THEORY NOW

Eulogy for Virginia Estelle Boyd . . . December 9, 1930-February 8, 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 21:02:00 +0000

My grandmother, Hallie Mae, used to tell people, “Oh, Virginia can do anything!” And Virginia “Jo” Boyd, my mother, would live up to that high praise and more!

Jo epitomized the do-it-yourself ethos throughout her life. As a teenager she was already a talented painter and often sewed her own clothes to wear on dates. As a young adult, she continued to expand her talents and build them into strengths. She was a self-taught architect and interior designer, building many homes and offices for clients in the early 1960’s. One client waited over a year for Jo to design their home. She was in demand!

Throughout this time, she and my father, Jack, also designed and built several custom homes for their family and made major modifications to other homes. Jo often said, “ I never met a house I didn't like, once I was done changing it.”

And while my three brothers and myself have garnered certain talents, particularly in music, it is our youngest brother, Jett, who inherited the enviable talents of Jo’s ability in building things. I am sure that Jett’s skills in woodworking, plumbing and electrical would make him the general contractor that Jo would have loved to work with!

But I am not done! Because Jo’s talents knew no bounds as she broadened her artistic interests to include woven tapestry, stained glass, ceramics and silk scarf-making. Several of her custom contemporary tapestries were installed in commercial locations throughout Arkansas, and one tapestry is in the collection of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.

And as if all this wasn’t enough, in her mid-60’s, she turned her attention to learning how to use the Internet and developing a website! Just like her mother had said, “Virginia can do anything!”

Jo didn’t just nurture her own talents and build them into strengths, but she nurtured mine as well. Growing up, my beautiful and creative mother was a constant support and inspiration to me, and she was instrumental to my becoming an artist. In 1968, my father received a promotion which meant we’d have to relocate from Fayetteville to Little Rock. I was a junior in high school, looking forward to my senior year with the good friends I’d made, so naturally I pitched a fit. Jo in her wise and gentle way told me that Little Rock had the Arkansas Art Center, now called the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and that after we’d moved I could enroll in the Art Center’s Summer classes to study painting and sculpture. To a 17-year-old kid like me, excited about art, those classes I took that Summer were so impactful that it continued to echo throughout my artistic life. From that point onward, my life as an artist was launched. My heart warms as I remember the countless conversations Jo and I had over the years about how gratifying it was for her to see how my career had grown as an artist and art professor.

But of all her accomplishments, I can humbly say with certainty that Jo’s proudest creation was her four sons. At every family reunion over the years, Jo used to exclaim with beaming pride “I am responsible for all of that!” as she pointed towards the band, formed by her four musician sons, Scott, Craig, Jett and me, who had just finished serenading Jo and her friends. These performances have become the highlights of our lives — and some were recorded, which you will hear shortly. And the song that touched Jo’s heart most was “Together Again!”

As we now say good-bye to you, Mom, we love you, and we will miss you, but we know we will someday all be together again!

Christmas 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 02:34:00 +0000

My parents had noticed the bar stools in our kitchen were starting to look a bit beat up, tops frayed and wood edges distressed. I can't recall if I confessed or if one of my brothers squealed, but they soon learned I had been pummeling those stools with some old croquet stakes in lieu of having a real drum to beat.

In our early teens, my closest brother and I had been dreaming of drums and guitars, so before I destroyed more furniture Mom and Dad took me to visit a young man who was selling his used drum kit. I can still see him sitting behind a four piece set of Premier drums, playing live along with a Ventures LP in perfect sync with those tom-tom rolls and sixteenth notes.

That Christmas morning at our flagstone rancher on a hill top outside Fayetteville, Scotty and I were delighted to find our booty; he got an electric guitar, a Kent I think, complete with guitar lessons, and I got those Premiers.

We played our first gig on a flatbed trailer in a shopping mall parking lot at a "Battle of the Bands." We had a kid on bass and we played Jimi Hendrix's "Fire," with me dropping a drumstick halfway through but somehow scrabbling it up off the plank floor to finish the song. Needless to say, we lost; a tough electric blues outfit, with so many players they had to set up on the asphalt in front of the flatbed, won with their searing version of "See See Rider."

Later on I sold those Premiers to finance my move to the West Coast but I've had many trap sets since. Some were cobbled together with different drum brands, as Scott and I worked our way through many odd rock, blues and punk bands. Luckily for me, when I finally had a bit of spare cash I bought a choice set of original WFL's in Los Angeles, with serial numbers verifying them as vintage 1955.

I almost never play drums now without recalling the excitement of that Christmas morn long ago. Somehow the fates had me pegged even then as a "Drummer Boy," counting down in 4/4 as the beat goes on. Me and my drum.

IMAGE: My WFL snare, photo by MCB.

Mystery Monolith Vanishes!

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 22:53:00 +0000

The recent discovery of a “mystery object” embedded in an undisclosed location in the southern regions of Utah appeared in media reports as a curious side bar. Indeed, with all the other dire, distressing and unprecedented daily news we deal with it perhaps comes as no surprise that this strange find, variously christened a “monolith” or a sculpture by sources, quickly faded from last week’s news cycle — until today when we learned that the object has vanished just as mysteriously as it appeared.

In their statement Utah’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) informed us they had “credible reports” that the object, which BLM characterized as an “illegally installed sculpture,” has been removed. BLM further clarified that they “did not remove the structure which is considered private property” and that further inquiries should be directed to the local Sheriff’s Department.

Because of this surprising “disappearance” of the mystery “sculpture” my theory is that this was an elaborate hoax, probably by a team of artists who combined their energies and skills to accomplish this feat; trekking through remote, rugged terrain and carving down into stone to erect their 12-foot tall and well-riveted object.

First, let me address the John McCracken issue. When news first broke about this mystery find the David Zwirner Gallery had speculated that it could be a work by John McCracken. Frankly, I found that suggestion somewhat ludicrous, as anyone with even a vague familiarity with McCracken’s “plank” sculptures would recall them to be both plank-like and constructed as six-sided objects. As clearly seen in the video provided by BLM last week, the Utah object was triangular, with 3 sides, 3 corners, a top and, presumably, a bottom. So I suppose that Zwirner chimed in possibly to direct the public’s attention to an artist in their stable.

However, what about that other possibility, the “alien” angle? Clearly, the reference to Stanley Kubrick’s film about extraterrestrials planting vertical monoliths for primates and humans to “find” may have inspired these artists to create such possibilities in our minds, however incredible it may seem.

Now, for their encore, these imagineers have slipped back out there, in dead of night no doubt, and simply removed this massive thing. Alas, in a gesture of homey diffidence, they left behind a cairn of stones as a memorial to the strange object’s visit. Perhaps not from another planet, but maybe from a set of uniquely talented and creatively skilled minds who maybe wanted to take our collective minds off current affairs.

Tricks With Fruit Was Kinda Cute

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:23:00 +0000

Grazie, Maurizio. I needed that banana prank.

I was overjoyed to see you are still rocking this ancient schooner we call The Art World, with gnarly rigging and moldy canvas, manned by museum captains and gallerista crews, as well as swashbuckling corporate pirates. But it’s getting harder to laugh now.

You are aware, obviously, that the joke is on you. Although it is the public — and we artists — who’ll suffer most from your tired taunts. Before your duct-taped fruit had barely made the rounds of Instagram selfies it was unceremoniously detached and dispatched by another “comedian” for his fifteen-minutes, which perhaps you had expected all along, you scoundrel.

Not sure how it slipped past me last December — probably because I don’t do art fairs like Art Basel — but 9 months later, Post-COVID, art journalists may be desperate for their perennial “You call that art?” gambit. Which is fine, but it always reveals more about their lack of knowledge about art history and theory than it does about art’s definition anyway.

Of the very few assays I scrolled — not essays, because I don’t have much stomach for those on conceptualism — only Jason Farago hit the essential bullet point, writing “‘Comedian’ is not a one-note Dadaist imposture in which a commodity is proclaimed a work of art — which would be an entire century out of date now…”(1)

Clearly, Jason was referencing Duchamp’s 1915 provocation titled “Fountain,” a commercially manufactured urinal purchased from a hardware store, then entered in an art exhibit thereby introducing the real debate about art’s definition; “Is art defined by context or choice?”

Bottom line, Signore Cattelan? Joining the ever-growing mob of artists aping classic Duchampian tropes, yielding to appropriation’s seduction, and then further shimming it up with the late-Sixties conceptual art instructions wasn't your best move.

Your career may not have gone exactly as you planned but you did append a much-needed humorousness to the staid and stuffy Art World. However, with all due respect, your jest was at our expense, your fellow artists who have to prep for more “art is nothing but a con” debates. Meanwhile, the general public, who are often wrongfully maligned as Philistines, will have yet another setback in their art education again.

You see, Maurizio, we who make art are the ones bearing the brunt of suspicion your joke will inspire from the public, as we will have to once again define art and defend our own work, as the public is encouraged to buy into this “con in conceptual art” tripe: “Oh, conceptual art? Like that artist who taped a banana to the wall?

Notes on the Journey

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 17:37:00 +0000

Hurtling through time, approaching what a boyhood and life-long friend poetically calls "The Bliss," with memories dimming in brevity, I frequently find myself reflecting on the meaning of life. I sense now that our collective existence in this physical plane is minuscule in time and space, and this knowledge is frequently enhanced by the obituaries of contemporaneous heroes, artists, musicians and writers who are dying too young.

Recently, I posted a brief essay about a colleague’s curatorial endeavor, a very worthy exhibit of the under-appreciated sculptor, Yuri Schwebler. Writing about Yuri provoked thoughts about my present semi-retirement from teaching and my artistic pathways through the years. It was enlightening comparing some dates of Yuri’s accomplishments to my own timeline; when Yuri was exhibiting at the 10th Biennale of Young Artists in Paris, I was playing punk rock and running my "alternative art space" in Hollywood, California. Ergo, my own visual arts curriculum vitae reveals a schism during those years while I was deeply engaged in music and/or performance art until decades later, when I renewed my art muse to achieve my MFA, beginning a 15-year arts educator career.

And yet while frenetically creating alternative culture in a then-burgeoning Southern California DIY underground, along with painter/photographer friend Richard Meade, we had the good fortune to curate more than a few solid hit shows, including first-ever showings of drawings by Raymond Pettibon and paintings by Jim Shaw.(1) We push-pinned all that art, from painters like Georganne Deen and Fred Tomaselli, photographers Jules Bates and Gary Leonard, directly onto those legendary black walls in a rented storefront that I named the Zero Zero. Soon it quickly became the de rigueur after-hours hang for artists, punk rockers, writers, directors, actors and scenesters.(2) Over those next few years I would start up and manage two more art/music spaces in and around LA.

Conventional wisdom has it that the go-to modus operandi for a visual artist is an expected commitment to a 30- or 40-year track record and aiming for that MoMA retrospective. However, like many in my generation I was diverted by the invigoration of punk '77 and that instantaneous feedback from a live audience coupled with a not-knowing-what-will-happen potential of performance. The adrenaline rush of a stage, and the disruptive attitude of punk caused a détournement in my youthful psyche and opened up my alternative path.

Perhaps I will have the auspicious gift of another twenty or thirty years on our sadly decaying orb to actively continue this mad life. Having recently begun another text-based series which may take a year to complete, and organizing my many essays on art, music and culture for future publication, there's new work in the pipeline. And, as always, there is music, composed with my brilliant brother, Scott Boyd, my partner-in-rhyme, forever generous with his "Magick."

I mean, what could be greater?

IMAGE: Raymond Pettibon at his Zero Zero opening on January 7, 1982; photograph by Brian Tucker, sourced from Los Angeles Times.

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1. In a Smithsonian Museum's Archives of American Art Oral History interview with Jim, he mentions his first solo show but incorrectly "believes" that I went to California Arts Institute; I did not. And when I closed my original Hollywood space in 1982 my ex-partner didn't "take over" the Zero Zero; he opened a space on Wilcox Avenue he called "Zero One" and I opened a new Zero Zero Club in West Hollywood.

2. Jane Wiedlin states that her inspiration for the Go-Go's first new song in 19 years came while she was "reading about the Zero Zero Club, an underground, after-hours club in Hollywood in the Eighties." Yes, Jane was there, as was Kathy Valentine, along with John Doe and Exene of X, Keith Morris of Circle Jerks, John and Dix Denney of Weirdos, KK Barrett and Tomata du Plenty(RIP) of Screamers, Tito Larriva and Charlie Quintana(RIP) of Plugz, with members of the Brainiacs, Blasters, Gears, Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs, Fear, Dickies, L7, Gun Club and Mau Maus, plus actors Laurence Fishburne and John Belushi, and writers Iris Berry, Pleasant Gehman, Chris Morris, Howard Paar, Don Snowden and Rex Weiner.

Curatorial Practice: Recreation as Rebirth

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 19:59:00 +0000

In the history of art there have been numerous practitioners who failed to achieve any success, much less accolades, during their lifetimes. There are also those artists who receive that brief moment of recognition or notoriety — Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” — but then, either through wounds self-inflicted or fate’s imposition, their star fades and they drift into that vast Sea of Obscurity.

With a long-planned-for retrospective, American University’s Katzen Arts Center had been preparing to rectify one such artist’s obscurity, the under-known conceptual sculptor, Yuri Schwebler. Curated by my friend, artist and writer, John James Anderson, this show-that-should-have-been, Yuri Schwebler: The Spiritual Plane, promised a glimpse into Schwebler’s work that might have re-focused attention back on Yuri’s contributions to sculpture and conceptual art.

But life had other plans; the global pandemic shut museums down as their vast halls became virtual. However, Anderson soldiered on, with able assistance by the Katzen’s indefatigable director, Jack Rasmussen, and the Schwebler show morphed into a virtual exhibition, accompanied by an elegant catalog and an insightful conversation between Sir Jack and Anderson.

In Anderson's catalog essay, we learn that Yuri envisioned his art as undergoing a multifarious and cyclic transformation; art “begins as an idea, crosses three planes of reality — the mental, the physical, the spiritual — and ends as an idea.” Essentially, the artist conceives an idea and manifests it physically, which is then perceived by others, which Yuri characterized as “recreation.” As Yuri wrote:

“In recreation, which takes place both in memory of those who saw the artwork and were touched by it and the artist, is the only stage where a work can have existence after it has physically disappeared. As memory fades the art idea will die with it, but if the memory lingers there is a chance for rebirth which may trigger a new chain of events.”(1)

One might further speculate that Yuri’s concept of “recreation” encapsulates the act of memory as a genesis within the viewer to consider the work itself and the artist’s intention. From an art history standpoint, a viewer will re-create memories of artworks, from in-person viewing or via representation, such “recreation” being effectively paired with the artist's position in the historical canon. We may also conjecture that Yuri’s “spiritual plane” has equivalency to achieving immortality, suggested as “a chance for rebirth” in the minds of future viewers.

One of the many fascinating and curious aspects of Yuri’s story is that he eventually did achieve national and international exhibitions, yet remains sadly under-known. As Anderson’s tenacious scholarship and thoughtful writing details, Yuri developed art world relationships with several curators and art galleries and they would provide him with such opportunities, the shows seemingly tumbling into his lap. Thus, Yuri’s trajectory was jumpstarted by formidable shows; Richard Friedman invited Yuri to show his glass sculptures in the Phillips Collection‘s gardens, and Walter Hopps was a benefactor, acting almost as Yuri’s quasi-agent. Indeed, it was through Hopps that Yuri would exhibit site-specific sculptures at Artpark, and later at the 10th Biennale of Young Artists in Paris.(2)

Today, however, Yuri’s stature in art history has clearly faded. Was he simply to be forgotten? With his good fortune at being in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time, and with meritorious art concepts to deliver, his reputation should have grown. What happened?

Anderson’s curatorship reveals Yuri’s artistic achievements and exhibition successes but we also get a few clues about what may have caused Yuri’s current obscurity. In Anderson’s retelling of Yuri’s life we discover an abusive father, some foster care, an early marriage which “disintegrated,” then in 1970, while in the Army Reserves, Yuri was institutionalized at Walter Reed Hospital. Eventually, Yuri would be honorably discharged as “mentally unfit for active service” and so began his “artistic rebirth.”(3)

In the last years of his life, however, Yuri’s art world relationships unraveled as he evidently lost focus on his art. He failed to make the work he had proposed for a $25,000 NEA grant. He began to lose contact with his coterie of supporters and benefactors. MOCA’s Richard Koshalek had wanted to help; in 1982 Koshalek had asked Yuri to send him some of his museum exhibition catalogs but Yuri didn’t write back until 1986, apologizing and blaming his “mental illness” for the neglect.(4) Four years later, Yuri committed suicide — he was 47.

This exhibition is how an enthusiastic and capable curator rekindles the general public’s interest in an artist, their work and ideas. With the legions of historians, theorists, curators, gallery and museum directors that are growing yearly, the scholarship of art has reached a watershed moment. The possibilities of an ever-deepening research and curatorship of hitherto obscure and under-known artists like Yuri Schwebler promise us future revelations and surprises as more under-known and under-served artists begin to receive such a welcomed rebirth.

IMAGE: Yuri Schwebler, Pyramids, c. 1974; sand, plywood, brass plumb bobs; installation inside the Corcoran Gallery of Art's atrium, Washington, D.C.; image courtesy Yuri Schwebler Archive, Salem, NY.

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1. Yuri Schwebler. “Appendix I: Cyclic Structure as Art, page 2,” c. 1973; Yuri Schwebler Archive, Salem, NY.

2. John James Anderson. Curator’s essay for Yuri Schwebler: The Spiritual Plane; American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C.; 2020, 18.

3. Anderson, 7-8.

4. Anderson, 28.

Deux détournement virtuel!

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 01:33:00 +0000

For your enjoyment and edification, as most of us move gingerly into a Phase 2, I am sharing more virtual discourse (disguised as a “talk”), as well as an audience participatory “performance” event with one of my bisected text installations:

From October 2013, a Hirshhorn Museum podcast of my Gallery Talk on Ellsworth Kelly’s Red, Yellow, Blue V (1968). [And my follow-up debrief post for further interest.]

From April 2011, a video documentation of an installation/performance of Welcome, reader! at the opening reception of Postconceptualism: The Malleable Object that I curated for the University of Maryland's Stamp Gallery; poet Casey Smith read his “found poetry” aloud as fellow artists and I, along with some of my former and then-current art theory students attempt the simultaneous transcription of his words on prepared blackboards. A challenge of capturing live speech via real-time writing was further elided by subsequent tape removal, then audience participation to decipher his “remembered” poem. [Thanks to Casey, and Paris Bustillos for his videography.]

Be well!
MCB

Escapist Distraction vs. Participatory Interaction

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sat, 30 May 2020 22:07:00 +0000

Present societal conditions have introduced a wide variety of reactions from cultural producers. Museums, galleries and exhibition venues have responded to the health preservationist concept of social distancing with renewed online presence, virtual tours of galleries and shows, or otherwise two-dimensional screen experiences. In sharing these alternative art encounters, producers of these events promote their equivalency to traditional viewing, albeit over Internet, Zoom or video, as aesthetic entertainment. However, one cannot help to perceive, beyond an urge for preservation of institutional structure, commercial interests and desire for maintaining virtual presence, the latent belief in the power of art as escapism.

To be clear, the static two-dimensionality of paintings will obviously reproduce in fair likeness on video, and a camera circling a sculpture captures a semblance of the visual regard needed for comprehension of mass. But as representational documents, these digital images cannot grasp the totality of elements at play, unlike the lived moment of comprehension inhabiting a shared physical space with such objects. Thus, neither painting nor sculpture fares well as distraction via computer monitor, laptop or cell.

Theatre is an entirely different species. As 21st Century consumers, we are quite adept at home streaming, bingeing movies or the latest de rigueur cable programming, therefore, watching a play online is familiar screen territory for us. Once again, however, these events are traditionally shared physically, elbow to elbow, with their concomitant immersion in the sights and sounds projected within those hallowed auditorium halls. Yet unquestionably, watching a play on a flat screen regardless of its dimensions converts a theatrical experience, whether a drama or musical, into pared-down “direct-to-video” product.

Likewise for those other performative mediums of live music and performance art, their essence is simply not grasped in two-dimensional documentation. To experience music live is to share in its existence the moment that it’s created, if not in front of you then at a reasonable and yet intimate remove. Performance artists adhere to that same spatiotemporal credo, particularly at performance’s inception in the late 1950s, and the artists’ bodies occupy a specific space and time with the audience in a shared experience of actual creation.

A potentially more successful art encounter on digital screens involves interaction with the viewing public. To their credit some of the world’s major museums have begun utilizing their platforms during the pandemic to engage both youngsters and adults with do-it-yourself projects, to either discover contemporary art styles through imitation or to just inspire individual expression. Clearly, these interactive experiments provide online museum visitors with opportunities to collaborate in connection with art while offering some stress release.

The modality of interaction in public art has fully expanded, from the late 20th Century’s “happenings” into the movement we now know as social practice art. Multi-disciplinary, collaborative and participatory in scope, social practice projects began to push the envelope of institutionally accepted aspirations for art beyond static and contemplative theories of the past.

My proposal, and I submit this as a challenge for the world’s museums and galleries, is that they couple their need to maintain an online presence with a strategic thrust of civic responsibility demonstrated through hands-on projects encompassing social practice. With the current national health crisis limiting what contact arts organizations do have with the public, their continued use of digital platforms online must be integrated with more imaginative programming involving their viewers’ participation and collaboration. Certainly, partnering with artists who already create participatory and collaborative art could yield projects requiring viewers to do more than download instructions or post comments.

At the present moment we need an art that is more than a distraction from all the bad news. The world’s museums and art galleries have more tools and resources than individual artists do and hopefully they share the belief that art has meaning and purpose beyond aesthetics and momentary appreciation. To meet the challenge of today these art organizations need to achieve the ultimate goals of online presence, by providing expansive digital platforms for intellectual engagement and connection through a socially responsive practice; it is time to present a living art that will support lives by empowering discursivity among their viewership.

On Solitude

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 01:06:00 +0000

We are born into a reality exterior of our perception of it. To be clear, we have no understanding of this concept as infants but that does not deny the fact of a solitary existence beginning.

One has such thoughts as these in insomnia, awake in predawn hours, delaying rising, hoping to fall into unconscious realms of dreams again. But I am awake now, and trying to come to grips with the tenuous perception of my reality.

Briefly stated, that infant begins acquiring sensations through the five senses, and those sensory experiences begin to form a reality that is empirical in nature, verifiable via the sensory; what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch.

Later there’s logic, math, and arguments for a priori knowledge. But I won’t go down that rabbit hole today. The sun is up so let me state the obvious, that from birth our perceptual view of the world is solitary and solitude bears investigating.

This fact has become ever more apparent in self-quarantine. We rationally cut ourselves off from the world, not only for safety and health but also for suppression of the pandemic. With less direct experience of the world we’ve only a technological media reality, yet one can see that that presentation is streamed to us as a one-way street.

If what I am telling you is not yet clear, give me a moment. As empirical beings we absorb through the senses to begin our individual accumulation of experiences. That is to say, my experience is not your experience, even of the same object, action or event.

We may further speculate that my verifiable reality cannot be a identical to yours and the putative shared reality we believe exists between us may be a collective illusion. Yet is there an epistemological position that holds that each individual’s empirical reality is the only true one?

As an artist I am aware that the majority of my practice entails my lone creation of work in solitude. Again, on that one-way thoroughfare, with no destination per se, I am engaging in solitary experience, with materials, elements, sounds and ideas at play in my conscious and unconscious mind. And though there’s no guarantee this one-way street is not a dead-end, or that the results of my work at the end of my efforts will be empirically apprehended by others, I work on in solitude.

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CITY HARVEST— A New York specific effort to "rescue food" by recovering unused products from grocers, donors and restaurants, then donating it to soup kitchens, food pantries and community food programs.

Where We Are Now

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 04:38:00 +0000

There may have been wars that we lived through before, many wars. Although those wars didn't directly threaten us, most of us anyway, we still experienced a fair amount of anxiety, worry or stress, particularly if we knew someone in harm’s way.

But that’s not quite where we are now. Today we face a different kind of horror with this 21st Century war, with an invisible enemy, a microscopic threat. And because there are so many known unknowns about this enemy there is a palpable sense of dread and fear of it; a world pandemic knows no borders, has no political agenda, simply kills silently and indiscriminately.

One of the known unknowns is that we cannot say when it will end. There are strategies for containment and mitigation of the virus used by the first countries that were attacked and they seem to have “flattened the curve.” But those lessons learned from the stringent plans that China and South Korea quickly put into place were mostly ignored by our present administration; it is late March and we still don’t have a nationwide “stay-at-home” order.

The medical experts have at least urged us to stay home, adding that a 14-day “shelter-in-place” or self-quarantine would help to curb the continuing spread of infection. But many people, especially the youth of America, dismissed this warning and still flock to public beaches and parks. We do know now that no one is immune from this virus, both young and old can be infected easily and what happens afterward is simply up to fate.

Today is our 14th day of sheltering at home. It has been simple to do because my wife and I love each other and enjoy each other’s company. We engage our minds with creative projects and spend much of our time reading, writing and making music. We follow the news, of course. Andrew Cuomo has assumed the role of National Crisis Leadership and his press briefings on the coronavirus assault on New York serve as sane directives for the rest of the country. His clarity, honesty and compassion as he gives us fact-based information is riveting and required viewing right now.

We accept the basic rationale that the best way to slow the spread of this disease, and clearly to save lives, is to simply stay home and close all non-essential businesses. To that end, amazing adaptations are occurring in daily life, with numerous artists, musicians, actors, galleries and museums doing incredible things to entertain, enlighten, challenge and inspire us. There are hundreds to discover and I encourage you to search them out but here are three of the best art museum sites that I recommend:

The Menil Video Collection

The Menil Collection’s Youtube page has videos of interviews and lectures by artists, critics and writers like Sam Gilliam, Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Lucy Lippard, Calvin Tomkins and Yve-Alain Bois.

Guggenheim Museum Book Collection

Over 200 books on art, design, history and theory on the site, and don’t miss their 360-degree virtual tour down the ramp.

National Gallery of Art Video Collection

Our own NGA has a fabulous audio and video collection of presentations on and lectures about artists like Linn Meyers, Ann Hamilton, Rachel Whiteread and many others.

Finally, I close with Gov. Cuomo’s plea: “Stay Home — Stop the Spread — Save Lives!”

IMAGE: Photo by U.S. Army.

Definitely Intuitive Duchamp

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 19:24:00 +0000

It is hard to believe but in the forty-six years since our inimitable Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opened in 1974 only a single Marcel Duchamp artwork has been in the collection. That has now changed with the promised gift of 35 Duchamp artworks that collectors Aaron and Barbara Levine will bestow upon the Hirshhorn, which will then have one of the largest collections of Duchamp in the United States, second only to the Philadelphia Museum of Art‘s Duchamp holdings in the Walter and Louise Arensberg Collection

Opening in November of last year, the Hirshhorn’s Levine show has Duchamp drawings, objects, paintings, a gang of replica-readymades from the 1960s, a Series E: “Boîte-en-valise,” as well as a 1934 Regular Edition of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box).” All these treasures, as well as over 150 books “of or by” Marcel Duchamp, will undoubtedly inspire new pilgrimages and renewed focus on the continued contemporary relevance of “The Old Fox.”(1)

Accompanying that interest, along with the expected new essays, books, panels and dissertations, one might imagine that a revised comprehension of Duchamp within the canon of Art History will arise. Ostensibly, this may be the hope of both the Hirshhorn and Philadelphia Museums, given their substantial support for and belief in Duchamp, clearly evident in their respective recent exhibitions and programming, as a touring show of “Essential Duchamp” works from PMOA’s Arensberg trove traveled to Tokyo, South Korea, Australia and New South Wales in 2019.(2)

To add my own observations on the corrigible Duchampian legacy, I should like to address two of his most profound inspirations that continue to resonate in contemporary art theory. Undoubtedly, that first concept was initiated via his readymades, an invention Marcel himself viewed as possibly “the most important single idea to come out of my work.”(3)

Notwithstanding scholarly squabbles over which was “the first” readymade(4), it needn’t be mentioned that when that infamous Fountain was censored, Marcel and cohorts dashed off their defense of “Mutt’s choice” as the single element that transformed a commercially manufactured plumbing fixture into “art,” and then the controversy and a century’s worth of debate on that definition began.

With each passing decade since, critical theorists, art historians and artists came to realize that the brilliance of the readymade idea resides not only in the artist’s choice but also in the unpacking of art’s definition through its contextualization, i.e., objects became art within art’s context, like in an exhibit or museum. Eventually, as the 20th Century artists began to adapt this idea of contextually determinant art, and the inherent power of re-contextualization of objects, advertising, photography and comics in movements like Pop, Neo-Dada and Arte Povera, wedded to the radical ideas in linguistics and semiology by Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, et. al. then . . .voilà! Appropriation!

Armed with these new theories, the world was a multi-faceted buffet of images for the taking by contemporary artists; art practice became a bricolage of borrowings, floating signifiers, critique and conflation. Appropriation-istas took advantage of Duchamp’s irreverence, then added their own cheeky denial of authorship to finally excise authenticity as neither validation for or the measure of art.

The other extraordinary gift of Duchamp perhaps can be found in those boxes. Pray tell, can one detect his burgeoning genius within his lethargy? Notoriously slow in the completion of work, Duchamp allowed the public to believe he’d stopped making art, he said he was doing nothing; “I’m a respirateur, a breather. I enjoy it tremendously.”(5)

Yes, but he was making notes, those gloriously askew yet painstakingly created and constructed notes, replicating even the tears of whatever bar napkin or hotel stationaries his handwritten thoughts or artistry had originally adorned. Among the delicious standouts in the Levine collection is the 1934 edition of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” AKA “The Green Box,” containing 94 of such reproductions of various notes, drawings, photos in the “green-flocked” cardboard box.

In the text information on the display vitrine for “The Green Box” and a selection of its ephemera, the Hirshhorn characterizes the assorted facsimiles as “intriguing glimpses into the artist’s thinking.” Duchamp’s concept for this and similar works, like “In the Infinitive (The White Box),” was to leave “sheets scattered loose in the box, waiting to be ordered and deciphered anew with each encounter.”(6) Thus, by simply allowing the viewer to handle them Duchamp foreshadowed the participatory experience of art, very much antithetical to 1930s conventions of exhibition practice, and his approach would transform later into contemporary movements such as interaction and social practice art.

But in my estimation these scatterings of Duchamp’s “thinking” may also be viewed in relation to literary theories like Derrida’s deconstruction. As Duchamp had already expanded beyond art as retinal sensation, his work with language, always one of his primary fascinations, became nakedly fused with his creative thinking, and his notes might be seen as progressive steps to a final work — or “text,” if you will. And in 1957 Duchamp proposed that it was only through the spectator’s “contribution” that the “creative act” took place; the viewer completes the work.(7)

With the philosophic engagement of language after the “French turn” of the 1970s, artists clearly began to consider their art as a language, a system of representation and as “authors” they now came to view their art’s signification under the critical eye of deconstructive analysis. Moreover, artists now understood that artworks were activated as they were seen/read by the viewer/spectators, so additional information came to be added, e.g., documentary photos, tape recordings, video, database archives, maps, etcetera, as supplements to the reactivation of the artist's work.

So we must admire as well Duchamp’s facsimiles as exemplary once again of his genius for prophesy, his intuition for the “next move” on the chessboard of art. All the while, perhaps, knowing that his posterity was in our hands indeed.

Or, as John Sturrock wrote (with my added nouns in brackets):

“An author [artist] cannot conceivably control the eventual ‘reactivations’ to which his or her text [artwork] will become subject. That is, the meanings that are read into it may or may not coincide with the meanings which the author [artist] believes he or she has invested it with...For language has powers of generating meanings irrespective of the wishes of those who use it.”(8)

IMAGE: Selection of ephemera from “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her bachelors, Even (The Green Box)” on display February 17, 2020; to limit exposure to light the Hirshhorn will show portions of the 94 elements on rotation during the run of the show; photograph by MCB.

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1. Walter Hopps’ characterization of Duchamp in a letter dated August 20, 1963 to Frederic S. Wight, then chair of UCLA Art Department; original in the Norton Simon Museum Archives, Pasadena, CA.

2. https://press.philamuseum.org/the-essential-duchamp-to-tour-japan-korea-and-australia-in-2018-2019/

3. Katharine Kuh. The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 1962, 92.

4. Hirshhorn wall text nominates “Bicycle Wheel” as “the first” readymade. Francis M. Naumann says in the Levine Collection catalogue that “the spinning bicycle wheel was not considered art at the time” but when Duchamp discovered the English word readymade in 1915 he bought a snow shovel and titled it “In Advance of the Broken Arm.”(Page 15 of catalogue) Encyclopaedia Britannica discredits “Bicycle Wheel” as “the first” because as “a wheel mounted on a stool” it was “technically” just a “ready-made assisted” (Duchamp's term.) I opt for the “Bottle Rack” AKA “Hedgehog” and Arturo Schwarz agrees with me.

5. Calvin Tomkins. “Art Was a Dream...,” Newsweek, November 9, 1959, 119.

6. Quotes are from Hirshhorn Museum label text for “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her bachelors, Even (The Green Box).”

7. Duchamp's lecture “The Creative Act” given at the Convention of American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, 1957.

8. John Sturrock. “Poststructuralism,” Structuralism, New York, 2008, 130.

Appropriation Blues: "I'm Gonna Let You Pass"

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 21:41:00 +0000

“Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of ‘open source’ culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. […] it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.”(1)

In the assessment of many artists like myself, and equally many or more scholars, critics and historians, the art movement and methodology of appropriation continues to have theoretical relevance. In the visual arts of painting and photography the appropriation of “borrowed” imagery for reuse and re-contextualization has yielded resonant discourses on ideas of authorship, authenticity and even the definition of art. It need not be stated that appropriation as artistic action has also been controversial and mires us in argument concerning originality versus “theft.”

In my career as an arts educator I taught contemporary art theory, first for a state university and then for 12 years at a renowned art college. Appropriation was among the most challenging of contemporary art theories I conveyed to students, given their shock at the bald-faced use of another artist’s work as one’s own. Such a usage was so incomprehensible to some that they rejected it as legitimate art practice, even with numerous scholarly validations and plentiful texts that I assigned them to read and that we debated in class.

My critical support for appropriation has extended beyond academia in the form of writing multiple essays about the subject over the years, as well as my occasional letter of dissent whenever I believed a critic got it wrong or misrepresented the essential theories of appropriation.(2)

In 2014 I had the honor of curating a centennial celebration of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades for the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center. In my curatorial essay for Readymade@100 I wrote:

“My curatorial vision was to maintain an emphatic reverence for Duchamp’s selection of the unaltered, manufactured object as encompassing both a disruption of the object’s function and its concomitant transformation through its new context as art. Further, and on this point most scholars agree, Duchamp was first to designate unaltered, manufactured objects as art and to present these commodity objects as his readymades. Thus, he distinguishes his choice as the conceptual act of ‘making art’ from existing mass-produced objects and this distinction separates Duchamp’s readymades from works that were created from ‘found objects’ and then further modified and/or altered by artists.”(3)

A century ago there was no precedent for the readymade. But Duchamp’s choice of unaltered manufactured objects as art by placing them in an exhibition context made us question accepted definitions of art. Inherently, Duchamp’s readymade concept is considered by many scholars as the birth of conceptual art, and that genealogy continued through the 20th century to become the practice of appropriation.

All this being said by way of beginning, before I share recent insights about American music, particularly folk and blues. We know that one consequence of our folkloric music tradition is a common, shared archive of songs, melodies and lyrics that have been passed down through generations of our cultural heritage. Before modern documentation technologies like film and recording existed, music was preserved through its oral history; learned through the immediacy of playing, it lived on as it was shared through the continued adaptations and variations on the songs.

I propose that these common traditional songs that were adapted by new players are similarly questioning both authorship and context, and we should view such adaptations in the folkloric tradition as appropriation. Further, adaptation of “borrowed” music is a re-contextualization that disrupts as it culturally alters the song through new presentations; representation in a new context effectively reculturalizes the songs’ meanings through adaptive methodology.

These thoughts arose while I was reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One. Dylan’s transparency about his beginnings as performer and songwriter, first in folk and blues forms, is compelling as he references numerous musicians, singers and guitarists, some that I know and love, some I was peripherally familiar with, some I had never heard. Seeking knowledge, I searched and unearthed some excellent essays about Dylan’s scholarship for song forms and his skillful mining of that common archival folk tradition.

I found Jonathan Lethem’s deep-dive essay on the history of influence as homage, thievery or adaptation, and it immediately occurred to me that music adapted from the “commons” or this folkloric tradition, was actually akin to appropriation. As a play on “borrowing,” Lethem concluded his essay with a list of various quotes he used, as well as those he adapted, that were peppered throughout the essay; his “quote” I use above is indicative of this theme which champions all art as a “gift,” free to take, to use, extend or improve. Thus, the quote combines verbatim phrases from Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression (in red) and Joanna Demers’ Steal This Music (in green).

Briefly, the history of influence in literature and visual art is acknowledged as essential to the novice writer or artist’s development. It is mostly condoned or pardoned, unless glaringly obvious as plagiarism which may result in litigation, perhaps a monetary settlement, or a dismissal of charges.

In music, there are differing attitudes to this issue. Classical music takes a measured approach, chiefly because there are not many instances of classical music composers plagiarizing another’s work.(4) Not so in pop music, because of lucrative publishing royalties for hit songs that have created thousands of law suits over plagiarized songs. Plagiarism cases against pop, country and rock songwriters is on the rise, with some artists being charged multiple times for adapting material without proper attribution or compensation.(5)

In the folkloric tradition the borrowing, reuse or interpretation of existing material has always been accepted practice. As a way for beginning musicians to learn guitar, the imitation of a song’s chords and melody allowed one self-instruction, especially when coupled with a phonograph and records. The natural next step for creative musicians inspired to write their own songs would be to reapply those chord progressions and melodies, with variance of tempo and time, perhaps even adapting lyrics, to create songs based on the previous material. And with an ever-growing repertoire of songs in the public domain this became an accepted folk tradition.

Bob Dylan, of course, was aware of this, steeped as he was in folk music and the blues at an early age. His early life during his years in and around Hibbing, Duluth and Minneapolis, Minnesota were spent immersed in the music of our American tradition, including folk, Delta blues and country blues, learning to sing and play them on guitar. When he arrived in New York City, a new crop of folk music was beginning to bloom in Greenwich Village, and Dylan easily began to get gigs and establish himself as someone to watch.

By the time he recorded his first album in 1961 Dylan's song list had grown. Even with eleven covers of other songs, it reveals his taste and ability with the folk process of borrowing and adapting; among the album's selections are songs by Jesse Fuller, Bukka White, Reverend Gary Davis, Roy Acuff and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The legendary producer, John Hammond, who had signed Dylan to Columbia Records, had suggested some of these songs and Dylan already knew them. He also gave Dylan a test pressing of Robert Johnson's songs, an album that would eventually be released as King of the Delta Blues Singers. Dylan was mightily moved by Johnson's singing and guitar playing on this album, and sought to absorb and adapt its magic, as he explains:

“When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard. The songs weren’t customary blues songs. They were perfected pieces — each song contained four or five verses, every couplet intertwined with the next but in no obvious way. […] I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparking allegories, big-assed truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction — themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them.”(6)

Clearly, Dylan “copied” the words to “more closely examine the lyrics and patterns” to learn the songs, as musicians of his generation did, including Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones and others. Dylan’s true intention was acquisition of Johnson’s “free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-assed truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction” because he did not have these kinds of songwriting gifts — yet.

Critics have taken Dylan to task, particularly for his more recent songs noting that his expansive and liberal borrowing sometimes seems to drift into plagiarism. In music reviews of the 2001 album, Love and Theft, questions came up about how a few lines from Junichi Saga’s novel Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld resembled a few of the lyrics in Dylan’s song, “Floater (Too Much to Ask).” [Spoiler alert: They are close but not exact copies; Mr. Saga said he was honored, by the way.]

For much of the 20th Century, and possibly continuing through our newest, the arts have embraced the idea of the readymade; collage, pastiche, assemblage, sampling, mash-ups and more. We artists work in a sea of sound, words and image, all available for us to use — if we follow the Rules of Fair Use. The one rule that most affects the arts is the Transformative Factor: Has the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning? Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights, and understandings?(7)

Obviously, Dylan gets a pass on this rule, as his songs add immeasurable value to the melodies and lyrics that he “transformed” through the “new aesthetics” and “new expression” he provides whenever he adapts a traditional or public domain work. But, to return to my proposal, why is appropriation art so divisive, when “borrowing” music is accepted? To start with, visual art mostly deals with objects — paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs — and has established protections under copyright law, which generated those Fair Use statutes to sort out litigation over authorship, or ownership, of the objects under contention.

Music, on the other hand, doesn’t really “exist.” When you go see musicians play in a nightclub or concert, do you “see” their music? No — you hear them play the music. How about a phonograph record, is that the “music?” No — that’s just a vinyl delivery system. Sheet music? Nope — musical notations on paper, silence.

Of course, music exists, but I want to differentiate here between the object-ness of visual art and the audible experience that is music. Because I believe that is the crux of this pass that we give Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and many others who recycled and borrowed from the massive cultural heritage of music, re-culturizing these common forms from a limitless concordance of available, but yet invisible, material. They borrow, adapt, then transform them via different cultural parameters into unique culturally sited experiences.

Contrarily, when artists appropriate a photograph, or someone else’s Instagram selfie, they are dealing with an object, and that object has physical presence; it is a thing composed of matter. As such, it may also be transformed into property and therein lies another distinction that takes appropriation art into the realm of the court system and copyright law. However much we may wish to assert our control over it, music, as an intangible experience of an ephemeral nature, is not property and, as such, we must allow it to retain its living quality for rebirth through multiple adaptations, interpretations and transformations. You cannot steal what you never owned.

“We used to think of an artist as someone who sat outside in nature or in his garret, working alone to create something new from whole cloth. But now that we are bombarded by images, the most important artist may be the one who can sift through other people’s art, the one who functions like a curator, an editor, or even a thief. In a world with a surfeit of images, perhaps the greatest artist is not the one who makes an image but the one who knows which image to take: the artist who knows how to sort through the sea of images in which we are now drowning and choose the one that will float.”(8)

IMAGE: Bob Dylan, playing on back porch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Greenwood, MS in 1963; photograph by Matt Eich.

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1. Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harpers Magazine, February 2007.

2. For some of these, please see: P.F.D. (2 Bobs), Critic Wags the Dog, Survey Says?, (In)Appropriate Behavior, Prince of Thieves and Ms. Heartney’s Riposte.

3. Boyd, M. Cameron. Curatorial Essay for "Readymade@100" (Part 1)

4. Handel was accused by Johann Mattheson of stealing melodies from his work in 1722. In 1907 it was discovered that Mozart’s Symphony No. 37 in G major, completed in 1783, was a copy of Haydn’s Symphony No. 25 in G major — also written in 1783.

5. From Wikipedia: “On Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin II (1969), parts of the song "Bring It On Home" were copied from Sonny Boy Williamson's 1963 recording of "Bring It On Home," written by Willie Dixon. On the same album, "The Lemon Song" included an adaptation of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor." In 1972, Arc Music, the publishing arm of Chess Records, brought a lawsuit against Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement over "Bring It On Home" and "The Lemon Song"; the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Earlier UK pressings of the album listed the song as "Killing Floor" and part credited it to Burnett, Howling Wolf's real name. Led Zeppelin's song "Whole Lotta Love" contained lyrics that were derivative of Willie Dixon's 1962 song "You Need Love." In 1985, Dixon filed a copyright infringement suit, resulting in an out-of-court settlement. Later pressings of Led Zeppelin II credit Dixon as co-writer.”

6. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One; Simon & Schuster, New York; 2004; 282 & 285.

7. https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

8. Adler, Amy M., Why Art Does Not Need Copyright (March 1, 2018). George Washington Law Review, Vol. 86, No. 2, 2018, 355. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3206830

Secrets, Truth and Lies

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 21:52:00 +0000

"We’re on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They’re practically what define us. When the truth offends we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our governments. Our ideologies, Our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: what is the cost of lies?”(1)

Today as I write, the House of Representatives debates Articles of Impeachment of the 45th President of the United States, with a Full House vote on those two Articles, Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Justice, scheduled for later this evening. So this seems a good time to discuss secrets, truth and lies.

If you have followed the long and tortuous journey to today, replete with Constitutional law and the various minutiae of our government’s steps to impeach a President, then you have learned that we have scant knowledge about this process. After all, before tonight’s vote, which will undoubtedly result in passage of Articles of Impeachment with the House’s Democratic majority, only two Presidents have been impeached in our history.

You have also learned, as have I, that the “truth” of these matters has been difficult to determine during the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of POTUS45. And we discovered the actors in this drama have told numerous lies, lies that are well-documented in print, email, text, or recorded audio and video.

In the HBO-produced “Chernobyl” miniseries, actor Jared Harris plays Valery Legasov, the inorganic chemist and Deputy Director at the Kurchatov Institute who was tasked with the cleanup of the nuclear reactor disaster. Although the scene was fictionalized, the writers scripted Legasov as giving evidence in a trial that charged three Chernobyl personnel with responsibility for the accident. It is during this brilliant performance that Harris/Leasov delivers a speech that I quoted above; it is about secrets, fear of truth, and the cost of lies. It rang true notes for me about this moment we find ourselves in our American history, this present moment fraught with potential disaster for Democracy.

Because of our news cycle’s constant and repetitive presentation of the events leading up to today’s impeachment vote and, indeed, the last three years of this Administration’s chaotic and controversial actions and “Executive Orders,” tainted secrets have been exposed and we are indeed on “dangerous ground.” Is it not a threat to our Republic that we have a President who sought help from a foreign government to damage a political rival? And what of the many, many lies by him, his staffers and appointees to Federal Government posts?

“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth.” We owe posterity the truth; history must be written to reflect what really happened here, today. And we owe our citizens the truth; a Senate trial will certainly follow next year and 70% of Americans — not just Democrats, but Republicans as well — want to hear from those witnesses that the White House prohibited from testifying during the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation: John Bolton, the ex-National Security Advisor, and Mick Mulvaney, current Chief of Staff.

There are many who do not wish us to find the truth; nearly all the Republican Representatives and Senators. They don’t want American citizens to learn about these abuses of power, or to discover the true impetus behind POTUS45’s obstruction of evidence — 71 documents subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee, subpoenas that the White House totally ignored.

But the Truth lies in wait. We may not get it next year when the Senate takes up the Impeachment of the 45th President. Yes, we seek the truth, we want the truth, but truth does not care about our needs or wants. It does not care about our ideologies either. But it cannot, will not be denied. But this is the cost of these thousands of lies — lies by our President, lies by our elected leaders, lies by our governing bodies, our representatives: we witness history tonight without knowing the truth. We live in this moment of history but we are not allowed to fully comprehend its meaning. Moreover, we must live with the cost of these lies, and that we may not find out the truth in our lifetimes.

This is the cost of their lies. This is the result of their fear: the denials, the obstruction of justice has cost American history a (temporary?) burial of the truth. We await the exhumation, hopefully in our lifetime, and we await Justice being served.

IMAGE: The Capitol, Washington, D.C.

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1. From "Chernobyl," HBO miniseries; Craig Mazin, Writer/Executive Producer; Johan Renck, Director; 2019.

Curatorial Practice: Revise, Revert, Redress

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 02:37:00 +0000

With the October 2019 re-opening of their Midtown Manhattan building the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) seems poised to take on the 21st Century. Renowned Diller Scofidio + Renfro architecture studio, in collaboration with Gensler, designed new spaces which purport to “rethink the Museum visiting experience...through new interdisciplinary methods,” including an “innovative creativity laboratory, built on the second floor, which invites visitors to discover art by exploring new ideas about the present, the past and the future.”(1) Would that this were true.

Full disclosure: I have not visited these new spaces, nor seen the newly hung exhibitions, but my focus here is not on the design elements by the architects. Instead, I plan to address the “visiting experience” as advanced by MoMA to critique their curatorial plans about “the present, the past and the future,” which are symptomatic of a “history of art” timeline that is espoused by many art historians and museums.

Within days of MoMA’s relaunch I read feminist art historian Maura Reilly’s ARTnews review, “MoMA’s Revisionism Is Piecemeal and Problem-Filled,” and learned the disturbing news that the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. shopworn timeline is still in play in 2019, albeit with new “quirky” or “dumbed-down gallery headings.” Briefly, Maura worked as a MoMA tour docent in the 1990s while completing her art history graduate degree at New York University. In her words:

“At that time, the permanent exhibition galleries, representing art produced from 1880 to the mid-1960s, were arranged to tell the ‘story’ of modern art as conceived by founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., beginning with Monet and Cézanne, and then leading into Picasso, Futurism, Surrealism, and Jackson Pollock. According to Barr, ‘modern art’ was a synchronic, linear progression of ‘isms’ in which one (heterosexual, white) male ‘genius’ from Europe or the U.S. influenced another who inevitably trumped or subverted his previous master, thereby producing an avant-garde progression.”(2)

Thereafter, the museum failed at “reinventing” itself during the “MoMA2000” exhibitions, only to revert to Barr’s timeline in 2004 with “a return to strict art historical ‘isms,’ with the collection galleries installed almost exactly as they had been before ‘MoMA2000.’” Fifteen years on and MoMA is retooling again with the new plan to “rethink the Museum visiting experience.” Again, i quote from Maura’s review:

“While it purports to be non-chronological, the traditional narrative of modernism is left intact (unlike in 2000), and the ghost of the mainstream modernist timeline remains on the three floors, tracing art history from the 1880s to the present. The museum has done away with ‘isms’ in favor of quirky oftentimes nonsensical themes and dumbed-down gallery headings, such as ‘Stamp, Scavenge, Crush’ and ‘Inner and Outer Space.’”(3)

And so one might ask, “How will visitors actually be ‘exploring new ideas’ given the return to Barr’s 1980s era timeline?” But before we bear down on further critical analyses of art museums, their telos and authoritarian stature, I should like us to take a moderately deeper dive down this “history of art” rabbit hole:

“The master discourse which is the common sense of ‘Art’ is in the thrall of an antique, ‘nominalist’ view of language – believing that because there is a singular word, ‘art,’ then there must be some singular thing, some ‘essence,’ which the word names. History (to say nothing of modern linguistics) is the enemy of this illusion; real history therefore – mutable, heterogeneous, indeterminate – is kept prisoner in its own dungeons while a more coherent imposter (a more plausible narrative) takes public command, and displaces judgments. Our art museums are most often machines for the suppression of history, (4)

substituting for concrete historical locations the fictive backdrops of an autonomous history of art or an unquestioned, and perhaps inexpressible, standard of ‘aesthetic excellence.’ Where historically remote work is being displayed, instead of the massive historical work of recovery necessary to re-insert the ‘dead’ signs in the complex moments within which they once resonated with meaning, we are all too frequently offered the ‘scholarship’ of the family tree, the spectacle of the cemetery with its monuments and relics.(5)

The contents of this graveyard is the canon of established ‘masterpieces;’ to be admitted to it is to be consigned to perpetual exhumation, to be denied entry is to be condemned to perpetual oblivion. The canon is what gets written about, collected, and taught; it is self-perpetuating, self-justifying, and arbitrary; it is the gold standard against which the values of new aesthetic currencies are measured."(6)

Conceptualist Victor Burgin’s keen observation on the theoretical and art historical positioning of artists and art theories within the “graveyard” of academia and the “prison-machine” of the museum provides us an incisive and prescient alert that remains topical since publication of his above quoted essay in 1986. The erection and maintenance of the modern art history canon is continually supported and corroborated with curatorial and critical acuity by those with abiding interests.

Near the start of the “long 18th Century,” philosopher John Locke held the belief that human beings (like Burgin’s view of history) were mutable, and not only capable of change but in fact were constantly changing. Such thinking by Locke, Spinoza, Descartes and others helped forge the “Age of Reason” that would foster then radical ideas of equality, democratic governance, knowledge gained through empiricism, and the importance of progress based upon the attained perfection of humankind. Famously, Locke wrote that a government best served the people by protecting their “life, liberty and property,” a phrase Thomas Jefferson would borrow, substituting “pursuit of happiness” for “property” in the Declaration of Independence.

With progress as a goal, 18th Century teleology became wedded to improvement and this in turn encouraged purposeful advances in the arts and sciences. Moreover, a new preponderance of encyclopedias would change the way people thought and acted as they reveled in their newfound freedoms of self-education and (self)expression. By the 19th Century many artists saw existence quite differently and their studio practices transformed as they rejected the traditional methods and made original leaps forward in art, literature and music.

The history of art was hewn to this grand tale of progress, and art historians have closely monitored these past 350 years, eager to shelve and label the various “movements” that arrived in succession. A schema of “isms” was concocted and subsequently buttressed by the art critics and writers who touted them in their texts as a back-to-back progressive trajectory. Indeed, one might trace a somewhat legible, theory-laden, linear history proceeding as Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism . . .

But how could it be that simplistic? Long promoted as a static, unyielding narrative, this “history of art” fable had the occasional cracks in its armor of confident and dictatorial pronouncements. Suprematism and Russian Constructivism nearly collapsed the trajectory’s bridge from 19th to 20th Century; Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” presented subject matter as “supreme” reduction of color in 1915, and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, and Pure Blue Color” usurped representation entirely and declared the “death of painting” in 1921. Meanwhile, of course, Duchamp toppled everything off the table with myriad attacks on art’s smugly contented history, including his readymades that forced us to question the meaning of art itself.

Somewhat back on track by the 1920s art historians righted the ship and delivered Surrealism, before finally deciding that visual progress was tantamount to a reduction of the formal elements of visual art, and that the Enlightenment's value of “self” coupled with expression was also of equivalent importance. Thus began those Golden Years of Pollock, action painting, de Kooning, Gutai in Japan, Motherwell, automatism, Rothko, Newman and Clyfford Still.

Long promoted as an unyielding narrative, this “history of art” eventually began to reveal rents in its armor of confident and dictatorial pronouncements on the past. For it was right around 1956 that the “modernist” journey appears to have ground to a halt, or at least hit a speed bump. Pop Art interrupted the progressive experiment of individual artist’s “self-expression,” as the younger Pop-ists borrowed comics, newspaper imagery and advertising motifs to create work that denied the “medium specifics” of an art critic like Clement Greenberg; Clem lauded the Post-Impressionism-Suprematism-AbEx trajectory, the “literalness of paint” that provided a guarantee of “aesthetic quality,” and rejected the compromised “novelty” of Pop.

Walter Benjamin had told us that Western culture was dependent on objects that are separate from the “real world,” assigning them an “exchange value” rather than use value, and with the avant-garde artists already using politicized images, like European Dadaists had done, the move to appropriation in America began. The use of comic books (Rosenquist, Polke) and advertising (Warhol, Rauchenberg, Johns) became acts of cultural appropriation, as they denied the originary source’s context and “use value.”

Perhaps just as jarring was an apparent return to figuration by major artists. Toward the end of his life Pollock had shockingly introduced figurative elements back into his paintings, which provoked critical rancor from Greenberg. And Philip Guston, who had been an AbEx-er in the 1950s, returned to figurative representation in a personal cartoon-style.

When we consider what would occur in the art of the 1960s and 1970s with conceptual art, performance, land art, photo-text, video art and intermedia, it is clear that MoMA’s re-adherence to Barr’s timeline, or indeed any museum's aping of this flawed “history of art” timeline, must be rigorously subject to a redress long overdue. Those conceptualist, performative, multidisciplinary chinks in art’s “real history” are continuing apace, and art museums, and art schools curatorial studies programs, absolutely must undertake broad-based and inclusive projects if we are to be intentional in ways to help the public “discover art by exploring new ideas about the present, the past and the future.”

IMAGE: Museum of Modern Art entrance on West 53rd, New York, NY.

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1. https://www.floornature.com/moma-new-york-reopens-after-expansion-project-diller-scofidi-15045/

2. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/moma-rehang-art-historian-maura-reilly-13484/

3. Reilly, “MoMA’s Revisionism Is Piecemeal and Problem-Filled.”

4. Burgin, Victor. “The End of Art Theory,” The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity, Humanities Press International, 1986, 159.

5. Tagg, John. “A Socialist Perspective on Photographic Practice,” in Three Perspectives on Photography, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979, 70.

6. Burgin, “The End of Art Theory.”

The Arc of Creative Intellection (Pt. 2, Cerebrum-Coaster)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 17:28:00 +0000

In essence then, an arc of creative intellection, perhaps unconsciously hinted at in my earlier postcard to Richard where I explored an idea of communication “between the lines” as an alternative conveyance of thought, may have germinated within my consciousness later as a method of actualizing linguistic theory via my bisected-text art practice.

It is also worth noting here my reference in that same postcard of my views at that stage of my life on the state of contemporary art, and my creative call to arms for an “aart & obscurism.” Fundamentally, my manifesto was a response to contemporary art as a closed system, perceived as unsupportive of new art by unknown artists, whose sole drive was the commercial marketing of the “validated” artworks of already established blue-chip artists. Needless to say, a rebelliousness had already permeated my consciousness by that time of my life, and it was a nonconformity that was prodded further by the endlessly mercenary and hermetic Los Angeles Art World.

Nonetheless, my spirit would not be silenced by the anonymity of “obscurism.” I eventually finished the well-trodden path of academic possibility that lead inexorably to a professorship, whereupon I began to engage in productive years of theoretical and philosophical discourse, not only with my art students but with academic colleagues and artist peers.

Embarking on the furtherance of such intellectual discourse through the availability of the Internet, I launched this blog in December 2005. For nearly 14 years, my writing has encompassed everything from exhibition reviews to theoretical debates on performance art, to important distinctions of practices such as conceptual art and postconceptualism, to minimal art and social practice.

As I re-read my previous essays, often prompted by my research for a new post, I confess, with sincere humility, that I am often impressed by my words, how they represent my ideas with an ease and clarity, stemming from my immersion in art criticism, critical theory and its philosophic tangents that I voraciously read during 20 years of postgraduate study and my later pedagogical career.

However — and this tacks back to “The Arc” — I also confess that the intellection apparent within my past years of essays, discourse, debates and letters, is now somewhat intimidating to me. Regardless, I am proud that I wrote these essays, produced all of this, and that my words still have the power to convey my ideas. But often now my essays seem to emanate as if from a mind that is distant to me; the ideas are coherent to me but how I crafted the sentences that conveyed them seem a mystery. Thus, began my doubts about my present strength and stamina for intellection.

These days when I begin to write — about pop culture, or music, or even politics — I find it more of an effort; words don’t flow like they used to and the pace of my production is tedious and frustrating. What is more, my former immediate grasp of critical theory, an expertise nurtured through years of teaching studio and theory courses for universities and one of America's then premiere art colleges, is not as “back-of-my-hand” as it once was; distinctions of critique, meaning and critical validation seem enveloped in the hazy past.

Reflections such as these make one consider how aging undoubtedly affects mental ability as well as the physical, and how the intellection that the brain is capable of perhaps lessens, slows or deteriorates with the passage of time. Are the highs and lows of intellection subject to a cerebral gravity, rising to glorious heights before an inevitable plummet downwards, like a cerebrum rollercoaster?

However, if you will allow me to return to that coaster car for a moment, to recall one such discursive high-point as elucidation, I want to share one particular online discourse that was sustained in July 2007 with my fellow critic, artist and curator, Jeffry Cudlin, in reference to his “definition” of art.

Jeffry had appeared on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, along with art educator and critic, Dr. Claudia Rousseau, and DC artist and arts blogger Lenny Campello, and they had talked about art, eventually landing upon the topic of “what makes good art.” Long story short, the following week Lenny posted on his blog Jeffry’s written recollections of what he had said on-air about his view that “good art” was based upon three points: “Choice of medium, material mastery, historical positioning: my big three.” Given that Jeffry wrote his follow-up piece with a bit more time for reflection, it did yield intelligent weight, and most importantly for its inclusion here, it prompted my own riposte — which I shall post below Jeffry’s:

“1) How apt is the choice of medium?

For Clement Greenberg, art was all about specialization. He wanted work in any given medium to refer to its own method of construction and the characteristics of its component materials: Painting was about free-flowing or staining pigment in a resolutely flat pictorial space; sculpture was about volume and movement through three-dimensional space; literature was really about words, rhythm, meter.

Of course, Greenberg's brand of formalism died out in the late '60s. Now that we live in a cross-disciplinary, multi-valent art world, contemporary artists tend less and less to be specialists, winnowing out their problem set to a few spare material issues. Instead, they're typically trained as generalists who work from project to project, idiom to idiom.

But this can't mean that the choice of medium doesn't matter. Instead, that choice becomes terribly important: Why is this object a drawing, painting, photograph, or sculpture? Why was that choice appropriate, or not appropriate? What about the history or physical properties of the medium seems uniquely bound up in the content of this work?

2) Does the artist show enough material mastery?

Economy and clarity are virtues: No artist needs to show the viewer everything they're capable of in a work, lavishing their object/project with bells, whistles and flourishes.

If I go all the way back to John Ruskin--why not?--he stated that the artist should work until the idea has been made clear, and go no further; he warned against work in which the only evident merits were "patience and sandpaper."

And, again, if we're going to accept this idea that an artist might make a photograph, or a painting, or a video, then how skilled do they need to be in each? Skilled enough to demonstrate some empathy with the materials, and to achieve an appropriate level of fit and finish--one that doesn't distract from the content of their work, but instead enhances it.

3) How does the artist position him or herself in relation to history?

Every artist is making claims about the relation of their work to both that of their immediately present peers and to the canon. Every artist essentially chooses their grandparents, cobbling together selective (possibly arbitrary) genealogies out of the past few centuries of artistic production.

A contemporary painting is almost always an argument--for what painting ought to be generally, and for how we should position the artist within this imagined genealogy.

The task of the critic is to determine whether or not this positioning -- an argument made by the artist, and amplified, tweaked, or otherwise refined by the curator -- is valid.”(1)

---

Lenny then closed this post by encouraging his readers to email him their comments in the hope of initiating a discussion on the topic. Clearly, I needed little persuasion and quickly sent along my response:

I listened with fairly rapt attention to your WAMU radio broadcast on Kojo’s show last Thursday. As I recall, my good friend Jeffry Cudlin’s improvised “definition” for “what makes good art” was delivered astutely and with the clarity of vision that undoubtedly comes from writing and thinking about art “professionally” as an art critic.

However, his recollected print version (that you published) differs significantly from what he said “off-the-cuff” and "on air." His “recalled” version notably featured Clement Greenberg as a touchstone which would have pricked up my ears if Jeffry had actually mentioned Greenberg’s name “on air.”

Nevertheless, in the printed version Jeffry’s implication is that Greenberg’s theoretical views chiefly concerned “specialization” and I find this is a bit confusing. I respectfully remind my esteemed colleague that it was the “self-criticality” which Clem championed that fully expanded upon his idea that an artist’s medium must “refer to its own method of construction and the characteristics of its component materials.”

Granted, an artist ought to critically consider one’s “method” within a chosen medium but more importantly in the Greenbergian view one must critically assess one’s use and furtherance of a medium; what can be done with one’s method to extend the possibilities of the medium and further the discourse of art?

I also suggest that Jeffry’s framing of the medium question (“Why is this object a drawing, painting, photograph, or sculpture? Why was that choice appropriate, or not appropriate?”) is more a question of “how,” as in “how does the choice of medium help or hinder an artist’s work?”

To open the dialog: does the “how” (chosen medium and method of execution) trump the “what” (idea or concept conveyed) in contemporary art? Duchamp would say, “No,” as would most Postconceptualists toiling in Marcel’s century-long shadow (Martin Creed, Douglas Gordon, Peter Friedl, et al) and I think Jeffry was hinting at this when he writes about un-named young Turks “winnowing out their problem set to a few spare material issues.”

I would like to complicate this line of inquiry even more by mentioning that conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth countered and refuted Greenberg’s analysis by saying that the object is conceptually irrelevant to art. Kosuth also expanded Duchamp’s other idea about the definition of art, when he wrote in 1969: “Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. . . Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art.”

Kosuth effectively shifted the focus from the specifics of a chosen medium to “question[ing] the nature of art.”

What I attempt here is to propose that we are already in a “post-medium condition” (Rosalind Krauss) and that all bets are off on medium-specificity, which would lessen the impact of “why” one made a drawing as a valuable criteria for “quality,” and that art is about the “definition of art” and the ideas that artists try to convey.

To address Jeff’s second qualification for “good art,” which concerns “material mastery,” requires an introduction of the postmodern confusion of “talent” and “creativity.” To equate one’s “mastery” of a medium as indicator of quality (“good art”) tends to misrepresent “talent” as a consecrated “academic” skill that can be “learned” and that “talent” certifies substance.

This is “old school” and currently out of fashion in our post-medium condition. I should cite Thierry de Duve’s words that, “Creativity is grounded in a utopian belief. . . that repeats itself with clockwork regularity . . . from Rimbaud to Beuys: everyone is an artist.” And “Talent. . . is inseparable from the specific terrain where it is exerted, which in the last resort is always technical. . . Creativity, by contrast, is conceived as an absolute and unformalised potential. . . one has creativity, without qualification; one is creative, period.”

Depending on your allegiances, “talent” can either be learned, taught or does not exist. Again, this is old hat, supplanted in the 1970’s when “critical theory” appeared (linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, et al) and as Duve notes, “theory entered art schools and succeeded in displacing – sometimes replacing – studio practice while renewing the critical vocabulary and intellectual tools with which to approach the making and appreciating of art.”

To be sure, Jeffry’s “definitions” are muscular, workable points for a discussion of “what makes good art.” But we are on unstable grounds if we mingle academia with Kantian judgment and mastery with metaphysics. I do agree with Jeffry’s last point concerning the artist’s “positioning” of themselves within the history of art.

However, he falls short of fully fleshing his “professional” responsibility in all this when he writes simply: “The task of the critic is to determine whether or not this positioning -- an argument made by the artist, and amplified, tweaked, or otherwise refined by the curator -- is valid.” Again, to ramp up our discussion, we might ask Jeffry to elaborate on the obvious (possibly covert?) power of art critics in “positioning” not only the individual artists but wholesale art “movements” within the grander scheme of “art history.” This obviously implicates the “written” version as more “manifesto” than improvised erudition but clarifications are needed for public consumption and understanding, in any case.(2)

---

What strikes me now about this intellectual engagement of 12 years ago are two things:

First, my engagement with Jeffry, a man whose mind I greatly admire, clearly reveals the sincerity of my critical jousting with him, for his intellectual views are always presented succinctly, and I was stimulated as much by his choice of verbiage as by my personal disagreement with his points, so I rose to the challenge of a critical debate with him in a spirit of joy and enthusiasm.

Second, my point-by-point dissection of his triumvirate of those three points with which he delineates “good art” was obviously braced equally by both my occupational advantage of teaching art theory as well as the luxury of time to craft my verbal parries and evaluative thrusts.

I dare say that such discursive interactions at that highest arc, as the brain crests the penultimate threshold of intellection, are as rough jewels in our memory. As my postcard to Richard encapsulated our youthful eagerness to toss philosophy and creative intellection back and forth, so this one-way, online debate with Jeffry indicated two other art professors’ love of criticality and art theory. Far less interesting perhaps than proofread and edited dissertational analyses, such raw, conversational exchanges remain exemplary of life’s arcs of intellection, and offer personal evidence of one’s better moments as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage.

IMAGE: Front of postcard sent by MCB; photograph courtesy of Richard Doherty.

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1. https://dcartnews.blogspot.com/2007/07/what-great-definition-she-said-during.html

2. https://dcartnews.blogspot.com/2007/07/what-makes-good-art-another-view.html

The Arc of Creative Intellection (Pt. 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 19:34:00 +0000

Mementos from the past, reminders of times we have lived through, moments experienced, while physical are imbued with memory. Such objects stumbled on via research or proffered unexpectedly, can spark impactful reflection and provoke contemplative inquiry. These mental exercises may in turn encompass speculation on past life and reveal insights to us about intentionality as well the significance of our mortality.

That kind of object arrived in an email from an old boyhood friend; I had sent it to him from Los Angeles decades ago and he returned a digitized image of it to me. Richard Doherty and I spent a few high school years together, hanging out on Wingate Drive in Little Rock after class, pining for young women who ignored our attentions, playing music together, often printing black-and-white photographs in his father’s darkroom. We both studied at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and Richard went for his Masters in Chicago and became a professor of photography in Dallas. Meanwhile, I fled Arkansas to live as an avant-garde artist and chase rock-and-roll dreams.

When I received this flash from my past I immediately sent this reply back to Richard: “What a relic! Admittedly, I was only 24 or 25 years old so I obviously thought I’d figured it all out...But in spite of all my ‘Aart & Obscurism’ conflation of ink (read between the lines, right?) and typed text, there’s a couple of nuggets here: ‘In a succession of days is the last one more or less important than the first?’ In any case, quite empowering to see that over 4 decades ago I desired intellectual discourse with a peer - you, a fellow traveler on the art path. Fortunately for us both we also became teachers. Thanks for sending this, old friend.”

Before going further, I believe an inspection of this “relic” is in order. The card presents as an artwork and given its decidedly enigmatic intention, it bears a closer reading. As referenced in my email to Richard, my text alternated typed and printed-in-ink sentences. I have transcribed it below, punctuation and misspellings intact, no correction, with line breaks but without my hand-drawn graphic embellishments:

“to ‘r’ of 1st pstcrd: acknowledgemint of our

social status as one of unerring structure

in an unstructured world is hardly easy

can this really be changed will

we allow it can we now know if

our position at any given min?

to ‘r’ or whomever of sec. 2nd pstcrd:

assuming thatiwouldevenmergewith

such sentimetntal drivel is amistake

often made of one’s past lives: the

important thingforyoutoknowisthis:

anxiety breeds neccessity: farting in

tensionbreedsmalcontentrunning inplace

the little girl won’t stop her crying

wearsholesinyourtoes; la isagreat spoyt

wide openhe holds his breath 30 seconds

for shutterbugs; giventhechancewouldyou

have medoeither? in asuccession

of days is the last one more

or less important than the 1st?”

In the interest of objectivity, I transition now to third person to examine this text:

The postcard’s author, apparently seeking a creative approach to their missive, dispensed with proper grammar and spelling to establish novelty; words are run together, capitalization ignored, etc. Accidental or no, this produces a radical appearance suffused with this defiance of conventions.

In the specifics of the communication, the author references two “pstcrds” presumably received from “r,” evidently to answer or respond to the ideas raised therein. The first response says that to believe one’s “social status” is always right in “an unstructured world” isn’t easy, and questions whether the situation can be altered, then further complicates their point by suggesting that “we” may not “allow it” as, presumably, we might not even be aware of “our [social] position.” The author then abandons that previous statement as “sentimental drivel” and that we do make mistakes reflecting on “past lives,” emphasizing that “anxiety breeds necessity” and “farting in tensionbreedsmalcontentrunning inplace.”

Here the author inserts a non sequitur (“the little girl won’t stop her crying”) before continuing with an absurd observation about running “inplace,” and that it “wearsholesinyourtoes.” Then a compliment about Los Angeles, another non sequitur (“wide openhe holds his breath 30 seconds”) before finishing the LA sentence as being a great “spoyt” for photographers.

In closing, as if thinking out loud, the author asks his reader if “giventhechancewouldyou have medoeither?” and then follows this riddle with the somewhat philosophic questioning of whether any day of your life (“asuccession of days”), either first or the last, is any “more or less important” than another.

Revelations that I discovered in this object inspired me to dissect my long-lost text, I trust, with a bit of objectivity. This objectivity helps me clarify this re-experiencing of a past creative moment and the physical action taken to alternate lines composed of typed sentences with lines of ink, in the hopes of establishing a simultaneity of an approach to communication, if not the presentation of the dual nature of language, i.e., writing and reading.

I went on to finish my master's in painting at University of Maryland and became a professor of art, while Richard became a professor of photography. That both of us would achieve such arcs of creative endeavor is to be expected considering the earlier lives we shared as young men.

My graduate school experience included teaching courses in art theory as an assistant, and after graduation 20 years ago I taught painting, drawing and art theory courses for UMD as well as the Corcoran College of Art and Design. During my lectures on theory I used chalkboards to much advantage in my teachings, and the visual impact of words on a chalkboard wasn’t lost on me; in 2003 I began a series of text-based works on my handmade chalkboards. This in turn, coupled with my own continual research into linguistics, semiotics and some of the ideas of Jacques Derrida, allowed me to advance my practice beyond representation and into participatory installations.

One idea that fascinated me by Derrida was the idea of sous rature, a concept he derived from Martin Heidegger, whereby words whose meanings were less than adequate for philosophic intellection were struck through; author and curator Raphael Rubinstein explains:

“For both Heidegger and Derrida, the continued legibility of a term placed under erasure is crucial. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains in the introduction to her translation of de la Grammatologie: ‘Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.’ But while Heidegger puts ‘Being’ under erasure in order to signal his rejection of the notion that ‘Being’ stands apart from the realm of objects, that it’s not in the world, for Derrida this critique hardly goes far enough. Putting the word ‘Being’ under erasure is part of Derrida’s larger project of questioning transcendent meanings, systems of authority, faith in the power of origins, and Western ethnocentrism.”(1)

Derrida’s expansion of sous rature as a concept to enhance our understanding of the slippage involved in language, and our futile comprehension of same, inspired me to elide not single words but entire sentences. In 2003, I created a method whereby I would write my text along the horizontal edge of masking tape, and after removal of the tape either the bottom half or the top half of my sentences would be “erased” horizontally through “striking through” the text with tape. Thus, my practice evolved from text-based static works to creating panels wholly composed with my bisected-text method that became participatory art installations for the public, as viewers were invited to decipher the top or bottom half of my sentences to deduce the meaning.

[To be continued...]

IMAGE: Postcard by MCB; photograph courtesy of Richard Doherty.

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1. Heather and Raphael Rubinstein. Under Erasure; “printed on the occasion of ‘Under Erasure,’ an exhibition they curated at Pierogi Gallery, New York, November 28, 2018-January 7, 2019;” 6.

Content Defined, Denied, Disrupted

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sat, 31 Aug 2019 02:02:00 +0000

T Magazine, the “style” arm of our revered and de rigueur New York Times, recently convened two curators and a trio of artists — David Breslin from the Whitney Museum, Kelly Taxter from the Jewish Museum, artists Martha Rosler, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Torey Thornton — in a project to come up with “The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age.” As stated in a recent NYT article, their challenge was to cobble up those artworks “they considered to be the 25 works of art made after 1970 that define the contemporary age, by anyone, anywhere.”(1) The selections, as one would expect, run the gamut; from mediocre to visionary, the predictable to the obscure, with works by both blue chip and lesser-known artists. As one reads through the list, it appears that the “Definitive Works” perhaps suffer from the damages inherent in bricolage, with picks apparently based on decade-ism instead of art history or art theory. Furthermore, the panel’s inclusion of the expected art historical “-isms” amounts to mere tokenism, offering little substantive structure to the list, neglecting the relevant context and theory to convey what these 25 works might say about art of the past 50 years.

In her summation of their efforts, Thessaly La Force admirably covers for the art experts’ failure to actually determine a “Definitive” list. La Force apologetically writes that the list is “not definitive, nor is it comprehensive,” and continues: “Had this meeting happened on a different day, with a different group, the results would have been different. Some pieces were debated heavily; others were fleetingly passed over, as if the group intuitively understood why they had been brought up; a few were spoken of with appreciation and wonder. What came out of the conversation was more of a sensibility than a declaration. This list — which is ordered chronologically, from oldest work to most recent — is who we circled around, who we defended, who we questioned, and who we, perhaps most of all, wish might be remembered.”(2)

Well and good, but somewhat disingenuous after seducing us with that title; I dare say NYT readers were rather hoping to learn what “25 Works” are the quintessential ones that “Define Contemporary Art.” La Force’s recognition of the fact that “on a different day, with a different group” the works selected would vary, alludes to the subjectivity of individual taste which rings true. Subjectivity notwithstanding, once an artwork was selected for inclusion in the list then due diligence in research should have followed; in what sociocultural condition was a work created? What art theories were engaged, or created, in the artist’s practice? Providing even a modicum of structure would help both lay persons as well as those versed in art to consider the artworks.

Alas, the panel clearly abandoned intentionality and logic in this assignment. What’s more, their formidable task became even less historical with the panel replacing anything like a structure with a simple chronology. Why have these works merely checked off instead of touching upon their socio-historical context, perhaps grouped by art theories or movements? However, the chronological structure does provide irrefutable evidence that the weakness of this project lies in its neglect of both context and theory to support the art panel’s selections. For example, we need only to look at their first three choices on this list, works by artists who helped develop a few of the key late 1960s art theories that still inform art practices today, to see that the theories embodied in their work were ignored.

Undoubtedly, Elaine Sturtevant, Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke belong on this list; that much the panel got right. Notwithstanding their inclusion, the works chosen as representative of Sturtevant, Broodthaers and Haacke are not exemplary of the theories those artists espoused, but instead seem to provide a functionary tokenism for the panel; Sturtevant’s copies or “repetitions”(3) of paintings stand in for appropriation, with Broodthaers’ “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles” and Haacke’s “MoMA Poll” as feeble markers for institutional critique.

To be sure, Sturtevant has adamantly held that her practice was not copying, and in time art critics like Bernard Blistene would understand; Blistene viewed her paintings as “an apparent content being denied”(4) and the repetition of image moved her practice beyond surface content to the conceptual. When Duchamp birthed conceptual art by choosing to exhibit that urinal, he was first to introduce that idea of choice as art, and in so doing he forced his audience to consider art’s definition. Sturtevant moved her art beyond content — “what you paint” — and her focus on repetitions of Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns paintings commented on the art world’s patriarchy system as well.

Regrettably, Zoë Lescaze’s summary of Sturtevant’s artwork does little justice to her plenary contributions to contemporary art. Sturtevant’s obvious link to appropriation art is only briefly skimmed and Lescaze’s single mention of Sturtevant’s conceptualism is to suggest that her “conceptual reasons for copying” were to “skewer the grand modernist myths of creativity and the artist as lone genius.”(5)

Perhaps a dissection of the “modernist myth” of the “artist as lone genius” would prove too puerile for discussion here, but we should ask how Lescaze, as well as La Force and the art expert panel, would expand on a view of creativity as “myth.” If, as Thierry de Duve elegantly states, creativity “is conceived as an absolute and unformalised potential...one has creativity, without qualification.”(6) The potential of Sturtevant to unleash her creativity as a disruption of the privilege of content wasn’t mythic; it happened, and predicted the later photographic appropriation of Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, et al.

Continuing this vein of tokenism, the list next ticks through Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke as “mocking” institutions, with a reliance on brief descriptions of the respective and definitive artworks, but without sufficient context or theory to support the complexity of the practices that each of the two artists brought to institutional critique.

Writing about institutional critique in 2006 I stated that “artists like Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers would attack powerful interests by, respectively, exposing the complicit nature of wealth and power, and reflecting on the status of the art object under the reign of institutional commodity production.”(7)

I was referencing Haacke’s infamous conceptual photo-text piece, “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971,” that functioned both as an exposé of New York City’s tenement landlords, as well as creating the template for institutional critique. James Nevius’s very fine 2015 Curbed article on Manhattan’s gentrification would have assisted Lescaze, La Force and panel in helping us comprehend the sociopolitical implications of Haacke’s work:

“His [Haacke’s] concept was deceptively simple but required an incredible amount of legwork. In 1971, he undertook to map out the holdings of prolific real estate investor Harry J. Shapolsky, who at the peak of his career had owned as many as 200 tenements in Harlem, the East Village, and the Lower East Side. Using public records, Haacke painstakingly unearthed the dozens of shell corporations that Shapolsky and his relatives had created to control properties around the city. Haacke then photographed each property and presented his findings — 142 buildings in all — as gelatin silver prints, each accompanied by a dossier of facts: the building's address, block and lot number, lot size, and building type. Below that was information on ownership: corporate entity, date of acquisition, cost of the mortgage, the names of which of Shapolsky's associates were involved, and the assessed land value. (The idea of doing this for 142 buildings before the Internet makes my head spin.)”(8)

True, Shapolsky et al. was not the Haacke work selected by the panel. But if Lescaze had done some research on his art practice she may have helped to actually connect Haacke’s “MoMA Poll” to the political turmoil of 1970. Instead, we have another short shrift appraisal of the piece, basically lauding the appeal of its visuality. Thankfully, in the discussion transcript artist Martha Rosler amends this by stressing Haacke’s “revolutionary idea that the art world itself was not outside the question of: Who are we?”(9)

There are strong works by outstanding artists in the list, and the evidentiary relevance of their inclusion most assuredly could be strengthened with a bit of cultural and art theoretical context. By way of example, Gordon Matta-Clark‘s “Splitting” existed as a piece for just 3 weeks, thus, might be considered in relation to Lucy Lippard’s dematerialization of the art object.(10) The same might be said for Michael Asher’s Santa Monica Museum of Art installation’s relationship to site-specificity, while Mike Kelley’s “Arenas” project touches upon those 1990s hot-button art topics of psychoanalysis and the abject.

Returning to the subjectivity that La Force alluded to in her introduction, I should like to offer one artist that the panel did not pick — Yves Klein. It is unclear whether or not Yves came up, quite probably he may have. Yet the direction contemporary art has taken is much informed and enhanced by Klein’s practice and creation of his “Ritual for the Relinquishment of the Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zones.”

In 2007, I wrote that this project was one of Klein’s significant contributions to conceptualism; “the idea of these ‘immaterial pictorial sensibility zones’ which he ‘exhibited’ and ‘actually sold.’”(11) In essence, a transfer of the ownership of a “zone” was exchanged for 20 grams of gold; the transaction of gold to Klein authenticated the “immateriality” of the “work” as art. Yet “there was no proof that they had ever owned the invisible work. The making, purchase and ownership of the work of art had become a mystery, or ritual.”(12)

Klein’s radical idea continues, obviously, in any contemporary artwork engaging with the immaterial, the invisible, the ephemeral; this also might include the performative, particularly with regard to the spatio-temporal aspects of performance and the fact that the true power of performance lies in the fact that it is here and then gone, residing only after-the-fact in memory and documentary evidence, i.e., video, photography, props.

Finally, Klein’s immateriality project returns us to content; “Klein pioneered marketing ‘zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility’ — what media businesspersons today call content. Klein focused this artistic business not on content creation, but on transactions associated with the immaterial content.”(13)

Klein, like Sturtevant, had addressed content, but in a different way. Both had an absolute creativity that de Duve had spoken of, yet their individual artworks and art theories varied greatly. Are their works defining moments of contemporary art? Yes, I think so, and for different reasons and with differing theories. And this is what gives projects like T Magazine’s “25 Works” the potential to not only engage our attention but to educate us, and perhaps to open a broader discourse on the relationships between works of art with their times, and with contemporaneous artists and thinkers.

IMAGE: Yves Klein, Receipt book for the Zones of Immaterial Sensibility series, 1959-1962.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/t-magazine/most-important-contemporary-art.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
2. Ibid.
3. https://www.wmagazine.com/story/sturtevant-moma-retrospective
4. Bernard Blistene. “Label Elaine,” The Brutal Truth, Frankfurt, 2004, 37.
5. New York Times, op cit.
6. Thierry de Duve. “When Form Has become Attitude — and Beyond,” Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985; Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, editors; Oxford, Blackwell Publishing; 2005, 24.
7. https://theorynow.blogspot.com/2006/10/constructs-of-representation.html
8. https://www.curbed.com/2015/9/2/9924926/hans-haacke-photography-slumlord
9. New York Times, op cit.
10. http://www.c-cyte.com/OccuLibrary/Texts-Online/Lippard-Chandler_The_Dematerialization_of_Art.pdf
11. https://theorynow.blogspot.com/2007/09/transaction-voided.html
12. Tony Godfrey. Conceptual Art, London, 2004, 81.
13. https://www.purplemotes.net/2010/06/06/understanding-the-real-business-of-content/

Moby-D, Mueller's "Wicked" Report and The Whiteness of the "Wall"

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 03:22:00 +0000

I recently began reading Moby-Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville. Having decided to read a selection of the world’s classic literature, Moby-Dick was among my first choices; Melville’s novel was consistently lauded by visual artists but I had never read it. I have not read fiction for years.

During my graduate studies in fine art, also during my twenty years as art professor, I read art history, art theory and philosophy. Moreover, I write about and critique art, a creative endeavor that prompts research and more reading of essays, periodicals, reviews, all non-fiction. At 573 pages, Moby-Dick is a daunting task, and not solely for Melville’s flowing and lysergic prose, crafted in 1850 by quill pen, no less.

Through the happenstance of present life, I also began reading Robert Mueller‘s Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (the Mueller report). My sojourn through two quite different texts has been neither simultaneous nor prescribed readings of pages per day; I read from one or the other on whim as each beckons. As unusual as my literary adventure may appear, it has proved inspirational and I want to convey the relationships I perceive between the texts, and to propose what this portends about our present socio-political condition.

One initial revelation thus far gained, though elementary perhaps, will begin my thesis; though spanning 150 years, the texts can unveil connective meanings as well as the vast abyss between Melville’s mid-Nineteenth and our current 21st Century. Each text, both Melville’s novel and Mueller’s report, can reveal much about the culture, knowledge, mores, politics and social consciousness of its respective time. And though both books do emanate from their different eras, I urge your contemplation of the meanings behind my proposed relationships and I trust that the connections will prove insightful at my resolution.

As a first assignment of great literature, Moby-Dick (Moby-D), could not have been a more worthy choice. Melville’s visionary novel, depending on whose critical view you accept, is championed either as a “precursor of Modernism in its massive scope and satire of literary forms”(1), or “pre-postmodern” with its numerous and “perverse digressions.”(2) Structured in Melville’s distinctly unique style, virtually non-existent for literature of his time, the novel is a voyage through 135 chapters on a swath of topics and in myriad formats, e.g., cetology, commercial whaling, anthropology, philosophy, art reviews, sermons, autobiography, travelogues, and even plays, all the while with Melville spinning his epic seafaring chase.

I shall not attempt anything like a review of Moby-D herein, nor try to frame the two main players within its story; I prefer to dive right in to the relations between Moby-D and the Mueller. Most who have at least a passing knowledge of Melville’s novel undoubtedly know of its mad Captain Ahab obsessed with a single goal of hunting down and killing the great white whale that had cost him the loss of his leg in a previous encounter. The vengeance sought by Ahab enshrouds his darker urge toward self-destruction; his piteous lust for this single-minded prize could very well end in the death of Ahab, as well as his whaling ship’s crew.

Clearly, Ahab is cast as the “villain” of this tale, with his intense single-mindedness of purpose that transfixes his motley crew of multi-ethnicities and cultures who toil on a voyage in search of spermaceti, the sperm whale oil highly valued as smokeless fuel source for 19th Century lamps; “America’s first imperial venture - the getting of the oil that lit and lubricated the Western world.”(3)

Then we have Ishmael as our “hero” narrator of Moby-D, a noble lad, notably conflicted and questioning his life, the world, even the existence of God, among many other disparate topics through glorious chapters. Ishmael/Melville’s exquisitely detailed commentary of the action meanders through an encyclopedic sweep of very nearly everything to do with mid-19th Century existence. Ishmael is also tasked with assessing the guilt, or at least the sins, of his Captain. In this measure, Ishmael embodies our judgements of Ahab as a man, as well as madman.

Mueller’s report on our 21st Century Ahab, the current 45th President of the United States (45), bears near as much fruit and substantive sin as Melville’s Moby-D for nestled among its 448 pages we witness hundreds of deceptions; lies by Trump’s “crew,” his campaign managers, aides, advisors, lawyers and staff. Mueller, our “hero,” in this careful and painstaking report, with intricacies of judicial jargon and detail requiring readers adept with footnote management, lays out the explicit facts of how 45, clearly our “villain,” conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election, to later cover up his complicity, and to obstruct justice through lies, coercion and witness tampering.

For my thesis, you must understand that the specificity of 45’s crimes characterized in the two volumes of the Mueller report establish not only its dramatic narrative, as Ishmael/Melville does in plotting Moby-D, but Mueller also schools the reader in jurisprudence, including arcane legal topics, i.e., the charging requirements for obstruction of justice.

As other scholars have noted, Ahab commanded a whaling ship, The Pequod, and “Melville in several places numbers The Pequod’s crew at 30 - the number of states in the union when the novel was published in 1851.”(4) Thus, Melville symbolically presents The Pequod as Ahab’s constituency, motivating Ahab’s insatiable drive to achieve his single-minded goal through demagoguery, thereby setting up the tragedy that befalls this “ship of state.”(5)

45’s most obsessive goal has always been The Wall - not a whale. Indeed, the one campaign promise he made that became a rallying cry for his political base of supporters was to build a “Great Wall” at the southern border between the United States and Mexico. Seizing on his base’s fear of illegal immigration, 45 borrowed from the “fascist's playbook” and capitalized on tactics previous fascists have invoked about “the glories of a mythic past; promoting emotion over reason”(6), blaming all of our country’s troubles on the immigrants. Make no mistake, the scapegoating of immigrants is pure fascism, born of racism and nationalist propaganda. Regardless, a nerve was touched, the fears grew and 45’s diehard base would soon be chanting “Build the wall!”

In my view, Ahab’s whale is mirrored by 45’s wall; each man became obsessed with a single goal and, forgoing reason, political harmony and ignoring the cost, was willing to risk everything because of that obsessive fixation. In support of my thesis, I now submit an exemplary comparison of two incidents as evidence of their willful destructiveness.

The incident in Moby-D concerning the aforementioned qualifiers of reason, harmony, cost and risk occurred when Ahab orders his crew to cease the harvest of freshly killed whales to embark to where the white whale was seen; they wastefully abandon a massive amount of whale oil, potentially a windfall that may have allowed them to sail home. Moreover, in Chapter 36, Surmises, Melville writes that Ahab “seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion,” and that Ahab had “laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command.”(7)

This charge of usurpation is elaborated upon in John Huston’s 1956 film version of Moby-Dick in a scene between first mate, Starbuck, and other crew members. Whereas Melville had posited that Ahab jeopardized his command by his own unreasoned vengeance, Huston represents Starbuck as suggesting mutiny, referencing a passage from a book on whaling law conveniently at hand: “A captain who from private motives employs his vessel to another purpose than that intended by the owners is answerable to the charge of usurpation, and his crew is morally and legally entitled to employ forceful means in wresting his command from him.”(8)

While 45’s fascist fixation on the Wall is not a crime, the wall represents socio-political views directly opposed to American values concerning immigrants and asylum seekers, and I will have more to say about this below. Meanwhile, we forge ahead with 45’s incident that is comparable to Ahab’s misdeed above; our longest Federal Government shutdown in history, from December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019. By refusing to sign the Federal Budget bill into law because it did not include the 5.7 billion dollars he requested to build his Wall, 45 ignored reason, political harmony, and the costs to Federal workers who suffered 35 days of workforce furlough, and also created dangerous risks for other American citizens.(9)

Much has been written about Moby-D's Chapter 42, The Whiteness of the Whale, with essays that focus on the aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural aspects of Ishmael/Melville’s attempts to define the color white, and since the 1960’s a body of scholarship has analyzed the chapter racially. Melville’s descriptions of whiteness extend through the natural world, of objects and animals (pearls, polar bears) to the physics of the color itself (the absence of all- or the container of all-color). Yet when he writes of the “pre-eminence” of white that “applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe” one cannot help but consider this through the lens of white supremacy. Further still, Melville also projects whiteness as fearful, and even more so when “the thought of whiteness,” or the concept of whiteness, was “coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.”(10).

45’s wall, as described in speeches and press releases, made of concrete and steel, with razor-wire on top, rising to 30 foot heights, has been constructed in prototypes and is already an undeniably terrifying object. Thus, if we contemplate the nationalist ideology and hateful rhetoric that 45 associates with this wall, a barrier used to preserve the “whiteness” of America that his political base so desperately wants, then we begin to understand the impact and symbolism of the “Whiteness” of the Wall.

In November 1851, in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville wrote, “I have written a wicked book, and I feel as spotless as the lamb.”(11) Robert Mueller has every right to feel the same about his impeccable report; his investigation reveals numerous pristine facets surrounding the documented evidence of 45 committing ten intentional acts of obstruction of justice. With clinical precision, Mueller has demonstrably connected 45’s presence in those obstructive actions, whether physically being in the room, or participating via telephone. Thankfully, we Americans will not have to mutiny to “violently wrest him from command” because the Congress of the United States has the Constitutional power, and duty, to now begin an official inquiry that may yet result in the decisive impeachment of 45.

IMAGE: Wall prototypes in San Diego, California.

________________________________________

1. Washington, Ellis. “On Melville’s Moby-Dick and the obsession of self-will,” April 11, 2015.

2. Hoare, Philip. “What ‘Moby-Dick’ Means To Me,” November 3, 2011.

3. Hoare, ibid.

4. Franklin, Kelly Scott. “‘Moby-Dick’s’ 6 Steps To Demogoguing Your Way Into the Presidency,” June 6, 2016.

5. Franklin, ibid.

6. Jacobs, Tom. “Trump and the Playbook of Fascist Politics,” interview with Jason Stanley, September 17, 2018.

7. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, or The Whale; Northwestern-Newberry Edition, foreword by Hershel Parker; 2001, 213.

8. Excerpt from script of Moby-Dick, screenplay by Ray Bradbury and John Huston, 1956.

9. Denning, Steve. “America’s Longest Government Shutdown: How We Got There,” January 13, 2019.

10. Melville, op. cit., 189.

11. Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November [17?], 1851.

The Thing Itself, Obsolescence and DIY Preservation

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 00:05:00 +0000

Revelations about a major loss of significant and archival master recordings of American music is prompting concern among musicians and artists about the preservation of older media, as well as questions about the recording industry’s controlled obsolescence of older recording mediums. The fact that this tragedy took place over a decade ago in 2008 and is only now receiving significant reportage ought to alert us that we producers of music need to take a more active role in monitoring the preservation of such older recordings, especially those created using so-called “obsolete” technologies.

The major loss I am referencing was a massive fire at Universal Music Group’s storage facility in Universal City near Los Angeles. This tragic fire, which most reports estimate destroyed over 500,000 original master recordings, some with their original tape boxes containing production notes by engineers and artists, went generally unnoticed in 2008. However, a renewed focus on the historic implications of the destruction of these master recordings has been generated this month through a New York Times feature article, “The Day the Music Burned.” According to the author Jody Rosen’s meticulous research for his piece, the musicians and artists whose recordings were immolated include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Louis Jordan, Patsy Cline, and many more:

“The fire most likely claimed most of Chuck Berry’s Chess masters and multitrack masters, a body of work that constitutes Berry’s greatest recordings. The destroyed Chess masters encompassed nearly everything else recorded for the label and its subsidiaries, including most of the Chess output of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Little Walter. Also very likely lost were master tapes of the first commercially released material by Aretha Franklin, recorded when she was a young teenager performing in the church services of her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, who made dozens of albums for Chess and its sublabels.

Virtually all of Buddy Holly’s masters were lost in the fire. Most of John Coltrane’s Impulse masters were lost, as were masters for treasured Impulse releases by Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and other jazz greats. Also apparently destroyed were the masters for dozens of canonical hit singles, including Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats’ “Rocket 88,” Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley/I’m A Man,” Etta James’s “At Last,” the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the Impressions’ “People Get Ready.””(1)

Clearly, the safe and secure storage of these archival recordings can no longer be entrusted to the major recording industry corporations like UMG, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. These record companies appear to have a waning interest in the importance of the preservation of these master recordings, even if not motivated by their “for-profit” mindset as reissues of archival material. They have consistently modified, or in many cases eliminated, the older recording technologies and their concomitant music delivery systems as new recording technologies were created. Moreover, music corporations have marketed these new technologies with advertising campaigns strategically designed to virtually eliminate the consumer’s interest in previous music delivery products.

This has not always worked, of course, particularly given the rebirth and subsequent resurgence of vinyl records from 2007 onward. As both producer and consumer of music, I have empirical experience of four decades’ worth of recorded music technology, both for sound capture and sound delivery. I first listened to music on vinyl records, later on cassettes, then compact discs, now digital files, and I can testify that both sound creation and appreciation have evolved immeasurably. Yet there are elements of this older, not-quite-obsolete analog recording technology that many consumers, musicians and recording artists like myself believe clearly surpass digitized sound files. And I find it exquisitely ironic to see the rebirth of vinyl, and mono pressings, once disdained by the recording industry as archaic when they began to push their new CD technology in 1982; vinyl records have a steadily healthy marketplace share, currently with 11.9% of album sales in 2018.

Before proceeding, I need to make a quick detour to share my experience of recording music and what I learned from recording technology. Diving deeper into music recording, we may begin to approach new perceptions of music when engaged through recording technology. Further still, we may begin to see that we consumers may be the essential archivists when it comes to master recordings' preservation.

Our first recordings were on analog tape on compact cassettes, the quotidian cassette tapes. Analog tape quality had vastly improved and for musicians working out of our homes and garages, the new 4-track cassette recorders were an innovation that eventually transformed home recording productions into the do-it-yourself, or DIY, culture that continues today. Cassette tape manufacturers had worked with recording engineers to develop 4-track recording technology enabling the cassette’s skinny 3.81 millimeter tape to hold four individual tracks of music, and allowing DIY musicians to record individual tracks, overdub instruments, erase and re-record tracks. In short, musicians were able to theoretically create music at home with similar sound capture technology that professional musicians were using.

So what are analog master recordings? From Jody’s NYT piece:

“The archive in Building 6197 was UMG’s main West Coast storehouse of masters, the original recordings from which all subsequent copies are derived. A master is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the irreplaceable primary source of a piece of recorded music. According to UMG documents, the vault held analog tape masters dating back as far as the late 1940s, as well as digital masters of more recent vintage. It held multitrack recordings, the raw recorded materials — each part still isolated, the drums and keyboards and strings on separate but adjacent areas of tape — from which mixed or “flat” analog masters are usually assembled.”(2)

Herein lies the major insight I discovered when our recorded efforts graduated from home recorded 4-track cassettes to 24-track industry standard recording studios in Los Angeles: the art is in the mix. I saw how the individual tracks of vocals, guitars, keyboards and drums could each be separately treated with an assortment of outboard equipment like reverb, echo, compression and equalization. Having a background in visual art, I saw that each of these individual tracks could function like colors, and each instrumental or vocal track could be treated and then manipulated similarly to how artists work with painting, to achieve differing contrasts, shadings or emphasis. What is more, once I began playing with this recorded sound technology through the mixing, I realized how malleable recorded music actually is; a “final mix” was only that moment’s interpretation, often by one person or perhaps two people sitting at the mixing console. Amazingly, I was stunned to learn how much freedom was revealed in this medium of analog recording.

The hands-on experience of creating music in a recording studio was the revelatory moment that demonstrated the potential of the analog master, how it was almost an aural painting in flux, a soundscape that could be altered, changed, colored, texturized over and over again in a different mix. Moreover, one does not have to be a musician or a recording engineer to understand this: the master recording is the pure form that can yield unlimited versions of a musician’s art.

Some may respond to the UMG fire with a shrug. After all, those valuable master recordings have already been migrated to digital formats, correct? Unfortunately, no, that’s not the case. In fact, we are far from obtaining a secure level of digitized transfers of archival master recordings. Jody’s research turned up two people who conveyed that stark reality:

“This is the utopian tale we tell ourselves, at least. In fact, vast gaps remain between the historical corpus of recorded music and that which has been digitized. Gerald Seligman, executive director of the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Library of Congress, estimated in 2013 that less than 18 percent of commercial music archives had been transferred and made available through streaming and download services. That figure underscores a misapprehension: the assumption that the physical relics of recorded sound are obsolete and expendable. “It feels as if music has evolved beyond the reach of objects,” says Andy Zax, a Grammy-nominated producer and writer who works on reissued recordings. “In fact we are as dependent on irritating physical stuff as we ever were.”(3)

Zax is right, of course. As I continued creating music, I made the transition from analog tape to recording with a digital audio workstation, or DAW, using Garageband’s software application that I like for its simplicity of operation and easy interface with iTunes. With a DAW tracks are theoretically limitless with the right hard-drive, which can be either liberating or daunting depending on your aesthetic. In any case, the resultant “master” you have after recording and mixing is ephemeral; there isn’t a physicality because it is digitized information on a file. This is quite different from having a master recording on analog tape, that goes though the process of “cutting” a lacquer, plating a stamper, and pressing a vinyl record - all of these being physical objects.(4)

In the supposedly obsolete analog tape-to-vinyl record scenario, a similar chain of cause and effect transpires that also occurs in the visual art of painting. In a painting, the artist’s intention, essence, aesthetic and concept is conveyed via that physical object. Here the art of music mirrors the visual art of painting.

Again, from Jody’s NYT article: “Simply put, the master of a recording is that recording; it is the thing itself. The master contains the record’s details in their purest form: the grain of a singer’s voice, the timbres of instruments, the ambience of the studio. It holds the ineffable essence that can only truly be apprehended when you encounter a work of art up-close and unmediated, or as up-close and unmediated as the peculiar medium of recorded sound permits. ‘You don’t have to be Walter Benjamin to understand that there’s a big difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting,’ Zax said in his conference speech. ‘It’s exactly the same with sound recordings.’”(5)

So how should these older forms of master recordings be best preserved? Perhaps one answer is consumer-driven archival preservation. A couple of weeks after Jody’s article was published he was a guest on Jon Caramanica’s Popcast where they engaged in a lively conversation about the UMG fire, the tragic loss of these important masters and archival preservation. One intriguing idea they discussed was the prevalence of consumers uploading recordings onto YouTube, and how this may be the ultimate answer for preservation, especially for those fans of obscure or “lost” artists who actually never “made a record” with one of the major labels, or self-produced their own small run of 1,000 LPs for their fans.

Because of the huge growth of DIY music culture, and independent music by unsigned artists, the energies that birthed garage bands, punk, rap and other sub-genres of self-produced music may yield a solution to music preservation. Not only does this idea provide a free delivery system for under-known records to live online preserved as DIY uploads by both fans and indie artists themselves, but it may also give the unheard music a life beyond obscurity. And Zax said it best:

“The entire careers of artists we know everything about and artists we know nothing about. The future of all of the recorded music that we have ever heard — and, for that matter, all of the recorded music that we haven’t heard yet — depends on our ability to maintain these artifacts.”(6)

IMAGE: The fire at the Universal backlot in June 2008 that consumed the UMG masters; photo credit by Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press; published in “The Day the Music Burned,” New York Times; June 11, 2019.

__________________________________

1. Rosen, Jody. “The Day the Music Burned,” New York Times; June 11, 2019.

2. Rosen, Ibid.

3. Rosen, Ibid.

4. More on the complex process of creating vinyl records: http://www.soundsetal.com/blog-how-are-vinyl-records-made/

5. Rosen, Op. cit.

6. Rosen, Op. cit.

Joseph Beuys: The Absent Presence Professor

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Fri, 31 May 2019 01:27:00 +0000

A lot has been written, yet perhaps not enough, about the “site” of art, where it happens. Inasmuch as one believes in the relationship of “place” to art one might pursue a line of inquiry based on particular spatial locations, the “where” of art. We could either assume or allow that the medium of painting produces objects that we also call “artworks” themselves; whether or not art has been attained there is another question entirely.

What other mediums and locations might describe this “site?” Do we suppose that a stage is a site where art occurs? Again, the subjective analysis of exactly what criteria must be achieved to convey the status of “art” upon this or that stage production is subject to judgment, certainly meritorious if not mostly based on that other intangible designation of “taste.”

For a writer, certainly, the site is the page where one writes, whether written upon parchment or digitally wrought. Blank at first for a time but soon populated with letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, thoughts, emotions, philosophy, blasphemy, plots and ideas.

That other blank and vast space is the canvas. Primed white usually, a distant cousin to the writer’s page, that canvas presents just as much intimidation for a painter as the white sheet does to a writer.

For a teacher the site of art might be the blackboard. Again, we bracket the definition of art for the moment to simply get to the matter at hand: the site where the magic happens. Regardless of the curricula, that magic “art” may occur on a blackboard, whether it is physics, geometry, astronomy, art history or theory.

Let’s consider the blackboard as a site; a presentational tool used in classrooms and lecture halls. Students, colleagues or strangers may observe an individual transcribing information with language, even drawings, or perhaps simply brainstorming collaboratively with the audience. The blackboard provides a space for sharing knowledge.

Certainly for Joseph Beuys, blackboards functioned as sites for art during his “lecture actions.” An artist primarily known for performance, installations and physical sculptures, Beuys is equally influential for his socio-political activities and his pedagogy. He conceived of and taught his theory of “social sculpture,” a belief that human beings have inherent potential to revolutionize society through their creativity and art. As he famously said, “Every human being is an artist.”(1)

Within his academic role as professor, Beuys could enact the process of thought as discourse, his lectures becoming a performance as he talked and worked on the blackboard, conveying ideas “on-site.” These lecture performances, coupling radical concepts with his magnetic charisma, allowed a transformation of Beuys’ lecture into a living manifesto for the audience. More shaman than lecturer, Beuys grew so popular with students of Düsseldorf Academy of Art that they clamored to fill his classes to capacity. Eventually, Beuys fought with school administrators over class limits, demanding open admissions to his class, and that provoked his dismissal from the school.

Beuys continued using blackboards as visual accompaniment to his ongoing lecture actions throughout his life. Though most often erased, some blackboards survived with his chalk text and drawing intact, a few of which were sold. A Beuys blackboard lecture site witnessed his actions, his energies, chronicled his thought process, received his words as speech and language, and then usually was wiped clean.

One such pair of erased blackboards currently sits at the Hirshhorn Museum, part of their What Absence Is Made Of exhibit. Dated 1977-1979, entitled F.I.U. Blackboards, a reference to Beuys’ Free International University, created with Heinrich Böll in 1973 for the “reorganization of the cultural and social life.”(2)

Without the text and drawings of Beuys, prompted by his concepts and thoughts, these blackboards exist now only as memento of a specific Beuys lecture action, with empty pail and rag there to underscore the final erasure. Erased blackboards mythologize Beuys working upon them as a pedagogical site for documentation of a lecture; empty they may further assist us in deeper comprehension of his art. Because it seems to me that an erased Beuys blackboard resonates exponentially as a site specific performance action. As such, I believe that the true “art” of Beuys, his shamanistic presence while simultaneously speaking and writing before the blackboard, emanates spiritually from these faint erasures. Beuys’ blank board still yields his art as site; absence belies its presence.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates warned of the dangers of writing by recounting a dialogue between the inventor of writing, the god Theuth, and the King of Egypt, Thamus. Theuth praised his invention as giving people wisdom, saying, “My discovery provides a recipe for memory.” Thamus disagrees with him, and explains that writing gives only an appearance of wisdom, declaring, “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance.”(3)

Two thousand years after Plato, linguistics came into its own as a science and language was structured into Saussure’s sign-signifier-signified triumvirate, and this morphed into structuralism, infinite deferral of meaning and the fragility of language. Later still, Jacques Derrida charged that Western philosophy had succumbed to logocentrism and the “metaphysics of presence,” or the privileging of presence, with metaphysical import applied to speech over the written word, thereby launching scholarly debate, and thousands of dissertations.

Michael Harrison from Chicago School of Media Theory boils it down: “Per Derrida, logocentric thought is thought that privileges the ‘logos’ as the central principle of philosophy. The distinction between speech and writing here is essential: logocentrism views thought as something essential that is mediated for the purposes of discourse, first through speech, and then later through writing. Speech is thus the original signifier of meaning, while writing is merely a signifier of a signifier. [...] This thought process establishes speech as the primary human medium and writing as a secondary technology – a hierarchy that philosophers, linguists, and media theorists from Plato to Saussure will discuss in great detail.”(4)

With Derrida casting doubt on the validity of Western epistemology in questioning both mediated forms of discourse, speech and writing, we might begin to view Beuys’ blackboards through the lens of mediation. Derrida said, “There is nothing outside the text” because we only access meaning through the mediation of language.(5) And now, Beuys’ absent presence is documented by the emptiness of the site where his art once existed and is now gone; the erasure of the blackboard emphasizes both Beuys’ absence and presence at the board site.

Finally, I speculate that Beuys must have known that leaving a blackboard blank, with wisps of words faintly remaindered, would possibly have even more of an impact upon future viewer-audiences clustered before them. Even though the artist’s presence would be missing, this very absence would enhance the signification of his art in the now vacated site.

Today, Beuys remains pervasive, his conceptual influence winnowing out into relational art and social practice. As critic Laurie Rojas elegantly unpacks it, his concept of social sculpture “fashions everything into art, and proposes that everything should be approached creatively: a sort of Gesampkunstwerk, an art that not only discredits the totality but becomes it, and supposedly overcomes it in the process of transforming it. This is only possible when all humans consider themselves as artists, as creators of this total artwork, as architects of society.”(6)

IMAGE: Joseph Beuys, F.I.U. Blackboards, 1977-1979; blackboards, chalk, pail, water and rags; each blackboard: 63 x 47 1/2 x 5/8 in.; bucket: 12 1/2″h x 11 1/4″ dia. Gift of Frayda and Ronald Feldman in Honor of James T. Demetrion, 2002. Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

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1. Beuys, Joseph. “I am searching for field character;” Published in exhibition catalogue “Art into Society, Society into Art;” London, 1974; online: http://theoria.art-zoo.com/i-am-searching-for-field-character-joseph-beuys/

2. FIU-timeline and further information; online: https://web.archive.org/web/20110910110005/http://www.beuys.org/fiu.htm

3. Plato. Phaedrus, (c.360 BC); Reginald Hackforth, translator, Cambridge University Press; 1952; 274c-275e.

4. Harrison, Michael. “Logocentrism;” The Chicago School of Media Theory; online: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/logocentrism/

5. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology; Gayatri Spivak, translator, Johns Hopkins University Press; 1997; 158.

6. Rojas, Laurie. “Beuys’ Concept of Social Sculpture and Relational Art Practices Today;” Chicago Art Magazine, November 29, 2010; online: http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/11/beuys%e2%80%99-concept-of-social-sculpture-and-relational-art-practices-today/

Critical Fragments: Accumulation [9/30/12]

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Wed, 01 May 2019 02:16:00 +0000

Administrator’s Note: While updating my curriculum vitae for my personal website, academia.edu and other professional sites, I found this 2012 essay that I posted shortly after the College Art Association panel session I co-chaired with Nana Last; my friendship with Nana began online soon after I had begun teaching her essay, Function and Field: Demarcating Conceptual Practices, and I was honored when she suggested we would jointly propose and co-chair a panel session for the rather auspicious 100th annual CAA conference. Among multiple ideas zipping through today’s unearthed redux, readers will note an urgency of realization that retrospective assessment of one’s production, of culture as well as objects, may portend the most advantageous view of your contribution to The Canon. And I dare say this requires more focus as we continue this March Of Time.

Recent research and scholarly investigation of accumulation as an art practice, a construct, or art movement, has yielded intriguing theories on the various artistic processes that involve “amassing or gathering objects, documents and/or other items for express purposes.”(1) Art historians have well-documented artists’ fascination with storage and distribution via generative technologies to make quantitative volume the distinctive accumulative act. Other theorists speculate that accumulation reflects our collective guilt and obsession with “capitalist expansion,” product consumption and its resultant waste. Still other viewpoints focus on individual artists whose cumulative process of time and labor represents the artwork itself as a product of accumulation.(2)

It is to this latter position that I wish to contribute yet another theory concerning accumulation. My additional speculation is that this “cumulative process of time and labor” may help to define art certainly. Moreover, the temporal aspect of accumulation obviously helps situate art historically. What I want to propose is that it is perhaps through a retrospective consideration of past production that artists may have the best comprehension of their life’s work in relation to art history. That accumulation has a direct quantitative connection to this possibility is clear; this reflection via the “long view” of an artist’s past work is inexorably cumulative. However, given that past artworks are analyzed ex post facto, our theoretical conjecture must consider the possible clarity of knowledge the grace of accumulation may allow.

Historians and curators engage in such “long view” reflection on the past cumulative artwork of artists for their exhibitions; it is notable and accurate that all-inclusive exhibits of artists' works are referred to as “retrospectives.” The critical and analytical regard of an artist’s work by historians or curators might provide us with an historically measured perception. However, we must realize that these exhibitions are generally not with the artist’s participation, particularly if the artist is no longer living. Living artists often do participate in the curatorial selection of work for such exhibits but the museums nearly exclusively prefer that supplemental materials for these exhibits be authored by art historians; such academic remove yielding the putative objectivity favored by art institutions.

What if the artist had more collaboration in this endeavor? Would his or her critical analysis, “looking back” at all of the accumulated work gathered for such an exhibit, differ or be distinguished from a degreed art historian, art critic or curator?

Undoubtedly my esteemed colleagues in the fields of art history and curatorial practice would hold that it is only through an objective view of an artist’s body of work that we may ascertain its value for posterity. Further, they may argue that an artist’s close personal relationship to his or her work would necessarily muddy the perspective required.

These are valid arguments. However, there remains the distinct alternative theory that only artists have the personal connection and investment required to evaluate their own artwork. This is especially relevant if we proceed from the premise that an analysis of an artist’s past body of work acknowledges the definition of that work as a “cumulative process of time and labor.” The immediacy of their presence on a daily basis with their art practice would truly make the artist the sole expert on their artwork, its history and its intentions.

If we recognize the accumulative process of art practice, the day-to-day studio work, the requisite research and study necessary to become artists, then we can begin to understand that this involves an incredible amount of time and labor. It is a further given than that the temporal progression of one’s practice extends parallel and in harmony with one’s life, following a trajectory that produces objects (or perhaps “art as ideas”). We may also then agree that at any point along their life's trajectory each artist has the option to pause and take note of his or her past work. This retrospective view has the definitive potential to enlighten one’s perceptions of the past, one’s accomplishments as well as failures, with an overarching insight that one's past accumulation of time and labor is ultimately a finite archive. As archival knowledge, one's retroactive assessment of their accumulation of work has a transcendent power to define both the individual artist and grant us a glimpse of the very definition of art.

IMAGE: On Kawara "Date Paintings" installation at David Zwirner Gallery; Jan. 6- Feb. 11, 2012. ______________________________________

1. From an unpublished paper presented by Nana Last on Feb. 23, 2012 as introduction to our College Art Association panel session on “Accumulation” that we chaired in Los Angeles, CA.

2. Elise Richman presented her paper, “Performing Labor,” on the work of On Kawara and Michelle Grabner to demonstrate that artworks “embody” both time and labor.

The Wheel Reinvented as Infinite Carousel; I Don't Have Time for Art (Pt. 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:01:00 +0000

Administrator’s Note: Nearly six years ago in a post on AMC’s television series Mad Men, I touched upon the nature of ideation in advertising and made a bold comparison of “ad man” Donald Draper to a conceptual artist. By way of preface, I would like to share the gist of my earlier essay (searchable here in TNOW’s archives) before concluding that 2013 opening salvo with today’s “Part 2.”

I’ll cut to the chase: Sterling Cooper’s Creative Director, Don Draper, informs his art personnel he has a hot concept for an ad campaign. One artist asks Draper if he wants to “get someone in here who can draw?” Don’s reply is emphatic: “No - I don’t have time for art.” My premise was for us to imagine Don as a conceptual artist, a man whose talent “consists of concepts, often merged with text, that convey meanings.” Further, his skills at “verbalizing both the concept and the visual, to encapsulate that winning combination of word, image and meaning, speaks both to the naked desire of Capitalism to ‘move product,’ as well as to the reductive core values of Art.” Thus, Don perceives the distinction between the idea and how to communicate that idea via image. Clearly, “Don can’t be bothered with the actualization of the idea; the artist’s role is to conceptualize.”

Continuing with a few quotes cited on conceptual art, “dematerialization of the object” and “primary information,”(1) I concluded by affirming conceptual art’s “preference for ideation over actualization” and that our “comprehension that the message of art exists in its concept might be extended further to justify the transcendence of the object.” Because of our surrender to it, the omnipotence of “digitized information is quickly erasing the idea of a ‘hard copy’ of anything.”

I am currently re-viewing the entire Mad Men series and am eager to expand on my theories about advertising as conceptual art. The final episode of that first season, “The Wheel,” gave a hint of the brilliance to come as Don’s “pitch” to Kodak executives revealed the potency of images meshed with words.

______________________________________________________

To close their inaugural season of Mad Men in October 2007, the writers depict a fictional presentation by Sterling Cooper’s Creative Director, Donald Draper. Kodak had approached the advertising agency to develop a campaign for their newly designed device for photographic slide projection. They call it “The Wheel” because 35mm slides are slotted into a circular tray that spins around; slides drop down in front of a lightbulb and one-by-one the images are projected on a screen. Draper struggles at first to create a winning concept for the campaign and finally a “lightbulb” went off in his head: “It's not called the Wheel. It's called the Carousel.”

Because context is everything, we must note that Draper’s marriage is crumbling already by this time, with his heavy drinking, his womanizing and neglect of his wife. This will prove key to what motivates Draper in this Kodak pitch, using the desperation with his gift for language to create a visionary moment for the Kodak executives, as well as for us.

I believe that this ad man’s pitch has relevance for today’s users of social media. My hypothesis is that advertising is a methodology of conceptual capitalism because both ad man and artist pair “seductive images” with ad/art concepts to “sell” products or the artist’s idea. In his Kodak pitch, we see how Draper ingeniously conflates the product with the pitch. Moreover, what I propose is that a once-ubiquitous-and-now-obsolete consumer artifact, the slide projector, has been reinvented via “the glittering lure” of social media into the “infinite Carousel” of Instagram, wherein multiple pitches are digitized side-by-side with every consumer’s advertised “self.”

The Mad Men series was chock-full of Mid-Century cultural imagery, many of which were from Don and Betty Draper’s home life; morning meals at the kitchen dinette, family birthdays, backyard holidays and dinner parties. In his pitch, Don cleverly uses his personal photos of some of these scenes, projecting the slides with the actual device his pitch is designed to sell. He stands, running the projector and talking about these intimate moments of his home life preserved on film, and how photography works as memory. He also introduces the idea of pathos, how it lingers in some memories, how nostalgia develops through remembrance:

“Nostalgia. It's delicate...but potent. [..] in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the Wheel. It's called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around and back home again...to a place where we know we are loved.”(2)

Obviously, Don’s Kodak pitch is scripted to advance the plot and to expand our knowledge of Don. But it also reveals Don’s artistry as he seems to almost improvise his words, delivering his message while lost in reverie. It is a heady brew he delivers to the Kodak execs, presenting pain and memory, time and ache, with slides briefly glimpsed as Don mixes a powerful cocktail with words and images, intimately sharing his concept of the past as refuge.

Moving from a pain “more powerful than memory alone,” Don next says the projector “isn’t a spaceship,” effectively removing it from technology’s lexicon of “Machines of Action and Adventure,” because with this device our adventures are cerebral only. Instead, he characterizes the projector as a “time machine.”

Granted, Don is a gifted storyteller so his spiel momentarily distracts Kodak, and us, from logic. A device of fantasy, a time machine allows one to travel back to the past or forward into the future. But certainly we know Don’s projector cannot take us into the “Future.” Yes, we do move “forward,” if only literally, as we run through those slides stacked in the tray. And, yes, the past is figuratively accessible, if we imagine we’re “traveling backwards” into the past, by viewing moments captured on film.

We also know that advertising addresses us by personalizing our desires, showing us how our lives will be improved with various products. Scenarios and scenes are presented that personalize how a product’s use will make us happier, more beautiful, more loved. It is this personalization of products and their use that resonates so strongly with consumers, as the advertising world well knows.

This advertising trope is deliciously used by Don in his commentary on these slides, but with a twist. Speaking seemingly at random, his textual accompaniment personalizes his own relationship with these images, while knowingly personalizing the Carousel’s desired ability to endlessly view images and revisit past memories. Meanwhile, as he virtually acts out the very nostalgia that he’s selling, the desire of a perfect life, he himself is drifting away from that very happiness.

Revisiting Don’s magnificent pitch in Mad Men’s first season finale triggered my revelation: Kodak’s Carousel projector has been transformed into the 21st Century social networking service known as Instagram. Functionally, the Carousel allowed consumers to organize and re-organize their slides, much like Instagram allows the user to post, organize and share digital images.

I then recalled Lev Manovich’s database theory about how “new media objects” are databases, in that “they appear as a collection of items on which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search.”(3) In terms of relevance to my own theories about advertising relating to conceptual art, I thought some of Manovich’s theory may be of use. Retrieving and re-reading his essay, “The Database,” I discovered further evidence for my proposal that Instagram has emerged as the Carousel’s progeny amongst the numerous digital “machines” of today. As Manovich wrote:

“After the novel, and subsequently cinema, privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate — database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.”(4)

Precisely! Moreover, I theorize that the collection of digital images within an IG user’s “feed,” the photo timeline, represents the database, which indeed has no “narrative” per se, other than a diaristic account of the user’s life. One’s “story” begins when one comes online with your IG account and, conversely, it “ends” when the account reaches its terminus, i.e. is deleted or inactivated. Thus, as we recognize the database as infinite, we may perceive one’s IG feed as an infinite Carousel.

In a brief comparative analysis of Instagram and Carousel, we see that both contain “data” (digital images or 35mm slides) that can be organized; IG images accumulate easily via posting, Carousel slides are slotted in a tray, its maximum contents limited to 140 slides. Further “organization” in IG may be accomplished through deletion and/or reposting.(5) We are able to view images easily enough in IG via scrolling, while Carousel “scrolls” rather noisily through its tray of slides.

Looking at navigation, we see that IG emulates this “new media object” by offering the “Explore” icon on IG’s home screens (the magnifying glass) which lets you navigate for people/tags/places. Oddly enough, you can navigate the entire Instagram universe, but there’s no navigation within your own feed. Thus, IG doesn’t quite fulfill the triple-function of Manovich’s database theory. Neither did Carousel; unless you pulled slides out of its circular tray, or dumped them out, you had no way to “navigate” the slides.

The subtext of Don’s Kodak pitch contained unspoken questions for the 1960s consumer: What if we had a device that let you arrange images from your life that you could share with friends? And what if you could rearrange your images anytime? Would you buy that?

Instagram’s pitch, about 50 years later, had its own subtext, as they slyly played to consumer vanity and desire. The smart phone explosion had helped drive application development and social media platforms quickly adapted their marketing tools. 21st Century consumers of digital devices want to share their amazing lives, and what better way to show how great a life you’re living than to document everything through photos? The “selfie” ruled, posts of your pets, where you were vacationing, what you were eating and what you were wearing; all of these images at the service of an attempt at a “narrative,” your story, as the IG users share their lives with everyone else.

The advertising world quickly piggy-backed into this marketing opportunity, as Instagram began to exploit the insidious connection between advertising and personal image. Multiple websites presently tout the marketing aspects of IG with statistics that make it seem too good to pass up:

“Have you ever thought, ‘I love scrolling through my personal feed, but I don’t know if my brand is a good fit for Instagram?’

If you answered yes, consider these stats:

Instagram has over 800 million active monthly users.

60% of adults online use Instagram.

80% of the app’s user base is outside the U.S.

There are 25 million business profiles on Instagram.

50% of Instagram users follow at least one business, and 60% say they’ve learned of a product or service through the platform.”(6)

Regardless of whether or not you set up one of those “business profiles” with Instagram, you are marketing on your IG feed nonetheless, because those business accounts’ paid ads drop in to your regular feed of friends’ accounts and other accounts that you follow. In this way, just as Don did with his Kodak pitch, IG “conflates the product with the pitch” as you join 800 million cogs within Instagram’s digitized “Wheel.”

There is even a marketing plan setup now for the “Influencers,” Instagram stars with millions of followers, featuring designer clothes, products, fabulous homes and vacation destinations these influencers are paid to promote. With a 2,400-square-foot Manhattan penthouse already staged for those well-produced selfies, this marketing scheme is “introducing a new model that aims to turn Instagram influencers into the next generation of advertising creative directors. Think Don Draper staging a meticulously coordinated selfie. Or Khloe Kardashian pining for Cannes Lions glory.”(7)

Lest we give in to The Hype, I offer one final Mad Men quote to provide appropriate closure for today’s essay. We have duly rendered Don Draper as an “Idea Man” of this advertising game, and have also focused on his genius for conceptualizing those ideas, as well as his textual skills. As an Idea Man, he has little regard for the actualization of those ideas for he has “no time for art.” During a conference room melee, Don delivers another gem of an ad campaign idea; when he offers to meet with the clients, one of the partners says, “You’re an idea man - let accounts handle this.”

As we contemplate the specter of total enslavement to our social media, and its exploitative conquest of a Free Internet, it is not moot that we understand that many creative ideas have been ruined by Capitalism. When we actualize an idea we invariably alter or contaminate it, often by utilization of materials or the resultant action of bringing the conceptual into reality. This has always been and should remain the challenge; to divine the conceptual but not at the expense of the actual.

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1. “In his own model of Conceptual art, [Seth] Siegelaub distinguishes between ‘primary information’ (content: the signified) and ‘secondary information’ (the means of its presentation: the signifier)” From “Double or nothing: John Miller on the art of Douglas Huebler,” Artforum International, April 2006.

2. From “The Wheel,” Mad Men, Season 1, Episode 13; script by Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith; original airdate, Oct. 18, 2007.

3. Manovich, Lev. “The Database,” from The Language of New Media; Cambridge: MIT Press; 2001; 219.

4. Ibid., 218.

5. IG users may even repost another user’s images in your own feed, with attribution of credit for the original creator. There are countless websites with IG tutorials, manuals, etiquette for casual users, with ubiquitous sites geared toward IG marketing.

6. https://www.hubspot.com/instagram-marketing

7. https://www.fastcompany.com/90325270/the-woman-behind-the-instagram-influencer-penthouse-has-a-new-brainstorm-turn-influencers-into-creative-directors

Abstracted Empty Spectacles

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sat, 23 Feb 2019 02:32:00 +0000

Settling in to these early decades of the 21st Century, it’s become apparent that we are increasingly inured to this idea of a copy possessing more value than an original. Late 1970s and 1980s attacks on “The Dominance of the Original” by selective use and manipulation of copies were ostensibly handled by many artists, with Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine deservedly acquiring most of the fame, and their work was theoretically propped up by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens et al. I will not revisit my previous analyses of appropriation art here but humbly direct readers to a few of my earlier posts that delve deeper on the subject.(1)

Instead, today’s offering will deal with performance art and its threatened distinction as an art medium. I maintain that the authenticity of performance, as originally conceived, is at risk of dilution through recent prolific re-creations, replications, re-performances and “cover versions,” especially those approved of and directed by Marina Abramović, one of the foremost practitioners of this medium. Moreover, I want to challenge recent institutional and curatorial attempts to “exhibit” any putative re-creations as equivalent to their analogous, original, spatiotemporal performances. My critical position may seem strict, even un-hip, but I believe that such re-creation methodologies weaken performance art by ignoring its essential theories, whereby uniquely original works are transformed into superfluous copies.

Having finally screened HBO’s documentary on Abramović‘s MOMA retrospective, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012), I want to address my conflicts with the film and with Marina’s continued insistence that re-creations of her original pieces function as valid works of performance art. The film’s focus is almost entirely on Marina’s live new performance staged exclusively for the MOMA show, while only perfunctorily documenting the re-creations of Marina’s earlier pieces by the mostly nude contingent of young “re-performers.” This decision, privileging Marina’s new piece over the numerous re-creations, is tantamount to Marina and curator Klaus Biesenbach suggesting that a re-creation’s authenticity is a fait accompli, not to be questioned. Yet, as we shall explore, Marina and Klaus’s respective artistic and curatorial positions are quite at odds with performance art’s avowed and historical basic conceptual tenets.

Now a bit of history is in order. Performance art, specifically body art, which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, created shock waves throughout the art world with its spatiotemporal focus on duration and presence. As I wrote over a decade ago: The performance act is time-based certainly, and thus expresses itself in the duration of those actions by the performer(s), and our focus is on the physical body (presence) of the performance artist(s).(2)

In other words, an artist’s “piece” was performed in a particular space during a particular duration of time, making the piece ephemeral and virtually immaterial. What is more, the artist’s “medium” was essentially her or his body; props, costumes, sets, lighting might have figured in the piece but the action and the durational sequencing of the piece itself, generated through the artist’s physical presence, exist only in that space and at that time.

Obviously, performance art survived becasue it was exceedingly well documented since it began, chiefly because of the fact that when a piece was finished only photography, film and video could provide evidentiary proof of a work’s “existence.” And today performance is many a contemporary artist's preferred practice, the medium of choice in the 21st Century artist tool-box.

In April of 2010, a few weeks before Marina’s show opened, Biesenbach lead one of the Performance Workshops at MOMA. Marina was there, as were many performance art luminaries, museum directors and curators, including Joan Jonas, Terence Koh, Jack Pierson, Tino Sehgal, Alison Knowles, Tehching Hsieh, Nancy Spector and Chrissie Iles. Heated discussions ensued about performance art’s historical reception, the difficulties of exhibiting it in museums, along with genuine concern for its authenticity when it was re-performed. As Joan Jonas, a 1960s artist in video, said, “There’s never a way that you could repeat the original thing, it just can’t be done.” Also, Chrissie Iles, curator at the Whitney Museum, addressed the idea of individual authorship, when she said, “To my mind you can’t recreate performances that rely on the power of the presence of that artist.”(3)

A few weeks after Marina’s MOMA show closed, Kirsten Swenson wrote a brief piece on it for Art in America. Her view on Marina’s use of young performers to re-create enactments of Marina’s original performances deftly labels the “copies” as the weaker versions, and that “the effect is largely to convert high-stakes undertakings into empty spectacles, abstracted from their original historical and personal circumstance.”(4)

I do not expect a groundswell of opposition by the art audience to re-performances, or “covers” of Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Valie Export or Hannah Wilke pieces. Yet I am heartened to hear there are serious misgivings about performance art becoming another watered-down institutional genre. But perhaps there’s a chance that some cutting-edge community-run spaces or college galleries may attempt a resurgence of “one-night-only” events, to inject some new blood into this truly original art before it is irrevocably lost to us.

IMAGE: Maria S.H.M. and Abigail Levine reperforming Imponderabilia, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2010).

1. (In)Appropriate Behavior, November 9, 2007; Survey Says?, November 26, 2011; P.F.D. (2 Bobs), December 22, 2012.

2. Performance Art: Recreation or Emulation, October 19, 2006.

3. Work or Recreation, March 23, 2010.

4. Swenson, Kirsten; Marina Abramović; Art In America (online); June 4, 2010.

Painters Talking Theory, Practice, Birds and Things

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 18:00:00 +0000

“I hope that my work can be seen and understood on a universal basis, that is that the language is of a nature that it doesn’t have the necessity for its American labels. But all these issues in the end, whether it’s American, or whether it’s painterly...are false issues raised by aesthetes. I’ve expressed myself on this issue many, many years ago, when at a conference between aesthetes and artists, I said to these aesthetes, that even if they’re right, and even if they can build an aesthetic analysis, or an aesthetic system that will explain art or painting, or whatever it is, it’s of no value really, because aesthetics is for me like ornithology must be for the birds.”

— Barnett Newman

Distinguishing between the theory and the practice of art may afford artists a conceptual break, a creative opening through which the boldest of them take the risks necessary to find original ways to obtain images yet to be grasped. Throughout art history we can trace the linear narratives of progress as art historians sanction new visual discoveries, very often to support their own perceived “new art” movements. Later still, academics and theorists can focus their attentions on organizing and incorporating these new practices in visual art into palatable theories of art history.

Needless to say, not all artists are happy with this arrangement. When Barnett Newman spoke the above words about his art in Emile de Antonio’s documentary film, Painters Painting,(1) he was adamant that aesthetics, and those “aesthetes” he obviously disdained, were of no use to him in his art practice. Referencing their analyses of style or labels as “false issues” the aesthetes pursue as a matter of course, Barney made it clear that the practical creation of art is distinct from any systematic analysis, and then marvelously illustrates his point in a now famous statement conflating aesthetics with ornithology.

Barnett Newman‘s brilliant analogy and his sardonic delivery of it on film caused me to reflect upon the relationship between theory and practice in art. And Barney wasn’t the only artist appearing in the documentary whose words incited my thinking about how artists may have to forget, or cognitively bracket, theory altogether in order to arrive at unique practices to create original art.

Let us first address some distinctions within art, how the “study of” differs from the pursuit of art. Far from a simple theory versus practice dichotomy, Barney’s dictum suggested that art is pursued in a rarified vacuum, with the artist as pioneer in the art wilderness. Those artists who are able to access that wilderness are seeking the new and they face the unknown as they walk a tightrope with no net. In that space there are no rules certainly, because there are no theories. Indeed, this is truly the avant-garde, as these are “vanguard” practitioners out ahead of the regular troops, with little protection under cover of theory or history.

Art is not a science, but we can draw comparisons between the two fields of knowledge. Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has written: “All scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, and nothing is final. There is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science. The currently accepted theory of a phenomenon is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives. Its status as the accepted theory is contingent on what other theories are available and might suddenly change tomorrow if there appears a better theory or new evidence that might challenge the accepted theory. No knowledge or theory (which embodies scientific knowledge) is final.”(2)

As in science, knowledge and theory in art is unquestionably provisional, especially given its place in today’s robust art market. Art theories often are challenged dramatically, and were especially challenged in the 19th and 20th Centuries because of significant breakthroughs of the boldest artists, which is why art theory remains contingent on new discoveries. Moreover, the privileging of any one particular theory over the others is unwise because any theory’s dominance has always been at the mercy of contemporary art practice.

“The things which have interested me in painting, and in thinking, are the things which can’t be located, or are the things which turn into something else while you locate them, or are things which are located so nicely that you know they can’t survive. But it’s never interested me, just the idea of forming a territory, or a, a thought and defending it. So my idea of what Pop Art is, is somewhere in that area of...I don’t like the idea that things are...that you’re sure what they are, and it seems to me that Pop Art suggests the...the term “Pop Art” suggests that, that everything is certain.”

— Jasper Johns

One of America’s boldest 20th Century artists, Jasper Johns later delivers his own deeply personal and frank assessment of art making in Painters Painting. His presence in this documentary is magnetic, his speech thoughtful, and yet peppered with humor and self-effacement. Nakedly honest, he describes his reverence in seeking out the unknown, acknowledging how an unobtainable image might be stumbled upon, and Jasper’s words perfectly depict painting as a solitary exercise in a near-romantic seduction of art.

His words about the “things which can’t be located,” or “turn into something else while you locate them,” or “are located so nicely that you know they can’t survive” were a revelation for me to hear, indicative as they seem of Jasper’s apparent lack of intentionality in his art practice. “Things that can’t be located” might be yet-to-be-discovered breakthroughs; his desire to “locate” might express a desire for new discoveries. Perhaps the “things that turn into something else while you locate them” conceivably may explain the flux of materiality as a painter works his media. Further still, do the “things which are located so nicely that you know they can’t survive” refer to Jasper removing, or painting over, something arrived at too easily, revealing his subjective taste decisions?

Possibly as well, Jasper’s disinterest in “forming a territory” might allude to the putative intention of staking one’s claim in art history, a path he seems disinclined to take. Indeed, his distrust of the “certainty” of an art critic label like “Pop Art” itself may also clarify his doubts about the then current perceptions of his work.

I do not propose that artists should completely disavow the importance of art theories, or the relevance of art history obviously, in order to pursue their new practices or modalities to enable them to create original art. On the contrary, I do support art education and want artists to understand their own position with respect to history. Moreover, I emphatically believe that artists must comprehend the art that has come before, to be cognizant of theories, art movements, and those radical breakthroughs that have brought art to this moment in time, the time in which they embark on their own art practice. But then setting to work in the studio, each artist makes their own decisions on what ideas to bring to bear, and/or reject in their own practice. If Barney and Jasper taught us nothing else it was that all artists approach their practice differently, that methodologies and actions taken by any artist to pursue their visions are infinitely variable. Clearly, Barnett Newman and Jasper Johns were fortified by boldness to advance their individual practices beyond then known parameters of art, working in relative isolation in the now mythologized, mid-20th Century painting studios. Barney bypassed theory and aesthetics, avoiding the “episodic” to create work that “declares the space”(3) while Jasper ignored even the conventions of Beauty, seizing greatness seemingly by accident and made work that taunted mass culture yet remained uncertain of it.

____________________________________

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OCnvrNfrUGg
2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/common-misconceptions-about-science-i-scientific-proof
3. http://theoria.art-zoo.com/interview-with-dorothy-gees-seckler-barnett-newman/

The Bedazzled Syndrome [May 21, 2007]

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Cameron Boyd) — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 04:43:00 +0000

Administrator’s Note: Now that this infamous “outlaw artist” (a gentleman by the name of Robin Cunningham) has been finally acepted within the Art World he once taunted with his anonymous graffiti and pranks, we were presented last week with a carefully hyped, and possibly collaboratively staged, “destruction” at auction of one of his pieces. The validated status of "Banksy" by Sotheby's as one who “has cleverly nestled himself in the pages of art history,” makes him yet another enfant terrible appropriated by The Show, and I thought this a perfect moment to re-post my 11-year-old previous takedown of Mr. Gunningham. Cheers, mate!

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

- John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten) to the audience from the stage, 14 January, 1978.

News that graffiti artist Banksy now commands low-six-figure prices at Sotheby's should come as no surprise, given that art historical precedents have long established the “outlaw” artist as a worthy commodity. Rebellious artists are never more desirable than when they toil in the shadows and, as a recent New Yorker article on Banksy attests, struggle mightily to maintain that anonymity. We duly revere our reclusive artists, from Duchamp to Dylan, and will forgive their obsessive reticence to discuss their art, particularly if they happen to be geniuses.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to unpack Banksy’s aesthetic value here, but urge other critics and art theorists to delve into his street-art interventions that utilize a distinctly Surrealist, yet re-cycled juxtaposition for their effect. Instead, I wish to spotlight how Banksy’s near sadistic (mock?) rejection of fame and recognition has produced an increased and frenetic desire in (masochist?) collectors and, finally, an enhanced interest in this artist by the art world.

In film director Stanley Donen’s original Bedazzled, actor Peter Cook, playing the Devil/British pop singer Drimble Wedge, variously replies to feminine choruses of "You drive me wild" and "You knock me out" with his soporific "Leave me alone" and "I’m not available." Filmed in black-and-white and set in a TV studio, this scene brilliantly depicts the hypnotic adulation of the young for a self-absorbed pop idol, as his boredom with and verbal abuse of these fans continues to fuel their insatiable need for him. As an archetype of the “outlaw” artist, this character study reveals what we might call the Bedazzled syndrome, in which utter disdain for the public yields further desire.

To see Banksy shrewdly taunt his newly developing audience of wealthy and rabid collectors with an insulting cartoon (I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This S**t.) is to witness again the "Not Available" mantra, as that very same punk ethos proven to somehow attract rather than repel. Banksy joins the ever-growing “outlaw” horde (Dash Snow and Dan Colen come to mind) of artists who create “in the shadows,” projecting disinterest in the “game” yet reaping the benefits, all while feigning an atmosphere of “unavailability” that cleverly drives public interest and collectors to auction for the artwork.