhaps more complex at the same time.

Currency Part 1: Modes of Expression is, in many ways, a very traditional exhibition. It contains the largest collection of contemporary print works made with traditional media that has ever been exhibited at Artlab. And, in many ways, this observation was initially an impediment. My reservations stemmed in part from my own inability to critically position printmaking as a contemporary discursive practice, a reservation that was dispelled by my conversations with professor and printmaker Derek Cracco. My reticence was exacerbated by what I perceived as printmaking’s emphasis on technique – something that while not unimportant, was not and still is not my primary criterion for evaluating a work of art. Here is a contemporary dilemma, one in which I perceived that the value of a work could not be derived from its medium or methodology, but was instead wholly dependent on its concept.

I believe this belief, which I acknowledge can border on a prejudice, stems in part from the historicity that accompanies so much printmaking today. It is difficult, for example, not to consider the practices of printmaking as falling somehow outside the fine arts realm. Consider, for example, an exhibition from the early 1990s that appeared in London, Philadelphia, and Canberra, Australia. It’s title? Lasting Impressions: Lithography as Art. The title implies, by necessity, that maybe lithography (and by extension every other print medium), might somehow not really be art – it might be a commercial practice, or a practice so trapped in its industrial/commercial applications that whatever it was it would never scale the heights of the true fine arts – painting, sculpture and architecture, of course.

We know, of course, that this is not the case. We accept that the print medium has not only expanded our experiences of art, but that it has also opened its market. We see the screenprints of Andy Warhol, the transfer prints of Roy Lichtenstein, and the etchings of Kiki Smith as works that assert the primacy and the possibility of modern and contemporary printmaking.

I begin here because it is from this framework that Currency Part 1: Modes of Expression was conceived. When Derek Cracco first posited the idea, it was framed in the ways I have outlined above. I believed that there was duplicity in the concept much as there was duplicity in the idea of printmaking itself. It seems self-evident that the very process of printmaking, the creation of a copy without an original, creates something that is unique and universal in precisely the same instant.

What follows, then, is an exhibition that explores the notion that printmaking stands as a trope for the contemporary creative practice. One could read the media themselves as being subject to a single question, which became “What does it mean to express an idea through the practice of a printmaking medium today?” What is, and what do we mean, when we speak of its mode of expression?

The six artists in Currency Part 1: Modes of Expression, each have an individual approach to a medium and a methodology. Five of the six artists are represented through their emphasis on abstraction, while the sixth explores a terrain somewhere outside pure abstraction itself.

Consider, initially, the three works by Polly Apfelbaum. Each is a lithograph, a work made possible by the natural opposition of oil and water and the capacity this creates for binding ink to a plate. Apfelbaum’s iconography is both simple and familiar. She began drawing and printing flowers almost twenty years ago, initially by simply sketching some of Warhol’s flowers. This unexpected appropriation stands as indicative of printmaking itself. Apfelbaum subtly appropriated and altered one of history’s grand appropriators, recontextualizing the imagery to be delicate and intimate. The flower, as a flat block of unified color, stands as a symbol for nature far more than it actually represents nature itself. Rainbow Love, Mountain Ranch, New Mexico is a twelve-color lithograph that arrays itself vertically in terms of color but horizontally iconographically. Her flower theme, a consistent element in her works for over twenty years, provides a constant yet ever changing element that can serve to unify her works. In When Opposites Attract we see two approaches to the monochrome representation of a unified subject. On the left, we see what we might regard as the gesture, while on the right we find her marks reduced to the flat blocks of color that appear in other works. These latter icons are, in a sense, more indicative of the modernity of printmaking, while the former refer to its history.

Artist Laura Berman’s works from both her Gridrocks and her Rockpiles series consider the relationships between the form and pattern of nature and the essential flatness of printmaking. Writing on the Gridrocks, a series of relief monoprints, Berman has observed that the works are inspired by both the permanence and whimsy that cohabitate in her rock collection. Formally, the pieces are ambiguous, a series of organically shaped, multicolored shapes arrayed across a sheet of paper. Berman’s monoprints are the only ones in the exhibition. Perhaps the single most challenging element of these pieces is that in representing the rocks Berman’s reductions make their lineages more hidden. The idea of the rock as a subject creates an automatic dichotomy, one between the beauty of nature (where the rock signifies both groundedness and permanence), and the shortsightedness of the narrow minded (in which someone might be ‘dumb as a box of rocks’).

Carl Fudge’s screenprints combine aspects of historical art, contemporary technology, and traditional printmaking techniques to create works that refuse to be historicist while at the same time being historical. The significance of these works lies not in our capacity to recognize their source material, as it is not about whether or not we can locate the pieces comfortably. Instead, Fudge’s transformation of the source material into a series of pieces, which are represented by variables –x, y and z –, means that the works themselves become both singular and universal. Our expectation, or even Fudge’s assertion that the pieces actually have a historical framework hinges on our complicity in believing this to be the case. What is most challenging, and therefore most unexpected, is that screenprinting has so often been used as a medium of pop and post-pop reduction, something suited for both Warholian excess and garage band success.

More unexpectedly, Fudge’s nomenclature creates a kind of expectation that the works themselves have identifiable sources. A brief search suggests antecedents might be Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s Komposition Z, or although seemingly less likely, Wassily Kandinsky’s Komposition X. Fudge’s abstractions become complex studies in pattern and repetition, multilayered works that obscure their primary sources and become something more than pure abstraction at the same time.

Kevin Haas’ Inventory series shares much with Klingberg’s Brand New View. The most representative of the works in the exhibition, Haas has still distilled his iconography to its simplest elements. The black silhouettes highlight the unexpected subtleties of design, and the works represent objects that are traditionally found at human scale. Haas’ focus on traditional printmaking techniques highlights the absolute banality of the subjects themselves. The works, intaglios on paper, capture subjects that would not seem to merit such complex treatments. In this disparity, Haas distills one of the focus areas of contemporary printmaking to its simplest elements. Whereas historically printmaking allowed members of a social structure to assert status and power, contemporary printmakers use complex techniques to represent quotidian objects. For Currency Part 1, Haas’ nine-piece grid of objects from the everyday world almost creates a taxonomy of the overlooked. Like Klingberg, the capacity of the banal becomes the celebration of unexpected beauty.

At first, both the beauty and the seemingly obsessive qualities of creation inherent in Karla Hackenmiller’s works are not necessarily apparent. Liminal Collision, an etching and spit bite aquatint, is a delicate abstraction with threads etched across the plate. The Liminal Slices combine etching and collage, adding an unexpected texture to our expectations of the print. This unexpectedness is represented through the collision and passage of information across the ground, much as the way in which the idea of the liminal and liminality address the space one inhabits between two states – between conscious and unconscious, or between asleep and awake. Hackenmiller uses traditional methods to represent universal experiences that are more often illustrated through the moving image.

Gunilla Klingberg’s Brand New View is the least traditional print work in Currency Part 1, at least to the extent that it lacks a traditional ground. Her large-scale, site-specific works turn mundane corporate identities and well-known corporate brands into large-scale rosettes or mandalas, icons for a new view of the corporate age. For Brand New View, she hybridizes American and international corporations, familiar brands like Wal-Mart or Target. The former’s oft-overlooked star becomes a repetitive signifier of success and glamour, while the latter’s ubiquitous target icon serves to create dynamism and movement. Kmart’s oversized K becomes transformed into something suggesting the Indian subcontinent, while the Northeastern supermarket chain Shoprite makes an appearance with its former logo, still in use at some locations. Klingberg’s installation makes the banal become beautiful, as the texts and embellishments become transformed into patterns suggestive of a higher value. One need only walk a short distance to the stained glass rosette window on the UAB campus to see an antecedent that is both transformed and skewered by Klingberg’s repurposing of such iconic logos. The vinyl serves to stand as one of the most contemporary approaches to printmaking. Its capacity for boundless design and endless identical representation means that it shares the process of printmaking at least as closely as it strays from printmaking’s traditional media.

For now, Currency Part 1: Modes of Expression serves as a tentative step towards reconsidering and recontextualizing contemporary printmaking. It seeks to work at the edges, to question the roles of traditional media as mark making methods in the modern world. Obviously each artist is committed to the potentials that traditional mark making provides in the printmaking context. But rather than be constrained by media, these artists take control of both the media and their histories to assert new ways of using well-understood tools.

Perhaps each of these artists explores a duality that might not have readily been apparent. Fudge and Klingberg explore the intersections of technology and tradition. Berman and Apfelbaum sit on the edges of nature and process. Kevin Haas uses the contemporary world as a means of abstraction, and printmaking as its method. And Karla Hackenmiller allows the spaces of transition, the liminal spaces, to be both reflected upon and represented through both her process and content.

Clearly contemporary printmaking allows us to process this ongoing process, that of thinking historically without historicizing it. Printmaking may be the most ubiquitous artform we encounter each day. Perhaps it is more pervasive than photography. In any event, it is time to rescue it from its consignment to history, and to understand that tradition and traditional are not the same thing. Instead, printmaking has a currency as a mode of expression that is defining our understandings of the world and its expression today.

Beast? Beauty? Bewildering.

2010-12-16T10:54:00.001-08:00

Somehow, I simply can’t bring myself to watch Bridalplasty. In television’s latest bastardization of Pygmalion, women compete for the opportunity to have plastic surgery prior to their wedding. They receive this benefit after a series of competitions, they form alliances, and we watch as our culture slides further and further into the realms of the ridiculous.

Almost fifteen years ago I wrote an essay entitled “Rewritten on the Body” in which I explored the sudden expansion of progressive advertising targeting both men and women, encouraging body alterations and ‘improvements’ through plastic surgery.

The notion of this process isn’t anything new. It has been represented, artistically, through works such as Andy Warhol’s ‘Nose Job’, or, as I mentioned previously, through the ongoing body alterations that mark Orlan’s entire practice.

In a sense this transition from ugly to beautiful is classically American. Ours is a culture marked as much by the notion of the instant fix – think here of the Jordan Chase character in the just completed season of Showtime’s Dexter – as it is by a complex belief that outer beauty is identical with inner beauty. This is not to suggest that in certain instances there is a correlation between the two, both for physical and psychological reasons. But somehow, somewhere, when a group of women compete for surgery as part of a reality series, taking the process steps further from both its many predecessors (The Swan, Extreme Makeover, Dr. 90210), the process itself seems somehow more tawdry, more meaningless, and more unnecessary.

Somehow, culturally we are so far removed from Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, that we can barely imagine a face that would make us walk across the street. Instead, we are trapped in the cultural freakshow that gives us the genius of Diane Arbus at the same time that it gives us the shallowness of Bridalplasty.

Perhaps for 2011 a resolution should be that we move away from the constant aggrandizement of the equation ugly duckling to swan, and towards something that is altogether more complex, more valuable, and more meaningful.

Visit a museum. If you want to see a moving image, try “The Artist’s Museum” on display through January 31 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. For a more contemporary New York approach, try John Currin’s takes on beauty until December 23rd.

Whatever you do, remember that the ongoing mass media reconfiguration of the ideals of beauty hinges on a willingness to give it value. Imagine the discussion that is taking place – Wife: “I’m going on Bridalplasty to make my boobs bigger.” Husband: “Great, and at least we won’t have to pay for it.” Oh wait, you’ll pay, we’ll all pay, for the ongoing visual trauma as we lose our abilities to make any discerning decisions about beauty or value with out the intermediacy of the TV.

Are You Allowed to Have Some Candy?

2010-12-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

We are living in a strange time now – strange, because the more we assert our freedoms, the more we restrain them at the same time. Rights, responsibilities and obligations are like an interwoven tapestry that is fraying at the edges.

What is strangest is that while the flyover states, in general, become more and more insular, the slightly outside the mainstream media continues to shower us with articles, essays and images of semi-debauchery that, while not necessarily representing the metaphorical fall of Rome, at least making its stumbles more salacious.

Consider, for example, Vice Magazine, and its VBS.TV. Where else would you find a link that suggests, “Click here for War, Politics, Economic Turmoil and Sweeping Global Havoc on Every Front.” There, interviews with Japanese serial killers are interspersed, inexplicably, with stories on gorilla survival. It’s as if our culture’s fetish for the macabre, coupled with our progressive values, somehow congeal into this digital realm between voyeurism and activism. Strange space.

This similar type of revelation is interwoven into the photography pages of both the Village Voice and LA Weekly, basically bastard twins of the same media organization. There, Nate “Igor” Smith, Mark “The Cobrasnake” Hunter, and others, document a range of events tagged with the ever-enticing NSFW label. The Voice, its Slide Shows ever so demur, highlights its image of a well-known lesbian dance evening with the title “Choice C-words”, somehow finding the true title too forthright for the link on the splash page even though it appears immediately below? The NSFW fantasmagoria continues with the Erotic Photographers’ Fundraiser and the Exxxotica Convention 2010, among others.

What is so surprising is that in a country to afraid of the human body that basic television is fined when it shows a breast, many media outlets recognize that in larger cities people are interested, somewhat after the fact, in the freedoms certain of their neighbors are able to express on a regular basis.

One of the most consistent examples of this realm of documentation comes from Merlin Bronques and his site Last Night’s Party, which asks the question “Where were you last night?” Probably not at the exclusive poolside Miami bash replete with disheveled models in various states of dress and deportment. I imagine that the wannabe hipster in the Midwest probably imagines that he or she could be there, but somehow they probably won’t, and this dissemination of the experience probably serves not so much as a means of inclusion, but merely as a reference to how exclusive this type of expression probably is.

I ask these questions because there seems to be such a chasm between our desires for complexity, whether visual or written, and our support for it publicly when that representation appears. Publications such as Vice, the Village Voice and LA Weekly, and sites such as Last Night’s Party, probably serve as the known but unknown underpinnings for more complex dialogues about these desires as the public response to the David Wojnarowicz work at the National Portrait Gallery serves as a focal point for censorship in the fine arts.

Somehow, in the depiction of religion, we have become so culturally afraid, and so immediately reactionary, that our capacity to consider the intentions of the artists simply falls away. In our desires to both reflect upon and simultaneously reject images of the human body, we find sites that fall within our realms of acceptability, as well as ones ones that simply respond and report. Somehow, we all know outwardly and inwardly that the intricacies in weaving a dialogue about the erotic versus the pornographic, for example, is one most of us will never have.

We could reconsider the critical dialogues that ask these questions, from essays such as The Pornographic Imagination by Susan Sontag through The Story of the Eye, by George Bataille, but in each instance we would somehow fail to fully comprehend what is at stake. What is at stake is not a battle against interpretation, as Sontag might suggest, but one that is against representation. We move further and further away from the image as the site of dialogue, and closer and closer to the moment when the image becomes merely the moment.

We watch helplessly as the capacity of an image to generate a discourse becomes more and more in danger of having any relevance whatsoever. Imagine the day that Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ ‘A Corner of Baci’ becomes impossible to exhibit because it contains sugar, it could promote unhealthy eating or, in an unintended moment it could lead someone to suffer from a glycemia related issue.

Artists, be warned, the space for discourse is shrinking. Each time artists, organizations or institutions fold like a house of cards, we each reinforce the belief that the questions we ask, and the answers we propose, have little or no value or meaning.

Consider this the next time to hesitate before supporting anything that pushes, gently, the boundaries of our shrinking freedoms. Look at the Slide Shows at the Village Voice or LA Weekly. Click on over to Last Night’s Party. Buy a complex work by Sontag, or Bataille, or any other number of writers. Or support a publication that tries to highlight the fact that representing the body isn’t always already the same as making pornography. Otherwise, we’ll be back to covering Renaissance statues to protect their propriety, and the hemline index won’t have anything to do with economics, but it will have something to do with the restraints of our freedoms.

Dear John

2010-12-07T13:27:00.000-08:00

When John Fields first told me about “Dear Chuck: A Love Letter in Five Parts,” I wasn’t sure what to think. I thought it was a joke…maybe.

I think the issue, the challenge, the question, was where to situate these works. Obviously, these five paintings can’t be a joke, because no one would expend so much effort on making a one-liner. And no gallery would exhibit something without significant artistic merit. But where can we site these pieces? Are they homage? Are they appropriation? Are they something else entirely?

I begin here because the simple fact of the matter is that I’m not sure where these works reside. Perhaps one of their closest ancestors would be Andy Warhol’s works based on the writings of Truman Capote, fifteen pieces Warhol exhibited at the Hugo Gallery in 1952. Or maybe it’s just that Fields considers Chuck Close to be an enigma, a cipher, an icon, an artist whose works are so emblematic yet so ubiquitous that it is difficult to determine where the affection, or maybe the affectation, begins and ends.

Stylistically these works are more complexly detailed than those in his most recent previous exhibition. He has expanded his range of blacks and greys from ten to roughly thirty, creating more tones, more subtleties and more variations. The scale, which borders on immense, is both enticing and repellent at precisely the same time. Somehow, the flatness of the images and the distillation of tones into simple blacks, whites and greys gives the works as much in common with death masks and other face coverings as they have with Close’s most restrained palettes. Obviously, the lack of color simply serves to shift the focus to the ‘love letter’ itself, which, when read in its entirety says:

“Dear Chuck, you complete me. Love, John. XOXO. PS – you never call anymore”

Lovers of pap popular movies will of course snicker at the Jerry Maguire reference, but here it is something else entirely. Here Fields is suggesting that Close’s deconstruction of the practice of portraiture into its discrete elements – into a series of tones, delineated by a grid, and arrayed across a canvas – gives Fields a freedom that he never expected as a painter. It is as if Close himself has given the finger to the whole practice of academic painting, and this is the reason that Fields loves him. What Close did, and the lineage Fields wishes to continue, is one in which the discourse of painting doesn’t revolve around outdated or outmoded ideas of perspective or representation. Instead, in the lineage of what we might even term the flatliners, Close, Warhol and Alex Katz, Fields is able to lay it all on the surface. That’s something worth loving anyone for.

So the true subtlety lies in the shift from the idea of love for a person to love of the creative practice that they represent. It is as if Fields is writing an artistic ‘thank you’ note, one in which his ongoing reiteration of the mantra thank you, thank you, thank you is evidenced by the layers and layers of pigment that he brushes across the canvas he is painting upon.

I think it is a great challenge for viewers of Dear Chuck to make this distinction. It would be altogether simpler to try to lump Dear Chuck into the pastiche of post-postmodern works that refer to something that becomes a commentary on an appropriation of an appropriation.

I don’t believe this is the case here. For in Dear Chuck, Fields asserts himself as the author by his appearance in the initial image, practically mirroring Close’s Big Self-Portrait (1967-1968) that is in the collection of the Walker Art Center. In Fields’ painting the cigarette is on the other side, flipped reversed, we could even call it mirrored. He, like Close, is staring out at the audience, smoking a cigarette, après le diner, après sex, après something.

Of course the other challenge is to consider how Fields, like Close, uses his friends in the images. In 1970, Close remarked, “I don’t want the viewer to see the head of Castro and think he has understood my work.” Fields doesn’t want the viewer to think this either. He wants the viewer to question just what the love letter is actually ‘telling’ Chuck Close.

Maybe the fact is that these five paintings don’t tell him anything, that they exist outside the realm of his experience, and Fields understands that - just like we always understood that most fan letters aren’t really answered by the stars. So when we look at the works we get drawn into the deception. It’s almost like a secret, and we know something that Chuck Close doesn’t.

All five portraits reflect this theme, with text scrawled across the apparently shirtless chests of Fields’ male and female subjects. It is as if he is inscribing his appreciation on himself, and others, because there isn’t a way to represent its internalization and actually still see it. All five stare blankly into the lens, Chuck Close style, as if the indifference or lack of emotion somehow had the capacity to remove the intimacy of the process. Remember, this is a love letter in five parts. Yet ever ironically, Fields makes the ‘letter’ a pastiche of clichés, icons, something that borders on the emotions he might be feeling if we were able to believe him. I think the more complex dynamic is between Fields and his sitters rather than between the artist and his desired audience.

Strangest of all, I believe that everyone who appears in these paintings probably does ‘love’ Chuck Close, and I believe that the artist loves him the most of all. But I imagine Chuck Close, in his studio, trying to formulate a response. I imagine he writes, “Dear John: You adore me. Love, Chuck. XOXO. PS – it’s almost the sincerest form of flattery.” And then he tries to title the work. “Dear John: A Love Letter in One Part.”

Actions Speaking Louder than Words

2010-12-06T08:55:00.000-08:00

National Portrait Gallery Director Martin Sullivan’s acquiescence, apparently against his better wishes and at the instruction of Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough, to remove David Wonjarowicz’s video “A Fire in My Belly” highlights the challenges faced by institutions and their reticence to actually engage in complex discourses. This reminds me of an exhibition curated by the artist Joseph Kosuth, for the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1990.

Well before the museum became a repository for solo exhibitions by popular reality show contestants, it was actually a site of some complex critical discourse. For “The Play of the Unmentionable,” Kosuth was allowed to delve into the museum’s storage, extracting and exposing, if you will, pieces that would have possibly been deemed offensive in many contexts.

Strangely, the cover of the book is blurred on both Amazon’s and Barnes and Noble’s websites. Strange because the subject of the book is precisely this type of occlusion, obstruction, tendency towards the hidden.

Museums and galleries are trapped between an assertion of freedom and a commitment to its visual expression. In many instances, their response is to purchase challenging works, simply to bury them in their archives never to be seen again.

Consider, for example, the Larry Clark exhibition “Kiss the Past Hello”, currently on view in Paris. This exhibition has so enraged some viewers that not only has it actually received a ‘rating’, but there are ongoing and continuous calls for its closure. Minors under the age of 18 are forbidden from viewing the exhibition’s contents. In all likelihood they could find similar material in any number of accessible popular publications on newsstands all over Paris, but allow them to view this material in a gallery? Non!

Clearly, the forces of censorship continue to triumph over the assertions of artists’ rights. Museum professionals have both the capacity and the responsibility to protect these rights, but often they, like Martin Sullivan, simply fold like a house of cards.

This type of passive censorship is no more dangerous, no more insidious, and no less threatening than censorship that is active, assertive and continuous. It is time for arts professionals to take a stand – in the US, they may do so under the protections of the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is on display at the National Archives and Records Administration, which, I would note, is not a member of the Smithsonian Institution’s group of museums. Perhaps Mr. Sullivan might want take Mr. Clough on a walk over, and they could spend a few moments considering the document's contents. My understanding is that a trip from one location to the other is under half a mile, and could be driven in one minute.

Slap that Stereotype...Hard!

2010-12-03T09:24:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Hicks’ “Kill Dat Stereotype”, on display at Birmingham’s Roam Projects, highlights the challenges young artists face as they explore complex ideas from a range of directions, each time, hopefully, aiming at the same target.

For those familiar with Birmingham’s gallery scene, the works in “Kill Dat Stereotype” have been exhibited before, but never as a group and never with an overarching conceptual context.

From the outset, let me say that I appreciate Hicks’ works. Some more than others, and some, more problematically than others. Perhaps the biggest difficulty any critic today faces, or even anyone writing on contemporary culture, is that the overarching signifiers – “blackness”, “whiteness”, “queerness”, for example – each create such a loaded discourse that critical engagement becomes problematic at best, impossible at worst. At its best, it teeters on the apologistic, at its worst, on its perceived insensitivity.

With this in mind, as a mid-forties, middle-class, educated, white male, I will consider “Kill Dat Stereotype” not so much in terms of its authenticity of ‘blackness’ or the black experience, but from the perspective of its consistency, its capacity to convey meaning, to emote, and to express.

Perhaps the biggest challenge Hicks faces is that, like many young African-American artists, there is no clear distinction between pieces that are about identity and pieces that assert identity. The casual spectator then simply lumps everything into work about the black experience, and moves on.

I’m not sure, also, whether Hicks is really killing dat stereotype, or in fact using it to reinforce his assertion of its existence. Most powerful are the images in which he washes the blackface off himself, only to reveal the fact that he himself is black, calling to mind the uncertainty of William Faulkner’s “Light in August” where Joel Christmas’ ‘blackness’ is always oscillating, always waiting to be defined, always something to be moved away from.

So when Hicks photographs himself, hooded, in fabrics reminiscent of African tapestries, with a noose around his neck, it is as if he is asserting the history of black consciousness, but maybe not necessarily moving its discourse forward. Here, Hicks himself is passive, almost as if he is enslaved. Is he enslaved by the history of the black experience? Is he enslaved by a creative process that compels him to remain precisely within this dialogue? Does the discourse become simply self-reflective? These are all issues that Kill Dat Stereotype seeks to address, but somehow what we become left with are beautiful images that are in danger of being overwhelmed by their own technical artistry.

Several years ago Hicks regaled me with stories of nighttime jaunts across Birmingham, Alabama, roommate in tow, stopping to photograph said roommate, nude, with a noose around his neck, in locations public and private. Somehow, the odd juxtaposition of black man photographing black subject contemplating horrific black experience publicly in Birmingham, Alabama, provided these images with an immediacy and an unnerving quality that Kill Dat Stereotype may lack. It is not a question of better or worse, but merely a question of external versus internal, of trying to represent a cultural experience versus trying to explore a personal one.

I think this is where Jonathan Hicks is now, exploring the chasm that can exist between the two. I am not sure he, or anyone, can necessarily Kill Dat Stereotype. I think he might give it a good left hook, go crunk on it, give it a bitchslap, knock it down…but it is the person who perpetuates the stereotype, not the person who it represents, who is the only one who can kill it.

Framing Nostalgia Locally, Buying Globally

2010-12-03T09:19:00.000-08:00

Tonight, in Birmingham, Alabama, Bare Hands Gallery hosts its final opening, before closing December 30th. I can only imagine it will be a huge night, with well-wishers, collectors, artists, the curious, the caring and the casual all pouring out onto the sidewalk on 21st Street South. While the forthcoming display of love and care will be touching, the demise of Bare Hands Gallery simply illustrates the difficulties of art organizations in middle-tier cities, and the challenges they face.

Problematically, many artists in smaller cities approach the business model differently than an artist represented in a major city might. In the former, the production, display and sale of works forms the basis of a “more is better” equation in which the greater the output, the greater the opportunity for sales. In a city like Birmingham, apart from monthly exhibitions, artists have the opportunity to participate in Magic City Art Connection, ArtWalk, the Moss Rock Festival and other similar events. Then, in many instances, they seem bewildered by why their works don’t seem to sell as well at galleries when they have their biannual exhibition or are included in a group exhibition.

This isn’t an argument for availability or scarcity. Instead, I believe that the actual art-buying public is reasonably small. In many instances, worldwide, artists trade their works with other artists rather than each purchasing them in commercial spaces. Many artists have studio sales. Time and again, the opportunity to saturate a limited market may satisfy the legitimate need of an artist to make a living from their work. But somehow, this simply can't be reconciled with partnering with a commercial gallery to exhibit the same pieces and create the same sale opportunities.

How do we address this disparity between artistic production as day-to-day supply item versus artistic production as limited availability object that creates increased demand, and therefore increased value. It is a basic economic argument, a relationship between supply and demand.

I love Bare Hands Gallery. My wife and I had our first real meeting at an exhibition opening. Over the years, we have purchased pieces by a number of artists. But like someone said recently, “If your idea of supporting a space is putting three dollars in the tip jar and drinking a few beers, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out why someplace is closing.”

Galleries close every day. It is a fact of business as much as it is a fact of life. I encourage people to buy something from Bare Hands Gallery during its final month, but out of a desire to support local art since it’s too late to save this local business, it would seem. And remember, nostalgia for something after it’s gone is nothing like supporting something while it is here. Just imagine if we’d all bought something last week, or last month, or last year.

Jurgen Tarrasch: Artifacts

2010-09-29T09:17:00.001-07:00

For all bodies are in a perpetual flux like rivers, and parts enter them and leave them continually.

Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology

For the moment, we’ll simply call Jürgen Tarrasch a landscape painter. This is of course an oversimplification and, on some level, it might not even be true. But I begin here because I want the opportunity to engage with the works in Artifacts on an experiential level before I even begin to contemplate what they might mean.

This method of approaching art is something of an anomaly. And, in many instances, this will certainly be the case. But here I believe that taking the time to engage with the works on a purely visual level, to interact with the series, and to move through the installation without a predetermined narrative, will lead to a more subtle, more contemplative, and more unexpected experience.

Of course, Tarrasch actually refers to himself as an organic abstractionist. This might provide one with a framework for categorizing the pieces, but it might also provide little guidance in understanding what they mean. This is significant because Artifacts is something more than a series of disparate pieces. It is rather a large-scale, site-specific, painterly installation. In moving within and through the piece, one finds oneself both within and without the work at precisely the same time. In the front gallery, it is almost as if we are able to detach and disengage, while in the back gallery it is as if we are being enveloped, literally swallowed by the work itself, or more accurately being consumed by its gaze.

Artifacts may be considered as a suite of interrelated pieces. Consider, for example, The Spill, a series of three works suggesting the unexpected power of nature. Each slowly expands within the space at the same time that its densely packed elements are dispersed across the canvas. This idea of the fragmentary nature of experience reflects Tarrasch’s philosophical observations on the nature of the physical world, or, perhaps better, the physics of the natural one.

Drawing on a long line of philosophical precedents, including Immanuel Kant, Baruch Spinoza, and most specifically Gottfried Liebniz, Tarrasch’s approach involves a complex process of depicting the ways in which forms become matter, and matter depicts form. “How can I define my observations of nature,” Tarrasch wondered, “and how can I define these theories on canvas?”

What resulted is an installation in which Tarrasch explores both the rooms outside, and the rooms in his mind. Both The Spill and Relieve depict sequential observations of the external world. In Rising we experience the observation of a space that has depth at the same time that it is flat, and has color at the same time it is monochromatic. Tarrasch describes Rising, a particularly complex and subtle work, in what seem to be the simplest of terms. “I was riding over the hills near my house, and I was struck by the ways the light and the mist were simply hanging in the hills.” Without this context, this work could depict almost anything, but here it stands as a signifier for something that is happening just outside your window.

In moving between gallery spaces, one transitions from the observed to the remembered world. Here, Tarrasch has transformed the space entirely. Works expand beyond their formal boundaries, creating shifting perspectives, unexpected relationships, and opportunities for closer and closer observation. Each work is a discrete object but, at the same time, its pattern and repetition extend beyond the edges of the surface. In expanding, each piece fragments, with discernible elements appearing subtly within, between and beyond each work.

It is here that Tarrasch’s philosophical analyses of the processes of memory become most evident. As Gottfried Leibniz postulated, Tarrasch considers the actions of memory to be both physical and physiological. It is as if the processes of neurotransmission have poured out of his thinking and onto the walls.

“The flow of thoughts, much like the flow of nature, can be beautiful,” Tarrasch remarks. “They can be straight, or patterned, or random.” In The View (Leaves),we encounter an unexpected geometry. Tarrasch’s leaves are square, simple placeholders for any thing, any thought the viewer might want to put in their place.

At times, Tarrasch makes this idea of materiality even more manifest. In one of the works from the series Stream, nuts that form an organically irregular pattern on the work’s surface expand to float away on the wall itself. They appear again, contained within smaller, discrete groups in Random, immediately adjacent to Stream. That Tarrasch would choose to break from the perceptual depth of the pictorial field within this space simply serves to reinforce his beliefs that patterns of thought can be both arbitrary and random. Had this rupture of nature occurred in the front gallery, it might have been entirely expected. Here, within the confines of the represented mind, is completely the opposite.

Tarrasch also explores the implications of place, of a site’s specific geography, and the unexpected objects and symbols that emerge. In Vines, Tarrasch represents, however abstractly, a ubiquitous invader, a foreigner, an “Other.” “I may not have been able to have painted a series about vines while living in Germany,” he observes. “Sometimes, although you may see a negative in nature, something like kudzu, an introduced vine, for example, it creates the opportunity for you to see something positive within your works.” Tarrasch strives to represent the power of nature, using observation and representation to find and define the colors, but more importantly, their clarity. He also uses specific methods to rupture our passage through his pictorial space. The shimmer and luster of his fresco technique creates unexpected moments of additional light, of reflection, of flicker, and of movement.

“I hope,” Tarrasch remarks, “that viewers will have a type of shared experience when they view this project. I want their thoughts to flow, to build, to climb up, to become a stream of thoughts that transition from and between each work.”

In the end, Tarrasch’s approach is one that leaves a great space within which viewers can insert themselves. Just as The Spill creates a space that moves visually from just open, pushing viewers further and further into the works, Relieve uses exactly the same approach to gently ease viewers out of the space. From The Spill’s dense shades of vibrant blue through the color and variation of The View (Leaves), Stream, and The Vines, we finally arrive back near the beginning, but in an entirely different place. Here, in Relieve’s spring palette, we are thrust forth out of the space and directly into the natural world.

Before leaving, we might turn to consider Rising again. Its flatness opens to reveal deeper and deeper layers of depth, its monochrome both absorbs and reflects its subtleties over and over again, revealing more and more colors - although we know that they are exactly the same. Our perceptions are struggling here, trying to handle the complexity, trying to understand the movement, our thoughts both ahead and behind themselves in precisely the same instant.

Artifacts refers to the fragments that are left behind, to the flashes on both our retinas and our memories. It is a challenging and complex work, beautiful in its simplicity.

One might think here of an observation Tarrasch made when speaking about the perceptions the work might receive: “I don’t want to complicate the situation.” Perhaps not. Instead, he is content to lead viewers through both the rooms outside and the rooms in his mind.

Making it Work...for art?

2010-07-29T12:40:00.000-07:00

I've tried several times to watch the Bravo series "Work of Art". When it was casting, I knew a number of artists who went to the cattle call, or casting call, or arts call, or whatever we want to call it. One even made it to the "second round", which means he at least made it past the initial screening.

So now a group of people are competing for a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It's great for the winner, it's probably good for art. I'm not sure how good it is for Simon de Pury, who somehow seems to lack the televisual tartness that Tim Gunn brings to Project Runway.

Whatever the case, the idea that a television show can make (but I would like to think not break) an artist's career isn't necessarily good or bad television. Instead, it simply represents a condensation of the arts education process, coupled with a heightened opportunity for access.

What's so surprising is the idea that the "opening" is when one really looks at the art. Anyone who has ever been jammed elbow to drink, struggling through a lobby, knows that people who really want to look art art don't do so at an opening. More often than not, it simply doesn't work, and the "idea" of the opening devolves into something part spectacle, something part expression, something part exhibition, but all the while to inhabit a space that exists somewhere in between.

What Work of Art really highlights for me is how far away we are as a culture from having either the experience of art or the idea of art a part of our everyday lives. Instead of actually attending a gallery (patronizing in this context is all to problematic a word), we can experience art mediated through the television screen, coupled with senses of ennui, frisson and drama, all the while never really considering how we might contextualize these works were we to encounter them in a non-televised context.

In a sense, a show like this highlights the disregard with which much art has come to be held, at least to the extent that one could combine figurative painters, designers, installation artists, conceptualists or whatever else into something that has no more cohesion than the opportunity to get a solo museum show.

The problem is that when that television viewer finally drags themselves down to their local museum, where they may or may not even encounter an exhibition of contemporary art, there is a disconnect that is far more significant than the cross-media or cross-discipline hopping we're seeing portrayed on tv. For in that very moment that this viewer (who may have become motivated to visit a gallery precisely because of this show) discovers that their local cultural institution isn't really like the show (cut to visitor trudging up marble stairs on neoclassical facade), we create precisely that instant of disappointment that museum and gallery professionals find so horrifying in the first place.

So let's think a little about both the opportunities and the outcomes for Work of Art. The artist gets something great; I imagine the sponsors get something great; perhaps even the judges get a 'bump', maybe more twitter followers, maybe more readers, maybe more visitors to their commercial galleries. But for the people who might really think that this thing represents the real art experience - just what do they get for their work?

New Beginnings

2010-04-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have been absent from posting for a considerable time due to the unexpected implications of an injury. In my absence I have thought a great deal about how Contemporary Visual Culture could more fully explore what it means to create and consume visual culture.

Contemporary Visual Culture remains committed to critically interrogating visual culture in all its forms, and this forum now returns to its original goals.

I trust that I will be able to continue to explore relevant and engaging ideas in the twentyfirst century.

Welcome back.

Reframing the Question

2009-09-08T08:48:00.001-07:00

The capacity to take an object and use it in a way that it wasn’t intended is what marks creativity today. When I say this I mean that somehow the mere alteration of the picture plane can’t be enough in the present day. Nor is it enough to merely alter an everyday object so it becomes unexpected – a bottle rack, a urinal, a snow shovel.

Perhaps the problem is that the capacity to rupture our expectations as viewers has become so challenging that simply making a cathartic image isn’t enough.

Many years ago, in an essay on the New Zealand painter Max Gimblett, I suggested, “Consider the shaped canvas.” My assertion was that the very existence of the structure – the quatrefoil, in Gimblett’s case – was enough to “rupture the rigidity of the modernist grid.” What I didn’t realize at the time was that the picture plane of a canvas, or even of a photograph, was all to often the grid itself, its own restraint, suffering under the delusion that what happened wthin its limits was somehow sacrosanct.

Historically, artists have struggled with this very dilemma. They attach objects to the canvas surfaces, making portions of the image emerge in relief. Yet this has the danger of becoming a doll’s house, a simple interpreation of what’s happening beneath. Some artists, like Eva Hesse, create works in which the work itself becomes its own base, its flatness always already ruptured by a non-pictorial element that it contains. Still others, like New Zealand artist Julian Dashper, deconstruct the image into its constituent elements.

So where could this possibly leave painting?

Perhaps the issue is that at its limits of allegory and illusion painting is a medium marked simply by a set of values that judge quality over content. We speak of someone who “can paint”, by which we mean that someone has the ability to render in its utmost detail. We don’t speak of someone who can “move” or “emote”, but simply of someone who might have the capacity to make it more real than real.

I’m not sure this is an effective framework for understanding the contemporary arts in the present day. By saying this I am not implying the endless endgame of painting, but simply asking a question: “When the frame sets the limits, who really cares what happens inside the frame?”

Ten Questions: Fred Mitchell

2009-08-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

Ten Questions is a new feature by curator and Gallery Director Brett Levine. He asks artists, both emerging and established, to respond to ten questions regarding their artistic practice.

First to be invited is Fred Mitchell, an emerging artist based in Las Vegas, Nevada.

BL: Who or what is your most significant influence when making work?

FM: My daily interactions, experiences, relationships, and emotions subconsciously immensely affect my work. I suppose that my art is my conveyance of where I am currently at or about to be. If that makes any sense? I have plenty of heroes all of whom I consider to be an artist in some form or fashion.

BL: What piece of creative equipment do you most like to use?

FM: After much thought, I have only been able to narrow this down between two things. Technology and Nature.

BL: Do you describe your thinking as more analogue or more digital?

FM: I suppose I would see it has a middle-ground between the two schools of thought. I have grown up in a very interesting time in the world when there are frequent technological advances but I have on the older side of this revolution. I am sure there are kids growing up nowadays, unaware of what analogue actually is...

BL: What is your biggest creative success?

FM: I am not sure if I would consider anything I have done necessarily a creative success, but I am pleased with ideas that I have seen all the way through. Mainly, 4D work I have done would be projects I am truly proud of.

BL: What is your biggest creative failure?

FM: Each time I stumble, I like to think I have learned something.

BL: Which book, if any, first influenced your thinking about creative practice?

FM: On Photography by Susan Sontag has been a pretty important to me, although I do not think that was necessarily the first to impact me. Film has played a huge part on me as well as music and literature, and all in different aspects. I could narrow it down and probably explain each if you like though.

BL: Are you more afraid of originality or appropriation?

FM: Probably appropriation because I worry that my point of view may be misconstrued in the eyes of someone else.

BL: Do you archive or destroy works that you view as failures?

FM: I have a problem with being impulsive. I make an effort not to destroy failures because I need time to look at them and figure out how to put the next foot forward, but in the past my impulsive side has caused me to destroy projects. Hopefully that side of me will go dormant in the future.

BL: What medium do you view as the most relevant in the present day?

FM: This issue is one I have obsessed over for quite some time. To keep it brief I will say that I feel the most relevant mediums are any that can combine with science or the digital world to create something new and engaging.

BL: What medium do you view as the least relevant in the present day?

FM: I do not really consider any mediums do be less relevant than others but I do feel that some mediums are faced with a greater difficulty appealing to a wider variety of individuals.

Fred's works can be found here: http://yay-fredmitchell.com/

What's Working?

2009-08-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

Day after day, art magazines, blogs, newspapers and other media outlets categorize a shrinking field. Museums and galleries close, staff are laid off, students in arts-related programs obtain degrees for which there is no foreseeable opportunity.

What’s evident is that the arts as its current model exists – educational institution, creator, writer, critic, curator, collector, gallerist, agent, muse – simply doesn’t function any more. The market itself is so top-heavy, even after its recent ‘adjustments’, that works of art and their relative values have no correlation today. This is as evident in the four figure prices of emerging and mid-career artists as it is in the speculative nature of the auction market. Dollars and euros seem, to ‘coin’ a phrase, chase good money after bad as a market built on demand dwindles to bewilderment.

Consider, for a moment, what it means for a major corporation like Polaroid to have its collection, wait, its assets, appear in public and private sales. What can it possibly mean if, using recent figures from artnet.com, as many as six hundred and twenty seven works by Ansel Adams suddenly enter the market?

Here’s how the house of cards must have worked – speculators, pardon me, collectors, purchased major works in an overheated market, driving prices and values up for everyone involved. Now, in a cool market, not only are the implications of that strategy becoming evident, but every organization reliant on the market is suffering. What’s even more remarkable is that educational institutions that should have been immune – those ivory-tower bastions of scholarly pursuit, ne’ertofore sullied by the vagaries of the market (heaven forbid) – now find themselves in precisely the same predicament, with fewer donors, shrinking endowments, ambitious plans.

So what in the world can this possibly mean? Will we see the market become a ‘cash-for-clunkers’ emulating, bargain chasing, free-for-all positioned by whoever might be left when the galleries and auction houses have swept their rosters clean of ‘surplus’ staff or shuttered their doors entirely?

Maybe the actual issue is that it is time to lift the veil and recognize that art is a market, that apart from its scholarly frameworks, its intellectual positioning, its speculation on mood and emotion, in the end its simply a transaction that is based as much on supply and demand, scarcity and availability, as anything else.

So what we have now is a more educated class of educated people, artists, professionals, supporters, languishing in a field of closures, cutbacks, and changes of scale.

I wonder if anyone took the time to consider something on the way up – did anyone outside the bubble really care? Did more people come to exhibitions? As prices were being driven up, did it actually attract people to the market, make them more generous with their time and money? Did we really make it bigger, stronger and faster? Or was it just some bloated behemoth teetering on the edges of speculation and belief, propped up by language and then deflated when the bubble burst.

Ask yourself now, what’s working? I’m in the business, and I don’t even think I have an idea.

Strange World Video

2009-08-03T14:05:00.000-07:00

For a work that is almost fifteen years old, Pipilotti Rist’s 1995 “I’m a Victim of this Song” remains as compelling as it did when it appeared in the Biennale of Sydney in 2000. Then only five years old, and still fresh, I described Rist’s voice as she works her way through Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” as sounding as if she were gargling with broken glass. Hearing her version again after so long, my initial thoughts remain intact.

What surprises me after such a long time is how, somehow, we have witnessed a transformational moment in image consumption in which, for the everyday viewer, the idea of Rist’s intervention is almost unimaginable as art. Now, when everyone has the chance to mash up the latest hit and post it somewhere until a bot removes it, “I’m a Victim” seems almost nostalgic.

I mention this because what we are witnessing is the realignment of expectations in video art. That’s not to suggest that any of its core principles have changed – the non-linearity of its relevations, the real-time experience of viewing. But somehow viewers now approach these types of works without even the understanding that they are art. Videos posted on Artform.com may have the YouTube logo emblazoned in their lower right corner in many instances, but viewers of YouTube videos don’t even experience these images as art. Instead, I would argue, these have become part of a fine arts detritus that is overlayed on the visual experiences of the everyday.

Still, the notion of art as video, rather than video as art, might just be revolutionary, the insidious idea that an artwork might somehow slip up onto the YouTube favorites.

Just wait until some hipster thinks they’ve discovered Peter Campus for the very first time. Then you’ll see what I mean.

Tired of Art?

2009-07-31T08:08:00.001-07:00

With all the gallery closings, devaluing of artists’ oeuvres, and a general malaise in the art world, at least from the perspective of collectors who speculated and dealers who sold, maybe the reality is just that people are tired of art. At least, tired of the current model where one artist after another has his or her solo show then, miraculously (if they sold enough the first time, or perhaps if their contracts stipulate it,) two years later they show again.

In the interim, they dutifully count the months, and their collector base dutifully waits with baited breath.

But what if something’s wrong with this model – wrong because two years is an eternity in the art world, wrong because two years won’t necessarily make someone’s art innovative, wrong because the market is a fickle place that twists and turns and somehow becomes a self-perpetuating behemoth beholden to nothing but itself.

Art today almost invites one to be tired of it. At the other end of the biannual exhibition spectrum is the endless stream of flickr posts or Facebook updates that reduce every creative act to a post, make everything perfectly identical, reduce it to pixels and almost obliviate its value.

Artists operate in a strange place where the dealer/artist model seems ripe for revision. Collectors and speculators alike want access, questions of taste seem entirely meaningless. It is as if the entire process has been reduced to cashflow and guesswork, hoping, usually beyond hope, that the one artist you might be interested in has the potential to “crack it”, as they say, to make it big, to take off, to be something other than his or her other classmates from an MFA program. Anachronistically, we speculate that someone might have “the right stuff”.

The problem is that this mysterious “stuff” is just as elusive to the gallerist and the collector as it is to the artist. Every artist has to operate under the self-deception that his or her work has the potential to be the best ever made.

So now, in an endless sea of speculative works, everyone experiences what I will term vision fatigue – a neverending stream of hopes and desires spread across a range of media so diverse that no one can be an expert in them all.

What happens? Well, for the most part people simply retreat to the TV. My new favorite game is speculating on who might have made that exceptionally cool – though also somehow nondescript – artwork that just flickered by on the screen. I’d try to remember what it looked like, but I’m tired, so tired, I’m on the verge of falling asleep.

Keep Dumbing it Down Until Everyone Gets It

2009-07-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

I suppose it’s how you approach it. As a curator, I spent many years in the South Pacific, exploring themes of globalization, territorialization, isolationism, cultural studies and related topics only to find myself within the confines of the American south. What is so surprising about the south is how far within itself it remains, how the discourses that should be paramount become subsumed within the overall veil of the culture wars, how art has a voice that teeters sometimes on silence and how, somehow, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Many years ago I sat in a conference with keynote speakers Lynne Cooke and Elizabeth Sussmann, and four days later in the same space as the late Kathy Acker took four hundred culturally and creatively intrigued listeners on a fantastic journey.

Somehow, sometimes, the periphery becomes the center. Displacement is overcome by distance, and isolationism is replaced by its multifaceted international doppelganger.

I raise these issues because it appears that art maybe teetering on an edge of irrelevance. Not so much in part because it has nothing left to say, but in part because what it has to say is so often said into the face of deafening silence.

Dialogues are now more often than not carried out within the confines of a tweet, subtly placed within Facebook pages, or subsumed by the assumption that somehow meaning always transcends.

Instead, what it does is teeter on the edges of repetition and pastiche. The recent death of Dash Snow made me realize just how short our memories are, as if Larry Clark’s Tulsa had never existed, as if Nan Goldin had never snapped an image, if the eroticism of George Platt Lynes in the face of legal and social consequences had never happened.

What seems surprising so far, however, is that the laudatory missives seem absent, suggesting that maybe, just maybe we’ve pushed art as far as it can go. Maybe we’re at the point where we’re not so much interested in the naked as in the nude, where excessive consumption isn’t indicative of innovation, where somehow, somebody or bodies is trying to determine how the whole world of art is going to continue to be relevant.

It’s hard to imagine that the days in which a three-minute attention span courtesy of MTVs twenty-four hour videos now seems an eternity as text messaging and tweets whittle our capacities for expression into smaller and smaller fragments. Artists works become digital experiences sorted through Google via resolution, all the better to be displayed on non-calibrated monitors in various NSFW environments.

And yet somewhere, there on the periphery, in the Antipodes or Aotearoa or China, somewhere on the Pacific Rim or on the edges of Africa, somewhere crossing into or through the occupied territories is a discourse on art that isn’t always already prefigured by its Puritanism or its reservations. Instead, it is positioned by intelligent discourse confident of the opportunities and the potentialities it faces.

But here while I sort the possibilities into two columns, “job-keepers” and “job-losers”, I wonder just where we lost the ability to engage with complex ideas in intellectual ways.

It's All About the Title

2009-07-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

As the art world feigns disinterest, intelligent artists young and old spend time applying for a coveted spot on Bravo's "Untitled Art Project", something that artnet.com or the Village Voice suggested was the perfect title already. Cuts have been made, with a friend learning that they had not in fact proceeded to the second round.

But unlike a culinary competition, or one that focuses on design, how does a profession that is already marked in part by its superfluousness - one does not "need" art, despite protestations to the contrary, whereas one "needs" clothes even to the extent that their absence creates a legal liability - create a result that has the capacity to change the winner's world?

Over lunch today I was discussing this very conundrum. Our conversation went something like this:

Artist: I didn't even know the auditions were on.
Me: Would that have made any difference?
Artist: No.

Artists themselves may be struggling with what this will mean as professionals anticipate the challenges. "Today is the life drawing challenge," as pixellations cover our cultural inabilities to accept we all have a body; or, "Today, contestants, you will make a sculpture from what you can find in the junkyard in the next ten minutes" - cut to exciteable artist crashing into rusted hulk, cue medical attention.

In any event, hopefuls in four cities are auditioning, hoping that somehow this will catapult them into being the next big thing.

Remember the last big thing died in a room at the Lafeyette Hotel last week, and his name was Dash Snow. Ever seen his work?

Crossing Out A Signature Style

2009-06-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

I was recently discussing an artwork that was by a major artist but regarded as not indicative of their “signature style”. I asked an artist whether or not he felt there was a need for artists to visually develop throughout their careers, and he responded that in his opinion this approach had actually held him back in the market.

Think here, if you will, of a signature style. In creative fields, we often talk about chameleons – Madonna, Bob Dylan, even, if you will, Robert Rauschenberg. Then, at times, we find that artists visit and revisit their breakthrough styles, even if it seems that over time this could perhaps work them into a visual corner.

Barnett Newman speaks of the revelation he had when he painted “Onement 1”, widely regarded as his breakthrough painting. He says, perhaps metaphorically, that he stared at the painting for a very long time. Months. What came next was a body of works punctuated and articulated more than anything else by a “zip”, a vertical band dissecting the canvas. Some paintings had more than one zip, but they all had at least one.

This signature style allows viewers to develop a shorthand for artists – “that’s a Warhol, that’s a Pollock, that’s a Newman,” they might say, “that’s an Agnes Martin, that’s an On Kawara,” and so forth.

Each of these artists has in some way developed an aspect of their practice that allows viewers to enter into their works. At the same time, this doesn’t imply that their works are any more or less valued, or any more or less understood. It just implies that a silkscreen painting with a slightly askew registration is more often than not a Warhol, and that a painting of a date, in white, on a solid ground, is more often than not a Kawara.

What this also means is that for certain artists this can become a limitation, a straightjacket. Not so much for the artist themselves, but for viewers who have an expectation that art is always both recognizable and immediate.

I believe, in fact, that comfort and immediacy may have replaced analysis and challenge as some of the key aspects of viewing art. In a field in which there is a constant desire to expand audiences, and a concern about alienating what must necessarily be a dwindling audience, is there an argument that signature styles lead viewers to view artworks? I think so. This checklist, which becomes dangerously close to simply marking a scorecard of classic or contemporary works, leads both artists and curators into a place in which recognition becomes synonymous with experience.

I am not sure that this is necessarily so. I am also not sure that a signature style is either good or bad for art. What I do know is that artists themselves ponder precisely this question, as to gallerists, auctioneers, and collectors. The idea that a work is marked by its maker in such a way that everybody knows leads us all into a space in which breakthroughs become tentative and experimentation is in danger of marginalization.

This also doesn’t mean that Gilles Deleuze’s statement in Plato and the Simulacrum leads us to an answer – it is not viable today to merely posit this question under the rubric of the postmodern dictum, “only that which is alike differs, and only differences are alike.” Instead, I would think more of the words of Leonard Cohen in “Everybody Knows”: “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded/everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.” No doubt that artists, at least are rolling the dice and crossing their fingers each time they take a tentative step away from the styles that they, or their dealers, believe ‘made’ them who they are.

Full Screen Infothesia

2009-06-01T13:54:00.001-07:00

Somehow the idea of an “endgame” essay about art seems to hearken back to the heydey of the eighties. Yet it seems that for whatever reason, we should perhaps be thinking about the implications of technology, information creation and dissemination, and the ubiquitous resolution of the 72 dpi image. It is as if apart from the impossibility of actually experiencing most works, I think there may be an “infothesia” happening. What I mean by the term is the idea that not only is the experience of art becoming more and more difficult as it becomes both more globalized and more fragmentary, but there is a belief that is exactly the opposite of the one proposed in Museum Without Walls.

Perhaps we are now at the edge of an abyss in which the experience of art is deemed to be as valuable whether experienced personally or digitally. The stigma of the reproduced image has, in a generation, been replaced by the expectation that this is precisely how one will see a work.

It is as if the expectation that our experiences will be compressed – MP3 files replace .WAVs, more information gets squeezed onto a personal media player of whatever type, and somehow that smaller and smaller image, that slightly altered audio experience, suddenly becomes the norm.

This is not to suggest in any way that this is necessarily problematic. When the cover of the New Yorker magazine can be created entirely on an iPhone, or when a series of squelchy, glitchy chords can transform into a genre of music – glitchcore, anyone? – then what both creators and critics must understand is that the baseline experience just simply isn’t the same. It’s simply the result of pressing the “full screen” button.

So what does this necessarily mean? I wrote recently about a pheonomenon I had termed “microsaturation”, and I think perhaps “infothesia” is its necessary outcome. Artists of all types will have to struggle against this perception. When the entirely of your visual experiences come from a Nintendo DS or an iPod Touch in landscape mode, your expectations simply must be different.

One of the great experiences in life could be the transcendental experiences of viewing a painting. But maybe, just maybe, that same image, enlarged, pixellated, transformed, might also be transcendental too.

Apologists can argue all they like about the death of art, about its ends and its implications. Maybe, instead, we should be talking about the death of the medium with a nostalgic wave to its demise.

Kentucky Rain Keeps Pourin' Down

2009-05-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

It is genuinely hard to predict what the implications might be, but Paducah, Kentucky’s Artist Relocation Program seems to have its heart, and its economics, in the right place. Apart from its slightly disconcerting title, the program provides opportunities for artists to acquire free or low-cost properties that they commit to refurbish. In exchange, they receive, you guessed it, free or low-cost properties.

Artists are of course at the usual epicenter of gentrification. Seeking expansive spaces and low overheads, creative professionals are usually some of the first to pioneer neighborhoods that have been forgotten, urban centers suffering blight, quaint towns that have somehow fallen off the beaten path. So, when Paducah, Kentucky, institutes a program to draw precisely these people, it is evident that some degree of visionary thinking is involved.

What is even more revealing is that eight years after the program began, the City of Paducah is still taking out ads in Art in America, among other publications I can only assume, to continue to promote the project.

I would imagine that, in the current economic climate, if you were a creative professional with a desire to acquire space, and if you had the skills, experience or nous to rehab a space, Paducah might just be the place for you.

There and Back Again, and Again

2009-05-21T10:57:00.001-07:00

There’s really no clear beginning or end. Or so explains Annie Butrus, standing within the galleries displaying her series, Peach Tree Trail: New Works from Culp Farm. Here, twenty-eight diptychs, each a total of twenty-eight by fifty inches, explore the four seasons in a single peach farm in rural Alabama.

Butrus’ investigations of Alabama peach orchards, both painterly and culturally, have been a keen area of focus for five years. Now, after beginning a series at a single place, Culp Farm, Butrus recognized that a late spring freeze could dynamically alter both the physical and the economic conditions of the farm, its family, and their crop. She decided to visually pursue the implications of this challenging event further.

Technically, her diptychs reflect an object and its shadows, although the horizons don’t necessarily remain consistent. Instead, the images laid upon the panels, and the depths created through the layering of glazes and resists, stand as metaphors for the passage of time. This is reinforced through the structure of the exhibition, in which each season’s story is told across seven consecutive panels, with the ruptures and slippages that nature always includes.

“I enjoy making works with rules,” Butrus observes, “but through interrupting the linearity of the seasons, by slightly rupturing or restructuring time, I am able to reflect how nature itself is uncontrollable.”

This dichotomy between structure and chaos allows Butrus to segue between panels that are more representational and others that are almost entirely expressionistic. In the middle of the series, for example, four consecutive works read almost entirely as Rorschach blots, while a few panels later an almost entirely white block at the top of a work suggests being blinded by the sun.

It is these breaks that make the works, when viewed together, so rewarding. The pieces are capable of being viewed individually, but their whole may read more complexly than the sum of their parts.

Color is also key to the experience. As Butrus remarks, “The way I’ve been setting up the emotive qualities of the colors gives you clues to how to move through the space.” The exhibition leads viewers from left to right along a linear track that is familiar in a Western tradition. Butrus had always envisioned this construction, believing that its reverse might simply be unnerving. As it is, the seasons themselves are not defined by texts or markers, so understanding that the works begin and end in winter is a subconscious realization.

One of the challenges presented was a space punctured by doors and windows. Butrus used this to create what she terms the exhibition’s rhythm, remarking that towards its end it is punctuated by several staccato bursts. “One of the challenges of presenting the works as a continuous linear experience,” she notes, “is the possibility of sags or weak points.” She compensates for these possibilities by shifting between panels that are more or less representational, as well as being more or less internally mirrored. She refers to this constant shift in mirroring as “strained symmetry”, which is used to create tension within and between the works.

The twenty-eight panels in the Culp Farm series are smaller, more gestural, and more abstract than many of Butrus’ earlier works. She remarks,

these paintings have become more dynamic… I had certain goals with them. I wanted these pieces to be as minimal and as raw as I could possibly get them. I also didn’t want to rely on any additional senses, as I felt that this would allow me to push my visual language further.

This was, in part, a recognition of the control and polish of her earlier works. Both the scale, the format and the installation of these works provided a space for exploration. Her focus became one in which simple oppositions such as positive and negative, or light and dark, became the significant measures for the composition of each work. She also approached the pieces as having a linear progression, a narrative that was constructed to tell the story that had motivated these works originally.

“The late freeze of 2007 was so significant,” Butrus remarks, “that I wanted to address how that specific event had so dramatically affected a single place.” As a result, Butrus chronicled specific trees in a particular orchard over the course of a single year.

What may seem anachronistic in a digital age is the fact that Butrus works en plein air, carrying sketchbooks and tracing paper to the orchards to track the passage of time as the trees cast their shadows across the ground. These are then transferred to her panels, as obverse and reverse images, creating the diptychs that comprise each single work. She is committed to the technical pursuits of painting and believes that it is the fundamentals of painting that, when interpreted or altered, have the greatest potential for innovation.

“I am really intrigued by color theory and I use it to guide the palettes that I use.” This is evident in her warm, rich blacks, and the bursts of pink, yellow, red and green that cover her gessoed panels. The colors push out from the surfaces and overlap from one panel to the next. This creates an almost cinematic sense of movement. One might consider it to be the antithesis of meditations on urbanism like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, among others, or Michel de Certeau’s chapter Walking in the City from The Practice of Everyday Life.

In the end, Butrus’ meditations become elliptical, leading the viewer almost back to the point of beginning. But somehow, it is not the same. The simple spatial dislocation of the gallery’s architecture gives the exhibition a defined beginning and end and mirrors the simple fact that, for Culp Farm as well as for everything else, time has passed. A new period begins, with the same name, yet somehow its place and space are completely different. It may be Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall, but it will not be that Winter, that Spring, that Summer or that Fall.

Instead, the Peach Tree Trail will continue, as a series and perhaps even at Culp Farm, but it will never again be a portrait of those trees, in that place at that time. Perhaps this is why we will recall what Butrus said in the beginning when she remarked, “it is like I am making works that have no clear beginning and end.” And yes, there is a beginning, and an end, but yes too, they are not clear indeed.

Which Picture, What Story?

2009-05-13T07:46:00.001-07:00

Matthew Schechmeister’s recent article, “The Unlikely Events of a Water Landing: New Photos From Flight 1549,” an essay with images by photographer/photojournalist, documentarian and, ultimately fine artist Stephen Mallon published at wired.com, highlights the slippages and interstices in our understandings of both the ways in which images are captured and, ultimately, the ways in which they are received.

In an era in which an audience is far more likely to see one of Mallon’s images than, say, a work of more characteristically regarded fine art, simply because our exposure to mass media is far more pervasive, one might remember that at times this notion of photojournalism simply transcends the strict limitations we traditionally place on the fine artists.

Two remarkably disparate examples might be the photographic responses in the wake of 9/11 that resulted in the incredible, and incredibly moving exhibition, “Here is New York,” with its subtitle, “A Democracy of Photographs.” I had the privilege of seeing the exhibition in its original venue in 2001, only weeks after the tragedy. In a city marked most then by its silence, this exhibition gave both the relevancy of photojournalism, the immediacy of the digital image, and the existence of the “citizen journalist” (regardless of how problematic I find that term) a voice that was far more powerful, far more moving, and far more expansive than anyone could have expected.

What separates these images from something like William Eggleston’s “Stranded in Canton” or perhaps Larry Clark’s “Tulsa”, or even Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is that at the same time that they are documenting these events, they are always already aware of the fine arts context that is inherent in the works. As a result, these pieces purport to be situated somewhere well outside the motivational space of a work by Stephen Mallon, although this clearly can’t be the case.

The challenge comes from the situational positioning of the images. It appears that Mallon recognizes the convergent values of documentary and art, or, perhaps, documentary as art. At the same time, it seems that he understands the specific needs of each genre, and may perhaps even ask himself the question, “How can a complex documentary image also meet the needs and expectations of the fine arts?” Clearly, his compositions, framings, exposure, and subject selection are grounded in an understanding of both what the image needs to mean and what it hopes to share. If you then juxtapose any of his “Water Landing” images with ones by Larry Clark from the Tulsa series, wouldn’t they both merely map differing positions along something like a photographic construction of heroicism? Wouldn’t one merely show an obviously heroic success in the face of danger, while the other would merely indicate the apparent failure with the slightest possibility of success in something like Clark’s “Accidental Gunshot Wound”?

I ask these questions in part because I believe it is the role of the curator, as well as the role of the critic, to consistently and constantly evaluate images of all types and media outside the frameworks of the academy, and thereby outside the realms and restrictions of the traditional fine arts.

We might recall here the words of the late Donald Judd, writing in his classic essay “Specific Objects,” where he made what might be the ultimate subjective analysis now somehow dressed up as an objective and overarching rule. He said, “A work of art need only be interesting.” Yes, Donald, that probably is the case. Now how do we go about constructing a set of criteria and values that might actually help us respect what ‘interesting’ actually is.

Microsaturation

2009-05-04T14:24:00.001-07:00

Call it microsaturation. From the outset, let me say that I don’t twitter. I don’t follow you, and you don’t follow me, and we’re both probably better for that. Perhaps you are a friend on Facebook, and that makes it somewhat simpler for me to communicate with you. Perhaps this simplicity stems from the fact that I may be perpetually lazy, or perhaps I like the distance inherent in the digital world, or perhaps I genuinely am too busy to pick up the phone.

Whatever the case, for me, social networking has already reached the point of what I will term microsaturation. It’s not as if there isn’t value in sites like Facebook, MySpace, or twitter, and perhaps there is also value in being able to “digg” something. But what seems clear is that yet again there is also the capacity to merely explore the edges of whatever exchange is actually being related.

Consider, for instance, the regularity of arts related postings, as friends suggest that they have uploaded a new group of works on flickr or a related site. This should compel viewers to take note but, crowded in amongst the Susan Boyle videos or the clips of classic 80s camp, it is altogether too easy to simply be missed, for that moment to pass. And then, artist, what do you do? Do you re-send the post, becoming informative, courteous, and, heaven forbid slightly desperate all in precisely the same moment? Or, instead, do you merely assume that the original post has been read and is merely being digested?

One some level I genuinely believe that digital communications seem to both enhance and blunt our experiences at precisely the same moment. Without engaging in the historical discussions of the dehumanizing experiences of email, I do have some reticence regarding an unwavering commitment to the pull of social networking. At some point, it is as if the specific requirements of each site, and of each experience, results in experience itself becoming edited, blunted, pre-digested, like one hundred and sixty word haiku distilled to their most basic, yet most predictably sound-bite worthy utterances.

So, as I try to parse my words to fit a predetermined format, I wonder if these limitations are beneficial, detrimental or both. And yes, I know, this is far too many words, but for what, I don’t know.

John Bankston in Birmingham, AL

2009-03-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

Contemporary artist John Bankston will be the guest of honor as the Jack Drake Visiting Artist 2009 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Bankston will be present at a reception featuring fifteen watercolors and oil on linen paintings courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, on Friday, March 20th.

The reception is from 5 - 6:30 PM, and is followed by a roundtable discussion featuring the artist, Dr. Jessica Dallow, Doug Baulos, Tony Bingham and Rosie O'Beirne.

For further details contact the Department of Art and Art History at the University on (205) 934-4941.