Recent news

• My work is in a group show, After Image, at 315 W39th Street #801, NY. It comes down April 29th. Email me if you want details. Sorry the announcement is late - been a bit busy recently!
• I participated in Celestial Suitcase, an art event which took place over the weekend in Bushwick, with Eric Ayotte, Ryan O'Connor, and over twenty other artists.
• I have a new series of works that I'm quite excited about. I am holding an open studio event at my new studio space at the end of May to show these and celebrate my birthday.
• I will be giving a short talk (7 minutes!) at the Tate Modern in London, on 20th June.

Details of the open studio / Tate talk to follow.

Happy Spring!

Ward Shelley at Pierogi

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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.