Photo by 16 Miles of String

Bruce Nauman has made a work that speaks to people.  Actually, he made a work that speaks through people.

Enter a minimally-installed gallery and on either side of the room you’ll see a series of white square boards suspended on cables facing one another.  There’s a cacophony of sound and as you approach the squares you note that they’re actually speakers. Through some audio engineering wizardry, a device has been adhered to the back of each square which sends a signal across the board, effectively turning it into an amplifier. You go to the middle of the room and stand between one of the sets of speakers.  You hear a looped logorrheic stream: an endless recitation of days of the week: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday…” But then the speaker starts skipping words and gaps in the week begin to emerge in a pattern of Nauman’s devising. The speaker is male, serious. You walk to the next pair and the voice is now a child, plucky.  The next pair, a woman, robotic.  The pattern of words spoken is the same from speaker to speaker.  Only the intonation and timbre change.

You step back and you think: I need to conduct a fake interview with Bruce Nauman about this work, Days.

Perry Garvin: So let’s jump right into this.  Why use board and not a speaker?

Bruce Nauman: It looked cooler. [Laughs]  Well that’s just part of it. I wanted to create as little visual distraction as possible and thanks to some amazing audio engineering technology that was possible.

PG: There are a lot of art historical references going on in Days. Can you talk about a few?

BN: I’d rather not get into that.

PG: Why not?

BN: I didn’t make the work about “art historical references.” Any that are present are either coincidental or part of the visual culture. I’d rather people focus on the work itself.

PG: Okay, fair enough. But let me casually ignore that and ask you about one I couldn’t ignore and actually shaped the way I saw the piece: On Kawara.  From his date paintings that reference the passage of time to his recent work, “One Million Years” presented at David Zwirner where speakers count from one to a million.  Days seemed like – how can I put this – maybe a twist on what On has been doing for years.

BN: I think it’s fair to say that there are some similarities.  On has always been interested in the mutability of time and the systems we create to help order it.  He’s also a consummate performer, even if his performance is “in absentia.”  I guess in Days I wanted to leverage the predictability of reciting the days of the week but then disrupt it by leaving holes. I mean, the piece is quite simple: it’s a meditation on “where does the time go.”

PG: You know, I always think about that when I look at your Mapping the Studio at Dia:Beacon. I sit there in a darkened room watching rodents scurrying by, waiting for something to happen, and I myself start to lose track of time and start wondering where my time is going while watching the piece.

[Laughter]

Then there’s the whole Sol LeWitt reference at the entrance to the piece where you lay out the schematic of the recitation.  And I picked up some Janet Cardiff Forty Piece Motet allusions and of course Robert Irwin and that minimal “cool” look.  I guess the space just seemed to drip with a lot of very hip visual clichés of contemporary art: minimalism, systems-based works…  Would you agree this is a very fashionable piece?

BN: No, I wouldn’t. Or I don’t really care. I designed the work to communicate as efficiently and elegantly as possible.  If that means it has a certain “look” or adopts certain references to other artists or styles then that is pure coincidence or at least such a part of my world that it’s incorporated into the work.  Let’s not forget: I’ve been in this game for decades.

PG: That’s true.  On the same day that I saw Days, I saw a number of your pieces scattered in other exhibitions throughout MoMA including the permanent collection and the photography of sculpture exhibition.  You probably have work on display right now in about four museums in New York.  Not to sound like a sycophant, but you are a major artist – probably the most likely among the current crop to be remembered for decades hence.  Aren’t your prices going through the roof?

BN:  You know, I don’t pay attention to that.  I’m comfortable and I’ve been lucky to be able to keep making work over the years.  I don’t for one minute take for granted the reception I’ve received and I just hope to keep making work that speaks to people.

PG: I would say that there’s a bullying quality in your work.  Or, if not bullying, aggressive.  Forcing people to walk between tight walls, pushing your face in extreme directions, designing neon that blasts photons at people, recording videos of clowns doing obsessive compulsive actions, or this piece which just bombards the viewer with words.  People in the installation were genuinely cowed!

BN: [Silence] I don’t know how to respond to this.

PG: Is aggression something you value in your work.

BN: Well, I’ve never gone for art that is limp-wristed and mousy.  I want to make assertive pieces that stand on their own and that stand up to the viewer.  Let’s not forget that viewers of works of art have tremendous power.  For one – they think.  They are sophisticated machines honed over millennia and a work of art – basically a few ideas an artist comes up with and seals in amber – is supposed to compete?  That’s why I think that assertive works of art are important.  That’s the word I’d prefer to use to describe some of the work I make: assertive.

PG: And Days is assertive?

BN: Sure.

PG: Can you tell me a funny anecdote about Days?

BN: I don’t know how funny this is but that kid, Justin, that recorded one of the loops.  He sounds very peppy in the recording because, I swear, that was the most hyperactive kid I met.  We found him through a friend and he came to the studio and basically couldn’t sit still.  We gave him the script and he kept fumbling over words and saying words twice and messing it up.  I think it took three hours until he finally got it all out without any mistakes and we were so grateful.  Was that a good anecdote?

PG: Terrific.  OK – let me ask one other question.  The “wow” factor.  It’s pretty cool that there are square boards that are speaking.  That alone is pretty exciting since it seems like a new technology (or at least something I’ve not often seen).  I went into the room and saw that and was amazed and then that amazement was transferred to the piece itself.  Do you think that this work is getting an illegitimate boost in acclaim because of its technological sophistication?

BN:  No. We live in a world saturated in high tech stuff.  A talking board?  Are you kidding me?  This is a “wow” factor?  Hardly – it’s a talking board.  You get over it and then you get on to experiencing the work and listening to the speakers and the words and decoding patterns and, if I’m successful, taking a bit of your day to think about time and daily, lived experience.

Perry Garvin Studio is proud to announce the launch of our latest work: The Ecology Center website.

The Ecology Center is an environmental education center in San Juan Capistrano, California. They hired us to redesign their website to present an intuitive interface for accessing the Center’s array of programs. We simplified the navigation options, introduced bold illustrated graphics, and built a content management system that enabled staff to update all parts of the site.

Thanks to illustrator David Rager and The Ecology Center founder Evan Marks.

See more of Perry Garvin Studio’s work

- The navigation bars (necessary when navigating but not when reading)

- Advertisements (necessary revenue generators for site owners but visual annoyances)

- Links to other articles in the form of images or text boxes (helpful when looking where to go next but inapplicable when you’re planning on staying put)

These competing page elements take up space which shrinks the amount of room available for the article you’d like to read.  They also introduce distracting visual clutter, making reading long form text on the web unpleasant.

Here’s how to cut out those distracting elements and focus completely on the article you want to read:

1) Click a button called “Readability” in your browser bookmark bar
2) Enable Full screen mode in Firefox or Chrome

Readability is a button that you add to your bookmark bar that automatically detects the text you want to read in a webpage and isolates it in a new window, removing all competing visual clutter.

To improve the experience, hide the browser frame by going to the “View” menu in Firefox or Chrome and selecting “Full Screen.”

What you’re left with is pure text and images associate only with that article you want to read.

See the image to see a sample “before” and “after.”

Get Readability

Download Firefox or Chrome

Kodak Camera, 1888. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History

The iPad is to computing in 2010 as the Kodak camera was to photography back in 1888.

In that year George Eastman registered Kodak as a trademark and coined the phrase “You Press the Button and We Do the Rest” thus introducing the concept of a “snapshot” and expanding access to photography beyond a niche, technical audience.

Prior to Kodak, photography was a pain.  You had to tinker with recipes, manipulate complicated instruments, and go through a time-consuming and error-prone processing period.  With the magical Kodak, however, you took a picture with the camera’s one button. You extracted the roll of film when it was used up and mailed the whole thing to Kodak for processing.  They’d return you a complete set of tidy-looking prints.

Amateur photography exploded and access to image making blew up.  Competitors came in on the scene and here we are in 2010 with a vast ecology of cameras from basic point-and-shoots to full-featured digital SLRs.

Some are complaining that iPad kills creativity by controlling access to computing.  Its “black box” concept of computer interaction waters down programming and restricts innovation because Apple controls both the programming environment and the user experience so tightly.  This, they argue, is a harbinger of a dark future where corporate behemoths restrict how we use computers.

But did this happen with photography when the Kodak was introduced?  Absolutely not.  Photography expanded and became even more instrumental in people’s lives.  The iPad will have a similar cultural effect by liberating computing from a technical crowd.  There will still be computers with power user features, knobs, and cogs and all sorts of customizations for tinkerers and professionals.  But there will also be a huge swath of very basic computers that get basic things done.  And offer a gateway experience for those who might otherwise be turned off from computing in its current form.

This is a promising time for computing.  Let’s think back to 1888.

Photos For Tino – artnet Magazine

IGN Entertainment

“The city is the privileged field for the exertion of power. Subjugation procedures are deployed everywhere (on bodies, on language, on places). But nothing is in itself political for the mere fact of hosting the exercise of power relationships, and yet anything, upon the right occasion, can become so.”

via Neighborhood / e-flux.

The decline of art world money as expressed through the thickness of ArtForum.

Diane Carr, Thicket, 2009, 30" x 48"

Diane Carr – a painter I particularly admire – is back with another gallery show. December 9 – 11, 2009 at Gallery SATORI, 164 Stanton St, New York, NY.

I thought she had a website but since I can’t find it you can see more of her work at the White Column’s Artist Registry.

Roberto Coromina, Untitled, 2002, oil on paper, 25.6”x32”. Courtesy Magnan Projects, New York.

“Collectors have achieved a central role in contemporary art, not that the spirit of today’s collectors has less or nothing to do with yesteryear’s philanthropist or maecenas. With the advent of neo-capitalism and neo-con philosophy, new players and distant economies have descended upon the arts with a set of new motivations that loathe the great charm of the cultural benefactor in his relationship with “the men of genius” who formed his circle. The original simplicity, cordiality and sincerity have given way to aggressiveness, benefit-seeking, and vanity. This attitude, that for decades was considered by Europeans typically “American,” is finding its way among European private collectors.”

via ARTPULSE MAGAZINE » Feature » THE NEW SPIRIT OF COLLECTING: FROM MAECENAS TO PRESCRIPTOR TO SPECULATOR.

I hope the critical coverage the Whitney’s new site has been receiving

a) demonstrates that people care about museum websites and that they are worth holding to a high standard

b) encourages the Whitney to redesign their site

c) provides recommendations to the Whitney’s staff when the dust settles from the relaunch and they contract with a new firm to fix it

For the record – reviews from Edward Tufte and Mediaite and my review. User comments are interesting and useful, too.

Nothing new here but I’m a sucker for nostalgia.

From the press release, “Florian Slotawa has ripped out pieces of his studio’s walls and transferred them to the gallery space. During the duration of the exhibition, the physically displaced architectural pieces are layered against the storefront window, through which the gallery space opens onto the street. The installation changes the usual spatial impression of the gallery and conceptually links both the artist’s workspace and the exhibition space.”

Florian Slotawa at Nordenhake (Contemporary Art Daily).

“How do you acquire or display a work of performance art that exists only in the form of an instruction sheet? What should conservators do about works that are deteriorating because they were made from unstable materials, such as neon, or sharks? If you want to exhibit a huge work of conceptual art that is housed at another museum, does it make sense to pay for shipping when you could probably just get permission to make a copy?”

via Copy That! Wait, Don’t. Whitney Ponders Problem of Replication in Modern Art | The New York Observer.

Fixing all this required a redesign and after a long incubation the Whitney has relaunched their new site.

They enter a highly innovative field.  The past three years have seen growing recognition among museum management that mission is enhanced by a robust online program.  The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Walker, MoMA, and SFMOMA have upgraded their sites to enterprise-level content management systems delivering gigabytes of audio, video, and text to millions of viewers annually.  As museums have increased their digital output and come to recognize that “audience” includes a vast online public, directors are coming to realize that an intuitive, attractive website is a worthwhile, mission-critical investment.

2008 saw many museums of the Whitney’s caliber relaunch their websites including the Hammer Museum, Guggenheim, MoMA, SFMOMA, and Museum of Art and Design.  These organizations produced polished, professional sites to serve as content delivery platforms for a swiftly expanding online audience hungry for museum content.  It’s against this backdrop that the museum community has been eagerly awaiting the Whitney’s entry into the field.

It’s a shock, then, that the new Whitney website not only fails to improve upon its old website but actually ends up being worse.  Visual confusion, counterintuitive navigation, and illogical organization put it on par with its predecessor but setting it a step backwards is an absence of a compelling design that knits the site together into a coherent whole.  The lack of color, proper division of page elements, and clear information hierarchy leaves the viewer with pages where content floats without clear order or priority.  Perhaps more dispiriting is how generic the site feels.  It’s lifeless.  More a wireframe suitable for preliminary development than a digital platform to project Whitney mission and programs.

If this was a lesser organization such a website would be a shame.  But for the Whitney it’s a liability.  In a highly competitive culture industry, the Whitney needs to continue to assert itself as the dynamic, relevant, and high-quality organization it is.  When its website declares the opposite – that it’s pedestrian, unsophisticated, and banal – the brand takes a beating and its reputation is called into question.

Breaking It Down

12 RSS feeds are available for fine-grained subscription to specific site content and 9 iCal feeds allow for users to keep tabs on the museum’s date-based programs.  A “Your Collection” feature allows users to select and save images, video, and web pages from the site.  Internet art projects will be integrated into the site which – while at first blush appearing little more than gimmickry – will likely be worthwhile given the Whitney’s strong track record of supporting digital art through its ARTPORT.

The site features a completely new design and re-ordered information architecture.  And this is where the site’s problems begin to appear.  7 main categories on the old site have ballooned to 17 main categories on the new site.  Redesigns usually reduce and simplify than expand and complicate.  The new site obfuscates a clear visual flow of hierarchical information.  Little is grounded by bordering, shading, or sectioning (the common methods in web design).  Instead, content blocks float in white space without adhering to a consistent grid.  And within that white space, text leading is used to differentiate sections but that type is of inconsistent style and positioning across the site.

I counted over 12 different link styles:  blue underline, bold black, bold grey, bold blue, bordered black, green background, light blue background, yellow background, grey background, white text on black background, white text on red background, bold black with grey underline, and orange.  It’s such an overwhelming array, it suggests that anything could be a link – a paralyzing position to put a user in.

Since the site is designed exclusively with text and that text is styled in no consistent way, the site’s color palette is hard to define but if pressed I’d say it’s black, white, and forest green.  When I think of the Whitney I think of slate grey – the color of the building.  A proper design should build off of this color and incorporate complementary hues that draw connections between the website and the museum location.

Navigation Problems

The main vertical navigation bar breaks basic user interface design rules over and over again.  First, its 17 top-level options need to be reduced.  Even the old Whitney nav bar was better than the new one.

The priority of information within the bar is also questionable.  Is “Support” and “Membership” – the first two links – more important to a visitor than “Visitor Information” or “Exhibitions?”  Certainly not.  Is “Support” and “Membership” of greater importance to the museum than its exhibitions and events?  I hope not.  The “About” section features fascinating information about the organization’s past and promising future but isn’t even a link on the nav bar.  It’s sunk to the bottom of every page, relegated to what is effectively a website’s graveyard.  Is the museum’s history that irrelevant?  I doubt it, but it’s sending a disconcerting message.  Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that increasingly drive word-of-mouth traffic are hidden in the “Feeds and Email Notifications” section.  They’re doing great things on these sites and should elevate them to the top-level or at least group them in a logical category.

The navigation bar violates the most fundamental rule of user interface design: persistence.  Instead of remaining in the same place when you click a top-level link, that link is pulled out and elevated to the top of the list.

Before clicking:

After clicking “Exhibitions”:

When you click into certain sections – “Education,” for example – links that were once in the nav bar disappear (“For Kids / For Teens”).

Sections two-levels deep make the higher-level parents disappear.

Inconsistency like this is considered unsound by professional web designers because it breaks the convention of a persistent navigation bar where high-level content sections stay put no matter what.  A nav bar with sections that move or even disappear makes a site feel unpredictable, leading to visitor exasperation.

Other oddities include subsection links that because of their green color appear visually to be of higher priority than their desaturated parent and horizontal navigation links within a vertical link structure.  “Film / Performance” are actually two separate sections masquerading as one.  When you click “Film” it’s pulled to the top leaving “Performance” behind even though it’s on the same line.

Visual Design

Visually, the site’s elements are adrift as if they’ve been casually dropped onto the page.  The lack of a uniform grid and an absence of grounding makes viewing page content difficult because everything appears of nearly equal importance.

Let’s look at the “Exhibitions” page:

The top “Your Collection” strip should be sectioned off from the rest of the site content because it’s part of the website and does not specifically refer to the page.  The Whitney logo should be flush with the vertical nav bar’s left margin.  The nav bar should be drawn up to match the horizontal alignment of the page title.  Images should be equally sized and in horizontal alignment with one another.  The border around “more info” should be removed to indicate its lesser importance in the order of title and date.

Problems like these abound on nearly every page but a redesigned template could pretty easily fix them.

A harder fix is the “Education” section where a collection of ambiguous phrases in orange lettering appear on the top of that section’s landing page.

It’s unclear what one is supposed to do here or how one should choose where to click.  “Curiosity” may be an option they provide but “Confusion” is really what I’m thinking.  I don’t know where I’m going to go or what I’m going to get when I click one of these links (I assume they are links – but perhaps I shouldn’t since they aren’t underlined – another convention disregarded).  When I do finally decide that I’m “playful” I am presented with a page but no indication through a bread crumb or a nav bar entry where I am.  The navigation system here completely breaks down and a user is adrift in a sea of links without reference or bearing.

“Your Collection” vs. “The Collection”

The “Your Collection” feature allows users to collect pages, images, and video from across the site and store it in a personal user account for future access.  This would have been innovative had MoMA not already introduced an identical feature more elegantly implemented on its own site months ago.  I’m skeptical of the utility of such a tool.  I think a more effective approach is to design a site that enables visitors to easily export site content to whatever content aggregation service they’ve adopted (Delicious, Evernote, Facebook, Tumblr, bookmarking, etc.).  I suppose these “collections” features are supposed to increase site stickiness but I think they probably just go unused.

“Your Collection” is not to be confused with “The Collection” which is a growing online database of the museum’s permanent holdings and is the new website’s highlight.  Images are impressively sized, and navigation – though rudimentary – is at least functional.  This section holds great promise.

In Conclusion

I’m not sure what went wrong here.  How could a museum as first-rate as the Whitney have produced a site so inferior?  Linked by Air – the development company the museum hired – should shoulder much of the responsibility.  Apparently the backend is robust and well designed for the staff but this must not come at an expense to the end user.  The failure to successfully integrate a strong back end and an elegant front end throws the firm’s credibility into serious doubt.  I would also venture to guess that the museum had no dedicated project manager familiar with the web to help guide the museum through the thicket of options.  There may also not have been the will to redirect a project going down the wrong path.

I have great confidence in the Whitney.  The staff is enthusiastic and recent hires indicate an institutional understanding of the importance of the web.  Although this particular site is stillborn, I’m certain that with a new developer and a strong project manager the Whitney will retool their site into something they – and the museum community – can be proud of.

–

Update 11/13/09: In the interest of full disclosure, I’m the Digital Projects Manager at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

From the press release of an upcoming show at the Brooklynite Gallery titled “Go Get Your Shinebox”:

With the global economic downturn and the hardship it has caused blue-collar workers throughout, we find it fitting to explore the world’s simplest way to make a living- SHINING SHOES. We are planning an exhibition around just that— SHOESHINE BOXES.

And how will they “explore” it?  By taking replicas of shoeshine boxes, decorating them, and plopping them in a gallery.

It gets worse.

However a “SHOESHINE BOX” should not be taken in the most literal sense of the words. These objects, our inspiration, have all been created out of necessity – a need to earn money, or further, to survive. We push “the need to survive” beyond its literal context, commissioning our favorite established and emerging artists to design their own, “SURVIVAL BOXES”.

This is a classic example of political art done wrong.  Here’s the pattern:

1. Take an object associated with a subjugated group of people

2. Reproduce and decorate it

3. Assert a political critique

What’s so frustrating about work like this is that it simply aestheticizes a political symbol without getting to the bottom of the core issues that political symbol represents.  A pure visual product alone is silent and – because it’s a work of art – open to multiple interpretations.  This is the opposite of assertion.  It’s suggestion.  And suggestion and open-endedness is what makes art great. But when an artist traffics in political subjects that have real-world affect on subordinated peoples’ lives, simple open-ended “visual inquiry” by  priveleged artists producing for a priveleged audience is an offense.  It exploits serious social problems for cultural capital gains.

This Shinebox project is even worse because it ignores the issues behind shoeshiners and focuses on the damn box.  And then, in an extraordinarily outrageous move, leaves the box behind and sets up a show of “survival boxes” drawing attention to the individual ARTISTS leaving behind the source subjects.

If you want to, you can visit their atrociously designed website and then navigate to the exhibition page.  Only to find it broken. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Brooklynite Gallery

MoMA | Claes Oldenburg: Conservation of Floor Cake (Week 2)

OK, so there’s nothing “new” here with this theme but, still, could be a hoot. From their release:

“The Christopher Henry Gallery invites you to the exhibition The Map as Art , a group show curated by Katharine Harmon and Christopher Henry opening November 5, 6 – 9 PM.. The exhibition presents a diverse group of work in a variety of media, all of which use mapping concepts to explore uncharted territories both formal and intellectual. The show is presented concurrent with the launch of Harmon’s book, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography Princeton Architectural Press. The exhibition features works by: Doug Beube, Matthew Cusick, Joshua Dorman, Jerry Gretzinger, Ingo Gunther, Jane Hammond, Emma Johnson, Karey Kessler, Joyce Kozloff, Hayato Matsushita, Meridith McNeal, Florent Morellet, Vik Muniz, Aga Ousseinov, Matthew Picton, Karin Schaefer, Dannielle Tegeder, Heidi Whitman, and Jeff Woodbury.”

via Opening reception November 5: Christopher Henry Gallery.

Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway, 2nd Floor
Saturday, November 14 7:00pm
FREE

via Performa

This massive anthology collects scripts in the form of notes, instructions, drawings, graphs, charts, and more from artists of varied backgrounds and styles whose shared interest is in the performative. With contributions from Marina and Ulay Abramovic, George Brecht, John Cage, Peter Frank, Philip Glass, Dan Graham, the Living Theater, Claes Oldenburg, Rachel Rosenthal, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Wilson to name only a few. Over 700 pages.

PrintedMatter.org