Jon Meyer - Blog

Access vs diversity in bookshops

2011-12-19T05:43:00.001-08:00

I recently visited two of my favorite bookshops in New York, St Marks and the Shakespeare & Co on Broadway. Both shops used to have great philosophy sections. However, they have adopted the approach of presenting larger format books, and turning many of the books face-out, and consequently they now they carry a far smaller selection, barely anything beyond the top-of-the-pops. They've eliminated the one reason why I love going to bookshops: when you search for a specific title, you often find lesser-known works shelved nearby. Now, rather than a dozen books on or by a particular topic or author, the shelf only displays two or three. The bookshops appear to have ceded diversity to the Internet, and focused instead of appearing easy to access. It is a massive loss for readers.

LoBe - London Berlin Art Kunst

2011-12-15T09:03:00.000-08:00

I have been selected by curator Elke Falat to be a resident at LoBe. Founded by Olivia Reynolds, LoBe is project space and gallery in Wedding, Berlin. I will be resident for the month of February, collaborating with artist Ulrike Mohr. We will create artworks that responds to the space, to each other, and to the Berlin context. There will be a gallery opening and dinner at the end of the February to celebrate the resulting artworks, which will be exhibited for three weeks during March.

For images of past exhibitions at LoBe, see their Flickr Stream.

Berlin

2011-12-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

I've relocated to Berlin. I'll be based in Berlin while I am conducting research on my practice-based Art PhD. It looks likely that I'll be staying somewhere in Wedding, but I'm still finalizing details. For now I've rented a studio in Moabit. So cool to get back to studio time.

Portal - Process of Performance

2011-08-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

My artwork is included in Portal - Process of Performance at the Institute for Contemporary Art Newtown (I.C.A.N), Sydney, from Aug 12 - 28.

The exhibition is curated by Stephen Truax and organized by Janis Ferberg. There are six artists in the exhibition: Colby Bird, Jon Meyer, Kevin Regan, Jason Varone, Jody Wood and Mikel Bisbee-Durlam.

Stephen Truax writes:

"Process of Performance will present five works by six artists: a VHS tape recording Colby Bird’s formal experimentation’s in sculpture in his studio, edited on the same TV-VCR on which it is presented; Jon Meyer’s performative drawing Eight hours drawing at one inch per hour with left and right hand, 2011, a drawing which was created with assistance from a unique software program the artist developed; Kevin Regan’s home-made video, widely available and presented in the gallery on YouTube, The Conversion of St. Paul, 2007, shows the artist passing out and waking up three minutes later after taking Salvia Divinorum, while his wife supervises and cleans the kitchen in the background; an illustration of a cloud, hand-painted on the wall, will rain Twitter feeds in Jason Varone’s microprojection Inclement Weather, 2010; Jody Wood and Mikel Bisbee-Durlam present a two-screen video documenting their performance of dragging one another through the streets of Bushwick, and within the controlled environment of a studio, while covered in concrete.
Representing both a unique cross-section of the wide variety of artists’ practices in Brooklyn today – with a strong focus on the artist-rich neighborhood of Bushwick – and providing an intimate view into their quotidian lives, Process of Performance serves as a snapshot into the incredible creative energy present in Brooklyn now, and reveals how even the most traditional artist is exposed to the world via the digital space. Each work is strongly connected to digital technology, and how that technology has been employed by these artists to address’s the archetype of the artist, and how the artist engages in performance in every aspect of their practice. – ST"

Going way up

2011-08-02T18:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Sam Cuttriss and I just completed an enduro motorcycle trip from San Francisco to the Colorado rocky mountains and back. We rode 1,200 miles on dirt roads and trails, and travelled a total of 4,000 miles. A complete trip report with dozens of images is posted at AdvTrail.com.

Spiral Jetty

2011-07-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

I made a day trip to visit Robert Smithson's 1970 earthwork sculpture, Spiral Jetty. The jetty is sometimes fully exposed. During my visit it was partially submerged in water. See link for more images.

My friends told me Spiral Jetty was down a rough narrow road, a little hard to find, with four-wheel drive highly recommended. Exciting! However, some folks have decided to "improve" the site, extending the gravel road all the way to the end and plonking a large car park literally a hundred feet from the sculpture. eliminating any sense of discovery. Smithson would have hated this. Why do institutions have to sanitize everything?

Venice Lido

2011-06-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

On the Lido

This year I am staying in a small hotel on the Lido in Venice. It smells of jasmine, is away from the crowds, two stops on the vaporetto from the biennale, and best of all it has a small beach. At the end of each day I come back to the hotel, drop my bags, grab a towel, and walk to the beach. After a swim and a run I have a beer at the surf-bar on the beach, then return, change into dinner clothes and walk to a restaurant. The sun is out till around 7.30 so its a perfect way to end the day. My hotel is Villa Della Palme. Its fairly basic, reasonably quiet, clean, and a hundred euros a night for a double room. Time for a spritz!

The crowds in Venice

Venice Biennale 2011

2011-06-12T19:10:00.000-07:00

Start the morning with a Caffe del Doge. It *is* worth hunting for. Almost up there with Blue Bottle coffee in San Francisco!

Crowding onto the morning vaporetto.

For me the most lasting impression from the Venice Biennale 2011 is Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's American pavilion, “Gloria”. It was a refreshing encounter. Most of the works in the pavilion resonate, and together they make a provocative exhibition. The tank piece in particular is great to talk about, look at, listen to… I want one.

Recurring themes this year: Heavy closed-loop industrial machinery (French, American, Israeli, Slovenian & Turkish pavilions); Anything plugged in; Performance everywhere but never when I was there; oh, and lots and lots of talking-head video - so much so that, at Marco Polo airport, I mistook the instructional video at the security gate for yet another artwork.

Missing this year: Any serious attempts to recuperate painting, with the exception of Seth Price’s paintings in the Central pavilion.

Allora & Calzadilla's American Pavilion. Maximal restraint. And really good legs. The tank piece is also theirs (see the video I posted)

Live performance in Allora & Calzadilla's American Pavilion

Impressions

Below are the words I jotted down for each pavilion as I went around – Its fleeting, unedited and flippant.

Giardini

Swiss crystal excess. Someone gave Hirschorn too much money.

Denmark. “Speech matters”. Not.

Nordic / Eriksson. Oh D&E where are you now?

Tank. Brilliant.

Venuzuela. Bassim pop tarts.

Russia. Monastryski mystery and substance, served dry.

Japan / Tabaimo. Dreamy animations with mirrors.

Korea / Yong Baek. Flower gun disaster.

Germany / Schlingensief. Egomania confronts blasphemy. I love this.

Christoph Schlingensief's German pavilion - I liked the little touches, like changing the label from Germania to Egomania, and adding a 'Kino' grafitti tag on the side.

German pavilion - Christoph Schlingensief's installation is astounding.

Another view of the Christoph Schlingensief's German pavilion

Canada / Shearer. Not for me.

Australia / Armanious. Trying too hard.

Britain / Nelson. Theme park made of dust.

France / Boltanski. Trumped by the tank.

Dutch. Opera without the melodrama.

Spain. “The inadequate”. Just so.

Israel / Landau. Didactic rises to new levels and goes underground.

Poland, Egypt, Romania. Worthy, but the Romanian’s grafitti should have been applied to all three.

Romanian Pavilion (Adrian Bojenoiu, Alexandru Niculescu). The 'why not' reasons were better than the 'why' reasons on the other wall, and better than what was inside.

Central pavilion

A slightly disheveled anti-statement that made Catelan’s stuffed pigeons the best statement of all. Oh. and Nathaniel Mellors videos.

Minimalism meets relational aethetics. Norma Jeane, #Jan25 (#Sidibouzid, #Feb12, #Feb14, #Feb17…) (2011), colored plasticine (Central pavilion).

Arsenale

After the Giardini, on to the Arsenale. Song Dong's mirrored chinese closet doors were very Wong Kar-Wai .

Song’s cupboards are a great start. Marclay’s Clock is a great end. Turel’s space glows in the middle, though for me it was ruined by the attendant who insisted on standing right at the front, thereby destroying the effect (apparently someone had fallen off the edge).

A picture of my iPhone with Marclay's "The Clock" in the background. This was a perfect capstone to the Arsenale. I watched for about half an hour, I could have stayed all day.

Elsewhere - Picks:

Hirst deconstructed by Wu Rigen, in the Future Pass exhibit (17 on the maps). It was a fun pavilion if you like anime.

Nicole Knauer's cloud in the Future Pass pavilion.

Irwin Wurm's house, next to the bridge at Academia. The large guy with a blue top is unfortunately not part of the exhibit.

Yes, that is a block of watermelon on the floor. (Wilfredo Prieto, Future Generation Art Prize pavilion).

Karla Black, Scottish Pavilion. It is much better than it photographs.

Melanie Smith's Mexian pavilion showed incredible scope.

Nato a Venezia is thought provoking and the setting is cool. Talk to the gallery guides upstairs to learn more about this exhibit.

Also notable: Iraq / Abidin’s light saber battle. And Haiti by the waterfront: Glad to see them here.

PhD - End of year one

2011-06-05T02:04:00.000-07:00

I've completed the first year of my part time Art Practice PhD at Goldsmiths College, London. Well on my way in terms of creating a research plan. A lot further to go in terms of writing and making!

Montalvo Fellowship

2011-06-01T18:22:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce I have been awarded a Fellowship at the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program, at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, for the 2011/2013 season. The Montalvo Visual Arts Fellowship is an award specifically for committed artists working in areas of contemporary visual arts. I was invited to apply. My work was selected from a pool of candidates by a jury comprised of arts professionals including Bruce Yonemoto, Visual Artist; Alard von Rohr, Curator and Art Historian, Deutsche Bank; Susan Krane, Executive Director, San Jose Museum of Art; and Donna Conwell, Curator, Getty Research Institute.

A home/studio at Montalvo, designed by Adele Naude Santos and artist Doug Hollis.
Photo by Tom Ligamiri. See this SFGate story.

"Montalvo Arts Center is a multi-disciplinary arts center that has been in existence since 1939. Our artist residency is the third oldest in the United States. In 1999, the program was closed to redesign a new residency complex, consisting of ten live/work studios and a commons building designed by six teams of renowned architects and artists, on 10 acres of land within a 175 acre park, that is home to the Montalvo Arts Center. The Lucas Artists Residency Program re-opened in 2004 as one of the largest facilities specifically built as an artist residency for an international, multi-disciplinary program of artists and scholars. The Lucas Artists Residency Program fosters a community of highly motivated, talented, creative, and critical minds from a range of disciplines and geographical areas. As the heart of the programmatic offerings at Montalvo, artists and thinkers are invited to live and work in the Program’s residency for 1-3 months."

See link.

No More Art! @ ImpromptuSpace

2011-05-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

GET YOUR PUNK ON!

Featuring: The Flails & Sunbeam Rd

May 12, 10pm to midnight

900 Tennessee Street #18, San Francisco, CA 94107

We are pleased to feature a post-art punk event to end all post-art punk events.These two bands will grind your brain. This follows the CCA MFA Thesis Exhibition (link) and is guaranteed to be an art enema. A short set, don't miss it. Dress appropriately.

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The Flails. Your last chance to see these legendary San Francisco punks before they enter into decrepitude. The Flails are the meaning of the earth.

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Sunbeam Rd. Nice post-punk guys who all your friends dig. Why don't these fucking guys have a record deal yet? (more)

For more, see impromptuspace.tumblr.com.

Liberated! @ ImpromptuSpace

2011-04-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

LIBERATED!

Exhibition by Bob Lake

Presentation by Ignacio Valero

TALK BY IGNACIO VALERO STARTS AT 6.30pm

April 22nd, 6pm to midnight

900 Tennessee Street #16, San Francisco, CA 94107

This evening we feature two spaces within the 900 Tennessee Street building. One space presents Liberated!, an exhibition of found objects by artist Bob Lake. The second space features Heat & Noise - photography by Lucy Im and Audry Jones, and music by DJs Vinnie Esparza and Jerry Nice.

A central claim in art is that it offers freedom or escape. Implicit in this notion is the realization that the previous state, of non-freedom, is left behind. In other words, within freedom is the contradictory concept of loss. True acts of liberation inevitably have buried within them a poignancy at this loss. Bob Lake's unusual exhibition of found objects, collected over a period of several years, amplify this contradiction, pointing both to the possibility of new found freedoms and the ghosts that are left behind.

Accompanying this exhibition, there is a brief critical lecture by Professor Ignacio Valero at 6.30pm, on themes of the free in art. Ignacio is a theorist at California College of the Arts, well known for his wide ranging insights and spontaneous style of speech.

HEAT & NOISE

Photography by iM and Audge
DJs The Count, Jerry Nice and The Others

In the adjacent space is the event Heat & Noise. Lucy Im and Audrey Jones will be exhibiting photographs based on the topic of optics, entropy and work obliquely inspired by the ideas of Kandinsky's musical synesthaesia. DJs Vinnie Esparza and Jerry Nice will be spinning Latin Boogalu, psych and avant-garde jazz.

See impromptuspace.tumblr.com for more.

Rhythm in Space @ ImpromptuSpace

2011-04-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

Installation of Suspended Sculptures by Soo-Hwa Yuan
Performance by Liesa Lietzke

Friday's Opening Party April 15th 5-9pm
April 16 & 17 12pm-5pm

900 Tennessee Street #16, San Francisco, CA 94107

In this exhibition we bring together work by Soo-Hwa Yuan and Liesa Lietzke. Architecture and performance art are apparently very divergent fields, with their own specific histories and dialogs. By placing practitioners from these two different fields within the same exhibition frame, we aim to both juxtapose their differences and also reveal ways that they adopt similar strategies for occupying and problematizing space.

Soo-Hwa Yuan, Sculpture & Installation

Soo-Hwa Yuan's work deals with the intersection of light, form, and movement. While his installations explore the mystery of space with light and fabric surfaces on a large scale, it is his suspended sculptures that embody these three elements on a more intimate level. With light, the sculptures create movement with shapes, and change shapes with movement. This dynamic interplay of light, form, and motion creates visible rhythms as air moves the sculptures through space.

The work will be shown in a unique space that allows the viewer to move around, beneath, and above the sculptures to view them from various levels and angles.

Yuan holds a Master of Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and BA in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

soohwayuan.com

Liesa Lietzke, Playing at the Edge of Intelligibility

Liesa will install herself as a performing sculpture in suitu (business tutu) and flirt with absurdity, accompanied by spoken word. She earned her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BA in Creative Arts from San José State University. She is currently completing an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

liesalietzke.com

See impromptuspace.tumblr.com for more.

ImpromptuSpace

2011-04-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

Gary St. Frankenstein playing the piano.

I have created a temporary popup event space in two unusual 1,000 square foot industrial units in the heart of Dogpatch, San Francisco. ImpromptuSpace will host a series of art events and performances for two months.

See impromptuspace.tumblr.com for more.

Manual or Automatic?

2011-01-17T02:52:00.000-08:00

Chickens by left hand, squares by right hand, simultaneously, while wearing 3D glasses. Ink on paper, 22 x 17", 2010

Jon Meyer’s exhibition, Manual or Automatic?, considers the history and the future of the human hand. Industrial automation has dramatically altered the role of the hand in contemporary life, leading paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan to conclude that in the future the hand may regress until it is no more than an index finger with which to push buttons. Responding to this provocation through anaglyph drawings, a mural-sized installation, biographical objects, geometric paintings, algorithmic and software-based works, Meyer tests the bounds of his own neuromotor capabilities, and considers his complex personal relationship to histories of manual labor.

Meyer recently began a PhD in Art Practice at Goldsmiths College, London. He is a visiting artist at California College of the Arts, teaching in the Graduate Fine Art, Critical Studies, and Graduate Design programs. A recipient of a 2009 NYFA Artists Fellowship award, Meyer has exhibited in London, New York, Seattle and San Francisco. This is his first large-scale solo exhibition.

With thanks to CCA's Division of Humanities and Sciences and Professor Rachel Schreiber for making this exhibition possible.

Tecoah Bruce Gallery at the Oliver Art Center, CCA Oakland campus, 5212 Broadway.
Reception: Wed., Jan. 26, 5:30–7:30 p.m.
Hours: Mon.–Fri., 8:30 a.m.–noon and 1–4:30 p.m. (closed Wed. morning);
other times by arrangement with the artist.

Eclipse - San Francisco

2010-12-20T23:30:00.000-08:00

Upcoming Oliver solo show

2010-12-18T14:49:00.001-08:00

I have a solo exhibition titled Manual or Automatic? at the CCA Oliver Arts Center in Oakland, California from January 21-31, 2011. The public reception is on Wednesday, January 26th, from 5:30 - 7:30. link.

Error, Fate, Chance

2010-12-17T14:43:00.000-08:00

Shotgun blast (the longest path between fifty points), Charcoal and pricing stickers, 20' x 12', 2010.

I have an installation at Work Gallery as part of the exhibition Error, Fate, Chance. The show opened Nov 12 is now extended through Jan 16th. See WORK Gallery for more.

Bad Things that could happen

2010-12-16T14:53:00.000-08:00

Bad Things That Could Happen from This Is It on Vimeo.

From This is It, a collective of illustrators, animators, artists and designers based in London. Thanks Erika.

CogSci in Pop Culture

2010-12-01T11:10:00.001-08:00

In my Body and Cognition class in 2009, I asked students to send in links to things they found on the web that they felt were relevant to cognitive science. Here's what they came up with:

Cartoons

Pinky and the brain
Song in which Pinky and the brain describe the parts of the brain.

Visualizations

How the Body Works: The Regions of the Brain
Narrated animation: "The brain has three functional and anatomical parts…"

Neurotransmitter Synapse 3D animation
 3D computer graphics animation of an action potential traveling down an axon

Hybrid Medical Animation
Simple 3D computer animation of a DNA molecule

Action potential animation
3D animation of cells and action potential

School Projects

Brain Tumors
A school student creates a narrated video with cartoon figures, describing medical facts around brain tumors.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
A school student creates a talking-head account of Piaget's stages of Cognitive Development.

The Right Brain vs. Left Brain
An optical illusion that tells you which side of the brain you use more.

Metaphorical / Art

Sensory Neurons
A metaphorical animation that uses stop-motion to illustrate the moment between touch and feel.

Sounds of Complexity
Audiovisual performance where crude sounds of the brain are monitored then transformed into frequencies.

Sounds of Complexity 2009
Continuation of above. Material is processed digitally in real-time, frequencies are transformed into Cartesian space to form visual trajectories on screens that react dynamically.

Health Education

What causes Epilepsy? (Epilepsy #5)
A health education video on the causes and effects of epilepsy.

Promotion/Advertising

Honda Develops Brain Machine Interface
Promo piece by Honda: Using the brain to remote-control things by thought alone. Technology showcase of current state of the art.

Sex, drugs and Rock'n'Roll center in the brain
Promo piece by Philips about how rock and roll music stimulates the reward center of the brain - the same way that sex and drugs do.

The Many Faces of Toni Collette in “Tara”
An Associated Press introduction to "United States of Tara", Showtime series from Steven Spielberg and Diablo Codya, featuring an interview with the show's star, Toni Collette.

Popular Science

Human Body: Pushing The Limits
Discovery: Too often we take our bodys for granted, but under presser our bodies can show how extraordinary they are". Uses 3D to illustrate full of hyperbole "our brain can slow down time and unleash immense power."

Super Brain Yoga
Channel 2 news feature about a form of exercise that is claimed to "pump up" neural activity in the brain and turn people into Grade A students.

Your Brains on Sex
When we have an orgasm, the limbic system releases the highest legal of dopamine in the brain - the same chemical released by Heroin.

Brain Controls Pain
Short video about how doctors are teaching patients how to manage pain through brain control.

Making Brain Cells
Science feature by ScienCentral on genetically modified mice, and the similarities between skin and brain stem cells. Claims that that the brain stem cells and hair follicle stem cells can both form into neurons. Could have long-term medical implications.

Crush the myth about Hypnosis, find out the truth today
A Mythbusters test about whether pypnosis helps three subjects remember details of a staged scene. Conclusion: they do have enhanced recall.

Remember Name hypnotically with Wendi
Self-help video in which Wendi tries to use hypnosis techniques to help people remember. Claims "things are stored in specific places in the brain."

Optical Illusions Show How we See
A TED presentation by Beau Lotto where he shows several optical illusions to illustrate that we don't see "reality" but a filtered version of it.

Feature Films

Ghost in the Shell (philosophical scenes)
Three philosophical scenes from the feature animation "Ghost in the Shell". The main character's memories are shown to be faked - raises questions of identity and subjectivity.

Waking Life Clip: Ants
A segment of the film waking life. "I don't want to be an ant" - female character asks male character for a more human connection.

The Cruise
A clip from the film The Cruise. Timothy Levitch a NY bus tour guide singing. "This is the first real day of their lives" - Timothy talks about cruising manifestations and connecting with tourists.

Mindgame Clip: God
A clip from the film Mindgame, in which the main character dies and meets God.

Documentaries

Music and the Brain
A clip from a lecture at the library of congress by Daniel Levitin. He presents an argument that music came before language.

Science Bulletins: Language and the Brain
An American Museum of Natural History mini documentary on speech and language in the brain.

Cognitive Psychology: The Brain
A ten minute clip from a longer KPBS documentary on learning and brain plasticity. "The brain is capable of rapidly revising..."

Dissociative Identity Disorder
A day-in-the-life style documentary about a man with dissociative identity order.

Kim Peek – The Real Rain Man
A documentary about Kim Peek, the savant who inspired the Rain Man. "He's become a living Google." Talks about his emotional life, his relationship with his father, and his cognitive abilities.

Savant Drawings
Documentary about Stephen Wiltshire, a savant who has perfect visual recall. He creates a near-perfect drawing of Rome after only seeing it from a Helicopter.

How to Improve Your Memory -2
Part of a British documentary about change blindness, memory and attentiveness.

US Language Attitudes
A documentary by Dennis Preston's on what people believe are "correct" and "bad" accents in American English.

East of Krakatoa - John Kang
Clip from the documentary Ring of Fire: East of Krakatoa. Appears to show John Chang, a meditation expert, creating fire only with his hand.

Design as intervention

2010-10-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a series of presentations by designers who were invited to create "interventions" in public space.

I've been thinking about this since then, and especially about the concept of design as intervention. Is "intervention" a valid or appropriate strategy for design?

Interventionism is where one group disregards another group's right to self-determination in order to forward the first group's moral agenda and sovereignty. There are clear cases where interventionism is accepted, e.g. to prevent genocide. However, in the case of a designer intervening in a space or situation through a designed artifact in order to forward that designer's moral (or technical) agenda, we have to be more careful. "Intervention" has an activist ring to it, but when employed by those equipped with the tools of mass production, it quickly becomes hegamonic.

In particular, I wonder what criteria is used for evaluating a given intervention? Designers talk of objective functions for measuring the consequences of an object in line with their agenda. For example, if a designer were to publish a series of leaflets on waste disposal they might adopt an objective function that measures the resulting increase in the use of recycling bins. Although these types of objective measurements are appealing, they are often misleading. I'm reminded of Thomas Midgley's invention of Tetraethly Lead (TEL), a gasoline additive that had important benefits measured in the metrics of the day (it reduced engine "knocking"). It was only years later that we discovered the disastrous secondary and tertiary consequences of this change. Another example is plastic bags, which in the objective measurement function of their day were cheap, lightweight, and strong. Today we have a new artificial island in the Pacific that is made up from this cheap, lightweight and strong.

Interventionism applies a cause-effect analysis that fits well with the service-based ethos of design: Have a problem? Identify a solution, create an intervention, measure the improvements, iterate. How does this address a complex ecosphere? It is unclear, since the designer in this scenario is placed on the outside, as a lone agent with little real accountability for the secondary and tertiary effects of their work.

I realize I am being rather cynical. Certainly I often enjoy encounters with social interventions. I especially relish the bizarre, strange and unexpected. But the strategy of interventionism seems stuck in a colonial imaginary, one that relies on a construction of self and other. What other strategies are possible? What about design for the subaltern, for example?

Thinking about this (and this is very unformed), Daniel Eatock represents one place to start. Eatock is an independent artist with a design practice (or is it the other way around?) He offers a materials-based conceptual take on design. His manifesto on his website is:

Begin with ideas
Embrace chance
Celebrate coincidence
Ad-lib and make things up
Eliminate superfluous elements
Subvert expectation
Make something difficult look easy
Be first or last
Believe complex ideas can produce simple things
Trust the process
Allow concepts to determine form
Reduce material and production to their essence
Sustain the integrity of an idea
Propose honesty as a solution

His approach is deceptively simple. His model is collaborative and at the same time he asserts his independence. He does have large clients (e.g. Channel 4), but he is selective in his choice of clients, and insists that they work within his creative model, rather that designing to a brief. "there is no brief, no description, no guidelines.... If criteria were written down, they would be restrictive." Eatock's approach downscales design and takes it out of a solution-oriented framework. He doesn't make any claims about interventions or about measuring results.

Discussing Eatock in class last year, one student proposed taking the idea of an independent designer further: What about a designer who creates designs for just one other individual? Or a designer who creates artifacts for one very small community or village? Returning to these highly embedded and communal models is a counterstrike against design for the masses.

Finally there is APG. Claire Bishop wrote about the Artist Placement Group in this months ArtForum (link). The APG was a group in the 1960's which placed artists (or "Incidental Persons") within organizations. The motivations of APG's founders, John Latham and Barbara Stevani, were intentionally precarious. Rather than aiming for a specific identifiable outcome, the Incidental Person was viewed as a figure who "takes the stand of a third ideological position which is off the plane of their obvious collision areas." In other words, rather than occupying known positions, it was an attempt to intentionally create unknowable positions.

The APG makes a mockery of activism since, although their aim was to achieve change, they were unconcerned with the ideological direction of that change. Instead they measured the change produced by their placements in terms of what they called the "delta unit", which had factors like the number of people affected by a change, or the length the change lasted. At first this seems absurd - how can you be for any change whatsoever? But what the delta unit does is force us to take a much longer view on assessing change. It prevents us from pre-determining an objective function based on naive causality.

The APG is a call for experimentation that is intentionally unplanned, where evaluations are performed a long time after the fact. If I were an interventionist, this is the kind of agenda I would want to impose on design.

PhD induction week

2010-10-11T11:17:00.000-07:00

Last week I started my MPHIL/PhD in Art Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London. I had my first meeting with my supervisor at Goldsmiths, professor Suhail Malik. I also recently met with Joseph Tanke, a philosophy professor at CCA who is co-advising me in San Francisco.

The working title of my thesis is "The fate of the hand." This is a section heading of the book Gesture and Speech by paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan. In the book, Leroi-Gourhan argues that in the future the hand may regress to simply an index finger to push buttons. Machines will take care of the rest. Against this prediction, in my thesis I plan to examine many possible scenarios for the future hand.

So what am I reading? In art theory, I'm starting with Heidegger, and the 2002 book Tool-Being by Graham Harman, who aims to rethink Heidegger's analysis of the tool. Harman is one of a group of philosophers arguing for "speculative realism" - the first time since Kant that there has been a concerted push to advance a realist position, rather than the myriad relational positions found in philosophy from Kant to Deleuze.

I've also begun reading neuroscience papers. Cognitive scientists, like speculative realist philosophers, have shown a renewed interest in the relationship between mind and reality, and there are now entire conferences dedicated to "embodied cognition," which aims to study thought without isolating it from body states. It can be no accident that these two groups, with very different historical trajectories, have both zeroed in on the mind-body problem. The connection, I am certain, will be found in Flying Spagetti Monsterism.

Things I learnt last night

2010-10-11T11:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, my friend Scott pointed out two factoids during a party to celebrate 10/10/10:

1. 101010 = 42. Which of course is a very important number.

2. The volume of a pizza whose radius is z and whose thickness is a = pizza. Which is perhaps only important when you are hungry.

Back in San Francisco

2010-09-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

Photo by Bob Lake

I have arrived back in San Francisco. I decided to kick off my year here by going on a Motorcycle course (above). It was outrageously fun. I plan to purchase a motorbike to get around the city. I'm still waiting for all the paperwork to come in so it will probably be another month before I have a bike. Can't wait.

Body and Cognition

2010-09-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

This semester I am teaching a class at CCA called "Body and Cognition" - the syllabus is below. I have also enrolled as a distance scholar in the MPHIL ART program at Goldsmiths - I will be dividing my time between the two.

Body and Cognition

“Body and Cognition is a tour of topics in cognitive science - from vision and language to memory, learning and consciousness. The course has a special focus on the relationship between mind and body. Students will learn some of the core underlying concepts of cognitive science, and also practice data collection and analysis.”

Week 1 (9 September) Introduction. Decartes and the Mind/Body problem. Dualism, materialism. Doubt as a methodology.

Week 2 (16 September) Language 1: Phonology and Morphology. The Devanagari writing system.Low level language processing.

Week 3 (23 September) Language 2. Higher level language processing. Grammars. Mental lexicons. Syntax and semantics. Mentalese.

Week 4 (30 September) Psychology 1: Experiment design. Between-subject versus within-subject. Central tendency. Spread. Collecting data.

Week 5 (7 October) Psychology 2: P-scores and the null hypothesis. Central limit theorem. Analyzing results.

Week 6 (14 October) Machines 1. Software. Algorithms. Incompleteness, uncertainty and the Enlightenment. The Turing Machine. The halting problem. Sort and search algorithms.

Week 7 (21 October) Machines 2. AI: The Turing Test. Machine Intelligence. Eliza. Searle’s Chinese Room. Logic and knowledge representation.

Week 8 (28 October) The Brain. Neurons, ganglions, axons, brain structure. Connectionism.

Week 9 (4 November) Vision 1. The eye and the visual cortex. Illusions. Marr’s Three Levels.

Week 10 (11 November) Vision 2. Face recognition. Change blindness. Visual memory. Vision and art. Non-photorealistic rendering and HDR.

Week 11 (18 November) Information and Memory. What is information? Information theory. Redundancy. Memory. The hippocampus. Long and short term memory.

Week 12 (25 November) Thanksgiving break.

Week 13 (2 December) Emotions. Feelings. Affect. Emotional models. The limbic system and the Amygdala.

Week 14 (9 December) Consciousness. Philosophical approaches to consciousness. Bandwidth. Attention.

Week 15 (16 December) Final class: Special topic (tbd).

Research in an art school

2010-09-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

Rachel Schreiber kindly invited me to be on a panel talking about research for the Humanities & Sciences divisional faculty meeting at the start of term at Califorinia College of the arts. A copy of my statement is below.

Thank you Rachel for inviting me to speak. Its a pleasure to be back in San Francisco after a summer break. I spent much my summer in England, while there I had the opportunity to watch my niece learn to use the slide for the first time. It was pretty cool...

Rachel asked me to respond to four questions: (1) what methods of research are used within fine arts? (2) What is the current state of the discussion around studio practice as research? (3) What would you like CCA students to learn about conducting research that will help them become better artists? and (4) Can you articulate connections between research in fine arts and research for science.

Pondering these questions, I quickly hit a stumbling block. It is this:

I don't believe in "research". Or rather, for me the concept of "research" is a myth: specifically it is the myth that rational processes and rational methodologies will lead to positive outcomes. It is a positivistic vision, and, as James Elkins has pointed out in his books, it is invading the shores of creative practice. When Goldsmiths College, a well respected art school, renames their woodshed the "woodwork research laboratory", we know what's in store. Art is in the process of being territorialized by research. The panel we are having today is evidence of this, as is the fact that I was able to enroll in a PhD program in research based art practice - something that didn't exist ten years ago. The myth of research is spreading.

What do I mean when I say research is a myth? My friend Andre Fenton, a neuroscientist at NYU, recently related to me how, when he is teaching science to his students, he has them read two papers from the 70s. One paper follows stringent methodologies. It is well articulated and clearly presented. It provides extremely accurate data. It is beautiful research. Meanwhile, the second paper, by some competing scientists on the same topic, is scrappier, it has some holes, patchy methodology, weaker writing.

It just happens that the conclusions of the first paper are wrong - or not wrong, but the authors were so focused on the details that they missed the big picture. Meanwhile, this second paper, which was initially dismissed as bad research, had some ideas in it that changed how people conceived the problem. It led to breakthroughs. The second paper is now a seminal landmark in the field. The learning lesson for Andre's students is that there is no a-priori criteria for evaluating good or bad research. Without criteria, the entire category of research is unstable. Most of what we can say about research is rhetoric.

And yet countless books continue to written on the subject and the story these books tell is almost inevitably the story of the first paper, because this is the story we know how to tell, and this is the myth of research: follow the process, get your results, communicate well, and you produce value. We know how to discuss this. We know how to discuss "how do we follow a process?" We know how to discuss "how do we communicate results?" How do we… how do we? Any amount of elaboration of the "how do we" line of thinking can only get us to that first paper.

Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith and Matt Lebo

My visual aid today is an image of two artists asking the question: how do we perform puppet dissection? (Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith and Matt Lebo). It strikes me that in this image we have a clue to a response to the "how do we?" problem. Taking a line from Donna Harrayway, when faced with a myth, our best course of action is to create a new myth to replace it. Rather than allowing art to be territorialized by research as is, we must do the opposite, we must articulate a new vision of research, one that overthrows the idea of research as primarily a rational engine of epistemology, and reinserts what art has always laid claim to: processes of ontology - the making of worlds; and phenomenology - the experience of those worlds; the non-rational; the nonsensical; the compelling but utterly useless.

There is something paradoxical to what I am saying. I'm arguing that we must embrace the insertion of research into art, along with research's logic, precision, and intellectual authority, not to make creative practice more rational or more predictable, but precisely the opposite: Research through art, research through creative practice, is, in my opinion, a political project that aims to undermine the authority of research and remind us of those woolly, soft, and very human qualities of expressivity, emotion, affect, hunch, guesswork, intuition, doubt, or blind leaping... ironically, all qualities that have been downsized by academic art in its play for legitimacy in academia. Research based art is a way to return us to unresearch concepts, or 'pata-research. It might mean simply trying something, whether it is puppet research or neurobiology research, or research on using a slide for the first time … to see what happens. Because, as Andre Fenton would agree, this is at the core of good science, at the core of good art. It is probably at the core of everything.

Our challenge as teachers, then, in an art school is to not be overly seduced by terms like "design research," or "design thinking." Yes, teach rigorous research practices. Yes, teach the latest tools and processes, Yes, teach exquisite communication skills. But this is not our quest. Our quest is to demand, assert, struggle, and cry over something that no amount of rationalism can explain: the awesome reign of the imagination.

The Business of Aura

2010-08-01T18:14:00.000-07:00

Some of my recent works will be included in both parts of the group show The Business of Aura, showing at Broadway Gallery and Elga Wimmer Gallery this August in New York. Details below.

The Business of Aura is a single exhibition hosted in two locations, Elga Wimmer Gallery and Broadway Gallery, curated by Kelsey Harrington. It includes painting, drawing, photography, sculptural prototypes, and installation. The show examines the potential of studio processes to produce aura. In particular it considers sensual, conceptual, and psychological interpretations of aura and highlights the role aura plays in the buying and selling of art.

Elga Wimmer Gallery
526 West 26th St. NYC #310
August 12 - September 18, 2010
Opening reception Thursday August 12 6:00-8:00pm
Summer hours - Tuesday - Friday 12-6pm
Hours after Labor Day Tuesday - Saturday 12-6pm

Artists & architecturally trained designers at Elga Wimmer Gallery include - Helen Brough, Elizabeth Cooper, Cmmnwlth (Zoe Coombes & David Boira)-in collaboration with Timothy Saccenti, Kelsey Harrington, Jon Meyer, Steve Orlando, Devin Powers, Snarkitecture (Daniel Arsham & Alex Mustonen), SOFTlab (Michael Szivos and Jose Luis Conzalez), Studio Mode (Gil Akos & Ronnie Parsons), and yo_cy (Christine Yogiaman & Ken Tracy).

Broadway Gallery
473 Broadway 7th Floor, NYC
August 19 - September 10, 2010
Opening reception August 19 6:00-8:00pm
Hours - Monday - Saturday 10-6pm

Artists at Broadway Gallery include - Jaqueline Cedar, Laura Greengold, Kelsey Harrington, Jeff Hutchison, Jeanne Jo, Amanda Lechner, Lauren Luoff, Jon Meyer, Jan Mollet, Ryan Russo, Matthew Schreiber, Rebecca Sherman, Emet Sosna, and Christopher Ulivo

Press Release (pdf)

MPhil/PhD in Art

2010-06-18T15:43:00.000-07:00

I have joined Goldsmith's MPhil/PhD in Art programme as a part-time student. I will be studying towards my MPhil (leading to my PhD) part-time while completing my second year as a visiting artist at CCA in California.

Artist's talk at Harvestworks

2010-05-19T15:23:00.000-07:00

I have been invited to present at Harvestworks on June 7, 2010, 7 - 10pm in New York.

The title of my talk is Digital materialism and its ramifications in arts practice. I will cover both theory and practice. I plan to show artworks, discuss process, give a demonstration of coding, and then talk about theoretical issues for digital artists.

Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center
596 Broadway #602
New York, NY

Bureaucracy Now!

2010-05-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

About 150-200 people came to the exhibition Bureaucracy Now! at my live/work space.

Commencement at CCA

2010-05-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

My classroom

I have just completed my first year as a visiting artist at the California College of the Arts. I created and taught two undergraduate science classes: Body and Cognition, a survey of cognitive science, and The Human as Information Processor, which covered data visualization. I participated in undergraduate curriculum meetings and was on the faculty search committee for the school's first tenure track science faculty. At the graduate level, I advised twelve MFA fine art students, and I created and taught a graduate theory/practice class called Thinking Objects. All told, I taught 60 students, including art, design, curating, fashion, and writing students. In addition to my classes, I gave an invited lecture on String Theory to MFA Textile students, and another on Code to MFA Architecture students. I organized a symposium called the Research Research Symposium, which had fifty attendees. Several of my students told me I had a reputation for being "intense," which I guess means that, after a year on the West coast, I remain a New Yorker.

CCA Graduate Thesis Exhibition

2010-05-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

CCA Graduate Thesis Exhibition [click to enlarge]

I attended the Graduate Thesis Exhibition at the California College of the Arts today.

My graduating MFA Fine Arts students included:

My graduating MFA Design students included:

You can see the exhibition websites: MFA in Fine Arts and MFA in Design.

Research Research Symposium

2010-04-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 9, 2010, 5-7pm

On Friday, April 9th, the Research Research Symposium convened at the Graduate Center at the California College of the Arts. Fifty artists, students and teachers met to discuss the art school of the future.

The symposium was formulated around two conditions—the possibility of learning without a teacher, and the experience of being alone together—both relevant to arts research and central to the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, thought out in his books The Emancipated Spectator and Aesthetics and its Discontents.

The first condition—learning without a teacher—is championed by Jacques Rancière's writing on Joseph Jacotot. Jacotot claims that ignorant students can teach each other and through this become emancipated. This idea was tested in the symposium by having non-experts give lectures on subjects they did not know, and additionally by adopting pedagogical forms but intentionally withholding their pedagogical outcomes. In other words, not only was the figure of the teacher removed, but the forms of teaching were reformulated. If Jacotot and Rancière are correct, conventional pedagogical forms favor certain possibilities and inhibit others. Modifying standard pedagogical forms should, accordingly, lead to new learning opportunities, as attendees/teachers self-define the learning activity that is taking place.

The second condition—being alone together—is also discussed by Rancière , who quotes Mallarmé, writing “Séparés, on est ensemble” [Apart, we are together]. This condition was invoked in the symposium through private and one-on-one exchanges that were organized to take place within the symposium. Rancière observes that in art we frequently encounter siutations that produce a sense of separation even as we stand together. This highlights a paradox faced by arts schools: how can arts institutions foster independence, given that this independence is itself anti-institutional. Rancière points to a possible way out of this paradox. He notes that artists anticipate being together as a community in order to create works as individuals that stand apart, so as to bring a new community into being. Creating communities of the future requires that we stand apart from today.

Each art school of the future must therefore be anti-hierarchical and self-negating, ensuring the continuing succession of art schools in the future. Schools must promote learning through individual dissensus, replacing top-down knowledge transfer from skilled “experts” with private meaning formations. How can this be achieved?

Arrangement for a symposium

The Research Research symposium followed a sequence of events:

First, the room was organized in a schizophrenic layout, with the audience facing two opposite directions, dismantling any possibility of a hierarchical podium arrangement.
The event began with a low-stakes writing exercise: everyone wrote his or her definition of “research” on a piece of paper. Rather than reading the sentences out loud for group discussion, each person passed their sentence to their neighbor in a private exchange.
Attendees were informed that the symposium presenters had failed to turn up, though A/V materials had arrived, so presentations would be given by members of the audience.
For the first presentation, Rob Marks and Saul Rosenfield read out proposals from A Potential Art School by Liam Gillick.
Paul Wood and Elysa Lozano reenacted an early design research exercise by Moholy-Nagy, where a design student organizes a set of materials by tactile ‘tones’ which are then tested by a blind person.
Angie Stalker invited Emily Eifler to go on a private dérive during the conference, but without leaving the conference room.
Nancy Nowacek improvised a presentation for a PowerPoint slide deck in which all the slides were the same image, and only the transitions between slides varied.
Rashin Fatemi and Samin Soheili gave a presentation on ergonomics titled Ethnographic Ergonomics. They spoke only in Persian during their talk.
Two test subjects, Liesa Lietzke and Allison Rowe, were shown a sequence of images. For each image, they were asked to hold up an appropriate card. There were three cards, each with a label: “Art”, “Design” and [blank].
The keynote speaker, Richard Feynman, gave a three minute speech on science as a positivity.
Clapping after the keynote lasted one minute.
There was a Q&A session in which only the Q part was held - the A part scheduled for a future event.

Angie Stalker, dérive map

In addition to the public program, there were three programmed but unannounced events during the symposium. One attendee was given written instructions at the start of the symposium to start an argument with his neighbor during one of the talks. Another was asked to start a Skype video ycall. Finally, David Kasprzak instructed Cody Frost to attend the symposium in his absence, and give his presentation for him, on the topic of absence.

In fact, all three unannounced events failed to take place. Cody Frost did not introduce himself to the organizer, so his talk on absence was not given. The person asked to start an argument declined, saying that his neighbor was his thesis advisor. And the Sykpe video conference call could not connect.

Furthermore, several decisions had not been pre-planned and had to be improvised on the spot. These improvisations and non-happenings contributed to the atmosphere of uncertainty during the symposium, which had a dynamic and lurching quality.

For me as the conference organizer, it was these unconsidered moments that gave me the most pause for reflection afterwards.

For example, I hadn’t considered introductions. Should I introduce speakers, asking them to mention their name and program, or should I treat the speakers as actors, or even make up names for them? My confusion was heightened when it came to introducing the keynote speaker, Richard Feynman, as channeled by Brenda Laurel. How should s/he be introduced? As physician or as the chair of graduate design? I realized in hindsight that my ambivalence about these introductions reflected the way that the symposium was both a parody, and therefore a fiction, and at the same time an academic symposium, and hence a non-fiction.

This tipping between reality and fiction reached a crescendo at the end of the conference. When the formal program ended, I had a strong desire to lead a group discussion, in order to explain the symposium, unpack the event, and share experiences. In other words, I wanted exactly the kind of top-down outcome-driven pedagogical knowledge transfer that the symposium set out to remove. If the symposium was fiction, then a post-hoc discussion of the symposium would have made sense. If the symposium was real, then the logic of the form of the symposium would impose itself - in which case there could be no post-symposium diagnosis, and any outcomes would instead be dissembled through private discussions. Finally, in the last moments of the conference, I recognized that Research Research was more reality than fiction, and closed the proceedings with no public explication.

The conference concluded with olives and coffee.

The Crux of Minimalism

2010-03-24T11:28:00.000-07:00

Hal Foster, in his chapter “The Crux of Minimalism” in The Return of the Real, positions Minimalism as both the crowning apogee of Modernism and also the break from it. According to Foster, Minimalism completes Modernism only to exceed it. He writes:

“We arrive, then, at this equation: minimalism breaks with late modernism through a partial reprise of the historical avant-garde, specifically its disruption of the formal categories of institutional art. To understand minimalism – that is, to understand its significance for advanced art since its time – both parts of this equation must be grasped at once.” (Foster, Return of the Real, p54)

Foster recognizes some of the complexities and contradictions in Minimalism (particularly the extent to which Minimalism claims both phenomenological and epistemological traits). He also warns of anachronistic interpretations. Nonetheless, he draws on a series of binary oppositions to show how Minimamalism is a break from the Modernist ideals championed by Clement Greenberg.

I found myself analyzing Foster's text in terms of these binary oppositions. I wrote down all the pairings I could find. Looking at the list, I thought others might find it useful:

Greenbergian Modernism	Minimalism
“Expansive” and “vanguard” (Greenberg)	“Reductive” and “retardaire” (Greenberg)
Participated in cultural regressions of Reagan-Bush era	Opened up a new field of art
Apparent freedoms	Apparent restrictions
Transcendental space of modernism	Immanence of Dada readymade or constructivist relief
Anthropomorphic images and gestures	Presence of objects
Siteless realm, standing apart on a pedestal or as pure art	Repositioned among objects and redefined in terms of place
Safe, sovereign space of formal art	The here and now
Surface	Site
Topographical mapping of the properties of a medium	Perceptual consequences of a particular intervention
Essential qualities of art	“Extraneous effects” (Greenberg)
An ideological model of meaning and of consciousness	Called “reductive” and “idealist” but complicates the purity of conception with the contingency of perception
Formal essence and categorical being	Perceptual conditions and conventional limits of art
Private meaning and subject	Public meaning and subject
Mental space of idealism conception	Physical interface with actual world
Strictly spatial, entirely present, grasped in a single glance, a transcendental moment of grace	Concern with time and reception, and the temporality of perception.
Illusionist	Literal readings
Objects set in relation to one another	Nonhierarchical ordering of objects to “take relationships out of the work and make them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision” (Morris)
Structural linguistics	Phenomenology (but with a structural underpinning)
I express	I perceive
Categorical imperatives, historicist tendencies	“linear history has unraveled somewhat” (Judd)
Objective painting	Not painting, but a creation of objects
Quality – judged by reference to the canon of Old Masters and great Moderns	Interest - provoked by testing aesthetic categories and transgressing set forms
Normative criticism and aesthetic refinement	Epistemelogical disruption, aesthetic play
Artist as existential creator and formal critic, with access to transcendental sublime	Death or the author, birth of the viewer
Aims to defeat or suspend objecthood	Aims to discover objecthood as such
Discover the essence	Transgress the limits (there is no way you can frame it)
Formal autonomy	You just have to experience it
Sublime “instantaneousness” “which at every moment is wholly manifest”, individual “grace” (Fried)	“theatrical”, “as it happens it merely is” , “the negation of art”, only literalism (Fried)
An act of faith and devotion that compess conviction (Fried)	Avant-gardist atheism (Fried)
Autonomy, belief, conviction, a secret substitute for religion (Fried)	Saps, disrupts, corrupts autonomy, belief, conviction (Fried)
Self critical objectivity	Specific objects
Modernist autonomy based in formalism and disciplines	Literalism, gestalt, perception, situation
Old	New
Purify art of life	Sublate art into life
Preserve	Transform
Posits aesthetic norms and normative examination	Posits functional analysis: investigation of the social and institutional
Normative	Experimental
Refinement	Redefinition
Secure a transcendental conviction in art	Undertake immanent testing of discursive rules and institutional regulations
Seek the essential	Reveal the conditional
Compel conviction	Cast doubt

Diaries of a Young Artist

2010-03-21T10:59:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

Do you remember I once read Letters to a Young Artist? A great book. It contains twenty three letters by established artists, written in response to a letter from a fictional "young artist" asking for advice. The young artist's letter is not published, so the task of reconstructing it is left to the reader. This makes reading Letters a treasure hunt. The effect is reinforced by the letters themselves, which contain moments of frankness and intimacy, nuggets offered by the older artists to their younger selves. The resulting mixture of personal history, practical advice, and considered reflection make this a classic small book.

When I finished Letters, I wrote on my blog that "I would really love to find a book that contains text by artists before they become established." When I saw the sequel, Diaries of a Young Artist, I eagerly purchased it.

I was disappointed.

The second book is far less compelling that the first. It is well written, but the book fell flat. There were few "take homes." It would be easy to argue this is because younger artists have less to say than established artists, but I don't accept this. I think the editors got it wrong.

For Diaries, the editors asked the younger artists to contribute "dear diary" entries - and there's the nub. Many of the artists take the project literally, and write about their daily routines. Consequently, where first book was polemic, the second is prosaic. The trips to cafes, openings, and the doctors office are all very well, and many of the artists write enjoyably. Terrence Koh's entry is hilarious, or offensive, take your pick. But there are far fewer of the reflective and intimate moments found in Letters. The "dear diary" form is too open ended. It did not challenge the artists enough to address specific issues or to reflect on what art is or what it is to be an artist.

Another issue is that the diary form is exhausted by the web, which, with thousands of free art blogs, does diaristic better and cheaper, with video too. A book of diary entries must to do additional work to establish value - but this book contains no additional essays or information, not even bios of the artists or pictures of their work (far more significant in this book than the first, since the included artists are not yet household names).

And a third issue with the diary form. In Letters I believed the established artists wrote in order to help younger artists. It was a generous gesture, so I approached the book sympathetically. But publishing diary entries hints at self promotion more than altruism. There is nothing wrong with this (it is certainly one reason I blog). But it alters how I respond to the book. It sets a higher bar. I found myself more cynical. I expected to get my fifteen dollars worth.

I was primed for disappointment.

I finished the book blaming the editors. I wish they had instead reversed their original project: why not arrange for an established artist to write to younger artists, perhaps telling a story or two and relating issues from their career, and asking the younger artist to propose alternatives, or dream what a career in art could be. The same artists presented in this volume would, I am certain, have responded very differently to this call. The editors, distracted by treasure, forgot the treasure hunt.

Chus Martinez

2010-03-12T00:13:00.000-08:00

"The best aerobics for the brain is to see exhibitions" - Chus Martinez

Today: a presentation at CCA by Chus Martinez, currently chief curator of Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), previously the director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. The talk was refreshingly rich and cerebral. In contrast to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a fan of randomness who claimed curating is like being a traffic director, Martinez rooted her museum curating in the conceptual, saying at one point "the museum can only be about one thing: research." For Martinez, curatorial research is a vehicle for revisiting the near past, not for nostalgic purposes, but rather to bring it to the present and ask how it can move us now.

To expand this idea, Martinez turned to philosophy, starting with a YouTube clip of Heidegger from 1969, discussing the future of thought:

"No one knows what the fate of thinking will look like. In a lecture in Paris in 1964, which I did not give myself but was presented in a French translation, I spoke under the title: "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." I thus make a *distinction* between philosophy, that is metaphysics, and thinking as I understand it. The thinking that I contrast with philosophy in this lecture—which is principally done by an attempt to clarify the essence of the Greek "aletheia" (unhiddenness) — this thinking is, compared to metaphysical thinking, much simpler than philosophy, but precisely because of its simplicity it is much more difficult to carry out. And it calls for new care with language, not the invention of new terms, as I once thought, but a return to the primordial content of our own language, which is, however, constantly in the process of dying off.
A coming thinker, who will perhaps be faced with the task of really taking over this thinking that I am attempting to *prepare,* will have to obey a sentence Heinrich von Kleist once wrote, and that reads "I step back before one who is not yet here, and bow, a millennium before him, to his spirit." - Heidegger

Martinez said we are still trapped in the logic of dialectical thought. The dominant notion of culture remains Adorno's, wherein culture is understood in negative terms as a dialectical defense against the market and capitalism. Click. In this mindset, culture is whatever is antagonistic towards the market, and the museum acts as a shelter, protecting culture from the market.

Taking up Heidegger's quest, Martinez asked how we can move beyond dialectical logic. "What is this future of thinking? How does it work? What do we want with all that?"

One offering is relational art. In an insightful analysis, Martinez noted that the arrival of relational art, identified in Bourriaud's book Relational Aesthetics, was not an accident: relational art arose as a response to the fall of communism. Click. We cannot separate relational art of the 1990's from the collapse of the Berlin wall since, in the post-communist era, artists sought a less negative model of culture, one that embraced participation, a kind of enthusiasm, "a new happiness in a landscape of grayness," "lets do it together."

Martinez again raised Heidegger's challenge: how do we move beyond this enthusiasm, to a future of thinking?

She cited as one inspiration Deleuze's last book, Pure Immanence (see review). Martinez noted that traditional philosophies based on the transcendent produce a divide: Some objects are so powerful that they overwhelm thought, producing only experience. Click. With other less powerful objects, thought is superimposed on the object, but transcendent to it - Martinez referred to this as the October syndrome. Deleuze offers a third possibility, pure immanence - not thinking about (i.e. superimposing thought on an object) but thinking through an object.

Deleuze's theory aims to be an empiricist's riposte to rationalism and idealism. Deleuze argues that underlying rational thought there is a plane of immanence that unifies concept and experience. But Pure Immanence is evasive and incomplete. Click. What does it mean to "think through", for example?

Martinez offered imagination as a way to formulate the conduit between object and thought. Martinez distinguished imagination from fantasy. Where fantasy is static, like a frozen image that you hold in your head, imagination is active. It is speculative.

Martinez she said a freaky question is: can you imagine talking about love but using a technical language, not the language of love? Can you superimpose a logic within another logic? With this, Martinez turned to writing. She claimed writing is an immanence exercise. Fiction, she said, empowers imagination, it is an expanding act. She told the story a studio visit she had with an artist who mentioned having written a novel. This spiraled into a project (a project, she noted, not an exhibition) where she collected novels by over 200 artists and presented the collection in a reading room at MACBA. Click. Click. These novels are not published literature and therefore become something else - a "power weapon" to open a space for speculation. Someone asked "who reads them?" Martinez said "nobody," but quickly countered that she had read all the books in the collection.

As an artist, I found it curious to hear an art curator linger on writing. For a while it blotted out everything else, distracted as I was trying to grok how a collection of fiction which nobody reads could be the future of thought. Where does this leave art?

Later, revisiting (to use Martinez's word), I thought about the ground that was covered. What Martinez presented was a well-rehearsed theoretical track from the Frankfurt school - Adorno and Heidegger - to Deleuze. As Martinez noted, these are not new ideas.

Click. What was much less rehearsed in Martinez's talk was her use of media. Throughout the hour, Martinez showed images, sometimes pausing on one image for a long time, other times flicking through several images quickly, almost casually. Sometimes the images synchronized with what she was saying, other times not. On occasion she looked at an image and explained what the image showed. Other times not. At one point she opened a PowerPoint deck with 150 slides and started clicking through the images. "Powerpoint slides all look the same" she said, shuttling through ten images of past shows. "This was our John Cage retrospective."

And on Heidegger, Martinez showed an 8 minute video in German with no English subtitles. Afterwards, she pointed out that she knew the words by heart, but wanted to read them to us - so she opened a Word document and read the English translation. In a short moment, then, a YouTube clip; Martinez's citation of her memory of the text; a Word document showing an English translation of the text; and her performance of the Word document out loud.

This was new for me. Curators often have a reverential attitude towards images, and are more casual towards words. Martinez was the opposite. She signaled that media images are not the art, could never be the art. Media and memory fold together in complex ways that cannot be trusted. Language is more reliable.

I left with two questions.

First, although Martinez argued for expanded thought, I felt in many ways her presentation remained hermetic, focusing on the French and German thinkers who appear in all art curricula. To expand thought, isn't it now time to move to the diaspora of thought beyond the tradition of the European? I wondered about cognitive philosophy, particularly recent research on embodied cognition, or tribal thinking, as powerfully articulated by Donna Haraway.

Second, although Martinez flirted briefly with pure immanence, her presentation was fundamentally an epistemological enquiry - her central question was "what about the future of thought?" She stressed the individual thinker, and talked about alternative logics. But why thought, logic, language? What about the ways that art performs as phenomenological, ontological and communitarian activities? These today seem far more significant, yet remain less represented than epistemologies of art.

At one point, Martinez said "The best aerobics for the brain is to see exhibitions." I think this sums it up. It is not enough to see slides of exhibitions in a lecture hall, to hear words or see images. Media produces alienation. Instead, we must carry our brains (literally, not only our minds) to the exhibition itself. Doing so produces aerobics, a group body-brain activity. The importance of community and body were implicit throughout Martinez's talk, but rarely foregrounded.

Incompleteness

2010-02-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been reading Todorov's "In Defense of the Enlightenment" (good book). Todorov points out something I hadn't really considered before, an inherent restriction in the concept of freedom (p5):

To engage in [individual autonomy], one must have total freedom to examine, question, criticize and challenge dogmas and institutions: none can be regarded as sacred. An indirect but decisive consequence of this preference is the restriction as to the character of authority: it must be on the same dimension as human beings, meaning it must be natural not supernatural. This is the sense in which the Enlightenment produced a 'disenchanted' world, obeying the same physical laws overall and, insofar as human societies were concerned, revealing the same mechanisms of behavior.

In other words, if we have total individual freedom, that implies that all concepts are equally open to being questioned, criticized and challenged. This means all concepts must be of the same order - there can be nothing above criticism (since that would limit freedom). This in turn restricts the character of authority - there can be no authorities above reason. Consequently if we choose freedom we must give up a supernatural god, since a supernatural god is formulated as a being of a different order, hierarchically above critique. So individual freedom implies we must reject certain concepts, in other words we are not totally free.

This style of argument reminds me strongly of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, from 1931. Gödel showed that, for any formal system T that met certain basic criteria, "T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent." In other words, all formal systems have the equivalent of the liars paradox: "this sentence is false." Mathematical systems are inherently incomplete: we can never have a grand theory of everything, since all sufficiently complex mathematical reasoning systems will contain statements that are contradictory.

I wonder, then, if philosophical reasoning is also incomplete: do all philosophical absolutes contain within them a paradox or contradiction which renders those absolutes incomplete? Anyone?

Partage du methodologie

2010-02-19T22:19:00.000-08:00

Asthma Attack. Art stops.
Marginalized by mass media, stripped of grand narrative by pomo funk, art is proclaimed dead. Unable to do anything anymore. We have devolved, according to Giorgio Agamben (2000), to pure communicability, where nothing can be said. Pluralism, says Boris Groys (2008), means that all art discourse is ultimately futile and frustrating.
Can there be a cure?
Yes, we hear. Like the bionic man, we can rebuild. We have the science. Inject a dose of pure research into the heart of art. Research will restore rigor to the viscera, pump vigor into the limbs, spread the balm of money onto the bowels, bring respect to the intestines. Through research, art will regain its place as a viable arena of operation. All praise the new art PhD.

But, with the regulating pacemaker of methodology strapped to its aorta, we must ask if our new art is alive at all. Or is it a walking zombie?

There are many reasons why art in the academy is now being framed as research: art departments, wishing to increase their funding and academic standing, see research as a way to provide validation and rigor, separating institutionalized art from the whimsical arbitrariness of “intuitive” or “expressive” art. Yet, although research brings prestige and funding, we are still left with defining what exactly it means to do research in art.

Throw a stone at the word research and you hit the word method. To do research, we are told, we systematically apply methods in order to conduct an inquiry located in a discipline. A central question, then, is what methods?

One body of the literature in art research focuses on process-based methods. For example, according to Carole Gray (2004), art research means employing methods to achieve a “process of accessible disciplined enquiry”. To do art research, we follow these stages:

1. Planning the Journey
2. Mapping the Terrain
3. Locating your Position
4. Crossing the Terrain
5. Interpreting the Map
6. Recounting the Journey

What is disappointing about this approach is that it equates art research with project management. Following the stages above tells us nothing about the art that is produced… rather it tells us the steps we ought to follow to make it. This use of methods to define process is a retreat to an identification of art with craft, in other words with a set of conventions that dictate ways of making. Meanwhile, a jarring ground truth is ignored: many artists are indisposed to following a sequence of steps in their making. Artists can be idiosyncratic, inconsistent, oblique, eccentric, unpredictable, failure-driven, wayward, non-normative, and whacko, not because they lack training or discipline, but precisely because these tactics are effective tools of discovery in art making. Art is often far more unplanning than planning.

Another body of writing in art research (e.g. Sullivan 2010) locates art research as a “method of enquiry” that generates “new knowledge” or “understanding”. Sullivan acknowledges that the methods used in art research should come from art, and not be imported from, say, project management or social science. He goes on to suggest that we use those methods for seeking knowledge, after tidying them up to make them “rigorous”:

“… if you happen to be making art within an educational setting, then there is a responsibility to be able to use your imaginative and intellectual drive to respond to our incessant need to know and to do so in a way that meets the rigor demanded of practices undertaken in institutional communities.” (2010, p242)

Part of me wonders whether increasing the rigor of art practice will also dampen the very creativity and imagination Sullivan so admires (rigor as in rigor mortis comes to mind). Mostly, though, Sullivan's tack makes me think of an art educator I once heard saying “artists are so imaginative and creative, if we just used artists to design cars, think how great cars could be.” Aside from how this patronizes the creativity of non-artists, it implies art is a kind of service bureau for imagination. Sullivan similarly wants to yoke art into service, this time for knowledge production. But is art really a service? If we define art as a service for inquiry into knowledge production or understanding, we ignore how art operates phenomenologically and ontologically. This over-constrains art to an epistemological frame. Elkins (2009) responds to this by asking bluntly: what is the new knowledge produced by a painting by an artist like Picasso?

Sir Christopher Frayling provides a third way of thinking about art research. Frayling identifies three approaches: research into art (using research as a historical lens, e.g. carrying out research into art history), research for art (using research in service of a practice, e.g. researching a new pigment) or research through art (where the art itself is research). The last category, research through art, is the least well defined, and therefore to me probably the most appealing. Faced with the over-determined alternatives, thinking of art itself as research is a good start. What exactly this means, however, is unclear. And again, we should not forget a ground truth: artists carry out investigations for and into their practices on a daily basis as part of their making, as they look at other artworks or study processes for making. It is unclear what leverage Frayling’s three distinct labels give us over a single label.

James Elkins (2009) urges us to spend time asking what other approaches are possible before we commit to categorizing our options, copying existing methodologies, or restricting art research to loosely defined goals like “new knowledge”.

My first response to this challenge is to propose inverting the research paradigm. Instead of asking what methods go into art research, we should ask what methods come out of it. Art, in this paradigm, is not about the production of knowledge, but the production of worlds, each with their own systems, discourse, rules, and possibilities. It follows that we should not restrict how art is made or what methods are followed, since that restricts what worlds are possible. Instead, we should focus on the worlds proposed by art, and investigate the distribution of methods intertwining with those worlds - not so much a partage du sensible (Ranciere 2006) as a partage du methodologie.

How could we do this? To start to answer this, lets consider different ways for analyzing art. I have often heard art enthusiasts asking "what does this artwork mean?" This question presupposes that the role of art is to generate meaning. Some art viewers, on the other hand, may ask "what is this artwork doing?" This is a far more open question, one that imbues in art a degree of agency, supposing that art can act, can do things in the world, is a form of life, or at least it has lifelike qualities. The question "what is it doing?" does not limit art to generating meaning, but broadens the enquiry - we can talk about what an artwork is doing in terms of the history of art, or in terms of its political ambitions, or in terms of how we experience the work in moment (a phenomenological account). The question of doing is, in my opinion, a relatively recent invention, one that only begins to make sense once art takes on performative qualities, from the Dadaists onwards. The shift from "what does it mean" to "what is it doing" signals an expansion in the methods that art participates in, from methods of meaning, to methods of interaction and embodiment. It is a change in the methods of analysis of art that also signals a change in the distribution of methods that art participates in.

References

Georgio Agamben, Means without ends: notes on politics. 2000.

James Elkins (editor), Artists with PhDs. 2009.

Christopher Frayling, Searching and Researching in Art and Design, in Proceedings of the National Research Conference Art and Design in Education. 1997.

Carole Gray, Julian Malins, Visualizing Research: A guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. 2004.

Boris Groys, Art Power. 2008

Jacques Rancière, The politics of aesthetics. 2006.

Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research, 2nd ed, 2010.

Live the way you feel

2010-02-04T18:20:00.000-08:00

I'm not saying its going to be easy
but I don't think you can carry on like this,
I mean, you can, of course you can, but it has a price.
I think sometimes we just have to risk it.
Live the way we feel.
And you know, it might not turn out well, sometimes
it doesn't turn out well at all,
but we have to try, we have to keep on trying,
otherwise we just become puppets,
all painted smiles, but inside, nothing.

From Little Ashes. Best moment in the film.

Design Thinking

2010-01-15T18:22:00.000-08:00

Design Thinking - from ideo.com.

I went to a presentation at CCA Thursday by Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo. The presentation was structured as a conversation between Tim Brown and Mark Breitenberg, CCA's Provost, who himself has a record of leadership in design. In the talk, Tim Brown plugged his new book, Change by Design, which I haven't yet read.

During the talk, Tim Brown and Mark Breitenberg frequently used the term Design Thinking. It is a fairly new term to me and I didn't really understand what they meant by design thinking - at least in a way that distinguished it in my mind from thinking on the one hand or design on the other. I did hear lots of descriptive words - prototype, experiment, build, iterate, change, collaborate, reflect, observe, or analyze. In the end, though, I realized design thinking is a misnomer. What emerged (consistent with here and here) is that design thinking is not a type of thinking, like, say, analytic thinking or creative thinking, but rather it is a label for a methodology or process model, like the waterfall or spiral methodology. Design thinking is a shortcut for referring to the process that designers typically follow.

My first response was to wonder: in these days of interdisciplinary teams, how is it helpful to adopt a label for a team process which privileges one discipline over others? Design thinking hints at hubris. It is liable to lead to turf wars. I imagine non-designers seeing this as a branding tactic that positions the designers as the source of cool.

Next, I thought: it is a clever label. Designers are cool, after all. So this methodology must be cool too. And because it involves thinking it must also be smart, in the same way Adidas shoes are intelligent. What could be better? If I had to pick between, say, "human centered design methodology" and "design thinking" I know what I would swing for.

Clever labels are not necessarily good ones. I'm reminded of George Orwell's great essay on Politics in the English Language. Orwell notes that language is full of tired metaphors that people use automatically and without thought. He argues that we should always seek out fresh metaphors that evoke clear images and assist thought. As a metaphor, design thinking is fresh and appealing. However it is far from a clear image that assists thought. Quite the opposite, design thinking is so vague and sounds so good that people (myself included) immediately want to use it regardless of what it actually means. The result is a cacophony of claims. We learn that design thinking is "what all the creative people do", or it is "about innovation and creativity." It is "a human centered systems thinking that enriches life." "Design thinking converts need into demand" writes Tim Brown. Design thinking is the change agent that will lead us to a better world, where complex problems are addressed in a transparent, inspiring, transformational, participatory, contextual, sustainable way.

Design thinking has grown to become far more than a label for a process. It is a movement, a group of people sharing a vision for how to make better things. Coming from the software industry, I've seen similar movements there, all aiming to overlay some kind of roadmap over the chaotic moshpit of innovation. Scrum, extreme programming (xp), test driven development, agile, ... I could go on. Coders are a vanguard of process innovation. They are also in the unique position of being able to build software tools to assist in and instrument these methodologies. You could argue (eager as I am to use the term) that coders have been applying design thinking to the problem of software design for 25 years.

What have we learnt? That we haven't finished yet. The core of the problem is that innovation involves building things that haven't been built before and thinking things that haven't been thought before. To innovate you have to leave the map. Methodologies, on the other hand, always produce a map, structuring what innovations are possible. Methodologies only help innovation to the extent that the map they produce doesn't get in the way. In other words, the team using the methodology must realize that it is not the methodology that innovates. Design thinking does not think in exactly the same way that Microsoft Word does not write. Thought takes place in the complexity of dissensus, where we leave behind labels like "designer", "coder", "user" and "product".

Ultimately, it is about what works. In software, I've seen teams that adopted rigorous methodologies only to crash and burn, and teams who followed almost no methodology who then thrived and excelled. In my experience the methodologies that work best are those which start with modest claims and a lightweight infrastructure, provide a barebones of management scaffolding, and then slip into the background. The more sophisticated, complex, ambiguous, ambitious or vague the methodology, the more steps there are, the more room there is for debate about the methodology itself - all of which is time taken away from getting it done.

Will design thinking stick? It is probably too early to say. But, even if we question the label, or wonder at the efficacy of the methodology, we should agree with the intent of design thinking: our goal is to expand human-centered approaches across our organizations and companies. Meanwhile, back to the moshpit.

LED Lighting

2010-01-12T17:16:00.000-08:00

Flexible LED lighting from Elemental LED

My friend Bob referred me to Kick Lighting and to Elemental LED. They both sell LED lights on flexible rolls that can be powered with 12v. I haven't quite figured out what to use them for yet, but I was really impressed by the sample Bob showed me. The LEDs and control circuitry are mounted directly into a flexible circuit strip. You just tape it up somewhere, plug in 12v and you have light. You can get small power dimmers too.

Avatar 3D

2010-01-10T17:48:00.000-08:00

Zoe Saldana plays the warrior Neytiri in "Avatar" (from NYTimes)

I went to see Avatar 3D IMAX today (NYTimes review here). It is the best visual smorgasbord I've seen in film in a while, with an astonishing level of attention to detail, especially in the nature scenes. The film takes 3D visual effects to a new level. I loved the flora and fauna, and thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the film. However, ultimately the film left me disappointed.

The story contrasts a dystopian military-industrial society with a utopian primitive-natural society. The military-industrial society consists of entirely bad guys, people out to exploit purely for profit. Meanwhile all of the natives are constitutionally good - there are no liars, cheats, thieves, cowards, drunks, slobs or lazy aliens. Straddling these two, a tiny group of heroes must decide where to take a stand.

The two societies collide and then bounce apart. In the end (spoiler alert) the men with their machines exit, and the heroes join the "noble savages" to return to their graceful state in harmony with nature.

This is a massive rewriting of colonial histories, one that pretends we can close pandora's box and return the gift of fire. Bring back the Dodo, let the natives win, Cameron suggests. Nice idea. Of course, we know the men with machines will be back with bigger guns and better bribes. And at least some of the natives will discover they have more leverage if they switch from warriors to miners and traders. Isolationism is only a temporary solution.

We expect nostalgia and fantasy from Cameron, whose previous films include Titanic and Aliens. Cameron's films rely on binary oppositions, on WW2 narratives of good and evil. But today these binary oppositions seem faded and naive. We crave stories that embrace the both-and world of globalization and post-colonialism. We want characters who deal with the gray slushy middle ground of issues like integration, assimilation, control, and liberation. Avatar's making is a case in point - the film's astonishing 3D visuals are only possible because of technologies born out of the military-industrial complex the film aims to critique. We live in the circular, the meta and the post. Our stories must live there too.

The criteria of curating

2009-11-03T23:27:00.000-08:00

Fridericianum - site of Documenta (link)

I went to a presentation at CCA by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator for the next Documenta. Erudite. Talented. Charming. Her talk made my blood boil. Carolyn claimed that she does not "select" artists for her shows. She repeatedly rejected that word. "Addition" she said, "I work through a process of addition, not selection." She said she adds artists in a way that is very chance driven, through random encounters that would lead her to work. Her shows, she claimed, were formed in this happenstance of accumulation.

I appreciated Christov-Bakargiev's effort to distance curating from the image of an all-knowing judge who selects the best work with a kind of pre-planned foresight, like a scientist performing selective breeding. But her model of chance-based addition presents its own problems. The word "add" is suffused with positivity. It glosses the unavoidable: the calculus of curating is far more subtraction than addition, since there is always less space than art. Curating inevitably involves rejecting some artists that would otherwise fit because there are other artists who otherwise fit... in other words, selection. The word "add" projects mathematical neutrality, not the shopper adding products to their shopping basket. And the idea of a curator of Documenta who "randomly" discovers artists struck me as very optimistic about the neutrality of chance. Invite a curator to your art school, pay a stipend, and see if the curator perhaps randomly meets some of your MFA students.

I left the talk hungry for criteria for curating that escape the toxicity of pluralism, without resorting to Iron Chef. Then I remembered that I'm an artist. Thank goodness I don't have to worry about that.

Aethetics after the Postmodern Turn

2009-10-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

This public symposium looks like it will be really great:

Saturday, October 17, 2009, 9 am
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
1111 Eighth Street, 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

A select group of philosophers, art historians, cultural critics, and artists examine the status of aesthetics in discussions of contemporary art. What can the discipline of aesthetics, with its roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, contribute to the analysis of contemporary art? What role do philosophical ideas play in creativity? What can reflection on feelings of beauty and sublimity contribute to studio culture?

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

9–9:30 a.m. Coffee & Continental Breakfast

9:30–10 Welcome & Opening Remarks
Joseph J. Tanke
Mark Breitenberg, Provost
Rachel Schreiber, Director of Humanities and Sciences

10–11 The Identification of Aesthetics and Politics in Rancière
Emiliano Battista, Jan van Eyck Academie

11–12 The Case of the Aesthetic Regime
Joseph J. Tanke, California College of the Arts

12–1 World Modernisms: The Case from Indian Modern Art
Pradeep Dhillon, University of Illinois

1–2 Lunch

2–3 New Games
Pamela M. Lee, Stanford University

3–4 What Is Art?
Frederick M. Dolan, California College of the Arts

4–5 Aesthetic of the Cool: The Life and Times of an African Artist
Robert Farris Thompson, Yale University

5–5:30 Short Break

5:30–6:30 Keynote Address
Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art
Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University

Looking at Art

2009-09-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Visitors at the Louvre: some engage directly with the art while others take pictures of pictures.

Back in August, Michael Kimmelman wrote a piece in the New York Times titled At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus. In it, Kimmelman argues that few people look at art slowly any more. He observes:

"Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute."

He then goes on:

"At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint..."

Needless to say, according to Kimmelman, today we have lost something compared to earlier times. But his comparison is bizarre. He compares an earlier "highly educated Westerner" with today's general readership ("we"). His highly educated Westerner can only have been an ultra-wealthy gentry, since in Victorian times high-brow books cost far more than most could afford. One book of Wordsworth's poems cost as much as 100 pigs, for example. Meanwhile, we (the rest of us) read voraciously even then. Miners in the 1920s are documented reading 80 books a year on average. Not the 100 classics that Kimmelman refers to, but far more populist fare. In other words, plus sa change...

What irks me most about Kimmelman's article is that his main claim is that we don't look carefully anymore - but what he actually demonstrates is that journalists don't report carefully any more. Kimmelman makes no attempt to back up his opinion with any scientific research, cultural or social studies, consultation of experts, referencing of scholars, citing of statistics etc. In short, he practices precisely the kind of intellectual skimming he derides in art lookers. This is simply journalism on the fly. The difference between Kimmelman and his target, the lazy art tourist, is that he is writing front-page articles for the NYTimes.

(As an aside, many of the arguments from Krugman's article on Horse Race Reporting apply here).

Do people look at art more rapidly today? To answer that, we would need to know how long the average art goer spent in front of each artwork in previous decades. As far as I am aware, this data does not exist. They didn't use closed-circuit TVs in museums 100 years ago. Anything we say must be speculation.

There is a deeper problem. The "we" that we are talking about has changed. Art audiences have risen dramatically in the last few decades. For example, the Tate Modern is the second most visited destination in England today. That is a lot of eyeballs. Do we look at art differently? Or is it instead that different people are looking? What was a fairly self-selected group of serious art lovers has become "diluted" by a more diverse group of people visiting museums for many reasons. In other words, perhaps the apparent increase in people wandering around museums casually is not a cognitive change in our visual attention, but simply a reflection of a broader and more diverse population of artgoers.

These questions are beyond Kimmelman, who prefers unsubstantiated statements. He writes "Cameras replaced sketching by the last century." Which is like saying "TV replaced radio by the last century." It sounds good. So does my radio, by the way, which works great today. Sketching is still with us. Is it any more or less "normal" than it was 100 years ago? Again, answering that question in a meaningful way requires far more of an investigation than Kimmelman provides.

Kimmelman identifies the digital camera as the enemy of looking. Is that really the case? Why not target postcards, also? After all, they too enable art visitors to think "I won't bother looking, I can always buy a postcard." The argument about digital technology is inconclusive at best. Clive Thompson in Wired Magazine recently wrote a profile of Andrea Lunsford. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford. She recently conducted a survey of over 14,000 writing samples and concluded that, rather than killing writing, technology has created "a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." I can think of no reason why Lunsford's observations would not also extend to the visual.

Upcoming- Fall 2009

2009-08-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

This autumn is beginning to look quite full. Besides teaching at CCA I have three art events:

Overlap

I have a piece in Overlap, a group show at Elga Wimmer gallery. Here's the info:

Overlap - Extending beyond edges and boundaries in art & architecture
August 27 - September 19, 2009 (Tuesday - Saturday noon-6:00pm)

Opening Preview: Thursday August 27th 5:00-8:00pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday September 9th 6:00-9:00pm

Art and architecture are often portrayed as distinct, even opposing fields, though they share many material and conceptual practices. The invited artists and architecturally trained designers share interests in generating forms, pattern, and geometries through tactile material processes -whether hand crafted or through the use of computational technology. They often incorporate an awareness of codes or conceptual layers in their work as well as new generative methods and modes of production. The intent of OVERLAP was to begin with these commonalities, and provide space for indefinable qualities to emerge, hinting at something new.
The participants in the show are 4-pli/Associated Fabrication, John Monteith, Jon Meyer, Kelsey Harrington, Myles Bennett, SOFTlab, THEVERYMANY, yo_cy, and Ziad Naccache.
Curated and produced by Kelsey Harrington & Christine Yogiaman

Governors Island Art Fair

I will be installing Farm Yards stickers on September 5th during the afternoon at Governors Island in New York, as part of the Governors Island Art Fair.

The Governors Island Art Fair - over 150 artists
The art fair is open weekends, September 5-27, 11am-6pm. See here for more information on visiting the island.

San Francisco Open Studios

I have a new studio in San Francisco, and will be participating in the San Francisco Open Studios, October 24 & 25, 11am-6pm. My studio is at 900 Tennessee, unit 18. Here is a flickr set of Unit 12, which is quite similar.

New York to San Francisco by train

2009-08-22T23:23:00.001-07:00

Hudson valley, taken from the train. The slanted tower is caused by the iPhone's rolling shutter.

I took the Amtrak train from NY to SF. Three days total on the train. And spectacular scenery - particularly after Chicago, when we reached Wyoming and Nevada. I went coach class for the first leg of the trip, from New York to Chicago. Then I splashed out on a sleeper room from Chicago through to SF. I'm glad I had a sleeper - the moment I settled into my little sleeper room, I shifted from travel mode (watch the bags, stay on alert) into vacation mode (relax, put my feet up, stop worrying, read a book...).

My general impressions: The people on the train were great, the views were amazing, service was generally good, the food was so/so, and the Amtrak carriages have seen better days - for example, the toilets broke in my carriage, which was no fun for anyone. That said, I would take the train again, if I had another space three days.

Click here to see more photos.

Super magnets for putting up artwork

2009-08-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a cool technique for mounting flat paper-based works to a wall:

Basic technique:

Drive a flat-headed nail into the wall until it is flush.
Place the paper against the wall, over the nail
Put a neodymium disc magnet on the paper, over the location of the nail. It will stick to the nail and pinch the work, holding it against the wall.

This technique easily scales to larger works:

More nails: For large-area works (e.g. 40"x40" or more), place a nail about 1" in from each of the four corners. For wide works, use 3 nails along the top edge. For long works, place a nail in the middle of each vertical edge.

More magnets: If the work uses heavy paper, you can stack up 2 or 3 magnets over each nail to increase the pinch pressure.

You can buy neodymium magnets from a number of household goods stores - the Container Store calls them "mighty magnets". Some hardware shops sell Magnetsource.com magnets, which come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are not too expensive - less than a dollar a magnet - and they are reusable.

Ward Shelley showed me this technique. It has several advantages over the pins, clips or tape:

You don't have to be super-precise about the location of the nails. Once you have the work up, you can "slide" it, moving each corner so it slides under the magnet. I place a level on the top edge of the work and adjust it until it is level. This is much more tolerant than working with pins.
Unlike clips or pins, the magnets leave almost no impression on the work - I've found I can put up a work and take it down and not see any mark where the magnet was. Unlike tape, there is no risk of tearing.
The magnets are unobtrusive and have a more minimal look than pins or clips.

The one downside is that, when the work comes down, you have some nail holes in the wall, instead of pin holes. In most art locations this is no problem, because the walls are patched and painted all the time. In a home location, you may want to stick to pins.

Will it happen?

2009-07-27T21:33:00.000-07:00

I have a piece in a group exhibition curated by Kelsey Harrington called Will it Happen?

Elga Wimmer Gallery
Opening: Tuesday August 4th 6-9pm
526 West 26th Street #310 New York, NY 10001

Then August 5 – August 15th, 2009, Monday-Friday 12-6 or by appointment

Artists:
Rory Baron
Myles Bennett
Ginny Casey
Ama Saru & Hsiao Chen
Ghost of a Dream (Adam Eckstrom & Lauren Was)
Rachel Frank
Laura Greengold
Kelsey Harrington
Amanda Lechner
Jon Meyer
Anna Mikhailovskaia
Ziad Naccache
Yuka Otani
Antonio Serna
Eduardo Terranova
Bohyun Yoon
Brian Zegeer

ELGA WIMMER PPC is pleased to introduce the group exhibition Will it happen? as part I of two summer shows, produced and curated by Kelsey Harrington. Hours are Monday to Friday from noon to 6pm or by appointment.

The title for this show, taken from an artwork made from lottery tickets, asks a question about the future. The exhibition features a selection of artworks that are representative of current studio practices. Rather than adhering to a preconceived strict thematic curatorial agenda, the work was selected following an open framework. The idea was to juxtapose works from a range of artists and find potential connections. Reflecting on the collected works, several themes emerge. One theme echoes the kind of anxiety or uncertainty embedded in the show's title, which could also be what will happen? or will what happens be good? In many cases, the artists manifest this anxiety via the figure, which is seen as misshapen, fragmented, operated upon, escaping, or simply missing. Another theme is a reliance on invention, free play and intuition. Above all, there is a continued investment in material and formal concerns. It is almost as if the artists have responded to uncertain times by becoming more heavily invested in making and material.

In association with StudioFuse artblog, studiofuse.wordpress.com.

For further information please contact Kelsey Harrington 401.316.4303 or (kelseyharrington at gmail).

The Gallery @ Elga Wimmer, PCC
526 West 26th Street #310 New York, NY 10001
t. 212.206.0006 c.401.316.4303 Monday-Friday 12-6 or by appointment

Open studio

2009-07-26T21:38:00.000-07:00

I'm having an Open Studio day to show recent work at my short-term space at the Elizabeth Foundation.

Reception: Friday August 7th, 6-9pm
Open day: Saturday August 8th, noon-6pm.

323 West 39 Street #1203, between 8/9 Ave.
(closest subway: Times Square).

Quindar

2009-07-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

Like everyone, I am caught up in the Apollo madness.

I love that the Quindar beeps you hear on the Apollo tapes were a cost-cutting measure. Bureaucrats saving dollars on their telephone bill created an essential part of the aesthetic of space travel.

We have choices

2009-07-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

the punctum
the object petit a
the screen
the gaze
the pharmakon
the parergon
the Other
the dialogic imagination
the supplément
différance
ousia
the trait
the rhizome

List taken from James Elkins, "What Happened to Art Criticism"

Treviso to Venice by Water Taxi

2009-07-15T08:01:00.001-07:00

My biggest disappointment with Treviso airport was the discovery that there are no water taxis. A friend had told me that the water taxi from the airport into Venice itself was the only way to arrive, because, aside from being one of the romantic wonders of the world, it lets you encounter the city from the water, the way it was designed to be seen. It was only after purchasing the flight that I learnt this option is only available from Venice's other airport, Maro Polo.

The Ryanair ticket from Stanstead to Treviso was a mistake all around. It seemed like a money saver at the time. But add a checked bag (20 pounds) and the train ticket to Stanstead (28 pounds each), and the savings were pretty meager. And the journey took forever. On top of the hour-long train/bus connections at either end, on the return leg we had to stand in a sequence of lines for five hours, because of crowding at the airport. Treviso and Stanstead have poor facilities for handling large numbers of passengers. Avoid Ryanair's Venice/London flight if you can.

After the rude Ryanair experience, my friend's words about the water taxi were a challenge. I was determined we would try it, at least once. So we took the ATVO bus from Treviso to Mestre (50 minutes, 6 euros each), then the ATVO bus from Mestre to Marco Polo airport (20 minutes, 3 euros each). It was actually very easy, with hardly any waiting. The water taxi from Marco Polo to our hotel was around 100 euros, more than the flight. It was thrilling from the outset. A journey I will never forget.

If you're lonely

2009-06-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

Martin Creed, Work No. 958, 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 30" x 24" x 3/4".

I admire Martin Creed's artwork, with its bombastic silliness. But I wasn't aware of his writing until a friend pointed it out (thanks Stephen). Things like this:

Sometimes people say: 'What the fuck do you think you're doing? That's not art.
I say: 'Fuck off, assholes!'

Assholes... they are something to get excited about, something to work for.

The text continues in this vein. Its hilarious. From Martin Creed's work #470 (read the full text)

La Biennale

2009-06-30T01:44:00.000-07:00

Show Highlight

The Collectors - in the Danish and Nordic Pavilion

Don't Miss

The huts at the back of the Arsenale - hard to find but worth the trouble.

The Ukraine pavilion - kitchy and fun.

AES+F's video The Feast of Trimalchio in Unconditional Love at Arsenale Novissimo (take the free shuttle ferry at the end of the Arsenale).

The question on many minds at the 2009 Venice B was how the director Daniel Birnbaum would perform. Birnbaum accepted the appointed in April 2008, and some undoubtedly felt sympathy for the new director, who took charge under tempestuous circumstance, with only 14 months to organize the mammoth event.

Robert Storr had been commissioned to direct both the 2007 and 2009 Venice Biennale, but after a clash with the organizers, he pulled out of this years show, leading to a scramble. For my part, I was saddened we didn't see Robert Storr's part deux. It would have been fascinating to compare a before-crash 2007 Biennale with an after-crash 2009 Biennale directed by the same person... How would Storr have reflected this change? We will never know.

Did Birnbaum succeed? In my opinion the answer is yes. At the Arsenale and the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini (now renamed the Palazzo delle Esposizioni), Birnbaum started with large-scale and bold installations - by Lygia Pape, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Wade Guyton/Kelley Walker, Tomas Saraceno, and Massimo Barteloni. These giant works set the tone for much of what was to follow - a focus on aesthetic play and use of space, a deflection of any obvious political readings, and a mixture of old as well as new. Lygia Pape, who died in 2004, was one of 13 dead artists in the 90-artist exhibition, an unusually high percentage for a contemporary art show. It was a bold start.

Installation by Lygia Pape, from artnet.

Birnbaum has drunk the koolaid of pluralism, and his show reflected a diverse range of interests. Still, there was less of the political gravitas and shock factor of Storr's show - no videos of human skulls being used as footballs, for example - and virtually no grand abstract painting - no Gerhard Richter's this time. The tone of much of the curated exhibition was light and humorous, though without sacrificing substance.

In the national pavilions, there has been much chatter about Liam Gillick, a British artist, installed as the sole occupant of the German pavilion. Some saw this as a call for the end of nationhood - the national pavilions have long been viewed as anarchonistic. But putting a white male British artist in the German pavilion felt tame to me - this move does very little to undermine national sovereignty.

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET "death of a collector" @La Biennale 2009, Photo by Strifu

Instead of Gillian's taxidermied cat in the German pavilion, I was more drawn to Maurizio Cattelan's taxidermied dog, part of The Collectors, a joint collaboration between the Danish and Nordic Pavilions, organized by the artists Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset (photos here or here). The dog is listening to its master's voice - a groaning modernist sculpture, both comical and eerie. The Collectors was for me the strongest statement in the Biennale, even to the extent of upstaging Birnbaum's giant show. It represented a complex collaborative model between nations and individuals. It was less straightforward than the blunt bi-nationalism proposed in Germany's pavilion. The entrance signaled what was in store - a real estate "For Sale" sign was cockily planted in front of the Danish pavilion (apparently, you can book an appointment for a tour with an estate agent). Inside the pavilions, Elmgreen & Dragset had "staged" over twenty artists - meaning that some elements of the show were artworks and others were set dressing. Was the poster near the entrance an artwork? You decide.

The Collectors had a didactic narrative element. The two pavilions represented the homes of two fictional art collectors. In front of the Nordic pavilion, a swimming pool held a floating mannequin representing the owner, a writer who had committed suicide. Visitors were invited to lie on the bed, sit in the chairs and otherwise occupy the house, introducing a participatory element. The artworks themselves were solid, unashamedly homo-erotic, with modernist trappings.

What are we to make of this multi-layered bending of public and private, national, collaborative, staging and art? The Collectors operated on different levels, and I felt compelled to return to it on a second day. The revisit did not disappoint. I saw that on one hand the show could be read as the death of collectors - a symbol perhaps of the collapse of the art market. But it could also be seen as the death of curating.

David Bestué / Marc Vives

Finally, among my favorites in the international exhibition were the videos by David Bestué / Marc Vives. One video showed a horse transforming into a person into a super-hero, all done using costume parts that folded and collapsed. It was a rickety and hilarious. It is hard to find - set at the tail end, in one of the collapsing sheds at the very back of the Arsenale, the video was the opposite of the grand start, and the perfect endnote.

Shortness

2009-06-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

My talk at the Shortness Symposium at the Tate Modern went well. I had to restrict it to seven minutes long, which was a challenge!

I started by conducting a financial transaction. I had created a small program which displayed a market exchange rate between UK pounds and US dollars, fluctuating over time (a simulated figure based on data from the last three months, replayed much faster). I asked for a volunteer in the audience who wanted to buy two dollars off of me, paying in pounds at the going exchange rate. A woman in the audience agreed. When she said "now" I noted the exchange rate. Then, because I owned no dollars, my next task was to find a source for the dollars. I asked for a volunteer in the audience who happened to have two dollars they were prepared to sell at the going rate. Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) raised his hand (I knew Paul was present, and hoped he might volunteer, but it wasn't prearranged so I was a bit nervous at that point!) I completed my purchase of the two dollars, noting that in the meantime the market exchange rate had fallen. The result: I sold two dollars at one rate, purchased them a little later when the exchange rate had fallen a little, and made an 8 pence profit.

Selling something you don't own and purchasing it later is a strategy in finance known as a "naked short". It is one of several Short selling practices which aim to make a profit from something going down in value.

A short is the opposite of a long. In a long investment, if you invest a pound in a company, the worst that happens is the company goes bust and you lose your pound. If the company does well, the most your pound can increase is limitless.

Shorts work the other way. If you short a pound, say the company plummets and has a bake sale - the best you can do is to obtain the thing you shorted for free - so the most you can make is a pound. But if you short a company and it suddenly has a surge, at the time you complete the short, you may end up owing a lot. In a short the amount you can owe is potentially limitless. Shorting carries risk, and some investors have been driven into bankruptcy by shorting. Shorting also creates systemic risk - if too many traders short a company, it can drive the company value downwards, even into collapse, with knock-on consequences.

These risks perhaps explain the poor reputation of shorting. According to Wikipedia, the first person to perform a short was a Dutch trader in the 1600s. The other traders took a dim view of his investment tactics and he was banned from trading. The 1929s crash was also blamed on shorts. A regulation called the uptick rule was introduced to restrict shorts in 1929. (President Bush cancelled the uptick regulation).

To summarize, shorting is a bet that something will decrease in value. It is associated with high risk.

What I find fascinating about finance is that, despite its cold logical instrumentality, it contains these moments of innovation, really models of thinking. The short is one such model - a counter-intuitive way to turn a loss into a profit. As an artist, I look for ways these models translate in art.

We can immediately say nearly all art is long. Art is usually invested in its own value and importance. The assumption is that, over time, the value and importance of the artwork increase – How else will it end up in a museum? Which of course is the ultimate goal. Additionally, to survive, artists must sell work. Few artists can afford to see prices pushed down. How could an artist even leverage devaluation?

The short is the epitome of the antisocial, it is a bet against the system, the desire to see things go down. Put this way, we can say the logic of shorting is the logic of iconoclasm. It is the impulse to break things apart and create something new from the pieces. In 1919, the artist Kazimir Malevich talked about burning the museums, burning the Rubens, and creating new ideas from the ashes. A case can be made that the short is to finance what the Avante-garde is to art. It is the attempt to build something in the desert, to produce value through devaluation. It is this attempt which places it at the center as a destabilizing force. Just as the Avante-garde revolves and returns, shorting will remain a part of our future.

Guruji

2009-06-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

Sri K Pattabhi Jois

Today I went to the New York memorial tribute for Pathabi Jois, a Yoga teacher who died May 18th, age 93. I was fortunate to have studied with Guruji in India on two occasions. They were formative trips, marking the moment in my life when I shifted my focus to art. Guruji was inspiring in many ways. For a leader, he was a man of unusually few words. At the school there was no memorization of texts, rote chanting, led classes, ritual music or services... the kinds of things many people assume take place in a Yoga school. There was daily physical practice, and "conference", a time when people could sit together, often in silence, though Guruji might answer a question or tell a story. Guruji had no interest in trying to convince people to blindly follow a dogma. He was a householder, he didn't run an ashram or demand that students conduct their lives in a fixed way. For Guruji, actions counted. In the physical actions of the asanas he was extremely demanding. He would sometimes shout at me when I made a mistake in a pose. But just as often he would laugh. One time, trying to get my body into a pose, he said "perhaps not this lifetime!" and chuckled loudly, "but no problem, next lifetime." He believed that what mattered was to to keep the focus on what is just in front of you, and then try and try again. Rather than teaching from the pulpit he led by example - giving instruction in physical yoga practice six days a week, getting up before dawn, and rarely missing a day for 70 years. He led an extraordinary life.

NYFA Fellowship

2009-06-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) for selecting me as a recipient of a 2009 NYFA Fellowship award. It is a prestigious art award that comes with a $7000 grant. This year 134 fellows were chosen from over 3,600 applicants. The grant is "unrestricted" (it doesn't have to be used to a specific project) - which makes it particularly welcome just now. You can read the announcement here.

Bushwick and Vikings

2009-06-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

Stephen Truax, Untitled, gouache on stretched paper, 8.5 x 11 in., 2008

I was in Bushwick over the weekend at the Bushwick Open Studios. If you missed this event, make sure to look for the version next year. Getting there was a hassle since the L train was not running, but I'm glad I went, its the most fun art event I've had in NY. It was really well organized, with around 250 participating artists/groups/events.

The show ranged from non-profit galleries like Austin Thomas‘ Pocket Utopia and Norte Maar, to group shows, to individual artists - some showing in purpose built studio spaces, others in their homes. Stephen Truax was presenting from his home studio - he uses geometric forms but with hand brush strokes, which I found a refreshing departure from the pervasive masked-tape technique.

I had one of my new Shopping Cart works in a group show called Viking Mountain Funeral, curated by Kathleen Smith and Eric Ayote. The show hung together well and was well presented, and Eric and Kathleen were a pleasure to work with. All together a great weekend.

On the seventh day god created the Art World

2009-05-31T08:45:00.000-07:00

I purchased Sarah Thornton's book "Seven Days in the Art World" in 2008 weeks before the crash. $24.95, plus tax. I tried to read it several times. Each time, after reading a few pages, I experienced a giddy sense of nausea. I would quickly put the book down. I didn't try to analyze this. Tim Griffin may have identified one part when he is quoted in the book declaring that the problem with writing about the art world, as opposed to art, is that "it risks simply mirroring the 'celebrification' of the art world and its creation of veiled coteries."

For me it was less about mirroring than amplifying. Reading the book, my ears rang with the resounding ka-ching of money and power.

At the time I was struggling with my relationship with New York. The only developments in the city were those that served the super-wealthy. Danny Meyer's proposed Tavern-on-the-Green style restaurant in Union Square was the pinnacle. One of Manhattan's main public parks, named in celebration of labor movements and free speech, was destined to be a theme restaurant for the rich. All my friends were talking of leaving, Berlin or Philadelphia. The city I loved looked certain to be the worlds largest shopping mall. And Thornton's book played to this idea. When she goes on a studio visit, for example, she picks Murakami, famous for turning a museum into a Vuitton boutique. I wanted out.

With the financial crash, the froth has gone and now we have a bitter hangover. I used to jokingly wonder when NYU will convert the Mews into luxury condos. Instead, with tens of thousands of foreclosures, luxury condo developments are frozen or incomplete, and the city faces a new crisis.

The bracing effect of the recession, like a shower on a hot day, changed my outlook. My love of the city has returned. And that $24,95 investment matters more to me than it used to. Before taking the book to the Strand, I picked it up to read a few pages. To my surprise, the resounding roar had new overtones, the brass section had turned into the strings. I realized the chapter on the Crit was actually very funny. And the chapter on Artforum reminded me of an unusual encounter I had in 2000. I was in Mysore, India, and I received an email asking me a favor - would I pick up a suit from a taylor there and deliver it to someone in New York. I agreed. The suit was a bright primary color, and the someone turned out to be Artforum publisher Knight Landesman. In return for my role portering, Landesman invited me to a meal at the Bowery Bar and Grill. I appreciated his generous hosting and the evening was a lot of fun.

Thornton's encounter with Knight was similarly brightly colored. She quotes him saying he loves the art world because "it's a neutral ground where people meet and interact in away that is different from their class ghettos." The clash of the classes is, more than anything, what draws me to New York City. But the art world, and Thornton's book, are far from neutral. David Drammonds' book jacket design says it all: it shows an image of a woman's leg, spiky high heels, as she walks into a gallery space. The view is from one gallery to the next, the galleries appear empty, and the central focus of the image is a fashion accessory. Thornton describes the book as ethnographic research, but a rush judgement is that, like the cover, this is an account from one room in the art world to the next, and it is more interested in glamour than art.

This overlooks the value of Thornton's account. Thornton is at her best writing portayals of people. And with her insider position comes access. She spoke to over two hundred people while working on the book, and her thoroughness pays off. She uses the cameo to dizzying effect. My favorite moment so far is the CAA (College Art Association), where Thornton "bumps into" Jerry Salz, and has lunch with Roberta Smith. Her summary of their relationship is witty and poignent.

It is easy to complain the book is an insiders account and so not objective. This complaint falls away the moment I stop to think how much my own responses have changed. Distance has flipped my position, what revulsed is now curious. Each day we change. And on the eighth day...

Ward Shelley at Pierogi

2009-04-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

Autonomous Art ver. 1, 36 x 24" (detail), Ward Shelley

Went to visit Ward Shelley at Pierogi, where he has a show titled "Who Invented the Avant Garde - and other half-truths ". Ward is showing a series of diagrams mapping various takes on history, primarily art history, ending at around 2000. The drawings are beautifully detailed, they have an an organ-like quality, like giant cardiovascular diagrams of bodies.

In addition to the diagrams, Ward has set up a (tiny) living area in the back of the gallery, where he will live for the next two weeks, sleeping during the day and working at night. Sleeping in a gallery is no longer new, but Ward takes things to an extreme - both in terms of how long he has been doing it and the kinds of demands he places on himself during each stay. When you visit his website you can see some of his previous living arrangements. In the Pierogi show, he invites visitors to enter short sentences into a laptop, in a document titled "Dreams" (I entered "relational aesthetics", my stock response when given an opportunity to comment in an art context). These sentences are converted by Apple's Text-to-speech into spoken words, which are played on speakers mounted in the extremely small sleeping area, a narrow mattress buried in a pile of cardboard boxes. Peep-holes let visitors see Shelley as he sleeps during the day, and you can hear the sounds of the words from the speech synthesizer.

Shelley says he is inviting the viewer to influence his dreams and through that his drawings, a way to experiment with how this effects the drawings he makes during the night. He also invites people to suggest topics for the drawings. Shelley blends both social and autonomous elements in his art.

Social art often makes democratic claims - suggesting, for example, that everyone is equally a creator. Such claims are overstated since, in practice, the viewer always occupies a tightly proscribed role. Shelley's approach is more carefully positioned. He gives the viewer a role to play, a way to contribute, but there is no claim that the viewer becomes the author. At best the viewer can become part of the authors dreams.

Shelley demonstrates, in both his diagrams and his social practice, a commitment to a kind of balancing act - between art as commercial enterprise and intellectual enterprise; between the history of art and art today; between social and autonomous drives; between the needs of the artist and the demands of the viewers. In contrast to the idealizing of modernist art, this kind of balancing act is a compromise, an attempt to have it all ways at once. However, if Shelley's work gives up on the radical idealism of modernism, it also skips the kind of irony typically associated with post-modernism. The work sets a sincere tone, almost worthy - one viewer thanked Ward as he left the show, saying that it was informative.

Then the Apple text-to-speech generator blurts out a phrase, and the whole exhibit lurches into the ridiculous.

I value art which proposes a sincere attempt a balancing act, trying to have it all ways at once, with a dose of ridiculousness that reveals how futile it all is and how important it remains to try.

Top Twenty

2009-04-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

Top twenty words of two art critics, listed in frequency of use:

Critic 1

the
of
a
and
in
to
is
as
it
with
that
from
for
by
was
he
at
on
but
art

Critic 2

the
of
and
a
in
to
is
that
art
it
with
from
museum
by
or
are
this
at
an
new

Based on a sample of 5000 recently published words by each critic.

New Museum - Younger than Jesus

2009-04-12T20:18:00.000-07:00

AIDS-3D. OMG Obelisk, 2007.

I did a very quick tour of YTJ at the New Museum this weekend. I really enjoyed much of the art. Ryan Trecartin's piece gave me a huge smile. I am excited this is showing near me. I plan to go back and may find time to post more.

However something Holland Cotter said in the NYTimes review resonated with me:

“Younger Than Jesus” doesn’t have a comparable sense of unity, texture or lift. It is, despite its promise of freshness, business as usual. Its strengths are individual and episodic, with too much work, particularly photography, making too little impact. But my point is that beyond quibbles about choices of individual works, it raises the question of whether any mainstream museum show designed to be a running update exclusively on the work of young artists can rise above being a preapproved market survey. Removed from a larger generational context, can such a survey ever become a story, part of a larger history? (The same question applies to museum exhibitions that leave young artists out of the picture.) I’m asking. It’s a complicated subject. I don’t know the answer.

I wonder the same thing.

If the YTJ show has a story, it is one of pluralism. The curators have done everything they can to be inclusive - consulting 150 "experts" facebook-style, listed in the published materials (I applaud this enormous effort); publishing a directory of 500 artists (also a great thing); including every form of art, from performance, video, sculpture, painting, photography and computer software; bringing in art from dozens of countries... all this demonstrates how connected everything is, how every attitude, image, form, or expression is equally valid. Every position is represented. Pluralism reigns supreme.

Yet as soon as the curators decide to divide artists into two classes based on a gambit like "younger than Jesus", they expose how shallow pluralism is in practice. The focus on the young/hot market segment does little to increase the overall pluralism in art, rather, as Holland Cotter remarks, it is business as usual. This is, as Hal Foster once said, "the false pluralism of the posthistorical museum, market and academy in which anything goes (as long as accepted forms predominate)." In the book Art Power, Boris Groy points out that pluralism is misguided, since any attempt at pluralism fails as soon as the curator has to make a choice who to exclude: "the alleged pluralism of modern and contemporary art makes any discourse on it ultimately futile and frustrating. This fact alone is reason enough to put the dogma of pluralism in question."

Of course, I may be getting this all wrong. I hold out hope that the curators are fully aware of this, and that if I spend more time in the show I will discover moments of irony that show how generational labels often collapse (perhaps they included an artist who is only fifteen, or one in their nineties?).

Hal Foster and Mimetic Excess

2009-04-10T08:10:00.000-07:00

During questions an audience members asked "What about Now?"

Hal Foster had just spent an hour discussing the Dada movement of the 1920s. His image for the talk was Hugo Ball (above) dressed in an outfit - a kind of joker card that kept reappearing throughout the evening.

Foster's talk was a swirl of words. He has a non-linear take on history, rejecting terms like linear progression in favor of phrases like "rhythmic persistence". History as a series of turns and returns. I enjoyed this, I pictured a pulsing repeating rolling movement rather than a crash vector.

For Foster, Dadaism was one such turn. Foster presented a nuanced take on Dadaism, arguing that Dada was not about trying to be a vanguard or a resistance, but instead an imminent "biting from the inside." Dada was indifferent to the moment, rather than trying to transgress it (as surrealism was) or legislate it. Foster talked of Dada in terms of bathos, centering on the figure of the buffoon, as in Hugo Ball miming the fit of the epileptic.

Foster characterized German Dada as flaccid, fractured, the pathetic subject, epileptic, part-shamen, part-priest, yielding to a moment of pandemonium, utter confusion. A Dada artist "suffers from the dissonances of the time to the point of self-disintegration" (Wol?), at which point the body collapses. The Dadaist is the un-man, pushed to the limit.

Foster contrasted this with Russian constructivism and the new man, the hero figure, "ecce homo novus", Lissitzky's rational subject representing the new order, where man and machine fuse in unity.

Instead of the new man, in Dada Foster saw imminent mimesis (copying objects that surround us, drawing from the here and now), a strategy to survive civilization, to survive the death of humanism. Through miming the epileptic, through incorporating objects from the here and now, and then modifying, altering, changing, the mimesis becomes an excess, a surplus, a hypertrophic collapsing of distance. Foster called this collapse mimetic excess. It is a term I am still somewhat unsold on. Both mimesis and excess are highly subjective (one persons excess is another persons appetizer, for example). Which makes me wonder how useful a criteria mimetic excess is for understanding art.

As for "What about now?" Foster's immediate response was to turn the question back to the audience: "What about now?" A moment of silence. Several peopled snickered. "Why the laughter?" Foster asked coolly.

It was an electrifying second precisely because it signaled the moment when the audience shifted from passive listeners to reflective thinkers: Why do we laugh about about the now?

Then Foster backed off. He made some quick comparisons. For him, Isa Genskin is a contemporary artist who works with and achieves mimetic excess. Rachel Harrison, with her bicycles and pictures of Mel Gibson, worked in a similar vein but more often only achieved mimetic affirmation - repeating mages around us without going full circle to undo them. Foster likened Martin Kippenberger to the Dadaist Picabia, a wandering restless figure.

In making these comparisons, Foster reiterated the importance of history in art today, justifying why he feels it is important to be both critic (or artist) and historian - to balance these two powers.

The call to history is the expected response, and therefore disappointing. What Foster didn't discuss is the pervasive discourse today about the end of art history. The book "Canvases and Careers Today - Criticism and Its Markets", for example, is full of remarks bemoaning the challenges faced by contemporary criticism. "So maybe it's okay now to say goodbye to the critic" writes John Kelsey. Since artworks have become self-reflexive, and have their own website, the role of the critic as explainer of art has evaporated. The self-critical art object is not only the telos of contemporary art, it is also the terminal negation of art criticism (to bend a phrasing from Boris Groys).

In this climate it is hardly surprising that critics turn to history (Fried, who started as a critic, also turned to history). And who could pick a juicier period of history than the avant-garde? The question "what about now?" is even more relevant to art criticism than to art.

Two tips about flying

2009-03-28T18:30:00.000-07:00

Two things I've learnt on the transatlantic hop:

If you ever fly virgin, remove those little security stickers they apply to the back of your passport within 24 hours. If you don't, they adhere to the back of the passport and over time it becomes a gummy mess.
After pushing the flush button in an airplane toilet, you have about 2 seconds to put your fingers in your ears.

Altermodern

2009-03-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

[published in ArtArtArt Issue 6 | The New Cultural Imperialism]

I saw the light, B/W photographic print, Lindsay Seers, 2005.

In Lindsay Seers’ moving video documentary of her life, shown in the Altermodern exhibition at Tate Britain, we are told by several narrators of the artist “becoming the camera” and later “becoming the projector”. These two becomings involve Lindsay placing a piece of film in her mouth to form an image, or strapping a projection device to her head to project light out into the world.

Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of Altermodern as well as writer and theorist, seems particularly drawn to these types of transformations today. Listing more examples, he writes in the exhibition catalog of how Simon Starling relocates a piece of furniture from one continent to another by radio waves, Katie Paterson transmits silence from the Earth to the Moon and back. And Darren Almond teleports bus shelters from Auschwitz into the gallery.

None of these becomings actually took place. Just as, this morning, when I filled my mouth with water, I did not become a water bottle. In common language, words like “camera” and “teleport” are too specific to bend this far.

What Altermodern proposes, through language and imagery, is a lyrical take on contemporary art – one where the artist becomes a poet or a shaman figure, capable of performing mystical transformations, living a nomadic lifestyle. We see in the exhibition catalog Shezad Dawood and Olivia Plander use imagery of American Indians, and Sparticus Chetwynd writes of rituals and of entering into a state of trance. But perhaps the clearest example of this nomadic theme is artist Marcus Coates, who literally dons animal outfits and performs shaman rituals, as confusing as they are funny.

Badger-skin headdress: Firebird, Rhebok, Badger and Hare by Marcus Coates 2008, from the Telegraph review of Altermodern.

The poetic tone in Altermodern is a new departure for Bourriaud, whose earlier theorizing is far more operational. In his book Relational Aesthetics (1998) Bourriaud describes how Christine Hill works as a checkout assistant, Cattelan feeds rats cheese, and Hirakawa puts an ad in a newspaper. These are mundane everyday tasks. No magic here. In relational aesthetics, instead of the artist transforming, it is the viewer who is transformed by the experience. Relational art adopts a collaborative model, one that rejects the authorship of the artist. The attention is on the everyday (serving a meal, watching a movie) rather than the market-driven aesthetic objects in galleries. Relational aesthetics is always both anti-author and anti-aesthetics.

In constrast, Altermodern embraces aesthetic objects. Loris Greaud's installation vibrates with minimalist aesthetic austerity, and Subodh Gupta's mushroom cloud of stainless steel utensils has an arresting presence, to name just two examples. Authorship also returns, and many of the selected artists have strikingly individual voices. Bob and Roberta Smith places humorous shrines in the galleries once a week, consisting of painted signs and found objects. He calls them a "physical conversation." These temporary altars are based on conversations that Smith and Bourriaud hold each week. Although outtakes of the conversation appear on some of the signs, the original conversation remains private. Smith therefore occupies a position of authorial power – as an interpreter, filtering a private event to create an aesthetic representation for public consumption. This, too, has a shamanistic feel – Smith is talking to the “gods” of theory (or god in this case) and producing public signs based on this private interaction.

The return to aesthetic objects and authorship in Altermodern is not a rejection of the social. Bourriaud retains his commitment to the dynamic circuit of relations that extend beyond the art object. Each artwork in the show refers in some way to something outside of itself, removing any pure notion of autonomy. For instance, Ruth Ewan’s gargantuan accordian is a monumental aesethetic object. It is also also a working instrument used in social song gatherings. Through this dualism Ewan embraces a wider and more diverse relationship between the social and the aesthetic.

Since the 90's in art there has been a split between what you could call autonomous art practices (such as painting and sculpture) and social art practices (which cover a wide range of relational and collaborative activities). These two camps have tended to sneer at each other. The social crowd labels their counterparts too elitist and market oriented. Meanwhile the autonomous crowd responds with accusations that social practices lack rigorous criteria for evaluation or artistic relevance.

Through Altermodern, Bourriaud is, it would seem, joining Claire Bishop’s call (in Rediscovering Aesthetics, 2009) to seek art that exists in the midway point between social and autonomous, weaving together elements of both. Such art clearly argues from opposite poles at once - being both aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, authorial and anti-authorial. In the worst case the result of this hedging is a total cancellation: art which tries too hard and fails in a compromise that lacks any coherence. However, I think Altermodern (and other recent shows) indicate that when such art succeeds, it does what all great art does: it exists as a paradoxical hydra, a multi-headed creature where no one head defines the identity of the whole.

Empty storefronts for art

2009-03-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

James Wagner recently wrote in his blog about putting art in the vacant storefronts in New York:

We absolutely should be doing this already. We have experienced people in place in several institutions now who could act as administrators and curators. We're going to have a lot of vacant stores for a while; artists never have enough spaces to show work; and most people never see enough art. It might have been a bit of a hard sell twenty-five or thirty years ago but today real estate owners and developers should jump on the idea. Art is now taken more seriously, and capitalism, well, it's not. I worked as a liability underwriter when I moved here, and it was clear to me that the biggest obstacle for these installations would always be the difficulty and expense of getting insurance to cover property owners who might otherwise be supportive. It still is. By the way, one of my company's biggest competitors, AIG, was always the most aggressive underwriter for this kind of odd risk arrangement. But New York City self-insures; there's no reason why it's not in the interest of the whole regional economy to absorb the risk for these minimal exposures. The idea is to turn the visual and performing arts, already integral to both the soul and the pocketbook of all New Yorkers, into an even more vital, attractive and economically-valuable part of New York (maybe the most successful part economically), at least until the rest of the economy can be reconstructed.

Why turn to curators already at New York institutions? They have a platform for expressing their curatorial agenda. Far more healthy would be to turn to the thousands of independent, emerging curators, as well as emerging artists who want to self-curate but don't have an opportunity to do so. If vacant shopfronts are used for art, they should be in ways that challenge the existing power structures in the art world, rather than strengthen them

Regarding administration, I wonder if the New York BIDs can assist with this. What would be ideal is:

an adminstrative agent such as a BID that acts as the broker connecting curators (or artist-curators) with landlords
a blueprint set of documents outlining a short term (six weeks?) lease structure that makes sense both to the artist/curator and the landlord.
a tax abatement program for landlords who join the scheme.

I once went to a talk by Derek Denckla from The Propeller Group (http://www.propellergroup.net/) who said that tax abatements would be important to get the landlords on board. There are already tax abatements for landlords who work with non-profits. My understanding is that they are complex and would need to be streamlined and simplified to make the suitable for short-term rentals.

On liability insurance, I think this one will end up falling on the folks who rent the spaces. Fractured Atlas lists several liability insurance options for artists.

California College of the Arts

2009-03-22T21:02:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to announce I have been appointed a visiting artist at the California College of the Arts (CCA). Kate and I will be going to San Francisco for a year, starting in September. I have a joint position in the critical studies, graduate art and graduate design programs. I will be teaching and also making new work and presenting my work there.

CCA was founded in 1907. It has around 1600 full time students, and is the largest independent school of art and design in the western United States. When I visited, the scale of the space reminded me of Goldsmiths. The photo above shows the new graduate center. I'll be posting regularly about the transition on my blog here.

Three Fishbowls

2009-03-22T16:50:00.000-07:00

I want to make some comments on the relationship between participatory art and aesthetic art. First I will describe three "fishbowl" artworks. Last year was a big year for fishbowl art. I am thinking of three installations in particular: Do-Ho Suh's Reflection, Leandro Erlich's Swimming Pool and Tomas Saraceno's Observatory: Air-Port-City.

These three works share many qualities. They use surprise and humor (haha, look at the funny creatures in there). They rely on industrial materials, transparency and translucency to achieve their effect. All three adopt a split-level structure, dividing the audience into two classes on two different levels, where visitors on a higher level can see/be seen by the people on the lower level, separated by a layer of material.

By positioning the audience behind a transparent material layer, these works create an "inside", a site of containment and display, that references spectatorship and the beholder. Through drawing attention to the environment we live in and its constructed nature, the works of course reference the virtual. They also engage the audience in looking at each other, and in this sense they are all social works, the audience participates in social forms of play.

Observatory

Tomas Saraceno
Observatory, Air-Port-City (2008)
Photographed at Hayward Gallery in 2008

Observatory utilizes materials in a direct and utilitarian manner to create a fairground ride, a high tech Bouncy Castle on the top of a museum. Members of the public are allowed to enter the upper or lower portion of a large spherical structure. The upper floor is made from translucent plastic. People below can see can look up and see the upper deck people floating above them.

The message here is - bounce around, have fun, enjoy!

Observatory is similar to Carsten Holler's slides at the Turbine Hall of the Tate modern: art as a thrill ride, artist as an enabler of an experience. Much of the success of these types of work depends on operational pragmatics. For example, both Holler's slides and Saraceno's Observatory suffered from long lines and strict health and safety restrictions. As a value judgement, I can say I enjoyed the ride down the slides at the Tate far more than the Observatory, mainly because the guards at the Observatory repeatedly told us not to bounce. All that waiting and the payoff was anticlimactic.

As art, Observatory is closest to a pure relational model. The focus is on the audience and participation. The dome is a big industrial object that is impressive and quite striking to look at. But the aesthetic forms at play are fairly established, conservative rather than complex. There is little to shock or frustrate, little that is unexpected. Observatory reaffirms the spectacle and arts' role in it, rather than offering a critique.

Swimming Pool

Leandro Erlich
Swimming Pool (2004)
Photographed at P.S. 1 in 2008

An encounter with Swimming Pool happens in three stages. First, you see what looks like a swimming pool, your believe it is a real indoor pool. Second, you see people standing below, it only takes a moment or two to understand that it is a fake swimming pool, a trick. Third, you decide to believe in the illusion anyway, to treat it as real even though you know how it works, so you can enjoy the oddity of seeing people standing at the bottom of the pool.

In Swimming Pool, Erlich uses a transparent acrylic sheet and a thin layer of water to create the illusion of a small indoor swimming pool. Swimming Pool has a strong social element, since the piece works best when there are some people below and some above. The audience activate the work.

However, the piece is not purely social. At its core it is illusionistic. Like a magic trick, the artist takes on the role of the magician. The suspension of disbelief that happens in Swimming Pool is similar to our experience with realist paintings - you know that what you are looking at is not "real" but decide to believe it in any case. Swimming Pool is therefore activating aesthetical concerns. Swimming Pool reclaims the role of the artist as an individual capable of facilitating transformations. The scale of the model is important. Swimming pool is a modest pool, almost intimate, the kind you could imagine having in a small private residence. It has a hand-made feel to it, there is some evidence of the artist's hand. You can imagine the artist making the model in his studio. All of these factors temper the social element in Swimming Pool.

Reflection

Do-Ho Suh
Reflection (2004)
Photographed at Lehmenn Maupin Gallery in 2008

For Reflection, Do Ho Suh created a model of an archway out of silk, then made a duplicate of the model, and positioned the two models stacked vertically, so one appears to be the reflection of the other. Viewers can either enter the lower chamber, and look up through the "water" (a thin layer of silk), or enter a balcony above and look down into the water.

When I first encountered Reflection I was on my own in the space, and the archway evoked a dreamy and slightly eerie impression. Reflection has sufficient autonomy as a sculptural object that it does not need multiple people present in the space to activate it. It functions well as a sculpture in its own right. In this respect it differs from Observatory and Swimming Pool, which both function best with a group of beholders.

During my visit, some people entered the lower space while I was upstairs. What struck me was how the people became entwined in the exhibit - I found myself imagining them as carp in a pond. Rather than the surrealist "oh there are people beneath the water" sight-gag of Swimming Pool, or the art-as-play of Observatory, in Reflection I found myself caught in representational and imaginary modes of thinking. In this respect, Reflection was, of the three pieces, the least participatory, the most reliant on aesthetic values.

Art and the social turn

I first mentioned the essay "The Social Turn" by Claire Bishop in my post on the Deller show at the New Museum. Taking up that essay again, Bishop at one point remarks on how we must reevaluate the terminology we use to evaluate socially engaged art:

The development of a new artistic terminology by which to discuss and analyze socially engaged practices is now an urgent task - and one that is not assisted by the present-day standoff between the nonbelievers (who reject socially engaged work as marginal, misguided and lacking artistic interest of any kind) and the believers (who reject all aesthetic questions as synonymous with the market and cultural hierarchy). If the former risk condemning us to a world of market-driven painting and sculpture, the latter self-marginalize to the point of artistic and political disempowerment.

Bishop refers us to a set of binary oppositions identified by Gillian Rose which capture the two sides of this standoff:

active and passive viewer
egotistical versus collaborative artist
privileged versus needy community
aesthetic complexity versus simple expression
cold autonomy versus convivial community

However, as Bishop is quick to note, these kinds of binary oppositions are too reductive. A productive rapprochement must take place.

I think this is beginning to happen. The work of Do-Ho Suh, Leandro Erlich and Tomas Saraceno shows there are many shades to participation, a spectrum of midway points between pure aesthetics and pure sociality. Artists in the future will seek new positions, awkward balancing points, which lie between these two poles.

Morph says goodbye

2009-03-21T16:14:00.000-07:00

Pryers photo stream

Earlier this month fans placed a cluster ofmorph figures outside the Tate to commemorate British TV presenter Tony Hart, who died in January aged 83. Like everyone who grew up in England in the 70s and 80s, I remember Tony's Take Hart, his popular children's series. Here's a sample of the 1976 series:

Hart focused on low-tech and playful techniques for making. The episode above shows Hart using kitchen utensils as stencils, and using fingers to "walk" paint across a piece of paper. Stop motion animations also featured regularly, most memorably Morph, a creature created by Aardman Animations of Wallace and Gromit fame. Hart's mixture of animation and inventive use of materials is an aesthetic that lives on in the films of Michel Gondry.

I hope the BBC commissions a special episode of Morph to commemorate Hart.

'Patadisciplines

2009-03-16T00:04:00.000-07:00

I was recently in London, and attended a lecture at Goldsmiths by Adrian Rifkin, professor in art writing. Rifkin's lecture was on the topic of art research. One thing that caught my attention was his remarks on disciplines.

In the lecture, Rifkin commented that he wasn't an advocate of the words interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. Transdisciplinarity, he said, implies the imposition of a single sovereign transcendental discipline, one discipline to rule them all I suppose. Interdisciplinarity implies merging several sovereign disciplines into a new discipline. Both retain the sovereignty of disciplines: they suggest we start with disciplines as a base and build from there.

Rifkin preferred adisciplinarity: without a discipline. He suggested as an example that art can be adisciplinary. Art is annunciatory, in art it is possible to make things that don't recognize disciplinary boundaries, or that confuse and disrupt those boundaries in productive ways. (See my previous post on Jeremy Deller).

When I thought about this later, I thought perhaps the Internet, too, might be described as adisciplinary, without a discipline. The universal linkage of anything to anything else flattens disciplinary boundaries. So perhaps adisciplinary makes sense.

As a holder of degrees in different fields, some people refer to me as interdisciplinary, and I share Rifkin's discomfort with this word. When I think, I don't think in terms of disciplines. If someone starts talking about unbalanced hashing functions or about minimalism I don't switch between a "science" or "art" discipline. We all have what Wittgenstein called a mental toolbox, a compound collection of professional languages, tools and ideas that we work with. Disciplines make no sense in that framework.

Also, perhaps strangely, when people talk of disciplines, I find myself thinking of my friend's dog Rocko. Rocko, who is good at tricks, is at times well-disciplined, and at other times needs disciplining. These other aspects of the meaning of discipline - being in control or being punished - are important. Disciplines are not simply an organization of knowledge, they encode power structures. Foucault was thinking along these lines when he wrote "Discipline and Punish." Here is an extract from Part III of Discipline and Punish where Foucault discusses the relationship of control and power in the formation of disciplines:

"To begin with, there was the scale of the control: it was a question not of treating the body, en masse, 'wholesale', as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it 'retail', individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself - movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body. Then there was the object of the control: it was not or was no longer the signifying elements of behaviour or the language of the body, but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization; constraint bears upon the forces rather than upon the signs; the only truly important ceremony is that of exercise. Lastly, there is the modality: it implies an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result and it is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement. These methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called 'disciplines'. Many disciplinary methods had long been in existence - in monasteries, armies, workshops. But in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the disciplines became general formulas of domination. They were different from slavery because they were not based on a relation of appropriation of bodies; indeed, the elegance of the discipline lay in the fact that it could dispense with this costly and violent relation by obtaining effects of utility at least as great. They were different, too, from 'service', which was a constant, total, massive, non-analytical, unlimited relation of domination, established in the form of the individual will of the master, his 'caprice'. They were different from vassalage, which was a highly coded, but distant relation of submission, which bore less on the operations of the body than on the products of labour and the ritual marks of allegiance. Again, they were different from asceticism and from 'disciplines' of a monastic type, whose function was to obtain renunciations rather than increases of utility and which, although they involved obedience to others, had as their principal aim an increase of the mastery of each individual over his own body. The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A 'political anatomy', which was also a 'mechanics of power', was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, 'docile' bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short; it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an 'aptitude', a 'capacity', which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975. trans. Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 2nd Ed (1995). Part III, p.137.

Thinking in this framework, adisciplinarity, the end of disciplines, can be seen as a utopian quest - a quest for an end of control, a quest for a world where all forms of knowledge are equal, and all people are equal. It is a nice vision. However, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book Outliers, it takes around ten thousand hours, or ten years of practice, to become a master of a skill. When I go to see a doctor, I legitimately hope the doctor has put in those hours. I would not want to rely on WebMD. This is why we are all willing slaves to the docility of disciplines. Expertise has tangible benefits.

Finally, talking about adisciplinarity masks that, if anything, the world is becoming more specialized. The web has not reduced the number of disciplines, to the contrary, it has multiplied the number of things we now recognize as forms of expert knowledge. Suddenly there is a market, for example, for someone who specializes in jellyfish aquariums. And when I seek an expert, I no longer look for someone who just has the right diploma (the right discipline) - I do a search on their background, training, reviews, website and so on... Web technologies have created a cambrian explosion of disciplinarity, both a daunting and a thrilling prospect.

We have arrived at the age of the 'patadiscipline, dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of the interdisciplines. I am a staunch 'patadisciplinarian.

Jeremy Deller at New Museum

2009-03-14T16:51:00.000-07:00

I went to Jeremy Deller's "It is What It Is: Conversations about Iraq" at the New Museum today. Physically it consisted of a livingroom style area where Deller had invited "experts" to come in and talk informally with visitors about Iraq. There was one large physical object in the space, a burnt out shell of a car that was car-bombed in a market in Iraq, literally a shock and awe art object.

Carne Ross was the resident expert during my visit, sitting in one of the chairs and talking at a fast clip. He is a compelling and impressive speaker, with a very real story to tell. He is a diplomat who worked in the British Foreign Office, and helped negotiate several UN council resolutions on Iraq before the war. He resigned in 2004 in protest over the handling of the Iraq war, after submitting a testimony to the Butler Review. This interview with Carne Ross is representative of his position. My own not very eloquent summary (I took no notes so this is from memory) is that (1) the UK government lied to its people to justify an illegal war, a lie he was caught up in, (2) modern diplomacy has become so complex that ministers no longer grasp the ground situation and there is a systemic breakdown, and (3) when a Western democracy lies to its people and fails so systemically, it signals a time when people must stop trusting government to take care of everything, and start taking much more individual responsibility.

I asked Carne Ross how he had come to be part of a show at the New Museum. Carne responded that he knew Deller from school, and had agreed to do the New Museum talk partly because they are friends. He commented that he was uncomfortable being labeled an "expert," that on the whole we rely too much on experts. Many of the people in the government who are called experts have no clue what they are doing, he said. For example, how could he be called an expert on Iraq, even as he helped the UN make decisions regarding Iraq, since he had never actually been there, spoke no Arabic, and had little deep knowledge of the culture.

I next asked Carne how it felt talking about these issues in an art museum. Carne admitted he had reservations talking about Iraq as part of an art project in the New Museum. One of the possible risks of Deller's project, he noted, was that talking about Iraq in popular entertainment, in plays or in art serves as a release valve. It produces discourse but without any actual political consequences. It reduced pressure, allowing people to go "that was a good play, lets go have a beer" etc., whereas what we need is political action. For example he felt there needed to be a public inquiry, much like the 9/11 commission, into the Iraq war. The ministers who made mistakes should be held accountable. He was concerned that talking about Iraq in an art museum would reduce the public demand for an inquiry.

At that moment, another visitor (who identified herself as "I am creative time," I believe it may have been Anne Pasternak) remarked that, in her experience, the opposite occurs. Art can raise awareness of political issues, and through that, increase the demand for political change. Creative Time is a co-sponsor of the Deller show.

This was the most intriguing moment of the event for me, it highlighted some of the complexities that are at play. On the one hand, an experienced career diplomat expressed concerns that mixing art and politics might actually be counterproductive, emptying a drive for real political action. On the other, a seasoned art director expressed enthusiasm for arts ability to raise social awareness and cause real politics to occur.

What I experienced personally at that moment was a sense of conflict. As an artist, I was reluctant to openly disagree with the artistic director of Creative Time, a powerful arts organization. But I agreed with Carne Ross's point. It was actually refreshing to hear someone openly question whether art makes the world a better place.

When I hear people argue that art can produce political betterment, I often think of Eyal Weizman's research on Deleuze, Guattari, Debord and the Israeli Defense Force. Eyal observes that the IDF for a period of time were using critical theory as a way of re-conceptualizing urban war. What Eyal's research illustrates, in my opinion, is that the link between critique (or art) and its object can be very counterintuitive and surprising. Debord's goal when writing the Society of the Spectacle was almost certainly not to supply the IDF with a war manual, yet this is one of the things he achieved. My conclusion is that when artists and intellectuals make claims about any real-world effects of their work, these claims are at most conjecture. The opposite effects may also occur. History has a way of surprising us, we just have to wait fifty years to see...

The sense of conflict that I experienced at Deller's exhibition made me think of an essay I read recently, "The Social Turn" by Claire Bishop (in the book "Rediscovering Aesthetics"). Claire Bishop cites Jeremy Deller as an example of an artist whose works provoke complex reactions. She writes of one of his works that "it harnessed the experiential potency of collective action towards conflicting ends." She continues:

Some important terms that emerge here are "disruption," "ambiguity," and "pleasure," and the way these converge in psychoanalytic accounts of making art. Rather than obeying a superegoist injunction to make an improving or ameliorative art, Deller [and Phil Collins] act upon their desire without the incapacitating restrictions of guilt. This fidelity to their desire - rather than to the judgmental eyes of the big "Other" - enabled their work to join a tradition of highly authored situations that fuse social reality with carefully calculated artifice ... in which intersubjective relations are not an end in themselves but serve to unfold a more complex knot of concerns about pleasure, disruption, engagement, and the conventions of social interaction. Instead of extracting art from the "useless" domain of the aesthetic and fusing it with social praxis, the most interesting art of today exists between two vanishing points: "Art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art."

Bishop's essay is an important call to end the polarizing divide that has existed since the 1990's in the art world between artists engaged in social practices (or relational aesthetics) on the one hand, and artists committed to aesthetic objects on the other. This divide was manifested most recently at the Guggenheim, where the main ramp was given over to theanyspacewhatever, a show on socially engaged art practices, while the Annex exhibited Catherine Opie, a photographer in the more classical sense. Bishop makes a plea for recognizing a middle ground, artwork that does not aim to be purely social or purely aesthetic.

In today's event, I think Deller achieved this. What is crucial in Deller's work is that he involves actual witnesses to history - how often can we sit down and chat with a career diplomat who worked at the UN during the start of the Iraq conflict? It is Dellers intentional crossing of expert and non-expert, art and non-art, history and staging - a car shell that is also a war artifact - which produces a moment that defies classification. In some ways he constructs the very systemic breakdown that Carne Ross identifies at the heart of diplomacy. I don't really know if this is art. That, in all likelihood, may be what ensures that it is.

Bloomberg's Buildings

2009-03-14T09:37:00.000-07:00

Jane Jacobs, in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” famously identified the vital signs of a healthy city. One of her simple ideas with profound consequences is the following:

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jacobs' observation was that, in a vibrant city, city blocks “must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones.” Jacobs points out that the types of companies that can afford newly constructed spaces are invariably chain stores, banks and chain restaurants, because they can afford the high capital costs associated with new construction. But startup companies, the companies that will produce future growth of the city, these must make do with older spaces. If you eliminate all the older spaces, you also eliminate the potential for future growth.

What is remarkable about Jacobs’ book is that it presents an economic argument for tempering the speed of development. She doesn’t argue that cities should pace construction for nostalgic reasons, e.g. to preserve some idea of the city of the past. Instead, she makes point after point of sound economic sense why cities must avoid the temptation to raze and build.

There are numerous ways to achieve a healthy balance of development in a city. A comprehensive review process is one. Leveraging a tax on developers who buy and flip a building in less than five years is another. The goal is to dissuade developers looking for a fast buck, while encouraging developers who think in longer terms about investing in a community.

Politicians, however, rarely argue for this model of development. Major Bloomberg, well known for his developer-friendly stance, took the opposite tack. During his tenure, Bloomberg doubled the size of the Department of Buildings, which grants building permits. At the same time, he reduced the budget to the city community boards, which review building permit applications. The result was a huge increase in the volume of building permits, with less oversight from the communities that were being developed.

By eliminating barriers to development, Bloomberg achieved his goal of massively expanding construction in the city. For a while, it seemed that every block in Manhattan had at least one building project underway. Many developers saw this as their chance to get rich: buy a building, fast-track a permit, do a demo or gut reno, flip it in eighteen months as luxury condos, and make a huge profit.

The results of this recipe for quick money are now clear. While we have had an unprecedented level of construction of new buildings since Bloomberg came to office, they are not the buildings the city needs. In the economic downturn, we now face a massive glut of unsold luxury condos, unrented newly built storefronts, and stalled building projects that may never reach completion. Meanwhile the city needs affordable apartments, low-rent commercial spaces suitable for new business growth, and hospitals and schools - in short, incentives to keep New York's middle class in the city, something the city is failing to do, according the a report by the Center for an Urban Future published in February.

Jane Jacobs’ book easily predicted the current situation. In what must be economics lesson 101, she argues throughout the book that cities must above all preserve diversity. Diversity is what gives the city its strength in times of crises and rapid change.

Bloomberg argues that he is running for a third term as major because this gives New Yorkers more choice in the election, and it gives us the choice of electing a financially knowledgeable manager.

The New York Times reports today that political opponents are dropping out of the race left and right, because they view Bloomberg’s $80 million campaign war chest as unbeatable. Just as he reduced the diversity of the city’s stock of buildings, Bloomberg is now doing the same for the pool of candidates running for mayoral office. For a man who claims to have economic wisdom, Bloomberg is surprisingly forgetful of his Economics 101.

I hold Bloomberg largely responsible for the city’s unfettered development of buildings for the ultra-rich, and the consequent housing bubble. He will not receive my vote.

Jon Salad

2009-03-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

Large bunch of fresh baby spinach
Fresh basil leaves (a whole handful, twenty or so)
Spring onion, cut into small segments
Other veg, nuts, raisins, sprouts, as available
Half a lemon squeezed (don' be shy)
Olive oil, salt, pepper

Close friends refer to the food I make as "Jon Food". I don't usually follow a recipe. I know the basic sauces and preparations, I have a strong instinct for what will go together, and I do a lot of improvising. I prefer food that is fast to prepare (fifteen to twenty minutes), packs a lot of flavor, and is healthy. I'm not afraid to use a bottled or canned ingredient (e.g. olive tapenade, pesto etc) to speed things up, but I read the ingredients of prepared foods carefully. My rule is, avoid products whose individual ingredients I can't imagine stocking in my kitchen, which rules out anything with e.g. corn syrup or artificial colors.

With no recipes, its hard to explain to people how to repeat what I make. But several people have asked about my salads. My salads tend to combine two main things: first, my friend Kaethe showed me that nothing beats fresh lemon and olive oil as a dressing. I rarely use any other dressing. Its simple, affordable, fast, and tastes great. The second thing is, mix a sweet green with a bitter green to cut the flavor. Basil and baby spinach can do this, but you can also use any lettuce with dandelion, endive, arugula, ... its that combination of sweet, bitter, salty, and sour (lemon) that is so great.

St Ives (again)

2009-02-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

St Ives, Cornwall, Jon Meyer

Spent another week of holiday in St Ives in Cornwall. It is fast becoming an annual habit. St Ives is great in the winter months because the weather is generally mild and the views are amazing. Best food was at Gurnards Head, just outside St Ives.

This time we took the train, stopping at the St Erth railway station. I don't mean to sound like a rail geek, but the old mechanical train signals at this station are a wonder. With everything switching over to automatic electronics, its funny to watch the semaphores clank up and down, driven by cables and pulleys, with some folks sitting in a signal hut all day long watching the trains go by and pulling levers. Must be an unusual job. I hope they preserve the signals.

I also picked up a book on the Porthmeor Studios, which are on the beachfront. Like the rail station, these hark back to earlier days, although they are in desperate need of renovation (see this news article.) Amazing story and really cool studios. Plan to try to visit some of the artists there next year... You can also see them in this YouTube Video (better muted).

Umbilical Brothers

2009-02-22T15:28:00.001-08:00

Thanks Ruth and Bruno!

Dark Space

2009-02-07T22:21:00.000-08:00

Dark Space, created by Kate Brehm and Alexis Macnab

Kate and Alexis's new show, Dark Space, is underway. Puppets galore. I went to see it last week, and was mesmerized.

BUY TICKETS (there are only 15 seats per show, so buy them fast) at Brown Paper Tickets.

The show runs until Feb 14th at the Chashama space at 217 e. 42nd st. You can check out what they are doing on their blog.

Air Port City

2009-02-07T22:15:00.000-08:00

Air Port City (2008), Tomas Saraceno

[Published in Art Art Art issue 4]

“Utopia exists...” says Tomas Saraceno, in the notes for The Hayward’s Psyco Buildings. He adds that his Air Port City installation is like a cloud, a floating platform, “an attempt to equalise the (social) temperature and differences in pressure.”

Air Port City was installed as a large white translucent ball hovering on the rooftop of the Hayward. It was very photogenic. But how did Saraceno’s utopian dream operate in practice? Here is an excerpt from the instructions posted by the exhibition:

“Due to the limited capacity of the Tomas Saraceno, Observatory, Air-Port-City, 2008, those who meet entry criteria (age 16 years and over, fit and not suffering from vertigo) and win a lucky dip will be permitted on the upper level.”

Saraceno’s first order of the day is to divide the audience into two classes - upper and lower. A lucky few get to ascend the stairs and enter the upper platform. The lower class must be content to sit in a humid enclosed pressurized container below, looking up at those who reached the upper level. The floor of this lower chamber is a giant mirror, a panoptican effect which ensures the lower occupants are constantly reminded of those above.

The instructions continue:

“During and just after wet weather the lucky dip will be suspended and no one will be allowed on the upper level until the membrane is fully dry. We are unable to guarantee participation for everyone. It may be necessary, for the benefit of our customers during inclement weather to close the exhibit.”

When two visitors ascended the staircase to float on the cloud above (religious metaphor ends here), after queuing for forty minutes, they were given more instructions orally (transcribed from memory):

“Right, next two customers please. Two at a time. Step up. OK. Its like an airport security procedure here. Please take off all watches, sharp objects, take off diamond rings, empty your pockets, place all items in the bag. Madam, I need you to take off your belt. And your shoes. Just the clothes is what we want. Good. Now, step here, hold this with your right hand, hold that with your left, twist,step down. Got it? ... Stay away from the edges... No standing up... Don’t roll towards the edges,stay in the center... OK, three minutes is up, face the exit, hold the two hand rails. Wait for the air to lift you up. Now, place your knees there. OK, got it. Thanks for coming, enjoy the rest of the exhibition.”

Utopia, apparently, has more health and safety regulations than a shopping mall. The floating platform is constructed from a thin plastic, easily punctured and extensively patched, requiring numerous safety rules. So where the lower class had to be content with the passivity of spectatorship, the lucky uppers entered a strictly controlled regime.

I admit, I shortened Tomas Saraceno’s quote in the first paragraph. What he actually said was “Utopia exists until it is created”. He demostrates this point here. Tomas Saraceno’s democratic goals for his relational art achieve precisely the opposite. What he has orchestrated is a two class society complete with security guards, rules and regulations, a highly structured notion of entertainment (no jumping!). Had he addressed this in his statement, for example by discussing the Disneyfication of art and the expectations of spectatorship, I might have left his floating city feeling more uplifted. As it was, I found myself thinking about the free bouncy castles offered in some parks where all may enter, in large groups, to bounce and jostle, uninhibited and blissfully unaware of any claims to utopia.

Barnes and Noble

2009-02-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

Conversations with twenty seven men and one woman.

Inflatable Bag Monsters

2009-02-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

by Joshua Allen Harris

Thanks Steve!

New homepage

2009-02-02T20:11:00.000-08:00

I've put the Farm Yard Construction Kit project up on my homepage. Still working on it, but you can see it now. link.

The theory tickle

2009-01-24T08:34:00.000-08:00

Critical theory used to not be my thing. When I first arrived at art school in 2003, I had zero exposure to critical theory. My background is in science, and scientists on the whole don't read Derrida. Someone once told me that a German philosopher referred to the French school as Derridada and Lecancan. I laughed heartily - an apt description!

I recently read Postmodernism Disrobed, a review by Richard Dawkins of Intellectual Impostures by Sokal and Bricmont, and realized I may have changed camps. I found myself disagreeing with Dawkins.

Dawkins aims to debunk postmodernism, and the thing he latches onto is communication style. Dawkins writes:

Suppose you are an intellectual imposter with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarify would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machanic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously." (Felix Guattari)

Later he writes:

No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes.

The core of Dawkin's critique is that theory writers use overly-complex language to express their ideas, and misuse scientific terms in ways that make no sense in science. Dawkins argues that critical theory texts should adopt the same metrics of logic, comprehensibility and lucidity as science.

Given that Dawkins wishes to be an advocate for logic and reason, his own heavy reliance on rhetoric does not set a good example. He is surprisingly quick to adopt ad-hominem attacks and juicy language, using words and phrases like the following to try to characterize his subject:

ridiculous
fashionable
daffy absurdity
intellectual imposters with nothing to say
vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans
po-faced, solemn and pretentious
their writings are so stupefyingly boring
a useful tool for bamboozling readers
the author of this stuff is a fake

When I first started reading critical theory, I had many of the same kinds of irritations and kneejerk responses as Dawkins. "This stuff is just nonsense!" I told my friends.

I also knew that many in the art world respect writers like Deleuze. Why is this? As a scientist I decided to approach the question empirically. I began a theory reading group with a group of friends. For a year we read a paper a week, meeting every other week to discuss. We called the group Remediality, because it sounded like "remedial," as in remedial studies. The title also contained "media", which suited our focus on media theory. Mostly, though, we made the word up, which goes with the territory.

I discovered that members of the group had very diverse responses to the same article. Some, like me, were theory skeptics. We were quick to point out any passage we thought made no sense. Others were theory agnostic, inquisitive without being dismissive. And a few were theory fans. Kate is in the latter camp. She has a lot of experience reading theory. Once when I said "this makes no sense" Kate responded "yes, but it does give me that sensation in the pit of my stomach." She explained that for her reading theory was not simply about understanding what is said. When she reads theory she gets a buzz, a sense of meaning at the periphery of what can be expressed in language. Kate commented that, after reading a good theory article, a few days later an idea would occur to her in her work, a thought she knew linked back to the theory article. For her, theory helped her think.

I should mention Kate is an extremely rational person, not easily given over to superstitious and religious feelings. So how do we analyze that sensation, her 'theory tickle' as I called it. I am sure Dawkins would dismiss it out of hand as a religious moment. But I'm not so certain. Many scientists will also admit to having had a hunch, a sense that they knew something but didn't understand how, a realization that they grasped an idea at the very edge of their comprehension, and couldn't yet put it in words. These are very human experiences. Kant, perhaps the epitome of a rational thinker, grappled with this issue too. He realized his explanation of the mind was incomplete, some things didn't fit, there had to be an exception - a special case for a human experience at the fringe of reason and feeling, where the mind thrashes against itself. He called it the Sublime.

If we accept, as Kant did, that some experiences are beyond reason, we must also accept that no amount of rational thought can explain those things. Logic will never sufficiently explain human experience. It is here that Dawkins' rational "one model fits all" approach breaks down. When your field of study involves trying to build a mathematical model of the universe, Kantian reason is appropriate. But when your field of study is human experience, there will be moments when the rationalist must admit defeat, put down the pen, and experience a moment of nonsense.

Unleap

2009-01-23T08:45:00.000-08:00

I was originally planning to title this post "A boring image". Not because the image above is of a mundane street scene, but because the kind of digital alteration it represents has become so commonplace it is a cliche.

Instead, I thought I'd tell a story about leaps.

At a coffee counter the other day, the young professional sitting next to me informed me sagely that he no longer trusts media. "It's all lies," he said. "All of it?" I asked. "Well, all except the National Geographic." I laughed, and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to convince him of how the yellow-bordered-one exoticizes semi-naked tribespeople. The conversation drifted to photography and photoshopping.

What has this got to do with leaps? Well, I told my coffee-friend a story about an exhibition I saw a few years back of large scale color photographs. Each photograph showed the artist leaping from an improbably high place - a treetop, a window, and so on. "Really good photoshopping," I said at the time to a bystander, using that knowing tone Keanu used in the Matrix when he said "Really good noodles." We nodded at each other.

But when many years earlier I came across Yves Klein's famous photograph, I was captivated by it. I stared at it for several minutes. Given the date (1960) and the black-and-white newspaper quality of it, I assumed it was everything it looked to be. I puzzled over what I was seeing.

Naturally, I had it all turned around. The artist of the recent color photographs turned out to be an extreme sports fan. He actually liked leaping off from high places, and had injuries to prove it. (SPOILER AHEAD) Yves Klein's much earlier photographs were, of course, a clever fake, made with a double exposure and a rather large mattress.

The way we leap has changed in the last forty years. When we see images of the unbelievable, we used to leap to an assumption of reality. Now we leap to an assumption of unreality.

I was just beginning to warm to this topic when a semi-naked tribesgirl came in and ordered two coconuts.

Under Pressure

2009-01-21T21:43:00.000-08:00

I've been reading the book Under Pressure - Pictures, Subjects, and the New Spirit of Capitalism. Its my favorite kind of book because it is small enough to tuck in a pocket, good for reading on the subway. It has four essays, together with responses, which is not too daunting. Oh, and when I dropped it in the bathtub the other day (my secret is out!), it dried out nicely...

The longest essay is by Boltanski, who, with Eve Chiapello, wrote The New Spirit of Capitalism in 1999. I've read parts of their earlier book, so I was curious to see where Boltanski would go next. I haven't finished the essay yet. The first section is a good recap of ideas from the 1999 book.

A major part of the analysis concerns three shifts in capitalism, what Boltanski and Chiapello call the "three spirits of capitalism," which took place in the 1930's, 1960's and 1990's. Here is a paragraph by Boltanski discussing the shift in the 1960s:

The years 1965-1976 are marked by a very sharp rise in the level of critique against capitalism, culminating in 1968 and the following years. These critiques threaten capitalism with a significant crisis. They are far from being merely verbal and are accompanied by strikes and violence and result in a disorganization of production that lowers the quality of industrial produce and, according to some estimates, doubles salary costs. These critiques are targeted at almost all established tests upon which the legitimacy of the social order was based. The objects of critique are, (a) the tests upon which the relationship between salaries and profits and the distribution of added value are dependent; (b) the tests legitimating asymmetries in terms of power and hierarchical relations (at work, but also in the family); and (c) the tests upon which the social selection is based: in education, professional recruitment, career advancement, etc. The critique unveils that which, in these tests, transgresses justice. This unveiling consists particularly in revealing the hidden forces that feed off these tests and in unmasking the undeserved advantages benefited from by certain actors. This high level of critique alarms those responsible for the institutions of capitalism and, first and foremost, the bosses, acutely concerned with the "crisis of authority" and the "refusal to work in firms," in particular amongst the youth.

According to this model, in the 1960's, social injustices led to a rise in a critique against capitalism, which eventually produced a crisis, with workers and intellectuals going on strike and rioting. Eventually, capitalism responded to this critique, giving rise to a new spirit of capitalism which remedied issues or at least mollified critics.

Today we live the credit card dream. In America there have been relatively few recent riots or strikes. Yet in the absence of a strong external critique, capitalism is now undergoing a drastic shift, we are entering a new "spirit of capitalism". The change is not in response to a rise in a social or artistic critique, but rather it has come from within, from the mortgage and finance crisis. The media blames the current crisis on "toxic" debt, invoking a metaphor of capitalism as a body that has ingested a poison, and whose immune system is responding to internal attack.

If capitalism is capable of enormous change from within, what does this say about Boltanksi's suggestion that it responds to external critique? At first glance, we could argue that the new spirit in capitalism follows a different model from the 1960's. However, let's imagine for a moment that the economy continues a downwards spiral. We can expect civil unrest and strikes will follow, aimed at "unmasking the undeserved advantages benefited from by certain actors." Would these future actions be critique to which capitalism responds, or simply the side effect of ingested toxins? The problem is that neither answer reveals the full picture.

In fairness to Boltanski, he recognizes that capitalism and critique are mutually imbricated, that their relationship is complex. At the same time, I suspect that many who read Boltanski and Chiapelle will take their notions of social and artistic critique literally, as a kind of cause-and-effect explanation of the relationship between capitalism and critique. This narrative is appealing precisely because it suggests critique can have a direct effect.

For my part, I don't believe critique and outcome ever have an easy relationship. I look forward to seeing how Boltanski and Eve Chiapelle theorize the forth spirit of capitalism.

Celeste Prize 09

2009-01-20T06:54:00.001-08:00

This just arrived in my inbox:

A new international contemporary art prize in which artists decide who wins the prize money!
40,000 Euro prizes in 5 prize categories: Painting, Photography & Digital Graphics, Installation & Sculpture, Video & Animation, and Live Media.
Final exhibitions and awards ceremony in Berlin, Germany, end-September 2009 at the Alte AEG Fabrik, 5 Voltastrasse.
The 46 finalist artists are chosen by a panel of international art critics: Mark Gisbourne, Adrienne Goehler, and Victoria Lu, while Live Media artists are selected by Claudio Sinatti and a panel of consultants with specific experience in audiovisual performance.
Deadline for prize entries: 30 June 2009 (launched 23 December 2008)
Celeste Prize is organised by non-profit cultural associations in Italy and Germany: Associazione Culturale L'Albero Celeste and Celeste e.V. Both associations were founded by Steven Music, who has organised similar artist-led prizes in Germany, Italy and the UK since 2004.
www.celesteprize.com

The Berlin jurists express some excitement about the idea of artists voting for artists in this competition:

"It is a charming idea to as it were revivify the idea of a final outcome of 'artist(s) choosing artist(s)', and is reminiscent of the traditional idea of artistic body of 'Societies of Artists', such as that which formed the Salon d'Automne of Paris, in 1906."

This reminds me of a proposal I floated at a large corporation a few years back. Once a year the company gave review scores to each employee. The scoring was conducted in closed-door meetings between managers. I proposed an alternative approach - give employees a number of "votes" they can allocate using an online form to members of the their team, and base review scores on these votes.

Voting systems offer some advantages over the horse-trading and nepotism of closed-door meetings. Of course, democratic-seeming voting system are hard to operate fairly in practice. They also favor those who are popular and good at networking. Hard workers who spend their time working solo are unlikely to do well in such a system.

In a company-wide review process, I believe voting has a place. Communication skills and networking are valued assets in a company. But in art, popularity votes miss the point. They shift the focus from the art to the social abilities of the artist.

Perhaps online art voting could be conducted "blind", i.e. with the names of the artists withheld from the website. However, even then, artists with broad social networks would simply email their friends saying "vote for entry 57." There is no easy way to address this in a public vote.

A second limitation of web voting is that viewers cannot experience the actual artwork, only a small imitation of it reproduced on their screen. This favors images which have dramatic impact when reproduced at small size. Works that rely on more subtle affective qualities will do poorly in this context.

The Celeste Prize recognizes many of these issues. The web-based vote is used to include works in the Celeste exhibition, but the shortlist of finalists for the prize money is selected by a group of "expert" panelists. This selection falls back on the traditional closed-door meetings, with the associated challenges of nepotism and horse trading ("you can have this artist if I can have that artist"). Clearly, the jurors are more likely to pick people who they already know. With Celesete, though, there in an interesting twist. The panel selects 46 finalists, and then those finalists themselves select the final winners, in a vote held at the exhibition, after they have seen the artworks. This is a good compromise.

But there is a kicker. €50 per artist! That's how much you pay if you want to submit work. That's more than twice what competitions like the John Moores prize charge, and goes beyond any definition of an "administration charge."

Poof. Any lofty claims the jurors make about being "an accessible entry without barries" go up in smoke. The jurors say "Celeste has de-formalised things and extinguished many of the stultifying aspects of traditional art prize administration." If they really believe €50 is not stultifying, they have lost touch with artists. The jurors should not be so self-congratulatory about using this form of income redistribution amongst artists already strapped for cash.

Critical thinking in education

2009-01-19T12:25:00.000-08:00

Over the new year I went to a party and met Andrew, a distinguished intellectual and teacher. Our conversation turned to education.

I casually remarked that schools are good at teaching facts and figures. But, in this test-score driven system, they do a poor job teaching critical thinking.

Poppycock, responded Andrew. Critical thinking is overrated. Everyone in education says critical thinking is important. Its so easy to say, nobody would disagree with you. But it is a platitude. What does it really mean to teach critical thinking.

I took the bait. Critical thinking means knowing what an argument is, being able to break an argument into its constituent claims, then being able to analyze those claims. It means recognizing the difference between reason and rhetoric. This is what is not taught. For example, Obama in his speech in Berlin said "because of these aspirations all free people - everywhere - became citizens of Berlin." That was a powerful moment because it clearly connected to Kennedy, and his "I am a Berliner" statement. Obama was updating that concept, broadening the idea. Rather than declaring his own unity with Berlin, he was saying, we are, all of us, Berliners. The historical linkage to Kennedy is what gave his statement rhetorical force. But the statement is actually assimilationist, it erases difference. And of course it isn't true. If I turned up in Berlin and said "because of my aspirations I am a Berliner" they wouldn't hand over citizenship papers. We are so easily persuaded by things that aren't true - recognizing this requires critical thinking.

Yes. But the voters of this country didn't need classes in critical thinking to know to vote for Obama. They figured it out on their own. Thinking, yes, we need thinking. But don't applying your elitist ideals to everyone.

So what would you suggest instead. If we agree that teaching just facts and figures is not enough, what is needed?

Me? I'm just a curious bystander. I watch the world go by. I write articles. I don't need to prescribe anything.

...

Of course, afterwards I wanted to point out that Andrew was, himself, using the tools of critical thinking to construct an argument.

But something in his words stuck. As Obama prepares to make his inaugural address, I'm still pondering whether critical thinking is overrated.

Puppet Month!

2009-01-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

Disfarmer, photo by Dan Hurlin

I love a good puppet show (and a certain puppeteer). Which means I feel fortunate to live in New York, which has a thriving adult puppet scene, with some of the best performers anywhere. January promises a crazy great lineup. If you haven't seen a puppet show recently, check one of the following out:

Jan 7 - Jan 11 Labapalooza at St Ann's Warehouse link

Jan 3 - Feb 4 Culturemart at Here Arts Center link

Jan 27 - Feb 8 Disfarmer at St Ann's Warehouse link

Feb 6 - Feb 8 Trio Molemo at Here Arts Center link

Feb 4 - Feb 10 Dark Space at Chashama link

Happy 2009

2008-12-31T16:20:00.000-08:00

link

Problems with Freelancers Union Healthcare

2008-12-30T19:54:00.000-08:00

I signed up with Freelancers Union for healthcare in October, after several days comparing plans and filling out forms, so I was dismayed when they announced in November that they were changing all of their health plans come January to a new health provider. That meant more research.

Who is this new health provider? Freelancers Insurance Company, a new independent company setup by, you guessed it, Freelancers Union. As the website explains:

Freelancers Insurance Company (FIC) is a for-profit insurance company that provides health insurance solely to the eligible New York-based members of Freelancers Union, a nonprofit membership organization, and to those members’ dependents.

The new plans offered by FIC not only cost more than the old plans, they also cover less in return. And in all of the hubristic email from FU about the change, nowhere did CEO Sara Horowitz explain how a non-profit union operating its own for-profit health insurance company can be anything other than a conflict of interests. How can the CEO of a health insurance company also in good faith be the head of the non-profit organization that is its sole source of clients?

As if to demonstrate this, in its first act in this new relationship, FU created a transition system which penalized members who did not switch to the new plans promptly - by requiring payment of an additional two months in advance. This move benefitted FIC but cannot have helped members already stressed by the transition.

If the new plans had started out no more expensive than the old plans, and if members had been given a choice to stay with their old plan for a longer grace period, this would have demonstrated that FU still put its members ahead of profits - and I would have made the transition to the new plans. Instead, I felt FU was strong-arming its members to make a choice that many didn't want. The only option was to leave.

I now get my healthcare from Fractured Atlas, a non-profit group aimed towards artists that has no pretensions of being a health insurance carrier.

The NYTimes article glosses these issues as the "grumblings" of a few members. Reading the members-only Forums at Freelancers, it is clear that the frustrations at Freelancers Union are much deeper. I will not return to Freelancers Union unless it offers health plans besides those carried at FIC.

Polaroid in the icebox

2008-12-29T13:36:00.000-08:00

Polaroid has been at the heart of many amazing projects (like this one). They cease production tomorrow. I presume I'm not the only one who stashed away a couple of boxes. Won't last long.

On Artistic Research

2008-12-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

I'll admit, James Ryerson's obit of David Foster Wallace influenced me here...

Recently I have been researching "artistic research." I wanted to understand the motivations behind artistic research, as well as the difference between artistic research, art and research.

So far, I've identified three main reasons why an academic institution might be interested in artistic research. They are:

1. To prove art ≠ art0, where art is the set of all things that could be described under the label "art", and art0 is the set of art worth consideration in an academic context (not to be confused with W, i.e. Worthy art, or "W").

2. As a way of maximizing $$ = $a + $r, where $$ is the total amount of funds raised by an academic institution, $a is the amount raised for "art" activities, and $r is the amount raised for "research", given that C$a < C$r , for all known countries C. In this equation, confusion over the new factor $ar ("artistic research") between $a and $r is expected to improve $$.

3. As a way of optimizing s + T^s where s is the total number of students, T is the total number of teachers, and T^s expresses the condition that the Teachers be more qualified than the students.

From an artist's perspective, I initially modeled the desire for artistic research as a complex nonlinear formula involving Egg (a Freudian identifier), Cds (desire to spend time alone in a studio listening to music, aka the cave-dwellers coefficient), Pfame (the probability of achieving fame), and Pimportant (the probably of actually doing something important). However, after consideration, I realized in nearly all cases the much simpler factor Nmfa/Nphd dominates, where Nmfa is the number of artists with MFAs, now nearing infinity, and Nphd, the number of artists with PhDs, much closer to zero.

What is curious is that most research papers on art research ignore these compelling pragmatic arguments. Instead they focus on higher level merit claims which, when analyzed closely, reduce to claim art = art research. I have yet to identify any paper which shows how "artistic research" is significantly different from "art", excluding the pragmatics listed above. In other words, in all cases, good art is directly correlated with good artistic research.

On the other hand, there are examples of a worrying alternative: good artistic research can sometimes lead to poor art. In creating the compound formulation Art+Research, it seems some students may become distracted by R, and forget that the goal is to prove the equation A=A+R. This is a topic worth further investigation.

New School in Exile

2008-12-19T07:07:00.000-08:00

I am impressed by this student movement - raising awareness through direct action. link

Since...

2008-12-18T10:23:00.000-08:00

Since the recession, more
Stretch limos in front of Lombardi's Pizza.

Art Research Reading Group at New Museum

2008-11-22T13:36:00.000-08:00

I went to the inaugural meeting of the Art Research Reading Group at the New Museum on Thursday. The reading group is led by Sabrina Locks, and is part of the Museum as Hub program. Texts for the series are drawn from a published collection of essays: Artistic Research (Lier en Boog: Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory, vol. 18), eds. Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.) Available online here.

While I was at Goldsmiths College, they renamed their woodshop the "Woodwork Research Laboratory." I asked a staff member how a woodshop is a research laboratory, and he explained that the rebranding was part of a broader effort to raise the college's research profile, in turn to help with fundraising. I wonder if "artistic research" is another kind of branding effort. More in a followup post...

I raised some of my concerns during the Art Research Reading Group, and was pleasantly surprised by the conversation that followed. One attendee (still getting names straight) suggested that art is being framed as "research" partly because aesthetic accounts for art no longer make sense. I agree with this. The implosion of Modernism and the collapse of the radical left created a vacuum. Art research can be seen as an alternative narrative to fill this vacuum, one that is not directly linked to aesthetics or critical theory, but which skirts the social practice / relational aesthetics debate.

Update: I just read this interview with Jörg Heiser, where he is asked "to what extent ... do debates on ‘artistic research’ count among the ‘things that matter’ in contemporary art?". Jörg replied:

It’s a little tricky. Research as such is not an achievement, and artists impersonating scientists, ethnologists or sociologists have to be careful not to a) underestimate the discourse in these respective fields they are tapping into, and b) keep in mind what they do their research for. Like one could get carried away with self-referential questions of the specificities of a medium – ‘New Media Art’ that becomes techy-nerdy in an unproductive, or even oppressive way; or abstract painting that becomes merely tautological and plainly dull – it is equally problematic to be absorbed by the mere aura, or political gravitas, of the material one encounters in the course of one’s research. You can see the effect of that in press releases that highlight that an artist explored this social context or did research on that obscure 1950s phenomenon, without bothering to argue whether the artist then managed to do anything productive with that artistically. If an artist did great research, say, on a case of corruption, why don’t they – to put it very bluntly – do a good reportage rather than a crappy installation, i.e. chose the appropriate context and method to communicate? A productive methodology would be then to remember what really mattered, which I think (in generalising terms) is to remember what art can bring to that research; a sense of form, of perceptive qualities, and conceptual reflection – which would be precisely its political stake in this.
To give a recent example: Duncan Campbell has made a fantastic film, Bernadette (2008), about Irish dissident Bernadette Devlin. The material he did four years of research on, ploughing through the archives of film stations around the world, is in itself fascinating. Devlin – who was the youngest Member of Parliament at Westminster at the age of 21 – was an amazingly self-confident and charismatic activist. One wonders immediately, however, what the artistic ‘surplus’ is in terms of the way he treated the material, as opposed to just feeding off its aura. In the end, Campbell succeeds because he refrains from the well-trodden ground of the conventional biopic, and – as one would expect of a good, auteur film essay for that matter – instead opts for surprising juxtapositions of uncommented material, amazing footage - like a journalist rehearsing the questions he wants to ask Devlin. It is, again, method and contextualization that make the difference, not just research as such relying on biography and medium.

This idea of artistic 'surplus' seems crucial here. Artistic research only makes sense if it is not about research, but about something in addition, the surplus, which transcends the research and offers new insights and perspectives. However, the term "surplus" may not be the best word for this other thing that is art. As we have seen in the economy, in difficult years the first thing that is cut is the surplus.

Cory Arcangel at New Museum

2008-11-17T17:16:00.000-08:00

Here's the blurb:

According to the artist: “This performance is going to be about ‘Continuous Partial Awareness’—a phrase that was first described to me as meaning ‘you know, like, when you have three IM windows open, two e-mail in boxes dinging away, are texting five different people, and also have five tabs open on your browser, each with updated content.’ It is about paying attention to everything all the time, but not really concentrating on anything. It is different from multitasking, because with multitasking, one actually is expected to concentrate on tasks at some point, even if in small doses. ‘Continuous Partial Awareness’ is the eroded degenerate modern version of multitasking. I still don’t know how this performance will take shape, it might be a lecture, a music show, a broadcast, a chess game, etc., but what I do know is that the feeling of ‘non-concentration’ that has seeped into today’s life through our flat-screen displays and Wi-Fi will be its starting point." -- New Museum website

And here's what happened:

Cory gave a fast-paced lecture, fifty PowerPoint slides in 40 minutes. Each slide presented an idea. Most slides had pictures, many also contained video or audio snippets to explain the idea. Some ideas were things Cory had done, others he was thinking about. As he flicked through the slides quickly, he gave a running commentary, including jokes and stories.

Some sample ideas:

Make a music video that sets U2 to video images of the Berlin wall coming down
Create an art audio tour using time scaling so the narration goes really slowly
Give an lecture with a laptop whose battery is about to run out
Give an artists lecture using a voice box effect
Auto-tune a song so that it shifts pitch ever so slightly
Make a blog that collects posts with "sorry I haven't posted in a while" in 'em
Create a fake structuralist film
Create some pretentious CMYK prints
Make two computers email each other "Out of office" emails all day long

The last three are included in his current show at Team Gallery. (Cory said he would post the 50 ideas, I haven't found that link yet)

If my description sounds cavalier, I doubt Cory minds. His attitude these days is all shoot-from-the-hip. From his press release:

Arcangel states: "Imagine me buying some video equipment off of eBay, turning it on, pressing some random buttons, and then calling whatever comes out my 'work.' This mind-set is the spirit of "Adult Contemporary". In contrast to some of my older work, which exercised a somewhat subversive use of modern digital tools, the pieces in this show are inspired by the idea of using technology exactly as it was designed, although in a manner best described as "non-expert." What if the possibility of using a system poorly in an uneducated manner were celebrated? What if I, as an artist, attached my name to the aesthetics of different eras of technology without really bothering to do my homework or even reading the manual (so to speak)?"

I have no gripes with this. I enjoyed the talk immensely. Cory is an excellent presenter with a good sense of comic timing. Towards the end, Cory noted that the first question he usually gets is "How do I get away with this." When an audience member dutifully asked "how do you get away with this?" Cory replied "Look in the mirror, you are the ones letting me get away with this, you tell me."

Cory's humor, jokes and self-deprecation are a strength, a way to avoid falling into the trap of over-intellectualizing the work.

One thing puzzles me, however. When Cory talks about his art, it is all very lighthearted, jokes and puns and fun. But when you see the work at the Team Gallery show (see here for more images), the objects themselves are sincere, even austere.

Cory Arcangel, courtesy Team Gallery.

The two computers emailing each other "Out of office" emails are two Apple computers on separate desks, running Microsoft Entourage. The CMYK prints are serious looking prints in frames. The films are abstract and provoke a certain distance.

In other words, although Cory's presentations rely on affect and pop entertainment, his art objects do the opposite. They appear cool and conceptual. Where's the fun gone? The "wink wink" is not in the art, it happens outside.

Looking at his structuralist film, for example, Cory stated his intention was to make a fake structuralist film, almost as a joke. But did he end up making a structuralist film? The only way a viewer could know the difference is if she knew how it was made, if she had inside knowledge about the fact that the piece used digital technology to simulate a film effect.

So, my questions are - does it matter if the way an art practice is talked about and the way it appears are so different? And is it an effective strategy to create works that appear Modernist or Structuralist, but that differ only in intention?

One final observation. Cory relies heavily on pop culture in his work, which appeals because it is accessible to all. Yet understanding Cory's work requires a lot of arcane inside (often technical) knowledge about how the work is made and how that is significant - an elitist tactic. I think there is something in this clash between populism and elitism, I just haven't figured out what yet.

Government 2.0

2008-11-17T07:30:00.000-08:00

Every street in Manhattan is watched by a dozen computerized surveillance cameras. Meanwhile, in a city not so far away, the president works in an office devoid of laptops, Blackberry's and iPhones. He relies on printed documents and verbal communications. The president has the power to avoid surveillance. But to do so he must also give up using Internet toys.

The abstinence of technology in the oval office may be about to change. Obama is reported to be quite fond of his Blackberry, and may look for ways to introduce a laptop to the Oval office.

The topic was recently raised on Slashdot, which asked its readers how to build a web 2.0 government?

InKubus gave one insightful response:

I would like to see some good version control. If you look at the congressional record, it's full of crap like "Strike out the sixth sentence of chapter 12, paragraph 348, replacing with: 'b. except where already addressed under USC 90.01.23'"
WTF? I would like something like Trac where you can click on ANY statement in the US Code and see instantly:

What changes have been made, over time
Who sponsored the changes
Who voted for, against, present
Links to related code, as needed
Public opinion related to the law
Press releases by public offices/personel about the law

All with a nice Google timeline kindof interface.

Version control is one of the secret sauces of the software industry. It tracks every change to a codebase, and lets programmers see who made which changes, and to easily compare different versions of a document.

So far, very few people outside the code world have heard of tools like SVN, a powerful version control application. I agree with InKubus that adopting such a tool in congress would be a major shift in governance, and one I would welcome. Obama, you said you would bring change. How about tools to track those changes too?

Change.gov

2008-11-09T12:45:00.000-08:00

A few days back I found myself wishing Obama would apply the grassroots techniques he adopted so successfully in his campaign to the office of the Whitehouse.

Now, with the release of Change.gov, Obama has made it clear he intends to do this. That is exciting.

I was struck by how Change.gov has a notice at the bottom indicating it is a "501C(4) Organization." The office of President Elect is a non-profit? In that case, shouldn't that be "Change.org"? How can a branch of the government declare itself tax exempt? Aren't they the folks that collect the taxes?

It reminded me of something I saw earlier this summer:

Why do the Marines use a ".com" suffix? They get the ".gov" suffix, but the office of the president elect could?

Who is your favorite artist?

2008-10-29T07:24:00.000-07:00

The other day, a friend said to me "yes Jon, but who is an artist you actually like? Who is your favorite artist?" The remark came after I had spent five minutes deriding Air-Port-City, a work by Tomas Saraceno in the Psycho Buildings show at the Hayward (link).

Talking about art, it is easy to focus on the negative, the problems with a work or process. It is always safe to critique, complain, dismiss a work as too simplistic, too didactic, too utopian, too instrumental ... take your pick. Saying you actually like something is putting your head above the parapet - it is an invitation for someone to say "you like that? Isn't it too..."

Of course, my first response to my friends question was to say I don't believe in favorites and top-ten lists. That's all pop culture stuff.

At the same time, the question made me think back to a lecture by Pil and Galia at Goldsmiths.

The Goldsmiths MFA program has a weekly lecture series. In '07 Pil and Galia gave a memorable first lecture of the academic year. They decided to do a "top ten" list, going through a series of contemporary artists - ten they loved, ten they hated - and explaining why in each case. What started out as a serious academic survey of contemporary art practices quickly descended into farce. I remember at one point towards the end of the lecture, one of them clicked the next button on their slideshow, glanced at the image, said "too german," and clicked next again.

In the pub afterwards, many of the freshers looked quite confused - they came to a graduate art program and this was the level of discourse? A satire more biased than Fox News? What about all that criticality Goldsmiths is known for?

But the lecture was very considered. Through producing a moment of top-ten populism, Pil and Galia highlighted the entertainment aspect of art discourse, and showed there are no real authorities in art. Although there is a difference between an extended academic treatise and the simple phrase "too german", neither explains art. Don't come to an art degree program expecting answers.

Ooo, go on then. Francis Alÿs.

End of New Media at ICA

2008-10-26T22:02:00.000-07:00

Ekow Eshun, Artistic Director of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, announced last week that he plans to close the institution's "Live and Media Arts" department.

The ICA was a key center for early computer-based art, with its pioneering 1968 presentation Cybernetic Serendipity curated by Jasia Reichardt.

Eshun wrote an internal email about the closure that has since become widely circulated. It was the subject of this Blog post in the Guardian by Lyn Gardner. Gardner quoted Eshun's inflammatory remark that "it's my consideration that, in the main, the art form lacks depth and cultural urgency." Eshun was targeting new media, but Gardner suggested his comment was aimed at live and performance art as well. Eshun tried to qualify his statement with a followup comment, but too late. All are offended.

Eshun did display a lack of tact in his email. But I find myself sympathizing with his decision to close the department, though for different reasons.

Media-based categorization is less than helpful in art today. All too often these categories constuct walls rather than dismantle them. Medium-specificity was a modernist ideal, one of Greenberg's tenets. With all the changes in production methods, media categories have become increasingly blurred. Many artists have hybrid practices. There has also been an expansion of the forms and methods of art practice. As the curators of the Whitney 2008 Biennial write, "Today there are more artists working in more genres, using more varieties of material, and moving among more geographic locations than ever before." In other words, everything is more messy.

Schools and institutions need to adapt and shift their programs reflect this. Many are. For example, Goldsmiths last year folded its textiles program in with fine art, and renamed the department, from "Department of Visual Arts" to simply the "Department of Art". These kinds of changes are always disruptive. Hopefully, the new arrangement is also more open.

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