In Terms Of

Author: Christopher Howard

  • The Money Pit

    Collecting the “Uncollectible”: Earth and Site-Specific Sculpture
    Thursday, May 23, 2019
    Center for the History of Collecting, Frick Art Reference Library, Frick Collection, New York

    In November 1973, Walter De Maria wrote to his former dealer, Virginia Dwan, seeking funds to create a second, larger version of 35-Pole Lightning Field, a work of Land art that he had erected near Flagstaff, Arizona, earlier that year with Dwan’s financing but later dismantled. During her keynote lecture at “Collecting the ‘Uncollectible’: Earth and Site-Specific Sculpture,” a half-day symposium held at the Frick Collection, New York, on May 23, art historian Suzaan Boettger quoted from the letter: “I have come to realize that the land or earth movement as a whole is best advanced through fewer major statements rather than a profusion of smaller ones.”

    Dwan turned De Maria down, but he eventually found another patron—the Dia Art Foundation—for The Lightning Field (1977), his monumental artwork in the western New Mexico desert. The artist also got his wish. As Kirsten Swenson noted in a 2012 essay in Art in America, any survey of twentieth-century American art will likely represent the movement with the same set of works: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), and De Maria’s The Lightning Field, a triumvirate of “major statements” that have become synonymous with Land art as a whole. The symposium, which addressed the commissioning, collecting, and maintenance of large-scale outdoor sculpture, did not stray far from De Maria’s conceit, reducing the wide-ranging Land art movement to a few consequential practitioners and patrons.

    Dia, which now administers two of these three sites (the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, oversees Double Negative), as well as other monumental works like Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), located in the Great Basin Desert in Utah, and De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), was prominently represented at the symposium, reflecting the institution’s success in positioning itself as virtually synonymous with Land art and its administration. Aside from Boettger and collector Jarl Mohn, all of the speakers had direct ties to Dia: participants included the foundation’s director, Jessica Morgan; two Dia curators, Alexis Lowry and Kelly Kivland; and board chair emeritus Leonard Riggio. Another participant, curator James Meyer of the National Gallery of Art, recently served as Dia’s deputy director and chief curator. The lone artist speaker, Michelle Stuart, currently has a work—Sayreville Strata Quartet (1976), a set of monochromes made by breaking apart rocks from an abandoned quarry and vigorously rubbing the sediment onto muslin-backed paper—on long-term view at Dia:Beacon.

    Since the late 1960s, the conventional narrative around Earthworks has been that they are difficult to access and experience in person because of their remote locations, and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to sell. Artists offered documentary materials for gallery display—maps, written descriptions, photographs—but these were considered poor substitutes for actual work. This notion went largely unchallenged during the symposium: The Earthwork was ordinarily bound to its place, Meyer said during his talk. “It was unmovable and therefore unexchangeable. It could not take on what Marx called exchange-value—it couldn’t be moved around, bought and sold.”

    However, the land on which an Earthwork is situated can be sold in a real-estate transaction. Because Meyer and his fellow symposium participants focused narrowly on access and patronage, they sidestepped thornier issues of control. Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), for instance, constructed in a sand quarry in the Netherlands as part of an outdoor sculpture exhibition called Sonsbeek ’71, remains in private hands. The quarry’s owner, Gerard de Boer, whose father agreed to host (and pay for) the work nearly fifty years ago, told the New York Times in 2017 that he wants to sell the business but also find a custodian for the artwork. The buyer of one may not be interested in the other.

    Other works have even more complex ownership structures. Smithson’s estate gifted Spiral Jetty to Dia in 1999 but retains the copyright to the work. Neither institution owns the physical land, which the foundation leases from the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands. Meanwhile, Heizer executed his series Nine Nevada Depressions (1968) on government property near the Nevada-California border. Since Heizer created the works without permission, could he have been prosecuted for trespassing and vandalism? Do the “depressions” belong to the heirs of collector Robert Scull, who financed them, or, since federal land is publicly owned, to all Americans?

    If their works couldn’t be easily sold, how did Land artists make a living? Someone had to fork over cash for the machinery and materials necessary to create these works. Two names came up repeatedly: Virginia Dwan, who was scheduled to speak at the symposium but ultimately didn’t appear, and Scull, who died in 1985. Whereas Dwan’s position as an independently wealthy gallery owner enabled her artists to operate on a grand scale, Smithson’s next dealer, John Weber, was a man of lesser means who, in Boettger’s words, “did not give grubstakes for Earthworks.” Though none of the speakers at “Collecting the ‘Uncollectible’” admitted it, their presentations clearly privileged subsidized, completed works over proposals. Artists unaffiliated with Dwan or Scull—such as Dennis Oppenheim, Will Insley, and Terry Fugate-Wilcox, among others—devised plans and built scale models for outdoor sculptures that, due to a lack of funding, were never fully realized.

    During her conversation with Dia curator Kelly Kivland, Michelle Stuart said that although her German dealer connected her with collectors, she scraped by on public grants and private fellowships throughout the 1970s. She depended on voluntary labor to complete Niagara Gorge Path Relocated (1975) for Artpark in upstate New York and worked with a miniscule $2,000 budget to complete Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns (1979) in Oregon. In contrast, better-known male artists encountered fewer restrictions and reaped larger rewards. Heizer has worked on City, a massive installation in the Nevada desert, for forty-seven years, accepting millions of dollars from collectors and institutions, including Dia. Boettger noted that James Turrell’s Roden Crater is a “cash cow” that, since the mid-1970s, “has received funding from the NEA, every major foundation, [and] many private collectors such as Count Panza.” Kanye West gave $10 million to Turrell last December. Despite this lavish support, both City and Roden Crater remain unfinished.

    Even when artists managed to find sufficient funding to execute their plans, these works require ongoing maintenance, as conservator Rosa Lowinger made clear when describing her firm’s efforts to preserve concrete boxes by Donald Judd in Marfa, public sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein and Ann Norton in Miami, and Holt’s Sun Tunnels. Whereas Holt consulted a team of experts in various fields (including astronomy, construction, and engineering) when planning her work, other artists were less concerned with longevity, making efforts to preserve them more complicated. Sabato “Simon” Rodia, for instance, erected his Watts Towers between 1921 and the mid-1950s idiosyncratically, with no central plan or style. The City of Los Angeles now owns the work and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is its steward. “They have a permanent team onsite,” Lowinger said, “just to do constant maintenance” on a work that cannot be brought “to a state of equilibrium.”

    Many works of Land art, such as Stuart’s Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns, were never intended to last. For others one must ask: when does the perpetual cost of care exceed an artwork’s value? In other words, when does an Earthwork become a money pit? Though patrons like Dwan and Scull helped artists to realize ambitious projects, Land art also encompassed many other smaller-scale gestures that lasted for hours or days, not for decades. Because the symposium focused so narrowly on these Dia-approved figures, it felt more like a consolidation of the foundation’s influence over the movement’s history than a diligent exploration of collecting difficult art.

    In Terms Of count: 10.

    Source

    This review was originally published by Art in America on June 28, 2019.

    Read

    Andy Battaglia, “‘The Story of Our Civilization’: Land Art Symposium Explores Earthy Tales of ‘Uncollectibility,’” ARTnews, May 29, 2019.

    Brian Boucher, “‘We Shouldn’t Own These Things’: Five Takeaways from a Landmark Conference on Collecting Land Art,” Artnet News, May 27, 2019.

    Scott Indrisek, “The Market for Land Art Challenges Us to Think about Collecting Differently,” Artsy, June 20, 2019.

    Watch

    The Frick Collection has posted video from the symposium.

  • Make American Art Great Again

    “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art” with James Little
    Wednesday, November 15, 2017
    Lunchtime Lecture Series, Art Students League, Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, New York

    James Little (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The audience gathered in the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery of the Art Students League, a midtown Manhattan art school founded in 1875, was mostly middle-aged folks and senior citizens, with a scattering of younger people who were probably students. They arrived to see and hear James Little, an abstract painter and professor, give a lunchtime talk. I was unaware of him prior to the event—I did not know if he was a critic, an artist, or some other art professional before showing up. Born in Tennessee in 1952, Little earned his BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art in 1974 and two years later received an MFA from Syracuse University. June Kelly Gallery has shown his work since the late 1980s.

    Today’s wordily titled topic, “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art,” felt like a time warp—meaning Little’s complaint was decades old. He characterized the current situation of contemporary art critics as a decline of quality that he likened to an “unedited book.” Critical debate, he claimed, has diminished since Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), Hilton Kramer (1928–2012), and Robert Hughes (1938–2012) were actively writing. An attitude of confusion was manifest in the most recent Whitney Biennial, he said, which included a 2016 artwork by Dana Schutz, whom he referred to as “Schultz,” that caused a controversy. Protesters accused Schutz, a white woman, of playing around with—and profiting from—the suffering of African Americans. “There was a big uproar about the fact that she did a painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket,” Little said. “The whole time, nobody said anything about the quality of the work. It was never mentioned…. What I recognized was that the critics weren’t stepping up, the artists weren’t stepping up, and we were just accepting this, accepting what they were feeding us, with no debate, with no criticism.” Little’s speaking style avoided complete sentences or thoughts. The supporting arguments behind his statements lacked substance.

    Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016, oil on canvas, 39 x 53 in. (artwork © Dana Schutz)

    I was puzzled and wondered how much reading Little had done on the controversy. Coco Fusco avoided the topic of quality in a Hyperallergic essay, focusing instead on censorship. Calvin Tomkins, though, noted the “deftly brushed colors at the top” of the painting in his New Yorker profile last April. Elsewhere in the long read Tomkins wrote, “The horror is conveyed in painterly ways that, to me, make it seem more tragic than the photograph, because the viewer is drawn in, not repelled.” A New Republic piece by Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye compared the painting’s formalism with its subject matter; it also contextualized Open Casket within Schutz’s oeuvre, noting the artist is not known for her solemnity. These three examples are the first ones I read while writing this review. If I had followed up with dozens more articles on the subject, I’d surely uncover further discussion of the painting’s formal qualities. Little declared that criticism is essential, that it improves art, provides direction for artists, and even offers them something to resist. Criticism can only do these things if a person reads it, which Little seems not to have done. I wondered if he actually saw Schutz’s painting in person instead of online.

    Chris Ofili’s painting Holy Virgin Mary (1996), in the traveling exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, provoked New York’s mayor Rudolph Giuliani to call for censorship and defunding. “Nobody talked about the quality of that painting,” Little exclaimed. “Nobody said whether it was a good painting or a bad painting. Or if it was despicable. They didn’t say that. He made the guy famous. And that’s my point.” Later during the Q&A, Little agreed with an audience member that if Schutz had the skills, fewer people would have complained. “Dana Schultz was one of shock value. And she got it. She was in the right place to get shock value, and she got it in the Whitney. If she was a better painter, it could have been different. If it had been something, a personal experience of hers, it could have been different.”

    The matter of a white woman painting a lynched black boy had little to do with the work. For Little, closeness to the subject matter is important. That an artist needs to experience his or her subject matter firsthand is an odd stance to take, considering that few painters in the Italian Renaissance witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ or the beheading of John the Baptist. Maybe Little meant that an artist depicting current or recent events should bear witness to them, implicating an early text-based work by the artist Glenn Ligon, who riffed on the “I am a man” posters created in the wake of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, which Little lived through as a teenager—though his recollection of basic facts of the event were faulty in several important ways. Nevertheless, Little was there but the appropriator was not, and therefore Ligon trivialized the situation.

    Edouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, probably 1864, oil on canvas, 29 7/8 x 60 3/8 in. (artwork in the public domain)

    Little paired a slide of Open Casket with a work by Mary Cassatt—the first in a series of comparisons of art influenced by pop culture, the media, consumerism, and novelty (which was bad) with art connected to tradition (definitely a good thing). Contrasted here next were Paul Cézanne’s apples and Carl Andre’s bricks, then Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Édouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador (1864). Little showed an installation of rocks by Joseph Beuys called The End of the Twentieth Century (1983–85) and a painting from Claude Monet’s Haystacks series (1890–91). Little wondered how we got from one to the other without any critical debate, positive or negative. Once again, I was perplexed about this alleged dearth of debate. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written on the evolution modern art. Bringing this specific painting by Manet was confusing. The artist had painted a bull in the picture, but critics wrote that it looked like a rat. Manet cut down the canvas and saved only the bullfighter. Does Little support critics having the power to force an artist drastically alter even a finished and exhibited painting?

    Little periodically read passages from the writings of Greenberg, Kramer, and Hughes—critics whom the art world generally recognizes as having conservative views. The quotes were meant to buttress the artist’s “I am not a Duchampian” stance. Fair enough. Not every artist should embrace the readymade. Little further articulated his position: “I don’t think idea is enough to constitute art. I think art has to have vision, content—emotive content. It has to serve a purpose to humanity. It’s essential for our spiritual and mental health.” For Little, Andre is minor art, and “minor art is not major art.” Minor art that proliferates today is evidence of a cultural decline. “When art gets better, everything else gets better.” In other words, the relationship of art to life is a matter of trickle-up economics.

    Jacob Lawrence, panel 35 of The Migration Series: They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers, 1940–41, casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. (artwork © Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation)

    Little said he felt nothing upon seeing Duchamp’s urinal or Beuys’s Felt Suit in a museum, but he marveled at Manet’s fallen bullfighter. “I had an aesthetic experience,” he said of his episode. “What I mean by aesthetic experience is the experience that you have when you see a great piece of art. It’s a life-changing thing.” Little’s definition of the aesthetic experience was wholly subjective, even tautological. You not only know it when you see it, but it’s completely explains itself. “Rembrandt is Rembrandt” was what Little stated to demonstrate the self-evidence of greatness. Art “has to offer something,” he continued. “It has to enrich my life and my experience in order for it to be art. It has to give me something I didn’t have in the first place. It has to take me further along in this journey.”

    The three photographs comprising Ai Weiwei’s action Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) fail to meet his criteria for art, but paintings in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1941) do. Lawrence’s paintings speak for themselves as art, Little said, through a connection to the past, their color and composition, and their narrative. “An idea alone does not create an aesthetic experience,” Little reiterated. “An idea alone does not create art.” Little was agog at why Ai would drop a two-thousand-year-old Chinese vase, when a quick Google search would have turned up the answer. Sometimes an artwork doesn’t reveal itself immediately. Don’t we check the museum wall label to see who the subject of a portrait is? Does the iconography of ancient sculpture of Egypt or the Americas reveal itself to a nonspecialist? It needs interpretation.

    Cady Noland, Industry Park, 1991, zinc-plated steel chain link fence, 100¼ x 216 x 3 in. (artwork © Cady Noland; photographer unknown)

    I sympathize with Little’s disbelief that a destructive act can be creative. I agree that rigorous formal training is a necessary precursor for a certain kind of artist—but not all artists. What puzzles me is how Little started the lecture by lamenting critical discourse, but then began condemning art he doesn’t like and pleading for a return to reason. I understood where he was coming from but failed to grasp a coherent argument. A photograph of Cady Noland’s Industry Park (1991), which consists of an unaltered chain-linked fence displayed in a gallery, was projected onto the screen beside him. People don’t see their lives improved by this art, he said. Art needs rigor to make. “We can no longer allow for the public to feed us stuff that we don’t understand, or don’t really matter to us in our daily lives.” Description, novelty, and consumerism has infiltrated criticism, and Little finds the writing of Robert C. Morgan, Karen Wilkin, Mario Naves, and James Panero to alleviate this. Is it because they praise art he likes and denounce art he hates?

    A chain-linked fence does not reach the masses, Little remarked during the Q&A. Noland’s work does not provide an aesthetic experience. It’s only utilitarian. The Art Students League has provided traditional artistic training for decades, he reminded the audience, educating Jackson Pollock, Louis Nevelson, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. “We can’t throw this [tradition] out the window, you know, because somebody decides they want to go out here and take a chain-linked fence and put it up in the Museum of Modern Art. And we look at it like it’s some, you know, revelation. No, it’s not a revelation! That’s what I’m saying! I’m gonna go get me a chain-linked fence when I leave here, and I’m gonna put it in my backyard. Is there any difference? Well maybe it’s Earth art.” Little has seen art exhibitions of trash swept into a corner—a clichéd insult that is ironically based on real life—and a room full of grocery carts. (Could the latter show be Josh Kline’s recent solo outing at 47 Canal?) Little admitted he was a conservative formalist, which he confidently understands as meaning “I know what I’m doing.” He obviously demands high craft and skill from artists, who make their work by hand, with a vision, and a sense of history. Further, Little feels he belongs more to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to the twenty-first. He does not make art for himself but rather is concerned what others think and feel about it, including his fellow artists.

    An audience member speaks during the Q&A (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the Q&A an audience member asked about the connection between Rembrandt and Pollock. Thomas Hart Benton, Little replied, served as the lineage of formal training, which includes studying classical art and knowing the figure. “Where [Pollock] took it was another place.” Pollock had “developed a relationship with the medium” of paint and expressed himself through paint. Rembrandt was connected to Titian, El Greco, and Leonardo. “Look, if you gonna built a house, would you build it without a foundation? I guess not.” Someone else argued that Duchamp and Beuys attempted a dialogue with the past. “What you just said is right on,” replied Little. “They were trying to do that. I’m saying that they didn’t do it…. The others, they weren’t trying to do it—they did it.” Little returned to Beuys’s Felt Suit. “When I walk past this suit, at the Walker Art Center, it did not do anything for me. That’s just the way it is. It just didn’t do anything for me.” The work presented a conundrum. “Why is this here?” he wondered. “Why is there not an outcry against this art? Critics have failed us. I pray for another Clement Greenberg, and Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes. I pray for it because we don’t get that.” Little contented that we have failed to uphold standards. That “we” includes artists, scholars, curators, museum professionals, and the public. Little was not surprised that art mocking middle-class values has found an audience among the wealthy elite who fund art museums and serve on their boards. One attendee remarked, “Whose interest does that serve?” The lecture thankfully ended before a discussion of collecting practices began.

    Earlier this year Bomb interviewed Little for the magazine’s Oral History Project. “His paintings are guided by intuitive responses to form, color, and feeling,” LeRonn P. Brooks wrote in his introduction to the piece. “This approach is not overly calculated, though its complexity may suggest so.” Little was interviewed by the Brooklyn Rail in 2009 and profiled by ARTnews in 2011. In the latter, he described his process in detail, describing how he applies layers of paint (made from powdered pigment and mixed with varnish and beeswax) to his surfaces to produce a high sheen. Though I disagree with most of what he said, Little’s views did not put me off. In fact, I am curious to see his paintings in person, to understand why he believes the things he does and how his vision for art manifests itself in his own production. I don’t wish to persuade him of accepting the value of Duchamp, Beuys, and Noland. How he feels about his own art is of greater interest and importance.

    In Terms Of count: coming soon.

  • Using Fair Use

    Putting the Fair Use Code to Work: Case Studies from Year One
    Friday, February 5, 2016
    Committee on Intellectual Property
    104th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Marriott Wardman Park, Delaware Suite B, Washington, DC

    Under my capacity as managing editor for the College Art Association, I live-tweeted a session at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC. It was the first time I had attempted to write about an event as it was taking place. Sponsored by CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, the session addressed how the organization’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, published in February 2015, has been used by artists, publishers, and museum administrators.

    The names of the speakers, their affiliations, and the titles of their presentations were:

    • Betty Leigh Hutcheson, Director of Publications, College Art Association, “Contract Changes at CAA”
    • Patricia J. Fidler, Publisher, Art and Architecture, Yale University Press, “New Fair Use Guidelines for Art and Architecture Books at Yale University Press”
    • Rebekah Modrak, Associate Professor, Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, “Re-Made Co.: Meeting Legal and Publishing Challenges with Help from CAA’s Code”
    • Joseph N. Newland, Director of Publishing, Menil Collection, Houston, “One Museum’s Fair Use Policy: Adapting CAA Guidelines for Internal Criteria”
    • Susan Higman Larsen, Director of Publishing and Collections Information, Detroit Institute of Arts, “Second Time Around: Remembering to Bring Fair Use into Play”
    • Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor, School of Communication, American University, “Looking Both Ways: Reviewing Year One and Projections for Year Two”
    • Peter Jaszi, Professor, Washington College of Law, American University, “Looking Both Ways: Reviewing Year One and Projections for Year Two”

    The live tweets follow, in chronological order.

    In Terms Of count: unknown (I did not keep track).

    Read

    Janet Landay, “CAA Celebrates Fair Use Week,” College Art Association, February 22, 2016.

    Mayra Linares, “Fair Use Successes in the Visual Arts at #CAA2016,” Center for Media and Social Impact, February 5, 2016.

  • The Still Life

    Eric Banks
    Wednesday, December 2, 2015
    Creative Writing Program
    New School, Klein Conference Room, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, New York

    Eric Banks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In academic art history, the single-author, single-subject monograph—an extended study on an individual artist, a group of artists, or a chronological or geographic range—is typically considered the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. A parallel to it in the hierarchy of subject matter in Western art would be history painting, a large work that addresses a biblical, historical, or mythological subject. To continue the analogy, a coauthored or edited book is comparable to a portrait, and an essay in a book is a genre scene. The article published in a peer-reviewed journal would be the landscape. The lowest form is the book review—the still life of academic writing.

    “I’m a book reviewer,” said Eric Banks, director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University since 2013, to about thirty attendees of a talk at the New School. No kidding—he has assessed hundreds of books on a wide range of subjects (art, literature, nonfiction) over the last twenty years for the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Slate, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Financial Times, to name a few. Despite this hierarchy established in the opening, the book review and its parent form, the critical essay, allow for a high amount of creative liberty for its author, as demonstrated every week in “The Critics” section of the New Yorker. “Writing about books,” Banks said, is “a springboard to talk about so many other things in culture.”

    The critical essay is the hardest thing to write, said Honor Moore, nonfiction coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the New School, who introduced the speaker. Where do you begin? Who are you when you write one? How do you manage a voice that is neither an encyclopedia entry nor a bad sermon? All good questions. What seemed to concern Banks the most, when reviewing books, is to avoid writing that’s too “plotty.”

    Banks admitted that he misunderstood the initial invitation to speak and became preoccupied with preparing a talk on the autodidact as critic, or on what it means to be self-taught in the internet age. Another possible topic could have contrasted the work of a critic with that of an academic scholar or a writer of personal interest. (Is that a semiprofessional blogger or a contributor to Amazon or Yelp?) He could have kicked around a “praise of digression” but instead read his work and talked about it—a strategy Moore had suggested.

    The cover of Artforum in October 1997

    Before reading three of his own short critical essays from the past few years, Banks gave us a brief professional biography. In the mid-1990s, he found himself in a senior-editor seat at Artforum, his first real job out of graduate school. At the time, he said, voices in the magazine came from the belletristic tradition of poets and novelists, from people interested in film, photography, and fashion (“fashion was an extremely important thing around 1995”), and from art historians and graduate students. Art criticism is always tied to higher education, Banks remarked, but book reviewers for the types of publications in which he publishes (journalistic and cultural outlets covering literature and nonfiction) don’t interact with the academy. A good essay on art achieves good formal description, which Banks said comprises 90 percent of the text. “Students are really trained—and they’re trained very well by their professors—to be able to look at something and describe it. You can’t write a critical essay unless you really describe in form[al] terms, in descriptive terms, the object you’re writing about.”

    I beg to differ. First, I would put that figure at no more than 50 percent, because subject matter, biography, history, and cultural context are crucial topics. And this rigorous training of graduate students? A few years ago, while editing the first sixty pages of a doctoral student’s dissertation, I was astonished by the inability of the author to describe works of art: her words hardly corresponded with the accompanying illustrations. Then again Banks, as an editor for Artforum and Bookforum—two of the top publications of criticism of any kind—probably saw only the best stuff from the brightest academics.

    Twenty years ago, Banks observed, writers on art didn’t need to explain a lot in their criticism because their readership was small and dedicated. Now the art world has a wider audience that may not share the same knowledge base. When he took over the editorship of Bookforum from Andrew Hultkrans in 2003, and with the publication’s relaunch later that year, Banks said he wanted swagger from his writers.1 He led the bimonthly journal for five years before replacing Lawrence Weschler at the New York Institute of the Humanities.

    The covers of three books on horse racing from the collection of Eric Banks

    The first text Banks that read tonight, “Pony Up,” came from the April/May 2012 issue of Bookforum. The piece grew, he disclosed, from evolved from avoiding a book review (Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading from 2011) to a musing on his longtime obsession, horse racing, and in particular, his collection of “ridiculous books” on the subject (from pulp novels to betting tips). Banks eventually shoehorned the book review into the piece, in the fourth of seven paragraphs, but the essay was truly his own thoughts—delightfully self-indulgent, if not somewhat neglectful of the author.

    Banks said his stuff is good when it hits both high and low culture. He also identified the pitfalls of the middle-ranged piece, which plagues many writers of short-form criticism:

    People have written a lot of short reviews, reviews in the fifteen-hundred-word range, which are just long enough to take you forever [to write], and to involve a lot of work and … thought about how to structure an essay, but just short enough that you really can’t get into great depth into the kinds of things you’d like to get into. It’s eye opening, because you frequently will go back and read something you’ve written and think, “I have no idea what I was trying to say with this sentence. I have no idea why I reviewed this book. I don’t even remember reviewing this book.”

    Some reviewers, he said, don’t even remember reading the book.

    Banks apologized in advance for the scatological passages from the Franz West catalogue essay he read, saying he is uncomfortable with colorful language.2 The piece was structured into three sections: Twinkies, roses, and sausages. Banks read from the sausages passage, telling us how the artist’s studio often ate at a Chinese restaurant nearby and sourced their own lentils to accompany the brown rice, and how West’s body was deteriorating because of illness, looking not unlike Ichabod Crane, bad teeth, still smoking cigarettes and marijuana. In West’s work on paper, “sausage equals dick equals turd equals sausage.” Banks described a handful of sculptures and drawings, how the artist’s work was autobiographical despite the collaborators in his studio, and how his audience-engaged pieces differ from that of Relational Aesthetics (they are private).

    Eric Banks reads from three review essays (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “Public Anomie,” his review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, recently translated from French to English, was freshly published by Bookforum. It was difficult to avoid thinking about the November terrorist attacks in Paris, Banks mentioned, which took place after he wrote the review. Banks remarked how both his essay and a New York Times review of Submission compared Houellebecq to Lars von Trier, which Banks thought was his observation was a special discovery. Sometimes things are in the air. The plague of modern life, Banks said, borrowing a term from Benedict Anderson, is short-lived communities we form. Those which surround books (and their reviews) still engender “magic conversation.”

    Moore moderated the event’s Q&A, first addressing the solitude of book reviewing. Banks thinks about voice a lot, and he writes, rewrites, and rewrites. Moore concurred, “One has to keep rewriting to find out what you think.” Banks replied, “You’re always writing criticism in your head. You’re constantly taking notes in your head for essays that will never be written.” Yet “When you finally arrive at something, it’s almost like the smelling salts have been broken open, and you’re really alert to what you’re thinking about, reading about, what you’ve read [already].” Critical writing, he implied, sharpens your perception of the world. “There’s something about the critical essay, it makes you more attuned to … a lot of things. Somehow your senses are shot into another level of awareness. It’s the cocaine of writing, or something.” Yet he worries if a piece be embarrassing in a year—not unlike many people’s regret, the next day, about their behavior on the illegal stimulant.

    Banks wished he was more daring in certain areas. Born and raised in Louisiana, he feels he needs a weird Southern high-brow persona yet cannot write a history of the South. Nor could he write a book on smoking cigarettes (he once was a smoker) and the invention of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The questions I didn’t ask were: Is it harder to write about art than about books? How important is the editor, and what is it like writing and publishing without one?

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Banks’s career path was chronicled in Cynthia Cotts, “Banks Knows His Books,” Village Voice, July 1, 2003.

    2 Rachel Harrison and Eric Banks, “Hostess with the Mostess,” in Darsie Alexander, ed., Franz West: To Build a House You Start with the Roof (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

  • Good for a Girl

    This essay was partly written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Women in Music
    Thursday, November 19, 2015
    The Luminary, Saint Louis, MO

    April Fulstone (second from left) describes her experiences with sexism in the DJ world (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    How do you deal with sexism in the music industry, personally and professionally? This question from Liz Deichmann, operations and event coordinator at the Luminary, came halfway through the panel “Women in Music.” April Fulstone, known professionally as DJ Agile One, said that her experiences spinning records for fifteen years, specializing for a while in hip hop, have been plagued by “unintentional” sexism, such as comments about her ability to transport two Technics 1200 turntables, which weigh fifty pounds each with a case, by herself. At one venue, an older man was impressed that she was able to set up her equipment on her own.

    Syhrea Conaway, a black multi-instrumentalist who works under the name Syna So Pro, cannot separate sex and race: a white woman or black man is less likely to experience what she has. A case in point: after playing with a bluesy band at Ten Mile House, a man remarked to her, “You know what? When you first walked in here, I was like, ‘What’s this black bitch doing here?’ But now that I’ve seen you play, I respect you.” At a venue, she regularly needs to assert that she is actually in the band, that she isn’t the merch girl, and that she isn’t loading in equipment to get free admission to the show. Conaway acknowledged that she will always be “questioned by my mere presence.” The most devalued compliment of all, she said, is being told “you’re good for a girl.”

    Laura Sisal, a partner in the Ready Room, a mid-sized concert venue that can accommodate up to 750 people, must regularly persuade touring bands to accept her authority. “It’s extra pressure on you,” she said. “Do I bite my tongue or do I decide to fight this battle?” Often it’s a lose-lose situation when she stands up for herself—but why should she even have to? Christine Sanley, director of AAA radio promotion for co-sign, an artist-development agency for radio promotion, licensing, marketing, and brand strategy, is regularly asked “What does your boss think?” when she presents her company’s final decisions to others.

    Five successful women in music, from left to right: Christine Sanley, Syhrea Conaway, April Fulstone, Laura Sisal, and Liz Deichmann (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Deichmann stated that “Women in Music” was held in response to “The Future of Music,” a discussion that took place at the Luminary in February 2015. Like that event, “Women in Music” had a local focus on the Saint Louis scene, yet the five panelists—all women, unlike the earlier, all-male event—shared personal anecdotes and experiences that, for better and worse, many across the country can relate to. Deichmann, who is also a musician and a promoter for Secret Sound Society and St. Louis Arts Project, began the conversation by asking how each woman first got involved with music and about their professional role models. Her questions, while job interview-y at times, garnered interesting and diverse responses.

    Promotional flyer for a Clothesline event

    A former DJ at Washington University, Sanley came from the Omaha suburbs and entered the music scene surrounding the band Cursive and the record label Saddle Creek. Conaway began playing music at age seven, breaking free from her classical training at age twenty. Her mother played violin, which she took up herself, along with guitar, bass, keyboards, and now drums. A formative experience for her was watching TLC’s video for “Baby-Baby-Baby.” An Iowa City misfit, Fulstone lived for a while in Detroit and now runs a monthly party in Saint Louis called the Clothesline. A child of the 1990s, she admired Björk, Kim Gordon, Courtney Love, and Lauren Hill, and later M.I.A. “I love unique women who have cross-cultural sounds and backgrounds,” said Fulstone, who is Asian. Sisal has played in bands (organ, piano, guitar), worked for music labels, and studied audio production.1 Her peers include radio professionals, publicists, and entertainment lawyers. A foundational moment for her was watching the music video for No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak,” in which the singer Gwen Stefani looked feminine, tough, and beautiful all at once. Sisal also respects Sade for dropping in and out of the music business whenever she wants.

    What are your biggest successes and challenges? As a kid Conaway performed at Carnegie Hall twice as a choir member—she is an incredibly gifted vocalist. Another highlight happened earlier this year, when four members of the contemporary chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound performed as her backing band at the Sheldon Concert Hall in Saint Louis. Conaway claimed to be bad at promotion and social media, but her Facebook page looks up to date. Marketing is the fake version of you, Fulstone said. “I’m bad at being fake,” she added, noting that some music promoters actually want fakeness and femininity.

    Sanley doubted she can eclipse facilitating a collaboration between Boy George and the Black Lips—they covered T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong.” Her biggest challenge, going from college radio to AAA, has been talking on the phone to old white dudes, persuading them to change their programming. Mainstream radio, Sanley noted, plays about 30 percent music by female recording artists. I wondered how changes in music business—such as corporate media consolidation, the collapse of the record industry, and the decline of radio in favor of satellite transmission and digital streaming—have changed gender relations in the industry.

    Sisal, a self-described overachiever and perfectionist, pronounced that opening a concert venue—something she has wanted to do since seventh grade—was both an accomplishment and a challenge, especially for someone lacking an academic business or management background. “You don’t really have any type of instruction manual as to how to do this,” Sisal pointed out. Be patient and go with the flow, this Zen master advised. “If my thirteen-year-old self could see me now, she’d be freaking out.”

    Do the panelists self-identify as an artist or as a woman artist? “People are interested, a little more, if you’re a woman,” Fulstone responded. Conaway said the press perpetually touts her as a “one-woman musical enigma,” sends up the notion of a one-man band. “You want to be faceless, so to speak,” Sisal insisted. “You just want the music to do the talking for you.” But appearances matter. She explained two paths to success for female performers: “There are certain artists that are fighting hard to be recognized as an artist, not a woman artist. And then there’s other people taking the approach of ‘I want to use my sexuality to get noticed and then once I’m famous, once I have your attention, I’ll let you know who I really am.’” Sisal finds that approach to be counterintuitive—it doesn’t have to be this way.

    Conaway believes that “to slut it up a little bit” is a larger media problem that spills over into academic, athletic, and political life, where women’s achievements aren’t recognized or valued. Sanley argued that it’s transparent when a woman pimps herself, citing Du Blonde’s record cover for Welcome Back to Milk: “This woman, she’s like ‘Hey, it’s me with this banging merkin, and this really rad full coat.’” Du Blonde gets discredited, Sanley explained, for “doing her thing and embodying herself and being comfortable in her own skin.”2 Responding to Sisal’s comments, Sanley said, “It’s a clear line between someone going through the machine and getting oversexualized, and someone else just trying to take hold of their own body and sexuality and getting called out for it in a different way.” Look at Nicki Minaj, Fulstone quipped, “that’s what you have to do to be successful.” She also noted that fans of hip hop must often overlook a performer’s misogyny because of his talent. As a contrast, near the panel’s conclusion Deichmann recalled that she dressed masculine or androgynous on her band’s show days to make it easier to carry equipment, climb ladders, and kick stage divers off the stage.

    How does Saint Louis compare to other cities? New York is a competitive hustle no matter what sex you are, Sanley recalled of her three years there. On returning to Saint Louis, she expected to find a tighter-knit community of women but didn’t. In New York, she felt more connected to the scene, less so here—though she recognized that her job in radio has a national scope. Conaway bemoaned that indie rock is the only supported genre in town, especially by publications, at the expense of hip hop and R&B. Band ethics usually dictate that no performer leaves until everyone has played, she added, yet groups in Saint Louis don’t support the whole bill like they do in other cities. Fulstone found a strong scene in Detroit, where the music comes first, but in Saint Louis, it’s who you know. The racially segregated city is also a problem, she said. Sisal recalled that, in 2006 and 2007, you’d see members of other bands in your audience. They’re not there now. This may have to do with aging, the ebbs and flows of the scene, or both.

    Syhrea Conway (center) prefers to support musicians on their merit, not their sex (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Any mentoring advice? Sanley advised, “Don’t be afraid, make connections, reach out to people, and support each other.” Emphasizing hard work, Conaway advocated setting goals and being honest with yourself and why you’re doing this. The panelists agreed that programming kids differently—with toys, for example—will help reduce sexism and change the music industry in twenty to thirty years. Deichmann acknowledged the power in collective action and support and, on a personal note, realized that tonight was the first time she and Sanley had talked about these issues, despite being longtime friends.

    A male audience member noticed an increasing female presence in the noise, punk, and loud music scenes, identifying Savages, Melt Banana, and Pharmakon as examples. Sanley agreed but pointed out that a member of Perfect Pussy was ridiculed for writing a tour diary for Vogue—for some it’s not acceptable to be a badass punk interested in fashion and feminine things. Meredith Graves of that band wrote a tour diary for Elle in 2014, but maybe Sanley was referring to the “Thrift Diaries” that Emily Panic of Foxygen wrote for Jezebel. Progress is being made, she concluded, but there’s a long way to go—especially when she relayed a story about how an unnamed band’s management dropped an all-female four-person group after replacing two members with men. Fulstone proclaimed that seeing women in power positions in venues, as organizers of programming, demonstrates significant progress and a positive model for younger people.

    For further reading (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The contentious discussion of artist and woman artist resurfaced. Conaway brought up the quality argument often heard from men: “You’re not really that good at what you do, but you are getting a lot of support because you are a woman. That’s not okay with me. How about you support a person on the merit of what they’re doing?” Conaway opposed using sexuality to compensate for the lack of talent.3 From the audience, the artist (and former Luminary resident) Tori Abernathy found the staunch agreement of being an artist (and not a woman artist) to be surprising. If gender is removed from the narrative, she argued, history gets rewritten with men being in charge. Women should get documented and make history their own. Putting that aside, Abernathy was curious about how women communicate their strengths, such as the leeway (white) women have when dealing with police and fire marshals—using prejudice to their advantage. Sisal proposed empathy and compassion. Sanley noted that a person’s sex is more intrinsically related to music than to art: an artwork or style can more easily defy gender stereotypes, while a woman onstage or heard on a record cannot.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Laura Sisal and Syhrea Conaway played together in Stella Mara, a shoegaze-inspired band, in the late 2000s.

    2 Beth Jeans Houghton, who performs as Du Blonde, discussed the cover in Rachel Brodsky, “Du Blonde Pushes Dirt under Her Nails on ‘Welcome Back to Milk’,” Spin, May 12, 2015.

    3 April Fulstone said something similar about her DJ career a few years ago: “‘I think it was a big novelty,’ she says. ‘People were really pushing me to take gigs, even before I was ready. They really wanted to see a girl out there. But it was important for me to be respected for my skill and not thrown in there because I’m a female.’” See Kevin C. Johnson, “St. Louis Women in Hip-Hop Struggle to Break Through,” Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, July 26, 2012.

    Read

    Natasha Patel, “Gender Inequality in the Music Industry,” Music Business Journal 11, no. 4 (October 2015): 1, 3.

    Taylor Pittman, “This Is the Kind of Bullsh*t You Face as a Woman in the Music Industry,” Huffpost Women, August 27, 2015.

    Dianca Potts, “DJing while Female in NYC: ‘I Can’t Believe You’re a Chick…’,” Village Voice, October 8, 2015.

    Lindsay Zoladz, “Not Every Girl Is a Riot Grrrl,” Pitchfork, November 16, 2011.

  • Running in Circles

    This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Olivier Mosset in Conversation with Marie Heilich
    Wednesday, November 18, 2015
    Parapet/Real Humans, Saint Louis, MO

    The speakers, from left: Marie Heilich, Olivier Mosset, and Amy Granat (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Olivier Mosset was in town for the opening of his exhibition at Parapet/Real Humans, a project space run by Amy Granat in a storefront in the Fox Park neighborhood of Saint Louis. On view was a framed set of four lithographs of two thick black stripes on a square of white paper. The set, it turns out, was made for a Swiss Institute benefit in 2004. Granat said the work reminded her of September 11—I suppose any two vertical lines will do that. The artist compared them to an optometrist’s vision test. As someone who can’t see six inches past his nose without glasses or contacts (and who never skips his annual eye-doctor visit), that made more sense.

    With long gray hair and a long gray beard, Mosset easily looked the part of a sixties Euroactivist and biker outlaw—he has lived in Tucson, Arizona, since the mid-1990s. His interviewer was Marie Heilich, assistant director of White Flag Projects in Saint Louis, a slender brunette with bangs, dressed in all black and armed with an MA in curatorial studies from Bard College. Mosset’s talk—a rare speaking engagement for him, we were told—was largely a monologue. Heilich made intermittent comments and Granat, who was operating a smartphone that projected slides of the artist’s work on the wall beside the speakers, jumped in every so often.

    Heilich encouraged Mosset to revisit his early years, so he gave a brief history of BMPT, a group of four European artists (Mosset with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni) that came together in 1966. “The idea was to question what gives value to painting,” Mosset said, targeting uniqueness, personal expression, and color as culprits. His conception of art, however, began changing a few years earlier, when Mosset had been floored by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he saw at Kunsthalle Bern in 1962. “This was in,” he recalled his excitement, “This was happening.” Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), the sculpture of a shaggy taxidermied goat stuck in a car tire, “was quite a shock—is this art?” But Mosset still had classical modernism on the brain, as he twice emphasized the painted nature of Piet Mondrian’s work, declaring that reproductions of it are nothing like the real things. Though he wasn’t familiar with Russian Constructivism and Swiss Concrete art at the time, he acknowledged an affinity with them. I got the sense that Mosset is unburdened by tradition, not antagonistic toward it. Give painting autonomy, he even said at one point.

    Olivier Mosset, Sans titre, 2004, suite of four lithographs on Rives, 200 x 200 cm (artwork © Olivier Mosset; photograph by Christopher Howard)

    For Mosset, Rauschenberg taking home the Golden Lion, the top prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, marked the end of the importance of Paris, where he had moved two years before, at age eighteen. Previously the French avant-garde consisted of the Nouveau Réalisme movement: Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Piero Manzoni, and others. BMPT reacted against that group’s preferred materials: found objects and rubbish. Earning notoriety after its first event, BMPT was invited to participate in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where the artists painted their works—Buren’s stripe, Mosset’s circle, Parmentier’s fold, and Toroni’s brush mark—during the opening, not in advance. (They subsequently withdrew from the exhibition the next day.) At that and other events they projected slides, played audiotapes announcing “art is the enemy of freedom” and “art is the enemy of presence,” among other statements, and handed out their propaganda pamphlets. “Ideas are the art, not the paintings,” Mosset declared. Audiences soon came to recognize each member’s signature style, so the four agreed to do each other’s work.1 Mosset began painting stripes and later introduced color: gray stripes on white, then green on white, then white on color, and so on. After that he made monochromes (more specifically, they are single-hued paintings).

    Mosset continued his monologue, which by this point felt like someone reading a Wikipedia article—it was all factual recollection in a dry tone. Even in Paris, he said, people were talking about New York, so he traveled there in 1967, where he met Andy Warhol. After moving to the city ten years later, he sought out the painter Marcia Hafif after she wrote an essay on contemporary painting called “Beginning Again,” published in Artforum in 1978. With her and Joseph Marioni, he formed the New York Radical Painting group, which had exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1983 (New Abstraction) and at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1984 (Radical Painting). Mosset also got hip to a newer scene of artists, including Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, and Jeff Koons. In the 1990s, Mosset worked with John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Steven Parrino, and Cady Noland, but the artist barely mentioned these collaborations during tonight’s talk.

    BMPT, Manifestation 1, January 3, 1967, 18th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. From right to left: Michel Parmentier, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Niele Toroni (photograph ©Bernard Boyer)

    Mosset affably stated that he has no strategy, does what he wants, and cannot control trends. “I’m basically interested in abstract painting,” he said, and somehow people are attracted to what he does. Heilich questioned him about his social and flexible practice, in which he diminishes his own authorship (evident, for example, in his work with BMPT), but Mosset construed the question differently. “The art practice is very selfish,” he responded, and exhibitions involve a community. “It’s personal when you do it; it’s social when you show it.” Mosset believes the gallery gives you the distance to see your work differently.

    During the Q&A, an audience member inquired about the meditative nature of his circle paintings that, she conjectured, might signify emptiness or completeness. Mosset deflected this impression and said he was thinking of the shapes found in works by Johns and Kenneth Noland, which have formalist, not symbolic, meanings. (He also recognized that he did invent the circle.) The questioner asked him if the circles got better and better as he made more of them. Yes, he replied with a smile, but they were still the same.

    Heilich asked, “Do you see any contemporary approaches that stand out to you, for better or worse?” He didn’t identify any artists or styles but instead considered the differences between then and now. “At the time in Paris, we could react against what was happening, whereas today, I don’t know exactly what you can react against. It’s a different era.” And who else to blame but the internet. A younger audience member argued that “artists will always respond to each other, and to each other’s work, but that kind of clear dialogue [from the sixties], I don’t think it’s actually possible now.” Today everyone has a voice and a platform, she continued, but with equity that voice is minimized. Mosset agreed—there are now more artists and more information. I feel sorry for them, overwhelmed by online communications, and am sure artists from forty to fifty years ago probably had the same anxieties about their own ballooning art world. The audience member was relieved that artists are becoming activists again. Culture is important, Mosset chimed in, especially after the recent terrorist attack in Paris.

    The audience at Parapet/Real Humans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Earlier Heilich had observed that Mosset’s practice—producing circles, stripes, and singular colors—united painting and the readymade in the same object. This idea made sense at the moment but unraveled the more I thought about it. His practice is actually artisanal and small batch, not mass production, and analogous to someone like Gilbert Stuart, whose cranked out 130 versions of the Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “A second painting might be a repetition,” Mosset said in a recent interview, “but it can never be a replica.”2 You can’t help but admire the audacity of painting the same type of picture for years, if not decades, while at the same time pity the paucity of ideas.

    Trying to vary the topics, Granat asked about Mosset’s interest in motorcycles, which he collects, rides, and occasionally exhibits with his paintings. While such lines of inquiry did not lead to interesting discussion, the effort was appreciated. And while I enjoyed hearing from an artist whom I have not previously studied, I was disappointed with the light moderation—Mosset did not get into much detail about the meaning of his work and with art itself. It seemed as if Heilich was too timid (or just too polite) to cross-examine this art-historical figure about any radical ideas he has or might have had, or to find out what makes him produce what appears to be redundant or complacent work.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Olivier Mosset made circle paintings from 1966 to 1974. Daniel Buren obviously never stopped with the stripes.

    2 Sara Stephenson, “Collaborative Reduction: Q+A with Olivier Mosset,” Art in America, February 10, 2011.

  • The Most Bleed Possible

    This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Brody Condon
    Tuesday, November 3, 2015
    School of Visual Arts, 133/141 West 21st Street, Room 101C, New York

    Brody Condon in Miami Beach in 2010 (photograph and GIF by David Toro)

    Though the outrageous antics of Jim Jones and Charles Manson reverberate through the American public consciousness, a broad history of less-sensational activities from the 1960s and 1970s probably had a larger if surreptitious impact on US culture. Encounter groups, the human potential movement, large-group awareness training: these cultic approaches to self-actualization came shortly after mind expansion through psychedelic drugs in the sixties and just before business motivational seminars and self-help gurus of the eighties (followed by the deliriums of late-night religious programming and inspirational infomercials). Today, soccer moms practice yoga and mindfulness is all the rage, but once upon a time, New Age ideas were a serious threat to mainstream Judeo-Christian values. The objectors were partly correct, but I digress.

    Born in Mexico, Brody Condon is an American artist working in Berlin who has recently been mining the New Age practices of the Esalen Institute and Erhard Seminars Training, among other groups, cults, and otherwise strange organizations, through an aesthetic lens. Using live action role play (LARP) as an artistic form, Condon creates scenarios of psychic strain through what he calls performance engines, described during a lecture at the School of Visual Arts as “creative performative systems that drive action … that drive social choreography.” Through these events—typically documented on video—he produces not only an “emotional significant group encounter but also a psychologically charged art critique.”

    Brody Condon talks about performance engines (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Crucial to Condon’s practice is gestalt practice, which he described as a conception of the physical body, the environment, and the mental state of the individual as an integrated, organic whole. Conversation gestalt therapy, he said, focuses on an individual’s expression and experience of the present moment—there is neither past nor future. Condon is not interested in actual healing and trauma. Likewise, there is no crossover with drama therapy or art therapy. Participants are supposed to maintain some critical distance when in the moment. The artist emphasized that performance engines are an alternative to, not a replacement for, real political dialogue. He also framed his work as an “experiential essay.”

    Some works come across as simple. For Circles of Focus (2015), one project from a four-year collaboration with the Scottish artist Christine Borland, people were encouraged to free-associate about museum objects they handled. Other pieces are just plain weird. Extracurricular Anatomy (2015) took place at the Laboratory of Human Anatomy at the University of Glasgow, where Condon and Borland devised a performance for five fourth-year anatomy students, three cadavers (two real, one played by a living person), and a carnivorous plant. One participant uttered sounds when touching parts of the cadaver, which the plant positioned above the body’s head “interpreted.” A second person “psychically communicated” with the plant and told a third where to dissect a geometric section from the body. “Yeah … that happened,” Condon said.

    The finished version of Future Gestalt (2012) consists of video of the fifth and final session of a performance that took place under a Tony Smith sculpture Smoke (1967), installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—a building designed by the architect William Pereira that, for Condon, represents an “antiquated version of the future.” Smith’s sculpture embodied the “facilitator,” intended to be an artificial intelligence or “interdimensional entity” that, like a cult leader or psychotherapist, guided the four performers. Wearing colorful, loose-fitting robes and “playing fictional versions of themselves in the future,” the performers spoke to the sculpture, sometimes in shrills, clicks, and whispers; it also talked to them. The audio of Condon’s instructions and commands (such as “focus,” “responsibility,” “empathy,” an “control”) was split, with a clear signal sent to the performers’ earpieces and garbled distorted audio filled the room at LACMA. Watch the clip below for a taste of the work.

    Brody Condon, sample from Future Gestalt (2012) on Vimeo.

    LARP communities throughout the world volunteer to participate in Condon’s works. He also posts open casting calls, which convene both professional actors and regular folks, but the artist’s approach that contrasts the feel-good nature of most audience-involved art. Before screening footage from Zeigarnik Effect (2015), commissioned by Momentum 8: The Nordic Biennial, Condon explained, “I’m not casting, and they’re not performers. I’m providing a service for them. I’m providing an event for them to immerse themselves in, for a day to five days at a time. And often they pay me to participate.” This low “token fee” gives him more power as an artist and “changes the power dynamic of participatory work.” In museums, artists typically treat visitors as material. Condon perceives himself as a service provider. A live feed of Zeigarnik Effect was presented in a split screen. Condon said this was a nod to the psychiatrist Ian Alger, who in the 1970s introduced the two-camera technique in therapy. Alger would simultaneously record both sides of a patient’s face; the patient would choose the preferred side—or something like that.

    Brody Condon, sample from Ziegarnik Effect (2015) on Vimeo.

    The concept and script for Level Five (2010–11), the earliest and most historically grounded work, drew from elements of Erhard Seminars Training, Alcoholics Anonymous, Scientology, and gestalt therapy. Level Five was Condon’s reconceptualization of self-actualization seminars, using two actors with years of LARP experience to keep the psychological flow going (what he called “run-time game management”) during the two-day event. The performers—a mix of LARPers, actors, and volunteers—arrived as characters, emoted as them, and stayed in character for the duration of the piece. Filmed with three cameras, Level Five was streamed live next door, at the Hammer Museum’s theater. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Hammer has been offering weekly Mindful Awareness sessions since 2012.

    “In role playing,” Condon said, “bleed happens when the thoughts and feelings of the character start affecting the player, or vice versa.” Coming from a background in performance art, he wants “the most bleed possible.” Back in the day—Condon played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid—it was off limits for role-playing games to affect your real life. Today there are levels of bleed. “Rather than forgetting the existence of an original self,” the artist said about Level Five participants, “the character becomes a tool for projection, self-exploration, and experimentation.” Sometimes performers intentionally try to puncture the illusion; sometimes they experience a minor schizophrenic break. For each work trained professionals are on hand, Condon revealed, to pull a person aside in either case. “We can’t stop these events,” he said. “Once they start, they run…. If they hate what’s going on, they leave.”

    Brody Condon, sample from Level Five (2010–11) on Vimeo.

    One wonders exactly what Condon gets out of the whole thing—he is the one instructing people to inhabit a fictional character whose personality is subsequently gutted. Getting to the core self of a fictional person is “the funnest part to me, it’s the most twisted part.” He explained: “You’re attending a seminar that’s meant to push you, to get you to the core of your being, to strip layers of your socially constructed personality—but you’re doing that as a fictional personality.” The idea is twisted indeed, and you wouldn’t get the same results with a film or stage play. At the time of conceiving Level Five, Condon said, “I was interested in the genealogy of New Age culture in the United States.” After thriving in the 1970s, he told us, the human-potential movement was depoliticized and sold it back to the masses via motivational seminars for businesspeople, Silicon Valley entrepreneurial philosophy, and life coaching.

    A work looking beyond the West, Four Sessions (2014), was executed in Seoul, South Korea, for the fourth Anyang Public Arts Project. Condon found four traditional craftspeople—an instrument maker, a mother of pearl inlay master, a mudang shaman, and a slack-line performer (a.k.a. a tightrope walker)—that are Intangible Cultural Treasures in Korea and identified by a number. He instructed them to pick an object from their studio or to collaborate with him to make an object. Number 24 (the lacquer craftsman), for example, brought a bowl he was never able to finish because it was tied to a past trauma, and Condon made a drum with Number 30 (the instrument maker). Again borrowing from gestalt therapy, the artist ordered the participants to converse with these objects, which spoke back. What’s more, the Intangible Cultural Treasures pretended to be an inanimate object themselves that their objects, now alive, talked to. The piece of rope that belonged to Number 58 (the slack-line man) chastised him for failing to practice.

    Brody Condon, sample from Intangible Cultural Treasure No. 58: Traditional Slackline Performance (2014) on Vimeo.

    Four Sessions felt like the weakest of the projects Condon presented, but that’s probably because the video clips he showed lacked English subtitles. (The excerpts on Vimeo are now translated.) I also got the impression that Condon struggled to maintain order—the participants seemed to battle with him directly and indirectly. Though they were instructed to come alone, they brought family members and apprentices. One man’s daughter and her friends played with their cell phones while the sessions took place. The stubborn shaman resisted the academically trained mediator for Four Sessions, a Korean psychotherapist who did PhD research on the history of shamanism. The psychotherapist, in turn, did not bow to Condon’s authority. There was also a certain amount of bickering. Common trait among the four Intangible Cultural Treasures, the artist said, were peer jealousy, worries about money, and complaints about corruption within the Intangible Cultural Treasure system. Perhaps the difficulty was that the four participants did not adopt a persona or role. They were playing themselves going through a somewhat experimental therapy session that was too much like garden-variety psychotherapy.

    In Terms Of count: 6.

  • Say It Together, Unmonumentally

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Say You, Say Me: Art Is a Song in Your Head—Rachel Harrison in Conversation with Greil Marcus
    Thursday, October 29, 2015
    Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center, City University of New York, Martin E. Segal Theatre, New York

    Rachel Harrison, Cindy (Green), 2004, mixed media, 72 x 37 x 31 in. (artwork © Rachel Harrison; photograph provided by Greene Naftali, New York)

    “Language is forced on art,” quipped the artist Rachel Harrison to an audience member during the Q&A session of this event. “We’re just throwing words at art all the time. Is that really best for art? Is that really good for art? Does that make art happy? It might. It employs a lot of people.” Such is Harrison’s self-consciously funny and cynicism-free outlook for giving titles to her works. That outlook is also a good way to understand her art practice over the last twenty years. I lost track of how many times I chuckled to myself during this hour-long talk.

    Harrison attached funny stories to a few of her works. A gallery goer stole a Baby Phat handbag fastened to one sculpture, and friends told her that someone had ruffled the blonde wig topping another. “What is that desire, not to mess with hair but to mess with artworks?” Harrison asked during her lecture. “Because I get that sometimes.” The way Harrison recounted taking the photograph she uses for Marilyn with Wall (2004–ongoing) characterized an Andy Warhol museum archivist as a sketchy street drug dealer.1 Yet irony plays no role in her practice: “I work too hard to be ironic,” she told another attendee.

    Harrison’s art practice is varied: mostly sculpture and installation but also photography, drawing, and writing. (Artforum has published a few great articles by her, on Andy Warhol’s Empire, Jeff Koons’s Bob Hope, and a parade organized by Paul McCarthy.) She isn’t yet known for a singular masterpiece, for which she could be inextricably linked, but her style is recognizable a mile away. A typical work is larger-than-life-sized, built from construction materials or polystyrene and slathered with cement and paint, with an extra prop or two—a bottle of Mr. Clean, a plastic figurine, or a framed photograph of a celebrity—fastened to it. Sometimes a sculpture rests on a plinth, a pair of milk crates, or a shipping dolly.

    Rachel Harrison, Zombie Rothko, 2011, wood, polystyrene, acrylic, and plastic doll, 70 x 23 x 31 in. (artwork © Rachel Harrison)

    Tonight’s event paired Harrison with the music critic Greil Marcus, best known for writing the books Mystery Train (1975) and Lipstick Traces (1989). Marcus was funny, too, in his own way, as he read aloud a short introductory essay peppered with off-the-cuff observations. While in Paris, he visited an art exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a Frank Gehry–designed building in Paris that “from the outside looks like a spaceship just about to take off.” Marcus circled Harrison’s Zombie Rothko (2011) round and round, taking in the bright orange hair of a plastic doll torso placed on the top of a craggy, painted blocky form. “What first might bring a laugh might turn disturbing,” he surmised. “What first might just throw you and not seem to hit is going to end up being the governing principle of the work.” And considering the ways she infuses pop culture—in particular a series of twenty colored-pencil drawings of the British singer Amy Winehouse carousing with characters from paintings by Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Martin Kippenberger—he argued, “Not enough has been made of the way that Rachel’s work engages with the world that people actually live in…. That when you see it you’re seeing a distorted, funnier, more gripping version of the life that you actually lead.”

    I am embarrassingly late to the Rachel Harrison party. My longstanding impression of her work was that the criticality vibe overpowers all other interpretations, including humor, which I certainly noticed but didn’t take seriously. After all, Greene Naftali, her gallery of eighteen years, shows Very Serious Art by Paul Chan, Michael Krebber, Bernadette Corporation, and others. Over the years I have dutifully seen Harrison’s head-scratching exhibitions—at Greene Naftali, in the Whitney Biennial, at the New Museum—but never considered it in depth, despite my editing an exhibition review of her work in 2005. For years I recognized the work’s shock value—you could never call it beautiful—but never acknowledged its smart value and its terrific sense of humor. To get a better sense of what her work is all about—this is the primary reason why I attended tonight’s event.

    Rachel Harrison introduced the front side of Buddha with Wall (2004) as “Buddha Descending a Staircase” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In a chronological artist’s talk, Harrison presented two principle themes in her work—walls and frames—and how her thinking has has shifted from the former to the latter. Indeed, since the early 1990s she has made use of Sheetrock and metal studs brought into the gallery or taken down existing gallery walls (but never removing them from the exhibition space). The title of Harrison’s first solo exhibition—Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere?—came from a New York Times article on building codes after Hurricane Andrew; the show took place in an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

    Developing this interest in modular and provisional work, the artist filled a gallery with a maze constructed with rectangular sheets of cardboard (Perth Amboy, 2001). “People call this a labyrinth, but you’re not going to get lost,” she joked. For Marilyn with Wall, Harrison took down nonstructural gallery walls and set them aside. “You make more space by cutting up a wall, and you make more space for a body,” she explained, sort of. “And by having more bodies you can have more spaces.” She metaphorically attributes physical space to mental space and to thinking. Harrison notices how people walk through rooms and on the subway—she may be watching you.

    Installation view of Perth Amboy (2001) at Bard College in 2009 (artwork © Rachel Harrison)

    After discussing a handful of museum and gallery exhibitions across Europe, Harrison tackled Three Young Framers, a solo outing at Regen Projects in Los Angeles this past summer. With wall studs leftover from shows by Glenn Ligon and Raymond Pettibon, which the gallery saved for her, she demarcated rooms within the hangerlike building, not unlike Michael Asher’s 2008 show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Although her initial idea came from drawing outlines of the gallery’s floor plan on paper, using a ruler, Harrison confessed that she wanted to see the Asher exhibition again, and this was a way to do it. She finds sophisticated humor in his work, from the George Washington statue to the Santa Monica show.

    During the conversation, Marcus saw “a scary, lifeless, maximum-security prison” in Three Young Framers, not a reference to Asher (who he may not know). No reviews of the show mentioned the prison angle, which Harrison chalked up to the herd mentality of art criticism. If the press release had mentioned jail, she noted, everyone would have zeroed in on that instead of Asher. There is no single meaning in your work, Marcus continued, adding something about how taking selfies imprisons actually imprisons the vain photographers. “Where they are,” he said, “is much less important than the fact that they are there.” Or maybe people just like documenting their life in photographs, like they’ve done for decades.

    Harrison’s 2012 exhibition The Help comprised a handful of sculptures and the Amy Winehouse drawings, which Marcus found to be upsetting and nihilistic, distorted and angry, bitter and self-destructive. Seeing the pictures changed the way he perceives the British singer, who died of drug and alcohol–related causes in 2011. Harrison appreciates her music but did not previously follow her career. The subject of the drawings was chosen randomly, she said, from a magazine cover spotted in a supermarket checkout line—though celebrities certainly play an important role in her work. Harrison admires the way Winehouse turned herself into sculpture, into a pop icon, purely through invention: her hair, singing soul music, and having working-class origins. What if someone looking at the drawings knows very little about Winehouse? If one puts the singer in the wrong place, Harrison and Marcus concluded, we can rethink her career and how she got there instead of repeating platitudes.

    Rachel Harrison, Untitled, 2012, colored pencil on paper, 22⅜ x 27⅞ (artwork © Rachel Harrison; photograph provided by Greene Naftali, New York)

    Marcus saw the “scrapbook” exhibition Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, which he did not find terribly interesting. Three artists (Harrison, Jennie Ottinger, and Jason Jägel) had work at the same museum in a separate exhibition, called You Know I’m No Good. That presentation, which included Harrison’s Winehouse drawings, was overwrought, disturbing, violent, and mutilated, according to Marcus, not unlike the disturbing images in Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. There is agency in creative acts, Harrison avowed. Marcus agreed, arguing that pain is an expressive force.

    Another audience member—it was the art historian Hal Foster—stated that most people understand Harrison’s work as collage and assemblage. He articulated a different perspective: “You don’t collage things; you collage views, viewpoints. It’s about putting subjects together, not objects together.” Although the same could be said for many artists, his observation is spot on. Harrison seemed pleased with it. She mentioned another description about her work, made by Foster, that she likes: “You take a bad thing and make it worse.”

    In Terms Of count: 13.

    1 Rachel Harrison said: “They’ll let you make an appointment, and you can go to Andy Warhol’s archives. And you just wear gloves, and they’ll let you touch everything. And there’s a can of hairspray, chewing gum, all the things you know about—fabulous things. And then I was about to leave and the guy was like, ‘Well, don’t you want to see it?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said ‘Everyone wants to see it.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Don’t you want to see the source material for Marilyn?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care.’” She ending up taking a 35mm photograph of the publicity still, partially veiled by a glassine sleeve. The image is a key part of a sculpture called Marilyn with Wall, which she has created several times since 2004.

  • Critical Conditions

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Fields and Praxes: Dino Zrnec and Marko Marković in Conversation
    Tuesday, October 20, 2015
    Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY

    The Serbian sculptor Marko Marković has expressed an interest in museum conservation departments and in the process of finding, restoring, and preparing objects for exhibition. For him, the final display is as much the work of archeologists and conservators as it is the labor of artists, artisans, and curators. In addition, Marković is not a fan of the normal exhibition catalogue for an artist, with an art historian or curator explaining the art. He would rather provide a fictional document for audiences to follow, to create something believable beyond the contemporary artist’s professional requirements to present work in galleries, to create a portfolio website, and to give talks.

    Marko Marković speaks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During a lecture at Residency Unlimited, Marković read a written paper while projecting images behind him. His tale started with Jeffrey Horowitz, a University of Oregon professor, who in 1985 made an accidental discovery during an excavation at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Horowitz—who may or may not be a real person—found documentation for an unfinished architectural work or broken pieces of an artwork—it’s hard to take in everything. The folder also contained a ninth-century Asian book of geometry and conflicting inventories (from 1864 and 1878) of an archaeological dig in which the Kritios Boy, also known as Acropolis 698, was discovered. Side by side Marković showed two vintage-looking photographs of identical piles of sculpture, except that one included the Kritios Boy among the rubble, and the other omitted the statue. Unless you are a scholar of archaic Greek art, it was impossible to know which image was digitally altered.

    Continuing the tale, Marković highlighted a second, more recent archaeological discovery, in 2013 in Ebla, Syria, by scholars at the University of Sapienza. A clay sculpture of a nude torso was unearthed, conserved, scanned three dimensionally, cast in plaster, and exhibited a year later. Through Greek in origin, Marković said, the work had a different stylistic appearance: hard edges instead of smooth curves. This second find was actually Marković’s own sculpture. His elaborate backstory—with real and invented facts and using found and Photoshopped images from the nineteenth century, the 1980s, and today—creates a specific way to view the work. In a later conversation, he told me that, unlike other acts of parafiction in art, his discrete sculptural creation is the primary focus, not the narrative that accompanies it.

    Pieces of painted drywall by Dino Zrnec at Galerija Galženica (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Marković’s talk was followed by a presentation by the Croatian painter Dino Zrnec, who articulated his primary interests: the conditions of display and experimental processes. Zrnec showed documents of recent exhibitions at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria and Galerija Galženica in Velika Gorica, Croatia. For the latter, he transported rectangular sections of drywall—one had white acrylic paint on it, and another had white oil paint—from his studio and leaned them on the wall. He also removed a square piece of ceiling board and stretched a canvas over it, again leaning it. These material explorations remind me of what Robert Ryman and Gedi Sebony have been doing in New York. Zrnec took a similar approach in Graz. The exhibition’s curator, Katia Huemer, wrote:

    The interventions Zrnec employed in order to engage the existing structure were at once minimal and ruthless: the artist cut various shapes out of the wooden panels in the walls of the project space, stretched fabric over them, then inserted the cut-out shapes back into the incised hole. The front of the resulting canvas disappeared into the wall, leaving only a few visible hints that the “actual artwork” was hidden behind it.

    While visiting museums in New York and Philadelphia, Zrnec paid attention to how art is displayed, noting how the raised platform on which Robert Rauschenberg’s Winter Pool (1959) rests in the Metropolitan Museum of Art adds a sixth step to a five-rung ladder that is part of the work. (He is not the only one to notice the plinth.) Such curatorial maneuvers could be considered a slight shift in authorship, and Zrnec said he is thinking of ways to cannibalize the work of another artist for his next exhibition.

    Dino Zrnec, 23:30–11:13, 2013, plastic tumblers and oil on canvas, 50 x 35 cm (artwork © Dino Zrnec)

    Zrnec recounted another exhibition, which took place in an abandoned post-office building in Croatia, where he showed several paintings that had created themselves—almost. He poured turpentine in plastic cups that held surplus paint, placed them on a canvas on the floor, and left the studio. Coming back the next morning, he set the finished painting upright. Here the act of creation takes place while the artist is somewhere else.

    Both artists were on a two-month residency in New York after capturing the annual award for emerging artists in their home countries: Marković won the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award in July, and Zrnec received the Radoslav Putar Award in June. Eriola Pira, program director of the Young Visual Artists Awards, which administers the awards from the United States, joined the two for a conversation.1 She asked about the award’s meaning, but neither artist made an effort to provide a sufficient answer. Zrnec felt it was important for artists under 35 to come to New York, and Marković expects a stay in the city to “raise the level of my practice.” These responses, along with the tenor of their individual presentations, attested to a tight-lipped, unforthcoming attitude. Were Zrnec and Marković elusiveness by personality or unsure of their English language skills? Were they holding their cards close? This was frustrating at times because their conceptually oriented work demands explication

    Pira’s question about developing new artistic languages stalled. “I still think there are some possibilities within painting,” Zrnec replied. “That’s why I am practicing painting.” Marković declared that works are usually unfinished and not always bound by the exhibition. “Every project continues,” he said. “It takes time to develop” The geometric sculptural models he designs on the computer are not always built, but sometimes he draws these virtual objects on a wall or creates videos for projection. His answer made me wonder if he will deliver his Kritios Boy lecture again, with additions or changes to the story.

    Eriola Pira pulls the teeth of Marko Marković and Dino Zrnec (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Both artists articulated a strong attachment to their chosen medium—painting and sculpture—and downplayed the significance of installation, even though the exhibition space plays a crucial role in their work. For Zrnec, the meaning of his work is cumulative as it moves from the studio to the gallery and beyond. “If I were to show [my paintings] in a new space, I would transform them,” Zrnec said, “and they would become something else.” Pira prodded him further: “Your work has been described as performative. Do you agree with that?” With the paintings made with plastic cups in mind, Zrnec replied, “It’s me but it’s not me.” He reiterated his interest in situational qualities: “I always try to experiment with these very technical processes, and to think of the conditions of the work.” He also relayed a story about the limitations of studio space: “I had this small room and I wanted to make a big painting. So I decided to cut really big canvases, but I would stretch them around smaller stretchers … fold them like a very random item, a t-shirt. And then I would paint them from all sides, in different monochromes.” A single canvas might be painted while on several different sized stretchers, achieving a provisional quality. Such a painting could potentially fit over a sofa, a love seat, or a La-Z-Boy, depending on your needs.

    Marković was prompted to describe a recent exhibition with his twin brother, which focused on the Serbian architect Nikola Dobrović’s masterwork, the Ministry of Defense building, destroyed in a NATO air strike in 1999. The Markovićs had separate rooms: a project for the restoration of the building for his brother (an architect), and a room for the artist’s six-foot plaster cube made from a single modular unit in plaster, cast from an outside wall of the defense building. Marković stacked the pieces to form the work and in one corner broke a hole to allow viewing of the interior. “For an antimodernist,” Pira commented, “you rely a lot on the grid.” Marković reminded her that Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Grids” emphasized the ambivalence or irrationality of the grid.

    Painting in commercial galleries in New York has not impressed Zrnec. There are not so many painters back home, he said, and art institutions have their own agendas. Though Conceptualism and performance are the dominant postwar trends in the former Yugoslavia, he feels an affinity for Croatian artists from forty years ago. “Most of the Conceptual artists had brushes in their hands at one point in the sixties [and] seventies,”

    “Is the construction of a work the discover of it?” an audience member asked Marković toward the conversation’s close, adding, “You’re discovering what was already there.” While he didn’t quite answer affirmatively, a good way to interpret his work is as an archaeology of the future. And it’s promising that two artists are exploring strategies of presentation that are artistic in nature, not curatorial.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 I served on the jury that selected Dino Zrnec as the winner of the Putar award in June 2015. I also conducted studio visits with both artists two days after this talk.

  • Words Got Pwned

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Jannis Androutsopoulos: Scenarios and Evidence of Linguistic Change
    Wednesday, October 14, 2015
    Goethe-Institute, New York

    Texting is ruining language, right? People who use LOL, cul8r, and brb have lost the ability to write formally and coherently, if they ever learned at all. Writing skills are deteriorating, and who else is to blame but the internet? What makes it all worse is that everyone is writing more today than twenty or thirty years ago, a time when civilized people sent letters instead of emails. Yet nothing about this moral panic is true—at least not yet—according to Jannis Androutsopoulos, a professor of German and media linguistics at the University of Hamburg, who gave a talk on “Scenarios and Evidence of Linguistic Change” at the New York branch of the Goethe-Institute. Nevertheless, and with a twinkle in his voice, he said, “something called the media has some mysterious effect on something called the language.”

    While some folks perceive how Millennials communicate—through indecipherable internet-informed language and those silly emojis—as a decline that “threatens us as a national community,” Androutsopoulos told us that people have been alarmed over the state of language and communication for some time, noting that a 1991 study by Sigurd Wichter predicted our situation today. Technological determinism such as autocomplete may force people to use language in certain ways, but what is the long-lasting impact? Because the internet is still relatively new, Androutsopoulos said, linguists cannot agree if “fuzzy and indeterminate” shifts in communication will turn out to be systemic changes. Thus blanket statements like those above cannot be validated by social science. To present his arguments, he introduced two current schools of thought: “system and features” and “repertoires and practices.”

    Jannis Androutsopoulos translates textese into English (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    System and Features

    Androutsopoulos identified four critical elements of networked writing:

      • technology mediation (keyboards and screens)
      • dialogic (interpersonal exchange, like status updates on Facebook, where you expect someone to respond)
      • vernacular (outside professional institutions)
      • unplanned and transient (unedited, ephemeral)

    The spelling of words is shortened to simplify a message, and in German the nominatives are not capitalized; homophones such as gr8 and cu are shortened with no change in pronunciation. These changes, Androutsopoulos revealed, existed before the internet and gravitated online. Look at any high school yearbook from the 1980s and 1990s and you’ll see net neologisms handwritten all over (KIT = keep in touch). Networked writing is also marked with an informal, spoken style (hafta); using all caps identifies tone (typically a shouting one); and the appearance of multiple letters (hiiiiiiiiii) indicates prosody, which means how quickly or slowly something is said. Punctuation such as ellipses takes on multiple meanings depending on where they’re used in a piece of internet writing, and what he called the inflective alludes to bodily movements that express emotion (*doing my happy dance*). The professor’s basic descriptions of “textese” were familiar, if not banal, but they indicate how academics approach the subject.

    “When do words exist?” Androutsopoulos asked. “When they are in the dictionary or when people start using them?” Linguists are interested in how new words—and new meanings for old words—enter the larger lexical sphere. Some oldies in the digital realm are download, modem, cyber, web, e-anything, hashtag, tweet, and app. More recent examples are Facebook stalking, unfriend, defriend, selfie, and (in German) entfreunden. “English-language scholars are oblivious, in a sense,” Androutsopoulos remarked, “to many important things happening in other languages.” It’s true. I had no idea that people are having serious discussions about conjugating the verb “to Google” in German. Nor did I ever think about how English-centric such phrases as “because + [noun]” can’t be translated into German, or how German verbs are now dropping their Gs.

    How does one conjugate the verb for “having found something out by googling” in German? (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Repertoires and Practices

    It’s common sense that written language evolves, but only academic research can confirm what we suspect is true. The German language wasn’t standardized until the eighteenth century, Androutsopoulos said, but digital communication has begun to break down this homogenous and invariant expression. The need to keep records, transmit knowledge, and build lengthy, complete arguments still exists, but the importance of social interaction has returned through the written word, not speech. Sociological studies reveal that people develop competence in more than one way of writing, and that formal and digital language are mutually intelligible. Read through a lengthy Facebook thread or a newspaper’s comment section—both examples of what Androutsopoulos calls “unregulated writing in the public space”—and you’ll find people carrying on a coherent conversation despite flagrant mistakes in punctuation, grammar, and spelling by some, and perfect formal writing by others. As a linguist he doesn’t aim to establish a binary of right and wrong, but rather he wants to know why languages change.

    What is also interesting to linguists is how tone, gesture, facial expression, prosody, and contrast appear in networked writing. To indicate expressiveness, “you need to find out ways to write it without saying it,” Androutsopoulos said. When texting, people have replaced the sentence-ending period with one or more exclamation marks, not to project enthusiasm but to avoid conveying apathy. Changes manifest is other ways. For example, in German an email begins with a salutation and ends with a farewell, but the professor’s students sometimes use greetings normally reserved for friends, families, and lovers. While Androutsopoulos claimed that a person’s writing style fits the situation, that people know how to move between the formal and informal styles, I regularly witness senior-level colleagues neglect punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar all within a single two-sentence business email. But maybe that’s just carelessness, not the inability to distinguish between professional and personal contexts.

    They See Me Rollin’ They Hatin’

    Because Funny

    Androutsopoulos spent some time talking about memes and image macros, such as Scumbag Steve and Bad Luck Brian, whose templates for manufacturing he called egalitarian. His specialty seems to be They See Me Rollin’ memes, Bayeux Tapestry parodies with hip-hop lyrics, and Hamburg memes with city-specific humor. The professor strangley claimed that when memes circulate, there’s no original to reference and that it doesn’t matter, but the high level of research presented by Know Your Meme and other obsessives clearly indicates otherwise. A serious analysis of memes may be a valid academic subject, but often it feels like someone explaining a joke—the experience gets ruined.

    An audience member asked if differences between male and female internet writing exist. Androutsopoulos stated that girls and women write hiiiii and use smileys more than boys and men do, but it also depends if the female interlocutor is writing to a male or female. Other research, he said, shows that gender differences eventually neutralize, and that scholars try not to make essentialist definitions.

    Although the claim of texting having a negative impact on formal writing has been refuted, Androutsopoulos conceded that linguists need more research and data, more fine-grain contextualization that focuses on qualitative close readings alongside quantitative statistical analyses. There is evidence for fleeting innovations, he concluded, but “it is difficult to draw the lines between innovations and change.”

    In Terms Of count: 10 (including 1 on a PowerPoint slide)