Keeping it moving

Charles Atlas, Painting by Numbers, 2011, video (Photo: Carol Diehl)

When I first saw the impressively wall-size Charles Atlas video installations at Luhring Augustine Bushwick (up through July 15^th) I was excited. Animated abstraction—they could be paintings come to life. But unlike a good painting, where your interest grows the more you look at it (I’m thinking of my experience with the de Koonings at MoMA) these pieces, upon extended viewing, became more repetitious and tedious. How could that be? Video and film, just by being able to incorporate movement, should be more interesting than, say (for comparison, given the scale) a Sol LeWitt wall drawing. And it can happen: Nam June Paik, who started the whole video phenom, was a master of surprise. Christian Marclay’s film smorgsbords can keep you transfixed for, well, 24 hours.

But then not all that looks new, is new. On his Facebook page, British artist Alasdair Duncan, who I met when he was installing his exhibition at  Stephanie Theodore in Bushwick, posted examples of abstract animation that offer some historical perspective. Enjoy! And thank you, Alasdaire.

Len Lye, “Trade Tattoo,” 1932, made in association with the British General :

Post Office:

Len Lye, “Color Flight,” 1937, also made in association with the British General Post Office.

More Len Lye here and here.

John Whitney, “Catalog,”1961

John Whitney, “Matrix III,” 1972

Life, death, and abstraction

At first I wasn’t going to write this post because it seemed too personal. But then I couldn’t justify the difference between reading my poetry to 150 people at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, as I used to, and putting it on the Web. Anyway, this came up because of the week-long kundalini yoga workshop I just finished at Kripalu, along with another 3-day course just a couple of weeks ago. I love kundalini because it works on energetic alignment as well as physical; when I do it, I feel as if I’m straightening out my brain.

In the workshop our teacher showed the TED video by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, describing her stroke and the experience of coming close to death (note: it’s inspiring, not depressing, otherwise I wouldn’t share it; I’m not into depressing).  I had a similar experience—without the stroke part—and hearing it so aptly described and close to my own, was startling. I’d also never heard right and left brain function defined precisely this way: that the right brain thinks in pictures and is about the collective, while the left brain is linear, wants to name things, and is concerned with establishing an individual sense of self. I used to owe it to my lack of formal higher education—and that could be part of it—but now I also understand that from going to the other side and coming back, where everything is new again, I developed the peculiar ability (which both helps and hinders me) to stand outside a thing or situation and see it without the names or the layers of meaning society has given it. I can still often look at humans and view them as an alien might coming across them for the first time—and believe me, compared to other animals (I think it’s the lack of body hair with the thatch on top), they ‘re completely weird and funky-looking.

I also realize now why I’m so ardent about letting art speak for itself, about allowing for the possibility of emotional response rather than always having to define it or give information that makes it seem rational. This is why I rail against the museum wall texts and idiotic artist’s statements that become the lenses through which art is viewed. Art, like music, is a language without words, and the way it invokes sensation is mysterious and inscrutable. I’ve chosen to be an abstract artist because it’s an investigation into making something that’s essentially unknowable, where the possibilities of interpretation are boundless.

But then I’m also a writer, which gives the lie to it all, as I go about creating defined situations in order to promote undefined ones. Life is a paradox.

WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW

They say write about what you know

Well I know

about death

I have felt death’s

icy numbness

creeping up my legs

toward my heart

I have seen faces

hovering over me

as I am pumped full

of the

blood

of strangers

I have felt my body

dissolve

into a pillar of

pain

Don’t scream, the doctor said

I have wished for death and prayed for life

to a god I didn’t believe in

but promised

I would

If I lived

I have known an aloneness beyond description

before descending

into unpeopled blackness

And I have wakened

to the cruel bright whiteness

of a recovery room

too loud, too alive

with voices

footsteps

the clatter of metal against metal

My husband, noting I am conscious

fills me in on current events

Watergate

Nixon

He and Willy had been talking about it

In the car on the way to the hospital

and now he is giving me

an update

And I’m feeling guilty

because I’m alive

and I don’t believe

in God

After two weeks I go home

everything is strange

I feel like an immigrant

newly arrived

who happens to speak the language

but doesn’t know the customs

and no one I meet

has been where I’m from

So now I know about death

but I’m no longer afraid

I believe in a god

And I’m not married anymore.


Copyright © 1994, Carol Diehl

Carol Diehl, Alexandra, 2011, pastel and pencil on board, 9' x 12".

Kehinde Wiley: Sell-out or provocateur?

I just finished writing my review for Art in America of the Kehinde Wiley exhibition at the Jewish Museum, The World Stage: Israel  (to be published sometime during the run of the show, which is on through July 29th).  I’ve been interested in Wiley’s work for some time, and in 2008, commissioned from him a portrait of Obama for the cover of TIME which, sadly, never ran.

However what I love about this exhibition is the totality of the experience: the paintings in the context of Wiley’s selection of examples of antique papercuts and textiles from the museum’s collection, and the grand, historic Fifth Avenue mansion that houses it. I began to think about how frustrated I’ve become with the white-box gallery format, so sterile and one-dimensional it rarely shows art to advantage—like staging a fashion show in a hospital. However, uncharacteristically, I don’t have an answer to the problem. Most “designed” museum exhibitions are even worse.  Like Jorge Pardo’s installation of Pre-Columbian art at LACMA, they always seem to be in competition with the art they’re showcasing. The Tod Williams and Billy Tsien design for the 2008 Louise Nevelson show, again at the Jewish Museum, stands out as the best I’ve seen. Probably I’ve never gotten over seeing a stunning Pop Art show, many years ago, in the baroque multi-balconied atrium of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (including a 20-foot high Warhol Mao), where the contrast and interplay of old and new showed both to exciting advantage. That’s what happens here as Wiley’s hip-hop sensibility is set off against the cased antiques and the wood-paneled opulence of the museum’s interior.

Photos: Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum.

Doing my research I read “The Diaspora is Remixed,” Martha Schwendener’s review in The New York Times. As I remember, she’s written other pieces that didn’t raise my hackles (or you would have heard about it!). This one, however, is marked with surprising vitriol, as if there’s a subtext we’re not getting.

….the show raises some difficult questions. For instance, what is the position of the Ethiopian Jew in Israeli society? The gallery installation gives the impression of Jewish culture as a seamless visual narrative, slipping faultlessly from old Europe to modern-day Tel Aviv. It also posits, particularly in a video accompanying the paintings, Israel as a haven for persecuted Ethiopian Jews.

First, I question if it’s fair to critique an artist on the basis of the success or failure of his presumed intention, rather than on the work itself. Secondly, what is it about the “gallery installation” that gives the impression of Jewish culture as a seamless visual narrative? The fact that Wiley’s paintings are shown alongside works from the museum’s collection? If that’s what Schwendener is referring to, my understanding is that the antique objects are part of the exhibition because Wiley was inspired by such patterns and it provided an unusual opportunity for the museum to display them. To see it as an attempt to rewrite history is a stretch worthy of Fox News.

Also, in the video where Wiley’s subjects talk about their lives in Israel, it’s about not being fully accepted. As for Israel being a “haven,” maybe it is, all things being relative. Perhaps being discriminated against is better than being persecuted.  

By not mentioning the others, Schwendener gives the impression that Wiley has focused solely on Ethiopian Jews, when they’re only a third of his subjects. The rest are dark-skinned native-born Israelis and Arab Israelis—who, no one can say, have had an easy time of it. On the hand-carved frames Wiley designed for the Arab Israelis, inscribed in Hebrew, is Rodney King’s famous cry, “Why can’t we all get along?” The point made in the video is that hip-hop and reggae have brought these spurned groups together; the music scene is the “haven” where all are accepted.

Another question is why Mr. Wiley’s work focuses solely on young men, when many of the textiles on view were made by women, and, as the catalog informs us, one of the best-known Israelis of Ethiopian descent is a female singer named Hagit Yaso, who won last year’s edition of an Israeli show similar to “American Idol.”

My answer to that, which is the only answer to why any artist does anything, is because he wants to.  Why didn’t de Kooning paint men? Because he didn’t want to. (Has anyone even asked that question?) Are we obligated to be equal-opportunity artists, presenting society as society would prefer? However if it must be discussed, Wiley has explained that his initial impulse came from having seen, in his childhood, portraits in museums of men who didn’t look like him—which could have little to do with painting women, regardless of the fact that….

Part of the answer is that Mr. Wiley has generally painted preening young men, and there is a strong homoerotic element in his work that is glossed over here.

Gasp, Wiley is gay! I don’t know who’s glossing it over, since he’s hardly in the closet. Is it mandatory to discuss in depth an artist’s sexual orientation at every turn?  (Or rather a “gay” artist’s orientation, since the same does not apply to straight artists.) Should the Jewish Museum, in their promotional material, be faulted for not making a bigger deal of it?

And finally….

Just as music critics have complained of hip-hop’s becoming a corporatized global commodity, Mr. Wiley can be accused of using it to neutralize differences and difficulties….And it is those very difficulties that we rely on art to broach.

[This when, a few paragraphs back, she writes, “the show raises some difficult questions.”]

Regardless, I never thought art had a responsibility (to whom?) to broach differences and difficulties. (I’m becoming more and more grateful that I’m an abstract painter.) Further, by highlighting the “disenfranchised” (Schwendener’s word, BTW) in a way that enables them to be seen and empowered as individuals, it would seem Wiley is doing just that. It’s not Wiley who is somehow using hip-hop to “neutralize”—i.e. make it seem as if differences don’t exist. His work celebrates a vibrant global community that does not recognize racial distinctions thereby, quite literally, neutralizing the differences—which can only be a good thing.

Everything Schwendener criticizes Wiley for avoiding, he seems to have provoked her into discussing. In other words, his art has made her think about and explore the very issues she is critiquing him for lacking—by her own criteria, Wiley has succeeded!

It seems that unless black artists approach their subject matter in a thoroughly predictable, heavy-handed and didactic manner, they’re not doing their job, are not “political” enough—and apparently poor Wiley has the double burden of not being gay enough either.

A gay black artist—especially one who gets involved with anything having to do with Israel—just can’t do anything right.

Note: The rumor that Wiley himself does not actually paint his paintings, that they’re farmed out to workers in China, is perpetuated by Schwendener when she says that they look “factory-produced.” In the interest of thoroughness, I called his gallery, who told me that although Wiley does, like many artists, have assistants who may help with the intricate backgrounds, but he alone is responsible for the central figures. Not that I care, one way or the other. They are beautifully painted and the marginally mass-produced look relates to the intention, like images on postage stamps, posters depicting African potentates—or covers of TIME Magazine. More about his process here.

Draw it with your eyes closed....

New York Times, "How to Teach Art in 89 Simple Lessons," March 29, 2012 

My first thought was, this is all about teachers showing off.

You’d never catch me giving assignments like these, because I believe that the most important ingredient in any successful endeavor is INTEREST, and I’ve discovered that students are most interested in what they make up themselves. Therefore if such a thing were to occur in a class of mine, it would be because I encouraged the students to make up the assignments (why waste another opportunity to engage creativity?) and decide among themselves which to pursue.

While entertaining to read, none of the assignments made me want to stop what I was doing and try them—so, were I the student, my demonstration of “freedom and risk-taking” would be not to do them. Also, while they might have been of use in the 70s, in the current climate, where “cool” and wacky ideas are routinely used to bolster insubstantial art, I fear they could send the wrong message. I asked three friends (two teachers and one student) to comment:

Matt Freedman (Penn): It's funny how fast that review went viral. Touched a nerve I guess.  Even before it ran my friend Cathy in Paris sent me the link. Then Friday morning I was having a studio visit and the visitor brought it up, noting that the "make all your clothes into art" assignment would be most unfortunate if you were wearing an outfit you really liked. My initial reaction was like yours, teachers showing off—art school as performance piece. On the other hand, the list of contributing artists contains some really good people and several great teachers I’ve worked with myself, so the project deserves some default respect on sheer talent alone.  Also, I have some skin in the game, since the graduate drawing seminar I teach tiptoes close to assignments that verge on the utterly conceptual. Not to mention that I've always loved the Thek list and used it a lot. Two things, though.  First, as my mother the kindergarten teacher points out, it’s control of the classroom, whether for six-year-olds or grad students, which determines whether learning happens or not. In that sense, the idea of the “school-in-the-book,” though appealing, is the problem, if it suggests just another shortcut to something…let’s call it, for our own amusement “enlightened art making.”  I’ve seen seemingly dopey assignments yield wonderful work and great breakthroughs, and conceptually tight, innovative assignments produce boring, conservative responses. The difference (besides dumb luck!) is how the class is run, and also what particular thing turns the student onto something new.  Breakthroughs usually happen not because of an assignment, but when teacher and student line up perfectly for a moment and something useful is communicated between them.  In Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, a number of artists comment on their best learning moments. They were all, as I recall, about those passing watershed moments as opposed to the assignments they were given. Those I remember working best for me:  an undergraduate TA in a life drawing class showing me how to move my arm loosely, an ancient professor getting down on his hands and knees and cutting out a piece of his office carpeting for me to use in a (failed) casting experiment.  Both events were notably non-intellectual demonstrations of freedom and risk taking. It's a coercive and hierarchical environment, art school, in which we try to teach the very opposite.  The paradox is the problem, the challenge, the game and the reward. More to the point, the best assignments, when you do offer them, offer solvable but challenging problems that are geared toward the student, rather than depersonalized demonstrations of the creativity, progressive thinking and/or sheer cleverness of the teacher. That said, perhaps taking off all my clothes in the middle of my graduate studio would have been a great liberating experience that would have accelerated my development by ten years, or at least ramped up my social life for a moment.  

Mike Glier (Williams): Most of the assignments listed here develop creativity by encouraging students to challenge convention and engage in divergent thinking, and are useful for beginning classes in which students are reluctant to take risks. They’re fun and help to bring a world of possibilities into the classroom. But an equally important part of teaching art is the discussion of the artwork after it is made. Here, critical skills are developed through some very old-fashioned methods, like learning to observe closely, acquiring the language of visual analysis, memorizing the history of art, reading and applying theory, composing logical arguments and perfecting the art of oral presentation. First-rate art education supports invention by inviting the unexpected, the inchoate and the improbable into the tank, but once these slippery, silvery things enter, they’re held in a net of observation, contemplation and analysis to be sorted, then cooked, assembled, garnished and presented with a dash of confidence and a drizzle of doubt. 

Nikolas Freberg (Cooper Union): Generally when I'm assigned prompts as a student, such as the ones mentioned in the article, my first inclination is to jump off the nearest high building. Usually I stop myself because I know that the 4-hour-long critique of my dead body would be way too ironic and obvious in an art school setting where students seem to think that their lives depend upon a project that took the whole of 2 weeks to complete.  Assignments like those mentioned in the article are basically what drive any "conceptually-oriented" art school, the result being that you get ONE kind of student who just happens to be even more irreverent than the prompt itself and may actually succeed in, say, designing an enclosure for Robin Williams made out of Q-tips, and everyone gets a brief moment of "isn't that clever" and then you go get coffee. The reality is that said student doesn't even want to be an artist, thinks that any form of drawing or painting is too obvious, and will probably end up working in construction when their "noise" band fails to go viral.

Keith Haring, Untitled (Exploding Head), 1983

LETTER

What Car Buyers Want

To the Editor:

Re “As Young Lose Interest in Cars, G.M. Turns to MTV for Help” (front page, March 23):

Again, Detroit gets it wrong. Rather than acting on the societal message that cars are no longer seen as fashion accessories, General Motors, by focusing on surface, is trying to entice young consumers into just that.

Instead, the automobile industry should follow Apple, Ikea and Uniqlo, which have married function, form and cost to come up with products that appeal to all age groups.

Forget the outrageous colors, which Apple eschews. What young people need and want — what everyone needs and wants — is an inexpensive, super-efficient car that’s a pleasure to look at and drive, like an iPod on wheels.

CAROL DIEHL
  Housatonic, Mass., March 26, 2012

From the Devil's workshop

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Issac Asimov, from a column in Newsweek (21 January 1980)

When this image went around on Facebook a while ago, it annoyed me; unattributed as it was (you know how I feel about that!), I guessed (no doubt correctly) that it was created by an artist using PhotoShop to mine the cultural divide.

However a friend, who works at the Berkshire Museum, recently sent me a link to an online publication, The Curator, and the essay,  “On the validity of the Vogel collection” by one Sarina Higgins who declares: “I do believe that the Vogel collection is a fraud.” Higgins supports her thesis with shadowy photos of  “a few geometrical lines drawn on paper with colored pencils, a triangle of steel in the corner of the baseboards, a series of pieces of notebook paper with a few drops of watercolor paint” taken with a point-and-shoot camera.

On its “About” page, The Curator denies being a religious publication (which means it is, or there would be no reason to deny it).

Instead, like its parent organization, IAM (International Arts Movement), the publication says it’s geared toward “people of faith” with a desire to create “the world as it ought to be”—a world that clearly does not include the Vogel collection, Marina Abramovic or, by extension, most modern art from Malevich on.

The Curator also explicitly claims “no singular affinity toward ‘highbrow’ art or ‘pop’ culture.”

About the same time, I read “Haven,” a wonderfully subtle short story by Alice Munro in The New Yorker (March 5, 2012), about a teenage girl and her physician uncle, whose antipathy toward classical music causes a breach in the family:

            “Now tell me,” my uncle is saying, addressing me as if nobody else were there, “tell me, do your parents go in for this sort of thing? What I mean is, this kind of music? Concerts and the like? They ever pay money to sit down for a couple of hours and wear their bottoms out listening to something they wouldn’t recognize half a day later? Pay money simply to perpetrate a fraud? You ever know them to do this?”

            I said no, and it was the truth. I had never known them to go to a concert, though they were in favor of concerts in general.

            “See? They’ve got too much sense, your parents. Too much sense to join all these people who are fussing and clapping and carrying on, like it’s just the wonder of the world. You know the kind of people I mean? They’re lying. A load of horse manure. All in the hope of appearing high class.  Or more likely, giving in to their wives’ hope to appear high class. Remember that when you get out into the world, O.K.?

It all makes me think that the differences between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, may be more than political, even a matter of neurology, as some have suggested. Or it could simply be that there are people who thrive on nuance, ambiguity, complexity and paradox, while others are fearful of anything, including art (and possibly democracy), which poses questions to which there are no concrete answers.

I offer no solutions.

Curmudgeon

Sometimes I think it’s my job to be the contrarian, although that hardly applies where Gerhard Richter is concerned. His work and philosophy have long inspired me, so it was a special pleasure to see Corinna Belz’s film, “Gerhard Richter Painting,” which confirmed everything I always wanted to believe about the artist. Belz has great understanding, both visual and intellectual, and strikes just the right note, which films about art hardly ever do. I won’t say more, because I’m most likely reviewing the film elsewhere, except to urge you to see it (even twice, as I did) at Film Forum, where it opens on Wednesday and runs through the 27th.

Also I learned, from watching Richter doing interviews in the film, how to answer impossible questions.  Which of his painting styles does he prefer? “It varies,” he says. What is his response to fame? “It varies.”  So helpful! Now when people ask me how much time I spend in the country or the city, I can say, “It varies.” Which do I enjoy most, painting or writing? “It varies.”

So now for the curmudgeon part—are you sitting down? Prepared for a terrible shock?  Okay, here goes…I am not a fan of Cindy Sherman. This is almost as huge as admitting I liked some of Damien Hirst’s spots, but I have always thought of Sherman’s work not as feminist, but anti-female, even mocking—clichés of women as established by the male world. Unlike the women I care about, her permutations are not warm, nurturing, sympathetic, or even sexual.  Would you choose any of them to be your best friend? I didn’t think so.

I may also be prejudiced because I remember how, just before Sherman made her film stills in the seventies, Eleanor Antin was transforming herself in photographs in ways that were more haunting, funny, varied and complex—as well as more human. Where Antin was clearly on a quest for self-knowledge, Sherman’s portraits come off as unflattering commentary on the aspirations and ways of life of others--especially in this series, which still strikes me as ageist, sexist, and just plain mean. (I’m plagiarizing myself here, as I wrote about this in an earlier post.)

Eleanor Antin, The King, 1972 (image from the Web)

Eleanor Antin, The Angel of Mercy (Florence Nightingale), Myself-1854, 1977 (Image from the Web)

And on, curmudgeonly, to Doug Wheeler’s sleeper show of the year, which had people braving the winter chill, lining up around the block to be admitted into the David Zwirner gallery, five at a time.  Before going further, I want to make it clear that I found the piece admirable, and waited to write about it because I didn’t want to interfere with anyone’s experience of it. If there’s a single form of art that has engaged me to the point of indefatigable research, it's this, “light and space” as it is called, the art of atmospheric environment, as exemplified by the work of Robert Irwin, Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell—as well as Fred Sandback, whose work, though not directly involved with light, engages the viewer in similar ways.

One of the things that impressed me most about Olafur’s famous weather project at the Tate Modern, is how he gave thought to every aspect of the experience, from the pre-publicity and catalogue (neither of which contained images or descriptions of the work, to the length of its run (when asked by the museum to keep it up longer, he refused).  Through my study of his work I took on this hyper-criticality, which has contributed to my campaign against artist’s statements and museum wall text, as they often to serve to direct and limit how work is experienced. So, for instance, while I admire Turrell, I began to see his requirement that viewers remove their shoes and put on Tyvek booties before entering certain installations, as a not only part of the experience, but an unpleasant one—even a form of subjugation on the artist’s part, as they make you look stupid.

I also dislike having to circumvent black curtains or don headphones.

So for me, the Doug Wheeler experience began with Ken Johnson’s rave review in the Times, after which everyone was talking about it, then the happily chatty and anticipatory cue along West 19^th Street, which began forming at least a half hour before the gallery opened. Once being allowed to enter the building, five at a time (throughout we were attended by a bevy of friendly, courteous gallery assistants, each more beautiful than the next), we were ushered into a room to wait our turn, sitting on wooden folding chairs (or in my case, a scarily wobbly shared bench next to the wall) arranged in a square so that we faced each other, as in Quaker meeting.

From there, again five at a time, we were invited leave our bags in a pile, take off our shoes and put on white booties similar to Turrell’s, which folded around our ankles like oversize institutional house slippers.

But then there was the space Wheeler created. With no evidence of floor, ceiling, or walls, it was like being suspended in air. When we went in, the slowly changing light was white. I tiptoed as far as I could go, stopping, as instructed, when the floor sloped up, and stood immersed, as if by fog.

My friend, Roberto, remarked that it was like being in heaven.

Photo: David Zwirner Gallery

Heaven, yes, but with refugees from an insane asylum, as everyone was moving slowly and their booties caused them to shuffle. The effect of the lighting was so much like that of seamless photography background paper that everyone looked like part of a fashion shoot, and thus highlighted became inadvertent performers.

Roberto and I became fascinated with a young woman in our midst who was shuffling about in a particularly distracted way. Everything about her was slack—her mouth hung slightly open, rumpled clothing fell loosely over her heavy frame, and her hair looked as if she just gotten out of bed—in marked contrast to the art students she came with and the fashionable gallerinas. Roberto dubbed her Sloppy Girl. “Meds,” he whispered to me. Who was she? What was she doing there? Was she going to be okay?

Ultimately Sloppy Girl is what we remember and still talk about—not, perhaps what the artist intended.

(Also note that the people in the publicity shot above, courtesy of the gallery, are NOT wearing booties.)

Statements and interviews....

In the interest of raising the bar on artists statements, I've decided to post all I come across that fulfill my basic parameters, which you will remember are:

An artist’s statement should be fun to read, and shed no light whatsoever on the intention, content, or experience of the work.

Therefore this from Barbara Barg, who I know from the poetry world:

Barg was the first being born out of formless chaos. For billions of years, Barg grew in a cosmic egg, working ceaselessly to create order by separating her clear yang from her turbid yin. The clear became the egg white, the turbid the yolk. 

After incubating for billions of years, Barg hatched from the egg and laid down to rest. Her breath became the wind, her voice the thunder. Her left eye became the sun, her right eye the moon. Her limbs and trunk became the mountain ranges. Her blood became the rivers, her flesh the fertile soil. Her hair became the stars and the Milky Way, her fur the trees and forests. Her teeth and bones became metals and minerals. The marrow of her bones became jade and pearls. Her sweat became the rain and the dew. And when the wind blew, the fleas on her fur became fish and animals. Then, feeling well-rested, she got up and wrote some poems.

So now that we’ve gotten artist’s statements out of the way, let me vent a bit on another prose genre—the interview—which I’ve always considered a low form of journalism. Andy Warhol made interviews famous, but he loved vacuity, and that’s fine when one celeb is asking questions of another and no one is pretending to be a writer or even serious. In art magazines, however, interviews often come across as a legitimized excuse for the writer to get out of actually writing something, or even doing their homework (“Where did you grow up?”), with little more insight than we’d get from a press release. I remember starting to read one interview with an artist whose work I was not familiar with, where the first question was, “How does it feel to be back in New York?” Needless to say, I turned the page.

However I love being proved wrong. Recently I read an interview that showed me that the format can be used to generate more insight than a straight article ever could. Coincidentally it happens to be by son, Matt, with David Lynch—in Interview magazine.

Me and them

Facebook friend Todd Kelly shared this link, which should be “required reading” (ha-ha, it’s about anti-authoritarianism) for everyone: Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill.

Reading it makes me grateful that I wasn’t born into the current culture, where the child I was would not survive. Nor, probably, would Steve Jobs—or at least that’s the impression I get from reading his biography.

And I like the term—“anti-authoritarian”—better than being called, as I was, a “problem,” and definitely an “underachiever.” This from the memoir I will most likely never publish:

School and I did not get along. After I learned to read I had absolutely no use for it. I had to go, so I did, but it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was like watching a play, but one that lasted far too long and wasn’t all that entertaining; the characters were predictable and there was no action. Only rarely, did anything happen, like the day Dick Santee’s garter snake collection escaped from his shirt pockets, or when the paraffin we were melting with crayons to make Christmas candles erupted into a pillar of flame, leaving a permanent red stain on the bulletin board. I was able to get by with a minimum of effort because, until sixth grade, we had hardly any homework. Only the Catholic kids who went to St. Joe’s had homework. I’d see them getting off the bus in the afternoons, wearing drab uniforms and dragging beat-up brown leather briefcases the size of small suitcases that caused them to walk lopsided, and when I found out what the briefcases were for, I began to think my mother might have a point about Catholicism after all.

In sixth grade, however, our teacher, Mr. Hampton, known as “Hamp,” made it his mission to see that I paid attention, and I resented his intrusion into my personal space. As far as I was concerned, staring out the window, doodling in my note pad, and slouching down in my seat to read the book I had hidden in the slot in the desk, were boring, but not nearly as boring as the major exports of Latvia, or whatever it was they were studying. I don’t know because I wasn’t there.

Actually one day Hamp got so mad at me for reading that he grabbed my book and threw it against the blackboard.

I really only like school when I’m teaching, which has become more problematic as I don’t have a degree (having taught four years in an accredited undergraduate institution and ten years in an accredited graduate institution are no longer acceptable credentials).  And while I know plenty of people who have managed to maintain their intellectual and personal freedom while existing within the system, in some cases even gaming the system so that it works for them, it does seem strange that we would require of potential innovators (because that’s what artists are) and those who teach them, proof of their ability to jump through authoritarian hoops. 

Image by Banksy, of course.

Decisions, decisions

James Rosenquist, I Love You with My Ford, 1961. Oil on canvas, 6 feet 10 3/4 inches x 7 feet 9 1/2 inches. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York.

A friend, who had just sold some work, called from Europe the other day to ask me which mind-bogglingly expensive camera she should buy. She’s not a photographer, per se, but a conceptual artist who uses photography, and the question was—digital or analog? You may be wondering why she’d seek advice from me, who knows squat about photography, but she knew that wouldn’t keep me from having an opinion—which, of course, I did. I asked her to describe the qualities of each, and when she was finished, told her unequivocally that she should buy the analog Hasselblad. It was easy. Describing the Hasselblad she was animated, talking about dense blacks and whites, crispness, and Ansel Adams; when it came to digital not only was her voice flat, she even said, “I hate digital images.” But, she told me, everyone else—artists and professional photographers alike—had weighed in on the side of digital, saying that printing would be expensive and difficult with analog, and besides, no one uses it anymore. “So what?” I said, “It’s clear you want the Hasselblad, and you can only make great art if you love your instrument and are excited about what you can do with it.”

Meanwhile another friend, a student at a high-profile art college, reports being pushed toward installation, video, and performance, when all he wants to do is paint.

The problem with gearing everything toward what’s hot, what’s happening NOW, is that it’s NOW—when, hopefully, we’re making the art of the future. And while we can’t predict the future, we do know one thing: it won’t be anything like NOW.

So what do we have to go on? Fortunately, we’ve been created with the perfect internal barometer: our gut. Are we excited? Are we not excited? It will always tell us—unless, of course, we’ve been programmed to let our heads overrule its messages.

I interviewed James Rosenquist many years ago, who told me that when he was coming up it was all about Abstract Expressionism, and he could see that by the time he got good at it, it would be over. So he turned to what he knew best: sign painting. Was anyone else doing sign painting? No. Did he have any idea that anyone would be interested? No. But he was, and that was key.

Well, right now, THE THING is information-based art. Coupled with a sneering disdain for the visual, it’s been THE THING with curators and academicians for many years—at least as pervasive as AbEx was in Rosenquist’s student days. And while I don’t know that the next THING will be painting or analog photography, I don’t know that it won’t be, either.

However I DO know that in the hands of my two friends, painting and analog photography won't look anything like they did back in the day.

***

Today I got an email from my friend with the subject “No words.” The message:

Got it yesterday as planned!

She also send the link to this, from 2001, which I’d never seen, a French production by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson:

Another statement about statements

I’ve said before that when I'm king, the first thing I’ll do is abolish artist’s statements—which will make me very popular in the kingdom, as I’ve never met anyone who likes them. What I want to know is, how does something no one likes continue not only to persist, but become increasingly unintelligible and ridiculous? The form is only about 15 years old, and how it evolved and took root in the culture would be a (semi) interesting study.

However since I’m not king yet, and schools, galleries, and curators seem to require them (in fact graduate students complain that their teachers often put more emphasis on the quality of the statement than the artwork) I am pleased to provide a formula that’s been very successful for the artist I stole it from, and you can then use the time you would have spent on your statement to work in the studio:

My work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, -----------, and social practice. After leaving behind my formal training as a ---------- and relocating to ----------- (note: you MUST relocate. Jesus couldn’t work miracles in his hometown either) I have created a diverse body of artwork that explores urbanity, spatial justice, and land-based poetics. Employing a broad range of media from ------ to ------ to ------ these works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence.  I reconfigure time, making reference to the concept of --------, originating from the work of Charles Baudelaire and developed by Walter Benjamin (you may substitute Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard or Lacan for either of these).  Cyclical repetition and return also inform the character of my movements and mythology, contrasting geological and technological time through land-based and social practices that examine individual memory and collective mythology.

Notice that the artist left out a few essential terms, such as “gender,” “social identity,” and “the body.” So that all artist’s statements from now on don’t look exactly alike (you don’t want to be accused of plagiarism, not that anyone would notice) it’s your job to insert them in a creative way; just don’t spend more than five minutes doing it.

***

Of course after I wrote this, I realized that eliminating any kind of written accompaniment to an artwork would restrict creativity unduly, so I’ve decided to modify my ruling to allow statements if they fulfill the following requirements:

Are fun to read.


Shed no light whatsoever on the meaning and experience of, or impetus for, the artwork.


I liked my friend, Colin Brant's statement for his 2011 exhibition at the Bennington Museum, where he wrote:

My approach is one in which reverence and skepticism coexist naturally. I like to imagine the possibility of a world in which men and women in their underwear read poetry by a reflecting pool, looked on by deer and birds.

If Colin's paintings don’t fit the description of “land-based poetics,” I don’t know what does. But as for "reconfiguring time," well, only God can do that.

Colin Brant

Colin Brant

CAN ART SURVIVE THE ART MARKET?

This is the question I’ll be putting to the panel I'm moderating on The State of Contemporary Art, Wednesday at the National Academy Museum (6:30 p.m., 1083 Fifth Avenue @ 89^th Street). 

Panelists:

Michael Hall, Director of Exhibitor Relations for The Armory Show

Paul Laster, Blog Editor of Artspace.com, editor of Artkrush.com, a contributing editor at Flavorpill.com and Art Asia Pacific, and a contributing writer at Time Out New York and Art in America.

Rachel Wolff, freelance art writer, editor, and critic, and contributor to New York Magazine.

Just as we've gone from being “citizens” to “consumers” and “patients” to “clients,” the “art world” has turned into the “art market” and the playground of the 1%. Globalization, chain galleries and ever-expanding museums, an excess of art fairs, “gallerists” touting artists like hedge funds, and art schools churning out MFAs whose only function seems to be teaching more MFAs, are all part of the "corporate-ization" and institutionalization of the art world. So the question is, can art sustain itself as the true non-verbal expression of our times, something that takes us to a higher plane, increases our aesthetic awareness, and serves, as Tolstoy said, "to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations"-- when money is the primary concern?


Hope to see you there!

Spot on, spot off

Out, damned spot! – Lady Macbeth

I was walking along 24^th Street in the bitter wind, wondering if it was necessary to write any more about Damien Hirst’s blasted spots, and if I really needed to see even one of the shows. But there I was at Gagosian’s door, and it seemed silly not to go in, so I did and….a terrible thing happened. Are you ready? I’m about to admit something that could ruin my credibility forever: I liked them. Okay, to be completely candid, I didn’t just like them, I loved them. Especially the humungous gallery with the big, big spots and the smaller room with the paintings where the spots are formed into vibrating circles. The color, movement, and exuberance reminded me of Matisse and made me want to dance (by now you’re wondering, what is she taking, and where can I get some?). It was such a relief to have an experience of art that wasn’t complicated by a lot of tacked-on personal or intellectual bullshit, but was simply happy. Especially since I’d just come from the Bill Jensen painting show at Cheim & Read, which was over-the-top depressing. The mantra in the art world seems to be “if you can’t make it good, make it grim.” And I thought how, in the current context, the most radical thing an artist can do is create art that causes to people feel good, that makes them, as Tolstoy said, “love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.“ The art world seems to equate happy with sappy. And there’s a reason for this – happy art is extremely hard to make, which is why hardly anyone even attempts it. But here it was, in the Gagosian gallery of all places, suddenly transformed into  a joyous, celebratory oasis in the middle of cold, heartless Chelsea.

The next day I visited the Madison Avenue permutation. To get there I had to walk past a shop selling Hirst "spot" effluvia, whose giant windows looking onto the street revealed a lone, rather dazed-looking customer. It reminded me of those stores that used to be ubiquitous on Madison and in SoHo (do they still exist?) that specialized in knock-off Dali, Chagall, Miro, and Picasso prints. And upstairs, well, it was a total bore. I trudged from room to room and floor to floor, marveling at the ridiculousness of the over-abundance of guards, until I realized that this was one of those situations that could cause someone not to want to steal the things, God knows, but I could see how, in that compressed, airless environment with all that repetition, a person—maybe even me—could go berserk and act out. Happily, I was able to contain myself. Back on the street the chilly breeze was refreshing, and I walked toward the subway thinking, what a load of crap! I hate those fuckin’ spots!

Why college is expensive

Cartoon: John Fewings

Nothing I’d heard about the spiraling cost of higher education (127% from 1980 to 2000) made sense until a friend, whose daughter is in journalism school, told me she was studying statistics at American colleges and universities and found an enormous increase in administrative jobs with salaries much higher than those of faculty, whose numbers are declining—including the small, private liberal arts college where I used to teach (administrative salaries over $100,000, faculty salaries considerably less). Then today, when I was catching up on old New Yorkers—print version, in the bathtub, the biggest downside of digital readers being that they’re not yet waterproof—I found this letter to the editor (December 19 & 26, 2011):

James Surowiecki, in his commentary on student-loan debt, does not identify an important source of growth in college costs (The Financial Page, November 21^st). Coincident with only a modest increase in enrollment in the past decade is the meteoric rise of a professional university administrative class. One study found that between 1993 and 2007, while enrollment at universities increased by fifteen per cent, the number of administrators per hundred students grew by thirty-nine per cent. This vast layer of university administrators has changed the composition and culture of the American university. Increasingly, they are private-sector outsiders who are more willing to undermine the missions of research and teaching in order to preserve the bottom line. A notably egregious case is the recent shuttering of the theatre department and several language programs at cash-strapped SUNY Albany under the leadership of its president, George Philip, a former investment-fund manager. Bubble or no, universities are building an expensive management structure around an academic core that’s becoming more and more hollow. Any effort to reduce college costs must restore leaner administrations, representative of the faculty and staff who carry out the institutions mission.

Ryan Walker

Lexington, Ky.

Walker’s source is no doubt the Aol News/HuffPost article, by Matthew Ladner of the Goldwater Institute, which provided this graphic:

This article about Obama’s plan to control college debt states that student debt now exceeds credit card debt. Very little I’ve read, however, mentions administrative “bloat” as a contributing factor. Student debt reduces the opportunities for entrepreneurship and hobbles the economy, while the narrowing of college choices makes for stunted cultural, scientific and intellectual growth. How this can be controlled, I have no idea, but it’s time we got on it.  

What's youth got to do with it?

Louise Bourgeois, Fugue, 2003
Screenprint, 30 cm x 42 cm

On a Facebook friend’s wall the other day:

I have erased a black cloud eating my stomach with an unknown weight. I am young, 34, but I am not young within the context of New York. The black cloud is from the perception of myself I feel from others. There is this, what I would, call "petit bourgeois" view of success that runs through the art world. A false belief art is a career that can be measured by degrees of success that correspond to age. I have been around art long enough to know in reality most artists do nothing until their thirties or later. But I face day to day the idea I am too old.

My comment: “If this even crosses your mind, it indicates that you're looking outside yourself for validation. The best art is made by people who don't care what others think.”

Even though he’s part of the OWS movement that’s causing such great change so quickly, he’s stuck in the assumption that the art world and its values are always going to stay the same. Again, we can’t predict! The only thing we know for sure about the future is that it will be different. And isn’t that fun? Wouldn’t it be boring if it stayed the same, if we knew exactly what was going to happen? Therefore, since the art world has been predicated for two or three decades on the coming of The Next Big Thing, a concept that has everything to do with money and speculation, perhaps once we get off our current financial merry-go-round, it will come to reflect more meaningful values.

I recently saw the first one-person show in NY of another artist, who happens to be around the same age. He is tense with ambition; his desire and extreme need are palpable, evident in his every word and gesture—and it would seem that he’s done everything right. A deft marriage of painting and sculpture, the work is competently executed around a concept that comes off as smart and cool when described in a press release. Not too big, not too small, perfect for people who want contemporary art on their walls that’s not threatening, it lacks only one ingredient: soul. 

I know people in the art world who, while not particularly talented, attractive, smart, or even nice, have “made it” through sheer persistence. I could also point out some who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, whose ideas merged with those of an important exhibition or Whitney Biennial, which set them on a path for life. Unfortunately, it is not a meritocracy. But then there are those, like Louise Bourgeois, whose work was of such value that it couldn’t be ignored, regardless of her age, gender, and prickly personality.

For true success to happen, an artist has to make art that’s not only exceptional, but is a reflection of the needs and desires of his time. The first is more or less in our control; the second, as adroitly described in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, is not. The reason you can’t pay heed to what others are thinking, doing, or making, is that they’re stuck in the present, while you’re creating art for the future.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 20 years, when our FB friend has reached the ripe old age of 54, everyone will be wanting art that enhances their lives, takes them to a higher place, the kind of work that, in most cases, only a mature artist can do. And he’ll be the right person for the right moment, glad he didn’t burn out at 34.