power slice

Ai Weiwei

2011-11-07T00:10:00.000-08:00

The latest update on the Ai Weiwei story: The New York Times reports that supporters have chipped in over a quarter of his "tax bill". And what major arts institution in the United States has made a statement recently? You guessed it.*

*None. That I'm aware of, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Why we should subsidize arts majors

2011-11-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

The Economist argues that we should continue to subsidize college arts majors, responding to critics who quake at the thought of more and more young Americans directing their attention to Yeats instead of cancer cures. The Economist's response?

What is economic growth for, anyway? It's for expanding our choices and making life better. Is it really so surprising that, as we grow wealthier as a society, more and more of our young people, when the amazing resources of the modern university are put at their disposal, choose to use them learning something satisfying and enriching and not for anything except cherishing the rest of their lives? Is it really so surprising that taxpayers are not in revolt over the existence of poetry professors?

Yoko Ono's twitter

2011-11-04T06:34:00.000-07:00

Twitter is great for some things, and certain comedians have mastered the art of the hilarious tweet. I'm still on the fence about whether Twitter is good for contemporary visual artists. Case study? Some gems from Yoko Ono:

Anna Ostoya

2011-11-02T15:46:00.001-07:00

An old classmate works at MoMA and produced this short exploration of Anna Ostoya's Fluxkit piece.

Marcel Duchamp archive

2011-11-02T06:55:00.000-07:00

Check out an excellent archive of Marcel Duchamp-related audio, including interviews (English and French) and Duchamp's sound recordings.

Alfredo Jaar

2011-10-31T01:25:00.000-07:00

I'm not really a fan of the artist questionnaires in Frieze. Sarah Lucas is a fantastic artist and I've kept her riveting self-portrait (above) on my wall for years, but who really cares what Sarah Lucas wishes she knew? (The fact that the answer is "Everything I don’t know, I suppose" is hardly encouraging).

But I keep reading the feature because every now and then a gem comes along. Alfredo Jaar's turn is one such find, even though he basically wishes he knew what Sarah Lucas wishes she knew:

I became an artist because I do not understand the world. Everything I know I learned from being an artist. And I am still learning. I wish I knew more of everything.

The difference being that Jaar starts with a disclaimer, a direct rebuke to philosophers of science and sociobiology like Lee Cronk who neatly section art off from any question of understanding the world:

In the arts and humanities, in contrast to the sciences, the goal is not to expand and refine our understanding of the workings of the universe in which we find ourselves, but rather to produce things of beauty and meaning and to understand the significance they have for people.

I challenge you to explore Jaar a little further and see if he doesn't challenge Cronk's simple dichotomy.

More Libya

2011-10-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

Struck by another photo from the death of Gaddafi, this one of the dead leader surrounded by a constellation of cellphones.

Libya

2011-10-20T14:39:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know, former Libyan leader has been killed. There's the obligatory bloody trophy shot, captured on cellphone video and flashed around the globe (The Atlantic has a comprehensive selection of images including the kill shot), but I'm more interested in the profusion of photographs from the warzone. In one compelling shot (above), a rebel fighter serenades his comrades as they fight a pitched street battle. In nearly all photographs, fighters record each other with camera phones and lightweight digital cameras (see two examples below). These are examples of battle being performed as it's executed, the ultimate example of the 'Rambo syndrome' that sees fighters worldwide modeling themselves on Sylvester Stallone's caricature of masculinity.

Update - see this post on Conscientious on the believability quality of cellphone footage.

Science and art

2011-10-17T17:49:00.000-07:00

Robert Irwin. Way Out West.

What happens when artists move into high-tech scientific set-ups? As a variety of artists head for a residency program at CERN, their stay will be limited to three months:

"When they're working with physicists, there's a tipping point where artists want to prove that they have the brains of the physicist. The minute they do that they start to lose their artistic creativity."

That's according to Ariane Koek, head of "international arts development" at CERN. I think back to the days when James Turrell and Robert Irwin headed to Garrett Corporation as part of LACMA's Art & Technology program, an episode chronicled beautifully in Lawrence Weschler's Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Irwin's exposure to science certainly changed his art, but his art also changed the lives of the scientists he worked with, at least one of whom dropped his science career for a life of transcendental meditation.

Panoramic ball camera

2011-10-17T17:33:00.000-07:00

File this under the latest line of gadgets that expand the realms of what's possible in portable filming. BLDG BLOG writes about Jonas Pfeil's "throwable panoramic camera," a ball that captures a panoramic view when tossed in the air.

Ryan Trecartin

2011-10-17T16:11:00.000-07:00

Ryan Trecartin in conversation:

As the project gets underway, the script disperses: sometimes the centre drops out and no longer even ends up in the final work. I write alone, but what’s actually shot and edited into the movie is also the product of synergy between the script, situation and performers. Within the work there are platforms for free agency, for people to create something new, for meaning that I never necessarily intended to be there.

Links

2011-10-16T16:35:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports on the find of a neolithic "paint factory."
An unusually clear and in-depth discussion of the Prince copyright case at Brooklyn Rail.
A great interview with Eliane Radigue:

This immediately opened up a new world; it’s enriching once you’ve educated your ear to that, because when you’re annoyed by the sound of the street you can make music out of it. You can make music out of almost everything! So the discovery of the wild electronic sounds was important, namely the ones like feedback, which are accidents, garbage sounds, but they contain a lot.

Art and Athens

2011-10-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

Stefania Strouza. The Condition of (Im)Possibility. 2010.

The arts seem to have flourished in Greece, even as the economy has tanked. Artists and filmmakers have joined their Arabic and Chinese compatriots in crafting an explosion of ground-up art that examines social ills as an increasingly prevalent condition of daily life. I'm particularly taken with the work of Stefania Strouza, a trained artist-architect.

Link

2011-10-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic has a short article on the first computer-cataloging of art museums.

Andy Warhol and Liz Taylor

2011-10-06T00:11:00.000-07:00

Check out Liz Taylor's note of thanks to Andy Warhol after she acquired her own versions of Warhol's 'Taylor' pieces.

Video games link

2011-09-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

Sean Maden interviews game designer Krystian Majewski about his inspirations and source material.

Menil collection returning frescoes

2011-09-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

In a deviation from the standard antiquities narrative (American museum turns up artifact with shady provenance, outraged foreign government demands return of artifact, drawn-out legal battle ensues with typical loss of goodwill on both sides), the Menil Collection will return its 13th-century Byzantine frescoes to Cyprus. The museum's founder purchased the frescoes on behalf of the Greek Orthodox church, after discovering that they had been looted. New York Times details the terms of an agreement brokered between the church and the Menil, as the Dominique de Menil's foundation both purchased and restored the frescoes in return for a long-term loan. It's encouraging to see such a positive interaction between the market, a museum, and the rightful owners of an outstanding cultural artifact and artwork.

Poor artists not welcome

2011-09-19T20:25:00.000-07:00

Laurie Fendrich articulates some of the reasons why MoMA's latest admission price hike is a bad idea.

In one of the sadder ironies surrounding MoMA’s decision to increase its admission fee, a large number of the artists whose work hangs on MoMA’s walls were poor during their own lifetimes. Many were so poor, in fact, that were they alive today, they would not be able to afford to go see their own art hanging on the museum’s walls.

Richard Prince and copyright

2011-09-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

Richard Prince has announced his intention to contest his loss in a recent copyright case. I think it's probably a good decision for Prince, as courts are still in the process of figuring out the legal standards of appropriation art, but I think it's probably a bad thing for the art world. While some critics have decried the decision as a victory for philistinism and/or censorship, I agree with Peter Friedman who approved of the decision, noting:

if we realize how plainly and directly Prince’s appropriations damaged Cariou’s opportunities to economically benefit from his own work, the outcome (if not all of the reasoning) of this new case is obviously correct.

Appropriation art, like most art, only exists in the guise of "art for art's sake." Whenever art enters a market, is reproduced, or hangs in a gallery, it enters a world of commerce that has tangible impact on a great many people, including other artists. Courts have signaled that they are far from hostile to the idea of appropriation art in general (see Blanch v. Koons) and in Gordon v. McGinley the judge memorably stated his unwillingness to find copyright infringement in a recent case. As far as I can tell, appropriation art per se isn't under siege; rather, courts are holding artists responsible for actions that might adversely affect the well-being of other artists - and I'm ok with that.

See a summary of responses to the case.

Hamilton update

2011-09-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

As more updates come in about Richard Hamilton's death, check out Frieze's look at some of Hamilton's work.

Richard Hamilton is dead

2011-09-13T18:26:00.000-07:00

Richard Hamilton, often described as the "father of pop art" has died, aged 89. He was in the midst of preparing for a major retrospective - always renowned as a hard worker, he was still going strong. Although a number of his works have stood out for me, his cover for the Beatles' White Album will always be my personal favorite. His painting of Mick Jagger's arrest is above.

NYTimes obituary.
NPR obituary.
The Guardian has Hamilton's life in pictures.

9/11 pt. 2

2011-09-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

For one of the more interesting artistic responses to 9/11, see Charlotte Dumas' portraits of 9/11 rescue dogs. ArtInfo has the back story.

9/11

2011-09-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

It's hard to know how to adequately memorialize something on the scale of 9/11, a problem Megan Amram described with a mixture of biting humor and straight-shooting. Suffice to say, the event was tragic loss of life that left a complex and enduring legacy in the lives of millions around the globe.

USA Today describes the loss of documents, libraries, and artworks in the tragedy. The scale of that destruction is also tragic: Al-Qaeda destroyed twenty-one libraries, a cast of The Thinker, and seventy percent of a Calder sculpture. Wikipedia also has a partial list of destroyed art, while ArtInfo cites seven post-9/11 art controversies, including the debate about where to move the Koenig sphere (above).

Surviving the attack, badly damaged, the sculpture has attained iconic status. Installed in 1971, The Sphere celebrated the idea that world peace could be brought about through world trade. Given the devastating impact of free-trade agreements like NAFTA, it's perhaps appropriate that the sphere became, in the artist's words, "now...a monument." Intriguingly, Koenig has increasingly turned to the theme of memorialization in his work, using human bones in his sculpture. His commissions since The Sphere have included memorials to the Holocaust and the "Munich massacre."

9/11 has made it almost impossible to evaluate The Sphere aesthetically. Falling debris didn't do much damage to the sculpture's surface but they completely re-oriented the work's presence. As an active participant in the very disaster it memorializes, it's a far more effective (and emotion-laden) testament to tragedy than many of the specially-commissioned memorials dotting public squares around the world.

MLK and The Economist

2011-09-03T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Economist has been venturing into borderline art criticism lately, interpreting a Libyan mural and critiquing the new Martin Luther King, Jr. monument (above) in Washington, DC. It's the latter article that intrigues me, and although I have nothing to add to their insightful critique, I'm impressed by The Economist's aversion to "cheap grandeur" and embrace of Maya Lin's subtlety in crafting the Vietnam War memorial. Of course it's now good form to embrace Lin's sculpture but the article, preferring that the sculptor had interpreted Dr. King in recognition of his complicated and very human life, reflects a good understanding of the nuanced art of portraiture.

Ken Lum

2011-08-28T02:22:00.000-07:00

Jen Graves reviews a Ken Lum show for Art in America. She sounds impressed, as was I by the survey of his work at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In many ways, Lum's ouevre represents the most thematically consistent portfolio of any of the Vancouver photographers, and the show's impressive collection of his works illustrated how rigorously he has developed his ideas about language, culture, and methods of experience.

Representing race in Mac Miller

2011-08-26T16:14:00.000-07:00

Mac Miller is an upcoming rapper with a little talent and a respectable knowledge of hip-hop history. In the video for his song Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza, however, he does little to allay concerns about white appropriation of hip-hop, which one academic recently called "an unambiguously African-American form." The Awl points out that:

He shows that he has black friends in his videos (let's dap each other up on camera!), sports a bunch of awful tattoos, constantly refers to getting high, and displays a nice collection of sneakers.

Most troubling, the video features Mac Miller wandering around an urban environment while a shirtless black teen with a boom-box follows him around. The implication may be that Miller channels authenticity as he pays homage to hip-hop's genesis in the Bronx, but it comes off as yet another instance of a white creator "speaking for" black artists. Michele Wallace writes persuasively in Invisibility Blues of how Stephen Spielberg's big-screen translation of The Color Purple neutered its relevance to the black community. There was the white writer William Dufty ghostwriting Billie Holiday's autobiography, which extended a long lineage of white writers telling the stories of black women.

While these examples don't quite parallel Mac Miller's music video, they do help illustrate his lack of self-awareness about the kinds of discourses (visual and otherwise) that his video engages with.

Race and nostalgia

2011-08-23T23:46:00.000-07:00

Political bloggers have been buzzing about the rhetoric of conservative politicians like John Boehner, who are worried that Obama and his Democrats are "snuffing out the America that I grew up in." Matthew Yglesias and The Economist agree that "conservative nostalgics like Boehner are primarily driven by regret at the loss of social privilege by white men," noting that pretty much everything else about American society in the fifties and sixties is antithetical to the Tea Party program (powerful unions, foreign interventionism, high taxes, to name a few). Some of the differences between the present-day and Boehner's childhood America? No more immigration quotas, plenty of civil rights, and a far more diverse population.

Taking a look at African American art from the days of Boehner's childhood is a fascinating (if totally unscientific) way of reminding ourselves that not everyone shared his America. For instance, in 1975 Robert Colescott painted his seminal piece George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (top). A parody of Emmanuel Leutze's famous painting, it lampoons the way African Americans were marginalized in seventies America. When Colescott looked around him, and then back at history, he saw hypocrisy and the absurd gap between reality and the rhetorical promises to African Americans by politicians and leaders of all stripes.

Of course, Colescott was a fantastically intelligent artist whose narrative-bending paintings are too complicated (and slyly witty) to reduce to talking points. Unlike Boehner, he's aware of the way contradictions settle into any conversation about the past, and he embraces them to his advantage. In 2009, Huey Copeland wrote in Artforum about Colescott's attitude toward "the blackness of comedy and the comedy of blackness," quoting the artist:

If you decide to laugh, don't forget the 'humor is the bait,' and once you've bitten, you may have to do some serious chewing. The tears may come later.

The way forward will not come from a yearning look back. While Boehner played with his toys in Reading, Ohio, powerful voices like Colescott were rattling cages and letting the world know that all, in fact, was not well.

More Blade Runner in Hip-Hop

2011-08-21T16:44:00.000-07:00

I'm noticing more and more Blade Runner references cropping up in hip-hop songs and videos (I noted a few previous references here). The film even crops up on the new Beastie Boys record. In the video for J. Dilla's 2006 song Won't Do, a blimp floats overhead (above), quoting the film (below).

While the Blade Runner blimp promises a utopian off-world life, the Won't Do blimp memorializes J. Dilla's death from lupus.

Mad Men

2011-08-21T04:22:00.000-07:00

In Season 4, Episode 12 of Mad Men, the show's mercurial lead Don Draper sits, mesmerized by an abstract painting. Recently purchased from a Greenwich Village artist (a heroin addict caught in the upheaval of the sixties), the painting is standard abstract fare. The artist's husband-of-convenience describes it as motivated by her interest in 'afterimages', giving form to the blurred line between dreams and reality.

Ink has been spilled about the art in, and of, Mad Men before. Era-appropriate art adorns the walls of Draper's ad agency, and the characters are alternately beguiled and intrigued by the emergence of trends like Abstract-Expressionism. I'm more interested in the way the show sometimes gives currency to the art's power.

In the scene above, for instance, something in the painting catches Don's eye. He pulls up a chair and gazes into it as the camera swirls around him, before the shot dissolves into a picture of inspiration as he works up a desperate gambit to save his ad company from sure destruction. The painting functions as a catalyst for thought, pushing him in a new direction as he maps out new ways of working with his world. I wonder what strategies a Gorky, an Eakins, or a Giacometti might have prompted.

News

2011-08-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

Artforum reports that the Catholic Church is leading all manner of activities in response to the exhibition of Mideo Cruz's "blasphemous" Christ figure.
Janine Gordon's copyright infringement suit against Ryan McGinley has been dismissed (one of McGinley's photographs graces the top of this post).
Christopher Thomas on a soon-to-be-iconic image of the London Riots.

Art catalogues

2011-08-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

Louis Marchesano, the Getty's curator of prints and drawings, gives a highly readable account of the origins of the art catalogue. In the eighteenth-century, the collection of the Düsseldorf prince Johann Wilhelm II von der Pfalz found its way into independent galleries, where its director began to hang the paintings thematically. After a series of failed attempts (bankruptcy seemed to be a recurring eighteenth-century problem), the court architect of Prince Johann's nephew printed up a "systematic overview" of the art collection.

Significantly, this catalogue was intended to do two things: publicize an art collection in order to raise the prestige of its owner, and to serve as an educational tool for artists and other members of the educated aristocracy. Each painting got an analysis and a printed reproduction. These days, catalogues of private collections are something of a rarity. Even large public collections rarely provide complete overviews in printed volumes, instead diverting their resources to chronicling their thematic or historical exhibitions and reserving their collections for websites (some well-designed, some not).

As for those exhibition catalogues, they vary tremendously in shape and size. We have coffee table tomes with rarely-read academic essays and lavish reproductions. We sometimes have splashy layouts with banal quotes, and we sometimes have multimedia extravaganzas. How, I wonder, will exhibitions and catalogues be presented in the future (near and distant) as tools like iPads gain currency?

291

2011-08-15T01:11:00.000-07:00

This is too good to not share: Ubuweb has posted pdfs of Alfred Stieglitz's journal 291. This is a golden opportunity to check out the journal, published between 1915 and 1916, in all it's glory. Above is Francis Picabia's illustration for the July-August issue of 1915.

The iconography of "Otis"

2011-08-14T16:09:00.000-07:00

For those plugged into pop-culture (even just a little bit), the release of Kanye West and Jay-Z's album Watch the Throne has been impossible to ignore. With the release of a video for the album's single "Otis," the album's mess of contradictions between the rappers' luxurious lifestyles and the street sensibility they've tried to maintain becomes glaringly apparent.

Let's start with the video's placement of Jay-Z and Kanye in front of a giant American flag, in an industrial wasteland. Reminiscent of Budweiser's shameless appropriation of the flag to hawk beer, and Ford's caricature of blue-collar life in endless truck commercials, the video tries to place two mightily successful rappers in a narrative best described as "struggle begets success."

Taking the theme one step further, the camera follows the rappers as they advance on a luxury car (a Maybach, hip-hop's new ride of choice) with power tools they've probably never had to use. This is the mythologizing of their commitment to manual labor, with its connotations of hard work and authentic hustle.

Of course, the lyrics of the song pay unashamed homage to the power of capital. Kanye and Jay-Z rap over a very recognizable (and thus, very expensive) sample and exult in their multiple Rolexes, their fleet of luxury cars, and their appearance as "photo shoot fresh, looking like wealth." Compare and contrast to another buzzed-about rapper of the moment, Mississippi's Big K.R.I.T. Paying homage to his working class roots, Big K.R.I.T.'s song "Dreamin'" relates the story of a hard-working rapper who makes good. In the song's video, Big K.R.I.T. dons a janitor costume and raps on the same empty stage he has to wipe clean (above).

Big K.R.I.T.'s video smartly picks up on a visual tradition of labor that alludes to racial and socio-economic oppression. While "Otis" merely taps a hyperbolic vein of American exceptionalism, "Dreamin'"references works like Gordon Parks' seminal American Gothic (below) or Io Palmer's Janitorial Supplies (above). This, I think, is a better way to tackle questions of heritage and authenticity in hip-hop.

Links

2011-08-12T01:27:00.000-07:00

The photographers of the so-called Vancouver school have done an excellent job of branding their public identity, aided and abetted by one of the most engaged art institutions I've come across, the Vancouver Art Gallery. Every time I'm in Vancouver B.C., somewhere in the city is celebrating the achievements (still continuing) of Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, and their compatriots. Roy Arden is one of my personal favorites of the group, and his work Supernatural seems oddly appropriate (still above, watch the video on his website), given the recent events in London.

While I enjoy my time in Vancouver, some links:

Peter Richmond bemoans the lack of ambition and vision in American stadium architecture.
The New York Times describes the conditions of Ai Weiwei's imprisonment.

Beauty in the Philippines

2011-08-10T00:41:00.000-07:00

Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines, is back in the headlines. Artist Mideo Cruz was included in a controversial show at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) that featured a sculpture of Jesus, complete with dildo (above). The outraged Marcos, who reportedly considers herself a patron of the arts, led the charge to shut the show down. How did she resolve the apparent contradiction between her sponsorship of the arts (including her support by the CCP's founding) and her call for censorship? Well, The Manila Bulletin quotes her as saying "you can express yourself but express yourself in a beautiful way."

Although volumes could probably written about that statement, I'll just limit myself to the observation that Marcos pays lip service to the worst kind of censorship, one that denies art the possibility to be anything more than a soothing, insipid purveyor of pleasure.

McQueen at the Met

2011-08-09T03:06:00.000-07:00

Reaction to the Met's Alexander McQueen has been decidedly mixed. It was a popular smash, with thousands lining up to get into the exhibition's last weekend, and garnered the title of eighth most visited exhibition in the Met's history. The New York Times reports that attendees frequently dressed to the nines, sometimes in McQueen imitations, and the Met spokesperson told Artinfo that he'd seen nothing like it.

On the other hand, Holland Cotter took the Met to task for failing to ask "critical questions" about McQueen's possibly-racist stereotyping, producing a scholarship-lite catalog, and effectively renting museum space to the Alexander McQueen fashion house. Tyler Green picked up the last thread, a pet hate of his, and did the math. The Met's pay-to-play approach, while not unheard of in the art-museum world, isn't exactly the norm, and is anathema to many museums and curatorial departments nationwide.

It's easy, therefore, to cast the McQueen show as a testing ground for a number of oppositions plaguing the art world. It's even easier to see the show as a limit case for the art-museum's role these days. The relentless pace of admission hikes means that most museums are effectively off-limits for anyone lacking a student card or deep pockets. That holds true for some of the country's best-known institutions in the country's strongest arts communities; MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are all now prohibitively expensive. And, unlike the Met, they don't charge "suggested" admission prices. So, if museums are suggesting through their ticket fees that they're exclusive strongholds of culture, strictly upper-middle-class and up, why hold shows pandering to popular appeal?

Make no mistake, populist shows aren't inherently bad. They do good things for the local economy, they prompt large swathes of the local population to get involved in the art scene, and (as the McQueen show has obviously done) inspire visitors to greater creative heights. These are all tangible benefits. So, just because the Met has stressed some parts of a museum mission over others (sacrificing scholarship and ethical integrity), is that a reason to castigate the show? I tend to say yes, but McQueen's not really my cup of tea anyway, and it's a conversation that needs more voices than frustrated scholars in the blogosphere.

Identity politics

2011-08-06T23:04:00.000-07:00

In 1993, art historian Ann Gibson wrote in the journal American Art about her embrace of identity politics. For her, borrowing the insights from African-American studies, gay and lesbian studies, and feminism (to name but a few of the disciplines that lent their weight to identity politics) was a handy way to navigate the "extras" left over from her dissertation on Abstract-Expressionism: namely, the social contexts that helped explain why some (white, male) artists found success while others fell by the wayside. Of course, this approach didn't come without its drawbacks. The legacy of deconstructionism means that identity politics has increasingly focused on everything except the work itself.

I had a professor who bemoaned the fact that practitioners of identity politics rarely let the artwork speak, caught up as they were in fitting artists and their works into grander social narratives. They simply exchanged the idea of a canonical history for a variety of competing histories, never really acknowledging that artworks can themselves be multi-faceted objects. I've always remembered Martha Sandweiss' description of photographs as stable objects with unstable meanings.

Of course the value of any theory (or discipline) lies in the use-value of the insights it can glean. Leonardo Drew is one artist who seems to demand good writing from the practitioners of identity politics. Critics tend to interpret his work in light of his African-American heritage, and usually note that his large installations use materials like cotton that explicitly reference African-American history. But as works like Number 54 (above) testify, his art has to be understood through its formal properties, its qualities of touch and smell, the way it looms in the space of a gallery. A sculpture made from rust, fabric, plastic, and wood affects viewers on a visceral level as well as an intellectual one. His work, in fact, seems tailor-made to push the practice of identity politics to the next level.

Borders

2011-08-06T04:13:00.000-07:00

Back in June, Andrew Berardini chided Doug Aitken for his "theatrical posturing" about the porous nature of geo-political boundaries. Aitken, the darling of bienales and billionaires alike, used a large-budget commission to stage a film-driven "happening" aboard Dakis Jannou's yacht. Berardini's description of Aitken's theatrical installation has to be read to be believed, but, most notably, the artist seems to have missed the irony of his own work. Riding the the flow of art-collecting capital as it sloshes around the globe, Aitken can easily sing the praises of "international permeability." But, as Berardini points out, this is a permeability made possible mostly for the bored rich.

I'm consider myself a fan of Aitken's work, and I'm sure he produced a visually compelling piece of work. His films are generally aesthetically flawless, and often unsettling in their depiction of slightly surreal places. But there are more interesting, relevant, and (perhaps) truthful things to be said about borders and the conditions of bordering, and other people are saying them.

There was the project that erected a temporary crossing point between the U.S.A. and Mexico. There was Emily Jacir's work Where We Come From, where she repeatedly crossed the Palestinian border to fulfill the requests of Palestinian exiles. There is Clemens von Wdemeyer's short film Otjezd [Leaving], which creates an imaginary consulate scene, eerily mimicking the disorienting experiences of navigating different cultures and their bureaucracies (still above). These works go a long way towards confronting conditions of bordering that shape the lives of the not-so-wealthy billions, and I'm betting that they make for more engaging art as well.

Jean Epstein

2011-08-05T01:56:00.000-07:00

The director Jean Epstein (above), fascinated with cinema's power, wrote:

To discover unexpectedly, as if for the first time, everything from a divine perspective, with it symbolic profile and vaster sense of analogy, suffused with an aura of personal identity, that is the great joy of cinema.

I'd say that's a pretty good summation of why film fascinates me too.

Spending cuts

2011-08-03T02:54:00.000-07:00

Just how much damage did the recent budget deal do to the arts in the United States?

Michael M. Kaiser notes in the New York Times that in government funding cuts "the organizations that tend to get hit the most are rural, organizations of color, avant-garde institutions — those that have a harder time raising individual and corporate money." States already spend a fraction of their budget on the arts (the governor of Kansas recently vetoed an arts budget of just $689,000), and that amount looks to diminish in the near future as many NEA grants require matching state funds. While slashed funding at the federal level won't hurt big, donor-rich museums like the Met, it will winnow out smaller institutions that lack the support of wealthy communities.

South Carolina just successfully resisted a zero-funding attempt, with the New York Times reporting that creative industries pay the state a handsome return in both jobs and economic growth. Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts, already running on a shoestring budget, argues that the arts generated $287 billion in 2009. That's considerably more than the $275 million appropriated for the arts nationwide this year (granted, the arts will probably generate less money anyway in a slower economy), but it's a disservice to view the arts in economic terms. After all, in Washington State the governor proposed eliminating the Washington State Arts Commission and handing its duties off to the Department of Commerce. Simply handing the arts off to a commerce department and scrutinizing them for payoff has obvious, negative, ramifications. And some apologists just weaken the position by holding up projects that the general public (let alone hardline deficit hawks) will scoff at.

Happy birthday Giorgio Vasari!

2011-07-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

Today Giorgio Vasari turns 500. If not the founding father of art history (Winckelmann, Philostratus the Elder, and Vitruvius might all possess equally good claims to the position), he was the one who made it sexy and set the discipline's tone for generations. He was a character, who remained convinced that making music would lead to an artist's downfall and reveled in the salacious gossip of his day. Art history might have got more responsible since his day, but it was rarely as much fun. So, as they might have said in Tuscany, felice compleanno!

A roundup of coverage of Giorgio's big day:

Noah Charney uses Vasari's birthday to talk about efforts to uncover a lost da Vinci.
The Guardian recounts some of the best moments from Vasari's Lives.
The Uffizi has a special Vasari-centric exhibition up.

Geoff Dyer vs. Michael Fried

2011-07-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

Geoff Dyer kicks off a new column for the New York Times by launching an attack on the unsuspecting Michael Fried. The Atlantic's Ujala Sehgal likes it, New York Observer's Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke wants to see a good literary feud, and Tyler Green thinks Dyer did a "deft" job. Others are a little more charitable.

The general social media consensus seems to be in favor of Dyer, and Ian Bogost's blog post sums up most of the reasons why. Dyer wittily mimics Fried's style to critique the turgid prose of academia, a prose-style that has become increasingly inaccessible to non-academics. His article isn't a piece of anti-intellectualism, as some of Bogost's academic friends claim, but it plays on the ivory tower's well-cemented position as object of ridicule. From Thales falling down the well to Fried endlessly introducing his ideas, academics make themselves easy targets. Folks largely re-tweeted Dyer's article with glee for the same reason that my non-academic parents switch off when I try to explain the appeal of Hubert Damisch.

But, as someone who spends the majority of their time wading through academic publications, I've come to appreciate the occasional economy of academic prose. Some academics, like Joseph Leo Koerner, write beautifully and prove that Dyer's punches can't be generalized too far (Yale University's Alexander Nemerov is a joy to read, but since his father was poet laureate he should probably be considered a special case). Ultimately, I think Bogost was right to link to Damon Horotwitz's article which points out the benefits of cultivating a well-informed, readable humanism that snatches the best of both worlds.

Jerry Saltz and the art world

2011-07-27T02:14:00.000-07:00

This year's Venice Biennale provoked an impressive number of hostile reviews, particularly of the American Pavilion. Jerry Saltz penned a cogent critique of the Biennale, seeing an insidious trend in contemporary art towards a generic style of "aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements." Highlights of this style include:

Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction...

Saltz concludes that much of the problem lies in the education of artists:

This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.

Having studied art in an academic environment, this critique largely rings true. That's not to say there's anything wrong with earnest yearning, nor that artists shouldn't learn the history of their art. Robert Indiana's extended homage to Marsden Hartley, for instance (below), demonstrates how contemporary artists can craft rich, subtle pieces that reference and rehash old art. But even Indiana's elegies enlarge our view of being human in a slow, stilted way that demands years of study and ultimately proffer an intellectual stimulation.

I read this as confirmation that the most exciting artistic work rarely happens in the art world. Instead, the worlds of film, graphic design, and architecture pulse with the kind of life the art world left behind years ago. Rather than enlarging our worldview slowly and subtly, films like The Thin Red Line or Taste of Cherry shatter it and (more importantly) offer profound creative insight.

Data display

2011-07-22T21:50:00.000-07:00

New Scientist describes a collaborative project between a Boston University researcher and an atmospheric analysis company to measure and visualize methane leaks in major U.S. cities (a screen grab from their video of Boston is above). Their videos graph measurements onto Google Earth simulations. The mustard-colored pixelated spikes indicate that all may not be well in our city streets, grafting danger onto the street-view function. As yet another example of scientific illustration that attempts to make the invisible (literally) visible, the video embodies a key assumption about scientific inquiry that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Barbara Maria Stafford, analyzing shifts in scientific imagery notes that before the advent of invasive imaging (brought to a head in contemporary techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging), notes that "diseases only existed when they became manifest on the skin." When Gericault painted the heads of convicts (below), J.T. Zealy photographed slaves for Louis Agassiz, or phrenologists drafted painstakingly precise guides to the human head, they worked from the exterior in. The keys to the world lay in experience and keen observation.

In contrast, the methane video dramatizes a mistrust of the naked eye. As the data display industry grows (check out Periscopic, where a friend of mine works, for example) and visual literacy evolves in a media-heavy environment, what kind of assumptions about looking and visualization will change? Already, smartphone apps augment vision in real-time. Stafford's work turns on the opposition between interiority and exteriority; will other oppositions reverse or fall?

The beauty differential

2011-07-08T01:34:00.000-07:00

The latest attempt to use science to explain art pulled people from different cultures, and used fMRI to evaluate their brain patterns as they made aesthetic judgments about paintings and pieces of music (the original study can be found here). Aiming to "formulate a brain-based theory of beauty," the study's authors from University College London walk into an arena fraught with tension - after all, countless hours have been spent composing tenuous (and racist, sexist, ethnocentric) scientific criteria for evaluating beauty.

Twenty-one subjects ranked pieces on a scale of beauty, from 1-9, and the study's authors used these rankings to sort pieces into the categories of beautiful, ugly, and indifference-inspiring. Attempting to side-step entrenched art-historical debates about cultural conceptions of beauty (typically opposed to traditional, humanist claims of universally appreciable beauty: see Winckelmann), the study's authors left the actual evaluation of beauty up to each individual subject. Leaving aside the question of what makes the beautiful beautiful, the study's authors seem to ask whether the human brain even recognizes beauty as a phenomenon.

Apparently, they found that the human brain responds to "beautiful" stimuli very differently from "ugly" stimuli. While I can't speak to the science of their findings, it's important to note (as Katherine Harmon does) that the study has significant limitations. It doesn't attempt to define what made subjects rank a painting more beautiful; nor does it bear on the role of beauty in evaluating art by other criteria. Notably, subjects made their judgments on 16-second flashes of paintings and pieces of music. "Slow art," or forms of beauty that take time to emerge, disappear from the study's purview.

Cy Twombly

2011-07-05T13:10:00.001-07:00

Cy Twombly has died.

Video games

2011-07-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

More on video games: the Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot restrict the sale of video games to minors because of violent content. Scientific American rounds up the science behind the decision.

Karlheinz Weinberger

2011-06-25T03:05:00.000-07:00

Karlheinz Weinberger spent decades shooting the disaffected youth of Switzerland as they styled themselves after fifties biker gangs and the stars of the silver screen. Adorned with patches, badges, and tattoos proclaiming allegiance to Elvis or James Dean, his subjects scandalized the Swiss public. Weinberger chronicled their daily life, as well as shooting posed portraits.

A show of his works is currently running at Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver, B.C., titled Intimate Stranger. The show also includes articles of clothing, postcards, and other paraphernalia related to Weinberger's subjects. Their obsessive attention to detail comes through clearly, as well as their proclivity for misinterpreting American icons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Weinberger's experience as a photographer of Swiss gay culture, the exhibition hums with the ghost of Kenneth Anger.

As well as their formal similarities to Weinberger's photographs, films like Scorpio Rising (Anger, 1963, stills above and below) share a sense that something's amiss in the staid world of the bourgeoisie. More importantly, they uncover that something living on in an occult, seductive, and grittily sensual world of the symbolic: both Anger and Weinberger treat us to the spectacle of false idols (embraced and emulated) working through sympathetic magic. Whether it's the belt buckles of the Swiss youth, adorned with the image of Little Richard, or Anger's fascist-chic boys caressing their highly-polished motorbikes, however, these symbols fade into leather, flesh, and blood.

Weinberger's work begs for scholarly attention, of which it has received little to none. Perhaps a point of departure could take the photographer and Anger as kindred spirits, concerned with the fuzzy boundaries of the real and the symbolic: but only insofar as they meet in the mode of living on edge, in the kind of violence that held lenses but repelled polite society.

Is the past dead in film?

2011-06-20T02:27:00.000-07:00

Still from The Searchers.

Joseph Natoli has a somewhat dysfunctional rant on the Western's fading appeal in the latest Senses of Cinema. He argues that the "millenial" generation (American and otherwise) has little interest in Westerns, Sword-and-Sandal epics, or anything historical not beefed up by Zack Snyder's animation wizardry. This, according to Natoli, is because the millenials are "whatever" about a history obliterated by Twitter and "a new 'cyberspace'." The past has become passé, and Natoli wants us to:

...consider how impossible [the] task of meaningful connectedness would be to the new Millennial digitized consciousness which parries attention deficit disorder with “multi-tasking,” confines historical people, places and events within a “friendship locale,” and parries interpretation and understanding with one criterion alone – personal interest.

Aside from the rhetorical bombast, citations of anecdotal evidence, and sweeping generalizations, Natoli's critique is worth considering, if only because it reflects a broad paranoia gripping many contemporary intellectuals (reaching a fever pitch in Nicholas Carr's fearmongering). Indeed, Natoli channels Carr in concluding that Westerns in the traditional sense are "lame" compared to videogames, and that contemporary action films are forced to rely on elaborate bells and whistles and fast-paced cutting to force millenials "to look up from their Blackberries." His critique thus rests on his diagnosis of a generation's "fractal attentiveness."

So, let's take a look at Natoli's claims. First, the plight of the digerati. The Economist has already done a nice job of probing those claims of digital-based attention-deficit, a nice enough job that I won't reproduce the evidence here. I'll just quote a pair of psychologists who remind us that:

There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organisation in a way that affects one’s ability to focus.

Second, there's the problem of chronology and "meaningful connectedness." Natoli, in a case of misplaced nostalgia, argues that Coen brothers' neo-Western True Grit represents the past as a "flattened" image, unworthy of engagement. Any films that attempted to do otherwise died when IBM became a household name.

Far from it, I'd say. True, blockbusters like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise gloss over the niceties of history and animate the mere trappings of the past. But in this respect, the contemporary entertainment industry is no different to its forebears. Johnny Depp upgrades Errol Flynn, but not by much. Films that take a more nuanced, patient approach to representing the past have always existed and continue to flourish. Just look at the success of Sokurov's Russian Ark (still above). That they do so outside the mainstream is nothing new.

Hip-hop in the metropolis

2011-06-20T00:22:00.000-07:00

Blue Scholars, hip-hop duo extraordinaire, recently released their new album Cinemetropolis, subtitled a "visual soundtrack." Lightheartedly picking apart television's role in the metropolis on the album's title track, the group's thematic references run the gamut from name-checking The Godfather and Godard to pushing critical theory. Aside from lamenting in rather cliché style that the "public is addicted," the group's MC, Geologic (who can be seen reading André Bazin on the john in an old Scholars music video at 2:38) does some interesting things.

According to Geologic, the cinemetropolis lives where "if it spins on a reel / it's got to be real / for real in real life / just remind us of film." This is where "a film's much realer than / anything you feel." Where, exactly, is this world that seems to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality? That blur doesn't seem to be all bad. On "Lalo Schifrin," he raps "me and Bruce Lee / not so different."

Cinemetropolis flips the monstrous city of Fritz Lang's cinematic imagination into a typically off-modern crucible of dreams with their music videos. "Fou Lee" celebrates a local Filipino grocery store (still above) while "Slick Watts" pays homage to the long-lost Sonics basketball team. In this respect, valorizing the city and postmodern values of multi-culturalism, the Scholars hold the hip-hop torch high. Charles Mudede has written compellingly about hip-hop's identification with fictional cities, particularly the grimy urban world of Blade Runner (still below):

Hiphop, of course, does not identify with the police agent Deckard but with the rebels, the replicants, the slaves from the other world, Orion. Hiphop ignores the flying police cars (the repressive machines) and focuses on the foul streets, crowded clubs, and miseries of the posthuman proletariat.

There's not much misery in Cinemetropolis. Instead, treated to a world where cinema shapes positive dreams as well as stereotypes, the listener cruises rather effortlessly through Geologic's panorama. This is no saccharine gesture towards generalization however. The world of Cinemetropolis, replete with the imagery of South Seattle, is a vividly reconstituted, personal one. Even if Cinemetropolis is more Amélie than Blade Runner at times, the MC has learned "how to make a camera with a pad and a pen" and become a vocal advocate of active watching in the best hip-hop tradition.

Ai Weiwei and more

2011-06-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

There are two opposing opinions on whether U.S. museums should publicly support Ai Weiwei after his arrest in China. Dan Keegan, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, believes that "I would say very emphatically that we should not protest ever." Philip Bishop disagrees. Tyler Green has been tracking the coverage and argues (correctly, in my view) that

...art museum directors should be leaders in their communities, especially when it comes to issues that affect art, artists and our shared cultural heritage.

Okwui Enwezor weighs in on some of the larger ramifications of the Ai Weiwei debate. Writing in Artforum, he argues that the concerns about censorship and freedom of expression currently provoking flurries of online petitions obscure some of the larger issues of the globalized art world. He juxtaposes Ai's case with the Sharjah Art Foundation's dismissal of Jack Persekian (see the story here) and asks:

Is there no other type of pressure that could be brought to bear on behalf of Persekian or Ai than a meek petition or sign?

Ultimately, he concludes that:

To my mind, the several petitions that have been circulated in the past months have failed in one striking respect—namely, their inability to engage the larger complexities of the geopolitics of art, much of which they seek to smooth away. If the capacity for critique and defense of the ideals of free thought is to remain the bedrock of all serious art, then we must submit statements proffered on behalf of art themselves to scrutiny.

I agree with Enwezor. American critics and institutions ought to consider the complexities of Ai's situation before responding. The ultimate goals ought to be both obtaining Ai's release AND finding a way to make the institutional art world a meaningful, ethically responsible force for social good (whatever that may be). In an interview given before his dismissal, Persekian described his impressions of biennial scene in the U.A.E., impressions that prompted him to broaden his curating activity:

I saw that most or the biggest chunk of resources in the region was going towards building edifices and real estate for art rather than the much-needed infrastructure and support for the artists and the production of art.

His take-home message? That a few museums and international pavilions do not an art scene make. We need more, and we need it now.

After all that, a reminder to sign the petition calling on China to release Ai Weiwei.

A new Michelangelo?

2011-06-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

Last week the New York Times profiled a painted pietá (top) held in a private collection in Tonawanda, N.Y. A family legend holds that the piece is a long-lost Michelangelo, and despite the skepticism of numerous experts (including the fabulous Alexander Nagel), a prominent Italian conservator agrees.

The crux comes in the last lines of the article when the current owner, a retired fighter pilot, pulls out the painting in question.

“I’ve been looking at it for too long now, decades,” he continued. “I know every inch of it, so it’s hard to be objective. But I can’t sit here with it in front of me and figure out how anybody could think it’s an inferior copy.

“Look at it.”

Whether or not the piece is, indeed, a rare easel painting by the Tuscan master, the real story seems to be the owner's infatuation with the painting and the way art slow grows on us.

Video games and art pt. 2

2011-06-04T10:57:00.001-07:00

After my conversation with Calum Stevenson, I've been delving deeper into the relationship between video games and art. I'll be talking with Akihiko Miyoshi, a computer engineer turned visual artist, and posting more thoughts in the upcoming days.

In the meantime, here are some more links:

New Scientist posts about the "the new generation of digital artists."
Is Cory Arcangel, architect of the seminal video game art piece Clouds a huge asshole?

A thought on criticism

2011-06-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

Still from Tarkovsky's The Mirror.

Every art student has had to grapple with Susan Sontag at some point. With all due respect to Ms. Sontag, her polemics have received a little too much attention for my taste. On Photography is the de riguer starting point for almost any pseudo-serious discussion of photojournalism, and her misty-eyed writing on Aleksandr Sokurov (like that of Nick Cave) does the director a grave disservice.

Prompted by Tarkovsky's The Mirror [Zerkalo, 1975], a friend of mine queried me about "Against Interpretation." Re-reading Sontag's essay, one sentence caught my eye:

Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice.

Writing in the mid-sixties, Sontag did battle with the towering influence of Clement Greenberg, the critic who dictated both theory and practice and loomed monumentally over art writing and production. Sontag's call for a responsive - nay, reactive - criticism must have seemed liberating. After all, it handed power back to the artists.

But art criticism should be more than a response to "contemporary needs and practice." Sontag's position pins the writer (or defender, or justifier) into a historical box, while as a writer I want to do more than respond to what artists currently make. Writing, thinking, and arguing about art should also be a creative process. In my humble opinion, that is.

Calum Stevenson in conversation

2011-05-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

Can video games be art? That's the crux of my conversation with Calum Stevenson, an artist who primarily works in designing character concepts for video games. A few days ago I posted some links that represent positions in the debate.

First, tell me a bit about what you do.
I draw and paint character or creature concepts and turn them into 3d reality, or as my grandmother so succinctly puts it “that little man running across the screen.”

John Sharp is an art historian who teaches video game designers. He argues that it's important for game designers to be aware of shifting notions of what art is. Do you see yourself fundamentally as an artist?
I do think of myself as an artist, but that doesn’t necessarily always carry over to game design pieces. That's not to say that I don't consider game characters or creatures as having the potential for being art, more that I haven't reached that level of artistic maturity yet within the game design envelope. I think the highly technical nature of game art is problematic too, as with any medium real potential can only be achieved when the tools cease to become a barrier and the tools in game art are complicated and always changing. With that in mind there are game artists who, for me, rank as highly as some of the great fine artists. Andrew “Android” Jones, Kekai Kotaki, Skan Srisuwan to name a few are all incredible artists in their own right.

Mr. Sharp writes: "A lot of developers have this romantic notion of what art is. They're rooted in a 19th-century idea that it's a form of expression and tied to public perceptions. That's not what art is anymore." What kind of artistic criteria do you think we should use to assess games? Are artistic criteria even relevant?
Ultimately I think it comes down to labelling. Maybe games would be more approachable as art if they were renamed ‘avatar-based interactive audio-visual experiences’ but I’m not convinced that any established artistic criteria can truly be applied to games, they’re so completely apart from anything the art world is familiar with. Aside from anything else there is a much greater level of investment required to really appreciate a game. Yes, a painting can be studied for hours and films re-watched countless times but many games easily hit 30 hours of solid playtime. You can’t play just 10 minutes of a game and expect to reap the same reward as someone who has engaged with the narrative or characters and seen it through to the end. Don’t get me wrong though, the majority of games were made with entertainment and commercial success in mind and to try and interpret every single one as a work of art would be optimistic at best.

What kind of art do you look at to inform your design?
I generally try to absorb as much visual information from as many areas as possible. The great thing about game art is that it blends all the other artistic disciplines together but in a virtual space. There are some staple inspirations like Frazetta and Paul Bonner whose works are very close to a game aesthetic but I also look to fashion design, classic portraiture, street art, comic illustration and just about anything I can get my hands on. I’m constantly being laughed at for filling my camera with pictures of ‘rubbish’ too, bits of moss, that kind of thing. It’s all good stuff!

I've read about Mirror's Edge, a game that has some architects very excited because of the way it integrates real-world architecture into the game's design. Do you think about the relationship between the virtual environment and the "real world" when designing? Can we explore that relationship productively?
I think that really the relationship between the real and the virtual, in a game context, boils down to what we as designers can get away with without breaking immersion for the player(s). Gamers can be both very forgiving and completely unreasonable when it comes to what they are willing to accept in a game. Generally the rule seems to be that you can do practically anything as long as the game is good! Thinking along the lines of Mirror’s Edge there’s another game that integrates real-world architecture called Prototype. It takes place in a pretty faithful reproduction of Manhattan and sees your genetically enhanced character able to leap from buildings and glide above the city. There’s something about taking control of a virtual character, especially one with beyond-human powers, in a real-world location which appeals to me at a very basic level. I suspect it resonates with that childhood superhero daydream.

I'd also like to note that Mirror's Edge is up there on my favourites list. Mirror's Edge certainly polarized opinions when it was released but I don't think anyone would deny that it’s a visually beautiful game. It sounds cheesy but there were moments where I would stop and marvel at the world and architecture around me. Just being aware that each and every piece of the game world, of any game world really, has been hand crafted regularly stops me mid-game.

Screenshot from Prototype.

Roger Ebert, the film critic, thinks that video games cannot be art "in principle." Respond!
Let's just get it out there that I totally disagree. I don’t want this to turn into a personal attack but I think it's interesting that Ebert feels qualified to speak about this when it's doubtful whether he played any of the games mentioned, which maybe weren’t great examples, let alone any games at all. How he can critically evaluate an interactive medium without actually interacting is beyond me. Personally there are two games which come to mind straight away, Ico and it’s spiritual sequel Shadow of the Colossus which most gamers would agree have crossed that “artistic boundary” mentioned in Ebert’s article. Both games are visually stunning, thought provoking, emotionally engaging and most importantly they don’t fill in all the blanks for the player. It sounds obvious to say, but they really do have to be played to be appreciated. There has to be that link between you as the player and the character’s actions in the game. Incidentally, neither game did very well commercially when first released.

One of Mr. Ebert's points is that you can "win" a game but you can't "win" an artwork. I tend to disagree that all you take from a game is a "win." When you're putting work into a design, what kind of experience are you hoping to create? What are the ramifications of that experience for a player?
I’m not sure sure I understand what relevance Ebert thinks being able to win has here, does that condition automatically disqualify games as art? I don’t buy it. Yes, generally there are structures within games which reward the player and provide motivation to keep playing but often these structures are constructed internally by the players. Really the goal of any character artist is to evoke some sort of response from the player beyond passive acceptance. It's difficult, as a character artist you only have control over the visuals, which depending on the genre have a varying degree of importance. Role playing games for instance place a huge amount of emphasis on interaction between characters, so yes the visuals are important but in this case so are the voice acting and the dialogue options. You have to remember too that you will usually be working within a particular aesthetic or style, and there will be certain technical specifications so really it’s a case of trying to inject as many visual cues and as much character within these boundaries.

Anything else to add?
I’d just like to say that if there’s one area to keep an eye on right now it would have to be the Iphone app store. The mobile game industry seems to have raced through the entire history of game development in the space of about 3 years and isn’t looking to stop any time soon. The fact that one and two man teams are able to realistically develop on the mobile platform has opened it up to a much wider developer base and there are some really interesting games being produced. I’m playing a game on the Iphone just now called Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP and it just keeps on amazing and delighting me. Find or purloin an Iphone or Ipod and check it out. Other than that, thanks for having me!

Calum Stevenson lives and works in England, Hartlepool to be exact. He holds a degree in Games Art and Design from Norwich University College of the Arts

Andrew Brischler in conversation

2011-05-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Andrew Brischler, Like a Dead Deer on the Side of the Road, 2009, gouache and pencil on paper.

Attending a liberal arts college as an art major, I often found myself on the defensive as fellow students questioned the wisdom of studying art at a "non-art" school. My studio professors, on the other hand, often talked about the MFA world and the differences in classroom pedagogy. As having an MFA rapidly becomes the prerequisite to art-world success, I wanted to explore some of the peculiarities unique to MFA programs. I went to Andrew Brischler, an accomplished painter working in Brooklyn, for a little insight. We corresponded over email.

First, I know you went from an undergraduate state school to a professional MFA program. As a practicing artist, what prompted that decision?

When I was 18 and applying to undergraduate programs, I applied to 4 art schools and 4 liberal art schools; At that point in my life, being so young, it never really occurred to me that art could be professional; so after not getting into my top two schools, I panicked and decided to go to a state school. After getting my BFA in painting, I knew that this was it for me; I like to joke that I'm not good enough at anything else but art, but in actuality, it's the only thing that I truly can't get enough of. Seeing shows in the city, reading art blogs at 3am, it's all just natural for me. So going right into an MFA program right out of undergrad was an easy decision.

You've described the move as "quite a transition." Tell me more?

The transition has been immense. At SUNY New Paltz where I went to undergrad, there was a sense of isolation in art making; though we planned trips to Chelsea galleries and talked about contemporary artists, there was no way around the fact that I was making art in a comfortable bubble in the Hudson Valley. At School of Visual Arts, it's completely different. My studio building is in the heart of Chelsea--21st st and 7th ave--and my professors are people that I've admired for my entire adult life, like Marilyn Minter, James Siena, Petah Coyne, Fred Wilson, and Jake Berthot. It's such a friendly and supportive atmosphere, but because almost everyone in my program has the same goal, it's definitely competitive and critical.

I know from our previous conversations that you aspire to a career as an artist. At this point, how do you think your experience in an MFA program has helped/hindered that?

My first studio class ever at SVA was with James Siena, and sitting next to him the first day, everything, the whole art world, was just demystified. He's represented by The Pace Gallery here in NYC--one of the biggest galleries in the world--and he talked about his career, the inner workings of dealing with galleries while still making successful work--with such a level head that it all just seemed to make more sense. SVA has helped me get into a groove of making work, being constantly critical of it, and be proactive when it comes to my career.

Looking back on diverse classroom experiences, what do you think has meaningfully impacted your own artistic thinking?

I think it has been one on one conversations with working artists, whether they've been professors or artists part of our visiting lecture series. I have become so close to the artists who have mentored me, and I think that's crucial in any artist's success, to have a network of supportive, creative, intelligent people around them.

As I look through your art, it's clear that your practice has evolved quite a bit. What kinds of factors do you find influential in pushing you to grow?

I like to think of whats happened to my work over the past 4 years as letting go. I've let go of control, of personal subject matter, of, I think, the "frills." I've realized that what I've always been interested in has been materiality--how working with paint at a primal level can prove to be a deeply emotional experience. I think I've found that through making a lot of outwardly personal work and realizing that it wasn't a part of my ultimate goal. My first semester at SVA was definitely a large factor too; people saw that the work was derivative and too cluttered with reference. In the past few months, I've definitely found a way to let the work be the work and my personal life be separate.

Your choice of titles intrigues me. I had a photography professor who lamented that students rarely take the time to title their art well. What do you think?

Titles are tricky. I don't take titling my work too seriously; almost all of my recent work have titles relating back to song lyrics or movie quotes, mostly because its a way to give the work some levity and lightness. Abstract painting can get really heavy with reference and psychological baggage. One day in my studio, I was listening to Tina Turner and decided to name what I was working on exactly what I was listening to. People seem to respond to that. As for what your photography professor once said, I can sympathize. In my opinion, titles should either be completely incidental (like mine are), simple (like Rothko's) or deeply add to the experience of the piece.

Andrew Brischler lives and works in New York, NY. He is an MFA candidate at the School of Visual Arts, and received his BFA from SUNY New Paltz. He has exhibited at Hecksher Museum of Art, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and K&K Gallery, among other institutions, and in 2010 was named to the Annual Artist VIP List by Long Island Pulse Magazine.

Video games and art

2011-05-23T15:51:00.000-07:00

Screenshot from the game Celestial Impact.

Ever since Cao Fei began to make waves with RMB City, the art world's attention has quickly moved to the world of video games. I'll be posting an interview soon with Calum Stevenson, who recently completed a degree in Games Art and Design at Norwich University College of the Arts, about video games and art. In the meantime, here's a roundup of relevant links:

Jason Rohrer has blazed a trail in making interactive, game-based art. I recommend playing Passage.
BLDGBLOG's interview with games critic Jim Rossignol. Highlight:

For instance, at what point might architects stop putting out $100 coffee-table books that are only bought by libraries, and instead commission someone to design a game environment that features all of their buildings? It’d be a new kind of monograph. You buy the new Grand Theft Auto—but all the buildings are designed by Richard Rogers. It seems like you’ve got incredibly imaginative and very passionate people playing those games, so why not present your buildings to that audience?

Another BLDGBLOG article, this one on "tactical landscaping and terrain deformation" in the game Fracture, which discusses the weaponization of the earth and the politicization of terrain creation.
An interview with John Sharp, who teaches art history at Savannah College of Art and Design.
Artist Paul Clay utilizes elements of video games in his installations and music videos.
Roger Ebert thinks video games can never be art.

Remnick and Kabakov

2011-05-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

Current The New Yorker editor, former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, and Pulitzer-Prize winner David Remnick knows a thing or two about Russia. He wrote in 1996 that

[to] live in Moscow at century's end is to exist in a strange and contradictory landscape, one filled with both ruin and possibility.

After talking with Vladimir Voinovich, a former dissident writer, Remnick went on to describe the plight of artists, authors, and intellectuals who suddenly found themselves adrift after the Soviet Union's collapse. The old order, repressive but stable, had provided fodder for work for generations. What kind of work would emerge in the post-Soviet "strange and contradictory landscape?" As Remnick noted:

The texture of Russian life after 1991 is so fluid, so changeable and supercharged, that it is nearly impossible to capture in words and images.

Ilya Kabakov rapidly became the poster child for post-Soviet art, wowing international audiences at biennials with his reflections on Soviet life. He riffed on themes of fluidity, doublethink, and displaced identity, and the critic Svetlana Boym wrote that "going to Kabakov's exhibits is akin to trespassing into a foreign world that feels like home." It's easy to see Boym's point in his 1997 installation My Grandfather's Shed (above) at PS1, one of many installations where Kabakov painstakingly recreated scenes from Soviet life in gallery spaces, building transient spaces replete with the intimate warmth of domesticity.

Kabakov, who insisted on calling himself a Soviet artist for years after the Soviet Union broke up and he moved to the West, mines a special kind of history for his work. He draws on the history not so much of "daily life" (a province better suited to the dry analyses of academic visual culture enthusiasts), but rather on the history of how a certain people wove a world from things. By building strange, contradictory artworks that plumb the depths of time and space, he does what the best archaeologists do. He makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.

Charged by the unraveling of Russia's social fabric, Kabakov's works deal in the currency of ruins, but exude a kind of possibility of re-engaging the past, whether that past is alien or our own. I agree, therefore, with Boym, who argues that his installations are about the "reenchantment of the world through art, at any cost." This, I think, is the best response to Remnick.

Sokurov

2011-05-22T03:09:00.000-07:00

I recently published a paper on Russian auteur Aleksandr Sokurov (above) at Vestnik. Full text available behind the link.

Manifesto

2011-05-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

In restarting this blog, I want to do several things.

I want to explore and expose interesting art in my area. I want this blog to engage with both the institutional and non-institutional art worlds of the Northwest.

As much as possible, I want to bring to the fore the words and works of artists themselves, whether through interviews or other means.

I'll bring historical context to my writing, drawn primarily from my academic background. I'm not interested in being a press-release conduit, and I'll critically evaluate artwork. Sometimes I'll dig back into the past for critical art history posts.

When need be, I'll delve into politics and less academic areas of the art world. Education, funding, or art therapy, for instance, are all relevant to understanding the role contemporary art plays in our society.

I'll attempt to post around three times a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) and link to some of the better writing on art around the web.

Finally, in all this, I'll try to be guided by what W.J.T. Mitchell wrote about Nelson Goodman:

His great values are rigor, simplicity, clarity, scope, and rightness.

Happy reading, and be in touch. Image from Brandon Tauszik's Pray for Mercy.

Artist's archives

2011-05-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

My father (Roger Fidler) taught me almost everything I know about photography, and I grew up in a house full of chemicals. He recently had a show at Havana Gallery in Vancouver, B.C., and when he sent me pictures from the exhibition (above) I was struck by just how multi-disciplinary his work has become. He enrolled in a print-making course after moving to Vancouver, and photo-etchings and other photoworks constitute most of his current output.

Part of what strikes me as I see my father's new art emerging is just how extensively he mines his archive of negatives for new work in alternate media.

I remember him shooting this still life (above) when I was much younger. He spent a great deal of time photographing cutlery at the antique store of a friend who specialized in old French furniture. Now, probably almost a decade later, these photographs form the backbone of his new work.

There's something intriguing about artists who return to the same images over and over again. Painters like Albert Pinkham Ryder obsessively repainted canvases, while photographers like Richard Renaldi spent years documenting the same geographic location. Perfectionists like Ansel Adams reprinted the same negatives, but measured them against a consistent, self-selected objective ideal. My father's reprinting hints at something different; an extended engagement with the same images that reworks them over time. It's something I'd like to see from more artists.

Return

2011-05-18T13:09:00.000-07:00

I've decided to resurrect this blog, after realizing how important contemporary conversations about art are. Over the upcoming weeks, I'll be working out how to redesign the interface, as well as formulating a game plan to ensure regular, relevant posting.

Leon Bakst

2010-07-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

Leon Baskt's costume designs showcase his artistic versatility.

Sokurov and Friedrich

2010-07-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks I've delved deeper into the world of Caspar David Friedrich, while putting the final touches on a paper about Russian auteur Aleksander Sokurov. The connection between Friedrich's Romantic landscapes and Sokurov's hypnotic films seemed obvious, and today Botz-Bornstein's Film and Dreams filled in the gaps by examining Friedrich's direct influence on both Sokurov and his sometime mentor Tarkovsky.

Africa

2010-07-12T17:22:00.000-07:00

The World Cup saw a burst of interest in all things African. CNN reports that the influx of foreigners stimulated South African art galleries and museums, rather than the local prostitution scene (surprising some). Zwelethu Mthethwa is a photographer who's gaining some worthy attention.

Ron Cronin pt. 1

2010-07-10T19:14:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, an artist notices what I've written and gets in touch. I was particularly excited to receive an email from Ron Cronin, whose photographs I featured back in March. D.K. Row's 2008 article is a good introduction to Ron's life and work, and the Augen Gallery features a good selection of his photographs.

A Vietnam vet who claims to "hide behind the bamboo," Ron continues to use his large format camera to capture detailed images of nature. Images like South Falcon Cove Beach (above) demonstrate the richness of his prints, uncovering landscapes that repay long study. Despite his self-proclaimed status as "a sort of hermit homesteader" who grows his own food and still shoots in 8 x 10, his interest in large scale prints has lead him to embrace aspects of digital technology. Enthusing about the potential of Photoshop, he admits that he uses "about 1%" of the computer's capacity.

He's claimed not to study his photographic peers, preferring to draw influence from poets like Yeats or C.E.S. Wood. Nevertheless, he shared his interest in painters from a variety of periods. "Pollock, it seemed to me, made perfect compositions which really had no meaning--just amazing visual fireworks and a definite muscular rhythm." Rejecting conscious imitation, determined to find his own "style of ambiguity," he nevertheless saw Pollock in geology and Constable and Turner in atmospheric storms.

The best artists transcend the aesthetic boundaries of the visual, and someway into our discussion Ron noted that he'd forgotten to mention the relationship between his photographs and the music of Brahms and Beethoven, Schoenberg and Thelonious Monk. He recalled a scene from Ken Russell's film Mahler, where the composer's inspiration strikes in a cabin in the woods. Beyond the literal parallels - the photographer making visual magic on the Pacific coast - Mahler's 'heavy romanticism' speaks to the unfashionable themes of grand ideas and (preciously) fragile dreams. I can't help but notice a touch of the same in Ron's photographs.

Most interesting to me, he recalled the impact Louis Bunce and Carl Morris (above) made on his work. Like Morris or the California painter Edward Corbett (above), Ron's photographs work the complex forms and textures of nature into productively ambiguous images. Remembering the uproar Bunce's airport mural caused in the 50's, Ron describes his abstract geological photographs as an "intentional homage" to the abstract expressionists. I found them 'quietly subversive,' and Ron agrees. "I hope that these are more subversive, in challenging the viewer to see the beauty of what many people think of as threatening--storms and cloudy scenes far removed from what are more familiar views of nature stylistically."

With thanks to Ron for sharing his time and views, I'll leave off with another of his photographs; A Tidepool on Submarine Rock, Ecola. A second installment about our conversation will follow in the next few days.

Hockney and sunshine

2010-07-07T16:46:00.000-07:00

It's hot. Real hot. What better way to enjoy the heat than with one of David Hockney's too-cool-for-school pool scenes?

David Goldblatt

2010-07-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

David Goldblatt has been getting plenty of press lately, as the most sophisticated and best-established photographer chronicling an Africa in flux (the photographic press has been uncriticially singing the praises of anyone fortunate enough to use a camera south of Cairo). Goldblatt has produced a rich and sensitive body of work over the years, which is well worth investigating.

Intriguing...

2010-07-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

The Detroit Institute of Art will auction off Custer's flag. The museum's press release:

In 1895, the flag fit in with the wide range of artifacts collected and displayed at that time. It remains, without doubt, an important historical treasure, but has long since ceased to meet current criteria as a work of art. It makes sense for us to sell it for the benefit of the collection.

Interesting to see a museum de-accessioning because an item no longer fits the "criteria as a work of art." DIA seems to be intent on re-defining the role of the 'responsible' institution; either that or it's stretching even further for excuses to turn art into cash.

Deborah Luster

2010-07-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

Deborah Luster's photographs of prisoners gain a layer from the backstory behind their creation.

A minor frustration

2010-07-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

Critics and bloggers rightly take institutions to task for 'fluffing' trustees and major collectors. Tyler Green often leads the charge, recently skewering the Smithsonian's Rockwell show. As Tyler has written before,

It is always disappointing when art museums with the capability to present art in thoughtful contexts choose not to and instead simply hang art because one person bought it. It’s especially disappointing when a contemporary art museum does it.

On the other hand, I'm always intrigued to see a collection on display. Critical evalations of historic collections have become widely accepted. That aside, I hope that critics like Tyler can judge the Rockwell show on it's own merits, as well as decrying how it came into being.

New living

2010-07-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

BLDGBLOG has a great post about floating cities and their potential manifestations (image above from Anthony Lau's student project on a flooded London) and sums up three typical responses to the advancing ocean:

retreating from the coast, defending what we've built there, and attacking the incoming waters with aggressive engineering.

Tomas Saraceno's Lighter than Air exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston begs to differ. A trained architect, Saraceno uses works like Biosphere 06 (below) to suggest the possibility of engineered co-existence. The audacity of his work (artistic ephemera as a serious engineering proposal flies in the face of the aggressively bureacratic skepticism that continues to cut arts funding) is inspiring. It reminds me of an anthropology class I took ('Ethnography of the Image') where my professor told me that our curriculum had effectively been duplicated at West Point. Aestheticians and radical surrealists like Bataille and Callois are now the philosophical touchstones for the military's urban warfare theorists. Perhaps an encouragement to take Saraceno seriously?

Mark Tansey

2010-07-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Mark Tansey drank deep at the well of Postmodernism and made painting relevant when it had no right to be. Derrida Queries De Man (above) quotes Sidney Piaget's illustration from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular Sherlock Holmes stories. Tansey's diversity of sources (high and low art, critical theorists, advertisements) portrays the artist as a kid in a candy store turned curator.

Ben Nixon

2010-06-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

Ben Nixon's show at Duncan Miller gets a shout from the LA Times.

Chema Madoz

2010-06-25T21:37:00.001-07:00

More.

Joe Deal

2010-06-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

Joe Deal recently died. I've always appreciated his work, which was especially innovative in the context of the romanticized West that continued to dominate American photography into the sixties.

Walid Ra'ad

2010-06-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

...and the Atlas Group. From the series Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves.

P.J. Crook

2010-06-20T15:07:00.000-07:00

P.J. Crook's work has been near to my heart ever since one of her paintings graced a King Crimson album.

Sarah Palmer

2010-06-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palmer.

Photography

2010-06-11T16:48:00.000-07:00

Two quality photo series via Conscientious.

Reuben Cox's Record Shack.

Isabelle Pateer's Manufacturing Apathy.

Sigmar Polke

2010-06-11T15:58:00.001-07:00

Sigmar Polke is dead.

Civic art

2010-06-07T17:18:00.000-07:00

Blast from the past; how not to do public art.

Dalton Rooney

2010-06-06T10:22:00.001-07:00

Dalton Rooney exhibits a touching sensibility; sometimes. His work would benefit from greater selectivity, which is a shame as when he's good, he's very good.

Alvaro Ybarra Zavala

2010-06-05T20:05:00.001-07:00

Compelling, if at times over-filtered images from Alvaro Ybarra Zavala.

Wrestling...

2010-06-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

From Malcom Venville's series Lucha Loco: The Free Wrestlers of Mexico. The subject, Maximo, states "My outfit, as you can see, comes from the Roman Empire."

Curating

2010-06-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

Ben Street argues that curating a show should be like making a mixtape. My experience hanging the Scarecrow show at Reed's Cooley Gallery, with it's various themes unfolding through works of art felt much like the days I patiently recorded tape-to-tape in an undoubtedly underappreciated effort to convey all sorts of things through other people's music.

It left me with a fresh understanding of how to treat each work with the respect it deserves, especially in the context of competing artworks, expectations, and exhibition spaces. One of the best books on art, Thomas Crow's The Intelligence of Art, argues convincingly that artworks can be understood through a careful analysis of their internal elements. How does this translate to a curated environment, how can a curator encourage viewers to look beyond the thematic emphasis?

It's something I struggled with while hanging Andy Warhol's polaroids, and something I still haven't resolved.

Military and light

2010-06-05T01:32:00.000-07:00

Paul Virilio's seminal War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception outlines the mutually informative relationship between visual art and the military machine. Two posts on BLDGBLOG examine how the military's exploration of light and reconnaissance, including the provocatively titled 'military chiaroscuro' drive.

Richard Billingham

2010-06-02T18:07:00.000-07:00

More.